The Revenant's Costume Designer Jacqueline West on Terrence Malick, Ben Affleck, and... Anaïs Nin?
Thursday, January 7, 2016 at 12:36PM 
Jacqueline West at the premiere of The Revenant.© Frazer Harrison for Getty ImagesClothing was always in her blood though Costume Design came later. Two time Oscar nominee Jacqueline West (Quills, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), the daughter of an avante garde designer, originally pursued fashion. After building a successful clothing line of her own her career made a sudden fate-filled turn in the late 80s via a favor for a personal friend, the director Philip Kaufman.
Her filmography in the subsequent 25 years has been a grab bag of film genres -- her latest The Revenant (2015) is a 180 from Henry & June (1990) you must agree -- but the consistent throughline is that she's in demand with the auteur set. She's worked repeatedly with Terrence Malick, David Fincher, Philip Kaufman, and Ben Affleck. The Revenant marks her first, though one assumes not last, collaboration with Alejandro González Iñárritu. To get in the right mindset, she drew on her personal history -- she was intimately familiar with the Hugh Glass story before Inarittu and Leo were all about making it for the screen-- and eventually read a ton of journals by fur trappers, including the invaluable "40 Years as a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri."
Our conversation starts with The Revenant but you know yours truly won't let this talented woman go without talking Henry & June and other more glamourous gigs...
NATHANIEL R: You've designed many gorgeous movie costumes over the years but for The Revenant your challenge is so different. I imagine a lot of your job this time was making the clothes look disgusting!
JACQUELINE WEST: [Laughter]
NATHANIEL: They're overworn. They're muddy. They're bloody. [More...]
JACQUELINE WEST: Yes, that was definitely a factor. Alejandro wanted everything to feel very real. After you look at the all the drawings and the paintings and the sketches and the journals it becomes an onion skin. In this one journal it said that when the trappers arrived off the boats after two years out trapping you couldn't tell what the fabric was of their clothing, it was so covered in grease. I took that as a mantra!
I got most of the hides from first nations traders up in Canada and we tried different kinds of grease and animal fats on the clothes. But of course that gets very rancid so you can't leave that on actors. My chief ager/dyer Karen Durrant came up with this wonderful compound we called "Black Wax" which emulates the look of bear grease. Alejandro and Chivo [Cinematography Emmanuel Lubezki] loved it so very much that I lost her to set, just being there to coat the clothes as they would get wet and it would wash off or the light would change and they'd want the clothes darker or lighter. It almost became a department in the movie.
[Laughter]
I love Karen and I've done other movies with her. I affectionally gave her a First Nation's name and called her "Walks With Black Wax"
I assume you had to have multiples for everything Leonardo DiCaprio wears it takes such a gruesome beating.
Yes. Leo, before he gets the fort, has twenty renditions of his costumes in different stages. We made almost every single piece of clothing in the movie - very few rentals. As far as the furs I used as much could from First Nation Canadian tribal trappers and fur traders. The bear skin is almost a character in the movie.
Right.
Fitzgerald [Tom Hardy] is mercenary and monetary but Glass [Leonardo DiCaprio] is out in the wilderness for different reasons. He's looking for something spiritual in nature. That beautiful scene with the elk in the river. He'd take one to save his life but only for that. He pretends to shoot one with a stick because he's starving to death but his attitude towards nature is so different. There's a poetry that the animal who almost takes his life, saves his life and it becomes an ode to the bear the way he so carefully dries the fur and makes a house out of it after he gets out of the river.
I love that part.
You feel there's this relationship with him and the bear. As heavy as it was, as grueling as it was for him to crawl in it it became his talisman almost for survival.
Were there any concerns from a visual perspective of losing these famous movie stars, they're so covered up in the clothes. Even their faces.
You have to keep them safe. Once I thought I was going to drown Tom hardy -- he had the heaviest wardrobe really. His coat was double elk skin and inside it was double lined with beaver. I did worry about the actors but it kept them warn. One day when we were shooting it was 40 below with the wind chill. It's a double edged sword. The clothes might have killed them in the river but saved them in the snow.
Some of your past films have been much more glamorous. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) is so stylish and Water for Elephants (2011) -- Reese looks dynamite in that.
Thank you.
Do you like to alternate types of films to get different challenges?
Brad Pitt once called me a 'method costume designer.' This is one of my favorite movies I've ever done -- for me it's all about getting to the character and helping Alejandro tell this tale with the clothing. Alejandro reacts to costumes viscerally and emotionally. I knew if I didn't see the reaction early on i had to keep working on it. I loved that challenge. You feel this enormous sense of achievement. From the beinning I understood that he was telling the story of enlightenent from pain. And how do you express enlightenment through costumes? I agonized over it. I hope I got close. I wanted to show in the clothes what he was seeing in the character.
I have Native American Romantic Dementia so...
[Laughter]
...before this film The New World (2005) was my favorite.
Terrence Malick's The New World (2005)Do you think Alejandro hired you because of your work on that Malick film? A lot of artists from The New World worked on The Revenant.
