Bowfinger

When moviemakers decide to create a new motion picture, at what point do they ask the question: "So, what will it look like?" How about these follow-up items: "What is the best way to realize these scenes on film? Should we shoot on location or build sets on a stage? f there are visual effects, should they be done digitally, optically, or in miniature?" These questions and many others are usually first answered by a movie's production designer, one of the key artist-craftspeople in the moviemaking process. MovieMaker recently met with several of the industry's leading production designers. Read on, and learn a few tricks of the trade from some of the best in the business.

Jack DeGovia

PRODUCTION DESIGNER, Bowfinger

"I'm responsible for the settings, characters, and look of all the physical properties that go into making a motion picture," said DeGovia. "That is, finding locations, constructing the sets, overseeing graphics and effects, designing vehicles of all kinds, and coordinating costuming for the overall look of the picture. I like the European term "film architect," but it's even broader than an architect's role. Being the production designer implies an overall design role in the context of the whole picture."

Originally a freelance theater designer, DeGovia quickly moved on to commercials and films, and by the early '70s, he was designing features. He continues to do so, and recent credits include Red Daum, Die Hard, Speed, and this summer's Bowfinger. According to DeGovia, who is president of the union local that governs Hollywood production designers, his brethren typically oversee the duties of a film's art director-who is often also a designer, but functions more as an executive officer, making sure everything gets done on time and on budget.

After breaking down the script and discussing the film's unavoidable limitations with the director, DeGovia explained that sketches are generated concerning virtually every visual element in the film. "Some production designers do not draw," he said. "They like to work in a collage fashion-they do research with photographs and art work. They usually bring in an illustrator who specializes in making drawings that you would see through the camera lens it's a highly skilled position."

Bowfinger (1999)

Once a design aesthetic is approved by the director and producers, a production designer next begins to search for locations and oversee set designs. "Finding locations is as important as set design," DeGovia stated. "Historically, it's our job; location scouts would round up possibilities, but often the production designer will get in a car and drive around for a couple of weeks, determining locations. There is a certain amount of dramatic truth to finding a location, and there are also the logistical considerations, like `How much money and time do we have? Also, what real life throws you is usually more interesting than what you can invent."

Set designers-architectural draftsmen governed by yet another union from which many art directors come-then enter the process to create sets, both on stage and on location, that will work for the camera. The set design process itself can take months, depending on the complexity of the film, and a production designer is constantly revising drawings until things are exactly in place. "A motion picture evolves," DeGovia noted. "It is not thought up beforehand and carried out like a task. That would be the most efficient way to do it, but the human mind cannot think of everything in advance. You have to allow for evolution during the moviemaking process."

As the design stage progresses, the construction coordinator joins the team under the art director/production designer to determine costs. "He knows how long it's going to take to build your sets,” said DeGovia, "and he has very skilled people working with him: general foreman, carpenters, painters, plasterers, welders, riggers, finishers of all kinds. The crew can fluctuate from five to 10 to 50 people at full speed." As sets go up, the production designer works with set decorators to establish the furniture, drapery, lighting fixtures and decor to be used on a set. They often bring a designer choices at the outset of a movie and work in tandem throughout production.

If those responsibilities weren't enough, production designers must also work closely with the physical effects crew-including the stunt coordinator, transportation captain, and visual effects staff to establish the look and operation of all the elements which involve the physical production. "You can often be on the set all day," DeGovia remarked, "to make sure that the sets are going to be lit correctly; you're collaborating with the cinematographer as soon as he or she comes onto the movie. You make sure that they have places to light from."

As principal photography progresses, the production designer must constantly stay ahead of the game. "You get the first set ready for the first day," he said, "but by the second day you're going to need something else, so you're also preparing that. The shooting company is like this monster that's moving behind you, devouring these things you're preparing at great expense, one after the other.

"Of course, some time during the movie, they're going to change the schedule and move something up two weeks. It's a race and the starting gun is day one."

Nevertheless, with Bowfinger as the latest in his rich history of projects, DeGovia doesn't see himself slowing down. "There's lots of different kinds of pictures that I'd like to design," he said. "There isn't anything more fun than this."

Pleasantville (1998)

Jeannine Oppewall

Production Designer, LA Confidential and Pleasantville

"There are only a few of us," said Jeannine Oppewall of her position as a female production designer. "When I first got into the union, it genuinely seemed to be a gentleman's club. It was a little uncomfortable, but I just ignored that and marched on ahead. Women seem to make very good designers and I think we are breaking ground. It's got to have more time-it's building."

Coming out of college with a liberal arts degree, Oppewall got a job working for Charles Eames, who at the time was the most famous living American designer. "He said, `I can teach someone how to draw. What I cannot teach them is how to think, or how to see,' " Oppewall recalled. "He took a chance on me and I tried to hold on." After deciding to turn her career toward the movies, the first design job Oppewall got was for Tender Mercies in 1983, followed by such career highlights as the period drama Ironweed and Costa-Gavras's Music Box. "I usually try to take scripts based on how they resonate with me personally," she said, "because I feel that I bring more to the party when I can participate emotionally in the story."

One she couldn't refuse, of course, was LA Confidential. "Those kinds of stories and scripts don't come along too often," Oppewall said, "and when you find them, it's a good plan to say yes." The project, which garnered Oppewall an Academy Award nomination for best production design, involved 93 separate sets scattered around Los Angeles in an indeterminate late '40s to early '50s time period. "You have to establish each one as a separate place where a separate piece of action takes place really quickly," she stated. "I had done many smaller period pictures, so this was kind of a culmination."

To undertake a project which involved so many individual sites, Oppewall conducted methodical research. "I drove around the city with the location manager for about two months," she said. "When you fill yourself up with what you need, sometimes it just pops out at you as you drive by We did modify all the places we found on location, however. My habit was to find the location that we all felt would work for us, then go there, walk around it and make lists of what I felt we needed to do to make that location-no matter how good it was-workable for the film.

"There's nothing that comes ready to shoot, especially in a period movie. A pencil has two ends-the lead and the eraser. On a period movie, you spend more money on the eraser to take away the present. You have to take away much of the present before you can think about putting in the past." 

She barely had time to put one movie behind her  America when another beckoned. "They kept calling me for Pleasantville when I was finishing LA Confidential," Oppewall recalled of her back-to-back projects. said, `No! I don't want to do another huge period movie! I just finished one!' Then I got a phone call saying `please, go talk to the director, Gary Ross.' Lo and behold, I got to his office and he had furniture by Charles Eames. I couldn't say no!"

Oppewall said that doing Pleasantville was a similar process to doing LA Confidential, except the newer project involved sets all constructed from scratch. "You're looking to find and create environments from the past and you proceed the same way even though the outcome is different," she said. "Pleasantville was meant to be a generic all-American town. I was frankly intimidated by the size of the project when I read the script, but I took it building by building."

Once a construction strategy and location were settled, Oppewall needed to explore Gary Ross's innovative integration of black and white and color imagery. "Because I was designing both, it seemed that the best thing to do was learn for myself," she remembered," so I constantly shot stills that interested me both in black and white and in color. Every single wallpaper, pattern, brick color, and awning we used was shot in both black and white and in color so that we could place them next to each other and figure out how to create a good color rhythm."

Undoubtedly, Oppewall's experience on Pleasantville was enriched by her relationship with director Gary Ross. "We had a lot of laughs together, which is important," she said. "At the beginning of a project, I feel like I interview the director as much as the director interviews me. I want to have the sense that it is going to be a good two-way working relationship. It's not just a job; I have to be able to enjoy the company of the person I am working with most closely."

This fall, Oppewall's work will be featured in Snow Falling on Cedars, a Scott Hicks movie with Max Von Sydow, followed by another collaboration with Curtis Hanson, the contemporary film Wonderboys. "Though I haven't got anything planned yet, I will start looking for something challenging to do soon," she said. "Being a production designer seems to be a good combination of whatever skills I learned from the Eames office, whatever genetic skills I inherited from my family, and my need to be involved with telling stories. It comes easy for me."

Rusty Smith

PRODUCTION DESIGNER, Austin Powers II

"I've never done a sequel before," said Smith of his assignment as production designer on Austin Powers II: The Spy Who Shagged Me. "We wanted to go further than the first film-which was basically a '90s all love  movie-in terms of color. The director, Jay Roach, felt like the '60s were a huge explosion of color." Along with the increased expectation of a sequel script, comes a bigger budget, but not necessarily for the art department. "We had more money than they did on the first film, but not a lot more," Smith explained. "As movies grow, the above-the-line budget grows considerably, not necessarily the money you have to make the movie. One of the things that I'm proud of is that Austin Powers II is a small- to-medium-range budget that looks like a lot more than that."

Austin Powers II (1999)

With 80 percent of the movie shot on stage and 20 percent shot on location-the ideal balance for production designers-Smith's design took into account the film's secret weapon: Mike Myers. "Mike has the ability to create on the spot," said Smith, "so we wanted to have the design give the comedy more freedom. One thing we did is reuse and recycle sets, and some locations are actually parking lots across from the stage. Cut to one little piece of wall and you're in China. It's about making use of the smallest amount possible to tell the story and to get the joke."

Among Austin Powers II’s visual delights is a recreation of Carnaby Street in London, cleverly shot on a modified section of Universal Studios' backlot. "We were meticulous in our research about Carnaby," related Smith. "We had to take all the elements of '60s London and create the most interesting mix of actual references and artifacts. The Universal backlot was not as big as it seemed on screen, but the scene was done with such energy, vigor, and color that it worked."

