Tim Burton films have such a specific, unifying theme and visual style—the tales of misfits told through a prism of dark humor and surreal imagery—that it is easy to imagine members of the filmmaker’s creative coterie working carefully to frame each film in precise Tim Burton fashion. But as Big Eyes production designer and longtime Burton collaborator Rick Heinrichs tells it, that is not how Tim’s filmmaking process works.

“Whenever I work with Tim, it’s not about sticking to a style,” says Heinrichs, who has worked with Burton on more than eight projects—including Edward Scissorhands, Planet of the Apes, and Sleepy Hollow, for which he won an Oscar. “It is still about going to the source material of the script and finding the elements that we want to make expressive or stylize or make somewhat more surreal.” Burton’s latest film, Big Eyes, chronicles how the late con artist Walter Keane took credit for his wife Margaret Keane’s iconic paintings, which depict children with hauntingly over-size eyes. Since expressiveness, style, and surreality are already so overt in Keane’s artwork, Heinrichs and Burton did not have to go to additional lengths to establish that theme.

Instead, Heinrichs focused his energy on re-creating a believable 1950s San Francisco in Vancouver (where much of the film was shot) and Margaret’s environment in that fraudulent chapter of her life, drawing inspiration from historical evidence, magazine spreads, and private photos provided by Margaret and her daughter Jane. “These [were] very casual family images,” he tells us. “Every time we got a photograph, we would be looking at the furniture, to see which house it was. We’d be looking to see what was on the wall—[Margaret] often hung her paintings on the wall. Occasionally we would see paintings stacked up against the wall, and we’d try to figure out which paintings they were. This was not just about trying to create mise-en-scène, but to create a chronology to everything.”

Perhaps the most cumbersome task for the production team, however, was re-creating hundreds of the paintings that the prolific artist produced. Heinrichs and his team carefully storyboarded Margaret’s artistic evolution, planning for certain key pieces to appear in specific scenes. (The moment Margaret decided to add a tear to one of her “Big Eyes” paintings, for example, was pinpointed.) To duplicate the paintings themselves, producers cooperated with Margaret and her gallery to obtain permission to reprint nearly 200 pieces, some of which were re-created at early stages of the process so that Burton could show Amy Adams, who stars as Margaret, at various points in her portraits.

“We were doing a lot of high-res printing on canvas,” Heinrichs explains. For paintings that would be shown in close-up, the production team worked over the prints “with oils and gesso and impasto, making it so that the camera could get close to the paintings and see some of her brushwork.” Some portraits required extra attention, however, like those showing Margaret’s daughter Jane. Since Delaney Raye, the actress cast as young Jane, does not look exactly like the real Jane, the art department hired an on-set artist to painstakingly alter those paintings so that the subject better resembled Raye.

While the paintings tell their own story of Margaret’s artistic evolution, Heinrichs also telegraphed the artist’s emotional state through her surroundings and claustrophobic studio spaces. “We [conveyed] Margaret’s personality with the kind of colors we would use in her suburban house and her first apartment in San Francisco—soft and pastel that show optimism,” Heinrichs says of the period before Margaret’s husband exerted complete control over her. “Then when she moved in with Walter into his house in Berkeley, that was more of a brooding, dark, male interior, [which] reflects how domineering he was in their relationship.” By the time they had moved into the mid-century-modern house, and Margaret had begun to show some resentment toward Walter’s scheme, “there’s a little bit more of a parity between the power that is established there. She is still kind of confined to her studio, but the place also expresses some more of her optimism, with the bright color, and weirdly, that mid-century-modern flight of fancy that kind of expresses Walter’s somewhat unhinged personality.”