Interview with Cabot McMullen, Production Designer of Apple TV+ series, Shrinking

Cabot McMullen is an accomplished production designer with a 40 year career in feature films, television, commercials and the stage who has worked with some of the most popular stars in entertainment. His work is currently being seen on the Apple TV+ series Shrinking starring Jason Segel and Harrison Ford. In this interview with Popgeeks, McMullen shares stories of working with everyone from Mariah Carey to Steven Spielberg as we explore his distinguished career highlights.

Adam Pope: When you go to a wedding or meet a classmate from high school that you haven’t seen in 30 years, how do you explain your job to people?

Cabot McMullen: Well, if it was high school, It’s funny, I used to be the set designer for the theater group. So this wouldn’t be too big of a departure from how they knew me back then. But I always like to say that my work basically tells you something about the characters that the script can’t convey with words. We create a visual subtext for the story.

Adam Pope: Your career has encompassed so many different spheres in entertainment, from the stage to television, to feature films and obviously most recently you are the Production Designer for the streaming program Shrinking on APPLE TV+. What appealed to you most, taking on this particular project?

Cabot McMullen: Well, the story most of all. I was actually doing a pilot for HBO two years ago with Eva Longoria as our Director, called The Gordita Chronicles. It was a story about immigrants going to US back in the 80’s, a fish out of water story. They came from the Caribbean to Miami. It was a story that was perfectly suited for Eva because she’s such a champion of diverse stories and storytelling. She’s really com into her own as a director. I have to say, I’ve been doing this a long time and she is really the most prepared Director I think I’ve ever worked with. She’s super passionate, she carries the whole production on her shoulders and get it’s all done and motivates and inspires all of us to do our best work.

So I was on the show with her and and towards the end of it she came up to me and said, you know I’m doing a feature about the janitor who created the Frito-Lay Flamin’ Hot Cheeto. So she brought me along to that production, we shot that in New Mexico. And then when I came back, I got the call rom Bill Lawrence about Shrinking. So it’s been a very interesting last couple of years. I’ve been involved in a very mixed and varied group of productions, ranging from super high budget with superstar casts, to low-budget with a lot of unknowns. For me it’s all about the story. Like Michael Douglas used to say, “If it ‘aint on the page, don’t engage”. I can tell a few pages into a script, whether it’s something I can bring something to or not.

Adam Pope: With a show like Shrinking, it feels like the most challenging part might be creating a design aesthetic that is complimenting both the drama and the comedy that is present in the series. What is going through your mind when you have to balance those two in your production design?

Cabot McMullen: All in this case with Shrinking, we wanted it to be grounded in reality. It’s a story about a man who’s in grief and even though it has comedic elements, we didn’t want to take you out of the emotional foundation of the story. It was decided very early on that we would set this in Pasadena. I don’t recall any show recently that’s been set in Pasadena. You see a lot of shows that are I L.A. or Hollywood or the West Side, But Pasadena became a real character in the story.

Jason Segel, who is an executive producer on the series was in solved in many of the creative discussions early on, with James Ponsoldt, our director, the two of them came up with this idea that we’re going to tell a story about a man who’s in the darkness and he emerges out of the darkness after 10 episodes. So essentially it’s a five hour movie about a man who we find in his house with all the drapes drawn and he’s not taking care of himself, he’s not taking care of his daughter. Then as the show goes on, things start to open up, physically and emotionally.

Adam Pope: You have a lot of history in television and being on a series for a long period of time. You’re the production designer for the full run of Spin City and SCRUBS, series that ran for years and years. In this case you’re talking about ten episodes, very fixed, knowing what they’re trying to accomplish. But when you’re on a long running sitcom, after you’ve created the initial design of the series, what is keeping you occupied in the years and years that continue on?

Cabot McMullen: Once you fill out your stages with the permanent sets, which are really the home base for each of the key characters. Whether it’s a working environment or a residential/domestic environment. Every episodic script brings some new challenge, whether it’s a location or a stage set. Whether it’s dinner at a restaurant or a party or somebody goes shopping at a store.

In the case of Shrinking, Sean climbs upon a water tower in episode 4, I think it was and we had some challenges with that location, so we had to actually build the water tower on stage and we had about 3 days notice to pull that together. So there’s always a “fire drill”, every week there’s something that has to be pulled off.

I actually met Bill Lawrence on Spin City back in the 90’s. So we go back 30 years now, which is kind of nuts. And he brought me from California to New York to do Scrubs. So I’ve watched him over the years develop this incredible ability to take the audience from these moments of exuberant joy, to suddenly you turn the corner and you’ve got a lump in your throat and you’re crying. It’s not something that you seen done very deftly like he does and so I think Shrinking has really taken all those years of our experience to put them into this one vehicle, in a way that suddenly this a show that a lot of people really need right now.

