Home Movies

The last time Jeannine Oppewall finished designing a home interior for Clint Eastwood, the director walked into the house, smiled and said, “Thank you,” and then kissed Oppewall on the cheek. The home, as it turns out, was not for Eastwood. Meryl Streep would live there, raise her two kids, pack them and a husband off to the state fair and eventually enter a doomed-but-passionate tryst with Eastwood.

“We picked each of the pictures on the wall so it was something bucolic, something reinforcing life on the farm,” Oppewall says of the home. Streep’s character “has life-giving qualities, so we chose red and green and yellow, letting you know she’s warm.”

Oppewall designs home interiors for film directors. Actually, that’s wrong. She designs interiors for film scripts, the 120-or-so-page missives she considers her real clients. In recent years, her roster has included “The Bridges of Madison County,” “Pleasantville” and “Snow Falling on Cedars.” Like people, some of her clients are more neurotic than others. “L.A. Confidential” included 93 sets in more than 40 locations and was, as clients go, overbearing, demanding and incoherent about what it wanted from the production designer. This is not, however, a bad thing. “The only scripts I actually stay away from are the ones that tell me exactly what they want,” says Oppewall. “I look at them and say, ‘Next.’ ”

Oppewall’s role as a production designer is the opposite of that of interior designers, who take on the homes of living, breathing clients. Those designers create (hopefully) beautiful spaces that help transform their occupants into people they imagine themselves to be--say, postmodern hipsters in a glass-wrapped living room. Oppewall instead designs interiors that express a character’s personality at the moment. If you’re a slob, she’s not going to fill your bedroom with Eames furniture. She’s going to throw cheeseburger wrappers on your floor.

This is pretty much what she did for Michael Douglas’ home in the upcoming “Wonderboys.” Douglas plays a writer who has fallen on slovenly days following a divorce, and after reading the script, Oppewall phoned the film’s director, Curtis Hanson, and said, “I know exactly what the house looks like because I think I used to date this guy.”

Here’s the pitch for her current client, “Wakin’ Up In Reno,” about two white-trash couples spending a long weekend in a Reno hotel suite, forced to come to terms with their lives: “It’s very hail, Caesar,” she says. “We have friezes of antique coins for the wallpaper, the faucets have to be swan wings, a glass-top table, smoked-glass mirrors--bad Louis Quatorze.” Oppewall’s set--inside a sound stage not far from Magic Mountain--will take about two months to complete. Afterward, Billy Bob Thornton will spend one week talking to the camera--a celluloid print that will become part of Oppewall’s “show book.” “Then the whole thing goes into the dumpster,” she says. “And I’m back on the street waiting for someone to love me.”