Thirty years ago this month, production designer Arthur Max began his working relationship with director Ridley Scott. It all started with a TV commercial in the U.K. for Pepsi. Assorted spots followed and now the two have collaborated on 10 feature films, with an 11th just underway. Max has earned two Oscar nominations, both for Scott-directed films: Gladiator in 2001 (shared with set decorator Crispian Sallis); and American Gangster in 2008 (shared with set decorator Beth A. Rubino).
Now Max is back in the Oscar conversation for his work on Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings which is slated for wide U.S. release on December 12. SHOOT caught up with Max as he was beginning work in Budapest on his alluded to 11th film with Scott: The Martians, which is based on Andy Weir’s best selling novel about an astronaut (portrayed by Matt Damon)–stranded on Mars–who struggles to survive.
The Martians is light years away in setting and chronology from Exodus: Gods and Kings, an epic which brings new life to the story of the defiant leader Moses (Christian Bale) as he rises up against the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses (Joel Edgerton), setting 400,000 slaves on a monumental journey of escape from Egypt, which is besieged by deadly plagues.
These two most recent Scott films underscore the variety and challenges that the director provides for Max on a regular basis. “Working with him is the award,” said Max of Scott. “Ridley is the three ‘E’s’: Educational, entertaining and energizing.”
Max observed, “Ridley often wants to amp up the scale of the work as we find ourselves in competition with heavy visual effects movies, often of the comic book world. The expectations of a modern audience are beyond the scope of reality but in the case of Exodus, we didn’t have to exaggerate. When you see the Nile, the ruins of Luxor, you are dwarfed by the settings and gigantic nature of the early Egyptian architecture. There are temples carved into the sides of mountains. Yet while the Egyptians had 1,500 years to create their world, we had 15 weeks, so that was the big inherent challenge.
“To be honest,” continued Max, “I wasn’t all that sure we could do it. For Gladiator we had 22 weeks to do ancient Rome–and that was just for the build. We had 12 earlier weeks for the drawings, making for a total of not quite four months for the whole process. Exodus, though, was even bigger and with a much more compressed schedule. We were drawing as we were building. It was quite an intense process–the biggest thing we had ever done. Interior sets were mostly on stage at Pinewood Studios. We built 24-foot-tall columns and extended them digitally–the actual historic columns were 70 feet tall. We moved the columns around with a crane. There were huge bronze doors, hieroglyphic murals. We were moving all these pieces around to create different parts of the palace. We created 10 different sets on one stage. We even constructed on stage a stable for the Pharoah’s horses. Basically we created gigantic worlds in confined space and within a restricted time frame. It was some of the best work we’ve ever done which shows that sometimes constraints can work for you. We had a great team of art directors on stage and at the various locations.
Max related, “We went on location in Spain, built some big sets outdoors. Then we went to the Canary Islands off the coast from Morocco. We found beaches of a grand scale with mountains along the seacoast. We were trying to recreate one of the most monumental cultures in the history of mankind and one of the best known epic biblical stories of all time. We made more chariots than Ben Hur and Gladiator combined. We had to do justice to a monumental world of exotic grandeur. There was nothing small about this movie–yet at the same time we had to give the characters their due. Ridley’s desire was to keep the storytelling intimate and connect the audience to the human nature of the characters.
In addition to Exodus: Gods and Kings, The Martians, Gladiator and American Gangster, Max’s feature filmography with Scott consists of G.I. Jane, Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, Body of Lies, Robin Hood, Prometheus and The Counselor.
Another marquee director also figured prominently in Max’s career–David Fincher. “I worked in England as a draftsman and art director before I did any commercials. Just as I was getting going, the British industry collapsed under Maggie Thatcher in the 1980s. Film funding and rebates disappeared. That’s when I went to Los Angeles. I started out working with David Fincher on commercials in L.A. He was then brave enough to give me my first job as a production designer with Se7ven.”
