Co-producer Karin Shiel and producer Monique Walton discuss how they scouted locations for their heartfelt, prison-set film. By Yasmin Omar
When an acting class of imprisoned students is invited to imagine their perfect place in the moving carceral drama Sing Sing, for a fleeting moment they are transported back outside to picnics in Prospect Park, to cherry ice lollies on neighbourhood stoops. In the absence of a location manager, the film’s co-producer Karin Shiel and producer Monique Walton were similarly tasked with finding perfect places – only they had to will theirs into reality. Sing Sing, which takes its name from a maximum-security New York prison, shows incarcerated men coming together to mount a play as part of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a real-life programme that helps people develop transferable skills during their sentence. A quietly affecting Colman Domingo, playing the group’s compassionate de facto leader Divine G, heads up an ensemble of largely non-professional actors with first-hand experiences of the judicial system. The resulting film is a hopeful, heartwarming tale about finding dignity behind bars.
Naturally, the producers’ first instinct was to shoot within Sing Sing itself, where RTA was founded, though this proved impossible. ‘We did try, we did want to get access, it’s just very, very hard,’ Shiel explains. ‘Sometimes you can go in on a documentary-style format, but to do a narrative film inside a prison is really difficult.’ The compromise solution was to capture the facility’s specific, thematically resonant exteriors. Sing Sing is one of the only prisons in the world bisected by a commuter railway, whose free movement weighs heavily on the convicted population (‘It’s a profound thing that the men inside can hear and see that train’). On the first day of production, the director Greg Kwedar and cinematographer Pat Scola travelled up and down the Hudson on a ‘pretty turbulent’ boat ride, filming the Metro North tracks, lush vegetation and birds perched in coils of barbed wire as a means of emphasising the outside world’s apathy to the imprisoned.
Sing Sing (2023)
For the Sing Sing stand-in – which required sparse, cold, unwelcoming interiors and plentiful natural light – Shiel and Walton scouted decommissioned prisons that would allow for more flexibility than a working institution. There were some on the Canadian border (too far away), one on Staten Island (not authentic enough), but they quickly settled on Hudson Valley’s Downstate Correctional Facility and its anonymous, bland spaces that didn’t require many cosmetic changes. ‘The cells were tiny and very close together,’ Shiel says. ‘They don’t have bars, just solid steel doors with a little hole in them, which worked out beautifully and really accentuated the claustrophobia.’ The cells may have been small, but Downstate is a massive 558,000 square feet with a confusing, maze-like structure designed to minimise the risk of jailbreaks. ‘Our crew were clocking up to 10 miles a day walking around the prison,’ Walton says. ‘The spaces were so far apart and there were all these long hallways.’
Sing Sing (2023)
The excessive walking was made more uncomfortable by the sweltering July 2022 temperatures. ‘There was no air-conditioning at Downstate, which is the case in prisons. All of the sweat you see on screen is real. And then some,’ Shiel says. ‘The conditions were harsh – we put ice packs on people to keep them from overheating.’ Being there was emotionally, as well as physically, taxing for a lot of the cast, 85% of whom were formerly incarcerated at Sing Sing, and had passed through Downstate back when it was an intake prison. ‘We talked to several therapists about how to create a safe space,’ Walton explains. ‘And we had a therapist on set who had worked with a lot of the cast because he was a volunteer at Sing Sing. The fact that everyone was having this reunion became a way of healing.’
Sing Sing (2023)
The producers’ safeguarding duties also grew to encompass the Downstate furniture. ‘The place had been sold and, while we were there, they were pulling out fittings and fixtures, which was stressful,’ Shiel says. ‘We were begging them, “Please leave the tables in the mess hall for an extra day!”’ Walton adds. As well as the prison, the other key location in Sing Sing is the rehearsal space where the RTA members prepare for their show. In the interest of protecting the cast and crew’s mental wellbeing, Shiel and Walton had cannily planned the shoot to end in this more hospitable environment.
Sing Sing (2023)
They scouted a number of schools and churches in Upstate New York. ‘We were trying to find a space that could feel like an oasis inside the prison,’ Walton explains. ‘Our vision was the Sing Sing stage, a theatre inside the bowels of the building that’s very old and cavernous,’ Shiel says. In the end, they landed on Hudson Sports Complex, a dilapidated former boys’ penitentiary (now commonly used for séances), with high ceilings and a suitable stage, while Beacon Hill High School served as the backstage area. Some of Beacon Hill’s students and staff pitched in on Sing Sing, assisting with lighting, making props, collaborating with the art department. The homespun scrappiness you see on screen during the play – cardboard swords, cut-out stars, polystyrene rocks – very much mirrors the production. ‘It was a real community effort,’ Shiel notes. ‘RTA is all about community, vulnerability, honesty and sharing.’
This article originally appeared in the Summer Journal. You can pick up a free copy at your local Curzon cinema while stocks last.
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