Tina Kakadelis
If anyone were to program a film screening and put the Oscar-nominated drama Train Dreams and the throwback comedy Little Brother on the same bill, it would be madness. Tonally, they’re complete opposites. Train Dreams is an affecting movie about a man’s life as the world changes around him at the turn of the 20th Century. Little Brother stars John Cena and Eric Andre as a slapstick Odd Couple pairing who prove family isn’t all about DNA. One thing these two films have in common is that production designer Alexandra Schaller crafted both worlds.
Last time we spoke, it was about your work on Train Dreams. Little Brother is the polar opposite. What was it like to go from such a natural film to one that is one hundred percent manmade in terms of the movie’s setting?
Kind of wild, but it’s one of the things I love about this business. In every project, you step into a completely different world. A big, broad studio comedy is not something I’d done before, and I had a lot of fun. The vibe on the set was upbeat as well, because of the jokes, and I had a really good time.
We built a ton of stuff on Train Dreams, but Little Brother was all soundstage builds as opposed to builds on location. Now I’m working on a movie that’s a completely different genre and style again, and it’s cool to kind of flex and stretch all those muscles.
Is there anything that was unexpectedly similar about the two?
The methodology was to design a broad comedy like we would a drama. It’s not overly lit, overly saturated. We wanted it to feel grounded so the comedy could really be the thing that was completely off the walls, which it is, by the amazing Eric Andre.
To be honest, the methodology, the setting, the rules of the world, and how to think about space were kind of similar, even though the topic is largely different.
When I was growing up in the ’90s and early 2000s, it felt like there was a broad comedy coming out every month, but that’s kind of disappeared. Why do you think that is, and how do you feel Little Brother and movies like it fit in now?
I think they’re coming back because it’s so dark in the world that everybody needs a little bit of fun, you know? I honestly feel like that’s what it is. Now it’s like horror movies, comedies, and rom-coms are coming back. I think everything moves in cycles.
What’s interesting is that the group of people who came together to make Little Brother are people who come from, I guess, more “serious, dramatic, or artful” movies. A lot of the creative production team from Netflix were people I knew very well from the Train Dream circuit. One of our creative executives did both movies. We had so much fun together, being like, “Oh, we can go big, we can go small, we can do it all.”
I think there’s something great about getting a bunch of people together to watch something really stupid. It just goes to show that it’s not that deep. I’ve started doing improv in my personal life, not because I have any desire to be a comedian, but because I feel like it feeds into my creative work on films. What’s so nice is I was doing improv at the beginning of the first eight weeks of prep on Little Brother and the movie that I’m on now. I had to go once a week to improv, and it was so nice to realize that, you know what, it’s just not that serious.
Since the group you were working with had a drama background, did you talk about wanting to bring the focus or intensity we associate with drama, as opposed to broad comedies?
Matt Spicer, the director, comes from a very different style of movie. I mean, his last movie was Ingrid Goes West, which was completely different again. It was so funny. At the premiere, he was like, from the people who brought you Train Dreams and Sinners, here’s Little Brother—hope you enjoy. We were laughing so much.
He’s of a similar age to me. Grew up in the ’90s, watched those comedies, loved those comedies. He really wanted Little Brother to feel like the highest point. A lot of the movies that were touchpoints for him are very grounded and naturalistic. The production design of the world is quite subtle.
That’s what I tried to do in Little Brother, but I also had a really fun opportunity to make the sets beautiful because John Cena’s character, Rudd, is a real estate agent, right? He’s all about luxury and selling beautiful homes. I was able to watch all those reality shows about real estate and the high life to make the world we were designing a representation of Rudd’s aspirations and his inner life. That was then able to be completely subverted by the madness of Eric Andre’s Marcus character.
For Eric Andre’s character, you talk about the chaos. Everything he touches just implodes. When you think about his space and his world, how do you create chaos that’s perfectly manicured by your hands but also has to look like chaos from the viewer’s eyes?
That was one of the reasons we built Rudd’s house on the soundstage. We wanted to give them a playground for destruction and chaos. The set was actually planned to be destroyed and roughhoused with. The way I designed the house was sort of this grounded, aspirational house, but one that felt realistic.
