Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my delight to welcome back Tamara Deverell. In this interview, she talks about making stories for big screens, what makes a great artist, pushing for physical builds, and the rise of generative AI. Between all these and more, Tamara goes back to her work on “Priscilla” and takes a deep dive into the recently released “Frankenstein”.
Kirill: We spoke about your work on “Nightmare Alley” in mid 2022. How have these last three years been for you, professionally and personally?
Tamara: I’ve moved from Toronto, which was our home base for many years, while working in the film industry. We built a house in the woods in Cape Breton by the ocean, and we’re living here now, which is really nice. It’s been a big year of change, finishing “Frankenstein” just over a year ago and landing here in Cape Breton.
I’ve taken this year off. I’m at an age now where I’m going to be picky and choosy about what I’m going to work on. I’m trying to do stuff that is a little bit more appealing to me emotionally and politically – not that “Frankenstein” wasn’t – but that’s also a little more accommodating to a change of lifestyle. “Frankenstein” was a very long project for me. I worked on it for almost two years and then took the year off. And now I’ve been doing a lot of publicity and interviews about it. It’s come back at me in a big way, which is wonderful because the movie is doing well.
It was a passion project for Guillermo and me. One of the things that we intended for the film was to make it very handmade, particularly in this age of the increasing use of AI. Guillermo is a big supporter of not letting AI replace human creativity. It’s not something we should be relying on to create our own artwork, masterpieces, and cinematic journeys. Ones and zeros don’t have human emotions. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ve been trying to do my own artwork, which is actually hard [laughs]. It’s much easier to work on a film that I’ve been doing for almost 40 years. But I’ve been trying. I’ve been trying to do a graphic novel as well.
I was so involved in living and breathing while I was doing “Frankenstein” every moment of my day, 24/7. I was dreaming about what I was going to do for sets, there were so many sets and layers within sets, it took over my psyche. We had approximately 110 sets and locations, and 20 or more studio sets. The lab in the water tower was comprised of eight different separate set builds, both in studio and on location, exterior and interior. It had several different looks. It started as an abandoned water tower, and then there’s a scene where it’s renovated. Following this, there’s a scene where it’s the operational lab during the moment of creation. Finally, there’s the destruction scene and the aftermath. The same goes for the tower lobby. When you come in, it’s run down but intact. And then later on, it is post explosion, and it’s winter when the creature goes back and finds out his true story of creation and how he came to be.
All of the “Frankenstein” sets had to be carefully orchestrated and planned out to tell those stories. We ended up shooting it in order, because we were making changes that we couldn’t go back on. It was also helpful to be in story order as much as we could for the actors and for Guillermo while directing.
Production design of “Priscilla” by Tamara Deverell.
Kirill: How was “Priscilla” for you?
Tamara: It was great, it was a breath of fresh air. It was really nice working with Sophia. It was like working on a memory poem, in a way. People ask me how I replicated Graceland, and I both did and did not. I did what I considered to be Priscilla’s actual memory of Graceland when she first arrived. Then we evolved it with two distinct looks for different time periods.
When Priscilla lived at Graceland, it was not the Graceland of today. So when people ask if I visited Graceland, I say that I didn’t as it wouldn’t have served a purpose; it’s so different in our movie. We wanted to be this poetic memory. Memories are strange things. When Priscilla first arrived there, Sophia wanted this feeling of a white, creamy wedding cake. That’s what I wanted to evoke in the space.
We did want to make it feel like Graceland. Elvis had this crazy 15-foot-long couch, and we custom-built it. I purposely made it very tall because Jacob Elordi is such a tall man. I did have the blueprints from the original Graceland, and I extended the ceiling height to accommodate Jacob. So we heightened that couch a bit for him, and when Cailee Spaeny, who played Priscilla, sits on it, her feet are dangling. We thought carefully about a lot of things that we could control in that movie, because we didn’t have a big budget for that. It was certainly no “Frankenstein”.
We cobbled it together. It’s amazing the things you can do. You don’t have to have all the money in the world – just some clever and creative choices and a thoughtful colour palette. We had a wonderful cinematographer, Philippe Le Sourd, he had worked with Sophia many times in the past. Sophia is not used to shooting in studio sets, but we had to shoot in the studio because you’re making Graceland. You’re not going to find that anywhere. And she found the whole thing quite magical to see this set come out of nowhere. It was a beautiful film, and I was very proud of it.
We built Priscilla’s little teenage bedroom and the family home that would have been part of the U.S. Army base in Germany. We built onto the front of an existing Southern plantation style building for the exterior of Graceland, which I had used many years ago on “The Feast of All Saints”. I remembered the mansion, which is how we found it again. We built a facade onto the existing exterior of the house to make it look similar to the real Graceland. Again, poetic notions and poetic license freed us up to give the essence of Graceland without actually being there.
