Team Deakins · James Ellis Deakins, Roger Deakins

CHRIS LOWE - Production Designer

January 14, 2026·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

Skyfall’s glass office could be built on the 007 stage instead of a 40th-floor Shanghai location.

1. Team Deakins speaks with Chris Lowe about production design and art direction across television and feature films. 2. Roger Deakins and James Deakins introduce Chris Lowe as a production designer whose credits include In Bruges, Dark Shadows, Skyfall, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. 3. The episode asks how Chris Lowe went from drawing at school to supervising large film builds with budgets, schedules, and construction managers. 4. Chris Lowe says his family was creative, with a father in a cash and carry, a mother who was a stay-at-home housewife, and both parents able to make and draw things. 5. He describes being the only thing he could do properly at school as drawing, then missing a predicted grade one and ending up with a grade four. 6. He tells how a year of general art and design led into a two-year BTEC course in graphics and ceramics, where Mrs Simpson snapped his HB pencils and taught him to draw with 90 percent observation and 10 percent technical skill. 7. A friend pointed him toward a course with a 3D design module and a film and TV design module in Suffolk, and Chris Lowe says he applied after visiting the college. 8. At Suffolk, he met Jeff Patterson, an ex-BBC designer who taught him to draw in front of people and to speak about his work with confidence. 9. Jeff Patterson then recommended Kingston for a post-grad course, where Chris Lowe studied with working designers such as Stuart Craig and other film and television tutors. 10. Chris Lowe says the film industry was dead at the time, but Quentin Chase hired him directly after college and sent him to design sets for a sitcom. 11. He recounts Up the Garden Path, including a pottery-class set about four meters by five meters, the borrowing of ceramics equipment from his old tutor, and director David Askey praising the finished set. 12. Chris Lowe says Quentin Chase kept throwing him into difficult jobs for two years, which forced him to sweat, manage sets alone, and learn fast. 13. He contrasts art direction and production design by saying the art director handles logistics, construction, and support, while the designer focuses on story and the director. 14. He says modern work is shaped by drawing, sketches, models, budgets, schedules, construction managers, and practical crews, not by computers alone. 15. Chris Lowe describes production design as a team craft, naming colleagues such as Andrew Bennett, Neil Keller, Mark Harris, Sandra Phillips, Dean Clegg, Tim Browning, Kim Frederickson, and Greg Fanjo Brockbank. 16. He says he assigns people according to strengths, gives them sketches and photographic references, and prefers to help them become supervisors and designers rather than keep them at one level. 17. On lighting, he says he wants to sit down with the director of photography early, citing Skyfall and practical lights, color temperature, and the need to know how a set will be lit. 18. He describes the director of photography as crucial because people like Bill Pope and Bob Elswit help make the sets and actors look right, and he ties that to his work with Sam Mendes, Tim Burton, George Clooney, and George Lucas. 19. Chris Lowe would suit listeners interested in film design, set logistics, and large-scale movie construction. 20. Chris Lowe would not suit listeners looking for celebrity gossip or plot summaries.

As heard by us

Chris Lowe makes production design feel like careful listening, hard budgeting, and still leaving room for the impossible shot.

Chris Lowe's Team Deakins conversation treats production design as practical imagination: listening first, costing hard, then finding the version of a world the film can actually afford. His Skyfall memories give the episode its clearest shape.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for practical film craft and a sharp look at how production design gets turned into a workable movie budget.

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