This story about the production design of “Wednesday” first appeared in the comedy series theme from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
Creepy. Crackpot. Chilling. Okay. All of these adjectives naturally come into play when you’re adapting an “Addams Family” spin-off, even more so when Tim Burton is your boss. For “Wednesday” production designer Mark Scruton, that made him as happy as Wednesday Addams witnessing a torture chamber.
“When I got this gig, I very consciously didn’t watch any of [the past adaptations]Scruton said. “I went back to the Charles Addams cartoons very specifically, but we wanted to bring it back to that original look and aesthetic. Tim answers to his heart and is minimalist and likes things very precise and composed, rather than a lot of background fluff, so that was a great starting point for us.”
Scruton took advantage of the creative freedom offered by the new locations of the Netflix series, beyond the well-known abode of the Addams. Among them was Wednesday’s penthouse bedroom, which is split in two down the middle, right through the windows, to reflect her sombre palette and the rainbow hues of her roommate Enid (Emma Myers ). There were also Nancy Drew’s campus hangouts, including the town’s restaurant, the Weathervane, and the beauty of them all, the sprawling Nevermore Academy, which was set up in Romania’s Cantacuzino Castle (where most of the film was filmed). the Serie). ) after a Toronto location had to be scrapped.
“We looked at a lot of castles, but it was surprisingly difficult to find one that really worked for us,” Scruton said. “It’s just that Tim’s aesthetic is more restrained – a lot of them were very ornate and over the top and that wasn’t what we were going for. The Cantacuzino castle had the ground floors and the footings and this great central tower, which already had that slight inclination of the Addams family”.
A close look at the staging of “Wednesday” shows some visual nods to Burton’s work: a bit of “Beetlejuice” in a graveyard scene here, a bit of “Sleepy Hollow” in a chase scene there. For David Lynch fans, Weathervane might bring to mind the mysteries discussed by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern on “Blue Velvet.” (“I love David Lynch almost as much as I love Tim,” Scruton said.) But the most surprising scene was shown in the scene that went viral: the Rave’N, where Wednesday dances to “Goo Goo Muck” by the Cramps. .”
“The school dance, the Rave’N, that whole sequence was originally conceived to be in a huge, grand, elaborate ballroom space that we were going to use for additional sequences as well,” Scruton said. But budget constraints brought down the hammer on that idea. “Then it became very difficult to find the right location, and then even more difficult to find one that would allow you to spray it with thousands of liters of blood. And the clock was ticking.”
“We were looking for a location in Bucharest, but nothing was really working, so very late in the day we came up with a way to set it up at the Buftea studios. [a nearby town]. I took Tim to my office and we decided to use curtains and fabrics and build a space out of nothing,” he said. “And then everyone accepted it. I didn’t think anyone really missed [the ballroom] in the end.”
Read more of the comedy series edition here.
