[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our annual series, The Big Picture, which spotlights Oscar-nominated creatives who work behind the camera to bring some of the year's excellent movies to life. Our next guest had the responsibility of creating a whole new world, the world as experienced by Bella Baxter and the Best Picture nominee, Poor Things. Production designers Shona Heath and James Price combined forces to create surrealist, semi-Victorian practical sets, mostly on soundstages in Hungary instead of on location.

When Bella, a grown woman who has been given the brain of a baby and who rapidly matures, she heads out of her gilded cage of a home to Lisbon and Paris on a luxury cruise, James and Shona and their teams had to build these sets from scratch. The vibe is both retro and futuristic considered, yet random, and most impressively unique. Shona Heath and James Price are Academy Award nominees for Best Production Design and they join me now to discuss their work on Poor Things. Shona, nice to meet you.

Shona Heath: Nice to meet you. Hi.

Alison Stewart: James, welcome.

James Price: Nice to meet you. How are you doing?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing great. [chuckles] Shona, this was your first major film project. Just to give people a sense of what you do, what were you doing right before you got this gig? What were you working on?

Shona Heath: I work a lot with a British photographer called Tim Walker and I'd just done a very big show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London called Wonderful Things which showcased his work from the last 25 years and a lot of mine actually. I designed the exhibition and a lot of new work and new sets within shoots for it. Actually, that's where I met Yorgos. He'd come to visit Tim at the exhibition.

Alison Stewart: What were those initial conversations like? How could you tell he was sussing you out for a film work?

Shona Heath: I absolutely didn't think that at all. I just met him with Robbie Ryan, the cinematographer, and then his producer, Kasia Malipan, contacted me and said, "Would you come and meet Yorgos and read the script?" I was like, "Yes." "Okay, then." No idea what was going to become of it. Then there was a few unusual twists and turns and then James and I met and then we did the film. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: James, what did you think when you first read the script for Poor Things?

James Price: I was blown away by how just complete it was as a script. Scripts can sometimes be quite hard to read and especially for me, I'm pretty severely dyslexic. It can be a bit of a chore, to be honest, even if it's a good one. I couldn't believe how easy it was to read and how quickly I read it. I'd been told that Yorgos had wanted to build everything and create a world. That starts your mind racing of where it could go, because if you're going to build a world from scratch, there's no point building a photorealistic world because you could just go and shoot it in Paris or Lisbon or Alexandria. It was funny, it was clever, it was bonkers, it was racy. It had everything you wanted in a script.

Alison Stewart: Oh, bonkers is the best word. James, just so people understand, let's say you were doing production design on this film, and you did indeed shoot in Lisbon. How would your job have been different?

James Price: It would have actually involved a lot of scouting, as we call it, scouting and wrecking. That involves working very closely with the location manager. The first thing to do would have been contact a company within that country, Paris, French one, one in Portugal, and get usually archive photos that exist of the squares and buildings of a certain period. We would have briefed them, we would have made some mood boards saying we want to go Art Nouveau in Paris, and we want to go Lisbon, we want to go whichever way it may have been.

There's a lot of backward and forth looking at location photos and then actually going out. Then when you hit upon on areas that you like, you then go and get on a plane and go and look at these things, photograph them, and figure that out. It's totally different the way we did it. We never once went to look at these places for reference, and part of that was because of lockdown. COVID happens, and there wasn't enough time.

I'm not sure we would have gone anyway, even if COVID hadn't have happened, because it didn't feel necessary. We talked about it early on, Shona and I, and we spent time figuring out what we liked and didn't like alternatively, because we'd never worked or met one another before. We met one another for an hour's meeting before we started work on it and that was off [unintelligible 00:05:13]. I knew who Shona was, obviously, because she's a pretty famous designer in the UK.

Alison Stewart: Shona, Yorgos has said he thought that you two might work well together and that way he just says, "Oh, I thought they'd work well together." Do you understand why he thought you and James would work well together?

Shona Heath: Yes, I do. I think he wanted both of us and maybe both of us had slightly different skill sets. I certainly wasn't capable of doing a feature film on my own. I don't have the experience in that industry at all. I think maybe he wanted something that he hadn't seen in film before, so maybe almost getting the wrong person in that respect was good. He knew he could trust James and James' design aesthetic. I think he thought that it might just turn up something different.

Alison Stewart: James, when was the moment you knew that the collaboration was going to work?

