Tod Lippy: Where did you go to school?

Thérèse DePrez: I went to Parsons School of Design. That’s why I came to New York.

Did you know what you wanted to study?

Clueless. I actually did an accelerated freshman year—a half a year for the year program, which was very competitive. They review your portfolio at the end of the six months. Every teacher suggested a different area to go into—illustration, fashion design, graphic design, sculpture, fine arts, etc. I didn’t know what to do, so I finally decided on graphic design—that’s what my father did; I felt comfortable with that. I grew up with typography and design books all around.

How did you become involved with production design?

My brother, who’s a year older than I am, was studying film at NYU at the same time, and on weekends, or whenever I had time, I would go work on his films. I did mostly grip and electric work, but there would always seem to be a position missing on those films—“Someone needs to hand-paint a sign over there.” “Someone needs to do the furniture.” So I started doing that, having no idea that was actually going to lead to anything, or even that it was an actual position. And that was really the beginning, doing his student films, which I very much enjoyed.
   And then a friend put me in touch with two of his friends who were making a very low-budget movie and needed an art PA—a grueling, horrible job. Aren’t they all? [Laughs.] I think we had a three-person art department, and I remember the production designer was crying all the time, but I was happy to do anything. And one of the producers of that was doing a movie right afterward called The Refrigerator, and he asked me to design it out of the blue. I was 23, had never designed anything—I didn’t even own a camera yet; didn’t know how to draft. So I just dove right into that.

The Refrigerator was a horror film, right?

It’s a low-budget black-comedy horror film that takes place on the Lower East Side—Avenue D. A young couple from the Midwest moves into an apartment and their refrigerator turns out to be the gateway to Hell. [Laughs.] It starred a great group of actors from the Cucaracha Theater who I became very close to; I did theater work for them because of this film.

So you were doing theater stuff after this or at the same time?

In between, back and forth, but not anymore. Anyway, my brother happened to do the special effects on the movie. The refrigerator ate people.

Did you build it?

We had two different refrigerators that were completely rigged. The movie cost maybe $300,000 or $400,000. My budget was a few thousand dollars, and I was making $200 a week. “Okay, Thérèse—the gateway to Hell, how do you want to do this?” We did it with garbage bags and seaweed from Chinatown. [Laughs.] Up all night with garbage bags and seaweed and lots of fake blood. Also, there are scenes where, in the character’s nightmares, people appear in the refrigerator, so I had to build this entire refrigerator set where I hand-painted a huge Aunt Jemima box, a Rolling Rock can of beer, a box of Arm & Hammer, and a milk carton. I kept the four-foot Rolling Rock in my apartment for a long time, and then one day I carried it out and just left it on Houston Street—quite a sight. It was gone in an hour.

What did you do next?

I met Brian Savegar, the art director who did A Room with a View and Maurice; he knew a graphic designer I was working for. When he came into town, I showed him my little portfolio, which was basically The Refrigerator, some MTV work and The Ben Stiller Show. He was about to do a low-budget horror film in Wisconsin with the producers who did Hellraiser and Heathers. They had bought an old Boy Scout camp and built a “quasi-studio,” and were just going to pump movies out of there. He hired me as a set decorator. I went out there to do the first one, and he quit—“This is too low-budget, this is too crazy!” So the art director was bumped up to production designer, and I was bumped up to art director, clueless—again—about what I was doing. I worked so hard—huge elaborate sets, some of the biggest sets I’ve done, actually—and ended up staying there for almost a year. I did three movies in a row.

When was this?

Early nineties. It’s actually not even on my résumé anymore. But they’re on video.

What were the movies?

One was called Mindwarp. And then there was Children of the Night, and Severed Ties. They all had crazy stars, like Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Elke Sommer, Garrett Morris. They’re pretty funny.

What a great education.

I learned everything that year—construction, budgets, power tools, the hierarchy of the set, how to run your own crew…

How big of a crew did you have there?

It was fairly large. And ironically, I just worked with the construction coordinator again last year when I was doing High Fidelity. Small world.

And then you came back to New York. How did you get involved in Swoon?

