Martyn John (‘The Gentlemen’ production designer) on building a Georgian palace and digging graves: ‘They’re very hard work’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“I was fortunate that I worked on the film,” says “The Gentlemen” production designer Martyn John, who worked with the Netflix series creator Guy Ritchie on his 2019 movie of the same name. “I was the supervising art director on the film, so I went through the process originally of finding an aristocratic country house estate. We went through about 40 options, so I knew where not to go. So, that was the first thing. And then the second thing is because of production bases, we had to be as close to London as possible, but that didn’t exist. So then I had to narrow the options down, and I went to three or four different places and Badminton was one of the favorites. [Guy] knew Badminton House because he’d been hunting there in the past and he just loved it, so that was a goer.” Watch our full video interview above.
Because a real family currently occupies in the Badminton House, the filming crew had to limit how much of the estate they actually used. “A film crew of 250 people and all the equipment are quite disruptive,” John says. “So we went into the entrance hall, we went into the staircase, we went into two of the salons, and then we used the grounds extensively. And we had to bury the Duke and they didn’t want me digging a hole in the family cemetery, so I created a cemetery in one of the paddocks where they keep horses. So, that was quite a challenge because when we started digging, we hit a lot of roots. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had to dig a grave, but they’re very, very time-consuming and hard work.”
“I think we dug two or three different holes before we got the right one,” he continues. “And then it’s all about the shot where the actors are going to be having the house in the background, where the sun is. It’s quite a complicated thing. So, we were quite limited. But yeah, we didn’t shoot that much inside Badminton, which meant I had to recreate Badminton House in the sets I built. And it was always a problem because it’s incredibly grand, it’s fabulously decorated, it’s got incredible paintings and to match those are very difficult. It’s just a scale of everything. It’s a palace, a Georgian palace. Amazing.”
“The Gentlemen” stars Emmy nominee Theo James as aristocratic Eddie, who inherits the family estate and discovers that it’s home to a huge weed empire, and its proprietors aren’t going anywhere. All episodes of the comedy series are streaming on Netflix.
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