Peter Ramsey’s filmmaking journey is as close to a superhero origin story as it gets. Someone who thinks he doesn’t belong discovers he actually has astounding abilities. His own heroes and icons become powerful mentors, guiding his way. There’s a crisis when things unexpectedly go bad and doubt overtakes him. Then resilience leads to comeback and triumph, all while he retains his aw-shucks charm.
It may sound a little bit by the numbers, but that’s how things really played out for the Oscar-winning codirector of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the filmmaker behind 2012’s animated Rise of the Guardians. Ramsey is currently directing the new Netflix series Lost Ollie, about a beloved stuffed toy who is trying to find his way home, and several live-action projects are in competition for the next spot on his to-do list.
Guardians made Ramsey the first African American filmmaker to direct a big-budget animated feature, while Spider-Verse made him the first African American filmmaker to win the animated-feature Academy Award. Francis Ford Coppola calls him a vital collaborator; Ava DuVernay considers him a fellow champion for Hollywood inclusion; and Lionel Richie, Wyclef Jean, and LeBron James are among those lining up to work with him.
But how did he get here? Ramsey sometimes finds himself asking the same question.
Chapter 1 —THE ORIGIN STORY
I was born in South-Central, L.A.,” the now 58-year-old said. “Right off of Crenshaw and Slauson, which is now kind of famous for Nipsey Hussle. That’s the place where he was shot, literally four blocks away from where I grew up.” Ramsey was the oldest of four children, raised in a blue-collar family. His father was a letter carrier; his mother was an aide at an elementary school.
Ramsey explored the world outside his neighborhood through his mother’s magazines, drawing his own stories in the margins with a ballpoint pen. “Without realizing it, I was kind of playing around with some kind of narrative already,” he said. “I just never stopped drawing.” His mother encouraged reading, and his father taught him to love music, especially jazz and classical. “I always feel like it opened up some kind of mental space that gave me an appetite for looking outside my immediate sphere of experience.”
But they had no ties to the arts beyond that, despite living in a show business region. “Definitely no connection to anything having to do with Hollywood or the movies,” he emphasized. “That was all a million miles away—or might as well have been.”
Ramsey kept drawing through his teenage years, and got accepted to UCLA as a fine arts major, the first in his immediate family to go to college. “I thought I’d be some kind of painter, or had the vague idea of being an illustrator. I didn’t know,” he said. “How do I find a career path? Or what do I want? It was all this hazy weird mystery to me.”
All Ramsey knew for sure was that he loved comic books, and the works of Andrew Wyeth—muscle-bound fantasy heroes and lonely people in desolate landscapes. College further expanded his interest in abstraction. He dropped out of art school to study film at Los Angeles City College.
Ramsey’s friends were movie obsessives, and he soon realized that filmmaking combined a number of his interests. He loved movies as a fan, but had no idea how they were made. “It was like they fell out of the sky,” he said. “I had no concept that I could be a part of something like that. It just never, never penetrated in my mind until I saw my friends nibbling at the edges of it.” 
One film in particular opened his eyes about the ways music, narrative, and visuals combined can transport an audience. “I remember pretty clearly, coming out of the theater, talking with my friends, like, ‘Man, the way that you’re just in the palm of the hand of the guy that made this…”
That movie was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Peter Ramsey, about 19 at the time, would never have dreamed that someday he would work alongside Steven Spielberg, developing the visuals for two of his future films.
Chapter 2 —THE MENTORS: SINGLETON, COPPOLA, AND KRUEGER
Ramsey broke into Hollywood by doing storyboards: the comic-strip-like panels that help filmmakers plot their shots and pace their movies. Ramsey had no idea he could do such work until an illustrator friend introduced him to the late storyboard legend Maurice Zuberano, who had worked on Citizen Kane, The Sound of Music, and West Side Story, among many others. 
“I had my sketchbook with me and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, sure, you can definitely do this!” Ramsey said. “‘I could? Me?’ I was just this dumb kid who had grown up 10 miles from Hollywood, but it was finally starting to gel that, oh, maybe this is a foothold.”
Ramsey got a job doing storyboards for commercials, selling products like Miller Lite, Pepsi, and cat litter. After doing that for a number of years, he was asked to work on a feature film. Frank LaLoggia, who had directed a cult-favorite scary movie called Lady in White in 1988, recruited Ramsey to do storyboards for a movie about Michelangelo. It fell apart in development, but it gave Ramsey both a chance to practice, and a trip to Florence to do location scouting. After that, he secured his first actual movie job: storyboards for the 1989 Freddy Krueger slasher sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.
That led to another job—Predator 2, in 1990—and with those dues paid, the prestige followed. A young filmmaker named John Singleton hired Ramsey to do storyboards for Boyz n the Hood. It was a breakthrough for both of them: Singleton would go on to become the first African American filmmaker to get an Oscar nomination for best director. “We really connected because he had grown up not far from where I grew up,” Ramsey said. 
