Even in London, where "The King's Speech" clearly had home-court advantage at the BAFTA Awards, the royal movie didn't win everything. One of the areas where it fell short was in Production Design, where the elaborate and densely layered work on "Inception" took home the prize for Guy Hendrix Dyas, Larry Dias and Doug Mowat.
The three are also nominees at the Oscars in the Art Direction category, where they once again appear to be in a tight race with "King's Speech" for top honors. (The other nominees: "Alice in Wonderland," "Black Swan" and "True Grit.") Before the BAFTAs, Dyas spoke to TheWrap about his experience on the film, where he was one of the first crew members hired by Christopher Nolan and where he spent his first month working out of Nolan's garage as they planned the look of the film's multiple dream levels. Note: Because it comes up in the conversation, it's worth noting that we spoke in a lower-level lounge at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, in a dining area with a bar at one end of the room.
Dyas' comments on the look, feel and execution of "Inception":
Turning Japanese: "One point of pride is that when I read the script, the castle was undefined as any specific style. It read very much like a European medieval castle, and I remember one day saying, 'Chris, what do you think about this being a Japanese castle?' Not only because the character we’re introduced to is Saito, but because Japanese architecture is so quintessential to any architect's understanding of what architecture is. And he just looked at me and said, 'Great, do it, I love it.'"
True Colors: "It was extremely important that we made all the different dream levels read as very different places. With the quick cutting style of Chris and Wally Pfister's photography – they don’t hang around too long on any one shot – I thought it would be important to use color. The human eye's an amazing thing, and you can give someone a quick read by coming up with a different color scheme for the different levels of dreams.
"So when they're trying to seduce their target, it's an environment not dissimilar to where we are now: a warm, stylish, relaxing hotel, perfect for a seduction. Whereas if you're out in the street and you want to scare someone s___less, then you want to have a rainy, stark L.A. street."
Dream On: "In dreams, at least from my experience, our focus is on what's directly in front of us, and everything else merges away. And the only way I could figure out how to portray that in the real world was literally removing the detail. For instance, if you and I were on a set in 'Inception' right now, everything in front of you would be real. We would avoid CG at every cost. And we would start removing things from the background.
