vulture on set

Steven Soderbergh Transforms Williamsburg on the Set of The Knick

Hooper Street and Broadway in Brooklyn. Photo by Ramon Palacios-Pelletier Photo: Ramon Palacios-Pelletier

Brooklyn looked a little more artisanal than usual the other week when a South Williamsburg intersection served as the set of Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming Cinemax show The Knick, a period drama ­starring Clive Owen as a doctor at downtown’s Knickerbocker Hospital in the pre-antibiotic early 1900s. “They put dirt down, changed all the signs, and had horses and buggies everywhere,” says photographer Ramon Palacios-­Pelletier, who stumbled upon the shoot by accident when he turned the corner of Hooper Street and Broadway that ­morning. “There were probably around 200 extras in period dress.” Those actors weren’t merely for decoration: “They needed them to block things”—like bystanders in Nikes and the odd twenty-year-old Toyota—“from the camera’s view,” says Palacios-Pelletier. “They didn’t shut down the whole block, so they had to let some traffic through.”

*This article originally appeared in the November 25, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

Steven Soderbergh on the Set of The Knick