Set and costume designer Tim Hatley on ‘Back to the Future: The Musical’

Tim Hatley with the DeLorean from Back to the Future The Musical Photo provided by Allied Global Marketing Tim Hatley is no stranger to film-to-musical adaptations The set and costume designer has worked extensively on productions on the West End and Broadway including shows like Shrek the Musical and The Bodyguard an adaptation of the film of the same name One of his more modern works is Back to the Future The Musical based on the iconic movie directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale Back to the Future follows high schooler Marty McFly Michael J Fox on an adventure through time after his best friend a quirky scientist named Doc Brown Christopher Lloyd invents a time traveling DeLorean Hatley has worked on the musical from its debut in Manchester England in to the majority of fresh tour which is coming to the Fox Theatre Sept and running through Sept Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Hatley about his work on the musical including what goes into adapting a film for the stage and of unit creating the iconic DeLorean This interview has been edited for length and clarity I was looking at specific of your work before Back to the Future and noticed that you ve done a lot of film-to-stage adaptations I read a quote from you where you announced that it can be a tricky thing moving the design of a film to the stage I wondered if you could elaborate on what specifically you find tricky or formidable about that Tim Hatley It s not tricky or complex it s just that the consideration of moving a property from the film to the stage is I think when you re presenting something on the stage you have to celebrate what works in a theater which is not the same as what works necessarily on a moving screen For me taking a film as the starting point and often it s also a book so there s also that there as well if the book goes to a film and the film goes to the stage I absorb both the book if it s there and the film Then I try to put it in a box and I start designing my own version of it for three dimensions and for telling the story in a theatrical way That often involves work with the writer who isn t necessarily just copying the screenplay You have to turn it into a theatrical version which often means you have to simplify particular of the locations There s no point in going back to a location repeatedly in the arc of a story of a stage show because you ll just end up changing the set all the time and it s not moving the story forward There has to be a collaboration with the writer who will also have the same issues that I have of turning it into a stage adaptation None of it s a challenge It s just a way of thinking about it For me you don t just copy a film and put it right on the stage It necessities to be reinterpreted and reinvented That s what I mean Certain people say I don t bother looking at the film I m doing my own thing I also think you do need to look at the film especially when you ve got a property like Back to the Future where there are so numerous sacred moments in the film You have to choose what you think the fan base would really really really appreciate seeing and what you think they might not miss I think you have to respect that I think it s foolish to throw out the DeLorean and turn it into I don t know a refrigerator or something When I did Shrek as well you have to take what you know the audience is going to love They want to see Shrek He s got to be green He s got to look like he does in the film Once you decide that then the rest of the characters all fall into place It s inevitably just a question of picking the elements that you feel are relevant and will work on stage and not getting too involved in the smaller areas that genuinely aren t going to go for anything on stage and the fans aren t going to be too cross with you if you don t have it there The other thing is add musical flair and add things that you will not see in the film The DeLorean is a good example In the film the DeLorean does not excursion in the same way that we make it tour on stage with moving video and lights and all of those linear lines that we have when it speeds around That s not in the film nor is our context that we have You have to add to it too to make it a three-dimensional experience I m glad you brought up that idea of fan venture in different aspects of the film Shrek is a great example and I m sure there was that sort of added pressure there too With properties like Shrek and Back to the Future what are the specific things you re thinking of when you re balancing making this something that you re designing and has your handprints on it along with this added aspect of what fans want to see Hatley It s a juggling act Back to the Future was a bit of a gift in a way because it s so well documented and the fans are so vocal There are fan sites and blog sites all over the place talking about people s favorite moments in the movie So it s quite easy to research that and find out what all that was I made a list of the top moments We need to make sure we re addressing these things Not necessarily they ve got to be identical they need to happen I learned it really early on how obsessive people are to detail which is altogether fine Before I started getting right into the design we did a teaser photo shoot to go out online We had the original actor playing Marty dressed and he was with a skateboard and we had a guitar The photos went out and within seconds there were fans going Oh my God this is going to be terrible I thought oh crikey That was a really good lesson to learn From that moment on which was early days thankfully I realized detail was a really big thing The DeLorean is a really good example We had to have the DeLorean It had to look like it looks People would be very disappointed if it didn t look how it looks People would be comparing and contrasting It felt sacred to me that we veritably built that But then of unit it s a DeLorean for a musical The DeLorean in the movie you don t have girls jumping up and down and dancing on it But we do Our DeLorean has to do countless several things It has to passage it has to tilt it has to turn The wheels have to go around It has to be full of sound effects It has to emit CO and lighting effects It has to be strong enough to be danced on It has to be strong enough to lift and we have to tour it We have to get it in and out of theaters often on a weekly basis We have to get it on the road and we have to move around the country That s a tall order Bob Gale who s the original writer of the film also wrote the book for this musical Having him there must have been a boon and I read that he was able to show you original imagery from the movie I assume that s not really something that usually happens so I longed to hear more about