This is Jim Silk, and this is Mary Voet, costume designer, and I guess we've lost Jim Bissell,
but I think we can still do it.
I actually am a production designer myself.
I didn't do the rocketeer and that kind of stuff, but I did do the Terminator 2 3D that's
up at the Universal, which is a pretty big show.
I did Species, which was a pretty good science fiction movie, so I have a sense of how these
things are done.
Okay, yeah.
Is there one more tall chair?
I'll just stand.
So we have one mic.
You can share that?
Thank you.
I need to look at you guys.
Why don't we start?
So Jim, I think the first question is for you.
You know, we started this with me, no actually we don't seem to have the other guest.
As you remember, I was saying that what I find so interesting about these two pictures is
the sense of the kind of sincerity and the attempt to really do the original now.
You know the work of Alex Raymond better than, certainly better than me and maybe better
than anyone here.
Did you know Alex Raymond actually?
No.
No.
I know Al Williamson, who followed, okay, no, I know Al Williamson, who followed Raymond.
Well, he was the foremost, or he did what I'm trying to explain in all ways.
Well, he's a contemporary of Frizzetta's and of mine, who did the EC Comics.
They all grew up on Flash Gordon when I first met Al.
That was all he wanted to talk about, that and Eric Wolfgang Korngold, I guess.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, it's the serials and Robin Hood and the Deeper Baghdad by Corda.
Those are the primary films that influence most of the illustrators from my generation,
along with the comic strips and the Sunday comic strips primarily, of which Alex Raymond
was the best draftsman.
I can't tell you how much, you know, it's very hard to explain how erotic that is for
a forties boy.
When I first wrote about Betty Page, I tried to explain that, you know, every fifth grader
today has seen more naked women than the entire male population of the 1940s.
So it was, you know, a belly button was a big thing, even in those days, LA Times would
airbrush them out, I don't know, but anyway, it was, and it still got in a sense of not
only, you know, Raymond's personal erotica, but it's very sensual, and his line is the
drawings are very sensual.
Anyway, we loved it.
Okay, go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to say that to me, I don't know the comic strips as well as you
do, but I'm a big fan of Prince Valiant, which you probably know, Valiant is unbelievably
well drawn.
There are different guys, but Alex Raymond to me is sort of like the Bernini of comic
art.
The way the bodies move, the way they're shaped, the way they twist in space, it's, there's
nothing else like it.
And I, so that's my point.
Do you think, is this where these films come from?
Is this a matter of?
That and King Kong, you know, King Kong is there too.
And he drew his women naked and then put clothes on them.
You know that game from the costume field.
And that's Frazetta.
Frazetta does exactly the same thing, Rom Naked and Gustav Klimt and a few other people,
but then he would drape it on them so you can always see the female figure.
And he did some pin ups for Esquire and a lot of other things.
He had about three or four periods of art.
The first stuff you showed in the preview was the early, very, very primitive.
And then it gets into a very, what we call the pulp feeling with lots of lines, lots
of movement, lots of forward movement.
You're talking about the Buck Rogers drawings?
No, no, the Flash Gordon.
The way he drew it and he kept changing his periods.
He ended up in the Ice Age with Freya, probably his epitome of that period, Queen Freya.
And then he went to war and then he came back and did a comic strip called Rip Kirby, in
which he brought back Prince Baron and Rip Kirby and so forth.
He tried to do an adventure story with a detective called Rip Kirby.
As Milton Kenneth said, neither Raymond nor I realized that after World War II you couldn't
do that anymore, so forth.
In fact, nobody did until Frasetta came along in the 60s.
Your turn.
Let me just ask, what do you mean, couldn't do what?
Didn't get that sense of romantic adventure and that naivete that's in there, it's, you
know, it's...
Didn't you do a galtro strip called Drago?
No, that's Hogarth.
Byron Hogarth, who did Tarzan after Foster, did Roster, right?
And it was also at a very...
Very erotic.
Drago is very erotic and it almost looks like a fetish drawing.
I've not seen much of that, but I'd always connected it with Alex Raymond.
One more, as a filmmaker, because you've really done all this stuff and you probably
saw this picture when it came out.
I saw one serial, I worked on Saturdays, I couldn't go to the Saturday Mountain Ace,
and I saw one serial which had the Clayman in it and I didn't find out what happened
until about 1952, 53, when it was on television, really bad 16 millimeter prints.
