BACKGROUND

How did you start working in film?

Sarah: I've only ever worked in film, I've never had a proper job. A very long time ago when I was a student at university I used to work at the Edinburgh Film Festival. I thought it might be interesting to do something more with film, but I didn't know what I wanted to do at the end of my course. During my last term at university there was this notice that went up looking for volunteers at the National Film and Television School at Beaconsfield in England. I thought I'd go along and have a look at that because they needed people to do the art department for them at that time. I knew a couple of people there who I'd met at Edinburgh, and that was it really, I just walked into the stage and thought, this is what I want to do, I don't want to do anything else.

After I helped out there, I got a job working as an art department junior. That was a time when there were a lot of big American productions coming into the UK, like Labyrinth and White Nights, and I did this thing called Young Sherlock Holmes with Barry Levinson as the director, which was my first big production. I made a lot of tea, made a lot of prints from drawings, and from then on just worked my way up the ladder, really; so I've been doing it for quite a long time.

What was your break where you became an art director?

Sarah: It's difficult to say because I actually live here in Berlin, I moved here 12 years ago now, so it's not like there was one big picture. It was more of an organic thing where you work your way up the ladder, and then maybe you get the chance to be an art director on a smaller movie, and then you might go back to a bigger movie and be in a slightly lower position, but it doesn't matter because you're always learning. You do a little bit more on smaller pictures and perhaps have a little less responsibility on a bigger film. Coming here 12 years ago with English training was a pretty good thing to have, and certainly in the last 3 or 4 years my career has really kicked off here because we've had so many productions coming in.

The early ë90s in Berlin was the best time to come, it was a kind of free for all, really, in terms of the city and what you could do in the city. It was a fantastic time, the wall had just come down, there were a lot of buildings standing empty, nobody really knew who they belonged to, there were a lot of alternative events and clubs and theaters. Things moved into these empty buildings and took them over, and some of them are still there, most of them are gone, actually, but some of them are still there to this day. It was a really cool time to be in Berlin; some of the best years of my life.

Have you been working a lot at Studio Babelsberg?

Sarah: Yes, I've worked here a lot in the last 3 or 4 years, and before that certainly I did some work here as well. I have also done other work outside Babelsberg, but within Berlin I think this is definitely the best place to be if you want to be working on films. The other work tends to be smaller TV work, which is not quite so interesting from an art department point of view because you can't build as much; they don't have the stages anywhere else.

Also, there's an amazing history here at Studio Babelsberg. It's very interesting for me to see what's happened to the studios in the last 12 years, because obviously when I first came it was quite different to what it is now. I arrived in '93 so the wall had been down 4 years, but there was still a lot of the old system in place, and over the last 12 years I've seen that change and it's become a lot more competitive. It could also be more competitive, you never reach a point where you can say this is it. It has the competition from Prague and from Romania, and all these other places coming up now, so you always have to keep an eye on them.

I guess the breakthrough for Babelsberg as a studio was probably films like Enemy at the Gates and The Pianist, because that drew attention to the fact that one could make big films here successfully. At Studio Bablesberg I have been involved in Around the World in 80 Days, The Bourne Supremacy, Aeon Flux, and now V For Vendetta; it's great!

V FOR VENDETTA

What is your role on this production?

Sarah: I'm an art director on V for Vendetta, and I work underneath Owen Paterson who is the production designer, and Kevin Phipps the supervising art director.

How did you become involved with V For Vendetta?

Sarah: I got a call from Roberto Malerba (unit production manager) when I was working on Aeon Flux, and then I came over and met Owen. Aeon Flux was just finishing off and I actually got a job offer for V when I was finishing off that film, so it was fantastic and a very rare thing for me. After Christmas [2004] I just came straight to work on V.

Had you heard of the material before?

Sarah: No, I hadn't. I got the script first, before I got the graphic novel, so I read the script first, and then I saw the novel afterwards. I found it a fascinating story because the novel is set in 1980s Thatcherite Britain, which is a time that I know very well because I was there and very much involved in that anti-Thatcher feeling.

What were some of your thoughts on reading the script?

Sarah: When I read a script I'm looking at the sets and I'm thinking about what will potentially be a build and what will potentially be a location, without actually knowing from the production at that stage how they're planning to do it. What really interested me was the amount of sets; there were an awful lot of environments I could see were going to be built. I love building sets in studios, it's always much more interesting than doing stuff on location because you can develop ideas in a much greater way than you can when you're out on location. Also, it's quite a political film, so I'm very interested to see how it's going to be received on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the challenges is to educate an American audience on the historical references.

