The Knick—Steven Soderbergh’s riveting Cinemax series, which looks inside the Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhattan at the turn of the last century—has become as beloved for its harrowing depiction of antiquated ailments as for its irresistibly edgy sets. Through the show, which follows medical innovator Dr. John W. “Thack” Thackery (Clive Owen) and his staff, we venture into the surgical theater where Thack performs then-innovative C-sections and skin grafts, we enter the Lower East Side tenement houses where the majority of the hospital patients live, we gawk at the lavish homes where the wealthy reside, and we witness the red glow of the Chinatown opium den in which Thack feeds his own addictions after hours. With a hospital cast in a palette of almost exclusively black and white (aside from the regular shock of crimson blood) and scenes shot on the exact New York City streets in which it is set, the show has captivated design enthusiasts for its cool riff on the Victorian era—and those sleek brass light fixtures that seem to crop up in every scene. Now, as the series enters its second season, AD caught up with production director Howard Cummings and set decorator Regina Graves to talk period furnishings, the challenges of shooting in New York City, and what happens when hundreds of gold plastic chairs show up for a 19th-century soirée.
Tune in to Cinemax tonight at 10 P.M. for the Season 2 premiere.
Click here to look inside the stunning sets.
Architectural Digest: What sort of direction did Steven Soderbergh give you before you started shooting?
Howard Cummings: Steven said to me pretty early on, “If I could have made this in black and white, I would have, but nobody would fund that.” Regina and I saw that as a great opportunity. Since we were building the interiors from the ground up, we could limit the palette to black, white, four shades of gray, and a lot of dark wood.
Regina Graves: He didn’t want it to feel stuffy. It’s the Victorian era, so it can get very granny or old and heavy. The aesthetic was definitely period but with a modern flair.
AD: Was there one location that set the tone for the rest of the show?
HC: The heart of the drama is in the hospital. In the script, it’s located on the Lower East Side, and it has a mission statement to help the poor. Everything about it is pretty antiquated, and that’s the struggle. We actually found the location on the very first day we were scouting. We went to this old boys’ high school in Bed-Stuy [Brooklyn]. It’s a Victorian building with Romanesque architecture, amazing brickwork, and embellished turrets. It’s a very archaic building. We both got out of the car and said, “This is it.” So we started to create a world based on that.
AD: Did you use any specific historic documents or interiors for reference??
HC: Our researcher found that a Presbyterian hospital on the Upper East Side had full reports that were published with ground plans and photographs. We built all the beds and wards based on the furniture in those rooms. I did the layouts based on the ground plans, and if I couldn’t decipher them, we had a historical medical adviser we would ask, “Is this the sterilizing station?” and things like that.
AD: Soderbergh shoots the series with a handheld camera and no additional lighting. How did that come into play when designing the sets?
HC: Steven uses a handheld RED camera, which is really light-sensitive. Because of that, all the interiors are lit with practical lighting. Electrifying the hospital is also a big part of the plot in Season 1, so we manufactured all of the fixtures to be historically accurate. The early bulbs were quite inefficient, so it turned out that our electric look was yellower and warmer than our gas look. Because we built the entire set—ceilings and all—all of the hospital rooms interconnect, so you can follow the action from one room to the next, which gives it a certain reality.
AD: You also shot a lot on location.
HC: Yes! Even though we had these giant sets, nearly half of Season 1 was shot on location. In Season 2, that percentage is even greater.
AD: Many of the Lower East Side scenes are actually shot in the Lower East Side. How did you rewind streets like Broome and Orchard back a century?
HC: The thing you have to come to terms with is that you can’t change everything. It’s not possible. It has to be about our interpretation of Victorian. For me, changing the texture of the street was really important. I wanted dirt. But you have to schedule it, and you have to do drainage cover for environmental reasons. You have to have the dirt removed at a certain time for traffic. Those businesses—you know, the local Chinese laundry—can’t close for the day. We install a façade in front of the building so patrons can still walk in, and life goes on. By the time we were filming the second season, we had a giant “street kit,” where we would make façades that would go in one or two days ahead of time for a quick transformation.
AD: Were there any locations that you didn’t have to change much?
HC: In Brooklyn, the trend is naked lightbulbs with pseudo-Victorian interiors. A bar called Cafe Moto in Williamsburg was one of the first places to do that antique look. I walked in and thought, If I just edit a few things in here, could I get away with it? It’s not really historically correct, but it’s definitely our series. It ended up being the bar where Algernon [an African-American surgeon played by Andre Holland] would go and pick fights.
AD: Were there any contemporary interiors that influenced the sets for Season 2?
HC: I was eating at a restaurant in the Village called the Clam. I looked up, and they had a barrel-vaulted ceiling done in mosaic mother of pearl tiles. Steven loves shooting ceilings, which is very unusual, but we have a lot of scenes where people are looking up at the doctor who is attending to them. In the operating theater in Season 1, everything was shiny. Steven wanted the kick of the light on everything. If I couldn’t do shiny, it was wallpaper. But I got to do an operating theater in another hospital in Season 2, and it has that ceiling from the Clam.
AD: Where do you source most of the furnishings and textiles for the sets?
RG: We got a lot through prop houses, but we went to the D&D Building in New York for our fabrics and wallpapers. At the beginning of the season, I make a trip and pick fabrics that are to the period in our preferred color tones. We divide them up by color and put them into different bins, then we work off those for every set. The same thing goes for wallpaper. For the period furniture, I did a trip to Brimfield, Massachusetts, hit some antique shops in Virginia and California, and canvassed Newel antiques in New York.
AD: How do you keep rooms from going too period?
RG: A lot of the furniture is authentic Victorian, but with fabrics and wallpapers, we used colors and choices and styles that were very modern. We wanted to keep it fresh to give it a sexiness and a lightness.
AD: Did anything have to be custom made?
RG: Of course! We worked a lot with George and Martha [link: http://interiorsgm.com] in Brooklyn. I showed them these Victorian waiting-room benches with turned legs and carved backs, and George made eight of them in nine days. And we worked with about four different manufacturers on the lighting. A lot of this is about making friends and being really nice.
AD: Is there anything in the show that is totally 100 percent contemporary that would have never existed in this time period?
RG: In Season 2, there’s a big party scene where we rented ballroom chairs, and they ended up coming in gold molded plastic. They were supposed to be old-fashioned wood ballroom chairs. We had to fake it. I was just praying, “I hope Stephen doesn’t sit in that chair and realize it’s plastic.” But sometimes you just have to work with it. Honestly, they didn’t look that bad on camera.
AD: How do the sets change in Season 2?
HC: The season expands the scope beyond the hospital, and we had great opportunities to use real New York locations. We see more into the lives of the rich and the super-rich. We used every part of New York, from Yonkers to Staten Island and everywhere in between, even Long Island. We create San Francisco’s Chinatown in Yonkers.
AD: Exciting! Were there any historic interiors that were particularly inspirational for this season?
RG: We looked at a lot of photos of the Hearst mansion in New York. And we shot at the Lotos Club on 66th Street.
AD: How does the edginess of the interiors speak to what is happening in the show?
HC: That really is the period. Everyone has their own agenda, and it’s brutal. It’s a harsh world, and I think we had to show that.
