‘Oppenheimer’ Production Designer Ruth De Jong On Rebuilding A Full-Scale Los Alamos Without CGI – Featurette
EXCLUSIVE: When location scouting for Oppenheimer, production designer Ruth De Jong was tasked with finding a location to recreate Los Alamos. Although the actual town of Los Alamos was too modernized to use for the period piece, De Jong and her team spent some time there for research. “I began laying out the expanse of the town with our set designer Jim Hewitt,” she says. “We took these drawings, with plans and elevations, and made foam core architectural models in a quarter-inch scale.”
De Jong and her team landed on Ghost Ranch, which is along the same mountain range as the existing Los Alamos. “We had this epic town that we wanted to do,” she says, “but the U.S. government had $2 million and a few years and I had nowhere near that.” Neither De Jong nor director Christopher Nolan wanted to use CGI for extensions on the town, so De Jong opted for building exteriors and shooting the interiors at the actual Los Alamos, like Oppenheimer’s house, which has been largely untouched since he lived there.
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Building the physical exteriors, rather than relying on CGI, helped the actors immerse themselves in the era and also gave the art departments room to work close by while staying out of everyone’s way. “As Oppenheimer is walking down Main Street, each department is hunkered down in one of those houses with additional gear,” De Jong says. “I tried to set up and design all the spaces so we weren’t wasting time because of how efficient we needed to be. There were no monitors, but this meant you’re always in earshot.
Click above to watch an exclusive featurette on the production design of Oppenheimer, with production designer Ruth De Jong.
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