Watch: M. Night Shyamalan Hired 'True Detective' Production Designer to Create an Underground Prison for 'Split'
Mara LePere-Schloop faced the challenge of designing 'Split' to represent 24 different personalities.
M. Night Shyamalan's Split is a tense, labyrinthine psychological thriller about a man named Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) who suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), causing his personality to fracture into 24 different characters. Beyond the incredible feat of McAvoy's performance, the multiple personalities posed a major challenge for the film aesthetically. How to successfully convey 24 different personalities in one living space that also happens to be an underground dungeon—without revealing all of the film's many twists and turns in the process?
Shyamalan sought out True Detective production designer Mara LePere-Schloop for the task. "There’s so much thought behind everything that there isn’t really any guesswork," says LePere-Schloop in a new exclusive behind-the-scenes video from the Split DVD and Blu-Ray release. "We had to dress the multiple personality aspect of the character into the set, but not reveal [it] right away."
Find out more about the process of production designing Split below:
For LePere-Schloop, "the greatest reward is when people catch these little things that we worked so hard to thread throughout."