ASTEROID CITY (Focus Features)

No Wes Anderson film takes place in reality as we know it, and production designer Adam Stockhausen—who won an Oscar for 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel—has helped bring many of those wildly eccentric worlds to life. But Asteroid City offered a unique challenge, a story set in a 1950s Southwest town that’s many levels removed from the real world. “There’s the town, Asteroid City, but it’s not necessarily a real place,” says Stockhausen.

Asteroid City is a movie about a fictional 1950s TV presentation of a live play about tourists who travel to a desert town and encounter a surprise visit from a UFO. With an enormous blue sky and reddish buttes rising in the distance, the town feels like Utah, but because the viewer is aware it’s also a play within a TV show within a film, Stockhausen toyed with perspectives. “We were kind of doing all the tricks that have historically been done to cheat being in a landscape on a stage, but then we’re doing them on a much bigger scale out in the landscape,” he says.

After scouting numerous locations in the Southwestern US, the production landed in the desert in Spain and built the town from scratch, right down to the power and plumbing. Stockhausen took inspiration from Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid and Ace in the Hole, along with the motel from Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. He also delved into the work of photographer Burton Frasher, a series of black-and-white photos that captures Southwestern hamlets and ghost towns.

Asteroid City’s locations, including a motel, a diner, a small research center, and a one-pump gas station, are filled with retro details while sticking to a unique color palette that plays against the setting’s dusty red landscape. “From day one we were talking about the red dirt and the hotness, the heat of the sun, and that the buildings would be largely white and have a baked kind of feeling—old but not dirty,” Stockhausen says, adding that eventually they started adding pastels in the decor and the cars to solidify the motif.

Even the red rock formations off in the distance added to the town’s surreality, built as very large miniatures on wheels that could be moved between scenes. “We would have these big mountains driving by attached to tractors, and we could say, ‘Okay, take that rock and for this scene drive it over there,’ ” says Stockhausen, “which was an incredibly fun thing to play with.”

POOR THINGS (Searchlight Pictures)

“I don’t know what it should look like, but it should look like nothing that’s been seen before.”

Those were director Yorgos Lanthimos’s instructions for his production designers, James Price and Shona Heath. It felt a bit like a “poisoned chalice,” Price admits—demanding but infinitely open-ended. Poor Things was such an ambitious undertaking that instead of hiring one production designer, Lanthimos asked Price and Heath to team up to create the worlds that Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) would visit on her coming-of-age adventure.

A woman rebuilt by a Doctor Frankenstein–esque scientist played by Willem Dafoe, Bella leaves her London home to explore Lisbon and Paris—but through her eyes the cities are utterly transformed. “Her brain was surreal because it had no limits, no boundaries,” says Heath. “It didn’t know—it just saw and felt, and therefore it could be anything.”

The story begins in London at the Baxter home, with Heath taking inspiration from the mad surgeon’s work. “We used the textures from brains and colors from internal organs in the design,” she says. “That gave us a different edge and it added something that we also hadn’t seen, which we were always trying to find in this world that people would believe.”

Dr. Baxter’s love for his adopted daughter inspired the design of their home, where Bella is learning to navigate the world. For Heath and Price, that meant the walls were padded for when she would run into them, as were the floors for when she would fall. “I think it drove everybody crazy because the floor was a big mattress,” says Heath. Bella’s room was full of elements from the outside world, like hot-air balloons, sailing ships, and images of fish and cows—so she could experience them despite the fact that she was banned from leaving home. “There were all these little gifts of beauty that he would’ve done,” says Heath.

But Bella does eventually leave, following a love interest (Mark Ruffalo) abroad. At Hungary’s massive Korda Studios, Price and Heath built the entire Lisbon set, which measured more than 60 feet high and hundreds of feet in all directions. “It was sunny, happy—she’s in love, so it wanted to feel like a kind of magical place,” says Price. He built a composite set from the ground up, where each room connects to another to create an authentic—if fantastical—city, including bars, restaurants, and a hotel, using mostly pinks, yellows, and pastels. “You could really wander around the little streets and alleys and totally get lost,” says Price. A massive water tank wrapped around the whole set to stand in for the coast. And to create the surreal pinky-blue surroundings, a 160-foot-long backdrop was hand-painted by three artisans. The final touch was a trolley inspired by the trams that traverse real-life Lisbon—only Price and Heath put it in the sky.

Price and Heath wanted every setting in the film to feel a little off-kilter. For a scene set in a forest, Price added fake trees that were tilted at a 45-degree angle. “Everybody was going, ‘This is insane. This is a forest. It’s beautiful. Why are you trying to improve on it?’ ” says Price. “But, no, we didn’t want any easy sets.”

BARBIE (Warner Bros.)

