Setting the stage: an interview with Dean Tavoularis.

Production design is one of the least discussed and most underrated of the cinematic arts. The production designer (often formally credited as art director) can be extremely influential in creating the overall mood and visual tone of a film. No production designer has been as highly honored as Dean Tavoularis, legendary for his twenty-five year collaboration with Francis Coppola. Tavoularis has also worked with notable directors such as Arthur Penn on Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, Wim Wenders on Hammett, and Michelangelo Antonioni on Zabriskie Point. He won an Oscar for The Godfather Part II and received four additional nominations for Apocalypse Now, The Brink's Job, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and The Godfather Part III.

At the 38th Thessaloniki Film Festival, Tavoularis was honored with the Alexandros Award for life achievement, which was presented by Irene Pappas on behalf of the International Greek Film Network. Coppola sent a video in which he discussed his work with Tavoularis, stating that, on those rare occasions when they had a different take on a problem, he learned that Tavoularis was usually right. On the occasion of the event, Cineaste talked with Tavoularis about his work.

Cineaste: How did you get started? We suspect most people don't quite know what production design is all about.

Dean Tavoularis: Well, when I first started in film, I didn't know either. When I looked at movies, I never thought about the work done by an editor or cinematographer. I was only exposed to these realities by working for the Disney Studios as an animator. At first I thought being hired there was a great break. People from all over the world were constantly applying for jobs. After a year I felt disillusioned. I was always working on some fragment, some piece of something. I never had the feeling of accomplishment, so I told them I wanted to leave.

They looked at the portfolio I had given them when I arrived and they saw that, although my educational background mainly consisted of art and painting, I also had taken a lot of courses in architecture. They suggested that instead of terminating, I should transfer to the art department. Of course, you can say all of Disney was an art department, but, in the industry, the art department is where they do set design. They said they were beefing up their live-action work. They had done some films in England and were building stages in Burbank and starting live-action production.

Cineaste: They must have had high regard for you.

Tavoularis: No, it wasn't that. Not wanting people to leave was characteristic of the studio, which is kind of endearing. Most businesses aren't like that. That was part of Walt Disney's legacy. He tolerated a lot from his talent. He accepted the reality that most of his artists were eccentric. Many times I heard that people had gone on binges or done something really stupid and went in to resign. Disney would tell them to take two months off. He'd say: We'll keep you on the payroll; dry out, do whatever you have to do. Otherwise, I suppose he would have lost creative people. On Friday afternoons, half the studio was gone. Well, I switched to the art department and that proved much more to my liking. I was making models, doing drafting, and going out on stages, almost like an apprentice. That was my film school. I learned about projection, different lenses. I learned how films are made.

Cineaste: Do you think that kind of on-the-job training is superior to film-school training?

Tavoularis: I think so, but I never went to film school. I imagine film school is like any school. In the workplace, it's the real thing happening. There's a special excitement you can't get anywhere else. Everything counts, the good things you do and the errors. I think it can't be beat.

Cineaste: At what point in the filmmaking process does a production designer usually get involved?

Tavoularis: Every film is different, but we usually start to function before most of the other departments. I think you need a minimum of twenty weeks to do a good job, and you have to have most of it done before the others can do their work. Certain directors like you to start very early, so you become part of the process of how the film develops and unfolds.

Cineaste: Do the sound people and cinematographers have much say in those early decisions?

Tavoularis: Not really. We usually go to them. The cinematographer starts two or three weeks before shooting. By then we've already selected locations and laid out sets and probably begun construction. When they come on, we go back to look at all the locations. Technical issues are paramount. If you're in an old building, you need to know if you have the necessary electric power. The windows and the lighting are always worrisome, so we try to anticipate problems when we first scout the locations.

If you are on the twenty-third floor, for example, and it's a straight drop, you have to cable up, which is difficult. If you have a day and a night scene in an office way up, the cinematographer may want to put lights outside. You can forget that if you are twenty stories straight up, so you want to be on lower floors. But if you need to be way up to get a river view, you look for a building that has something that juts out on the twenty-second floor so you can use it as a platform to light up the twenty-third.

Cineaste: Do you have other people look first and preselect the best prospects?

Tavoularis: That's a recent thing and it's kind of nice. When I first started, there were no location people. You'd put together your department and start the designs and then go out and look for locations. Someone on the production team would contact the building manager and find out about the ownership and we'd work it out. Nowadays, on some films, there might be twenty location people. I've personally never worked with more than about half a dozen on a film. Once you work out who owns the building, who lives in it, and all that, you get insurance and you start working with the police. Another problem is that American companies have grown so large. In Europe, you have two vans and maybe twenty people. In America you have maybe forty trucks and a couple hundred people. So you need lots of space. You need a base camp. You have to feed everyone. You have to cater to your actors. So it's quite a task, much like being quartermaster at the site of a military battle.

