In the Land of Women Movie Trailer. Production Designer Sandy Cochrane and Costume Designer Trish Keating were brought on as key collaborators for ensuring Kasdan’s vision was translated onto the screen. The two key sets in the movie, the Hardwicke house and Grandma’s house, were brought to life by Cochrane. After an exhaustive search that took the filmmaker scouting various cities across Canada, the city of Victoria, located on Vancouver Island, had all the elements that Kasdan was looking for.
“Jon wanted a slightly heightened reality and we spent a lot of time talking about that when we were driving around looking for locations,” says Cochrane. “The story starts off in Los Angeles then shifts to Michigan, so when you arrive in the suburbs of the mid-west, there’s an overwhelming sense of green as opposed to the overexposed, sun-parched landscape of Los Angeles.”
“Both Jon and I are from Southern California, which doesn’t have the most traditional suburbs,’ Brody says, “To us and to Carter, the suburbs are this pristine place you’ve seen in movies – football games, prom – sort of John Hughes meets Norman Rockwell. Jon’s got a great crew and they’ve found and transformed our location into this ideal suburb. My character’s curiosity of wanting to explore this other side of the world, in a way, is satisfied when he runs away to Michigan, in search of something he’s seen in movies.”
“The pairing of the houses was the most critical element to finding the locations we wanted. For Grandma’s house, we needed to find a house where the owners would allow us to take their beautifully kept home and make it a visually distressed residence. Then we needed to find a house directly across the street, where there couldn’t be any impediment view-wise, which had to have a certain kind of architecture that presented a completely different aesthetic.”
Once the houses were found, movie magic stepped in and both houses were transformed. The entrance to Grandma’s house was dressed with overgrown shrubs and weeds to give it the appearance of a dark burrowing world. The interior of the house was completely redone to reveal a home that had been neglected, where newspapers and mementos cluttered every inch of space. Across the street where the Hardwicke House stood, immaculate green lawns and an abundance of carefully groomed flower beds presented the opposite impression . a family that was very concerned about outward appearances.
The rest of the locations needed; a mall, ice cream shop, a hospital among others, posed no problem and Victoria easily doubled for the Michigan suburbs. For the Los Angeles portion of the shoot, Kasdan already had real landmarks in mind that he wanted to shoot at such as the 101 Coffee Shop and the Santa Monica Pier.
Cochrane explains that Kasdan’s clear vision of what he wanted, meant “asking the right questions, listening very carefully and taking every opportunity to bounce ideas off him. Jon has a vast knowledge of film, he has a long list of films that he can reference so that you can go back, look at these films and know exactly what he’s going for.”
But besides providing the physical locations needed for In the Land of Women’s intimate world, the Uplands neighborhood where the Hardwicke House and Grandma’s House were located, also became much more of a home away from home than anyone had expected. An experience not lost on Meg Ryan.
“I loved shooting in Victoria and this neighborhood was just crazy! I couldn’t have made it up!” the actor remembers. “They were so cool to let us into their neighborhood night after night, day after day. They would walk their dogs and wave to me, then they started baking things and bringing them by the trailer . I got chai tea from someone’s grandma. It was the biggest, open-armed hug all the time. Adam would leave his dog at one the neighbor’s house who left the door open so that when we stopped shooting around 3am, Adam would just go inside and call ‘Penny, Penny’ and Penny would come out – their dogs would hang together. It was just so sweet!”
Producer David Kanter adds, “The neighborhood of Uplands was incredibly accommodating to our shooting and it took some leading people in the neighborhood to get everybody to allow us to come in and disrupt their lives for five weeks. These neighbors became part of our crew and every night people would come out at cocktail hour with their glasses of white wine and watch us shoot, which sometimes is like watching paint dry. We met some incredible people on this film and we’re so grateful.”
In the Land of Women is a character-driven story and Kasdan wanted the wardrobe to enhance and reflect the reality of each character. “Jon had done a lot of tear sheets himself from magazines,” says Keating. “He had a very clear idea of what each character’s wardrobe should be.how it ties into and tracks the progression of the character.”
With Sarah’s wardrobe, the objective was to capture the character’s shift from a very contained and repressed person to a woman that begins to reconnect to her sensuality and becomes more emotionally available.
“Sarah plays the part of a very frustrated, upper-middle class wife and mother,” observes Keating. “As she meets Carter, a certain awareness comes to her about life and she loosens up considerably, which we reflect in her clothing. We’ll see a change from cooler colors at the beginning, to warmer colors toward the end, as well as more casual styles.”
As for Carter’s character, both Kasdan’s and Brody’s love of true vintage clothing, was utilized to express this young man’s physical as well emotional journey to Michigan. “We wanted to get as far away from what he wears on the O.C. as possible,” says Keating. “We also wanted to take Adam to an older level of clothing, so that he would be playing twenty-five, which is his real age.”
For Grandma Archer, the process of inhabiting that character was a little more involved and carefully constructed. “I like to have a lot of input in the costumes and had really good conversations with Trish Keating, The first thing I asked for was a hump,” laughs Dukakis. “So they built me a little hump, then I asked for all the sleeves to be a shorter so that my little bony arms would stick out. I wore these droopy bright colored crocheted sweaters. I didn’t want her to be drab.”
Transforming the vivacious actress to that of a much older octogenarian also involved over two hours of make-up every morning. Dukakis found the experience rewarding as an actor but also a little unnerving on a personal level, as she explains. “We put latex on my face to create deep wrinkles and I also put a wig on. People say that if you want to know what you’ll look like when you’re old, look at your mother. After this show, I know exactly what I’m going to look like and it’s going to be much worse. It was a really interesting journey.”
Rounding out the talents Kasdan enlisted to make In the Land of Women is editor Carol Littleton. Even at a young age, Littleton says Kasdan’s curiosity and talent as an aspiring filmmaker were selfevident “I’ve known Jon since the day he was born. Ever since he was a little kid, Jon was very tuned in, very smart and very funny. He used to hang out in the cutting room and always have the most extraordinary questions about the process. When he came into the editing room, I’d give him a piece of film to experiment with and after a while he’d suggest cutting a scene in a certain way so I’d stop what I was doing, and do it his way so he could see why something would work or not work.
“The biggest challenge in this film is the mixture of tone. It’s definitely a comedy but there is a serious undertone to the whole movie . a basic humanity we must preserve. It’s this constant changing of gears that is challenging but inspiring for an editor. I’m so impressed by Jon’s talent. The writing is extraordinary and he knows exactly what he wants, that’s very rare, yet alone with someone so young. He’s a very committed and serious filmmaker.”
In the Land of Women (2007)
Directed by: Jonathan Kasdan
Starring: Adam Brody, Kristen Stewart, Makenzie Vega, Elena Anaya, Meg Ryan, Danielle Savre, Gia Mantegna, Kelsey Keel, JoBeth Williams, Olympia Dukakis, Elise Gatien, Christine Danielle
Screenplay by: Jonathan Kasdan
Production Design by: Sandy Cochrane
Cinematography by: Paul Cameron
Film Editing by: Marty Levenstein, Carol Littleton
Costume Design by: Trish Keating
Set Decoration by: Louise Roper, Erin Boyd
Art Direction by: Margot Ready
Music by: Stephen Trask
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, thematic elements and language.
Distributed by: Warner Independent
Release Date: April 20, 2007
Views: 105
