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Henry IV and Henry V: Q&A with the costume designer

2012-07-05T11:31:44+00:00

The Hollow Crown is a series of four adaptations of Shakespeare's History Plays on BBC Two starting with Richard II. Annie Symons is the costume designer on the three continuing films: Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V. Annie talked to me about the creative and practical process of clothing the cast.

How do you research the costumes for these three films?

I started seven or eight weeks before filming. Normally it's shorter but this needed a lot of prep.

Paintings are critical for research. It's not just a literal view of what people wore. I look for other information - feel, colour, sense, something that will unlock the ideas.

Henry V (Tom Hiddleston) declares no surrender ahead of The Battle of Agincourt

In this case there are relatively few paintings from the early 15th Century so I looked at artefacts, I went to buildings, I tried to understand what it was like to live in those days.

We looked at war films and thought about what it was like to be a soldier. We wanted to appeal to a war film audience, to contemporise it and strip out all the pageantry and pare things down.

I looked at football hooligans, the way they move and wear colours. We thought about war as sport which it definitively was in the age of chivalry.

We decided they were football teams and Alan MacDonald and I chose dark congealed bloods for England and beautiful blues, whites and golds for France. It's very subtle and I think the way it is graded looks incredibly beautiful. It is perceptible but it's not in your face.

How much creative freedom do you get?

Richard Eyre and Thea Sharrock are theatre directors so they are used to working in a way which is different to TV. Conceptually you build things together. It's a much slower development and I love that. I'm interested in colours and concepts and literally the big picture and how it all fits together. So I was in heaven really.

There is a lot of fighting in armour, how do you accommodate this?

Flexibility is critical as it's basically an action film. Tom Hiddleston is an action hero and the fights are extreme physical endurance, we honed those costumes like building a second skin.

Tom as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1

We made his armour out of rubber and he was sewn into things at times. It was precisely fitted so he could move and look sexy because he's got an amazing physique. It's like working with a finely tuned instrument and you work very hard to get it right.

The French had to look particularly shiny and scary and mannered but for the English we stripped the armour away for some characters and just put little bits on so you got a sense of metal.

Do the actors have input?

Yes, that's part of the process. It was a big journey for Tom, from playing Prince Hal to Henry V. Doing Agincourt felt like we were going to climb Everest. We had lots of fittings and chucked things around.

Some actors are quite happy to put on what you give them, but it can inform their performance and certainly what they say informs you as the designer.

Jeremy Irons is extraordinary in costume and that was a very interesting journey. The first thing he said was "I want this to be real."

We chose clothes that looked like they belonged to him, very old things. He had to look frail yet majestic, so he wears this enormous overwhelming fur coat and this sort of bobble hat with no bobble.

He told me they invented bobble hats to keep the helmets up because they were incredibly uncomfortable. Also old men cover their heads because they get cold. All these elements grew out of fittings.

The transformation: Henry V is crowned

It's a huge cast, how did you clothe them all?

We ran! It was a huge physical and logistical feat.

I chose a look and we stuck to it, particularly in Henry IV. Richard wanted the whole of Westminster to look like men in suits so we put nearly everybody in black and all you see is the face.

Also we very deliberately put everybody in leather trousers. Because they are in the rain we could wipe them clean so they only needed one pair. It gave them a masculinity and a sexuality and a warrior-likeness. Even for the older men - it changes their performance making them virile and vital.

We shot Henry V first. So we re-dyed the armies in-between Henry V and Henry IV from pale blue into dark bluey green.

There is a lot of mud, how did you cope?

The mud is an entity in itself. It's very heavy and it wrecks clothes so in between shooting days we had to hose things down to try and preserve them.

We worked in tents with blow dryers going and as a lot of the costumes are hired we spent a month cleaning and restoring them.

The Mud! Battle scene in Henry IV Part 1

What got you into costume design?

I think it's been hardwired in me since I was tiny. I started making costumes for my dolls from watching BBC dramas. I remember watching Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R and being completely amazed.

Then I started making clothes for school plays and working in the local theatre. I couldn't quite believe that if you drew something it could then become three-dimensional and real.

I just thought that it was magic, and I still do which is just as well when you're working 18 hour days in the mud! I'm thrilled to bits to be doing it and I think that's what gets me up at four in the morning!

Annie Symons is the costume designer for Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V.

Eliza Kessler is the researcher on the BBC TV blog.

Henry IV Part 1 was originally scheduled for Saturday, 7 July at 9pm on BBC Two and BBC HD. Due to extended Wimbledon coverage it was actually broadcast at the later time of 10pm, and was repeated on BBC Four on Sunday 8 July at 9pm.

For further programme times, please see the episode guide.

The films are part of Shakespeare Unlocked and the 2012 Festival.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Julius Caesar: Political thriller in a modern African state

2012-06-20T13:47:33+00:00

On a dismal afternoon at the end of April, as the rain pours down outside, the cast and crew of Julius Caesar huddle in padded jackets around bright electric fires.

We are shooting a film for BBC Four of William Shakespeare's vivid political thriller on which I am the producer.

Behind the scenes on the set of Julius Caesar

We are camped out in an abandoned and decaying shopping mall in north London.

