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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. If you're planning on seeing a movie over the holiday weekend and you choose the latest installment of The Hunger Games franchise, take a close look at our next guest's work. This time, a prequel tells the origin story of future dictator President Snow. Like in all the other Hunger Games films, the costuming in this one isn't just nice to look at, it's all part of the politics of this fictional world. It's fitting that 10 years after her work on the Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Oscar-nominated costume designer Trish Summerville has returned to the franchise.

Set more than 60 years before Katniss Everdeen was selected for The Hunger Games, the new film follows a young Coriolanus Snow as a student at the Capitol's prestigious Academy. His once great family is now in economic ruin and he is strapped for cash. Luckily, an opportunity arises. Win the prize for being the best mentor at the 10th annual Hunger Games. Coriolanus is assigned a tribute, a singing rebel from District 12 named Lucy Gray Baird. His job is to keep Lucy Gray alive as she fights the other tributes to death in the arena, but is it just money motivating him or is it something else?

From Lucy Gray's rainbow dress to the blood red gloves worn by one menacing character, costume designer Trish Summerville's use of color and detail help bring the story to life. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is in theaters now and Trish Summerville joins us to discuss her work. Nice to meet you, Trish.

Trish Summerville: Nice to meet you as well and thanks for such a lovely introduction.

Alison Stewart: There you go. We got people in the place. We've got them in the scene. On any project, when you get the call to join a new project, what is among the first things you do?

Trish Summerville: One of the first things I do if I don't already know the director and their body of work, I definitely look at that. With this one and several other projects I've worked on are based off of books, so then I grab the book and start reading the book if I haven't already read the book, and then going through the script. It's in that order.

Alison Stewart: How does it differ working on a fantasy series versus some of the period work that you've done?

Trish Summerville: With fantasy, it's all based on imagination and what you can conjure up in your brain. That's one of the things I always say that's so great about books, is we can read a book and we can all picture in our head what we think things look like, the world, the environment, the characters. With fantasy, it's pretty much that same thing. With period films, I do a lot of research on the actual history and the actual period. You want to be really true and authentic to that.

On the complete opposite with this, with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I was able to talk with Francis Lawrence and figure out what he envisioned the film to look like, what he wanted the world to look like. We were leaning into Americana 1940s to 1950s, but since we don't really have a specific time and place, since we're fantasy and sci-fi, we could put a little spin on that. We didn't have to be authentic to that particular period. We could play with it a bit, have things look period, but then put a futuristic twist on it.

Alison Stewart: What's an example of a fabrication you chose, which was of the period, but then you were able to make it postmodern and futuristic?

Trish Summerville: That is an excellent question. Some of the characters like say Tigris, who for this character, she is in the later-- the books that were previous books, but the later films if you're going in chronological order. Her character is a fashion designer, owns an atelier in the Mockingjays. For this, I wanted to use a very prominent designer from the '40s and '50s, Lilianne, and use those silhouettes of that 1940s women's wear and women's designs. With that, I took and extended the shoulders, and raised the shoulders quite a bit, and put really intense shoulder pads in, and curved them out.

Then on the outside of the dress, all the seams, I sewed the seams outward instead of inward so that they look a bit frayed. Then we went in and airbrushed all the edges of the jacket and all the edges of the skirt, so that it looked like it was maybe originally a really dark fuchsia, but she'd had this fabric for so long that it had faded. That was one of the best examples of that mash up of authentic 1940s shape that we tweaked and made it a bit more futuristic.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Trish Summerville. She is the costume designer for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It's in the theaters now. Lucy Gray's rainbow dress is a very important focal part of the film. It's also the only costume that the character has for about half of the film. It's already reached that iconic stage because there are versions of it online, or copycats, or people are making their versions of it online already. What description did you have for that particular outfit?

Trish Summerville: Well, in the books and in the script, it just keeps referencing several times this rainbow ruffle dress with pockets that was her mother's. For me, typically, I'm not big on a lot of color and definitely not multiple colors together. That was a design challenge that I really had to take some time and wrap my head around and wanting to be very true to what Suzanne Collins, the author of all the books, what she was envisioning. Then also trying to think of what would really be, as you mentioned with the fans and recreating all these costumes that they do and cosplay.

