“That’s what there was, and so we thought, ‘Get more, put more in, and you’ll really feel the lushness of the place,’ ” Dunn says. The production team also filled spaces with flowers and fruit to add to the decadent fantasy of “Friends in Low Places.” Certain frames are absolutely packed with bowls and bowls of oranges. While Dunn jokes that the walls “flapped in the breeze” if you looked at them the wrong way, he concludes “it was a wonderful illusion to bring that color that so tells the story of where you are.” To re-create the majesty of Saint Laurent’s original Majorelle vision, the production team built wall-sized frames, wrapped them in canvas, treated the material to look like stone and painted them seawater blue. The space used for filming didn’t have those same walls and “they were not going to let us paint them blue,” Dunn points out. “We definitely amplified everything that we saw and altered it.” For example, the Majorelle Garden is famous for its lapis blue walls. “We were able to kind of cram the frames with enough stuff that people watching it would really get a sense of the astounding richness of Morocco,” Dunn says.
That grand home is where Inventing Anna set up shop. So, set decorator Henriette Vittadini - who joined the team specifically for its Moroccan adventure - tracked down a nearby villa designed by the same architect behind La Majorelle. “As a rule, I really don’t like shooting in places that have priceless antiques,” Dunn laughs. The real location is teeming with expensive art pieces befitting its storied place in style lore. The characters’ dreamy visit to Majorelle quickly becomes a nightmare when Anna refuses to pay for a $2,000 tour. The most harrowing sections of the episode unfold at the Majorelle Garden, Yves Saint Laurent’s former Marrakesh mansion and the obsession of mark Rachel DeLoache Williams (Katie Lowes). A spa scene was shot at a reflecting pool, Dunn says, and in an effort to ground the setting, the hotel’s restaurant - which is traditionally an Italian eatery - was dressed to look more traditionally Moroccan.Īnother central “Friends in Low Places” location, however, couldn’t receive such a straightforward real-life-to-screen adaptation. While Inventing Anna did shoot all of its resort drama at La Mamounia, a few swaps had to be made to accommodate production. She stayed here - they left a mess.’ ” The experience reminded Dunn how “fresh” the tales of Delvey’s exploits still are.
“We were talking to managers who had dealt with her not paying the bills,” Dunn recalls. Since Inventing Anna went to La Mamounia less than two years after its subject’s catastrophic stay, which led to an entire Vanity Fair first-person exposé, many employees still remembered her now-infamous antics. You could almost understand what was driving Anna to want all of these things.” “It really was a seductive kind of richness. “Shooting in the actual rooms - it was haunted, in a way, with her,” Dunn says over the phone while driving to Montauk for another project. Delvey’s riad was, naturally, the largest one on the property, production designer Henry Dunn confirms to Tudum. Production quickly realized its home of New York would never be able to serve as a dupe for the lavish locale, and a small team scouted the resort - and other parts of Marrakesh - starting in the fall of 2018 filming of the episode began in February 2019. Inventing Anna filmed “Friends in Low Places” at the real La Mamounia in the exact riad that Delvey and co rented in 2017.