The Superman production design brings a vibrant, energetic, and hopeful palette to cinemas thanks to frequent James Gunn collaborator Beth Mickle.
Take one look at James Gunn’s vision of DC Comics staple Superman, and you’d swear everything in the film appeared the product of extensive CGI. Shockingly, that’s not so. Working with 4-time collaborator Beth Mickle, Gunn outlined a handful of criteria for the Superman production design. First, he prioritized practical sets over visual effects. Second, Gunn wanted the film’s structures to boast a very specific geometry. Finally, he wanted the sets to be bathed in optimism and feature hopeful, vibrant, and bright, reflecting the early 2000’s Frank Whiteley’s All-Star Superman comic book series.
Those directions helped Mickle form the basis for her fantastic sets. In the film, she recreates the iconic Fortress of Solitude and Daily Planet locations in addition to several designs new to Gunn’s film. Each image became a stark departure from the darker tones recent DC Universe films or Gunn’s previous Marvel efforts have taken.
“We wanted to let it be a little simpler. So, you’ll see the surfaces in general, aside from Lex’s darker world, are a bit simpler. Big, simple geometry. Back to those bright colors. [Gunn’s] one of the directors I’ve worked with who loves color more than most,” Mickle explained. “It’s still bright use of colors, but you’ll see we’re dealing much more with kind of the primary colors of Superman: blue, red, yellow. Whereas with Guardians [Of the Galaxy], we got much more into the fuchsias and the aquas and the oranges. Even though it’s still distinctively a rich and vivid James Gunn film, it’s definitely decidedly different from the Guardians world.”
Re-imagining Superman’s Fortress of Solitude
For the Superman production design, Gunn and Mickle built several key locations as practical sets as with many other Gunn-led films. Mickle calls that a “designer’s absolute dream come true.” For example, she built nine prison cubes to establish the basis for Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) pocket dimension on a sound stage that would eventually hold 170,000 square feet of content. The practical sets would naturally be extended through Gunn’s visual effects team led by visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti and visual effects producer Susan Pickett.
Mickle also worked with the visual effects team to realize her vision for Superman’s iconic Fortress of Solitude. And Mickle’s emotional reaction to the film indicates they fully delivered.
“I cried every single time I was seeing the Fortress of Solitude come out of the ground. I cried when I watched the preview, and I cried at the premiere. Also, I cried at the casting crew screening three days later. They really, really nailed it.”
Mickle and team wanted to pay homage to earlier incarnations of Superman’s Fortress, including the beloved Christopher Reeve-led films. They kept to the same materials and lines as those films leveraged, but they gave the set a fresh visual appeal. To begin, Mickle needed to determine the design of the iconic silhouette that would be the audience’s initial exposure.
The design became sculptural, asymmetrical, as it evolved. It needed to appear as if it were propelling itself from the ground. It needed to boast an aesthetic of visual movement, even when stationary.
To accomplish this, Mickle referred to classic photographs of waves.
“We played with a lot of different shapes. Ultimately, we looked at the way waves crash into rocks and how they spray upward. There’s one shot in particular, a vintage 1960s photo of this giant wave splashing up against a rock,” Mickle recalled, “which ended up becoming the silhouette that we looked at most and kind of aligning our crystals similarly to the way that that wave crashed. That led us to what the exterior shape was.”
The interior was an even bigger challenge. Mickle and Fortress art director Alex McCarroll filled a 40,000 square foot stage with crystals made out of resin. Some crystals were four feet in diameter and up to 40 feet long with most increasing to 15 feet tall. Mickle’s dedication to color and kinetic movement brought the Fortress of Solitude to the big screen in a totally unique way.
Realizing Other Iconic Sets
Aside from the Fortress of Solitude, the Superman production design featured other comic book-inspired sets. The LuthorCorp tower feels like a location we’ve never seen in DC films before. Here, three tenets of color, geometry, and nostalgia played into Mickle’s design. It is both modern and deeply inspired by 1970s architecture. Geometric patterns play out in the interior ceiling, and the traditional Luthor-associated green played into the set’s marble interior.
This set served two purposes being both visually pleasing and in service of the story.
