00:00
When the producers came to me and asked me,
00:02
hey, by the way, in a few months
00:04
we’re gonna do this other job and make sure you’re available
00:07
And then when I found out it was the Joker,
00:08
I was like, oh my God, the Joker,
00:10
How the hell am I gonna do that?
00:12
I approach it like painting to make people interesting
00:16
rather than beautiful.
00:18
Hi, this is Nicki Lederman.
00:20
And this is the timeline of my career.
00:25
I wanted to be an opera singer,
00:26
and I went to a performing high school
00:29
of the arts in Germany, in Munich.
00:33
And I truly thought I would become a musician.
00:35
When I saw the exorcist, that was really my turning point,
00:40
because, when I saw just Linda Blair’s head turn,
00:45
and I was like, how the hell did they do that?
00:47
Or American Werewolf in London,
00:49
like this whole incredible rig that Rick Baker built
00:53
and got an Oscar for, with that wolf,
00:55
coming out of the guy’s mouth.
00:57
It was just so magical to me that I was like,
01:01
how did they do that?
01:03
The artistry in it,
01:04
the emotions that it makes you feel, all that stuff,
01:08
that’s all created by makeup,
01:10
I thought it was so fascinating,
01:12
And I couldn’t stop thinking about these,
01:14
scenes in all these cool movies that I saw
01:16
when I was, in my teens.
01:18
I thought like, they don’t make movies here like that,
01:21
I would have to go to America.
01:22
I was 20 years old, and I left my home
01:25
to live the American dream.
01:27
My boyfriend at the time had this great idea,
01:29
why don’t you just go to NYU, put fliers out,
01:33
for the film students offering your services,
01:36
doing makeup on their thesis films.
01:37
And that’s exactly what I did,
01:39
and the kids were so excited,
01:41
and we all kind of rose up together.
01:43
My very first paid job, I shall say,
01:47
was on a small TV show, that was shot in Boston,
01:50
called Against the Law.
01:52
That show ran for I think only a season,
01:56
and we came back to New York.
01:58
It was such great timing because, early 90s then,
02:01
we had this amazing, independent movie scene in New York.
02:05
So my friend Derek, he called me up and said,
02:08
listen, my buddy from NYU,
02:11
he’s directing this really amazing movie,
02:13
it’s called Palookaville.
02:15
And he said, you have to work on this film,
02:17
the script is amazing.
02:19
So I met with the director,
02:20
and it’s funny because I walked in,
02:22
we met at Bobby’s in Tribeca,
02:25
and I saw him sitting at this little corner booth,
02:29
and I looked at him and I’m like,
02:31
I’m gonna marry that guy.
02:32
Turns out, we did get married,
02:33
and we did have three kids together.
02:36
So working on Palookaville was like,
02:38
my first experience of like, a real movie.
02:41
The movie was a beautiful movie
02:44
that we were all really proud of.
02:46
It won awards, it was like,
02:48
my first movie that I’ve done,
02:50
that I really was very proud of.
02:52
That little movie not only was a stepping stone
02:54
into a really amazing career,
02:56
but having three beautiful children.
03:00
When I heard that Todd Solondz,
03:02
who previously directed Welcome to the Dollhouse,
03:05
was doing another movie, I thought like,
03:06
oh, this is great, I would love to work on it,
03:08
he’s such a funny, quirky, smart, talented guy.
03:12
So they sent me the script,
03:14
[laughs] and when I was reading the script,
03:16
I was like, oh, my God, I thought it was so ballsy,
03:21
so brave, I need to be part of it.
03:24
That was like a wild experience that I’m grateful I had.
03:28
My taste in the contributions,
03:31
that I am giving to in my work,
03:34
is I wanna show the beauty,
03:36
in what people don’t wanna recognize
03:39
or people don’t wanna deal with or people look down upon.
03:45
It’s that maternal instinct
03:46
that I had even before having children
03:49
to help make the underdog shine.
03:52
I just broke up with my fiance, which trust me,
03:55
is traumatic enough.
03:58
And now I have 25 days,
04:01
to either find the money to buy my place,
04:04
or I am out on the street.
