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Arts And Crafts
DESIGN
DESIGN
FORLIVING
FORLIVING
AWARD WINNING COSTUME DESIGNER SANDY POWELL TALKS TO QUENTIN FALK
Last year must count as a sort of annus mirabilis for British cos- tume designer Sandy Powell. There was a Hollywood Oscar for Shakespeare In Love and a BAFTA award for Velvet Goldmine, two extraordinarily different film assign- ments which managed to demonstrate perfectly the breadth of her versatility.
Powell, 39, is naturally delighted with the accolades from both sides of the Atlantic which deservedly arrived on the back of a veritable string of nominations which have accompanied her work throughout the Nineties on movies like Interview With The Vampire, Orlando and The Wings Of The Dove.
But much as she clearly enjoyed helping recreate an authentic whiff of ye olde Englande on Shakespeare In Love - “the one thing we deliberately tried to do with the actors was to make them look as though they were wearing their own clothes and not just fancy dress” - you suspect she perhaps felt a more emotional kinship with the glam-rock New Elizabethans of Velvet Goldmine.
It was not, admits Powell, “like any- thing I’d done before. It was not like
doing a period film or like a contempo- rary film; it was a mixture of both. These clothes were really important when I was growing up, but I was too young to wear most of them. So a lot of the costumes I produced for the film was stuff I wanted to wear.”
Velvet Goldmine also reunited Powell with production designer Christopher Hobbs with whom she had forged a close relationship years earlier when they worked together on no fewer than five films for the late Derek Jarman starting out with Caravaggio in 1986.
Her fruitful collaboration with Jarman (which continued on, among others, Edward II and Wittgenstein) had a kind of logic ever since when, as a teenager, she first became
properly fired up by theatre,
and especially costume design,
after seeing the Lindsay Kemp Company in performance.
Later, at art school at St
Martins, she chose theatre
design because it seemed to be
a more varied course then just fashion, “which everyone was
doing.” That continued on at
the Central School - “there was
nowhere to study just costume design, as far as I knew” - although she confess- es she got “bored” with the technical drawing classes.
After art school, there was fringe theatre, dance, pop promos and, with early echoes of Velvet Goldmine, the odd assignment designing concert stagewear for the likes of Mick Jagger and Peter Gabriel. Powell agrees that she was “quite spoiled” working for Jarman especially at the outset and that when she went to work for others, it was like “learning again.” Perhaps none more so than alongside Neil Jordan with whom she now made six films starting with The Miracle in 1990.
“Neil’s a very visual director, which is why I’ve lasted so long with him, and has a way of commu- nicating that’s difficult to describe. Derek would be quite specific about what he wanted - a colour or a texture - and be able to describe it because he was a painter. Neil has a differ- ent way of giving you a sense of the atmosphere. We don’t talk that much in depth. I get a feel- ing, go away, do something,
then show him.”
Their latest collaboration is on
Jordan’s steamy new adaptation of Graham Greene’s Forties-set The End Of The Affair, with Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore and Stephen Rea, who paid Powell this compliment saying, “Costumes were extremely important just in terms of your bearing. I can’t praise Sandy highly enough because her eye is perfect and I think her contri- bution to my character was immense.”
As Powell prepares to work next in Rome on Martin Scorsese’s hugely ambitious Gangs Of New York, set in the mid 19th Century, she also ponders other aspects of her future career path: “I am not just interested in bigger, big- ger and bigger. After all, how many huge films are amazing? Often the best and most interesting are the smaller ones and I love working with new direc- tors who have a fresh vision.”
She’s also developing a project in partnership with actress Toni Collette. “We’ve optioned a book. I would love to be involved in choosing everyone. More control? Yes. That means I can’t then stand around and complain about what everyone else is doing.” ■
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