Dressing to kill

Published on January 31, 2008

She started her career in the early 1970s as a fashion advisor and eventually moved on to theatre costume design, earning fame for her work on Sting's "Bring on the Night" world tour.

A two-time Oscar winner - for "Chicago" in 2002 and "Memoirs of a Geisha" in 2006 - with nominations for several Academy and Bafta awards under her belt, Colleen Atwood is back in the limelight again, nominated for her work on the musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street".

She's collaborated several times with the movie's director Tim Burton, on such films as "Planet of the Apes", "Ed Wood", "Edward Scissorhands", "Mars Attacks", "Sleepy Hollow" and "Big Fish".

She chats about working on "Sweeney Todd" and how she came up with the costumes.

It must have been quite exciting to work on this project with Tim ...

I was very excited because it's a project that has been around for a while and I was thrilled when I heard Tim was going to do it, because I thought, "He's the man for it. He'll do a great job."

Do you work together to bring his original vision to the screen, or just take orders?

He has an overall vision, but not specifics, you know? I'd say he knows the feeling and the texture that he wants but he doesn't really say, "This person's this and this person's that." He lets everybody have their input.

What was the inspiration for Sacha Baron Cohen's bizarre character [Signor Adolfo Pirelli]?

It was like the Sacha Baron Cohen Show. He had a real process with developing who he thought he was and how he wanted to look - so we started with the fat stomach and ended up with a big-breasted, sort of skinny-legged chicken. But we played around a bit. He had a lot of fun with it.

Did the desaturated look of the film affect your choices of colour and texture?

Yes, it did. I've worked with the desaturation process on other films that I've done. It's a little different but the same technique. So, I know what the camera and what light does with that process. I also had to bear in mind the way film these days goes to digital prints when it's distributed, which makes a dark thing darker and light things come forward. So, I used shiny materials and did screens and stuff so they wouldn't just pop out of the background. 

What exactly is the era depicted in the film?

Very loosely, probably 1820 to 1860. It was a chunk of time there that we pulled from.

Where did you find your reference points for the costuming of that era?

We used books, character drawings, which I really love because they say more about people sometimes than these great pictures of people posing in really stiff clothes. Reading and, of course, Internet research is now a huge part of researching film and everything else.

You can't go out and buy clothes from that period, can you?

There's not that much stuff left. It's in museums and it's also very, very small. It doesn't fit people today. We're much bigger than we used to be. It wouldn't even fit our children. All the principal clothes are made. The extras' clothes I made maybe 10 per cent of, and the rest were rented from costume houses in the UK.

You've worked with Johnny Depp on numerous occasions before, and of course, he is a very stylish man. Does he ever get involved with suggestions that go against the way you might envision him?

He's not considering how cool he is with his own style. He really lets you create the character. I mean, he'll have input about it.

What happens to these costumes after the shooting is done?

Warner Bros has the costumes in their archive, and they have the best kind of costume archive of any studio. They're really preserved. It's pretty amazing. You go there and you see stuff from "My Fair Lady", and they've really taken care of it. A lot of other studios haven't.

We often hear from actors that they like to keep their costumes. 

I've worked on shows where we just gave them their stuff, like the Edward Scissorhands costumes. There were only three, and luckily, Johnny got one. So, it just depends on the movie, but now, [studios] are kind of coming back to keeping them more. But some actors have in their deals that they get their costumes, so they keep them in their personal archives. Johnny has all of his costumes.

Fox-Warner Bros

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