LIZZY GARDINER AND STEPHAN ELLIOTTLIZZY GARDINER AND STEPHAN ELLIOTT

When the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert debuted in 1994, moviegoers embraced the story of two drag queens and one transsexual on a road trip across Australia. The film won an Oscar for Best Costume Design for Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel. When the film was turned into a Broadway musical, the designing duo won the Tony for their stage designs. Priscilla director Stephan Elliott has continued to work with costume designer Lizzy Gardiner on subsequent film projects.

Q: Lizzy, what were your first thoughts about costumes in films?

LG: My mother was incredibly beautiful and used to wear Valentino in the 1970s. I was always around fashion. I loved storytelling as well, and I used to watch movies that were completely inappropriate for my age. The Graduate (1967), The Getaway (1972), and Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Those films still inspire me.

I became obsessed with filmmaking and fashion at the same time. I went to the Academy of Arts in France and studied fashion design, but majored in costume. I don’t know where it came from, but I was very sure that costume design was what I wanted to do. The thing about fashion is that it lacks the storytelling. Stephan Elliott and I were friends since we were kids, and he had this film called Priscilla, and then it began.

Q: How did you meet your Priscilla co-designer, Tim Chappel?

LG: I was designing a soap opera in Australia and I needed an assistant, and he came on to the show. We were both only twenty-one or twenty-two. Then we went straight into doing films. We couldn’t have been luckier.

Q: Where did the over-the-top ideas for costumes for Priscilla come from?

LG: From childhood cartoons, from our mothers, from our grandmothers. Tim and I have a similar sense of humor. We just made ourselves laugh and laugh and laugh. There was no one to say stop laughing, so we didn’t. We just had a ball doing what we wanted to do, with no boundaries.

Q: Stephan, is there a level of trust a director has to have with his crew?

Tim Chappel’s sketch for Guy Pearce in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Costume design by Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel.

SE: There are two ways of doing it. One, you can become a bastard control freak. You can carry on about anything. Or, if you have a relationship with someone you trust, you can actually let them do their job. If Lizzy puts a foot down and says this is what I think is right, then it probably is right. A director’s job is not telling people what to do; it’s to keep everybody going in a direction. I work out a goal post, and I have to make sure everybody moves within that. You are basically giving people within that space the license to do whatever they want because you trust them.

Q: Lizzy, how are you usually brought on to a project?

Hugo Weaving, Terence Stamp, and Guy Pearce in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

LG: A lot of times it is my agent who introduces me to someone through my body of work. There is always someone who says, “Oh, I remember she did that film.” A film can be held for you or against you. Priscilla has been held for and against me. You try not to get typecast. If I only did films of drag queens, I would only work every ten or fifteen years. You’d be surprised how many people see the film or the live show of Priscilla and think, “She does drag queens, how could she do fashion?” You spend a lot of time almost apologizing for some of your best work so that you don’t get pushed into a corner. I also do big period films, but often people don’t realize that. The people who have done their homework know what I’ve done.

Q: What do you bring with you to a meeting?

LG: In the case of a meeting for the Marvel Comics genre, a lot of the work is already done before you walk into the meeting. They’ve had conceptual artists and designers and illustrators working on the films for years sometimes. So you walk into a job where you’re given the vast body of what they want and they don’t really want you to upset the apple cart too much. There are other films that are an open slate and no one has put any thought into the costumes at all. Then when you go into the meeting you have to be very careful that you don’t start pitching something that is completely the wrong image for what they want. I do a lot of research before I have a meeting. You need to understand who the director and the producer are as filmmakers. You have to find out what it is that they are looking for. They have to understand that your ego is not so big that you aren’t going to be a collaborator. You can’t be someone who has only one vision—your own.

I find that with actors you need to do as much research as they have about their character. You need to help by coming in with ideas about back story—where was a character born, where did they go to school, did they go to college or drop out, what kind of family did they come from? You want to hear what the actor has thought about, or what they haven’t thought about. You have to become enveloped in that character in order to design for them, and steer them away from, “Does my bum look big in this?” But at the same time, you do have to be incredibly sympathetic to the fact that these actors are up there on the big screen, and they’re putting it out there in such a big way. I think they are so brave doing what they do. The best thing I can do for them is be honest and try to make them look good and look right. When you work with a really good actress like Nicole Kidman, she will do anything. She is not a vain person at all. She will go anywhere with her character and doesn’t necessarily have to look beautiful, as long as she trusts you.

In The Railway Man (2013), Nicole plays a middle-aged, working-class English woman and she really wanted to be true to the character. She didn’t want to wear Burberry from head to toe. It was a period film and she wanted period and she wanted dowdy. Maybe it’s her maturity, and maybe she knows that to be a great actress she must transform herself. She always has the red carpet to look glamorous, so she doesn’t have to do it in the movies.

Q: Stephan, do you always have a vision when you approach a film?

SE: As a writer, there is always an image in your head. I’ll discuss what I think that image is and then hand it over and say, “Now you add to it. You bring what you can bring to the table.” It also comes with being older and wiser that when someone has had a better idea, you acknowledge it and say, “Yeah, that’s a better idea, do it.” A lot of people are very frightened on a set of being trumped or someone having an idea that’s better than theirs. Rather than saying, “No, I hate it,” which is what the majority of people will do when they are challenged, they should reward someone and say in front of everybody, “Better idea. Let’s go with it.” You should see what that does to a crew. They feel rewarded, not just for the person who had the idea, but for everybody else. They see that the director’s ego is not getting in the way of a better idea.

Q: Lizzy, when you come into a franchise like the Mission: Impossible films, and design the second film, do they want to keep things or change things?

LG: They wanted to change it at that stage. Tom Cruise wanted to try something completely different. Everyone was on pretty much the same page. That film was incredibly difficult because of how long it took to get all the stunt work done. Tom tries very hard not to come into the room with his huge body of work behind him. He wants to be open to a new designer and a new direction. He doesn’t want to keep creating the same character. Tom had a lot of physical things that he needed to do in the film, so he made me aware of that. Once I understood that, I was able to make him look like the movie star he is, but still be able to do the stunts. Learning all about the harnesses used in stunt work is another education.

Q: Can we talk about the famous dress made of Gold American Express cards that you wore to the Oscars the year that you won for Priscilla? It is one of the most controversial moments of Oscar fashion history.

LG: It was one of the many ideas that got thrown around for Priscilla. It wasn’t something we put an enormous amount of focus on because we knew that American Express would never agree to it.

Q: Was your original idea to construct it like a Paco Rabanne dress, connecting the cards with metal wire?

LG: It’s the only way you can construct it with credit cards. But had we even considered that construction for the film? I don’t think we even got that far because we didn’t think it was ever going to happen. But then the Academy Awards came, and literally a few days before, I was still looking for something to wear. I just couldn’t wear one of those dresses. It just seemed ludicrous to go in some big gown. It just felt so wrong. Back in those days, when you drove to the Academy Awards, you went through one of the worst parts of Los Angeles. In your limo, in a $35,000 dress, you pass homeless people that have slept on that road for most of their lives. The whole thing struck me as being quite bizarre. Of course, it really is much more complex than that.

At the very last minute, I thought I’m just going to wear the American Express dress. I thought I would never get permission from them, but I was going to do it anyway. We may have changed the cards or something. But then at the very last minute, they agreed to it. With a security guard, they sent hundreds of American Express cards that had my name on them. They arrived the day before the ceremony. I told a few people I was going to do it, and the vast majority said, “Don’t do it.” But it was too late and I didn’t have anything else to wear. If I’d had something else in my cupboard I probably would have pulled that at the last minute. I had put all my eggs in that basket. I thought there was no chance in the world we were going to win.

Q: Even if you didn’t win, you would have made the fashion pages the next day.

LG: As many people loved it, that many people hated it. That hurt my feelings a bit. They really misunderstood it or they took it too seriously. How could you take that seriously? They wondered what I was doing—was I insulting the Academy Awards? There were quite a few actresses that felt I was insulting them. If anything, I was insulting myself by wearing the thing. But if you pull a stunt like that, you have to expect that you’re going to upset people, and I was a bit too young to understand that. Now I do. I understand that I did upset some people. And I really inspired some other people. It became really controversial, but that wasn’t what I set out to do. The Academy Awards are an incredible part of filmmaking and I never meant to insult them.

Colin Firth in The Railway Man (2013). Costume design by Lizzy Gardiner.

Q: But you were trying to make a statement about the commercialization of Oscar fashions. Did you think everyone was going to be in on that statement?

LG: They didn’t realize that and they didn’t see it that way. And, of course, now it’s gotten much worse. I believe now it’s more about the dress on the red carpet than it is about the film. I don’t know what you do about it. But then in focusing on the dresses, it’s also put more focus on costume design.

Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939). Costume design by Vera West.