I stayed home sick from my job at NBC to watch them.
But now you've seen both, you've seen the black and white.
Yeah, that's great.
Do you see the connection between the two?
Oh yeah, yeah.
You see the...
Yeah, and they tried the story.
I could... the second film tries too much for me, it tries to put eight, nine years
of Flash Gordon into one movie and it's overdone.
The first one sticks with really the first story of the comic strip and so forth.
And I miss them.
It's really a high school romance set in an exotic world, it's not sci-fi, it's high
adventure.
Yeah.
Buck Rogers was the most sci-fi.
Yeah.
I had more of the gadgets and stuff, but well, and it's a formula that George Stevens explained
to me.
I was questioning him about Gangadin, which is full of this exotic world, and I was saying
how can you come up with these grotesque monsters like the Mad Moolah and so forth and the snake
pit and so forth.
And we were sitting in the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills at the time and he said, Jim, look
around you.
And we were sitting there and there's all those Hollywood barracudas there and so then
I had to laugh at myself because that's where you take it from, right from life.
But then he said, but there is a formula, is that into that exotic adventure you throw
a domestic problem and Gangadin, it was the fact that one of the sergeants wants to quit
and marry Joan Fontaine, in which they borrowed from Front Page, Hector MacArthur, who wrote
the first script for Gangadin.
And Flash Gordon is essentially that, you've got high adventure and Flash goes into a new
world, whether it's the witch queen who intoxicates him so he can't remember anything, or Undine
who lives underwater, who keeps him underwater, they take him away from Dale, who gets very
jealous, which is your basic high school romance, Freya gets him into the ice world, or after
him for years.
Anyway, that makes it work for me.
When they first, our Williamson first did it, they left that out and I got very upset
at him.
Go ahead.
I talk too much.
Let me ask you, I know you so well and I know what's interesting to me about the way you
work as a costume designer is that you work so much, you always start in my opinion with
the silhouette.
You're always finding the right body shape and creating it with shoulder pads or corseting
or something.
And that's really sort of what cartoonists do is because they create silhouettes.
That's why particularly the classic cartoonists often just draw the silhouettes, they don't
bother with fileresting.
So how do you think that relates?
You know all this material, what do you think of these pictures in a sense of how that creates
the...
Well, these costumes are very sculptural and when I was watching this at home, you get
very distracted by the color.
And so I watched it with the color off so it was black and white and then you can really
see the silhouette, the shapes of the shoulders and the girls.
It's a very graphic and you should, if you look at what I'm going to do one day, look
at it in black and white because it's really fascinating to see it that way.
Well, I don't know if it's better because it looks pretty good on the big screen.
But each one of these costumes, and there must be like 5,000 costumes in this movie,
each one would take a month, maybe 50 people a month to make.
So I suspect, and Danella Donati who did the costumes at Cosme Designer, you know, Philanese
Cosme Designer, I'm sure he has a lot of contacts in China and India and I bet all that beadwork
and there was miles of beadwork was done in India because you just couldn't do it in England.
You couldn't do it?
Maybe some, but I suspect in China and India is it's just the volume of work, like even
one of Ming's costumes, the whole collar was all bugle beads, it must have like 5,000 bugle
beads in it.
And each one has been put on by hand.
I mean it's an enormous amount of work.
Every one of those costumes should be in a museum, I mean they're gorgeous.
And for some, I don't know what the reasoning was behind them, but they're designed for
a musical or a rock opera.
So I'm surprised there was more music in this movie because you wouldn't design that and
make that in bugle beads.
You could do it in metal, you could do it sculpted, there are a lot of easier ways to
create that look than bugle beads which is like the hardest way to create that look.
So maybe in the beginning they thought there'd be more music in it or they were going for
a rock opera look, but it was obviously intentional with a huge amount of work to do it that way.
Well, you know what's interesting is the sets are by Danela Donati as well and there are
so many people and so many outfits that it's almost like that, do you consider that part
of the set?
Costumes?
Yeah, think about it with those miles of women, everyone in a different costume and
they're covering quite a bit, you know what I mean?
So all you're really left with is the ceilings and the doors.
