”I am going to start my speech by saying how utterly wonderful it is, but I still have things to achieve in my career,” Oscar-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan told IndieWire about her recent Career Achievement Award by the Costume Guild. “And I’ve got a small mortgage still to pay.”
Luckily for Beavan’s mortgage and for all of us, it doesn’t seem like anyone wants Beavan to stop working anytime soon. Her designs encompass a huge swath of what we picture when we think of our favorite movies from the last 40 years, from Merchant Ivory films to “Furiosa.” That wide range is reflected her in three Oscar wins — for “A Room With a View,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and “Cruella.”
“ I take things if they interest me,” Beavan said. “And I do love working. I mean, I don’t want to work absolutely every day of the year, but I really enjoy the challenge, the motivation, and the sociability of it, working as part of a team.”
As with everything else, Beavan’s work begins with the script. After reading it through, she’ll start plotting out the characters within that particular world, one reason she initially found “Fury Road” a challenge, making her Oscar win all the sweeter.
George Miller approached her about that film, and working on it filled Beavan with “terror.” But the collaboration came to the rescue. “Once you just see it as storytelling and you’re working on, OK, she’s got this arm and you’ve got to support the arm somehow, so it was really important to have something very solid around her middle to put the harness on. So you have certain things that feel logical and then you just sort of work it from there and it sort of fell into place.”
But there’s always a level of anxiety when embarking on a new project. Or, as Beavan said, “ Almost every production is, ‘I don’t know what this should be, oh my God!’ Then you sort of think, ‘Oh, come on, get over it.’”
It helps that Beavan is an instinctual designer whose voluminous pre-production research lays a solid foundation for her work. “I mean, now the computer’s fantastic,” she said. “We used to be having to go to the BNA and the library there. And as you can probably see, there’s a lot of books behind me, which I’ve collected over many years. So I’ve got lovely research materials. And then I go for a walk or I go shopping, just ordinary supermarket shopping. And at that moment, your mind’s gone free, but you’ve actually got all the information. And that’s when you get a lightbulb moment.” Beavan paused. “Or you hope you get a lightbulb moment.”
Lightbulb moments there have been, but more vitally, Beavan points to the relationships she’s formed throughout her life, starting with a fellow dance class student when she was 3 who led to her Merchant Ivory work by asking her to work on the costumes for her very first film project.
”My lovely friend Nick, he was a commissioning editor on Melvin Bragg’s arts program ‘The South Bank Show,’ and they commissioned this script, ‘Hullabaloo Over Bonnie and George’s Pictures’ [a 1978 TV movie directed by James Ivory],” Beavan said. “Nick asked would I go and help Peggy get together a wardrobe of clothes. She was playing an eccentric English art dealer traveling to India. And I went round to her’s, and we got on well and we had no money. I mean, it was pulling it from her clothes and my clothes and just putting together whatever. And the second time I saw her, she just said, ‘My dear, we’re getting on quite well. They’ve given me a first-class ticket. I’m a little concerned to go to India on my own. If I change it for two economies, will you come with me?’ So there I landed in Royal Georgetown and basically did anything they wanted me to do. Crowd collecting, acting in it, you know, you name it, I did it. And I became part of the family.”
And on that note, Beavan has a story about Ivory’s reaction to “Mad Max: Fury Road.” “ When James Ivory saw ‘Fury Road’ in 2015, he sent me the following email,” she said. “He was probably 80-something at the time. And it went thus: ‘Jenny, I did not bring you up to run around deserts with semi-naked men and scantily dressed females wearing bits of old overall and transparent veils. I quite like the chrome sprayed on the lips of that young man, but that was not your doing, I guess. You’re now living in Berlin, I hear. Maybe that’s the cause for your abrupt change of costuming style.’ Isn’t that the best email ever?”
