MTV Interviews Breaking Dawn's costume designer Michael Wilkinson

Michael Wilkinson

MTV Style: How familiar are you with Twilight as a whole?

Michael Wilkinson: You have to have been living under a rock not be the least bit familiar with these books, they’re so much a part of the public psyche of pop culture. You can know about them through mere absorption. That was part of the appeal of working on this for me—being involved with something that’s such an important franchise for so many people.

Right, but did you read the books?

Yes, I read them all! We tried to do as much preparation as possible. We wanted to be respectful and reverent to the source material. As a costume designer, it was fantastic because there are so many details. It’s such a blessing that Stephenie enjoys describing her characters, so there was lots of material for us to cue off of.

The most critical element with this movie is, of course, the wedding (*spoiler alert*), and this was misleading in the previews but the
re’s a dream sequence wedding and a real wedding. How did you delineate the two dresses from each other?

The script gave us a great opportunity to get inside Bella’s thoughts about the impending wedding. There’s a nightmare wedding and her perfect wedding. For the nightmare, we chose something that was a version of the dress that she would hate to wear. Something that’s uncomfortable and a dress Bella would be embarrassed in. It was stiff and had a boned bodice that showed a lot of bare skin which she’d be horrified by because she’s a bit of a tomboy.

There’s nothing very girly about her style so we had a huge, cumbersome, puffy skirt. We just tried to picture everything she’d find difficult to deal with and import that into a dress.

The real dress fit Bella like a second skin and I was really glad about how all that worked out. It reflects her simplicity and elegance. It’s not too girly, I thought it really hit the right note of having some vintage elements while working well for a modern woman. 

Details of Bella's wedding dress.
Photo: Courtesy of Summit Entertainment

That dress was stunning. I went to the midnight screening and it was an entire theater filled to the gills with girls sighing in unison. The lace panel in the back with hundreds of covered buttons, we all swooned.

That’s the great thing about Kristen, she has such an amazing physique so we thought the best thing to do was to show that. The dress really reveals curves and highlights each part of her shape but it’s all covered up and so we thought it was sexy but completely elegant.

There was such speculation for a long time about who would design that dress but it was Carolina Herrera all along, right?

Carolina had worked with Stephenie personally for events. And they’d struck up a friendship and dialogue so we talked to Carolina for the dress.

As you do…

[Laughs] Right! As you do… They’d been talking about the day that this dress would hit the big screen for a while and I was happy to help with the design as a consultant because it had to work with the rest of the film. So we needed complementary language getting the same look across.

Mind-boggling hotness front and center.
Photo: Courtesy of Summit Entertainment

You designed the other dresses? There were musings that Alice was wearing Zac Posen, how many costumes did you build from scratch?

I designed and built from scratch all of the Cullen women’s dresses. So Alice, Rosalie, Esme and Renee… it was lots of fun to start from the drawing board and think about getting all of the different personalities across. Alice has lots of fun with clothes and has a playful sense of style and a savvy approach to fashion so we wanted a modern take on a flapper. A 1920s dress makes a lot of sense for her because that’s when her character became a vampire so it’s a particularly strong era for her.

Plus, true to her personality, the ‘20s were very much a decade that celebrated female sexuality and independence.

Exactly.

You really did give it a lot of thought. The fans are lucky.

It’s all such a joy for me. This is gold for a costume designer, to have such great source material and these fun characters that are all so different from each other and, uh, a wedding? What’s not to love about that? You get to see the characters like you’ve never seen them before.

Let’s talk Rosalie. She has such a huge role in this movie.

Yes! I was so glad for Nikki, it was a great opportunity for her so show what a great performer she is. She’s got such different tonalities, for the wedding she obviously has a different personality from Alice so we went for something very dramatic, floor-length with a very high slit up the leg and it catches that great hourglass silhouette. We looked at the poise of the movie stars of the ‘30s and ‘40s so they were our references.

Total bombshell material.

Exactly. And it’s in the way they styled her hair and she has one of the most beautiful smiles in Hollywood, I think, which we actually get to see in this movie because in the other films she’s been a lot darker. In this one, she’s so protective of Bella and she’s at the wedding so there’s lot of different moments where she really shines and that’s a treat. Of course with Esme, she’s got that timeless understated beauty that’s so warm and appealing. It was a dream to dress them all.

Edward looked phenomenal in his tuxedo. Details on the boys please!

We put a lot of work into that too because we wanted to have them display a special, made-to-order feel. We didn’t want people to feel like you could just go out and buy them.

Well, there’s nothing off-the-rack about any of this.

[Laughs] No off-the-rack! Never. I drew up my ideal ideas for all the tuxedos. We wanted them to have a vintage feel, that sort of Edwardian turn-of-the-century vibe. Edward says, “I’ve been waiting a hundred years to marry you,” so we thought Alice would have fun riffing off of that.

But at the same time we didn’t want it to look theatrical, we wanted contemporary, young, and fresh. I drew up something that combined the lines of Edwardian formalwear and we made it up in beautiful contemporary Italian wools and gorgeous shirting materials.

Did you go into this with a list of designers you wanted to work with?

