The Penguinis a success on many fronts. It’s a stellar character story that finds something new to say about a character that few would give a second thought to. Fans are far from starved for takes on the Batman mythos, but many were shocked to find such a textured glimpse into Gotham’s underworld. One of the most important parts of the artistic team behind that new perspective is veteran production designer Kalina Ivanov.
Ivanov is an Emmy Award-winning production designer with an astonishing history in the industry. She cut her teeth on projects including the quintessential American thriller,The Silence of the Lambs. More recently, Ivanov worked on projects likeLovecraft CountyandThe Boys in the Boat, bringing distinct views of the past and the present to life. Herwork onThe Penguinis her first step into comic book media, but she’ll be back soon, as she’s already been tapped to work onPeacemakerseason two.
An Interview With Kalina Ivanov:
What drew you to this as a project?
OK, so it is my very first project based on a comic book, but what drew me to it was my love for Batman, and particularly Christopher Nolan’s Batman prior to Matt Reeves, but I also have to say I’ve reallyenjoyed Tim Burton’sBatman. So as far as comic heroes go, Batman has always been my most favorite character, so I followed every single one, from Tim Burton to Chris Nolan, and then the very first film I went to see after I got it was Matt Reeves’sThe Batman, and I loved it. Absolutely loved it. So I was really very surprised when I got the call for it, given the lack of experience I’ve had with comic book characters, but it turned out that they were looking for a very grounded design approach that I’m very comfortable with, and it really made a lot of sense once I got the job, and once I started working with Lauren and Matt, it became very clear to me why I was the designer of this show.
Between this and the second season ofPeacemaker, you’ve sort of become one of the leading visionaries on how DC Comics look on the screen now.
They’re very different, though. These two projects are very, very different. I mean, one’s a comedy and one is as dark as it gets,speaking ofThe Penguin. But I think that it’s wonderful to challenge yourself and to try something new, and that I really, really love. I call myself The Accidental DC Designer because I’ve kind of stumbled into it, but I’m loving it because it’s allowing me to do things that I would have never been doing otherwise. And as a designer, I’ve tried to change many, many genres I cover in my career—comedies and dramas, and musicals, and you name it, and I like that. I purposefully do that. In the last five years, I’ve been focusing on fantasy and period. So, you know, The Penguin was just a great opportunity to take another direction, to go in a, you know, a new territory.
I’ve heard you speak about your love of fantasy. Do you feel like, even in a series this grounded, you kind of had a hand in the fantastical?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, yes, it’s grounded, and we talked in great depth about the characters and backstories and everything, and I made it feel very relatable and very real. But at the same time, I was always thinking aboutthe mythology of Batmanand how that compares to Greek mythology, because I kind of developed this feeling that what Batman and Superman are to today’s audiences is what Greek mythology was to Greeks 2000 years ago, and I became fascinated with how I can weave that kind of mythology visually into the mythology of the Penguin, and particularly at the very last scene at the very last set that you see in the series is very muchbased on Greek mythology. I remember going to Lauren and kind of casually saying to her, “How do you feel about the hounds of Zeus?” And she just looked at me and started laughing, and I said, “Yep.”
Some people may know them as the Harpies, but they’re from Greek mythology, and I said, “I really have this idea that at the very last scene of at the abandoned hotel penthouse, the Penguin should be watched by a lot of really pissed off Greek women, as portrayed, you know, in famous paintings.” So anyway, it was interesting. It was interesting getting there, you know, and that’s what I mean is like, I love the opportunity to think outside of my box and outside of a normal approach to a set. He really allowed me to think metaphorically about the set designs. They’re not just environments, but they actually have a deeper meaning behind them.
I don’t mean it in an intellectual way; I meant it in a visceral way, because the Greeks really believed in, in, in, in the gods, and they really believed that mythology. It was very real to themand Batman and Supermanare very real to a big segment of the population. They’re just equally as important to them in their daily life or in their sense of fantasy and a sense of enjoyment. And I thought, oh, I just would love to bring this together somehow and visually. It’s very visceral. It’s very interesting.