James Price: That's difficult. I don't go into things that I don't think are going to work so I'm pretty sure-- and working in a lot of films, it's all about collaboration anyway. It didn't worry me too much. Once I went to Shona's studio and met Shona and her design team, I knew that she wasn't barking mental, that we would get on. We were from the simplest part of the world, and similar ages, and we had so much in common. I was pretty intimidated though, because I was only just starting my design journey, and Shona has been doing it for so long, and so incredible. One of the guys in my team, Jonas, who's a concept artist came to London because of Shona's work.

On our part, there was a big like, "Wow, she's--" It was an amazing experience because what you don't realize having worked in film for 20 years, is you get blinkered into a certain way of thinking, it's all about the photo-real. Most directors want a photo-real, and creating a believable world. We did create a believable world, but it was a world that hadn't been seen before. Shona comes up with left-field ideas that are just like, "Where did that come from?" Or, "Yes, let's give it a go. That's cool." I've learnt so much from working with Shona about not preconceiving, which I never said that, but thank you, Shona.

Shona Heath: Oh, thanks, James. I've learned an unbelievable amount, but not enough, actually. There's so much experience. You can't gain in one film at all. It's a lifetime of experience that James brings and has.

Alison Stewart: It seems like you guys tried, though, to get as much into one film as possible. [laughs]

Shona Heath: Yes, we did.

James Price: We got about 10 years of experience in one film. That was pretty good going, I think.

Alison Stewart: My guests are James Price and Shona Heath. They are nominated for Best Production Design for Poor Things. I want to talk a little bit about proportion and depth perception in the film. Some of the sets, it seems that the proportion is slightly off. Some of the chairs are really enormous around the dining room table. Shona, how did you want to play with proportion on the sets?

Shona Heath: I think the idea that Bella was essentially a child for the first part of the film and it was quite clear, Emma Stone was never going to play that in a cute, childish way. That wasn't what was going to happen. In some of the references, and also Alasdair Gray's illustrations, he always drew people like puppets. Even on the front of the book, his illustration is of Baxter, Max, and Bella, and they're all very different scales, almost like they're holding puppets or ventriloquist dummies.

That sparked off a way of looking at it. Also, James and I are trying to get the humor into the set as well. We thought it would be really fun that they sat on these enormous chairs and their legs were dangling, like Victorian dolls on a chair. The scale was a really nice thing to play with. I think making such a wrong move in a way, I think it enabled us to use miniatures, which we built, the boat in Alexandria, and compressed sets.

Like Lisbon was a-- we built an enormous city, but of course, it wasn't very big in comparison to a city, that you never questioned the scale throughout the film because we'd already messed with it from very early on. It was a very deliberate game we were playing. We did even toy at one point of making Paris a quarter size. I remember everybody just going, "Such a bad idea." I always wonder what that would look like. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: James, I'm curious about depth and depth perception, because there are a lot of scenes where characters are different physical levels. There's a lot of staircases. For example, in the scene when Godwin is teaching and the students are looking down in the brothel. There's a lot of staircases that go up and down. What's something a production designer needs to keep in mind about how depth is perceived on film and how can it be used to tell a story?

James Price: Oh, that's a good question. Starting with the medical school that you were just mentioning, that was in a real location, actually. One of the few locations we had. Both medical schools were in a real location, but we built the seating. That was all constrained. The idea was we wanted to play around with a proportion to give it a feel, a bit like that was his stage. That was where he was and people looking around him as if he was in the theater and around, like the Globe Theater or something like that.

It's good to have different levels on sets because if you listen to the grip department, the floors would just be flat and they'd be able to roll the camera around wherever they wanted. Like the ship corridor, which they gave us all kinds of stick for, and the spongy floor in Baxter's living room, that being on a different level as well. When you can build in these different levels, it feels like the scale is bigger the place than it actually is. We wanted everything to have just so much interest in it that the playing on the different levels was one of the funny things.

The biggest version of that is actually Lisbon, where you have the streets start at the waterfront and then they go up towards where the hotel is, and all of that floor, it was really complicated to build that set. It was decided that each block of buildings needed to be built from the stage floor like a skyscraper.

Alison Stewart: Oh my gosh.

James Price: It was built out steelwork and then clad with the timber flat edge, as we call it, with windows cut in. Then on top of that, the plaster finishes and the tile work. See, we had each block happening at different stages as they were going back towards the hotel. The hotel was the final block to be built because then we had to build the water tank, and then the floor all had to be filled in. That was all built out of timber rostra at different levels. Then there was soundproofing put on, and then, I think you guys call it luan on top of that. We call it plywood. Then a concrete pole put on it. It's hugely complicated, but when you go through that city, you really get a sense of it moving around in different levels.

