Hello ladies and gentlemen, your pal Muldoon here with another interesting look behind the scenes, this time with a master in his field, an Oscar Nominated Costume Designer, Mr. Paco Delgado. You've seen his work in THE DANISH GIRL, WITCHING AND BITCHING, LES MISERABLES, BAD EDUCATION, and possibly the latest Sacha Baron Cohen movie THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY. I'll be blunt, this is one of my favorite interviews I've done with AICN, ever. The man's sense of inclusion, of being part of a team, is something I wasn't prepared for. What follows below is incredible insight from a legend in the field, a professional who does this day in and day out, a man who sees the whole picture and isn't caught up in his own department. As is typically the case with true masters, the vibe I got during this Q&A was of sincerity, with a multitude of answers lacking any sort of pretentiousness. This man is the real deal and an artist that commands respect without having to let you know just how talented he is. It's a privilege to get to include him in MEET THE CREW, a sporadic column that is very near to my heart. Before we jump in, I'd be remiss not to thank him openly for taking the time out of his day to talk with me and the folks here at AICN. So let's dig into the mind of a Costume Designer!

PACO DELGADO - COSTUME DESIGNER

First off, congratulations on the Oscar nomination. That’s an incredible honor, so thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.

Oh, thank you for talking with me today. Thank you very much.

I realize we don’t have much time, so would you be okay with me jumping right on in and asking you all sorts of wild questions?

Oh yes, of course!

How did you get started with Costumes in general?

Well, how I started in Costumes was by chance. I wasn’t like thinking “I want to be a Costume Designer.” I wanted to be a Set Designer for theater mainly, but as it so happens in life your destiny is almost always different than what you think it’s going to be. I felt like doing sets for theater and because when I started I was doing productions with very little money, they never had the budget to hire Costume Designers and so it became a part of my job. People used to say that my costumes were not very interesting and little by little I began doing more costumes and less sets. When I jumped into the cinema world, I just started doing costumes.

When are you typically hired on to a project? You’ve done quite a few incredible films, I’m just curious at what point does a Producer/Director bring you on where you really start to dig into what you are about to create.

Well, I don’t know that answer really, because that’s more a producer question. I think I’ve been very, very lucky to work with very interesting directors. I mean I’ve worked with people like Pedro Almodóvar, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Tom Hooper… M. Night Shyamalan. You know, it’s like… I think one film leads you to the next one somehow. I think Pedro liked my work, because obviously I’m Spanish and was doing the movie thing for the Spanish market. He saw my movies and invited me to do BAD EDUCATION and then I suppose the work from Pedro lead me to work with González Iñárritu, and then Tom Hooper was interested because he was looking for a more “Latino-French” feeling. I think one thing leads to the other, you know? They’re all artists and they have a vision and sometimes they see something that works for them, you know?

That makes total sense. I mean when people can see your work, they’re going to want to work with you and the more of it you do… the more you get to show what you’re capable of, which is quite a bit it looks like. Specifically with THE DANISH GIRL, how big of a crew did you have in terms of Seamstresses, and… Who do you fill your team up with on a given production? What are the key roles you have to fill in order to create the best you can? I assume you’re not stitching every piece of fabric.

(Laughs) No, no… I mean basically I try to surround myself with people I really trust and know. Normally I’ll have an Assistant Costume Designer, and some times it depends on the movie, like with a big movie you have more than one Assistants, like two or three. More on the technical side, I have a Costume Supervisor. Lately I’ve been working with a lady named Hannah Walters and you know I always will want to work with people that I trust. Normally you have the people that are the makers, who would be the Seamstresses and the people who help to accessorize along with the Buyers, the people who will help buy the fabrics that you will use. So at the beginning with preparation, you have a buyer and then one of the most important jobs is when you finish the clothes, you have to pretend that these clothes have had a life before. Therefore you need to have another person who will do all of the aging and adjustments to make the costume feel like it’s been used. There’s nothing more horrible than clothes that just came off of the rack in the work shop. That’s more or less what I do… I have like forty-five or fifty people working under me. On THE DANISH GIRL it was reduced to maybe like fifteen or sixteen people and we’d bring in people as they were needed, but my closest team is really like five people.

That’s incredible, the fact that you have roughly fifteen people to create all of the costumes for THE DANISH GIRL. Looking at just the primary leads alone, there’s so much attention to detail, and that aging absolutely does make it feel more “real.” But then to think of the background actors, the extras… How many original pieces were you tasked with creating for THE DANISH GIRL?

