Judas And The Black Messiah Production Designer Takes A Closer Look

Considering that Academy and guild members only had access to screen it immediately before the holidays and the fact it was only widely available on February 12, “Judas and the Black Messiah” has already had a remarkable late awards season run. Star Daniel Kaluuya has been nominated for every major award so far and took home both the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor right in time for AMPAS voting. The film has earned a WGA Award nod for Original Screenplay and a Costume Design Guild Award nomination. While you can make the justifiable case that Shaka King warrants serious DGA Award and Best Director consideration, another member of the crew deserves consideration as well, production designer Sam Lisenco.

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Lisenco’s name is likely unfamiliar, but his resume features strong work in a number of films you’ve already seen including “Uncut Gems,” “Vox Lux,” “Frances Ha” and “Eighth Grade,” among others. “Judas” is his first true period piece “that anybody has ever seen,” but, by recreating late ’60s Chicago a few states over in Cleveland, Ohio, he knocked it out of the park. Lisenco jumped on the phone last week to discuss his process for “Judas” and what’s next. Accompanying the interview are a number of exclusive design materials provided by Warner Bros.

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The Playlist: How did this project come your way?

Sam Lisenco: I was on another project in Los Angeles that had closed out, and I had left my car there. I live in New York, and I came back to the city. I went to go get my car and hang out with some friends. And I just happened to be in Los Angeles the same week that Shaka was there to take meetings for the film. I put together a lookbook very quickly, literally within three to four hours of finishing the script. And a lot of it was less Chicago-centric and more New York-centric, just because that was an aesthetic I knew that I could play in, and then pulled a bunch of reference images from period films. I went to go meet him because we were both in Los Angeles. And it turned out, we grew up a couple of blocks away from each other [in New York]. We had a very similar childhood experience. We’re very close in age. We probably knew a lot of the same people.

That’s a nice surprise.

Yeah, there was kind of this shared childhood baseline of understanding, of how we interpret the urban environment that I thought was really fortuitous. And also, he’s the coolest guy, and it was just dope. And we got along immediately, and it felt like a great fit.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but this is the first period piece you’ve done, correct?

It’s the first period film I’ve done that anybody’s ever seen. I kind of got this reputation, especially on the East coast, of doing these kinds of auteur-driven, hyper-realistic, contemporary films, in which the consideration for the aesthetic was always born out of the practical nature of the storytelling.
That being said, those movies all had very individual aesthetics that I thought internally I’m like, “People are going to see I’m flexing my f**king muscle on this. Nobody’s seen anything like ‘Uncut Gems’ before.” Or whatever. But I had always been itching to do more period because I wanted to try to exercise the same kinds of creative impulses towards realism in period work, which I thought was kind of lacking, especially in post-war American period stuff. My area of expertise, just personally, my passion area is American post-war furniture, like 1946 to ’56. So, I was like, “Oh well, like a duck to water.” I can absolutely start playing in this sphere and kind of working with some of the similar approach approaches and themes that I have towards production designs for contemporary work, and I’d like to apply that to period work. So, it didn’t feel like a huge sea change in terms of my methodology. I think in terms of the final product, there’s a radical difference in the stuff that people have seen of mine previously, but it felt like more of the kind of playing with the themes that I’ve been exploring.

How concerned were you about authenticity? For example, the Blank Panthers headquarters where the shootout took place?

There were a couple of diametrically opposed methods or the considerations that we had verbalized throughout the process. And that was A, we want[ed] in every capacity for the historical elements in this film to be as accurately portrayed as possible, which can be a bit of a daunting task when you’re making a film in which the subject matter is about a radical socialist leftist organization that didn’t keep good records of ownership. So, tracking down information about what these spaces looked like could prove to be a little more complicated than we had originally envisioned, especially with reproducing posters and things. In terms of doing the story justice, that was the highest of priorities. In fact, in the finale sequence in the apartment, not just is the apartment an exact recreation based on evidence photos of what Fred Hampton’s apartment looked like at the time. But additionally, we went the additional steps of making sure that every single bullet hole is generally placed exactly where an actual bullet was fired that night. I mean, stem to stern, that that is exactly, down to every stick of furniture, what that apartment looked like that evening.

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And the same goes for the exterior of the Black Panther headquarters, to a certain extent. The interior is a bit of an amalgam of various Black Panther offices throughout the country that we were pulling different references from, because we were making it fit into the existing architecture. So, as far as the historical elements that needed to be done justice, I feel like we did our best to make it as truthful as possible.

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But that being said, and the other side of the coin, was that we would constantly have this internal discussion about the fact that we knew that the best method for expounding the virtues of this story to a mass audience was to try to appeal to the kinds of movies … I kept saying this to him all the time. I was like, “This has to be the kind of movie that you’ve seen before. And it’s on, on a Sunday afternoon on a basic channel with commercial breaks. And you’re folding laundry, and you leave it on, because it’s that comforting thing of it being a classic movie, movie.” And so, we were constantly trying to flex back and forth between doing the story justice and also just making an exciting Dick Tracy style, Warner Brothers, ’90s action movie. And for the most part, I think that the execution is pretty successful in that vein, because I think it’s an exciting watch.

