When Christopher Nolan gathered his team of artisans for his adaptation of Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” he first told production designer Ruth De Jong of his plans.
But the process was shrouded in secrecy because working with Nolan is an in-person process. De Jong explained, “There are no scripts emailed, sent or discussed on any form of device. Everything is in person, which I love about him.”
De Jong was speaking with Variety’s senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay at the Middleburg Film Festival, where she was honored alongside costume designer Ellen Mirojnick and editor Jennifer Lame with Variety’s Creative Collaborators Award.
De Jong, who had worked with Nolan on “Oppenheimer,” read the script in three hours. When she was done, she asked about the parameters. “He said, ‘There aren’t.’” The world was her oyster.
“Working with Chris is the closest thing. It’s equivalent to playing basketball with Kobe Bryant. He’s truly the ultimate collaborator and coach.” She adds, “I knew we weren’t going to fail, but I had no idea how we were going to do this practically.”
From the fall of Troy to Circe’s isolated home to Odysseus’ boat, De Jong brought Nolan’s vision to life across six countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland and the United States, building practical sets along the way.
Mirojnick and Lame were brought onto the project the same way; Nolan invited them to his house to read the script. She said Nolan didn’t want a “sword-and-sandal movie. Not a Hollywood movie, not something we had seen before.”
Mirojnick and her team created over 5,300 total costumes for the film, but it was a giant undertaking. “The armor had to be done first,” she says and with that she had “to think of a thousand people in different armies, the Trojans and the Spartans.”
Next was figuring out Odysseus. Mirojnick said, “The one thing we understood from Ruth’s research was that there were two fabrics at that time, one of which was linen. Linen gives you a great ground to age, distress and make into anything that you want. It was quite interesting seeing sand, salt, wind, rain and black sand mixing that all together and how that affects the fabric.”
Lame is no stranger to editing Nolan’s famous non-linear timelines, such as “Tenet” and “Oppenheimer.” she cut 2.1 million feet of 70mm Imax film for “The Odyssey.”
The Polyphemus scene, in particular, proved to be a puzzle. Lame recalled, “There was so much interesting material to use and mine.”
In the scene, Odysseus and his men enter a cave filled with cheese and sheep, only to discover it is the home of Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon. Odysseus tricks the Cyclops by telling him his name is “Nobody.” When Polyphemus passes out, Odysseus and his men drive a wooden stake into his single eye. As they make their escape, Odysseus foolishly taunts the Cyclops and reveals his real name. Polyphemus prays to his father Poseidon to curse Odysseus, dooming him on a long and perilous journey.
De Jong revealed that, from the beginning, Nolan wanted the Cyclops to be physically present in the cave. “We scoured a lot of places with some really cool, interesting caves, all of which we critiqued heavily. We scouted this area in Greece, and we were scouting these palace ruins. The cave was underneath us, but it was 100 degrees in Greece in September and we just kept going on our scout.”
At one point, they considered building the cave, but De Jong admitted, “It felt like using the resources to construct a cave — they’re expensive. And I was like, ‘Surely we can do this practically.’” Eventually, they found the perfect spot. The location allowed the boats to be placed practically at the bottom of the mountain, which helped everyone connect the dots.
The scene was practically shot with Bill Irwin playing the Cyclops. Lame explained, “We were all working together. Visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson and his team would do this crazy temp eye work, so we could always see what Bill’s eye looked like. The emotion of Bill’s character was so rooted in the eye, so having little things like that along the way allowed us to build it all together collaboratively, from the beginning of the shoot to the end of the movie.” Lame added that while the Cyclops scene was short in the final film, it was initially much longer. “We had so much interesting material, and we were constantly deciding between the puppet and Bill and what to use.”
De Jong also spoke about Troy. The colossal set spanned 2.5 acres, totaling over 110,000 square feet. The search for a location began in Turkey, but everything there “was so modern and contemporary and we just couldn’t find anything that would work for us.” After more scouting, De Jong found Aït Benhaddou in Morocco. “There were huge swaths of acreage, and I figured if I could build everything practically from the ground up and then you have the entire existing town, that gives us that set extension — but in real life.”
Looking back, De Jong reflected, “I don’t know how we did it, but it happened. It was a lot of moving parts and incredible artisans that powered through, and we got there.” She added, “That was one of five other countries where we were simultaneously building every single set.”
While the Cyclops scene was a puzzle, the beheading of Athena during the Sacking of Troy and the magnificent edit of the statue came together with ease, as it was already written into Nolan’s script. Lame said, “Chris is such an amazing writer in so many ways. He’s been doing this for so long, and he writes a lot of that stuff into the script. That cut was very important to him in the story because the connection between Athena (Zendaya), Matt, and what that all represents in Odysseus was such a huge part of the story and the reveal.” She added, “They shot that pretty quickly at the beginning of the movie, so we had that early on. Hoyte and Chris do such a beautiful job; it allows me to do my job so easily.”
As the conversation drew to a close, De Jong discussed the Trojan Horse. Each version of the horse stood approximately 35 feet tall. “The two things Chris was eager to get into were the horse and the Cyclops, and conceptually figuring out what we were doing,” De Jong said. Both needed to be practical builds. Staying true to the aesthetic, De Jong knew she wasn’t interested in the naïve-looking, hammered-wood type of aesthetic. Instead, she conceptualized that the horse would have been constructed using ship parts. “Conceptually, I was thinking they would have put this together with ship parts and shiplap. They were master craftsmen of their time.”
She continued, “I came up with this shiplap idea and they would have carved the head and the legs, but it needed to be large enough to have a belly where we could physically put the actors, the Imax camera, DP Hoyte Van Hoytema and Chris inside of it.” De Jong began building prototypes and models in Los Angeles with her construction coordinator Jonas Kirk. He came up with the idea of making a mold because they would need multiples of the horse.
In the scene where the horse is dragged along the beach of Troy toward the temple, De Jong said, “George Cottle (stunt coordinator) and his team got all 300 men that day; they physically tied ropes. There was no machinery moving the horse — it was the actors.”