Daily Archives: June 29, 2022

What is the most famous gay and half-Jewish comedy duo you can think of? If youre coming up short, the answer is Kate Berlant and John Early, who have solidified that reputation in the zeitgeist with their Peacock special, Would It Kill You to Laugh?, which premiered on Friday.

The special, directed by Andrew DeYoung, is extremely high concept. It sets the scene of Berlant and Earlys decades-long feud and public falling-out from their hit sitcom, Hes Gay, Shes Half-Jewish. Meredith Vieira (yes, the real broadcast journalist) sits them down for an interview and things quickly go sideways, as the two battle it out over who got the rights to which comedic bits in their settlement. (Berlant got the right to cross her eyes, while Early got the right to do a mechanical robot arm movement.)

It then transitions into seemingly unrelated sketches that traverse time and space: the two of them have a meltdown in a childrens hip-hop class, they wear full beaver costumes at an airport (everyone else is human and they are never acknowledged as beavers) and they play a multitude of characters eating at restaurants where hot caramel is accepted as a form of payment. It also includes flashback scenes from their sitcom in which Early was the first gay man to shit on television and even includes a meta behind-the-scenes romance between the two of them in their dressing room for the Peacock special.

To Berlant and Early, however, the origins of the special werent high concept at all. The characters, sketches and central premise all derived in some form or another from inside jokes the two comedians have had over the years of their friendship. The two spoke to Varietyabout why they love playing on their absence of sexual tension, finding authentic emotion in absurd circumstances and whether Berlant would ever reprise her iconic role on The Other Two.

So, how did this special come into existence?

JOHN EARLY: Weve always made and wanted to make sketches. But we love when we get the opportunity every 16 years to make something where the sketches get to be a little more interconnected and refined and have some money behind them. So this really just came about from, frankly, being desperate to make something together again. We were just like, Can we just do a big batch of sketches like the old days? And we basically set out to make something that was a collection of sketches that were all in our sweet spots, like Kate and John, right in the vein, you know?

KATE BERLANT: Even though there is a framing device in this, its kind of just as simple as characters that make us laugh. There isnt any driving point of view.

It was hard not to notice throughlines that you put in between different sketches. Can you explain the world this special takes place in?

BERLANT: Yeah, I think its open to interpretation, if I can speak in cliches. The whole world is sort of turned up in the sense that beavers are people, a world where hot caramel is currency. Were always looking for those kinds of absurd visuals or absurd stakes, but always grounded in very authentic emotion. And the tension between those things always is what were naturally drawn to or what we as performers together always arrive at.

Where did the caramel idea come from?

BERLANT: Theres not that much of a story. It was a joke that John and I just for years have said. I dont recall when it started or anything.

EARLY: It was like 2012. I honestly think it was at that place Sweetwater in Williamsburg.

BERLANT: Really? Wow. Its good to actually have the origin. Yeah, they have a watermelon feta salad

EARLY: That is to die for!

BERLANT: So much of the special or what we do does come from these little jokes. Like, I would do a joke just in life of hitting on John and making him uncomfortable.

EARLY: Because we often share hotel rooms to save money when were touring or shooting something. It would always be funny to acknowledge, like, what if there were sexual tension between us all of a sudden?

BERLANT: Because theres just the absence of sexual tension. As Ive said I have more sexual tension with my mother. So its like imagining that I would hit on John.

EARLY: Yeah, she always does that to me, where shell be like I just wanna blow off steam.

BERLANT: That always made us laugh and scream because its so, like, insane. And that ended up being kind of a favorite thing of the whole special. And it kind of comes from this very real joke that really just was a private joke.

EARLY: And again, the absurdity of what if there were sexual tension between us gives us permission to approach it on an acting level as totally real. That was the challenge of that sketch, like this is so funny, but it will only be funny to the audience if we just play it like its really happening.

Throughout the special, you guys just dont seem to be able to tell the truth. Every second that something happens, there has to be a lie that you keep covering up. So Im curious where that aspect of your characters came from.

BERLANT: The characters were always drawn to are hiding something. I mean, the way we all are kind of performing authenticity or performing some kind of truth, which is very familiar to any celebrity interview the person going there and its all highly choreographed.

