‘Peacemaker’ Production Designer Shares Exclusive Sketches From James Gunn’s HBO Max Hit (Interview)

Production designer Lisa Soper can’t say enough positive things about her experience on the set of Peacemaker, a small screen spinoff of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad.

“We were allowed to flex our creativity as far as it would go and were pushed even further into something where we had to work together to make it work and discover things with each other as human beings, as creative individuals, and through the story,” she told me during a recent Zoom conversation.

Let’s back up a bit, though — specifically to spring of 2020 when the world went into strict lockdown in response to a little-known pathogen dubbed COVID-19. Gunn, who was just finishing up post-production on The Suicide Squad, needed something to curb the profound anxiety he was feeling alongside the rest of humanity.

The solution? An eight-episode DCEU television show centered around the bargain bin Captain America known as Peacemaker (played by John Cena). Warner Bros. loved the idea so much and made a move extreme by green-lighting the series nearly a year before the filmmaker’s new iteration of Task Force X had even opened in theaters.

***WARNING! The following contains major spoilers for the first season of Peacemaker!***

Filming began in Canada in early 2021 with a top-notch production crew, which included Soper (known for her work on Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the pilot episode of The CW’s Batwoman), who was tasked with picking up the production design baton from The Suicide Squad’s Beth Mickle.

“I was concerned about that at first,” Soper admits during our conversation. “It was quite daunting because I got sent a cut of The Suicide Squad to look at for reference. And then as soon as I saw it, I relaxed and I thought, ‘Oh…well this has nothing to do with our show. It’s a completely different country, a completely different tone, and a completely different setting.’ I kind of just let that go …  I would say that I gave The Suicide Squad about as much attention as I did the original Charlton comics of Peacemaker. What was always in the forefront was the script, was the story.”

Created in the late 1960s by Joe Gill and Pat Boyette, Peacemaker (real name: Christopher Smith) is an expert killer who — as his name suggests — is dedicated to maintaining peace at all costs…no matter how many men, women, and children he has to kill in order to achieve that goal. As Soper mentions above, the antihero with a penchant for wearing shiny helmets was initially owned by Charlton prior to the publisher’s acquisition by DC in 1983.

In the comics, Peacemaker is not only a formidable fighter and assassin, he’s also technologically gifted, building all of his own weapons and gadgets.

His DCEU counterpart, on the other hand, is much more of a macho and insecure blowhard who relies on the sci-fi inventions (mainly a collection of helmets equipped with different lethal capabilities) developed by his emotionally abusive — not to mention incredibly racist — father, Auggie Smith (Terminator 2’s Robert Patrick).

“It always started with being grounded. It’s an absolutely ridiculous fun adventure that takes us to an unbelievable place,” Soper explains of Gunn’s initial vision for the project, later adding: ‘It wasn’t just, ‘Sit down and imagine whatever cool laser beam things that you could’ … Everything needed to have a history and a purpose.”

Here’s an exclusive sketch for Peacemaker’s trademark headgear:

Peacemaker’s trailer home, for instance, is full of subtle design choices that reflect the main character’s unique blend of incompetence and ingenuity. Soper states that it was important to make him feel like a person who could actually exist in our world, which meant rounding out the sets with little flourishes that weren’t necessarily scripted by Gunn (who directed five out of the eight installments). One such embellishment is the presence of an improvised decontamination chamber.

“He’s not intelligent enough to actually make one and his dad doesn’t give a sh** about him enough to make him one,” Soper adds. “He doesn’t have any money, so he takes nine shower heads from Home Depot and he sticks them in his shower and he makes himself a decontamination chamber out of that.”

There was also a ton of thought put into Peacemaker’s pet Bald Eagle, Eagly, who got his own “custom magazine” based on a fowl pun. “It’s called ‘Tits and Boobies’ or ‘Boobies and Tits,’ which is a bird magazine,” Soper reveals. “But we figured that Peacemaker would pick it up because … it’s his way of buying his pet eagle a porn magazine. I don’t know if you can see it if you freeze frame anywhere throughout, but it normally sits on the coffee table.”

Set in the aftermath of The Suicide Squad, the series picks up in the quiet town of Evergreen, where a newly-healed Christopher Smith finds himself swept up into another secret mission sanctioned by the one and only Amanda Waller (Viola Davis).

He joins forces with her most trusted operatives: Leota Odebayo (Waller’s daughter, played by Danielle Brooks), Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), John Economos (Steve Agee), and Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji). Peacemaker’s hometown buddy and fellow vigilante — an unsubtle sociopath who just so happens to go by the monicker of Vigilante (Freddie Stroma) — ends up tagging along for the ride.

Together, the motley crew is tasked with preventing the Butterflies, a race of butterfly-looking aliens, from taking over the brains of powerful human beings and, by extension, the world. The aliens (which feel like a nod to Gunn’s 2006 directorial debut, Slither) are natural burrowers and thrive on a special nectar secreted by a “cow” from their native planet. This creature is less earthly cattle and more Slurm Queen from Futurama.

Seeing an opportunity to draw a comparison between Peacemaker and the show’s main antagonists, Soper came up with “a full history and functionality of how these Butterflies work, how they eat, how they secrete, what they would do on their planet, and how they build all of their units and the ships and the objects that they’re in.”

She continues: “Because they’re here on our planet and all of our elements are different, they have to be able to do things differently. They can’t go to the ‘Butterfly Home Depot,’ they have to use what they [have] which is kind of a parallel to what we’ve got with Chris … So I built this document for James and I showed him how they pull their esophagus out to eat, but they also pull their esophagus out to secrete this goo, which they can turn into a hardened material. They can make these types of things like the doors and that kind of stuff. And he went for it, which was amazing … We ended up with something that was really fun and very unique because it gave another complex layer to these creatures and their abilities and the mystery of what they are — instead of just having the burrowing itself.”

See below for a piece of concept art drawn up for the subterranean “Cow Cavern” featured in Episodes 7 and 8:

As with any James Gunn joint, Peacemaker is chock full of licensed needle drops. But where the Guardians of the Galaxy films are musically defined by classic hits from the ‘60s and ‘70s, the filmmaker’s DC show opts for a more punk-inspired sound by way of hair metal touchstones of the 1980s.

Nowhere is that influence more prevalent than in the opening titles where stone-faced members of the principal cast bust a move to Wig Wam’s “Do Ya Wanna Taste It” in a neon-filled studio space. Soper recalls how this particular set was designed and built three or four days before the choreographed sequence was filmed. Luckily, this production designer works best under pressure.

“James called me and he said, ‘So…I need you to design a stage.’ I was like, ‘Ok, great!’ And he gave me the direction of those old ‘60s/‘70s variety shows. I think we talked about Laugh-In as well with the pop open doors with different characters popping out. I went home and wanted to get everything done that night because with the time constraints … we needed to move and move fast.”

She apparently stayed up all night, coming up with 29 different pitches. “I had done everything from Lamborghinis all pulled up on a stage with big bombs sticking out of the trunks to wolves howling at the moon with laser beams coming out of their eyeballs. But nothing quite landed perfectly and I think it was around five o’ clock in the morning when I decided, ‘Ok, I just need one more.’”

That’s when Soper decided to hone in on the show’s curated soundtrack:

“It’s all these hair metal bands and I was going through the rolodex of vinyl in my head and thinking of the covers. There was a theme that just kept coming up, which was that look; those colors: the pink and the purple and the reflection and the neon. So I just did this really simple, slick kind of environment that didn’t have as much detail and character and texture as what the rest of the show had … But I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna throw it in as an option and then see if he likes it.’ He did like the wolves, but he went with that one, which was great because if it hadn’t been that last-minute ‘I think I should explore this,’ it could’ve been something completely different.”

While our virtual conversation takes place ahead of Season 1’s eighth and final episode, Soper does allude to that hilariously unexpected back-and-forth between Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and The Flash (Ezra Miller) when the Justice League shows up late to the Butterfly party.

“I remember standing on set for 7 and 8 and going, ‘There’s no way this is gonna work at all.’ I’m looking and they’re like, ‘5…4…3…2…’ And I’m like, ‘Mmmm…ok, it worked! Alright, cool. That’s great!’” says the production designer. “It’s amazing. This is part of the reason why I was so attracted to the show is that James has a real unique quality of telling a story and also putting a crew together and putting a team together.” 

Ahead of the record-setting finale last Thursday, HBO Max renewed the series for a second season — much to the celebration of fans. It’s unclear when production will begin, especially since Gunn is back in the MCU, currently knee-deep in production on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (whose production design is being handled by Mickle).

“I would love to keep it going,” Soper concludes when asked about her hopes for Peacemaker Season 2. “I would never go up against Beth and be like, ‘Yo, can I get in your world?’ Wherever the show takes James is gonna be great and I’m directing right now as well and my world is infinitely exciting in every way. Do I hope that I get to work with James and with [producers] Peter Safran with John Starke and everybody else that I worked with on Peacemaker again? Absolutely. Who wouldn’t want that? But yeah, I think that whatever ends up happening, James is gonna guide it in the right way.”

All eight episodes of Peacemaker Season 1 are now streaming on HBO Max.