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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Welcome to the Academy - The Lucky 322

As is their annual tradition now AMPAS has released the list of the names they've offered memberships too. If you're new to the tradition, you'll note in the following list that most of the time a first nomination will results in an invite (but not always) and that generally a few people who weren't nominated but got a lot of buzz the previous season will be invited (hi, David Oyelowo & Gugu Mbatha Raw). Lately the lists have gotten longer and much more surprising too as the Academy attempts to broaden its demographic after years of being dinged for skewing too  'old white and male'

The complete list of 322 potential inductees is below. There's a welcome to the Academy reception in September for those that accept and then the process starts again. The Academy works on a referral basis of sorts so current members can nominated new prospective members and that process (a longer list of names than this - never publicized that I'm aware of) concludes in March each year. Unless they're all "You can't sit with us!" then they end up on this list which comes out in the summer.

So let's look at who was invited.

Multiple Branches
Damien Chazelle (Writer/Director) Whiplash
Malcolm D. Lee (Writer/Director) The Best Man Holiday
Paweł Pawlikowski (Writer/Director) Ida
Abderrahmane Sissako (Writer/Director) Timbuktu
Damian Szifron (Writer/Director) Wild Tales
Andrey Zvyagintsev (Writer/Director) Leviathan
Mathilde Bonnefoy (Documentary/Editing) Citizen Four

Damian Szifron, WILD TALES writer/director

These eight people must decide which of the two branches that invited them they will join. While members can be on more than one branch -- I imagine Warren Beatty, for example, is on a few since he's been nominated in four different categories -- they can't join two in one year. You'll notice that four of the Foreign Language Film nominees are accounted for though weirdly not the director of the Estonian film Tangerines. 

Actors and Actresses are in the same branch but I've separated them just for fun as befits the Oscar categories and also to point out that they invited way more men than women, more than twice as many! Hey, I thought they were working on the diversity thing! They also invited both men who got crying closeups at the ceremony earlier this year.

315 more people after the jump...

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