Movie review for the day (Argo)

Mekado Murphy has an article in The New York Times about Argo:

The production designer Sharon Seymour has collaborated with Ben Affleck on all three films he has directed, creating gritty contemporary Boston sets for Gone Baby Gone and The Town. But Argo, Affleck’s  thriller set amid the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, presented a new challenge for the team. She and Affleck wanted to recreate the looks of the period, without drawing attention to them and making the film feel like an episode of That ’70s Show.
“There was a lot of anxiety in America at the time, both political and economic,” Seymour said during a recent interview in New York City, “and we didn’t want this movie to feel glossy and fantasy-like. It needed to have a reality base, but also needed to touch on the color and the world of the ’70s, which is really different than how we live now.”
To start, Affleck sent Seymour some documentaries and a box of books about the hostage crisis. Then she researched the locations  in the script; like what the Warner Brothers studio lot looked like at the time, and the differences between government buildings in Washington. She and her team also found former Iranian students who shared photographs from their school years in the ’70s. With every set, the team looked for one element that grounded it in the period, whether a specific kind of carpet or a particular color of wall. Seymour discusses some of her design ideas for Argo:

“In the Washington scenes, we were looking for more monotones and more repetition, in set decorating and color and props,” Seymour said. “The CIA wasn’t moving completely up to date to 1979 at the time. Government functions fifteen years behind in terms of what you can get allocated.” This was reflected in the more simple, streamlined sets for these scenes.

Some of the CIA footage was shot in Washington, but the CIA offices were created in a basement room at The Los Angeles Times. Seymour and her team spent nearly two weeks dressing the space, repainting the walls and adding period-appropriate desks. “The one thing I left was the carpet,” she said.

The Tehran exteriors were shot in Istanbul. The crew scheduled the shoot around a Turkish holiday, which meant access to the grand bazaar used in a sequence.

But many of the Tehran interiors, including the Canadian ambassador’s residence where the Americans were  hiding, was shot in Los Angeles. “We wanted that space to feel really claustrophobic,” Seymour said. “So we dressed it as if Ken and Pat (the ambassador and his wife) had a lot of things they brought with them from their various postings. They had layers of curtains because the houseguests couldn’t open the curtains.” The room was filled with paintings and furniture to contribute to the closed-in feel.

For the scenes in Hollywood, many of which were shot on the Warner Brothers lot, Seymour was aiming for a lighter mood. “The color palette was more of what we were classically thinking of as ’70s colors,” she said. Seymour was able to have a little more fun in these scenes, including a sequence in which the makeup artist John Chambers (played by John Goodman) is working on a low-budget science fiction film set. Seymour’s team created the set-within-a-set, using the bright colors of movies from the era.

The production office, however, was more traditional. “It was a very standard production office that you can still rent on the Warner Brothers lot to this day,” she said.

Rico says that Ms. Seymour is one of those unsung 'below the line' people who make movies look like the real thing...