Costume & wardrobe

had real problems. And when I say a set, we got told it was impossible to create what we created because it was just scaffolding. And Russell Rosario, I'll have to call him the costume designer, the production designer, did a brilliant job. In fact, I think someone should open a comic store like this. The idea of a diner-stroke comic book store would be a place I think my son and I would go to. Here is the kid that does not like to be called McLovin.

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Here we created this scene from another scene. Everyone was saying, where did he get the costume from when it arrived? So that's actually a shot of him wanking, believe it or not. But we decided to make it look like he was buying. That's why we didn't use shock. We had to cut to that, because before the camera was floating across New York and then came down to this shot. But anyway, people haven't seemed to complain so far. Kicks our asses. It steals all the coke. This would be the guy that looks like Batman.

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chased on that famous day. I was just gonna sit in there quietly. I mean, I should probably start learning this stuff anyway, right? Hey, go finish your oatmeal. God damn it! I'm gonna be 18 in eight months, for Christ's sakes! Basically, I'm colorblind, and I saw Orange one day, and I just thought, like... I thought he needed something which would just make it more, you know... I think Mark came in the costume fitting and he had an orange shirt on. I went, hold on, let's make you obsessed with Orange, so therefore he has the orange desk.

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And seeing Stan Winston's credit and all the things that he did for us, which when we get to some shots of the Rippers, we can talk about. But how much I learned from that man. Ariana Phillips, one of the greatest costume designers. And Catherine Hardwicke, a production designer who has gone on and become quite the amazing director. She twilighted the world. Yes, exactly.

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And same thing with, because Jamie was very involved in costumes as well. So the collaboration with Ariane Phillips was also very, very strong. Ariane's been nominated several times, I believe. Besides creating Madonna's 10 billion looks. Yes. I think the biggest battle for me was hair.

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But then you build them and you're like, wow, they work and that's incredible. I know that Malcolm kept all his wardrobe. He did? He kept all his costumes? Yeah, he loved what Ariane designed for him. And he just kept it all, which is pretty complimentary.

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The dressing of these sets. Now, that's not actually not a set because that's a real train going by, but that's probably shot in Brooklyn in and around, you know, what is now known as the Transit Museum. But again, all of the textures, all of the props, even the wardrobe, everything seems old and used, which...

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happens in the book. But again, Stone making the decision to be kind of the conduit to Robert Shaw, it's great because you have these great opponents. That's Dick O'Neill, who I think is referred to as the Lord Byron of the subway system. Dick O'Neill is another great New York face. I mean, look at that sweater. That is a lived in sweater. In fact, all the wardrobe in this picture

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you go back and you look at these films and you think of a different city in a sense than it was. And then Pelham is much more accurate to that. Now, Nathan George is playing the transit cop who's following down there. And transit cops always wore leather jackets. Not every New York City police officer wore those leather jackets. It seemed to be a trope that a wardrobe choice

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It was cold and misty wept, and honestly, the Camps of Hells didn't look like South Africa. It looked like the Camps of Hells. And then about sort of 10 o'clock, we got word up that there'd been a revolt, and they refused to put on the costumes. They said they were too flimsy. So we had to abandon the shoot that day and reschedule it for the next day. And we couldn't get any black actors. We had to get white actors.

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And one of the reasons why they're so good is because of the costumes. They're so meticulously researched and done by Jim Acheson, who's won three Oscars for costumes. But just look at Eric's shirt there. It's so correctly tailored for the period. And Graham's costume and makeup, it makes him into a period character. It's meticulous costuming, brilliant stuff. Any other problems I can reassure you about?

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And it's really hard to deal with criticism. It's, you know, one's being very defensive, protective, critical of everything. And to be able to then step back years later and look at it and just see how good the work is here, it just knocks me out. I think it's really nicely done. Again, the costumes with the helmet all hacked to pieces. It's sort of a lot of thought. Jim pays such attention to detail, and he's full of ideas. It just makes a little difference, you know.

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You're kidding. Well, just don't shoot me. Sometimes things happen when you actually put a costume on. Something changes. And I suspect that I began to discover, you know, as you do, when suddenly you have a prop or you have another actor or you have a set where it's no longer a concept. It's now flesh and blood and you've got to deal with the environment. So all kinds of things just occur. And very often my favorite...

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that can be very helpful, very informative. Curtis had this traveling bag of 10 to a dozen period photographs that he had found, some of which, as I recall, were places and some of which were people in costumes and just general sort of dog and pony show photographs that he showed everyone when he was selling the movie.

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brought the film to life. I think everybody got their element right. I really do in the film. The cinematography, the acting, the costumes, the design. I think that's what's great about the film as well is that everyone got their elements right. To create that tone that is not only appropriate for the film but is such a cliche to say but it's almost a character within itself to establish that world is so important and it's amazing. I mean aside from the

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James Mangold

And I think what you see here among these men is a tremendous sense of confidence and comfort in this wardrobe and in this world. The other thing that I think is important with actors is that, and this stems from what I was talking about a moment ago, good guys and bad guys, villains and heroes, no one, no person in the world, including Hitler or Osama bin Laden, walks around believing they're a bad guy.

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James Mangold

Who's that? That's him. I think this scene is as good as any to talk about the contributions of our costume designer, Arianne Phillips, who I think has been someone who's worked with Kathy and myself since Girl Interrupted, which is in 1998.

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James Mangold

does amazing work, and I think part of what makes her work so amazing is it's not selfish, meaning it's not show-offy only for herself, but that she has a real partnership with the actors and myself and Kathy, finding answers that work for the actors. I think that very often people don't understand what an incredibly critical role costume design is in the development of character for actors. Part of it has to do with the chronology of how a movie happens.

