Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1352017
Spring 2021 The Costume Designer 23 crazy life.' We just laughed." Trish Summerville Mank Mank is set in the 1930s and '40s and focuses on the story behind the script for Citizen Kane. The film cel- ebrates the craft of the screenwriter, while delving into the power, politics, and ambitions of Hollywood in that era. It strives to conjure the spirit of Kane with period-correct act- ing, lighting, sound, and design. Says costume designer Trish Summerville, "I've done small things, but never an entire project in black and white." She continues, "There are so many different ways you can go about that. We actually shot in black and white instead of shooting in color, so everything we would see on the monitor was as it was to be." Summerville and her team relied upon their phones' camera app, which had three black and white settings with very different results. With feedback from director David Fincher, they zeroed in on which would be closest to what would appear onscreen. This allowed them to problem- solve as they went. The production chose to avoid high con- trast because of the way Fincher shoots. "It's not traditional black and white," observes Summerville. "So we didn't use very much black at all. I didn't oversaturate anything, because I felt it soaked up too much light. And we stayed away from anything that was a true bright white, because it just blew out." Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) was the exception to the high-contrast rule, as Summerville felt that it was important that she be always in light tones as the main focal point in all of her scenes. They learned that patterns and prints did not work well for their method of filming, so went very tonal instead, choosing solids and subtle details. Because men's fashion at that time was constrained, they had to find ways to dif- ferentiate the mostly male cast. They tracked the men's clothes by making charts "to distinguish what fabrics we were using for their suits, their shirts, and their ties so that we could give them each something different and special," Summerville explains. "When you're shooting in black and white, you have to have a variance of tone, but also texture. It was about trying to find things that would make each gar- ment interesting." To maintain the visual through line, illustrations—by Gloria Kim, done in a style based on old magazines and catalogues of the '30s—and all fitting photos submitted for approval were also in black and white. Summerville and assistant costume designer Corey Deist became very adept at monochromatic visualization. "In our heads, we knew what color it was supposed to be. You start figuring out what works," she observes. Color still played an important role, if only on a psy- Gary Oldman and Jamie McShane in Mank Nikolai Loveikis/Courtesy of Netflix