Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my honor to welcome Rick Carter. His wonderful career has brought us the worlds of the original “Jurassic Park” and its “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” sequel, “Forrest Gump”, “Cast Away”, “Polar Express”, both sequels in the “Back to the Future” trilogy, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and “Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker”, “Munich”, “Lincoln”, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and “Avatar”. He has won Academy Awards for the production design of “Avatar” and “Lincoln”. In this interview Rick talks about building a world that serves the story, the expansion and evolution of the role of the production designer in the last 50 years, the magic of watching these stories on big screens, and what advice he’d give to his younger self.

This interview is the third and final part of a special initiative – a collaboration with the Production Designers Collective that was founded in 2014. This collective brings together over 1,500 members from all around the world, sharing ideas, experiences and advice across the industry. We talk about its goals and initiatives, and the upcoming second International Production Design Week scheduled in mid-October this year. Here you can browse its full program, where you can filter by country, city, category and more to find an event near you.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself, and how did you start in the industry.

Rick: I grew up around the Hollywood filmmaking industry because my father was a publicist. I knew about it a little bit from the inside, but I wasn’t sure I wanted too much to do with it. After I went traveling extensively as a young man, it seemed to fit because of the art that was embedded in the art direction. It felt like that it would be a good path for me to see if I can make my way.

I think I came in also to a fortuitous time because the industry was in the midst of a lot of changes. This was in the early 1970s, and I was able to meet some people that I got along well with. So I had it quite good, because once I met Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, I had 20 years of the two of them as these two brothers, almost an older brother and a younger brother that I could collaborate with. They were so good at what they were doing in terms of making movies, and they took me along for the ride. I attribute a lot to where they went with their ideas and how those were realized.

It felt like I was growing up going on those adventures through the movies that we did together, from “Back to the Future” to “Jurassic Park” to “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”. There were so many adventures to go on in the stories – time travel, dinosaurs slave ships and islands, the future with the AI. I was introduced to so many worlds, and then I was the one who got to be in charge of making the worlds. That was an adventure to be called upon from my early thirties to my mid fifties. They were jobs, but it wasn’t that formal. It felt more like I was being invited to partake of their fantasies. And they were very interesting people, and they were successful with what they were doing.

Kirill: Would you say that you got to participate in this transition from special effects to visual effects? What kind of world building it unlocked for you?

Rick: There was the digital revolution, moving from analog to digital, and from optical to digital. The expansiveness of the digital realm has opened up how big the worlds can be as they come across on screen. They’re not necessarily built out more physically, and so the production design is more split now between the physical and the digital side of it.

It can be an historical world or a fantasy world, but they all share the same DNA for me. I ask myself how could I believe this? How could I truly be inspired to be at that place? That’s what I try to bring to the production design – the authenticity of the place that I’m in. I want to have it feel like it serves the story in the right way. And also, it needs to come together emotionally to be supportive of the actors and the narrative of the story. It’s an intuitive process, and there are many levels to manage through the process, be it set decoration, illustration or digital arts.

As production designers, we’re in the midst of this expansive arena, and it keeps on expanding as the technology keeps on expanding. Generative AI is just the latest example of this.

Rick Carter’s work on “Jurassic Park”.

Kirill: How do you see the role of the production designer evolving over these last few decades? I’m partial to the ’50s and the ’60s, with Hitchcock and Kubrick as some of my favorites. I just rewatched “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “To Catch a Thief”, and there is no production design credit. It was art direction, which later morphed into world building, and separating – or maybe elevating – the role of the production designer.

Rick: The elevation creation of the production design credit happened all the way back in 1939 with “Gone with the Wind”. They gave William Cameron Menzies a special title called production designer for that production, because he had so much involvement in all the development of the whole movie getting made.

But at that point, most people that were in the art direction end of it – they were art directors. Then, as you said, production design started slowly getting credibility through the ’60s into the ’70s. That gets to the era that I’ve been involved in, starting in the ’70s and all the way until now, where the movies have become so complex that more often than not, I’ve had co/production design collaborators. The role is so big and so diverse, and it’s important to have a way of making it cohesive, which often is beyond the capacity of one person. And it’s never really one person anyway. It is so collaborative. There’s so many people involved.

