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The Stranger is the latest local film in which an “invisible art” sets the scene, without us even noticing.

Joel Edgerton in The Stranger.Credit: See-Saw Films

One of the startling things about the filmmaking process is how much effort goes into solving problems many people mightn’t notice anyway. I can’t recall the last time I emerged from a movie complaining about a fake-looking kitchen, for instance – but from a production design perspective, this can definitely be an issue.

“It’s just really expensive building kitchens,” says Sydney-based production designer Alex Holmes, whose credits include Jennifer Kent’s 2015 horror film The Babadook and most recently Blaze, the directorial debut of painter-turned-filmmaker Del Kathryn Barton. Rather than starting from scratch, he says, the usual practice is to buy one off Facebook Marketplace, stove and all.

Clockwise from top left: Elisabeth Moss in The Invisible Man; Julia Savage in Blaze; Noah Wiseman in The Babadook; Yvonne Strahovski in Stateless; Hannah Lynch in Petrol.

Floors, too, can be a challenge, especially when a set isn’t meant to look new.

On The Babadook, Holmes says, “the scenic painter spent half his time just getting all these new floorboards and ripping them up and ageing them”.

Production design, says Holmes, is “the invisible art”. Those of us without direct experience in the film industry are likely to be a little fuzzy about exactly what the job entails: if we think about it at all, we probably assume the main tasks are designing sets and supervising their construction.

But that’s only part of the story, especially at the low-budget end of the spectrum. It could equally mean creating hundreds of legal documents convincing enough to pass muster in close-up – as Leah Popple did for Thomas M. Wright’s upcoming crime drama The Stranger, loosely inspired by the police investigation into the disappearance of Queensland teenager Daniel Morcombe.

Or it could mean the kind of intensive period research that Melinda Doring undertook for the first season of the ABC show The Newsreader, set in mid-1980s Melbourne: interviewing veteran journalists, watching endless YouTube clips, spending days at the library looking through old copies of Woman’s Weekly and House and Garden.

Or, depending on the day, you might be called on to create a realistic-looking high-security detention centre, a challenge Doring faced on the ABC’s Stateless (her work on this and The Newsreader won her two successive AACTA awards, in 2020 and 2021). At first the Stateless team hoped to use the former Baxter Immigration Detention Centre in South Australia, now an army base. But while they were able to visit for research purposes, it was soon clear they had no chance of filming onsite.

Instead, they constructed much of what they needed on the grounds of a decommissioned transportation building, in a nearby desert location outside Port Augusta. The mess hall was real timber, but fake barbed wire was made from plastic to avoid injuring the cast; various additional locations were used for interiors, while digital effects helped give a sense of scale in aerial shots.

A decommissioned transportation building stood in for the detention centre in Stateless.Credit: Ben King

The more I hear, the more I’m impressed by the range of skills production design requires. As Doring puts it, she and her peers are called on to become “instant experts” in many fields – whether it’s a matter of how people live in the real world, or the tricks that come in handy when recreating that world for the purpose of fiction.

No less essential is the ability to adjust your approach according to circumstances: there are times when an obsession with minutiae is an asset, others when the quest for perfection is best set aside.

Holmes notes that TV shows are traditionally shot more quickly than films, with less attention to detail. Doring, who works in both fields, concedes that “film tends to be more carefully crafted,” though she says this is changing as TV comes closer to cinema overall.

With low-budget independent films of the kind Popple has often worked on, production design may be mostly a matter of finding the right locations, whether these are filmed as they stand or adjusted to fit the scene. For The Stranger, Popple and Wright had to find around 75 locations in the Adelaide area – a stream of dingy motel rooms, petrol stations, and other semi-anonymous spaces where criminal dealings happen out of the public eye.

While these settings are anything but attention-grabbing, Popple says their very mundanity was vital to maintaining the look and mood she and Wright were after: “It was important to see and choose the right car park, or even the right exterior of a warehouse.” For inspiration, they looked to the work of contemporary photographers such as Alec Soth and Bill Henson, “powerful images that had this emptiness or darkness to them”.

Joel Edgerton in The Stranger.Credit: See-Saw Films

Often a good production designer is one who can do a lot with a little. Still, there’s no denying money makes a difference – and as Holmes points out, there are few opportunities to practice the craft locally on the scale possible in Hollywood. The closest he’s come personally might be the 2020 version of The Invisible Man, which starred Elisabeth Moss and was shot in Sydney by Australian writer-director Leigh Whannell, with backing from US horror specialists Blumhouse Pictures.

Holmes’ work on the film included talking with physics professors at Sydney University about how invisibility might work in practice, and then designing a sleekly sinister black-on-grey laboratory for the villain of the title (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), constructed in a “15-car garage in Hunter’s Hill”.

Looking back, he’s proud of what was accomplished, but regrets that the relatively generous budget didn’t stretch to furnishing the lab with more equipment: “I think we just had enough to sell the idea.”

It seems that production design always tends to involve a degree of compromise, whether it’s a matter of budget or of yielding to the preferences of the director (or, in TV, the showrunner).

Holmes admits that during the making of The Babadook his instinct was to push for more realism – though he acknowledges that the stark, almost monochrome palette has its own logic, reflecting the onscreen picture book that introduces the monster of the title.

