I am – Hercules!! Gaspode really enjoys his “Doctor Who.” This week he interviews Louise Page, who seems to have something to do with the cast’s costuming. Louise Page: what the well-dressed Time Lord is wearing [Creating a look for the new Doctor Who can be a mixed bag. While James Acheson (who eventually went on to such big-screen superheroes as Spider-Man and Daredevil) was able to design an iconic look for Tom Baker’s bohemian fourth Doctor, complete with trademark long scarf, Pat Godfrey was less than successful with Colin Baker’s character a decade later, creating a multi-colored eyesore at the behest of producer John Nathan-Turner that even the actor himself has subsequently gone on record as being- ahem- less than successful. For Louise Page, who joined the new Doctor Who team in season two, one of the first tasks was to create a look for David Tennant who was taking over the lead role, but she was also making adjustments for returning companion Billie Piper, as well as designing a Christmas special and 13 episodes that ran the gamut from period drama to parallel worlds. If the interview that follows doesn’t give AICN readers an accurate enough idea of the complexity of Page’s job, bear in mind that this conversation took place while she was supervising no less than three different episodes that were in production at the same time, while packing away an entire department for the pre-season three hiatus…] How did Doctor Who come up as far as your involvement? Louise Page: I was asked to go and meet Phil Collinson the producer, so my agent rang me and said, ‘They want to see you for Doctor Who, so I said okay, fine and then she said, ‘Oh, by the way, they want you to come up with looks for the new Doctor as part of the meeting,’ I thought, oh no, that’s a nightmare, because you don’t know what to expect. You don’t know what other people are going to do, and you don’t know whether you’re taking your portfolio, so you don’t know whether you’d better do loads of drawings or just do mood boards or whatever. I ended up doing it in a little book form, so I think I spent about a day sampling fabrics and came up with different looks. I went along and met Phil and he looked through my portfolio like you would at any meeting, and I had gone through maybe four different looks or ideas for things. I’d looked at some of the old Doctors and talked about what we might achieve with the new Doctor and that he should be sexy and maybe a bit eccentric. The boys should want to be him and the girls should want to fancy him, mothers should want to fancy him, little girls would want to like him, young boys would want to be him, grown-up men would want to be him and I thought David would probably want to be quite eccentric in the way he would play it, so I talked about that at my interview. At the time, I wasn’t really thinking I wanted to go into Doctor Who. I had watched it as a kid and Jon Pertwee was my Doctor Who, and at the age of ten, I was like, ‘Oh wow, can you imagine being costume designer on Doctor Who; that would be amazing!’ but when the project came up, I was a bit [reluctant] because somebody had already done it the year before, so I was a bit nervous about the idea of taking over somebody else’s project. Normally I wouldn’t want to take over somebody’s project like that, because you would feel that they had done something to make their mark on it, so it’s certainly more intimidating. But Phil was lovely when I met him, so that’s really what swayed it for me. And then my agent range me a day later and said, ‘They want to see you again,’ and also Phil had asked me if he could keep my ‘school project’ and I said, ‘I don’t think you’re allowed to do that actually!’ but he said, ‘I promise I’ll send it back to your agent,’ so I said, ‘Fine, I’ve only done it for this meeting, so it’s not a problem,’ and then my agent rang and said, ‘He wants to see you again.’ I went and met Phil again and Julie Gardner was with him this time and he gave me my school project back and Julie was asking me about stuff in my portfolio and films that I’ve been doing, so that was that. They were very nice, and my agent rang the next day and said, ‘They really want you to do that’ so I had to make that decision, but it’s been fantastic. I’ve always wanted to do an eighteenth century thing so that was lovely. I love the fifties, and I’m not as mad about the Victorian era, but the story we did was lovely, so from that point of view, it’s been great. The contemporary episodes are very stylized, so there isn’t a right or wrong, and for the first time in my life, I can say, ‘It’s Doctor Who, it doesn’t matter, because you can do what you like. If I want to do that, we’ll do it!’ When you began designing David Tennant’s look, did you stay with some of those original ideas? Page: We did; in fact after I got the job, I had to go meet David, who was on another project, so Phil and [director] James Hawes and myself all went down and met him during his lunch hour. Because he was quite restricted on time, that was all he could give me, so I showed the school project, and he said, ‘Oh, I really like that suit!’ He had always wanted a long coat as well, and he liked trousers that were thin and narrow, so I went around to the shops to find shapes that I thought would work, and the next time I saw him, he came to the costumiers, and I literally had two rows of clothes from different periods, suits and shapes to try on him, and pretty much from that fitting, we came up with the basic silhouette of the coat. I ordered the fabric for the coat that day, and also the ideas for the suit came from that too. From then on, we started making everything, and obviously David could only come in during his morning or afternoon off so we really only had four sessions for fittings. Phil came to each one of them, which was brilliant because it meant that he was there with me every step of the way, and then we e-mailed Russell with pictures of the fittings so that he knew what was going on. Phil had warned me from the very beginning that they were very keen on the whole creative process and seeing everything and I would have to have to send everything to them for feedback. So we’d send stuff to Russell and I did have a mad moment at one point where we had narrowed the coats down quite a lot. Originally it had cuffs on it, and it was much more highwayman than it is now and the skirt was slightly more flared out, but Russell said, ‘I think it’s too wide, it should be narrower,’ I said, ‘But he’ll end up looking like a pencil!’ and Russell said, ‘Actually, you saying that appeals to me, I quite like the idea of a pencil.’ And Phil at one point had said the coat was too long, so we chopped five inches the bottom, and then we sent a picture to Russell, who said, ‘Oh, it could have been longer!’ Phil did hold his hands up and said, ‘I’m really sorry, that’s my fault,’ and I said, ‘Oh my God, £1,000 later!’ Isn’t that the problem sometimes when there are too many cooks in the kitchen? Page: It was the same with the Sycorax, where James Hawes had got reference from Masai warriors and he wanted to use that shade of red. They were described as scavengers in the script with bones hanging off them and it was all quite rough fabrics and clothes, so the essential silhouette was there, but I had started off with velvet and muslin and they said, ‘No no, rough, rough!’ so we did some drawings and sent them off and Russell e-mailed me back and said, ‘Yes, I know I said they were scavengers, but I think they’re sophisticated scavengers, and it’s Christmas, so it’s regal and therefore it’s red.’ And I said, ‘Oh, so it’s red velvet then?’ and he said yes, ‘Okay, we’ll go back to the drawing board,’ so we had to redo the Sycorax concept and it wasn’t as rugged as we first thought. But with David, obviously he had a lot of input in the look of it. He wanted to be comfortable, and he had to feel that it was right for the Doctor. The geek chic tag was David’s. I think we were fitting and he said something about geek chic and it stuck I don’t mind that; it’s fine, it’s quite funny, and I know Julie Gardner said we got something like an 84% vote of confidence from one of the Doctor Who websites when the suit was announced and I thought that’s not bad. Is that because it’s a costume that the fans can actually make for themselves? Page: Well kind of, because they’ve got to pick the right fabric an also they need to see it well enough to know that the stripes go in the other direction on the back of the jacket. They recently did it in one of the sci-fi magazines and said, ‘You too can look like the Doctor!’ and they just put a brown pin-striped Portsmouth suit on the page with a pair of white Plimpsoles and a white shirt, and I thought well, it’s not a white shirt, they’re not white Plimpsoles and it’s not a white stripe, but you’re right, it’s a brown suit. I’m sure if people wanted to try and copy it, they could paint stripes on it and do whatever they liked. You’d be surprised what the fans can do. Page: I know, I’ve seen the Star Wars conventions and what they do with websites, because my friend Tricia Biggar designed Star Wars and I know that she has all sorts of weird people come up to her at conventions in America and she’s had to judge competitions with George Lucas, and they’ve taken pictures off the website and said, ‘I’ve made this, but I wasn’t sure about the fabric, but I thought it looked like this.’ What was your starting point for Billie? Page: When I had my interview and they talked about all the characters, Phil and Julie Gardner said they weren’t really thinking about changing Rose, and that she was this girl from the council estate and she was a tomboy and they thought it would be very much the same. They asked if I felt there was anything I would have wanted to have done differently, and I thought because she had been with the Doctor a while, perhaps we might be able to have a bit more variety or make her a bit more sophisticated, and when I spoke to Billie, funnily enough, she thought that Rose should move on a bit as well, that she wanted her to be a bit more sophisticated, so we did quite a successful shop actually, because nearly everything that we bought that day we ended up using at some point. We only went shopping on that one day, and after that, I shopped for her. I’d bring back a load of stuff and she knows what looks good on her, so I just tried to marry up the episodes. In ‘New Earth,’ there was a sexy element to it, because of the nature of the script, and I found that top and it turned out that it was the perfect top for that episode. We found two pairs of jeans and boots very early on that we liked the shape of, and then for the Victorian episode, we’d found that dungaree dress and liked it and it was cute. I had found that T-shirt with the crown on it, so it became quite a cutesey young girl episode. With ‘School Reunion,’ I found some jackets that we liked, so we tried to vary them. In episode four, the Madame Du Pompadour episode, because Sophia Myles was going to be in such big grand dresses and the episode being such a costume piece, I felt it would be nice if Rose was the opposite in simple jeans and T-shirt. That was what was going on in my head with that episode. In episodes five and six, she gets into some other clothes, which is very script-driven, so she starts off in a Rose costume but as you’ll see, she has another little outfit that I think people will be quite surprised by. In seven, the fifties episode, she’s in a dress, but it isn’t meant to be the fifties of the period; it’s meant to be something that she has in the TARDIS, which is more American fifties, but Billie didn’t want it to be just a fifties frock. We wanted it to be something slightly contemporary as well, so I made the dress for her, but she’s got a little bomber jacket on as well. Some of those costumes, we literally tried them on the morning she worked. We never had time; sometimes she was busy on an episode and I’d say, ‘Can you try stuff on, because I have to get doubles or triples of it. I’m reminded of the old expression that art is never finished; only abandoned Page: I think that’s happened all the way through with these episodes: because of the pace, you never have time to enjoy it. Even when we did the ballroom scene in ‘Pompadour,’ you don’t stand there for more than five minutes and think, ‘Oh yes, it actually looks quite nice!’ You’re actually wondering if it’s okay and then you have to move on, because on Monday, I have to be somewhere else on another episode so you don’t have the luxury of standing around thinking, ‘Isn’t this beautiful?’ It’s a very fast process, much faster than if you’re doing a feature film and you’ve got a beginning, middle and end. With the fifties episode, I prepped in London for something like three days, which was not long enough, cramming in fittings and getting that crowd sorted, so things like that are a nightmare. I think the last episodes were done in just two or three days, so it often becomes a race against time, but you still want to give it the best shot you can, so I don’t ever compromise on the decisions. It just means you’re working harder and harder to get it all done. I don’t spend any less time on a person who’s got one line as someone who’s in the whole episode. I give everyone equal amounts of attention and time, because you want to get it right, and I think that you just do. If it means I have to shop with one person for five hours just to get one suit, I will, because it’s got to be the right suit, even if they’ve only got one line, I don’t want to shove in any old thing. It just doesn’t work like that. But conversely, don’t you have to be careful where you put your money? Page: Definitely, but I don’t feel I’ve compromised too much in this series. Where I’ve seen that things are going to be expensive, like with the Queen Victoria dresses I had to make two of them in one week, and I didn’t have an actress, so I had to start making them before even knowing who was going to be in them because time was so tight and casting was so late. We knew roughly that these dresses were going to be expensive, so when we did the budget for the Victorian episode and the Madame Du Pompadour episodes, I said, ‘It’s up to you; all I’m saying is that this episode is obviously going to be a lot more expensive than the last episode, and if you want it, this is what will happen, so it’s up to production to either say, ‘In that case, we’ll cut the crowd,’ or, ‘Fine, just get on with it!’ How closely do you have to work with the other design departments on the series? Page: There’s a lot of collaboration, because makeup always needs to know what costume I’m thinking about. I haven’t had lengthy discussions with Ed [Thomas, the production designer], but I think that’s because we’ve both been at the tone meetings and therefore we’re working off the same page, because we’re all at the same meeting with Russell talking about the look of he episode. Ed would joke about it and say it’s because he and I both went to the same college but he went there ten years after me, but somehow unbelievably it seems to work with us. I’ve walked onto sets and the costumes fit perfectly and they seem to complement each other, without me seeing more than a couple of cardboard models at a meeting and a few photos of a location and Russell talking. I rang up Ed’s art director on the fifties episode and said, ‘What color is the wallpaper in the house, because I need to know that these people aren’t going to merge into the background,’ so it was things like that. I also have a lot of collaboration with Millennium FX because obviously things like the Sycorax and the helmets and the heads, I had to design collars that would fit around the parameters of those heads. With the clockwork man and woman, we had to adapt the costumes and they painted masks to match the costumes. It was a bit of a nightmare when I suddenly said I was changing one of the costumes, so with things like that, it’s very important that you have that kind of collaboration, but obviously we’re all under the same creative umbrella of Russell’s vision. So those tone meetings are helpful in terms of pointing everyone in the right direction? Page: Absolutely. With Russell talking about the Christmas special, it was just, ‘It’s simply Christmas, so it’s this and that,’ but with some of the other episodes, he’d say, ‘This is a very dark episode,’ or with a more contemporary episode, he’d say, ‘This has to be colorful, because it comes out after a double episode that is the darkest in the series, therefore, it should be blazing with color, and it should be sunny and lively,’ so much of it comes from that tone meeting. It really is the key to the look of the episode, because it means that we’re all thinking along the same lines. Even when you get to a location and suddenly discover a lovely sunny colorful location, it’s freezing cold and the people are freezing and they’re all standing there in T-shirts and you’ve got children in T-Shirts, and you’ve got he first AD saying, ‘For goodness sake, why can’t they put a jacket on?’ and I have to say, ‘Actually, I’m really sorry, but it’s meant to be July, and it’s meant to be the colorful episode, so no, you can’t do that because it won’t work.’ Ultimately I have to stand my ground and say, ‘Russell’s vision is this sunny colorful July summer episode, and as soon as we start putting jackets on because it’s cold, it’s not going to work and you’re not going to get the look you want,’ so that can be quite tricky when you’ve got a six year-old standing there in a summer frock with no tights. Or shooting a Christmas special in July. Page: When it’s boiling hot, exactly. It was boiling hot, so the Sycorax were all boiling hot, but that’s just the way it is. 8 p.m. Friday. SciFi.

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