He must have liked it -- I didn't even think of that when he first hired me! Jack Fisk [the Production Designer] called me -- we've done eight movies together. I was in Italy on vacation with my husband. I sad 'are you kidding me? I love his movies. I would love to work with him.' And I knew the story of Hugh Glass very well -- I have a ranch about 100 miles from where the bear attack took place and I'd been to the mile marker of the attack way before the movie when I first got that place.
That's wild. I know you're on set right now but what's the movie?
I'm on Live By Night and ironically I'm working with Brendan Gleeson who is Domnhall Gleeson's father! So now I'm with the dad.
And it's another Ben Affleck film! You did Argo, too. And Live By Night is set in the 1920s.
I've gone from trappers to flappers.
Such a great period.
It's fabulous. I love working with Ben. I've worked with him as both an actor and a director.
Ben Affleck and Sienna Miller on the set of "Live By Night"
Do you think actor/directors are better with understanding costume design, since they've had to wear them?
[Pause] That's a really hard question! It's so different from director to director how they respond. I have such a shorthand with Ben that he kind of leaves it to me. He knows my process. I show him everything -- I don't take it for granted that he's going to fall in love with everything -- but he trusts me and leaves me to it. Alejandro and I, we hadn't worked together before so we worked really closely. We had to learn how the other navigates creating characters. You adjust to different styles just the same way actors do with different directors; everyone gets to their place in a different way.
You do most of Terrence Malick's films.
Yes.
And he's famous for shooting a lot and then not using a ton of what he's filmed. Whole performances get left on the cutting room floor. So as a creative on the team do ever worry 'this costume is not going to be in the movie'?
No, you never think that with Terry. There are certain people within the film world. Probably Fellini was one. Tarkovsky. Bergman. Terry is one. There are certain directors, Ben, Alejandro, Fincher -- you're in good hands. You don't have to worry. If you have a favorite costume you have to keep it in your heart. The autuers are going to be like Michelangelo and chip away the trivia.
I did a whole thing on Philip Kaufman's Quills where in the middle of the day I changed 1000 actors over to Regency. And the Regency part never made it into the movie! And I agonized over everybody in the background they were all going to be seen. But I did it and had the joy of doing that. I pulled it off.
So you have to be process oriented rather than end result.
Yes. It's like before we started taking pictures of everything we see with cameras -- remember it in your head. The memory and imagination is so vivid. I try to do that with my favorite scenes in movies and not worry if my favorite dress makes it on camera. Often it doesn't. So you have to be philosophical about it.
I remember Quills as having a very strangely muted pallette - white on white and off white.
Yes, It was suppsoed to represent the written page. That was the symbolism there.
her first screen credit "artistic consultant" on Henry & June (1990)
NATHANIEL R: Ah! I'm glad you brought up Quills BECAUSE I HAVE TO ASK YOU ABOUT HENRY & JUNE (1990). That's also by Phil Kaufman. Your very first screen credit "artistic consultant". That movie is so beautiful.
JACQUELINE WEST: Thank you. My very first movie! Phil Kauffman I knew as a friend in San Francisco. I was a fashion designer and had my own clothing company. Phil and his wife shopped in my clothing store, we had mutual friends in common. One day he came to my house and said 'I'd love to have you design my movie.' But I wasn't even in the union.
[Later] I was showing my clothing line in France and I got a call from my office. 'Call Phil Kaufman. He's in Paris.' He said he couldn't bring me on as a designer because of the union but would I come on as his overall artistic consultant. He had me doing sets more than anything because he wanted Anaïs Nin's house to look more like my house in Berkeley and that I was in tune with Anaïs Nin, I had her sensibility. I had actually met her as a college student. And he had met her, too.
When we finished he and his wife took me to the Venice Film Festival as my reward because I wouldn't take any payment because I had so much fun doing it.
It sounds like your movie career was meant to be.
That's what Phil Kaufman says.
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Reader Comments (10)
Great choice of photos to accompany this interview. I'm digging this costume designer series, Nat!
I will repeat again: YOU DO. THE. BEST. INTERVIEWS. They are just so joyous. And you get so much out about the movie they're selling but also range all over their careers.
Also, you cant fool me: THAT can't ALSO be Sienna Miller!
Nathaniel-I agree with Nick-no one does an interview as well as you. I always feel like I not only learn something, but I also have a greater appreciation for the subject even if it's an artist I hadn't deeply considered before or had been an adamant fan of their work. That's a tricky feat! I heart this blog!!! :)
Nick & John & Paul -- you're all so sweet. I know i need to pace them out better during the film year but we're down to the last minute. LOL. and all these long transcripts are clogging up my computer ;)
Girl, you are deflecting the compliments. John and Paul and I don't play like that.
Mmhm.
Nick - i love you.
I'M SO EXCITING THAT NOMINATIONS CLOSE TOMORROW AND SO WE CAN BREATHE A SIGH OF RELIEF.
nothing more to be done than hoping for best / making silly surely terrible predicitons in this volatile year.
Great interview, so happy to hear someone talk about Phillip Kaufman who did some wonderful films. I was very impressed with the work done on "The Revenant", those hand stitched skins and furs looked very authentic. (Unfortunately I thought the film went on too long)
Sloppy typography here. Skimming only parts of it, I found 'I sad', 'autuers' and 'a creative on the set'. Clean 'em up, people.