Shona Heath and James Price
AS: Did Yorgos request a lot of texture in the architecture?
SH: Yorgos was very specific. He said, Don’t be shy with texture. Make really extreme texture. We realize now that he was planning on shooting quite a lot in black and white, which we didn’t know. So really, the textures on the walls became much deeper than anything I would ever normally have done and I think James as well. They were really chunky, like two inches of texture in the moldings. In the office part of the Baxters’ living room there was this sort of muscle-shell texture, like a zoomed-in muscle shell with big striations that were three inches deep–you could lose your fingers in them! They were really chunky. Everything in that house was really chunky which actually was why it worked so well when the lines warped and the shapes warped with the fish-eye lens. It was just so rich, it wasn’t just flat color or pattern or graphic. There was all this crazy texture that went distorted. It was the best advice Yorgos ever gave us, I think.
AS: Did you use 3D printing for any of it?
JP: Set dec did a lot of 3D printing. So in the brothel there’s lots of busts and you didn’t realize they’re scans of their faces and they’ve made themselves up to be 19th century aristocrats. There was a room near the art department where there were three or four 3D printers working twenty-four hours a day, manufacturing a lot of the set dec details. They were turning out light switches, all sorts of stuff. There were also a lot of components 3D-printed for the miniatures, like the boat.
AS: And you used both painted backdrops and LED backdrops?
SH: We didn’t really have a system, did we? Sometimes it was painted and we moved it afterwards. Sometimes it was LED and the movement was onscreen. Sometimes the water was on the LED screen. Sometimes it wasn’t, sometimes it was real. All the scales were off and sometimes it looked better that they were very off rather than nearly right. That was actually quite liberating. We never tried to get perfect. We just didn’t have time to be perfect. So things stayed as they were and it just kind of worked itself out. Consistently odd, you know?
AS: Did you both go to art school? What was your background?
SH: I always wanted to be involved in fashion. That was the thing that I looked at, fashion magazines and fashion illustration and drawings of fairies. It was always the people with crazy clothing on that got my imagination going. I studied fashion and worked in costume design for a couple of years and then I realized if you sort of infiltrated the set you could say a lot more. The two became one in my mind and I moved into set design. Windows and photography and film.
AS: And James?
JP: I was going to be a stone mason’s apprentice after school and that fell through at the last minute. I went to art college literally two weeks before I was supposed to start my apprenticeship. Growing up I’d always loved film but it just seemed completely inaccessible, especially back in the 90’s. There were no films being made here in the UK back then. It wasn’t until Four Weddings and a Funeral and Trainspotting that really kickstarted it.