I remember being in Wisconsin on one of these horror films and seeing the Swoon script just floating around—somebody there, I think Jim Denault, was called to be the gaffer—and I remember how well-designed the cover was. Tom Kalin is so brilliant that way. I started reading it and I was very interested. So I called in, and they already had a designer, Neil Spisak—a huge production designer—and I told them I would be glad to just come in and work for free or whatever, and I showed up. They were maybe three weeks out from shooting, and nothing was ready. Neil was used to working with so much money—his assistants were still going out and taking Polaroids of furniture in high-scale stores in Manhattan.
   I actually came in being a little bossy-boots: “Neil, you can’t do it this way, this movie is tiny.” So he and I spent quite a deal of time together going to all the low-budget prop houses. I remember being in State Supply, which is this low-end prop house—I love them, they’ve been so great to me. They’re in that little grouping of prop houses in the West Twenties. Going to State Supply is like going to somebody’s attic. Anyway, when Neil and I got there, I thought he was just going to start to cry looking at all of the trashed furniture. I remember him calling Christine Vachon on his phone and saying, “I just can’t do this job anymore. You should just have Thérèse do it.”

It sounds like you’ve had one trial-by-fire after another.

I know; it was tricky. I’ve recently been reviewing portfolios of NYU students. Last year I saw the senior-thesis pieces and this year I saw the junior pieces. And to see what they’re doing—beautiful drafting, beautiful rendering. But I wonder...

If they have the chops?

I’m one of the few people I know of who’s come up a different way, with absolutely no background. I taught myself how to draft, and construction I’ve done ever since I was a kid. It’s just a very different background than what I see the younger people coming up with. And I’m not sure they realize that when they get on a set, it’s also going to be about administrative stuff, personality issues and getting dirty.

Was Swoon a healthy budget compared to what you were working with in Wisconsin?

No, far lower.

How much did you have to work with?

A few thousand dollars. At that point I luckily was sharing a small woodshop on Ludlow Street, which only had eight-foot ceilings. We had a few sets to build, and I couldn’t even stand them up. I always had to keep them on their side. We barely got them down the staircase. I spent many all-nighters in that shop...

If I recall correctly, there were a lot of sets in that film.

A lot of locations. I remember one uptown apartment where we did three different sets. A taxidermist’s office, a psychiatrist’s office, and a house—in this tiny apartment. It was beg, borrow, steal. I called everyone I knew—“Do you have a piece of furniture?” “Do you have a Bank of England chair?” And Tom Kalin, phenomenally supportive, helped me as much as he could. Called his friends, borrowed his furniture, and he always thanked everybody at the end of the day. I remember saying that at the Sundance awards ceremony—he’s one of the few directors that every night went around to every PA, every electric, every grip, and thanked us. Swoon was a very rough job, too. Tight schedule, budget, we were all young, inexperienced. And the toughest part of it was that it was a period film.

Do you prefer working on period stuff?

I love the research, although I find shooting period films in New York more and more difficult. Which is why doing a movie like Going All the Way in Indianapolis—whether or not it was set there—was a smart idea. Architecturally everything is still intact; you can still find old things. New York is completely different now. Every mailbox, every lamppost, every sign—everything has to be changed, and if you’re doing a low-budget movie, you need to go to the Bronx or other boroughs now. Which is what we did with Summer of Sam. There are still great old things in those areas. But it’s more and more difficult, and every time I see a change on the street, I’m like, “Fuck, no!”
   Swoon was great in terms of the people that I met as well. Christine Vachon, Tom Kalin, Todd Haynes, Derrick Kardos, who’s been my art coordinator on seven films—I think he was the production-office coordinator at that point. And Ellen Kuras, who I’ve done many movies with.

What film did you work on next?

Dottie Gets Spanked, the Todd Haynes short. Also very low-budget.

How was it working with him?

