Movie Lovers We Love: Interiors Journal Draws Up the Blueprints of ‘Panic Room,’ ‘Dark Knight’
The two men behind the new online journal Interiors are plotting out their film geekdom in the form of architectural floorplans of some of their favorite films.
Armen Karaoghlanian studied film at USC and Mehruss Jon Ahi studied architecture. Ahi’s thesis for school was a floorplan and exploration of David Fincher’s film “Panic Room.” When Karaoghlanian got ahold of the thesis, he knew that the two could easily join forces to make an interesting, analytical resource for film fans interested in art direction, set design and direction.
A few months after this revelation, the two decided to contextualize Ahi’s study of the panic room in “Panic Room” with some more background on the film, and they published it as the first issue of Interiors Journal. (Facebook link)
Ahi tells Indiewire, “We start out each issue by watching a film together. There are certain things that he or I will pick up or that we’ll both catch. We’re similar in the ways that we watch and analyze films, so we’re usually drawn to similar scenes.”
The two claim to have encountered a few surprises along the way: They were surprised at how intricately planned the bank robbery scene in “The Dark Knight” is. They also didn’t realize at first that the two characters in “Lost in Translation” are watching “La Dolce Vita” in the scene they studied, which helped add to the complexity of their analysis of that film.
“When we first started doing this, we didn’t know what was going to happen with it,” Karaoghlanian explains. “We have now reached out to different people who are working on different films, different production designers and other people who have worked on other films. For instance, it would be very interesting to get the perspective of a costume designer when space is impacted.”
Ahi adds, “Ultimately, we would like to look at this as more comprehensive. With Christopher Nolan or David Fincher, it would be great to have a book of the kind of stuff we do where all of the spaces of the films are analyzed.”
Favorite Film:
Karaoghlanian: “The Bicycle Thief”
Ahi: “Drive”
Favorite Director:
Karaoghlanian: Woody Allen
Ahi: David Fincher
Favorite Art Director:
Karaoghlanian: Dante Ferretti’s work with Scorsese. The amount of research someone has to put into a work is important to me. I appreciate directors who have an influence on the production design. With “2001,” for instance, it’s obvious that Kubrick has a hand in the scene.
Favorite Architect:
Ahi: Rem Koolhaas, Bjarke Ingels. They really look at film as an inspiration with plans and diagrams, humanistic types of drawings.
