Dean Tavoularis, Production Designer on the ‘Godfather’ Films and ‘Apocalypse Now,’ Dies at 93
The Oscar winner and five-time nominee teamed with Francis Ford Coppola on 13 features after getting his start as the art director on 'Bonnie and Clyde.'
He was not on the list.
Dean Tavoularis, the revered Oscar-winning production
designer who collaborated with Francis Ford Coppola on 13 films, including all
three Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, has died. He was
93.
He died Wednesday night in a Paris hospital of natural
causes, THR writer and film critic Jordan Mintzer reported. The two teamed on
the 2022 book Conversations With Dean Tavoularis.
Tavoularis received his Academy Award in the best art
direction-set decoration category for The Godfather Part II (1974) and also was
nominated for his work on three other Coppola-directed films — Apocalypse Now
(1979), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and The Godfather Part III (1990)
— plus William Friedkin‘s The Brink’s Job (1978).
In his first movie as art director, Tavoularis came up with
the bleak Dust Bowl look for Arthur Penn’s fabled Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the
first of six best picture nominees on which he worked. Two of those — the first
two Godfather films — took home the ultimate prize.
Tavoularis also teamed with director Coppola on The
Conversation (1974), The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983), Peggy Sue Got
Married (1986), Gardens of Stone (1987), New York Stories (1989) and Jack
(1996).
Talking about Coppola, “There are many partnerships in all
different kinds of businesses that can always turn out badly, but sometimes it
can turn out to be a collaboration. You see eye to eye; you feel supportive,”
Tavoularis said in a 2018 interview. “When you’re doing a film, no matter how
tough you are, no matter how strong you are, you need a feeling of support. And
I always had that with Francis.”
“Like all great collaborations,” Coppola said in 1997, “I
began to depend on Dean. This grew into a natural and wordless collaboration,
which provided so much comfort to me and added to the style of the films we
worked on together.”
He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Art
Directors Guild in 2007.
For The Godfather Part II, Tavoularis transformed East Sixth
Street between Avenues A and B in Lower Manhattan into Little Italy in 1918,
complete with a dirt road and quaint, old-fashioned storefronts.
There was nothing quaint about the making of Apocalypse Now,
for which Tavoularis created a nightmarish jungle kingdom with a decaying
temple — inspired by the ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia — as its centerpiece.
His scheduled 14-week stay in the Philippines wound up lasting two years. (In
all, the movie took four years to finish.)
“You never had the feeling at the end of the day that it is
one day less and you were one day closer to completion,” he told the Los
Angeles Times in 2012.
And for the nostalgic (and pricey) love story One From the
Heart (1981), who needed to trek to Las Vegas when you could have Tavoularis
construct a multimillion-dollar, high-tech version of Sin City at Coppola’s
American Zoetrope in San Francisco?
Covering nine soundstages, his set included replicas of
casinos and Fremont Street with loads of neon lights and a paved intersection,
a residential neighborhood, a desert motel and a faux runway at McCarran
International Airport.
“I’ve bought a movie studio, which is like getting a
theater. What the hell am I going to Las Vegas for?” Coppola told Rolling Stone
in 1982. “Let’s build it inside the studio and totally control it and have the
sets be on one stage, as on Saturday Night Live, and have the actors literally
perform it like a play — ‘Ready, begin!’ — and do the whole movie as a
performance and then go back and put the cameras in different places with the
transitions, music, everything. There’d be nothin’ like it!”
He continued, “Dean, in his mind, couldn’t get with the idea
of creating the illusions of the movie with matte shots and trickery on that
level. He wanted to build the fantasy — that’s what cost the extra 10 or so
million dollars.”
On Thursday, Coppola called Tavoularis “a dear friend” and
said his death is “a profound loss. I would be unable to list the many ways he
benefited my work and my personal life. He was a great artist, a great friend,
a great production designer and a great man.”
Constantine Tavoularis was born on May 18, 1932, in Lowell,
Massachusetts. When he was a kid, the family moved to Los Angeles, where his
dad was in the coffee business.
“We are Greek Americans, and one of [his father’s] clients
was Fox studio, which was owned by [Greece native] Spyros Skouras,” Tavoularis
said. “In the summer sometimes I would go with my dad and spend a day going
around on his deliveries. We would drive back to the commissary, and you saw
stage pieces and ladies dressed in their period gowns. It was a mysterious,
magical paradise.”
He studied architecture and painting at Otis College of Art
and Design and joined Disney as an in-betweener in its animation department,
where one of the first films he worked on was Lady and the Tramp (1955).
He served under art director Robert Clatworthy on the live
action Disney films Pollyanna (1960) and The Parent Trap (1961), then was
Clatworthy’s assistant at Warner Bros. on Robert Mulligan’s Inside Daisy Clover
(1965), set in Santa Monica in 1936.
Despite Tavoularis’ lack of experience, Penn gave him a
great opportunity on Bonnie and Clyde, and he delivered.
