Creating The World Of ‘The Crow’ And How It Influenced ‘Fight Club’

“It was a really difficult film to make. We were working very long hours, six days a week,” recalled Alex McDowell, production designer on the cult classic movie The Crow. “I actually learned scuba diving because the only thing I could do to take myself out of the film was go down 100 feet in the ocean and change the environment. It was tough and strenuous.”

The iconic comic book movie stars Brandon Lee as Eric Draven, aka The Crow. Draven and his fiancée are killed by a gang and on the anniversary of their deaths, he rises from the grave to take revenge. In 2024, the film celebrates its 30th anniversary and receives a 4K Ultra HD release for the first time courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.

When McDowell joined director Alex Proyas’ vision for James O’Barr’s comic book series to life on the big screen, he knew it would be a world of challenges and welcomed it.

“Personally, I thrive trying to do stuff that’s impossible, and I thrive in chaos and disruption, so coming out of music videos, we have an expectation of achievement and being able to do anything with whatever you’re given,” he said. “Alex comes from the same place, so I don’t think it’s as daunting as acknowledging how hard it is. The constraints are not a bad thing. In fact, they’re probably directly influential on the outcome, and you come up with ideas you wouldn’t have come up with because you were forced to think differently.” Among the videos that McDowell designed is Madonna’s legendary Vogue promo.

Even though it was an exercise in world-building way beyond its city setting, The Crow only had a budget of $23 million to achieve the goal.

“The model team was building something completely impossible. They had to create an enormous city with very few resources, and I love how it came out,” McDowell explained. “I think that we were all working partly within the constraints of budget, but really, it’s not even saying that’s what made it look that way; it was in the nature of the design and the look of the film. Alex wanted The Crow to be a movie where that stylization was an advantage, not a disadvantage. I love seeing the model now and how little it has to do with CG or anything we’ve become accustomed to. There is a particular quality to it.”

Something McDowell remembers clearly about The Crow was how engaged Lee was with the process and the movie’s look and feel.

“It was a long time ago, but I remember him being incredibly kind, honest, warm, involved and engaged,” he explained. “There was no question about that. Whether he came through the early design phase or not, I don’t remember, but he was completely immersed in the part, and when that happens, it also influences us. If you have access and don’t have an actor who is standoff-ish as some can be, you’re responding to that as much as to the director. He definitely understood what we were all doing.” Lee tragically died after being fatally wounded by a prop gun during filming.

While The Crow was based on a monochromatic comic book series, Proyas and McDowell wanted to add texture to O’Barr’s world beyond the limited scope of the page. To do that, they had to get creative, embrace, and play with what they had.

“Shadow is a huge part of The Crow, and darkness is too, and I think we were exploiting that a lot. Texture is only emerging out of the shadows,” McDowell said. “It’s very visceral and exciting working from a graphic novel source where, in a way, the black and white is so important to James’s original work, but a lot is not defined. He’s drawing it himself, and it’s relatively crude. It’s his style, but a lot of it is coming out of the black, and the texture comes from something like a woodcut and the idea of a very high contrast. You have to carve deeper to get the light shadow and light to work, so I think the word texture is very applicable.”

Despite a plethora of iconic imagery, out of everything McDowell and the team created for The Crow three decades on, his favorite elements remain the scenes on the rooftops.

“It’s what I remember the most,” he confirmed. “It’s because it was about being able to create a set that was entirely about being in that open space and yet doing it on a soundstage and in a very constrained way. The other thing I remember is the warehouse stuff, which was cluttered and decaying, and we were so lucky to have found that in our locations. The combination of being able to get those kinds of things working together in the movie was incredible. Also, there is the music, which had nothing to do with me but has so much to do with the movie as a whole.”

McDowell, who also worked on Fight Club, Watchmen, Total Recall, and Minority Report, will be the first to admit that what he learned and experienced working on The Crow has influenced his work over the three decades since.

“The Crow was a huge thing for me,” he concluded. It made it feasible for me to understand how to translate music videos into a feature. Fight Club and The Crow overlap enormously in my mind. The Paper Street house is built on what I learned in The Crow, so it was a perfect transition from the spontaneity and chaos of music videos into this foundationally music-based movie and then out from there. It was a very important transition point for me.”