The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon production designer Clovis Weil discusses creating a new identity for the inventive France-centric spinoff.
SUMMARY
- The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon takes viewers to France, showcasing iconic landmarks and spoken French language for an authentic experience.
- Production designer Clovis Weil played a crucial role in creating the familiar-yet-new look of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.
- Transforming real locations into post-apocalyptic ones was a challenging task, with limited time and the need to leave the sites as they were before. Paris was particularly difficult due to shooting restrictions.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon proves that there is life left in the world of The Walking Dead. The six-episode series may revolve around Norman Reedus’ fan-favorite character, but just as exciting is how unfamiliar the rest of it is (outside of some obvious The Last of Us similarities). The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon takes The Walking Dead across the Atlantic to France, expands the known mythology of the walker-filled world, and more.
France is a character all its own in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, with iconic landmarks often taking center stage and the French language spoken in nearly every scene. It’s authentic to boot, with much of the filmmaking team and cast native to France, or a resident of the country. One such team member is production designer Clovis Weil, who was instrumental in creating the familiar-yet-new look of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.
Clovis Weil spoke with Screen Rant about bringing The Walking Dead to France, the challenges of filming in Paris, and more. Note: This interview was conducted during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the show covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions.
Clovis Weil On The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon
Screen Rant: When you signed on to do this, like, what did you want to take from the flagship show in terms of production design, and where did you want to expand now that we’re in France?
Clovis Weil: Well, to be honest, I didn't want to take too much of the eleven previous seasons of The Walking Dead. Some things are a bit like cliches of the post-apocalyptic universe: vegetation that has gone wild everywhere, the decay, and the destruction; it makes sense, and it's kind of the base of the elements we're going to play with.
But the idea was to be different somehow, and the production didn't want to do the same thing, just in France. They wanted to use France, first of all. That's the first reason why they came here; they wanted to have some iconic French scenery, towns, and places. Then, I had permission to play with it to make it apocalyptic, and, actually, it’s really fun to do.
Most of the production designers I've spoken with in the past have been on shows like Star Wars, where you're working a lot on very contained sets, and I imagine you're doing a lot of location work on this show. How does it work when you have to transform a real place into a post-apocalyptic one?
Clovis Weil: One of the difficult parts is that we don't have much time on each side, usually, and we need to be able to get out of the site at the end of the shoot and leave it as it was before. We go on-site, we think of everything we want to do, we take over measurements, and then we work things up 200 kilometers away from that. For instance, the beginning of the show is in Montpelier, which is near Marseille in the south of France. We went there a few times, but most of it was built in Paris in our studio. Then, we had a full load of trucks going down there for days just to bring up everything.
We have many, many modular elements and ways to mess up facades, and we have many ways to [decorate] the walls of the buildings to age them temporarily. We brought boats, sunken boats, [for] that little harbor. We have painters that go wild, but we still have the same restraints that two days away from the shooting, everything needs to be absolutely neat. So there's the creative part and there's the technical part, and both are very linked because we need to be able to be very quick, very fast, and irreproachable when we leave.
Was there a specific location that was the hardest to work with on the show?
Clovis Weil: Probably Paris, because you have many neighbors. Paris is not always friendly, to be honest, because they shoot a lot, and some neighborhoods are just fed up with shootings. And that's where we had the shortest time, and where we had the most streets to do. We had many streets in a very short amount of time.
When—like in the school and the abbey—we are in a closed space somewhere, we are quite free. We are careful about many things, but it's easier. When you're working on the streets of a very dense city, that's the hard part. Something I really love about this show is how distinct the groups are. You have the abbey; you have the nightclub people. Everyone's so different. How do you go about making them all feel like their own communities? Is that a challenge at all?
Clovis Weil: A good set is a set that tells a story without anyone telling it. I love having thousands of details that tell the story of the people who built it and the people who live in it. The first part, to be honest, was in the script. David had very distinctive, different communities—the school, the abbey, the rooftop camps—And so these were different kinds of people that had different backgrounds. My favorite part was to imagine—and I wanted this—very distinctive looks for these different communities.
[I wanted] to have a more out-of-time, out-of-age feeling for the sisters in the abbey, and to have something a bit in the spirit of Lord of the Flies for the school and these kids living like little savages and. My favorite was a stage set: the demimonde—the nightclub. I'd been wanting to do a set in a sewer for a long time; at the beginning, it was written in the catacombs and I had quite a few discussions with David to put it back more into a sewer. We had a lot of fun building that one and adding the dodgy feeling, [with a] more speakeasy reference for that.
Each time, [we think of] everything; “How do they pay? How do they get money or exchange things? How do they grow food? How do they get light or electricity?” For the rooftop camp, we had a little school and a repair shop. They need to build things with what exists; there is no production and no industry anymore, so you need to reuse everything that already exists. It’s the way you tell all these stories in your head that you need to see on screen.
There are so many pieces of iconography, like famous paintings, that made it into the show. Were there any that you were most excited to work with? Clovis Weil: What I did like was [that] this kind of universe allows you to play, and to mix things that don't go together, usually, at least in our world. You can think and imagine many stories in this kind of afterworld. Bringing pieces of art into a sewer is a very fun thing to do, and it looks very good. It would be a wonderful museum if you ask me.
In The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, Daryl washes ashore in France and struggles to piece together how he got there and why. The series tracks his journey across a broken but resilient France as he hopes to find a way back home. As he makes the journey, though, the connections he forms along the way complicate his ultimate plan.
Post a Comment