Bridgerton's Production Designer Gives Us a Peek Behind the Scenes
Will Hughes-Jones was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding production design on a period or fantasy show for Bridgerton's first season. So naturally, the pressure was on for season two.
The production designer already took Town & Country through where Bridgerton season two filmed around England, and here, he tells us about how his team adapted to the constraints of filming during a pandemic, what it was like to create this season's elaborate ballroom sets, and the challenges of Regency homes that only have windows on one wall.
What is the main thing you keep in mind as you design sets for Bridgeton?
The main thing is the story. You always come back to the story, because that's what we are doing. It is set in the Regency period, but we are telling a story. What is always omnipresent is what we're trying to put across to the audience, and how we, as a team, can highlight that storyline with the sets, the design, and the set decoration. We're constantly looking at it and going: Okay, how can we make this shine?
When you get the scripts, what do you do think about first?
Generally the process is, we get the first two, and what we call outlines [of the rest of the season's episodes]—which give us a sort of quick rundown of what happens, who does what, when, where, and that sort of thing. They're fairly loose, but we know how the story's going to progress from day one. There may be things that are in the script which seem quite innocuous when you read it, but they may come back and become quite important later down the line. There's always a conversation about: Is there anything in here that we should really take notice of that may not be obvious?
From that, we start looking at designing the spaces and looking at them in terms of, are we gonna be coming back there later in the season? Do we need to add something to it that's not in this script? It's quite a forensic study whilst we're actually doing our preliminary stuff. Then comes the fun bit where we start talking about colors and pattern and flow of spaces, and talking with Sophie [Canale], the costume designer and Erika [O?kvist, hair & makeup designer] about what their plans—we all come together and, and do what we do.
Can you tell me what "flow of spaces" means? I've never heard that term before.
When you read a script, quite often it's set in a room and it says something like "Anthony enters," and then the majority of that scene happens in the room, but there's always him entering. So you've gotta think about where he is come from, and where he is going. So you end up building and finding places, which have got a bit more of a run up into the scene.
Also, if it's a scene that's got four or five people talking in a room, you have to think about how they're gonna move around the room and how you're gonna keep it interesting rather than them all being static. We are always looking at, as I say, the flow within the room of where people would sit, where people would move, what sort of things within the room force the actors to move to a space.
Because of the style of the houses, the windows are all on plane. So within the room, there's three walls that don't have windows, and one that does. That's just cause of the nature of how these houses are built, but what that then creates: the D.O.P. [director of photography] Jeff [Jur] will always want the actors to be standing by the window, to get a nice soft light. Then, you are looking at how they get to that window from the door. So you don't wanna put a big piece of furniture en route for them, unless you want them to move around. That's what I mean about flow through the spaces.
I understand that in comparison to season one, a lot more was filmed on sets versus on location due to the COVID pandemic. What was that transition like— making some things that were previously been on location into sets?
We had to be quite clever. We didn't have any more space within our unit to build any more than we had before. This is where having all the scripts, or an outline, at the beginning really helped. We realized that in season two, the Bridgerton kitchen didn't feature at all, and neither did the Featherington kitchen and their backyard. So, we collapsed them, we took them down, we stacked them up like a set of books in the corner of the studio, and then we built new sets in their space.
Then there were the sets that we weren't able to go back to, principally because of COVID: the tea shop and the Modiste. So we actually built a little street in the studio, which had the Modiste, Genevieve's front door and then another property. Then we had Gunter's tea shop, and another property to give it movement just outside the sets.
We also had the Duke of Hasting's courtyard for the final scene of the last season—we built that in a studio to have warm rain, because we filmed in February and it was freezing. So we then had this very large set that was occupying a large area that had a lot of structure to it. So there was a conversation of, did we take it down and put something else in or did we just revamp it? We decided to turn it into something else. Because of the issues with COVID this year, we had to be in a very, very controlled situation to do balls. So we we made that space into ballrooms.
We divided in half: On one, we did a ballroom for the Bridgertons, and on the other side, we did a ballroom for Queen [Charlotte]. We then turned the Queen's ballroom into a cupboard for another scene, then we turned it again into a ballroom for the Featheringtons. We also turned the Bridgerton ballroom into the Academy Art Studio. There was a constant running around, in a hamster wheel.
When you're transforming one set into another, are they filming chronologically, or are they filming based on how your sets are being redone?
We film semi-chronologically. We film episodically; so we'll have two episodes that we all mix up over the space of 26, 27 days. We shoot those two episodes, but they're not chronological within the shooting.
When the decision's made that another ballroom appears that we didn't know about, we then work out very quickly how long it's going to take us to build it. With the assistant directors, we talk about how much time they're not gonna be in the studio to allow us to make noise, bang nails in plasters. With the Queen's ball, we actually had to work overnight a few times just to get it done in time.
It's a juggling match—but it's normal in filmmaking. It's just what you have to do.
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