Wide Sargasso Sea

Everything in this film is operating simultaneously on three registers. The material register: what is literally present, the dialogue on the page, the object in the room, the body in the space. The spiritual register: what the space holds beyond its surface, what is being enacted at the level of belief, protection, power, and ritual. The ancestral register: what the moment carries from what came before and what it carries forward to those who will come after. The ancestral is not only past. It is also the ancestor we are becoming for those who follow.

These three registers are never separate. Christophine's mortar is a kitchen tool (material), a site of Obeah preparation (spiritual), and an object whose form and use carry West African knowledge across the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and forward into a future that has not yet arrived (ancestral). Antoinette's white dress trailing in brown mud is a ruined garment (material), a crossing from one world into another (spiritual), and an image saturated with the history of racial categorisation in the Caribbean and with the futures it forecloses and opens (ancestral).

A musical analogy: the material is the drum, the spiritual is the bass, the ancestral is the vocal carrying across generations. The drum is the first telephone. The vocal carrying across generations is the message it transmits. Every scene has all three playing at once. Every space you build should be able to speak on all three registers at once.

And the test that follows from this. Nothing should ever be sitting solely in one register, and if it is, it is not doing its best work. If a chair is doing material work alone, it is a chair. If it is doing material and spiritual and ancestral work together, it is a chair that has earned its place in this film. Apply this test across every space, every object, every surface, every choice. The Encoding section returns to the practical form of this principle.

The four elements as operative presences, not symbols. Water, fire, air, earth. They are not decoration. They show up in nearly every scene as material conditions and as spiritual presences at once. Water includes the Sargasso, the natural pool, rain, sweat, the river where Christophine washes herself underwater, tears. Fire includes Coulibri burning, Thornfield burning, candles, the moths falling into flame, the hearth, the heat itself. Air includes the wind that lifts Annette's hair on the veranda, the insect hum, breath, voice, the wind on the battlements, Antoinette flying. Earth includes the mud the white dress trails through, the forest floor, the African mortar, the dirt that makes Rochester's mask, the soil itself. As you design every space, ask which elements are most active in this room, in this scene, in this moment. The elements are characters.

The theoretical line and the practical line. Every choice in this film holds a theoretical argument and a material reality at once. The theoretical line is the idea, the philosophical claim, what the space means. The practical line is what that looks like in cloth, paint, plaster, wood, stone, light, sound. The two move together. When they separate the design becomes either decorative (practical without theoretical depth) or pretentious (theoretical without material conviction). I have laid out a number of sections in this document with a double column showing how the two lines hold each other. That is the rhythm I want our prep conversations to have.

Three further principles run alongside these registers and elements, and I want to name them here so they hold across every section that follows.

The Remix Potential of Space. Locations and their elements can be recombined, layered, dissolved, re-edited across time and within scenes. The film's spatial logic is not literal continuity. It is resonant assembly. The remix as a form of mal-adaptation that preserves the source material's traces while transforming everything around it. This film is, in many ways, a remix of the architecture of Wide Sargasso Sea, of the architecture of Jane Eyre, of the architecture of empire itself. The spaces we build need to be able to hold this remixability without falling apart.

Madness as access. What the colonial frame calls madness is, in this film, a form of perception. A doorway. A way of knowing that registers what reasonable seeing will not allow. The spaces around Antoinette have to honour her perception as legitimate. Not as illness. The room as Antoinette experiences it is the real room. Build for that reality.

Voice on three planes. The film holds the spoken voice, the internal voice, and the psychic voice as three distinct registers operating at once. The spaces we build need to be able to receive all three of these voice-fields without flattening any of them. A room must be able to be a place where someone speaks aloud, a place where someone thinks, and a place where the dead, the absent, and the not-yet-arrived can be heard. Three voice-fields, one room.

The tropical sublime as a contested aesthetic. Who is permitted to find this landscape beautiful, and what that permission costs. The coloniser's gaze on Caribbean nature as desire and terror operating simultaneously. Rochester's "too green, too dense, too vivid" is the colonial sublime breaking on its own contradictions. Antoinette's "vibrant and warm" is the same place rendered through belonging. Hold both in the design. The same plant matter, the same vegetation, the same set dressing. What changes is the body the camera is reading the world through. The dual perspective is the chromatic and somatic version of this contested aesthetic.

The Sargasso as the central image of the film. An ocean with no shores. A place of entanglement. A sea named for seaweed whose mass beneath the surface enormously exceeds what is visible above. The film opens by descending below the Sargasso surface to find "a much greater, tangled mass than that which is apparent on the surface" (Scene 2). It closes with Antoinette flying above a sea that is now "clear and no longer filled with sargassum" (Scene 105). What appears on the surface is always the smaller part of what exists. This logic governs every space in the film. Every room is a Sargasso surface. The design is the work of attending to what is beneath.

The film moves through a small number of distinct architectural worlds, each of which is doing very particular work. Coulibri, where Antoinette grew up, is a Jamaican plantation great house in two states: in her early childhood, "past splendour and present dilapidation," a house that has been let go because emancipation has hollowed out the labour and the wealth that built it. After Mason arrives, Coulibri is a great house aggressively returned to colonial order: floorboards repaired, stables cleaned, new servants imported, the parrot's wings clipped. Two architectures of the same building, two ideologies of inhabitation. The spaces have to read this difference.

Granbois is the honeymoon house in the Windward Islands, described in Scene 7 as "an imitation of a classic English summer house, surrounded by lush jungle, entirely isolated high in the mountains." That phrase is doing a lot of work. Granbois is not Caribbean architecture. It is English architecture imposed on Caribbean land. The jungle pressing in on it is the land's slow refusal of that imposition. The house is besieged by what surrounds it and the design needs to make that pressure visible.