04:06
When I started Sex and the City.
04:07
It was a complete shift of working in the gritty reality
04:11
and turning everything into the high fashion world,
04:14
that is special, that is art,
04:17
because fashion, if you think about it, is art.
04:20
And that really helped me and my team
04:22
to come up with really pretty beauty looks,
04:25
for our girls that are not as conventional.
04:29
What our goal was, to be the trendsetters
04:31
and not being the followers of the trendsetters.
04:34
What we try to do, to try not to keep it as superficial,
04:38
as fashion sometimes seems to be,
04:41
is that the looks that we created
04:44
are not looks that are unachievable.
04:47
You have magazines where people are airbrushed
04:50
and nothing is really real that you see.
04:52
What we did was trying to create cool looks for everybody.
04:57
It doesn’t matter if you pretty,
04:58
it doesn’t matter if you’re supermodel,
05:00
everybody can have those looks.
05:02
And we put the emphasis of uniqueness rather than beauty,
05:06
which I thought was very interesting and very important,
05:08
because, even the clothes, the hair, the makeup,
05:10
it wasn’t always like gorgeous,
05:12
but it certainly was unique.
05:14
And that was really the thing that kept us
05:17
from like dropping into that superficialness,
05:20
because the uniqueness is an expression of personality,
05:22
it’s an expression of character, and anybody can do that,
05:28
anybody, and I have to say,
05:29
working with all my friends on that show,
05:31
we all kinda grew up on that show.
05:33
We all had children on that show.
05:34
It was like an incredible, incredible run.
05:38
And that was really my breaking point,
05:40
when I thought to myself, I made it as a makeup artist,
05:44
because of Sex and the City.
05:46
Do you have any other income besides the column?
05:50
No, but I was chosen as New York Magazine’s,
05:53
best pick for city columnist,
05:55
Good, now can be saucy.
05:58
When we were filming Bettie Page,
06:00
as a makeup artist, I had a few challenges.
06:03
We were shooting most of it in black and white,
06:05
and some of it in color.
06:06
And when you shoot black and white,
06:09
your application of makeup in terms of colors
06:12
are very different.
06:14
When you shoot color,
06:16
and you put like a really pretty red lipstick on,
06:20
But when you put a red lipstick on, on black and white,
06:22
it doesn’t look like sometimes anything
06:25
or sometimes it looks black.
06:27
You have to really test all the colors
06:30
that you’re going to be using,
06:31
and shoot it on black and white,
06:33
so you know, what it’s going to look like.
06:35
So you really had to experiment and practice a lot
06:39
in terms of color application, to get the shade right.
06:43
What is really important is that,
06:45
you research what people actually really look like,
06:48
Great Bettie, great.
07:01
When we did, Devil Wears Prada,
07:03
Anne Hathaway character, Andrea,
07:05
had a really lovely evolution, from the frumpy, normal,
07:12
not caring about fashion kinda look,
07:14
into this high fashion vogue girl.
07:19
And that was really fun, because you get to play,
07:22
you get to try different things,
07:23
you really change a look of a person,
07:26
but the trick is really,
07:27
that you have to keep the essence the same.
07:30
You can’t just make somebody look completely different,
07:33
because no matter how much a person changes,
07:36
the essence has to still be there.
07:39
And in creating a makeup look,
07:40
I felt the essence that I tried to keep in her,
07:43
is a little bit of that innocence in her,
07:46
by not overdoing it.
07:48
So you kinda have to find the essence of that character,
07:51
and try to keep that throughout the whole movie,
07:53
otherwise, the change of the character is not believable.
07:57
That movie was really fun, because we had Valentino there
07:59
and we created one of Valentino’s fashion shows,
08:02
and that was really fun.
08:03
That was a really great movie
08:05
about fashion, and makeup, and hair.
08:09
And at the same time, there was a lesson in this,
08:11
and we wanted to make sure that,
08:12
that lesson is not lessened by overdoing it.
08:17
I couldn’t do what you did to Nigel, Miranda,
08:19
I couldn’t do something like that.
