[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This is what it sounded like when four-time Oscar Nominee Ruth E. Carter won her first Academy Award for costume design for Black Panther in 2019.

Ruth E. Carter: Marvel may have created the first Black superhero, but through costume design, we turned him into an African king. [applause] It's been my life's honor to create costumes. Thank you to the academy. Thank you for honoring African royalty and the empowered way women can look and lead on screen.

Alison: This is what it sounded like when it happened again when she won for Wakanda Forever just two months ago.

Ruth: Thank you to the academy for recognizing the superhero that is a Black woman.

Alison: That includes her mother who had just passed away at the age 101. Now, a couple of important things about those moments. Together, they made history, or she did. Ruth E. Carter is the first black woman to win two Oscars ever, and on both occasions, her note cards for her acceptance speech matched her dress. The first time, midnight blue cards to go with her midnight blue sequined gown, and the second time, a saffron yellow to match her shantung silk dress.

It's that attention to detail, the flair for storytelling, the confidence, that has led Carter through her decades-long career which started with Spike Lee. Included Carter bringing to life our own Bed-Stuy and Do the Right Thing. She brought history alive in Spielberg's Amistad, captured the reality of modern love in Gina Prince Bythewood's for Love & Basketball. She transports us back to the wild west for the prestige TV drama Yellowstone.

Carter shares her thoughts, her process, and some wisdom in her new book titled The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do the Right Thing to Black Panther. She joins us today to talk a little bit about the book and about her career. I'm so happy to meet you.

Ruth: Oh, thank you for having me, and wdhat a wonderful introduction.

Alison: What's the first thing you want to know about a character? Before you even start to think about the costuming, what do you want to know?

Ruth: I need to know what world they live in. Whether it's a period piece, I need to know about their neighborhood, about the inside of their home, about the socioeconomics of the times. What were people going through? I need to actually understand the world around them and then move into more details about the costume.

Alison: That brings my next question. I keep thinking about this when I see your work. You have to make the unbelievable believable or make something believable in the unbelievable. We have to believe that these security guards, the Dora Mirage, exist and this is what they would look like or the men and Jabari would rock skirts.

Ruth: Yes. The costume can't wear them, they have to wear the costume, and it has to feel like it's a part of them, it's a part of their world, it's a part of their being. It's a fine line.

Alison: You've said some of your major influences are writers. Baldwin,-

Ruth: Yes.

Alison: -Nikki Giovanni. What did you learn about storytelling from some of your favorite writers that you use every day?

Ruth: I started to hear about history for the first time, Black history for the first time, reciting poetry like Crystal Stair and Mother to Son. I think it's James Baldwin's Mother To Son. Even the music that I grew up around. Curtis Mayfield and The Temptations, all of those artists were storytellers, and I could see who they were talking about. I could see the images in my mind. That just opened me up to wanting to understand more about myself and about the history of African-Americans in this country first.

Also, when I started working at Forty Acres and a Mule, I was determined to be as authentic as possible because that's what we wanted. We wanted to see images that we weren't seeing on screen. We wanted to create those images. I think that answered your question.

Alison: Sure did. My guest is Ruth E. Carter. The name of the book is The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do The Right Thing to Black Panther. You majored in theater arts-

Ruth: I did.

Alison: -at HBCU Hampton, yes?

Ruth: I sure did. I started in special education though. I wanted to be an educator like some of my aunts were and also do theater for the deaf, so that drew me into the theater department to audition. And it really brought me in, and I changed my major to, yes, theater arts.

Alison: How did your work as someone who was an actor, acted at some point in your life, how has that impacted your costume design?

Ruth: I feel like I understand the actor a little bit better because I know what kind of journey that they go on. Emotional journey, there's a mental journey. They need to feel supported by the costume. I always ask questions when they come into the fitting room about how they're planning to play the character. I'll ask them what kind of background work they've done. I share with them the character arc that I've created and together we come up with all of the details.

Alison: It sounds really collaborative.

Ruth: It is. It's a very collaborative medium, filmmaking. Very collaborative. I understand the world through the production designer. I understand how it's lit and the mood of the environment from the director of photography, and I understand the story from the writer and the directors. The way he's going to guide the art, the way he's going to guide us in making what type of film that we're going to make together.

Alison: What does a film need to have for you to say yes at this point?

Ruth: Oh, I have to be challenged. I like to be challenged, and I also like to be shown things I haven't done before. I love doing the research, so if I get to research something more in-depth or come up with something I've never seen before, I'm excited.

Alison: I want to start with Do the Right Thing since you're in New York [laughs] and your public radio. How did spending time in Brooklyn make its way into the costumes in Do The Right Thing? What's an example?

Ruth: Oh, wow. Well, it was during a time when we were making an independent film. Do The Right Thing was done. It was a protest film. It was during a time where Tawana Brawley and there was the Bensonhurst issues. Mike Tyson and all of that was happening and Spike wrote this protest film. There's a part of it that feels very surreal, the saturated color, the vibrancy of Do the Right Thing, and when you look past the block where we were shooting and looking into Bed-Stuy, you did see a vibrant community.

We may have been a little more vibrant because we got a lot of product placement from Nike, and there was a lot of sports team colors and saturated colors so we balanced it out with Ankara fabrics, but it felt alive. That's what I think we took from our environments in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. That their neighborhoods were alive. You saw the melting pot. You could go get some Jamaican food at the corner and you could go to the Korean grocer, and that's what Do The Right Thing was all about. This melting pot that was Brooklyn.

