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When Christopher Nolan assembled a team of craftsmen to adapt Homer’s epic “The Odyssey,” he first told production designer Ruth de Jong about his plans.
But because working with Nolan is done in person, the process is shrouded in secrecy. De Jong explained, “There are no scripts emailed, sent or discussed on any device. It’s all done in person, and that’s what I love about it.”
De Jong spoke with Variety’s senior editor Jazz Tangcay at the Middleburg Film Festival, where she, along with costume designer Ellen Mirojnick and editor Jennifer Lame, accepted Variety’s Creative Collaborators Award.
De Jong, who worked with Nolan on ‘Oppenheimer,’ read the script in three hours. After she was done, she asked about the parameters. “He said, ‘There is nothing.’” The world was her oyster.
“Working with Chris is the closest thing you’ve ever had. It’s like playing basketball with Kobe Bryant. He’s truly the ultimate collaborator and coach.” “We knew we wouldn’t fail, but we had no idea how we were actually going to do this,” she added.
From the fall of Troy to Circe’s remote home with Odysseus’ boat, De Jong created practical sets, bringing Nolan’s vision to life in six countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and the United States.
Mirojnick and Lame also joined the project in the same way. Nolan invited them to his home to read the script. She said Nolan didn’t want “a sword-and-sandal movie. A Hollywood movie or something we’ve never seen before.”
Mirojnick and her team created a total of over 5,300 costumes for the film, which was a huge undertaking. “I had to make the armor first.” “I had to think of the thousands of people in various armies, including the Trojans and the Spartans,” she said.
Next was finding out about Odysseus. Mirojnick says, “One thing we understood through Ruth’s research was that there were two fabrics at the time, one of which was linen. Linen gives you a great base to age, distress and create whatever you want. It was very interesting to see how sand, salt, wind, rain and black sand all mixed together and what that did to 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 puzzling. “There was so much interesting material to use and mine,” Lame recalled.
In this scene, Odysseus and his companions enter a cave filled with cheese and sheep and discover that it is the home of Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon. Odysseus deceives the Cyclops by telling him that his name is ‘Nobody’. When Polyphemus fainted, Odysseus and his men drove a wooden stake into one of his eyes. While they escape, Odysseus foolishly taunts the Cyclops and reveals his true name. Polyphemus prays to his father Poseidon to curse Odysseus and make him go on a long and dangerous journey.
De Jong revealed that from the beginning, Nolan wanted Cyclops to be physically present in the cave. “We scoured a lot of places that had really cool, interesting caves, all of which we criticized heavily. We were scouting this area in Greece, scouting these palace ruins. The caves were below us, but it was 100 degrees in Greece in September and we just kept scouting.”
At one point, they considered building a cave, but De Jong admits, “It felt like we were using resources to build a cave. It would be expensive. And we thought, ‘Surely we can realistically do this.'” Eventually they found the perfect location. The location allowed the boat to be positioned practically underneath the mountain, which helped everyone connect the dots.
This scene was actually filmed with Bill Irwin playing Cyclops. “We all worked together,” Lame explained. “Our visual effects supervisor, Andrew Jackson, and his team did crazy temporary eye work so you could always see what Bill’s eyes looked like. The emotion of Bill’s character was rooted in the eyes, so little things like that were something we could work together to create from the start of filming until the end of the movie.” Lame added that while the Cyclops scene was brief in the final film, it was much longer in the beginning. “We had so much interesting material, and between Puppet and Bill, we were constantly deciding what to use.”
Melinda Sue Gordon
De Jong also spoke about Troy. The massive set covers 2.5 acres and has a total area of over 110,000 square feet. The search for a location began in Türkiye, but everything there was “so modern and contemporary that we couldn’t find anything that suited us.” After further reconnaissance, De Jong discovered Aït Benhaddou in Morocco. “We had a large area, and we thought if we could actually build everything from scratch, we would have a whole existing village. That would give us the ability to expand that set, but in real life.”
Looking back, De Jong recalled, “I don’t know how we did it, but it happened. It took a lot of moving parts and amazing craftsmen working together to get there.” “It was one of five other countries where we were building all the sets simultaneously,” she added.
The Cyclops scene was a mystery, but the beheading of Athena at the fall of Troy and the grand edit of the statue were already written into Nolan’s script, so they came together easily. Lame said, “Chris is a really amazing writer in many ways. He’s been doing this for a long time and has written a lot into the script. That cut was very important to him in the story because the connection between Athena (Zendaya), Matt, and everything that comes up in Odysseus was a very big part of the story and the reveal.” She added, “We shot it early on in the movie because it was shot so quickly. Hoyt and Chris do such a beautiful job. It made my job so easy.”
Towards the end of the conversation, De Jong discussed the Trojan Horse. Each version of the horse was about 35 feet tall. “The two things Chris was interested in and wanted to be involved with were horses and cyclops, and conceptually figuring out what we were doing,” De Jong said. Both required a practical build. Staying true to the aesthetic, De Jong knew he was not interested in the naive-looking hammered wood type aesthetic. Instead, she conceptualized that the horse would have been built using ship parts. “Conceptually, I thought they would have put this together with ship parts and ship wraps. They were the craftsmen of their time.”
Melinda Sue Gordon
She continued: “I came up with this shiplap idea and they would sculpt the head and legs, but the ship had to be big enough to physically fit the actors, Imax cameras, DP Hoyte Van Hoytema and Chris into it.” De Jong began building prototypes and models in Los Angeles with construction coordinator Jonas Kirk. He came up with the idea of making a mold because he needed a drain for his horse.
In the scene where the horses are dragged along Troy Beach toward the temple, De Jong said, “That day, George Cottle (stunt coordinator) and his team captured all 300 people and physically tied them up. There were no machines moving the horses, there were actors.”