um sorry it's just me nope nora's not here today she's uh getting ready for the oscars
she's very excited but she's had a couple of mishaps and didn't couldn't quite make it
yeah um same questions always is your journey to get to this point in your mentors or
school experiences or yes so um shanghai bars tom
i trained at art school but before i decided to take a take hike and that was in new zealand or it
was in new zealand um i grew up working on film sets for my um my father was a scenic backdrop
artist and welcome and as from a very young age i have helped him tidy up the polystyrene and paint
paint the prime prime the canvases and um that was a nice introduction for uh for for me because i
i thought at that point maybe i wanted to be more of a classical artist so i studied sculpture and
having us coming from a sculptural background i
found myself working more and more in advertising and building environments which led me to
a significant role on the lord of the rings with their sculpting fabrication department
it's the last time you were with us actually uh hobbit yeah on harvard so a lot of the rings of
course was 20 that was 22 years ago now um half of our audience wasn't born yet
and then by the time 2013 came along i was decorating for dan henner and we were we were
in this room well okay so that explains a little bit about the colors in jojo
the colors are just amazing and i i just um they were so vivid everywhere and it was a
nice little surprise wherever they sort of went i mean even just the the containers the
doors on the containers and that sort of thing but her inga's room was just beautiful right
so what how did you arrive it at that colors were very important a very important tool for me
i find that you can not only evoke a very a various palette of emotion from the use of color
but you can also ground an audience into a moment in the story so if we come back to
for instance singer's room with it's slightly slightly dustier palette it's a little bit kind of
um melancholic kind of somber vibe to it and then those colors can also reappear during the film in
certain places which will bring you back to either a a piece of geography that you know
or a feeling that was evoked the first time you saw it so even though it looks like a splatter
effect of multiple colours the film generally its colour arc is an intentional movement for
the art department to take us from kind of from the young uh optimistic jojo rabbit through his
um through his story act and we find ourselves at the end of his journey in in quite muted tones
and that kind of goes to support the drama and you know i think we also took a few liberties with
historical colors because our experience of this story is not only that of an eleven-year-old boy
but also it's uh the color palettes there to serve the the narrative and because we're not being a
historical film we're being an emotional film so the first your first key needs to be an emotional
reaction from the audience so we used color for that it was it's interesting to um blend the
historic aspects of it with with the emotion i mean that really did come across so i think
that was really well done yeah listen it's nice i mean it's not totally inaccurate because in um
in germany in the 1930s the german um german society was at the height of its artistic movement
with the it was the end of the bauhaus movement it was the beginning of kind of a a very germanic um
design revolution in furniture and architecture so with with that combination of bauhaus and art deco
we have a unique opportunity to show a german aesthetic which was actually really vibrant
yeah it needs to say it's a dark comedy and i i always thought only mel brooks could
make the third reich funny uh and somehow you found your own voice and all of that
what in the early process when you don't have 400 people standing at your door for decisions
and questions and answers and budgets what gives you the most joy in that early period when you're
getting into the material really the exploration into what the movie is going to be is my favorite
part i mean you have you have an initial reaction to the writing but it took us to travel to the
czech republic to the location that was kind of budget favorable maybe had a few details that were
historically kind of quite useful for us so did you take over an actual community a town
center yeah so um the czech republic is quite big turns out i got off the plane and
got driven around in a van and said this is great this is great this is a fantastic spot
and then a few days later they tell me that they're like 200 miles away from each other
but we um we picked two little villages a village called jates and one called ushtek
which were largely kind of um kept in a time capsule i mean there's some beautiful little
villages in the czech public that are kind of almost virtually untouched
we'd we did a little bit of colour therapy with them and we took away a few of their
modern modernized components we had to take down a lot of satellite dishes
and um and then you blew up a bunch of buildings and we blew up a few buildings
so you'll never work there again we worked very closely with the local communities there to make
sure they were happy with us being there we put some gallows in the in the main street we hung
swastikas and we were here i mean this it's sort of horrifying really anywhere else in the world it
would have been quite difficult but because czech republic shared a border with germany and the nazi
party had quite a significant presence because the border had shifted we uh worked with people who
two generations previous were living there so we had personal stories from people who were in them
who lived in the villages that we were working in so in a lot of ways we were vindicated in
some of our choices because we were also working with the local community and there
