When Production Design Plays a Supporting Role

We’ve all seen movies with such a dynamic production design that the setting or appearance is often considered an additional character. This may bring to mind the exaggerated or grand truths in the work of stylist auteurs like Tim Burton and Wes Anderson. But a handful of prospective Oscar nominees have built compelling design worlds by delving into working-class realities, particularly the blue-collar struggles to build and maintain a life in an ever-changing America.

These struggles can be seen on water-stained walls, among the brick piles of a bulldozer-ravaged neighborhood, or in the battered carnival tents of old towns. “People,” “West Side Story” and “Nightmare Street.” Below, we talked to the production designers of these films about how they created such serious, lively backdrops.

‘People’

David Gropman

Drama of Stephen KaramAn adaptation of the play, the movie spends an evening with a family whose Thanksgiving gatherings are more inflammatory than festive. Dinner takes place in a Manhattan apartment that has just been home to a young couple, but that’s all that’s new about the place. The paint is peeling, the tiles are missing, the pipes are rumbling. Many apartment-seeking New Yorkers inevitably encountered this type of rental.

Production designer David Gropman, who has also included stage-to-screen adaptations of “Fences” and “August: Osage County,” says he started by inviting Karam to spend time at a friend’s house to get the right feel for this apartment. place outside the city.

Gropman liked the scale of the rooms, the long corridor, and the labyrinthine layout. There they discussed the movie and how a real venue would work. “We talked about the width of the hallway,” Gropman said, “how it goes from one room to the next, where the kitchen sits and how it’s forced into a space that doesn’t need to be a kitchen, what its texture is. The walls are as if they’ve been painted white a million times.”

The circle really drives the story, forcing the characters to bring them together in one room, separating them in others. It’s a brutal setting for the struggles of a financially cramped family that holds grudges and secrets. Gropman and his team built a duplex apartment set at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, with each floor on a different stage. But Gropman said it was important to make the space feel as real as possible so the actors could forget they were on a soundstage and “feel that this is where they should or shouldn’t be. ”

‘West Side Story’

Adam Stockhausen

The 1961 big-screen version of “West Side Story” took to the streets of New York in its live opening and circled areas that had been razed to make way for new buildings, including Lincoln Center. This destruction becomes a plot point Steven Spielberg’s new adaptation of the musical. So, we see Jets and Sharks waging turf wars in a neighborhood that is crumbling before the eyes of residents.

Production designer Adam Stockhausen (who often works on Wes Anderson’s films) stated that he and Spielberg had agreed from the start that most of the film would be shot in and around New York. “Real street, real dirt, real sand, real danger,” he said. In his research, Stockhausen said he stumbled upon an image in a “slum cleanup report” for redevelopment: an aerial shot with a giant red line surrounding the neighborhood. Stockhausen was stunned by the breadth that was to be razed, but using it as a tool to shape the geography of the story.

They decided that the Jets’ territory would have already met the wrecking ball. And they gave the Sharks a space where the same fate was imminent. The noise would be made at a salt shack by the river, and the “Cool” number would be shot on the rickety piers where pieces of wood fell.

They knew they would need a lot of urban space, Stockhausen said: “It’s not like we’re making a small, secret stage on a patio or something,” he said. “These were hundreds of dancers running at full speed into the middle of the street.”

They skipped the Columbus Circle section of the movie because it was “overbuilt and modernized,” Stockhausen said. Instead, they went to northern Manhattan neighborhoods like Washington Heights and spots in the Bronx to find suitable settings. They went to Paterson, NJ for the Jets scene in the middle of the rubble. “There we found these wonderful parking spaces adjacent to a really beautiful period street,” Stockhausen said. “And so that was the essence of where we built the Jets demolition zone.”

‘Nightmare Street’

Tamara Deverell

In Film noir by Guillermo del Toro From a carnival rushing to the big time, the carnival scenes are played out in a color palette with a somewhat muted vibrancy. Its splendor and its filth, life’s tug-of-war on the cycle, appear in every weathered tent, every dark banner. For production designer Tamara Deverell (the television series “Suits” and “Star Trek: Discovery”) it was important to match her design to the moods of the characters and scenes.

He started by building small wooden blocks “almost like a toy” to represent the characters and tents, and “we played with the shape of the carnival to get through the carnival, because that was so important to Guillermo.”

It also explored the carnivals and circuses of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s and the artist’s works. Fred G Johnson“The Picasso of poster art,” as Deverell calls it. He benefited from his work, but made his interpretation less cheerful for this melancholic film.

Then he and his crew built most of the side show sets in a vacant lot north of Toronto. “I approached the whole carnival as a kind of canvas painting,” he said. The fabric for the tents was hand dyed and aged, then shipped to a family business in the Midwest that built them. When the tents were returned, the film crew would paint and wear them some more.

“We wanted a patina that felt timeless because we just rolled around,” she said.

Production, along with the rest of the film industry, had to be halted during the first wave of the pandemic. “When we got back,” Deverell said, “some of the tents were torn and we had to mend the tears. And some of the things we had already prepared were even stale, and that was great.”