Sarah: Yes, of course, because everybody in Britain knows Guy Fawkes, you grow up with it as a child. That's also a very interesting idea: to take this historical figure and use this figure as a vehicle for explaining a different political situation in the future, or even for the original that was happening in Thatcherite Britain in the ë80s.

THE SHADOW GALLERY

What has been your experience in working on the Shadow Gallery?

Sarah: It's based on the undercroft of the law courts - the Old Bailey - in London, which I believe Owen visited when he was doing some reccies in London. It is a hidden place where V lives that has this vastness and these great perspectives, but at the same time it's hidden and it's under the earth, it's an area that you don't know about. One of the very interesting things about it is that you get a sense of this hidden but this very big space at the same time.

From a construction point of view it was a great set to build because there was an awful lot of plaster work in it. The plasterers here were really happy they had such a big set, they don't normally get the chance to do so much. It was quite challenging from a technical construction point of view, with all of the ribs, the vaulting, the ceiling pieces, and having to cut sections of the ceilings out. You have to apply camera and lighting requirements to the set, which are complicated things in themselves, so some of the sections of the ceiling had to come away like bits of orange peel.

That's always what's very interesting when you're building a set, particularly one like that: accommodating all those requirements within the original concept of what's been decided. Moving bits of the walls around on this was a little bit more complicated because the shapes were more complicated, there were no straight walls. Also, the set is just so big it ate props. I can't wait to see what it looks like on film.

Who sets the color scheme for a particular set, such as the Shadow Gallery?

Sarah: It comes from Owen because it's his call on what the look of it is, but that's obviously something he has discussed with the director [James McTeigue] and the DOP [Adrian Biddle]. Basically he decides what color it should be and also what textures it should have because the Shadow Gallery is a kind of neutral stone color. A lot of it is the textures, how old the stone is, and how much ageing we want it to have on it.

With something like the Shadow Gallery it would have been easy to take it in a completely different direction, where it might have ended up looking quite Disney-like, which is almost a too forced kind of ageing. What's great about it is that it has this restraint, and that came from Owen. When we were laying the flagstones he said we should soften up the edges on the stones, and I thought he meant we should take off the corners on things. I can see now, when you see the whole thing, if you start taking all the corners off every stone, then it does become this too forced kind of thing. It's just knowing when enough is enough, how far to go to make it look right, but stopping at a certain point so it doesn't become too much.

How closely do you work with the electricians in regards to the lighting?

Sarah: Very closely. There's always a discussion that has to be had with the Gaffer to find out how he is going to light it, we always give a copy of all of the drawings to the Gaffer so he can have a look at it and put his lighting rig into it. He always has a look at the models, and with something like the Shadow Gallery we did have to make holes in the ceilings so he could drop rigs into it where he was going to light in certain areas. Therefore, if you punch a hole into something like the Shadow Gallery, you then have to make a little decorative kind of grill that goes around it, so it becomes a ventilation grill or at least reads as something like that. Those sorts of issues have to be decided and discussed in advance.

OTHER SETS

Which of the other 80 plus sets have you found challenging?

Sarah: We have a TV studio, which couldn't have been more different to the Shadow Gallery because it's very modern, very clean, very anonymous, and very gray. It was deliberately built to be an absolute contrast to things like the Shadow Gallery that have a very different atmospheric feel to them, with much more light and shadow. The TV studio itself was quite a challenge because we had several different things going on: we built a TV studio within a studio, so we have a real live TV studio within the film studio situation, and we also have a control booth with all the different panels and mixing decks that go into that, plus an awful lot of video play back, link up and green screen that had to be thought about. Then we have the cutting of the TV studio door, which is this enormous and very thick metal door that has been made in various different stages for different parts of the cutting through.

I think the rest of the sets are smaller sets, there are some other big ones, but I've not been so involved in them. There are so many sets, we're tending to make smaller more flexible sets that we can adjust as much as we can because there is so much to build.

What sorts of challenges do smaller sets present?

Sarah: The prison cell corridor has this very dark, dark feel to it, and very grim, for want of a better word. When you're building things like cells or interrogation rooms, which are small spaces, you then have a logistical issue:: we want a small space, but how do we get all of the equipment and camera in there at the same time? What we actually ended up doing with the cell was to build it as a separate entity. We have the corridor and then the cell is built as a separate set, but when the film is cut together you won't actually know that. Physically we needed to have it separate so we could get the equipment and the camera and the lights in there.

