Steve Carell’s New Netflix Satire Space Force Evokes Dr. Strangelove and The Office
For production designer Susie Mancini’s work on the new Netflix series Space Force, the design directive was clear: Think Dr. Strangelove. The iconic brutalist-style sets created by production designer Ken Adam for the 1964 Stanley Kubrick classic proved the perfect fresh and futuristic inspiration for the new military workplace comedy starring Steve Carell. (Most notably, Adam’s concrete-lined bunker and triangular War Room with an oversize round conference table.) Executive producer Greg Daniels (writer and producer of The Office) and Mancini “wanted to create a look that is steeped in a slightly enhanced reality while creating backdrops that don’t overwhelm or distract the audience,” she says.
The series is a satirical look at America’s newly formed sixth branch of the armed forces known as Space Force. Actor and series cocreator Carell (The Office) plays four-star General Mark R. Naird, who, along with head scientist Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich), is ordered by the president in a text to put “boots on the moon by 2024.” (The comic text in question actually reads “boobs on the moon.”)
Mancini, who has never created the final frontier before, designed an expansive Space Force campus as the backdrop for much of the film’s action. There, a colorful team of scientists, engineers, and astronauts work to achieve world dominance in space. In the story, the campus is situated in Wild Horse, Colorado (exteriors were filmed at the California State University, Dominguez Hills theater building in Torrance). The designer says the structure of the headquarters was inspired by brutalist buildings, and she devised a design backstory as part of the process. “We were really lucky to find a university campus [that] looked like a military base,” she notes, “and figured the government would have an abandoned building, particularly the old Soviet buildings that exist around the world.”
Since the interiors were filmed on a soundstage, space was at a premium, so Mancini adapted the brutalist theory of “less is more” when it came to the windows. “Every time you have windows, you use so much space, so I wanted to avoid them as much as possible and focus on the light coming from above.” The result is a large ceiling in the central atrium area that casts shadows on the floor, creating a textured environment where the light is the protagonist. The designer also used classic brutalist details such as strong geometric lines and concrete, glass, iron, and metal materials with an accent of wood to give the industrial aesthetic a touch of warmth. For the color palette, Mancini offsets the redundancy of the architecture by using different tones of gray and black for the walls, adding texture with the marble floors and green tiles to break up the gray whenever possible, along with red fire extinguishers for a pop of color.
Inspired by the work from another Ken Adam film, the 1967 James Bond movie You Only Live Twice, Mancini favored the “beautiful linear environment with very masculine materials and lines,” she says. Set decorator Rachel Ferrara looked to the usual sources (antique shops, prop houses, thrift stores, and online along with custom-made tables and sconces) for General Naird’s office, where organization, minimalism, and neatness were the order of the day. As part of the backstory that Naird would want his office to center on his past, his collection of medals and other items marking his achievements in his 20 years in the Air Force is prominently displayed.
Though NASA and the Pentagon did not open their doors to the production team for research, Mancini did get guidance from military advisor Max Vasquez. “This is not a documentary and doesn’t have to be exact and on point,” she says, “but we did want the experts to lead us on details of the way people interacted in the headquarters and on the military base.”
The design team also worked with the private aerospace company Spacex (founded by Elon Musk) for direction on all things involving spaceship exploration. “We haven’t been on the moon for a long time, and so many memories we have are grounded in the past. There is no official model of what it looks like [today], so we used Spacex for research,” says Mancini. She discovered that the environment at Spacex is entirely different from what we’ve seen in movies such as Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff.
“As a movie viewer, I thought the cockpit was all metal and buttons, and now it’s a little room with one large screen that looks like an iPad. The control room was filled with midcentury chunky desks, old microphones, and phones, and lots of paperwork everywhere.” As the command center, the control room was different from what the designer envisioned (complete with IKEA desks), so she created one with glass walls, a large screen, and a 360-degree environment where everyone could watch the launches.
Homage is also paid to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (where an astronaut/monkey astronaut conducts maintenance repairs) for the space environment both inside and outside the shuttle. And since this series is classic farce, the designers found inspiration for the chief of staff boardroom at the Pentagon from none other than North Korea. “The ceiling is a lightbox and a nod to 2001, while the rest of the room is very much based on North Korea’s conference room design with columns in the corner, paneling, and a big map of the world made of copper.” No word yet if it’s Kim Jong Un–approved.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
