Tag: Trish Summerville

Costume Designing “Mank” and “The Prom”

Insights from Trish Summerville and Lou Eyrich into their work, including collaborating with directors David Fincher and Ryan Murphy, respectively.

Robert Goldrich
February 5, 2021
Shoot

Trish Summerville has thus far been nominated for five Costume Designers Guild Awards in her career–two of the honors coming for David Fincher films, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2012 and Gone Girl in 2015. Summerville won for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and again two years later for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Her other two Costume Designers Guild nods came for Westworld (TV) in 2017 and Red Sparrow in 2019. Westworld also earned Summerville a primetime Emmy nomination in 2017.

Now for this awards season, Summerville reunites with Fincher on Mank (Netflix) which centers on screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (portrayed by Gary Oldman) as he races to finish director Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane on a tight timetable, secluded in a bungalow in a desert town miles removed from Los Angeles as he recuperates from a car accident in 1940. Attending to him are his secretary Rita (Lily Collins) and his German nurse (Monika Grossmann).

In the process, through Mankiewicz’s worldview–marked by his abiding social conscience and wit, at times caustic–we are introduced to not only Hollywood but life in the 1930s, ranging from the struggle of the rank and file during the Great Depression to the grandeur of Hearst Castle and high society. We also become privy to Mankiewicz’s own inner struggles with alcoholism, as well as a professional battle with Welles (played by Tom Burke) over screen credit for what became the classic Citizen Kane. The Mank cast also includes Charles Dance (as William Randolph Hearst), Amanda Seyfried (as Marion Davies, Hearst’s wife), Tuppence Middleton (as Sara Mankiewicz, Herman’s wife), Arliss Howard (as Louis B. Mayer), Sam Troughton (as John Houseman), Tom Pelphrey (as Joe Mankiewicz, Herman’s brother), Toby Leonard Moore (as David O. Selznick) and Ferdinand Kinsley (as Irving Thalberg).

Summerville jumped at the opportunity to again team with Fincher, deeming him “one of my favorite people in the world and also to work with. He has a hilarious sense of humor that a lot of people don’t get at times.” On Mank she collaborated closely with Fincher, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, ASC and production designer Donald Graham Burt on the overall tone, look, feel and coloring. “The reason David has collaborators who want to work with him is that he himself is a collaborator,” observed Summerville. “He gives you a lot of room. It’s not ‘my way or the highway.’ He always wants you to show him more stuff, what else do you have. He’s open to ideas. There’s a lot of trust and dialogue.”

Read the full profile

Homage to the Golden Age

Mank wears its luminous black & white cinematography like a costume, blending in with the themes, but never distracting from the story

Chelsea Fearnley
February, 2021
Definition Magazine

There was never any doubt that David Fincher’s brilliant Mank would be shot in black & white. The film follows a Hollywood screenwriter, Herman J Mankiewicz aka Mank (played by Gary Oldman), as he wrestles with the screenplay for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. It’s a sumptuous ode to the Golden Age of cinema – one that transports audiences to a place where they can understand and appreciate the homage – and yet, it is littered with modern filmmaking techniques that aren’t fooling anyone about its release date.

Fincher and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt agreed that they didn’t want to be confined to shooting on film or within the aspect ratio of 1.37:1 that would have been accurate for the period – not with Fincher’s digital prowess and proclivity for a widescreen format. And, just in case there was any confusion about the technological resourcefulness of this film, Messerschmidt is even credited as being responsible for ‘Photography in Hi-Dynamic Range’ in the title sequence.

“Filmmaking has always been a medium where we selectively employ the techniques that are available on the day,” says Messerschmidt. Nonetheless, shooting in black & white demands huge amounts of creative courage and the cinematographer was conscious about being too seduced by the opportunity.

He explains: “Before I had even read the script, I sent Fincher some images referencing the film noir genre of that era. I soon realised that, thematically, Mank is not a noir film. There are certainly elements that call for hard lighting effects, such as the flashback sequences in the writers’ room or with Shelly Metcalf [a fictional test shot director friend of Herman’s] moments before his suicide, but I tried to ground much of it in realism. I didn’t want to draw audiences away from the storyline by being too dramatic, so I chose to light through windows and illuminate interiors with practicals.”