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Tim Burton

Colleen Atwood, I worked with many times, of course. And, you know, with that kind of work and the costumes, it's such an important thing because it's like a character in the movie. The costumes are the character. I mean, if you look at each one of them, Rory, Dolores, all of them, every character, it's important to me because what they come dressed in is who they are, you know? And so, you know, and again, this is what's the joy of making a movie, working with creative people. And photography, costumes, sets, you know,

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Tim Burton

I'm co-chaperoning Lillard Jane's Girl Scout troop. We spent weeks coming up with a group costume theme. We agreed nothing Disney. The closest we ever got to Disney was when Astor dressed as Cinderella's dead mom. You'll never guess what the girls came up with. Fruit salad. Isn't that genius? It's healthy and non-triggering. I'm going as... Reverse mortgage. Which is...

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Tim Burton

that felt sort of right. So it wasn't just deadhead slight undulating quality to it. It's just so that there's a weird kind of a hypnotic rhythm to the whole thing. So it's like with costumes, sets, cinematography, we discussed all of this in terms of creating what it ultimately is. You are no more my king, but with the blessing of the angels of undying love.

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This is a man who has a post office named after him, who is a king in his world, because I had based him in some way on these kings I had met, like Paul Grossinger and Murray Posner from Brickmans. And Jack listened to me very carefully. And you had a postage stamp, really, that would say Kellermans or Grossingers, as it were. And he said, I wouldn't wear this tie. And he pulled off the bow tie he was wearing and raced to wardrobe. And he came back.

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They're the dance people. They're here to keep the guests happy. Costume designer took my memories from the Catskills, and I had described seeing when I was a little girl a woman in a pink backless dress. So she made this and called this Eleanor's dress. And every time I look at this, I think of it as Eleanor's dress. You see how brilliantly they're dancing and how they absolutely look like the kings of their domain. And then you will see how...

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Cynthia having understood that her character needed it, and David coming up with this wonderful scene, and Hilary making this charming costume which showed process. I guess you've probably figured by now that the thing that interests me the most, and that was one of the places also that Emil and I joined so sweetly, is process interests me much more than performance. What you need to do to get there is so fascinating, and that's why I loved He Makes Me Feel Like Dancing, Emil's...

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Gary Goddard

building the props, building the costumes, while we were shooting these things. This is pretty funny. Gwildor's the first one to discover food. He's got that little grappler hook that he used before, and he smells something. An interesting thing is we had no second unit on this. I had to shoot every frame of the film. I requested a second unit, but Canon was very tight on money.

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Gary Goddard

This would be a good time to talk about the costume design. Julie Weiss was involved in manufacturing the costumes based upon designs that Bill Stout did. They worked collaboratively. The tribute to the costumes here is that, you know, everyone just accepts it. This is kind of interesting.

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Gary Goddard

All of these guys are in costumes. All of these guys are... You cannot believe what goes through in these scenes because things fall off and things fall apart. And you have to go back and do it again and again until you get it right.

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When we were first staging these scenes in Whoville, we had 11 sound stages at Universal Studios to produce this movie. It was really like old Hollywood. You know, all the extras wandering around between takes in their Who costumes, you know, eating lunch. I was wandering from one stage to another because we constantly had two or three units in production, and riding around on my bicycle or scooting around on a golf cart.

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It's important to mention that Jim Carrey was absolutely miserable every moment that he had to be in the Grinch costume. And yet he loved what Rick Baker had designed and loved being the Grinch. But everything about it was literally painful for Jim. The contact lenses that he had to wear, the bodysuit, the hours and hours it took to put on the makeup. And yet he never once said, let's simplify the look.

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Don't forget, tomorrow's our big Christmas gift exchange. Everyone bring a special gift for a special someone. Also have to talk about Rita Ryack and her costuming. She was nominated for an Academy Award. Rita and I have done a number of films together. What I didn't know about Rita is that she had been an animator at one time in her life. Her designs for these costumes are, you know, they're little treasures. They're hilarious, they're ingenious,

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of Gil-galad. In fact, even naming Gil-galad himself, it just was too much information and it wasn't really until Pete got in there in post that you could feel the weight of just excessive information. Nida Dixon, our costume designer, worked very hard. Wherever there were descriptions of clothing,

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Just this moment of Frodo reading a book under a tree would be a really great way to introduce his character. It was funny seeing him standing there after four months or so. And he was standing there with his feet on, in costume, with the hair on, just laughing and laughing that he was back being Frodo again. This was a very important scene because it's the first time we see the size of hobbits compared to a human, or in this case, a wizard, Gandalf. And we used very simple techniques

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Now, the city of Minas Tirith that we're looking at here plays a big role in The Return of the King, another third of the movies. And you'll be seeing a lot more of the city. About half the movie, I guess, probably takes place there. It was interesting for Sir Ian McKellen in this shot when he's walking through the streets of Gondor. He hadn't put that costume on for probably about six months. He'd been Gandalf the White for a very long time. Hopefully they'd washed it.

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Richard Curtis

Right, okay, let's go. Who do you think the costume is tougher on? Which one, mine or... Yours or Gregor's? -/ see. Yours makes you look as though you don't exist and Gregor's looks as though he's a wrestler. Yeah. Love is all... Fuck, wank, bugger, shitting ass head and hole. I'm sorry about that. You're a Shakespearean actor, basically. Yeah, I know. I never... I know. Shakespeare would have written those words if they'd existed in his day. So this is singing... Love Is All Around was... Everyone in England knows, but it was number one here for 15 weeks after the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. Bloody hell. And I couldn't think of a funnier way to start the film than actually making them listen to the same song again. Very good. Now, that's kind of good. Take a look, Tom. This must be excruciating for you, isn't it, watching middle-aged men doing hip-grinding.

