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Spoiler Warning: This article contains light spoilers for “Materialists,” playing in theaters now.
“Materialists,” Celine Song‘s follow-up to “Past Lives,” offers a candid look at how money and financial status influence modern dating. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a matchmaker whose clients often have strict income expectations for their hypothetical partners, as does Lucy herself. She wants the stability of wealth, and she knows it. It’s what everyone striving toward the rarefied world of upper-class New Yorkers wants.
The film’s depiction of New York’s geography serves its examination of socioeconomic differences. “The movie is all about class, and the neighborhoods that everybody lives in speak to their class, like right away,” set decorator Amy Silver (“The Beguiled,” “On the Rocks,” “The Mastermind”) says.
There are various apartments shown in the film, and the sharp contrasts between the interior of a penthouse belonging to Harry (Pedro Pascal) and the shabby digs that John (Chris Evans) shares with roommates are absurd, and true to life.
Silver worked with a frequent collaborator, production designer Anthony Gasparro (“Kinds of Kindness,” “Showing Up,” “The Mastermind”), to create the apartment spaces. The pair spoke with Variety to break down how they put together the apartments shown in the film, including what each living space says about the character’s lifestyle — and also how much they think that character pays in rent. Plus, they delve into the locations for the weddings and Adore office.
Lucy’s Apartment
Location: Brooklyn Heights
Rent Estimate: $3,200/month
The script originally had Lucy living in Greenpoint, according to Gasparro, but none of the locations there worked. The team also looked at Williamsburg before settling on Brooklyn Heights. “It’s not Brooklyn Heights proper. It’s Brooklyn Heights, between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill,” Gasparro says. Lucy’s place was one of the last locations the team found since they were looking for something that felt unique from other rom-com films.
Crucially, it had to be “something that she was able to afford, too,” Silver says. “But her apartment was very considered. You don’t see a lot of it in the movie, but what you do see, everything was very considered and designed.”
And the decor had to be “choices that she could afford,” Gasparro says. “Maybe she spent a little bit extra money on the table, but had IKEA flatware. She also probably isn’t spending a lot of time there, so it’s definitely on the smaller side. And we utilize the fire escape as a place she probably would go and just reflect or have a cigarette.”
Silver’s favorite detail from all the sets is the makeup desk where Lucy sits at the start of the film. She found that desk in Hudson, NY. “It’s a desk that used to belong to Norman Rockwell,” Silver says. “It was this really beautiful, Victorian-ish, kidney-shaped desk painted white with a mirrored top, an antique mirrored silver top. And it was so beautiful. And I just loved that that was the only thing in her apartment that had any kind of age on it.”
Both artisans emphasize how tiny the space was. “It was like the size of a laptop. It was great that Shabier Kirchner — a lot of director of photographies would say no because it’s so small — but he really embraced how small it was,” Gasparro says. “And how it made sense for exactly what Amy was speaking to, like, “Well, what can she actually afford?” We were trying to be as realistic as possible, because she says she makes $80,000 a year. Even then, like, “How do you afford an apartment in New York City without it being this tiny, almost like a studio?”
Lucy’s decision to live in that neighborhood indicates aspirations of wealth, even if she’s not home much. “Brooklyn Heights is also a really wealthy neighborhood, but she lives on the outskirts of it. So I think that speaks to [how] she would live in an apartment that speaks to people who have money,” Silver says.
“She also wants to be close to a subway, and she doesn’t want to live on the outer boroughs because she wants to be as close to Manhattan and the Adore office,” Gasparro adds. “Even if she could get twice a bigger apartment in Sunset Park, she would never settle for that. She wants to have a smaller apartment that’s closer to the vibe of Manhattan.”
Harry’s Penthouse
Location: Tribeca
Rent Estimate: He owns the apartment.
With Harry’s $12 million penthouse, the team needed to find something with “a richness and the aesthetic that was going to be to speak to who Harry was as a character. There’s a sophistication to it. It’s almost bespoke. It’s incredibly tasteful,” Gasparro says.
They looked for something with the right scale and size to accommodate filming for a long time, particularly within the bedroom, living room and kitchen. It was difficult to find something in that condition, but once they located one, “we knew that this was going to be one of the tent poles on how the rest of the film was going to look,” Gasparro adds.
Harry’s penthouse is real, and an actually family lives in that space. Silver went through and removed anything that seemed family-oriented, in order to transform it into bachelor pad. She describes the style of Harry’s place as “quiet luxury.”
“The apartment mostly had a lot of neutrals and really spoke to a design sensibility from probably the 2010s, and there was a lot of really special antiques. The lighting in there was a lot of Italian lighting and Charlotte Perriand sconces on the wall,” Silver says. “Nothing was advertising big name designers, but everything in there was quite special, and expensive.”
