Dressing up monarchs and superheroes is a craft that receives and deserves praise. But we would also like to spotlight the crafty artisans this year who clothed characters from today – with results that are imaginative, seductive and sewn with many threads of this modern world.

May December
Costume design by April Napier

Everyone has their own story,” costume designer April Napier said, “and characters have to be imbued with a sense of individuality.” She leaned forward in her chair and added with emphasis: “Especially in a contemporary film.”

Napier should know. Her filmography includes such sharp and idiosyncratic modern-set projects as “Booksmart,” “Your Friends and Neighbors,” “Certain Women,” “Gentleman Broncos,” the Tilda Swinton drama “Julia,” Apple TV’s “High Desert” and Greta Gerwig’s contemporary-ish “Lady Bird,” which took place about 15 years earlier than its 2017 release.

Todd Haynes’s devilish melodrama “May December” is also set one click before present day, in 2015. “It’s contemporary, but just prior to the polarization of today’s society,” said Napier, a first-time collaborator with the famed director of “Safe,” “Far From Heaven” and “Carol.”

The film focuses on controversial married couple Gracie and Joe (Julianne Moore and Charles Melton), decades apart in age, whose lives are upended by an actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) doing research to play Gracie in a movie. As the story continues, the two women’s identities subtly overlap.

“Gracie is such a princess character and her femininity is what she’s hanging onto, to maintain that control,” Napier said. “She has more flouncy, softer, feminine clothes. So we did a costume fitting for (Moore) on a Friday and then used all her wardrobe choices as a map to dress Natalie. Natalie’s character comes into the film in an urban uniform, shirt and cool jeans, so we intentionally started her wardrobe dark and then moved her into softer pastels.”

For the production, Napier and Haynes were bursting with cultural references, which subliminally influenced the film’s look: Robert Altman’s “Three Women,” Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman,” actress Jane Birkin, photographers Deborah Turbeville, Nicholas Nixon and Tina Barney. “And Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona,’ of course, obviously,” Napier said, referring to the great-grandmommy of blurred-identity films.

Another major touchstone was the 1964 marital drama “The Pumpkin Eater,” starring Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch. “At one point in that film, a young Maggie Smith comes and lives with them and there’s a scene where Bancroft and Maggie Smith are cooking and their outfits are mimicking each other,” Napier said.

She continued, “One’s in a checked outfit and one’s in a striped outfit with a towel over her shoulder and I was like, ‘That’s Julianne and Natalie.’ That’s the scene in our film where Elizabeth comes over to bake and that’s when she starts her transition into Gracie. I went up to Todd and showed him a photo from ‘The Pumpkin Eater’ and was like, ‘We’re doing it.’”

“May December” is set in Savannah, Georgia, a perfect locale, according to Napier, for the cultural expression of attire as uniform. “But Savannah can be very limited for prepping,” she said with a laugh. “Even the thrift stores, for menswear, were limited to blue Oxford, blue Oxford and blue Oxford. Every middle-aged man has a uniform: blue button-down shirt, khaki shorts and Top-Siders. The women also wear very similar types of floral dresses.”

But the costume designer pointed out that there is a special, magic-key feeling to discovering the perfect outfits for a contemporary movie, such as non-identical twin white frocks that the two women wear for a climactic stand-off on a football field near the story’s end. “There is something about finding your Fabergé egg,” she said. “So that we can support the actors, stay out of the way, be quiet – but really help to evoke a mood and imbue a feeling in the film.”

Past Lives
Costume design by Katina Danabassis

“Past Lives,” the exquisite first feature by Celine Song, opens with an image of three people filmed from a distance while sitting at a bar. The shot immediately highlights the nuanced, thoughtful work of the film’s costume designer, Katina Danabassis. The three people are Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), childhood friends in Korea who have reunited in New York City, and Nora’s patient husband Arthur (John Magaro).

“You can see that Arthur is wearing more of a neutral, earthy color and his shirt is looser,” said Danabassis, whose credits include “C’mon, C’mon” and TV’s “The Curse.” “With Hae Sung, he’s more buttoned up and business-like and thinks that he’s more stylish. His color palette is more cool and cosmopolitan. His shirt is maybe just a little too snug, which also shows that he’s a bit pent-up.”

She added, “With Nora, she looks amazing but she’s also a writer, so we had to find the balance between great outfits, like late ’90s Prada, minimalist and restrained, while also showing that she’s not putting that much effort in there.”

The opening image is repeated later in the film, following a dreamy walkabout sequence between Nora and Hae Sung on a gorgeous day in New York. At that point in the story, we have also learned much more about these three people and what connects them.

“It was hot the first day we were shooting that scene,” Danabassis said of the stroll-around-New-York sequence. “Nora’s pants were summer wool, which worked very well. She’s wearing a cream-colored button-down top and there’s a specific lack of care in her shirt, which was important. The cuffs being unbuttoned – that says, ‘I’m not sure how I want to project myself to this person but I’m not going to try too hard.’ We communicated a lot on how to convey that sort of vibe.”

The subtle contrast of warm and cool clothing resonates across the arc of the film’s lovelorn emotional narrative. Danabassis found inspiration in another directorial debut, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year.

“(Terrence Malick’s) ‘Badlands’ is a film that I rewatched while on a plane,” she said. “And I noticed the little contrasts of white and dark and navy blue in the costumes, and I thought that was just so beautiful. So that was what I tried to do, specifically for when Nora and Arthur are together. There are a lot of contrasts of blue and white between them.”