I don't know what I've seen in the movie, it was such elaborate costumes and the work
and even the extras are just fantastic and there's a lot of Fellini designs in it like
the people in the background, there was one thing that Visconti used to do in his movies
where they would have an elaborate dress and then they'd have a long kind of veil over
the whole thing and they had that in several of the background characters, it's just gorgeous
but they're right out of Visconti films that I think Donati must have done some Visconti
films.
Did you guys get who Fellini the character was, that little guy, did you know who that
was?
That's Deep Roy who turns up in Charlie, he's still around, he turns up in Charlie in Chaco
Factory.
An interesting side note is that Federico Fellini wrote Flash Gordon in Italy, he wrote it.
It was called Guy Leclerc and Mussolini said you couldn't use the American comic strips
so they recreated them and that's, well White Sheik is about that kind of, and Fellini wrote
Flash Gordon.
Was it redrawn as well?
No, no, didn't draw it, somebody else redrew it from the Raymond, yeah, it was against
the law to do it anyway.
And it was Mussolini that they didn't need to pay for it either, that was the point I
tried to make about that actress because she had done, they made a version of the Postman
who always rings twice in Italy without paying for it either during the war.
So what do you think the costumes do to the story and create for the, I mean, but compared
to the other movie, because the costumes in the other movie are inexpensive costumes,
but they are very, what do you think of the first picture?
Well, I happen to like that look of the early, yeah, the Deco feeling and we talk a little
bit about it, sort of like, it's kind of a loose version of Russian constructionism
which I really like, like Elita, which was in the beginning of The Real, that, I don't
know if you remember, it's very graphic and very simple and very Russian looking.
And it's the style that I really like that you don't see in movies very often, but not
that they really do that in the early Flash Gordon, but there is a little bit of that.
And because it's in black and white, that helps a great deal.
And it controls it and they probably were not shot, the costumes were probably in color.
So I'd be curious to know what colors they were wearing to get that really high contrast
look if they used red for black or, because you can't really, you can't really use black
and white and gray, so you have to use specific colors that photograph really well for black
and white.
I know I did a commercial once in black and white and it was very tricky, you probably
know a lot about it, to get it to look black and white and sharp and like to have the blacks
really rich and black and whites, whites, yeah.
But the thing that amazed me looking at the early show is how unembarrassed the actors
were to wear, like the guy who was the scientist, he had this little jumpsuit on with a big
star.
And if I tried to put an actor in that today, they would like run screaming at the trailer.
Bare-legged too.
Bare-legged and just like skinny legs.
But these guys were just, you know, they're just proud of themselves and there's something
really charming about that.
I don't think you can get people to do that in town.
Well, I have to say that for me, part of the whole sincerity, both of these films, this
doesn't really have much to do with the design, but the acting is incredible in the sense
that they take it seriously and they never wink, you know, and there is some stuff in
there.
You know, the second film was written by Lorenzo Semple, who's a guy who's famous for writing
the, you know, Dino's King Kong and writing the bad man to be shot.
If you see an interview with him and it is on the DVD, he proudly says it's meant to
be campy.
It is campy.
Ha, ha, ha.
So you get this football game and you get these kind of jokes that are, to me, they're
awful.
It doesn't really wreck the movie for me.
But the actors, I mean, what's his name?
Timothy Dalton.
That's great.
It's clearly doing Laurence Olivier with complete conviction.
Can you imagine, I'm sure there are actors in the house, how you play that scene where
he suddenly becomes Flash's friend and he says, I'll follow you anyway, and he makes
it work.
Yeah.
It's astonishing.
Yeah.
And to a certain extent, it's true of the actors in the first film as well.
Everybody, and they're not good actors, but they're so sincere.
Yeah.
And was that sort of, you know, Robin Hood thing?
Was that from the comic?
The Robin Hood look?
Yeah.
That was from the comic.
Yeah.
He, Baron, is in a jungle.
That's his world, is in a great big jungle with those oversized trees.
Not nearly as complex as this jungle.
But I'm just going to note, for me, though, I saw in the first film costumes from Sign
of the Cross.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And I got Roman helmets, and then from Sheave, the Marion Cooper Sheave, particularly the
priest has got the same hood on that, and that lame shawl from the helmet, that's right
out of Sign of the Cross.
I saw them, well, they couldn't have made them all just for that film.
