Bringing on the jingle
CREATING the massive North Pole set for the holiday comedy “Fred Claus,” which opens Friday, required major real estate, says production designer Allan Cameron (“Shanghai Knights,” “The Da Vinci Code”).
With the goal of conjuring a fantasy Santa’s workshop “where every kid would want to go,” as director David Dobkin put it, the production spread out in a “gigantic blimp hanger from World War II,” Cameron says. “We built the whole of the streets and the exteriors of the toy factory. The interiors were built at Pinewood,” covering seven or eight stages of the famed British facility.
“Fred Claus” stars Vince Vaughn as the younger brother of Nicholas Claus (Paul Giamatti), a.k.a. Santa. A huckster repo man working in Chicago, Fred, who has always lived in his famous sibling’s shadow, desperately needs money. But Nicholas will give him a loan only if he goes to the North Pole to work on toys. The film, which also stars Kevin Spacey, reunites Vaughn with Dobkin, his “Wedding Crashers” director.
Cameron’s North Pole was based on folk art from various countries, which he encountered in a number of settings. On a visit to the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, “There were these wonderful folk designs from Eastern Europe where they had painted traditional eggs in a folk manner,” he says. “I did a lot of research . . . . I went to Scandinavia and I had gone to Lapland on a previous film -- I loved that architecture as well. It was an amalgamation of all my favorite folk art and bits and pieces really.”
The massive toy factory that dominates the North Pole was based on old photographs of New York’s Penn Station. “We thought it would have evolved,” he says, “from a wooden structure to a bit more English Victorian.”
Even in the case of something as seemingly simple as snow, Cameron reached for a touch of dazzle.
“I wanted the snow to have a little sparkle to it,” he says. “We played about with different snows. All the rooftops in the village were quite hard to do. They were carved styrene and then we blew paper snow on top of it and sprinkled sparkles on top of that. It was quite a lot of experimenting to make it look reasonably OK.”
-- Susan King
