In Conversation with Mara LePere-Schloop
Recently, I spoke with Mara LePere-Schloop, the production designer behind one of television's most recent fantasy period dramas, 'Interview with The Vampire' on all things spooky and sustainable.
TMOF: So I read that the theatre was your introduction to the world of design, can you tell me a little bit more about that?
M: Sure! So I guess that I grew up in Detroit, Michigan and, there was this really amazing youth theatre group called ‘Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit’. They had a whole acting and music component, but they also started doing a technical theatre that was an apprenticeship program but for kids. So between the ages of 11 and 18, they would train everybody to basically run the shows completely and they toured to my school when I was 9 or 10 years old and when I was 11, I was like, “I want to join the technical department”.
I ended up going to school for architecture and, my father was a very practical person, he said, “Why don't you, instead of being so specific, try something a little bit broader?”. I'm very thankful for that advice because I think getting an architectural education as opposed to just set design, really kind of opened up a way of thinking about design on larger levels and helped me get an understanding of how things are built and the realities of the world.
TMOF: I always love hearing everyone's stories, because they’re so different, but you all kind of end up in the same sort of place. How do you describe to people what production design is and what you do?
M: You know, it's had different capacities over the decades of the film and television industry. And I think in the middle of the last century, production design meant literally the whole look of the film - it was overseeing costumes and makeup and, it was a much more kind of comprehensive figure. But I think that the projects that I really enjoy working on and have the benefit of working on, are the projects where there's the most collaboration to try to unify design again and really make it a collaborative process.
But getting back to your original question, what does the production designer do? We're basically broken into 3 parts and I think of it as the architects, project managers and construction - those are the people that are overseeing the designs of the builds. The supervising art director is like the project manager overseeing construction. Then you have the set decorator who is the person that's kind of in charge of the interior design. So the furniture, the wallpaper, the drapery, etc. and they have a whole huge team of people that are dressing the set.
In my mind, the way I think of the job is as communicators and psychiatrists. We're just kind of getting the information from the directors, the cinematographers, the producers and making sure that there's a cohesive concept, and then taking it and disseminating it and making it as clear and digestible as possible. You're not just a designer, you're a psychologist, a historian, you wear so many hats.
TMOF: How do you find being responsible for all of that? Is it a lot of weight on your shoulders?
M: It is.
The big lessons that I learned were never let them see you sweat because I think that’s the reality is of running any department or working in any sort of managerial positions on any given day. There's a million fires happening, and for me, it's very important to protect the crew from those kind of unnecessary worries or headaches and just create an environment so that people can function at their peak.
TMOF: I find that so refreshing, the desire to protect your crew and set those boundaries.
I wanted to know what your thoughts were on the rise of sustainability in the industry because I think that's a very important topic that a lot of people don't even think about in terms of set building.
M: Yeah, I mean, it's something I was actually talking about yesterday with our supervising art director that I'm working here in Prague with and and it's something that I really admire about her practice here.
Something that I've learned over time in this job is that, we all have to be really mindful of being not only our own advocates, but advocates for things that we find morally or ethically important in life. I don't understand why there's not more diversity or, pay equity or why we don't recycle. I’m asking all these “why, why” and then I finally said, “Well, what am I doing? What am I doing to change that? Why am I always looking for someone else?” And I think that it's something that I try to challenge myself to be more proactive about engaging with when we are starting up, to be more proactive about engaging with when we are starting up an art department.
It's so frustrating because you build these huge things and then you get caught in legal limbo where there's not a lot of ways you can be proactive about recycling them and or reusing them and then also at the end of a show, usually everyone's ready to get the hell out of there and cut back on cost. So it's like, what can we be doing to help make this… you know, financially motivated? Which unfortunately, a lot of the times is the only way you're gonna get studio reaction to these things. But to make it part of a built-in infrastructure where it's just assumed that that's part of the process.
So I think what's amazing about the PDC [Production Designers Collective] and even the strikes is, it's really bringing a lot of conversations to the table that I think people didn't know they could even engage in before. One of the panels that is happening as part of their ‘Production Design Week’ is on sustainability and great design and I think the way we change is by uniting and making this a large conversation and not just something that we may talk over drinks and complain about.
The PDC’s panel on sustainability is available to watch on the ‘International Production Design Week’ channel on YouTube.
TMOF: I saw with ‘The Alienist’ in Budapest, that those sets were reused and that people would message you about it. Is that weird to see, when things are reused and how different they are to your initial vision?
M: Totally. And that's the funny thing of ego where, my human core is like “Thank goodness that this is being reused” and then selfishly I'm like “Well, I did that.” [laughs] From a design perspective, the way I'm come to look at it is, how interesting it is to see how it's used in different ways.
