Tuesday, January 07, 2025
'Conclave' Design: Red Robes, Pop-Up Chapels and Instant Espresso Machines
www.thewrap.com: Imagine you’re strolling down a darkly-lit, marble-walled corridor in the blandest, grayest hotel hallway you’ve ever seen. You open one of the doors, step through, and enter the most iconic and recognizable room in Europe: the Sistine Chapel.
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This article provided such a fun behind the scenes look at how a bunch of different aspects of the film all came together. I have not seen Conclave but it was very evident throughout that the people working on it cared and seemed to have fun with it while still being very focused on everything they needed to be. Especially noted with the costume designer, I very much liked that - was open to changes in how the characters were dressed that affected their character, like with Tucci’s character, but was also focused on the historical facts that would have to be true for the film, such as the 33 buttons. I look up to that dedication and flexibility. How the scenery was done made me realize a large difference in live theater versus film, and that's the ability to modify the set, permanently, if really need be, for film, while live theatre needs to be reset at the end of the night. The way Suzie Davies described how the bedrooms and corridors were used really blew my mind, I just hadn’t really thought it could be used that way before.
I always love hearing about the logistics of production design for film. In virtually every industry there’s gotta be someone whose job is to make sure all the different pieces of a project come together in a certain way, but in film that job becomes more interesting (and seemingly more silly) when it’s stuff like figuring out how to space out replicas of the Sistine chapel and cardinals’ bedrooms in a film studio. In this particular article it was also cool to see that the crew was able to reuse the 110 flats that had been used to create the same chapel in an earlier TV show, since it seems like a lot of the time, film sets just get thrown out completely once they’re no longer being used. It was also awesome to read about how cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine used subtle changes in light in the film to evoke night and day despite the near-total absence of sunlight. Thinking about how to make decisions that tap into the audience’s subconscious like that is a part of lighting design that I really enjoy.
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