Fire-engine red. Egg-yolk yellow. Christmas-tree green.
The palettes of this year’s potential Oscar contenders can be summed up in one word: Bold.
“Everybody on Pedro’s sets ends up wearing really strong colors,” said Inbal Weinberg, the production designer who dreamed up the striking, primary color-heavy visual aesthetic for Pedro Almodóvar’s euthanasia drama, “The Room Next Door.”
We spoke with the costume, production and makeup designers for three of this year’s potential Oscar contenders — “The Substance,” “The Room Next Door” and “Wicked” — about choosing just the right shades, creating striking sets and costumes that don’t overwhelm the story and finding the secret ingredient for Elphaba’s green makeup.
Red: ‘The Room Next Door’
Even though the “The Room Next Door” tells a downbeat tale — about Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and her dying friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton) — the screen is bursting with vibrant tomato reds and electric lime greens.
“It was important to Pedro not to go into the cliché universe in which, if you’re telling a really dark story, you also have these demure interiors or a drab color palette,” said Weinberg, who worked with Almodóvar to create eye-catching monochromatic sets (like a red kitchen, with a red counter, bowls, apples, strawberries and even a phone lock screen).
For inspiration for the film’s New York City scenes, Weinberg looked to the paintings of Edward Hopper — she and Almodóvar attended the exhibition “Edward Hopper’s New York” at the Whitney Museum in 2023 — as well as homes built by modernist architects like Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier, who favored primary colors.
“When we encountered the house in the woods, it felt too clinical — it was basically white, with a lot of blonde wood,” she said of the place where the characters decamp for a month to carry out Martha’s end-of-life plan. “Adding the colors was a way for us to warm up the house and make it a space where you want to spend your last days.”
Bina Daigeler, who designed the stars’ decidedly non-funereal wardrobes, took a similar approach.
“Even though she was wearing these very strong colors, it was really important for Tilda that we could show also through the costumes — and not only through her acting and her makeup — that she is so fragile.”
Yellow: ‘The Substance’
The costume designer Emmanuelle Youchnovski always knew she wanted a standout piece for Demi Moore’s character in “The Substance.”
“She needs to have control, so her coat is very important — it’s like armor,” Youchnovski said of Demi Moore’s character, an actress in her 50s whom Hollywood has officially deemed over the hill in Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body horror film.
Youchnovski tried about 15 coats from various stores and designers, but none was quite right, she said. This one was too dark; that one didn’t create a big enough silhouette. So they eventually decided to make one with enormous lapels, voluminous sleeves and an oversized fit.
And, most crucially, in a shade that would stop traffic a long way off.
“You see the sun everywhere, so the yellow coat you can see far away, also,” she said.
Her vision, Youchnovski said, was always for a decidedly masculine garment.
“When she’s distracted by age, she wraps herself in the coat,” said Youchnovski, who opted for virgin wool sourced from Italy. “She’s a woman in a masculine world, and this is a masculine coat with a big collar and cuffed sleeves.”
The task of a “Wicked” production designer might at first appear simple: Make it green.
Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, said Nathan Crowley, who worked on Jon M. Chu’s “Wizard of Oz”-adjacent musical fantasy extravaganza. He built an Emerald City using more than a dozen shades of green, yes, but also rust reds, navy blues, bronzes and gun metals.
“We have to find the room — define it — without stepping on Elphaba’s green,” he said. “ We have to be in the background; she has to be in the foreground. So if you look at that set, it feels green, but it’s not if you actually look at it.”
Paul Tazewell, who designed more than 1,000 costumes for the “Wicked” films (Part Two arrives next November), including more than 500 for the Emerald City scenes alone, was up for the challenge.
“We’ve got emeralds and greens that are bluer, greens that are chartreuse. And then contrasting that with pops of fuchsia and magenta, and different kinds of blues, and some turquoise as well. So that creates a little bit of sparkle,” said Tazewell, who won a Tony Award in 2016 for his work on the Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
But perhaps most important: Finding the right green makeup for Elphaba (played by Cynthia Erivo).
“It had to look beautiful on Cynthia in every light, not look like face paint, not rub off on the costumes or Ari and last 12 hours,” the makeup designer, Frances Hannon, said, referring to Erivo’s co-star Ariana Grande.
The secret ingredient, she said, was a couple of drops of neon yellow fluorescent base in a small bottle of the green shade. The tactic — a formula she borrowed from a vivid eye shadow — gave the makeup a reflective quality and made it look like skin, not face paint.
“In some of the light, as she turns, the highlight on her cheekbones, the base of the green, catches the light differently, and that is why her skin looks so real,” she said.