A dream. There are two directors that I think I’d stay up all night and sketch for: Todd Haynes is one of them and Gregg Araki is the other. They so inspire me with their ideas, and their films are so incredibly visual—as are everyone else’s that I’ve worked for, really. But there’s something about their heads that inspire my head. And with Dottie Gets Spanked, we built some pretty elaborate sets—again, in my tiny little shop, with a bunch of interns. It was also black-and-white. Luckily I had done Swoon, but I was still getting used to how black-and-white transforms on film, the different grays. We had some wonderfully interesting props. I learned a lot from the DP, Maryse Alberti, as well; that was my first time with her.

What did she teach you?

Oh, things I was still naïve about. That wallpaper will moiré. Things moiré on film, or when it gets transferred to TV. I was unaware of that.

You mentioned the grey-scale issue—obviously when you’re designing for a black-and-white film, you still use color props, right?

Yes. And now I’ve learned what different colors do. Red, for instance—actually this is something that Tom Kalin and I discovered on Swoon. He would have red lipstick on the women, but you actually need to use green lipstick, the opposite of red. Quirky things like that, that through experience you start to figure out. And at that point, you don’t have time to watch dailies or reshoot anything, because you’re far too low-budget. It was really trial by error.

When you first read a script, how do you determine whether or not it’s going to be an interesting project for you to work on?

I try to base things on the writing of the story rather than the art direction. I used to do it vice versa, and that led me into a lot of these horror films—that’s when I was a little younger and hungrier. Now I want a really good story. And the first time I read something like Happiness—what a crazy, bizarre script. And you would think the art direction/production design wouldn’t be that exciting, but actually it was very challenging to make realistic suburban homes with a little twist. I read tons of scripts, and I can tell pretty quickly when it’s something I want to do.

And once you’ve decided that you’re going to do a project, what do you do next?

Unfortunately, they’re sent to me so quickly—it’s like you have to meet the director tomorrow. So I usually get one read-through, which I hate. I like to read a script two or three times. The first time I just read it as story, the second time with “How will I design this” in the back of my mind, and then the third time I try to involve both of those. And if I have the luxury of doing that, it’s perfect, but normally I don’t.

What do you do once you’ve taken the job? Literally start making lists of furniture, props, that sort of thing?

I actually have the script for Hedwig and the Angry Inch over there, which I’ve completely broken down. First I break it down by locations, then by what we’re going to build and what we need to find. And eventually I’ll do all the set decoration per location, studying the characters. Then a prop breakdown and a picture-car breakdown—all the graphic design, all the still photography we need to shoot, etc.

And you obviously have a figure to work with regarding how much money you’re going to be able to spend.

I have such a great sense of budgeting now. I actually like doing budgets; I was a math/science geek in high school. And there’s something about budgets—you have this figure, and you have a list of all the things you need to do; now make them match! And that’s tough, especially on a low-budget movie.

You’ve done both low-budget films and bigger-budget films at this point. Does “more money” necessarily mean more options?

With the bigger films, what’s so difficult is the union issue. I love having union crews, because they are amazingly experienced, but you need to budget for that. They’re on their eight-hour day, then they get time-and-a-half, then they get double-time, and that takes a chunk out of my budget. And I hate that my head has to even go into that vortex. On a low-budget film, we have 24 hours a day—we all get into it, we all need to get dirty, we all get it done. It’s very different, and I respect both worlds.

What’s the largest budget you’ve ever worked with?

I would say Arlington Road.

Same issues, union problems?

Yeah, but we were in Texas—that was a little different from working in New York. Spike Lee’s budget for Summer of Sam was just a little lower than that, but it was tough: “I need you guys to stay another half-hour to finish painting this wall,” but then you have to call three or four people to approve that, and you can’t reach them. And you keep wanting to go paint it yourself, and you’re not allowed to. Sometimes when they all left I would just do it myself. You just want to get it done. But when it becomes about administrative issues and budget, and I can’t get my design done, it gets very frustrating. But not as frustrating as having to go to a cover set…

What’s a cover set?

If we were planning to shoot on a beautiful day like this, and it suddenly started pouring rain and we couldn’t shoot outside, we would have to get inside somewhere so we didn’t lose the day. So every day I’ll have to have a set standing by, just about ready, which is a nightmare because you have to rent things like paint, furniture, props…

This is only on bigger-budget films?

