Moonlight’s Hannah Beachler talks designing an Oscar winner on a budget

Why you looking at me like that, bro? What, man? Come on, you just drove down here? Yeah. A lot of what, you know, also a big part of production design, like I mentioned a little bit before, is collaborating with the cinematographer then director, and mostly the director, but also the cinematographer. And I think that it just helped sort of figure out, like, our color worlds for each chapter, you know? Because it was a small movie, I didn't have a ton of money to work with. So a lot of what I was doing would vary with a lot of color control. Because you can, that doesn't cost that much money, you know? So I can do that, I can control the color. And we did a lot, don't get it twisted, we did a lot on that movie, more than probably a lot of 1.5 million, the art department did. But that was the main way I think that I elevated. And then just, you know, I think that one of the reasons that Barry hired me was because I kind of understood what he wanted to do with Miami, where we're not getting the birdcage Miami, you know? That exists, but we wanted to take that Miami and just put a layer over it. And we wanted to use the pastels and the Cuban colors and architectures, the colors of the Bahamas and the Caribbean, which you also find in New Orleans a little bit, all those coastal, you know, areas along the Gulf. And so that was one thing that I did do, was go in there and just try to give Miami people to see that it's not birdcage for everybody. While that's it, because you do see them going on the train and you see like the lights, but taking the color from the neon, which Miami, it's like neon and deco, you know? Taking those colors and some of the shapes, if you look, from the deco. And so that was part of what I think I brought to the table for them.