Looking for Green on the Big Screen Now that spring has (finally) brought bloom-inducing weather to the city, many of us are turning our focus to what can be done with gardens and balconies, decks and window boxes and stoops. For landscape designers, however, the lens is always and everywhere open - even in darkened movie theaters. Take, for example, the experience of Marissa Mandel, a Los Angeles-based designer who recently saw the 2010 film ""I Am Love,"" a portrait of a Milanese haute bourgeoisie family in decline. Despite all the debauchery on display (Tilda Swinton makes out with a shrimp at one point), Mandel couldn't keep her eyes off a succulent-filled container dominating the stairwell of the family's mansion. "The movie was just O.K.," Mandel says, "but I haven't forgotten the planter." "I see everything through green-tinted glasses," says Judy Kameon, another L.A.-based designer whose work a few years ago on the Melrose Avenue Balenciaga store gave it the postapocalyptic aesthetic of ""Blade Runner,"" one of her favorite movies. To express that look, Kameon eschewed leaves and greenery. "The new plants were all silver and bronze and icy blue and black," she says. I used succulents and cactus: everything had a sculptural static form. The ground cover was a black lava gravel. A landscape architect named Steve Martino, currently completing a red stucco structure for a client's garden in Phoenix, found his inspiration in a film's location. "The shed was influenced by Casa Malaparte in Capri," Martino says, "which I first saw in a movie with Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance called "Contempt." I was watching the movie on late-night TV 25 years ago, and when the house appeared, I jumped off the couch and jumped to the TV to get a closer look. "It was very spectacular and dangerous," Martino says of the original 1937 building that overlooked the Mediterranean. Simple and dramatic. I was fascinated by its form and its placement on the cliffs, and seeing Brigitte Bardot on the roof wasn't bad, either. There are limits, however, to how far people are willing to let cinematic visions shape their home environment. File this one under Projects Never Completed: Martino once suggested to his client look to the big screen for a possible solution to unwanted view. "She had just shown me a new book of Dennis Hopper's photographs from the early "60s that she was proud of," Martino says. My idea was to get a huge photo of him to paste on the wall beyond the window - similar to King Kong looking in the hotel window. She liked the idea but said she couldn't live with it.