The homegrown talent behind Disney blockbuster Cruella
Behind the scenes on Disney’s latest live action extravaganza was a lineup of local talent — director Craig Gillespie, writer Tony McNamara and production designer Fiona Crombie.
Craig Gillespie hasn’t been home in a while. The Australian filmmaker was last Down Under in February 2020 — “right before Covid” — and a trip home to Sydney for Christmas last year was sadly impossible.
And yet, Gillespie has spent the last few years surrounded by Australians. The filmmaker who first drew acclaim for Lars and the Real Girl, rocketed to fame in 2018 for directing Margot Robbie to her first Oscar nomination in I, Tonya, and securing an Oscar win for Alison Janney, her co-star in the film. Gillespie’s follow up to his revisionist Tonya Harding biopic is Cruella, in which the origin story of one of Disney’s most iconic villains is reimagined for new audiences.
Starring two Hollywood Emmas — Stone and Thompson — the film is slated for release in cinemas and on Disney+ later this week, and follows Estella (Stone), a wicked young fashion designer who will one day be known as Cruella, as she tries to stake her claim in London’s design world.
Gillespie joined Cruella when the project was still in its infancy. One of his earliest edicts was to enlist the help of Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara, who had penned the script for The Favourite, which also starred Stone. Leading lady Olivia Colman won the 2019 best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Anne in the film.
McNamara is one of the best known local television writers, whose work has been seen in everything from The Secret Life Of Us and Love My Way to Puberty Blues and Doctor Doctor.
At the moment he is at the helm of The Great, the deliciously anachronistic costume drama about the life of the Russian Empress Catherine, starring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult.
Gillespie brought McNamara on board to rewrite the Cruella script, and in turn sought out McNamara’s The Favourite collaborator Fiona Crombie, a graduate of NIDA, to work on Cruella’s production design.
“We are everywhere,” Crombie says, laughing, also name checking Lisa McDiarmid, Cruella’s standby art director — another Aussie working on the film.
“We pop up all the time,” Crombie adds. “Not just in the heads of department, but in amongst the crews. It’s so funny how we gravitate towards each other, and suddenly talk about AFL or something.”
Gillespie happened to be working with McNamara on a different project when he first heard about Cruella from Sean Bailey, the head of production at Walt Disney Studios, who pitched him on a 1970s punk rock extravaganza, complete with warring fashion houses and a lot of tiny dogs.
“I met with Emma, and she had just done The Favourite with Tony,” Gillespie says, “and we were both like: ‘It has to be Tony to do the rewrite on this.’ I can relate to his sensibility so well. Maybe it’s our Australian sense of humour, but he just has an incredible way of doing dialogue and story.”
Crombie joined the project later, meeting with Gillespie for lunch in Los Angeles. Her creative spirit kicked into gear hearing Gillespie describe his vision of a shaggy, up-and-coming ‘70s London and the people in it. “That planted seeds, and then I read the script,” Crombie recalls, and she had an “instinctive response”. Working with a researcher, she began curating “little visual databases” for each of the characters and key moments onscreen, research that ended up playing a key part in the mammoth scale of the production design: Crombie dressed a total of 130 sets over the course of the shoot. At their busiest, the team worked on 20 sets in just five days.
Gillespie describes Crombie as “unflappable”. “She had just done an amazing job on The Favourite, and she blew me away,” he enthuses. (Crombie was Oscar-nominated for her production design on The Favourite.)
“The scale of this … the attention to detail … She never broke a sweat. Her production was exquisite. Every time I would step into a space, I would think this looks absolutely gorgeous.”
Cruella is the latest live action origins story from Disney, aiming to do for the monochromatic-haired eponymous villainess what Maleficent did for the witch in Sleeping Beauty. “Villains get to have more fun, for sure,” Gillespie says, laughing. Not only that, but “we have the opportunity to have two villains in this,” he adds: both Stone’s young Cruella and Thompson’s The Baroness, a fashion magnate of the Miranda Priestly variety.
How was working with the two Emmas?
