Jacqueline West is one of Hollywood’s most respected costume designers with four Oscar nominations for Philip Kaufmann nailsDavid Finchers The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonAlejandro G. Inarritus The revenant and that of Denis Villeneuve dune.
She is also Terrence Malick’s costume designer, at the recommendation of his longtime production designer, Jack Fisk, who works with him. the new world, The Tree of Life, To surprise And Knight of cupswhile other credits include that of Stephen Norrington the company of exceptional menBen Afflecks argon and Martin Scorsese arrives Killer of the Flower Moon.
Discussing her career while attending a master class for the Doha Film Institute, West said she stumbled into cinema by accident after connecting with Kaufmann through a clothing store she started in Berkeley in the 1990s after studying art history studied after originally intending to study science.
“I never intended to work in film,” she said.
The daughter of a fashion designer, West grew up surrounded by paraphernalia of fashion design, such as a dressmaker’s dummy in her bedroom that she would dress up for fun, but she had no intention of following in her mother’s footsteps , although she has a strong sense of style.
“When I got out of school, I taught kindergarten for a while at a private school,” she said. “My future husband said you should work in the clothing store because everyone wants to know where you get your clothes from, so he rented me a store.”
The property was adjacent to Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant founded by farm-to-table pioneer and cinephile Alice Waters and named after her favorite character in Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy. Marius, Fanny and Cesar.
Waters’ friend in the restaurant’s early days was producer, cinephile and Telluride Film Festival co-founder Tom Luddy, who died in February
“It was kind of a center for film people because of Tom Luddy, a friend who sadly passed away. It brought many filmmakers to my shop, one of them was Philip Kaufmann who decided I should work in the film industry,” she said.
“It didn’t happen immediately. I created a clothing line that went international. Five years later he said it again. I was like, okay, I did the clothes business. I got it, maybe I should try to learn something else.
West’s first on-set experience was working as an artistic consultant on Kaufmann’s 1990 Paris drama Henrik and June about the tortuous relationship between Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and his wife June.
“He said, ‘Now I have to pay you,’ and I said, ‘No, no, you’re my friend. I had so much fun doing it.” He said, “So you’re doing my next movie,” a big Hollywood movie with Sean Connery (Sun rise). That’s how it started and never stopped.”
West received her first Oscar nomination in 2001 for her work on Kaufmann’s drama nailsstarring Geoffrey Rush as Marquis De Sade during his final years in an insane asylum where he was kept in solitary confinement and penless and penless.
The film’s biggest challenge was creating De Sade’s suit, which was covered with lyrics written in his blood, which the main character wrote without ink.
“Blood didn’t work, it turned black on the suit, we tried cow’s blood. We tried everything and it ended up being a mix of all sorts of things and also some organic materials. But it was labor intensive,” says West.
“When Geoffrey saw this, he began to cry. We shot in Luton Hoo outside London. He put it on one night and just walked the grounds. He is very fluent, he became the marquis. It was so nice.”
West revealed that she often takes a very academic approach, citing the example of Alejandro G. Iñárritu The revenantfor which she read extensively to recreate the trapper costumes for the wilderness adventure in the 1820s as there was very little visual material.
“There was actually nothing for the trampers. You just have to be a reader. I don’t understand how you could get the period, many of the periods I did without reading. For the new world“I’ve read all of John Smith’s journals,” she said.
“I remember reading 40 years fur trader [Forty Years a Fur Trader on The Upper Missouri by Charles Larpenteur). He said that when trappers would come back to St. Louis, after two years of trapping, the people would comment that you couldn’t tell what their clothes were made of because they were so dirty and so caked with grease.”
On the basis of this description, West created a compound consisting of paraffin and bootblack.
“We put it all over the clothes… Alejandro would say what is that stuff, more of that stuff. We came up with the term ‘black wax’,” she recalled.
West said she was surprised when her agent called her to tell her the news that she had been Oscar-nominated for the work.
