So you finished Big Little Lies, and then you immediately went on to Sharp Objects, right?

Yes.

So where did you guys start? Were you scouting to find the small town first?

Actually, you know what we really concentrated on was the house. The house is a big character, so we spent a lot of time trying to find a Victorian in Los Angeles since they wanted to keep it in Los Angeles.

At one point there were, and there still are, a bunch of big Victorians in and around the zone of LA (the film zone), but what has happened over some time is all of the land that was around them has been chopped up and sold. These Victorians are hemmed in by modern houses.

We then thought we would build it on location at one of the movie ranches, but then we had the same kind of problems either with the palm trees or where we could put the characters. It didn’t give us the sense of the estate that Adora and the Crellin family would have.

Our location manager was looking around Redding, California when he saw that someone had decided to build a replica of a Victorian on a big piece of property, so we used that as the basis of our exterior. We did build the Victorian interior and a portion of the exterior on a stage.

It was interesting because the people who had built this Victorian in Redding had built the exterior pretty faithfully as to what a Victorian would be. However, the inside was modernized entirely, so we could only use the exterior.

A lot of the research and references came from scouting a lot of the Victorians in Los Angeles and some in Atlanta that we had visited. We put together the interior of the Victorian on the stage, and we also did work to the Victorian exterior in Redding. We painted it and changed some things about it so that it would be better for shooting.