Daniel's home is its own world entirely, a class and material register unlike any other in the film. Modest, hot, worn. The grandfather clock that ticks loudly. The corrugated wall. The "VENGEANCE IS MINE" sign. The red tablecloth he blows his nose on. This is post-emancipation Caribbean rural domestic life as it actually was for the majority of the population. It is the world Granbois pretends does not exist and that Rochester is forced to enter when he goes looking for the truth that Granbois cannot tell him.

Thornfield is the imperial endpoint and gets its own section later in this document because the maximalism it requires is doing different work than anything else in the film.

• Jamaican plantation great house architecture. The typology of the building, the verandas, the louvered windows, the elevated foundations, the relationship between great house and outbuildings, the particular spatial logic of a building built on enslaved labour. Research the actual surviving great houses: Rose Hall, Greenwood, Good Hope, Bellefield. What they were made of. How they were laid out. How they decayed.
• Windward Island vernacular domestic architecture. The smaller scale of houses in Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent. The relationship between French Creole influence and English colonial influence in built form. The specific materials available in the Windward Islands as opposed to Jamaica.
• Adolphe Duperly and Sons. The Jamaican photographic studio active from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. Duperly's daguerreotypes and prints document Jamaican architecture, landscape, and social life from inside the period the film is set in. Their archive is one of the most precise visual sources you can work from.
• Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica by Edward Kamau Brathwaite. A foundational text for thinking about post-slavery Jamaican material life. The architecture of the yard, the language of the kitchen, the spatial logic of the world the formerly enslaved made for themselves alongside and against the great house. Read it for how it thinks about space, not only for what it tells us about it.
• Hand-coloured photographic prints from the period. See An Evening Party, St Thomas, Jamaica (1905) and Arrival of the Royal Mail Steamer, Dominica, Roseau (1905) as starting points. The colour added to these prints is itself a research subject. What the colourist chose to brighten, what to leave muted, what they thought a Caribbean scene was supposed to look like to a European eye.
• The decay of the great house after emancipation. A specific aesthetic and historical condition. Buildings that were maintained by enslaved labour and that, when that labour was withdrawn, began to slip back toward the land. The garden growing wild. The paint flaking. The roof leaking. This is Coulibri before Mason. Research how a colonial house decays in a tropical climate. What it sounds like, what it smells like, what it looks like when no one is fighting against the fact that the climate wants to take it back.
• Daniel's home as a specific class register, and as Obeah residue. Rural post-emancipation Caribbean domestic architecture. Single room or two-room dwelling. Corrugated metal. Hand-painted signs. Religious iconography. Worn furniture, inherited or improvised. The grandfather clock that ticks loudly, an anomaly and aspiration, a borrowed sign of a respectability that is partly real and partly performed. The "VENGEANCE IS MINE" sign on the rough corrugated wall. The chewing stick that Daniel works between teeth and fingers, a fidget object as much as a mouth one. The worn-out white singlet. A small clarification on the bulge in this scene. The bulge of money belongs to Rochester, not Daniel. Daniel's eye catches the bulge of Rochester's wallet on his arrival (Scene 33), and Daniel taunts Rochester about it directly later (Scene 35: "I know there more in them pockets, your pockets swell, even though the other ting not"). The economic encounter begins as a visual one. Daniel reads the wallet before he speaks to Rochester. Hold this for staging.
  
  What follows are descriptive details from an earlier draft of the script that were trimmed for page count but always intended to come through in the actual space. I am holding them as non-negotiable design intent for Daniel's home.
  
  The room is as uncomfortably hot as Daniel is uncomfortable to be around. The air is part of the architecture. There is a small unopened window. The heat is sealed in. No ventilation, no relief. The room is a hot box, and the discomfort of the air is doing real work in the scene.
  
  A table sits in the middle of the room, covered in a blood-red tablecloth. A bottle of rum and a jug of water on top of it. The cloth is the chromatic centrepiece of the room. It is also the same red Daniel later blows his nose into. The red of this cloth threads forward through the film: when Antoinette, in Scene 101, lowers her hand and lights the edge of another red tablecloth at Thornfield to begin the burn, one red answers another across continents. Daniel's red and Antoinette's red are in conversation. Hold this as a deliberate chromatic motif we are tracking.
  
  And then the corner. A dirty corner of the room: a mound of black earth, dead skin, and feathers, swept together but not swept away. This is not just texture. It is character through space, and the production design here is doing real philosophical work. The mound reads as the residue of an Obeah practice that has happened in this room, that Daniel has tried to mask but has not fully cleaned. The sweep is partial. The disposal is incomplete. The room betrays him. The mound is not a standing corner he keeps deliberately. It is the unintended evidence of practice that he thought he had hidden. It contradicts everything Daniel says aloud later in the scene about not believing in "all that devil business." He profits from informing on Christophine for being an Obeah woman, but the work has happened here too, and the evidence of it remains at his feet. The corner is the room telling Rochester what Daniel will not. The corner is the room being more honest than its inhabitant. Build it accordingly. The mound has weight, smell, history. It is what was done here that the doer thought he had cleared away.
• The village called Massacre (Scene 5). A small handful of huts where the carriage gets stuck in mud and Antoinette recognises Caro. I am thinking we design this as one to two outbuilding-style huts with some African tinge to their construction, but equally rooted in their period and place. There is something quietly powerful in a "village" being only one or two huts left standing. It speaks to the ideas around the Middle Passage, about communities reduced almost to nothing, about names of places outliving the places themselves. A makeshift sign reading "Massacre" is something we should discuss. I am drawn to it but I worry it could be heavy-handed. Worth a conversation about whether the sign earns its place or whether the name gets carried only in dialogue (as it currently is in Baptiste's line).

Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space has been a central reference for me across years of work. His thinking about how interior spaces hold psychological and spiritual life, how the architecture of a room is also the architecture of the self, is foundational to how I make images. I want it to be foundational to how we build the world of this film together.

Bachelard's vocabulary is wider than just nest and lair. He gives us a whole language for thinking about space as the topography of the inner life. The miniature and the immense, sometimes inside the same room. Inside and outside as porous categories rather than fixed ones. The house as cosmos, every house holding a complete world. The drawer as a space of secrets. The cellar as the irrational, the attic as the rational, both as spaces of the psyche. The corner as the place the self retreats to in order to become itself.

Every significant space in this script is doing one of these things or transforming from one into another. I want us to read the script through Bachelard's lens together in our first design conversations, and I want each space we build to know which Bachelardian role it is playing in that scene and in the film overall.

• Read or revisit Bachelard's The Poetics of Space with this script in hand. The chapters on Nest, Shell, Corner, Miniature, and the Dialectic of Outside and Inside are particularly relevant.
• Bachelard on the imagined house as the house we carry inside us. Antoinette is doing this throughout the film. Coulibri lives inside her even when she is at Granbois. Granbois lives inside her when she is in the attic. The final image of her flying home is, in part, the recovery of all these inner houses simultaneously.
• How the rooms relate to each other architecturally. Bachelard cares about thresholds, corridors, the relationship of one space to another. Geomap the spaces of Granbois and Coulibri in our prep work so that the journey through them is as designed as the rooms themselves. I want us to know, in advance, the spatial relationship between the drawing room and the bedroom and the veranda and the dressing room at Granbois; between the corridor and the dining room and the parrot room and Annette's bedroom and the kitchen at Coulibri. The path the body takes through the house is part of the script's argument and we should map it before we build it.

Colour in this film is doing argument-work as much as composition-work. No chromatic decision in the frame is default. Every colour choice is in conversation with the three registers, with the four elements, with the dual perspective, with the ancestral and the somatic, with the Bachelardian work of the room. This section gathers the spines of colour that run through the film and asks you to hold them as a unified field rather than as a collection of accents. Each spine is a thread the audience is being trained to read, even when they do not know they are reading it.

One of the central principles of how I am making this film is that theoretical ideas must encode into material reality without ever being announced. The film should feel like a saturated material world, not a thesis with examples attached. That means the design has to do the philosophical work silently, through what the eye actually meets in the frame.

Below are six worked provocations to show you how I am thinking about this practice. They are starting points for many more. Build out your own. The method matters more than any specific example.

These six are starting points. Build out your own. The point is that every choice in production design should be encoding something. When you find yourself unable to articulate what a chair is doing beyond filling space, ask the three registers of it. Material, spiritual, ancestral. If it is not doing work on at least one register, consider replacing it with something that is.

The script is precise and obsessive about objects. Many of the script's most loaded moments are object moments. Below is an inventory of the objects that need particular attention, organised loosely. Each one needs to be designed as an argument, not just dressed as a prop.

One thing to flag at the top. Some of these objects will technically fall under the costume department's remit (Ola) or under hair and makeup (Evi). I am detailing them all here to you in the spirit of how I want the departments to work: in close conversation with each other, each aware of the wider material life of the film. Naturally pick up on what falls under your remit, and hold a working awareness of what falls under Ola's, Evi's, and beyond. The boundaries between departments are working boundaries, not silos.

