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Creating Film Texture: A Conversation with Harry Horner
From: American Film Institute
| By:
Harry Horner |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The diverse designs of Harry Horner's film sets throughout his five-decade long career in the motion picture profession display his range of talent as a production designer and art director. From depictions of Victorian-era New York in The Heiress, to the seedy pool halls of Harlem in The Hustler, Horner's (below) ability to capture the essence of such distinct settings earned him Academy Awards for both films.  His range extended even further on They Shoot Horses, Don't They? , set in a Depression-era dance marathon--also nominated for an Oscar.
Engineering a feasible set and adorning it with the right touches is just part of the artistry production designers and art directors bring to film. Before that, they bring detailed research to bear on each recreation, both in terms of historical accuracy and how the director wants the scene to be lit and shot.
In 1970, Horner spoke at AFI about production design and the intricate art of designing a set that extends and enhances a story's themes. |
 he training of most production designers is architectural. Most of them know how to draw and build a house or room, but a production designer also contributes to the overall design concept the minute they have read the script. This is discussed with the director. After the overall plans are drawn out into working plans, they go into the hands of an art director, who is the marvelous partner to the production designer. The production designer is the mechanical executor and the art director who visualizes all the subsequent details. On The Heiress, I was an art director. |
Extending a film's themes through production design
In the film The Hustler, director Bob Rossen wanted to shoot it all on location. It's a story about a big city--originally Chicago--and it was a realistic story about people in a billiard-game racket. |
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| Still from the 1961 film The Hustler, starring Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman. | |
I found some marvelous locations in New York--in Harlem poolrooms. I saw marvelous colors and textures in these old, run-down places, and I thought that the film was a film of texture, really. To me it was a texture of people who are really rotting away, a decadent story. |
It interested me to visually capture the decadence in the places where they do their business. So I found these marvelous places in Harlem--places where people live in darkness and then come to these green billiard tables. The brown and green is a marvelous color scheme, with everybody gravitating toward that green. |
Rossen insisted that he wanted to have the freedom of taking out a wall to, say, create a mood by getting behind something or taking up the ceiling and shooting down. All of this cannot be done on a real location. So, very reluctantly, we agreed we would build everything. |
In the film They Shoot Horses, Don't They, a period piece, we also went for a worn quality. The feeling is that nature and weather does with a room as it does with a human being. There are wonderful chemists who helped that idea along--they put ingredients into the paint that made it bubble and burst, and then it dried and cracked. |
In another part of that film, we dealt with the problem of how to solve differences between time periods--how to create within a more-or-less realistic color film an element that is removed and yet recognized. It was a challenge to the designer. |
I thought it would be very interesting to shoot the flashbacks with a sense of timelessness. To do this, I wanted it all in white. That means totally over-exposed. The sets, which were very minimal, were put into a totally white space. Everything was like the inside of an egg. And that was the concept of it--to invoke a definite estrangement, an anxiety. |
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| Still from the 1949 film The Heiress, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift. | |
For the film The Heiress, we used setting motifs. The staircase took on a central role in the story, as did the grill work and winter garden outside. The central character was a girl who felt trapped by a father who thought that she was not as sophisticated as his dead wife, who used to play the piano and make their house beautiful and so forth. So, I tried to set the daughter as if she were in a birdcage. She was caught. The winter garden became a pictorial motif that lent a feeling of claustrophobia. She was framed in the grillwork of this Victorian building like a caged bird, and downstairs her lover would come. |
The final design element was to characterize the girl's lover as a kind of adventurer, who was really only out for money. The question of the story became, is it better to be unhappy under the rule of a heartless father or would the girl be happier with a worthless husband, who was at least a handsome man and a lover? |
So, the architectural element of the staircase became a very important prop. When the girl was happy, she ran down it and it had a kind of joyousness and beauty. When she was rejected and had to climb back up, it was an object of torture. |
On supporting design through research
Research often inspires or guides design. For instance, research led me to one of those boarding houses east of Eighth Avenue in New York City. It was fascinating to look at the debris of mankind living in this building and their personal spaces. |
For instance, the landlady showed me different rooms, because for that particular project I wanted to find out how young girls--specifically dancers--lived. We saw the room of a young girl who was a dancer who was very sloppy, who left everything all over the place. |
Very interesting, however, were all the books she read. She read many, many paperbacks. And the paintings and prints on her wall were very good and interesting, but still terribly messy and sloppy. The whole geography of this way of living was very interesting. |
In another room, a very well known actor lived. It was just a room and a bathroom. It's pathetic to think of these people who all live in these isolated cells in these boarding houses, rather like a dirty beehive. This actor had the whole room padded with newspapers, even on his bed--he slept on nothing but newspaper. There were newspapers everywhere. |
Yet this man had an immaculate closet. He was very fussy about clothing, and he had about 80 pairs of shoes. This contrast was fascinating, and can provide a very good basis for thinking about a character's surroundings. |
Most of my research, in fact, is in text--not pictures. When you read, for instance, exactly what happens at the dining table of wealthy people at the turn of the century--how they ate, how they were served and other details--you can construct a set for that period. Out of research you gain a better understanding of the formality of their meals and the characters' relationships to elegance and so forth. It is crucial to have an understanding of how these characters act under specific social circumstances to design their surroundings properly. |
Trends in photography
When I worked on The Heiress, I worked with a process developed by a fantastic cinematographer, Eugene Shuftan. He invented a process they called the "Shuftan Process," which was a system from the early Fritz Lang films, where half of the set is miniature and half is full-sized. This was so real-sized people could get through a door, ride through a castle and other things. |
But there was a mirror in front of the camera, which produced a reflection of the miniature part. It created a split image subsequently blended in the camera to give the illusion of a full environment. And you can move the camera to some extent--you can pan down and move under. |
Trends in photography can also impact design choices. After Gregg Toland shot Citizen Kane, everyone wanted that grand depth of focus. The lighting was so strong that the foreground and the background could be extremely sharp, and it was very fashionable. |
Suddenly, everybody wanted to shoot in depth and keep everything in focus. Theoretically, even though it is obvious and simple to do, it is very difficult to find a balance of light, and to keep the right kind of light on actors. |
It becomes a complex, planned design, which takes out some of the spontaneity an actor can bring to the scene. It can become a design obstacle, but it also offers a great dramatic quality. |
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