Oscar-nominated Hamnet production designer Fiona Crombie on director Chloe Zhao and her late father
When Australian production designer Fiona Crombie heads to the Academy Awards next month – and especially if she wins for her work on the richly emotional drama Hamnet – she’ll be thinking about one special person.
It’s the same person her brother Peter mentioned when he accepted an award for best editing in a documentary at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards last week: their father Donald Crombie, celebrated director of Caddie, The Irishman and The Killing of Angel Street, who died at the age of 82 last year.
“I think about him every day,” Fiona Crombie says from Prague. “Every day. So I’m sure I’ll be thinking of him.
“He was very important for us creatively. [We] were second generation Australian film industry so he was a big part of our lives.”
After growing up in Adelaide and studying production design at Sydney’s NIDA, Crombie was a theatre set and costume designer until she moved into film with Snowtown (2011). Based in London since 2015, she earned a first Oscar nomination for The Favourite (2018) and has since worked on Cruella (2021), Beau Is Afraid (2023) and Mickey 17 (2025).
While she is busy shooting an unnamed film for a major American director in Prague, Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet has thrown her back into the Hollywood awards season.
An emotional drama about how an unbearable tragedy for William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his spirited wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), led to the writing of Hamlet, Hamnet is nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture.
Crombie considers Zhao (Nomadland, Eternals) to be an extraordinary director.
“She’s very much about discovery,” she says. “What’s on the page – certainly that first draft – was absolutely [just] a guide and the process of pre-production is when she discovers what the film is.
“The film that we’ve made, there are really significant parts of it that did not exist in that first draft I read. It was through the rehearsals and location scouting and then through conversations of what we needed it to be that the film took shape.”
The best example was finding a tree in a forest that became a central image, enhanced with ground cover, ferns and roots, in Hamnet.
For Crombie, the biggest challenge on Hamnet was Zhao’s passion for authenticity, “performances and environments that feel absolutely authentic and real”.
The Globe Theatre, the family house, the attic and the London apartment all had to be built to feel authentic, while saying something about the characters and where they were in their lives.
“The plan was to try and work on location so that we were away and we were private in the making of the film – away from offices and freeways and in nature,” Crombie says. “But it didn’t work out that way so we ended up building a huge part of the film.
“It became about ‘how do I match that to the location?’ Knowing that you’re calibrating off what exists and what we’re creating is the dance – the balance – to make sure the whole film feels cohesive; so you can’t tell what’s a set and what’s a location.”
Crombie, who admits to “a certain amount of melancholy” learning about her second Oscar nomination because of how much her father would have loved it, says the first was transformative for her career.
“I remember going in and having a meeting with [producer] Marc Platt about Cruella,” she says. “I know I would not have had that meeting had I not suddenly come into focus for people.
“Then, of course, I got Cruella, and that was a big budget jump for me up to $US120 million. When you’ve done something like that, it opens up, and you can basically pick and choose in budget brackets.”
This nomination, which she learnt of during a mundane Zoom call on her new film, feels different.
“Last time, I wasn’t working,” Crombie says. “It’s very complicated when you’re working, even just in terms of going from thinking about the current film to then remembering back to a year or a year-and-a-half ago when we were making Hamnet and talking about that.
“It has a quite different feeling because I’m so busy, but I also feel incredibly proud. It really says something to be nominated twice in your career … Maybe it’s not a fluke. You’re onto something.”
While the favourite to win best production design at the Oscars has to be Frankenstein, Crombie isn’t discounting her chances.
“You just never know,” she says. “The Academy is made up of so many different people who have different takes on things, so I have absolutely no idea.
“But I do remember last time feeling relief when our category was announced. You’re partly holding your breath for months. I remember just being relieved and thinking: ‘I can have messy hair again, and I don’t have to have makeup on. I can go just back to my normal life’.”
Crombie will miss all the lead-in events and just fly in for the Oscars.
“It’ll be a real whirlwind time,” she says. “At the end of the day, my day job is what’s important.”
Crombie and her husband, Peter Knowles, have thought about moving back to Australia, but they have to weigh up the effect on their two children: Oona, 19, and Orlando, 15.
“We’ve got one that’s still at school, so I think we just wait it out,” she says. “But we always talk about coming back to Australia. We’re always on realestate.com.au.”
Shouldn’t that be domain.com.au given that fellow Australian Oscar nominee Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) appears in its commercials?
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