EARLY: Its like, what is funny about someone being real or being honest? I cant imagine us doing a special where the sketches were us being truthful. I think theres just the tension. We always find it funny when someone is saying one thing and feeling another, you know? Were less joke-driven on principle. Thats our favorite joke, just a kind of behavioral thing of suppressing something and posturing and social anxiety, like what you do when youre nervous and youre in public and youre being seen.

BERLANT: Whenever youre, like, trying to curate someones perception of you.

EARLY: Which is impossible, its fundamentally impossible. But Lord knows you can try.

BERLANT: Oh, yeah. And Ive been doing it.

How did the central aspect of the celebrity interview come in for you?

EARLY: Its like the kind of drop dead seriousness of something that is purely just pulp schlock. Its as if theyre talking about Darfur, but theyre talking about their first album. Thats always been fundamentally funny. But the truth is we have always loved this one video that you can find on YouTube of Suzanne Summers and Joyce DeWitt having a reunion after not seeing each other for like 30 years or something, not speaking and having a very public falling out over Threes Company and stuff. Its just an incredibly layered video. Its like watching Bergman. Its so wild just to see what theyre projecting and what theyre actually feeling.

BERLANT: And the competition to come across the most open and empathetic. John showed me that video in the very beginning of our friendship, and its amazing, just the way they hug each other.

EARLY: We had to cut our hug for time unfortunately.

And how did Meredith Vieira get involved?

BERLANT: Meredith, we were so thrilled, of course, that she said yes. We were expecting her to pass and we would have totally understood. Apparently her kids are fans of ours, so I think that helped. But she was, first of all, just a delight and a dream, but also so funny, such an amazing actress and just really understood. I mean, that is her world. She elevates the entire special and allows the joke to feel even more pronounced.

EARLY: We wrote very simple lines for her. I never would have been prepared for her, like, acting.

I want to also talk to you about this idea of examining the comedy duo, like the legacy of the comedy duo. So, first of all, who are your favorite comedy duos?

BERLANT: Us.

EARLY: I love French and Saunders.

BERLANT: Mike Nichols and Elaine May are beyond iconic. I mean, its funny because in our generation not to like, of course there have been people that have worked together but its not as lauded a form.

EARLY: But it makes a lot of sense because peoples main platform to even be seen by people is Instagram where youre a one-man-band. So it would make sense, actually, that the duo is undervalued or not even attempted as much. Like, imagine if we had a joint Instagram account. That would be so embarrassing. You know what I mean? In our age of narcissism and rampant individualism, theres something very sweet and old-school about it that we both treasure.

BERLANT: Also just on a level of sheer joy of working, its so much more fun.

EARLY: And on an acting level, too, theres obviously so much more that can happen when there are two factors instead of trying to create something thats built around yourself.

Will there be a feature version of this special?

EARLY: Well, I hope so.

BERLANT: I would love that vein of brain candy. We have deep aspirations of doing a classic comedy show, like a scripted narrative show that were currently writing. But something about the sketch comedy hour felt so right to us the kind of self-contained nature of it and wed love to make more of them.

Because it is Pride Month and youre now the preeminent gay-half-Jewish comedy duo, Kate, you have perhaps the most famous instance of saying the F-word on television, in The Other Two. John, what do you think about that?

EARLY: I was so proud. Ive tried to work it into a lot of my own work, that word. It was thrilling.

BERLANT: Woman is the word that were referencing, right?

EARLY: Yeah, I love it. I really, really love it. And I love the way people responded to it. I dont think anyones ever been mad at you for that.

BERLANT: Not one person. By the way, that line was written by Jordan Firstman.

So youre going to pass off the blame?

BERLANT: Well, I would never, you know, write something like that for myself. Yeah. Thank you. I love when people yell that to me on the street.

And would you return to that show?

BERLANT: Pitzi Pyle was kind of a flash in the pan, and a fun one at that. A spinoff.

Can we petition?

BERLANT: Absolutely.

Since you said some things were cut, is there anything you want to share that was a darling of yours?

EARLY: Theres so many. Every single sketch I would say has about like a four minute arm we had to lob off. Like in the book club [sketch], I would say there are so many.

Just because you brought that up, is there a story behind the book your characters are reading Clancys Reward by Paul Floor?

BERLANT: That was truly like, what should his name be? I was like

BOTH: Paul Floor.

