What a Production Designer Does

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.

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