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Getting the Impossible Shot: A Conversation With Robert Boyle
From: American Film Institute
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Robert F. Boyle, renowned production designer and art director, worked closely with Alfred Hitchcock on such films as North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963). In both, Boyle expertly coordinated photographic technology, set design and art direction to extend the possibilities of what could be constructed on the screen.
Boyle received four Academy Award nominations for best Art Direction for North by Northwest (1959), Gaily, Gaily (1969), Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and The Shootist (1976). A documentary devoted to Boyle's contributions to cinema, The Man on Lincoln's Nose (2000), was also nominated for an Oscar.
In an AFI seminar, Boyle outlines the fundamentals of effective production design and art direction, beginning with his work with Alfred Hitchcock on the film The Birds. |
 e're usually first on the picture after the writer and the director, sometimes even before the director--it's not right, but that sometimes happens. Then you go out and look for locations. That's usually the first thing you do. |
If you're doing a period picture, things immediately get difficult. The most difficult period is turn-of-the-century because they had everything: they had horses and buggies; they had drays in the street; they had rapid transit; they had overheads, subways and the beginnings of the automobile. |
The Birds is probably as good an example of what an art director or production designer does as any film that I've ever worked on, because it was the most complicated film I had ever been engaged in. I think it was the most complicated one that Mr. Hitchcock ever engaged in, and surely he's done some pretty complicated films, technically. |
The art director or production designer starts with the script. You have to identify your characters. Really, the art director is a key contributing factor to the overall film, aiding the director in getting what's wanted for the whole film. |
Let's just take The Birds. I got a call from Hitchcock, saying he had this project--Daphne Du Maurier's short story called The Birds, which, incidentally, had not much to do with the final product. But he wanted to know whether it would be technically possible to make this film. |
Well, I read the short story and it didn't give me too many clues except that we were going to have birds all over the place pecking at the walls, coming down the chimneys, doing whatever they had to do to destroy the human race, and that already seemed very difficult. I knew we would have to get into some technical procedures that were not new, but there would have to be many of them put together. |
The film took on more complications. For one thing, we decided that we wanted to do it on the west coast, so we went up to Bodega Bay and made our one little town out of about half-dozen sites. The schoolhouse was one location. One place was out on a point, which is now the site of a defunct atomic site. Our town in the movie, which I hoped had a cohesive quality, was made up of about six towns all put together. |
Then the other problem was superimposing the birds over whatever set or settings we had. We tried to do this as early as possible without getting into second- or third-generation duping, and for the most part we were very successful. |
One of Hitchcock's main tricks is the use of subjective point of view. He cuts from the close-up not necessarily to get the reaction of the person, although that's part of it, but he wants to have a reason to cut to what the person is seeing. |
So a Hitchcock picture looks more open, because he doesn't resort too often to over-the-shoulder shots. He'll go into a close-up and then you'll see what that person sees. It may be a moving point of view, but he uses the point of view as a subjective thing to put the audience within the person. I think Hitchcock uses the subjective point of view better than any director I know. You can quarrel and argue about his content or lack of content, but his use of the film language is a very hard thing to argue about because he uses it so instinctively. |
Before shooting, we each sat on either side of a desk and we'd each draw how we thought scenes would play out, and then we'd compare drawings. I think he was testing me. Then after we had made all of these roughs they would be transferred into better sketches. |
Hitchcock started as an art director, himself. He has a very pronounced graphic sense. In those days every shot was prepared and outlined. Although he would often say when he was finished, "Now I will be bored making the picture." Actually, that wasn't quite true. I think he enjoyed making the picture, but perhaps he did like the preparation more than the actual making of the film because he had done it all in his head. |
A lot of the newer directors have not had the opportunity to work with the art departments that we used to have at the studios, and therefore they haven't had the opportunity to find out what kind of help they can get from an art director or, as some of us like to call ourselves, production designers--which, incidentally, comes from a very interesting film, Gone With the Wind (1939). That film gave birth to the title of production designer because William Cameron Menzies, probably one of the best art directors who used to do these continuity sketches all the time, almost single-handedly established that picture. |
That picture never left the Culver City lot--never went to Atlanta. That's an extraordinary thing because that's a big picture. I think that's a tribute to the people who made films in those days, the technicians who designed the whole picture. |
On the "truth" the production designer ensures
The camera is a real liar and what we all have to do, who are behind the camera, is to do something to the filmed environment to make it the real truth. I worked on a picture with a director who I think had great potential. He wanted to do a film where we were going to work in Death Valley in the middle of summer because he felt that if we went down there and we were all dying that the camera would record this truth. |
So we went down there in July, and the temperature was bouncing from 130 to 140 degrees. I remember once that the ground temperature, which was one foot off the ground, was 170 degrees. Now that could fry you, you know. People were getting burns just touching the equipment--bad burns. |
I said to the director, "This is crazy. In the first place, look at this: it's blue sky. It is so hot and so dry that there is no perspiration showing." There was no sweat under the arms, no sweat on the faces. The minute anyone perspired it evaporated instantly in conditions like that, and everybody was dehydrated anyway. |
And I said, "It's not going to look hot. It's going to look like a walk on a spring day." Well, we got the film back and, sure enough, it looked like the loveliest horseback ride you can imagine--not hot at all. |
On manipulating design elements
One of the first things I do after reading a script is to establish an economic bracket for the characters--what their educational background is, what things would be found in their environment: clothing, automobiles, etc. Economics are very important--the economic strata that your people are in. |
Then the next thing is to decide on the space that's required--the kind of moving space and how you want to be able to see it. Do you want somebody to come in the door from there or do you want him or her to come in from behind you? You address questions like that. Then you start blocking it all out without a set, just in a planning format. |
In The Shootist there's a sequence where John Wayne, the shootist, walks through a house that is being introduced to him by a woman. She brings him in the house and takes him down a hallway. |
It seemed rather dull to have a set where every time she says, "This is the dining room," you have to cut to the dining room. Then you go down the hall--"This is my kitchen," and so on. So I designed the set with larger openings than normal, so that as you go through the house you had a greater number of angles where you could see the whole house. The tough part was to design it so it didn't look like you did it purposely. |
This is why I don't like to let a location manager choose the locations. I don't mind if he does the scouting, but I'd like to be able to say whether it works or not, because I'm the one who is going to have to add to it or work on the inside. |
I prefer to do my own scouting, and I'm sure that most art directors would because they not only have in mind what they're looking for on the outside, but what's on the inside. A location manager or production manager is liable to be thinking about it in terms of how close it is to the nearest Holiday Inn where he can put the troops up and things like that. |
You have to make a detailed set list, especially with period pieces. You then begin to know, for instance, if you'll need a ballroom, and you call up the research department and say, "We'd like to look at pictures of New York ballrooms from 1930"--you start to flesh out a whole social environment. |
Sometimes you have to be careful because a certain period object can be accurate but distracting. In The Shootist, a character uses an old flour sifter--it looks like a kitchen cabinet, and you would see dozens if you go down to the Antique Guild. Well, people don't cook with flour anymore--you buy it ready cooked. I think more people have commented on the oddness of that piece of furniture than they have on the rest of the picture. You can run into problems using something unique to a period that no one knows about. |
On the final shot in <I>North by Northwest</I>
We had a big problem using Mount Rushmore at the end of North By Northwest. Mount Rushmore is sacrosanct to the Department of the Interior. The picture was originally called The Man on Lincoln's Nose, so that got them upset, and the fact that Hitchcock had made some very disparaging remarks about the New York Police Department did not help either. So they said, "No, we're not going to have the four faces desecrated by having people climbing all over them and everything else." |
So Hitch said, "Bob, what are we going to do?" |
And I said, "Well, we can go back to the old trick stuff." |
I said, "Let me see if we can get some photos." So we get permission from the Department of the Interior to take still photos. |
Well, Gutzon Borglum, who did those faces, had left a metal chair at the top, and each head has a big, rusty ring on the top. So I said, "Hitch, you know, it's anticlimactic. Maybe we don't need the sequence." |
He said, "Bob, it's the only reason for making this picture!" So I knew I was licked right there. |
I said, "Let me go up to Mount Rushmore. I'll get a still photographer and we'll cover with stills"--they would not allow any movies to be made. |
We didn't use a wide-angle lens--we took fairly normal shots made for what we called stereopticon plates, which would be back-projected later. So we went down every head doing that. We were up there for days. |
Then we made backings. We made some great big backings, and then we made little pieces. Between each head there were lots of dynamite marks (those heads were made with dynamite). Very often the actors were filmed lying flat--and the stereopticon slide would be flat--but other times we would have to make the actors hang. |
The problem was always the clothes, which don't hang right if you're lying flat. We helped it with wind, particularly to get the hair to blow correctly, but occasionally we had to shoot down. For instance, the very last shot was against a painted backing, which was the floor of the valley. |
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