- 2 months ago
Director: Julie GoldstoneDirector of Photography: Vivian LauEditors: Lika Kumoi, Katie WolfordProducer: Chase LewisAssociate Producer: Lea DonenbergAssistant Camera: Ness BevinsGaffer: Pedro PenteadoAudio: Gloria MarieProduction Assistants: Comfort Abiodun, Spencer MathesonMakeup Artist: Maureen SherwoodProduction Coordinator: Tanía JonesProduction Manager: Kristen HelmickLine Producer: Natasha Soto-AlborsAssistant Editor: Andy MorellPost Production Coordinator: Holly FrewSupervising Editor: Kameron KeyPost Production Supervisor: Alexa DeutschSenior Talent Manager: Mica MedoffExecutive Producer: Rahel GebreyesSenior Director, Digital Video: Romy van den BroekeSenior Director, Programming: Linda GittlesonVP, Video Programming: Thespena GuatieriFilmed on Location: The Maybourne Beverly Hills
Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:00I am Colleen Atwood and this is my life in looks.
00:08Whoa, Edward Scissorhands. The process of making Edward Scissorhands come to life
00:13was really like a visceral process. He was born from Orchard Street, Canal Street, back in the
00:20day in the 80s when there was all these boxes of leather and findings and all this stuff that
00:25these guys sold. His leather suit was mainly from jobbers on Orchard Street where I'd just go get
00:32you know a cool piece of leather with a texture and put the puzzle together gradually combined
00:38with some stretched materials. Those days we didn't make a lot of multiples so there are really only
00:43two authentic OG Edward Scissorhands costumes around and the real part of the costume that I think for
00:51all of us. Me, Johnny and Tim were in a room at Stan Winston's who made the hands. We were there
00:57coordinating the hands and the costumes but the minute he put these hands on that are like gloves
01:02was one of those moments in your life that's like magical. With costumes like this it's often
01:08you know the fear of people oh it's going to take forever to get in and out of and it really is like
01:13putting on pants and a shirt and wrapping it around and buckling it. Poor Johnny wearing it in Florida
01:18in 90 degree weather the whole time was the hardest part like just drying it out in between because
01:24it was really really hot there. I was influenced in that period by early Gautier who had been using
01:29stretch with with non-stretch fabrics to make it fit tightly but still move and it was really
01:36important to me that this costume was able to move and not just bag out like leather does if you don't
01:42have anything behind it. Back then there wasn't stretch leather like there is today.
01:46Oh my god Handmaid's Tale I forgot about that one. The color coding it was very very strongly
01:54supported by the director who really wanted the color symbolizing the order of the people in the
02:00story. There was a designer I think named Zoran in New York at the time period who was very influential
02:05on how the director wanted the clothes to look that kind of Soho kind of vibe. It really influenced
02:13those costumes in that period in the 80s. What I remember the most about it is myself and the head
02:18of the hair department did everybody's ponytails every day because we were obsessed with them being
02:23a certain way and then putting on the scarves. Silence of the Lambs. The way it was written and the way it
02:33was envisioned by Ted Talley I think and Jonathan was so terrifying that you're kind of in the middle of the
02:40night waking up and checking your doors. Oftentimes in costuming you're making things you want to have
02:46a feeling of them being manufactured not being something that's so craft oriented and in this
02:52case Jonathan had a lot of thoughts about what this mask could be. Should it be leather? Should it be
02:57just rope and like kind of more basic and old-fashioned? But I really felt it should be a version of what's
03:04happening today and I was looking at all these hockey masks and I was like you know that's really
03:09the best tech that's out there today and I found this guy I believe he was in New Jersey who made
03:14these masks. The great story about this mask is originally we were going to paint it but the first
03:20proto came in it looked like dead skin and we're like oh my god this is so much better than painting
03:26it but we didn't even think about it. It is actually fiberglass which probably shouldn't be on anyone's
03:31face in that state but we didn't know better than them. Little Women a wonderful job was my first
03:38period film and I was able to find a lot of authentic fabrics. I bought a lot of dresses from
03:45the period that were half rotten and things were you know not good about them but I took them apart
03:51and repurposed the material and I felt like it really was art imitating life because really in that
03:57period people did that with their clothes. We even had one dress which was you know everyone was
04:02terrified about but I really wanted Claire Danes to wear one of Winona's dresses because people had
04:07hand-me-downs and everyone was freaking out because like what if we have to have continuity and
04:12I was like who cares like we can go back you know it was just like a really great movie for me
04:18in the fact that it really familiarized me with the fabric of the period and the sort of
04:25texture of the production design and that the lighting and everything really worked together
04:29to create that world. Oh look at Oprah. Beloved. My influence with actors in films is always a
04:38collaborative process. I always show them a bible that I've done of the story how I see it just kind
04:44of a flow of the film and it's always a funny process because some actors are very engaged by it
04:50and some of them you're just like what am I going to wear. Oprah in this case of Beloved was very
04:55respectful of Toni Morrison's vision of the story but also very respectful of having these costumes
05:03that people actually made by hand and I think it was really interesting for someone you know as massive
05:09as Oprah with style and everything to just really kind of hone it down and appreciate the simplicity
05:16of these costumes and the story that we were telling with these characters.
