Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/891583
writes down the story that is her life before Ben, Ben reads those words to us as he experiences it, and we should experience that the same way we have experienced the whole movie—through Ben's point of view. Much of what the movie is about, the Cabinets of Wonder, is the emotional power of tactile objects, that is what museums are, that's what art can be. In fact, Ben, who realizes that he has ended up in the Cabinets of Wonder, also realizes that he is a curator himself. My suggestion was that we do it ourselves, and Todd and I somehow arrived at the idea of dioramas. He said, "The characters won't move. Let's keep them all still and let the camera be what is animated. Let's not do stop motion, just move the camera through still images and places and let that be what is kinetic." Handmade dioramas were created to depict the nineteen or twenty settings. I used all of prep and production to prepare them, and Todd came in at the end to film. Part of the goal was not to make them in the museum style. I wanted them to be messy—in a good way—and I wanted to connect them stylistically. If they are coming out of Ben's mind when he's reading Rose's text, they are on some level a dream, and dreams are on some level surreal. I wanted to marry those elements. When Ben is seeing Rose's story, he is doing so with what's available to him, with what he has seen and experienced. The miniature of the whale is a good example. That whale was a toy from his room. When the pickup truck with Danny pulls up and first meets Ben's mother, that toy pickup truck (which was my toy pickup truck from my childhood) was by his bedside table. There were a lot of those cross-pollinations, not as Easter eggs but as part of the way I think of dream language. You reconnect or reuse the palette of information you've had during your waking time, and you reorganize it into a different kind of collage that helps you understand things, similar to the way that Ben understands the world that he is in. Todd and I took a big chance. If it were anyone else, I might not have been so brave. But it was Todd, whom I trust and who trusts me. We had established a great working relationship on Far from Heaven, and we have this "two artists messing around in the basement" mentality when we work. It was a huge undertaking to build all those dioramas, but here's the thing: I cry through the miniatures sequence every time I see it because it is so moving. (Not because I made them have sad faces.) It connects to what Ben is dealing with. They work as an emotional moment. It was exciting and unusual, and who gets to do that? We joked that this was Todd getting back to his roots. This was how he started. The miniatures were made with honesty, with a belief in art and craft, and a belief in the power of cinema. I wanted these dioramas to do their job in the movie, but also to be inspired. I even wanted them to be a little bit childlike, which wasn't hard for me—it's hard for me to be a grown-up! Todd was cool about it; I showed him pictures all the time, before anything was built. He worked out storyboards with Art Director Kim Jennings for the angles he was Mark Friedberg, Production Designer Ryan Heck, Kim Jennings, Art Directors Michael Auszura, Eric Lewis Beauzay, Katya Blumenberg, Erica Hohf, Rumiko Ishii, Jeffrey D. McDonald, Robert Pyzocha, Assistant Art Directors Sam Bader, Art Researcher Edward A. Ioffreda, William J. Hopper, Graphic Designers Hugh Sicotte, David Swayze, Concept Artists Debra Schutt, Set Decorator A B