🎬 #187 What Makes Us Love A Film.
Another different flavour of post this week. Talking about something that intrigues me and I think that makes us love certain films, aside from story, characters or shooting style.
Enjoy!
Bry
When I keep coming back to a film I love, it’s usually the feeling of wanting to be able to live in the film itself. To walk into the protagonist’s house, even if it’s dilapidated, to be able to stroll through a park where they take a run. The production design of the spaces in a film often tell us more about the characters than we can articulate or make conscious as we’re watching. But production design and art direction also creates a lot of the film’s aura. Some design is more obvious on first view than others, but if we feel drawn to a film it more than likely is because of the spaces that are presented to us. Even if we didn’t think that consciously about the rooms, the car or the workplace that the protagonist ran through, or lived in or died in.
The frame above is from the film Tár, which I’ve talked about before on the newsletter. This is the perfect example for me - because this film occupies a much larger place in my heart that I would ever have anticipated. Of course it’s brilliantly directed and written and the characters feel real and alive and the journey Tár finds herself breathlessly living through is compelling. But for me the excellent design is the reason that I deeply love this film. That might sound shallow, but each space tells us everything we need to know about Lydia Tár - her exacting nature and perfect taste. They're also just such beautiful spaces that you want to be in them, the lecture hall you want to learn in, the concert hall you want to hear music in, the car you want to take a drive in.
It’s the same for me with films like Gattaca or Vanilla Sky, the design is such a powerful storytelling tool and at the same time it pulls us in, we want to be standing in the vast geometric spaces in Gattaca, lit in the steely, golden light. We want to be in the Dakota building in Vanilla Sky - interior design and costume design that looks effortless - cool. Colours and quality that we feel, even if we’re not even consciously aware of it. It’s why certain spaces we walk into in our real lives have a feeling that we can’t quite put our finger on, why an image on a billboard ad draws us in. They’re the result of thousands of decisions, building up like layers of paint. This rug from such and such, this hue of anthracite, this quality of wood, the matt finish on concrete, the warmth of a specific kind of tinted glass. Together all these choices make up a dramatic and magnetic pull - that draws us in closer to the film and the characters that occupy those spaces.