‘True Detective: Night Country’ Production Designer Daniel Taylor Reveals How They Made Those Ice Caves Look Real

Awards Daily chats with True Detective: Night Country production designer Daniel Taylor about that spooky RV, building ice caves from scratch, and why creating the Solal Lab was an all-hands-on-deck team effort.

As a Brit, production designer Daniel Taylor felt a degree of responsibility when working on True Detective: Night Country. While it’s a global success, it’s a very American show.

“I wanted to make sure that most domestic spaces felt as realistic as possible,” said Taylor. “If they don’t, you’re immediately taken out of the show. If it doesn’t feel convincingly Alaskan, then I’m ruining the show for everybody else.”

As part of his research, Taylor and the True Detective team flew to Anchorage and then they traveled to Nome and Kotzebue on the coast before flying to Iceland to see if they could recreate the architecture and general vibe.

“It’s the little fiddly bits. The bigger things you can change with CGI, but it’s things like light switches, radiators. all those awkward funny little things that are harder.”

Thankfully, because everything takes place at night, that allowed him some leeway.

“Shooting at night and in snow covered a multitude of sins. We camera-tested with the practical lighting, the right color-temperature bulbs we were going to use in the space. We made sure whenever we were looking at anything we were putting in front of the lens that we were looking at it in the right lighting stage. It’s not like you would look at wallpaper or a paint sample or furniture item in the daylight because everything was going to have a blue hue over it.”

An old U.S. army base in Iceland proved to be very helpful to Taylor and his crew, providing a strong starting point for them to “color between the lines.”

“Every interior, we completely redressed, repainted, changed radiators, new wallpaper, new floor, and then we brought in American dressing. There was an old army base in Iceland, so there were a lot of American products on the island that were hanging over from the ’70s and ’80s, which was perfect for us. Modern Alaska is a little stuck in the ’80s at times. We had container loads coming from the U.S. Americans have big fridges, but in Iceland, they’re tiny little things.”

While Taylor had to make the domestic spaces look lived-in, the RV that Navarro (Kali Reis) discovers had to look terrifying. He used some inspiration from the pine-fresh magic trees in David Fincher’s Seven.

“We knew we wanted those string dollies. I just think the idea of something brushing your face and stuff that’s moving above you is really unsettling. We knew we wanted things to be hanging, and that spiral took a long time. We added many coats and it had a resin in it. When you traced it with your torch, the shadow moved as well. We managed to find 8 or 10 RV units, and we built that caravan part up in the north. We built it three months before because we wanted to the snow to come and sit around it. We built it there and we left it, and we came back and the snow had come. The snow drifts were real.”

However, the ice caves prominently featured in the series were not real and something that Taylor and his crew created themselves.

“To be honest, I was dead set against building them. We’re going to Iceland, and they have the most beautiful ice caves over there. This is what we’ve come to this place for! But then as we came to understand the sequence and read the scripts, it felt like the only way to do it was to build them. It was drawn first in Unreal Engine, and then we put VR goggles on, so we as a team could walk the length of the ice caves with the goggles on and understand size, proportions, scale, and length. And you could actually read the dialogue and understand you have the right length of cave. Then we set out doing samples of how we were going to recreate the cave walls themselves. We ended up painting sheets of translucent plastic, some were sheets so they had a thickness to it, and others were very thin. We heated them and then laid them on rocks that we put into a forma and then the sheet would take the shape of the rocks in the forma, and it would dry in that shape.”

Taylor said it was nerve-wracking because it had never really been done before, and that watching Kali and Jodie Foster walk through the tunnels felt unreal.

“I’ve got string, Sellotape, and plastic sheeting, and it felt like an amateur dramatic theater performance. It was petrifying! But fortunately it looked really good.”

Of all the production design achievements on this series, the one Taylor is most proud of is the Solal Lab.

“It required a lot of back and forth with [showrunner] Issa (Lopez) and I in the beginning in terms of understanding the geography. I did a lot of research with a paleo-climatologist who spent 30 seasons in an Arctic research center. I thought it was really important that we got the layout right. It could match the story, but it had to feel real and believable. Then I had a 3D modeler building the interiors as a sketch model, and then I had a concept guy matching that but painting the exterior. Then we put it into VR and the Unreal Engine to paint and texture the outside to give it to visual effects. Then we gave it to the art directors to draw and build the set physically, which was the biggest set they’ve ever had in Iceland with those huge glass windows. Then the set decorating team came in and dressed it. Then it went to the CG guys to paint it in post-production. There were so many people involved in its final end product, and I think all the way through people fell into line and bought into how Issa and I wanted it to look. It rang right and true from the very first conversation I had with Issa. It was exactly how I imagined and hoped.”

True Detective is streaming on MAX.