A man of a few words and emotions, slowly drawn into a deepening vortex of violence. “Drive” is a patiently woven tale of action, tension and darkness that revels in impeccably styled sets and meticulously raw drama. It is my absolute pleasure to interview the movie’s production designer Beth Mickle on how the movie came together, her most memorable sets and, how not, the story of the scorpion jacket.

Kirill: Let’s start with your background and how you got into the movie production design.

Beth: I started about ten years ago when I designed my first film when I was 21. I worked on several films with my brother when he was at film school at NYU back in 1999, and he had me working on a several student films helping out with sets, props and wardrobe. During the summer before my senior year at college a cinematographer friend of ours was planning to do a feature film; we worked together on a few films and he recommended me to be the designer. I did that – for no money – we just chipped in for the love and to get experience in feature films. That was called “Madness and Genius” with Tom Noonan, and it ended up going to the Toronto film festival, was up for Independent Spirit awards, played on the Sundance channel and did quite well for a little indie. We actually made the whole film for $18,000 (laughs).

That was how it began for me, and I was extremely lucky that the director of that film had gone to NYU with Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden who directed “Half Nelson”. About two or three years after I had done that first film, Ryan and Anna called to see if I would be interested in doing “Half Nelson” which will forever be the film that really began my career.

Kirill: And then you went on to progressively larger productions?

Beth: I did very small indies for most of my career, actually. That was how I was recognized, I think. And then they started to be a little bit bigger in size over the last few years until “Drive” came up. Ryan and I had stayed in touch after “Half Nelson” and they were looking for a designer and he recommended me for “Drive”. That is how I ended up on “Drive” which was another incredibly fortunate moment in my career.

Kirill: How does in general the selection process work? Do you show the stills and pictures form your previous productions, or some kind of a motion highlight collection?

Beth: It’s a mix of things. It’s almost always previous work in past films that I’ve done and people have seen, and directors and producers respond to. If I do few period films, people can see my work in that area and it can lead to jobs in other period productions. And then when I go in to actually sit down with the director I’ll bring in two things.

The first is my portfolio that has hardcopy photos of all the main sets I’ve done, and I always include “before” and “after” photos. They show the locations before we started working on them, completely empty stages or sets in a warehouse, and then after we’ve done our job to rebuild or decorate from scratch. This shows the transformations and the possibilities.

And then the other thing I bring to the interview is a book of inspiration photos that I pull together after reading the script and imagining my vision for it. I pull hundreds of reference photos for the overall tone and color, and then I pull out the top five or six sets from the script and show reference images for each one so that the director can see the direction I’m imagining for the sets.

And so we sit and I go through them all and see if the things I’m envisioning are along the lines of what the director has in mind, and it goes from there.

Kirill: How was the process for “Drive” specifically?

Beth: It all happened extremely quickly, it was a really unusual case. They were just three weeks out from shooting and they needed a designer to come in and work very quickly. So I was sitting at home on a Friday night after finishing a job a couple of days before, and I had another potential job that was going to start in few weeks that I hadn’t officially signed onto yet. I got a call from my agent, and he said there was a film with Ryan Gosling looking for a designer to come on board ASAP.

The next day I had a Skype call with the director and the producers for an hour-long interview, and that night they called and said “You have the job. Can you be on a plane to LA tomorrow?”

Kirill: So you only had three weeks before the shooting started.

Beth: Normally you have around eight to ten weeks, but it all happened so quickly that we only had three weeks from when I landed to do all the prep. This was the shortest amount of prep that I’ve ever had on a feature film; even on the tiny indies you get at least four or five weeks. But that was one of the things that Nicolas [Winding Refn, director] really responded to, he really appreciated that I was able to work very quickly under pressure to get everything done. It was very demanding. We would work 16-18 hour prep days from the minute I landed up until we started shooting. We worked over our weekends, with no days off throughout prep – and even then we didn’t have a day off until about three weeks into the shoot (Laughs).

Kirill: As I was watching the movie I noticed that you had relatively very few sets, with each scene taking much longer than in a typical action movie. On one hand you have fewer sets, but on the other you have the camera spending much more time on each one. Does that require more attention for each set?

Beth: Absolutely, and that’s a great thing to point out. We didn’t have a high volume of sets, overall we had maybe 15 total sets that we really had to focus on. And you’re right – we spent so much time on each of these sets. Even at the end in Albert Brooks‘ home where we spend perhaps 20 seconds in the scene, the original script and shooting had us there for two or three really long scenes in this huge house of his.

There was such a small number of sets. In the film I’m doing now we have over 50 sets that we’re building and dressing. And to only have 15 or 20 made the short prep a lot more feasible.

Sketch-up of driver/Irene’s apartments. Courtesy of Beth Mickle.

Sketch-up of Irene’s apartment. Courtesy of Beth Mickle.

Kirill: Did you have to spend much more time on each individual set because the camera ends up being there for minutes at a time?

Beth: Yes, and we ended up with a lot of detail, especially on Carey Mulligan‘s apartment and Ryan Gosling’s apartment. Those were the ones with the most focus, and both the actors were really responsive and collaborative. Ryan had a bunch of ideas for his set, and if you look at it, there’s one wall that has this kind of old toile wallpaper. We aged it to look like it had been there for several years, and it was Ryan’s idea. He said that he wanted one wall in the apartment to have an old wallpaper that has been there forever, something that you can’t explain, something that doesn’t fit his character but it had formerly been somebody else’s apartment and he didn’t bother to change or paint.

Carey / Irene apartment’s set. Courtesy of Beth Mickle.

He liked the idea that when you move into these apartments as you hop around as a nomad, you always move into somebody else’s space, into the decisions that somebody else made before you. What kind of linoleum floor to put down? What kind of carpeting? What kind of wallpaper? He wanted to play with that idea which I really liked. He also wanted to have a car engine part sitting on his table, something he’s working on it. That’s his only hobby outside of driving and listening to music in his car, and Ryan wanted to show that passion.

Kirill: Does it happen a lot that you have these conversations with actors about what they would like to see around them?

Beth: It depends. Some actors really want to be involved, and some actors are happy to let you go at it and then step in on the day to see what it is. I would say half and half. Ryan is extremely involved, and he was on “Half Nelson” as well. Probably two or three main actors on each film would want to sit down and have a conversation about their sets, bring some ideas. And the other half of the main actors are so focused on their performance and their work with the director that when it comes down to the set details, they don’t address it too much.

Kirill: Let’s talk about the car shop where Ryan’s character works. Did you use an existing location?

Beth: The space that we’ve used was the “Picture Caw Warehouse” company in LA which specializes in cars for films. They had one huge car bay out back that was empty and all white, with an office adjacent to it. We found that we wanted to shoot there, and we went in and did all the painting with rich blue tones, and did rich green tones for Bryan Cranston‘s office, and dressed everything from top to bottom. That was definitely another set with a lot of attention and a lot of details. We were there for days, and that was one of the sets that we dressed around the action – where Ryan would be working on the car, or where Ron Perlman would be walking around. We would pull the dressing around that in the background so you always see something behind them.

Bryan Cranston was really involved. He came up with a lot of ideas about what he would want to have in his office. We ended up doing a whole row of business cards lining the huge window in his office, little business cards tucked all along the frame of the window and piled up on the side of the wall. That was all from him.

Kirill: Did you do anything special with the cars?

Beth: It was so enjoyable. I went out to the vintage car lot and went through all of our options and picked the top 15 cars that we wanted to have in the background. Then we would bring them over and I would select 4 or 5 that would actually go into the car bays. We color coordinated it so that the right colors would end up there, with good rich reds, blues, greens as primaries, a few really sharp snazzy tones. Each day we would bring new cars and change them around to figure out what we want for each scene. I did learn a lot about cars, and a film that I’m doing now is a bigger action filled with lots of cars and car chases. It’s fun getting back into it.

Kirill: Apart from the pawn shop and the stunt chase, most of the outside scenes are just overhead shots of the night city streets. Was this due to production constraints?

Beth: Because we were a lower budget film in the eyes of the studio we didn’t do a lot of dressing outside. The director was great. He just said “it’s all the night time with naturally existing lights in LA and let’s not worry about adding light or signage.”

