- By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked
this way comes.
- When I work on a film,
I always kind of come in at this human level
and at an empathetic level, especially with the director.
I think working with Joel Cohen is kind of putting me
at the pinnacle of where I'd like to be.
It's a bit of a difficult question when you pose it
like what's it like to work with Joel
as opposed to working with Joel and Ethan?
Since the only time I worked with Joel and Ethan
was as an art director and it's a little bit of a different,
it's quite a different job.
As a production designer,
you're seeing the overall look of the film.
As an art director,
you're kind of getting into the nuts and bolts
and you're supporting that production designer,
so in the case of True Grit,
amazing production designer, Jess Goncher.
It was my job to kind of make sure
Jess' vision went forward.
So, you know, I had interactions with both Joel and Ethan.
It was just that you had two directors
that you were dealing with.
They were so in sync that it seemed like one
and working with just Joel was just
such a different experience because there I was
in the production designer role where I'm overseeing
the whole thing as opposed to True Grit
making sure that one specific set is really working
at that time.
Your point of view is completely different
as a production designer.
- Working on Macbeth
was probably the most collaborative project I've worked on.
You know, you bring something to it,
but you're hoping that your crew or somebody else will go,
oh, you know what I thought you were going to say?
I thought you were going to say this,
and oh, you're like, that's a great idea,
and you start layering up and then something beautiful that
you didn't fully conceive comes out of it,
and I think that's the best.
And that did happen.
When I came into the project,
I think that Joel and Fran and Bruno had kind of
been working together, I want to say close to a year,
maybe nine months to a year.
Joel and Bruno had already been going in
and laying out photographs, architectural photographs,
clips from other movies, some of Bruno's photography,
and kind of breaking down a kind of film scape
of what different environments would look like,
and they had kind of laid that in,
so I was coming into that mix.
So the foundation of what Joel gave me
allowed us to just get it and be creative right away
and get into it and get in that place where you want to be,
where you want to start creating imagery
where you're reflecting the director's movie back at them
and they can tell you if you're right or not,
or how they feel about those ideas.
But it's a great spot to be in,
and Joel just gave me an incredible foundation to do that.
It was always part of the conversation
to have the hand of the artist in there.
You're kind of creating sets and environments
that hold the performances
that are being captured on film.
When I talk about the sets getting carved
out of light and shadow,
really that's what they are.
They're not designed as sets to be kind of lit
in the naturalistic way.
They're lit in a stylistic way,
and that they create their own architecture
in terms of how that shadow is placed.
With that carving light and shadow is so integral
because the sets are designed as a cinema construct,
more so than just creating a naturalistic environment.
I mean, everything's designed to be shot.
If you can't shoot the set, it's just an art project,
but this was very specific to embrace
the cinema of the movie.
We wanted to embrace artifice,
we wanted to embrace abstraction,
and let that speak to what was going on
in the moments of the play.
The crossroads, especially when you're back with Fleance,
and it's just this (blows a puff of air)
of grasses and Bruno had done a test light of these grasses
and they looked great because these little tufts on,
and it was not something I even thought was going to work,
but just the way he lit them looked great,
so we had to cut them all so that they're all
at the right height and then
we had those all in buckets that we could move around
and whatnot and that looks pretty god damn awesome.
I mean, you could look at Macbeth
and because it's got its pedigree in the director,
in the actors, it doesn't set it apart
for me as a project in terms of where it becomes work,
because I think if it became work for me,
I might think about retirement.
I just had wonderful experiences
working with other creative people, and
I think that's the joy that I take out of it,
and it's either about a 130 foot tall gorilla,
or it's about the Thane of Cawdor.
You just have to put your head in
that zone
and embrace it.