The Drama is an exceptionally smart film. It is well made, it is entertaining, but above and beyond all else, every detail is on purpose and everything is woven together purposefully.

Watching The Drama, I could see all the times and places when everyone had made a point of doing their work elegantly. It is a layered film, and it is smart, and the filmmaker assumes the audience is as intelligent as the story.

Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, this is the story of a young couple, Emma and Charlie, who are engaged and planning their wedding when something unexpected knocks both of them out of their comfort zones with each other. I was able to sit down with the film’s costume designer, Katina Danabassis, and production designer, Zosia Mackenzie, and find out how their work contributed to the telling of this story. This movie is weird and magical. It is a glimpse inside the neurosis of two young adults about to make a massive commitment, and it beautifully illustrates the ways they change, or don’t change, as they try to figure out how to make their lives together work for both of them.

An Introduction Through Costume

The film opens with a shot of an ear, which we soon see belongs to Emma Harwood (Zendaya). She’s wearing a small silver stud, the first of a few small simple pieces of silver jewelry we’ll see on the character. The placement of the earring, the consistency of the metal, it felt meaningful, and I asked the costume designer how she’d used the pieces to convey information about Emma.

“The jewelry is mostly just about being practical with money,” Katina Danabassis said. “Sometimes gold can feel a little bit too expensive for the regular person, and so it's nice to ground the choices with accessories that can be big ticket items at a lower price point, I think that speaks to audiences.”

Emma’s fiancee, Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson) is better off financially than she is, they come from different backgrounds, different cities. Emma grew up a military brat in Louisiana, Charlie comes from at least a little bit of Boston money. Plenty of couples have gotten past further divides, but we understand from the start that these are two people who see the world differently.

Emma’s teardrop necklace, also silver, no one ever explicitly says that it was a gift from Charlie, but it feels that way, and what I learned from the costume designer made me feel like that was possible. The character wears this necklace a lot, in almost every scene, and asked about this choice.

“It's the naturalism of wearing everyday jewelry that just kind of stays with you,” Danabassis explained, “and that one actually is a Tiffany Elsa Peretti The Drop necklace. I liked it because there's this sort of East Coast kind of conservative, a little bit wasp-y vibe to it, but still with the Elsa Peretti touch of artfulness. It's riding an interesting divide.”

Finding Tangible Ways To Frame A Story

From the meet-cute at the coffee shop when the story starts, to girlfriends meeting for coffee to catch up, these young people spend as much time sipping indie brew as most members of the audience. This being an A24 production, I was not expecting Starbucks, but a quick Google of Boston-area coffee shops produced a dizzying array of options. How, I wondered while watching, was it possible for the production designer to narrow it down to just a few? What made these locations the right ones for this film?

“It's funny,” Zosia Mackenzie told me, “there were some locations that we found really, really quickly, like the apartment or the wedding venue. Of course, it took time to actually lock those locations in, but one that we really struggled with was the coffee shop. They're often quite small, but this one had, like, amazing sight lines. It had so much depth which was really important for the way that our cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan, wanted to do the blocking and be able to shoot all those reaction shots. so it had the size, it had all those windows, which for the way that the film is lit, through all the natural light, that was huge. But I think we went to pretty much every coffee shop in Boston, not that I'm complaining about that.”

Later, when Emma meets Rachel (Alana Haim) and their friends, it was obviously a different location, and hearing about the coffee shop odyssey confirmed what I’d felt while watching the film, that these places mattered very much to the people in this story. They weren’t arbitrary decisions, these were places where the characters had chosen to make a pattern of patronizing. I had to ask about the dingy restaurant at the end, which looks like a 24-hour type of place, well lit so that we can fully appreciate the orange and brown of a decade or three back.

“The film does bookend with the coffee shop in the diner,” Mackenzie explained, “which was actually the first location that we locked in, the diner. When I arrived, Kristoffer had flown to Boston a little bit earlier, maybe like a week before, and my flight landed and I dropped off my bag at the hotel and went to meet Kris and Arseni for scouting, and that was the first place we went to. On the drive over, Kris was like, ‘this is it, this is it’. and I was thinking, let's not be hasty. And then we walked in there and I was like, oh my gosh, this is it. It's like a time capsule. So that was our first locked location.”

Purposeful Design Provides Information

One of the things about this movie that I really liked was that we see garments repeat, the way that real people wear their wardrobes. Charlie has a blue windbreaker and we see it a lot in The Drama. It’s never overkill, there’s never any chance of it feeling like the only garment he owns, and its use helps to establish how very normie he is. Nothing about Charlie is particularly controversial, possibly why he responds so poorly to something that never actually happened, and the jacket proves this to us without killing suspension of disbelief.

"That windbreaker bookends the film in cool ways,” Danabassis told me. “And that was vintage Eddie Bauer. Vintage double XL, shockingly. It fit perfectly, exactly the way that we wanted it to. I think that when you look at people in real life, who have to go to work, they might have to be biking or taking city transit. And there's weather in that city, you have to do what's practical, rather than what is just aesthetically pleasing or correct. So, choosing incongruent things that work well together, and it creates a sort of more specific and zeroed in on character.”

There’s this idea about color and character in film that goes all the way back to the very first movies. It’s in the 1903 western, The Great Train Robbery, and it continues through the 1920s, 1940s and through film’s transition into color: Bad guys wear black hats, good guys wear white hats.

This is not a story so simple that we can divide its characters into arbitrary categories like Hero and Villain, but Charlie and Emma wear opposite colors enough times throughout The Drama that the color-coding establishes, or reinforces, the ongoing conflict between them.

