‘The State’s’ Painstaking Realism Is Clear in Its Setting

If you’re going to set a drama in ISIS-controlled Syria, as writer/director Peter Kosminsky does with The State, you have to make absolutely sure the action appears to be taking place in the war-torn region. Enter production designer Patricia Campbell, who oversaw creation of the various locales seen in the four-part National Geographic series—an undertaking complicated by the fact that Kosminsky’s saga plays out in many different types of areas. “We had war zones, to domestic interiors, to cafes, to hotel interiors,” says Campbell, who finally found what she was looking for in the southeastern Spanish city of Almeria. “It’s very arid, very barren, and actually looked very Syrian as well.”

An even bigger obstacle, however, was finding credible props for the sets themselves, which were eventually located in Istanbul and brought to both Spain and to Wales, where the show’s interiors were filmed. “We tried to be as authentic as possible. We didn’t want to overstylize it because we were doing a fanciful recreation of people’s lives and events—not exactly a documentary but we tried to be as realistic as possible with our recreations of rooms and interiors.”

Don’t miss a rare glimpse into the world of ISIS recruitment. The two-night miniseries event, The State, premieres Monday, 9/18 at 9/8c on National Geographic.