Production Designer Reviews Movie Mansions, from ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ to ‘Clueless’

Subtitles section Play video

- I have to tell you a storage about the cottage.
I was looking for like the best English cottage door.
I Googled, English cottage door and what came up
was Rosehill Cottage from, "The Holiday,"
and I thought on my god I've ruined the culture.
My version in an American movie of an English cottage
is now an English cottage door.
[beeping and hands smacking]
My name is Jon Hutman, I'm a production designer,
welcome to my home.
This is not a sound stage, this is not a set.
We're in an unusual moment in cultural history,
we're a little bit quarantined at home
nonetheless I'm here with you today
to talk about set design production
designing some of my favorite movies.
[easy music]
- I wish you could help, I wish [dinging], ah.
- I had a gut feeling you would be on line now, hi.
- We're gonna talk about
"You've Got Mail," which is Nora Ephron's film from 1998.
The movie is about a man and a woman
who start having a relationship over AOL Chat.
- You've got mail. - You've got mail.
- Nora Ephron and her team are so good
at delivering what this romantic comedy audience wants.
In particular Meg's apartment,
there is something about just like the shape of her couch,
the detail is so loving.
One of the things that they've done with her apartment
is they've taken out all the walls.
It's very unusual that you can see all the way through
from the front window where the camera comes in
which is kind of her bedroom area,
to the kind of sitting room and kitchen in the back
because you've got so many scenes at the laptop computer.
They've put their desks in the center of the room.
So you're intercutting between the two of them
on their primitive chunky laptop computers.
So whether we use that as a table, or whatever,
it's got a very specific shooting-staging depth purpose.
There's another clip toward the end of the movie
where he actually comes over to her apartment
and she is now single and she's moved her bed
which is something that you might not notice,
it feels real and faithful to the footprint
of an Upper Westside townhouse.
One of the big design challenges of this movie
is the fact that the two main characters
have most of their pivotal scenes
until the third-act of the movie online
which makes them either at their desks or in bed.
The thing that I would've done differently in a big way
is they both live in these kind of signature
warm-yellow apartments.
If you look at them in their beds
she has a curved headboard and he has a square headboard,
and she has a frilly bedside lamp
and he has these very kind of architectural bedside lamps.
I just wish that the walls in his apartment
had been a different color,
a small subtle art department mistake
is it's unusual that the bathroom vanity
has exactly the same carved floral molding detail
as the door.
Those buildings would be about a hundred years older
than the vanity fittings, nit picky small detail,
I love her apartment.
- [Cher] I actually have a way normal life
for a changed girl.
- So now we're gonna talk about Amy Heckerling's movie,
"Clueless," from 1995.
This is a very well-designed movie.
Her line is, I'm like a typical normal American teenager
and you see her use her computer
to go through her virtual closet which we will later see
has a dry cleaners track in it,
that sets the bar for her reality.
Every beat through this movie from this
grand staircase coming down to her father's home office
which is just solid Mcmansion mahogany.
Every room is super clearly what it's supposed to be.
In my opinion lives up to that bar that was set
in that early scene with the virtual closet.
One thing that's become very popular in Los Angeles,
where real estate is so expensive,
is people try to cram all of the details of their s-a-i
onto kind of like a small lot.
- Cher get in here.
- Yes daddy?
- Even though these choices are let's say,
very sort of bling-bling nouveau riche predictable,
they're delivered with a real visual clarity
and the palate is very de-saturated.
Like you have this black and white entryway
and you're sitting in the dining room
and it's got these like gold-rimmed chairs
and you see these bright bold pieces of modern art.
She pops out of there in her colorful outfits.
The design of the movie completely helps
define and support that world.
["Practical Magic"]
♪ Ain't there nothing I can take, I say ♪
♪ Doctor ♪
♪ I say wow, to relieve this belly ache, I say ♪
♪ Doctor ♪
- This is, "Practical Magic,"
directed by Griffin Dunne in 1998.
It's the story of two sisters who are witches.
- What's going on in here?
- Just making toast is all.
[toaster dinging]
- And they are dealing with a curse
that has been put on them
under which any man who they fall in love with dies.
This is a friggin' great looking movie.
I think it avoids two traps.
