Brand New Day’ Production Designer Interview

For a movie about a superhero who can literally climb walls, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is seemingly interested in what happens when Peter Parker (Tom Holland) puts them up himself. Still reeling from the loss of the people closest to him, Peter has convinced himself that being alone is the price of being Spider-Man, and production designer Charles Wood had the task of making that isolation visible.

That meant giving Peter a new apartment that could feel like both a refuge and a prison, with a view of the New York life he can see but can’t quite join. Elsewhere in the concrete jungle, Wood and his team also had to build and stylize another part of New York through Yelena’s (Florence Pugh) elaborate bathhouse, built from scratch and based on spaces Wood discovered while scouting the city.  And it meant creating Jean Grey’s (Sadie Sink) containment unit as a room that initially feels almost domestic before revealing itself to be something much more sinister.

Wood, whose production-design credits include several MCU projects such as Doctor Strange, Black Widow and both Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, also had to account for Holland’s famously immersive approach to his performance by creating sets and props that didn’t just look real, but actually worked just as Peter Parker would hope.

Below, Wood spoke to Deadline about the making of Brand New Day and the web-crawling details hidden within its narrative walls.  

DEADLINE: What was the briefing from Destin Daniel Cretton about what this Spider-Man world should feel like?

CHARLES WOOD: I think he wanted it very street level. It’s a very grounded feel. Everywhere we went into this place we created, he wanted the audience to feel that Peter Parker could really be around the corner. So, in the creation of New York in the U.K., he wanted to make sure it felt natural. Given that this is based on fantastic comics, there’s a twist of that sort of graphic iconography applied to it.

DEADLINE: Let’s jump into a few locales now. First and foremost, this bodega that Peter constantly visits. Talk about creating that New York bodega, and did you have to import all those American snack goods?

WOOD: We might have flown some things in, but I’m not entirely sure. There are actually quite a lot of American products available in London because many Americans live there. But there’s also a bit of product placement here [laughs]. Honestly, we did an awful lot of research on that. I went to New York a lot, and the team photographed a lot of bodegas because places like this you really have to work hard to try and be as authentic as you can, because you can lose the audience if it doesn’t work. And we had an awful lot of Americans coming in and looking at these sets—a tough bunch [laughs].

DEADLINE: What was the flavor profile of creating Ned and MJ’s shared apartment?

WOOD: Destin and I went back and forth on whether or not it would be set in Astoria or Queens. We ultimately wanted to say that it was Queens above a shop, and we wanted it set in an old tenement building. So we gave the set a lot of history – like maybe this building was around a hundred years old. It’s supposed to be set in a well-trodden, fun neighborhood, but not in one that depicts huge wealth.

DEADLINE: I don’t think we ever get to see MJ’s room. Did you all have any discussions about what her room would look like?

WOOD: There is actually a little bedroom for her in there. When Tom first enters the apartment, I mean, to be really prescriptive here, on the left. I don’t even know if it made it into the movie, but there was a little bedroom for her. It just wasn’t a place where the story naturally played out. Even on the day we were changing things around, when Tom came in and wanted to work on it to make it work for them both. And then, quite frankly, the rest of the apartment was really more about the idea that it was just somewhere they could all come together – which was by the window.

MJ’s room, I believe, had something to do with stuff from her past and education, but I can’t quite remember [laughs].

DEADLINE: Was Yelena’s bathhouse a location or built set?

WOOD: That’s a built set. There’s a nice story there, because I went to New York with Destin, Brett Pawlak, the cinematographer, Jerome Chen, the visual effects supervisor, and David Kane, our producer. We happened to go to a place called Brighton Beach, and there was this building that we thought could have been an old bathhouse. Then when we thought we were going to film in Manchester, we found this old Victorian bathhouse that felt right. So, we took the ideas from that.

The guys built this really beautiful, hand-tiled set, and the pool was also all made.

DEADLINE: I don’t know how online you are, but –

WOOD: Not at all, they would eat me alive on there.

DEADLINE: I want to ask on the fans’ behalf—the water. There’s a running joke about the MCU having the most magical water that clouds everything.

WOOD: Ultimately, we needed to cloud the water.

DEADLINE: Right.

WOOD: Florence obviously wears a bodysuit, so there’s nothing there. But, I mean, we have to do these things because of the ratings.

DEADLINE: Of course. The question is less about that and more about the water’s composition. For example is it like 15% soap suds, 30% dye, 40% milk, etc?

WOOD: It’s a type of dye, I think. In the old days, when I first started in the business, you used milk because it worked very quickly to cloud something. But, interestingly enough, we ran all sorts of tests to figure out the right consistency. And ultimately that’s what we came up with. Also, it was all heated and very comfortable, with lots of benches underwater that Tom was floating around on, and it was funny. I love that sequence, a very good scene.