“I was driving to set on a movie, It was like five in the morning. I couldn’t believe it because those clothes were so dirty and so foul. Alejandro wanted them to get really smelly so that they would really feel like trappers,” she recalled.
“I thought those clothes will never get noticed. I even told the publicity person don’t put too much energy into this because these are dirty, filthy, greasy pieces of skin and leather. To give Alejandro the level of realism, he was looking for, I had to do that.”
West also talked about the process behind obtaining the bearskin worn by Leonardo DiCaprio.
“The bear skins were a whole other deal. They were extremely, extremely expensive,” she said. “They were bought from the park’s department. They have an allotment. They only cull two of the oldest bears, which they think will not make it, a season. And you have to bid on it with several people, so I went into a bidding war to get those. I had to become a fur trader and take out a fur trading licence. Fortunately, it’s very, very governed.”
West has just come off the set of Dune: Part Two, having been Oscar-nominated for her work on part one.
She revealed she had initially turned down Villeneuve when he first contacted her agent for Dune on the back of her work on The Revenant.
“I said, ‘I don’t do sci-fi. It’s not my thing.’ I said no. He hired someone else, and I guess he wasn’t happy because he called my agent a second time and said, ‘Can I just talk to her.’ Mary Parent, who produced The Revenant and was producing Dune, got me in her office and put me on FaceTime with him on a big screen,” recounted West.
“He was so compelling. He said, ‘I want you because I do not want it to look like sci-fi. I want it to be classical. I don’t want it to look like a video game.’”
West recounted how she had taken inspiration from the Touareg people as well as old paintings of the Middle East for the interior costumes on Arrakis.
“I spent time in Morocco, I was always fascinated by the “Blue Men in the desert”, the Touaregs who would wrap their faces in the cloth and how the dye would come off on their faces. It was a beautiful image for me, and I always remembered the robes and the wraps,” she said.
In an example of her attention to detail, West had the robes worn by the main cast members cut out of cotton cloth hand-woven by a friend in Italy.
A major challenge was recreating the “silence suits” worn by the Fremen on the planet Arrakis to protect the wearer from the elements and recover bodily fluids.
“It had to have all the pumps and the hoses had to be visible in some way so you could believe it could do everything,” she said.
West shared how she consulted the Dune Encyclopaedia, Willis E. McNelly’s 1984 work describing the worlds of Dune, and consulted a concept artist [Keith Christensen] to refine the design.
“Some people don’t trust this encyclopedia, but it’s pretty well documented,” she said.
One costume—the flowing white dress Zendaya wore against a backdrop of desert in fleeting vision scenes—wasn’t the result of careful research and prototyping.
West revealed it was from a line she designed for Barneys in the 1990s, the Nomad Collection, which she immediately restarted after Villeneuve asked for a dress out of the blue.
“We shot a van shot with Zendaya in the California desert just east of Bakersfield. This is the first time you see her not in a nursing suit. They haven’t reached the Sietch (the Fremen settlement) yet, so you don’t see the Seitch clothes yet Dune: part two
“Denis asked if I had a dress for her and I was like, ‘A dress? No, she never wears a dress in the script,'” she explained.
“I went home that night and looked through my sample closet from my old clothing line and found this dress. She just walked in and fell in love with it and everything Dune: part twohe (Villeneuve) said can we do more with your Nomad collection?
West said that Dune: part two was much more intense in terms of costumes as the film expands on the worlds of Geidi Prime and Arrakis’ Harkonnen fortress.
Reflecting on her journey from ready-to-wear fashion designer to Oscar-winning costume designer, West said her earlier career — designing several collections throughout the year — prepared her well for the rigors of the fashion industry dune Franchise.
Source: Deadline
Elizabeth Cabrera is an author and journalist who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a talent for staying up-to-date on the latest news and trends, Elizabeth is dedicated to delivering informative and engaging articles that keep readers informed on the latest developments.