And though the movie’s pulse is synched to the here-and-now, the title the title deliberately suggests reincarnation. Song encouraged Danabassis to lean into the notion of genre blending during the costume process.

“One of the things we talked about was that ‘Past Lives’ is, in some ways, a movie about time travel,” Danabassis said. “It’s not literally a science fiction film, but that idea encouraged us to use stars in Nora’s wardrobe. Blink and you’ll miss it, but Nora has a star ring while she’s in college. She wears a star necklace. The shirt that Nora’s mother is wearing has speckles on it, which we echoed with Nora in the first scene and then the last scenes. So there was this thread of family and storytelling and, well, yeah, the cosmos.”

Passages
Costume design by Khadija Zeggaï

Set among the bourgeoisie in modern day Paris, “Passages” is another crackling romantic drama from the great, uncompromising Ira Sachs (“Keep the Lights On,” “Love is Strange”). The film stars Franz Rogowski as a German director named Tomas who is married to artist Martin (Ben Whishaw) but falls in love with schoolteacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos).

“We realized that we weren’t really making a realistic film,” Sachs said during a recent BAFTA interview. “We were making an unreal film, in which the costumes elevate everything to a point of the dramatic and the impactful and the emotional. So we took risks with the costumes.”

The head of that risk-taking department was Khadija Zeggaï, a collaborator with Sachs on his previous feature, “Frankie,” starring Isabelle Huppert. “The idea of finding a unique piece stimulates me,” Zeggaï said. “And Ira’s attention to costume is the most obvious. Without imposing anything, he guided me to find the right silhouette for each character: Go for what you love, be fair and make sure it’s sexy.”

And sexy it most certainly is. The outfits in “Passages” create a whole visual language, especially for Tomas. A skin-tight dragon-print crop top and leopard pants – the most memorable of many memorable looks in the film – serve as a trigger for seduction in one scene and a weapon for provocation in another.

Zeggaï wanted to suggest a beastly quality within Tomas, while also empha- sizing the frame of Rogowski, a trained dancer. “Ira’s freedom and Franz’s personality really helped me to make the right choices,” she said. “Tomas is wearing clothes cut for the female body. I didn’t alter the clothing. Everything (fit) his dancing body.”

Zeggaï also found a snakeskin jacket in a vintage shop, which she felt accentuated Tomas’s animal nature. “The idea that Tomas could be a wild beast helped me to find this python jacket, as well as his bearskin jacket and much of his clothes,” she said.

The character also favors mesh tops, including a heavy green sweater with net holes large enough to show his body underneath. “I worked a lot with Ira and Franz on the type of German director who likes to dress up,” Zeggaï said. “And the mesh quality of the sweater is a signature of Tomas’s look.”

Tomas’s relentless personality and his desire to be loved forms the narrative thrust of the film. But the clothes of the other two characters, Martin and Agathe, also serve as a mood-ring contrast. In the movie’s later scenes, we see Martin wearing a loose and light-colored jumper, a departure from the blues and grays in his wardrobe, and Agathe in a scarlet turtleneck sweater.

“Ben, Ira and I talked a lot and did a few fittings,” Zeggaï said. “Ira wanted Ben to
be dressed in white at the end of the film. And (for Agathe) at this point in the film, she has decided she is free. Red evokes strength.”

Showing Up
Costume design by April Napier

Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt would just as likely direct the next Marvel movie as she would dress her characters in the sparkliest, fresh- off-the-runway clothes from luxury brands. Glamour is a legitimate and desirable aesthetic – surely Reichardt observed some of it when she premiered her newest, “Showing Up,” in Cannes – but the Oregon- based auteur greatly favors the warm, comfy, thrift-store garb of hanging out. In her films, people even wear the same thing two days in a row. (Just like the rest of us do.)

Perhaps the movies where Reichardt has dripped into the 1800s (“Meek’s Cutoff” and “First Cow”) have informed her attitude towards clothes as well- worn, hand-me-down uniforms in her contemporary projects. In “Showing Up,” set around the modest art scene of Portland, a soft-spoken sculptor (played by Michelle Williams) and an installation artist (Hong Chau) appear for about a third of the film in a soft-touch grayish sweatshirt (Williams) and navy blue overalls (Chau), as seen in the photo above.

The story of those blue overalls goes right to the heart of Reichardt’s creative process. “Kelly sent me a text,” costume designer April Napier said. “She said that a camera operator from her previous films had shown her a picture of his wife, who was wearing blue overalls. And Kelly said, ‘It looks so great. Do you think we can get that for Hong to wear?’”

Reichardt didn’t mean a replica, according to Napier. “I called the guy’s wife, her name is Molly,” the designer said. “And I said, ‘Hey Molly, can we borrow your blue overalls?’ She said sure. So we got it for Hong to wear in all those scenes. And then when we wrapped, we cleaned the overalls and returned them to Molly. This is how it goes on a Kelly Reichardt film. Everything, even the clothes, are family- and friends-oriented.”

Read more from the issue here.

The post ‘May December’, ‘Past Lives’ and Other Costume Designers Explain How They Weave a ‘Sense of Individuality’ Into Modern Clothes appeared first on TheWrap.

The Searchlight film is a metaphysical tale of longing and nostalgia adapted loosely from Taichi Yamada’s novel “Strangers,” centering on a single gay man (Andrew Scott) in a London high-rise who is grappling with memories of his deceased parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), while fending off the advances of a handsome, mysterious neighbor (Paul Mescal). It all takes place on a lush, saturated widescreen palette that enhances the story’s deeper revelations.

