Touring the Set of Netflix’s ‘Black Rabbit’

[bright upbeat music]

Hi, I am Alex DiGerlando,

the production designer of Netflix's Black Rabbit,

and I'm here to show you the set, come on.

[bright upbeat music]

Black Rabbit is the story of the freaking brothers

played by Jude Law and Jason Bateman.

And the restaurant that they have,

which is the beacon of nightlife in New York City.

This guy, three negronis.

Three Negronis.

[Bartender] It's four now, actually.

Four Negronis, you gotta hang on one second.

We kind of set out to design a place

that feels very exclusive but welcoming at the same time.

After looking for a building that we could use

as our exterior location,

that would drive the design

of the interior set,

we landed on 279 Water Street,

which is this amazing building.

It's the oldest wood building in New York.

It was built in 1794,

and it was almost a hundred years old at the time

the Brooklyn Bridge was being built

and it's nestled right at the base

of the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge.

We had this vision of a multi-level restaurant

that occupied a whole building.

Come on, there's like three floors to look at.

There are a couple reasons why one would build

the interior of a set on a sound stage

rather than shooting it on location.

And a big part of that is logistics.

Like we have to occupy the space,

the conditions at the actual location.

The location is in pretty bad shape

because it was fairly decimated during Hurricane Sandy.

This is the oldest bar in New York.

[Jake] Oh, that's luxurious.

[Vince] No, no.

Landlord said this is seven years older.

Pirates used to drink here.

There's like a brothel upstairs.

That's how you found it, huh?

Oh yeah.

I've taken friends both to the location

on Water Street, down the Street

and obviously brought them to see this wonderful set.

And when you describe what had happened,

the bar, the brothel, the Pirates,

whatever it is have passed.

It's like the free can fit very neatly into that.

And so in the history of, I hope that location,

people will definitely remember the Black Rabbit

being a part of it.

And yeah, it's something we talked about like we,

the show, Black Rabbit

are now part of the history of that building.

Yeah. Which is really cool too.

Yeah, it is.

[gentle jazz music]

So this is the hostess stand

where the guests coming into the Black Rabbit are greeted.

And it was important to all of us that every detail

was as authentic as possible.

So that goes down to little details like matches,

we had these made.

We had these pens made,

a bunch of factors went into designing

the dining areas of the restaurant.

We wanted this to be a very warm and cozy

inviting environment,

kind of akin to like a pub in the English countryside.

And then we also were talking about the brothers

before they were restaurateurs.

They had a rock band in the early '2000s.

I'm just a drunk, there's the singer

that's the guy you want.

[crowd cheering]

So we wanted a little bit of a rock and roll influence.

So we were looking at the homes

of famous rock stars like Jimmy Page and Keith Richards.

So we were pulling all those kind of ingredients

into the design.

These snugs, which were inspired

by the English pubs we added.

And one of the reasons we wanted to do that

was the whole show is shot in a way

where we're always looking through something

and from behind something.

So it gives us a good opportunity to have foreground.

We had Rosco backdrops photograph

the two sides of the street across from the restaurant

and print them as large scale backdrops

so that there's opportunities to have shots

where people enter and exit.

And we're actually looking out into the real world

as opposed onto the sound stage.

[gentle jazz music]

So one of my favorite things on the first floor is this bar,

which it was the bar that was original to the building.

This bar is completely made from scratch

and lovingly painted to look old

by Elizabeth Lynn and our incredible scenic department.

Another thing that I love is this glass partition wall.

We source this bottle glass from a glass-blowing studio,

and we just love the way the pains distort.

So there's a lot of shots that start on the distortion

and pan through.

The walls are another scenic treatment.

And the idea for that is somewhere between 1794

and the present day,

there was beadboard up on the wall

and that was pulled down revealing like this chippy paint.

And that's kind of an ongoing theme

throughout the entire space

where the two brothers, there's Vince played by Jason

and Jake played by Jude.

One is the more kind of polished, front-facing brother,

and the other one's the more scrappy ne'er-do-well brother.

