As part of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking team presents “Behind Their Lenses,” a series of panel discussions with some of the most exciting filmmakers, directors, and producers of 2026. At the artisan panel, Ruth de Jong, production designer for “The Odyssey,” Amy Roth, costume designer for “Paper Tiger” and “I Play Rocky,” and Sarah Broucher, editor for “Disclosure Day,” spoke to students and guests about their process. And moves towards each of his particular corners of the huge puzzle that is putting a film together.
But there was one thing that united them all in their various creative disciplines, and that was the importance of climbing (sometimes literally) mountain peaks to create a sense of authentic wonder.
If a costume designer can please a director without asking for anything special, the film is liveable. If the editor’s intuitive sense of rhythm is working in sync with the footage shot, then in many cases the film is showing the post team what it wants to be. And if a production designer could build a Trojan Horse at perfect scale and it fell down? Well, don’t worry. When picked up again it may appear even more pristine and accurate to the initial plan.
“Clearly the scale [of the horse] I needed to physically fill it with actors. And IMAX camera and [cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema] And Chris. So that way we worked proportionally and built several of them, then to physically shoot that scene built a separate body of the horse, lowered it into a tank, and shot it on a set near our town of Troy,” de Jong said.
But besides the need for a half-drowned Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his companions, an IMAX camera, a cinematographer, and an acclaimed director, some of the aspects that really make Trojan Horse look like it’s been in the wars came about organically.
“[For the opening]We mounted the horse on a huge trench plate and got a dredger. We got really deep into the sand. We did some tests a few days ago. We put the horse into the waves. Got beaten. it fell. We had to recreate it overnight and then shoot the next day. So the horse you see in the movie had to go through a lot before he got shot. It was very physical,” De Jong said. “Water always wins.”
But according to de Jong, production design work, even on projects without the grand scope of “The Odyssey,” is always the same. De Jong said, “I feel deep down that if my sets are too obvious, then I have failed because they should fade into the background and the actors should simply be immersed in their own world, and the audience should be lost in that world.”
This is equally true of good contemporary costume design, where clothes should help us make judgments about characters and feel changes in the story, something Amy Roth talked about doing almost invisibly in both “I Play Rocky” and “Paper Tiger.” With the former, Roth took a lot of cues from not only existing material around “Rocky” and Sylvester Stallone, but also how the character of ‘Mike’ would feel about his body as he worked himself to become Sly.
“He was really like three people,” Roth said. Roth said, “Dressing him early on was taking cues from a future Sly and putting them into the way he dresses so we could see how ‘Rocky’ came to be. He was big into working out and he was very body conscious. So that silhouette was important to me and I was literally, layering clothes on Anthony so he wouldn’t be bulky,” Roth said.
Meanwhile on “Paper Tiger”, Roth worked in a silent partnership with the set to give more or less agency to characters caught up in the mob scheme. “The house was very beige, so I placed the actors just so that the mother was in focus. And then towards the end she starts to fade. She starts to match the walls; the mother and father fade into the background. And that’s just me doing my job. I don’t think I even discussed it with James. [Grey, the director]But he would have liked it.
What the director likes and how the director is responding becomes very important in editing, this is where Broucher has developed a great book on Steven Spielberg during his many collaborations.
“When you’re spending hours, weeks, months and years sitting in a room with someone, you get shorthand. You don’t have to say the words much. You can just kind of feel the tremors. If I move a little bit, Steven will look at me, like, ‘What? What are you thinking?’ You can tell,” the brochure said. “I think you’re always trying to sit down and watch a movie or see a scene like you’ve never seen it before. I always catch myself looking at something, and try to see if I’m feeling stressed or I’m distracted or thinking about lunch – and that’s a real red flag.”
One of the ways the brochure helps surprise itself and others watching the cut is the sound, especially in such an enjoyable action sequence as “Disclosure Day” involving the train chase. “Like anything, it just takes patience and imagination, and you keep track of the timing of things – where and how do you want to see the train, how far away is it, when do we hear the train, how fast is it?” The brochure said. “I have great assistants who do really good sound work, and I kept asking them for more. They’d say, ‘We spent three days on this.’ And I’m like, ‘Awesome.’ Now spend three more. And let’s just keep it [going] More, more, more, more. And then, you know, as soon as the great Gary Rydstrom and Brian Chomier and their team come in with the sound, it all sparkles.
Be it sound, colors, or elements of nature, it is the wonder and richness created by the artisans that helps make each filmmaking department feel alive.