Tony Award-winning Designer Tim Hatley Talks ‘Back to the Future’

Tim Hatley: I remember sort of six or seven years old, I used to ask my mom to keep all of the rubbish egg boxes, cereal boxes, anything that was sort of cardboard and easy to cut. Plastic things, things were odd shapes. And yes, I spent my childhood gluing things together and making things. And in England we have a TV program called Blue Peter, and in the seventies, which is when I was growing up, it’s still on now I think, but in the seventies it was when we only had two channels to watch. Blue Peter was the foundation of many kids’ lives, and for me, they also do a little craft section and they’d make things out of famously sticky back plastic they would always use and old boxes and things. And I used to be glued to that program and I could never wait for the next creative elements come on. And that was very much my training. I was trained by Blue Pizza.

StageNotes: Were you into film and movies as well?

Tim Hatley: Yeah, I mean I’ve interestingly spent a lot of my time working as a theater designer putting films on stage. But I mean, I enjoy film and I’ve worked in film. I’ve designed two or three films, but theater is my love. Storytelling is my love. Theater is my love. I love the live action, if you like. And when I was working on films, my favorite part of it was actually not the prep. The prep on a film can go on for months. That was never my favorite part. My favorite part was actually when we were shooting and when we had to make decisions on the day and running around in the theater, that’s what we call a technical rehearsal. And when all the set is on stage, the actors are about to come on stage and then they of course join us on the moving set. So for me, the moments of theater come alive when you’re actually able to make it in three dimensions. It’s not so much all the models and everything beforehand, which you have to do as a part of the process to explain your ideas to a lot of people. You have to explain your ideas to the director, to the producers, and eventually to the actors, and of course the set builders. So models and drawings extremely important. But I love that live, working in the theater with the set, with the actors, with the lights, with the sound. That’s for me where it really comes alive

StageNotes: And what I love about your designs, is you really do think about sight lines. There really isn’t a bad seat because the sight lines are so good as it is designed.

Tim Hatley: Yeah, no, that’s the wonderful thing actually about being a theater designer. That’s the one thing that we know is where the members of the audience are going to be sat. And we can draw a line from that seat to the stage and we can take that into account. It’s very different on a film. As a designer on a film, you can design this fantastic environment, but it’s actually not you as the designer who chooses what the audience member looks at, it’s the cameraman. So on the films that I’ve done, I’ve designed huge rooms and actually just one corner’s been looked at. The rest of it, no one’s seen. So that’s the wonderful thing about being a set designer. We know where everyone’s going to be sat, we know exactly what they’re going to be looking at. And I know that the key points of the story, for example, when our car flies, you can only go to a certain height if it goes too high, a lot of the audience aren’t going to see it because there’s a cutoff. So certain elements of the show need to be really factored in design-wise, as to what people see. And we try and make it so there is not a bad seat in the house. Some seats are better than others for sure, but that’s why there are fluctuations in ticket prices, but there’s no seat. That’s rubbish.

StageNotes: I saw that Bob Gale shared visual research with you from the original film as inspiration. So what did he share with you that helped inform how you designed the show?

