Unchained: Adam Stockhausen & Patricia Norris talk about 12 Years a Slave

“I wouldn’t trade my time or training in the theatre for anything because figuring out how to get inside of a play, opera or musical is incredibly similar,” states Adam Stockhausen who has designed stage sets for Theatre For A New Audience, Huntington Theatre Company and The Santa Fe Opera.  “It starts with a visual response and what is the space for the story?  It teaches you to break it down and to think about it that way.”  The theatrical experience assisted when production designing 12 Years a Slave (2013) for filmmaker Steve McQueen (Shame).  “We went into the scene rehearsals without a definite plan.  It was much more about feeling it out and seeing how it developed.  What I was trying to do was to make things so that was possible and finishing things that I didn’t know if we were going to see but thought there was a chance.  A lot of it came from the exact same process of, ‘Where would I come in if it was me? Where would I want to stand?  If I was living on this farm and had to go work over there which way would I go? What would I want closest to where I was living for convenience sake?’  All of those questions are very much the way you ask them when you’re starting to breakdown a play.”  The historical nature of adapting a memoir that chronicles the tragic journey of a free black musician who is sold into slavery was not a complete departure for Stockhausen.  “Wes Anderson [The Grand Budapest Hotel], Wes Craven [Scream 4], Noah Baumbach [While We’re Young] and Steve McQueen are all astonishing directors so the language is the same.  We look at research, pick specific details and then find out how to best utilize them and make them big.”

The production designer worked closely with Steve McQueen in determining the visual imagery.  “A big scene like where Solomon Northup [Chiwetel Ejiofor] has been drugged and wakes up in a set we called Birch’s Dungeon but it’s the trader’s cell; he’s in chains and is beaten for the first time.  We talked about what it would look like.  We came at it from the inside out.  There is a particular type of a whip that Solomon describes called a cat o’ nine tails and we looked at what that is.  That wasn’t a throwaway detail.  Steve wanted to be specific and understand why it was so important that Solomon had described that exactly thing.  What was it about it?  We looked at that and said, ‘This is the historical object.  How was it made?   What was it intended to do to a person?’  We looked similarly at the specifics of the shackles that were used on these people.  When we stepped a level deeper into it and started looking at the physical space then it became, ‘What was the brickwork like?’  We were looking at the reference photos together and literally looking at the patterns on the brick, the size and the shape of the cell, and where the window was and how high off the ground it was exactly.  If Solomon is going to interact with the window in this little room how high should it be?  We literally went through it all and were measuring how high his chin was off the ground when he’s standing on his flat feet and how high was it when he’s on his tiptoes.  We were making the window to perfectly fit the relationship that Steve wanted.  All of those little details add up to the little room that you’re in.  This particular room was a little box of a room, maybe 10 feet by 10 feet by 10 feet.”

“There were some visual effects for cleaning up a telephone poll or two we couldn’t take down,” states Adam Stockhausen.  “There wasn’t even much of that.  The New Orleans levee works did involve a set extension.  We built that in field next to a parking lot behind our construction shop rather than out on the river and on an actual wharf.  We built a good size chunk of it about 150 feet or so.  Many shots are contained with that set but there are a few shots that see the vast sweep of the levee works and those are extended.”   Stockhausen adds, “It was primarily a location movie.  The only time we ever went indoors fully onto anything that could be considered a stage is when we’re down in the hold of the ship.  That was a traditional stage set.  Sometimes it was minimal like Epps gin house, the barn was already standing and we added all of the structures and the cotton that’s in the air and on the walls.  Other times we built the houses where Solomon lives out on-location.  Even when we went inside of it we weren’t cutting into a set onto a sound stage.  We were always doing it at night on the plantation with the bugs and the rain.”  360 degree environments needed to be created.  “Once you’re on those locations it was important that the structures did not feel like stage sets because there’s a one sidedness that would have taken you out of it.  Steve, Sean Bobbitt [cinematographer] and I talked about doing everything we possibly could to get locations where there weren’t any period obstructions so we could be free to make them legitimate feeling working farms from every angle we could manage to do it. So we did.  The occasional side of a building you wouldn’t end up seeing because it works out that way but that’s okay because on the other side of the scale there were so many times where we thought,  ‘Thank goodness we finished that over there because here it is on-camera!’”

