Fiona Crombie: Academy Award-nominated production designer on storytelling without words

Mar 4, 2026

Fiona Crombie, an Australian production designer twice Oscar-nominated, shapes film worlds that tell story without words. She discusses defining everything in frame that is not costume. Short scenes cover research, visual mapping, prototyping, and how sets influence performance. The conversation highlights making locations feel lived-in and using motifs like trees and corridors to carry emotion.

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INSIGHT

Production Design Is Visual Storytelling

Production design is everything in the frame that isn’t a costume and functions as storytelling without words.
Fiona uses landscape, architecture, and small objects like spoons and tablecloths to reveal characters’ interior lives.

ADVICE

Turn Imagination Into Practical Plans

Communicate clearly and practically: translate nebulous ideas into drawings, budgets, schedules, and build plans.
Fiona balances imaginative impulses with engineering, money, and team coordination to make designs real.

ANECDOTE

Early Hire Who Scales The Art Department

Fiona often joins early in development and sometimes before green light to help shape viability and budgets.
For Hamnet she began reference work in early months, starting with one art director and scaling to a 300-person crew.

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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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