Photo by Merrick Morton
Florence Pugh as Alice and Olivia Wild as Mary in New Line Cinema’s “Don't Worry Darling,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Warner Brothers new movie Don’t Worry, Darling will look very familiar to anyone living in the desert region. Even the poster for the movie is quintessential Palm Springs, with a view of the mountains, palm trees and a mid-century Albert Frey house. In the movie, Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) are a young couple living in the seemingly perfect company town of Victory during the 1950s. Curiosity about the nature of her husband's work on the secret Victory Project consumes Alice. The movie centers on how much is Alice willing to lose to expose what’s really going on in the utopian community.
Production designer Katie Byron notes that this is not an American Beauty representation of American suburbia. “I would describe the town of Victory as a hedonistic playground,” explains Byron.” It’s not a tame and controlled conservative suburban life. Victory is a spectacular place full of opulence. We were depicting a secret society in America, so it doesn’t represent traditional 1950s America or its values.”
Nowadays, Palm Springs is bohemian and gay-friendly, but it’s often used to represent 1950s conservative America in movies. Katie Byron’s well-aware of this. “Maybe it’s a meeting space between those two worlds,” she reflects. “Our film is definitely a love letter to how progressive and wild Palm Springs has been. Even if it was conservative in the 1950s, the architecture, design and lavish Hollywood partying was anything but that.”
On a personal level, Katie Byron’s had a long-standing fascination with Palm Springs. “I’ve always had an interest in Palm Springs as an architectural playground,” she explains. “It was such a place where rule breakers had the space and freedom to experiment. The modernist movement was so impactful in that way and unlike anything that has come since.”
The use of natural light enhances the movie’s gorgeous color palette. “When I read the script, I saw a color palette and oddly enough (architect) Albert Frey’s robin’s egg blue was the only pastel I chose,” she explains. “The rest was deep red, Frey’s bold yellow, a dark brown—a color we fell in love with from Neutra’s Kaufmann house—deep wooden tones, gold, a lot of smoked glass and black. Working with legendary costume designer Arianne Philips was such a great experience. When she proposed jewel tones, I thought about how the sultry palette I had imagined could really work with the pastel costumes and create a unique depth to the world build.”
Finding the right houses was a lot of painstaking work for the production team. “We toured lots of homes in the area before pinning down our style,” says Byron. “We desperately wanted the Elrod house at first. The Elrod House was under construction and the Bob Hope house didn’t feel right. After a day of scouting, we drove up to the Kaufmann House in 120-degree weather and sat in the car looking at the giant fence obscuring the house and looked at each other knowing that it was the one. Of course, many weeks passed before that was an option. It was such a privilege to shoot there. You could very much say Frey and Neutra were our guiding lights. There were obviously other inspirations.”
Albert Frey, one of the founders of “desert modernism,” was a big source of inspiration for Katie Byron. “Albert Frey designs the spaces of my dreams,” she gushes. “There’s oddly a subtlety to his work. The Frey House 1 and 2 are small and so well designed that they never feel ostentatious. I love Schindler for the same reason. There’s a utilitarian simplicity to the way these spaces look yet they are so cleverly designed to integrate into the surrounding landscape. Schindler doesn’t try to hide anything. Neutra is of course the master at this as well. We brought aspects of these designs into our built set. We shot in the Kaufmann house, so our crew had a lot of time to examine details like the hinges, drawer pulls, etc. The construction materials are just as much a part of the design as the set decoration.”
Byron believes that while the design may be well-known, the way we look at it has changed. “There is a predictable image that comes to mind about 1950s modernist utopia as it’s been seen over the years,” she says. “I think we are now in an age where we are desperate to see the edges of material. We may no longer be interested in the plastic polished side of utopia. We want to see how things are made so we can be inspired and empowered creators. I think that’s how we move forward and envision the world we want to live in.”