PICTURES,
1967)
When Mrs.
Robinson (Ann
Bancroft) se-
duces Benjamin
(Dustin
Hoffman), she
wears a leopard-
print coat, pro-
viding a visual
commentary on
her predatory
behavior. Frame
Inspired by William Cameron Menzies’s work, Ken Adam has been one of cin-
enlargement.
ema’s most imaginative production designers, designing two films for Stanley Kubrick ( Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon ) and seven of the James Bond films, an enormously popular and influential series. Adam’s work on the first Bond production, Dr. No (1962), established an essential feature of the series: the villain’s huge, futuristic headquarters, the designs for which blended serious and comic elements and which have influenced many films in the action–thriller genre. Built to colossal proportions, these sets often were constructed on the huge soundstage at Pinewood Studios in England. So essential has Adam’s design become for the series that even productions STAR WARS
EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM
MENACE (20TH CENTURY
FOX, 1999)
Queen Amidala’s (Natalie
Portman) costumes create an
exaggerated futuristic spec-
tacle. They blend a variety of
ethnic and regional elements
into a series of outlandish de-
signs. From scene to scene, the
viewer never knows in what
flam boyant manner she will
appear. Frame enlargements.
105
Production Design
such as Goldeneye , on which he did not work, use Ken Adam–like sets for the villain’s lair. Trained like many production designers as an architect, Adam was skilled at using space to create a visual statement. His brilliant set for the war room in Dr.
Strangelove —where the president and military generals gather to plan for nuclear war—used a giant round table suspended beneath a hanging circular light panel. The design was eye-catching and explicitly metaphoric, a giant poker table around which the president and military had gathered to gamble on the fate of the world.
The tradition of building huge sets to serve as film locations has very deep roots in cinema, going well back to the silent period. One of the most famous examples in early cinema is the mammoth set D. W. Griffith erected to serve as a Babylonian palace in Intolerance (1916). The set was so huge that it could accommodate scores of extras, and its most famous feature was six fabulous white elephants, statuary atop glistening marble pillars. Griffith introduced the set to viewers with a dramatic crane shot, with the camera slowly descending through the vast open space of the set. For many years after the film’s production, the set remained standing, a reminder of this opulent chapter in the history of production design.
In the 1920s, the German expressionist filmmakers preferred to work on sets because they could design them to perfectly embody a film’s style and theme. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) used imaginatively designed large-scale sets to evoke a city of the future and, together with Menzies’s Things to Come , established the tradition in cinema of using set design to visualize ultramodern cityscapes, a tradition that includes the Batman movies, Dick Tracy (1990), Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987), Dark City (1988), The Fifth Element (1997), and other films.
Large-scale set design in contemporary film includes the climax of Saving Private Ryan , a fierce battle between the Allies and the Germans in the fictitious French town of Ramelle. The Ramelle set, built from scratch, was three blocks long, with multistory buildings and a bridge over a canal, with massive buildings constructed in various states of rubble to simulate the effects of years of war. Because the set enabled the lighting crew to bury its electrical cables beneath the rubble and to hang fixtures inside its buildings, it facilitated many elaborate and complex lighting setups.
BRAM
STOKER’S
DRACULA
(COLUMBIA
PICTURES,
1992)
The imagina-
tive design of
Dracula’s suit of
armor evokes
a body flayed
of its skin. The
helmet is batlike,
with horned ears
and menacing
slits for eyes. It is
both angel and
devil and is rust-
colored, a varia-
tion of red. Frame
enlargement.
106
Production Design
Case Study SCHINDLER’S LIST
Stylized films like Moulin Rouge or The Lord of the Rings
that equipment like booms and cranes will produce, and
clearly depend on production design for achieving
Starski designed sets that facilitated a free approach to
the visual look appropriate for their imaginary screen
camerawork. Starski said that for the story to feel real, the
worlds. But filmmakers who shoot on real locations de-
camera should be able to move as in a documentary, and
pend as deeply on the production designer to find lo-
his set designs aimed to facilitate this.
cales and to create sets that will further a film’s themes
Spielberg noted that Holocaust photos had been in
and visual tone. Shooting on location is not a substi-
black-and-white. Accordingly, working in black-and-
tute for production design. Patrizia von Brandenstein
white became essential to achieving the film’s realist,
( Saturday Night Fever, The Untouchables, Working Girl )
documentary-like style. This required Starski to design
has said that her trademark as an artist is building on
a tonal palette for the film, finding colors and textures
location.
that would separate naturally in black-and-white and
Steven Spielberg shot on location in Poland for
would be consistent with the kind of naturalism that
Schindler’s List (1993), a factually based film about a
Speilberg wanted.