So for the actors, especially Eddie, they had nearly thirty or thirty-two changes, each one. For Eddie, we really had to create quite a bit from scratch simply because he’s a man and it was incredibly difficult to find things that would fit. I do love to work with originals, but to create the level of detail we needed… We bought a lot of already existing dresses, old damaged dresses, and then we’d take the parts that weren’t damaged and recreate them. We sort of recycled them for him. For Alicia, for example, that’s such a huge one, because she’s much smaller and we could do more with originals. I think with Alicia we did around fifty originals and the rest were vintage. For the crowds, we did a mix of new things and old things, but basically we didn’t do the whole complete outfit, except all of the outfits for the nurses and the doctors… That was all completely new, but for the people in the streets, in the markets, the opening exhibition, we took what we could and then made up parts of it. I mean let’s say we did the blouses, but not the complete outfit. Ultimately we dressed roughly seven hundred and fifty people.

Wow.

We created new outfits for secondary characters like “Ulla,” and for “Dr. Warnekros” and all of these kind of secondary roles we made the costumes brand new, so not only for Eddie.

That’s an incredible amount of people to dress and they all looked so stunning.

Well I have a very, very good team I have to say. A lot of them have worked with me in the past and also I mean you really work hard in movies, because you are carried away by the enthusiasm. If you have a really good story to tell, you always want to put a lot of effort into it.

Absolutely. So if you had to pick, what was your favorite costume you designed for THE DANISH GIRL? If not your “favorite,” how about the most difficult? What was the most difficult thing when you were tasked with creating all of these looks?

Well I wouldn’t say “difficult,” because I didn’t find anything really more difficult than another. I think it was more challenging than difficult. Basically the challenge was to make a beautiful woman of Eddie, being a man. That was very challenging, but you know… Between Eddie’s costumes, I particularly liked two of them. I like the first costume we created dressed as a woman. That would be the outfit he wears to the Artists’ Ball, a sort of dress made with silk and it looks very theatrical. It’s important for me that the audience sees Lili and not him, also because we have to show a woman and the proportions and the dimensions weren’t easy to show that. Then I liked the male suits… There’s a suit that Eddie wears in a park where he is being beaten up by two thugs. I like that suit especially, because it’s very ambiguous and at that particular moment in the story it was all about change and she had to become the woman that she wants and this was a way to show with costumes how getting dressed every day effected… and the reaction you can get with a dress or with a suit. Sometimes we get appreciation or we can get “You look really handsome or beautiful,” but some times clothing can bring out attitudes in people, even violence… I think that shows in a way how powerful costumes are and that’s why I like that suit so much.

Taking a step back from THE DANISH GIRL, I’m just curious about you in general. What Costume Designers working now do you respect and admire? As a fan of film and of costumes yourself, what designers out there do you see and take notice to?

This year for example, the three people who are nominated with me… I’ve always been a big fan of them, especially Sand Powell. She has such an incredible career and I love her sense of color and theatricality, and style. I love Jenny Beavan’s work as well. I mean I’m not saying this because they are nominated along with me, it’s that I really truly believe this. I love Jenny’s work, especially in the late eighties and early nineties, these styles that really changed the way we Costume Designers work nowadays. She was one of the first of using reality as a source… Before that, the Costume Designs were much more like inventing the things some times and not based in reality. Jenny was really important for that. I love Jacqueline West’s work. The work she has done for THE REVENANT is amazing, because it’s very real. They look very real, but at the same time they’re theatrical, but they don’t distract… They look very real and I can’t help but respect that.

Now back to THE DANISH GIRL. You mentioned earlier about the background characters and how many different looks you had to account for, one thing that stood out for me at least were the newspaper hats on the fish merchants.

(Laughs) Right! Well you know that comes from reality. When I did my research, I found a picture of a lady wearing a newspaper had and selling fish. I thought it was amazing. Research is incredibly important and I normally try to find “what in reality looks a little awkward or strange.” Sometimes we don’t realize reality is much more fantastic than fantasy, so I found that and I just thought it was great. Think about it, these ladies spent their whole day under the sun and they are poor people, therefore you need to make something quick to protect their heads. I thought that was a great thing to do. Unfortunately one of the days we shot it started raining. It was a bit crazy, given they were paper hats…

It was just an interesting detail that stood out. That’s probably one of the many reasons people look to what you do and really appreciate it. That’s not something I believe most people would think of when tasked with dressing fish merchants. Clearly that research and attention to detail really stands out.

I think research is very exciting. I think it’s crucial for all of us in film. You as a journalist have to do your research and I assume you find it challenging and interesting. You’re opened up to a new world that you didn’t know and that to me is the best part of this work, to be honest.

With regards to the reality of what you do day in and day out, what departments would you say you work with the most? Who would you consider your “boss” on a given film production? I assume so many people give you input that it’s difficult to decipher who to truly listen to at the end of the day.

