Production Designer Paul Harrod on Building Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs
Wes Anderson’s latest caper, Isle of Dogs, premieres today after a warm reception last month as the opening night film at the Berlinale. The film sees Anderson making a return to stop motion animation, following The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and working in both Japanese (the human characters) and English (the canines, who are presumed to be speaking translated dog). A complex set involves a past-futuristic fictional Japanese city, called Megasaki,
How Billions‘ Production Designer Created the World of the Insanely Rich
Three years ago production designer Mike Shaw needed a change of pace from the lowdown penitentiary aesthetic he created for Orange is the New Black. In Showtime series Billions, Dash went the opposite way by designing the deluxe milieu inhabited by super-rich hedge fund shark Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis). “One of the biggest challenges in designing Billions is that a lot of people know what a millionaire’s lifestyle is like,
How the Black Panther Production Designer Rooted the World’s Most Advanced Nation in African Culture
Everyone on the set of Black Panther felt the weight of being a trailblazer. Realizing Wakanda for the screen meant reclaiming a painful history, honoring a rich heritage, and imagining the hope of the future right now. It also has the potential to confirm the demand for more diverse storytelling. It was a challenge that would require the greatest talents of our time to come together. Miraculously, it seems they did.
How Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri‘s Production Designer Fire-Proofed an Entire Location
By the time Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri production designer Inbal Weinberg joined up with Martin McDonagh, the writer-director had already spent months traveling the south in search of a title town. He found it in Sylva, North Carolina. Hired over Skype on the strength of her Americana-themed designs for Frozen River and The Place Beyond the Pines, Weinberg met McDonagh in person for the first time at the Asheville airport,
The Production Designer Who Recreated the Famous Kaczynski Evidence for Manhunt: Unabomber
Mentions of the Unabomber immediately call to mind the deadly postal packages containing explosives and that famous police sketch of the suspect in a hoodie. While working on Manhunt: Unabomber, production designer Erik Carlson realized, however, that the case actually hinged on hundreds of handwritten documents. The eight-episode Discovery Channel miniseries delved into the infamous FBI investigation that eventually resulted in Ted Kaczynski’s arrest. Carlson painstakingly recreated all 17 of the homemade bombs,
Set Decorator Rena DeAngelo Recreates a 1970s Newsroom in Steven Spielberg’s The Post
The Post, Steven Spielberg’s latest film opening December 22nd, recounts the Washington Post’s part in bringing the Pentagon Papers to light, on the heels of the New York Times. For the first time, Spielberg is working together with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, playing the newspaper’s first woman publisher, Katharine Graham, and its editor, Ben Bradlee. Set in the early 1970s, with much of the action taking place in the paper’s colorless newsroom,
Mr. Robot‘s Production Designer on Designing Disintegration in Season 3
From the outset, Mr. Robot and hacker Elliot (Rami Malek) have been barreling toward a doomsday scenario, so fans of the USA Network show, which began Season 3 Wednesday at 10/9 pm, will be happy to see that things are only getting worse. “The theme for Season 3 is ‘Disintegration,'” says production designer Anastasia White, who teamed with show creator Sam Esmail to implement his vision of a chaotic New York City beset by a power outage.
Goodbye Christopher Robin Production Designer on Recreating the World of Winnie-the-Pooh
Seemingly all the world knows A.A. Milne as the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, a bear whose escapades with his coterie of animal friends in the 100 Acre Wood were made up to entertain Milne’s little son, Christopher Robin. Not always known is the fact that Milne suffered from PTSD from his time fighting in World War I, and the 100 Acre Wood is the real life Ashdown Forest, which abuts the property for which the Milne family left behind a glamorous London life,
Production Designer Serves up History in Battle of the Sexes
Oscar-nominated for her production design on American Hustle, which takes place in 1978, Judy Becker also designed The Fighter (set in 1976), Feud (1962) and Hitchcock (1960). Now she’s brought her retro touch to Battle of the Sexes, focused on Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) as she discovers her own sexuality in the run-up to her historic 1973 tennis match against self declared “male chauvinist”
Atomic Blonde Production Designer on Recreating Cold War Berlin
Summer 2017 got its second kickass female lead in David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde. Based on the Cold War-era thriller graphic novel The Coldest City, the film stars Charlize Theron as MI6 spy Lorraine Broughton headed to Berlin in November 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Wall. A fellow undercover MI6 operative has been killed, a death Broughton needs to untangle before all hell can break loose in the imminently reunifying country.