“The aspect ratio of a film for me is as important as the choice of lenses or your color palette,” Ramsay said of the bold choice for an achingly intimate movie whose end credits list a mere six actors. “I wanted to lean into the concept of a wide frame with a single person—being able to isolate a character and use the empty space in a wide format to really exacerbate that feeling of loneliness.”

“Strangers” marks Haigh’s most intensely emotional film to date, placing the lead character’s melancholy against carefully composed vistas and reflective surfaces that created challenges for the man with the camera. “The main apartment that was built on a stage, so we could remove glass things, but it’s always a trick, getting yourself out of reflections and such,” Ramsay said. “I’m sure if you pause a frame and zoom in, you’ll see me somewhere in that mix. But Andrew would always say, ‘Get the shot that you want first, and then we’ll figure out how to fix reflections and stuff’.”

The film continues Haigh’s bold, realistic depictions of sexual unions—seen here in supple scenes between Scott and Mescal—that make audiences sit up and take notice in a non-salacious, affirming way. “What I realized when I watched it (at festivals) is it transcends expectations for it to truly just be a love story,” said Ramsay, whose film arrived in a film year rife with liberating depictions of sexual scenarios in everything from “Passages“ to “Poor Things“ to “Saltburn.”

The movie’s furtive narrative twists (What is Mescal’s character’s deal? Why is their building so spookily sparse?) and the tender but haunted parental narrative is all borne out in a careful assemblage. “The intent was to create this ambiguous feeling of current, future and past all blended into one as seamlessly as possible,” Ramsay said.

Even though the film has yet to receive its wide release, fan theories abound, some of them taking the ghostly implications of the narrative—particularly as it applies to Scott’s character—even further than the filmmakers may have planned.

“Maybe Andrew’s got that deep in the back of his pocket, but we never intended that,” Ramsay said. “But that’s what’s beautiful about it—everybody brings their own interpretation to it.”

This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post ‘All of Us Strangers’ Cinematographer Unpacks the Film’s Sensual Intimacies and Mysteries appeared first on TheWrap.

Lovers of the original film will get a feeling of déjà vu from some scenes and locations, including the recreation of a masked kidnapper entering through a glass patio door, and even the car dealership in which William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard worked in the 1996 film, right down to the placement of his desk. (Also, listen close for a mention of the TruCoat treatment his character brags about in the film.)

The chief difference this time is the focus on the wife—played by a daffy, deliriously funny Juno Temple as Dorothy “Dot” Lyon—rather than the crummy husband. Dot is a force to be reckoned with even before a botched kidnapping attempt. (In the film, the Lundegaard wife is successfully kidnapped and has far less agency.) The moneyed, no-nonsense Harve Presnell character is now the wife’s lacerating mother-in-law, Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh, with a “Hudsucker Proxy”-like Mid-Atlantic drawl). Lorraine keenly draws the conclusion that there is more to her daughter-in-law than meets the eye.

“It was a really enjoyable fusion and loving homage to the original film,” Smith said. “It was a real challenge for my assistant art director Amanda Nicholson and I to go shot by shot through the original film, find the pieces in the home that we could replicate, including the front door and its openness to the kitchen, and yet still make it do all the other 30 or 40 things that it physically needed for Noah’s scripts. It was no small feat.”

The show famously plays with reality, even keeping the cheeky “based on real events” title card. However, one of the main locations this season is an actual real place, Scandia, Minnesota, though Smith and his crew used Calgary as a stand-in for Minnesota and neighboring state North Dakota, also an important locale for Season 5. Smith’s background in designing Westerns, not to mention being an acclaimed Canadian artist himself, was kismet for the storylines, especially one involving shady, self-governing sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), who gives off echoes of the Coens’ “True Grit” and, especially, “No Country for Old Men.” “We looked a lot at the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and were trying to get a vibe of this desolate, barren Western side of North Dakota,” Smith said. “As we worked through it, we wanted to topographically make sure that the viewer always knew if they were in North Dakota or Minnesota, and it just so happened that the villain was to the West in a more desolate, barren place.”

Smith even pointed out a horror vibe to this season, shades of “No Country” baddie Anton Chigurh. Halloween is a major theme, with allusions to the POV of Michael Myers in suburbia, à la John Carpenter’s 1978 “Halloween.” In addition, a Gothic holiday classic celebrating its 30-year anniversary logs in some serious screen time. “In the opening scene of the season, the school brawl, there is actually a setup of “The Nightmare Before Christmas“ as a student production,” Smith said. “If you look carefully, you can see miniature sets of that and the front doors of the school has some posters referencing it.”

In addition, a Jack Skellington mask can be spotted in the Halloween-night sequence and one scene is scored to “This is Halloween,” a song from the Henry Selick-Tim Burton film. Even in a show set a mere four years ago, the team still had to be laser-focused on detail: For instance, Kias are part of the narrative but had a major brand overhaul in 2020, so Smith and co. had to vet their accuracy. But given the “Fargo” milieu, Smith insisted it doesn’t always have to be exact. “There’s nothing worse than a period film where all of the cars are from 1945,” he said with a laugh. “That’s never been the case, and it’s no different with contemporary pictures. Deep at its core, we’re still trying to allude to the “Fargo” we know in our genetic viewing code, which is the 1996 picture. So it didn’t bother me to have anachronistic things that were further back in time, because I think it’s this strange reach back into the entire movie.”