• Rochester's trunk of law books in Scene 5. Heavy, English, useless in tropical rain. The trunk dragged through mud while Baptiste and the coachman do not help. The books themselves: leather-bound, embossed, the apparatus of empire's legitimation. Later abandoned, covered in red ants in Scene 24.
• Christophine's African mortar in Scene 26. Tall pestle, the body's full weight pounding. A West African form. The specks of coffee like dirt in the air. Research actual African mortars in the Akan, Yoruba, and other West African traditions where these forms originate. The mortar should look like it has crossed an ocean.
• The calabash full of strained tomato pulp in Scene 26. Blood red, smooth, thick. Sitting on the floor. A material rhyme with violence and with feeding at the same time. Calabashes in general across the film as Caribbean domestic vessels with deep indigenous and African inheritance.
• Christophine's heavy gold earrings in Scene 11. Pulling down on her lobes. Her silk turban elaborately tied. The earrings as an ancestral connection to the goldsmithing traditions of the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Akan peoples. Gold worked by hand, shaped to mean something specific, carried across the Middle Passage as one of the few forms of wealth that could be hidden, melted, reshaped, kept. The earrings are not decorative. They are an argument about what survived.
• The portrait of Annette in Scene 8, in a gilded frame. "The Creole imitation of the English lady of the manor." The portrait as colonial technology of legitimation. Annette posing as English for the painter, the painter painting her as English to flatter her, both of them collaborating in a small daily fiction. What does the portrait actually look like.
• The Miller's Daughter painting at Coulibri, watching Young Antoinette across her childhood. Brown curly locks, blue eyes, dress falling off the shoulder. A picture of demure Englishness. The painting that turns to look at Young Antoinette in Scene 55. The painting that resolves, in the carriage at Thornfield, into Jane Eyre herself standing in the welcome line. Three paintings essentially: the one that hangs at Coulibri, the one Young Antoinette sees in her mind when it turns, and the human person who shows up at Thornfield as its embodiment. Design all three together.
• The neckerchief. Scene 6, Antoinette unties it from Rochester's neck and ties it around her own wrist. Track this object. It transfers from his body to hers. A restraint becomes an ornament becomes a claim. I am also considering having Hilda stuff this neckerchief into her own mouth at one point to stop herself from laughing, which would track the object even further across bodies and meanings: a restraint, an ornament, a claim, and a gag (self-imposed). Later Rochester ties one again in Scene 75, "the same neck scarf his father wears, the same neck scarf Antoinette once removed." The object is an argument about inheritance and refusal. This object lives across costume and production design and we are flagging it to Ola and Evi too.
• The candle and the moth in Scene 9. The moth flies into the flame and falls into the holder. Rochester releases it. Antoinette's line: "It's no use. More will come." Design the candle holder and the candle so that this beat lands. Later in Scene 86, moths fly into candles repeatedly and "a stream of tiny corpses creating a pile of death." The same image returns in extremity.
• The hand bell. Scene 67 and 68. Antoinette rings it for hours. Baptiste answering it, increasingly hurried. The bell is a small bronze object with a wooden handle. Its sound is specific. The shape and weight matter. The fact that it is small and yet shakes the house when rung relentlessly is an architectural fact.
• The cuckoo clock in Scene 86. The mechanical cock that crows. The Master of None scene needs this object to do real work. The clock as colonial domestic kitsch. The cock as foreshadowing, as comedy, as horror, as Bertha's husband-bird. Find the right specific clock.
• The Glittering Isles book in Scene 35. A real or invented colonial volume on Caribbean spiritual practices. Rochester searches it for "Obeah." The book itself as an object of colonial knowledge production. The pages he flips through with sentences leaping out: "offerings of fruit and flowers," "white people pretend to dismiss," "black magic," "cases of sudden or mysterious death." Design the actual book. The leather, the paper, the typography of the period, the illustrations. It will be on screen for moments only but those moments are doing argument-work.
• The male corset in Scene 81 and 86. Rochester laces himself into it. Empire constricting the body of the man who carries it. The corset is audible when he moves. Real period men's corsets existed and were worn. Research the actual object. The boning, the lacing, the fabric, the hooks. The sound it makes. The way it forces the spine.
• The cutlass in Scene 74. Antoinette takes it from the outbuilding kitchen. A working tool, not a weapon, until she takes it. Its presence in the kitchen is a fact of post-emancipation Caribbean rural life. Its movement to her hand is the moment a tool becomes an instrument of refusal.
• The set of keys at Grace's waist in Scenes 95 and 99. The drunkard jailer's keys. I have been thinking about whether these need to be small or whether, read through the maximalism-of-empire and period lens we are using for Thornfield, they should in fact be varied in size and proudly clunky. Cast iron, heavy, obvious. The kind of keys that announce themselves when she walks. There is something about the architectural confidence of imperial possession that wants its keys to be unmistakable: this is what locks the doors here, this is who holds the locks, this is the visible technology of containment. My instinct is leaning clunky and cast-iron rather than small and discreet, but tell me if you read it differently. The object that locks Antoinette in and that she eventually takes when Grace passes out. Track the keys.
• The ginger sweets in Scene 97. The box Richard Mason pushes across the table. Sweets from home as the final cruelty. The packaging itself, the period typography, the colonial trade logic of how a sweet from "home" is in fact a sweet made from colonial sugar. Design the box.
• The candelabra and gold dining service in Scene 101. The line of gold candelabras. The gold plates, gold cutlery, gold-rimmed glasses. The three patriline portraits hanging above. This is the room the fire takes. Design the dining service and the portraits with full conviction. They have to read as the visible weight of empire so that the burn registers as the exorcism it is.
• The children's learning flashcards. "H is for Home," the bright square house. "F is for f, f, fire," the family hearth that becomes a crib on fire. The flashcards as a material genre of colonial childhood. Design them. The illustration style, the typography, the cardboard, the colour palette of mid-19th century English children's primers. They are doing some of the most precise ideological work in the script.

The Caribbean was not empty before the colonisers arrived. The Taíno, the Arawak, and the Kalinago (Island Caribs) inhabited these islands for centuries before European contact. The script holds a specific space for this in Scene 87, where an Arawakan-speaking ancestor speaks over black: "Our rain knows all the songs. And all the tears. Listen." This is the spiritual hinge of the film. Indigenous presence is not historical curiosity here. It is the deep ground beneath everything.

For your design, indigenous traces are not decorative additions. They are the underlayer. The Caribbean as a place that was named, mapped, walked, sung, and made sacred long before the colonial period the film is set in. What remains in the soil, in the place names, in the food, in the rain. Research indigenous Caribbean material culture not for surface motifs but for the deeper logics that survive. The forms persist even when the people are absent or invisibilised.

Two concepts I work with travel together at this layer of the film, and I want to name them explicitly before the threads list that follows. Cosmic Archaeology, AND THE MISSING. Side by side, neither subsumed under the other. THE MISSING, drawing on Arthur Jafa's articulation, is the recognition that we cannot fully quantify what was lost in the colonial rupture, because we do not know the full scope of what was taken. The negative space of Black and indigenous experience: the unregistered, the unrecorded, the unwritten, the things that never made it onto any archive's shelf. Cosmic Archaeology is my own coined practice for working with that absence. The fragments that remain are dusted off and treated as still-active transmissions rather than finished remnants, then assembled not into false completeness but into a more honest form of knowing.

Indigenous Caribbean cultures are one of the clearest fields for this practice. So much was destroyed, so quickly, that what survives are partial traces. Half-known forms. Names of places. Words that survived in Creole languages. Foods that crossed into Caribbean cuisine. Hammock and calabash forms still in use. The forest floor in this film is on top of indigenous burial grounds. The natural pool is on a sacred site. The food Christophine cooks contains indigenous staples. The design should know this even when no scene explicitly states it. Build with these two concepts running underneath every Caribbean exterior, every interior, every object: what is here now is the visible part of a much greater field that the colonial archive could not capture.

