Tim Burton’s live-action “Dumbo” may not make you cry like the 1941 animated classic, but it’s hard to ignore the incredible contributions from production designer Rick Heinrichs and costume designer Colleen Atwood. The latter has four Oscar wins to her name along with 12 nominations making her, arguably, the greatest living designer of this cinematic era. Moreover, it may only be March, but with her work on “Dumbo” she could easily find herself back in the ring when award season fires up again this fall.
READ MORE: “Dumbo” is filled with overwhelming cuteness but doesn’t soar [Review]
This version of “Dumbo” features performances from familiar faces such as Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton and Eva Green. Atwood gives Green, in particular, some of the most beautiful performance attire you’ve seen on screen in years. Earlier this month she sat down to talk about the challenges on tackling another animated favorite after “Alice in Wonderland” and how she and her longtime collaborator have changed over the years.
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The Playlist: From when you first met working on “Edward Scissorhands,” how do you think you’ve changed as a costume designer and how do you think Tim has changed as a director?
Colleen Atwood: Interesting question. I think I’ll start with myself. As a designer, I think over the span of like in respect to Tim, I think that we’ve sort of stayed the same in a sense of how we work together. It’s sort of a shorthand sort of way that we’ve always connected with few words and a more reactive sort of process, but I think that the industry and the way that movies are made has changed a lot which has made us change. Like, that category at that time that was a certain scale. They were big, but…there is no such thing as a little movie, but they’re like big little movies like “Ed Wood,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Sleepy Hollow” in a higher costume sort of level way, but I feel like that as things have grown and that sort of style of film making has changed, that we’ve made bigger movies, we’ve gone back to really smaller movies and, [now] the world around us has kind of made a demand for the scale of the movies to go up in a way. But I a way we’ve kind of embraced those nostalgic days of Edward Scissorhands or that scale of movies. It’s a really nice level to work at because you can creatively do really interesting things, but it’s still something. It’s not just like so sad that you can’t make anything. I think that has influenced our work, the kind of work that we’ve both done together. I think as a filmmaker there is something about Tim that’s always going to be there, that’s always Tim. But I think the people around him, and the sort of way he works is a constant kind of evolution of a story in a way. There are certain threads that run true. Anyone as original as Tim is going to have that signature on his work.
This story, in particular, I believe it takes place in the early 1920s?
No, it’s 1918, 1919.
So it’s just on the cusp of the roaring ’20s?
The ’20s haven’t hit yet.
Was that the starting point? What sort of themes did you and Tim discuss?
Circus in that world spanned from 1890 to 1919 because in some ways the circus has always had a nod to that sort of turn of the century kind of feeling to it. I really felt like I wanted to draw from a bigger kind of reference for the design of the film and from my point of view. I think that kind of baroque circus wagons, all the traditional circus stuff does harken earlier than actually 1919 which is on the cusp of modern design. What we thought modern today. So, we kind of looked back a little bit and then we sort of put it all together and sort of had that layering effect, which I think, you know, makes it more interesting than if you just research one period like it’s between these two bookends of years. I always look backward and forward when I’m doing research because I think it’s more interesting to see how you end up with the period that you end up in. And plus, the small little circus they’re in, they’re not a rich circus. They’re not like trying to get the hottest styles that are going on over the past couple of years. They’re sort of living in the past a little bit anyway. They have things they’ve had for a long time. They remake clothes, which in the theater they tend to do anyway so there is a real feeling of griminess in the first couple circuses before we hit New York with the Vandevere Circus that I really wanted to sell in the design of the film.
One of the scenes that recreates the original animated film involved Dumbo performing with “fireman” clowns. Those costumes in particular pop so strongly. What was your inspiration for that sequence?
For me, that scene was my homage to the animated film. You totally got it. It was kind of the same. The big hat on the little guy, and the little hat on the big guy. The sort of really simple, broad, clown kind of stuff. The coats were definitely the color that kind of bilious sort of horrible yellow of the old coats. I put a lot of dirt on them and stuff, so it was kind of spotty, so you didn’t just get too differential boom of that one yellow color, which is pretty strong. I felt like it was the scene that really paid respect to the original movie because we couldn’t have him in the tub getting drunk and all that fun stuff.
The other costumes that just totally popped to me involved Eva’s outfits or gowns. They’re stunning, both of them. The first one I think is sort of gold and silverish.
Yeah, gold and silver.
Can you talk about the thought process for those? The first one felt a little bit like it was almost hinting about the ’20s. Am I wrong there?
Well, I used a sort of a deco pattern on the sequin shapes because by the time we got to New York there was bit more influence of that sort of modernity. So I felt like I took license with that and then a second one, which is much more Victorian in feeling, with the ruffles and stuff, so I sort of went back and forth with those. Her gag was dropping the skirt, so I used this really lightweight aluminum and nylon fabric, which a very modern fabric, mixed with toole for the skirts, just to keep it so when it fell it didn’t just clunk down to the ground, so it could kind of float. I sort of took license with some of the materials in those, but I tried to keep this sort of shape and the trueness to that sort of early 1900s sort of corsetry shape with it.
