.chrisstanton27 spoke with the production designer and set decorator of InTheHeightsMovie about translating the hit musical and all its intricacies to the big screen
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. When Jon M. Chu asked his Crazy Rich Asians production designer, Nelson Coates, if he was interested in working on a film adaptation of In the Heights, Coates played it cool. “I had been chasing the project for years,” Coates says, “but I didn’t tell Jon that I knew he was attached.
Nelson Coates: They couldn’t be more different, in some ways, but a level of specificity, culturally, was very important on both projects. Jon loved the level of detail in what I was bringing to Crazy Rich Asians. He appreciated what I was doing research-wise with the Peranakan culture that’s not in the book — the fact that it was assigning looks to each of the characters. He wanted to have a very specific look as well to Washington Heights.
N.C.: Ironically, if you look actually at the stage sets, they look nothing like what the movie looks like. There’s a feeling, though, so the feeling is important. Since we had the opportunity to do this cinematically and add scale and scope, it was really about how we expand [without making] it suffocate, being claustrophobic like it would be on a 45-foot proscenium stage.
N.C.: And the map is made from pieces of everything he sells in the bodega. So if you look really closely, there’s MetroCards, Sweet’N Low packets, Pepperidge Farm fish. There’s keys, because they make keys — in fact, the Florida Keys on the map are actual keys. One of my crew members was actually going on his honeymoon [to the DR] the very first week of prep, so I asked him to bring a bag of sand back.
The salon has a sort of sun-bleached aspect to it, at the same time as having vibrant colors, as if the walls were painted 20 years ago.
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