Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Costume designer, Janty Yates won an Academy Award in 2001 for her work on Gladiator. Now, she's nominated again for Gladiator II alongside fellow costume designer, David Crossman. Janty and Dave split the work for this epic tale of vengeance and scheming in ancient Rome. Janty worked on the costumes for Roman civilization, including Denzel Washington's beautiful robes. David worked on military costumes, which meant making many, many, many suits of armor.

Jantee and David are both nominated for best costume design, and we are speaking to them now as part of our Big Picture series. That's when we speak to people who worked behind the camera to make movie magic in 2024. Janty Yates joins me. Hi, Janty.

Janty Yates: Hi there. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I am doing well. David Crossman joins us as well. Hi, David.

David Crossman: Hi there. Hello.

Alison Stewart: Hello. This is the Big Picture question for you outside of this one film. Janty, I'll start with you. What do you see as your job on a movie set? The job of the costume designer?

Janty Yates: Well, without us, they'd be naked. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: David, to you, what do you think is the job of the costume designer?

David Crossman: Well, it's a similar answer to Janty, really, but I suppose it's to try and fulfill the director's wishes and help them achieve the look of the film, you know, what they're after. Plus the naked part.

Alison Stewart: Plus the naked part. Dave, you worked with Napo-- [laughs] I'll get back. Dave, you worked on Napoleon with Janty and Ridley Scott. What did you learn from that experience that was useful to you on Gladiator II?

David Crossman: I think Gladiator II, weirdly, was a bit easier than Napoleon, to be honest. It was less complex, so it was-- Janty and I, we worked together for a long time for like 20 years, we've known each other for a long time. I've done a few Ridley Scott films so I know roughly how it all works on his films. I think really, for us, it was more of a logistical race against time, really, to get lots of armor ready. That's one of the biggest. Whenever you're doing an armor film, it's always about just time and trying to get everything done in time and into a certain place in time. It's all of that alongside what you have to do for the actors.

Alison Stewart: Janty, you won an Oscar for your work on Gladiator. What was it like to return to this world and these characters all these years later?

Janty Yates: Well, it was very exciting. We were told, actually, while we were doing Napoleon, so it was like, "Oh, it's really going to happen," so I just went. I dove back into research because it was 24 years ago and the brain's not as it was and I had to, as usual, research the hell out of it. It was very exciting. With Connie, for example, she's hardly changed in 24 years. She's still 6 foot, she still has amazing bone structure, she still has got a body to die for. We did go a bit, we went a little bit haute couture on her to start with, and we cut a lot of costume and we fitted it and neither she liked it, nor did Ridley, nor did I, so we went back to the original, the original feel of her look.

Denzel was a complete unknown and he'd asked for a couple of garments to just practice with at home. I hadn't really realized what he meant by that, but his way of handling his costumes was so much part of his act, not his act, of his persona. He was always just swinging his toga over his shoulder in a nonchalant way and marching off. I just thought, "My God, this man really works. Works at it." The twins, they were just mad. They were like my sons, I loved them to bits.

Alison Stewart: Oh.

Janty Yates: We just put gold and gold on gold and then some more gold.

Alison Stewart: Fred Heckinger is a friend of mine since he was a little, little boy, so that was quite a joy to see him play a crazy emperor.

Janty Yates: Crazy beyond crazy. Ridley's brief for them was Johnny Rotten.

Alison Stewart: That's a genius. Oh, that makes me want to watch it again. Dave, when you're thinking about the costuming in the army, how much of the original Gladiator did you look at initially?

David Crossman: [laughs] Well, wait, I gave it another look. I mean, I'm well aware of Gladiator, it's been with me for 20 years. People always think that I did it with, or worked on it with Janty and I always say, "No, I didn't do Gladiator, so no, I was aware of it. Obviously, I wanted to do a bit of my own thing. The thing that ties most of the first film of the Praetorian Guards, we gave them a 20-year makeover and we made lots of the Roman army in New Zealand. Then we remade Paul Mescal's mini journey of his new Numidian armor going all the Way to Maximus's armor, which we remade.

