Director David Freyne has spent a long time thinking about afterlives. He did his film thesis in college on the sterling Powell and Pressburger comedy “A Matter of Life and Death,” which has a playful post-war twist on the world to come, as well as the brilliant manipulation of color that The Archers are known for. So it’s unsurprising there is a lot of Powell and Pressburger in Freyne’s new A24 film, “Eternity” — especially in the design of the film’s own cosmic train junction/hotel/infinite convention center wherein souls may elect where they wish to spend the rest of time.
Working with production designer Zazu Myers, Freyne didn’t want to replicate the concept behind “A Matter of Life and Death,” which paints the living world in gorgeous color and the afterlife in a majestic but frozen black and white. What he did want was to create a clear internal logic to the afterlife in “Eternity” that was nonetheless simple, playful, and artificial. For this, Freyne and Meyers crafted a combination of brutalist architectural design with charming painted bluffs and sheets that would fall over windows, changing the time of day.
“ It was just a really lovely way of creating something that was, on the one hand, beautiful, and on the other hand, completely artificial and constructed for the purposes of keeping these people somewhat happy in a somewhat familiar place,” Freyne said.
That almost-but-not-quite-natural familiarity finds its fullest expression in the archive tunnel, where the newly deceased Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) can stroll through the memories of her life, including both her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), tragically killed young in Korea, and her long life with her reliable putz of a second husband, Larry (Miles Teller). Here, Myers and Freyne and the art team melded bits of a museum diorama with that same brutalist shape language to the building, and a whimsical, deeply artificial approach to dramatizing memory.
“When writing it, it was like, ‘What would it be like to walk through a Natural History Museum of your life? How do you pair them back to just what’s most meaningful in memory?’” Freyne said. “We talked a lot about how we could take that conceit of the scenic backdrops and abstract them even further to just give an impression. ‘American In Paris’ was something we went back to time and time again when creating just those sparse details on those gauze backgrounds, [which] really paints a picture but with the least amount of work.”
Modulating the amount of work and really putting it where it counts was really important for “Eternity” to be authoritative and ambitious in its scope, while still staying within its logistical and budgetary constraints. For Freyne and Myers, it’s all about being smart with color and shape language so that the production design succinctly tells the story of the world while being visually striking in its own right.
“In writing and designing [the archive], it’s almost like they’re arteries from the junction. So they have the same architectural language, so it feels of a piece to what we’ve seen. It’s all connected, and myself and Zazu always talked about, ‘How does every element of this set connect to the other sets? How is this one space, even though it’s vast and there are many different eternities? How do they all work back to the junction?’” Freyne said.
All roads leading to the same place, in terms of design, allow for repetition and emphasis in the plot to take on infinite afterlives of emotional resonance. Wrestling with her feelings for both men that she’s loved, we watch a montage of times that Joan finds herself in the archive tunnel over and over again. In the last instance, we see her watch the very first scene in the film, of her and Larry bickering as they drive to a gender reveal party for a new grandchild. While the scene itself was covered with modern, realistic, if slightly paler and pared back color, cinematography, the archive memory shows her and Larry vividly, but driving a cardboard cutout of their car with a painted screen background.
“Having that cardboard cutout of the car — probably our most Michel Gondry-esque moment in the film; he’s a genius who should be in every film in some way — it was a lovely way of having her connect with that memory,” Freyne said. “Having the detail of that station wagon cutout in red, too — in the opening of the film, the car was gray, but we wanted to give it an additional pop of color, because it’s such a vivid and vibrant memory for her. Those little details were so much fun to design with Zazu and then the way my cinematographer [Ruairí O’Brien] shot it… we just move out from her and leave her in this vast tunnel alone. It’s such a gorgeous, simple shot.”
The beauty and the power of what Freyne, Myers, O’Brien, and the whole “Eternity” team were able to achieve ended up influencing how Freyne tackled the film’s ending — without spoiling, the archive ends up being a tunnel of memories. Finding another surprising, and rewardingly integrated, use for the set came out of shooting and building constraints, but ultimately, Freyne thinks, made the ending better.
“I think necessity made it so much better and so much more moving and more powerful,” Freyne said. “Not that I don’t want money for my films, but I really do strive for the kind of ingenuity that constraints give you. I think it makes things more fun to make and makes things much better and more creative in the end.”