So I really wanted, anywhere you look in the space,

both brothers are represented.

It's a new piece of woodwork

next to an old piece of crumbling plaster.

[gentle jazz music continues]

We dubbed this to the library room

'cause it has a kind of reading room feel

even though it doesn't have any books in it.

It's got a working fireplace,

which is one of five throughout the all three floors

of the Black Rabbit set.

In the actual restaurant,

there's these beautiful tin ceilings in the front room,

which were in the original space.

This back room is based on other rooms

where the tin ceiling had been ripped down.

We bought wrought saw lumber

and aged it to create the illusion

that this is a deconstruction of the space.

[upbeat music]

This is the kitchen.

I guess they heard you were coming

so they prepared some food.

We had amazing food stylist team

who are more than just stylists.

They're also chefs and they invented this menu,

especially for the show.

You might hear a buzz

and that's coming from an actual fridge that's over there.

All the stuff in here is actual kitchen equipment.

The one exception to that rule is this walk-in refrigerator

one of our art directors came up with

which is one of my favorite details.

The walk-in has both a door where you can walk into,

but it also has these glass doors

so that the chefs can easily grab their ingredients

and bring 'em to the stove.

What that does for us is it gives us a lot of depth behind

so we're not just staring at a blank wall behind them

when we're seeing them do their work.

She told me she wasn't coming in

so I fired her.

What? Yeah.

There's a moment in the story

where the restaurant staff recognizes

that a food critic is in the restaurant

And bar tabs on me when we get more than one star.

All right, no, I don't wanna hear a word

about that from anyone.

And a detail that we learn from our food team.

A lot of times we'll keep pictures of restaurant critics

up on the wall

so that the whole staff is familiar with their faces.

Lee Malecki our set of decorator,

she has a little cameo on this wall.

This looks like a real kitchen

and it has some functionality,

I mean, including a working dumb waiter,

which we have a scene in the show

where the camera goes into the dumb waiter

and goes up to the second floor through the dumb waiter.

The heartbeat for me and literally coming in here

and overseeing my pretend staff and my pretend clientele

and feeling this place when it's buzzing

with 300 plus background artists all at dinner

or at the bar has been so important,

conjuring the energy required,

creating that authentically

was a really important starting place for me.

Along with everyone else, we all stepped on

and was just wowed by the detail.

They're saying they're on the list.

No.

Private party upstairs on 3:00 tonight.

[gentle instrumental music]

Chick biryanis?

[indistinct chattering]

[gentle jazz music]

So here we are on the second floor.

This area embodies the two spaces

that the Black Rabbit is made of,

the brick building and the wooden building next to it.

Oh and through this window I spot Lydia Marks,

our set decorator.

I'm very focused on the space itself and the architecture

and Lydia's job is to fill it with all of the stuff

that makes it real and that's everything.

Once I get the basis of our design from Alex,

with the research that he's brought

and a lot of conversations

and a lot of visuals,

I start to flesh out the real things

that are gonna make this place a real restaurant.

It's everything from the carpets, to the furniture,

wall coverings, fabrics, artwork.

We also have been stocking our bar

with real herbs and lemons and limes

trying to keep it very real.

The only thing that's not real in our bar

happens to be the liquor.

We bought all this beautiful alcohol and then emptied it

because we don't like to have real liquor on set.

It's cool to see the set dressing crew

like trying to get the right color mixtures.

It's like it looks like a laboratory.

I think one of the things I really enjoyed

about making the set with Alex

was that we let it become such an organic process

the way that the history of the building informed us.

We also let what we were finding

in the real world to decorate, inform the decoration.

We wanted the artwork in the restaurant

to be sort of playful.

So we found this artist, E.J. Bellocq,

who is a New Orleans photographer in the early 1900s.

He made two books about sex workers

and those pictures were actually really beautiful portraits

of these women,

and they have a lot of joy in them.

Along with this slightly illicit nature

was really appropriate for this restaurant.

