RUNNING SCARED: COSTUME DESIGNER KRISTIN BURKE
Published   February 16, 2010
||Source - Clothes On Film

Costume designer for Running Scared (2006), Kristin M. Burke, has kindly chatted to us about her contribution to the movie. Being a long time friend of Clothes on Film, she opened up her big book of anecdotes specially. For anyone even remotely interested in costume design this is essential reading.

Running Scared (directed by Wayne Kramer) is a restless action thriller; an enjoyable, if visually exhausting and violent fairytale. Paul Walker stars as Joey Gazelle, a low-level mob hood frantically searching for a ‘hot’ weapon he was supposed to stash, while pursed by crooked cops and an impatient mafia family. Vera Farmiga features as Joey’s loyal yet independent wife Teresa, who frankly has a bad enough time of it herself.

The film has garnered something of a cult following since its release and holds up well on sheer momentum alone. With a packed CV including The Cooler (2003) and recently Crossing Over (2009), Kristin Burke is highly experienced in her field. Yet the shoot for Running Scared was about as testing as they come. As calmly as possible, she tells us why:

Chris, Clothes on Film: I had a quick look over the film again today. I think I may be a little in love with Vera Farmiga.

Kristin Burke: He-heh. There’s a lot to love.

Chris: So then, you mentioned to me earlier that Running Scared was a difficult shoot. Can you elaborate why?

KB: Well, the film is set in New Jersey; we shot in Prague. That’s one thing. Prague is such a beautiful city, and we ended up having to disguise it! Money was the issue. The cost to shoot six weeks in Prague was the same as the cost to shoot two weeks in Jersey. The wages in the CZ (Czech Republic) are about 1/3 what they are in NJ, and we shot a lot of the film on ‘soundstages’. I use that term loosely because it was actually an old MIG (airplane) factory. Asbestos fell from the ceiling and it was freezing cold. It was way on the outskirts of town, and quite an experience. I was fortunate enough to bring my costume supervisor with me. When we landed in Prague we had a pre-selected crew waiting for us. Of those six people, only one spoke English. It was very difficult, and not ideal.

That aside, we also had late, VERY LATE, casting. And when you try to make a movie about New Jersey, you need to have those resources at your fingertips. There is NO store in Prague at which you can buy gangster wear, pimp clothes, hooker clothes – so it was a true challenge. Also at the time you were not allowed to make returns on anything you purchased from a store in the CZ. So if we bought a suit and it didn’t fit? TFB. We were stuck with it. We did a lot of international shipping from JC Penney and other vendors, because we were not finding the ‘Guido’ stuff we needed, especially in the right size range.

Czech people are, in general, pretty trim and there were a lot of actors in this film who were beefy, big dudes. We could not get the multiples we needed in the CZ. It was a joke. We looked in Germany and other places where we thought they might have ‘bigger people’ clothing, but to no avail. When you need six copies of a Guido Mafia suit, tie, shoes, etc., your best bet is the USA. Sad, but true.

So our resources were severely limited over there. It was eye-opening in that respect. If we were doing a period piece it would have been no problem; they have a lot of fabric, skilled sewing labour and a kind of opera/theatre house from which to pick stock. But Guidos, gangsters, thugs, mafia types, pimps, hos…not so much.

Chris: I assumed that costumes were sourced in the US and shipped out. Am I naively over-estimating how long you had to prep for the film before you got on a plane?

KB: The problem is casting. It is very common these days to NOT have actors right up to two or three days before shooting. This is terrible for us, and terrible for the actors. Everyone needs time to prepare and if you only have two or three days, you run the risk of being sloppy. It’s a travesty. I attribute this delay in casting to the deal-making process, for one. An actor (or their agent) might try to hold out for a bigger, better deal from someone else, or try to leverage another project against the one that you’re doing. It’s all about money. The foot-dragging is usually about getting more money or being available for other work. An agent must create a perceived ‘urgent need’ for the actor, in some regards, in order to get what they want, and usually that is more money.

This foot-dragging really kills the costume department on a smaller-budget movie. I think that Running Scared was budgeted at about $15 million, which is hardly “small”, but being in the position we were, we couldn’t just ship over 250 E-containers worth of costumes for a “just in case” scenario. It would have been cost-prohibitive. As it was, everything we shipped, E-containers and all, went via FedEx international. Many of our containers were held for a few weeks in customs. It was a crazy scene. I think we may have had three or four weeks of prep here in the US and we ransacked ‘The Alley’ in downtown LA, bought a bunch of cheesy fake gold jewellery, bad accessories, big baggy jeans, etc. But we couldn’t over-buy; it just wasn’t feasible for us. We ended up buying a lot of costumes in Prague and just scraping the barrel to find multiples. It was really a challenge.

