In her third collaboration with writer and director Nia DaCosta, production designer Cara Brower transforms Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” into a bold, modern, cinematic vision. Set in 1950s England, “Hedda” reimagines the classic play through a modern lens of female agency and emotional repression, capturing the tension and elegance of a woman fighting to escape societal expectation.
The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, stars Tessa Thompson as the restless newlywed Hedda. When the brilliant and magnetic Eileen Lovberg (Nina Hoss) reenters her life, Hedda’s carefully constructed world begins to unravel. Over the course of a decadent party, Hedda’s scheming gets her caught in a dangerous web of desire, jealousy, and deceit. Imogen Poots and Tom Bateman round out DaCosta’s stellar ensemble, in a story that explores the cost of longing and a woman’s refusal to be contained.
For Brower, “Hedda” offered a rare opportunity to create an entire world within a single location. After scouting over 200 properties across the UK, she discovered Flintham Hall, a romantic estate that would become a character in itself. Following her Emmy-nominated work on “Twin Peaks”, the “Candyman” and “The Marvels” production designer relished the chance to return to a more intimate creative space, focusing on the fine details that define character and tone.
“It was really an exciting chance to get back into the character details, which you don’t really get to think about on something as big as a Marvel film,” Brower shares. “On “Hedda”, I was using a completely different part of my brain. I felt like my bandwidth had expanded, and when I watched the film, those little details really stood out, and it felt so fulfilling.”
Brower spoke with Awards Focus about the meticulous search for the perfect estate, the experience of living in rural isolation during production, and her collaboration with other department heads to bring DaCosta’s vision to life.
Awards Focus: What’s been surprising to you about how audiences have received the film?
Cara Brower: I was surprised that even in Toronto, every single time that Tessa and Nia are doing a Q&A, the moderator asks about the house in the film because it’s almost a character. It felt like we all were locked in, and that’s a testament to Nia and how she selected all the department heads. We were really on the same page, and you can tell that in the final product. I’m just so proud of it.
AF: It really did feel like a strong collaboration. Can you talk a bit about reading the script and then envisioning what the colors in the interiors would look like?
Brower: When I first read the script, there was a scene where Hedda eats a piece of rotten fruit by accident. And I thought, oh, that’s just such a gorgeous metaphor for this whole film. She’s gorgeous, and so is the estate, but it shouldn’t be too beautiful. There’s something unsettling about the whole atmosphere.
I was really inspired by the socialites of the time, and that drove the whole reasoning behind the look. I read a lot about Gloria Vanderbilt and Lee Rodwell, and Una Guinness, especially as somebody who was really inspired when I saw her estate in Ireland.
Una had decorated her house outrageously, with rose colored carpets, purple satin bedding, and a whole canopy around the four-post bed in bright magenta. She would have these weeklong parties where Brian Jones and Mike Jagger and Lucian Freud and all these bohemians and artists of the time would come. I loved how bold it was, but I took down the color palette because Hedda is not that person. We wanted the whole atmosphere to really create this moody tableau for the whole film.
AF: How did the collaborations with the heads of departments unfold in designing the different areas of the house and securing the color palette?
Brower: Lindsay Pugh, the costume designer, and our cinematographer Sean Bobbit, and I, had both worked with Nia on and off for three years before on “The Marvels”. So, we had already had a really good dialogue, and we all were very dialed into Nia’s taste. And thankfully, my taste and Nia’s tastes are very aligned. Lindsay had also picked up on the rotten fruit. So when we spoke initially, we were both on the same page about the dark, moody colors. They’re so period correct, too. I collect paint charts from different decades. The color palette in the forties is very, very funky and desaturated. And it has this moody burgundy and, almost like, overcooked pea soup. And the purple is just a dusty, dirty purple. That’s really what I honed in on to create this atmosphere that was lush and had color and was flamboyant and bold, but also wasn’t going to be distracting.
The bedroom was such a fun piece to design, too. I knew that Sean was really taken with the idea of doing a really cold color palette up there. He was really influenced by the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. His work is very cold, with gorgeous saturated blue and cold lighting coming in. We looked at a lot of boudoir and Hollywood glamor. I also love the bedroom of Lauren Beall, which also had some desaturated kind of floral motif wallpaper. There are really intimate scenes in here, and Hedda is a seductress, so it needed to be lush. We used lots of silks and satins and animal skins, and the carpet looks velvety, but also contrasted in a way that feels really cold and sort of unappealing. We used a lot of metallics, and then we put mirrors all over the house, and it added to this element of Hedda really using her environment to her advantage to watch everyone.
AF: It’s fascinating hearing about all these features that add depth to Hedda as a person. She’s also meticulous in designing the long dinner table for the party. How did the table setting all come together?
Brower: I worked with this fantastic set decorator, Stella Fox. She works in the UK and she does a lot of very interesting, smaller, independent period films. She really knows how to stretch a budget. She already had the team ready to go, and she knows where to get the fabric, she knows where to get the set dressing, she can think outside of the box, which was the most important thing I was looking for. We were aligned the whole time. We made up this backstory for ourselves to justify the motivation for all these furnishings.
AF: What was the backstory?