It’s on every film. Cover sets are a big nightmare for production designers, because you have to have all these things standing by. You spend months doing the research, picking out specific pieces of furniture, and then you can’t get them up in time. “Oh, Law and Order wants that prop—it might not be ready.” You get the call at 10:00 p.m. the night before: “We need to go to cover, Thérèse.”

What percentage of the time do you actually need to do that?

Depends on the movie. Arlington Road, we went to cover quite a bit. We had tornado warnings, rain. Cover sets make me cry. [Laughs.] They’re like a big, painful tumor.

How did you get involved with I Shot Andy Warhol? That must have been your third or fourth Christine Vachon film.

What used to disturb me about Christine, but now I completely respect, is that she always wants to give a director choices. And as much as I have worked so hard for her on so many movies, she’ll present the director with three or four different designers. And most of them I know. [Laughs.]

That must be anxiety-producing.

It is, but it’s healthy for me, too, at this point. I want to hustle for any job—I want to shine, I want to have a good interview, I want to show them my best work. With Warhol, I knew Mary Harron was looking at several people—she had many different people in mind—and I fought for that job. I kept calling her, sending cards; we actually had two interviews—“Can we have another interview, please?” I don’t know how I ended up getting it—I’m not sure whether it was my enthusiasm, or perhaps Christine’s not being sure whether these other designers could handle the budget. And I think a good producer should always keep that in mind. You can get a big Hollywood designer to do a little art film, but can they do it and stay in budget? I’m very proud of that movie.

Can you talk about that experience a little more?

It took forever for Tom Whelan, the location manager—who I worked with on Living in Oblivion and Stonewall—and I to find a location for The Factory, which was obviously the key part of the movie. We finally found a space that is across the street from the Dia Art Center in Chelsea, before Chelsea was “Chelsea.” No heat, no bathroom, no water. We had to go to the bathroom at the Mobil station around the corner. I remember freezing, it was so cold. We did put in a little plastic sink. And we were pulling hundreds of silkscreens—replicas of the actual Warhol paintings—which we made completely from scratch, with our little plastic sink, running hoses up and down the stairs.
   Then we foiled the entire place, as Billy Name had done originally. Our hands were completely black by the time we finished. Alzheimer’s! That’s why I can’t remember anything. And again, tons of interns and assistants. Interns that wouldn’t show up when we thought they would. Sometimes there would just be two of us, four of us, five of us, building 20 Brillo boxes, doing all the silkscreens, foiling, etc.

How did you pick the images to be silkscreened?

We researched where Warhol found his images, then had to get those approved by the Warhol Foundation. Then we made the actual screens. Painting all the backgrounds, stretching all the canvas, priming all the canvas, making all the frames. I have a photograph where you can see the entire floor of the space covered with Poppy pictures and the Brillo boxes. That was a huge set, but I had such a wonderfully dedicated crew. My set decorator, Diane Lederman, was amazing. There’s a great place in the city called Materials for the Arts, where artists donate furniture and other stuff, which I’ve been able to use for a few different movies—I actually keep donating back to them. They had a lot of the things we used, and then we went to the depths of Jersey to thrift stores, or even into people’s basements. “We’ll clear this all out for you—we’ll take all your paintbrushes, your tools, everything.” And we completely filled the space.

I know you wanted every detail to be period-specific, but I’m sure in the second row on the top shelf you could cheat it a little bit, right?

You had your front row, then your filler. And you move things for camera. Now it’s so much harder to find those items. There was something about those particular years where I could still find the junk, the crap, the filler items. You go to the yard sale and say, “I’ll just take your whole garage for $20, just give me all this crap.” That’s what I needed to fill the space up. The 8-mm projectors, all the things Andy would have had, the old paintbrushes. We also built quite a bit from scratch. For instance, he had that very peculiar red couch. Of course we couldn’t find that anywhere, so we built it, from just looking at photographs. I remember myself, the decorator and a P.A. doing that, and we’d never upholstered anything in our lives. We got a hot glue gun, a staple gun—we had the material, we knew the shape—and we just did it. But through the whole shoot I had to keep going over to it, staple-gunning it back together. [Laughs.] “Ellen, don’t get too close to that corner!”