It certainly has expanded during my time. It used to be about drawing up physical sets and maybe do some illustrations, but nowadays it is about world building. We’ve also seen many games taking advantage of world building. You might or might not have a narrative in a particular game, but the world is still in there.

I don’t know where it’s going from here. It’s extremely expansive because of how much even my own minimal experience with the AI has been. I look at the AI as a partner and not a tool. It’s an advancement of what started with the digital revolution, and now it’s going that much further. You mentioned Kubrick, and he is in many ways a godfather of the concept of the AI. It wasn’t specifically digital in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, HAL is the entity brain. And then I got to work on “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” which was Kubrick’s concept.

I am old enough to have been around at those times, and that was my learning curve to see it a little broader than most people see it now – in the evolution of it from the analog times in the beginning of production design, through going into the digital realm to design worlds. Calling it “worlds” is an interesting way for people on the outside to perceive it. It’s almost a magician’s act. You’re always involved in something that the audience can see. But you have to really look at it and admire it. And when you’re admiring production design, you’re not into the movie. It’s almost going antithetical to how most people like to watch movies.

Rick Carter’s work on “Jurassic Park”.

Kirill: Another thing that I didn’t know up until recently is that only in 2012 the Academy rebranded the category of best art direction to best production design. Do you feel that it was too late? Or maybe it was the acknowledgement that production design superseded the physical builds?

Rick: I don’t think it’s too late. The two words – art and direction – are probably the two best credits you could possibly have. And it’s hard once you have it to give it up, even if it’s superseded by something that supposedly is more important. The head art director was the production designer, so in a way they had to eventually come to that way of recognizing it. If you’re giving the award to a production designer, why is it called the award for art direction? The branding and the clarity of the definition of the award was too difficult already for people to understand. It was more a function of trying to make it as clear as they could.

But in doing so, they did have to give up these two fantastic words. There’s no better role for anybody who’s in our side of things to want. Anybody who was anywhere near an artist would want an artistic credit or a direction credit of any sort. When you have the word “art” in it, that tells you what the role is. It’s not an artisan role. It’s not a craft. Those imply no thinking. That’s not what art is.

We have so many more thoughts than almost anybody, because we’re there in the beginning. I’m not saying that as an ego thing, and I’m not saying that we have more thoughts than a writer or a director. It’s because we’re exploring so much before anything’s there. By the time most people come into a movie, there’s a lot that’s been established. Usually there are no visuals that have been established, so there’s a tremendous amount of exploration that has to be done in order to find what you really want to do. It doesn’t fall off the tree and you go “yeah, that!”

You have to design it, you have to think about it. So I love the word art, and I think most people do. That’s why the Art Directors Guild is still the Art Directors Guild. They can’t give it up. They like it too much [laughs].

Rick Carter’s work on “Back to the Future Part II”.

Kirill: What is the Production Designers Collective for you?

Rick: It’s a long overdue and wonderful way for production designers to gather – literally – every two years on a Greek island. It goes beyond the superficial level of talk of what it is that we do and our role in the movies. It’s deeper places that we tap into that are not only artistic, but also philosophical. We also talk about the specific methodologies that are used to achieve the settings, physical or digital. The ability to get us all together in a relaxed atmosphere has been fantastic.

From there, it spawned the in-between weeks of events that coagulate and coordinate designers coming together to express what we do on movies, to interface with one another, and to illuminate for other people who are interested from the outside what our involvement is. It does not come at the expense of someone else. It’s not egotistically saying that we’re more. But it’s so easy to not see what we’re doing, and people enjoy trying to come up with words and images to express what it is that we get to do.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm around it. I’ve been doing this for many decades, and I get to interface with many younger people who are coming up. They’re not sure what it is or what their role will be in it. It’s changing so much and always has been. There are peaks and valleys. People can get a sense that this can be a lifelong pursuit. It’s not an adjunct thing that you did. It can be a real career as it is for me. It is an inspiring thing for me to mentor younger people, to have collaborative discussions with my peers, and to have a sense of legacy, to feel that there’s something going on beyond me that I’m handing off.

