We grab a quick word with acclaimed and accomplished production designer Sophie Becher to talk about her career.
“Practical Secrets of Production Design for Commercials & Features – with Sophie Becher (Heineken, Gucci) & Alice Normington (Suffragette)” will be held at Cinema Jam HQ at Collective Temperance Hospital on the 29th and 30th of October, from 10:00 to 18:00. Tickets are £259. Readers of the The Spread can use the promotional code ‘Spread10’, for a 10% discount. Click here for more info.
What first drew you to production design as a career?
I started out doing Art, and History of Art, at Edinburgh University. This consisted of an MA in Art History at the university and sculpture at Edinburgh Art College. I was doing a lot of theatre design for the fringe and beyond the fringe; even then I knew I wanted to get into film design. When I started out it was very hard to get into film. I tried as soon as I left Edinburgh but met with quite a bit of opposition from established union members therefore I went on to do a postgraduate degree in theatre design but as soon as I started I made it clear I actually wanted to do film. Quite a few production designers had undergone the course before, Gemma Jackson, Maria Djurkovic, Caroline Amies .The course supported me in pursuing this path and that’s how I started to really think seriously about working in film.
Do you remember your earliest stylistic influence?
Dr Zhivago.
Are there any films, like Dr Zhivago, that you would say are essential for people studying production design?
The films of Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The films of Ken Adam. The way Sarah Greenwood handled Anna Karenina was brilliant. I think she’s a very good designer, so look at her work. Stuart Craig was very clever in the way he did Harry Potter but that’s kind of a formula now. Inception for its cleaver mingling of sets and CGI.
A lot of production designers started out, like you did, studying theatre. Did you find that studying theatre first gave you a clearer path into film or would you have found it more beneficial to have studied film from the get-go?
I would have found it more beneficial to have studied film from the get-go but what you tend to find, with the film courses that are out there such as the National Film School, they expect people to have already done a degree in something else. Some sort of art course. So a lot of people come from architecture, theatre design or they’ve studied some sort of media studies.
What would consider to be the defining moment of your career?
I guess my biggest break was my first big job, The Borrowers for the BBC, because it was such a design challenge. That, for me, was a huge challenge, technically, because we didn’t have CGI like we do now.
If you had the opportunity to speak to your younger self, just as you were starting out, what advice would you give?
I would say that you’ve got to really, really want to do it because it’s a very, very demanding job and it’s always good to have a fallback. A plan B. Because it’s very competitive.
With a film like Alfie you had a modern setting, in Manhattan, but you had to evoke, or play off of, an image of the 1960s. How did you go about tackling something like that?
That was quite a challenge because we predominantly shot that all in England. So I had to turn Manchester into New York. We stylised it, out of necessity to some extent, because we didn’t have modern Manhattan we had Manchester which we had to make look like a version of Manhattan. So in a way it was easier, because we could stylise it a bit.
You’ve had to show Britain in quite a conservative way, for films such as Flawless, and then in a very grand and opulent way, for films like To Kill A King. Is one vision more challenging than the other?
Every vision has its own challenges. The thing about being a production designer is you’ve suddenly got to be an expert in a week, on any subject you’re doing. So the challenge for all designers, on every subject, is, whatever the film’s about, you’ve got to really know the background to it. I’ve just done a project all about travelling to Mars and suddenly I’m expected to be an astrophysicist, a cosmologist. I’m expected to know everything about space travel.
With period films, specifically, do you feel more duty-bound to the visual aesthetic of the film or to historical accuracy?
It all depends on subject matter, even if it’s period. If it’s like Anna Karenina, you can go much more theatrical but if it’s much more like To Kill A King, which is more to do with a particular historical event, it’s more important to be accurate. It depends on the project.
What would say is your most indispensable tool as a production designer?
At the moment, probably my iPad.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’m about to start a project with Woody Harrelson who wants to shoot a film in one take, like Victoria, but shoot it as a live event.
What do you look for first when you’re choosing a project?
Ideally, I like it to have subtext. I don’t want to be making something that isn’t going to give anyone a message. I want people to walk out of the cinema having gone on a journey, feeling that in some way it’s touched their life. I look at the work the director’s done before, to see if it’s something I can relate to. I want to relate to the subject of the project.
Check out all of Sophie’s work on her website sophiebecher.com