The team wasn’t able to really building anything in that space besides a new headboard and bed for Harry’s bedroom, which were necessary since they filmed in that room for a while. “We were limited with what we were able to do there because the walls were plastered, so we couldn’t put anything up on the walls. So Amy had this idea of building this giant headboard and and then bringing in the beautiful sheets and all the bedding for that,” Gasparro says.
John’s Apartment
Location: Sunset Park
Rent Estimate: $3,400/month between all the roommates
John’s apartment was actually built in a studio in Long Island City although the exterior is Sunset Park. Song shared photographs of a place where her husband, Justin Kuritzkes, formerly lived, as a reference point for the dilapidated apartment. “We also had a great crew, great construction, scenic crew that put that together. So we kept building in all this wear and tear that those apartments all over the city would have with multiple roommates coming in and out,” Gasparro says.
The artisans tried to incorporate details that reflect what “a very traditional, lazy landlord would do,” he says, including: a painted-over intercom, ugly sconces, pipes with paint peeling off and a run-down air conditioner.
“It really is this kind of apartment that you could only imagine people in New York would dare to live in, like there’s no living room. There’s just a strip of wall and a sofa, and there’s one bathroom,” Silver says. “[John’s] apartment was the best one in the house, because he’s lived there the most, so he had those windows.”
Silver remembers scrounging for the right decor touches. “It was fun to literally get the cheapest things we could find at Home Depot, IKEA, Salvation Army, and somehow make it look aesthetic, but also have it look a dump. I mean, he steps on the condom. And that tells a lot of the story. And then Tony, had us put a thing of spaghetti that had been left over in the sink for how many days. So many of the guys on the set were like, “Oh, I lived in an apartment like this,” Silver says.
At one point, John stands over the sink in the bathroom and can’t get the mirror to close. It springs open no matter how many times he pushes it back. That detail was in the script, Gasparro says. “Amy found the perfect mirror, and then we just did a little — actually, no, I think it came that way. In the end, we didn’t even have to give it any sort of rigging,” he says.
During the process of bringing the apartment to life, the team mapped out the entire space with tape. “We would tape where the the sink would be, where he would step on the condom, where the kitchen would be. So we actually laid it out as this giant, to-scale blueprint, and we’d walk Celine through it and Shabier,” Gasparro says. “And then we designed it basically from the ground up, and then made sure it had just the right amount of space for Shabier to get the camera around and for everything to happen, and we really kept it on the smaller side so it definitely read cramped and dingy.”
Silver says that “it wasn’t like a fantasy of what it’s like to live in New York. It was actually very realistically, like, this is how three people who don’t have a lot of money live in this space that’s almost impossible to live in.”
Sophie’s Apartment
Location: West Village
Rent Estimate: $6,800/month
Sophie lives in a two-bed, two-bath in “one of the most beautiful streets in New York City,” Silver describes. That street is world-famous, thanks to Carrie Bradshaw.
“I think it’s two houses from the famous house in ‘Sex and the City.’ Perry Street. The idea was because she was able to afford to have a matchmaker, her apartment was more considered,” Gasparro says. “She spent a little bit more money. She had more money than Lucy so she had more of the built-ins. She had a little bit of a bigger table. She had a little more refined sense, or more space to settle into her apartment, whereas Lucy’s is so cramped she has to sit outside to have some respite. So it was more about just giving her, like: this is where someone that can afford a matchmaker, that’s ambitious, would live in New York City. We considered, like, ‘Oh, the West Village would be the perfect place for her,'” Gasparro continues.
Viewers mostly just see Sophie’s kitchen, but even that glimpse correlates with what we know about the character. “The idea around for her space was that she had money, but she was a bit of a blank slate too. The aesthetic in that apartment was also pretty spare, but she had nice things that were maybe a little bit more mainstream than Lucy’s apartment, [which] was filled with more idiosyncratic furniture. Sophie’s apartment was just very simple and clean and very nice,” Silver says.
Other Locations
“Materialists,” of course, displays wedding culture and all its grandeur. “The weddings all take place in Midtown, around Central Park, like the classic New York City, anytime you see a film, when you see Central Park and Fifth Avenue, not the Midtown which is by Herald Square, but closer to Central Park, which is a little bit more upscale,” Gasparro says.
Think: the Plaza Hotel. Gasparro recalls how the film was shot during peak wedding season, which restricted their location options. “We had to combine a few hotels to make it look like it was one venue,” he says.
As for Lucy’s workplace, Adore: “We always thought it would be somewhere central New York City, which has a vibrant sort of heartbeat and a great location,” Gasparro says. “So we decided to shoot in Soho. But we were also looking around Union Square.”
Additional filming spots: “A lot of the locations for the restaurants were also either in Tribeca or lower Manhattan. And then John’s world, like the theater, his apartment, were all based in either Sunset Park or other parts of Brooklyn. And then we have Central Park,” Gasparro says.
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