Painstaking Craft: 'Wallace & Gromit', 'Wicked' and the Art of World Building
Co-directors of 'Vengeance Most Fowl' and Oz's costume and hair and makeup designers tell me how they did it. Plus: Get your pundit on with our Oscar pool
Before I dive into today’s newsletter, I have a fun announcement! We’re running our first-ever Prestige Junkie Oscar Pool, inviting you and your fellow awards season obsessives to compete against Ankler staff and friends to correctly predict this year’s Academy Award winners. First place comes with bragging rights as a reward we’ll be announcing soon.
Sign up here and make your picks — don’t worry, you can change them as many times as you like between now and when the Oscars begin on March 2. May the best pundit win!
Waiting Game: The Stop-Start of Stop-Motion Animation
On film, kooky inventor Wallace and his brilliant dog, Gromit, may not often leave their cozy English town. But in real life, they’re globetrotters. A day after sitting on the table at the Critics Choice Awards, the real Wallace and Gromit — joined by Wallace’s latest invention, Norbot, and the dastardly Feathers McGraw — were the guests of honor at The Ankler and Letterboxd’s latest Audience First event, featuring the Oscar-nominated Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
Sure, the human guests of honor may have been Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, the co-directors of the latest film in the beloved, long-running animated franchise. But posing for photos with the audience before the screening began, Park and Crossingham seemed to know that their puppets — the real ones used in the film, adjusted frame-by-frame in the painstaking stop-motion animation process — were the real stars.
In our conversation following the screening at Netflix’s Icon building in Hollywood, Park and Crossingham broke down the day-to-day process of making a Wallace & Gromit movie, and what might be the most important element: patience. “The dailies were pretty quick” to watch, Park said, a major understatement. Added Crossingham, “If the whole crew got a minute and a half done in a whole week, then we were on target. And that was a really good week.”
The stop-motion process also means there’s not a lot of room for traditional improvisation — having a new idea for a scene or even a joke might require weeks of extra production. But Park and Crossingham both try to find moments for spontaneity, whether it’s a background prop or even a camera angle that brings out a different aspect of a character. “You may think of the gag when you’re setting up a shot, and then the art department has a day to get it together,” says Park, who points to one of his favorite such tweaks in the film: a road maintenance truck full of traffic cones, with “The Cone Brothers” painted on the side.
He and Crossingham higlighted a long list of cinematic influences in our conversation, from Aliens to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca — perfect for the crowd of cinephiles The Ankler and Letterboxd can gather. You can watch the full conversation at Ankler Enjoy, and keep an eye out for future Audience First events — we’d love to have you in the crowd.
The Women and the World of Wicked
Here’s a stat about this year’s Oscar nominees that’s been a little easy to miss amidst the chaos: In alignment we haven’t seen since 1978, all five best actress nominees come from films that are all nominated for best picture. And there’s reason to think that’s not just an anomaly, but evidence of a genuine industry shift toward putting women at the center of the most popular and acclaimed movies of the year.
On Tuesday USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative sent the announcement of its annual survey with the enthusiastic subject line, “Gender Parity Is Finally Reached in Top Films.” For the first time in the 18 years since the organization has been doing the study, 54 of the top 100 highest-grossing films at the domestic box office featured a woman as a lead or co-lead.
That includes a good number of Oscar nominees, plus straightforward box office hits like Twisters and A Quiet Place: Day One. (Yes, it also includes Lupita Nyong’o’s voice-only role in The Wild Robot — Roz may not be human, but she is a mom!)
Today I’ve got my conversation with two of the people responsible for one of last year’s biggest female-driven hits. That would be Wicked, whose hair and makeup artist Frances Hannon and costume designer Paul Tazewell tell me it required the work of almost literal armies to make their versions of Oz come to life. I spoke to Hannon and Tazewell separately but aimed to get a holistic look at how their work comes together to form some of Wicked’s most indelible images, from wigs that echo the film’s nature-inspired production design to green makeup that wouldn’t rub off on the dresses — at least, usually it wouldn’t.
I’ll be keeping an eye on the costume and hair and makeup categories at this weekend’s BAFTA Awards, where Tazewell and Hannon are both nominated. The BAFTAS are voted on by a group that overlaps significantly with the Academy, and with the awards happening smack in the middle of the final Oscar voting period, their influence could be significant.