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Richard Curtis

Now, for our foreign viewers, Ant and Dec here are the two hugest television stars in the United Kingdom. They are so overwhelmingly popular. They're definitely the most famous people in the film, aren't they? Yeah, absolutely. - Might not realize that if you live abroad. And in England, that line, "Ant or Dec," that's the funniest line in the whole film, and in Los Angeles, it goes by without... With ne'er so much as a crisp packet. And we're very pro-Blue because they let us do this. Yeah. Which shows they must be very confident that what Bill's about to write isn't true. They've now got a new Christmas single with Stevie Wonder. Do they? Oh, my God, which one? - Stevie Wonder's on it. I don't know what the song is. So, you know, God help us. That's my favorite costume. I love that suit. Now, Bill, you're good here. Watch.

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Richard Curtis

Come on through. I'm sorry your wife couldn't make it, by the way. Billy took the part based on the letter that we sent him. He thought we sounded like a nice bunch of guys. Well... - And he fancied a trip to England. So... And I love him for that. Yeah, well, the difference is you're still sickeningly handsome, Did you feel... - But he does have particular demands. He's a wonderful actor with particular demands. Like the one that he can't be around antique furniture. This scene must have been torture to him. There. - And there on the wall, incredibly, is a picture of Benjamin Disraeli and his biggest phobia of all in life is Benjamin Disraeli, so he's actually being very brave. - It's true. Very sensitive about this. - I know. And I said to him, "You're frightened of Benjamin Disraeli?" He said, "Don't be ridiculous. Who would be frightened of Benjamin Disraeli? "But, on the other hand, his facial hair, terrifying." ls it particularly Benjamin Disraeli? - Yes. Yes, it is. Before he came here to make this film and saw Ben... Absolutely. - He walks around... And in this scene here, just when he's about to do an important close-up, I slipped that picture of Benjamin Disraeli in front of him. And that's why he's looking so distressed. Well, it worked. Wow. Golly. Now he hates you. Yeah. Now he's gonna punish you. There's no point in tiptoeing around today. Glamour. Look at that tie. It's actually made of sheer gold. The costumes were done by Joanna Johnston, and I won't talk about her for 40 minutes, but she was fantastic and did this great thing of always trying to push me a bit further than I wanted to be pushed, particularly with your clothes, Bill. - Well, quite. Yeah. Bit further than I wanted to. -[t made it so much more interesting. She always wanted that third button undone. She also followed the golden rule, which is to spend much more on my suits than Colin Firth. Which is very good. - Yeah.

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Not in the way that the Uruk-hai were. The Uruk-hai, we managed to get a lot of menace out of them in the Helm's Deep scenes and stuff, but we actually set aside some time during pickups, and we had Richard Taylor and his guys redesign the prosthetics of the orcs, redesign the costumes, and what you see in the finished Return of the King now is a combination of some of our old orcs, but a lot of the close-ups and featured characters are the new orcs that we reshot on pickups just to make them look a little bit more scary.

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which I think he did a really good job. I remember we had to reshoot some of this because I wanted the horse charge to be just with the armour plated Gondorians and that word hadn't got through to second unit so they shot, they mixed it up with some rangers like Faramir's rangers in the green and brown costumes and it just didn't look so I actually had them.

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at the time that we shot Elijah on a forest. That's a real forest in the South Island, and we did it as a pickup. So we used one of our focus pullers, Jack Fitzgerald, to put on Galadriel's costume, and it's her that's standing here. And this is obviously a shot of Cate Blanchett we did a long time earlier, but we used Jack for the person who actually reaches down and offers her hand.

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I told him, I want to destroy the images. I don't want to beautify them. I don't want to sentimentalize. I don't want to make them pretty. I want to destroy it. And this is what he came up with. And the third was, find a sound. You know, this should be a sound that, you know, everything is there to, you know, whatever it is, costume, makeup, production design, camera, VFX, music.

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We had a wonderful costume designer. If you look a little bit at the costumes in the movie, they're really worth a look. You might think, well, they're uniforms. They're not. They're really... Lizzie Crystal is her name. Wonderful, beautiful costume designer from Bavaria in Germany. And every character wears their uniform differently. Felix, first of all...

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the costume designer, I wanted to explain the buttons. So she is so thoughtful. She thinks like, all right, he's gonna have to cut off these buttons. They're sitting in a crater for 10 hours a day, four days in a row.

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The costumes in this film are done really well. They're not like pushy where they're out with flashy stuff, but every actor's wardrobe expresses their character in some way, in some subtle way or not subtle way, but really Johnny Johnson caught the character with the clothes and brought the character out.

1:48:38 · jump to transcript →

So much is in the role itself. If you give a great actor the role that can really utilize what they have, that's half of it. And if you give them a little bit of preparation, give them the opportunity to get comfortable with what they're doing, let them be comfortable with their wardrobe and set the stage, so to speak, then really they're most capable of realizing the characters. With the director offering...

2:00:13 · jump to transcript →

contemporary, it should not have hippies in it, and it should not be shot in St. Louis, but rather it should be shot in New York where it was set, and it ought to be set in the post-war years so that the whole giant theme of America as it emerged from World War II could be part of it in not only in theme, but in terms of the wardrobe and the cars and just the feeling of

2:06:52 · jump to transcript →

For one, you get all PMS'd out, there's no room in your purse for no hairbrush. Robin put a lot of thought into his wardrobe for this. I recall him being specific on the jackets and stuff. He did? Yeah. Completely works. The hair, everything. This is our new foreign exchange student, Anna Maria Mazzarelli. Anna Maria is from Milan, Italy. She's about to brush up on her English skills before the fall semester begins. Well, I guess...