Adam Pope: Going back a little bit earlier in your career, you to work in music videos and MTV programming. Something like the C+C Music Factory video for “Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…” or Ll Cool J’s “6 Minutes of Pleasure”, they have such a distinct visual style and look like they would be at home in a trendy art gallery of New York in that era. Was there a major connection between that you recall between the New York art scene and how those things were being connected with music in the music video format?

Cabot McMullen: Absolutely. I think at that time in the 90’s there was, I guess I would call it a graphic movement. You had Pee-wee’s Playhouse was on with Gary Panter’s work. There was a keen interest to celebrate post-modernism and things that had a real graphic style to them. So in the case of C+C Music factory, I started working with Marcus Nispel, the director, he had come to New York from Germany, I think he was right out of art school actually. We started his company in a two bedroom apartment in Chelsea, we were doing commercial after music video after commercial there and he had this real visual sense of things. He did the “6 Minutes of Pleasure” video, he did C+C Music Factory, I did a lot of commercial work with him. He later went on to do The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Conan The Barbarian. But I worked with a lot of young directors back then who were inspired by the same visual graphics. That was really our focus, to do something that caught your eye and if you turned the channel you knew exactly where you were and what world you were in.

Adam Pope: Do you feel like you’ve noticed a change away from that type of visual representation and more “let’s just present a beautiful person and their song”, since that period?

Cabot McMullen: I’m 100% focused on narrative work now, occasionally I’ll get a commercial here and there, but I’m mostly focused on scripted material. Just from my own observations, a lot of what’s going on today revolved around some kind of visual gag, you need some kind of visual hook to pull people in and to keep them there for 3-4 minutes. Back when I was doing it, of course it was a priority, but it was about creating, almost a a moment you would find on stage. It was a little more performance driven.

Adam Pope: Speaking of which, you also worked with a lot of music performances and stage design. People like Mariah Carey, Backstreet Boys, Carly Simon and Kenny Loggins, all in very different settings. Was there a particular project for you for a live stage design for a musical performance that stands out that you felt was creatively very satisfying?

Cabot McMullen: I think it was the Mariah Carey show. It was on NBC, it was a Thanksgiving prime time special. It was kind of a big deal at the time. That was the show that launched her. I was kind of Sony Music’s music video designer back in those times. Tony Motolla had a management company called Champion Entertainment, he managed Carly Simon, Taylor Dane, Hall and Oates, a lot of the big music acts back then. He became the head of Sony Music and he started incubating all these artists and one of them was Mariah Carey. Nobody had heard of her then and I certainly didn’t know who she was. I got to sit in on a few sessions when she was recording her first album and I could just tell that this was going to be something really amazing.

What we did was we created a set that had three different acts, three different looks. Inspired by an operatic set by Boris Aronson, it was this very monolithic, monumental, heroic stage set. Larry Jordan, who was the director did some fantastic things with lighting cues and things like that. It remains to this day one of the things I’m very proud of because my architectural experience, my theatrical experience, my film and television experience all went into this one production. It was a theater up in Poughkeepsie, NY called the Proctors Theater and the audience was just insane, they were so into her. It was so loud, you literally had to put earplugs in because of the screaming, it was like The Beatles or something. It was just so intense. The only time I’ve experienced something equal to that, in terms of decibel levels from an audience of girls was the Backstreet Boys.

Adam Pope: Somebody else that you’ve collaborated with a few times that I’m curious to get your take on is Kevin Smith. You worked with him in two very different films that were just worlds apart in terms of tone. You handled the production design for his thriller, an unexpected dramatic turn for him with Red State. Then 5 years later you’re working together again on a silly, cartoonish film starring this daughter called Yoga Hosers. How would you compare those two experiences working with Kevin?

Cabot McMullen: Red State was kind of a dream come true for me because I’ve always loved Kevin’s work. I had always at that time wanted to be involved in the horror genre. I grew up obsessing about all the Universal classic monsters and just loved that genre. So to have that opportunity was fantastic and the fact that it was woven in with a very timely topic in the news, which was this religious cult that were anti-gay, anti-freedom, anti-anything liberal. I think Kevin found a way in with his script, it was just brilliant.

The challenge was that we did the movie for I think it was $6 million, so there wasn’t a lot of money and not very much time. I think what I’m very good at is taking a challenging situation and creating way to make every frame interesting. There’s always something interesting facing it up or interesting to look at.

With Kevin it was interesting, because he was there every day. We had a location in Downey that was a campus for a reform school, so it had houses and prisons and gyms. It had everything we needed there, so we shot 90% of the movie there. He has this fantastic suped-up bus that he rides around in. So he would shoot all day, he would go into the bus at night and he would edit all night and he would sleep there. So we would come in 6:00am call the next morning and he’d be coming out of the bus with his cup of coffee. So by the end of the shoot, I wanna say 23-25 days or something like that, he had the whole show cut together. At the wrap party he had a screening of the movie. That kind of explains Kevin and how passionate he is about what he does.

