Early life
Audouy was born in Toulouse, France and grew up in Fillmore, a small city in Ventura County, California.1 He left college at age 20 to pursue an apprenticeship inside Hollywood art departments, learning the craft directly from two leading production designers: Bo Welch, best known for his work on the original Men in Black, and Alex McDowell, who later designed Minority Report.4 Rather than academic training, Audouy absorbed production design through hands-on illustration and graphic work on those departments' productions.
He became an early adopter of digital concept design tools and was among the first illustrators in Hollywood art departments to work fully digitally, giving him a workflow advantage on the large-scale visual effects films that defined the early 2000s.4
Career
Concept illustrator and graphic designer
Audouy's first decade in the industry was spent as a concept illustrator and graphic designer contributing to dozens of productions. His credits in this capacity include Men in Black (1997), Men in Black II (2002), Primary Colors (1998), Wild Wild West (1999), Minority Report (2002), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), and Zodiac (2007).5
Art director
From illustration, Audouy moved into art direction on major studio productions, including Spider-Man (2002), The Terminal (2004), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Transformers (2007), Watchmen (2009), and Green Lantern (2011).5 These tent-pole films deepened his experience managing large-scale art department builds and working within the constraints of visual effects-heavy productions.
Production designer
Audouy received his first production designer credit on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), directed by Timur Bekmambetov, followed by Dracula Untold (2014, directed by Gary Shore).5 His debut collaboration with director James Mangold came on The Wolverine (2013), which began one of the most sustained director-designer partnerships in contemporary Hollywood.4
His work on Logan (2017), again with Mangold, earned him the Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design in the Contemporary Film category at the 22nd ADG Awards (January 28, 2018).6 The film's stripped-down, grounded visual world, a deliberate departure from the heightened aesthetics of other X-Men productions, became a signature reference for production designers working in genre films seeking a naturalistic register.
Ford v Ferrari (2019), his third Mangold collaboration, brought another major motorsport and period recreation challenge. Audouy earned a Satellite Award nomination for his work on that film, faithfully reconstructing the 1960s Le Mans racing world across multiple continents' worth of practical locations and sound stage builds.1
For Air (2023), directed by Ben Affleck, Audouy recreated the mid-1980s Nike corporate environment with period-accurate detail, a production constrained by a tight schedule and budget that relied heavily on location work and practical dressing.4
A Complete Unknown (2024), again with Mangold, required Audouy to design 75 distinct sets representing Bob Dylan's New York world from 1961 to 1965: apartments, Greenwich Village cafes, folk venues, and Columbia Records Studio A (rebuilt as a full 1:1 replica from over 1,500 archival photographs).2 The production employed exhaustive historical documentation, including photographers' original negatives and Suze Rotolo's memoir. Audouy received an Art Directors Guild nomination for Excellence in Production Design in the Period Film category for the film, and the production won a Set Decorators Society of America award.7
Beyond features, Audouy designed music videos for several major artists, including Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, Coldplay, P!nk, Camila Cabello, and Dua Lipa. His video for Harry Styles's "Falling" earned the first Art Directors Guild Award ever awarded to a music video.4 For television, his work on The Residence (2025, Shondaland/Netflix) earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Production Design.8
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Design approach
Audouy joined Ghostbusters: Afterlife as production designer under director Jason Reitman. His foundational brief was to honor the visual language of the original 1984 film directed by Ivan Reitman without replicating it literally. To establish a baseline, Audouy took screen grabs from the original movie and modeled its iconic locations in 3D before designing anything new.3 His core philosophy for the production was explicit: build real things in camera, use practical locations over digital environments wherever possible, and let aging and weathering carry the weight of narrative history.3
The production filmed almost entirely in Alberta, Canada. Audouy and his team used four separate Alberta locations, including the Drumheller badlands and Fort Macleod, to construct the fictional town of Summerville, Oklahoma, connecting them through a coherent "story map" that made the geography feel continuous on screen.3 The town's architecture drew from Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on American Southwest vernacular and incorporated Art Deco elements that the story attributed to the fictional industrialist Ivo Shandor.
The Summerville farmhouse
The farmhouse belonging to Egon Spengler, the film's gravitational centerpiece, was built from scratch as a fully functional 2,000-square-foot Queen Anne-style structure on 30 acres of Alberta land.3 Egon's eccentric modifications, including rooftop antennas and improvised experimental equipment, were designed as expressions of character psychology made physical in architecture. The interior was replicated at 1:1 scale on a sound stage at the Calgary Film Centre for filming that required controlled lighting and camera freedom.3
Spinners Roller Hop
The 1950s-era carhop diner was constructed from an abandoned garage. Audouy's team converted it into a fully operational period restaurant, complete with working kitchen, dining hall, and mid-century design details consistent with the fictional Oklahoma setting. The challenge was balancing nostalgic legibility with authentic physical deterioration, since the film needed it to feel lived-in rather than theme-park pristine.
The Ecto-1
Two fully operational Ectomobile vehicles were built for the production.3 Audouy added a scissor-arm jumper gunner seat, a new mechanism designed with the story's young characters in mind, and applied detailed physical weathering throughout. For the No-Ghost logo decals on both vehicles, he created vinyl replicas and then integrated specific cracked aging patterns to simulate decades of use.3 The vehicles were built to be driven as working props, not hero cars maintained on trailers.
Temple of Gozer
The subterranean mine and Temple of Gozer complex required a 40-foot vertical mineshaft set built on a sound stage, complete with a functioning elevator.3 The 360-degree temple interior drew on Shandor's fictional architectural vision, with a bas-relief transformation sequence and a throne designed with reference to the modernist architecture of Carlo Scarpa.3 The sculptural elements were produced through a combination of CNC milling and foam carving, then finished to simulate stone.
Ray's Occult Books
To recreate Ray Stantz's occult bookshop from Ghostbusters II (1989), Audouy took a forensic approach: he studied screen grabs from the original film and researched the New York City location to reconstruct the layout and atmosphere accurately.3 He also consulted Tom Duffield, who had worked in the art department on Ghostbusters II, for direct institutional knowledge of the original set's construction.3 After the reconstructed set was built and dressed with props, Audouy deployed a vintage Hollywood dust machine across the whole space and burned incense and patchouli to achieve the sensory atmosphere of an old bookshop that had been accumulating stock for decades.9 The Ray's Occult set was built on a sound stage at the Calgary Film Centre in the same building as the Temple of Gozer set.
The trap field
Audouy's team engineered a practical field of 198 ghost traps buried across a large exterior location, each wired to a programmable control system.3 Every trap was built with functioning LED lighting and mechanical actuation so they could be operated on camera without digital compositing.