But funnily enough, we built a backlot for the second season of ‘Interview With the Vampire’ and the studio here just bought it, so now there's going to be another backlot that someone else can use.
TMOF: There was something that you said earlier about sort of cohesiveness and staying with the story. How do you find keeping with the authenticity of an era in terms of the design with what's needed from the narrative?
M: I think that period shows really appeal to me because part of the process that I really enjoy is the research and diving into things and learning something new about a time and place. I think there's a lot of different ways to approach period and so, for a show like ‘Mrs. America’ which is about the 1970s Women's Liberation Movement, and, you know, the 70s is such a graphic decade, I didn't want to over stylise or over fetishise the 70s because for me the characters in the story were so important. So many of the women and featured in that show were such huge figures in American culture, even now. And so I really felt the responsibility of not turning them into caricatures, but helping supporting elements in defining who they are as people.
There's so much research that we did and there were various apartments, we were pretty meticulous in recreating. But then there were other women in the movement where there were no photos of their homes and so it was really about taking cues from research and references from the period, but then also reading their biographies and autobiographies and understanding their character, what they were doing, what their lives were like, so that then we could inject that into their individual apartments and homes. For me, that's one type of approach for period where it's designed as a supporting role for character.
Then you have something like ‘Interview With the Vampire’. We first had conversations about the tone of the show that this is a gritty vibrant world that happens to have vampires in it. You know, this isn't pure fantasy, this is grounded in reality. And because these aren't real people, it also meant we could introduce them with a bit more of the luxury of the period as well. You know, it's like making it more of a lush world, especially when the vampires are concerned because the whole thing is that they have these these heightened senses and, so how does that impact their interior design?
I think I'm always checking myself and reminding our teams that whether we like it or not, there are rules that we've established, whether it's from previous shows or budget or location. There's these things that are informing what we're doing and I think it's really important to be mindful of what those things are and making sure you're not falling into the traps of those rules, but seeing them, understanding them, and then, harvesting what's best out of them.
I do have gut instincts and there's things that I definitely like and I'm drawn to from my own personal style. But I think that I really like putting on different hats of character and getting into the research, ingesting as much as I can and then just kind of letting that funnel into the show as it needs to be.
TMOF: I like that you're so aggressive with the research.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall in those sort of discussions where it's like, “Okay, so who's going to go down to the funeral homes and look at some coffins for us?” What is it like researching the architecture of New Orleans and then going into the more fantastical side?
M: I have never hated a single thing more than the coffins. [laughs]
And it's just because it's one of those things, you know. And with shows like this, it's very funny because at the heart of it, it's a very dysfunctional love story that happens to be period that also happens to have vampires and action and gore.
So from a design perspective, it's really about meshing the need for very intense collaboration with other departments. Coffin lids are very heavy, sometimes they burst open, so figuring out the mechanics with the special effects teams of how to make these things work in camera - it's one of the things we didn't realise how frustrating it would be if they weren't like highly functional. There were so many scenes that first season with the two of them getting ready for bed and getting in and out of the coffins and it was just the bane of everyone's existence because they would, you know, one day they'd be fine and the next day they'd be temperamental and they weren't opening the way they needed to open so you have to change it. The amount of times I had to talk about those coffins… I have nightmares about them. [laughs]
At the beginning it was very fun because it was more of this design exercise based on character - Lestat’s coffin versus Louis’ versus Claudia’s. We ended up building them all and building them in different sizes so that you could shoot inside of them. We would build sample versions out of cardboard and then get Sam and Jacob to come and lie in them and make sure they could both fit. You know, it was a very charming exercise.
And then this season we have a whole coven of vampires with coffins. But we've streamlined it and gotten much better about dealing with functional coffins for everyone. But it is very funny. There’s very specific things that, you don't realise you have to learn about, like the difference between a coffin and a casket and different types of upholstery and period. It's what is so fun about this job, the things that stress you out.
TMOF: Was that a similar thing for Pachinko - I mean congratulations by the way for winning the ADG award for that!
M: Thank you! Thanks.
TMOF: What was that like? Finding those gambling machines?
M: It's funny because I started that job the March of the year the pandemic started. We were literally headed out the door to scout for ‘Pachinko’ and we were going to Japan, Korea, and Vancouver and then the world shut down. I give the studio a ton of credit that they, instead of just putting everything on ice, they gave us this really amazing time period to work with illustrators and concept artists to start pitching what the show could be. But it was a very weird time because we didn't know what countries we were going to be allowed to go to. We had a lot simmering on the stove with different scenarios of what we were gonna do.
