Filmcraft: Production Design

Rick Carter

“I’m not selling architecture, I’m not selling decoration. I’m seeing and realizing the image. The very fact that it is designed, literally, not to be seen, means it takes a certain type of person. Perhaps it’s best described as a magician’s illusion. You’re looking right at it, but if you are aware of it, it means you are not suspending your disbelief. Admiring it is a very distant cousin to believing it.”

Born in 1952, Rick Carter grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by the movie industry—his father was a publicist for the actor Jack Lemmon—but took a while to come to the world of film himself. A conscientious objector to the ...