In the quaint coastal town of Widow’s Bay, Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), determined to create a better future for his teenage son, is desperate to help put the town on the map by making it into an attractive tourist attraction, but he must contend with the superstitious locals who believe the island is cursed. Somehow, it works, but he soon finds out that the locals are right and the island is awake and no longer safe.

Recently, production designer Steve Arnold spoke with SciFi Vision about shaping the visual world of Widow’s Bay, including its deliberately remote, out-of-time look to the older technology, creepy welcome videos, and horror homages layered throughout the town. Arnold also discusses designing the sets such as the Salty Whale and Breakwater Inn, changing the town to 1702, and creating detailed props like the unsettling board games in episode two and the grimoire Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) uses in episode four.

New episodes air Tuesdays on Apple TV.

Watch the interview and read the transcript below.




SCIFI VISION:   How did you get involved in the project?

STEVE ARNOLD:   You know, like all my jobs that my agent finds the project, and they connect me with the important people. And I think they may have been looking at me, because I had done another project on a set on an island, Midnight Mass, up in Vancouver. And I'm speaking to you actually from an island on the West Coast where I have a vacation home.

SCIFI VISION:   Well, that's fun [laughs] but hopefully the same type of things aren't happening there.

STEVE ARNOLD:   [laughs] No, no, not too much of that.

SCIFI VISION:   So, talk about how you came up with sort of the look of [it], because obviously it takes place now, but a lot of it looks like it could take place kind of before. I know it's a small island, so some things could potentially be behind, but I don't know, to me, it makes it feel kind of out of time. It makes it more quirky. So, just talk about sort of how you came up with that and why.

STEVE ARNOLD:   So, you know, Katie [Dippold], the writer, she came up with a lot of elements that in her world had, you know, spoken to her, things like, films like Jaws, which is set on an island, and it's in the 80s or, you know, late 70s. And we talked about how we could make this seem remote and not really in step with the rest of the world. So, we just picked lots of older elements. You've got the rotary phones, and you've got the old TV and all that kind of stuff, because in her original idea, you know, there wouldn't be cell phones. They don't work there. There's some computer computer technology available, but it's very rudimentary and old school. So, that's  kind of the direction we went.

SCIFI VISION:   Is it hard to source those kind of things? I mean, I know that's what you do, kind of getting that kind of stuff to work, but I'm just curious, because, I don't know, you don't see a lot of that anymore, unless I guess you're looking for it.

STEVE ARNOLD:   The trickiest one is the TV's there. They're very few of them. There're several vendors who have them and have them fixed up so that they'll work with 24 frame, either film or video, but we rent those on a specific set up so that we have it for when we need it. And a lot of times they have to either send a technician or somebody who gets it all rigged so it works properly. The phones and a lot of those other things, that stuff is still around. Our decorator has sources back in Massachusetts and all along the East Coast where all that stuff comes from.

SCIFI VISION:   When you were talking about the TV's, you made me think of it. How did the idea for the videos come up? Because some of them are so strange. It's like you don't even know what to think when you watch the different videos.

STEVE ARNOLD:   The one Welcome to Widow's Bay, Follow Me, that was shot. And I think both Katie and Hiro [Murai] had some very specific ideas about what that would really be. And the fact that no matter what channel you pick, it's going to go to that welcome video. And I think the idea that they, you know, slip in at the very end, this sort of quick shot, subliminal shot of this monster guy, whatever, you know, that was all part of the plan when they shot it.

SCIFI VISION:   The show obviously pays homage to a lot of different horror movies. How do you draw the line between doing that and acknowledging them without going too far? I know you talked about the Jaws, and obviously there're a lot of other influences too.

STEVE ARNOLD:   Yeah, we we went through and looked and particularly I think Jaws was one of the touchstones, because it is on an island, and there are some similarities in terms of, you know, the mayor or the guy in charge of of the Jaws village and all that. So, we, the decorator and I, work together like in Tom Loftis's house, the fabric in the kitchen drapery matches. It's a dead match to the one in Jaws. And, you know, the hanging light fixture in the kitchen. A lot of those things we could find something either exactly that or very similar to that. So, we had fun adding things that aren't too, you know, too outspoken or too on the nose in the hallway, in the town hall. There's a similar sequence in Jaws where Roy Scheider is walking down the hallway and there are these little signs that stick out that kind of are hanging, and if you watch that, he hits his head on one or two of those. So, we did the same thing. We had some little signs that would stick out and indicate different offices and stuff like that, just to see if anybody would catch that in the conference room, which is where they have some meetings at the town hall there. Again, what's on the walls are these little framed, they're like documents almost. And we copied all that from Jaws.

