Babylon Costume Designer On 1920s Inspirations And Creating A Chicken Suit [Exclusive Interview]

Mary Zophres has worked as a costume designer on "Dumb and Dumber," "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski," "There's Something About Mary," "Any Given Sunday," "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," and many more, but her latest project is the biggest of her career so far. After working with director Damien Chazelle on "La La Land" and "First Man," she reunited with him for "Babylon," Chazelle's sweeping Hollywood tale about the transition from silent film to talkies, and Zophres and her team were responsible for creating a staggering 7,000 costumes in this gigantic epic, cooking up backstories for each and every character along the way.

As a big fan of "Babylon," I jumped at the chance to speak with Zophres about her dazzling work on this movie, the director's edict about the look he wanted, being inspired by photos from the 1920s, and yes, convincing Chazelle himself to don a chicken costume.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

What were your early conversations like with Damien about what he wanted the costumes to feel like in this movie?

The first thing he told me, and I think everybody else on the film, was that he did not want it to look like a Hollywood film that you've seen before. His challenge to us was to find research that was from the '20s and historically accurate, but that was surprising to all of us. At first it was like, "Oh, that's tricky," and, "Oh, that's very typical." I find that what we associate with the '20s is very much guided by what Hollywood has told us, because once we started to scratch the surface, we found so much that was able to speak to this unapologetic, very bold, brash script that he had written. When I first read the script, I was so shaken. It was like I had been on a rollercoaster and it was so visceral that I wanted the audience to experience the same feeling that I had the first time I read the script. That was always in the back of my head.

This edict that he gave us to try to find this kind of research, we started gathering, we're talking thousands and thousands of images that we then started to divide into different characters in different character albums. With the iPhone, it makes it so easy to do that. Then we would divide it into sets. "How are the people going to look at the Wallach party, how are people going to look at Jack's party, how are people going to look on the battlefield, how are people going to look at the Skid Row-type [location]?" They're endless. There are so many. I feel like there was 200-something scenes, and for every scene there was a look board for it, and sometimes the look boards numbered into the fifties.

Every time we'd start to film those scenes or fit those scenes or fit those characters, we would break out and paper the fitting room walls with this research. It was really helpful for not only my crew, but the actors and the extras. Everybody just became imbued in this world of the film that Damien had wanted, but that's how it started. That's how he wanted it to look, but it was based on this script that he wrote, which, to me, it's epic and original and it's just set against this backdrop of time that — it's debauchery and excess and you haven't really seen it before. Damien, the first thing he did, even before we started sharing images, was he gave me the list of the books that he read and the movies that he watched, and I started digging in and I was like, "Holy moly. He's totally right."

Was there a single costume that gave you the most trouble in the design or the production phase?

No. It was a challenge to try to figure out how to do the 200-something pink raincoats [for the "Singin' in the Rain" sequence]. It was a challenge to dress 1,000 men on the battlefield and do it in a way that I didn't spend my whole budget. We were lucky enough to have Paramount greenlight the film and I can't even thank them enough for that, but they knew it was an art house movie and you can only give them so much money. It's not going to recoup its budget. So we had a limited budget. It was like $60 million — and that's not for me. That's for the whole film, and that had to cover Covid costs. We had a limited budget, so there were a lot of challenges. It was just trying to make it work and be on the epic scale that it is.

But I think when you watch the film, nobody thinks that we didn't have resources. Nobody knows that there is not a single CGI'd costume in the whole film. We did not tile the men on the battlefield. Those are all real people in real costumes. Then, trying to find Margot's opening outfit, we went through several prototypes. I want to say it was four to six before we landed on what that was going to be. The dance was developing and we were lucky enough to have the choreography studio, like 200 yards, and so we could watch the dance as it developed and realize what wasn't working. Some things that didn't end up working in the dance ended up working in later costumes.

There were a lot of challenges, and the most I would say would either be the battle or the pink raincoats, or ... actually, the blockhouse was pretty challenging, too. That scene at the very end where it's the deepest, darkest, to me most unsettling part of the film, and we had to make a lot of the costumes that were used down there in sort of papier-mache masks. Because it's not available in the rental houses. It was a pretty twisted scene and some of it got cut. I don't know that you see everything, but that was a whole [separate] level for me.

Damien got a kick out of [the costumes in that scene], because he was like, "That is wacked." I was like, "I don't know where that came from, but there it is." But it was really fun, because I had never gone to a place like that before where it was just twisted mindsets. I don't know that I could pick a single one out, but those were some of the few that were — the pool party where everybody ends up in the pool, we had to build everything. All the women's clothes are built, and the men's swimsuits for the USC team were built. So a lot of building clothes. So much of the costumes in the film were built from scratch.

What is an example of something that you and your team did where you went the extra mile, even knowing full well that there was a good chance that most people might not notice a little detail in a costume?

Okay. I'll tell you something. We had developed this photo album of the Wallach party of things that we loved. There is a photograph from the '20s that Damien loved, I loved, and it's this guy standing in a full, round chicken costume. In fact, if you reach out, I will send you the photo. [Note: Mary did send me the photo after our conversation, but since I could not track down who owns the rights to the image, I don't have the ability to embed it here. But you can Google "vintage chicken man costume," and it's the first thing that pops up in the search results.] I said to Damien, "Wouldn't this be awesome at the Wallach party?" He was like, "Yeah." We're fitting and it's in the beginning of the shooting schedule, and so this thing of this chicken costume is just hanging over my head. "How am I going to do this?" But I wanted to do it so badly. We just started chipping away at it.

The distressing artist, Sarah Brown, she's also a specialty costumer — super talented artist, as were my entire crew; I would not have been able to accomplish this movie without them — I started talking to her about this. I was like, "Would you be up for working on a couple of weekends? We'll come and sculpt the base and we'll plot out the feathers." She was game. She took three of her weekends. She got paid, but still, that desire to do something creative and create something you may have never created before and try to problem solve. "How are we going to make this costume in the round?" It's not like a mascot. It's not the cushy ones that you wear at a football game. It was made with real feathers.

It was just that kind of intense collaboration and desire to accomplish something because we all knew this was a crazy ambitious project. For me, I don't know about everybody else, I was just like, "Is this ever going to happen again for me? Or is this ever going to happen? When's the next time you're going to be able to work on a film like this?" I feel like my crew, the people that I chose and that were my partners in this, all had that feeling of, "We know this is a very special movie and we are going to break out all the stops."

People were exhausted, but no one ever was like, "Ugh." Everyone was like, "Okay!" Just adrenaline and caffeine. It was like the movie itself: Just keep on persevering and making it happen. Honestly, I think you see that chicken — It took her probably at least 100 man-hours. All of the feathers were placed by hand. And you sense him, and I feel like you see him, kind of, but it's not like the camera is still on this chicken. It had to be a certain guy because he couldn't be claustrophobic and the Covid and all of that, but that's just an example. There are so many costumes like that. Even at the Wallach party, where so much time and energy was spent on a singular single costume and the camera just — whoosh — flies over it. I had to watch the movie in slow motion. In fact, I think that's where I saw the chicken, because I was able to pause. I was like, "Oh, there he is."

But somewhere in Paramount's photo collection, they did a photo session while we were filming the Wallach party, where they had all the guests at the Wallach party go on a [white background] that was set up right outside of the set. People took photographs, and I made Damien get into the chicken costume, and there's a photo. There's a whole set of photographs with he and Olivia, his wife, who's also the producer, standing side by side, and Damien's in the chicken costume because I was like, "Well, you got to wear this thing!" And he did, reluctantly.

"Babylon" is now available on Digital, and is set to hit 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD on March 21, 2023.