This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post How ‘Fargo’ Expanded the Coen-Verse With Help From Westerns and ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ appeared first on TheWrap.

The look of the film – set in a fairy tale 19th century world unlike any you’ve ever seen – is singular, even if the moniker Lanthimosian doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

“That’s a really hard word to say,” said cinematographer Robbie Ryan with a laugh. The Irish camera maestro earned an Oscar nomination for “The Favourite,” his previous collaboration with Lanthimos.

“Maybe Lanthimosesque is better – or is it even worse? I do totally agree, though: His filmmaking is signature, for sure. It’s inventive in a way that’s undefinable. I can describe his style by saying that I never know what Yorgos is going to do next. He is practical and pragmatic but he is also very enigmatic.”

And no doubt that last characteristic drew Lanthimos to the late Scottish author Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel “Poor Things,” an allegorical and fantastical narrative that can be interpreted from several societal angles at once. In the book and film, the plot follows Victorian era heroine Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), the childlike medical invention of a Frankenstein figure (Willem Dafoe), as she embarks on an adventure of self-discovery.

Her journey, which begins in London and at one point involves an ocean liner, includes stops in Paris, Lisbon and Alexandria. These cities, with grand town squares, decadent apartments, narrow streets, restaurants, dining halls and beautiful promenades, were constructed from scratch in Budapest on some of the largest soundstages in all of Europe. The sets required months to build, with each butting up against the walls and ceilings of the stage.

“Incredibly, the doors on the set didn’t go into voids,” said James Price (“Paddington 2” and this year’s “The Iron Claw”), who helped conjure up the elaborate production alongside Shona Heath. “Everything we designed had something behind it, whether it was the end of a street or through the window or in the sky or the ceiling. Everything led to something else and it kept on getting bigger and bigger. At one time, we reckoned that we had three-quarters of all construction crews in Hungary working on the film.”

Heath, whose background includes sumptuous art direction in the fashion industry, estimated that 95% of “Poor Things” was filmed on soundstages. “One of the scenes we shot in a real forest, which felt like a bit of a compromise at the time,” she said. “But we gave the forest a ‘Poor Things’ makeover by installing a
giant tree at a crazy 45-degree angle. And when I watch the scene, I love the fact that it seems so open and real, except for this very huge tree.”

Perfect realism, of course, was not Lanthimos’s top priority, though he still insisted on verisimilitude – the real within the fake – in every scene. The director showed his production designers movies such as 1967’s “Belle de Jour” by Luis Buñuel, Conrad Veidt’s 1924 silent classic “The Thief of Bagdad” and 1992’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” the Francis Coppola film that eschewed the convenience of modern VFX for real in-the-camera tricks.

“It’s important for Yorgos that we used CGI elements as minimally as possible,” said Price. “We used miniatures, we used painted backdrops, we used forced perspective. We used lots of LED screens. Everything off the deck of the ocean liner was one LED screen, which bent in a curve. The skies were all designed. The Tower Bridge, which you see in the first scene of the film, was an enormous miniature. The miniature model for Alexandria was almost 50 feet long.”

Despite the embrace of artifice, “Poor Things” is especially notable for being the first Lanthimos film to employ complex prosthetic makeup effects. Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter was the victim of his own father’s medical experimentation, which is branded on his precisely sliced face. “There was a picture of a Francis Bacon painting in our production bible,” said Oscar-nominated makeup artist Nadia Stacey (“Cruella”). “And that distorted face was a reference for Baxter.”

Stacey admitted her initial surprise that Lanthimos was going the prosthetic route. “I worked on ‘The Favourite,’ and Yorgos would look closely to make sure that there was no makeup on any of the actors. Ieven did an advert with him once and he didn’t like it when I covered a tiny imperfection on someone. He loves imperfections and he doesn’t want anything ever looking too polished.”

To find the face of Baxter without burying the face of Dafoe, Stacey called on Heath to assist with an architectural approach. “I went to Shona’s art studio and we did a photo collage of Baxter’s face, where we took the different elements, the eyes, the chin, the nose and kept swapping them around until we said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got it.’ We sculpted that for Willem and that was the look that fit.”

The daily application process took about three hours. “Baxter’s face is geometrically cut up, but it was crucial that he didn’t look like a Marvel villain,” Heath said. Stacey added, “The compelling thing for me was that Bella really loves him. So we needed to sympathize with and care for him, too, in our own way. For every scar, we thought of a backstory for it. His father was a master surgeon, so these scars form a patchwork, which is impressive in its own way. But Baxter’s obviously a victim, too.”

Importantly, the actor was visible – though in the makeup chair, the question arose of exactly which actor that was. “Of course, Willem Dafoe’s got such an interesting face and you don’t want to completely mask that,” said Stacey. “But Willem felt that he looked like Kirk Douglas. And now we all can’t unsee it!”

While the anatomical was being considered in the prosthetics studio, those same intuitions were occurring in costume designer Holly Waddington’s workshop. “Yorgos had shown me an image of inflatable latex trousers,” said the theater costume veteran whose credits include TV’s “The Great.”

“He asked me to come up with some concepts, so I really blew up this idea of bodily organs in the clothes. The sleeves were like huge lungs, even if the effect is very subliminal.” (The production design worked in tandem, with aspects of the architecture resembling skin, tripe, or the wrinkles of brain matter.)