Were the storefronts that you created, were you going for historical accuracy with all of those?

Principally, we had two main exterior drags that we see in the movies. One is in and around that deli, where that small police shootout scene occurs. And there’s a three-and-a-half street long tracking shot that takes us into a U-turn that terminates at the exterior of that deli in a previous scene. Then we have the one block radius in and around the Black Panther headquarters building. And then we have a very brief scene, but a really integral scene, early on in the film, where Fred Hampton is trying to rally pedestrians on the street for the cause and sell newspapers. And Bill O’Neill is watching from across the street. And so, those were kind of our three drags, where we were like, “O.K., we want at least enough breathing room to be able to feel these environments.” And that included the storefront changeover. Every one of those strips was a moderate recreation of real storefronts from historical reference photos from Chicago, from the period. Obviously, names and things were changed. And we adapted a few things to suit existing architecture.

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Like the pizza place. That was actually a period of New York reference that we’d pulled, but when you’re at this mid-range budget where you have enough to do what you need to do, but not so much that you can do anything you want. And you’re just kind of trying to make the pieces fit.

Judas and the Black Messiah, Production Design

The facade of the Black Panther headquarters and the immediate storefronts to the left for the next two buildings beyond are exact reproductions of what actually existed on that block in Chicago, the liquor store and the bank that had been converted into, I believe, a furniture warehouse or something. And then beyond that, those were just rando referenced, voted that we pulled from the neighborhoods that we liked.

Was it easier than you thought to have Cleveland stand in for Chicago?

There were incredibly helpful existing elements that Cleveland provided to us. Basically, when you have this kind of moderately derelict, second-tier, American Rust Belt city on the fringes of Chicago, to a certain extent, because it’s very drivable, you have comparable urban architecture. But you did not have the kind of influx of newer money in the mid to late ’90s and into the 2000s and any redevelopment. So what we found with Cleveland in particular, which was the upside, was that existing urban, municipal, utilitarian elements were primarily for the most part, pretty good as a Chicago cheat. And things like sodium vapor and mercury vapor lights still existed, pay coin parking meters still existed. The curb cuts hadn’t been safety-ized, with those stupid carbon fiber bubble placards and things that kind of pop on camera that you’re rushing around trying to paint out.
There was a lot of that that existed. That was great. The downside obviously was that it’s a city that’s been left to just necrotize. So you have three or four great buildings, and then you have an empty lot, because it’s become cheaper in that city to demolish a building than it is to keep it up. So the calculus became like, “Okay, if we look this way, it looks clustered enough that it could be Chicago.” If we had shot there 20 years ago, we probably would have had the entire street to work with that. That was really more the daily challenge.

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Was there one set-up or design in particular that you were most proud of in “Judas?”

Well, there are definitely moments in the film. I think there are moments of practical humanism, quiet negative space in this that were justified by the moments of grandeur that had punctuated them throughout the film. So, for example, you have scenes like Roy Mitchell [Jesse Plemmons] meeting Bill O’Neill [Lakeith Stanfield] in what can only be described as a fake abandoned warehouse that you would only ever have seen in a movie, because they don’t actually exist anymore, but they did exist in the ’60s. And it looks so cinematic. And then you have a scene where Mitchell is in his office, on the phone, sitting in front of a white wall, just eating a sandwich. There are moments like that in the movie that I think we pulled off, in the language and in the tapestry of this story, that is really beautiful, even though they’re not necessarily huge art department achievement moments. And that’s the stuff that really kind of when you get lost in it and you’re following the story and not thinking about the design, I think it’s really effective. And for me, it’s the stuff that I really take away from it.

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I know you wrapped this in 2019. What have you been working on since?

Right before COVID started, I had started prepping the “Sesame Street” movie for Warner Brothers, which was really exciting, because we were building Sesame Street outdoors, the whole block. It was going to be an incredible picture, a musical picture, to be shot in New York. And then the pandemic hit, and the movie fell apart. And I basically told my people, I was like, “Listen guys, I don’t feel like I can do great work right now.” So I’m just going to take the pandemic off and just do commercials for a while. But I am prepping a movie that we’re looking to shoot in September, October, that Todd Haynes is directing, which is a Peggy Lee biopic.

Oh, right. He’s talked about doing that for awhile, I think.

Yeah. It looks like we’re getting that thing off the ground this fall.

In New York, I’m guessing, or Cleveland?

He loves Ohio.

I know he shot” Carol “there. That means you’re going back to Ohio.

Going back to Ohio. We’re currently looking at Cincinnati. We’ve also been looking at the New York tri-state area. That portion of it’s still very much up in the air. It spans so much of Peggy Lee’s life, and there are so many different aesthetics built into the movie over the course of that span, that no matter where we land, we’re going to have some things we’ve got to figure out. It’s been really exciting, trying to get into how we’re going to approach it, but that’ll probably be the next picture.

“Judas and the Black Messiah” is in theaters nationwide and available to stream on HBO Max.