Interview: James Chinlund's Evolutionary "Apes" Vision. (Plus a Look Back at "The Fountain")

Production Design James ChinlundThough today's film culture is as as overun with franchises as the decaying cities of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes are with unchecked vegetation, franchise movies do have a few beautiful unique pleasures all their own. Chief among those, we'd argue, is the sheer scale of imaginative spectacle they can provide when the right people are hired behind the scenes. 

James Chinlund, the award winning production designer behind the fantastic world-building in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is one of those people.  Though his filmography was once mostly the domain of scrappy ambitious auteur indies, he's recently experienced a sort of super-size me effect. He credits Marvel's gamble in hiring him to design their biggest blockbuster The Avengers with reinvigorating his film career. This led directly to Dawn of the Apes, one of 2014's most acclaimed giant-sized hits. Though Chinlund undoubtedly has his share of film offers these days, he prefers the mix of small and large scale projects that his still-diverse career provides and opted out of superhero sequels from the time commitment. 

Apes, Avengers, and The Fountain are after the jump... 

After studying to be a sculptor in college, Chinlund had worked as a carpenter -- describing his talent in that capacity rather humbly as "competent" -- before seguewaying into art direction and production design on music videos and indie film. Both mediums were in arguably their most creatively fertile and well-budgeted period (ah, the Nineties). Even today with gargantuan blockbusters on his resume, he speaks with obvious fondness about that period. He valued the speed and experimentation of those jobs... "a fun way to churn through ideas" 

And churn through ideas you must as a production design hired to create whole fantastical worlds, spinning off from our own. It's a gargantuan job. 

Nathaniel R: Production Designers are responsible for the entire look of a film. How maddeningly impossible is that to get a grip on at the start of a such a big assignment like Apes?  

JAMES CHINLUND: I think the easiest way to explain it is that after the director we’re the first ones in. For me it all starts with meeting with the director. I like to go into that meeting prepared with a pitch, based on my take of the script, for the look of the film. Slowly but surely the team starts to build and then we’re the last ones out. It’s an interesting perspective on the process to be able to see everyone show up; it turns into a city basically and then everyone slowly trickles away.

Nathaniel R: How do location scouts factor into that. On this film in particular that seems crucial.

JAMES CHINLUND: They are an early part of the process. I am involved in picking that person though it doesn’t necessarily fall directly under my purview. Certainly location is a huge part of the process — on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes we had a lot of puzzle pieces to figure out. We knew we wanted to set the movie in San Francisco but we knew we could only shoot there for a very very limited period as it is these days with incentives and things.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the most advantageous place to shoot. We landed on New Orleans on a possibility based on the idea that we wanted an urban environment and a city that would allow us to do work on the streets. New Orleans was a good potential because it had a nice bunch of Victorian architecture that would help us tie into looks in San Francisco. That’s the puzzle -- build off of a few kernels of your idea and start to cobble together a plan for the film. 

Not every film you've worked on -- well, none of them actually -- have this much of a history. Did you feel you were starting from scratch with this script or did you look back at the whole 40 plus year old franchise history?

We were absolutely looking at the history of the franchise. I felt a huge responsibility to the fans to help tie all those pieces together. Technologically we’ve taken huge leaps and we could bring a richer and more complex visual world than had been represented ever before but at the same time we really wanted to stay true to some of the language and ideas so people would be able to see the threads being connected from the earliest films to ours. For example we spent a lot of time analyzing the written language in the earlier films. We really tried to set up an evolutionary development where we were looking at the symbols and to bring those back into the language we’re developing. 

Nathaniel R: That’s so cool. The thing I loved most about the movie visually was its mix of a post-apocalyptic look with something that's also just lush and fecund. That's a weird weird combination if you think about it. You don't see that in many 'end of world' movies.  

JAMES CHINLUND: Right. That was hugely exciting for me. What these films are about is the triumph of nature over man so, in a way, yes, its apocalyptic but it’s really a rebirth with nature healing itself and wiping away the damage that mankind has wrought on the world. 

Visually what you’re seeing  — it’s melancholic to see decaying cities but you’re seeing Super Nature, the world resetting its roots. In a way they are optimistic films. We’re living in a time where we’re seeing how terrible some of our decisions have been and the consequences of man’s decision on the world. It was fun to be able to imagine a world without people and how it would start to rebuild itself.

When you’re doing the decayed city with the vegetation — on things like that do you get notes from the studio like 'more more more' or 'not so much'? How much feedback do you get?

There was a lot of debate internally on the studio side about how far to go. Obviously there’s a huge fantastical element sitting right in the middle of the story but Matt and I had a really strong idea that we wanted to stay true to science as much as we could. We looked around and really tried to build a world that reflected what would happen if civilization paused and how far nature would go. We were looking at things like Fukushima and Chernobyl, areas in the world that were sort of frozen in time and how far the vegetation and that sort of thing could come. I think we delivered a fairly accurate represation of that.

