Creating Agrabah

GOT designer turns her talents to Aladdin’s world

Somewhere in Burma, there’s an ancient monastery that triggered a burst of inspiration in production designer Gemma Jackson.

The film she was working on did not require a holy place in the traditional sense.

It was something much more decadent.

Guy Ritchie’s new live-action version of Aladdin called for a brooding palace to tower over the bustling streets of Agrabah, the fictional port city with a vaguely Middle Eastern bent at the centre of the sprawling musical.

“It was quite exquisite,” says Jackson about the crumbling Burmese facility.

“It was quite run down, but it had elements that really spoke to me. It was timber, all carved wood and painted gold. Some of it was almost like a Christmas-tree gold, because they haven’t got any money. But it was wonderful and had these lively areas and balconies all around and this sort of indoor-outdoor sort of life. And I thought: ‘I think there’s something here.’”

The palace is where Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott) is sequestered by her well-meaning father the Sultan (Navid Negahban) until he can marry her off to a prince. It’s one of a number of impressive sets in the lavish production.

Aladdin is a reimagined take on the 1992 animated classic of the same name, with Toronto-based actor Mena Massoud in the titular role.

While this world created by Jackson, an Emmy winner and Oscar nominee, maintains a sense of wonder, she didn’t want to approach the film as if it were simply a cartoon come to life.

She wanted her Agrabah to be a real place filled with real people doing real work.

“Everyone was busy doing things, real things, making things,” Jackson said.

“I don’t do decorative. I want it to be a real, vibrant living place. It has real trees, real dirt, real prickly pears. The animals come and they s--t on it. We’ve made it as functional a place as possible. I think that’s partly why people find it attractive. It’s a proper working place.”

“The ultimate compliment from the actor’s point of view is we were transported to the time and place,” said Will Smith, who plays the Genie. “That’s what happened when we walked on that set. When we walked through, it was in the textures on the walls. The stairs were real. You could walk up and go onto the rooftops. It was a powerful way to transport the actors into the emotions and the smells of the time and place.”

Jackson and her team basically created a city on a massive sound stage in Surrey, England.

Alongside the Sultan’s palace, there was the chaotic marketplace and Aladdin’s cleverly jury-rigged home atop a rickety tower.

There was also the forbidden “Cave of Wonders,” a supernatural realm shaped like a tiger’s head where the villain Jafar sends Aladdin to find the lamp of the Genie.

“When you first read a big script like this, you get a tone in your mind and a sense of the scale and the colour and the hustle and the bustle,” Jackson says. “The most important moment for me is first reading the script. I have to make sure I can read it uninterrupted. I don’t want to have to read it in bits. I want to get the hit.”

Jackson has designed the look of films of all stripes, but she is likely best known for her work defining the original visuals in the first three seasons of HBO’S Game of Thrones, which earned her two Emmy Awards.

“Whether you’re researching strange parts of Iran architecture or whether your doing downtown London somewhere, that doesn’t matter to me,” she says. “As long as I feel I’ve enjoyed the script and I want to tell that story then I’ll tell that story. I could be in a submarine and tell a story of a submarine. I just want to feel passionate about it.”