Tagline: All she ever wanted was a little credit.
In the glamorous world of New York City, Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) is a fun-loving girl who is really good at shopping – a little too good, perhaps. She dreams of working for her favorite fashion magazine, but can’t quite get her foot in the door – until ironically, she snags a job as an advice columnist for a financial magazine published by the same company. As her dreams are finally coming true, she goes to ever more hilarious efforts to keep her past from ruining her future.
Rebecca Bloomwood is a sweet and charming New York City girl who has a tiny, little problem that is rapidly turning into a big problem: she’s hopelessly addicted to shopping and drowning in a sea of debt. While Rebecca has dreams of working for a top fashion magazine, she can’t quite get her foot in the door-that is, until she snags a job as an advice columnist for a new financial magazine published by the same company.
Overnight, her column becomes hugely popular, turning her into an overnight celebrity. But when her compulsive shopping and growing debt issues threaten to destroy her love life and derail her career, she struggles to keep it all from spiraling out of control.. and is ultimately forced to reevaluate what’s really important in life.
About the Film
To direct “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” Jerry Bruckheimer selected Australian-born, U.S.-based P.J. Hogan as the man for the job. “P.J.’s work has the kind of deft, light touch that we wanted for the movie,” notes the producer. “Both `Muriel’s Wedding’ and `My Best Friend’s Wedding’ were two pictures that I loved watching. He has such a wonderful sense of humor, and a delightful romantic touch.”
“Rebecca Bloomwood was a character I totally identified with,” says Hogan. “A shopaholic is somebody who believes heavily in retail therapy. Feel bad? Go into a store, you’re cheered up instantly. Everybody can understand that. When we’re down, we’ve all used retail as a way to cheer ourselves up, but Rebecca just can’t stop.”
Eventually, Alex confesses that she felt abandoned by Anna and was left alone to cope with Rachel. Says Arielle Kebbel, “Anna is trying to tell her how awful life was in the mental hospital, but Alex is saying that life at home was pretty terrible as well. It’s interesting, because you can tell how happy Alex is to have Anna back, but she doesn’t want to show it too much because she feels that she was deserted and left to deal with everything at home.”
For the film version of “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” both the setting and Rebecca’s nationality have emigrated westward across the pond to America. “In my head and in the books, of course, she will always be British,” says the author. “But I have met Becky Bloomwoods all over the world, of every nationality. What matters to me most is that in the film, we have her heart, her foibles and her comedy. The film uses elements from the first two `Shopaholic’ books, the second of which is in fact set in New York. Many of my favorite scenes are in the film, and watching them being shot was a huge treat. Becky’s story is really a parable for our times as she tries to cut back her spending, put away the credit cards and turn her life around.”
New York Fits the Bill
NYC a Shoe-In for “Shopaholic” Setting
Once the decision had been made to shift the location of the story to the United States, it was clear that Rebecca Bloomwood’s tale of over-zealous shopping could be set in only one place. New York is a character in itself, an icon of all cities as well as the world capital of fashion,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “It wasn’t that much of a challenge to change the location from London to New York, because both cities have the same kind of panache and design sense.”
Director P.J. Hogan adds, “The thrill is in the shops. In the book series, Becky Bloomwood heads toManhattan in the second book, and finds herself in absolute shopping heaven. And where better to put a shopaholic than in shopping heaven?”
The elaborate shoot, which kicked off in arctic 15-degree temperatures and wrapped at 90 degrees, presented the notable challenge of filming in the streets and stores of one of the busiest, if not outright chaotic, cities on earth.
“Filming on the streets of New York is like voluntarily admitting yourself to an asylum,” says Hugh Dancy. “You’re right there working in the middle of a very busy city. It’s crowded and hectic, but that’s the point. That’s why you do it. Because scenes in New York are grounded in acting. I think it adds something to the character of the movie.”
Filmmakers called on Kristi Zea as production designer. “Kristi is the premier New York production designer,” says Bruckheimer. “She understands the city and the kind of melting pot that it is, the texture that it needs, and with her design and fashion sense created wonderful sets, whether for the Successful Saving or Alette magazine offices, or her re-design of the famous stores and their window displays.”
Says Zea, “I immediately realized that the film would have great visual potential. It’s fun to dabble in high fashion and trends, and since I come from a costume background, I recognized that this was going to be one of those films where you can just let it all hang out…and you could also set trends. The film goes from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of economic views and areas. You have the super-high fashion of Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue, the Meatpacking District, Tribeca, SoHo and the Lower East Side, and you have Becky’s Mom and Dad, who live in a nice, middle-class world. I liked being able to find the iconographic element of New York and boost that, but also to find a new way of showing New York.”
