San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cover Story
Inside the stunning home that stars in ‘Malcolm & Marie.’
Movie producers like Ashley Levinson are used to highstress multitasking. Yet, making sure a cast and crew stayed safe and healthy during a clandestine shoot in the midst of the deadly coronavirus pandemic was an entirely new degree of challenge for Levinson, one of the principal backers of “Malcolm & Marie,” which was written and directed by her husband, Sam.
“I don’t think I slept through the night until two weeks after we wrapped shooting,” said Levinson, reflecting on the highwire act of pulling together the intimate new Netflix drama out Friday, Feb. 5, which was filmed over 14 days near Carmel over the summer to become one of the first films to wrap production during the pandemic. When Sam Levinson and Zendaya — both concerned about the forced time off from filming their HBO drama series “Euphoria” — hatched the idea of making a movie while the entertainment industry was on lockdown, using “pods” and “bubbles” to prevent the virus’ spread were not yet familiar concepts. The NBA’s successful experiment of playing all its games in Orlando hadn’t even started.
“First off, we had to immerse ourselves in learning as much as we could about how the virus is transmitted and figure out, could we even do this safely?” Ashley Levinson said. “We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t have doctors telling us that what we were doing was safe.”
She knew a highlevel epidemiologist who had been in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began, and his findings informed the protocols the producers devised: preshoot quarantining, regular coronavirus testing, everyone in protective equipment, and “a promise from everyone involved not to leave (the set) once we arrived,” Levinson said.
Although they discussed shooting in Zendaya’s or the Levinsons’ home, “Los Angeles wasn’t issuing permits (to shoot) because the (COVID19) numbers were so high,” Levinson said, “so we started looking at various places we could get to with one tank of gas, to eliminate as many stops as possible.”
Monterey County was the only place in California at the time allowing shoots on private properties. “So it had to be Carmel,” Levinson said.
Production designer Michael Grasley, who also works on “Euphoria,” researched contemporary homes along the Central Coast that would fit the film’s aesthetic goals: a midcentury, openplan property that would pop on screen in black and white.
San Francisco architect Jonathan Feldman’s stunning, ecoconscious, rammed earthandglass Caterpillar House, on 33 acres in the private Santa Lucia Preserve, fit the bill. While “Malcolm & Marie” has just two roles, a feuding couple played by Zendaya and John David Washington, the glamorous house in which the entire movie takes place became effectively the movie’s third character.