In terms of actual bodies, the costume department was involved in amplifying the pompous postures of certain characters, such as Mark Ruffalo’s virile suitor Duncan. “I was inspired by satirical drawings of upper-class Victorian men with rounded thighs and their chests pumped out,” said Waddington. “So Mark wore padding on his thighs and bottom, along with a corset. And originally we padded out his chest, but on camera it was just too extreme and pantomimic. Yorgos knew we had to lose it.”

Waddington was given the freedom to reach deep into the 20th century for anachronistic ideas. “I was researching how designers created styles based on the future, especially at the start of the space age. I looked at airline fashion, knowing that we were not going to go as far as that in the costumes, but it inspired plastic elements in Bella’s clothes. She wears boots that are an homage to the (1960s) French designer André Courrèges. I took his Space Age style and merged that with a Victorian boot.”

Though the early scenes are filmed in black and white, Waddington embraced bold colors for Bella’s wardrobe during her world travels. Especially one. “Yellow is the color of madness and the color of joy,” she said. “I’d read when I was a student that yellow and black together are nature’s warning colors. And I
thought that would be quite an interesting thing to explore with Bella. Not that she’s hazardous, but just that she’s not to be ignored. And she is a beacon of a sort, which is also yellow.”

In command of those colors was the adventurous cinematographer Robbie Ryan. Shooting on 35mm celluloid and restricting themselves to only natural-source light, even if from an artificial sky, Ryan and Lanthimos used an even more portal-like fish-eye lens than the one they exploited in “The Favourite.” But “Poor Things” is more notable for their propensity towards gorgeous slow zoom shots, many of which feature Bella in a state of contemplation within her surroundings.

“We talked about Fassbinder’s ‘The Marriage of Maria Braun,’ which was shot by Michael Ballhaus,” Ryan said. “But the timings of things get a lot more complex when you include a zoom lens. I do love a challenge, but I found those zoom shots to be the most challenging thing on the film, because you have Emma Stone doing amazing stuff and you just don’t want to get the zoom wrong. Anytime I got it wrong, the joke was, ‘One more time…for Robbie.’”

Ryan, whose filmography speaks to his repeat collaborations with such directors as Andrea Arnold (American Honey”) and Ken Loach (“I, Daniel Blake”), is excited to keep contributing to the Lanthimosian canon. The two have already
completed another feature called And, shot last year in New Orleans, also starring Stone and Dafoe.

“Just working on (Poor Things) got the hair of my neck up in a great way,” he
said. “One minute I was on the steamship set, completely immersed in that,
and then I’d open a door and be in the Paris set. It was like this crazy time
portal that Yorgos had made. I did have to get used to it in order to work. But
I’d always try to pinch myself. Because it’s not often that you get to be on
such a wonderful set.”

This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

Read more from the issue here.

The post Inside the ‘Poor Things’ World of Miniature Steamships, Massive Sets and Sleeves That Look Like Lungs appeared first on TheWrap.

At the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, “20 Days” won the audience award in the World Cinema Documentary category. Since then, it has won the Critics Choice Documentary Award in the Best First Documentary Feature category, been nominated for five Cinema Eye Honors and been named to the National Board of Review’s list of the top five nonfiction films of 2023.

Had you thought about making documentary films before this, or were you focused on being a reporter?
I did. First of all, I’m a writer. I’m a fiction and documentary writer. And I like big, complex stories. War in general is complex story, and literature in this case gives an opportunity to look deeper into motivations, meanings and so on and so forth. But for eight years, I was stuck with making short stories for a news agency. The stories are almost like a Spartan way to tell the story because there is no narration, no music, no sound manipulation, just simple editing from the beginning to the end. And that’s it.

It taught me a lot how to tell a story without words. But at the same time, it’s so limiting. I had so many questions after I was in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza and Syria and all these conflicts and wars. So many questions about journalism, about people, about war, about the general meaning of life, and no way to address any of that in the work you do. So naturally you look for an opportunity to do something bigger, to be able to ask these questions.

Also, I find it extremely frustrating that even the most important events that are happening last for a day or two or three or a week, and then they disappear in the sea of other events. There’s just too much happening, so it takes a lot of effort to actually save something important from oblivion. As a journalist, I see that every day. I do a story, I send it. It could be very important story with incredible footage. And it’s gone. If not for this film, Mariupol as a memory and as an event would be gone from the perspective of almost everyone.

So when you were in Mariupol covering the siege for the AP, were you thinking beyond that coverage to a movie?
I think I started understanding the importance of recording everything when all the other journalists left. The editors told us that no one else was reporting. And when the siege started and the city was fully encircled, I knew that I needed to record every single shot. It still wasn’t an idea of a film, but I started thinking about, how would I tell a bigger story? And fortunately for me, AP has a partnership with “Frontline.” That’s how the idea of the film was born.

Putting the film together, you had to be very careful about any kind of manipulation of the image or sound, didn’t you?
I cannot call this manipulation, but that’s right. By the end of the siege, my mic was broken and we had problems with the sound. It was not good enough for a cinematic experience. But I wanted for the viewers to experience it as close as possible to how it was, because the whole film is about bringing the audience into this experience of claustrophobic fear and loud, chaotic explosions around you. So we tried to make the sound as close as we could to what we were hearing when we were there.

But the editors told us we couldn’t do that. We had to use whatever we recorded when we were there. There was a worry that Russia might claim that we staged things or manipulated the footage. We didn’t want to give them any opportunities for propaganda about what we did in Mariupol.

Instead of talking heads, we get perspective from your narration. How did that come about?
At first, we had in mind a classic “Frontline” structure: You conduct retrospective interviews about the events, you intercut them with the footage and assemble a story with different voices. But I felt necessary to transport the viewer inside the siege. And when you have these interviews, it stopped the narrative and took away a lot of tension and fear. So we started looking for another way to connect the stories that we see inside the city.

