TNMC

A former commercial and music video production designer, McDowell first received acclaim for his work on the 1990 David Fincher video "Vogue" for Madonna. Oft-compared to the late Anton Furst for his dark and foreboding sets, he is also a leading proponent of pre-visualization, a kind of 3-D storyboarding process pioneered by companies such as Pixel Liberation Front and Proof Inc.

People outside of Hollywood tend to be generally unaware of all the complexities that go into filmmaking, of which the production designer is an integral part. Can you give us a better idea of what the role of the production designer empasses?

1. The Production Designer is a translator of words into images.
2. The PD is an historian - pulling from a script the (often unwritten) historical layers of the story. (typically, one has to invent a back-story for each character - where were they before the story starts - to allow props, set dressing, etc to have a starting point - much as each actor has to do for their own character development)
3. The PD provides the visual frame for a film, based on script, directors input, the emotional needs of the characters and is responsible for the physical look of the film.
4. The PD provides the frame for the actors, both physically and contextually.
5. The PD provides surfaces to reflect and absorb light.
6. The PD starts the film sometimes before script, sometimes before director, sometimes before producer.
7. The PD provides the production with a gallery of visual images that will infect the filmmakers with the visual texture of the film.
8. The PD interacts with all the heads of department (translating the design needs to them, and their needs to the design team) which requires a certain knowledge of the skills of each department, and actively collaborates with all the creative departments (lighting, costume, SFX, VFX) in addition to the design departments.
9. The PD is responsible for a lot of money.
10. The PD leads the design team and hires the art director, decorator, prop-master, location manager, construction and paint supervisors, sculptors, greens-man...
11. The PD oversees the design of sets, choice of locations, furniture, props...
12. The PD is instrumental in choosing the color palette of the film, in collaboration with decorator, DP and costumer, based on the emotional and historical need of the story.

How did you first get involved with production design? What have you discovered about your own career as a PD that you wouldn't have anticipated when you began?

I got involved in production design entirely by accident. I was an artist turned graphic designer working in the music industry, and started working in film when some of those bands began to want me to design their videos as well as their record sleeves. The directors I worked with in videos took me into commercials, and then the commercial directors started working in film. There's countless things in my career I never anticipated - first of all that I could make a career doing this at all.

Beyond that, the delight of working in these four dimensions - space plus time, when I originally considered myself a 2-D artist. And the pleasure of working as part of an integrated team, where the sum of the whole is always greater than the parts - it's some kind of alchemical process.

What do you take into consideration before signing on for a project? What kinds of movies do you find most challenging?

Every film I've done has seemed impossibly daunting at the start and that has been the challenge. I really wouldn't consider a script that seemed to have an easy solution - I'm bored too easily. I usually try to avoid a genre of film that I've recently worked in, and if a script is set in a genre, subject or period I've never explored then I'm likely to be attracted to it. If it's well written. The two most important considerations for a designer are the script and the director. A great script is always a great attraction, and hard to refuse if offered because there are so few great scripts, but a great director can always turn an average script into an exceptional one. An other consideration is where the film is shooting. Unless the story demands it, I'm reluctant to do a film away from Los Angeles because I think this city has the best crews and great resources.

Where do you go for inspiration? Do you ever venture outside of film?

Film is in fact the last place I look for inspriration. I feel it's already a medium that's too self-referential. I think my first source is art history - sculpture, painting, and photography. After that, architecture. But I'm always interested in casting wide for inspriration (and self-education), and throwing random elements into the mix. For example in The Affair of the Necklace, which is set in 18th century Paris, I looked at a lot of photography from the 1930's, and contemporary American photography of 19th century interiors. I look for inspiration more in atmosphere and texture than in accurate historical reference.

Does your level of expertise as PD affect your movie watching, or is it relatively easy to lose yourself in a film?

Except for films I've worked on, I'm glad to find that I can still easily lose myself in a film. In fact, I usually have to watch a film a few times before I can concentrate on the craft aspects of it.

You mention that sometimes the PD begins his work on the film before even the writer, director, or producer. At what point in the process did you start working on Minority Report? How did you become attached?

I was working on a remake of Fahrenheit 451 for Mel Gibson, which went down as films in early pre-production often do. The same week Steven Spielberg was looking for a production designer, and one of Mel's producers was a friend of Bonnie Curtis, Spielberg's producer. The kind of great good fortune you can never plan! I started working on Minority Report right at the start of Steven's involvement, and the same day that the writer started. So we knew that initially we would be designing contextually rather than specifically, and a large part of our early design effort went into creating a world for Spielberg and Scott Frank to weave the story through.