EARLY: There was a running joke in Search Party of peoples names being objects, like Doctor Amanda Baby. And then I realized with Paul Floor, you do that because its so much easier to clear legally because you are more than likely not going to run across someone named Paul Floor.

BERLANT: They even tried to make it look like Paul W. Floor.

EARLY: Yeah just make sure, we were like, Theres no one named Paul Floor.

BERLANT: Imagine some Paul Floor in Delaware sues.

Youre going to get a letter.

BERLANT: A little Easter Egg in the sitcoms is that the book thats hiding one of Johns gins is a Paul Floor short stories book. So you can go back on your third or fourth watch.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Kate Berlant and John Early Discuss the Origin of Would It Kill You to Laugh? and Their Absence of Sexual Tension - Variety

LONDON For roughly three decades, making sure athletes participated in the biggest events regardless of the worlds never-ending military and political battles has been a nearly sacrosanct tenet of international sports.

Wars broke out. Authoritarian nations with egregious records on human rights hosted major events. There were massive doping scandals. And through it all, boycotts and bans on participation all but disappeared from the sports landscape.

That principle staging truly global competitions and not holding athletes responsible for the worlds ills began to crumble after Russias invasion of Ukraine. It will be on hiatus starting Monday, when Wimbledon opens without the world No. 1, Daniil Medvedev, and the rest of the tennis players from Russia and Belarus, who have been barred from participating.

World Athletics, track and fields world governing body, has also barred Russian and Belarusian athletes from its championships next month in Eugene, Ore., the biggest track and field event outside of the Olympic Games.

The bans represent a drastic shift after years of resisting letting politics interfere with individual athletes participation in sports. They are also a departure from the decisions that various sports organizations made earlier this year to limit punishments to banning Russian and Belarusian teams or any flags or other symbols of the countries from competitions.

What changed? Chinas authoritarian government has stifled free speech and other human rights, and its treatment of the Uyghurs has been deemed genocide by multiple governments, yet it was permitted to host the Olympics in February. Why were Russian and Belarusian athletes pariahs by March?

Experts in international sports say that the so-called right-to-play principle ran headlong into the most significant package of economic sanctions placed on a country since the end of the Cold War. That shifted the calculus for sports leaders, said Michael Payne, the International Olympic Committees former director of marketing and broadcast rights.

For years, people would point at sports and athletes and demand boycotts, and sports could say, Hang on, why are you singling us out but going on with the rest of your trade? Payne said. But if you have full economic and political sanctions against a country, then Im not sure that sports should still sit it out.

The leaders of tennis in Britain ultimately decided they could not. In April, acting at the behest of the British government, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which runs Wimbledon, and the Lawn Tennis Association, which oversees the other annual spring and summer tournaments in England, announced the ban, explaining they had no other choice.

The U.K. government has set out directional guidance for sporting bodies and events in the U.K., with the specific aim of limiting Russias influence, said Ian Hewitt, the chairman of the All England Club. We have taken that directional guidance into account, as we must as a high-profile event and leading British institution.

He said the combination of the scale and severity of Russias invasion of a sovereign state, the condemnation by over 140 nations through the United Nations and the specific and directive guidance to address matters made this a very, very exceptional situation.

The move is broadly popular in Britain, according to opinion polls, but it has received significant pushback from the mens and womens tennis tours. They condemned it as discriminatory and decided to withhold rankings points for any victories at the tournament.

On Saturday, Novak Djokovic, the defending champion at Wimbledon, called the barring of players unfair. I just dont see how they have contributed to anything that is really happening, he said.

One Russian-born player, Natela Dzalamidze, changed her nationality to Georgian so she could play doubles at Wimbledon. Last week, the United States Tennis Association announced that it would allow players from Russia and Belarus to compete at its events, including the U.S. Open, this summer, but with no national identification.

This is not an easy situation, Lew Sherr, the chief executive of the U.S.T.A. told The New York Times this month. Its a horrific situation for those in Ukraine, an unprovoked and unjust invasion and absolutely horrific, so anything we talk about pales in relation to what is going on there.

But, Sherr added, the organization did not receive any direct pressure or guidance from government officials.

Tennis has been juggling politics and sport a lot lately. Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA, last fall suspended the tours business in China, including several high-profile tournaments, because of the countrys treatment of Peng Shuai.

