The ‘Penguin’ production designer tells us how her first-hand experience during a natural disaster inspired her version of Gotham

On October 12, 2024By Yukito

Penguin is very much a show about Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobb. However, after watching the first few episodes of the new HBO series on TV schedule for 2024it’s easy to discern that this is also a study of the cast of Gotham City as a whole and how the metropolis continues to cope with its impact The Riddler’s Flood. This is what the city looks like a few days later Batman end was largely inspired by first-hand experiences with natural disasters.

In the first episode of a series that does a great job preparation of Oswald Cobb’s journeywe also see that while some areas of Gotham were seemingly unaffected, others were left in ruins or still underwater almost a week after the great flood. CinemaBlend recently spoke with production designer Kalina Ivanov, who revealed to us that she brought her first-hand experiences to build City of the Haves and Have-Nots to convey many of the show’s messages:

I lived through Hurricane Sandy in New York and experienced firsthand what happened when the hurricane hit and the city lost power, and how on the Upper East Side some people never even lost power, but the power was restored the first day I did. he lived in the East Village and was reinstated on the fifth day. You can literally say which district was more important to the city, which was the most important to it and which was not. It was a very clear indication of the haves and the have-nots. And my family and I somehow fell into poverty, even though we were middle class.

Touching back PenguinIvanova explained that she and her team wanted to show the destruction caused by the flood, the dichotomy between Gotham’s rich and poor, and the disproportionate distribution of the lower classes under the influence of the Riddler’s attack: :

We paid attention to what happens when city services stop working for citizens and how it really affects poor people neglected by the city. And while the rich people just got in their cars and drove over the bridge to Bristol Township and lived unscathed and the flood didn’t even touch them.

In addition to drawing on her own experiences, Iwanow, who also works on upcoming Arbitrator Season 2revealed that she did a lot of research to create a broken and divided Gotham for the new series. This included everything from floods in Germany to Hurricane Katrina, which in August 2005 brought unprecedented levels of destruction to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. She explained:

Katrina was the most important for us because it was directly related to the US system of how FEMA deals with it and what they have a system for labeling buildings, what is a first degree destruction, what is a fifth degree destruction and what is the symbol of a contaminated building. In our show, we really took advantage of the actual FEMA system and used a lot of very effective images of how water pushes, pools, and piles up cars.

All of these first-hand experiences, countless hours of research and planning came together to create a TV show setting that not only looks on par with the film that preceded it, but also as if it were part of the aftermath of a real-life disaster.

New episodes Penguin airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and for anyone who has it Maximum subscription.