ADG Perspective

6 4 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 2 1 Walking into a coffee shop a few years ago, I had no idea how it would affect the direction of my career. I'd arrived for an interview with writer director Julia Hart and writerproducer Jordan Horowitz for a million film called Fast Color. I loved their script and was happy to meet an emerging young female director. Little did I know that Julia and I would discover a mind meld that day as we went through my presentation and a discussion of their script. I've been lucky enough to enoy working with her ever since. She has a clear vision and happily we often share that vision. Ideally, that's how it should always be but sometimes it's more of a struggle to see into directors' minds and harder to get them to see into a designer's. Julia listens, hears and weighs options and will also relay her vision of what she sees in her mind's eye. For many designers that may not seem significant, but some female Production Designers might understand the rare oy of having one's voice listened to and heard. On the first two movies with Julia and Jordan, we were oined by set decorator Patrick Cassidy, on whose talents, friendship and good humor we all depend. The 10s crime drama I'm Your Woman was our third collaboration and a script close to Julia's heart. A year before we started preproduction, we were sharing images of inspiration back-and-forth ust for fun. Our connection to the material was different in that I had lived in the 10s, while she was writing from the viewpoint of research. Granted, mine were high school and college memories…but still. The inspiration for the script germinated from a line in Michael Mann's 180 film Thief. While watching the film Julia thought, I want to know what her story is, referring to Tuesday Weld's character as a new mother after she leaves the movie with a bag of money. What they wrote isn't a continuation of Thief but inspired by it. For my part, coincidentally Mel Bourne, who had been my mentor in the early 10s, was the Production Designer of Thief. A ' 0 s S u r v i v a l S t o r y I ' M Y O U R W O M A N B Y G A E B U C K L E Y, P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R A

• 0C1_ADG MAR-APR 2021