Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s Production Designer on Creating Authentic New York in the U.K.

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. The apartment, located in Queens above a shop, is a well-trodden, fun neighborhood, but not one that depicts huge wealth. Wood and his team wanted to give the set a lot of history – like maybe this building was around a hundred years old – to make it feel truly authentic.

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. The bathhouse was a built set, with a nice story behind its creation. Wood and his team went to a place called Brighton Beach and found a building that they thought could have been an old bathhouse. When they thought they were going to film in Manchester, they found an old Victorian bathhouse that felt right.

They took the ideas from that and built a really beautiful, hand-tiled set, with the pool also made. Wood mentioned that they 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.

Wood also spoke about the biggest challenge in designing this Spider-Man movie – making New York. He said that it is a fabulously interesting city, incredibly layered, and culturally rich. Bringing all of that detail, cultural realism, and history to a place in London, in England, is really difficult. Wood spent a lot of time photographing New York, getting a lot of advice from New Yorkers, and trying to make it feel natural.

One of the most fascinating parts of the interview was when Wood talked about the water in Yelena’s bathhouse. He mentioned that they needed to cloud the water, and they ultimately came up with a type of dye that worked well. They also spent a lot of time testing different combinations to get the right consistency.

Wood’s favorite prop that he built for a set was the fabricator, which is a big prop because it’s the machine that built the inhibitor. He 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. They wanted to make it very tactile, so it worked, it buzzed, it did all the things.

Wood also talked about how Tom Holland is completely immersive in his performance. Once he gets into a space, he starts to understand the characters and the world, and that makes the set-building process much easier.