10 Questions With… Production Designer Ramsey Avery

Production designer Ramsey Avery used the color of White House Blue Room to represent a sense of control in Captain America: Brave New World.

Ramsey Avery, the production designer for Captain America: Brave New World, has an impressive portfolio that spans film, TV shows, themed entertainment, and commercials. His latest project opened in theaters on Valentine’s Day weekend to a $192 million haul—but it cost Marvel $180 million to make, much of which went to Avery’s work, which is front and center as Anthony Mackie’s character, Sam Wilson, navigates an international incident involving President Thaddeus Ross, played by the evergreen Harrison Ford.

Avery designed the film’s White House interiors to reflect President Ross’s prescient approach, drawing inspiration from Jackie Kennedy’s 1960’s designs. He meticulously sourced furniture and incorporated unique design elements ranging from printed designs on the carpet and Easter eggs in the wallpaper to help tell the story. His commitment to grounding the story led him to scout and redesign locations from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta, ensuring that over 60% of principal photography was shot on location. This dedication to realism is evident throughout his work.

From his early days as an astrophysics major who also acted, Avery has always been fascinated by world-building. This passion fuels his career, which includes art directing on the sitcom Roseanne and designing the Second Age lands for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He has also designed for other notable projects, including The Consultant, Minority Report, A.I., Team America, Star Trek: Into Darkness, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. As a production designer, Avery’s credits include 10 Cloverfield Lane, Hotel Artemis, Peppermint, and Waitress. He has also designed national commercials for major brands like Budweiser, Microsoft, and Capri Sun, and even a Super Bowl spot for Dodge.

Production designer Ramsey Avery shows off Captain America’s shield.

Avery’s talent extends to themed entertainment as well. He designed the Avenger’s Campus for Disney’s California Adventure (DCA), including the Webslingers interactive attraction. His Animation Pavilion at DCA previously won a THEA award. He has also contributed to live attractions like a Royal Saudi Wedding in Riyadh and country singer Martina McBride’s Christmas national tour. We asked him how he gets it all done.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ramsey Avery Pulls Back the Curtain On Set Design

Production designer Ramsey Avery used the color of White House Blue Room to represent a sense of control in Captain America: Brave New World.

Interior Design: What’s your background?

Ramsey Avery: I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I helped my father, who was a middle school principal most of the year, build houses as his second job in the summer. I devoured science fiction and fantasy books and loved Dungeons and Dragons—places where new worlds challenged and enlarged my small-town life. When I mowed the backyard in the summer, I would create stories for the various patches of grass. Whether they were small, wet depressions, dead patches, or zones covered with anthills, each of those areas was its kingdom, alive with its people and passions.

ID: How about educationally?

RA: I studied physics in college, with an emphasis on astronomy and cosmology. But I also loved theater, which led to the opportunity to be the first student at the University of Wyoming to design on the main stage. From there, I went to graduate school in set design at the California Institute of the Arts.

My education has never stopped—every project brings the equivalence of a new degree in some unexpected field. I’ve learned about particle accelerators for Star Trek, mobile phone game design for The Consultant, small-town pie making for The Waitress, magnetic levitation car systems for Minority Report, the deep wells of Hinduism for a new project, The Ramayada, and literally everything Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Plus, I learn from the hundreds of talented people around me: powerful metal workers and delicate textile artists, brilliant illustrators and deeply thoughtful set designers, costume designers who know all about why a silhouette tells a specific story of time and place and character, and directors of photography who can expound for hours on what a particular quality of light means emotionally.

Remington sculptures and Hudson School–style landscapes dot the Oval Office set, inspired by the presidencies of Kennedy and Reagan.

ID: How did you transition to production design?

RA: Pauli Jenkins, the advisor on my graduate thesis project, was a lighting designer from Wyoming who worked in L.A. theater. She introduced me to her friend John Lacovelli, who was a theatrical set designer from New York, but currently working in sitcoms. I was insanely fortunate to graduate with that MFA and start the very next Monday as a PA on The Cosby Show because a strike in New York suddenly threw that production to L.A., and John needed help. That show’s production designer, Garvin Eddy, loved my theater training, so he asked me to stay on as he started new shows A Different World and Roseanne.

