The Golden Compass
Set Visit: Dennis Gassner on The Golden Compass Production Design
"Obviously color is really important but also the architecture of the snow is interesting," said Gassner. "I've taken basically one crystal of snow and manifested it into a very large element. It's a fusion. I wanted a place where a meeting took place so the nature of snow and ice converge and create a massive shard which gave a focal point to that world itself."
That sounds like a job for CGI, but Gassner has done his best to create the world of Philip Pullman's books in real life. "More practical. Everything here is practical and extensions in CGI. When you have a long, long journey in how to make this movie, there's push and pull in all films so you say, 'What can we build physically? What does CGI have to take over?' But it's a practical element of dealing with the financials of the film. You divide it up, you have so much money and you say, 'Where is it going to go? What's the best use of it?'"
The mandate for the film has been to combine real world elements together to create something fantastical, a process Gassner dubs "cludging." As such, viewers may recognize London, but not the London they'd visit today.
"It's very, very complicated. The time period was obviously something that came forward actually quite quickly to me, sort of where are we placing this? This told me that story. I said, 'This will be the turn of the century to the '40s. We have that window of 40 years to say…' For costume, for props, everybody needed to have a window in time to deal with. But it's a broad window of time. So we're dealing with a generality and that opened things up so it's much more fun for the audience to look at because it is a fantasy even though we're basing it in a reality environment. We're saying, 'This is a real time, real place that you're in now.' But it gave me the scope to play with a lot of elements of time. And that accumulation is the exciting part about getting to do something like this."
Which elements come together are purely Gassner's instinctive decisions. "It's what looks good. For me, it's the emotional content of the pieces. I react emotionally to as well to material and say, 'Oh, that feels about the right size and the right shape and the right proportion because emotionally that should be happening at this point in the script.' The environment is just really the backdrop. Like any piece of architecture, any environment that we all go through, it's how it feels in space."
The Golden Compass comes to theatres on December 7th.
For movie stills, full synopsis and addition info, go to The Golden Compass
Movie Page.
More Golden Compass set reports coming soon on CanMag.Com.
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