Tamara Deverell on the water tower lab set in “Frankenstein”, courtesy of Netflix.
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Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and episodic productions, it is my delight to welcome Sam Bader. In this interview, he talks about the responsibilities of the production designer, the importance of layering for visual storytelling, what is art and what makes a great artist, and his thoughts on generative AI. Between all these and more, Sam dives deep into his work on the upcoming “The Testament of Ann Lee”, a wonderful reminder of the sublime magic of this delightful art form.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
Sam: My name is Sam Bader and I production designed “The Testament of Ann Lee”. I grew up in the middle of the country, St. Louis, Missouri, and starting at a very young age, I found myself doing oil painting and figurative drawing. I had a lifelong fascination with cinema, and as I was growing up, it was that golden era of TV with “The Sopranos”, “The Wire”, and later on “Breaking Bad”. Those were my formative years, the lexicon of culture in my brain from music, books, movies and video games.
I went to college at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and I was circling around the film school without ever having taken a major there. My paintings attracted the attention of some of the producing students who were doing the thesis projects, and I was asked if I wanted to pitch to production design. I knew notionally what that meant, and I had certain intuitions about how to approach it, and I’m pretty proud to say a lot of those intuitions carried forth. It was reading a script, breaking it down, pulling references, doing drawings, trying to figure out the structure of what you have to build in terms of staff, as well as graphics and construction.
I had that experience when I was about 22 years old, and I was gravitating in the direction of the film industry. Having come from a place where there was no real industry knowledge of what that meant, I followed the proverbial North Stars. Out of college, I was lucky to intern at Indian Paintbrush, where Wes Anderson’s whole team worked, reading and writing script coverage. That was still miles away from what I would end up doing, but I made good friends with the people who ran that day-to-day office. They put me in touch with a phenomenal production designer named Adam Stockhausen, who hired me as an art PA.
That’s when I moved to New York, and I wasn’t totally sure what I was going to do. I had a painting studio. I was working a construction job for set building. And Adam hired me to be on “Bridge” of Spies as the art assistant in the design office. I clasped at that quite firmly, and you could draw a pretty linear line from that point in 2014 to now. I stayed in the art department, and gradually – and then suddenly – went from having not ever drafted or done graphic design or organized databases of reference imagery, to doing all of those things over 7-8 years.
Once I was in that seat, I knew I wanted to be a production designer. There’s a tradeoff between striking out on your own in indie productions and staying in the big art departments. You can go out into the world, design little things on your own, and climb that ladder. Or you can stay in the “incubator” of these massive art departments with white glove teams, some of the best draftsmen, concept illustrators, graphic designers, getting to be on the floor, seeing how bigger construction and scenic teams make these worlds. I stuck to the latter pretty narrowly for the first half of my now 12-year career, and would jump out and design a commercial or design a $600,000 indie feature – trying to have one foot on both sides of the line.
And then, around 2020-21 I got to leap up and be an art director in full, which meant managing construction, managing scenic, overseeing all the designing, all the drawing, working with a production designer. I got a ton out of that. On some of these projects that I art directed, the overall budget for just wood and paint and foam exceeded the cost of a lot of middle indie features. That helped me fortify a level of knowledge and gain an amount of confidence that I am grateful for.
There were moments when I did question it. Should I be out just designing indie? Am I losing nine or ten months doing a TV series or a studio feature? But looking back on it, all of these things really harmonized for me around the time Mona asked me if I wanted to design “The Testament of Ann Lee”. I could not have done the work I did and managed the team I did, had I not really cut my teeth in that arena.
Mood sketches for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Kirill: How do you see the role of the production designer? What do you feel are the bigger misconceptions about it from the outside of the art department?
Sam: I think a production designer stands at the crossroads of the directing side and the producing side. It’s a little cheesy to say, but you are designing the production. You’re not just designing the film. You are working with producers to frame out the scaffolding – financially and logistically – of how you’re going to achieve this film with the money and the time you have.
If you were to ask the average person what they thought a production designer did, you’d get an answer about having the sets, the paint finishes, the furniture, the aesthetic, and the visual through line of the whole film. That is certainly true, but the misconception is the extent to which you have to shave down the contours of this whole machine, in terms of staffing and locations and budget and timeline to make it work.
You have to be able to draw and illustrate and communicate ideas on paper. And you have to be able to pull abstract ideas out of yours and the director’s heads, and communicate them to a vast group of people who are all coming with their own sensibilities.
