She’s right at home with ‘Sand and Fog’

It’s right there in the title, after all. When production designer Maia Javan took on the “House of Sand and Fog” project she knew that much of the success of the production process and ultimately the film itself would have its basis in what she accomplished with the house.

Working closely with writer-director Vadim Perelman and cinematographer Roger Deakins, Javan scoured the seaside towns just south of San Francisco, where the film is set, to create extensive reference books of fences, eaves, windows, trees and all the other elements that would go into visualizing the focal point for the collision course drama about a troubled woman who loses her home and the Iranian family that purchases it.

The very centrality of the house to the film’s drama presented its own set of challenges. As Javan explains, “Conceptually we didn’t want the kind of house everybody in the audience would have an emotional connection to or think ‘what a great fixer-upper,’ but at the same time we didn’t want the house to be so shabby it was ironic people were fighting over it.

“At every turn I was asking myself if it was too heroic or too ironic. By not hitting either of those notes it makes the story much more powerful and much more performance driven. We actually wanted the house to not be imbued with anything other than what the performers brought to it.”

Ultimately Javan based her work on the house used as a practical location in Malibu, which was itself modified to meet the needs of the production, but the majority of her work went into the interior set built on a soundstage in Culver City.

First Javan had to keep in mind such production-specific details as having the interior walls hung on motor-driven chains for easy removal, adding exposed beams in the ceiling to mask seams where portions could be removed or even fudging the placement of a closet door to facilitate crew access.

Then as the set was built, walls were plastered and covered with vintage wallpaper that was sanded to approximate aging and hand-rubbed with glaze to alter the color.

The hardwood floor had a residue applied to it that was purposefully allowed to build up in the baseboards to simulate years of neglect.

For Javan, it is the imperfections that make the work true-to-life. Her goal is to make her efforts invisible.

“There are scenes where I’m probably the only person who picks up on these details, but I think they are my favorite pieces of art direction in the entire movie, what I’m proudest of,” she says.

“There are a lot of moments in an interior hallway where you’re really close to the wall, and we worked for a long time on the texture of the plaster on the walls. As characters move through the hallway you can see just the tiniest pockmarks and imperfections in the texture of the walls. To me it doesn’t look like a set, it really looks real. And that’s just what this particular house needed.”

Having grown up in Cambridge, Mass., where her father (himself an Iranian immigrant) worked at MIT, Javan began working on Harvard theater productions while still in high school, eventually moving to New York City, where she began working on commercials. After a move to Los Angeles she designed her first feature, “This World, Then the Fireworks,” and has since overseen the look of such films as “The Way of the Gun,” “crazy/beautiful” and “The Banger Sisters.”

Climactic scenes of “House of Sand and Fog” take place with numerous characters crammed into a small bathroom, and Javan explains the way in which something as simple as the placement of a room within the overall layout -- in this case to position the bathroom so three of its four walls were hanging off the overall set for ease of movement -- can make a huge difference to the production.

“It’s just very practical. A lot of art direction is just super common-sensical -- if it’s here I have to take the bed out, to do that I have to take the wall out. The wall may only take 10 minutes to move, but the rest of the production also moves around it. It’s not anybody’s fault, it’s just the Rubik’s Cube of shooting. I always say whatever wall you want to move, the craft services table will be up against it. Guaranteed. I mean, it’s got to go somewhere.”