Another bigger interior set we dealt with was built right downstairs from where we built Ryan and Carey’s apartments. It was the strip club dressing room with the mirrors going around in a big circle, red drapery everywhere, ornate gorgeous red carpet on the floor. We did that from scratch, set it up on an empty warehouse floor. All through the prep the Nicolas [director] kept saying that he didn’t want to see the strippers on the stage, dancing around poles as you have seen them before. He wanted to go into a more interesting space, a place where we don’t usually go as an audience. And so we came up with the idea of a behind the scenes dressing room.

Sketch-up of strip club set. Courtesy of Beth Mickle.

Strip club dressing room set. Courtesy of Beth Mickle.

Kirill: It was this big splash of color

Beth: That was really exciting. Nicolas said “Do something, I like mirrors, I like red drapery. Play with it”, and we had no money to do it. We ended up finding a ton of mirrors. We built them onto moveable frames and I drew it up as this big circular rim of mirrors so they would all hit each other and reflect back and forth. We couldn’t afford a ceiling so we just had red drapery hanging all across the ceiling. We found this great carpet with swirling gold and jewel shapes on it, and we used that as the ground flooring. And finally our set decorator, Lisa Sessions found these beautiful dressing lacquered tables and it all came together. We added beauty bulbs around each of the mirrors and it all became this glittering mirrored set. To this day that’s probably my favorite set in the whole movie.

Kirill: Were you sad to tear it down once the shooting was complete?

Beth: Yes, it’s always sad to pull these sets apart as quickly as they came together.

Kirill: Even though you didn’t have a lot of external scenes in “Drive”, in general you have much less control over the external locations, especially for long shots.

Beth: Especially on smaller films. You’re part of the process when you’re picking the exterior, going out with the location manager looking to see what streets look the best, what streets have the best signage and the best layout. You’re involved with it, but on smaller films you don’t really have the budget to do a whole lot of changing there. Actually on the film I’m doing now we’re doing this Western street corner, painting the building facades, doing different signage throughout the decades everywhere, exterior lighting. It’s great when you have the resources to spread this far.

Kirill: Going back to the few outside night scenes in “Drive”, did you play with the lights to bring out certain specific areas?

Beth: That was mostly our cinematographer, Tom Sigel, and he did such a beautiful job with it. We did bring in a dozen sodium vapor street lights for the scene where Ron Perlman drowns in the ocean. We lined them along the Pacific Coast highway to provide more light for that scene.

Kirill: You already mentioned that the director wanted natural light. There were quite a few inside scenes happening in broad daylight where the outside light was let in in a very low, almost horizontally bounded pyramid. Did that affect the way you dressed up the interiors?

Beth: Not too much. We did have conversations with the cinematographer on what kind of light was he imagining to use – daylight, natural light, table lamps, standing lamps, overhead lighting. Once you know the layout of the set that definitely helps you to dress it and to think about the colors you’re going to use.

Kirill: What about the quality and spectrum of the light? Does it affect your choice of colors, textures and patterns for the set dressing?

Beth: That’s always a big thing when you’re choosing colors —you need to know what kind of lighting there will be in the room, to know which colors would work well and which won’t.

Kirill: Let’s talk about the scorpion jacket. What’s the story behind it?

Beth: None of us expected it to become such an iconic thing. It was just a fun byproduct of the film. I think that the idea came from Ryan [Gosling] and our director, but I’m not 100% certain. We knew that we wanted to have a scorpion on it, so we had the graphic designer Megan Greydanus work on the different scorpion symbols to put on the back of it. The costume designer Erin Benach worked on several different designs, tried everything – brown jackets, gray jackets, ivory jackets, aged ivory jackets with black trim, white trim. What color is the collar? What color is the cuff? We went through countless versions. We had camera tests on it, and finally we landed on the version that you see in the film. Erin did a fantastic job with it.

We wish we would have known what a recognizable item it would become. Ryan has one of the jackets, Nicolas has one of the jackets. We needed to have about six or eight of them by the end because it goes through different stages. It’s newer at first, and then it gets dirtier and then it gets bloody… then bloodier!

Scorpion illustration with Pantone legend. Courtesy of Beth Mickle.

Kirill: There are certain comparisons that have been drawn between “Drive” and film noir from 1940s – with low lighting throughout the movie, slanted camera angles and the overall pervasive atmosphere of doom for the main characters. Did you have any particular references?

Beth: We watched a few French films. “The Samurai” by Jean-Pierre Melville (1967) was one. We watched a few Jules Dassin‘s films, and Japanese Technicolor films. Nicolas really liked the colors in those. We watched “Irreversible” for some of the fight scenes to get sense of how he wanted the violence to go. The prep was so quick and we didn’t have a laundry list. Nicolas also wanted “Drive” to go in the theatrical direction of “Bronson”, so we kept that in mind.

Kirill: Let’s talk about Carey Mulligan’s character. Even though she essentially leads Ryan Gosling onto a doomed path, she is a very soft spoken, shy girl. Everything about her is very quiet – the fabrics, the wallpaper patterns, her hair style. Was this intentional?

Beth: Definitely. We went through lots of different options for her place. We knew we wanted her place to be a place where Ryan’s character would want to come to, a place that is warm and comfortable – versus his place which was very sparse and less inviting.

Carey / Irene apartment’s set. Courtesy of Beth Mickle.

Kirill: You mentioned that the strip club was your favorite set. Was there any other set that you particularly enjoyed?

Beth: The motel room with Christina Hendricks. I was crazy about it. The location had pink walls and brown carpeting. We went in and did the pale blue wallpaper with little gold medallions all over it. And we found this beautiful bed spread with soft pink floral patterns and the same soft blue color in it, and some browns – it was a perfect complement to the wallpaper. we aged everything down to a slightly worn-in look and it ended up being this dynamite moment in the film. We added some large mirrors into the room for the DP [director of photography] to get some really interesting shots of Christina. We ended up spending so much time in that room even though it’s this tiny claustrophobic space.

Kirill: Did you build it from scratch?

Beth: No, it was an existing motel room. We couldn’t pull the walls out like you normally can, and we had a very few windows so you couldn’t even shoot through the windows. The director and the cinematographer were both really creative in figuring how to shoot it and make it work. Then we ended up having a lot of action in there where Ryan ends up killing the two perpetrators. Just to try and get all the choreography in that little room was pretty challenging.

Kirill: Did it end up destroying the set over and over again?

Beth: We got blood splatters everywhere and we had to replace a lot of wallpaper pieces stained with blood. Between setups we would CLEAN the carpet. The set was very simple but to me it was one of the more memorable sets on “Drive”. One of the reasons why I love working with Nicolas is that he’s OK with pushing the envelope visually. He’s OK with going into a heightened direction visually, taking a few risks to play with the visuals a bit more. Some directors prefer to play it safer, to have authentic interiors and not take too much attention away from the action, to have sets that are very straightforward. Nicolas really loved to turn up the volume on each of the sets, to turn up the volume on colors. Designing for him is really exciting because you get the opportunity to pick bolder metallic wallpaper patterns and put them up, to do a set with bright red everywhere, and wild mirrors everywhere. He just loves it and wants more of it.

Kirill: But on the other hand you don’t want to overdo it.

Beth: That’s the balance. You have to find it. There are some films that go overboard and the design is screaming for attention, it dominates the frame. You don’t want it to become that, unless that’s one of the goals of the film. There are certain movies where the director does want the visuals to dominate in some scenes, and you do want it to be a more visual experience. And Nicolas is really drawn to that. The film I just did with him in Thailand is very visually driven. He wanted it to be a wild sensory experience for his audience, and so it is actually much more heightened than “Drive” was. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it comes out; we took lots of risks in it and did lots of unusual things visually. I do agree that on some films you don’t want to go too far and to take away from the story. In “Drive” we just wanted to create this sort of fantasy version of LA where these two characters meet and fall in love. That was the idea that we based everything on – that it’s actually a beautiful love story between the two characters. It’s not a story about the pawn shop robbery, it’s a story of two people falling in love.

