Production design of “Immaculate” – interview with Adam Reamer

October 12th, 2024

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Adam Reamer. In this interview, he talks about the roots of the horror genre, building worlds to support the story, the rise of generative AI tools, and career development. Between all these and more, Adam talks about his earlier work on “Grimm” and “Insidious: The Red Door”, and dives deep into what went into making “Immaculate”.

Kirill : Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Adam: My name is Adam Reamer, and I’m a production designer. I didn’t start early on a path intending to pursue film, but I do feel like a lot of the turns I took along the way did lead me there – in terms of developing a sensibility and a skill set that has been useful to me in the film industry.

I was interested in visual arts from a very young age. I was always crafting, building, making things with my hands, whether it was Lego toys or anything in the physical world of making. I got my degree at Penn State in architecture. When I moved to New York after graduation, it was shortly after 9/11, and the building and architecture economy had crashed. It wasn’t possible to find jobs for new graduates in the field, so I answered an ad in The New York Times for a set carpenter.

I wound up with a company called Readyset. I worked there as a set builder and scenic painter for many years, and eventually I took over management and design at that shop. We served the still photography industry, but also to events and retail display and trade shows – a lot of environmental design. That was my first introduction to scenic design more broadly.

When I left New York, I got into design-build architecture with a guy I met out here in Portland, Oregon. We were designing and building remodels and some new houses for a couple of years. As I was doing that, there was a TNT television show “Leverage” that came to Portland, and they needed a set designer, which in the industry is a draftsman of construction documents for set building. I got that job through a friend of a friend, and then I fell in love with the work. That started my career.

I moved up through assistant art director and art director, and I ended up on a series called Grimm, which was a fantasy / police procedural. I art directed that for about 4 years, and then I was bumped to production design. That was my first credit in the role, and what allowed me to get representation, and start pursuing feature film and projects outside of the Portland area.


External walls of Villa Parisi (principal location for the convent) as reference for the gate build. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Do you remember if there was anything surprising when you joined the industry and you saw how it looks like from the inside? Hollywood likes to present itself as this glamorous industry, with red carpets and beautiful people and parties, but that’s probably for the top 1% of the top 1%.

Adam: I was immediately surprised that the people making television weren’t like the people on television. It’s such an obvious thing if you think about it, but back then as soon as I started doing the show, that’s what I saw – people being the nuts and bolts of the industry. It’s all different kinds of people, from creatives to accountants to people that drive trucks. It’s not all glamorous people. It’s a wide variety of personalities and backgrounds that come together. That was a bit surprising.


Blocking diagram for the construction of the convent gate on location of Villa Parisi. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: It’s always been an industry that has had its ups and downs as the business around it changes, but it’s also always at the forefront of technology changes. If you look at your first 15 years in it, what stands out for you in terms of changing technology in your craft?

Adam: I came into television at the time when people were first starting to make the full transition to shooting digital. I wasn’t in the feature world at that time and I don’t know where they were, but I think that they probably followed a little later. Initially, the big motivation for the digital for some television productions was affordability, and economy of speed and production, and turning around dailies and content. I wasn’t part of the industry before that shift started.

I will say that in the 15 years that I’ve been doing it, we’ve seen the industry change dramatically around streaming services not only offering content, but then starting to create their own content. We’ve seen the gradual shift away from the traditional studio TV model of doing episodic series with 22 episodes, which is rare now. That’s what we were doing on “Grimm” even 8 years ago with NBC, and now most of it is moving to streaming models with shorter production runs, and different production strategies like block shooting. It’s less related to the technology of the actual filmmaking, and more about the distribution format.

The contemporary modes of the VFX production were already pretty well established by the time I started. I’ve seen that grow and become more technically simplified in ways, and it’s much easier to shoot for VFX production than it was 15 years ago. The technology is so much better in terms of how it can do isolation and animation, and everything is way more streamlined as a process. It’s nice, because it offers you the opportunity to use that tool without it being egregious in terms of budget.


The built part of the convent gate on location of Villa Parisi. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Going back to “Grimm”, that was over 100 episodes. Did it feel an almost full-time job for those 5-6 years?

