In conversation with Designer/Art Director Paul Inglis

How did your first degree in Product Design shape your career?

Ravensbourne gave me a fantastic grounding in the design process, in taking a brief and really justifying your decisions. It was quite gruelling, going into that as a 19-year-old who'd never been forced to justify themselves before.

But learning how to do that has been one of the main foundation stones of my career. If you are lucky enough to be in the room with really interesting visual directors like Denis Villeneuve or Sam Mendes, it's fantastic to be able to join the dialogue in the right way.

For product design, it would be a mood you're trying to evoke or a response you are trying to get from the user. With film, it's about trying to understand the story the director is trying to tell and work out how the visuals can augment that story.

Should a set be dark and gloomy? Should it be claustrophobic? Should it be bright and joyous? Should it be slightly fractured, slightly off-kilter? There are any number of different decisions you can make that will help justify the story.

So you don't really buy into the idea that sets are characters in and of themselves in a film?

No, for me, it's very much about the way they shape the characters in the story and the characters' actions. I would hate for the design to overpower the characters, for my work to be so attention-grabbing that it distracts the audience from what it should be watching and taking in.

How does a new project begin for you?

Going into a project, you always feel slightly like you are doing it for the first time. Every film is different, and every director is different, and so you have to start your R&D work from the ground up. As I read the script, images will come to mind, or there will be a gut feeling, and so based on that, I will start doing image research.

There is a logistical side to it too; you know roughly what the budget is and having done it for a couple of decades I can guess, ok, it's probably this amount of stages, this amount of construction and this amount of location.

And sometimes you don't know whether you'll be on location or building set, so you start in a fog, and gradually aspects come into focus bit by bit. You have to remember not to be scared that you don't have all the answers yet — some things you are still solving three days from finishing the shoot.

How does a single creative vision emerge when you have so many people working on a big film?

If you are lucky enough to have a strong visual director, and they've done the job enough times, they will be phenomenally tenacious and have the patience of a saint. It's remarkable to watch. You have people like Ridley Scott, who just fundamentally have an extraordinary eye. Ridley can come onto a set you've been working on for two months and find the best camera angle in three minutes.

Denis Villeneuve has a powerful instinct for how the visual architecture of the film should feel. He describes it in quite physical terms, whereas someone like J.J. Abrams describes things in emotional terms, so he tells you what he wants a set to feel like, not what he wants a set to look like.

The more evocative you can be with your descriptions, the better. If you just say, "I want it to be a tiled room that is 12 feet by 12 feet," then it doesn't tell you any of the why. It doesn't help you add to it and give it any of the character and the quirk that will make it the right tiled room. So it's often about listening to what directors say and offering up more.

Good directors will allow you space to breathe. Sometimes it can infuriate you – with the wrong collaborator it's murder – but with a good collaborator, it's so exciting as ideas build and grow.

Why is it important for sets to be so detailed, even if sometimes the audience won't even see some of those details?

Human beings have this phenomenal ability to take in visual information and process it. We are doing it every moment of every day, and subliminally people are doing that with every image they look at on the screen. So if you get the light switch at the wrong height or the ageing doesn't look convincing, it's going to look like a set.

All the time, we have to try and find the truth of the place, to make sure it feels as convincing as possible. And not just does it look convincing standing there looking at it, but does it look convincing to the camera?

And that's very different?

​It is, yeah. Maybe 300 people see a set, but hopefully millions of people will see the photograph of the set, so it's the photograph that's the important thing. You have to think like a camera, think about the aspect ratio you're shooting in. The tendency is to frame shots around people's faces, so you know 3ft to 7ft is the most crucial area of any set, as that's where you are likely to see details. The doorways you are likely to see close up because that's where people enter and exit.

You give the illusion that the detail is everywhere. You choose certain materials and techniques and place those where they are going to be seen, and the brain sort of fills in and imagines they are everywhere else as well.

And I suppose you have to be conscious of time and money the whole time?

Of course. It's cheaper for us to build things physically than it is for VFX to add it afterwards if it's anywhere close to the camera. The minute it's distant from the camera, it becomes more cost-effective to do it digitally.

I think I assumed it was always easier to do it on a computer…

Well, it depends where you want to pass the problem. For Blade Runner, Roger Deakins was adamant we would have complete environments to shoot in. Therefore, we had scenic painted cut-outs with back-lit windows, 3D scale buildings, and a half-scale scale building outside K's apartment with lit interiors.

That meant we had to design the look of the entire city before we started principal photography. If we'd shot it with a green screen, we could have carried on designing during the shoot.

What was it like working on Blade Runner and Star Wars, films that first inspired you to get into this industry?

It's very odd. Part of you, your work brain, just gets down to it. You roll up your sleeves like normal and break it down, and do the things you have to do. You try not to get too worried that it's something you care about, but you try and bring that love to it, that care and attention, that knowledge of the originals.​

And what about the fan pressure? Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Bond – these are things people are obsessed with. Does that affect you?

You're aware of it, but it's easy enough to ignore it. If you try and make the film people want, it's probably not going to be a very good film. People have a great bullshit detector, and you've got to creatively produce a piece of work that pleases you and have faith in the fact that if it pleases you, it's probably going to please enough other people, and it will be accepted to some degree.

