Men and Their Apartments in Materialists

Is there a more classic plot for a romance than a woman choosing between two men? Materialists, the new film from director Celine Song (Past Lives), shows that plot is also about a woman’s choice between two apartments. On one hand we have Harry, Pedro Pascal’s hedge funder with a $12 million Tribeca penthouse walled in rich wood and intriguing art. And on the other, there’s John, played stiffly by Chris Evans as an aspiring actor who rents an Ikea-furnished “boy room” in a nightmarish Brooklyn apartment for $850 a month. We know the prices because our heroine, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), is a pragmatist who simply asks.

Production designer Anthony Gasparro had experience showing claustrophobic Manhattan apartments for Tadpole, and set decorator Amy Beth Silver made the Soho lofts in Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks feel like they were put together by actual New Yorkers with taste.

We talked about love and real estate before the film opened on June 13. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

It was wild to see an apartment like John’s in a movie. It’s the apotheosis of a crappy Brooklyn apartment. 
Anthony Gasparro: That was quite a fun set to put together. It was actually inspired by Celine’s husband, Justin. She had shown me photographs of the apartment he had lived in. I also had an apartment like this at one point when I was in my 20s in New York.

We looked for locations on Google Maps trying to get a sense of the bones of the place. I liked the idea that it was on a corner. It was on a second floor. It’s small. The front door almost comes into the kitchen. And there’s not enough room to have a proper living room, so the couch is in the kitchen. In the bathroom, the mirror — and everything else — is worn down and broken. The original intercom is painted over. I wanted it to have hideous light fixtures — wall sconces that have irregularities in the glass. I mean, there are kinds of horrible shadows in those lights. It was all about just finding all the classic New York City details. And we gave him the biggest bedroom — the parlor room — because he’s probably been there the longest.

John’s room was sweet. It looked like he was trying. 
Amy Beth Silver: Almost everything in his room was either from Ikea or Remix, which is a vintage furniture store, a couple things from Lichen, and Salvation Army. The duvet, I have to say that’s a little bit of a cheat. That’s Tekla, but I just loved these beautiful stripes and I thought it looked enough like Ikea.

I was sure it was Ikea. And what about those little touches like the flower in a jar on his desk? I feel like we get the sense he’s trying or that he would try more, if he had money. 
ABS: The flower reference was actually taken from Celine Song’s husband’s bachelor pad because he had that and she would talk about how disgusting his place was. So I think I just kind of borrowed that from him.

I thought it was a real choice to have the kitchen painted a very bright teal. Like a boy went to Home Depot and was like, Oh, I love bright blue so it will look great across my entire apartment. 
A.G.: Thank you for noticing that. It was a hideous color. And even the DP was like, “I can’t believe we’re going with this.” I felt like the landlord went to a hardware store and they just happened to have a premixed paint on sale, and he used this disgusting can of blue paint. It would look horrible in even the kitchen of the worst restaurant. It was actually an even uglier blue that Amy and I just loved. And in the end, they tinted it slightly, so it wasn’t as ugly.

Did you shoot this at a real crappy apartment? 
A.G.: In New York City, for a tax credit, you have to work a certain amount of days on a soundstage. It seemed like John’s apartment would be the perfect space to build from scratch.
ABS: And if we built Harry’s, that would’ve been my entire budget.

Great. Let’s talk about Harry’s apartment. 
ABS: I think the key to what we were looking for, in Harry’s apartment, is a line in the movie when he says, “I’m the only rich person that you would be able to stand.” He is nice and humble and he has class. But part of that is that he has taste and style. I think that is part of the package. They have that as a connection. Harry is refined and tasteful, and I thought that, knowing the wealth that he had, he probably hired an interior designer to come in and create this beautiful space.

A.G.: The real struggle was finding the perfect penthouse for Harry. Believe it or not, it’s harder than you might think in New York City. Of course there are millions of penthouses, but the ones that are going to allow you to have a film crew come in for three weeks are very limited. I think there were 50 that were available to us, and most were giant empty white boxes with bad renovations and horrible-looking kitchens. Honestly, I was worried. We weren’t super-funded, in terms of budget, so if we had to dress the apartment, that would have been the entire budget. We knew we had to find something that was going to do a lot of heavy lifting. And I only saw one or two penthouses that I thought were going to really work and have the substance and the scale and ultimately the charm of the one that we wound up shooting in. I thought that place was spectacular. So we really pushed for it.

