Designing Suncoast was like riding a fast car since the very beginning! I put together the moodboard for the interview probably in 5-6 hours the morning after I wrapped another feature film, in the afternoon I met Laura on zoom and I knew I wanted to keep going full speed right away!
After talking to Laura and doing more in depth research, some references - Petra Collins, The Florida Project - stayed, others left space for new ones like Anastasia Samoylova's photos as well as some of Laura's own period photos. Below my design boards for Kristine's house.
One of the main locations to find was Kristine's house. I got to Charleston - yes we shot in South Carolina, not in Florida - when we were 4 weeks out and besides the hospice, all locations needed to be either found or picked. Even if we didn't have a lot of time and Kristine's would play at the beginning of the shooting schedule, we really wanted to find the perfect one. After scouting many houses and reviewing a lot of photos - Stacey and her locations team were incredible - we finally found the perfect one, well probably not that perfect...
We had to hire a mold remediation team who sanitized and cleared out all the owner's belongings and then we could finally start working on it!
Unfortunately not just the dolls and mayo collections were not in character, so we had to clear everything out and probably we just kept the fridge and the kitchen valances.
The exterior and the kitchen colors were unbelievably matching my color palette, but everything else needed to be painted.
The front yard was way overgrown and blocked the house too much. Our greens team trimmed some trees and bushes and removed others completely. We also spread sand on the grass, added some fan palms and Spanish moss to help us sell it for Florida.
See some pics below of the before and after:
Another fundamental location for this film was the hospice. So many key scenes happening there, it really needed to be special. A former retirement home for nuns with its proximity to the water, the lush estate with a thick canopy of trees and dancing Spanish moss did the trick!
The interiors were completely empty and this posed quite of a challenge given our limited budget. Nevertheless, our capable set dec, construction and scenic teams managed to turn this place in our Suncoast Hospice.
Laura wanted the hospice to have a very similar atmosphere to the original but it didn't need to look the same or use it as a strict visual reference. For the protestors instead she wanted us to follow reality as closely as possible. Here you can see part of a much wider research.
In terms of color palette I wanted to keep a connection between Kristine's house and the hospice: I softened it with a dust layer and veered its pink and teal juxtaposition towards orange, salmon, aquas and blues. The protesters had their own palette of flashier colors, black and reds we don't see anywhere else in the film.
We painted the front lobby and its adjacent corridors entirely, we created a memorial wall and a front desk area. We replaced the entrance door and added an automated opening system.
For the exterior front of our hospice we added plants to the lawns, we added the suncoast signage and dressed all the protesters areas and barricades.
We had many scenes in Max's room and all the rooms at the location were way to small for us to shoot so we decided to demolish a partition and join two rooms. We plugged the second door and one of the closet nooks was blocked by a built in shelf.
