Fashion Wire Daily LA May 19, 2003 - There is a look of love in the new movie "Down with Love," and it isn't the romantic glances that happen between stars Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. Instead, it's the stylized look of a love of fashion and design, circa 1963 New York.
Peyton Reed, the film's director, explains: "The fun thing for me as a director was to create a version of New York that was not the real New York in the early Sixties, but the fabricated Hollywood version of New York -- just like movies like "Pillow Talk" always did. [I wanted to] create this sort of clean, colorful idealized version of New York City."
Costume designer Daniel Orlandi agrees with Reed, as he elaborates on how he created an ultra-sophisticated New York look for all the characters in an homage to those classic Doris Day-Rock Hudson sex comedies from that time. "We're not doing a historic re-creation of 1963. Instead, we're doing what the movies in 1963 told us people wore. It's very different. It's like looking at the cover of 'Vogue' magazine and saying that that's what someone wears on the street -- and we all know it's not. It is sort of this ultra-designed world that no one really lives up to, or in."
According to Reed, the vividly stylized look of the sets and clothes in the film sprang right out of the pages of the screenplay. "The script really created this whole world, and it allowed me to create the rules of this world and show that it wasn't a real New York City, but a surreal, heightened New York City," he says. "I also love that it sort of harkened back to this genre of movie, this kind of forgotten genre of the early Sixties sex comedy."
An important element to the look was finding the right people to play the lead roles, since the clothes needed people who could truly pull them off. The casting of Zellweger and McGregor was key, along with co-stars David Hyde Pierce and Sarah Paulson.
"We wanted it to look fun and sexy," Orlandi explains. "But we didn't want it to look campy and we didn't want to put too many clothes on people -- you know how you can put something on an actor and they just can't carry it and the clothes wear them? We needed people that could carry it, and we got the best with all four of the leads."
Orlandi designed every element of the film's hundreds of costumes including the dresses, hats, shirts and ties, and cites film and fashion designers Jean-Louis, Ray Aghayian, Oleg Cassini, Givenchy, and Balenciaga as his inspirations for the eye-popping looks in the movie. Still he insists he couldn't have done it without Renée and Ewan.
"Renee can carry off an amazing amount of clothes. She can wear the highest heels and she has this great sense of clothes never wearing her," he says. "She really can wear anything beautifully. And with Ewan, there was no challenge there because he wears clothes amazingly well. He's got a great body because he has that skinny silhouette and that Cary Grant man-about-town style."
Reed agrees that, while the New York style of the sets and the costumes create the right look, it is the actors that make "Down with Love" such a winning blend of homage and contemporary comedy.
"It's not an easy thing to find actors who are game to do this style of comedy. I think that a lot of them are afraid to come off as appearing stupid, and there is a huge element of trust involved," Reed says. "But they are incredibly talented actors who are brave enough to try anything, and I think that they loved the challenge of doing it."
"It was SO much fun!" Zellweger giggles. "The little pink suits and the flips and the hair. I loved it!"