Kirill: Stepping away from “Drive” into a more general field of your craft, let’s talk about the technological progress in home entertainment. You started with smaller student and indie productions, and then moved into bigger films. About four years ago BluRay has won as the consumption format for the home entertainment systems, bringing a rather high level of details with it. Does this mean that you can’t “cut corners” anymore in your everyday work on the sets?

Beth: Absolutely. It’s one of the bigger challenges that we have to keep in mind these days as we’re doing the sets. They’re shooting digitally and the details are so much sharper. It’s a lot less forgiving. The aging on the walls has to be just right, the colors have to be just right, all the little visual details in the background and the dressing are no longer in soft focus in the distance. They are much more visible now, and that’s something that we do have to keep in mind. But on the other hand there’s this fantastic thing with digital that you have the ability to go back in post production and fix a lot of things. If you don’t like the color of something you can play with the colors in post. Or, for example, as we were bringing a lot of wallpaper pieces, if some of them don’t line up and you can see seams, you can fix this in digital post to make it go away. It has its pluses and minuses.

Kirill: What about shooting in stereo for 3D productions? Even if you haven’t done any of those, it seems to be increasingly prevalent these days.

Beth: It’s absolutely more and more prevalent. My boyfriend Russell Barnes has done three films that were shot in 3D format. I actually talk to him quite a bit about it. I’ve watched him work with it and one of the things that he’s much more aware of is that the 3D space has these visually different planes that you’re dealing with. With set dressing you end up creating different fields: the foreground, the middleground and the background. You want to make sure to have separation between them. Another important thing is the lights. The lighting for 3D is always interesting because you have to have a lot of lights to pick up all the details in the 3D format.

Beth Mickle and Russell Barnes at BAFTA 2010.

Kirill: Can you recommend a few productions that particularly impressed or inspired you?

Beth: One of my favorites is “Far From Heaven” with Julianne Moore. It’s one of those films that has an absolutely stunning design, well thought out and beautiful choices everywhere in it. Another one of my favorites is “All The Real Girls” by David Gordon Green — it has very authentic, naturalistic sets, feels like a true documentary.

And here I’d like to thank Beth Mickle for this wonderful opportunity to learn about the design process of “Drive” and for sharing the additional materials.

At times futuristic, at times mirroring the outer edge of the latest research, and almost always an integral part of the story. In this conversation Jayse Hansen talks about fictional user interfaces, his approach to the initial research, interaction with the movie director and visual effects supervisor, and how these interfaces shape and are shaped by their real-world counteparts. Jayse has recently completed his work on “The Avengers” and he delves into how shooting in stereo has affected the design of Iron Man’s helmet HUD. He also talks about the future of user interfaces and, in particular,  exposing huge sets of data for smart consumption and effective non-linear navigation.

---

Kirill: Let’s start with your background and how you got to working on user interfaces in movies.

Jayse: I was just a kid that loved film and wanted to get into it, but I had to do it in a roundabout way because I lived far away from the main centers of action, and didn’t really have the means to go to school for it. I started by teaching myself graphic design for print from books and asking designers everything I could. Most told me I’d never be a designer unless I went to school for years and years. What I found was that some of those schooled designers came out very cocky but lacking the skills to actually back it up. So I took the hard road, and bought a library of books on design, asked for critiques from designers I respected, and grew as much as I could.

I then moved into Flash-based web sites, did some UI design in the old Stardock theming community, and finally into motion design. And then a friend of mine, Mark Coleran introduced me to the fact that people actually get to design screens for films. If you’re a good UI-designer and a good motion-designer, then you might be a good fit for FUI’s (Fictional User Interfaces.) I thought that would be about the best job in the world.

I realized that since I was little I’d always paid attention to the screens in film, for example, the x-wing targeting displays in “Star Wars” or the holographic globe in the “Return of the Jedi”. With shows like ‘Knight Rider’ or the Delorean in ‘Back to the Future’ I’d always wanted to know what all the displays on his dashboard were and how they worked.

I sent Mark some UI work I’d done and luckily he didn’t laugh at it. He thought it was decent enough to start sending my name around. So I got my first gig doing concept work for Dead Pool’s vision and Striker’s command center screens on “X-Men Origins: Wolverine“. And after I got through the first door it just kept on going because there really are only a few people out there that specialize in this type of work. I think the detail involved might kill a few people, but I thrive on it.

Kirill: What is the process of creating screen graphics for these fantasy user interfaces? Who do you usually work with?

Jayse: There are usually two sides to it, although they’re somewhat merging. One side is called “playback design” where you’re designing before they start filming. In this case you may be working with the film’s art director. You may get a part of the story or a part of the script and you’ll be designing screens for them to use on-set while they’re filming so that the actors can actually interact with it. The other side is called “post-replace” and those are designed and composited in post-production after the filming is done. There, you’re usually working with the VFX Supervisor and the director.

Hero screens seem to be becoming more and more post-replace, as the director and editors have a clearer vision at that point of what the screens should contain. “Hero screens” are more about story-telling or clarifying. The director will focus on them to move the plot along or to quickly clarify a certain point.  They’re usually in focus and seen closeup, sometimes even full screen as in “2012“.

I’ve been doing hero screens for the most part, and for this type of work I’ll usually get a rough edit and all or part of the script. Reading through it is never wasted time – as I pick out parts of the story that really inform the design and the aesthetic. Then it will be a conversation with the director, vfx supervisor and the leads of the company that I’m working for about how to make it look super sexy and tell the story at the same time.

Kirill: Do you get a rough estimate on how much screen time and screen estate you’re going to get?

Jayse: Sometimes screen-time has not been determined yet and we’ll have a little of a back and forth discussion. For example, for “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes” they came to me through G-Creative Productions to do the boardroom sequence where James Franco is explaining how a new drug, ALZ-112, is going to help cure brain illnesses and make everyone smarter, including apes! In that sequence, as he’s describing the process, the drugged chimp goes crazy and jumps through the glass presentation screen at the very end. The entire sequence, which ended up at around three or four minutes in the final movie, was originally just text on a page. Although it was really well written, it didn’t have much in the way of descriptions of visuals.

So before filming began, they wanted to flesh it out in terms of what would be on the screen behind James, which on set was simply a large, 11’x17′ blue screen. In addition to visuals, they wanted to know the overall pace of the scene. I started by doing a roughed out animatic sequence. I needed pacing so I recorded my own voice doing all the actors’ parts. Director Rupert Wyatt used that on set to pace it out, and then about four months later, after they filmed it, they came back for me to do the final shots.

Kirill: So essentially you are doing a very dynamic pre-vis sequence, and not just a bunch of static image boards.

Jayse: Yes, it’s basically pre-vis for filming – but it’s also somewhat post-vis for the post-production work. I even had a little terribly-animated Poser-monkey in there just to convey some of the ideas.

Kirill: Do you get a relative freedom for your first explorations, and then refine it based on the feedback from the director or the VFX company?

Jayse: Exactly, yes. There’s a ton of freedom upfront and that’s what I really like about it. They are really relying on me to provide what I think the content should be, and so they’ll usually be very general in the script or description. So beyond that it’s up to me, or the team, to do the initial research and flesh it out.

Kirill: Let’s talk about the research phase. You did a virus proliferation map for “Contagion” and brain cell activity simulation for “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes”. Do you go to the technical literature on the subject to get a roughly plausible visual language?

Jayse: Yes. I really love doing the research. Unfortunately there is always a deadline, so you can’t get a degree in the fields I study – even though some of them are so interesting I’d love to learn more – like learning to fly in order to design the upgraded Iron Man HUD.  I will continue to learn that type of thing! But, because the pace is pretty fast, I do try to talk to people who either work in that field or have done that kind of work, and of course there’s a ton of web research.

For example, for “Apes” I made PDF’s of research for each of the 20 or so different story-points that had to be told.

I did some reading about chimp research, and how they display that data in terms of graphs, and a ton of work on how they map the brain. Jorik Blass has done great research in diffusion tensor imaging of the brain and it turns out to be this beautifully complex look which I recreated in Cinema 4D for some of the brain sequences.