Read the full magazine

David Fincher’s ‘Mank’ Production Designer on Recreating Hollywood’s Golden Era

Jazz Tangcay
February 1, 2021
Variety

David Fincher’s “Mank” is a visual feast. Shot in black and white, Fincher takes audiences back to the glorious days of Hollywood, as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz pens the screenplay to Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”

Production designer Donald Graham Burt is receiving awards buzz for his work on the film. Burt worked closely with costume designer Trish Summerville to translate color into black and white.

Their secret? Using iPhone filters to see how the colors worked. Burt also relied on the camera monitor a lot.

And when it came to translating wealth and recreating the big sets such as the lavish Hearst Castle home of William Randolph Hearst, Burt says, “It was about emulating instead of replicating.”

Read the full profile

Designing Eye-popping Costumes for the Black & White ‘Mank’

Costume designer Trish Summerville’s extraordinary designs bring classic Hollywood to vivid life in gorgeous black and white.

Clarence Moye
February 1, 2021
Awards Daily

When designing specific looks for Mank’s iconic characters, Summerville had ample research material available to her. For Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), she used Davies’ book and publicity stills of the era to design her outfits. She mostly avoided mimicking historic photos directly, using them as a jumping off point instead.

Mostly.

There were two Marion Davies’ looks in the film directly pulled from historic photos: her famous circus party costume and her “going away” look as she leaves MGM.

“One of the items that I did mimic, besides the circus party costume was a picture of her in a coat with a fur collar, standing on the side of a car like she’s departing. That was an inspiration for me for the scene where she departs MGM,” Summerville revealed. “Mayer gives her the bouquet of flowers and sends her on her way. So I wanted to have this really beautiful coat where we used faux fur for the collar and had a big diamond brooch on her. There were a few areas that I did pull from her real life, and that I got inspired by.”

Read the full profile

Right On Hue

Photo by Nikolai Loveikis

David Fincher’s black-and-white tribute to Old Hollywood took a radically different approach to the role of color in design.

January 29, 2021
Netflix Queue

In the annals of Hollywood, Herman Mankiewicz will forever be remembered as the screenwriter of Orson Welles’s towering classic Citizen Kane, but his impact on the history of cinema doesn’t stop there. Mankiewicz also served as an early, uncredited writer on The Wizard of Oz. His contribution? Suggesting that once Dorothy Gale travels over the rainbow, the film transitions from black and white to glorious Technicolor. “He walked away from that [project] saying, ‘This is all I can come up with,’” laughs director David Fincher. “It might be the greatest special effect in the history of the movies.”

For Mank, Fincher’s backstage drama about the screenwriter’s life and his work on Kane, the director and his creative team journeyed from a world of color to one rendered entirely in black and white, shooting eye-catching sets and costumes with the RED 8K Helium Monochrome camera. That created an interesting artistic puzzle for Fincher and his collaborators to solve. From cinematography and production design to costumes and hair and makeup, each department needed to determine the best way to manipulate color to achieve the proper register of lights and darks onscreen.

“We had to train our senses to see through a lens of black and white,” explains Oscar-winning production designer Donald Graham Burt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). “It mandated a palette based on tone and contrast.”

Fortunately, they proved more than up to the challenge.

Read the full article

How an iPhone filter came to the rescue for ‘Mank’ set decorator Jan Pascale

Joyce Eng
January 29, 2021
Gold Derby

“Mank” set decorator Jan Pascale is no stranger to black-and-white films: She received an Oscar nomination for George Clooney‘s “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005). But those two monochrome films couldn’t be more different.

“When I first met with [‘Mank’ production designer Donald Graham Burt] about it, I said, ‘I’ve done black and white. I can do this.’ And Don said, ‘No, no, no, this is different.’ The way the images were captured was quite different,’” Pascale tells Gold Derby at our Meet the BTL Experts: Film Production Design panel. “On ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ we shot on film … and we had a really limited budget on that one — $7 million the whole movie — so I couldn’t paint anything or really paint anything, so everything was shot as is. But it sort of worked.”

