Interview: ‘Ripley’ Production Designer David Gropman Breaks Down Trains Stations, Expansive Sets and Where ‘the’ Ash Tray is Now
David Gropman began his journey into styling of Ripley, the limited series production of Steven Zaillian’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, in October of 2019 by studying photography books with images 1960s Italy, from top to boot, including “Neo Realismo: The New Image in Italy 1932-1960,” which he referred to as his “style bible.” Digging deeper, he dove into the works of photographers like David Seymour, Bert Hardy, Pietro Donzelli, Herbert List and Mario Cattaneo to help visualize what this 1960s world would look like.
Highsmith’s novel, one of a series of six, details the exploits of conman and killer of opportunity (or opportunistic killer) Tom Ripley. Poor and desperate and wanting to be among the elite of New York, he gets by on small jobs like forging documents and passports and swindling old folks with fake medical invoices. When the father of rich playboy Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) seeks out Tom to travel to Italy to bring his layabout son back to New York, Tom quickly jumps at the chance as he’s given a huge stipend and luxury travel. He insinuates himself into Dickie’s life, to the raised eyebrow of Dickie’s girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning) and close friend Freddie (Eliot Sumner).
“In November, I took my first trip scouting in Italy and Steve joined me shortly after in December,” he recalls. The series, which began at Showtime at the start of production, was about to head into a worldwide pandemic and Italy was among the first countries to lock itself down. But even in those first few months Gropman and Zaillian “found the language together,” scouting the locations of the town of Atrani, where Tom finds Dickie, and Dickie’s villa. As the pandemic reared its ugly head, production on the series turned into 162 days drawn out over several years before finding its way to Netflix, who scooped it up amidst Paramount absorbing Showtime.
In my conversation with Gropman, we go deep into how Robert Elswit’s black and white cinematography of the show helped form his own visual style, building train stations from scratch, copying Picassos and Caravaggios, the typewriter and ash tray and much more.
Erik Anderson: I wanted to say that I’ve been an admirer of your incredibly expansive work since the ’80s. Like, Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, that far back. And I think this [Ripley] is one of your most incredible achievements.
David Gropman:
Thank you.
EA: What were your conversations with Steven Zaillian in terms of scope and parameters and the freedom of your designs?
DG: I’ve known Steve for a long time. I did his first two films that he did as a director, Searching for Bobby Fischer and A Civil Action, and Conversations, read the script. He’s the most amazing writer. So, it’s all, I mean, what was it all? 500 pages or so? You just read like a novel and it’s so descriptive as the film is. The film does a lot, or I should say series. The series does a lot with often without any words spoken at all, which is, I think, part of what makes it so incredibly brilliant.
Steve knows my style. I know his style, which is one of great detail and care. He’s incredibly visual. So, I dived right into research, which was, I mean, I was lucky enough to have several researchers working with me because you might’ve noticed the story takes you to many places and each one of those places is filled with details, and each one of those details you can be sure that Steve is going to find and analyze and look at and let it become a character in its own in the story.
I started in with the research in October of 2019 and then I’d say the most important part of the process in discovering exactly where Steve wanted to go. In November, I took my first trip scouting in Italy and Steve joined me shortly after in December.
You can imagine in a month’s time, there wasn’t a lot that I could find in terms of the number of things that we were looking for, but enough that then we had this month together in December, almost a month, and just scouting locations. We kind of found the language, I would say, together. So, anything that was a question mark that I might’ve had in regards to the script was soon answered in our just being together and looking together.
And we started sort of the two things we tried to crack really early on and both were difficult, was what’s now become the town of Atrani, where Tom finds Dickie, and Dickie’s villa. We looked at a lot of different possibilities for Dickie’s villa and finding just that place between this sort of richness and grandeur of Dickie to represent Dickie’s villa and something that would make Tom possibly not envious, but wanting to get his hands on.
It had to be both kind of grand, but also sort of Bohemian because I think that in the end, Tom’s greatest fascination with Dickie is not just his wealth, but the fact that isn’t the first thing that drives Dickie in his life. What drives him is just having a good time and pursuing his interest as an artist and kind of living the joie de vivre.
EA: I’d love to hear about your design choices for a project that shot in black and white, because I’m sure, as with costume design, things weren’t the color that they would be in a full color project.
