‘The Intern’: Nancy Meyers on Bringing Movie Interiors to Life
http://www.decor-ideas.org 09/23/2015 06:13 Decor Ideas
Fans of writer-director-producer Nancy Meyers’ movie interiors love to reel off their favorite rooms in her films. For many, it’s the kitchen in Diane Keaton’s casually perfect Hamptons beach house in 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give. Others drool over It’s Complicated’s California Mediterranean open-plan kitchen, where Meryl Streep cooked a croque-monsieur for love interest Steve Martin in the 2009 movie. And there are those who never tire of the fairy-tale interiors of 2006’s The Holiday, starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet.
Meyers’ latest comedy, The Intern, opening Friday, September 25, and starring Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, also has plenty of eye candy for interior design buffs. Houzz got an early look at the movie, set in Brooklyn, New York, and spoke with Meyers about how she creates homes for her characters. Stroll with us through the movie’s sets and check out the trailer below as we hear also from some of her stars and her production designer.
Photo by Joshua McHugh
Meyers’ comedies explore relationships — romantic, familial and between friends — in the modern world. The Intern’s primary relationship is between De Niro’s widower Ben Whittaker, a 70-year-old retiree, and Hathaway’s Jules Ostin, the founder of e-commerce fashion website About the Fit. Ben, bored with a life of leisure, becomes a senior — as in senior citizen — intern for Jules at her company’s Brooklyn headquarters. The setup provides fodder for humor and commentary about tech start-up culture, working mothers, modern dating and the things baby boomers and Millennials can teach each other in the workplace and in life.
Meyers’ previous movies were filmed on studio lots — the whole Something’s Gotta Give house was a movie set filmed on a Sony soundstage in Culver City, California. But Warner Bros. Pictures’ The Intern was filmed mostly on location in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. The kitchen above in the home of Jules and her husband, Matt, is in a brownstone in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, a stand-in for the Park Slope area.
It’s no accident that Nancy Meyers’ movies are known for their interiors. Meyers, pictured above on the set, has long had an interest in interior design and she writes her movie scripts with her characters’ homes and workplaces in mind. She even draws floor plans that help her move the story along — if she has Meryl Streep walking into her kitchen in It’s Complicated, she says, she has to know how Streep gets there. She also gives the floor plans to her production designers, along with pictures she’s found online that give visual cues as to how she wants everything to look. The drawings and mood boards are effective communication tools. “The result is always very close to what I imagined,” Meyers says.
“It’s a credit to Nancy’s energy level that she can troll through thousands of websites and pictures and post exactly what she wants, so accurately, that we were able to look at it and say, ‘I get it,’” says production designer Kristi Zea (Revolutionary Road, Goodfellas), who worked with Meyers for the first time on this movie. “Nancy has a keen eye and is very precise; she knows what she does and does not want. She has an enormous amount of knowledge about decor, color and style and is extremely astute when it comes to all that.”
Photo by Francois Duhamel
Click on the trailer to watch a preview of the movie and see more of the locations.
Meyers, who also directed What Women Want and The Parent Trap and cowrote and produced Father of the Bride, among other films, says her movie sets are always character-based. “Every interior is a reflection of the person who lives there. The fact that the houses turn out in a way that people like so much is very nice, but it really isn’t a drive for me or the production designers or the set decorators to do anything more than to help create the characters, help make the movie seem authentic to the characters.”
Meyers, who describes her design style as “evolving,” says she finds inspiration in the work of Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt. “I find his work to be the most soothing and the most beautiful.”
Photo by Francois Duhamel
She describes some of her thinking regarding two of her most popular movie homes.
“The Something’s Gotta Give house, which I know a lot of people like, was really, first of all, a combination of many homes I saw in the Hamptons,” Meyers says. “It was definitely a reflection of Diane Keaton’s character. The way I approached it was, I think she’s a busy person, she hired a decorator, it was very Hamptons-y in that it was the classic blue and white. Then if she’s not a great cook, she wants to be one, so she gave herself a great kitchen to encourage herself.”
Meyers says the character’s desk was in her bedroom “because she was done with her love life, and her desk had the best spot in the house. The desk looked out on the ocean.”
Meyers says Meryl Streep’s house in It’s Complicated also had a backstory. “In my mind, Meryl had one big room. I even had an image of the house that I sort of based it on. She had three kids, and even though she had a lot of land she didn’t have a big house. She took down the walls between the living room and the dining room and the dining room and the kitchen so they felt like they had more space.
