Production Designers
Interviews - Production Designers
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Personal Effects: Boots Riley and His Collaborators on Crafting I Love Boosters
Boots Riley BTS on I Love Boosters
Boots Riley has directed two movies and one TV show over the past decade, but he’s been telling stories through music for more than 30 years. “I usually think about my songs the same way I think about movies,” said… Read more
“What Does a Thing Provide You With?”: Amanda Kramer on the Props and Interiors in By Design
By Design
“I have never seen the problem with fetishizing objects and fetishizing people as though they were objects,” director Amanda Kramer tells me in a conversation ahead of the release of her latest film, By Design. “It doesn’t mean we don’t… Read more
Paris, Remembered: Production Designer Katia Wyszkop on “Nouvelle Vague”
Matthieu Penchinat, Guillaume Marbeck and Aubry Dullin in Nouvelle Vague Photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez/Courtesy of Netflix
In setting out to make Nouvelle Vague, his effervescent ode to the birth of French New Wave cinema, Richard Linklater knew from the start that realizing his artistic ambition—to dramatize Jean-Luc Godard’s making of Breathless—would involve revisiting both the film’s… Read more
“We Couldn’t Find that Exact Beige — It Was a Real Struggle”: Production Designer Louisa Schabas on Designing Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language
Universal Language
Driving around Montreal on a gray November day with Universal Language writer-director Matthew Rankin, production designer Louisa Schabas noticed an elementary school with a row of stark, monolithic concrete walls facing the playground. The slabs were at an angle, allowing… Read more
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History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on The Brutalist
In constructing The Brutalist, his epic of assimilation and survival, Brady Corbet sought a sense of scale large enough to reflect the ambitious vision of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who flees to America with hopes of building a better future. As Tóth works to reclaim his life, legacy and marriage to wife Erzsébet after being forcibly separated from all three, this decades-spanning immigrant saga—which Corbet directed and produced from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold—settles in Philadelphia, where Tóth is offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit at a steep psychological cost. For production […]
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Behind Closed Doors: Production Designer Kevin Thompson on Maestro
In making Maestro, his magisterial portrait of Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper set out to explore the life of the legendary American conductor and composer through the lens of his complicated relationship with wife Felicia Montealegre, which lasted from the 1940s until her death in 1978. Depicting their love story across four decades, two engagements and three children, Cooper—who directed, co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the biopic—often approached Maestro “as if he was conducting a musical symphony,” according to production designer Kevin Thompson. Envisioning its story in movements, Cooper opted for period shifts in color and black-and-white (both in a 1.33 […]
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“450 Resin-Coated Pieces of Plastic”: Production Designer Ethan Tobman and Mark Mylod on The Menu
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. Ethan Tobman describes production design as the art of “visually interpreting the world of a director through emotional architecture.” Below, he and director Mark Mylod discuss their film The Menu and going from reference images on the wall to a fully realized world structured to best absorb the viewer emotionally while furthering the narrative (along with meticulously crafting a last-minute birthday cake […]
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Reject Departmental Sectarianism: Production Designer Akin McKenzie and Writer-Director Terence Nance
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. At the heart of production designer Akin McKenzie and writer-director Terence Nance’s long-running collaboration is a mutual recognition of the importance of, as Nance puts it, “creative execution that flows from emotional framework.” The two first worked together on the Peabody-award-winning HBO show Random Acts of Flyness and went on to create Space Jam: A New Legacy and award-winning commercial campaigns for […]
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“You Provide Everything That’s in Every Shot”: Production Designer Sara K White and Director Susanna Fogel
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. In the first episode of The Wilds, one of the main characters is introduced via a quick beat of her smoking a cigarette on her family’s back deck with a nicotine-stained, pink flamingo ashtray nestled on the rail nearby. Sara K White, the show’s production designer, recalls: “We were working to build out Dot’s character—a girl who doesn’t come from money and […]
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“We Had to Row a Kayak to the Camera Truck to Save the Film Cans”: Director Derek Cianfrance and Production Designer Inbal Weinberg
Ahead of the launch of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of meetings between directors and production designers in which they discuss the particularities about their working dynamics as well as how production design can elevate the vision of a filmmaker. Derek Cianfrance and Inbal Weinberg first collaborated on Blue Valentine, which set the stage for exploration and discovery. They continued to experiment with environment and process on such projects as The Place Beyond The Pines and I Know This Much Is True. Here they discuss the delicate balance of artifice and authenticity […]
