Set against the massive canvas of 1920s Oklahoma, Martin Scorsese opens up America’s sinister wounds in a story of complicity, Killers of the Flower Moon. In their first collaboration with Scorsese, Production Designer Jack Fisk and Set Decorator Adam Willis were tasked to recreate one of America’s most brutal eras in the rolling plains. Offscreen Central had the opportunity to chat with Fisk and Willis in an incredible conversation about the onset of a communal experience with the people of Oklahoma, crafting period-accurate interiors and exteriors to depict characters, and the importance of telling the Osage story through details.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hello to both of you and congratulations on your Oscar nominations. I’m very excited to talk to both of you about your work on bringing to life, this important part of history and all the details and what went into it. Sounds good. Yeah. So first, I want to start like, every time I watch what we would consider, like a period film or a period piece, I’m always curious about your point of view when you go in for the research like what is the most important detail of you for you? Is it the authenticity? Is it capturing the essence of the era?
Jack Fisk: I think it’s different for each film. Marty in this particular film, wanted to tell the Osage stories as realistically as possible and so we were using realism as our base in naturalism so that it looked organic. We did that by going to Oklahoma, luckily, we were able to shoot in Oklahoma, and just start dissecting the community. The people that live there now, remember but they don’t remember back to 1919 when the story took place. Facts get confused from 1919 to 1935 talking to their grandparents and stuff so some of the things that the Osage talked about being existing at that time we found didn’t exist. We started investigating through numerous avenues of research, including the researcher David Grann, what life was like in Fairfax, although a lot of film was shot in Pawhuska. Mollie’s mother, we found lived in that reservation area so she didn’t own the land, but she built a house there, and they lived in the house. That is the house we recreated. Now, we didn’t recreate it realistically, because the original house was too small to shoot in and we didn’t know what it looked like 100 years ago so we looked at other Osage homes that still existed and picked the elements that we liked. We found that the Osage were communal people and when family and friends would come to stay, they’d stay for a while. We put a porch on the house so that they could put beds out there. They also had an exterior, native structure that most of the people at that time had that reminded them of where they came from, but also, practically, it was much cooler in the summer than the houses, the houses didn’t have air conditioning at the time and they would live outside. Adam did extensive research through the dealers in the area that handle equipment and other avenues of photographs. We’re lucky that there were some photographs from that era and then we took licenses in some areas like Hale’s house, I knew that he owned several houses in Fairfax, but none of them were impressive enough for the horror that he had committed so we created a house for him on his ranch. His ranch did exist, it was about 50,000 acres and it was right next to the reservation of Grey Horse and that’s how we got started. Let’s just keep it natural and also work with the elements that we found in that area.

