Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1485934
Slowik is a man haunted by nature's perfection. Mark Mylod, the film's director, and I agreed in our first meeting every construction material should therefore be harvested from the island's ecosystem. But Slowik, who is so preoccupied with precision that he's lost his most fundamental ingredient—joy—presented an irony: how a man inspired by nature could unwittingly choose to destroy it. Bending oak trees and river paths at will, he would juxtapose harsh geometric shapes with softer, natural ones. He would treat building materials as a chef would ingredients—pickling, oxidizing, baking them. I set about researching. I started with Ferran Adria's food laboratory El Bulli, a process where experimenting IS the process, never actually finalizing a dish. Chef's Table of Grant Achatz, Magnus Nilsson and Francis Mallman were of particularly cultish inspiration. Nancy Silverton graciously invited me to worship her life's devotion to bread and yeast. The production's equally food-centric Art Director Lindsey Moran and I spoke with kitchen designers, suppliers and workers like a couple of anthropologists. We charmed our way into the backs of restaurants high-end and low in LA, NY and Chicago, studying their phenomenally packed use of space. Every square inch of the commercial kitchen is squashed for the sake of one more front- of-house chair. Each chair represents a half a million dollars over the course of a year. No matter how chic the restaurant, the junior chefs work with elbows pressed skin to skin. Some complain when they get home at night, they can't stretch out their limbs. We traced kitchen layouts onto the floors of our living rooms, practiced rushing from imaginary fryers to Dutch ovens, weighing authenticity against the practicality of filmmaking. Chef Slowik's obsessiveness became our own. Set Designer Steve Hardie and I started by exploring very basic geometric spaces using white models, then SketchUp and Vectorworks. My first two goals were to establish, one, the relationship between the open kitchen and the front of house, and two, the importance of showcasing the sun and then, moon's trajectory over the course of a single evening. All genre films grow tension as the sun goes down, and this genre mash-up needed to mine that source. From there we established the layout of the entire island, as the characters fall further down Slowik's rabbit hole. Around this time, COVID forced the production to move from Scotland to Savannah. The creative A. HAWTHORNE ISLAND. MODEL. B. & C. HAWTHORNE RESTAURANT. MODEL. D. RESTAURANT INTERIOR PLAN. DRAWN BY JENNY WENTLING. E. RESTAURANT INTERIOR. EARLY 3D RENDER BY STEVE HARDIE. A B C