Production designer Adam Stockhausen has spent more than a decade creating cinematic worlds for directors Wes Anderson, Steve McQueen and Steven Spielberg. It’s a long line of enviable collaborations, but two of the most notable episodes – ‘The French Dispatch’ and ‘West Side Story’ – hit theaters last year, the latter earning Stockhausen his fourth Oscar nomination. .

Spielberg’s idea to bring a new version of the famous 1961 musical was first discussed with his collaborator after the production of “Ready Player One” in 2016. The director had only one specific request for Stockhausen and his team and that was to make it “real”. by turning as much as possible in place. Stockhausen recalls, “So how do we do this? Because it’s not easy to do big musical numbers like that in the streets of New York. This is where Stockhausen’s personal knowledge of city life came in handy.

“I was [living] a little below 66th Street, less than 20 blocks away for five or six years,” Stockhausen notes. “So I knew those streets pretty well and I’ve toured and scouted enough in New York to know what was there. I wasn’t too surprised by it, but I was surprised by how many places we were able to find where the city was able to help us take control and there’s a lot of the upper part of avenue Saint-Nicolas that we were able to redirect buses on and do some of the long sections of the “America” ​​issue.And I was pleasantly surprised that we could get as much of this avenue as long as we had it.

To transform the neighborhood, production had to painstakingly approach one building after another building signs and awnings to age the streets and stores 60 years old. Stockhausen says the work of the art directors and on-set technical team has been “a bit relentless”. And that’s without even considering the community relationships that come into play. He notes, “You do a lot of dry editing where you say, ‘Before we open in the morning, can we come and install the panel, test everything, then we’ll take it down and let you be open for the day?’” Sometimes, he adds, the crew would offer to make new signs for the store if they would allow the production to put up their sign for the shoot.

Despite a bit of luck for the “America” ​​number, few New York neighborhoods can still pass for 1957, let alone allow you to shut down traffic for months at a stretch. Most of the film was going to require a controlled exterior set. After a long search, a partial solution for the film’s exterior scenes was found across the Hudson River in Paterson, NJ Stockhausen and his team rebuilt a Manhattan neighborhood on active city parking lots using shipping containers. stacked with steel skeletons and foam to create authentic facades. The intersection and lots became the film’s “location alley”, where many of the film’s key moments occur.

“We had looked at a lot of things,” Stockhausen says. “And it was one of those things where you start walking around, you’re like, ‘Maybe, maybe. We kind of walked in circles around this lot for about an hour and it was adjacent to a street area where we actually did a bunch of work in shark territory. So, we’re like, ‘OK, that’s pretty exciting.’ “

A lot of preparation went into making sure the location aisle matched Spielberg’s vision. Not only did Stockhausen and his team build a model, but they flew a camera in the area to give Spielberg a real-world perspective. Yes, it was a big operation even before the signing of the filmmaker. What followed were “loads and loads” of engineering studies to then build it.

As with his relationships with McQueen and Anderson, it’s the creative connection to Spielberg that Stockhausen values ​​most.

“We’re looking at these beautiful Walker Evans photographs of an early ’60s construction site. We’re looking at a Bruce Davidson photograph of these gang members,” Stockhausen explains. “And he points out what excites him, and I underlines what turns me on. The only way I know is to do it the old-fashioned way. And I really think he does too. It’s just not some kind of formula.

Given the difficulties of reconstructing a bygone era of New York, you might assume that Stockhausen considers “West Side Story” one of the toughest jobs of his career. He agrees it’s up there, but his latest project, a highly anticipated franchise film directed by James Mangold, might top it.

“There’s a tiny little movie called ‘Indiana Jones’ in there,” Stockhausen says with a smile. “It’s been a bit of a challenge, but it’s been interesting for sure.”