Production design of "Wednesday" by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my honor to welcome back Mark Scruton. In this interview, he talks the critical role of production design and how it feeds into everything else, the changes in the art department in the last decade, key ingredients to longevity in the industry, and his thoughts on generative AI. Between all these and more, Mark takes a deep dive into the first two seasons of the charmingly delightful “Wednesday”.

Kirill: Welcome back! What have you been up to in the last 15 years since we did our first interview, and how was your transition from the world of art direction to the world of production design?

Mark: It was always my long-term goal to be a designer. Several opportunities came my way before I’d made the proper transition, but I always wanted to understand the craft fully before I took that role on in a meaningful way. I could have segued into designing low-budget things or things that I wasn’t invested in, or to jump up the ladder quicker, but I never felt that was the path I wanted to take. I always wanted to understand the craft and have confidence in myself that I was able to hold my own in the top field. A lot of this job is having the confidence to tell people what you think it should be, having the knowledge that you’re selling a design or a look or a whole concept for a show that you 100% believe in, and I feel you need that weight of experience to sell that with confidence. Personally, I could only ever do that if I had a fully rounded understanding of the world that I’m trying to sell.

I did a lot of big feature films, and I supervised a lot of films after we last spoke. “Gravity” was a huge learning curve. I was heavily involved in that film. It was very much an experiment, and we were making the process up as we went along. I supervised other big location and studio jobs after that, working with people like Steven Spielberg and Paul Greengrass and trying to understand all the different aspects of it. Then an opportunity came along, and as I read the script, I was thinking I can take this job on and I can do a good job of it.

You have to take a leap of faith. Once you start designing, you can’t go back to art directing in a meaningful way — not if you’re doing it seriously. It’s front of house. If you’re flip-flopping, it doesn’t present a strong career desire.

That first project was “The Informer”, and it had a lot of good in it. Unfortunately, it suffered from Covid. It was due to be released just as the lockdown hit, and it didn’t get released in cinemas for a long time, and when it did come out, it wasn’t really marketed, it was just put out there, cinemas were struggling and people weren’t going. Later on, it did find a new life on Netflix, and I’m happy to say that it was quite a big hit there.

That project taught me a lot about being at the sharp end of film production. I put a lot of effort into things that ended up not getting the attention they needed within the project. There was a lot of back and forth between what you thought was relevant and what ended up getting shot. It was an interesting learning curve in terms of understanding what was important and what wasn’t, and when to dig in on something and when not to. This job is a lot about budget management, like supervising, the difference is, you’re spending the money! — finding the best way to spend the money you have, knowing what to make beautiful and what doesn’t matter and what does.

On the sets of “Wednesday”, production design by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

After that, I took on a TV show called “Pennyworth”, which was a DC spinoff set in the sixties about Alfred Pennyworth, who was Batman’s butler. That was really where I managed to get my teeth into designing something of scale. It had a good creative mind behind it and, with multiple directors lined up, it needed somebody to take it and run with it. It was a world-building exercise, but it wasn’t so overblown that it was unrealistic. It was exactly the right proportion where you could do interesting things without the studio breathing down your neck about the amount of money you were spending. You weren’t constantly having to justify yourself to people outside of the production.

In the end, I did two seasons of “Pennyworth”. It was a great initial brief with wide-ranging designs. We did amazing builds for it, with lots of environments like nightclubs, villainous lairs, cool apartments, and war-torn streets, with a heightened-reality sixties look, digging into fantasy and period worlds. It’s high-end TV with a feature-film-quality aesthetic. The expansive world of a TV show lets you explore those designs beyond their initial outing, giving you the ability to refine and learn.

These two projects were a nice springboard that led me to getting the call from Tim Burton to join “Wednesday.” It was a segue that I very much wanted but never imagined the way it happened, and I’m pleased it worked the way it did.

On the sets of “Wednesday”, production design by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What do you feel are the bigger misconceptions or misunderstandings about what production design is?

Mark: There’s no one straightforward answer to that. You ask different people and you’ll get different answers. When I talk to people outside the industry, most of the time they have no idea what we do. They either think that we turn up at locations and shoot them as is, or that these environments that we create somehow arrive through osmosis.

The biggest misconception with my world is how important it is in the structure of it all. The whole moviemaking industry is homogenous. Everybody relies on everybody else. If one cog falls off, the whole machine falls apart. It always amazes me that anything gets made, given the pressures we’re under. But it works because everybody knows what they’re doing and when they’re doing it. Everybody understands the nuances and the fluidity of filmmaking.

