Rebuilding the World of 1620 | Saints & Strangers

I've covered myself a little. I do not sleep safe, nor do I seek glory at war. If it's something like this, where it's 1620, you finally got to get yourself immersed into the era. To start with, I did a lot of research on the pilgrims themselves: who they were, where they came from, and what they were running away from, and why they were so desperate to come over here and start this enormous adventure.

The construction of the village, we took a lot of reference photos and a lot of sort of reference material. You know, whatever we could find, whether it be paintings or anything like that, to kind of see how they were built. We took a lot of that research and said, "Okay, right, so we need to have these kinds of clapboards, and this is the kind of—this is how they would chop them up, and this is how they laid them onto the structure that they then built."

I think that the sets are breathtaking too. It's been so much work that has gone into all of that, and so much research. There's a lot of informing that happens when you get on a great set. You can get down to who this person is in the role, and how they fit in with the other people, and how they interact. And that's a huge opportunity.

Walking onto the set in the pilgrims' village, we also get that sense of everything's squared and linear-based, but everything within the native world is all round and circular. So there was a sense, again, of within our own spaces, we walk a different way than when we walked into the pilgrim town.

What I've got behind me is a deserted no-sex village. What we've basically done now is we've dressed two sets of graves. In the graves, we've actually got some skeletons, and each skeleton had a specific bundle that had their kind of personal possessions. So a smoking pipe, maybe some arrowheads if it was a male, maybe some pan beads if it was a female.

If you look behind you quickly, there's an amazing skull we're gonna use. On, say, chest, I'm designing Native American villages. There's also a massive learning curve. What we've got is a much more pared down, much more basic, much more organic looking tribe. I'm really impressed by how they built their villages, and they had their where-twos and their longhouses, and how massive they were, and how beautiful they were.

There's something to be said when you walk onto a set and you see this great longhouse and this great village that has been erected, and there's such great care that you can't help but fall into the story. It informs the way you think. What would it be like to wake up in the camp? It's very important to be accurate and authentic to the period and to their own plight.

We're building a village that's all made out of the same kind of timbers, and we're using old techniques. With that, it's very good to have the ability to build for real.