Production Designer Renee Read On How Research Was Her Guiding Light for ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’

Before my conversation with production designer Renee Read, I had no idea how much painfully thoughtful research went into FX’s Under the Banner of Heaven. In a year packed with true crime stories, it’s easy for people online or awards prognosticators to lump these re-tellings with one another, but we need to stop doing that in order to honor the struggles of these stories. They are being dramatized for a reason, and we need to respect that. Read’s work on the Dustin Lance Black series was created with unbelievable precision, urgent detail, and the terrifying reminder that people are suffering in this community to this very day.

There are audiences who are tuning in to Banner with little to no knowledge of the Mormon faith, history, or practices. Some people might only be aware of the framework introduced in a certain musical from a few years back. The more you dive into Banner, however, the more disturbing the story gets. In order to understand the present, we must go back to the past, and for Read, that meant a mountain of research.

“Research was everything. We had three full-time researchers in addition to Lindsay Park who runs the non-profit Sunstone Education Foundation and Troy Williams, who is a gay rights activist for Equality Utah. Troy grew up in the Mormon church and Lindsay describes herself as an Independent Mormon. We filmed in Southern Alberta, which is still a hotbed for the LDS community. We also had a couple crew members in the art department who grew up in the church and they brought in personal family photos to help us with specific details to give us a broader and deeper understanding.

“LDS bookstores in town were open to selling art and literature to us until they found out we were adapting Kraukauer’s book and then they weren’t so welcoming. We also had a lot of contact with the main library in Salt Lake City, though, again, our researchers found we would get more information if we didn’t disclose what production we were working on. Many hours of each day were devoted to excavating the historical nuances of key scenes like the historical battles. If you look at something like the Mountain Meadow Massacre, the gentile, the Paiute

Native American and the LDS will all have different accounts. There was an investigative nature to the work we were doing. There’s the narrative of the Church, and then there are competing narratives from the Paiute people and historians outside the faith.”

A space that I kept thinking of throughout the entire series was the home of Jeb and Rebecca Pyre, because of its natural warmth. Their children run around the space, and Jeb’s mother is now living with the family. There are always scenes in the kitchen, and that space too radiates warmth. As the series progresses, I was desperate for Andrew Garfield’s Jeb to get back to his family every night. If he can make it home, I thought, he can put a distance between himself and the senseless violence he is investigating. The further he seeks, the closer that darkness is to knocking on the Pyre front door.

“We were striving for a severe and discriminating authenticity. We tried to stay super vigilant to not allow the period materials to become hyperbolic. We trekked across the Southern Alberta landscape, and built many key sets on location.

“We found his home about an hour outside of Calgary and stripped it down to reverse-renovate backwards in time. We removed the wall between the dining room and kitchen as well as the one toward the family room to open up the space and stay true to the aesthetics of late ‘70s residential floor plans. And, of course, like every home in the show – covered every inch of wall and floor with period appropriate materials.

“Using as many of the elusive images of private Mormon residential life from that period we could find, we pieced it together in hopes it would feel like a safe refuge for Jeb during the beginning, though grow darker and more claustrophobic as the series unfolds. Jeb’s home is the natural product of a devout man who is performing his faith and duties well and correctly and is therefore provided a safe and loving home. This is at the heart of what comes undone throughout the story.

“Lance’s writing navigates all these paradoxes with empathy, honesty and a real intimacy of storytelling. The visual design of that space had to be fiercely sincere and painstakingly intimate, laser precise. Every single object that would go on the set had to pass four tests.

“Was it period accurate? Does it belong in a Mormon household, whether it be 1825 or 1977? Would this character, as many are inspired by real people, own this object? And only then, we would ask – does it support the overall design. All that exhaustive work was brilliantly executed by our three tireless set decorators.”

In episode three we see the endowment ceremony for Allen and Brenda Lafferty, and I had no idea how private the ritual was until I spoke to costume designer, Joseph La Corte. Inside the LDS temple, you can see light streaming through the windows, and it gives a hopeful feeling. The most striking image, however, is a large mural that Read created from hundreds of imagery pertinent to the Mormon faith. We feel like a voyeur in this room–an intruder. It was a tremendously huge moment in Read’s overall design that we only get to see for one episode. It’s another example of how Read wanted to honor the history of this space.

“There are almost no images of the Telestial Room at that time period. Part of the ritual there is that those who participate are sworn to secrecy. They cannot take photos, obviously, but they aren’t allowed to talk about what happens either. Lindsay Park was married at the temple and lived through the very rituals we re-create in the show. When she stepped onto our set, she became intensely emotional because it was so dead-on. She also felt a deep sense of anxiety being in the space, as she had crossed a line in the faith by explaining to all of us what, exactly, had gone on in that room. She had broken the covenant of secrecy to help us tell this important story.

“It was so difficult to find imagery. The hand-painted mural inside the actual Temple was completed just over one hundred years ago and depicts man’s struggle between dark and light and the strife of existence. Obviously the church wasn’t interested in releasing the rights to the painting, so we had to create our own custom mural compositing hundreds of elements from 45 classical paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. We applied it as a wallpaper finish and had our scenic painters do the final touches.

“Our overarching goal was to create a sense of place. I was genuinely obsessed with building that out through authenticity of locations and builds and landscape lust.

