consulting vintage postcards in order to create the set; she said this part of the film was especially difficult to research because, "A Tijuana Historical Society didn't exactly exist back then." She also built a replica of the ranch owned by Charles S. Howard, the owner of the racehorse Seabiscuit, out of fir planks. Actor Jeff Bridges, who played Howard, was so impressed with the set that he made an unsuccessful attempt to buy it and have it shipped to his property in Montana, despite Oppewall's assurances that it was just a set and was not built to last. In a similar episode, the owners of the Santa Anita racetrack were so impressed with her design for a tote board that they wanted to keep it. When Oppewall was assigned art director for the 2006 spy film The Good Shepherd, it took her a week to organize the number of set locations due to the large amounts of settings in the script, which included Cuba, Guatemala, Léopoldville, London, Moscow, New York and New Haven, Connecticut, among other places. Although the vast majority of the movie was filmed in New York, the only scenes that are actually set in New York take place in a house in Far Rockaway, Queens. As a result, many sets had to be constructed under Oppewall's direction, including a Skull and Bones headquarters and the Berlin set, which was built on the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Oppewall built sets based on Skull and Bones, Central Intelligence Agency and other clandestine organizations after she consulted with a former CIA operative and researched books of interviews with spy agency insiders. Since the lead character played by Matt Damon originally aspired to be a poet, Oppewall incorporated many visual poetic symbols into the film, including a large number of mirrors to represent the duplicity of the CIA, full-rigged ships as symbols of the state and eagle symbols, which were used in ironic situations such as suspect interrogations. she is a member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She is also a world-traveled amateur lepidopterist. , she also serves on the Art Directors Guild's education and workplace issues committees. In 2000, Oppewall tore down the bungalow and built a larger modern house in the style of Charles and Ray Eames because she "did not want my house to conflict with my (Eames-designed) furniture,"