July 20, 2021
The clothes, women tend to know this more than men, that what you wear is going to dictate how you feel and that's why, often, for an important evening, one that is meaningful to you, you’ll change your clothes a few times. Costume designers, that's what they're all about. You put the clothes on and suddenly you feel the character start to happen, because they’re not your clothes, which you have a prior association for. Bernie Pollack did little movies like: “The Way We Were”, “Tootsie”, “Out of Africa”, “3 Days of the Condor”, etc. Bernie Pollack. Taught me so much in a four-hour afternoon about acting. I walked away from that day and went “wow!”, because costume designers and production designers only think in terms of granular specificity. It’s the only way they know how to think.There’s a great lesson for us to learn from them. As we enter voting season and i’m a voter and all this stuff, what will always win is “period”. It takes “Love takes time, love makes time”, it takes more time to do anything period. As a producer, it’s 25-30% more budget, because anywhere I point the camera, I have to dress it, whether it’s extras, lamp posts that have to be “CGI” out,etc. If it’s contemporary Montreal, Los Angeles, New York [...] Stella Adler would not let us get up on stage, unless we were costumed perfectly. When I studied with her, I was 27-28 and none of us had any dough, but we figured out how to get the clothes and I learned so much from her that a man would never be in shirt sleeves and a vest, without a jacket on in the presence of women. That would only be in the den, with Brandy, Cognac and cigars with the guys. A man would always wear his jacket, it’s amazing stuff. I remember this one girl getting up there and her clothes weren’t right on and she maybe got two syllables out of her mouth and Stella was like : “STOP! Your clothes, darling, your clothes!” And she said : “I'm sorry, Ms. Adler, but you know, I don't have any money to get a costume” and she [Stella] said: “STEAL IT!” Wow, no excuses. “Steal it”. Yeah,okay.