Jillian Chilingerian: For Hale, because I feel like Robert De Niro in this movie is very scary the houses and the environments help sell that. With Mollie’s house, it says a lot about her. So I want to dive into the aspect of creating the spaces for the characters to tell more about them. In Mollie’s house, her family lives with her. It’s not that it’s just her alone, and how that says about their dynamic, and as time goes on, and she loses her sisters and her mother it hits so hard because then it’s just her left with Ernest.
Jack Fisk: One thing that we found out was that Lizzie wasn’t living in Mollie’s house, Mollie was living in Lizzie’s house and Lizzie had been there since the early 1900s. In the court cases, Mollie stated that she didn’t own a house of her own and that she lived in a house she grew up in so that helped give us a clue that it wasn’t a new house. There was some time in there and establishment, and the fact that they chose to live in Grey Horse, the reservation area, rather than venture out into the land that was given to them through the allotment. It told me a lot about family there, they were sort of traditionalists of the Osage.
Adam Willis: The wallpaper set the tone of the space, the dark furniture, and the harsh lighting that was coming from the fixtures of the period. It was difficult for us at first to like, really understand what the interiors of these houses were going to be like, because we had so many photos of the more like commercial spaces, like the offices, the pool halls, and stuff like that. Luckily, Jack and I were able to go scout locations in I think it was in August of 2020, which was like three months before we started prep in December. As we were walking around scouting and stuff, we were meeting a lot of Osage people going into their houses and started to capture an essence. We met this guy, Raymond, in a grey horse who, you know, he still had beds on his porch, you know, and we ended up using his beds in the film for the porch, and they were from the period, they had just had a dome, and never got rid of them. We were also kind of relying on, like written descriptions, Jack would find, like allotment records of the time that showed every piece of furniture that they were purchasing at the time. So it was listening to people talk about the era and going into the modern houses to form your idea of what it would be like from these things, as opposed to just you know, using reference photos, I think we had three reference photos of an interior that were from, the 60s or 70s or something, but that was kind of our only point of reference for that. Once we started meeting people, we met this man named Raymond and he had a spare warehouse space in Alaska. He was telling me they still have a lot of original furniture from that period in storage there that came out of his family’s house. He had a bedroom set and dining room set, like a lot of the furniture you see in Lizzie’s House came from his family’s home and they were stamped Osage underneath it. He also lent us his Spode dishware, which is the dish they use in all the eating scenes, and what’s lining the walls on the plate rails, which was a very important thing for them. They spent so much money on the dish where one of the main places they would splurge and he let us use his family’s kind of heirloom dishes, which was incredible to be able to have.
Jack Fisk: China and cars were something they loved a lot, and they spent more on that and white servants than they did on houses. I think ultimately, at that time. Later, their houses may have gotten bigger, they didn’t in Fairfax, but Fairfax was the one that suffered the brunt of this Reign of Terror.
Adam Willis: Yeah, and we wanted to give it an organic feel inside, so we picked this wallpaper from the period and had it recreated that just felt very like you were in a forest or something. That set the tone and then naturally seeing all the wood tones of the furniture from the era and the stuff we were getting from Raymond, it was all dark and it balanced out because like I was saying before, the lighting from that period is very harsh. It’s a lot of clear glass or lightly frosted glass with exposed bulbs and so it ended up working out very well having that harsh light in the dark rooms with the dark furniture and it kind of just created almost like a painting with the way the lighting and interiors ended up looking with a lot of darkness. A lot of contrast.
Jack Fisk: In contrast, in Hales’s house, we used reds and we did paper on the walls with a three-dimensional paper and treated it to look almost like leather. He was in the cattle business so it kind of made sense and we wanted to give him some sort of feeling of royalty that went with his name king. He spent most of his life there right next to the village and befriended all the Osage. He spoke their language pretty fluently, but he had no qualms about killing them for money.

Jillian Chilingerian: Going back to those contrasts everything about this area is very gorgeous, but the poison of this community is seeping through. Over time it gets worse and worse and worse. How did you approach the exteriors of the town while using the natural elements of Oklahoma, because they know it’s so idyllic but then it’s like, there’s this poison and the sinister ism like hiding with it that you feel.
Jack Fisk: Yeah, this town was built in the middle of the prairie, it was land given to donated by Osage and the town was built. Because the railroad tracks didn’t come near Grey Horse, it was about five miles away, and they knew they needed the train tracks to get will take to get goods in and people delivered to the town so they set up the town of Fairfax in the white man’s world and that’s what the Native Americans were suddenly sort of thrust into it was completely different than the way they lived a communal life and suddenly people had property and stuff. It was something that I don’t think the Osage ever dealt with before and when they did the allotment of the land, they did it fairly, but they were able to keep the oil rights and a communal gift to everyone. There are 2,229 Osage, and each one got an equal share of any money from the oil. The town sort of represents everything that was brought, into the Osage world by a white man. And they were like, in a way, they were like the, you know, the people going after silver, you know, now they’re going after oil, but it was it. It brought out the most greedy elements of white society, and they were infiltrating land that was at that time owned by the Osage, they had a million and a half acres there that they purchased from the Cherokees. We both tend to make the world as wide as possible that they had to go into, the stores and the businesses, and they were taken advantage of in every business. However I think one of the biggest things Adam did was the, the Red Hill Trading Company, and that’s where they go to buy all their goods, they were kind of forced into certain areas to buy their unit would approve, their loans, and, and those businesses could charge almost anything they wanted to the Osage and they would pay it because they weren’t used to dealing with crooks. Every person in that town, from the sheriff to the lawyers, to the politicians to the businessman, was a participant in taking money from the Osage. In our story, only Hale and Ernest, and two others were convicted and I think that’s pretty much true that whole Reign of Terror, even though more than 60 people were killed. The only people who were convicted you saw in the film. Once again, the suffering of the Osage was put it into a radio program, and it was entertainment. So this horror was forgotten until David Grann’s book.

