Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538080
5 2 P E R S P E C T I V E J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 2 5 I wanted textures, colors and spaces authentic enough to evoke memory, yet arranged with intent, always rooted in the characters and story to build a world oscillating between memory and motion, fact and fable, just like the Southwest in the 1970s. Color Film and television love to fossilize the 1970s beneath rust, avocado and harvest gold. Digging through the roadside archives of my favorite 1960s and 1970s photographers, I found a truer memory: unapologetic primaries—traffic-signal red, mailbox blue, caution-stripe yellow—burning against stucco neutrals. The Art Department papered our walls with William Eggleston's abandoned places and old signs, Stephen Shore's motel courts and diners, Ernst Haas' motion blur and saturation, Ed Ruscha's gas stations and billboards, Hockney's bright, graphic optimism. There were definitely winces about a primary palette of only blue, yellow and red at first. But once I shared concept art, reference photography and even paint decks from cars of the era, the idea clicked across the board. What emerged was a new color story for a period too often flattened into secondary color shorthand. We wanted different, bold, graphic and emotionally charged. Starting on Stage Duster follows Nina Hayes—the FBI's first Black female field agent—as she collides with Jim Ellis, a grief-haunted getaway driver. What starts as a modest cops-and-robbers drama, balloons into a conspiracy story told on a national scale, dragging the viewer from sun-bleached desert roads to all the way to the White House. This series would be going out into the world a lot, but first we had to start with the biggest set of the show. Of all the sets designed for Duster, none carried the conceptual weight or technical complexity of the Phoenix FBI field office. It wasn't just an office. It was a pressure chamber. From the beginning, I gave myself a challenge: to subvert the audience's expectation of what a 1970s FBI set should look like and really make it work for the journey of the lead, Nina, recently assigned to Arizona by her own cunning design. In Hayes' narrative, she's surrounded by a system that wasn't built for her. A world that wants her visible for optics but silent. The set had to make that emotional geography real. So, the design started with something radical: a glass room at the center of the set. Not off to the side, not boxed in—dead center. From there, the crew built outward. All around that glass room, we installed articulating wood shutters—adjustable louvers that allowed us to shape light and shadow, but never truly conceal. They offered the illusion of privacy without the reality. And that illusion was essential to the design. Nina's presence unsettles the institution, and the space had to reflect how precarious her position really is. She can't hide— not from her colleagues, not from the institution, not from us. Her solitude would be framed in every reflection. A. PHOENIX FBI OFFICE. ILLUSTRATION BY SVEN JOHNSON. B. PHOENIX FBI OFFICE. PLAN. A B