Some other things, if you look at the exterior of the Breakwater Inn, it's kind of an homage to the the house behind the Bates Motel in Psycho. And that's sort of an homage to a famous Edward Hopper painting called House by the Railroad. So, it's this spooky little cupola on the top of the structure, which we couldn't find there, but we added in post.

SCIFI VISION:   Well, that answers the next thing. A lot of things. I was gonna say, are there any kind of Easter eggs you added? Is there anything else you can think of that you sort of added to see if people pick up on? Not necessarily even homages, just little things that are kind of little jokes or whatever.

STEVE ARNOLD:   You know, it's kind of sprinkled all over the place. And some of them are very, very subtle. But in the Salty Whale, you know, there're elements that we put some of the artwork on the walls is reminiscent.

There is a bit in the Captain's Suite where Tom Loftis hears this celebration through the radiator on the wall, and that's directly from The Shining. And when we were doing the hotel, we wanted to try to instill it with some of the things from The Shining hotel. There's a photograph, or there're a bunch of photographs in The Shining of these black and white photos of these groups of men or groups of people. And you don't really see the one that we did, but it's in the men's room when he's washing his hands and looking at the mirror. It's on the left hand side there. So, just little little things all over the place.

SCIFI VISION:   I was going to ask, we do deep dives into this. So, I'm always looking at screen captures, and I feel like we're talking about all these details. Do you expect people to like, look at them, or do you not really think about some things? I’m always curious how much you put into a lot of the background things, if we're just like obsessing over little things, or you really think about even those tiny details.

STEVE ARNOLD:   We do, because now you can, you know, screenshot things, and previous to streaming, you couldn't do that as easily. Now [there are] people who become obsessed with a project, you know, with a program, and they'll just go through with a fine tooth comb and find all kinds of little things. So, we try to sprinkle that stuff around as much as we can.

SCIFI VISION:   That's great. I just feel like sometimes we're focusing too much, and like, we're looking at all the books and everything on the bookshelf and talking about it, but it's fun. You talked about the Inn, talk about the board games, because I think those were kind of my favorite little crazy props, I guess is the best way to put it, especially the Teeth. I don't know about that. That's scary.

STEVE ARNOLD:   We had a brilliant graphic designer with us, Ellen Lampl, and I worked with her for many, many years, and she was actually working remotely. So, we would send her the pages that described what things were, but it was usually a fairly loose description. And she came up with - we went through a bunch of versions of every one of those games, you know, like Daddy's Home, let's make him a little more frustrated and crazy and mad and, but not too much. And the Teeth thing, we had all kinds of different exterior images for the box, and that was the one that Hiro picked. He said, “This is funny and just quirky.” So, yeah, a lot of time and energy went into making the game, the game pieces, the little spinner things, all that stuff. And again, I was extremely happy to see that a lot of that made it into the show, because sometimes you'll spend a lot of time on something very specific like that, and it just kind of falls out, doesn't get in the cut what, for whatever reason. So, that was fun to see all of that.

SCIFI VISION:   There's a lot of creepiness going on with that. Talk about creating…1702 from the flashback episode and kind of how you did that.

STEVE ARNOLD:   That's usually fairly tricky. There were a couple of places back in Massachusetts. Sturbridge village we looked at, which is kind of a museum park kind of thing. They have lots of old structures, and they have people there in costume, you know, blacksmiths and all that kind of stuff. But it seemed like it was going to be just not practical for us. And so we actually reuse some building exterior buildings that we made for the scene where the ferry boat comes in, and the people get off, and there're some back building buildings in the background. We ended up taking those apart and moving them to this farm where the meeting house was, where the wedding takes place. And so we made the cemetery, and we did all that kind of stuff there. And we did a lot of research to see, you know, when you're back in someplace near a lot of these East Coast places like Salem and other village places that are kind of kept, you can find the right furniture, the right dressing, the right feel for the scale of the buildings and the style of the buildings and all that kind of stuff. So, that was very useful for us to be there.

SCIFI VISION:   As you were talking, you were making me think about the stuff in the historical society. And obviously that's supposed to be the same building, but how did you guys decide what to kind of pull for that? Because there's a lot of crazy stuff in there too.