Kirill: Do you have any specific directive to take that look a little bit beyond what is available in the real-life systems in that particular area, to make it a little bit more sexy or appealing?

Jayse: I always assume that they want something that feels grounded but is at the same time sexy, or “Hollywood” as they call it. I only had one time where they came back to me and said, “make it more Hollywood” (laughs). I tend to amp stuff anyways, and that’s my goal to make it look more polished, more sophisticated, as well as tied into the general art direction of the film itself.

Kirill: But then on the other hand you’re not supposed to steal too much attention away from the main characters.

Jayse: Exactly, and it’s a big balancing act. A lot of designs I do use the composition rule of thirds or the golden mean to direct the viewer’s attention to the actor. In “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes” the designs were done very intentionally to always make sure he was the focus. Sometimes the main graphic would literally ‘point’ to him.

With Avengers, I was directed to design the glass screens with a lot of negative space, or lots of black in other words, to make sure when you’re looking through the screens you can clearly see the actors’ faces and performances.

Kirill: Do you start with the physical medium of pen and paper, or do you go straight to the computer?

Jayse: I always sketch first. Though I’m also comfy with starting digitally first as well – I just prefer thinking with paper. I give myself permission to ‘draw badly’ and sketch out everything without rulers and without rules. Just let things flow from your brain kind of thing. I went through two notebooks for “The Rise of the Apes”, and three notebooks just for Ironman’s HUD for “The Avengers”. It’s the quickest way to test out ideas, and visually ‘think’. I always try to go away from the computer, away from electrical interference, get out. I have an art-room in my house with a big drafting table and a nice view out the window, and I like to go there to brainstorm.

Kirill: Do you keep a notebook to collect your ideas in between the projects?

Jayse: Yes, and I have that in both the physical notebook and on my phone. I would snap pictures and put them in Evernote. Mark Coleran has a huge folder of screen references that I was super envious of – so I started making my own. I came up with my own way of categorizing them by screen type – like ‘Facial Recognition’ or ‘Thermal Imaging’ or ‘Access Denied’. Inside each they’re broken down to real-world applications, film, hardware, and ‘unrelated-but-inspiring’. I track the existing movie references so that I’m not repeating them, but also to be inspired. I also have stuff that maybe is not related at all – a painting, maybe – but it has a neat feel or a neat color palette to it, and that is perhaps the best reference to use to make your stuff look unique and new.

Kirill: Getting back to playback designs that are used on the sets and hero screens developed in post production, which one is more interesting for you?

Jayse: I actually like both. I’m yearning to just do some background screens sometimes – pure interface-love. But I guess generally I like the hero screens best. Having a story to tell, or a narrative is one reason I love designing for film. You also have more definition of what is happening in the scene and you also tend to get more time to get it right.

Kirill: In your interview for FxGuide you mentioned that this was your first production done in stereo. This makes it even more important to work in post-production, as opposed to “flat” playback background sequence.

Jayse: Right. Although the screens themselves didn’t have depth, the interaction of the actors with the glass screens was all improvised on the set. They filmed with just glass screens, with no tracker markers. It was interesting to get the footage and see how different actors interact differently with these screens. Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson) was just moving and swiping things – usually in a somewhat angry manner. Banner (Mark Ruffalo) would timidly slide things slowly, purposefully up and down, and then Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) would just go crazy turning things, sometimes using his index finger and pinkie to slide. We would always think that he was probably just messing with us, “let’s see what they come up with” type of thing. There was really no direction in terms of what it would be.

Kirill: So you’re designing each type of the interface around this fluidity.

Jayse: Yes, we designed and animated it to work with those movements. Another awesome designer who I worked with, Jonathan Ficcadenti had the fun task of coming up with the graphics behind a thumb-twist and dual finger slide, tap tap. We came up with a lot of ideas over a few beers – but in the end it took a few design variations to actually get that to work.

Kirill: Apart from doing more modeling for the stereo environment, do you see that it affects the way you approach designing the on-screen elements?

Jayse: This especially affected the HUD. This was the first time that it was done in stereo and I was surprised by how much it changed pretty much everything that we did. A lot of cheats would no longer work – because stereo reveals that they are just cheats. Also – they didn’t want shallow depth of field in these HUDs. In the previous HUDs you could get away with a lot of stuff being out of focus and blurred out to get some sense of depth. And so it was easy to put things in front of his face or move things around more dynamically. But stereo purists like stuff to be mostly in focus because the viewer’s eye is what determines what is in focus. We were worried about it at first, thinking: are we going to deliver two versions, one for the 2D version of the film, and the stereo one for the 3D version? And that would have been just a nightmare, so we had to come up with something that would look good in both 2D and 3D.

The consequence of this is that everything is in focus – so everything is readable. We ended up with a much more detailed look where we can read, for the first time, the small micro text and so we made sure that all the text is related to the scene, and all the graphics had a purpose – which is the way I like to design anyway.

There was another thing that happened in the stereo process. In the previous HUDs you could fake things in terms of where they were in Z space. You could have something that is closer to his face but small, and it would look all right. You’d put it closer to have it move less with the track and look more stable – so it’s a great cheat in 2d. But once you put it in stereo, suddenly it would look like it was inside his face. It was kind of an optical trick that worked in 2D, but doesn’t work in 3D and you realize, wait, that’s actually inside of his cheek – that looks awful! So you had to redo the positioning and scale of graphics to make sure that it felt right in stereo as well as looking right in 2D.

But designing in stereo also gave us the unique opportunity to use depth to differentiate designs. There are two HUDs in the film. The first HUD, Mark VI, designed for Iron Man II, was kept a bit more flat and the intraocular distance less spread, for less stereo depth. The second, new updated Mark VII HUD – the one he jumps into during the final battle sequence – was where we pushed the 3D depth a bit more. Really it was just spreading the two left-right cameras in After Effects a bit farther apart.

Kirill: It would seem that 3D is more affected by the difference in how people perceive it through these special glasses they hand out in the theaters. Did it happen that you got such a feedback that some of the parts would appear inside Tony Stark’s face, but it looked all right to you?

Jayse: We had a lot of going back and forth between different people (laughs). And a lot of tests! The visual effects supervisor, Janek Sirrs and the stereo team had the final say. We relied on their expertise a lot. In terms of pixels, we had worked out where his cheek actually lived. We looked at it in the blue and red format, and you can count the pixel offset between the two versions to estimate whether the specific element was too close or too far out. Stephen Lawes (Cantina’s Creative Director) and I developed a ‘cheat sheet’ for our team of people working on the final stereo run.  It listed general z-space coordinates for each major element to keep them consistent from shot to shot. He’d spent a lot of time figuring out the ideal space of the elements so that it didn’t feel too empty or too crowded.

Kirill: Do you see this as the path forward, stereo-first productions for sci-fi movies?

Jayse: Yes. Like it or not, so far it’s proven to be a good money-maker, and if nothing else, that will continue it. I actually really liked working on this in stereo. I think that HUD was one of the things that was meant to be seen in stereo. Once we did our first stereo tests, we all got pretty excited about how it looked with depth. It felt like you were in the HUD with Tony Stark, which was pretty cool.

Kirill: Did you have any specific instructions on what to avoid in your stereo work?

Jayse: Well I learned that there’s a James Cameron approach to 3D – which is to have the most foreground object be at picture plane and everything else to recede back. And that’s a really nice way of doing it. And there’s another way of doing it, the more typical way, where you have your main action at picture plane and you have stuff at front come forward into the audience, and background things go back. But having stuff come forward ‘into the audience’ can tend to produce headaches – especially if you have a lot of action – and camera shake – basically all the things you see in our HUDs. You’d also have a lot of elements cutting the picture-plane. So we were aiming for picture-plane and back since that worked really well on “Avatar”, for instance.

