COSTUME DESIGN
by Isis Mussenden
NEW CHALLENGES
The beauty of the Narnia stories is that each book is its own story, yet they’re interconnected and reference each other because the hero and the main character of “The Chronicles of Narnia” is always Narnia. New faces are introduced – we lose some beloved characters but we gain new ones as the stories progress. Having this rich base to build upon for new characters and cultures makes my job as a costume designer endlessly exciting.
The scope of “Prince Caspian” is massive – about 10 times bigger than the first film (we tried to count the rivets on the brigandines and we can’t – it was over a million!). We have a cast that has quadrupled and on top of that we have to build multiple sizes for Georgie and Skandar who continue to grow at such a rapid pace. Georgie hit 5 feet tall finally after all these years. When we started with her, she was just 8 years old – it’s kind of amazing to us! We have probably built over 1,000 pieces just for the extras, including the Telmarine village. In addition we build everything for the soldiers; boots, brigandines, greaves, pants, shirts, gloves – the only thing I didn’t create really are their underwear and socks.
NARNIANS VS. TELMARINES
One of my goals in this movie was two create two distinct cultures with the Narnians and the Telmarines. I was determined to make the Telmarine soldiers, cavalry & lords look completely different – they were from a foreign land and this needed to be evident all the way down to the chain mail. On the other hand, with the Narnian armor we imported through lines, design-wise, from the first film but we re-vamped it to reflect a more renegade style. These old Narnians are essentially on the run, hiding in the woods and their resultant unrefined appearance needed to stand in contrast to the sophisticated look of the Telmarine culture. We conceived our palette for this new culture from the El Greco paintings of the Spaniards. We were searching for colors that were acidic and hot & cool at the same time, because we didn’t want to use red and gold, which are Narnian colors. I’ve known the El Greco paintings all my life, but I did go back to Madrid to look at them again and they were so gorgeous and brutal at the same time.