How do you make the dimly lit space of a strip club feel like an exciting location on film? How do you decorate a mansion so that it conveys a sense of wealth and yet looks under-furnished enough to be the home of a twenty-something young man? How do you find locations in Brooklyn that feel lived-in and not like the same generic landmarks that Hollywood is always using to evoke New York City?
These were the challenges that production designer Stephen Phelps faced while working on Anora. The free-wheeling comedy-drama, currently a darling of awards season and a frontrunner for the Oscars, centers on Brooklyn stripper Ani (she prefers not to go by her full name of “Anora”), played in an electrifying breakout performance by Mikey Madison. Ani can’t believe her luck when Vanya (Mark Eidelstein), one of her clients at the strip club, turns out to be the son of an extremely wealthy Russian oligarch, and what begins as some routine sex work between the two turns into a whirlwind romance and then a quickie marriage in Las Vegas. But when Vanya’s family learn what’s happened, they send their enforcers to intervene and break the couple up, shifting the film’s second half into a mix of seedy thriller and screwball comedy.
That’s a lot of ground to cover, and Phelps does an expert job of using the locations to detail Ani’s long, strange journey from working-class Brooklyn to a privileged bubble of wealth to a frantic search for Vanya among the shops and restaurants of Brighton Beach. His work appears seamless onscreen – you never doubt you’re looking at real, lived-in places – which is even more impressive considering that he made a lot of changes to make them look photogenic and had to deal with the difficulties of using real businesses. “We had to go (to the strip club) on three different weekends, because we could only shoot on their off days,” Phelps admits. “So I had to set it up, reset it, then go back next weekend, do it again. It was kind of a hard one to work with.”
Phelps sat down with Awards Focus to talk about his journey from property master to production designer, helping realize Baker’s vision for how New York City should look, and the even crazier parts of Vanya’s mansion we didn’t get to see.
Awards Focus: What kind of team did you have working on this film? And can you talk about your rise from property master to production designer?
Stephen Phelps: My team was a group of people I’d been working with on the previous ones that I had designed, but which I worked with less as a property master. But yeah, my art director Ryan Fitzgerald, we go way back — we’ve written a script together, and we were making movies as kids in my backyard.
And then my brother Chris was my set decorator. They came on when I shifted from prop master to production design and I started making smaller movies again. So we’re doing very scrappy stuff.
Bringing them along was extremely helpful because we have a very quick shorthand and we’re able to not only look at the big picture, but then work very hands on. And so unlike the really small ones I had done beforehand, they were like essential. And then as new movies came in, they were still up to the task.
So yeah, they’ve been great to work with. Those are the two core members of my team that I’ve been working with.
AF: How did you first connect to writer-director Sean Baker?
Phelps: Sean and I met through producer Alex Coco. I had been the set decorator on this movie, The Sweet East, that was directed by Sean Price Williams. And Coco was there as a producer on The Sweet East. And he saw me working and was like, okay, this guy is able to problem-solve and get his hands dirty and figure stuff out.
And Sean really wanted that type of energy; he wanted a really small crew, a very intimate kind of thing. I did a few interviews with Sean and we hit it off.
AF: How much time did you have between getting the script and getting to work on the film? And did you run into any difficulties with the strikes?
Phelps: It was right before the strikes. So yeah, I had gotten the script — actually it was a scriptment. I didn’t actually have access to a full script. It’s probably like a 50-page general idea of the film, that I read in the summer of 2022 when I was working on a movie upstate.
I went through that, and I had a couple of conversations with Sean about what he wanted the look of the movie to be. So I put together boards and wrote a description of the types of colors we were thinking about.
And he was like, yeah, that all sounds great. And pretty much as soon as I got back from that, we started doing some scouts at the mansion and the strip club and everything, and then went into full-on prep at the end of the year. So I had December and January to prep before we started shooting in February.
AF: Can you talk more about what Sean said he wanted for the look of the film?
Phelps: The main thing that he had said in the first conversation was he wanted the movie to be very gray with pops of red. He wanted the whites and blacks and grays of New York in the winter, those kind of muted tones, and then add the pops of red and everything. And then once I started doing the boards and looking at the strip club, it’s like, well, we’re obviously going to be bringing in those blues and purples as well.
AF: Did you and Sean discuss what aspects of Brooklyn to focus on? I feel like the characters go to very specific locations that you don’t always see in movies.
Phelps: Yeah, it was definitely focused on Brighton Beach. And then when we were shooting it, it expanded to Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and the mansion was in Mill Basin.
The strip club ended up changing to a different location. It was originally written as something like Pumps, which is kind of near me in Bushwick. But that wasn’t the right vibe for the interior. And then he found a strip club called HQ in Midtown Manhattan, and we weren’t like, oh, we’re going to show Midtown Manhattan. But that just happened to be where the club was. But yeah, we very much wanted to show Brighton Beach, which you see less of.
AF: Did you change a lot to the strip club to make it look better on film?
Phelps: Yeah, it was a big place. The location provided a lot, but they had a lot of black plexiglass that would just look like nothing in the back. So I put up a lot of red mylar and some sparkly wallpapers around.
We definitely moved a lot of the furniture around. We did a lot of practical lighting changes, specifically. Also in the beginning when you’re in the booths, those had something similar to that when we had scouted it. And then when we went there, they had removed all that stuff. So I ended up installing curtains and setting up the booths in that way for that opening shot of the film, which also has all the red mylar behind. So you see that shining through the reflections of the black plexiglass.
