A gallery of images showing photographs, drawings and designs of the sets from Darkest Hour.
Production Designer: Sarah Greenwood
Interview with Sarah Greenwood
The Ephemeral Nature of Production Design
Jane Barwell in conversation with PD Sarah Greenwood
When you see a beautiful painting by John Box or someone it looks amazing but that sort of thing doesn’t exist anymore because we work digitally now. We still do artwork, I have amazing illustrators and it’s all done on the computer. So, they don’t have that museum quality to them but I was asked about 5 years ago by the University of the Arts to do an exhibition which I was against initially because I thought what of? The end product is the film and everything in between is ephemeral. I mean it’s all relevant but it is about that moment. There might be a drawing and it gets sent to the workshop and they build it and film and discard it and becomes an irrelevance.
So, we created a set of the art department and dressed it as mine and Katie’s [Spicer, set decorator] desk, in the art department. We kept everything we’d been working on for the purposes of this set, even the contents of the bin was kept. My laptop, all my books, the drawings, the models and the references, so that was the solution to illustrate the process. It is a process, a constantly changing process.
We don’t own anything it belongs to the studios, which is also part and a parcel of how do you keep anything? Everything that we have gets put into a great big skip at the end and anything of value gets shipped to America and its gone.
The Design concept behind Darkest Hour (2017)
I think it was how completely grim it was and how make do and mend. We were still coming out of the 1st World War and the depression and we weren’t back on our feet so the last thing we wanted to do was go back into another war. You have to find a different way in to every film. So, the whole feel of it was very low key and interestingly that was as a point of contrast Valkyrie (2008) and Downfall (2004) the visual opposite of what we were doing. Both of those films represented Hitler and the Reich as this sharp, hard immaculate organized machine. Whereas, everything about what the British were doing was chaotic and underground.
The whole nerve centre of the map room in the bunker was held together with string and pins. I love the idea that from that tiny room they were running the operation. (ref to the real war rooms that you can visit). When you go round the war rooms museum they talk about carpet, people brought carpet from home and chairs it’s just an absolute shambles. It was a subterranean world that they lived in.
The visual references for the film
The war rooms themselves were an incredible reference, unbelievable.
We all looked at the Bill Brandt series of photos, The English at Home, 1936, A Night in London, 1938 and Camera in London 1948as a visual reference, very atmospheric.
‘When we did Buckingham Palace we shot that in an empty house, Lancaster House in Yorkshire which is down at heel and not been painted for 70 years so it was perfect for what we felt Buckingham Palace should look like at that time. It’s not out on its own in a sort of gilded existence. We are all in it together. So with the furnishing instead of using beautiful gold damask we chose one ten shades down from that so everything had this dowdy air, even royalty.’
Space, Character and Story
‘Telling the story for me it’s about finding the best solutions sometimes it’s a build sometimes it isn’t. Something like the War Rooms was a set build, the real space is a very linear space and that wasn’t going to work for us. What we wanted was for it to feel like a maze with the different heights and claustrophobia and compression. So, to design the set on plan I do it over a weekend at home because by the time you get to do it you know exactly what you want it to be.’
‘Spatially it feels like it could go on forever so it’s the principal of a maze it then actually had to be designed around the actual space we had available on the stages. We had two stages at Ealing. You could open the door and interlock them so that’s what we did. Joe [Wright] likes to shoot 360 degrees and he likes to shoot on the move so the opening shot when you get introduced to the space you know the journey that’s going to take. You predict that and you know you come down these stairs here, we can track through there they can walk through these doors and double back on yourself. And then it develops in this case with Joe and DP Bruno Delbonnel there are masses of conversations that go on and its constantly evolving.’
Based on an interview with Sarah Greenwood, 2018.