Besides NYC, the film shot in Miami and in Connecticut. In fact, the “Shopaholic” odyssey began its first week of shooting in Connecticut, where Zea and her team created myriad locations, including the very first day’s shoot inside the offices in a nondescript building, resulting in a coincidence which amazed author Sophie Kinsella. “Considering what I’ve recently learned about the random order in which movies are made, as it happens the first scene we filmed was also the very first scene I ever wrote of Rebecca Bloomwood for the first book. It was like a psychic moment!”
The interior set of Becky and roommate Suze’s fun, kicky and colorful apartment, which is meant to be in the fast-rising and terminally hip NoLita (North of Little Italy) neighborhood in lower CityManhattan, was shot on a Norwalk soundstage. Says Zea, “It was absolutely essential to me that the inside of the apartment be small to realistically match the 100-year-old building we found on Mott Street Manhattan as the exterior. Suze lives in the bedroom, and Rebecca in the living room, practically on top of each other. The two women also have very distinct styles, but the idea was to wrap up the differences between the two characters and go a little crazy with color, cool fabrics, mosaic mirrors in the tub, multicolored glass bottles, a fun, exuberant environment.”
Over the next four months, the production hit several New York City historic locations, including St. James Church, St. Anthony of Padua, the elegant Grand Salon of the Jumeirah Essex House hotel on Central Park South, the majestic former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in the Wall Street district, Lord Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower, and the exterior of Rockefeller Center. A nighttime interlude with Rebecca and Luke was shot on a landscaped Rockefeller Center terrace with the landmark St. Patrick’s Cathedral and (perhaps more importantly for Rebecca Bloomwood) the equally churchlike edifice of Fifth Avenue, directly across the street.
It was up to director of photography Jo Willems to take one of the most oft-filmed cities on the planet and look at it with new eyes. “Our goal was to make the girls, the clothes and the city look as gorgeous as possible,” says Willems. “This isn’t a down-and-gritty movie; it’s fun, big and upbeat. The style of the movie is dictated by the story and main character, and I tried to elevate it as much as possible. These days, a lot of movies are desaturated, but we tried to saturate the frame with as much color as we could.”
Filmmakers selected a number of shops and boutiques as locations, including Catherine Malandrino (in the Meatpacking District), the elaborate Kleinfeld bridal store, as well as a chic stretch of Madison Avenue featuring Yves St. Laurent, Sonia Rykiel and Asprey stores. Key scenes also took place at the Barneys New York store on Madison Avenue and Henri Bendel on Fifth Avenue.
For the scene inside of Barneys-one of America’s most heralded shopping destinations-Rebecca is taken shopping by fashion editor Alette Naylor as a test, which she passes with flying colors to the consternation of arch-rival Alicia Billington.
Rebecca, who pens her financial column as “The Girl in the Green Scarf,” actually finds the all-important billowing “Denny & George” green scarf in a scene shot in New York’s famed Henri Bendel store. The signature fashion locale is a shopping space created from three adjoining townhouses on Fifth Avenue, including the landmark Coty and Rizzoli buildings. It features an extraordinary three-story atrium entrance, fronted by the jewel-like Art Nouveau windows created by Rene Lalique in 1913 and only discovered after Bendel renovated the building. For the atrium, production designer Zea and supervising art director Paul Kelly joined creative forces with Bendel’s own in-house designers and created a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”-themed display. They also created an aviation-themed window display in which Rebecca first sees the green scarf.
“It was a military maneuver for us to install the displays,” explains Kelly, “because we could only have Henri Bendel for eight hours to dress it. We planned it down to the last minute.” New Yorkers were transfixed by the film company’s alterations to the store. “The reaction has been fantastic,” said Bendel’s CEO, Ed Bucciarelli. “We do an elaborate window like this only once a year at holiday time, so to see something like this so early in the year has been quite a treat. What they’ve created is really magical.”
Continue Reading and View the Theatrical Trailer
Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)
Directed by: P.J. Hogan
Starring: Isla Fisher, Joan Cusack, John Goodman, Hugh Dancy, Krysten Ritter, John Lithgow, Kristin Scott Thomas, Leslie Bibb, Lynn Redgrave, Julie Hagerty, Nick Cornish, Wendie Malick, Clea Lewis
Screenplay by: Tim Firth, Tracey Jackson
Production Design by: Kristi Zea
Cinematography by: Jo Willems
Film Editing by: William Goldenberg
Costume Design by: Patricia Field
Set Decoration by: Alyssa Winter
Art Direction by: Paul D. Kelly
Music by: James Newton Howard
MPAA Rating: PG for some mild language and thematic elements.
Distributed by: Touchstone Pictures
Release Date: February 13, 2009
Visits: 129