But we had a problem with the HUD. You can put all the graphics that are in front of his face at picture plane, and then have Robert Downey Jr.’s face recede super far into the background – but then the HUD feels cavernous. We had a lot of different tests and we finalized on having the picture plane on his cheeks. Otherwise the HUD ended up feeling like a rather overly-capacious closet (laughs) when he was pushed too far back. But now we had graphics coming up front and we were worried about very fast 3D movements and motion shake as he’s flying. Would it make you dizzy or nauseous? And how would cutting from scenes where your eyes are focused on distant NYC landscapes to super close-up shots work. I have to hand that to Stephen Lawes, Janek Sirrs and the wizards at Stereo D. It ended up working really well.

Kirill: There is a lot of emphasis on interactivity. If you look back at “Star Wars” and “Star Trek”, or even the movies from 1990s, there wasn’t a lot of real interactivity. Perhaps there was not enough technical capacity to do this, but nowadays it’s an almost implied part of your job.

Jayse: Everything is interactive these days. It used to be keyboards and mice, but these days it’s all touch screens or holographic or a direct-neural-interface, such as the HUD which works off of both line-of-sight and the neural-oscillatory-activity of Tony Stark.

Kirill: Do you see this connected to the renewed interest in UX in the real world software, with touch-first hardware from Apple, Microsoft and other companies? Is this affecting what you do?

Jayse: Absolutely. People used to be a little bit mystified by a few things – such as interactivity – but now it’s completely natural for an actor to walk up to a glass screen and do swipe or twist movements to zoom in. That’s where it changed. It’s no longer mysterious; it’s just pretty much everyday life. Same with glass screens – people think those will never happen but they’re already here.

Kirill: And you get to cut corners here and there, as you’re not creating real-world systems for the real-world environment.

Jayse: Yes, we design them to a degree that it works for the story – which is the most important – and reality comes in as a second. Full functionality is lacking, as we don’t need it to be working in eighty different situations like the real software would, and we’re quite thankful for that. We simply don’t have that kind of time. So yes, we gladly cut a lot of corners. It’s also what allows us to think outside the box a bit. I’m not worried about how a programmer is going to have to make this all work.

Kirill: Looking at this the other way around – do you see the fantasy user interfaces leaking from movies into the real-life software, perhaps a few years later?

Jayse: I think it grows consumer demand for that type of thing. For instance I just started working on a ‘top secret’ real-world government UI design project. I guess they were jealous of the way government screens look on film (laughs). They don’t want theirs looking like an Excel spreadsheet when it could look better – and work much more efficiently – by being better designed. People ask me “do you prefer function or form first” and I think that they are inextricably related. A badly designed interface is not going to function very well, and that’s what I really like about user experience. You can’t separate the two. You can’t say it functions well without it being formed well.

Kirill: You work with real-life software tools on a daily basis. What do you see as the main source of pain for you as the user of the current crop of user interfaces? What would you change if you were a king in the world where the software works for you instead of fighting at you?

Jayse: It’s a good question. I think a lot of software could benefit from a nodal approach if done in the right way. That may be because I’m a very visual kind of guy, but the software that is currently done in that way – which is basically a lot of compositing software, like Nuke, Shake, or Flame – and how it works with nodes and links between the items really makes sense to me. Some of the recent real-world interfaces that I was working on reimagined the Excel spreadsheet look as a node-based interface, and I think it will work well that way.

I think one of the biggest challenges of software and data design is the amount of data that it has to make accessible to the end user. I’m extremely interested in ways of mapping complex patterns of information – looking at patterns rather than individual pieces – and I see a lot of work exploring that which is really exciting to me such as Circos.

I integrated parts of those ideas in the Mark VII HUD diagnostic. It showed him an immense amount of data on his suit at a glance, but yet you can’t read each individual thing. And you’re not meant to – he’s looking at the patterns of it. He could zoom in if he wanted to see each one, but he knows where each piece of data lives and he can see at a glance whether it’s OK, or whether it’s depleting or malfunctioning. And so he can read the patterns at a glance, rather than just raw information. I really got into it designing the HUD. This guy’s got so much info coming at him from Jarvis, his suit computer. How does he read it? What he’s supposed to look at? How can he read it and fly his suit at the same time? He has to be able to glance at stuff and absorb the data in an instant.

Kirill: Projecting that into the real-life software, you’re talking about investing time to understand how to reduce the visual complexity of the information.

Jayse: Maybe not reduce it. Simplicity is very relative after all. Some people, like Tony Stark, are very comfortable with immense displays of data. The challenge is how to display it in a way that is understandable and useful to the user at a glance. So it can remain complex – yet convey what you need simply and effectively.

Kirill: There’s been a recent explosion in the interest in infographics, how to take these big data sets and distill them down to the underlying traits and tendencies.

Jayse: Exactly. For so long we’ve relied on a linear display of information, such as a family tree. But there’s so much data now that it kind of fell apart in the 1950s and 1960s. For a long time there’s been so much data that we haven’t been able to organize it, the tree stopped working and we ended up with all this scattered data. But recent advances in network visualizations and network complexity mapping have come out and allowed you to organize all that data in a way that makes it useful for you, once you learn how to read it. A radial network map might look futuristic to you now – but it will soon be as familiar to you and your children as a family tree.

Kirill: Bringing it back to your film work, is this where your research comes in, to know what is that information that is supposed to be shown to the main character interacting with your screens?

Jayse: Yes. For “The Rise of the Apes” it was a lot of medical visualization, and for “The Avengers” it was studying the aircraft carriers and how they work.

For the HUD it was studying combat aviation HUDs and what kind of information they display – how they change in different modes etc. I consulted with an A-10 fighter pilot. I would explain the general situation of something like flying low through a city and ask him what kind of stuff would he want on his ultimate HUD. Then I’d add my sense of dramatic alternative UIs and merge it altogether. But that information changed how I designed the new Mark VII HUD.

If you just started out to design something ‘cool’ in a HUD – you’d just end up with a bunch of circles and random text and I think it would just feel wrong, even if you couldn’t put your finger on why.

Kirill: Can the work you’ve done to understand and map visual complexities of real-world data in fantasy user interfaces affect the real-world software?

Jayse: It’s possible. I’ve recently had a few new offers to design real-world UIs… so we’ll see. With Iron Man’s HUD it’s always a balance between too much data or not enough. But that’s the balance with real HUDs as well. I asked the fighter pilot, Johnnie Green about information overload and he said that the standard HUDs are always overloaded with information. In fact, he said the first thing he teaches his students is how to focus on the important stuff as you need it, how to zero in on the information that you need and blank out the rest.

Real F-18 HUD

Mark VII Iron Man HUD

Kirill: You mentioned growing up on the interfaces from “Star Wars” and other older movies. If you look at them now they look quite dated, as they were built within the confines of not only the old hardware, but also within the confines of what the designers could think about. Is this going to happen to your current work in 40-50 years?

Jayse: I’m sure it will. When I look back at the interfaces in “Star Wars”, I totally appreciate them and I think they were well-designed. They immediately tell the story of what they were trying to tell, and for that I love them. They do look dated because of their simplicity, but we may always go back to simple, so it could come back around. Minimalism and Maximalism are constantly in and out – like an ocean. And I love both – I just don’t love indecisive in-betweenism. I think we’ll probably see less grid-based design and more organic pattern-based data-design – and much more holographic displays which are really exciting to me. In the end though, good design will always be good design, and in a way it may always be timeless. If you look at the screens of “War Games” and the big command center at the end – and I saw a screenshot the other day – that was just gorgeous.

Kirill: Wouldn’t that be affected by your impression as a kid growing up seeing that? You’re not really viewing it objectively from where you are today.

Jayse: It’s always hard to be objective about this stuff when you have your own personal memories integrated into it. But design is a learned discipline, and I look at things very differently now than when I was a kid – and those screens still look pretty sexy in their lo-fi kind of way.

Kirill: There’s a recent trend – in “The Avengers”, “Avatar” and quite a few other productions – to gravitate towards translucent screens with no visible batteries or wires where you fling stuff between the screens and you can look at the 3D models projecting from them. Can you realistically expect this to happen in the next 15-20 years?

Jayse: Absolutely. There are DJs already using glass screens in their sets. You can be in the crowd looking at the DJ and see his face, see him interact with the virtual turntable.

