It is rare for a filmmaker to reach such a level of skill that they end up becoming an artist themselves. It’s rare to spend hours upon hours sitting next to that artist, learning first-hand how he has managed to achieve all the magic of movies over the years.
And in the case of legendary production designer Dean Tavoularis, who died Thursday at age 93, I had the honor of doing just that: speaking at length with Dean about his remarkable life and career, which began in his childhood as the son of Greek immigrants during the Great Depression; He transformed during World War II and into the 1950s when he was a budding animator, then an assistant art director at Walt Disney (sometimes working with the chain-smoking Walt Disney himself); He reached his peak a decade or so later when he designed masterpieces such as Bonnie and Clyde, The godfather Triple f Apocalypse now.
Our conversations culminated in a book that delves into those films, as well as many others, in great detail, blending Dean’s ideas with those of his most famous collaborators: Francis Ford Coppola, Warren Beatty, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, and costume designer Melina Canonero, all of whom held Dean in high esteem.
Rather than just rehash our discussions here, I thought I could offer other ideas that aren’t necessarily in the book—things culled from conversations that continued long after the book was published, even just a few weeks ago, in fact.
I first saw Dean in 2020, after he sold his gorgeous home in Hancock Park and moved permanently to Paris with his actress wife, Aurore Clément, whom he met while filming his film. Apocalypse now. At that time, I presented him with the idea of doing a short interview with the French magazine Even the movie. A few weeks later, after spending less than an hour talking to him to prepare the article, I called my publisher, David Frenkel, and told him we had a new book project. He agreed immediately and we started the next week.
Our lengthy conversations took place in a ground-floor apartment, tucked away in the quiet residential 17th arrondissement, which Dean had converted into an artist’s studio after working on his latest film, Roman Polanski’s. massacre — a film set entirely in a Brooklyn apartment that Dean masterfully recreated on a soundstage outside Paris.
To give you one idea of how detail-obsessed he is, all the furnishings in the house massacre The kit, down to every door handle, light fixture and electrical outlet, was shipped from the United States and installed by the technical department. The devices, which were also shipped, only ran on a US-compatible circuit, so Dean rewired the entire set to accommodate that. This was all because of one scene in which Jodie Foster’s character may or may not use a hairdryer in the bathroom.
Dean told me stories like this when we sat together for months in his studio, surrounded by paint tubes, a jar of turpentine, brushes, canvases, all sorts of tape he used in his collages, and, usually, a bottle of scotch and a bucket of ice. “I’m living the dream I had when I was a teenager: to paint my days in a studio in Paris,” Dean said, sipping his whiskey. He was already in his late eighties and still going strong.
When he answered questions about his work, he thought carefully about what he was saying; It seems like every word counts. He usually had one strong idea in mind and then carried it through to the end. And I learned that this was also how Dean approached his career.
This is what allowed it to survive during the crazy two-year production period Apocalypse nowamong many other crazy things, huge sets that took months to build were destroyed by one of the biggest typhoons in Philippine history, and had to be rebuilt all over again. This allowed him to resist Paramount’s insistence on shooting the first part godfather A film set in their backlot, or in St. Louis of all places, rather than on the streets of New York as Dean and Coppola wanted – and it was finally achieved. This is what allowed him to design the amazing Las Vegas Strip One from the heartwhich occupied every soundstage at the newly christened and soon-to-be-fallen Zoetrope Studios.
“The job was about 20% creativity and 80% logistics,” he told me, insisting on the fact that the idea was only as good as its execution, which was by far the hardest part. However, it was Dean’s ideas that would define his work, making him—along with the great Richard Silbert (Chinatown), who preceded him by a good decade—a conceptual artist whose visual creations, large and small, startling and sometimes invisible, marked a major shift in American film from the studios to the streets, from illusion to realism, from old to new Hollywood.
“I remember when I started working as an assistant, I asked one of the art directors why the decor on movie sets was so heightened, why everything looked so big and fake,” Dean said, referring to the classic studio productions he began working on in the 1950s. “Let’s take the blocks: in real life, they’re usually a certain size, but on the films I worked on as an assistant they were too big… And when I asked the art director why, he said it would be too small and the camera wouldn’t pick it up – which is 100% nonsense. It’s just a small detail, but it explains the whole mentality in Hollywood at that time.”
