I did some illustrations of the ruins and to me they were too real so I went further into that Laughton world. And ‘Night of the Hunter’ because Charles Laughton did a similar thing: He’s looking at Griffith and then abstracting the night scenes with the twinkling stars. “We talked about Murnau and creating an artificial environment, so we looked at the lake and marshes in ‘Sunrise’ as a touchstone that influenced the grasses along the ruins. Then, woven through all that is repeating imagery from the original text: birds, blood, night. That was intentional and was also a part of the psychology of Macbeth. The stairs in Inverness had the same layout as Dunsinane. This is where Casa Luis Barragan came in and we looked at the simplicity of the castles in ‘Siegfried.’ Then he talked about Dunsinane, which is the seat of the throne, as the place where you bring in this verticality. “He talked about Inverness as the impression of a castle. “You’re reflecting the text as imagery and Joel had it all organized,” added Dechant. Inspired by the blueprint, the production designer went to work on the very spare Shakespearean world building, shot on sound stages in L.A. It cried out German Expressionism, with images from movies (“Siegfried,” “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” “Sunrise,” “The Night of the Hunter”), architecture (Casa Luis Barragan in Mexico City, with its square tower with two very black walls), photography (Hiroshi Sugimoto’s monochromatic, soft focus impression of the Barragan house), and theater (modernist stage designer Edward Gordon Craig’s use of large geometric blocks).

The look and design were explicitly laid out in a photo album that Coen shared with Dechant, after the director spent a year refining his black-and-white vision with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel. When production designer Stefan Dechant (Disney’s upcoming hybrid “Pinocchio”) got a surprise call to meet with Joel Coen on the spur of the moment to discuss “ The Tragedy of Macbeth,” his noir-like Shakespeare adaptation of murder, madness, and mayhem, starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, Dechant was immediately hooked.

Tragedy of macbeth