Jillian Chilingerian: I remember we’re all in the theater, and we’re like, whoa, like, what’s happening of the radio show? You’re tasked with the symbolism of the commercialization and Marty’s cameo in it, which is so good.
Jack Fisk: I think Marty came by it, quite honestly, like, how do you end the story because the FBI came in for a short amount of time? They arrested four people and their money ran out, and they left. They later commercialize that case, as if it was, you know, a much bigger deal to make money. I think that Marty thought that was important to show how we’re all kinds of accomplices in this. His speaking at the end came quite naturally, he knew what he wanted the person to say, but he didn’t know how to direct him to say it, so he thought he would give it a shot. I felt it was powerful that he did it in that way, the story is not ended.

Jillian Chilingerian: For the interiors, I love the use of the pool hall in that white man’s world that’s where they’re congregating. Almost like a watch tower on what the rest of the Osage Nation is doing, where they’re conspiring, but it’s a pool hall, and it’s a barber shop. How was it to design that?
Jack Fisk: Adam did a lot of work putting the dressing together realistically.
Adam Willis: Well, initially, we were thinking that the pool hall wouldn’t be quite as big as it ended up being in the film, so we were having a hard time finding a location that worked around Paluska that was big enough for us to be able to do this the way Marty wanted to do it. Right on the main street was this old furniture store when you walked in, it felt like you were traveling back into the 70s. It had wooden paneling walls, a dilapidated kind of drop ceiling with water stains everywhere, and carpet on the floor. The more we thought about it, we were walking around in there, and we’re like if we take everything out of this space and get it back to where it was and get rid of all the walls and strip it down to the original, whenever they first built the building that it could work. We ended up doing that, which is interesting because I think it’s probably rare for a film to do this in an actual space like this. All the windows were uncovered, it was the most perfect space imaginable for this in the wood and the floor was all still kind of in good condition. We re-stained it and the tin ceiling was still there in good condition after we took all that drop ceiling out. The next step was now that we have this giant space, where do we get all these pool tables to fill a state like this, because initially, we’re like, oh, maybe it’s two pool tables, or three and now it is ten. So we ended up finding this vendor in Kansas, he’s probably the number one collector of pool tables early 1900s in the whole country. We wanted to make it as authentic as possible and have the right type of pool tables. So we had a good mixture of billiard tables, the ones that would be in spaces like that at the time and he sent us home with a catalog from the period that had pool tables, all the spectator chairs, like everything that would be in a pool hall. We picked the tables that we wanted and hoped that whenever we picked them up and got them back all the pieces would be there and would all get put together. He had these original spectator chairs, which are the high kind of ice cream parlor-looking chairs, but Brunswick made chairs that they would put in pool halls and they were in all of our references. It’s the type of thing that you would never find ever anywhere. That was kind of the approach that we had for almost every set, we wanted to try to find somebody who was an expert on it in the area in there. People were interested in that period in that area so it wasn’t too difficult once we started searching and we tried to do everything to get as authentic as possible, and it was the perfect place to do that.
Jack Fisk: Every set was three-dimensionally completed. Neither Adam nor I had worked with Marty before, but we wanted to give him complete freedom. In the houses we built, you could go inside, outside, upstairs, downstairs, and look anywhere in every location that we shot in, in town. We built the courtroom inside a church and that became a complete building sort of hidden within a building, but there were no sound stages close by. We later found an airport hangar in Bartlesville, where we built some sets for the end part of the film, but yeah, it was to give the actors and Marty freedom to shoot any area they wanted. We had a great construction crew and decorating crew, and we had to build things strong because it was in Tornado Alley, so we worried about sets flying into the sky. So it made it more fun. The way I like to build and Adam was a perfect decorator for it because every every detail was taken from electrical outlets to sofas to linens, it made it more fun.
Adam Willis: Touching on what you were saying earlier about exteriors. Mollie’s house and Hale’s house were built, miles off the road, completely removed from everything, and another thing that’s incredible about this production is that there were no roads to get to the spaces where we wanted to build. We were just kind of riding around on ATVs, and trying to find the perfect space. They built roads to the sets, and every time we would go to sit, we would be driving through partial rivers. It is incredible because it’s something that I feel is lost in film. We had these interior exterior houses, instead of building the interiors on stage. and for every scene that we’re shooting in the house, the windows are open, and you can see the life happening outside, whereas now usually you’d have like a volume set up outside of a window and it would all just be kind of fake and but it was all real.

