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Michael Novotny

January 18, 2010 Tom Lisowski 3 comments

Michael Novotny worked with James Cameron on True Lies and Terminator 2 and production designed K-19: The Widowmaker for Kathryn Bigelow. With these $100 million features under his belt, he moved on to designing a series of episodics including Better Call Saul, The Affair, and seven seasons of the hit CBS crime drama The Mentalist…

AS: What first got you into the field?
MN: Probably painting. I always painted, starting around 14. And then in our small town of 3,000 I was able to get a free pass to the movies for 6 months at a time by doing very bizarre, outrageous cartoons. The cartoons depicted what happened on the balconies and in the main seating area when a bunch of animal-like teenagers came in. The manager liked them so much he would put them up in his office and I could get in for nothing. So that was my first commercial art deal. I was a kid -you’re just trying to be cool. That’s when I found out that art was cool!

And then I was fortunate enough to move to a town near Pittsburg that had a high school where they could offer advanced art. We did subjects like intaglio etching. We had very high-pressure presses, kilns; we did stained glass. From there I went to Goddard College in Vermont, which was a very experimental college with a very small campus of maybe 200 people. David Mamet was my dorm mate. There were no grades, you designed your own courses. I studied the bushmen and Kalahari by producing large sand paintings, 8 by 16 feet. When I left Goddard I went to the University of Pittsburgh and I went into premedical studies. I did a lot of physics and chemistry and that sort of thing. But soon I’d had enough and I left and went to England. I started a communal theater company, Footsbarn Theater, with a group of friends from Goddard College. It’s still going in France.

AS: Were you involved in set-building there?
MN: Totally. I was painting, we did a lot of sculpting. We wrote all our own pieces. They were folk tales of rural England -tales and legends of the giants, the formations of St. Michael’s mount, King Arthur’s castle, Camelot. Everybody had to do everything and I was really much better at painting than at performing. But everyone had to have their time on stage. I did that for about 4 years in England and then we did 6 years based out of Amsterdam. We did almost every Western European city. From North Africa all the way through to Scandinavia.

Daniel Novotny

January 1, 2010 Tom Lisowski One comment

A second generation production designer, Daniel Novotny made a name for himself with the insanely popular TV show CSI. It was both the most watched program on television and the most watched scripted show at various times in its fifteen seasons. He has worked nonstop since then, designing back-to-back episodics including Gotham, The Arrangement, and Outer Banks…

AS: What was your first introduction to the field of production design and art department in general?
DN: I was building models and miniatures in my dad’s model shop. He made underwater effects for Jaws 3D –that was his first movie. I cut the foam and made latex molds, sharks, and plants. So I learned about fake plants -I learned about spraying them and painting them.

Then I was on a Barbie Doll commercial with my dad. I might have been ten or twelve. They were shooting into this little glass tank where Barbie was on the beach. They carved out the bottom, which was Plexiglas. It looked cool to me but when they got the camera set up they couldn’t shoot it because of the the glossy reflection on the bottom of the Plexiglas, underneath the water. So they had to empty out all the sand and put in black paper. The black paper got wet but it didn’t matter because now they could shoot it. So I learned about coming up with art department solutions kind of young.

One of my dad’s early production design jobs was when he was working for this visual effects company 4Ward Productions. For features sometimes they subcontract out these big visual effects shots, they’ll give you a check for like $300,000 and in return they get the sequence. You know that shot in Terminator 2 where Sarah looks through the fence and imagines the explosion and it’s like the end of the world? My dad was the production designer for that visual effects shot -just that shot. So that was the first time I realized that, as a production designer, he’s actually not really making anything but he’s still responsible for it. So he did all the drawings of all the palm trees bending over and all the houses being blown away and he designed the sequence. That was pretty cool. And over the years I just watched him work as an art director and as a production designer and saw the way the whole system worked.

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