While preparing for production to start on James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown following the actor’s strike in 2023, three-time Oscar-nominated costume designer Arianne Phillips reflected on the feedback from Christian Bale during a costume fitting on Mangold’s 2007 film 3:10 to Yuma.
“Christian Bale was meant to have a prosthetic leg. The film is set in the late 1800s when they were cast iron, so they were quite heavy, and we made a feather-light one to look the part,” recalled Phillips. “Christian quickly said in the fitting no that he wanted to feel the real thing so that it could help him with his performance, and that was a great learning curve for me always to consider. What are the tools that can help the actor get there?”
A Complete Unknown marks Phillips’ sixth collaboration with Mangold, previously working together on films like Walk the Line (2005) and Knight and Day (2010). The film stars Timothée Chalamet as the musical icon and is based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! The story tracks the transformation of Bob Dylan from a 19-year-old troubadour in Manhattan to becoming one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Phillips, who received an Academy Award nomination for her costume design in Walk the Line, joined the project in 2019. The film’s development was interrupted first by the COVID-19 pandemic and later by the 2023 actors’ strike. Yet, despite these challenges, Phillips spent every moment researching and refining her designs, immersing herself in the cultural shifts that shaped Dylan’s iconic style.
“It was after ’66 that his style really exploded. He spent a lot of time in London, and it’s really the British invasion time wearing crazy things like polka dot suits,” explains Philips. “So, being able to have the orange shirt he famously wore at Newport was helpful to hopefully immerse the audience and invest in this journey of a young artist finding his way.”
In an interview with Awards Focus, Phillips revealed further insights into the extensive process of designing the costumes for A Complete Unknown, including her work with Timothée Chalamet, the one thing she must have during a costume fitting, and her approach to crafting many of the costumes from scratch rather than sourcing them.
Arianne Phillips: I still have the afterglow from our premiere last night. It was so great to see everyone, the cast and crew. Have you seen the film?
Awards Focus: I saw the film a couple of weeks ago and it’s easily one of my favorites of the year.
Phillips: Really? I’m so happy to hear that.
AF: It was so gorgeous and I loved the message of the film. What was it like for you to be involved in it, and when did you start working on the costumes for the film?
Phillips: An embarrassment of riches, really. This is my sixth film with James Mangold, but I haven’t worked with him in a long time, just based on our schedules. He reached out to me in 2019 and asked if I wanted to join this Bob Dylan movie. The truth is, I would follow Jim off a cliff. He is definitely one of my most favorite collaborators.
AF: How did Covid impact development and pre-production, and your work as a costume designer?
Phillips: We had many delays. We were delayed by Covid initially, then Timmy [Chalamet] was blowing up with Dune, and Jim [Mangold] was prepping Indiana Jones, so it took a minute. We finally went into pre-production in 202,3 but the great thing about the movie taking time is that it afforded me a deeper dive in research than perhaps I had ever done before.
AF: What was something interesting you came across in your research that you hadn’t known when you worked on Walk The Line?
Phillips: I learned doing the research on this movie the influence that Johnny Cash had on Bob Dylan, just by being himself, and how that must have been a beacon of light for Bob to be given permission to not be boxed in or defined by one thing. To keep evolving as an artist. I love that connection and the fact that I got to revisit Johnny Cash 20 years later with a different actor, a different physicality, and a different story.
AF: Johnny and Bob meet at various points in the movie as the years move forward. You see a lot of the changes in Bob Dylan’s clothing across the four-year period. What was your starting point with this project and breaking down the script to find pieces that would be worn by Bob Dylan and the rest of the cast?
Phillips: The first thing I did was create a big visual document chronologically with all of my research in our story. We shared it amongst departments, from writers to production designer François Audouy, what we could find, even photos from his childhood. I created this bible, and it has different iterations. One iteration was figuring out the passage of time in the script and the actual events we were recreating that had been documented and publicly known.
Usually, I have my scene partners in set design and props to help move the story along because biopics are usually from birth to death. The trajectory of someone’s life. With this, you don’t see architecture changing, automobiles changing, or changes in technology. But what you see is this young man changing from 19, showing up in New York City and looking for Woody Guthrie, and learning that kind of haphazard, messy boy look that was considered to be curated by him, which came from reading Suze Rotolo’s ‘A Freewheelin’ Time.’ It was really surprising to me.
AF: What were his stylistic influences that helped establish who we meet when he’s 19?
Phillips: He was very considerate about those Pendleton shirts. Almost like the train conductor, little hat dungarees kind of worker look. It’s very American and like a Woody Guthrie style. I don’t know about you, but I was thinking about myself at 19, leaving home, and finding my identity in the world as we do. How I wanted to be perceived as an adult, and when we had the freedom to dress ourselves, there were a lot of dress codes. You couldn’t wear jeans to school or church, and they were relegated to recreation or the work site, like a working-class job. You see Bob Dylan wearing denim throughout the movie, which is a really interesting precursor to the youth culture movement if you think about the summer love in Woodstock.
