The production designer Jack Fisk has made a specialty of bringing lost worlds to life. In a more literal sense than cinematographers, production designers are responsible for the look of a film - they create its physical reality - and Fisk's projects tend to be more physically demanding and more rooted in reality than most.
He works on a large, even heroic scale, combining elements of architecture and anthropology. For The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick's meditative depiction of the Battle of Guadalcanal, he built World War II fighter jets and a Melanesian village.
For The New World, Malick's retelling of the Pocahontas legend, Fisk replicated the log fort and mud buildings of 17th-century Jamestown, not far from the actual site. Most recently, for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, an obsessive epic about a California oil prospector (Daniel Day-Lewis), he conjured from scratch a turn-of-the-century desert settlement studded with derricks and drills, a starkly poetic vision of the Old West suffering its first industrial scars.
Fisk, 62, may not be the most prolific designer - he has worked on fewer than 20 features and even gave up the trade in the 1980s to focus on directing - but he is one of the most fascinating unsung figures in American movies. It is impossible to trace a line through the major filmmakers of the last few decades, from Malick to Brian De Palma to David Lynch to Anderson, without running into Fisk. (He has yet to be nominated for an Oscar, an oversight that his work on There Will Be Blood seems likely to redress.)
Fisk has been the production designer (or art director, as the job used to be called) on all four of Malick's films; he met his wife, Sissy Spacek, on Malick's first feature, Badlands (1973). He goes even further back with Lynch (for whom he has worked twice as production designer, on The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive). They met in the ninth grade, shared a painting studio while in high school in Alexandria, Virginia, and then attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Fisk provided sculptures for Lynch's first short, an expulsive animation called Six Men Getting Sick (1966), and has a memorable cameo as the Man in the Planet in Lynch's first feature, Eraserhead (1977).
There Will Be Blood is his first collaboration with Anderson, whom he was quick to put in the company of Lynch and Malick. "Like a lot of films I work on, it doesn't seem commercial," Fisk said in a recent interview in Manhattan. "But I think 20 years from now people will still be talking about it, the way they talk about Badlands and Eraserhead."
While writing the screenplay, Anderson was acutely aware that some scenes would be logistically daunting, but "I didn't want to not write something because I didn't know how to do it," he said. "I kind of had to say, 'Well, there's going to have to be a scene down a 15m mine shaft.'" He added: "The first time I talked to Jack, he said, 'I have no idea how to do this, but I really want to do it.' Which was exciting. That's exactly what you want to hear from someone you're going to work with."
The first big decision was where to shoot. "I was searching for years in California because it was a California story," Anderson said, "but you could barely get a place with 360-degree views."
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