08:29
When we worked on Enchanted,
08:31
we had this amazing scene,
08:33
that was taking place in the ballroom.
08:36
Where Amy Adams had this gorgeous purply dress on,
08:40
and I was so excited, I thought like,
08:42
oh, I’m gonna make you look so gorgeous.
08:44
I was so excited, this is the ballroom scene,
08:47
like Cinderella’s ballroom scene.
08:49
And so I did my thing and we went down to set,
08:52
and I realized, oh my God, what is this lighting?
08:56
And oh my God, I should have checked first,
08:59
because you know what, lighting is so incredibly important
09:03
to my work as a makeup artist
09:05
because it can break everything.
09:08
And when Amy arrived on set,
09:11
my gorgeous makeup was completely washed out and erased.
09:15
I didn’t recognize the colors in her face.
09:18
She looked like she had like, nothing on her face.
09:20
And I’m like, we can’t shoot her like that,
09:23
she looks like a washed out little girl.
09:26
I have to take her back into the makeup room.
09:28
And so I had to adjust her makeup,
09:30
with colors that I would never put on her normally.
09:33
But I had to adjust the colors,
09:36
so they can register in the light
09:39
that they were using for that ballroom scene.
09:41
So I put like this crazy color,
09:44
weird kinda purply pink on her lips,
09:47
and like gave her this strange blush,
09:49
that looked ridiculous in real life,
09:52
but on set it looked beautiful.
09:54
And that was my big lesson,
09:56
and I should have known better
09:57
because I’m trained for that, right?
10:00
That I need to make sure,
10:02
that I know exactly what the lighting is on set
10:04
because the makeup can really look horrendous,
10:08
if I don’t compliment the lighting or vice versa too.
10:18
I’m gonna talk to Nucky.
10:20
I don’t know, two years killing Jerries
10:23
doesn’t exactly prepare you for a whole lot else.
10:25
I love period projects, because you can really paint,
10:29
you can really like, evoke a different era, different time,
10:33
it’s like time traveling, it’s so exciting to me.
10:36
When I was called in to interview for Boardwalk Empire,
10:40
for the pilot that Martin Scorsese was directing,
10:43
I was like, oh my God, I wanna do this so bad,
10:45
I wanna work with Martin Scorsese, God.
10:47
I did research like I’ve never done before.
10:49
When I was called in, to come in for an interview,
10:52
I had pages and pages and pages of research
10:56
of my suffragettes about the time period,
10:58
about the politicians at that time.
11:00
So I went in for the interview,
11:02
and, you know I nailed it,
11:04
because I guess, I just had the best research.
11:06
Martin is an incredible collaborator,
11:09
that was the first time I worked with him.
11:10
I mean, he was so serious about every little detail.
11:14
And that’s what makes him really such a great filmmaker.
11:17
In the case of Boardwalk Empire,
11:19
he showed us Splendor in the Grass.
11:21
I wasn’t quite sure, why he would show us,
11:23
Splendor in the Grass,
11:24
because it wasn’t really the right period.
11:26
What he came down to, is that he said,
11:28
see this big scenes, see all these background people,
11:31
the one very back in that corner,
11:33
the person looks great, the person looks perfect,
11:36
and I wanna make sure, that on Boardwalk Empire,
11:39
that every single background person
11:42
is treated like a principal actor,
11:44
because they have to look perfect,
11:45
because if they don’t look perfect,
11:47
the whole picture won’t look perfect.
11:48
And that really taught me a huge lesson,
11:50
when you do a big period movie,
11:53
you really have to make sure,
11:54
that every single detail is perfect.
11:57
Y’all remember Jimmy Darmody,
12:01
Gave him handsel I heard, sure did.
12:04
You do realize if you choose to join us,
12:07
the work will be hard and the hours long,
12:09
the results slow and agonizing,
12:11
and we will see no shortage of [indistinct]
12:16
When I started prepping for The Knick,
12:20
I pulled together photographs of paintings
12:23
from American realists like Sargent and Eakins,
12:28
who was really famous for these beautiful paintings
12:32
of hospital theaters where all the doctors would sit
12:35
in arena like settings where the surgeries would take place.