My first step is to absorb the script and get into the character’s heads to figure out how they feel about themselves and the world around them. We think colors, textures, silhouettes and fabrics and that’s my first step. 

From that I do massive amounts of research and I put up my boards with all my references for each character. I go online, do extensive research, go through magazine tear sheets and then I hit the stores and I do more research and call on my friends and contacts in the fashion industry. I try to cast the net wide. I don’t think it makes sense on camera if a certain character only wears certain designers. 

Edward's vacay clothes.
Photo: Courtesy of Summit Entertainment

Can we get onto a really important topic now? Um. Edward. IN SHORTS. Discuss.

How crazy is that?

Insane! I’d never dreamt that I’d see the back of that man’s knee.

There’s going to be so many inches of journalism written about this.

It’s breaking news. It’s MAJOR.

It’s a challenge to put an Englishman in shorts.

And Robert Pattinson is an Englishmen.

They have an instant freakout! I think it has to do with their public school uniforms that they wear as kids.

It’s all charcoal boiled wool.

Completely. Itchy, scratchy… they go, NOOOOOO long pants! We tried all sorts of different lengths but we ended up with a really classic look. My references were the Kennedys on summer vacation. That classic American summer wear. 

We went crisp with cool natural fibers, nautical navies and whites, trying to capture that classic style. More often than not, we went with a rolled-up chino but we didn’t think we could get away with not doing a short for a Brazilian scorching honeymoon so there you go. 

Members of the wolf pack.
Photo: Courtesy of Summit Entertainment

How was dressing the wolf pack different and was it difficult?

It was challenging. The choices are limited and I think it resonates as being truthful only if it reads like old clothes that they don’t care if they get ripped or destroyed when they turn into wolves. I had that as my starting point—what they have around their homes—old sweatpants, gear that they’ve painted a house in or washed a car in. I went for clothes that were disposable but even within that you have to capture the different personalities so again you’re using different colors, textures and shapes.

Speaking of textures and shapes, you know what was highly entertaining? Watching Bella arch her back and awkwardly prancing around in lingerie trying to entice Edward in that honeymoon montage.

That was such a fun moment because once you get to know Kristen, just the idea of her slipping into something black and lacy is hilarious. She has a physical aversion to it, she’s definitely your jeans and T-shirt kind of girl. I think she really didn’t find it hard to act those scenes because there’s a lot of Kristen there. And also there’s something so playful about Alice packing her bags and planting those items in her suitcase. It’s so cute.

Tell us who made the negligee and the polka dot number. I’m sure they’ll get sold out in moments.

There will be a worldwide search. I believe the negligee was La Perla, the knickers and bra was Agent Provocateur - they have the sauciest, cutest, frilliest bits of wispy underwear, so we went in and layered some things together.

But you know, I was thinking about your earlier question of what we made from scratch and we built a lot of the costumes in this movie but B.D. two, it’s SOOOOOOOO huge.

Did you just B.D. two me? La di da, B.D. two, no big deal… [Laughs]

[Laughs] Oh, come on, B.D. two, that’s what we call it.

So. Tell me THINGS!

Think about it! You’ve got the Denalis, Volturis, vampires from all over the world. We’ve got the final battle scene with the beautiful billowing Volturi capes. 

It’s just a whole vampire freak out that you’ll just have to hold on until next Christmas to see.

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Carter Burwell On Scoring Twilight and Breaking Dawn

TRIBECA, MANHATTAN: It was like a scene out of a movie. Film score composer Carter Burwell wrote the final cue to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Part I) at his piano in the country by the flickering light of an oil lamp.

“I was out at my place in Amagansett trying to finish up the score when Hurricane Irene hit and took out my power,” Burwell describes. “And it stayed out for four days. So I ended up writing the ending in this darkened, boarded up house.

Carter Burwell during "Breaking Dawn: Part I"
mixing sessions at The Body Studio, NYC.

“It was interesting and painful at the same time,” he says, with a laugh. “But it worked out.” 

Being forced to compose the old-fashioned way is not as extreme an exercise for Burwell as it might be for another composer; he does write most of his themes at the piano. 

And the storm made a perfectly dark and romantic setting in which to conjure the final scene’s music, where Burwell reprises the soaring “Bella’s Lullaby” theme from the first Twilight, with liturgical sounds. 

Without spoiling the ending, it’s a heavy, most climactic scene.

We met up with Burwell during Breaking Dawn mixing sessions at his studio in Tribeca – by contrast a very well-lit, and highly technical environment. He’d been to record the score with an orchestra at Abbey Road, and was now working through the final stages with his longtime mixer Mike Farrow and his assistant Dean Parker.

He took some time away from the mix to chat with SonicScoop about scoring for Twilight, and scoring in general…

Looking over your filmography, it seems like you haven’t scored a sequel before. You did the first Twilight but not the second and third. Can you tell me about how you came to do Breaking Dawn, the fourth of the Twilight films?