My opinion is that the mentoring part of it is as much for the mentor as it is for the mentee. You feel there’s something that you’re passing on. I had mentors when I was starting, and I’d love to be able to do that now. That’s what the collective helps with.

Kirill: Do you want to reach a wider audience inside the industry and outside of it with these initiatives?

Rick: There’s a lot of desire on the part of many production designers who are in the collective to be able to not just reach, but to communicate with others in the industry as to what the role is. The idea is that it is given as much respect and encouragement to participate as I’ve had in my career.

Where I am now, I’m beyond the point of being ambitious to have it turn into something more than it is and has been. I want to share that, but not because I see any specific gain. I don’t know whether any of it will ever be something that will help people from the outside to see it, although I have seen a bit of that.

For me, the more important part of it is how do the production designers regard themselves? I want to encourage them to regard themselves as artists. You have so many pragmatic things you have to do. You’re held so accountable to schedules and budgets. But I want to make sure that as a production designer, you contribute to the vision of it and foster the collaborative nature of helping the movie become something special. We’re the keepers of the dream, because we’re introduced to it so early. We believe it early, and the directors look to us to maintain that all the way through our involvement with it.

We’re never there just to give them the bad news of what they can’t do. That’s the job of the producer and the studio’s production manager. We’re on the side of encouraging their dream and trying to show how they can get it through pragmatic solutions. That’s a wonderful role to have in the collaborative process.

Rick Carter’s work on “Back to the Future Part III”.

Kirill: You mentioned that you do not necessarily want me as a viewer to think about production design, because you want me to be in the story. Do you feel there’s a certain tension between promoting production design as an artistic discipline versus it taking the backseat to the story?

Rick: I don’t feel that at all. I feel like I found the key to how it works. You can look at the movies I’ve worked on. I can’t tell you how many people say to me “I grew up on your movies”. The answer is in working on good movies. Now, you don’t have control over how a movie is received. But I put my belief into truly contributing to the story and the vision and the emotion, into putting your own ego aside and putting it into the service of what the movie needs. That what worked out for me.

I know that there are many people who did wonderful work, and it doesn’t show up. Maybe the movie is not good. Maybe it’s not memorable for whatever reason. Maybe it doesn’t get the attention that the movies that I have been able to work on have. However, I think that you’re going to get the most notice from being in the service of the vision of the movie to help create the vision, to truly have a heartbeat, to truly have a mind, to actually resonate. People notice what I’m doing, because they see the movie, and they like the movie, and then they go a step deeper.

If people don’t like the movie you’ve designed all that much, it’s hard for them to say it. In fact, it’s almost the inverse. If you’re a production designer and your friend first tells you that they loved your work on it, it means that they likely didn’t like it the movie itself very much. It’s just the way it is. You’re happy that they liked your work, but most people go to movies for other reasons than how it looks.

The more that we’re associated with good storytelling and good heartbeats and philosophy, the more we will be always recognized for what we do. But that’s maybe my singular experience.

When artists are clamoring to be recognized, it becomes clamoring. It becomes that Rodney Dangerfield’s punchline “I don’t get no respect”. Anybody who works on movies can be in that situation where they can have a tinge of unfulfilled recognition – but if they voice that frustration too much, then that can go counter to having people want to give them their recognition. That’s my own personal view on it. But I very much admire all the work that’s being done by the collective to try to get the concept of the production designer out there.

I always want to have it be on the positive side of what we get to do, because it’s such an extraordinary job to get to do this. I can’t think of any other pursuit where we’re given the money and the resources to go explore things and come back with what we find. It’s pretty miraculous, even when there’s small budgets.

Rick Carter’s work on “Warhorse”.

Kirill: Speaking of making movies and going to movies, what is the magic of watching a movie in the big theater for you?

Rick: The most obvious aspect of it is the communal experience. When you’re watching a movie that is involving groups of people, there is a collective consciousness that starts to be in relationship to what’s going on on the screen. If it’s something like “Jurassic Park”, it’s visceral. People get very involved with who the dinosaur is about to attack.