How many films have you worked with Ellen Kuras on?

At least four or five.

Do the two of you have a sort of shorthand communication going on at this point?

It’s wonderful to work with a cinematographer that you’ve worked with before, and to spend a lot of pre-production time with them. A lot of these films that I did with Ellen, I actually sat in on the storyboarding process—“This is how much of the set we’re seeing,” “This is the shot we want”—and that gives me a better idea of what I need to prioritize on. She’s incredibly patient, as are a lot of the DPs I’ve worked with. Very patient, and very art department–oriented. Ellen will often ask me to look through the lens, and will be willing to change things around if I have suggestions. Her work is beautiful.
   I think my biggest complaint about being a production designer would be when I’ve worked with DPs who, when I’m not on set, have an “anything-goes” kind of attitude. My on-set dresser—who, by the way, has to always be so strong to stand up to a director and a D.P.—will say, “This is how Thérèse wants it,” and they’ll say, “Get away, we don’t care.” And often they’re shooting nights and I’m working days, so it can get complicated. But Ellen is one of the most supportive, especially in terms of lighting, which I’m very, very concerned about. Obviously, that’s what makes a film. I mean, there’s always an issue of fixtures that we may or may not see—if we see them, that’s my job, and if we don’t, that becomes the lighting department’s job. But I’m always anxious to make sure that what they get is okay. That happened a lot on Summer of Sam. Because it’s a period film and Ellen loves to use fluorescents—she’s constantly throwing things up here and there—and I wanted to make sure that if the lighting wasn’t period, it was hidden.

Can you describe the typical production designer/director relationship?

It really depends on who you’re working with. The personalities I’ve dealt with are so incredibly different; they really run the gamut. Spike, for instance, didn’t spend that much time with me—I usually just sent him sketches in envelopes via his assistant, and he’d send a little Post-It back that just said, “Okay” or “Good” or “Bad” or “This is better.” We would have very short meetings. Then there’s someone like Mark Pellington—or Todd Haynes or Tom Kalin—but especially Mark, who was just obsessed with research and the look of the movie. We would stay up all night together, weekends together, going through books, watching movies. He would always come to see the set beforehand, always look at anything I did, spend enormous amounts of time with me. Actually, almost too much—he’s the other extreme. But I prefer that—your life becomes this movie and these characters.

Can you describe the psychological process you employ as you create the environments a film’s characters will inhabit? Is there some sort of “channeling” involved?

Well, having done a decade’s worth of films, I’ve spent a lot of time scouting locations. I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of people’s homes and workspaces, and I absorb all the different details they each have—the quirkiness of each place. With Happiness, for instance, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s apartment was completely based on different locations that I had seen in the past. The baseball caps aligned on the wall I had seen in someone’s apartment and was amazed by. I remember scouting an off-duty police officer’s apartment, where his coffee table was literally the box his TV set came in with a towel over it and some obscure piece of glass he had gotten with a bunch of crap on top—it was the most exciting thing I had seen all day. Sketched it right away—“I have to use this sometime.” That ended up in Philip’s apartment, too. Scouting is so visually absorbing to me. It’s exhausting, but so exciting. I’m such a voyeur. To go into people’s homes and meet them, to poke around, to see these different realities.

Any other examples from that film?

Joy’s bedroom is based on my bedroom and all my friend’s bedrooms as teenagers. Jared Harris’s apartment came from days of scouting interiors in Brighton Beach. I really filled my sketchbook on those trips.

On that movie, was everything shot on location or were some sets completely built from scratch?

That movie was almost all locations. Almost all of them had to be completely redressed, filled, painted, and decorated, though, and were purely based on all the locations I had been scouting for years—I keep really great journals of photographs and sketches based on those locations.

Do you find actors ever have input about sets or particular props?

All the time. The one example I can think of off the top of my head was Lili Taylor on Warhol. She came to me and said, “Thérèse, could we change this around? I don’t think Valerie would have had it like this.” And I totally appreciate that, because Lili went so deep into that character—she did so much research—I knew I could trust her instincts. The only time it can be annoying is when an actor bypasses me and removes something or changes things around without discussing it with me first, just out of respect.