It’s true, I’ve never scored a sequel. But it’s pretty simple – I’ve worked with this director – Bill Condon – before [on Kinsey]. Bill wanted me to do the scores, but he wasn’t sure I would want to because they’re such huge melodramas, and that’s really very different than what I normally do. But he is entirely a pleasure to work with so I definitely wanted to do it.

When I was composing music for the first Twilight, I don’t think any of us knew that it would be that popular… that it would have this cultural resonance. There was such an enormous response. There have been thousands of emails people have written me, wanting to know how to play the themes on piano. And that has been really nice.

Oh that’s really cool – the fans genuinely engaging with the film’s score. Wow. So, in scoring this latest film, did you reprise any of those themes from the first? How did you continue that work you’d done on the first one, or did you not approach it like that at all?

Well, I did to some extent. The intervening two films were directed by different people and composed by different people and they didn’t use any of the musical themes from the first one.

But there’s this one love theme called “Bella’s Lullaby” that was on the Twilight soundtrack album and that’s the one that most people respond to from the first movie. And when I first talked to Bill Condon, he was excited to bring back “Bella’s Lullaby” – so we have brought it back, judiciously. There’s a hint of it here and there, and then in the last scene of this movie, we actually play it out. And it’s pretty dramatic.

Having worked with Bill Condon before, and having scored the first of this insanely successful series…how much actual direction did you get at the start of this project? How does it get started?

Well first we have the spotting session, where – on the one hand – we’re talking technically about where the music starts and ends. But honestly in a movie like this, it turns out that it really never ends. There’s 80 minutes of score in this movie, so the “where it starts and stops” conversation hardly entered into it. Really we spent that time talking about what is the point of this scene? What can the music say? What kind of theme can we use for this? There’s a lot of give and take in a conversation like that.

And for one thing, in a movie like this – there are (especially in the second half) a lot of special effects so when I’m looking at the screen, I won’t necessarily know what’s going on. So I have to depend on the director to say, ‘OK, here there are going to be wolves coming down this hill,’ because I cannot always tell what the important dramatic impact is when there are all these unfinished effects shots.

Mike Farrow and Burwell mixing
"Breaking Dawn: Part I" at The Body Studio

And from there, do you just start working? You have the job, so you’re not exactly pitching music… 

That’s right. As soon as I talked to Bill and we agreed I would do this, I started thinking about themes and melodies. It’s a very different story than the first Twilight. In the first one, you begin in what seems like a normal environment for a high school girl and it becomes supernatural and very intense emotionally.

Here, by this point, there’s no pretense of anything being normal. So you begin in an already a heightened emotional state, with supernatural qualities and it just gets more so…so it’s much more melodramatic. And I knew that I would need a lot more thematic material than I did in the first one. In this movie, Edward and Bella get married. They’re becoming grownups. They face different challenges. The score has to take that into account. And so their music is really pretty different.

I began working as soon as I found out I had the job because I knew that it was a huge job and I wouldn’t have that much time to write all 80 minutes of music.

Did you tap any special musicians to play on this score? I know David Torn played a role on the first Twilight, contributing a lot of that characteristic electric guitar that worked so well. Since you are based in NY, it’s cool to think there’d be some NY influence on the sound of your stuff, just based on who you get to play on it.

Well, I like to think there is. This particular score is not as guitar oriented as the first. And that’s part of the tone that’s shifted from they’re being high-schoolers to them living an adult life. This score has a little more of the flavor of a traditional melodrama in the sense that we went to Abbey Road and recorded it with a larger orchestra than what we had on the first one. We did have, in London, this guitarist Leo Abrahams play on it – and he’s a very interesting guitarist.

Cool. What about the fact that Breaking Dawn is a two-parter? Knowing you’re also going to be scoring Part II, does where the story goes from here enter into the picture at all for you? When you’re thinking of these themes?

Well, I’ve read the script, but I haven’t seen any of Part II yet. But I did have to write a theme that Edward plays on camera in Part II. Bill wanted to echo the “Bella’s Lullaby” scene from the first Twilight in the last part, and so I had to write a lullaby for that well in advance so Rob Pattinson could learn the fingering – he’s a musician and prides himself on being able to do that.

So we know that’s an important part of Part II. And we hint at that theme in Part I. But honestly, it was quite a challenge for me to get my head around the 80 minutes of music for this one. My scores are usually half that. So I didn’t give very much thought to Part II while I was doing Part I.

To read more of Carter's interview (where he talks about his other projects like True Grit) click here:

UK Bel Ami Release Date to be March 2nd 2012?

Robert Pattinson’s next film, Bel Ami, is tipped to hit UK (and Irish) cinema’s on March 2nd 2012. 

Are you all ready for gorgeous Georges DuRoy?

It's about time we got a release date for this!
It's already been just over three months since the trailer was leaked ;)

Are you excited for it? Will you be going to see it in the cinemas?

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Video: David Cronenberg talks to Popsugar about Rob and Cosmopolis

Another great interview with David Cronenberg - talking about his newest film 'A Dangerous Method' and then Robert Pattinson and Cosmopolis. 
(Rob talk begins from about 1:50)
It’ll be a while until we see Cosmopolis [ READ: Over a year:( ] but having so many goodies come out to tease us has been exciting!!

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