Arianne Phillips first teamed up with director James Mangold on “Woman Interrupted” when she was “a child costume designer,” as she advised IndieWire. Within the 25 years since that collaboration, Phillips has created among the most iconic garments in up to date American cinema, from her seems to be for Brad Pitt’s laidback stuntman in “As soon as Upon a Time in Hollywood” to her recreation of Johnny Money’s “man in black” model for Mangold’s “Stroll the Line.”
Each of these movies garnered Phillips Oscar nominations (she was additionally nominated for her work on Madonna’s “W.E.”), however they have been mere warm-ups for her newest work on Mangold’s “A Full Unknown.” Not like “Stroll the Line” or among the different biopics Phillips has designed (like Milos Forman’s “The Individuals vs. Larry Flynt”), “A Full Unknown” takes place in a comparatively compressed time-frame, following Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) for the primary 4 or 5 years of his profession. Its simplicity, nevertheless, is misleading — not less than so far as Phillips’ job is worried.
“Timothée had 66 or 67 costume adjustments,” Philips mentioned, and that was only the start — each character from Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) and Johnny Money (Boyd Holbrook) to Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) had between eight and 25 seems to be. Along with the over 100 talking components, “A Full Unknown” additionally had over 4,000 background actors whom Phillips needed to costume in period-accurate clothes, making “A Full Unknown” as huge an endeavor as any movie in her profession.
Making the progressions of every of the movie’s characters really feel natural was Phillips’ greatest problem on the movie, however she says she received some assist from circumstances that weren’t, on the face of it, totally optimistic. “The concept was that we have been going to shoot in 2020, after which we received delayed by COVID,” Phillips mentioned. “Then once we got here out of COVID, it grew to become a scheduling kerfuffle between Timmy doing ‘Dune’ and Jim doing ‘Indiana Jones.’ Pre-production didn’t really begin till 2023.”
Even then there was one other delay when the actors’ strike shut the film down. But for Phillips, there was a serious benefit to all of the stops and begins. “By the point we received began it had been 4 years of me realizing I used to be going to do the film and maintaining an archive of pictures, searching and gathering as I went,” she mentioned. When the film shut down for the strike, Phillips had executed her preliminary fittings with the actors and was in a position to ruminate on her decisions. “I received this actually quiet six-month interval the place I used to be by myself time, simply pondering and looking out on the work I had executed.”
Phillips took benefit of the hiatus to learn each Dylan biography she may and to create hours and hours of playlists of his music, actions that helped her acquire a fuller understanding of the musical legend. “Quite a lot of the time you must run and gun from zero to 60,” she mentioned. The added prep time led to a number of discoveries that made their approach into the film, essentially the most vital of which was that Dylan was extraordinarily deliberate about his garments, even earlier than he was well-known.
“In Suze Rotolo’s ebook, she describes how meticulously Bob dressed, and I had thought he simply dressed like a messy 19-year-old boy,” Phillips mentioned. “Actually, he actually made an effort to imitate this Woody Guthrie thought of an American employee with dungarees and Pendleton shirts. I wouldn’t say it was orchestrated, nevertheless it was considerate — he was fascinated by how he wished to be introduced.” Phillips’ deep dive led her to discoveries relating to different characters as nicely.
“I had seen this beige mod vinyl coat in photographs from Newport, and it simply didn’t appear in tandem with something Joan Baez ever wore,” Phillips mentioned. Finally, she realized that Baez had worn the coat on an album cowl photographed by Richard Avedon and found out that the coat will need to have been given to her. Phillips launched into a little bit of detective work to hint the coat’s origins, and it grew to become a central costume for Baez, who, like Dylan, was looking for her personal identification on the time — an concept that was central for Phillips.
“I actually wished the garments to indicate a younger man discovering his voice, not solely musically, however how he presents himself to us,” Phillips mentioned. She added that the garments have been additionally essential for displaying the passage of time. “Most biopics are the trajectory of somebody’s life from start to loss of life, and this was simply 4 years the place Dylan wrote this unimaginable quantity. The know-how, the structure, the cars…none of that basically adjustments in 4 years. So I actually had a chance to information the viewers via the movie.”
Though “A Full Unknown” is a interval piece a few particular cultural second, Phillips feels its enchantment has extra to do with the way it speaks to the current day. “There are similarities with what’s taking place on the earth proper now,” she mentioned. “We’d like hope, we have to imagine change is feasible, and we nonetheless have the identical tensions and the identical divisions. In the end, for me, this film is about how creativity is important, and music is the last word leveler that brings everybody collectively. Hopefully, these themes will resonate with individuals.”