INTERVIEW: Karyn Wagner Talks Waco & Preacher

I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with the very talented costume designer, Karyn Wagner. She is most notably known for her work in The Notebook, Friday Night Lights, The Green Mile, and most recently Paramount Network’s Waco. Learning about her background and journey into the world of costume designing was inspirational and enlightening. Her passion and devotion are represented in every character she dresses and her work helps bring life to the story of every movie and television show she has worked on. Over the course of our conversation we discussed her inspirations, her favorite characters to dress, and her experience working on Waco. Check out our interview below as we talk about all things Karyn Wagner!

While perusing your website I saw that costume designing runs in the family. What are some of your earliest inspirations you had from your parents and grandmother?
To digress really quickly – when the Russian Revolution happened my grandparents decided to emigrate to the United States because they didn’t really see anything good coming out of that situation. They escaped with a fair amount of money because they both came from pretty decent families and then my grandfather gambled everything away in one night because some card sharks got a hold of him. They traveled east through Shanghai and my grandmother had to go out and make a living and figure out a way to raise enough money to get the boat from Shanghai to the United States. Fortunately, there was a huge collection of Russians who had all emigrated to a suburb of Shanghai called Harbeen and the local Chinese people were thrilled to have them because they were Western and it was a time of great change and influences, in 1919.

One of the women that was living in my grandmother’s boarding house said ‘well, I have finally raised enough money to make it to the United States, do you want my job in this couturiere house?’ And my grandmother was like, yes, absolutely, and she asked my grandmother if she knew anything about making clothes and my grandmother lied and said ‘oh yes of course I made all my own clothes’. My grandmother had everything made by motifs in St. Petersburg where she was working so she sat up that night and took apart her clothes to see how they were made and put them back together and went to work the next day. You can’t really fool tailors but she had this great spirit of invention about her.

She’s always been one of my greatest influences. She came to this country and became a silent actress and all that but she always from there on in made her own clothes. And I don’t know if you know this, but in the early movies you got hired based on a pretty face and some ability to act, but in the silence the acting ability wasn’t that important. How you got hired was based on how pretty your clothes were, and how rich you looked. So my grandmother got hired a lot because she made her own clothes and then hand-painted them.

She taught my mother to sew, and my grandmother was very Bohemian, like there couldn’t be enough paisley or hand-painted flowers. My mother was like tan, beige, and black and made all her own Chanel suits. So I had these two opposite ends of the spectrum influencing me. And then when I was old enough to understand what Vogue magazine was, I would wake up and wait for the mailman to come and I would steal the magazine and read it in the backyard really quick, and then put it back in the mailbox. My grandmother also made clothes for me, and I wasn’t really a doll girl, I always had these amazing pet stuffed animals and plastic horses, and my grandmother would help me make clothes for them. We would sit down and make crafts, instead of watch T.V. and that was really strong in my household.

I see that a lot of your work is primarily period pieces. What about this type of genre do you enjoy?
Well, I’m an art historian by training. I had originally intended to be in academia and what I really love is story. I am really fascinated by other people’s lives. My mother always used to tell the story of when I was a tiny child and she would take me for a walk down Wilshire Blvd. And she would walk into hotels to window shop and I would hang out of my stroller watching people and she said I almost fell out a couple times. So I’ve always been fascinated with other people and other people’s stories and always trying to imagine what goes on inside somebody else’s head. So for me, film-making is really about good story. I think my art history background made me a natural for period pieces. But it’s also that process, because I really do love doing period and going back and reading journals and letters and watching movies from another age to understand people carried themselves differently. All of that is so fascinating to me! Your surroundings and influences are so major that no two people will pack or unpack them in the same way.

Did you always want to be a costume designer? And how did you get into the business?
No, zero desire to be a costume designer. My dad was a sound mixer and I grew up on back lots. And I wanted to be a veterinarian and I thought there is no way I am going into the film business. I got into U.C. Davis which has a very big vet school, and I was very proud of myself. I was sitting in chemistry lab one day idly thinking about if an animal has a problem, how does this chemistry affect that, etc. But then I started thinking about the imminent grief that comes with this job 24/7 and it got me started on this great voyage of exploration. I took six years to go through college because I wanted to be a veterinarian since I was four and I was unmoored and felt adrift, so I studied law and engineering because I found it fascinating. And then eventually I ended up in Art History and it really connected with my artistic side. I graduated with a double degree in Painting and Art History.

