Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/834282
80 P E R S P E C T I V E | J U LY / AU G U S T 2 0 1 7 For another example, I always use real vintage wallpaper for a period piece. The colors, texture and patterns are so unique and, although it's hard to apply, it never needs aging. I found fantastic vintage wallpaper for Bette's house, a small colonial pattern, but there wasn't nearly enough of it, so Astek printed the remainder—something I'd never done before. The great thing about working in Los Angeles is the whole history of Hollywood is here. Nevertheless, I was still surprised to discover that some of the original furnishings from Baby Jane were still in storage in the Warner Bros. property department, more than fifty years after the film was made. Very little gets thrown away. Florencia found the original sofa, and the birdcage, and the piano. The piano was a really unusual-looking instrument, more like a harpsichord. I wouldn't have believed they would use that, but of course, the original movie proved it was correct. There were a lot of surprises like that. When I designed Hitchcock, I was never able to find any color stills of Psycho. Some of the sets from the film had to be reproduced and I made educated guesses what colors they would have used, how they would have appeared in black-and-white film. But for Baby Jane, we actually did find color stills at the USC Library. This was a marvellous resource. I could see that the sets had been done in a really interesting way. They were very monochromatic. There was a lot of beige and white and a kind of very light pink, then super-saturated bright accent colors. So I did that, too. When you see the sets in color, you can see that everything's very faded and monochromatic-looking, and then there are these intensely blue curtains, a bright blue pillow on Joan's bed, and Joan is wearing this vibrant red dressing gown. That is all based on what was found in the color stills of the sets. There is something special about this moment in Hollywood history for me. I find myself creatively stimulated by that play between reality and artificiality, by the challenges of how to express that and how to execute it. Back then, interior design was often minimal and simple, even in a very fancy interior. These kinds of people had good interior designers, who did things with great taste and sophistication. People didn't have as much stuff as they do these days. It's actually harder to create these kinds of sets than latter-day interiors where you can layer mess on top of mess and keep adding objects in a room, or just really clutter things up. But when you're doing sets that are as stylized, clean and simple as Joan's house, it demands greater attention to each element.