Observes executive producer Kopeloff: “We evaluated a number of cities, including San Francisco and New York, but we were just so taken with Chicago and its architecture. It screamed out to us that it was right for this film.”
Once in Chicago, production designer Kevin Thompson began his work in earnest. “This film was a great job for a production designer because it’s not just a naturalistic world Marc is trying to capture, but one that is always slightly heightened and stylized,” he says. “I approached the design through the obvious contrast between Harold and Ana. Harold lives in this very rectilinear, grid-like world with pale, monochromatic shades and clean, straight lines until Ana brings curves and colors into his life.”
Thompson especially enjoyed bringing a restrained creativity to Harold’s apartment, which was built from scratch on a sound stage, as well as to his IRS office, which was re-created on an empty floor of a glass-and-steel Chicago office building. “Everything in Harold’s world is very austere, mundane, concrete – so the idea was to depict a much lower level of detail than you would have in real life,” he explains.
The IRS office space was further enhanced by visual effects supervisor Kevin Tod Haug, who extended the office’s gray, warren-like cubicles into a repetitive pattern stretching into infinity. The theme of grids was then reprised in the hauntingly austere archives room. For this set, Thompson researched a variety of archival spaces around the world. “We ended up being inspired by an archive we found in Europe,” he recalls. “It was a huge room that had one strikingly beautiful visual element: a man in the space who appeared tiny relative to all this stuff around him. I also photographed a city municipal building archive in Manhattan that had all these stark white boxes on the shelves, which also wound up informing the design. The idea was always to slightly exaggerate the look that surrounds Harold Crick.”
Thompson found a different challenge at the other end of the STRANGER THAN FICTION design spectrum — Ana’s bakery, which is defined by its jazzy fluidity and bursts of color. Thompson explains: “With Ana, the challenge was to create how Marc envisioned her, which was someone who was almost a storybook kind of princess on the one hand, and a kind of punk rock rebel on the other. So my focus was to create a balance between soft and hard, between punk and nice. Ana’s world is vitally important to the story, because it is she who introduces sensuality to the film and opens Harold’s eyes to a whole new kind of life experience.”
Finally, to marry the magic of STRANGER THAN FICTION with a dash of inner logic, Thompson needed to ensure that Karen Eiffel’s literary style permeated the film. “We always had to be mindful that Kay is imagining all these worlds, so for every different location there was a similar kind of language and certain overarching rules that we had to keep the same,” he comments. “You see certain visual themes repeated over and over, suggestive of the fact that this is all coming from one single imagination.”
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