Obviously with something like Star Wars or Blade Runner it's harder because people have such a love for those films and a very specific notion of what they feel the continuation of those stories should feel like.

With Game of Thrones, there was a lot of fan art, but there was no desire from HBO to use any of that as a reference or a starting point.

The brief for that show was: One, it should absolutely not feel Arthurian in any way. Two, each of the worlds should feel very distinct, be that the weather, the materials for the buildings, the costumes, the colour palette, the quality of light. The idea was that when the story travelled from location to location, it wasn't necessary to put a subtitle up on the screen, the audience would instinctively know where they are.

And three, that the camera work should always be as though it was shot by someone who had lived in that place for 20 years. So it wasn't a tourist looking up at the heights, it was following the action as it unfolded, and if it happened to catch the Red Keep in the background, it would do.

That was to try and ground it and give it a feeling that it existed in a real place. Until that point, HBO was known for The Sopranos and The Wire, and I think there was an anxiety that if they did not concentrate on character above all else, they were going to lose the thing that made them special.

Did you have a sense Game of Thrones would be such a hit?

I think we hoped it would be successful enough to warrant a second season. But no I don't think anyone knew it would become one of HBO's biggest shows, certainly in terms of its cultural presence.

How are the challenges you face different on something like Bourne, which is not set in a fantasy world?

Bourne was tough. We had a second unit where we recreated Athens in Tenerife, and it was just crazily busy. We dressed something like 6km of roads for a single chase.

If you looked at where we shot, you'd struggle to see how it became Athens. But it's still the same thing – you have to ask, what are some of the big gestures we can do to make it feel real? One of the big things was creating fake Greek adverts to put on the billboards. The minute you do that, it's a big enough statement that you believe you're there. You don't believe people would hire these billboards and make up fake adverts.

Of course, then Paul Greengrass will come and turn it on its head and make up his version on the night, very kinetically and instinctively. But if you've given him as much of a world as you can, he will find his version of the truth of it. So it's not so much about the film, it's down to who is telling the story.

And that would be the same for Bond?

Yes, so the Marc Forster version of Bond is different to the Sam Mendes version of Bond, and although I didn't work on it, I think the Spectre Sam Mendes version of Bond is different to Skyfall Sam Mendes version of Bond.

There'll be a through-line in specific ways. Sam Mendes will often be precise about the size of a set – on Skyfall he knew how long he wanted the duration of a walk to be to get a conversation on the move. And he knew where he wanted moments of stillness and moments of transition. But the look will be different, and the way of finding the look will be different.

When it comes to building new worlds, it doesn't get much bigger than Star Wars, does it?

Quite a few designers turned it down because they felt they were walking into a place that had already been designed. And yet they wouldn't turn down a story set in Georgian London, even though of all architecture, Georgian has the most rules.

For me, it's the same thing. Making Star Wars is a bit like a big period film. You're trying to put yourself in the head of the art department which made the original episodes IV, V and VI in the 1970s and 80s.

The challenge is, how do we make these new sets feel like they belong in that universe without making them feel like bad photocopies? That's the challenge – finding a unique visual look for that atmosphere.

Some of the sets came together quite easily, and some are much harder. And J.J. is so rigorous about two things – first of all, the emotion. Does it feel right? And secondly, he has an incredibly keen graphic sense of wanting the clearest possible image at all times, the layers to a set and a good strong read. That sense that if you squint at it, can you still tell what it is? Does it still feel like a good composition?

He is a rigorous taskmaster, but that's great. I think it ended up being very handsome, one of the better looking Star Wars films.

Is there a particular set you were proud of?

There were two. The Resistance Base with the giant blockade runner in it was a giant set, and we used a lot of traditional methods like scenic painted backings, cut-outs. We were determined to try that stuff, and it gave J.J. and the actors a real place to be in. We shot 16 or 17 days at that set, so wanted to make it feel real and tangible.

The other one that was delightful was Kajini, then the snowy city where C3PO has his memory banks wiped. At one point that played a more significant part in the film, which is why we committed to such an extensive back-lot build for it. Bit by bit its role dwindled, so it ended up being a slightly luxurious set for the amount of screen time it got. But it was a really beautiful old-school set, and it showed that a lot of the old ways still work.

One of the interesting things is that we may be one of the last drafting professions, that still uses pencils.Not always – there is a real move, especially in newer members of the art department, to draft digitally. But for me, I still feel a beautiful pencil construction drawing conveys far more clearly what the set is.

When you're drafting, you are forced to think more about the actual dimensions you are choosing to put on that page, and the proportions you are giving it because you are committing to lines that you don't want to have to rub out.

What's the biggest misconception about what you do?

That it's glamorous. People imagine you are part of that world that the people in the tabloids inhabit, and they are always surprised to hear that the crew doesn't get invited to premieres. There will be cast and crew screenings, but it's very much Sunday morning somewhere. It's hard work. It's long hours and pretty stressful.

The travel is great, but you are experiencing these places without friends and family. I do count myself as incredibly lucky to do the things that I do, but it's not the experience I think that people imagine from the outside. There's a lot of being in the cold and the mud.