August 28, 2024

Albert Wolsky, Arianne Phillips, Bugsy, Grease, Lenny, Road to Perdition

Words by ARIANNE PHILLIPS
As told to JEREMY LANGMEAD


Esteemed costume designer and Hollywood Authentic correspondent Arianne Phillips sits down with a man she describes as ‘the costume designers’ costume designer’, Albert Wolsky, to discuss swapping travel agenting for tailoring, working with legendary directors, dressing Diane Keaton and the beautiful mistakes of the classic musical Grease.

Albert Wolsky, 93, is a great artist with a prolific and profound career that has continued to influence and inform culture across multiple generations. His work spans every genre of filmmaking: drama, comedy, science fiction, period, contemporary, musicals, thrillers. From Grease to Galaxy Quest, All That Jazz to The Jazz Singer, Down and Out in Beverly Hills to Star 80, Manhattan to Sophie’s Choice, Across the Universe to The Manchurian Candidate, Revolutionary Road to Road to Perdition, and Birdman to Bugsy, Wolsky has worked with the most influential directors of the last century and this. He has close to 100 films to his credit.

Albert Wolsky, Arianne Phillips, Bugsy, Grease, Lenny, Road to Perdition

I have a deep respect, reverence and admiration for Mr Wolsky. I’m in awe of his artistry, his vision, his subtle and bold choices, the worlds he creates, and his layered storytelling. He is truly an icon for me and many of our colleagues.

Albert is also incredibly humble, kind, funny, warm and generous. Preparing for our conversation was nerve-wracking, to say the least – where would I begin? How would I be able to do justice to his more than 50-year career? In the end, our hours-long conversation flew by. Albert shared many wonderful stories and memories. I am thrilled to be able to share a part of that conversation with you here.

AP: Thank you so much for giving us your time.

AW: Not at all. You’ve made me reflect, and think back, which I don’t often do, so it’s been very interesting.

AP: And Albert, as you know, we all like to discuss how we can promote or elevate, even celebrate, the art of costume design and stories such as this help us to do that. 

AW: Absolutely. It’s very important. Because otherwise you get totally ignored. Even today it’s always a fight to get your name out there otherwise you get swept under the carpet. 

AP: I’m so grateful that I got to talk to you today. You are a costume designer’s costume designer: humble, approachable, warm – and the benchmark that we all aspire to. When I was revisiting your resume I was intimidated  because the films you have designed have been probably the most influential ones for me, personally. From Where’s Poppa (Carl Reiner, 1970), Lenny (Bob Fosse, 1974) and Harry And Tonto (Paul Mazurksy, 1974)… all these films my parents dragged me to as a kid. And I was especially inspired by your collaborations with Mazurksy. You made 11 movies together…

AW: Well that was a gift. He is the only director I’ve worked with for that long – between 15 to 20 years. I’ve had influential directors – Bob Fosse, of course, and others – but for me Paul Mazurksy was the benchmark. [During his career, Mazursky, who died in 2014, received five Academy Award nominations and two Golden Globe nominations.]

AP: So Albert, how did you get into a career as a costume designer. You came into it quite late I think? 

AW: Yeah, I was 30. I never knew what I wanted to do. And I kept sort of wandering along and got through college and then I was drafted, so I went in the army for two years. When I came out I joined my father who was a travel agent. We worked together in New York City for around five years. We got along really well, but I came to realise that he was doing exactly what he wanted to do. He loved it. And I wasn’t. I was getting more and more miserable to the point where I dreaded weekends because I had to come back to work on Monday. So I thought, well, I’ll  have to go in and say, ‘I have to leave,’ and he’s going to say, ‘For what?’ And I would need to say something. And because I liked fashion and loved theatre, I thought why not combine the two? I’ll try to become a costume designer for the theatre. Movies hadn’t crossed my mind at that point.

