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Designing man >> From Zardoz to Richard Attenborough's Grey Owl, Anthony Pratt is a master of production design by MATTHEW HAYS
Production design all too often falls into just such an overlooked category. Make a film look good as its production designer, and people might not single you out; but make a mistake, and audiences do seem to notice. Anthony Pratt may not be a household name, but his designs have appeared in umpteen famous films: Hope and Glory, The Butcher Boy, Excalibur and The Man in the Iron Mask, among many others. Now in town to production design for Oscar-winning director Richard Attenborough's Grey Owl (starring 007 himself Pierce Brosnan), Pratt is also celebrating his 30th anniversary in the business during his first working stint in Montreal. "Montreal is very good for shooting," says the affable Pratt, who has high praise for the city's architecture and efficient film crews. "The people I'm working with have been wonderful. They're very enthusiastic about the subject and the work." The work of a production designer launches months before a film shoot begins. As Pratt explains it, the job requires a careful reading of the script, finding appropriate locations for scenes, sketching the sets and then overseeing their construction. For Grey Owl--a turn-of-the-century story about a British man who passes for native, and later suffers the consequences after his true identity is found out--the toughest obstacle was the distance between locales. "All of our main locations are an hour and a half away from each other," he explains, "so it's tricky to control things." Pratt spent time researching the period from information culled from the Ontario archives. "The actual period references are quite good--there are a number of photos of that period." Complications did arise, however, when the film's main setpiece, a cabin Brosnan's character lives in, burned to the ground one night last month. "It was a small set but nonetheless a crucial one. We'd been shooting for over a week. The props went up and everything. It all had to be replaced." But that mishap was nothing compared to what Pratt faced in 1970, when he was production designing for a film called The Last Grenade, which ironically enough, featured Attenborough in a supporting role. During the shoot, some explosive devices accidentally went off, destroying an entire set. "I got no sleep that night," recalls Pratt, who had to rebuild the set entirely in short order. Scanning Pratt's lengthy list of achievements, his career is a grab bag which encompasses the good, the bad and the bizarre. There are Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy and Michael Collins, numerous films by John Boorman (including the cult oddity Zardoz, a 1974 Sean Connery film about a group of 21st-century intellectuals), and the Mel Brooks' production Solarbabies which, Pratt says, "you'll be forgiven for not having heard of." Among the most challenging for Pratt were the ultra-elaborate sets of Excalibur, Boorman's 1981 riff on the King Arthur legend; Pratt says Zardoz was a complex project too, a futuristic sci-fi "look into the unknown." Another stellar piece of production design came with Naked Tango, a film in which Pratt painstakingly recreated Buenos Aires in the '20s. Though the London-born-and-based Pratt has never entertained any notions of working in front of the camera, there's thespian fame in his family tree. "When I was eight, I was told that I had a famous film star for a great uncle. Boris Karloff is my grandfather's brother. His real name was William Henry Pratt." Pratt met Karloff once, in the late '60s, when the elder actor's health was failing. And Pratt says family lore of the famous horror movie icon involves Montreal. "He came here from London with about $15 in his pocket--in one of the coldest winters Montreal had ever had. He was sort of beached here. Then he went to Vancouver, and from there to Los Angeles." Where the rest, of course, is celluloid history. "He was very well liked in the industry. He was always happy to be working, he felt happy to do things like Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer." For Pratt, who studied general arts courses and theatre design years ago in Britain, trained on various film shoots and now works regularly for heavyweights like Boorman, Jordan and Attenborough, advice to newcomers aspiring to make it into the field is straightforward and no-nonsense: "Meeting deadlines is important. Be there on time. The minute you're not, no one's interested." Grey Owl is slated for release in 1999
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Dustin Hoffman once said he had trouble with the whole notion of the Oscars, simply because the awards focused on a finished film's glitzier elements--the actors, directors and writers--while often overlooking those who work behind the scenes.