We found the set of the original Maximus armor, scanned it, and then made a version for Paul. Yes, I'd say the difference was this time we had an Italian leather maker called Gianpaolo Grassi, who did a lot of the armor work in-house. We blended traditional and modern techniques together, I think, and we had a bit of time to do that. There were slight differences in the approach, I suppose, in the time. We know a bit more than you did say 20 years ago about certain things.

Alison Stewart: Janty, on Gladiator, you had both military and civilian costumes, that was your responsibility, and this time you had Dave to help out. What was most valuable to you about that collaboration?

Janty Yates: Everything. I adore working with Dave and Dave, for the rest of my life, he takes, for example, all my military, which I did before. He's taken it and enhanced it so brilliantly that it's unrecognizable. Also, I only had 15 gladiators to design, actually, that fought Russell and he had about 150. They constantly were making padded shoulders, padded arms, padded knickers, you name it. They were just making so many different varieties so they could dress. You know you always need 200 if you're fit dressing 150. It was a huge feat, what he did.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with costume designer, Janty Yates and Dave Crossman. They are nominated for an Oscar for their work on Gladiator II. You mentioned research is a part of your job, Janty, how much research, where did you go to research, how did you start?

Janty Yates: Well, I really did exactly what I did in the first Gladiator. Ridley is very painterly and will always be passionate about specific artists for a specific film. This one for Denzel, he was mad for the Orientalists, for Jerome, for Benjamin Constant, he always adores, there's one particular artist that even the Art department, [clears throat] excuse me, use, for example, the petals in the first one and his name is Alma-Tadema, and we copied a lot. I won't say copied, but we had drew a huge amount of inspiration from Alma-Tadema.

For example, the tunics were wrapped around with a silk ribbon. I'd call them sausages because they were doubled up and you'd drape them around the bosom, round the waist, and around the hip and hanging down to the ground. That was wonderful in a different color until we got to Malta and found that they weren't all six foot and [laughs] they weren't looking like a horse, you know clothes horses. They looked more like bags of potatoes.

[laughter]

Janty Yates: Anyway, we managed.

Alison Stewart: Dave, how about you? Where does your research start?

David Crossman: There's a wealth of material here in England. I was on holiday with the kids in Rome the year before me had an inkling that we thought it might happen. I was dragging them to a few museums and things, and we looking at contemporary things just to see where you can either take license or, what's real, what's not, and all that kind of thing.

There was a lot in the British Museum, there's a place in Cambridge where you can look at copies of sculptures. There's lots of plaster cast-off original sculptures that you can look at and photograph, so all of that. There's so much of it and then just dating all the Roman helmets so that our periods correct for what we're doing 20 years on from the original Gladiator. Yes, it's nice. It's nice research to do. It's a nice subject.

Alison Stewart: How are you able to make sure the costumes are flexible enough, Dave, for the actors and the stunt doubles to perform these action sequences, and also that they look good?

David Crossman: Well, you always make because we made a lot of them in leather, so it's-

Alison Stewart: Leather?

David Crossman: -way more comfortable to wear than usually, they're made in plastic polyurethane. They're molded and so after about two minutes, everyone's bought [unintelligible 00:10:31], it's really hot. The heat in water in Morocco was unbearable, so actually the leather cuirasses saved us a bit with Pedro Pascal and with Paul Mescal because it's natural material. Any plastic pieces that we added to it, like Pedro's embossed Medusa head [unintelligible 00:10:53] doesn't affect him in any way, so he's always wearing leather.

Then all of the Roman armor is made out of a polyurethane but it hadn't quite got so hot by then. It's all made in a flexible-- The materials have come on a long way since the first Gladiator where they were doing a new technique of spraying out hundreds of sets of armor. We've, over the years, that's developed, now the materials are way better. There's more materials that are softer, they're more flexy and they look the same. It used to be the case, that anything that was soft just looks silly. It looked dull gray and you could spot it a mile off. Now, it's very hard to tell the difference and have-

Alison Stewart: Janty [unintelligible 00:11:36]--

David Crossman: -spongy [unintelligible 00:11:37].

