FILM
Project Name: Jimmy P (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian)
Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Mathieu Amalric and Gina McKee
Locations: Michigan and Montana
Notes: This multi-period piece was inspired by "Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian" by Georges Devereux. Many of the characters were real people, others are fictitious, and the main action in 1948 flashes back to memories of 1939, 1929 and 1919 . The events of the story originate from Devereux (Matthieu Amalric)'s point of view, but in the film we're invited to move beyond that, into Jimmy (Benicio Del Toro)'s own experience and dreams. How to blend together reality and imagination is always an enormous part of my job, but the foremost challenge here began with choosing the other main character, Winter Hospital. The actual Winter Hospital was in Topeka, Kansas, and it had a particular low-lying army barracks look to it. However, Menninger, the innovative doctor at the hospital's helm, had founded a well-known, more classically designed, clinic at the same time, so this enabled us to leave ourselves open to a variety of stylistic possibilities. Arnaud and I scoured states and Canadian provinces, discouraged by uninspiring jails and dilapidated Civil War-era mansions, finally striking gold at a 1920's Catholic boarding school in Monroe, Michigan. It was in fairly sound condition, had multiple rooms, and some incredible period details, the "bones" necessary to transform it to suit the project. So, with the help of a crackerjack local construction team and a tireless office staff, my research became reality. The company moved to the Blackfoot Indian reservation in Montana for the final week of the film, which is where the majority of the flashbacks and dream sequences were shot. That all had to happen in an extremely short time with very few people, but we were lucky enough to have local support to keep us authentic and true to their heritage.
Project Name: Disconnect
Director: Henry Alex Rubin
Cast: Jason Bateman, Andrea Riseborough, Alexander Skarsgard, Frank Grillo, Paula Patton, Max Thieriot, Mark Jacobs, and Hope Davis
Locations: New York City, Yonkers, Ardsley
Notes: Henry Alex Rubin's background is in documentary filmmaking and directing commercials, so as I worked with him on his first feature it was clear to me that the film would be influenced by both. As usual, I spent a lot of the early days doing research. Henry had lined up a series of "experts", real people who were something like the characters in the film, and seeing them in their elements helped to flesh out their world. This was primarily a location shoot, although we recreated Ben's room and invented an attached hallway on the stage that connected it to the practical location.
Project Name: Syrup
Director: Aram Rappaport
Cast: Amber Heard, Shiloh Fernandez, Kellan Lutz and Brittany Snow
Location: New York City
Notes: The book that this film is based on is about the wars between Coke and Pepsi. My most immediate contribution to the film was alerting Aram to the fact that we couldn't afford (in time or money) to try to get permission and product from these conglomerates. Instead, we had to invent two fictitious companies and create corporate identities for both. It was an enormous graphics job, which we miraculously ended up pulling off. The shoot was fast and furious in locations transformed for pennies with a tiny but dedicated crew.
Project Name: Darling Companion
Director: Lawrence Kasdan
Cast: Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton, Dianne Weist, Richard Jenkins and Mark Duplass
Locations: Salt Lake City, Park City and Sundance, Utah
Notes: This film was divided set-wise into three sections; hiking in the woods, a vacation home in the mountains, and everything else. The script was written by Larry and his wife Meg, and was based on their own experiences with their dog combined with stories from people they know. Originally, they had hoped to shoot in Telluride, where their own country house is, and it was important to keep our world looking like we had shot in Colorado. Our main house was actually two different houses, and my mission was to blend those together. In one house, we completely redid the kitchen and created an office nook for Diane Keaton's character.
Project Name: Bringing Up Bobby
Director: Famke Janssen
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Bill Pullman, Spencer List, Marcia Cross and Rory Cochrane
Locations: Oklahoma City and Guthrie, Oklahoma
Notes: When I went for my interview with Famke, I brought a book of photographs, paintings, and references that I felt were evocative of the feeling of the story. She was visibly shaken, but I was happy to find out that it was because she had her own book with many of the same images in it. It's always exciting to work with a director who you feel you can communicate with, and this was evident from the start. It was also a big help, because this was another film with an exceptionally limited budget. Another influence at work here was 70's films of the 20's and 30's ("Bonnie and Clyde", "Paper Moon) which had a visual style we were emulating.
