Geektown Radio: Production Designer Special - Seth Reed & Erik Carlson

On Geektown Radio this week it's another special edition, due to Dave being away on a super-secret set visit, so we have interviews with two of Hollywood's top Production Designers - Seth Reed and Erik Carlson.

We first interviewed Seth Reed last year, where we chatted about his work on 'Supergirl', designing the world of 'The Expanse', and building just about everything in the brilliant 'Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey'. His latest job sees him return to a much more earthly plane as he tackles the monumental task of recreating Bagdad in Texas for National Geographic's 'The Long Road Home'.

Based on the New York Times best-selling book by internationally acclaimed journalist Martha Raddatz, The Long Road Home tells the story of the 4th April 2004, when a small platoon of soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas, was ferociously ambushed in the teeming, maze-like Baghdad suburb of Sadr City - a day that would come to be known in US military annals as “Black Sunday.”

 

To recreate the events surrounding that day, Seth and his team built the largest standing set in North America, creating and modifying over 113 structures on a 12 acre set at a military base in Texas. Seth talks about this incredible feat of production design, about working with the actual soldiers involved in the incident, and how the process helped those veterans.

 

Erik Carlson has been involved in a number of other incredible shows and movies throughout his career including 'Desperate Housewives', which earned him two Emmy nominations and an Art Director’s Guild Award nomination, 'Episodes', Chris Nolan’s 'Memento', the brilliant 'Team America', and is currently working on History's Navy SEALs drama 'SIX'.

 

His other most recent work is Discovery's 'Manhunt: Unabomber', starring Sam Worthington as FBI agent Jim “Fitz” Fitzgerald and Paul Bettany as Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. For those that don’t know your US history, Kaczynski mailed or hand-delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs between 1978 and 1995, and was incredibly careful not to leave clues or fingerprints, making it extremely hard for the FBI to track him down. He was eventually caught hiding out in a wood cabin. The cabin and its contents had to be painstakingly recreated for the show by Erik and his team, and he talks about how vital it was to make sure every little detail was totally accurate.