One is to make them and their house scary,
which it's not.
The other is to lean in the opposite direction
and make it feminine and benign and instead
just sexy and cool and historic and modern
and it makes you understand why men fall in love with
the women who live in a house like this
and if you go into Sandra Bullock's bedroom
it's got this kind of warm yellowy tone
which repeats itself in a lot of romantic comedy's.
What I think works about this kind of very complex kitchen,
with a lot of layers and depth,
is that if you're a witch the kitchen is your laboratory.
In a Victorian house like this
the people who lived in the house didn't cook.
Houses were built for servants so they tended to be
either in the basement or tacked onto the back
and that's what they've done here
which is why you can get away
with having this vaulted ceiling
and what's beautiful about it
is the depth with those glass cabinets
that kind of divide the room in half
and the idea that women who are witches
have to have an herb garden attached to their kitchen
brings in this very kind of natural botanical element.
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a conservatory
attached to the kitchen, like usually I think of them
being separate in the backyard,
but it's a delicious visual detail.
The production designer is a woman named, Robin Standefer.
She's one of the first people who looked at
the inspiration for this and said,
"what happens if I cross a house with a laboratory?"
These two worlds that were very separate
in the period where they were invented
she brought them together.
What I think she's so wisely done
is remove color from the house.
That contrast makes the house really
just kinda modern chic.
The black shiny floor with the white cabinets
and the white stairs coming down
and similarly in the front entry
those black stairs and the black wainscoting
and beautiful rich-colored oil portraits.
It's a way of taking the history
of the people and the house and wrapping them together
in a way that feels contemporary
without feeling inauthentic.
[crying]
We're watching, "Something's Gotta Give,"
which I designed, directed by Nancy Meyers in 2003.
Jack Nicholson ends up falling in love with the mother
of a woman that he's dating.
When half of the movie takes place in a single set
the house sort of does become a character in the movie.
- [Man] Wow.
- Our initial impression of the house
sets us up to wanna meet the woman who lives there.
My inspiration for designing, "Something's Gotta Give,"
obviously came from the writer/director, Nancy Meyers.
"Something's Gotta Give," in particular was very personal
and she'd spent a summer in The Hamptons to write this.
What we tried to do is reflect the sensibility
of a successful woman, an independent woman,
a woman who's a writer and values books.
She has kind of an interesting collection of art
that doesn't overwhelm the house,
but that reflects who she is and what she likes.
I visited The Hamptons, I actually scouted from an airplane
because a lot of the homes are large and gated
and you can't really see them,
so I went up in the air and I like literally,
with a map book, marked out all of these different houses.
This home which is in South Hampton on Meadow Lane
was one of those houses.
The interior we built on a soundstage
and, you know, there are a lot of elements
that are similar to Nancy's own house,
kind of ubiquitous in The Hamptons.
So the kitchen is where Erica first meets Harry.
- Okay you stay where you are we have a knife.
- Do you live here?
- It's where they have this great midnight snack
where she makes him pancakes in the middle of the night.
My favorite little detail in the house
is the little corbel brackets underneath
the upper cabinets in the kitchen.
[laughing]
The color scheme of the movie
is pretty typical of a house in The Hamptons.
Shades of white, the kind of rich ebony floors,
her bedroom has a little bit of a bluish cast
and his bedroom has a little bit of yellowish cast,
that big blue-and-white stripped dhurrie rug that you see
in the overhead shot in the living room,
those are the things that become anchor points
that we try to make everything work around.
After I did this movie I went to someone's house
and I was introduced to a woman who said,
"oh my god, I love that house."
And I said, "I didn't invent that house."
What I try to do when I design a movie
is kind of choose and synthesize
the best details from those houses.
And she said, "you know, it's so funny you should say that."
She said, "because that plate shelf in the dining room,
that's my house."
And I was like, "what?"
And truthfully her house had been published
in a house and garden magazine that year
and we like fell in love with this plate shelf
and what I will tell you that I know for a fact,
the issue of "Architectural Digest" that featured this house
is apparently the most back-ordered issue
of "Architectural Digest."
A lot of people remember the movie from that kitchen.
- [John] Do you think this story's
gonna have a happy ending?