We did that not just with the floors. Each one of our cities that we build, we made sure we were very determined to get as much variance into that like a real city, because [unintelligible 00:13:50] things I hate about a lot of backlog set builds are out of ease. Every building is the same kind of thing because it's easy to do. You just get a production line going, and poor art directors and poor draft people and poor construction, nothing was the same, ever the same, and so everything needed to be drawn, made individually. That gives it-- what gives it such an interesting feel, Lisbon. All of the cities because of that.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to guesstimate how many trades workers were involved in building of these sets.

James Price: I know we had three quarters of the whole construction crew working in Hungary, working for us at one time. I would say, over the course of the job, it would be in its thousands.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

James Price: There would be, best part of a hunch, 70 or 80 on each set being built at one time. That's just on the set physically, not in workshops and studios.

Alison Stewart: My guests are James Price and Shona Heath. They're nominated for Best Production Design for Poor Things. Shona, some of the film is in black and white, some is in color. I know there were some curtains you were bummed out about, to be frank.

Shona Heath: Yes, I was. We knew that some of the film would be in black and white, but we didn't know which bits were, and actually in the end, Yorgos flipped it all on its head and the flashbacks were in color. The beginning of the film was in black and white. Actually, Bella's bedroom, which had this dreamy color palette of medical green and these beautiful deep-dyed crushed velvet curtains that were like they've been dipped in blood, and this raspberry color had seeped up. They were so beautifully done, and they had these padded edges and they were just gorgeous. In black and white, they literally look gray. You can't see anything. That was actually the only thing that didn't translate. They still look lovely, but you don't read it.

Alison Stewart: I will tell you, though, you can see them online in one of the EPKs. There's a color shot of it. I wanted to let you know that. You can see it.

Shona Heath: Thank you. Brilliant. I can look at them again and drool over them. Everything else, really, the textures that we worked so hard to put into everything in the house, these deep carvings, quilted wall panels, panels with depictions of flying machines and boats to inspire Bella to dream about the world outside, but not go to it, little carved fish on her ceiling with these big lily pad lights that we specially made.

There was so much texture that actually read beautifully in black and white. It was such a treat later on to come back to see the house in color when everybody comes back into it, namely colored in blood. That was a bit of a rollercoaster, but actually, it didn't matter in the end. It was a beautiful thing to do.

Alison Stewart: James, have you noticed or have you observed that actors are different on physical sets?

James Price: Yes. Interestingly, I asked Mark Ruffalo this question just the other day in an interview, because I had a theory that the more real you make the sets, the easier it is for them in fact. I had a comment off Jude Law one day where he said to me, "Your set did all the work for me there." That was like, "Okay," and I took that on board. I have a belief that if the set doesn't feel real to me, then it's not going to translate onto screen and it's not going to feel real to everybody else.

If I believe in it, in something that we've created, then that will go across to everybody else and it will make it easier for them, and then they don't have to spend time imagining what's there. They just feel it and react and then they're thinking about. Yes, I believe that the more you can do that, the better. Even if we weren't shooting in super wide on the 4-meter sets, we wouldn't have really done anything any different if we could. We had a lot of comments this week actually.

We've just got back from Los Angeles with our own peer group and people saying, "Did you build the ceilings in the rooms? In Baxter's house? Was that CG?" I'm like, "No, that's all there. That is all there. Everything." The only time we did not build a ceiling or go any higher was because we physically couldn't because the stage was there. They're completely immersive these things. Shona really loves, and I'm sure she'll say, about London, Baxter's, because it felt such a real place to be, because it wasn't on the stage like Lisbon. Lisbon felt much more like a theme park. I always referred to it as a theme park because it was inside, but Baxter's was a real place. I was there one night on my own and I really got a little bit scared.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] That means you did a very good job if you scared yourself. The film, Poor Things, Shona Heath and James Price are nominated for Best Production Design. The film is also nominated for Best Film for the Oscars. Thank you so much for sharing your work with us.

Shona Heath: Pleasure. Thanks very much.

James Price: Thank you very much.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for today. On tomorrow's show, Black runners and coaches work to make running more inclusive and help create the New York City Marathon. On the show tomorrow, we'll talk about an exhibition at the New York Historical Society titled, Running for Civil Rights. It features the activism of the New Yorker Pioneer Club, an interracial group formed in Harlem in 1936. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you, and I will meet you back here next time.

[music]