HOW THEY DID IT
I talk to anybody in the crew. Then I walk
my DP (Pawel Pogorzelski) and my produc-
tion designer (Henrik Svensson) through the
entire list so they can begin to see the same
movie in their heads, and from there we can
build a dialogue. This approach was abso-
lutely necessary on Midsommar: I needed
Henrik to be able to envision the geography
of the Hårga houses so that we could con-
struct their world from scratch.
Whether it’s the miniature dollhouses
of Hereditary or the Hårga village of
Midsommar, I somehow put myself in the
position of having to build complex sets in
a short period of time—perhaps just to re-
move years from my life. Henrik had to sim-
ply trust me as to why certain rooms were
positioned in the houses, and we had two
months to build all the sets and cultivate the
land on our Hungarian field location. Henrik
did an amazing job, which was helped by
a shot list method that my production de-
signer on Hereditary, Grace Yun, introduced
to us after she had used it while working on
Paul Schrader’s films.
Grace suggested that we do it on
a dry erase board, drawing up
the blocking of our characters
and a game plan for each
scene—essentially an
overhead view of our
space. In this overview, you might have
a circle that represents a character with
the number one next to it and an arrow that
points to where the character moves from
his or her initial spot, with the number two
next to that spot. In any given scene, one
or more characters might move up to
20 times. You’ll also have a little box icon
that represents the camera and arrows
pointing to where it will move—again, both
marked by number.
We only managed to plot out about half
of the shot list before we were scheduled
to shoot, so I made sure to walk Henrik and
Pawel through the whole list each night
before the next shoot day. We didn’t alwayshave a chance to discuss these read-throughs
at length, so Pawel went out to spend three
full days in the fields, watching where the
sun began and where it traveled, considering
when we would need to get each shot.
Shooting for days in the pure, white, hot,
chalky outdoors with sunlight so utterly
blinding you can’t keep your eyes open, our
cast and crew and I thought we were going
crazy. We had no idea if the film would even
be coherent by the end, and we were relieved
that it is. MMMidsommar opened in theaters July 3, 2019,
courtesy of A24.TOP LEFT: PHOTOGRAPH BY GABOR KOTSCHY; BOTTOM: PHOTOGRAPH BY MERIE WEISMILLER WALLACE; ALL COURTESY OF A24