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Alison: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Today we continue our ongoing series, The Big Picture. That's when we speak with the talented Oscar nominees who work behind the scenes to make their film shine. Our next guest Hair Department Head, Camille Friend transform the actors on the set of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever into the citizens of one of the most powerful nations in the world and home to some of the most fierce heroes in the Marvel universe. In the blockbuster sequel, we enter a kingdom mourning King T'challa played by the late actor Chadwick Boseman. Throughout the film, we see his family sister, Princess Shuri, and Mother Queen Ramonda grieve while fighting to maintain the independence and safety of Wakanda.

The outside world has always been a little suss, and now there's a new threat from the ruler of an underwater nation who wants to be friends, or else. A Variety article noted the challenges presented to the filmmakers, "the sequel expands beyond the kingdom of Wakanda and into the Atlantis-type waterworld of Talokan. That meant the entire crew and Friend had to build creations that would work underwater." Camille Friend joins us today. Some of our feature film critics include Dreamgirls, The Help, and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts One and two. Please welcome Oscar nominee Camille Friend. Hi, Camille.

Camille: [inaudible 00:01:18]

Alison: Nice to meet you. Let's dig right into your work.

Camille: Let's go.

Alison: What were those early discussions like with Ryan Coogler about what needed to remain the same for continuity but then also what had to evolve?

Camille: Actually, he basically said everything needed to evolve. One thing I was great that I did the first one, so that's where we really did a lot of the hard work, the blueprint. It just took us into the second movie and it really started with talking to him and talking about, this movie is about the women, it's about the relationships, it's about the mourning of Chadwick but on the other side, we are totally opening up a whole new Marvel world in the Talokanil and some of the other characters. We had a lot of heavy lifting to do.

Alison: [chuckles] No doubt. It's so interesting. As I started digging more into this, and I love the movie and that it looks so beautiful, you realize, and you know this, that these details help the narrative and help tell the narrative and tell the story because we start in a mourning period of King T'challa. When you would think about what the hairstyles needed to be to reflect what that culture would be, what were some of the considerations you had?

Camille: One of the big considerations is when I first talked to Ryan, he was very specific and we just decided, like for the Ramonda and the Shuri character, we really wanted to say like in West African culture people shave their heads in mourning. If we fast forward to a year after they would have done that, what would their hair look like? Keeping them in the same vein as the first one like Angela had the beautiful long locks, the platinum and the silver and the gray locks. How do we transform her but still keep her in the same vein? I really lent to the hats that Ruth Carter had designed because they're crowns. I was like if we keep her hair shorter but we keep it in still a beautiful like 4A texture but we make it a crown shape because Angela, she is royal, so we want to keep her in her queen-like state.

Then for Shuri, on the first one, she was a kid. She was the girl who was always making jokes and poking with her brother, but on this one, she is a young woman trying to figure out her life in mourning and moving through the change. We kept her the same by keeping her hair shaved on the sides and keeping that but then using a 4C texture and the two-strand twisting it in order to create her look.

Alison: Last year for this series, I interviewed the costume designer for Nightmare Alley and he told me something really interesting about how he searched for buttons, specific buttons for the period because on the screen of buttons like a foot tall. I'm curious if there was one detail for you, one or two details that you knew you had to get right because-- Of course, you want to get everything right, but because you knew the scale.

Camille: Yes. I think the biggest for us was the Talokanil. One thing that was beautiful about the first Black Panther, one of the main headlines that I loved is a journalist wrote that Black Panther was a love letter to black hair. That was something that I always treasured in my heart. Going into the next one, it was like, okay, we are now doing this Mayan Latin culture. I wanted this to feel the same way. I wanted this to be a love letter to the culture. Going into it like making sure that we really nailed the Mayan looks and we had a professor Aldana who really helped us. He's of Mayan studies. We had him on speed dial for real. [laughter]

Obviously, Alison, you could call him anytime. They were like, "Really, you guys could call him anytime." All the departments, we really called him and really leaned into him. Even if you go-- People are like, "Can't you research on the internet?" I said, "Hello. The internet is not real in the sense of it's not always the truth." We wanted real authenticity and we wanted to really be grounded in realness and grounding in reality. Talking to him constantly about how these looks are going to look, what kind of fabrics, what kind of materials, what things could we use in order to create these characters. Just like one of my jokes is on the first one you can't call up 1800 Africa and get this hair.

The same thing with these looks. You couldn't call up 1800 Mayan and just get this. It was something like pains, sacredly, we made every hairpiece that was made. We got the jewels, we got the metal and we actually made those. I actually learned how to be a jewelry maker. All of these things people don't know from the background and even finding different materials that are going to work in substitution for things we didn't know exactly what they were but to get that look and Dr. Aldana was really great about. I would send him pictures and he'd be like, no, this work or this doesn't work or it should be at this level instead of this level. All of those things people don't know that we think about in the painstaking background, that's what we do.

