What do horror film It , mutant feature film Dark Phoenix and post-Endgame Spider-Man: Far From Home (SMFFH) have in common?
To start with, they are all multi-sensory experiences whatever medium you’re watching them.
The lesser-known commonality is that these films’ production designer is Claude Paré.
Over a Skype interview, the French-Canadian, currently in Montréal, looks relaxed after the non-stop few years of working with different crews, on different sets and countless recces.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Holland in 'Spider-Man: Far from Home'
Production designers are some of the unsung heroes behind the visual concept of a film. They essentially identify a design style for sets, locations, graphics, props, lighting, camera angles and costumes, while working closely with many other departments. He shares that he was working with very different moods — the tension and fear in It , the conflict and struggle in Dark Phoenix and what’s to come in SMFFH — and he elaborates, “The last few years, I’ve been working back-to-back on It , Dark Phoenix and SMFFH (the latter, directed by Jon Watts, released in the United States on July 2 and yesterday in India). I was on a roll, but at the end of SMFFH , I realised how much of a journey it was.” He chuckles, “Getting these jobs is not easy; these are movies everyone wants to work on. So you have to adapt to the different moods of these films and crews.”
He also needed to adapt to different genres and storylines. “The story was in the continuity of the other films so I had to learn about the whole franchise,” Claude recalls, “Similarly, before doing It , I was not a fan of horror movies. The learning curve of apprenticeship is always very steep for any movie. With Dark Phoenix (which was shot in Montréal), there are sets we are familiar with like Cerebro and Hank’s lab although we actually recreated Hank’s lab for the film.”
Claude is in deep praise of Simon Kinberg who’d made his directorial début. “[Simon’s] known the X-Men franchise very well having written ( Apocalypse, Days of Future Past and Dark Phoenix ). He was directing me to give a personality to the environments of all these characters and I was directing how to put everything together visually. We always wanted each other to be happy which I try to establish with every director.”
SMFFH ’s trailer reveals Peter Parker, as part of a class trip, travels around Europe (and fights crime as per Nick Fury’s orders) before running into super-villain Mysterio (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). For Claude, this meant several recces and working with international crews and departments. But, as he shares, it wasn’t linear, especially since they didn’t have a completed script at the beginning.
“We and the main core of the crew which I formed (art directors, illustrators, a set decorator and a property master) were based in London. In January, I went on a recce to the Czech Republic, Spain and Italy. In the beginning, interestingly, we didn’t know in which country we’d shoot so I was scouting more locations than those finally used. That said, we didn’t have a completed script till much later. Lots of ideas were on the table as to where and how we could do particular scenes but they weren’t written down per se. I’d built up a catalogue of locations and we’d coordinate with the script pages as they came in and we’d distribute the scenes to the catalogue. It’s backwards but that’s how it was done.”
'Dark Phoenix'
Claude adds that some of what you may have seen in the trailers won’t be in the film, adding, “For example, some trailers show Spider-Man arresting mobs in a restaurant — but it’s not in the film. It was tricky to work backwards by splicing and assembling the visuals we had, to make it transparent. It keeps you on your toes; especially the fact that we were dealing with five countries and five art departments. There was an art director for each of the other countries... probably a total of 11 art directors including those in the UK.”
Covert globe-trotting
With such mammoth moves underway, how do you keep a project with international fan-following under wraps? “The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is incredibly secretive, in which you sign detailed Non Disclosure Agreements at the start of anything,” Claude admits, adding, “As they were putting together Endgame and Infinity War , there were so many things happening in those films which had to be reflected in ours. We were learning as those Marvel movies progressed. For director Jon Watts, it was tricky to reveal things and there were even moments we were asked to do things we didn’t fully understand the reason but it became clear as other films developed and were released. That was the nature of the beast! Sometimes we had to build sets two weeks before a shoot (design, construction and everything).”
- When I ask Claude about the colour palette chosen for SMFFH, he smiles holds up swatches of muted hues and fans them out for me to see. “There’s one thing that’s clear when we look at these tones: no red, a colour we associate with SpiderMan. We create everything around these actors, and working with visual effects elevated that.” As shown in the trailer between the subdued shades of the non-moving European architecture, SpiderMan is a bright red and dynamic dart.
- Additional challenges, though interesting, came about when they had to recreate certain European environments on a set. “We’d recreate Venice on the back-lot complete with imported gondolas. Our visual effects department could then bring Venice to life. Special effects also had to recreate the blue-green water of Venice in our tank which was very challenging. With the cinematography team, there was a constant exchange of ideas, keeping in mind the lighting and such.”
Needless to say, SMFFH and Dark Phoenix have their fair share of chaos and destruction; that’s a given with any MCU project. So what goes into designing chaos? “I always make a joke now; when we work on a budget, we make a line for the set and a line just below that for the ‘destruction’ because there’s so much work going on and many resources. There’s a moment in the trailer where Spider-Man meets Mysterio in a desolated location. It took forever to build this set. This intended location is a small town in ruins in Spain which is actually retained as a tourist spot. So much had to be observed and noted: the colour and texture of the rubble, the people walking about and the distress of the area. It’s so detailed; you have to build stuff up to break it apart so that it doesn’t look like it’s been broken by special effects. It’s a huge job.”
Claude Paré had to recreate certain European environments on the sets of 'Spider-Man: Far from Home'
It’s safe to say it requires the energy of the Avengers and espionage-like of S.H.I.E.L.D to pull off an MCU project.
