The script described the setting in these words: “There had never been anything in Metallogorsk. The Germans and the French never got this far. The Mongols may have, but they found no one here.” I thought a small town in the Urals might fit this description. But after travelling across the region from Perm Krai to Bashkortostan, we found nothing suitable. We then scouted several less obvious places, until everything the story required turned up thousands of kilometres from the Urals, in Murmansk. Its uniform urban fabric, spread across rugged terrain, and the pearly light of the endless polar day proved exactly right.
An important part of the protagonist’s world is the MESIVO festival — the Metallogorsk Syncretic Renaissance. This entirely fictional event is made up of a collection of myths created by the protagonist around Egg Light, a local punk band that everyone has forgotten. We needed to develop the elements of this mythology so that they could work in any form and at any scale: as an urban masterplan, an airship, a poster or a tattoo.
The protagonist has turned his apartment into a museum devoted to the punk band Egg Light. It was important to create a parody of celebrity museums, where a chair someone once sat on or a cigarette butt they left behind can become an exhibit. This time, however, the collection included bricks that the band’s frontman had supposedly excreted, as well as a telephone technician’s tool transformed into the mysterious Wunder-element.
We decided that Metallogorsk should be closely associated with rust. The production design therefore used a palette ranging from rusty orange to dark brown.