12:39
So I collected all these paintings,
12:41
and I invited my core team,
12:44
and for a week we tried to copy these portraits,
12:48
to learn about color, tones, highlights, lowlights,
12:54
the mood, so we can take that and translate it
12:59
onto our actors, by making them up,
13:01
just like a painter would on the portrait.
13:03
The tools that we used on The Knick and the makeup,
13:06
we try to really replicate products
13:09
that women use back then, we got beeswax,
13:11
we had a juicer, we made our own mascara.
13:14
So we try to keep everything as natural toned as possible,
13:18
no crazy colors, just really colors and hues
13:21
that were available back then and in nature.
13:24
When the blast of war blows in our ears,
13:27
then imitate the action of the tiger,
13:30
[Movie actor] Your majesty, Mr. Phineas T. Barnum,
13:33
and his oddities from America!
13:37
When we started on The Greatest Showman,
13:40
which was my most favorite job ever.
13:45
Personally, I’m still depressed that I’m not working on it,
13:49
that it couldn’t go on forever, but I gotta let that go.
13:53
When we started on The Greatest Showman,
13:55
I started doing a lot of research about that time period,
13:58
about all the oddities,
14:00
and I put a great research book together.
14:02
And then when Jerry Popolis, the hair designer and I,
14:05
went to have our meeting with Michael Gracey,
14:08
love him director, the best, oh my God!
14:12
We were like ready to show him,
14:13
all this great research we had, and he’s like,
14:16
we’re not gonna do period.
14:18
And we’re like, oh, we’re not?
14:21
So he basically told us, what I want for this movie,
14:24
I want it to be period inspired,
14:27
but I want it to be like a crazy fashion show.
14:30
And Jerry and I were like, oh my God, this is amazing,
14:34
cause that’s our strength,
14:35
we can do period, we can do fashion.
14:38
And this is like the perfect marriage,
14:39
of two things that we’re really good at,
14:41
that really excites us, it’s super challenging,
14:44
but it’s also so creative, it was amazing.
14:48
So rather than doing a lot of prosthetics
14:50
to make it authentic,
14:52
we wanted to show the beauty in them,
14:55
rather than the sad ugliness.
14:58
And some of these looks were really challenging,
15:01
for example, Dog Boy,
15:03
we had to build like all these hair pieces,
15:05
and then glue in his face,
15:07
and incorporate them with a wig and everything.
15:09
For example, the tattooed guy,
15:11
which we all know what he really looked like,
15:13
because he did exist, Prince Constantine, as he was called,
15:16
we had to make a suit for him,
15:18
because we couldn’t put transfers on him everyday,
15:21
because his skin couldn’t have handled it,
15:22
and besides, it would have taken us hours and hours,
15:24
just to cover his body in tattoos.
15:26
Everything we did was like, handmade,
15:29
Michael gave us such an amazing freedom to create,
15:33
which I so appreciated and was incredible.
15:37
Did I tell you guys,
15:38
that I really loved working on that job.
15:47
Do I look like the kinda clown that could start a movement?
15:50
I killed those guys because they were awful.
15:53
Everybody is awful these days.
15:56
It’s enough to make anyone crazy.
15:58
Joker was a really challenging job,
16:02
we met with Todd, and we were talking about Joaquin,
16:06
not only what the look is going to be like,
16:08
but how to best deal with Joaquin,
16:10
cause he’s gonna have a really hard role to play.
16:14
And so Todd showed us a photo of what they came up with,
16:18
they thought Joker should look like.
16:21
And it was basically the working clown look,
16:24
which is a very simple look.
16:26
And from that, look, we need to evolve him into Joker,
16:31
which is like a version of that working clown look,
16:34
but a very kind of distraught, messy, wilder version of it.
16:39
And it’s a little different to take a photograph
16:42
and trying to replicate a design on a picture onto a person,
16:47
because sometimes certain colors may not work
16:51
or the sizing may not work.
