Shona Heath and James Price
Eventually Zsuzsi [Zsuzsa Mihalek, set decorator] was mad enough to say, Yeah I think I can do this. But she’s very experienced and has a team around her that’s very established. In terms of set dec, you hired Zsuzsi and then everything else fell into place for set dec.
AS: Was timing ever an issue there?
JP: Yeah, I mean it was always down to the wire. Like for the bedroom in Lisbon, set dec would get in seven o’clock the night before and we were supposed to shoot the next morning. That’s not a lot of time to dress. But it was the nature of the beast that it was always going to go down to the wire. When we knew things were going bandy in terms of timing that’s where my own skill set is very good. I will just make big decisions to get it back on track. It’s like this big monster that you’re trying to wrestle, isn’t it? Like on the back of a crocodile just trying to get it over the line.
Adam and Géza and Zsuzsi would flag things early enough that we were able to react and get it over the line when needed, on budget as well as time. We were fortunate that we had experienced people around us. We didn’t have the resources to just go to the production and say, Can you give us another five hundred grand? There wasn’t that money. People realized that we weren’t just going to throw money at it to sort the situation out.
AS: Did you mostly work with set designers or did you ever do your own sketches?
SH: Well, James and I both draw and collage. Quite often we work on one, then swap it over. But some sketches went from literally horrible, ugly, thumbnails straight into the concept artist’s hands because we didn’t have time. There was so much to do. Our concept artists, including Plum [Woods] and Salwa [McGill] and Jonas and Antonio, they’re all capable of building those sets up from very little.
JP: Yeah, we had a team, the first stage after the initial week. There was seven of us all together holed up in an office in Central London. Plum and Salwa, part of Shona’s team, Jonas and Antonio who work predominantly in Blender, and we had Perry who was researching. Everybody has got different skills but all very capable designers in their own right. We blended a design family together very quickly and it was so much to do at such a quick pace. There’s no not achieving a day. It was just a race.
AS: Once you got to the building stage, were those organic, Gaudi-like set pieces built with plaster or just carved out of foam?
JP: They don’t tend to use much plaster in Hungary actually. We would use everything out of plaster in the U.K., we’d make molds, but in Hungary they do a lot of carving straight from foam and then coat it with plaster on the foam. But you might be referring to Baxter’s living room which ended up being raw plaster finish. In the U.K., the plaster which we put on the wall is flesh-color, it’s very horrible. But the Hungarian stuff has this nice, stone, almost chalky feel to it. It was such a lovely finish that we used that in quite a few places.
SH: We didn’t have to paint it in the end because the color was so beautiful, it was slightly soapy, pearly. So that was left raw in the end.