The thing about the design department is how critical it is to everything. I think people underestimate and maybe sometimes don’t understand that everything relies on it. It’s not just props and soft furnishings. Production design is intrinsic to how special and visual effects work. What we design feeds into how productions are lit and shot. Everything revolves around this key geological hub of the art department, whether they realise it or not. That’s not to self-aggrandise it, as everything is always about the team, but the decisions we make affect everything.

I’m working on a show currently that is complicated and time-constrained, where a lot of different departments are spinning and trying to pull all that together, and you realise that you’re in the centre of it all. You’re not just sitting in your office making pretty pictures of how the set is going to look [laughs]. It embodies every aspect of the filmmaking process. When people turn up on set, they might not think about how much effort has gone into making that set exactly right. The more you have directors and showrunners rely on you to do it, the more you realise how important that is.

We are so budget-driven in how and where we spend our money, and how that filters through all the different things. You must understand what’s relevant and where that money goes. Everything ties together, and unless you’re in the middle of that, it’s quite hard to understand.

On the sets of “Wednesday”, production design by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Looking back at these 10-15 years, what are the bigger changes that the art department has seen?

Mark: In some ways, it hasn’t changed at all. I still use pencil and paper at the beginning of the process. We still make models. Some of the set-building processes are still the same.

But conversely, we are a much nimbler department with a great many more tools at our disposal, and that has been driven by 3D modelling and CAD. When I last spoke to you, we were quite slow in using computers at all. When I first joined the art department, it was very much drawing boards, 5mm lead pencils, and rubbers. You wouldn’t even dream about mentioning computers. I learned 3D modelling in college, and when I joined the art department, I had to learn how to technically draw with pencil and paper. That’s how retrograde it was.

Obviously, things have massively caught up now. When I design a set, I’ll design it in CAD first. That then gets passed on to my team, who expand, refine, and then break it down into technical drawings, but also those models can go to other departments — VFX, even lighting. Anybody can take those models and work with them as an asset. That streamlines the whole process, so you’re much more fluid. It doesn’t always help us because people feel they can change things a lot more, but overall that process has massively changed the art department and how it works.

We get a lot of benefits from 3D printing and manufacturing. You can achieve more, and that depends on the production. If you’re doing a sci-fi show or something that’s heavily driven by fantastical design, you’re much more reliant on 3D modelling to drive the process. But if you’re doing a lower-budget period film, you might well go back to the drawing board. It comes with the territory of understanding the process and where it’s relevant. If you’re going to build a period column, there’s no point in 3D modelling it and sending it off to a CNC company, as there’s probably one that exists already, and you may well have a sculptor in the construction department who can make one much quicker and cheaper. It’s important to understand your assets.

Having all those tools at your fingertips has driven the art department into a whole new world of creativity. I don’t know whether it’s all going to get stamped on by AI. This technology might be our downfall. We’ll see.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Getting to “Wednesday”, when you were reading scripts and talking with Tim Burton, was it clear in your mind how gargantuan it would be?

Mark: Not at all. When you get a call from Tim Burton to come and do a reimagining of the Addams Family, you have initial euphoria followed by a mild panic. And then you have to set all that aside and try not to think about it, because you drive yourself to the point of madness if you try to live up to expectations you would set for yourself. My wife will be testimony to that. You have to knuckle down and try and do the job you think is right, and be pragmatic about it. Otherwise, you freeze like a rabbit in the headlights if you think about it too much.

It was an interesting time. We were just coming out of Covid. “Dumbo” hadn’t been a great experience for Tim, I don’t think, so he was quite open to a new creative process at that point. We were still in lockdown, so we had the time to explore it, and he was very generous dealing with me creatively. He didn’t come in very prescriptive about everything. He wanted to hear my ideas, which was nice because you never know quite what you’re going to get when working with creative auteurs of his magnitude. I’d worked with him before on “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”, but only as an art director and not the designer, so it was a different relationship.

We did a lot of prep work before we even went into production. We flipped and flopped between countries. In the end, I wouldn’t say that we hid ourselves away, but we certainly went off to Romania and hoped nobody knew what we were doing. Everyone left us alone, and mercifully we didn’t feel the weight of pressure on us that we probably should have, given what we were doing and who we were doing it with.