Known for their meticulous work on period pieces like Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and Anna Karenina, Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer stepped into a whole new and very pink world for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Neither of them had ever played with Barbies growing up, so their first Barbie dreamhouse was the one they purchased for research to create Barbieland, the puffy pink world where all the Barbies live. Beyond its cutesy exterior, though, Barbieland was a significant challenge because the iconic doll holds so much weight to so many people, and at first it seemed like the possibilities were endless for what the world would look like. “When I say that it was actually one of the most philosophical and intellectually challenging films I’ve ever worked on, that is not a lie at all,” says Spencer.

For the blockbuster hit that follows Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical Barbie,” the pair were tasked with using a strong color palette they’d never used before and creating a world for Barbie that felt both familiar to the millions of Barbie fans around the world and also original and fresh for the film. “Barbie comes with her own baggage as to what she means to everybody, but she doesn’t have her own narrative, only what Greta has given her,” says Greenwood. “So, it is trying to funnel that down, and make her and her environment make sense to everybody.”

They did a deep dive into Barbie and Mattel’s archives, and found additional inspiration in Slim Aarons’s iconic lifestyle photography. “What was a real breakthrough, I think, and it came from his photography and how he shot things—the absence of things, and the space between,” says Greenwood.

And of course, the Barbie dreamhouses have no walls, adding an unusual challenge for the production designers. “You don’t have a background to work against that is a normal background. You have almost like a weird infinity, because you’re looking right into the, sort of the mountains and the palm trees,” says Greenwood. “It’s peculiar.”

Built at the Warner Bros. Studios in Hertfordshire, near London, the set included an 800-foot-long by 50-foot-high painting of the sky that wrapped completely around the studio. Layered in front of that were painted mountains, then a layer of palm trees and banana plants to create the unique perspective of Barbieland, similar to how a background is created in a diorama.

In the end, Greenwood and Spencer found that once they created a rule book for Barbieland, they were able to easily make decisions that felt right in this unreal real world. “We had this phrase that everything had to have this sort of authentic artificiality,” says Greenwood. “The reality, to us, had to be real.” Sometimes that meant designing objects that were 23% smaller than normal, or sometimes it meant making things awkwardly bigger, like Barbie’s hairbrush. “I find creativity comes out of limitations and parameters,” says Spencer. “Once we’d worked out what the rules were, it made sense, and you could answer anything. Now, I could design any set in Barbieland like that, because I know exactly what the rules are.”

OPPENHEIMER (Universal)

Production designer Ruth De Jong was quite familiar with creating Western towns, having done so for Yellowstone as well as Jordan Peele’s Nope, which she had just wrapped when she signed on for Christopher Nolan’s epic Oppenheimer. But for Los Alamos, the plot of land in New Mexico where J. Robert Oppenheimer built an entire enclosed city in order to build the atom bomb, the challenge was recreating an iconic location that, in De Jong’s words, “anybody can Google.”

For starters, it had to have that expansive, untouched look of the American West. “Knowing that Los Alamos was on this epic plateau, 360 views— there was nothing. It was so incredibly rural,” she says. “How do we capture that? How do we build it? How do we find a place that we can go to and create that?”

They then hit the road, scouting locations in the American West from Utah to New Mexico and Colorado. Nolan gave her one note to start off with: “I think originally Chris was like, ‘I don’t care what state it’s in as long as it’s epic,’” she says. They eventually landed on Ghost Ranch, a 21,000-acre retreat and education center in New Mexico that once housed the studio of painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

The initial plan was to build the entire town there, but soon budgetary restrictions began to creep in. De Jong came up with a new plan in which they’d shoot the exteriors at Ghost Ranch, but still utilize some of the buildings in modern-day Los Alamos for the interiors. Los Alamos has modernized and grown a great deal over the years (there’s a Starbucks now), but many of the buildings that Oppenheimer and his team lived and worked in remain. “All of a sudden, we had these incredible period-perfect interiors that were the actual real place,” she says. “And then when the actors found out, ‘Oh, my gosh, I get to be inside of my own house that I actually used to live in,’ there was something to that.”

Of particular importance was the “T-section,” a closed-off area that captured the secretive nature of Los Alamos with its looming gates, guard towers, and barbed wire. “Even if you were a family member, you couldn’t just go back there. Gating that off from Main Street, I think that was really important to us,” she says.

But even though she created the buildings to look similar to the real ones from the 1940s, De Jong took some creative measures, like using forced perspective for the buildings on Main Street. For example, at the front, the buildings looked 40-feet wide, but, due to space and financial restrictions, she tweaked the perspective so that at the other end, they were just five-feet wide. Movie magic allowed De Jong and Nolan to recreate the old while still preserving originality and a timelessness that she says was key. “Our goal throughout the film and throughout Los Alamos, Chris and I wanted this film to be utterly raw and honest and pure and not contrived in any way.”