We do take our fans very seriously, so just trying to think also what I could present to the fans that they would like and then number one, I have to be true to myself and be really satisfied with the design because it will live for time and all eternity if it chooses to. That one was quite a challenge to get around.

The biggest thing I wanted to do was I wanted to make it really authentic to Lucy Gray's character and this Covey, these musicians that she hangs out with. It being her mother's dress, I wanted it to look like an heirloom or a heritage piece, and really giving it a lot of life and a lot of aging and just dressing on it, so it didn't look like this bright, flashy, brand new dress because that wouldn't really be authentic to the descriptions in the book. Yes, that was probably one of the more challenging pieces in the beginning was figuring out exactly what I wanted it to look like once we had Rachel cast, figuring out what-- because she's quite petite, what would work on her frame really well.

Then I also had to take into consideration, as you mentioned, all the action that she has in this dress. For us shooting it, she wore this dress for weeks as we were shooting the games and fighting in the games. It had to be something that I made in pieces so once it ripped or was torn, got really too dirty that we couldn't clean it, we could interchange other pieces out and not have to get rid of a whole dress. I made it in several pieces.

Then you have to have all the multiples made because we don't shoot films in chronological or in script order. We shoot as we have locations or actors, so it's all dependent on many things. That dress, we had to make 10 of those pieces, so that we had enough to cover all the stages of it getting distressed, and then enough for Rachel and enough for her stunt woman.

Alison Stewart: Right, because you can't go to one scene that was four months ago, and now the dress looks in a completely different shape in the next scene.

Trish Summerville: Exactly, or the dress is completely destroyed.

Alison Stewart: I remember interviewing, and I'm forgetting his name, but I remember the movie, it was the costume director of Nightmare Alley. I'm sure you know his name.

Trish Summerville: I do and this is terrible because I'm friends with him, but I'm just spacing right now.

Alison Stewart: It will come to us. Someone in my team will find out. I remember something he said that has stuck with me about how he drove his team crazy looking for buttons because a button on a screen is a foot high, could be a foot high in a close up. Luis Sequeira.

Trish Summerville: Yes, Luis, who is extremely talented and also a very nice person and very hard-working, so I appreciate him a lot.

Alison Stewart: Yes and I thought-- that as always stuck with me, a button. What was a detail like that for you in one of your designs that you knew that it was going to be enormous on this screen so you needed to get it right?

Trish Summerville: Oh, God, it's all of it. It's the same thing like Luis is saying. It's like your team gets so over hearing how the minutiae is that we love because I keep saying that. A lot of people now watch things on their phone, but I love film, and I love filmmaking, so I'm always joking. I’m like, “It looks fine right now, but when it's the size of a house, how are we going to feel?” That would have probably been definitely maybe-- again, sadly, probably these buttons. In the story, in the book and in the script, there's this reference about, and it's an opening scene, so it's Snow getting dressed and Tigris has remade his father's shirt. There's much detail in the book about how she pulls these tiles from the wall to make him these buttons for his shirt, to just make his shirt-. -look more expensive and make it look new and presentable.

I had designed these buttons and in our, we call it the patina department, or I call them magical unicorns that can age and die and create anything, we had this really amazing patina department that I went into and showed him what I wanted the buttons to look like, and they hand cast and hand painted all these buttons because we had multiples of the shirts. Then I took the button that we wanted to use and I brought it to the production designer, Uli and so he could incorporate it into the wall in Snow's bathroom.

That was probably one of the ones, because it is so described into detail in the book. It's such a small thing but you strive to do your very best on everything. When you can't do your very best on everything, you at least have a lot of wins and hopefully, not too many losses.

Alison Stewart: Well, just that example shows how departments on films are not silos. They're integrated. You got to talk to the production designer. You’re going to have to talk to the stunt people because that dress, she's got to be able to run it or her double needs to be able to run in. It seems like there's a whole lot of interaction between departments.

Trish Summerville: There is, and I think that's what I love about filmmaking, is I don't want to work in isolation. I love being part of a tribe of people that want to tell a story. I think though, with costume design, I'm very passionate about it, but I'm equally as passionate about what do the sets look like and what are the props going to be, and who the actors are. I think that you have to work together as a team so that the characters that I'm dressing represent and work well in this world.

