‘Fantasmas’ Wants You to See Its Scaffolding
“Fantasmas” doesn’t hide its set, or more specifically, that creator Julio Torres’ New York City exists on a single sound stage. The colorful artifice of Tommaso Ortino’s production design isn’t grounded in the real world. The series’ exterior city street backdrops are designed to look like obvious rear projections that don’t even extend the entire width of the frame. We are often given wide overhead shots of interiors (like Julio’s apartment in the photo below) that reveal it was constructed on a stage, and there are times if you peer into the darkness surrounding one set, you can see another set in the background.
When Torres appeared on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, the “Fantasmas” star/creator/director talked about how the production design related to how he wanted us to see his characters.
“The idea of seeing these characters often from a bird’s eye view and having a black void around them just further emphasizes the loneliness,” said Torres while on Toolkit. “And to further emphasize his idea that often we can’t see beyond our own experience.”
“Fantasmas” was influenced by “Dogville,” director Lars von Trier’s parable set in a small Colorado mountain town, which is conjured by nothing more than a single stage dressed with minimal furnishings and chalk marks on the floor to indicate the walls, doors, and street. But for Torres, it was less about engaging with the Brechtian ideas of “Dogville” and more about the emotions that the concept elicited.
“‘Dogville,’ for some reason, when I watched it as a teenager, it really stayed with me,” said Torres. “I think of that movie a lot, and more about how the movie made me feel rather than the actual plot. That’s the best-case scenario for a movie operating within its own frequency.”
There was an aspect of the audience being overtly aware of how the world was built from the ground up that emphasized a fable-like quality Torres wanted for “Fantasmas.” But von Trier’s film wasn’t the only influence on the “Fantasmas” production design, which ranged from Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” to the life simulation video game “The Sims.”
“You have a feeling that maybe the world beyond them is infinite, or maybe it isn’t,” said Torres, in drawing the connection of looking down on the characters in “The Sims” and “Fantasmas.” “Like you don’t really know how far the world goes, and you don’t know if they know how far the world goes or if they’re just aware of their existence in that house.”
While leaving the limitations of his characters’ world an intentionally open question, Torres and his production team were acutely aware of their own. According to Torres, “Fantasmas” had “a challenging budget,” especially considering all six episodes were shot in less than 32 days. Creatively embracing those limitations was something that shaped the series’ production design, but this isn’t your normal working within limitation indie film shop talk; it was something Torres wanted thematically baked into “Fantasmas.”
“Thriving within limits is something that I’m very interested in, both pragmatically and artistically, but also, I feel like that’s a theme that’s followed me in my life,” said Torres. “All the people in the show are a little limited, and that’s where the idea of them being ghostly comes from, them being fantasmas [the Spanish word for ghosts]. I don’t lean into that title for its spookiness, I lean into it for the idea of being lonely and having things that people can and cannot do. I’ve always loved the rules around the mythology of ghosts: You can’t talk to that person, you can’t leave this house. That’s exciting to me, feeling a little invisible.”
It’s an idea that Torres said he planted in his feature film “Problemista” and more thoroughly explored in “Fantasmas.” But whereas “Problemista” was a 98-minute film telling a single story, “Fantasmas” was a series of vignettes, constantly introducing new characters, in which Torres was intentionally leaning into his sketch comedy background as a writer for three seasons on “Saturday Night Live.” While each vignette was thematically connected, Torres’ producers expressed concern they could lose a confused audience as they moved from one to the other.
“The producers had an eye on transitions, [what’s the] throughline [of] these different vignettes, and would it work, or would it feel clunky? And I actually didn’t really have an answer,” said Torres. “Tommaso, our production designer, suggested having some kind of visual connective tissue beyond just the tone of the sets, having something that reminds you that you’re in this world.”
While scouting locations for “Problemista,” there was one exterior Torres planned to use but later had to abandon because scaffolding went up around it. This got the director’s mind churning: Scaffolding is something you constantly see in New York City, but film shoots try to avoid it because it’s not pretty.
“We used the scaffolding and hand sanitizers to remind us that we are all part of that same world,” said Torres. “That allowed Tommaso and his crew the flexibility of reusing pieces.”
Scaffolding was the perfect solve for “Fantasmas,” a constructed world connected by its own limits and those of the characters in it.
The “Fantasmas” Season 1 finale airs July 11 at 11 p.m. ET. All six episodes are available to stream on Max.
Look for IndieWire’s Toolkit episode with Julio Torres on Spotify, Apple, and other major podcast platforms on July 15.
