They’re turning the concepts on you, which is human nature to a large group. You lose the intimacy and the control and people step outside the box all the time and before you can stop them. It was more fun than doing, say, “Kingdom of Heaven,” which is probably the biggest production we did, or “Exodus,” with a huge art department and several countries with dozens and dozens in the art department. But there were six people in the art department doing all of that. It was a little bit too literate and too obscure and too unresolved. Unfortunately I think it wasn’t to the taste of a modern audience. The non-resolution of the story and the characters. It’s Cormac McCarthy world, the ambiguity of it. I loved “The Counselor.” I think it’s one of Ridley’s best.
OK, bad example! But “The Counselor,” for instance… I mean moving the unit in period, dressing blocks and blocks of New York City streets with hundreds of cars, signs and graphics. We were doing, fractionally, two-plus locations per day, and I don’t mean just around the corner.
Yeah but with “American Gangster,” for instance, you think smaller scale but you have to realize there were 155 different locations in 68 days of shooting plus eight days in Thailand. From something like “Gladiator” to, say, “American Gangster.” And then back to something like “Prometheus,” which is this big build. Speaking of which, within Ridley’s work, you do have these interesting jumps in scale. And how do you cope with that? Don’t ask me. You go from doing “Se7en” and then you end up doing “Gladiator” and suddenly there’s a whole kind of exponential, quadratic jump of scale. The richness of lighting, the conception of scale. So you apply that only in a longer version to a film. You know, “How do you tell a story in 30 seconds?” There’s got to be a lot of visual information, a lot of dense visual cues to people to tell a story in a very short period of time. How the set dressing, the density of which, the detail of which, contributes to the storytelling, which comes out of commercials. Well, it saves a lot of breath! But I think, whatever the genre is, there’s a kind of vocabulary of elements, whether it’s lighting or shape language, to use a phrase, and how you can apply that to any genre. What does that consistency do for your work? It’s interesting to talk to the two of you, who have such consistent collaborations with filmmakers like this. I spoke to Michael Kahn recently, Steven Spielberg’s longtime, virtually exclusive editor. There’s also an evolution of a shorthand vocabulary and it’s just easy to work with him. Well because he does different genres and interesting projects one to the next. So how does Ridley keep you on such lockdown? I think also his usual designer was ill or unavailable so I got the call for “Se7en.” That’s all I remember doing was a bunch of Nike spots. I did something in London but not in this country. What about music videos? Did you work on those at all? I was already on the film under contract so I got unionized.Īnd that’s how I got to work with Ridley because the next thing I know I’m in the union and I can work with him on features. So anybody on the film had to be in the union consequently. And then Brad Pitt came along and he had a limo in his contract and the limo had a union driver. That was how I met Fincher and I worked on several commercials with him for a while, and then suddenly out of the blue came this project called “Se7en,” which was an indie film at the time. You’re coming over to Propaganda with me because I’ve got a job with David Fincher and they need a designer because there was an illness and the guy that was supposed to do it wasn’t physically able to do it.” So it was an emergency.
where I was living at the time when one of his producers came up to me and said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I’m just doing my petty cash receipts and I’m traveling back to London.” She said, “No you’re not. I had just finished doing a job with Ridley’s company and I was preparing to go back to the U.K. So I was obliged to work on commercials because it was the only thing I was allowed to do. After the British cinema industry collapsed under Margaret Thatcher, I came here and I couldn’t get arrested for American films for the fact that I had no American credits.