This story about the design of “Elvis” and “Blonde” first appeared in the problem below the line from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
You couldn’t find two more iconic figures of 20th century pop culture than Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, or, perhaps, two more intimidating people to recreate on screen in the same way they are recreated in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis.” and Andrew Dominick’s “Blonde.” On both films, production and costume designers and makeup artists and hairstylists were asked to duplicate some of the most familiar looks of the time, and on occasion to subtly tweak those looks.
TheWrap spoke to the below-the-line talent responsible for the bizarre appearance of both films.
“Elvis”
designing the world and Elvis Presley’s clothing in Baz Luhrmann’s outlandish fantasy biopic “Elvis” initially seemed rather plain to Catherine Martin, Luhrmann’s costume designer, production designer, executive producer and wife. After all, Elvis’s life, career, and clothing choices were painstakingly documented, from the fierce young Elvis, harnessing a power he could barely explain in pink shirts (pink, for a trucker!) to the Elvis” Jailhouse Rock”. the silly movie Elvis, the return of black leather Elvis and the sequined Vegas Elvis jumpsuit.
“I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be amazing, because I’m going to be able to flex a different muscle,’” Martin said. “This is going to be an incredibly detailed investigation and then a technical execution. But I kind of underestimated the scale and sheer volume of possibilities.”
Martin did enough research to know exactly what Elvis was wearing at key moments in his life, but duplicating an outfit wouldn’t necessarily convey to a modern audience how impactful Elvis was at the time. “What I enjoy about design is that it solves problems,” he said. “How do we make Elvis’ clothing connect with modern audiences while remaining historically accurate?
“That involves an archaeological dig to find all the idiosyncratic things that were specifically Elvis in the ’50s but edgy enough to shock and surprise people today, things that were still going strong in terms of challenging the norms of gender”.
For early Elvis, he focused not only on colors, but also on details like the way Elvis would sometimes tie his shirts over high-waisted pants. “It was also making sure the clothes connected to the sensuality and sexuality of his body movement, which Austin (Butler) channeled.”
For the 1968 “comeback” special, for example, he made several different versions of Elvis’s iconic black leather suit: one that looked great when Butler walked down the aisle, one that was good to sit on, and one that was good for dancing.
He also compiled a massive table of all the jumpsuits Elvis wore during his Vegas and touring years, though he didn’t always stick to the most historically accurate ones.
“We had the perfect timeline on the wall, but we chose the story,” he said. “On his opening night in Las Vegas (in 1969), he was actually wearing a black karate outfit, but we wanted to put him in something that was the purest form of Elvis in a white jumpsuit. We really leaned towards white suits when he was hot and divine in his acting skills. And as things got crazier, we started wearing colors and more crazy embroidered and decorated outfits. And then the last suit we see is white again.”
The Las Vegas years also presented some of the biggest challenges for production design undertaken by Martin and fellow production designer Karen Murphy. “The International Hotel showroom was a challenge due to its sheer size,” said Murphy. “At the time it had the biggest curtain in North America and we thought we couldn’t build something that big. But we created it.”
However, there was less documentation of the hotel rooms where Elvis lived while in Las Vegas. “There were some pictures from when the celebrities came to see it,” Murphy said. “You would see the corner of the room and we would try to put those photographs together. But we could never really determine what the bedroom looked like, so it became more like, ‘How should it feel?’ Baz said that he wanted a golden sarcophagus where Elvis was trapped, so that’s where the design came from.”
The entire film was shot in Australia, from the muddy streets of Tupelo to the carnival where Colonel Parker (Tom Hanks) worked and the frenetic nightlife of Beale Street in Memphis. They shot scenes from the ’68 special, which was recorded on a soundstage in Burbank, on a soundstage in Queensland, and things got “very meta,” according to Murphy.
And then there was Graceland, Elvis’s lifelong home. Luhrmann and Martin were able to tour the property with the blessing of the Presley estate, which also gave them many measurements so that they could double the dimensions of the original.
“We built Graceland as an absolutely inch-wide replica,” Martin said. “It’s a lovely house, it’s a mansion, but it’s not what we know today as a mansion, which is completely extravagant. So people would walk on set and say, ‘Oh, this feels small.’ And we’d say, ‘Well, this is exactly what Graceland was.’”
