Though the exact images are not faithfully reproduced in the movie, you can feel their influence on "Lemony Snicket" sets.
Also tacked to the inspiration boards might be photographs of peregrine falcon nests (for batty Aunt Josephine's cliff-side cottage) or Irish seaside villages (for Damocles Dock) or movie stills from 1979's "The Onion Fields."
"Lemony Snicket" is a showcase for Hollywood set design.
(Paramount)
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About that, says Heinrichs: "I was riffing off 'The Onion Fields,' a movie I saw so long ago, but it stuck with me. That central California look, flat to the horizon, just that feeling of dread you get, the horror, the endless farmland, the murderous intent, like you can't run away."
Or the inspiration for Uncle Monty's house. In the book and movie, Monty is a distracted world-roaming herpetologist who loves cake and the orphans. To create his house, Heinrichs and team sought inspiration from the Royal Botanical Gardens in England and the turn-of-the-last-century American architect Bernard Maybeck, whose arts-and-crafty creations feel naturalistic, like a home for Charles Darwin. The set dressers then filled Monty's Reptile Room with museum specimen cases and wooden and glass snake terrariums -- and then filled those with 70 real live vipers and reptiles, and got a 200-pound tortoise to walk through the scene (actually, across Monty's M.C. Escher-esque tile of interconnecting lizards, just barely glimpsed in the finished movie).
Next, Heinrichs produced sketches of sets, which then went to the illustrators, who added their own touches in detailed drawings. These were endlessly edited, and then models were created. Director Brad Silberling then peered into the models with Heinrichs, then more fine-tuning, and, finally, they built the sets. And then the set dressers threw themselves at the mansions, stores, beaches.
The Last Chance Superette, for example, at the railroad crossing where Count Olaf first tries to remove the orphans from this world (by locking them in his car on the tracks for the arrival of the 11:15 a.m. train) -- the forlorn store is stocked with items. There are Polaroid sunglasses and fly paper dotted with tiny plastic flies (bought on eBay), canned meats (30 cents), bottles of "Parsley Soda," old hubcaps, folk art, a bag of Doritos.
Some of this made it into the final film; much did not. This might feel like a letdown for a designer like Heinrichs and his team, who spent so much time on the procurement, placement and attention to detail. But Heinrichs is resigned to this outcome. His job was to construct a world.
"I finally saw the finished movie," he says, a few days ago. "And I'm seeing the sets as they were meant to be seen. Not as pieces. But a whole. The audience doesn't care . . . that everything I designed and made isn't shown. What we do is give the director the tools."
And then? "And then he makes his movie," Heinrichs says.