Rudd lives in Westchester. It’s a beautiful, perfect American neighborhood, but perhaps he doesn’t have the flashiest house on the street. He may have the smallest house in the most beautiful neighborhood and the house has been renovated as his career has grown. We chose beautiful things because he and his wife, Deirdre, have an eye for design.
We used a lot of traditional stripes. Very subtle, American colors to represent order. That home is what gives Eric the playground to completely destroy everything. It’s sort of like two opposites colliding.
When we talked about Train Dreams, you also talked about the cabin and wanting to set the cabin on fire. It seems like you enjoy breaking houses.
I do, and watch this space next year for the movie I’m working on now because its shit gets pretty crazy.
It’s fun, you know? On Train Dreams, my art director, John Lavin, refused to come to set the day we burned the cabin because he was so upset about it. For me, it’s the cycle of life. It’s why we’re doing this. I haven’t really done anything physical like that before. There’s a lot of planning that goes into it. For Little Brother, the whole house was basically designed around the scene where he has to crash down the stairs in his wheelchair.
We had to make the house dynamic for shooting and make it feel real. I designed it so there was depth in every room. You didn’t have flyaway walls. We were able to catch whatever action was unfolding.
Is your next career move to become an architect?
You know, it’s so funny. Sometimes people do ask me to design their home projects. There have been a couple of times where I’ve collaborated with folks from the film world on their homes, but it’s just different. It’s like, I’m just designing for a stage. I can make the sink run for the scene, but it’s not plumbed forever.
There’s no building code you have to worry about.
I don’t care about the code. Although I will say, on my sets, as much as possible, the cabinets do open and are actually filled. I think it makes a difference.
Aside from Rudd’s house, what other aspects of the film do you feel most proud of?
All the locations were also completely transformed from the ground up. I really like Rudd’s brother Josh’s house in the movie. He’s played by Christopher Meloni. It was a completely different style of house. It was this wild party house that we designed. It plays very quickly in the movie, but if you look closely, there are a lot of details about the character that were really fun to incorporate. I think we put like 36 disco balls on the ceiling.
The whiplash between this and Train Dreams is just so crazy to me.
It’s astonishing, right? One of the reasons I took the job is I thought the script was fun, but I really like the people who were involved. It was a group of filmmakers who were coming together to do something fun. We had all been living in these very serious worlds, our dramas, and it was something different.
Maybe it’s like this in every industry, but I feel like there’s so much in our industry that’s trying to understand you or put you in a box. I’m really trying to be fluid and do a bunch of different stuff, because that’s the fun of it.
You mentioned that stripes are a recurring theme. How did they come into the project? What are some of the different ways you added them into the background?
Oh my gosh, they’re absolutely everywhere in every set, even if in a very subtle way. In Rudd’s house, you walk into the foyer and there’s this beautiful striped wallpaper up and down the stairs. That’s probably the most straightforward use of the stripe look. We enter and it’s order. The banister on the stair has hard lines as well. The sofas have stripes on them. Some are wide, and some are very thin.
In Josh’s house, we might have a zebra print, which is also a stripe but somehow distorted. In his hot pot room, we have waves that our scenic artist made. That’s just another kind of stripe that’s distorted.
The goal was to keep everything grounded, have fun in the background, and not be distracting. There’s always this quest, I think, for me and maybe for a lot of designers and decorators, about how to put a TV into the set and have it not look like a big black rectangle when we’re not doing the TV scene? How do we do that? It’s ugly. We don’t want it.
I put an art TV in this house with rotating artwork on it. That was an elegant solution for the problem. Again, only I would know this, but the art rotates in the movie based on Rudd’s energy, emotion, and psychology in the given scene.
You said your next project is entirely different once again. What do you feel like you’re taking from Train Dreams and Little Brother into this project, even though they might, on paper, have nothing in common?
I think it’s the attention to detail, honestly. Also, the focus on character. A lot of this movie takes place in a psychological space.
What I will say is that we’re doing huge amounts of building on the stages for this one. I try to work with the same team if I can, because I love them so much and they’re so talented. I walked onto the stage one morning, and my construction coordinator was like, “Alex, this isn’t Little Brother big, this is big, big.” I feel like I’m taking the training wheels of Little Brother and riding the bike into the night.
Building another house, setting it on fire, ruining it, that sort of thing?
We do have fires. I can’t say too much, but yes, there is fire again.
