Readers of Architectural Digest might feel a tug of déjà vu watching certain scenes of Breaking Dawn—Part 1, the latest movie in the popular Twilight series. It’s the penultimate installment of the five-film saga, whose story line centers on a love triangle involving a young woman, a vampire, and a werewolf, played by Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner. As it happens, a Brazilian beach house designed by the architecture firm Bernardes + Jacobsen, which was featured in AD’s January 2011 issue, also has a starring role, as the honeymoon retreat where Bella Swan (Stewart) and her vampire husband, Edward Cullen (Pattinson), finally consummate their romance. In anticipation of the November 18 release,AD talked with the film’s production designer, Richard Sherman, to get the stories behind the movie’s sets, life on location with the young stars, and his approach to designing the wedding of the century.
ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST: How did you choose the Bernardes + Jacobsen house for Edward and Bella’s Brazilian honeymoon?RICHARD SHERMAN: We looked at pictures and found a house we loved. But two days later we learned it was going to be blown up because it had been built illegally. The next morning I got on a plane to Brazil, hopped on a boat, and went through countless islands along the coastline south of Rio. It took us four weeks to finally find the Bernardes + Jacobsen house, which had a tropical modern interior and was located near Paraty on the coast that we liked.
AD: Did you change anything about the house?
RS: For the movie we actually created our own exterior—what’s visible when you approach the house by boat—in the visual effects department. What you see of the real house is the front door, the steps leading up to it, the veranda, and all those glass doors. I loved the interior. We made a big open kitchen and living room. Some of the scenes that take place inside the house were actually shot on soundstages in Louisiana, where we created a courtyard, a bathroom, and the bedroom where Edward and Bella spend their wedding night. It was a seamless set—you really couldn’t tell the difference between the house and our stages.
AD: How closely did you follow the descriptions in the book when filming in Brazil?
RS: In some cases we really veered away from the book. What works well on the page doesn’t always work well on film. The location was challenging. Stephenie Meyer, who wrote the novels, set the honeymoon on an island in the middle of nowhere. Brazil is famous for its many islands down the coastline from Rio to Paraty. When you look out from the location where we shot, you don’t just see a horizon of water, as she wrote, but all these beautiful tropical islands. In the end it all worked out very well.
AD: Basically the whole series has been building toward Bella and Edward’s wedding. What was your approach to designing such a momentous scene?
RS: The way Stephenie has written it in the book, it’s a very pretty wedding—it has the white path and the white chairs that are covered in white fabric. But Bill [Condon, the film’s director] and I thought, How can we make this truly special and unique? For the people who know the books and movies, this is the wedding of the century. So we created this very organic, whimsical, fairy tale–like atmosphere—A Midsummer Night’s Dream kind of thing—with benches and seating made of branches that came out of the ground and were covered in moss and flowers. The whole forest floor was covered in moss. The ceiling was dripping flowers.
AD: Were some of the sets recycled from previous movies, or are they all new?
RS: Bella’s house is the same. But we rebuilt the whole three-story set of the Cullen house in Louisiana on a soundstage, and we remade its exterior in the woods of Vancouver. We changed the interior decoration of the Cullen house subtly but completely. If you remember the original house well, you’ll notice that it is completely different. This has the same tone, but it’s a lot prettier. The other huge change is the castle of the Volturi, a group of vampires from the Roman Empire. The sets from the other movies kind of looked like—no offense to those art directors—the Four Seasons Hotel, with marble columns and sconces. So we built an old castle on stage.
AD: Did you worry about the perceptions of the fans?
RS: You have to keep your fan base in mind, because they’re the real critics. They know the story so well, they know what happens, and they know the environments and the atmosphere. You hope that your sets coincide with what the audience and the fans expect. The producers, studio, director, and I were all very conscious of that.
AD: What was it like on the set?
RS: Everyone had a good time. The three main actors are all very fun to work with. Kristen is quite serious. Rob and Taylor are a little bit wild. Rob and Kristen are actually a couple in real life. When he’s with her, he’s a little more restrained. When she’s not around, like most guys when their wives or girlfriends aren’t around, he’s a little looser. Taylor’s a kid—he’s 19—so he was bouncing all over the place.
Photos:
Edward’s sisters, Alice (Ashley Greene) and Rosalie (Nikki Reed), help Bella (Kristen Stewart) prepare for her wedding in Alice’s bedroom, one of the new sets created for Breaking Dawn—Part 1. Production designer Richard Sherman says for this movie subtle changes to the decor in the Cullen house kept the same tone but made it “a lot prettier.”
Here, Alice and soul mate Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) are seated with their adoptive—and ageless—vampire parents, Esme (Elizabeth Reaser) and Dr. Carlisle Cullen (Peter Facinelli), at the nuptials on moss-covered benches amid a cascade of white flowers.
The best part of working on the movie? “We got to travel all over the place,” says Sherman. “It was like being paid to go on vacation.” For a scene during Edward and Bella’s honeymoon, the crew blocked off a street in Rio’s bustling Lapa district, which led to complaints from residents.
Sherman and his team re-created Edward and Bella’s fictional honeymoon destination, Isle Esme, on Saco do Mamanguá, a remote tropical fjord near Paraty, Brazil, accessible only by boat or helicopter. The house was designed by Thiago Bernardes of the architecture firm Bernardes + Jacobsen and was featured in the January 2011 issue of Architectural Digest.
A number of the scenes that take place inside the Brazil beach house were actually shot on sets—a bedroom, bathroom, and courtyard—built on a Louisiana soundstage. The production team’s challenge was to create a seamless transition between the house and the sets. “We see Edward and Bella arrive at the house at night,” Sherman says. “Then she walks through the living room, and the scene cuts to our set. You can’t tell the difference. It looks like a part of that house.”
Pivoting glass doors along the veranda span the entire length of the house, allowing breezes to pass through, while the double-height ceiling adds to the feeling of openness. Everything about the design is intended to enhance the architecture’s integration with the surrounding landscape.
Edward and Bella play chess on the terrace with neighboring islands in the background. “The view from the house became a problem with the studio because that’s not how Stephenie described it,” Sherman recalls. Meyer was persuaded to keep the natural surroundings in the scene instead of the empty horizon she described in the book.
Another sticking point was the verdant yard. “Bill Condon, the director, really wanted a sandy beach,” Sherman says. “I tried to explain to him that most Brazilian beach houses don’t have that. But he insisted, so we covered the whole front of the property in sand.”
Condon directs Stewart and Pattinson between takes of a scene shot in the bedroom of the Isle Esme house, one of the sets built in Louisiana.
Sherman also gave the Volturi castle—home to Aro (Michael Sheen, center) and Caius (Jamie Campbell Bower)—a new look for Breaking Dawn—Part 1. “That was fun for me as a production designer because we started with a big empty stage and ended up with a medieval castle.” But fans will have to wait until Part 2 comes out, in 2012, to see it fully. “Though we didn’t show too much of it in the first movie, you’ll see a lot of it in the second,” Sherman says.architecturaldigest
xoxo
Carrie
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