Anna
Borghesi has had a distinguished career in the
Australian film industry, working on such notable
productions as "Romper Stomper" and "Love
Serenade" and receiving six Australian Film
Institute award nominations.
But working on
"Ned Kelly" presented her biggest challenge yet.
Designing period costumes for the main characters and
over 100 extras was a big job, and one Borghesi took to
with aplomb.
The first part of the process was to
determine the look and feel of the costumes in a broad
sense. "The look in the film is predominantly
Australian," she explains. "But what we've tried to do
is give it a feel that accentuates how isolated we were
during the 1800s. It's not a direct copy of an English
or an American look of that period, but it's slightly
derivative of an English style."
Borghesi and her
team particularly enjoyed working on the dresses for
Julia Cook (played by Naomi Watts) and Mrs Scott (played
by Rachel Griffiths). "The women's frocks were fantastic
to do, they were a bit of an oasis is such a
predominately male film" she says.
"Naomi's
character represents wealth in the film. She is from
England, and she would have brought a trunk full of
fabrics and garments out with her. Her fashions were
probably between one and five years behind current
fashions in England. We only had a short amount of time
with Naomi in pre-production and she had the most
complicated garments. For every day she was on set we
had a fitting with her. She had six screen days and six
changes but the girls in the work room did a fantastic
job putting them all together."
When fitting the
cast, Borghesi tries to ensure the actors feel as
comfortable as possible. "If I tried to force them into
costumes that limited their ability to find their
character, then you lose a sense of truth that the film
really needs to have. So what I tried to do is maintain
the cut of the period costume, but give it a little bit
of a relaxed feel. I'm not really interested in creating
a final look, it's really up to the actor to get into
the character - what I do is just give them a skin and
then they need to sort out what happens after
that." | |
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The Glenrowan shootout, the most
complicated scene in the film, involved 350 cast and
crew |
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Anna Borghesi with a collection of the
costumes |
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Anna Borghesi chats will Joel Edgerton
(Aaron Sherritt) on set |
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Naomi Watts as Julia Cook |
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