My father was actually very supportive and so I started asking around to see if anyone would let me study under them. I was persistent and eventually someone suggested I should talk to the renowned Broadway costume designer Helene Pons. She was a designer, but she also ran a costume house, and had executed Cecil Beaton’s costume sketches for My Fair Lady in 1956. [Pons worked with everyone from Tallulah Bankhead to John Gielgud; and as well as My Fair Lady worked on original stage productions such as 1949’s Kiss Me Kate and 1955’s The Diary of Anne Frank.] 

We met, I did her a favour with some flights she needed for a trip, and she offered me a job straight away. So I left the travel business on a Friday, and I started on a Monday with Helen Pons working on Camelot starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews. And that was my beginning. For $100 a week, I helped run her studio and learned on the job. And subsequently got to work for and alongside some of Broadway’s most talented designers, directors and actors.

Albert Wolsky, Arianne Phillips, Bugsy, Grease, Lenny, Road to Perdition

AP: What was the first production you did on your own?

AW: It was a play called Generation in 1965. It was the first time I got sole credit for costume design. And Henry Fonda was the star. And then sometime later I got a call from the costume designer Theoni V Aldredge [whose work included 1974’s The Great Gatsby, Ghostbusters and Addams Family Values] offering me a film. Assisting on a movie is probably a good idea, I thought, so I said, ‘When do you need me?’ She said, ‘Right away. And I don’t want you to assist. I want you to do it yourself as I can’t.’ 

It was the film version of one of my favourite books, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. The cast included Alan Arkin, Sondra Locke and Chuck McCann. Alan was a spiritual man; very nice, and he requested me for the next movie that he did. And so we’re off.

AP: How did you find the difference between theatre and movie costume design?

AW: I first noticed it with the fittings. You could always tell in those days whether an actor came from television or from the theatre by the way he looked in the mirror. A theatre actor would immediately start looking for the character. A movie actor would just pick clothes off the rack. The clothes weren’t him, they were just another costume. I try to avoid working that way. And I very rarely had to deal with that in my career. 

One of my favourite people to work with in recent years was Jude Law when we were working on Sam Mendes’ film Road To Perdition in 2002. He really invested in time with the costume, hair and make-up teams. We experimented in many different ways for his character to dress and appear. And what we ended up with had nothing to do with what the person he was playing looked like originally. He was so involved with that. It doesn’t happen very often.

Albert Wolsky, Arianne Phillips, Bugsy, Grease, Lenny, Road to Perdition

AP: So tell me about working on Lenny, the biographical film about the comedian Lenny Bruce, starring Dustin Hoffman and directed by the legendary Bob Fosse.

AW: Fosse had done two movies, Sweet Charity, in Hollywood, and Cabaret, which he made in Europe. Fosse was not what you would call buddy buddy, he was serious. You never laughed a lot on set with Fosse, but he worked hard. He’d be the first one on set, moving things around, setting up all the camera shots. And he remembered everything. He had that kind of mind. But as far as influence with costumes, it was very free. 

We decided we wouldn’t dress Hoffman like Lenny Bruce and after that he didn’t get too involved. I would present my ideas to him and he would say, well, maybe this, or he would say no. It went very smoothly. But he was a true perfectionist. I stepped up a level working for Fosse on Lenny and on All That Jazz.

AP: What do you think made you have such a successful career?

AW: You know, I was starting to reflect a little bit and I thought, I don’t consider myself so brilliant. So how did I do that? I don’t know. When you start out, you’re just glad you’re working. You don’t spend too much time contemplating how or why. But I think I always looked out for a good script, as it gives you ideas, and who the director was. I’m very director oriented. And I’d always hope it was a period piece because I found contemporary very difficult to do. 

AP: How come?

AW: Difficult because it then becomes a thing of taste. The other person’s taste, a producer’s taste. There’s so much interference. There’s much less interference in period because they don’t quite know as much. And you can really push harder.

AP: Tell me more about working with Mazurksy? 

AW: Oh, we knew each other from New York. And we first worked together on Harry and Tonto in 1974. It starred Art Carney, who won an Academy award for best actor. We worked mostly in New York; Paul preferred it there. Obviously for films such as Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) we were based in California. 