Following Austin Powers, one of Smith's proudest film moments reaches screens this fall in a film called Mystery Alaska, also directed by Jay Roach. "The art of that movie is that you shouldn't know that we built an entire town just north of Calgary in Canada," said Smith. "Half of the town we rented, half of the town we bought. If I've done my job well, you shouldn't know that when you see the film."

Eugenio Zanetti

PRODUCTION DESIGNER, The Haunting

"I took The Haunting because the sets are a character," said Eugenio Zanetti. "In every movie, production design should and must help storytelling. In this case, because it's a character, it is part of the storytelling."

For Zanetti, whose 30-year career as a production designer began in South American theater, spectacular film projects such as the period splendor of Restoration for which he won an Academy Award-and the otherworldly realms of What Dreams May Corne, all culminated in his seemingly insurmountable tasks on The Haunting. An updating of the 1963 Robert Wise movie, The Haunting required a complete panoply of interiors to be built in a mere eight weeks. "You get a script and you have to completely conceptualize it in two or three days," Zanetti recalled. "Then you have to produce an enormous amount of sketches within the first week and you have four weeks to build the first sets. It was extremely elaborate-everything was sculpted on an enormous scale and molded. We had more than 40 sculptors, 200 scenic painters, and 400 carpenters working in three shifts. It was an enormous operation."

The Haunting (1999)

To establish his conception of Hill house, Zanetti relied on his personal interpretation of the script. "My ability to design a movie is in finding my own idea of what it is about," he said. "For me, the story is about a woman who had no childhood and an absent father. I thought that this "monster" that inhabits the house is basically the absent father. That way the house performs in the movie like an actor in many ways. This is a personal take from where I draw my juice to do my work."

Through extensive discussions with director Jan De Bont, Zanetti arrived at an overall potpourri style for the house. "It contains all the elements of the man who made it," he explained. "The house is like an encyclopedia of styles, as the Victorians used to do. There is everything-Moorish, Turkish, neoclassical, Gothic. The beauty of the Victorian thing is that they were mad-they mixed everything in the way that a schizophrenic would."

Despite his successes in creating a visual language on film, Zanetti feels restricted by the methodologies of moviemaking in the U.S. "The problem in America is that you sell scripts," he noted. "Filmmaking is issues/35/images; movies that we all love have nothing to do with the script. In Kubrick's movies, sequences are created around an image or around a piece of music. A film that is tied up to words goes against the nature of filmmaking."         

Next, Zanetti is going to write and direct his own film with Henson Pictures, called The Road to Ganabad. "It encompasses everything that I know how to do," he said." Visually, it is a fantasy. We are in negotiations, and it will take at least a year and a half to produce. It is not a movie you can prep in eight weeks."          

The Haunting

Kirt Petrucelli

PRODUCTION DESIGNER, Mystery Men

"It was a world that I could create," Petrucelli said of Mystery Men, the latest comic book-derived fantasy romp. "I had to make the huge cast completely ridiculous but exciting at the same time. Also, the film was a complete manipulation of classic architectural ideas, melting them, twisting them, colorizing them, making them bad, making them funny, all the different variations. I used things from the '30s through the '70s; it was a highlight of pop culture-the best and the worst of it"

Arriving in LA a decade ago as a Steadicam operator, Petrucelli worked his way through the art departments of low-budget movies by loading trucks, decorating, set designing, and art directing. His resume includes a rich list of unique films, including Where the Day Takes You, Murder in the First, and Anaconda.  While Mystery Men is his first comedy, he seems to welcome most any challenge. "The most difficult for me is contemporary," he said, "because it's very subjective. There are many opinions on what contemporary should be."          

Mystery Men (1999)

On Mystery Men, Petrucelli's chief design task was creating the interiors of a huge mansion set piece, actually eight individual sets built over four separate sound stages. "You reinforce the charac­ters-break them into color schemes," he explained. "We assign them each their own space in the world. From that, you permutate your ideas. We threw things together-a huge, mixed bag. Kinka Usher, the director, has lots of Cleo Awards, working in over 300 commer­cials. He was a dream to work with."

Petrucelli's next project is Roland Emmerich's Revolutionary War film, The Patriot, being shot on location in South Carolina. "We pick locations for the battle sequences and do concept work on the landscape and architecture," he said, "and we'll use post-production to accentuate or elevate what we are doing on location.

Mystery Men was a unique challenge-we made up everything, but now The Patriot is going to be restrained in that you have to be very realistic." Perhaps as a result of the wildly eclectic elements he worked with in Mystery Men, Petrucelli sees his future as one filled with variety.

