Odile Dicks-Mireaux on Enhancing Saoirse's Journey in "Brooklyn" / Reuniting with Rachel Weisz for "Denial"

Odile Dicks-Mireaux. Image via Female FirstThe thing about Brooklyn is that everyone can relate to it. Stories of immigration touch almost everyone, or at least run through their family's DNA. Even the move from one state with a personality quite unlike your original home, can feel like a reinvention.  Nearly a year after seeing Brooklyn for the first time it's strange to think that I worried that people wouldn't connect to it! Who needs sensationalistic drama when a story is this really. When it's power can sneak up on you? 

I had the pleasure of discussing this universal resonance, and the job of defining Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) through her costume changes with the designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux, who herself related to the story. Her mother was French and her father British and they met, both immigrants, in Brooklyn in the 1940s, and built a life in a foreign country together. Odile is London based and was best known, prior to know, with her frequently BAFTA nominated work on British television miniseries like Gormenghast and Great Expectations though she's also designed Oscar nominated dramas like The Constant Gardener and An Education. 

Here's our interview. 

NATHANIEL R: I first saw Brooklyn at Sundance and I loved it but I remember feeling that I had no idea how people would react to it when it was released.  Which in retrospect was kind of foolish of me.

 ODILE DICKS-MIREAUX: You never know when you're making a movie how it's going to turn out and whether it will hit a nerve. Would it be too much of a simple story or too old fashioned? So it's been a real pleasure that it's resonated. [More...]

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3 Hateful Links. 16 Nicer Ones.

As you may have heard The Hateful Eight expanded a smidge early today into nearly 2000 theaters after the success of its roadshow weekend. So here are 8 links about the movie because we're feeling masochistic...

Variety The Hateful Eight is leading current movies in spending the most for TV ads
Deadline an interview with Hateful Eight's costume designer Courtney Hoffman. (Everyone knows I hate the movie but I actually liked her work in it a lot!)
Awards Daily Sasha struggles to suss out what Tarantino is doing with Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in The Hateful Eight and tries to make sense of the many journalist opinions on whether its an inherently "misogynist" work. I'd love to defend Tarantino on this front personally but I have to face facts. He hasn't written a good female character since Inglorious Basterds. He's lost that particular skill. But I don't think he's misogynist so much as betraying his ultimate misanthropy with his ugliest most masturbatory movie.

Escape From Minnie's Haberdashery (for more hospital climes)
Gothamist Russell Crowe throwing tantrums again -- this time about hoverboards 
Guardian I'm eager to hear what our resident Australian Glenn thinks of their choices for best Aussie films of the year 
Gawker "the year in Gay"
Empire first look at Michael Fassbender in Assassin's Creed
Vanity Fair picks the best new TV characters of the year from series including Daredevil, Empire, UNReal, Fresh Off the Boat and more
Antagony & Ecstasy Tim's razor sharp review of 45 Years is a must-read but then so is his...
Antagony & Ecstasy ...review of Carol. Basically he continues to be one of the web's most underappreciated frequently inspired film critics.

Meanwhile on Jakku...
Variety Carrie Fisher on her body shamers 
imgur "how BB-8 works"
NPR Nigerians are getting excited about Star Wars... in large part thanks to John Boyega 
i09 going to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens a second time? i09 has a list of 23 things to watch out for
LA Times talks to the designers of Mad Max, Star Wars, and Mockingjay sequels on their dives into genre work
LA Times and here's a dissenting voice on the cultural phenomenon if you're not feeling the love 
Reverse Shot has an amazingly insightful lengthy review of The Force Awakens that grapples with the film only speaking its own Star Wars language and impatiently exploiting old adventures to venture out on new ones.  

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are "Nice Guys" - Movies are make believe! 

2016?
We're so not ready to go there. It's not really our practice at TFE to look ahead to the following year before the Oscars wrap (the true end to the film year) but I have bookmarked this article "61 Original Movie We're Dying to See in 2016" because it's cute on the rare occasion that people realize that non-sequels exist. The Guardian has no such anti-sequel slant in their "75 films we're excited about" and they go full in for any movie that drives traffic so say hello to the superhero films even the ones that are daring us to agonize over how bad they might be like the scowl-a-thon of Batman v Superman. 

Interview: The Discipline and Humanity of "Bridge of Spies" Costume Design

Mark Rylance and Spielberg on the set of "Bridge of Spies"Costume Designers are among the great unsung heroes of the cinema, regularly helping actors to define their characters and directors to create those images audiences get lost in. The latter achievement comes in tandem with the other creatives most connected to the mise-en-scène, the cinematographers and the production designers. It's perhaps not surprising that when you sit down with the behind-the-scenes professional they are often disarmingly modest, used to serving and enhancing the vision of the director. General moviegoers might not know their names but cinephiles, critics, and industry professionals are wise to learn and love them for the unique contributions they make to fine movies. 

