Hal Pereira

After graduating from the University of Illinois, Hal Pereira served his apprenticeship as a theatrical designer in his home town Chicago, between 1933 and 1940. In 1942, he moved to Hollywood and signed with Paramount as a unit art director under the tutelage of department head Hans Dreier. He took over Dreier's job of supervising art director upon the latter's retirement in 1950. Pereira had an innate sense of naturalism and knew how to best suit and enrich the emotive or thematic needs of a subject. He was particularly adept at designing realistic urban landscapes, often using understated sets, and employing props and lighting devices which conveyed moral or economic values. His best early work was on Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), for which he provided a sombre and claustrophobic atmosphere, alternating his use of light and shadow, both for dramatic effect, and as juxtaposition between good and evil. He used similarly confining interiors, both for the dust bowl of the angu