‘A Reality People Have Never Seen Before’

“Every time Barry walked onto a new set he’d say, ‘I want it,’ ” says production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti with a laugh as he recalls the making of “Toys,” Barry Levinson’s homage to the world of childhood things. “I think he has a warehouse someplace where he’s storing all the stuff from the film.”

Levinson’s covetous response to the fantastic sets and gizmos masterminded by Scarfiotti is exactly the response the director hopes “Toys” will elicit from audiences, as it takes the viewer into an enchanted realm where everything is bigger, brighter and more magical than the world of day-to-day reality. The toy factory where the “Toys” fable unfolds, for instance, is overlooked by a giant, snow-belching elephant set on rolling hills of green grass devoid of trees. (One character’s grave is also marked by an elephant-shaped tombstone.) Inside the factory are huge, brightly colored sculptures that double as the toy assembly line.

As the story progresses we encounter a video game “war room” that employs state-of-the-art technology to create a three-dimensional effect on screen. Other electronic optical tricks include a shrinking room where toys are invented, a stereophonic singing coat (lent to the filmmakers by Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini, who collects weird clothing), a burning “smoking jacket,” and a “Woozie Helmet,” which enables the wearer to travel through time and space.

The pivotal scene in the film takes place against the backdrop of a massive scale model of Manhattan’s Central Park on Christmas Eve, complete with carolers, elves and reindeer. The replica of Manhattan is the most ambitious and expensive set in the film; however, a bed in the shape of a duck where leading lady Joan Cusack sleeps is hailed by cast and crew as Scarfiotti’s most beautiful creation. And finally, offering a nod to modernity is an MTV video that pays homage to French Surrealist Rene Magritte.

“The script for this film was very bizarre and was full of possibilities, and I told Barry I’d love to do it if he’d let me go completely crazy,” says Scarfiotti, whose work on the films of Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci has made him one of the most sought-after production designers in the business. “I told him I wanted to develop a look for the film that incorporated elements of several European artists who aren’t too well known here--some of the Dadaists, Italian Futurists (a revolutionary 20th-Century Italian school that incorporated elements of Fauvism and Cubism), the Surrealists and the Russian Constructivists--and he was really open to that. I also suggested that the film should have a plastic, artificial look and use an elastic palette of colors that goes all over the place.”

Scarfiotti’s far-flung approach suited Levinson, who describes “Toys” as “an attempt to invent a reality people have never seen before.”

“We all have an image of what a 19th-Century toy maker’s workshop looks like, but that doesn’t really exist in the late 20th Century,” the director says. “The challenge was to figure out what the world of a modern toy maker looks like, so I encouraged everyone involved in the making of the film to give their imaginations free rein.

“This was never intended to be a film that played off a specific genre like the comic book or German Expressionism--we were trying to come up with something completely new and I think we succeeded,” he continues. “At Nando’s suggestion we looked into several European art movements of the 20th Century, but we weren’t looking at the work of specific artists so much as we were looking for nonsensical, whimsical elements that would support the story--and obviously Dada and Surrealism lend themselves well to that.”

Shot from February until June of this year on sound stages at Fox, “Toys” is the most ambitious project ever tackled by Scarfiotti, who won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor” (1987).

“I’ve never worked with so many sets on a film--I think there were more than 50 or 60 sets on five different sound stages, with each stage containing three or four sets,” he said during an interview at his home in the Hollywood Hills. “All the sets were fairly complex, but the New York set (a scale model of the Manhattan skyline) was the most elaborate--it took up an entire sound stage and we had to rebuild it several times because it kept getting wrecked in the battle sequences.

“There are lots of special effects in the film too, and some of them were quite complicated. The shrinking room, for instance, seems simple, but believe me, it was very involved. The Duck Bed was difficult in a different way, in that it’s poised on the line that distinguishes the poetic from the ridiculous. I hope it doesn’t come off as ridiculous, as it’s one of my favorite scenes in the film.”

Levinson also mentions the Duck Bed scene as one of the most beautiful moments in the film, but he’s equally proud of the “Toys” war room. “Some of the technology we used to shoot the war room scene hasn’t been seen much on movie screens yet, so that scene has a really fresh feeling for me.”

While the high-tech moments in “Toys” inarguably have a lot of zing, one of the most striking visuals in the film is provided by the one organic element Scarfiotti included--a sea of rolling green hills outside Spokane, Wash., that’s strongly evocative of a landscape by American regionalist painter Grant Wood.

“I drew those hills having no idea that these green dunes actually existed someplace,” Scarfiotti says, “and it was a miracle we found that location. The script was originally set in a heavily forested place, and one of the first things I said to Barry was, look, a tree is a tree, and a tree is rooted in reality. These green, treeless dunes have an air of unreality about them--they could be anyplace, in any season.”

Scarfiotti comments that he, Levinson and cinematographer Adam Greenberg were pretty much in sync as far as their vision of the look of the film but that they did have a difference of opinion on a few key scenes.

“Very close to the shooting date Barry decided he wanted to insert an MTV number performed by Robin Williams and Joan Cusack into the film, and I didn’t want to do that,” Scarfiotti acknowledges.

“All of my tricks were manual, and I used a lot of trompe l’oeil painting in the sets,” he says, referring to paintings that create optical illusions, “and suddenly you have these computerized images--it didn’t have anything to do with my style. I didn’t want to do this MTV bit but I had to, so I came up with the notion of playing off Magritte at the very last minute. It’s an idea Barry liked a lot better than I did.”

The pointedly contemporary music video sequence does seem out of kilter set against the vintage toys that are featured in the intricately choreographed climax of the film. The use of antique rather than new toys was another of Scarfiotti’s contributions.

“Fox insisted I go to the toy fair in New York--I went and it wasn’t very interesting,” he says. “After seeing all the modern toys I decided to go with the old windup ones, which we had duplicated in three versions: motionless toys, moving special-effects toys and breakaway toys that would explode. There were three versions of each toy, and 10 copies of each type--it was very expensive.

“When word gets out that a film like this is in the works, people start calling up,” Scarfiotti adds, “and this guy named Alan Adler who’s an obsessive toy buff with a huge collection of toys called us and he wound up making an immeasurable contribution to the film. He knows toy collectors all around the world, and he helped us get the toys we needed together. Most of the ones we ended up using are friction or windup toys from the turn of the century through the early ‘50s, made of tin plate, celluloid or very thin plastic that gives off a translucent glow when you paint it.”

And where are all these beautifully glowing toys now? Though Scarfiotti says Levinson claimed them when the film wrapped, the director himself innocently insists that Fox kept them and has them stored on the lot.