When Denis Villeneuve first approached costume designer Jacqueline West to work on Dune, she flatly refused. “‘No, I don’t do sci-fi,'” West remembers telling the filmmaker.
Determined, Villeneuve circled back weeks later and asked again, but West wouldn’t budge. “Denis, I love your work,” she told him, “but this just isn’t my genre.”
A former high-fashion designer turned costume creator, West has been nominated for three Oscars, all for acclaimed period films: Philip Kaufman’s Marquis de Sade biopic Quills (2000), David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Much of the rest of her distinguished filmography sits in the same genre, often with widely acclaimed auteurs: Terrence Malick’s The New World and Tree of Life, Ben Affleck’s Argo — and, next up, Martin Scorsese’s Leonardo DiCaprio-starring period Western, Killers of the Flower Moon.
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West’s reputation for deep research and character-driven design was precisely what appealed to Villeneuve as he was envisioning a sci-fi epic of uncommon complexity and grandeur. “He kept saying the reason he wanted me was because of my background in historical work,” West says. “And he had read some quote Brad Pitt once gave saying that I was a ‘method costume designer.’ It was all very flattering, but I just didn’t think I could it.”
Dune‘s lead producer Mary Parent, who had worked with West on The Revenant, then intervened. Parent said, “Jacky, you just need to meet with him. Come to my office at Legendary alone; I’m going to put Denis on the big screen with you from Canada, and I guarantee you, once you hear his vision for this movie, you will want to do it.”
“So I did that,” West remembers, “and she was absolutely right.”
The Hollywood Reporter recently connected with West to discuss her creative journey with Villeneuve on Dune — and how she turned to the aesthetics of the papacy, pre-revolution Russia and the Knights Templar to lend symbolic meaning to the film’s multilayered world.
I’ve heard that you and your collaborator, Bob Morgan, created over 1,000 costumes for Dune. That seems like an astounding amount of creative work. Is that typical of a project of this scale?
We figured we actually created about 2,000 costumes — 400 of which were specialty costumes. So that’s enormous. That probably outdoes anything in Star Wars or any other very big sci-fi film. It’s up there with something like the original Ben-Hur or some classic epic.
When I first read the script, I thought, ‘Oh my God, 400 specialty costumes — that’s daunting.’ So that’s when I asked [costume supervisor] Bob Morgan, who had never designed before, to join me, because he has supervised so many films with specialty costumes and I knew he would hire the right crew for us and have incredible input into what works and what doesn’t work on the human body.
What were some of your very earliest creative development conversations with Denis?
Initially, Denis was most concerned with two things: What Baron Harkonnen would look like, and how we would create the stillsuit, because it’s described in such minutiae in Frank Herbert’s book.
The Baron was going to be a 400-pound man that could only move around with suspensors because he couldn’t carry his own body weight, as in the book. Denis was concerned that he needed to look strong and menacing. He couldn’t look silly. And how should he be dressed? I suggested that maybe Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now would be a good place to start — and that he could wear some kind of long black silk, almost diaphanous, muumuu. Denis really flipped out over that idea. I think he actually had been thinking about these Brando-inspired references himself, because he said, “Exactly!” We were immediately on the same page.
Those Brando touches are some of the most fun details of the film. And Stellan Skarsgard, of course, just nails it. So how did you get started on the stillsuit?
I had an incredible concept sketch artist I worked with, Keith Christensen. He came up with about four drawings of the stillsuit, which I immediately put in front of Denis and Denis just fell in love with them. Once I brought Bob on, we took one of those four drawings to Jose Fernandez at Ironhead Studio, [the effects firm specializing in costume and creature design] here in Los Angeles. Jose is also a total Dune freak and he wanted to create something that was absolutely true to the book. He’s a magnificent sculptor and he figured out a way to make it work and created a prototype.
Then, while I worked on the rest of the designs with my concept artist, Bob took the stillsuit prototype to Budapest, where we would shoot. He went ahead and hired the most magnificent, talented crew, mostly from England, who came to Budapest. He then got the crew working to create the 250 stillsuits we would need, which all had to be bespoke because they were so form-fitting. We had actresses that are 5-foot-3 like Rebecca Ferguson, to Jason Momoa who is 6-foot-5. They were made individually for each body and each one took two weeks to create.
Denis loved them and I think they’ve been a huge success. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from people who love the book about how authentic they feel. I’m most happy about the fact that they looked like they could really function — and they really did keep the actors cool when they were shooting in Jordan.
Can you share a little more about their construction? They functioned in a similar way to how they are described in the book, preventing the actors from overheating in the desert?
Well, they functioned to an extent … the actors weren’t drinking their own wastewater. (Laughs.) In the book, the suit is a distillery. It collects human wastewater — perspiration, urine — and it distills all the ammonia out of it, and through the nose piece oxygen is added to the hydrogen, which creates potable water. In the book, only a thimble-full of human water is lost during a day in the desert when you’re wearing the suit.
What we did was create a bodysuit out of five or six layers of what we called a “micro sandwich” of fabric. It’s not unlike some of fabric that Under Armour uses to wick water away from the body when football players wear it under their football padding. We selected a beautiful Japanese fabric that would wick water from the body and then it would kind of cool the body when the moisture hit the air of Jordan, through a mesh system of cotton, nylon and acrylic. When there was a breeze in the desert, there was a cooling effect on the wearer — and the actors said it really worked.
In the real stillsuit of the book and in the film, there is a network of tubing that collects air from the outside through the nose piece while also collecting the absorbed body water, which goes through a filtering system in these different pockets throughout the costume, and then the distilled, potable water also creates a cooling system around the whole body. It is all mechanized by a pumping system that starts at the heels with the whole thing powered by the musculature and movements of the body.
For us, that meant it had to have all of these functional elements but be totally form-fitting. You had to be able to tell that it was all being mechanized by their body movements. It was quite complex, making it look that way, because we had to actually create the collecting pods through the costume and the tubing system that runs all the way through it — all around the legs, the arms, the chest and the neck. But we also had to make it attractive and form-fitting. It was a big challenge, definitely.
We might need one soon in Los Angeles, with all of the debilitating heat waves from last summer and the forest fires. I really see Dune as a vision of our future, and I could see something like the still suitbeing something we need to use one day.
For the other costumes, how helpful was the book? As you said, the stillsuit is quite meticulously described, but I don’t remember much other detailed description of how characters are dressed. Were there other cues there for you in the source material?
With Dune, it wasn’t so much description but this feeling it gives you. I know that when I did The Revenant, I really relied on written descriptions of costumes and clothing that trappers and the native tribes wore in that period. Frank Herbert didn’t go into those kinds of descriptions. He created a feeling. That feeling is so deep in Denis’ gut — he has such a strong, intimate feeling for this prophetic masterpiece. So Denis became my barometer.
I had some feeling for it too, though, I suppose. I’m from Berkeley and Frank Herbert wrote it in the area. In fact, he famously wrote a lot of Dune on Allan Watts’ houseboat in Sausalito Harbor, and my family’s houseboat was just 30 feet away from Alan’s when I was a kid. Then I went to [the University of California,] Berkeley years later and everyone was reading it. Dune was like a bible back then. They even sold it at the Whole Earth Access store. So I always felt I had a connection with it.
I mentioned to Denis, “I feel like this is a world starting over 10,000 years from now in the future.” If you know the story, computers have caused the world to go crazy and created all these intergalactic problems. So I said to Denis, “I think I have to look to the past — the distant, distant past — to find a style for this movie. I see it as ‘mod-ieval,’ a modern take on medieval times.” And Denis loved that. This was why he wanted a designer with period experience.
What were some of your references?