Peng, a doubles champion at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014, accused a former top government official of sexually assaulting her. She then disappeared from public view for weeks. She later disavowed her statements. Simon said the WTA would not return to China until it could speak independently with Peng and a full investigation took place.

In explaining the decision to bar Russian and Belarusian athletes from its world championships, Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, acknowledged in March that the move went against much of what he has stood for. He has railed against the practice of politicians targeting athletes to make political points when other sectors continue to go about their business. This is different, he said, because the other parts of the economy are at the tip of the spear. Sport has to step up and join these efforts to end this war and restore peace. We cannot and should not sit this one out.

Michael Lynch, the former director of sports marketing for Visa, a leading sponsor of the Olympics and the World Cup, said the response to Russias aggression is natural as sports evolve away from the fiction that they are somehow separate from global events.

Just as the N.B.A. and other sports leagues were forced to embrace the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake, international sports will have to recognize that they are not walled off from the problems of the world, he said.

This genie is not going back in that bottle, Lynch said. We will continue to see increased use of sports for cultural change, for value change, for policy change. Its only going to happen more and more.

Sports sanctions against Russia could be the beginning of the end of largely unfettered global competition. Who gets to play and who doesnt could depend on whether the political zeitgeist deems an athletes country to be compliant with the standards of a civilized world order.

Should Israeli athletes worry because of their countrys much-criticized occupation of the West Bank? What about American athletes the next time their country kills civilians with a drone strike?

This a slippery slope, David Wallechinsky, a leading sports historian, said of the decision to hold Russian and Belarusian athletes accountable for the actions of their governments. The question is, Will other people from other countries end up paying the price?

This month, some of the worlds top golfers were criticized for joining a new golf tour bankrolled by the government of Saudi Arabia, a repressive government responsible for the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and columnist for The Washington Post. Looming a little more than two years from now are the next Summer Olympics, in Paris. Who will be there is anyones guess.

I do think Ukraine has rightly galvanized the West and its allies, but I also believe that sport will emerge as a connector instead of a tool of division, said Terrence Burns, a sports consultant who in the 2000s advised Russia on its bids to secure hosting rights for the Olympics and the World Cup during a different era. But it will take time. And during that time, athletes, for better or worse, will pay a price.

Christopher Clarey contributed reporting.

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As Wimbledon Begins, an Era of Sports Free of Bans and Boycotts Ends - The New York Times

The law, too, belongs to cultural history. A decision of the Supreme Court struggles to connect to a timeless principle. But a decision always connects, as wellalmost unconsciously, as if talking in its sleepto its particular moment in the nations life.

Think about Roe v. Wade (1973) and Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization (2022) as an exercise in time-lapse photography. Those decisions were, respectively, the beginning and the end of a 50-years-long American chapter dealing with the subject of abortion. Those 50 years coincide, precisely, with the adult lifetimes of the oldest members of the baby boom generation, who were in college or law school at the time that Roe was handed downor were just starting out in their public careers (think of Bill and Hillary Clinton). Now they are settling into old age.

The Roe decision, a revolution, came at the height of the Gloria Steinem wave of feminism. The late sixties and early seventies were the seedbed of the American culture warsthose struggles that began just after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, when the conflict moved on from the legal to the cultural battlefield.

The old authorities had failed. The cultural elites were engaged at the time of Roe in a sheepish mind-meld with the countercultural young; those elites (who mostly had avoided the draft) recoiled against the humiliation of the lost war in Vietnam and against Richard Nixon (the abortion decision came in the midst of Watergate, as the damning facts seeped out) and against the dismal earlier rule of Lyndon Johnson. They despised the regime of discredited old men (the country hadnt been any good since Jack Kennedy died) and they pined for new, enlightened gestures. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven! The weak Roe ruling (even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought it lame as a matter of constitutional law) became part of the ardent overreach of the time. Roe, too, seemed like a victory of the young elites against the Old Believersthe unwashed Silent Majority that Spiro Agnew had been courting. Later in 1973, Agnew had to resign as vice president. It seems that in his days as governor of Maryland, he had a habit of accepting bribes delivered in brown paper bags.

The generational theme was pervasive in those days. The sexual revolution, a phenomenon of youth, had produced its natural consequences, despite the best efforts of the pill to prevent that kind of trouble. So Roe was a practical blessing. The ruling elites (in the media, in the universities and the arts, in the government, in corporations) had been badly shaken by the second half of the sixties and by their own failures (Vietnam was only part of the story). They sought to appease the multitude of boomers, who were, after all, the coming thing, and, in the end, the victors as the country emerged from the 1960s.

