A cluster of period pieces this season highlights the key yet often overlooked role of production designers. Here (and on Page 32) is their chance to describe . . . : How They Got the Look

Jeannine Claudia Oppewall came to production design by an odd route. She pursued a liberal arts education in college, studying art history with thoughts of becoming a writer. As a result, says the designer whose work for “L.A. Confidential” and “Pleasantville” received Oscar nominations, she knows that there are designers with better technical skills. She says what she brings to the job, though,

“is my understanding as much as I can about the history of Western culture and other cultures. This and also all the images that I’ve spent my life gathering--these all come to bear when you sit down to build a set.”

She tries to choose projects that she feels an emotional connection to. “Then I can bring more to that particular party, more than just the exercise of whatever technical skills I’ve accumulated over the years. I design,” she says, “out of the same place that a writer writes from or an actor acts from, which is to say out of the deepest recesses of where your personality is, of who you are.”

Describe your job.

“The designer takes responsibility for all of the environments in any given film,” she says. “I don’t like to use the term that everybody else in Hollywood uses, the so-called ‘look’ of a picture. The look is the result of a collaboration between the screenwriter, the cameraman, the director, the editor and various accidents of God, known and unknown. No one person is responsible for that.”

How did you become a production designer?

Oppewall was a student at Bryn Mayhr College when a friend offered to arrange for her to meet Charles Eames, the celebrated furniture designer. She jumped at the chance and was given a job despite her lack of design experience. “I can teach someone how to draw,” she says Eames told her. “I cannot teach them how to think or how to see.”

“So he apparently decided to take a chance on my thinking and seeing abilities, and I learned the technical aspects of design from him,” she says.

Eames was not only a great visual artist, but he was also “enormously intellectual and well educated,” she says. “When I was working with him I felt like I was the only person I knew among my acquaintances who actually got up every morning and used my liberal arts education.”

How do you prepare?

She prepares for a project by reading the script over and over “until it speaks to me,” she says. She makes a list of all of the environments a script calls for--a courtroom, perhaps, or a doctor’s office, or a beauty parlor. If it is an adaptation, she reads the source material. She has accumulated a large clipping library, collections of photographs and other images that she can draw from.

On “Snow Falling on Cedars,” she did research at Los Angeles’ Japanese American National Museum, which has lots of film and photographic material on life in the United States for Japanese Americans immediately before, during and after World War II, which is when the movie is set.

What’s the scene that best shows what you do?

Much of the action of “Snow Falling on Cedars” occurs in a courtroom. The movie, she says, “is about the nature and meaning of accidents in human life and how humans come to terms with accidents, generally and specifically. One of the ways we come to terms with them is to battle it out in a court of law.”

The action is set in a small fishing village on Puget Sound and the sea is an important factor in the story. “I had the courtroom built out of wood, and I shaped it in a general way like an upside-down boat,” she says. “It’s painted a sea-foam green with the warm wood colors of the Pacific Northwest. I tried to get cool and warm vibrating together.”

She wants the courtroom metaphorically to represent the ship of state. Among the details drawn from nautical themes are brass rails she had built around the jury box and balcony.

“They’re adding sounds in the background of the courtroom scenes--creaking accents and the sound of wind that evokes ships at sea and buildings buffeted by windy, horrible weather.”

The sounds, like Oppewall’s visual metaphors, are meant to work subliminally. “Designers do these things to amuse themselves,” she admits, “but you design out of your feeling for the story and situation. . . . It is all about finding the images that move people. If you’re successful, everyone will feel it but it will be a subliminal image,” she says.

The Academy Award category for this work is “art direction,” and it seems that many of the people who are “production designers” have worked or do work also as “art directors.” Would you explain?

The Academy Award category of production designer evolved over time, she says. The designer is the head of the art department. The art director helps the designer get his or her vision across, makes sure sets are built on time and on budget and helps with drafting and organizing. “Most art directors are production designers in training,” she says. The exception are those who don’t want the political hassles that go with the designer job, she says.

Even though the Oscar category is for “art direction,” the award goes to the production designer and set decorator, who work closely together. The set decorator also works from the production designer’s designs. The costume designer is in a different category, although they all must work together to achieve a unified vision.

What was the worst crisis, if there was a crisis, during filming, and how did you solve it?

“Every kind of crisis imaginable occurred on this movie,” Oppewall says. The biggest had to do with financial difficulties brought on by the unpredictability of the weather. “We were chasing snow up the side of the mountain because it was melting faster than you can shoot it,” she says. “It was more problematic than anyone thought it would be.”

Aside from this current project, what was your favorite movie to work on and why?

Oppewall has a soft spot in her heart for her first movie, “Tender Mercies,” which she admires for its “extremely understated simplicity.” But she rates “L.A. Confidential” and “Pleasantville” as her favorite productions.

“L.A. Confidential,” she says, was a tremendous amount of work--the movie had 93 different sets, far more than average. But she enjoyed the opportunity to explore her feelings about Los Angeles architecture and what it says about the city and its history. “I was trying to put on screen what Los Angeles felt about itself after World War II,” she says. It felt boundless optimism. “It had a lot of gloss on top,” she says, “but peel it off and what you found was just as sordid as anyplace else. But it was also angering because the city tried so hard to promote itself as the orange juice and sunshine capital of the world.”

What she liked about “Pleasantville” was the opportunity to design the “ideal all-American small town.” She drew from her memory of towns she knew as a child and places she’d visited.