Moving on to the wolf pack, was it easier to dress them since they were shirtless?
We still had to have a lot of fittings with them. You had to be very careful with where the shorts fall on the hip bone, we had to make sure everything sits at the same place when they run. Each individual actor had their own request, but we also had requests from the visual effects department, because if we had big, loose shredded shorts on when they morphed into wolves, it’s too much work and too many hours to magically get rid of that clothing on camera. They wanted the shorts as close-fitting to the leg as possible, whereas the natural tendency of the guys would be to have something baggier so that they didn’t look like they were wearing hot pants. [Laughs] So if I knew they were going to morph, then they had tighter-fitting shorts, and if they didn’t have to morph, then we would give them something a little bit looser and longer. There were lots of Levi’s, American Eagle, Old Navy. Quite honestly, I tried to shop where I figured the wolves would shop. [Laughs] So we went to Wal-Mart. The general concept was that anytime they went off to hunt, those shorts got destroyed because they’d change into a wolf. So they all had a secret little stash, buried in a hole somewhere in the forest, where they went running naked. [Laughs] That’s what we imagined. They had an unlimited selection of cut-off pants.
And did you or did you not pay special attention to where the sleeves of Jacob’s T-shirts fell on his biceps? Because job well done.
Absolutely. Everything was geared towards making sure that his arm muscles really showed. There’s a scene where he’s working on a motorcycle, and his muscles are really pulling against this plaid shirt he’s wearing. He looks very strong and very built, and we tried to do the same with this T-shirts. There was no way since it was the same actor that we could show somebody that had grown like six inches. So it was Chris Weitz’s genius idea to tailor his clothes, to make the sleeves a little bit shorter, a little bit tighter — make it look as if he’d grown out of his clothes in a couple of months and hadn’t had time to go get new ones. We found T-shirt brands that fit him well with hardly any adjustments and just stuck with those in earth tones — The Gap, Banana Republic, American Apparel, Levi’s. We tried more expensive T-shirts, but he looked too pretty.
Last question: What can you tease about the costumes in Eclipse?
We go back to the 1700s and do a complete Quileute tribe. I had to go to museums and pour over clothing that was dug up from burial sites, and I went into diaries of sailors to read what their first encounters were with the Indians on the Pacific Northwest coast. Then we did vampires from the Civil War era, then we did the 1930s, then we did our contemporary world, then we did fantasy Volturi flying over on a jet to Forks, Washington. Then we did an army of vampire newborns. It’s pretty cool stuff.
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Tight jeans and loose jeans explain everything! No wonder Jared/Bronson and Embry/Kiowa don't wear tight jeans in the transformation scene. But Embry's not wearing jeans though. He's wearing basketball shorts. And Jared's wearing cargo shorts. LOL.
