Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Standstill

I'm at sort of an impasse this morning with the movie I'm scouting. Every director has a different relationship with their Production Designer. To put it mildly, some Directors have their own vision of what the movie will look like and expect their designer to make that happen. Some expect the relationship to be more collaborative. I met my director for the first time yesterday and while he's articulated his vision to me very clearly, he doesn't want to start reviewing possible locations until we've hired a designer. He obviously is from the latter camp.

So, I'm just keeping on keeping on until later today, when they say they'll have made their choice and hired someone.

One of the designers who is in the final running is someone I worked with when I was just getting my start in the business. I was the Assistant Location Manager on the picture and he was doing his first movie after having designed a number of stage plays. On the first day, he handed us a list of the locations with his descriptions of what we should be looking for. I expected to see descriptions along the lines of "warm tones; lots of wood" or "stark with minimal furniture"; you know, stuff like that. The first location on the list was the Psychologist's Office. The description read: This location should be Freudian, not Jungian. I neglected to ask what the hell that looks like.

Having said that, I actually hope he's the one they hire. I liked him on that show and thought he was very talented. With almost 20 more years under his belt, I'm guessing he' pretty terrific now.

4 comments:

Eric said...

Freudian locations look like the set of Alien and Jungian locations look like music videos by The Police from 1983?

I don't know, that's the best I could come up with.

Nathan said...

Actually, as it turns out, Freudian locations have a couch.

But, nice try. Thanks for playing.

Shawn Powers said...

My office is Freudian. Oh yes it is...

(And that makes teachers so mad!!!)

Eric said...

...and a Jungian location only has a couch if you had a dream about the Ottoman Empire the previous night or bummed a cigarette off a friend when you arrived at the location and he happened to give you a Chesterfield. Got it.