Project Name: Gracie
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Cast: Carly Schroeder, Dermot Mulroney and Elizabeth Shue
Locations: New Jersey and New York Ciry
Notes: Gracie is a film set in 1978 about a girl in a New Jersey High School who wants to join the boys' varsity soccer team. It was based on Elizabeth Shue's own experience growing up in her own soccer-mad family in a time when there weren't any girl's varsity sports. One third of the shoot took place at the main characters' house, a location we completely overhauled. Another third was filmed at a soccer stadium that we created at an empty field in ten days. The final third was comprised of a number of locations throughout New Jersey that also had to appear as they had in the late 70s.
Project Name: Awake
Director: Joby Harold
Cast: Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba, Terrence Howard and Lena Olin
Location: New York City
Notes: Awake is a thriller, so it was important to convey that things aren't always what they seem at first glance. There were very many locations; some set in present day reality, a series of flashbacks to the main character's childhood, and some anesthetic-induced dream states. So, it was also a job where I needed to stay organized. The two main sets had very different looks to them. The first was an enormous set dressing extravaganza where we had to transform the Ukrainian Society, a mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, into the childhood-to-present-day home of our supremely wealthy main character. The other was a set we constructed of an operating room. It had to have a certain level of complexity in order to be both the setting for both an authentic open-heart surgery as well as a skewed sense of place for scenes where our main character was having an out-of-body experience. The other sets in the film were practical locations, each requiring a large amount of dressing and construction.
Project Name: A Prairie Home Companion
Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Garrison Keillor, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, Jon C Reilly, Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen and Maya Rudolph
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota
Notes: Almost all of this film was shot in the Fitzgerald Theater, which required an enormous overhaul in order to transform it into the place where our characters came to life. Our goal was to create a world that had a history for those performers without letting the look get too theatrical or overly sentimental. Altman's plan was to shoot with two cameras using extended takes and meandering camera moves, so most of the film's lighting had to be built into our sets. Another trick we used to open up more possibilities was building a series of gimbaling mirrors that could be torqued to catch images of actors while avoiding cameras and equipment. All over the Fitzgerald we were re-conceiving and remodeling; the theater's sound booth was repurposed as our VIP lounge, a small green room/kitchen turned into a private dressing room, an empty rehearsal room became our barber shop/make up room, a sterile lobby was enlivened by a mural (that the theater decided to keep) and a shop selling "Johnson Girls", "Dusty and Lefty" and "Chuck Akers" swag, and so on...
Project Name: Dark Matter
Director: Chen Shi-Zheng
Cast: Liu Ye, Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Notes: In Dark Matter, Liu Ye plays Liu Xing, a Chinese Cosmology Student pursuing a Ph.D in the US in the early 1990's. Working with a Chinese director to tell a story from the perspective of a Chinese immigrant was a real education for me. Shi-Zheng's background is in avant-garde opera and theater, and his sensibilities tend toward minimalism. The challenge here was not only the pedestrian concerns of where to obtain Chinese antiques in the Salt Lake City area, but more importantly, how to stay true to a poetic story without our sets ending up looking too empty or stylized. The reality is that these students just wouldn't have much stuff, so the film became a lot more about texture and color. We go on a journey with our main character, and sense his loneliness in how he pops out from the brutalist architecture around him. It was necessary for me to research the science of cosmology, generating some large-scale posters of the universe and fleshing out the lab where Liu Xing spends most of his time. Most of my budget went towards the set inhabited by Meryl Streep's character, which, like practically every other set in the film, had to change over time. We had a very short prep for this film, a tiny crew and limited funds, so I'm really proud of what we were able to accomplish.
Project Name: The Groomsmen
Director: Edward Burns
Cast: Edward Burns, Brittany Murphy, John Leguizamo, Jay Mohr and Matthew Lillard
Location: New York City
Notes: This was a contemporary film about friendship, so my main focus was to keep things real while still remaining cinematic. Another challenge was to blend our Brooklyn locations and City Island locations so they all appeared to be the same neighborhood.