Paul was very collaborative and would get me involved very early in the process. By the time we started rehearsal, I had had weeks of preparation. And that was a gift. It makes you a better designer, and it makes you able to give more to help the project. Paul was very open to ideas. And smart. What he didn’t know, he picked up very quickly. Being open is so important. 

Albert Wolsky, Arianne Phillips, Bugsy, Grease, Lenny, Road to Perdition

AP: Which other directors have you found collaborative to work with regarding the costume design?

AW: The last great director I worked with in that way, I would say, was Sam Mendes. Road To Perdition, which I mentioned already, with Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Daniel Craig, as well as Jude – about a mob enforcer in the Great Depression – was a very rewarding experience. Sam was great, a wonderful director. 

On the first day of shooting Road to Perdition, there was a scene with 500 people coming out of a factory. And in the afternoon, a bread line of 300 people. That’s a lot of costumes. And as we were setting those scenes up, Sam’s assistant was watching and she came up to me and said: ‘Sam’s going to be so impressed.’ And I said, ‘Well if he doesn’t like them, fuck him.’ Later in the day I get a tug on the arm. It’s Sam. ‘It’s very nice,’ he says. ‘And I understand I have to like it.’

We worked together again on a big crowd costume scene in Revolutionary Road (2008) with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. When DiCaprio is heading to his office in Manhattan from the suburbs of New York in the early 1960s, we had dozens of commuters in similar grey or beige suits and fedoras. Really, that scene was all about the hats.

But you see, you can discover my secret of how I handle some period things. It’s not the exactness of the period, but it’s what people did that helps me. The fact that everybody wore hats. Not every person wore hats then, but for that scene to look right and to tell the story, and to capture the mood, we put everyone in hats.

AP: It’s the thinking like that about costume design that’s important to share. It’s important for people to know what a costume designer does and thinks. It is not just pretty clothes. It’s about storytelling, and it’s about helping the story and helping the director to visualise that story. And if you feel you can help that, it’s a gift for you personally. 

AW: Oh, yeah. I think it should always be a collaboration. And it doesn’t matter who gets the credit. I’m not worried about the credit. I’m worried about what we have, what do we need, what do we see, how do we help? And it’s such a joy when it works like that. 

Albert Wolsky, Arianne Phillips, Bugsy, Grease, Lenny, Road to Perdition

AP: Hats have played an important role in a few of your movies. Didn’t you work with Warren Beatty on Bugsy (1991)?

AW: Warren is a lovely man, very talented, but he’s not comfortable with anybody the first time. He has to work with them a lot before he trusts them. It was wonderful working with him and the director Barry Levinson. And then Annette Bening, who was just at the start of her career. She was very open and it was a joy to dress her. The only problem I ever had with Annette is that she never reacted when looking at herself in the costume in the mirror for the first time. 

AP: Are you looking for some sort of reaction? 

AW: She never said yes, or let’s just do it, or that’s okay. So I would think what’s missing; something’s missing. And then one day, while we were shooting, as she was walking towards the set and I was behind her, she stood straight and everything about her changed. She opened the door, was ready to act, and that changed the whole costume. It came alive. That was so moving to me, to watch. That’s what was missing at the fitting. 

AP: It must have been interesting working with Diane Keaton, who has an amazing dress sense of her own?

AW: I worked with Diane on Manhattan with Woody Allen in 1979 alongside Meryl Streep and Mariel Hemingway. Diane was very influential on how her character looked; especially after Annie Hall had come out. At that point she was Allen’s girlfriend. I learned that Allen was never going to say no to any actor about how they wanted to dress for the role. If an actor wanted to wear a pajama top, that’s what they wore. Which didn’t always make it easy for me.

Diane always dresses as if she’s playing a role. Her whole personality is how she looks. When we filmed Crimes of the Heart together in 1986 (Bruce Beresford directed) alongside Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek, we were all staying in a resort out of town. Off-set, everyone was dressed down in the mornings except for Diane who would appear at breakfast in a big cape, hat, big cross, looking like a character from a different movie. The other two were so in awe of her. I liked her a lot. She was always in costume.

