Ethan Tobman: Designing For ‘Free Guy,’ Taylor Swift & ‘Pam & Tommy’ [Interview]

Ethan Tobman may be the hardest working Production Designer in show business. If he’s not, he’s certainly one of the most talented. Over the past year his real-world versions of a virtual video game world grounded Shawn Levy’s “Free Guy,” he collaborated with Taylor Swift on her 10-minute “All Too Well” short film and a live “SNL” performance. He also recreated the ’90s for the highly anticipated mini-series “Pam & Tommy,” a love story that sparks with the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape, and designed a set that will be the center of Mark Mylod’s “The Menu,” a fall prestige drama starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, among others. And those are only the projects he can talk about.

READ MORE: “Free Guy:” Ryan Reynolds excels In this heartfelt, hilarious action-comedy [Review]

Already an Art Directors Guild winner for Beyonce’s “Black is King” (he was previously nominated for Taylor Swift’s “Cardigan,” Ariana Grande’s “No Tears Left To Cry” and Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “All The Stars”), Tobman jumped on the phone last month to take a deep dive into his work on “Free Guy,” and much more.

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The Playlist: You had to create a real-world version of a virtual world for “Free Guy.” Where did that process start for you?

Ethan Tobman: As a production designer on this job, your responsibility is to communicate to the audience, from the first frame of one world, that you’re no longer in the other. They need to understand, immediately, they’re either in the game or not. And this was one of the things that Shawn and I talked about in our very first meeting, and it became our visual Bible, both for our production designer, our cinematographer, our costume designer, even our actors, to approach this as two different worlds with rules; the rules being, which we came to eventually, through copious amounts of research and brainstorming sessions, that the world inside the video game would be saturated pastels, hypersymmetry, no garbage, everything’s super clean. It never rains. There’s a very clean depth of field. Everything’s in focus; many of the things that you feel emotionally when you’re playing a video game.

And the world outside of the game, the real world, would have grays instead of blacks and would have rain and frame obfuscation and mess and confusing frames and handheld and short depth of field and all the things that you will not find in a video game. So we used a lot of that to help create the message of being in one world versus the other. And when you’re a production designer, and you are given such a bold, high-concept, sort of “Truman Show,” a little bit of “Being There,” a lot of “Brazil” world, your imagination gets to run wild for two or three months of pre-pre-production, R and D. And it’s such a glorious, creatively-rich period of time, where you’re vibing with people like Zak Penn, and you’re sitting in on writing sessions and pitching ideas. And that’s just really rare in this market today. And what the challenge becomes is to refine your ideas and cut down on all the brainstorming and decide on just the things that should make it to the screen.

You were sort of thrown a wrench in the mix in that the film had to shoot in Boston, which isn’t traditionally used for a “generic city” like a video game would have. What were the benefits and the challenges in having to use the Boston city streets?

Good question. When we were first approaching this job, we scouted Atlanta. We scouted Montreal. We thought about Vancouver. We needed to stay close to New York for talent reasons. Ryan and Blake specifically have a home base in New York and wanted to stay close to there. So, we started fanning out from there. Boston made the most sense geographically. I was nervous at first because it is such a distinctly American city. It’s got really distinct federal and colonial architecture. The downtown area was literally built for cattle crossing so that the roads are intentionally thin and labyrinthine. When watching a movie like Ben Affleck’s “The Town” The chase sequences are so brilliant because the streets are confusing. Bostonites themselves are really confused by it. So it was really daunting for us at first. But then, we actually came to really embrace it and use the claustrophobia and the weirdness and, particularly in Boston, the fact that the sun shines super hard for one hour a day on each street and then goes dark, to help us create two different worlds. Boston also has the highest concentration of Brutalist architecture in America, which is really interesting to use for the world outside of the game. So, we embraced brick and warmer turn-of-the-century materials for inside the game and then more glass and steel and modern, brutal concrete for outside. And the biggest challenge I think I had logistically was, we changed storefronts up until the second story on several blocks, adding really unlikely colors and really funny sight gags and Easter eggs for the world inside the game. And then, we would undress it and dirty it up for the world outside the game, which was really a great challenge and reminds me of what, say, the production designers would do on “Back to the Future,” where they built the fifties town, they shot it out, and then they gussied it up and forwarded it up for the eighties version of Michael J. Fox’s town.

One of my favorite sets from the entire film, though, is an interior. It’s the location out of the city, a stash house, where Ryan Reynolds and Jodi Comer’s characters are stealing a car and it features a fantastic wrap-around staircase. What was the inspiration for that particular set?

