About The Production

Helping Weiland bring Made of Honor to the screen are cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts, BSC and costume designers Penny Rose and Rebecca Hale, all of whom have previously collaborated with the director, as well as production designer Kalina Ivanov, who designed last year's sleeper hit Little Miss Sunshine.

Ivanov says that the look of the film is defined by each individual character. "I lay a very specific color pallet, because I feel that color is emotion," she says. "When I read a script, I have very distinct feelings about what the colors of the characters are. I try to lay that pallet throughout the entire film. Every character has its own narrative arc, and so do my colors. They tell a story, too.

When she was first approached about the film, Ivanov created a gallery of images on her website for Weiland to look at. In a subsequent meeting with the director and producer, they realized that they had very similar visions of the characters, the humor, and of the elegance of the script.

"One of the things that appealed to me," says Ivanov, "was the opportunity to create two different worlds. One is Tom's world, which is very contemporary. He's a very wealthy, creative man. The other is the traditional Scottish world based on years of tradition and very old money. It was new money in New York which is hip, trendy and vibrant, versus old, rather staid, and old-fashioned money in Scotland.

"One of the things I'm most proud of is finding the loft in Los Angeles that we used for Tom's home," Ivanov continues. "We found a space that had the greatest bones you could imagine, with very high ceilings and on various levels. It was two lofts put together. I realized that by knocking out a wall we could easily connect the two spaces and have the most beautiful New York-like architecture."

"It was an empty shell that allowed me to create a style for Tom's character. I also wanted to create a fluidity in it. I built a lot of bookcases, an entire library that curved around the room. It made the room more inviting and warm and gave it a sense of creativity and heart. Because he's a wealthy bachelor, I wanted to create the ultimate in technology, so I also designed a curved DVD library and metal library ladders. I also created the ultimate bachelor's kitchen, a breathtaking and beautiful space that probably had never been used, and a huge wine rack."

Luckily, after creating the space, Ivanov found a building in New York with exteriors that matched the interior windows of the loft space in L.A.

When it came time to create the Scottish sets, Ivanov looked to history. "The inspiration for the pallet for the Scottish section of the film was the classical tartan of the Scottish family in the film," he says. "The tartan has a very beautiful green, a little bit of blue, and a little bit of red running through it, so I reserved the color red until we got to Scotland. For the wedding in Scotland, we did most of the flowers with red roses, plus the traditional Scottish heather -- which was our blue and green."

Though Dunvegan Castle represents, in most shots, the exterior of Colin's home, Ivanov notes that finding locations for the interiors was not so easy. "There was a lot of movie magic used in creating that castle. We used 4 or 5 structures to make the one," she says. "By scouting castles and reading books about Scottish architecture, one of the things I noticed was that every castle has many layers to it, added through history. If the original was built in the 13th century, a brand new Tudor ceiling might have been added in the 15th century, and then in the 18th century they might have remodeled and used the first wallpaper, then in the 19th century plumbing came in. So there are a tremendous number of looks in each castle. The ground floor might look like 13th century but the second floor might be completely 19th and 20th century."

Among the English and Scottish castles that form the interior of the McMurray home are Broughton Castle, near Oxford, England, which has a great hall of stone, traditional in Scottish architecture.

However, the second floor of Broughton did not suit the filmmakers' purposes. So it was on to a third castle, Dorney Court, for the more intimate rooms. Putting false stone over the wood-and-brick hallways to match the stone of Broughton Castle, the rooms were just what the filmmakers were looking for.

In a few exterior shots, Colin's home is played by another Scottish castle, Eilan Donan, which stands on a rocky promontory in the waters of Lochalsh on Skye. "It became a little bit of a Rubik's Cube, to put all the pieces together to make sure that they all kept the same Scottish feeling we had seen in our research," notes Ivanov. "But that is the magic that production designers perform!"

Cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts, BSC, who has two Academy Award® nominations to his credit, was charged with lighting Made of Honor. Unlike many romantic comedies, Made of Honor is being shot in a very lush, very beautiful way with a lot of depth to it.

"Paul was very keen that he didn't want the film to look too bright. He didn't want what he calls 'comedy lighting,'" says Pierce-Roberts. "He wanted it to look real and believable."

Finding and then lighting Tom's loft was another challenge for the director of photography. "The loft that Kalina found for Tom was fabulous," he explains. "It was huge, but was very difficult to light because it was 15 stories up. The windows were a lovely hemispherical shape that you find in a lot of older New York lofts, so that worked rather well.

