Words & Interview by ARIANNE PHILLIPS
As told to JANE CROWTHER

The Kiwi designer who regularly collaborates with Guillermo del Toro – including awards-season contender Frankenstein – tells Arianne Phillips about growing up surrounded by stories, the alchemy of opportunity, turning fear into motivation and her photocopying addiction.

Kate Hawley is a New Zealander, who grew up in the world of opera and theatre. She attended the Motley School of Theatre Design in London, under the direction of Margaret Harris and Alison Chitty. This provided a foundation and a love for design in all disciplines of her work, including theatre, ballet, opera and film. She began her professional career as a costume designer and set designer in theatre and opera, with her extensive theatre credits including set and costume design for the New Zealand International Arts Festival, the New Zealand Opera Auckland Theatre Company, the Salisbury Playhouse, Wexford Opera Festival, and the National Theatre Studio – to name just a few of her many accomplishments in the sphere.

2003 brought the release of Kate’s feature film debut with The Ride, which would be followed on by On a Clear Day with the same director, Gaby Dellal. In 2013, Kate’s third film would be her first collaboration with director Guillermo del Toro for Pacific Rim, followed by Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow. In 2015, she reunited with director del Toro for Crimson Peak. Notable films that have followed are David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, Christian Rivers’ Mortal Engines, Chris Sanders’ The Call of the Wild, and her second film with Doug Liman, Chaos Walking.

In 2022, Kate made her foray into television, designing the series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, while 2025 saw her third collaboration with del Toro, Frankenstein. Kate’s designs have been presented at numerous exhibitions, including an upcoming exhibit, The Art of Frankenstein at Selfridges at London; At Home with Monsters at LACMA, Los Angeles, and AGO in Toronto; the theatre design exhibition at the National Theatre in London; the František Zelenka Exhibition at Central St. Martins in London; and the International Scenofest exhibition in Prague and at The Barbican in London.

AP: ​It’s nice to learn about all of your accomplishments…

KH: What I see when I look back is moments of opportunity, that people saw what I was into, and saw the passion that I had for working. Like, during school, I would go and work in the theatre and the opera. I had two teachers that actually understood and supported it. You think of an Olympic talent, and they’re always supported in their youth. Most of us in our world of the arts don’t develop those skills until later. But having those two teachers who actually saw that I wanted to be in this world, and actually turned a blind eye to my appalling grades – it made a difference.

AP: Where did you grow up?

KH: I was born and bred in New Zealand but when I was still a baby my parents moved to the UK, because my father was singing with the opera there. My mother was working in the wardrobe there, as well as being a nurse. I remember this feeling of being in the world of a storybook, and seeing the productions. I would sit through the opera at [age] 5. 

I remember crying when my father was in Eugene Onegin, and he shot someone. But it was larger than life, you know? Tremendous highs, some lows. They’d have parties after the opening night of the opera, and all these women would drift in, in fur coats and this heady perfume… It’s a sensory thing, a lot of it. All of this had an amazing impact on me. We learned to visualise stories by listening to the music. And every night, my mother would read us a story; every birthday, gifting us a story. Imagination and being in those worlds – it was both parents who gifted me that. All of my siblings are creative.

AP: What inspired you to start designing costumes and sets? And drawing your designs?

KH: I can remember the moment. I was painting backdrops on sets, just because I wanted to. You know, it was a great thing to do. I loved being there, in that world. There was one woman who was in charge of the props, and she said to me, ‘You know you can do this as a real job?’ There was that one moment that I went, ‘I never thought that I could do this.’  Back home in New Zealand, there’s so much creativity but there’s also this fear that you must go and study, or have an education behind you to fall back on, because the arts aren’t financially supported. When I went to Motley, the theatre design school, I learned a really amazing process. We had to look at it from a director’s point of view; from an actor’s point of view. A huge part of our job is communication. And drawing was my way in with characters. Sometimes it’s drawing gestures or moments, and not being locked into a finished costume illustration. There’s pressure when you work on big movies to have these highly polished illustrations. But actually the best of the work that I do is when they’re just little gestures or moments, and you can get a sense of volume of a character, or the sense of a silhouette. I think when you’re not locked in by a very highly polished piece of concept art, there’s room to play and live and discover things within it.

AP: How did you make the transition from theatre into film? 

KH: I worked on a short film with David Morrissey and I had my first interview with Gaby Dellal for On a Clear Day, which was the film we did with Brenda Blethyn and Peter Mullan. She did give me a chance and was extraordinary in her use of colour and graphic sensibilities. Another opportunity happened when I was living in Suffolk. I got to meet and know Bernard Hill, the wonderful actor who was in The Lord of the Rings. Somehow my work ended up in conversation on a photocopier in New Zealand, where Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh  saw it. And then I got my opportunity to return home to meet with them. While working with Peter I met Guillermo. Guillermo just looked at my books, and went, ‘We have a common language.’ So it’s all been a series of little accidents. You don’t always choose things. Things happen for you sometimes, you know? An alchemy.

AP: When working on a film does your experience as a set designer change your conversations with the production designers?

KH: There’s a lot about the language that they’re using, and, in the case of Frankenstein, there’s a lot of imagery that Guillermo and Tamara [Deverell, production designer] used of circles and windows, which also echoed the themes of mythology and religion. So you have the architecture, the bones, the skeleton of the visual language. And then there’s the layering that goes within. Colour works between both of us. Very much the way that Tamara, Guillermo and I work – he’s a conductor. Tamara’s hugely collaborative and sharing. Every note she gets, she shares with me, and I do the same with my crew, or with her. It’s not a competition. Because we all know the language that Guillermo is developing, we know how to respond, or what to offer.

AP: How do you make your choices?