In the same breath, you didn’t know what was going to happen to it. You see so many great shows with big names attached these days on streaming channels that just disappear into obscurity. You almost forget some of them even existed until you go rummaging around the streaming libraries. There was a bit in me that thought that this might not amount to anything, that this might become a footnote in the streaming history of shows that nobody really watched.

I don’t think anybody expected it to be the huge success it was. I’m very glad that it was, because we obviously put a lot of time and effort and thought into it. But I had no expectations that it would be that [laughs], and I don’t think anybody else did either. There are so many good films and TV shows that don’t do anything. You can never expect it to be a huge hit.

Kirill: And there is some time between when you finish your work on season one and when it’s out, and then you see the audiences’ reactions?

Mark: We’d all moved on, and then suddenly it was coming out. I was just starting to work with Tim on “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” when the first season of “Wednesday” came out. We were getting back together again, and it was nice to be connecting at that point. But we were all in a little bit of shock. Obviously, we all want our work to be received well, but it’s still amazing when it happens on that scale [laughs]. And then no one knows quite what to do with that.

On the sets of “Wednesday”, production design by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Certainly, the dance sequence in season one became a cultural moment during that year. It was everywhere.

Mark: Massively, which is always weird when you think back on how that was achieved and the mayhem of film shoots. We had several false starts with that sequence. We were about to shoot the part where the blood rained down from the ceiling, and then a cast member tested positive for Covid. The whole thing had to shut down, and we didn’t shoot any of that for two more weeks. It was a whole weird, protracted process.

Once we were done with the dance itself, it was on to the next thing on the list. No one thought it was going to become this big thing. It was, of course, great watching it on set. Jenna was fantastic. But it’s only later that you see these things put together in the edit. And then it’s out, and everyone was copying it, and it became this viral TikTok thing.

I don’t think you can engineer that. They didn’t market the dance specifically. It was just another part of the show. The public took that and made it a thing.

The show caught a wave of being at the right time in the right place. It hit the right spot. Jenna is amazing, and so is everybody else who worked on it. Tim knows exactly how to work with his cast and get the best out of them. He certainly got the best out of Jenna and knew how to work to her quirkier side. That gelling of the creative minds made that show work. I’m glad that everybody else appreciated it too.

Kirill: How much time have you spent on these first two seasons?

Mark: It was a bit disjointed in the beginning since it was still Covid time. Season one was well over a year, and season two was for the best part of a year.

They are all-consuming. We went off to Romania, and that went on much longer than it should have done. We had numerous delays because of Covid shutdowns. The war in Ukraine broke out at that time, and that meant more delays. I remember a moment when we were shooting a sequence in the forest, and I noticed the spring flowers were coming up. And I had almost a moment of panic, because I realised that I’d seen those flowers already grow once on the job. That took me back a bit, as it meant that I was there well over a year, and it wasn’t meant to be that long.

These high-end TV shows are complicated. We’re trying to generate eight hours of feature-film-quality television, and you do that in the same period of time that you would normally generate two hours for a film. Here we are trying to do eight hours of that in a similar time. These shows are all-encompassing, and they rely on everybody keeping their A-game for a long time, which can be gruelling.

What’s nice about “Wednesday” is that the stories you’re trying to tell, and the worlds you’re trying to get into, are always fun. You’re never sad to get a brief from Mile & Al (the showrunners) or from Tim for what you’re doing next. It’s always exciting. You never sit there and think about how you’re going to get some joy out of it. Tim always pushes you creatively, and that is great.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: How much of the Nevermore Academy spaces was built, and how much was in existing spaces that you took over?

Mark: We looked at a lot of places that were going to be the surrogate for the Academy. You are tempted by amazing places like Peleș in Romania, which is this grand fairytale building. But this gave a very specific look with no room to make it our own.

When we found Cantacuzino Castle, which is the location that we used for the school, it was really a blank canvas. It’s a great topographical location, and it gave us an interesting building at the front which had Addams Family vibes. It’s got a strong front tower with the right silhouette, but importantly it had a lot of negative space. We always felt like they hadn’t quite finished it properly.

There are a lot of low buildings that went off into the distance that didn’t do a lot, which for our purposes was actually perfect. It meant you could design into that space and create a world off the back of the low-level stuff. You still had low-level buildings to film in and do your real-world shooting. Then, when you went up into big dramatic shots, you could create this whole sprawl of Gothic architecture and change the roofs. It was an excellent location from that point of view. It didn’t tie you into a look that you couldn’t move away from.

