At the start of “Friendship,” Tim Robinson’s character Craig’s favorite place in the world is a beige armchair. That’s how much the world of the film is meant to be ordinary, contemporary, and painfully unremarkable. But contemporary comedies can do just as much work in creating a sense of character and place as more heightened sci-fi or period settings. When Craig meets new-to-town meteorologist Austin (Paul Rudd) and gets an invite to his home, the space feels like it’s been designed to meet Craig’s wildest fantasies of what is cool — because it has.
Rocío Giménez, the production designer of “Friendship,” told IndieWire that the film’s turn into something manic and self-destructive as Craig becomes more and more obsessed with Austin isn’t telegraphed by the design of the world, but all the production design choices put a kind of invisible pressure on the characters to snap. Austin’s home is tastefully mid-century modern in design and furnishing, but Giménez made sure these were as hollow as the character ends up being himself.
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“His aesthetic is mid-century modern. It’s cool, but it is also a stereotype of what cool is in the eyes of Craig. He looks at the couch and says it’s such a cool couch but it’s actually a replica of a designer couch. It’s — and the character’s — super fake. Like, [Austin] doesn’t even have real hair. He’s trying too hard; it’s all a front,” Giménez said. “If you look at the objects [in his home] it’s all replicas of real designer furniture that is supposed to be cohesive, and in Craig’s perspective, it’s super cool, but the audience knows the difference.”
The audience can also tell how much of a ghost Craig is in his own home and his own life, as his wife Tami (Kate Mara) turns more and more of it into a flower business. Only the armchair is really visible as a choice Craig made for himself. His “man cave” garage where he drags the drum kit he bought to jam with Austin (awkwardly not interested) is empty. The walls are bare. Giménez only slipped one additional thing into the house that Craig would have chosen, and it’s barely a choice at all.
“There is a painting of Van Gogh above the bed, but if you look at it, it says ‘The Immersive Experience.’ Maybe he actually didn’t know who Van Gogh was, maybe he just went to the mall, and he went to the light show of Van Gogh and he was like, ‘Oh, this is so cool; I love the lights.’ So they bought the poster,” Giménez said. “That’s the type of thing we’re always doing. Just putting this little visual twist, people barely notice it’s there, but we are constantly building those psychological levels into our designs, into really saying who this person is.”
It’s the kind of work that isn’t meant to distract from the flow of the comedy, or ever draw attention to itself. But it does help guide the actors and the other members of the production in creating the comedy. Giménez refers to great, immersive production design as having the ability to create the contrast that comedy needs to thrive, especially Tim Robinson’s brand of it.
“This movie was shot like ‘The Master.’ Everything is deadpan. Everyone is serious. And then you drop in Tim Robinson, and he’s the yellow guy in Google Street View, and he expands it. That’s something amazing that can happen in comedy where the environment, the world, is very grounded and it’s not super bright or pastel or screaming jokes. It’s a comedy because it’s a comedy without jokes. It’s acting more psychologically,” Giménez said.
Those psychological cues are scattered all over “Friendship,” with Giménez taking not only the production constraints and logistical timing of where the shoot needed to go when, but finding ways to seed little bits of cringe into Craig’s world and let us know that things are not quite right — with him, or with anyone.
“The production design is a silent partner for comedies,” Giménez said. “These sets become characters, if you look. There are a lot of layers. It’s subtly supporting the emotional state of the character and has to be, to me, like a playground where the actors and the director and the DP can fully go and play in it. We are making that 3D, 360 degree playground for them.”