05:22Aw Christina so beautiful. Sleepy Hollow. It's a fantastical story. It's a tale. It's a fable.
05:31Chivo Emanuel Lubisky's lighting was a huge part of that show. The kind of idea that Christina Ricci
05:37was this glowing thing and that it was like a world surrounded by darkness and I think that that's what
05:42Tim was depicting in the telling of Sleepy Hollow. The stuff that wasn't there. It was my first film
05:49in the UK and I really was cutting these clothes in a way that they weren't very happy with me about
05:55in the sense that I really wanted to take them to a different level. I expanded the skirts. I did all
06:01kinds of things to the shapes and in the beginning the people in the workroom were just like well it's
06:06not Janet Arnold which is a familiar face to them in pattern making but once we got into it and they
06:13saw what I was doing with the fabrics and the lighting and stuff they were really excited about
06:17it and it was really a great turnaround for me as a designer working with fellow artisans. These kind
06:23of movies especially these sort of period films everything then was sewn by hand so the hand on
06:29everything and the finishing is really important to me. In that area I had an amazing textile artist that
06:35did the horseman's cape and all the aging on the horseman and the screening on that which was the
06:40first time I'd worked with people of that level in that area. Catherine the Great. Chicago. When I
06:48started Chicago my first meeting with Rob Marshall I just finished Planet of the Apes with Tim which was
06:53such an action movie like all these layers on layers that these guys had to do all this work and I was
06:59showing Rob the book and I said this doesn't scare me at all doing dance. I can see what it
07:05takes to make these costumes work. My fashion inspiration from Chicago really came from the
07:11period and from a lot of Versailles photographs, different photography like Man Ray, sort of the
07:17grittier side of life. It was kind of the first time photographs weren't so formal. It was sort of
07:23more journo kind of photography and it was really interesting for me to look at that because I knew
07:28the standard pretty photography but it was great to go a little bit deeper. The biggest challenge on
07:33Chicago was the budget which was very small. The dance numbers in Chicago we shot usually in about
07:41a 16-hour day. The dancers and the actors had to perform that long in one costume. I did not have
07:48multiples. You just stood on the side poised with a needle and thread waiting for something to blow up
07:54on you. And that's kind of how we got through the job. Jim Carrey, Lemony Snicket. In Lemony Snicket I
08:03really made kind of quiet plea to myself that I was going to create the textiles themselves. So I took
08:10textiles and took them apart, applied them to other things. Jim's suit is like strips of wool cut with
08:16metal base behind it which is why the stripes have that strange kind of iridescence to them. It isn't just a
08:21hard stripe. I just was really into the baby's dress as one of my favorite costumes I've ever made because it was
08:28really dark taffeta with a layer of baby pink on top and it just made it the sickest most amazing color and every
08:36element of it had a feeling of something being made by hand. Memoirs of a Geisha. That's a good memory. In Memoirs of a Geisha, it was a really
08:47terrifying project as a designer because you're honoring a 500 year old culture. It was really
08:54important to me to know what was real in what the Geisha wore. So I had a lot of research that I went by.
