How NYC Was Transformed into Gotham for The Penguin

Why New York City for The Penguin?

Because New York City is the love of my life. [chuckles]

I love it decayed. I love it shiny.

I love every look of New York City.

It has everything.

It has the streets, it has the history,

and the crooked politicians.

It has everything.

That is why New York City had to be Gotham.

[upbeat music]

I'm Kalina Ivanov,

and I'm the production designer of The Penguin on HBO.

Today, we're gonna talk about

how we transformed New York City

into Gotham for The Penguin.

New York City was the perfect background for us

because of its eclectic architecture.

You can have five good blocks, and then two bad,

and then three good blocks, and then one bad.

You can see the tension between the poor and the rich

in the streets of New York.

You can see it. You can feel it.

You can breathe it.

I moved to the city in 1979.

New York City in the '70 and the '80s.

was a very different city than the modern one.

It was city left to the rats, and it was a garbage strike.

And it was one disaster after another.

So the rich people left New York at that time,

but I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world.

And I carried that love for the city

and for the grime of the city, deeply with me.

I used it to the full extent in The Penguin.

And it relates to the story of The Penguin very well,

because he is somebody who grew up in the city,

down on the streets, on the dirty streets of Gotham,

and he wants to become the top gangster.

He wants to go to the top.

He is full of personal discontent and full of ambition,

and that suited the story very well.

The Penguin takes place immediately

after Matt releases The Batman.

That means the Riddler has set off his bombs,

and the city is flooded.

The last images of The Batman are the flood,

and the first images of The Penguin are the flood.

Let's look at the neighborhood

where the post flood was stage five.

The most affected neighborhood was Crown Point.

So this is Crown Point.

Crown Point is very important

because the poor people live there.

And one of the things that was very important

to Lauren LeFranc, our showrunner,

was that the poor people are proud people.

They take care of their business.

And the Penguin uses that very well to his advantage.

The good people at Crown Point, hard of work.

We got the love, in a way,

'cause we pay them.

Hmm.

You know how meaningful that is, Vic?

To be the guy in the neighborhood who takes care of people?

Crown Point is the last place to have its power restored,

and it's only in the series you see the Penguin

bribing a politician to restore the power.

This is a real street in Yonkers.

Nothing you see here is CJI.

All the 40 tons of dirt, and the garbage, and the cars,

everything is brought by the art department.

This is what a production designer really does.

I dropped 40 tons of dirt on the street

and all the cars and all the garbage

because you really needed to feel

like FEMA needed to come here and markup the street.

And you can see the FEMA markings

on the stores that we created.

I lived through Sandy.

As a matter of fact, the water breached where I live,

and Avenue C was entirely covered in dirt.

I took that memory and experience,

and I transferred it to the set, in a sense.

So this is the real FEMA signage.

This is done by us.

My art director, Debbie Whitley,

became an expert on FEMA signage.

And you can see here how it says FEMA,

and it shows the most destruction

you can ever see in the city.

So Crown Point is based on five points in Manhattan.

The real five points in Manhattan

was where the Irish used to live in the '30 and the '20s,

and where the gangs used to live.

So Crown Point is based on five points in Manhattan,

particularly the Mulberry Bend.

It gave us this wonderful curve

to slowly reveal the Crown Point.

It allowed for a flowing shot to go through this street

and ends up right where you need to end up.

But you don't see it from the beginning.

If the street was straight,

you'd see where your end point is.

If the street was bent, it will slowly reveal itself.

Matt Reeves based the Batman on the comic book Year One,

and that took place in the '80s.

And therefore, his heart was always in the '80s.

And I wanted to follow that dream, his dream.

And I wanted to base The Penguin

on New York City in the '70s and the '80s.

It was very evocative time.

It was time of decay, of crooked politicians,

and it played very well into our story

and into the tension between poor and rich.

They're gonna talk about this night.

You know, the time that we decided

that it's better to work with the ones we hate

than live under those that they don't even know

our fucking names!

This is the trolley depot,

and he is gonna set up his big drug business in here.

[motor revving]

You know what thrives in a place like this?

Mushrooms?

Bingo.

It's an abandoned trolley depot, which we built as a set.

The last car left in 1957.

And the trolley depot is also underground,

like the New York Subway.

Actually, New York used to have trolley cars until 1957.

This set was built in the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx,

and it is 4,500 square feet.

The Armory is huge.

It is three times bigger than the Sack.

It's the biggest armory in New York, and it's massive.

I mean, it's a spectacular building.

I hope you go to see it.

So this set was built in the atrium of the Armory,

but there is a real part to it.

