If a pop star offered you an invite to their secluded compound for a listening party, you’d go, right? There’s something comforting, certainly parasocial, about modern celebrities that has us bypassing the instinctual creep factor of meeting a stranger in a remote location. Opus, the directorial debut of former GQ editor Mark Anthony Green, puts Ayo Edebiri in this unnerving position. The result is what critics are calling an entertaining, if somewhat confused, 100-minute flick.
John Malkovich co-stars as Alfred Moretti, a bygone hitmaker turned cult leader who lures an unsuspecting group of reporters, influencers, and hangers-on to New Mexico. The visitors step out of a van and into a haven of farmers and painters, all dressed in matching indigo garb and calling themselves “Levelists.” The pastoral pueblo setting was envisioned by production designer Robert Pyzocha, known for his work on a laundry list of familiar titles, including two installments of John Wick, Joker, Daredevil, The Whale, The Darjeeling Limited, and Girls.
Here, however, he had only 19 days to wrangle an Albuquerque compound into a believably festering cult, sometimes quite literally running from one end of the 65-acre space to the other with the beloved The Bear actor in tow. Ahead of the film’s theatrical release later this week, Pyzocha revealed his secret to putting together an insta-cult with Green, who he calls MAG; parodying the New York Times; and crafting a delightfully disturbing puppet show.
CULTURED: What initial conversations did you have with Mark about his vision for the cult?
Robert Pyzocha: As you know, cult movies and cult stories—it's all out there. We definitely needed to find a strategy to make this one unique in visual respects, but also so that we weren't treading on the same territory that other people have also fallen victim to. We chose colors that were compatible color opposites. Shirley [Kurata, the costume designer] and MAG had already said, “Let's make all the Levelist uniforms blue.” I just needed to find a color strategy, a color opposite, to make that work. So that became orange. Moretti's rooms are orange. It's a simple elementary school thing, but I knew it would work.
CULTURED: Did you have a conversation about the magazine office, where the film starts? It felt so true to working in a magazine—I noticed Edebiri's character has the Best American Magazine Writing of 2021 on her desk.
Pyzocha: MAG originally wanted to shoot that at the Albuquerque Journal, which was this 1970s [building]. Immediately when I saw it I was like, “Oh man, that is not the New York Times.” I mean, the J Times [Edibiri’s fictional publication] is the New York Times. So I said, “I've been to that building many times in New York and if we want to make a greater separation between the environment of Green River, Utah, and New York, we needed to shape this in a certain way.” We ended up at a community college right between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. It worked because it’s that open area where everybody's listening and everyone's engaged.
CULTURED: As you said, it's a very sharp contrast to the compound. Were you, for reference, looking at other films about cults or real-life examples?
Pyzocha: I have always been fascinated with cults. I think MAG's take on this was that this was a unique arts cult. This was a sacred space for the nourishment of the arts from a celebrity musician. My first take, the idea of painting the place lilac, came from the Aum Shinrikyo Japanese cult. They would meditate together in lilac outfits. But then once you get into that color world, you realize Elton John has worn lilac suits. It was too similar to what Prince had done—not that Prince had a cult, but I mean, maybe. MAG didn't want to have those associations. Moretti could be David Bowie, it could be Prince, he could be any number of famous musicians. It also feels a little like Robert Plant. It could be any of these characters that were larger than life.
CULTURED: One pivotal scene is the listening party for Moretti's new album in a warehouse at the compound. Can you tell me about putting together that set?
Pyzocha: It was a little bit of a listening room rave vibe. It was a horse-riding stable; it has a dirt floor. We set up the 60-foot-by-60-foot stage, and then brought in all these big speakers for outdoor concerts and I put them on the four corners of the stage. Then we just had these modernist chairs that pivoted around for some of the choreography that John Malkovich and MAG put together. Again, I used the color opposites. The speakers are this indigo blue color and the floor is that Moretti orange color. I tried to keep that color scheme consistent through the film. It doesn't hit you over the head. It's sometimes just a framing device that I use.
CULTURED: I remember him stretched out on an orange chair when he's poolside.
Pyzocha: There is definitely his grandiose world, and when you see him getting made up before his reveal at the dinner party, he's in this orange world. It's more of a baroque operatic room with burning candles and there's busts of young boys in there. We just hammed the whole thing up. There's some Rick Owens shoes on the mantle.
CULTURED: How did the setting impact the design direction you took?
Pyzocha: We were in Pojoaque Pueblo on an Indian reservation. The whole place is pseudo-Adobe, but there's European furniture and moldings and the whole thing was a hodgepodge of stuff. I couldn't come to terms with all of this aesthetic murk. I said, “Let's embrace the bones of the building and get rid of everything else. Let's paint all the walls. Let's take everything out of there, take all the rugs, and let's just use a couple simple things, some skins, some modern furniture, some plumes.” It's not that conscious when you see the film, but there's a neutrality to all of the guest bedrooms. There's neutrality to all of the Levelists. It heightens Moretti’s funky aesthetic that Shirley and MAG came up with.
CULTURED: Towards the end of the film, there is a puppet show featuring a number of rats posing as reporters and harassing Billie Holiday, ostensibly put on by the children of the compound. These rat puppets are something you made in your studio?
Pyzocha: The whole scene is weird. MAG, when you meet him, he's a beautiful man. He's always put together, well mannered, just drinks green matcha tea and eats chicken—but he's got this crazy mind. The whole concept for the puppet show was this rat pack of swarming, obnoxious interviewers. It ended up being Billie Holiday that they're attacking. I had made them out of papier-mâché, some Sculpey, and I dipped it in something called aqua resin. I was just buying time because we weren't sure we were gonna get the waiver to start the film [during the Hollywood strikes]. A friend of mine who works on Broadway made the outfits. We only had a very brief time to shoot those—I think we shot that whole little bit in an hour and a half, and I think we wanted a day and a half, so you can see how consolidated our time frames were to get the material.
CULTURED: Have you worked on something that fast-paced before?
Pyzocha: I've done a lot of projects in New York, Joker and Ocean's 8, where you're moving mammoth groups of people to different locations constantly. Out in New Mexico, Todd, the first AD, really strategically worked the schedule. You would see the crew just running to the next location because the compound, La Mesita... is about 30 minutes outside of Santa Fe, and the territory is pretty big. It's 65 acres. So we're running from one building to the next to the next to the next.
Is there a lot of time to experiment? No. I think MAG would have explored a lot more had we had another five days. But these projects are what they are. We did do two additional days of pickup shots, so that helped fill out some of the narrative points that could have been better, [where] the calibration of those moments maybe needed a little bit more time or maybe needed one more beat … [The story] moves very quickly.
In terms of other movies, you might have more of a breath to explore some of those character relationships or some of that territory explaining to the audience exactly what's going on. Why the hell are they in a yurt in the desert picking oysters looking for pearls? We could have really explored that for another couple pages at least. But there's an efficiency to MAG’s script, and he was always trying to keep that tension building. We had to bypass certain narrative points to keep that momentum and that cadence alive.