I think all of Tommy’s (Johnny Messner) costumes were from Prague. Chazz Palminteri’s stuff was all from Prague. I mean, we did what we could, but at one point I hired an LA costumer to shop The Alley for us while we were in Prague. He FedExed us more Guido/thug wear. There was just no sourcing that in the CZ.

Chris: That’s a crazy situation. It must be very stressful, you trying to do the best work you can when, under the circumstances, that is practically impossible?

KB: Well by now I am used to the stress. The logistical aspect of the job is something I think I do pretty well. You know where to find things; you get creative about how to make something look like you want it to look – that is just skill acquired over time. The stressful thing is having to do all of this in a foreign place with different rules.

Now, I have lived in Europe and I speak a few languages, but I have never dealt with anything as immovable or stalwart as the Czech return policy. It was nuts. Further, I did the shopping by myself, while we were shooting, so I had no-one to help me translate. I spoke about three words of Czech when I arrived: “Yasem Americhanka” and “Djetkwui” – “I am American” and “Thank You”. This did not get me very far when I needed five copies of Tommy’s cream leather jacket. How do you say, “Can you call your other stores and put this on hold?” when they don’t even understand or have the concept of why I need five of the same jacket? It was intense.

I drew a lot of pictures, called the production office to have them translate over the phone, etc. At the end of the show, I was able to speak more Czech: “Please bring a black suit to work with you on Sunday”, “Can you take in the waist of these pants”, “These need to be hemmed” – that was about the extent of my Czech. Oh, and I also learned the word for “Bitch”. Very important.

Chris: Ha, Ha. I mean it’s not funny, but the situation sounds like a heart attack waiting to happen. Oh, and what’s the Czech word for bitch?

KB: It sounds like the word “peachy”.

Chris: How do you know how many multiples of a costume to buy? Obviously if there is a gunfight and blood is whooshing everywhere you need more, but I just wondered, in general, how you determined this?

We buy multiples of the costume depending on the requirements of the scene, set-up, or script in general. If we work with children, we automatically buy doubles (at minimum). Why? Because we will shoot a photo-double whenever we don’t see the child’s face. We can’t use ‘hot’ wardrobe on another actor – it’s a SAG violation – so we can’t put clothing that has been on one body, onto someone else. And let’s not forget that the hours we can shoot with kids are very limited. Here is the SAG table for you HERE. You can see exactly how it’s parceled out.

Children must also bank ‘school’ hours while working, so their time is at a premium for us on set. We might have more than doubles if we know the kid is messy, or if he has any stunts in the film (falling down, getting hit in the face with a pie, etc).

For Oleg I believe we had twelve copies of his costume. He had so much action, so many stunts, we had to cover ourselves. His stunt double was a Czech little person – a great guy – who was just about Cameron’s size and did all of the dangerous work (he had the plastic bag over his head in Dez & Edele’s closet, etc). For Alex Neuberger, I think we had four or five copies of his costume. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to go back to the store where we got the garments if we ran into trouble, so we were playing it safe. Plus there was that explosion in the end, so we had a stunt actor for him there, too.

For Joey Gazelle’s costume, we had eighteen copies. The film really takes place in one day (mostly) and you know, the things that happen to Joey Gazelle… well… there are a lot of costume considerations. We needed to have as many copies as we could. The problem is that he wears a plaid shirt. Matching plaids is very difficult. We wanted to make sure that of all eighteen shirts, the plaid patterns (especially in the front) were more or less the same. I think we originally purchased that shirt at Mervyn’s (a now-defunct department store) in Burbank.

As we needed eighteen of them, and we needed them to match pattern as closely as possible, I personally drove to every Mervyn’s store in Southern California to pick up each copy. I went to Fullerton. I went to Torrance. I went to West Hills. I went to Arcadia. Look at that on a map. Mervyn’s was not the kind of store with the infrastructure to transfer merchandise easily between store locations, so we had to do it ourselves. I did all of this on the Saturday before I left for Prague. It was actually a fun adventure – I had never been to Fullerton before! But we needed all of those multiples in order to get through the film. As it was, Paul had a stunt guy and a photo double that came with him, so it made shooting 2nd (and sometimes 3rd) unit go really quickly.

 Chris: Regarding the ‘beefy dudes’ in Running Scared that you mentioned, they did all look massive on screen; it was like their clothes made them intimidating, especially ‘Mac Daddy’ pimp Lester (David Warshofsky). He is clearly dressed OTT and this suits his character and the tone of the film perfectly. How much do you know about the intended tone of a film when you start on the costumes?