For a wedding scene on a rooftop, Pierce-Roberts worked closely with the production designer to light the scene naturally. "Kalina had done a drawing to show how she was going to decorate and what kind of lights she was planning to use," he notes. "I was able to use most of her practicals as a light source. It made it prettier and a lot more romantic, and in fact, they lit most all of the background action and the extras. It worked quite well."

"We have three weddings in this movie," explains Weiland. "Each wedding had to have its own theme. Obviously, the last one was the most important. We wanted it to feel free, so we shot it in the open air and we shot it at night. It takes place in New York with a beautiful skyline. It's beautifully lit and there are great light effects -- it's incredibly romantic. You want people to leave feeling that the scene was not only a feast for the eyes, but a feast for the heart."

A major collaboration on the film was that between the film's two costume designers. Penny Rose was responsible for the American portion of the film, and Rebecca Hale took over once the company arrived in the United Kingdom.

Laughs Weiland, "When I think of it, I did some terrible things to Patrick: I had him naked and in a mini-kilt."

"The truth is," says Rose, "we're just there to help the actor en route to the look they'll have in the film. We don't superimpose on them. An actor wraps himself in what we give him and then they become the character. It's really all in the actor.

"Michelle's character needed to have a progression from the beginning of the film until the end so that she became more glamorous," she continues. "I think it's also relevant that, as an art restorer, she probably doesn't earn a lot of money, so we tried to avoid doing high, high fashion. In the beginning she's quite 'girl-next-doorish' and then a little more chic as we went along."

"For a wedding to a member of the Scottish aristocracy," explains Rose, "you can assume that it will be a very fancy affair. The Scottish wedding would be almost royal in its glamour. We gave Hannah a very glamorous silk, taffeta, and organza gown. I saw a wedding dress in a magazine called Vogue Sposa. I contacted them in Italy and they put me in touch with Atelier Aimee, a shop that had just opened in New York. The bridesmaids' dresses were from Vera Wang."

Contrasting with the glamorous dress Hannah wears for the Scottish wedding is the simple, elegant dress she wears to marry Tom, designed by Selia Yang.

Rebecca Hale was charged with costuming the UK portion of Made of Honor. "For over a month, Penny and I talked about what she was doing," she says. "We had to make the divide between Scotland and America very obvious."

According to Hale, she and Rose initially discussed not having any tartans until the wedding. "Generally, Scottish people aren't dressed head-to-toe in tartans or kilts. They're used for weddings and ceremonials. But I spoke with Paul about it. He had always wanted the Scottish people to look almost 'alien' to the Americans, and to show the difference between the two cultures, we did it that way. We both felt that for the arrival of Hannah's family and wedding party, we should put Colin's entire family in the McMurray tartans, tweeds, and plus-twos, which are the britches they wear."

What Hale discovered through her research was that during the day, the men would wear tweeds, rather than a tartan. One of the Scottish members of her team went up to the North and discovered an amazing little shop with hundreds of thick fabrics in the back. "You don't find fabric like that anymore," Hale says. "And for me it was the most fascinating. The Harris tweed is made up there and it is specially fabricated for each family."

For the McMurray tartan, Hale and Ivanov looked at about 80 different Murray clan tartans before choosing a very subtle one that is predominantly green with a little bid of red and blue. "We went to the House of Bruar, an enormous mall-like place, where they make kilts. One of the women there was married to the butler of a local man. It's in that type of small talk that you find out what people wear and how they wear it."

The tartan selected for Patrick Dempsey's character is called a Royal Stewart. Says Hale, "It's a military tartan -- it's what the pipers wear. When people think of tartans, it's the Royal Stewart that they generally are thinking of."

For the Highland Games sequence, Hale says, "Paul said one word -- medieval. Because I've worked with him a lot and know that he likes to play upon people's sense of humor, I got it immediately. We rented a lot of the costumes from theaters, because it's a more imaginative form of costuming. We found fabulous pig's-head masks and cockrels and jester's costumes at the Royal Shakespeare Company." Her greatest challenge for the sequence turned out to be dressing the 250 extras in various types of renaissance dresses, pantaloons, and exotic headgear.

Adding to the merriment for the Americans was the terminology used on British film sets -- not to mention the few Celtic words they picked up on Skye. Carpenters are chippies; electricians are sparks; bairn are children in Scotland; and detours are deviations throughout the British Isles.

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