- Happy endings are to stories that haven't finished yet.
- This is, Mr. & Mrs. Smith directed by Doug Liman in 2005.
It's a story of a husband and wife
who unbeknownst to each other are both paid assassins.
The way the house is decorated
is I think very intentionally impersonal.
Everything is sleek and in it's place
and there's a whole scene where she's talking about
the curtains and what the new curtains look like
and at the same time all of that
sleek-sophisticated interior
has the sense that they're hiding something.
The inside of this house completely flips
the expectation of the exterior of the house.
The exterior of the house which is
kind of typical traditional colonial American
you then go to the inside of the house
and you see the kitchen, the little black tile,
which is the same on the countertop and the walls,
that's something that I wouldn't do
and I also wouldn't use the little black tile
on the counter surface,
but when you get to the bathroom
I feel like I'm in the presidential suite
of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel
which is exactly appropriate for a husband and wife
who are international hit men.
I also have a little bit of an issue
with the bedding in their bedroom
which is kinda shiny, the stripes are run on the bias.
In Havana they were together and they were having sex
and now they're this kind of duplicitous couple
who are married but sort of lying to each other.
So they have their international jet-setty
sophisticated life hiding behind the veneer
of this traditional exterior.
♪ Baby do you wanna love me now ♪
♪ I love you baby ♪
- This is, "10 Things I Hate About You," from 1999
directed by Gil Junger.
This is an updated teenage version
of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew,"
- New rule, Bianca can date when she does.
- This movie fit into the sort of comfortable
upper middle class domestic rom-com.
Whether it's an adult romance, a teen movie,
or a family, the common denominator in a movie like this
is the setting of the story is connected to
a warm inviting positive family home.
They clearly shot in a a practical location,
the house is beautiful.
Will notice again and again
that this kind of warm-yellow walls
is a popular choice.
A lot of the interesting things is
to look at Kat's bedroom.
She's the shrewish difficult older sister.
A lot of times set decoration is a signifier,
in other words, if I see a room it's plastered
with rock and roll posters, the visual message is
angry teenager, right, that's very thoroughly done.
I think the message is very clear
and I think these images are the right kind of images;
however, I don't think that this set decorator
got over the second challenge which is to make them look
like the collage has evolved over time
rather than everything was put up in a haphazard fashion
at the last minute.
So the dressing in my opinion tends to be generic
to this kind of movie then it is to tell specific details
about a specific family.
- I knocked-up your sister.
- And we understand there are concerns about your wife.
- I don't know where my wife is
and I came home to this.
Now I don't panic easily, but it's weird.
- We're now gonna talk about, "Gone Girl"
which was directed by David Fincher in 2014.
This is a movie about a guy whose wife disappears
and he becomes the prime suspect in her disappearance.
One of the tricks of the movie
is making the audience question what they see.
The house and the interiors and the furnishing
are so intentionally generic.
Everywhere the audience is looking,
which is everywhere the police is looking,
for some clue, some hint about where is she,
what was going on, what was happening
and the house just doesn't give it to you.
It looks like no one lives there.
There's no history, there's no sense of life there.
This veneer of perfect domestic order is just that.
How do we take things which should feel safe and familiar
and question them?
The trick is creating visual tension
and one of the things that happens
when the police come back at night
and now he's a suspect.
So the difference between seeing the house in the day,
which is very benign, and at night
when it's dark and shadowy
and you sense that things are hidden
and to lean into the artifice
of a traditional classic American home
and to use that trope as a cover
and to kind of suggest doubt,
is a fantastic trick.
[upbeat music]
"The Holiday" directed by Nancy Meyers in 2006,
I also designed this movie.
"The Holiday" is a story of two women
and they do this online house swapping thing.
- Are there any men in your town?
Honestly [computer keys tapping].
- If you were a production designer
and somebody shot like a minute and a half of footage
of Kate Winslet running through your set
and being like delighted and delighted and delighted,
and delighted, it's a production designer's dream.
When you look at it in contrast to the house
that Amanda shows up in, which is
this little tiny stone cottage
and so part of the joke when Amanda gets there
is where do I put my clothes,
where do I put my suitcase, like it's tiny tiny tiny.
- Okay, that'll be interesting.