On Minority Report, you obviously dealt with a lot of different people every single day. How did your experience on that film compare to some of your past projects? Being a high-budget science fiction film, did that make your job harder or easier?

This was the hardest film I've worked on in one way at least - there were so many people involved in the process because of the scale of the film that it was impossible to stay close to all the day to day aspects of the design. We had an art department of about 20 designers, with four art directors, and up to 400 people building the sets at the peak of construction. You spend about the first hour of each day in pure design and for for most of the day you are in meetings and traveling from set to set. However, the cachet of working with Spielberg on a film like this allows you to access to fantastic resources, mostly in the great team that he collects around him, and you can design further and deeper because of it.

You've worked with some amazing directors - Fincher, Proyas, Gilliam, and now Spielberg. In what ways have those been similar experiences, and in what ways have they been different?

Of course, every director has their own style in their approach to the content of the story and in the way they work. What the directors you mention have in common is their clarity of vision and the strength of will to get that vision to the screen. Working with all these directors has been incredibly satisfying because each in their own way has pushed me and my crew further than we might have thought we could go. And although each director is strong, they all have the self confidence to set up the parameters of the vision and then let the design develop out of that, so that you have the best of both worlds - clear direction with a lot of freedom to push the limits of the design. Spielberg is amazingly focused but has a limited amount of time, so you strive to give him a very clear ideas of what you are doing in the hour every two to three weeks that you have with him. But during that hour you get more information than you might in a week with another director. David Fincher is very accessible and also extremely focused - he knows the size of the lens and the move of the camera six months before he shoots a scene - so you can design very specifically for him.

Specifically, what were some of the hardest challenges that you faced on Minority Report? Was there any one sequence in particular that required an unusual amount of preparation?

The hardest piece of the film was probably the car factory. The scene was written in the original script as a fashion show and didn't change until after we had started shooting, so we had to not only design a working car factory, but also the interior parts of the car, based on some sort of future engine technology that had to appear convincing and still carry the elements of danger needed for the narrative. Luckily Kawasaki (automotive robot manufacturers) decided to let us have a dozen robots and worked with us to adapt the heads to physically carry our car parts, or we would have been in trouble. We pre-vised the whole car factory sequence also, because it was an incredibly complicated meshing of design, Special Effects, Stunts, camera and acting. The tenement sequence was interesting because the shot itself was designed in the computer with Spielberg's camera moves attached to a 3D Technocrane built digitally and `moved to the key grip's specifications before any of the set was built. The set and the crane and track were then set up to exactly match the digital animation, and the final shot was accurate to within 1/2" of the original computer model.

"Pre-Vis" is a relatively new approach. Do you anticipate it becoming more commonplace in the future?

Pre-vis is a very logical outcome of the combination of storyboarding and visual effects, and has been a VFX tool for some years. The great thing now is that designers like Ron Frankel have made the tool accessible directly to designer, director of photography, and director. As such it's one of the most versatile advances in digital technology for film. The problem is that it's easily confused with either VFX or virtual walkthrough. It's really neither of these things - directors need to see it as a storyboarding tool that gives them LIVE interaction and a very accurate description of a shot, well in advance of standing on a set. DP's need to see it also as an accurate planning tool that can tell them and their crews a great deal about the space they will be lighting and shooting in. The way that the key grip used the Tenement Hotel pre-vis sequence in Minority Report to plan a complex crane move that was then put together side by side with the design of the set is a good example of this.

The data created in pre-vis has many very useful by products also. We can build in a sun path so the DP will know exactly where the sun will be on a specific date in relation to the set. It can send data to a motion control rig that will cut down enormously the on-set programming time. It allows art director to set up a translite as a computer built matte painting with a background that is in exactly the right scale to a pre-determined camera position in the set. Etc, etc...

Can you tell us a little bit about your next project? Will you be working with Ron Frankel again in the near future?

I'm in the middle of pre-production on The Cat In The Hat. And yes, Ron is designing the pre-vis for us under the guise of his new company Proof Inc. In this case, he is also involved in building fairly accurate 3D characters of the Cat, Thing 1 Thing 2 and the Fish - so the crew has a good idea what these sometimes fully CG characters will be doing in front of the camera long before they are placed there.

As a successful production designer in Hollywood, what are you goals for the future at this point?

To avoid getting bored. To stick with the most interesting and challenging directors and projects I can get my hands on. And to get better, and keep learning. Onward and upward.

 - Rafael Pujals