The original
Prisoner was shot in Portmeirion, a faux Mediterranean resort town in North Wales; the new version filmed in Swakopmund, Namibia.
Both locations, said Pickwoad, are “in some ways similar in nature” and exuded an oddness that assisted the filmmakers. “It’s a place that’s out of place,” said Pickwoad of Portmeirion. “You think you’re in this sort of Mediterranean resort town but you’re not. It’s in a cold, strange climate. It’s an odd setting.”
Likewise, the Swakopmund setting of AMC’s
Prisoner uses the same sense of incongruity, setting The Village in a sort of beach town… which just happens to be located in the middle of the desert.
“It’s that oddness that we played on,” said Pickwoad. “There’s a very Italian look to Portmeirion and Swakopmund is a very German town that’s in the middle of Africa. You recognize it as a German town but then there are palm trees and it’s in the desert and it doesn’t seem quite like Germany but at the same time it’s very German.”
In the original Prisoner, the production utilized some of the more future-gazing stylistic elements of 1960s. There was a mod factor to the overall look of the series, which utilized computers, electronically-controlled sliding doors, space-age rockets, and the iconic Ovalia egg chair. The future never looked so cool or so dangerous.
The overall feeling of The Village in the miniseries seems somehow cozily dated in order to lure you in, utilizing styles from both the 1950s and the 1960s.
“It’s safe, it’s cozy, it’s old fashioned yet it’s also sort of understandable,” said Pickwoad. “It’s not like ancient old-fashioned. So the cars, the general technology, everything about it, are something that you would say, yes, I know that. It’s sort of normal and old-fashioned yet it’s strange.”
While the Village of the 1967 Prisoner offered its protagonist a mod-flavored place to rest his head, the town itself was a jumble of temporal and spatial elements: a computer-assigned map of The Village is juxtaposed with stagecoaches, taxis seemingly crossed between jeeps and rickshaws (Mini-Mokes), and the omnipresent penny-farthing bicycle and, in the distance, a faux European castle next to the sea. It’s disorienting to say the least.
Despite the incongruity of those pink triangular houses in the desert, they weren’t built for the production, but were 1950s holiday homes built in a Baltic style.
“They had this regimentation to them that gives them this conformity,” said Pickwoad. “Everyone in The Village is required to conform... And the conformity of those A-frame houses was wonderful to give that sense because people don’t normally live in those houses — they are holiday homes—therefore it gave an air of a very simple form of life. With The Village it all looks too terribly good to be true until you realize that it’s not terribly good. It’s there to cajole you into behaving, into making you feel safe, make you feel comfortable.”
In the original Prisoner, the ever-present symbol for The Village was that of the penny-farthing bicycle, that curious precursor to the modern cycle from the 1880s. While there’s nothing malevolent about the bicycle itself, it quickly became a symbol for an obligatory nostalgia for bygone years; even as The Village seemed to look forward into modernity, so too was it forcing its citizens to look back. In other words: you’re always being watched.
The iconic penny-farthing bicycle has been switched out for a new emblem, one that almost appears to be a hand urging you into supplication. The inspiration, Pickwoad said, came from an 1890s art nouveau building in Darmstadt, Germany.
“There’s a tower that was built there which had a top rather like that symbol,” he said. “It looked almost like a modern skyscraper with a slightly Chrysler Building feeling to it and yet, when you isolated it, it had this hand, this sort of strange shape that looked as though it meant something. It just says someone is watching you… It’s also New York, like the art deco skyscraper. It’s got this strange kind of feeling that you might have seen it somewhere.”
One of the most enduring images from the original Prisoner is the menacing and mysterious floating white orb named Rover, seen here in a production photograph. While Rover was never explained, its presence in the Village seems to be that of a security system (rather like Lost’s black smoke monster, in fact). Throughout the series, Rover hovers menacingly… or suffocates its victims or pushes them back if they attempt to escape.
In the 2009
Prisoner, what’s immediately noticeable is Rover’s scale, alternating from the vintage weather balloon-shape to something massive and all-encompassing. Pickwoad said that they developed Rover a lot especially in post-production as the team attempted to capture “a lot of light and the sense of weight built around the balloon-like feeling of the last one” but this Rover became “more animal-like, more strangely shaped, [and] altering its shape” of its own accord.
“It’s that thing that’s unexpected that suddenly becomes very threatening,” said PIckwoad. “It took on a wonderful sort of sense of comfort turning to fear.”
Despite the Italianate style of the Village’s primary buildings, there’s a different feeling inside these structures as the interiors are designed in range of styles from classical Georgian to ultramodern. It’s an effect that once again serves to add confusion, a stylistic overload.
Number Two (Sir Ian McKellen) and his son 11-12 (Jamie Campbell Bower) live in the chateau-like Palais Two, the exterior of which deceptively leads you to believe there’s an ornate interior. Not so, said Pickwoad.
“There’s very little decoration with stone walls and it’s quite an austere shape, a shape of Baroque authority,” he said. “It’s a mixture of one or two styles together, so you might think you would recognize it, may have been to a place like it, but you haven’t.”
In the original Prisoner, The Village had its own fully functioning hospital. It’s a place of healing rather like any typical National Health Service hospital in the 1950s or 1960s, but there were also hidden laboratories in the Village where experiments are performed, such as one where Number Two attempted to gain access to and influence Six’s dreams.
Six (Jim Caviezel) finds himself returning time and again to the shadowy Clinic, a place of treatment and torture where “everything is highly sophisticated on one hand and quite crude and simple on the other,” according to Pickwoad. “The computer is advanced, yet medicine is rather nasty, syringes and tools long since not been used, which again give us that sort of nightmare feel to it. It’s all green tiles in this building and it reminds us more of this sort of European hospital where you might not wish to be mended in.”
Strange shapes beckon Six in the desert: an anchor, a deserted railway station, and mirage-like towers.
“It is dream-like, very worrying,” said Pickwoad. “[The anchor is] a Dali-esque sort of image. You’re taking things and putting them into the desert… That was the fun thing, that you could put together all sorts of wild things that were pertinent yet throw them together to become something else so that they are attractive in their own sense. Yet somehow there is this oddness and it’s surreal. It’s the reality of surrealism that’s quite valued; it seems on the one hand quite terribly real until you realize that it can’t be.”
