Filmmakers find a home on the range, even if it’s really London ... or Spain

As the song says, spacious skies, amber waves of grain and purple mountains have long populated the wide, open spaces that represent America at its most expansive. The Hollywood western, of course, mythologized this country’s deserts and prairies as dramatic vistas against which such filmmakers as John Ford, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah could foreground their rugged characters. This year, A-list auteurs reconfigured western-inspired horizons to their own ends for stories set in the Southwest, Southern California and Oklahoma. Here’s a look at how “Oppenheimer,” “Asteroid City,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” use western landscapes to enliven wildly diverse stories.

“Oppenheimer,” starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt, was filmed very near the actual Los Alamos location.

(Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Place in story: New Mexico desert, Los Alamos

Place in real life: New Mexico desert, Ghost Ranch near Los Alamos

Time: 1945

Production designer: Ruth De Jong (“Nope,” “Manchester by the Sea”)

Transformation: Current-day Los Alamos, complete with Starbucks, no longer resembles its 1945 incarnation, so De Jong and her team rendered a period-perfect re-creation as a 3-D white model so massive it had to be stored outside in the production office’s backyard. Filmmakers then created a full-size version of those exteriors at the 21,000-acre Ghost Ranch. Interiors were shot in Los Alamos where Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt filmed scenes in the actual Oppenheimer residence.

Key vista: White Sands Proving Ground, home to the original nuclear bomb test, remains an active military base so filmmakers replicated the Trinity Test site’s iconic 100-foot steel tower and bomb-proof bunkers in Belen, N.M.

Palette: Dusty brown, in keeping with “our little western town,” as executive producer Thomas Hayslip describes it. Sandy terrain, scrub-brush green and pale-blue sky predominate.

Mood: Foreboding. As scientists attempt to harness subatomic energy for destructive purposes, ferocious desert storms symbolize the fearsome forces of nature.

Writer-director Wes Anderson shot his story set in the American Southwest in Spain.

(Roger Do Minh / Pop. 8)

Director: Wes Anderson

Place in story: American Southwest

Place in real life: Rural Spain. Filmmakers initially considered shooting in Death Valley or Big Bend National Park, then considered Cinecittà soundstages in Rome before deciding to build the town from scratch on a watermelon field near Chinchón, Spain.

Year: circa 1955

Production designer: Adam Stockhausen (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Moonrise Kingdom”)

Influences: Billy Wilder. He shot “Kiss Me, Stupid” mainly on a single stage set with a gas station in the center, Stockhausen told Focus Features. “We also looked at Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole” for when the carnival comes to town and “It Happened One Night” for the way it stages a motor court.… That was exciting in terms of the artificiality of the world of ‘Asteroid City.’”

Palette: Red tones, inspired by photographs of Monument Valley taken at the magic hour, define the core perspective. From there, Stockhausen and his team painted the diner and motel cabins in white, aqua blue, pale green and mellow yellow.

Mood: Depression. In contrast to the warm colors of their desert surroundings, “Asteroid City” tourists embody East Coast gloom throughout, with family man (Jason Schwartzman) grieving the loss of his wife while the monotone movie star (Scarlett Johansson) grapples with career and relationship angst.

“Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie, used a London studio — and some hand-painted backdrops — to step in for Southern California.

( Warner Bros. Pictures)

Director: Greta Gerwig

Place in story: Southern California

Place in real life: Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, outside London

Time: 1959-2023

Production designer: Sarah Greenwood (“Pride & Prejudice,” “Anna Karenina”)

Influences: Mid-century modernism including Richard Neutra‘s 1946 “Kaufmann House” in Palm Springs, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and Hollywood musicals such as “An American in Paris.” Filmmaker Greta Gerwig says, “I’m in love with 1950s soundstage musicals … and because Barbie was invented in 1959, it felt like we could ground everything in that look.” Greenwood and her team used hand-painted backdrops rather than CGI to portray the San Jacinto Mountains looming on the Barbie Land horizon.

Palette: Many shades of pink. “It was important to figure out where those bright pinks would live alongside our palest, pastel pink and, of course, every tone of pink in between,” Gerwig says.

Mood: Optimism. Appropriate to a realm in which death and cellulite are not a thing, Barbie Land revels in the bright tones of immortality. Gerwig says, “First and foremost, I wanted Barbie Land to feel like a happy place.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” was shot on Osage Nation land in Oklahoma, very near the actual town where the events took place.

(Melinda Sue Gordon / Apple TV+)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Place in story: Osage Nation, Oklahoma, in the town of Fairfax

Place in real life: Osage Nation, Oklahoma, in nearby Pawhuska

Time: 1919-26

Production designer: Jack Fisk (“There Will Be Blood,” “Days of Heaven”)

Influences: Director Martin Scorsese cites “Red River” (1948), “A Place in the Sun” (1951), “Giant” (1956) and “Wild River” (1960) as touchstones. “This film is Marty’s western,” notes Fisk, who relied on nonfiction sources for inspiration. “I read journals. I look at documentaries. I look at period photographs — anything that will give me a glimpse into what it was really like. You’re chipping away and trying to get back to what it looked like 100 years ago.”

A taste of history: Fisk covered the streets of Pawhuska with dirt to capture the period look of Fairfax’s main drag, Kihekah Avenue. “You see the car tracks, and suddenly, you’re back in time,” he says. “We were building Fairfax from 1919 to 1926, and all the ghosts were there.”

Authenticity factor: In Oklahoma, Fisk visited the home where the movie’s real-life characters Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) and her mother, Lizzie Ne Kah Es Sey (Tantoo Cardinal), once lived. “I looked at the placement of Lizzie’s house in Gray Horse. There was a stream and then a cemetery up to the right. The land I found had a beautiful stream, and we put the house in a similar position. We built a barn, a roundhouse and a cemetery with about 75 or 100 tombstones fashioned after the original cemetery.”

Mood: Dread. Picturesque rolling hills, verdant pastures and golden fields of grain provide a deceptively bucolic setting despoiled by greed, treachery and murder.