Inside The ‘Practical Magic 2’ Set With Nicole Kidman & Sandra Bullock | Architectural Digest

Hi, AD. Welcome. Welcome to our home. Come on in. Blow it out. Make a wish. We're so glad to have you here. Back in our home that we haven't left in 20-some years. So, we're inviting you back in. In the original house, we had two corners in a beautiful field in the San Juan Islands and the rest were on stages. So, we didn't get the benefit of going outside to inside. Versus here, where we have built it basically from the ground up. You're going to be shown around by our production designer. Tom Burton, who put blood, sweat, and a lot of tears into this house. And a lot of joy. Yeah, a lot of joy. And very patient with the nitpicking, as our director likes to say I do. Oh, attention to detail. Thank you. Very important. I agree. They were asking me about teacups today for the pops. Why are we using some of these? My favorite, I would say the kitchen. And to recreate the kitchen was the most emotional for everybody. Everyone who was a part of the first film walked into that kitchen. May or may not have cried. Are you crying? Oh, she's crying. Wow. She's kind of like, oh, emotion. Every major life event happens in that kitchen from the first film and the second film. And life usually, right, is in the kitchen. It's true. Center of the home. Not that any of us really cook. You do. Oh, our director does. Our director does, yeah. Susanna Beer. I do breakfast. I do avocado and toast. She's great at it. We just shot a huge scene in there, which actually was the scene that sets everything afire. The whole film in motion. Is this real? Is he going to die? It's true. We're witches in the ******* curses room. Kind of like the first film, too. This is what we really kind of took a lot of time and detail matching to the first film. These tiles we matched on the first film. The plasterers actually ended up building those from scratch and sculpting them because we couldn't find them. That's the stairs that goes up to the first floor. Obviously, in this set, it doesn't go anywhere. If you look up, you'll see mostly it's a lot of lighting rigs. But on the stages, we did build the two bedrooms, one for Jet and one for Sally. There's a scene when all of these doors fly open and closed in a sort of magical way. The special effects department had to rig everything with pneumatic closers that are electrically operated. So they can kind of open and close on cue. So within the first movie, the sort of iconic midnight margaritas, they used that mixer, which we've got as a prop in this one. You'll find out what happens in this one later, but it does appear again. This is a real aga. It's very heavy and it took a huge amount of people to wheel it into the set. This is kind of pretty much an exact copy of what we had on the original film, but we've tried to dress it in a brighter way. And also what we've got on this one is we can actually see outside. So if you come through to this one, it's basically a kind of match to what they had in the first film. There's a lot of apothecary jars and little potions, and they're all labelled up with everything that's in there, kind of in the books. The solarium is my favourite because that's where all the spells take place. This is a really nice build to do. We sort of thought that 20 years later that everything would have grown a lot more. So we used a lot more kind of real greenery. Most of these greens are real. The vines we got from Italy. All of these have the real things that they are growing in. That's all the detail that the SecDec department do. The glass was aged by the construction department, the painters. So this is actually just real glass with a resin put over it. Our prop making department made that light that matches the first film, and that came in and out depending on which shots we were doing. We've got a shot which we did from a drone. So we actually come out through the ceiling of this, which is why it's clean. The SecDec department did an amazing job, and the greens department did an amazing job in here of dressing it to feel really real and also to feel like it's been here for a huge amount of time. Because this house, in story terms, has been up for 100 years or so. We sort of want it to feel like it's had a life before we've seen it. My SecDec department did a massive amount of research into the original movie and literally went through it frame by frame. The living room is again something that we've based on the first movie, although we've kind of changed quite a lot of the colouring and a lot of the dressing in here. We're very lucky in the UK that we have incredible prop stores here. That was a big help in being able to source all of this detail. Within the film, there's certain shots of the fireplace and we see all the photos. We took some from the first film and we also did some photo shoots. One thing we did match from the first movie, although we've tweaked it, is the wallpaper. My graphics department had to redraw this wallpaper and get it printed. What I really like is the fact that because we've got an interior exterior set, you can actually look out the windows. We tweaked the sort of windows at the back and then the painting department did a really nice job of actually ageing everything. So we've sort of played with