The movie takes place between Chicago and Greece, but was filmed entirely in Greece. How did you pull that off?
What we did is, Grant, [supervising art director] Matt [Kerly], Barry, and I transformed the Athens airport into Chicago O’Hare. Grant would do this thing, when we walked through any place—squint his eyes and turn his head sideways and go, “Guys, take a look at this.” And it was always just some vision he had where he’d say, “This looks like Gate 12 at O’Hare.” That’s how production designers are! Where normally, we are taking in feelings and sounds and ideas and travel and emotions, production designers see. And so, he was able to transform Athens airport into O’Hare. Then there was the incredible feat of finding a house in a wealthy suburb of Athens that we could transform into the interior of the Portokalos family home.
Will you give me an overview of what other places appear in the movie?
I wanted to show neoclassical architecture. My overarching theme of the film is that immigrants and migrants, most often, do not go by choice. They go because they are left with no choice, as was the case with my dad. My dad immigrated because, and I put this line in the movie, he had everything. He had an idyllic, beautiful village he grew up in, in Greece, but no food. The message I’m trying to say is, worldwide migration is happening due to wars and famine and the loss of choices, so what I wanted to show was the beauty that they were surrounded by. My dad’s house was beautiful. We found neoclassical architecture in Athens, in the Plaka, which is the main shopping area of Athens. It’s like textiles, leather bags, shoes, soaps made out of olive oil and donkey milk, which God only knows what that is. And then if you look up, you realize, “Ah, I am looking at neoclassical architecture.”
The family journey in the movie is that we leave Chicago, get to Athens, and we do not stay in Athens. We go directly to an island, and while we are on the island, we go shopping in the big city. Well, the big city is actually Athens. We were in the Plaka at 6 a.m., which was a lifelong dream of mine—to get to film in this historic shopping area.
We also found neoclassical architecture on the island of Corfu, which became our second base. We were basically a two-base movie. We have many coastlines of Santorini, Paros, Crete, and Hydra. What we found on Corfu is a neoclassical village called Varipatedes, at the tip-top of a mountain. The architecture there is stunning. When we got there to scout with a 20-person team, we were greeted by the mayor, and found out that there are only 20 people who lived there during the winter. That became our main base.
Were there any locations where you had to clear out tourists? And how does that work exactly?
