Media > Production Design

The Godmother is set in the home of Danny and Rosella Wu, which happens to be a colorful, upscale, and decidedly tacky penthouse. Rosella's live-in mother, Silvia, dominated the decoration of the place and fashioned it into a shrine unto herself. The challenges to the production design team were to create a showcase of bad taste out of a mixture of hyper-real colors and over the top artwork and design, to make it a photogenic and entertaining, and to do it all on a shoestring budget.

Here are some of the images from which Director Lior Chefetz and Production Designer Harrison Yurkiw drew their inspiration during the preliminary design stages.

The apartment was planned out as one large space, which allowed the filmmakers to achieve maximal visual depth, while also creating different looks for each "room" in the house. The rooms were slightly separated with design elements such as a decorative divider, counter, and a column. The set had to be spacious enough to facilitate a multi-camera 35mm shoot, elaborate martial arts and stunt performances, and a crew of 25 people. Some elements were designed specifically to accommodate certain stunts - such a dinning room window to crash through, a destructible decorative divider, and break-away furniture.

Art Director Brad Rubin drafted the set layout using Google Sketch, which enabled the art department to generate 3D Illustrations of the set and even animate clips that helped them to pre-visualize the space before building it.

The set was built on sound stages at the Robert Zemekis Center for the Digital Arts on the University of Southern California campus. The walls were donated from several sources, among them a cannibalized apartment set from Everybody Loves Raymond, donated by Universal Studios, and a World War II german apartment set from Valkyrie. Those walls were then repurposed to create Danny & Rosella's home.

Construction lasted 10 days, a serious challenge for a small crew and a production with very little money. As luck had it, a 220v adaptor went missing, which prevented the saw table from working until Producer Ian Dickinson located the only available replacement in Hollywood.

After nearly two weeks of very hard work, the set was ready for principle photography.

Production Designer -
Harrison Yurkiw
Art Director - Brad Rubin
Asst. Art Director - Matthew Horan
Set Decorator - Sharon H. Lee