Yoga Hosers was a very different experience and by the way, Austin Butler was in that, he being celebrated for Elvis right now. That was one of his first movies if you go back and look at it, he plays the love interest in that. Also, Johnny Depp’s daughter. It was fun because it was kind of a family movie. It was just fun being around the family and all the kids and everything, Kevin’s wife was in it, so it was fun. It was a very bizarre film, I still don’t know what to make of it.

Adam Pope: You mentioned horror movies and obviously the design of those films makes or breaks the movie. Is there an established character that you would like to help design a film for?

Cabot McMullen: I think what Coppola did with Dracula was just incredible. I’d like to do something similar with Frankenstein, I think. A director I work with a lot, Paul McGuigan, he did a Frankenstein movie and I wish I had known him then, I could have had the opportunity.

Adam Pope: You did get a chance to be instrumental in Supergirl, creating the look of that series and I’m a big comic book fan…

Cabot McMullen: Me too! I do graphic novels on the side. That’s my side hustle. I have a new little start-up I’m working on called The Electric Book Wagon and I’m working with Hollywood screenwriters who have these scripts that for whatever reason don’t get any traction as film properties and so we’re turning them into webisodes. Sort of like web toons, it’s all vertical scrolling. I’m working with Rob Kutner right now, from The Daily Show and Conan, John Kesselman, who I did The Hebrew Hammer with and I have a couple of fiction novelists that we’re working with. So it’s a genre I’m very keenly aware of.

When we did Supergirl, it was such an honor to be part of that because I did the pilot and the first part of the first season. We really wanted to tell this story from a young woman’s point of view. In terms of lifestyle and politics, it wasn’t just about taking care of the villain every week. It was really about the struggles that a young woman goes through, trying to find herself and becoming who she eventually is going to be. That was a good one.

Adam Pope: Did you enjoy getting a chance to mix in a sci-fi element to it? Because for most of your career that doesn’t seem to have been a big part of your work.

Cabot McMullen: Yeah, it’s interesting because I grew up where my Dad was an engineer who worked in the space program and my Mom was an artist. So I’m a pretty good combination of their interests. I was very happy and honored to do the sci-fi series Extant with Steven Spielberg and Halle Berry, where I got to develop some very forward looking, futuristic space travel stuff. But something that was very grounded in reality and we got to deal with a lot of robotic engineers on that one. So I was able to bring some of that to Supergirl.

The conceit was that a big star fell to Earth with all these villains on it and so there were literally hundreds of alien villains roaming the Earth and each one of those was going to pop up each episode as a new situation for her to deal with. So we got to deal with extra-terrestrial travel, but we also go to deal with some things on Earth like a super train and some new technologies here that here to benefit humans.

I always kind of leaned into the DC Universe rather than the Marvel one growing up. I just loved Batman and Superman, of course. So for me it was a big thrill being able to go back to the origin story of those characters and tell it. When she leaves Krypton, that was kind of a big moment in the pilot and it was great creating all that.

Adam Pope: You’ve been in this industry long enough to see the evolution of where prestige was attached to theatrically released films, while television was always on the lower tier and yet now we’re in an era where that has reversed to where people are staying home and paying attention to what is streaming into there homes, like in the case of Shrinking. Is there a particular point in the where you said to yourself, people are really paying attention to television more and did tat lead you to want to take on more television projects?

Cabot McMullen: I love the feature format and it’s interesting that 10 or 20 years ago features were the long form, but now their kind of the short form because you’ve only got 90 minutes to tell that story. But the thing I love about the television format is that, as I said about Shrinking, we’re telling a story that’s essentially a 5 hour feature. So you’ve got 10 episodes to create that arc. I’ve already heard rumors about what they’re doing for the second season, which will be equally interesting. It’s taking Jimmy into a new phase of his life.

With features, I’ve never really done any huge budget shows, so it’s hard for me to say how rewarding that might be. I’ve always done shows that $20 million and below, mot of them have been between $5 to 10 million. So it’s a very immersive, passionate process where the director is completely invested and there isn’t really a studio because most of them are independent. So it’s sort of like everybody is leaving us alone to do the best work that we can.

Features is a much more director driven environment, whereas television is really the show runner runs everything. So it’s much more producer/writer driven. I think there are pluses to both, but it’s probably no accident that streaming is the king now because the best stories are being told on television. And the fact that people have the ability to have these huge screens in their homes or now you can get a projector for a couple hundred bucks that will give you a pretty big screen. If you can have god sound with it, it’s as good as going to the movies. It doesn’t give you that communal experience, but I do think the best stories are being told on television now. So for designers like myself, it’s a great opportunity to really do some great work.

We want to thank Cabot McMullen for agreeing to this interview.

Shrinking follows a grieving therapist who starts to break the rules and tell his clients exactly what he thinks. Ignoring his training and ethics, he finds himself making huge, tumultuous changes to people’s lives … including his own. Shrinking is currently streaming on Apple TV+.