Right and that corset. I’m not sure if was jewels or crystals or what you did, but it is gorgeous.
Those were all hand [stoned]. It’s a mixture of little tiny stones, and then I think I I really like the really tiny sequins because you can’t quite see them, but they’re there. They kind of kick a little bit of light. I like them a lot. I knew that it was going to be seen from far away with a spot so I wanted to make sure it had some oomph with a kick back and I feel like I like old crystal. It’s kind of dirty, like old rhinestone stuff, more than I do like modern, super blingy crystals. I kind of crunched it into stuff so it wasn’t so like blatantly out there as a crystal thing. It feels like if you squint your eye a little bit it’s kind of magic, like when you’re a kid and you look at something and it sort of has this thing. I wanted to sort of convey that as much as I could with those kinds of high-performance costumes.
And also, Eva’s character, I think she appears in a bodice three times. When we first see her during rehearsal, she is also wearing one, sort of. A tight, black, constricting number.
Early dance kind of thing.
Yeah.
But what it is, is I found in reference, a real circus rehearsal corset, which was a striped thing with these leather kind of bondage straps and I copied it because I thought, “Wow, this is amazing.” It was sort of ideal to show that she was a little bit afraid of climbing on an elephant and riding it. So it was more protection as well as a restriction thing. There were places in it to hook cables and stuff like that, so if you came off the elephant you wouldn’t just land. That scene kind of got shortened in the cut and you kind of see the best of it, but that’s what that actual corset thing was based on. It was so cool. The old one. I just found a picture of it some random way.
It also tells you a lot about her character because when you first meet her you don’t really know a lot about her and then she shows up with that and you immediately go, “Oh, she’s serious about what she’s doing.”
She’s a performer.
That’s one of the great things about what costuming can do is she doesn’t even say anything and you know something about her that right away just because of what she’s wearing when she comes in. Were there any other costumes that you thought that you were particularly happy with for any characters, or how you styled them through most of their scenes?
I love the mermaid costume. She is such a great girl. People are always trying to make big people look smaller and I just kind of like made her bigger because I had to make her hips bigger to sell the fish shape in an amateurish way and get the ankle thing smaller. So many things for this movie were fun. I loved the contortionist costumes. I really loved the colors that those turned out and doing them was fun. Also, the children’s clothes were really interesting in this. It’s interesting because they were poor, they didn’t have a lot of clothes, so people washed and ironed their clothes every day and wore the same thing over and over, and I really liked the challenge of making them look not too cute. To look lived in, but still, have some kind of little details and things that were sort of helped, I think, with the character a lot.
I’m curious, working with Michael Keaton again. Did he want anything specifically in his costume for his character? How did you guys sort of collaborate on that?
He is awesome. He’s quite deferential, but he definitely knows what he wants. He really wanted the costume to not be a costume. I think, first of all, that he wanted just to feel like the character, but not be restricted in any way. He and I laughed because he definitely didn’t want a necktie. So we did the cravat, which was even better anyway, so it was kind of fun in that sense. This sort of dandi-fication. Vandevere is a guy that’s between the circus and the bank at all times, so he was a little bit of circus, but a little bit of bank, and so that was kind of how I built his character. He was acceptable to the bank guys, but he was a little bit flashy compared to them, but he was a little bit more refined in the circus. He was a city boy and probably in his time would have embraced fashion and had a tailor and kind of been sartorially connected at his own level.
Was there any aspect of the production that was incredibly difficult in terms of the number of actors you had to dress on one day?
The Vandevere Circus, when we shot there, I had 150 performers for the parade day and the circus days and then five hundred crowd. So, [to get] those people ready we had 4:30 AM calls to do hair, make-up, wardrobe to get these people dressed and then they go to set. Then they’d have lunch. So, just maintaining and keeping all those costumes together. We shot that scene like more or less for a month.
Oh wow.
Keeping that going on was a big challenge for the film. The performance costumes were a different challenge because they were actually performing in them, so you had to make them look old, but have elements of modern stuff in them so they could move because they couldn’t do some of that stuff if they were in a real corset, etc.
I actually wanted to ask you a quick question about that. Have you ever had a moment where someone went to lunch and they stupidly got something on a costume that was just insanely hard to get out and you just wanted to scream?
Yes! Some people are the Anti-Christ. My favorite story is about Helena Bonham Carter, O.K? [She’s wearing a] suit of armor in “Alice In Wonderland.” I’ve never had anybody break a suit of armor.
How do you break…?
She fell off a chair and broke her [breastplate]. I was like, “How the hell did that happen? How did she do it?” It’s really hard to do.
So did you have to make a new …
I taped it. Get through the day!
“Dumbo” opens nationwide on Friday.