“I want to write something new, something extraordinary and ...

If Gatsby’s wild castle is the ultimate representation of new money, the
Buchanan’s home across the bay is meant to symbolize the ancestral wealth of
many generations. Martin therefore designed the tasteful but grand manor as an
example of the American aristocracy, complete with red brick and stables and
elaborate manicured gardens. “Baz’s idea was that we really needed to juxtapose
the ephemeral fantasia that is Gatsby’s mansion against an establishment mansion,”
explains Martin.
The Buchanan house was one of the biggest sets of the film, taking up one of
the largest stages at Sydney’s Fox Studios. It encompassed the front of the house,
the hallway that leads to the salon where we first meet Daisy, and then continued
out to the terrace.
“The story of the book really starts here, the night Nick went to the
Buchanans’ for the very first time,” says Martin, “and Baz always points out that in the
book it says that the Buchanans were unbelievably wealthy—Fitzgerald uses names
of very prominent families at the time whose wealth was unbelievable. So, with the
house, you needed to understand how wealthy Tom Buchanan was, and therefore
we needed to make Gatsby’s wealth feel competitive, because in Gatsby’s heart
he has always believed that the reason he didn’t get Daisy was because he was
poor.”
“My favorite set was the Buchanan house, and as you walked down the
hallway—they called it a Hallway of Champions—there are hundreds of portraits
and pictures of Tom Buchanan standing in his polo gear,” says Mulligan. “They go
from the floor to the ceiling and every single one of them has the intricate print
written on it about his sporting achievements. You get sucked in to the world so
easily; it sort of does half the work for you.”
Another important set created in the studio was the speakeasy where Nick
meets Gatsby’s dubious associate, Meyer Wolfshiem. The underground club is part
of the seedy back story of the prohibition era, when corruption, organized crime,
boozing and debauchery ran rife.
“There were many speakeasies,” says Martin. “In Harlem you had the very
famous Cotton Club, where you had a black review but only white patrons. In our
speakeasy you had a mixture of white and black patrons, which was very common,
particularly in Harlem.”
A sound stage at the studios was also used to create a room in The Plaza
Hotel, on an unbearably hot summer’s day during which the five key characters play
21