Artisans Break Down the Tricks and Treats of Designing a Trojan Horse at SCAD Savannah Film Festival

As part of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking team presents “Behind Their Lens,” a series of panel discussions with some of the most exciting artisans, directors, and producers of 2026. On the artisans panel, “The Odyssey” production designer Ruth de Jong, “Paper Tiger” and “I Play Rocky” costume designer Amy Roth, and “Disclosure Day” editor Sarah Broshar spoke to students and guests about their process and approaches towards each of their particular corners of the giant puzzle that is putting a film together. But there was one thing that united all of them, across their different creative disciplines, and that was the importance of (sometimes quite literally) climbing hilltops to create a sense of authentic surprise. If a costume designer can delight a director without being asked for something specific, then the movie is alive. If the editor’s intuitive sense of rhythm is working in harmony with the footage that’s been shot, then in a lot of respects the film is showing the post team what it wants to be. And if a production designer can build a Trojan Horse to the right scale and it falls down? Well, don’t panic. It can look even more weathered and accurate to the initial plan when it’s picked back up again. “Obviously the scale [of the horse] came from me needing to fill it physically with the actors and the IMAX camera and [cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema] and Chris. So that’s how we proportionally worked out and built several of them, then built a separate body of the horse to physically shoot that scene, lowered it into a tank, and shot that on a set near our city of Troy,” De Jong said. But in addition to needing to half-drown Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his companions, an IMAX camera, cinematographer, and acclaimed director, some of the aspects that make the Trojan Horse truly look like it’s been in the wars came about organically. “[For the opening], we mounted the horse to a massive trench plate and got a dredger. We dredged up really deep into the sand. We did a few tests a couple of days before. We put the horse in the waves. It took a beating. It fell. We had to rebuild it overnight to then shoot the next day. So the horse you are seeing in the film went through a lot before it got shot. It was very physical,” De Jong said. “Water always wins.” But according to De Jong, the work of production design, even on projects without the grand scope of “The Odyssey,” is always the same. “ I feel deeply that if my sets are too obvious, I’ve failed because they should fade to the back and the actors should just be immersed in their worlds, and the audience should be lost in that world,” De Jong said. Amy RothGetty Images for SCAD This is as much the case for good contemporary costume design, where the clothes should just help us make judgments about the characters and feel the shifts 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 not just from the existing material around “Rocky” and Sylvester Stallone, but about how the character of ‘Mike’ would feel about his body as he worked himself up into becoming Sly. “He really was like three people,” Roth said. “Dressing him early on was taking hints from a future Sly and putting them in the way he dresses so that we can see the impetus of 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, like, layering clothing onto Anthony so that he couldn’t bulk up,” Roth said. Meanwhile on “Paper Tiger,” Roth worked in a silent partnership with the sets in order to give the characters caught up in a mob scheme more or less agency. “The house was very beige, so I put the actors just so that the mother was in focus. And then in the end she starts to fade. She starts sort of matching the walls; the mother and father sort of fade into the background. And that’s just me doing my thing. I don’t think I even discussed that with James [Grey, the director], but he would’ve liked it.” What the director likes and how the director is responding gets very important in the edit, which is where Broshar’s developed a great read on Steven Spielberg over the course of their many collaborations. Sarah BrosharGetty Images for SCAD “When you’re spending hours and weeks and months and years sitting in a room with somebody, you get shorthands. You don’t have to say words as much. You can just kind of feel a twitch. If I make a little twitch, Steven will look at me, like, ‘What? What are you thinking?’ You can tell,” Broshar said. “I think you’re just always trying to sit down and watch the movie or watch the scene like you’ve never seen it before. I always watch myself watching something, and I try to see if I’m feeling tense or if I am getting distracted or thinking about what’s for lunch — and that is a real red flag.” One of the ways in which Broshar can help surprise herself and the other folks watching a cut is with sound, especially on a delightfully bonkers action sequence like “Disclosure Day” has in its train chase. “Like anything, it just takes patience and imagination, and you keep an eye on 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 loud is it?” Broshar said. “ I have great assistants who do really good sound work, and I just kept asking them for more. They’d say, ‘We spent three days on this.’ And I’m like, ‘Great. Now spend three more.’ And let’s just keep [going] more, more, more, more. And then, you know, it all gets polished out as soon as great Gary Rydstrom and Bryan Chomier and their team come in with sound.” Whether it’s sound, color, or the elements of nature themselves, it’s the surprises and flourishes that artisans build into their work that help each filmmaking department feel alive.