Jack Fisk: From "Badlands" to "Flower Moon"

by Cláudio Alves

Jack Fisk as "Man in the Planet" in David Lynch's ERASERHEAD.

From Malick to PTA, going through De Palma and Lynch, Jack Fisk's contributions to American cinema are enough to take one's breath away. This year, he collaborated with Martin Scorsese for the first time and earned his third Oscar nomination for Killers of the Flower Moon. According to the designer, his director wanted his film to be "wide, big, like a western," and Fisk delivered.

Working primarily from historical documents, he dove deep into Osage country records to figure out the reality of the characters' lives, including which houses they once inhabited. He also dug through old buildings in search of period foundations and used original plans of buildings like the train station to recreate them as faithfully as possible. For the oil derricks, he recycled research he'd done for There Will Be Blood. In total, Fisk and his team built over forty interior sets, plus entire houses like Hale's ranch, and two blocks of Pawhuska restyled to represent the town of Fairfax across a decade of bloodshed. It's impossible to overstate the scale of his achievement. And yet, what would be other artists' crowning glory is just one among many such triumphs in Fisk's career…

Born in Canton and raised in Ipava, Illinois, Jack Fisk didn't study cinema or any performing arts, for that matter. His background was in painting, having gone to the Cooper Union and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There, he started to explore the medium of sculpture, free to experiment with large-scale work that, in his own words, looked better when you were walking around them. In other words, he was building environments rather than a piece to be observed from a static distance. He attended college with childhood friend David Lynch, whose acceptance to the AFI prompted the pair to go West, to California. There, Fisk found work on movie sets, like a non-union gig managing traffic for a shoot. 

Inevitably, he found his place in the art departments of small productions, such as the Jonathan Demme and Roger Corman-produced Angel Warriors. In that project, he worked alone and learned the necessities of set dressing, which, until then, hadn't crossed his mind. Still, cinema was a job to Frisk until one production opened his eyes to its possibility as an art form. It was Badlands, and Fisk got his job after knowing of Terrence Malick through Lynch – their time at AFI overlapped – and feeling curious about the film's premise. Mostly, the art director wanted to try his hand at a period piece, even if it was set in the not-so-distant past of 1958. Learning to work with this new director was a wild experience, a repudiation of mechanical filmmaking practices and a love for artistic freedom.

Take the treehouse inhabited by the runaway lovers. There was no such thing in the script, but Fisk suggested it to Malick, took a day to build it, and they were shooting there by the next sunrise. With no storyboards and such fluidity, he became more aware of the world-creating magic of production design, intuitively relating spaces to each other to generate ideas, blending actual location with scenography to invoke a seamless feeling of immersion. Moreover, the director's methodology often involved creating something even more expansive than what ended up on the screen, being ready for any eventuality, the camera's will. 

Fisk has described Malick as a brother, but it was also on the set of Badlands that he met his wife, Sissy Spacek. Less than a year after the film saw the light of day, they were married, and she soon started working as a set dresser between acting jobs. Spacek's first art department credit came in 1974 when Fisk got a job designing the theatrical lunacy of Phantom of Paradise. It was the first of the couple's two collaborations with Brian De Palma since the thespian managed to win the role of Carrie White, and Fisk also designed the 1976 Stephen King adaptation. Far from the only genre pictures he made during this time, such projects proved that this artist could thrive beyond realism.

But between horror and blaxploitation, indie nightmares and musical fantasy, Fisk's "brothers" pulled him into their own worlds at the height of New Hollywood. For Lynch, he was Eraserhead's The Man in the Planet, and for Malick, he was the man in charge of bringing to life Days of Heaven's farmland poem. Inspired by historical photographs and the director's idea of a three-story Victorian house lost in the middle of a wheat field. In his most lavish production up to that point, Fisk found himself working the land like the characters, seeing that engaging with the picture's reality helped him as a designer. His achievement is also a treatise on the power of emptiness in the cinematic frame and the lyricism of light.

That last aspect would repeatedly feature in his Malick films, including the jungle purgatory of The Thin Red Line, old Virginia in The New World, and the Vermeer-inspired interiors of The Tree of Life and subsequent poems. But before that came to be, both Jack Fisk and his director took a near-two-decade hiatus. For the designer, the decision came after a series of disappointments working within the Hollywood machine. He still did some films with Spacek and even directed her in Raggedy Man, but chose to dedicate most of his time to raising the couple's daughters. Only when Malick came out of his break for the 1998 war epic did Fisk decide to start making movies again. 

After that return, he'd design two features for Lynch and envision a Jamestown documentary that would never be. It was swallowed by The New World, which Malick envisioned very differently than Fisk. Still, he continued to be attracted to strong-willed, passionate about filmmaking and all its wonders, eager to collaborate with other artists. That's how he ended up with Paul Thomas Anderson, defamiliarizing the American past for There Will Be Blood until the landscape become alien. That spectacular creation earned him his first Oscar nomination, and the two men would work together again on The Master.

