4 hours ago
2
Nina Ruscio wasn’t even supposed to work on “The Pitt.” When writer John Wells reached out to her, she had a prior commitment that prevented her from signing onto the Max medical series. But after working together on “Animal Kingdom” and “Shameless,” she agreed to contribute a blueprint for the Pittsburgh ER at the center of the show, which takes place in almost real-time over a 15-hour shift. That blueprint became the bedrock for the medical drama’s sets even as Wells and the writing team were beginning to work out the storylines that would pulse and careen across the pristine hospital floors.
Then, in a stroke of fortunate timing, a production delay meant Ruscio was actually able to join the production after all. But that meant that it was on her to solve the challenges of what is, on the surface, a single-location television series. 15 hours is a long time to spend in one place, even one as big as the hospital complex of ‘The Pitt,’ and Ruscio and her team needed to provide changes in space to help the audience follow the motions of the story.
“The intention was to be able to create maximum transparency and see everything all at once. The whole show is about continuous motion, so the physical set wanted to be about continuous motion,” Ruscio told IndieWire. “Within [the set], I’ve got these curves so that wherever you are, you’re never at a dead end.”
We may never be at a dead end, but Ruscio makes that possible through not just clever location design but through subtle visual variety. She spoke to IndieWire about choosing between hundreds of shades of white for a more sterile hospital environment than we’re accustomed to seeing on TV, adding in “architectural kisses” as nods to Pittsburgh history, and keeping the sets of “The Pitt” from ever reaching an impasse.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
IndieWire: How did you land on this color palette? It’s starker than the peach that springs to my mind when I think about hospitals.
Nina Ruscio: And blue, when you think about hospitals on television. Really, in many ways, it was a choice against those choices. The fearless choice was to do this palette of whites. It’s like 100 shades of white. Creating a really neutral palette is more connected to the realism of actual hospitals and people’s personal experiences. It’s a very blanched and sterile experience. It was [our] very direct intent, to make the space not feel art directed.
When you were having conversations with other department heads, were they saying, “What have you done to us with all of these whites?”
They’re very carefully orchestrated, all of those [shades of white], and everyone embraced it. The top lighting and the white palette follow through to isolate the actors, visually. And the [darker] palette of the wardrobe is designed to foreground [the characters] because you’re not distracted by anything else, you are able to see multiple things at once. You’re able to see the foreground action, and then you’re able to see the background action. The set is designed to be completely transparent, and that way, you can see all the way from edge to edge. Everyone on set needs to either wear scrubs or a dark hue because if you’re caught through a window [on camera], there’s nowhere to hide. That’s the experience of being in a medical situation, and it’s also the intention of this design.
There are also marble pillars scattered throughout the ER.
To give it visual power, I wanted to have these elements that hinted at architectural details that I saw at the exterior we ended up selecting, Allegheny General in Pittsburgh. There are a few architectural materials and details that I’ve woven throughout, particularly in the heritage spaces of the waiting room and the heritage hallways that are tributaries off of the emergency department. Marble and columns and all of these things that I think give the hospital history.
I have to come back to this — when you’re looking at so many shades of white, what were the conversations around selecting the final shades?
Well, we did a camera test, [cinematographer] Jojo [Coelho] and myself, with a very, very restrained range of white, knowing the quality of the light that we would use. To the human eye, they might not have seemed that wide of a range, but we landed on this one because it was the most satisfying for the widest range of skin tones and also the most satisfying and complimentary to the LED light system that we intended on using. So it was a very educated guess, that particular white. And there’s tones of wood and there’s tones of gray and yellow and black, which are Pittsburgh colors.
Once the scripts were written, did John share any storylines that your blueprint influenced? Or did it serve just as a guide for how to get characters from Point A to Point B?
I think that was more a matter of how to move people from place to place. They were very connected to this idea that you could see through [a series of rooms] and that there was never a dead end. Because the show was intended to be handheld from the beginning, there needed to be a freedom of movement and that has sustained itself all the way throughout. The energy of the continuous motion is never blockaded by a dead end. So that part of it has felt successful, but there are so many, there’s a lot of very specific intentions with the layout of a hospital emergency department.
In your research, what design rules stayed true no matter the emergency room?
There are a lot of very specific intentions with the layout of a hospital emergency department. For instance, we have the behavior rooms that are isolated immediately when you come in via ambulance because if there’s anyone imbalanced, they need to be isolated immediately. Then, the two full trauma rooms will be within view of a center hub. And the idea that the center hub has a vista that can see everywhere from that center area. That part of the research bore itself out in multiple instances, no matter the layout of a hospital or [how] the functionality of it has evolved. It’s evolved further into new systems, into negative pressure rooms, and things like that after COVID. But we chose to place the renovation of this trauma center and this emergency department to be about 15 years ago, and that’s where [we’re] locked in time.
Did that affect the medical equipment used?
A lot of hospitals aren’t renovated, so all of this equipment is still relevant. There’s antiquated equipment that’s still actively relevant for many facilities. [Our] trauma rooms are fully equipped. You could really do surgery here. The experience of being in there is not at all like being on a set. You can open up any single drawer and Matt Callahan, the set decorator extraordinaire that I had the pleasure of working with again, has filled every single drawer. It’s all P-touch labeled, and everything’s complete. I’ve been told by many of the medical personnel who are part of the show or who came to visit the show that we passed the test. A personal intention of all of ours was to have a verisimilitude that was so accurate that you would not be distracted by it and it would not be overly art directed. It would be authentic.
New episodes of “The Pitt” premiere every Thursday at 10 p.m. ET on Max.
English (US) ·