We spent a lot of time trying to get the silhouette of it right, literally drawing with marker pens to get a strong shape. We ended up with the three clock towers. There’s the Addams Family shape at the front, the three clock towers, and the bigger building at the back. Probably 30% of it was real, and the rest of it was digital in the end. Our VFX supervisor, Tom Turnbull, went to a lot of effort to make sure it was seamlessly integrated as a digital environment.

When it came to season two, we also did physical models. We built the clock tower as a miniature — or bigature, as everyone calls it. It’s a real combination of live action, digital, physical models, and everything else to get that final look.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Was the big round stained-glass window a part of the script when it talked about the girls’ room, or was it added as you started thinking about the layout of that room?

Mark: It was sort of there. The dorm room was the first thing I tackled on the show, because it was the main linchpin for everything. It alluded to the space being messy and colourful on Enid’s side, and monochrome on Wednesday’s side. The script said it had a dominating window, and as I started drawing it, I split it and coloured in one half. I thought it said so in the script, but when I went back and reread it, it didn’t really say that at all [laughs]. It was how I imagined it when I’d read it. Then, when I fed it back to the showrunners, I was concerned it was too much, but they embraced it and it stuck.

A lot of development went on after that basic concept of the window, half coloured and half black and white, that looks like a spider web. Then we had to make that space versatile. I wanted it to be a space where you could get intimate, close scenes, but then you could open the whole thing up for bigger dramatic moments.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: How does it feel to be able to play so much with colour?

Mark: Colour is something I always wrestle with. I’m not a colourful person myself by nature. I have to think a lot about the colour I use in what I do. I will sit with colour charts for a long time, getting those tones right even if they’re greys or blacks. I put a lot of thought into that.

On “Wednesday”, I didn’t want to be formulaic, to put everything in black, and Tim didn’t want that either. We spent so much time with Enid’s side to make sure the colours were vibrant and poppy and harmonious. And we had to pay as much attention to Wednesday and her world. Nothing was ever painted pure black out of a tin. You either had the original textures or colours underneath it. If it was wood, it was always stained so you could still feel the warmth of the wood underneath it. It was tones of black, or black with a touch of warmth in it, or a touch of cold in it. You want to create a palette of colours for her as well as Enid. And you saw that in Colleen Atwood’s costumes as well. She’s never just wearing black. There are elements and tones and texture and colour.

Colour is one of the hardest parts of my job. I can design you a great space quite quickly, but then I’ll spend days trying to figure out how to colour it properly.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: When we go into the courtyard, and there’s all these sculptures and gargoyles and reliefs, what was your inspiration? What styles did you want to bring into it?

Mark: Even though Romania wasn’t our first-choice destination to make the show, it was a real inspiration for the look. I really liked it being an architectural mishmash, for want of a better term. You see Art Deco crashing into Rococo crashing into Brutalism, crashing into all sorts of styles.

I was there for two months recceing, and that led me down a greater path — which I thought was quite liberating — of messing around with these different types of architecture. You can have some fun without being slavish to one particular style. You can’t say that Nevermore is only Gothic Revival, or that it’s only Ottoman. We wanted to dig into different looks.

We wanted to achieve this sense of Nevermore having a history and having evolved over time. Some of the sculptures are far more weathered and aged than some of the others, and some are fresher. Some of them tell stories about the history of the school, and some are far more whimsical.

In season two, we had big bronze sculptures, and some of it is much more Brutalist. I didn’t want to get stuck in a rut with it all. We have our own set of rules, but they’re ours.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Would you say that the principal’s office is the second biggest in the academy after the girls’ room, in terms of how much time the story spends in there?

Mark: Certainly it is in the first season. That set was a great one for me. It epitomises what I was just saying about how I wanted the school to be a melting pot of styles. It was a location that we found in Romania. It didn’t go by any rules. It was Rococo, but it was also Gothic, and it also had modernist elements in it. And Weems [the principal] was much more into a Brutalist style, so we brought a lot of Brutalist furniture and accoutrements into that space. It really reflected the melting pot of the school, and it made sense that it was another linchpin in the storytelling.