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People have asked Carl about these shirts that Shoup wore in this movie and they were the old style Hawaiian shirts and the wardrobe mistress went out and found them from collectors everywhere in big sizes. But I remember thinking that Shoup would have worn them.

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Wardrobe ministers found all these T-shirts and stuff. I remember this is, I don't know, Diablo Valley College or something, and amazing the amount of mail I would get from people who went there. No kidding. Yeah. Remember she chased a guy down the Venice boardwalk who had a Wheaties T-shirt on one day to try to buy it from him to use in the movie. But she was terrific. Got a radio, blanket, beach chair, dark glasses, dog. Why would I want to go back to you guys?

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For some reason, this blue dress you're going to see is one of my favorites. She has blue shoes. Holly Davis, who was terrific, was our wardrobe girl. I just think that was a nice outfit for her, and we should have kept her in that dress. She has beautiful legs. Yeah, cute. Notice I put mushrooms there in front, our production design. That's a colorful little mushroom, plastic mushroom. Again, trying to kind of get a...

11:56 · jump to transcript →

You see the paintbrushes on Ozzy's shirt, which was made, I think, again, our wardrobe, Holly Davis. And they were specially made. Hi, I'm Alex. Nice to meet you. This is my friend Ozzy. How you doing, Ozzy? Hi. So, you boys need any help out here? I remember Mark would, every now and then, when we were on the sound stages, much to the horror of production, when he was bored, he would just yell out, cut!

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You put the cast in all over the place. The wardrobe ladies were serving and to the table to the left I'm wearing the baseball cap and Warwick is there with his wife Samantha.

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E. Elias Merhige

Now you have to remember also that Willem spent a good three, three and a half hours in getting into makeup every day and all of that makeup is very cumbersome and very, you know, it's not easy to walk around with both a corset on and platform shoes and, you know, the full costume and regalia and then have your head and face completely submerged in all this prosthetics.

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E. Elias Merhige

of days and memories that have been lost in the past. And I just love the looks and glances that she gives everyone. And, you know, the costumes that Caroline de Vivet's are quite obviously gorgeous, and the colors just really stand out magnificently. When Carrie Elwes says, hello, Greta, and she says, where did we meet?

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E. Elias Merhige

new technology, this new form of expression in cinema. Here we use the hat. This is something that I talked to my costume designer about. He's wearing very much the clothing that we would see a young Orson Welles wearing. And I feel that there's this uncanny connection between Orson Welles' work and F.W. Murnau's work. I think that if F.W. Murnau had not made