The budget couldn't have done it.
No, they had to use everything that Hollywood had.
Yeah.
It's so funny, because I had a long list of films, and I had several biblical films
that I wanted to include.
I was already killing Dennis, as it was, I couldn't put any more films in.
But there is so much of that, the arena, the gladiator stuff.
It's the same, Joi Zell was the woman in Sign of the Cross and also in Just Imagine.
Now you can correct me on, I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that something
like, for instance, Aura's Helmet, which is very distinct, is exactly from the comic
book, though, right?
Yeah.
They tried to keep it as close to the comic.
It is not as naked, though, as the comics.
They got in, she's topless in some of them, and there's no whipping, which was very big.
Whipping, oh, whipping in the comics, yeah, but Raymond was big on whipping.
He did it in Jungle Jim, which was the top panel over Flash Gordon, and in, not Secret
A...
X-9?
No.
No, Secret A, X-9, there's a lot of action in something.
That was written by Dashel Hammett, I don't know if you know that, yeah.
The first part, he did it, I can't remember the names.
He ghosted Blondie and another comic strip that took place in Africa, but he was big
on whipping.
So was Kniff in the early days.
It's kind of like pre-code comics.
Well, that's why we included the Fumanchu stuff, because obviously that Murnawai character
was very much kind of an aura thing.
There are so many of these things that's floated in through big budget, low budget, any kind
of picture, and the Flash Gordon sort of synthesizes all the best of that stuff for
me.
Who was the DP on this, do you remember?
On this other?
On this other?
The last movie.
Was it Gil Taylor?
Yeah.
Yeah, Gil Taylor.
The director photography.
Who my research in the case was not so crazy about Daniel D'Aunty.
Well, you could see they didn't get along, because he was not helping out the costumes
at all.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Because they should have been mind boggling.
They should have been like, you shouldn't need sunglasses.
It was so much glitter and so much stuff on, and they were not shining.
I'm sure D'Aunty was like ready to kill him, because that stuff should have been blazing.
And it wasn't.
Interesting.
Interesting.
I never thought about that.
I mean, it looked pretty eye-catching, but it really should have been blazing, because
I've never seen so many sequins and rhinestones and gold.
Gold everywhere.
Yeah.
Othered me.
So, that's interesting that they didn't get along.
What do you think of the, I mean, Ming's costumes seem like women's costumes to me.
Do you agree?
Men's versus, is D'Aunty better at women's than men's costumes?
Many costume designers are better at one or the other.
Do you see any difference?
I didn't see.
I didn't think it was feminine.
No.
Ming's costume?
The black?
No, I didn't think so.
No, I mean, the red thing with the huge hood behind his head, covered with bugle beads.
Well, that was really, wasn't that very close design to the first one?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That didn't bug me.
No.
Okay.
Just curious.
I thought they were, I was just astonished by the amount of work on those guys flying
with the wings.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And all that.
I mean, that stuff is so hard to make, and it takes so long to make it, and it was so
beautifully done.
If you're talking about the Hawkman, you also have to think of nine or 10 of those guys
on wires in front of an enormous blue screen, day after day after day, trying to make the
wings work.
I mean, this must have been a huge nightmare.
And you can see how it really strained the technique in those days.
So you see a lot of matte lines and a lot of blue screen problems.
Not that it hurts anything, but it was, yeah, there's miles of work in every bit of it.
And you know, it's just, the quality of the work is really beautiful, and Donani was really
famous for that in all of his movies.
The quality of the work is just astonishing, as well as the design, and a lot of it was
very facet of looking the girl, but you know, the princess was right out of a book.
I'd say politically that Donani dominated the director, which happens, the famous Menzies
did and Gone with the Wind.
Since you were also away, I think.
Yeah, I don't know anything about that story, but it's, but I don't think the clothes overpowered
the actors.
I thought the actors were very strong, but I tend to take the side of the costumes anyway.
Well, you want an opinion.
I think when you play at camp, you're in danger of, you know, a one-joke movie, you know.
That's the way they started the adventures of Robin Hood.
William Kigley was directing it, and Henry Blanky was the producer, and he told me he
was playing it tongue-in-cheek, and that lasts a very short time.
As you said, some of the actors are playing it straight, and then it's much funnier when
they do that, which is the way to do the first film.