“We made Bonnie and Clyde on a minuscule budget. It was
barely more than a couple of million dollars,” Penn said. “But Dean Tavoularis
and Theadora Van Runkle, who designed the costumes, created a whole era.”
After working on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Death Valley-set
Zabriskie Point (1970), he reteamed with Penn on Little Big Man (1970), a
Western filmed in Montana and Calgary.
Tavoularis first met Coppola while he was an assistant art
director on the Marlon Brando-starring Candy (1968).
He said that Paramount execs pushed for the director to make
The Godfather (1972) in St. Louis. “Why St. Louis? I went over there and looked
around; it was ridiculous. It wouldn’t have made the picture better; they only
wanted to escape the New York unions,” he said. “Everything that Paramount
wanted would have made this movie a flop. Everything that Francis fought
against and fought for made The Godfather a screen classic.”
For Apocalypse Now, Tavoularis went in search for
helicopters and a river.
“We went to the Pentagon, this huge mythical Pentagon
building, but the Department of Army read the script and they said, ‘No.’ No
helicopters from the United States,” he recalled. “So we started looking for
helicopters elsewhere — and we needed a river. … I went to Thailand, Borneo,
Jakarta, Malaysia — it was educational, and I still remember the weirdness of
these trips. I ended up in the Philippines, and like a lot of war films finally
did, the government co-operated and gave us helicopters, and they had the
rivers. So we shot the film in the Philippines.”
He once described the shoot as “living in the house of death
that I was making.”
Tavoularis’ other credits included Farewell, My Lovely
(1975), Caleb Deschanel’s The Escape Artist (1982), Wim Wenders’ Hammett
(1982), Shelf Life (1993), Philip Kaufman’s Rising Sun (1993), Warren Beatty’s
Bulworth (1998), Nancy Meyers’ The Parent Trap (1998), Roman Polanski’s The
Ninth Gate (1999) and Roman Coppola’s CQ (2001).
After a decade away to paint, he returned to work for
Polanski again on Carnage (2011), his final feature.
In The Offer, Paramount+’s 2022 limited series about the
making of The Godfather, Tavoularis was portrayed by Eric Balfour.
Survivors include his second wife, French actress Aurore
Clément, whom he met on the set of Apocalypse Now and then married in 1986 at
Coppola’s home, and his daughters, Alison and Gina.
(His wife’s scenes in the mesmerizing French plantation
sequence of Apocalypse Now were cut from the original release but restored for
the expanded redux version.)
In an introduction to a 2007 exhibit that showcased
Tavoularis’ career as a film designer and painter, writer Jean-Paul Scarpitta
said the designer “attained a higher reality, that of poetry.”
“In his art, he doesn’t dwell on magic, visual deception,
optical illusion or unreality … His penetrating eyes allow him to watch and
feel things deeply, which leads him to capture what others are not privy to
see: the gimmicks, the artifices, the tricks, the element of life upon which
the veil of illusion is cast,” Scarpitta wrote. “In his mind, there is a clear
parallel between painting and cinema, in that he considers one and the other as
different yet compatible means to create an illusory world that only exists in
a dimension of its own.”
Production Designer
A Therapy (2012)
A Therapy
6.1
Short
Production Designer
2012
Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet, and Christoph
Waltz in Carnage (2011)
Carnage
7.1
Production Designer
2011
Jennifer Lopez in Angel Eyes (2001)
Angel Eyes
5.7
Production Designer
2001
CQ (2001)
CQ
6.2
Production Designer
2001
Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate (1999)
The Ninth Gate
6.7
Production Designer
1999
Dennis Quaid, Natasha Richardson, and Lindsay Lohan in The
Parent Trap (1998)
The Parent Trap
6.7
Production Designer
1998
Warren Beatty in Bulworth (1998)
Bulworth
6.8
Production Designer
1998
Robin Williams in Jack (1996)
Jack
5.8
Production Designer
1996
Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte in I Love Trouble (1994)
I Love Trouble
5.4
Production Designer
1994
Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes in Rising Sun (1993)
Rising Sun
6.3
Production Designer
1993
Shelf Life (1993)
Shelf Life
5.5
Production Designer
1993
The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980 (1992)
The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980
9.3
Video
Production Designer
1992
Kim Basinger and Richard Gere in Final Analysis (1992)
Final Analysis
5.9
Production Designer
1992
Al Pacino, Andy Garcia, Sofia Coppola, and Talia Shire in
The Godfather Part III (1990)
The Godfather Part III
7.5
Production Designer
1990
New York Stories (1989)
New York Stories
6.4
Production Designer (segment "Life Without Zoe")
1989
Jeff Bridges in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
6.9
Production Designer
1988
Mary Stuart Masterson and D.B. Sweeney in Gardens of Stone
(1987)
Gardens of Stone
6.3
