- My names Marcus Rowland.
I had to turn London in 1970s L.A.
And this is my design.
I was a production designer on Rocketman.
Most important collaboration, after the director,
is the director of photography.
You can build a great set but if it's not lit well,
it's not gonna ever stand out and have presence.
Wardrobe is incredibly important, it sets the period.
And then obviously hair and makeup.
It's a combination of different skills really
in all departments coming together.
[upbeat rock music]
I think the hardest thing we found was trying
to make sure we were sort of capturing the flavor
and the style of the place.
I mean it's got a great typeface that we emulated.
And some of the details, which are very what I'd consider
to be American in terms of L.A., is all this stone work,
that's so not available in the U.K.
It's a very American thing.
So it's trying to capture the flavor of that really
within our set, which we built in the U.K.
on a mundane looking car park.
So it was quite a strange thing to see this
sort of warm facade appear in a car park outside London.
Using cars, they're a great thing in terms
of period dressing.
Certainly when you're on the street or doing locations
that you don't have as much time as you would like
in terms of dressing them
because if they're a fully functioning street,
you're gonna be cut down to a limited amount of time
to be able to turn that into a period dressing.
Cars say a lot, especially in that period.
It's a lot harder to get those cars in the U.K. [laughs]
We didn't have any of these cars so instantly
they all helped by establishing that as American.
- [Broadcaster] The Troubadour is an a vanguard cafe.
It's the favorite of Hollywood's young and young in heart.
- Through periods of time it sort of changed in the way
it looked as well, the exterior varied
and the color of the exterior varied.
We tried to workout the size of the frame
so we built the smallest amount we needed to believe.
The thing that we did fundamentally change is the
the main entrance in the real place is just here
on the right hand side.
Whereas we decided to focus our attention
into the middle door really.
So that's how they enter within our world.
In the real place, they enter and they walk to a bar area
and then you're into the venue.
We wanted to sort of condense that journey really.
So then they walk in off the street,
straight into the venue.
- [Man] What the hell are you wearing?
- [Marcus] This is the dressing room area,
which is actually off the back of the stage as well.
- My stage gear.
- [Marcus] I think you can see in this clip is
how much effort we go into trying to make
the set feel as real as possible.
We use a lot of plaster and this brick work and molding
is plaster brick, it's what hopefully makes it feel real.
- I think you're over reacting.
- No, Bernie.
You are under reacting.
- Filming in a small toilet's a fairly tricky thing.
So this is a blueprint of the interior of the Troubadour.
Ideally, it's all pre-prepared, it's planned exactly where
the camera would need to be, and we've accommodated
that by a design that allows the wall
to pull out very easily.
The last thing anybody wants to do, stand around waiting
for somebody to spend 13 minutes pulling out a wall.
I mean it really does have to happen fast.
- [Man] Now get out there and play you little twat!
- Well come on then.
- [Marcus] Club scenes tend to be,
when the performance is on,
feel like very dark spaces really.
So behind Elton when he's on stage, it's still fairly dark.
But we put a bit of texture in there
and we've got this neon blue Troubadour sign
which becomes quite a crucial bit of the design.
It tells a big story straight away.
And it's quite interesting seeing these photographs,
it's probably, I thought ours was much bigger,
but in fact, it looks like it was exactly the same size.
[vocalizing]
♪ I remember ♪
- [Marcus] Fairly technically difficult thing to do,
when the whole crowd is elevated.
♪ La la la la la ♪
- [Marcus] It's sort of quite a simple idea,
but we ended up with quite a complicated rig, we built two
rows of what looked like sort of bicycle seats
on a big pole.
We layered up the two, one behind the other,
so we'd get as much depth as we want.
And the reason we cut down on the amount of raised
platform is obviously that becomes a lot more expensive.
You never have enough money,
so part of the process is sort of analyzing where
to spend it.
Put the emphasis on spending the money where you feel
that it's gonna be on screen.
I think we probably had
at least 30 people or 40 people lifted on these devices.
So that gives you the basic motion of them traveling up.
- All right, enough of this bullshit.
Who wants to go to a party at Mama Cass's?
- [Marcus] After the Troubadour, they had off to
a party at Mama Cass's which is Laurel Canyon.
Which is of a very distinctive look.
So we were challenged with trying to recreate
that in the U.K.
We tried, initially, to try and see if we could find
a location that would work.
It soon became apparent that that was gonna be tricky.
The second phase was okay, we'll find somewhere a landscape
that we can control.
The location manager forged me a shot
of this particular place, it's a big ol' farm.
So I went around with him and we worked out a space
that we would be able to construct a particular building.
From that point, I start thinking about what we have
to design and what's required.
So these I just drew on the iPad really quickly.
They laid the basic idea for the space
based around reference that we'd acquired.
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There are some pictures out there, there's not tons,
but you got a sense of the flavor of the place.
There was a sort of ethereal quality about
that particular place anyway, and there's some good photos
of various famous bands.
We did use that as our source material.
So once we sort of enlightened on a plan
or the scale of the set that we wanted to build on
on location, we obviously drew up some blueprints
which I've got over here.
This is a basic layout.
And from this we also can talk to construction about
the methodology and the materials.
It was quite a lot of discussions
in this particular build really about what we could
get away with in terms of structurally.
How much load bearing it needed to accommodate.
There are fairly stringent planning limitations in the U.K.
We have a structural engineer who comes along.
We make a good guess of what we think is the most
sensible way of building it.
We design the sets.
Then the set decorator on this,
she's doing her own research.
She will go off and come up with her ideas
of how that looks inside, show me photographs,
we'll discuss it.
So it's a real collaboration of ideas.
When they approach the party,
we found a space that we could digitally put in L.A.
in the distance.
That obviously helped sell it.
At night, it's very much more atmospheric.
In reality, it's a fairly big open space.
But I think because we chose to break it up
with different bits of dressing,
it's trying to give it as much depth as possible, so,
you're not in a contained space
where you don't need sort of steady cam shots.
You get a great sense of the space.
It's nice to have built something knowing
that you get the money's worth out of this,
we're wandering in and out.
I like this bit where you see down the side,
I think this was particularly successful.
Even though the weather wasn't particularly brilliant
those evenings, everybody sort of had a fun time.
I think it sort of comes across in the filming.
The extras were enjoying themselves,
everybody, it had a really good atmosphere.
The good thing about Rocketman,
we could expand on the world so it was more obvious
that we'd actually constructed or we'd created this world.
And ideally you're doing it
in a way that is advancing the story,
not pulling you out of it.
The harmless bit is making sure it sort of,
it fits with the script, really.
So that's how we brought L.A. to London.
It was great fun.
Rocketman was a really great script to work on
and as you can imagine, the source material is fantastic.
In the end, it was a very great project
and we had some great crew to work with.
I sort of enjoyed every minute of it.