But in the second one, and the way it's written is to laugh at itself from time to time.
That's when I think it fails.
But I would like more control.
I mean, under the color, like red shoes, the tails are hot, and you know, lots more control
of the color.
Well, you know, you're also a screenwriter, which, I mean, you're a multi, I mean, as,
what do you think of the screenwriting in, particularly in the second picture?
Do you feel it's a, do you feel, do you go for all that sort of?
Well, you know, simple work, because he gave them what the producers wanted, there's a
certain kind of sexuality in it that they want, and there's political, they like the
jokes, they wanted to get the drugs in, there's a lot of period stuff that he's trying to
get into it and so forth.
I just think they should have kept it simple, but it's amazing that it got made, actually.
On the other hand, you know, it's a, but he's good at that, and that's what they wanted.
Well, he's a very self-effacing man when you see him in these things.
I'm not a fan of the work, really, but I'm a fan of his personality, because he really
takes responsibility for those things, and he's perfectly willing to talk about it.
And I'm sure most people know, most of you guys know, that they're making a movie out
of Princess of Mars, which I'm very curious about, a friend of mine is designing it, and
he was going to be here, but he's out of town.
And he says they are really trying to do the Victorian, romantic, weird, you know, exotic
adventure as it's written.
But who knows?
And it's a, do you know about this picture?
It's being produced by a Pixar, it's a Pixar film, directed by one of their directors, a
character which I'm sure David knows, which, who's directing it?
Andrew Stanton.
And he did Finding Nemo.
So he's doing an enormous live-action picture now, you know, for Disney Pixar.
You know, I think we're starting to get, you have a question, sir?
I never saw this movie when it came out, and my impression was that it was not that big
of a hit at the time, is that right?
The question is, was this picture a hit at the time?
I don't know, I don't remember really, I saw it then, but did you know that?
It wasn't.
I'm sure somebody knows.
Rick?
Well, they were released differently though.
It wasn't a huge hit, but it got released very differently, you know, there were many
more films in release, it's a whole different system, you can't compare it to the way they
released films today, you know, with 2,000, 3,000 theaters, it'd go out in about 5,000,
6, 700 theaters.
It didn't last very long.
I made movies in that period, I know.
What happens?
Let's ask Rick Mitchell, who does this stuff?
How did it do, Rick, first time around?
It did okay for a universal picture.
Did it do okay?
That's fine.
Did I see someone else?
Did anyone have one?
I thought, what?
There is somebody?
Yeah.
I can't see.
We'll just speak up, please.
Yeah, did everyone get what he said, did everyone hear him?
Yeah, Fori Ackerman who, unfortunately, is gone, and Ray Bradbury is still around.
That's his world up there, yeah.
Yeah, I've always been in love with all of this sort of, there's a real wonderful quality
to this.
I can't remember if I talked to someone in the lobby or here about this question of George
Lucas wanting to do Flash Gordon, did we talk about that, no?
I've always found it amazing because Lucas has often said that he did Star Wars because
he couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon, and that if he'd been able to get the rights
to Flash Gordon, he would have done it.
I can't think, now, Star Wars, whatever you think of it, for all its virtues, I can't
think of anything that's more different than that from Flash Gordon.
Star Wars has none of the things that, to me, make Flash Gordon really interesting,
which is the sort of arch quality and the sensuality and the craziness of all those
things that I don't even really feel like Star Wars attempts to do.
Star Wars is a different kind of thing.
To me, it's closer to Buck Rogers.
Do you agree, Jim?
You know more about this.
Well, he loves the machinery, and there's more machinery in Buck Rogers.
He loved the, you know, Frasetta's Buck Rogers covers for famous venues.
That's one of the images that Frank Frasetta did is Buck and Wilma in the front with a
great big red planet behind them, and George Lucas went to Frasetta.
That was one of the images he wanted, and he tried to get Frasetta to do some things,
but Frank didn't buy into it at that time and so forth.
And Bradbury would love this because he did a lot of, the EC guys, Frasetta, Tories, Williamson
all did a bunch of Ray Bradbury stories.
They thought were public domain.
Oh, yes, in the comics.
He wrote them, and he said, that's great, I'm glad you did them, but you know, I own
them, so they paid him eventually, but it was a, it was a good relationship, but he
loved that stuff.