Project Name: O
Director: Tim Blake Nelson
Cast: Julia Stiles, Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett and Martin Sheen
Location: Charleston, South Carolina
Notes: "O" is a re-telling of Shakepeare's "Othello", ours, a tragedy set in a South Carolina boarding school. There were a couple of critical pieces inherent in getting the story to resonate; we needed to show that the kids here all had lives of considerable promise, colors were carefully chosen to emphasize our tropical surroundings and connect us to the Cyprus of our source material, and the overall look of the environment needed to be stylized but believable. One of my main contributions to the look of the film was coming up with an alternative to the cave-like, cinder-block-walled dorm rooms we were shown in the beginning of pre-production. Our offices were housed in an abandoned naval base, and one day I was shown some old officers quarters on the compound with multiple high-ceilinged rooms, parlors with built-in cabinetry and decorative molding, and wrap-around screened porches. Aha! I presented them to Tim as perfect girls and boys dorms, opening up scenes and bringing in the lush Carolina greenery.
Project Name: Camp
Director: Todd Graff
Cast: Anna Kendrick, Daniel Letterle, Robin de Jesus and Sasha Allen
Location: Liberty, New York
Notes: The majority of this film was shot on location, at the camp in upstate New York that our fictitious version was based on. My crew and I actually worked in their scene shop to create the sets needed for eleven different shows. We barely came up for air, but it was an excellent experience where I was able to take advantage of my theater background and revisit my own memories of camp.
Project Name: The Business of Strangers
Director: Patrick Stettner
Cast: Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles and Frederick Weller
Location: New Jersey
Notes: This film was an organizational puzzle to be solved. We knew we were going to be building a hotel suite, an elevator, a sauna and a hotel room under construction, so it was necessary for the remainder of the scenes to be practical locations. One challenge was to make six different hotels look like the same hotel. The other was to build our suite around a view over an unnamed city in a way that gave us enough variety for the many scenes that were to be shot there. As a guide to unify the look of the film we invented a behind-the-scenes concept of treating the world of these traveling business people as a biosphere. You should be able to make out some of that by looking at the stills.
Project Name: Milwaukee, Minnesota
Director: Alan Mindel
Cast: Troy Garrity, Randy Quaid, Bruce Dern and Alison Folland
Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Notes: This film about a seemingly naive ice fishing phenom was shot on location in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our main locations were the family home Albert shared with his mother and the copy shop where he worked. At the house, the main challenge was being able to restore the interior surfaces to how it might have looked around 1920, since the conceit was that generations of their family had inhabited the place and no one would have had the money or inclination to have renovated or updated at any point. At the copy shop, I wanted to bring in the local German immigrant influence in a bit, and thus, the "Kopy Haus" was born.
Project Name: Freak Talks About Sex
Director: Paul Todisco
Cast: Steve Zahn, Josh Hamilton, Arabella Field and Heather McComb
Locations: Auburn and Syracuse, New York
Notes: This was a contemporary film about a couple of friends who are at a crossroads in their lives, hanging out and getting high on a daily basis, much as they had been for the past ten years of their lives. "Freak", Steve Zahn's character, lives in his parent's garage, where my main focal point was the acid green sofa I'd picked up at a local Salvation Army during the first few days of pre-production. "Keenan", Josh Hamilton's part, is in a dead-end job at the local supermarket, and we were lucky enough to convince Wegman's, a local chain, to give us clearance to use their name.
Project Notes: Whatever
Director: Susan Skoog
Cast: Liza Weil, Frederic Forrest and Chad Morgan
Location: Wheeling, West Virginia
Notes: For this movie, set in New Jersey 1980, I had a budget of $1000 and a crew of two. That said, we all pulled together and somehow managed to make it into something I'm especially proud of. We met everyone in town, scrounged through their garages, unearthed a treasure trove of 1960s furniture in the basement of the local library, found a charismatic doctor whose Jackson-Pollack-meets-Spin-Art paintings were perfect for one character's artwork, and drove our set dressing and props around in a van belonging to a nun who fixed bicycles.