*In a recurring series,*Vanity Fair pulls back the curtain on the year’s most visually enticing films, revealing exclusive details of the creative process of art directors, costume designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, and more. This week, Oscar-winning costume and set designer Catherine Martin discusses her production designs forBaz Luhrmann’sThe Great Gatsby.
When Baz Luhrmann first decided to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsbyfor the screen nine years ago, no one was less enthusiastic about the venture than the filmmaker’s wife and longtime production and costume designer, Catherine Martin. “As an Australian teenager, I really did not connect with the book,” Martin admitted to us. “I said to Baz, ‘Why would you want to do that novel?! It’s so boring!’”
“Anyway, he convinced me to reread the book, and much to his annoyance and irritation, I then became the book’s biggest fan,” Martin, who also served as a producer on the film, says. There was one line in particular that inspired her visually. “I love the phrase that [narrator] Nick [Carraway] says: ‘I began to like New York, the racy adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.’ I just feel that’s what New York is . . . that feeling of endless possibility and energy moving forward.”
Rather than make a nostalgic film, with period-appropriate music, Luhrmann recruited Jay-Z and the Bullitts to score the 3-D feature. To Martin, the mix of 1920s-era images with contemporary music and effects makes the nightlife of Manhattan and West Egg seem as “visceral and modern and exciting as it would have been to Zelda Fitzgerald, and also to Nick, Tom, Daisy, and Jordan. This visceral city where skyscrapers were being built, hair was being cut short, and skirts were going up.”
Nowhere are the restlessness, energy, and excitement clearer than the scenes depicting Gatsby’s legendary parties. There, Luhrmann and Martin nail the narrator’s description of “kaleidoscope carnival” nightlife—excess incarnate courtesy of hundreds of whirring extras outfitted in fur and beaded apparel, surrounded by champagne bottles that double as confetti cannons, fireworks, and a bass-heavy soundtrack that keeps the festivities thumping through the night. Martin says that the crew was very conscious of striking the right balance between modern and classic during production: “We talked a lot about what the dance style should be. Our choreographer John O’Connell would spend hours with the extras rehearsing basic Charleston steps, or saying, ‘No hip thrusting. That will remind people that we are [not] in 1922.’ We created vignettes for every extra. Baz always likes all of the extras to have a character name and a little bio, so everyone has a little sense of who they were and how they fit into the landscape of the party. What they are looking at; who they are talking to. And I think that helps create a reality of texture.”
Thought was even given to which type of champagne Gatsby would be serving at his larger-than-life Long Island soirées. A friend of Martin’s, who works for Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, told her that one of the most important vintages of the decade was a Moët millésime of 1921. “If that was the case, and this was the summer of 1922, Gatsby, trying to impress and being the most extraordinary purveyor of the most extraordinary things, even in the midst of prohibition, would have this extraordinary vintage of Moët,” Martin says she reasoned. “Baz said that he wanted the champagne to get bigger because the party had to get wilder, so we talked about a bunch of enormous champagne bottles, bigger than jeroboams, that people are carrying around. Then we got permission from Moët to make them in house. We blew up the 1921 labels and made up these gigantic props, one of which has confetti that spurts out of it.”
In the film, Gatsby’s parties are centered around his circular pool, which later serves as the setting of a tragic climactic scene. During an extensive location scout of houses in Long Island, Martin says, she, Luhrmann, and their crew stumbled upon their inspiration at Eagle’s Nest, a Spanish Revival–style mansion that William K. Vanderbilt II began building in 1910. Even though the pool had been filled in with grass and dirt after a hurricane, she says, Luhrmann was so taken by the property that he had his music supervisor and an assistant spontaneously act out the pivotal scene right there. “The video that Baz shot that day is almost identical to the scene that ended up in the movie. Although I’ve got to say, Leonardo DiCaprio is about 500 times playing Gatsby than Anton [Monsted] is. But it’s quite extraordinary that in that moment, the genesis for the scene was filmed. At one point a security guard came out and asked us what we were doing. I think he thought we were making an amateur porn video or something,” Martin recalls, laughing.
While Luhrmann did not film any poolside love scenes, he does capture intimate moments between Gatsby and Daisy in Gatsby’s two-story bedroom, where the title character entertains his on-again love interest and, as seen in the trailer, playfully tosses pastel-colored oxford shirts at her from the mezzanine. “One of the people [we thought that Gatsby] would have known about is a French designer named [Émile-Jacques] Ruhlmann,” Martin explains, “so we based the bedroom on a number of Ruhlmann [Art Deco] inspirations.” (For a more garish 20s boudoir, look no further than Tom and Myrtle’s rose-and-blush-colored love nest in Morningside Heights.) Martin says she considered the logistics of the soaring room’s dimensions when coming up with the sleek design: “We were thinking that the best way someone could create storage for themselves in a room that had such an enormous ceiling height, in a tower, would be with a mezzanine level. Not only would it fill up the floor-to-ceiling space, but it would also provide a really great vantage point to throw the shirts from—so that they would have a much more graceful journey to the floor than if you were just trying to throw them from the floor up into the air.”
Aside from making it rain cotton-candy-colored shirts, Gatsby demonstrates his fondness for flashy spectacles with his signature yellow car—a key player at the end of the plot. “Baz made a rule that we were able to use any influences or references from 1922 through 1929,” Martin says their automobile research. “His rationale was that the book was set in ’22, published in ’25, and foreshadowed the crash of ’29. So we had a decade to work for in terms of reference. This was particularly important in terms of the cars, because Baz felt very strongly that the cars at the very beginning of the 20s had a Keystone Cop association, rather than that of a racy sports car.”
Luhrmann made sure that all of the film’s cars came from the second half of the 20s, Martin tells us, a time when “Duesenbergs were really coming into vogue. Duesenbergs are interesting because they were a motor and a chassis, and then all of the add-ons were totally custom, so people could just pimp their car however they wanted.” Since, Martin says, a Duesenberg can cost upwards of $2 million, the budget allowed only for two identical replicas, at $250,000 each. After receiving the reproduction cars from Chicago, the art department completely refitted, reupholstered, and redetailed each—even subtly painting the vehicles several shades of yellow to enhance contouring and dimension. Other custom details that were added to Gatsby’s yellow car: alternating chrome and gold detailing on the mirrors and mounts; complicated beveled glass on the windshield; bespoke hubcaps decorated with a daisy and Gatsby’s monogram; embroidered and monogrammed seats; and, although you never see them, carpets also stenciled with his initials.
In total, the yellow convertible, the mansion, and the circus-like soirées show Gatsby’s aesthetic ostentation, Martin explains. “You get this sense of excess—of someone overreaching. This is conveyed in the Neo-Gothic style of Gatsby’s house, the almost Versailles-sized fountain in the front too. Then you go to the Buchanans’, which is described in the book as an enormous pile of red bricks, and it is a much quieter view of wealth.” For their East Egg estate, Martin says, she drew inspiration from Old Westbury Gardens, a stately redbrick mansion surrounded by formal gardens in Long Island. Built on a soundstage with digital flourishes added in post-production, the exterior of the residence establishes an immediate sense of old money, restraint, and establishment. Meanwhile, just across the river, Martin says, “you get this sense [that Gatsby] lives in an adult Disneyworld.”