Well, how do you think Flash Gordon fits into sort of the canon of science, because it's
not really science fiction.
Where would you put it?
Well, it's high adventure in an exotic world, that, you know, anything exotic, you know,
my generation created jungle girls, and there's nothing weirder than a blonde-haired jungle
girl, you know, supervising Africa, you know, ruling in Africa.
This is something we have not seen since Sheena flopped 15 or 20 years ago, but in the 50s
there was the Sheena television show, which for those of you who are too young, was what,
a huge tall redheaded woman, Buxom, running around the jungle, and there were probably
comic book, how many comic book jungle girls were there?
Well, there's 20 or 30 of them, and before that the pulps had jungle stories and so forth,
but Tarzan's Jane and Faye Ray, and they're all kind of John Trader Horn.
We love that exotic world with, you know, some girl in trouble in this strange, exotic
world.
You still do these kind of paintings, right?
What?
You still do these sort of paintings?
No, I do them all the time.
I'm writing a book on jungle girls right now.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So that's why it comes to mind.
A book of stories or a book of...
Yeah, a little leopard skin.
Yeah.
Of course, Betty Page did a lot of jungle stuff with Verne Yeager and so forth.
It was anything exotic, you know, Delilah, Cleopatra, all that stuff.
We just loved all the villanuses from the Old Testament and the New Testament, that
was exotic, you know, just strangely enough.
It was difficult when I did the Rascals in Paradise, which is...
I'm trained under Sam Peckinpaw, and it's about Peckinpaw and I trying to put on a
burlesque act in a planet in the 25th century where half the people go naked.
So it's...
How can you do this with that?
Anyway, it's...
But do you kill anybody?
That's a...
That becomes a question when you do that, is the naivete is you don't kill anybody in
the first film.
You know, they may have died, but...
And that throws me off in the second film one day, because they're in between.
And they had similarity with Star Wars is that he had to have sword fighting, but there's
no real reason to have lightsabers, you know, there's no logic behind it if you've got
a blaster.
But Raymond loved the sword fighting, and George Lucas loved the sword, so they put
it in there and make it work.
There's a simplicity and a tremendous sincerity, as you know, in the film and in the comics.
And it's very, very hard to do it like the comics.
You know, the movies they make from comics today are not the way the comics were written.
They're very realistic in many senses, all except for the superhuman powers, but they
got psychological problems, they got growing up problems, all that kind of stuff.
So it's a different thing, and they kill people all the time.
But it was a big question for me when I did it, do I kill somebody or do I have stun
guns?
You know, I've talked enough.
Well, you know, what you touched on, I was talking about this whole, this sort of female
ideal sort of thing, and the jungle girls and all that kind of stuff.
But what Mary did, as I referred to her earlier, is she did this Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman,
which is sort of the ultimate fetish thing for the, and that was in the 80s, was that
80, when was Batman Returns?
Oh, 92, like tell us how that thing evolved, because the Catwoman of the comics wasn't
quite that.
You did something, you went into a different, can you explain to us how that evolved into
that?
Well, all I know is Tim wanted, he had like some sort of a cat, like a calico cat, it's
like a little cat that had stitches and it's like cut up and it's like you stitch it together.
Is this a real cat?
This is like a toy.
And we're talking about stitching, he wanted to incorporate stitching into the costume,
like she was falling apart and pulled back together and she hadn't made it herself.
And we would, you know, Bob Ringwood and I designed it together and we were just like,
stitching on latex, how's that going to work?
So, but you know, he's a director, so you have to do what he wants.
So we ended up sculpting the stitches in rubber and, you know, sculpting them and casting
them and then gluing them on a latex suit that we had made, you know, we had a body
cast made of Michelle and then we made them on the body cast, otherwise, you know, you'd
have like fittings forever, so you could fit the body cast and then, you know, the boots
and the gloves and the whole thing.
But then gluing the stitches on to the latex and, you know, in person, the thing looked
like the biggest mess you ever saw.
She had all these stitches glued on and, you know, it really looked terrible.
We couldn't get the glue off and you couldn't really clean it up properly.
So then we painted the whole thing, you know, Michelle in the costume in like a pretty
heavy silicone, which you could do because she didn't go near anybody.