“It was a nightmare,” Gillespie jokes. “It makes my life so easy, because they’re both so talented, and such masters of their craft. In Emma Stone’s case, it can be quite unnerving because you’re creating a very arch character and you have to find that balance between that heightened performance and still keeping it grounded, and being able to have empathy for that character. That was a really interesting thing to watch her discover that and find where that tone was.”
Thompson gleefully carved through Cruella as The Baroness, a powerful designer who runs her brand with an iron fist, firing minions for the offence of incorrectly cutting her daily cucumber snack. (She requires two and a half inch wedges of the vegetable, garnished with parsley that is “shredded, not torn”.)
“I’m attracted to these outsiders and these misfits,” Gillespie muses. “You could classify them as villains, but it’s a very interesting journey that Cruella goes on.”
His vision for the film was to completely up-end the audience’s expectations of what a ‘Disney’ movie looks and feels like. “Disney was unbelievably supportive,” he says. “I felt like, they came to me after I, Tonya, they gotta know what they’re in for. They wanted all this punk energy, a lot of music — we ended up having 50 songs. So I just leaned into it and waited until someone told me no.” And did anyone ever tell him no? “Not in so many words,” he adds, laughing.
It was a message he made sure to relay to his department heads, including Crombie and Jenny Beavan, the two time Oscar-winning costume designer of Mad Max: Fury Road, who crafted each of the 277 costume changes for the principal characters. “I’d say: ‘We’re not making a Disney movie,’” Gillespie says. “I love Disney movies, but we’re having the chance to do this villain coming-of-age movie. We’re doing a 1970s London misfit [story], it’s going to be gritty.”
For Crombie, that meant a peeling, crumbled down warehouse where Estella and her grifter pals Horace (Paul Walter Hauser) and Jasper (Joel Fry) live with Wink, their beloved chihuahua, cooking up elaborate schemes and cons. There are, of course, a lot of dogs in this movie. Half of them are crafted using visual effects and the other half involve real, trained animals. “Wink was surprisingly good,” Gillespie reveals.
Crombie was also responsible for the three ball scenes that signpost the film at the beginning, middle and end. With hundreds of extras, literally thousands of candles — one ball was decorated with 2,672 flickering wicks — and props in the tens of thousands (40,000, to be exact) including soaring tiered cakes, painstakingly hand-iced, and bouquets and bouquets of paper flowers, Crombie had her work cut out for her.
It was also, she says, a lot of fun, and involved a team numbering in the “hundreds”. “I had sculptors, and painters, and we had the flowers and the food people, and then I had my set decorating team and my art department team, vehicles and the prop team,” Crombie lists off. “I was very spoiled with the level of craftsmanship on this film.”
Crombie invested that craftsmanship back into the movie, ensuring that every scene, whether it was a huge Marie Antoinette-themed ball or a tiny vignette in Estella’s studio, was treated with creative precision.
“There are so many beats in the film, which keeps it so lively,” Crombie says. “There are so many things, but they all require attention to detail, because you can’t have the wheel fall off at any time.” It was, she muses, one of the biggest challenges for her.
“You have to keep the whole thing of equal balance,” she explains, “whether it’s the ballroom or the dog groomer. They all have their role to play.”
Crombie is now based in Montreal on her next job — we speak at the tail end of the Oscar nominee’s hotel quarantine. “I think I’ve acclimatised,” she jokes. “All I do is Zoom all day — but I haven’t worn shoes for 10 days. I’m pottering around the apartment. It will be a rude shock when I go to the office on Monday.”
Gillespie is also in the middle of his next job: directing every episode on Pam & Tommy, a forthcoming Hulu miniseries about the chaotic relationship between Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan. Pictures of the pair, heavily made-up to resemble their infamous alter egos, have broken the internet.
“That was kind of crazy,” Gillespie admits. “We were in the middle of shooting that day when we started trending, it was great. I mean — I love the show. We’re four weeks in, and Sebastian and Lily are just killing it. They’ve done so much work to get into those characters: the weight loss for Sebastian and the transformation for Lily, and the voice work. The scripts are absolutely crazy and poignant and really out there, at times. I’m really enjoying it.”
Cruella is in cinemas on 27 May and on Disney+ with premier access from 28 May.
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