Imaginary Worlds - Fixing the Hobo Suit

Episode Date: July 15, 2015

Superhero costumes used to be stand alone works of fashion that over time became dated or cringe-worthy. But lately, movie and TV superhero costumes have been looking good -- with fewer complaints from the fans. I talk with costume designers Michael Wilkinson (Watchmen, Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman), Sammy Sheldon Differ (Ant-Man, X-Men: First Class) and Jams Acheson (Spider-Man trilogy) about what's changed. They're learning new tricks, and using better technology. But there's also been a change in attitude. The designers are now constantly asking themselves, "why?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Order now. Alcohol and select markets. See app for details. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Bane. Let's not stand on ceremony here, Mr. Wayne. If you haven't seen The Dark Knight Rises, Tom Hardy plays the villain, Bane.

If you haven't seen The Dark Knight Rises, Tom Hardy plays the villain, Bane. And for some reason, he did the voice as a cross between Sean Connery and Darth Vader. Given that the character is supposed to come from a fictional Latin American country, it was a very weird choice. Oh, you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. But it was so weird, it was kind of amazing, and led to all these really great parodies. But for all the buzz around the voice, I was surprised more people didn't talk about the costume, which I thought was ingenious. So in the comics, Bane looks kind of like a Mexican wrestler. He's got a black hood over his face with a white design in the middle

that kind of looks like a skull with red eyes. His strength comes from tubes going to his back that pump him full of liquid steroids. In fact, his shoulders are so huge and bulked out, artists like to draw his head below his neck. There's no way he could do a literal version of that. But that didn't stop Joel Schumacher from trying in his 1997 catastrophe, Batman and Robin. Behold, the ideal killing machine. I call this little number Bane. Bane!

Of course, Christopher Nolan's Batman took place in kind of a semi-realistic universe. So he and Lindy Hemming, his costume designer, turn Bane's liquid steroids into a gas that he inhales. But it doesn't make him super strong. It actually dulls physical pain. His breathing apparatus is the same shape as the design on the hood in the comics, but the breathing apparatus is black and the design on the hood was white. Of course, he's not wearing a hood in the movie. Instead, we see the actor's bald head. So if you squint, Bane's head in that movie looks like the exact same design as the comics, but the negative image of it. Of course, they couldn't give Bane cartoonishly huge shoulders. So instead, he wore a coat that had a very high round wool collar that gave him the same

silhouette as the comic books. Like I said, it was a brilliant design solution. Impossible. Superhero costumes used to be cringeworthy. Even the cool ones like, you know, Batman from the Tim Burton films, the costume was so bulky. Michael Keaton couldn't turn his head or fight unless the bad guys basically ran into his fists. So what happened? How did the costumes get so much better? I'm Michael Wilkinson and I'm a costume designer for films. Michael worked on Man of Steel and the upcoming sequel, Batman versus Superman. He got a lot of heat for the new Batsuit because the first images, it looked like Ben Affleck was wearing a thick rubber cowl

and wouldn't be able to turn his head, which would feel like a step backwards. But newly released images show the Dark Knight turning his head. I feel like hopefully when the world has a really good look at the cowl that Ben wears, I hope people like it because a lot of work went into the construction of that. There's all sorts of amazing things going on inside that cow that make it easy to move in and have a full range of expressions. Superhero costumes used to be just stand-alone works of fashion which over time became dated or cringeworthy,

even if they were designed by a genius like Edna Mode in The Incredibles. This is a hobo suit, darling. You can't be seen in this. That won't allow it. What do you mean? You designed it. I never look back, darling.

It distracts from the now. It will be bold, dramatic, heroic. Yeah, something classic. Like Diner Guy. Oh, he had a great look. Like a diner guy. Oh! He had a great look. Oh, the cape and the boots. No capes.