“When we were at Epps Plantation the location of the whipping post where Patsey [Lupita Nyong’o] is beaten was critical,” remarks Adam Stockhausen.   “We spent whole afternoons at the backside of the Epps house trying to figure out the best possible spot for it.  We didn’t know exactly how the staging would work out but we knew the key elements that were going to happen and that needed to be a central thing.  Everything else radiated out from it.  We took stakes and twine and mapped out where every building was going to be.  Sean and Steve were out there with the lenses.  We were moving buildings around to make sure that they didn’t all stack up on one another and as we turned around the whipping post we didn’t have blank spots in other areas.  Similarly with the Ford Plantation the position of the tree where Solomon is hung and almost dies was critical in selecting the location in the first place.  The entire farm was built off of that tree.”  Creative license was taken when placing a certain structure containing pigs.   “At Epps Plantation Edwin Epps [Michael Fassbender] has a pigsty right in the behind his house which is stretching it a little bit to say that would be the natural spot for a pigsty to be but it seemed right for his character.”  Colour played a role in establishing the atmosphere of the movie.  “Solomon’s life is comparatively a lot more pleasant at the beginning of his time when he’s at Fords and it goes steadily downhill to a bleak end at Epps; we tried to support that with the physical space so the colour is really pulled out of Epps which is a much dirtier, harder and nastier place. When you look at the two side by side Fords has a lushness and warmth.  It looks a great deal more like a happier place and a painting you would see of a stately home rather than a working farm with a pigsty.”

Recreating the 1840s and 1850s was not easy for Adam Stockhausen.  “It was tricky because this was a location base film so we weren’t building everything from scratch and there’s a lot of out of period stuff that you have to deal with and try to cover up as best you can with as much time and money you have.  From a research point of view there are a huge amount of etching and paintings from the period you can look at. Then there’s a huge amount of photography once you get into the 1850s and certainly when you get into the 1850s.  You look at them and go, ‘This photo is from 1862 what’s in it that’s out of period?’  We were looking at these photographs that unions soldiers had taken of a slave traders’ building, I believe it was in Virginia, so these came from 1864 and you could look at it and say, ‘There are a couple of things here we don’t feel great about but the iron and brickwork in the cell is clearly 30 to 50 years old.’   We felt confident that we were being historically legitimate by pulling some details from it.  You do that image by image and piece by piece.  You try to find as much reference that you can and to make it as specific as possible.”

“A huge amount of props were found from different sources,” explains Adam Stockhausen.    “Michael Martin [Now You See Me] was the property master on the job and did a great job scrounging around not just the New Orleans area where we were based but also up into Mississippi to the reaches of Louisiana, hauling from antique stores and peoples’ barns.  The piece that came from the furthest away was a set of shackles that I had seen from a research trip.   Months before we were making the film I went up to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut and there are a couple of historical ships out there including a whaling ship.  I was looking at minute details of how all of these ships were built and wandering around the area up there.  I went into a historic and functioning blacksmith shop where people work on their projects and manufacture parts to repair these ships.  I looked at a pile of parts and stuff that was sitting on the ground and there were a set of shackles that had been made in the exactly the means, methods, and ways that they would have been in our time period.  They were modern reproductions but they weren’t reproductions in the sense in making a prop for something.  They were manufactured with only traditional methods in mind and so the authenticity of them seemed important.  We ended up calling the seaport and they worked with us and loaned us a few pieces.”

“We shot the whole film down in Louisiana,” states Adam Stockhausen who had to fabricate Saratoga Springs which is located in the state of New York.  “We wanted Solomon’s house, a commercial street, and then we decided to add a scene in a park and that came directly out of the period.  We researched these pavilion structures that were built over the natural springs by the different companies bottling and selling the spring water.  We had beautiful stereoscopic images from the Library of Congress of a great specific detail to tie us to Saratoga and we tried to take advantage of that.”  Solomon is transported into slavery by ship called The Orleans.  “We decided to make it a coastal steamer and it was based on one that which was built in 1831.  We felt that the steamers were new at the time but they had the right feeling of industry.  The abduction and sale of Solomon was not personal malice it was business.  It was serving this huge industry, primarily cotton production in the South at the time.  The coal furnace and the churning of this mechanized ship felt appropriate for that.  We were looking at this particular ship that we used as a primary reference. There’s incredible documentation on it so we were able to look at an awful lot detail in trying to recreate a version of it.”

