About seven days from when we were to shoot the Oval Office, I get a call from locations, "We lost this location." And so Chris just looked at me and said, "You have to build this," and walked away.
Hi, I am Ruth De Jong and this is how I designed Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer".
I actually sat down with Chris Nolan and Emma Thomas, his producer, and wife.
I was actually filming "Nope" at the time, and Hoyte van Hoytema was the cinematographer on "Nope", and he also has been a longtime collaborator with Chris and Emma and team, and they were looking for a production designer, unbeknownst to me and thought I would be a great fit.
The way Chris likes to work is he works very closely with his designer and in previous films he had done the same where he'll spend six to eight weeks alone working one-on-one with his production designer.
Together, Lauren and I, our extraordinary researcher, Lauren Sandoval, and she has some just incredible relationships with archivists, universities, the US government, and was able to get her hands on a lot of declassified documentation and imagery.
But also, Chris was very careful to remind me he was not interested in making a documentary.
We were not interested in replicating these pictures.
It was essentially, study this, get the essence of this imagery, and we were to make the "Oppenheimer" that we made.
First, I'll sketch out sort of how I'm seeing things.
