Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546033
4 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 6 I read Maggie Gyllenhaal's script for The Bride! in 2023, a year before filming began, unbound by location, in a creative bubble of sorts. The film is set in the 1930s, both a period of great personal interest and a turning point in modern history, science and design. My first instinct was to shape our world by contrasting modernism with the grandeur and crumbling textures of 19th century buildings and interiors. In early discussions, Berlin was proposed as the production base. By the end of the year, we had pivoted and were ready to turn our lens toward New York. It would need to play itself, Chicago, and the cities and towns of the road movie. With a set list of ninety-eight environments, I wanted Dr. Euphronious's townhouse and Chicago to serve as the visual scaffolding for the world, tapping into the 1930s American zeitgeist and its possibilities in science, design and the modern city. With the story starting and ending there, we could use a visual language of innovation as our fulcrum and ground our world in a design philosophy that had shifted from the glamorous but fading Gilded Age and Art Deco to the functionalist approaches of the Bauhaus and the International Style. Beyond tangible structures, I found myself thinking about women from that era—writers, artists and intellectuals. I peppered my initial boards with portraits and photographs of these women, including Florence Henri's image of German photographer Lore Krüger, pictures of Irish designer Eileen Gray, and a photograph of novelist Djuna Barnes by Berenice Abbott. Maggie and I often discussed the world, envisioning these women living within it and imagining what it would be like to be in rooms with them. For Dr. Euphronious's sets, we imagined a thoroughly modern woman in a large, grand and somewhat decaying house, with contemporary additions and renovations woven in to support her scientific pursuits. I thought about how immersed I felt in the details when visiting the Maison de Verre, the 1932 urban infill designed by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet. Those memories immediately began to shape that world. Maggie posed the question, 'What will make it feel undeniably wild?' which became my guiding question. We discussed how women are repeatedly told they are "too much." Our overarching philosophy was to flirt with the very ideas of M a k i n g T h e B r i d e ! U N D E N I A B L Y W I L D B Y K A R E N M U R P H Y, P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R A. DR. EUPHRONIOUS'S TOWNHOUSE LAB SET BUILD. CONCEPT ILLUSTRATION BY ALEXIOS CHRYSIKOS USING 3D STUDIO MAX AND PHOTOSHOP. A