The Crow Production Designer Alex McDowell Talks 30th Anniversary 4K Release

The Crow 4K UHD release was made to celebrate the iconic film’s 30th anniversary, and fans are in for a treat as it features a great transfer and wonderful special features. ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to The Crow production designer to discuss the film, which receives a 30th-anniversary limited edition SteelBook release on May 7, 2024, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“Young musician Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) is brutally murdered alongside his fiancée by members of a violent gang. On the anniversary of their death, Eric rises from the grave and assumes the gothic mantle of the Crow, a supernatural avenger. He then sets out on a macabre mission to mercilessly hunt down everyone responsible and make them answer for their crimes,” says the synopsis.

What drove your philosophy for the look of The Crow, which has aged so wonderfully?

Alex McDowell: Working from the beginning with the film, I had this unique opportunity to meet the source, to work with James O’Barr at the very beginning before I started design and walk through Detroit with him and have that direct visceral connection to his art and to the graphic novel. I think that drove everything, really. Being in Detroit and seeing the way that Devil’s Night was a throughline of the streets at that time and that there was nothing fictional about the fact that every second building was burnt down essentially, or one block after another was destroyed by fire. The absolute decay of that part of the world at that time was a huge influence.

I think that my job as a designer was to try and hold onto that call. In a way, we have an opportunity to do something more than he could do with the graphic novel, which was contextualized in film terms in a visceral way. The source of his narrative with the narrative itself. So as a designer, the real excitement of this project was how do you both convey the absolute nihilism of that background that he was writing from as designed and have the ability to stylize it and use it as a driver of a very stylized aesthetic framework.

What’s incredible about the behind-the-scenes on this 4K disc is we see all the miniatures that you use for the city, which looks incredible. We see how much you were able to do on what wasn’t a huge budget. You have a music video background. Did that kind of teach you that method of problem-solving of maximizing what you’ve got?

You’re very perceptive. Yeah, I think we had this unique moment in time just by pure luck coming out of the punk era. I was at art school in 1975, and it just was the moment when music was asserting a completely different influence on the industry that kind of kickstarted music videos. I was in the first wave of making three music videos for a thousand pounds for Iggy Pop, and the need to be able to work with whatever you had. So, I think music videos was where I came from. It’s where Alex Proyas came from. It’s enormously influential on our practice.

I guess it’s not really the content at that point, but the ability to have the freedom to understand that there isn’t any constraint, really. You can do something with anything that you have, and it turns it into an advantage. I mean, music videos, the really powerful music videos, are often the ones that were very constrained with budget or time. That’s what you have to react to. When I was making music videos, we did three a week at some point and so you really have to be agile. It’s a way that I think you can maximize with a film like The Crow that was working in the same kind of six days a week, very tough conditions, short pre-production. None of that is disadvantaged. You kind of see that as an advantage at some point, I think.

The models are a perfect reflection of that because they’re crude, and I love that about them. They’re not some CGI kind of fantasy. They’re really visceral, and the fact that they came out of no question, a constrained budget [and] having to do a lot with a little makes them really unique. I hadn’t seen the film for a long time, and what struck me the most in terms of design was how much the models were visibly models without compromising your engagement and immersion in the film at all.

You mentioned Iggy Pop, and he’s in The Crow: City of Angels. That film, I know it got meddled with the cut, but there are a lot of interesting ideas. There are some fun performances. I know you were involved in that. How do you feel about that film all these years removed?

It was kind of compromised. Tim Pope was the first director I ever worked with in music videos. We remain deep friends. I think it was very hard for him. I think he brought a very music video aesthetic. He and I met Iggy Pop at the same time. So he was coming at it with that sort of expectation perhaps of a freedom of thinking and a freedom of work. A way of working that was more in the music video, and it doesn’t sync with studio production. So I think it, in the end, it was compromised by just divergent way of working and a different kind of expectation. It’s kind of like David Lynch making Dune. It’s just in the wrong format in some way.

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