Production designer Kevin Thompson knew Joe Wright’s film adaptation of “The Woman in the Window” would be a darkly lit movie and noirish. In bringing the A.J. Finn novel to life, he would have to find a color palette that was specific to Amy Adams’ Anna Fox, who suffers from severe agoraphobia and watches the world from inside her home.
Thompson added pops of color in the house, such as a red couch and sheer orange curtains. “We did that to inform the audience that there was life at the windows and that she once had vibrancy in her life.”
The character’s 19th-century townhouse was built on a stage and broken down into five sets. At the start of the film, which debuts May 14 on Netflix, the camera moves through the home and its spaces. The largest parts of the set were the stoop, the first floor and the stairwell that rises three floors. All are central to the storyline, but the stairwell served as the connective tissue.
“That went through many incarnations,” reveals Thompson, who based his design on New York brownstones. To make Anna feel secure, he chose a continuous design for the staircase’s handrail rather than one that would be stopped by a post on each floor. “We wanted it to feel as though the handrail was one line, so her hand holding it would not be interrupted.”
Ultimately, the stairwell design allowed Wright to shoot looking up and down to give the house — like the protagonist — a sense
of isolation.