‘The creativity just blooms’: “Sing Sing” production designer Ruta Kiskyte on making art with formerly incarcerated cast in a decommissioned prison

Sing Sing is a movie that takes place in a prison, but it’s not a prison movie.

Instead of violence, corrections officers, and civilian saviors, it centers incarcerated men using theater to restore their humanity in a place that is anything but humane.

The film is based on the work of the nonprofit organization Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which runs arts programs in prisons throughout the U.S. The film specifically focuses on the theater program at the Sing Sing facility in Ossining, NY, and its production of the original time traveling musical Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code.  

The only recognizable Hollywood face in the mix belongs to Colman Domingo, who portrays founding RTA player John “Divine G” Whitfield. (Whitfield himself is an executive producer and consultant on the film.) The rest of the cast is mostly made up of former members of the Sing Sing RTA Players, including Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin in a stand-out lead performance. 

Sing Sing’s directors Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley designed a unique compensation model for the film: Everyone in the cast and crew, including Oscar nominee Domingo, were paid the same rate and will receive equity.

This singular vision is turning heads: On December 3rd, Maclin and Domingo won the Gotham Awards for best supporting and lead performance, respectively. Sing Sing is riding this wave of award season momentum into a second theatrical release in select theaters beginning January 17th, 2025.

Like its production, the film is hopeful, not delusional. It doesn’t center the dehumanizing horrors of prison life, but it doesn’t shy away from them either. Sing Sing is able to strike a realistic balance between the brutal infrastructure of incarceration and the promise of programs like RTA. 

Much of this balance is found in Sing Sing’s production design, led by designer Ruta Kiskyte. Kiskyte, who is Lithuanian, and her team made the prison interiors feel both grounded and dreamlike. I spoke with Kiskyte about crafting set pieces out of candy wrappers, filming in a decommissioned prison, and much more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Alexis Haut: You’re European. What was your knowledge of the U.S. prison system before you started working on Sing Sing? And what was your research process like? 

Ruta Kiskyte: What was really the cornerstone, aside from regular research, was our formerly incarcerated cast who were actually imprisoned at Sing Sing. We were able to get first hand experience of what it was like and all these tiny details of incarceration that are just impossible to document or put in a news article. 

The prototype of Colman Domingo’s character, Divine G, served a really long prison sentence of over 20 years, and he was moved around prisons in New York State; and what he said is that every prison is really unique. He had a cup that would signify that he served time at Rikers because only Rikers would have that type of cup. And the documentary Dramatic Escape, featuring Divine Eye and the other RTA players, was incredibly resourceful. In that footage, if you removed the prison greens, you would think people are in a school. The walls have the same kind of pastel yellow color. It was very democratic in a way: Everybody sitting at these single desks. 

Coming back to your question about being an outsider as a European in an American prison movie, I think that to me it all seemed stranger than fiction. This is not conventional to imagine that the horrors of prison would happen in a space like this, but it was very much close to reality. Most of our prison interiors were shot in an actual decommissioned facility in upstate New York. It was an intense space. So we were trying to be as authentic as possible. 

AH: I read an article where some of the formerly incarcerated actors had shared what it felt like to actually be back inside of the building where they had once been imprisoned, and just how scary and how intense, as you said, that would be. When you first saw the space, what did it feel like? What did you see? 

RK: It’s deceiving. You know, the walls are ice cream colored, yellow and pink. There’s a lot of sunlight. But the way it crushes your soul is much more subtle. An audience might think, it’s probably fine, it looks like a classroom. But it is a human cage. We spent weeks in that facility, and it was hard to find my way through after a few weeks of going through those corridors because it’s just so disorienting and it’s such a maze. And something you cannot really feel from the pictures is that the air is forever dead. You cannot open one window. There’s no air conditioning, and there’s no heating. But New York has four seasons. We shot it during summer. Everyone had giant sweat stains. So that is what struck me the most: how visually deceiving a facility like this could be. 

AH: The film does a really nice job of balancing the therapeutic, hopeful parts of the RTA program with just how dehumanizing it is to be in a prison. What role do you feel like the production design played in that balance, and what are some of the design choices that you made to portray that? 

RK: We shot in a few different spaces, which helped achieve this balance. Throughout the movie, the prison setting is so monotonous and claustrophobic, until we get to the scenes in the Daylight Theater (where the RTA players rehearse and perform their plays). It just gives oxygen to everything. It’s this big hall with high ceilings and natural light. And even though it’s a prison, you feel a little bit more liberated once you’re inside. So I think that’s where most of the hope comes into the film. And in the very last scene in the movie, which is something that we decided upon later on in the production process, two characters are in a car and the scenery is passing them, and they feel the wind on their faces. It’s just so simple and it’s something we do every day, and we really take for granted. So this is extremely hopeful in a very understated way.

AH: How much did you alter the Daylight Theater and classroom spaces? Or were you working with what was already there? 

RK: We had almost a journalistic approach to showing things as authentically as possible and were not really interfering or redecorating too much. Because we were working with extremely limited resources, it was a lot about curating what we chose to show from what we had available on location. Some of it felt kind of stranger than fiction, like there’s still even some signage left in the theater. In the classroom spaces, we wrote our own inspirational quotes on the chalkboard. But we did alter the theater space, just so it was a little bit calmer to the eye. One especially important piece in that space was this stage curtain that we added in from the original RTA Sing Sing productions. And it was made from fabric scraps and sewn together with dental floss. We did a nod to that while trying to echo the colors of the facility we were shooting in, which were pinks. And even though we still echo the colors of the prison, we just had control over it and added this fun, quirky element.

