Ms. Crombie, as a film production designer, is it hard for you to say goodbye to the sets you’ve created at the end of a project?
I remember very distinctly walking out of my office at Shepperton Studios and seeing one of my sets for Cruella getting crushed into a skip, and I thought, “Oh, that’s a bit much!” (Laughs) But at the same time we do just kind of continue on because we have to. A lot of the times, I never see the sets come down anyway, because I’ve moved on to a different part of the film, so it’s very much a sort of a normal part of the process that you say goodbye. The nice thing is that they’re on film, and they live on in that way.
You mentioned moving on quite quickly… Does that mean most of your work is complete before the rest of the cast and crew come in to work on a film?
That’s right, yes. I mean, I do try and come in to visit and start my day with the shoot crew, with the art director, but you’re right that sometimes people don’t even know who built what because they have to step away and move on to the next set. We’re sort of a funny department in that we have so much run up, we do so much pre-production, and then we leave it and it’s almost like you’re handing over the keys. It’s part of our process. We’re always 20 steps ahead of the crew, otherwise the whole thing falls apart.
“Putting all that together creates atmosphere, and if you do that the right way, when an actor walks in, they’re informed by that.”
It’s almost an invisible sort of job, and I think often an underappreciated one, even though so much of a film’s world relies on set and location.
It’s so interesting, somebody said to me recently, “Oh, I guess there wasn’t any production design in that, because it was a naturalistic film.” But the thing with production design is that it’s all a decision! It’s a decision to have an empty room, that is production design too. It’s a decision to have no color, or one particular color. Sometimes this job is also about extraction; it’s not necessarily what you’re bringing in, it’s also what you’re taking out. At the end of the day, production design is about: what are the choices that you’re making to inform a story? Every choice has meaning.
One description of production design that I read about is the creation of a film’s atmosphere.
Absolutely. What does it feel like to be in a room? What is that room doing? I’m hyper sensitive to space, personally, so I’m always thinking about: what is the impact of a space, what is color doing? What is texture doing? Putting all that together creates atmosphere, and if you do that the right way, when an actor walks in, they’re informed by that. They’ll receive the space and understand more about themselves, their character, because of what we’ve provided, if we’ve done our job well.
Is that the magic moment for you? When the set is complete and the actors arrive and it all comes together?
To be honest, no, because often what happens is we will set up a beautiful set, and then somebody will come in with the monitors and gears, and then they’ll take out the table or things get moved around and the magic disappears a bit. Of course it’s a beautiful thing to see it start to take on that life, but the best moment for me is in the dreaming phase, when you’ve read the script, you’re just starting to gather inspiration, there’s no limitation… It could be anything. That’s my favorite part.
Where do you go from there to start building your vision for a set?
You start looking at space and thinking about budget… So the whole thing becomes clearer and clearer. I usually speak with my historical researcher, Phil Clark, and we’ll go back and forth, back and forth, just looking at loads of things depending on the project: contemporary photography, period paintings… And the whole thing just crystallizes.
You tend to have fun with historical accuracy, though. In your work for The Favourite, which earned you your first Oscar nomination, there were plenty of elements which didn’t exist in the time of Queen Anne. How do you decide when to pinpoint reality, and when to experiment and play?
I’m always trying to think: does it take you out of the film? It’s a really fine line, and it’s not necessarily something that you can even define, it’s something you can just tell. A good example is my recent project Hamnet, and our use of glass, which existed in this time period but was considered more of a luxury item. So with this film, should we use glass? Should we not use glass? What it became was: What does glass offer us? That feels more important than like, “Oh, actually, they wouldn’t have had glass.” It’s an interesting dynamic, because there are things in my movies that are completely historically inaccurate, but also a lot of things that are accurate. For example, we spent a lot of time really investigating what plants would have been there. There are certain rosemaries that would not have been around, so we made sure we had the right rosemary. But then the theater backdrops at the Globe in the final scenes of the film, those wouldn’t have existed, and we used them because we needed them. Interpretation is a fine line.
Without the theater backdrops, we wouldn’t have had that beautiful callback to the hollow tree from the scene when Agnes gives birth in the forest.
Exactly, and that also depended, funnily enough, on the fact that we found this specific tree with the hollow in it, and it became a theme of the film. The film sort of came into greater focus when we found that location. That tree did not exist in the script, we just went looking in the forest and found it… We were wandering around thinking about where she would feel safest to give birth, and we found this hollow that gave some semblance of an embrace. I worked with a greens team in the UK to create the nest shape, we sculpted the roots and the forest floor so that all the ferns were running through…
How was it to work with sets like the forest and gardens that were so alive, both in a technical and an emotional sense?
I actually really became attached to the gardens. You asked if it’s hard to say goodbye to my sets, and this time it really was, I mean, it’s unbearable to think that they don’t exist anymore. I remember on my last walk out of there, knowing that it was the last time I was going to be there, I really wanted to soak it in.
The sets and locations for Hamnet are so intimate compared to something like The Favourite, where we get this real sense of opulence. How is it for you to jump between these worlds?
Yeah, with The Favourite, I loved creating the royal court, something that was designed to be admired. And it’s true that that does really contrast with Hamnet where I wanted to show the ordinary, every day sort of stuff, I wanted to show how these characters were alive in these spaces. But I’m really trying to find challenges and contrasts in my projects. It’s deliberate because after I made Cruella, people were saying to me, “You only do beautiful, luscious sort of movies.” And I remember thinking, “Ah, well, I’d better upset that!” And that’s when I made Beau is Afraid, which was quite a deliberate sort of antidote to that.
Have you always been the type of person who loves creating worlds in this way?
Yeah, I’ve always been creative, I love books and I love reading, I love plays. And so I think the the transfer of word to image has always been really natural for me, even as a kid, I would tell myself stories and draw pictures at the same time. And then I guess going to my dad’s sets and seeing them, that was a thread for me. My dad was a filmmaker and I just remember the kind of wonder of seeing this perfectly realized house in the middle of the Australian Outback… Then you walk inside and it’s completely empty and it’s just made of plywood! Seeing the craft behind the whole thing really struck me as being something kind of fantastical, and I was fascinated.