The Criterion Collection

A treat for fans of the visual splendors of Terrence Malick and David Lynch movies: in the spring 2010 issue of Filmmaker magazine, production designer Jack Fisk—who’s created some of contemporary cinema’s most memorable worlds, including Malick’s Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line and Lynch’s The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive—reminisces about his thirty-plus-year career. Speaking to journalist Alicia Van Couvering, Fisk discusses his process with actors, the influence of painting on his work, and his close collaborations with his directors, especially Malick, whom he reveals to be a creative bosom buddy (“Terry and I have developed a relationship where we just go and look at locations together, for weeks, and that way we kind of get in sync on a picture. And then he says, ‘Whatever you do will be fine.’”). There’s also a bit of backstory about the location scouting on Days of Heaven, for which Canada stood in for the Texas panhandle.