Brower: Hedda and George had just been on their honeymoon in Europe. George had been going to libraries every day for six months. Hedda had no interest in doing that. So, what is she doing? She’s out shopping at antique stores and thinking about what to entertain with. In our mind, she had shipped all this stuff from Europe, which we did. The bar came from Italy, and a lot of the furniture came from Europe, and Stella reupholstered everything.
The dining room was really fun to do. We painted it this dark, kind of plummy burgundy. I had a couple of references that I really loved, like David Hicks, this really avant-garde British interior designer. We also looked at Salvador Dali’s dinner parties, which he would have all the time. And all these artists and bohemians would come. There’s a whole book on it with the recipes. The dinner table settings were exquisite, so we looked carefully at what he had chosen and what he had done.
I have watched the film several times now, and I look at all the little things that we did. We wanted to be a little bit out of the box with it, and surprising and do something that maybe George’s guests would be a little shocked by. If you look closely, there are animal skin placemats. There are shiny black candelabras. All the tableware is shiny and glittery and sparkly and in a kind of gothic fairytale type of way.
AF: The whole evening is like a dream sequence, and in the cold light of day, Hedda looks completely different and holds herself differently. The collaboration between the production design and the lighting spoke to her as a character and what she’s internalized as well. It’s all so sumptuous.
Brower: I’m so glad that it felt like you were going into a world because that’s exactly what we were hoping to achieve. We really wanted it to feel like it was a kind of time warp. When you stepped into that house, you were stepping into Hedda’s world, where she controlled everything. We wanted the color palette and all the paintings and the furnishings to feel almost oppressively suffocating in a way that really made it feel like you stepped into another reality.
AF: Within the estate, you also have the lake and a hedged maze. How did you go about finding the perfect location for the film?
Brower: Nia, when she writes the script, is always very specific. She has a clear vision, but then she’s also so open. She really wants you to collaborate with her and bring ideas to the table. But in the script, she was very specific with the layout of the house and how the rooms connected together and how she wanted to move through the house and have little corridors and nooks. I vetted around 200 houses for a year.
AF: Oh wow, that’s so many!
Brower: It was so fun, and it sounds crazy to vet that many, but obviously I didn’t go to all of those in person. I had a scout, and I would look at photographs first. It was very easy to rule out the ones that weren’t going to work because we needed to have a lake that had the house right in the background. She wanted to be able to go into it, and you can see from the house to the lake. I really believed that I could find this house if I looked hard enough. I looked at Georgian houses, and I looked at houses that were more baroque. I looked at houses that were more medieval and Elizabethan. It needed to have a grand staircase and a lake with the house in the background, and an epic ballroom. Those were my key anchors. Also, we wanted to drop a chandelier and shoot guns [laughs].
I was intrigued when I saw the outside of Flintham Hall because it’s Italian in architecture. I didn’t see another house that was styled like that. It had all these beautiful carvings and details and windows and asymmetry. It had a romance about it, but also looked a little bit crumbly. I just really believed that this is something that would be graphic and eye-catching from the outside. But then it also had the fabulous interior, and it was just kismet that it had the lake and that relationship.
The maze is always something we had talked about building on the property, and we had a whole space picked out. We had a design, but because of those wonderful factors, time and money, we ended up going to a maze. There were not that many hedged mazes in the UK. Something like twenty are spread out all over the country. It just so happened that 20 minutes away is the estate that they used in “Bridgerton,” and it had a hedge maze.
AF: The logistics sound so interesting. Were you also having to consider where the cast and crew would reside with respect to Flintham? Did you stay on the estate?
Brower: We didn’t stay on the estate, but there were our little villages nearby. I was one of the only Americans on the crew, and I stayed in a village that was 20 minutes away. All the prepping crew would come up during the week and stay in the little pub or cottage, but it was intense for me. For everybody else, there’s a train that goes from London right to this place, which was so great, but it also meant that everybody went home on the weekends. So then I was there in a very beautiful, picturesque cottage, and it did get a little lonely on the weekend. But to be honest, I think maybe that seeped into my conscious subconscious because I could see how this would be a really oppressive life for a woman who really wanted to be out in the modern world, sort of expressing herself.
There’s a scene where Hedda’s like, “Oh my God, George’s not going to get this professorship. Everybody’s gonna leave. I’m gonna be here. What am I gonna do?” I get it because I was there day after day with nobody there on the weekends. It can be very lonely when you’re living in a part of the country where you can go to art galleries and the fantastic clubs in London and meet interesting people. I can imagine what that would’ve been like for someone like Hedda in that time.
AF: “Hedda” marks your third collaboration with Nia after “Candyman” and “The Marvels”. How stark was the contrast between working on “The Marvels” and then “Hedda”?
Brower: It was a lot. I have such a whole new respect for anybody who does something like Marvel films, because it can be very rough at times, and you really have to be on your A-game and work harder than you’ve worked on any other project. I think that is the film that I learned the most on, and when we all came to “Hedda”, Nia and I talked about this, we took so much with us that we had learned on “The Marvels”, which is kind of a crazy thing to say, because it’s so different and it’s shot very differently. Hedda is all in one location. There are no visual effects. We’re building on location, we’re not building on sound stages.
But I feel like we were so much more efficient. We knew exactly how to get everything done. We knew how to work really fast. We already had a dialogue, and we were thrilled to be doing something so intimate again.