At the Visegrad Film Forum in Bratislava, German production designer Uli Hanisch framed production design as a discipline that begins well before visual decisions and extends far beyond them.
Known for his long-standing collaboration with Tom Tykwer and for projects ranging from Perfume: The Story of a Murderer to The Queen’s Gambit, Hanisch works at the intersection of narrative interpretation, spatial thinking and logistical execution, where ideas are tested collectively and materialized under often severe production constraints.
His masterclass and subsequent conversation focused on process: how a project is approached in its earliest stages, how collaboration shapes interpretation, and how design decisions emerge from extended discussion, research and iteration within a trusted creative team. Hanisch describes a workflow built on dialogue, on “digging and failing together”, before arriving at what eventually becomes visible on screen. By the time surfaces, materials and visual details are defined, the conceptual groundwork has already determined the direction.
The discussion with Screen Anarchy moves between that conceptual phase and the realities of execution. Hanisch discusses the mechanics of long-term collaboration with directors, the role of production design as an extension of storytelling, and the way spatial decisions alter the meaning of a scene.
He also details the practical side of large-scale filmmaking, from building entire environments under extreme time pressure to coordinating teams of dozens during overnight transformations of active locations. Throughout, the emphasis remains on how ideas are translated into physical space, and how that space, once constructed, begins to carry the film.
Screen Anarchy: You mentioned teaching. Has that become an important parallel track to your work?
Uli Hanisch: Yes, in a way. I started doing it, I think, almost 25 years ago now. Maybe not continuously, not in some systematic way all the time, but on and off, in different places, over many years. And I do like it. It forces you to articulate things you otherwise maybe do intuitively.
When you work for a long time, you jump from project to project, and many decisions become instinctive. Then suddenly you are in a teaching situation and you have to explain why you do what you do. That can be very useful, because it makes you reflect on your own process. And also, I enjoy that it takes you out of your own routine. You jump from topic to topic to topic. It keeps things moving.
You’ve had such a long collaboration with Tom Tykwer. How did that relationship begin?
Almost 30 years ago, I think. We met in 1995, more or less. It was not some grand plan. We both knew some of the same people, and at that time they were looking for a production designer based in Cologne, because they wanted to shoot there. That was really how it started.
And then, you know, sometimes these things are just very simple. You meet, you talk, you look at things together, and you realize you understand each other. You feel there is some common ground, some shared ideas, maybe also a similar curiosity. That’s what happened, really.
What made it last? A professional understanding, or a friendship first?
Very quickly it was both. I think after the first collaboration we were already friends, really. And that changes everything, because then I was not only being called in once the machinery was already moving. I had a chance to be there very early, when a new idea begins, when it is still open, when it is still fluid.
So with Tom, when there was a new project, we would usually talk about it from the very beginning. That gave us time. Time to understand how and why the material was interesting, what kind of world it might become. That early stage is very important.
Where does that process begin for you, personally?
Of course, it starts in your head. But then you need to talk about it, think about it and share your research and analyzes with your core group. Might be the directing or producing persons, in my case it's very early the people I work with for a long time.
Kai Karla Koch, who is our supervising art director and Thorsten Klein, who is the senior art director, both are my closest artistic and creative partners. We start the digging and the interpretation and the failing together. That´s the most important part, really. The thinking and the talking and the chance to make mistakes. And start again, until it's there.
Tom Tykwer’s films move across very different genres. Did that appeal to you?
Yes, absolutely. I realized over the years that Tom has something, I always think a bit of Kubrick, actually, in the sense that he doesn’t want to repeat himself. Kubrick had this idea, more or less, of doing only one film of one genre, then moving on to the next, and always trying to make the best film of each genre.
If you look at Tom’s work, it’s not identical, of course, but there is a similar movement. One kind of genre film, then another, then again something completely different. So in a way we kept stepping from one genre into another. And that is very stimulating for a production designer, because it means you are not just refining one visual mode over and over again.
Were there ever projects where you felt less aligned?
Yes, of course, this can happen, but I consider myself utterly lucky, because it has almost never happened to me. Once, I started a very interesting film with a director, who turned out to have a completely different idea about the movie. So, I left the project.
Another time, we started a very silly genre movie with a terrible script, but the director had an open mind and we did many beautiful sets and learned a lot. But usually, it´s a great process to crawl into the mind of the story, or the director and translate it into an invented world, that we have been given the chance to create together.
CLOUD ATLAS must have been a completely different kind of challenge. How did that collaboration work?
That was very unusual. When Tom first started talking about Cloud Atlas, it was not immediately clear how they wanted to structure it. In the beginning, the Wachowskis only wanted to produce it, but quite early it was decided that they would direct as well and the film would be split. There are six stories, so they divided it into two film teams, each doing three parts.
