Tina Kakadelis
Most people would think that a production designer would prefer to create the world of superheroes. With credits like Thunderbolts*, The Suicide Squad, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 under your belt, you’d think the real world would feel boring. Production designer Brittany Hites, who served as Art Director for those three superhero flicks, would much rather work in the difficulties that the real world presents. There’s perhaps no better opportunity to explore reality than a romantic drama where true, grounded emotions drive the film forward. With the recently released Regretting You, after fifteen years of working as an Art Director, Hites had her first opportunity to serve as production designer for a feature film.
From her filmography, it’s clear that Hites is no stranger to audience expectations. When designing in the Marvel or DC universes, there’s an awareness that people are going to be watching these films like a hawk. Scanning and searching for Easter eggs or discrepancies between the film and the comic. With Regretting You, there’s a similar sense of excitement and trepidation from those who read the bestselling book by Colleen Hoover.
“It’s a book that so many people are in love with. They see it as a part of their psyche almost,” Hites explains. “It’s a huge responsibility to create this three-dimensional world and it’s a huge honor, but again, it’s a responsibility I take very seriously.”
As one might imagine, Hites’ copy of Regretting You is what you might call well-loved.
“I should have brought it up,” Hites laughs. “Yes, it is well-worn. Well, now it’s bedazzled because that’s been my fun little new hobby. It has notes all inside of it and there are highlighted little things here and there. The script materials, though, are what I base most of my design off of for the most part.”
“With that said, I love reading. I’m a feral reader. Again, a huge responsibility to bring this tangible, three-dimensional world to life outside the book that is also faithful to the script,” Hites continues. “I read the script first, so I already had this idea and this dynamic of these characters and the relationships, which was what really made me want to do the movie, aside from the fact that it’s an adaptation and my desire to do an adaptation. When I was an assistant art director, I did Where’d You Go, Bernadette and I loved every minute of it. That was my favorite project I’ve ever worked on, believe it or not.”
“To be able to do something in a contemporary setting, based on another book, and also a work that means a lot to female audience members, that was really important to me,” says Hites. “I read the Regretting You book right after I finished the script. I read it in one night, highlighting everything. My initial design standpoint, off of reading the book so closely after the script, is all based on feeling. The script did keep true to a lot of the aspects in the book, but there are changes due to location changes, what we’re going to shoot, and things of that nature. What I felt when reading the book is really what I wanted to portray into a visual language.”
Regretting You tells the story of the picturesque Grant family, made up of parents Morgan (Allison Williams) and Chris (Scott Eastwood) and their teenage daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace). Morgan and Chris are high school sweethearts who got pregnant with Clara after their senior year. Morgan’s sister, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), is also still with her high school sweetheart, Jonah (Dave Franco). This happy family dynamic is fundamentally upended when a fatal car accident claims the lives of Jenny and Chris.
The cornerstone location for Regretting You is the home of Morgan and Chris. The couple inherited the house from Chris’ parents, so it’s a little dated, but clearly well-loved. A major plot point for the film is Morgan’s change from living a passive life to deciding what it is that she wants. Her passion, she finds, is interior design, and her canvas is her home that undergoes a massive transformation throughout the film.
“You get the sense of traditionalism and almost, slightly claustrophobia, from Morgan’s standpoint. That’s her world that she didn’t necessarily choose. She was kind of like, I’m just going to accept this reality. This is where I am, this is who I am. She’s living in another person’s home,” explains Hites. “It was this really, really unique opportunity for me to play with a character who wanted to get into interior design, who had this passion for design. I was like, oh, this is just like me! I had a kinship with her.”
“The design itself was based on a location set that was chosen by Josh Boone, our director. He was like, I love this house. This is the house I want to use. Even before I was on board, he was like, this is the house I love, you can do whatever you want to the interior, but I really want to shoot here,” recalls Hites. “I was like, oh, so we’re shooting on location. There was a lot of conversation early on about building this interior as a set, which would have been so much easier, honestly. Sometimes when it’s on location, it actually breeds more creativity, in my opinion, because you,re more or less stuck within certain confines of what you have to work with.”
Little did Hites know, the confines of this project meant that she and her team would have to renovate this home three times. Initially, she asked Boone if they could capture plate shots (a background-only shot to be used for visual effects) and use a blue screen, but Boone wanted it all to be real.
“We essentially gutted the whole house,” reveals Hites. “My construction team took that house down to the studs. I blew out a pretty big wall from the dining room into the living room area. We took out all the trim in the house, every door. We put flooring on top of flooring. We had to do that with the understanding of the wear and tear this needed to endure. We’re also in a home environment that we would have to put back eventually.”
“We needed to be able to have a camera and crew in that location for almost four weeks,” Hites goes on. “We didn’t just need material that would just look good, like beautiful wood tones and terrazzo flooring. We actually needed some sturdiness to them or else it would all fall apart after the spring in Atlanta of rain and wind. My art director, Carla Martinez, and I relished the challenge.”
“I wanted this house to breed traditionalism, but I also wanted it to feel warm and cozy, specifically at the beginning of the movie. I took so much inspiration from the lake by the house and the colors outside, and I brought it back in. I brought in all these traditional elements of mid-century modern design, terrazzo floor, wood paneling, and some of those really distinct, warm aspects of that time that people love and are very precious about.”
