Production Designer Ruth De Jong on How to Build (Ancient) Worlds for Auteurs

From the misty seaports of Massachusetts seaports to the otherworldly town of Twin Peaks and even the distant shores of Troy, Ruth De Jong has spent the past twenty years transporting audiences into the unforgettable worlds created by auteur directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Terrence Malick, Kenneth Lonergan, David Lynch, Jordan Peele, and Christopher Nolan.

“My goal in my work is to always paint the most authentic pictures,” De Jong shared with IndieWire at the Virginia Film Festival, where the production designer received the festival’s Craft Award. The town of Charlottesville has a special place in De Jong’s heart.

It’s here where legendary production designer Jack Fisk, father of De Jong’s high school friend Schuyler Fisk, suggested she forgo attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for grad school in favor of working on the set of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 Oscar-winning film “There Will Be Blood” instead. Recalling that fateful conversation, De Jong said that Fisk told her he saw the younger version of himself in her, sharing, “I think what the world continually needs are mentors [like Fisk] showing up.”

De Jong fell in love with filmmaking as she continued to work with Fisk on Anderson’s “The Master,” and a handful of films by Terence Malick, including his Palme d’Or winner “The Tree of Life.” Eventually she spread her wings and took on her first film as production designer: Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea.” Looking back on these early days and everything she learned on those sets, De Jong said that she believes “a body of work like that is built upon itself. I think I’m constantly pulling from the past, but also pulling from the future.”

Whether designing a fishing village in modern-day Gloucester, recreating the White House Oval Office, or crafting the iconic Trojan horse, all of De Jong’s work comes in service of the characters and story being told. While crafting a film’s world, De Jong asks herself, “How do I make this tangible and alive and real and authentic?”

To capture undertones of the real working-class people in the fishing community at the center of “Manchester by the Sea,” this meant spending time with local fishermen. “We asked if we could go into their houses. We asked if we could use their fishing boats. We asked if we could use their lobster cages and rope everything, and then we would,” De Jong recalled. All of this research helped De Jong nail the subtle nuances and layers of the region. “You’re always striving to not make it cliché,” De Jong told IndieWire.

The first step involves breaking down the script. At this phase of her process, De Jong attaches an image to each scene. “It may be a piece of art. It could be a photograph. It could be a texture. It could be a piece of cloth. It could be anything,” she shared, adding, “Then from that, I add physical locations, and we start putting the whole thing together and seeing our film.”

‘Manchester By The Sea’ ©Roadside Attractions/Courtesy Everett C / Everett Collection

Sometimes these images come from the director themselves. While working on “Twin Peaks: The Return,” David Lynch gave De Jong some of his own artwork for inspiration. “He would hand me some of his paintings, his drawings, his work, and say, ‘Here, this is this set. Build that,,’” De Jong revealed, adding that even if it was “a flat 2D painting, the colors were wild and it’s textural.” These came in handy for the new worlds of the series, like the landmark Episode 8 (also known as “Gotta Light?”), in which De Jong designed the radio station and other eerier riffs on the atomic age 1950s.

For the more iconic aspects of “Twin Peaks, ” De Jong also dug up the original plans for the Red Room from the 1990s. “David remembered in his mind’s eye,” De Jong said, “and I’m there to continue to be David’s conduit on the new work. It was just a beautiful, beautiful dance.”

Along with reviving iconic sets from pop culture’s past, De Jong herself has created work that has become part of the entertainment firmament. The set she created for the “Jupiter’s Claim” theme park in Jordan Peele’s “Nope” has been added to the Studio Tour at Universal Studios Hollywood, a unique feat for an aspect of filmmaking that is often binned as soon as a production wraps. On the honor of her set being preserved in such a way, De Jong said, “It’s pretty incredible, because in the act of doing it, you aren’t thinking about what this is going to turn into.”

After receiving her first Oscar nomination for her work on Christopher Nolan‘s Best Picture-winning biopic “Oppenheimer,” De Jong re-teamed with the writer-director this year for his ambitious take on Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey.” For this film, her process began at Nolan’s home, where she spent hours reading the script. Afterwards, De Jong asked for the parameters. “He said, ‘There are none,'” De Jong recalled.

‘The Odyssey’ ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

This allowed the designer the freedom to “take the audience on the same journey that Odysseus (Matt Damon) was on,” she said. Starting with seven countries, De Jong and Nolan began searching for the film’s faraway locations, the only edict being that Nolan wanted the film to start in the Mediterranean and end in the Mediterranean. Without the barriers of realism, De Jong found inspiration in locations across the globe. “We didn’t care that we were shooting the Laestrygonians in Scotland. It didn’t matter. It just had the topography we were interested in. Same with Iceland and the same with Morocco,” De Jong said. Once the locations were determined, then came building sets that reflected the characters who inhabit them.

For the ominous stone house owned by Circe (Samantha Morton), who beguiles Odysseus’ men and turns them into pigs, De Jong shared that Nolan “was very clear about not wanting Circe’s home to be a Hansel and Gretel in the woods type cottage. She’s so peculiar and unique and bizarre and a witch.” With this in mind, the duo decided she should live on the edge of a cliff, finding the perfect craggy rocks in Scotland. Soon, a whole backstory informed the building of her dwelling. “She formed her house out of those craggy rocks,” De Jong said, adding, “We just made up all these stories and created the sets from there.”

The same attention to character informed the creation of the iconic Trojan horse, an imposing image of which opens the epic film. Nolan envisioned a rearing horse, telling De Jong that “it has to be iconic and it has to be larger than life.” For Nolan, De Jong said, the question at the center of this opening scene is, “Are the Trojans going to accept the gift?” Thinking about what kind of horse would be accepted, Nolan wanted their horse to be “the antithesis” of the one in Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film “Troy.” “We didn’t want the clunky wheels,” she said, adding that “these were master shipbuilders.”

‘The Odyssey’ ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

“They’re master craftsmen,” De Jong insists, “If they collected all this wood, why don’t we shiplap the entire body, shiplap the tail? They hand-carved the legs and the head. That leaves the body all hollow like a ship, so all the men could all go inside and cut a trap door.” Once they agreed on the backstory for the building of the horse, the next step was figuring out how to make multiples out of fiberglass (and later out of plastic as one of the summer’s hottest collectible popcorn buckets).

As “The Odyssey” marches its way into awards season, De Jong is looking towards her future – and her next gig. With every project she takes, De Jong is looking to push herself as an artist. “It’s that space of being uncomfortable that is how you know you’re in the right place,” she said, adding, “The minute I find comfort, I realize I’m in the wrong place. So I’m always pushing to get back into that area of discomfort.”

Thinking back to her conversation with Fisk all those years ago, De Jong feels that what he taught her was “The act of physically doing and going and staying in momentum,” adding, “That’s something that Christopher Nolan has. All of these directors; They don’t stop producing work. They don’t do it in vain. They do it because that’s their language and their medium. They’re all artists at heart.”

Although De Jong looks back at her past fondly, she doesn’t regret forgoing art school to join the movie business. What she learned after all these years is that, “You need to go forward, and even if you go forward and you hit a wall, then just keep pivoting a little bit. Stay open and don’t be fearful. You can’t fear. I’d rather screw up royally and have tried than not tried at all.”