Which meant that, in practice, you had two separate film crews, two designers, and all these overlapping actors moving through all the different narrative levels. It was like a gigantic puzzle. I remember that at the very beginning there was the smallest core group, but already 16 people or something, because almost everybody had a counterpart, a double function, and we were all sitting together talking about the whole thing.
Then we split. And after that, a lot of the communication became logistical, but also conceptual in the sense that we had to maintain an interconnecting design logic. We were handing over ideas to each other, sharing references, sharing ways of thinking. But in practical terms, I was mostly working within our part of the structure.
So you weren’t directly working with the Wachowskis in a day-to-day sense?
No, not really. Only in the very beginning, when everybody sat together and talked about the whole film. After that, the structures separated. There was communication, yes, but not in the sense of working closely every day.
With Sense8, it was different again. That happened later, and then I was asked to do the Berlin story, directed by Tom Tykwer, who was helping them out. The series also had a fragmented structure, but geographically. It was divided by cities, by continents, and we were responsible for one part of a much larger organism.
You’ve worked with filmmakers who seem to have very different temperaments. How does that affect your work?
There are directors who think they need to project certainty all the time, who would more or less come in saying: this is what I want, now let’s execute it. I would rather try to avoid such a collaboration! And then there are others who are much more open, much more vulnerable even, and that creates a very different atmosphere.
One director I worked with, is a brilliant script writer, and he would say quite openly: I know my story, I know what the material is about, but I’m not going to pretend I know everything else. Please everybody help me to make a very good film.
That’s a beautiful way to work, actually. Because it creates a room where contributions are real. He has a very strong sense of what he wants, but not in that authoritarian way. He is the director who says, I know what this should be about, but I need your feedback, your intelligence, your response. That makes collaboration extremely fruitful.
You’ve said before that production design is more than decoration. What does it really mean to you?
Yeah, I think it’s important to understand that it is not about dressing a room with pretty things like, you know, crazy wallpapers and nice fabrics. That’s not the point.
For me, it is about building a picture of the world. It has to come from the content, from the meaning of the story, from its attitude. You are developing something together with the director, with the team, and it is about shaping that world, so it reflects what the story really is.
It is much more than just picking elements. It has to feel like the world you are creating could actually exist, for the magical moment of the storytelling. And for this alone.
You’ve described production design almost as an additional act of writing. Is that how you see it?
Yes, very much. I think in a way the production designer comes in with some additional pages for the novel. There is already the script, of course, the director’s vision, the structure of the story. But then the design contributes another narrative layer. That is why I like to describe it as world-building.
You are not just deciding whether the walls are blue or green. You are asking much more fundamental questions. Does this scene have to be inside? Could it be outside? Would it be stronger in a garden, or on a street, or in a room with a different spatial energy?
Because places are not neutral. Rooms are not neutral. They carry meaning, they carry pressure, they can intensify or redirect what is happening in the scene. That is why I always find it a bit sad when people reduce production design to something weird like “style”. Style is maybe a possible consequence of a much deeper process.
How important is research in that process?
Research is very important, but not in a boring way. It shouldn’t be about just collecting information. It should open your mind. It should give you freedom. It should challenge you.
When you really go into research deeply, you start to understand connections, how things belong together, how environments shape people, how history leaves traces. And then it becomes something intuitive. That is when it starts to be useful.
So for you, the actual visual design comes relatively late?
Yes, exactly. The actual design process, in the narrow sense people usually mean it, materials, surfaces, specific visual decisions, is maybe the third or fourth step. By the time I get there, a lot has already happened.
There has been conceptual work, research, long conversations, narrative thinking, discussions about meaning, function, rhythm, movement. So when you finally arrive at what people call “design,” in a sense it is already almost done. Or rather: the crucial decisions have already been made.
You also come from a background of comics and illustration. Does that still shape how you think visually?
Very much. Comics are extremely important to me. They were probably my first great love, even before many books. As a child, I was always reading comics, all the time, and I think that shaped something fundamental in me. They are part of my soul, really.
They also pushed me toward drawing, toward illustration, even though I was never especially brilliant at it. But that way of thinking in frames, in visual storytelling, in compression and rhythm, that stayed with me.
Of course, comics and production design are not the same thing. But there is a relation. Funny, enough, it´s perhaps almost like a reverse situation. If you consider the comic artist, the main figure up front, the writer is probably there in the back, building the foundation of the story. So, however it's done in every specific constellation, I like to think of the production design to be a significant addition to built up the story and everything behind it.