I took a gap year to rearrange my priorities and to think about if I wanted to be a university professor or go into art restoration. And while I was in this gap year, I needed a job and somebody asked if I wanted this executive secretary thing, where I would be a production coordinator for a reshoot that they were doing. I was like yes, sure I can do that! I got into that and was wondering, why I am trying to fix something that isn’t broke? I know this business, and this is something I understand. And from there I thought I still really want to be a painter so I’ll paint with light and become a director of photography. So I got into the camera department, and this is during the ’80s. However, the sexual harassment I got in the camera department was more than my soul could handle. Other brave women stuck it out, but I was just not made of stuff that stern. So I was talking to a friend of mine and she told me to try costume design and then that was it, done! I tried for it a year and I knew it was where I was meant to be.

What is the typical creative process (from start to finish) for a costume designer?
It always starts with reading the script and talking to the director to see what their vision is, and then reading the script six more times and making lists and figuring out a direction. In a good screenplay, the characters will ark into each other on page, so the question is how to get them to ark together on film, which is a collaborative effort – the director, the cinematographer, production design, myself, and props. It all has to be seamless or the viewer will be pulled out. When I go to a job interview, I’ll take along a notebook with ideas and say this character feels like it’s headed in this direction and this is what I’m thinking depending on casting, which can sway costumes one direction or another. So we’ll start with all these ideas on page, I’ll start gathering and doing drawings, shopping and figuring out what can I make and what can I find. Depending on the period of the show, how much am I going to be building, etc. and peppering the director with all these ideas until finally we get to the right thing. It’s so much about immersion and trying to have some part of your soul belong to that character. It’s about creating or recreating a place of art but also collaboration and safety so that the actors feel they have a safe space to find their character within these costumes.

Waco is set in the early 90’s and explores the cult culture. How did you balance the time period where the clothes were very chic with the particular way the cults dressed? What was your design approach?
I’ll start by saying we were very careful about how we used the word cult. I know that’s how press reported it, it’s more of an emergent religion. I tend to define cult as a group of people who dress identically and follow their leader blindly and do whatever he says and take no responsibility for their lives. This is a very different situation – these people came and went at their will. If they chose to allow themselves to be swayed by David Koresh, that was their choice, but they could also leave at any time. Now that we have that out of the way, we’re in West Texas, it’s 1993 and the Internet hasn’t really arrived yet. People aren’t checking what Kim Kardashian is wearing and Vogue magazine isn’t online. Many of these people came from different walks of life (London, Hawaii) so they looked like that.

One of the things I did was make a huge research wall in my office. I put up a bunch of manila folders and each folder had a name of one of the people that died in the siege, and I had at least one picture for every person that died. I extrapolated from however many photos I had what that was person was like, and I got a little bit of background information and read the coroner’s reports to find out what they were wearing when they died, which I didn’t even tell the actors at the time. I tried to get as true to each person as I could, and when the script was finalized, I knew which of those characters were actually going to be cast and get speaking lines. I worked with the casting department to cast extras that looked like the rest of those people and each of them had a closet with clothes that were as close as possible to what I thought each person must have owned. Everything was backdated a bit, but then you have the other side coming in like the FBI wearing street clothes, and they have a very corporate look about them in a way.

What was it like re-creating David Koresh for the screen?
This was the next thing I was going to go on to! I have pictures of him as a little kid learning to walk all the way up until he died. I was fascinated, there’s an underlying connection to his clothes which is his own personal taste, but he dressed as so many different people throughout his young adult and adult years. You really got the sense of him wanting to please whoever his audience was. There was point where he and Rachel had to go to court on some kind of a gun charge and he’s wearing this suit, and it fits way better than anyone in rural West Texas should have a suit. And then you see him in his rock and roll attire, in a deep arm holed tank top with his long wavy hair down to his shoulders and acid washed jeans like a rock god, so that’s one David Koresh.

