WHAT’S THE HIGHEST-END S&M riding crop on the market? How far can a cow walk in a day? What makes a floating mountain look ‘‘natural,’’ given that there is no such thing? How much pink is too much pink? If questions like these have not occurred to you while watching a movie, it means that a production designer has done her job by asking them first. The tools of filmmaking may have changed profoundly since King Kong swatted his first toy airplane — along with the expectations of viewers, who now have their own editing software in their pockets. But the designer’s central task — to make the world within the work feel both irresistible and invisible, both unimagined and instantly imaginable — has not.
Transcendent production design isn’t just about getting surfaces right, any more than great acting is just memorizing words. It’s about translating writers’ and directors’ intentions into a crystallized universe that’s both visceral and rich with meaning, telling parts of the story that even the best actors can’t. Think of the weirdly realistic theme park design in ‘‘Jurassic Park,’’ and what its fossilized columns and thatched roofs convey about not just the character who created it but also about the human obsession with reproducing nature. That isn’t Steven Spielberg’s symbolism; it’s the invention of designer Rick Carter, who just finished his 10th movie as a production designer with the director. ‘‘Rick helps me better understand the subtext of the stories I’m telling,’’ Spielberg says. ‘‘I’ll say to him, ‘just make it look really cool,’ and he’ll say to me, ‘What if we’re the only two people who know why it’s going to come out this cool?’ ’’
Steve McQueen, director of ‘‘12 Years a Slave,’’ goes so far as to describe his collaborator Adam Stockhausen as ‘‘a narrative filmmaker. He looks at a script and says, ‘What does that mean? Where is he or she within that time and space? How do we want the audience to feel?’ ’’ The intense, codependent nature of the director-designer relationship helps explain why, in an industry of temporary and transactional bonds, it often lasts longer than many marriages — and sometimes overlaps with them. ‘‘You understand what the director is looking for,’’ says Catherine Martin, who has done production design for all five of her husband Baz Luhrmann’s full-length films. ‘‘You are also able to say, with love, ‘I don’t agree.’ ’’ An auteur’s designer has his ear, and becomes his eyes and hands. Directors might get all the glory, but without designers they’d be flying blind.
You might argue that in an image-obsessed — and, as importantly, image-savvy — culture, production designers are, more than ever, the soul of a film. Today’s designer needs to stay one step ahead of an audience that already lives in a predesigned world, both on screen and in real life, and whose primary visual references for places often come from the movies. (We see Manhattan and think of ‘‘Manhattan’’; we see Vienna and remember ‘‘Before Sunrise.’’) To be alive now is to be in a constant state of visual déjà vu. So what do we want from movies? Not curation but creation — the invention of images above all. Actors come and go (and might one day disappear entirely). Writing and plot are necessary but never sufficient. But production designers are the essential makers of the movie; they use tools ancient and modern, glaringly obvious or masterfully hidden, to compel us to look at something new. They are artists who shape what we imagine and, therefore, how we see.
THE BRIEF HISTORY of the craft can be roughly divided into three generations. The first formally credited production designer to be widely known was William Cameron Menzies, for ‘‘Gone With the Wind’’ in 1939. Menzies’s Technicolor spectacle was the high-water mark of studio set design — everything from Tara’s mansion to a burning Atlanta was built on David O. Selznick’s studio lot. One of Menzies’s students, Richard Sylbert, went on to make ‘‘Chinatown’’ in an era (the 1970s) obsessed with authenticity and grit; as much as possible was shot on location in the Los Angeles area. Sylbert, in turn, taught the young Rick Carter, maker of the computer-enhanced spectacles of our own era, from ‘‘Jurassic Park’’ to ‘‘Avatar.’’ Carter says that Sylbert saw what was coming 30 years ago: ‘‘He said, ‘Kid, it looks like you’ll be heading into the digital realm.’ ’’ It’s a realm in which computers have replaced many specialized craftspeople, only to make the set designers who craft our collective visual fantasies more important than ever. ‘‘As more advanced digital technology becomes available, there is an even greater need for production designers who will have increasing degrees of control over every nuance of the sets and scenics,’’ Spielberg says. ‘‘People with really deep, probing imaginations.’’
