‘Fargo’ production designer Trevor Smith on replicating the designs from the original Coen Brothers 1996 feature [Exclusive Video Interview]
“It was a case of sort of coming full circle for me,” observes Trevor Smith of his serving as production designer on the fifth season of the FX anthology series “Fargo.” Not only did it represent a return to familiar turf for Smith after working as an art director on the initial “Fargo” TV installment in 2014; it also found him designing a series that was “a direct echo” of the original Oscar-winning film in 1996 from Joel and Ethan Coen on which it’s all based. “We get to sort of tighten up the ‘Fargo’ circle and revisit themed directly from the Coen Brothers film again,” he says, “and topographies and locales that are referenced directly in the movie as well. So it’s almost a back to Ground Zero return for us, and it was really cool for me personally to kind of close the loop.” We spoke with Smith as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV Production Designers Panel. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
In point of fact, the main house in the original “Fargo” movie was “a direct blueprint, literally and thematically” for the fifth installment that stars Juno Temple, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jon Hamm. Smith notes, “We screen-capped every scene in the movie, rebuilt the house from footage, and then used that as the baseline to then build up from the needs of Season 5. The story itself has some wonderful sort of direct references to (the film), including the sliding doors, the break-in, the stairs, the shower curtain – all sorts of wonderful and obvious echoes.” He calls the job of getting the design of the house right “a heck of an undertaking. We built the interiors in-studio and then the shell of the house in a vacant lot of location, on a perfect street. The lot was sort of frozen in development with the right vibe that gave us those spooky Halloween shadows.”
Base camp was in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which for four of the five seasons of “Fargo” has provided an effective stand-in for Minnesota and North Dakota. A heavily Western theme also ran through the North Dakotan side of the story. “We really got to put our cowboy on, more than probably ever, in the show,” Smith says. “We had a lot of fun with that.” The way Smith describes things, it actually sounds like they had a lot of fun with everything. “(Creator-showrunner) Noah Hawley and the writing team and myself, we love a good Easter egg. So we put a lot of them in along with little set-deck details and props from the whole Coen filmography. So it’s like this fun sort of second-guessing game for fans of the Coen Brothers to go back through it. Like the tracking device that Gator (Joe Keery) uses to track Munch (Sam Spruell) is almost directly from ‘No Country For Old Men.’ So there’s just a million little teasers in there for those that want to look for them.”
Smith adds that there’s a “sparseness and simplicity” to the special set decor, “so when we do drizzle in fun cues and strange paintings in the background, they’re there with intention and with a tongue firmly planed in cheek. There’s this universe of Coens and Noah Hawley that pings around.” It also included cheeky references to director John Carpenter’s “Halloween” from 1978 as well as “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” “The more we got into shooting it, with all of the violence and the cat-and-mouse games in the house, and the darkness of the colors we used, and the cinematography, that we were making a horror movie,” Smith says.
All installments of “Fargo” from FX are streaming on Hulu.
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