BUILDING AN IMMERSIVE WORLD

Jabbar Raisani, executive producer,  director, and visual effects supervisor of Avatar: The Last Airbender: “It’s really about figuring out how to establish a world that [the actors] can relate to and understand and connect with. One of the things we try to do is always show actors concept art so they know what it’ll eventually look like, even if it’s a green screen. With [creature companions] Appa and Momo, they understand who these characters are and they have to really connect and emote and look at them as other performers, even if they’re not there.” 

Boris Schmidt, Scanline visual effects supervisor of 3 Body Problem: “One of the biggest challenges was to re-create the Panama Canal sequence because we had to create a virtual environment. For our team, the biggest challenge was to choreograph the slicing of the tanker — going from the moment when these nanofilaments start slicing it up to the point where it just ends up as a pile of trash on the shoreline — so there was a huge team effort that we had to make. We had various challenges of visual things to solve, and there’s not really a reference for stuff like this, so you have to do research, look at images, and that leads you down pathways.”

Kim Leonard, set decorator of Griselda: “We needed to show that progression of wealth for Griselda and how that manifested in the goods and the objects, the gold and the animal prints used. As we went house to house, you could see clearly that the money and the wealth were growing. Not only did you see it in her cars, but you also saw it in her clothes and definitely in all of the furniture matching by the end. She had so much money that she would call a decorator and say, ‘Just handle it,’; by the end, she didn’t need to have control over that. The control was to have that person do everything for you. That’s what we tried to show, house by house.”

Martyn John, production designer of The Gentlemen: “I looked at so many fabulous English country houses and we found Badminton House [to stand in for Halstead], which was stunning. We liked it because it had faded grandeur. We put five houses [together in total] to make Halstead, so it was a combination of fixing all of these bits together in a design aesthetic that gave us a rhythm for that particular part of the show. As soon as you go into the gangster world, it needs to be real and gritty and scary and very, very different from aristocratic design, so putting those two together was a fantastic challenge.”

CASTING AND CREATING CHARACTERS

Dan Hubbard, casting director of The Gentlemen: “It was sort of [about] looking a bit further than the usual actors and performers. You have to approach each different community with a lot of research but also a lot of lateral thinking and connections. It’s usually synergetic because one thing leads to another. It’s Guy Ritchie, you know? Guy has always been very famous for his trademark casting, so I felt a huge amount of responsibility to have a mixture of real-world [faces] who could act. But then, in terms of the trained actors that work with Guy, a lot of the time they throw away the dialogue and the script on the day and improv. So, I have to send people down that are going to be able to keep up with that. But also, each and every person has to be unique and believable.” 

Angela Nogaro, makeup department head of Griselda: “We had to transform Sofía Vergara into a woman that looks nothing like her. The first thing that I did was call the police officers that actually arrested Griselda. We tried to add elements that made her look just a little bit more sinister — the nose and her eyebrows and changing the structure of her face, so she didn’t look sweet and bright [like] Sofía Vergara. With everybody else, we set about trying to really create three completely distinct worlds because the Colombian world was very different from the Cuban world, which was very different from the wealthy white people in Miami world. We tried to really create different feelings so that you knew what world you were living in as we traversed through each of them. 

Loulou Bontemps, costume designer of The GentlemenThe Gentlemen: “On The Gentlemen, we have so many different characters, so it took a lot of conversations with Guy. He very much created this world that’s Guy Ritchie’s — heightened, stylized, super over the top — but at the same time believable and plausible. It was a bottomless pit of incredible characters, so we got to really lose ourselves in lots of different wardrobes from not just all around the U.K., but around the world, too. It was a lot of fun. From a costume perspective, as well as creating looks for each person, it was really important to make sure that visually, every moment they had a group scene they all very much [had] a tone for who they were together. Working with Martyn John on the color palettes of his set and working with Ed [Wild], the director of photography, on how he was going to light each location, each scene, together we had this wonderful creative rhythm that I think really shows that beautifully heightened, stylized world that Guy Ritchie has created.” 

Safowa Bright Bitzelberger, costume designer of Griselda: “It was tempting to dial into all of the trends from the 80s that I grew up with. With Sofía, when we discussed her evolution and that arc, even though we had an endless resource of beautiful vintage pieces from that era, we decided to simplify it and not have it be about the beading and the Dynasty type of items that Griselda absolutely could have afforded. She really wanted to show that it wasn’t about that. It was about [Griselda’s] power; that’s what she was really craving. So although we did honor the bold shoulders and the structured garments, we stayed away from pieces that were either overly embellished or might be distracting.”