- The goal was to make it as different as possible
from Amanda's house in California,
but also to try to find something
that was quintessentially English,
not only in terms of the house and the architecture,
but the furnishings.
And so when you see the interior of that house
you still understand that
a young interesting woman lives there.
So we scaled it up probably by 50% on the inside
and it still feels minuscule.
And we had this charming little staircase
up to her bedroom.
I wanted to bring some of the half timbering into the walls
and then she's got this charming little bathroom
with the tiniest free-standing tub you've ever seen.
Behind the kitchen we added
this little sort of library office.
It's just gives you a little bit more light and space
which you might not have clocked,
or you might now know where in the house it is.
We ended up building this cottage
and the stone wall in this little town in Surrey,
called Shere, and because we were building the exterior,
as well as the interior, it gave us the flexibility
to figure out how it sits on the site
and so it's got this big field in front of it
and we let the country lane wrapping around it
with this wonderful old kind of rambling stone wall.
The trim color, which is that sort of light
almost French blue, and that carries through in the kitchen,
there's something about that that lifts the house
and makes it contemporary and a little bit feminine.
One of my favorite things about the cottage
is the way the roof sags.
They actually built that sagging roof into the set
and it's one of the things that I think
makes it look real.
[motor whirring]
What we were looking for for Amanda's house
was exactly what Iris reacts to
when she sees the set for the first time.
- Holy shit.
- We were going to do more
of a kind of a classic Paul Williams' house.
We thought maybe is the Spanish like too obvious
and one of Nancy's favorite quotes
is actually from Billy Wilder and he said,
"like make your subtleties obvious,"
that house that we chose was actually
not only designed by Wallace Neff,
it was his own house.
The interior was our sort of reimagining of that.
There is some antiques, there's a lot of natural wood,
there's a lot of stone.
It's contemporary but it has a little bit of a warmth,
a sort of slightly feminine sensibility
and that seemed to be appropriate.
- This place suits you.
- [chuckling] Yeah right.
- I think it was Nancy who said, "like let's go for it,"
let's do black cabinets in the kitchen
and once you have that continuity around the room
we put black on the refrigerator
because the stainless would've kind of popped out of there.
The couch in the kitchen is this great device,
you don't really see it until that scene
where she's teaching Arthur to walk with his walker.
We love that kind of high wingback love seat
as a way to kind of define
this walkway part of the kitchen.
Our thought was that it was,
it was a kind of younger way to live in an older home.
- What's so funny?
Well it's nice to see you too.
- Now we're gonna about, "The Royal Tenenbaums,"
Wes Anderson's film from 2001.
This is a fantastic movie.
The patriarch of the family returning
and trying to reconcile with his estranged wife
and his three grown children.
- What are you suggesting?
- That he come here and stay in my room.
- Wes Anderson is one of those directors
whose visual style is inseparable
from his directorial style.
You have characters who stand out
against a flap backdrop, but that backdrop tends to be
very richly decorated, colorful,
the frame is filled with information,
everything is flat, flat, flat, flat.
You learn about each of the kids
and each of their accomplishments
in these very two-dimensional ta-ab-la-ves
and what I think that does is it makes
the characters standout in front of the backdrop,
particularly Margot you can really see
this two-dimensional flat-on approach.
Sometimes he'll tilt down across a surface
Sometimes he'll track across a surface,
but it's always the character against the background.
We see Gwyneth Paltrow locked in the bathroom
in the bathtub, boom against a two-dimensional backdrop,
a wall, a tub, a TV, all of the information
that we need to know about that character
tends to be in that quirky frame.
This game closet where Ben Stiller and his father
get into a fight and it's filled floor-to-ceiling
with all of these board games like from their childhood.
It seems like so much of the detail
comes from like very specific childhood memories,
a closet full of games, or the tent
that Richie, the tennis-player brother, lives in.
At the end of the story Owen Wilson crashes his race car
[car crashing]
into the front-- - What was that?
- Of the Tenenbaum home.
- Eli just crashed his car into the front of the house.
- There is something that happens in that moment
where that two-dimensional space breaks down
and the story becomes human and connective.
♪ Love, love, love ♪
♪ Love, love-- ♪ - Did you do this?
