Mank’s Costume Designer On The Glamour Of 1930s Hollywood And Working With Daniel Craig

In a normal year, the cinema offers a moment of solitude when life, and its frenetic pace, becomes too much. In 2020, we haven’t got to physically sit in movie theatres a great deal, but the worlds contained within screens, whether they be silver or small, have been even more of a boon.

David Fincher’s Mank is 131 minutes of pure escapism, mostly because it’s a film set slap-bang in the golden age of movie-making: 1930s/40s Hollywood. Already generating awards season buzz, it chronicles the writing of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, and his alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, played by Gary Oldman. Trish Summerville, the film’s costume designer whose big break was Fincher’s Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, thinks that the fact it’s a black and white film means that the feeling of losing yourself in an alternate universe is even more intense for audiences. When she watches something contemporary, in the age of Covid, she says she can’t help but think of face masks and people’s proximity to one another. ‘With Mank, because it’s black and white and it’s period, none of that is brought to your attention,’ she says. ‘You’re just able to be drawn into the film.’

The action focuses on Mank, zipping back and forth between his recuperation at a ‘dry house’ in Victorville, California, as he's writing Citizen Kane, and the preceding decade of his life, where he works for film studio MGM, and crosses paths with starlets (Marion Davies, played by Amanda Seyfried) and media scions (William Randolph Hearst, played by Charles Dance). For Summerville, the starting point was full immersion in the era, reading books about MGM, Mank, Davies, and the period’s most famous costumiers such as Edith Head, and going to research libraries in LA. After making moodboards, she would drape fabrics during fittings and try vintage pieces to get a feel for shape, making almost 90% of the principals’ wardrobes from scratch. ‘I try to be really observant in the fittings,’ says Summerville, who says questions like, ‘How much does this actor put their hands in their pockets? Are they weighty or do they act and not put their hands all the way down? Do they slouch? What’s their body posture? Do I need to build their shoulders out?’ are key at the stage before everything is constructed, after a test fabric version, in its final fabric. She then adds small touches to really help the actor build their character. ‘With Gary, in his pant pockets and jacket pockets, we would put crumpled up cigarettes or bits of change or bar receipts or matches from the Trocadero.’

Being in black and white, one of the most important elements, interestingly, was colour. Summerville painstakingly photographed everything (right down to individual buttons and findings) in the monochromatic and noir settings on her phone, and even brought garments out into the moonlight if they were involved in a nighttime scene. This wasn’t just because of how the colours would translate on film, but how much it would distract the actors and Fincher. ‘If you’re my actress, I can’t have you in chartreuse and salmon and then you’re in the scene trying to have this intense dialogue,’ she says. ‘We had to have this overall tranquil kind of feel.’

She also used costume to chart a character’s journey through the film. Rita Alexander, Mank’s British secretary who’s played by Lily Collins, is initially disapproving of her employer’s vices. ‘I wanted her, in the beginning, to be this really prim woman, who is serious about her job and wants to be taken seriously,’ says Summerville, who starts her off in buttoned-up suits and pantyhose. As the story progresses and she becomes much more sympathetic towards Mank, her wardrobe shifts to almost reflect his, shedding the sharp tailoring for chunky-knit cardigans and sports shirts. ‘She’s kind of engaging with where he’s at and what her level of comfort can be,’ says Summerville. ‘And showing her ease with him, and the trust.’

At Louis B. Mayer’s birthday party at Hearst Castle, Marion Davies wears one of the film’s most intoxicating outfits, a bias-cut gown that moves like liquid gold. Summerville found the fabric first, an antique gold lamé, which inspired the sketch of the dress. ‘Lamé was becoming a glamorous, popular fabric in the ‘30s for women’s cocktailwear and eveningwear,’ she says, remembering that her department wasn’t overly thrilled with the choice. ‘It’s definitely a hard fabric to work with because you can’t really press it, and you can’t really steam it,’ Summerville laughs. Davies is holding court at the party, pretending that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about when the conservation devolves into a discussion about Nazi Germany, before she slips into the garden, followed by Mank. ‘I wanted all eyes to go to her, but I knew she had to transition and go outside into moonlight,’ remembers Summerville. ‘I did take this out at night and we tested it outside and then photographed it in black and white so we could see that it wouldn’t just go flat and lose all that opulence.’ She also added a loop so that she could hold the skirt up in case of (almost) any eventuality. ‘We didn’t know exactly what would happen when she got outside. Dave was like, ‘Oh then she’s going to take her shoes off.’ And one day he’s like, ‘And she’s walking on the fountain.’ I’m like, ‘Wait? What’s going on?! Is she falling in this fountain because we don’t have that much yardage!’

Having worked with him way back when on commercials as well as blockbuster projects like Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, Summerville is used to taking Fincher, and his fully fleshed-out perspective, as her starting point. ‘I constantly say, he has seen the film from start to finish. He knows the whole thing, it’s running through his head, and we’re trying to gather all that information from him,’ she says. Dragon Tattoo was their first project together, and it was an experience that will always stay close to her heart. ‘We developed this family,’ she says. ‘It was the transformation of Rooney [Mara] into Lisbeth Salander that was phenomenal. And working with Daniel Craig, who was just brilliant and up for anything. And then Dave. I remember at night just going up to his apartment, because we all stayed in the same building, I would be texting him questions and he’d answer at 3am. I’m like, ‘Why are you awake?’ And he’s like, ‘Come look at a cut.’ I’d go upstairs and look at some of the cutting. It was an amazing experience.’

Mank is now available to watch on Netflix.