German factory owner, Oskar Schindler, who used his
Production design requires careful research into
business connections with the Third Reich to shield
period and style, and Starski’s designs were based on
Jews from extermination and also to help them escape
detailed historical research. He collected numerous
from the Nazis. Spielberg relied on Polish produc-
books, drawings, and photographs from the period. He
tion designer Allan Starski to find sets and locations
studied the Nazi SS architectural plan for the Plaszow
for his film, and Starski’s work won an Oscar for Best
forced labor camp (presided over by Kommandant
Production Design.
Amon Goeth, played in the film by Ralph Fiennes), and
Starski grew up in Lodz, one of the principal
he simplified the design for the film while retaining its
locales for the film, and he had worked on numer-
essential features, such as the triple-tiered bunks inside
ous films with the great Polish director, Andrzej
the prison houses and the circular, outdoor assembly
Wajda, which included a movie that challenged and
area (A).
changed the Communist system in Poland, Man of
But research is in service to drama, and some of
Marble (1976). Prior to Schindler’s List, Starksi had
the sets departed from known facts in the interests
visualized the Nazi era in a black-and-white film
for
of theme, idea and style. The windows in the film’s
Wajda ( Korczak , 1990) and a color film for Agnieszka
depiction of Schindler’s factory, for example, were
Holland ( Europa, Europa , 1991). His experience de-
unnaturally big (B) because this enabled Spielberg to
signing filmic portraits of the World War II era and his
convey a visual idea that he thought was essential.
intimate knowledge of Lodz locations made him the
Spielberg asked for large windows so that the office
right choice for the project. Starski felt that strong
overlooking the plant would seem like a paradise
production design could push a film deeply into the
to the workers below, and Starski complied even
viewer’s consciousness. He wanted his sets to work as
though he knew authentic windows would have
strong images conveying story, theme, setting,
been smaller.
period, and character.
Starski’s sets and locations were a major factor in the
Spielberg gave him great freedom to find locations
film’s ability to sustain a sense of historical realism. About
and design sets and wanted to be surprised by the results,
his objectives, Starski emphasized that his design goal
so that he could adapt quickly to them like a documen-
was to make viewers believe that what they are watching
tary filmmaker coming into an uncontrolled situation and
is real. His success is demonstrated in frame enlargement
having to respond. Spielberg wanted mainly hand-held
C, which looks compellingly like a newsreel image and
cameras on the shoot, in order to avoid the glossy look
not like something from a Hollywood feature film. ■
107
Production Design
(a)
(b)
(c)
108
Production Design
DR. STRANGELOVE
(COLUMBIA, 1964)
Global nuclear war as a high-
stakes poker game. Ken Adam
visualized the Pentagon war
room in these memorably meta-
phoric terms for director Stanley
Kubrick. Illuminated maps
against the back wall track the
flights of bomb-laden planes.
The hanging circular light panel
supplied the source lighting in
the scene. Frame enlargement.
USING REAL LOCATIONS Filmmakers frequently “dress up” real locations to make them part of a film’s unified style. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing explores racial tensions that explode into violence on a hot summer’s day in a New York City neighborhood. Translating the ideas of heat and tension into a visual design for the film, production designer Wynn Thomas transformed a real location in ways suitable for the film’s themes and visual concepts.
While scouting locations, Thomas wanted to find a block with few trees to suggest the absence of shade and the inescapability of the summer heat. When he found the location, the filmmakers had to refurbish the buildings because the brownstone exteriors were decayed. Their fronts were cleaned and repainted in warm browns to evoke the summer climate. Because the action was largely confined to this block, however, Thomas wanted to add additional colors to the setting, and he began to see his own function on the film in terms of finding opportunities to add color to existing scenes. A recurring set of characters are the three men who sit on the street corner under an umbrella and gossip about their neighborhood. The action in these scenes was static; the men sit in their chairs in front of a concrete wall. To add energy to the scene, Thomas wanted to paint the wall red. When he suggested this to director Spike Lee, Lee visualized it as fire- engine red, and that is how it exists in the film. The wall’s fiery coloring intensifies the film’s mise-en-scène and its underlying concepts of heat, fire, and explosion. By skillfully applying color to the setting, the production designer made the locale an embodiment of the film’s themes.
In many films, locations that may seem real and authentic are actually the work of clever production design. The conclusion of Terminator 2 (1991) is set in a steelworks factory where the evil Terminator hunts his victims and eventually perishes in a vat of molten steel. The location was a real steel mill, but it had been shut down since the mid-1980s and was about to be dismantled. It was totally inoperative, but in the film it had to appear active, with fiery, sparking furnaces. To create the illusion—to make the factory spit fire and glow with molten heat—the filmmakers used lights and colored gels.
