Costumer has designs on Handmaid’s Tale
Crabtree discusses fangirl moments, fabrics and being inspired with Aleesha Harris.
VIFF CREATOR TALK WITH ANE CRABTREE When: Oct. 2; 6:30 p.m. Where: Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour St.)
Tickets and info: $25; viff.org You’d be forgiven for assuming a longtime Hollywood costume designer would be “over” the idea of an encounter with a celebrity, director or the like ending in an epic fangirl episode.
But Ane Crabtree isn’t immune to the idea — at least not privately.
So who are the stars that cause Crabtree, whose past projects have included The Sopranos, Masters of Sex, Westworld and more, to lose her cool?
Well, they aren’t exactly ones you’d expect.
“Margaret Atwood and Daniel Wilson are part of the reason why I’m sitting in this chair today, doing The Handmaid’s Tale Season 2. And, really, responsible for a lot of my success,” Crabtree admits.
“I was educated by their films and novels.”
Suffice to say, Atwood’s ability to create — and Wilson’s to recreate on film — the frightening dystopian reality where select women are forced to bear children for the elite that is at the centre of The Handmaid’s Tale helped to rattle Crabtree’s view of women’s roles in society. Speaking from the Toronto set of the hit Hulu drama, Crabtree detailed the depths of the duo’s impact on her career — and her life.
“I’m 53 and I saw The Handmaid’s Tale when it first came out in the theatres (in 1990). I was a young 20-something and ... I remember it was quite controversial,” she explains of the movie, which was produced by Wilson and starred Natasha Richardson.
“I knew, at that moment, that my life was forever impacted as a woman asking questions about the future of women.”
Shortly after watching the film, Crabtree found herself a copy of Atwood’s novel. Needless to say, she found it just as jarring as the film adaptation. And it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time in her life.
“(It) was quite a big moment because I was actually working in fashion — in a very specific world — and I was really trying very hard to understand how to get into film,” she explains. “I moved to New York in 1985 ... and then I saw the film in 1990. That was a hugely instrumental time that made me question what I was doing in the fashion world. I wanted to have a bigger voice. And I wanted to represent other women that you do not see in the fashion world, even to this day.
“I wanted to represent brownskinned people, black people. Film was a way to do that.”
Crabtree says The Handmaid’s Tale helped give her the push she had been looking for.
Fast-forward, oh, about 27 years and Crabtree admits she never could have imagined she would get the opportunity to put her own spin on the story.
“It’s so personal for me to do a good job,” she explains of her role as lead costume designer on the Emmy Award-winning show.
“On a million levels — it’s unfolding in a different way every day: personally, emotionally, psychologically, politically. I feel a huge sense of responsibility, not just to the elders who made the film, but to women in the world to get it right.”
So how did she get the costumes “right?”
“The book influenced me there, wholly. I only changed one thing, which was the Econo women and men in grey as opposed to multicolours,” she says.
But while she knew which colours to choose in a broad sense, she initially struggled with navigating the nuances.
“It has to be emotional,” she says of the colours. “It has to creep into your consciousness. It can’t hit you over the head or it would be so boring — this giant swath of red hitting you over the head constantly. “It would have no impact.” Her formative years in New York City as well as her formal education in art and art history helped.
“If you grow up as an adult, if your education is in New York and you’re not from there, you’re quite taken by a concrete world. Colour really shows up,” she explains.
But it was perhaps the one thing Crabtree says she does the worst that helped her when she was planning the “visual poetry” that would become regarded as some of the best work she’s done to date.
“The thing that I don’t know how to do at all is music — and yet I insist on playing the cello badly, because it really moves me,” she says with a laugh. “It has been the way in to this work specifically, because it’s so poignant and so stirring emotion-wise. Whenever I have a block, which I often do, even recently for Season 2, I’m always stumped saying I’ve lost it, I’ve lost my fire. Everything I had last year is gone! I’m a failure!”
When she encountered that moment during preparation for Season 2, she turned to cello-heavy music — specifically the remix of This Bitter Earth by Dinah Washington and Max Richter — to renew her inspiration.
With the exact colours nailed down, Crabtree then turned her attention to fabric.
“It’s a very thin, floaty — but at the same time heavy. We did that on purpose,” she says of the rayon textile of the handmaids’ cloaks. “If you find the right fabric that can evoke that onscreen, but also on the body, they can feel that.”
To do that, Crabtree added extra panels to the dresses in order to make them “flow.”
When Crabtree first met the show’s star and executive producer Elizabeth Moss in a hotel room with the final five dress options, she recalls she made the actress get moving — literally.
“I immediately made her put them on and walk around, set to music,” she says with a laugh. The chosen dress was one Crabtree and Moss easily agreed upon.
“We immediately felt it. It was because of the movement of the rayon fabric.”
Funnily (and slightly ironically) enough given the seriousness of the project, it is this very fabric — and the countless others Crabtree and her team use to put together the costumes — that are now giving back to people in need.
“Our fabrics from our handmaids, our fabrics from our commander’s wives and our Econowives and commanders even, all of that is finding its way onto the backs of children in Third World countries as well as homeless people in Toronto — and that’s super cool,” she explains of an initiative that was started by a Toronto woman named Diana Collins.
The happenstance meeting between Crabtree and Collins has led the award-nominated costumer straight to her latest project, an as-yet-unnamed documentary telling Collins’ story of the scraps she collects for use in “healing art,” as well as clothing, mattresses and scarves.
“It’s about women and it’s about struggle,” she says of the project, which sees her working alongside her assistant on The Handmaid’s Tale, Courtney Mitchell. “It’s closely, I’m sure not by accident, aligned with the vibe of The Handmaid’s Tale.”
So given the fact she has now had more than a few occasions to tell both Atwood and Wilson how she feels about them, has Crabtree ever divulged? Not quite.
“Daniel Wilson, I think a little bit, because he’s been around. And the man is so kind! I’ve had a chance to very shyly, quietly tell him,” she admits.
“With Ms. Atwood, I’ve told her very quietly because the world wants to speak with her and grab her. And tell their whole story to her when they see her. She’s such a beautiful conversationalist, as is Daniel Wilson, so I just kind of sit and listen with mouth agape when they’re talking.
“It’s awful because I’ve been next to her on the red carpet almost fainting just looking at her.”