Tim Hatley: He bombarded us with fantastic imagery. A lot of it was sort of things that never made it to the film. For example, he told us the story and showed us the drawings of the DeLorean being a refrigerator before it was the time machine, should I say, being a refrigerator as an idea before it actually became a DeLorean. So we had an insight into all sorts of little gems. And of course, because it’s such a well-known movie, the franchise is so big, there’s a lot online too, you can Google it and there are so many super fans. It was so enthusiastic about the film and how things look in the film and what things are in the film. But actually that was all quite good fun. It was fun to research the musical because although I’d seen the film, I did not cast myself as a super fan.  I needed to educate myself and to come up to speed with what a super fan really, really would hold dear and would be furious if we didn’t do. And I learned my lesson very quickly and early on in the process we did a photo shoot of Marty, literally just for a sort of teaser poster to go on social media. And we had our actor playing Marty in costume with a skateboard and a guitar, and he was leaping around in the photo shoot. Then it went out online. I was there looking after the general look of it and the clothes, the guitar and everything, and it all looked to my eye. It was, I mean it wasn’t perfect, but I thought this will get the message out there. Well, we were bombarded within seconds of things going out. That’s the wrong color, that’s the wrong life preserver.  Those aren’t the right shoes. And I thought, my goodness, everybody is on this hawks and we have to take this extremely seriously. And that was very, very early on. And that’s when I thought, no, this has really got to be, we are going to do this. We’ve got to satisfy all of those things. It’s a big part of it. Often in theater you can not necessarily fudge it, but you can have artistic license and you can take the inspiration and you can move it into another world. And we’ve done that with a lot of the show. We’ve taken inspiration of the movie and we’ve moved it into a theatrical world. But there are certain elements of detail that it just became very clear to me. They need to be repeated. The DeLorean is one of them. We’ve took all of the details on the outside of the DeLorean extremely seriously. And the costuming too, certainly of Marty, they’re very beloved things and people will be very disappointed if they don’t see them. And there are a lot of people that know the detail.

StageNotes: There was so much respect for the source material. I think for the diehards of the film, it definitely checks all the boxes.

Tim Hatley: Well that’s really nice to hear. And that was definitely the aim to also to give them the detail, to bring in people who love the film, but also they don’t necessarily love the theater, but hopefully they leave knowing, ah, this is what theater is. And I’ve had a number of people email me saying how much they’ve enjoyed the film and a lot of questions about how do you do this? How do you do that? How did you achieve that travel sequence at the end? Lots of those questions, which I don’t normally get, but I’ve also had a lot of people saying, I want to go and see more theater. I didn’t realize this is what theater theater is. This is great fun. And for me that’s job done. It’s just terrific when you just one person, if you can just encourage them to go in a more creative or another direction that makes their life fuller, that’s great. And to go to the theater, it’s a fantastic thing. Everybody should experience the theater. When it’s good theater, it’s very hard to beat.

StageNotes: I love it when children go to the theater because that’s the next generation of audience and theater supporters. And so to see the number of children going to this show and enjoying it as much as they do, I think like you said, job done.

Tim Hatley: I mean, we are doing this for the audience. We’re not doing it for ourselves, we’re not doing it. We are doing it for the audience. And the more to get a young audience in there and for young audiences to be so excited and have such a good time and to want to go back and see more theater, it’s a fantastic thing. And that honestly is, it’s a really makes the job completely worthwhile.

StageNotes: One of the aspects of the show that you were so visionary in designing is the DeLorean, which you’ve likened to almost designing a lead costume, which I love this comparison. So talk about that parallel because truly the car is its own character.

Tim Hatley: Yeah, I mean it became very clear to me that the car had to be the car and we couldn’t do it as a, I don’t know, I’m just saying it out loud, but it couldn’t be like a puppet made of cardboard boxes that suddenly appears and disappears. And it felt to me that that was one of the, when I made my list of things that had to be very true to the show indeed as to reflect the film, the DeLorean absolutely on that list, and I had a wishlist of what I wanted our DeLorean to do. I wanted it to light up. I wanted it to have CO2 jets coming out of the back. I wanted the wheels to turn. I wanted it to tip and turn and tilt, and I wanted it to travel across the stage. I read the script. I wanted Doc to be dancing on it. I wanted the DeLorean girls, his backup singers to be dancing on it. It became a kind of a whole piece of set as well as a character. And it was like thinking of it as another character who had to be costumed. Also, Bob gave the DeLorean a voice in the musical, the DeLorean speaks. The DeLorean doesn’t speak in the film. And that was interesting to me too, that actually there was an interaction sonically with the DeLorean. So yeah, it just needs to be taken extremely seriously and to be pushed that little bit further so it could become a theatrical help.  And whenever we see the car, I wanted it to delight and I had a lot of technical issues to wrestle with. We see the car three or four times and do we see it? I questions, do we see it always in the same orientation? Do we have four cars backstage? Do we just have the front of one? Do we just have the back of another? Do we just have the side? What do we have one that flies? So are they all different cars? And that was a kind of conundrum for a while. But then we sort of realized that in the real estate of the space backstage, which is tight always that actually no, let’s try and do it with one car. Let’s put all of our money into one car, make it fabulous, make it so you can dance on it, you can light it up, you can spin it, you can have jets coming out of it. You can have sound coming out of it. There is not an inch of space inside that car that is available. Honestly, you can just about get the two actors in there. And it is packed. It’s absolutely packed with effects, with mechanics sound. So that has been a real task to get back to work.  It really was like designing another character. I do think of the DeLorean as a character, a lead character in our show.

