She didn’t let their heads get too big
FOR MOST people, the worries associated with helmets involve their protective qualities and what they’ll do to the wearer’s hair once removed. Australian native Kym Barrett wraps her head around helmets for entirely other reasons.
The costume designer, who brought black leather back into fashion in a big way with her work on “The Matrix” trilogy, has been called upon in the recent past to create space suits for 2000’s “Red Planet,” leather armor for “Eragon” and prototype wings for Paul Greengrass’ unproduced “The Watchman.”
For those projects, she had free reign to use her imagination. For the just-released “Speed Racer,” she had to re-create and update an already universally familiar look.
When it came time to design racing gear for Speed and the gang, the 42-year-old L.A.-based designer approached it with hard-headed resolve.
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Breaking the mold: On “Speed Racer,” Barrett had to dress the actors in helmets without making them look like bobbleheads. “We were shooting in Berlin,” she says. “So I tried to get a whole lot of helmets that I could buy secondhand or on EBay. A lot of the old East German helmets were floating around and were quite good because they didn’t have heaps of padding. They were quite thinly fashioned, tight to the head. So I would take them apart, have the sculptors work on sculpting on top of them, then remold them, paint them and put them all back together. Because if you go buy a motorcycle helmet right now, you’re going to look like a giant egghead, because there’s so much padding.”
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Speed ball: In the case of Speed, a certain degree of dorkiness could not be avoided. “Speed’s helmet I copied really close to the picture in the cartoons,” says Barrett. “And I looked at a lot of the really old ‘50s racing car photos, which is obviously what the cartoon people did as well because most people didn’t wear fireproof suits or anything. We tweaked the colors slightly, but his was very close to the original. We tried not to shoot it from unflattering angles. We tried to make it as handsome as we could, but it’s a fine line. Making it too modern and moving it too far away takes away some of the soul of it. And, in a way, there is something special about Speed because he’s the ultimate good guy. He’s the ultimate nerd.”
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Leatherhead: For Racer X’s helmet, Barrett had a chance to return to her black leather “Matrix” days. “I had two brilliant couture leather makers who worked a lot for Alexander McQueen and [Jean Paul] Gaultier and different people,” she says. “They came to Berlin with me specifically to work on Racer X. So we made a body cast of Matthew Fox, and then we molded all the leather, including the helmet, to his actual bone structure. And so that helmet is like 2 millimeters thick, but it is totally the shape of his head.”