Alison Stewart: Spongy. Hey, Janty, I want to ask you more about Denzel's costumes because aside from the robes, the gorgeous robes, he is loaded down with jewelry. He's got them on the rings, he's got earrings, he's got big necklaces, how did you decide to have him wear so much jewelry?

Janty Yates: Well, again, looking at the reference that Ridley gave us, they were very, very ornate, the paintings. Actually, we dressed Denzel down. I was astonished that he'd wear the earrings because I never thought he would. He seemed to want a lot more jewelry than I'd ever anticipated. It was a joint venture but not really because he, in the end, is the one that puts them on in his trailer without any interference and he'd just appear looking magnificent. I just said, "Oh, blimey, how wonderful." [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I agree with you. Dave, I saw it mentioned in an interview that you used vodka to keep the costumes fresh. Is that true?

David Crossman: No, I just drank vodka and then they seemed fresh, it was like [unintelligible 00:12:52]. We often [unintelligible 00:12:53]. It's [unintelligible 00:12:55], you put it into a bottle and you spritz it into the costume. You're more or less just saying alcohol, so it just kills the bacteria, so it stops that when you can't wash things or they get sprayed and it's usually vodka. There's always cheap bottles of vodka on the costume truck waiting to be spritzed into things that can't touch water.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking--

Janty Yates: I thought [unintelligible 00:13:22] is actually in our civilian wear as well?

David Crossman: We do also use tea tree oil as well just for anybody who has an alcohol issue [unintelligible 00:13:32].

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with costume designers, Janty Yates and Dave Crossman. They're nominated for Oscars for their work on Gladiator II. When we first meet Lucius, he's a soldier in North Africa, this is the Paul Mescal character. During that time, what would he have worn and what would his wife have worn? She was a soldier as well.

David Crossman: Yes, so we tried to do the contrast between the kind of might of the Roman army. They've got the most technically advanced armor. There they are, they've all the money. Then Paul's Numidian armor is just a very cheap woven Leather hand-hewn kind of look. The most basic under tunic underneath the skirt, and then a very round, primitive piece of metal on his chest for very basic protection.

His wife, his wife wears an actually a kind of half-breastplate, and that's because Ridley wanted to, he kept looking at his wife, how he wanted to dress her, and then he wanted to emulate from the first Gladiator some of the women in the arena on the chariots when they're being killed by Russell. We did a version of that cuirass for her. Then she's got a basic helmet, so she's a sharpshooter kind of archer. In a way, she's more elite than Paul is in some ways.

Paul was a primitive look that was based on a Pasolini film. Ridley had seen something, he was quite excited by this pale armor, so it started off very pale. It got slightly darker as we wove it but it was all kind of woven in-house. We made about nine sets of it, and then he develops on. He goes into a slave tunic and then into his gladiator look which is a nod to the first film. It's the language of the first film, the Gladiator Cuirass. Then eventually into the Maximus [unintelligible 00:15:47] after that.

Alison Stewart: Janty, let's talk about the emperors, the twin emperors. They have this almost white face they wear.

Janty Yates: Yes, and bright orange hair. [chuckles] It's all Ridley and it was all from Johnny Rotten because that's not only the characters they were to base themselves on, but they wanted their look to be that in a Roman styling.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, though, and they're unstable, they're a little scary in some parts. How did you want to communicate their fearsomeness, their scariness through their costumes?

Janty Yates: Well, to be honest, I was leaving that up to them because I wanted more on more and more layers and more this so that they would be quite intimidating in their actual appearance or their characters. They would be in the brightest colors, or the most jewels or the most gold. I mean just greeting Pedro on the steps, these hysterical emperors in gold on gold cuirasses, which Dave very kindly did for me. They looked magnificent. I thought they looked hysterically funny.

Alison Stewart: Dave, General Acacius played by Pedro Pascal has this awesome armor and it's pretty cool. You mentioned it earlier. It's got the head of Medusa is right in the middle. Why Medusa?

