Shona Heath and James Price
Because of all his other films, we saw Yorgos as sort of a minimalist with raw and empty sets and locations and we didn’t know how far he wanted to go with the density of the design. But I remember at that point thinking, Oh, okay, it’s everywhere and everything. Everything is dealt with, designed, made, crafted, colored, bent and on top of each other.
When we thought we’d finished things he said, What are you going to put on the floor? It was like, Oh my God, you need something on the floor as well? He wanted everything. I remember thinking, Okay, this means everything needs to be as full and as detailed as we can. And we just put in detail until we ran out of time. Or money.
AS: It’s insane what your team was able to accomplish with the money you had. And considering the overall budget of the movie it’s amazing you got the share of the budget that you did.
JP: That’s what Yorgos wanted. The whole budgeting of the film was very much built around our sets. Kasia [Malipan, co-producer] worked extremely closely with us, to build a budget for the film. And then the next film Yorgos shot after Poor Things had hardly any art department at all!
AS: How did the two of you first become a production design team?
SH: James had worked with Kasia who was the producer who really put all the crew together. He’d got on really well and done really good work on The Nest and Yorgos had seen that and liked that. And then I met Yorgos at an exhibition that I had designed. I’d done a lot of work at the exhibition with Tim Walker, a photographer that I work with a lot. And Yorgos liked something about the work that I did, the slightly fantasy world stuff. Then we met up and it was pretty clear that I was not capable of doing a film this size on my own. And then James and I met.
JP: It was Ed [Guiney, producer] that initially put me forward. There was definitely a conversation of, Do they ever have two people work together as production designers? And I said there were examples of it. I knew of the one where Doug Chiang who heads the Lucasfilm concept art team had got together with supervising art director Neil Lamont and they’d done the Star Wars movie Rogue One together. Obviously in that instance you’ve got a very experienced supervising art director and a really experienced concept artist whereas I was just starting out on my journey as a production designer and Shona’s from a fashion background. I was very much like, That’s just insane!
SH: James came to my studio for us just to sort of check each other out a bit. It was a bit weird and then we had this trial period that I think both of us probably thought wasn’t going to work out. But we just get on incredibly well and work incredibly well together and that in itself is really unusual because I don’t collaborate in that sort of way with anyone. Neither does James. You collaborate with millions of people, but not on a level, so it was quite unusual. We had so much to do that we never had time to argue or even disagree with each other. There were a hundred cities, a hundred sets, a hundred everything to design. So much.
AS: You hadn’t previously done anything as demanding?
JP: I supervising art directed on A Boy Called Christmas but that was just one backlot. Paddington 2 was no backlots, it was studio. I understood how a department of that size should work and run, just never at that scale. Never with three backlot builds! But I think that actually helped. Shona’s used to ducking and diving and in my art directing life I’d ducked and dived so it was a case of understanding how to structure it in a way that was possible. We had a lot of resources but it wasn’t anywhere near enough.