Various on-screen versions of Gotham City have been inspired by cities including London and Chicago but for HBO’s The Penguin Emmy-nominated production designer Kalina Ivanov drew inspiration from the dark heart of New York City.
“When I first came to New York [in 1979], I always thought of it as this shining city. And none of that was true! It was full of garbage… It was pretty awful!” Ivanov laughs. “But to me, because I had escaped Bulgaria, it was still the shiniest city in the world.”
Ivanov brought this duality to The Penguin, a Gotham that is explicitly a fictional take on New York City and is where the series, overseen by Matt Reeves and helmed by showrunner and writer Lauren LeFranc, was filmed.
The series picks up in the aftermath of director Reeves’ 2022 film The Batman and centres on the titular villain’s rise to the top of the mob. Oz, aka The Penguin played by Colin Farrell, takes advantage of the power vacuum created in the wake of Joker destroying the sea wall and flooding Gotham at the end of the film.
As a viewer, “you had to feel the results of the flood,” Ivanov says, likening it to the impact of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy on New York City. Famously, the lower east side and Staten Island were left without power long after wealthier areas were restored. For Ivanov, this moment “crystallised the class structure of New York”.
The Penguin, though contemporary, is not necessarily contemporaneous. Based loosely on the comic Batman One, Ivanov looked to 1970s and 1980s New York aesthetics to build her Gotham.
Oz’s mother Francis’ house was where she played most overtly with era-based aesthetics. “This was the one where we did the most 80s [design],” Ivanov says.
Oz’s mother, a central figure the way any mother is in a good mob story, is stuck in time. The design is familiar to anyone who had an Italian-American grandmother on the east coast in the 2000s - chinz, pink, and ornaments.
Design method
Ivanov calls herself a method designer. She started The Penguin by assembling a team of familiar faces. In particular, set decorator “Melissa Lavender, who I’ve worked with since Little Miss Sunshine. She’s like my sister, she reads my mind”.
Then, she collaborates with her actors. Farrell was integral to building Oz’s aesthetic, including his objectively ugly purple art. The character wants to emulate Carmine, but it is a hollow attempt.
Carmine, played in the series by Mark Strong taking over from the film’s John Turturro, is “a third generation gangster,” Ivanov says. ”By the time we meet him, he’s gotten the best education you can have. He’s brought Italian art from Italy. The interior of his house is classical, but dark – because he’s a dark character.”
“Italian villas are so airy, but I found one on Lake Cuomo that was done up as a hotel and it was done in black and gold, and I went ‘Ah, that’s it.’”
Once Ivanov had decided on gold, they did “a lot of tests” to see how – or if – it would work on screen. “I threw my hands in the air and said ‘I’m doing gold.’”
It was the design hill on which she chose to die. “It was going to pick up the light. I knew it was going to shine,” she says. Luckily, HBO “pumped up the volume” as Ivanov says, so viewers would see the level of gilding, keeping it truer to her design.
Colour theory
Reeves’ The Batman film was very dark. Quite literally. So when Ivanov got some of The Batman production designer James Chinlund’s original designs, she realised “the colours were not at all what I thought they were. Or anybody thought they were,” she reveals.
“I was very cognisant of that. I used more gold than I’ve ever used in my life. And it still wasn’t enough!”
Carmine is the “personification of good taste”, but upstart Oz moves into the third floor of a diamond district loft. His sterile silver penthouse is the visual foil to Carmine’s gold-gilded villa; two takes on what it means to be ‘king gangster’.
“I was very much going for ’King Gangster’,” she laughs. “Of course the Penguin moves into a vault – it’s shiny to him. But it’s a silver prison,” Ivanov says.
Despite the obvious mobster themes, the only mob related visual reference was Scarface. From that, Ivanov pulled a detail that may be lost to viewers: red.
“Scarface was the big theme for the last scene. I wanted to quote that movie. When you see Scarface you know the set – the red, the black columns, the women from Pompeii. I took red and use it sparingly. You use it in a way that it evokes.”
The marble was red on the bottom, but “because of how we treated colours, it kind of came out as a brown.”
Though not a direct influence, Ivanov swapped the women from Pompeii with the Hounds of Zeus – better known as the Harpies.
The way women are treated in The Penguin – badly – is certainly a reflection of reality, and the design choice of the Harpies feels pointed. “I absolutely had a political agenda about it. I very purposefully drove the Hounds of Zeus into that scene.
“[The Harpies] weren’t scripted, but I very much wanted them because there’s nothing better than those women in their Greek robes looking sternly at him, down from their pedestals. Looking at him and judging him.”
No comments yet