The Look of Les Miserables: NEW Production Design Featurette

Universal has started releasing new craft featurettes of Les Miserables. I'm sharing this one on Production Design as I expect Eve Stewart will be nominated for her amazing work here! There's some irony for me that this is a Universal picture as once upon a time I was a tour guide at Universal Studios;  for me, the parts that take place in Paris look just like that Universal Studios backlot - dressed and populated as a crowded poverty-stricken city in the middle of chaos. 

I spent a fair amount of time taking tours past, and wandering around myself, the European streets of the backlot. Cruising the empty sets is a bizarre trip into a world of wonder and make-believe, a world fabricated from foam facades, plastic bricks and candy glass.  It was thrilling, as a fan,  to press ones' palm against a 'looks like brick but it's not' wall and ponder the possibilities. For Les Miserables the filmmakers built their set, constructed with very much the same materials, as Anne Hathaway points out, from painted plastic, on set at the famed Pinewood Studios. See what Ms. Stewart and her set decorator, Anna Lynch-Robinson have to say in this featurette. While they aimed for realism, Ms. Stewart was acutely aware she was not recreating Paris for a historical documentary, and aimed as well, for the magic. I think she succeeded. 

As always watch this at your peril, it may contain...

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