Albert Wolsky, Arianne Phillips, Bugsy, Grease, Lenny, Road to Perdition

AP: And, of course, you did the costumes for Grease. Costumes that are still emulated and worn by generations who weren’t even born when the film was made in 1978. 

AW: In the making of Grease (directed by Randal Kleiser), none of us who worked on it ever thought that it was going to become so iconic. We were just trying to do a good movie. As John Travolta said to me at one of these open-air screenings a few years ago, ‘Albert, do you realise we’re still talking about Grease?’ You know, its endurance and fashion influence is a total surprise; the fact that people now dress in character to go to watch the movie is amazing. It wasn’t what we imagined when making it. I don’t remember if I was trying to make a statement or what. I was just going by numbers. It wasn’t a big budget and the shooting was quite hectic. And everything, everything was off the cuff. The last number… well, we didn’t have a last number when we started the film. I think it was two weeks before they started rehearsing that we were given the script for that scene. But there it was and, all of a sudden, you had to get all the costumes done. In retrospect, the mistakes were better than the non-mistakes. The play was a mess on Broadway, and the movie is a slight mess, but it worked out really well. [It was the highest-grossing live-action musical movie until 2012’s Les Misérables.] 

AP: There’s so much more we could talk about, Albert! We will have to continue in person over dinner. 

AW: Thank you. You made me feel very good revisiting my work today.

AP: You’ve worked with the most incredible talent because you are an incredible talent. Your extraordinary career is a measure of who you are as a person.

AW: It’s been such a pleasure to be a part of so many stories. It always will be.


Words by ARIANNE PHILLIPS
As told to JEREMY LANGMEAD
All images © 2000 Block 2 Pictures Inc. © 2019 Jet Tone Contents Inc.
Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction / Once Upon A Time in…Hollywood

Words by ARIANNE PHILLIPS
As told to JEREMY LANGMEAD


When Pulp Fiction was released 30 years ago, it wasn’t long before the wardrobe worn by Uma Thurman’s gangster wife Mia Wallace influenced a generation of designers: 1995’s catwalks from Miu Miu to Alexander McQueen boasted a multitude of over-sized white shirts fit for a twist-dancing, milkshake-sipping bad girl. The movie even prompted sell-outs of Chanel’s iconic nail colour, Rouge Noir (Vamp in the US). Here, Arianne Phillips sits down with Betsy Heimann to explore the road to creating such an iconic moment on celluloid.

‘On the eve of Pulp Fiction’s 30th anniversary, I had the good fortune to discuss the film’s iconic and culture-shifting costume design with one of our most respected and revered costume designers, Betsy Heimann. Her stellar body of work underscores generational filmmaking at its finest, with her designs featured in Reservoir Dogs, Get Shorty, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky, Lady in the Water, Green Book and many other memorable films. Betsy’s costume design for Pulp Fiction  remains as relevant today as when the film premiered in 1994.

pulp fiction, john travolta, samuel l jackson, hollywood authentic

Betsy is an artist; a truly remarkable and talented costume designer whose brilliant work with Quentin Tarantino significantly contributed to the enduring success of his first two films. It also benefitted me 26 years later when I was invited to design Quentin’s Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood. I was so excited to speak to Betsy about the early days with Quentin, their process creating the visual language that we have come to know unmistakably as a “Tarantino film”, and designing and imagining the world of Pulp Fiction.’

AP: Watching Pulp Fiction again this week I thought about you so much, and what we have in common. I worked with Quentin on his last film, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood, and I really have to hand it to you that you really are a part of the visual language that Quentin is so known for – whether it’s the Hawaiian shirt on Tim Roth in Pulp Fiction (a look that re-surfaces on Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood) or Quentin’s love of a leather jacket and a T-shirt, or a black-and-white motif… this is the Tarantino language that you both created together. I’m curious to learn from you what your process was like with the young Quentin when you worked together on Reservoir Dogs. How did that happen?

