There is no denying that movie villains often live in architectural splendor. From volcanic fortresses and underwater compounds to secluded modernist retreats hidden deep in nature, the villain’s lair has become one of cinema’s most seductive architectural archetypes.
For architect Chad Oppenheim, the fascination began early. After seeing the cliff-carved home of Bond villain Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), he became captivated by the relationship between architecture, power, secrecy, and fantasy. That fascination eventually became Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains , a cinematic exploration of some of film’s most iconic villain dwellings, featuring architectural illustrations, essays, interviews, and film analysis.
One of the book’s most compelling conversations is with production designer Mark Digby, whose work on Ex Machina (2014) transformed Nathan Bateman’s isolated retreat into a haunting study of technology, control, and immersion in nature. Rather than relying on the clichés often associated with cinematic wealth and villainy, Digby approached the house as an extension of character itself.
In the conversation below, Digby discusses designing Ex Machina, resisting architectural cliché, and why cinematic villains so often inhabit extraordinary spaces.
Fighting Cliché and Building from Character: A Conversation with Mark Digby
A high-tech facility hidden in plain sight deep in the wilds of Alaska. When you enter Nathan Bateman's seemingly rustic house, there's no sense of what lies below, just as you have no sense of what is beneath the façades of his creations (or, at times, even that they are his creations). Throughout Ex Machina, production designer Mark Digby subtly plays with the dichotomy between the natural and the man-made, between what occurs organically and what is a product of technology, between what you see and what you get. Digby, who has worked on dozens of films, among them Annihilation (2018), Rush (2013), and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), spoke with Tra Publishing's Andrea Gollin about Ex Machina, his design process, and villains' lairs.
Tra Publishing: You originally envisioned a very different type of house for Nathan. Can you walk us through the process?
Mark Digby: Yes, and the process is a common one. It was difficult finding spaces. When you read something, you are influenced by what's gone before or what you imagine, by our cultural language. The original script called for a Colorado timber lodge house. But before we even established that, we imagined it might not be set totally in Colorado. We imagined a billionaire tech guy in a Le Corbusier-style or modernist California-style house––geometric, rectangular, white, angles, glass, one or two levels, a classic building of that type. And we started to look for places like that. If you look at millionaires' or billionaires' homes, you tend to find either palatial, historical style buildings or modernist, white buildings. We got into lots of millionaires' houses, but they weren't big enough. They were beautifully designed, and they were large but not awe-inspiring. And getting into billionaires' houses was a problem. Ultimately, that was the mistake we made, or the cliché we had in our heads. This was an interesting journey, because we realized we equated wealth purely with size and space. When we couldn't find that, we asked, what else might someone with that amount of wealth buy that others can't? And that was privacy, security, and nature.
We thought perhaps there is a type of person who is so wealthy they don't need space, they don't need to be visually ostentatious. We then moved toward Nathan's character, and we realized that he just needs enough space. So we started looking for interesting properties in stunning natural environments. We looked at castles in the Swiss Alps, for example. But also, before we went small and remote, we looked at large buildings with interesting design aesthetics, including some museums. We did commit to a museum, which was large and circular, but that arrangement fell apart. Then we chanced on the Juvet Hotel [in Norway]. Although it didn't quite have the narrative and the space we needed, the architects had designed a nearby private residence, and that was the interior of the house with the rock formation. And we realized that both dramatically and practically, we could have some of the rooms be subterranean.
Tra: How, if at all, did Nathan's identity as a villain influence your ideas about his house?
Digby: We did not want to highlight his evil. He's not a villain, necessarily, at the beginning of the story. He's a man potentially doing a great deed of creationist magnitude. He's doing something potentially for science. He's doing this big thing. It is not bad on the face of it. It gets darker, but it doesn't start out dark.
Tra: You've commented that in designing Nathan's house, you wanted to move away from the James Bond-type of villains' houses and away from science fiction tropes. Why?
Digby: Our process always is to throw out the language of sci-fi, the language of cinema, the language of culture that we have been fed. There is a whole bunch of that sci-fi language that was great thirty years ago, and somehow becomes the default. It's not necessarily wrong. But it doesn't have to be that. We immediately thought there is a danger we could head into a Bond-type villain here, where there's a big table with twelve people and it's the size of a turbine hall. We imagine that's how it has to be, and it doesn't have to be like that.
Tra: So you wanted to move away from those conventions.
Digby: Yes, we fight cliché and we keep to integrity. We build from the character. I'm very pleased that we didn't end up with a white California modernist building.
Tra: As you think about countering clichés, why is it that movie villains so often live in fantastic houses?
Digby: With wealth and power, there is an element that is equated with evil and crime. Why are people evil? Why do they resort to crime? I think it's to accumulate wealth, which accumulates power, and also to show that off. It's about subliminal feelings about size, space, power. And there is a price for that, and the price is that you have acquired it through badness.
Tra: In terms of the interior space in Nathan's house, we don't see Ava's space from her perspective, but from Caleb's point of view. Artistically, what was the thought process?
Digby: That space is a spatial flip-around. The immediate and natural thought was that Ava was being observed, and she would be contained, like a goldfish in a fishbowl, and Caleb would walk around her. But in fact, he is the goldfish, and she walks around him. The glass cube worked well because we have two people facing each other, talking, which can be boring. And we don't particularly want to watch her watching him—it's her we want to watch. So she's not sitting in one place all the time. The design allowed us to go in 270 degrees around her, if not 360 degrees.
Tra: Did your work on Ex Machina influence the way you've worked since then?
Digby: Yes, with Ex Machina, there was the success of that notion that you can flip things around completely, and you should. You can take a different approach, not just a sideways approach but an upside-down approach. That feeds into now. It makes us think, how can we take that approach?
Tra: As you've discussed your process, it seems that it's not driven by architecture, even though you're creating spaces.
Digby: Our starting process is very much about emotion and what that brings. It's not necessarily architectural. A lot of our references have nothing to do with space. They often are people, and that takes you to a mood.
Tra: Would you say that your work starts with character, and that leads to space?
Digby: Yes, and it's an interesting point about how things are made and what people do. I am not architecturally trained. I'm not artistically trained at all. What my team brings is a sentiment that we've gathered through life as opposed to a place of academic knowledge. We don't think about architecture. We think about characters and their space and their environment. From that comes the architecture. It is within everyone to have a style and a design and a feeling about things. It gives a little hope to everyone that everyone can do anything. They can find their talent and their feel in it.
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