Jillian Chilingerian: When I watch things I can tell when they’re not on location and I understand why for some situations, but it adds something for not only the viewer but the actors that they can map distance out, it adds to fluidity, I think of everything like camera movement, and having all these people around you that sounded passionate about the project of wanting to help bring that to life.
Adam Willis: Share their expertise, which made them so happy that they were able to talk to somebody about their passion.
Jack Fisk: Adam found someone who was into electrical wiring and they helped when we put the telephone poles up in the town they came in over and saw the wiring of the telephone poles and how it connected to the buildings and stuff. There was an awning company that specialized in period awnings, and it was it’s fun to immerse yourself in the community and then work with locals as well as crew members to bring something about, once people got excited about the realism, they started coming to you with things, oh, I’ve got something better than that, we found a guy that was into oil wells, and he took us to his farm. It was just a matter of connecting with the locals in several states around where we were shooting, to find out what they had, and get them excited about the film.

Jillian Chilingerian: I’m always curious, what is the timeline from when you’re building these houses of how far out before production or before shooting?
Jack Fisk: I think a week, the total pre-production was about 12 weeks, starting just after New Year’s, we started shooting in April. The weather was horrible. I remember some days, it’d be like 14 degrees and snow, but we had a big warehouse and we would prefab if we couldn’t work outside. We’d be building window frames and doors and even walls, and then take them out to the location and start assembling. We worked around the weather, and it made it much more difficult for the construction crew and decorating crew to get in and out as Adam said we put in roads, and gravel roads, but it took a while to get them thick enough. Depending on the scale of the house, Hale’s was more difficult because it was much taller and you’re out in the middle of nowhere with any anytime you need a screw or a lift or any piece of construction equipment, you end up driving to Oklahoma City. The supply chain was affected by COVID. Wood and all the paints and stuff we needed were not always readily available. So that it was it was challenging, but that made it more exciting.

Jillian Chilingerian: Did you build everything to scale?
Jack Fisk: Everything was full-scale that we built. There’s no false perspective because false effective works after you know what the shots are going to be. I met Marty in person when he came out to look at locations in February, we’d already been working since January. So we’ve been working in about a month before he arrived and it necessitated us going forward. So I didn’t want to hinder his ability to direct his scene by trying to prejudge where he was going to shoot it. You have to coordinate with the camera and the director and I have to say that when he came out Rodrigo also came out so we had the cinematographer and the director and ourselves and we’ve talked through everything and that saved us a lot of time. I remember Marty at Hale’s house, he was pointing out where it could be and he was saying, Well, I’d like a be able to put a camera right over the den and shoot down on the actor laying on the floor and so we were able to incorporate that into the construction and easily remove the ceiling.

