In recent years, production designer Florencia Martin has cemented her reputation as the Master Builder of Movie California. Her output has included the the 1920s decadence of “Babylon,” the 1950s glitz of “Blonde” and the 1970s vibes of “Licorice Pizza.”
Her work on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is not a glamour fest. Instead, it’s a celebration of the real world, spanning dozens of local landscapes (the production also filmed in El Paso, Texas) and offering a vivid collage of the Golden State and its many haunts.
“Our journey took us out into a California that many of us hadn’t seen before,” Martin said. “Sacramento and the Redwoods and the desert. I feel fortunate because not only was it an exploration of locations but of people and stories, which we wanted to bring to life in the movie. We went and we listened and learned and came back with the most honest portrayal of California.”
The film opens with a raid by a revolutionary group (including Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor) on an immigration detention camp near California’s border with Mexico, situated under a highway. The scene is set in the unspecified past, so Martin’s design was based on decades-old centers. “We built the camp from the ground up, but it was an active border-patrol road, with trucks coming in from Mexico to the United States,” she said. “We couldn’t tell what was real and what was our film, and that became part of the environment and this continuous texture.”
Real locations seen include the La Purísima Mission in Lompoc, a local high school in Eureka and a bank in Stockton. But on a soundstage in Los Angeles, Martin and her team also built a 60-foot dirt tunnel for a sequence in which DiCaprio’s stoner Bob, living off the grid, escapes capture by his adversary Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
“We based Bob’s tunnel on those cartel tunnels that look hand-hewn,” Martin said. “There had to be a sense of haphazardness in the design. The tunnel opening was just a plywood top and it’s under his bed. We always liked the idea that Bob had an escape plan that he forgot about completely.”
In one of the movie’s many visual jokes, Bob emerges from the tunnel into an outhouse made from a redwood trunk.
“We saw so many of those when we were scouting in Eureka,” Martin said. “And that location, with all the cars covered in moss, was inspired by the home of a widowed woman we’d come across in the same neighborhood as Bob’s house. (DiCaprio) was bouncing off the walls with excitement when we got there. He was like, ‘This is it, this is what I do! I sell used car parts!’ It’s an incredible way to build something that’s based on the character. And not force it into the story but let it come to you.”
She added, “Tunnels followed us throughout our entire location scouting.” In El Paso, her team set up a labyrinth of passageways and trap doors in an existing building, which served as the immigration sanctuary and karate studio of Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro).
And the stark white curved tunnel that leads to a racist society called the Christmas Adventurers Club is depicted in the bowels of an upper-class home in Sacramento. The house’s exterior is the onetime residence of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the capital city.
“But the serpentine tunnel was a location we found in Stockton,” Martin said. “And the actual meeting room we built on a set, with that mural of the American Northwest on the wall, with all the taxidermy and that vision of preservation.”
The final act of “One Battle After Another” is set in the California desert, which proved to be a challenge for Martin and her team. The sequence, a car chase involving Chase Infiniti, DiCaprio and Penn, was stitched together from about 10 different locations, including a huge rock-wall formation in Anza-Borrego, California’s largest state park, known as the Reef.
As Martin headed back to Los Angeles with a colleague, they drove on a two-lane blacktop that undulated up and down like the ripple of a wave. It became a crucial location in the film’s climax.
“Paul really allows for the time it takes to revisit places until we find the perfect spot,” Martin said. “It’s a very special, amazing way to work. Because every single time you go out on the road, you uncover something else.”
This story first ran in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