Adam: We shot about 9 months out of the year. That’s a long production run on an episodic where you’re grinding, constantly prepping and shooting an episode at all times. That was exhausting work. We would finish a 9 month run and then I wouldn’t work until the show came back. I would rest and recuperate, travel a bit. That was probably the most intense time commitment for production work I’ve had.

Kirill: But it also wasn’t repetitive. I remember there was so much variety between the episodes and between the seasons.

Adam: Absolutely, there was. It made it such an ideal training round for an art director striving to come up into the production design role. It felt like every week we were creating a new world. We had the grounded world of the city of Portland, the police department, and the characters’ homes – but there was always a wild card, a monster’s lair inside a garbage pile or a stone temple out in the forest – these wild, fantastical sets.

Each one of those was a new challenge. How do you design this? How do you craft this? There weren’t a lot of rules for this stuff. A lot of times in episodic you have another hospital room, another office, another apartment. You can bang those out without thinking about it too much. But on “Grimm” every week it was something that I’ve never done before [laughs]. It’s challenging and that makes it fun too.


Full design spec for the convent gate on location of Villa Parisi. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: “Grimm” was half reality, half fantasy, half supernatural, and recently you’ve done “Insidious” and “Immaculate” that are more in the traditional horror genre. How do you explain our fascination with the genre, or maybe the need for us to have this out-of-this-world entertainment. It doesn’t happen to most people, but it’s set in such a familiar environment where we can easily see ourselves being in such a situation.

Adam: There is something particular about what you’re describing when something extraordinary or unusual happens within a more common place or within a setting that we understand. We can relate to that in an immediate way. This world looks like the world I know, and yet these fantastical or horrific things happen in it. It makes it more real to me that I can imagine it could happen in my own life. This is different from a story world that is completely fantastical. There’s no direct point of reference for the common viewer. Maybe it’s in outer space, or set in medieval time, and it’s not as immediate.

Kirill: Is this what you wanted to have on “Immaculate” and “Insidious”? The environments there look “normal”, for the lack of a better word. We see some frescoes on the walls in “Immaculate”, but they don’t depict some satanic rituals. They don’t forebode the evilness of the story.

Adam: So much about the horror genre and the thriller genre is the unexpected twists and turns of the story, the reveal that things are not as they seem. You’re watching a character in the story realize that things aren’t what they seem to be – at the same time as the audience is realizing it. You share that common experience with the character.

On “Insidious” particularly, we tried to pursue this by creating grounded, real spaces in some of the characters’ homes or the dorm room at the college, and creating a sense of normalcy around those environments – that would then be sharply contrasted when we jump into the fantastical or horrific.

In “Immaculate” we strove to create a bit more tension from the start. The environment of that story may be recognizable as something we know from history or travel, but not what we experience personally. It was an opportunity to create a little sense of unease for the character that built slowly. Instead of making it seem like everything was fine, there are little things in the architecture and the lighting. The colors and textures of the world of the convent in “Immaculate” automatically makes you a little timid – what’s in that dark corner or around the corner in this candlelit hallway. You’re creating a lingering sense of suspense that builds to more dramatic moments.


Shooting the approach sequence for the convent gate. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.


The final visuals of the approach sequence with VFX extensions of the outer gate / wall. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: As you mentioned, we’ve seen the industry shifting to different formats and schedules with the rise of streaming giants, and I find it fascinating that the horror genre is still largely staying in the feature film world. Some of the more popular ones get sequels and become franchises, but they don’t stretch themselves to 6-8 hours to tell that first story.

Adam: There have been some successful horror mini series, like “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Haunting of Hill House”. There are some good ones out there, but there’s something to be said for the experience of watching the horror features in the theater surrounded by people reacting off their reactions. There’s a communal experience of fear and relief. That depends so much on the theater that you’re in and the crowd you’re sitting with. It can make it a unique experience.

We premiered “Immaculate” at South by Southwest, and it was one of their feature celebrity premieres. They put it in their biggest venue, an enormous theater that sits around 1,300 people. It was packed. It was 10 o’clock at night, after people have been watching movies all day and eating and drinking. Their energy was up. They were excited. The volume in that theater was at maximum. Our director Mike Mohan soundchecked to make sure that they had the maximum volume.