“Our collective dream was for all the hard work –  quite literally, the blood, sweat, and tears of our crews building this beast on location from the height of summer in the desert to the depths of a relentlessly cruel Canadian winter is that the sense of place would be at the forefront of your experience as a viewer. We wanted to transport you there –  inside the danger and beauty of it all. The throughline here is Truth: This story happened in America and it happened very recently. And it’s still happening. As Lance said before screening the premiere, ‘We know better now, so we HAVE TO DO BETTER.’ We didn’t want to undermine the reality of this with a bunch of overly art-directed sets on a stage.”

In the final two episodes, we see more of Brenda and Allen in their home together. It it not overly decorated, and it truly feels like it was put together by a family with a lot of promise ahead of them. Since Brenda was more of an outsider, Read wanted to infuse a sense of individuality with Brenda’s faith. The space also feels different from other, more established members of the Lafferty family. Read put painstaking effort into finding just the right duplex location, and she used Black’s words to guide her.

“It was imperative that Brenda’s housework be shot on location and not built on the stage because we needed all the door threshold work to be legit and nestled amongst her fellow LDS neighbors as it occurred in real life. In addition, it had to be a side-by-side duplex with an almost identical floor plan to the real crime scene so we could remain true to the horror of what actually happened. It took months to find the right location, and then we stripped the interior and put an exterior back door and back deck off the kitchen to mirror the original geography of the murder.

“Lance brought with him an excruciating amount of detail around the crime scene so we could re-create every last blood splatter, hand, and footprint. Those are actually my bloody fingerprints in evidence near the front door as we re-set that crime scene upwards of half a dozen times over the course of the series.

“While Brenda and Allen’s home feels more contemporary than its anachronistic Mormon counterparts (Lafferty’s, Bishop Lowe’s, Pyre’s, etc.), it’s still firmly within the guidelines of a proper LDS household; ostensibly modest and relatively austere with devout attention to celebrating family and the canonized imagery of the faith. That said, this is one of the few spaces in the entire show where we feel the more sleek and curvilinear shapes of the 1980s creep in because, unlike the Lafferty family members, Brenda is not stuck in the past and is keen to embrace what the future has to offer. She’s a progressive AND devout woman, and we hoped every single item, textile, timbre, and wallpaper choice in that home would help tell that conflicting story.”

When I found out just how much Read and her team built for the final showdown and capture of Brenda’s murderers, I was floored. The Circus Circus Casino is like something out of a glittery movie–it shimmers and blinks like a live specimen. So much of Banner has been the modest and honest homes and offices of members of the LDS community, but Read gets to turn up the glitz and darkness for the final chase. As Jeb and Bill Taba run through the casino, more doors unlock and it’s like the building is unfolding itself before our eyes. It swerves and opens like a manic children’s game or a deadly puzzle.

“The Circus Circus Casino set was a full build on the stage. The entire thing. It’s a colossal example of our approach to designing the innumerable dark sets of this series in a way that serves story because it’s a final herculean version of what we endeavored to accomplish across the board; the set was lit practically with thousands and thousands of tungsten bulbs. Craig Wroebleski, (DOP), and I, collaborated to create a comprehensive world for the actors and Tommy (Schlamme, the director) to play in that felt monumental and authentic, because – it was.

“It was a massive playground that allowed all the true cat and mouse work to be filmed in cinema verité — people running in and out of natural shadows and hidden spaces. In short, excruciating detail on a monstrous scale lit practically.

“The exterior was shot in downtown Calgary in the middle of winter. Another epic snow struggle with the snow.

“The theatre had an old, dilapidated marquee structure that we had re-wired, but we still needed to build and suspend full-scale light boxes for the actual marquee elements. Tricky cause the building was zoned heritage. So the clowns cane and marquee supports were built. What you see in the end is practical from the ground up to about 20 feet and set an extension above that to reflect the original full clown icon.

“The casino work was shot in late December in the last two days of production. We were painting and dressing that thing until they rolled the camera. Then, like the show as a whole, we were running full speed until the final lights went out for good.”

Read has another beautifully detailed project in the limited series race in Netflix’s Maid. That series is like a beating heart, and Read hopes that audiences don’t assume that they just purchased items and threw them together. It’s still character-driven and infused with intention. I wanted to explore so many spaces from that series after speaking with Read. I want to go into Paula’s trailer and Nate’s cozy space.

“Because Maid feels and looks so organic and seamless, like a documentary, I hope audiences don’t feel there was less care put into it. Creating sets that live in the world of social realist photography require just as much attention to detail and obsessive creativity.

“One of my favorite moments is Alex being ‘swallowed by couch.’ I think those are the exact words Molly used to describe the scene in the script. We loved that image, and the director of that episode, Quyen Tran, and I, agonized over that thing for weeks. It could have so easily become a disastrously comedic gag about an anthropomorphized couch eating Margaret Qualley alive.

“Seamlessness is what we were trying to achieve. Molly’s writing is deeply intimate. She built a whole world for us that was delicately personal yet nevertheless feels universal. She’s a world-class storyteller. Maid should be required viewing for all high schoolers and elected officials.

You described the show as having a beating heart, and that makes my heart feel so full. When I create a world from scratch, that’s what I’m aiming for; I want you to enter the world fully, completely, and I want you to believe it”

Under the Banner of Heaven is streaming on Hulu and Maid is streaming now on Netflix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDRqWtwbiSM