Was that in the script? Or was it something you came up with?
No, I came up with that. I came up with that when, you know, because we have these three women, and they’re very different and distinct characters. You know, I wanted to obviously show that within the costuming. And I thought Rachel [Weisz]‘s character, Sarah, was very much in control. She seems to be the most in control of all of them. She has a confidence. And I wanted to show that in the way that she dressed. I mean, she holds herself in a very sort of imperious way, actually. In a very confident way. Which helps. And I just wanted to have that sort of masculine element. And women always have, historically, adopted a more masculine look…not look, I mean the clothes borrow from the masculine shape. Even if they’re cut for women. I mean, quite often they’d be wearing jackets and waistcoats like the men but with skirts. But I just gave her the sort of whole male look. And I don’t think she looks like a man at all. She is the same as Katharine Hepburn doesn’t look like a man in all the films that she wears trousers. And she was my sort of Katharine Hepburn, really. I can imagine Katharine Hepburn playing that part.
I think when people think of the movie it’s an iconic image of her.
Yeah, it is. Which is great.I mean it really makes a difference who your actors are. You can have an idea to do something, but they’ve got to wear it. They’re the ones that pull it off. It’s not the costume pulling it off, it’s the actor wearing the costume in the scene that does it.
Did Emma [Stone], Rachel or Olivia [Colman] have any requests about what they would be wearing or did they just let you do your thing?
They let me do my thing. Because in a sense, it was a period that really no one knows much about. No one’s done it. And Emma, who’s never done a period film before. I mean, she’s done the ’50s and things like that, but never the sort of, you know, corset films, shall we say. So for her, it was a completely new experience. The corset, you know, gives you this silhouette. Without it, it would look really weird. It would look all scrunched up and horrible. It wouldn’t make a nice shape.
I seem to remember Olivia’s wearing dresses that didn’t appear as though she was wearing a corset.
Well, that’s because she didn’t, because she wears a nightgown half the time. Most of the time, in her bedroom, it’s not a dress. It’s a nightgown. And it’s because she spends most of the film, like, sick. She’s physically ill with gout and she’s pretty depressed. She’s pretty miserable. And a lot of the scenes are written in her apartment. And I thought, you know, it’s going to look really weird if she’s all dressed up for court every day in her apartment and she’s lying around being ill. It’s going to look really horrible. She’s the queen. She wakes up feeling ill, she’s not going to get dressed. So that’s what I wanted it to be like. I wanted her to look like she had the same thing on day in, day out.
Am I wrong in remembering that some of the nightgowns were ornate?
No. The nightgowns were just nightgowns. But she has a robe over the top that was velvet, but then it was lined. It was reversible. I made a reversible robe, so we had flexibility with the colors, whether we wanted a dark exterior or a light one. And it was a robe made out of, I made it out of a bedcover. Chenille bedcover. Cotton chenille bedcover. I bought two, that I got on eBay. And that’s what her cozy robe is made from. Her cozy dressing gown is made from a bedcover.
Do you have more fun, in a way, when it’s more challenging in that respect?
Well, I think the fun’s always in retrospect, actually. Yes, we had fun. It’s great trying to solve all the problems. And then you, you know, with the restricted budget you have to have even better ideas. And I mean, yes, often you do come up with really clever solutions when you’re really forced into it. but at the time, it’s not fun. At the time, you’re sort of tearing your hair out, thinking it’s going to be a disaster. I mean, how are we going to do this? I haven’t got any money. Okay, well we’ll just try this and let’s hope it works. At the time, it’s quite stressful. But then again, it’s the sort of stress that I thrive on.
How much time did you actually have to prep this film?
We had very little time. I mean, for something this scale. And we made 150 costumes for every extra.
Were you able to order from any…
No, we didn’t order anything from anywhere. What, from “The Favourite” Shop? “The Favourite” Costume Shop? No, we didn’t.
I didn’t know if there was, in London, a warehouse where you could order…[Laughs.]
I mean, normally, okay, in period films, there are huge warehouses here [in Los Angeles] and in London. That have racks and racks and racks and racks and racks of period clothes. I mean, quite often, if you’ve got big crowd scenes, you get all your extras from there.
Right.
But, this period hasn’t been done. So there are no costumes in this period. There’s nothing in existence. I didn’t want to sort of cheat and get the wrong period and get some horrible old costume that’s been used, some horrible old, dusty costume in some random color, that didn’t fit in with the look. So in a way, it was good there was nothing I could rent. The producers couldn’t say to me, “Why can’t you go rent it cheaper?” So I didn’t. And I wanted to control the look so we had to build every single thing. So I had to find quick and fast and easy ways of building things.
Is there one particular costume piece that you’re most proud of?
