cameron diaz movies
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 Chapter 9 - The Sets
It is a tribute to the director that the key production staff from Charlie's Angels returned for the second installment, including production designer J. Michael Riva, director of photography Russell Carpenter, costume designer Joseph G. Aulisi and editor Wayne Wahrman, among others.
"These people are an intimate part of the fabric of Charlie's Angels," says McG. "Each had a part in creating the voice of the first film and the new one as well."
That's not idle talk either, says Academy Award-winning dire c tor of photography Carpenter (Titanic), "McG makes every person feel they have a contribution to make. He knows he can look in any direction and toss out a challenge 'how can we make this better?' It's that attitude that made me want to work with him again that sense that everybody is included."
According to Riva "we had all developed a shorthand that was even shorter than on the first film. In the chaos of pre-production, the creative enthusiasm managed to prevail on all levels. It's an unusual group of people and McG is responsible for letting everybody expand quite a bit. His enthusiasm is palpable and it's infectious. His sensibility is very much reflected in the people he hires. We're all supreme optimists."
As production designer, Riva's job is basically to translate the written word into a fabricated set or a practical location. In Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, one of Riva's main objectives was to animate the personal drama in the Angels' lives. "In this story Natalie is about to commit herself to a serious relationship.
Dylan is leaving because she doesn't want to jeopardize her fellow Angels. And Alex is constantly lying to her parents and her boyfriend about what she does for a living. Then there is the appearance of Madison Lee, a past Angel."
Riva's job, he says, was to bring texture to the story beats. He envisioned Natalie's home as a small, simple beach house 'a modest first step at cohabitation. Alex's residence is shown to be extremely neat and perhaps just a bit lonely' except that it sometimes gets messy despite Alex's passion for order. Dylan lives in a hotel room and Riva attempts to give the sense that she has lived in this transient environment for years, which highlights her problems with commitment.
"You try to suggest character traits by where you put the actors, what props they use, the clothes they wear," says Riva. "It's something we all talk about and collaborate on."
Getting the right take on Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was a bit more challenging than the first film, Riva admits. "This film is a little bit more dangerous," he says. "More than anything else, it's about identity and individual personality. What is an Angel? Who are they really? What is going to happen to them in time?"
Though the original Charles Townsend Agency was blown up in the first film, Riva redesigned it for the sequel. He describes the location as "essentially a womb, the one place where the Angels share the same space. It's where they receive their directives from Charlie, a man who's never physically there but who is this benevolent father figure. I wanted it to be kind of Old World and clubby, with wood paneling, less contemporary and cozy than the first one, more august in a kind of Ôrumpled royalty' way. McG and I both made a conscious decision that it should feel appropriate for Charlie, but the girls should look and feel slightly out of place there."
The Charles Townsend Agency set was constructed to appear "disproportionately large so that you could get lost in it," Riva continues, "because in the film there are constant questions of identity and it elaborates on that thematic thread."
The film opens in a bar in Mongolia to which the Angels have been dispatched to rescue a kidnapped U.S. Marshal being held hostage. "The Mongolian bar was a way to start out with a big surprise, to give the audience a caper that threatens to go bad," says Riva. "When McG and I discussed this scene, I suggested it should take place somewhere very far away, a hostile environment filled with jeopardy, yet wild and eccentric. We created a fictitious place where these crazed brigands get together and have a good time like land pirates. There were many extras and a great deal of noise and texture. And in the middle of it all are the Angels, working outrageously together. You immediately sense they're going to come up with a cool solution."
The set required extensive research for Riva and his crew. Mongolian textiles, giant gas lighting fixtures and heavy furniture were created for the bar as well as the addition of a mechanical bull that Natalie rides, which is covered in faux yak fur, giant horns and bells, to give it an exotic touch.
With his longtime passion for still photography, McG says he took great pride in composing each shot, working alongside Carpenter. "If every frame isn't special, then why do it?" he asked Carpenter rhetorically. "So we'd reconfigure it and find a way to make it more special, more fun."
Carpenter particularly enjoyed lighting the Mongolian bar "because it was so far from where we had gone in the first film and it set the tone for the new movie from the get-go. We introduce Cameron in a snow-bunny costume atop the yak, Drew in a drinking contest in the background and Lucy downstairs in the basement rescuing Robert Patrick. Suddenly we realize we're in this weird, comedic place. It's now officially a Charlie's Angels movie."
One of the more lavish sets designed by Riva was for Madison Lee's hideout, known affectionately as "Madison's Lair." In order to find a space large enough for what he and McG envisioned, Riva and his art department went to downtown Los Angeles where they transformed Union Station's former ticket area into the place from which Madison directs her evil empire.
"Because it was Madison's Lair, I thought it should be really big and grand," recalls Riva. "The room has fifty-foot ceilings. We put in a fireplace that was so big you could stand two people one on top of the other and walk them into it. It was very extreme. Lauri Gaffin, our set decorator, filled the place with telescopes and black forest oversized furniture, and naked statues everywhere…with Demi walking around half-dressed. It was very sexy. We had a giant bed built that was practically as big as the Titanic. It had a huge canopy and a headboard with a golden sunray radiating out of it. Very stylized. It was crazy! We all loved it."
One of the largest sets to be completely constructed on a stage was of a Hollywood rooftop, for one of the film's major fight sequences. The rooftop is supposed to overlook Mann's Chinese Theatre where the premiere of a new film by Alex's boyfriend, Jason, is taking place and Madison Lee is trying to wreak havoc on the Angels' loved ones. Rather than take the chance of being exposed to the elements and noise, Riva decided to build the set on a soundstage. "It was a major undertaking," he recalls. "It's extremely difficult to make a huge set like that look real but Russell made it come alive. Without his interpretation, it would have been nothing."
Carpenter is amused by Riva's compliment. "One of the great things about being part of the Charlie's Angels team is that everybody gets credit for what someone else did. Half the time, good cinematography is actually good production design and vice versa. The Hollywood rooftop set was one that requi ed total collaboration. We had a 360-degree site that literally represented the entire Hollywood area at night. Our job was to light it in a way that made sense for the Angels' world. Things have to be real, but also fantastic, somewhere between fun and reality. And it all had to be tied in with a sequence shot on the real Hollywood Blvd. You always hope that it's a seamless transition from the real world to the world we create on stage."
The Treasure Chest interior where the Angels have another adventure was also constructed on a soundstage at Sony Studios. "McG and I love old musicals," acknowledges Riva. "I don't think you can go wrong by putting at least one or two dance numbers in any movie. And he's determined to do that any chance he gets. He wanted the appearance of a 'knockdown, dirty, seaside bar' for the Treasure Chest. But he wanted the interior to be a total surprise, so we came up with a sexy red strip joint kind-of-place with circular fish tanks mounted in the walls, and a sexy floorshow all enveloped in this red plastic patent leather." (Diaz's per formance in a giant martini glass in this scene pays homage to and is inspired by Playboy beauty Dita Von Teese's risque´ and renowned burlesque act.)
Over 500 yards of shiny red vinyl was used to quilt the walls and more than 3000 silver and gold coins were strung up to make curtains. Aquariums filled with dozens of exotic fish were set into the walls behind the bar. Carpenter admires McG's showmanship and his ability to "know just how far he can go before he hangs himself. He has a great and joyful appreciation of the old-style Hollywood filmmaking. When I first met him, I was amazed by how easily he referenced films from the Golden Age of MGM. He could talk about Ben Hur and Show Boat and '60s films like Viva Las Vegas as effortlessly as last week's best-selling music video."
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