Another misconception might be that everything that you see in front of the camera was touched by a designer. On a very small movie where you are doing everything, that might be more the case. But on most films, you have to ingest imagery, ingest information, ingest ideas from a director, and then communicate them to other people with the trust and the knowledge that they too will interpret and produce their version of what they think it is. And then it’s your job to absorb all of what you’re being shown, and know how to tweak it, and edit it, and understand the extent to which you should tell somebody that something doesn’t work at all. You steer the art department and your artists to make them motivated and inspired to do their work.
Production design renders for “The Testament of Ann Lee” by Sam Bader. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
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Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and episodic productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Jess Dunlap. In this interview, he talks about the transition of the industry from film to digital, finding the balance between technology and art, the meaning of art, and advice he gives to younger cinematographers. Between all these and more, Jess dives deep into his work on “Herman” that is releasing on video-on-demand channels tomorrow.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
Jess: I’m a cinematographer, currently based in Los Angeles, but I am originally from Massachusetts – not too far from Boston. I went to Emerson College to study film and specialize in cinematography. I didn’t know until late in my childhood that I wanted to do anything in film, or even anything artistic long term. I did have artistic passions like music, but I was a science and math oriented student. I excelled in math, biology and chemistry, and I thought that’s what I wanted to study.
Then I reached a point later on in high school, where the standard setup of academia felt frustrating. I felt a lot more drawn to my artistic side, and it was music that opened up my eyes to the fact that one can pursue something artistic. So in a lot of ways, I abandoned my math and science oriented self, and decided to pursue filmmaking, almost on a whim. I was not super obsessed with movies, and it was a total 180-turn in my life at that point. It really felt like I was abandoning that more technical side of my mind.
I went to film school thinking that I would be a writer and a director, and that it would be a purely creative artistic process. Then I started working on a couple of short films during my first freshman semester, and I saw the role of the cinematographer, and I saw that it was obviously a perfect marriage of the technical and the creative. I saw that I didn’t have to abandon that math and science oriented side of myself. I saw that I could still exercise those parts of my mind, but be creative at the same time. Typically it takes me a while to make major life decisions, but that one came pretty easy. I watched the DP shooting on my first or second short film at Emerson, and I knew that it was what I wanted to do.
From there, I kept on pursuing that path. And since then, it has maintained its complexity, and how it challenges my left brain and my right brain at the same time. I love it.
Jess Dunlap (right) on the sets of “Herman”.
Kirill: In this marriage of technical with artistic, do you find that one is more important, or is it a balance of the two?
Jess: It’s definitely a balance of the two. At times you do need to weigh one heavier than the other. You need the ability to go really technical when you need to, and the ability to go really artistic when you need to. If you’re not a highly technical person, it’s fine. There are ways to pick up the slack. Once you reach the level of cinematographer, you have camera assistants, you have a gaffer and a key grip who handle almost all of the technical issues for you. You don’t need to be an extreme technician.
Even within the artistic side, we’re exercising those capabilities of our mind that work with geometry, space, and physics. It is a role that’s well suited to someone who thinks in those ways.
Kirill: Do you feel that your field lost something important in the transition from film to digital?
Jess: Yes, at least from the perspective of a cinematographer. When I went to film school, we were shooting on film. Digital only started to really take hold at the end of my time there, so most of the bigger projects that I shot were on 35mm and 16mm.
When film was more dominant, the experience was that the cinematographer was the only one on set who knew how it was going to look. Maybe the camera assistant or the gaffer had an idea, but the cinematographer was really the only one who knew how it was going to look in the end. There was the monitor, but it was for framing. It wasn’t for lighting or exposure. Nobody knew what the mood was that was being created. The director described it and had their vision of it, but at the end, it was in the mind of the DP. Selfishly, it was fun. It was fun to be on set feeling like a kind of magician who has all these creative visual ideas running through you. Everybody else wanted to know how their work was going to show up – the costumes, the make-up, the production design.
Nowadays, a little of that is lost. You only need to look at the monitor to see what your work on costume, makeup or sets looks like. In some ways that’s good, because you can make more efficient decisions. But there’s something lost in the experience of the cinematographer.
There’s another difference in how much care went into shooting on film. It’s a more delicate process where mistakes matter more, and mistakes can be more expensive. The way we shoot on digital is you keep on doing more takes. You have time, and you keep on going, and you eventually get your take, but there’s something that is lost in there. There’s a little less pressure for everybody, including camera operators and even actors.