All these elements were part of the zeitgeist that surrounded the Roe decision. I do not mean to say that the decisions author, Justice Harry Blackmun, a Minnesotan sent to the court by President Nixon in 1970, was either a hippie or a fool. He was 65 at the time and had started out on the bench as a conservative. He would eventually become the most liberaland (some would argue) most humane justice. But I do propose that the reasoning and language of Blackmuns Roe decision (in what he said and what he left out) were influenced by the ambient cultural energies of that vivid time: by what magazine editors used to call the psychic surround.

Wisdom on the left embraces the idea that last weeks decision in Dobbs was essentiallyfeloniouslypolitical: an act of Trumpian brutalism. But that formulation is upside down. The energies of the boomer elites (going back to civil rights days and the antiwar movement) have always been ferociously, theatrically political. Their victories in the 1960s were mostly achieved by performance politicsdissent, disobedience, protestrather than by the conventional instruments of constitutional process. It was the elected politicians (Johnson, Nixon) who were their villains. Younger generations inherited from the boomers certain ideological and anti-democratic preferencesincluding a faith in political theater and hyperbole and even hysteria, which have now been amplified a thousandfold by social media. Rioting has become one of the most familiar and accepted forms of American theater. Women dress up in costumes from The Handmaids Tale and beat upon the doors of the Supreme Court.

The truth about Dobbs isor ought to beanticlimactic. Anti-theatrical, too: what the Court has done is to try, at last, to take the difficult, painful subject of abortion out of the hands of baby boomers and their heirs-in-performance and allow it to be sorted out, democratically, in the legislatures of the 50 states.

Lance Morrow, a contributing editor of City Journal and the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was an essayist at Time for many years. His latest book is God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.

Photo by Leif Skoogfors/Getty Images

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The End of a 50-Year Chapter - City Journal

There are plenty of performers that captivate their audience with their culture-defying sound, gyrations, and romps. Visually, however, there are few superstars that have cultivated a more distinct image than Elvis Presley. Baz Luhrmanns latest biopic Elvis (released on June 24, 2022) explores the arc of Presleys fascinating, boisterous, calamitous, exciting lifeso much of which is conveyed through his clothing.

For Elviss (Austin Butler) first performance in the film, he dons a silky pink suit that flummoxes his audience nearly as much as his music and moves. Baz always spoke about tapping into Elvis's inherent punk-ness, his sexuality, his rebelliousness, his shocking presence, and the effect he had on the parental generation, says Elvis costume designer Catherine Martin. He was affecting culture through how he presented himself, his hair, his clothes, his moves, his music. The history alone presented fashion symbolism ripe for interpretation.

In Martin's pursuit of the visual component of what she dubs an American tragic opera, she delicately toed the line between exact replications and artistic interpretationa Luhrmann signature. Martin, who is married to Luhrmann and has worked on his prior films including Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, and Moulin Rouge, notes that this is the first of movies she's worked on based on actual people. Naturally, the research process was extensive. Not only did Luhrmann, Martin, and their crew consume every tangible thing they could, they spent hours and hours at Graceland, immersing themselves in Elviss world. Martin herself dug into the archives to discover the minutiae of every beaded jumpsuit and silky suit.

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley.

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

You've worked on so many Baz Luhrmann films. What separated this one from the rest?

Well, I think the scale of it, which sounds ridiculous, because all of his movies have a huge scale. This one particularly was just gigantic in its ambition because it spans all of those decades. It's also about real people, some of whom are still alive. So that puts a little bit of pressure on the production and on the subject matter, as well as how you deal with it respectfully, which was certainly something that Baz wanted to do. And obviously, it's also a movie about a man's life, the complicated relationship he has with his manager, the conflict between art and commerce, what it means to be famous. This is all against the backdrop of a very tumultuous time in American history. You have the loss of innocence after the Second World War in America. You've got segregation, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the rise of the feminist movement, hippiedom, drug culture. In the space of 20 years, things got pretty crazy. I think what attracted me when Baz described the subject is that it wasn't just a biopic. It was much bigger. (These are my words not his.) It was like an American tragic opera that I thought was a really interesting way to explore not only the period, but someone's life.