How many films have you done in New York City? Happiness was partly shot here, wasn’t it?

New York and New Jersey. Which to me was far away. Summer of Sam, Swoon, Stonewall, Warhol, Eddie Burns’s movie was in Rockaway Beach—kind of New York.

Was The Doom Generation shot in L.A.?

Yes.

Todd Haynes said once that he thought it was much harder to do a low-budget indie film in L.A. than in New York because there didn’t seem to be that surplus of people willing to work for little or no money. Did you find that to be true?

I think that is true. Somehow, though, I managed to find them. [Laughs.] I happened to have a great art director, Michael Krantz, who’s from New York but who had lived in L.A., and luckily he knew a lot of people. There were a lot of sets in that movie. You know, he’d have a carpenter friend who’d come in for a day, and a painter friend who’d come in for a day. But it was yet another film where there were a lot of all-nighters. I was painting everything, and we were building everything together—we had probably a 5-person crew. And we had no prop master, so I was on set every day doing props. I was the prop master, the on-set dresser, the production designer—but I love the way that film looks.
   Again, it’s the low-budget vs. the union issue for me. I think there are so many eager people out there. You can call any art school, and if it’s the right time, you have these kids just flocking to do anything. Interns are the only way these low-budget movies get made. I just started Hedwig and there are so many eager to work on it.

And on larger-budget films you can’t get them because they expect money?

They don’t expect money. It’s an insurance problem, which is sad. Studios will say you can’t have interns, because if they get in an accident they can potentially sue you. So you have to at least pay them minimum wage, but then they’re no longer really an intern, they’re paid, and then there’s the question of whether or not that can come out of my budget. I remember having a meeting with Spike during Summer of Sam, and I was complaining about this. He loves interns as much as I do, and it was like, “Just hire whoever you want.”

Did you?

Oh, yeah. I couldn’t have done that job without interns. We had so much work to do.

Are you generally on set most of the time?

I try to be on set most of the time, which a lot of directors aren’t used to but certainly like. And again, it’s because at the last minute they want to shoot that other corner they weren’t going to shoot originally, and it’s what we will finally see on the screen, and I want to make sure it’s what I want to see, too. But it becomes very difficult if they’re shooting nights and I’m working days. And there are some directors who want a designer on set all the time. That’s just often physically impossible, though.

Do you ever look at a film you’ve designed and have one of those “Oops—I missed that one” moments?

Always. I scrutinize every single film. Actually, there’s something in Spike’s movie that drives me so crazy I can’t look at it. There’s a scene where John Leguizamo is in his apartment, and all the boys come in and they’re fighting, they’re wrestling, and he rips the phone off the wall. And there are two black drywall screws on this very light yellow wall. No one mounts their phone with dry wall screws. That’s such a “film” thing to do. And after he tears it off, it’s in the frame for a little while. My heart just stopped. That’s one of those moments where if I had been on set, that would not look like that. Little things like that. In that film, we pulled off huge riot scenes with cars crashing through store windows, fires raging out of control—you name it. And still, those two damn screws…
   But it’s usually continuity problems. There’s a bar scene, and the drinks jump around between cuts. That’s the prop master. That can be frustrating. Or really bad scenic jobs. If you have an on-set scenic, you know, if something’s too shiny, “Can you make this more dull?” Or, “This wall’s too white, can you make it a different color?” They usually have about two seconds—because everybody’s watching them—and you can tell they had about two seconds. Even if they’re really good, they just are not given the time. And usually, if I’m not there, hopefully a good DP or a good director will give them the time. Especially if it’s in the background, and it’s a key part of the shot.

You talked about your location scouting serving as a good research tool. What else do you draw on for inspiration? Paintings, photography, architecture?