Bo Welch

PRODUCTION DESIGNER, Wild Wild West

Wild Wild West (1999)

"What's nice about a stylized movie like Wild Wild West is that there's a lot to design props, objects, scenery, matte paintings, etc.," said the film's legendary production designer, Bo Welch. "You do a contemporary talking movie and you've got nothing to hang onto in terms of design. It's harder to find the spine of the movie around which you can get any visual concept going. In Wild Wild West, you see everything and get to enjoy it all."

Prior to Lost Boys, his first film as production designer, Welch worked on many projects as an art director and set designer. He designed the Tim Burton projects Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman Returns before collaborating with Barry Sonnenfeld on Men In Black. "There was no real expectation level on Men In Black, and then it turned into a monster success," Welch said. With the current Wild Wild West, both Sonnenfeld and Welch felt greater pressure to deliver a spectacular movie. "I look at it and smile and get exhausted," he said. "The chal­lenge was that Wild Wild West is not really a western, but it's a period film. It is also futuristic, but from an 1869 perspective. To balance those elements and arrive at a tone that services a Barry Sonnenfeld movie was really my job." Since he knew it was the most complex element in the film, the first thing Welch designed was the gargantuan mechanical spider that villain Arliss Loveless commandeers to terrorize the western landscape. "First I did a little drawing, then an illustrator did another drawing," explained Welch.” Then we built a maquette, then ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) took our maquette and built another maquette, then they started modeling it in the computer and started doing motion studies. It goes on and six months of nibbling away until we figured out we needed to build two separate heads, the engine room, one real leg, and otherwise, the spider is CG."

Other gadgets in Wild Wild West included a nitrocycle, desert wasp, disk launcher, and flip­ping pool table, which was designed by Welch's team and executed in-camera. "Those gags were built by physical effects supervisor Michael Lantieri," Welch stated. "You draw those up and do blueprints. Even with all that information, there are invariably nine million questions that go with the pool table gag, for example. How fast does it turn? Clockwise? Do the straps go left or right? I make sure that it works right and aesthetically fits the frame­work of our 1869 movie."

With a measured amount of modesty, Welch is reflective about his status and future at this time in his career. "I have a pretty good variety of movies I've done," he said. "I don't look for types of movies, I look for a good script and good people; beyond that, it's insignificant. I've been fairly lucky thus far."

William Sandell

PRODUCTION DESIGNER, Deep Blue Sea

The biggest tip of the hat to the art depart­ment is when someone looks at a movie and thinks they shot it all on location," said Sandell, a veteran of such "strategically" visual films as Robocop, Newsies, and Air Force One. "That's pretty tough filmmaking," he continued, "to modify a set on location so that it becomes what you think it ought to look like and what the director is demanding that it look like."

Deep Blue Sea (1999)

Following the massive Mexico City-based production of Total Recall-in which Sandell's team built immense sets on eight sound stages, each of which completely changed no less than three times, Sandell's newest project took him back to Mexico, this time as production designer on Deep Blue Sea.

He said that on productions like this Renny Harlin action film, in which genetically-bred sharks attack a marine facility, his job respon­sibilities move up a notch. "On these movies, the interaction between an art department and physical effects, visual effects, and specialized effects, like Walt Conti's mechanical sharks, are much more complicated than a little talking movie. Production designers look for hard movies; they pay the same, but they are so much more complicated and interesting."

In the Deep Blue Sea script, which went through many rewrites, Sandell found a blueprint for his ideas.  "Then the discussions start and you begin dreaming with the director," he said. "There's a wide artistic interpretation of what that could be. That starts a whole other sequence of story­boarding and illustrations. It's an ongoing process-a big movie could have seven or eight months prep for the art department."

In concert with Harlin and visual effects supervisor Jeff Okun, Sandell next had to determine the most efficient and economical way to make the movie. "In some cases, good tradi­tional filmmaking in-camera can get the best look," he said. "Other scenes are so fantastic or layered with incredible effects and stunts, you don't even go there-it will be CGI. It's a constant give and take." Deep Blue Sea was primarily made in Mexico because of the huge outdoor tanks that Fox had constructed for James Cameron's Titanic in Rosarita Beach. "We had to bring a lot of people down there-the foreman, construction people, painters-two or three key people in each craft," Sandell explained. "A whole other challenge and dynamic was building huge sets that held up to the strain of being underwater. You're also handcuffed by the practical matters of what the set must do-shaking apart and being flooded. It's quite an ordeal."

Sandell is not out of the water yet, as he moved from Deep Blue Sea directly to Warner Bros.' A Perfect Storm. "I am working with four or five very talented art directors right now, so my job is to keep some cohesive viewpoint," he said. "Everybody has great ideas, but everybody is doing a different movie. You have to make it seamless." MM