KB: Man, that Lester the Pimp story is epic. I will try to be brief. We had cast another actor – the original actor was 6′ 4″ and about 250 lbs. Size 13 shoe. His deal was not inked before I left LA, but the director’s vision was very strong for this character. He wanted Lester to have an ‘Honest John’ from Pinocchio vibe to him. The whole film was a fairytale, heightened reality seen through a child’s eyes. So this ‘Honest John’ look on a pimp would be, naturally, a pimp suit.

We bought four or five copies of the suit in downtown LA, complete with hat and jewellery in multiples, packed it up and shipped it off. When the actor’s deal was done, I called him to check in. We can’t legally call an actor until their deal is inked. I had procured this guy’s sizes from another costume crew with whom he had recently worked, so I knew the suit would fit him.

Long story short, he had some creative differences with production and was replaced at the last minute. The actor who was cast, David Warshofsky, called me from the airport as he was in line to board the plane. By this point I am sh*tting a brick, because I know he is probably going to be a different size. And he was: 5′9″, 150 lbs. Size 9 shoe. Further, the schedule was such that he had to get off the plane, come to the studio, get in the costume and immediately shoot the scene where he dies in a pool of blood. Which. Means. We. Need. All. The. Multiples. Ready. To. Fit. Him.

This is where I learned the bulk of my Czech swear words and tailor vocabulary. We had to cut those suits down, massively. There is no ‘pimp store’ in the CZ, and besides, we had to get this together overnight for him. I sent out one of our costumers to try to find ‘pimp shoes’ in his size, and thank God, with good luck and a lot of grace, she found a pair, in his size, with doubles. That was serious.

He arrived the next day, completely jetlagged from the flight and we had a suit ready for him. We continued to cut, alter and sew as the day progressed, so we had at least three suits completed for use in that scene. It was really unbelievable. I have never had to pull something so big our of my a$$ so quickly. It was kind of crazy. So, yes, in the end, that suit does look a bit comical on him. Now you know. Cutting it down overnight from a 52 to a 40 was quite a stretch.

Chris: You did an amazing job on the sleeve length; the looseness of the suit looks intentional, even the very long jacket.

KB: Thanks. We based the look on ‘Mr. Whitefolks’, a pimp (real-life pimp) from the documentary Pimps Up, Hos Down (1999). You should see it.

Chris: What was the idea behind Vera Farmiga’s ‘Virgin Mary’ look as Teresa? I can only assume she was cast on the way to the set for the first day’s shooting?

KB: Ha-ha. No, Vera was cast well in advance, actually. The problem was that she lives on the East Coast. We didn’t get to fit her until we were in Prague, but we had purchased a number of options for her while we were in LA. We did some studio shopping on memo (with an extension from the store) and sent back what we didn’t use. She was really, REALLY into the ‘Jersey-ness’ of the character. Vera has a lot of personal ties to New Jersey, and she knew the character inside and out.

As for the Virgin Mary stuff, the director Wayne Kramer and I spent a lot of time thinking about what images (from literature, culture, etc.) were iconic enough to use in this ‘fairytale’ world we were creating. Now, there is no disrespect intended in using the Virgin Mary in this context. She saves Oleg (Cameron Bright) and is the moral compass in the film. We just wanted a maternal icon that would be familiar enough (and subtle enough) to influence the audience without being overpowering.

Chris: I found it interesting that the immediate ordinariness of Vera’s costume drew attention away from her character. It was a surprise when she turned up later kickin’ ass for arguably the film’s most memorable scene.

KB: What do you mean by that? Do you mean that because she looked ordinary/Jersey, we didn’t have expectations of her ass-kicking?

Chris: Yeah. I was not sure how she’d fit into the story at first. Then WHAM, out of nowhere she turned up packing heat. I loved the jolt. Almost cheered. Terrific performance from Vera too.

KB: She was amazing. I had not seen her in anything before this film, so I had no expectations of her at all. I went to set to watch the scene where Oleg calls her from the bathroom of Dez and Edele’s house (the pedophiles). It was her coverage – just her on the phone and the script supervisor was reading Oleg’s lines. Vera had to act and emote with urgency and what she was reacting to was the script supervisor’s monotone, accented line-reading. Vera’s sense of place, character, situation and emotional level is superb. I knew, when I saw her in that moment, that she would be huge some day. And look at her now!

By the way, people in the audience where I saw the film DID, in fact, cheer when Vera does the whole ‘paedophile’ thing…I don’t want to spoil it for your readers.

