Aussie designer Fiona Crombie ‘favourite’ to win an Oscar
For Australian production designer Fiona Crombie, an Oscar nomination has meant a new level of visibility.
For Australian production designer Fiona Crombie, who usually works her magic behind the scenes, an Oscar nomination has meant a new level of visibility.
“It’s been tricky to have to present yourself in a completely exposing way,” she said of the Oscar publicity.
“It’s not just about the work: you have to stand up and talk and worry about your shoes. It’s been wonderful to be part of a film that has struck a chord.”
Crombie is nominated for her work on Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, which has 10 Oscar nods, including one for its Australian co-writer, Tony McNamara. The winners will be announced on Monday, Australian time.
Early this month, Crombie and best friend Alice Felton (who are both Oscar nominees) won a BAFTA for production design for The Favourite, which is set in 18th-century England at the court of Queen Anne and takes liberties with history and authenticity in ways that are hilarious, scurrilous, queer, poignant and perceptive.
Lanthimos gave his creative team a wonderful feeling of freedom, Crombie said, “that really made us all want to step up”.
Yet creating the world of The Favourite involved a particular kind of discipline, so anachronistic elements are used judiciously. For example, the ailing queen gets about in a wheelchair, something that didn’t exist in the early 1700s: the challenge was to make a wheelchair that plausibly could have come from that period.
“We’re making an invented version of the early 18th century, rather like a parallel universe,” she said. “You don’t want farce or fantasy, or for it to be overdone.”
They shot a good deal of the film in Hatfield House, a Jacobean property in Hertfordshire.
The design, Crombie said, “is always about the characters”, and has a role in creating emotion. The court “entraps people, but it can also be a playground. And sometimes we make the rooms feel like they change according to how people are feeling”.
Crombie made her feature debut with Justin Kurzel’s confronting 2011 drama Snowtown. She said it was an “unbelievably happy experience” working on an ultra-low-budget film with grim subject matter that was “embraced by the community” in which it was made. She also worked with Jane Campion on the drama series Top of the Lake.
Who is the human, who a monster?
This brilliantly staged Shake and Stir production takes the audience to the heart of a tragic tale of unnatural acts, obsession and madness.
Noemie Merlant: The actor bares all
The French actress and director’s ease with nude scenes in movies such as Emmanuelle and The Balconettes is part of the risk-taking she seeks in her projects.