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.

“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.

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.

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. This time, as in Coppola’s famous film, it came with an offer he actually couldn’t refuse.

“Aron was like, ‘Look, I’d really love for you to come out. I think your combination of skills would be great to have. And I think DreamWorks would be a great place for you to get a shot to direct,” Ramsey said.

Ramsey soon became the company’s head of story, then directed a TV special based on the 2009 feature Monsters vs. Aliens. That led to 2012’s Rise of the Guardians, which turned childhood myths into an Avengers–like team of action heroes. The central figure was not Santa, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy, but Jack Frost (voiced by Chris Pine), who provides kids with snow days but isn’t someone children necessarily believe in. He barely believes in himself.

Ramsey felt just like him. “Quite literally,” the director said. “I remember Francis saying once, ‘Every movie I’ve ever worked on, I realized that the story of my life was becoming the story of the movie.’ I know I thought about that with Guardians. It’s the story of this kid who’s aspiring, but feels like he doesn’t deserve to be in the company of these hallowed figures.”

Even now, when people tell him how much they love the movie, he winces—thinking only of the compromises, the things he wishes he could fix, the creative battles he lost, the extra time or money he wishes he’d had.

Guardians hit theaters in November 2012 on a wave of immense hype. Today, it’s a holiday cult classic, but its initial box office did not live up to DreamWorks’ expectations. “It was a shock,” Ramsey said. “We’d been working on it feverishly for three years, and the studio thought they had Frozen on their hands before Frozen. They thought it was going to make a billion dollars.”

Instead it earned about $306 million globally. Given its $145 million budget and the large portion of revenue that theater owners collect, Guardians was regarded as a financial disappointment. Ramsey took it especially hard, not just because it was his directing debut, but because of his status as the first Black director of a major animated film.

“I had newspaper articles describing me as ‘the Obama of animation,’” he said. “I remember the weekend after the opening, and we were in these incredibly gloomy phone calls. I said, ‘Well, I guess instead of the Obama of animation, I’m now the Herman Cain of animation.”

Selma and A Wrinkle in Time filmmaker Ava DuVernay, a friend and fellow proponent of inclusion and diversity in Hollywood, said this is the peril of being a trailblazer in an industry that has traditionally undervalued Black creativity. “It’s an exorbitant and unhealthy expectation when you’re in this ‘firsts’ category,” she told Vanity Fair. “It’s quite a bittersweet category.” Being the first Black anything, she said, “very rarely comes with freedom. In some places it’s ornamental, it’s ceremonial, it’s done with caution, or it’s done halfway. And now that person is the first—and is expected to fly.”

Ramsey remained at DreamWorks for a little over a year after that, but something was off. “It was just more deflating than anything else,” he said. “You have such gigantic expectations coming at you from every direction, and suddenly things hit a brick wall. I think the thing that kept me from feeling completely defeated about it was simply the fact that I had been in theaters with audiences that were moved by the movie.”

But there was no other directing opportunity on the DreamWorks slate, and he knew that their full pipeline and struggling business model meant it might take several years to get that shot again, if ever. So, Ramsey moved on. “I was in the wilderness,” he said.

Agents who had once promised Ramsey he could get “the next Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel were no longer so enthusiastic. It was like he was in “director’s jail,” that unspoken curse that looms over Hollywood filmmakers who don’t meet expectations. “I still got meetings, but I wasn’t being hunted down,” he said.

Still, he kept trying. 

DuVernay said perseverance is as much a part of being an artist as creativity. “I think that he moves through those spaces with as much grace as one can,” she said. “Anyone who survives that and not just makes more, but innovates and elevates his craft, is doing something right. He definitely is.”

“One good thing about that time was I was able to pull some old projects that I had sitting in the drawer,” Ramsey said. “The phone was not ringing off the hook, so I thought, I’ve got to start generating something. So I wrote.”

There was other work too. Avi Arad, the famed producer of the early Spider-Man movies, recruited Ramsey to direct an animated feature intended for the Chinese marketplace. “It was a lot like Rise of the Guardians, but with Chinese mythological characters,” Ramsey said. He worked on it for about a year before one of the financiers pulled the plug and shuttered the project.

That’s when the team working on an animated Spider-Man movie at Sony asked Ramsey to join the project—at first, just to do storyboards. 21 Jump Street and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were producing and had devised a story, and his DreamWorks friend and colleague Bob Persichetti was directing. 

“My first meeting with Bob, he said, ‘The cool thing about it is, it’s not Peter Parker Spider-Man, it’s Miles Morales Spider-Man,’” Ramsey recalled. “I was like, What…? Oh, my God, this is a whole different thing.” The hero was a biracial kid, half Black, half Puerto Rican, trying to do good and protect people in his New York neighborhood. As with his work with Singleton, Ramsey felt like he knew kids like this from real life.

“I read the very early treatment Phil had written. And man, there was something in the emotion of it even at that stage, where I was like, This is really going to be something special. If you can preserve this feeling, it’s really going to be something,” he said. “And the finished movie is way different, but it still has the same core that it had back then.”

Ramsey and Persichetti worked on storyboards for nearly a year. Then Ramsey was formally asked to sign on as codirector. Rodney Rothman wrote a new draft and came aboard as another director, and the rest is literally film history. Reviews of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse overflowed with hosannas. The global box office was $375 million—only a bit more than Guardians, but the budget had been about half of the previous film’s. It was an unabashed hit.

