Apple TV Plus’ Silo needed to build the world’s most perfect set of stairs

If you ask Silo star Rebecca Ferguson how many stairs she climbed during production – well, it’s too many.

“30,000 a day? I don’t know,” she laughs. “The team – the number of stairs everyone has climbed is just insane. We are in good shape!”

For a different show and a different set, this would be seen as overkill. But on Apple TV Plus’ Silo, Hugh Howey’s adaptation of the Silo book series, the Central Staircase and Its Thousands of Stairways is more than just “really one of the main characters.” It is the things that determine the life and appearance of the whole world.

The series is set in (where else?) an underground silo, where some 10,000 people live, generations after the Earth became uninhabitable. There are hundreds of levels in the silo and transportation between floors is entirely on foot. That’s one thing if you’re only going down a few floors a day, and quite another if you have to traverse dozens of floors, or even the whole thing from top to bottom. Traveling the whole thing can be a pilgrimage for days, which also makes it a very rare feat; it is enough to separate (ayyyyy) entire sections of the community, and perfect for allowing conspiracy to fester.

In the show’s universe, the design of the silo is very special (and, predictably, a mystery left by the enigmatic “founders” that will be unraveled over time. Silo). But these first few episodes had to sell the audience a very specific reorientation of the reality of a world made up entirely of one vertical building, and one showrunner Graham Yost wanted to get it just right.

“It was incredibly difficult to build,” says Yost, crediting production designer Gavin Bocquet for coming up with the design of the silo, the first thing they “really got into” when making the show. “We knew there would be a blue screen involved, and you could move a blue screen to sell it [and] dress it in a certain way to make it look like a certain part of the silo. You could recover it, but that would take days or weeks.

“But the stairs themselves never change. […] And this design was fantastic.”

The design of the set is surprisingly intuitive: there are three staircases, built in a refrigerated warehouse about an hour outside London. The stairs themselves represent each of the different floors the characters are on as they try to unravel the intrigue they’re entangled in, and with so many stairs, the actors can actually go down and up as needed. It is natural, as Howey points out, enormous. “You walk into this set and it’s like, Are you trying to prepare for the end times? Why are you building this?”

Image: Courtesy of Apple

Image: Courtesy of Apple

Image: Apple TV Plus

But at every stage, Yost and Howey wanted the silo and its world to feel plausible, even a little at kind of like something people can actually relate to.

“We would think, how would this really work? How would you build that?” Yost asks. That meant there were little details everywhere, often details the camera didn’t even notice. “Alleys where people live – would they just be smooth walls? And it’s like no, they’d like parts to pop out and be recessed and have separate levels within a level because they don’t want people to go crazy right away; you need some variation in the shape, so it’s not just smooth lines.

“And that ended up being a more attractive-looking design. And yet it’s also a bit claustrophobic – well, that works because sometimes we want that feeling of claustrophobia. So in a way, form followed function.”

although SiloBarely having time to get into the first two episodes – there’s a conspiracy going on, a murder, and perhaps even more nefarious forces in the underground society – the stairs are the hallmark that comes to define every part of the show’s world. They can make or break everything from transport to danger and everything in between. Like New York in it Sex and the city, Silo‘s kicks are a bit of a character in their own right, and one that puts each of the players to the test in the show’s mystery. They are a concrete behemoth, always at the center of the action. And just like the citizens of the silo, you will see many of them.

The first two episodes of Silo streaming now on Apple TV Plus. New episodes come out every Friday.