Inside the Hungarian Castle Shadow and Bone Used as a Location
Downton Abbey had Highclere Castle. The Favourite used Hatfield House. The Great made do with sound stages in London. From Bridgerton to The Crown and the upcoming The Pursuit of Love, there’s seemingly no shortage of movie and TV projects looking to film in spaces that approximate castles or grand estates—but with sufficiently grand spaces in short supply, how does one find the period-appropriate pile that’s best?
“The place to start is always the script,” says Matt Gant, the production designer for the new Netflix series Shadow and Bone. “Because, okay, [the action is taking place in] a castle or a palace, but there are lots of different types of castles and palaces, aren't there? So, where do we begin?”
For Shadow and Bone, a series adapted from a series of novels by Leigh Bardugo, it began with imagining the kind of world the series wanted to build and thinking about how much time would be spent in each location. For some scenes, like those that take place inside a character’s office, sets were built on a Vancouver soundstage, but for the scenes that required a truly opulent setting—or, really, two, considering the series makes use of one called the Little Palace and another called the Grand Palace—something more monumental was required.
“There had been some discussion about building a lot of this as a set, but it became apparent to me quickly that that wasn't appropriate for this job,” Gant says. “We made the decision that we should be looking at location shooting for the Little Palace and the Grand Palace. It would give us the opportunity to shoot something with much more scale, that felt more authentic, and would give us the opportunity to really put something exciting on screen.”
It’s a challenge nearly all projects that want to capture historical grandeur face. In a recent discussion about filming at Britain’s historic sites, Harvey Edgington, Head of Filming and Locations for the UK National Trust, said to find a location conducive to filming, one has to ask a litany of very specific questions. “Does it look great on screen? Yes, it does. Has it got the right atmosphere? Technically, is it possible? Sometimes somebody will send me a photograph and they'll say that room looks great, but it's on the first floor. How are we going to light it with all the lighting outside? So, there's those kinds of practical things happening as well.”
Keeping in mind the inspiration Bardugo took from Tsarist Russia in writing her story, Gant and his team began searching Europe for historical buildings that felt architecturally aligned with her vision. The journey brought them to Keszthely, Hungary, where they discovered the Festetics Palace, an 18th-century castle that’s now home to a museum.
“The way we came upon the Festetics Palace, which is the country house that we ended up using for the Little Palace, is that one of our producers had shot there before and recommended that I go take a look,” Gant says. “This place was a few hours’ drive outside of Budapest. I hit the road with the location manager, and when we got there, almost immediately, I thought, this is going to work. It had the sort of Baroque architecture and almost fairy tale like quality to it. It wasn't exactly the same as the Catherine Palace [Bardugo had referenced], but it definitely was reminiscent of that architecture.”
The production shot at the location for close to four weeks and utilized a number of its spaces. “I found a lot of incredible interiors in there, my favorite of which was [the character] General Kirigan's war room, which was a beautiful wood paneled room with gold and silver inlay,” Gant says. “The building was built in the mid-1700s, I think it was built by successive generations of the same family and was eventually finished around 1890. So, it was perfect for the period we were trying to explore and gave us pretty much everything we were looking for within those sets.”
And what the space didn’t provide, a bit of set-design magic was able to achieve. “When we're creating a scene and we're trying to design a certain look, you always want to bring things in,” Gant says. “You always want to change the look of it slightly in some way or other, so you have to find smart ways of bringing those interventions in.”
For Shadow and Bone, that meant changing a black-and-white checkerboard marble floor with vinyl squares to create a darker room and, in another room, hiding lighting inside columns to provide illumination without hanging a lighting rig overhead. Green screens were used in some cases to create geographic connections, but more often Gant used what he calls “the sorts of tricks you learn over time by working in and out of these buildings.”
Festetics Palace also wasn’t the only location the production relied on. For the Grand Palace, which in the series is a neighbor for the Little Palace, it used lesser-seen parts of the Buda Castle in Budapest. “It's a lot more imposing and solid in its nature, but I felt that that was a really nice contrast to the Little Palace,” Gant says. “It made the Little Palace feel more whimsical; I wanted the Grand Palace, and in particular the king's particular throne room, to feel much more imposing and imperial.”
Still, it required fancy footwork to connect the two on screen. “We don't see a lot more of the interior of the Grand Palace,” Gant says. “Because in Leigh's story, the Little Palace is supposed to be within sight of the Grand Palace, so when we were shooting in the Festetics Palace, we actually put that in as a visual effects element so we could narratively connect the two buildings in the story.”
Having used historical buildings as much as Shadow and Bone does, Gant still hasn’t had his fill of the process. His dream location? The Houses of Parliament in London.
“I think we've used the Royal Courts of Justice in London, which gets used a lot because it has areas that look similar but have never actually shot in the House of Commons for real, or the House of Lords, or any of Westminster Palace,” he laments. “I'd love to film in there, but every time it comes up as a set, we always end up using other buildings that are similar to try and recreate it.”
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