‘The Regime’ Created a World as Off-Kilter as Its Dictator
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Rulers cannot, as the old anecdote goes, physically roll back the tide on command, but “The Regime” would not be the first piece of art (or history) to show that with enough money, guns, sycophants, and social media, dictators can create a manufactured reality where it sure seems like they can. The HBO limited series explores what it’s like to live in the reality of Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet), chancellor and de-facto dictator of an unnamed country vaguely located near the Danube.
What it’s like is kind of a nightmare. Elena’s palace is as imposing and grand as it is nonsensically tailored to her whims, and the people whose security, power, and lives depend on pleasing her can never quite anticipate what she wants next. That unpredictability is baked into every technical aspect of “The Regime,” from the way that odd instruments like pan flutes and didgeridoos tip the music off-balance to the way that the camera’s canted angles still can’t catch the cavernous edges of the palace and make them comprehensible; to the way that costume designer Consolata Boyle keeps changing up Elena’s wardrobe so the image she presents is never what the people waiting for her expect.
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“One thing that was important to us all the time is that you never know what to expect with her,” Boyle told IndieWire. “When you think you know her in these militarized suits, always very high fashion, then suddenly she appears a little bit more girly, then again, she’s in a more peasant look, and then again, some absolutely extraordinary evening gown. So all the times she’s changing, she’s playing to the camera.”
In the videos below, watch how Boyle, production designer Kave Quinn, and composers Alexandre Desplat and Alex Heffes all worked in concert to keep the viewer guessing about Elena’s intentions over the course of “The Regime” in a way that’s patently absurd, and just a little bit frightening.
The Production Design of ‘The Regime’
We spend the bulk of our time in “The Regime” in Elena’s palace, which reflects its owner in that it’s never just any one style. The main staterooms are vast and grand, the cabinet offices almost comically wood-paneled for Serious Business, and Elena’s personal apartments a mix of every kind of rich Instagramable chic design. Production designer Kave Quinn wanted moving through the rooms to be a little nonsensical and very bewildering — and she didn’t have to look far to find inspiration.
“When [Elena] has a meeting with Judith Holt [Martha Plimpton], she’s sitting at one end of a massively long table — which Putin employs to make whoever he’s talking to feel that they’re being looked down upon,” Quinn told IndieWire. “The scale was the thing I think that made people feel awkward. Trying to push out the scale as much as I could and just getting all the architectural details right was the critical thing.”
Scale works for Elena but also works against her. Quinn specifically designed a few spaces where Elena wouldn’t have the props and pomp that make her feel powerful. A standout example is the in-palace mausoleum where her father lies in state. The room has a slightly different, less European design language to it, like a stripped-back Egyptian tomb. When Elena feels she’s stripped back is, not coincidentally, when she makes her most fateful decisions.
In the video above, watch how Quinn terrorized the denizens of Elena’s place with the sheer scale of how the dictator uses space to assert her own power.
The Costume Design of ‘The Regime’
It was important to inject some of Elena’s personality into whatever (radically different) approach she took in how she presented herself. But the goals for Elena’s costumes were always the same: to be the thing that, in that moment, makes her feel that she’ll be regal, in control, and loved in the eyes of everyone. So costume designer Consolata Boyle packs a lot of different looks into “The Regime,” but always with a few commonalities.
“I think I was very interested in making her as clear and as calculated in that way — her color is calculated, her lack of prints. Everything’s as much as I could [is done] with strong block primary colors. It’s something that you notice the more you look at female politicians,” Boyle said. “And also her silhouette, which is very clear. The shape is clinging. And then sometimes it’s completely different.”
While the costumes contribute to Elena’s unsettling lack of a consistent identity, the costumes around her also do some quiet visual storytelling about the country that she rules. Boyle blended Eastern and Western styles for the soldiers, palace staff, and functionaries so that they appear modern but unplaceable in time. We get a sense of history, hardship, and aspiration in people’s clothes without ever feeling like we have a handle on them — which seems like it is exactly how Elena wants it.
In the video above, watch how Boyle collaborated with Kate Winslet to create the look of a modern politician who stands for nothing and might fall for everything.
The Music of ‘The Regime’
Composers Alexandre Desplat and Alex Heffes each took three episodes of “The Regime,” with Desplat doing the first half and the title theme and Heffes tackling the show’s conclusion. On paper, it might seem like that kind of handoff would be tricky, but both composers were on the same page about what the music on the series needed to accomplish. It wasn’t the job of the score to be funny or play up the comedy necessarily, but to unsettle the audience in such a way that they can’t help but laugh.
“I don’t think music is funny. It can be grotesque, or it can be playful,” Desplat told IndieWire. “The opening title is very pompous and very grand, and at the same time, there are some weird instruments from the Middle Europa, which suddenly put you off balance. You don’t really know what you’re doing. Why suddenly there’s a cymbal or more pan flute? It does remind the audience that you are in a strange world.”
The strange world that the music creates also darkens as “The Regime” unfolds. “Really, what I wanted to do is chart that path into the heart of darkness that Elena goes on,” Heffes told IndieWire. “I added a little male choir which is very low and slightly foreboding, to give the feeling that the people are encroaching on Elena and then using a lot of military percussion like marching band percussion but in a sort of slightly off-kilter way because everything in this show is like slightly not expected.”
In the video above, watch how Desplat and Heffes modulated the music of “The Regime” to enforce the power, absurdity, and eventually the darkness and uncertainty of Elena’s hold over her country.
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