One of the big changes is that costume designers are now looking more closely at the source material. When Michael Wilkinson and his collaborator James Acheson worked on Man of Steel, they researched the history behind Superman's costume. The genesis of that idea was that, you know, the circus performers, the weightlifters and the strongmen had this look of wearing, you know, early wool jersey tights with their sort of shorts over the top. So Superman's suit was kind of like a combination of the weightlifter and the ringmaster who wore boots and a cape. Also, swashbuckling heroes like Zorro wore capes. So, James and Michael thought, OK, that still communicates strength, power, adventure.

But... How are we going to resolve those silly red underpants? So we went through dozens and dozens of drawings. And I remember they pretty much just got smaller and smaller and smaller until one day they just kind of weren't there on the illustration. And that was the look we decided to go with. What's the S stand for? It's not an S.

On my world, it means hope. Sammy Sheldon Differ had a similar experience working on X-Men First Class. Now, in the previous X-Men movies, the mutants were wearing these sort of black leather outfits with just a few distinguishing characteristics. But the director of First Class, Matthew Vaughn, told Sammy that he wanted to go back to the original comics when the X-Men wore yellow and blue jumpsuits.

So, given that, obviously, it's a very simplistic drawing that was on the first cover i just started researching into the period of the time why they were drawn the way they were what the colors were representing and what immediately came out was in 1963 dupont discovered kevlar. It felt to me like maybe that's what they were trying to represent in the comic. So we kind of went down this route of seeing if that would work for us and also what NASA were up to. The advent of the nuclear age may have accelerated the mutation process.

Individuals with extraordinary abilities may already be among us. She pulled it off. The costumes look cool. Very 60s. But honoring the source material is tricky. Comic book illustrators, not that they don't understand, but they don't need to make a logic of the lines that they're drawing, where it goes from the front to the back of the body, round over the shoulder. It's just what looks cool on the page and sells the dynamic of the character. But when you put that into reality,

you've got to follow those lines around the body 360. And those characters are wearing skin-tight clothes to show off their ridiculously well-defined muscles, which for some reason is completely believable in the comics. One thing we discovered is that no matter what incredible shape an actor is in, once you put a leotard on them, then everything is kind of smoothed out and all that fantastic definition that they've been working so hard at is kind of negated. The next big leap away from cringeworthy costumes was texture.

Now in the old days, comic books could only be printed in a few limited colors. That's why the costumes were usually just one or two, maybe three colors, which looked good. I mean, they kind of leapt off the page. But for a movie like Man of Steel, once you get rid of Superman's red underpants and the yellow belt, the suit is very blue, and that's boring to look at in HD. So they created a silver layer that went under the blue to give it a metallic quality, and a 3D printed texture to give it muscle definition, and a pattern of ridges which creates visual interest for lighting and cinematography, and they created a backstory

to explain that texture. It was chain mail that went under the armor people wore on the planet Krypton. Another trick which Sammy Sheldon Differ likes to use is mixing and matching materials on the same costume. With the X-Men costumes, they were layers and layers of fabrics all worked into and pieced together and then, you know, connecting things one on top of the other. So if you stand away from, they just look quite blue with yellow bits. But actually when you go in close, it's all kind of intricately stitched to make it textured and then panels and then leather pieces and then the Kevlar in the middle. Part of design, if it's going to be interesting, is that you have to take risks. And the thing about superheroes, it's a fabulous arena to take risks.

The problem is that these films cost a huge amount of money. So you can take the risks, but you better make sure that you come up with the goods because it's an awfully expensive process to get it wrong. Yeah, and a lot of very angry fans that will let you know if they don't like it. Not so much the fans, it's the producers who are still waiting on the set saying,

where is it? Finally, it needs to move. James Atchison had a devil of a time working on the first Spider-Man film, the one with Tobey Maguire in 2002. He spent three months making nearly 70 versions of that suit. He was trying to get the colors right, making sure the textured webbing stayed on. And when it was finally ready, they took it for a test run. We had a stuntman on a wire, and they flew him straight into a tree, I remember.