I resisted being the narrator as long as I could. My first idea was that maybe someone would narrate something I wrote, because I did write a lot of diaries and articles during the siege. But then again, it would take away from the urgency. So we decided to let me narrate. And I finally felt that it’s acceptable because it’s ultimately also my story. I live in Eastern Ukraine in a city which is very similar to Mariupol. It all feels very personal.

You’ve reported from lots of other conflict zones. Does it change how you do your work when you’re reporting from the country you live in?
It definitely makes you much more emotional. And it definitely helps you to understand more deeply the people around you. It means you have more tools to tell a story better and deeper, but I wouldn’t say it stands in the way of the reporting. Having to report from other wars, other countries gives you a very good perspective on reporting in your own country. You don’t see it anymore as something unique.

You mentioned earlier your frustration with the fact that you can report a story and then within a couple of days everybody’s moved on to something else. This is a little different, but the war in Ukraine has been going on for quite a while…
Yeah.

…and at this point the world’s attention is more focused on the Middle East. Do you feel like films like this are necessary to keep reminding people of older conflicts that still warrant attention?
I’m a bit cautious about saying that I’m on a mission to remind the world about anything. I can hope. But then again, the most important part for me is that I saw the eyes of people who were in Mariupol and who saw the film. Only then I understood that the biggest value of this work is memory. Not memory in an urgent sense, to remind the world about the atrocities that Russia is doing in Ukraine. It’s a futile effort to try to convince the world of anything, let’s be frank. And anyone who tells you that they do that are probably trying to look better or they’re just lying to themselves.

The world looks where it wants to look. But when the world wants to remember what happened in the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the film will be there. And for the Russians too, if they want to see it. That is something that I also hope for.

[Laughs] I’m a bit more pessimistic than usual today.

A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from that issue here.

The post ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ Director Hopes His Film Can Go Where the News Cycle Can’t appeared first on TheWrap.

A holiday that finds them left behind at the school turns into a road trip to Boston, and over the course of the film the antagonistic relationship between Paul and Angus takes a few twists and turns.

Mary, meanwhile, is a constant reminder of the inequities and dangers of the era: She took the job at Barton Academy to ensure that her son would get a good education, but after graduation he was drafted, sent overseas and killed in the Vietnam War, while his white classmates escaped that fate. And while Randolph may be familiar for the exuberance she’s shown in films like “Dolemite Is My Name,” she breaks our hearts in “The Holdovers” with a performance grounded in grief and delivered with a quiet grace that commands our attention.

“We always see these cute holiday movies that are predictable,” Randolph said. “Things are seemingly great, something happens, they resolve it and everything’s hunky dory. I liked that this was a bit more real and grounded.

“And I liked that there was this woman whom he wanted to be the heart of this story and who was allowed to be messy, who was allowed to take up space. I love the idea that they all were seeking connection and needing to feel heard, and through all of their collective pain inadvertently they were able to be of a great support for one another. I thought that was really beautiful.”

Mary is deep in grief over the loss of her son, but for the most part Payne stayed away from big outbursts or overly emotional scenes. “For my character, parts were kind of like a silent movie,” Randolph said. “It required me to use other parts of my senses as an actor to navigate the role. How do you keep the character alive when the text isn’t there?

“It was difficult at first for me to adjust to it, because I kept feeling like I needed to do something. But Alex wanted to explore the moments when she’s still, and to be in that space was really nice.”

You might not see the connection while watching the film, but to Randolph, the early ’70s Norman Lear sitcom “The Jeffersons,” about a Black family moving to the Upper East Side in Manhattan, was a touchstone for the look of her character, particularly the hair. The bun that she wears in many scenes, for instance, comes from Isabel Sanford’s hairstyle in the earliest seasons: “You’re not seeing her wealth yet, and she’s still dressing as she was in the lower tax bracket.”

They also went for a more stylish flip when Mary gets fancier. “We got that from the character on ‘The Jeffersons’ that Lenny Kravitz’s mom played,” she said, referring to Roxie Roker, who played Helen Willis.

Playing a woman who is deeply grieving, she added, could take its toll if she permitted it to. “I don’t allow it to come home with me,” she said. “I take great measures to make sure it doesn’t, whether it’s as simple as me watching cartoons or something lighthearted when going home at the end of the night. Or speaking with family. Or cooking can be therapeutic for me, something where I get back to normalcy. I have to do it that way because if I were to dive in it, it wouldn’t be helpful for me.” She laughed. “Three months of that in cold Boston was a little too much art imitating life.  So I had to find time for myself.

“And also, I’ll say this: Grief has many facets to it. It’s not just super-sad. It can be awkward sometimes, it’s funny sometimes. So it wasn’t just one dimension. You go through the seven stages of grief, but also, there are many dimensions of grief. And that was something I tried to constantly engage and explore.”

Aside from the setting, “The Holdovers” provided another academic connection for Randolph, because she and Giamatti are both graduates of the Yale School of Drama. “We attended at different times, but the language was the same,” said Randolph, who graduated in 2011, 17 years after her co-star.

“We were able to meet each other at a very grounded place from the jump, which was a gift because this is such an intimate piece that you need to have that familiarity.” Some of her favorite scenes, she said, were the ones where Paul and Mary simply sit together on a couch and talk. “We were working with natural light, there weren’t any monitors — and being paired with Paul and having the same education, it felt like I was back in scene study in school.”