But when the lamps are switched on and the camera turns over we are transported to the tropical temperatures of a modern African state and to an overheated world of conspiracy, assassination and revenge.

Director Gregory Doran, who later this year takes over as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, started two years ago to prepare a new stage production of Julius Caesar for the company.

As he worked he was struck by the parallels between Shakespeare's tale of the violent overthrow of a dictator in ancient Rome, including its bloody aftermath, and the history of certain African states since independence.

The events of the unfolding Arab Spring seemed only to enhance the contemporary echoes.

The film, which Greg has also directed (as he did the 2009 BBC film of Hamlet with David Tennant), was shot in the middle of rehearsals for the stage production.

With the same distinguished cast (including Paterson Joseph, Cyril Nri and Jeffery Kissoon) this television production complements the theatre version, which opened earlier this month to hugely enthusiastic reviews.

At the same time the film is a distinctive and original interpretation for the screen, with the spaces of the shopping mall allowing us to create a richly detailed African world and the camera achieving an exceptional intimacy with the motivations and the ideals, the hopes and the fears of Shakespeare's characters.

While respecting the essentials of the stage production the film re-imagines many of the key scenes including the central drama of Caesar's murder.

Brutus (Paterson Joseph) and Cassius (Cyril Nri) after the assassination of Caesar

On screen this is set on the shopping mall's escalator, where Caesar has paused in what we imagine to be the anonymous architecture beneath the Senate House.

So while this has been opened out as a spectacle for the camera the later appearance of Caesar's ghost before the climactic battle called for the tightest of shots filmed only an inch or so from Brutus' face.

In their very different ways both for me are highlights of the film: exciting and immediate and illustrative of how Shakespeare can still surprise and thrill audiences familiar with the political drama of The West Wing and The Killing.

From its first production in 1938 to the most recent in 1979 the BBC has broadcast eight previous versions of Julius Caesar (making it the most popular of Shakespeare's plays on television).

None however will have made quite such sense as this African setting for Cassius' exultant - and chillingly prophetic - words just after he has plunged his dagger into Caesar's heart:

"How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted over

In states unborn and accents yet unknown!"

John Wyver is the producer of Julius Caesar.

Julius Caesar is on Sunday, 24 June at 8pm on BBC Four and will be available on iPlayer until Sunday, 1 July 2012.

Julius Caesar is part of Shakespeare Unlocked and the 2012 Festival.

Comments made by writers on the BBC TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.

Macbeth with Sir Patrick Stewart: The Scottish play from stage to TV

2010-12-09T11:23:11+00:00

Huddled against the cold in a huge overcoat, I'm cowering by a wall with a vicious-looking Alsatian snapping at my heels.

That's one of my more vivid memories from the location shoot for director Rupert Goold's film of Macbeth with Sir Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood.

Fortunately my canine assailant was being expertly restrained as the camera captured my far from feigned fear. I'm the co-producer of Macbeth which is being broadcast on BBC Four on Sunday, 12 December. Sadly my starring moment ended up on the cutting room floor.

The shot was originally intended for the sequence we called, after the former East Germany's secret police, "the Stasi montage". Which suggests that our film of Macbeth is not exactly a conventional presentation of the Scottish play.

This is Shakespeare's bloody drama reimagined in the midst of a mid-20th Century war zone. The witches are deadly nurses and Banquo is assassinated by handgun and silencer.

Rupert Goold's Macbeth started at the Chichester Festival Theatre, transferred to the West End and then had a triumphant run on Broadway. The film came together after my production company Illuminations worked with Sir Patrick on the film for the BBC of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet with David Tennant.

As with Hamlet, shown on Boxing Day a year ago, we transplanted the stage production to a richly visual location and shot it across three weeks just like a feature film. Our setting was the eerie below ground world at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

This warren of tunnels, claustrophobic cells and a vast windowless ballroom was created in the mid-nineteenth century by the reclusive fifth Duke of Portland. His descendants still live in the main house, but they seemed content as Macduff's invading army fired off round after round of exceptionally loud blanks from their automatic weapons.

Although his production began life on the stage, Rupert Goold has crafted a fast-moving and highly cinematic version for the screen. Yet I believe it demonstrates a deep respect for Shakespeare's drama, and a full text (including the often-excised "England" scene) is played with very few cuts or additions.

But you may also recognise visual touches from contemporary movies like Downfall, the tale of Hitler's last days, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Let us know in the comments which references you spot, and do please tell us whether you think our approach does justice to the play.

At the heart of the film are compelling performances from the immensely polished and practised stage cast.

Kate Fleetwood is a calculating and chilling Lady Macbeth who descends into a desperately moving madness.

Patrick Stewart is imperious as Macbeth: a man of "vaulting ambition" yet also hesitant, a deadly dictator of overweening confidence, but also a man tormented by guilt and regret.

John Wyver is the co-producer of Macbeth.

Macbeth is on BBC Four on Sunday, 12 December at 7.30pm.

Macbeth is available in iPlayer until 9.59pm on Sunday, 19 December.

Comments made by writers on the TV blog are their own opinions and not necessarily those of the BBC.