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Paki Meduri: In the Hand of Dante, artist and production designer
- Serena Trivelloni
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
From Italian cinema to Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante, artist and production designer Paki Meduri explores worlds built from color, sound and atmosphere. The best of all possible worlds may not exist, but cinema and Paki lets us move through them all.
He moves through sets listening for sounds, shaping colors, searching for the precise atmosphere that can draw an audience in. For Paki Meduri, one of the most distinctive production designers working across contemporary Italian and international film and television, space is never just a backdrop. It is memory, wound, desire, unease. It is a character breathing alongside the actors.
An architect by training and a painter by instinct, Paki has built a visual language defined by contrast: the dirty, sensual baroque of Gomorrah ; the criminal geographies of Suburra; the visual tension of ZeroZeroZero; the moral landscapes of Adagio; and the almost organic darkness of Il Mostro. He has worked across Italian and international productions, from The Old Guard to Django, always carrying the same conviction: a set should not merely contain a story. It should begin telling it before anyone speaks.
His latest, outstanding work is In the Hand of Dante, Julian Schnabel’s new film starring Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Jason Momoa and Sabrina Impacciatore. Presented in the official selection at the Tribeca Festival and arriving on Netflix on June 24, the film moves across eras, languages and visions: the Middle Ages and the present, black and white and color, Dante and Nick Tosches, the materiality of painting and the grammar of cinema.
In this conversation, Paki reflects on how he builds worlds: the search for locations, his collaboration with Schnabel, Benjamin Clementine’s music as an emotional compass, the handmade craft of the sets, his obsession with detail, and the delicate threshold where architecture stops being space and becomes storytelling. In his cinema, space can become perfection, the image can turn into desire, and a place can become a dream in which we learn how to listen, and how to breathe.
Your work moves across architecture, production design, writing and art. When did you realize that building spaces wasn’t enough, and that those spaces needed a narrative life of their own?
I have always been a curious explorer of the arts. I learned to paint when I was 10, and I have never really stopped. I played in three post-rock bands, writing lyrics and music; I write poetry and short stories; and, at the same time, I trained as an architect.
I think of myself as an architect with the mind of a painter.
My first experiences in theater made that need very clear. The spaces I was designing had to carry a story; they had to mean something. For me, production design is subtext. It is not simply the place where the action happens. It is a character in its own right. And like a character, it speaks, dresses, changes. Most of all, it creates feeling.
You have worked on both Italian and international productions, from The Old Guard and Django to ZeroZeroZero and Lasciarsi un giorno a Roma. What really changes between those two worlds, and where do you feel it most on set?
My approach to the work is basically the same. What changes is the budget.
The instinct is the same: to create worlds and draw the audience into a visual journey made of places, atmospheres and colors. International productions usually come with a more complex production structure, and the challenge is often to keep the project focused, without overloading it or getting seduced by unnecessary flourishes, especially when a larger budget gives you more room to move.
With Italian films, where budgets are often more limited, the challenge is to make up for that with invention and creativity. Very often, a more handmade approach brings you closer to something real. It allows you to go deeper into the soul of a place.
I have always thought of you as a production designer of contrasts: from the almost baroque world of Gomorrah to exterior locations that convey poverty, emptiness and oppression. I’m thinking not only of Gomorrah, but also of Il Mostro, Adagio and Suburra. What kind of work did you do on Il Mostro, where the spaces and the light seem to give physical shape to the protagonist’s unease?
A production designer can have a personal style, but every project forces you to deal with different themes, different periods, different scripts and, above all, different directors. Every project has its own key. Every project has a world that has to be found.
I like to push the accelerator all the way down, to reach the bone of the story through atmosphere.
On Il Mostro, I wanted to bring out all the disgust and unease that had grown inside me, day after day, during the research phase. The more I read about the real events, the darker, starker, rawer and more mold-stained the world I imagined for the series became.
So I built sets that had to resemble the characters and their states of mind. The places themselves had to become characters. The most beautiful part is seeing the finished series and realizing that every department felt the same need I did, bringing that same emotion into the visual design of the show and creating an extraordinary kind of magic.
In the Hand of Dante, with an extraordinary cast, premiered at the 82nd Venice Film Festival and will soon be released on Netflix. From the set builders crafting furniture for the medieval world to the painters working on textures and patinas, the production has a deeply handmade quality. What did Julian Schnabel ask of you in building those sets, and what is it like to work with him?
The film had a long, layered prep process. There was an enormous amount of study and a very long search for the right visual language. We were telling a story that moves across different eras and places that are very far apart from one another.