16:52
So you really have to play and work out,
16:55
what the final design will be,
16:57
and so what we did is like we had Joaquin,
16:59
coming for a couple of weeks,
17:02
to basically just play with the makeup,
17:04
until we got where we all felt like,
17:06
this is the right look.
17:08
Again, this was a really amazing collaboration project,
17:12
Todd, Joaquin and I, coming up with this really cool look,
17:16
you starred him as Arthur fleck, the working clown,
17:20
and then slowly throughout the movie,
17:22
he gets degraded, degraded, degraded,
17:24
and then turns into the Joker,
17:26
which is the final mad makeup look,
17:29
which in itself had a lot of different stages as well,
17:32
like being smeared, running away from the cops,
17:36
arriving in Murray Franklin Show, killing Murray Franklin,
17:40
then being taken away in the police car, having car crash,
17:43
and then, the resurrection.
17:45
So these are all different stages within the same look.
17:47
And that was really hard in terms of like continuity,
17:51
because when you shoot a film,
17:53
you don’t really shoot scene one,
17:55
and then you shoot scene two, three,
17:57
we always shoot totally out of sequence.
18:00
That means one day,
18:01
we actually started with the working look,
18:03
and then we did a Joker look,
18:06
in the middle of the Joker script,
18:08
where we hadn’t had shot anything yet,
18:11
we weren’t quite sure,
18:12
we’re gonna do it like that,
18:13
and it’s really hard when you work that way,
18:15
because you have to be incredibly organized,
18:18
you have to match everything you’re doing,
18:20
you have to go backwards forwards,
18:22
you need to know what’s gonna come,
18:23
even though you haven’t done it yet,
18:25
so it was really challenging.
18:27
Joaquin was really incredible, and the strategic way
18:31
of keeping his makeup messy,
18:33
throughout the filming processes is that,
18:35
I had to use different products
18:37
that look the same when you put them on
18:39
but have a different life on the skin,
18:42
meaning sometimes I needed the makeup,
18:45
to be able to smear, when he touches it would smear,
18:48
and sometimes I needed it to be staying put
18:52
that even if he brushes up against something,
18:54
or touches it, that it won’t move.
18:56
And I needed that because of continuity reasons,
18:59
so I wouldn’t have to constantly reset it.
19:02
There’s this one scene,
19:03
the bathroom scene when after he kills this subway guys,
19:07
he runs into this bathroom and he does this incredible dance
19:10
and he’s all smeared, so I had to match that smeared thing,
19:14
from when he shoots the subway guys,
19:15
but we shot this subway scene,
19:16
after we did the bathroom scene
19:18
so I kinda had to make sure that I take a lot of pictures,
19:21
so I can recreate something
19:23
that we haven’t done yet, basically, right?
19:26
But in that bathroom scene,
19:28
he not only dances but the scene goes on,
19:31
which was cut out later from the movie,
19:33
where he goes to the sink and washes off his face,
19:35
and it was all one shot,
19:37
so I had to redo it, like I think 16 times,
19:40
comes in, does the dance, washes his face, cut,
19:43
okay, reset, I had five minutes to do it.
19:45
Do the makeup again, watching my pictures that I took
19:48
to make sure that I copied exactly the same
19:50
and then doing it over and over and over.
19:52
So I had to use makeup that is really easy to wipe off
19:57
or wash off, so I could reset it,
19:59
but there’s other times when he’s in the subway,
20:00
I had to use makeup that had to look smeared,
20:03
but it had to be waterproof,
20:04
so I wouldn’t have to reset it all the time
20:06
because it would just take too long.
20:08
If I had to go in between every single take
20:10
to fix things differently,
20:11
it would have taken too long.
20:13
Joaquin would have never let me do it in the first place,
20:15
so I had to be really creative with the materials I used.
20:18
It was a really wild experience I had,
20:20
working on a job like that, creating such an iconic look,
20:26
Yeah, it was really wild and difficult
20:28
and interesting and exciting.
20:30
I’m really blessed with the projects that I worked on.
20:33
When you find a crew that is very good in collaborating,
20:36
a kind of is infectious,
20:38
I find it also incredibly exciting,
20:40
and I’m really looking forward
20:41
to see what will come next.
