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Anton Furst - Production Designer
by Esther Eley, as featured in the August 1989 issue of Film Review
Posted by raleagh on Tue, 30th October 2007 at 10:03am
This article has been viewed 176 times
'Production Designer' is one of those film credits that few people can fathom. The more enlightened may know that it's something to do with set design. But actually it goes much deeper than that. The production designer's job is to create a film's own peculiar visual illusion of reality. Less loftily, he is responsible for everything seen by the camera except for the performers.
Anton Furst is one of Britain's handful of top production designers. He has a distinguished track record, his latest project being the hotly-awaited Batman, out this month. His other films include The Company Of Wolves, Full Metal Jacket and High Spirits. What draws Furst to a project? "It attracts me when something requires original thought," he says. "When you know you've got to construct a new reality and transport people into it. It's such a wonderful challenge". "I like to work within the vocabulary of cinema because it has its own reality."
Anton with the Batmobile
The director selects and hires the production designer at a very early stage, to allow enough time for the planning and construction of sets in advance of shooting. Furst says: "On Batman, I started eight months before anybody else, and finished three months after them, because I was still looking at the composite shots resulting from all the special effects."
What research does the production designer undertake? "If the job is sheer fantasy, then I usually call on my own resources," Furst says. "I have an art training, so I have quite a lot of resources up my sleeve. But, when you're talking about something like Full Metal Jacket" then there's an unbelievable amount of research to do. We looked through about 6,000 photographs and then catalogued everything, from helicopters to peasant and town life."
For a film shot on location, the finding of suitable sites is a critical aspect of the production designer's work. Location managers are called in and shown all the available material on the project. Then they go off and photograph appropriate locations. A short-list is drawn up by the production designer, who will then help the director view and make his mind up. But the preparation and scope for disaster doesn't end with the finding of a location. "You've got to set up something you can build on," Furst says. "You can't build on wood, so you've got to build sub-structure frames and scaffold tubes, and you've got to put in sunken concrete tiles to hold it up. "The classic example would be The Mission where they built a village on the side of a hill in Colombia - and it slid down it!"
Batman, however, was filmed almost entirely at Pinewood Studios, near London. Studio production offer the advantage of ideal working conditions, with crew and facilities all close at hand. Furst comments: "We decided in the very early stages with the main Batman set, Gotham City, to construct it as a reality of its own. We weren't going to mix location and studio filming." Furst was given $51/2m to design Batman, a dark, heavy adaptation not of the camp 1960s TV series, but of the more disturbing DC comic-book strip. As mentioned, the setting is the fictional Gotham City.
"It's a place which is dog-gone," says Furst. "If you took the worst aspects of New York, and worsened them, you'd probably get a Gotham City. "So I thought we'd go back to the turn of the century; and imagine what New York might have become had there been no planning permission, and no concern about the quality of life for people in the city." The skyscraper sets treated a shadowy 'canyon' effect.
The first step in set design is the sketches. "Maybe the most important thing is to try and find out what the film's spirit and tone is, and what the director feels," reckons Furst. " And then to try and visualise that." The script is then broken down into sets essential for the live action of the film - both full scale and those that can be constructed in model form - and the effects that should be employed.
Although Furst comes from a special-effects background, he doesn't over-rate their use in filmmaking. Commenting on computerised motion control photography he says: "You use it when there's no other way of doing it. It almost gets to the point where you're fascinated by the technique rather than the image it produces. "We had to use it on Batman. But most of the film was done on '0' Level physics. What we wanted to do was to give people images that they wouldn't forget."
The next stage in planning is storyboarding, which is done by the production designer and a storyboard artist in conjunction with the director. "We draw the film frame by frame - close-ups, medium shots, wide shots, all sorts of shots. You're talking about eight months of work there. "Then you take the storyboard and think: how do I do that shot? You've got the full-size Batmobile, with a burning factory in the background that's got to be a model. And in the mid-ground you've got sets. So you know it's going to be three composite images." These different elements will then be fused together to form one image. The flow of shots has also to be considered.
"I think you've got to orchestrate a film," reckons Furst. "Even with Batman we put in daytime shots, just to give relief, because you've got to think about the audience. You can't give them the same tone all the way through the film." The production designer is also responsible for employing the people to construct the sets, such as the head plasterer, chippies and riggers. The construction manager will keep the production designer up to date with the progress being made, and the production manager will ensure they follow the production designer's instructions.
But at what stage will the sets actually be constructed? "Everyone thinks that you build sets before you start shooting, which is not true. At Pinewood you've got six very big stages, and you need to turn those over. So you've got to work out a schedule where you build, strike, then build another set on the same stage. So we're constantly building throughout the whole filming." And what happens to old sets? "In the case of Batman, we built one very big Gotham City set which I understand is being kept, but that's only because of a potential sequel. Normally you've got to just ruthlessly strike it out. Nothing is kept."
The production designer, incidentally, is also responsible for all props. And he must still be available at the film editing stage in case extra shots need to be arranged. "I get editors coming to me saying: 'We need this - I haven't got a shot of Batman from his point of view looking down the street. I can't cut it together, so we need to do this...'."
The director has the power to accept or reject the work that a production designer puts forward. Are they difficult to convince? "It depends on the director," says Furst. Batman director Tim Burton chose me because he knew I had a similar philosophy to his. But it was a big film so he had a huge amount on his hands. "So it was very much left up to me. Sometimes I gave him about six alternatives and he always went straight to the one I liked, so there was never a problem. "I had an experience on one film where I loathed the director. I think that when it gets to a situation where you totally disagree, it's impossible and you should leave the picture." |
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