(dramatic music) - Usually on a series with the episodes, you'll return to the same sets fairly regularly.
But of course, the very nature of this story, it's a travelogue, and therefore, each episode we're in different places.
The world is dazzling and new and alien to him, and it's so beautifully realized.
- The book goes back to a time when you could first travel around the world, and it's ironic that as we're shooting it, the pandemic created its own headaches for us, like South African flights were canceled altogether for a while.
The number of flights coming in and out of Bucharest is dramatically reduced.
Despite all that, it's wonderful to have such a fantastic international crew with countries uniting despite all of the challenges.
Right from the outset of doing Around the World in 80 Days, we knew it was going to be impossible to physically afford to go to eight countries for the eight episodes.
South Africa was always one of the places we would go to.
Partly because of the weather, because it's got a great filming infrastructure.
But it's just got such a variety of geographies and locations and sets.
First episode we shoot in South Africa is Yamen, so it's the Arabian desert.
And then we do India and Hong Kong, which is a mixture of locations within Cape Town.
And then we go on a Pacific desert island, which is also on the beaches of Cape Town.
- Romania is the other side of the South African coin, so we're using it for the more European episodes, which are less weather dependent.
We're using it as London, as Paris, as Italy, and strangely as the Wild West.
- The sets are incredible.
Sebastian Krawinkel, a fellow German, has done an amazing job designing the sets.
My first day of filming, the whole set was just full of people and animals.
- [Ibrahim] It's incredible.
Even though you know it's just a set, you feel you are in another century.
When I saw the balloon, I thought it was amazing.
All the tiny details are fantastic.
- We've basically converted, you know, previous sets from other shows and modified them to suit 80 Days.
I love our set in Oakland.
Just the transformation from taking it from a biblical set into this beautiful Indian village.
It's incredible to watch the process.
- And there's always a slight element of color in there so that you can distinguish each episode from another.
So for example, for India, we decided to go for orangey colors.
For Italy, we wanted to be green.
For France, we wanted to be blue.
Hong Kong, all white.
- We try to get maximum value on the screen, in every scene, with every location, for every episode.
