“This used to be a hotel,” one character tells another of the palace in HBO’s new limited series “The Regime.” That accounts for the opulence and the feeling of unease. A hotel is, by nature, a transitory place, and as “The Regime” progresses, we get the sense that the unraveling Chancellor Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet) may be closer to checking out than she realizes.
Part of the comedy in Will Tracy’s pitch-black satire comes from the juxtaposition of the stolid grandeur of Elena’s palace with its very vexed and unstable ruler. The result is akin to the war room sequences in “Dr. Strangelove” taking place within the halls of the hotel in “Last Year at Marienbad.” The walls are elaborately gilded — but covered under a layer of plastic when we first meet Elena, who is convinced that spores within the walls will kill her if she lowers her guard. Likewise, the very flag of Elena’s country seems to taunt her: It is regal where she is insecure, elegant where she is effortful.
What Becomes a Fictional Country Most?
A combination of a rich red and a royal blue — plus a leopard! — the flag came about early for “The Regime,” with many of the creative choices stemming directly from it. “There was no really specific information about the country in the scripts, which I quite liked: It freed us up from the history and look of a real place,” graphic designer Franny Bennett told IndieWire. “It is sometimes quite tricky to produce realistic-looking graphics for somewhere that doesn’t exist; but, again, a nameless place gave us more freedom. We used a graphic of the flag in these instances.
“I had lots of conversations about the flag, because we wanted it to be, obviously, a very strong symbol,” production designer Kave Quinn told IndieWire. “We thought that blue and that red would really work well with Kate, to tie in with Kate’s costumes and everything else.”
That flag — and portraits of Elena — appear throughout the palace, despite whatever recent whim might have led to redecorating. “I wanted the different elements to allude to the history of our made-up country and for it also (hopefully) to be beautiful,” Bennett said. “It could be appliquéd and tasseled for important state occasions and cheaply printed for tables at a rally, for example. I put the leopard in a laurel roundel like the Roman flag, slightly sinister and also a bit ‘flashy,’ with the black and gold against the red and blue of our flag. I like the way the red and blue are subliminally both Labour and Conservative, Republican and Democrat.”
Playing the Palace
The palace itself is many things simultaneously, both onscreen and in real life. The production’s filming locations included several palaces (including Palais Pallavicini, Palais Liechtenstein, and The Hofburg) in Vienna over six weeks, with Schönbrunn Palace serving as the exterior — with digitally added additional floors — then returned to the U.K. to rebuild some of the rooms and create additional spaces for scenes on soundstages. “Because we shot [on location] in these amazing big spacious palatial rooms, just getting that scale of those rooms into our sets was really difficult,” Quinn said. “We had to really work out the less expensive ways of doing it. For example, in all the palace rooms in Schönbrunn and Pallavicini, the Palais Liechtenstein, Hofburg, they have these beautiful parquet floors. And we couldn’t do it for real in the set. So we literally got amazing images of these floors, and my graphics team got it printed. And just getting the right tone and texture… You know, it has to look perfect. Little tricks like that to get the palace looking amazing.”
One of Quinn’s challenges was creating living spaces that could conceivably fit into the palaces they used for filming locations while also remaining apart from it — but also a mausoleum fit for a daddy’s girl father. Throughout “The Regime,” Elena drops by her father’s glass coffin to argue, cajole, and brag to his corpse. And Quinn found it the hardest set to design.
“I wanted the room really to be quite plain but have a bit of a design feel to it,” Quinn said. “That’s why I adopted this more pharaoh tomb type of look, with the wall panels and things. Not Egyptian, but modernist. It was more representative of something that you’d find in a Korean mausoleum. I wanted the coffin to be the thing that you focus in on and to be very minimal. I just didn’t want to go down the baroque route; I just wanted to make it a bit weirder, I guess.”
Exchanging Peasantries
By the second episode, Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) has convinced Elena that she is not at risk of dying from the air but from the toxins her advisors have been pumping into her. A return to the simple life is needed! That dictate quickly transforms the palace, replacing plastic wrap and humidifiers with cauldrons of boiling potatoes wafting steam and starch. “We did mood boards and imagery and obviously concepts of what these would look like,” Quinn said. “When she’s going through The Peasant Regime, you know, in Tchaikovsky’s palace, I found a reference of some beautiful peasant costumes in boxes. And there’s lots of box things going on in the script, this metaphor of people being in their own little cocoons. So we used peasant costumes in boxes for one of the sequences.”
Only time — and the final four episodes — will tell if the new palace decor in “The Regime” is a lasting change or, like the peasant costumes, it’s just another role for Elena to try on and then discard in her freefall.
Source link
