How did you get involved with Amsterdam?
It was the dual effort of my agent, Daniella Milton, and producer Anthony Katagas. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Anthony on several projects in the past and he kindl recommended me to David O’Russell for Amsterdam. Not only was it a period film set in the early 1900s-30s, an era I adore, but it was also a feast of creative work.
What special makeup FX and prosthetics, were involved?
You can expect to see lobotomies, different stages of scarring, rotting teeth, and pockmarks; all are prevalent features throughout the film, and we tasked ourselves with overlaying it all — the good, bad, and the ugly — with the patina of the 1930s glamour.
Any challenges you faced working on this project?
The biggest non-technical challenge was the pressure to bring the same quality of vision to my makeup as our collaborators were bringing to the acting, writing, and directing. The bar was set high from the get-go with the level of star power in the cast and with David O’Russell at the helm. David had been writing this script for several years and the vision was already living in his head; it was like he knew each character in real life, so he was reasonably specific about each look. Having said that, he is an incredibly openminded director who is willing to change the look of a character at the drop of a hat, which I love about him. From a technical standpoint, the biggest challenge was the volume of work and creating nuanced body trauma wounds from bomb explosions in bulk.
What was the most important detail in getting the look of the eras right?
Since there were multiple eras in this movie. I collaborated with the DP Emanuel Lebowski to have the faces pale, while the hair, costume, and production design were all in darker shades to make the faces pop. He would light the faces and dim down the lights so that it was a moody spotlight effect. I used a lot of shading and contouring to create the old Hollywood portrait look. I did this for every era in the movie.
Where did you draw inspiration from when designing the look for the characters?
Old Hollywood was the key to our approach. Our major influences were icons the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable to name a few. My main inspiration came from the photographer George Hurrell who was a maverick artist that captured the essence of movie stars from the period with bold contrasting and seductive poses. He was known as the Rembrandt of Hollywood.
Was your team divided for straight makeup and FX?
There was so much work to go around. Ultimately, for management reasons, the straight makeup and FX departments often worked in unison. For example, for the autopsy scenes, Joel Harlow and his prosthetics team would work on the bodies of the corpses while Jason Collins, Kenny Myers, and myself in the makeup department would take care of the face, hands, and feet. It’s important to have the right people on board, and I had a great team on this film.
Mike Myers’s transformation as Paul Canterbury was amazing. What was involved with that?
Mike arrived with a complete character in mind and brought several appliances created by the talented Louis Zakarian, who did the first test in New York. Upon Mike’s arrival, the creative teams and I assessed his look and decided to adjust it slightly to make his character look a bit more facially ambiguous, leaving one to question whether he’d had work done or not. We used all of Louis’ original appliances except for a new nose that Autonomous FX supplied us with. We used three prosthetic pieces – a chin and jawline, a nose bridge, and a nose lip which were all applied with Telesis 9 adhesive. The colorations were achieved with Skin Illustrator colors to blend the pieces into Mike’s natural skin tones. For the flashback scenes of a younger Canterbury, we used multiple “lifts” to streamline his face to an earlier time. We also used a popular undereye treatment to shrink the skin under Mike’s eye to give the illusion of youth.
Can you talk about Margot Robbie as Valerie Voze and the shifts in her look over the course of the film?
We had five stages to her look: First, as a young nurse we used warmer skin tone, freckles, rosy lips and cheeks, natural eyes, some mascara. The next stage is years later when she is back in the US. I made her three shades lighter to look pale with red and brown eyeshadow to make her eyes stand out, and a lot of shading and contouring. The third stage is the flashbacks when she is young and living a bohemian life in Amsterdam. We see a montage of different looks — the iconic black smudges, smoky shiny eyeshadow, and pink reddish lip. I added a bit of Vaseline in the middle of the eyes to give them a slightly dewy look, applied a dot of lipstick or cream blush on the apple of her cheeks and finger blended it, as somebody would have done at that time. For the fourth stage, I gave her a Katharine Hepburn look with a soft skin tone, nude lips, a slightly smokey eye, and subtle contouring. The final stage at the ball is the most glamorous and vintage, with a Valerie twist. We opted for a lighter foundation, a very elongated brow, and deep brown shadow elongated to a flick at the bottom line opposite to an eyeliner flick with false eyelashes on the corner of her eyes and a full red lip with two long mounds that flare out at the corners. Then we used a thin makeup brush to add two dots on the inner corner of each eye for a unique look.
Words Shannon Levy
Photos Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