There are parallels with his experience on Blaze, which he describes as mirroring the aesthetic of Barton’s paintings. If Holmes was not directly responsible for the memorable illustrations of Mr Babadook – that credit goes to Alex Juhasz, although Holmes had conceptual input – he likewise can’t take credit for Blaze’s gigantic, glittering dragon puppet, an imaginary friend to the traumatised young heroine (Julia Savage). “They had been working on that for months before I came on.”

Still, he and his team were tasked with ensuring all the sets fit this same aesthetic, and for realising many of Barton’s other surreal concepts on a limited budget – like the tunnel of cherries assembled over seven weeks with materials from Christmas decoration shops, or the inflatable church ordered from China at the bargain price of about $5000.

As with The Babadook, Holmes found himself asking questions about how far the dreamlike imagery could be justified by strict narrative logic. “It’s still got to be believable, you know. Sometimes she [Barton] would push me beyond my comfort zone in a good way, and if she hadn’t it wouldn’t have been the film that it is.”

For Popple, the ideal is to be on the same page as the director from the very outset. This was the case with The Stranger, a project she and Wright first discussed years before it finally went into pre-production: in hindsight, she sees the delay as a luxury, allowing a long, happy period of discussing possibilities and swapping images back and forth.

Things had to move faster with another project Popple worked on recently: Petrol, the second feature from Alena Lodkina (Strange Colours), premiered at MIFF and will be released early next year. Fortunately, this wasn’t one that required so much research: “In terms of how it’s set around the Melbourne art scene and film school, it wasn’t too far from our own experiences.”

In fact, the main location was the director’s home, though not because other options weren’t available. “I think there was something about her own abode that was true to what she wanted to depict,” Popple says. “She’d had so many experiences there that were almost present in the film as well.”

While Doring doesn’t discount the importance of the director’s vision, her account of work in TV – where it’s rare to have a single director oversee an entire series – puts more emphasis on the collective, pragmatic side of the process. Looking back at the pilot of The Newsreader, she recalls an anxious confab with director Emma Freeman and cinematographer Earle Dresner about the choice to paint the walls of the main set a sickly beige (“A horrible colour, a colour I would never usually pick”).

The ’80s vibe was there for sure, but was it right for the show? Would it work with the costumes? Would the actors’ skin tones survive in any remotely photogenic way?

So much to think about on so many levels. Popple describes the production designer’s task in terms that suggest a camera zooming in: “I always try and think about the world we’re creating, and the city that it’s set in, and the colour and tone that feels right for it, and I keep going with the breakdown of details until we get to, you know, what do the cushions look like?”

Again, there’s a limit to how much of this any audience will absorb, at least on first viewing. But that might be part of the point. The ideal, Doring says, is that “the viewer can get lost in the story … without knowing that what they are seeing has been totally constructed, thought about and designed.”

Holmes concurs. “A lot of what you’re doing is intended to be fairly invisible to the average viewer, but it affects them psychologically. When they’re watching it, they feel it, but they don’t know why.”

Anna Torv as Helen Norville in The Newsreader.Credit: ABC

Helen’s office, The Newsreader

The office sets of The Newsreader are filled with touches – phone books, typewriters, cassette recorders – that reflect what you might expect to see in any journalistic workspace in the 1980s. But there was scope, too, to reveal the individual traits of characters such as Helen Norville (Anna Torv), the first female anchor of the fictional News at Six.

“Emma Freeman, the director, wanted Helen to be someone who was interested in current trends,” Melinda Doring says. That meant a fashionably ’80s palette of “salmon pinks, mushroom, and beige,” also used in the design of Helen’s home.

“I researched as many female journalists from the period as I could,” Doring says. “One image that I found inspirational for Helen’s office was an image of Lisa Wilkinson in her Cleo office from 1986. Indoor plants were on trend, so we added some of those to Helen’s house and office. We gave Helen a contemporary poster of the Melbourne Arts Centre which would have opened in 1984.”

Noah Wiseman and Essie Davis in The Babadook.Credit: Courtesy Causeway Films

Amelia’s kitchen, The Babadook For the home of Amelia (Essie Davis), the widowed protagonist of The Babadook, Alex Holmes and director Jennifer Kent aimed for “a classic Victorian storybook look,” mirroring the design of the sinister picture book Amelia stumbles upon.

The interiors were sets, which Holmes explains tends to be the easiest way to go if complex physical action is required, especially stunts. To achieve the desired aesthetic, everything had to be painted black and off-white and “aged appropriately”. Furniture and floor tiles were bought second-hand, but most of the fittings – cabinets, counters, sink – came free, aside from labour costs.

“We found a retro ’50s kitchen in a house that was going to be demolished and ripped it out,” Holmes says. This is common practice, although “it did take some time and a lot of ringing around to demolition companies to find the kind of kitchen we needed.”

The desolate landscape of The Stranger.

On the road in The Stranger

For Leah Popple, production design on The Stranger was about “leaning into restraint”. If the loner characters played by Sean Harris and Joel Edgerton are in no rush to reveal themselves, nor are many clues to their intentions supplied by the desolate landscape they travel through, where neither man ever appears truly at home.

“We didn’t want the audience to be in a particular place for very long because we didn’t want the audience to know anything,” Popple says. “Then when we did show something it would be quite strong and for a reason.”

While Popple and the rest of the filmmaking team strove for realism, in its deliberate restriction of detail the film also has a murkier, more abstract side. “We kept a lot of the sets quite minimal, but also concentrated on what those locations offered in terms of interesting architecture and interesting places to light in a particular way.”

The Stranger is in cinemas from October 6 and on Netflix from October 19.

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