Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/619377
"I spent October reading as much about Dennis Stock, James Dean and his girlfriend Pier Angeli as I could get my hands on. I watched every documentary, movie and press clip I could find. But, there was so much information missing." famous jacket and striped sweater, a locket he kept that Pier Angeli had given to him, some books and toys that he made home movies with. At the start of production, Anton had briefly mentioned possibly shooting the movie in black-and-white. Costume designer Gersha Phillips and I were worried. We'd have to do many tests transferring various set and costume colors into black-and-white to be able to pull off what we felt would be a convincing re-creation. We just didn't have that time. Luckily, that idea didn't last long, but the road trip did yield a big haul of treasure: color photographs of Dean's personal possessions, historical photos of the town and Dennis Stock's contact sheets. These latter bits meant that we could see more of the rooms and not just the small pieces that existed in the media and online. Set decorators, props people and the Art Department all pulled out magnifying glasses in search of details we hadn't seen in any previous James Dean film. didn't want to talk about other period movies. We weren't making a documentary. So, how to give the picture a true, 1950s feel, a story about a world- famous cultural icon, without giving it a dated or constrained feel? I started out by setting color palettes for New York (muddier colors), Los Angeles (brighter colors pulled from '50s paint palettes) and Fairmount (a mixture of the two). Gersha and I worked together to make sure all tones and colors worked well in their respective settings. We didn't want too much brown and ageing— we wanted to capture the 1950s as a vibrant present, not as an aged past. The Winslow farm was proving difficult. Anton wanted the house and barn to be in the frame in a specific way and I was having a hard time finding anything that could work near the Toronto studio zone. Either the barns were nice and the house completely wrong, or Below: An elevation of the barbershop cabinetry wall hand-drawn by Mr. Deros. Bottom, left to right: A detail of the barbershop floor created by Ms. Lott in Adobe Photoshop ® . A production photograph of the barbershop scene, built with a mattress store in Toronto. Patricia and I returned to Ontario to start building Fairmount. Now that I'd been there, it was easier to scout for the look of the real street. We spent two weeks scouting locations close to Toronto and eventually fanned out to small towns. When Anton finally landed at the beginning of December, I was armed with a hard drive of research and the bulk of locations to show him so we could discuss how he wanted to approach the film. We had been told that it was going to be a biopic about James Dean but learned that Anton wanted to take a more personal approach and tell a story about the photographer's relationship with his subject. He