When Dean was hired by Betty and Arthur Penn to work Bonnie and Clydewhich was his first job as a production designer (he was still credited as “art director” at the time), tried to undo all the bullshit he’d seen before. Much to the anger of studio head Jack Warner, the film was not shot in the Warner Bros. backlot. In Burbank, but on location in the same Texas towns that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow robbed in the 1930s — towns that Dean visited and photographed himself, because at the time the art director was usually the location scout as well. When interiors were used, they were designed to look real: “I made the ceilings deliberately low because I wanted to give the feeling that the characters were becoming more and more trapped,” Lee said. “They were staying in these crummy hotels and everything was small and stuffy.”
I recorded these and other musings while Dean poured us another glass of scotch, which he served in his studio with a bag of Fritos that people from the States brought whenever they visited. (Some habits die hard.) “Dean,” I complained. “It’s only three in the afternoon. If I drink another whiskey, I won’t be able to work anymore.” He looked at me with a sly smile, then said after a long silence: “How do you think we made all these movies we’re talking about?”
I’ve learned so much more from Dean beyond how to try (and mostly fail) to keep my liquor down. “Everything people see in the film, rather than hear, comes from the collaboration with the production designer,” Coppola told me when I interviewed him. Gradually, I began to understand how Dean not only turned the visions of auteurs like Coppola (13 features together!) into reality, but how he brought his own vision to each project, usually through months of intense research, an impeccable sense of detail and a desire to experiment — to create “brilliant visual ideas of illusion,” according to Coppola.
The most memorable of these experiences, and certainly the most magical, was the series of slow explosions that close Michelangelo Antonioni’s painting. Zabriskie Pointwhich was Dean’s second credit as production designer (he also designed Penn’s Little big man in that year). More than any other sequence, the ending Zabriskie Point Illustrate the countercultural aspirations and cinematic liberties of New Hollywood in their most extreme forms. It wasn’t just about building a mock-up of a house Not only was it blown up in the Arizona desert, but there were also a lot of other things, from televisions to tomatoes to chickens.
I’ll let Dean talk about that: “The idea was that in the explosions there would be details of American consumerism… It was done when Michelangelo was already back in Rome, and I was left to deal with it on my own. We did it all in the back of the MGM, where we dug a big hole and put these huge sewer pipes in the ground, and then people put explosives inside, along with compressed air and gas jets. It was a Hollywood explosion but most of it was real… every morning on my way to MGM, I would stop at Ralph’s Supermarket to buy raw chicken and other food products, then stuff them into tubes, and we spent about a week in that back area blasting stuff all day long.
the Zabriskie Point The sequence sits alongside other visual landmarks that Dean created during the 1970s – from Don Corleone’s office to The godfather To Colonel Kurtz’s temple Apocalypse now – As permanent testimonies of his genius. But perhaps the greatest thing I learned during my conversations with Dean is how the role of the production designer also extends, in the best of cases, to things we never end up seeing at all.
When he began work on Coppola’s classic paranoid thriller ConversationDean decided to sign up the film’s main character, Harry Cole, for dozens of periodicals in the months before filming began. “I put a few of them in the desk drawers once I got the collection together,” he told me. “The first time Gene Hackman came to film, he opened some drawers and saw these spy magazines with his character’s name on the mailing labels… Well, the camera didn’t see that, and there were no close-ups of the interiors of the drawers. But maybe it did something to him as an actor.”
For William Friedkins’ Italian grocery store Brinkmanship function – An underrated working-class crime thriller worth another look – Dean had his art department smash garlic and oregano on the floor so that the place smelled less like a freshly drawn movie set and more like a real grocery store. The attention to unseen details extended to the costumes as well (Dean was both production and costume designer Apocalypse now): “I’ve never understood why the wardrobe department would give an actor a jacket to wear with nothing in the pockets, and I would say to them, ‘This character is a nervous wreck, so why don’t you put a roll of Toms in there?’ Or give him five or six heavy keys to carry?”
It may seem like a contradiction, but of the many things Dean said about art direction in films, these ingenious concepts, which most people never notice, stuck with me the most. They reminded me that artists can influence films in countless ways through their ideas and working methods—or simply by infiltrating them through the sheer force of their personalities, whether they be directors, actors, or master craftsmen like Dean. The best films work this way on the viewer too, sneaking up on us as we watch them and staying with us long afterward, becoming embedded in our memories as if we were part of them.
I remember what Dean told me as much as I remember the way he told me, sitting in his studio in Paris on all those hot evenings, so sharp and funny, so wise and generous, the ice melting in his whiskey glass before he poured us another drink. What started as a brief encounter eventually evolved into a multi-year relationship, lasting all the way until we had our final round of Scotch and Fritos just a few weeks ago.
It is truly rare for a film artist to become an artist and leave their mark on some of the greatest films of all time. It’s rare that you spend a lot of time learning alongside them. And the rarest of all is when you can also call this person your friend.
