Hannah Beachler

Hannah Beachler (/biːklər/) is an American production designer. She worked on the 2015 Rocky film Creed,[1][2] the Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead,[3] and most recently has become known for the film Moonlight,[4] Beyoncé's 2016 TV special and visual album Lemonade,[5] and for her Afrofuturist design direction on the film Black Panther,[6] for which she won an Academy Award for Best Production Design and making her the first African-American to be nominated in the same category, as well as the first to win.

Hannah Beachler
Alma materUniversity of Cincinnati, Wright State University
OccupationProduction designer
Websitewww.hannahbeachlerpd.com

Life and career

Beachler grew up in Centerville, Ohio, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati, studying fashion design. She attended Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio where she studied film.[1] She first collaborated with director Ryan Coogler on 2013's Fruitvale Station; this led to Coogler contacting her to work as his production designer on Creed,[2] and later to their working together on Black Panther.[6]

Fruitvale Station, covering the shooting of Oscar Grant, was filmed on a limited budget and required Beachler's creativity to come up with low-cost ideas; she used her own Bay Area Rapid Transit card that is seen in the visor of a car Grant is driving.[7] Fruitvale Station won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Film and the Audience Award for Best Film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013.[8]

For Creed, Beachler watched the first four Rocky films for inspiration. She was responsible for designing Front Street Gym that appears prominently in the film. She visited a number of gyms across the United States, but particularly in Philadelphia where the film series is based, in order to get a good idea of what the set should look like. She designed the entire gym including the professionally sized boxing ring, and her plans ensured that cameras could get a 360-degree view of everything.[1]

For the outdoor scenes in Miles Ahead, Beachler searched through numerous photograph archives to accurately capture the scenes in New York City from the 1950s to the 1970s, but ultimately took inspiration from some silent film shot from a car window, that was posted on YouTube decades later.[3] She used no stage shots in the entire film; the set of Davis' home was a disused church in Cincinnati that was gutted and renovated to resemble a multi-layer house including a basement recording studio.[3]

As the production designer on Marvel's Black Panther, Beachler oversaw a $30 million art budget and a crew of several hundred people.[8] Beachler is the first-ever female production designer of a Marvel film, and was the second person hired for it behind director Ryan Coogler.[6] To research the project, she first spent time in Cape Town, South Africa, and then traveled the region with the rest of the crew to get a sense of the countryside and cultures represented there. "It’s all different, and they’re different countries..." Beachler explained: "you can’t represent everything, but I can certainly interpret the fact that there are so many different things within [its fictional country of] Wakanda and within that one culture."[6] For her work on Black Panther, Beachler became the first African-American to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Production Design,[9] as well as the first to win the category.

Filmography

References
  1. ""Front Street Gym is the Heartbeat of the Film": Production Designer Hannah Beachler on Creed". Filmmaker Magazine. December 23, 2015. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
  2. "INTerview: Hannah Beachler (Creed)". Interiors. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
  3. "Miles Ahead' Production Designer Mixed the Real and Surreal in Biopic". Variety. March 29, 2016. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
  4. Valentini, Valentina (November 30, 2016). "'Moonlight,' 'Black Panther' Production Designer on Big Break With Ryan Coogler". Variety. Archived from the original on December 1, 2016. Retrieved December 1, 2016.
  5. "Beyoncé: Lemonade". IMDb. Retrieved February 23, 2018.
  6. Kai, Maiysha (February 21, 2018). "The Root". The Glow Up. Retrieved February 23, 2018.
  7. "The unseen world of production design". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
  8. Mihalek, Bob (December 7, 2017). "Wright State University". Wright State University Newsroom. Retrieved February 23, 2018.
  9. Daniel Montgomery. "'Black Panther' Production Designer Hannah Beachler Made Oscar History". GoldDerby. Retrieved 2019-01-30.
  10. "Hannah Breachler". British Film Institute. Retrieved June 22, 2016.
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