Moulin Rouge
Production and costume designer Catherine Martin
A film as brash, lush and visually complex as Moulin Rouge (2001) has a keen aesthetic sensibility behind it: the one belonging to the Australian husband and wife team of writer/director Baz Luhrmann and production/costume designer Catherine Martin (they are also two of the ambitious musical's producers). Luhrmann and Martin founded the Sydney-based multimedia company, Bazmark, in 1997, and have set out to put their distinctive creative signature (described by Martin as "dedication to detail and to pushing the boundaries of what is new and re-examining the old") on movies, music, theater and the world of design. For Moulin Rouge, Catherine Martin functions as the film's overall artistic director, the person ultimately responsible for everything the camera sees.
She began her career as a costume designer at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, and reunites with her NIDA classmate, Angus Strathie, to create the audacious costumes for the lavish Moulin Rouge. [Martin would eventually win the film's two Academy Awards — out of eight nominations — for art direction and costume design.] Luhrmann and Martin began their creative partnership working on avant garde stage productions, including La Boheme at the Australian Opera (which will be restaged for a Broadway run). Martin's set designs have ranged from the intimate (Paris runway fashion) to the grandiose (creating a backlot streetscape for Twentieth Century Fox's new studio in Sydney, where Moulin Rouge was filmed). Here, Catherine Martin discusses costume design and the increasing interdependence of fashion and cinema.
THE CINEMA GIRL: Obviously, you do a lot of research for a film like this, but do you come to a point when you say, 'I have this all information in my head, I'm throwing it out and just going forward with what I think it should be?'
CATHERINE MARTIN: You always try and keep it in your mind, and Angus and I were classically trained in the sense that to us, in a period movie, everything on camera that you see in close-up is hand-stitched as per the period: the edge of a bonnet would be hand-rolled, the bones in a corset would be whale bones, a kind of pretentious viewpoint that we would usually take in approaching period. We were forced by Baz's vision to take, I think, a much better road, which was to take the period and the feeling of what it would have been like for a nineteenth century person to actually be in the Moulin Rouge at that point. So it meant that we stopped being pretentious designers saying, 'In 1899 everybody would have blah blah blah blah blah,' and say, 'How do we communicate the excitement of the can-can to a contemporary audience?' And we made certain rules, like we could only use what had been available in the nineteenth century, but we could use it out of context, say.
TCG: Just how different is a costume designer's job than a fashion designer's?
CM: With fashion, they're more akin to a fine artist in a sense, although they do have pressures of the commercial world upon them. But it's very much about their own vision in a given time and place, whereas a costume designer is working on a story and trying to illustrate and help and support the characters. So it's very much an applied art form where they're dealing with a series of problems. You might have to make someone who's 15 look 35 or someone who's 35 look 15 through the use of illusion, illusion through clothes or in collaboration with your colleagues in hair and makeup. So the difference is that you're dealing with a script and a story and hopefully you're trying to make that script and story as plausible as possible within the circumstances that they exist. So you can have very realistic costumes if that's necessary, or outlandish ones. I think that if you look at something like The Lion King onstage, they're not real costumes, but within the context of the piece, they totally support the story and they expand the characterization of each of those animals.
TCG: But don't costume designers sometimes set the fashion trends? Remember how much the Annie Hall look impacted women's fashion in 1977 after that movie came out?
CM: I think one of the interesting things — and why clothes in movies are so powerful — is the Annie Hall look is the result of Diane Keaton wearing the clothes. And it's her attitude, it's her ability as an actor. That's why actors are so appealing because they project something that attracts us, they kind of channel a feeling of the times or a type of character that allows us to live a story through them. So you and I wouldn't be the same in Annie's clothes as Diane Keaton: she creates this character, this persona, and the glamour of the persona that goes with it. I think that is very interesting because that is why fashion designers now turn to actors to make clothes live at premieres or at the Oscars. Because there's something intangible about the personality of that person that brings something extra to the clothes. I mean, clothes are just clothes until someone wears them. Actors, because it's their profession to project personality and to project story, kind of push those clothes into the stratosphere. And you want to own, as a person, a piece of that glamour. I know I do.
TCG: Do you see a blurring of the lines between costume designer and fashion designer, particularly when a fashion designer's work is used to define a character?
CM: I think that with extraordinary artists like Gaultier or Galiano or Thierry Mugler in their couture collections — which are the expressions of their individual visions — you certainly see themes and costumes and personas and characters explored through clothes. So I think you're right in saying that it's a blurring of those lines. Also, if you were doing a modern day show and you were actually buying clothes off the rack, that's a great debate. Who's designing the clothes if you buy a CK suit and put an actress in it? Are you the costume designer or is Calvin Klein? That is an interesting point of discussion. But I suppose it's about the eye that chooses the garment for that particular scene on that particular actor. I've had the pleasure of working with some extraordinary stylists in my time, and often it's difficult to explain to studios. They think it's a necessary actor's perk, but sort of meaningless. But when you meet someone who has that ability to sit through 500 collections and pick all that stuff, you are incredibly grateful for that person, because it's their editorial ability. It's about the collaborative aspect, that you somehow make a difference in the whole big alchemy that is the show.
TCG: A number of costume elements that you use in Moulin Rouge — corsets, for example — are still couture staples. But is there anything that you and Angus designed that might cross over to the runway?
CM: I certainly think that if the movie’s influential in any way, it's to a large degree from the effect of the personality that Nicole [Kidman] projects in the clothes. [Before an all-important rendezvous] she’s in this fabulous red dress and it’s meant to be the most spectacular dress in the show, and you’re focused on it and trying to make it work perfectly that it’s always a little bit off. But then in the movie, she turns around and says, 'How do I look?' And you say, 'Pretty damn fine, actually.' That is why the power of the clothes in Moulin Rouge will have an effect, because of the personality of the actor that imbues something into a garment which, at the end of the day, is only a red dress.
TCG: So your actors get a say in what they wear onscreen?
CM: With every actor in this movie, and every other movie I've worked on with Baz, every actor has input into how their costume's developed, what they wear in what scene. Because ultimately, the clothes are on a hanger, they're just clothes. It's the actors that make them come alive.
TCG: Does being a costume designer affect the way you dress?
CM: Baz will often say to me, 'Why are you wearing that outfit?' Or question a choice of my own in my life, and I realize it's a place of attitude. I'm thinking, 'I look like Carole Lombard in 1935,' and of course I don't, but in my mind I'm in that place. How many times do you go and get a garment out of the wardrobe and you put it on, and it's a state of mind thing. And if you've got the panache in than moment to carry it off, it looks great. But two hours later if you weren't in the same state of mind, you wouldn't have it.
© 2001, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.