South Australia’s overlooked Academy Award nominee Fiona Crombie tipped to win Oscar

Fiona Crombie was once a Pembroke School alumnus and excelled in one particular field — and that talent is tipped to win her an Oscar on Monday morning.

• Adelaide’s Fiona Crombie wins BAFTA on her way to Oscars
• Australian Crombie marches toward Oscar

Oscar nominee Fiona Crombie had her first taste of designing a period film in 2014 when she worked on the blood-soaked Scottish drama Macbeth, directed by another South Australian Justin Kurzel, who grew up in Gawler.

The producers, who had superstars Michael Fassbender and Marion Cottilard on board, wanted a designer with more experience but Kurzel, a good friend of Crombie’s from Pembroke School, dug in.

“It wasn’t easy for Justin to get me on to that film,” says Crombie, a few days out from the Oscars where she is very likely to win an Academy Award for the moody, sumptuous and off-kilter look of The Favourite.

“He has always been a great supporter and advocate for my talent, as I have been for his.”

Pembroke in the 1980s was a magnet for film talent with Kurzel – whose latest work The True History of the Kelly Gang is one of this year’s most anticipated films – in the same year as Crombie. Kurzel’s brother Jed, an internationally regarded composer of film scores (Slow West, Alien: Covenant) was just behind them.

Crombie says she knew Justin was special when they met in an art class.

“I remember noting that this new guy was really talented,” she says. “Through art and drama classes we became close friends and have stayed that way for many years.”

Fiona Crombie at the 34th annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival Variety Artisans Awards Tribute at Lobero Theatre. Picture: Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images

She came on to Macbeth with no experience of a major production (they had collaborated before on Kurzel’s first movie Snowtown) and had to portray the look of 11th century Scotland with little money and a lot of restrictions.

The result was grim and magnificent; a child’s corpse at the beginning laid out with stones on its eyes a harbinger of the deaths to come.

“In many ways the film looks the way it does because we were backed into a corner and had to come up with a bold approach,” she says.

“Justin is a very nimble director and for weeks on end we would problem solve how we were going to create the distinct look that we were after.”

To win the job of creating the look of The Favourite, the multi-nominated slightly surreal film about Queen Anne by visionary director Yorgos Lanthimos, Crombie put together as many references as she could.

The script showed her this was no classic biopic; it was an amusing and poignant story about a stout and childless queen who overate, suffered from gout, and was manipulated by those who sought her attention (and her bed) while she tried her best to be regal.

“I tap danced to get the job,” Crombie says. “I said too much ... (Yorgos) was sitting there taking it in.”

She showed him architectural drawings and talked about how empty and lightly dressed the rooms should be.

The great expanses of wooden floor in a room with a single canopied bed helped to emphasise the queen’s isolation within a very ornate and detailed space.

“In many ways it was very simple. I had landed on a look that he instinctively felt was right,” she says.

The success of The Favourite has catapulted Crombie to the top of her profession.

So far she has won best designer, with her set decorator Alice Felton, at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTAs), the Art Directors Guild Awards and the British independent Film Awards (the BIFAs).

She and Felton are almost certain to take out the Oscar on Monday, which will make her one of the most sought-after designers in the industry.

Designer Fiona Crombie and set decorator Alice Felton won awards for Production Design on The Favourite at the BAFTA British Academy Film Awards. Picture: Ben Stansall/AFP

Crombie was born in Sydney but moved to Adelaide as a baby when her father, Donald Crombie, was appointed drama director of the newly-formed South Australian Film Corporation.

He and wife Judith Crombie, who in the 1960s worked in the library at The Advertiser, moved to Sydney in 1975 so Crombie could direct Helen Morse in the film Caddie and stayed until 1983 when they returned to Adelaide and Fiona began school at Pembroke.

“She was drawing from the time she was about four,” Judith Crombie says, “ladies frocks, things like that.”

Fiona remembers visiting SAFC film sets with her father – who she took as her date earlier this month at a BAFTA reception at Kensington Palace – and travelled with him to Wilpena Pound where he was filming the bushranger classic Robbery Under Arms, starring Sam Neill as the notorious Captain Starlight.

“The production designer George Liddle had built a house in the middle of nowhere and I was fascinated by this perfect but temporary creation,” she says.

“It totally captured my imagination.”

After Pembroke she studied a BA of Dramatic Arts (Design) at NIDA and worked with Kurzel at the Sydney Theatre Company.

Kurzel asked her to design his first film, Snowtown, about the Snowtown serial killers, and she says they happily fumbled their way through, finding authenticity through the generosity of the ordinary people who helped them.

Fiona Crombie with some of her designs in 2003.

“I think it is still the happiest shoot I have been on,” she says.

“We were embraced by the community around Davoren Park. We were welcomed into countless houses as we looked for locations and it was through seeing how people were actually living and talking to them about their lives that inspired the look of the film.”

The Favourite was exceptionally demanding.

The budget was $15 million, which isn’t huge for such an ambitious production, and the use of historical locations like Hatfield House and Hampton Court came with great advantages but obvious restrictions.

On top of that, Lanthimos wanted natural light and Crombie lit the sets with 80,000 candles which generated their own problem of dripping wax.

“Wax management is a really big deal in the kinds of environments we were in,” she says. “Candle logistics is something I am very good at now.”

Crombie is going into Monday’s awards ceremony overwhelmed to be in the company of people she has admired for so long and with no real expectation of what might happen.

“I never expected any of this!” she says. “The Favourite is a small film made with a low budget.

None of us could have foreseen that with 10 nominations we would all be flying in to LA en masse to go to the Oscars.”