Dave Warren

Graduated from art college in North London in 1992.

He began work in the UK film industry as an art assistant for Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti on Interview with a Vampire (1994).
further work followed with John Box (First Knight, 1995), Roy Walker (Scarlet Letter, 1995) and Brian Morris (Evita, 1996), by which point he had become a set draftsman.

His first major movie as an art director was for the visual effects department on Lost in Space (1998) and he then moved into art direction full time.

In this period as an art director, he was able to work with Dante Ferretti again twice, on Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (2007) and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), both movies garnering academy awards for best production design.

After meeting director Terry Gilliam early on in his career, he was asked to participate in the design of the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in 2009, and worked closely with Terry in conceiving multiple environments in CGI, miniature and full-size set. For his work on Imaginarium he shared an Oscar nomination and Bafta nomination with production designer Anastasia Masaro.

He worked again with Terry Gilliam as production designer for the Zero Theorem (2017), and went on to design the feature film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) for Burr Steers and Emerald City, (2017), a ten-hour fantasy series for NBC directed by Tarsem Singh.

His latest movie is Ophelia (2018), a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, directed by Claire McCarthy.

In addition to his film work, Dave was also responsible for set design and exhibition design on Philip Hass’ installation for the Kimbell art gallery in Fort Worth, ‘Butchers, Dragons, Gods and Skeletons’.

More recently he was set designer for the Belgian Vlaamse opera’s critically acclaimed production of Falstaff, directed by Christoph Waltz.

As well as working in the UK he has worked, and continues to work, in Spain, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Morrocco, South Africa and Namibia.