These days, moviemakers have the luxury of choosing elements from all three approaches — set, location and visual effects. The Italian designer Dante Ferretti, who grew up sneaking out to his hometown cinema (‘‘it was like ‘Cinema Paradiso,’ ’’ he says), worked with Fellini, Pasolini and Zeffirelli before becoming a collaborator of Martin Scorsese. ‘‘Fellini did everything on set [at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios] — everything looks fake,’’ Ferretti says. It made sense to a designer who’d grown up enchanted by movies whose visible seams forced the viewer to collaborate in the creative process. Ferretti strives for something realer, but also takes pride in the artifice of his (more technically advanced) artistry: He built the 17th-century Nagasaki of Scorsese’s ‘‘Silence’’ from scratch in Taiwan, and erected the ‘‘Gangs of New York’’ ’s Civil War-era slums at Cinecittà, to achieve Scorsese’s stylized brand of historical fiction. The results are hyper-realistic — based, of course, on months of in-depth research — but they also uniquely fulfill Scorsese’s visions: sparse and agonized in ‘‘Silence,’’ dirty and expressionistic in ‘‘Gangs.’’
Portfolio: Set Designers
Clarissa Bonet
If the contemporary production designer has a paramount goal, it might be verisimilitude. Specifically, does one strive for it, or instead try to achieve a deliberate artificiality? Or should one combine the two to achieve that particular sense of uncanniness that only the movies can project? Stockhausen, a former theater set designer who has worked with Wes Anderson, embraces both approaches. He took naturally to Anderson’s precise framing, spatial economy and high-toned, winking confabulations — he squeezed about a dozen sets into a building in Görlitz, Germany, for the defiantly, dazzlingly fake ‘‘Grand Budapest Hotel.’’ But for ‘‘12 Years a Slave,’’ visual effects were used to create something that felt not just real but historically accurate; he built a set steamship that was then placed digitally into the sea — all in the service of preserving a key transition scene that the studio would have otherwise cut for budgetary reasons. ‘‘How he did it, I don’t know to this day — I’m just very grateful,’’ McQueen says.
Then there’s the difficulty of making one place look like another, relying on the sense that the way we see or remember a famous location often comes down to a few small visual elements. Judy Becker — who was responsible for the production design of Ryan Murphy’s ‘‘Feud’’ and is now working on the director’s ‘‘American Crime Story’’ season — tends to alter just one or two key details: placing neon signs atop an L.A. boulevard’s median strip to make it resemble New York City through a wet diner window, for example, or adding a security gate and a rolling safety ladder to a window to make the interior of a Hancock Park mansion look like Geraldine Page’s Manhattan flat. There’s a science to the art of this particular fakery, the way the brain builds a gestalt world around selected details. Digital tricks help Becker and others in postproduction, but not until she’s figured out a way to nudge the audience into willing belief. No special effect could replace her understanding of how accordion gates or blurred neon light up our ‘‘old Manhattan’’ neurons; in order to manipulate the eye, you must first have an understanding of our associative visual vocabulary, and in order to take advantage of a well-known reference, you must first be able to identify it.
The same was true for designer David Wasco and his wife and collaborator, Sandy Reynolds-Wasco, a set decorator, while creating ‘‘La La Land,’’ even though they shot L.A. as itself. The director Damien Chazelle wanted to alchemize the city’s present-day studios, freeways and vistas into an aria to the city’s original spirit. One of the couple’s locations was the actual Warner Bros. studio lot, but they still built out sets — a prototypical model street and a coffee shop — in order to evoke the lush movie musicals of the past: a Hollywood movie about the magic of Hollywood movies evoking a Hollywood of the popular imagination shaped by its own movies. As Wasco says, ‘‘It was heavily manipulated, painted and propped like a Jacques Demy movie.’’
But of all the challenges to meet, these production designers say, is not the constraints of the medium, budgets or directors’ schedules — it’s the ability to create a universe without leaving a footprint in the frame. Verisimilitude, after all, is a kind of invisibility. Production design is ‘‘not design for design’s sake,’’ Becker says. ‘‘When my attention is drawn away from the story and into the design, that’s not a good design.’’ David Wasco’s definition of truly great work is similar: ‘‘It’s when I get taken away and forget that I’m watching a movie.’’ Technological advances only make that mission more important. Carter believes that one of the next big leaps, into ‘‘synthetic actors,’’ will only happen when ‘‘you actually believe them, as opposed to just admire them,’’ and production designers will no doubt play a huge role in that achievement. Art doesn’t have to imitate life, any more than ‘‘Chinatown’’ or ‘‘Avatar’’ or ‘‘Moonrise Kingdom’’ does, but great designers make it feel like life all the same — or, preferably, a better version of it.
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