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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thanks for sharing part of your day with us. If you couldn't be with us every single second of the week, you might want to check out the podcast to hear our conversations with folks like Jazz great Christian McBride whose album with his band, New Jawn, drops today. It is called Prime.

We also had a great conversation with podcast host and reporter Matthew Amha. About the untold history of the Black Liberation Group move and the infamous bombing of its HQ in Philadelphia by the police. That podcast is called The Africas VS. America. You can catch those segments and more on the All Of It podcast. Now that's in your future, but right now we're heading back to Old Hollywood.

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We continue our best picture series, celebrating Oscar nominees working behind the camera to make movie magic. Production designer Florencia Martin and set decorator Anthony Carlino had a big task, bring Old Hollywood to life for the three-hour romp that is Babylon. The film stars Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad, the beloved if messy superstar of the silent film era, and Margot Robbie as Nellie Laroy, a determined up-and-comer in Hollywood.

Both stars face challenges as the industry transitions from silent film to talkies. This film is big in every way. Massive sets, scenes with hundreds of extras, parties with elephants and alligators, fights with gangsters and with snakes. Throughout all of it, the film also remains grounded in period-accurate sets and details. The work of Florencia and Anthony, who are nominated for best production design at the Oscars this year might be in a good spot to take home the award because this happened last weekend.

Speaker: The BAFTA goes to.

Speaker: Babylon.

[cheering]

Alison Stewart: In addition to the BAFTA, Babylon won the Excellence in Production Design from the Art Director's Guild and the Critic Choice Awards. Florencia Martin and Anthony Carlino, welcome to the show.

Florencia Martin: Hi, Alison. It's so great to be here.

Anthony Carlino: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Congratulations on your work and all of your success. Should say that as well.

Anthony Carlino: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Hey listeners, we know so many of you are in the arts. Do you have a question for the Babylon production design team about their work on the film or maybe you have a question in general about production design or set decoration? Florencia and Anthony have been nice enough to say they'll take some calls. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can hit us up on social media, @allofitwnyc.

Florencia, you've been a production designer and a set decorator. On a set decoration, you were in Manchester by the Sea and Us, production designer for films like Licorice Pizza, Blonde, and of course Babylon so I'm going to ask the base-level question. What is the difference between production design and set decorator?

Florencia Martin: In production design, we're looking at the overall arch design of the film and then set decoration, looking at the interior design for filmmaking essentially. Working, in both ways, in storytelling of the character and in production design, touching on working with all the heads of department and film.

You're working with the director, cinematographer, special effects, picture cars, as well as your art department in designing the architecture and the overall structure of the film. Then I collaborate with our set decorator, Anthony Carlino on Babylon, to design the interiors of the sets. The textiles, the furnishings, the light fixtures, and always importantly, all the details that go into the character and the development of how the story is spanning through the script.

Alison Stewart: Florencia, what was something in your early conversations with Director Damien Chazelle that really stuck with you, that was something you went back to again and again?

Florencia Martin: It was the feeling of immersing the audience in both the depravity and the excess of the period. That really stuck with me that although we were trying to be period accurate, you really wanted to have you present in the story. See the hardships that these characters were going through, and also the lavishness of and extremes of the era on all ends.

Alison Stewart: Anthony, when you started to dig into this project and you started to dig into the research, what was something that you saw, maybe it was an object or a detail that you knew you wanted to incorporate and why?

Anthony Carlino: That's a good question. I don't know. For me, the script was so full of detail, and then by the time I had started the project, Florencia in the art department had done a lot of research and boards for each set in script order. When you walked in the art department, it started first scene, second scene, third scene on all 150 different sets or locations.

Each board would have some research on it, pictures of the location, or we know if it was a stage build and the general feel and color paddle of each set and you just dive into the research. For me, the interiors of the sets were fun. The hardest part of the movie was actually the film equipment part of it because we wanted to make sure that was all period accurate and it was really hard to find all this stuff and so you end up manufacturing things, searching.

There's prop houses in LA that house some of it, but the volume of what we needed was so vast. With set decoration is that you dig into the research or the feel of each character.

My philosophy is that if you notice something or something draws your attention in a scene, at a place where it doesn't flow in a set, then I haven't done my job. For me, when you decorate a set is that you just want it to be real and that if you're looking at the set dressing, it's probably the wrong thing.

It just has to just be real and in there, but not, I don't know, just not jumping out at you. You know what I mean?

Alison Stewart: I do. Let's take a call. Roger is calling in from Brooklyn. Hey, Roger, thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Roger: Hello.

Alison Stewart: You're on the air.

Roger: Oh, yes. I would love to know about the medieval war scene and what did you decide to focus on? When I watched it, I was like, "That's crazy that there are just a bunch of extras and they're just dying left and right willy-nilly." What did you decide to make happen when Brad Pitt comes up as the crusader?

