You have to pick up a lot of skills and expertise as a production designer, given the wild and varied worlds you might be asked to craft, but for “Hedda,” the new adaptation of “Hedda Gabler” by writer and director Nia DaCosta, it helped production designer Cara Brower that she collects vintage color charts and paint chips.
Browser told IndieWire that it’s a little bit wild how pre-Pantone catalogs from the ‘40s and ‘50s do not match up with the standardized colors today and Brower wanted Hedda’s (Tessa Thompson) world to feel very singular and wild, a throwback to the post-war period setting, but sharply, relentlessly modern in its taste — the same way that Hedda herself is.
The manor house into which Hedda and her husband George (Tom Bateman) have recently moved and are throwing a grand party to buoy his hopes of getting tenure had a number of requirements in DaCosta’s script — a grand staircase for Hedda to swan down, one space for jazzy dancing and another for a chandelier to fall, levels and layers for Hedda to survey her realm or conspire with her frenemy Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock) or scheme to foil the hopes of her former lover Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), roof access for some ominous target shooting, and, oh, also, no big deal, a hedge maze and a lake.
Brower’s monster, 200-plus location scouting trip around the UK eventually led her and the filmmaking team to Flintham Hall, in Nottinghamshire, which had just about everything the script needed — they did end up filming the hedge maze sequences at a neighboring estate — and was miraculously willing to leave the house dressed over the hiatus the production took during the SAG strike, including a completely 1940s-ified kitchen.
The sets were worth the wait, moody and alluring and brimming with scandalous modern art and sour colors chosen to make the English Heritage building regulators faint. Brower delights in talking about how researching real society raconteurs of the ‘50s, like Lee Radziwill and Oonagh Guinness, gave her the confidence to go big and bold with Hedda’s complete reorganization of the castle she’s gotten her husband to buy her. But Brower also credits collaboration with the other department heads on the film to craft a world that feels so unified and so ruled by Hedda’s gravitational pull.
It helped that most of them also had a singing planet under their belt by the time they got to “Hedda.”
“I love that everything feels really in tandem on this film, because it’s harder to achieve than you would think. We’re always busy and in our own little world, and so you really have to make time to go and speak to the other departments, see what they’re doing, discuss ideas,” Brower said. “It really helped that we had all worked on ‘The Marvels’ together for years. So we all had a dialogue going already.”
For instance, inspired by a stage direction in DaCosta’s script, Brower and costume designer Lindsay Pugh wanted to ensure that Hedda herself and her environments felt a little bit like looking at a rotten fruit. “You get all those gorgeous colors, but they’re turned. We had plummy burgundies and dirty purples and lavenders and sort of acidic greens. And then Lindsay and I really embraced that color story. I love that she made that dress that sort of putrid green. It’s so unexpected,” Brower said.
Both Brower and Pugh also took inspiration from the kinds of Art Deco sculptures Hedda would want in the house in place of flowers to create harsh, strong lines on both the clothing and the environment. “Art Deco shapes are always so sultry and graphic. I’m so glad we found all these ideas and put them together [because] sometimes, as a production designer, especially in contemporary movies, you’re really working to get accuracy and authenticity. But I feel like I got to put so much of what I love in, to reflect the character obviously, but everything that we did, I personally loved as well.”
Brower said that it was also really fun to be able to get away from stage sets and have to be creative within the limitations of a location. One prime example is the imperial, carpeted (!) bathroom we see Hedda in at the beginning of the film, getting ready for the party.
“Those [upstairs] rooms were all just guest bedrooms that had been renovated. They were very modern and white and [DaCosta] said, ‘Oh I love this window. I wish we could have this in the film, but we can’t use this room.’ So I decided, well, let’s just build a set around this beautiful window,” Brower said.
Brower’s team brought in the tub, new walls, and the all-important carpet. “I had this image of this David Hicks bathroom — which is actually from the ‘60s but it was so iconic and he was the interior designer that really brought the bathtub as a main focal point into the bathroom, and with the carpet, which is so strange, but we did that and it really brings us in,” Brower said.
What it brings us into is a beautiful blend of period flare and character psychology, which was always the goal for Brower. “It’s very shocking for George’s guests to come into a house like this that’s been decorated the way Hedda does. But that’s absolutely who she is,” Brower said. “When you step into this world, she seems like somebody very stifled, but an interest in fashion and art tells me that this is a creative person who wants to express themself. She’s probably looking to express herself in her surroundings, too.”
“Hedda” is now streaming on Prime Video.