Paris Peterson was acting in Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s L.A.-shot Cam, and showed up on set “just to hang out and PA.” When production designer Emma Rose Meade ducked her head in the room and asked, “Does anyone here know how to wallpaper?” Peterson immediately volunteered—as a child actor and the son of artist parents, the Boston native was accustomed to watching his mother build sets for amateur theater productions. “I must have done a good job,” he remembers, because when he moved from New York to Los Angeles two years later, Meade “started to bring me on to assist her on jobs,” setting Peterson on his current dual professional track.

While continuing his acting career—including a role in Michael Showalter’s Hulu series The Dropout and a commercial spot for California Grown olive oil—Peterson took production design gigs on music videos for Pink Sweat$, a commercial campaign for Bose and an anti-smoking series of TikTok PSAs. (In one instance, for Courtney Loo and David Karp’s Slamdance short, Post Office, he production designed and acted.) But while he did some additional long-form work—he was set dresser on Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline—he hadn’t production designed an actual feature by the time he interviewed with director Tyler Taormina for the director’s follow-up to Ham on Rye. Peterson had seen the 2019 microbudget drama during the pandemic and was “blown away” by it, he remembers, then became friends with Taormina through Goldhaber. Still, when Taormina asked him to production design his sprawling and near-hallucinatory holiday picture, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, the director was operating largely on faith. “He had really only seen a music video I had done” that was no possible reference for Christmas, Peterson recalls. “Everything was made of cardboard.” Speaking to Filmmaker before the forthcoming IFC release’s premiere this year at the Cannes Film Festival, Taormina remembers the hiring decision: “Something in me made me think that he’s going to do a great job. He’s just such a sensitive guy. I knew [the job would be] hard—enormous—but he had this way about him that totally had me convinced. And I think that putting faith in him caused him to move mountains to make this movie happen.”

Move mountains Peterson did. Working, astonishingly, for most of prep as a one-person art department—art director Kevin Hillier joined shortly before the shoot—his beautiful and uncanny design work evokes not just one Long Island Christmas but a kind of American ur-Christmas exploding with sensory detail. Again, wallpaper was crucial. “I spent about half of our art budget just on wallpaper alone,” he says, “because I knew that the house was a character in itself. To make it feel like nothing in the house has changed a lot over the decades, I sourced a lot of wallpaper from the ’40s and ’50s from this company in the [San Fernando] Valley that scans and reprints old wallpaper as new.” Rather than rent from prop houses, Peterson swapped out the home’s furniture with pieces borrowed from the crew and the neighborhood. The process “ended up making the movie feel more authentic because these were people’s real things,” Peterson says. “They had a story of their own behind them. And I’d say 30 percent of the Christmas decorations are from my home because, within Tyler’s vision, I wanted to put a piece of my memories in this movie, too I’m a sucker for detail. My favorite art department [role] is creating it when it’s needed and asked for.” He describes standing at the monitor with DP Carson Lund, with the two “checking every corner [of the frame] and seeing, like, ‘OK, can we add something here?’”

While, going forward, more art department work is the priority, Peterson says, “The acting bug is never going to leave me. I’ll always be pursuing it. A lot of times in this industry, people think that they have to be a part of just one aspect of filmmaking, but why do that to yourself? If you like to do a lot of things, I say do all the things.”— Scott Macaulay/Image: Emily Pinto