Interview: Beth Mickle On Being A Rare Female Production Designer and How She Recreated The Original Penn Station for ‘Motherless Brooklyn’

Think of a production designer… a female production designer. Hannah Bleacher? Fiona Crombie? Judy Becker? Who comes to mind? There aren’t many. If we drill down to this Awards season, our list of possible contenders jumps to four candidates: Fiona Crombie for The King, Barbara Ling for Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Jade Healy for Marriage Story, and Beth Mickle for Motherless Brooklyn. Interesting!

Beth Mickle is the second female production designers I’ve spoken to this season. “It is very small.” She tells me about her peer group. “I know for the old guard, and the crowd that has been doing it for the most part, just one of thirty, or forty people was a woman. That was back in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s.”

Mickle is currently in Toronto working on Suicide Squad and was acclaimed for her work on Collateral Beauty and Focus. This year she’s in the mix for Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn. “It is starting to shift a bit. In the indie world where the movie budgets are $5,000,000 or below. It’s beginning to be around 50/50. In the bigger budget world, I can’t tell you how many people come up to me and say, “I’ve never been on set with a female production designer.” It’s nuts. Among the top 20 names of production designers that everyone knows, only three or four are women.” Fiona Crombie (The Favourite, The King) and Sarah Greenwood (Anna Karenina, Atonement) come to mind. “Those are the iconic production designers.”

Mickle teases about Suicide Squad 2. “It’s really fun. Our art director is really big about having everything in camera and not CGI.” She’s excited about doing real explosions and working with no blue screen. “It’s a craftsman dream.” She says and points out that only two women have worked on superhero movies. The other being Hannah Bleacher (Black Panther). Mickle is optimistic about how this could change in ten years.

For Motherless Brooklyn, Mickle recreated the original Penn Station.

The original Penn Station was built in 1910. It was torn down in the 1960s and replaced because it wasn’t an architectural piece that New Yorkers were very proud of.

Edward really wanted to make sure that we shot that scene there just to emphasize the theme of what modernization can do to a city landscape. He wanted to show how you end up losing some of these architectural relics when you’re trying to modernize. However, as it didn’t exist, we had to figure out a way to do it on a shoestring budget. Our budget for the film was $25 million which is really small.

We had a stage at Gold Coast Studios in Long Island. It was this big empty space around 100 x 200. The whole scene plays out when Edward opens the door and steps through a hallway and comes down this set of stairs. From that point, when he comes through, that was all one continuous set that we had on the stage. It was a giant collaboration between myself, the cinematographer (Dick Pope) and our visual effects supervisor Mark Russell. We all sat together with Edward and went through archival photographs of Penn Station.

The Seven Year Itch did a scene there too, so we looked at that for the layout. Along the way, someone found floorplans of the actual Penn Station, so we knew the distances we needed to set from the doorway to the area that Edward walks to. With all the research pulled together, we were able to figure out what needed to happen for the scene with the choreography. Edward wanted to enter, come down a set of stairs, walk along the floor of the station, and he goes to the lockers and finds that piece of evidence. We figured out that my department would do the ground level stuff.

I did the door, and we built a set of stairs. The stairs we built were built in blue so visual effects could put the real stones in after. He walks down the stairs and hits the flooring. We had photos of the original Penn Station floor which had 4×4 glass blocks sunken into the concrete. We made up the pattern in photoshop and printed it on the back of vinyl rolls. We did a big stretch of that for what you see as he’s walking along.

When he sits on the benches, we ordered those too. We also ordered period lockers. We got all of those elements. We had kiosks and vendor stands where you see the extras interacting.

The real masterful work was with Mark who put in the surrounding architecture and he did the walls, Windows, ceilings, and the beams. You can look at the frame and splice it; the bottom was us, and the top was all Mark. It’s some of the best interior visual effects work that I’ve ever seen.

On her challenges:

The biggest challenge was figuring out the size of the space. Where would the lockers be? The prep was the biggest challenge. Different photos would show different things, so we had to try to nail down the most accurate.

Sourcing the lockers was the biggest challenge. We had to find period lockers in the quantity that we needed – we needed 200 lockers. You can find period lockers online, but you can only find ten of them. We needed hundreds. We eventually found a company that did lockers that looked timeless enough. Visually, they matched up with the period lockers we needed. We had to guess the colors and we had to age them. We also had to do the metal number tags. In a movie like Suicide Squad, we could just press them into metal, but we didn’t have the budget. So, I went on Etsy and I found them, but they were only selling sixty. I bought all of those, and Edward had to pick one. Anything that he interacted with and anything close to him is those metal numbers, but anything further was just paper that we printed and put into the scene.

The Benches:

We needed a few dozen of those. We were on a minuscule budget, and it’s impossible to find what we needed. We ended up finding a church that was liquidating its church pews so we got those for $100.00. We got these pews, and we modified them to be in a richer wood tone.