BH: I met [producer] Lawrence Bender at a New Year’s Eve party and we just got chatting and he invited me to a screening of a small indie film that he had worked on, and then it evolved into him sending me scripts and asking what did I think it would cost to do the costumes for them. And I would help out with the budgets. And then, one day, he sent me this script for Reservoir Dogs. It was fascinating. I had a costume career before Reservoir Dogs – I worked my way up from seamstress – but I had never read anything like this. I said to myself, you know, they’re gonna get good actors for this because there are pages of dialogue. So when Lawrence called me up and asked, ‘So what do you think?’ I said, ‘Err, who’s doing the costumes for this movie?’ He said, ‘I don’t know yet.’ And I said, ‘I’ll do it. I wanna do it.’ He told me they didn’t have any money. And I told him I didn’t care. That’s how it happened. 

AP: And what was your impression of Quentin when you first met him?

BH: Oh, his enthusiasm was so contagious. And he was very organised. I remember being very impressed that he was so prepared. He was very grateful. And I just thought, I like this kid and I like being with him, and I love his enthusiasm. And then I went over to his apartment and we started watching movies together. Quentin was always visual. We’d go through the whole script visually. And our language was the language of film. I remember one conversation most vividly about Pulp Fiction. It was about Butch, about Bruce Willis’ costume. I said I think he should wear a leather jacket. He said, yes, I want a leather jacket like Nick Nolte’s in Who’ll Stop the Rain; so I sourced a similar old brown pigskin suede one, put it in the car, and Quentin and I drove out to Malibu where we had a meeting with Bruce. Demi [Moore] was there and Bruce brought all of these 1980s and 1990s leather jackets he liked – he must have had 10, but they were all oversized – and mine looked quite skimpy in comparison. But Quentin liked it, so Bruce tried it on. He put it on and said to me, ‘Well, are you gonna drag it behind a truck?’ And I said, ‘Oh, you mean age it? Yes, and with you in it.’

pulp fiction, john travolta, samuel l jackson, hollywood authentic

AP: I love it. Another of the things that I was really noticing when rewatching it was the day players and all the ancillary characters are wonderful characters whether it’s Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stoltz or Kathy Griffin. You did such a beautiful job of letting us know who these characters were in such a quick, short time period, the costumes really allowed us to just get there immediately. You infused so much storytelling into your costumes, it’s so impressive. 

BH: Well, thank you very much. Yes, it was a big cast. As with Reservoir Dogs. We had a very big warehouse that we prepped and shot in. When I would get the things together for the fitting, I would call Quentin and he’d come in and he’d peek his head in and he would say ‘great’. But we had discussed it all before. One of the things that he and I did is watch anime cartoons. And one of them was Speed Racer. And I remembered that when we were prepping Pulp Fiction

AP: And you put Eric Stoltz in that T-shirt, right? 

BH: Yes. I said to Quentin, I think Speed Racer is the way to go. For me, I always tell a story about the character to get inspiration. And he said that he had one in his closet and so he went and got the T-shirt. There was a lot of spontaneous back and forth.

wardrobe, pulp fiction, john travolta, eric stoltz, hollywood authentic
wardrobe, brad pitt, once upon a time in…hollywood, tarantino, hollywood authentic

AP: These graphic T-shirts are a part of Quentin’s language. In my experience with him, he had a lot of graphic T-shirt ideas for Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood

BH: He has the same respect for the graphic T-shirt that I do. It’s not just, let’s put this guy in a graphic T-shirt, it has to mean something. It’s the same on all the films I’ve worked on. On Jerry Maguire, for example, when he is writing his mission statement, I figured he went to Notre Dame College. And so I called the Student Union and asked where do you guys all hang out? And I found the Little Bar, and I got hold of a T-shirt from them, and that’s the one Maguire is wearing when he writes his mission statement – his college t-shirt, the one he wore when he was full of ideals and full of how he was going to change the world… So every T-shirt for me has meaning. 

