After Yang is a science fiction film written, directed, and edited by Kogonada - a South Korean-born American filmmaker known for his video essays on audiovisual content analysis. The main plot of the film follows the story of a family trying to repair their damaged artificial intelligence in a post-apocalyptic world connected by technology and nature.
Alexandra Schaller, in charge of production design and the appearance of the sets, imagined a future that translates these considerations: From the family house that recovers the original design by Joseph Eichler of the 1960s, going through the importance of outdoor space and vegetation, to each of the materials that had to be non-disposable, renewable or biodegradable.
We interviewed Schaller to find out what this new world can teach about the future of architecture.
Fabian Dejtiar (FD): In "After Yang" you created a sci-fi world based on nature. Both natural materials and environments are part of the storytelling design. What is the inspiration behind this?
Alexandra Schaller (AS): In our early creative conversations, (director) Kogonada and I discussed the visual world of the film that we wanted to create. The movie is intentionally set in an unspecified time and place, but the backdrop of the world is a post-apocalyptic period. The idea was that a great natural calamity has occurred, humanity has undergone some kind of reckoning, and we’re now living in a world with less destruction of the natural environment and more of a symbiosis between humans and nature.
One of the central themes of the film is the idea of connection. Connection to others, but I also interpreted it as a meditation on our connection to the world around us, to something greater than ourselves. As this is quite an interior film, both existentially and spatially, we sought every design opportunity to bring the outside world in, in order to reinforce the idea of interconnection.
As a result, it was important for us to incorporate plant life into all the environments, as was the way that specific things were engineered to work with nature. That overarching idea infused the entire design of the film: we created a self-driving car powered by plants and illuminated trees in the Museum of Technology. Kira works in a botanical lab, and the center of the family home is a beautiful tree that can be seen from everywhere in the house. A small detail that might go unnoticed is that all the floor planks in the house are designed in a pattern where they appear magnetized towards the central courtyard and towards the tree.
What’s wonderful about designing a movie set in the future—which is a time period that doesn’t exist—is that it allows you to create a version of a future world that you wish to see, so that’s what we did!
FD: I have been told that internal “rules of the world” were created to guide the design process and bring the creative departments together in order to have a creatively harmonious film. What were these rules?
AS: Taking a respect for nature as my guide, I only made one hard rule for the overall aesthetic of the film, which was that there were to be no props or scenery that were immediately disposable and everything had to be either renewable or biodegradable, so there’s no plastic in the world. Though the effect is quite subtle, I think it can be felt in the design of the movie as that concept is also infused with Arjun Bhasin’s wonderful costume design as well as many of the props and set dressing that we created for the film.
As far as the sets go, we used a lot of natural and untreated woods, and for metal details, we used copper, as it has an infinite recyclable life. The decoration of the home also includes a lot of organic elements like natural fiber fabrics and clay ceramics. Choices like that went into the design, which I think contributes to the overall feeling of texture and warmth.
FD: Could you tell us about your work process? How did you translate all that on the set?
It takes a village to make a movie, and on After Yang, I had wonderful creative collaborators on my team to help bring my ideas to life. They say that the art director builds the house and the set decorator makes it a home, and it’s really true on this project—that goes for the house and all the other environments that we created. My art director Max Wixom, set decorator JoAnne Ling and graphic designer Matt Vidalis (among many others!) were all instrumental in translating the details I imagined for the world onto the screen.
FD: I understand that the Fleming home acts as a main character. What is the story behind this?
AS: One of the many things that drew me to the design of this story was that the Fleming home is really the heart of the family. Much of the movie takes place inside the house, and it’s through its design that we cue the audience to the kind of future the characters inhabit.
There’s also an overarching feeling of absence in the movie once Yang is no longer part of the family unit, and one of the ways Kogonada wanted to feel this was through empty shots of the house, allowing the viewer to experience the home as its own character, with its own presence on screen.
We were initially debating whether or not to build the Fleming home as a stage set, but we ultimately selected a location that we found and modified a house where the bones were conducive to the types of visual compositions Kogonada was after that could reinforce the themes of the story.
The house we chose is an original Eichler house from the 1960s, of which there are only three in New York State where we were shooting, most of the others having been built in California at that time. When we found the house, much of the original 1960s character remained, but everything had been painted over in white and some parts were in disrepair. I was delighted by the challenge of making this very iconic period house work for our future world and giving it a new life.
We embarked on a process of restoring it back to its beautiful self—but not really back, more forward. We tried to imagine how this kind of house might look in the future while trying to stay true to the intention of the original design.
The Eichler had a lovely flow and a beautiful interplay between the interior and exterior. We planted a tree in the central courtyard so that you could see greenery from wherever you were in the house, which was both visually and thematically important.
We wanted the design of our future to be easy, practical, comfortable and cozy, with spaces designed for living so we removed some walls to create a more open and functional space, introduced new materials to bring back the texture and added color to re-introduce warmth.
Much of the furniture in the home is modular, like the huge living room sofa for example, which could easily be tucked away or stacked if the family needed the living room for other activities, like for the weekly dance competition.
Through the design choices, I tried to give the home its own unique character specific to our world that would create a lasting impression for the audience.