Florencia Martin: There's a great number of films that inspired Damien and one of them was Braveheart and another one was a period film from the era, and he wanted it to feel like an epic battle scene, so we were able to bring in all of these extras to actually play this part live. He wanted to also show how vulnerable and how aggressive shooting in the era was.

With that was the violence of the fact that there probably weren't soft weapons yet or fake props, that they were using real spears and there wasn't the attention to safety that we probably have today. He wanted to showcase that aggressive nature of shooting in the era and also we based our research on these big outdoor epics that were being shot with MGM where they had big light towers and camera cars.

We custom-built the camera car that Spike Jonze is on. I know Gay Perello spent a lot of time working on the different types of cameras because it was the first handheld cameras of the era. It was based on a lot of research and we actually wrote a treatment. Damien wrote the script of Blood and Gold so that we knew also what the action was between the two sides, the Crusaders. Mary Zophres, our costume designer, did a lot of historical research and ended up bringing period costumes from Europe in order to have the quantity and also the accuracy of 1920s costumes of the era.

A lot of references went into that major decisions.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Florencia Martin and Anthony Carlino. They are the Oscar-nominated duo for best production design for Babylon. It's part of our big-picture series. If you have a question for the Babylon production design team about their work or film, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. They're kind enough to take a few calls as we continue our conversation.

There's the opening scene. The movie takes place in this massive mansion, this debaucherous party taking place, movie stars, drugs, jazz band, an elephant shows up. Anthony, a lot of things are being broken and thrown around, and [chuckles] generally trashed. How does that complicate your work and your team and what they have to do, and what they put on set?

Anthony Carlino: A lot of stuff that's thrown, we end up making breakaways for. I'll find a chair that I want to dress in the set, and then we will figure out ahead of time, that's the chair that's getting thrown across the room. Then they'll manufacture 20, how many takes they want to do, 20 chairs that are actual breakaways.

Other than chairs, there wasn't really much that really got destroyed, believe it or not, the tables that were in Don Wall's ballroom were actually manufactured. They were manufactured in a way where there was steel reinforced through them so that dancers could dance on top of them. I found one table, that we liked, and then we manufactured a dozen of them.

Other than that, believe it or not, that crazy party, pretty conscious about not destroying antique furniture [laughs] that we might need. It was very well planned out of like, okay, this chair gets thrown. We'll make duplicates of it.

Alison Stewart: I found this on the web.

Anthony Carlino: Sorry.

Alison Stewart: Siri wants in on the conversation. Florencia, where did that take place? How did you find the location for that big opening scene?

Florencia Martin: That took place at the United Artist Theater now run by the Ace Hotels as Ace Theater, and we were looking for movie premier houses for Jack Conrad and Nellie LaRoy. We stepped into the foyer and just were taken aback by the amazing, detail in the architecture. Damien had written a cathedral ceiling with three levels and a staircase that descends into a party, a very specific choreography and storyboarding for the sequence.

We took on the challenge of working on this historic venue and converting it into a ballroom and then adding the mayhem party design over top. What Anthony was saying, it all was very meticulously choreographed because we were working in a historic venue, and also with Linus Sandgren's wonderful cinematography, he had this sweeping shot that was actually a wired spider cam that went through the space and descended back onto Sydney.

It was also like amazing technology in order to make that space work. That was pretty great to work with.

Alison Stewart: This movie is about making movies, so you have to see sets as they would be filmed. You have to see backstage area, what went into the construction of the sets within the sets.

Florencia Martin: We worked with our paramount archival to get a lot of behind the scene photos of crews on set, crews eating, and building the sets. We stitched that together as our research, and also Los Angeles started out as farmland, there was the first layer of the film studios being based out of barns. We did a lot of research on farm equipment, the visceral nature that Damien wanted where it felt like everyone was working in the heat, and then the dirty and the dust.

We built our film sets so that they were free-standing individual sets that you could see more than the 19 tents. That's because he really wanted to ground them in the dirt and in the hot sun. You could see all of the behind-the-scenes, all of the rigging. That was a great collaboration with Anthony and Linus, that we were using the shade cloths like they did in the 1920s, practically on our set to shade the characters and to shade from the sun.

There was just a lot of working and it was a real living, breathing studio by the time we had finished for Kinoscope.

Alison Stewart: Anthony, one of, the lavish sets is Jack Conrad's house. This is the character that Brad Pitt plays. He's a movie star. It's got full little statues and lamps and furniture. What did you want to communicate about Jack as a character through what you chose for his home?