DG: Sort of going back to the early days of filmmaking and black and white, I know that there were rules as to what colors would give you more contrast and work better for the camera going into black and white, or realizing them in black and white. But my approach was much easier having done so much scouting on the show.
So, having so many things in my phone, you just plug it in to your computer at the end of the day and you start going things and you change everything to black and white, and you kind of play with contrast there, and you figure out fast enough what works or what might be a real problem. What I always had my eye on, and I think, obviously, Steve and [cinematographer] Mr. [Robert] Elswit, as well, was a contrast. So, whenever we could kind of afford gray as it were, but things that just were high contrast and which, I think, I don’t know, that’s what I did. That’s what I did.
And I was going to say at the same time, because to me, story and character is always so important. What I didn’t want is actors walking onto a set for the first time and being thrown by a strange kind of arrangements of colors. So, I really pretty much just keeping contrast in mind, I really pretty much tried to create the worlds in colors that made sense and that the crew could walk into, the director could walk into, the actors could walk into and just be involved in the story and not think about some mad experiment going on.
My whole sort of career, I’ve always been, I think, fairly controlled with color and have always kind of chosen one color theme to take all the way through the story so that even if you’re representing highs and lows, you always understand as an audience that you’re in the same world from the beginning of the story until the end.
And having done that my whole career and trying so hard to eliminate unnecessary noise and knickknacks or what you will along the way, sort of eliminating color, for me, was kind of the final step in my journey. It’s kind of, I think, where I, with Ripley for the first time, I see myself more completely in terms of what I want to accomplish as a designer.
EA: I feel like there’s two objects that really hold so much weight in the series, no pun intended, and that Tom’s typewriter and the ashtray.
DG: Yeah.
EA: Can you talk about these two specific pieces that factor so much into this story?
DG: I don’t think I’m giving anything away. But that’s an ashtray that sits on a side table in Steve’s House in Santa Monica.
EA: I love that.
DG: So that was easy. Right? And even though we were shooting in black and white, we talked a lot about, that designer does ashtrays a lot in that brick shape, but also in square shape and circular shape, but it’s always got a patch of color blown into the glass.
Green is my favorite color when I’m using green. That’s what we used, but we looked at all the different possibilities to see what was going to have the most effect with the black and white. There’s a red, there’s a blue, they all shot pretty much the same. That’s that.
Typewriters. I’m not going to say that Steve had that sitting in his apartment, but I think if it’s not scripted what brand it is, I’m sure it is because Steve was very specific about that. He’s very specific about everything, which makes working with him so spectacularly challenging and wonderful, and he is so smart.
I’ve often said to him, “I can’t even send you an email because it’ll have typed words in it and either the construction of the line or the punctuation, the spelling, something will be off and he’s going to be critical.” He’s not.
But everything that’s considered. I think it’s cut now, but there’s a wastebasket, an outdoor wastebasket in the story. And so you start researching what a trash can would look like in Italy in 1960. And guess what? They didn’t have trash cans on the street.
So you kind of go through the whole process of the whole history and getting all the details correct so you can hand that over to Steve and then Steve can make his decision. I think that’s why you don’t see a trash can in the end.
EA: Yeah.
DG: Same thing with pay phones. They weren’t much of a thing in 1960s Italy unless they were in a tabacchi. So, everything gets considered.
EA: Yes. I understand you weren’t able to shoot in train stations. Can you talk about the creation of those gorgeous sets?
DG: Thank you. Train stations, ferry docks, banks, not a single hotel lobby, with the exception of the Danieli was a real hotel lobby. But the train stations, again, not only is there a fantastic research, historical research, but the train station in Venice and Rome were both built prior to 1960, and so we had perfect reference there.
The train station in Naples was opened in 1960, and quite frankly, I was kind of anxious to move away from that fascist architecture for at least one of the train stations. And so that was based on the train station that preceded the current one, which was originally built in the late 1800s.
So, I felt I found a really good location to shoot the train station in Rome. That was from the same period architecturally, the same style of modern architecture, which was in an area of Rome called EUR, which was created for the 1942 World’s Fair, which never happened. But many great pieces of architecture were built there.
So, the interior of the train station for Rome was shot there. We used one of the other buildings for the Rome bank. But the train platforms, and then there was a great piece of architecture in Rome to use for the Naples Street station. For all four stations, we shot at a train yard in just outside of Rome.