The Man in the High Castle‘s Emmy-Nominated Production Designer on Building a Nightmare America
Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 novel Man in the High Castle imagined the horrors of living in an America where the Allies were defeated in World War II. The series follows Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) who refuses to accept the terrible outcome and believes that things could be another way. Production Designer Drew Boughton has received two Emmy nominations for his harrowing interpretation of a world in which Nazi Germany has seized most of the United States while Imperial Japan controls the west coast.
Key and Peele Production Designer Reflects on a Career of Comedy
Production designer Gary Kordan is setting the scene for some of the funniest shows on television. From instantly iconic sketch comedy to powerhouse sitcoms, Kordan has built backdrops for some of the top comedians in Hollywood. His work adds realism and exceptional detail to outrageous scripts by heavyweights like Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.
“Key and Peele is the gold coin in my pocket as a job in the television industry for a production designer,” Kordan said of the Peabody award winning sketch comedy show.
Comic-Con 2017: Production Designers From Black Panther, Spider-Man: Homecoming & More
“How many of you love the movies because they look so goddamn cool?” Production designer John Muto (Home Alone, River’s Edge) already knew the answer. “The audience doesn’t pay money to sit in the dark and look at drab images.”
Everyone loves movies because they look cool, and that was especially true of the people who came to Muto’s panel on production design. “You know those images that get buried in your lizard brain,” he asked.
How the Genius Production Designer Took Audiences Inside the World of Albert Einstein
The first season of National Geographic’s Genius chronicled the life of a man whose name has become almost synonymous with brilliance – Albert Einstein. The story exposes the personal side of Einstein’s life that his scientific contributions often overshadow in textbooks. Filmed in the Czech Republic, primarily Prague, Genius production designer Jonathan Lee created over 600 sets to take audiences from Einstein’s small Swiss studio apartment to his famed lecture halls and Nazi Germany.
The Wizard of Lies Production Designer on Building Bernie Madoff’s World of Deception
Production designer Laurence Bennett was responsible for creating a visual language for a film without sound, and the results earned him an Oscar nomination. We're talking about Bennet's work on Best Picture winner The Artist, which followed the story of a silent movie star’s life turning upside down after he falls for a young dancer only to witness their careers zoom in opposite directions with the arrival of talking pictures.
While Bennett's currently working on David Simon's
Production Designer Martin Childs on Getting The Crown’s Interiors Royally Right
At an estimated cost of $100 million, the first season of The Crown, Netflix’s historical depiction of the early years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, is the streaming service’s priciest show to date. Yet the settings — Buckingham Palace, Winston Churchill’s Downing Street chambers, broader post-war London — are hardly a representation of purely lavish living. In this restrained and forgiving portrait of the royal family in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
The Amazing Year of Moonlight, Lemonade, and Black Panther Production Designer Hannah Beachler
Production designer Hannah Beachler has produced incredible artwork that led her to a former slave owning plantation in Louisiana where she stood among forty powerful women of color. They danced and cried and shared their stories. Oh, and they listened to Beyoncé sing Freedom a capella on a paper stage Beachler created.
Beyoncé’s triumphant visual album Lemonade splashed into the social conversation almost a year ago. Coming from one of the most influential black women in the world,
The Leftovers Production Designer on Season 3’s Mind-Bending Finish
"It's really hard to create Gary Busey as a blow-up doll," says production designer John Paino, and he should know. For HBO's third and final season of The Leftovers (debuting April 16), Paino oversaw the creation of a 35-foot inflated figure of the toothy celebrity, a major attraction for the Texas spiritual mecca-turned-tourist trap known as Jarden. "The blow-up doll is about this mix of a pop culture sensibility with the beginnings perhaps of some spiritual movement,"
Werner Herzog’s Go-to Production Designer on Salt and Fire
A kidnapped scientist, Laura, (Veronica Ferres) fends for herself on a barren salt flat, the poisonous result of a manmade catastrophe caused by a shady conglomerate owned by her abductor, Matt (Michael Shannon). Inexplicably left behind with her to use up the water supply and sweetly play with legos are two blind little boys, Matt’s sons. Laura’s colleagues (Gael García Bernal and Volker Michalowski) are back at the ranch, a gloomy compound whose staff is never without their balaclavas.
See How They Created the U-Wing in Rogue One
One of the coolest new additions to the rebel air fleet in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was the U-Wing. The U-Wing is described as a sturdy transport and gunship that “must penetrate heavy fire zones to deposit soldiers onto battlefields and then fly air support during dangerous missions against the Empire.” The U-Wing factors heavily into Rogue One—it’s the ship that Jyn and her crew take to Scarif in the final phase of their mission to steal the Death Star plans.