KH: I haven’t always had choices. Sometimes I’ve had to do the realistic thing of: I need to work. There was a time when it was always based on the script. But I’ve learned more and more that it’s actually the chemistry of the director, and understanding their language. When I work with Guillermo, I know we’re going on a journey. With Doug Liman, there’s chaos and a different kind of fun journey to be had. So I think for me, at the end, it’s going to be your director who’s going to shape whatever’s in the script and the vision beyond that. It can be surprising. Sometimes it moves drastically away from where that starts, and sometimes it doesn’t change. I think at the end of the day, if I had my choices, it would be based on all those things coming together – the director and script. But the director is the biggest thing. It’s the most important relationship.

AP: What is your favourite part of being a costume designer?

KH: My first favourite part is where there’s no talk of money or budget, and you’re in the dreaming. You get the script for the first day, and everything’s possible. You don’t always get that in the end result, but the potential for it all to be possible is magic. And the second moment is when you find one hook that starts describing the language of what you want. There’s one thing that’s catching that idea. It comes back to communication, and allowing the process, too. It’s a very intimate thing, sharing ideas, in a way. And no one’s going to get it right the first time. So you have to trust that. I’ve only now become brave in myself about offering something, and going, ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect, if it’s not the final idea.’ Because I’d hold onto things. I’d rip up bits of paper and drawings and illustrations going, ‘It’s not good enough.’ And then you realise: it’s a component of parts. It’s trusting in the process, and going, ‘Here’s one idea, and here’s an idea with this added.’ It’s a process of communication.

AP: What would you say would be your strength as a designer?

KH: I always have another idea. So if something gets turned down, I have lots of ideas. Sometimes that’s a bit of a pain in the ass for everyone else, and sometimes it can be overthought. Sometimes if people just want a police uniform, I’m the person that goes, ‘But does it have to be just a police uniform?’ But 90 per cent of what we do is: ‘That’s not working. What else have you got?’ And you’ve got two seconds to do it, right?

AP: What do you think the biggest challenges are? 

KH: The way my head works – I sometimes fixate on something, and it becomes really important to the point of driving everyone up the wall. I’ve got a photocopying problem! I have to plant trees at the end of every project. And learning to let go and say, ‘It’s not perfect. Time’s moving on. There’s a deadline.’  Sometimes I find that difficult because I want everything to fit in a certain way, and I have to let go, and think of the bigger sides of the project, and the good of the project, and for my workroom.

AP: I agree. We have quicker prep times now… 

KH: It’s defined by output, isn’t it? Because we can jump so high; because we have teams with amazing skills, and you meet those amazing deadlines. And then people go, ‘Great. So now we’re giving you half the time to do it.’

AP: When you’re looking for inspiration, where’s the well that you draw from? 

KH: Always books, you know? But actually I’ve chosen to live on this piece of land in New Zealand that’s far away from the rest of the world. It’s a world-building place. It’s just seeing shapes in nature. It’s why I always loved the works of Tolkien and the Norse myths. It’s why I love Frankenstein. Even if I’m doing something that’s more sci-fi or architecture – there’s still a landscape there. There’s still a language. I think it’s all around you. And then in the development of this, Guillermo was building his visual language, and I needed jewellery and Tiffany came on board. We went through the archives and Louis Comfort Tiffany’s use of organic forms in nature, the colours – they echoed Guillermo’s visual and painterly language. And then there was the appreciation of beauty in craftsmanship. Inspiration in the form of nature, breaking its boundaries.

AP: What continues to motivate you? 

KH: Fear is a great motivator. Not paralysing but it does make you seek and question, and to be brave and learn something new. Going back to Edge of Tomorrow – that was like putting a car together with all its parts. It’s not something that would have been on my wish list, but then when you understood that basically we were making a giant puppet and all the components – then it became a different thing. And then you get through to the end of it. I always compare it to childbirth. There’s the terrible moment of labour where you go ‘never again’… then six months later you forget the pain you went through.

AP: What would you say is your career highlight?

KH: I suppose there’s different achievements. When we did the exosuits on Edge of Tomorrow, I learned a hell of a lot from Tom Cruise about filmmaking. Frankenstein was a once-in-a-lifetime project and to see a finished cut, and go, ‘Oh, look at what the scenic artist did. Look at what the props team did…’ So every frame, I sit there and I go, ‘Well, there’s at least 100 of my department, and there’s 200 over in the ship-building department…’ So every time I look at that, I see all of those people that were involved. And Guillermo celebrates it. The film is a celebration in itself of craft. Crimson Peak was a chamber piece. It’s like when I saw your work on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Arianne – I really saw the scale and all the beautiful mythologies within the world of Hollywood being created.

AP: What films were influential for you?

KH: Definitely Cocteau. Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes was an amazing influence. Pan’s Labyrinth obviously was another defining moment for me. The world of Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman was a huge influence on me – the way they used colour; the theatrical quality of it. Drowning by Numbers and The Draughtsman’s Contract. All of those films have a quality in world-building. And sometimes it changes as you grow. What Motley taught me is that you serve the text, and you serve your director. What I think is not championed enough, is that all of us costume designers are capable of many languages, different approaches. We are capable of moving from one discipline and genre to another. I find it frustrating that we can get typecast in to a genre – I love crossing disciplines but we all bring our own process, unique language and point of view to it.

AP: What do you tell students about pursuing costume design?

KH: What I have learned is that everybody has a different story about how they came to be costume designers. There doesn’t seem to be a rule. I’d say: find your like-minded people. Find those kids wanting to be directors. Get together, and make stories. Keep being brave and trying things. And learning from others. It might not be your end goal, but you’ll always learn from every opportunity and every situation. Always. And for young directors, it goes back to what we discussed earlier – trusting in the process, that it is a process in terms of trying to communicate and share your ideas, and being kind.