Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1010570
existing angled walls, a space was created that was a blend of old theme park Tiki and retro bar. For this set, I relied on a lot of photos from my childhood, taken by a camera-happy father who took us on vacation every summer to theme parks like Epcot, Busch Gardens and Tiki Gardens. Between dressing locations, building in studio, weighting down set dressing for our water tank sequence and shipping in seventy-five hundred pounds of aquarium gravel, the Art Department was also scouting and planning a car crash into a river in Vancouver and figuring out sets and locations in New York. Once Marlo headed into Brooklyn, the production followed, leaving Art Director Craig Humphries behind to oversee the car and river stunt work. NY locations were scouted during preproduction, and I traveled to NY just before finishing the shoot on the West Coast. The design of this second part of the shoot was much more organic—set decorator Karen Wiesel Holmes and I visited various rental houses, picking dressing from conversations we were having on the road. I was lucky that we connected artistically right from the start. The general feeling of this portion of the film was that Marlo and Tully are shipwrecked in Bushwick, so we gravitated to some themed pieces. To add to the dream feeling, we re-used pieces of set dressing from Marlo's real life and sprinkled them throughout the various bars, most notably in the beach-themed bar. I've been asked by a number of people if this movie was easier than my previous movies, because it's not as obvious in its design details. I approached this movie with the same level of care and commitment to character as any other movie. I wanted to bring this same level of detail and storytelling to all the sets, including the elementary school, which was filmed at a high school in Vancouver. A sparse math classroom was emptied and turned into a learning environment for young children…lunch bags and umbrellas in cubby shelves, puzzles and crafts frozen mid- play, old vinyl polka dots dried from years of sun peeling off the blinds. For the principal's office, a lunch and an afternoon snack were packed, she had D E F