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An interview with the Oscar-winning production designer from newly published book Production Design.
The production designer of films such as Jurassic Park, War Horse and Avatar talks about his work in this excerpt from Production Design, a FilmCraft book written by Screen contributor Fionnuala Halligan and published by Taylor and Francis.
The book's other interviewees include Ken Adam, Jim Bissell, William Chang, Stuart Craig, Nathan Crowley, Dante Ferretti, Jack Fisk, Sarah Greenwood, Eve Stewart and Dean Tavoularis among others.
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 Vietnam War, he dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley and eventually entered the art department for the first time as an assistant on Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory (1976), followed by James Bridges' The China Syndrome (1979). His first credit as art director was with Ashby again on Second-Hand Hearts (1981), but art-directing The Goonies in 1985 was a pivotal job for the designer, as it led to another key meeting for Carter: with that film's writer and producer Steven Spielberg. The two hit it off and began a close working relationship that endures to this day.
While Carter's first credit as production designer was on Francis Veber's The Three Fugitives (1989), it was Spielberg's TV series Amazing Stories (1985-87) that cemented their relationship and also led to an encounter with Robert Zemeckis. Carter proceeded to work exclusively with Spielberg and Zemeckis for the next 20 years, on everything from Back To The Future Part II and Part III (1989 and 1990), and Death Becomes Her (1992) to Jurassic Park and its first sequel The Lost World (1993 and 1997), Forrest Gump (1994), Amistad (1997), What Lies Beneath (2000), Cast Away (2000), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), The Polar Express (2004), War of the Worlds (2005), and Munich (2005). Carter then took up the three-year challenge that was the giant, ground-breaking production of Avatar (2009) for another Hollywood titan--James Cameron--and his most recent credits are Sucker Punch (for director Zack Snyder, 2011), and War Horse (2011) and Lincoln (2012), both for Spielberg. Carter...