To create the vats of molten steel in which the Terminator perishes, the filmmakers placed powerful lights inside the vats and used orange gels over the lights to give a fiery glow. They then covered these with sheets of plastic, on which they placed a mixture of water, mineral oil, and white powder. This created the impression of molten steel 109
Production Design
DO THE RIGHT THING (40
ACRES & A MULE, 1989)
Production designer Wynn
Thomas came to movies with a
background in theatre, which
trained him to think conceptu-
ally and not to feel confined by
a need to be realistic. Color is
Thomas’ emotional response to
the world of the script, and he
envisioned this wall as red be-
cause it enlivened the scenes at
this location and corresponded
well with the themes of heat
and anger that the film drama-
tizes. Frame enlargement.
moving in the vat. To simulate flame, they manipulated the lights to create a flickering effect, which they augmented with the use of heaters near the camera to create ripples in the atmosphere, heat waves from the molten steel. In the background, artificially produced sparks added atmosphere and a sense of realism to the scene. With these techniques, the dead factory came alive. The molten steel on screen had a terrifying reality, but the illusion rested on some very basic manipulations of light and color.
On many films, real locations in one region or country may double for those
in another, primarily to save money. It’s often cheaper to shoot somewhere other than where the story dictates. From Hell (2001), about Jack the Ripper, was shot in Prague, Hungary, with East European castles and museums doubling for 19th-century London, the period and locale of the story. In Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), scenes set in Vietnam and Mexico were filmed in the Philippines, and those set in Massapequa, Long Island, were filmed in Texas.
MATTE PAINTINGS To extend the size and scope of their sets, filmmakers use matte paintings, which are usually placed behind a set or miniature model and may show a distant horizon or landscape. When these are used effectively, viewers do not notice the shift from a three-dimensional set or model to a two-dimensional matte painting.
Matte painting is based on the techniques of tromp l’oeil , first practiced by Renaissance painters, which are designed to fool the eye into seeing three dimensions on a TERMINATOR 2
(TRI-STAR
PICTURES,
1991)
Through some
basic manipu-
lations of light
and color, an
abandoned steel
mill comes to
fiery life in
Terminator 2 .
Frame
enlargement.
110
Production Design
flat surface. The illusion has to be a good one because matte shots are often held on screen longer than other optical effects. Matte paintings are used to establish locations, and in order for the viewer to feel the reality of the locale, it needs to be on screen for s
ome time.
The matte painter has to convey size and scale—sometimes many miles in height or depth—on the flat painted surface. Unlike a cinematographer who uses real light, the painter must draw and color the light effects into the picture—how will the atmosphere look, how will the tonal quality of light change, how will color relate to distance? To fool the eye, all this must be convincing. And the painting technique needs to produce a picture that will resemble a photograph when viewed from six or more feet away.
Some of the greatest matte paintings ever created appear in Black Narcissus (1947).
The story takes place in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal, but the film was made indoors on studio sets in suburban London. Nothing was shot on location. And yet the matte paintings of the Himalayas, when conjoined in effects shots with sets and live actors, powerfully establish the remote locale of the story. The tromp l’oeil illusion is very powerful.
A more recent example is provided by Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The warehouse in the film’s last scene is, in fact, a matte painting.
Today, filmmakers often create digital matte paintings in the computer. Light and color effects on a simulated landscape are achieved easily by coloring pixels in the computer image. Once the digital matte has been painted by computer, it is composited with the live-action components of a shot. The opening scene in The Passion of the Christ (2004), in the Garden of Gethsemane, is a studio set with a digital matte painting representing the sky. The spectacular long shot in True Lies (1994) of a Swiss chateau nestled by a lake and the Alps was a digitally composited image employing a computer matte painting of the Alps. In working with digital mattes, filmmakers sometimes face an interesting problem. Light and color in a digital painting can be optimized for style and beauty, whereas live-action imagery cannot. In Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997), for a scene where the Dalai Lama leaves the Tibetan capital in a small boat, digital artists added mountains and a star-filled sky to the background of the shot. The soft, beautiful BLACK NARCISSUS
(RANK ORGANIZATION/
THE ARCHERS, 1947)
The majestic Himalaya
Mountains provide the
story setting, but the film
was shot on indoor sets
in suburban London. A
series of matte paintings
visualized the mountains
and valleys surrounding a
convent, where the action
Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition Page 19