大象传媒 Cult - Printer Friendly Version
Stuart Blatt - Angel Production Designer - Interviewed on location in Los Angeles August 22nd 2001
Stumbling into design
Tell us about your background.
I became a production designer about 14 years ago, sort of stumbling into it as a lot of people do.
I came from a background of art, theatre and music in college and earlier life and apprenticed with some people out here where I first found out that there was a career like this. I really enjoyed it and was offered a film to design right away, and things snowballed from there.
I went from film to film to film, realising "I now have a career, this is something that I enjoy doing." It was very creative and rewarding, something that really stimulated my creative juices. Realising that instant gratification, building things and seeing it on screen right away was something I really enjoyed.
Low budget flicks
What was the most interesting thing you had to design when you were working in the movies?
Coming from mostly a very low budget film world, as a designer you鈥檙e also an art director, you鈥檙e the lead man, a painter, you鈥檙e wearing a lot of hats.
One of the most challenging things was to try and give each project its own unique look within the confines of the budget and a time schedule that didn鈥檛 always allow anything much out of the ordinary. That was always a challenge and something that was fun.
If you looked at it as a challenge rather than a hurdle, you鈥檙e always able to come up with something or use it as a learning experience. "Well that didn鈥檛 work and I鈥檒l try something else next time" or "That went really well, I鈥檒l use that next time as a device".
So each film, video, commercial, movie of the week, became a stepping stone and a learning situation as to what I enjoyed, what I thought were my strengths, what I realised were my weaknesses, and what I felt I could capitalise on to more effectively create myself as a designer that could fill a niche.
Taking on Angel
How did you come to work on Angel?
I was approached by a good friend of mine, Carey Meyer, who鈥檚 a production designer on Buffy. We worked together and were good friends for many years.
When they were doing Angel, Carey was asked by the producers to design the very first permanent sets. Then they were looking for a designer to take over the show so Carey called me and said "Listen, I鈥檇 like you to come do the show here, I know the way you work and I trust you."
I came in and met with David Greenwalt, Kelly Manners and Joss Whedon. They looked at my portfolio and saw that I had a similar background to what they were hoping to achieve. They thought "Might as well entrust the show to him as well as anybody else." It seemed I had something that they thought was worthwhile tapping into.
Sewers and more sewers
So how did you develop the designs?
The only thing Carey did design in season one was the first place of business where Angel lived and worked. He designed the offices upstairs and Angel鈥檚 living quarters downstairs. They were the only things established when I first came on.
I鈥檝e done every episode from episode two until now. On the first season we did things as fun as all the Wolfram and Hart offices and the chamber where the Oracles lived underground with a fantastic disappearing hallway. We did many sewer systems, sewer caverns, sewer rotundas, sewer chambers. You name it, anything that appears on screen we did.
Hotel living
Was the move to the hotel in season two for the change of location or to get some fresh design?
A little bit of both. The producers really wanted to give Angel a dynamic season finality. An explosion is a dynamic season finality and they thought "Well what better way to let us out of one place and take us to a new place than blow up his residence."
A little side note is that everybody, all the directors from David Greenwalt on down, were getting very tired of shooting in a small cramped office space and a dark underground lair where Angel lived. Anything very dynamic on screen would have caused a lot of problems production-wise, so that was a big consideration.
Once they blew it up, they said to me "We鈥檝e got to create a new space that is tremendous to look at but also is very film-friendly. We want the crew to be able to move in and out freely, we want to be able to move the cameras around at will, and we want to be able to make a lot of use of this new space since we鈥檙e spending a lot of money on it". All those things went into the decision on the new space.
They were unsure what they wanted to do, they were kicking around the idea of maybe putting in an old mansion, but we thought "Well, that鈥檚 kind of like Batman". Then we thought about putting it in some abandoned what have you, when Joss Whedon said "I want to put Angel in an abandoned hotel, what do you think of that?"
I thought "That sounds great to me". I wanted to have something as a jumping off point as a frame so we all understood where we were coming from, so I said "Are you thinking of something along maybe as grand as The Shining?", that big spooky hotel in the Stanley Kubrick film. Joss said "No I鈥檓 thinking something a little more Los Angeles based, how about something like Barton Fink, the Coen Brother鈥檚 movie".
From that point on we all had a frame of reference that we could work with. Once we got the go-ahead with our design we took a few weeks to build a scale model of what we could achieve with the budget, and from there we took about 10 weeks for us to build it from start to finish until we started shooting in it the very first episode of the second season.
Inside outside
How did the look of the hotel from the outside come about?
We knew that we were going to need an exterior of this hotel location and on the first season we shot an episode entitled I Fall To Pieces at a building on Wiltshire Boulevard that we all liked the look of. It鈥檚 called the Los Altos apartments, it鈥檚 a famous old apartment building where Marian Davies, William Randolph Hurst鈥檚 girlfriend used to live.
