BRINGING THE PAST TO THE PRESENT

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

An abandoned farmhouse outside Prague was the starting point for the World War I field hospital, which showed the destruction in the hinterland beyond the battlefields. Production designer Christian M. Goldbeck explains, “Parts of the walls you see in the background were built and painted by our wonderful scenic painters.” (This is a set photo; in postproduction, the VFX team removed the background behind the structure and added further destruction to complete the look.)

BABYLON

The fictional Kinoscope studio was critical for Damien Chazelle’s evocation of 1920s Hollywood, explains production designer Florencia Martin, and the vast studio setting was built on location and showed the sets and the desert simultaneously to give the viewers a full sense of that world. The bar set where Margot Robbie’s Nellie shoots her first film was based on Chazelle’s hand-drawn storyboards. “We picked a Western gold rush bar in Northern California and frosted the windows with snow,” says Martin.

ELVIS

Research for re-creating Graceland included visits to Elvis Presley’s famous Memphis home to take photographs, dig into the archives and even have the ground surveyed. “When we got back to Australia, we could mill the timber perfectly or make sure that our Graceland sat on the right topography,” says production designer Catherine Martin, adding that the production built one and a half stories of the mansion’s facade. The set evolved to reflect the progression of time over Presley’s career.

THE FABELMANS

In Steven Spielberg’s semiautobiographical film, aspiring filmmaker Sammy is invited to meet one of his idols, John Ford, in the director’s office on a studio backlot. For this set, writes production designer Rick Carter, his team “re-created Western paintings with low and high horizons to depict the axiom expressed in this final scene: High or low experiences are interesting to audiences because they create real drama that inspires an emotional response.”