How One Battle After Another’s Production Design Team Created Sensei’s Apartment | Interview
ComingSoon Senior Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to One Battle After Another production designer Florencia Martin about the Paul Thomas Anderson movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Martin discussed how they designed the movie to be as realistic as possible, the process of creating Sensei’s apartment, and more.
“Washed-up stoner dad, Bob (DiCaprio), exists in a state of paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited, self-reliant daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti),” the synopsis reads. “When his evil nemesis (Sean Penn) resurfaces after 16 years and she goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her, father and daughter both battling the consequences of his past.”
One Battle After Another is now available to purchase on 4K UHD. It is also currently streaming on HBO Max.
Brandon Schreur: I want to start just by asking how you reacted to this project when it all came about. Paul Thomas Anderson is Paul Thomas Anderson, we all love him. But when you first got the script for One Battle After Another and you started working on this film, what excited you the most when it comes to tackling the production design? What made you want to be a part of this movie?
Florencia Martin: That’s such a great question, I love it. What’s incredible is the fact that I’ve worked with Paul on Licorice Pizza and some music videos. And we knew we wanted to film on location. I think the best thing I could say is that it was like stepping into the unknown. That is such an incredible act of trust and collaboration. You read the script, and it goes all over the place. You have structure — it’s an incredible script, and you know that Bob is going to go on this journey.
But what’s amazing is that Paul was receptive to collaborating with the locations and the people that we met along the way…Building these characters in live-time. So, for me, it has to be one of the most fulfilling and joyous ways that I’ve ever worked.
First of all, we had a long amount of prep. We had, like, two years to prep the film and scout. And the fact that we traveled through the vast majority of California by car, train, and plane. We went to real people’s houses and businesses and learned. Every single part of this story — from ham radios and hemp growing, to what it’s like to live in the Redwoods. For me, personally, just talking about design, [we’d then] infuse that into these characters and the environments that they live in that we were building from the ground up. We were trying to make them look seamless.
Something that was so great was the fact that we really wanted it not echo that we had a design theory. The design theory was to be raw and honest with what we were receiving and putting that back into the film. It’s all about creating a character, so, to go back to your question, what was really satisfying was that it was true process work. Just to take Eureka — going to the Redwoods, seeing what it was like to be isolated, meeting these people that lived this way who created outhouses out of their Redwood stumps, and who have collections of rocks and stained-glass windows. Traveling and seeing how people live in the desert, or going to real dojos, and then getting to recreate that from the ground up, and bringing things from Eureka, from a dojo up there — Sensei’s logo with the tiger.
That was our process. It was really from the ground up, starting with story and character, and then collecting, collecting, collecting.
Totally. And it’s all so effective; I just think it turned out so great. There are so many specific moments that are especially effective in this movie. One that I really want to ask you about is Sensei’s apartment, because I absolutely love that sequence. I was rewatching the movie earlier this week, and the line that really jumped out to me this time is when Benicio is walking around, and he’s like, ‘I’ll be in 24!’ Which implies all these other doors and rooms have these other things going on. There’s so much happening. Can you tell me what it was like bringing that whole thing to life? It looked so elaborate with the production design, since there’s so much going on. How did you go about tackling all of that?
It was, like, the absolute greatest…The vision that Sensei lives in this communal way, with his family. They busted through the walls and were living in this chain of apartments. Production design brain is like, ‘Okay, that’s a build.’ We have to manipulate a space like that. The first interior space that we walked into in El Paso was Perfumeria Genesis. And it was so magnificent; that was a space where were like, ‘Don’t touch a thing.’ Everything was perfect, including the people who got cast into that scene by Paul and Benicio. Because we took Benicio through a walk-through, and he started to build out his character. He was like, ‘You’re going to come over here and work the cash register! You guys, close up the shop!’ He just started running business in there. It was marvelous to see.
We were very fortunate that we were working with a local scout and architect who helped us transform the second floor of those buildings. The fact that we were able to actually build this huge hallway that led to these interconnected apartments, which were based on immigrant apartments that we had seen in El Segundo Barrio. It was just amazing — like one was the grandma’s space, one was the bachelor. Every apartment was identical, but each interior was completely its own creation. So, okay, that’s something great. The hallway was based on a hotel we once had. So, it was about magpieing and grabbing the best of what you see that tells a story.
Also, the best fun for me was stitching that all together to create that labyrinth for them. You go up the actual stairs of the perfume shop to their second floor, where we created the sanctuary space for all the immigrants that they’re helping. We did that in collaboration with the local church that did that — they allowed us to use all those materials and the artwork that the children had created for that space. That, for me, was really special work to be able to collaborate that way. But you go through that door to the business next door, which had a trap door that led to their bag store. Then we created the hallway to line up with that trap door. Then the door in the back led through a water closet to the flower shop, which was a block away. Then Bob goes through the flower shop and up onto the rooftops.
We scouted over 30 — I think we scouted every rooftop in El Paso. At the same time, all the civil unrest is happening, and then it ends with a very unceremonious splat from Bob. Or, double splat — the tree and then the taser. It was just an incredible sequence to be able to build.
Thanks to Florencia Martin for taking the time to discuss One Battle After Another.
Source: Comingsoon.net