Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/891583
P E R S P E C T I V E | N OV E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 7 67 thinking of, so the miniatures could be tailored to the actual shots. The models are more abstract than you might think when you look at them. In the whale room, the fillers of the archways are made of cut-up fishing rods. We even cast the tiny characters that appear in the dioramas. The actor who played Rose's son Danny was flown in from California to have a still photo taken so I could print it out on color Xerox paper and stick it on the face of a two-inch doll. Young Rose had to be made older, and adult Rose had to appear younger, in order to show Rose growing up. Our Art Department PA, George DuPont, played Danny's father, a character that never physically appears in the movie. He found himself fictionally married to Julianne Moore, which he was pretty psyched about, but he had this great face, he was perfect. To me that was important: they were dioramas, they were handmade, they were childlike, but it was also about their faces. I didn't want to introduce another character to play those people, especially Rose and young Ben. There's one miniature where young Ben gives the wolf drawing to Rose that she ends up giving back to him in the bookstore. We used the actor's baby picture. Depending on the model, the figures were two to four inches tall. The whale room model was done in a different scale, and they were little teeny tiny figures. The ice skating scene was a little bigger. Designer Hayley Morris made the characters, mostly from sculpted paper. The panorama of New York, the set where Rose tells Ben his story, was commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 World's Fair as an attraction which was so overwhelmingly well received that it became the Queens Museum. It's still open, with a huge collection celebrating New York City. The model is unique and breathtaking; it has around 400,000 structures on it. It used to turn from day to night and had little planes landing at LaGuardia. I've worked there before, those guys know me, it's one of my New York treasures and I was not going to let anything bad happen to it. I think we left it in better shape than when we found it. Wonderstruck is a story about the power of museums. The people who run the Queens Museum, as well as some of the staff at the Museum of Natural History, became part of Brian's process writing the book. He involved them and they feel some ownership of the story, in a very positive way. Both museums gave the production an unusual level of cooperation. No one gets the kind of access we had to the Museum of Natural History—that place is like Fort Knox—but this was a story that needed to be told in the right way, and they were tremendously helpful. Now here's the real story. This movie is actually about me: a young boy who has an epiphany in the Museum of Natural History in 1977 and gets lost in the Upper West Side. I grew up seven blocks from that museum at the same time the movie is set. As a little kid, my parents took me there all the time, I was obsessed with it, and it probably has a lot to do with why I do what I do. Later, in my teenage years, living in the sort of the ne'er-do-well New York, I did ne'er-do-well things on the steps of that museum. Soon after that, as a young father, I brought my little kids there, and as an older father, I brought them back as they became interested in science. It's been with me my whole life. To design this movie has been especially emotional for me, to have the good fortune to do it with Todd has been exceptional. ADG Most of the museum dioramas were chosen because of the story or their appropriateness to the period. A. American Museum of Natural History records room. B. Museum of Natural History display under construction. C. 1927 Times Square, this was a huge miniature set with moving illuminated cars and lots of signs. It was made at the last minute and finished the morning it was shot. D. Minnesota cabin from Ben's story. E. Museum of Natural History collections area. C D E