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In the seemingly utopian 1980 Texas suburbia of Love & Death, cracks are beginning to appear. Housewife Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) has murdered her friend Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) whose husband (Jesse Plemons) was Montgomery’s lover, with an axe. The small town of Wylie does not see it coming, and the idyllic Americana its residents are so used to no longer stands sound. This story is as strange as it is true—and to bring it to life on the silver screen, production designer Suzuki Ingerslev used locations around Austin, Texas to stand in for for the real-life Dallas suburb of Wylie, which has become too modern to shoot for the time period.
Luckily, a number of other Texan towns still have that Wylie-in-the-80s feel. “From the beginning we wanted to show these big, open roads where you’d have to drive endlessly to get to church or into town,” explains Ingerslev. “That emptiness sums up the loneliness of suburbia. We wanted to show the isolation of living that life in the suburbs and the tedium of their daily routine.”
Ingerslev and her team created more than 100 sets for the seven episodes, which depict events both before and after the murder—the affair as well as the aftermath. Although some reference images did exist, Ingerslev tried not to get caught up exactly recreating locations. Instead, she and director Lesli Linka Glatter focused on visually evoking Candy’s world in an attempt to help explain her state of mind. Below, Ingerslev breaks down some of the key locations used in Love & Death.
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Where exactly did you film?
Austin and the outlying suburbs offered us a lot of towns that hadn’t been developed. We were able to find towns like Lockhart and Smithville to double as an old Wylie, Texas. We added a lot of signage and painted and added old cars and brought them back to the time period. We also shot an airport scene at an old military airport in Killeen. The big courtroom drama at the end was in Georgetown, where we used an exterior of a dated-looking courthouse, the Williamson County Courthouse. We also used Kerrville and Seguin. We drove from location to location in a 120-mile radius.
Did you use any other locations in Austin?
When they go to see Star Wars it’s at The Paramount Theatre, which is actually where we had our SXSW premiere. Our Liberty Beauty Salon was the Crestview Beauty Salon. Allan’s office, Rockwell International, was the Austin American Statesman offices. We also shot at the Austin State Hospital, the Austin Seminary, Omni Austin Hotel Downtown and Garrison Municipal Pool.
Were there any documented photos of what Candy’s house actually looked like?
That was the one thing I had trouble finding. But I knew what area it was in, outside of Dallas, so you understood that it was horse country. The important part for finding Candy's house is that we really wanted it to be in the hill country, where the roads were a bit windy and the properties were bigger. It's greener. It's more aspirational. It's where everybody wants to be. We were able to find a residential area called Cat Mountain in Austin that had these more modern, aspirational houses. I wanted her to be very stylish, because she is an avid reader. She is a designer. They have the money to do the research and read the home magazines of the time and then apply that in the house. We wanted it to be happy, with brighter colors and open spaces.
How does Allan and Betty’s house compare?
That one was actually pretty well-documented. We found the house for the series in an area near Manchaca. It had brick and almost looked like the real house. We built the interior on a stage, like with Candy’s house, because it needed a very specific interior following the script and how the murder transpires. For Betty and Allan, we wanted the house to be a little bit darker and more claustrophobic. While Candy’s furniture is on the modern side, there's was probably passed down from generation to generation.
We're not doing a documentary, but we are trying to give the flavor of a time period. What was so important to me was explaining what happened in this American tragedy through visuals. Both Candy and Allan have a decent life and they're happy, but they both suffer from loneliness and isolation and being products of their time.
Where did you film Candy and Allan’s first date?
That was in Lockhart. It was Lil Charlie’s, which we called Skip’s Fine Eats. We repainted that whole thing and fixed it up and made it look like a perkier restaurant where you believe that somebody would want to go on a first date. Even the townspeople came up to us afterwards like, “Oh my God, this is so great, thank you for fixing this place up.” But then we had to restore it back to what the owner wanted.
Other restaurants we used were Back Door Café, which existed in Smithville—we thought it was clever because of our subject matter. The Richardson Cafe on the highway was the Texas Grill Restaurant in Bastrop.
Candy and Allan's affair plays out in several roadside motels. Where did you find those?
Those were actually some of the hardest things to find. It used to be the American Dream to travel cross-country and hit these motels with pools. They've become more transient now. The Cottonwood Inn Motel that stood in for the Como [motel] was in La Grange and it was really rundown. During COVID-19, they had filled the swimming pool with cement. So it was a lot of work to uplift it and add greenery. We created the hotel room on a stage and had some fun with the flocked wallpaper. The other hotel, the Continental Hotel, was actually the University Inn in San Marcos. That was better kept. The doors had new locks, so we had to change them to be lock and key again.
Early on, Allan and Betty go to Marriage Encounter—essentially a weekend of marital counseling—which takes place in a kitschy motel. Was that a real hotel?
It was scripted as one of those themed hotels from back in the day. So before we left we went to Disneyland to look at some for inspiration because they still exist in Anaheim. We thought, “Worst case scenario we’ll come back here and film.” But we found two hotels to use as the Dunfey's Royal Coach. One, the YO Ranch Hotel & Conference Center, was themed as a hunting lodge so we brought in the knights in shining armor and flags. The other hotel was called Inn of the Hills. It was such a dated, great hotel so all I had to add was the Tudor elements. It was so much fun.
It's not a spoiler to say the murder is an important moment in the story. Where was that filmed?
That had to be a set. It was so specific, how they found the body. We were offered the option to look at the [real] photos at first, but then they pulled them and said “nobody should look at these,” and I respect that.
The truth is nobody will ever know, except for those two, what really happened.
