The production team for the FX limited series “A Murder at the End of the World” scouted the entire world for existing circular boutique luxury hotels in remote locations – and came up empty. That’s when they gave Alex DiGerlando – the production designer on such projects as the feature “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Netflix’s “tick…tick…BOOM!” a call. His assignment: to build from scratch an isolated Arctic compound in Iceland worthy of a tech billionaire (played by Clive Owen) who has gathered a group of elite thinkers to discuss the impact of the climate crisis – only to have a murder occur. So where do you go to construct a sleek, sophisticated Icelandic hotel? In this case, Jersey City, of all places. That’s where the interior hotel set was built, on a soundstage, over the course of three months. “We also used a tiny bit of the exterior of a hotel in Northern Iceland,” DiGerlando says, “along with the front and back of a geothermal pool house in Eastern Iceland. We kind of stitched that all together with some computer graphics and we ended up with pour hotel.”
We spoke with DiGerlando as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV Production Designers Panel. Watch the exclusive video interview above.
One of the challenged for the production designer with regard to the hotel was the fact an entire circle wouldn’t fit on their soundstage. “Which was not a small stage,” DiGerlando adds. “It was about 26,000 feet. So we built it as a semicircle as a stacked set. So the pool house I was describing, which is Vök Baths in Iceland, there’s kind of a ramp that leads down to the swimming pool house. So we used that as our exterior walkway and then built the lobby of our hotel as if it were there, kind of below ground. And then the rest of the ring was above it.”
If that sounds rather complex, it’s because it was. For example, building all of the rooms of the hotel would have proven impossibly time-consuming and unnecessary. So all of the rooms are essentially variations on the same one. “Most are simply implied,” DiGerlando says. “Behind all of these doors are just support space for the crew, which they filled up quickly.” The idea in the script was that this hotel would survive the end of the world, and it nearly had to. About two days into filming on the exterior work, nearly the entire crew came down with COVID. “I had miraculously come back to the states to work on the big build,” he explains.
One of the reasons that “A Murder at the End of the World” creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij had hired DiGerlando is that they share similar sensibilities. Part of that was their joint understanding that “what people think of as wealth is actually very uncreative,” DiGerlando believes. They understand, he adds, that finest quality doesn’t mean everything is gilt with gold. “People who have the most unlimited resources can think of amazing ways to spend their money that you and I can’t. Building a large fortress out of old growth trees in a country that doesn’t really have them seemed like a good symbol for the kind of hypocrisy that Andy Ronson (Owen) had. We had to demonstrate the idea that he would’ve spared no expense to build whatever his heart desired. That’s why, for instance, we built a grand fireplace in his underground chamber. Our set decorator Lydia Marx did an amazing job sourcing beautiful pieces from all over.”
All seven episodes of “A Murder at the End of the World” from FX are streaming on Hulu.
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