Artisans Ellen Mirojnick, Ruth De Jong and Jennifer Lame played key roles in making the Christopher Nolan epic and will be feted at the Middleburg Film Festival. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, production designer Ruth De Jong and editor Jennifer Lame are part of the team that helped bring Christopher Nolan’s sprawling adaptation of “The Odyssey” to the big screen. These talented trio will be honored with the Variety Creative Collaborators Award at the Middleburg Film Festival on Oct. 16.
It was a mammoth task and historic in both its filmmaking process and box office success. The film was the first to be shot entirely on Imax 70mm. The film was shot over 91 days on 2 million feet of Imax film.
De Jong scouted locations around the world. She found a fifth-century castle in Italy, perched approximately 1,030 feet above sea level, which became Ithaca. She also designed multiple Trojan horses, each standing approximately 35 feet tall.
The beaches of Essaouira, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, served as the discovery site of the Trojan horse and the boat launch for Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaca. Troy, by the numbers, was an incredible accomplishment — it covered more than 2.5 acres, or over 110,000 square feet, large enough to accommodate 2,000 extras and more than 60 structures.It’s an achievement De Jong is proud of. However, the film also shot scenes in Los Angeles.
They are truly the best of the best.” She adds, “With a massively ambitious movie like ‘The Odyssey’ — having to manage so many locations, so many sets all over the world — my stress levels absolutely drop knowing I have an L.A. crew on my side.” Mirojnick had crews all over the world, moving with the production. Once we understood who Odysseus was, every other costume had to belong to the same world while revealing a distinctly different relationship to power, identity and myth.” With Nolan shooting so much in-camera, editor Lame found that some scenes came together with ease. Take Circe’s scene when she turns the men into pigs.
Actress Samantha Morton, who played Circe, molded the men into pigs using animatronics and other effects. That was a scene Lame had worked on since she arrived in Greece. Her skill helped create a sequence filled with horror and pathos and was key to building the characters of Odysseus and Eurylochus, and advancing the story.
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