COMPANION PIECES with K. K. Barrett

Hard to Be a God (2013) / Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

As an Oscar-nominated Production Designer, K. K. Barrett has had a phenomenal career designing some of the most acclaimed music videos and films over the years. From The Smashing Pumpkins’ iconic music video for “Tonight, Tonight” to working in close collaboration with Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola including his work on Being John Malkovich, Her, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette. In more recent years he has been pulled into the huge hemisphere of the superhero genre working on DC’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), which you can’t help but feel took him back to his punk days.

Whether it’s big studio fare, indie cinema or a multi-disciplinary live motion project — bringing Kid Koala’s graphic novel Nufonia Must Fall to the stage in 2015 — K. K.’s seamlessly imaginative designs set the perfect stage for the most intimate tales about the human experience. For his Companion Pieces, it was the human experience (and condition) that was to be explored further through a rather gruelling, yet mesmerising, double bill…

I would love to hear more about your background as a production designer and how it all started for you after your life as a drummer for the punk rock band The Screamers.

I had no career plan after college as an artist except to follow whatever was exciting to participate in. I hadn’t planned to be in a band when I moved to Los Angeles in 1977 but culturally it was the most exciting time to be in raw music. By being in a band, and conceptually performing for audiences, it wasn’t a big leap to design film sets for audiences, although I had never planned to work in film. It was a happy accident that I didn’t realise I was prepared for. Music videos were the gateway drug and soon they let video directors experiment with film… and there I was.

L.A. Punks. From left: Tomata DuPlenty, KK Barrett and Tommy Gear in their band Screamers during the mid to late '70s.

In the middle of starting to work on films I also had an underground Hip Hop club in LA in 1983, only because it was new and exciting. Chopping up music? Chopping up film? Preparing to surprise an audience and lead them on an emotional roller coaster was surprisingly similar in approach whether it was a live performance or a film set. I hadn’t studied film or music but studied my restlessness and knew what I’d like to see. So, it became a constructed pattern of tease, surprise, lull, awaken and surprise again, whether music or film.

Does music continue to inform your work? If so, how?

Most of my friends are musicians. I still make music with friends and voraciously listen to music all day. I am currently working on soundtracks for paintings, with a friend I’ve been recording with since the 1990’s, Lucas Reiner. I also think of a set of songs played live or sequenced on an album as parallel to a film’s story. They have the same arc with dynamics that bring you up and down and deliver something you are satisfied with and hopefully elated yet quizzical by the end. I tend to like dense minimal instrumental music but still swoon for a heartbreaking vocal. I’m looking forward to the new album by William Tyler, in particular — I love the snippets I’ve heard so far.

“… the visual mind never stops.”

— K. K. Barrett

Are there particular production designers or any other specific artists out there who still inspire your work?

I have a group of Production design friends who always surprise me with what they do. Recently Patrice Vermette on Arrival and Dune: Part Two along with Jeremy Hindle on Severance. I like to say I don’t think about production design… but then find myself collecting images for unimagined films that I haven’t had the chance to work on yet. So, the visual mind never stops.

What are your first memories of the movies, and have you always been drawn to the design and visual aesthetics of a production?

The first time I noticed Production Design was 2001: A Space Odyssey and then The Devils. I didn’t know what the term production design meant but I knew these places didn’t exist anywhere else when I discovered them. Dean Tavoularis — from his work with Francis Ford Coppola — was the first time I knew the name of a Production Designer.

Having started off as an art director on cult horror BLOOD DINER (1987), K. K.'s films as a production designer include BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999), MARIE ANTOINETTE(2006) and BIRDS OF PREY (2020), to name a few.

The two films you have chosen are rather existential. Before we dig further into them, what do you feel are the “root” connections between Hard to Be a God and Embrace of the Serpent?

Both films are a quest into the unknown by thinking men who submit themselves as litmus subjects. Both think they know what to expect from a modern world perspective but have no idea how little they know and that the revelation comes from within. When we talk about a character’s arc in a film these are doozies. In Serpent he is stripped to his soul, In God his soul is stripped by awareness of his dilemma.

