FYC: Udo Kramer Designs Frozen World of “Nine Perfect Strangers” S2
There’s something endlessly interesting about rich people in a beautiful locale having a terrible time. The White Lotus and Nine Perfect Strangers are leading the pack in this unofficial genre, but Nine Perfect Strangers stands out for its new Alpine, snow-covered world. Season 2 of the Hulu series sees Nicole Kidman’s Masha retreating to an isolated castle in the Alps to continue her controversial therapy. This new world was created by production designer Udo Kramer who sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss joining the series in the second season, blending the old and new worlds together, and his favorite sets from the show. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
For Nine Perfect Strangers, you’re coming into the second season, and it's a brand new location. I saw in another interview that you said you kind of wanted to forget the entire first season and make something new, but I was curious if there’s something from that first season you didn't want to forget, that you wanted to make sure was breathed into this new season.
Udo Kramer: If I said I wanted to forget the first season, those were strong words and probably translated a bit differently (laughs). I wanted to keep the idea that whatever place Masha goes to, she takes her kind of approach with her.
Ideally, it shouldn't feel that she’;s kind of stuck in a California-like, mid-century place where everybody has mushroom cocktails, which I love as an idea, otherwise I wouldn't have done it in the second season. In a way, if things change, Masha would move on. She has to move on because there's not really a place where she belongs if you look deeper into her character.
I thought, if Masha lost her funding and probably had lawsuits, what would she do next to save her idea? You take what you're thinking is the right way to do things and then move where you get the next opportunity to do your thing.
She's kind of a little…the German word would translate to break the bridges behind her. She's always looking ahead and she's not trying to recreate a California resort in the Alps.
For me, it’s what aspects are the positives or what is the challenge, and then try to solve it.
courtesy of Filmuniversität Babelsberg
There's an interesting blend of Old World and New World in terms of the castle they’re all living in. I saw that you only shot exteriors at the castle. Everything else was built on sets. Can you talk about the decision to build rather than use what existed?
Except the ballroom! Also a little bit of the staircase to be precise, but the rest is built.
Part of that decision is the availability of your actors. That’s the thing that leads most of the decisions on these kinds of productions. Then you look into the costs, how many shooting days you’ll be there versus the location’s rent and the infrastructure that comes with it that needs to be paid.
The main thing, for my side, is can you create the room that delivers what the story needs? In our case, we had found this castle through research and we were lucky to find it because it wasn't on the market. Many people didn't know that it even exists because it was owned, I think, from the ’90s on.
It was owned by the Koch family. The strange part is that he kept it just for himself. So he never opened the doors. It comes with the whole environment because it was on hunting ground. For you and me, if we talk about hunting grounds, I'd say it's something like a decently sized part of a forest or something.
In this case, it's the valley, including parts of the mountains. To get there, you needed to cross his property, and that was fenced in. Many people couldn't even cross this valley as a part of their hike because there is no street and there's a fence.
courtesy of Hulu
Long story short, we found it on the internet and got in contact with the foundation that runs it and they’re very nice people. They said we were not allowed to even look into parts of the castle. If a door opened, we had to place a full wall behind it so you had no idea what was inside. I think it's cool that somebody said that and to respect this kind of privacy.
I once did a show called Dark on Netflix. They do tours in Berlin to see the house of the Kahnwalds or something like this. Some of the owners found it funny, but others had no idea what caused it. If somebody says they want to keep their privacy, then we do it. That was one reason.
We definitely wanted the exterior to show how it sits in the mountains and the magic of it. We used it first to establish this place and the exclusivity of it. Normally, these houses have interiors that were designed a century ago with different purposes. For the places that were kind of comfortable where people live and want to sit, they had to be smaller because they don't have the chance to heat this shit with fireplaces.
You have these big halls that were mainly made for parties in the summer or to show off to the king on the other side of the fence. If you want to sit down, have a conversation, and have long evening talks, you need something that you can heat. These places normally have a different setup and we needed something that shows the space and the size of it.
We needed to create this feeling that I would like to be there. On the other hand, we wanted to make it slightly unnerving so it can change. So that it starts off like, oh, that's interesting, but a bit off. As the episodes proceed, it's getting colder outside, the snow starts falling more, the castle is changing. We need to be in control of the light, which is the other big key thing in building sets.
courtesy of Hulu
Lastly, we had to think about how to modernize this place. You can't modernize something classic. I don't like it, but that's my personal taste. If you look at it as a normal person, you could imagine a classic chair, but you cannot do a modern classic chair. It has to be classic or it's modern, but you can change the fabrics and then it looks kind of like a funky classic.