A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from that issue here.

The post How Da’Vine Joy Randolph Found ‘Many Dimensions of Grief’ in ‘The Holdovers’ appeared first on TheWrap.

“It’s an object,” Gerwig said. “It’s a doll. There’s no character, no story. The very nature of Barbie is that it’s a toy to be projected onto. We would have to invent a character and a story that felt somehow part of it but had to go beyond it. It felt terrifying in that way. Also, she’s been around since 1959 and people love her, people loathe her and everything in between. It just felt like the exact kind of idea I like, which is just on the edge of ‘how is this even possible?’”

She laughed. “And then I roped Noah (Baumbach, her partner and co-writer) into it, and his reaction was basically, ‘Why are you making us do this?’ But then, as we got going, he said, ‘Oh, this is really fun.’”

But for a while, it was fun that seemed unlikely to be made. “We were in the middle of lockdown, the spring/summer of 2020,” she said. “In that moment, nobody was going to the movies. So there was this feeling that the world that we love of moviegoing and being together doesn’t even exist.” And that, in a way, freed them up to write a seriously wacky script that could find room for nods to everybody from Stanley Kubrick to Marcel Proust. “We thought, well, nobody’s ever gonna let us make this. So then it became, ‘Let’s (write) the greatest script nobody ever makes!’”

Warner Bros., though, wanted to be in the Gerwig and Robbie business, and Mattel was actually OK, more or less, with a script that acknowledged the divisiveness of their signature doll and made fun of their executives. So Gerwig assembled what she calls a “dream team” of collaborators and made a movie whose shooting she summed up this way: “It felt like going to a great party that you don’t really know how the night’s gonna go, but just when you think it’s over — nope, it’s fireworks!”

But “Barbie” was always meant to be more than just fireworks. Like Gerwig’s last movie, “Little Women,” it simultaneously tells a story and interrogates the way that story has been told in the past. “That’s true,” Gerwig said. “In ‘Lady Bird,’ too, there’s a way in which I was using the framework of a high school movie. With ‘Little Women,’ we had the framework that was not only from the past, it was fiction, and there’s a loss and loneliness embedded in that. With this one, it was going in all directions. And part of that was asking, ‘How has Barbie functioned in culture? What does this object mean? What do dolls mean?’ I kept coming back to the fact that our relationship with dolls is so strange. We’re so advanced — we have 5G, whatever that means, and yet we still take inanimate objects and have feelings about them and arguments about them. That seems almost mystical. We think of ourselves collectively as being beyond that kind of magical thinking, and yet we engage in it every single day.”

To slip those ideas into a major-studio movie is sneaky, and to have that movie turn into an historic blockbuster was, to Gerwig, thrilling. “It feels very connected to my childhood dreams,” she said. “I grew up in Sacramento, where it gets really hot in the summer. So you’d go to a dark, cold theater in the middle of summer and have a movie overwhelm you. I have a sense memory of being at a big movie theater with a lot of people in the summer. So not only do I get to make a movie about a doll that’s so intimately connected with childhood, to see audiences dressed in pink is like getting to enact a version of the excitement I felt going to movies in childhood.”

This story first appeared in the Below the Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read the rest of the “Barbie” below-the-line stories here.

Read more from the Below-the-Line issue here.

The post How ‘Barbie’ Was Made: Greta Gerwig and Artisans Tell All appeared first on TheWrap.

They were struck by the details in the house, particularly what was a physical item versus what was a decal attached to the hard surfaces of the house. It was something they used when showcasing Barbie’s first breakfast. Barbie opens a physical refrigerator that’s filled with a giant sticker of all her food. “That’s the toy thing,” Spencer said.

“You don’t need (decals) everywhere. You just need them enough,” said Greenwood, who added that it made sense to use stickers on areas like the dashboard and lights of Barbie’s car. But even the process of creating and working with the stickers for Barbie’s house and other elements of her world was a laborious process. “The fires were decals, the palm trees were a decal,” Greenwood said. “Even though we scenically painted them, then we copied them, and then we cut palm trees out, and then we stuck them on the palm trees.” 

That same sticker aesthetic applied to Ryan Gosling’s Ken-created Kendom. “We had stickers of horses everywhere,” said Spencer. For Spencer and Greenwood, creating this male-dominated world of Kens posed a greater challenge than Barbie Land. “It was quite tricky for us to get into Kendom, initially,” said Spencer. The pair would routinely ask Greta Gerwig, “Do you mean this ugly?” about everything on the set. “You have to imagine that they’re your worst younger brother, or they’re your worst boyfriend you never, ever wanted,” Spencer said. 

Once Barbie Land was established, the duo used that to create counterpoints for Kendom. The pair started to think about what men like to do—for instance, barbecue. “We brought in the barbecues and we put them over the stoves,” Spencer said. “And then on top of that, we put the plastic food. Everything was like, ‘Is this what they do? Is this not what they do?’ Instead of blending food they blend Doritos. Their record stacking system goes all the way up.” And everything was horses. Spencer and Greenwood said they made countless different types of hobby horses on which the Kens could ride into their beach battle. 

Throughout Barbie Land, the designers kept things pristinely plastic, without any of the “patina or mess” that Greenwood said they would normally use. She said this approach is best exhibited in the scene when the Kens are all singing to the Barbies around a series of campfires. The sequence pans out to wide shot that, as Greenwood explained, is so beautiful because it has no aesthetic look to it. “But, hang on a minute, that is the aesthetic,” she said. 

