Director Kristoffer Borgli’s new A24 film The Drama stages some of its most pivotal — and calamitous — wedding scenes inside Turner Hill, a 1903 Elizabethan mansion in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the production team tells ELLE Decor. The film stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as Emma Harwood and Charlie Thompson, an engaged Boston couple whose wedding week spirals into dark comedy; Borgli, production designer Zosia Mackenzie and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan sought a venue that would feel elegant, old-world and faintly theatrical to hold the story’s dramatic unraveling.
Mackenzie, whose recent credits include Dream Scenario and Infinity Pool, led location scouting across the Boston area until Turner Hill matched the creative brief. “We fell in love with it immediately,” she said, praising the venue’s “amazing hand-molded plastered ceilings” and an overall sophisticated, elegant atmosphere that could double as a stage. The house’s Elizabethan bones—the heavy woodwork, plaster detail and a clear “front” of a room—gave the filmmakers a natural directionality that focused attention and lent a formal, performative feel to the wedding set.
Because Turner Hill remains an active wedding venue, the production had to adapt its schedule and build multiple temporary setups. Mackenzie’s team moved in and out of the mansion three separate times during filming, tearing down and rebuilding the reception several times so the site could continue to host real events. “We switched out all of the window treatments and we brought everything in with us,” she said. “Even though it’s a wedding venue, it’s just an empty space, essentially. So you’re bringing in the tables and chairs and all of the dressing every time. It was a bit of work, but it was so worth it.”
On screen, the Turner Hill reception reads authentic and formal — deliberately different from the couple’s bright, curated Back Bay apartment, which the designers set up as white-walled, naturally lit and modern. In contrast, the mansion’s moodier register was layered with contemporary touches: Artemide globe lights were installed alongside custom-built floral structures, marrying old-world architecture with present-day wedding aesthetics. Mackenzie and Borgli also spent extensive time refining the table layouts; they tested circular seating, parallel rows, zigzag patterns and multiple orientations to balance the needs of camera framing, natural light and choreography.
That choreography mattered in practical terms: the team had to plan where the DJ would be stationed, where the bride might slip off to the bridal suite, and where the best man and maid of honor would stand relative to microphones and sightlines. Ultimately they settled on a traditional arrangement — bride and groom centered, parents nearby, wedding party near the DJ — a configuration that grounds the action and makes the eventual collapse of performance all the more visible. “There is a lot of thought put into every part of it,” Mackenzie said.
The mansion’s architectural confinement proved narratively useful. Mackenzie described the room as having an “inherent moodiness” and a stage-like quality that keeps everyone in the same space, intensifying scrutiny and making every gesture public. For a film that interrogates the performance of social rituals and what happens when a curated public moment falls apart, Turner Hill offered both the aesthetic and spatial logic to amplify the story: formal, rehearsed and, crucially, poised for spectacle when things go wrong.