“In four weeks”: Jack Fisk discusses how he created the iconic house in ‘Days of Heaven’
One of cinema’s finest moments comes like a prolonged dream in the 1978 film Days of Heaven, directed by Terrence Malick, a great American tragedy where the audience is transported to the dreamlike golden vistas of the Texas wheat fields. Here, labourers work tirelessly for their money under the shadow of the towering house that juts out of the earth like a monolith, constructed by the great production designer and art director Jack Fisk.
Too often forgotten in place of the grandeur and fame of being a filmmaker or screen actor, a production designer helps decide a style for any given project, seeing to it that every set, location and scene adheres to such a mood. When it comes to such creatives, few can compare Fisk to the American artist who collaborated with some of the greatest filmmakers of all time, including David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Malick.
Looking back on Fisk’s filmography, indeed, reflects an embarrassment of cinematic riches with his most recent successes of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant creating a gateway to explore the beauty of his earlier movies, namely Malick’s Days of Heaven, which Fisk worked on as an art director and second-hand-man to the auteur.
“I’d done Badlands with Terry [Malick], and then I went to his office about two years later, and he showed me a picture of a Victorian house,” Fisk told Far Out in an exclusive interview, with Fisk being the man in charge of constructing one of arthouse cinema’s most attractive homes. Continuing, Fisk added: “He said what he wanted to do was build a house that we can move, and we would just go from field to field and set it up or shoot and then go to the next wheat field set up and shoot.”
Yet, to build a house of the scale that Malick required and then be tasked with moving it by putting it up and down was an impossible task given the mere $3million budget of the project. So, Fisk built the mansion using plywood, recalling: “It was the first time I’d ever done anything like that, I was 27. I was kind of figuring it out as I went, and I got nine friends to come up from Los Angeles because there was no film community in Canada at the time. And we built this house the best we could in four weeks.”
The film industry was, indeed, a different beast back in the 1970s, with young men seemingly being allowed to construct buildings at their will with little regard to health and safety or proper filmmaking practices. As Fisk further details, he took any help he could during this process, calling for help from friends as well as the local Hutterites they had rented the land from.
Recalling how he built the barn, the stables and the grand central house, Fisk exclaimed: “I got some Hutterite kids… they would come out after church on Sunday, they would sneak out, and I’d send a van down to pick them up, and they’d come up…I felt a little bad because I heard they took their money and bought a TV set so they can watch baseball games, and the Hutterites aren’t supposed to watch TV, so I felt like I corrupted them a little bit.”
A beacon of hope in a golden field of hard labour, Fisk had unwittingly created one of the most iconic homes in late 20th-century cinema.