Production Designer Mark Ricker first film gig was Bull Durham. What an experience. From speaking with Ricker, however, his life in show business is one surreal experience after another. As the Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans production designer put it, “it’s a great, great gig.”
The frequent Jay Roach collaborator, who’s currently working on the director’s remake of War of the Roses, has a remarkable eye for detail. When he starts to build or recreate a world, he even thinks about the grain in the marble tile, at least in the case of the compelling second season of Feud.
Recently, Ricker spoke with Immersive Media about recreating Truman Capote’s (Tom Hollander) apartment, Babe Paley’s (Naomi Watts) home, and his journey in the industry.
[Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity and length]
Where did your work start? Did you focus on Capote or the Swans first?
Well, it started with Capote. It’s a scene that was cut out of the show, but the series was supposed to open with an interview with Lee Bailey, the famous Lee Bailey from the O.J. Simpson trial. I’ve forgotten the details of why he was interviewing Truman, but they were in a cottage in Sagaponack that I have actually been to in my youth. I just had connections to the painter who bought it and his assistant who, anyway, long story short, I was very excited to replicate this cottage.
And then the scene got cut and the entire cottage got cut because of budgetary reasons and various other things. But I did start with Capote because of my experience with that cottage and also my experience with the apartment that he rented in Brooklyn Heights on Willow Street. He rented it from a famous set designer, Oliver Smith. He was a Broadway designer, did the original Oklahoma, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady. I studied with him at NYU for exactly one day.
And then, he passed away. But when he did, then I found myself in his house. I feel like I’ve walked similar paths as Truman. So, of course when this came to me, I was just licking my chops to do it. And then, it was just a deep dive. I pulled my Gerald Clarke [Capote] biography off of the shelf again and was flipping through. I mean, what’s better than Truman Capote?
The Swans themselves, I was vaguely aware of specifics within their lives, particularly Babe. It was just a deep dive into who all of them were as people and getting into the details of their world in every way that I could.
For the Swans, how much did you want their environments to reflect them? Was there also the question of, well, is this an extension of themselves or someone they paid to make it an extension of themselves?
Exactly. I think it’s one of the key differences in creating Truman’s environments as opposed to creating theirs. All of the knickknacks and the furniture and the details of his world are just from the photographs, he just collected. He was an eccentric and he liked items, he just liked collections of various things, and he just threw them all together in this apartment and in the cottage, which was very well documented.
I’m still bummed that we didn’t get to replicate it. That Architectural Digest did a great story on that cottage. But you could see the similar theme in his world. Looking all the way back to his youth, some of the bits you could just see that he brought from Alabama. One of the things we had in his apartment was a porcelain cherub that I think he brought from New Orleans that happened to be in the house in New York City that Gus [Van Sant] rented. And so, he brought it to set and we put it on set.
Whereas Babe Paley famously had an army of decorators doing her apartment from Parish Hadley to Billy Baldwin, famous decorator. And so, she and their art collection, there was a sense of presentation and majesty and of American royalty that they liked to purport. There was a polish on it that was different from Truman’s. It is the difference between making your own choices and having somebody else guide your choices.
Particularly with the Paleys, Babe from my sense had more of her own stamp, her own personality in her environments. We tried to do that. We created more of her in her world that some of it was cut from the show as well, but she had a real flair in terms of a fascination with leopard prints, which we created in one room in her mansion that just didn’t make it to the show.
For Truman’s apartment, what were some of the more eccentric items you replicated from your research?
I mean, a gigantic viper, just a stuffed snake that sat on the coffee table right in the middle of the room. It’s very prominent, and I don’t know what it meant to him, but it’s the kind of detail that you can’t not put in there. We found a replica.
It is interesting because the desk that we put in there wasn’t straight out of research, but I found it in a basement of an antique shop in Pittsboro, North Carolina, where my mother lived. But it was just this great old Victorian lion’s head carved oak desk that I just said, “Well, that has to be Truman’s desk.”
For some reason, he just had a collection of glass paperweights. They were everywhere. A portrait of himself that hung on the wall, and somebody else that I talked to said it was almost the picture of Dorian Gray. It really played in that way. It was fun to connect his youth captured in this portrait with the man that he had become.
Tom Hollander, the brilliance of Tom, is that they played it up. All of the factors came together where he was able to lay on her right underneath it and acknowledge his own youth. It wasn’t anything that was scripted, just happened organically. It was one of the great things that happened in this show when all of the talents came together.
Did you shoot at all at the real location?
We managed to get into his actual apartment in the UN Tower complex, mainly to shoot the back. We had the exact same view that he had of looking south out of that tower at the East River, which we actually had to erase all of Queens in Brooklyn because it hadn’t been built up in the way that it is now. So, we shot the photograph and then had to erase all of that. Now, I can add a third environment that I’ve walked the paces in, and this lovely woman lives there now, and it had been renovated to a degree, but his bathroom had not been touched.
Really?
