Mary Zophres
Gangster Squad has some of the most lavish and beautiful costumes of the year so far and they are thanks to the work of Mary Zophres.
We caught up with the costume designer to chat about her work on the movie, her research and her inspiration.
- When you begin a new project what is the starting process to begin designing the costumes - do you do through a similar process with every film you do?
Yes I do go through a similar project with every movie that I do. First of all I read through the script and then I break it down; that helps me internalise it and learn more deeply what all these characters about. It allows me to build the character and what motivates them and give them back-stories if they don’t have them in the script.
Then I start doing research - I do the same research process regardless of whether it is a contemporary movie, science fiction, movie or period film - because it gives me something visual to sink my teeth into.
I then do some sketching and put some character boards and scene boards and mood boards together. I then have conversations with the director to make sure that I am going in the right direction. Then it is pretty much ‘on your marks, get set, go’ and you start full on.
By having that base it gives me a foundation and I have a clear idea of the direction and the look of the film. That has always been my process and it has always worked for me.
- Research was my next question as the film is set in the forties so I was wondering what research you did into this period and the fashion of the time?
For Emma Stone’s character I looked into Vogue magazine and McCall’s, McCall’s is a bigger deal back then than it was today, so that is where I looked for fashion.
In the same ways there are tabloid magazines today there was an equivalent called Photoplay and most of it was picture of celebrities out and about in town. That was a huge help because most of our movie takes place in nightclubs and so that was informative.
This is based on a Los Angeles Times piece that was taken from a true story, so some of the characters in the film really did exist; Mickey Cohen did exist and Josh Brolin’s character John O’Mara is also real. So there was a fair amount of research on that that was a help.
Catalogues of the time are also very useful as they were a place that people would shop and sold well made clothes that were pretty much on trend - so they are very useful.
- This is a very male driven movie and there are a lot of suits and fedoras so how go about giving the main characters their own style despite the cast that they are wearing similar things?
For me Josh Brolin’s character was a legitimate really good cop but also a very single minded cop; he was on the police force where he wore a uniform before becoming a detective.
He is all about protecting and serving and he is all about his job and he doesn’t really want to think about what he has to wear. To me he found a suit bought four of them and wears those suits like a uniform.
He doesn’t worry about what he is wearing and what he does wear is simple and practical and a sense of formality. He is also saving for a family and he has a wife.
Ryan Gosling’s character is the opposite of that as he goes out every night and he thinks about his clothes and spends quite a bit of his income on clothes.
So I started thinking about the kind of people that this character would be influenced by, so the likes of Carey Grant and Errol Flynn and the movie stars of those days.
So I distinguished him through pattern, fabric choices and cut.
Josh Brolin’s suit did look flattering on his but Ryan’s was tailored because I think his character would have had a tailored suit.
If he had bought something off the rack he would have had someone measure it to him properly.
Michael Pena is a new detective and he is sort of cobbled together. I imagined that he had the trousers but borrowed a jacket from his dad because they are the same size. But he is never in a suit.
Giovanni Ribisi is a little more put together and a little more controlled; his look is tighter and there is an element of nerd to his costume. We found some clothing that had been made at the time but had never been sold and Giovanni walked right into it.
So each look really did depend on the character and while, as you say, most of them are wearing fedoras but I was hoping to carve out an individual characteristic for each member of the squad.
- Emma Stone is the one of few women who has main roles in this film and she wears some beautiful dresses so where did you start as you were developing the look for this character?
This film is set in 1949 and so I started looking through 1948/9 Vogue’s - that was right after The New Look hit. I love The New Look and it is one of my favourite images in the history of fashion but Emma’s build… up until that part she was known for playing characters young then herself or the same age as her; young women.
This character was supposed to be young but there as something more mature about her and I felt that she was a cross between Lauren Bacall and Rita Hayworth.
So there is something very womanly about those stars and Emma had never really played that on film, so we wanted to make her womanly.
The New Look didn’t really work for the way that she was built so I started looking back further to mid forties and early forties where the cuts of the gowns were a little different.
So Rita Hayworth in Gilda was a very big jumping off point for me and that really was how I wanted Emma to look. So I backdated her a little bit. But she still looks very glamorous.
We knew from the very beginning we knew that we were going to have to build all of Emma’s gowns.
- Finally what is next for you?
I am currently working on Christopher Nolan’s next movie. It is exciting as I have never worked with him before but I am a huge fan of his films.
Gangster Squad is out on DVD & Blu-Ray now.