“Patricia Norris [The Elephant Man] and I were trying to get the period details right and trying to making sure that the props always felt right with the clothing,” states Adam Stockhausen.  “We had tons of discussions about the specifics of the props in the houses of the slaves.  I remember us going through all the pieces that were going to be in Parker’s general store to make sure that economic level and the period of the clothes were all tying together and feeling right.  There were a few big dance sequences where Solomon is playing for a party, once in Saratoga before he leaves and once in Louisiana.  Because of the typical way that you make a movie we were shooting both of those in one location and trying to do our best with paint, details, dressing and costumes to separate the two of them so they worked as individual places so that was a delicate balance.  The deeper richer colours that we were using in Saratoga versus the lighter bleached colours in Louisiana and making sure that they worked together.  There were a lot of opportunities for that not to work but we worked for a long time together trying to coordinate it together.” 

                                                

“I was doing a movie in New York and the producer on that was also one of the producers of 12 Years a Slave,” recalls Patricia Norris.  “Brad Pitt [World War Z] and Dede Gardner [The Tree of Life] I had worked with before and they introduced me to Steve [McQueen] and fortunately he liked and hired me.”  The American costume designer has frequently collaborated with filmmaker David Lynch (The Straight Story).  “David always writes his own scripts and Steve had a lot to do with the writing of this one; they have a vision.”  Norris and McQueen did not speak too much together.  “We talked in generalities of the very rich and poor. There’s little research on slaves in that period because its pre-cameras and the etchings always showed happy slaves so you had to find a lot from reading like where they got their clothes.  When you bought someone you were responsible for them so it was cast-off clothing from the house.  As long as I backdated everything 10 to 20 years it seemed to make sense to me.”  The production schedule resulted in long distance conversations between the movie veteran and Adam Stockhausen.  “Unfortunately I was trying to prepare some of this in L.A. and he was in New Orleans so it was on the telephone.  We talked about what the sets were and he sent me pictures of the plantations he had chosen.” 

“I know what authentic is in that period because I’ve studied history for over 50 years so I have a pretty good idea of what people wore and what they were made out of,” explains Patricia Norris.  “You translate that to what you think is right.”  The clothes from the 1840s and 1850s were fairly interesting looking.  “For the women they kept wearing more and more petticoats and the weight became so bad that’s how the hoops came in during the 1850s.   With men’s clothes you find until the mid-1850s is when suits came in or had three pieces working as if they belong together. Where before it was all individual like a coat, a waist coat, and pants that didn’t match.”  The costumes had to appear as if they had been lived in.  “We had a wonderful ager dyer by the name of Scott [Coppock] who could destroy anything.  Joni [Huth] made our shirts, and our pants were made at Western so it was matter of getting them together to make them look like one person.”  Soil samples were needed to add to the realism.  “There are five different plantations and they were all in different locations and they all had different colours of soil.  Some of it was dark and some of it was beige.  It helped with the dirt that you put on them.”

“When you’re on-location and they bring the actors in as late as they do you’re trying to do eight changes in one day on someone who is going to go through a movie and you only have that one day,” remarks Patricia Norris.  “You better guess right.  It doesn’t all shoot in one day too so you have to spend your time doing the first thing that works.”  There was a lot of wear and tearing on the clothing.  “A lot of them were bits and pieces like you would have to make five shirts.  We made quite a few trousers and vests.  I rented clothes from London and America because you need a huge amount of clothes.”

Solomon Northup was rich and became poor.  Free black people dressed like your middle class white people so that’s what we did with him.  When Solomon became a slave we got into the cast-off clothing.

Steve and I wanted Edwin Epps to be slightly romantic whereas slaves were poorer.  I thought Edwin should look fairly good with a baroque vest and that was our idea for him.  They would dress for diner because life would be boring back then and that’s why we did tuxedos on him at night.

Mary Epps [Sarah Paulson] was always dressed [like a Southern belle]; that’s why you have the house servants to keep you that way.

Patsey was fun to do because you could do anything old that looked right.

William Ford [Benedict Cumberbatch] was a richer white man from England.

That’s a tricky bit because Samuel Bass [Brad Pitt] was Canadian and you try to find something in research and couldn’t so you think, ‘Lets do this.’  Samuel is looking more like a landowner than a slave.

John Tibeats [Paul Dano] was a nasty piece of work.  You try to give all of them an individual look with his coats.