So you only looked at real penthouses with Tribeca views. So they were all in Tribeca? 
A.G.: Yes. And luckily this place had those beautiful wooden wall finishes, lacquered ceilings, the beautiful floors, the beautiful furniture. All of Harry’s apartment, none of that was built. That was all there.

ABS: That was a beautiful, beautiful loft. It had plaster walls, and that kitchen was really spectacular. Actually I know the cabinetmaker, Patrick Keesey, who does the most beautiful work. And there were all these built-ins.

Even that puzzle bookshelf? I really coveted that. 
A.G.: Yes, and it’s funny. We didn’t know that we were going to be shooting in that direction until maybe ten minutes before. They just decided, Oh, let’s put Dakota there. So we were scrambling to re-dress the shelves because the books and the small objects were from this family, and they didn’t make sense for Harry as a bachelor. It was a scramble. Then next thing you know, it’s a six-minute wide shot, and all you see is the bookshelf.

ABS: To dress that bookshelf would’ve been $15,000, but it looks great. We were really lucky. And a lot of the furniture in the loft was perfect — a lot of mid-century-modern antiques in natural tones, and some of it came from these really expensive, high-level furniture stores like R & Company and Wyeth. In the living room, he has this Kevin Walz sofa. He’s a really niche interior designer, but he makes a few pieces of furniture that they sell at Ralph Pucci, which is the most exclusive showroom. I’ve been obsessed with him for a long time, and I’ve only seen this sofa in a showroom. They had that and I was so excited to see that.

What did you feel like you had to change about the penthouse? 
A.G.: Well, a couple was living there. So we had to make it feel like Harry’s, as opposed to a couple’s. In the kitchen, we had to take all their things off the shelves because it looked like a couple’s pottery and glassware.

What does a single man’s glassware look like? 
A.G.: I’m a single man at this point, and I have just the right amount of glasses that I need and maybe enough for the three people that will ever come over to my house. It’s all Japanese glassware, and it’s not like lollipop colors — just clear glass, simple, and probably thinner than it needs to be. I don’t like a big, thick glass and no one has to tell me differently so I can just choose what I want.

ABS: I bought Harry all new glassware at the RW Guild store in Soho. And we built the bed. It was kind of an homage to Billy Cotton, and part of it was because the walls were plastered. We couldn’t put anything on the wall. So the headboard did a lot of the heavy lifting, and it was upholstered with this Kerry Joyce fabric that was quite beautiful. And then the sheets are silk. They fell over their bodies in a beautiful way. They are real silk from Bloomingdale’s, and they were thousands and thousands of dollars. We only had one set.

Do rich people really use silk sheets? 
ABS: They do in films, but it was also to make it sexy and romantic.

It definitely felt special. And I felt like the lights on the sides of his bed are the main characters in the film.
ABS: I love those lamps. I’ve had my eye on those. They’re by Vico Magistretti, and they’re called Alega lamps. I’ve always just sort of loved them and tried to use them in other movies, so I was psyched that everyone else liked it. One of them we were able to get new in time, and the other one we found vintage, and it was fun to try and track them down. I actually kept one.

Why did the lamp feel so important to source? 
ABS: There are a lot of mid-century-modern lamps you sort of see over and over and over again. And this in general, it’s a kind of a lamp that you don’t see that often and one I hadn’t seen in other movies. They’re impossible to get.

So you get the sense that scarcity and rarity is important to Harry. 
ABS: Exactly. Harry has very particular taste. He’s very refined. And we gave him a really impressive art collection, too. That was a big part of it for us was the taste. He was all these things, but he had a lot of taste and a lot of money. So that was a fun exercise, too, to choose the artists. We chose things that we love and also thought would be good for the character. There are blue-chip artists that are really popular with hedge-fund collectors, and we stayed really far away from those artists. There’s this Luisa Lambri black-and-white photograph in the scene where you kind of see them at the dining table. It’s off to the right. That was a piece that we both really loved. There’s an Ed Ruscha, there’s a Saul Leiter, and a Francesco Clemente watercolor in the kitchen that you sort of see. We had this incredibly beautiful Ross Bleckner that he let us make for the movie that we ended up not using, heartbreakingly.

He let you “make” it? 
ABS: We get permission from the artist and then we build the art ourselves. We don’t use original pieces. It would just be an insurance nightmare, so we make beautiful, beautiful copies and we have to destroy them at the end, which is always so heartbreaking for me because they’re pretty spectacular looking.

That sucks. I want to buy them all.
ABS: Me too. A lot of what we do you don’t end up seeing in the movies.