Earlier this year, The Bluff was released through Prime MGM Studios, first in theaters and then through Amazon’s streaming platform. A pirate story yes, but also a story about the Island culture around Jamaica in the 19th century. It’s a wonderful film, cathartically violent with bad guys we’re comfortable rooting against because of how blatantly evil they are. Our hero is a lady, and in this story, which was written by Frank E. Flowers and Joe Ballarini and directed by Flowers, she is allowed to be as capable as a character with her backstory would be. Ercell, Priyanka Chopra (in yet another role which ought to reaffirm her role as action super star of the 21st century), has a lot on her plate but lives a life filled with love on Cayman Brac, and only returns to who she once was under duress.
The costume designer for the film, Antoinette Messam, who I spoke with last year about The House of Clarence, is one of the best period designers working today, and I was thrilled to be able to speak with her again about her latest project.
An action movie, with its actors and stunts and stunt people, puts some challenges on costumes that are unique to the genre. Costumes are a big part of continuity in a story like this one, they are directly braided into the audience’s ability to achieve suspension of disbelief, and there is protective gear for performers to wear any time there a fight breaks out or a piece of a set explodes into an inferno.
Knowing how many costumes period films can require, I asked the designer if she had an estimate of how many she had made for The Bluff.
“Believe it or not,” Messam laughed, “not as many as The Book of Clarence. This was similar to The Harder They Fall, where they didn’t have as many changes, it all happens in a day. Priyanka had a couple of changes because of flashbacks. We saw her in the Indian-inspired aqua two-piece that she wears to the bluff to use her spyglass to see if her husband was coming home. That is her trying to reclaim her heritage. And with that costume we adapted it a little bit to be a little bit more modest than it would be now. It would be cropped a lot higher, worn with more midriff out. I just didn’t feel that because it was Victorian times that felt appropriate. She was on an island. She hadn’t been home since she was a child. In my head, she came up with this design from memory. And what she had on was something she could have gotten; the fabric from a merchant ship that came over from Jamaica or one of the other islands. Maybe Elizabeth helped her to make it.”
A Threatened Island Paradise
The people of Cayman Brac, and how bright and colorful and joyful their community was, I told the designer that I felt that this was reflected in the textiles that they wore and decorated with. And then, when we see that community versus the pirates, that coloration becomes more distinct when the brightness meets the darker rainbow of pirate colors.
“I’d done this period before,” Messam explained, “but Victorian in London or the Americas is very different from Victorian in the Cayman Islands, which is not even a main island. It’s a small, small island that was very secondary to Jamaica and Barbados, and other bigger islands that had the infrastructure of sugar cane plantations, overseers, women of the manor with their servants. That was all very evident from my research in Jamaica at the time, which was the Cayman sister island. But the people who landed on the Brac were farmers, former indentured servants and indentured laborers. They were runaway slaves. Some of them freed slaves. They were the mishmash of diverse people from all walks of life who ended up there. And that was Irish, Scottish, Indian too, as well as Chinese.”
Keeping all of that straight, when there might be a dozen characters to dress before extras, representing two different camps, all the stunts and injuries sustained on film, it’s a massive amount of organization, keeping all of that straight, all those clothes for all of those actors.
“It was a lot of organization,” the designer confirmed. “But I was very intentional, and I had my two assistant designers, who are like my right arm and my left arm. Jillian Steinhardt oversaw Connor’s costume with the cutter and did the manufacturing of the sailors, and then Madeline Turner, our local ACD, did Ercell, Elizabeth and the townspeople. Michelle Wickey was my cutter for Elizabeth. I had an incredible, incredible crew. I mean, the Australian crew are such artists.”
The costume designer believes that another reason for the success of her department, as well as the cohesion between this film’s creative departments, was the setup of their departments.
“In Australia we were all on the same floor in a Billabong shop. And when I walked in, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m sharing a bullpen with the entire art department.’ You might have thought that was going to be a little hairy, because there’s a lot of us sharing one space. But it turned out to be incredible. If I’m by my work table, our big cutting table, where we would do all our meetings and stuff, I could see what was happening in the art department. It was really communal. It was like a community. It really became very family oriented, we just all shared resources and information. I think it really showed on screen that we’ve worked together as a team.”
