Production designers rarely get the credit they deserve. That is, of course, unless they are building fantastical new worlds or recreating eras long gone by. Sometimes the best work actually goes under the radar intentionally. Sometimes you’re supposed to believe an actor is performing on a real-life location when they are not. And, surprise, thanks to Ethan Tobman‘s efforts that’s exactly what you’ll experience watching Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell in Felix Van Groeningen’s “Beautiful Boy.”
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“I never want to wake an audience up from a dream,” Tobman says. “Somehow if we do our job, for an hour and a half or two hours we have direct access into a person’s heart and brain. Hopefully both at the same time. If we break that in any way, either by acknowledging that they’re looking at a backdrop, realizing that they’re looking at something fake, presenting something old that looks too new, or vice versa? We wake you up.”
Tobman is best known in the film world for his work on the Oscar-winning “Room,” but his credits also include Beyonce’s “Lemonade” and the videos for Ariana Grande’s “No Tears Left To Cry” and “God is a Woman” as well as Kendrick Lamar and Sza’s “All The Stars” from the “Black Panther” soundtrack. “Beautiful Boy” was a unique situation for Van Groeningen and cinematographer Ruben Impens as neither had worked with a production designer before.
“They’ve describe the Belgian film industry where they hale from as being sort of production designer-less. They hire prop masters and set dressers, but rarely do construction and don’t really have that position as part of their crew,” Tobman notes. “They were intrigued because they felt they wanted to work with somebody who could do really naturalistic environments on sound stages, but also had an eye for maybe more iconic visuals in some of the music videos that I’d done.”
Based on David Sheff’s “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction“ and “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines” by Nic Sheff, the film chronicles a father and son trying to come to terms with the latter’s drug addiction. Reading David Sheff’s novel, in particular, was incredibly helpful to Tobman who had a very close person in his life struggling with addiction.
“It was incredibly eye-opening to me to learn about how for example relapsing is part of the recovery process,” Tobman says. “That’s something I’d never understood before and also how the brain chemistry of an addict to this particular drug makes Narcotics Anonymous much less likely to succeed and rehabilitation in general much less effective.”
To the naked eye “Beautiful Boy” mostly takes place in “real” locations whether it’s the family home of David Sheff (Carell) and Nic Sheff (Chalemet), a coffee shop or a crack den. In fact, outside of the exterior and the first floor of the Sheff home, almost every interior scene took place on a constructed set.