The Designer of HBO’s The Penguin on designing Gotham

HBO’s new show The Penguin centers on a charming hustler from 2022’s The Batman, played by Colin Farrell. The show picks up where the movie ended, with waters receding from a flooded, half-destroyed Gotham. 

Curbed spoke to production designer Kalina Ivanov — who worked on The Silence of the Lambs, Lovecraft Country, and The Boys in the Boat — about creating her own, 1970s-inspired take on Gotham.

There are so many comics and TV episodes that show Gotham. How much research did you do? 
I call myself the accidental DC designer because I knew very little. I had to take a crash course. James Chinlund, who designed The Batman, is a friend and a colleague, and he talked with me about how he built his mythology. But all of my work is grounded in reality, and all our conversations were about how we need to make our own version. So grounding Gotham in reality became my task.

The director Matt Reeves based The Batman on the comic Year One, and that takes place in the ’80s. So that’s why we decided we were going to go into the ’70s and ’80s of New York before it became this shiny island of department stores and every Soho gallery got turned into a Sephora.

So your Gotham is New York, even though, officially, the comics put Gotham in New Jersey?
For us, Gotham is New York. We tried to relate each neighborhood in Gotham to a neighborhood in New York. When the city is flooded, who would be most affected? The poor people, the ones who live by the water, by the docks. So our story is concerned with the lower depths of Manhattan and the lower depths of the social scale. In my research, I discovered this area directly between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges that, in the 1920s, was the biggest slum. It was called the Lung Block because people there suffered from tuberculosis. In the 1930s, it was demolished and the first projects were created. And those are the projects we used as a basis for Gotham’s poor neighborhood, Crown Point.

Meanwhile, the rich people have gone out of Gotham, they live out of town. For Carmine Falcone’s mansion, I went immediately to The Great Gatsby, to mansions in Oyster Bay, and that is actually where we found our location.

And wealthier people were also leaving New York in the 1970s. 
Yes, they all moved to Long Island or somewhere else, and the poor were left to fend for themselves. People forget how incredibly dirty New York was. in the 1970s, the services were not operating.

The first step for me was to bring in the dirt. The very first thing that you see of Gotham in the show is the outside of the Iceberg Lounge [where Penguin works in the 2022 film]. We dumped about 40 tons of dirt on that street. When the water recedes, what’s left behind are piles of cars bunched up into each other by the force. We started with the muck, and then the furniture and a lot of trash. The director Craig Zobel and I talked a lot about a broken lamppost.

Was there anything you kept as is, or mostly as is?
There is an incredible restaurant on 22nd and Park — the Hawksmoor. It’s a British steakhouse, but it’s only been open for a few years, and the space used to be a union hall. So for 75 years, no one has seen inside except for the people who can have meetings in it. That’s where Sofia takes Penguin for lunch. Plus, there was beautiful light there, and the big vaulted ceilings with gothic arches.

I noticed a lot of arches in the show. 
Yes, we really embedded vaulted ceilings throughout the design from episode one to episode eight. There’s a lot of different kinds of arches, some more geometric, some gothic, some more calling to traditional Roman and Greek architecture.

We used arches as a vernacular. It shows the social structure. If you think of poor people being in the shadow, being invisible, being always suppressed by the ruling class — when you’re under a bridge, you’re in the shadows. You’re suppressed metaphorically by the architecture. We used the squalor under arched bridges, where the homeless congregate. The poor are vulnerable in the darkness.

When we didn’t have a bridge, we added a bridge with visual effects. In the map created for the 2022 film, Gotham is three islands that are almost roundish, jagged circles connected by bridges, so the Tricorner Bridge is kind of like the Brooklyn Bridge, but not quite.

Because of that, we ended up shooting the majority of our locations in Yonkers and South Bronx, and we followed the elevated subway in Queens. That’s why the Red District was set right underneath there.

The Falcones — the crime family running Gotham, Penguin’s bosses, the one-percenters — live in the Gatsby-esque mansion you mentioned. Tell me about creating that.
I was really inspired by the fact that Carmine Falcone is a third-generation gangster. He’s gone to probably Harvard or Yale — a fancy school. He’s very educated, and he wants to portray class. So he would completely transform this house by leaning into his Italian heritage and importing pre-Renaissance paintings. And I specifically wanted the pre-Renaissance art, right on the cusp of Leonardo and Raphael and Michelangelo. It’s a bit more primitive and a bit more stiff. I wanted that rigidity. That’s how I think of Carmine. He’s frozen in a pose.

Like the painting of a horse and rider at the end of the table where the family meets? 
Yes, it’s a re-creation of a painting of the Duke of Padua, and that meant a lot symbolically because Italy didn’t become a Republic until very late. It was all separate kingdoms.

What about the rest of the house? 
I was deep into researching Italian villas. I visited Italy a few times and, when I was in Venice, we visited a whole bunch of villas on the river. They were too cheerful, too beautiful. I was looking for something darker and then I stumbled on this villa on Lake Como, and I thought, Aha. It had this really interesting palette of black marble with gold.

Penguin’s apartment is also black, gold, and dark.
There was a lot of discussion about how, in the Batman universe, he lives in the Diamond District. We wanted his house to have some kind of a worklike feeling so that you feel that he has not arrived. So it wouldn’t be a fancy penthouse or anything like that.

I was thinking of a loft and I looked at jewelry-repair stores. In one of them, there was a vault. It gave us the idea that Penguin sleeps in a vault. So I created the concept, created a design, and showed it to Colin Farrell, and he absolutely loved it. We talked a lot about the symbolism of how, in the vault, there are drawers where the store might have kept jewelry, and how Penguin as a character compartmentalizes: Every feeling is in a drawer inside of him. For the art over the bed, Colin sent us references of paintings he thought his character would have. So the very big, purple painting with the gray circles is based on something he sent us.

The purple and black and gray of his apartment, and the checkers, feels a little 1980s. Were you also going back in time for some of the interiors? 
Yes, of course. In the timeline of the show, we know Penguin grows up in the 1980s. But his mom didn’t decorate then. She decorated before that. So for her house, we leaned into the 1970s — flowers and strong patterns.
I settled on patterned wallpaper because I wanted the women in the story to have a visual connection, but not an obvious one. The patterns are all very strong, but the idea was to have a very different color template for each of them. In The Batman, the Falcones have an Art Deco style, so Sofia has Art Deco wallpaper.

For Penguin’s lover Eve, we wanted her to be like this very bohemian, free-spirited person. She doesn’t have money, so she’ll decorate with stuff that she picked up at flea markets, or the remnants of wallpaper in a store.

How are you sourcing retro wallpaper? 
I actually love wallpaper. I research wallpapers. And I always try to go for big, memorable choices. I use a lot of websites: Hannah’s Treasures sells samples by decade, and you can buy the original roll or design something in that vein. Sometimes you’ll find them on Etsy. But for the Falcones, the wallpaper was our own design by a brilliant graphics team.

There were elements of your sets for Gotham that were terrifying, like a shot of a subway car smashed up in a tunnel, as if it was flooded in the middle of service and everyone on it died, and now commuters are walking around it. 
That was a direct Sandy reference. I was in New York then, living in Stuyvesant Town. And when Sandy hit, the power went out, and a few lucky people on the Upper East Side never lost power. But it took five days to restore the power and it went first to the richest people, then the less rich people, then the less rich people. Our power was restored on day five because we were right by the water and we were on the Lower East Side. And it was such a tell about how power works in New York City, the invisible rules of who is on top of the food chain and who is not. It’s very personal when you experience that. And we wanted this show to be grounded in that way.