I don't want my costumes to be the thing that sticks out. I want it to just be this beautiful story that you can look at and you're enraptured in the whole story. Then later you might think, "Oh, that dress was really cool because of this,” or, “That location was amazing because of those incredible statues." I think it's really important to work together as a unit. I feel the same way about hair and makeup as well. It’s we have to create this character together so that the head goes with the body and the body fits in the world.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Trish Summerville. She's the costume designer on The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It's in theaters now. People who saw the original Hunger Games films will know the President Snow, the suits he was wearing, these elaborate suits with a white rose pinned to his lapel. How did you want to nod his style through his original outfits, through the outfits of him as a young man, if that makes sense?

Trish Summerville: There are a couple of things. What was amazing, I did Catching Fire and Donald Sutherland was in the original Hunger Games, which I wasn't a part of. When he came in, he brought this boutonniere, this little lapel pin. It was his personal item that he'd brought to Juliana, the first designer and wanted to use it and that's what he put the rose in, which I thought was really beautiful. I love when actors have these really little secrets that they have that they feel a kinship to. That became transferring to all the movies after that.

For Tom who plays Snow, we really wanted to have that representation of the rose, which the grandmother grows, and we get to see that in this film. It was trying to make this young Snow his own person in the beginning but as we see the progression of him growing into a man and who he's eventually going to become as Snow, as President Snow. It was towards the end I really wanted to bring in this silhouette of these really strong shoulders, this long overcoat and also tying into this really bright, this deep Bordeaux color. I had dressed Donald Sutherland in a coat in that same kind of color in the Catching Fire film so there was a nice little tie-in there.

Alison Stewart: Viola Davis' character as the head game maker is outrageous, a mad scientist with this laboratory. One of the distinct parts of her outfit are these bright red gloves she wears sometimes. What is the thought behind the bright red gloves and how does it fit in with what we get to know about her character or you want us to understand about her?

Trish Summerville: Well, Viola, I can't say enough amazing things about her in general. She is just completely incredible to be able to work with her. She was very busy on her Woman King press tour at the time and so we got her three days before she had to work. In her first week of work, she wears three costumes. We're quite busy getting her stuff ready. With the lab costume, I'm a big fan of red and a lot of directors don't like red because it does really pull your eye and it can steal a scene if it's not used appropriately.

For her in this lab, when Francis unusually showed me what the lab looked like, and it was very cold and stark, I thought, "Oh my God, I can use red here." I wanted her lab coat to look as if like blood was just draining down. She's full of blood and then the blood dissipates. Again, the patina team did this beautiful job doing a degraded dye on the lab coat, and then knowing she has these stitching seams with Snow, I was really into these red latex gloves. We had white and we had red, but I was really into the red ones.

I just like the fact that there's this really beautiful Cheshire cat smile that Dr. Gaul has, but there's this really underlying evil, as you mentioned, mad scientist. I just thought that these red gloves are so off-putting that I thought it really worked with the whole thing of being in a lab. I didn't want her just to have regular latex gloves or rubber gloves in a lab. I like that you did mention it because oddly it was such a fan favorite for everybody on set, even though producer Nina Jacobson wanted the gloves. All the things you designed, you're like, "Really, it's the gloves that everybody wants?"

Alison Stewart: It's really funny. We've got about a minute left. Of course, I'm going to ask you an essay question now. How is fashion political in the Hunger Games films?

Trish Summerville: We try through all the films, or I say I try through the films that I've done with The Hunger Games, to really show all the levels of what is still existing, has always existed in levels of society and caste systems. Particularly, this time, the difference between what's in The Capital and what's in the districts, for this film, since it’s only the 10th Hunger Games, I really wanted to show the happiness in District 12 before they've had so many years of the brutality of the Hunger Games. I wanted to show this life.

Since we got to have these amazing dancing and singing scenes in the Hob, I wanted it to be more colorful there and patterns there, and all these hand details and just show these people that are so connected to nature and to the earth about how they live quite happily in these environments outside of The Capital. This time around keeping The Capital much more communistic, much more strict and much more classic in fashion and controlled and contained. I think it was like they're showing that, just the difference in the life.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Trish Summerville, costume designer for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Thank you so much for being with us, Trish.

Trish Summerville: Thank you, Alison, for having me and having such great questions. I really appreciate it.

Alison Stewart: That's All Of It.

Trish Summerville: And happy Thanksgiving. Happy Indigenous People's Day.

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