Even in a show that doesn’t necessarily have a superhero in it?
Well, true, but the Batman is a real person.He is Bruce Wayne, and that’s kind of what I absolutely love about him: that on one hand, he is a superhero, but really, he is very much at his core, a real person, and there’s just something so cool about Batman. I’ve always loved Batman, always very funny. It is also that I got the job while I was designing a movie calledThe Boys in the Boatwith George Clooney directing it, and he was, of course, one of the many Batman actors, and we kind of had a big laugh about it. You know that somehow even Batman got to connect us? We were connected, you know, professionally through Batman somehow.
Speaking about The Boys in the Boat and period pieces, The Penguin is ostensibly set in the modern day, but it’s so heavily influenced by history and the way that cities have changed. How do you go about blending the modern with the historical?
Oh, such a great question, because if you live in New York, and I’ve lived in New York for 40 years, there’s so much history, and yet there’s so much modern life in it, and it’s such an incredible cocktail of styles and architectural styles, of period buildings with completely contemporary state-of-the-art architecture buildings, and it’s very unique in that way because it’s very eclectic, and it teaches you a lot how to blend styles in a way. It’s a great place to live and learn about grime and blending styles. I think I always call upon New York in my design work in some way or another. It’s a very visceral and emotional city and everyone talks fast and walks fast and there’s such a sense of dynamic life. No other city has that. Every other city is leisurely, and you go for coffee, and you sit on a bench, and you read a newspaper. Not in New York. Everyone’s in a hurry, and that energy is soappropriate forThe Penguin.
Also, what really helped me was talking to James Chinlund, the production designer ofThe Batman. He’s a friend and a colleague, and we had a great conversation about his approach toThe Batmanand what kind of architectural history of New York he was drawing on, and it was very informative, and it spoke deeply to my heart. I just tried to continue that kind of thinking, but in a different neighborhood, in a different kind of in a different part of Gotham that we were portraying. But I tried to staytrue to what Matt Reevesand James wanted to do inThe Batmanand continued that same approach to design.
I actually thoughtThe Batmanwas a period movie when I saw it, mostly because of a lot of the cars on the streets. It felt 80s and 90s to me, and Matt Reeves said, “no, no, no. It’s contemporary.” And I was like, “Oh, you wanted to do contemporary, fine.” But then I was thinking, “I know why it feels this way; so many of the cars that James Chinlund brought in were from the 90s,” but the other thing also is the book thatThe Batmanwas based on. Thecomic book isYear One,and that is, I believe, was written in 1986, and it really captures that kind of New York in the 70s and the 80s, and that’s why I started really following that visual arc and embedding it into our version of Gotham. So, you’ll see a lot of nods to the 80s and the 70s, and yet it’s still contemporary. You have contemporary phones and contemporary cars, and it allowed us to shoot in contemporary New York streets, but when you get to the interiors, it has a sense of timelessness, and, to me, that makes it very interesting to look at, and it gives you a deeper sense of Gotham in a way.
It is funny you mention the phones, because you do sometimes see a character pull out an iPhone and feel catapulted into the modern day.
It was very much what they also did in Batman, you know? I think that there is a timelessness that we were all trying to achieve, and, in that sense, you want to be kept and not, to me, as being true to the comic books, trying to capture the spirit of a comic book. And as you’re able to see in comic books, the way Batman is drawn in the 1950s and 60s is not the same as in the 80s or the 70s and now, and there’s a difference in portraying him, and that’s what we’re doing as designers too. You are trying to capture the essence, the kind of universal quality of the Penguin and ofBatman and Catwomanand everybody else that comes into this universe. Because there was so much about the Penguin, and he lives on the street level and in the shadows, in the darkness, and his dream is to ascend to the top, we had a very different kind of world from the movie, in a sense. It was very liberating, I think, for Lauren to be able to create her own neighborhood, in this case, Crown Point, and to be able to focus on the east side of Gotham, and I think it became very liberating for the show to be able to create its own different neighborhood of Gotham and portray that.
