Production designer Don Burt’s biggest challenge in David Fincher’s Mank was recreating the opulent home of William Randolph Hearst. He could have driven four hours from Los Angeles to San Simeon and taken a tour of Hearst Castle, which remains a popular tourist attraction.
But he didn’t.
“I was afraid with some of the budget constraints and so forth, that I’d get up there and I’d be overwhelmed. And I think it’d be impossible to pull off,” Burt says in the latest MovieMaker podcast. “So I just sort of took it another way.”
That other way was to work with set decorator Jan Pascale to tell a story with no extraneous details. As Burt and Fincher explain on the podcast, they didn’t want audiences to see ostentatious displays that might distract from the story — despite the countless expensive displays in Hearst’s home.
“Don was exactly right to say, ‘we’re going to need to weed this back a little bit.’ Otherwise, people just aren’t going to know where to look. And they’re not going to know where the floral arrangement ends and the brocade jacket begins,” says Fincher. “And you know that it could be — especially with deep focus photography — just exhausting for your eyes.”
You can listen to the full interview on Apple or Spotify or Google or above.
Hearst Castle was an especially important set because Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) has some of his most pivotal moments there. He forms a kind of emotional alliance with Hearst’s girlfriend, Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), while strolling the grounds, and later suffers a drunken breakdown in Hearst’s dining hall. The film dramatizes how Hearst came to inspire Charles Foster Kane in Mank’s script for Citizen Kane.
Fincher says he left almost all of the decisions about Hearst Castle to Burt, and mostly weighed in on matters of framing and blocking.
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