By Gabriel Snyder

Executive Editor, Enterprise

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During the pandemic lockdown, when Rick Carter found himself alone in his Los Angeles home, he began to experiment with something that would have seemed impossible just months earlier: an artificial collaborator that could visualize his wildest creative impulses. The legendary production designer—who had spent decades collaborating with Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron and J.J. Abrams on the dinosaur-filled landscapes of Jurassic Park, the floating mountains of Avatar, the bus stop bench of Forrest Gump and the Jakku deserts of The Force Awakens—was prompting an AI called Midjourney.

"I started to make these little videos on AI combining ballet and skateboarding in Paris," Carter recalls of his early surreal experiments, "flying, basically, so that they could do things you can't do." For someone accustomed to creating cinema's most ambitious visual spectacles, this felt familiar yet revolutionary. "The AI came up with it very easily," he says, "I mean, very easily."

Carter represents a fascinating paradox in Hollywood's current AI anxiety. An Academy Award winner for his production design on both Avatar and Lincoln, whose filmography includes the Back to the Future sequels, Forrest Gump, AI: Artificial Intelligence, Munich and The Rise of Skywalker, Carter sees something entirely different from the industry orthodoxy. While Nicolas Cage declared that "Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us!" and show business leaders warn of artificial intelligence's threat to both creative integrity and livelihoods in the entertainment industry, Carter views AI as the next evolution of a creative process he's been perfecting for half a century.

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For instance, Spielberg makes "a point of not knowing what he's going to do," Carter explains. "He used to storyboard a lot. Now he makes a big point of not knowing at the beginning of a project what he's getting into." Spielberg has learned to trust his process rather than reverse-engineer outcomes. With uncertainty came fear, and that was part of the process too. "I asked Steven," Carter says, "'Why do you want to not know? And why do you want to be afraid?' And his answer was, 'Well, if I know what I'm going to do, then it's like having a job at Denny's, and I'm just servicing an order.'"

As Carter was prompting AI video generators Midjourney and later Runway, he encountered many of the same feelings of uncertainty and creative fear that bordered on the spirit of collaborative discovery with Spielberg—throwing ideas into the digital void and watching something unexpected emerge. What began as pandemic experimentation would lead him to a profound realization about the nature of creativity itself—one that would be tested in the most unexpected way.

Carter's perspective is borne of his life's work: creating worlds so believable that audiences never notice his hand in their construction. "There's nothing I can say that will ever explain to you what a production designer does," he admits. "It's certainly connected to the suspension of disbelief. You don't want to see it. When you're watching a movie, you don't want to think somebody has put together the world that you're looking at."

This dedication to invisibility shapes everything about Carter's approach. Where most other people who make movies thrive on recognition—actors want to be seen, directors want their vision acknowledged, screenwriters want their scripts celebrated—production designers succeed by disappearing entirely. Carter spends months crafting environments that feel so natural, so inevitable, that they become transparent to viewers. It's an artistry rooted in covering every seam, hiding every constructed element, making the artificial feel authentic.

Perhaps this explains Carter's comfort with AI as a creative partner. Like production design itself, AI works best when it enhances rather than dominates, when it serves the creative vision rather than calling attention to its own cleverness. Both require what Carter calls "trust"—a willingness to let the medium serve the message without overwhelming it.

Before he was building movie worlds, Carter was the self-described "rebel" son of Dick Carter, actor Jack Lemmon's publicist business partner, and he spent much of the 1970s traveling the world, painting and absorbing visual influences. "I was a conscientious objector to Vietnam," Carter told an interviewer in 2012. "I was up at the University of California in Berkeley in the late 1960s, and there was a lot of political rioting and turmoil. At a certain point, it became more than I could psychologically or spiritually handle, and I dropped out and traveled the world for over a year by myself. I wanted to go out and find something deeper that could give some purpose to my life."

His entry into film production came through serendipity and family connections. The pivotal moment came when he asked his father what an art director did "because it had the word art in it," he says. This led to a meeting with Richard Sylbert, the accomplished production designer behind films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, who explained how production design could be a conceptual art form. Chinatown became an exemplar of what he wanted to accomplish. "At its core is the fact that in that world, there's no water. So, the design then became parched and amber. It was not the narrative, and it wasn't quite the theme, and it wasn't the characters," Carter says, "it was just a presence throughout the movie that became a type of production design."

It was a revelation that would go on to shape his approach throughout his career, from his first collaboration with Spielberg on The Goonies in 1985 through their most recent work together on The Fabelmans in 2022. "There could actually be an intellectual and even heartfelt idea behind what you were looking at," Carter says. These elements of production design, he explains, are "curations of the prompts that you put in. And then you have this back-and-forth dynamic. That's happening when you design any movie; you're prompting the artist you're working with; you're being prompted, as a production designer, by the director as to what he [or] she wants to see. And then you come up with things, and there's a dialogue. It's back-and-forth. And it doesn't just come out of thin air."

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While Hollywood treats AI as an almost taboo topic, Carter recognizes it as a natural extension of filmmaking's collaborative process. When digital effects began replacing practical ones in the 1990s, he adapted through collaboration rather than resistance. "That's when I took on Doug Chiang as a partner, as a co-designer, to bring him into my process and also because he knew how to do the digital side much better than I," he recalls. "That's why I went into co-designing on movies: as a way to survive that transition."

His pandemic AI experiments became a laboratory for testing these theories. Isolated from his usual collaborative network, he found something in AI that he'd experienced with great directors: a creative entity that could understand his prompts and respond with something surprising.

"The AI has this uncanny ability to take whatever you put there and come back with something right away," he explains. "But then think about, What's its point of view? It has no point of view."