Speaking on the Penguin’s rise, you’ve spoken a lot about Oz’s apartment. How do you go about keeping the character consistent as he rises to the upper echelon of Gotham’s society?
Originally, we knew from the beginning that he was going to start living on a lower floor, and he was going to end up in a penthouse, and we knew that he wanted to emulate Carmine Falcone. So, when I presented the first ideas of a penthouse, they were very classy and very beautiful. They were decayed, but they were very beautiful, with a lot of modern stuff and a lot of shine and Matt Reeves said, “no, no, no, no, he doesn’t have taste. He still doesn’t have taste, even when he’s on top of the world.He’s the Penguin,” and that made me rethink the entire approach and how consistent I had to be with the Penguin character and the fact that he doesn’t have taste and that he is a brash gangster. He’s got an enormous amount of chutzpah and imagination and is very capable of getting himself out of tricky situations, but he’s never going to have the culturalpolish that Carmine Falconehad. And so, that’s how you keep the character consistent. You strip him from any other layer that is not in his character. You strip that away, and you just stay true to his core, to his emotional core.
The Gotham that you were handed was in many ways falling apart.The Penguinbegins immediately after the disastrous flooding. How do you go about creating places that are both completely ruined and lived in?
Yeah. Well, again, yeah, living in New York, I mean, I always like maybe I was just very lucky to live in New York in 1979. So, I saw that incredible urban decay that New York used to be in the 70s and the 80s, and it was getting itself out of complete bankruptcy, and you really witness what happens when a city government stops serving its citizens. It was such a different New York. And then when Hurricane Sandy hit, even though by that time I was professionally established and, technically speaking, middle class, we lost power on the east side in New York, and it didn’t get restored for five days, but the Upper East Side, where rich people lived, got restored on day one, and some of the streets never even lost power. And that was fascinating to watch this just 10 years ago—how that class structure is still very much alive, and it really manifests itself in a time of disaster, so I was very well aware of that and very kind of emotional about it in a way. The way I’ve really felt viscerally is the disaster that has fallen upon these poor neighborhoodsbecause of the Riddler’s bombs.
Our supervising art director, Debbie Wheatley, and I spent a lot of time studying the Katrina floods, and she developed a system of damages of the different kinds of zones, with five being the most flood damage and one being the least. And it was all based on FEMA and the FEMA charts and the FEMA signage. And we used real FEMA identification throughout the show. It was very fascinating and also quite painful, frankly, to see those images and to see what happens. But a lot of the images that we created have piled up cars and piled up furniture on the street, straight out of Katrina. And what happened and what happens when a massive amount of water rushes down the street and then recedes, and then the mud is left and everything in its path. Really, one of the most potent images was the piles—the three car piles—in the Katrina flood images. And there was something we very painstakingly recreated.
So, I wanted to ask about the art that’s on display in the show. There are so many classical pieces on the walls. What’s the process of determining what’s going to go where and deciding what this person would hang in their home?
I mean, I think that you’re referring to Carmine’s mansion, right, because that’s where the big frescos are, and now is a very specific idea that I had about Carmine. And again, the difference is thatCarmine is, to me, a third-generation gangsterwho, at this point, has gone through the best schools and probably has an Ivy League education, and he is very polished on the outside. He’s very cold and a shell of a man inside. But on the outside, there’s a lot of surface to him. I felt like, in his mansion, he would bring pre-renaissance frescoes. I specifically wanted a pre-renaissance because those frescoes are kind of frozen. The poses of the people on horses and the way they stand—they’re frozen. And it was, to me, like karma, because that was a person also frozen in terms of his emotions.