StageNotes: And I guess I do have to ask, is there more than one car?

Tim Hatley: Might be.

StageNotes: Now one thing that has been published, so this isn’t a spoiler alert, is the DeLorean on stage is not a real DeLorean. However, you did start with a scan of the actual car.

Tim Hatley: Yeah, A starting point was to scan, we wanted the DeLorean obviously to look like the DeLorean. So what better way in this, in incredible day and age where you can 3D scan a car, I would not have known that when I was sticking my cardboard together, watching Blue Peter. But now in this day and age, you can scan a car. We had a machine come in and we had a couple of lads coming in and scanning the car for us here in London in the scenic workshop that then gave us the information of the volume of the car. We actually slightly stronger. We then built a replica in wood to get the scale and to see how we wanted to use it in rehearsals. And we got a wooden car into a rehearsal room and we’d sang with it. We danced on it, we spun it around, and we realized actually it’d be good if we can get these things to happen. Then we went back to our 3D blueprint of the car and we also realized where we had to fit it off stage. It was slightly too big. Could we shrink it a little bit? And also it was interesting when we built our mockup, when you have a human against it in the confines of a set, which is not very wide really, it’s not real life. It’s not like having it outside in the streets. You are within a sort of architectural box. And actually we needed to shrink it ever so slightly just to get the scale right next to a human being and to make it feel right within the context of our set. So it’s shrunk ever so slightly, which of course we can do just by shrinking down the 3D scan. And then once we got those measurements, we crafted it. And we had an amazing company, STS in Holland who did all of our automation. They built the innards, all the steel frame, and they allowed the spaces for everybody to house all of their effects. And then the outer shell is made of fiberglass. And that was crafted by Simon Kenny at Souvenir in the souvenir workshops in London. And they lovingly just replicated all the detail and made it look a million dollars. And then of course, all of our fabulous electricians and sound engineers and FX guys, they all came in and put in their bits and pieces. And we have the DeLorean.

StageNotes: When you workshopped the show, you did a lot of storyboarding. Is that typical in your process to storyboard or was this unique?

Tim Hatley: Yeah, I mean it is typical to story, a complicated show where there’s a lot of sequences. It’s typical for me certainly to storyboard the show. I think as a designer of a big musical, you have to communicate your ideas to a lot of people. I’m the leader of a big team of people. I have to be able to communicate to the lighting design department. I need to communicate to the video design department. I need to communicate to sound to everybody, and then indeed to the director and choreographers, producers, people with money so that they can see the idea and realize why they’ve got to spend all this money. They’re very important. And then of course, to the actors ultimately who have to be act in this show, it’s really important that they, or it helps, that they can see what the plan is. So to me, a storyboard is crucial.  And the great thing about a storyboard is it takes up my time, but if it’s wrong, I can just rip it up and start again or alter things and change things. When it’s all built and it’s all there and you haven’t really thought about how you’re going to use it, it’s all a little bit too late and it’s very expensive to then start shifting ideas and go, oh, that’s not working. Can we build that? So it’s like if you can work that out beforehand, it’s like an instruction kit. It really helps you in the long run. So yes, storyboarding is for me, crucial. Certainly not necessarily for a play that set in a living room with some French windows and a sofa. No, I probably wouldn’t storyboard that as a design, but certainly a big musical that moves and changes scenes and shifts all the time in a massive travel sequence that we have that needed storyboarding. Because to me, that’s like a movie. And when I’ve worked on movies, when I’ve done car chase sequences and things in films, that’s all storyboarded for exactly the same reasons. Everybody needs to know what’s going on. What are the camera angles? What’s this? What’s that? There’s questions from every department and theater is made up of many, many, many brilliant practitioners. I’m literally just the surface, the top. I’m credited as the designer of the show. I rely on some brilliant hundreds actually of brilliant, brilliant technicians and people and minds and creativity and positivity. Positivity. So I need to communicate to them and share vision so that they can help me make it.