After the first “Jurassic Park” came out, I watched it a few times as a viewer, and then I would go and sit in the front row and look at the audience. I knew what was coming, and I loved watching people’s collective response and how many were exactly the same. You see something bringing people together. They’re all tracking what’s going on. And it doesn’t have to be only the action sequences. It could be “Forrest Gump” catching people’s attention on a deep emotional level and identification level.

Seeing movies in cinema is so powerful becomes it comes from the collectivity of the group that’s with you.

The other part of it that you ask not during a movie but afterwards is – where is the movie playing at any given moment? It’s starting on the screen, but then it goes into your head. There are times when it goes in your head, and for ten minutes you don’t even know you exist. You’re just in it. Then maybe you see the audience or you hear somebody laugh, and there’s that empathy experience between what’s in your head that’s so esoteric and what’s coming at you that’s exoteric. It bounces back and forth. There’s a gap.

I call it “minding the gap” between those two levels. The breathing between those two is the cinematic experience – in a theater, particularly. It can happen in your own home, but it’s so easy to have your peripheral vision interfere with that. Some light over here, somebody says something, whatever it is, where you don’t stay so directly connected.

The art of the cinema is truly, over time, specifically able to keep people involved in that way. Older movies are a bit slower for the new generation. This generation is much faster with the literacy of the visual images, and maybe they can admire aspects more. When you’re young, a teenager of in your twenties, cinema is speaking to you. It’s a blessed moment. And older movies are like fine wine that you can enjoy over and over, at a different pace.

I hope we don’t lose the big cinema experience, because that’s definitely where that type of thing happens the most.

Rick Carter’s work on “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”.

Kirill: I can’t watch “Jurassic Park” in a movie theater, unless there’s a special event in one of the big cities. Do you find that newer audiences miss out on not being able to see “Avatar” or “Back to the Future” or “Star Wars” on the big screen?

Rick: I’m guessing they probably are. So much has change radically with Covid, pushing people to watch on their iPhones and home theaters. It’s amazing that the AI is coming up. It’s going to fundamentally change what we expect from entertainment. It’s a gray area, obviously, and it’s a big unknown.

We want great storytellers to tell us stories, and not have us to tell our own story, because we’re not that good. Most people pay money because they get something from what the moviemakers can do. But there is an aspect to when you see how much you can do yourself. It’s evolving right now, and it will change the dynamic of what you expect and at what level you expect it, both on the phone and all the way up hopefully to some big event. Stories bring people together in a communal way.

There’s something missing, but you can never go back. It becomes fruitless. You understand it more as you get older. It’s just a trap to go back too much. It’s great to have the screenings, but I don’t know if I’m going to count on the big initial releases the way it was done before. The business model that allows for movies to first get shown that way is changing. But people crave it, especially if they think it’s going to be something special.

Rick Carter’s work on “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”.

Kirill: It feels like in the last few years in the world of feature films, we see the big multi-hundred million dollar productions and a whole bunch of indies. And the mid-size drama looks to have moved to the episodic, streaming format. How do you feel about the evolution of where these stories are told?

Rick: That’s a fair assessment of what’s happened. You take “Forrest Gump”, “Munich” or “War Horse” that were mid-sized, and they wouldn’t be movies in the same way they were back then. They would be streamed. I’ve personally benefited by having so many people see the work in a large format. That’s what people did at those points in their life – they went out, and they saw movies, and they came back to the school, and they talked about it at school.

Movies had an impact on the culture, and culture had an impact on the movies. It was almost a dialogue. Cinema is a part of whatever is happening in the culture. Today they call is the zeitgeist. You can have impact with the music. There can even be a political aspect to it. It’s such an ethereal thing, and somehow I was fortunate to be at a time when some of these things mattered.

The computer use on “Jurassic Park” was the opening of what the computer could do to the public. It was an exciting moment for viewers and filmmakers. It felt almost like a Pandora’s box. What else could happen here? I’m not referring only to the technical side. Storytelling can be exuberant or sombering. A few of the movies that I worked on caught those moments through their own processes or serendipity, and that allowed me to see into that side of it that most people don’t necessarily get to see.