09:01Then I got the cast and the cast were quite tall and willowy beautiful women. The actual real Geisha clothes were made for
09:10people much, much more compact and smaller. And I was totally like going, what am I going to do? But I went to a show
09:17in Tokyo, an art exhibit of an illustrator from the 30s in Japan. He set me free because he'd done all these
09:26illustrations that were kind of the idea of what I wanted to do with the costumes. And at that point, I took the
09:33proportions and played with them and made them work better on our cast. Sweeney Todd. Sweeney's necktie
09:42was actually one piece of fabric I had very little of. It was an old hand-woven piece of fabric. There
09:48was blood everywhere in that movie. And you're just like, everyone's freaking out about the scarf,
09:52this tie, the tie. And I was like, I don't care. I want this tie. And then Steve Gallo was my textile
09:57artist. We printed fake ones. So they looked good for, you know, the blood work. I really wanted it to
10:03be a black and white and gray character. So I liked using all the warm and cool tones of all those
10:10colors together to evoke, you know, the moodiness of Sweeney. Nine. Beautiful Nicole. The early 60s high
10:19Italian fashion is one of my favorite periods. It's just so classically elegant and a throwaway at the
10:25same time. It isn't as stuffy as the Americans were. It's a little more real. Like it's really glamorous,
10:31but you believe people actually wore it and lived in it. And that's, that was their lifestyle. And
10:36then you have Sophia Loren, Marion Cotillard, Penelope, Nicole, like, you know, on and on. I mean,
10:42just amazing cast of, of actors. For this movie, it was all made costumes. We did have jewelry from
10:50Chopard. In this photo, Nicole's bracelet was Chopard bracelet. Queenie, we called her. This collaboration with
10:59Tim was really special to both of us because we both loved the Tenelle drawings of the early Alice.
11:05And then we knew that the audience was slightly more familiar with the Disney version of Alice
11:10than Lewis Carroll's novels. To juggle like taking something that's a beloved sort of image of a
11:17character like Alice and, and putting her into a new vibe was something that we're like, we're just
11:24going the blue dress. How do we lose it? Tim really figured out. He goes, how come when she shrinks and
11:29grows her clothes, they just shrink and grow with her. Let's have her just like shrink. And then she's
11:34in like this kind of underwear thing. And then she grows and she's in something else. So it really set us
11:40free from that. And it was a really fun thing to collaborate with. We were also dealing at a time
11:45before technology was quite what it is today. Helena's costume was an especially big challenge
11:51where we had to have the collar and cheat the neckline lower in order to make the head fit on
11:57the body in a way that worked low tack, which was a fun learning curve for me. Meryl has a blue witch.
12:06My research for Into the Woods was somewhat fairy tales, but also is like Meryl's opening in the show,
12:11she comes out of a tree. And I really liked her being the textures of bark. And I'd fooled around
12:17on something else with these leather cords put on chiffon. You could twist it like bark. It was
12:23like Fortuny, but a little bit more dynamic in a sense of what you could do with it. So I did that
12:30with her initial costume, which is really a ratty, you know, she'd been living in the woods forever,
12:35like a mad woman's costume. She comes in and we're thinking, do you need a hop? And like,
12:39we put the thing on and we have the big sleeves and everything. And she like stoops over in it.
12:44And we're like, you know, she doesn't really need it. She can do it with her acting because
12:48she's such a great movement actress. This costume here was her fancy high-end witch's concept of a
12:55beautiful mother witch, which we also had fun with, made with the same technique, but with ribbons
13:00in with the cord. So it had a little bit more silky quality to it. Eddie, fantastic beasts and where to
13:07find them. When I first read a script, a lot of times I see the character, like I see this little
13:13guy that's introverted and shy in the world and think of how to make clothes that make him like
13:20that. In a same way, in a kind of whacked out way, I thought of him as a bird, like a robin.
13:26And I don't know if it's because I'd seen a robin in my yard that day, but I like the colors of robins
13:31a lot. And I thought, oh, I'll make his waistcoat kind of like the color of a robin, but a little
13:36bluer, not quite so sad. I think when I do a show like Wednesday, you never know what it's going to
13:43mean to anybody. It's fun to see it go on the street. It's fun to see how people interpret it
13:48and people reinterpreting each character and how much they embrace Enid and how much they embrace
13:53Wednesday. And it's fun to see on Halloween that, you know, people are coming to your door that are
13:57like Wednesday Adams. So are their moms. And so you're just like, oh, wow, this is like something
14:03to people. I've had a few great costumes in my past for Halloween, like the Martian girl,
14:09Edward Scissorhands, Wednesday, Hannibal Lecter.
14:14Ariel, the little mermaid, a challenge and fun. I designed all the tales for all the sisters and
14:21stuff with the digital artists that use them in the movies with depicting actual fish from the seven
14:27seas to have that vibe. Even though it's not really a big part of the story, it was a really fun
14:32element of the design, the embracing of the sea world and human world of all different cultures.
