“In a situation like this, we need it to feel that every room was lived in and was never perfect. We’re not going for Architectural Digest here,” Tobman says. “There’s some beautiful design choices and there are some very mediocre ones. There’s ‘mess’ where you expect things to be clean and there’s clean where you expect things to be messy.”
The project began by staying at the Sheff’s real home and observing how they lived. What Tobman discovered its that the family has a very open relationship with nature.
“Their house has enormous windows. You constantly feel the drama of the Inverness landscape that surrounds the home,” Tobman says. “That played into a larger theme that I really grew fascinated with exploring. This is an incredibly open home where it was impossible to hide a secret. So, how could one this dark fester? That was the approach for almost every decision we made moving forward from a visual theme and emotional character standpoint.
The result for the Sheff house was a very careful experiment of building trees and forced perspective. In order to avoid green screen, it meant photographing the actual landscape outside the location exterior so that it matched exactly inside and using lighting to get an accurate depth of field. Additionally, Tobman observed that drug addicts, by the nature of their shame over their addiction tend to use and frequent smaller and smaller spaces.
“You see this constantly in your research and when you speak with addicts and sober people who’ve been through rehab,” Tobman says. “They start living in the dark, they start trying to avoid light. Be it that they put things up on their windows to block the outside or the literal choice to live in basements, use in bathrooms, clubs or halfway houses. They are frequenting spaces that are smaller, more cramped, and less visually interesting. So, how do you stay true to that while also keeping something visually engaging for an audience and logistically feasible for a crew to work in?”
This is where the lessons Tobman learned on “Room” came into play. You may be in a very small space, but you’re creating interesting portals within the set where the camera can access the performances and the director of photography can employ the necessary lighting out of frame.
Tobman’s work did not go unnoticed. Chalamet volunteers, “Ethan did such an extraordinary job in this movie.”
And Carell adds, “When you forget that you’re on a set, that’s the best indication of how well the production design has gone. When you just feel like you’re in an environment, and you don’t sense the cameras and the crew, and all you feel is the house? I think that’s the true mark of a successful production design.”
“Beautiful Boy” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles.
