Production designer Eve Stewart earned Academy Award nominations for her contributions to a pair of Tom Hooper-directed films: Best Picture Oscar winner The King’s Speech, for which she won an Art Directors Guild Award in 2011; and Les Miserables, for which she won a BAFTA Award in 2013. Her previous collaborations with Hooper were the historical miniseries Elizabeth I, for which Stewart received an Emmy Award, and the feature The Damned United.
Now her fifth collaboration with Hooper, The Danish Girl (Focus Features), goes wide in the U.S. this Friday (11/27). With a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon based on the book by David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl tells the remarkable, real-life love story of artists/painters Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, portrayed in the film respectively by Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) and Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina).
The story takes us to Copenhagen in 1926, introducing us to Gerda and her husband, Einar Wegener. The latter begins to realize his true identity as a woman, Lili, and becomes one of the very first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Gerda and Lili remain in love throughout their journey, which takes them to Paris and elsewhere. Though their marriage is strained at times, their bond is strong. In fact, Gerda is supportive and selfless in the quest for Lili to find her true self.
As a production designer, Stewart said a prime concern was “not to overburden a very spiritual love story. The characters were young artists living in an artistic world. That’s what drove them so I wanted to simply express the scenery and look of the film through their art—and through their hearts. Also important was expressing the world in Copenhagen at that time, and clearly defining their emotional journey when they came to Paris. Initially there was talk of filming entirely in London. I decided to persuade and cajole everyone to use real locations in different countries to help with the look, scale and beauty of the picture. The sense of time and place expressed the characters’ journey at different points, including when Gerda was in full bloom as an artist.”
Relative to that “full bloom,” Stewart also had to reflect how Lily became Gerda’s work of art. “Gerda captured Lily on canvas. Lily inspired Gerda artistically. And her paintings are a part of the story,” said Stewart. “The exploration of the narrative entailed showing her two-dimensional work which at the same time was coupled with the 3D physicality of their lives.”
The challenge of bringing these perspectives together became less daunting thanks to the positive long-time working relationship Stewart enjoys with Hooper. “You develop a trust, a shorthand to express what you’re trying to portray,” related Stewart. “Ultimately we approach each project the same way. You get to know the characters, the world they reside in and use all that to tell the story exactly as it should be told. Tom is always striving to attain that. My job is to support his vision, not to overwhelm the story, to make sure the worlds we are creating do full justice to the narrative, his vision of how to best tell the story.”
Subsequent to The Danish Girl, Stewart has remained busy. She served as production designer on the recently released Victor Frankenstein directed by Paul McGuigan, and the Gore Verbinski-helmed A Cure For Wellness which is slated to come out next year.
Jan Sewell
Make-up and hair designer Jan Sewell is a five-time BAFTA Award nominee, the most recent nod coming earlier this year (shared with Kristyan Mallett) for her work on director James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything, starring Redmayne in his Oscar-winning portrayal of Stephen Hawking.
Sewell reunited with Redmayne on The Danish Girl, which also marked a return engagement with director Hooper. Sewell was on the makeup/hair crew for Hooper’s Les Miserables. However, The Danish Girl was the first time she was in the lead hair/makeup role and had the opportunity to work more directly with Hooper.
For Sewell, The Danish Girl presented many creative challenges, the prime one being, “We didn’t want Eddie [Redmayne] as Lily to look like she had makeup on. This was an HD shoot so that became an even bigger challenge.”
To make Redmayne’s transition from man to woman more believable, Sewell related, “We made his jawbone a bit more masculine because we knew it would help us when we softened that jaw, making him look more feminized. When the change first takes hold, it’s normal for the man to overly feminize. I learned that from Eddie who is so thorough and meticulous in his research. Then as the film progresses, Lily looks more natural. She was becoming herself. When people are in transition, they become more natural and comfortable over time. They feel more correct, that they are in the correct body. Their whole look relaxes and they are themselves.”
Sewell said that working with Redmayne “is an absolute delight. He is so dedicated. I do a lot of preparation myself and I knew Eddie would as well. When we got together, he had a wealth of information. I knew he would help me and that I could help him. When he and I got together, that shared knowledge and those insights helped us bring Lily and Einar to life. It helped the whole process. He was the first one to tell me about the violence people like Lily experienced, which we reflect in the film.”
Redmayne was also instrumental in helping Sewell get the opportunity to work on The Danish Girl. “He asked me to do The Danish Girl after we finished The Theory of Everything,” recalled Sewell. “I still had to go through the whole interview process with Tom but Eddie opened the door for me.”
Sewell said of Hooper, “Tom is amazing to work for. He is clear about his ideas, the timeline, the characters. He suggested I look at Gerda’s paintings of Lily, the way she saw Lily, which helped a lot in helping to realize Lily for the film.”
To realize that this story is set in the 1920s and there was no name for what Einar felt makes this story so remarkable, related Sewell. “I was very conscious of that when, as I always do, I break the script down. I know what Eddie will look like in each scene, reflecting why he was feeling like he was. Every time Eddie became Lily and goes back to dressing as Einar, we made Einar look slightly more feminine. We wanted to show how powerful Lily was as Eddie’s true persona. We wanted to work that into the film, to show her true self.”
This is the third in a multi-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies, SHOOT’s December and January print issues (and PDF versions) and on SHOOTonline.com. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards. The 88th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 14, 2016. The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 28, 2016, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network at 7 pm ET/4 pm PT. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
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