AP: That’s so great because it gives us little Easter eggs of reality. For me, watching Pulp Fiction, and seeing the Santa Cruz Banana Slugs college T-shirt that Vincent [John Travolta] wears was, like, nobody knows about that T-shirt unless they’ve been there. But Quentin wanted to get across that Jimmy had some connection with Santa Cruz. And so you see how costume can give a character an instant backstory – it really adds another layer and a texture. It’s the same with other clues you used in Reservoir Dogs. Tell us how the black suits came about in that film?

BH: Well, for Reservoir Dogs, my budget was $10,000. So I said, ‘Guys, I can give you four suits with this budget for the film. And I need to keep one clean’. 

wardrobe, hollywood authentic, reservior dogs

AP: Four suits for all? 

BH: Right. But, you know, we were shooting multiple action scenes with them. So the fact of the matter is that only Harvey Keitel and, briefly, Quentin, wore actual suits. We couldn’t afford them. So I found this stash of 10 black Beatle jackets at American Rag – which is now very hip, but it was a thrift store at the time – and I thought these would work on the younger guys, like Tim Roth and Steve Buscemi. They were great jackets. And then I teamed them with Beatle boots and black jeans. And Quentin was, like, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘Trust me, nobody’s gonna know the difference. It’s gonna be fabulous’. 

AP: That was amazing foresight to know that it would work so well on screen and not show. 

BH: Well, that’s what we do. That’s what we know as costume designers. The other thing I will tell you is that not all of the jackets people were wearing were black. Some of them were navy, some of them were dark grey. I spent a little bit of time with our cinematographer, Andrzej Sekula, and I would say, ‘Okay, look at this grey suit jacket and look at this black suit jacket. How are you lighting this picture? Are they gonna photograph the same?’ And he would say, yes, and I would trust him. 

AP: I think that was ingenious. And it actually gave it a modernity that a regular suit might not have. And a black jean was probably great for all those action scenes because they could put pads under them and you wouldn’t see anything. And back to Pulp Fiction, and they’re also wearing black suits, what was your budget like then?

BH: $36,000. I remember sitting with Quentin at Barney’s Beanery, and I said to him, ‘I really think that Vincent and Jules are Reservoir Dogs.’ And he thought about it. He goes, ‘You know, I like that. I like that’. This time I could do actual suits because now these guys have a little more money. I could do a linen suit with Vincent so that he always looked kind of a mess; and with Jules [Samuel L Jackson] I wanted a very slim-fitting narrow lapel, which was not that popular back then. So I went downtown and I found this Perry Ellis suit that I could get at a discount. And the collars of the shirts were very important to me, too. With Reservoir Dogs, each one of those guys had a different shirt with a different collar and a different width of tie in proportion to the width of their chest. This is all very technical, but it gives them a difference. So in Pulp Fiction, I did that again. 

wardrobe, pulp fiction, bruce willis, hollywood authentic

AP: And so Jules had a very narrow collared shirt because he’s the preacher?

BH: Right. And then there’s a bit of a cowboy theme in Pulp Fiction, too. Amanda Plummer has the cowboy boot dialogue, and Jules calls Tim Roth ‘Ringo’ – Gregory Peck played Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter. They’re all gunfighters. And so for me there was this kind of a Western influence in the costume. And we all used to shop at King’s Western Wear in the Valley and that’s where I got the idea for the bolo tie. I thought, well, here’s Vincent thinking he’s cool. He’s got his bolo tie on. And Mia [Wallace, played by Uma Thurman] says to him, ‘How are you doing, cowboy?’ And he refers back to her as a cowgirl. So these are all messages to me. So I came up with that idea and Quentin liked it. 

AP: A lot of those choices influenced the way people dress then and now. Let’s talk a little bit about Mia. I really was taken by her proportions and how you used them. How did it come to be that her trousers were short, like pedal pushers?  The proportions of her outfit work so beautifully, especially in the twist-dancing scene… the way that you tailored that shirt, and it had the French cuff with the cufflink, and the black-and-white motif. I really love the beautiful symmetry of design in that scene. They’re dancing and they look like cake toppers. That scene is burned in our minds forever. It really kicked off a trend. 