When we moved to Dublin for the second season, we had to build it as a set, and we were able to refine certain elements of it. And that journey continues now with additional refinements. When we found that location, I looked in that room and it had a set of doors exactly where I wanted to put the fireplace. That Gorgon head was a bold statement, and I think even Tim was taken aback when he came in and saw the scale of it. It had to be that big. The room is gaudy and loud, and if you’re going to make a statement there, it has to be more of a statement than everything else. And it worked. That Gorgon fireplace became its own standalone image from the show.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as your favourite set on the production, or are all of them your babies?

Mark: It’s normally the one I’ve just finished [laughs]. There are some obvious ones like the dormitory and Weems’ office that we just talked about. I thought the quad was a great set. We did the gardener’s cottage in the second season, which was meant to be a proper Addams Family environment, for want of a better description. I was pleased with how that turned out. That was a lot about time and money and all the constraints that go with it. It’s a nice set because it wasn’t so overblown as to be ridiculous. It was a measured set, and I was pleased that it didn’t come out looking contrived.

One thing that Tim and I are quite keen on is that we never try to dehumanise environments to make them so big and so grand that you lose the human aspect and lose touch with that reality. You always want the space to feel a bit more real and grounded, no matter how fantastical it is — and that holds true for most of what we’re doing.

The Willow Hill hospital set we did in the second season was one of the more fun and pleasing ones for us. We found a great location that was a good jumping-off point for everything. It was this big empty seminary in Dublin that we took over. We almost rebuilt the place, but it had the right bones to give us the structure we wanted. It was symmetrical, and it had space directly in front of it so we could build the gatehouse and the entrance directly in line with the front door and have this grand driveway up to it. It had all the big spaces and the right-shaped windows, which meant we could build into it and create this whole world you could roam around in, complete with secret passages and hidden doors. It was a gratifying set to go to because you really felt like you were going to that place. You would arrive at the gates, go in through the gatehouse that we built, and go into the entrance lobby, and all the rooms were where they should be. If you can do that on a job without it being frivolous, that’s always a joy.

Kirill: Are there — or how many are there — Easter eggs throughout these two seasons?

Mark: Netflix made a big sell of the Easter eggs in the first season. There were a lot. I couldn’t tell you how many there were, because some of them I’ve forgotten. It’s probably a good thing because I’m sure some of them would come back to haunt me.

You have some in the Weathervane Cafe on the walls. Some were nods to Tim Burton shows, and some were plot-driven. We would always try to hide little sailing ships as little signposts to the villains and that narrative. We put ships in the wallpaper or carved them into the stone. The Hyde monster is one of the gargoyles up in the quad. In quite a lot of shots, you see the monster long before you actually SEE the monster. It was there in people’s faces and no one realised it. There are lots of Edgar Allan Poe references and Charles Addams references.

One of the nice ones we did in the second season was in the gardener’s cottage that the Addams Family takes over. When they first go in there, it’s this horrible bright pink environment — it’s horrifying to them. Then, when they come back later, it’s full glorious Addams-core. That wallpaper was specially designed. In the first iteration, it’s pink and flowery, and then it becomes black and grey with roses — it’s actually the same design, just different colours. That was a direct reference to the TV show from the sixties. If you look at pictures of the original TV show set in colour, it was bright pink. It was only because it was broadcast in black and white that everything looked the way it did for the viewers. If you know, you know.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Were there any lingering effects of Covid restrictions in the second season?

Mark: When we got to the second season, it was fine. We obviously had a new home. We moved to Dublin and by that point Covid was very much a thing of the past. Pretty much the only rule at that point was not to bring it to work if you had it.

Kirill: How do you see generative AI today?

Mark: It depends which day you ask me that question on. It would be naive not to think that, on the path it is on at the moment, it could well finish off most of what we do as a creative element. There’s a lot of me that wants to feel that people will still want physical things and human creativity. There’s also a lot of me that realises there’s a big market for just any old nonsense and people will still watch it.

The reality is that what I do, and what my department does, and the extension of that through physical sets and environments, is an expensive exercise. It’s hard not to see the financial benefits of generative AI having a big impact on that. If you can completely circumvent a department that potentially costs you 20-30% of your production budget, why wouldn’t you do that?

We’ve gone through 20-30 years of people predicting everything would be shot entirely on blue screen, and it isn’t — but AI is different. Just a few years ago people didn’t even know this existed. And here we are now in a world where you can easily predict producers and studio execs sitting down with the right prompts and handing you a portfolio of designs and saying, “This is what we want our show to look like.”