how opaque or how kind of distorted the glass is. We're now in the Owens hallway. The Owens kind of historically treat the people from the village with potions. So we've got little bits of dressing with the various potions and their letters in the hall. This is our stairway up to what would be the rest of the house. But actually, if you look up, you can see that we've just built the ground floor. Anything above the ground floor is built on the stages. On the stage, we match the top of that stairway. So you can kind of walk from one set to another and there's an invisible join between the two. Oh my gosh, the front walkway hosts all the women of our history. So much of our family are on the walls going up the stairs. So much happens again in this hallway in this film as it did in the other film. A lot of new people have come through the door on this version, which is really nice. Hi. Aunt Jilly, this is Gideon. Gideon, our Aunt Jilly. Hi. Tall, dark and possibly cursed. This painting is Maria Owens, which was painted by an artist within the art department. She is based on a real actress because that actually comes to life. And we have a scene with the real Maria Owens in the 1660s. So once we'd shot that scene, we took the stills and we turned it into a sort of an old painting. We go through into the dining room. We changed the colour from the original film. You didn't see a huge amount of this in the first movie, so we've got a lot of license to change things. Things like the craft we kind of matched from the first film. We matched all of the panelling. We sort of made our best guess. We've actually used a Lincruster wallpaper that we've painted up with gold to match. We've lightened it generally from what was a very dark timber to a sort of mid-tone timber. Oh, and there's the wind blowing the windows open again. Oh, it could be magic, but it's probably the wind. It gives you a nice view from the dining room through to the living room, which kind of cinematically is quite a nice thing to have. We tried to introduce more blue into this room that wasn't there in the first movie. I suppose the idea of introducing more blues and greys was it just feels very New England. And that also became a sort of colour palette from New England to England. So within the New England colour palette, we were having a lot of blues, greys, whites. And then when we come to the United Kingdom, England, then we've got a lot more kind of rich reds, browns, greens, darks. We have had the wedding scene, so there's a big patch there where the wedding took place. This was the original plan of the vegetable patch, and we've kind of kept that from the first movie. But I think we've probably added a bit more greenery. Obviously, it's 20 years later, so it can have grown a bit more. These are all real vegetables that are actually growing very well. The greens department did a fantastic job keeping all of these alive in what was a very, very hot summer. And once we actually planted them, they've actually started growing really well. So the carrots are doing really well. The tomatoes have been doing really well. They're getting a bit battered at the moment, but I have a feeling that these will actually be quite good to eat. People always make fun of Hollywood, and they go, it's fake. I go, no, it's not. We're actually growing it at our place. With the greens department, we had a huge amount of trees to find. And a lot of the trees are kind of, you know, 30, 40 foot trees, which we transported here. Some of them were so big that we had to have wide load police escorts to get the trees into the studio. Like what you can see is a container wall, which was one of the first things that we built. It's one of the easiest ways to kind of construct a big wall that you can use to stretch backings onto. The backings we actually shot in a forest not that far from here. The sea backing was from photos from the original location. This house, which we kind of made into more of a sort of outdoor arbor, and that gets used at the end of the movie for the wedding scene. You were absolutely adamant on how it had to be built and how and what every detail, because Sandy has an enormous ability to design houses and her attention to detail. No, she's being kind. But she does. She tells, because you do. Who is this? Who is this? We're teaching her to accept a compliment. Okay, thank you. Thank you. There we got it. Do you know how hard that is? Isn't it the most incredible thing? Let me just take it in. It feels incredible. I'm so happy you're happy. You guys did such an incredible job on the tiles. I want a garden room. That'd be great because you have the trees, we can pull the cafe lights. It's a work of art. The back lot where we are now was just dirt and gravel in January. And now it's providing apples from real apple trees. Butterflies, birds have made their homes here. A lot of love and hard work has gone into this by incredible artisans who recreated what we knew, but they made it their own. And it's pretty amazing. Can we do this for one moment? Thank everyone, our extraordinary artisans who created the impossible. This is incredible. This is absolutely incredible and very emotional and really just the most beautiful thing. Thank you, ID. Thank you. Thank you. Come again, hopefully. Bye. We need a script.