“In doing that,” Hites continues, “we had this kitchen that needed to be completely usable and practical. We had to use, for the most part, some of the existing gas lines, the existing electricity, and things of that nature for the fridge to work and for the water to work in the sink. Everything still needed to work in this house that we had just abated and remediated.”
Anyone who has lived through renovations in their own home will tell you that it seems to go on forever. Just when you think you’ve finished, some other project pops up. Home renovations can take years, but how long did Hites and her team have?
“Six weeks.”
There are three stages to the Grant house. The first is the traditionalist style the film opens with. Things are warm and lived-in, but it’s clear Morgan feels like a stranger in her own home. As the grief takes hold and she begins to play around with interior design, the house transitions to an active construction site. Then, as the final reaches its resolution, so too do Morgan and the house.
“I wanted the final look to be a breeding ground of mid-century feminine, which we don’t see very often. I think we always equate mid-century modern style with very masculine sensibility,” states Hites. “I really wanted to play with this lime wash plaster on the wall. In the kitchen, we had a lighter wood tone that added a really nice fluidity to the whole thing. I wanted not so much to compare and contrast the beginning of the film with how the house looks at the end, but I wanted the audience to take a deep breath with Morgan at the end.”
“When they get to that end scene, they’re just like, oh, wow, she did it. It’s her and it’s independent. I actually wrote down some of the words that were going in my head about the transformation: levity, femininity, and liberation.”
Hites and her team started with the house in its renovated state, then went to the home in its final form. The crew then switched everything over to its beginning form over a weekend. It’s an incredible feat that goes back to why Hites prefers designing for real-world sets instead of big superhero movies.
“On a sound stage, this would have been too easy,” says Hites. “We would have just flipped the walls around. Everything would have been on casters and it would have just been, bada bing, bada boom, you know? When you’re encapsulated in this lakeside property, it brought all of these ideas to a head for me. I was like, okay, we need warm tones, we need creams, I want to bring this house back to what it was and what it could have been. The themes I wanted to go with were togetherness, warmth, and comfort.”
One of the most important rooms in the Grant house, and one that remained untouched in the renovations, is the bedroom of Clara. For teenagers, their bedroom is a safe haven. It’s their small corner of self-expression, and Clara’s is no different. This is the bedroom she’s had since she was a child, and you can almost plot her adolescence through the artifacts strewn around her room. The glow-in-the-dark stars of her childhood are posed next to a collage of Playbills that speaks to Clara’s growing passion for acting.
“Clara’s bathroom and her bedroom were built on a set. I specifically remember having this really great collaborative conversation with our costume designer, Erinn Knight. And she was like, I just want to thank you for not making Clara’s bedroom hot pink,” laughs Hites.
“I wanted her bedroom to be an extension of that house. We have this Murphy bed that’s been flipped out. We have these existing shelves that she’s filled with her books and she’s put all of her Playbills and the things she’s interested in there. The room still has a grounded sense of the ’70s, this house has been lived in. This is cozy, but it’s Clara.”
“Having that neutral palette of mid-century modern gave us so much freedom to play with Clara’s individuality, with her bright comforters and her nice mustard colors. Her taste is very eclectic and I wanted that to come across with the dressing, which my set decorator, Nicholas Urbano, just nailed. He has these wonderful women on his team, Haley Ganatos and Kat Parham, who do these layers, as we call them.”
“I told them exactly who Clara was, played a song from Josh’s playlist that he always puts together for us, and I said, this is who she is, here’s my mood board,” Hites explains. “They put pins on the drapes and these stars everywhere. Then I had fun. I would go down there sometimes and just put stickers on the wall. Places where a little kid would put stickers. Intentional remnants of young Clara existing around that room.”
Every good teen romance has the broody boy with the floppy hair who captures the heart of the teenage girl at the center of the film. Regretting You’s broody boy is Miller (Mason Thames). Like Clara, Miller dreams of a life beyond their small town. He wants to go to film school and, as such, his room is plastered with movie posters. In the rare spaces of bare wall, we get to see bits of the room’s history.
“I wanted that bedroom to feel inherited by Miller in a way. That it had these layers that had been there from when his dad lived there, because Miller lives with his grandpa now,” explains Hites. “You have this blue plaid wallpaper in his room. Miller’s color story, to me, was very blue. Just kind of classic, but not on the nose with it.”
“I really wanted it to have a stark contrast to Clara’s room, but also it’s where you see their passions and you see their individuality. I wanted Clara’s to feel more type A, because clearly she’s Morgan’s daughter. I wanted Miller’s to feel more like a creative outlet for him. Like he felt safe in this house, even though it was his dad’s old bedroom.”
What unites Clara’s and Miller’s rooms is their dedication to the art that fuels them. For Clara, it’s neatly hung Playbills. For Miller, it’s floor-to-ceiling movie posters. Note to the cinephiles watching – there are plenty of eye-catching posters in Miller’s room, and it was Hites who shaped Miller’s taste in films.
“My favorite movie poster for sure on Miller’s wall was Chinatown, but I also really wanted Election on there too,” smiles Hites.
