Variety’s senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay during Variety’s A Night With Artisans. The creatives who helped build the Los Alamos set for “Oppenheimer” or acquired 1,000 blankets for “Killers of the Flower Moon” shared their creative processes and stories from set.
In six separate conversations, Tangcay spoke with the teams behind “Oppenheimer,” “Saltburn,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Maestro,” “American Fiction” and “The Color Purple.” See the full Variety A Night With Artisans recap below. “Oppenheimer” For production designer Ruth De Jong, creating the town of Los Alamos was a “daunting task.” Because they had a lean budget, she said they had to be creative about their approach.
The existing Los Alamos in New Mexico is modernized and did not reflect the version Nolan wanted to portray in the movie, so De Jong had to construct Los Alamos from the ground up, in addition to building all of the Trinity site as well. “As I was digging into the research, it’s like the U.S.
government in 1942 gave Oppenheimer $2 billion … and the entire Army Corps of Engineers. I had neither,” she said. The initial model for the town was so large it could not fit in the house.
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