Oscar nominated Archives

Ruth De Jong

January 13, 2024 Tom Lisowski Leave a comment

After art directing films such as There Will Be Blood with production designer extraordinaire Jack Fisk, Ruth De Jong blazed her own path, going on to design hugely successful projects for writer/director auteurs Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone), David Lynch (Twin Peaks), Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester By The Sea), and Jordan Peele (Us and Nope). Most recently she brought her force of optimism and unique vision to a collaboration with Christopher Nolan on his historic epic Oppenheimer.

AS: How involved was Christopher Nolan with the visual design of Oppenheimer?
RDJ: Chris was incredibly involved. In fact, we spent seven to eight weeks together prepping, just the two of us. As soon as I started, we spent every single day together in a close collaboration, figuring out the direction of the design. At this point the script was written and he was very happy with it. So it was all about exploring the design and look of this film. I brought on a researcher the very first thing, Lauren Sandoval, who was incredible. She and I covered our offices floor to ceiling with archival photographs on every single topic, for every single scene, through all the periods. The Truman office, the Trinity site, the actual Los Alamos location and on and on and on. All the real characters, their faces, as much imagery as we could find, some never before seen. We studied these and almost by osmosis soaked it all in over the weeks. It was also great because those coming through to read the script could walk the halls and take it all in, it was immersive.

Ralph Eggleston

July 10, 2022 Tom Lisowski Leave a comment

Pixar production designer Ralph Eggleston explains that while the production process is different with animated films, the design thinking is the same. An Academy Award winner, Eggleston has contributed his artistic vision to features at Pixar since Toy Story. Over the years he’s production designed a series of beloved, animated blockbusters including Incredibles 2, Inside Out, Finding Nemo, and more, all adding up to a worldwide gross close to 4 billion.

Very sorry to learn that Ralph Eggleston passed away of pancreatic cancer last Sunday. He was one of the nicest guys in the world and a truly inspired genius, as you’ll read below…

AS: Normally live action production designers go from one project to the next, not knowing what, when, or where the next one will be. What is it like being a production designer with the security of going into an office every day?
RE: It’s akin to to the old studio system in a way. I start before we have much of a script at all, and I’m there all the way through helping out with marketing and merchandise. The longest show I’ve ever worked on was five and a half years and that was Inside Out, the shortest was Incredibles 2, which was two and a half years.

Lee Ha Jun

March 3, 2020 Tom Lisowski Leave a comment

Lee Ha Jun designed arguably the greatest film of the 2020 Oscar season, the Korean movie Parasite. He was nominated for the best Art Direction Oscar and won the Art Director’s Guild award for Best Contemporary Production Design. The film itself won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. His team built and dressed almost every set in the movie from scratch, including an entire city street that was flooded. I was elated to discuss production design with the artistic visionary behind this masterpiece.

A huge thank you to Juhee Yi of Neon for translating!

AS: Director Bong Joon Ho told me that you built a section of the city for the amazing flood scene in Parasite. Can you tell me a little about designing that exterior set?
LHJ: There is an actual location in Seoul that has a similar look but since we had to flood the street in the scene we built the whole neighborhood in a water tank. We went location scouting where there are still apartments that have history. I designed the set by looking at the photos from the location scout and also referred back to the semi-basement where I used to live as a university student. When I was living in the semi-basement I hated having a toilet full or mold but later I realized I could draw from that experience!

Oscar nominated

Dennis Gassner

April 12, 2018 Tom Lisowski One comment

Dennis Gassner’s visionary work on Bladerunner 2049 earned him one of 7 Oscar nominations. Of those nominations, he took home an Oscar in ‘91 for his unique take on the 1940’s gangster film Bugsy. Before he designed Bladerunner 2049 or the innovative Sam Mendes war film 1917, he had been the exclusive James Bond production designer -he created the look for Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, and Spectre. These big budget extravaganzas are far removed from his early work on Coen brothers’ movies like Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing…

AS: What drew you to the field of production design?
DG: My journey began in Vancouver, British Columbia and took me to Portland Oregon, Eugene Oregon, then on to Berkeley and Los Angeles. I’ve pretty much covered the West Coast. I was studying architecture at The University of Oregon when I went to see this technicolor film by David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia. It was my first Cinemascope film. The scale of it was so enormous and the power of the film was so awe-inspiring I said, Who was the architect of that? I wanted to know more and investigate the field of production design so I took my van and my two-year-old daughter and my wife and we moved to LA. I went to the Art Center School of Design, the old school on Third and Highland, and I connected to that world of thinking. They’d just started the film program and I got to make short movies. There was also graphic design and fine arts, transportation design and advertising design. It was thinking beyond anything that I’d experienced before, in a multitude of facets.

Guy Hendrix Dyas 2

January 12, 2017 Tom Lisowski Leave a comment

When I saw photos of Guy Hendrix Dyas’ design work on Passengers my mind was blown. You may remember my interview with Guy back when he had his first Academy Award nomination for Inception but with Passengers he’d taken it to the next level. Here’s an update on his process…

AS: Is sketching as important to you now as it was the last time we spoke?
GHD: Sketching is all I do when I start a project. I’ve got this routine now where I’ll read a script and get an 8.5” x 11” sketchbook and basically sketch the entire film. This sketchbook becomes my bible. It becomes my go-to place when I’m thinking of handing out projects to my staff to develop.

AS: After your initial meeting with director Morton Tyldum did you then go off and create a lot of sketches to bring back to him?
GHD: I turned up to the initial interview with many of these sketches. I’d been given the script and was excited by it. This is a script that has no monsters, no guns, just raw science fiction in the greatest tradition of films like 2001 or even Silent Running. It’s a wonderful film because it makes you think about moral choices. It makes you think about love and life and your own existence. The script had been knocking around in Hollywood for many years and I never thought I’d get a chance at it. But when I was up for it I grabbed it, and ran with it.

