Jack Fisk, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is arguably the greatest of all living film craftsmen. A painter and sculptor turned art director and production designer, he literally built the worlds of many of the most admired films since the ’70s. Among them: 1973’s Badlands, 1976’s Carrie, 1978’s Days of Heaven, 1998’s The Thin Red Line, 2001’s Mulholland Drive, 2007’s There Will Be Blood, 2012’s The Master, 2015’s The Revenant, 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon and 2025’s Marty Supreme, the Josh Safdie film starring Timothée Chalamet, for which Fisk is Oscar-nominated for the fourth time and poised to win for the first.
Over the course of a conversation at the London West Hollywood hotel, the 80-year-old — who has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2016 and at the American Cinematheque in 2024, and who was presented with the career achievement award at the American Cinematheque’s Tribute to the Crafts in January — reflected on how he wound up coming to Hollywood from Virginia in 1970 with his high school pal David Lynch, initially thinking he’d paint billboards.
He shared how he broke into filmmaking and what he has learned from each of the major filmmakers with whom he has worked, including Terrence Malick (eight times), Brian De Palma (twice),Lynch (twice), Paul Thomas Anderson (twice), Alejandro González Iñárritu and Martin Scorsese; how he met and fell in love with Sissy Spacek — who has been his wife since 1974 — on the set of Badlands and helped her to execute her most famous scene in Carrie; and why he stepped away from designing productions for 18 years between 1980’s Heart Beat and 1998’s The Thin Red Line.
Finally, he went in-depth on Marty Supreme, only the second film that he has ever designed in New York, explaining how he drew upon extensive research — and his imagination — to bring to life the Big Apple of the ’50s.