He also always wore boots. Initially, he wore the red wing kind of worker boots that you’d find a Woody Guthrie type wearing. Then, in the middle of the story in ’63, you see him wearing those pointy Chelsea boots. I would speak with Jim and figure out the beats, knowing what our goalposts were with Bob showing up in Manhattan and then we’re going to be in Newport.
We put our heads together with Jamie Leigh Mcintosh, our brilliant hair designer, and we worked out in ’61 and ’62. He had a woody Guthrie fresh-face look, where his face is rounder. His silhouette is baggier and less defined. Then, in the freewheelin’ era, he wore a slimmer jean that looked like 501’s.
AF: It’s fascinating to learn about the different types of jeans across the years. I only really know about straight-leg, bootleg, and skinny jeans.
Phillips: I had to reach out to my friends at Levi’s in San Francisco to help vet the denim. He was wearing a version of 1962 501’s, and that’s what someone would have worn in 1963 at his age. He was then kind of playing around in ’63 and ’64, and Joan [Baez] covered one of his songs, and he quickly became known. In ’65, he was the most realized and recognizable Bob Dylan that I think the larger culture thinks of with the long hair. I always think of pictures of him on stage with a backlight and that beautiful album cover where he has a darker, skinnier silhouette.
They made this style of Levi’s called a super slim, which was very popular at the time, which is crazy because they look so contemporary. Bob Dylan is our American rock and roll archetype that we would go on to see Tom Petty and Lenny Kravitz emulating.
AF: How much research was available to you, particularly as Bob Dylan is not really out doing a lot of interviews and press tours?
Phillips: My goal was to mirror what his music was saying and what was happening to him, both in how he wants the world to perceive him and how he chooses to dress. There’s a lot of publicly documented footage of him, but he’s famously press-shy, and there are not a lot of photos unless it’s a live photo at a concert.
In the early days, he was doing press calls. We had access to Columbia records archives of photos, which was hugely helpful for the recording sessions. Just like Walk The Line, we weren’t privy to any private photos, so we became fluent in what we knew him to wear, understanding his aesthetic, and created color palettes and textural palettes.
It was after ’66 that his style really exploded. He spent a lot of time in London, and it’s really the British invasion time, wearing crazy things like polka dot suits. Being able to have the orange shirt he famously wore at Newport was hopefully helpful to immerse the audience and invest in this journey of a young artist finding his way.
AF: The scenes at the Newport Folk Festival feature so many extras. Can you talk a bit about the pre-production stage and organizing costumes for each role and extra?
Phillips: We had a unique situation because we had around 5000 costumes and 120 speaking parts, and Timmy had 67 costume changes. In pre-production, production design usually has some warehouse they’re working out of. It’s rare we can all be in the same space and for this, we were. It really felt like a workshop or a summer camp where people could flow freely into each other’s offices.
Because we had to fit everyone head-to-toe, it was constantly exciting. There was a rehearsal room where the actors could come and play music. I shared a wall with our production designer François, and our research just went wall to wall all the way down this massive floor in a skyscraper in Hoboken, New Jersey. It was massive. I had 40 people on my crew, and they were the best in New York.
AF: Was there a moment during costume fittings with Timothée when you both saw the connection between the character on the page, the costumes you’d accumulated, and the performance he was preparing?
Phillips: That’s an excellent question. When I had my first fitting with Timmy in Los Angeles, the first thing I did was try to understand proportions. Bob Dylan wore his jackets very short, and there are certain proportions that we dress for ourselves. So, I tried a few vintage pieces on him in that first fitting to figure out the balance and the sweet spot where Timmy would wear clothes as Bob Dylan wore clothes. They’re not exactly physically alike, and I needed to work out what worked and what didn’t work. So, I started with a lot of vintage pieces as prototypes.
AF: Were you then creating the costumes or sourcing and fitting onto the characters?
Phillips: We recreated probably three-quarters of Timmy’s costumes. There were things we created that I just designed because they were a part of the storytelling process. So, there were some really special moments in the fittings, and we did a lot of them. I even hesitate to tell you how many because we were fitting all the way through the movie.
There are moments I live for as a costume designer in the fittings, where you can say the magic happens and where the character evolves in a fitting. It might be one piece, like a pair of boots or it might be a jacket or a shirt, or a combination of a couple of pieces together where you really get to see the silhouette and the color.
I made many playlists, and the thing I love so much about music, whether it’s a film about a musician or not, is the levity and the emotional layer that music gives.
I like to bring that into the fitting room because I’m the only department that meets the cast and asks them to take their clothes off. It’s very intimate, and there’s something soothing about having music in a fitting. I had playlists that represented the fitting,g and Timmy often came before or after a rehearsal or pre-record, so he would have his guitar. That was really helpful for the design and something I learned with Joaquin Phoenix on Walk the Line, that having the guitar helped in terms of the physicality of the clothes.
You never know an actor’s process. Some actors are not connected to the physical process, and some are. I ask a lot of questions in a fitting, like how does that feel? Do you think you can do the work in that? Sometimes, an actor wants to be uncomfortable.