Oscar-winning production designer Adam Stockhausen on creating 130 sets in the small town of Angoulême for the new film.
Wes Anderson and Adam Stockhausen on the set of “The French Dispatch”A Google Earth search led the creative team to the hilltop southwestern town of Angoulême, which was ideal with its ancient architecture, the twists and turns of the narrow cobblestone streets and the vertical stacking of the spaces and an old felt factory that doubled as a film studio.
The 20-minute stories include a student revolution , an imprisoned painter and his prison guard muse , a crime mystery and “The Cycling Reporter.” This translated into 130 sets where every shot demanded a different set-up with its own visual look. Stockhausen did a deep dive into the animatic process and then designed the different pieces of the story, followed by the scouting process.
“The challenges were how many different things we were doing at one time,” he says. “It was a flat out-run trying to do the turnaround from one set to another.”As with any Anderson film, authenticity is the name of the game. Set decorator Rena DeAngelo scoured the basements of Angoulême and the flea markets from Paris to Le Mans for period set pieces.
The result is the director’s French love letter to his adopted country, a visual masterpiece and perhaps his most creative one to date. Behind the scenes, the success is attributed to a familiar tight-knit team. As Stockhausen says, “The great thing about working with Wes is the way we make movies and go to a place to hunker down away from the studios and live together.
Director Wes Anderson and production designer Adam Stockhausen selected the town for its ancient architecture, scenic bridges and “nooks and crannies,” says Stockhausen.
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