It’s not only even about how a movie performs when it first comes out. How does it last for a while? No movie lasts forever, but the idea is – what are we contributing to, and what is its impact? On a more personal level, it is also the type of imagery that we’re involved with in the production design. There are some old movies that you wouldn’t necessarily want to watch in their entirety, but there’s an image of them that you have in your mind. It’s taking you to a certain place in the way it was designed. It goes all the way back to the silent movies, which are difficult to watch for the modern audiences. But you look at the image of what was created in some of those old silent movies, and those worlds are absolutely fantastic. They can’t sustain the same pace as a modern movie, but the creation of that place for that world is something that can last quite a long time.

It goes well beyond the performances of the actors, the editing, the pace, and even the cinematography. They become dated. I’m not trying to put it above, but at the heart of it is an image. Sometimes, you look at those images, and you think that we can’t do that anymore. There hasn’t been anything even close to the version of “War and Peace” that was created in 1965 in the Soviet Union. It doesn’t matter how much technology you have. In my opinion, you’d almost be going in the opposite direction to try to make the scale work using only technology, even for a current audience. The original film had its own vision in the service of a powerfully epic and profound story, and it was marshaled into a six hour movie. It is never going to be topped. I hope it gets preserved, because then it’s like a painting that can last forever.

There are movies that sear in with their vision, not because of production design, but because of what they’re about and the combination of all of its parts coming together. I get excited that we get to participate in that aspect of it.

Rick Carter’s work on “Forrest Gump”.

Kirill: Speaking about images that are seared in your mind, what films would you consider to be the golden standard of production design of all time?

Rick: The sequence in “The Wizard of Oz” where we’re opening the door from Dorothy’s black-and-white bedroom to the full Technicolor world of Oz that represents the shift between one reality and another reality. The way that singular transition was created can never be topped, in my mind.

Another one is Tara, the plantation house in “Gone with the Wind”. The tree, the mansion, and the whole concept – it is all taken away by the Civil War. It’s created in this glorification of color and exuberance, and yet the harshness of what happens almost becomes unbearable a little bit because there was so much put into what then gets destroyed.

Going to my own era when I was growing up, it would be “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” – not a singular moment, but its whole world. I entirely believed it. It was so artistically expressive in how it was presented. And around the same time, “Chinatown” also came out. It had a different feel, and I felt enveloped in that world. There was something indelible for me in those experiences. And I’ll add “Apocalypse Now”, which was a way of telling what I had just been through for myself in the Vietnam War era, with a surreal point of view that had theatricality to it. Its words seared into my FEELINGS, and it was set in a classically large, deeply resonant settings.

Rick Carter’s work on “Avatar”.

Kirill: If you could go back in time to give a piece of advice to your younger self when you were starting out, what would it be?

Rick: When I was 20, I was traveling around the world and I didn’t know where I was going. Much of what seeped in then, became the basis for what I’ve worked out later. So I would tell my younger self that these experiences that you’re having now (back then) are going to play out in ways you can’t imagine. Don’t only judge them by what you think their importance is to you right now, because some of the ones that aren’t even pleasant, will come back to matter to you in unexpected ways that I’ve had that happen to me. Don’t get too hung up in the moment. Your point of view on it right now is not a problem you have to fix.

Kirill: What keeps you going in this field?

Rick: I’m still interested. Early on, I was fortunate enough to go out into the world, and to see the role that art has in it. The artistic life is worth a lot to lots of people. It’s not about the money or the status. It’s about the need to express. If you’re given an opportunity to be in that arena or that role of an artist within any context, it’s a very special role to have.

Of course, I was specifically inspired by Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis for 20 years. They never made it difficult for me to be a part of their world to help create. That’s what kept me always coming back to it, both from the interior, but also the exterior version of it.

Rick Carter’s work on “Avatar”.

And here I’d like to thank Rick Carter for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of production design. I also want to thank Javier Irazuzta for making this interview happen. To stay up-to-date on the latest news from the International Production Design Week, click here. 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.