Home is where the heart is, but in a movie, a house can also define a character — or, in a way, become one. The production designers of four Oscar contenders break down how their residential locations served as spaces for lost souls, dark memories and more.
‘Bugonia’
In Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist black comedy, Emma Stone plays high-powered tech CEO Michelle Fuller, who is kidnapped by a pair of conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons’ Teddy and Aidan Delbis’ Don) convinced that she’s an alien infiltrator of the human race. Teddy’s rural farmhouse, in which Stone is held captive, is a key factor for understanding Teddy’s psychology, explains Oscar-winning production designer James Price. “The house is important in defining who Teddy is — the isolation in being a young man, probably just old enough to look after himself,” he says. Knowing that the bulk of the film would be set in the house, and expecting it to be difficult to “evict someone from their home” in order to shoot at a real location, led Price to make a big pitch to his director: What if they built the house from scratch?
While scouting locations in “the outskirts of London,” Lanthimos took Price’s idea one step further. “He looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t we build the basement with the rest of the house?’” Price recalls. “And I looked at him and said, ‘Because I didn’t think anyone would let us.’” Finding a spot in which the soil was largely chalk and thus good for drainage, the production dug a massive hole and built a basement by welding together shipping containers upon which they erected the rest of the house — complete with electricity, plumbing and interiors inspired by Atlanta-area real estate listings that set decorator Prue Howard found on Zillow.
‘Die My Love’
Production designer Tim Grimes recalls that the script for Lynne Ramsay’s drama, in which Jennifer Lawrence plays a new mother, Grace, whose connection to reality slowly unravels, described the cabin where Grace and her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) live as a run-down home passed down through generations.
The location that Grimes and Ramsay found in Calgary was indeed on the verge of condemnation. “When I first saw it, I didn’t think [that it would] work,” says Grimes. “The house was really falling apart. But then I walked out and looked around the property and I was like, ‘Man, this is a real playground for Lynne.… She’ll just love this. Maybe we can figure out a way to bring this house back to life.’”
Grimes’ team added a front porch to the house’s facade, also tearing down interior walls to allow director of photography Seamus McGarvey to easily film inside. He was conscious about not making it look too nice, as it needed to be a space where Grace would lose her mind. “We brought it back to life, and then brought it back down to an acceptable level for where it needed to be story-wise,” he says.
Because the film often leaves the viewer unsure if what’s happening is real or just Grace’s imagination, Grimes had to strike a delicate tonal balance with the setting. “I definitely wanted to ground the house but also make it feel a little surreal and a bit story-bookish,” he adds. “We tried to ride the line a little bit, but also give it enough character and color and stuff to make it interesting, because we’re in the house an awful lot.”
One sign that Grimes’ work was effective? He started to feel as stir-crazy in the home as Grace. “I almost got sick of the wallpaper after a while, personally, but I think that’s kind of what Grace is probably going through as well.”
‘Sentimental Value’
Joachim Trier’s film opens with an introduction to the Borg family home in Oslo, seen through the eyes of 12-year-old Nora (played as an adult by Renate Reinsve). Built in the 19th century, the ornate structure belongs to Nora’s estranged father, film director Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård). After the death of their mother, Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) grapple with Gustav’s return home, new autobiographical film script in tow, setting the stage for a complex family drama.
For production designer Jorgen Stangebye Larsen, the latest collaboration with Trier marked his own return to a familiar setting: The home appeared in Trier’s “Oslo, August 31st,” which was also Larsen’s first film. “I knew that we were going to film in that house when I read the script so I was picturing all the rooms while I was reading,” says Larsen. “It was a funny thing, that we had a history with that house.”
The striking details in the wooden structure, such as carvings in the windows and ceilings, offered a timelessness for the home, which in real life is surrounded by concrete and brick townhouses. “It was renovated in some places — there were some new floors and the kitchen had moved,” he says, “but it [still had] this feeling of patina and life to it.”
Because Larsen couldn’t touch the greenery outside the house, he also built an exact replica of the house on a soundstage (seen as a movie set in the film’s final sequence) with LED screens outside of the windows. “In very little screen time, there are fragments of [history] that fly by, but we had to shoot them all,” Larsen explains of the technology, which allowed for virtual backgrounds set in various periods to indicate the passage of time.
‘Train Dreams’
Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella tells the story of logger Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) as his ordinary life contrasts with the ever-changing world around him in the first half of the 20th century. Central to Grainier’s character is the log cabin he builds on the banks of a river in Idaho for his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their daughter.
Production designer Alexandra Schaller brought her experience in immersive theater to the project, filmed in locations around eastern Washington. “We wanted it to feel like a real cabin, and as a result we built it out of real logs,” says Schaller, noting that the material was locally sourced. “So much of [the film] is about the trees and the cycle of life, how the forest becomes the logs, [the logs] become the towns, [the towns] become America.”
Although the film is told through Grainier’s eyes, the cabin also represented Gladys’ presence. “It was very important to all of us for Gladys to not be a passive character, a woman at home waiting for her husband while he was away,” says Schaller. As such, the interiors represented Gladys’ domain more than her husband’s. “It was very important for the cabin to be functional,” Schaller says. “Everything in the cabin, whether or not it made it into the final movie, was used and touched. There was nothing superfluous, really.”