The Baltimore Sun
Richard La Motte, chief costume designer for the Civil War movie "Gods and Generals," checks an actor's clothes in between takes.

Costume designer makes sure that actors have the right look

HOLLY SELBY, THE BALTIMORE SUN

Originally published Sunday, February 24, 2002

HARPER'S FERRY, W.Va. -- Richard La Motte stands, eyes narrowed, on the edge of a movie set. The hills cradling this historic town rise and fall in gentle swells around him, and the trees cling to the reds and golds of an unusually warm autumn. But in the scene from "Gods and Generals," the Civil War movie unfolding before him, it is supposed to be a chill December day in 1862, just after the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Corpses and broken furniture and shards of ceramic pots litter the streets. Feathers from a mattress shredded by Union soldiers waft through the air like snow. Confederate foot soldiers, some shivering in their winter uniforms, stagger through town, their expressions blank as they survey the destruction. Behind the infantrymen, officers on horseback wend their way past the wreckage. They are followed by Gen. Robert E. Lee -- played by Robert Duvall -- who rides into town on a muddy white horse.

To many eyes, the wintry tableau would seem picture perfect. But La Motte views the scene differently. As chief costume designer, his job is to illustrate the film with clothing. When he looks at the drama before him, he sees not the soldiers, but every detail of what they wear.

A frown lowers his brows. "They don't look cold enough," he says to an assistant.

He is in luck.

Director Ronald F. Maxwell, unhappy with the way the feathers are falling, wants to re-shoot the entire scene.

When the assistant director yells "Cut!" La Motte rockets across the set. He swerves around plundered housewares, rushes through clouds of artificial gun smoke and leaps over mannequins outfitted to resemble fallen soldiers until he reaches a wardrobe truck parked out of camera range. He and an assistant grab armloads of heavy woolen coats that have been meticulously splattered with mud and run back across the set toward the soldiers.

La Motte and his crew rush from actor to actor, passing out overcoats. No one wants to keep the director waiting. "You got a big coat?" asks Carl Brandt, a Civil War re-enactor from Augusta, Colo.

Barely slowing, La Motte yanks the sleeves of a giant wool coat over Brandt's arms, tugging it past the soldier's bulky uniform. "Here you go. This'll fit."

"Clear the set!" the assistant director yells.

Quickly, La Motte is back on the sidelines, standing amid the cameramen, hairstylists, makeup artists and grips. "They didn't look cold enough," the costume designer says, slightly out of breath.

A day's work

In mid-afternoon, La Motte leaves the set and drives to a nearby empty department store he has transformed into a temporary wardrobe department. Washing machines and dryers hug one wall, racks of clothing line another. In the center, a half-dozen seamstresses and tailors sit at a line of sewing machines, stitching Confederate overcoats.

La Motte weaves through rows of hanging garments -- women's petticoats and day dresses, shawls, ball gowns, hats, men's trousers and jackets and children's clothing -- to his makeshift office. His desk is covered with sketches of period gowns, tubes of acrylic paints and brushes. Reference books line a nearby shelf.

In about two hours, Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino, who is playing the wife of Col. Joshua Chamberlain, will fly in for a late-evening fitting. Between now and then, La Motte will: stand in the parking lot spray-painting Styrofoam balls for use as pom-poms on Confederate hats called "shakos;" remind an assistant to get wet suits for the stunt doubles who next week will be filmed crossing a river; review the costumes to be presented to Sorvino, then meet with Sorvino; figure out how to build a dryer big enough to dry overnight 250 or so wet, wool overcoats.

By just about anyone's standards, "Gods and Generals" is a behemoth. From a costume designer's perspective, La Motte says, "it is a monster that needs to be fed."

Based on Jeff Shaara's book of the same name, the film follows the military career of Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. Directed and produced by Maxwell, filming here ended last month; the movie is scheduled for release in theaters later this year.

In 1993, Maxwell directed "Gettysburg," a four-hour Civil War epic renowned for the authenticity of its battle scenes. Now he aims to duplicate that realism by capturing the drudgery of a war that grinds on for years. "We're trying to get everyone as dirty as possible," La Motte says.

The movie unfolds between April 1861 to May 1863, in elegant homes, three public theaters, fields and dirt roads, in summer and winter. There are 157 speaking parts and a cast that includes nearly 3,000 Civil War re-enactors. On days that battle scenes are being shot, there may be as many as 800 soldiers on the set.

Duvall's Lee needs three costumes and an overcoat; so do his stunt doubles. General Jackson, played by Stephen Lang, needs 16 outfits, some of which are duplicates of the same costume, but in varying stages of aging. In the last scene, General Jackson gets shot: "We have to have five or six coats just to get through the killing," La Motte says.

He is hard-pressed to say precisely how many costumes are being used in the film. But he can say this: Whatever the costume is, if the director wants it, the costume designer is supposed to have it -- on hand and ready to go.

Color is key

Sometimes La Motte thinks of films as a sequence of paintings. Each scene is a landscape or a portrait to be filled with the brushstrokes of clothing. Add an illuminating detail with a pair of shoes. Or a dab of color with a hat. Fabric matters. So does the cut of the garment. Color matters most.

"I've always thought it was like painting. You get the script, and it is your job every day to illustrate that drama with clothes. And many times what you find is that the camera doesn't read the garment, it reads the color."

After a few weeks, the set is moved from Harper's Ferry to a family-owned farm near Keedysville, Md. As the blackness of dawn gives way to the velvet blue-gray of day, a freezing rain falls steadily, dampening the yellow grass being flattened and churned by hundreds of boots, wagon wheels and horses' hooves.

La Motte stands at the top of a hill next to Carl Curnutte, a member of the wardrobe crew. Both men warm their hands on their coffee cups.

The scene calls for scores of townspeople to flee their homes as the Union army ransacks the city. Huddled under worn blankets or shawls and clutching small satchels or baskets, they rehearse the scene.

"Looks pretty good," Curnutte says to La Motte.

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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