Bad dream couture: How noir ‘Nightmare Alley’ got its carnival look
You’ve never seen a noir like “Nightmare Alley.”
Sure, Guillermo del Toro’s latest film — about a small-time carnival worker (Bradley Cooper) who grifts his way into high society by claiming to read minds and commune with the dead — has all the trappings of the genre: drunk degenerates and femme fatales; dimly lit streets and stalking shadows; greed, lust, murder, hubris and a creeping existential dread. And it’s based on William Lindsay Gresham’s scandalous 1946 noir novel of the same name.
But stylistically, it looks more like a lush costume drama than a hard-boiled crime flick.
“We decided that we didn’t want to make it a film noir, but really base it in reality,” production designer Tamara Deverell told The Post about creating the movie’s intoxicating atmosphere. “We wanted to really give that feeling that you can smell the dust and rain and dirt and everything.”
“Nightmare Alley” follows Stan Carlisle (Cooper), a taciturn fellow with a mysterious past who joins a carnival in the late 1930s. The traveling show includes a cast of colorful sideshow characters from a leotard-clad strongman and an acrobat who can twist himself into pretzels to — most horrifyingly — the “geek,” an almost feral alcoholic who crowds can watch eat a live chicken for a dime.
Stan begins sleeping with Zeena, a seasoned clairvoyant (Toni Collette), and pursuing Molly, the girl who can withstand electrical shocks (Rooney Mara). He and Molly later take their “mentalist” act to the big city, where Stan hooks up with a glamorous psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett), who has a host of ultra-wealthy patients he can exploit.
“It was almost like working on two films,” Deverell said. “From the carny world where everything had a faded patina and was a little rough around the edges … to high society, where we wanted everything to be really rich and sumptuous and enticing.”
For the carnival scenes, the film crew built their own fair in an abandoned field in Ontario, with a real light-up ferris wheel from the 1920s and a carousel from the 1930s.
“We lovingly repainted every horse and redid the murals because it had been used up until the ‘70s and it had an awful ‘70s paint job,” Deverell said.
But most everything else was made from scratch, from Molly’s faux electric chair and the hellish funhouse based on Dante’s “Inferno” (a popular trope at the time which also nicely foreshadowed Stan’s descent into depravity) to the striped tents and carnival banners, to the Spidora attraction, featuring a freak with the head of a girl and the body of an arachnid.
“That was straight from [del Toro’s] childhood memories,” Deverell said. “When he was 6 he went to a carnival and he saw this spider woman, and so we researched it, and we found out how they did it — she pokes her head through a board with [spider legs attached to it] that you can puppet from behind.”
Costume designer Luis Sequeira also built much of the film’s wardrobe from scratch, looking at photos of rural America in the 1930s and studying vintage catalogs to give the carnival scenes authenticity.
“I wanted to create a more realistic collection of clothing that people would wear for years and years, so everything from that part of the movie was well-worn and out of date,” he said, adding that he wanted, say, Collette’s 1920s bohemian fortune-teller get-ups or Molly’s nubby sweaters and sweet calico dresses, to have the rumpled look of something hastily thrown into a trunk, pulled out again and thrown on.
To get that look, the costume department would hand-distress each new shirt, jacket and dress made for these scenes. “There’s staining, airbrushing, sanding — highlighting ripples along the edges of the seams — it was all about giving the garment some history and making it feel believable not only to the actor but to the viewer, too.”
For the city scenes, Sequeira looked at high fashion publications from 1940 and ‘41 to outfit his characters in the most up-to-the-minute styles.
“We decided that Stan would have burned all his carnival clothes as part of his reinvention” into a debonair mentalist at classy nightclubs, said Sequeira. So he commissioned a raft of luxurious tuxes and suits for him, worn with showy deco-patterned ties. Molly would mix some of her favorite sweaters and shirts with her more glamorous new duds, including a strapless sequined dress and an elegant scarlet coat — and would cling to her signature red color palette.
But Blanchett’s psychiatrist, Lilith, would epitomize that seductive glamour of metropolitan high life that Stan so badly wants, with her slinky gowns and exquisite black suits.
“Even though we weren’t doing a film noir, per se, I wanted her pieces to have that same sort of reflective quality that would give us a noir mood,” Sequeira said. “So even her black suit had a textured weave to it that reflected light in that low-light scenario. As for the lines of her suit, I took some cues from her office with soft round walls and put in some round seams. Of course, [Blanchett] is one of the most elegant women on the planet, so everything fit her beautifully.”
As for her deco lacquered-wood-paneled office, Deverell said that was probably the film’s trickiest set, taking three months to design and three months to build.
“It was so complicated because it had so many sliding doors where she hides her recording device,” Deverell said, adding that she based it off an elegant 1930s room at the Brooklyn Museum. But it was worth it.
“I just want to make the best looking thing I possibly can, especially for Guillermo [del Toro],” she said. “He really is an artist and pushes all of us to another level. With him every little detail matters as much as the big picture.”
