How Oppenheimer's Sets Were Built Without CGI

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.

[dramatic music]

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,

get the essence of this imagery,

and we were to make the Oppenheimer that we made.

[dramatic music]

First, I'll sketch out sort of how I'm seeing things.

We'll send it to my set designer.

This is our official plan view of our finalized Los Alamos,

drawn by Jim Hewitt, a fabulous set designer

who's been on my team for many projects.

Jim is a hand draftsman, so he draws by hand.

We will go from plan view to elevations to sections,

and simultaneously we'll have art directors

make these three dimensional in the computer.

So we're able to fly through, see scale,

understand it immediately.

Simultaneously with going from 2D to 3D,

we will go 3D with our model maker.

These are elevations,

and then these will get broken down to actual build plans.

I always love to do foam core white model.

Very simple, very efficient,

you can understand the scale.

The real Los Alamos was very expansive, and big, and epic,

and the US government spent about $2 billion and four years,

and had a lot of support.

I had neither, yeah, I had I think less than eight weeks

to get this entire thing ready.

This is where we were gonna start.

Chris and I scouted the American West, New Mexico, Utah,

full well knowing that Los Alamos was located in New Mexico,

but the very first thing that interested Chris

was finding the most epic cinematic vista.

We landed on Ghost Ranch outside of Abiquiu,

and we found this epic plateau,

uninhibited views, nothing we had to take out.

There was no interest on Chris's part

to use any CGI or post work, no set extension.

So everything needed to be built 360, in camera, all of it.

We had to build a road for the crew

to even access to get up here,

and we were able to hide base camp way out of the way

so we could be up on this plateau in 360,

see north, south, east, west.

And we had these rock formations

that Chris and I fell in love with,

and it truly was wow and cinematic

and exactly I think what he had in his mind's eye.

Somehow we just landed on a T

of Main Street and Trinity Avenue.

Trinity Avenue is what went into the technical section,

which is often referred to as the T section,

which is where Oppenheimer held all of his lectures.

This was completely surrounded by barbed wire,

and fencing, and towers, and guards.

Main Street was more, it's serviced from the bar,

and the school, and the hospital,

and the laundry, and the trading post,

and there was a theater, there was a church,

there was 25 total, 360 sets,

one of them being a massive building

with a bridge coming out of the main lecture hall

and where you see in the scene

where the bomb is loaded and carried off,

and every single building was finished 360.

So Chris and Hoyte shot every single side

of all of these buildings.

I fully understand, they may say,

Oh, this is all I need to see.

I'm never gonna see over there.

But I think with the way Chris works,

it's intuitive, it's felt.

I think he already knows and sees

what he's going to shoot that day,

but also he and Hoyte will lean into things

if the light is epic,

if the windstorm picks up,

if the rain is coming,

if the snow,

we've dealt with all of it,

and they don't have to worry about,

Oh, well the set's not finished.

We treated the entire film this way as we went through.

I think Los Alamos, I wanna say

we did that in about 12 weeks, start to finish.

Construction started in December

and began shooting the end of February,

and we were hit with several snowstorms.

I remember writing Tom Hayslip, our executive producer,

maybe two or three weeks

before we were literally supposed to land here and shoot,

and we got hit with a huge snowstorm

and I was like, These sets will not be ready.

And he goes, So what are you telling me?

I was like, I don't know, I just have to tell somebody

because we can't get up there

and there's snow on the ground.

And he goes, It's gonna be great.

The Trinity Tower was an old radio tower

that actually existed in the White Sands missile range,

and that is what Oppenheimer and his team chose

to take over and build the shed on top

and lift the bomb up to the top for the first test.

Chris and I scouted the actual location.

That was a very moving day.

We stood at the base of the tower,

the four concrete pieces are there,

and there's maybe like a foot each of the metal,

disintegrated it completely.

It was very somber thinking about,

this was the very beginning

of nuclear weapons being a thing,

so it was very important to us to be there,

and see this and take this in.

And that was infused into the Trinity Base camp

that Chris and I designed and recreated from scratch.