Cineaste: Is that the process you went through for the roof shots in Godfather II?

Tavoularis: That was before we had these location people. I had an assistant and we had sixteen locations to set up. I had a street in mind from photos I'd seen. What you see in the film is not Little Italy but an area in the Ukrainian district around Tenth Street and First Avenue. I wanted to be able to look down the street without making major changes. Then we dealt with doing cutouts, blocking out water towers, bagging the traffic lights, and making the blocks in the distance seem of the same time period. Luckily we had no big buildings to obstruct the roof view. All we had to deal with were some TV antennas.

Cineaste: Would you give another example?

Tavoularis: When I was doing The Brink's Job in Boston we had to deal with five different time periods. We shot in the garage where the robbery actually took place. I can't remember if it was exactly the same safe or a twin, but we had to get it shipped from St. Louis. Naturally, it weighed tons. We had to build the locker rooms and different chain-link fence areas. In reconstructing the robbery, we had to shoot through windows, but Billy Friedkin didn't want to deal with all the neighbors when doing night shots. You couldn't have lights turning on and off, and you couldn't keep all those windows dark for hours at a time. So we built a cyclorama around that school playground with cutouts of all the buildings for the night scenes. We shot the real thing in the day and put the cyclorama up at night. It was 200 feet in radius. We had a TV antenna problem there, too. They were all coming down except for one big antenna. I told my crew that, if that big one stayed up, it didn't matter if the others came down or not. Well, it turned out the owner was a bookie and the antenna was his national link. But we worked that out.

Cineaste: Nowadays, for other periods you'd need to add antennas.

Tavoularis: If you look at the rooftops in Thessaloniki, you'll see that they are bristling with TV antennas. This is what it was like in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. When cable came in, the rooftops changed. So if you have a film set in that time period, you need to put up antennas.

Cineaste: What are the special problems of a period piece that goes back more than a few decades?

Tavoularis: I think of it as having more opportunities. It falls on you to design the environment for every set. If you're doing a contemporary picture, you might want to repaint a restaurant, but sometimes the producer doesn't want to spend an extra nickel and says it's authentic as it is. When it's a period movie, you can insist that, to be historically true, it must be painted a certain way. So the set designer gets more clout.

Cineaste: Do you use period books?

Tavoularis: Oh, yes, that's another area I like. There are various research departments in Los Angeles and elsewhere. You can make a list of books you want. Or you make a list of topics, like the digging of subways under New York. What did it look like? You start getting pictures of donkeys hauling dirt and portraits of the immigrant labor.

Cineaste: Studios used to have departments for that.

Tavoularis: MGM had a department until recently. Warner Bros. still has. Mainly you have independent people. Francis [Coppola] has a specialist he likes to use for his research. If she doesn't have the books, she gets them. We have film libraries and other agencies. You break down the script and make a list of what you need.

Cineaste: Do you prefer to go on location or to build a set?

Tavoularis: I prefer to build. When you read a script, you start getting images. You feel certain sequences require specific elements you can visualize. So when you look at locations, you look for those elements. You can have considerable freedom. You can knock out walls and rearrange the landscape. But your problem-solving is restricted. You have to accommodate something already in existence to your thinking. Whereas, if you're building it, you can get exactly what you want. Most of the time, it's not one or the other.

Cineaste: Would you give an example?

Tavoularis: The temple for Apocalypse Now. In some versions, it was to be blown up. The difficulty was that, if it was going to be blown up, we would need to build it one way and, if not, another way. We had to use water buffalo for that, an idea I got from looking at pictures in National Geographic. I realized we had to build a road down to a river but that trucks could go only so far. No cranes could be used. So we had water buffalo with sleds and we had these men build the set pretty much as they built other things. I guess you'd say it was very authentic. We had 600 people working on that set.

Cineaste: Where you in the Philippines for the whole ordeal?

Tavoularis: I had three birthdays on that picture! We had to build props that were a mixture of grass, straw, mud, and a crumbly kind of cement. We had molds for the structures. The mud went in first and then the crumbling cement. We numbered the pieces and stacked them. Working at it day and night was truly apocalyptic. There were plastic sheets over various areas. It was always raining. It was always hot. Hot and raining; raining and hot. We constantly churned out banners and totem poles. Filipinos can carve anything. We made jewelry out of bullets and beer cans. We just made it up as we went along. It was a mixture of Montagnard stuff and jewelry and costumes native to the group working with us. They were not ethnic Philippine, just as the Montagnards were not ethnic Vietnamese. There was a woman there, now a scriptwriter, who bussed them to us. We had designated an area for them, with houses built on stilts like the homes of the Montagnards. After two or three weeks, they had carved things here and there. They had their pigs running around. They had cats. They had unpacked everything they had brought and seemed to have been there since the beginning of time. So we just used it.

Cineaste: Hurricanes were another ungovernable factor.

Tavoularis: Well, yes, we were on the shore of the China Sea. Our set was a mile and half long with a supply station. Just before we were going to shoot, we got hit by the hurricane, and we had to rebuild everything. We went to a different spot that was supposedly less likely to be hit by storms.

Cineaste: How do you select films to work on? At this point in your career, you must have lots of options.

Tavoularis: Things just unfold. When you finish one, there seems to be another in line. Sometimes you have two to choose from. I mean, there are maybe a half-dozen offers, but you can dismiss the bulk of them easily, and you may have two to seriously consider. Who the director is weighs heavily for me. I think it's safer and more satisfying to work with a great director, even if you don't like the material so much, than to take on great material with a director you don't know.

Cineaste: Do you read the script first or talk to the director?

Tavoularis: When you're first contacted about a film, they ask you to read the script. If you like it, then you meet with the director.

Cineaste: What kind of questions would you ask a director you hadn't worked with before?

Tavoularis: They usually ask me the questions. But I'd be concerned about the location. If it's a film set in New York, will it be shot there or will financing require we go to Toronto to shoot? Maybe they want to go to North Carolina or another of those right-to-work states. I'm concerned with the effect such budget choices would have on my work.

Cineaste: You can't make Greensboro look like New York.

Tavoularis: You can't make Montreal look like New York. I prefer to be in the city being filmed.

Cineaste: You recently completed Bulworth with Warren Beatty.

Tavoularis: Yes, Warren plays a California senator in that. I always like working with him, but he's one of those directors who tend to go on a bit in the talking stage. I was working with him on Dick Tracy for so long that I finally left to work on another film. That was the segment Francis did for New York Stories. I could have gone back to the Tracy project, but I didn't. So this was a chance to work with him again.

Cineaste: Once the shooting begins, are you still on the set or is your work mainly done?

Tavoularis: I'm still there. You attack the first third of the film to be shot, then you move to the next third. If there are complicated sets farther down the line, you work on those as soon as you can. Usually it's best to do the locations first and save the interiors for later. So you build what is called a cover set, which they can use in case of bad weather. Or you may have to deal with an actor problem. You may have someone for only a few weeks, so you must have those sets ready for that time period. I stay pretty immersed from beginning to end.

Cineaste: Do you have to make many changes due to changes in the script or things you forgot to handle?

Tavoularis: Well, as little as possible. On Bulworth there was a shot where this guy is pushing a hotel cart with a bottle of Chardonnay in a stainless steel container. Just as they were shooting, I took the bottle off and substituted another. Warren asked what I was doing. I explained that the first one was sweating. So maybe you don't repaint, but you must pay attention to detail.

Cineaste: Do costumes change much at the set design stage?

Tavoularis: Again, mostly not. I work closely with the costume designer and I've done costumes myself. You might work out a color scheme for a set and then find it doesn't work out, or the actor won't wear that color, or it just doesn't look good. That's a constant struggle, but people are usually quite reasonable.

Cineaste: Has computer technology altered what you do?

Tavoularis: I don't do computer-generated stuff. I am not interested in the big effects movie. If you do those kinds of films, the special-effects people just take over and use you like a gas station. They need a twelve-foot sofa that's four feet deep to hide their equipment. You end up changing sets to accommodate them. The other side of it is when you hit a problem and think computer-generated imagery might help. They do a cost analysis and tell you it's just too expensive. You can do it better by going up there with a saw and hammer.

Cineaste: Do you think the art of production design is properly

appreciated by the public?

Tavoularis: Maybe we are more appreciated within the industry than outside. The public reacts to the film and they appreciate what I do by appreciating the quality of the film.

Cineaste: What would you tell a moviegoer to look for that would help them better appreciate your art?

Tavoularis: In most cases, you don't want people to notice what you've done. You want the set to enhance whatever the emotion in the scene is. There are exceptions, of course, but the moviegoer should not particularly notice the set. If it's working, you will feel something from the color, shapes, and environment we've put together that help tell the story.

Dan Georgakas is coeditor of The Encyclopedia of the American Left

Barbara Saltz is a free-lance writer living in New Jersey