Set in an unidentified upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood, “American Beauty” was shot partly on the backlot at Warner Bros., on soundstages, and at L.A. locations in Hancock Park and Brentwood, where interiors and exteriors were used. Nominated by the Art Directors Guild, production designer Naomi Shohan is now in pre-production in San Francisco on “Sweet November,” a romance with Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, and directed by Pat O’Connor.
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Because of the specificity of the sightlines between windows — from the kids’ windows, and the kids’ windows to the garage, we rebuilt two houses on a backlot to work with those sightlines. Then we used interiors — both the ones we had built into the backlot and ones on locations, and then we again built some of the rooms on soundstages for overhead shots and things like that.
A lot of the filming was done on Blondie Street (on the Warners backlot) in two houses that were side by side: the house of Carolyn (the Annette Bening character) and the house of the Colonel house (Chris Cooper), both on the backlot.
Other than the aerial shots we did in Northern California, we did all of our shooting in Southern California.
In the beginning, people were thinking the setting was something New Jerseyish, and then it was a high-end suburb outside Chicago, and we sort of let it be that as an idea: a place like Evanston, Ill. But it’s not about a place, it’s about an archetype.
The milieu was pretty much Anywhere, USA — upwardly mobile suburbia. And the specific milieu has to do with the characters, who are also archetypal. All of them are very strained, and their lives are constructs. The main comparison is between Carolyn and the Colonel. Carolyn’s quality of strain has to do with another archetype that she aspires to, which is the perfect all-American household, whether it’s from magazines or just the general media idea of that.
Her house is the “perfect house,” but a newly minted version of that which has no grace, is built by a contractor with an idea in mind but no real sense of inner balance. So, her balance is all achieved by putting together her exterior.
We were very specific, since red is the key color, to keep the rest of the palette away from red and keep Carolyn in the cool end of blues and the Colonel in a depressed military palette — but to keep red far away from the palette so it could stand out and be a signature and an icon throughout.
The Colonel’s house, by contrast, is shrouded in a kind of exaggerated darkness, an exaggerated symmetry. The symmetry was another thing that we exaggerated everywhere in order to enhance our quality of strain.
For the bedroom of Wes Bentley’s character, his combination of voyeurism and monkish personality is blended with a high-tech aspect. So it was kind of his cell with all of his surveillance equipment, where he views the world and makes a record of it.
The epiphany that Kevin Spacey experiences toward the end of the film is reflected in two ways: with rain, and the other way is with the color red; the whole thing builds to this red climax. It’s in contrast and opposition to what the Spacey character’s feeling since he’s achieving a release as the rest of the world crescendos to its destruction. And so I think that really what we put there was the red, the rain, and finally the air, when he’s no longer alive.
