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SEE MORE Click here to see footage of the tree from Tree of Life being relocated. |
“Nobody makes canvas tents anymore,” says Jack Fisk, but that’s not exactly true. The Academy Award-nominated production designer is in Los Angeles—at work on a new film titled Water For Elephants, starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon—creating a circa-1931 big top. A damned big top, 110′ by 160′, and 40′ tall, to go with circus wagons and a train from the same period.
For many of modern film’s auteur directors—his longtime friend David Lynch comes to mind—Fisk is the essential collaborator. A sculptor in spirit and fan of Edward Hopper, 65-year-old Fisk says he often works by “taking things away rather than putting things in the frame.” For There Will Be Blood—his first film with director P.T. Anderson, for which he also crafted a looming oil derrick—Fisk removed any identifying text from the movie’s locations.
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Plenty of Jack Fisk’s production-related art is wrecked in the course of a movie. “The thing that excites me is that it’s recorded on film, so that you don’t have to carry it around afterwards or worry about it,” says Fisk. |
“There’s no signs in the film,” says Fisk. “Not on the train station, not in the town, not anywhere.”
This year will be busy for Fisk. Water for Elephants starts shooting in May. And post-production winds up on Tree of Life—his fifth film with Terrence Malick, alongside efforts like Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. “Terry has been working on that film for 35 years that I know of,” says Fisk.
His biggest challenge for Tree of Life? “We moved a 60,000-pound tree down the main street of town to get to a house that we were shooting. And every wire, every Internet cable and every TV cable had to be cut to get the tree down the street,” says Fisk. “It took two days to move it five miles.” The pair will begin work on another film in August.
Most of Fisk’s work outside of film is on his 29-acre Albemarle County farm, which he bought with his wife, Academy Award-winning actress Sissy Spacek, in 1978. During last winter’s heavy snow, Fisk says their house lost a few gutters, and the power was out for four days. “I used to love snow, and I got tired of it this year,” says Fisk.
Recently, he also built a 55" replica of the boat Lewis and Clark took up the Missouri River.
“My wife loved it. She put it in our house,” says Fisk. However, he adds a minute later, “I love working full-scale when possible.”
