Uli Hanisch
“When Space Becomes the Narrative”
Born in Nuremberg in 1967, Uli Hanisch is a German production designer and art director whose career extends across more than three decades of European and international filmmaking and is distinguished by a persistent engagement with cinema as a spatial, architectural, and material practice. Trained initially in graphic arts in Düsseldorf, Hanisch entered the world of film in 1989 through his collaboration with Christoph Schlingensief on radical experimental projects such as The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990), an encounter that situated his early cinematic thinking within a context of provocation, improvisation, and aesthetic risk, and which decisively shaped his understanding of visual storytelling long before his work expanded into large-scale studio productions.
Uli Hanisch.
“We had no budget and improvised everything, but I immediately fell in love with the process of filmmaking.”
This formative period of experimental practice shaped Hanisch’s attitude toward uncertainty as a creative force and informed his later approach to production design, in which intuition, risk, and visual invention remained central values even as budgets, crews, and production scales increased. Moving through the 1990s, he carried this openness into a wide range of European productions, working within art departments on films by directors such as Enki Bilal and Peter Greenaway while also designing German feature films with filmmakers including Leander Haußmann, Oliver Hirschbiegel, and Sönke Wortmann, as well as shaping the visual environments of films associated with Helge Schneider, where comedy, satire, and stylisation demanded a precise yet flexible manipulation of cinematic space.
“There was nobody around who knew what to do. We were all absolute beginners. Pretending to know what to do is very important.”
A decisive shift toward international visibility occurred with the beginning of Hanisch’s long-term collaboration with Tom Tykwer in 1996, a partnership that would culminate in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), produced by Bernd Eichinger, a film whose sensorial density and historical intensity required a form of production design capable of rendering atmosphere itself as narrative substance. The recognition Hanisch received for this work, including the Bavarian Film Award, the German Film Award, and the European Film Academy’s Prix d’Excellence for Best Production Design, confirmed his position as one of the leading figures in contemporary European production design and marked his transition into internationally financed productions such as The International and genre-driven projects like Season of the Witch.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 2006.
„It all begins with reading a script and understanding the story, as well as analyzing, thinking, and talking to producers and directors. If the project is a period piece, the first step is to research that specific time and place. From that, I develop a visual concept. Based on my visual ideas, I decide what kind of visual story I want to tell, and I think about how to manifest it.“
In 2011, Hanisch contributed to Cloud Atlas, designing three distinct segments of the film’s complex, multi-layered narrative, a task that demanded an acute sensitivity to shifts in time, geography, and cinematic language within a single overarching structure, and for which he received the German Film Award for Best Production Design alongside a nomination from the Art Directors Guild in Los Angeles. His later work extended into serialized storytelling with the Berlin segment of the Netflix series Sense8 and returned to intimate historical drama with the American arthouse production In Secret, shot in Belgrade and Budapest.
„I don’t have a specific filmmaker, artist, or individual that I can think of, but I am heavily influenced by the 1920s art scene. Walking through museums at a young age, I fell in love with all the German painters from the 20s, especially German Dadaists. Dadaists were much more radical than any other artists at the time, and they addressed serious subject matters while making jokes about them. I always related to that because humor is an important aspect of my life and my work. I’m not able to take things too seriously. I’d rather laugh about something than worry about it. That’s what the Dadaists did.”
Cloud Atlas, 2011.
A significant expansion of Hanisch’s work for television began in 2016 with the period series Babylon Berlin, produced for SKY and ARD and directed by Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten, and Achim von Borries, a project that demanded sustained visual coherence across multiple seasons and resulted in a lasting architectural contribution to German film production through the development of the permanent backlot street Neue Berliner Straße at Studio Babelsberg. This work extended the role of production design beyond individual films into the infrastructural fabric of contemporary European cinema.
„Any professional production designer would answer that you walk through a city and scout locations or analyze architecture. But funny enough, I’m not into that because I’m not really interested in architecture or design. I think I have more of a tendency to look around and observe people. But might find this kind of anti-place, I think is fascinating and shows the dynamics of Berlin.“
Throughout his career, Hanisch has consistently articulated an interest in spaces that exist beyond the immediate focus of representation, explaining that his attention often turns to the environments behind the visible stage of social order, places where structures loosen and behavior becomes unstable, a perspective that has shaped his recurring focus on transitional and backstage spaces across his filmography.
Hanisch’s work on the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit (2020) highlights his ability to translate psychological states into spatial form, as the series relies on production design to reflect the protagonist’s inner discipline, isolation, and gradual ascent. It comes as no surprise that he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Period or Fantasy Program. Through a careful orchestration of institutional interiors, private rooms, and international tournament spaces, his designs articulate shifts in control and self-definition, using restraint rather than spectacle. In The Queen’s Gambit, production design functions as a subtle narrative structure, supporting long-form storytelling while anchoring the series’ historical atmosphere and emotional precision.
“That’s where the real story happens, behind the stage where everything is messy and crazy, and people are hysterical.”
The Queen’s Gambit, 2020.
Alongside his professional practice, Hanisch has maintained a sustained commitment to film education, lecturing at film schools across Germany and Europe since 2001 and, since 2018, serving as Professor of Production Design at the International Film School Cologne, where he emphasizes production design as a narrative, conceptual, and collaborative discipline. Living and working in Berlin, Uli Hanisch continues to articulate a vision of cinema in which space does not merely frame action but actively generates meaning, affirming production design as a form of authorship that shapes how stories are felt, structured, and remembered.