One of the strongest examples of large-scale world-building in your career is PERFUME. What do you remember as the main challenge there?
The biggest challenge was to find the establishing moment for Paris, the point where the audience first truly enters that world. We have always said: once we find that location, we can decide where and how to do the whole movie.
We were looking all over Europe, really. Croatia, France, Czech Republic, many different options. It took a very long time. More than a year, I think, in development and searching. Eventually, we realized that if we could do it in and around Barcelona in Spain, we could reduce the geographic spread of the production and suddenly, it became manageable.
But the key was this one specific street through the old part of Barcelona, the Barri Gòtic, where the character could walk down this street and we could establish Paris. The architecture had the richness, the right historic texture, and the whole thing had a depth we could use. Once we found that, we said: okay, this is it. This is where our period Paris could happen!
But that location came with enormous logistical restrictions.
Yes. That’s the part I will never forget. Everybody loved the idea in theory, the city, the officials, everybody said yes, yes, yes. Then we actually stood there with all of them, on the street, and once it became concrete, their faces changed completely. Because suddenly they realized what it meant.
We asked how much prep time we could get. Normally, for something like that, I would say a week, or at least several days. They said no. Impossible. Tourists, tourists, tourists. Then we asked them, how much time can you give us? And after some back and forth they gave us one night. One night. Saturday evening in, Sunday morning shoot, then immediately strike, and by Monday everything had to be gone.
And then, naturally, everybody looked at me. A minute before I had said we need a week, and now they said: can you do it in one night? And somehow I heard myself saying yes.
What did “one night” actually involve?
Everything. Covering and protecting the real architecture. Laying protective materials on the ground. Building up facades. Dressing the street. Extending parts of the architecture visually. Reworking the whole foreground and depth of the street and to bring in a whole lot of our dirt material.
And then there was another complication: Tom said that if he had to wrap by afternoon, the camera had to roll with the very first daylight. Which meant we didn’t have to be ready by eight in the morning, or something comfortable, we had to be done by six, maybe even earlier, fully ready for rehearsal and then shooting as soon as there was enough daylight.
I remember at around five-thirty, I thought our crew would collapse. It was one of the most stressful things I have ever done. The logistics for that one night felt as big as the logistics for the whole film.
Did you face similar situations on other films?
Many times, really. These kinds of time-pressure challenges are very typical. Another one I remember was on The Queen’s Gambit, in that theatre in Berlin. It was a fully working place, very busy, and again, the idea was wonderful in theory but almost impossible in practice.
They gave us basically one night to transform the entire space, three levels of their lobby, staircases, all of it. Dress the whole thing overnight, and then of course it all has to function for camera.
That’s the reality of film work very often: you are asked to do something unreasonable in a very short time, and the answer is somehow still yes.
How big is the team behind that kind of work?
Quite big. People sometimes imagine the production designer as some solitary author figure, but that is absolutely not the reality. I have been working with a group of people around me for more than half my life. We are a team.
For some of those night shoots, you might have 80 people just out there. Many more surrounding, contributing, researching, transporting, packing and having things done. Outside those extreme moments, there is a core group around me, my supervising art director, art directors, set decorators, props people, scenic artists, dressers, I trust intellectually and creatively for a long time.
But we are all freelancers, all individuals. It is not a company in the normal sense. So with every new project, you have to gather people again, depending on availability, timing, all of that.
Does budget ever restrict your imagination?
It should not. That is very important to me. Of course, we are not stupid. If it’s a very small film, you don’t walk into a location and imagine something completely absurd that nobody could ever realize. Naturally, you develop a kind of internal grid in your mind according to the scale and requirements of the project. That happens automatically.
But still, the first step should not be the limitation. You have to begin by thinking about what you want to do before you think about how to do it. If you begin only with the “how,” then you are missing the most important part. You might have already reduced the idea before it even had a chance to exist.
So yes, later you adapt, you negotiate, you find solutions. But in the beginning, you have to think almost without limits.
So you’re not interested in simply reproducing reality?
No, not really. I don’t want to copy reality exactly. In fact, I don´t even know exactly what reality means. Especially, in a fictional context. We build our own world, according to the story. That is where it becomes interesting. Otherwise it would just be reproduction, and that is not really the point.
After all these years, what still attracts you to this work?
I still like it when things become alive. When an idea that was abstract suddenly has physical presence, emotional presence. When a world comes together and starts to carry the story by it´s meaning.
I am not so interested in the polished surface as such. I like when something feels alive, when it has energy, when it gives the actors and the camera something real to respond to. That is still the exciting part.
Image courtesy of Visegrad Film Forum.