20 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
1
DISCOVERIESDEPT.
MOHONK’SHOMEMOVIES
I
n 1869, Albert Smiley, a nature-loving
Quaker schoolteacher, bought a prop-
erty at a good price: a few hundred acres
surrounding a lake and a tavern in New
Paltz, New York, in the Shawangunk
Mountains, on a ridge “covered in charred
stumps,” Priscilla (Pril) Smiley said the
Sandy Powell
1
THEPICTURES
LAPELARCHEOLOGY
L
ike Robert De Niro gaining sixty
pounds to play Jake LaMotta in
“Raging Bull,” which Martin Scorsese
directed, in 1980, the budget for Scor-
sese’s latest film, “The Irishman,” bal-
looned, reportedly, from a hundred and
twenty-five million dollars to a hundred
and fifty-nine million dollars. This in-
crease was in large part a result of the
special effects required to make De Niro,
who is seventy-six, and is onscreen al-
most constantly for the movie’s three
and a half hours, look as young as he
was when he filmed “Raging Bull.”
Sandy Powell, who was a costume
designer on “The Irishman,” which
spans five decades in the life of Frank
Sheeran, a hit man for the mobster Rus-
sell Bufalino, took a less expensive ap-
proach to de-aging De Niro for his cos-
tume-fitting photographs. “It was very
distracting, with his face and his gray
hair,” Powell explained the other day, at
Angels Costumes, a film-and-TV
costume-rental company in northwest
London. “So I actually got pictures of
him from ‘Goodfellas,’ or whatever, and
literally stuck the head on the photo,
and it really made a difference. With
the older, real head, it’s, like, ‘Oh, that’s
weird.’ But then you put the younger
head on, and it worked.”
De Niro had a hundred and two cloth-
ing changes for “The Irishman,” based
on selections from the thousands of gar-
ments that Powell pulled from racks
at costume-rental companies in New
York and Los Angeles. These range from
the suit Sheeran wears at one of his chil-
dren’s baptisms—“that’s a fairly cheap-
looking fifties suit, before he got a bit
more money and started wearing better-
is gone.... He’s way beyond the blue”—
followed by an orchestral swell and a
sweeping overhead shot of a deep, end-
less ocean. “He had work to do, and he
wanted to do it,” John continues. “To
say what he had to say. A real, bell-ring-
ing truth.” It’s a very Terry moment.
—Andrew Marantz
actors were allowed to wear the under-
wear of their choice. “Provided it wasn’t
distracting—so long as you haven’t got
boxers that are crammed into something
that’s too tight,” she said.
The most important challenge for
older actors playing younger is to remem-
ber to move like a young person, Powell
went on: “Head up instead of forward,
shoulders back instead of rounded, even
walking on your toes more than schlump-
ing. It’s just sort of a lighter walk. Swing-
ing your arms—if you have a swing in
your arms when you walk, it makes you
look younger.” What’s revealed by the
costumes of “The Irishman” is that, aside
from the slightest widening of a leg or
of a lapel, the clothes De Niro and his
peers wear have changed much less than
the bodies inside them. “I can see a suit
changing,” Powell said. “But, for the
general public, they will just see a bloke
in a suit.”
—Rebecca Mead
quality things,” Powell explained—to the
sweatpants he wears while parked in a
wheelchair in the nursing home where
he spends the years before his death, in
- “We made those a bit oversized,”
Powell said. “We spent half the film mak-
ing him look bigger”—Sheeran was six
feet four, while De Niro is five-ten—
“and then at the end we wanted him to
shrink and be aged.” The elderly Sheer-
an’s outfit is Powell’s favorite costume in
the movie: “There’s something really sad
about it, because he is still making an
effort—he’s got a nice pressed shirt on,
but with horrible track pants.”
Powell’s job in dressing De Niro—
and his septuagenarian co-stars Joe Pesci
and Al Pacino—was made easier by the
fact that their characters came of age in
the middle of the twentieth century, when
men dressed formally from the onset of
adulthood. “Everybody looked much
older in the fifties, didn’t they?” Powell
said. “My mum was twenty when she
had me, and you look at pictures of her
then and she looks like she’s in her late
thirties.” Powell, who is British, was born
in 1960, and got her start in costume de-
sign in the early eighties, working with
Lindsay Kemp, the late choreographer;
Powell has received fourteen Academy
Award nominations and has won three
times (for “Shakespeare in Love,” in 1999;
“The Aviator,” in 2005; and “The Young
Victoria,” in 2010). She has vivid orange
hair, cut short, and was wearing baggy
black pants and a jacket with slashed
panels across the shoulder blades, both
by Comme des Garçons. “I love Comme
des Garçons—you can wear it forever,”
she said. It was just as well, she remarked,
that she wasn’t trying to dress senior ac-
tors in the clothes worn by young peo-
ple today. “Jeans that are low slung, on
somebody who’s like seventy?” she said,
with a trace of distaste.
In “The Irishman,” the actors’ faces
and hands were digitally de-aged by the
visual-effects supervisor, Pablo Helman—
the technique involves eliminating lines,
raising eyes, and diminishing jowls—but,
when it came to de-aging the actors’ bod-
ies, Powell had to resort to more analog
measures. She encouraged the men to
wear elasticated undershirts—essentially,
Spanx for the torso—under their clothes.
“Sometimes they wore them, and some-
times they didn’t,” she acknowledged.
When it came to the nether regions, the
