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How the Production Designer of 'A Most Violent Year' Recreated 1980s New York

We talked to John Goldsmith about designing the look and feel of J.C. Chandor's new film with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac.
Oscar Isaac as Abel Morales in A Most Violent Year. Images courtesy of A24

John Goldsmith had to scale things back to create the world of J.C. Chandor's new crime drama, A Most Violent Year (in theaters now). Not only did the architecturally-educated fine artist-turned-production designer have to subtly recreate the gritty realities of New York in the 80s, he had to do so on a bare-bones design budget. Having previously worked with Chandor on the Academy Award-nominated survival drama, All is Lost, however, Goldsmith knew exactly where to start: the characters.

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Set in 1981, A Most Violent Year tells the story of Abel and Anna Morales (played by Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain) and their struggles to retain their dignity, humanity, and social mobility amid record levels of violence and corruption. It is this inner turmoil that sparked the initial look and feel of the film. "Abel and Anna […] aspire to be people who 'have arrived,'" Goldsmith explained to The Creators Project. "They strive very much to show themselves as successful and prosperous, and they're competing with their neighbors through the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, and the house they built for themselves—but they aren't those people. In terms of the level of sophistication, they're off just a bit."

Weaving together visual inspirations that spanned from New York archives, the MTA Museum, and even a trip to the Armani collection in Italy, Goldsmith and his team could reflect the realistic inner worlds of the Moraleses as they navigate an ever-darkening city poised to swallow them up.

The Creators Project spoke to John Goldsmith about production designing A Most Violent Year, building its historically-accurate world on a budget, his personal method for putting mood boards together, and why it helps to work as an artist with a parallel practice:

Can you tell me about how you got started on this project? How you got involved and a little bit about what the debriefing process was?

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I'm lucky enough to have met J.C. I designed All is Lost before this one for him down in Mexico with Robert Redford on a boat at sea. That was a fantastic experience, and I liked J.C. a lot and his two producers, Anna [Gerb] and Neal [Dodson]. The genesis of the whole thing came from my pre-existing relationship with them. They're good people, and I was excited to return to another project with them.

J.C. had a lookbook in place already and a strong sense that he did not want design to upstage the story; that you had to walk a line where you didn't fall on the side of cliché for the period, which is another way you could have done it. Debriefing had mostly to do with research, which is where I always start. We found some fantastic photographers who had done work at the time. My background is architecture, so a lot of the settings in the story were architectural, of course, but there was one in particular—the Westchester house, where the main couple move to—that had to be really special in expressing where they're coming from, where they aspire to go to. I used architectural precedents from that period to find the right collection of pieces to include, set dressing-wise, as well as the spirit and palette for the whole thing.

Can you tell me a bit about how your mood boards came together?

I have a website called artdepartmentresearch.com. I take everything that I'm finding, and I put it in folders that align with the different sets or the different characters. That way, I can send a link to the producers, the directors, the DP, whoever needs to weigh in on what we're looking at and sort of shape and narrow and define better where we're going, that way as we're moving through it. People were looking at that all the time.

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We were looking primarily at historical photographs. There's a photographer named Dinanda Nooney, whose photographs were of typical New York families from that period living not in Manhattan, but in the outer boroughs. We found unbelievable images with great furniture, great lighting fixtures, great rugs, great wall textures, like all that kind of stuff. For our exteriors, it was fantastic to be able to find out things like, what do the garbage cans look like? What do streetlights look like? What was signage like? What was storefront signage like? What were the cars? All that kind of stuff was there in those photographs. That, for me, was really helpful. Those interiors are filled with a kind of repertoire of furniture and they're all very high end. There's Mies [van der Rohe] Barcelona chairs and lounges. There are Artemide lamps. There's very specific stuff. If we had had to get those things, we could have—with a certain budget, which we did not have.

We didn't want to get all those high-end museum pieces of furniture. Instead we had to find things that gave us that feeling but with some other things that were mixed in, like her fingernails, say, a simpler couch, which we were able to find, actually—the perfect couch at a thrift store. The set decorator, Melanie Baker, was fantastic. She pulled rabbits out of a hat, and we had a really good mixture of name-brand furniture combined with things that were found, that made it feel much more interesting, I think, and related to the characters and the choices they would have made then.

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Could you speak to your process of boiling down the film's color palette?

Absolutely. J.C., first of all, has a really strong design sense himself, just as a man in the world. We had a great time talking about these issues on All is Lost and found a way to talk about it easily and trust each other's judgment. On A Most Violent Year it was no different. We actually took largely from a framework of clothing because the costume designer, Kasia, got access to the Armani collection in Milan. Jessica Chastain has a relationship with the Armani family. They flew over there and saw the Armani collection, the late 70s, 1980 and 1981 stuff, and made their picks of who this couple was and what they would wear.

Then for the interiors we decided we wanted to work with that collection of clothing, especially in neutrals and interesting textures. We included chrome and brass accents to highlight that, but my conversation with J.C. was largely, "Let's talk about the Moraleses as sort-of Armani people. It's luxurious materials and interesting textures, like the clothes. It's the same with the style of the interiors.

Then let's move to, say, Julian, who's a character who's a mini version of Abel. He also has these aspirations but he's much earlier on in his own trajectory. He and his wife are immigrants here, and living in a tenement apartment and trying to make it nice. For us, Carhartt was a way to enter into their world. They would have chosen their things from places like Kmart or maybe Salvation Army. J.C. kept saying that these people are "down but not out," and everything they do be, in the same ways it is with Abel, aspiring to something better. It would be clean, organized, well thought through.

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For the assistant DA's office in Brooklyn. We talked about Brooks Brothers, but Brooks Brothers that you've been wearing, say, for ten years, and it's threadbare and well-worn. That meant navies and dark browns and crimsons with maybe some brass accents, things like that.

You're also a painter, sculptor, and installation artist. Can you talk to me about what the draw to cinema is for you, and how these disciplines inform your production design?

What I'm learning, personally, is that the way that multiple practices affect each other is something I'm going to be learning about to the very end. I'm aware when I'm working on a movie of it being a team effort. It's a collaboration. There are multiple people working on the same thing, and that requires a completely different way of working which I love. Then I go into the studio and I make my own work. After doing that for a spell, I find I really long for something collaborative again. There's something amazing that happens in the going back and forth. I also find that when I'm working alone in the studio, I'll become aware of things that interest me personally. Now that I'm at this point in my overall career development, I'm able to bring some of those things into my meetings with directors for projects that they have.

Now I'm meeting with a director who has a story where the idea is something I wouldn't be aware of if I didn't have a studio practice that was parallel to my filmmaking practice. Like I said, things sort of continue to open up inside me working in both ways because it's the reverse, too: if you're on a movie, you have to think about things that, normally, you would never think about. Maybe one or two of them will strike a chord and become of interest to you, and when you go back into the studio you can explore those more fully. They take on a life of their own which otherwise would never have come into existence without having been on the movie. The two tend to feed themselves in ways that are absolutely unexpected and sometimes really interesting; they just kind of breathe back and forth to each other, if that makes sense. And I love that part of it.

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A Most Violent Year is in theaters now. Visit the film's official website to learn more.

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