The brief on the Owens house was to build a house that told you who these people were before anyone had to explain it. I wanted to make sure we could feel the presence of the mum and the love she gave the brothers. It was about finding a version that felt lived in by Owen and his brother rather than dressed as a type.
Four references I kept coming back to:
It was the way the light hits each object and the overall softness which is how I wanted to grow Owens character.
The reference that set the rule: every object in the Owens house had to have been chosen once and never revisited.
I liked this found image of a kitchen from an estate agent for the layout of the tiles. The colours are working in harmony here.
This gave me the feeling of mothers memory, which I thought was important - removing the actress from this scene and you still know exactly how she likes to live.
Creating a wallpaper with a series of moments spent with his mum.
The palette landed in the accumulated register — nothing coordinated, everything picked because it belonged in the same conversation. The point was for the rooms to feel like it had been assembled over time by these people, not curated for camera.
The painted back wall was what made the yard specific to this family rather than any Manchester terrace. One visible fact carries it: the flowers are painted straight onto the brick, in household emulsion, at whatever height each kid could reach at whatever age. Some careful, some scrappier. A butterfly gone over years later in a heavier pink. A couple of pencil names still legible along the bottom course. A growth chart with no ruler. The palette, dirty cream ground, sage leaves, faded coral, ochre centres, sits inside the film's arc, but that was almost incidental; a consequence of whichever tins she'd had in the cupboard. The point wasn't the palette. It was that she'd let them keep it there.
We'd designed this corner around a bed and a worktable — logical for a boy who plays guitar and mixes records, needs a surface to spread across. Read on paper, didn't read on the day. No room for the camera. We stripped the table, pulled the bed, brought in the low chair and the football beanbag, let the kit scatter along the skirting instead of centralising it. Better corner in the end — sitting on the floor with a guitar is more truthful to the age than sitting at a desk with one — but a lesson relearned. DOP, set dec and I now walk every hero corner with a lens before signing anything off.