Looking over his entire filmography, one notices recurring themes in the artist's career, especially after his eighteen-year pause. Jack Fisk is an expert at recreating American History, especially the West, making it feel authentic while avoiding the clichés that can come along with such concepts. Since The New World led to researching Native cultures, these stories have been a motif echoing throughout his career. They lead to another Oscar nomination for The Revenant and later Killers of the Flower Moon. Those two pictures are quintessential Fisk movies in their paean to the outdoors, with colossal exterior sets built in communion with the landscape.

It's wild to realize how many towns he has built from scratch, how he mastered the integration of location scouting into his art, or how many large structures Fisk has created just so his directors could burn or blow them up on camera. And yet, despite such chaotic ends, he describes the work of a production designer as the search for cohesion. For Fisk, it's all about figuring out how to realize a scene and have all its visual elements come together in one whole. It's also about flexibility and finding a common visual language with each director, whether a newbie like Malick in 1973 or a living legend like Scorsese in 2023. Before we get to the many photos of his creations over the years, I'd like to leave you with a Jack Fisk quote: 

I work to never do less than I can, because our work is recorded on film and if it's not up to my standards it will haunt me for the rest of my life.

BADLANDS (1973) Terrence Malick
Badlands is on most major platforms, available to rent and purchase.

MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973) Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz
Messiah of Evil is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Fubo TV, MGM+, AMC+, Tubi, Shudder, Screambox, Pluto TV, and Night Flight Plus.

PHANTOM OF PARADISE (1974) Brian De Palma
Phantom of Paradise is streaming on Fubo TV. You can also find it on the major platforms, available to rent and purchase.

CARRIE (1976) Brian De Palma
Carrie is streaming on Max, Cinemax, and Showtime. You can also rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, VUDU, and the Microsoft Store.

DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) Terrence Malick
Days of Heaven is streaming on Pluto TV and Showtime. You can also rent or purchase on most major platforms.

MOVIE MOVIE (1978) Stanley Donen
Movie Movie is streaming on Fubo TV, Crackle, Shout! Factory, and Plex. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon.

THE THIN RED LINE (1998) Terrence Malick
The Thin Red Line is streaming on Starz. You can also find it on most major platforms, available to rent and purchase.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001) David Lynch
Mulholland Drive is streaming on the Criterion Channel and Showtime. You can also rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, VUDU, and the Microsoft Store.

THE NEW WORLD (2005) Terrence Malick
The New World is available to rent and purchase on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, VUDU, and the Microsoft Store.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007) Paul Thomas Anderson
There Will Be Blood is streaming on Fubo TV, Paramount Plus, and Showtime. It's also available to rent and purchase on most major platforms.

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (2011) Francis Lawrence
Water for Elephants is available to rent and purchase on Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, Apple TV, VUDU, and the Microsoft Store.

THE TREE OF LIFE (2011) Terrence Malick
The Tree of Life is streaming on Hulu. You can also find it on most major platforms, available to rent and purchase.

THE MASTER (2012) Paul Thomas Anderson
The Master is streaming on the Criterion Channel, Tubi, Pluto TV, Plex, and the Roku Channel. You can also rent and purchase it on Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, VUDU, and the Microsoft Store.

TO THE WONDER (2012) Terrence Malick
To the Wonder is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Fubo TV, Hoopla, Tubi, Kanopy, Freevee, Distro TV, and the Roku Channel. It's also available to rent and purchase on most major platforms.

KNIGHT OF CUPS (2015) Terrence Malick
Knight of Cups is streaming on Starz, Hoopla, VUDU, Tubi, Shout! Factory, Plex, Freevee, and the Roku Channel. The film is also available to rent and purchase on most major platforms.

THE REVENANT (2015) Alejandro González Iñárritu
The Revenant is streaming on Max. You can also find it on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, VUDU, and the Microsoft Store, available to rent and purchase.

SONG TO SONG (2017) Terrence Malick
Song to Song is streaming on Peacock, Fubo TV, Tubi, Shout! Factory, Plex, Freevee, and the Roku Channel. You can also rent and purchase it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, VUDU, and Flix Fling.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023) Martin Scorsese
Killers of the Flower Moon is streaming on Apple TV Plus. You can also rent and purchase it on Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, VUDU, and the Microsoft Store.

To learn more about Jack Fisk, read Nathaniel's interview with the man himself during the 2015/6 awards season.

Comments

[Peggy Sue]

Oh, I would totally vote for him this year. I though he was going to be a lock (great career+great work in Flower Moon) but he's not.

[thevoid99]

He's overdue for a win as he's one of the best production designers ever. Love his work with Malick, Lynch, and PTA.

[Gallavich]

It's not a showy production designer, but is one of the greatest underplayers

[Mr Ripley79]

He's deserved it many times and now is the time to reward him,stunning work.