Three weeks later, John left to do a movie, and suddenly, I was in charge of doing all of the modeling, drawing, decorating, budgeting, overseeing construction, and even running the trucking on what became two of the most successful productions on television. I learned how TV leveraged many of the same storytelling tools as theater, but for a camera instead, which controlled the audience’s viewpoint in a different way than blocking and lighting did on a stage for a live audience.

Through an odd series of connections, I ended up set designing for a Frank Oz–directed Energizer Bunny commercial and met Alex McDowell, a brilliant production designer. He taught me how a single camera took light and texture and created a world in a different way than the three-camera world and open-sided sets of sitcoms. When he left commercials to do film, I inherited many of his commercial contacts, so I had a chance to put these things to work as a production designer. That leaves out all of the work I did in that same time period designing environments for Walt Disney Imagineering and various Disney theme parks. I loved that, too!

ID: What’s an average day for you?

RA: There is really no such thing as an average day in film and TV. It depends on the day, where we are in the process of a project, and what fires need to be put out. Everything I do comes from the deepest well of research that I can unearth to support the story we are trying to tell. In pre-production, I can start the day by talking to concept artists around the world. For example, on Rings of Power, we had people working across nine time zones on five continents in 13 cities. I’d start talking to people in the U.S. and New Zealand at 5:30 a.m. and then work my way with the sun’s travels to Australia, Singapore, Argentina, Italy, Belgium, and Spain, ending my day at 10 p.m. with London. Captain America wasn’t quite as intense; we just had artists working across America.

After calls or zooms in the morning, I will review the work the designers are doing in our office and then work out construction techniques and paint finishes, sort out how we may be building a cherry blossom tree, or talk to Set Decorating about the texture and fall of a drape, or Props about how a weapon should be carried in a holster. I can spend time talking to Special Effects about how to move a platform to make it look like a ship’s deck is tilting or, like on Captain America, how we have to choose and prep a car so that the department can send it flying through the air and appear to slice in half. There are always conversations with Visual Effects on determining how much of a set to build and where to make the hand off. And there are conversations with the 1st assistant director to work out what order we are going to shoot scenes to give us enough time to get the set ready.

I spend a lot of time in cars (and sometimes helicopters) with location scouts, looking for places to shoot a scene that we don’t want to build. All of that has to be worked out with the director of photography in terms of how they are going to light and film the things we create. And there are constant conversations with producers about time and money. This is all within the context of constant conversations with the director about how the environments we are creating will tell the story. Then, we start building and filming, getting the camera crew ready on one set before dashing off to make sure the set we are shooting on the next day is ready.

The White House Rose Garden was built at Trinity Studios in Atlanta.

ID: Who are your architecture and design influences?

RA: I love thinking about how Art Nouveau can visually complicate a design and still control the way our eye follows its story, but also how Brutalism powerfully distills a design to its core elements of shape and light. I love how photographers Nan Goldin and Gregory Crewdson use color and light in vibrant but very different ways, as well as how photographers Weegee and Horst P. Horst use light and contrast in black-and-white to focus an emotional response. The muscular massing in painter Thomas Hart Benton is such a powerful tool in his storytelling, but I love the mystery and light in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, or, especially, one from artist J.M.W. Turner—how can we use light to hide or reveal the story we want to tell? Director Hayao Miyazaki’s visual storytelling always inspires me: lush yet clear, and things are not always what they seem. The design of the Hadron Collider particle accelerator also inspires in its hubris fulfilled through painstaking detail and thought.

Every day, as I walk about, it is fascinating to observe how people sculpt the spaces around them to make them fit their story. Looking at shops, homes, and freeways always tells me something about the world and how we can tell a story in it.

ID: Why did you model this White House after Jackie Kennedy’s from the 1960’s? What is the significance of that choice?

RA: It is part of Ross’s story that he wants to become a better person—he wants to bring people together, and he wants to show that he can inspire unity. As we looked through the previous versions of the White House, the Kennedy White House stood out. It was an effort of both restoration and creation—looking all the way back to former First Lady Dolley Madison and, at the same time, how they could use American designers to create a sense of American optimism. Plus, there was a strong simplicity to Jackie’s approach. Her bold use of color and simple shapes had an almost comic book graphic simplicity that both fit within a Marvel context and also spoke to the “meticulous design” the director, Julius Onah, wanted us to emulate from both 70’s paranoid thrillers and 21st-century films containing a sense of unseen control.

The White House Colonnade is one of many of the design details inspired by Jackie Kennedy’s version of the White House.