Obviously, we changed the fireplace and tried to come up with a version that is spacious, and it has some blobby, modern vibes to it, but it's comfortable enough that you can reuse it. I wanted to have the feeling that the actors can wander through this house, and it's always a little bit empty. You don't know what you can expect. Behind the next column, somebody could appear or disappear. If you’re locked into little rooms, you always need the feeling that somebody is knocking on the door. The idea was to create the feeling of endless corridors and then somehow end up in the lobby.
My favorite set was the Crabapple Clubhouse, which is so wildly different from the castle. Could you talk a little bit about how you made it feel like it was part of this world, so that it's not super jarring for us to go there and be in that space. I like how it mirrored the same thing you were talking about with the castle. At first you're like, oh, this is really sweet, and then it's almost like the paint starts to chip. It was an interesting duality between these two spaces that I loved.
I like designs that have an easy approach to them. If you say you have an apple TV show, I thought it has to be something with an apple and it actually has to do something with a tree. In the script, they were thinking of a yard, but probably I missed that (laughs).
I said, let's do a crabapple clubhouse in a tree with an apple, and then it's all in one picture. We knew we couldn’t feature the whole show, so we wanted to show what the audience would see and then pull back. You have the clubhouse as the center, you could show it and approach it from different angles, but then he leaves the set. Mainly, the purpose of that set is the look onto the set, not necessarily the Crabapple show itself.
What is the show about when you step back and look at the decoration from the point of view of the camera as a whole? Then, what you said about the way things change, that comes mainly with the light possibilities. We made more silhouettes. If the front light switches off because the star left the stage, and you have a little bit of back light, then it makes a little bit more silhouette. More noir, if you will.
courtesy of Hulu
We used the same approach in the big set as well. The closer we got to the finale, we thought about awkward shadows and how the architecture is lit. As the light goes away, people will instinctively regroup near the fire where the strongest light is. I think this is something human beings normally do. In the series, I think it works similarly because your eye is drawn to where the light is. You get attracted to it.
My last question for you – what is your favorite set?
I think it's two. May I say two pieces?
Absolutely!
First of all, I like the rooftop office. It's kind of a classic piece. It's always interesting to stack different traditions of a house that probably has hundreds of years of history and then I get to bring it together.
I also like Masha’s apartment, which took us a while to develop. If you have these open spaces where everything is visible from the beginning, but it should not be visible from the beginning, you have to come up with a way to hide things. We needed to separate the scenes from each other. So that aspect was kind of tricky.
In the beginning, there was a bathroom scene scripted where she had the bath together with a lost daughter as a ghost. That was kind of a key element that needed to be designed because then following the script, I won't change the words. I needed to come up with a bath that is integrated, that is not showing an ugly bathtub. It would have been just for one scene.
courtesy of Hulu
You don’t want the audience to say, hey, what's this thing doing there? Then it disturbs the vista on the mountain. It was kind of difficult. Our solution was to kind of sink it into the ground and then we have a cool reflection. It's there. Nobody will miss it. In case somebody needs to have a bath, we could say, there's the bathtub.
We had LED boards around it so we had the mountains projected, which is a cool technique that I like. Sometimes it's difficult to visualize that a character’s mind is shifting in the movie, you have to find an imagery for what is happening in their brain. One way to do it, the classic way, would be a double exposure. Apocalypse Now does this very well. You see a guy, then hear the helicopter sound and an explosion, then back to the guy. You get the sense that this guy is mixing his imagery together in his head, which I like as a stylistic choice. I think this is the only art form where you can mix music, editing, timing, and imagery.
In this case, I remember that Masha was sitting near the fire again and then she was thinking of her time in Prague. It starts with snow, so we came up with this idea with this atrium where it could start to snow. We wanted to make a nice transition, a soft transition from the real snow, which is then snowing in the apartment in this glass cube. You could use this as a decisive moment.
We also had this corner of the apartment where glass meets at a corner. If you switch off the light outside, the glass becomes mirrors. It depends on how much light you give on it. You can imagine if you have two glasses on a corner, you could have one face on the other side. You could do an in-camera double exposure. We thought it was a cool thing to try to blend things together so that when she's in her apartment, we could have control on mixing the imagery.
I think it came out pretty good because the downside of this technique is that you always see the team in the mirror. Sometimes people said, you know, it looks nice, but it's fucking complicated to do the shots, so get rid of it. That's the safe bet if you have to deliver the shots at the end of the day.
This time we were lucky because the director and DOP, both were inventive and wanted to get this kind of imagery. They embraced it. It’s a lot of work to do it, as you could imagine, but I'm very thankful they did it.
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