It was the most remarkable movie viewing experience in a theater I’ve ever had. There was so much energy in the crowd. The screen was so huge. The sound was so big. It was such an incredible experience to see it that way. A couple weeks later, I saw it in a small theater in Portland with friends. It was about three quarters full, but the sound wasn’t quite the same, and the crowd wasn’t quite the same, and it made for a completely different viewing experience. There was some energy missing.

The theater experience can offer something unique and special to the exact moment that you see it. The communal energy of having that experience, fear and shock and reaction to jump scares and the horror, is better in theatrical.

Horror has a long tradition of coming from very low budget roots. A lot of horror has traditionally been produced at the sub-million dollar budget level. The true fans of horror will look past a little bit of a deficiency in production value or believability of gore for the excitement of the horror. If you look at a company like Blumhouse, they’re making big franchise movies now, but when they started out, the first “Insidious” was made for $1.5M, while this last one was budgeted at $16M. They’ve practiced this model where they make a lot of low budget movies, and the ones that are special because of story or talent that can launch a franchise, they’ll become these bigger movies.


Adding greenery decorations to the main entrance of convent location of Villa Parisi. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Is the horror genre an American thing? Pretty much every week there’s a horror movie or two playing in the theaters, but I don’t think it’s an international phenomenon at the same level outside of United States.

Adam: I don’t have as much experience with the foreign theatrical release markets, but it does feel like an American phenomenon. Horror is having a resurgence in the last few years. We have less and less movies go to theatrical releases, but the horror movies somehow seem to still do it with some success. It’s an interesting question, and I would love for social psychologists to explore why Americans love horror more than the rest of the world [laughs].

Kirill: What is art? Is there such a thing as good vs bad art?

Adam: That is a profound question. I don’t have a good philosophical definition for art, but I’ve been a creative all my life in one medium or another.

At a base level art is an attempt to tell stories or express human emotions and creation. Art functions as an analogue. Even when you’re representing life in your art, it’s still an interpretation of it. Any artistic pursuit seeks to translate something about experience and emotion into a different format that can elucidate something about it in a new way to an audience.

In terms of good and bad art, I think there’s bad art. But much of that has to do with the perception of the viewer, and how they’re responding to the artist’s hand in the work, or the subject matter, or what kind of emotions it brings up for a viewer. It’s not binary that there’s good and bad, but there is a wide spectrum about how successful art is in expressing the information or ideas or feelings it seeks to, and how it uses media to do that.


Final still of the main exterior of the convent location of Villa Parisi. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Getting closer to “Immaculate”, this is your third project with the director Michael Mohan and also with Sydney Sweeney. At this point, do you find that you have shortcuts, that you have mutual trust and understanding, and that this collaboration becomes more flowing?

Adam: Absolutely, and on all these three projects we also had the brilliant cinematographer Elisha Christian. At this point, we trust each other a lot and we speak a common language. There’s an innate feeling that we get when we know we’re gelling in a way that’s going to be good for the project. We might go to scout locations, and we’d be scouting for weeks and struggling to find the tone or the look or this one specific location, and then we’d walk into a spot, and we’d look at each other – because we all know that this is it. This is the movie, this is what it looks like, this is the place. That feeling comes with the experience of working together, and understanding each other’s interests and preferences and biases.

Kirill: Was it clear from the start that you wanted to have it shot in Italy?

Adam: That was determined before I joined the project. The script has a long history, as it was penned by the writer Andrew Lobel about a decade or so ago. I think it was originally written for Ireland. It wasn’t a convent, it was more of a boarding school situation. As Sydney Sweeney took control of that script with her production company and Black Bear, and it started to gain momentum, Italy fell into place for a couple of reasons.

Creatively, people saw the opportunity for how it would play in a convent in this historic architectural world of Italy. In addition, there was a practical component in that our producer, David Bernad, had recently concluded shooting of “The White Lotus” season two in Italy. So we had a certain world of contacts in Italian production that he thought he could also bring to it. And then it was Sydney’s connection to Bernad from “The White Lotus” season one that made that relationship work. So it was a lot of different things came together.

By the time I joined the project, it had already been decided that Rome was going to be the base for it.

Kirill: And who can say “No” to Rome?

