‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ production designer Steve Saklad on re-creating Greenwich Village in 1970: ‘It was such fun’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

The Lionsgate feature “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” production designer Steve Saklad faced what would seem on the surface to be a daunting challenge: transform modern-day Charlotte, North Carolina into New York City and suburban New Jersey circa 1970. But he dove in with gusto. “Charlotte turned out to be this great juicy source that had not been exploited much by movie companies much before,” he tells Gold Derby at our “Meet the Experts” Film Production Design Panel. “We got the A-class crew when we got there in the middle of a pandemic. We got a pretty great match for suburban New Jersey all over Charlotte, lots of choices for those various homes and we could exploit a split level for Margaret and a traditional colonial for Nancy Wheeler’s (home). But we had a real struggle finding New York City in Charlotte, as you might imagine.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

Based on the beloved bestselling novel published in 1970 by writer Judy Blume, “Are You There God” centers on 11-year-old Margaret Simon and her family’s move from the city to the suburbs, where she is tasked with navigating new friends and feelings along with the onset of adolescence. Margaret is played in the movie by Abby Ryder Fortson, with Elle Graham portraying her bossy neighbor Nancy. Rachel McAdams stars as Margaret’s mother Barbara with Kathy Bates playing her Grandma Sylvia, who has an apartment on New York’s Upper West Side.

So how did Saklad locate something that looked like 1970 NYC in Charlotte? “We found a street a half-hour outside of Charlotte as our main exterior, which (represents) the West Village life Margaret enjoys before she moves to New Jersey,” he says. “For Sylvia’s Upper West Side apartment, where she’s lived for 40 years, Charlotte offered a bland, beige drywall apartment with several rooms. My team came in and built the pilasters, the framed panels of wallpaper, the color palette, the French doors, the years and years of decor that Sylvia has brought to that space. All of the evidence of her travels to Europe and the Far East. The ketubah, which was the marriage contract of her husband whose passed away. The Hadassah tin box that every Jewish grandmother had where you would put in quarters to grow trees in Israel. We started and sent to a hundred to create the world of Sylvia in that apartment.”

Then there was the challenge of creating New York’s distinctive and funky Greenwich Village as it was back in 1970, replete with hippie folk singer flyers tacked up. “It was such fun,” Saklad, who was born in 1956 and raised in suburban Connecticut and Philadelphia, recalls. “I moved to New York officially in 1980, so I was about 10 years too late for my real memories of living in Greenwich Village as a resident. We came to New York, we saw Broadway shows as we were growing up. We drive into the city and I had this really vivid memory of the smell, the noise, the sweet (aroma) of pot hovering along the streets. It was very exotic to somebody who’d been raised in the suburbs, and we wanted to get that exoticism on screen.

“What you see in the finished movie was about four facades that were completely signage, decorated awnings, neon, all the set dressings, the public payphones, the cars, the cast of extras in their fantastic (costume designer) Ann Roth clothes.”

The design day that Saklad describes as being the “juiciest,” however – “the one where we were planning the hardest and longest” – was a 10-minute snippet of the play “The Pirates of Penzance” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. “We (designed it) in an empty parking lot in the middle of Charlotte,” he explains. “There was a pie piece of the bleachers that the audience sat on and a half-round disc platform of the stage as well as some real trees directly behind the stage that we could exploit. Then everything else was green screened to comp in Central Park…But my gosh, I got to do a 19th century Gilbert and Sullivan operetta…We got to bloody well build and paint a traditional engraving-laden theatre set. No day was happier than the day we got to start the playback and watch that team of dancers and singers perform that number 25 times.”

“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” is available to stream over numerous platforms.