How Real World Costumes Animate the Looks of ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’

When costume designer Deborah L. Scott first worked with director James Cameron on “Titanic” in 1997, she won a well-deserved Academy Award for her work; this year, she received her second nomination for another Cameron film, “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” and her achievement in that film is even more impressive. Over the course of three “Avatar” movies, Scott has crafted thousands of costumes for the completely fictional world of Pandora, rooting her designs in meticulous research (Cameron’s mandate was that everything should be drawn from real-world influences) but then letting her imagination take flight to create a vivid, fully realized fantasy world.

Although the “Avatar” films are shot using performance capture technology in which every physical detail is executed by visual effects artists after the live-action portion of production, Scott’s department fabricated hundreds of costumes and accessories for “Fire and Ash” so that the digital artists would know how the clothes responded to movement and the elements. “I have an incredible team of people who work for me and are just brilliant with their hands,” Scott told IndieWire. “After I start designing on paper, the first thing I try to do is get into the workshop and start building samples, because that’s where the cultures really come alive.”

For “Fire and Ash,” Scott had to design costumes for two entirely new cultures, the Wind Traders and the Ash Clan. In each case, no detail was superfluous or designed only for aesthetic impact (though the costumes are some of the most beautiful of any film last year); the greatness of Scott’s costume designs comes in their use as a storytelling tool that conveys the entire history of the characters that are wearing them. The Wind Traders, for example, are nomads who live in the sky, and their culture and lifestyle are clearly represented in their clothes.

“Jim and I started by talking about their environment,” Scott said. “It’s cold, and it’s windy, so they would need to weave more cloth.” Scott’s concept was that, like many of the indigenous people she studied in her research, the Wind Traders would weave their own clothing with their hands — and that they would like to express themselves through a great deal of accessorizing. The variety of accessories speaks to the Wind Traders’ lifestyle, as presumably they’ve been able to buy and sell a wide range of goods while traversing Pandora. That lifestyle is also represented in the loincloths Scott created for the characters.

“They’re skirts, basically,” Scott said. “They could cover more of the body in the cold, but then tuck up when the characters needed to climb up into the rigging, which is another part of their environment. Their work led the costume design in terms of the science and practicality of the climbing, rigging, and hauling ropes that they had to do. That physicality partly separated them from other clans.”

Another way in which Scott wanted to differentiate the Wind Traders from other clans was in the use of color. “I wanted more saturated jewel tones because I hadn’t used that before,” Scott said, noting that the Wind Traders’ weather conditions gave her the justification to use vibrant capes and other vividly colored garments. “Jim and I talked a lot about capes flapping in the wind and rippling as someone walks, being thrown over a shoulder, and things like that.” Seeing how the capes reacted in these physical environments was another reason why it was so key to actually build the costumes, rather than having the CG artists create them from artwork.

Another reason why this was important was the collaboration between Scott and the actors in using the costumes to express character. Varang, the leader of the Ash clan, played by Oona Chaplin, was a case in point; the actor’s physicality was so powerful that it inspired Scott to take a more ambitious approach to the character than had been initially intended. In the original conception of Varang, Scott and Cameron thought the character would wear the same costume throughout the film, but as the filmmakers saw and responded to Chaplin’s performance they decided to give her several costume changes throughout the film — a decision that both deepened her character and made Scott’s job exponentially more challenging, as each costume was built and rebuilt in the digital world, constantly refined over the course of several years. (Scott began working on Ash people designs nearly 10 years ago.)

“Oona Chaplin had a very distinctive way of walking and presenting her character,” Scott said. “It would inform my look for her, as I realized she needed something more presentational, with more sway.” A key part of Varang’s look is the headdress that she wears, which Scott employed to give a sense of the character’s power and singularity among the Ash clan. “It’s an adornment that has a really striking effect. You see her coming. The feathers are fresh and bold and clean — she’s not dirty like the other people in her clan, whose feathers are a bit mangy and dark if you look closely.”

Given that the Ash clan came from a far darker place psychologically and historically than the Wind Traders, Scott wanted their costumes and accessories to go in an entirely different direction. “There are piercings and a lot of scars that are part of the psyche of these people,” Scott said. “They’re masochistic, and sadistic, and live in a dark part of the world. They don’t travel like the Wind Traders, so they’re limited to what’s in this barren landscape. And they don’t want to celebrate, so they’re not very demonstrative in their clothing.”

Cameron decided that he wanted the color palette of the Ash to be as grim as the Wind Traders’ world was vibrant. “Jim wanted the black of the ash of the volcano, with an accent of red for fire and blood,” Scott said, noting that the color red had rarely been used in the world of “Avatar” before, which allowed Varang to stand out even more — as did the body paint used for her and other Ash people. “That came from research into indigenous people all over the world, who paint their bodies for both decorative reasons and practical ones, like protection from the sun.”

Looking back on nearly 20 years of working on “Avatar” films, Scott says what stands out to her is the intensively collaborative nature of the series, where she has been able to evolve her designs via conversations not only with actors and production designers but visual effects artists and even composer Simon Franglen, who worked with Scott and other department heads to develop the details of Na’vi culture. “It shows that we as costume designers can be everywhere,” Scott said. “We can collaborate and contribute on a larger platform, in different kinds of media, toward all the ways a character needs to be brought to life.”

As elaborate as the “Avatar” movies have been, however, at the end of the day, Scott says her job still comes down to the same core principle: using clothes to tell a story. “It all starts with character and the hands-on craftspeople in the workshop,” she said. “And it’s all under Jim’s guidance. We all have talents and bring something to the project, but he guides everybody — you’re nothing if you don’t have everybody working in the same direction, going down the road together trying to create something, and he’s a real visionary. It’s been an amazing journey.”