Adam: You can’t say no. I lived in Rome when I was studying architecture. I did a semester of urban planning there when I was 20, and I had lived there for months. I knew the city. I love the city. I was familiar with it. Going back there to make a movie was an exciting opportunity.


On location of the bathhouse, before construction. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Where was the main location, and how much were you able to do there in terms of taking over the spaces and making them fit the story?

Adam: The principal location was Villa Parisi, which is a villa and grounds about 45 minutes outside of the center of Rome. It was built in the early 17th century, and it had undergone different periods of renovation, as had been the residence of a Cardinal and this noble family. The place had a lot of history. That started as a principal location, but there were 8-9 other locations that made up the convent in places in and around Rome, like the town of Nepi north of Rome where we shot in the cathedral for the chapel of the convent and the crypt.

All of these locations are historic places. You have to get permits to shoot there, and it’s challenging. But each one offers so much inherent production value, and there’s a lot to embrace.

The main location at Villa Parisi serviced Cecilia’s room and some of the other nun’s rooms, the refectory where they ate, some exteriors, the front courtyard, and some other locations. We were mostly adding set dressing, window treatments, lighting, candles – and the architecture of the place played for what it was. You see the murals, the arches, the columns – it was all inherent to the location. But it was empty when we took it over. There was nothing in it.

Kirill: When they are walking around the hallways, and there’s these beautiful frescoes on the walls, was it already there?

Adam: Yes, the frescoes were there. Originally I was a little adverse to this location, because they were not religious frescoes. All of them were secular from around 19th century, depicting different time periods. At first it felt like they were not appropriate to the story or to the idea of a convent. But as we got further into it, the actual subject matter of them mattered less than the richness of detail and texture that they add to scenes. You’re not analyzing the subject of that artwork, so much as using it to create a feeling of the place. It was a critical location.


Additional design spec of the bathhouse. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Much of central and southern Europe has deep Christian roots, and it’s seen in churches that you can visit as a tourist. There’s so much material opulence inside, from wall decorations to stained glass to elaborate fabrics to gilded statues, which stands in such a stark contrast with what the church teaches about the individual austerity, if you will. The priests and the nuns are expected to dress modestly and behave with humility. How did you approach this contrast of the richness of the environment with the sparseness of the nuns?

Adam: It was a creative struggle in preparing to shoot. Initially I had envisioned an environment that was way more ascetic, spartan, almost medieval in quality – rough stone walls, and old raw wood furniture, and things that spoke to what one might think of as a monastic or cloistered life.

But as we got more into it, and we started to identify locations that spoke to us, we swung hard in the other direction. We found that there was almost something odd, in a way, about having not only the richness of the architecture and the frescoes of these locations, but then what we brought to it in terms of textiles and furniture and lighting. This richness does speak to what you identify as this contradiction in certain parts of the Catholic faith between the notion of humility and simplicity to the environments in which this religion is practiced, and it was appropriate for Rome in particular.

We watched a film called “Black Narcissus” that was made in 1947. It’s about nuns who go to the Himalayas as missionaries, and they’re in this place up in the mountains. There was that odd contrast between the nun’s life as missionaries, and this arabesque or oriental palace in the mountains. We loved the strangeness of that contrast. Eventually we wound up embracing that.

Cecilia’s character comes from the United States, and she has no experience of a world like this. It amplifies her experience of a new environment that’s so rich in detail and texture. In a sense, it’s almost distracting her from the evils that may be lurking ahead.


Final still of Cecilia’s room. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: How did you approach building your room? There’s the bed, but also in the same space there’s the bathtub, the toilet and the sink. Did you take over an existing room, or was it empty to begin with?

Adam: The bathroom existed, but it wasn’t in the best shape. We had to add some things and fix it up a bit. There were two rooms that shared this bathroom in between, and after looking at a lot of different geographies for that space, it wound up matching what we had in mind for the character of Gwen to be in that other bedroom. They have this shared space for the first time, and then there’s also some drama playing out with Cecilia going through Gwen’s room or hearing things on the other side of the door. There was a natural geography there that we embraced. The villa has about 100 rooms, and we took these two rooms and we turned them into the bedrooms for those characters.

Kirill: And you said the chapel was in a different place.