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My name is Laurens Straub. I'm sitting here with Werner Herzog, writer, director and producer of the movie "Nosferatu" that you are currently watching. And we now want to talk about that movie. Werner Herzog and I have known each other for about 20 years and have worked together on many different projects. What do we see here? These are actual mummies in the Mexican city of Guanajuato. You have to realize that Guanajuato is located in a gorge. Because of that the cemetery was very narrow and there was no space. So they dug up the bodies every eight years or so, and because of different climatic conditions and the soil, they mummified without human preparation. They leaned them against the walls on both sides in a long underground hall and a hallway. I saw them there many, many years ago in the early 1960s. The story behind this is that I was in the U.S. on a scholarship but I resigned from it a few days in and gave up my legal status in the US because I had to earn some money. Out of desperation I went to Mexico because otherwise they would have returned me to Germany. I went to Central Mexico and Guanajuato and lived there for a while. I did all kinds of crazy things. For example, at rodeos, the so-called charreadas, I rode on wild bulls. Like a complete idiot because I don't even know how to ride a horse, but with the money I could live one week at a time. And there I saw these mummies. Are they similar to the ones at the volcano Vesuvius and formed from lava? No, those are real dried human beings. They barely weigh anything. They were in display cases so we had to take them out and carry them somewhere else. They weigh very little... 10, 12 pounds maybe. Is this something like a culture of death? No, it's completely normal. Isabelle Adjani. She is great at acting scared. That was a real and very large bat we brought in for this. The bat you saw earlier I could not shoot myself. The footage came out of a science documentary because bat's flapping motions are extremely fast, and this was shot with 500 or 800 frames per second. The bats had to be trained with food for that because it took very strong lighting, and normally they would not move under those conditions and not leave their hideout. Here we see Delft. In the Netherlands. That's my city. And I know when Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein teaches students cinematography he first introduces them to Flemish and Dutch painters. Why was Delft chosen as an alternative to Wismar where Murnau shot? Yes, but Wismar was not Murnau's location. I believe that was Lübeck. There is one single shot later in the movie where you see a few buildings that Murnau actually used and that are still standing. I used those as well. We chose Delft because the continuity of the architecture was uninterrupted and we only had to make very few changes in order to shoot there. We took down some antennas and moved a few cars. Other than that it was very easy to shoot there. The concept of "Nosferatu" was definitely to do a variation on Murnau's movie, not a remake in the classical sense. A Biedermeier image like this, for example, is unthinkable in a Murnau film. Moreover, this is in color and the movie's character is completely different. We had to show a very secure bourgeois world. We deliberately planned this, especially the furniture. That was done very thoughtfully by Henning von Gierke who is a painter by trade. With the furniture and the lighting, you can tell that a painter was involved. It reminds me of "Kaspar Hauser" which was done by Henning as well. What era are we in here? That is the Biedermeier era as you can see clearly by the costumes. We researched how to best do the building arrangement and the urban landscapes. Schmidt-Reitwein and I wracked our brains over that. I didn't simply want to recreate paintings. That was never planned. With one exception because we knew we had to work a lot in darkness with nothing but candlelight. Therefore, we studied the painter de La Tour and thought about how to do it if we only had one or a few candles. How do we light that? And Schmidt-Reitwein is exceptionally good at working with light and darkness. This is Roland Topor. - Yes. The famous illustrator, poet, and crazy man. Unfortunately he is already dead, I believe. Yes. - How did you find Roland? I coincidentally saw him in debate on French television. And he laughs in such a mad way. He laughs after every sentence he says. But in such a desperate and strange way that it impressed me deeply. Afterwards I contacted him I told him I was going to shoot a vampire movie and asked if he would play Renfield. Roland Topor immediately agreed. Unfortunately his voice is dubbed in some versions. And it is impossible to fully recreate his laughter. It was his strangest characteristic. What I love about this... I recently saw an exhibition with English surrealistic works from the 19th century. It reminds me of an old office, the cloth, and this blue. It was very carefully lit, and the costumes had to match. Bruno Ganz. And also the faces we chose. Those are not faces that fit into the 20th century. You have to carefully select actors who match. So Bruno Ganz is a great fit for this. The beautiful paper. - Yes. That was so much work, and it was prepared very, very thoughtfully. A beautiful country. Here I see a recurring theme of yours... maps. I already know that from "Aguirre" and other movies. In "Fitzcarraldo" geography is a crucial dramaturgic element. I'm a map fanatic. Oddly, I'm pretty good at determining locations ahead of time, too, because I understand maps. I know which formations you should find in a certain area. I was rarely wrong. It is always about uncharted territory, the Dorado, or doom. Yes, at home I don't have pictures on the wall. A few photographs every now and then, but generally, I can't stand my walls being covered in pictures. If there is anything on my walls of my home it's maps. Oh no. - You will be in danger. This was your first film in English, the first with big stars and a big budget, correct? Well, not really. "Aguirre" is also a big movie with a big star and great effort. But I have to say, we shot "Aguirre" for about 700,000 deutschmark... $360,000. What matters is what you manage to get on screen with the resources you have. To come back to paintings, I like this vase. Yes. Okay. This reminds me of a painting by Seurat. I think the still life-like and emotional atmosphere is phenomenal. But be careful, I always want to show inner landscapes. This was done very quickly, by the way. On that day we happened to have some time and drove to the beach. It was freezing cold, windy. There was foam. We set up the camera in three minutes and sent the two actors, Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani, into the image. We only told them that the music would most likely be slow and solemn. We already had received ideas for the music from Florian Fricke from Popol Vuh. These two, three shots here we did in 15 minutes. We never thought about paintings. It was born out of the situation... - Spontaneously. ...that we found there. Bruno Ganz has tears on his cheek because it was freezing cold. Lotte Eisner came to visit for a few days. We had to wrap her in 20 blankets because it was so cold. I was so proud that she could be there. She was very important for me and maybe for the new German film in general because she bridged the gap to the expressionistic movies back then that she knew very well. She also knew all the representatives of that time. She was friends with Fritz Lang, Murnau, Pabst. She knew them all. For us she was like a bridge to the generation of our grandfathers. We were a generation of orphans who did not have the generation of our fathers. Here I see your wife. Yes, Martje. Martje Herzog on the left. Essentially everyone who was there is in the movie at some point. Later you see the executive producer, the costume designer, the sound technician, and the gaffer. It was also a matter of how quickly can you get something done with very little money. This is the farewell. Bruno Ganz was actually pretty good at riding horses, which was great for me. Now he travels to Transylvania. The choice of the production company... Was this a Century Fox production? No, I produced it myself. Many people believe that 20th Century Fox produced it. But 20th Century Fox only bought an advance guarantee to the U.S. rights for very cheap. They only bought the rights for the U.S. A distribution guarantee. I believe this was... - German Romanticism. Well, you have to be careful. There is a hint of that, but I always try not to be connected with Romanticism because I myself have no real connection with that cultural epoch. Usually I refer to eras before that. The Late Middle Ages speak to me much more. They inspire me. This was shot in Eastern Slovakia. I was not allowed to shoot in Romania where I had scouted locations for months in the Carpathian Mountains. But you also have to see the context. That was when Ceausescu had just been awarded the honorary title of the new Vlad Dracula by the parliament. So he was named the new Count Dracula. That was an honorary title because the historic Count Dracul had been an important figure in the defense against the Turks. This is in the High Tatras, just 1,000 feet to the left was the Polish border. Bohemia? No, Slovakia. - Slovakia? Eastern Slovakia. This is a real group of gypsies that I had brought in from the very East of Slovakia. Among them are a few Czech actors. The gypsies actually speak their own language. Unfortunately I don't remember what it was called. ...my food. I still have to get to Count Dracula's castle today. This is a scene that in a very typical way fulfills all the criteria and conditions of a genre movie. This is one of those traditional scenes. He has to go see Count Dracula, and everyone immediately freezes in fear and the maid drops the dishes. Do you really have to go there? I wanted to integrate certain general rules of the genre into the movie. From there you can go farther and expand. But this right here is a very typical and traditional scene for this genre. The space has this wonderful of depth in the back. And the bed in the background. The set design was by Henning von Gierke who has a spectacular sense for these things. Yes. Spectacular. Parts of this we also built ourselves. The oven and things like that. It was a former hunting lodge of party functionaries. At that point there were only lumberjacks living there. During the day you only found lumberjacks there. ...were already on the other side. Here you have this sense of foreboding and doom. I liked the gypsies so much. They were very good. Watching this reminds me of Degas' "The Execution of Emperor Maximilian" in Mexico. Yes. Careful. Not too many paintings, otherwise... That's just a sign for how interesting and good this is. This is a wonderful face. I also enjoy the way they speak. Yes, definitely. He says you should... They said the dialogue I wanted but in their language, which I believe was not Romani. They translated it themselves and did it very well. You can see this was outdoors and at night which was always a problem for me because I'm not a night person. I had to stay awake until very late, and I've always hated night shoots. I had to force myself to stay up with gallons of coffee. This is also a recurring theme in your films... Native Americans, Mexicans, and Gypsies. Something completely foreign. But also the dignity of these people.

