BRAVE NEW WORLDS

In Poor Things and Asteroid City; Lisbon and the American West get bright, inventive reimaginings

VANITIES /Design

REBECCA FORD

POOR THINGS

Searchlight Pictures

"i DON'T KNOW what it should look like, but it should look like nothing that's been seen before."

Those were director Yorgos Lanthimos's instructions for his production designers, James Price and Shona Heath. It felt a bit like a "poisoned chalice," Price admits—demanding but infinitely open-ended. Poor Things was such an ambitious undertaking that instead of hiring one production designer, Lanthimos asked Price and Heath to team up to create the worlds that Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) would visit on her coming-of-age adventure.

A woman rebuilt by a Doctor Frankenstein-esque scientist played by Willem Dafoe, Bella leaves her London home to explore Lisbon and Paris—but through her eyes the cities are utterly transformed. "Her brain was surreal because it had no limits, no boundaries," says Heath, "it didn't know—it just saw and felt, and therefore it could be anything."

The story begins in London at the Baxter home, with Heath taking inspiration from the mad surgeon's work. "We used the textures from brains and colors from internal organs in the design," she says. "That gave us a different edge and it added something that we also hadn't seen, which we were always trying to find in this world that people would believe."

Dr. Baxter's love for his adopted daughter inspired the design of their home, where Bella is learning to navigate the world. For Heath and Price, that meant the walls were padded for when she would run into them, as were the floors for when she would fall. "I think it drove everybody crazy because the floor was a big mattress," says Heath. Bella's room was full of elements from the outside world, like hot-air balloons, sailing ships, and images of fish and cows—so she could experience them despite the fact that she was banned from leaving home. "There were all these little gifts of beauty that he would've done," says Heath.

But Bella does eventually leave, following a love interest (Mark Ruffalo) abroad. At Hungary's massive Korda Studios, Price and Heath built the entire Lisbon set, which measured more than 60 feet high and hundreds of feet in all directions, "it was sunny, happy—she's in love, so it wanted to feel like a kind of magical place," says Price. He built a composite set from the ground up, where each room connects to another to create an authentic—if fantastical—city, including bars, restaurants, and a hotel, using mostly pinks, yellows, and pastels. "You could really wander around the little streets and alleys and totally get lost," says Price. A massive water tank wrapped around the whole set to stand in for the coast. And to create the surreal pinky-blue surroundings, a 160-footlong backdrop was hand-painted by three artisans. The final touch was a trolley inspired by the trams that traverse real-life Lisbon—only Price and Heath put it in the sky.

Price and Heath wanted every setting in the film to feel a little off-kilter. For a scene set in a forest, Price added fake trees that were tilted at a 45-degree angle. "Everybody was going, 'This is insane. This is a forest. It's beautiful. Why are you trying to improve on it?' " says Price. "But, no, we didn't want any easy sets."

ASTEROID CITY

Focus Features

NO WES ANDERSON film takes place in reality as we know it, and production designer Adam Stockhausen—who won an Oscar for 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel—has helped bring many of those wildly eccentric worlds to life. But Asteroid City offered a unique challenge, a story set in a 1950s Southwest town that's many levels removed from the real world. "There's the town, Asteroid City, but it's not necessarily a real place," says Stockhausen.

Asteroid City is a movie about a fictional 1950s TV presentation of a live play about tourists who travel to a desert town and encounter a surprise visit from a UFO. With an enormous blue sky and reddish buttes rising in the distance, the town feels like Utah, but because the viewer is aware it's also a play within a TV show within a film, Stockhausen toyed with perspectives. "We were kind of doing all the tricks that have historically been done to cheat being in a landscape on a stage, but then we're doing them on a much bigger scale out in the landscape," he says.

After scouting numerous locations in the Southwestern US, the production landed in the desert in Spain and built the town from scratch, right down to the power and plumbing. Stockhausen took inspiration from Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid and Ace in the Hole, along with the motel from Frank Capra's It Happened One Night. He also delved into the work of photographer Burton Frasher, a series of black-and-white photos that captures Southwestern hamlets and ghost towns.

Asteroid City's locations, including a motel, a diner, a small research center, and a one-pump gas station, are filled with retro details while sticking to a unique color palette that plays against the setting's dusty red landscape. "From day one we were talking about the red dirt and the hotness, the heat of the sun, and that the buildings would be largely white and have a baked kind of feeling—old but not dirty," Stockhausen says, adding that eventually they started adding pastels in the decor and the cars to solidify the motif.

Even the red rock formations off in the distance added to the town's surreality, built as very large miniatures on wheels that could be moved between scenes. "We would have these big mountains driving by attached to tractors, and we could say, 'Okay, take that rock and for this scene drive it over there,' " says Stockhausen, "which was an incredibly fun thing to play with."