From Sketch to Still: The Dreamy, Oscar-Nominated 1920s Sets of Midnight in Paris...Lovely movie A Dream of Time Traveling...

Zelda & Scott

"The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners."

In a recurring series, Vanity Fair pulls back the curtain on awards season’s most visually enticing films, revealing exclusive details of the creative process of art directors, costume designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, and more. This week, production designer Anne Seibel reveals how she scoured Paris to create Woody Allen’s 1920s milieus on an indie budget—work that was rewarded this week by an Oscar nomination for best art direction.



Would your life be better if you were born in another era? We’ve all indulged that hypothetical, although never quite as literally as writer-director Woody Allen does in Midnight in Paris, in which screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson) romps through Lost Generation-era Paris, with literary greats Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) playing tour guide. Nominated for four Academy Awards—best picture, best director, best original screenplay, and best art direction—the independent film is also the highest-grossing of Allen’s directing career, which is not to say it had a large budget.
To design both a modern and vintage Paris on a dime, Allen tapped production designer Anne Seibel (Devil Wears Prada, Munich). They met briefly—an hour at the TriBecA Film Festival, and an hour at the Cannes Film Festival—and then Seibel set to work, immersing herself in period research and sending sketches to Allen, all in preparation for the start of filming just five weeks later.

Since Seibel couldn’t afford to build sets from scratch, she endeavored to find existing locations that could be easily disguised by putting a period reference in the foreground and adjusting the lighting to be appropriate for the era. For the Moulin Rouge, she says, she and her location manager Antonin Depardieu looked up and down Paris, but at the end of the day they only had one option to show Allen. “We finally found a concert hall in Paris called La Cigale. It’s an old theater, and you could remove all the seats in the middle,” she says. “It was my first day with Woody and I was alone in this concert hall in the dark, and I was trying to make him believe we could do it here based on a drawing. He saw it and he said, ‘That’s fine!’” And it was. “Your eye when you look at the Moulin Rouge goes to the girl dancing and the table and the light and the big chandelier,” Seibel says. “So when you see this scene, you don’t make comparisons. You are there.”

Hemingway,far left

Juan Belmonte

Djuna

Pablo

Gertrude & Alice

the surrealists 1930 Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Max Earnst  ,Man Ray,Luis Bunuel ,Joan Miro,Marcel Duchamp

Cole

Josephine Baker

Matisse, seated

T.S. Eliot

Leo Stein

Lautrec

Gauguin

Degas,at left

   
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."




In some scenes, however, her strategy presented a major challenge. “There’s one example that was a big problem for us. You know the scene where they see the prostitute? We went to all these nice cobblestone streets that could be Pigalle, but Woody wanted real Pigalle. The problem is, everything is modern,” Seibel explains—as in, there are “a lot of sex shops!” How they arrived at a solution: “[W]e framed the scene perfectly, like a square. We designed just this spot, changed the restaurant, changed the tables, added some signs, made some curtains, put posters on the walls, dirtied the streets, put a lamppost of the period in front.”

Despite Seibel’s best efforts, a modern touch snuck its way into the shot. “No one sees it except me, but in Paris we have a crosswalk for the blind that’s like bubbles. And I said, ‘Darius [Khondji, the cinematographer], don’t go over that because I can’t remove the bubbles!’ And in the shot you can see a bit of that by the lamppost. When I told Woody, he said, ‘You know, if the audience notices that, I’m a really bad director, because they’re not looking at the actors.’”

To create Gertrude Stein’s house, Seibel visited the historic property and found an apartment that had similar bones. She then repainted the walls brown-ish gold to create a warm, period appropriate feel. She stocked the shelves with rented books from antique shops, and the desk with the magazines and books that Stein might have been reading at the time. Then she layered on rich details, such as a set of cigarette holders, after she discovered that Stein collected them. Finally, she commissioned reproductions of the paintings in Stein’s collection. There was only one that didn’t work. “In the beginning, we tried to make a painting of Adriana in the style of Picasso, but we did several trials and Woody didn’t really like it—it didn’t look right,” she says. “So we decided to use one of [Picasso’s] paintings and call it Adriana. We were so late on this [decision], that one of my painters [painted through] the night—in the morning, we had this painting.”

Seibel’s intimate knowledge of Paris paid off in several key locations. She’d once spotted the sign in the detective office and wondered what was inside, she said. Finally, she had an excuse to go in. “When I went inside I thought, Oh, God. They’re going to kill me!” The office was minuscule, but to her eye—with the sign in the window, the desk, and the vintage lampshade—it was too good to pass up. In the end, form beat function, and a short scene was filmed there.

The most memorable sets, however, were saved for the party scenes. One location was so good that Allen changed the film for it. “In the script there was a party at the Fitzgeralds’ apartment. It’s not easy to find a flat already in the juice of the period if you don’t want to remake the whole thing,” she says. For a short scene, Seibel explains, it’s particularly difficult—she “found some [apartments] in the Sixth Arrondissement, but they were either too granny or too this or that. I told Woody you know there’s one place I really love and I asked him, ‘Do you mind if I take you there?’ And you know Woody doesn’t like underground, or closed [spaces]. It’s an old wine cellar transformed it into a museum for fair things. So I told the guy, Put everything in action when he comes—merry-go-rounds, harpsichord music, games. And [Allen] went. His eyes were like a baby boy’s! He was playing with the games. He was looking at the merry-go-round and he said to me, ‘Why don’t we use this for the Fitzgerald’s party?’”

Another hidden Paris landmark was used for the wedding party. The party didn’t actually happen inside famed taxidermy shop Deyrolle, but Seibel thought it might have been wonderful if it had. Seibel says, “I thought it was interesting to play with all these animals. We had fun!” And in the end, she says, Woody got carried away—“he put the tiger on the table.”