Finding a 127-Room Mansion to Replicating 1,000 Pendleton Blankets, the Teams Behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘Saltburn’ and More Unpack Their Films
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From production designers to composers, the creatives behind the biggest films of this year sat down to chat with Variety’s senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay during Variety’s A Night With Artisans. The creatives who helped build the Los Alamos set for “Oppenheimer” or acquired 1,000 blankets for “Killers of the Flower Moon” shared their creative processes and stories from set.
In six separate conversations, Tangcay spoke with the teams behind “Oppenheimer,” “Saltburn,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Maestro,” “American Fiction” and “The Color Purple.”
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See the full Variety A Night With Artisans recap below.
“Oppenheimer”
For production designer Ruth De Jong, creating the town of Los Alamos was a “daunting task.” Because they had a lean budget, she said they had to be creative about their approach. The existing Los Alamos in New Mexico is modernized and did not reflect the version Nolan wanted to portray in the movie, so De Jong had to construct Los Alamos from the ground up, in addition to building all of the Trinity site as well.
“As I was digging into the research, it’s like the U.S. government in 1942 gave Oppenheimer $2 billion … and the entire Army Corps of Engineers. I had neither,” she said.
The initial model for the town was so large it could not fit in the house. When De Jong visited Los Alamos in New Mexico, she realized how “incredible” the interiors were and brought Nolan there to crosscut.
“We are in the middle of nowhere, 360 views, completely uninhabited, no cell phone service. All of the actors were completely transported, all of us were, the crew was. Chris and I said set a precedent where there would be no video village, no tents, no crew vehicles, nothing could come up to our main set. Everywhere you looked was entirely period. We embraced full authenticity to the core,” De Jong said.
Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick then reflected on how she approached designing for J. Robert Oppenheimer over four decades. While she said Oppenheimer does not change his silhouette much, there is a notable shift in his look at Los Alamos.
“He becomes the man. He puts that suit on and that blue shirt and tie and picks up the hat, puts it on his head and holds the pipe. He is the sheriff of the town,” Mirojnick said.
As an editor, Jennifer Lame said unlike the other panelists, she does no research and tries to come into the editing process as an audience member. “I just pushed play on the first scene and opened the first scene bin, and it was just like, wow, I got to see Los Alamos and the costumes and the crazy hair and Emily’s neck at the end. Everything they did allowed me to hyper-focus and do my job because there was no distractions,” she said.
Hair department head Jaime Leigh McIntosh later discussed how she aged the characters, specifically Kitty Oppenheimer, while maintaining realism. “We wanted to, with her hair, create a little bit of harshness with age. Knowing that the actual Kitty Oppenheimer didn’t go gray, she must have continued to color her hair, so we gave her a little bit of a color buildup look and went a little darker with her,” she said.
“Saltburn”
Production designer Suzie Davies said she had “an absolute Oliver moment” when she discovered the 127-room mansion that they used for the estate the film centers on.
“I was able to use some of the history that was already there and add on layers, paint walls, take thousands pounds worth of tapestries down and put our own up, change some of the artwork and paint, bring some of our palettes that we’d spoken about in the prep to the film — the deep red, the shiny surfaces, the textures — because this film is about all the senses, not just the vision and the sound, but the smell, the taste, the texture,” Davies said.
In Oliver’s room, his wallpaper is a maze. Davies said this is one of the film’s “loads of hidden little Easter eggs.” “At one stage we were going to have blood running through the tiles, which would then leak to the maze, so it was great to play with all of those elements,” she said.
Margot Robbie recommended cinematographer Linus Sandgren to Emerald Fennell after working together on “Babylon.” With some referring to “Saltburn” as a vampire film, Sandgren said this was taken into consideration when honing in on the film’s aesthetic. “Visually, we felt more like painters than cinematographers in the way we were thinking about things,” he said.
Composer Anthony Willis said Fennell wanted the score to be as romantic as possible, despite the film being billed as a thriller, to lean into the relationship between Oliver and Felix.
“We settled on a kind of classical language, which I really like because it has a mathematical calculating quality to it … By the end of the film when all it’s revealed, it’s perfect for that kind of coming together,” he said.
“Killers of the Flower Moon”
Jacqueline West recalls the moment Martin Scorsese asked her to design the costumes for “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
“I ran upstairs and told my husband that Marty asked me to do this and started jumping up and down. Then I ran downstairs and started doing research, and I did research for four months,” she said.
By the time she got to Oklahoma to film, she had about 2,000 pieces of research, pulling from Osage home movies in the 1920s and the Osage Nation Museum. She worked alongside Osage wardrobe consultant Julie O’Keefe.
When designing Lily Gladstone’s Mollie, West said she was the most traditional among her sisters, embracing the clothes of her ancestors.
“Her outfit was mainly an Osage woman’s shirt, which was always the same shape, often embellished by ribbons at the shoulders, but usually calico, sometimes satin. And her skirt was usually broadcloth, either a wrap or a dirndl, and also very traditional. She wore moccasins around the house. When she went into town, she’d sometimes wear a French stacked heel or a beautiful leather purse. But for the most part she maintained the tradition of the Osage woman,” West said.
Pendleton opened their archives for West, sending her the color palettes of what the Osage would order. West took a panoramic shot of the Osage leaving for Washington, D.C., where she spotted about 100 blankets in the photo. She then broke up the photo into 22 sections and sent those to Pendleton — who replicated every blanket for her.