We were offered to be able to shoot

inside the White Sands missile range,

but they are doing periodic bomb tests.

And they said, Oh, you guys can film,

but we go forward with all of our testing.

We're like, That doesn't work.

We went 60 miles north,

exactly five miles off the mountain range.

To me, those 360 views of Oppie the tower,

as well as just setting up,

and getting ready for this, was very iconic.

A huge storm hit us the day we decided to shoot there.

There was so much sand flying through the air

and everybody had on goggles,

and we had the IMAX camera,

and it was just getting inundated with dirt.

It was a mess.

And Chris was like, And we will carry on.

That's when Cillian was climbing the tower and he loved it,

and it made those scenes really incredible,

and come alive,

and you can't create that in a studio or inside.

He thrives off of that, which is amazing,

and he has a crew that supports him through all of it.

We built one bomb, it's not a real bomb, it's no plutonium.

It was really important.

I saw the bomb as really the main character

alongside Oppenheimer.

Chris and I talked a lot about,

he needed to see the entire bomb throughout

and we wanted to capture

these initial tests they were doing.

Chris was thinking, Well, I can see the entire bomb,

but maybe you don't need

to build all of the components of the bomb.

It told a lot and it was just there, and it was present,

and you see the scene,

when they walk into the RAD Lab in Los Alamos

and you see them placing the lenses.

We had a wonderful set designer, Justin,

draw this up for us,

and then we sent it over to some incredible prop makers

who essentially recreated the bomb

and it was sort of art department props,

and special effects,

and together we came up with all of it as you see.

There's that really iconic shot that Chris captures

of Oppenheimer standing in the tower

and you see all the components,

including this plate that we fabricated, this diamond plate.

We tried to match the metal finish almost to the T,

in size, and scale, and proportion.

It was an exact replica, minus it being real.

[dramatic music]

The Oval Office.

Chris and I had preselected most all of our locations

in around Los Angeles,

for whichever places they were playing,

Berkeley, DC, et cetera.

Scouted it, thought we had a deal,

thought we could shoot there.

About seven days from when we were to shoot this,

and my art department was getting some frantic calls,

they weren't getting access to the building,

they had all the drapery,

everything was measured for the Nixon Library

to turn that over, and make it into a Truman Oval office.

And then there were other locations

that we were gonna use for the lobby, and the cabinet room.

So this would be a location

with just a complete dress in transformation.

I get a call from locations, We lost this location,

and I was thinking, I'm gonna probably have to build this.

There's no other option for an Oval Office in LA,

surely we can put it at the end of our shooting schedule

a few weeks from now.

Emma let us know that our actor was locked,

and there was no chance in moving his date.

Gary Oldman played Truman,

and so Chris just looked at me

and said, You have to build this,

and walked away.

And I remember staying there going,

I have no idea if this is humanly possible.

I knew in seven days

we couldn't erect an Oval Office this scale,

even if with 24 hours a day running a crew.

Early on in prep, we had researched standing sets

that might have been flat-packed.

Samantha Englander, my supervising art director,

she had put on hold,

I don't know if it was just a spidey sense or what.

I think it was the Veep set.

We immediately locked in a stage at Universal.

We had been planning on doing a cabinet room,

and lobby at the Nixon Library,

so we had a lot of flats

that construction had been building.

We took those and repurposed them,

and we had, I guess a total of five days,

running a crew 24 hours a day,

we did it.

I don't think any of us knew if it would be possible

or we would pull it off,

and this was one of three locations we shot that day.

Chris arrived too, and I remember he walked in

and it's still reeked of wet paint,

just that thick smell of wet paint,

but it was done.

It was perfect.

They shot the scenes.

It was if nothing happened.

Yeah, I never want to do that again. [chuckles]

We shot this entire movie,

180 page script in 57 days.

We moved so fast across the entire country,

starting in New Mexico,

going to New Jersey,

then New York,

back to California.

To be able to design and shoot

and act on this palatial level

was like nothing I had ever experienced

in my entire career,

and I don't know if I ever will again.

Thank you so much for watching.

This is how we designed Oppenheimer.