Eve Stewart

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.