It was no small task building “The Village” set where Shyamalan’s characters would come to life. In the two months the construction crew worked around the clock, creating a picturesque nineteenth century town nestled in a lush private twelve hundred acre valley.
The twenty structures that make up the immediate forty-acre town include a meeting house, school house, bakery, forge, livestock barn, greenhouse, graveyard, watch towers, and many homes for “The Village” characters. The extreme summer heat made the work conditions difficult, but the builders persevered despite losing a week to an intense hurricane storm.
“I knew it was a little unrealistic what I wanted our production designer, Tom Foden, to accomplish in such a short time. But the set had to feel real, like a community, for the story to feel real. They far surpassed what I imagined. “The Village” set location felt right out of a painting or photograph of the era,” says Shyamalan.
Many of the designs for the buildings in “The Village” were inspired from early American paintings.
Constructing the design of these 1897 homes of “The Village” with techniques of that time period would be too time consuming when you are working against tight deadlines in order to be ready for filming. Production designer Tom Foden and art director Michael Manson and their construction team had to come up with some movie magic of their own to save time but not sacrifice authenticity.
“Night was very open allowing our art department team to take liberties of how we saw “The Village.” It was one of those rare opportunities for us to let go of ourselves in the design process,” says production designer, Tom Foden. “We took leaps into ‘The Village’ characters history and lives, believing as if we too were residents of ‘The Village’.”
Many of the homes look as if they were built with exterior intricate rock walls. In actuality, a rock formation mould was taken from a number of historic homes, just down the road from the set, and replicated in plaster to create realism. These faux rock plaster moulds were then painted different earth tones to simulate natural rock variety. The result is so seamless that even when you look up close it is hard to tell the rocks are not real. The meeting hall in “The Village” is a good example of this technique.
The interior spaces of the period cabins are small which could make it difficult to fit an entire shooting crew inside. The art department anticipated this challenge and therefore built most of the cabins with removable “wild walls” so that Shyamalan and his director of photography, five-time Academy Award® nominee Roger Deakins (“A Beautiful Mind,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There”), could accommodate the complex and intricate camera angles they need.
Most of the homes in “The Village” are fully functioning houses on the ground floor complete with chimneys and front and trap doors that open and shut. Because modern equipment did not exist in the nineteenth century, the house roofs could not be as evenly straight as that of today. So much to their dismay of the builders of “The Village,” the central structural beams had to be cracked to create the look of a slightly crooked roof.
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