The movie just looks great. But aside from all the construction and conceptualization how involved do you have to be during the shoot. Are you there on set spray-hosing the forest? [Laughs]

I’m there every day. I feel responsible to deliver the vision all the way through. Details are always emerging until the camera rolls. It’s really important to keep your eye on all those things. Obviously there’s a lot to look out for. I was so lucky to have built such a talented team. A lot of my responsibility is shared with the amazing artists that work with me. And I was spread between Vancouver and New Orleans which is quite a tricky commute. So while we were up there shooting, things are happening back in New Orleans so I really have to be able to trust the people I work with to deliver on the vision. 

What was the trickiest set for you?

Well... trickiest? I would say most inspiring and most exciting was the ape civilization. That was the delicious meal at the beginning of the film to really be able to evolve a civilization and create the rules -  the way they organized their society and how their homes would look. That research was unbelievable — you know, looking at primates and other primitive civilizations and trying to create a hybrid idea of how that would go...

If you upped their brain power.

Exactly. What’s the next evolutionary step beyond primate? So really trying to create a blend of early mankind and ape life. We were looking at the different types of apes live in the jungle. Like Chimpanzees live in groups of hundred or more in these clans. Orangutans are solitary and live on their own and Gorillas live in groups of 10 and the different ways they make their nests. We extrapolated all of that and worked it into ideas about their architecture. So the main courtyard space, that circular space, was a chimp habitat and would accommodate the whole chimp family. And then the towers you’ll see around were meant to be orangutan perches. 

It was really exciting to build that from the ground up.  

So you take all the work from the Dian Fosseys of the world and then futurize it? 

Absolutely. One cool thing was looking at certain groups of orangutans. They build themselves umbrellas out of leaves. They weave them into these beautiful flat baskets that they wear on their head. You can tell an older orangutan's because his umbrella is really good. And then you see these junior orangutans --  theirs are falling apart and they’re getting all wet. It's amazing when you realize how it’s not a lot of steps on the evolutionary ladder that separate us.

The orangutan is my favorite in the movie.

Amazing looking guy!

absoanthm from sidereal43 on Vimeo.

"Absolut World" 2010 directed by Rupert Sanders and designed by James Chinlund won Chinlund two coveted prizes, the Art Directors Guild and the AICP Award

You're quite acclaimed but your filmography is actually slim. Why don't you do more films?

The bigger films like Avengers and Apes were both over a year long for me. Cinematographers can pack in a lot more projects because they’re on the film for sometimes a third as long. So it’s a huge commitment for me personally. And also I really enjoy commercials, print fashion and music videos. I like the break that that gives me. It’s a huge investment doing a film. Often it requires me to be somewhere other than my home.  I have a young family and I’ve been trying to balance it out.

But I started in film and that is my love and what I want to do forever. So it’s about pacing myself. I’m selective about which movies I do. I feel like they stand forever so it’s more about quality than quantity for me. 

You have such good looking films on your resumes like The Fountain. I was just talking to Matty Libatique the other day and that sounded like an arduous and painful process! 

The Fountain, yeah. we were all going through it on that movie. My daughter was born during that film in the middle of January in Montreal. On a personal level we were all sort of really fighting it. But in the end I'm so soproud of that work and that collaboration. I feel like that was really the pinnacle for that team Danny / Matty and myself. We had collaborated on Requiem for a Dream, too. We had such a clear vision of what we wanted the film to look like. That film was designed around the idea of the tree ship flying towards the distant star. And we decided to design all the sets around that idea so they’ll be a distant light that’s penetrating that set through a series of filters and layers when you look at it. And all the sets contain textures of the tree. The challenge on that movie was blending all these different time periods and creating a cohesive look: because we had 1492 conquistadors, modern day and future. Trying to get that all to sit together was a real challenge. I'm so proud of it. 

You should be. Is it more fun for you as a production designer to do more intimate films like The Fountain and Requiem than the big corporate behemoths like Avengers or Apes ? 

JAMES CHINLUND: Well [pause]... I’ll differentiate between Avengers and Apes. The Avengers was really a high octane machine that allowed me to feel the power of creating a blockbuster film. I’m still very proud of the design, I really enjoyed the process with Joss and we made a movie that really works as a film. But i think there are some films that are closer to my heart in terms of a design concept and a concept that runs throughout the film and Apes was one of them. I had a very strong connection and collaboration with Matt Reeves. We were on the same page and built a complete world. 

It's a little corny to say big or small it doesn’t matter. I love having the resources to build and create a world for people. But, you know, we did The Fountain for 33 million which is impressive if you think about the scope of what we were doing. It's a testament to good planning - there was very little waste. You can do it on a lot of scales. To answer your question, ultimately it’s really about some hook in the narrative that gets me.

Nathaniel: Do you have any genre you’d still love to try your hand at?

JAMES CHINLUND: I have to say I’m really more about directors and ideas. And when I did The Fountain I felt like I could stop at that point [Laughs] I had done space fantasy and period piece and combined that with a modern world. And then to build this ape world and The Avengers. It takes me by surprise to be brought into these worlds so I hope I continue to have the opportunity to explore. 

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