Celebrity Interview: Jany Temime, Judy Costume Designer, Speaks on Creating the Iconic Image of Judy Garland

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The Oscar bound film Judy, starring Renee Zellweger, recreates the legendary story of Judy Garland during her London Talk of the Town performances, adding to the authenticity were the iconic costumes created by famed costumer Jany Temime.

Creating the last year of her life, as Ms. Garland goes from Hollywood to London, as the peak of fashion explosion, Ms. Temime describes the process and her challenges of creating this time as well as addressing the rumors surrounding the costuming, and on creating the wardrobe for the entire cast.


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The following is an excerpt from our interview.

Q, Congratulations on the film. The costumes in Judy are phenomenal and really reflective of the time, the era and the icon that she was so if you could describe a little bit about how you began working on the project and you got the job to create the magic that we see in the film Judy?

A. I really wanted to do it. I read about it on the paper that Renee [Zellweger] ,was going to play Judy Garland with name directing, and I knew Renee because I had done Bridget Jones with her I knew the  director and I asked the adjunct to call and organize an appointment with her because I really wanted to do the film.

Q. That worked out well for you then. How did you create her wardrobe?

A. Yes. I looked, I looked, I looked in everything that she had been wearing. I had to summarize two years of her life or one year of her life in twenty costumes. I showed some sketches and took some documentation, pictures and I showed that to the director. It was sort of in a way Rupert [Goold] knew exactly what he wanted for every song. As a theater director he sort of knew what he wanted to have on stage for every song she was going to sing, so that part was not easy but it easier for me because he had a very strong idea about what she wanted to sing in the colors and the effect and like, he wanted for the opening a dress with a big motif.


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I wanted to keep that sort of 50s style for her stage costume at the beginning at least because that’s what she had always sing in you know like very classic dresses and that’s what I started with and then little by little I brought in much more London 60s style by introducing some suits and I wanted to show because she was in London she started dressing a little bit more Carnaby street and even more when she gets married with Mickey and she wants to please him and she wants to be a little girl and then he gets into that very girly style that swinging 60s style of London.

But Rupert had very strong ideas of what he wanted her to wear for every song. And for the television scene I wanted her to have a red dress because she is broken down, because she sad and crying, I wanted to have a dress completely extraordinary with feathers with something which was opposite of the state of mind she was and I always try to create that sort of opposition, to show the costume was wearing was armor for her how she was presenting herself and had nothing to do with how she was feeling.


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Q. There are many rumor’s surrounding this film and one of those indicated Renee had to be sewn into her costumes?

A. I don’t know where that is coming from. Because actually what I think they wanted to say is that Renee wanted to adapt the sort of the Judy Garland posture toward the end of her life because she was so thin and unwell, and she was always walking around with shoulder curved and belly inside, a little bit curved, she was not straight at all, a completely round back. And we created the costume for that type of position maybe that was the interpretation of that. Renee never had to be sewn into and no not all we created a certain shape that she could wear when she had constantly bad posture.

Q. Where you responsible for the entire cast for rest of the costume?

A. Yes. Yes. I did everything, I did all the costume. But you know that approach was not so different because I was always starting from the reality and looking what was looking like, because it is always the problem, in a way, with those films that are based on reality, you have to know the reality so well that you can to design beyond that.

Because it is not a documentary and I was not recreating I was giving to Renee Zellweger the opportunity to play Judy Garland. I had to adapt the Judy Garland shape to Renee playing her. It’s a different research and a different approach and it was the same for Mickey. I looked at what Mickey was wearing and I he was sort of pretty cool boy, very dressed up, and he was dressed up London like, big collar, double breasted very much Carnaby Street fashion and then I did my own interpretation and dressed the actor in it. Because the actor was very much a different man, not the mythology of Mickey.


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Jany Temime has won numerous awards for her work and has designed the costumes for the Harry Potter films Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban; Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire; Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, for which she received a Costume Designers Guild Award nomination; Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince; and the two-part Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. She was awarded the Costume Designers Guild (USA) Award in 2012, for Excellence in Fantasy Film. She has previously won a BAFTA Cymru Award for her work on Marc Evans’ House Of America, and scooped the 1995 Utrecht Film Festival’s Golden Calf for Best Costume Design for Marleen Gorris’ Academy Award-winning Antonia’s Line.

Her additional credits encompass more than 40 international motion picture and television projects, her upcoming work includes 6 Underground, directed by Michael Bay, and the next film from the Marvel Universe, Black Widow starring Scarlett Johansson.