The Great Gatsby (2013)Award seasons always initiates plenty of conversations. With Parasite, a non-English language film, winning four of the big Oscars this year, a norm was broken, history was made and a breakthrough was rightly celebrated. But, of course, many other Academy traditions remain stubbornly in place.
One field that rarely gets talked about is production design. The nominations for this category are traditionally stacked with budget-heavy titles, typically historical projects or those with an opulent visual style. Look at the winners in the last decade. Be it fantasies (Alice in Wonderland, 2010; The Shape of Water, 2017), musicals (La La Land, 2016), dazzling period pieces (Hugo, 2011; The Great Gatsby, 2013) or sci-fi action films (Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015; Black Panther, 2018), it’s the extravagance in their design that brings them attention.
It’s the same across the five nominated titles every year. Big budgets and big designs reign supreme. Only rarely do exceptions creep in. In the last 30 years, the lowest budget film to make the nominations list is Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992). Made for the comparative chicken feed of $4m, Potter’s film found ingenious ways to appear as opulent as any film with 10 times its budget – which is presumably the reason that it found its way into this exclusive club.
More recently, the mid-budget Midnight in Paris (2011) looks like an anomaly too. Capitalising on the cinematic potential of the City of Lights, Woody Allen’s film probably appealed to voters for its time-travelling structure, as it segues novelly between a recreated Paris of the 1920s and the present.
Is good design only about extravagance and novelty then? Or are there other factors the nominations should be recognising? With five slots each year, there is surely space and opportunity for more than one kind of art and expertise to be appreciated.
Production design is about realising the director’s vision for the screenplay in a physical and material space. This can be done either by remodelling an existing location or structure or by modelling one from scratch. The former comes with obvious constraints, and so may require more creative solutions. These adjustments may even force some changes to the original concept, but that doesn’t mean the results will have less artistic value. A rich man’s art isn’t artistically richer by default; aesthetic value isn’t linked to expenditure. After all, aren’t directors also essentially remodelling actors, and actors remodelling themselves to get into role?
Remodelling existing spaces requires research, with objects handpicked to dress the set. Each element is curated, as the environment is created piece by piece. The responsibility of a production designer is more than providing a good shootable stage. It is to be an enabler for what has been envisioned and to enhance the storytelling visually. So the assumption that realising more straightforward – and less extravagant – stories somehow involves less craft is wrongheaded, to say the least.
Admittedly, we see the same prejudices in the other craft categories, where a job well done is apparently a job done ostentatiously.
So where else should the voters be looking? Take, for example, Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, shot on a meagre budget of $5m. Adam Driver plays the eponymous bus driver and poet, who lives in a New Jersey town of the same name with his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), an aspiring country music star in the process of starting a cupcake business.
The production design plays a subtle but vital role in the power of Jarmusch’s storytelling. Paterson is engulfed in the mundane routine life of driving, walking the dog, having a daily beer. And we see such repetition echoed in the designs that Laura creates, and the way their house is decorated with flowers, polka dots, animal prints, checks and patterns. On sofas, curtains, guitars, kitchen walls, lampshades, cupcakes – endless patterns feed into the film’s visual design.
The recent British film Ray & Liz (2018) is also slim of budget but rich in visual ideas. It’s set in the Black Country, and follows the lives of a working-class family – Ray and Liz and their two sons – living in a council flat during the Thatcher era. Such social realism may suggest a lack of complicated design, but in fact the film is a triumph of specificity. The simple window frames, torn and aged wallpaper, curtains and limited furniture all tell a story. Much has been made of director Richard Billingham’s background in photography. But in a filmmaking context, you can only photograph what has been arranged in front of the camera. Styling and texture is everything.
These are but two recent examples of the richness that a production designers work can bring to filmmaking. Design can be simple and yet profound, and sometimes simple ideas can make immeasurable contributions to a film’s visual storytelling. And so creativity in production design should be recognised at all scales of budget, and in all its myriad approaches. It’s time awards bodies appreciated the devil in the detail.
