Everyone knows Indiana Jones, but how many know who created his costume? Costume designers are Hollywood's quiet observers, says Deborah Nadoolman Landis, as she subjects Deirdre McQuillanto close but subtle scrutiny
'We are much closer to Margaret Mead and cultural anthropology - we are observers of human culture. We help the director to tell the story," says Deborah Nadoolman Landis (left), an Oscar-nominated American costume designer best known for her work on movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Coming to America. She detests the word costume. "It's a terrible word, we're saddled with that word. It means carnival, masquerade, fancy dress and dressing up and that's not what we do," she insists when we meet in the Clarence Hotel, where she and her husband, film director John Landis, have been staying.
Dr Landis is in Dublin to give a lecture on costume design to the National Film School at IADT in Dún Laoghaire and to promote her lavishly illustrated new book Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume, which has taken her five years to write and twice as long to research. The captions and the stories behind the films make the book special, she tells me. "Everything is contextualised. I am more in love with the stories behind the costumes than with the pictures themselves. It represents a lifetime's research." The book is full of wonderful vignettes, including how Buster Keaton found the hat with which he became so indelibly associated.
A tall, handsome woman with a thick mane of greying black hair, dressed in a black trouser suit and white shirt with a flamboyant red scarf around her neck, she cuts a commanding figure and has a CV to match. She has worked on many movies with her husband, including Michael Jackson's ground-breaking music video Thriller, but also with famous directors such as Stephen Spielberg, Costas Gavras and Louis Malle in the course of a career of more than 30 years. She lectures widely on both sides of the Atlantic, delivered the distinguished Hearst lecture at the University of Texas last year, is on the Cannes Film Festival jury and has been president of the Costume Designers' Guild for two terms.
Eloquent on all aspects of costume design, she is forceful on the difference between it and fashion design. "Fashion designers must build the brand. Their name is their lifeline. Our costumes have to look as if they grow on the back of the actors. I love Armani, but on screen it is flat and costume has to look as if it looks good even if it isn't - it is a different art. You have to look right for the character because actors use costume as a conduit to get to the character and very often that happens in the fitting room."
In contrast to fashion designers, costume designers have to lack ego. "We work for the director. Every dress doesn't need to be an entrance. Glamour is only one thing we use in our toolbox. Mostly it is this creative effort to try to be authentic and honest and tell the truth of the character, and that is not shopping. Our work is supposed to disappear and that takes a lack of ego. Everyone on the street will know Indiana Jones, but how many know my name?" And she will argue that film may influence fashion - witness the birth of the Banana Republic clothing brand after Raiders of the Lost Ark - but never vice versa.
She can certainly scrutinise unobtrusively and I have never sat at an interview and been so closely and subtly studied, as she makes a point about what our clothes say about us. "Everything you wear is telegraphing to an audience. You don't have to say a word. That's the costume designer's job." She has noticed everything, my clothes, how they look against the background, my jewellery, the make of my glasses and even that of my pencil, which impresses me more than anything else. "It's an Aristo 0.5, right?"
She is particularly proud of her work in the movie Coming To America. "It was tricky because how do you make an African Cinderella and make it light and sophisticated? It was coming up with the idea of the Brighton Pavilion that solved it all. It is the Raj, a regency-looking orientalist fantasy and it just needed that filter. I was always interested in world costume, but it takes a long time to internalise design."
The book came about after her decision at 40 to find a way of staying at home with her then adolescent children combined with a desire to write down what she knew. In order to do that, with typical thoroughness and determination, she went back to college and did a PhD on the history of design at the Royal College of Art and wrote her 120,000-word doctoral thesis on "Deconstructing Glamour", which will be published by University of California Press next year. This new book was created "because I wanted to show that from 1906 to 2006, actors, directors and costume designers are saying exactly the same thing. Because I have done every job in the book my confidence to write comes from that. If you want shoes polished or shirts ironed, you want me. I love to iron, the iron is my friend."
Born in New York, she grew up in Manhattan, the daughter of a school principal and a pharmacist, both avid theatre-goers. "I saw the first performance of Oklahoma [on Broadway] and my feet weren't touching the ground," she recalls.
After a conventional theatre training - the playwright David Mamet was a colleague - she worked in wardrobe in NBC television and did her first movie with John Landis in 1975 called Kentucky Friends.
Today she lives in Beverly Hills with her husband and counts gardening and beekeeping among her interests. Their 22-year-old son is a screenwriter with a movie already produced and their daughter is involved in early child education. "I wanted to write about our world because I have the time and that is my mission now." And how does she define a good costume designer? She considers for a moment. "You have to have patience first and foremost, you have to be a good listener and you have to be a person who exudes trust. You have to have a talent for putting people at ease because there is so much pressure on a film - financial, artistic pressures - and that is the hardest thing to accomplish."
Her book is a singular accomplishment, however, a landmark publication that elevates her profession and will certainly earn her a very special place in Hollywood screen history.
Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume by Deborah Nadoolman Landis is published by HarperCollins, £60 in UK