What It Feels Like To Design The Oscar Stage
A behind-the-scenes look at the world’s biggest awards show
As we gear up for the Oscars on February 26th, we’re sharing an exclusive look behind-the-scenes through our “Making of the Oscars” series.
Five years ago, after collaborating on a Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan asked Derek McLane to design the set for the 85th Academy Awards. Derek has been a part of Team Oscar ever since. In this post, he discusses his inspiration and what it’s like to build a set for a 14-act show.
What was your first Oscars experience like?
I was thrilled to be asked, but I was also pretty terrified. I’d never done an awards show before and my television experience was somewhat limited — my entire career basically had been in the theater. Neil and Craig were very, very supportive. They had mentioned a number of Broadway shows that I had designed that they particularly admired and asked me to apply that aesthetic to the Oscars. They said they didn’t want me to design this as what I thought an Oscar show should look like.
They wanted me to design my own version of the Oscars. That was very liberating.
That took a lot of my anxiety away because I felt like I had a valid place to start.
What did your theater experience bring to the job? How are the Oscars different?
In the theater, almost everything we do is based on a written story. You don’t have a written story in the same way for the Oscars.
But you do try to develop, at least in your own mind, a kind of narrative that you want to tell about the evening.
So there are similarities in that way. The Oscars are done at the Dolby Theatre®, which is a proscenium theater very much like a Broadway theater; it’s quite a bit bigger than most Broadway theaters but the configuration is similar. So it’s familiar in that regard — it’s not in an arena, it’s not in a basketball stadium.
And then there is a fundamental difference between television and seeing something in a theater: a lot of TV cameras that move around, and you get a lot closer to things than you would on a Broadway stage.
How do you cater to both live and television audiences?
I always feel a great obligation, particularly, to the nominees. I think being nominated for an Oscar is such an incredible fantasy for so many people, so I do feel the need to both meet those nominees’ expectations and surprise them.
I want to design something that they will feel is worthy of the majesty of that event.
But the truth is, the number of people seated in the theater is microscopic compared to the number of people watching on television, so we’re really producing a television show more than anything.
I, and a lot of other people working on the show, force ourselves to watch it on the TV monitors rather than with our naked eye in the theater. We really want to experience what it is that the people watching at home will experience.
What’s one element that has to be designed a certain way for TV?
You see a lot of close-ups on television. That means, when you’re designing something, that you have to think about it on two scales. Probably 80 percent of the show is done in close-ups, which are shots of the torso and the head of the actor, maybe the full body. It’s a much smaller frame, so designing scenery that looks great in that context is a big consideration.
Another factor is that, with color, you want to be subtler for TV. A digital camera tends to exaggerate the differences in color. Little color differences can read quite strongly on camera, whereas when you’re looking at them with the naked eye, sometimes it all looks almost the same.
What’s your design process like?
I pull images — inspiration images, research images, pictures of architecture or design or nature — that I think would be interesting as a basis for a design. I put that together along with some sketches, which are often pretty rough to begin with.
I try to get that all in front of the producers as quickly as possible, so we can start a dialogue about what it is they respond to. Once that gets honed a little bit, we do more finished, presentation sketches. Then we draft the set, pretty much the same way that an architect would draft a building.
We end up producing a set of pretty detailed drawings that we then send to the shops that will build the scenery. Before they build it, we have to go through a budgeting process, so the producers and I will consult about what we can afford to do. Once we decide that, we give the go-ahead to the shops to start building the scenery.
What was your inspiration for this year’s set?
This year, Mike DeLuca and Jennifer Todd were very interested in Art Deco, classic Hollywood Regency and Art Deco films, so that was the inspiration for just about everything in the set. I’ve done a bunch of different looks, some of them more abstract, some of them more specific, that are based on Deco architecture and movies that have Art Deco production designs in them.
This is my fifth time doing the show and it’s the first time that I’ve based the design so much on an architectural period.
I hope it’ll be a lot of fun for the audience and I’m excited to see how this turns out because it’s a completely different way of thinking about it.
What has the inspiration been in the past?
Last year, the producers [David Hill and Reginald Hudlin] were very interested in video content. We made huge use of LED screens and that became a big part of the design. Ideally, when it’s most successful, the digital becomes a kind of layer behind the physical scenery, and you can’t quite tell when one thing begins and the other one ends.
With Neil and Craig, there was a lot of emphasis on live performance. For the design of the show, they were very interested in certain contemporary design trends so I pursued those.
The show is divided into 14 acts — that is, 14 segments between commercials. I try to come up with a look that feels unique for every one of those acts.
I do some variations, like combine different pieces of scenery or figure out different ways to light them. And there are times when we will change scenery in the middle of an act, especially if there’s a song.
What’s going through your mind during the show?
We do a dress rehearsal on Saturday night and another one on Sunday morning. But when we get to the live show, there’s nothing more I can do. I sit in the audience and try to enjoy it.
Sometimes I get lost in the show. And sometimes I’m sitting there thinking about how this is going well or what’s going wrong.
I can tell how the audience in the theater is reacting and I wonder, ‘What do people at home think right now?’
I haven’t seen the show in the theater for several days at that point because for all the rehearsals and run-throughs that week, I’ve been out in the TV truck, watching it on the monitor.
Why do you do what you do?
Set design was something I stumbled into when I was in college and I feel really lucky to have stumbled into it. It combined a lot of the things I’m good at. My brain is wired spatially, so I think about spaces a lot. I like to draw. I like to make things. And I’m a fairly impatient person. I like to do things quickly.
One of the great things about working in the theater and working in television is that it’s a relatively fast process from the time you have the idea to the time you see it done.
I also enjoy the diversity of what I get to work on. I find that really stimulating and rewarding.
