Academy Award winning costume designer Catherine Martin opens up about her designs for the Elvis film.
Not only is Catherine Martin an Academy Award winning costume designer, wife, and mother, she’s an incredibly kind person. Her work transcends her as she is leaving her imprint on the film industry. Martin is in Cannes for the much buzzed about biopic Elvis that premiered tonight, and that her husband Baz Luhrmann directed. As she walks into the interview, the medium height designer is dressed in head to toe black, even the rim of her glasses are flamboyant and black, drawing out her stylish short blonde hair. Her big smile shifts the atmosphere in the room, as she nestled on the sofa to talk about what everyone in Cannes is talking about: Elvis. How Catherine and Baz Met: the beginning that led to Oscar winning films
Opening up she talked about how she met Luhrmann and how the two have a shared passion for film, and how what they have done over the years is organic yet planned.
“When we met I was going for a job interview to work for the bicentennial year for Australia. He had been given a couple of companies as a bicentennial initiative and I was going to interview for those jobs. And when I met him we just started to talk, and talk, and talk about everything from Madonna, to space travel, to philosophy. I had been a bit dissatisfied with the intellectual rigor of drama school. I thought that he had such a big mind. We kept talking and began working together. I remember going into a rehearsal room and he was rehearsing an opera that I had done the costumes for. My collogue did the set and I remember seeing Baz’s staging, and I remember thinking, ‘wow, this person really has an incredible mind.’ It was about designing opera and being in the theater, but he decided to make a film from the play. By this time, we had been working together for a long time. It was a natural progression, it wasn’t planed, although weirdly, Baz plans everything, but it was also organic. He’ll think of something and it will go into his subconscious and it will end up happening. And he will then convince everyone else that they need to go in the same direction as him,” she muses and laughs as she thinks of her husband. If you remember the 1996 rendition of Romeo + Juliet, Martin did the costumes and won an Academy Award. Moulin Rouge!, a 2001 film won two Oscars, and Martin’s work in Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby won her a 2013 Oscar for Best Costume Design. Catherine’s love of fashion
She’s always loved fashion. “As there are men who love cars, I love the world of fashion, I love clothes, and I like looking at people and what they’re wearing.” But for her, her contentment is in costume design, not the kinesthetic nature of runway collections. “I sometimes daydream and think, ‘I’d love to do that,’ and then I think how hard it is with eight collections a year and it becomes tiring. It all just becomes a blur.
