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Focus Features releases My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 in theaters nationwide on September 8th, 2023. NYC MOVIE GURU:As a production designer, at what point do you think a film's style becomes part of a film's substance? How important is it to find the right balance between the two? Grant Armstrong: I think it's everything. When I first read a script, I conjure up images of how I see the film and, really, how I want to tell the story. I want the visuals to aid the story. It's not just the dialogue or the acting; the whole surrounding has to create an atmosphere. No matter what kind of film I work on, creating an atmosphere is the most important thing---creating the type of images that literally will propel the story forward. NYC MOVIE GURU: How do you know how far to go with the production design? GA: If something is in reality, you've got to keep it within reality at all times. You can push boundaries to a certain extent, but the minute you start to go over that edge, if I feel it then somebody else who's watching it is going to feel it as well. I think that it's really important if you've got a contemporary film that you, of course, push the boundaries as much as you can, but to keep in mind that it's a real story and the minute that you take it out of that reality, I think that's where you take it out of storytelling---your design overtakes the story and I don't think that you ever want to do that. The key is always the story, and the visuals are aiding the storytelling, so if you push the visuals too far, then I think you've overstepped your boundaries. NYC MOVIE GURU: When I spoke to a music composer once and told him that I barely noticed the music, he replied, "Good. I did my job." How similar is that to your job as a production designer? GA: Yes, I think that's very true. The minute that things really start to jump out and take over the story, I think you've taken the audience out of the world. For me, the visuals are always there in front of the audience, so I want to create this world that isn't jarring; it actually just takes you into the story itself or carries the story. In this movie, we just wanted to show a part of Greece that we felt like hadn't been seen before. We wanted to create, sort of, a more neoclassical rural village area. So, I looked at images of different villages in Greece and wanted to create this warm, colorful, vibrant, but faded grandeur environment. So, that's really the focus to start with and then you have to go with it and keep the story going. I feel that talking to [director] Nia Vardalos really closely---I was sending her pictures every day--made it a really collaborative effort of her storytelling and my storytelling working together to, hopefully, show the audience this different part of Greece that they've never seen before. NYC MOVIE GURU: You did a great job of capturing palpable warmth through the production design. How do you define warmth in terms of production design? GA: Greece is so well known for its blue water, so there's so much blue around. You have to counteract that. You're going into the okras, into the yellows and oranges which are different color spectrums than the blue skies, the blue seas and the green. So, that's one warmth. The second one is the textures. We've got these buildings that are almost 150 years old. They're slightly crumbling. You've got so much texture going on there. So that adds, I believe, a kind of warm feeling that it's well-lived. These places have a story. Every brick has a story, so it's that kind of world that you want to feel like you're inside of. You walk down these village lanes and there are so many stories in every facet that you look at--every window too. It's something that has a really warm atmosphere. NYC MOVIE GURU: What had to actually be built for the set? GA: For our main village, we were looking at different villages. The practicalities of filming in a small Greek village were very restrictive. We were on the top of a hillside with tiny little lanes. For one of the locations, we found a village called Bouas Village in Corfu which is an old village that was built in the 1970s as a replication of a Greek village. It was mainly one street, but what I wanted to try to do was to give it a 360 so that you could go in there and film 360 degrees and film wherever you wanted to and you'd be within this village itself. So, we built a big facade down the street, so it gave it a bit of a town square feel. Any of the shoot-offs that you look into the countryside, we built houses there--facades. Then the actual house itself where they stayed, we built the whole interior on the side of a building--on the entrance to the street, actually. So, that interior became a set piece, but, because of that, you could still shoot through the windows and saw halls and trees and the mountains, so it felt like a very real house, but it was actually built. NYC MOVIE GURU: How different is production design during daytime scenes vs nighttime scenes? Is the difference like night and day? GA: [laughs] I think that it's pretty much like night and day! The great thing about this film is that we got to see both worlds. We got to see the villages in the day and we got to see them at night. At night time, with the celebration, I wanted to create this magical atmosphere. I wanted to take the village on its own little journey itself. So, when we first see it in the film, it's a really desolate, quiet and somewhat spooky little old village, but by the end of the film, you feel like life has returned. I wanted to give the village itself its own character and to show it coming back to life at the end of the film. NYC MOVIE GURU: How do you feel about the use of CGI? GA: I feel fine about it. It's a tool to tell a story. A lot of times, it's financial that it works toward. You obviously can't do certain things, do you have to take things away with CGI or add things with it. It's mainly background or main visuals. Every show is different. I love to try and keep things as much in-camera as possible, but that's not to say that I don't think that CGI has its moments because it certainly does. It expands a world that you wouldn't be able to normally do physically. If it helps to continue to tell the story, then it's great, but I still love the film as much as possible. NYC MOVIE GURU: Which film do you think would pair well in a double feature with My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3's production design? GA: The film that [director] Nia Vardalos had first referenced visually is Call Me By Your Name. When we first talked about My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, she said that she wanted to create an atmosphere like in that film, so I suppose that those two films would go together rather well. It gives that kind of rural, lived-in and feel-good atmosphere with a good story in between. If those two films would work together, I would be very happy. Main Page Interviews Menu Alphabetical Menu Chronological Menu ______________________________________________________ |
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