Chris: I’ll put a spoiler in. Actually I want to get onto those two lovelies in a second. Just one more point about Teresa – there did seem a deliberate attempt to sexualise her from the get-go. I’m referring to her G-string popping out the jeans, then no jeans at all while making the dinner; much of the dialogue from peripheral characters refers to her in this way too. Is this correct or am I just being pervy here?

KB: Well. The G-string thing is a bit of a joke, especially for Teresa’s ‘type’. If we didn’t have the G-string, we would have missed the mark. As it was, Vera was hiking the sides of her undies up so that they would really show in the laundry room. It was funny. It’s really Vera’s embodiment and understanding of the character. I can’t recall the dialog of the other characters re: her sexuality. I think that, as a character, she embodies the best in womanhood. She’s a good mom, good neighbour, good wife and good person. She just presents herself in a way that suits the neighbourhood, her own self-perception and self-image. If you ever watch Dog the Bounty Hunter, take a look at Beth Chapman. Here is a woman who is taking her look to the extreme. It’s not all that uncommon here in the States. I know it must look tragic and unreal to eyes unaccustomed to such expression, ha-ha!

Chris: We Brits are so repressed. Bending over with your pants popping out would put you in The Tower. Vera’s dress at the funeral is beautiful by the way. Where was it from? US or Czech?

KB: I think I got that dress at the Burlington Coat Factory outside of LA. It’s a cheapo store that sells ‘Jersey-like’ clothes. I wanted to find something that was budget-appropriate for the character, but also tarty enough (the keyhole neckline) to be in line with her previously-established style. After all, she’s not REALLY in mourning. And I loved the giant 1980s sunglasses, too.

Chris: I must admit I laughed out loud when I saw the creepy paedophile couple (Elizabeth Mitchell and Bruce Altman). Never trust a woman in florals or a man in lemon! Just knew something serious was up with them. From an audience perspective this was fun costuming; it’s like you gave us clues to follow.

KB: Well, yes. We wanted them to have kind of happy, sing-song colours so as not to appear threatening. The colours of their house also fall into this scheme. They were really fun to costume, that’s for sure.

Chris: The silhouettes against the glass when Oleg is in their bathroom scared the living hell out of me.

KB: Ha, ha! We actually tweaked those silhouettes, adding shoulder pads and the finger extensions. Very creepy, but very fun to create!

Chris: The fingers reminded me of The Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz (1939). Excuse me while I check the doors are locked. Now, finally, how did Wayne Kramer’s decision to shoot an entire scene under UV light affect your costume choices? Surely whites would suddenly become very white? Or was there camera trickery involved?

KB: Yes, it was very important that we take the blue-light into consideration. James Whitaker, the DP (Director of Photography), and Wayne collaborated on the lighting for this scene at great length. First they tried black-light and then settled on blue-light, as it was (I think) easier to see the details of peoples faces, etc. while still getting the effect of black-light. I designed the hockey uniforms here in LA, and we did a lot of fabric testing under black-light to make sure the fabric would glow. Once we found the best ‘fluorescent’ fabrics, we turned them over to Sportsrobe (a costume house in LA known for sports equipment rental and manufacturing) and they constructed the hockey jerseys. If you look closely at the names on the back of the jerseys, they are Russian, and literally translated, mean things like ‘goat sucker”, etc. I wanted it to be extra creepy for anyone paying attention.

As for the rest of the guys on the ice, it was a continuation of what they were wearing before. Of course we knew from the beginning that we would end up here, in the blue-light, so we didn’t want any of their items to really pop as it might be too distracting. We teched John Noble’s (Igor Yugorsky’s) shirt so that it wouldn’t spike in the light. And come to think of it, we bought all of his stuff in Prague as well. We shot that ice rink sequence over the course of five days, with a little extra time in there for 2nd unit, fighting, etc. The lighting was no trick and the ice was real. Paul Walker was my personal hero. He really was face-down on that ice for days. And he never complained or had an attitude. I love him so much.

Chris: He had all that fake blood dripping from his mouth as well. Presumably one of the reasons to shoot with UV was to have all that excess blood without falling foul of the censors, as it would look black on screen?

KB: Wayne does not like the censors or the MPAA. We had such a good laugh about how offensive this film could be. I mean, they gave The Cooler (2003) an NC-17 rating because of a 1.75-second-long glimpse of pubic hair. So I think the idea was: give them all the violence they can handle, because they don’t seem to have an issue with blood and death.

Chris: Pubic hair?! Nooooooo!!!! Kristin, thank you so much for taking the time to chat during what I guess must be about breakfast time in LA.

KB: No, by now it’s noon!! Ha-ha, lunch time.