Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504681
3 2 P E R S P E C T I V E | J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 2 3 When Rian Johnson and I first spoke about bringing the scripts to life onscreen, he mentioned he had conceived of Poker Face as an homage to the '70s TV classics, Columbo, The Rockford Files and Murder, She Wrote from the '80s. I was inspired to create multiple, original worlds steeped in our shared nostalgia for those shows. When we discussed our cinematic inspirations, we realized we're also both fans of Italian neorealism, of Fellini, and De Sica. But it was Antonioni's Red Desert and Zabriskie Point that rekindled my interest in the visual style and tone of sometimes gritty and expansive landscapes to serve as touchpoints for the overall look of Charlie's odyssey. As our carefree truthteller makes her way across America, she often winds up off the beaten path, encountering characters existing in specific pockets of the country. As I envisioned the ramshackle mobile home or rundown roadside garage in the first few scripts, I began to see them as inadvertent time capsules, and Rian and I agreed to anchor the design in an overall concept of timelessness. The episodic structure built into the series presented an exciting opportunity to create ten unique locales for Charlie Cale to stumble across, in essence, ten short films, but the format also presented major challenges in design, execution and scheduling. Each hour launched a new story with characters situated in a different city or state, all shot in NY on a TV schedule. I quickly realized an inventive approach would be needed to pull this off, and I knew from my work on commercials and previous projects with similar time constraints, that the only way we'd be able to deliver what turned out to be a staggering total of over two hundred sets for the entire season was F i n d i n g t h e T r u t h i n t h e S t o r y P O K E R F A C E B Y J U D Y R H E E , P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R By the time the series wrapped up our six-month saga shooting Poker Face, we had built and/or modified two hundred sixteen sets. The fundamental difference from my previous projects was the formidable number of incredibly specific story points affecting the design of each episode. A