Costume Designer Ellen Mirojnick On Creating J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Iconic ‘Sheriff’ Look

Awards Daily talks to Emmy Award-winning costume designer Ellen Mirojnick (Behind the Candelabra) about working with Christopher Nolan to develop J. Robert Oppenheimer’s iconic look.

Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick has worked with her share of impressive directors, including Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone, and Adrian Lyne, and with Oppenheimer, she added Christopher Nolan to her roster.

“It doesn’t get better than that,” she says. “He’s sublime. Working with Christopher was a dream come true. He’s everything that you read about and then some. He’s spectacular, a spectacular collaborator, a spectacular visionary. We all have so much work to do to fulfill Chris’s vision, but you want to always feel like you’re in good hands, that you know you’re all working toward the same idea. So much of that doesn’t necessarily happen all the time.”

Mirojnick says that one of the misconceptions about costuming period films is that it should be “easy” since all of the research is right there. However, the research is just the foundation; then it’s up to the costume designer to adapt or interpret the character.

“Period pieces are hard because we’re creating a portrait—we’re not creating a biography. And it’s an adaptation. You work with the actor to be able to design the character and craft the character so that it’s very well-suited to who they are going to play and how they are going to appear within the story Chris is telling. That is an adaptation, not a historical documentary.”

Another design misconception that Mirojnick demystifies is that men are not fun to design for.

“I love designing for men. I’ve done my fair share of everything, but when push comes to shove, I really get a thrill designing male characters. My task is to analyze the silhouette and what it should be and how I’m going to achieve it, what fabrications I’m going to use to create what my mind’s eye says. With that, you have to find the right tailor, the right fabrications, the right colorations, the right shape. It’s different than designing for women. For women, you can get distracted by adding different things. For men, it’s sleek, it’s paired down. You’re defining a full silhouette.”

In the case of Oppenheimer, it was a very specific silhouette she and her team were after.

“It was actually the same throughout his life—except when he gets to Los Alamos, when we purposefully did a look that was a bit more workwear and a bit more sheriff-y. The fabrication was a rough twill and high-twist fabric that was simpatico with the landscape and terrain. The colors were chosen for that reason. There was nothing urban about it. It was really akin to New Mexico and Los Alamos. And that’s where we introduced the hat. The whole look together becomes a man empowered.”

One of the challenges in Mirojnick’s research on Oppenheimer was that everything was in black and white.

“You have to use your imagination. When it came to his shirtings, there are contrasts. Chris said, ‘What do you think the shirts would be?’ I said blue, probably because Cillian’s [Murphy] eyes were staring me in the face. They’re so beautiful like the sea! Between the blue of the sky and the ochre-high twist of fabrication of his suit, it really told a story of where he was and what he had created.”

That same suit, although it was the same shape, took on a lot of different dramatic tones for the character.

“He tended to lose a lot of weight, and when he lost a lot of weight, the suit looked like a different shape, kind of voluminous and David Bowie-like. We got a lot of different notes to play with with that suit, and it actually shifted the tone of the fabric when they go to the Trinity test. That image of him coming out of his office in that suit, the shirt, his tag, his hat, and his belt—we didn’t plan it that way! But we knew how strong an image we needed to create. We needed to say, ‘This is the man; he has come into his full power, and he is the sheriff of his town.'”

Oppenheimer is available on 4K, Blu-Ray, Digital, and DVD on 11/21.