Adam Stockhausen

February 12, 2015 Tom Lisowski One comment

Adam Stockhausen brought his artistic style to the Wes Anderson masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel and southern plantation realism to Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave. He was Oscar-nominated for both and won for The Grand Budapest Hotel. Since then he’s continued to design Wes Anderson movies and has also become Steven Spielberg’s production designer of choice. But before all this he was inventing ways to keep blood off hardwood floors for Wes Craven…

AS: I hear you just wrapped your job as production designer on Steven Spielberg’s St James Place…
AS: Yes, we just finished. It’s a true story. We shot half in New York City and half in Berlin with a brief side trip into Poland. It was a wonderful experience for me. I had a blast.

AS: How was Spielberg to work with?
AS: Fantastic! We did a lot of sketching. We’d work things up and then go to see him and show our materials and it was a wonderful collaboration.

Eve Stewart

February 6, 2014 Tom Lisowski One comment

Eve Stewart has been nominated for four Oscars to date including for the tremendous historic epic Les Misérables. She’s perfected a distinct British realism for Mike Leigh’s films and an enhanced historic realism of Tom Hooper’s. When I interviewed her she was extremely busy designing the worlds of the Muppets and Frankenstein’s monster.

AS: Your movie Muppets Most Wanted is about to be released. How was the transition from the more serious Les Misérables?
ES: After Les Mis I thought I would do the polar opposite and so I designed the Muppets Most Wanted film. A bit of light relief after the harrowing scenes of Fantine dying!

AS: Did you shoot that in America?
ES: The majority was in the UK but we shot a little bit in America.

AS: How was working with James Bobin on the Muppets different from the Tom Hooper and Mike Leigh films?
ES: Really interesting because I thought it would be very different but it was actually just as rigorous! James Bobin was really clever and really fast and really thorough. It was actually quite a similar experience!

AS: You’ve done many films with Tom Hooper -is he a really visual director?
ES: He is a visual director but more than that he’s a very good conductor of visuals. I’ll always overdo it and just get loads of stuff together because I’m really enthusiastic. He’s very good at filtering and kind of conducting it like a piece of music.

Nathan Crowley

December 16, 2012 Tom Lisowski One comment

Nathan Crowley brought Modernism and scale into Batman’s formerly Gothic world, creating masterpieces of cinema with his friend Christopher Nolan. While his fifth Academy Award nomination was for Damian Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, he’d already been Oscar-nominated for four films with Nolan, including for the historic war film Dunkirk…

AS: When you were in art school did you have any idea you’d be a production designer?
NC: Not at all. I was thinking about continuing on with the School of Art and Design at Brighton. But I ended up getting hired after I got my art degree by a bunch of architects to draft. I did that for two years and it made me realize I didn’t want to be an architect! No one was doing anything interesting. It was what I call business architecture and it was really uninspiring. I ended up thinking, Shit, I don’t want to do post-graduate architecture, even though I love architecture. That was in the late Eighties just as Thatcher destroyed England. It was time to leave.

I ended up coming to LA. I drove old sports cars across America for a while that were being shipped to Europe. I’d take the I-10 and drive them from LA to Jacksonville, Florida. My friend and I would buy old Porches and Spiders, I’d drive them across and ship them to him in England where he’d sell them. It was just enough money to live on in LA. And then that economic crash happened. We got left with a few sports cars and we couldn’t sell them. I realized I had to get a job in LA somewhere!

Laurence Bennett

January 18, 2012 Tom Lisowski Leave a comment

Laurence Bennett designed The Artist, a black and white, silent film that won five Oscars, including Best Picture. His beautiful, meticulous design transports the audience to an artful portrayal of 1920-30’s Hollywood. I spoke with Bennett after he returned from Canada where he had just designed his next film, The Company You Keep, directed by and starring Robert Redford.

AS: Some production designers try to avoid using other movies as reference when designing their films but it seems The Artist is full of homages to other movies. What did you look at for inspiration?
LB: We watched a ton of movies. Trying to pay tribute to, and build, this world of Hollywood of the late twenties and early thirties we really needed to look at how filmmakers then portrayed it. I’d long been a silent film fan but my exposure since I’d been a kid had mostly been Chaplin and Keaton. Michel Hazanavicius, our director, opened up the world of that era to me. Murnau was probably the biggest single influence in the design of the picture and the mood of the piece. His films Sunrise and City Girl in particular. But we watched Lang, Von Sternberg, King Vidor. Three pictures by King Vidor really impressed me- Show People, which is about the studios at the time, The Crowd, and The Big Parade, which is just devastatingly good. Research about the period in general was key in trying to get into the heads of these people. They were inventing the language and business of filmmaking.

Oscar nominated

Jack Fisk

November 18, 2011 Tom Lisowski 4 comments

Jack Fisk has an amazing career designing the films of auteurs including Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch. He designed every Terrence Malick film including The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven, The New World, Badlands and the more recent Tree of Life. He received an Oscar nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Alejandro Iñáritu’s The Revenant and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. For David Lynch he designed the dreamlike Mullhulland Dr.

AS: Did you go to art school?
JF: I went to Cooper Union here in New York for a year then I went to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1970 David Lynch and I went out to California to seek our fortunes – or at least find a job.

AS: Did you know David Lynch from before?
JF: David and I have been best friends since high school and we went to art school together. He’d been accepted into the American Film Institute and I decided to go to California too. After a few months I got my first job as an art director. I had only worked on a couple of films, but Jonathan Demme hired me to be art director on a Roger Corman film Angels Hard as They Come. Steven Katz, the cinematographer, was a friend, I called Steven and said, What does an art director do? and he says, I don’t know!

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