[gentle jazz music continues]

Obviously the longer I've spent here,

the more detail and the more I fall in love

with certain areas.

Some of the art that was chosen to hang

has beautiful reference

to the history of the building

and the history of the brothers.

I love some of the illustrations that you've had done

for using the rabbit, like the choking poster.

Oh yeah.

[upbeat music]

A few of the things we love in this particular dining room

is this fabulous wallpaper,

we got at Zeuxis and Parrhasius in Vienna.

They're manufacturing their papers by hand.

Another thing I love about this wallpaper

is that it kind of conjures the feeling

of like a mermaid's tale

that fits into the like nautical mythology

of the Water Street location that we're in,

the original site of South Street Seaport

and the Fulton Fish market

Shopping for the Black Rabbit

took an entire set deck team.

And one of my assistants, Tyler Dawkins,

had found a chocolate mold

and that led us into I guess a rabbit hole

of looking for more of those.

And it turned out that we were looking for them

at the same time our prop master was looking at them,

and I think probably bidding against each other.

There's something so beautiful about this object.

If you don't know what it is immediately,

there's something familiar about it,

but you're like, No, what is it?

And then you're like, Oh wait a minute.

That's the mold of the Easter candy

that I've been eating my entire life.

And there are rabbits throughout the restaurant

and they're tucked into little corners.

They're tucked onto window sills.

[Director] If you had to guess, how many rabbits?

Oh, I don't know.

That's the M&M Game. [chuckling]

This is actually an etching

of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

And if you look closely, there's our building right there.

This is the same building from a surveying photo

from the '30s.

And then this is a photo of Gallus Mag

who was the first female bouncer of record,

and she was the bouncer at the Hole in the Wall,

which was a pirate bar that occupied the space.

There's legends of ears being ripped off in bar fights

and saved in a pickle jar on the corner of the bar.

And this woman was responsible for some of those.

So this staircase appears as if it leads up

to the third floor VIP level,

but we had to put the VIP on ground level next to this set.

[bright instrumental music]

This is Jake's office

and he does all of his paperwork in here.

He has his safe where he keeps money and valuables

that come into play.

The idea is that this building,

which is the brick building,

is a tenement building.

So all the rooms would've been very small back in the day.

So we've created the illusion of a wall

that has been cut through to make his office bigger.

Part of the story is that Jake runs so ragged

by the work and the hustle that's involved

in keeping this restaurant going,

that he has a very nice apartment in Soho,

but he very rarely makes it there

and ends up sleeping on the sofa.

Part of the mythology of the Black Rabbit

is the Black Rabbits, which is the band

that Jake and Vince started when they were in their '20s,

it fell apart due to all the temptations and the debauchery.

We try to honor that musical history up on this VIP floor

and we've carried that through to Jake's instruments.

So this hallway at the top of the staircase

is like kind of a transition space

from the other floors of the restaurant

to the more exclusive rock and roll vibe of the VIP room.

And it creates this really cool lighting effect,

the way that the light shimmers off of it and refracts.

[gentle jazz music fades]

[bright upbeat music]

So this is the third floor of VIP,

the crucial moment in the show.

A lot of the drama kind of hinges upon,

there's tons of extras in that scene.

It's very crowded, very chaotic.

So we needed to design the space

so that it would work for that.

[Reveler 1] Isn't it, Jake? I apologize,

We approached this floor a little bit differently

than the first and second floor.

While those floors are a little more nooky

with like lots of crannies and small spaces

that you can kind of disappear in.

This is a little bit more wide open.

At the actual location,

all the rooms on this floor have floors

that are painted different colored and I love that.

But what we did was we followed the sort of pathway

of where the walls were,

painted the floor to match that,

but then removed the walls

and you can see kind of the traces

of where the walls would've been.

Tucked away little lounge area.

One of the reasons to use red lamps and red light,

the brothers want to create the feeling

of a kind of a controlled seediness up here.

The kind of feeling that anything goes

to be invited up to this floor.