Alison: You got somebody laughing so hard at 1800 Africa, my team can't stand it. [laughs] My guest is Camille Friend. Oscar nominee, Camille Friend. We are talking about her work on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Truth or fiction because as you said the internet, 300 wigs?

Camille: Yes, about 300 wigs. When we started, my crew thought I was out of my mind where I was like, "Okay. We're all going to get in here." What I like, I'm very much a teacher and I'd like to get us all in the same room and we're going to just start building. We're going to start building wigs, we're going to start working. They were like, "How many do we have to do?" I never tell them the amount. I said, "Just keep going. Just Keep going." In my mind, I'm counting because I know what it takes for us to get. Then you have so many sections. You have the tribal wigs over here and you have all the tribes, the mining tribe, the border tribe, the river tribe, then we had over here, the Talokanil. Those all needed to all be specially built. It was something that it took a large group of us and painstakingly everybody and everybody rose to the occasion. When we had a win, it's a win for all of us.

Alison: Let's talk about the water of it all.

Camille: Let's talk about the water.

Alison: Black women and their hair and water.

Camille: Oh, yes.

[laughter]

Alison: Seriously, what was the biggest challenge in terms of your work that you have to do and having to have it stand up to the water, and how did you solve that challenge?

Camille: Alison, I'm going to tell you, I'll just start from the beginning. During our camera test, we put everybody in the water checking how was it going to look. The hair was like [unintelligible 00:08:27] and then too, also what we figured out is when they went in the water, the product would leave a big white cloud in the water. It's like, oh no. Talking to our executive producer like Nate Moore, he was like, "Camille, what are you going to do?" I'm like, "I don't know but we're going to figure it out." Jeff Bowman, our visual effects. He goes, "Camille, I know we can't have a white cloud in the water." I [unintelligible 00:08:55] we'll fix it. What we did was fast forward to lots of research and development trying to figure out what we could do.

What we came up with is I called a glue hairspray. We took basically what we call spearmint gum which is our glue and we used specifically-- I want to give a shout-out to Kenny Diaz, who's a very talented Latin makeup artist. He makes a glue called KD 151. We took his glue and we really watered it down with alcohol to change just to really thin it out and we sprayed it on the hair to make it like a hairspray. When they went in the water, the hair would stay up. We just learned with ponytails. We had to triple band them and then wrap hair around them or use other things to wrap around and tie around and even spray some of our components with that so everything would stay up and look beautiful and there would be no clouds in the water. [laughs]

Alison: You come from a family of hairstylists and hair artists.

Camille: Yes,

Alison: What is something you learned from that time from your family that's still useful to you today?

Camille: Work ethic. I saw my family really work hard and do it to the best of their ability. I grew up in the salon, going to the salon. The smell of the salon, I love it. I love the smell of pressed hair all day long. I love the hair of relaxes. It's the smell of my childhood. All of those things is something that I really learned from my family. Even to this day, so many of my family are still hair stylists. It's what we call the family trade, and it's something that I love, and it's something I get to work with my hands and work with such great artisans. My crew of artisans that help us get there; The hairdressers, the barbers, the braiders, the wig makers, the ventilators, the colorist. All those people that you guys don't see in the background that help us get there. In Atlanta, I had to color Lupita's locks. I called one of my girlfriends, who's a great hair colorist. I said, ''Can you come to my house and help me?' I got about 500 I need to color." She's right there. We're coloring all night. These are all things that people don't know happened, but we just rise to the occasion.

Alison: That speaks to you that people show up when you call.

Camille: I'm pretty lucky like that, people do truly show up for me, and I'm blessed to have just the community of people who support me, not only from people in the business but my ancestors and my family to this day, there's so many people that support me, and I get great love, definitely.

Alison: Where were you when you heard you were nominated for an Oscar?

Camille: I was at my house, and I was very-- I'll put it this way. Let me tell you. This is my third time. I had two times where you go to bed after your name is not announced and you just cry for the rest of the day. This time, I was just sitting there, and one of my dear friends, Evelyn Feliciano, who's also my colleague, she worked on Black Panther, and my manager, Alicia De Anda, were there just holding my hand.

I was like, "You know what? We'll just see." The first one they read was All Quiet on the Western Front, which one of my friends did, Heike. I was thrilled. Then I heard Batman, Mike Marino, and them and my buddies. I was like, ''Yes.'' Allison, all I heard was black. I was like, [unintelligible 00:12:38] my name. [laughter]

It was so funny because the whole day I kept calling my agent, who's also my manager, asking Alicia. I said, 'Did they call my name?' She goes, ''Just play it back, Camille.'' The whole day, I had to keep playing it back on the video. I had to keep playing it back because it didn't sink in until that night when I went to bed. I cried tears of happiness, and I was talking to my mom.

Alison: Oh, love it. Camille Friend is an Oscar nominee for her work on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Camille has been a pleasure talking to you. This is All Of It.

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