In a way, there are two different challenges on this job: how to create the city, a free city. But then there are the stash houses. And the stash houses are interior builds where players essentially level up and store all their wins. It’s their war chest, which on games like Grand Theft Auto, are cars and guns. So, we really fanboyed out. We looked at tons and tons of video games and tons of movies; everything from “Superman’s” Fortress of Solitude to “The Last Starfighter,” “Flight of the Navigator..” What would these rooms look like if you got to design them yourselves, but you were 12-years-old? And that’s where the idea for this giant glowing room came from, where, it’s something called Surreal architecture, where you, on the outside, see a very small environment. In this case, it was this brutal cliff. I was inspired by the cliffs of Iceland that had melting lava, that comes down at shards of black, in different angles, which kind of looked like The Fortress of Solitude. And the cliff is really small, but when you walk inside, it’s this giant room with glowing marble. I had been to the Yale Library once, as a teenager. And that was actually one of the inspirations for this. They have these onyx, marble panels that are backlit. And it’s really serene and really soothing and a weird mix of sci-fi and antiquity, kind of like some of what “Dune” does, in their design.

I loved the idea of turning that on its head and creating an oval out of it and then using this bonkers cantilevered, Italian-inspired staircase as their way in. In a way, it feels like it couldn’t exist in reality. It feels like a 12 or 15-year-old, would have dreamt big and designed this for themselves. And you want to feel, when you’re in there like you’re tiny, you’re just a little speck. And the actual set was the size of a football field. It took four months to build, 200 people, 40 tons of steel. And every step of the way, people kept saying, “This staircase is never going to stand on its own. It’s never going to work. There’s a motorcycle that needs to drive down it.” And we just kept pushing, saying, “Let’s figure out a way.” And it, ultimately, ended up being a real engineering marvel, and it ended up working.

Is there a standalone set, besides that one, that you might suggest to some of your peers, “Oh, take another look at this. There were more challenges with it than you might have expected”?

Absolutely. I have two answers to that question The first one is really subtle. And sometimes the subtlest sets are the most difficult and the most satisfying to achieve. Guy’s apartment was our greatest intellectual riddle from the very beginning. How do you create an environment for a half-developed character? And I mean a purposely, satirically, half-developed character. Shawn and Ryan’s first question, once I was hired, was, “What is that place going to look like? Is it just a blank slate? Is it empty? What makes it interesting?” And I had this idea from the very beginning that it should be a real cosmic joke. Here’s a man who has only literally been allowed a certain amount of megabytes because his story and his existence is so irrelevant to the larger plot. He’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of video games. So he has a calendar on the wall that’s missing a Tuesday. He has a door with several locks on it, but no doorknob, because we never need to see him coming in and out. He has books on his bookshelves with no titles on them. He has a notepad and a pencil sharpener, but no pencil. He has a spoon in his cabinet; no forks or knives; only cereal. And the counter that he sits at is an impossibly cantilevered, ridiculous, six-foot-deep counter, because some kid designed this apartment and never really thought about it being a functional human place. So those were the kind of things that were really, really, fun and subtle about creating literally a character who is stopped mid-sentence, in his existence.

And then, the second answer to your question is more of a technically difficult one. It was Molotov’s stash house, which is Jodie Comer’s stash house. And this was a real challenge because you want it to feel different from anywhere else in the game. She’s meant to be a brilliant designer, and she’s obviously one of the few feminine influences in the movie. And from the very beginning, I had this idea that I wanted to build a cave out of fabric. I wanted it to undulate. I wanted it to move. I wanted to be able to light it with moving lights so that it almost felt like a really soft, stalagmite/stalactite cave. And immediately everyone on my team was, “How are we going to do this? I’ve never done anything like this before. How many people have built a cave out of fabric before?” We started by cutting hundreds of pieces of tracing paper in various sizes, built a miniature out of it, and glued it all together in a plexiglass box. And then lit flashlights on iPhones through it, to see if it would work. We sent that to the studio and the director, and they flipped out; loved it. And then we needed to figure out how to make it on a large scale. So, we ended up buying parachute fabric and laser cutting it into hundreds of shapes that were preconceived on the computer and hung it with literally thousands of pieces of monofilament to get all the wrinkles out. Built it inside a fabric box; put white plexiglass mirrors on the floor. And then, the entire crew had to be outside the set and light it from outside this box while the actors were inside. It was a real challenge. And I think it’s a really interesting moment in the movie. I haven’t seen a lot of sets like that before.

Over the past year, you’ve worked on “The Menu.” You’ve worked on the “Pam & Tommy” miniseries. But you’ve also had this close collaboration with Taylor Swift. And I’m curious, beyond the fact that it’s Taylor Swift, what do you enjoy most about these collaborations, whether it’s “SNL” or the short films or music videos you’re working on?

