BEFORE THE DUST SETTLES; PRODUCTION DESIGNER WORKS WITH COSTNER TO ACHIEVE POST-APOCALYPTIC LOOK FOR `POSTMAN'.

Byline: Rick Lyman The New York Times

There has been some kind of global holocaust, part nuclear, part chemical. The big cities are all gone; the electricity's off; cars have long since run out of gas. A few people scrabble for sustenance in isolated settlements, surrounded by society's rubble.

But what does this world look like?

Is it futuristic? Prehistoric? Have they dismantled what remained of the old world and used it to build new, bizarre structures?

Ida Random, 52, answers questions like that for a living.

Random is production designer for ``The Postman,'' an adventure set in the post-apocalyptic year 2013 and the first film Kevin Costner has both directed and starred in since ``Dances With Wolves'' (1990), which won seven Academy Awards, including one for his direction.

In ``The Postman,'' which opens Dec. 25, Costner plays a wandering loner who stumbles upon an abandoned postal van. Donning the postman's uniform and toting a bag of old letters, he wanders into a settlement claiming to represent a new government in hopes of being offered a free meal.

So eager are the townspeople to believe him that a kind of postal cult grows up around him, and he is drawn into a battle with the thugs who control the region.

It is a film that relies not only on a strong central figure - the reluctant hero played by Costner - but also on the texture and depth of its production design.

``It's 16 years after the war, the Earth is starting to come back, but all this old stuff from before the war has been out in the open all those years,'' Random said. ``So we ask ourselves, What would you still find lying around? Plastic bottles. Abandoned cars coated with dust. And what would the skies look like? We thought a lot about what the skies would look like.''

They've got the look

Production design is one of those disciplines that come somewhere in the middle of the opening titles, after the stars but before the half-dozen producers.

It's a job that moviegoers see listed up on the screen without necessarily grasping the day-to-day reality of what goes into it. And it is a job that has grown increasingly important in recent years as Hollywood has continued to move toward bigger, more lavish films that aim less for verisimilitude than for a very particular look and feel.

``The designer is ultimately, along with the director, responsible for what you see on the screen,'' said Jim Wilson, one of the film's producers. ``Every interior and every exterior is Ida's responsibility, not only the buildings and the edifices but the wardrobe, the hair, the makeup, the props. It is the total design of the picture, the whole palette. In many ways, in films like this, her role is second only to that of the director.''

Random, who has been a production designer since she held that job on ``The Big Chill'' in 1982, helps the screenwriter and the director dope out how to turn their script into a physical reality - and how to use that physical reality to help tell the story.

``In `Postman,' the look of the world is kind of revealed to you as the movie goes on,'' said Random, who resembles a blond and grown-up Annie Hall. ``Everything is just rusted and ruined. The skies are a color we've never seen before. The design itself doesn't seem that huge, but the work in getting it to look old was amazing.'' In one scene at an old car lot, for instance, dozens of cars had to be sprayed with a ghostly coating of dust and ersatz chemical residue.

Old friends

It was September of last year when Random got a phone call from Costner asking if she wanted to become part of ``The Postman.'' She'd met him on ``The Big Chill,'' (he played the corpse) and they later worked together again on ``Silverado'' and ``Wyatt Earp.''

``He just called me and asked me if I wanted to do this movie, which was really exciting for me,'' she said. ``It's a movie that I think is going to be different than people are expecting. People think it's going to be really spacey and bizarre looking, because it's in the future, but Kevin's concept is really much more'' - she paused to search for the word - ``down-to-earth.''

That's how it works for production designers, Random said. It usually begins with a phone call, often from a filmmaker you already know.

Then there are meetings, lots of meetings, to talk about the look of the film, to brainstorm some of the small design elements. Sketches are drawn, hundreds of them, shown to the director, approved or disapproved, redrawn or sent to the set builders.

Nuts-and-bolts questions are asked: Which scenes will be shot on location and which in the studio? Which shots can utilize buildings or natural features that already exist? Which will need fresh sets to be built? Which will be done with visual effects? And how much will each set cost to build? (``Basically, I get together with the director and the art coordinator, and we start throwing money at each set.'')

Steve Tisch, one of the producers, said the budget was ``less than half'' of the $200 million reportedly spent on ``Titanic,'' another Christmas film.

If it's a location film, there are trips to various sites to help pick out camera locations and visualize how the proposed sets will fit into the actual landscape.

Sets are built under the production designer's watchful eye. Bits of debris or decoration are collected, properly aged and placed on the set.

Changing landscapes

Sometimes the director will get to the location and decide that what had been a cliffside shot will now be filmed on a bridge. So more sketches are made, and the set is redesigned.

``It's always a work in progress,'' Random said. ``You get ideas all the time. Kevin has endless ideas. I'm never finished drawing sketches until the movie is wrapped.''

If it's a film with a significant number of computer-generated effects (there are about 100 in ``The Postman,'' she said, some of them ``very small and subtle''), the production designer gets involved in those discussions as well.

Any landscapes or structures of weird creatures added to the movie in post-production special effects must meld with the overall design of the film, and it's the production designer's job to make sure they do.

In a field dominated by men who tend to be detail-driven, Random, her colleagues say, brings more of a flair to her projects.

``There are plenty of designers who are very orderly,'' Wilson said. ``Ida Random isn't all about order. She is a little about mayhem, which is what's great about her. She can be a little flighty, a little loose with the drawing, but that's OK because she's a little more artistic than the rest.''

By October of last year, a month after Costner's call, Random was meeting with him to discuss ``minor concepts,'' she said. She had pushed much of her first sketches ``in more of a futuristic direction,'' she said, and found that the director was more interested in keeping the film rooted in the real world of today.

``He just kept asking, What if we had a war today and then we jump forward 16 years?'' she said. ``We'd see all the stuff that we see around us now, except older and more decayed and falling apart. That's the vision he was after.''

So she did more sketches, scouted locations in five states, hired her crew in November and spent December and January working in Los Angeles before filming started in Arizona in March. Shooting continued in Washington state and Idaho before wrapping up in July.

There were 80 separate locations for ``The Postman,'' about 20 of which were so generic (``the side of a road,'' for instance) that no sketches were needed. But for the others, sketches were made, approved, transformed into workable blueprints and sent to the construction department.

``I really like working with directors, like Kevin, who are also actors,'' Random said. ``It's a different frame of mind that they go about it with, and they are more focused on the scene, the acting part. They trust you more to take care of the visuals for them.''

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Photo

Photo: Kevin Costner's character is embraced as a cult hero by the people in a small outpost in ``The Postman.''