I don’t know how you combat that in a meaningful way, other than saying, “Well, my opinion is better than yours” — but then, when does that ever hold sway? It’s easy to get depressed about it, but there are a lot of people out there making films and TV shows and narrative formats that still value the collaborative process and the creative process that comes with it. I’m always the first one to say that I’m only ever as good as the team around me. I rely on the creative input of the concept artists, my art directors, my prop makers, the sculptors, and the rest of the team. That creative input is what makes a department.

On the sets of “Wednesday”, production design by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

There are a lot of people who still value that greatly, who want to make films in that way. How long will that hold up financially? I don’t know. And that’s the problem. If you tell any filmmaker today that they can carry on making films in that more traditional format forever with no consequences, most people probably would, in one way, shape, or form. But if you tell people that there are ways to slash the production budget by three quarters, and here it is [laughs]… Unfortunately, the reality of that will probably get the better of the industry in the end. How long that’ll take, I have no idea. What route that will go, I don’t know — I didn’t see Doug Liman being one of the first filmmakers to go out of his way to make a fully generative AI film. You just don’t know what route it is going to take. All you can do is roll with it and try to do what you think is best.

Can generative AI come up with interesting stuff? Yes, it can. Is it meaningful? Who knows? You’d be foolish not to understand it. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t messed around with it, just because you need to know what you’re dealing with. And my biggest frustration with it has always been that it can never, ever generate what I’m trying to get out of my head. I always have a very clear idea in my head of what I want something to look like, and I can never get generative AI to do it. It never comes out looking how I want it to look, and I always get frustrated and cross with it. But if somebody doesn’t have that clear idea in their head — somebody who doesn’t know what they want — it’s got all the guns [laughs].

On the sets of “Wednesday”, production design by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Looking at these 25-30 years of your career so far, what do you feel are the key ingredients to longevity in this industry? How do you not burn out? How do you not get frustrated enough to get up and leave?

Mark: It’s tempting on a regular basis [laughs]. I always go out of my way to try to understand what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I wanted to make sure that when I got here, I understood and knew the craft. You need to understand the craft. And you need to understand that it’s a tough mistress.

I’ve always gone above and beyond what I think is properly reasonable to try to achieve things that are probably not worth the effort. But that’s just me and my nature. It was drummed into me at film school that you get up and you turn up and you do more than what’s required. I’ve always gone by that.

As you get older, you relax more because you understand more. That is what stops you screaming at the moon every night. Your understanding of the process becomes such that you know that although things are stressful and exhausting, it’s all nonsense in the scheme of things, and that we’ll all get up in the morning and do something else — and there’ll be another critical problem that seems just as important until it’s solved. And then it’ll be irrelevant a few days later.

You can’t lose your sense of humour. That is very important to me. There have been occasions where that’s happened, and I’ve questioned what I’m doing, but then you get some perspective on what you’re doing and you get up, and you turn up, and you put the effort in, and normally it will pay that back.

You also can’t underplay the fact that some of it is just down to luck. The film industry is a weird, meandering place. Most of the jobs I’ve done have not been the jobs that I actually wanted to do. Most of the jobs I’ve actively gone after, I’ve never got [laughs]. It’s always been a phone call completely out of the blue that’s taken my career in a different direction and down paths that I never thought were possible. But I never predicted it. If you’d asked me five years ago, I wouldn’t have said I would be here.

That is the joy of it. That’s why you keep going with this industry. You never know what’s around the corner, and what will happen, and what new exciting thing will be your reason to get out of bed again.

Production design of “Wednesday” by Mark Scruton, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: If you had a time machine to jump back to when you were starting out and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would that be?

Mark: It’s probably not relevant now, but back then, and for the first 10-15 years, I would have said to keep going with the 3D modelling and the computer side of things. Long into my career, I had to start again and relearn what I’d already learned at college and forgotten. I would definitely say not to move away from 3D modelling because at the time everyone thought it was a fad!

Kirill: “Wednesday” took you to Romania and then to Ireland. What did you discover in the local cuisine that was your favourite in these two places?

Mark: There was this Romanian cabbage (varză călită) cooked in a tomato-based stock. I have yet to perfect a version of it of my own, and if I could find somewhere that sold that, I’d always be quite happy with that, along with a spicy Romanian sausage. In Dublin, the food is very similar to London. They do a very good steak here, though.

And here I’d like to thank Mark Scruton for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design. “Wednesday” is available for streaming on Netflix. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.