Inventing Anna, based on journalist Jessica Pressler’s 2018 New York magazine article, follows the rise and fall of Anna Delvey (Julia Garner), a con woman who swindles the New York elite out of millions while pretending to be a German heiress.
While awaiting trial on Rikers Island, Delvey is interviewed by Vivian Kent (a fictionalized version of Pressler played by Anna Chlumsky). Seeking to bring authenticity to the scammer saga, production designer Henry Dunn and his team scouted — and got permission to — shoot at “New York’s most famous jail.”
Filming at an operating jail was hard, but shooting during the pandemic was even harder. Dunn tells Tudum how the “Inventing Anna” crew navigated the Rikers scenes before and after the COVID-19 shutdown.
“[Location manager] Damon Gordon worked on the first half pre-COVID. [He] managed to do one of the very, very difficult things in New York, which was to get us into actual Rikers,” Dunn recalls. “We went and scouted the whole women’s area of Rikers, which, as far as I can tell, nobody’s been allowed in. We built a set in the intake area, so we had that feeling of all the buses going by and the [feeling that] you’re clearly in the grounds of the prison. You know, that was really a coup to pull that off.”
In addition to the Rikers location, the Inventing Anna crew used the now-closed Queens Detention Complex (QDC) to film key interview scenes between Kent and Delvey. But then COVID hit, and production stopped. Once it resumed, the team had to come up with creative ways to think outside the (prison) box after the QDC had been rendered off-limits. “The tricky thing that happened was, when COVID hit, we were no longer able to go to any of the locations that we had been shooting [in],” Dunn says. “We still had scenes that were supposed to take place in those locations. It was not easy at all.”
The team set out to re-create the interiors of the various Rikers areas from scratch, including the visitors area and Delvey’s cell, which was “way too small to get a camera in.”
“We ended up rebuilding those locations in a way that you would never be able to tell if within a scene intercut that [it was filmed at Location 1] from a year earlier or at Location 2 a year later, shot on a soundstage.” This sounds like a fun, accidental creation of “spot the difference” for Shondaland stans.
Dunn also recognizes the poetic justice served to Delvey.
“One of the things that was great on this project was this feeling of how close the crime is [to the prison,]” Dunn says. “There’s a bus that connects Rikers to Queens that we could never have shot anywhere other than Rikers Island. And as you go over the bridge, you get this view of Manhattan that is absolutely beautiful. The view is so close you can reach out and touch it, but here’s Anna, who had been in [these] corridors of power and talking to people and meeting with people on top of Penthouse apartments, and now seeing it from this sort of worm’s-eye view from Rikers Island. She’s looking at her own playground, where she knew all the names of all the major restaurants, you know, and now she’s eating prison food. So that was something we could have only done shooting on Rikers. We were very lucky to have been able to get [the opportunity to film there.]”
Inventing Anna is currently streaming on Netflix.
Additional reporting by Lawrence Yee
