Dean Tavoularis obi

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