And the whole suit, I mean, half the webbing unglued from the suit. I mean, it was sort of like a terrible waffle hanging in the trees. It was a disaster. It's funny, superheroes are supposed to seem indestructible. And maybe there's that scene at the very end where like after the superhero has been roughed up, his costume is like a little bit torn. But in real life, these costumes are extremely fragile. So the solution is to create 20 or 30 versions of the same costume, but each one is tailor-made for the specific needs of each scene. When Sammy Sheldon Differ worked on Marvel's Ant-Man, even that wasn't enough.

The suit has power. The man harnesses that power. You should be able to shrink and grow on a dime, So your size always suits your needs. They want someone to kind of, you know, turn over and over and over. Well, I don't know what you call it, tumbling. And then they put in a rubber floor and then they kind of go, well, he can't do it in these boots. And you have to you have to go, OK, we have to whip up a pair of boots that look identical to the hero pair, but almost like barefoot. It's a grueling job. And Michael Wilkinson says you really need to sort of step back and realize that this is really a conversation.

It's happening across time among designers. You know, in Asian art, where over the centuries you take the figure of Buddha or something like that, and over the centuries they are refining, they're putting their own sort of stamp on these cultural figures. It's kind of like that, I feel, without making it too grand, with our superheroes. Because, you know, each iteration of a superhero, it reflects a lot about the society in which the iteration was born. He's been giving this a lot of thought because he designed the first movie version of Wonder Woman,

who will appear in Batman v Superman. For Michael, this was a dream assignment. Wonder Woman was super close to my heart growing up. She was the one that really captured my imagination in the strongest way. Really? Why? There's something about Linda Carter's performance. They really crossed into this kind of magical world.

I was fascinated by her backstory. And I was lucky enough to actually work with Linda Carter on a film called Sky High, where she played the principal of a high school for superheroes. So I had a kind of seminal experience shopping with her on Rodeo Drive that I'll probably never really get over. It was very exciting. I mean, I think the reason why costumes have gotten so cool is because the designers are now constantly asking themselves, why? I don't think you can just get away with doing a unitard with a funny helmet.

I think you have to make sense of why is that person wearing that suit? What does he do with it? Does he have a power or is it something that the suit gives him? And then all those questions lead you on to how does that work? That's one of the reasons why I love the new Daredevil series on Netflix. In the first season, there are actually separate episodes to answer all those questions. Why does he need fighting sticks? Why does he need a padded suit? In the first season, there are actually separate episodes to answer all those questions. Why does he need fighting sticks? Why does he need a padded suit?

Why does the suit have to be red? Why does it have horns? My grandmother, she was the real Catholic. She used to say, be careful of the Murdoch boys. They got the devil in them. The evolution of Daredevil's costume becomes the story of the character realizing who he truly is. The costume is like an expression of his real self, the one that he has to dig down and find below the surface of his alter ego, Matt Murdock. The best costume designers are storytellers. The fans will nitpick, but I don't really feel like there are any wrong choices,

so long as they make us believe something that's wonderful and ludicrous at the same time. I remember spending many, many, many nights in a loft in Manhattan trying to get the right color screen printed onto those suits. So New York is, you know, my favorite city in the whole world. Yeah, that's great. It's funny too because I'm, because of those films, those Spider-Man films,

when I walk around New York and I've lived here now for 11 years, every so often I look up and I just imagine how great it would be to see Spider-Man swinging through those canyons of skyscrapers. Yeah. Seriously, it kind of bums me out that we don't see him up there every so often going.

Anyway, that's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Michael Wilkinson, Sammy Sheldon Differ, James Atchison, and Darby Maloney at KPCC. You can like the show on Facebook or leave a comment in iTunes. A lot of you have left really nice comments and I really, really appreciate it. I tweeted E. Malinsky. Joe's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Now go on. Your no-suit will be finished before your next assignment. You know I'm retired from hero work. As am I, Robert. Yet here we are. E, I only need a patch job for sentimental reasons.

Fine. I will also fix the hobo suit. You're the best of the best, E. Yes, I know, darling. I know.