Vancouver man gets Oscar nod for Dark Knight set decoration
By Mary Frances Hill, Vancouver Sun
January 23, 2009 10:01 AM
Take it from the man who helped craft the expansive, sweeping lines of Gotham City and the suffocating interiors of a comic-Gothic police station, where Batman and the Joker contend with each other’s might and tortured psyches.
The camera is merciless. An IMAX camera is even more so, says Peter Lando.
“If you look like a fool on the small screen, just wait until you see your errors 20 feet by 30 feet across,” says Lando, the Vancouver-based set decorator of The Dark Knight, from Burnaby’s Mammoth Studios, where he is currently working.
As it turns out, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t see many flaws in Peter Lando’s set decoration when they awarded him an Oscar nomination for his work on the huge summer blockbuster.
The film nabbed eight nominations, including one shared by Lando and production designer Nathan Crowley for best achievement in art direction.
Nominated also for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award and one from the L.A.-based Art Directors Guild, Lando nevertheless refuses to assume he’ll be taking home any hardware by the end of next month.
“On [Oscar night] it will matter, but winning an Academy Award won't make me more marketable. I don’t think I’ll get any more respect from the people I work with, and it certainly won’t make me a better decorator.
“But I think contributing to the vision of the film — that’s the joy, that’s the huge payoff.”
Academy voters and audiences alike may have seen the storyteller in him, a trait engendered through his eye for detail, and his insight into character and motivation.
Working closely with the director, set designer, and production designer, the set decorator acts as both psychologist and inventor, manipulating spaces and objects to reflect the inner state of a character in order to tell a story, he says. “You get to know these characters in your mind, and the questions you always ask yourself, is what would he have here, how would he want this to look?”
Case in point: When Crowley decided to build in bookshelves that measured 24 feet high by six feet wide in Bruce Wayne’s penthouse apartment, Lando’s task was to fill them with relevant items.
To Lando, Bruce Wayne was a soul tortured by his parents’ violent deaths and caught in a state of arrested development; he was empty inside.
“That was the exercise: let’s find things that say nothing, that have no personality and no character, and other things that were about the absence of meaning.”
Cleverly, he chose small items like the token gifts given to guest speakers, and other tchotchkes that revealed nothing about the recipient.
Lando envisioned Gotham D.A. Harvey Dent as an Obama-esque diplomat and man of the people, and created an office to reflect that character’s egalitarian stance. A desk that let him face his visitors in the middle of the room positioned Dent “with his back to the riches of Gotham,” Lando says.
In another pivotal scene, after the death of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Rachel, the love of his life, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is left bereft in his penthouse bedroom surrounded by little but four white orchids.
“It was a really good environment in which to feel alone and abandoned,” says Lando. With the city surrounding him, he is no superhero but a frail figure; his psyche was, to a large extent, expressed through his space.
“He’s in this grand edifice, and he’s all alone. He’s taken off his gauntlet, and there’s nothing there to comfort him. The only images there are icons of mourning.”
Lando earned his master’s degree in anthropology at the University of B.C. It was through those studies that he learned to tell stories through objects, listening to what each item, each beloved or coveted piece, said about its owner.
After a few years in public event design, including work on Expo 86 and the 1992 World’s Fair in Sevilla, he made what he calls a “lateral shift” into film. The move was natural.
Despite his years of experience, it wasn’t as if Lando climbed a ladder, accumulating greater work to land The Dark Knight.
“My filmography sucks,” he admits.
Sure, Eight Below, The Santa Clause 2, and Look Who’s Talking Now may have entertained their target audiences. His successful work with Crowley and The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan on the Vancouver-shot Insomnia, starring Al Pacino, certainly didn’t hurt. While not every potential master filmmaker may land in Vancouver, Lando attests to the great talents who both live and work here.
The same could be said for the principals of The Embassy, a Vancouver visual effects company enjoying a brush with Oscar glamour by association — the company contributed effects to the movie Iron Man, which is nominated for best visual effects.
With three nominations under Lando’s belt, and connections with some of Hollywood’s most successful directors, the next question is inevitable.
When the grand lights, power lunches and riches of Los Angeles beckon, why stay in this hamlet?
“I was born here, my children were born here,” he says. He still fishes commercially from a base on Quadra Island, his teenage children are happy here, and so is his wife, independent filmmaker Marianne Kaplan.
“This place is in my blood. Why would I ever want to leave?”
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