He not only knew the characters in that South-Central drama, but was aware of how close he came to being one of them himself. “My life didn’t quite unfold that way, but it could have. If a couple of things had been different in my life, it 100% could have.”
Singleton, who died from a stroke in 2019 at the age of 51, made Ramsey see that someone like himself—a Black man, a Hollywood outsider—could work his way to the highest levels of the film business, all while telling stories about people like them, people who didn’t often see themselves centered onscreen. “That was huge for me because I had aspired to do something set where I grew up,” Ramsey said. “Before Boyz n the Hood, we weren’t even on the map, as far as movies went. John dragged that stuff into the light and introduced people to that world.”
Boyz n the Hood led to other high-profile work. Ramsey did storyboards for Ron Howard on 1991’s Backdraft and 1992’s Far and Away. Singleton hired him repeatedly, not only to draw visuals but also to do second unit directing on 1993’s Poetic Justice and 1995’s Higher Learning. “One day on Poetic Justice, we were going through some storyboards I had drawn, and he was really loving what I’d done,” Ramsey recalled. “He was like, ‘Man, if you ever wanted to be a director, you should really think about it, because you’ve got a good eye.”
Ramsey said Singleton gave him a chance because he saw another Black artist who was striving. “It was a conscious thing for him. He was definitely like, ‘I want to bring as many people as I can with me,’” Ramsey said. “The lack of recognition, the lack of people even being willing to look in the direction of a lot of Black artists or Black aspiring talent… There was so much untapped talent, and John could see it.’”
Ramsey also received important encouragement from another director he admired: Francis Ford Coppola, who had hired him to help create visuals for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “That probably has to be the most mind-boggling one of all to me, because my dad was a huge fan of The Godfather movies,” he said. “He was one of the few filmmakers that I knew growing up in my early teens. It was a literal worship.”
In the behind-the-scenes documentary featured below, a baby-faced Ramsey is seen sketching out some of the film’s gothic imagery. Ramsey is also interviewed on camera, talking about how the director encouraged him to study classical artists in order to get inside their heads and push his own boundaries.
Today, Coppola doesn’t recall Ramsey as a starry-eyed apprentice. “Even then, Peter had a very endearing personality. Kind, attentive, and always trying to be helpful. I consider him a friend,” Coppola told Vanity Fair. “I remember we occupied offices with rows and rows of Peter and the team’s storyboard drawings, and the production heads and I would constantly refer to them during preproduction and production of the film. He was an integral part of Dracula.”
Being the nexus point between a filmmaker and his creative team became Ramsey’s film school, and he recalls Coppola providing vital encouragement even when he had doubts about his own dream. “There was one story I’ll never forget,” Ramsey said. “One day, some Sony execs came in and I started packing my stuff and he was like, ‘It’s okay. You can stay, you can stay.’ They sat down and had a meeting right there in the room. I was drawing, like a little mouse in the corner. There was budget stuff going on, and I was like, Wow, he still has to deal with this? It’s crazy that they just don’t give him whatever he wants, because he’s a God.”
“So the meeting broke up and I’m sitting there drawing, trying to pretend like I wasn’t eavesdropping. Francis puts his hand on my shoulder and goes, ‘I wanted you to be able to see what these meetings are like and hang out.’ And then he goes, ‘As a young director, you’ve got to know how things work with the studio.’ I swear to God, I think a tear probably came out, because I was like, Oh my God, he takes me seriously.”
“From my working experiences with Peter, it was clear back then he was a great talent and very collaborative,” Coppola said. “His trailblazer status comes as no surprise to me, and I’m thrilled he’s found success as a director.”
What Ramsey didn’t expect was that his big breakthrough would also be a major setback.
Chapter 3 — THE RISE (AND FALL) OF THE GUARDIANS
Ramsey’s storyboarding career was going strong, and life was good. He’d gotten married and was raising three children. He became the go-to guy for blockbusters and awards contenders alike, storyboarding Independence Day and Godzilla with Roland Emmerich, Fight Club and Panic Room with David Fincher, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich with Spike Jonze, and Cast Away with Robert Zemeckis. The guy who walked out of E.T. with new appreciation for filmmaking worked alongside Spielberg on both A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report.
What he discovered was that the biggest hits didn’t always change his life. Sometimes it was the little movies, like 1995’s Tank Girl. Aron Warner, an executive producer on the film, went on to run a Silicon Valley–based computer animation company named Pacific Data Images.
PDI was eventually acquired by DreamWorks—and Warner wanted Ramsey to help develop their movies. “He said, ‘I’m working on this thing called Shrek and it’s kind of crazy,’” Ramsey said. “At the time, I’m pretty sure I was working on Fight Club. I was like, ‘Eh, animation shmanimation, I’m doing real movies! So thanks, but no thanks.’” After Shrek won the first best-animated-picture Oscar, and Shrek 2 established DreamWorks as a behemoth, Warner reached out again.