♪ Love, love, love ♪ - Ah no.
- Now we're gonna talk about, "Love Actually,"
Richard Curtis' film from 2003.
Emma Thompson realizes that her husband's having an affair.
She goes from her living room which is warm and colorful
and the kids are there and the Christmas tree
and this kind of like ethnic trunk
and it's full of life and you go into this bedroom
and it's dead.
It's gray and it's empty and it's quiet.
Design wise each character needs to have
their own distinct incredible world,
but we have to believe that there is something
visually, stylistically, tonally,
which ties them together.
Another beautiful sort of cross-pollination
is Laura Linney is in love with a guy in the office
and they finally get together
and her bedroom has a lot of the likeness
of Emma Thompson's bedroom without the sadness
and what's lovely is it's in like an attic,
so it has clipped ceilings.
The guy comes up the stairs into the room,
it's like a damsel's tower.
So Liam Neeson plays a guy who just lost his wife,
his story involves his late wife's son.
The balance between Liam's world,
which is very much without color,
to Emma Thompson's world which is very much,
except for her bedroom, very alive with color,
to make each character's space specific and real,
but I understand that like Alan Rickman,
who's Emma Thompson's husband, who's a graphic designer,
his office, that's the place where the guy
who lives in the colorful house works.
- This is Thad.
- Oh, yes.
- Hey buddy.
- Thaddeus. - You look beautiful.
- Hello, I'm Meredith I've heard so much about you.
- Now we're gonna talk about, "The Family Stone,"
made in 2005, the director is Thomas Bezucha.
This is a surprisingly well-done movie I have to say.
Sarah Jessica Parker, whose character's name is, Meredith,
comes home to meet the family of her fiance
and they're a tough audience.
- They hate me, yes I'm being myself.
- This is really a movie that is about the house.
The choices that they made are real messy.
There is a sense of history in the house.
I really admire the density and the texture
to have a conventional refrigerator
which has an ice maker, it puts it so oddly and firmly
in a period and I love that.
Wallpaper is hard in movies
for me it works best when it remains a texture.
That really happens in this movie.
The one exception a little bit
is the master bedroom where I don't think it quite works
but I think that in Ben's bedroom,
and in the kitchen there are these subtle
kind of faded textures that seem to come from
a different era and a different sensibility.
A set's supposed to be background.
You don't want any one detail to distract
or overwhelm the story and I feel like you have that
in terms of the kitchen layout,
the kitchen appliances, where Diane's desk is,
the sort of layering of patterns,
it feels like the rings of a tree
that's how the history of a place
gets layered by the people who live in it.
It's really really hard to pull off.
[airplane engine roaring]
- So now we're going to talk about "North by Northwest,"
Alfred Hitchcock's film from 1959,
Robert Boyle is the production designer.
The film is about Cary Grant who gets kidnapped
in a case of mistaken identify.
- Not that I mind a slight case of abduction now and then
but I have tickets to the theater this evening.
- From the very beginning he gets kidnapped
to this huge house on Long Island.
He goes to the United Nations,
he goes to Grand Central Station,
he goes to Mount Rushmore,
he goes to this incredible house.
The interesting thing is we never see Roger Thornhill
in his house.
The first house on Long Island,
which is supposed to be Townsend's,
it's this fantastic mansion and one of the things
that Bob Boyle does so masterfully
is segue from real locations into stage sets.
We pull up outside of a real house
and go through a foyer which I first thought was real,
but I think it's a set, into a study
which is definitely a set
and in a combination of practical locations,
well-designed and shot set pieces and mat painting,
you sort of seamlessly believe that you're there.
And when we get to the end of the movie
they're in this house which is very much
inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright,
it's supposed to be in South Dakota,
with these soaring wood beams and big stone fireplace,
'cause it's so much glass it's very much about
landscape and settings.
Visually and design-wise so many of these locations
are right on the cutting edge of moderate architecture
in the late, in the late '50s.
I don't think there's one right way
to design a movie and I have a feeling
that if six different designers did
"Something's Gotta Give,"
you'd get six different versions of that house.
What I wanna say when I watch my movies again
is to say like I can't imagine
that movie happening anywhere else and then, you know,
then we did our jobs.