I started then with Lady Jessica and used a lot of Goya, Caravaggio, Giotto. I used the ancient Marseilles tarot cards, the Golden Tarot, for the Bene Gesserit and for Mother Mohiam. I used drawings and paintings for the Avignon tapestries of the Knights Templar for the Atreides armor. For the Harkonnen world, I used a lot of books of medieval drawings of insects, spiders, ants, praying mantises and lizards. The monks did these absolutely beautiful drawings of every kind of insect and animal. The textured black leather of some of the Harkonnen costumes all came from ideas of insects, lizards and spiders. I’d read the Frank Herbert notes in which he mentions that Baron Harkonnen’s mother was called “the Black Widow” and that she was spider-like, so that gave me a hint there. The Harkonnen helmet came from a giant ant head.
There are hints everywhere like he aligns the Sardaukar with the planet Salusa Secundus, which is S.S. — and they were the Nazis of this universe. I felt like the Fremen were the French Resistance, so I felt like I had to camouflage them the way the resistance did in the South of France in the war. Every world had a symbol for me.
A lot of people will naturally wonder to what extent you reviewed or avoided the past interpretations of Dune — whether it’s David Lynch’s film, the TV series or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s famed, failed attempt to adapt the book. Or maybe even some of the voluminous fan art that’s been created over the decades.
I came to this a virgin. I’ve never even seen a single Star Wars film, though I know George Lucas because we both grew up in the San Joaquin Valley. I’ve never seen the David Lynch movie. I have seen some clips of the Jodorowsky work. A very dear friend of mine is a countess in the South of France and she lived with Jodorowsky in Paris when he was trying to make that movie. She is like my mother and I love her so much. Because of her relationship with “Jodo,” as she calls him, she’s shown me clips of that documentary where he was trying to make it when they were living together in Paris. Beyond that, I had no reference points besides the book. I wanted to not be influenced by things that I knew Denis was trying to avoid.
He always said he didn’t want to make a typical sci-fi film. He didn’t want somebody who was going to create video game costumes, or space suits, or something that he didn’t feel was part of this very layered, complex masterpiece with mysticism threaded through it. He wanted a totally new look that no one’s ever seen.
I’m struck by that Brad Pitt quote that has followed you around, about being a “method costume designer.” Do you feel that’s accurate to your approach? Was it true on this project?
It is. I felt I had to dress everybody from the inside out, and I had to show arcs for these characters. Plus, I was a contemporary fashion designer and when I was asked to do my first big period film, which was Quills. At the time, I told my husband, “I am a ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie,’ can I really do this period?” And my husband said, “Yes, of course. You have incredible taste — use that as your guide. Just take all of those characters shopping in the era of your film and only pick for them what they would pick. Read the script seven times, and know those people inside out and then dress everybody from the inside out.” This has been my approach my entire career.
Once I put myself in their skin, and get rid of all the onion skins, the levels between the inside and the outside, I feel I can then help create the bridge from the actor to the character. I did psychological studies on each of these characters. Lady Jessica is basically a concubine but a very intelligent one and a highly trained Benne Gesserit. Not only does she have a mystical side but she also has an intelligent, old soul side. I wanted her outfits to be both compellingly nun-like, but also appropriate for a courtesan, which is also what she is. I had to embody all of those somewhat contradictory things in her costumes.
So I went to Goya, who is one of my favorite painters. I’ve always felt there are two painters from the past who would be filmmakers if they lived today. One is Goya and the other is Giotto. I took from both of them — Giotto more for the nun-like Benne Gesserit; and more Goya for Lady Jessica, because there’s a deep, Spanish romanticism in his paintings, especially The Clothed Maja. That’s where I got the idea for the laced dress for her. I didn’t use Spanish lace, but I had a lace made that looked very much like the future, but with a real romantic touch from the past.
So, the costumes throughout Dune are stunning, but the scene where I was really overwhelmed by them was that ceremony sequence when planet Arrakis is formally being handed off to House Atreides. It’s almost like watching a sci-fi fashion show all of a sudden, as the characters face off and the costumes form a kind of collection. What was your process for presenting all of that work in one scene?
Well, as I mentioned, I based all of the Atreides armor on the Templars, so this idea came up in conversation with Denis very early on about how the Catholic Church condemned the Templars, so I thought perhaps the Spacing Guild should be quite ecclesiastic. I thought it was a good symbol — with the ruling body going after House Atreides, just like the king and the church went after the Templars for the most arbitrary reasons.
