Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1438629
Wynn Thomas: I thought King Richard was going to be an easy movie to design. This is the story of Richard Williams and the early days of training his daughters Venus and Serena Williams: the superstar tennis champs. The movie was shooting in the city of Los Angeles where the actual story takes place. It wasn't one of these projects that was following the tax incentives to Atlanta or New Orleans. But the production and the shoot were filled with challenges. ate 1980s, early 1990s LA. The City of Compton, local neighborhood tennis courts and the upscale world of private tennis clubs. A third act sequence that took the story to a central Florida tennis camp. nd finally, a pandemic that caused a disruption in shooting and forced the film to be shot in two hales with two different design teams. My fellow designer was the great Bill Arnold. The look of the film was drien by the locations chosen and the production had a great location department, headed by aid arks and atrick ignano, and filled with some great location scouts, iles ealmpah, odi eininger and Samuel Gomez. Each and every one of them an artist. . The challenges came from many directions. The LA ta incentie reuires that the film shoot a certain percentage of the movie "outside the zone." ocations that would hae been easy to find in the city now took us to the cities of Irvine, Spanish Hills, Claremont and Thousand Oaks. We had to shoot days outside the one. nd finally, there were a lot of oices in the room. When you are designing a movie where the characters in the script are still alive, it becomes a very tricky balance between telling the story that's in the script and honoring the reality of what really happened. The City of Compton has been modernized in the last twenty years, and what was once a tough neighborhood doesn't look tough anymore. The director, Reinaldo Green, comes from the world of lowbudget films. ts not unusual when someone comes from that world to want to shoot everything on location instead of building certain interiors on stage. Rei wanted everything on location. The original Williams' house was too small and is now in a neighborhood that has been upgraded, so all of the fencing was no longer "period" correct. The other problem was finding a house that had the right look—small, simple, the family is just getting by—but was large enough to shoot in. The houses that were large enough were on streets that were too large and too well maintained. It's hard to sell T h e C h a r a c t e r s A r e t h e S t a r s K I N G R I C H A R D B Y W Y N N T H O M A S A N D W I L L I A M A R N O L D , P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R S A. WILLIAMS' HOUSE EXTERIOR LOCATION IN COMPTON, CA. SET PHOTO BY CHIABELLA JAMES. B. PRODUCTION STILL OF A SCENE IN THE WILLIAMS' LIVING ROOM. PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES C. THE WILLIAMS' HOUSE LIVING ROOM. SET PHOTO BY CHIABELLA JAMES. A