Well I think basically everyone is my boss, basically. There’s the director obviously, and I work vey close with him or her as they are my boss, but also I work a lot with the Production Designer. They always have big input with regards to the visual aspects of a movie, from the colors to the feelings of it… I mean so many things. I always work very closely with the Production Designer, but also the DP, the Director of Photography is very important, I will say possibly the most important of all of us, because cinema at the end is light and the light is the vehicle with which we see cinema. We have to be very aware of how the DP is working, so I’m very collaborative with them, because basically if you don’t have that collaboration then your work could be for not. I’ll also say Makeup and Hair, because we create the characters together and sometimes with movies it’s more on Makeup and Hair than costumes. I mean fantastically enough I would say the Makeup people are some of the most important people in the boat. Films these days include a lot of close ups and you can spend weeks of your life creating a dress and then find the only thing you see is the collar. That’s part of the profession I suppose.

It definitely seems like you’re a team player who sees the big picture. Respecting what the DP does and taking into consideration how they are going to light something or shoot it in a certain way might dictate how you end up designing yourself. That’s true collaboration.

The thing I think you can see in THE DANISH GIRL is it was a big collaboration from all of us. That comes from the fact that we’ve worked with each other in the past and we know each other very well. There’s no ego going into it. I mean I’ve definitely had experiences where there are egos, but I think collaboration is always the best approach. We are all working to achieve the same goal and it’s important that you don’t feel like your ideas are always the best ones. Your best ideas can come from other people, you know?

I think that’s great advice. So in regards to working with directors, what can a director do to get the most out of your expertise? What kind of input do you appreciate and what kind of input would you say “Hey, leave this to me…”

I think in my case the way I work the best is when I find directors that have a very clear idea of what they want and by that I mean that they explain to you the characters of a story, what they want to get from the story. It’s more about the idea, so for example with this movie and the first meetings I had with Tom Hooper, he said to me “I want you to make people understand that Lili was a woman and that she was trapped in a man’s body.” Right? He didn’t tell me… He also said “I don’t want you to feel that the costumes are the most important things to the whole process. I want people to feel that the process itself is the important thing.” I think to me that’s one of the best things, where there’s a very strong idea behind it and it’s not about “I want this character in red” or “I want everyone to look so and so…” I hate when directors come with definite ideas about the design. What I want them to tell me basically is how do they feel about the characters and how do they feel about the movie or what their impressions are on atmosphere that they want to have. I love to work in between boundaries, so I want to feel that I’m encouraged to explore while inside those boundaries. Do you know what I mean?

I very much do.

If you put me in a room and maybe close the door, then tell me “whatever you can do in this room, you can do it. Whatever is available in this room, you can use. I don’t want you to leave this room.” That’s what’s so great about Tom. He has a very good aesthetic approach when he does his movies, but he also allows you to be free within those boundaries. I think this is where you get the best out of you, you know?

I know your schedule is pretty tight today, so I’ve got one last question. Provided you’ve done so many incredible period pieces, is there any sort of genre that you would like to explore that you’ve not yet done?

Well I don’t know. The thing is I like ancient history, like the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. I think at times, especially the Greek and Romans, they are not… I wouldn’t say, “badly made,” but they all have a strange inspiration, so I wouldn’t mind doing something like that. I also love the end of the nineteenth century, because it was the pique of tailoring, especially for men and I think it would be very interesting for me to do something like that, because I would learn a lot about the different tailoring techniques of that period. Basically everything we wear today is based on the works of that time, especially in England with the great English tailoring. I would love to do something in the eighteen eighties or nineties. I think that would be fantastic for me.

Okay, well I hope to see you on a project like that. Thank you very much, sincerely, for your time, sir. I really do appreciate it and I think our readers will as well. Best of luck with the Oscars, sir.

Thank you! Bye.

There we have it, ladies and gents - a lovely chat with a talented professional. I hope you enjoyed the chat and perhaps got a little more insight into the world of Costumes. Thanks again to Mr. Deglado for his time!

If you work in film or television and feel like shedding some light on what exactly your position entails, then please feel free to shoot me an email with the subject line "MTC - (Your Name) - (Your Position)." I'm not here to get scoops or dirt on anyone, simply here to educate and ask for advice to any of our filmmakers in the audience.

If you folks are interested in finding out what other positions on a film are like, then check out any of the links below:

Robby Baumgartner - Director of Photography

Thomas S. Hammock - Production Designer

Seamus Tierney - Cinematographer

Brian McQuery - 1st Assistant Director

Shannon Shea - Creature/VFX Supervisor

Christopher A. Nelson - Special Makeup Effects Artist

William Greenfield - Unit Production Manager

Jeff Errico - Storyboard Artist

Joe Dishner - Line Producer

Monique Champagne - Set Decorator

Arthur Tarnowski - Film Editor