• Taíno zemis. Sacred objects, ancestor figures, small carved presences that mediated between the human and the spirit world. Three-pointed stones. Wooden carvings. Cohoba paraphernalia. The zemi as a category of the sacred that is older than Obeah and that flows into Obeah at certain points. Research the Smithsonian, British Museum, and Jamaican National Gallery collections of Taíno zemis. Their forms can inform objects in Christophine's space, in the forest, in the natural pool, without ever being labelled or explained.
• Arawak and Taíno material culture in general. Calabashes, hammocks, tobacco, cassava, cohiba (pottery), the duho (the carved wooden seat reserved for spiritual leadership). Some of this becomes Caribbean domestic culture across all later eras. The hammock that Antoinette and Rochester curl in at Granbois is a Taíno form.
• Kalinago (Island Carib) culture. The Windward Islands, especially Dominica, were Kalinago territory. The Massacre village in Scene 5 is in Dominica historically and the indigenous presence in the Windward Islands is more direct than in Jamaica. Research the surviving Kalinago Territory in Dominica.
• Pre-Columbian rock carvings (petroglyphs) in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Mountain River Cave in Jamaica. Caves and rock formations across the islands carrying carved figures, spiral motifs, ancestor faces. These forms can inform texture and surface in unexpected places. The rocks around the natural pool. The walls of caves we may or may not see. The patterns on Christophine's calabash.
• Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960). The Guyanese rainforest as interior journey, historical haunting, and consciousness expanding beyond ordinary perception. Direct reference for how the forest in our film is doing more than topographical work. The forest as the place where time collapses, where the dead walk, where perception exceeds the colonial real. Read alongside the Granbois forest sequences and the Atlantians.
• Colonial cartography and what is erased in the act of mapping. How land was named, divided, surveyed, and represented. The relationship between naming a place and claiming it. Maroon hideouts unmarked on plantation surveys. Indigenous place names overwritten with English and French. The "Massacre" village in Scene 5 carries its own history in its name. Research colonial Caribbean cartography for what it shows and especially for what it could not see. The design should know the names that were lost.
• Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa as a thinker and reference. The Zulu sanusi who held vast pan-African and pan-human cosmological knowledge. His written works Indaba My Children and Africa Is My Witness are vast repositories of mythic and ancestral material. He is not Caribbean, but his approach to the survival of fragments and the active transmission of cosmological knowledge across erasure is directly applicable here.

The outbuildings are the spaces of life that the great house pretends do not exist. Christophine's kitchen and adjoining sleeping room. The servants' quarters. The kitchen yard. The path to the river. These are the spaces where the actual labour of feeding, washing, clothing, healing, and raising children happens. They are also the spaces where the spiritual life of the house lives most freely, because the colonial gaze does not enter them.

Design these spaces with the same care as the great house, and probably with more love. They are where the film is most alive. Brathwaite's Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica is the best single text for thinking about these spaces.

• Christophine's kitchen at Granbois (Scene 26). The mortar, the calabash, the smoke escaping the doorway. Tools hung from beams. Bunches of herbs drying. A simple hearth. A clay floor. The smoke that obscures her at first when Rochester approaches. Build this space as a working kitchen that has been worked in for years, by someone who knows where everything lives.
• Christophine's sleeping room (Scene 45). The small adjoining room. Soft glow in the deep night. A bed. A few personal objects. A space where she rocks Young Antoinette and sings her a Caribbean lullaby. This room is the warmest space in the film. Build it that way. Things on the walls. Something hanging at the window. Soft cloth. Things that have been with her a long time.
• The path through the woods to Christophine's house (Scene 40). "Billowing sheets hang nearby, obscuring and mystifying her view." This is not Granbois. This is Christophine's own world. A small house with sheets drying on lines outside, a mango tree, a place where she sits on the ground with the calabash and the cigar. The architecture is informal, the line between inside and outside porous. Build this as an Afro-Caribbean domestic space rather than a colonial one.
• The river where the women wash linen (Scene 39). One of the most sonically and spiritually charged locations in the film. A group of women washing white linen in a river while Christophine leads a work song. The water itself becomes a percussive instrument: water drumming that builds as Antoinette approaches. The river is doing several things at once: it is the site of communal labour, the site of a spiritual rhythm that predates and survives colonial structures, and a literal sonic event. Find a river location that can hold all of this. Slow water, rocks the women can sit on or beat the linen against, light breaking through trees overhead, space enough for a group of women to be in audible relationship with each other and with the water.
• The river where Christophine washes herself (Scene 76). A different beat. Christophine alone. White sarong, gold jewellery. Slow ritual washing. She lowers herself underwater and screams into the water. King Tubby deep dub. This is a sacred site. The same river or a different one, but a place that holds her ritual.
• The outbuilding kitchen at Coulibri (Scene 45). A different kitchen, in Antoinette's childhood. Christophine and Young Antoinette in a soft glow at night. Build this as the architectural ancestor of the Granbois kitchen. The same logic, the same kind of space, an earlier version.
• Daniel's home (Scene 37). Already discussed in Section 01 but worth pulling forward here too. A small modest home that lives in the same spatial register as the outbuildings, even though Daniel is not a servant. His house is the rural post-emancipation Caribbean reality that Granbois pretends not to see. The grandfather clock, the corrugated wall, the "VENGEANCE IS MINE" sign, the red tablecloth. Design it as the visible truth that the great house is constantly displacing.

The exteriors of this film are doing as much work as the interiors. The Coulibri garden, the path between the house and the village, the hidden pool, the heart of the forest, the mountain ridge Granbois sits on, the Thornfield drive lined with oaks. The exterior design is closer to landscape design and natural site management than to set construction, but it requires the same level of philosophical attention.