It's all studio based, so every wall comes out and we can move it all around. We actually ended up building the cell up on a rostrum one meter high because we have some scenes when Evey is in front of the door of the cell reading the letter by the light that's coming underneath the door. So then we had to think how we were going to shoot that. Obviously you don't want to do that right on the studio floor because they're never going to get the camera down there, so then you build the whole thing up on a rostrum. We've actually got two different doors - we have a half that we're going to build so we have the option of raising the slit of light that comes in underneath so it can be smaller sometimes or bigger at other times. It's these technical requirements that we have to think about.

Has the short amount of pre-production time meant you make more decisions on set?

Sarah: When I was presented with the job I thought it was an awful lot to take on. Everybody understands that we have this date, the date when this film has to be released, and therefore you're working for that date and nothing and nobody can stop that. I think that creates a momentum in itself; you just have to dive in there and do it and start it. Perhaps on another film where you have more pre-production time you would have cleared up most questions in advance, but as it's worked out now, I think it's great. We're half way through; we're at the top of the mountain! The Germans always say when you're half way through, you're at the top of the mountain and it's downhill from there.

How does the flow of work go through the art department?

Sarah: Basically we have the pre-production time in the art department, where we're designing the sets, we're drawing them up, and discussing every step of the way with Owen, with the supervising art director Kevin Phipps, and with the construction manager. There are two art directors, I'm one and there's another one [Sebastian Krawinkel] - and we each get assigned projects. If the film was a building site we would be called project managers.

We get given a job and I manage the job, as it were, so I have certain sets that are mine and certain ones which belong to Sebastian, and we both look after ìourî sets. For example, Sebastian is doing the Larkhill location and I'm doing the interiors, so we talk to each other to check that his windows are the same as my windows and all that sort of thing. Then it basically becomes my responsibility to sort out all the tiny little details of every little thing that is in that set, everything that needs to be there at the right time on the right day.

Was any set more fun than the others?

Sarah: I got quite involved in the Deitrich TV chat show, which has been a lot of fun. We pre-shot news presenters who would be appearing on the show and giving their news reports on different scenes throughout the films. Deitrich's TV show itself is actually a scene that's going to be shot next week. I think it's going to be hilarious and we've had a lot of fun designing it. A lot of the stuff came from Larry and Andy [Wachowski, writers & producers] about what they wanted to see in it, and they had some really great ideas, some really funny things. We had an idea and started off, but in the end it turned out to be too expensive, so we had to throw out the first concept and start all over again, and what we've ended up with is something much better anyway. I'm interested to see it at the end of the day because it actually only turns up on a TV screen in the film, you don't actually ever see it for real.

It's also complete slapstick. It reminds me of the Benny Hill show - there were these comedy shows in Britain in the ë70s that had a particular style, and the way this has been written reminds me of what I grew up with. There is a difference between British humor and American humor and if you're going to do TV, and it's British TV, then I guess you have to get across that idea that it's that element of British comedy humor, albeit a very controlled one, because of the story within a story. The TV station is basically the government voice.

You have an Australian director and production designer, do you find their attitude different from say, German or British?

Sarah: Yes I do. We didn't have a lot of pre-production period on this film so there's more of a sense of just going for it. It's that ì no worriesî sense of not getting too agitated about everything because it's ultimately a waste of energy and at the end of the day, we've just got to try to work together to make this thing work. There's not a neurosis, which you sometimes find with American productions. This feels like much more of a team thing and very relaxed. If you can't manage something like strike a set within the allocated time-frame, it's accepted that you can't without making too much of a fuss about it.

How has it been working with James McTeigue?

Sarah: My contact comes more through Owen, however it's been very interesting working with James. I think he's had a tremendous amount to take on being a first time director with a short preparation time. He's doing an extremely good job and I think it's going to be very interesting to see what comes out at the end of it. I've been doing film a long time and I don't get that excited about actors and I don't have that much contact with them, but I do get a buzz out of working with Larry and Andy Wachowski. They have so much fun with the camera and such good ideas. There was an interesting thing in the medical block where we had been working on ideas for how to keep the prisoners in different cages. We'd had 6 or 7 different ideas as to how they were contained and one of the brothers took our model of the cage and turned it on its side. It was a really good idea, and it completely changed the whole thing, it became something you'd never seen before, something entirely new and totally interesting.

Thanks Sarah.