Ruth De Jong Builds Worlds: From Twin Peaks to Nolan's Odyssey

Production designer Ruth De Jong received the Virginia Film Festival's Craft Award in Charlottesville this year — the town where, twenty years ago, legendary designer Jack Fisk told her to skip grad school and work on Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 Oscar-winning "There Will Be Blood" instead.

De Jong reflected on her two-decade career in conversation with IndieWire at the festival. Her credits span auteurs including 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," she said.

Charlottesville holds personal history. Fisk, father of her high school friend Schuyler Fisk, saw a younger version of himself in her. De Jong recalled: "I think what the world continually needs are mentors [like Fisk] showing up." She declined the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and joined the set of "There Will Be Blood," then continued with Fisk on Anderson's "The Master" and several Malick films, including the Palme d'Or-winning "The Tree of Life."

Her first credit as production designer came on Kenneth Lonergan's "Manchester by the Sea." Of those formative sets, she said: "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."

How does she make a world feel real?

De Jong starts by breaking down the script and attaching an image to every 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," she said, then adds physical locations until the team can "see" the film.

For "Manchester by the Sea," authenticity meant embedding with Gloucester's working 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," she recalled. "You're always striving to not make it cliché."

What did David Lynch bring to Twin Peaks: The Return?

On "Twin Peaks: The Return," Lynch handed De Jong his own paintings and drawings as blueprints. "He would hand me some of his paintings, his drawings, his work, and say, 'Here, this is this set. Build that,'" she said, noting that even a flat 2D painting offered wild, textural color cues. For the landmark Episode 8 ("Gotta Light?"), she designed the radio station and eerie atomic-age 1950s sets. For the Red Room, she dug up the original 1990s plans. "I'm there to continue to be David's conduit on the new work," she said. "It was just a beautiful, beautiful dance."

Her own work has entered the firmament: the "Jupiter's Claim" theme park set from Jordan Peele's "Nope" joined the Studio Tour at Universal Studios Hollywood — rare for sets usually struck after wrap. "In the act of doing it, you aren't thinking about what this is going to turn into," she said.

How do you design Homer for Christopher Nolan?

After her first Oscar nomination for Nolan's Best Picture-winning "Oppenheimer," De Jong reteamed with the director this year on his adaptation of Homer's "The Odyssey." She asked him for parameters. "He said, 'There are none,'" she recalled. The search began across seven countries, with one edict: the film starts in the Mediterranean and ends in the Mediterranean.

Realism posed no barrier. "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.

Circe's home — the witch played by Samantha Morton — could not be, in Nolan's words, "a Hansel and Gretel in the woods type cottage." They built her stone house on cliff-edge craggy rocks in Scotland, inventing a backstory that "she formed her house out of those craggy rocks."

The Trojan horse, which opens the film, had to be "iconic" and "larger than life" — and the antithesis of the clunky-wheeled horse in Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 "Troy." "These were master shipbuilders," De Jong said: shiplapped body and tail, hand-carved legs and head, a hollow hull-like interior with a trap door for the hidden men. The design later became one of the summer's hottest collectible popcorn buckets.

As "The Odyssey" heads into awards season, De Jong is choosing discomfort. "The minute I find comfort, I realize I'm in the wrong place," she said. Her advice, looking back on Fisk's lesson: "Stay open and don't be fearful. I'd rather screw up royally and have tried than not tried at all."

By Elena Vasquez