In recent years, production designer Florencia Martin has cemented her reputation as the Master Builder of Movie California. Her output has included the 1920s decadence of “Babylon,” the 1950s glitz of “Blonde” and the 1970s vibes of “Licorice Pizza.”
Her work on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is no glamor fest. Instead, it’s a tribute to the real world, spanning dozens of local landscapes (the production is also filmed in El Paso, Texas) and offering a living collage of the Golden State and its many haunts.
“Our trip took us out into a California that many of us hadn’t seen before,” Martin said. “Sacramento and the Redwoods and the desert. I feel lucky because it wasn’t just an exploration of places but of people and stories that we wanted to bring to life in the film. We went and we listened and we learned and came back with the most honest portrayal of California.”
The film opens with a raid by a revolutionary group (including Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor) on an immigration detention camp near the California border with Mexico, located under a freeway. The scene takes place in the unspecified past, so Martin’s design was based on decades-old centers. “We built the camp from scratch, but it was an active border patrol route, with trucks coming in from Mexico into the United States,” she said. “We couldn’t tell what was real and what was our film, and it became part of the environment and this continuous structure.”
Real-life locations we’ve seen include La Purísima Mission in Lompoc, a local high school in Eureka, and a bank in Stockton. But on a soundstage in Los Angeles, Martin and her team also built a 60-foot-long dirt tunnel for a sequence in which DiCaprio’s stoner Bob, who lives off the grid, escapes capture by his adversary Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
“We based Bob’s tunnel on those cartel tunnels that look hand-hewn,” Martin said. “There had to be a sense of randomness to the design. The tunnel opening was just a sheet of plywood and it’s under his bed. We always liked the idea that Bob had an escape plan that he completely forgot about.”
In one of the film’s many visual jokes, Bob emerges from the tunnel into an outhouse made from a pine log.
“We saw so many of them scouting in Eureka,” Martin said. “And that place, with all the cars covered in moss, was inspired by the home of a widowed woman we’d run into in the same neighborhood as Bob’s house. (DiCaprio) was bouncing off the walls with excitement when we got there. He was like, ‘This is it, this is what I’m doing! I’m selling used car parts!’ It’s an incredible way to build something that’s based on the character. And don’t force it into the story, let it come to you.”
She added, “Tunnels followed us throughout our site scouting.” In El Paso, her team set up a maze of passageways and trapdoors in an existing building, which served as an immigration sanctuary and karate studio for Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro).
And the stark white curved tunnel that leads to a racist society called the Christmas Adventurers Club is depicted in the bowels of an upper-class home in Sacramento. The exterior of the house is Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s one-time residence in the capital.
“But the serpentine tunnel was a place we found in Stockton,” Martin said. “And the meeting room itself, we built on a set, with that mural of the American Northwest on the wall, with all the preservation and that vision of preservation.”
The final act of “One Battle After Another” takes place in the California desert, which proved to be a challenge for Martin and her team. The sequence, a car chase involving Chase Infiniti, DiCaprio and Penn, was stitched together from about 10 different locations, including a huge rock wall formation in Anza-Borrego, California’s largest state park, known as the Reef.
When Martin went back to Los Angeles with a colleague, they drove on a two-lane blacktop that rippled up and down like the ripple of a wave. It became a crucial place in the film’s climax.
“Paul really allows for the time it takes to revisit locations until we find the perfect location,” Martin said. “It’s a very special, amazing way of working. Because every time you go out on the road, you discover something different.”
This story first ran in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
