The Oscars: The costume nominees discuss the challenges of dressing a cast

Designing costumes for a film is never easy, but this year’s five Academy Award nominees faced some very daunting tasks — starting with characters that might shrink or grow, Shakespearean gender switches, animal hides and royal regalia. We asked the five women to tell us about the biggest challenge of their movie.

FOR THE RECORD:
Costume design nominees: The credits for two illustrations that accompany a Calendar section article elsewhere in this edition about Oscar-nominated costume designers misspell the last name of “The King’s Speech” designer Jenny Beavan as Beaven. The error was detected after the section was printed. —

Mary Zophres “True Grit”

One of the biggest challenges for me on “True Grit” was the lack of time. We had only seven weeks of prep in Los Angeles (and one in New Mexico) before cameras started to roll on principal costumes. All of the 12 main characters needed six to 12 sets of garments. So, after the actor was cast, we had a fitting to create their prototype, then I had to select the fabrics and get them here (it was often from out of the country or from out of state), manufacture the garments in multiples and then have the garments aged.

The other challenge was the Bear Man. We wanted Ed Lee Corbin, the actor cast as the Bear Man, to be enveloped in a bear. Ed is 6-foot-5-inches and, believe it or not, is bigger than any bearskin that we could find. The largest one we could find was being tanned when his shoot date moved forward by four weeks. You cannot speed up the tanning process, so I went to a taxidermist in Albuquerque who had a bearskin rug on the floor with a pretty good face. I purchased that rug plus four other bearskins that the taxidermist had in a box. My tailor, Celeste Cleveland, seamlessly sewed them together so it would look like one bear (having to remove parts, which was really gross) and then we aged the heck out of it so it would look like the Bear Man had been wearing that bear, sleeping in that bear, being out in the elements in that bear, for a very long time. All in a day and a half! The Bear Man went on-camera on my birthday, which was a really good present!

— Mary Zophres

Sandy Powell “The Tempest”

The biggest challenge of the project, apart from struggling with a very small budget and in very little time without having all the actors available for fittings, was creating Prospera’s magic cloak, which was described as being made from “shards of glass and light” in the script!

I initially considered taking the brief quite literally and looked into using fiber-optics, but soon dismissed this as being impractical. Since we were shooting exteriors in daylight and, in some cases, in difficult locations, the use of real light would have been ineffective, and we would have been in trouble if we had technical hitches halfway up a mountain.

Consequently, the cloak was made from about 3,000 plastic, vacuum-formed jagged crystal shapes, which were each individually painted and sewn onto the cloak pattern pieces, which were made from a strong mesh, or net. As I had no time to experiment with this technique, it had to work.

Although each “crystal” weighed hardly anything, once all 3,000 were attached and the cloak sewn up, the whole thing weighed a ton and was especially uncomfortable for Helen Mirren when she had to hold her staff above her head when creating the tempest. Fortunately for me, Helen was fantastically patient and tolerant, making the costume work. Without her help, it could have been a disaster.

— Sandy Powell

Colleen Atwood, “Alice in Wonderland”

The costumes when Alice shrinks and grows were a new and unique challenge for me. Within the story, Alice goes from normal size to three inches tall to nine feet tall. Once Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she eats the cake that makes her shrink to three inches and steps out of her dress, so we utilized her under slip as a long dress she ties up so she can get around.

Alice then grows gigantic and the same under slip becomes a tiny dress that Alice is almost bursting out of. Alice then shrinks again when she is hiding inside a teapot and the Mad Hatter makes her a tiny dress made from the scraps of her under slip. We played with the scale of the laces and ribbons of the dress to achieve the look that our actor was both large and small.

— Colleen Atwood

Antonella Cannarozzi, “I Am Love”

Writer-director Luca Guadagnino asked me to focus on bourgeoisie aesthetics and to take notes like an entomologist, in order to succeed in reproducing them. During my research, I was able to encode the symbols that show the real luxury and note that those symbols are a stylistic constant that is immutable in time — they are not datable and don’t like to confront to contemporaneity.

So, the idea to involve fashion houses such as Fendi [for the male cast costumes] and Jil Sander [for Tilda Swinton’s wardrobe], according to the great classical Italian cinema tradition, was very stimulating, and the great challenge to me was not to allow fashion to contradict upper-class, timeless style.

— Antonella Cannarozzi

Jenny Beavan, “The King’s Speech”

The biggest challenge on “The King’s Speech” was depicting characters who are still remembered, much loved, and in the case of our present queen, still alive, within the boundaries of our humble budget and lack of time on-set. I was hugely helped by the London costume house Cosprop, which has a fine stock of 1930s apparel and a wonderful workroom to make clothes as needed. Cosprop went far beyond the call of duty, staying open all hours so that we could maximize our very short prep time and accommodate actors who only had limited availability.

We begged, borrowed and stole accessories, medals, insignia for uniforms and jewelry for Wallis Simpson — whatever we could find to make our costumes complete. The best result is that so many people love and have embraced the film and the characters I was so honored to help create. All this helps my amazing crew and me to feel that all the hard work was worthwhile.

— Jenny Beavan