FUR shot for 57 days in New York from early May until early August 2005. Although there were various exterior and interior locations filmed throughout New York, most of FUR’s interiors were shot on sets built at the Steiner studio in Brooklyn. Shainberg worked with his behind-the- camera creative team, including director of photography Bill Pope, production designer Amy Danger and costume designer Mark Bridges, to create a cinematic landscape in which the real and the fantastic could believably co-exist. Lionel’s apartment contains subtle references to “Alice in Wonderland,” like the cup of tea awaiting Diane upon her arrival and Lionel’s pet rabbit. But they were careful not to over-do. As Shainberg explains, “If you play it too hard, you lose the reality of Lionel being somebody real who’s moved into her building. You have to feel that what’s going on has something real and vital at stake. She genuinely might leave her family for this guy. But at the same time, I think this character we call ‘Diane Arbus’ would feel very childlike feelings of wonderment upon leaving a known world for an unknown world. That wonderment, her internal experience, leads to the stylistic fairy tale quality that is balanced at all times with ‘the real.’”

Lionel’s revelation of his furry self to Diane contains a subtle nod to Jean Cocteau’s classic BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, a film Shainberg names as an inspiration. That film’s presentation of a splendid Beast also informed FUR’s depiction of Lionel. But credibility was as important as beauty. To accomplish this, the filmmakers enlisted the great makeup wizard Stan Winston and his studio. Explains producer Fierberg, “When we were talking to Stan Winston about designing the hair and the entire look for Lionel, we were very intent on making sure that the result wasn’t a caricature of a person with hair, but that it was a real person, with some individuality and reality to him. When we finally saw Robert in his full makeup, with the hair and the look created by Stan Winston, and still Robert’s face and his eyes, his humanism came through, and Robert was still there --we knew everything was going to be fine.”

Distinct visual looks were created for the three different worlds portrayed in the film: the Arbus home, Lionel’s apartment, and the outside world explored by Diane and Lionel. Color, light and texture all came into play. “For example,” says Shainberg, “the walls in the Arbus apartment downstairs all have a real sheen to them; they feel cool and covered like the apartment itself is wearing a mask. But when you go up to Lionel’s place, the paint has been chipped away, layers and layers are exposed. So you have a feeling of a much rawer experience. The robes that he wears in his apartment are filled with endless pattern so that you have the sense that he, and the world that he will take Diane into, have a labyrinthine complexity that the simpler clothes, and the simpler surfaces downstairs in her life don’t have.”

Eventually, Diane’s worlds collide as Lionel insists on meeting the man who has spent the last fifteen years married to the person he adores. “There are some great scenes where Diane’s got her husband on one side and this man who’s intriguing her --who I think she hopes will be somebody very important in her life --sitting on the other side,” Kidman says. “And she’s in the middle. I loved the way Steven structured those scenes, because there’s humor and wit there, as well as her being pushed-and-pulled.”

Watching Kidman and Downey work together was unforgettable. “I think that they just adored each other,” comments Shainberg. “They’re fantastically talented, amazingly vivid and open. I think it’s the part of a lifetime for Robert and he came with his ‘A’ game. Nicole was really committed to, and involved with, playing Arbus in the way that she and I had discussed, which is to say from her own truth and from what mattered to her most personally about Arbus.”