7 Jack Fisk Sets That Defined American Cinema

When Martin Scorsese decided that he would travel to Oklahoma to shoot “Killers of the Flower Moon,” he called on a number of his most trusted partners, including editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, and composer Robbie Robertson. Yet for the pivotal role of production designer, Scorsese chose a collaborator with whom he had never worked before: Jack Fisk.

A quick look at Fisk’s filmography makes it obvious why the greatest living American director would choose him to design “Killers”; for 50 years, Fisk has been creating historically accurate, visually poetic, and quintessentially American sets for master filmmakers including Brian DePalma, Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch.

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Fisk began his career working in exploitation pictures for producers like Roger and Gene Corman and quickly gained a reputation for creating atmospheric, expressive sets on a budget; his work on Stephanie Rothman’s thriller “Terminal Island” is particularly impressive in its triumph over limited resources. That film came out in 1973, a pivotal year for Fisk in which he also designed two cult classics (“Messiah of Evil” and Jonathan Kaplan’s “The Slams”) as well as his first movie for Terrence Malick (“Badlands”), the director with whom he would come to be associated more than any other.

“Badlands” established some of Fisk’s key strengths, most notably his skill at handling location work — no production designer in the history of film has been better at exteriors, whether he’s making the most of a preexisting locale (as in his “Winkie’s” diner set for “Mulholland Drive”) or building an entirely new town. His knack for exteriors reaches its apotheosis in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a Western that is simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic; the greatness of Fisk’s work lies in his ability to manifest the characters’ many contradictions in the landscape and buildings as he creates an epic tale of an Eden destroyed by greed and corruption.

While “Killers of the Flower Moon” may be Fisk’s finest work to date, it’s far from his only masterpiece. While Fisk is known to be choosy and doesn’t have as many credits on his résumé as other top designers, his ratio of classics is astonishingly high. Below are seven of Fisk’s most memorable sets from seven of his most iconic movies, all of them collaborations between Fisk and some of the most notable directors in film history.

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