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‘Wonderstruck’ strikes a powerful chord for production designer Mark Friedberg

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For production designer Mark Friedberg, the most fun part of working on the film “Wonderstruck” was going behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History in his hometown of New York City.

“That place always fascinated me,” he said. “I loved the art museum, but the Natural History museum — there was something about that place that was always special to me at every stage of my development.”

In “Wonderstruck,” the American Museum of Natural History serves as a center of gravity for Rose and Ben, two deaf children who run away to New York City in two different eras. In 1927, Rose visits the museum’s exhibit about Cabinets of Wonder — private collections of mineral specimens, dinosaur bones, stuffed birds, seashells and other curiosities. In 1977, Ben retreads the same path and discovers an old Cabinet of Wonder tucked away under the museum’s dust cloths, along with clues to his own identity.

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“The story had weird autobiographical tones to me,” said Friedberg. “My childhood place about a kid who’s interested in making things — it was just really powerful.”

What was your vision for 1977 New York?

This was a story about a kid lost in my old neighborhood, which was a scary place back then. And that was something I wanted to communicate. If you go to the Upper West Side now, it just ain’t scary. It’s nice there. It’s intellectual and it’s beautiful. It wasn’t like that back then — 1977 was really a desperate time in New York. The city was on fire and in rubble and garbage — and horrible and awesome and amazing.

How did you use color in the 1977 scenes?

I just walked in saying, “Orange!” That was my color. We even had Orange Julius as the first thing you see when he steps out into the city.

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Where did you find neighborhoods that could pass for 1977?

New York has been scrubbed. It was hard to find blight in New York City. It’s certainly not on the Upper West Side, but to be the Upper West Side, it has to be a vintage of architecture right after the Civil War. So a lot of our Upper West Side tended to be Brooklyn in Crown Heights and a little bit of Bed-Stuy. We were applying plywood to the side of the buildings. We spent a lot of energy making things look bad.

Where did you find 1927?

A lot of what we ended up doing was down in Wall Street. And the theater exterior is in Crown Heights. It was the original Loehmann’s department store, which was across the street from this amazing Deco building, which was the original Studebaker Building on Bedford Avenue in Crown Heights.

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How did you decide to shoot part of the film using miniatures?

That ultimately became the place where we couldn’t figure out what to do— the last part of the story with all the flashbacks. It was expensive, because it would require shooting in five different decades. A lot of the movie is in Ben’s point of view anyway, which is dioramas of the museum, curation of things, depiction of things through models. And that became the idea for how to resolve that. Also, I didn’t want them to be little claymation faces. It had to be the faces of the people we’ve invested in getting to know. So that’s why those little photographs in frames became the faces. That was inspired by the art of Kienholz, who did that on a big scale.

How did you get such great museum access?

Well, the movie is ultimately centered in the Queens Museum and the Natural History museum — more the Natural History museum. And they really gave us unique access and partnered with us in a lot of ways to make it work. Now having said that, that museum is also existing in 2017. And we needed a 1920s version of it, much of which is gone, and the 1970s version of it, a lot of which has changed. So it was about using what we could of the real museum and building out. So for example, the meteor room, we couldn’t use that. We had to build that. Some of the hallways, we had to build. And then the room that the Cabinet of Wonder is in, we built. And the Cabinet of Wonder, we built. We had real dinosaurs in there, because we found people who collected things, and then also there are some strange little museums out there that are on the double-decker bus tour. But the idea was that the Cabinet of Wonder is the heartbeat of the story.

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