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Here the ship lands with the dead captain. How was this movie interpreted back then? Or what did the press write? The press reacted well overall. For movies like "Aguirre" and "Kaspar Hauser", they beat me up badly. But those always had elements... Or "Even Dwarfs Started Small". That had to do with the trend at the time. "This is not a movie that postulates world revolution, so he has to be a fascist." That was the perception back then. Meanwhile this has been completely forgotten. The guy on the left who unties him is Uli Bergfelder. He often worked with Henning von Gierke, and he was the set designer in my last movies. Everybody who was part of the crew can be seen in the movie at some point. It was a relatively small crew, too. Don't forget that "Aguirre" was shot with eight people. That was the entire crew. And films like this one we shot with 16 people behind the camera or so. ...rats everywhere, but we have the logbook. Only 16 people? Yes, "Fitzcarraldo" was shot with 16 people. Imagine. Or movies like "Even Dwarfs Started Small" were always less than 10 people. But they require enormous logistics with the costumes and makeup... Right. Which we will see when the rats are in action. We had 11,000 rats from Hungary that had to cross all the borders that still existed in Europe. That was an awful ordeal. This theme I also know quite well from Bruges and Geneva when the scientists there... With the early anatomical studies and the human... I love this. The knowledge about science and Enlightenment in this movie and the perplexity at the phenomenon that is the human being, I do think that is a typical theme for you. Yes, and for vampire movies, too. There is always the dichotomy of Enlightenment and the inexplicable and sinister that resides somewhere within us. The genre has played with that since it first appeared in the literature. Since "Frankenstein." Especially since the English Romanticism, Bram Stoker, Murnau, and whoever else. "...14 knots." "It is getting scarier and scarier on board." "Only the First Maat and I are still alive." "There is something on board." "There are

1:04:09 · jump to transcript →

He has learned how to use the camera. He knows how to use his tools. Sometimes I wonder who expresses whom. Do you express Kinski or does Kinski express you? I do have the impression that it is almost symbiotic, complex, and sometimes unsteady. We complemented each other. Some things he did, I could have somehow done, too. "Fitzcarraldo", after everything went down the drain and we lost our first cast because the lead actor, Jason Robards, fell severely ill. I had to ask myself who would play the part. I saw two options. Either Kinski does it, but if he doesn't want to or can't do it because he is booked for two years, then I can only do it myself. You actually considered...? I would have also done it. But I thank God from the bottom of my heart that he came in and did it. We often almost switched person, part, and existence. Together we were a volatile combination. We were always a critical mass. With Kinski there were constantly screaming tantrums and other crazy stuff. But I was able to compensate for that, to discipline him, and make him productive for the camera. "Nosferatu, the undead." "He drinks the blood of his victims..." "...and turns them into phantoms of the night." This is also a beautiful piece of work by Henning and Jörg. The green and the blue. - Yes. And the costumes. It is always the combination of many different things. For example, the type of flower bouquet on the table hit the mark exactly. Topor always reminds me a little of Lorre. Yes, if you put it like that, he also reminds me of him. But he was far more eccentric and convoluted. "...an unnatural creature. He has to obey laws of nature. The sign of the cross compels him." Yes, this is again completely typical for the genre. "The sacrament can make it impossible for him..." "...to return to his lair." "If he misses the cock crow because of a woman of pure heart," "...daylight will kill him." The idea of a woman with a pure heart has played a role in literature for centuries. Yes, his is also such a beautiful scene. Yes, it's wonderful. Almost tableau-like. The way how he pushes him away. What does my master command? You can't copy that. I said earlier... - That's the expressionistic... There can also not be any eye contact between them. Almost like Munch. Great. ...the Black Death are with you. People also laugh during this scene. They don't laugh at the movie, but they recognize that inside of us there is something stylized and weird. It's difficult to pinpoint what exactly that is.

1:17:59 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

you know, amongst all these, you know, local British country folk. And, you know, that's the brilliance of the costume designer, Deborah Nadolman, because her approach was to almost make them look as if they were men on the moon. And it works for the terrain because, you know, when these guys are on the moors in pitch darkness, they do look like men on the moon.

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Paul Davis

And there's the tree stump that's covering the phone box. But back to the costumes, you know, it was, you couldn't find like North Face Parkers in London, Levi jeans or anything like that, Timberland boots. So Deborah had to get all of the costumes. She had to buy multiples of their costumes in the United States and then bring them back.

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Paul Davis

It took you out of the moment, but they did shoot the reverse point of view shot of Jack on the floor looking up at the wolf as it was kind of tearing him apart, but they didn't use it for some reason because they had the entire wolf costume there that night. And I remember being told that they did shoot a sequence where the two boys look straight into camera and they say that it's in front of us. We were supposed to cut to their reverse angle and you just saw this huge outline.