The Caribbean landscape in this script is not backdrop. It is participant. Rochester looks out of the carriage window and sees green that is "too green, too dense, too vivid." Antoinette walks through the woods and "plants and trees yield to her passage." The forest swallows a road whole. The pool is "blue-black water surrounded by silver rocks." The garden at Coulibri is "every shade of green growing wild." This landscape has its own agency. Design it that way. Three principles to hold across every exterior beat:

Density, saturation, and sensory pressure as their own form of consciousness. Overgrowth, heat, soil, decay, and bloom as simultaneous and inseparable states. The Caribbean does not separate growing and dying, blooming and decomposing, into different seasons. They are happening at once, in the same square foot of forest floor. The dressing of every exterior should hold that simultaneity. Excess as cognition.

Botanical specificity is doing spiritual and pharmacological work, not decorative work. Royal palms (the women climb them at Coulibri burning, Scene 1). Flamboyant trees (the homecoming, Scene 105). Jasmine (Young Antoinette runs her tongue over a jasmine leaf to catch raindrops, Scene 44). Octopus orchid (the bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purple in the Coulibri garden, Scene 44). Tree ferns. Mango (Scene 5, where Rochester, Antoinette and Baptiste shelter from rain). Guava. Sargassum. Each plant in this script carries spiritual and pharmacological resonance beyond its name. Research it as material culture, not as set dressing. The botanical world is a witness in this film.

The plantation landscape is psychological space. The built geography of slavery persists long after its formal end. Ruined great houses, overgrown cane fields, paths that disappear back into forest. Scene 31 where Rochester finds a paved road with orange flowers that vanishes when he turns around is doing precise work at this register. The land remembers what was done on it. Ground is not neutral.

• The Coulibri garden (Scene 44). Wild and overgrown. Every shade of green. Vivid red, yellow, orange flowers shimmering. Towering tree ferns. The octopus orchid (white, mauve, deep purple). Jasmine leaves Young Antoinette runs her tongue over to catch raindrops. This is the garden that has gone wild because the labour that maintained it was withdrawn after emancipation. The wildness is the truth of freedom. The wildness is not neglect. It is liberation. Research Caribbean garden plants in their wild state, particularly Jamaican mountain garden flora. Octopus orchids, flamboyant trees, jasmine, hibiscus, frangipani, allamanda. The flamboyant tree is critical: Antoinette flies home to one in the final scene.
• The same garden after Mason arrives. Pancake-slugs lined up along manicured flowerbeds, salt killing them. The garden returned to colonial order is the garden's death. The earlier wildness is the garden's life. Both states need to be designed.
• The path between Coulibri house and the surrounding land. The route Young Antoinette takes when the children chase her with their song in Scene 44. The undergrowth that scratches her legs. The light declining as she goes deeper. This is a path through the half-tamed half-wild land.
• The heart of the forest (Scenes 31, 32, 63, 78). The dense, dark, hostile-to-Rochester / welcoming-to-Antoinette space at the centre of the film's geography. The paved road that appears for Rochester and then vanishes. The orange flowers strewn along it. The ruined house in the distance that morphs into spectral colonial architecture. The same forest where the Atlantians walk. The same forest where Rochester digs and acquires his black mask of dirt. The forest is the place where the film's spiritual truth is most concentrated. Find a real forest location that can hold all of these registers. Light filtering down. Towering canopy. A clearing or two. Paths that can be made and unmade by the camera and the dressing.
• The mountain ridge Granbois sits on. "Entirely isolated high in the mountains." The relationship of house to surrounding landscape is part of the design. Granbois is an English summer house dropped into Caribbean mountain terrain. The architectural mismatch is the visible argument. Worth us going through our scouted sites and houses together to find what gets us closest to this, and considering what supplementary build or dressing might be required to push the location into the right relationship with the surrounding land.
• The mango tree in Scene 5. Where Rochester, Antoinette, Baptiste, and the coachman shelter from the rain. A mango tree of significant age, its leaves big enough to provide shelter. The tree is a witness in this scene. It is itself.
• The Thornfield drive (Scene 90). Long, lined with tall oak trees. The English landscape tradition of the country house approach, designed to perform the wealth of the family from the moment of arrival. Cold trees, bare branches, snow on the ground. The opposite of the lush Caribbean.
• The Sargasso Sea itself (Scenes 2, 104). Not designed in the traditional sense but worth holding in mind for the entire arc of exteriors. The sea is a presence at the very beginning and the very end of the film. It opens in deep blue with seaweed, "an undertone of a thousand voices." It returns clear and dazzling in Scene 104, the sargassum gone. The sea is the journey and the homecoming.

The Caribbean section of the film is approached minimally. Not stripped of life, but stripped of excess. The Caribbean is already saturated. The vegetation is intense. The light is intense. The colours of flowers, sky, water, soil are intense. The film does not need to add to this. It needs to let it speak.

This means that interiors at Coulibri in Antoinette's childhood, before Mr Mason's repairs, at Granbois, and in domestic Caribbean spaces should feel spare, considered, with each object earning its place. We are not filling rooms. We are inhabiting them. A few precise objects, beautifully chosen, in a room that breathes. The opposite of Thornfield. The Coulibri that comes after Mason's interventions sits inside a different argument and a different chromatic register: it is the great house aggressively returned to colonial order, fuller, more imposed, more English. That post-Mason Coulibri is not the minimalism of this section. It belongs alongside Thornfield in the maximalism reading.

