Today we’d like to introduce you to Phoebe Darling.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
It started by watching TV, actually. Catching up on Eastenders one Sunday afternoon with friends, (as is mandatory in the UK) I moaned that props kept moving around between shots. They collectively told me to Shut Up! but afterwards one of them – actress Izzy Laughland – mentioned that I should talk to her father, a TV director. He was kind enough to have me shadow him on set for a day and I instantly fell in love with the camaraderie that filled the air. Most of all, I loved being around people who seemed genuinely happy to be at work. It was such a stark contrast from the stiff silence of the commercial art world that I’d been working in for the past year.
Desperate to adopt this as my new career, I looked around at what resources I had to pool – I had plenty of friends who were in bands, and bands need music videos. They may not have had any money to pay me, but they made up for it in gig tickets over the years!
It wasn’t long before Sucker, a video that I had designed for my talented friends The Big Moon, directed by my good pal Louis Bhose, won Best Music Video at that year’s NME awards. Realizing that we’d beat out Taylor Swift and St Vincent in our category made me feel almost as queasy as the bottomless champagne at the afterparty.
As my network in the London music video scene expanded, so did the genres. By the time I left the UK, I was regularly designing music videos for innovative British rappers like Dave (Funky Friday, Starlight) and Headie One (Both, Home), collaborating with artists like Lewis Capaldi (Grace), Michael Kiwanuka (Money) and total sweetheart Loyle Carner (You Don’t Know) who even let my dad star as an extra.
This music video work crucially opened doors to what has come to be my real passion; narrative film. I worked on a number of award-winning short films before being offered to design my first feature; the critically acclaimed UK indie, County Lines. I had worked on the short of the same name and owe Henry Blake, the film’s director, a massive debt of gratitude for putting his faith in me and taking me with him when it came time to make it a full-blown feature.
A short while later I moved to LA. Searching for the next level in my career and dreaming of bigger budgets, robust film infrastructure, more scope and creative freedom…
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
We landed at LAX in late 2019, blissfully clueless of the oncoming global pandemic and unaware of just how extended the wait for my immigrant work permit would be. It was delivered in March of 2020, and the very next day it was announced that all sets in LA would be shut down indefinitely. Our ways of interacting with one another were suddenly altered, knocking my dreams of ‘networking’ in LA firmly on the head. At the time it felt like I had taken myself out of an industry in London that I had worked so hard to find my place in, and that this additional setback could ruin my momentum altogether.
Now we’re out the other side of it, I feel like I’m just getting into the swing I’d hoped to be in back then. Saying that, I’m very thankful to have ridden out the storm in LA and grateful for the opportunity for adventure and new challenges. The move has introduced me to a new community of incredibly skilled filmmakers, and I’ve started collaborating with a whole host of truly international talent across short films, commercials, music videos and even game shows.
In my last couple of years in LA I’ve worked on a number of short films with recent graduates of the AFI Conservatory’s MFA programme. Including Stripper by Anthony Sneed, set on the Cherokee reservation in NC, the award winning Soreida by Spanish director Julia Ponce Díaz and El Cadejo, set in El Salvador by director Jalmer Caceres. I had a lot of fun designing retro-abstract sets for two seasons of a gameshow for eBay, as well as commercials for Jose Cuervo, Meta, Samsung, T-Mobile and Fender guitars ft. Haim. I’ve just wrapped on a dramatic feature starring James Le Gros and am now on the lookout for my next project.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I love characters and projects that get you to think differently about everyday people. County Lines invited us into the home of a hard-working single mother and her two kids experiencing poverty and falling victim to the parasitic realities of urban gangs and child trafficking.
When designing sets, I spend hours getting inside the heads of the characters on the page – after all, it’s me making decisions on their behalf. It is only when I have gotten to know them on a profound level that I can really make believable decisions on props, decor and the whole mood of the set. It gives me a chance to do a kind of writing which no one ever thinks about: by going deep into the history, personality and decisions of a character, we can create the vivid texture that shows audiences who they really are.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
Alice Normington was my first really important mentor. She was the production designer on Suffragette, I learnt so much from her and her set decorator, Barbara Herman-Skedling, how they ran their art department and supported each other in the process.
My close friend Paulina Rzeszowska, was the production designer for A24’s Saint Maud and I spent years learning from her while we worked on music videos and commercials in London. We surfed many waves that required a strong sense of speedy creativity and the ability to exude a false impression of calm to ride out. A pretty invaluable set of skills to have when you work in film.
The big not-so-secret of this work is how much you rely on your friends. They’ve been my biggest supporters since the beginning whether it was crowd sourcing props on IG stories, twelfth-hour pep talks or using company printers to photocopy reems of bank notes for a heist scene.
Now that I’m in Hollywood I’ve spent the last couple of years gathering a team of babes who can lift. The crew I’ve been working with recently are a supportive group of peers and feel very lucky to be surrounded by their talents.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.phoebedarling.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darling__design/
Image Credits
Bar Hariely
Stefan Yap
Sverre Sørdal
Robert L Hunter
Nick Pomeroy
Laura Gallop
Sonali Ohrie
