Costume designer Colleen Atwood reflects on ‘Edward Scissorhands,’ ‘Chicago’ and more

Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood talks to Yahoo Entertainment’s Kevin Polowy about working on several major film productions, including “Edward Scissorhands,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “Chicago” and “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”

Video Transcript

KEVIN POLOWY: You see Edward Scissorhands all over the place to this day. What can you say about that character's look and what inspired it?

COLLEEN ATWOOD: I think that the look of Edward Scissorhands was an old-- Tim has these drawers of people. Edward Scissorhands was really his vision and his character from when he was in art school.

We got Johnny at a very young age and made the costume. And it was before-- the costume, we only made two Edward Scissorhands costumes. And we shot in South Florida, which was really hot. And there were so many things about the costume and compiling it out of all these old pieces of leather that were really tricky.

And it was really hard to find somebody that understood what I wanted. And I finally found this tailor who had done work for the ballet, and he knew how to get what I wanted with the super skinny legs and keeping everything not-- because you're using a bulky material, like how to actually construct the costume, which was a huge win for me at that point in history, before all the stretches were in place that they are today.

KEVIN POLOWY: You reteamed with Jonathan Demme for his Oscar-winning contemporary classic, "The Silence of the Lambs." I think from what I understand, one of the biggest decisions you had to make there centered around Hannibal Lecter's mask, right? What can you say about that?

COLLEEN ATWOOD: I have the drawing of it. It's so basic. It's just like-- kind of looks like a pencil drawing, with the eyes and the mouth or the nose and the mouth, the nostrils with the rods and the mouth.

And we sent it off to this guy to make it who manufactured hockey masks in New Jersey because we were working out of New York. And I got the first prototype of-- originally the mask was going to be a color or something or chipped-off paint.

And I got the first prototype of the mask back, which was the raw kind of fiberglass of it that looked like dried skin. And I was like, oh, my God. This is perfect. We don't have to do anything.

KEVIN POLOWY: You won your first Academy Award for the screen adaptation of the famed musical "Chicago," which, of course, took us back to the roaring '20s. What excited you about dipping into such a precise, famed time in American history and the looks that it would present?

COLLEEN ATWOOD: Well, the idea was a twofold excitement. The excitement of being able to do a musical with all that dance set against the background of the gritty '20s of Chicago and the great depressed sort of side of America.

So as a designer, you're creating a universe of an idea of what's beautiful and a universe of what's really going on that's gritty and poor and seedy. So it was a huge, huge job for me. The dancers were amazing. They danced 12 hours a day, like, without stopping. And we shot that movie very quickly. Just to be part of it was so exciting.

KEVIN POLOWY: And then you entered the wizarding world with 2016's "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them." How much did you study the original Potter movies in crafting looks for the prequel?

COLLEEN ATWOOD: You know, I had seen the early Potter films with my daughter, who was that age that embraced the wizarding world. But I didn't lean into it as a designer moving forward. I was setting it in a different world and a different place.

And even though some of the characters, like Dumbledore, went back to Dumbledore. I sort of used the palette of Dumbledore in a nod to Dumbledore. But per se, I didn't really lean into it because our whole idea was that this was a separate world, a separate thing, and we really wanted to not do that with those films.

KEVIN POLOWY: Have you ever dressed up as one of your own characters? Or is that like a costume designer faux pas?

COLLEEN ATWOOD: I don't know if it's a faux pas, but you know what? I don't like to dress up. I like to dress other people, and I like clothes. But I don't, like, do cosplay on myself.