David Crossman: It was a commonly used symbol and it's a heroic symbol. We overdid it on the snakes a bit. We had a lot more snakes to begin with, and then there was a snake reduction process as we looked [unintelligible 00:17:43] on the breastplate. They were definitely exaggerating just as they extended more, they were crawling all over the chest, that was the idea. It's meant to invoke fear in his enemies and that kind of [unintelligible 00:17:58]. Yes, we did look at it for a long time. That's his main.

Alison Stewart: He--

David Crossman: Then we [unintelligible 00:18:04] more traditional in his white armor, and he's got the more classic double griffin mythical creatures on his breastplate.

Alison Stewart: Is that when he's wearing the white and he comes back?

David Crossman: Yes, yes, yes.

Alison Stewart: He looked good in the white, can I just tell you?

David Crossman: Then the special forces [unintelligible 00:18:22]. The special forces version of the snakes later on when he's sneaking into the Colosseum. Then he's got dark version of the Medusa head snake ensemble.

Alison Stewart: Janty, that was really interesting. You said at the beginning of the interview that you wanted to evolve Lucilla's/Connie Nielsen's outfits, but I thought you said, "No, no, we have to go back to the beginning." Why did the haute couture, why didn't it work?

Janty Yates: It was too plain in the actual fact. We were taking Madame Gray, we were doing all sorts of lovely, Yves Saint Laurent early work, lovely single tubes that were shoulderless and with an inbuilt cloak. Really, Connie wanted more. I looked at her and I thought she looked beautiful but basically, we needed those drapes. We needed a drape from the head, a drape from the hips, a drape from the shoulder drape. You name it, we draped it. Everybody was happy then.

Alison Stewart: Dave, there are so many extras, so many soldiers, so many gladiators who need to wear the armor as well. What's the process for dressing so many different people?

Janty Yates: Can I just say there's nowhere near? We had 3,000 a day on the original Gladiator. They were starting at 2:00, 2:30 in the morning and I'd probably join them around 4"00. I'm a lion. Then we get rid of them all by 11:00, so we only had 7 or 800 in the crowd. Dave, how many did you have when your Praetorians met your Romans?

David Crossman: I feel bad now because we haven't got as many as the first Gladiator, but that's because digital technology has moved on and it would have been too expensive to dress. We're usually, on the bigger stages, we had around 500. I think we went up to 200 Praetorian Guards. Then on some days, we had 500 Roman soldiers. It depended what we were. You basically spend a couple of weeks before you start shooting pre-fitting all these extras. About 100 people a day come to you and they get fitted in the armor, ready or not, basically.

Sometimes you're fitting 50 people with one set of armor because it hasn't arrived yet. They're all going through that process and then they're all given a number and then on the day of shooting, they come with their number and then they go into the tent and they roll through. You try and get it as systemized as you can because of time because you try and not have the kind of two o'clock in the morning situation anymore. You try more like 5:00, 5:30, on set for 8:30, that kind of filling so you're not killing everybody in the process.

Alison Stewart: Janty, what is the thing that you are the most proud of in Gladiator II?

Janty Yates: Oh God, all of it. [chuckles] All of it. I love every single vision. I love Dave's work, I have to say. I think his praetorians were just spectacular and his gladiators, well, all of it. I loved how Denzel looked, but I also loved how Connie looked and I loved how the Empress looked, all of it.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What about you, Dave, what are you particularly proud of?

David Crossman: I don't know most parts, I like the boats fighting, I like the emperors, I like Pedro's costumes, I like Paul's costumes. There's nice moments in the film. I'm proud of a lot of it. I'm glad I did it. It's one of those nice jobs where you're happy you were involved. Thanks to Janty, basically.

Alison Stewart: Janty, have you figured out what you're going to wear, I have to ask the costume designer, to the Oscars?

Janty Yates: [laughs] I thought I might wear one of Denzel's off-cast [inaudible 00:22:37] gesture to him [unintelligible 00:22:41].

Alison Stewart: I've been speaking with costume designers, Janty Yates and Dave Crossman. They are nominated for an Oscar for their work on Gladiator II. It was such a delight to have you here.

David Crossman: [unintelligible 00:22:53].

Janty Yates: Thank you so much.