The eponymous ship in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, based on “The Captain’s Log” chapter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is just as crucial to the story as its ill-fated crew and passengers. What begins as a routine charter carrying private cargo becomes a harrowing fight for survival as Dracula (Javier Botet) uses the isolated Demeter as feeding grounds.
Director André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) enlisted production designer Edward Thomas to bring the Demeter to life, imbuing the schooner with impressive scale and meticulous detail. Thomas is no stranger to epic-sized horror adventures; the production designer is responsible for the thrilling set pieces in Escape Room, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, and Monster Hunter.
Thomas and his team built numerous sets to bring the Demeter to life, replicating the decks and interiors of the ship, some with functional sails and some on a gimbal system that simulated the ocean waves rocking the Demeter. In other words, the sheer size of the Demeter is outmatched only in the challenges and scope of work required to make this setting feel realistic and inhabited with years of use.
Ahead of The Last Voyage of the Demeter’s release in theaters on August 11, Bloody Disgusting spoke with the production designer about the challenges the Demeter created.
Javier Botet as Nosferatu in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, directed by André Øvredal.
Thomas refers to this as a once-in-a-lifetime project he couldn’t resist. He explains why when detailing how he came to the production: “I was lucky enough to meet André on a Netflix job that we were going to do in Prague, a job called Magic Order. The job sadly never happened. We started prep on it, and then Covid hit, and blah blah blah blah. But he talked to me about this movie, and from the moment he mentioned it, I was in. Because you just don’t get these. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime movie for a production designer. We get to do lots of wonderful things and create lots of wonderful worlds, but to create this world, with the physical challenges and the artistry across two countries, there was no way I was going to shy away from that.
“And my background, the Escape Room movies, Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, I’m sort of trained in killing people. That’s my vision; what’s the best way to dispatch people? When you get to do that on a schooner below deck, above decks in the dark, gothic horror. And to shoot in Babelsberg Studio, which is where they shot Nosferatu. I mean, it’s the history. Just walking around that studio and feeling the age of it. We actually shot in the graveyard where the Nosferatu director was buried. So, all the way along, there were these moments where you just thought to yourself, ‘I’m the luckiest designer in the world.'”
Thomas’ body of work is demonstrative of meticulous, painstaking detail on a massive scale. When asked where his process begins, the production designer breaks it down.
“Well, I think you begin by finding the best possible people that you can surround yourself with because you’re going to go on a voyage like no other,” Thomas states. “I’ve built quite a few ships in my time. I’ve built Viking boats; I’ve built Byzantine ships. I’ve built lots of different ships. But this one was the biggest one. This was the biggest challenge. I think this one was the biggest one that they’ve ever built in Malta, in the tank, and they’ve built some ships. But yeah, absolutely, you start with a script because that’s a great guide of where you need to be and the director’s vision for the film and his reference points. And André, the director, talked about Alien and the claustrophobic feel of that. The schooner itself lends itself very much to that sort of design. And then you go back to the source material because I read the book as a child, and getting into those pages and taking all the details that you can out of those pages. The scale of the ship, how it looks. They talk about how it’s laid out.
“We’ve got that scene at the beginning of the movie where the young boy, Toby [Woody Norman], takes Clemens [Corey Hawkins] on a tour of the ship, so you get to see the majesty of it. Imagine what it was like for those guys going on board those ships for those lengths of time, living in those conditions. And then to throw in a vampire? It’s just wild.”
(from left) Larsen (Martin Furulund) and Nosferatu (Javier Botet) in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, directed by André Øvredal.
Both Escape Room and its sequel introduced thrilling set pieces featuring water as a lethal force. While it pales in comparison to the open seas featured in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, did the experience help Thomas prepare for the challenges presented here?
“It’s an interesting point, actually, because I tend to get the movies where there’s a lot of engineering processes. As you say, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, with the water coming out of the room, created huge challenges to keep everybody safe and to keep the visual moving. I think the equivalent of the water coming through that little door was the equivalent of 32 Range Rovers. So, you can imagine the speed and the power that’s coming through that door to create that scene in the finale.
“Then you go to Malta, and you start working in the tank in Malta. When you work on the Escape Room movies, they’re interiors; they’re controlled environments. Whereas when you go to Malta, and you work in the tank, and you’re building a ship that’s way over a hundred tons, then that’s a new challenge. So yeah, I think all of those things. The Escape Room movies were great because they were full of engineering problems and solutions, and Demeter was exactly that, but on acid, you know? It was a million times more. We built all the interior sets in Berlin, in the studios, and that was quite controllable. Obviously, they all had to move and be animated, which is something that we do all the time in our industry. But to then create a set, if you like, which is a 214-foot schooner in the open air in a tank, where you’ve got all the weather conditions, you’ve got the wind, you’ve got all of those things that play into it with people on board. You’ve got the film crew on board; you’ve got all of those things to work out. It’s quite a headache, quite a challenge.”
(from left) Anna (Aisling Franciosi) and Clemens (Corey Hawkins) in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, directed by André Øvredal.
It’s not just engineering on such a broad scale that makes the production design stand out, but the richly textured details. Thomas extensively thought about capturing the gothic atmosphere to support Øvredal’s Alien-at-sea vision.
He tells Bloody Disgusting, “What I wanted to do with the ship, as well, was limit the palette. We weren’t making a black-and-white movie, but we wanted it to look as gothic as we possibly could and noir. So, you introduce scratches of color, but you really want to try and just keep it quite a constant color palette so that the actors pop, and Dracula does pop. Then it’s about shape. You might notice in the mess hall, just by having the shape of the church-like windows, the gothic windows, it just gives you a sense of where you are in the period and the sort of ship that we’re trying to create. And texture, huge amounts of texture. Making sure that the scenic artist, who did an amazing job, brought in a lot of texture to it, so the world felt really exposed and weathered, you know?”
See Thomas’ work in action when The Last Voyage of the Demeter arrives in theaters this Friday.
The post ‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ – How Production Designer Edward Thomas Built the Biggest Ship of His Career [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.