Ultimate Bad Guy Pirates
There is an alchemy that happens in design. An idea that starts in one person’s head gets explained to others, people who then work as a team to drag that first fragment into existence in the form of a physical object.
“I’d had the concept art made months before,” Messam said, “I had two incredible concept artists, Gina DeMonaco from LA, and Seth Justice from Australia. “It is shocking to me how it literally walked off the page. It’s like, wow, we did that. Not ‘I’, ‘we’, because it takes a village.”
Costuming all these vengeful pirates is an enormous project, they all need little details and everything is made in multiples. I didn’t see how it would have been possible without a massive team; this is not work that can be done outside of the physical world, there aren’t even digital shortcuts.
There are quite a few pirates who have become iconic in the centuries since the Golden Age of Piracy. I wanted to know if Connor, who certainly feels like an iconic pirate, was based on any specific historical figures or if he had his own story particular to this character.
“His background is he was a commander in the Navy for the East Indian Trading Company,” Messam told me. “So, he was true military. If you look at his coat, and look at say, Master and Commander, Russell Crowe, that’s the same jacket. Just adapt a little adaptation here and there to fit Carl Irvin’s physique. But that silhouette is an actual commander’s coat. I had the book in the reference, and I’m showing it to the cutter. And I’m like, ‘this is what I want. And down to the buttons. Military buttons.’ His boots are also authentic, what he would have worn as a commander. That is him carrying those pieces that are the base of his costume, that he still has with him.”
The character has retained the formality of his former rank, maybe it helps him lead or maybe he just likes the clothes. Either way, it establishes that this guy has an opinion, a style, a way of doing things that feels personal. This is one of the many ways that well designed costumes help turn a character into a person that an audience wants to believe in.
“And what he wears underneath,” Messam continued, “is what has evolved with him losing the rigidness of being a commander working for a company, to rebelling, being rogue and becoming a pirate. So the silhouette of the pants is not much different than his actual pants, he would have worn as a commander is just now black. His vest is the same shape as the white one that he would have worn as commander, but now it’s in leather. He could have easily said to a tailor, or someone who sews, ‘Here’s my vest, make me a leather one, one that is almost like armor but it’ll be harder for a sword to cut through.’”
A Costume Worn At The Film’s Premiere
I asked if Messam would tell me about Priyanka Chopra wearing the cuirass she designed, protective bodice made of a chest and back plate, to the premiere. I’d read about it in Women’s Wear Daily and wanted to know how it came to happen; it is not every film whose star wants to wear her armor on the red carpet.
“We were prepping the film in Australia and before I went, we had a meeting with Priyanka at her home,” Messam said. “At that time, I didn’t know what the Bloody Mary costume was going to be, but we wanted to work on Ercell, her farmer-fisherman-wife, day dress. What was she going to wear at night? And showing her some visuals of pirates and female pirates, just getting her head wrapped around a direction.”
After that meeting the designer went to Australia to prepare for filming. Working with Kit, the cutter she’d mentioned to me earlier, Messam began to create options for the cuirass Chopra would wear. They settled on a skin that would hold the shape she wanted to create, which also had the right color.
“I’d seen the production designer, Philip Ivey, design the sails for her ship with the siren,” the designer told me. “I wanted to incorporate that as her brand or her symbol. The siren in folklore entices ships and men to her, and then of course they shipwreck. It was on her ship and I wanted it on her armor.”
“We put a couple of mock-ups together because they could have been a few different shapes. When I traveled back to LA about a month later to fit her and when she tried the first one on she’s like, ‘how do I get this for the premiere?’ She thought it was really symbolic of the kind of craftsmanship that was going to be done for the film. And she’d never worn anything like that before. She’d never played a character like this before. I was honored, but I have no control over that stuff. So other than, you know, backing up with a truck and throwing one in there, and driving it over to her house, it was out of my hands. But at the time I’d mentioned it to our creative producer at AGBO. Then, when we were wrapping, Priyanka said it again, ‘you got to get this to me for the premiere’. So now it’s an official memo to all powers to be; Priyanka wasn’t joking. She wants one of these to premiere. So you guys make it happen. And they did.”
