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Art & Design|‘Wicked’ Green, ‘Room Next Door’ Red and ‘Substance’ Yellow: It’s a Bold Season
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/arts/design/wicked-the-substance-the-room-next-door.html
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Some potential contenders were especially vivid. Production and costume designers explain the conundrums they faced and their surprising solutions.
Dec. 30, 2024, 5:01 a.m. ET
Fire-engine red. Egg-yolk yellow. Christmas-tree green.
The palettes of this year’s potential Oscar contenders can be summed up in one word: Bold.
“Everybody on Pedro’s sets ends up wearing really strong colors,” said Inbal Weinberg, the production designer who dreamed up the striking, primary color-heavy visual aesthetic for Pedro Almodóvar’s euthanasia drama, “The Room Next Door.”
We spoke with the costume, production and makeup designers for three of this year’s potential Oscar contenders — “The Substance,” “The Room Next Door” and “Wicked” — about choosing just the right shades, creating striking sets and costumes that don’t overwhelm the story and finding the secret ingredient for Elphaba’s green makeup.
Red: ‘The Room Next Door’
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Even though the “The Room Next Door” tells a downbeat tale — about Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and her dying friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton) — the screen is bursting with vibrant tomato reds and electric lime greens.
“It was important to Pedro not to go into the cliché universe in which, if you’re telling a really dark story, you also have these demure interiors or a drab color palette,” said Weinberg, who worked with Almodóvar to create eye-catching monochromatic sets (like a red kitchen, with a red counter, bowls, apples, strawberries and even a phone lock screen).
