Simon Elliott (‘All the Light We Cannot See’ production designer) on ‘exploring a world from a different perspective’ for a blind actress [Exclusive Video Interview]
Simon Elliott has been working as a production designer for film and television for 30 years out of his home base of London. But he experienced something while working on the four-part Netflix World War II limited series “All the Light We Cannot See” – adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Anthony Doerr – that he’d never before encountered: a leading lady who was both blind and had never acted before. This ratcheted up the level of challenge significantly, given that star Aria Mia Loberti and the child version of her character Marie-Laure (portrayed by Nell Sutton) were not only sightless but hadn’t before been on a film set, much less performed on one. Elliott would, thus, be creating designs for actors who were tasked with interacting with his creations without the advantage of actually seeing them. “Because I work in a sighted medium, my life and my livelihood is dependent on my sight,” he says. “So to then explore a world from a different perspective was very interesting.” See the exclusive video interview above.
The complexity of his task started with creating a grotto for a scene in which the blind French girl Marie goes to collect oysters. Working with water on a set is itself an uncertainty because it’s so unpredictable, but then adding in someone who is blind and stunt work “attaches layer upon layer of complexity,” Elliott observes. “That was a challenge, exploring how to do that and make it completely safe for Aria while at the same time keeping her comfortable enough that she had the freedom to do what she wanted without the added threat of hurting herself unnecessarily on a bit of scenery.” To guard against any mishap, all the walls that Loberti interacted with were rubberized, and all the oyster shells sculpted from rubber.
Designing on “All the Light” was, in most every way, like learning to speak a new language for Elliott, including “learning to express to Aria and describe sets without the use of sighted language, something we take for granted,” he emphasizes. “It became about texture, about smell, about sounds, about the way sound moves around a set. She could clap, she would click, she would touch everything. This was most apparent in our attic set. I bought a century-old barn and we constructed the attic out of timbers from it, and the first thing that Aria noticed when she walked onto the set was he smell. For her, obviously it smelled completely real, because you could smell those old timbers as they were drying out in the heat of the studio.” And as is often cited, once one sense is eliminated (in this case sight), the other senses are enhanced.
Elliott was utterly taken with Loberti’s capacity to thrive “in a world that I think most of us take for granted and how she still appreciates and enjoys the world around her on a completely different level than someone like myself.” He remarks that it was “truly inspiring” to see the inexperienced actress learn a space and commit it to memory. The fact that she was so hyper-aware of her surroundings afforded Elliott and his team the ability to dress dress a room and invite Loberti to negotiate the space before shooting began to make sure it “felt” authentic. “If a chair was in the wrong place, or the door handle on a door frame needed the edge worn down more, or the spot where she leaves her cane was in the wrong place, Aria would know. There was a level of insight, which also, through her lived experience, Aria was able to share with me to help add another layer of authenticity to everything.”
At the same time, Loberti refused to be coddled and “taught us all to actually relax,” Elliott recalls. He was, for instance, very concerned about the staircase because there were several scenes where the actress needed to run down it. “Very early on I approached her and I said, ‘Do we need to leave little textural signals in the handrail?’ She she assured me, ‘No, don’t worry, I will learn the staircase.’ And she did.”
All four installments of “All the Light We Cannot See” are streaming on Netflix.
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