Victoria Paul (‘A League of Their Own’ production designer): Our role is ‘to be a scaffold for the story that never rocks and is never wrong’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“You need to get all of it right so that none of it rings false,” reveals Emmy-nominated production designer Victoria Paul (“And the Band Played On”) about the challenges of ensuring every space on a film or series is as authentic as possible. For our recent webchat about her work on “A League of Their Own,” she adds, “as soon as any of it rings false to the audience, then they’re outside the story, and then you’ve lost them.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
SEE Exclusive Video Interview: Gbemisola Ikumelo (‘A League of Their Own’)
“A League of Their Own” was created by Abbi Jacobson (“Broad City”) and Will Graham (“Mozart in the Jungle”), adapted from the classic 1992 Penny Marshall comedy film of the same name, but with new characters and storylines. The Amazon Prime Video comedy series is set in 1943, during the formation of the Rockford Peaches, a World War II-era women’s professional baseball team in the nascent All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Co-creator Jacobson also stars alongside Emmy nominee D’Arcy Carden (“The Good Place”), Gbemisola Ikumelo, Chanté Adams, Melanie Field, Roberta Colindrez, Kelly McCormack, Molly Ephraim, Priscilla Delgado and Kate Berlant.
“What the job is, I think, is to create an entire world that is never questioned by the audience, that they are just in it, in that world, through the entirety of the show. That’s our job. It’s to be a scaffold for the story that never rocks and is never wrong. So to that end, we really do want every detail to be as right as we can,” Paul explains about the role of the production designer and the entire art department on a project like “A League of Their Own,” which transports audiences to the 1940s. “As soon as I’m looking at a set, and it feels like a set, I know we’ve done something off. Something is wrong. It has to just feel like the place it’s intended to be, not a set. And then you have to step back and say, why does this feel theatrical to me? Why does this feel incorrect? And we go through it. What I often find is that in our, shall we say, desire to hit the right notes about a character in their space, for example, we may reiterate something too often,” she says. “What we need is the patina of authenticity for someone’s space.”
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