Awards News

To look at this year's Oscar nominees for art direction -- "American Gangster," "Atonement," "The Golden Compass," "Sweeney Todd" and "There Will Be Blood" -- is to see the full range of approaches to the craft. Each one an artistic achievement, these five films reflect the different ways a celluloid universe can take form, from scouting that perfect location to crafting the director's vision on a soundstage to embellishing with CGI.

At one end of the spectrum is Ridley Scott's "American Gangster." "We were the ultimate location movie," says Scott's regular production designer, Arthur Max, noting that the crew traveled to more than 155 locations in 64 days to capture the gritty feel of 1970s New York City -- with a little jaunt to Thailand in between. "It was an enormously complex puzzle," he says.

Achieving the look of the urban jungle was a near-impossible challenge in gentrified Manhattan, so the production trolled the less shiny fringes of the Big Apple. Nassau Coliseum substituted for Madison Square Garden, site of the Ali-Frazier fight; vacant lots in the South Bronx remained suitably bombed out to pass for 1970s Harlem; and one of the few remaining pre-renovation projects in Coney Island served as the exterior of Frank Lucas' East Harlem HQ. The interior was built in housing units slated for demolition on Governors Island. While Coney Island locals were less than thrilled by the garbage and graffiti set dressing, on Governors the crew had carte blanche to trash the units. "That's where we could go berserk and bring our sledgehammers in with impunity," recalls Max.

Minding their manors

Stokesay Court, a late-19th-century English manor house standing in for "Atonement's" Tallis House, provided a different sort of blank slate for director Joe Wright and production designer Sarah Greenwood, who reveals that they'd initially rejected the house. But when the duo's first choice didn't work out, they realized they could collage elements they liked onto Stokesay, whose furnishings had all been auctioned off to pay for its upkeep. That included painting the kitchen a "poisonous" green color that struck them in the other house -- and which became a key symbol in the film. It's a rather unusual twist, says Greenwood: "The locations actually informed the script."

Likewise, the swimming pool in the script was rewritten as a lake because Stokesay Court's lakefront "was so fantastic." Plus, "Keira's amazing on that diving board."

Although the fountain where Knightley takes a plunge was completely fabricated over an existing pond, the period Ferris wheel seen on the beach at Dunkirk (actually a small town in the north of England) was real and functional, sourced by an old fairgrounds worker.

Truth or derrick

Incredibly, Paul Thomas Anderson wrote "There Will Be Blood's" climactic confrontation before learning that a bowling alley existed at Beverly Hills' Greystone Mansion, although the lanes had been covered over. In exchange for restoring it to working order, the location waived its rental fee. Even better, "I got to bowl," says production designer Jack Fisk.

Fisk's m.o. is to "create as real a space as possible for the directors and actors," explaining, "I think it helps the actors to have a complete world where it doesn't look like a movie set." The ranch in Marfa, Texas, that became the town of Little Boston drew them initially because it had the requisite train tracks, but it was the 360-degree vistas and the "harshness of the land" that kept them there, says Fisk.

The massive oil derrick was built from the ground up according to plans from 1914 that Fisk found in an old oil museum. Learning that wood actually burns more slowly than steel, he worked with timber specially milled in El Paso. The idea was to set the structure on fire, shoot a number of scenes, extinguish it and "regroup." However when the fuel source was cut, the derrick kept burning. "There was no way we could put it out," recalls Fisk. "Paul just said, 'Turn it back on!'"

Black and white and red all over

Serendipity of that sort is precisely the sort of "accident" a stylistic director like Tim Burton prefers to avoid, choosing as he does to shoot all his films on stages. For "Sweeney Todd," Burton brought in production designer Dante Ferretti, who won an Oscar in 2004 for his work on "The Aviator." The entire film was shot at London's Pinewood Studios, just a tube ride from the real Fleet Street.

Although the film takes place during the Victorian era, Ferretti found his visual inspiration in a 1920s book about London at night. "The look was fantastic, the light was fantastic," he recalls. Burton took things a step further conceptually, and Sweeney Todd's sinister world crystallized: "It was his idea to make everything black and white, and the only color would be the red of the blood," Ferretti says.

Judge Turpin's home is also red, fittingly; all the other buildings are painted shades of black, gray and green. Only during Mrs. Lovett's fanciful dream does the whole world turn Technicolor, a sequence Ferretti calls "a little bit Fellini." And he should know: He worked with the master on six films.

Futures trading

Equally surreal is the London envisioned by Dennis Gassner for "The Golden Compass." Set in a "multifaceted" time period, this alternate version of the city is an odd, magical place where people buzz around in Zeppelins and gyroscopic carriages (no doubt, H.G. Wells would have felt right at home), and the real skyscape is enhanced with cathedral-like spires that were designed by the 17th-century architect Christopher Wren after the Great Fire but never built. The production designer's motivation for inserting them? "Because we can."

Gassner calls CGI "the really good pencil," with which he was able to create the northern region of Bolvangar, using the look of Norway's icy vistas minus the nasty temperatures. "To go shoot in Selmer at 30 degrees below zero isn't really needed," says Gassner, "so you build the floor and the foreground onstage and you fill in the rest digitally."

As to whether he was trying to achieve a "realistic" look, Gassner says, "I think it did look real within the vernacular of what we wanted it to look like. That to me is the fun part of solving the problem: finding the language of that parallel world."

ART DIRECTORS GUILD AWARDS NOMINEES
WHEN: Saturday
WHERE: Beverly Hilton Hotel

CONTEMPORARY FILM
"The Bourne Ultimatum," Peter Wenham
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Michel Eric, Laurent Ott
"The Kite Runner," Carlos Conti
"Michael Clayton," Kevin Thompson
"No Country for Old Men," Jess Gonchor

PERIOD FILM
"American Gangster," Arthur Max
"Atonement," Sarah Greenwood
"Elizabeth: The Golden Age," Guy Hendrix Dyas
"Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," Dante Ferretti
"There Will Be Blood," Jack Fisk

FANTASY FILM
"The Golden Compass," Dennis Gassner
"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," Stuart Craig
"Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End," Rick Heinrichs
"Ratatouille," Harley Jessup
"300," James Bissell

SPECIAL HONOREES
Outstanding Contributions to Cinematic
Imagery Award: Ray Harryhausen
Lifetime Achievement Honoree: Stuart Craig
Hall of Fame Inductees: Edward Carfagno, Stephen Grimes, Dale Hennesy, James Trittipo, Lyle R. Wheeler