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Continuing the ongoing series of interviews on fantasy user interfaces, it’s my pleasure to welcome Dave Henri and Stefan Grimm. Dave founded Modern Motion Pictures back in 2009 to provide services to design and present screen graphics for film and TV. Some of the company’s more recent work includes “First Man”, “For All Mankind” and “The Morning Show”. Stefan first joined the industry to work on “Powerless”, and later on “Constellation” after he joined Modern Motion as a partner. In this interview Dave and Stefan talk about their work on the just released “Alien: Earth”, going back to the original aesthetic of the first “Alien” movie and expanding it to the bigger storytelling universe of the show.
Left – Stefan Grimm, right – Dave Henri.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
Dave: I’m Dave Henri, and I founded the company Modern Motion Pictures in Los Angeles in 2009. At the time it was a one-man operation to create screen graphics for use on set. I was an on-set operator and an engineer for a few years, and during that time I’d done an occasional graphic here and there, and I realized I needed a way to bill for it. The company took off, and I started doing a lot of my own shows – doing design and technical on-set work together. A few years into it we brought on our first partner Chris Cundey, and a few years after that the third partner Matt Brucell. By that time we’d been working quite a bit with Stefan. The first show we worked on together with him was “Powerless” set in the DC cinematic universe. A few years ago right after Covid we set up a German LLC / GmbH to handle European productions, and we brought Stefan on as a partner.
That’s the brief history of it, and as for why we do it – it’s just so much fun. You start with a blank screen, and a few hours later you have a moving graphic that’s going to be photographed and used on set – it’s amazing.
Stefan: I started in early 2000s as a web designer. Over time it kept on getting bigger, and grew from a one-man show to a small agency. When the first “Iron Man” came out in 2008, I looked at the Tony Stark’s helmet interfaces and started thinking about how those can be achieved. I was using mostly Flash in the beginning, but it was already starting to phase out at the time and I switched to After Effects.
As I continued doing web design, I also felt like I needed to play around with FUI [fictional user interfaces]. At that point I wasn’t aware that there was a term for it, and it was hard to search for references online. I was experimenting with trying to achieve the holographic looks inspired by Tony Stark’s helmet. A bit later in 2016 I made a small animation that counted from 0 to 100, and uploaded it on Behance. That’s when Dave appeared in my inbox and asked me if I’d be interested in doing graphics for TV shows.
It felt unreal. I come from a small city in Germany, and I considered myself to be lucky to be doing web design. I never had any thoughts about working in the movie industry. We had our first phone conversation, and I was really excited. But my first reaction was to refuse it, because I didn’t know anything about this industry. I did ask Dave to send over some examples he had in mind for “Powerless”, and I gave myself a weekend to revise those designs to be more aligned with my design approach. When it was done, I sent him a huge email, detailing all the changes and why I made them, and that’s how I ended up on that show. Those were my first baby steps into this industry, and I’m still enjoying being a part of it.
Screen graphics for “Powerless”, courtesy of Modern Motion.
Kirill: There are so many screens in our lives today, and they do find their way into the movies and TV shows. There’s not a lot of screen estate on phones, but they are so deeply integrated into everything we do every day. Do you have a preference on the size of the screen you enjoy designing for?
Dave: As a company of designers and programmers, we’re building a lot for phones for the moment. We developed a proprietary software called Magic Phone that perfectly emulates either an iPhone or an Android, and it’s quickly becoming an industry standard. We use it for all of our shows, and also license it out to other developers and designers. It does everything from phone calls to texting to social media browsing and more.
Like you’re saying, phones are everywhere. It’s become an increasingly important part of telling a story in modern day. You just can’t ignore phones. Characters are texting each other, whether it’s a romance or a spy thriller. We also do shows with big screens in big rooms. “For All Mankind” has had multiple mission control sets throughout its five seasons. “The Morning Show” has the studio set, as well as the control room. We also did Mission Control on “First Man”.
I personally like the bigger, more out there stuff. It’s a little more exciting to be working on. But it’s also nice to be able to bring the reality of a phone call or a text, to fulfill something that is critical to a story and to make it look accurate. It’s getting a lot better, not just with our software but with other people’s work. A few years ago, if a character got a text from his wife, it was the only text in the thread. We did a big push with productions to give us the previous texts in their history. We might not see them text back and forth, but there has to be something there on the screen. It’s an interesting part to be striving for that realism.
Stefan: For me it’s definitely the big screens. My favorite sets are the ones where big screens and small screens are stitched together in a rig so you can play around with different sizes of graphics. I love mission control sets, and I’ve done a lot of those in the last two years [laughs]. Phone graphics are more tied to reality, because people use their smartphones every day. They know how it should look and how it responds to your inputs. – while a mission control set can be something more of a fiction. That’s why I have a bit more freedom to play around.
Screen graphics for “Powerless”, courtesy of Modern Motion.
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