“Part of the plotting of that movie is she meets Steve Martin because he’s redoing her kitchen. And I did hear a lot of people comment, ‘But I loved her kitchen.’ Well we made it very charming, but if you ever really look at it, it’s one wall. It’s almost like a New York City apartment kitchen. It’s one wall of stuff, and then she had a terrific island, and we bought her a little Ikea workspace for baking.
“Three people filled her kitchen. I think she wanted more space. She was expecting grandchildren soon, and I think she wanted the enjoyment of it because she’s a good cook. I think a woman who did what she did, she probably wanted the Something’s Gotta Give kitchen.”
In The Intern, Jules’ home was designed to be on-trend — thus the modern lighting, chevron patterns and reclaimed wood table mixed with vintage pieces. “I tried to do what I thought was real for somebody that age,” Meyers says. “I think young married people sort of go out and buy a lot at once. They go to flea markets and they go to Restoration Hardware. They sort of feel they have to have everything done at once.”
Photo by Francois Duhamel
While scouting homes to shoot, Meyers was surprised to find that all the brownstones she saw had the same layout. “It was interesting to see what people did to change them, to individualize them.”
Ben’s home, which isn’t pictured here but can be glimpsed in the trailer above, has a more classic look. “His was a home that was lived in for probably 40 years and grew over time,” Meyers says. “He and his wife had put together their house over time. So I wanted it to look that way.”
One standout feature in Ben’s house is his closet, where he keeps his suits. “He’s a guy who likes his suits. They take up a lot of space,” Meyers says. The closet was small, though, and it was a challenge to shoot. “The camera operator was squeezed between a rack of suits. Literally there were sleeves of suits over his head.”
Tucked in Ben’s house is artwork by De Niro’s father, who was a figurative painter and for whom De Niro was named. De Niro says Meyers’ suggestion that they include some of his father’s works in the house meant a lot to him. “I thought it was a nice touch that added some homeyness for me,” he says.
Ben’s kitchen has a lived-in look that comes naturally. “One of the reasons I really liked it was that a couple his age lived there,” Meyers says. “And we kept a lot of things in the kitchen because you can’t duplicate reality that well. All her oils and vinegars and things and pictures — we kept a lot of their stuff. It felt real. They really lived there for 30 years.” The brownstone is located in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood.
Photo by Francois Duhamel
In contrast, the open shelving, subway tile, pendant lighting, and gray and white palette place Jules and Matt’s updated kitchen firmly in the present. The couple’s daughter, Paige, has a pint-size table in the corner.
Meyers says they turned the island in this kitchen around 90 degrees to make the room easier to shoot. (“Ben is always sitting at the kitchen counter and you can see all the way down to the front of the house.”) But otherwise the design team worked with the original brownstone home, which had beautiful moldings and fireplaces.
Photo by Joshua McHugh
In Jules and Matt’s bedroom, touches of bold color in the chaise and pillows add interest to the room’s gray and white palette.
Photo by Francois Duhamel
The home’s neutral color palette is nowhere to be found in daughter Paige’s playful pink and white bedroom.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Much of the movie transpires in the About the Fit headquarters, seen here. The ATF office is set in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn but was filmed in the Bronx at the Light Box, a photo studio on the second floor of the BankNote Building.
When Zea and Meyers were thinking about the look of the offices, they visited tech start-ups to view the decor and get ideas. As in those real offices, this fictional headquarters has an open-plan design. The office features rows of white desks and gray ergonomic chairs, contemporary furniture, exposed beams, industrial lighting and tons of glass, steel and polished concrete. “It’s eclectic, a mixture of traditional, midcentury modern with found objects as well as procured pieces,” Zea says.
Photo by Francois Duhamel
In a scene from The Intern, De Niro’s Ben, a former telephone book company executive, talks with the overworked and underappreciated Becky, played by Christina Scherer.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
“Jules is very ambitious and smart and has been fortunate to fill a niche with this business that she’s created,” De Niro says. “I think anytime you start something, you have to treat it with a lot of love and attention; you really have to invest yourself in it.”
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Hathaway says of her character’s relationship with De Niro’s Ben: “Jules is the product of a generation that makes snap decisions: Click on it, tweet it, post it, trash it; so I think she puts a lot of pressure on herself. Ben shows up and he just listens to her. He doesn’t judge, he just accepts her and brings a level of calm.”
Photo by Francois Duhamel
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