The Founder‘s Production Designer on Building McDonald’s & More
A semi-fictionalized account of the takeover of the original McDonald’s franchise by milkshake salesman and the man typically referred to as its “founder,” Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), John Lee Hancock’s The Founder opened this past weekend. It is notable for several things, of which some, like Michael Keaton’s performance as ambitiously malevolent Kroc, have been getting lots of press, while others, like its thoroughness in depicting an accurate slice of the 1950s,
How Hacksaw Ridge‘s Production Designer Transformed Australia into Okinawa
Hacksaw Ridge Production designer Barry Robison has worked on films in Australia so often that he acquired dual-citizenship. Being familiar with the area gave him an advantage when working with Australian director, Mel Gibson. The setting, however, was unforgiving for a period piece set in America and Japan. Robison literally reshaped the land to take audiences back 70 years and thousands of miles away. The film garnered three Golden Globes nominations, and his rigorous research and scrupulous attention to detail earned him an Australian Academy Cinema Television Arts (AACTA) award for Best Production Design.
Hidden Figures Production Designer’s Subliminal Storytelling
Hidden Figures tells a quintessentially American story—a true story, no less—that has gone more or less untold until now. The film, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's book of the same name, tells the true story of three brilliant African-American women who helped NASA change the course of the Space Race between America and the Soviet Union. Those women were Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), they served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell) into orbit,
Production Designer Seth Reed Takes on Psychic Drama Shut Eye
With temperatures dropping, Hulu has your winter binge watching needs covered. Shut Eye, set in sunny southern California, dropped last Wednesday and the psychic drama sizzles. Production designer Seth Reed created the show’s sets with one big challenge you wouldn’t predict.
Passengers Production Designer Takes Trip to Outer Space
Two actors and one space ship command center stage in Passengers, the science fiction star vehicle opening December 21. Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt hold up their end of the entertainment bargain as travelers on the Starship Avalon who wake up way too early during their 120-year voyage to a distant planet. To craft a backdrop equal to the performances, British production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas challenged himself to infuse the story's familiar trapped-in-space premise with fresh visuals.
Production Designer Stuart Craig on Fantastic Beasts and How They Came to Be
In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Hogwarts graduate Newt (Eddie Redmayne) crashes his way through New York in 1926, fresh off a steamer ship from London, in hot pursuit of his various ill-trained magical beasts, whom he just can’t seem to keep trapped in a suitcase. After the case gets accidentally swapped with other nondescript brown luggage, Newt’s predicament grows, given that only one of the bags contains an entire fantastic beast-sanctuary.
Production Designer Ruth De Jong Talks Manchester by the Sea
When we caught up with production designer Ruth De Jong, she was on a ranch, outside of Atlanta, in the middle of a project. Considering her golden touch (De Jong has worked with Paul Thomas Anderson, Terrence Malick, and most recently Kenneth Lonergan), I briefly wondered which visionary she was working with now. She was actually working on a Super Bowl commerical.
De Jong's career has been a study in good taste. She's worked on multiple projects with Anderson,
Oscar Watch: Designing the Look of Loving With the DP, Costumer & Production Designer
In telling the true story of a white man and his black wife, director Jeff Nichols nails the late fifties period with uncanny precision. His Oscar-buzzed Loving (opening wide Nov. 11) begins in 1958 when police arrest Richard and Mildred Loving at their own Virginia home in the middle of the night and throw them in jail for being a mixed race couple. Banished from Virginia, Richard and Mildred (played with slow-burn intensity by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) decide to fight back and eventually win a landmark 1967 Supreme Court case declaring all anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
How Arrival’s Production Designer Created an Alien Language
Oscar-nominated production designer Patrice Vermette was tasked with creating an alien language for the new movie Arrival — and although he started by studying the languages used in other films about alien invasion, he ended up “reverse engineering” the language that Amy Adams uses to communicate with the invaders in the new film (in theaters Nov. 10). Vermette took a feelings-first approach to crafting the alien language by thinking about what it said to the audience without words.
Designated Survivor‘s Production Designer on Creating a Dystopian D.C.
Production designer Cabot McMullen has created the settings for television series from Saturday Night Live to Scrubs, Smash, and Cougar Town. Before the audience hears a line of dialog, sometimes before they even see a character, McMullen has to let us know immediately what world we are in. That is not just identifying the story as gritty reality or heightened humor or fantasy;
It’s All About the Doors: Production Designers at Comic-Con
“These images are more widely recognized than Michelangelo’s David or the Parthenon,” John Muto (Home Alone) said as he introduced the members of the production designers panel with a series of clips from films like The Avengers and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and television series like True Blood and Constantine.