I recently had the opportunity to speak with the Polish designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone, who designed two high profile projects this year: Scott Cooper's gangster drama Black Mass and Steven Spielberg's cold war drama Bridge of Spies. The latter was her first collaboration with Spielberg but the designer is no stranger to auteurs. She's worked with Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom) and Mira Nair (Amelia) and is best known for her work with Oscar fixture Bennett Miller having costumed all three of his narrative features (Capote, Moneyball, Foxcatcher).

It's perhaps unsurprising, given the temperament of Miller's filmography, to find her disarmingly modest and low key and not all that excited about the more glamorous aspects of costume design. At one point she even gave your host, a self-confessed costume nut, a coronary with a casually dropped "I don't care about the costumes" though she quickly revived me with an interesting explanation of what she really meant.

See for yourself in our interview after the jump...

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Link Wars Episode ∞: The Blog Awakens

Guardian has a piece on the 7 best financial films for the release of The Big Short. Confession: I'm always surprised when internet lists remember that films existed before 1990. And this list has 4 of them [gasp]
CHUD Have you heard Radiohead's Spectre theme. The studio went with Sam Smith instead for the latest Bond
Variety Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyez On Me is coming your way (and filming already). Given the massive success of Straight Outta Compton expect more hiphop/rap biopics 

Gothamist Oooh. AMC Village 7 has reopened in Manhattan with spiffy new seats and bathrooms. I haven't been there in years but will have to return now. Now if only Film Forum and Village East would get renovations and they'd burn down the Angelika, Cinema Village, and Lincoln Plaza and build new non-tiny, non-crappy, subwayrumble-free arthouse theaters somewhere else... wouldn't that be swell?! 
MNPP the only recap of the recent Tom Hardy junket journalist dustup that you need is right here. Seriously who cares?! Stars cancel or push back interviews ALL THE TIME. 
Comics Alliance prepare for your heart to melt with these photos of Chris Pratt visiting a children's hospital 

Best of '15
Florida Film Critics went with Mad Max Fury Road as best of the year in 4 categories and gave Daisy Ridley Breakthrough for Star War: The Force Awakens
Movie Scene Kyle Turner's top 15 from Appropriate Behavior (yay!) to Mistress America (say what?)
Playbill 10 biggest social media moments for Broadway this year. Naturally Hamilton made the biggest splash
Theater Mania names the 9 best Off Broadway shows... i dont understand this number 9? It has to be 10 or 15 this year. I mean, MATH. SYMMETRY. LIST RULES. 
The Film Stage names 50 "Overlooked" films... though the criteria for overlooked is sligthly murky. Tangerine and James White, for example, didn't get even a tiny percentile of the box office they deserved but they did win spirit and gotham nods and in Tangerine's case a lot of press... which has to count for something. Very happy to see Appropriate Behavior (which you'll remember I loved nearly two years ago at its festival debut) and Victoria on the list though. Hopefully Mustang's inclusion (Team Experience loves it) will look silly after the fact if the Academy nominates it and it proves a late-bloomer at the box office. But for now with only $100,000 in the bank at only 3 theaters, it deserves this list placement.

More Star Wars... The Force Won't Go Back To Sleep
Digital Spy People will post ANYTHING about Star Wars for traffic. Here we consider the possibility of a gay Star Wars romance between Finn & Poe 
Gizmodo award winning interactive fan animations - Love the Grand Prize winner on Tattooine.
Vulture polls several celebrities about the best order to view the 7 Star Wars films in. The correct answer is obviously 4,5,6,7 (ignoring 1,2,3) but there's a lot of variety in the responses
/Film concept designs for BB-8 
American Leather Jacket for only $209 you can try to look at cool as Finn or Poe from Star Wars with the jacket they trade off onscreen
Academy Conversations the filmmaking team talks about production - I haven't watched it in full yet but it's nice to see Michael Kaplan represented there. He's one of the great costume designers and has had ZERO academy attention. That's probably because his best work comes in stylish contemporary film (Fight Club, Burlesque, Flashdance, Mr & Mrs Smith) or genre films (Blade Runner, Star Trek, The Force Awakens) and we know how Oscar feels about both of those kinds of pictures.

And if you haven't checked out the Emo Kylo Ren twitter page, do so. Laugh, you will. Know that it's more fun than a yub-nubbing Ewok treehouse party. This is my favorite but there were many many choices for that honor...

mom please don't even pretend you know what I'm going through right now also we are out of conditioner

— Emo Kylo Ren (@KyloR3n) December 22, 2015

"Carol" Week: Carol's Style

Manuel here, continuing our Carol week festivities.

Carol Aird always looks like she’s stepped right out of a fashion spread. Or rather, she wouldn’t look out of place if she were to walk into one. She’s always so impeccably dressed, courtesy of course, of one Ms Sandy Powell.

“Category is: Femme Butch Realness”

I was half-joking when I wrote that note down as I finished Haynes’s film back in NYFF but the more I savored the concept, the more apt it became as a description of Mrs Aird...

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