I love talking about Taylor in this respect because I’ve worked with a lot of interesting people, and I’ve specifically been lucky enough to work with female pop stars who enter into the realm of storytelling and directing their own visions. I’ve done this with Beyonce. I’ve done this with Ariana Grande. I’ve done this with Madonna. I only met Taylor a year and a half ago, which seems crazy now. But it was at a moment where she was also transitioning from one type of music and a very, well-developed brand. And she was trying out something that was more earthy and more folk-driven and less obviously pop; almost closer to some of her country origins, in a way. And it was the first time she directed anything. So. in a way, I was ready to help her direct, in ways that she had never voiced creatively before. And my tremendous, happy surprise was she was a natural-born director from the second I met her. She is the type of person that makes everyone on the creative team better at their job. Beyonce’s the same way. It’s super rare when it happens. And I think one of the reasons I’m proud of the work I do with her, but that I’m also so eager to keep going with her, is every time we do a project together, I’ll come with ideas, and she just makes them a little better. Every time. She has a really strong perspective, incredible respect for the people she chooses to be around her. And she says, from the beginning, I’m not a micromanager. I want your ideas. But then she’ll hear your ideas, and she’ll suggest something. And there’s a dialogue that’s rare and creates better art, in that environment. And she creates that. That’s all her.

Of your collaborations, what are you most proud of?

Hmm. I think part of the things I’m most proud of is I love the world-building we’ve done. I love something like “Cardigan” and “Willow” because I think those are some of the most immersive, fantastical worlds we’ve seen in music videos in a while. Certainly the best experiences I’ve had in world-building in music videos. But they’re very heartfelt. And they’re very true. And they speak to the fans in really emotional ways. Then we’ll flip and do something like “All Too Well,” where she really wants it to feel naturalistic, almost a seventies love story. We shot on film. We came uncomfortably close to actors’ faces. We shot 10 minute takes without interrupting them. And so, I think one of the things that I find most satisfying, or that I’m most proud of, is how diverse the work has been.
And then two weeks later, we’ll turn around and do a “Saturday Night Live” performance where I get to play with creating lighting and theatrical effects in front of the film that compliments it, while she’s delivering a phenomenal performance herself. So, I think one of the things I’m most proud of is that we don’t repeat ourselves. She seems to be very keen on trying new things while always being very true to who she is and being very close to what the fans are emotionally inspired by.

“Pam & Tommy” is coming out next month. What was the biggest challenge in recreating a time period of 25 years ago?

Everyone thinks that when you get a job in the ’90s or the early ’00s, it’s not really period, and it’s actually the hardest period to create because of two reasons: the items of technology and furniture are not archived yet. They’re not in museums; they’re still in people’s homes. And even people like me, who lived through those periods, forget sometimes which Mac laptop there was, what cell phone, what type of wallpaper, what we were listening to on the radio, how we were listening to it. The technology aside, most of the things that we’re portraying there happened 26 years ago. That’s two generations ago. There’s a hugely different American landscape prior to the internet and prior to cable television. This is the era of America that we’re portraying. And in some ways, it’s a very innocent time.
When there’s a school shooting in the mid-’90s, it’s a big deal. It’s the first time it’s happened. Think about the cultural implications of how differently it felt to be exposed to a sex tape and then to have that sex tape be protected by its distribution online because America and the government were trying to help young internet startups be indemnified by the legal copyright of, say, third party postings. They would say, “Facebook and MySpace and Friendster are legally protected from anyone who posts anything, no matter how blasphemous or private.” Now, we see those internet companies running amuck and destroying any semblance of privacy in our lives. And this is the story of how that started. So I think one of the most challenging things that we had to do was to approach it as a legitimate period project, while not really having the quote-unquote archival resources to do it. We ended up scrounging in the strangest places to find that fridge, that toaster.

Even the TVs.

Even the TVs. And a lot of this is not documented. We don’t know what Pam and Tommy’s home looked like back then, so we’re imagining it. We’re in the Playboy Mansion. We’re in Capitol Records. We’re recreating “Barb Wire” behind the scenes. All that camera equipment, all the lights, all the chairbacks. And everyone who was working on the show said it was the most challenging job they’d ever done. Some of these people had done “Boardwalk Empire” and “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” but this was really, really tricky to do, two blocks of Los Angeles, recreating Tower Records because we all know exactly what that stuff looked like, but we don’t necessarily have good archival imagery of it.

Did you recreate any of the sets from “Barb Wire,” or is it just Pamela off set?

You’ll have to watch the TV show, but what I will say is, you will see things that you are familiar with, and you will see things that are quite surprising.

“Free Guy” is available for digital download. “Pam & Tommy” premieres on Hulu on Feb. 2.