All of the details in the tile, it sounds funny to say, but when we went in there, we were actually finding the grain in the marble that was in the photographs of our research. It’s a fun experience in doing what we do to get to walk in these places, the very places where these people have lived, when you do a show, when you’re recreating environments of the characters who were living people.
A lot of nice full circle moments for you on this show. For Oliver Smith’s place, did he rent it to Truman?
Famously, it was a townhouse that Oliver owned. Truman rented the basement apartment, but he would have Jackie Kennedy over there, and he would tell everybody that it was his house.
[Laughs] I know you said it was only one day of teaching, but anything that’s always stuck with you from Oliver Smith?
Well, it was my first year in grad school at NYU Scenic Design. I don’t think I appreciated at the time the legend that he was. So, it was more just an introductory class. It was going to be in scenic design, and unfortunately, he just passed away that very week. I mean, I had one day with Oliver Smith. He taught there forever, and I just didn’t get the wisdom from his own mind.
Oliver really was there with Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein. He was part of that trio that just created that magic with West Side Story, specifically. He was just around forever with the American Ballet Theater. Just an incredible designer and a bridge to another world. I do feel very lucky to have crossed paths and had that one class one day
That is very special. I’ve talked to a lot of filmmakers that went to NYU, not many production designers. How was your experience studying there?
Oh, it was great. It was the hardest thing that I had done to that point. I mean, I had worked in film. I grew up in North Carolina and graduated with an English degree, but the first movie I ever did was Bull Durham. They were making movies in the ’80s in North Carolina, and my first movies were Bull Durham, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Last of the Mohicans. And so, I cut my teeth in that world and decided that I wanted to design.
I left the business and went back to school. At the time that I was there, the concentration wasn’t in film design. There was sort of a lull in the teachers that were there. Still, I learned all of the skills of drafting and rendering and painting and research and all of it that I was able to come out of it with my prior experience having worked in film at the very bottom of the ladder and come out with the skills to get me right into the union in New York.
And then, I came back into the business as an art director and did that for a few years. There was a period of three or four years where I was art directing medium-scale movies. I started set designing on studio movies, and then I was designing very, very low-budget movies, but I was doing all three at the same time. They paid me the same thing, and I just used it as a very, very active soaking it all in and just saying, “Alright, well, I’ll learn from this, I’ll learn from this, and I’ll learn from this.”
Eventually, the design jobs just started to grow in stature and budget and eclipsed the other stuff. So, it was a significant part of my career. But NYU was the place that, for me, gave me the skills on top of the skills that I’d already learned working in the film business to then just add it all up to launch me into the next phase that has grown through the years and gotten me to where I’m now.
I did want to ask about another credit of yours and how maybe it compares to Feud, which is Trumbo. Any parallels or similarities you found in terms of a writer’s space?
I will say, two fairly eccentric writers. I mean, Trumbo would write in his bathtub. We recreated the bathtub where we could shoot him and gave him an entire writing board. I mean, I look back on my career and have to acknowledge, recognize that I’ve done a lot of projects about people who’ve lived. They come to me and I love doing them compared to just completely fictional scripts.
When I did Julie & Julia, I was in Paris. I don’t speak French, even though I’m ashamed to say I did study it, but I talked my way into Julia Child‘s apartment that she had lived in Paris. I love staring at the research and then go to those places and then to bring them back to life.
When I did get up on a movie about James Brown, his nephew was our Art PA. It’s a fascinating job. I mean, sitting down with Jack Kevorkian, it runs the gamut. It’s a great, great gig.
That’s fantastic. Let’s talk about dramatization with these real figures. Is there always a fine line for you, say on Feud or other projects, where you want to stay true but also depart for drama?
I think if it is a dramatization of a real person’s life, you start with looking at what the realities were, and then you can pick and choose and elevate. You can heighten. I mean, if something’s great and good and interesting, I like to just try to recreate that environment as much as you can.
Truman’s apartment, for example, there’s nothing fancy about that apartment. It’s a typical international style building without any flare at all. But to embrace the flare that then he brings to basically a box is, in its own way, telling the story of what he does. He starts with a blank piece of paper, and he turns it into a Truman Capote masterpiece.
When I become somewhat obsessed with the research, which is inevitable, you push it when you do, but I want to try to replicate. It becomes part of the game. It becomes part of the treasure hunt.
I mean, when I did Bombshell, I thought the only people who’ve seen the inside of the offices at Fox News were the people who worked there. They are going to see this movie, and I want them to say, “How did they get it?” So, I was a madman about really finding out what the inside of Fox News looked like.
A buddy of mine who had been there connected me to some of the people who got me that research. I invited him to the set and he was like, “Holy shit. They’re going to think you shot it in the real place,” but it didn’t exist anymore because you renovated the whole place. So, I enjoyed that.
Even Escape at Dannemora, when we recreated a tailor shop in a prison, our advisor was somebody who was in prison with those guys. The day he walked into the tailor shop, he walked out and he vomited because it brought him back to a moment that was so viscerally real to him. That was his reaction. I took that as a high compliment.
Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans is available to stream on Hulu.