There is something incredibly primal about both films that feels “out of time” and displaced. What would you say each film is saying about the human condition?

I think we as smart humans forget that we are nature and it’s good to stay in close touch with our animal side, either to let loose our inhibitions for delight or to be weary of what evil we might become. The more educated we are sometimes the more limited our perspective. The opposite should be true. I like that I am an animal. I also like to care about my fellow animals and not destroy them.

The operative. Leonid Yarmolnik as Earth scientist Don Rumata in Aleksei German's HARD TO BE A GOD (2013).

Both films have phenomenal cinematography. How important do you feel it is for these films to have been shot in black and white?

I love anything that takes me into a world which is nothing like my own. Black and white photography is much richer in detail than colour, so, for the grit and guttural blows these films deliver, it is essential. I loved when Antonioni used colour for the first time in Red Desert but I also liked his use of black and white up to that point. I like a pretty film as well, but I don’t fall into a film if it looks like reality. I recently saw The Girl with the Needle, which is also shot in black and white and it helps suspend us within its era and its bleak realities.

Do you feel they also benefit more from being shot on 35mm?

I like texture and depth. Although I am a minimalist at heart, neither of these films are minimal but they are singular in their consistent presentation. I think in this case 35mm helped with detail and contrast. It could be achieved digitally with a black-and-white sensor… but I can’t question the results.

As it was so integral to the director Aleksei German’s vision, I would love to hear your thoughts on the production design by Sergey Kokovkin, Georgiy Kropachyov and Elena Zhukova for Hard to Be a God. Obviously, this is an exceptional example, but how would a production like this be planned out? Especially in terms of all the elements that swamp it — from the rain to the mud and the snow.

I can’t recall a design with such slogging in the elements. The deterioration and dampness would be a nightmare to plan for continuity and to discover it was made over years! The poor crew. But it’s what makes it unique. I was in Vancouver on a job, and it was pouring rain outside and I saw a blurb about this film that I had never heard of so I had to see it. It was showing just one night, so I walked through the rain for 20 blocks, and it was the perfect introduction as I sat down to watch it. I walked home as well… and ended up with pneumonia.

Christ!

I didn’t know if I got sick from the weather or the film.

Is this the most filthy environment committed to celluloid? By comparison, it makes Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI look like a walk in the park.

Yeah… if any film is going to give you pneumonia, it would be this one, for sure. There is so much going on across these films; both involving scientists visiting other civilisations while we are forced to be surveyors. There is this feeling that we are treading where we are not meant to tread…

Ah, vicarious thrills from the comfort of our seats in darkened rooms. Almost what a hallucinogenic trip is. Travelling outside ourselves but hopefully delivered safely back to our quiet brains.

It reminds me of other stressful (and impeccably shot) Soviet cinema such as Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent and Elem Klimov’s Come and See. There are also reminders of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo as well as William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Films that feel dangerous. Is this the true power of these films?

Isn’t that the thrill of horror? The cinematographer Harris Savides turned me on to Come and See; something no one should have to witness yet everyone should see. And what a perfect title. When I first saw it you could only find a bootleg video copy that was shot off a screen in a theatre. This adds to the voyeuristic horror of it and makes you question the idea of 35mm clarity. He tipped me to another film called Decasia: The State of Decay — “A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality” — that was compiled from disintegrated nitrate film in which fleeting (barely discernible) images flicker in and disintegrate. What do we see and what does our brain imagine and fill in? It wasn’t until recently that I found The Ascent and didn’t know the connection between the two films with Shepitko married to Klimov before she died. I immediately tried to see everything I could by her only to discover the tragedy.

Sorcerer is one of my favourite films and I like it better than the original source. Those men are already doomed. In Apocalypse Now only some of the men are already doomed. I would say out of the two Apocalypse is closer to God… and… I just realized these are all primarily films about men. When I watched Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line I realised his theme is always man’s ridiculous quest to control others, while nature will slowly take its course. Our time is fleeting yet our ego thinks our timeline is the only one that counts.

