Drama Quarterly: Preparing for battle
Making television isn’t easy. But when it came to historical epic Rise of the Raven, thankfully costume designer Bea Merkovits and production designer Márton Vörös were ready for a challenge.
In fact, both Merkovits and Vörös took on their respective head of department roles for the first time as they oversaw the creation of this 15th century drama, which charts one warrior’s journey to face down the imperious Ottoman Army.
Based on the novels by Bán Mór, the 10-part series traverses Europe – from the Alps to the Bosphorus – to tell the story of János Hunyadi, whose life is plagued by scandal, political power plays and conspiracies between noble families from Warsaw, Rome, Belgrade and Vienna. His strongest allies are the women in his life: Erzsbét Szilagyi, his wife, and Mara Brankovic, his first love, who breaks his heart by becoming the lead concubine in Sultan Murad’s court.
When the Ottoman Empire mobilises an army of unprecedented size that marches west with ambitions to conquer the Vatican and overrun Europe, Hunyadi (Gellert L Kádár) scores a victory against all odds at the Battle of Belgrade, which ends the invasion and reshapes the history of Europe.
Austria’s ORF and TV2 in Hungary and Slovenia are attached to the series, which is produced by Serendipity Point Films, Twin Media, HG Media, MR Film and Beta Film. Beta is also handling international sales, and partnered with the National Film Institute Hungary to finance the drama.
Both Merkovits and Vörös were able to draw on some high-level experience as they began to work up their designs for the numerous sets that would populate Hunyadi’s world and the costumes dozens of central characters and hundreds more extras would wear on set. Vörös’s work as an art director includes Moon Knight, The Alienist and Hanna, alongside feature films Robin Hood and Inferno. Merkovits, meanwhile, has worked in the costume department on productions such as Blade Runner 2049, The Martian, Marco Polo and The Borgias.
“I did big shows before this as an art director or senior director, and then supervising director,” Vörös tells DQ, “but this was the first time [as production designer] and it was a great experience. I’m really pleased the production trusted me and gave me this status.”
“It was my first time in a big design role and I’m extremely happy for the opportunity from the producers,” adds Merkovits. “As a Hungarian, it’s a big thing to work on it because it’s an amazing part of the history [of Hungary] and it’s something we can be proud of. Also, my experience is more from bigger American shows, and here it was more a Hungarian crew so it was really familiar. And at the end [of each day], we went home.”
That this was a Hungarian production was also part of the appeal for Vörös, who actually began as the supervising art director but a change of roles led him to become the production designer. “The story is really cool. It’s maybe the best period of Hungarian history, and it was 95% Hungarian crew, which also was a good thing,” he says.
“The first script I read, it was really ambitious, with hundreds of locations and huge studio sets. During the whole process, we reduced this to make it achievable. That was the first issue, to figure out how many sets and how many locations we were going to manage and pay for. The breakdown changed 50 times. It was quite a long process to figure out which sets had to be done and which sets we could lose because of time or money issues.”
Merkovits similarly began her work by breaking down the extensive script to determine the number of characters and how many costumes they might need. Many years pass during the course of the story, which also meant fewer costumes could be reused than if the series had been set over a shorter period. “It was tough,” she admits.
The designer also needed to factor in a number of costume doubles, owing to the drama’s standout action sequences that could result in costumes being ruined or covered in blood, for example. “I ended up with 10 or 20 pages of breakdown, how many costumes we needed and how many changes,” she says. “It was frightening in the beginning. Then we had to work out how to reduce those numbers, because it was crazy.
“We had big scenes, fight scenes and rainy days, so it triples up the costumes because of the rain. There were constantly changing numbers as the script changed. I’m sure Márton also had a hard time following up the script changes, and the changing sets.”
When it came to the creative side of their roles, they naturally started with the real history, where Hunyadi led a band of Hungarian defenders as the Ottoman force led by Sultan Mehmed II attempted to capture Nándorfehérvár castle, in what is now Serbian capital Belgrade, in 1456. They drew ideas from books or paintings that would inspire their costume or set designs, and then infused those ideas with their own tastes and that of showrunner Balázs Lengyel, producer Robert Lantos and directors Robert Dornhelm, Attila Szász and Orsi Nagypál.
Merkovits’s decisions would often also depend on what kind of movements or actions the cast would be doing in their costumes, whether wielding a sword or riding a horse. “It’s a big combination. There’s the historical part but then you need your imagination,” she says. “The colours are always a little bit made up. They did not have those colours in that time, but to make it more interesting, we played with colours a lot. Sometimes we used a few different fabrics that didn’t exist [at the time] to make it more interesting. But the important thing is to make it in a way that you still believe you are in that period.”
“In Hungary, everyone knows this story of Hunyadi who beat the Ottoman Army,” notes Vörös. “We learn about it in school and we know the story, but there’s not too much architecture remaining from this period. So the castle where the famous battle happened, there’s only one tower and a piece of wall. No one knows exactly how it looked 500 years ago, so we needed our imagination to figure it out. There are several architectural elements from this period, but not too many. That was nice issue for the art department.”
They both had about a month of prep before filming was due to begin, with Merkovits taking some of her cues from Vörös, who had already started work by the time she joined the production. “So I was trying to match costumes to the set,” she says. “Somehow it just worked out. I wish we could say we had hours of talking and comparing colours and paintings, but not on this one. I wish for that on the next one.”
Astonishingly, there were very few items of costume that weren’t made from scratch by Merkovits and her team. “Everything was handmade, from the shoes to everything. It was amazing,” she says. “I had a huge workroom with several cutters and several seamstresses. I had a separate workroom for leather workers, a separate room for costume breakdown.
“Because we ended up making the costumes for the extras, I had several outdoor workrooms as well, because it was thousands of pieces. In the end, we decided not to rent our costumes because of the show length – it became super expensive – so we decided to make the soldiers’ uniforms, the Turkish uniforms, almost everything.
“I’ve worked on big shows before, but I don’t think I had that much making, including The Borgias and Hercules. These big shows rented [most of the costumes]. Here, everything was made.”
When it came to making the armour for Murad, Merkovits even tried something she had never done before – making the whole suit from printed leather leaves. “They’re all laser printed, so every single leaf was made one by one and hand-painted,” she says. “The same was done for his son as well. That [technique] was something I learnt on the show.”
Designing costumes for the female characters proved to be equally challenging, not least because they often have “big journeys” that mean regular clothing changes. Mara (Franciska Töröcsik) is sold to Sultan Murad as a pawn in the nobleman’s schemes and is determined to win her life back, but her growing love for the sultan causes her allegiances to waver.
The daughter of a king, Elizabeth of Luxembourg (Mariann Hermányi) is described as a spoiled beauty who is impetuous, passionate and easily manipulated; while Erzsbét Szilagyi (Vivien Rujder) fights for her family and country on the home front while Hunyadi is away, and even breaks convention by joining him on the battlefield.
“Mara was especially interesting because she starts in Serbia and she’s taken to the harem, so she had a big journey costume-wise – and ended up as a nun,” Merkovits says. “We were very lucky that we had the Turkish side, which is very colourful and exotic, and the European, medieval side. As a designer, there was a lot of freedom.”
Around half the series was shot on location in and around Budapest, Hungary, with the remainder filmed on huge studio sets for the Ottoman harem, the Ottoman castle, the Turkish castle, knights’ rooms and rooms belonging to the Vatican – one of which was described as being built from marble.
“That was an issue,” says Vörös. “‘How are we going to produce a full marble wall, a marble floor and stuff like this?’ We decided we would print it on a special paper, and when we put it on the wall like wallpaper, we would coat it with a special layer so it looked like marble. It was exciting.
“When the crew came in, everyone was checking, ‘Is this real or not?’ When you stand a metre away, you see it’s a print, but it looks amazing with the colourful marble patterns.”
The Turkish harem set was another major task for the designer, who at times oversaw 150 people working on the biggest sets, from members of the art department and carpenters to painters and other construction workers. “It was a big set and we built a pool in the middle of the set, so that was a tricky one. We had to raise up the whole set and sink the pool in the middle. That was a really colourful set with a lot of fabric delivered by the set decoration department.
“Of course, the big set at the end, the castle, was built nearly from scratch. It was a huge set with big walls, towers, catwalks, stairs and stuff like that. It was a big challenge, maybe the biggest, because we had a very short amount of time. Sometimes we had to design in parallel with construction to finish in time.”
Vörös and his team also had to work hand in hand with the VFX designers when set extensions and other effects were needed. “We had a lot of conversations and discussions about how we could build the sets to control the amount of CG, because it’s very costly,” he adds.
Naturally, costs and time-keeping were huge factors while making Rise of the Raven. Script changes also meant Vörös and Merkovits had to remain flexible and agile to best respond to last-minute updates. “To learn the right information from the right person, that’s the key to succeed,” Vörös says. “If you know the right information and talk with the right person and they’re sharing good information with you, your life is much easier.”
Merkovits is now already putting into practice the lessons she has learned from working on Rise of the Raven, which will have its world premiere during Mipcom in Cannes. “When you’re talking about period shows, in the end, what you see is never the exact period,” she says. “We always have to talk in the beginning about the period of the show, because you have to shape the characters and sometimes step out from the exact year [in which the story is set].
“That’s what I’m trying in my next jobs, to really talk before we start filming about what the producers’ aim is with the show and what theme they want to see. Do we want to see it super sexy? Do we want to it to be more quiet? You always learn.”