14:39With Ariel's costume above land, she's going into the palace and the palace was dressing her. So
14:45she couldn't really look like the queen, but she couldn't really look like the servant. She was
14:49somewhere in the middle. So the blouse is like more like an aristocratic kind of beautiful little silk
14:55blouse. And the corset is handmade, like somebody's made it. And then the skirt's like tux and tux of
15:00coral, reminiscent of the ocean. And of course, she had to be the color of the sea. I messed around
15:05with a lot of blues and stuff with it. But I ended up in this kind of pale turquoise color. Creating a
15:11character within the IP of an existing character is always a challenge. But I think if the actors can do
15:18it, then you can just kind of follow suit and make it all work. Masters of the Air, a huge challenge.
15:26It was hundreds of costumes manufactured. So I sourced really good materials from all over the world.
15:33I found real pieces and redid patterns that were currently being sold by leather manufacturers.
15:41So I had to go into the manufacturing world, but I controlled it by the pattern making side of it.
15:46Also, a lot of times in these shows, nothing's really aged. Nothing looks like people really wore it
15:51for a long time. And it was really important to me to have it really feel worn in and real on all
15:57these guys. The beautiful Monica in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The funny thing about Tim was I've been
16:04working with him for 30 years. And I always read about like Tim Burton's doing this. And then he calls me
16:10and he goes, you know, I'd be doing this thing. Like it's a secret because he doesn't like to talk
16:15about stuff until he's doing it. And I always act surprised. Oh, really? It's an interesting
16:22challenge to take something as contemporary as Beetlejuice and do your version of it. Because
16:28people really remember it, you know. The main thing is I got some of the real stuff. I had them
16:32fitting with Michael. And he's like, I remember the tux was my favorite. It was a real one.
16:37And I was like, I got it. And he said, oh, wow. It's just like people remember things in a way.
16:44When they see it, the memory is more beautiful than what the actual reality of the object is.
16:51Leo in probably the most disgusting costume he's had to wear. The process of working with Paul Thomas
16:58Sanderson is like no other. We had all these sessions at his house where he'd take pictures of
17:02stuff. We'd talk about stuff with Leo's character, especially, and with Willa's. And we'd try on
17:08things and take pictures and, you know, do different things with the army guys. And as stuff
17:13came along and it worked, then it became the costume for the movie. We did fittings, proper
17:19fittings as well. But it was mainly that fluid process that brought together the look of the film
17:25for Leo and for Chase Infinity's character. And it was really a road movie. So stuff was in all
17:31kinds of environments. We didn't have tons of multiples. I got the fabric for Leo's robe and
17:37made the robes and then we needed more. And I called them and they go, oh, we don't have that anymore.
17:42So we were stuck with like six robes for the whole movie, which is not that many for what he had to do
17:47in it. But, you know, it just worked in a way that, you know, you don't need sometimes so much stuff.
17:53Sometimes it's good to not have it. Jennifer Lopez as the Spider Woman. The use of color in
18:01Kiss of the Spider Woman was really inspired by the films of the 40s, the musical films,
18:08where color was really choreographed, orchestrated. And we really dove into it that way, which was a
18:14lot of fun because you really could control all the color in the room. It was a great process.
18:19It was a fantastic job. Bill Condon, the director, is a master at musicals. He knows everything there
18:24is to know about them on film. And Kurt Chops as an actress and as a dancer are beyond belief.
18:31I think my favorite part of making musicals is actually making costumes for actors, but also the
18:38dancers and what they have to do in the costumes. It's really fun to do that. I like music a lot. I do
18:44stuff for bands sometimes every once in a while. And it's just a really great part of making things
18:51to bring joy to people. Wow. That was my life in looks. At least half my life in looks.
19:14Em body music is very nice to you.
19:18I want to be in athletics. I want to be in athletics.
19:22Come to Sean.
19:23Am I looking forward to learning new things?
19:23Am I looking forward to seeing those who look truly strong.
19:26Are commercials that will probably sort of enjoy??
19:28Am I ocur Mobilize the video?
19:29I've got a dimension that will be awesome.
19:31It's got to be fun.
19:32I can lift you up all the time.
19:35I get 160 feet away from sitting there.
19:37Pepe PT Impossible.
19:39I'm looking forward to demonstrating this with clips similar
19:41that you might look like.
Be the first to comment