I can’t get over the lengthy production: the sporadic shooting having started in 2000 and ending in 2006. Then German passed away before the film could be completed; his wife and son then setting out to finish his work. Do you feel as though an audience needs to go into Hard to Be a God with the film’s backstory to contextualise the arduous nature of the film further?

I don’t think anyone should go into a film with production information. It pulls back the curtain in a poor way and distracts from the story. I did know that it was a time travel film, travelling forward yet civilization regressing… but that’s all I knew. Fairly prescient as it turns out for America. Going into a film I want to wander in knee-deep and trepidatious to the dangers or wonders that lay ahead.

It’s surprising how much humour there is in German’s film, the pseudo-documentary direction emphasising how the members of civilisation act in breaking the fourth wall every now and then. At least a little light relief!

I thought the film was hilarious yet very thought-provoking. Devolution.

Amazonian. The young Karamakate (Nilbio Torres).

Ciro Guerra’s research for Embrace of the Serpent was meticulous and I cannot help but feel that Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes’ diaries, as source material, gave him a great deal of focus. Do you feel shooting on film would have also helped focus the film further? I read somewhere there weren’t even any dailies due to the film being shipped out of the forest to Argentina. Imagine the anxiety!

You never know how the parts of the film you make each day will add up or contribute to the final edit. Dailies are overrated, but the mystery of what it may look like on film when you see it projected is a thrill... or a terrible regret. We had been trusting film without dailies for over a hundred years by that point.

“I think both films’ journeys are of the mind rather than of a culture.”

— K. K. Barrett

No intention to discredit production designer Angélica Perea’s work on the film, but for those who are unsure, could you explain what would be “designed” in a production such as Embrace of the Serpent than merely sourced?

Design can also mean “consistently contained”. My favourite design trick is to remove anything that doesn’t assist the story whether it was actually there originally or not. Honesty has no place in fiction except in performance. What do we perceive? What do we think we saw? People outside of film only notice films as designed when they are large builds. Yet editing what you see and the colours and scale of it are all part of designing an experience to be absorbed. I did very little building on Her, yet because I kept us from seeing so many of the elements in our everyday world people thought I had designed a futuristic vision. I had just eliminated a lot of our cultural noise, such as signs, logos and sports clothing until it seemed like a nicer place to be. The character didn’t see it, so I didn’t show it.

Hearts of darkness. Jan Bijvoet as German ethnologist and explorer Theo Koch-Grünberg in Ciro Guerra's EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (2015).

Do you feel both films are a prime example of highlighting the importance of how cinema may preserve and articulate the experience of other cultures; a cinematic expedition, if you will?

I think both films’ journeys are of the mind rather than of a culture. In a way they both explode the main characters’ culture, which would be the sanity — the place they find chaos — with humanity being so primal.

Despite both films exploring a “past” — or at least an alternative version/space — it is interesting how far each goes in fictionalising a “tribe”. They both feel historical yet feel more focused on their incredible mythology.

Both films resist academic interpretation. Both have a “scientist” venturing toward enlightenment thinking they will study the outside world and instead question their own sanity and whether they can handle the truth they want to contain and define. I think they both become more human and present rather than the academic view from the wrong end of the telescope. They are “immersed”. Ironically, a popular term, “immersive” is to make people feel again rather than simply observe. This is exactly what good cinema does. It makes you feel and absorb the fictional world presented to you through the screen. I want to participate in a film, guess what’s coming, be wrong, be surprised, and question myself.

If you were to present this double bill at a cinema, where would you choose to screen them

It would be great to show these films to a very uptight crowd in a fantastically formal setting. In an institution that has a long history of destroying cultures on the basis of myth. The Vatican would be ideal.

The Mission. Would these films be screened at the Vatican? I vote for a K. K. installation.

Oh, I would love to hear the Pope’s thoughts on this double bill. Thanks so much for bringing these films to the table, K.K.

Thanks for giving me the chance to share my thoughts on these films. I could have picked a dozen more pairings and rambled for pages.

K. K. Barrett resides in Los Angeles. For more of an insight into his work check out the Design Masterclass interview from 2020 and the Production Designers Gathering from 2023.