‘Fallout’ costume designer Amy Westcott: ‘It was about staying away from the bleak, apocalyptic feeling’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“Fallout” costume designer Amy Westcott found about her first Emmy nomination through three letters. “My assistant on ‘Fallout’ texted me and he just wrote, ‘OMG!’ And I knew from that text that that was why he was freaking out, so it was exciting,” she tells Gold Derby (watch above). “No other context. It was just O-M-G-G-G-G-G!”
Westcott was not familiar with the games on which “Fallout” is based, but she was quickly taken by its concept and its “quirky feel.” Though it’s a post-apocalyptic drama, “Fallout” eschews bleakness for a playful, darkly comic tone in a retrofuturistic world. And while many other shows have had viewers asking why TV shows are literally so dark now, it’s the opposite with “Fallout,” which pops off the screen with bright aesthetics from its sets to its costumes. “I think it was about staying away from the bleak, apocalyptic feeling. One of the things that I loved the most about the feel of it is that there was hope and inspiration that was spreading through the community through the years,” Westcott states. “So the apocalypse happened and then they sort of had to figure out how to live through it and keep going. And through that came a hopeful situation and also just people found their own style with what they could find and what they could steal and what they could steal.”
It has been 219 years to be exact from the time when the nuclear bombs dropped to when “Fallout” takes place in 2296. The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) has been traversing the wasteland above ground this whole time, but he was just a B-list actor named Cooper Howard playing cowboy at a birthday party when the bombs fell. Under The Ghoul’s many distressed layers of clothing he’s scavenged through the years is that same blue cowboy costume he was wearing on that fateful day.
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“That was a big conversation in the beginning with The Ghoul. What does he wear? Is it a whole new thing? It’s been so many years. And I was really gunning for keeping him the same because I felt like The Ghoul was trying to hold onto who he was. He’s trying to keep his humanity. So he does have stolen pieces and objects, “Westcott explains. “The sort of rules of the game is you scavenge, you grab things, you get what you can get, and there’s points and things like that in the game or you get certain things from it. But we wanted to take those rules and apply them to everybody. One of the most interesting things in the beginning doing research was [asking] what can remain? What was in the world? What was being produced then [before the apocalypse]? Because we had an elevated ’50s look. … And we just had to figure out, according to the game, what rules were there, what skeleton was there, and then we expounded on that and did what was sort of realistic.”
For the Vault Dwellers underground, Westcott, a BAFTA nominee and Costume Design Guild Award winner for “Black Swan” (2010), had to bring to life their iconic blue and gold jumpsuits. Her “major challenge” was satisfying gamers’ expectations while adding her own spin to the suits and making them practical, functional and purposeful. “When you see something in a game, it’s flat. Nobody wears it. Making something into a 3D, functional costume takes a lot of figuring out and how actors would move in it,” she shares. “It was a lot about the fabric and getting the fabric just right. It had to be a specific amount of stretch and an amount of stretch that would retract to its original state.” Westcott used a custom-made Italian fabric on the 2013 sci-fi film “After Earth” that she knew would be perfect for “Fallout’s” jumpsuits.
“The beauty of it was it was a four-way stretch, which is very rare to get sort of the matte feeling and the pliability and everything,” she continues. “When I got the job, I thought, ‘I gotta show them samples of this fabric because this is the thing.’ And it was so difficult because it’s not made in bulk at all. They put out very small batches of it, so we had to keep going back and keep going back. And then the Italian factories closed down for a month in August and everything, so it was very difficult to get the type of fabric yardage that we needed, but that was the king of fabrics for us.”
“Fallout” is moving production from New York to California for Season 2, and unfortunately, Westcott won’t be returning as she lives in New York with her husband, “Succession” director and Emmy winner Mark Mylod, and their children. “I can’t move for seven months. I wish I could, but my kids are in school. It’ll be interesting just to see Season 2 because I love the scripts … and I really can’t wait to see what they do,” she says. “It’s a little bittersweet because I’m very attached to not only the story but also the actors — I love them — and of them, I have such loyalty to. So passing the baton is a little like, [reluctantly] ‘Here.’ It’s one of those things where it’s like, ‘You can take it.’ But it’s a little heartbreaking for me because I loved it and I loved working with them. I am curious and excited to see what happens.”
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