We discover a lot about him in this series; even though he dies inThe Batman, his backstory is quite developed in our series. It’s hinted inThe Batman, but it’s fully fleshed out in our series and the kind of rot that is inside his soul and what he does to his own daughter and to his own wife and basically, most women in his life, actually. I had to make a statement about this character, and I wanted to capture his soul. So, he’s attractive on the outside, like he’sportrayed by John Turturroin the movie and Mark Strong in our series. And they’re attractive, tall, elegant men, elegantly dressed, but the inside is rot, and, for me, that’s what those frescoes meant. They are frozen. They’re beautiful to look at. They’re exotic, but they’re very stiff and they’re cold, and that’s why I didn’t want the Renaissance. Because once you get to Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio, they’re such emotional paintings, you would feel sympathy for the characters. When you are dealing with the pre-Renaissance, they’re very representational, and I felt they really captured these characters, and they also made a statement about this home: “This is a show. This is a showcase. I am powerful, and I can bring 14th century frescoes all the way from Italy, and I can put them on my walls, and you’re here to admire them.”
So, there were a lot of layers. I had a lot of thoughts about that character, and, again, every environment that I create portrays the backstory of the characters, and I tried to capture their souls basically, and they need to reflect deeply on their history and what is deep inside them. I hope I succeed, and sometimes, you know, I don’t know if I do. But in this particular case, it looks like people are really taken with it. So, I’m happy about that.
What’s it like designing from the highest points in Gotham’s society to the lowest? The underground tunnels where Oz handles this drug manufacturing industry, for example, is something that people don’t see outside of likeLaw & Order. So, what is it like trying to create that in a way that feels realistic without, you know, feeling too lurid or too exaggerated?
I really want to give a tremendous amount of respect to the writers, to Lauren and her team, because they had done so much of their own research when they wrote specific environments. You’re specifically talking about the trolley depot, right? That was just one of my favorite sets, of course. We didn’t know about the trolley depot until probably the middle of prep in a sense, because we only had the 1st through 4th scripts, and itshows up in the 5th. I just remember being completely like, “Whoa, this is going to be incredible” and finding out also that New York used to have a trolley system until the late 1950s. They used to be trolley cars, including one that was on the Queensborough Bridge, and they really were. There was a real trolley depot, but it looked a bit like a factory; you know, it was a very warehousing kind of environment, and I didn’t feel that it was interesting enough, and the other thing also is, in this whole show, I’m playing with the idea of arches because so much of it takes place under the subway elevated subway tracks and under bridges and under roads, and so vaulted ceilings and cathedral ceilings became a big part of the visual language of the show that I was creating. And so, when I pitched the idea of the trolley depo, I pitched it with vaulted ceilings and Lauren, you know, really loved it. And I explained to her why I was doing that. And so that’s the way we approached it and it worked great. And then we married it to a real location, to an armory. The Kingsbridge Armory. And so, the lobby in it is actually real; it’s a real location. And then from there, I built onto that and created this gigantic space that feels like a cathedral. And then the whole drug trade was very well researched, and we had a lot of meetings and talked a lot about the very specific bleeding mushrooms and how they grow. Again, the writers had done a tremendous amount of research. They sent us images. It was a beautiful, beautiful collaboration. And I think my work is only as good as the writing is, and I really want to stress how much respect I have for Lauren and her writing team.
I’ve read that some of the set design decisions, like, for example, Oz’s fake fireplace, were script details. Were there any set design decisions that were so good that they altered the script?
Well, I think that the one thing that I brought to the table was the secret passage. In the script, the way to discover the trolley depot was through a manhole, and I had an issue with that. I think I just felt like it was a little too easy somehow. I felt like it was not interesting enough, so I pitched this idea that they go through a secret passage. I started this idea with an electric box, a series of electric boxes. That was my first original idea. And then we started getting into like, “OK, but what if it’s this and that?” and we ended up developing it at the bottom of a bridge, you know. We threw out a lot of discussion back and forth, but it opened up the idea, “Let’s not do a manhole. Let’s do this,” you know.
It was really fun to have that back and forth, and ithappened to me inLovecraft Countrytoo, where, you know, through our conversations and through saying, “But what if we do this?” We came up with some solutions—design solutions and visual solutions—that we were not even thinking about when we started the project. And that’s the beauty of collaboration and the beauty of exploring, and the beauty of asking questions and saying, “Well, what if we do this and what else can we do?” And the manhole then became part of when he escaped through it at the end. So, it still played part of our visual language. But it’s just that its placement shifted. So yeah, so there were a lot of moments like that.