The pair said everyone on the crew was enchanted by Kendom, though they won’t say whether the women or the men preferred it more. “Fifty percent of the crew wanted to buy everything from Kendom,” said Spencer, especially the La-Z-Boys and massage chairs. The two admitted they did take some small souvenirs of their time in Barbie Land. Greenwood said she has a miniature palm tree, while Spencer has one of the Sugars, the dog owned by the discontinued Sugar Daddy Ken. “I would have liked Weird Barbie’s rug,” she said.

This story first appeared in the Below the Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read the rest of the “Barbie” below-the-line stories here.

Read more from the Below-the-Line issue here.

The post ‘Barbie’ Production Designers Created Kendom by Imagining ‘Your Worst Younger Brother’ appeared first on TheWrap.

But how to find the right color? The issue lay with the backgrounds and sets of the film, which could alter how the camera picked up Robbie’s blonde hair. “If it was too ash it would look sort of blue/gray,” Primorac said. “So you had to find something magenta-y.” It was Robbie herself who cracked the mystery of the blonde, taking note of how her hair looked in the mirror one day. “I was like, ‘Yes, I used the curling irons today,’” said Primorac, noting that the treatment could subtly alter the shade of the wigs. “So I made it more yellow and it popped on set.” 

From there, Primorac went super old-school, relying on her friends at Bristol wigmaker Peter Owens Limited, who offered to make her a wool dye toner for Robbie, mimicking a process used in Roman times. “They mixed up this huge vat of magenta wool dye for me in different strengths,” she said. From there on, if Primorac needed the hair to look blonder, she could dip it in a different level of toner. On the downside, though, the dye, which is acetic acid, left Primorac smelling of vinegar. “Not glamorous at all,” she said. 

Once Robbie’s hair color was set, the rest of the Barbie cast worked around it. “Everyone else was allowed to pick their preference,” said Primorac, who wanted each of the actors to bring their own sense of character to the Barbies and Kens they were playing. “Alexandra Shipp wanted the blonde tips in her hair,” she said. “I wanted Hari (Neff) to have red hair. She was like, ‘I love red hair’ and she stayed red after the movie.” 

What Primorac was most surprised by was that none of the actors picked looks similar to themselves—not even pop superstar Dua Lipa, who played Mermaid Barbie. “She didn’t want to be her fashion version of herself,” Primorac said. “I’m so proud of her. She wanted to be this exact replica of the toy.” Lipa and John Cena were the last characters cast, and Primorac decided to make the mermaid couple completely toy-like. 

It was Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie that presented Primorac with the biggest challenge. Greta Gerwig gave Primorac a lot of details she wanted the character to have, but the hair stylist couldn’t find a way to differentiate Weird Barbie from every other character in Barbie Land. “(She) didn’t look like a doll who’d been played with too hard,” she said. McKinnon had to fly to Los Angeles from New York three times to test out new looks. 

“Everything was overthought or too glamorous, or too simple or too punk,” Primorac said. “It just didn’t look like something that’d been hacked through by kids.” So Primorac went back to basics, unlearning the professional techniques she knew for hair. It took hours, but she just kept cutting and “hacking” into the wigs until she found something that fit the bill. That sense of throwing away the old methods also extended to McKinnon’s makeup, which was supposed to look as if an overzealous child had scribbled on her doll’s face. Primorac decided to start drawing on McKinnon’s face and allowed McKinnon to draw on hers until they found something they liked. “Everything came together, not matching, but pleasing together,” Primorac said.

This story first appeared in the Below the Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read the rest of the “Barbie” below-the-line stories here.

Read more from the Below-the-Line issue here.

The post How ‘Barbie’ Hairstylist Ivana Primorac Found the Perfect Shade of Blonde appeared first on TheWrap.

Durran said she had the entire history of Mattel to work with. But the challenge in the costume department was relating to a child’s viewpoint and how they would respond to the colors and, in turn, using that as a launchpad for a deeper, adult appreciation of the fashion. “I wanted to make it multidimensional so that you could look at it (as a) child; the child would just enjoy it from a point of view of colors, but there was something else going on if you wanted to look at it (deeper),” she said. 

Durran took inspiration from classic films like 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain” and the 1978 musical “Grease.” But when it came to Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie character, all bets were off. “The primary concern with Weird Barbie was whether to go for something that was completely messy, (like) at the bottom of a box that had been discarded, or whether to go for more of a discordant fashion look,” she said. “In the end, we went with the discordant fashion look, particularly for her first costume. The second costume is more made-up. Her shoulder pads were bits of tin foil. We just made them and sewed them on.” 

It was important for Durran to contrast Weird Barbie’s haphazard style with the perfection in Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie). It allowed Durran to find ways to blend the sensibilities and find a happy medium. Case in point: the final scene, wherein a now mortal Stereotypical Barbie debuts her real-world look, complete with a pair of Birkenstocks. The issue was: how to make a character who is focused on being perfect look like she belongs in the real world while still standing out? “We went through a lot of options to try and work out what Barbie would choose to look like when she was out (in the real world),” Durran said. They deliberately played up the Birkenstocks as a callback to a choice that Barbie faced earlier in the film.

This story first appeared in the Below the Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read the rest of the “Barbie” below-the-line stories here.

Read more from the Below-the-Line issue here.

The post ‘Barbie’ Costume Designer Says Weird Barbie’s Look Comes From a Child’s Point-of-View appeared first on TheWrap.