“In the end they probably made 1,000 blankets for us, and in the traditional 1920 colors. And then when we got the blankets, we added the fringe, which is very Osage. The yarn is kind of a macrame treatment that you run through the edges of the blankets, and you see that all through the movie. We hired young Osage women to come and work in our workshop and do all that work so they could be part of it,” West said.
“Maestro“
While shooting the party scene at the Dakota building, director Bradley Cooper suggested having everyone in the room actually talk, rather than only having the principal actors talk and adding in the rest later. For sound re-recording mixer Tom Ozanich, this was a challenge for post-production, with the principal actors being miked in addition to those around them.
“It’s a tricky weaving of balancing all of those elements to be able to actually hear the principal actors all the time because all of those people are talking all the time. In the end, it’s actually all of that plus group ADR and effects crowds added onto it,” he said.
Then discussing how the shifting perspectives shaped the scene, Ozanich added: “There was a lot of fun playing with shifting between where Felicia is in the party and where Lenny is in that party. And there’s a very big difference in worlds that they’re living in at that point in time, in the separation in their relationship. And so that’s mimicked in the sound at that point in the party. It’s very busy and chaotic where Lenny is. And then it’s much more quiet, and even though you hear all this stuff going on, there’s definitely this isolation that happens when you’re with Felicia.”
When asked about his experience with party scenes, costume designer Mark Bridges said he tries to give each party scene a “very specific place and time.” For the Dakota party scene, Bridges drew on real photographs from parties the Bernsteins threw.
“It was a neglected mix of theater artists and musicians and people who could give money and then of course, a spade of good looking young men. You try to describe the period, you try to make a through line of what was in style for women at the time and really take care to make each of the background interesting, so that should the camera land on them, they make sense,” Bridges said.
“American Fiction”
Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut “American Fiction” follows a Black novelist, Monk, who jokingly writes a book that embodies all of the Black stereotypes he is critical of — only for his work to become a sensation.
“American Fiction” artisans joined together to discuss their work, including editor Hilda Rasula; cinematographer Cristina Dunlap; composer Laura Karpman; and supervising sound editor Mandell Winter.
Rasula spoke to balancing the satire and the emotion in the film.
“We ended up shaping the comedy in very specific ways to make sure that it didn’t actually swing too high and too broad and go into farce, and then we also ended up taking the dramatic scenes and finding a way to find the lightness in those, finding a way to find the humanity so we weren’t wallowing in sadness. Because if we dipped too far into one or another tone, it ultimately didn’t work.
Dunlap explained the conversations she had with Jefferson about how to capture Monk on camera: “It started early on as really wanting to show Monk, how isolated he is. I think in the film his brother describes him as unknowable, and that was our jumping off point. So we shot in the 2.35 aspect ratio, so he could be isolated in frame often.”
Karpman spoke to crafting a score that reflects the film’s vast emotional landscape: “The film has tremendous emotional range. It goes from biting comedy to tragedy to a beautiful family story to some of the funniest scenes I’ve seen ever on film, so you’ve got to have a score that can cover those beats. But then you also always want to have the liveliness and the feel of jazz throughout the score. So I think the challenge was combining the stylistic parameters of jazz with the craft of film scoring.”
Winter discussed the craft of sound editing and supervising.
“Our characters have such unique voices that we needed to hear all of it,” he said. “On top of that, everything’s grounded in realism, to a point. There are moments where we get to play with the impressionism a little bit and go inside Monk’s head, where it is isolated. It’s one of these really wonderful films that plays with time and space in a nuanced way. So for us, it was just a lot of fun to bring everything together.”
“The Color Purple”
Director Blitz Bazawule called “The Color Purple” one of “the most important and sacred texts ever.”
“Celie was actively, like many people who have dealt with trauma and abuse, trying to work her way out of it, finding out how to love, who to love, how to forgive, how to triumph, how to conjure back her life together,” Bazawule said. “Once we open that world up, then I think that’s kind of where we all went, okay, I think we have something here, and we’re going to earn our way into the cannon.”
Songwriters Denisia “Blu” Andrews and Brittany “Chi” Coney described working on the project as “a dream come true.” “Having an opportunity to be of service and to give true spirit and be a part of this legendary thing, man, God is so good,” Coney said.
Choreographer Fatima Robinson recalled seeing the movie with her mom and sisters. To this day, Robinson said her and her sister will send hand emojis to signify them doing the patty cake like in “The Color Purple.”
“To be able to reimagine that patty cake, the beginning of the movie and re-choreograph, it was amazing. It was deeply rooted in me and definitely something I was so honored to be a part of,” Robinson said.
When meeting with Walker to create the Broadway production of “The Color Purple,” executive music producer Stephen Bray recalls her telling him to “listen to the ancestors.”
“It feels really good to continue and democratize this story because now that it’s a film, everyone can see it. Small children, girls … can experience this story in a way that maybe they couldn’t on Broadway,” he said.
To set up the score to lead into the musical numbers, composer Kris Bowers said Bazawule brought him into the process early on.
“A lot of that was just for me to be aware of the intention, the references, the sounds that they were going to really pull out and focus on. And so by the time I even started writing any of the score, I knew these songs very intimately. I knew these melodies forwards and backwards and they were just stuck in my head,” Bowers said.
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