Shutter Island: The Design
12 March 2010
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Shutter Island sees Martin Scorsese once again reunite with Leonardo DiCaprio for their fourth movie together.
As soon as U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule arrive on Shutter Island, they are thrust into a strikingly Gothic atmosphere that mirrors the terror and anxiety they feel within.
With calamitous weather, howling winds and driving rain ratcheting up the urgency of their investigation, they are confronted with a disorienting realm of imposing brick buildings, elongated corridors, claustrophobic cells and craggy, water-logged surroundings.
To fuse this starkly impressionistic world out of chillingly real locations, Martin Scorsese needed extraordinarily detailed design work from his artistic crew.
The director turned to many of his loyal, longtime collaborators to tackle this creative task, among them the award-winning quartet of director of photography Robert Richardson, production designer Dante Ferretti, costume designer Sandy Powell and editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
The task of evoking the film’s panoply of visual moods, from mystery and confusion to fury and panic, both physical and psychological, fell to director of photography Richardson, a regular Scorsese collaborator who has won Oscars® for his work on The Aviator and for Oliver Stone’s JFK.
Richardson used the camera creatively, sinuously, expressionistically to forge the sensation of moving through a spiraling fog of unanswered questions and lingering uncertainty.
He and Scorsese garnered inspiration from a whole library’s worth of classic films, not only from the previously mentioned features, but also from the camera movement and lighting of Roman Polanski’s groundbreaking studies in abject horror, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac and Rosemary’s Baby.
Scorsese explains: "The idea was to come up with a way of reflecting a state of mind in the lighting, the tone of the picture and the island itself. The look of any film is important but if you’re doing something that deals with street life, say in the case of The Departed, there is a simpler approach to visuals, whereas with Shutter Island, a state of mind had to be conveyed in every frame.
"We had to create a place that was more than just a setting, and there was a constant discussion about that between myself, Bob Richardson and also Dante Ferretti," he says. "There is a visual sense of not understanding what’s going on around you, who’s really in charge, who’s in control."
"Bob Richardson is one of a kind," adds Bradley Fischer. "From the first shots I saw, the variations in the lighting and the mood were so transporting that I immediately thought, ‘Wow, you can tell Bob Richardson is shooting this movie.’ He’s one of many brilliant people who showed up for Marty."
Richardson’s work provided an additional thread of inspiration to the cast. Says DiCaprio: "The look is almost like an M.C. Escher painting, where things are just a little off and you’re never quite sure what you’re really seeing. There’s an omnipresent feeling of being locked into an inescapable environment."
After long conversations about film references and the structure of the film and characters, Scorsese set out on a scout with Ferretti and Richardson to find a stand-in for Shutter Island itself.
They were looking not just for the right logistics, but the right feel. Several East Coast locations were considered but, ultimately, the filmmakers were drawn to the rustic, rocky shores of Peddocks Island, less than 100 miles off of Boston and which was settled by American Indians prior to the arrival of European settlers and has been used by farmers since the mid-1600s.
Equally key was the search to find a real hospital that could stand in for the imposing, unsettling complex of buildings that is Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a quest that would take the filmmakers on an intriguing ride into the history of mental asylums.
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