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Peter Greenaway

by certainly taking our knowledge of, for example, the costumes of the period, but extending them and exaggerating them. So a lot of the characters have, the male characters, really excessive wigs, which completely cover and disguise their features. The circumstances of the actual wig manufacture, for example, is not entirely fictional.

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Peter Greenaway

always somehow gets it wrong, so when all the members of the aristocracy are dressed in white, he always comes in black. And then halfway through the film, after the essential pivotal plot change, the reverse of costume and colour coding changes completely, so the draftsman turns up in white when everybody else is in black. Like a classic outsider, he always gets it wrong.

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Peter Greenaway

But there's a deliberate use of the actual costumes to indicate showmanship, to indicate egotism. The costumes are very, very multi-layered. Everybody's wearing a huge amount of petticoats and overcoats and undercoats and waistcoats so that they all strut about the house and gardens of this estate like peacocks.

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Now this is the boiler room at Boyle Heights Jail. Lincoln Heights. Lincoln Heights. I've actually shot there quite a bit recently, but not in this space. This space is condemned now. Right. And I think a wardrobe note, the nightgown had to have a certain see-through quality, as I remember, when we all... Yeah, I tried on many nightgowns before we found the right one. But this was the boiler room of the jail.

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garden tool in my garage. Wes's whole garage is filled with bizarre paraphernalia. Don't try to take it away either. I kept the wardrobe from this film for 10 years because they were going to throw it away. And we used a lot of it in the new Nightmare, Nightmare 7. I think I'm...

9:36 · jump to transcript →

But, Heather, I don't think you fit in tonight. Well, I think the wardrobe kept mixing up Johnny's jeans and my jeans, so some days when my jeans look particularly tight, I think I'm wearing Johnny's leg right here. The day we did jean splitting, I think. I think it was one size fits all. I think the wardrobe budget was probably about 10 cents. Everything was from Kmart. Nike.

9:57 · jump to transcript →

Pat McClung

This is Pat McClung. I was the model-shop supervisor on the film. They're wearing modified costumes from Outland, or the basic suit is from Outland and it's been redesigned and they put some stencils on it. This is microglitter and fuller's earth blown on there. I remember in this scene the batteries in the flashlights kept going out. You would think this would be an easy scene to do, but, as with everything in this movie, it was harder than it looked. There are no easy scenes with Jim. There's that nice dissolve, the contour of the earth matching her face. When we shot this, a matte painting combined with miniature and perspective, there are some perspective gags going on there. We used a clip of Sigourney's face in the viewfinder to line up the curvature of the earth, so we had a nice match. I wrote the piece obviously with Sigourney in mind for the character. I was told she was on board and I should just toddle off and write the film when in fact no deal had been made with her whatsoever. So here was a script that was written that everybody wanted to make, in which she was in every scene, and they hadn't made a deal with her yet. That's why she got her first big payday of her acting career. She got a million bucks, which was a big deal. She might have been the first actress to get a million dollars for a movie in movie history. It was all because it was mishandled by the producers. She was the main character and they hadn't made the deal. She was worth every penny of it and more. When people saw the film, they realized that. I Knew what a phenomenal actress she was. I'd never met her. I had her picture up while I was writing the script. I went off the character that had been created in the first film, took her much further. Of course, this is Paul Reiser. I certainly had no idea what a great comic actor he would prove to be, and certainly that's how people think of him, not as a dramatic actor. I just read him in a lineup of actors in the normal casting methodology, and I thought he was really interesting, that he could play this really sincere but slightly smarmy guy who could then turn evil. This is a dream sequence, but you don't know that yet. I remember from the premiere screening of the film that the incomplete chestburster scene here really got people cranked up and on edge, set the tone for the whole movie, that you were here to be messed with, which is a good way to start off, I think. The way you get a cat to hiss like that is you put another cat close to it. I had no idea. I didn't know what you did to make a cat do that. But that's standard procedure. Bring a cat it doesn't know close to it and it'll do that.

