The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly) - The Hollywood Reporter Awards Special
TAMARA DEVERELL, NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Searchlight Pictures’ Nightmare Alley follows Bradley Cooper’s Stanton Carlisle through the grisly, rural carnival circuit of late 1930s America. Cooper eventually migrates to the art deco universe of Lilith Ritter’s (Cate Blanchett) therapy office and the grand club where Carlisle performs his clairvoyance act. For production designer Tamara
Deverell, this necessitated creating two entirely different worlds from the ground up.
“It was really like working on two very different films,” Deverell explains. “For the look of the carnival, I did harken back to my own childhood, in a weird way, of country fairs and carnivals, and trying to evoke that feeling.”
Research played a key role in creating the look of the film, which was built almost entirely from scratch. For the circus, Deverell purchased authentic period banners for her art team to re-create and hired a family-run Midwest tentmaking company that worked on the construction of the original Barnum & Bailey pavilion. Custom details — like the optical illusion of the character Spidora, who pokes her head through a board and puppets a spider’s body that appears attached to her face — drew on Deverell and director Guillermo del Toro’s childhood nostalgia for county fairs. “[Del Toro remembered] the Spider Woman that he saw when he was 6 years old at a carnival ... and wrote it into the script,” Deverell says. “We researched and found out how to put [the illusion] together.”
For the art deco locations of the film, shooting took place largely in Buffalo, New York, which became a huge source of inspiration for Deverell. “The city of Buffalo had a lot to do with my process, when I think about it. People don’t realize: Buffalo originally was going to be New York City. I don’t know if it was too cold or wet, but it has a lot of spectacular original art deco architecture that we looked at and shot a few places, including the City Hall right outside the mayor’s office.”