Ramsey put a lot of himself into the film, but he is quick to point out that his codirectors did the same. “I feel like I get too much credit for what worked,” he said. “When you look at the movie, you can see everybody’s fingerprints.… Like the relationship between Miles and his uncle. Both Bob and I had stories of uncle figures who were slightly less reputable than dad. There was a bunch of stuff that comes from Rodney. Yeah, there was a bunch of stuff from me as a Black man that I know went into the relationship between Miles and [his father]. I think that was in the nuances of their relationship.”

When Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won the Golden Globe for best animated feature, Ramsey remembers DuVernay guiding him in front of banks of cameras at the various after-parties. “She was overjoyed. She was dragging me into pictures and she was dragging photographers: ‘This is Peter Ramsey!’” he said. “After Spider-Verse, that kicked me up into another realm of like, Oh, wow, I’m in the big kids’ room now’”—especially once Ramsey and his teammates won the Oscar, establishing him as the first Black winner for best animated feature.

DuVernay laughed when reminded that she’s often smiling bigger than Ramsey is in those awards-night snapshots. “I love it,” she said. “It brought me so much joy and it had so many layers. To see him as a part of that team. I wanted him to win, not in a sense of gold and trophies, but in general on his career: I just want him to win. And he’s doing that.”

That’s the famous lesson from Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, but it applies here too: With great power comes great responsibility. Ramsey remembers that his success comes with a debt, and he is determined to pay it back. “You get tons and tons of invitations or requests to address students or participate on panels or in forums,” he said. “When it comes to things that have to do with arts education for any kids really, but of course, Black students in particular, I always do it. I know how much it means to people when you interact with them. Partially because I know how much it meant to me when somebody took my aspiration seriously.”

One thing he tries to impart is that very few people start as directors. He wants students to know that there are many doors into this business. “It’s crazy that more people don’t know that there’s such a wide range of jobs you can get, because it’s been a closed shop in some ways. There are so many opportunities out there if you just know about them.”

For him, it was storyboarding. DuVernay started out as a publicist before becoming a director. His younger brother Eric Ramsey even took a reverse path into show business, starting in animation and then going into storyboarding. “After I got into the live-action end of the business I tempted him over, and he stayed,” Peter said. “He’s also a talented photographer and cinematographer.”

Peter is now working on his own next steps. He’s currently finishing the Netflix live-action/animation hybrid series Lost Ollie, based on a storybook by William Joyce, whose work inspired Rise of the Guardians. Kubo and the Two Strings character designer Shannon Tindle adapted and is producing this version, with Jonathan Groff voicing a stuffed plaything trying to get home. 

“Even the animated characters exist in a very real world, and it goes back and forth between the story of Ollie, who is a toy rabbit, and Billy, the little boy who loses him,” Ramsey said. "It’s going to be very interesting tonally because it’s not all fluffy. It’s not all sunshine and roses.”

Even before she began working with him on that project, Stevi Carter, production executive for feature animation at Netflix, said she was aware of Ramsey’s positive influence on their business. (She moderates the conversation below with Ramsey and other Black innovators in animation.) 

“I met him through various people in animation, and it’s a small community,” Carter said. “Peter obviously has had such an impact. So I hear his name a lot from young filmmakers who are just super inspired by him.… I think the first thing that comes to mind is he represents what’s possible.” 

Ramsey is now expanding his reach beyond the animation world. He’s still executive producing the Spider-Verse sequel, but he’s not codirecting it; he’s also serving as a producer on Master, an indie CG feature directed by former DreamWorks animator Jamaal Bradley, about a young woman martial artist who fights with otherworldly powers.

Meanwhile, Wyclef Jean tapped Ramsey to help produce Prince of Port-au-Prince, an animated take on the musician’s childhood in Haiti. Ramsey said he was won over during a Zoom pitch. “Wyclef’s on the screen with his guitar and he’s talking through it. He just wove this spell,” he said. “It’s magical.”

Ramsey hopes Lost Ollie will be a stepping stone to more live-action. Also on his list of upcoming projects is his own original screenplay Blood Count, a supernatural noir thriller set decades ago in his old neighborhood. LeBron James’s SpringHill Company is developing it. 

“That’s one of those projects that I pulled out while in the wilderness,” Ramsey said. “It’s a movie set in South-Central, L.A., in 1957, which is the year my mom and dad came to town. So in a lot of ways, it’s a love letter.” His version of his parents are a jazz musician and a fledgling journalist who become embroiled in a series of murders that might be perpetrated by something monstrous.

The supernatural is also a theme of his other live-action project, Love in Vain—a fantasy that goes all-in on the outrageous stories surrounding blues musician Robert Johnson, who was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil. “He’s the prototype of the musical bad boy,” Ramsey said, but this is not a true-to-life biopic. “We’re trying to do the legend with the truth hidden between the lines.” Singer Lionel Richie is signed on to produce, along with Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

Finally, there’s Boy 21, based on a novel by The Silver Linings Playbook author Matthew Quick, about two friends on a Philadelphia high school basketball team who help each other through the season. That kind of camaraderie is something Ramsey has experienced in his own work, and he knows what it means to pass it on.

Ramsey isn’t sure which of these will move forward first. He has also learned that Hollywood can be fickle and unpredictable. What he knows for sure is that there will be other stories to tell.

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