Guest Post by Molly Hughes

The Land of Oz. Wayne Manor. The Overlook Hotel. The Bates Motel. Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. These iconic sets have imprinted themselves on our collective cinematic imagination, and all of them are manifestations of collaborations between directors and production designers. On the eve of another Oscars ceremony at which women are yet again underrepresented below the line, I want to call attention to my field. Production designers serve a pivotal role in filmmaking, but we often get overlooked when it comes to discussions about gender equality in the industry.

For the uninitiated: Production designers are responsible for creating the overall look of the film with the input of the director and cinematographer. We’re often the first hire the director makes on a film, and his or her contribution to the look, feel, and mood of the film forms the psychological backbone of the viewer’s experience.

This year no women have been nominated in the production design category at the Academy Awards. While the set decorators with whom designers share these awards are often women, the production designers who oversee the overall look are not. Four women have won the award in the Oscars’ 89-year history (including Catherine Martin, who has won twice for her work on her husband’s films). Since the first woman was finally nominated (and won) in 1983 — Ana Asp for “Fanny and Alexander” — there have been 170 Production Design nominees, and of those only 16 percent have been women.

As we know, the problem is not simply the awards nominations — it’s the production culture specifically surrounding big studio films. The Art Directors Guild awards, which showcase the talents of designers across television, film, music videos, and commercials each year, have shown signs of a slow and steady increase in female nominees across every category in recent years except for their “Fantasy Film” category. This specific award, created in 2006 with the increase in high-concept, huge-budget comic book and fantasy films, remains men-only. No woman has been nominated in the 10-year history of this award. While women designers are sometimes hired for costume or period dramas, they are rarely hired by directors to design larger budget, high-concept productions. Of the 200 largest budget films from 2000 to 2015, none were designed by women.

So how do we change this?

For those of us who have the opportunity to work on studio films and films of a significant size and technical weight, it is our responsibility as designers and art directors, both male and female, to nurture young female talent in our field to be prepared for the big projects in their future; we must feel obligated to train young women to be ready to take on the technical demands of collaboration with the many departments on these larger films so they cannot fail under the scrutiny they will likely face as women doing the job most often given to men.

In the UK, things are looking more positive for women than in the U.S. I worked for production designer Stuart Craig and art director — now production designer — Neil Lamont on six “Harry Potter” films through the birth and young years of my two children. Their support and acceptance of young mothers in our award-winning art department sparked a cultural shift across the art departments of the British film industry.

There is now more support by male designers and art directors staffing their art departments of highly technical and design-heavy films with women with young children — an acknowledgement that flexibility doesn’t mean less productivity and job sharing can work successfully among female draftsmen and art directors. This mindset means that young women don’t have to leave the industry when they start having children, which is typically right around the age when they should be sharpening their technical skills and preparing to move up the art department ladder.

But we have to carry this mindset across to the U.S., and with projects now shooting wherever they can catch a good tax credit, it’s up to producers to support women with families on the road and those female crew members living in these tax credit hubs (Georgia, Canada, etc.) so they can be empowered to do their best work. There are excellent female designers and art department crew members out there who are great collaborators and communicators and would be a welcomed asset to any film, but they aren’t able to throw their names into the ring if they don’t feel like they have the support of the studio or production to help them balance their work and family lives.

Disney just announced Niki Caro will direct their live-action “Mulan,” making her the fourth female director to cross the $100 million threshold. Ava DuVernay, who has spoken out about her commitment to hiring a female crew, was the third with “A Wrinkle in Time,” and she hired Naomi Shohan, a female designer, for that project. While this is a positive sign, female directors still make up less than 10 percent of the population of directors in Hollywood and those numbers are even bleaker for studio films. So the likelihood of other female directors being able to make the same commitment as DuVernay to support women below the line is challenging.

We need the help of young male directors to remain loyal to their female designers as they break through to bigger budgets. So far in 2017, two films set in the Marvel Universe with young male directors attached to direct have female designers, a first for comic book films. Thanks to the loyalty of young directors with whom they’ve worked, and a willingness for studios to take a chance on a female designer the way they’ll take a chance on their young male director, this is a huge step forward. This could mean things are beginning to shift in our direction.

So let’s nurture young talent, set young women in our field up to succeed, and keep the momentum going.

Production designer Molly Hughes spent a decade as an art director, most notably in London on six of the “Harry Potter” franchise films with production designer Stuart Craig. She also served as an art director on Steven Spielberg’s “Warhorse,” and as supervising art director on Tony Gilroy’s “The Bourne Legacy.” Since making the leap to production designer in 2012 with director Max Nichols, she has worked with documentary filmmaker Amy Berg on her first scripted feature “Every Secret Thing,” Oscar winner Charlie Kaufman on his TV directorial debut “How and Why,” and with the renowned Norwegian director Joachim Trier on his first English language film, “Louder Than Bombs.” Hughes designed the hugely successful Josh Boone-directed film “The Fault In Our Stars” and is currently in preparation with Boone on his next film, “X-Men: The New Mutants,” for Twentieth Century Fox.