STEVE ARNOLD:   We had all kinds of crazy things. I actually, I don't know that you really see it. There's a horse and buggy, buggy that's in there. And one of the reasons I put that in there was there was one at Sturbridge village, which is in a museum space. And we actually had - this was a little over the top, but I actually had, set dressing had a horse. It was like a fiberglass horse that we had with pulling the buggy and everything. And Hiro was like, “I think that's too much.” So, we took the horse away, but yeah, we found all kinds of things. And there're things that you really have to look kind of carefully when the reporter is talking to Tom Loftis, if you look over the reporter's shoulder, we have a mannequin in a straitjacket. We just thought that there's all kinds of crazy things that happen in this town, this village. And some of that is stuff on the wall. Some of it was the outfits that were from the witches and, you know, pieces of clothing, things like that. So, yeah, we had fun coming up with really sort of slightly twisted, and, you know, there were a lot of images that we could find of the whale eating of, you know, a boatload of people or the priest or whatever, or a giant octopus, all that kind of stuff that, that kind of lore, nautical lore, was around in historic documents that we could use.

SCIFI VISION:   Cool. It all really adds to everything. What about the paintings? I mean, I assume when you do the paintings, at least the majority of them, you have somebody make them specifically for the show, but are any of them, I don't know, are any of them like real [paintings] that you pulled, or are they all just stuff that you had commissioned for the show?

STEVE ARNOLD:   The corridor in the town hall, as in the script, Katie had wanted these old paintings on the wall, and there's a bunch of them in there. And so, because we had so many paintings, we have a way of printing on canvas. And I think a lot of those are Library of Congress imagery that we were able to get, and then we'll put print them on canvas, and we'll have painters work on them so that they have a layer of, you know, painterliness on top. But but we had a very, very talented portrait artist also there working with us that did the painting in it's actually in Ruth (K Callan)'s office that is outside of Tom's office that you're looking at. And in a future episode, you will find out a little more about that. But yeah, the stuff of Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater), the painting of him, all that stuff, we had our scenic painter do that.

SCIFI VISION:   Talk about the cocktail party, you know, the night outside in the water and everything. Did you find a location for that? Or did you have to build some of that? Because that whole episode, I think, is my favorite.

STEVE ARNOLD:   Yeah, there's a lot going on there. So, shooting at the ocean, we were not anywhere near the ocean where our stages were. We were kind of west of Boston by an hour and a half or something. And it's also very difficult night. You're shooting at a beach somewhere; you can't really control the water, the waves, the safety-ness of it. So, that actually, that scene where they walk in the water, is actually at a lake near where we were, and it was a controllable space, the beach and all of that. So, yeah, we looked at a bunch of different places, the dock where Sarah (Betty Gilpin) and the kids escape, or where she arrives, that was also another lake that that was nearby that we were able to, you know, cobble together of what looks like a dock.

SCIFI VISION:   What overall was the hardest thing that you had to create - a design, a look, or just anything in particular for this series?

STEVE ARNOLD:   We had a hell of a time finding the exterior of the Breakwater Inn. We looked at real inns; we looked at big, elaborate houses. We were driving all over for weeks and weeks and weeks, and the director of photography happened to be staying in a neighborhood that was close to the building that we ended up using and drove by one day and took a picture and sent it to me and said, “What about this?” And I said, “Yeah, that's perfect. That's perfect.” It's sort of decrepit. It's not new or anything like that. It's kind of falling apart. So, that was one of the more difficult things.

The other difficult thing was, pretty much most of Massachusetts, if there's a town or a village or anything, there's usually like kind of a highway almost running right through the middle of it, and we wanted to avoid all that, you know, infrastructure that you get with modern day business and everything else. And the one that I knew when I read it at the very beginning was the convenience store. How were we going to do this convenience store and make it seem like it was kind of off the beaten path in the middle of nowhere, whatever? And we found this place. There's a little town called Berlin. They say it Berlin, it's spelled Berlin, but they like to say Berlin for various reasons. And this was a auto repair shop on a side street or little road. So, we turned it into a gas station convenience store, because it was so remote feeling. And we actually built that whole inside of the convenience store into a repair shop that basically had lifts in the floor and all that kind of stuff that we had to move a whole bunch of things inside to make it. And someone commented to me the other day about how when you see Tom come in the door, it's a pretty dirty looking place, actually, because it was an automotive shop and it was like a layer of grease over everything.

SCIFI VISION:   Well, that makes sense. All I can say is I wish we'd get the story behind Tom's shoe and what the hell happened.

STEVE ARNOLD:   Yeah.

SCIFI VISION:   What's your favorite set that you created for the show?

STEVE ARNOLD:   I really loved the Salty Whale. The Breakwater Inn was wonderful stuff. I've done Interior Victorian before when I started years and years ago on doing stage sets for theater. We did, you know, a big Victorian thing. So, that's always a lot of fun. We printed all the wallpaper, we designed all the wallpaper in there.

But the Salty Whale, I wanted to do something that sort of worked in the village world, but also had some various levels. So that especially, it had been written where at one point in the first episode, Tom is like running back and forth to the bar to get to a phone and all the rest of that. That kind of got shrunk down, but it also worked really well for when Patricia is having her event where she could get up on some stairs. And so it wasn't all on one level, which I had a lot of fun with.

SCIFI VISION:   You talk about the event, talk about the grimoire, I guess you'd call it, the other version of the book and creating that, because that's really cool. That and her headdress, I think, is kind of the two of my favorite things. That and the Teeth. I did like the Teeth too, I mentioned that.

STEVE ARNOLD:   Yeah. The headdress was costumes with props and, you know, they worked together. And the book turning into the other book, that was all props. Props handled that. Our graphic designer didn't really do very much with that, but I think our prop person had some calligraphy people who did a lot of that work. And so, yeah, it turned out really well.

SCIFI VISION:   I think it's cool how there's always so many, like they go into all the details for that. And some of that we probably didn't see, I'm assuming, that’s the book, but that's really cool.

STEVE ARNOLD:   Yeah.

SCIFI VISION:   Do you have a favorite item or something or costume?

STEVE ARNOLD:   That is a tough one. I would say we spent the most time on the painting I referred to before, which was in Ruth's office. And it had to be a giant heavy frame and big so that, Tom, it would be very awkward. We made a couple of those. And then we went through, I don't know how many iterations to get the wife's expression and her face and the fact that she's married this old guy and he's got her kind of under his thumb, but she's defiant and, you know, all of that. And that was a very tricky, tricky situation. The other thing that was quite tricky, and we were supposed to focus on it in the first couple of episodes, and we haven't. And that was at where the ferry docks, there is a little area where there's a statue of Richard Warren. And there was a reference to the fact that it had been defaced by the kids in the neighborhood and other things. And we spent quite a bit of time having a sculptor make this statue. And at the time, we didn't have a cast member for who Richard Warren was. And that kept getting pushed back farther and farther and farther. And we're like, we've got to see this guy. What does his face look like? And, you know, all of that. What's the costume going to be? And we kept going around and around and we just kept saying, “We have to finish this thing. We've got to put something.” So, we had it almost done, and we had it standing down on stage, but it didn't have a head on it. And when Hiro and Katie and Matthew, everybody came through, they just loved the fact that it didn't have a head on it. So, we were finished. We were like, that's great. We don't have to do this, this face and this head and all of that. But, you know, those kinds of things happen when you're short of time and you're trying to frantically finish something.

SCIFI VISION:   That's great. I remember wondering why. Now I know. I know a lot of the stuff you've done sort of have this, I guess I want to say like dark, creepy, gloomy aesthetic that you've done. Has that been, I know you said you did Midnight Mass and they had seen that, but did that just sort of happen, or do you enjoy doing this kind of aesthetic, or is there like a certain kind you haven't done that you want to do?

STEVE ARNOLD:   Yeah, I mean, I've been doing this for a really long time. I was an art director for many, many years. But, you know, I think I learned an enormous amount working with David Fincher on House of Cards and Mindhunter. And he has a theory or an approach where instead of everything being dark, dark, dark in terms of the set, painting the set and the colors and all of that, that he many times will have a lighter background or, you know, it's not like super dark and you get like a silhouette kind of effect with the actor being darker than the background many times. So, that was something that I still kind of cling to and do when I can. So, it may seem dark, and that's in the lighting situation and the cinematographer, but I tend to have, I think, a lighter palette and not as deeply colored as some other designers maybe. But no, I like doing all styles, all genre of film. So, it's just fun stuff.

SCIFI VISION:   Do you have like a favorite design, not in this show, but just in general that you've done over the years that kind of sticks out?

STEVE ARNOLD:   Yeah, I would say we were very, very spoiled and lucky when we were doing House of Cards, because they let us ultimately build the interior of the White House, the residence, which we got to just go hog wild in there, and we built an amazing amount of the interior of the White House residence, which we didn't see as much of it as I thought. We had a fantastic like master bathroom and the kitchen and just various areas that we could kind of go crazy and that turned out really well. Very, very good craftsmen in Baltimore where we shot that.

SCIFI VISION:   Well, I really enjoy Widow's Bay and at least we get to see a lot of the details, because I know we've definitely talked about a lot of the tiny details. So, we appreciate it as viewers, that's for sure. But I know we're almost at a half an hour, but thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And yeah, like I said, I really enjoy the show.

STEVE ARNOLD:   Yeah, yeah. It's got some nice stuff coming up and twists at the end. So yeah, it's fun.

SCIFI VISION:   Sure. All right. Well, thank you so much. Have a good rest of your day and enjoy your island.