The Film Experience

by Cláudio Alves

If Sarah Greenwood wins the Oscar for Barbie, Nathan Crowley will officially become the most nominated production designer without a single win. You may be familiar with his name from many Christopher Nolan pictures since he's worked on most of them. But most is not all, and this past year, the British production designer was absent from the Oppenheimer credits. Ruth De Jong did that job and is now up for an Oscar thanks to it. Crowley, however, was less fortunate. Instead of the blockbuster biopic, he was busy re-imagining the wondrous world of Roald Dahl for Wonka – new on PVOD if you want a taste of Chalamet…

This season may prove that the Academy's Production Design branch wasn't necessarily in love with Crowley. Maybe they're just passionate about Nolan. Then again, Wonka is a very atypical Nathan Crowley project. Though some of his first film credits included Spielberg's Hook and Coppola's wild take on Dracula, he soon left fantasy for dark dramas and historical grittiness. Some of the directors he worked with in the 90s include Mel Gibson, Abel Ferrara, Richard Donner, Alan J. Pakula, and John Carpenter, oscillating between film and TV, primarily within realistic registers. The new millennium brought with it new opportunities, specifically Crowley's first collaboration with Christopher Nolan, fresh off Memento's success and ready for bigger things.

Between 2002 and 2005, Crowley helped create the frozen noir of Insomnia and Batman Begins' vision of Gotham City. 2006 would be a turning point for the designer, when he worked on Nolan's Victorian nightmare, The Prestige, and The Lake House's dream of American Modernism. It seems silly to say so, but the romantic drama is almost more critical for Crowley's journey than the film that got him his first Oscar nomination. In it, he got to play with clean lines, a love song of glass and steel, boxes within boxes, spare décor within sets dominated by blocks, frames. It certainly looks like he embraced a new aesthetic moving into The Dark Knight and all the Nolan projects that came after.

Beyond that director, other notable titles include Mann's Public Enemies, the box office catastrophe of John Carter, the Westworld pilot, The Greatest Showman, and First Man, for which he earned his only non-Nolan Oscar nomination. He'll probably be back in the race with the Wicked movies, but it would be something if the first of the director's films to win the Best Production Design Oscar were one where Crowley wasn't involved. Oh well, as the title of this post states, better luck next time. In the meantime, why don't we look back at Crowley's six nominations, who they competed against, and what films bested him in the race for gold?