Before you hear a word of dialog or learn a character’s name,
Emmy Watch: How Fargo Production Designer Re-Created ’70s Prairie Noir
Coming off 18 Emmy nominations and three wins in 2014, Fargo posed a frosty challenge to production designer Warren Alan Young as he tackled the limited series' second season. (They announce the nominees for this year’s Emmy Awards at 11:30 a.m. EST.) For the show, set in wintry 1979 Minnesota and filmed in Calgary, Young needed to conjure period-perfect storefronts, kitchens, cars and diners tailored precisely to creator Noah Hawley’s prairie noir vision. "Noah wanted us to create a world that looked,
The Man Behind the Brilliant Sets on Key & Peele & Time Traveling Bong
Gary Kordan was the production designer for the entire Key & Peele comedy series, the legendary sketch comedy show that was not just brilliantly performed, but ambitiously produced, from the costumes and sets to the direction. Kordan also helped build multiple eras for Time Traveling Bong, a three-part miniseries starring Ilana Glazer and Paul Downs from Broad City. Kordan created sets for a dozen different times in history,
SXSW 2016: A Q&A With the Writer/Director, Production Designer & Producer of American Fable
Many first time directors might find themselves tempted to make their debut entrance into the world of filmmaking with simple, festival-ready fare, but for Anne Hamilton, the writer and director of American Fable, that approach just wouldn’t do.
Standing as easily one of the most visually striking films to play at this year’s SXSW, American Fable is what Hamilton & Co. have labeled as a “fairytale thriller”
Mad Max: Fury Road Earns 6 Oscars, Crushing Technical Categories
It's not all that surprising that Mad Max: Fury Road did so well at the Oscars last night, winning six Oscars, the most for any film. George Miller's sand blasted chase epic was a technical marvel, reminding viewers what a thrill good, old fashioned stunts are. Although it's a mistake to consider the film solely a marvel of practical effects—there was a lot of great special effects required, they were simply more subtle than you typically get in a film of this size.
Oscars 2016: Spotlight Surprises With Best Picture Win
A genuinely surprising Oscars wrapped with Tom McCarthy's Spotlight winning Best Picture over equally likely contenders The Revenant and The Big Short. Mad Max: Fury Road cleaned up the technical awards, which wasn't surprising, but Mark Rylance beating out Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor sure was. Despite five nominations, Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn't pick up a single award (but droids C-3PO,
Know Your Oscar Nominees: Production Design
And we're back (again) for part VI of our "Know Your Oscar Nominees" technical guide. So far we've covered the short film category (that's live action, animation and documentary), visual effects, editing, costume design, and sound mixing and editing. Now it's time to look at production design.
If there’s an overwhelming theme that the films nominated for best achievement in production design share,
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies‘s Production Designer Melds High Society With the Undead
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the film adaptation of the novel adaptation of Jane Austen’s iconic tome of class, manners, marriage, and love, opens this week. Starring Lily James as heroine Elizabeth Bennett and Sam Riley as Mr. Darcy, these two have something else on which to focus their fraught, unlikely courtship: the undead. As a zombie disease sweeps through the bucolic British countryside and London walls itself off from the plague,
The Real Effects Used to Simulate the Raging Sea in The Finest Hours
The Finest Hours tells the incredible true story of a daring rescue mission conducted by a handful of men from the Chatham, Massachusetts, Coast Guard when a huge storm struck New England on February 8, 1952. The storm ripped two 500-foot oil tankers in half, leaving their crews stranded at sea. Despite hurricane-force winds and 60-foot waves Bernie Webber (played by Chris Pine) successfully skippers a 36-foot wooden lifeboat, with a destroyed compass,
Production Designer Jon Billington Talks Alien Invasions in The 5th Wave
Director J Blakeson brings Rick Yancey’s novel The 5th Wave to the big screen this week, a blockbuster version of the popular young adult title. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as Cassie, a suburban teenager fighting for her life while searching for her younger brother, taken by aliens in the fifth of a series of deadly attacks on humanity. The unseen alien invaders, creative for their type, have explored a variety of ways to kill off humankind during the first four waves,
