Sue Chan: Designing the World of Murderbot
Production designer Sue Chan revealed the creative process behind Murderbot, the richness of the habitats, the show’s lingua franca, and of course the importance of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
What if hundreds of years from now, our reality as we know it evolved from corporate greed, cultural pluralism, and unregulated AI technology? Murderbot, the Apple TV+ original series starring Alexander Skarsgård based on All Systems Red, the first book of the series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells is a fascinating take on a possible distant future that dives deeply into humanity through the eyes of a rogue security android. Visually, the show has the right balance of cultural familiarity and innovation in technology–something that production designer Sue Chan, a lifelong fan of science fiction, coined ‘retro-futuristic historicism’: “It’s great to look to the past … There are persistent design tropes that underpin technological advances. Combine that with cultural touchstones to evolve in a way that makes sense but that’s also visually rich and psychologically resonant.”
“I always work from an idea of a narrative-based design.”
Chan revealed that Murderbot was not a show for conveying a society on the decline; instead of focusing on dystopian, colorless tropes that have been predominant in sci-fi, the production designer took a character-by-character approach—especially for personifying the habitats. Whereas the Corporation Rim in and of itself is less concerned with history and more on building fast and cheap products to maximize revenue, the PreservationAux team takes pride in their culture. She said, “I always work from an idea of a narrative-based design. One of the things we said about the PresAux team that I discussed with the showrunners and my decorators was that this is hundreds of generations in the future and there’s a big diaspora from Earth, from all of the cultures that make humans. I went all the way back to the most ancient cultures of every continent–Etruscan, African, Asian, European cultures–I just pulled together a lot of references of the pottery, the textiles, the language, the clothing, the jewelry, all of it. What are some through lines? If our team were the most inclusive cultural people, really cared about where they came from, what would they preserve and how would that have evolved?”
The result is a richly organic, colorful design that bloomed in a sterile environment and visually defined the PresAux team’s essence. “The PresAux team brought their textiles, and since they are biologists, they don’t just want to have pots of plants or just seeds. They’re going to display their plants and live life,” Chan explained.
One aspect of Murderbot that added an extra layer of authenticity was the inclusion of its own alphabet–something that only a few sci-fi franchises have managed to do right. Sue Chan–who has already developed a language for Landscape with Invisible Hand–created a one-to-one correspondence to the Roman alphabet for Murderbot’s lingua franca: “We took every written language–Chinese, Arabic, Hindu, Korean, all of it–and looked at consistency. There’s certain strokes that exist everywhere, so we imagined they would cherry-pick to create each letter so that almost every culture could understand it,” Chan revealed. The language was utilized extensively throughout the sets, costumes, and even for SecUnit’s interface, masterfully implemented by Murderbot’s VFX team.
Murderbot’s inner monologue is such a big part of the story, adding depth to the rogue android’s interaction with the humans and its self discovery. “The audio inner monologue is simultaneous with his visual one because as an AI whose brain doesn’t work the same as ours, it’s got all these things going on all the time. We were thinking about that the whole time, in early concept design, about what the character of Murderbot would see but also what the audience needs to know in order to get the idea across. What Sean [Faden] and the visual effects team came up with is so terrific … an amalgam of what we have been talking about, but also just developed much further.” Chan added, “I really do believe that the visual inner monologue is as important as the audio inner monologue for Murderbot because that is how it’s developing its personality.”
These inner monologues wouldn’t be the same without the inclusion of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, the show within the show that progressively becomes an integral part of the protagonist’s evolution. Chan admitted that it was incredibly fun to develop: “Our thought with The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon is that if all of the media was created by AI today, what would end up happening? How far and ridiculous would it be if you just kitchen-sinked all the stuff that gets the most likes and sorted it into different kinds of shows? That’s how we ended up with The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It was basically Star Trek on steroids! It’s obviously kind of a terrible show, but it’s such eye candy.” She then playfully teased a potential spinoff for The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Will we get a Christmas special this year?
Murderbot is not just another sci-fi show, it’s a beautiful reflection of humanity and its complexities through the lens of an artificial intelligence. Sue Chan sees the show as a “kinetic battle between wanting to be seen but also wanting to be left alone and be anonymous. It’s between Murderbot and the team, how it starts to reconcile after being hypocritical about humans, eventually recognizing that their opinions matter. And it starts to follow. I think we all do that … that’s just how we develop our ego.” All 10 episodes of Murderbot Season One are now available on Apple TV+.