AH: And these details, like writing quotes on the chalk boards and putting up the stage curtain, they make the set look realistic and lived in. Especially in the classroom space, it feels like this is where people actually went to learn, or they went to be in communication with each other. I wanted to ask about the chairs and desks you referenced earlier. There are very few props in the movie, but those chairs are in nearly every scene. I loved how you could arrange them in different ways to symbolize connection between the men, or sometimes they communicated isolation, like when an empty chair represented loss. These are just simple classroom-style chairs that probably a lot of Americans have sat in at school. But to see them in this setting and all these different arrangements was pretty striking. 

RK: I think it’s also important to note that inside of the prison, there are so few things that are actually allowed. The tool kit is really limited. And those chairs are only available in the theater and classrooms; even in the rec room, they would sit on like milk crates because furniture could become a weapon. 

There’s a pivotal scene in the movie: It’s Divine G’s parole hearing where he’s fighting for his freedom after having spent like two decades incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. I was scouting the prison for a place to film that scene with one of the facility managers who’s worked there for years and years. We were looking for a courtroom that looks like a typical courtroom with wooden walls and a podium for the judge. 

But he told us that those hearings would really take place anywhere that was available. And in the movie, that particular room, those chairs are just lining the walls. It just looks like the most nondescript space. So, yeah, those hearings are completely arranged in a rush and with sort of a “who cares” attitude as long as we have something to sit on. Colman Domingo is sitting in one of those chairs, and so are the judges. I feel like it just shows how the system treats people: This is what we have available at this moment, and we’re going to work with it. 

AH: We see three of the characters’ cells throughout the film: Divine G’s, Divine Eye’s, and Mike Mike’s. The cells really felt like they were these little oases. Despite the fact that they’re obviously quite small, and they have a toilet in them, they allowed for a certain amount of personal expression. I know it was a very collaborative process for you, but how did you think through the decor of those cells, and where did those items come from? 

RK: It was fascinating to see that even though there’s so little allowed in prison, those cells look so visually distinct. With Divine G’s character, specifically, his cell was really his mind map. He was laser focused on his goals, so he would have daily, weekly, monthly, yearly checklists of what he has to accomplish, be it his law research, or novels that he would write, or plays that he would write for RTA. And he was very kind to share his own personal pictures of his family, of his breakdancing, pictures of his little brother who he drew strength from throughout his incarceration. We had all the law books that he would have in his cell at the time and his exact typewriter. 

With Divine Eye, it was very about showing off and being flashy and showing his status as a drug dealer. And he demonstrated his status in signals only people inside prison would understand. One was having accumulated a lot of canned food, and he color coordinated his cell in burgundy. We also included his own wildlife drawings that he drew with a ballpoint pen. And what was interesting, and what we don’t really see in the movie, is that as he changed as a person, with the help of the RTA program, his cell also changed. He just gave up all the flashiness and status. So his cell interior would kind of catch up with his own interior.

AH: I want to ask you about the plays themselves. There are two within this movie: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code. The play scenes are a breath of fresh air; they’re just so whimsical and dreamlike. How did those sets come to life? 

RK: Divine G was one of the founding members of the RTA theater program. So what he told me, which I found fascinating, was that when it started, they had very little to work with. But as the prison saw what a positive impact this program had on the prison population, they would allow more and more resources into the theater. By now they have a fully functioning workshop. But what we wanted to show is the very resourceful nature of those early theater productions. So in the film’s opening shot, we see Colman Domingo as Divine G reciting a monologue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s standing in this forest that we made out of trash bags and cut-out butterflies made from candy wrappers. 

These extremely simple materials become something else once the light hits them. So that set was a nod to the extreme simplicity of materials used to build a piece of stage design. And then the central production around which this movie revolves is Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, which is this incredible time traveling musical that was written and designed by Brent Buell, who in the movie is played by Paul Raci. We really based that production on the real thing. And it was really honoring what Brent had designed and invented with the men. And, technically, we travel from ancient Rome to ancient Egypt to Freddy Krueger then to the middle of the sea with a pirate ship. And we just had this idea to bring in an oversize bedsheet that they might have gotten from their bedsheet factory and just hit it with a gelled light. We introduced that and just simple 2D flat drawings of the different settings. This could technically be truthful to what could have been done at Sing Sing with very simple means. 

AH: It was so evocative. And it was cool to compare it to the footage that we see at the end of the film of the actual production of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code. What are you taking with you from your experience on Sing Sing into your design career and into your life in general? 

RK: This production really just made me a better person. It was made in such a community. It was more like feeling like we are, you know, an orchestra or a rock band or a group of jazz musicians where everybody is contributing to one goal. Everyone is just improvising and enjoying every moment. Just meeting our cast, Brent Buell, Greg Kwedar and Clint (Bentley). The way they create, and the way they love and respect people around them and give their trust — the creativity just blooms around people like that. And I think it definitely did. I think anyone who was on that production, this is their benchmark. Like every day on the set, it was so cathartic. People would cry. I think everybody got some RTA into their bloodstream. It was proof of what art can do, but also what incredible, open-hearted people can do. 

Sing Sing will re-release in theaters on January 17th, 2025. Featured photo: The cast of Sing Sing. Credit Dominic Leon; courtesy Ruta Kiskyte.