Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1486000
THE ARTISAN WINTER 2023 • 49 PHOTOS, EXCEPT AS NOTED: © 2022 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MAKE-UP B Y N A N A F I S C H E R | D E PA R T M E N T H E A D M A K E - U P Amsterdam takes place in the 1930s around the time of the Great Depression in the USA. While it was a time of squalor, there was also space for glamour and style. Our amazing challenges included recreating period beauty make-up of the 1930s, period trauma, character make-ups, and heavy prosthetic character make-up. Old Hollywood was the key to our approach. With a star-driven cast and the incredible David O. Russell, the bar was high. As a make-up designer and department head, the body of work we had to come up with and produce was such a creative treat. I studied World War I photographs to properly capture what guns and bombs will do to human faces, and had to create numerous facial and body injury prosthetic make-up wounds. We utilized contouring to create the effects of previously broken facial bones. We had to replicate corpses for autopsy scenes, lobotomies, facial scarring, rotting teeth, blotchy rosacea and pockmarks (we put these on the handsome Timothy Olyphant, and Christian Bale did a whole scene with him without recognizing him!) while overlaying it all with the patina of 1930s glamor. I still wanted to create an air of movie magic, and wove romance into the grittiness of the subjects. My research did go extensively into the right shade for the lipstick colors, the shape of the lip liner, and nail shape and design. Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, our DP, wanted the lips saturated to stand out, and wanted the focus to be illuminated on the facial features to replicate Old Hollywood glamour. That meant going three shades lighter on our female cast than their natural tone would be. A big inspiration was George Hurrell, a maverick artist who captured movie stars with bold, seductive glamor portraits. I wanted to recreate the black-and-white contrast of the shading on the female leads, but in color. Continued on Page 52