The Motel project: reflections on a film production/interior design collaboration

This blurring of exterior/interior conjured by the poet brings into focus the conceptual approach taken by the interior designers, Kemp and Fryatt, in which spaces are always viewed as inhabited and configured by subjective relationships.
Their method, for Motel, was to take locations described in the scripts, such as the highway, the motel room, the inside of the car and the motel office and ‘to draw out more detailed relationships occurring in those spaces that presented conditions of interiority and indeed exteriority’ (Kemp et al 2009: 155). The sketches and diagrams with which they mapped these conditions (see figures 2 and 3) became provocations for the writer-directors. Rogers, for instance, was led to question her consideration of the mise en scene of The Papin Sisters:

Was the [motel room] bed itself, looming so large on the floor plan, exterior, or interior? And if it was interior, than what was exterior? And how then could this notion be applied to the two bodies who would populate the space, move on and off the bed? (Rogers 2010).

Taking this further, a scene of two characters isolated in the landscape on a deserted country highway might present conditions of interiority, the interior designers argued, in so far as the space of proximity and intimacy around the two characters might, as it were, feel interior.

Above fragment from the Text Journal essay