I think they have a few things to work out, but it’s all being done right now. I can’t wait to see paintings being created this way. The Explay Crystal phone was just released with a transparent display. Think of it from an interior design point of view – a sleek office full of transparent screens looks so much more open and nice than one with ugly black LCDs blocking the view. And in Avengers, Joss used them beautifully – even having conversations between them.

Once they figure out how to parametrically blur and ND, or darken down the background they’ll find wider adoption. I can’t wait to get mine.

Part of designing for films is that sometimes people will say that it looks too advanced for this film, but you always want to design a bit more advanced than what’s current because you don’t want the aesthetic-life of the film to only last a year or two.

You want that film to look good five years from now, ten years from now. Nothing dates a film like old cell phones or having an outdated looking interface on it. So for Fury’s screens – they wanted them to be less high-tech and polished than Stark’s interfaces – yet still be very advanced. If they weren’t, in two years it would be like Fury walking up to his monitors and pulling out a Motorola flip phone with a red LED display. It’d immediately date the film and you’d be pulled out of the story for a second or two. So I’m always looking to never have the design be dumbed down or be too current just for his reason. You want it to hold up years from now.

Kirill: But you also you don’t want to go too far beyond what seems to be reasonably futuristic.

Jayse: Yeah you don’t want it to stand out for just being crazy. It will just draw too much attention for being too ‘out there.’ That’s where tying it in to the art-direction and design of the film as a whole is important to me. But keep in mind; sometimes we’re unaware of what is truly ‘current’. Some of the really amazing data design that looks so next-level-futuristic is actually being done currently… right now, in the real world. For me that’s pretty exciting stuff.

And here I’d like to thank Jayse Hansen for this unique opportunity to graze the surface of what it takes to create screen graphics and user interfaces for movies, and for sharing his process and behind-the-scenes pictures with us.

The explosively fast-paced “Colombiana” follows Zoe Saldana on a deadly mission to avenge the murder of her parents. The visual look of the movie is defined early on with earthen browns, ochre yellows and desaturated emerald greens as perfectly illustrated in this outdoors shot. Note how not only the bodyguards, but the entire house seem dwarfed by the overbearing automobile, foreshadowing the quick murder of the three men and the impending disaster for the young Cataleya.

Slightly further in the same scene Jordi Mollà‘s character tries to appear not overly menacing, as the space between him and Cataleya is lit with soft yellows of the natural daylight. However the much darker space behind his head and the positioning of his face to be to the left of the top-right rule of thirds spot hint at the sinister ulterior motive of his visit.

The movie jumps forward in time to see Cataleya as a cold-blooded assassin that shares time between hit jobs overseen by her uncle and exacting revenge on people connected to the murder of her parents. There’s an interesting visual connection between the establishing shots of Bogota and Chicago – similar shooting angles and color treatment suggest similarity in the corruption of law enforcement agencies and prevalence of street violence:

Most of the inner spaces involving the local police sets add chrome blue to the palette. In the left shot blue is created when the fluorescent whites bounce off of the inner metal walls of the ventilation shaft, while the right shot features extensive use of light blue on background elements:

In the next shot of a coroner examination room blue is assimilated into the green to bathe the entire set in an almost monotonous drape of washed out turquoise. The position and alignment of the camera are coupled with a wide-angle lens to distort the depth, enhancing the perceived distance along the Z axis and distancing the viewer from the police officer in charge of investigating a string of murders. Note that despite positioning the three characters directly in the middle of the frame, our eye is guided by the perspective lines towards the far right corner of the room, all the while masking the technician with a deftly placed lighting device.

In one of my favorite sequences Cataleya goes into a book shop (or library) to be confronted by her angry uncle. The camera “welcomes” her at the door and then tracks her from behind as she makes her way across the shop floor. A fleeting cut to the bottom part of her legs reinforces her projected composure and determination:

It gives me great pleasure to have Colombiana’s director of photography Romain Lacourbas answer a few questions I had about this movie.

---

Kirill: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background

Romain: I studied art history for a couple of years in University and then joined a cinema school in Paris. Before my graduation I had the chance to be chosen as a trainee on a feature with the cinematographer Pierre Aïm. I went on to work as camera assistant, focus puller, camera operator and finally DOP [director of photography] for second unit on feature films. At the same time I was also DOP on short films, particulary with Lola Doillon. When she directed her first feature, she call me to be his DOP. It was the beginning of my DOP carrer.

Kirill: In your opinion what are the most important parts of the craft of cinematography?

Romain: Listening is the first thing you have to deal with to understand the vision of a director, and to be able to help him/her reaching the visual aspect that is going to serve the script. Finding the visual look according to the script and the director is a really important part of the work. It is also one of the most interesting and challenging parts of pre-production. Being open-minded and capable of changing what was planned, because a shooting is full of surprises, is also necessary. A good knowledge of all technical aspects (optical, lighting, grip) is also necessary to propose solutions during pre-production work as well as on the set.

Kirill: How much different it is to work on feature films, commercials and music videos?

Romain: Working on a feature film is like doing a marathon.  You have to endure. Commercials and music videos are a great pool to meet young directors and they have really interesting artistic confrontation. In the meantime, due to higher budgets commercials give us a chance to test new equipment and new tools.

Kirill: Can you describe the process of defining the visual look of “Colombiana” before the shooting started?

Romain: Olivier Megaton (the director) and went over a lot of feature references, particularly including Tony Scott’s features. We also made different kinds of tests with different optical setups and filters in order to polish the right look.

Kirill: “Colombiana” was shot on film. What drove this choice?

Romain: Olivier and I were convinced (and we still are) that digital cameras – unless a huge post-production work is involved – can not render the same highest quality as the film. A film’s image gets instantly more body, character and texture. To reach the same goal digital tools require a bigger intervention in post-production. Moreover, in terms of logistics, such as shooting Colombiana with the rhythms, the number of cascades, and the regular presence of multi-camera setups, might have been a hindrance during the shooting.

Kirill: On a related note, what are your thoughts on shooting digital?

Romain: I think this is a great way for smaller productions which allows the director to not be concerned about the film dailies. It also opens up many possibilities in regards to special effects. This is a medium that requires a different approach and method of work (compared to the film) but which nevertheless remains really interesting and creative.

Kirill: “Colombiana” has a few well defined color palettes. Does a limited color palette affect your choice of lighting and composition?

Romain: We tried to assign colors to each place. So, there are few different colors within the same scene but one chosen tone for the set. We used relevant lighting equipment – tungsten, HMI, fluorescent lights, balloons etc – to match the desired effect.

Kirill: There are a lot of scenes involving heavy weapons. How much time was spent on set on training and safety, and how did that affect your shooting schedule?

Romain: Zoe Saldana was trained a long time before the shooting started by our gunsmith team. In addition, Christophe Maratier’s team are all seasoned professionals who are used to work on feature films. They are very fast. We never had to wait for the weapons during the shooting. Also, during the preproduction meetings we all knew exactly how we were going to shoot those sequences so that everything was well prepared upstream.

Kirill: What was the scale of construction and destruction in the New Orleans house where the final shootout took place?

Romain: The interior of the house was rebuilt on stage. By the end of the shooting it was almost all destroyed…

Kirill: The chase after the ten-year old Cataleya through the streets of Bogota was such a thrilling scene. How much time did you spend setting up, shooting and editing it?

Romain: One shooting week.

Romain Lacourbas on the set of “Colombiana”.

Kirill: Do you see your craft affected by either shooting or post-converting in 3D?

Romain: I didn’t get the chance to shoot in 3D or do post-production conversion to 3D. I would consider my work differently starting from the pre-production when that happens.

Kirill: Finally, can you recommend a few of your favorite productions that have particularly impressed you over the years?