Max went on to serve as production designer on Panic Room, another Fincher film. “My career journey took me from feature films to commercials which wound up bringing me back to features,” said Max who beyond the two Oscar nominations has won both a Best Production Design BAFTA Film Award and an Art Directors Guild Excellence in Production Design Award for Gladiator. He has thus far a total of six Art Directors Guild Production Design Award nominations, the other five for Prometheus, Robin Hood, American Gangster, Panic Room and Black Hawk Down. Max was also nominated for the AFI Production Designer of the Year Award for Black Hawk Down.
Docu short derby
On a separate awards-related front, among the eight documentary shorts to make the recently announced Motion Picture Academy short list–from which three to five films will earn Oscar nominations–is Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace directed and produced by Jeff Dupre, and executive produced by Maro Chermayeff. Dupre and Chermayeff are partners in Show of Force, a production company which has produced assorted documentaries for the likes of HBO and PBS.
Public television’s Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace focuses on the latest project of Wiley, a New York-based visual artist known for his vibrant, larger than life reinterpretations of classical portraits featuring young African-American men. Wiley, whose portraiture has taken the art world by storm, has taken a new turn, his first series of classical portraits featuring women. Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace documents this project as it unfolds, tracking Wiley’s process from concept to canvas, including his scouting for and finding women subjects from everyday life on the streets of Harlem, Brooklyn and Queens, NY. Like Wiley’s prior works, his models were street-cast in NYC and posed to resemble 18th and 19th century portraits of society figures. But for this initiative, instead of posing the women in their own clothing as he’s done with his male subjects, Wiley envisioned each of his female models in an original couture gown. He joined forces for this project with Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci, bringing together the worlds of art and haute couture.
Earlier this year, Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace won a Grand Jury Award at SXSW in the Documentary Short competition. Dupre and Chermayeff are no strangers to the art world or the awards show circuit as documentarians. Dupre produced with Chermayeff and co-directed with Matthew Akers the lauded documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, which scored assorted honors including Best Documentary nominations from the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards as well as the 2012 Gotham Awards. “I met Kehinde kind of through Marina. Kehinde was setting out to create a new series of paintings, stepping outside his comfort zone. And we were able to add a whole new layer to the film, making the female subjects of his paintings characters in the film. We get to know each of them–the artist and his subjects. All of these women touched me in different ways. We have a young mother struggling to get through school, for instance. And she becomes an incredible subject in a Kehinde painting. His paintings almost inherently translate to film, for that matter to high definition video.”
An accomplished director as well as producer, Chermayeff noted, “All of the films from our company have a very strong sense of style and aesthetic vision. We don’t run and gun. When we do an art film about a really great artist, we are true to that artist and his or her work. At the same time we want our film to be another piece of artwork in its own right. Our films are not inexpensive. They are beautifully shot by top documentary DPs, several being Oscar and Emmy winners.”
Show of Force is represented for commercials and branded content via Pola Brown’s production house Workhorse Media. Both Chermayeff and Dupre are available to the ad community as individual directors and co-directors through Workhorse. Chermayeff’s credits include notable series for PBS. She directed all 10 episodes of Carrier, which chronicles life aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz. She was also a co-creator and co-executive producer of the series which premiered on PBS in 2008 and was honored with a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography/Reality Programming. Chermayeff additionally served as one of the producer/directors of the PBS series Frontier House, in which three modern families homesteaded in the American West circa 1883.
Both Dupre and Chermayeff said that making the documentary short Oscar shortlist is a great honor. Particularly gratifying to Chermayeff is that their film about a painter made the cut for an honor that typically recognizes the brand of documentary that tackles urgent social and political issues. “We do those kind of films as well but it’s great when we see the Academy recognize something like our portrait of a painter and his subjects. It’s recognition of the quality of the filmmaking which makes this shortlist recognition very special to us.”
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 87th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 15, 2015. The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 22, 2015 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network.
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