Alison: I think you mentioned in the book having something specifically made for one of the characters I think was interesting.

Ruth: Yes. Well, we actually used-- The artist of the neighborhood were a part of the costuming process. The t-shirt that Radio Raheem wears, Bed-Stuy Do or Die, was painted by Nasha who had a shop in Brooklyn. I loved all of her graphic colorful painted t-shirts, and so I asked her to do that t-shirt for us and she did. We both spelled Bed-Stuy wrong. We spelled it S-T-Y instead of S-T-U-Y. Telling Spike. I was pretty shaken up, and he just instructed me to go see Barry Brown who was editing in the editing bay and see how much of the shirt we saw on camera so we could correct it. There were a few times like that that happened. Early on, early on, but things happen.

Alison: Lesson learned.

Ruth: That's just part of filmmaking. Things happen all the time.

Alison: In the book you write about John getting a note from Spike. I think it's from Spike. He says, "John Turturro has some ideas about his costume."

Ruth: Oh, yes. Well, every time we returned to New York to work with Spike he would take us, either myself or Robbie Reed who was the casting director, and sometimes we'd sit across the table at a lunch place and he'd spit out all of these people who he wanted to have, actors he wanted to have in the films, and their phone numbers. He'd give me their phone numbers and he'd say, "Call John Turturro. He has some ideas. Talk to him about some of his ideas. You don't have to do whatever he says, but just see what he wants."

John had the idea of wearing all black when he showed up for work at Sal's Pizzeria. As if he really had an outside agenda, he really didn't want to be there. That really did play out in how he played his character. When they come with ideas like that that are so dead right in smack in the middle of what their intent is, you have to go with it. It's not a dictatorship. It really is a collaboration.

Alison: You received an Oscar nomination for Malcolm X and in the book there's a photo of you in Egypt on location. When was a time- It doesn't have to be with Malcolm X. -or a time in your career when the location really dictated something about the costuming? Maybe you had to either pivot or to plan for it then.

Ruth: Well, we were very prepared for that shooting. You can imagine, here I am, 30 years old standing in the middle of the desert at the pyramids on Forty Acres and a Mule, a Spike Lee joint. I felt then that I was right where I needed to be. I was in the right place at the right time. Costume-wise, I did rely on the local team that I assembled there in Egypt to help guide what was the proper wardrobe for a hajj.

They assembled all of the ihrams that they wore, the traditional garb that is actually worn when the pilgrimage members are flying in. Sometimes they put the ihram on so that everyone is dressed the same. That's part of what Malcolm X discovered on his hajj that there were Muslims of all types and all colors. He came back to the US a changed man. That's where I made the change in his look.

While he was experiencing those times, while Denzel Washington was experiencing those times, I made slight changes to the color of his tie. I softened things up. When he comes back, you see he has more facial hair, he's wearing more of a sport coat than a full suit. Those were some of the transitions that were made when we traveled through his life.

Alison: You do a lot of comedy as well. Which I love that some of the sketches of B.A.P.S. [laughter] Then there's Meteor Man starring Robert Townsend. When you are working on a costume and you know you're working on humor, and the idea is to evoke levity, how do you know when to pull back?

Ruth: Yes, it's hard. Comedy is harder than drama because I think that the writers do work on the joke all the way up to the second that it's performed. That might mean that the costume is no longer working for them and so you'll have to pivot. You do rely on not only the writing but also the performer. With Eddie Murphy, he usually says, "I don't want to wear the joke. I just wanted the costume to be the proper clothing for the character, and I'll tell the joke."

Alison: So interesting. The name of the book is The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do the Right Thing to Black Panther. The opening of Wakanda Forever, the funeral scenes, really-- I'm so curious about your conversation with Ryan Coogler because it almost feels like you had to really think about us the audience too, because we were really shooked having to go through it with the passing of Chadwick Boseman.

Ruth: Yes. Once we got our script and we knew we were doing this celebration, and we understood it from the historians that were brought on the project, and they told us about different African societies that have usually two celebrations. A small intimate funeral, and then a big, elaborate one. Ryan wanted everyone to wear white. That's what the historians told us. It was two colors that are commonly used. Red or white. Ryan wanted it to be a pure white, the same white, a unification of Africa by showing all the tribes.

There was a lot of thought and a lot of work that went into assembling all of those different tribes to have that unification but also being white. You think of African fabrics and cloth and it's colorful. The Ndebele prints and things, and now I am doing this all in white. I printed a lot of fabric and gathered a lot of fur pieces for the Zulu and the Turkana wore the turbans.

It was just an amazing process. Once everyone was dressed and assembled for the procession, it was very emotional.

Alison: I say. What were you feeling?

Ruth: I was jubilant because it felt like everyone had come from all over Africa to honor the king of Wakanda, and it was so beautiful. At the same time, I felt that this is something that Chadwick would've wanted us to continue doing but he wasn't there. That was our love letter to him.

Alison: He wasn't physically there.

Ruth: Yes, he was emotionally there. Yes, spiritually there.

Alison: The name of the book is The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do the Right Thing to Black Panther. It is available tomorrow, right?

Ruth: Yes, tomorrow.

Alison: Tomorrow is pub day.

Ruth: Yes, whew. [chuckles]

Alison: Ruth, thank you for coming to the studio.

Ruth: Oh, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Alison: This is All Of It.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.