Costume Design and Production Design - Kristi Zea
Can you think back to the bedroom you had during your childhood? Was there more than one? When I was growing up I was always sharing a bedroom with one of my brothers or sisters, and because they were older than me they had more of a say about what posters went on the wall and how the room was furnished. I’ve been wondering how the choice of decorating a bedroom changes from the being the parents responsibility to being their children’s decision — and how a person’s choices about style, fashion and functionality in their personal lives is influenced by historical and contemporary trends. How much thought does a person invest about what those choices communicates to others? What unconscious meaning can be found through our furniture, clothing and decor?
My grandmother is in her 80s and has lived in many different homes. What has remained consistent across each of these homes and over the decades is her choice of styling, which can be described as twee or old-fashioned. From the furniture to the picture frames holding family photos one can read her home as being from a different age — a period frozen in time. She has no interest in updating her style and likes her home just the way it is. This attention to detail is what the art department aspires to convey in filmmaking; to translate and interpret character through space.
From the late 1970s working as an assistant to production designer Mel Bourne, Kristi Zea has displayed her ability to create layers of meaning through design, first as a costume designer then later as a production designer in her own right. Beginning in 1980 she worked as costume designer for Alan Parker’s classic musical Fame and later rejoined his team on Shoot the Moon and Vietnam-era drama Birdy. Perhaps most famous is her work on James L. Brooks drama Terms of Endearment, spanning 30 years and charting the highs and lows of a mother-daughter relationship. As well as Lawrence Kasdan’s 1985 western, Silverado, Zea had demonstrated her skills with period costume and contemporary costume alike, and understanding the importance of aesthetic in storytelling. She would make the leap into production design with Jonathan Demme in 1988, armed with her knowledge and understanding of film design, ready for an expanded creative role.
Although Married to the Mob was her first film credited as production designer it wouldn’t be until 1990 that Kristi Zea would flex her creative muscles for Martin Scorcese to tell the biographical story of mobster Henry Hill in Goodfellas, a story spanning 25 years from 1955 to 1980. The recurring idea punctuated by Scorcese’s direction and Zea’s design is that the mob life Henry wants from a young age provides status and material wealth that only grows as the years pass and the bodies pile up. During Henry’s climbing through the gang ranks the rewards are seen through changes in his home space; from his parent’s blue-collar house as a kid, his first home where he builds a family, to the excess and faux-luxury of his new house decorated by his wife, Karen, after he is released from prison.
Early on the separation is made between the gang members’ personal lives with their families in suburban settings, versus their criminal activity in the numerous bars, diners and restaurants they frequent. During the film this divide, in actuality a complicit act of denial, gradually fades away. In a darkly comical scene several members of the gang are forced to accept an invitation inside the home of Tommy DeVito’s mother so as not to arouse suspicion about the body hidden inside the trunk of their car in the driveway; the physical and figurative space between their crimes and home lives is slowly narrowing.
In the end, after testifying against his friends and being placed into witness protection, the gangster lifestyle has given way to the surburban nightmare Henry had spent his life trying to escape. Kristi Zea gives the viewer a taster of what Henry Hill enjoyed during his criminal career; the design of spaces like the Copacabana nightclub and several other hangouts convey a feeling of carefree, lavish living. When this material world is taken away from Henry the audience shares a small measure of empathy with his predicament. The question one is left with at the end of the film is whether fortune and prosperity was worth the deceit, violence and death Henry was witness and participant to during his time as a gangster.
Kristi Zea would reteam with Scorcese on The Departed over 15 years later, expanding the perspective of the story to both criminal and law enforcement in present day Boston. The creative choices seen in The Departed find practical locations and constructed sets echoing similar themes found in Goodfellas about the material rewards of criminal activities, but also the cost of violence to maintain their material wealth. Whether the film is contemporary or spanning several decades Zea’s design has provided Martin Scorcese the spaces in which to tell both fictional and very real stories of American crime in the 20th and 21st century.
Immediately following her work on Goodfellas Zea continued her collaboration with Jonathan Demme on the seminal film The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. Telling the story of FBI trainee Clarice Starling’s hunt for a serial killer with the guidance of the incarcerated psychopath Hannibal Lecter, Demme sought to create visual concepts for the film that would be translated to the screen through the photography of Tak Fujimoto, ASC and Krista Zea’s production design. Visual leitmotifs and stylistic design choices elevate a procedural police story into a bold thematic film that balances stark reality with theatrical embellishment.
In her first meeting with Hannibal Lecter, under maximum security, Starling is exposed to an underground dungeon bathed in washes of vibrant reds and cold stone walls, creating a sense of dread before she has even glimpsed the infamous cannibal she has been tasked to question. Passing the other inmates who are kept behind bars the final cell is exceptional because Lecter is contained behind glass, a creative decision made by Demme and Zea during pre-production to make the interactions between Starling and Lecter both intimate and threatening. Also from a photographic standpoint metal bars would have obscured the actors’ performances and compromised the impact of their early scenes together as a delicate relationship is established. In their final scene where they are physically in the same room Lecter is caged in the center of a large hall space as a temporary cell after being transported to Memphis to aid in the capture of Buffalo Bill. The cage built for Lecter’s temporary cell was specially designed and made for the production to have wider spacing between the bars to ensure that the actor’s faces were more visible. Where metal bars were missing before in the institution their use in Starling’s last moments together with Lecter punctuate the emotional trauma she carries with her from childhood that he seeks to extract. The thematic intent and design of this scene come together to reveal a poignant notion; where Lecter is a prisoner in body, Starling is prisoner to her own feelings.
Both Lecter and Buffalo Bill inhabit a hyperreality that is a step beyond the muted world out of their reach, whether physically or emotionally, and Kristi Zea’s design elevates their personal spaces with rich detail and character that is largely absent in the stark depiction of the American Midwest. Despite his captivity Lecter adorns the walls of his cells with beautiful charcoal drawings that reflect his sophisticated tastes, and Buffalo Bill’s home contains several terrariums where he homes and raises exotic Asian moths — symbolic of his longing to transform. With the novel and adapted screenplay as their base the art design team took what was many times only loosely described on the page and created a unique and distinctive vision that is critically recognized and seen as a pop cultural landmark in 20th century filmmaking.
Over ten years later Kristi Zea would return to recreate the world of Hannibal Lecter in the second adaptation of the Thomas Harris precursor novel to The Silence of the Lambs, the Brett Ratner-directed Red Dragon. The production called for Zea to design a film set in the same continuity as the 1991 film but before the events seen in The Silence of the Lambs — it had to be a period piece from recent history. The familiar underground dungeon and glass cell were rebuilt, and the scope of the story introduces Hannibal Lecter’s refined home in the film’s prologue along with the new spaces inhabited by Francis Dollarhyde, a serial killer known in the tabloids as the Tooth Fairy, and former FBI profiler Will Graham, who has the task of capturing him with Hannibal Lecter’s help. The film is not simply a duplicate of The Silence of the Lambs but rather an expansion of the Hannibal Lecter mythos created by Thomas Harris and translated to the screen by a new director and a returning production designer.
Kristi Zea’s filmography demonstrates her ability to recreate period settings for the screen in films such as Barry Levinson’s Sleepers and Sam Mendes’ deconstruction of a marriage in Revolutionary Road, set during the economic post-war boom of the 1950s. She also has shown equal talent in creating contemporary spaces that can reflect character and story, such as in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia and more recently in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Throughout her career, beginning as a costume designer to her later work as a production designer, she has collaborated with her directors and art departments to create a wide, diverse range of spaces that are imaginative, expressive and authentic. Kristi Zea exemplifies the best qualities of what costume and production design can achieve in cinematic storytelling.
Recommended viewing:
(as costume designer)
Fame (dir. Alan Parker, 1980)
Terms of Endearment (dir. James L. Brooks, 1983)
Silverado (dir. Lawrence Kasdan, 1985)
(as art director)
Angel Heart (dir. Alan Parker, 1987)
(as production designer)
Goodfellas (dir. Martin Scorcese, 1990)
The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991)
Lorenzo’s Oil (dir. George Miller, 1992)
Philadelphia (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1993)
Sleepers (dir. Barry Levinson, 1996)
Red Dragon (dir. Brett Ratner, 2002)
The Departed (dir. Martin Scorcese, 2006)
Revolutionary Road (dir. Sam Mendes, 2008)
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (dir. Oliver Stone, 2010)
Sources:
Production Design in the Contemporary American Film, by Beverly Heisner
Art Direction and Production Design, edited by Lucy Fischer
Production Design: Architects of the Screen, by Jane Barnwell
kristizea.com
(note: this is only a partial list — additional information was obtained from further books, documentaries and articles but these details weren’t available at the time of writing)
(additional note: I would have liked to have written more about Kristi Zea’s work as a costume designer, however the resources available about costume design are limited compared to what is available about the many other facets of filmmaking. I hope to rectify the limited knowledge I have and learn more about the talent and contribution costume designers give to the filmmaking process)
Coming soon: Faking It — The Emulation of Aesthetic