My approach to the project was profoundly shaped by Julian. Julian is, first and foremost, an artist. Every directorial choice he makes is filtered through his imagination, his instinct and his poetic sensibility. It does not always have to be explained or justified.
I wanted to follow his inspiration. That meant changing the way I thought about production design. I had to feel the story we were telling.
It was an incredible experiment: rethinking every certainty I had in this field, allowing myself to let go as an artist, not only as a technician. When you work with a master like Julian, you have to trust his vision, try to understand it and embrace it.
We often built sets from scratch, and a great deal of the furniture was designed and made specifically for the film. As you said, it was a vast exercise in Italian craftsmanship. Painting, textures and patinas were a crucial part of the work. They are always important to me, but never more than when you are making a film with a painter.
Sharing a set with Julian was a unique experience. It made me rethink my own work, opened my field of vision even wider, and taught me how to bring a little of my own madness into production design.
In Schnabel’s film, black and white often alternates with the colors and atmosphere of the past: Dante feels vividly present, while Nick Tosches seems to exist in a suspended dimension, almost anchored to another time. How did you contribute to the character played by Oscar Isaac, and how did the world around him shape the storytelling?
As you said, in our film the past is vivid and alive, while the present feels like a story that has already happened, already been written. I brought that idea into the locations, the builds, the furniture and, above all, the atmosphere.
In the scenes where Oscar plays Dante, my sets become tangible, realistic, present. When Oscar plays Tosches, everything becomes smoky, rarefied, changeable, unpredictable, like a dream being dreamed by the protagonist.
For an actor, it matters that the production design around him speaks to the character. When a character feels at home inside a designed space, then that space is right.
Did Benjamin Clementine’s music become a kind of parallel design tool for you during the process, or did it enter the film only after the visual world had already been defined?
Often, during location scouts or in our meetings, Julian would take out his phone, play a track and look me straight in the eye, waiting for my reaction.
Once I got past the initial embarrassment, I would close my eyes and let my imagination start working. That was exactly what he wanted: to transmit images through sound.
Music absolutely became a filter, but also a kind of connective tissue. We were all listening to the same music, all moving in the same direction. There was no need for words or explanations. We just had to follow the sensations, the mood.
If you close your eyes for a moment, what is the first memory that comes to mind from your working life, and why?
The first image that comes to mind is tied to travel, to my constant search for locations, to meeting new people and discovering new places.
My work constantly pushes me to explore, to study distant worlds, to find inspiration. So the image that flashes before me is one of my classics: me on a plane, looking out the window, with a sketchbook on my lap, music in my earphones and an architect’s pencil between my fingers.
In your work, space is never neutral. It is almost always a psychological extension of the characters. Do you ever begin with the emotion you want to create in the viewer, rather than with a purely aesthetic idea?
Yes. When I read a screenplay, I automatically begin to imagine the places it describes. Sometimes my mind changes them, or completely transforms their nature.
Instinctively, a process begins that leads to the creation of an imaginary location. For me, it is essential to express the emotions of the individual characters through the places that contain them.
What has been the hardest part of finding a film’s identity? And what kind of work do you do when you translate a screenplay into physical space?
When I read a screenplay, I cannot rest until I have found the meaning of the film I am about to make. I ask myself where it should be set, in what season, what colors the story gives me as I read it.
The thing I love doing most, which is also the most complicated, is creating the world: the arena, the physical and geographical identity of the places that, one after another, tell the story.
I always begin with research driven by suggestion. I let myself be drawn toward the different paths my mind instinctively opens up, and then I gradually narrow the possibilities. Once I have chosen the road, I go straight ahead and try never to step off it.
What is something you still want to create, something you have not yet had the chance to build? And what are your next projects?
A film I care about very much should be coming out soon: a remake of the original Cliffhanger. I spent seven months between the Austrian Dolomites and the studios in Munich, where I rebuilt a luxury resort and, above all, a mountain ridge, a tunnel and several breathtaking passages where we shot many of the film’s action sequences.
Right now, I am working on the second season of Il Mostro di Firenze.
I love making period films. They force you to stay within certain boundaries, dictated by the architecture and fashions of the historical period, but at the same time they give you a great deal of freedom. Sometimes, depending on the film, you take poetic license, shuffle the deck, and recreate a past that never existed: places without time and without geography.
Above all, period films are a precious vessel into which I can pour my obsession with detail.
To answer your question, I have not yet had the chance to take on a science-fiction film. I would love to design worlds that do not yet exist. I would lose myself imagining a possible future, or even life on other planets. It is a dream I have always had.
Humility is a precious virtue for a human being. But it is not a virtue for someone who makes cinema.