Anthony Carlino: I think it was a direct contrast with Nellie's because it cuts from Nellie's house, which is squall to Jack's. Jack has made it, he's an established movie star, Spanish revival, and maybe a world traveler, he likes to travel around the world. He is got fine antiques.

He reads books, and wealth of Hollywood at that time, is as a direct contrast to Nellie's, because I know it was important for Florencia and Damien to have that class, that social level. He was an established movie star that liked nice things but not just nice things like important things. The scene is he's going off on--, God, what was it on? It's the famous what scene where he talks about?

Florencia Martin: Joan of Bark and the Art.

Anthony Carlino: Yes, that he travels and he's got things from his travels, fine art, objects from, his travels.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Florencia Martin and Anthony Carlino, they are nominated for best production design for the Oscar. This is our big-picture series where we talk to the creatives behind the camera. We have more of your calls and more with Florencia and Anthony after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It. My guests are Florencia Martin and Anthony Carlino. They are nominated for best production design for Babylon this year's Oscars. We are taking your calls. Let's talk to Jay from Yonkers. Hi, Jay.

Jay: Good afternoon. I have a question about how the more mundane items for an interior shot of a period piece are determined and who's responsible for gathering them. Because I have seen several different films where one thing was so out of place that has really annoyed me greatly.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Sure. Talking about period accuracy. Anthony, do you want to take that one? How do you assure period accuracy?

Anthony Carlino: It just starts with a lot of research. You definitely don't want to be in that movie that all of a sudden ends up online that something wasn't correct. It was really important to all of us that we got it right. Down from the furnishings to the film equipment that they're filming with. it's just tons of research lots of, we--

Florencia Martin: I think Anthony had many record players in this film. I think there was more than a dozen record players. That's a nice way to think about the character of an object. You have the finish of each wood, so there's walnut veneer or oak, and that speaks to the economic class of the character or the style and the why. Once Anthony does the selection and he presents one idea for one of the characters of that set dressing or object, then it's really nice to look at that and see how it fits in with the character. That's the second part of it too, with working with our director and building the character of what's appropriate for the scene.

Alison Stewart: Florencia what was, you can look at the script and you can think, that party scene, that's a challenge. What was a surprising challenge? One that you didn't see coming?

Florencia Martin: I think the amount of sets that we had in Los Angeles, 1920s we had to travel a lot. The sheer logistics of the fact that we had determined that we were a location-based film, that was a big challenge for the team that they took on bravely. That was first, your focus is the determination of making the film and finding the best places. Then you have to be conscious of how you're actually going to make it. That was a large challenge.

Alison Stewart: Is there anything is of either of you that's maybe easier working on a film that's this big or has this many moving parts? Is there anything that makes it a little easier?

Florencia Martin: No. [laughs] Are you crazy lady?

Anthony Carlino: I know, I don't think there is anything easy about Babylon. It was a challenge. I think Flo can agree that I think the hardest thing was just time. There wasn't enough time. It was just the amount of sets in the small amount of prep that we had, it was a challenge, but at the same time, it was also fun.

The way that I and Flo work is like, we always just laughed. We never like got to the point of like, "Ugh." I just believe what we were creating was just so fun. It was just fun. It was hard, but it was also fun at the same time.

Florencia Martin: I think on this regardless of the scale, a lot of vendors stepped up and were very, very excited to help us get the accuracy history for hire with all the camera equipment and omegas and props, Warner Brothers, and building and manufacturing, and our teams too. Regardless how big or small a film everyone's very dedicated and passionate on seeing this one through.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Caitlin from the Bronx. Hey Caitlin, thanks for holding. You're on the air.

Caitlin: Oh, hey there. Thanks, Alison for taking my call. It's really cool to talk to you guys and hear about your amazing work. I was wondering if you had any words of wisdom for someone who might want to get into this line of work, set design, and set decoration.

Florencia Martin: I think for me if you work already in the film industry is to keep following your heart towards scripts and directors that you really want to work with and learn from everyone on set. That's the best place to immerse yourself with the art of the craft and the awareness of what all the departments do.

It's such a collaborative art. I think that just being boots on the ground and working in production is the best way of learning the ropes.

Alison Stewart: Get in there and do it. How about for you, Anthony? A little word of wisdom for someone out there who's starting their career.

Anthony Carlino: It's the same. I started as a PA and then, and just gradually moved my way up. You learn it's not just learning set dressing, but learning what the grips do and what electricians do and what construction does and what special effects does and what the directors and producers and everybody so that you need to know a little bit about everything. No matter which department you go into, just start in and just start absorbing it all.

Alison Stewart: My guests have been Florencia Martin and Anthony Carlino. They are nominated for best production design for Babylon at this year's Oscars. Thank you so much for taking listeners' calls. That was a real treat for folks.

Florencia Martin: Thank you. That was really special.

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