StageNotes: And I love that you’re talking about this communication process when you’re studying in school theatrical design. Is it helpful to take classes in other aspects of theater other than just design so that you’re able to communicate those ideas and visions?

Tim Hatley: Yes, yes, yes, yes to all of that. I did design 30 years ago in London at St. Martins and very much our course was, we got involved in all aspects. We put on a play. We were in plays, we had parts in place. We had to remember lines and know what it’s like to be an actor. We had to put on costumes, we had to make costumes for other members of the team. We were given place to read and pray, see and learn and understand about what’s that scene actually meaning. And I think that it’s not just about drawing a picture. You’ve got to understand as a designer what everything is to create theater. And it’s crucial, I think to experience all of those things. It doesn’t necessarily need to be an expert at it. You don’t necessarily do that for your job. But I feel it with a lot of things in life.  I think it’s important to understand and to know how it is on the other side, to know what people are experiencing, to know what that means. And if you say that, what does that sound like to somebody? And I just think just in life, it’s just good to have a general overview and knowledge. And as a designer, it’s just good to know actually he’s really not going to want to wear that hat when he’s got to say those lines and to know why. And it is still always a debate with the actor or with climbing up the stairs for a big moment in a scene, you still get things wrong and you try and explain to actors how you want it to work. But I think if you have a knowledge to understand them a bit more and understand where they’re coming from and their nerves and what that really is, then it just works for a better team. And it’s all about putting it on together because it’s not, you need the actors and you need them to understand what you are trying to do to make your work look brilliant too. So everybody’s got to be sort of brought in to the party,

StageNotes: Back to the Future, opened on the West end and then moved to the Winter Garden Theater. All theaters are different, and they all have their quirks and size variables. Did the design of the show change from London to Broadway?

Tim Hatley: Well, listen, the Winter Garden is on Broadway and everything is bigger in America as we know. So yes, we got a little bit bigger. The physical stage is wider, and that’s an interesting point. In London, our stages generally are narrower and deeper than your stages in the us. So it’s a common thing. Whenever I’ve had shows go from one side of the Atlantic to the other, we’ve had to alter things. I make them shallower or deeper if they’re coming from the US to London. And that’s a sort of known fact that all of us designed community, understand and know. And we sort of bear in mind, we were very lucky with the Winter Garden, however, there is depth in that theater, so we didn’t have to force shorten things too much. But yes, it is different, and it had to be wider to accommodate the better.  So we have looked at all of that. But the interesting thing, I think if you were to watch the show in London and you were to then watch it in New York, you would think, I think to the untrained eye, you would think it’s exactly the same show, with the exception of the environment and the set that comes into the auditorium. We have a massive extension of the set, which all lights up, which comes right out over the audience. And that actually comes out a little bit more in New York than it does in London because we were sort of visiting it second time around and we were able to sort of refine that. But the big change which nobody sees is that backstage beyond the set is a completely different show. So for example, in London, the car when it goes off stage cannot store in the same place in New York because there’s a wall there, there’s not enough room, so there’s a knock on effect. So you start to put the DeLorean stage when it’s parked, then what was staged right in London then has to move and so on and so on and so on. And then so you have the backstage traffic is completely different. So Backstage is a very different show to backstage in London. That’s where the difference is. And that’s where a lot of the hard work goes into making that work, which of course the audience don’t necessarily see.

StageNotes: I am so curious because now the show is launching a North American tour moving from theater to the theater. Do the design elements have to change once again to be more variable for all these different stages?