All of the above. I constantly collect images. Not even for a particular film, just for composition and color. When I start a job I have stacks of reference books the director, the DP and I will go through for specific shots, composition, color—it’s important to think about the characters regarding color, and what that means for the characters.
   By the way, research is so great to share with the whole crew. One of the wonderful things that Mark Pellington did on Arlington Road is he made a big 11-by-17-inch book combining all of my research and his research for each scene, with different texts, different ideas of lighting, etc. And he gave one to the gaffer, one to the key grip, and one to the costume designer so we all had the same information going into a scene, or prepping for a different scene, or even scouting. I thought that was a great idea; that’s something I would love to do in every movie from now on. I always have my research on my walls in my office, but to give something like that to a gaffer—“This is the color, this is the mood we’re looking for”—would be great. It takes a lot of pre-production time to do that, but it’s certainly worth it.

How closely do you work with the costume designer?

It depends on the film. Again, with Happiness, which had such an eclectic array of colors and locations, I really had to talk to Kathryn Nixon: “Okay, they’re in Florida now, what do they wear here? These are the colors of the walls.” I tried to give them all color sheets of every set. Actually, there’s one scene where Lara Flynn Boyle sits on the couch in her apartment with Philip, and her shirt is dark and the couch is dark; she completely disappears into it—all you see is her hand. It’s a beautiful shot; she sinks in there and disappears. It’s a luxury to have time with any costume designer—in Summer of Sam, working with Ruth Carter was great—she is just so talented, and so experienced. And she had so much to deal with. But generally speaking, I constantly try to feed them all the research I’ve got: you know, here’s the period research I’m getting, here’s my wallpaper, the furniture, my paint colors, the curtains.
   It’s different on every job. Hedwig’s going to be a curious one. The costume designer is a friend of mine—we did Going All the Way together. She does Courtney Love’s wardrobe, Madonna’s and Lenny Kravitz’s wardrobe. And she did People vs. Larry Flynt, Mod Squad—she’s incredibly talented. And like me, she’s obsessed with Hedwig.

How’s that coming?

Great. I just want it to get green-lit! They want to shoot in Toronto, but I honestly feel I would save more money doing it here. The millions of kids I could get… No one has seen Hedwig in Toronto.

Here, every disaffected art student would be putty in your hands…

Exactly. That’s how I got started here. The talent pool in New York—the interns I had on Happiness and Summer of Sam and all the other movies were so great. And their dedication! For free, just for a screen credit. And now, of course, a lot of them are moving on up. I can’t get that when I go into another city or when I do a bigger-budget movie and I don’t have access to those people.

But of course there’s a “dark side” to that set-up, right? Some people would call that situation exploitative.

To me it depends on what stage you’re at in your life. I am thankful for what someone like Christine gave me when I was first starting out. I would not be here without that opportunity. Yes, I was abused, and I worked incredibly hard, and had to use my own space for either no pay at all or for way too little. But I wouldn’t be here without that. Where else do you get that opportunity? You sort of have to make a conscious choice that there is going to be a period of time where you go through that. But you certainly get to a point where you don’t want to do it anymore.
   I get résumés almost every day. I get phone calls out of the blue. “I love your work, I’ll do anything for you.” And I’ll call them back and tell them on the next film I’ll bring them in and they can help us paste-up something. I think it’s healthy, but I think the people who are on top need to be aware of the needs of these people. I mean, I really take care of my interns now. I try to support them mentally, buy them lunch, reassure them they’re doing the right thing, inspire them. Which I didn’t quite have when I started out. It was just nuts and bolts, get the job done. But then again, I was working with great directors who did give me that, and who were behind me.

What’s the best experience you’ve ever had working on a film?

Which film did I get the most sleep on? [Laughs.]

It sounds like that would be the worst one…

[Laughs.] I’d say I was most satisfied with the first few movies I ever did—The Refrigerator, Swoon.

Why?

Because I was so completely challenged and my adrenaline was on full-time. And to accomplish something like that—something I had never done before—for basically no money, made me proud. It’s just different from my experiences now, where I’ll do something, and it’ll look beautiful—I mean, of course I’m also proud of that, too. But when you first start out, you go in there and you dive right in with absolutely no clue. And to be able to pull that off—“Somehow I dragged that piece of plywood off of Canal Street, built that set, and it worked!” Those are the experiences that convinced me to keep doing this.