they were giving us feedback so to come back to your first question
about your reaction to the it's your reaction to the script and then your experience
so a film like this could never have been done on a studio lot right we needed the
input of the country that we're in and the and the new meetings that we had with people
and also to be able to respond from but respond to the architecture i know sometimes it's a good
idea to go and visit uh visit the country that you're going to be making portraying in a film
but to actually live there and work there and work with the local people it's
like that's the most in-depth kind of study research you can do
so is nora from czech republic nora is from czech republic she works in prague
and prague has a um a very long history of making incredible films quite a bit yeah the technicians
world class right and i i i'm going to ask you to speak for her a little bit because uh you
know we have to talk about set decoration um were there any things that she brought
that were just like the linchpin for a particular set um that really nora nora's um
because she grew up and has been uh she knows the country so well i don't think nora has
worked outside of czech republic before but um she's worked with a lot of foreign filmmakers
she has an incredible wealth of knowledge in the objects of art deco and her contacts a lot of the
a lot of the material in the movie was borrowed antiquities from friends of hers so
where maybe we would find a few dusty uh pieces of furniture and prop houses the
the real beauty to what the set decoration team brought to jojo rabbit was and that
most of the pieces are unique artists antiquities and we were there were a lot of generous people
who just wanted to be part of making this movie and and she managed to convince them
that's half of the skill but it really did seem to bring the heart
to the to the home at least oh absolutely absolutely i mean you can't kind of fake uh
if nora were here she could rattle off all of the artists names the chandeliers and the sofa and the
the art in the house was a contribution from both her and her husband's fathers who were
well notable czech artists anyway the names will be in there somewhere in the fine print
where did you get a lot of your military assets i mean you know that stuff's old now
look i um in czech republic there are a number of uh enthusiast groups
who specialize in different nationalities of the sycamore war we call them re-enactors here
reenactors scary well i mean it's incredible the the the american troops that you saw in
that little reel had been camping uh on the set for three days prior yes that's what they did and
they'd been sleeping underneath their vehicles in in their uniforms it's called getting into
character and eating out of the out of the bellies and all that so and these guys all bring their own
blank firing weapons they're all trained actors they will do their own stunt work it's pretty
amazing actually that and i think we probably paid about 1500 bucks for the whole experience
and did they go out they're enthusiastic did they go out drinking with the germans at night oh yeah
well we had we had a brigade of russian soldiers americans brits and
and germans think it's easy when you see it on the screen you're wrangling that lot hey
um and then i guess you found some old factories that you could use for all of your
yep yeah because judge i the the whole production budget was tiny the art department got left with
very little but the the idea about going to um going to the czech republic is we could try and
try and capture as much as possible through the lens and mihi was very generous and that he
would frame things that were complementary to art department and the performance was also mindful
you know our cast were mindful of of where they're of their surroundings
and we could inhabit a street and kind of forget about the shopping mall behind us
there are a few situations like that and we had a couple of old ruined
villages that we went to it was a sugar refinery that was half collapsed and left overgrown and we
fixed up and made it sturdy and added a few extra walls and things made it safe and um really the
it's the the quantity of material meant that in tom's uh tom and tyka's edit tom eagles the editor
they could make the world so much bigger than what our original plan was did you have any set
extensions with digital digital set extensions uh our jason chen our vfx supervisor lent some
help with a few uh battleground set extensions we needed to put ourselves back in our fictitious
uh falcon home town which is a town that we made up and um and occasionally those fixes would just
cure a blight in the background and then i think there's an introduction of an airplane and a few
explosions but really you know visual effects do soak up quite a bit of the of of your production
money and it's nice to give it back to our department and even just shrink your appetite a
little bit and make um make your story about about small meaningful moments and then save all your
big money for just a few of these big expensive shots it really worked i mean it it just was so um
just the way that you were able to capture everything was just so wonderful uh any uh
thoughts for anyone who wants to follow you into this uh profession of ours run away
oh i said you can't say that it is actually it's such a rewarding um experience being
being production designer and so and and making something that you're proud of so the key thing
my attitude to it is if you're going to go and do the work just do it to the best of your ability
you don't have to pretend to do be anything except for yourself and do you do the strongest
version of yourself that you can and people will recognize it and then they'll keep hassling you
to do jobs and you end up here well we'll see about that thank you so much beautiful work
set up 1917 please