JOHN MYHRE C H I CAG O “With Chicago, we were tasked with building two separate worlds. One was the real world of Prohibition-era Chicago, and the other was a fantasy world of theatre and glamour. That was the fun of the movie. When Roxie [Renée Zellweger] would retreat into her mind, she saw a very theatrical version of the world. That was Rob Marshall’s idea from the get-go. We used to have ‘transition meetings’, where we discussed how to segue from the real world to the fantasy world. You know, a lamp in Roxie’s apartment would become a lamp in a sleazy nightclub. How does a courtroom become a circus? “A lot of our inspiration for Chicago came from old gangster films from the 1930s. It better suited the storytelling to draw from the glamorous images of that world. It had to be fairly realistic but still fanciful. Some of our key images came from a painter, Reginald Marsh, who created these theatrical paintings of dancing girls. It gave us our colour palette and inspired some of the images we used in the movie. We didn’t want the movie to look like museum pieces come to life; we wanted it to look seedy, lived-in. The old, faded glory of a crumbling theatre, age and decay. “I’ve worked predominantly on period movies. Right now, I’m prepping a remake of The Thin Man, again with Rob Marshall. It’s set in New York in 1932, which is wildly different from our conception of New York at that time. I was surprised. Did you know that in downtown Manhattan in 1932, people were still driving horse-drawn carriages? In the 1930s, the poor of New York created a tent city called ‘Hooverville’ right in the middle of Central Park. I have a photo, and you’d think it was a visual effect. We just thought, ‘We have to use it. People won’t expect it.’ It’s one of my favourite things: to surprise people, showing them things they’d never expect.”
LAURENCE BENNETT THE ARTIST “I took a call from my agent asking me if I wanted to do, in his words, a ‘crazy little project’. ‘It’s in black and white,’ he said, ‘French director, no stars attached.’ ‘Great,’ I said, ‘get me the script.’ ‘Yeah but Laurence,’ he said, ‘it’s a silent movie.’ ‘Get me the fucking script,’ I said. I was intrigued. As soon as I read it, I knew it was something very special. Big? No. No one could possibly have foreseen what would happen to it. “It was a real pleasure to design a silent movie. It’s a purely visual form of communication, which makes your job all the more important. But at the same time, it was like any other movie in that the design begins and ends with the story. You must never upstage the actors. So it was a delicate balancing act. As far as period went, the trick was to be as authentic as possible without taking the audience out of the movie; to be true to the spirit of the period, rather than the letter. “Working in black and white was hard. We had endless film tests for sets, costumes and material to make sure they looked right in black and white. I have never worked as closely with a director of photography as I did on this movie. When you lack colour and hue, you have to rely on light, texture and patterns. And we were still testing materials as the movie was shooting. “But we actually created many of the sets in black and white. I couldn’t resist it. Everything that was the real world was coloured as it would be in the real world. George’s apartment was designed naturalistically, as real as it could be. But all the film sets were decorated in a palette of greys, blacks and whites as much as possible. “Period stuff on no money is hard. On this movie, I think we had a budget of around $11 million. It’s not much in Hollywood terms. It limits your options; you have to make smart choices. And on this, it wasn’t just money, it was time. It was a 35-day shoot with only eight weeks of prep – not nearly as much as I would have liked. But it proved to me that good, solid movies will overcome their constraints. This was really a labour of love. And faith.”
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