She touched her and so, you know, so she was just like covered in like an inch of silicone.
And then when we tested it, you know, when Bob and I saw the dailies of her in her first
screen, you know, her first costume test, we thought, you know, we went up to Mike Fink
who was the visual effects guy and go, gee, Mike, thanks, you really saved us.
And he's like, what are you talking about?
Because I thought he had done a visual effect to it to make it look so good.
But it was just the silicone catching the light on the latex just made it look like
unreal and gave it like this amazing quality.
So there was really kind of an accident that it looked as good as it did.
It was great.
But it set a certain, I mean, we've seen a lot of imitators.
We've seen a lot of, right?
Well, and plus it was shot dark, which helps.
I mean, she was never in the broad sunlight, would not have looked good in the sunlight.
And when we first shot, I remember the DP and the whole camera crew descending on her
with like cans of dulling spray.
And I was like, there's no way you're going to do silicone.
It's just impossible.
Oh, they could put dulling spray and it wouldn't make any difference?
Well, they didn't like it because it was too shiny.
Of course, yeah, the DP wouldn't make it.
Because you could see like the whole camera crew in her butt practically, it was so reflective.
So they were just like, how are we going to shoot this?
You can see our face in it.
And Tim was just like, well, you're just going to have to make it work because I like
it.
Well, that's good.
And they did.
But we did have to make a couple of dull suits for visual effects because they thought, we'll
make a dull suit because then we can add the shine in later because it might be too hard
to photograph with some of the effects because it's so shiny.
So we did, we made a few dull suits.
Oh, with Mike, you could trust him to do the right thing at least.
I don't, you know, I don't know that he ever used them because in the end it turned out
to be harder visually at that time.
It's probably easy now, but at that time it was harder to put the shine in than to take
out people's faces and stuff.
Well, I know you went through an interesting evolution on the suits for Men in Black, which
you know, the model for that and everything.
Do you want to tell a little bit about how that evolved?
Well, originally they were supposed to be wearing like all dirty FBI-type suits.
Like they had had these suits forever and this set was going to be in New York, you
know, old, crappy building.
Is that what the comic book looked like?
Was that from the comic book?
No, this was the director's idea.
So we were making these old, you know, FBI-type suits and then I, you know, went into the
art department to see what the art department was doing and Beau Welch, who I worked with
on Batman, was designing this fabulous set with all these spiky things and, you know,
very high-tech and really beautiful and I was like, you know, how am I crappy suits going
to fit into this beautiful place?
So I was like, I have to redesign them and like one of my favorite suits of all time
was a suit that was from North by Northwest that Kerry Grant wore.
It was a gray suit but it was just beautifully cut.
It was a 60s suit but it was just like cut from a movie star.
So I thought, well, that's what they should look like but in black and that's what we
made and I thought, well, if the director doesn't like them we can always, you know,
make them look chunky, mess them up later.
So it was really, they were designed to go with the set, with Beau's set.
Because it, you know, it doesn't, like this all worked together because it did not, he
did both of it but I think movies only work well with the sets and the costumes and the
photography.
It's all, it all has to work together.
Well it was also interesting how you got those two completely dissimilar guys to sort
of fit together, you know, the silhouette of those worked very much so somehow with
that suit.
I don't know how you did it but...
There's a lot of padding and all kinds of stuff in there.
Really?
Well because Tommy leaves a cowboy and he's falling off many horses and he's got like
arms and legs of different sizes and so if you saw his suit on a hanger you'd be like,
what is it, like one arm is shorter than the other but, you know, when you put it on it,
like, you know, it's like armor really.
It makes people look...
Now you guys, just so you know, this is what real costume design is about.
This is not about going to stores, this is about building sculpture.
That's what she does and unfortunately it's too rare today.
Well that's certainly what Denalo did in this.
Well he's a genius too.
Well, oh jeez.
But there is a lot to it.
Yeah.
So the silhouette is everything.
Does anybody else want to jump in on this?
Does anyone have something they'd like to say or...
No?
Jim, do you have anything else you'd like to say?
Jim?
No.
No?
No?
No?
Mary?
No.
Because we're going on 1030 and we kind of have to get to the end of it here.
So shall we call it now?
Okay.
Thank you very much for coming.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thanks Jim.
Thank you very much.
