How Costume Design Icon Ruth E. Carter Defies Expectations, Each and Every Time: ‘I’m Like a Worried Mother’
To look at Ruth E. Carter’s body of work is intimidating, ranging from nearly all of Spike Lee’s directorial efforts to crafting the wardrobe for both “Black Panther” features. Now, the two-time Oscar-winner is receiving a tribute courtesy of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures this Saturday where she’ll be sitting down with the Academy’s director and President, Jacqueline Stewart, for a discussion about her illustrious career and a signing of her first book, “The Art of Ruth E. Carter.”
“It further confirms that I am supported by my peers, and that the efforts that I have made throughout my career that [are] outlined in this book are supported and celebrated by the Academy,” Carter told TheWrap. “For a young girl from Springfield who pulled herself up by her bootstraps and made it out to Los Angeles in a little Volkswagen Rabbit, and worked hard in the theater first and then got an amazing break into the film industry, being recognized is not something that you think about on your journey. You just want to learn and grow. And this moment in time, where the Academy is supporting my book and supporting a talk about my career, is really a highlight in my journey.”
When discussing the desire to translate her costume design work to a book, Carter explained that she’s a storyteller, no matter the medium. “As Ruth Carter I have a story to tell and I’m always talking about my experiences,” she said. So it was a natural fit, according to Carter, when Chronicle Books asked her to collaborate with them on a book about her career. “I knew I had at least twelve chapters of stories in my head,” she said.
Carter went on to discuss the first time she met Spike Lee, working with Disney on the “Black Panther” franchise and the stories she’d still like to tell.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
TheWrap: What was your first impression upon meeting Spike Lee?
Ruth E. Carter: We’re very close in age; he may be only a year older than me. So back then in the late ’80s, 1986, I believe it was, we were all beginning. We were all out there in pursuit of our careers. Spike had graduated from NYU film school while I was at the opera doing my internship, and we had a chance meeting from a friend. We all hung out afterwards. We were still partying filmmakers, and Spike…he had an edge on him. He was a little more serious. The first impression from him to me was “this is a girl who should do film.”
I only was thinking about theater. I was a thespian. From me to him there was an admiration, but also a curiosity. I was juggling between is this a romantic connection? Or is this a real connection of advice because he didn’t let up. He was very interested in telling me that I should go to USC or UCLA, into the film studies department and sign up to volunteer on a student thesis project. He was adamant about giving me more information about the film industry. So maybe he had made some decisions in his mind that I was potentially someone that he wanted to work with. No one had ever approached me in that way before.
Having worked together for so long, does he still have the ability to surprise you?
Yes, he’s an artist and he has ideas that are born in imagination and in experience, he’s a collector. We all live our lives with interesting ideas that we want to see come to fruition that maybe we don’t get a chance to. Life is short, time goes by really fast. Maybe it’s that Jackie Robinson film he never got to make or maybe it’s a film about something in his life that he hasn’t shared with the world. But, as artists, we live with a bank of ideas that are just waiting to come out.
He also has a level of artistry that is all his own. You know that when you come together with Spike Lee you are going to be enlightened. If you are going to be brought into his aesthetic view, which is very fresh, and you know that the harder you work for him and his ideas, the more will come out, you know that he will start seeing things in what you’re doing and express more ideas. That’s why it will never get stale, it will never grow old, it will never die.
Are there genres or eras you’d still like to work with in your own career?
I could relive many genres and do something brand new. I would love to explore the greats of jazz and blues, and their wonderful stories, Robert Johnson. I would love to do a film about the Great Migration. Not just the journey of families from the South to the North, but there was also a migration from the lower North to the West. There are so many stories [about] the creation of this world, this country, it’s not by accident.
I love history. I could do Egyptian history. There’s lots of wonderful stories about the Moors. It’s Hollywood that makes the decision on what gets produced. We go through these spells where they want to produce things that make money, it is a business. But maybe somebody out there will want to produce something that Ruth wants to do.
Can you talk about how working with Disney, a corporation that has set rules for their characters, was different than working for a specific auteur like Lee?
“Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” were special films for Marvel and Disney. They were probably a lot different than their other pictures. There are rules where they have certain superheroes that they are in complete control of the aesthetics that go [with] it. But I realized really quickly that although they wanted a certain style to their superheroes, there was a whole world that I was able to bring to support it and were just as big as the superheroes. How T’Challah lived in Wakanda and how the Dora Milaje were presented.
I found that my artistry was still the same. I had to come up with the details. I had to tell the story. I couldn’t just do a superhero like he was gonna be a walkabout on Hollywood Boulevard. I had to give T’Challa a surface pattern that will connect him to Wakanda. The Dora Milaje needed to have an origin story about the creation of their costume, where it came from, what artisans made it. That’s the thing that Marvel doesn’t want to give you. They want you to do that part. And I was fortunate to be on a film like “Black Panther” and “Wakanda Forever” to have such a huge opportunity to create. Anytime they wanted to say “This is what we want for that.” I said “OK,” because even that needed more.
Do you ever look back at a project and just not like how the costumes turned out?
It’s the absolute opposite. While I’m creating them and I’m looking at our rushes all I’m looking at is when the actors are getting dressed or I’m in fittings. I’m constantly going, “Oh, that could have been so much better, but I’m out of time. Oh, let me just do this part here and send them off.” And when I go back and I look at a film I’ve done I go, “What was I so worried about? That’s fantastic.” So I’m like a worried mother the whole time. I’m constantly evaluating composition and how the actors feeling. It takes me a little while to relax and say, you know, you put it down, you put it in, and it’s fine.
What film was the hardest to make the costumes for?
The one that was really difficult might have been doing Tina Turner, her life story [for “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”], and that’s because she was living. She gave me access to a lot of her costumes that she had saved from the ’80s, but the early years when she was in Nutbush, Tennessee, I had to take Angela’s [Bassett] performance and support Angela’s performance as this young woman singer. I worried that I was not depicting Tina the best. When Tina said, “Oh, I wore designer all the time” I was like, “No, you didn’t! I saw photos of you in Nutbush.”
It’s really not trouble, it’s more of challenge. “Black Panther” gave me a lot of challenges. I’d never done a superhero film before. I didn’t know all the processes involved with a muscle sculpt and then a clay mold, the stretch of the suit. The Black Panther suit, when I first made it, I made it out of a very thin fabric because I wanted you to be able to see the Vibranium muscles underneath. And he [Chadwick Boseman] kept blowing his pants on-set. Every time he went to set we were stitching up his crotch. I was like, this is not a good look for the Black Panther. Then we found a woman who had worked for the Boston Ballet. We brought her in and she made these wonderful gussets everywhere and reconstructed the suit. She’d done dancers before so she was an expert and it made it much better.
It’s early days still but can you talk about designing the wardrobe for the new “Blade?”
We’re following in the footsteps of Wesley Snipes’ Blade. Wesley Snipes did an amazing job of creating the first serious Black superhero. That’s a big responsibility. It’s a big task, and we are constantly trying to better, and modernize and make it exciting. I mean, who doesn’t love a vampire film? It has so much pressure to be good. So I’m just on the journey and caught up in trying to create as much as I can.
You can purchase tickets to tomorrow’s presentation and book signing with Ruth E. Carter via the Academy Museum website.
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