Cemetery Junction
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant tem up once again, this time for the big screen, for new project Cemetery Road, a project the duo wrote and directed.
And Gervais, Merchant and the team behind the movie faced the challenge of making a film set in 1973 look authentic that attracted production designer Anna Higginson, who had previously collaborated with Gervais and Merchant on Extras.
Her initial brief was to 'keep it lifted and slightly heightened' and a world away from the grungy, gritty and dark image of working class Britain we’ve seen before on the screen. 'We didn’t want it to feel depressing at all,' she says. 'We wanted to keep it quite light and colourful.'
Influenced by the work of photographer Martin Parr, whose award-winning images find the beauty in the ordinariness of everyday working class life, Higginson began by finding a colour palette for the film as a whole. 'The 1970s rather obviously conjures up specific tones like rusts and oranges and browns and greens,' she explains, 'but I was keen to mix those with more 1960s pastel tones.
'While there’s a continuity to the colour tone throughout the film, each of the characters also has their own particular palette, Freddie’s house is very warm because it’s family-oriented, whereas Bruce’s is much cooler because there’s no maternal presence there.
'Green is a colour that goes through the whole film, so if there was a set which didn’t feature green, the character would be wearing a green dress say. It couldn’t be forced but it was important that there was a uniting theme running through the film.'
In contrast to the working class environment of the boys’ homes, the Kendrick house is much grander and more Lord-of-the-manor but its lack of warmth and love is reflected in the cool colour palette.
That coolness also comes through in the Vigilant Life Assurance company building; shot at Hornsey Town Hall in London’s Crouch End whose powerful beauty and stark 1930s architecture cast an appropriately imposing shadow over Freddie and his colleagues.
With the lighting adjusted to give the interiors a cold, stark feel, Higginson even had the chairs for the office scenes custom-made to a specific design.
The cool theme is also present in the banquetting suite filmed at Victoria House in London’s Holborn with its purple and grey furnishings. At the other end of the scale is the dance hall, shot at the Koko Club in London’s Camden Town, where the boys end up having a fight, dominated by rich reds and golds symbolising escape and fantasy.
Taking her lead from Gervais and Merchant, Higginson was keen to avoid making the props too self-conscious. 'We used a lot of props from the 1950s and 1960s because just like now, families kept items they’d inherited from their parents or had bought several years before. It’s actually ended up being more of a 1960s look than a 1970s look.
'There are only a few token 1970s items and those are mainly in the Kendricks’ house because they’ve got the money to afford the latest fashions.'
One of the biggest challenges facing Higginson was ensuring that the buildings looked authentically from the era. That meant removing or disguising modern doors, door frames and PVC windows, and hiding satellite dishes and replacing aerials with period examples, and replacing curtains and blinds with drapes made with fabric from the 1960s and 1970s in keeping with the colour code of the film.
Higginson even went as far as to re-landscape gardens so they would be authentically 1970s, including laying lawns over modern paving slabs.
Higginson’s favourite set was the Cemetery Junction train station café. The exterior was provided by the station museum at Loughborough in Leicestershire which has a row of buildings running along the middle platform.
Higginson and her team designed and built a tea room at the end of the row. 'I loved all the historical detail in the building which is inspired by 1930s railway architecture,' she says.
'It was important to make it look as though it had been there for ever, and my construction team did a fantastic job in making it look old and weathered.'
The set that proved the most challenging to design was the Kendricks’ house. Working on a tight budget, Higginson had to create a home whose wealthy opulence contrasted with the working class environment of Freddie’s and Bruce’s houses.
'I also wanted to make it a very light-drenched set but one that had a clinical feel about it,' she explains. 'To achieve this, I designed a two floor set which allowed me to have a galleried staircase which also worked well in terms of the shots Ricky and Stephen wanted.
'It really was a pleasure working with them, they knew what they wanted in terms of the overall look but gave me a lot of freedom in interpreting those ideas and allowed me to push the design if I wanted to. Their enthusiasm for the project and the look really made working on this film a delight.'
Cemetery Junction is out now.