Name: How ‘Rocketman’ Production Designer Turned London into 1970’s LA | Vanity Fair
Uploaded: 2020-03-07T01:31:23.000Z
Duration: 8 min 22 s
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I was a production designer on Rocketman.

Most important collaboration, after the director,

You can build a great set but if it's not lit well,

it's not gonna ever stand out and have presence.

Wardrobe is incredibly important, it sets the period.

It's a combination of different skills really

I think the hardest thing we found was trying

to make sure we were sort of capturing the flavor

I mean it's got a great typeface that we emulated.

And some of the details, which are very what I'd consider

to be American in terms of L.A., is all this stone work,

So it's trying to capture the flavor of that really

within our set, which we built in the U.K.

So it was quite a strange thing to see this

sort of warm facade appear in a car park outside London.

Using cars, they're a great thing in terms

Certainly when you're on the street or doing locations

that you don't have as much time as you would like

because if they're a fully functioning street,

you're gonna be cut down to a limited amount of time

to be able to turn that into a period dressing.

Cars say a lot, especially in that period.

It's a lot harder to get those cars in the U.K. [laughs]

We didn't have any of these cars so instantly

they all helped by establishing that as American.

- [Broadcaster] The Troubadour is an a vanguard cafe.

It's the favorite of Hollywood's young and young in heart.

- Through periods of time it sort of changed in the way

We tried to workout the size of the frame

so we built the smallest amount we needed to believe.

The thing that we did fundamentally change is the

the main entrance in the real place is just here

Whereas we decided to focus our attention

So that's how they enter within our world.

In the real place, they enter and they walk to a bar area

We wanted to sort of condense that journey really.

- [Marcus] This is the dressing room area,

which is actually off the back of the stage as well.

- [Marcus] I think you can see in this clip is

how much effort we go into trying to make

We use a lot of plaster and this brick work and molding

is plaster brick, it's what hopefully makes it feel real.

- Filming in a small toilet's a fairly tricky thing.

So this is a blueprint of the interior of the Troubadour.

Ideally, it's all pre-prepared, it's planned exactly where

the camera would need to be, and we've accommodated

The last thing anybody wants to do, stand around waiting

for somebody to spend 13 minutes pulling out a wall.

I mean it really does have to happen fast.

- [Man] Now get out there and play you little twat!

So behind Elton when he's on stage, it's still fairly dark.

and we've got this neon blue Troubadour sign

which becomes quite a crucial bit of the design.

And it's quite interesting seeing these photographs,

it's probably, I thought ours was much bigger,

but in fact, it looks like it was exactly the same size.

- [Marcus] Fairly technically difficult thing to do,

- [Marcus] It's sort of quite a simple idea,

but we ended up with quite a complicated rig, we built two

rows of what looked like sort of bicycle seats

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How ‘Rocketman’ Production Designer Turned London into 1970’s LA | Vanity Fair

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