Jillian Chilingerian: Another interior that stays in my mind that I’m sure a lot of people bring up is when Hale confronts Ernest with the checkered tiles in the room.
Jack Fisk: I want to let Adam talk, but that location was a real location. That was Masonic Hall in Fairfax and it was painted white when we found it. In the same kind of development, Marty shot other scenes in there that didn’t make it into the film, but he loved the location so much. Marty had written in the Masonic Hall, which is kind of a strange area. It’s almost like college fraternity stuff with paddles and symbolism. But I heard that Robert De Niro broke the paddle when he hit Leonardo.
Adam Willis: It was also an interesting scouting moment, because me and Jack, we went into that place in August, whenever we first scouted. As we got permission to go up there, and we were walking around, we started looking at there were portraits. The portraits are in the film, all kind of lining the top of the room. We were kind of looking closer and closer and saw that Pitts Beatty’s portrait was up there. It’s such a weird, weird kind of creepy space in there. We’re trying to figure out what to make it feel even more mysterious. Jack had mentioned Egyptian tombs, that midnight blue that you see in Egyptian tombs. I know there’s like a close association with the Egyptian mysteries so we picked this dark color. We weren’t sure how it was going to work with the lighting and everything because it was all very naturalistic lighting, but Rodrigo was, was really into it, whenever we got it finally painted, and everything. We used a lot of the stuff that existed in there, we replaced the lighting, we kept the carpet because it was original, and it was still in pretty good condition. We hand-painted the canvas with the checkered tile because we found the references we kept seeing that in most small-town Masonic lodges, it would be a hand-painted canvas that they would bring in for specific things. We found Masonic collectors that we got the podium and the columns and all the other kinds of little details around there. There was a lot of that stuff in Kansas, we would just we would go in random antique stores, and there would just be tons of Masonic stuff from the early 1900s, but in that building, you know, was another part of it on the other side, like when you go up the stairs and go to the left, that was the Masonic Hall. When you go up the stairs to the right, it is set up like an office. Jack was looking more at the references of the windows of that building because we had exterior photos of that building from the period of Fairfax. It had the brother’s name on the windows so where we shot the brothers’ office was where their actual office was.
Jack Fisk: Below it was a bank and in that bank, we found it used to be a museum, we found all kinds of paraphernalia and details from the time of our film including a 1925 phonebook of Fairfax with everybody’s name and phone number in it that was in the film. We found pictures of Hale and some of his cronies goofing off at the photo parlor in town and that inspired Marty to do his shot in the photo parlor. There were all kinds of blankets, really expensive, valuable antique blankets in there. This Osage woman, Danielle, had just bought that building. And she shared all that stuff with us and helped us a lot.
Adam Willis: There are also Big Old Trading Post invoices in there, like invoices from the furniture store. She let us borrow all this paperwork and we went in, and we scanned all of it. In a lot of the offices the insurance office and the lawyer’s office, all the paperwork was authentic and you could walk onto set and shuffle through papers, and it would all be real stuff.

Jillian Chilingerian: This is all so fascinating about the time that you went out there and the way that all these things were happening, and this film being made at that time. It sounds like a very communal experience for such a big film, which I love when it’s you hear those stories. I’m always so impressed and amazed at interiors and exteriors, especially when it’s historical.
Jack Fisk: I think it was important for the Osage story to be told, and that was why we wanted to help Marty tell it as realistic as possible. It helped the Osage to sort of see things. Every film is a little different and your approach to it’s a little different. The reality is you know, for some stories it’s not as important as it was for this one. Because we had an audience. I mean, I think it was the film was not made for the Osage, it was made for other people and that’s why the Osage import input was so important because we wanted to tell it as accurately as possible, so the rest of the world could see what they’ve gone through.

Jillian Chilingerian: Well, thank you again for this really exciting conversation.
Jack Fisk: Thank you.
Adam Willis: Thank you.

Killers of the Flower Moon is currently streaming on Apple TV+ and back in select theaters.
You can read our review of the film here.