“Sometimes it's super intentional,” Danabassis said. “And sometimes it's a happy accident. You know, when you actually just see it come together, you're like, ‘Oh, wow, like, yeah, this is the right thing.’ And it complements as well as repels. It creates that tension and that is interesting. It's in the photoshoot scene, where she's wearing navy, or black, whatever the color that shirt is reading as. And he's wearing off white. So it's like he's the good guy, and she's framed as bad.”

Spaces That Reflect Character

We learn a lot about Charlie, and we see the differences between him and Emma, as we spend more time with the couple in their apartment, a space which makes it very obvious that it belonged to him before he met her. It has walls of bookshelves, a spiral staircase and interesting art everywhere we look. After hearing about the lengths to which the filmmakers went to find exactly the right locations, I wanted to know about this deeply personal space. What made this the right building, and how did the production designer redecorate it to show us Charlie and Emma’s inner lives?

“As head curator he's not doing so bad,” Mackenzie said. “And I think it's somewhat insinuated he's coming from a little bit of money. But that one, that was love at first sight. Our location manager, Stephen Hartman, he'd been sending options through while I was still in Toronto and Kris was in LA. When we got there, we were looking at places and there were some great locations. I think from the get go, we wanted to shoot in Boston because it has that almost European feel, very old world, and sophisticated in the sense that it has history and soul. We wanted something that echoed that.”

After looking at a ton of options, Hartman showed the production designer a DropBox full of locations he’d scouted, and when she saw this one, Mackenzie knew it was something special.

“It had all those things,” she told me. “It's a late Victorian, 19th century townhome in the south end of Boston. I was like, well, Kris is going to love this. And he did. We went to see it. And then it was just a matter of convincing his family to move all of their belongings out of their apartment for over a month so we could take over and do all the things you do in an apartment when you’re filming there. Like paint, and have like 80 people in there filming and making noise. But it was love at first sight and the spiral staircase was a huge part of that. But also all the old molding, the windows, as I’ve mentioned, Arseni likes natural light or practical lighting from within. Or if he's using film lights, he's pushing the light through windows. He's not bringing in big lights into the sets ever. It had amazing windows at great sight lines. Also, it had that depth. It was a very open space for such an old apartment, that was a huge win. And it had those bookshelves already there. That was a ‘this must be it’ moment.”

“One of my favorite pieces of set dressing was the envelopes for parking tickets,” Danabassis said, “it's such a real thing, everybody knows that orange.

“I loved that,” Mackenzie responded. “We tried to make it as lived in as possible, but also very precise for everything. They are living in this curated little world.”

It’s Just Like Planning A Real Wedding

Our couple has a beautiful wedding, regardless of what happens before and during the actual ceremony. It's a big part of the story, the first hour is building towards this exact moment, and the decorations, the flowers, the production basically planned and set up a whole wedding. Anyone who has even been in the proximity of such planning will understand how much work all of that is.

“We were literally planning a wedding,” Mackenzie told me with a little laugh, “like, fully. We chose Turner Hill because it's got that classic New England vibe. It's so elegant and traditional, it's so perfect and so sophisticated, when it all comes crashing down, it makes it almost like extra, extra, extra crazy. We loved the old worldness of it all, but then we added in some more contemporary lighting. We added in these modern Artemide glow lights on the tables, very structural, and we went more contemporary with the florals. It just kind of all felt very, very timeless.”

The wedding dress, there was no way I wasn’t going to ask the costume designer about that. I’m not even a wedding girly, but Zendaya-as-Emma was fairytale princess perfect. And after learning about the crazy quantity of work these ladies had put into making this film a visual feast, I had to ask about that dress. Mostly, I needed to know about the cut-outs on the bodice, or were they panels? But I also wanted to know anything she was able to tell me.

“It’s very traditional,” Danabassis told me. “I think if you were to ask a little kid to draw a wedding dress, what it looks like is that silhouette. It's a quick read of a wedding dress. And there are some modern details, it was actually Zendaya's idea to replace the mesh on the side with something that was more like flesh tone. We dyed that to match and the tailor did that. You know, when someone as stylish as Zendaya has an idea, you're like, ‘yep, that's a great idea.’ We were collaborating the whole time, she’s brilliant and I feel so grateful to work with someone like her. The dress came from Jenny Yu, which is at a very approachable price point in general. She also helped provide one of the wedding dresses in the Materialist. We had a pre-existing relationship, and we were endlessly grateful to have her help.”

The costume designer paused and looked at the production designer. “Wait, wasn't there a detail with peacocks or something?”

“There was like the peacock thing,” Zosia Mackenzie grinned, “it was a room there. It's the room where we have the ‘Come to Jesus’ moment, when they talked to Misha. There was a room in the wedding venue that had a peacock fireplace. And I think I was like, Kris, if we don't film in this room, I'm walking. I was joking, but it was a bit of a thing. And you do see it a little bit. But we riffed off of that a little bit with the florals, I think they kind of act as a nice, sort of counterpoint to the estates, like very heavy architecture and sort of like the dark wood panelling. It's not that it's a huge move or something. But still, we could have just shot it somewhere else.”

“I love that,” Katina Danabassis smiled back. “I love that theme so much, we talked about it in the commentary, but like that moment where Charlie is freaking out. We watched Rob just do the most epic facial acting and I remember watching that take and being like, ‘my God, what an actor, he is so good in that scene, you just really see him processing and falling apart.”

‘The Drama’ is now playing in theaters everywhere.

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