I know you have a really high bar when it comes to research. I'd love to hear about what that process looks like.

Well, Baz is pretty exigent. And it starts during the writing process. He set us a number of visual research tasks for things that he might want to service the script. So for instance, we made an extensive chart of every single jumpsuit Elvis ever wore, when he wore it, if there were any anecdotes about the jumpsuits that were interesting, or might play into a story point. [It ranged from] something as workman-like as doing that to experiencing a road trip in the South to feel the landscape so when we were recreating the South in Australia, we had a feeling for what that was like. Going to Graceland and getting a survey done of the land or getting the original plans from the archives or making notations of every single plant that was in the garden at Graceland contemporaneously, and then comparing it with photos from the past.

We looked at things like Gladys's [Elviss mother] dresses in archive boxes, and just saw the simplicity of the woman. The resounding sadness that came out of the boxes when you lifted the lid, you really felt this sense of dissatisfaction with life or a kind of yearning for something that I think she couldn't quite put her finger on. It's all those ephemeral things that give you a sense of who the people are. And Baz is really into the details, understanding who the people are through their objects. He was at Graceland, on and off, for over 18 months writing. It's the fact that Vernon [Elviss father] kept every receipt and every check. You really see that his parents were products of the Depression. Obviously, we read all the books you can read about Elvis, about his entourage, about Priscilla, but documentary material is only a reflection of the documentarians opinion. So, it's great to actually see the objects themselves because it allows you to tap into who those people were.

Costume designer Catherine Martin and Olivia DeJonge who plays Priscilla Presley.

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

What struck me was how much fashion symbolism was already present in this narrative. You have this huge conflict where society tries to put Presley in tails as a symbol of repression. Were you so thrilled to work with that information?

Baz always spoke about tapping into Elvis's inherent punkness, his sexuality, his rebelliousness, his shocking presence, and the effect he had on the parental generation. He was affecting culture through how he presented himself, his hair, his clothes, his moves, his music. Although a lot of Black performers had synergized those things, it's interesting to see him do it on that scale. He becomes famous in almost two yearsliterally goes from rags to riches thanks to the television and the Colonel's masterstroke of putting him on the social media of his day.

Outside of the clothes, how did you experiment with Presley's appearance?

It's fascinating how hair has always been such a huge flashpoint for humanityand having long hair specifically. When you look at Elvis's hair now, you think, oh, it's a really handsome head of hair. It's not shocking at all. But that length, the way he cut it, the way it fell over his eyes, the fact that it wasn't short on the sides, but throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it was such a flashpoint for everybody. Hair is such a symbol of who we are. In our company, we have a motto, which is transportation, accommodation, communication, and hair. Hair stands for feeling good about yourself, self-care, and all the issues that having a bad hair day brings up in a person. Hair can bring a set to a standstill. We joked that Austin's hair was almost a character in the movie because so much focus was on this hair.

[Elvis's] hair was naturally blonde and he progressively, throughout the '50s, dyed it darker and darker. Some people say it's because he looked at the movies, and he felt that male movie stars tended to have darker hair. Maybe it was that in black-and-white photos, there's more contrast between your face and dark hair.

I read somewhere that a lot of stars in this time would wear flashy clothes so that they would attract attention. I know Elvis didn't have a stylist. What did you discover along this process about his own approach to fashion and style? And how calculated it was versus how much he just found things that spoke to him?

I think it's a combination of things. When you find things that speak to you and you're able to combine them in a look that galvanizes people, it's got to be deliberate to some extent. What's extraordinary about Elvis is he didn't come from a very stylish place. Tupelo, Mississippi, isn't inherently the style center of America, but Elvis had this ability to not be bound by any kind of convention, and look at things and be influenced by things and synthesize them into his own take.

He was very shy and had stage fright all his life so the clothes were probably armor for him. But he naturally gravitated to extraordinary and shocking combinations. He wore a lot of lace shirts. He used to tie his shirts up Peter Allen-style and not wear a shirt under a jacket. He loved a shacket. He constantly made bold choices. His mother thought this was totally fine so he never understood why people had such violent reactions to the way he presented himself. He was certainly swimming against the tide, but he made all these visual decisions deliberately. He wore mascara and covered his pimples with his mother's base. On the one hand, Elvis is unabashedly masculine. You feel this kind of virile masculinity. He often wore clothes that worked against that in a traditional sense, but you never think that. The jumpsuits, particularly in the latter part of his career, started to look very like Liberace's costumes, with the same degree of camp-ness. But it's just a fascinating thing because with him in the jumpsuits, you never think oh, that's super camp. And maybe that tension between the two things makes him more interesting.

Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley.

Photos: Courtesy of Prada

A sketch of Priscilla's outfit.

How many of these costumes were a perfect homage to previous ensembles from history and how many were you using as creative embellishment? Was the goal to recreate original looks with 100 percent accuracy?

Well, I think there were distinctly two schools, certainly that Baz spoke about. There was the trainspotting (which refers to a class of English people who can recognize steam trains and trains from a huge distance, and they know exactly what model of train it is). So there were certain outfits that were absolutely homages to existing costumes. For instance, the jumpsuits. They were all made by a company called B&K Enterprises [Costume Company]. They carry the Elvis jumpsuit torch because they actually connected with Bill Belew who designed the original jumpsuits. They connected with the tailor who actually put these garments together. They connected with the belt maker. But to some degree, we needed some subtle changesas simple as wanting a trim hand sewn on because it was to be on a 40-foot screen. When we got those jumpsuits, we fitted them to Austin. We changed them subtly because we found when we slavishly used all of the Elvis proportions, they became caricatures of themselves. The approach had to be for this version of Elvis.

Then there's some interpretive moments because they're either fictionalized scenes that are conglomerations of a bunch of events that happened to Elvis, but they're put into a scene that compresses all that information. Like the pink suit, which is totally based on real clothes that Elvis actually wore in the period. We know he wore black and pink and we know he wore that style of suit. So that is interpretive. But it's not like Gatsby in the sense that The Great Gatsby was based very broadly on research. It's more like a historical reconstruction, rather than just absolute fantasy.

Was your approach to Priscilla's character similar to that of Elvis's?

Just like Elvis, Priscilla's such a style icon. We didn't want to just slavishly reproduce her clothes and make a pale imitation of who she actually was. We wanted to keep respect and reverence for her. And so we didn't just get Priscilla's hairstyle and plunk it on Olivia [DeJonge]'s head. Shane [Thomas], our head of hair and makeup, spent a lot of time, along with his crew, working on the proportions. And similarly with the clothes, we needed to do the same thing. We did copy some of Priscillas outfits in exactly the same way that we did for Elvis. Her wedding dress is a loving reproduction. In the scene on the tarmac, both Elvis's tracksuit and Olivia's outfit were reproductions of the outfits that Priscilla and Elvis wore coming out of the divorce court hand in hand.

Costume designer Catherine Martin on the set of Elvis.'

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Fashion lovers will have spotted the Prada print from old runway shows on Priscilla. I know you've worked with Miuccia [Prada] before, but what was it like to collaborate on those looks?

It's always such a pleasure to work with her. I think there's a great synergy with Prada culture, and Baz and Muccia's perspective. Although she has said to me, Oh, I don't think I look at the past in the way that you say. But I always think it's that they both, in their completely different ways, look to the past, but always end up in the future.

Obviously, [Prada] is a luxury brand, but it's luxurious working with them because you have all these resources that add so much production value that is just not as available when you're making a movie. Just the ability to say, Okay, I want this beaded tunic with those pants in this brocade and I want the matching shoes. And its all beautifully made with incredible fabrics, incredible savoir faire, and such a depth of archive. I think that's the other great thing about Miuccia [Prada]. The clothes are a dialogue with women. They're about women and all their facets. They're very much clothes by a woman for women.

Are you excited to see how this film affects the way people will dress in the real world over the next year or two?

I always feel like fashion and cinema are in constant conversation. And you never know what comes first. I love fashion and I love clothes. So, I would have to say that I'm always influenced by what's happening around me. And I think it's just a conversation. It's always interesting, but I'm not sure it's as direct as that. It's more that we're all living in the same world at the same time. And Baz has this incredible ability to sort of [tap into] the zeitgeist. He always feels sometimes a little too ahead of his time. It's just interesting to see how they all interact with each other.

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'Elvis' Costume Designer Catherine Martin on Recreating the King's Inimitable Style - Coveteur