Inside the Kingsbridge Armory, there is a lobby,

and you can see

how the same architectural detail I copied on our set.

You can see it on the columns.

You can see how I repeated that element.

And it was done from plywood.

All the brickwork, all the stonework,

all the elements are done by the Scenics.

And it's painted bricks, and it's painted stone,

and it's painted everything, but it looks real.

I mean, the Scenics are such masters.

They deserve all the credit.

And also, these are the real windows of the building.

They're interior windows.

And they lead to the second story

where the officers used to have their quarters.

The prop master brought in two trolley cars.

We completely painted them, aged them to be from the period.

And this trolley car has the number 58,

because that was the first issue of the Batman comics

the Penguin appeared as a character.

And if you look at the production design,

that's not the only Easter egg.

In Eve's bedroom, there's a upside down umbrella.

Also, outside The Penguin's apartment

in the Diamond District,

there was the Burgess Diamond sign,

and Burgess is an homage to Burgess Meredith,

who played the Penguin.

We've got enough to put you back on ice, Penguin.

Oh, tut tut, Batman.

I only make the umbrellas.

What they do after they leave here

is hardly my affair now, is it?

Lighting in this set was very complicated.

We made life with the DP a little bit harder

because we built the set for real.

It was meant to be like a real building.

Because we built all the vaulted arches

like they were in real life,

there was no grid possible for the DP to light a set,

therefore, he had to use what we give him.

On top of everything, the scenes were shot handheld,

and he had nowhere to go.

In terms of the lights,

they would be in his way, you'd see them.

So we really had to think about the lighting

and built it into the set.

And we thought of what the construction department uses

while they construct the sets.

They have all these lights, practical lights, LED lights,

and those are the lights that you see in the show,

and they really light beautifully, the people,

and it gives you this very ghostly atmosphere in a way,

and it's very appropriate for the moment.

Remember, if somebody asked you where you got this cash-

I'd say construction. Construction.

We're all in construction.

So we've been looking at the underbelly of Gotham,

and now, let's look at how the other half lives.

So this is the Falcone Mansion.

In the '70s and the '80s, the rich fled the city.

So we took that as a cue.

The rich lived in Bristol township in our story,

which is, of course, 30 miles outside of the city.

I thought of it as Oyster Bay.

That is where the rich live.

So we found this location exactly at Oyster Bay.

I envisioned Carmine's residence as an Italian villa.

In a sense, I was thinking of The Great Gatsby.

And we went to Oyster Bay and we found this location,

which is a real Italian villa from 1925.

And all we did was bring the fountain in and the greens,

a lot of greens we brought in.

I loved this location

because it had the restrain of the architecture.

It showed a constricted character the way Carmine was.

Don't tell me you're sick of the party already.

Why didn't you tell me you met with a reporter?

You never ever talked to the press.

I thought you understood that.

So this is inside the Falcone Mansion,

which we built as a set.

I chose black and gold for Falcone as his theme,

because he's the number one gangster in Gotham.

I also liked paintings of pre-Renaissance painters

like Simone Martini,

is the main fresco we have behind Carmine

when he sits at the head of the table.

In this particular photo,

it is Sofia that is up against it because it is the scene

where she becomes the head of the family.

As of today,

my father's legacy is dead.

This is a new family now.

Let's not be rash here.

All right, these gentlemen know

we got a score we need to settle.

[gunshot bangs] Oh!

It's very important to me that it is pre-Renaissance,

because it's before they figured out perspective.

So the figures are always slightly stilted.

And that appealed to me very much

because that was like Carmine.

Carmine is elegant but slightly stilted.

There's something dead in him inside,

and I wanted to capture that.

And not only that,

but Carmine, when you sits in front of him,

he wants you to be impressed by that painting.

He wants you to feel the power of the painting,

the power of who he is as a man.

So all the textures inside the Falcone Mansion

are Venetian plaster, gold, black, columns,

the biggest fireplace you ever saw,

the biggest windows you ever saw.

Those textures there, together,

they're supposed to weave the picture of Carmine

to show how imposing Carmine really is.

How I see the difference between the rich and the poor

is in the scale of things.

Carmine has a two-story drawing room.

The poor are always under something.

They're always under the subway.

Underpasses were very important in our story.

They're always in the shadows.

Carmine is here with the light.

It's a golden light.

It shows the power of the person.

New York City was the perfect Gotham for The Penguin

because of its scope, of its history,

of the layers of history,

and of the one unique quality New York has.

The mixture of styles

matters to the production designer very much

because it allows you to do rich people, poor people,

and they're next to each other.

And that vibrancy of the city,

played very well into our story.

[gunshot bangs] [victim grunts]