Q: How did you decide on costume design as a profession?
A: I was studying English and classical literature at university. I was required to work in plays, and I didn’t want to act, so I chose to do sets. Traditionally sets and costumes are split up, but when you learn them at university, you learn them as a whole. Even during my theater days, until I moved into a realm with bigger budgets, I still had to do both. I spent a couple of years in charge of the whole vision of smaller productions. Once I started working at Belvoir St. Theatre or Sydney Theatre Company, all of a sudden the workload was separated, because the shows were bigger and I don’t think they felt designers had enough time to do both. I had a mentor at school named Brian Thomson, who was scenic designer of the original Australian and London productions of The Rocky Horror Show (1973). He asked me to do a musical with him, and that was the first time I did costumes exclusively. Once people see the show, and you do publicity, that is how people start to identify you. So it wasn’t that I particularly decided that was what I wanted to do; I was equally comfortable in either area. Occasionally I’ll do set designs for commercials because I enjoy it, but my career has gone down a costume path by serendipity.
Q: You went to school with costume and production designer Catherine Martin, and began your film career working with her and her husband, director Baz Luhrmann.
A: Catherine was a year ahead of me in school, and we were friends. I did Romeo + Juliet (1996) with Baz and Catherine. She felt her strength was more on the side of production design, and she wanted to spend more time on that. So my doing the costumes was kind of completing the team. Because we were reinterpreting our time, a parallel universe where the characters are speaking early modern English, I think it was important that the visual of the character set up their trajectory. I mapped a visual path for each character, taking a lot of clues from what Shakespeare said about them. He may have put so much information about the characters in his play because when it was originally performed, perhaps they didn’t have heaps of elaborate costumes. So I feel like he was doing in words, what I was trying to do with the costumes, so it reinforced the whole visual narrative.
Q: When you’ve described your first meeting with Lana and Andy Wachowski, directors of The Matrix (1999), I heard you use a word that I do not usually associate with Hollywood meetings—laughter. Are meetings with directors intimidating?
A: It depends on the people. Most of the time I get called for meetings for films based on original scripts. A director who is willing to work with an original script is a particular type of person. Sometimes the directors are also the writers, and there’s a natural openness. You have to just unfurl your ideas and see what sail catches the wind. If the director has had that same thought, it is fun. I first read the script for The Matrix a few years before I met the Wachowskis. I was living in my garret on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood, and I asked my agents to just send me any scripts so I had something to read because I couldn’t afford books. I loved the script, but my agent wasn’t sure it would ever be produced because they felt no one would understand it.
When I met the Wachowskis, they were with their wives, who I believe have a bearing on what kinds of people they want to spend time with. I brought up some references that they liked. I had grown up on westerns and Chinese Kung Fu movies, because where I lived that was all there was. There are a lot of themes in those films that they are drawn to. And I love beautiful clothes and beautiful things, but something doesn’t have to be beautiful or expensive for it to be good. They’re the same way. They would never say, “Give me five racks of Prada for the fittings.” But some people do, they say, “Listen, you can only show them Givenchy, Prada, and Armani.” I don’t do that. Quite often I’ll take the labels out of things and try to mix it in to find what’s right.
Q: Do labels have a psychological effect on choosing a wardrobe?
A: There are certain actresses that you can’t please unless you get a rack of clothes from Prada.
Q: Neo’s coat in The Matrix has a monk-like quality to it. Was the intent to fuse design with religion?
Keanu Reeves in The Matrix (1999).
John Malkovich in Eragon (2006).
Carrie Anne Moss in The Matrix (1999).
A: I wanted to combine East and West. Our main goal was the movement through space. We knew we wanted him to fly and we didn’t want it to look cheesy. Superman (1978) got away with it brilliantly, but that’s a special type of suspension of disbelief. One of the hardest things was how do you make a coat that can withstand having rain poured on it all day, that someone can fight in, and is not too heavy. You cave into a lot of practical things, and since it was black, I had to rely on a silhouette. The lighting was very dark most of the time. It was important to me that it shape-shifted between a Mandarin-collared Asian silhouette and a Western-type cleric look. I also had to consider the stunt work that would be done on wires, so the coat had to be tight to the torso and keep its silhouette when it moved. Keanu is very tall, and he didn’t want to slouch or be laconic. So I felt the high collar and a coat that was buttoned up quite tight across his chest gave him that extra reminder to stand up straight. In many ways, Keanu does have a monk-like sensibility. He speaks softly. If you visit him in his hotel room, there are books everywhere. He is rigorous in his training. He doesn’t smoke or drink when he’s working.