Minkoff credits his background with Disney animation as benefiting his live-action effort. “In animation, everybody worked shoulder to shoulder and shared the vision of what the movie was. It felt the same on this set as well. And that background has given me a lot of experience with visual storytelling,” he says. “In animation, you’re using drawings and paintings to create characters and tell stories, and in this case we’re using human actors. But what I’m thinking constantly is: how are we telling the story? How are we going to focus the audience’s eyes in the right place?”
Minkoff assembled a team of department heads to share his vision of the film. From the beginning, Minkoff saw the potential for a high level of class and sophistication for the film – an attention to detail that audiences have come to expect. For this film, he called this concept “haunted elegance,” a phrase that perfectly captured the unique blend of Gothic sophistication, romance, fantasy, and refinement that he was seeking. “When the Evers family enters the mansion, it’s almost like they’re walking back into the 19th century,” notes the director. “The characters in the movie have been walking the halls of the mansion for over a hundred years.”
If the audience was to believe this, Minkoff says, the mansion had to become as strong a character as any of the humans – which required that special thoroughness. “We designed a very elegant set, and the costumes are richly detailed and colored, and that contributes to building the world of this story,” Minkoff continues. “The richness of texture and detail informs the storytelling – it brings a haunted elegance to the mansion itself and all of its characters.”
First up was production designer John Myhre, who found a kindred “spirit” in his director and producer. “I’ve been a fan of the Haunted Mansion since I was a little kid,” says the veteran of both period pieces such as “Elizabeth” and “Chicago” and blockbuster genre films like “X-Men.” Myhre was responsible for devising the home of the happy haunts, inside and out. From the Conservatory and Séance Circle to the Grand Hall and the Graveyard, from the Entrance Hall to the Armory to the elaborate French-Gothic Mausoleum, the entire manor had to feel as though each room was a part of that same world.
Myhre’s production design team (Art Director Tomas Voth and Set Decorator Rosemary Brandenburg) drew their inspiration from a wide variety of cinematic, literary, and artistic sources. The walls of the production offices were lined with inspirational art and photographs from countless Hollywood classics from the genre and the original conceptual art and still photographs from Walt Disney Imagineering – the artists who designed the ride.
“Part of the fun was that each room could have a bit of a different architectural flair,” Myhre says. “I started grabbing references from really opulent, wonderful places, because this was a house that was put together, in a way, almost the way Hearst did, where one room would be one style, another room would be another style, with huge fireplaces from Italy and wallpaper from somewhere else….”
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