Exclusive: production designer Nathan Crowley explains how his early work on Steven Spielberg’s Hook and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula led to the practical sets of Wonka.
About the younger years of the magical confectioner Willy Wonka, director Paul King’s musical prequel Wonka is an ingenious fusion of cutting-edge CGI and traditional effects and props. A performance-captured Hugh Grant may play a particularly grumpy Oompa Loompa, but the film also takes in practical sets, location filming, and real props.
The town square that hosts at least one song-and-dance sequence is a huge, lavish set built at Warner Bros Studios in Leavesden; its nearby port was filmed on location in the UK’s picturesque Lyme Regis. The portable chocolate factory owned by Wonka himself (played by a fresh-faced Timothee Chalamet) was a real, mechanical prop, gently overlaid with a bit of VFX here and there. Even the chocolates were often edible, crafted as they were by confectionery expert Gabriella Cugno.
Overseeing all this was British production designer Nathan Crowley, who’s worked with some of the biggest names in the film industry over a career stretching back some 30 years – most recently, he’s been known for his Oscar-nominated work with director Christopher Nolan on such films as The Dark Knight and Interstellar.
Crowley’s work on Wonka, however, harks back to the very start of his career. In the early 90s, he was an art graduate in LA, doing odd jobs and looking for more permanent work as an architect. Crowley was in a bar one day when he happened to bump into a friend he’d known from university who’d landed a job on the production of Steven Spielberg’s Hook. The friend said that the production needed other artists, and so Crowley wound up getting an interview with the film’s production designer, Norman Garwood, whose work up to that point had included Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and The Princess Bride.
“I went to meet Norman, and he hired me,” Crowley tells us. “It was brilliant.”
Before he knew it, the 23 year-old graduate was working as a set designer on one of that year’s biggest films. (All told, Hook’s budget amounted to a then-huge $70m.)
Not unlike Wonka, Hook was a lavish, larger-than-life production which required the construction of huge practical sets.
Recalls Crowley, “I walked past stage 30 at Sony [Pictures Studios], which used to be MGM. And they had [Captain] Hook’s ship. They’d flooded the stage and had a tank, and there was a ship the size of HMS Victory on the stage. And then of course the tank leaks – because all tanks leak. So there was this river crossing the Sony Studios. And I just thought, ‘wow, this is how all films are made’.”
Crowley’s work on Hook led directly to his next project – Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1992.
Says Crowley, “Oddly, Norman Garwood, at the end of Hook, came to me and said, ‘You don’t know anyone in Hollywood, do you?’ And I said, ‘nope’. And he goes, ‘I’ll get you a job. We’re starting Dracula.’”
Interestingly, much of Crowley’s work on Dracula went uncredited (to this day, you won’t find his name attached to the film on IMDb), but he recalls spending 11 months on the production, working as an art director on its second unit (the film’s second unit director was Roman Coppola, son of Francis).
“They assigned me to second unit,” Crowley recalls. “I was really the art director – I didn’t really get any credit on that [film]. But it was like film school, working on second unit.”
Dracula was and remains striking for its use of in-camera effects that recalled the techniques used in early cinema – it used double exposure, two-way mirrors, and most importantly, precisely none of that then-new-fangled CGI. You can see how some of that work was produced in the short film below.
“It was using all the in-house practical filmmaking methods – puppeteers, two-way mirrors, shadow puppets,” Crowley says. “We did all of the hydraulic stuff. That was my film school, Dracula. And that has continued on all the way [through my career] – I still work like that. If we can do it practically, we will.”
All of which fed into Wonka, with its use of sets and location filming creating the illusion of another turn-of-the-century fantasy world – albeit one far less bloodsoaked than Dracula’s. Crowley’s work on the Roald Dahl prequel included designing an elaborate elevator system, designed to carry the viewer from the interior of a cathedral (actually the real-world St Pauls in London) to a subterranean lair film set. It’s a process that required hydraulics, clever set design, and a bit of camera trickery to pull off.
Similarly, a sequence in a drainage system used simple yet ingenious in-camera trickery to create the illusion of a much longer tunnel. “There’s lots of forced perspective in Wonka,” says Crowley. “You know when they dropped down into the sewer tunnels? There’s forced perspective on that. It’s only 10 feet long, but because it’s a single camera position, [we could use] forced perspective. It’s not CGI backgrounds – all the backgrounds through the arches are painted.
“…That all comes from Dracula,” Crowley says. “That film school of the Coppolas – that was my film school, definitely.”
Wonka is out in UK cinemas on the 8th December. Look out for more from Nathan Crowley on Film Stories later this week.