“Mank,” however, was shot in black and white on a RED digital camera, completely changing the way images and details came off onscreen. But Pascale got some very modern assistance to help her do color-testing. “David [Fincher] and Don had done some testing with the camera that we were going to be using. And they discovered if we used our iPhones with the noir filter and photographed everything, that’s how it would appear in our movie,” she shares.

Read the full article

Film Production Design Panel: David Crank, Jan Pascale, Mark Ricker, Barry Robison

Joyce Eng
January 29, 2021
Gold Derby

Mank, The Unmaking

January 28, 2021
Netflix

manktheunmaking.com [Old Domain]

mank.aristidebenoist.com

Text by:

Nev Pierce

Photography by:

Erik Messerschmidt
Miles Crist
Gisele Schmidt-Oldman
Gary Oldman
Ceán Chaffin
Nikolai Loveikis

Design and development by:

Watson Design Group, Inc.
Aristide Benoist

Mank: Method to the Monochrome

January 26, 2021
Netflix Film Club (YouTube)

Mank director David Fincher, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt and costume designer Trish Summerville detail the approach to shooting the acclaimed slice of Hollywood history in black and white. How does the absence of color distill the visual storytelling? How do different colors in the costume and production design read when captured in black and white? Learn about all of that and more.

The Next Best Picture Podcast: A Behind The Scenes Look At “Mank”

Will Mavity
January 26, 2021
Next Best Picture

“Mank” is one of 2020’s most technically dazzling films. David Fincher‘s perfectionism transported us back to the Golden Age of Hollywood to tell us the story of Academy Award winning screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman) and the film has been hailed as one of the year’s best, most recently being rewarded as one of the Top 10 films of the year by the American Film Institute (AFI). Many members from the film’s production were kind enough to give us a behind-the-scenes look into the making of the film including Academy Award-nominated sound designer Ren Klyce, Costume Designer Trish Summerville & Co-Producer/VFX Producer, Peter Mavromates.

The Next Best Picture Podcast is proud to be a part of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. Listen to the podcast:

NextBestPicture.com
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
SoundCloud
Google Podcasts
Megaphone
Stitcher
TuneIn
PlayerFM
Acast
Castbox

Please take a moment to review us on Apple Podcasts here. And if you’re feeling generous, you enjoy what you hear and want to hear more, please help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month and you’ll receive some exclusive podcast content.

Costume Designer Trish Summerville on Diving Into Hollywood’s Past in “Mank”

Susannah Edelbaum
January 25, 2021
The Credits (MPA)

David Fincher’s black and white epic, Mank, revisits the storied Hollywood era of the late 1930s when Orson Welles was writing what would go down in history as one of the best films of all time, Citizen Kane. But did he write it alone or with the help of Herman Mankiewicz, a once sought after screenwriter fallen prey to twin drinking and gambling problems? In Fincher’s version of events, based on a screenplay by his father, Jack Fincher, Mank the man (Gary Oldman) may have burned through the industry’s goodwill, but he was indubitably a co-writer on the film. However, the question isn’t central to Mank the movie.

Instead, the film’s focus is a gloves-off look at the gilded lives of Depression-era honchos Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), and the effect their political meddling and pay machinations have on the vast army of writers, grips, costume designers, and makeup artists who work beneath them. For Mank costume designer Trish Summerville (Red Sparrow, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), “one of the things I really enjoyed about the film was that we got to dress every walk of life of the 30s and 40s.” Though much of the film is set in an out-of-the-way house where Mank has been set up to heal from an injury and dry out, and spends most of his time in bed in a robe, Summerville’s work spans ample plebeian daywear to Marion Davies’s (Amanda Seyfried) furs (a high-end faux fur hand-painted to mimic silver mink) and gowns and the sharply tailored suits favored by Los Angeles power brokers of the day.

Read the full profile