In 'Worlds Imagined: Mark Friedberg,' Sag Harbor Cinema Brings a Life in Film Back Home to Springs

In the course of his long and illustrious career as a production designer, Mark Friedberg has taken a lead role in creating the visual language and style for his generation of filmmakers.

Since he came of age in the business in the late 1980s, Friedberg’s collaborators have included directors Todd Haynes, Ang Lee, Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Julie Taymor and Todd Phillips, among others. Along the way, he has worked on some seriously big movies, including “Joker” and “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “The Whale,” and the Wes Anderson films “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” and “The Darjeeling Limited.”

In the months ahead, Friedberg’s talents will be on full display in a trio of new, highly-anticipated films: Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Caught Stealing,” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Father, Mother, Sister, Brother.”

But for all his acclaim on the big screen, in his heart, Friedberg is, in fact, a hometown boy — one who grew up on the East End in the pastoral landscape of Springs in East Hampton. There, his youthful days were spent exploring the farm fields and marshlands that line the shoreline of Accabonac Harbor.

“In 1966, my father and another friend raised $10,000 to buy 10 acres on Accabonac Harbor, when the only thing between his house and the Springs General Store a mile away was the Miller farm, the Pollock house and maybe one other house,” explained Friedberg.

Friedberg’s father, M. Paul Friedberg, was the landscape architect who, in 1965, designed the play environment at Jacob Riis Houses in New York City, and in the years that followed he became well known for his Timberform playgrounds. Though his work was primarily city-centered, Friedberg noted that his father, who died this past February, always had an affinity for rural spaces.

“Everyone said, ‘What are you doing?’” said Friedberg in recalling reactions his father got to his purchase of the Springs property. “He was a country boy who ended up falling in love with the urban landscape. But he thought it was important for his family to not only grow up in cement — so he bought this property and built his own house.

“That’s where I grew up,” added Friedberg, who has since built his own family home in Springs. “We’d come out in May, my mother, my brother, myself and the wife of the man he bought the home with, and her two children. From May to September, it was we four kids.

“Like a Robert McCloskey book, our activities were self-generated, and a large part of our childhood was spent in the marshes of the Springs.

“I also spent a lot of time at George Miller’s farm. He was a great man and the last in a long line of the keepers of the stories,” Friedberg continued. “For whatever reason, he took me in — an Aspergers-y shy kid — and I’d egg the chickens, hay the horses and slop the pigs.

“I was in heaven. I didn’t fit in anywhere at all, but the minute I was on Accabonac, I was a superhero.”

This weekend, Friedberg comes home in more ways than one, when Sag Harbor Cinema opens “Worlds Imagined: Mark Friedberg,” a third-floor gallery exhibit that will showcase selections from his film work.

On view will be behind-the-scenes video, set stills, drawings, models and props from 10 films for which Friedberg served as production designer: “Across the Universe,” “The Darjeeling Limited,” “The Ice Storm,” “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “Noah,” “Far From Heaven,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Pollock,” “Joker” and “Joker: Folie à Deux.”

“The idea of a retrospective is new for me,” Friedberg admitted. “I’ve only done one other show of this depth, and that was at my daughter’s high school in Brooklyn.

“The cinema gallery has two walls, so on one long wall I’ll show photos of set designs and concept art from a few movies — just a few from each,” he said.

“On other side of the gallery, it will be the stuff I’ve kept from those movies,” he continued. “Sample boards, a bit of set dressing, notes from directors, models, drawings, ephemera, photos that matter to me from certain jobs.”

Also on view will be a painting from his grandmother’s art collection — something that Friedberg notes has become a tradition in any film he works on that calls for a painting.

“‘The Ice Storm’ is probably the first film where I did that — my grandmother’s painting is in Kevin Kline’s house,” Friedberg said. “It’s important as storytellers that we impart the story in our own way. If not for her and painting with her, I wouldn’t have survived my childhood. She was my priestess of art and how it can be a refuge.”

“Worlds Imagined: Mark Friedberg,” kicks off this Saturday, July 5, with a 5:30 p.m. gallery reception followed by a 7 p.m. screening of the 2000 film “Pollock,” directed by and starring Ed Harris. The screening will include a Q&A with Friedberg and the film’s producer, Fred Berner.

Of the countless films that Friedberg has worked on as a production designer, it is this one — “Pollock” — that holds special meaning for him, not only because it was literally shot in his backyard, but because it also represented a milestone of sorts for Friedberg in the arc of his career.

“It was a significant marker in my evolution, and was the end of a culmination, rather than beginning of something else,” he explained. “Smaller films added up to making this film. It was an art film about art. Back then, they were all about serial killers and kidnappers — rarely had anyone made a great film about art.”

Friedberg said that he was called in for “Pollock” by Berner, with whom he had worked on a previous film, “The Ballad of Little Jo.” At the time, Berner and Ed Harris were expecting to shoot “Pollock” in Nova Scotia, but that idea didn’t interest Friedberg.

“Then they came back from Canada to find a place based in New York to shoot, so they called me,” Friedberg said. “Fred and Ed asked what I would do. I said there’s a place that looks like the Pollock house on [Springs-]Fireplace Road.”

Recognizing the importance of the Springs environment on Pollock’s creativity and psyche was something that Friedberg understood innately from his years living there. “I believe that place had to do with why he made the paintings and his experiences there,” he said. “So we built the interiors and shot the exteriors in Springs.”

The act of physically creating the Pollock paintings in the film was another important aspect of the film. When Berner and Harris asked Friedberg how they should be done, he responded, “Either naively or brilliantly.”

“However you look at it, I would paint them. We should do it how he did it. Dancing around the way he did in the [Hans] Namuth film. Pollock paintings are not quiet on the wall. Get the energy right, which is more important than getting the drips in the right place.”

Friedberg notes that the production hired five talented New York painters and scenic artists, whom they dubbed “The Jackson 5,” to make all the paintings in the movie.

But it was Ed Harris who became Jackson Pollock on film. “Ed inhabited Pollock — or Pollock inhabited him. I responded really powerfully to his artistic complement — to have the wherewithal to direct and act as the pivotal character.

“What’s truly amazing is, he was brave enough to learn to paint on canvas.”

For Friedberg, the experience of working on the film version of “Pollock” in the very place where the artist had lived and worked felt authentic in a way that many things in the movie industry do not.

“Very little is done honestly in the film business. I feel confident enough to be myself as an artist and designer,” Friedberg explained. “Destiny was in my backyard. Fred became my closest of friends while we were pursuing the life of the artist in this movie.”

And it was around this time that Friedberg realized that he needed to set down roots for the next generation in the area.

“I realized I needed my own house in Springs — my dad’s house was filled with him,” Friedberg said. “I needed my children to grow up with the smell of Gardiners Bay, the way I did, to balance their New York prep school lives, but also to continue a legacy that’s creative and cultural … to learn what the world is made of. You don’t learn that in Central Park.”

Coming full circle with this new exhibit of his work is a poignant reminder of the important role film has played throughout Friedberg’s life, not just in terms of his career but in his formative years as well.

“We would go as a family and see the movie that was playing that weekend in East Hampton and talk about it all week,” Friedberg said. “It was essential to how we understood the world.

“Sag Harbor Cinema is the first cinema where I saw a movie on my own — ‘Butch Cassidy,’ during its first run there.

“I wanted to live in that story. I’ve always lived inside cinematic stories as well. I’m much happier in pretend reality.”

“This has been a blessing, to realize the kind of movies I want to work on are the kind I’d like to see,” Friedberg said. “Inserting myself in independent cinema, connecting with young and upcoming directors. Why Darren Aronofsky and Todd Haynes? They are my community and a world I live in — and they are now my family.”

“Worlds Imagined: Mark Friedberg,” opens on Saturday, July 5, with a 5:30 p.m. reception on the Sag Harbor Cinema’s third floor. A 7 p.m. screening of “Pollock” will be followed by a Q&A with Mark Friedberg producer Fred Berner. Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street in Sag Harbor. For more information, visit sagharborcinema.org.