Pachinko is a game played in Japan and we learned pretty quickly that we weren't able to go to Japan, not even to shop because of the pandemic rules. So now the place that had all of the things that we needed, we are now going to have to recreate somewhere else and also try to source everything. Those first few months I was so panicked about “How do we make a Pachinko parlour in Vancouver without any machines?” Our set decorator Hamish Purdy managed to find this collector in Japan and it's so funny because this thing that in the beginning I thought was going to be our hardest solve was the first thing we solved.
So I thought, oh, the show is gonna be a piece of cake. I know that pandemic filmmaking was very hard, but trying to run a multi-national show during that was a level of complex I don't ever really want to relive and I'm so proud of the end result. I think it was incredible but it was a very, very challenging time and it's crazy to me that we made that show without going to Japan because it's all set essentially in Japan after a certain point in the series. It's just a very crazy thing to look back on.
TMOF: So getting the nomination and then getting the win, it's like, “Yeah, you guys saw what I did!”
M: It does feel very validating. To feel like your peers understand something and appreciate it. I think it's so humbling to be nominated for something like that. I still don't even think of that as something that happened to me, it's like something that happened for the show, but it's very cool.
TMOF: Going back to research, what's your sort of go to when it comes to researching? Especially when you can’t go to certain places and access archives.
M: I think the other big lesson I've learned over time is that, as prep time gets more and more limited for a lot of things, I never feel like I have as much time as I would want to invest in these things. I learned early that if you can find consultants or advisors that you can bring in, to let the whole department or the whole crew take advantage of that. Spending the time to find the right people is a really huge thing to do.
On ‘The Alienist’, we had a man named Richard Zacks and I went into New York and had very long conversations with him, picked his brain and I would send him emails at 4 in the morning saying “What about this?” and then he would send me in the direction of things to do.
I find that if you can get a way to key in to getting out of the generic clichés of the period, but somehow tap in whether it's reading a book or talking to someone or doing something. How do you find out the things of how life was really being led?What did it smell like? How did they pick up the garbage? What are the things that are telling the story of what it was like to live in that time period? So that then it may not be in the script, but you can go to the writers and go to the directors and say, “You know what's crazy about New York at that time is that there was no public sewage.” These things inform a world in a way that you may not get just from looking at pictures.
And for ‘Interview’, we used a local historian in New Orleans named Richard Campbell, who is just like a walking encyclopedia. And I had the advantage of living in New Orleans for 20 years, so I was a little bit ahead of the curve for this show. But just getting to talk to Richard; he knew so much about Storyville and the brothels and then also just the political ramifications of that time period and its impact. So not all of that makes it onto the screen, but I think that what it does for me is it helps build this kind of armour of understanding so that on Day 120, when a set designer comes to me and says “What colour is this door?”, the world exists in my head in a way that I really understand and I can answer that question with confidence because I've built up this kind of a fundamental understanding of what I think this should be.
And so for me that's just that's my process. I think every project is different with the research and being in physical spaces and getting into archives is such a huge wonderful thing, but now there's so many great digital archives as well. I talked to a lot of designers and folks that worked in the industry, even just 10 years before I did and thinking about trying to do this without the internet, it's so wild. So I'm very grateful that we have so many fantastic resources at our fingertips.
TMOF: I think ‘Interview’ is my favourite representation of New Orleans on screen because I just feel that there's this, like you were saying, that armour, there's an ambience around it. I feel that sometimes there's representations of things and there's just not that same feeling of dedication.
And I was going to say as well with ‘Mrs. America’, I loved the graphics of the pins and the badges and the fliers. How do you try not to do the cliché but also not get stuck down in the details?
M: For ‘Mrs America’, we had a really, really fantastic researcher in and I love when you work with people who have the same kind of energy and excitement over learning things as you. We were going home at night and he'll have read a biography of one of the characters and you come in the next morning it would be folded over and creased and written in.
What we really focused on when we were dealing with events that happened like the conventions, whether it was Democratic, Republican, or the Women's Convention at the end of the show, we really wanted to be as loyal to the reproduction of those times and places as possible and not to kind of attempt to compete with them with some other kind of design.
We had a massive Graphics department, I think we may have had a dozen graphic designers on that show because so much of that story is told through the work of the women on the ground getting the word out on both sides. We remade every single element that was in the delegate convention package that was sent to the delegates’ home; even though we didn't always see all those things, the badge, the tickets, the map, we had the option to shoot it if we need be. I think having those textures and details to make it feel more real on the floor for the actors is also something that I think is really important.