We built 300 feet of platform. We had varying center posts matching the actual train stations that we depicted. We had five period train cars that we brought up from Milan, and the rest was all visual effects. And so, for Rome and Venice, it was very easy because there was the real architecture to refer to for us to do illustrations, but also for the visual effects to use as reference also.
For Rome, for Naples, I’m sorry, because that station didn’t exist, we were able to get architectural drawings of the original station. We created a 3D model so we could understand all the dimensions, and then reference photos for visual effects to create all the textures. But yeah, no, I’m pretty proud of that.
EA: Absolutely. They’re stunning. I’m also fascinated about the Picasso and the Caravaggio paintings, which also factor so heavily. Were any real or how did you go about finding or making them?
DG: Two of them were real Caravaggio’s. It’s always really complicated shooting paintings. But two of them were real Caravaggio’s that we photographed. Actually, I say two of them were real, the one in Palermo in the little chapel there, what you see is where that actual Caravaggio hung, but it was stolen in the 1960s and a reproduction was done at that point by the church.
But sort of what I’m most proud of is when we had to do Caravaggio’s, “Atelier”. I think that scene is like 1610, I think, maybe a little earlier. Sorry about that. But Steve and I chose the two Caravaggio paintings we wanted to have in the Atelier, but we wanted Caravaggio to be theoretically working on them.
So, from digital files, we did a print. But then not only was it overpainted by a wonderful painter by the name of Valentina Troccioli, but then we had to research on exactly Caravaggio’s painting technique so that we could deconstruct it and sort of have it laid in the way Caravaggio would’ve laid it in.
EA: I love it.
DG: And the Picasso the same thing. It’s from a digital file from the estate, but then the same scenic artist, Valentina, overpainted that to give it the texture. But you didn’t ask me about the most important paintings, which are Dickie’s paintings.
EA: Yes.
DG: Those were also done by Valentina. We were kind of, the hardest thing in the world is to create a bad painting. Right And we had dozens of bad paintings. And I started by researching outsider painters and naive painters all Italian, and kind of showed them to Steve as like, “You want to go this direction, that direction?”
And then we chose some examples, handed it over to Valentina, and she just turned out dozens and dozens. We didn’t use half of what she created, but enough to get, I think, maybe the biggest laughs in the movie.
EA: Yeah, very much. I imagine it would be difficult to go out of your way to intentionally create something bad. And it just goes against the nature of an artist, but…
DG: Especially when that same scenic artist can also do Caravaggio.
EA: Exactly. There’s another set piece that I was thinking of, and that is the lift. Was that something found or created for the show?
DG: No, it was found. And the thing is, we knew we wanted a beautiful old building, a former palazzo that was turned into, as so many of them are, into an apartment building. The thing is, I think in Italy, the lifts didn’t come in until the turn of the century.
So, all of the kind of 18th century, 19th century buildings we looked at that had lifts, or then even a little later, the architecture of the building didn’t do anything for us. So, we found some palazzi that had converted over the years and put elevators into their palazzi, or then apartment buildings, which of course means for a very narrow elevator. If you’ve ever been to Italy, for sure, but most of Europe, you put your luggage when you arrive in the elevator, and then you walk up and meet at the other end because it turns.
EA: Yes.
DG: And this was just a spectacular building. It had that beautiful corridor when you enter with a space that we used for Signora Buffi’s office, an apartment on the left, then turning into the stairs and the elevator. We built Tom’s apartment on stage, and so we did have to recreate the corridor and the cage elevator at the top.
And then after trying to get enough good takes of the cat in Signora Buffi’s office on the day, we had to recreate on stage the bottom of the stairwell and the cage elevator so that the wonderful second unit director could spend an entire day with that cat.
EA: Yes, King.
DG: Yeah.
EA: We love King.
DG:He is a star. You can’t look away. Part of the whole, we’re, I think, seeing the whole story through Tom’s eyes pretty much, and that’s, as a designer, you approach it that way and you see it that way. But also, Tom is being watched, being watched by a cat, he’s being watched by paintings, he’s being watched by statues. And luckily, there were a lot of great things to shoot to tell that part of the story.
EA: Very much so. David, thank you so much.
DG: Oh yeah, no, it’s my pleasure.
David Gropman is Emmy eligible in the category of Outstanding Production Design For A Narrative Period Or Fantasy Program (One Hour Or More) for Ripley.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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