ADG Perspective

January-February 2020

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At my fi rst meeting with Martin Scorsese to discuss the design of The Irishman, he stated that the movie should look "more or less like nothing." There was, he acknowledged, the element of diff erent time periods to depict, but nothing else out of the ordinary. By downplaying his description of the look of the fi lm, Marty was letting me know that he wanted a very realistic slice of everyday life. Actually, he was asking for 295 slices. That was the staggering number of stage sets and locations to be designed. It's a very big story (It spans six decades and is told through fl ashbacks within fl ashbacks) set in multiple locations across Pennsylvania, New York, Miami, Michigan and Ohio. The Art Department motto became "We go to extraordinary lengths to bring you the ordinary." It is still a little diffi cult for me to accept that the decades of the '50s, '60s and '70s qualify as period given that I was alive during all of them. In reality, locations from that era become harder to fi nd with each passing year. I found that there was nearly as much research to be done as there would have been for a fi lm set in the 1920s or earlier. Scorsese was the same stickler for accuracy that he is on any project. "Nothing" often proved to be extremely specifi c. "May I see some reference please?" was asked on almost a daily basis. The style emerged as "very carefully observed ordinariness." Kip Myers, the location manager, and I put fi ve thousand miles on his car and spent fi ve months scouting before the Art Department opened, looking for the garages, bowling alleys, auto shops and motels that would be needed. The producers were very generous with our preproduction time. A large part of the script is a road trip, so we were tasked with fi nding fi ve diff erent period gas stations. Everything found required major transformations. Most were not actually gas stations. Almost all of the locations required a similar approach. I confess that the Art Department took a certain pleasure in surprising the crew with the daily makeovers. I remember many confused looks on the technical scout as I described the scene that took place next to a Howard Johnson's swimming pool. We were standing in an area surrounded by a chain link fence that was piled high with cast-off motel furniture and other debris. In the middle was a crumbling and D A B C A. VILLA DI ROMA, GRAPHIC LAYOUT. CREATED IN ILLUSTRATOR BY HOLLY WATSON. B. VILLA DI ROMA. CONCEPT SKETCH CREATED IN PHOTOSHOP BY ERIC FEHLBERG. C. VILLA DI ROMA. EXTERIOR. PRODUCTION STILL. D. VILLA DI ROMA. EXTERIOR. CONCEPT SKETCH. E. & F. VILLA DI ROMA. INTERIOR. PRODUCTION STILL. G. & H. HOWARD JOHNSON'S EXTERIOR AND POOL. CONCEPT SKETCHES. CREATED IN PHOTOSHOP BY ERIC FEHLBERG.

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