Making sheet happen
A Ghost Story director David Lowery and costume designer Annell Brodeur on creating an iconic costume
THE SHEET
“Initially I thought it was going to be as easy as putting a sheet over someone’s head,” laughs David Lowery, director of A Ghost Story, in which Casey Affleck dies and comes back as a ghost wearing a sheet. Not so. “A king sheet isn’t long enough to go over a person in general, so we knew we would have to get some fabric and make it,” says costume designer Annell Brodeur. “I had a removable lining that would go in and that was usually used to help David let light bleed through the sheet,” she adds. “There are a few times when you can see through it and it’s really beautiful.”
THE SILHOUETTE
“I wanted it to look more like a drawing of someone wearing a bed-sheet ghost costume than an actual person wearing that costume,” says Lowery of the silhouette. That meant producing a “bell shape” with enough fabric to cover Affleck completely. Lowery says the final result involves plenty of puppeteering as well. “Usually before a shot, David would say, ‘His eye is collapsing!’” says Brodeur, laughing. “It was a very delicate process in the end.”
THE FEET
“It’s easy to focus on the top part of the sheet because that’s where the eyes are,” says Lowery. “But the bottom part is just as important and just as easy to get wrong.” Early camera tests revealed a lot of “ankles and feet”, according to Brodeur. Enough fabric had to be produced in order to give the ghost what Lowery calls a “slight billowing quality” without revealing Affleck’s size 9s. When the actor had to move, someone was positioned just out of shot to point him the right way.
THE EYES
“I’ve talked to a lot of people who assume that the eyes change shape throughout the film,” says Lowery. “They don’t. They’re always exactly the same.” Trial and error led to the shape, size and exact placing of the eyes (one test sheet was used almost entirely for dry runs for eyeholes), with Lowery admitting that he wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for until he found it. “It was about finding the right shape, the right angle, the right distance to allow the emotion to come through. I did know that I wanted the eyes to be vacant.”
THE ACTOR
Bar a few shots in the movie, which required Affleck to be in them as ‘C’ while the ghost lingered nearby, Affleck is under that sheet the entire time. Not that you’d necessarily know. “Casey wasn’t approaching it with any sense of ego or any sense he needed to make sure audiences knew he was under there,” says Lowery. In fact, the two worked to reduce the amount of time Affleck was
identifiable through the sheet, after an early scene where the ghost wakes up in a hospital morgue “felt very goofy and almost slapsticky. We needed to reduce the degree to which the audience would recognise the actor under the sheet, and make him more anonymous.”
THE IMPACT
The costume caught on immediately, with the film’s release in America celebrated with a pop-up shop in New York (one also opened in Seoul to mark the South Korean release), while Lowery was delighted to see ghosts aplenty on Hallowe’en. How does he know they were his ghost and not just blokes in sheets? “There were lots of couples doing the ghost and Rooney [Mara] with the pie,” he laughs. “It’s been amazing to see, even in a small way, how much reach this costume has had.”
A GHOST STORY IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD