The Modernist Interior as Criminal Signifier
Across Hindi crime films of the 1970s, the villain's space follows a consistent grammar: clean geometry, imported materials, low-slung furniture and the deliberate absence of anything domestic. These interiors borrow the visual language of modernism — open-plan rooms, recessed lighting, hard surfaces — and redirect its connotations. Where modernism in its original context signified progress and democratic design, transplanted into a crime thriller it reads as money without legitimacy, sophistication purchased rather than earned.
The 1978 Don, shot largely in and around Mumbai, works within this convention at a budget that requires economy. Don's base of operations is dressed to suggest luxury rather than demonstrating it — suggestion achieved through selective detail, a characteristic of the era's production design. The colour palette skews dark, surfaces are kept uncluttered, and sight lines are arranged so that Don himself is always framed with space around him: authority made spatial.
The 2006 remake, directed by Farhan Akhtar, expands the geography considerably. Kuala Lumpur replaces Mumbai as the primary location, and the production design works the actual modernist skyline and interiors of that city into the fabric of the film. The villain's operational spaces now include glass-walled towers and concrete surfaces that are genuinely contemporary, not merely implied. Criminal wealth here is visualised through real luxury architecture rather than dressed sets, which changes the register from suggestion to assertion. The locations guide explores how much this shift in shooting geography does for the world the film inhabits.
The 2011 continuation, Don 2, moves further into Europe — Berlin and beyond — and the lair-logic follows suit. Industrial spaces, brutalist interiors and bank vaults carry the modernist-as-criminal shorthand into a harder, colder key. The production design aligns with the sequel's generally more severe tone.
What holds across all three films is the underlying principle: the criminal headquarters must look like money, and money in this genre looks like the absence of clutter, the presence of clean line, and the studied removal of anything warm. The modernist interior is not neutral. In Don's world, it is an argument.