‘The Intern’: Nancy Meyers on Bringing Movie Interiors to Life

Meyers’ previous movies were filmed on studio lots — the whole Something’s Gotta Give house was a movie set filmed on a Sony soundstage in Culver City, California. But Warner Bros. Pictures’ The Intern was filmed mostly on location in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. The kitchen above belonging to Jules and her husband, Matt, is in a brownstone in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, a stand-in for the Park Slope area.

Photo by Joshua McHugh

Meyers’ comedies explore relationships — romantic, familial and between friends — in the modern world. The Intern’s primary relationship is between De Niro’s widower Ben Whittaker, a 70-year-old retiree, and Hathaway’s Jules Ostin, the founder of an e-commerce fashion website called About the Fit. Ben, bored with his life of leisure, becomes a senior — as in senior citizen — intern for Jules at her company’s Brooklyn headquarters. The setup provides fodder for humor and commentary about tech start-up culture, working mothers, modern dating and the things baby boomers and Millennials can teach each other in the workplace and in life.

Photo by Francois Duhamel

It’s no accident that Nancy Meyers’ movies are known for their interiors. Meyers, pictured above on the set, has long had an interest in interior design and she writes her movie scripts with her characters’ homes and workplaces in mind.

She even draws little floor plans that help her move the story along — if she has Meryl Streep walking into her kitchen in It’s Complicated, she says, she has to know how Streep gets there. She also gives the floor plans to her production designers, along with pictures she’s found online that give them visual cues as to how she wants everything to look. The drawings and mood boards are effective communication tools. “The result is always very close to what I imagined,” Meyers says.

“It’s a credit to Nancy’s energy level that she can troll through thousands of websites and pictures and post exactly what she wants, so accurately, that we were able to look at it and say, ‘I get it,’” production designer Kristi Zea (Revolutionary Road, Goodfellas) noted in the film’s promotional materials. Zea worked with Meyers for the first time on this movie. “Nancy has a keen eye and is very precise; she knows what she does and does not want. She has an enormous amount of knowledge about decor, color and style and is extremely astute when it comes to all that.”

Photo by Francois Duhamel

Meyers, who also directed What Women Want and The Parent Trap and cowrote and produced Father of the Bride, among other films, says her movie sets are always character-based. “Every interior is a reflection of the person who lives there … and in my movies it’s the characters,” Meyers says.

“The fact that the houses turn out in a way that people like so much is very nice, but it really isn’t a drive for me or the production designers or the set decorators to do anything more than to help create the characters, to help make the movie seem authentic to the characters.”

Meyers, who describes her design style as “evolving,” says she finds inspiration in the work of Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt. “I find his work to be the most soothing and the most beautiful.”

Photo by Francois Duhamel

In The Intern, Jules’ home was designed to be on-trend — thus the modern lighting, chevron patterns and reclaimed wood table mixed with vintage pieces. “I tried to do what I thought was real for somebody that age,” Meyers says. “I think young married people sort of go out and buy a lot at once. They go to flea markets and they go to Restoration Hardware. They sort of feel they have to have everything done at once.”

Photo by Francois Duhamel

While scouting homes to shoot, Meyers was surprised to find that all the brownstones she saw had the same layout. “It was interesting to see what people did to change them, to individualize them.”

Ben’s home, which isn’t pictured here but can be glimpsed in the trailer above, has a more classic look. “His was a home that was lived in for probably 40 years and grew over time,” Meyers says. “He and his wife had put their house together over time. So I wanted it to look that way.”

One standout feature in Ben’s house is his closet. “He’s a guy who likes suits. They take up a little bit of space,” Meyers says. The closet was small, though, and it was a challenge to shoot. “The camera operator was squeezed between a rack of suits. Literally there were sleeves of suits over his head.”

Tucked in Ben’s house is artwork by De Niro’s father, who was a figurative painter and for whom De Niro was named. De Niro said in the film’s promotional materials that Meyers’ suggestion that they include some of his father’s works in the house meant a lot to him. “I thought it was a nice touch that added some homeyness for me.”

Ben’s kitchen has a lived-in look that comes naturally. “One of the reasons I really liked it was that a couple his age lived there,” Meyers says. “And we kept a lot of their things in the kitchen because you can’t duplicate reality that well. All her oils and vinegars and pitchers and things — we kept a lot of their stuff. It felt real. They really lived there, and they really lived there for 30 years.” The brownstone is located in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood.

Photo by Francois Duhamel

In contrast, the open shelving, subway tile, pendant lighting, and gray and white palette place Jules and Matt’s updated kitchen firmly in the present. The couple’s daughter, Paige, has a pint-size table in the corner.

Meyers says they turned this kitchen around 90 degrees to make the room easier to shoot. (“Ben is always sitting at the kitchen counter and behind him I can see all the way down to the front of the house.”) But otherwise the design team worked with the original brownstone home, which had beautiful moldings and fireplaces.

Photo by Joshua McHugh

In Jules and Matt’s bedroom, bold color in the chaise and pillows add interest to the room’s gray and white palette.

Photo by Francois Duhamel

The home’s neutral color palette is nowhere to be found in daughter Paige’s playful pink and white bedroom.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Much of the movie transpires in the About the Fit headquarters, seen here. The ATF office is set in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn but was filmed in the Bronx at the Light Box, a photo studio on the second floor of the BankNote Building.

When Zea and Meyers were thinking about the look of the offices, they visited tech start-ups to view the decor and get ideas. As in those real offices, this fictional headquarters has an open-plan design. The office features rows of white desks and gray ergonomic chairs, contemporary furniture, industrial lighting, exposed beams and tons of glass and steel. “It’s eclectic, a mixture of traditional, midcentury modern with found objects as well as procured pieces,” Zea has said.

Photo by Francois Duhamel

In a scene from The Intern, De Niro’s Ben, a former telephone book company executive, talks with the overworked and underappreciated Becky, played by Christina Scherer.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures