Magnificent Obsessions at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image champions craftsmanship in film, an obsessive attention to detail across significant sound design, wardrobe and props. In partnership with Persol, the sunglasses synonymous with screen personalities such as Steve McQueen and Francis Ford Coppola, the exhibition runs until November. Over the next few days, we’re focusing on highlights from the show…

CREATIVE FORGERY

The role of a production designer “allows you to try personalities that you’d never otherwise experience,” says Jeannine Oppewall, the creative who worked on Catch Me If You Can.

It was Oppewall and her team behind Leonardo DiCaprio’s key objects in his role as trickster Frank Abagnale Jr. Assuming an array of identities such as airline pilot, lawyer and doctor, Opperwall’s fake diploma, pilot’s ID badge and paycheck shared prime screen time.

There are similarities between DiCaprio’s protagonist, based on a true story, and Oppewall: both have a fascination with being someone else. Though obviously there’s a healty dose of Karma in this tale – the cheques used to maintain Abagnale’s lifestyle in the film are also the evidence that leads to his capture.

“Jeannine would say do your research and do it right,” says prop master Steven Melton, under Oppewall’s direction on the project. “I was able to pull a bunch of my parents’ old cheques from the 60s, so I knew what they looked like… It was a four, five step process and at any point you messed up on any one of those steps you had to start over again. On the day [of filming], Steven [Spielberg] would say, ‘OK, I want eight cheques, [numbered] from 180 to 940’.”

The process involved a typewriter, perforations, purple ink, fingerprints, stickers and lamination. The team had to find the same equipment Abagnale would’ve used, a Heidelberg press – machinery so specific it would lead to his capture since the FBI analysed how the cheques were made.

“There was some guy who had his father’s printing equipment,” Oppewall explains. “It was his family’s old printing equipment from the 50s in storage. The problem was the machine was too large to be moved to a studio… in this case we’re building the set around the stuff. So we hired a guy to make his printing press work, and then I went in and built the interior wall and painted and dressed the whole thing the way you see it in the movie, the way the cheques come flying out of the machine when it stops.”

Crime doesn’t pay, but Oppewall and her team made it stylish. Forgery, it turns out, is pretty creative.

Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures/Jeannine Oppewall

Click here for our interview with Magnificent Obsessions curator Michael Connor and exhibition highlights: Poetry and Motion, Capturing the Supersonic, Costume Without Limits