How True Detective: Night Country nailed its eerie, icy environment

True Detective: Night Country’s vibes are immaculate. Immaculately desolate, icy, and hostile that is, which is just what season four showrunner Issa Lopez and production designer Daniel Taylor set out to achieve with their inky, azure palette. Taylor tells The A.V. Club they wanted the audience to be instantly immersed in the misty, remote world of a small Alaskan town. As seen throughout six episodes, the fictional burgh of Ennis is full of harsh truths, mysteries, tragedies, and weather. The gloominess transcends the screen; it’s hard not to feel a chill down your spine as the dark crimes unfold under a blue tinge. This melancholia also defines Night Country’s central partnership between two detectives who can’t get along, yet they’re each other’s only hope.

Season four of HBO’s anthology, which ended on February 18, is led by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, who star as officers Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro, respectively. The former pals team up after a group of scientists vanish in the middle of the night and are found dead with their entangled, frozen bodies in the snow. Their “corpsicle” ties to a case the officers couldn’t solve six years ago, and since then a dark cloud has haunted Liz and Evangeline’s relationship. It’s a perfect metaphor for the visuals, too. Taylor, whose credits include films like Argylle and Tetris, says he knew he’d have to spend substantial time with this specific world-building when he got the scripts, including mapping out the colors, light, sets, and optimally using the spaces they were in.

“I was filled with trepidation and tension,” he says. “There’s a wave of responsibility because you want to make sure you’re reading it in a quiet environment and are mentally prepared for the story. It’s going to be analyzed, theorized, and watched globally. I was intimidated by what I was about to take on because it was going to be extraordinary.” Taylor says they first narrowed down multiple potential filming locations to Winnipeg, Patagonia, Nova Scotia, and, of course, Alaska. “But we felt in Iceland, there was enough available architecture to match the town we thought we wanted to base our story in.” Season four was shot in Reykjavík, Akureyri, and Dalvík, and in studios where the Nordic landscape was converted to barren, snowy Alaska. With that, True Detective: Night Country’s journey began long before the cameras rolled.

Evoking a spooky visual language amid the icy terrain

Taylor says the idea was to depict a town in the middle of nowhere; the kind where “once the winter comes and the sea freezes, there are no roads, and you can’t get in or out.” Another creepy reference point became a fact he discovered while researching for True Detective: “If you’re not feeling particularly well or expected to live through the winter, in some places, your grave is dug in the summer before the frost comes because [in the winter] they’d unable to do so. It shocked me.” Evidenced by the gutting interpersonal dynamics, it’s clear Lopez and Taylor wanted to flesh out the no-nonsense interactions and layer them with something more intangible and creepy.

“We spent as much time curating the world outside a character’s window, not just inside, limited to what you see. Even if we’ll never take the camera outside, I’ve been mindful to remind the audience about [what might be going on] on the other side of the glass,” Taylor says. “We paid particular attention to the snow, and wind machines, we tried to dress people’s backyards or front gardens to be able to nod to the fact that whatever terrifying event happened to the scientists, it’s still just outside their front door.”

How the season finale’s ‘theme park’ set came to be

The True Detective finale unravels the outcome of the men at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station and its connection to Annie K.’s (Nivi Pedersen) brutal murder. A huge chunk of “Part 6” takes place in the icy caves to depict how she was killed, with Danvers and Navarro spending time in the claustrophobic area in the present day to finally learn the truth. It took about 10 to 12 weeks to construct this set, Taylor reveals to The A.V. Club. The caves also weren’t on a proper soundstage with the usual amenities. “It was an old fertilizer plant that had been renovated for us,” he adds.

“It was quite a process because each rock wall is completely individual and bespoke. We laid it in an inner quadrant to create its shape, and then we laid plastic over the top and heated it. Then we noticed we wanted it to have a curve to it, so we reshaped it all,” he shares. “We had sections to break through and squeeze drop to the floor. It was an ordeal. The guys there hadn’t built an ice cave because there you just … go to an ice cave.”

Taylor says a scenic place wouldn’t live up to building the exact set themselves, no matter how complicated that process might be. “We made so many sample sets. The low ceiling and vast spaces make an underground laboratory within it. It’s pretty big and all made out of plastic sheeting. We had hundreds of meters of those fake tunnels. You’re kind of just hoping that when the unit comes down and switches the light on, it’s going to work. I came in one morning wanting to walk the course myself.” Taylor says Night Country’s ice caves are tantamount to a “theme park attraction,” adding multiple people came to witness what the production team had constructed.

The payoff is rewarding, with the dramatic, frigid beats of “Part 6” hitting hard. But was it as cold on set as it looked? Taylor answers: “There was a conversation about turning the heaters off. I think they hoped it wouldn’t be as hot as a conventional studio. But yeah, it certainly wasn’t hot in there.”

Using design to enhance the characters

The tiniest details enhance a character beyond the writing and the performance. Imagining the actor in the role is usually Taylor’s initial approach. “The worst thing for a production designer is to force an aesthetic onto a character. If they don’t mesh, then you wrestle with it and come across the camera. You don’t believe the space they’re existing in or if they belong there.” That wasn’t the case with Night Country because of how quickly Foster and Reis settled into it.

In the case of Liz Danvers, he says they wanted her house to be washed out, to reflect her curmudgeonly personality and her wrecked relationship with her adopted teenager, Leah (Isabella LaBlanc). “We wanted to take the color and fun out of her interiors. There are lots of pastels, but they’re dirty pastels,” Taylor remarks. “It had to be dry and brittle.” Contrary to Danvers is Navarro, whom the designer always envisioned living out serenely by the lake. “I was on a soapbox about it, that kind of circular roof. It was in my early concepts for her.” He adds they were lucky to work with people like producer Princess Daazhraii Johnsonshow, an Indigenous woman from Alaska who provided a keen insight into Navarro’s world.

“I would go up to her with what I was thinking and she’d guide me with if it’s too big or small. We’d have a back-and-forth and refine ideas for Navarro. As a production designer, I don’t believe I have all the knowledge, so it helps to have an amazing team. If everyone feeds into the pot, what comes out is authentic and builds up the narrative, you know?”

Paying tribute to previous seasons

Lopez has spoken about how Night Country is inspired by hits of the genre, ranging from The Thing to The Shining, and Taylor confirms they wanted to reference things like using the Overlook Hotel as a reference point for Tsalal. “Alien is another big one in terms of how deserted everything feels. The science lab can translate to a spaceship.”

However, True Detective itself is season four’s biggest inspiration in many ways. The show’s most recent run tips its hat to the past seasons without losing its distinctive pattern or storyline. Yes, we’re talking about the spirals, but Easter eggs aren’t just hidden in the dialogues, according to Taylor. “A lot of it is already included in the writing obviously, but we brought our own from the art department. I ran it past Issa because I would never, ever put something on camera that she hadn’t seen or approved,” Taylor clarifies. “It was a fine line.”

A niche example of what he got away with? Taylor says: “If you look super closely, somewhere in the show, there is a Night Country version of a Big Hug Mug that Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) uses when he’s smoking and being interviewed.” He adds he actually kept the prop, and it’s sitting in his kitchen right now. “These small references are littered all over,” he adds.