4:32 · jump to transcript →

Pat McClung

Even though I liked the symmetry of the fact that she had had a daughter and lost her - that's Sigourney's mother, so there's an interesting inversion here. She's looking at the face of her mother but playing it as her daughter. As an actor, it allowed her to work the connection. All my movies are love stories. This one is about parental love, protectiveness and a sense of duty, and the ultimate sacrifice that a person would make, given that sense of duty. That was a nice touch. That was Sigourney's idea. This was one of the seminal scenes in the movie and was one of the ones that had to be deleted and omitted from the theatrical version because of length. We didn't have multiplexes, and there were only so many showings a day that you could have of a film, and we had to get it no more than two hours ten minutes in order to get the maximum number of screenings per day. Peter Lamont came up with a simple and austere look for our future sets. I watched this film recently and I was amazed at how little we see of the conventional future world, as opposed to the spacecraft interiors. She's actually on Gateway Station here. She hasn't returned all the way to earth. She never sets foot on earth in the whole series of films, which is interesting. This is as close as she gets until the end of the fourth movie, where she's re-entering the atmosphere. But this is earth for all intents and purposes. This is everyday life circa a couple of hundred years from now. And Peter came up with a very spartan look. It's not overworked at all, which I think was quite clever. We wanted to do it minimalist. We didn't have her walking around corridors. We didn't create a world because we weren't interested. We were interested in the through-line of her story and her character's dilemma and problems, the fact that she's not believed, that she understands there's this great threat. The same applied to the costumes. We didn't wanna suggest a wildly separated future from our present one. This might be one of the first science fiction movies where men still wear coats and ties. The thinking was people will still wear coats and ties. They may not look exactly the same. We turned up the collar on the jackets. It's no big deal but it's a subtle change. We wanted to have a place to go. We wanted the space environment once they get to the colony planet to be exotic and so we didn't wanna overwork earth. We also wanted to understand who these people were, and a Suit Is a suit. These characters are suits and we wanted to reinforce that. If everybody's in Star Wars type costumes, it's harder to relate to them as characters. I was thinking more of a writer than a designer when I was making my picks of what things should look like from amongst the suggestions made by the costume designer. Denny, did they shoot at 25 frames per second for all the video playback stuff? Do you remember? They did. The 24-frame issue was messy. It can be done, but it's such a big procedure. Shooting 25 frames per second on the camera puts the video in sync with the film camera very easily. There's a slight speed differential but it's almost impossible to perceive. In Britain they have a different television system, a 25-frame-per-second system. 625 resolution instead of 525. Later in the film there's some video footage that was used, appearing on video monitors. But the PAL system is better than NTSC, which is our system here in the United States. It almost looked like a slightly too fuzzy version of film, sort of in between. It's not as good as it should be for film, but it wasn't obvious it was video. Jim realized and made the video images noisier or break up more often so it was more obvious. The tag of this scene is gonna be a throw to this big sequence that takes place on the colony which is before the aliens attack. That's cut out of the release version, so coming up Is the biggest single change from the release version of the film. It's an entire reel. I'll never forget Gale Hurd, who was my wife and producer at the time, trying to shorten the film by 20 minutes. I just could not see how it was possible to do a cut here, a cut there, a few seconds, a bit of a scene, the tag of a scene maybe. She said "I've been thinking about this for days." I said "Go ahead." She said "Reel three." Which starts here. "You can take out reel three." I immediately rejected that as completely absurd. Then I thought about it. Reel three ends with Newt's scream when her father has the facehugger on his face. It works flawlessly. It's a brilliant cut and I have to credit Gale with that. I had poured a lot of energy into the design of these scenes and the alien derelict ship. The problem for me was that I couldn't imagine this film without the cognitive tether to the first film of the alien derelict, but it turns out that it works perfectly. A little dialogue bridge and it works fine. I like this tractor a lot, this tractor with this articulated leg design. This is one of my favorite effects. You see the big tractor driving by and in the background you see these people struggling to put a tarp over that tractor. That was done in perspective. There were full-size people back there, and a miniature in the foreground with distance between. It put everything in camera all at one time without any opticals or anything beyond that. The trick was that the actors had to act at double their normal speed of acting, because the camera was running at 48 frames per second. We had a Ritter fan on them to really kick those tarps around in excess of what it would be in real time, but because we were overcranking, that motion would then look normal. The multi-wheeled vehicle at the beginning is a fifth-scale miniature, radio-controlled, that Jim designed. On the airplane coming over from Los Angeles to London he just doodled it. Ron Cobb, I believe, fleshed it out.

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Bill Paxton

I encouraged the actors to customize their own costumes and armor, to give the impression they had been out a lot, that they were seasoned, that they had been away from command authority on their own a lot and were good enough at their jobs that they were allowed these kind of latitudes. This is a continuation of the motif from the first film, where they're wearing Hawaiian shirts and all kinds of strange stuff, all of which was a new idea in science fiction. People always wore uniforms on spaceships. That's how it worked from Star Trek on. Every science fiction film ever made, there was the general-issue uniform. Alen broke that mold and it just seemed so right to people. They recognized the archetype instantly. "Oh, these guys are truck drivers." "They dress however they want. There's nobody to tell them not to." And so the idea here was extrapolated to a military unit that's worked at the extreme fringes of human civilization. The power loader was not designed by anybody in drawings per se. I had done some preliminary drawings, but it evolved basically from trying to figure out how to make it work. We built full-size mock-ups of the arms and legs in foam core. There's a guy inside that thing, a big, strong English stunt man moving it. It's supported by cables. It's completely an on-set gag. The English visual effects guys thought we were crazy the way we wanted to do it. I said "It's the gag where the dad lets the daughter walk on his feet, his three-year-old." So standing behind Sigourney right now is this big 270-pound body-building English stunt man. He's raising the arms himself and he has in his hands a control that allows him to raise the forearm of the power loader. And then when they walk, they have to walk together. The weight of the machine is held by a crane which is off-camera, or some kind of overhead track rig - we had two versions of it. If we didn't need the machine to turn, we mounted it on a pylon, a boom-arm thing, and if we needed it to pivot we hung it on wires.

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Michael Mann

Right here, there's a father shamelessly putting his daughter, who's in the light blue dress in the background, in the film. She was 12 at the time we made the film and went to work with me every day and worked in wardrobe, getting extras ready with makeup and put in the same 16- and 17-hour days that everybody else did. And then she and many other people became extras.

52:14 · jump to transcript →

Michael Mann

was determined by what kind of bow was in vogue. And the kinds of bows that aristocrats did changed every couple of years. And they would redesign the coats and put weights in the hems so that the sides of the coat would furl out in certain ways as to amplify the bow. This is quite specific. There's also a brilliant piece of costume design here.

1:04:12 · jump to transcript →

Michael Mann

And if you look at the braid on General Montcalm's coat, they have woven in shadow as if the braid, in fact, three-dimensional and cast a shadow on it. This is also highly accurate and elaborate, but it's not the kind of thing you could just rent from a costume house. You have to do it yourself, which we did. And it was, again, one of those fortuitous circumstances, such as the fort, where either the real uniforms didn't exist

1:04:41 · jump to transcript →