There are many stunning, otherworldly sights in Ex Machina, the science-fiction film directed by Alex Garland that features a robot so lifelike she’s played by actress Alicia Vikander. But the most breathtaking sight of all may be the 100 percent real, available-for-a-night’s-stay location where the film is set: the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway.
According to Ex Machina’s production designer Mark Digby, it took a full-on global hunt to find the Juvet, which stands in for much of the modernist, remote hideout of tech billionaire Nathan (Oscar Isaac). “We wanted it to be among nature, we wanted it to be stunning, and we wanted it to be exclusive,” says Digby, who was given a script that originally placed Nathan’s estate in Colorado. After hunting all over Europe, from the Alps to Finland, the team finally noticed a house under construction on the side of a mountain in northern Norway—and, half an hour away, the Juvet Landscape Hotel. Nathan’s mansion had been found, in the form of two separate, modernist buildings.
When Domhnall Gleeson’s Caleb, a lowly programmer at Nathan’s tech behemoth Blue Book, arrives for a week at his boss’s estate, what’s impressive about the mansion is how initially unimpressive it is. Looking at first like a plain brown box stuck in the woods, the space gives way at first to a bright, modernist living room—part of that house that Digby’s team initially found—and then a vast subterranean space, most of it re-created on soundstages in England. The hotel supplied the dining room with expansive views and several other sleek interior spaces. “He is so rich he doesn’t need to be ostentatious with it,” Digby says of Nathan and the home he stitched together for the character. “We felt someone as powerful, as rich as this, and as intellectually competent as him, would have a good sense of design.”
That includes the modernist furniture, the kitchen stacked with sleek gadgets, and even the Jackson Pollock replica on the wall. “We chose an eclectic range of mid-20th century designs I think that are classic and everlasting,” says Digby, describing Nathan as a man who collects things, whether artifacts from around the world or ideas from employees like Caleb. “I don’t think he feels that things have to be up to date, it just has to be beautiful design.” Though Ex Machina is clearly set in a near future in which artificial intelligence is possible, it rarely feels explicitly futuristic; aside from some biometric keypads and computer programs, nearly everything in the house aside from robot Ava could exist today. “You need people to engage—they have to feel that they could be there and it could happen,” Digby explains. “We thought very hard about that.”
The clean lines of the furniture, gleaming windows, and spectacular views make Nathan’s home incredibly appealing, as if the placid and tasteful surface is there to distract you from something dark roiling underneath. “We have to be slightly on edge about the perfection and purity and brilliance of it all,” Digby explains. “We wanted it to be slightly at odds with comfort.” Which makes it all the more surprising when, in one of the film’s most talked-about moments, Nathan’s concrete-walled lounge transforms into a disco, of all things.
How did Digby install disco lights in the walls that we, and Caleb, wouldn’t notice? “With difficulty,” he says. In the concrete walls of the room Digby added a criss-cross pattern, behind which he and his team could hide flashing disco lights. “We needed this party environment, but did he have a separate party room? It needed to be something structural, something artistic, that would then turn into a disco environment. And disco environments are all about light.”
Like any good sci-fi film, Ex Machina is rich with metaphors, mining Caleb and Nathan’s fraught relationships with the robot Ava to explore humanity’s tenuous relationship to nature and technology. The production design is rich with those metaphors, too, including several spaces in which the wild forest surrounding the house is incorporated within the walls. “We want a constant reminder [of that] conflict for the audience and for everyone, including Caleb and Nathan,” Digby says. “The man-made, and the natural environment. Which is what is happening with Ava—she is man-made, but of nature.”