Adam: The chapel was the cathedral in Nepi, which is a small town to the north of Rome. There’s a lot of churches in Rome, and we looked at a lot of churches before we found the one that was just right. By that time, we had already decided on the villa as the base location, and at that point we were seeking locations that made sense stylistically and in terms of scale with that base location.

We wanted to find a place that had a grandeur to it, that felt almost exaggerated for what you would find as a cathedral in a convent. It continues that idea of this impressive, ornate space where Cecilia is in awe. It also fit the time period, the style of architecture, the decoration.

There was another thing about that cathedral. In some churches there’s a crypt that’s accessible from in front of the altar, and this one had an iron gate with stairs that went down under the altar to an older period stone crypt, which became the space where the relic of the crucifixion nail was kept. It was a struggle to find that relationship of spaces in one location, but it worked there perfectly.


Final still of the bathhouse. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Where was the space with the communal bathtubs?

Adam: It was my favorite. It was an old horse stable on the grounds of the villa, and it was a rough space that needed some love to clean it up. We built the pool and installed the showers. All of that was our intervention. It was essentially a barn, but it had this great big arch, and some interesting light with the windows that were there, and a cobblestone floor. Those are some of my favorite moments when you turn the most unexpected space into something completely different that works so well.


Full design spec of the bathhouse. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: What about the medical lab that we see in the last part of the movie?

Adam: The lab was in a place in Rome called Forte Bravetta, which was a military installation going back to the 18th century, and used heavily in World War II. It was a subterranean space in that building, and its architectural elements tied into other locations in terms of vaults. There was something about it that was much more utilitarian, much less decorative.

We were looking for something that could be believable as a bridge between this world of the convent and this world of the catacombs. In terms of the detail or architecture of it, it had to fall somewhere in between, and be believable as something that could be subterranean to the convent itself, but yet not be so similar in terms of architecture and detail.


Design schematics for the lab. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

It was the most challenging set for that very reason. Not only was it a pivotal story moment to discover that this lab – which is so different from any of the other sets – exists within this convent, but also to make it feel like it was believable as a part of the convent, and the hinge that took you from the above-ground world of the convent into the subterranean world.

It was also difficult logistically, as it was underground. It was a set where we had so many challenging things to shoot, in terms of practical effects and special effects, like fire and smoke and the explosion. You have breakaway glass bottles, and she douses the whole place in water, and there’s the fireplace with the poker. It was a lot, and we had two days to shoot all of the material down there. That’s a favorite set as well, but it was certainly the most challenging – creatively, logistically, and in terms of tricks we needed to accomplish.


Full design spec of the lab. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Do you find that such constraints are a welcome thing, that they make you focus on delivering a certain thing in a certain timeframe?

Adam: It’s constructive in a way, but you always need a little bit more money than you have. I’ve never been on a project where the appetite of the film matches its budget. There’s always some distance between how much money you have and what you want to create. It always feels like you need another 20-30% more to make it a little more comfortable.

The more experienced you get, the more you can go into a project understanding the budget scope. I start tailoring my vision for a project to the budget from day one. From the first location we go out on, from the first read of the script as a team, I’m already thinking about it in terms of asset allocation. What are the most important moments in the story? What are the most important sets to tell the story, or to support character, or to support character arc? How can I allocate maximum resources to those sets, not by ignoring the other sets, but by having the minimal intervention in some places to maximize the effect that happens?

That’s how my brain works. Even in the creative process, I need to prioritize the most important things that I need to accomplish. Then I can get to secondary and tertiary. As you’re prepping a movie, you wind up condensing locations, and moving scenes from one location to another to expedite shooting. The constraints can help you streamline, not just for production design, but for other departments. You maximize where you need to put the resources to get the most important moments.


Final still of the refectory table. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: One thing that stood out to me was that cross-shaped table for the welcome supper. It felt a bit elevated, but it’s probably not the most efficient way to seat people around the table. What was the thinking there?

Adam: That is an homage to “Black Narcissus”. There’s a scene there before the nuns traveled to the Himalayas. It’s a shot of their refectory as the nuns sit at the table and eat, and there’s a similar cross-shaped table. We were really into that movie at the time, and it was a fun little nod to that.


Reference stills of the refectory table in “Black Narcissus” [1947].