This absence of perspective, rather than being a limitation, became a creative advantage, as he understood that AI was a reflection of his own consciousness. "So you think more about, What is it? Why do I think this way, and what do I want now? What's the next iteration that would make it more interesting to me?"

Carter says his career owes to his having "been fortunate enough to have gotten got by certain people who are geniuses with cinema—Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Jim Cameron, J.J. Abrams—they got me," he says. But AI offered something different. "Now, I'm not saying that the AI understands me. I'm just amazed that I can prompt it and even make mistakes, and it comes back with things that—well, I don't know if it's complementary. These are new terms that need to be created. I'm just going to call it 'an adjunct to what I am thinking.' It starts to interface with how I'm seeing things, and it stimulates me to move further in that direction."

The AI becomes a creative partner—not replacing human creativity but amplifying and reflecting it in unexpected ways.

Carter evaluates creative collaboration with different "filters." "Trust is a good one," he says, "because it doesn't quite go to, Well, does it have heart? or something that might get very vague. Whereas trust feels like it gets almost to a survival level. I trust that, or I don't trust, and my reaction was only instinctive."

Trust becomes crucial when working with AI because "I know it has no heart," he says, "and I think the amount of heart it has, I think, has to be reflective of my own." Unlike human collaborators with their own agendas, AI remains purely responsive—a mirror reflecting the creator's intentions back with variations and possibilities.

He points to Avatar as a model for AI integration: "The abstraction of the Na'vi people, with their features being not quite human, allowed for us to emote more with them and go back and forth, almost breathing [between] live action and digital." This "hybrid" approach could be crucial for AI adoption. "Anything that is 'all AI' shows up as being kind of too sterile or not quite right," he observes. He points to The Polar Express, the first entirely computer-generated film he worked on. "It was all digital and had tremendous problems with the characters and the lip-synching and the eyes and everything."

Change will come "not from the top but from the bottom," he predicts. Young creators unburdened by industry traditions will experiment with AI tools and force established players to adapt. "It's gonna be people just doing it because they have no reason not to do it."

At 72, Carter had been planning a measured retirement. "I'm post-pandemic, mid-70s, into a place where I thought I had it figured out how I was going to have a kind of moderate engagement: how much time I can have for myself, my family, all that," he reflects. He would finally find time to organize the vast collection of his own artworks and the film memorabilia he accumulated over decades. "My brain works a little differently at this stage anyway, because I'm not trying to accomplish. It's a different—it's [different from] when you're in the middle of your life, and you're aware that you're in your time of doing it and getting it done."

Augmented Intelligence: Reflections on the Conversation with Rick Carter

By Marcus Weldon, Newsweek contributing editor for AI and president emeritus of Bell Labs

This is the second interview in our AI Impact series to cover AI's effect on the evolution of the video media and entertainment market; the first was with a leading prognosticator, Doug Shapiro, which we now complement with one of the most important practitioners in movie production history: Rick Carter. You can find my deeper analysis here, but my key takeaways from our conversation are:

1. Movies—and the large-scale creative process in general—have always been a prompting process between an artist and multiple others who jointly enable the artwork to be produced.
2. AI should be viewed as a co-creator that is prompted by an artist to allow the exploration of concepts and vistas that are ultra-human—beyond human conception or experience.
3. AI has no heart; it is a reflection or echo of the human heart, which is intimately tied to our consciousness, through our desire and need to understand our experiences.
4. We will (and should) apply filters to what AI produces, most importantly to assess the trustworthiness of the output and to parse for uncanniness. But other key filters that should be applied are "creative originality" (which we use as a proxy for "effort") and the shared value or impact on a larger human scale.
5. And finally, if we are open to the potential and don't become too paranoid about the risks, generative AI tools and technologies will allow any creator to produce visually compelling content without massive capital, expertise or compromise, effectively leading to the democratization of creative expression.

"And then the fire came and burned everything," he says, casually mentioning that seven weeks before our conversation, the Palisades fire consumed his home and everything in it. "Destroyed all my life's work on my personal side of painting, plus the house."

The matter-of-fact delivery is almost as startling as the devastation itself. Yet Carter describes something closer to liberation. "I wanted to kind of cull through it [anyway]," he explains. The collection had become a burden because, "The kids would have to deal with it."

The fire forced a creative reset that parallels his openness to AI. Just as losing his physical archive freed him from the weight of past accomplishments, engaging with AI freed him from traditional assumptions about creative collaboration.

"Plan A went away," Carter says, highlighting that instead of setting new goals, he's "finding this new stage that's just not hung up on the thing being resolved, the entity being created, and that's it."

Carter's vision for AI isn't about replacement but augmentation—having AI as a "co-journeyist" rather than a competitor, a tool that "just enhances your experiences and doesn't take away," he explains.

"AI will absolutely enable the chaos that changes and alters the course of history," he predicts but adds that "AI will absolutely not enable clarity that will then allow us to continue as we are." So the technology will force adaptation, but that adaptation can be creative rather than destructive.

"As an artist, I just have felt the high in my own brain that comes from having things put together in a new way. It's a new set of tools, something—I don't even know what the words are," Carter reflects. "We just don't have the lexicon yet."

The absence of adequate language to describe AI's creative potential mirrors the early days of digital effects, when the industry struggled to understand how computer graphics might enhance rather than replace traditional filmmaking techniques.

For Carter, AI isn't the end of artistic authenticity but the beginning of a new kind of creative dialogue—one that requires the same trust and collaborative spirit that has always driven great filmmaking. A partner waits, ready to respond to whatever prompts human creativity can imagine.

After a lifetime of unrivaled creative expression that has played a defining role in human culture, Carter is more excited than ever about our uncertain creative future. He embodies the creative resilience the entertainment industry needs. "I'm interested in the process of how things are coming together or falling apart," he says. "New exploration."

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