Romain: It’s always hard to answer this question, because either you forget a lot of examples or you spend a month trying to make a precise ‘list’. But here are some features on which I found the cinematography impressing and related to the narrative aspects :

« Brooklyn’s finest » by Antoine Fuqua
« Thunderbolt and lightfoot » by Michael Cimino
« Dog day afternoon » By Sidney Lumet
« He got game » by Spike Lee
« Roads to perdition » by Sam Mendes
« Amores perros » by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu
« Mr Nobody » by Jaco Van Dormael
« Goodfellas » by Martin Scorcese
« Little Odessa » by James Gray
« 127 hours » by Danny Boyle
« Bullhead » by Michael R. Roskam
« Bronson » by Nicolas Winding Refn
« Gerry » by Gus Van Sant
(…)

And here I would like to thank Romain Lacourbas for finding time in his busy schedule shooting “Taken 2” and for graciously agreeing to this interview.

Distilling the art of film making to its purest form of visual storytelling, “The Artist” is a breathtaking masterpiece of cinematography. A story set in the glamorous days of early Hollywood, it effortlessly transports the viewer into the meticulously recreated world of silent black-and-white film. An authentic, warm and enchanting journey combined with a universal story of fame, pride, fortune and affection brings one of the most remarkable films in the recent history. The weeks leading to the Oscars awards ceremony are a very hectic time for Laurence Bennett, the production designer of the film, and it is a great honor to interview him about his work on “The Artist”.

Kirill: Let’s start with your background. You worked outside the movie industry for about ten years, and then moved to work on TV and movie productions.

Laurence: I started working in design when I was quite young. Between the school and college I worked in a small design firm. I studied in Los Angeles and in Japan, and after finishing college I moved to Ireland for ten years. I worked in theater and taught in the National College of Art. I was a painter and working in theater was really my introduction to show business. In the mid-seventies I had friends from Los Angeles who were getting into film business, and one summer I came back and worked with them doing miniature models for a big television special. That was my introduction to Hollywood, and interestingly, the production office we had on a small side street for “The Artist” was right across the street from the place where I worked 35 years earlier.

Kirill: In the last few years you worked on action thrillers such as “In the Valley of Elah”, “One Missed Call”, “Traitor” and “The Next Three Days”. How did you get to work on “The Artist”?

Laurence: It was sheer luck. One of my agents called me and connected me with the line producer who was assembling crew for Michel Hazanavicius [director]. We met, talked and hit it off, and I went to Los Angeles to meet Michel. The next morning we were out scouting together working on the picture.

Kirill: Did you have any hesitations joining such an unusual production?

Laurence: I embraced it whole-heartedly. I was very excited.

Kirill: Were you particularly connected to the 1920-30s era before you’ve started working on this film?

Laurence: I’d always been a fan of the movies of the era. My knowledge wasn’t as deep or as broad as it is now, because of all those months I’ve spent living and working in the period with Michel, Guillaume [Schiffman, cinematographer] and all my friends. There’s real magic in the pictures that came out of Hollywood in those early days. They were inventing the language of the cinema, and at the same time inventing the business of Hollywood. They seemed to have had a great time doing it, so I encouraged my crew to take on the same spirit of fun in approaching this project.

Kirill: Can you describe what happened during the pre-production stage, as you were working with Michel and Guillaume on the overall story and look, and the particular scenes?

Laurence: Michel arrived with the entire story boarded. His vision for the project was so complete and so whole. He had very specific ideas for most of the shots. The trick for me was trying to build the world around these shots that the characters would live in. We spent a good two and a half months in pre-production. We watched dozens and dozens and dozens of movies together. Michel introduced me to the works of F.W. Murnau, King Vidor, Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg. Also in Los Angeles there’s always an opportunity to see restorations of older works. Mark Bridges the costumer and I went to see the new restoration of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” [1921] which was Rudolph Valentino‘s big breakthrough film. And when you see good cinematography and design from the period that’s well restored and printed, the photography is so remarkably beautiful. Really exceptional stuff.

“Ritz” theatre marquee. Sketch by Laurence Bennett.

Kirill: Michel and Guillaume worked together before. How did you get into the rhythm of working with them?

Laurence: They are also very close friends. They were very welcoming to me into the process. It was great, the pre-production was absolutely delightful. It was time of shared exploration, kicking ideas around and finding things, seeing what would work.

Kirill: Were you aiming to limit your setups and techniques to what would be available to production designers and art directors of that time?

Laurence: Very much. There’s a directness and simplicity and real grace around the art direction of the time. I tried to mimic that. One thing was very important to us – the supremacy of the story. We were telling the story of George and Peppy and Jack the dog. Nothing was ever to upstage them, nothing was ever to get in the way, they were always center and clear in the story telling. I felt a real responsibility to make these living breathing environments that they operated in to never be a distraction, and to always support the believability of their situations.

Kirill: Did you research the specific setup techniques of the era, along with the additional materials like fabrics?

Laurence: It’s all terribly important. Fortunately I had a team of very talented people, between my set decorator Bob Gould and the prop master Michelle Spears. They researched and put together many of these things to look at. Guillaume, Michel and I did extensive camera tests for materials, paint, pattern, make-up and costume. Testing in the various art departments went on right through the photography. Whenever we were putting together a palette of materials and textures and finishes for a particular set, we would test them in black-and-white.

Kirill: “The Artist” is your first production without color. Having such an important tool removed from your fingers, did you spend more time on contrast, textures and light to compensate for the lack of color?

Laurence: Certainly I focused a lot more on texture and pattern that I ever have before. Even the luster of finishes, the shine or the lack of shine. Without chroma cue for separating things within the frame you have to rely a lot more on rim light and contrast of light and shadow. I really found pattern and solids and different textures to be a great way to differentiate planes within a frame.

Kirill: Did you remove the color from the actual sets?

Laurence: I decided on an approach that was rather split. Because there’s so much film work within the film, with all the studio sets and the movies that we see in the movie, I decided to do all of those in black-and-white. The naturalistic sets within the story were rendered in naturalistic tones.

Restaurant set. Sketch by Laurence Bennett.

Kirill: And then you have another aspect of the era, shooting in the Academy ratio of 1.33:1, with much less horizontal space. How did that affect the preparation and setups when the audience sees less?

Laurence: You see different things. I’ve done 1.85:1, and most of my recent work has been 2.35:1. In 1.33:1 you see a lot of ceilings and floors, whereas you don’t in 2.35:1. So the composition would have a lot more above and below. It’s a different way of looking, a rather more awkward framing, and it’s difficult to adjust to. All of the location photographs, all of the sketches that I’ve prepared for Michel – everything was presented in 1.33:1 so that we would get used to that format.

I spent a lot more attention to the floors particularly. One of the things that was typical of the film sets of the time was that they seldom had ceilings. We had some ceiling pieces, elements and headers, but floors were a larger concern.

Kirill: Did you build your sets in the studio stages?

Laurence: It’s a big mixture. We had many many locations, all of the historic locations of the period – Peppy’s house, George’s mansion, the theaters. We did a lot of work on the back lots at Paramount – Los Angeles streets, the pawn shop, the tuxedo shop, George walking around, a little bit of the driving stuff, Peppy on the bus. Other driving stuff was done in an old Los Angeles neighborhood. The exteriors of the theaters were done at the Warner Bros back lot. And everything else was done on stage – George’s apartment after his fall, the screening room, the jungle, all of the little sets you see within the movies. We had a tremendous number of stage sets.

Magazine cover of “Screenland”. Graphic designer – Martin Charles.

Kirill: What happened to those sets? Are they gone, and was it hard to see them demolished?

Laurence:  That’s what always happens. You hope that pieces would be recycled in other things. We used only painted backdrops outside the sets, and I tried whenever possible to use  the oldest black-and-white ones. There are only very few still available, but there was one in particular that spoke to me. There’s a movie that Peppy does within the movie, “Guardian Angel”, and it has a North African, Moroccan feeling. The backing outside that set was from “Casablanca” [Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, 1942]. And when I found that, it was a very rare and wonderful thing, like unrolling a holy relic. It was painted in black-and-white in the early 1940s. It was a real honor and thrill to be able to use it.

Kirill: You mentioned one of the historic location used for Peppy’s house. This is the old Mary Pickford residence. What is it used for these days?

Laurence: It’s a residence. A family owns it, and they recently did a major restoration. It’s in a beautiful shape. We looked at it and fell in love with it, and only then realized its provenance. When George wakes up from his convalescence in Peppy’s guest bedroom – that was Mary Pickford’s bedroom in the few years when she was seeing Douglas Fairbanks before they got married. It’s pretty remarkable.

Kirill: Was access to all the historic locations one of the main reasons to shoot in Los Angeles and not Europe?

Laurence: There was another reason. Michel and Thomas Langmann the producer had a very strong feeling about making the story in Hollywood because the story itself is about Hollywood – and I loved them for that.

Kirill: There was this odd piece floating around about a UK theater issuing refunds to people who didn’t know that it was supposed to be a silent film. On one hand, the story becomes more accessible when you remove the sound, but on the other hand, do you feel that the modern audience is ready to see such a movie?

Laurence: I think those stories are very exaggerated. It seems to have been one cinema in some place in the UK. I would hope that the picture opened up to a much broader audience the incredible strengths of a pure version of visual storytelling. Cinema is first and foremost a visual medium. I would hope that it’s exposed people to broaden their horizons a bit. The universality of the story by lack of dialog is quite incredible. I only realized it the other morning as I was doing a radio interview with a journalist in Bogota, Colombia, and there were journalists from Spanish-speaking world in four different countries asking questions. It was an incredibly emotional experience seeing people moved by the picture, hearing people’s questions and reactions from around the world.

Kirill: Even as the sets are in the background and the main focus is on the characters does not mean that you have less work to do.

Laurence: It’s a collaborative art form and I never worked on a production where both the cooperation and collaboration between various art departments was as strong and joyous as it was on this picture. Also, because of the uniqueness of the approach to storytelling I think it was much more essential that we worked in sync. This picture is nothing without what I think to be a good solid cinematography, design, costumes, make-up and hair. The casting is phenomenal, the extras casting – everything that was done by all the departments was so strong that it supported a very strong picture.

Kirill: The movie itself covers a roughly five year period, from 1927 to 1932, with the Great Depression striking right at the middle point. If you just watch the movies from the era, the glamour did not go away; in “The Artist” there’s a certain transition as George goes broke, with much less glamour surrounding him. How did you alter the visual language throughout the story?

Laurence: And then you notice as he’s pulled back to life by Peppy’s faith in him, the movie ends with a glorious, very high style finale, as he returns to a very glossy career. It was obviously by intent that the picture is taking a dark, slightly expressionist turn. His crisis was an opportunity to really darken the story and let the threat and his conflict be demonstrated visually in a different way.

Still picture of one of Peppy’s 1931 movies. Photography by Peter Iovino.

Kirill: Do you notice any significant difference in the visual look of the movies from 1930s as they switched to sound?

Laurence: Last week I was actually watching a few pictures from the very early 1930s. Cedric Gibbons, the production designer who is best known from that period, was responsible for not only changing the look of the Hollywood product, but also influenced interior design and product design around the world. He was responsible, more than anyone I can think of, for popularizing deco. He had been to the exposition in Paris in 1925, and he returned to Hollywood with this incredible enthusiasm for the modernism, the modern hope that its flair personified to him, and he began putting that into the scenery.

There’s one set that’s very influenced by Gibbons in “The Artist”. The set where Peppy is filming when she receives news of George’s accident when she reads the newspaper – it’s derived very directly from a set that Gibbons used both in “Our Dancing Daughters” and “Our Modern Maidens”.

Kirill: You mentioned the scene where Peppy is riding on the bus. There’s a few dozen other cars in the movie. Can you talk about the logistics of getting access to all these vehicles?

Laurence: They are real vehicles, and it’s tremendously difficult. The picture vehicle people worked long and hard to secure those cars and trucks and buses. There’s an amount of very common ones available in Hollywood, but for very special ones you need to go to the collectors. The bus was particularly hard to come by. We used the vehicles as is with no modifications, but the search for a couple of them was particularly prolonged and difficult.

Kirill: Does that authenticity extend to the lower level of details of accessories such as microphones, hair brushes or light bulbs?

Laurence: We decided early on that we wanted to be true to the spirit of the period, rather than being slavish to detail. But certainly everything is quite authentic, requiring a little bit of looking and thinking. It also depends. The light bulbs, for example, are reproduction bulbs. But the sockets are from the period. We custom-made George’s table, but other items such as dressers and make-up tables were readily available.

Kirill: How much time and attention did you spend on the costume design? Was it a separate mini-production of its own?

Laurence: That was all Mark Bridges the costume designer who is a genius, and I think he has a lot of very deserved attention to this picture. There is a good bit of period wardrobes still available, but the problem is that it’s not in a very good condition. It falls apart as fabric deteriorates over time, so he built a lot of things. A lot of Peppy’s dresses, for example, were built from the styles of the time. He did a brilliant job saying a lot about the characters’ progressions through their arcs, but also helping bring them to the right amount of attention within the frame at any given time. Things like white colors on Peppy’s dresses and hats really bring attention to her face and focus her even in a crowd. Between lighting and costumes a lot was done that really highlights the characters.

Kirill: You’re recreating a very glamorous era in Hollywood’s history, but also an era that has the vast majority of its films well preserved (unlike the early movies that have been largely lost). Were you trying to avoid comparisons to any specific real-life actors, or was it a mixture of original storylines and homages?

Laurence: George Valentin begins as Douglas Fairbanks, morphs into John Gilbert and then becomes Fred Astaire. We were trying to be nimble in how we portrayed the characters and allowed them to grow a bit. There are obviously certain studios and stars and products from the time that were very much on our mind, but it was also important that we’re not too tied to any particular ones.

Kirill: Did you ever think about how the film would’ve been accepted had it been made back in the 1930s?

Laurence: I’d like to think that the story that Michel wrote is so strong, and Jean [Dujardin] and Berenice [Bejo] performances are so winning, that I think that it would charm audiences anywhere, anytime.

Kirill: There’s so much that has changed in the ways movies are made in the last 80 years. Without any specific reference to the current explorations of 3D shooting and projection, do you think there’s going to be a similar “nostalgic” movie made in 2100s about the modern movie making?

Laurence: We have no way of imagining. The technological changes and growth in the art and the crafts of cinema in the past 90 years – no one could have ever foreseen. There’s certainly some parallels in new technology now and what was going on with the conversion to sound, but who knows what sort of changes there’ll be. One thing I can say though is that good stories are always good stories. I am such a sucker for being told a story and being taken on a trip that when I watch a film form any country at any time and it’s good, the technology doesn’t really enter my appreciation of it.

Kirill: What was the role of visual effects in “The Artist”?

Laurence: There are several exterior scenes with an amount of CG augmentation and erasure. Philippe Aubry was the visual effects supervisor and he was with us through much of the shoot. He did a fantastic job in doing just the right amount and keeping the level of detail just perfect. He worked on a handful of very key scenes – the exteriors of the theaters, assembling the entire crowd within the cinemas for the big shots where we had around 200 people and needed 1200, the entrance to the studio. I built the gate and suggested to Philippe what we might put in the background, and he created it digitally.

Exterior of Kinograph Studios, sketch by Laurence Bennett.

Kirill: What about the scene in the staircase as George and Peppy pass each other by as the studio moves to the sound productions?

Laurence: That’s a real beautiful historical building in downtown Los Angeles – the Bradbury Building, seen in many movies including “Blade Runner”.

Kirill: What’s next for you, besides the very hectic weeks leading to the Oscars? Do you think there’s a place for more productions of this type, or is it a one-off never to be repeated?

Laurence: I can’t really think much beyond that. Right now that’s keeping me pretty busy. I don’t think there’s going to be a big rush to make black-and-white silent movies [laughs]. What I hope is that there will be people willing to take chances to explore more off-mainstream approaches. I’ve been fortunate to have been involved in a couple of indies that really broke through, and when you’re working on something that could in fact be very special – but you’re not sure if anyone’s going to see it… Two pictures I’ve done – “Crash” and “The Artist” were different. When a small picture gets a chance to be seen so widely, and gets so much attention, it’s pretty remarkable the impact it can have.

And here I’d like to thank Laurence Bennett once again for his work on this extraordinary film, for graciously agreeing to answer my questions and for sharing the materials used in this interview.