And I designed the heart logo, because the place was actually called HQ and they didn’t have that neon sign. So I had that neon sign made. The place provided a lot, but it was also a lot of work. And we had to go there on three different weekends, because we could only shoot on their off days. So I had to set it up, reset it, then go back next weekend, do it again. It was kind of a hard one to work with.
AF: Were there any other locations in the script that posed a particular challenge for you?
Phelps: I mean, the mansion was the initial, not necessarily worry, but the focus just to make sure that that came across correctly. The location was great, but it was very lived in. When you go in there, a lot of the furniture was stacked on top of itself. So it was a lot of clearing out space and then setting everything up and bringing in a bunch of pieces that we could break and shatter, you know, like the coffee table and paintings. Just get it all set up so that they can go through the break-in scene properly.
But yeah, focusing on making sure that location was correct was a big focus initially. But then they’re just going to all these different places. So we had to make sure we found places that we could actually work with, and we had to go scouting almost every day for all of December and January. But I mean, that part’s fun.
AF: What really struck me about the mansion is that it does a great job of conveying a sense of character. You look at that place and you understand it represents real wealth, but at the same time, it feels hilariously under-furnished in a way that shows a lot about Vanya and how empty he is. Can you talk a little about how you wanted to reveal character through that one location?
Phelps: Yeah, you’re kind of on to it with that statement of it being a little under-furnished. I like it being almost like a cold palace and not really providing the proper warmth of a family home, especially because this feels like a secondary home for that family.
The place actually had more furnishings than I had, and I had swapped some stuff out, used a lot of their stuff, but just kind of rearranged it. Things were stacked on top of each other, just because they did have different seating areas where you could sit together, so it just looked super busy in the frame.
We wanted to make it less cluttered, let the marble floors shine. It’s just an easier read when you had less stuff. And I thought that also showed how big it is, because a lot of the time on film, when you get into these places in person they feel really big, but it really shrinks down as soon as you get a camera in there, especially because you’re not seeing anything behind you.
So no matter where we put the camera everything shrinks down, and I wanted to make sure to keep it feeling opulent and enlarge the space. Toning down the furnishings really helped with that.
AF: Were there any particular difficulties in shooting in that big a space?
Phelps: For sure. It’s funny, it is a big space, but then once you have the entire crew and a lot of the holdings in the basement…it was big, but it was also nice, because it’d be working on building the cigar cabinet up in the office while also still being able to be nearby in case something’s going on downstairs that they need my eyes on while they’re setting up the next shot.
So it was large, but because we had a lot to shoot there, we’re there for so many days, we’re able to work intimately while also just getting everything else ready. I mean, we had to remove the carpet that they had in there because we weren’t going to be breaking the glass on their rugs, and I had to bring in my own. And the rug was like a 1000-pound rug or something like that. And then we were trying to get that down the stairwell, because it can’t fit in the elevator.
So it was definitely challenging, but it was a great location to work with.
AF: Were there any ideas you had for that location that you ended up not using?
Phelps: Definitely. I know we had a whole walk-in closet scene where the characters are having sex in there. It was a fancy closet, and they have all this designer stuff already in there. But everyone’s closet looks like a mess. So making that actually look nice was a challenge. And we did a great job. But that scene was cut.
There was a lot of the mansion you don’t end up seeing. There’s like one bit where they talk about the cryo chamber, and we shot a thing with her in a cryo-chamber thing, you don’t get to see that. But you know, I don’t think you need to.
AF: Do you know why it was cut?
Phelps: I don’t know that. I mean, we shot it. I think it just wasn’t needed. You get the idea. They mentioned the cryo chamber, they come through and you have the moment with the cars, which ended up being great. They had mirrors in there because we only had like three cars, but then the back mirror makes it look like feel like more.
AF: How did you find this house?
Phelps: Sean found it. He had it already when I first talked to him. He said he had looked up what’s the biggest mansion or the most expensive mansion in the Brighton Beach area or something like that. He either found an article about it or found it on Zillow and then had our locations guy reach out and get in touch with the people to secure it. So Sean was able to find that very early on in the process.
It was originally written as the Oceanic Condominiums. It was going to be the penthouse in one of those. And then he found this place and kind of shifted the script to that.
AF: That’s a big change, because obviously if Vanya is living in a penthouse then he’s in a building with a lot of other people, and that complicates the big hostage situation.
Phelps: Yeah, it ended up being great that we went with a mansion where it’s its own separate entity. And especially for shooting, being in a building with all those other people ends up getting extremely complicated.
AF: How are you enjoying the success of Anora, both at the box office and during awards season?
Phelps: I’m really happy that it’s happening. It’s very strange, I’m used to working on these really small movies and just having fun making them and doing the best we can. I’m excited to get other people interested in seeing what we’ve made. It’s pretty wild that it’s getting such a great response and I’m really happy for that.
AF: What are you working on next?
Phelps: I have a couple scripts I have to read for next year and they would start early on, but I haven’t decided exactly what.
I did this film called Peter Hujar’s Day, directed by Ira Sachs, which just got into Sundance and Berlinale. So that’s good. And I just finished up a movie with Michael Covino called Splitsville, which I’m pretty excited about too.