Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/619377
P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N UA RY / F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 6 101 Above, clockwise from top left: Oheka Castle's elegant library was dressed as the office of Access International Advisors' co-founder Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, who committed suicide after learning he had lost $1.4 billion of his investor's money. The manicured formal gardens with the French chateau in the background became the setting for a walk and talk between Bernie and a European hedge fund investor. A Palm Beach restaurant set was also filmed on location at Oheka Castle. half of what was needed and the conference room and Bernie's office both required stunning views of Manhattan. Ruling out a six-foot deck to elevate the set for a photo backing (too expensive) and surrounding the set entirely with green screen (cinematographer Frank DeMarco had his fill of green screen on All Is Lost), I shifted my focus to designing a set with as much depth as possible in the limited room I had. The Madoff offices on the nineteeth floor of the Lipstick Building by architect Philip Johnson were transparent, floor-to-ceiling plate glass, designed so that Bernie Madoff could see the entirety of his operation from his desk. He wanted to be able to see his secretary, his sons, his brother and the conference room. It was an important part of his psychology of intimidation. I started the plan with a bubble diagram of all these sightlines and adjacencies and made sure that from any position the film camera would be able to see what Bernie saw. My job as the Production Designer was to make these visual connections convey to an audience how the physical geography of the Madoff offices was key to the success of the ruse he maintained for so many years. The nineteeth floor was transparent in two ways: metaphorically speaking, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities was a legitimate trading operation run by his sons and daughter; and from a physical standpoint, large pieces of plate glass separating the offices created a transparency so that Bernie could see everything and be seen in return. The nineteeth floor was the showcase floor for all the clients that came in. The seventeeth floor, on the other hand, was absolutely opaque—so off limits that Bernie would not allow even his own sons go down there. It was the smoky lair of the architects of the Ponzi scheme, Frank DiPascali and Annette Bongiorno. The plain vanilla office suite doors at the seventeenth floor elevator lobby read "Madoff Deliveries" and Frank DiPascali's office door had a sign that read "Do Not Open, Do Not Clean." In addition to computer programmers and envelope stuffers, this floor was also the home of the now-famous IBM AS/400, the antiquated machine that produced perforated fake financial statements showing steady returns that were then mailed all over the world. Staying loyal to Madoff 's actual office layout was important to me. So too was conveying the gentle curve of the Lipstick Building's exterior window-wall. I felt that bringing the structure's pink granite into the elevator lobby and expressing the soft curve in the offices would