David Greenwalt said "I like the exterior of that apartment building. If you want to model your interior off that a bit, we鈥檒l have a place we know we is more or less film-friendly" .
Once we鈥檙e inside the hotel, that world exists only on stage, but we matched the front doors, they鈥檙e exact duplicates, and the back garden is reminiscent of the back garden in the apartments. So we can go to the apartments and film the cars coming and going, Angel, Cordelia, Gunn or Wesley coming and going out of the front of the exterior, and then we cut to the interior of the hotel, and it all works fairly seamlessly.
A holiday in Pylea
Does the village from Pylea exist or is it just a set?
A little bit of both. Earlier in the season (two) we shot an episode that took place during the Boxer rebellion of 1900 in China (Darla). We were looking around for a place to do a small Chinese province town, and through our research we realised that a lot of Chinese towns looked very similar to small Mexican villages. They used clay adobe structures with either thatched or tower roofs.
Our location department found a movie ranch that had a standing set, built years ago for, I believe, a Nick Nolte film. It was basically a Tijuana town, used many times as Columbia or Honduras or any place South America. We said "You know what? We can turn this into a Chinese province town," and we did so very effectively for that episode.
When it came to shooting Pylea we realised we were up against the same challenge and we said "You know what, it just so happens that the Chinese province town which looked a lot like Mexico also happens to look a lot like England, or Pylea or any other medieval pseudo Euro-space, alternative dimension with two suns kind of world".
We went out there and showed the producers what we could do. We have a great bit of latitude in that Angel is a fantasy show, somewhat based on a reality framework. So, having to stay true somewhat to everyone鈥檚 pre-conceived notion of what a medieval village looks like and then taking it one step further, we were able to say "Well, we鈥檝e got already clay walls to start with".
Then we put all the timbers on, we put the thatching on the roofs, we brought in all the stalls of the different merchants and the vendors and the blacksmiths that lived in the town, and the gallows. The costume department did a phenomenal job, we got our animal wranglers to bring in medieval chickens and goats and pigs and yaks and we created some wonderful vehicles out of old chariots.
Where effects meet reality
Do you liaise with Visual Effects?
In this world where anything can be created digitally it all really has to start with something physical. Whether we actually build something real, that our visual effects supervisor will take and then shoot on a green screen and then manipulate, or whatever, he usually starts with our department.
Sometimes he鈥檒l build a 3-D rendering or he鈥檒l make something out of elements that he can beg, borrow or steal from other productions or he creates himself, but they all have to fit in with what we鈥檝e created on set. What we usually do on the very first day of pre production of each episode is we鈥檒l talk about what each of us can contribute to that script and how it鈥檚 going to work scene by scene.
For instance, we did an episode entitled Untouched where a woman was using the hotel as a safe harbour. She was staying up in an attic room and at a certain point her father comes to visit her. She has had a traumatic past with her father and through telekinetic power she makes all the windows in the upstairs of the hotel explode.
Well, we didn鈥檛 have an upstairs to the hotel, nor could we afford to make all the windows blow up on location. What we did was build a set we were able to fake the outside of the hotel on, give the visual effects designer one or two windows that he could explode and he then took those and through the magic of digital medium created a whole wall of the hotel exploding. He could tile that effect down, so we could create 5, 10, 100 storeys if we really wanted to.
Backdrop for bad monks
Any particular new design challenges in season three?
We鈥檙e in the early stages of season three. One of the most fun things so far this year was creating an enormous Buddhist monastery for our first episode, where Angel鈥檚 fighting with some bad monks.
We did a lot of extensive research looking at monasteries from all over Asia, through Bhutan and Burma and came up with a design that we really liked. Within that framework we try and base things somewhat on reality so they are grounded in the real world, but from that point on we鈥檙e able to take things and get really fanciful with them.
We look at a lot of other movies and we beg, borrow and steal from other designers or other mediums. "Well they did this, let鈥檚 elaborate on that," or "They did this and this didn鈥檛 work, I鈥檇 like to see this happen there". Hopefully someone will eventually borrow from me and I would feel more than honoured if that happened.
More and bigger sets please
If you had unlimited budget what would you like to do or what would you have done differently in terms of production design for Angel?
I鈥檓 pretty lucky. My producer Kelly Manners is very art department friendly and gives me a lot of money to work with.
What would I like to do? More than money, I wish we had more stage space to build more sets. We鈥檙e constantly having to juggle sets around. We put things up, we take them down on a one or two day notice, to fit in other sets.
I鈥檇 like to have more money that we can build bigger sets, leave them standing and give the crew, the cinematographer, the directors, the actors, more room to work around rather than having to say "This is all we can afford here" or "This is all that鈥檚 needed, I can鈥檛 give you any more than that".