“James really wanted the LuthorCorps Command Center to feel almost like an observatory, one that looked out onto the city. It allows Lex to really take in the whole view of the city,” MIckle remarked. “For the longest time, the script indicated that the set just dropped. Yet, we came up with all of these designs to turn that command center into an actual spaceship. It ended up working. We really positioned it purposefully right in that middle of that bridge that connects the two big towers.”
The interior of that set required extensive preparation in terms of desk placement. Mickle partnered with set designer Chris Sanford and art director Domenic Silvestri to nail the build. They worked out the design to allow for optimal proportions and lines to look visually pleasing while allowing room for the actors to move. The result? A deliberately ominous and oppressive set perfectly suited to the character of Lex Luthor.
To build Clark Kent (David Corenswet) and Lois Lane’s (Rachel Brosnahan) Daily Planet workspace, Mickle initially wanted to build the set, which became impractical due to the script’s requirements and cost effectiveness. Instead she managed to find a location that provided a necessary classic art deco sense.
The solution became Georgia’s stunning Macon Terminal Station. Built in 1916, the railroad station was designed by architect Alfred T. Fellheimer, known for his design of New York City’s Grand Central Terminal in 1903. Uncovered by Superman supervising location manager Ian Easterbrook, the station now serves as a highly sought-after wedding venue. Mickle and team immediately gravitated toward its Art Deco-based architecture and accentuated that with Art Deco-influenced murals and other artwork.
And, then, Mickle had the opportunity to realize the first Gunn-approved vision of the iconic Hall of Justice.
“That was wildly exciting. There was a very serendipitous moment that happened with figuring out what that set was. Back when I did my first lookbook for the film, I found this great shot of this interior. I didn’t know what it was, but it had a big yellow circular ceiling. It had these big art deco windows,” Mickle said. “I added that to the lookbook, not knowing what it was. Two days later, my art director sent me an article about the train station in Cincinnati, pointing out that this train station in Cincinnati inspired the original Hall of Justice.”
Serendipitous, indeed.
Designing Homes For a Superman and a Super Journalist
Iconic sets aside, people need to live somewhere. Even if they’re super heroes, they still have a place to call home, even if it’s just a nod to maintaining their alter ego. Mickle and Gunn collaborated to create Clark Kent / Superman’s own apartment. Yet, how would Superman decorate? What would a space look like for a man who flies around the world on a whim?
Well, in a world, it’s kind of inhuman.
That doesn’t mean it’s filled with otherworldly gadgets or Krypton-influenced architectural elements. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. The Clark Kent apartment set needed to follow Clark’s desire to seem extraordinarily human. Or, rather, how he thinks an extraordinarily human space would appear. The set only contains a few pieces of furniture, very sparsely designed. Mickle recalled that Gunn advised the set should look as if Clark visited an open house and saw staged furniture.
Clark tried to look human, but he has zero understanding of homely furniture. In Gunn’s mind, Clark even goes so far as to throw in a comic bit of art direction all on his own, just one you’re not likely to see in the finished film.
“James actually gave us this funny note. I don’t think you see it in the movie, but he said the only piece of dressing he’d have is a set of hand weights because he’s trying to justify why he’s big and strong. So to throw people off the trail, [Gunn] said Clark has these hand weights on the side. So that’s the one thing that we had in the corner — a set of colorful hand weights.”
On the opposite side of the home decor landscape, Lois Lane’s apartment emerges as entirely human. It boasts the most human of home decor: clutter. Gunn wanted Lois’s apartment to be fill with a type of professorial clutter: books, notebooks, pens, and more.
Even star Brosnahan got into the act with recommendations on how she felt Lois would keep her apartment, down to the placement of her notebooks.
Color-wise, Mickle looked to the comics for inspiration.
“We wanted to bring in this kind of rich purple color that’s often associated with Lois in the comic lore. So it ended up being this really kind of nice kind of deeper eggplant, wine eggplant tone. So it was a nice little reference to the lore as well, but we also liked that her place ended up having this really lived in quality and brought a real humanity to her.”
Superman is now playing in theaters nationwide.
