“To understand Hedda, I went down these rabbit holes and learned all about these socialites, these European socialites and American socialites at the time,” says production designer Cara Brown, who collaborates on her third project in a row with director Nia DaCosta on Hedda.
“As soon as I started to learn about people like Oonagh Guinness and how she lived, and Gloria Vanderbilt and Lee Radziwill… they were bucking the tradition of their aristocratic upbringing, which would have been, you know, heirlooms and antiques. No, they didn’t want any of that. They wanted to be part of the modern world. They wanted to hang out with artists. They wanted to be bohemian and they expressed that, I feel like, in their personal surroundings.”
Hedda, an adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler, stars Tessa Thompson in the title role, with Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, and Nicholas Pinnock in supporting roles. The film is all set in one location, Hedda’s majestic estate. Its look and feel are essential to reinforcing Hedda as a boundary pusher, and creating the transportive quality of the film.
“We achieved that through just the layering that we did. We had this Italianate house that was built and cobbled together. They kept building it and building it, building it over decades, adding and adding so you have this house from the 1800s and then we put modern art in it, and then we brought in a lot of art deco silhouettes to furnishings, because that still feels so contemporary,” says Brown.
“Because of all the layers that we have, it kind of makes it feel timeless. A lot of people have come up to me and said they wanted to know what country the house was in… and then they want to know what year it was set in. We wanted it to kind of feel timeless and transcend any specific year.”
Taking Liberties With Hedda
DaCosta took some liberties from the play, by moving the time period from the late 19th century and gender switching the role of Eilert in the play to Eileen in the film. Those liberties were important considerations for Brown and set decorator Stella Fox.
“I think for me, choosing the furniture and the pieces had more to do with the shapes and the proportions of the pieces. The shapes of the deco pieces and the shapes of ’50s pieces kind of mirror that very elegant, very shapely, just very sexy pieces of furniture.
“And I think that when we were looking in auction houses we imported a lot of furniture from all over Europe antiques markets. It was more about just finding the perfect shape. But it just didn’t matter to me and to Cara, whether it was, you know, ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, even ’60s. Like, there were some mid-century pieces that obviously would have been created after them. But it really, it didn’t matter, because they had that freedom of slight wildness, I think, to them,” says Fox.
“We did a whole kind of board displaying leopard print, for example, and like it was so on trend in the ’50s… and (Nia) let us put leopard print carpet in the back hallway, and also a taxidermy jaguar on the staircase, just because,” says Fox. “I remember the first time we showed Nia the leopard print carpet. She literally laughed in our face. She was like, ‘Ladies, what are you doing?’ And then, OK, OK, I got it. I got it.”
How did ideas of gender, especially in this time period, influence the set decoration and production design?
“I really think it was just another example about how boundary pushing this person is, and how bold we could be with the furnishing, I think, and the production design, because she’s clearly somebody who is not afraid… I really don’t know how we would have made this film, or how special this film would have felt without that gender swap,” says Brown.
Hedda’s outward and inner lives are constantly at odds in the film, but the house does offer clues to who she might really be.
“I feel like she is grasping at anything she can, and so maybe the house is a bit of a creative outlet where she can express herself. Even though she finds that unfulfilling,” says Brown.
“I was gonna say it’s for her. It was the drama… It’s the show of it, the pomp of it,” says Fox.
Hedda is now streaming on Prime Video.
Main image: Tessa Thompson in Hedda. Prime Video.