Building the perfect ‘Maze’

The latest in a long line of young adult adaptations, The Maze Runner is hoping to match the box office success of its contemporaries such as The Hunger Games and Divergent. The Baton Rouge-shot film is in theaters today, and 20th Century Fox is optimistic for the future of The Maze Runner franchise. A sequel has been given the green light.

Unlike most of the silver screen adaptations of young adult fare featuring a strong protagonist, The Maze Runner‘s central character is the scenery—a gigantic maze with movable stages and challenges the characters must face in their attempts to escape.

The film’s production designer Marc Fishichella says designing the main attraction was not without its challenges.

Shot on a paltry $30 million budget, The Maze Runner had little to spare financially to bring writer James Dashner’s dystopian view to the screen. While director Wes Ball utilized the field-like canvases of Jackson, Louisiana, and St. Francisville, Fishichella had little space to improvise when it came to designing the maze set.

“We did our major set building in an empty Sam’s Club in Baton Rouge,” he says. “We had to scramble to find the warehouse space to build it. We’re used to doing this kind of intricate shooting in a sound stage with 40-foot ceilings and clear areas of 32,000 to 35,000 square feet. We were very tight in there and had to adapt.”

The key to many of Fishichella’s challenges was creating a set that could move around and be manipulated. The production design team had to satisfy Ball’s vision so that changes could be made on the fly.

“The idea was to make this maze modular,” Fishichella says. “Even though the maze is this character, we didn’t want it to have a repetitive nature. We would create these 16-by-24-foot walls, depending on the camera angles, and since they weren’t aligned on top of each other perfectly, you have these overhangs, shadows and all kinds of details that make it interesting in each scene.”

The team wouldn’t see the complete vision until the visual effects were done in post-production. At that point of the filmmaking, the cracks and haunts of the maze were given more detail and power.

“It’s certainly everything we hoped for and encompasses everything we tried to do,” Fishichella says. “The effects were integrated in the film seamlessly.”

See the trailer for The Maze Runner below.