You have to know someone

and so that you can be comfortable doing whatever you want.

I need two more bottles of the Barolo.

Is that for Wes?

And the burgers and the caviar,

it's been like this all night.

Did you put out a card?

You mean tonight or this month?

I need three espresso martinis.

So one of the ideas that Zach and Kate,

showrunners of the show wanted for VIP

was kind of a callback to some of their haunts

when they lived in New York City in their twenties.

And those would've been the same places

that Vince and Jake would've hung out at

when they were in the height of their success with the band.

We're talking about places like CBGBs and Mars Bar.

You weren't discouraged to write on the wall

and you could leave your mark.

Because in a bar like the Mars Bar,

that's like decades of very drunk people

scrawling things on the wall.

So our entire scenic crew, the directive was,

whenever you have some time

or whenever you're working in the space,

make sure you add to it.

I've drawn a little bit on it, my kids have drawn on it.

You guys are welcome to also.

[Vince] Do you remember the bars that we used to go to

when we were setting up the band.

It was a million years ago, man.

We were kids.

Okay, well restaurants are the nightclubs of adults.

That's what Black Rabbit would be.

[gentle instrumental music]

And the other big inspiration for this floor,

we looked at a lot of these vinyl bars.

We really liked the idea that the brothers love of music

crossed over.

So Molly, one of our set decorators

tracked down these old cassette racks,

which brought back lots of memory.

Like everyone who walked into the set would be like,

oh my God, I had that exact rack.

And these were taken by Lydia Marks who you met before,

and they're all of Bodega flowers,

which is a very like East village motif.

So you'll see those peppered out throughout the space.

We didn't want like the repetition

of like lots of little, pendant lights.

So I had this thought,

there's a lot of rusty old I-beams throughout the space

and maybe it would be cool to turn some I-beams

into light fixtures.

So that's what we did.

They're actually made of wood

and painted to look like rusty steel.

So this is the DJ booth.

It's an actual DJ booth with real turntables.

And when we're filming in here,

there's a DJ back here.

The records are all from the dollar store or whatever.

If you hold them off the shelf,

they might not be the most exciting,

but they look good

when you see a whole bunch of them lined up together.

This is what we think of as Wes' lounge.

Wes Williams is the hip hop star who is the financial backer

of the Black Rabbit

and he kind of holds court in this area.

What do you get in return?

The 33% of the Rabbit that your group owns.

[upbeat hiphop music]

That will give you two thirds.

[Wes] I knew you man was good at maths.

Another fireplace, black leather furniture.

I love this detail.

We had extra remnants of the carpet

that we use for the runner.

So we decided to use them as tiebacks.

The idea of both the ceiling

and the walls is that,

over time the plaster is crumbling

and as the chunks of the plaster are falling off,

you're revealing the history of the paint jobs

that came before.

And even we put in some vinyl tile to kind of imply

that like at one point, maybe in the '70s,

they kind of refurbished some of the rooms that were in here

and it shows ghosts of where the rooms were

when this space was carved up

as a tenement and apartment.

[gentle jazzy music]

Sometimes we have scenes outside the restaurant.

So we built this recreation of the exterior

and we went through painstaking detail

to recreate the sidewalks.

These are actually just wooden boxes

that are treated to look like cement.

This street lamp, we sent our scenics to the location

and they took a mold of this and cast this.

This sting glass was designed by Don Macy,

our graphic designer.

And the scenics used different kind of films,

and gel mediums, and lead tape

to create the illusion of stained glass.

A motif of some of the kind of hipper restaurants

around the city

to kind of start the experience on the sidewalk

by creating a plant event and line the sidewalk.

Sarah Joe, who leads our greens department

sourced all different planters and plants

and she also did the window boxes that you can see up there.

[gentle jazz music]

Okay, I gotta get back to work,

but thanks for joining me,

and I hope you enjoyed seeing

what we've been working on here.

Send me a drink at the Black Rabbit.

[gentle jazz music fades]