Then you got this other David Koresh which if you Google image him you will see a lot of him in a black terry cloth, rainbow hang ten t-shirt on and that’s not same guy who would wear tank tops. And then you see him lecturing to his followers and he’s wearing baggy dad jeans with this a really ugly chambray shirt with unfortunate sleeve lengths, and you think who is this guy? He’s not the same as the other three guys.This is the type of guy who dresses to please his audience and desperately needs attention and needs to be accepted. You have to explain the different characters he was without losing the audience.

Another thing I want to tell you is that we had two technical advisors, David Thibodeau (survivor) and Gary Noesner (FBI Agent) who were both on set. The day that Taylor Kitsch was doing that scene where Koresh is preaching and talking to the Bible study group, he’s going at it and they’ve been shooting for about 20 minutes and Thibodeau comes out of the sound stage and his face is absolutely white. And I looked at him and asked him if he was okay, and he said “I had to leave, one David Koresh is more than enough to last me a lifetime but that guy is good.”

Who was your favorite character in Waco to dress? Why?
Everyone! Just everyone. My relationships were so close with the actors as well because I was one of the first people they met when they got off the plane. The directors would walk them up the stairs and have them meet me to walk through their characters. I would show them what I have for the beginning fittings and then take them to see my research wall to see what we were doing with everyone else. The directors were so specific in their casting that each person would merge into the family. No fitting was twenty minutes in and out, everything was two hours because of how specific it was. I had so many favorites as I got to know them and their stories.

You’ve done a variety of television shows and movies such as Friday Night Lights, Underground, and Preacher. In comparison, how was Waco different/similar?
I want to throw in a movie into the mix which just got released and I don’t think a lot of people know about it and I’m very proud of my work in it, starring Brie Larson, called Basmati Blues. The thing that is always a constant is inconsistency and change, so you have to learn to teach yourself to love that, especially to survive in the film business. What all these projects have in common is that the light and setting are a character. So the place where you’re shooting is a character and wherever you are on globe and the light that comes into the camera is a character and the chemistry between people is also a character. And you can’t ignore that because it’s a part of the artistic process. The love of story is another constant among all these projects and the desire to tell that story.

I am a big fan of Preacher and I see that you have worked on it! Tell me about how that came to happen and your connection with it?
I was working on a movie in Ann Arbor, Michigan and on a Sunday I was bored and wandering down Main St. I am a graphic novel fan to begin with, and fell in love with Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels about the immortals. I wandered into a graphic novel store on Main St. in Ann Arbor and I told the guy I was out of things to read and he sized me up because I don’t look like the average person who wanders into a graphic novel store. He asked me if I had ever read Preacher and told me it was dark, and I thought this is perfect! I sit and read about 20 pages and I’m completely hooked and obsessed. For two years I was telling all my producer friends that they have to option this, it’s amazing! Finally it got optioned and I started sending flowers to people I didn’t know telling them how happy I was they were directing Preacher and telling them how much I love it.

Flash forward a few years and I was talking to a producer friend of mine and he said he had just watched a pilot of Preacher. I was so excited and ran into my library and grabbed my graphic novels and told him he HAS to read it. He didn’t care much but he signs onto the project and bless his heart, got me into the room! I get into the room and I said “Alright, before we start I’m going to say one thing and that’s I’m going to talk too much, too loud, and too fast because I’m so in love with Preacher so tell me when to shut up.” They were so amused that they gave me the job, which was so awesome. The challenge there was to bring Garth Ennis’s vision of Americana to life but Preacher is so much more tongue and cheek and so much more ironic.

If you had the option of dressing a character from any past/current TV show or film, who would it be and why?
That’s an interesting question! I know it would be someone dark, because characters who are sweet, good people are just not as interesting to me. One of the things I loved about dressing Tulip (from Preacher) is that she was so changeable. I love shapeshifters and that is one of the things I loved about David Koresh. So it would be someone who was a shapeshifter that way. You know who would be great? I’m not sure if there is a character like this already but somebody who could magically shapeshift and look like other people. I love Stranger Things and if that monster could come out of the Upside Down and suddenly assume human form, what would that look like?

What are some future projects you’re involved with that we can look forward to seeing?
I am waiting to find out myself so I’ll let you know!

More information on Karyn Wagner and her past/upcoming projects can be found at her website. Be sure to check it out here!