Kirill: Going back to the last part of the movie, let’s talk about the catacombs. I’ve never been in one, but I have this general idea of how they’re “supposed” to look like from stories such as these. How is it in the real world? Do they come in all different sizes and layouts?? How do you find the right catacombs for your story?

Adam: They vary pretty widely. As everything in Rome, their catacombs go way back, and they have adapted and changed over 2,000 years. You can trace the original catacombs to the ancient Etruscans that lived in that region before the Romans. They did a lot of excavation into the soft layer of limestone of the area for all different sorts of spaces. I don’t know that they particularly used them as burial sites originally, but at some point the Romans expanded the catacombs when it became illegal to bury people inside the city of Rome, because there was too many people to bury. They had to go to these catacombs outside the city, and so they grew and expanded.

The ones that we shot in is on privately owned land. It’s a true catacomb and a very old one. It being on private land was ideal for us, because we had complete control over it. Many catacombs are open to tourists. They have conduits and lighting and railings and pathways all cut through them to make it safe for tourists. But this one was in its original state. The selling point for us was how authentic it is.


Final stills of the catacombs.

As we were exploring it, you could find sections where there was pagan artwork on the walls, Jewish artwork on the walls, Christian artwork on the wall, as it had been occupied by different groups over this long period of time. It was a cross-section of civilization in the region through that time.

They all differ in layouts, and we found one that worked for us physically. It had an area with a lot of connecting passageways that connect back to each other, not quite a grid, but also not a linear path. You could double back around corners, and that created a little playground where we could set up and get a lot of moments just by turning the camera this way and that way to follow the characters as they turn corners. There were some chambers there that worked as well.

Kirill: Did you do anything special for the ending sequence as she emerges off the hill side? Anything with the greenery to elevate that setting?

Adam: That was an ancient Roman ruin site called Montenero. The spot where Cecilia crawls through from the interior to the exterior was this huge arched passageway that you could almost stand up in. We ended up building that cramped tunnel into this big archway to make a confined space that she had to crawl and could be pulled back in. And then on the outside, we added a lot of greenery and vines. There was something existing there, but we did amplify that, and add a lot of material to hide that hole a little bit. That way, when you shoot it from the inside, you could see the overgrown quality and the exterior, and then make for a nice reveal of her coming out. It’s a great contrast between that dark dusty stone world of the interior and this bright green world of the outside.


Final still of Cecilia emerging from the catacombs.

Kirill: You said that the script has been in the works for about 10 years, and there’s never enough money. Is it a little miracle that any movie gets made?

Adam: Absolutely, and especially independent films. The studio system is undergoing a lot of changes right now. We don’t know where it’s going, but obviously they have the resources to make bigger projects. They can decide when they go, when they’ve got the right casting, when they’ve got the right moment in the market, all of that. But with the indie films, they have a lot less control over those things.

For everything to come together with script, talent, financing, location – it is a miracle when it happens [laughs].

Kirill: Does it feel sometimes almost random which stories capture the audience and which fly under the radar?

Adam: I don’t know if it’s random, as opposed to the chaos being a system so intricate that we don’t understand it. That’s the way public opinion or popularity with film and television media works. There’s so many factors involved in what attracts a broader audience at any given time. It’s affected by projects that might have come before it that piqued interest in a certain genre, or what’s happening in the world politically, economically, culturally, socially impacting what people may respond to.

If you look at today’s world, you see the pervasiveness of social media and social media marketing. That has changed the way that people find and respond to the content. In the past you had articles and movie reviews, and you might get data on how well the movie or a TV show was doing. But there’s so much more exposure for everyone. You have talent talking about their projects on social media and promoting them, and that has had an effect on where projects go.


Full lab floor plan. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

So often I see the marketing for a movie that I worked on, and the marketing seems so different from the project that I worked on. You have all this intention that you put into a project, and when the people marketing it take over, they look at it and say “How can we make this most appealing? How are we going to attract an audience to this?” and that may not align with your intentions for the movie.

It’s the long pursuit of all filmmakers to tap into what it is that interests audience. Our goal is to attract an audience, interest them, entertain them, or make them think. That’s always the goal, but it does feel like a lot of times you’re shooting in the dark. You have an idea, and you feel like it’s interesting or engaging, but you never know how it’s going to land.

