‘Extrapolations’ production designer Sam Lisenco on how the limited series ‘challenged my conceptions of where we’re headed’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Sam Lisenco has served as the production designer on some of the coolest movies released in the last decade, including “Frances Ha,” “Uncut Gems,” and former Best Picture nominee “Judas and the Black Messiah.” So when it comes to choosing television projects, Lisenco tries to set the bar pretty high – which is how he ended up working as the production designer on four key episodes of the Apple TV+ limited series “Extrapolations” from creator Scott Z. Burns. 

“When I heard who the showrunner was on this, obviously, I jumped at the opportunity,” Lisenco tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. The New York-born Lisenco had spent the early months of the coronavirus pandemic rewatching the Burns-scripted film “Contagion” and found his storytelling and ability to forecast the future unparalleled. 

“He is such an immaculate screenwriter, and apparently a Nostradamus-style wizard at predictions that it seemed like sort of a no-brainer – not just to collaborate with somebody who I respected in that capacity, but also to start to challenge my conceptions of where we’re headed based on how things have been going,” he says.

“Extrapolations” unfolds across 33 years of a potential future ravaged by climate change – where society’s technological advances (many of which are vast) intermingle with the reality of rising sea levels, uncontrolled wildfires, and toxic air and sea. The eight-episode anthology series has an all-star cast that includes Meryl Streep, Edward Norton, Daveed Diggs and Kit Harington – as well as Forest Whitaker, Marion Cotillard and Tobey Maguire. That trio stars in the seventh episode, “The Going-Away Party,” one of four on which Lisenco worked. The episode, directed by Nicole Holofcener, is set in 2068 and imagines San Francisco being choked by drastically reduced air quality. The orange skies presented in “Extrapolations” looked eerily similar to the real world after the northeast was blanketed by smoke from Canadian wildfires last week.

“The entirety of that episode took place in this apartment. And there had been – prior to my tenure – a massive amount of conversations about what we would see outside of the windows, what the San Francisco skyline could look like a generation from now,” Lisenco says. “I came in and I was like, ‘It’s just orange. I just want to orange out the window. You can’t see anything.’ And it was, you know, secretly a bit of a cost-saving measure because we don’t have to conceptualize the skyline. But I said, ‘The air quality is so poor that everything should just have this horrible pall over it.’ Then inevitably, friends and family started texting me photos of the New York skyline going, ‘You’re not that far off the mark.’”

The reality of this fictional show, Lisenco says, is something that has stayed with him in the months since production ended. “I’ve learned quite a bit about my own level of expectation for how bad things could be. And it affects my daily choices to a certain extent,” he says.

The four episodes on which Lisenco worked represent a wide variety of what “Extrapolations” does so well. His first episode, “2059: Face of God,” stars Norton and Diane Lane and is a ticking-clock political thriller; his second, “2059 Part II: Nightbirds,” is a road trip through Mumbai (Lisenco built the Indian city on a massive set in New York); the aforementioned “2068: The Going-Away Party” is akin to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”; and the series finale, “2070: Ecocide,” is a courtroom drama that ties the show together. Throughout the episodes, Lisceno mixes unbelievable tech changes with a practical evolution of what the future might look like.

“I was not the first in terms of the creative parties involved in the show to sort of expound the ethos behind what I’m about to say. But my interpretation when I read it was – and I’m sort of paraphrasing a half-remembered TED talk from YouTube for many years ago, but I remember there was this gentleman who was talking about how in the woods, a Swiss Army Knife is the best possible tool you can have, but in your kitchen, it’s the worst tool because it’s not specialized in any particular activity,” he says. “I sort of conceptualize this idea that the future – as much as we want it to be this hyper-minimalist perfection of space and environment – in actuality, it’s an amalgam of everything that’s ever come before, in a hoarders nightmare of crap that has amassed over time. The critical adaptations, they’re not Swiss Army knives, they’re the new thing that makes that thing better. And when you start to layer these things together – and then on top of that, also assume that people’s personal tastes ebb and flow generationally – all of a sudden you realize our grandchildren are probably collecting the same stupid mid-century furniture that we stole from our grandparents. All of a sudden, you have these layers of practical realism that suffocate each other over yet another populace.”

All episodes of “Extrapolations” are streaming on Apple TV+.

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