that relationship Hatley Bob was great because he is Back to the Future He s the fountain of all knowledge Any questions we had any details he was able to provide us with the answers for absolutely everything and continues to as we do more and more productions There s dependably things that you notice that you find you haven t quite got right and you fine tune He is a stickler for detail which is great It s like our number one fan is in the room with us He s been a real real pleasure to work with and collaborate in that way In terms of all the film stuff if you re working on a production that has the backing of the studio and the original creators as indeed Shrek did then the access to the original material is never a trouble With this show through that original run and then transferring to Broadway and now with this tour how does your job change and evolve from production to when the show starts to run What is it like transferring everything to different theaters and making sure things still work right in a different space Hatley My involvement is enormous at the beginning obviously conceiving the idea Our first production was in Manchester England and then we moved that production with a pandemic in the middle we moved that then to the West End in London I m exclusively involved in that percent When we ve done big flagship productions on Broadway I was over in New York for three months mounting that and getting everything right because it was a brand new build It was all built in the U S so that needed supervising and making sure it s perfectly right The touring version was all designed in my studio As you can understand you can t tour absolutely everything that you ve had on a Broadway stage that sits down for over a year when we ve got to get it all into a number of trucks and we have to get it into the theater in a number of hours and we have to get out of the theater in a number of hours We re very limited with what we can in fact achieve manually in doing that Therefore the design has to adapt and evolve Selected things that for example might have been built as solid hard pieces of scenery to store in a large wing on Broadway or in a dock area you can t do it necessarily on the road It takes up a lot of space in the truck So you have to think how are we going to create that piece of scenery So specific things move to soft cloths because we can then roll that up put that in a lorry and it s job done There are changes that have to be made However it s very major to me that people are getting a similar or the same experience in a way that you get on Broadway So again it s a question of keeping the elements that you know you can t do without The DeLorean is the key thing in the show We have that moving we have that flying so that element has remained That has taken priority over chosen other areas But all areas of the show have to shrink down Lighting has to have a reduced amount of lights Costumes have to come down It s a very cutthroat world now Touring shows is expensive and we have to be considerate as to how the books balance Otherwise the show purely won t last Once the show is touring I don t go to every venue I saw the very beginning went in and checked it was all looking right and working well Then it s handed over to a massive company of brilliant production managers stage crew coordinators and they take it on the road I keep in touch with it I have show reports every day of what s going on and see where things have been a issue If we have repeated problems we all get onto a Zoom and we talk about how we re going to solve that Speaking of key elements of the show you mentioned earlier that when you first started you watched the movie and picked the top moments that you had to get right I m curious as to what various of those are Hatley The DeLorean is one Obviously the costume looks were another key element that absolutely had to be right Doc s lab seemed very critical to me his atmosphere and the detail that he had in all of that I would say that the school dance is really quite iconic and that whole look The barn felt really key to me when the car speeds and it lands in the s That genuinely wasn t in Bob Gale s original musical script That was an gripping one because he changed that to try and make it easier to stage We pulled that back let s bring the barn back Obviously the jump from the s to the s was key getting that to really read Those are the key things The DeLorean was a massive one and all the things that it had to do Key lines Roads Where we re going we don t need roads You ve kind of got to have that so you ve got to have a car that s going to deliver You ve got to deliver that taking off There are elements that are not in the film The Power of Love for example the song and Marty McFly performing that That s very much a musical moment That was a moment we could make our own That wasn t from the film at all the staging of that But that s become quite iconic and people love how we ve ended the show with that number There are other areas that are a complete invention the DeLorean girls they re not in the film Doc has his backup singers and help act in the DeLorean girls That was all invented by us The other big number that was an invention was the top of Act the st Century number which was nothing to do with the film but that was something that worked well for the musical It s stimulating that Bob thought the barn sequence would be formidable to stage Was there anything else like that that either he thought about changing or maybe you thought would be too complex to stage I m sure the DeLorean comes to mind Hatley The passage of the DeLorean was a key one That was written into the script but I went back to the movie truly because that was an area that I thought was quite iconic and we have to get it right we would be foolish to ignore the drama of that from the film I took it upon myself to really review that sequence in the movie and freeze frame it and take the bits that I felt we needed and also insert the song into it I sort of reimagined that in a sense and redirected that and worked that out I storyboarded all of that and added the video looks We worked with Finn Ross he was our video designer and he then took that to another level and improved on the quality of those images But the actual idea of that and how to stage that was a design invention I established that to Bob Gale and then Bob noted Great if we re going to do it like that then we can just snip to this and we don t need all of that That was a good example of all areas collaborating together because what s on stage is not what was originally written What s on stage is not what s certainly the film it s all inspired by and it s become its own thing The post Set and costume designer Tim Hatley on Back to the Future The Musical appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta