Dream Designer

By Stephen B. Hunt

Authenticity is something a director can always count on getting praised for. Every time Martin Scorsese explained how authentic Gangs of New York was, the press bent over backwards to marvel at his micro-managed set decoration, when they should have been wondering why he wasn't giving similar attention to the big, fat mess of a script.

But is authenticity really what we want from our movies? Movies are like a collective dream to which we all want to succumb. If a film takes us there, and keeps us there for two hours, that's all we ask for our 10 bucks: Get us out of our humdrum lives and let us live in yours for a while.

Costume Designer Colleen Atwood helps take us there. Whether crafting an elaborate hand-painted kimono for the upcoming Memoirs of a Geisha, outfitting a flapper for Chicago, or dressing Hannibal the Cannibal in a form-fitting orange jumpsuit for The Silence of the Lambs, the Oscar-winning Atwood is one part fashion designer and one part painter. And she's the person in charge of one of the most important moments in every movie: the first impression.

"Costume, hair and makeup can tell you instantly, or at least give you a larger perception of who a character is," Atwood told BBC News Online's Ian Youngs in 2003, prior to winning her first Oscar for Chicago. "It's the first impression that you have of the character before they open their mouths, so it really does establish who they are."

Of course it's one thing to re-invent the Roaring Twenties. Who's going to complain about that? Al Capone back from the dead, wielding that baseball bat of his? Elliot Ness, whipping out an Authenticity Subpoena? It's another thing altogether when what is being re-created is someone else's culture - in the case of Memoirs of a Geisha, a story set in the 1920s, '30s and '40s about a young Japanese peasant girl who becomes a geisha and falls in love. Geisha is based on a novel written by Arthur Golden, an American Anglo, starring Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese actress, as the geisha.

The authenticity cops have already begun to rattle their light sabers on the Internet, expressing concern, for the most part, about the casting of Chinese Ziyi as the Geisha.

"This is my impression of Japan in the '20s, the '30s and the '40s, because it's seen through a child's eyes and then one woman's eyes, so you have license there," Geisha director Rob Marshall said to Japanese journalist Akiko Tetsuta, visiting the Geisha set in early 2005, in what appeared to be a pre-emptive strike to ward off critics. "By this time, the geisha were the fashion icons of Japan, so I really want to make sure that the artistry of that time and the amount of work it took - I really wanted to honor the geisha, but also glamorize them in some ways to make it this incredible thing to be."

It will be one thing to wow Western eyes, for which one kimono is pretty much the same as the next. But what about the Japanese - and everyone else, for that matter, since the international market accounts for the lion's share of a film's box-office take?

"You don't tailor the costumes you design to try to fit what you think people watching in South America or India (or for that matter, Japan) might think of them," Atwood said in a recent interview. "Beauty comes from (having) a point of view of design - if you start worrying about design from everyone else's point of view, you lose it."

So does she take creative license with her creations?

"Always, at a point," Atwood said, "but especially in this case. A kimono takes up to a year to achieve. The kimono (in the film) are a romanticized version - we did definitely take license, but with the utmost respect for the Japanese culture."

To research Geisha, Atwood flew to Japan and visited the Fashion Institute of Tokyo, where she discovered a treasure trove of all things geisha in the school's archive - "everything from impressionistic Japanese paintings from the '20s and '30s to Japanese fashion magazines and other journalism I wasn't able to get access to," Atwood recalled. She made some interesting discoveries: "The Japanese were very influenced by Modigliani and Western Europe in those days... especially with regards to kimono from the Taisho Period (1912-26). A lot of kimono is painted work," she explained. "No two are the same.

"In some ways, this (Geisha) was a much denser project than Chicago," Atwood continued. "We still know nothing (about the East) compared to what we knew about the period (of Chicago). Japanese culture is a huge culture, full of nuance. It's deeply subtle. To the Japanese, so many things have meaning that we have no idea about."

Star Treatment

Atwood, who has been nominated for five Oscars (1994's Little Women, Beloved in 1998, Sleepy Hollow in 1999, Chicago in 2002 and 2004's Lemony Snicket), has worked with the best actors of a generation - everyone from Anthony Hopkins to Uma Thurman to Zhang Ziyi. Thurman, for one, likes to be extremely involved with her characters' wardrobe on every film she works on. "It's a big part of character for me," Thurman (who worked with Atwood on the futuristic Gattaca) said in Los Angeles recently. "Depending on the costume director, I usually have to kind of collaborate in that area. It's part of how I get into character - putting their stuff on."

"Different actors have different ways of expressing their participation in the costuming process," Atwood said. With Zhang Ziyi, Atwood said, "She understood the process. And since she spends a lot of the movie wearing peasant outfits, when she first got to wear a kimono, she just lit up."

Ziyi agreed. "Our costume, wardrobe and makeup are very helpful for us," she said. "They provide such an environment that we can look for the right feeling."

"It's exciting to see each costume come together," Atwood said of the Geisha shoot. "And then you finally get to see it all come together as a story. It's a very collaborative effort between costume designer, director, production designer and set decorator (Gretchen Rau) - a lot of testing of fabric and color. You need to match a general exterior and mood. We all collaborate on that together."

Atwood's path to the top of her field has been circuitous, she explained.

"I arrived at costume design, rather than growing up wanting to be one," Atwood said. "I wanted to be a painter." Atwood was born in Ellensburg, Washington and studied at the Cornish School of Fine Arts in Seattle. Raising her daughter in Seattle, Atwood loved the Impressionists, Expressionists and, when the rainy season hit the Northwest, admired nothing quite so much as the psychic gloom of England's greatest painter, Francis Bacon. Atwood loved mood and color and texture. She worked as a fashion consultant, which mainly involves being hired by people with bad taste to help them have good taste - a big business among Microsoft employees, one would think.

In 1980, her daughter grown, Atwood felt the need for a change of scenery. As nice as Seattle is, the rainy season can really bum a person out. She enrolled at New York University and moved to New York, where she soon dropped out. She didn't need NYU, as it turned out: She landed a job as a costume assistant on Milos Forman's Ragtime. It was on the set of that film that she met Patrizia von Brandenstein, the production designer.

"I found my mentor," Atwood said of von Brandenstein; and she was on her way. She designed costumes for Elton John and Sting, and eventually formed relationships with two up-and-coming directors, who turned out to be Jonathan Demme and Tim Burton (for whom Atwood has worked as costume designer on a half-dozen different films, from Edward Scissorhands to Planet of the Apes to 2003's Big Fish).

In Dreams

Chances are you've had dreams that featured the costumes of Colleen Atwood. Like a painting at its most effective, good costumes rely upon color, palette and texture, as well as one other element a painting can't offer: fit. For Chicago, costumes were built to accommodate dance moves. For Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal's memorable orange jumpsuit was snugly designed in order to project an air of physical menace. In Gattaca, Atwood borrowed from contemporary design.

"I call it haute sci-fi, picking elements from the '20s through today, but also the most modern design from each period," a strategy she adopted to give the film a timeless look.

On Chicago, Atwood owed her allegiance as much to the Broadway stage as she did to the actual Roaring Twenties, since Rob Marshall came from directing and choreographing hit stage musicals.

"Rob [Marshall] definitely had a vision of the film, but as far as specifics about the costumes, he was very open to what I thought," Atwood said. "The designs were based on quite a lot of research of the period, with a nod toward what a movie musical is," she said. "We wanted it accessible to the audience of today. If we'd gone strictly with the '20s, the movement (of the actors and dancers) would have been impaired. The costumes had to serve the choreography."

They also had to serve the performer's persona. The glamorous Catherine Zeta-Jones, for instance, played a criminal, but wouldn't be caught dead looking less than gorgeous. "The idea was that even if she didn't have two nickels to rub together she looked liked a million bucks," Atwood said. "Even her prison uniform still had a little Velma glam."

Creating the clothes for imaginary worlds, which are worn for a while and then discarded, has gained Atwood the indelibility of celluloid and an Oscar to boot. But does she ever think about making clothes that would have a longer shelf life in the real world? Is there a couturier in Colleen that's bursting at the seams to get out?

"I have considered it," she said, but added that nothing has yet come of the oft-floated notion of doing her own clothing line. "I still love the freedom film gives me," she said. "I still totally love that experience of doing something for a film, and then, two years later, we're walking down the street and someone is wearing shoes just like the shoes you designed for Chicago.

"The great fashion designers totally feed on everything. Fashion and film really are two parallel universes. It's exciting. I don't ever feel angry or think, ‘Someone stole that from my design!' No one owns anything in art, and everyone should know that."

Atwood's job, in other words, is to share a vision, not hoard a collection.

"I just try to design beautiful things," she said. And she does.