Like any film, however, unexpected changes do occur during the production process. Eggleston and his team actually spent a ton of time building out the “new” Parr home only to have Bird decide that for it to work in context of the story they needed to go in a different direction.
“We had actually pitched the idea of a larger house earlier and the story necessitated that they live in a more comfortable home,” Eggleston recalls. “What happened was at a certain point while Brad was writing he needed to consolidate a number of sequences into one. He wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, he knew he needed to do it. But then I pitched the idea of the larger house again and something clicked. And he goes, ‘Yeah I wanna do it!’ And I’m like, ‘Wait, wait we just finished the other house.’ We were so ahead of the game.”
With a release date clock that had already been moved up one calendar year ticking that meant a quick and dramatic turnaround.
“When we pulled the trigger to change the design of the house, which we had already had eight months working on, we had two and a half weeks actually to re design everything,” Eggleston says. “The first week everybody did whatever they wanted. The second week I broke it into parts: exterior, interior, living room, bedroom. [Shading Art Director Bryn Imagire] was building little models. Everybody was just jamming. Photo collage, whatever we could do to get something in front of the director to have him say, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want to do this or not? And if you wanna do it you’d better say yes now because we have no time left.'”
The new house also had to speak to the mood of the Parr family.
“Brad wanted an arrow up [as part of the home’s design] whereas the original film it was going to be looking down, the poor family was kind of under duress. In this film they’re doing a little bit better,” Eggleston says. “I kept drawing rockets taking off, and Brad said, ‘I don’t know if I want that, so let’s just kind of go with an arrow up’ so we found ways of doing that, off centering the arrow just a bit.”
Eggleston continues, “We have the grand room, which is the main room of the house. This is the room that family first sees and of course, it’s the “wow” room, but it makes a very uncomfortable horse. We were inspired a lot by Sunnylands in Palm Springs where you have large rooms, but then it [also] had a number of human scaled rooms which made people feel more comfortable.”
One of the most difficult elements of building the home, however, is a detail that may completely go over (or should we say under?) viewers heads, the Terrazzo floors. And Imagire appeared to be the biggest champion in incorporating them into the design.
“I really love Terrazzo floors, and so, because it’s such a big element in any kind of aggregate material, in mid century they use rocks embedded in grout or marble or stone,” Imagire says. “Terrazzo was a really expensive material back then and today it would probably cost lots of money to do it right. And so we felt like, ‘Oh, because this house is so fabulous, were gonna put Terrazzo everything.’ So, that was kind of our inspiration. [We also] brought a lot of plants indoors, sort of that Eastern idea of bringing outside inside. We’re inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, a lot of glass that has etching on it so that when the light shines through. It’s patterns, details like that, that we have to think about.”
What viewers and film industry professionals often misunderstand, however, is that it’s not as simple as just telling the computer to make the floors a certain pattern. As Eggleston notes, “Terrazzo, even in the computer, is expensive.”
Yet, like many of the choices the “Incredibles 2” production team had to fight for, as Imagire notes, “It was worth it.”
“The Incredibles 2” opens nationwide on June 15.