Achronological in this context means that even though the film is grounded in the post-emancipation period (1830s onward), the design can incorporate elements that feel temporally porous. An object that looks like it could be from any decade between then and now. A piece of fabric that reads as ancient and contemporary at once. A surface that has been touched by many hands across many years. The minimalism allows this temporal porousness to register. A maximalist Caribbean would lock the period in. A minimalist Caribbean lets time move through.

There is a second reading of this minimalism that I want to hold alongside the first, and the budgetary lens of our production is in fact one of the doors into it. The interiors of the film, particularly the Coulibri of Antoinette's childhood before Mr Mason arrives, and the rooms of Granbois, should feel like places that once held more. Places that have been emptied by time, by economic decline, by the slow leaving of things. Sparse not only because the Caribbean does not need decoration, but because these rooms are carrying the residue of past splendour. The mark on the wall where a painting used to hang. The lighter rectangle on the floor where a rug used to lie. The dust-line on a sideboard where something used to sit. The outline of what is gone as a present visual fact. The room as palimpsest, holding the memory of its former contents in negative.

This connects directly to several arguments already in the document. It is Bachelard's house remembering more than its inhabitants do. It is Cosmic Archaeology working in a single room, reading the visible architecture of a former order. It is THE MISSING surfacing as design: the disappeared made constitutive of what is visible. Hold both readings of minimalism at once. The first reading is a philosophical refusal to over-museum the world. The second reading is the visible record of a place that has been emptied. The two are not the same and they should not be flattened into each other.

• Coulibri before Mr Mason's repairs (Scenes 1, 42, 44). The dilapidated childhood home, "past splendour and present dilapidation." The wild garden going to bush. The leaks that Mason will later fix. The flagstones unscrubbed. Most importantly, the rooms holding the visible outline of what is no longer in them. The lighter rectangle on a wall where a painting used to hang. The dust-line on a sideboard where something used to sit. The empty corner where a piece of furniture once stood, the floorboards still marked by it. Coulibri-before-Mason is the place where the residue of past splendour is most visible, and the design needs to make this residue legible: emptiness as a kind of presence, the architecture of what is gone. After Mason's repairs (the same Coulibri in Scenes 50 to 58) the rooms are visibly fuller and more restored, but I want a few of these residue marks to remain even there, scrubbed at but not erased. The history of the house is in what was and what is.
• Granbois carries the same residue quality in a different register. "An imitation of a classic English summer house" (Scene 7), inhabited only intermittently across years and slowly emptied between visits. The drawing room with its one table, two chairs, and the gilded portrait of Annette. The bedroom with its bed, dressing table, mirror, and partition. Spare not only by design but because Granbois too is a place that has had things it no longer has. Hold the same logic of outline-of-what-is-gone here, gentler than at Coulibri but present.
• The Granbois drawing room (Scenes 8, 51, 59, 70, 80). One table, two chairs, the candle that holds the centre, the gilded portrait of Annette. A few other pieces. Not packed. The space around the bodies has to be doing as much work as the bodies themselves.
• The Granbois bedroom. Bed, dressing table, mirror, the partition wall to the dressing room. Soft pale colours of fabric. The hammock outside on the veranda. Spareness allows the candles in Scene 34 to register. Spareness allows the white powder on the floor in Scene 61 to register. Spareness is what gives the love potion night its visual charge.
• Coulibri after Mason's repairs (Scenes 50-58). The dining room "returned to its original splendour" but, in our design, that splendour can still be restrained. The portrait of the Miller's Daughter watching. A few precise pieces of imported English furniture that feel imposed rather than belonging. The contrast with the wild garden outside is the argument.
• Christophine's outbuilding (Scenes 26, 45). Already sparse by necessity. Hold to that. The mortar, the calabash, things hung from the ceiling, the smoke. Nothing extra.
• The veranda at Granbois (Scenes 7, 9, 17, 20). Almost empty by design. The hammock. The rocking chair. The balustrade. The space allows the insects, the moths, the rain, the moonlight to be the actual furniture of the scene.
• Surfaces and finishes. Lime-washed walls. Faded paint. Worn wood that has been sat on, eaten at, slept against for generations. The patina of use rather than the patina of styling.

The attic is one of the most important spaces in the film and one of the most specific. The script gives us its essential elements: a bare room, a single high window, a solitary chair beneath it, thick walls, a locked door. By Scene 98 the window is "packed with snow and ice. A white square, nothing beyond." By Scene 99, as Antoinette walks her perimeter with the candle, the room transforms around her. The walls do not fall. The room simply stops being seen. We can no longer see the walls. There is only Antoinette surrounded by thick darkness and deep shadow, with pools of light rendered by the candle and the candle holder revealing the space only in fragments.

The attic is an architectural fact, a psychological space, and a metaphysical site at once. Design has to hold all three.

• Research actual attics in English country houses of the early 19th century. The servant's quarters in the eaves. The trunk rooms. The sealed-off rooms. The quality of the timber, the small windows, the awkward low ceilings, the smell of dust and wood and time. The attic is a real architectural typology and our designed version should sit in dialogue with the real ones.
• Yorkshire as kismet. Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is a fictional location, but it was inspired by real houses in Yorkshire and Derbyshire that Brontë knew, most notably Norton Conyers in North Yorkshire (often cited as a primary inspiration, with its own attic story of a confined woman) and North Lees Hall in Derbyshire. Both held the gothic, isolated atmosphere Brontë drew on. Given that we are shooting Thornfield exteriors and possibly interiors in Yorkshire, this opens a real opportunity to work in dialogue with the actual architectural inheritance of the Thornfield idea, with care. Worth visiting these locations together if scheduling allows. Their attics, their staircases, their corridors may give us things we cannot invent.
• The contrast with Annette's room (Scene 59 flashback): Annette also held in a small bare room with a single high window. The architectural rhyme is critical. Mother and daughter in the same kind of room. Design these two rooms to read clearly as the same type of space, even though they are different rooms. The visual rhyme is part of how the film argues about inheritance.
• The food and objects in the attic. The leftovers of beef in a thick lumpy sauce that Grace tries to force-feed Antoinette in Scene 95. Rhyming directly with the English food at the Coulibri dining table that Young Antoinette could not swallow in Scene 55. The cold gin Grace drinks. The set of keys at her waist. The candle Antoinette walks the perimeter with. The knife she palmed earlier from the dinner tray. The rope binding her wrists, which she burns through over the candle flame. Every object in this room is doing precise work.

