Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle on building iconic sets, Hollywood's decline, and the craft of world-building

Summary

Jeremy Hindle, the production designer behind Severance, built the show's visual identity around a single conceptual rule: the outside world is always winter, always bleak, and the underground office is a sealed environment where the technology should feel alien to anyone under 30. CRT screens, trackballs, obsolete interfaces — deliberately chosen because Hindle's own 20-year-old son had no idea what they were. The goal was a world that couldn't be located or dated.

Building the office

The script gave Hindle almost nothing — "four desks, one large room." He treated the main workroom like the bridge of the Enterprise: get one object right and actors, directors, and audiences buy everything else. The central desk had to be structurally strong enough for Zach Cherry to jump on it, because the severed employees are functionally five-year-olds and the set needed to accommodate whatever impulse they had. Nothing is balsa wood. Physical reality is the point.

Sets for the show run across five stages. The birthing cabin in Season 2 was built for a single scene, then struck. By contrast, something like Parks and Recreation runs an entire series out of one standing set. Every location — Utica, Newfoundland — is chosen specifically because no one will recognise it, and then altered further with VFX so the show could plausibly be set anywhere. Poland, Hindle says. Nobody knows.

Iteration is relentless: concepts go through roughly 50 rounds before a set is locked. Hindle, cinematographer Jess Hall, and director Ben Stiller storyboard together and argue constantly — what he describes as passionate collaboration with no egos and a simple standard: if it isn't right, they don't shoot it.

Tom Cruise and the $3M jet

The most expensive single prop Hindle has built was the fighter jet for Top Gun: Maverick — approximately $3 million for a non-flying replica. The cockpit was co-designed with Lockheed's Skunk Works division. There are prototype components inside it, worth $2–3 million each, that only about ten people can identify — easter eggs for insiders, invisible to everyone else. Cruise had the cockpit custom-configured to match his actual piloting preferences, right down to button placement. Producers pushed back on the cost, arguing the set could be changed in post. Nothing was changed.

Hindle's philosophy is consistent across projects: build the full 360-degree set, finish the last 1%, leave nothing out because a director like Kathryn Bigelow will shoot the half you left empty. Actors in Severance regularly comment on details the camera will never catch. That's the point — they feel it, and it comes through.

Hollywood and the theater problem

Hindle is blunt about what's wrong with film culture: too many gun-on-the-poster action films, not enough of the character-driven comedies and love stories that defined the John Hughes era. He sees Severance itself as a love story — Mark loves his wife outside, falls for someone inside — and argues that vulnerability as a narrative theme has largely been abandoned.

On theaters, he thinks the issue has nothing to do with bathrooms. Studios want guaranteed returns and won't take risk. His counterargument is simple: Severance episode 10 screened at the Dolby Theater for 3,000 people and played like Rocky Horror. His daughter held weekly Severance dinner nights every Friday. That communal appetite exists; the industry just isn't feeding it. He suggests streaming platforms could reintroduce scarcity — pulling titles off all platforms for a year before a theatrical re-release — as a way to rebuild event-viewing culture.

On AI

Hindle uses no generative AI in his process and doesn't see the need. His constraint isn't ideas; it's budget. What he wants from collaborators isn't automation — it's opinion. His full-time sculptor produces work in a day that carries something Hindle explicitly did not plan for, and that unpredictability is the value. A robot, he says, wouldn't work for him.

CGI set extensions are a different matter — he uses them extensively on Severance and across other projects as a practical tool for compressing prep time and finishing sets that couldn't be completed physically on schedule. The ongoing friction is with producers who haven't pre-budgeted the VFX work: Hindle's advice is to commit the money upfront and ring-fence it.

Jack Tati's Playtime is his primary reference for Severance — a film that bankrupted its director, played to empty theaters, and is now considered a masterpiece. Sometimes, he notes, it takes 50 years.