ID: Why were 1970’s political thrillers an inspiration for you? And were there elements from specific films you could point to?

RA: Julius had a long list of films that conveyed this sense of outside and sometimes unknowable powers controlling the characters in their stories. Most were ‘60’s and ‘70’s paranoid thrillers like Day of The Jackal, Le Samouraï, Point Blank, and Parallax View. He also liked more contemporary movies that had a similar sentiment, like Trance and The Killing of the Sacred Deer. Those movies are all very different in design and style, but when you view them together, you notice they use a specific viewpoint, choosing specific camera angles sculpted with form, color, and light to convey a specific mood in each scene. That mood supports a visual stance that tells us something about the key characters at that point in the story. They spoke about how the composition of the frame gathered the color and the lighting to frame the characters.

ID: Tell us about how you blended historical research into White House interiors with the Marvel universe.

RA: In many ways, it wasn’t so much about blending Marvel into the design—it was about meeting the emotional needs of our story in each scene. We wanted to emphasize our themes of control and safety versus anger and chaos in the White House sets, using our thematic colors of blue versus red. We first see Ross in the Blue Room, where he meets Sam and expresses his desire to control a new version of the Avengers. Under that sense of control, though, there is a subtle note of something not quite right: the wallpaper is an interlocking web of shield patterns and fine lines, suggesting that there is something already constraining our characters. We contrast those blues with the next scene where we see him, in a bit of foreshadowing, stride out onto a brilliant red carpet. He then goes into a room of yellows. The East Room. Yellow is our color where control starts to slip away, as it does with the attempted assassination.

We also brought that blue into the Oval Office in the carpet, drapes, and upholstery (much like Kennedy’s Oval Office). At this point in the movie, Ross thinks he has regained control, so we wanted to emphasize that with our colors. But you will note that the wallpaper is a vertical bar of pale yellows—he is still trapped, and things are still uncertain, as we clearly discover in the next scene outside in the rose garden, where the Red Hulk lazes against the blues of the press stands, destroying them.

On the practical side of all of that was a massive effort by our Set Decorating team to find or make the pieces that told these stories. They found furniture in the old prop warehouses at Warner Bros., but had to rebuild them to make them safe, and we sculpted eagles to add to various armrests. There were pieces procured in a sale of set dressing from the recently completed First Ladies series that was shot in Atlanta, where we were filming. Since we were in Georgia, we did have decent access to antebellum pieces from antique stores or estate sales. 

One overall note about Marvel in this world is that the idea of “meticulous design” aligns closely with how comic books treat environments. The design of the paranoid thrillers was often reduced in palette or detail to emphasize the character in the scene. That same thing is even more true in comic books—the backgrounds are often reduced to some blocks of color and a few lines. To keep our emphasis on our characters and their emotional stories, we looked to simplify their worlds. We turned to Jackie Kennedy’s Queens Bedroom design, where the space was entirely a field of blue to inspire our Blue Room, and at the way her blue curtains, upholstery, and carpet simplified and organized the Oval Office in a cleanly graphic way. Marvel meets Kennedy meets emotional narrative filmmaking.

The East Room is in shades of yellow to signify control starting to slip away, a device inspired by 1970’s political thrillers.

ID: Why did you prioritize scouting and redesigning locations from D.C. to Atlanta to have over 60% of principal photography shot on location? What would have been the alternative?

RA: It was important to director Julius Onah that this superhero story concentrates on the human characters within it. That is, they wanted to move away from the more fantastical elements of recent movies to things that felt more visceral and recognizable in our world. It became clear as we worked through the design of the film that the movie became about those ideas and not the characters.

Throughout the movie, we looked for the same things—if a story could be grounded in a real place and still support the action and filming we needed, we wanted to find that real location. If we didn’t, it made our movie feel less “real” overall. Plus, there are some places that just look like nowhere else. Washington is built using strict rules about the style, height, and spacing of buildings that happens nowhere else in the world. It is hyper-specific. So, it was important to try and film there instead of trying to cheat it in Atlanta or create it in visual effects.

ID: What’s next for you professionally? Where do you go from here?

RA: After Captain America, I spent almost a year working on an epic retelling of The Ramayana with visual effects studio DNEG in India. I am also currently in pre-production on a film that I can’t disclose details on at the moment.

President Ross, played by Harrison Ford, makes an address in the Rose Garden.