We had these certain moments in the show where we would go on eBay and we would buy the original tickets or pins or buttons from that period, bring them in, reproduce them, get them cleared, which is a whole other long process, and then reproduce them for the show in different quantities. Then other times, there were things where there weren't photographs of events or things that were happening so we had a little bit more flexibility there to just try to fill it in with something that was appropriate but not distracting.
Everyone was so proud to be working on that show and every time I'd be like, “No, no, we should stop here, we've done enough”, they'd be like, “No, but what about this?”. It's the most humbling, amazing experience when you have a team that's like “This isn't just a job, this is something we're really proud of”. They weren't doing it because they wanted their random thing to be seen on camera, they were doing it because it's so important to them to be connected in that way to the events that had happened.
TMOF: When you were just talking about clearance just then, I was thinking about every time I saw an art-piece Louis’ Dubai penthouse. What were the references like for his space since everything else we see is set in a Gothic New Orleans?
M: It's funny because when I first got the call to work on ‘Interview’, I was like, “There's no way I will say no to this”. I read the books when I was a teenager, I went on a ghost tour when I was 13, fell in love with New Orleans, and ended up back there probably because of that. I think more than anything, I would’ve been heartbroken to see someone do this wrong.
Originally, it was just kind of a generic fancy Dubai apartment but when I started looking into all of them it was just that international, affluent style where it almost doesn't have any personality to it. I just kept saying to myself, “If I were a vampire who was like Louis and my entire existence is based on believing in mankind and trying to find the good in people, then would I just live in some boujee apartment in Dubai?” And because we don't really know what he’s been doing the last century and all we had seen is Lestat’s townhouse and Louis’ family's house - we never saw anything that was about his persona and his identity. I was just trying to get in the head of seeking peace and the presence of excellence in humans - it was a lot of Japanese minimalism and Eastern architecture and ritual, not necessarily based on religion, but process and ritual and those types of things.
The other thing is if you were a vampire, what's the one thing that you can never have? Daylight. I pitched this idea of having the tree with a skylight that is almost like a sundial, so he knows not to step on it during the day but it's a way to still be connected. I'm so glad they let us go down this road and not just make some generic penthouse, because I really wanted something that was a stark contrast between our story in the 1920s, 30s and 40s and really gave us a palette cleanser.
Louis was a collector of art too, and so, that was months of discussion, because I think art is something that so many people have ideas about. Rolin [Jones, the showrunner] is a collector so there were certain artists that we immediately kind of keyed in and agreed upon. We knew that we wanted to have one of the stolen masters, the paintings that have kind of disappeared in history, so we have the Rembrandt. Then we kept going back and forth about what should be in the main room and we ended up doing the Francis Bacon’s, which is a funny story that will have a narrative impact in Season 2 because it ended up being used in another show and Rolin was mad. [laughs] So now we're gonna discuss that on the show.
Also, I wanted to have a lot of people of colour represented. There's a fantastic artist who teaches at Xavier, New Orleans who does these beautiful charcoals of southern oak root trees, so that's one of the pieces in the dining room. There's a photographer from New Orleans and a famous New York photographer. It was a really great way to drill in things that I think really help cultivate a sense of who Louis is in the world and that he is this inspired collector.
But all that being said, you know, art ain't cheap and we didn't have all the scripts at the time, so you're trying to budget and make a deal with people and the estates of people and you don't really know how often it's going to be seen. Super challenging and complicated but so worth the battle. I think for a lot of people you throw down the towel and just say, “Okay, let's just get something that's public domain or pay an artist something cheap and make something” but I think that it's such a great thing and a great victory for the show that you can have a bit of reality that contextualises history and puts things into proper place.
TMOF: What has it being like doing all of this during the strike? Did you stop and then you got the interim agreement and started again?
M: Yeah, we stopped end of July, mid July? We stopped and then we stayed a little longer to keep building because here in Prague, you don't have one construction company that builds everything, you hire different companies for different sets. So the fear was that when the strikes ended that it would be kind of a gold rush with everyone going back.
And so I stayed a little bit longer and then went home, and then I got a call from our producer and he was like, “You're never gonna believe this”, because we didn't even know they had applied for it, we didn't know it was in the cards. And I was on a plane not too long after that coming back here to get things up and going. So we've been getting everything back and ready.
TMOF: So, after that, what's in store for you?
M: The last several years, I've been doing these big period TV shows and they're wonderful. There's so much that I get out of them that I love but they take up a year of my life and when that means leaving a husband behind and all sorts of things, it gets a little old. It was fun at first, but now I am a little over it.
So I think I'd like to go back into film and try to not do the year long thing. But I say that and then as soon as I start seeing amazing stuff on TV being made and I'm like, “Oh!” So who knows? We'll see.
TMOF: Well, whatever it is. I will be watching!