I should also mention that we spent a lot of time chipping tile and making sure the grout matched to bring that level of reality to it. These characters are big, so if you drop the ball, you don’t make these spaces feel truly real. And if you can do that, then I think that’s a good place to be in because it’s all about the performance. If you produce a set which feels like a set, you can pull the audience away from that. So it’s an important thing. We spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort to bring authenticity to these places.

DEADLINE: What was the biggest challenge in designing this Spider-Man movie?

WOOD: Making New York, because it is a fabulously interesting city.  It’s incredibly layered. It’s so interesting culturally. Its heritage is extraordinary. And as a non-New Yorker, but as someone who, for instance, lives in London and has spent a lot of time there, bringing all of that detail, cultural realism, and history to a place in London, in England, is really difficult. And we spend an awful lot of time photographing. I spent a lot of time photographing New York, getting a lot of advice from New Yorkers, and trying to make it feel natural. That was the biggest challenge in that movie.

DEADLINE: What is your favorite prop that you built for a set?

WOOD: The fabricator, I suppose. That’s a big prop because it’s the machine that built the inhibitor. Like Peter, we felt like we needed to apply a lot of mechanical detail too. We wanted to create something that could have come in 500 Amazon boxes, but that was also something you could build and a great mind could build. And we wanted it to be very tactile. It worked, it buzzed, it did all the things. It actually was this mad kind of almost sewing machine. We wanted everything to be tactile.

It helped because Tom is completely immersive. Once he gets into a space, he starts to understand what his world is, and he then wants to react with it. We try to do all of those things to make that interesting for him.

DEADLINE: Jean Grey’s containment cell was pretty massive, it seems. What went into making that room within a glass containment?

WOOD: The whole idea of it was that Jean’s sister was taken to this room by Damage Control. We looked at all these strange rooms from all sorts of places. We found this wooden space. And we wanted it to be odd enough to not sit well with you, but real enough to say, “This is clearly where she is and is it her bedroom, question mark, because all of her stuff’s near, but why are the walls glassy?” So, when you are first in there, if you look at the walls, they are actually glass. There’s glass in front of them. And then it became this idea where actually at some point during the sequence, we realize the room isn’t the room. It’s actually a glass cell that is housed within a larger room.

And then we decided to actually do this reveal because it was all in camera; that’s not visual effects. All the walls lifted to reveal this much larger space where she was housed.

DEADLINE: What was your favorite set to build?

WOOD: Probably the New York backlot. We built two or three city blocks of New York: 40 big buildings. I love building the rooftops. I like the Silver Cup rooftop because we built that big sign and the big rooftop. I always love doing those wells above New York. I think that’s a really interesting thing to do. But people don’t generally go. And being in New York and having access, it’s a lovely thing about my job to all of these brilliant buildings and actually getting up top, going out some fire escape somewhere many hundreds of feet up in the building was brilliant. And recreating those worlds to display the historical nature of them…lots of things are forgotten on New York rooftops, and I loved getting into all of that; the eccentricity was really interesting.

DEADLINE: What was an environment that looked ordinary on screen, but was incredibly complicated to build?

WOOD: Peter’s apartment was complicated, believe it or not. There were a lot of surfaces. There’s a lot in that place, and that was with all the skylights and all the different finishes and the history. We really wanted to come up with some crazy old pad. It was tricky because we had to think about New York, because everywhere’s valuable. Everywhere’s worth something and most places are worth an awful lot. And so it was odd coming up with a cinematically interesting place, but didn’t look as though it was worth a few million. So we had to sort of play with it quite a lot to make it feel really neglected. But not so neglected that it felt non-authentic or you couldn’t have a place like that. It was difficult to find the sweet spot.

And when he walks in, and it’s all full of that junk, and we’ve cleared the junk away, we wanted something to be there but not trying to grandstand anything. But you could feel its history and neglect, which, in a way, very much suited the scene we were trying to convey.

From a narrative viewpoint, we wanted to do something where Peter had these great big windows, but actually, if you were to look at the windows just beyond, we were actually on the other side of the East River. And in the distance, we did have these lights on these big backings where you could see New York and the Queensboro Bridge. The idea was all about being somewhere he had this view of the city he could never join. He could look at families across the way, but he could never be part of that. This place represented a barrier between him and, in a sense, the happiness, all the togetherness he missed.

Then the way it was designed with materials, you wanted the rain to hit the skylight above him, the clitter clatter and all the awnings which gave different lighting moods, and the coldness of the brick and the heat of the pipes. Then there was us having the clattery old washing machine that wasn’t quite working.