Circular designs make sense in space. Because you basically cannot leave the ship, having a design where everything connects to everything else is a natural solution to maximizing efficiency floating through the cosmos. Speaking with Nerds & Beyond, production designer Beth Mickle, who started working with James Gunn on “The Suicide Squad,” details how circles determined just about everything about the Bowie’s design:
“If you look at the shape of the Bowie, you can actually really see it’s very circular. Behind the whole pilot deck is circular. That really informed the interior spaces. The med bay where we spend most of the time with Rocket, that’s a big circular space, the central core is a big circular space, the spiral staircase … that really drove a lot of the interior designs. Then you get the nice, iconic shot looking down the long hallways, which are all big and circular in nature. We really took the circular theme and ran with it.”
These were not purely aesthetic reasons though. A set can only be great if it is designed in conjunction with how the filmmakers want to shoot the project. Gunn wanted a free-flowing set, and putting it together Mickle “wanted to make sure that all the spaces really connected so that the actors could all go from one space to another to the next in dialogue scenes with long walks, tracking shots, following actors … same with some of the big fight scenes and choreographed scenes in the ship.”
Being able to seamlessly move from one space to another does so much to convey that what you’re seeing is real, because it is. There’s a believable life to be lived on this fake spaceship, and that’s something so few designs are able to capture. The Bowie does.