Longtime Albemarle County resident Jack Fisk ranks among movie-making’s greatest production designers. His current Academy Award nomination for Best Production Design for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is well-deserved. Another frontrunner in the category, Ruth De Jong, is nominated for her work on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. De Jong’s cinematic path to designing acclaimed mega-productions also has roots here in Charlottesville—as Fisk’s protégé.
Growing up in Charlottesville, De Jong was friends with Fisk’s daughter, Schuyler. De Jong had no ambitions to enter the film industry, but a long conversation with Fisk led him to hire her as his assistant on There Will Be Blood. She’d studied painting and photography at Texas Christian University and movie production design nicely encompassed all aspects of her artistic training. This is Fisk’s third Oscar nomination and De Jong’s first.
Fisk excels at recreating period settings with uncanny accuracy and naturalism, from World War II-era Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line to Oklahoma’s post-World War I Osage Territory in Killers of the Flower Moon. His regular collaborators include well-known filmmakers such as David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Taught by a master, De Jong went on to assist Fisk on Water for Elephants, Tree of Life, and The Master. Her first feature-length solo production design credit was for Charlottesvillian Derek Sieg’s Swedish Auto, a small indie filmed in town that opened the 2006 Virginia Film Festival, and her career continued ascending with major movies including Inherent Vice, Us, and Nope, and the TV series “Yellowstone.”
Of her relationship with Fisk and their mutual Oscar nominations, De Jong told AwardsWatch: “You can see where my affinity for natural sets was born. Jack and I have a deep connection. We’re very best friends today in life, and I think it’s a full-circle moment, of being in the company of my mentor. It’s almost like, ‘Is this happening?’”
De Jong’s biggest assignment to date, Oppenheimer, challenged her to create the backdrop of the “Destroyer of Worlds,” titular physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Challenges abounded: The period sets had to be filmable from 360 degrees in large-format IMAX 65mm and Panavision 65mm film for projection on towering IMAX screens.
In a YouTube interview with STIR, De Jong says that director Nolan also wanted his sets, including the Los Alamos scientific community, built from scratch without computer enhancements. Nolan told her they were “not making a documentary,” and she admitted that, after extensive research, they “took creative liberty,” partly for budgetary reasons.
Elsewhere in the Southwest, Fisk was painstakingly, meticulously creating 1920s Oklahoma for Killers of the Flower Moon. Unlike De Jong, Fisk had the benefit of using CGI to expand his locations and sets, which was justifiable considering the sweeping narrative he was bringing to life. Fisk’s documentary-like verisimilitude bears out his deep research and extraordinary eye for detail with each shot densely packed with vintage trappings.
At the Oscars, De Jong and Fisk are competing against the design teams of Barbie, Napoleon, and Poor Things. Who will win is anybody’s guess. (DeJong has already won an Art Directors Guild Award for Oppenheimer for Best Period Film.) But it’s a sure thing that De Jong has officially graduated with honors, and can now rank her teacher as a colleague.