Steven Spielberg once told an audience of filmmakers that after writers, production designers – the artists and craftspeople who create the visual environment of a film – have the most important vision, but that they “just don’t get enough credit for it.”
That’s according to Rick Carter, Spielberg’s longtime Oscar-winning production designer.
It’s just one of the anecdotes that underlines programming in the first-ever International Production Design Week, a worldwide celebration of production design in film and television.
The festival, which features more than 20 events in New York City alone, runs from Friday Oct. 20 through Sunday Oct. 29, with further in-person and online events in multiple languages, across dozens of cities including Tokyo, São Paulo and Prague.
The New York events offer a look behind the scenes of the sometimes-overlooked design elements in film and television. They include movie screenings, Q&As with production designers, and tours of prop fabrication studios and soundstages.
Organizer Inbal Weinberg, an NYU film grad who has designed movies from “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” to “The Place Beyond the Pines,” says that on any project, the art department is the biggest presence on set.
“On a really tiny indie film, it could be 20 people,” Weinberg said. “On a Marvel movie, it’s maybe 300 people working every day – carpenters, painters, illustrators, draftspeople and prop buyers.”
With production work still largely stopped as the actors’ strike enters its fourth month, Weinberg says the economic impact in New York has ripples beyond the industry.
“We do a lot of our work on the streets of New York City,” Weinberg said, from purchasing design items in stores, to renting from prop houses and buying specialized material that’s normally inherent to the interior design trade.
“We actually involve a lot of New York City vendors that are also hurting right now,” Weinberg said.
Along those lines, the festival’s programming aims to show connections between film production design and the greater worlds of design, interiors and architecture.
The full schedule is available here; select “New York” from the dropdown for local events. We’ve highlighted a few of the most interesting below.
See film screenings at Metrograph with Q&As from industry legends
Famed production designers from Mark Friedberg (“Synecdoche, New York” and “Joker”) to Kristi Zea (“Goodfellas” and “The Silence of the Lambs”) will introduce their films, with a moderator-led discussion at the Metrograph theater on the Lower East Side. Julie Taymor, perhaps best known as director of “The Lion King” on Broadway, will present her 2007 jukebox musical “Across the Universe.” There are various screenings throughout the week and you can learn more here.
Tour The Specialists design and fabrication shop in Ridgewood
These industrial designers have built large and small-scale specialized props for decades’ worth of film and television productions, from ammunition boxes in the “John Wick” film series to masks from USA’s “Mr. Robot.” They are opening their studio space for a look at their mold-making, blacksmith shop, sculptors studio and more. The tour takes place on Tuesday, Oct. 24 at noon and you can learn more here.
Tour Great Point Studios in Yonkers
When Great Point Studios opened last year, it was touted as a step towards making Yonkers the “Burbank of New York” — the place just outside of town where movie magic has space to be made. Renowned studio Lionsgate signed on as the primary tenant. The studio will be offering a production design-focused tour on Tuesday, Oct. 24 at 6 p.m. and you can learn more here.
Tour the Decoration & Design Building
The Lenox Hill D&D building, as it’s known to the legions of interior design professionals who rely on its concentration of showrooms for their work, is generally closed to anyone outside the industry. But Design Week organizer Inbal Weinberg says that anyone in the general public with a connection to the design world should feel free to sign up for this tour led by Sara K. White, production designer for HBO’s “The Flight Attendant” and more. The tour takes place on Thursday, Oct. 26 at 2 p.m. and you can learn more here.
Virtual events
There are also a number of interesting virtual events, such as a panel discussion about the worldbuilding behind the Apple TV+ adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel “Pachinko,” and an animation masterclass with the artist and illustrator behind Marvel’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.”
To learn more, visit International Production Design Week.