BH: Well I thought that Mia was really a Reservoir Dog, but she couldn’t express that because she was married to the boss and she had to be chic and glamorous; the eye candy. But on her date with Vincent she wanted to show him that she was one of the guys. And so I said, I wanted her to wear the black and white. But Uma is very tall, and we didn’t have any money, and all the pants weren’t long enough for her, and so I said, ‘What the heck, let’s just cut ‘em off’. I called Chanel and I said the magic words, Uma Thurman – they are magic words, things fall from the heavens – and I told them I needed these gold ballet slippers I had seen in a magazine and they lent us them. And then the shirt had to give her some shape and I wanted it to be oversized because I wanted it to say ‘I’ve got money but I’m also one of you; I’m a bad girl’. And then we added the bandana underneath. So it was another cowboy reference. 

AP: And then Mia’s bob. It all works in tandem: the short pants and the oversized shirt, and then that black bob, it’s just so successful. 

BH: The bob is all Quentin. It’s based on the old film star Louise Brooks and that’s what he wanted. And so knowing that, you start with that, instead of hoping that it’ll work with what you’re doing, you start with that. That’s the reality. And the reality is the inspiration. 

wardrobe, uma thurman, quentin tarantino, on set, pulp fiction, hollywood authentic

AP: Something else I love, which you do beautifully, is using a costume piece more than once to tell the story; when it starts on one character, then another character wears it. So, for example, we have Vincent wearing his black suit and that wonderful trench coat. And then we have Mia coming back from dinner with him and she has the trench coat on. That’s just beautiful. It says so much. It still looks so great today. 

BH: I love that you noticed the raincoat, because that was something I was really, really adamant about. And Quentin liked the idea. I knew that I wanted her dancing around in that big coat and then she could find the drugs in the pocket. I wanted to make it more of a natural thing and so I had to get that coat on him in order to later get it on her. And so I searched everywhere for one of those old gabardine raincoats from the 1950s and found it at Palace Costume.

AP: It worked so well. And I love the colour… it would be easy for it to be a black raincoat but then we would really not see the detail. Also when she puts it on, it’s clearly not her coat. And what’s amazing, again, is the way these characters dressed in Pulp Fiction still inspires the way people dress today. It’s the marriage of your trueness to the characters, but also the fact that you and Quentin really tapped into a fantasy of larger-than-life characters that a part of us would like to be. And elements of the way they looked are attainable: you both turned regular items into iconic ones by the way you used them on the characters.

BH: Yes, I suppose it is the connection that the public makes with the characters. There’s a poignancy to Mia Wallace. I mean, she has to wear the trench coat as she has to find the drugs in the pocket. So therefore she could just ruffle through his coat that’s left on the couch, or she can have it on and reach in the pocket. And these are motions and actions that the audience can relate to. 

wardrobe, pulp fiction, uma thurman, hollywood authentic

AP: That’s because these are the choices you made in respect to how you saw these characters. The reason for its influence on fashion is that this film is such a great reflection of what was happening in our culture, and it just resonated with people. These characters are unattainable, but people can create their own versions and make it accessible because the design is so uncluttered, it’s so specific. 

This film also is indelibly a part of ‘the film language’ with other costume designers and directors. I’m sure you’ve seen that your work is often referenced or recreated. In the 1990s I was doing a lot of music videos, and I know that this was cited as the pinnacle of cool for so many directors; we’ve seen iterations of it in music videos and fashion magazines. Just this last Halloween, I was in New York and I was invited to a party where everyone was supposed to come dressed as a character from Pulp Fiction. There were 500 people dressed as these characters you helped create…

BH: Who knew that 30 years later we would all still want to dress like the baddies in Pulp Fiction [laughs]. But I’m only as good as my director. I’m inspired by my director. I get all my ideas from the energy that’s coming out of my director. And Quentin was on fire. He was on fire with these two movies, and they were original, and they were different from anything I ever read.


Words by ARIANNE PHILLIPS
As told to JEREMY LANGMEAD
All images © 2000 Block 2 Pictures Inc. © 2019 Jet Tone Contents Inc.
Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction / Once Upon A Time in…Hollywood