Can Conclave and its European production team overcome Anora’s Cinderella story to win BAFTA’s best film? Could The Brutalist snag some wins in crafts categories that prove it’s still in the mix? And could Wicked star Cynthia Erivo, a British national treasure, maybe have enough hometown advantage to best the seemingly unstoppable Demi Moore?
I’ll have more on the results of the BAFTAs and what they tell us about these final days of Oscar voting early next week. For now, let Tazewell and Hannon whisk you away to the Land of Oz.
How ‘Tangible, Timeless’ Techniques Ground Wicked’s Wild Style
“Ask Paul about the makeup rubbing off on the costumes.”
That was Hannon’s advice to me as we wrapped up our conversation and I prepared to talk to her collaborator Tazewell about their work bringing the world of Jon M. Chu’s Wicked to life. The hair and makeup and costume departments work hand in hand on every film, of course; I was particularly fascinated hearing both artisans talk about the importance of the time they spend in the trailers with the actors each day, helping set the tone for their stars’ performances while also focusing on the minute details of their own work.
But for Wicked, Tazewell and Hannon weren’t just operating on a massive scale, outfitting hundreds of extras with wigs and costumes that would make even the faintest of background actors stand out. They were also inventing an entire world — a world heavily inspired by Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and the iconic MGM musical, of course, but one with its own unique look and feel.
The magic was conjured in a “war room” on the film’s London set, where Tazewell, Hannon, production designer Nathan Crowley and other members of the crew could put their heads together. “It was imperative for all of us to be in the same room and looking at what everyone else was doing, because there was a great overlap in how we were going to define this world,” says Tazewell, who started his research process eight months before reporting to set. “The rules that we were setting up — it needed to speak of Oz-ians and how they design, how they see themselves. What governs the world within that?”
Cynthia Erivo’s and Ariana Grande’s looks as Elphaba and Galinda may have gotten most of the attention, and will inspire Halloween costumes for many years to come, but it’s the details surrounding them that make Wicked such a spectacle. For days with large crowds, like the Emerald City musical number “One Short Day,” Hannon would have more than 100 people working on her team, doing everything from coating wigs in polyurethane to keep them in place to making sure each extra’s manicure suited the character. Tazewell, meanwhile, employed 70 full-time costume makers at the studio, with individual rooms devoted to Galinda (“this explosion of pink and lavender and sparkles”) and Elphaba (“covered in black”).
As for that green makeup, Hannon developed what she calls the “Green Bible,” with dozens of makeup tests required to get the exact right shade for Erivo’s Elphaba. (The secret? A touch of fluorescent yellow, which gives the luminosity of real skin). The green was crucial for Tazewell too, who didn’t just have to worry about the makeup rubbing off on Erivo’s garb, but also had to recreate the color as a costume element.
“Elphaba knows that people already are going to have certain assumptions because of the color of her skin,” says Tazewell. “So with the fabric choices, it’s allowing her skin to be a part of her persona in a proud way. And that was very important for Cynthia as she was playing the role.”
In the Ozdust Ballroom sequence, for example, the long arms on Elphaba’s dress are sheer — and beneath it Erivo wears a green bodysuit that matches her makeup precisely, but is just translucent enough to still render as real skin. You may not be able to tell any of this when seeing it onscreen, but Tazewell is confident you can feel it.
Despite the fantastical creations she made, Hannon aimed for a level of grounded realism too. “There’s a lot Jon didn’t want to use because he didn’t want it to be a fantasy film,” she says of Chu. “We wanted it to be tangible, to be real, to be timeless. We wanted people to be able to relate to it and not be taken out of it by something that’s rather odd. I think everyone agrees that Cynthia’s green skin doesn’t remove you from her. You’re never looking at face paint. You believe it’s totally her.”
For Tazewell, the amount and intensity of effort that went into creating the world is what makes it so immersive. “We’ve created a world that is so detailed that you buy into it,” he says. “It has this feeling that everything has been figured out — and indeed it has.”
Interesting. Tazewell is a great designer. But Susan Hilferty designed the show on bway and every incarnation owes her Much.