A question I often ask production designers – or any designers or architects for that matter – is on their view of the role these disciplines play in influencing something as primal (and unpredictable) as human emotion. A lofty pursuit by all means, imparting that portentous significance and agency to something non-human with a view to alter something essentially human. That line of enquiry has also been the very shield in often defending architecture and design’s dwindling authority, and conversely in keeping these practices rather elitist and aloof from the status quo by elevating their dispensation to art itself, instead of a service with (ideally) more forms of universal access. The question, however, has a somewhat resounding significance in production design, even if the aspect of habitability is eliminated, and the time frame under question is significantly minimised.

Purpose-built sets and filmographic environments exist for the very purpose of eliciting what the scene demands of the actor, apart from constituting specific backdrops that the performers draw from, as much as they do from the script and fellow performers. For Oscar nominee Ruth De Jong whose work populated what was easily amongst the biggest and best films of 2023, Oppenheimer, authenticity in recreation proved key, and the only kind of influence she envisaged her spaces would have on the actors. Including her own, the film leads the nominations charts this year, and the acting nominations – particularly Cillian Murphy whose chilling, conflicted performance is poised to win – should speak to the kind of authenticity and research-led period recreation De Jong was vying for.

The same authenticity in telling the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer–the triumph and tragedy of the American Prometheus, from the biography that lent the framework and a bulk of the research for the film–was then a common goal for De Jong and director Christopher Nolan. The time-twisting director’s (in)famous insistence on the use of only practical effects for his films for heightened realism, and the technical feat of capturing a majority of Oppenheimer on IMAX 70mm film posed unique but exciting challenges for De Jong and her team, now tasked with building an entire town from the ground up without any reliance on green screens or computer effects.

Just like the film, switching between a sombre character study delving into the personal pathos of a creator over the world-altering effects of his creation, and the (cinematically) grander, bolder Trinity Test, De Jong’s design for the world of Oppenheimer had to transcend not just time periods, but also scales. The former of the two was attempted and achieved in terms that are architectonically ambivalent, but just about work in the film’s context. Both De Jong and Nolan wanted to steer clear from period details that were too specific or “precious” to end up attracting attention to themselves. While De Jong’s set designs were, as mentioned, authentic and true to form, the set decoration and dressing were successively peeled back to arrive at a certain level of minimal that could allude to timeless.

This was particularly interesting to try and comprehend with respect to Nolan’s distinctive filmography and his travails with time, while also allowing him to shoot and direct sequences non-linearly without a sense of jarring dissociation in place. Specificity was arrived at through details in time and place communicating bigger ideas, like Woman sitting with crossed arms by Picasso and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot during the Can You Hear the Music montage, a sequence that is the wonderful coming together of everything that constitutes film. ‘Props’ like these, for De Jong, underlined as prevalent art and literature, the world’s ascension into modernism from an age of classical romanticism, from an epoch of art and religion to a new world order wherein science and industry – and war – reigned supreme.

The latter, moving between scales, was invariably more material and conspicuously visible in the scheme of interventions De Jong applied in Oppenheimer. Of particular mention are the two extremes of that scale - the urban placemaking exercise carried out in the recreation of Los Alamos, manifesting the quintessential Americanism in constructing in the middle of the desert, and the molecular, the particulate, the abstract visions of Oppenheimer conjuring ideas as grand as quantum physics theorems and fission, ultimately leading to the successful test and the atomic detonation.

While the actual scale of Los Alamos during its heyday in the 40s would have been impractical to replicate on film, De Jong’s Los Alamos, the site of the Manhattan Project was, according to Nolan and Hoyte van Hoytema, just the right amount of built. Constructed primarily of log and weathered naturally, the ‘city’ was put together from scratch, complete with infrastructure, amenities, and a sense of community, with structures including hospitals, bars, offices, lecture halls, residences, and laboratories – all with sound principles of urban planning in place. Somewhere between these two scales, De Jong and her team, armed with mounds of research, assembled the film’s hero prop down to the last wire and its distinct external casing - the bomb that changed the course of human history, one that could, in lesser hands, combust the planet almost instantaneously.          

Also read, STIR’s coverage of the best of production design from 2023: 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' and its many worlds with Jason Kisvarday
Dylan Cole and Ben Procter on designing the world of 'Avatar: The Way of Water'
In case you missed: Mise-en-scène with STIR—enticing conversations with four of 2022's Oscar-nominated production designers.