When costume designer Louis Sequeira got the call from Guillermo del Toro to start working on “Nightmare Alley,” he didn’t have to go far to begin researching the 1930s set project. A self-described hoarder, he’d been collecting visual references for decades.
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“I have a tie collection that I do not want to give you a number on how many ties I have, but it’s all for work,” Sequeira says. “And so for me, I was lucky I had this stuff. I’m fascinated by the different times. I’m fascinated by what makes a 1932 suit, a 1935 suit, and a 1939 suit. And that can play into anything, a shoe, a hat. And so, there was that aspect of the research, and then it was building those worlds and were those visual references that we wanted to zero in on. For the carnival, it was looking back in time. And for the city, it was of the moment. And even though there’s two years difference, there’s a chasm of style and palette and texture in those two worlds.”
An Oscar nominee for his work for “The Shape of Water” and a Costume Designer Guild Award nominee for “Nightmare,” Sequeira was handed a designer’s dream with the mysterious Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a psychiatrist with a drop-dead gorgeous sense of style.
“I mean, for Cate’s character, we had some pretty distinctive mood boards of-the-year fashion looks, both from fashion and sketchbooks from Paris shows,” Sequeira says. “I had built this backstory that she was getting these pieces made up for her, coming from old money. And so, we found details in these Paris sketchbooks [from that exact year] and I showed them to Cate. And she was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ And so, that’s how the genesis of those things came to be. And then it was about picking the fabrics that would speak to the low light scenario of her office.”
He notes, “It’s not film noir, but it is film noir, it’s color noir. And so, what were those fabrics that were going to be moody, but pull away in the environment? And the pebble wool, the silks everything was at play to work with the lighting and the sets.”
Cinematographer Dan Laustsen, who was nominated for an American Society of Cinematographers Award for “Nightmare,” isn’t sure he’d refer to his work as “noir” (which seemingly contradicts everything del Toro and the rest of the crew have said).
“We wanted to make a period movie that’s told like a modern movie,” Laustsen says. “Of course, the clothes and the sets and the cars and all that is period but we wanted to shoot it like a modern-looking movie. And of course, when you’re coming into the Copacabana sequence in Buffalo, it’s getting much more like old-fashioned lighting again but not old-fashioned, just more like very precise old Hollywood like.”
Recently, during a public Q&A for the film, del Toro told The Playlist it was the first film he’s ever shot where he continually moved the camera while shooting a scene. The celebrated auteur usually shoots as though he’s editing a sequence in person. He’s not even necessarily a shot list director. Lausten notes, “Guillermo’s never making storyboards. He makes some small drawings in his book and then he shows me, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ and then he closes it before I see it so that’s the way but he’s not making storyboards.”
When Dr. Ritter first appears at the Copacabana club, Laustsen says they wanted to make sure she was shot like a movie star.
“She should look like a million dollars or whatever,” Laustsen says. “And for us, it was very important to have this mystery about her. The first time you see her, she’s sitting there backlit, looks gorgeous but you don’t see her. Then, of course, the rest of the scene is coming with the gun and all that and we’re going into this classic shadow on the top of the head and stuff. And that is not easy to do when the camera’s moving so much because that light has to move. We have to try to track with the lights and stuff like that. And when we are coming into her office, that was the same there. We wanted to have her look fantastic but not in the soft light way. We wanted her face to have all the character and powerful things, and the way we thought we could do that was with powerful, beautiful lighting.”
Of course, Bradley Cooper’s character Staton Carlisle goes through one of the most dramatic transformations in the film. We’re first introduced to him as a down on his luck, carnie and then two years later, he’s a celebrated psychic entertainer dressed to the nines.
“I think with Bradley, it was really about precise tailoring and the choice in the fabric combinations that we went through together,” Sequeira says. But he also had quite the adventure landing on the fedoras that Carlisle wears throughout the picture. “I know that there’s a story that I believe on his previous film, ‘A Star is Born,’ he went through 100 fedoras. And when he mentioned that I was like, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to find 100 fedoras.’ But we had about a dozen different ones [to choose from].”
Cooper is central to one of the most striking images of the film. A shot of Carlisle leaving his childhood home set on fire in the middle of a field. It’s a distinctive image because it’s not quite overcast, it’s not quite sunset or sunrise, either. Lausten excitedly admits they were “so lucky” about the clouds that day.
“The cloud was unbelievably beautiful,” Laustsen recalls. “Then, of course, we wait till the right light. We had discussions about it should it be magic hour or should it be sunset? How dark? So we shot a couple of takes and then it starts to rain. We were like, ‘What the f**k? What are we going to do?’ But we were super, super, super lucky. We built the house. We knew exactly where that was. We have the crane, we have light and then we made a decision because 99% of Guillermo’s movies, there’s no by the way. But in that scene, there was because we were waiting for the light in the right position, and then it came, and we shot it.”
Also known for his lensing on the last two “John Wick” films, Laustsen isn’t sure he’d describe working on a del Toro movie as “fun,” but says the experience itself is always “fantastic.”
“He is fantastic,” Laustsen says. “But that’s because we have the same idea about how to make movies, how the movie should look. We like the same lighting. We like the same camera movement. We like the same movies and I think he’s a genius. He’s f**king great and only the best is good enough for him and I really, really love that. For him, there are very, very, very, very few shortcuts. ‘This is the way I want to do it and that’s the way you’re going to do it,’ and it’s fantastic.”
“Nightmare Alley” is now in theaters nationwide.