So, those Space Guild costumes, as they’re all lined up, were done all in white — and there are those big dome headdresses. It’s all quite ecclesiastic. I looked to a lot of drawings and murals from the Avignon Papacy in the 1200s, but we made it look more ominous with those big dome headdresses. I worked on that forever with Keith Christiansen and he came up with a lot of those ideas, which I just thought were stunning and beautiful. When I showed it to Denis, he said, “Yes! Yes! More of this!” So the domes got bigger and bigger, and we had all of the Sardokour kneeling in their space outfits with the blood-red stripe.
Piter de Vries, the Harkonnen Mentat played by David Dastmalchian, is another one of my favorite characters, because he’s like a human stiletto. He’s just amazing. There’s something like a praying mantis about him, but in black. And then there’s the Messenger of the Change, whom I also made quite ecclesiastic. We needed you to feel the depth of culture of this world, and the references helped us get there.
To what extent did you collaborate with Dune‘s production designer Patrice Vermette throughout your process? Do you have to stay in contact with one another in some way to interweave the film’s visual language?
I worked pretty close with the production designer on this film. They started their work way ahead of me, but my guide was always Denis, because he knew exactly what Patrice was doing because they’d been talking about it for so long. So Denis would be my filter when I showed him something I was thinking of. Denis has incredible taste and an incredible eye, and as a visual director he’s very, very smart. He had such a deep feeling for this movie and saw it all in his head. Whenever I put something in front of him, I’d know if it was right if I got this very visceral response, where he’d get really excited. “Yes! Yes, Jacqueline, yes!” I also talked with Patrice a lot about the color palette.
I knew that Denis’ vision for this was quite brutalistic as far as the architecture for palaces on Caladan and Arrakis. As it’s told in the book, this is a world starting over. If you imagine the brutalist architectural movement, it was huge in Britain after World War II when so much was destroyed and they had to rebuild much of Great Britain. For these castles on these planets, they are quite brutalistic buildings with many simple, unadorned rooms, with big spaces that can be utilized. This made sense to me — that would be the aesthetic of a world starting over. You don’t want it to look like Louis XIV’s court; you want it simple, stripped-down, utilitarian. I approached nearly all of the costumes that way. I never wanted anything to look over-reaching, or overdone and baroque in any way. The only ones I didn’t approach that way were the costumes based on the papacy, but I still simplified those enormously.
Also, when Duke Leto’s family is on Caladan at the beginning of the movie, I looked at a lot of pictures of the Romanov family just before the Russian Revolution, because I thought their costumes were quite elegant yet simple. They had much more simplicity than a lot of the other houses of Europe, yet they were quite regal. I used paintings of the Romanov family because I thought they were a doomed family, just like the House of Atreides, where everything was about to be taken away from them. I thought there would be some symbolism for the audience to see and feel that. Maybe they would make that connection, even subliminally.
It must have been a joy to dress this particular cast, which is one of the most impressive casts on a big-budget action movie in recent memory. There’s really something for everyone in this cast — whether you’re an art house person or a big-budget action fan, or even just a fashion lover.
Oh, it’s always easier when you’re working with really good actors who have their own particular body language. I’ll never forget, I dressed Geoffrey Rush once as the Marquis de Sade and when he came in, he was languid and fluid, almost limp like he had no bones. But when he put on the Marquis de Sade costume, he became this regal, rich aristocrat from the 1700s. The transformation of good actors, when you get the costume right, is the most rewarding thing about being a costume designer.
With Dune‘s actors all being consummately great actors, and with such grace and confidence as people — yes, they were really fun to dress. Timothée Chalamet was a lot like when I first met Geoffrey Rush, in a way. Timothée’s mother was a ballerina and he has incredible grace and he’s very fluid in his movements — but he’s also young and there’s a super coolness about him. But when he put on that stillsuit for the first time, he became a desert warrior — it was so beautiful to watch.
