Old suit at the ready for production designer's latest trip to Academy Awards
Credit to Author: Dana Gee| Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2020 21:08:02 +0000
Production designer Dennis Gassner will be wearing a 30-year-old suit when he sits in the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Feb. 9 waiting to see if he and Lee Sandales win the Academy Award for achievement in production design for their work on best picture nominee 1917.
But that suit isn’t just any old suit.
“I’ll wear the same tuxedo I wore when I won for Bugsy,” said Gassner, who, along with Nancy Haigh, collected the Oscar for best art direction-set decoration in 1991 for the Warren Beatty-starring film. “It is the only (tuxedo) I have ever had and I think the most expensive thing that I ever bought back in 1991. So, the amortization has been quite nice.”
For the record, the suit is a Giorgio Armani Classico double-breasted tuxedo.
“The style fits in with the movies I make, you know, the period films,” said the 71-year-old Vancouver native, who credits 40 years of yoga as the key to fitting into a suit bought as a much younger man.
Production designer Dennis Gassner is nominated for his seventh Academy Award for his work on the film 1917. Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
This year, the period film that has brought him to the big show with his seventh Academy Award nomination (his last nomination was 2018’s Blade Runner 2049) is the epic First World War drama from Sam Mendes about a pair of young soldiers (Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay) who are sent out on a mission to try to deliver a message to stop an attack that would result in huge loss of life for the English army.
The best-picture favourite and recent BAFTA sweeper, including production design for Gassner and Sandales, is a visual masterpiece that looks like it’s one long continuous shot. It isn’t. It’s a series of shots that are meticulously put together to give the overwhelming impression that it is one shot and that you, the viewer, are right there beside the scared young men as they make this perilous journey through the French battlegrounds.
This marks the fifth time Gassner has worked with Mendes, and the ninth film he has done with master cinematographer Roger Deakins.
It took over a year to complete 1917. Each scene and shot was put together like an intricate dance with the utmost in complicated choreography.
“You can only do that when you have a lot of experience and especially with the camaraderie that Sam and Roger and I have. Old relationships,” said Gassner. “It was kind of an inch-by-inch journey. Defining it, measuring it, discussing it, and designing it and building it and shooting it.”
Schofield, George MacKay, foreground, with fellow soldiers in 1917, the new epic from Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes.
As for his actual design, Gassner said he had a sense of what he wanted to create as soon as he finished reading Mendes’s script.
“I really wanted to have a dreamscape environment or a slightly surreal one, because that kind of goes to the context of what those boys must have gone through,” said Gassner. “The surreal element of war. It certainly was not their normal lives.”
Everything you see in this movie is real and no detail goes unnoticed.
“Everything you saw was created by artists. So, I used the term the art of war. It is going to be an approach that everything is going to be exact,” said Gassner about his brief to those working with him on the design of the film. “It’s going to be perfect in the way that it would have been done as if we were doing it for real.
“Every person who worked on this film, I talked to them about that. That was their edict: to make sure that everything they did was precise.”
Each step and movement was laid out before shooting. There was not an inch of the film that wasn’t measured, marked and considered to the highest degree.
“Beat for beat was laid out. It was a very complicated thing to do,” said Gassner. “It was an immaculate dance. In my opinion, perfection, because it had to be.”
This was easily one of the more demanding movies Gassner has worked on in his five decades in the business.
“The last shooting day was the scene where George jumps into the river from the bridge. Sam, Roger and me, we all looked at each other and I said, ‘I think I’m quite tired.’ We all started laughing,” said Gassner. “It is amazing you get through an experience like this and you can smile at it and give everybody a hug and say, ‘Well done.’ It’s like running a super-marathon. You go through the finish line and you fall over and you hug each other.”
Gassner was born in Vancouver in 1948 and lived here for five years before his parents took him and his brother to Portland, Ore. He was raised there and went to the University of Oregon at Eugene, where he was studying architecture. It’s during that time that he saw David Lean’s 1962 cinematic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia and everything changed.
“I said, ‘Now that’s big. That’s big and I want to do big. That is bigger than any building I could ever design and build,’ so it was about having a big imagination,” said Gassner, who moved to Los Angeles at age 21 and enrolled in the ArtCenter College of Design.
It was while at the Pasadena, Calif., college that he and a pal decided they were going to get a job working for Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now. And the rest, as they say, is history, as Gassner did go on to design the movie poster for the legendary Coppola film.
Always in demand, Gassner took the 1917 job over another James Bond film — he has done three already, two with Mendes.
“It was the unknown,” said Gassner, when asked about that decision to go to war with Mendes. “I didn’t know that much about the Great War and I wanted to explore, and hopefully tell the truest of the stories.”
The story for 1917 came from Mendes’s memories of the stories his grandfather, a First World War veteran, told him as a kid.
“It was the most powerful script I have ever read,” said Gassner.
And Gassner has seen some pretty great scripts. A glance at his resumé and you can’t help but utter “wow.”
“It’s been a nice journey,” said Gassner, a two-time BAFTA winner (Road to Perdition and The Truman Show), when asked about his IMDb page listings.
More like epic voyage.
He has done six Cohen Brothers films and worked with the likes of Barry Levinson, Tim Burton, Mark Forster, Denis Villeneuve, Rob Marshall and Chris Weitz. And he is part of one of cinema’s most storied franchises — Bond, James Bond.
“It was exciting,” said Gassner about the Bond films (Spectre, Skyfall and Quantum of Solace). “There is a lot to do because there is a huge history … It’s a huge, huge responsibility and something I have been lucky to do three times, and I will probably do again later on and down the line.”
Fun fact: The single shot, opening Day of the Dead scene in Spectre, directed by Mendes, is where the inspiration for 1917’s one-shot look came from.
“That’s where we got the idea to do 1917,” said Gassner. “We figured out how to do it and it was actually pretty cool.”
When Gassner is asked about the amazing list of talented filmmakers he has worked with, he pauses and says, “It’s always fun to be with friends.”
OK, but is there something else besides a good time with old pals that connects the dots between the projects of his impressive career?
“Good storytellers. Everything is about story. That is all I care about, is story,” said Gassner.
With that statement in support of story, it seems only fitting to end this piece with a great story.
It was 2002, and Gassner was at the Governor’s Ball after the Academy Awards. While winding his way through the tables to the bathroom, someone slid their chair back into his path. There, in front of Gassner, was the legendary actor Peter O’Toole, Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia.
O’Toole had been fêted earlier in the evening with a lifetime achievement award.
“I said, ‘Oh, Mr. O’Toole, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Dennis Gassner. I’m here because I’m nominated for a film, and congratulations on your lifetime achievement award.’
“And then I said, ‘I am here today because of you and what you did on Lawrence of Arabia,’” said Gassner.
“He looked at me and bowed and said, ‘I’m honoured.’
“Then he said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘To the loo,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, me too. Let’s go.’
“So there I was standing next to Peter O’Toole at a urinal and I looked over and said, ‘Hey, Peter, when you were in the desert, where did you pee?’ and he said, ‘Anywhere I wanted.’ ”
And, cut.
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