"The film first started at Hailsham School and all the children were wearing all grey smart clothes, like uniforms but they weren't all wearing the same clothes and none of the children had any colour on their clothes. The teachers were in smart clothes that were a bit dreary but had colour in them.
Later on in the film the Tommy, Ruth and Cathy (old Hailsham students) wore quite old clothes, some would say vintage. They were quite muted colours but they had colour in them and they were worn with a mismatch style."
I have found this article explaining more about what the costume designers, Racheal Fleming and Steven Noble wanted the audience to see in the costumes.
Never Let Me Go: Crafting the costumes for a timeless look
Mark Romanek is the director of "Never Let Me Go," starring Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, and Carey Mulligan. The film, which based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, is being released by Twentieth Century Fox on September 15, 2010.
“This was a very challenging film for costumes,” comments costume designer Steven Noble, “because it is set in a parallel universe that needed to reflect the recent past, from the 70s to the 90s, while also looking completely timeless. That’s not an easy line to walk.”
Noble, along with costume designer Rachael Fleming, used a lot of second-hand clothing, the kind of well-worn, vaguely eccentric items one might find hanging in a hidden corner of a thrift shop. They also asked a variety of British boarding schools to send them old uniforms, from which they forged the mismatched hodgepodge of the Hailsham outfits. “The children have no need to identify themselves or their school so the outfits are very plain and simple, with no emblems, stripes or badges of any kind,” explains Fleming. “Any sense of style they have comes only from what tiny glimpses they’ve seen of the outside world.”
Meanwhile, the teachers wear what Noble calls “tweedy chic.” “We used 60s silhouettes but in tweeds which manages to look period without really being from a specific date and place,” he says.
A different England
In the end, the team created an England that is not quite like any other England ever seen at the movies. “This is not a lush evocation of England,” Romanek remarks. “There are no shiny, new objects in the film. Everything is faded and worn and hand-me-down. This is where the idea of Wabi Sabi came in. There is always a sense of time ticking, ticking, ticking. We were careful to put clocks and watches in nearly every scene, because the story is so much about the passage of time and the preciousness of time. We tried to do that with sound design as well – it’s not just clocks that mark the passage of time but the wind and rhythms of nature as well.”
Seeking Ishiguro's approval
When the film was completed, the filmmakers put all of its elements, from the costumes to the photography to the performances, through a final test: showing it to Ishiguro. Recalls Romanek: “There was tremendous trepidation and anxiety when we showed him our first rough cut. We were all waiting for him outside and . . . he really seemed to love it. He had some constructive comments but he seemed thrilled. That was a massive relief. We set out to make this movie because of how much we loved and respected his novel – yet we knew the film also had to have its own life independent of that novel. It was gratifying to feel that we had — in his estimation — been true to his novel while allowing the story to become its own experience for a movie audience.”
Concludes Ishiguro: “I hope audiences start off thinking this is a strange, eerie film about peculiar people; but as the film goes on, I hope they see it is a story about all of us, so that the sense of recognition gets stronger and stronger until, finally, what Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are going through is what we all go through in life.”
Filming
Never Let Me Go was given a production budget of US$15 million.[23] Principal photography for the film started in April 2009 and lasted a few weeks. Production design was done by Mark Digby, and Adam Kimmel was assigned to cinematography. The commercial director was Duncan Reid, who works for Ingenious Media,[24] and the film was shot by crewmembers of the English company DNA Films.[25] On 8 May 2009, the production moved to Norfolk for filming. The beach at Holkham is also featured in the film. Knightley previously shot scenes at nearby Holkham Hall for her 2008 film The Duchess.[26] A location on Hill Road In Clevedon was used, and a shop was converted into a travel agency. They also filmed on the beach and the Victorian pier in Clevedon. The pier is featured on the film poster and the cover of the rereleased book. A large property on the Bexhill-on-Sea seafront was used on 12 and 13 May 2009 to act as the exterior for the residence of Madame, where Tommy and Kathy go to apply for a deferral.
Andrew Melville Hall in the University of St. Andrews was the setting for the Dover Recovery Centre.[25] Nearly thirty film extras, film producers, and location scouts had to wait several hours for the sun to set so they could film the scenes there.[25] The restaurant scene, which is featured in the trailer and in promotional screenshots, was shot in the Regent Restaurant and Coffee Lounge in Weston-super-Mare in April 2009.[27] Chiswick Town Hall, a dark building in London, was also used as a shooting location. The scenes where the Hailsham assemblies were held was filmed at a school inSnaresbrook, called Forest School, in May 2009.[4] Ham House, Richmond, was used for filming the exterior shots of Hailsham School.
No comments:
Post a Comment