If you’ve ever wondered what a movie production designer actually does, our guest today describes it in the simplest terms: it is everything you see in the frame that isn’t a costume. It turns out, production design has a lot in common with product design.
Our guest is the visionary production designer Fiona Crombie. You’ve seen her work in incredible films like The Favourite, and most recently, in the hauntingly beautiful Hamnet. This film is currently taking the industry by storm with eight Academy Award nominations, including a nod for Fiona herself for Best Production Design.
Trailer for Hamnet, nominated for 8 Academy Awards in including Fiona Crombie for production design
From the sprawling architecture of a Tudor estate down to the specific curve of a spoon or the texture of a tablecloth, Fiona’s job is to build a physical reality that reflects the interior lives of the characters on screen.
In our conversation, we explore how production design shapes performance, how historical accuracy balances with storytelling, how a visual “mission statement” guides an entire crew, and what it means to create environments that carry grief, love, and memory.
Bio
Fiona Crombie is an Australian production designer, twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Production Design — for The Favourite and Hamnet. Born in Adelaide and raised in Sydney, she trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) before becoming the resident designer at the Sydney Theatre Company, where she developed the deep relationship with text and storytelling that still shapes her work today.
***
Premium Episodes on Design Better
This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. New premium benefit: get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes.
Premium subscribers get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show.
And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further.
Upgrade to paid
