‘The Bear’ production designer Sam Lisenco on how creating a busy kitchen was like a ‘choreographed dance number’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

“There was always this conception that a sensitivity to the realism of the kitchen environment as a workplace was paramount,” explains production designer Sam Lisenco about his work on “The Bear,” which earned him an Emmy nomination for Best Production Design for a Narrative Program (Half-Hour). We talked with Lisenco about his work on the FX dramedy as part of our “Meet the Experts” Emmy-nominated production designers panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

“The Bear” is the story of elite chef Carmy Berzatto (Best Comedy Actor nominee Jeremy Allen White), who returns to Chicago to run his family’s sandwich shop following the death of his brother. For a series with food at the forefront, “part of the ethos was that we needed to be able to set up the production with a methodology to allow the actors to actually practically be cooking and create a space in which our biggest production fear was actually, like, actors cutting fingers off.”

Lisenco and series creator Christopher Storer “discussed movies that were inspirational to us in particular,” including “American movies in the late ’70s, or specifically Chicago comedies of the ’80s, a lot of the John Hughes stuff.” They explored “real kitchens and real spaces that … felt like it could fit in the footprint of this fictional restaurant.” From there, accommodating actors in that tight kitchen space was “akin to … a choreographed dance number in which you’re coming up with a footprint of actor motion and blocking well ahead of time … and then trying to make the practical space functional for that outline footprint. So that really just meant reconfiguring elements of practical kitchen spaces to make them work for us.”

Ultimately they “settled on a defunct restaurant that had an oversized kitchen space that we were able to then shrink down” for the purposes of the show. “And then when it went to series, that was recreated on stage by the very talented permanent art crew.”

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