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How Game of Thrones production designer Gemma Jackson created a 'whole new world' for Aladdin

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Somewhere in Burma, there’s an ancient monastery that triggered a burst of inspiration in production designer Gemma Jackson.

The film she was working on did not require a holy place in the traditional sense. It was something much more decadent. Guy Ritchie’s new live-action version of Aladdin called for a brooding palace to tower over the bustling streets of Agrabah, the fictional port city with a vaguely Middle-Eastern bent at the centre of the sprawling musical.

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“It was quite exquisite,” says Jackson about the crumbling Burmese facility. “It was quite run down but it had elements that really spoke to me. It was timber, all carved wood and painted gold. Some of it was almost like a Christmas-tree gold, because they haven’t got any money. But it was wonderful and had these lively areas and balconies all around and this sort of indoor-outdoor sort of life. And I thought: ‘I think there’s something here.’ “

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It all goes to show that inspiration can come from strange, out-of-the-way places when designing a fantastical world where Genies and sorcerers, magic carpets and monstrous caves don’t seem out of place.

The palace is where Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott) is sequestered by her well-meaning father the Sultan (Navid Nagahban) until he can marry her off to a prince. It’s one of a number of impressive sets in the lavish production. Aladdin is a reimagined take on the 1992 animated classic of the same name, with Toronto-based actor Mena Massoud in the titular role of the resourceful street urchin and Will Smith as the shape-shifting, wish-granting Genie he accidentally conjures at the behest of an evil sorcerer. But while this world created by Jackson, an Emmy winner and Oscar nominee, maintains a sense of wonder, she didn’t want to approach the film as if it were simply a cartoon come to life.

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She wanted her Agrabah to be a real place filled with real people doing real work.

“Everyone was busy doing things, real things, making things,” says Jackson, in an interview with Postmedia in Beverly Hills earlier this week. “I don’t do decorative. I want it to be a real, vibrant living place. It has real trees, real dirt, real prickly pears. The animals come and they sh-t on it. We’ve made it as functional a place as possible. I think that’s partly why people find it attractive. It’s a proper working place.”

In fact, at the press conference for the film, more than one actor spoke about how the authenticity of the sets made it easy to deeply immerse themselves in the setting, even if their characters were prone to breaking out in song or engaging in elaborate dance routines.

This image released by Disney shows Naomi Scott as Jasmine and Mena Massoud as Aladdin, right, in Disney’s live-action adaptation of the 1992 animated classic “Aladdin.” (Daniel Smith/Disney via AP)
This image released by Disney shows Naomi Scott as Jasmine and Mena Massoud as Aladdin, right, in Disney’s live-action adaptation of the 1992 animated classic “Aladdin.” (Daniel Smith/Disney via AP) Photo by Daniel Smith /AP

“The ultimate compliment from the actor’s point of view is we were transported to the time and place,” said Will Smith. “That’s what happened when we walked on that set. When we walked through, it was in the textures on the walls. The stairs were real. You could walk up and go onto the rooftops. It was a powerful way to transport the actors into the emotions and the smells of the time and place.”

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Jackson, who received an Academy Award nomination in art direction for 2004’s Finding Neverland, took a similar approach the first time she worked for Ritchie. While not exactly a box-office triumph, no one could suggest that the authentic world Jackson created for the British filmmaker’s 2017 epic King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was anything short of spectacular.

“So I think he felt confident that the Aladdin world would be of a similar but different scale,” she says.

And Aladdin certainly has scale. Jackson and her team basically created a city on a massive sound stage in Surrey, England. Alongside the Sultan’s palace, there was the chaotic marketplace and Aladdin’s cleverly jerry-rigged home atop a rickety tower. There was also the forbidden “Cave of Wonders,” a supernatural realm shaped like a tiger’s head where Aladdin is sent by villain Jafar to find the lamp of the Genie.

Any of these sets would warrant a head start by Jackson and her team. But she says she tends to think of the film as a whole first before breaking down individual sets, a habit she has kept since her early days working in British theatre.

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“When you first read a big script like this, you get a tone in your mind and a sense of the scale and the colour and the hustle and the bustle,” she says. “The most important moment for me is first reading the script. I have to make sure I can read it uninterrupted, I don’t want to have to read it in bits. I want to get the hit. Ever since I worked in theatre, I have to get that first hit.”

Jackson has designed the look of films of all stripes, from the more grounded feel of State and Main or the 2001 hit Bridget Jones’s Diary to the period accuracy required for HBO’s historical drama John Adams. But she is likely still best known for her work defining the wildly original visuals in the first three seasons of HBO’s Game of Thrones,  which earned her two Emmy Awards.

She just wrapped production on Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, a British gangster film that brings both the director and Jackson back to their cinematic roots. Ritchie’s first movie was the mobster comedy-drama Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, while Jackson’s first job in film was as art director for Neil Jordan’s 1986 gangster drama Mona Lisa.

Jackson says her approach doesn’t change all that much, whether designing contemporary, down-to-earth visuals or fantastical new worlds.

“Whether you’re researching strange parts of Iran architecture or whether your doing downtown London somewhere, that doesn’t matter to me,” she says. “As long as I feel I’ve enjoyed the script and I want to tell that story then I’ll tell that story. I could be in a submarine and tell a story of a submarine. I just want to feel passionate about it.”

Aladdin is now in theatres.

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