“Drive-Away Dolls” Production Designer Yong Ok Lee on Transforming Pittsburgh Into the Whole East Coast

Ethan Coen’s solo directorial debut, Drive-Away Dolls, stars Margaret Qualley as Jamie, an unhindered Texan attached at the hip to her best friend and human hand-brake, Marian, played by Geraldine Viswanathan. The only trait these two twenty-somethings seemingly share is that they are both lesbians, but when an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee turns into a game of cat and mouse involving a couple of hired goons, Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C.J. Wilson), the girls’ bond gets even closer, with the fun bonus of their transformation into skilled accomplices.

That Marian and Jamie ended up at all with a suitcase of highly coveted contents is an unfortunate coincidence set in motion by Curlie (Bill Camp), the short-worded proprietor of a rundown Philadelphia drive-away service. Hearing he needs to send a particular car to Tallahassee, he hands the keys to the first Tallahassee-bound clients who walk into the shambles of an office. For Jamie and Marian, now the unwitting conveyors of precious cargo, Curly’s is just the first stop on a road trip’s worth of grungy locations, all evocative of an American time that has passed by.

The film is set in 1999 at the end of the year, but “Ethan didn’t care that much about the time,” said Yong Ok Lee, the film’s production designer. Drive-Away Dolls is set in the Y2K era, but she focused less on period and more on the character of each location. For Curly’s dumpy office, for example, “nobody notices this place even exists,” she said, and “texture was more important than other considerations,” so she layered the room with wood, water stains, and bales of paperwork, the last of which doubled as a comedic prop for one of the film’s most memorable action scenes.

Staying one step ahead of Arliss and Flint, Marian and Jamie stay at cheap motels and amuse themselves at a series of dive bars. Shooting locations frequently doubled for more than one set, so Lee focused on what the viewer would see inside and out to create the illusion of distinct venues.

“My main focus was how I could achieve making Pittsburgh everywhere, from Philadelphia to Florida,” she said. “The signage was really important for this movie,” and Lee and her team worked with Advision Signs, a local Pittsburgh sign-maker, to create signs for every dive and roadside motel the girls enter. Building a juke joint to which the hired goons are misdirected by a women’s college soccer team with whom Marian and Jamie quickly bond, “we unexpectedly used a lot of recycled material,” primarily from Construction Junction, Lee said, in order to build the juke joint as it would have been in reality, a DIY project using cinder blocks and reused metal and plastic.

Home environments, like Marian’s apartment and that of Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), Jamie’s blood-curdling cop ex-girlfriend, were simpler to create, highlighting just what the viewer needs. “I wanted these to be a little loose, design-wise. It’s about character, not about their places. We even let [Sukie’s] place be a little empty so that we could focus on the dildo decoration,” Lee said, of an odd bit of wall decor foreshadowing what’s to come.

Most aesthetically significant are the bars where the film begins and ends, similar long, narrow spaces with high-backed booths reminiscent of classic dives easily found all over the country. In one [spoiler alert], the Collector (Pedro Pascal) loses the story’s precious cargo, as well as his head. In another, Marian and Jamie triumph. Lee built the interior of each bar to mirror the other, using the same layout so that the spaces functioned like “a head and a tail” to this bawdy romp down the Eastern Seaboard.

Drive Away Dolls is in theaters now.

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Featured image: (L to R) Margaret Qualley as “Jamie” and Geraldine Viswanathan as “Marian” in director Ethan Coen’s DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, a Focus Features release. Credit: Courtesy of Working Title / Focus Features