Inside the enduring movie homes of Jack Fisk, production design legend

NEW YORK (AP) — Jack Fisk, the legendary production designer, has been down a lot of roads in his life. He goes looking down back roads for movie locations and hillsides on which to plop down mock houses. He’s been to the Solomon Islands for “The Thin Red Line” and the Canadian Rockies for “The Revenant.” But America, really, is his territory.

Fisk, 78, has for half a century been building some of the most indelible homes and structures of movies. He crafted the grand Victorian that peers down from above the wheat fields in Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven" (1978). He erected the oil derrick of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (2007). And he built Mollie Burkhardt's Osage home for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” which entailed recreating the circa-1919 Oklahoma town of Fairfax, expands the wide swath of American ground, and history, that Fisk has covered. And it’s earned Fisk his third Oscar nomination, a capstone to a career crafting rough-hewn on-screen worlds with such fine-grained dimensionality that you feel as though you walked through them.

That’s partly because you — or at least the actors — actually could. Though much set design is done piecemeal, with a few facades just for the camera, Fisk prefers to build entire houses on location to give filmmakers and actors the ability to cross in and out of them. To see out the windows.