Setting the Mood
A set designer talks about the heartbreaks that come with dismantling what she creates—homes, worlds, lives.
It is an empty house. A few books, a few sandals, two mattresses, a desk and a chair. Outside, the pink bougainvillea is in full bloom. You can see the ruins from the balcony of this house on a summer afternoon. There’s time. Empty spaces are for her to fill, and this one belongs to acclaimed writer Vikram Seth. And this time, it will be a house that won’t be demolished. That’s solace, for now.
The Beginning
Years after she designed the sets which included building a whole house in Goa, for the Bourne Identity series, production designer Aradhana Seth still hasn’t returned to the site even though she now lives in Goa. Of all the temporary homes and spaces she has built over the years, this was one she got attached to. Such are the occupational hazards of her work—you need a heart of steel perhaps to demolish what you once created. From a distance, it looks like a giant clam shell. A song sequence for The Sky is Pink, a film starring Priyanka Chopra and Farhan Akhtar, is being shot at the Filmalaya studios in Mumbai. It is a complex set, she says; "You have to be imaginative.” As a little girl, she was always curious about spaces. She would go to others’ homes and rearrange furniture in her
head. The artist and production designer is the daughter of Justice Leila Seth and sister of author Vikram Seth. Her father Prem Nath Seth studied footwear design in England and worked with Bata in the early 60s. Part of her childhood was spent in Digha in Bihar in a bungalow on the premises of the shoe factory. Seth graduated with a masters degree from the Mass Communications Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi and first worked as an assistant director for In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones written by Arundhati Roy, after her graduation in 1987.
Life on the sets
“I’d do everything on the sets, including design; I was young and tireless at the time,” she adds. And in 1992, she met director Deepa Mehta on the set of George Lucas' Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. That led to Seth designing the sets for Fire in 1996 and Earth in 1998. It is the little things, like the yellow hues in Fire, a film that first tested her skills at storytelling through objects, perfume bottles, window frames, ageing on the walls, everything that tells something. “In Fire, we dressed the house. In Bourne Supremacy, we created it,” she says. For every story that is given to her, she travels in time and space. There are facts and there’s imagination, and after she has read the script a few times, she begins to place the people in time and context. There are truths and myths. She must act as the mediator between the real and story world where visual fiction needs everything—costumes, props, furniture in real or simulated architectural spaces in imaginary worlds. Film scholar C. S. Tashiro says reality needs to be shaped “to fictional ends” and “the production designer sits at this conjunction between the world outside the story and the story’s needs”. Everything must have a visceral response to it and for the sake of immortality in memory’s treacherous landscape, you must burn a scene in collective consciousness. The train in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) is one such example. A train was dismantled, reimagined and reconfigured and redesigned and then returned to its original state after the film. It is then about working with believable reconstructions, even in a dream sequence.
Of needs, nostalgia and narratives
“You live in that world. And you also can’t live in everybody’s world,” Seth says. That’s the conflict of it and that’s the irony of it. Seth is always elsewhere. There are photos on her social media that belong elsewhere. Like a steel box that must have belonged to another era with red books piled on it; the location says Kolkata. Or a staircase with black semi-circles on each landing. She is always looking, always recording. These will reappear on some set somewhere. And that’s how she summons command over every element of the set as a narrative device. There’s a lot of emotion. That’s how people relate and ultimately remember.