“One Battle After Another” led the American Set Decorators Association award winners.
Set decorator (Anthony Carlino SDSA) and production design by Florencia Martin, who produced the film, won Best Contemporary Feature Film Decoration/Design, and Paul Thomas Anderson won Best Picture.
Other winners include the “Frankenstein” team (Shane Viau SDSA for stage decoration and Tamara Deverell for production design), who won the Best International Organization Award for Decoration/Design for a Fantasy or Science Fiction Movie, and the “Hamnet” team for Best Decoration/Design for a Historical Drama Movie. (Set decoration by Alice Felton SDSA, production design by Fiona Crombie).
The award for Best Decoration/Design for a Comedy or Musical Film went to the team behind Wicked: For Good (set decoration by Lee Sandals and production design by Nathan Crowley).
In recent years, SDSA winners have won Oscars for production design. The set designers and production design teams for Frankenstein, One Battle After Another, and Hamnet all received Oscar nominations.
Guillermo del Toro asked Deverell and Viaud to make Frankenstein, but one thing was clear: there was no green screen. Everything will be handmade from scratch. “We had 20 sculptors working at any given time,” says Deverell, who worked with Shane Vieau, who was responsible for the film’s set decor, to ensure the authenticity of the film’s look.
Crombie and Felton worked together to bring Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” to life. One of their challenges was to create London’s Globe Theater in the late 1500s. This moment, where the set dominates the third act of the film, was a big moment for both of them. For Felton, the glove workshop was a small but important detail in the Shakespeare family.
In “One Battle After Another”, Willa’s bedroom was built on top of a small house, and the cottage was decorated to show the accumulation of the years that father and daughter lived there. Carlino and Martin received much artwork from the Anderson children, and Chase Infinity provided Carlino’s childhood photos to decorate the house.
