This interview with “Avatar: The Way of Water” costume designer Deborah L. Scott first appeared in a special section of TheWrap awards magazine’s Below-the-Line issue.
With a film as heavy on effects and animation as “Avatar: The Way of Water,” it’s easy to assume that the physical costumes weren’t actually built. Instead, you can imagine, they were drawn on a tablet and sent to the magicians at Weta FX, who would make the clothes look fully realized on the finished film. But that was not the case. Instead, the advanced technology in the film required everything to be created in real life.
“We built everything,” said costume designer Deborah L. Scott, a veteran of “Titanic” and the first “Avatar.” “We build every Na’vi garment, every bracelet, every necklace. Because the technology is so good at capturing the image and texture of these pieces, you can’t just draw it on the computer and expect it to have the three-dimensional life that it does. Give them a real piece of cloth so the computer can scan every rough spot, every worn spot, especially when you get into the very complicated Na’vi pieces that are handwoven and custom made. You can’t draw a macrame knot by hand and read it.”
For “Avatar: The Way of Water,” a new group Scott designed for were the Recombinants, evil marines from the first film who are now resurrected in avatar bodies. Aspects of their stylized, military look included their tactical gear, the shade of camouflage they wore (Scott moved away from the more digital look of camouflage from the first film after the US Army abandoned it), and the patches and badges they wear on their vests. . (“Deja-Blue,” a patch catchphrase that talks about how the Marines were back in blue Na’vi corps, was an idea that came from Stephen Lang, who plays the villainous Quaritch.) And he also created a version of some of the pieces that could be worn while the actors were filming their performance capture footage, adding to the authenticity.
“Jim is a true believer that your clothes dictate your movement,” Scott said. “Whenever possible, we would take parts of a bulletproof vest and build it around the (performance capture) markers. They make you move in a different way, they make you bend in a different way. You can see them cling to the leashes or hook their thumbs. It’s hard to fake it, and Jim doesn’t fake anything.”
There’s also the issue of water, both in the design of the new reef tribe’s appearance (“they use their environment to create their clothing, that’s where you see the shells and coral and sea grass,” Scott said) and in figuring out how the costumes would interact with the water.
“That started to influence the design early on because, being Jim, there’s no cheating,” Scott said. “I would never put the real things in the water, but we would build replicas. We would make them all white because when we were shooting underwater it was easier to see the shape and color. We did extensive testing. All of these things informed digital artists to make it look real.”
Read more of the issue below the line here.