Tim Hatley: They do. They do. We have to be very, we design it so that we can get in within a number of hours. We can get the set out within a number of hours. We need to get the set up physically up. We need to be able to get it lit. We need to be able to line up our video projectors. We need to make sure that everything is on the same page, and that happens on the clock is ticking because time is money on the road. And so yes, we have to take that all into account and we’ve changed some elements. I think, again, hopefully it will still be entertaining and it will still be the show. But for example, some of the things that we were able to store on the deck, the trucks, for example, the diner that was with two trucks, we’re actually going to put that into the grid now and fly that in.  So it’ll be the same overall picture, but the way it gets there will be altered and different because that is an easier thing to load into the truck, and it takes up less space. And the way that the rigging all works, we can get that in, fly that out, and it’s out the way. Then we can get on with setting up other things on the deck. So yes, it’s a complicated process and it for sure is, it’s a slimmer version than we would have in New York, a sit down show in New York. You can do things that you simply can’t do on the road. So yeah, they’re two different things, but still it’s going to be fantastic. And we have our lead, DeLorean is there and no compromise there. So yeah, we know what the show is. The great thing about doing it, firstly in London, then in New York, we really get a sense of what our show is and what people love about the show, what we really feel we have to have and what we think. Maybe no one will miss that if that changes a little bit there. And so that’s what we’ve done. And then as it goes forward and we do another talk, we’ll still learn and we’ll still change and we’ll update. And that’s the great thing about live work. It’s never really over, there’s always a way to improve it and make it better and keep it moving forward.

StageNotes: One of the undercurrents of the show that Bob Gale talks is this idea of failure before success. You see it in Doc Brown, that’s his whole storyline. Can you talk about the idea of failure as perhaps a means to an end in your work?

Tim Hatley: Yeah, I mean, it’s a very big part of being a practitioner in the theater. I would say in life, you’re going to do things and they’re not going to work out. But I think it’s very important to try. I think at least try. If you try and you do your best and it doesn’t quite work out, you’ve tried, you’ve done your best. If you don’t do it at all, then you’ll never know and you’ll just regret that, oh, I never did that, I haven’t done that. And I just think that is, and it’s very, very true in theater design, just try it. It’s an idea that we’ve not done this before. It could be, I’ve never had a whole set come up through the floor and tip around and turn and dah, dah, dah, dah, and it might not work, and the critics might hate it, and you might get absolutely slaughtered for it, but try and I think you then learn and you learn by your mistakes. I think your mistakes are sort of in a way more important than your triumphs because I think that they sort of sculpt you and they guide you and they help build the foundation of what you then know will work. Because often when I start designing things and I don’t quite know how to do it, what I do know is how I don’t want to do it. And I often draw what I don’t want as a way to start. It’s like, okay, I have no idea how to design the life of mine, but I tell you what I don’t want and I don’t want this. And I literally will draw it and go that I know what I don’t want. I’m feeling better now. I know what’s not required. And then that allows you to free up and think, well, what would it be fabulous if it were that? And so I think failure is extremely important and you’re not to be scared of failure. I really, really believe that. And at the time when you’re going through the failure and you’re going through the pain and the agony and the upset, it doesn’t seem like that. But I would say hold on to the long picture, the big picture, because it will help you in the long run and it will inform you to create good work.

StageNotes: Camp Broadway is bringing 101 kids to see Back to the Future on Broadway this summer. I’m so excited for them to see it. Are there any elements or maybe even Easter eggs you would like them to keep an eye out for?

Tim Hatley: Oh, goodness, goodness, goodness, goodness, goodness. I mean, not really. Easter eggs, we’ve not really hidden lots of, well, there’s a couple of little things in lab, which if you kind of keep your eyes open, you might spot, I won’t give that away, but if you kind of really examine Doc’s lab, there are some little things hidden in there. But when you are taking young people to the theater, I just hope that they sort of enjoy the theatricality, and I hope that that just sort of invigorates them to want to go to the theater more and to ask questions. That’s great. When I hear kids come out of the theater really talking about the show and Did you see that? Did you that, oh my God, how did the car do this? And I think how, and I think that’s really wonderful, and I think that’s, to me, the joy of theater.