Kirill: Does it feel that Covid is behind us in this professional industry?

Adam: I’m starting a new project this week, but I haven’t worked on a film since before the writer and actor strikes. It’s been a really tough year for film workers. I don’t know what it looks like on productions right now. Back then in mid-2023 we were still testing regularly, and still masking on set.

The film industry is known for being one of the sectors that had the most aggressive and successful approach to continuing to work under Covid through regimented and frequent testing, regimented safety protocols, inventing a new department on film sets for the Covid team. It’s what allowed film to bounce back in the way that it did a couple of years after Covid. I don’t know if it’s completely done, but it feels very much in the way that does not hold filmmaking back.


Initial rendering pass for the lab. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Speaking of the strikes, one of the major negotiating points was about the use of generative AI. Where do you find yourself these days? Are you intrigued? Are you aggravated? Are you anxious about it?

Adam: I’m not anxious about it. I’m more intrigued than anything. I see some beautiful and interesting AI generated art and video coming out, and we also see a lot of junk. What that makes me think is that the way that creatives interact with the technology is important to the end product. The AI by itself cannot create great content, but with thoughtful intervention from a human creative, you can yield something interesting.

The AI affects writers and actors in a much more direct way that it does production designers. I see AI becoming a useful tool for concept art and visualizing, and I think it’ll contribute a lot to the VFX world. I don’t want to see work taken away from people in those fields due to a rise in AI either, but for the moment, I see it as a promising tool that can help me do my job and push creativity.

What I do feel a little bit of anxiousness about is that it feels like the technology is developing so much faster than we have the ability to understand or to regulate if necessary, or to establish protocols around. Maybe the technology would benefit from taking a beat and letting humanity catch up to it [laughs], and figure out the implications and move forward with some awareness and wisdom. It feels like a runaway train sometimes, and that can be a little scary.


More detailed rendering of the lab walls. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.


More detailed rendering of the lab walls. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: Speaking of the words of wisdom, you’ve probably seen a few people burning out, and maybe you’ve been burned out yourself a couple times in your career. How do you avoid it, or perhaps it is an inescapable part of this field?

Adam: To a certain extent it is inescapable, particularly for a certain position. Department heads have a lot more responsibility and pressure. My problem is that I’m over-invested. Once I’m in a project, I cannot stop thinking about it. I cannot turn it off. I cannot back away. That’s the level of engagement that I bring to it. It brings my best work, but it also does exhaust me and burn me out.

There’s a way to find a work-life balance in the industry. For me it’s always been going 110% when I’m on a project, and then taking the time after to recover and not moving into a new project too quickly. Take a little time, rest, reset, get happy, and then go back into it. When I’m on a project, I do want to be able to give it my all.


On the lab set. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.


Final lab stills. Courtesy of Adam Reamer.

Kirill: What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out?

Adam: I never went to film school, and I didn’t have the base understanding of how filmmaking worked. If I did have that, it would have changed the way that I developed within the industry. But at the same time, to a large extent every production is so different. You’re learning a new way of filmmaking every time you do it. Of course, there’s standards that cut across. But each one requires an adaptation of strategy, creatively, logistically etc, to make it work at the budget level, for the subject matter, with the team. There are aspects of that that I don’t think can be known ahead of time.

What’s helped me in my career is that I’ve always taken a strong interest in other departments. I’m not necessarily on set all the time. A lot of my work is done behind the scenes, but I do spend a lot of time on set. Any time spent on set helps me learn how the filmmakers I’m working with work – how they’re shooting, in terms of how they’re lighting. I’m constantly learning about different methodologies and filmmaking, just by watching them working – and that varies from project to project too.

It’s super important for people in the industry to take an interest in other departments. It’s a collaborative art form. All of our work informs each other’s work. The more you understand someone’s discipline or their department, the better you do your job. For me, the cinematography is the principal one. The better I understand cinematographers, how they work, how they light, how they shoot the cameras, the lenses, the instruments, the better I can design sets that are conducive to their shooting.

And here I’d like to thank Adam Reamer for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design, and for sharing the supporting materials. “Immaculate” is available on a variety of digital platforms. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.