No, because there’s all different moments. I mean obviously, I like the queen’s ceremonial, because it’s crazy, it’s really over the top and masses of, and you only see it for a second, which I like. I mean, I love the way that you see that in the beginning. I like the queen’s bedclothes. I actually like that. But then I also really like Emma’s final costume, the one where [her character sort of clawed] her way to the top. In all her finery, which is just a little bit over the top and a little bit too vulgar. I think the end scene is one of my favorite scenes. The image of the queen in the nightgown that she’d worn all the way through. And then with Emma, like, down on the floor. And I just love that whole dynamic. That whole thing with the queen there, and that really unattractive camera angle. Like, looking up at her.
Have you ever worked on a film with so much natural light? Did it worry you at all?
No, I loved it. No, I’ve never done, never ever done something with natural light. And I kind of knew that it would be really interesting. I knew. Because I think most of the time things are over lit.
Was there time to do any tests to see how the fabrics would look, just in case?
Oh, we did, yes, we did do one camera test to see how the looks would work. But that was just in daylight. We didn’t do it in a dark situation, I don’t think. Or did we? We must have done, actually. Even if it hadn’t worked, there wasn’t time to change anything. It had to work.
It worked! I want to ask you also about “Mary Poppins Returns” which is literally the flip side of this.
Yeah. Yeah, it couldn’t be more different.
What made you want to jump on board in the first place?
I’ve always wanted to do a musical. Never done one. And “Mary Poppins,” the first one, was the film I ever saw in a theater. I was four. And I knew all the words to all the songs, you know what I mean? And I know we weren’t doing a remake but it was like, “Yes, I’m going to do Mary Poppins. Yeah.” And I knew it was Emily Blunt, who I love. And I’ve worked with her before, on “Young Victoria,” and she’s great.
And obviously, there’s the iconic outfit that she wears when she first arrives in the first film. How did you use that for inspiration in the new film?
I mean you know, obviously it’s about the same character, so she couldn’t be somebody looking completely different. It had to have an element. It had to have something that reflected the original one. And so I looked at it, and then just sort of transposed it to 1934, which luckily lent itself to a silhouette. I mean, just the fashion for women in 1034 was a longer hemline. I don’t know if you know about fashion at all, but it was a longer hemline. Which didn’t last very long, because then the hemlines got shorter. But it was a very lovely, long, elegant line. And I just did a 1930s version of what she wore in the original one, and added a little cape addition to the coat because I wanted to have some movement. I just did another version. And then the color was navy blue in the original, which is quite dark, and I thought, “I want to bump up the color a little bit in this.” And so I made the coat a much sort of stronger blue, a bolder blue. So that it wouldn’t disappear and look like black.
Isn’t she wearing a hat too?
And she’s wearing a hat, yeah. We did a hat too because a hat is absolutely right for the 1930s. But obviously, I didn’t want to do the same flowers [in the original one]. And we actually made this Mary Poppins a little bit more sophisticated than the original one. I mean, you know, sophisticated but Rob [Marshall] still wanted an eccentricity. So she has a bird. She has a little robin in her hat. But I think she’s a bit more chic. And a bit more elegant. And Mary Poppins is very vain. She likes how she looks. And she’s concerned about how she looks.
Interesting.
If you go back and look at it, she’s quite snooty. In the first one, she’s always kind of checking herself out in the mirror. And she does it in the second one as well. I mean, when you watch the original one again, it’s quite weird watching it again, because I did watch it once, and it does drag on a bit.
Yeah, and there is another animated number in this one.
She wears a couple of costumes in the animated number. And they basically jump into a world that is 19th century. So they change their look. And what I did with these costumes is, I made them all out of cotton canvas and I painted them. They were all hand-painted to look as if they were part of the animation. As opposed to being, like, live action people in their normal clothes in the middle of some animation. So, they’re all painted to look as if they’re 2D, but they’re 3D.
Was there any finished or close to finished animation to show you?
No, they hadn’t done any of it at all. No, the costumes came first. I talked to the animators and said, “O.K., what is the style of the animation?” And it was all old fashioned, hand drawn. So they obviously had started doing stuff. And I wanted to know how the painting was going to be. Whether it was going to be washes, watercolors, and that sort of thing. So they showed me samples of that. Then I did the costumes. And then was showing them, as I was going along, what I was doing with the costumes. And then when we finally had them, they then used images of the actors in the costumes as they were designing the backgrounds. They were popping those images into it so that all the colors worked. Yeah, I was actually allowed to choose the color palette of the world, from the costumes that I did.
Do you know what you’re doing next?
Yeah, I’m just starting. It’s called “The Glorias” and it’s about Gloria Steinem. With Julie Taymor. We shoot in the new year.
“The Favourite” and “Mary Poppins Returns” are still in theaters.