With locations and sets in two countries for new movie ‘The Raven’, as well a complex script and only seven weeks in which to shoot, the production designer Roger Ford had his work cut out for him. “There are between 40 and 50 locations in the movie,” he says. “We were never on any set or location for more than a day. We were very fortunate to have excellent crews in both Budapest and Serbia. To pull off a movie like this, there were plenty of challenges. Our greatest asset was the crew.”

Ford likes to say the only similarity between Baltimore, Belgrade and Budapest is that they all begin with a B. “Most of the architecture dates back to about 1880-1890, whereas our period is 1840-1850,” he adds. “But the look is very successful for the film. James [McTeigue, director] wanted a stylized look that immediately took it a bit away from the period.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that telling the story is more important than slavishly following period detail, as long as the atmosphere is right. Architectural purists might pick up something here or there that’s not strictly period, but we never intended to make a full-on authentic period movie. We wanted to make a good thriller.”

Ford shaped a dark and mysterious environment out of the disparate elements available to him, says producer Aaron Evans. “Roger’s got a great track record of creating worlds of his own for movies. We couldn’t replicate the look of Baltimore in 1849 exactly, but we didn’t need to because we’re watching this story unfold through Poe’s eyes. That gave Roger a great deal of freedom to mix and match elements and create a palette of locations in Budapest and Serbia.”

The designer was able to build quite a few sets for the film’s more unusual scenes, including the site of a grisly murder inspired by “The Pit and the Pendulum.” “I really like the ‘Pit and the Pendulum’ set,” says McTeigue. “He found a huge attic space above a school in Belgrade, then retrofitted it and put the gigantic working pendulum in there.”

The pendulum setup was tricky, says Ford. “It’s massive with all these cogs and gears, and the thing drops a little lower every few seconds. We looked long and hard for a location. You can tell when a location’s going to work and when it’s not. Everybody walked into the space and said, ‘Wow, this is fantastic.’ The special effects department put together a big set of cogs and wheels and the thing went backwards and forwards. It’s very impressive.”

Other scenes were shot in a studio on sets constructed for the film. “We saw a lot of interiors along the way that we thought we might use as locations,” says Ford. “But for a variety of reasons, we decided to build a set. If you look really carefully, you might see similarities between the newspaper offices and the police precinct room. In fact, it is the same set basically, turned around, repainted and redressed so it looks different.”

Ford says he was relieved to move into the studio. “Everybody breathes a sigh of relief, because at last we’ve got control of the lighting and the sound and the space. I get a chance to truly influence the look, rather than trying to adapt a location that’s not quite right.”

He was also able use the studio to expand on practical locations to make them more versatile. “We filmed in some underground fortification tunnels in a castle in Novi Sad, two hours away from Belgrade,” says Ford. “They are defensive fortification tunnels made of brick tunnels that go for miles. We recreated them in the studio by taking molds of the brickwork in those tunnels, bringing those to the studio and reproducing them to perfectly match the real tunnels.”

In fact, Luke Evans was the only actor to shoot in the actual tunnels and he says it’s impossible to tell them apart onscreen. “They’re brilliant,” he says. “In Novi Sad, there were about 18 kilometers of tunnels around the fortress. The replicas set the mood perfectly. They’re quite eerie.”

Image Courtesy of   The Raven

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