“Blond”
In Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde”, Ana de Armas does not play Marilyn Monroe. The film, after all, is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel of the same name, which Oates always insisted was Monroe-inspired fiction rather than a biography of the actress. It’s a fantasy about Marilyn’s life and the demons the actress may have faced, a riff on the idea of Marilyn Monroe.
But to “Blonde’s” makeup artists and hairstylists, costume designer, and production designer, the fictional aspect of the film was essentially irrelevant. His task was to duplicate the Marilyn Monroe who existed in the hundreds of photos that littered the walls of the production office and filled the 800-page PDF that director Dominik had assembled (“The Bible,” they called it), and who lived in the movie clips that Dominik played on the monitors along with the recreations of those moments in his film.
“We had to forget about the fictional part, because Andrew had given us so many specific images that we needed to get as close as possible,” said hair department head Jaime Leigh McIntosh. Head of the makeup department, Tina Roesler Kerwin, added: “The story is fictional, but the image he’s using to tell the story is much more of Marilyn.”
For McIntosh and Roesler Kerwin, the challenges began with de Armas’s hair, which is naturally much darker than Monroe’s. “The first time Ana did a camera test, they put a blonde wig on her and you could see her dark hair very clearly through it,” McIntosh said.
Roesler Kerwin came up with prosthetic pieces that would look like scalp through the wig and allow McIntosh to accurately recreate Marilyn’s hairline. “Those prosthetic pieces also gave us the ability to change the wigs multiple times throughout the day, which we couldn’t have done with a bald cap because it wouldn’t have resisted gluing and movement,” she said. De Armas’s eyebrows were also lightened and thinned to match Marilyn’s.
From there it was not as easy as using Monroe’s makeup on De Armas, because the faces and skin of the two women were different. “Andrew told me that he found Marilyn inside Ana,” Roesler Kerwin said. In most cases, that meant finding the Marilyn from one of Dominik’s “Bible” pictures. “About 80% of the time, we matched some type of image that Andrew had,” McIntosh said.
Costume designer Jennifer Johnson also had to do many combinations from that book, including recreating some of the most famous dresses in history, including the skintight red gown from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and the white gown from ” The Seventh Year Itch”. .”
“That was kind of scary,” Johnson said, referring to this latest dress. “We all know him very well and he didn’t want it to look like a Halloween costume. I ended up adding a little more fabric to the circumference of the skirt, because I knew there would be a very lavish slow-motion scene where the audience could really take in Marilyn’s weight and monumental importance.”
He made some changes to Marilyn’s appearance, reducing the tips of de Armas’s bras so they would not look “comedical and distracting” and choosing not to add prosthetics to give the actress more pronounced curves. “Not much was done to change the actual shape of her, aside from building her bust and cinching her waist,” she said.
(She did, however, incorporate some padding into one dress in a “Some Like It Hot” style.)
Part of “Blonde” was shot in black and white, which meant Johnson and production designer Florencia Martin had to be mindful of how colors are photographed.
“Black and white can be extremely complicated,” Johnson said. “In some cases, I had some backup colors, because colors can get very muddy and dull. He had a very strict palette, and the iPhone’s black and white filter is your best friend when you’re shooting black and white photos.”
Martin said that she, too, used that technique to figure out how the sets would be photographed in monochrome. “Reds turn black and wood grain can do really weird things,” she said. “It’s a fun challenge and we were constantly using the filters on our phones.”
The production designer was able to shoot a couple of locations from the real life of Marilyn, from the bungalow where she and her mother first lived in Hollywood to the Brentwood house where she died. He even had receipts from Marilyn’s purchases at a Mexican furniture store to outfit that latest home, allowing him to accurately reproduce her interior.
“It was very important for Andrew to go to the places where Marilyn lived,” Martin said. “It was amazing to navigate Los Angeles and bring her life back together. And we were able to incorporate all these different textures and elements to take viewers through these chapters of his life.”
However, in addition to Marilyn’s houses, he had to recreate iconic scenes from his films as accurately as possible, with limited time and budget. “All the studio sets were built on a sound stage, and we shot all of them in three or four days,” she said. “So what my team did was build the back of the sets to look like they were built in the ’50s, so we could flip the walls over and use them as the backstage world of that scene. “Marilyn could be on the set of ‘Some Like It Hot,’ and the audience doesn’t know it, but they’re looking at the back cover of ‘All About Eve.’ There’s something poetic about creating that kind of collage of her life.”
Read more of the issue below the line here.