Production Designer
1987
Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
Peggy Sue Got Married
6.4
Production Designer
1986
Diane Lane, Matt Dillon, and Mickey Rourke in Rumble Fish
(1983)
Rumble Fish
7.1
Production Designer
1983
Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Patrick
Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, and Ralph Macchio in The Outsiders (1983)
The Outsiders
7.0
Production Designer
1983
Marilu Henner, Peter Boyle, Frederic Forrest, David Patrick
Kelly, and Lydia Lei in Hammett (1982)
Hammett
6.4
Production Designer
1982
Teri Garr, Raul Julia, Desi Arnaz, and Griffin O'Neal in The
Escape Artist (1982)
The Escape Artist
6.1
Production Designer
1982
Teri Garr in One from the Heart (1981)
One from the Heart
6.5
Production Designer
1981
Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now (1979)
Apocalypse Now
8.4
Production Designer
1979
The Brink's Job (1978)
The Brink's Job
6.5
Production Designer
1978
Robert Mitchum in Farewell, My Lovely (1975)
Farewell, My Lovely
7.0
Production Designer
1975
Al Pacino in The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Godfather Part II
9.0
Production Designer
1974
Gene Hackman, John Cazale, and Allen Garfield in The
Conversation (1974)
The Conversation
7.7
Production Designer
1974
Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather
9.2
Production Designer
1972
Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man (1970)
Little Big Man
7.5
Production Designer
1970
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Zabriskie Point
6.9
Production Designer
1970
Art Director
A Man in Love (1987)
A Man in Love
5.8
Art Director
1987
Spoon River (1969)
Spoon River
TV Movie
Art Director
1969
Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, Walter Matthau,
John Huston, Charles Aznavour, John Astin, Ewa Aulin, and Ringo Starr in Candy
(1968)
Candy
5.1
Art Director
1968
The Young Loner (1968)
The Young Loner
7.6
TV Movie
Art Director
1968
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde
7.7
Art Director
1967
Art Department
Burt Reynolds and Peter MacNicol in Heat (1986)
Heat
5.7
visual consultant
1986
Petulia (1968)
Petulia
6.8
associate art director
1968
Natalie Wood in Inside Daisy Clover (1965)
Inside Daisy Clover
6.1
assistant art director (uncredited)
1965
America America (1963)
America America
7.7
assistant art director (uncredited)
1963
Actor
Pina Colada (2009)
Pina Colada
Short
Vincent Miller
2009
CQ (2001)
CQ
6.2
Man at Screening (uncredited)
2001
Additional Crew
Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1989)
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
6.2
pre-production consultant
1989
Thanks
La saga Rassam-Berri, le cinéma dans les veines (2023)
La saga Rassam-Berri, le cinéma dans les veines
7.4
TV Movie
thanks
2023
Dans ta bouche (2010)
Dans ta bouche
Video
thanks
2010
Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010)
Machete Maidens Unleashed!
7.3
our deepest appreciation to our interviewees
2010
Francis Ford Coppola in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's
Apocalypse (1991)
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
8.1
special thanks
1991
Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in The Godfather Family: A Look
Inside (1990)
The Godfather Family: A Look Inside
7.8
TV Movie
thanks
1990
Self
The Look of One from the Heart (2024)
The Look of One from the Heart
Short
Self - Production Designer
2024
Kinoscope
Short
Self - Narrator (voice: English version)
2017
Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010)
Machete Maidens Unleashed!
7.3
Self
2010
Les derniers révoltés d'Hollywood (2008)
Les derniers révoltés d'Hollywood
6.3
Self
2008
Revolution! The Making of 'Bonnie and Clyde' (2008)
Revolution! The Making of 'Bonnie and Clyde'
7.0
Video
Self
2008
The 11th Annual Art Directors Guild Awards
TV Special
Self
2007
Festival de Cine de San Sebastián (1996)
Festival de Cine de San Sebastián
TV Series
Self
2005
2 episodes
Masters of Production: The Hidden Art of Hollywood
7.7
TV Movie
Self
2004
Dean Tavoularis in Dean Tavoularis, le magicien d'Hollywood
(2003)
Dean Tavoularis, le magicien d'Hollywood
6.7
TV Movie
Self
2003
The Godfather: On Location
6.6
Video
Self
2001
Metropolis (1995)
Metropolis
7.0
TV Series
Self
2001
1 episode
James Lipton in Inside the Actors Studio (1994)
Inside the Actors Studio
8.6
TV Series
Self
2001
1 episode
Writing with Light: Vittorio Storaro (1993)
Writing with Light: Vittorio Storaro
7.2
TV Movie
Self
1993
Francis Ford Coppola in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's
Apocalypse (1991)
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
8.1
Self
1991
The Making of 'One from the Heart' (1982)
The Making of 'One from the Heart'
6.5
Short
Self
1982
47th Annual Academy Awards (1975)
47th Annual Academy Awards
6.8
TV Special
Self - Winner
1975
Archive Footage
The Dream Studio (2004)
The Dream Studio
5.0
Video
Self (archive footage)
2004
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