For The Room Next Door, production designer Inbal Weinberg says her main focus was maintaining a realistic New York look while incorporating director Pedro Almodóvar’s visual style. “Pedro has his own very strong aesthetic style and visual language that he has developed over 40 years of filmmaking,” she says, “but this was sort of his first time venturing outside of his known environment of Spain and going into a city he doesn’t know well personally.”
Martha’s (Tilda Swinton) apartment is based on a 5th Avenue apartment owned by a friend of Almodóvar’s, with a balcony overlooking downtown NYC. “The views were very important to him,” says Weinberg. “In fact, the view that you see out of the windows is the actual view out of that apartment. We took plates out of that apartment and turned it into a photographic backdrop to hang in our studio in Spain.”
The interiors of the apartment were different, as they had to match Martha’s life as a war photographer. “I got in touch with two female war photographers, one in DC and one in Brooklyn, and I visited with Pedro and the team,” she says. After shipping a lot of décor items from New York, especially books, Weinberg was able to work with Almodóvar to craft the visual aesthetic. “Pedro knew immediately what would work for him and for the style of the character. It was a very good matchup between his style, which is very expressive in color and more stylized, and the New York City touches that connected the thread.”
The other main location from the film is a rental property in upstate New York, which required an extensive search to find a location in Spain that would match the aesthetic. “I was obviously a bit concerned because Spain looks nothing like the northeast of the United States, so I sent Pedro a lot of options,” she says. “He was immediately drawn to a more modernist version of an upstate home, because the first wave of modernist architects that came to the U.S. settled around New York and many built beautiful, iconic modernist upstate homes for rich clients.”
Past the look of the house itself, Weinberg says the landscaping was also an important part of the decision process. “For me, a lot of the decision was on the vegetation surrounding the house, because a Mediterranean landscape does not look like the same vegetation,” she says. “The house we picked was very impressive, stylistically. The very radical angles were really interesting cinematically, and it incorporated nature in a way that I felt could link with upstate New York without being too jarring.”