Four themes run through the film and through the design. They do not get their own sections in this document because they are the connective tissue of every other section. I want to name them briefly here so you have them in your hands as you work.

Knowledge. The film is making an argument about who is permitted to possess knowledge and what counts as knowing. Antoinette knows things. Christophine knows things. The land knows things. The Arawakan ancestor knows things. Rochester arrives with law books and a framework for understanding the world and the film systematically dismantles that framework while showing that other forms of knowing have been operating all along. For your design: ask of every space, what does this room know? What is it withholding? What kind of knowing happens here? Christophine's kitchen knows things the dining room never will. The forest knows things Rochester's law books cannot.

Freedom. The film's ultimate argument and Antoinette's final destination. Freedom in this film is not just liberation from imprisonment. It is also Annette in the wind on the elevated veranda. Christophine's gold earrings the colonial economy could not extract. Antoinette's white dress trailing in mud as a small daily refusal of English propriety. Christophine riding away through the forest in Scene 85, "regal, free." The Atlantians rising from the sea with second eyes opening on closed eyelids. And the final image of Antoinette flying home above a clear Caribbean sea. Design every space so that the moments of freedom (small or vast) have somewhere to register. A space that is too tightly composed will not hold a free body.

Gender. The film is built around the scrutiny of women's bodies, women's perception, women's work, women's voices, and women's confinement. Antoinette and Annette and Christophine and Tia and Amelie and Hilda and Myra and Grace and Leah and Jane Eyre. Each is differently positioned but the architecture of patriarchy presses on each of them in different ways. For your design: women's spaces, the spaces women make for each other (Christophine's kitchen, the river where they wash, the bedroom where Antoinette and Christophine sit at the end), are different in spatial logic from the spaces designed for and by men. Design the women's spaces with a different rhythm. Things on the walls. Soft things. Things that have been kept. Things that have been chosen. The men's spaces (Rochester's dressing room, the dining room at Thornfield) have a different logic: imposed, institutional, commanded. The contrast is the argument.

Possession. Possession in this film operates on three registers: legal possession (Coverture, the renaming of Antoinette as Bertha, Rochester possessing the estate), spiritual possession (Vodou and Obeah possession as visitation rather than theft), and ancestral possession (empire as a possessing force inhabiting Rochester himself). For your design: ask of every space whether it is a space of being possessed or a space of refusing possession. Christophine's spaces refuse possession. The forest refuses possession. The pool refuses possession. The drawing room at Thornfield is the architecture of possession itself. Antoinette's body in the attic is the most possessed body in the film, and her walk in Scene 99 is the moment she ceases to be possessable.

I want to name this directly because it is how I think and how Bradford and I work. Mise en scène is not just the arrangement of elements in a frame. It is the construction of a saturated material world in which every element is participating in the argument of the scene. Production design, costume, hair and makeup, lighting, blocking, sound, performance: when these are working together in the way I want them to work, the frame is doing more than recording. It is composing a world.

This means our prep conversations need to include Bradford as much as possible. The relationship between what you build and how it is lit is too important to be sequential. The same room, lit two different ways, can be two different rooms. The same wall, painted one shade off, can refuse the light Bradford wants. We need to be in shared conversation about the dominant materials and surfaces of every space, the way they will absorb or reflect light, the way the camera will move through them.

I would like the design to think in terms of composed images rather than dressed sets. What is the dominant image this scene is composing? What are the supporting images around it? What is the colour palette in this moment, this room, this beat? What does the room have to provide so that the composition has somewhere to land?

For example, the Master of None scene (Scene 86): the composed image is Rochester alone at the head of the dining table, four other places empty, the half-plucked capon, the candles and falling moths, the cuckoo clock, the rain outside. The room is a portrait of empire's interior collapse. Every element is composing this argument. What you place on that table, the colour of the tablecloth, the height of the candelabras, the wallpaper behind, the size of the window, the species of the moths: each is participating in a single composed image. We will design that image together with Bradford.

This is how I want every significant space in the film to be approached. Not as set decoration but as composed image-making.

One last thing before the close. This film is an opportunity to try things we do not normally get to try. I want our process to be experimental in the proper sense. Things that might fail. Things that might open. Things we do not know yet how to do.

I am thinking specifically of the moments in the script that exceed conventional production design altogether. The Atlantians rising from the sea. The forest morphing into "spectral visions of colonial iconography, grand sugar plantations, crumbling European estates, Thornfield Hall, towering cathedrals, and even imposing contemporary skyscrapers." The archive sequences in Scenes 99 to 101 where archival material itself enters the film. The walls of the attic dissolving in Scene 99. The final image of Antoinette flying home through a composite Caribbean landscape that contains the heart of the forest, Coulibri garden, the natural pool, and the flamboyant tree all in one place at one time.

These moments are the film's open spaces for invention. Bring proposals. Bring methods I have not thought of. Bring the strange. Use materials that do not normally meet on a film set. Test things in prep that we are not sure about yet. The spirit of this work is play in the most serious sense: the willingness to make something we cannot yet picture in order to find out what it is.