I think there were definitely certain locations that I was pitching to them very early on, to Matt and Lauren, and that became very important throughout the show. You know, there was a lot of room for me to contribute. Not everything was scripted, but there were a lot of wonderful details about the characters in the scripts, and that is really beautiful. I always give theexample too of Colin. The Penguin’s loft and that Colin gave us references to the kind of bad art he would have, and I was so grateful for it because bad art is such a big subject matter. Somebody’s idea of bed art could be smoking dogs, and somebody else’s idea is a black Elvis or something, and a third person is an abstract painting. And that’s what Colin brought. He brought these samples of abstract paintings, and we thought it was very funny to take that approach. So, you know, it’s so collaborative. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful when it works like that.
Did you feel you were creating an antagonistic energy, even in the set design?
I mean, part of the show, what’s so beautiful, is that I get to portray the poor, desperate people, but I also get to portray the super-rich, and really, it’s so wonderful to be able to create these different worlds and our two heroes.Sophia and the Penguinstraddle these two worlds. And it’s very interesting. The dynamic between them as characters and their battle of wills. And then the battle of wills. If you say visually, between these environments too, and that’s something that I thought was very exciting for a designer.
Yes, literally, the haves and the have-nots, and yes, and then the other thing I wanted to do too was connect the women, the three important women, because Lauren wrote spectacular women from the surrounding Oz. His mother, Sophia, who becomes his nemesis, and Eve, his girlfriend, and I wanted to connect these three women, but not in an obvious way. So, the way I did it was that because the show has a dark palette, the women are the ones that actually have color around them.And for Sophia, it is tragicbecause she sees her mother in the murder bedroom, but that is very bright gold wallpaper. Art Deco-based wallpaper that we specifically created. The mother has the very kind of innocent pink wallpaper in a sense, but she is a woman of steel, you know? So, it’s an interesting contrast. And then Eve has the most Bohemian, brightest, shiniest wallpaper in the kitchen and colors. And it was interesting to play and connect them in that way. So, subliminally, they feel connected, not in an obvious way, but somehow, they are definitely visually connected, and the audience will feel that.
Is there a question that you’ve been dying to answer that no one has asked you yet?
Hmm. Oh, well, OK. So, another idea that I contributed to the show was in the Jazz Club—the fallen chandelier—you know, that was not scripted. That was not there. And I think that was probably the question that you touched upon, which is a very interesting question of “what are some of the original ideas that were not scripted that the designer brings to the table,” and that is something that, you know, happened tome inLovecraft Countryand happened to me again on this show. And I really cherish those kinds of shows where I’m allowed to bring original ideas and say, “Hey, what do we do?” And then the writer embraces it and writes it into the script, and it becomes a scene, and that is very gratifying.
You really touched upon it, and you asked me that question earlier, and that is a great question because no one’s asked me that question, and that is something. And you know, it’s very uncomfortable for me to start saying “I did this” and “I did that,” because it’s not like that. It’s collaborative. Some people will allow you to bringa lot of original ideas, and some people will not, and that’s not the truth, you know? And it’s wonderful when an artist is allowed to think outside of the box, and be very free, and bring a lot of new ideas. Lauren is a magical person. Really, not just very talented, but a magical person. She’s just one of the nicest and most composed and just a really wonderful collaborator and really a very talented writers’ room, and you can see her in print in every episode. I’m very happy for her. I’m very happy for all of us, but I’m very, very happy for her to tackle this predominantly male world and do such an interesting take on it.
The Penguin
Cast
Created by Lauren LeFranc and starring Colin Farrell, The Penguin builds on 2022’s The Batman. The Max series chronicles the eponymous villain’s attempt to reach Gotham’s criminal peak, rising through the underworld in the middle of a power struggle.
