playing the two sides of cruella estella and cruella um it has it's been it's been really interesting it's also been interesting to kind of gauge the tone and how different they are it's one thing to read it on the page but it's another to really try to do it day in and day out um how much of cruella is in a stella and how much of a stella is in cruella but i think it's kind of fantastic because it's the personification of those two sides of her hair you know there's kind of like the dark
and the light um but one of the great things i think about the way that estella the the original cruella is written is that she's not if she's the white she's not like this pure sweet um kind of unattainably you know perfect creature she's full of vim and vigor and she's feisty and smart and is a con artist so she definitely has a lot of personality which i love to first see the entire look of cruella together i have to admit i took a lot of pictures i did a lot of my like you know
i don't have social media but i would imagine that when you do and you want to take pictures of yourself that was like my day as cruella it was very narcissistic day which is perfect for cruella um it was just it was so cool it was so cool to see to see you know people that talented bring her to life in that way and me get to just sit there and have this hair and makeup and these clothes put on me it was um felt very lucky i loved that garbage dress it was i hadn't
seen it in person i had seen pictures of it so putting it on was just like mind-blowing in a 40-foot train and it's just um it's like things you only ever imagined and think you would actually put on your body and carry behind you on a garbage truck um yeah and i my my favorite piece of of clothing that they created was the coat at the very end of the movie the coat in the the last scene is just beyond stunning and i am hoping they'll let me take it home with me but i doubt
it emma's character the baroness is a died in the wall narcissistic over the top fashion obsessed dalmatian obsessed um piece of work and she's incredible to act with because hey she's emma thompson but b the character is just so hilarious and so cruel and um it's yeah i mean i i feel like she really it's called cruella it's about the making of cruella but she really is the uh as it is explained later in the movie she really is the the og it's more intimate jasper and estella's bond um i think there is love there
and so i got to do a few scenes with joel that were um you know where we really get to look at each other and speak and he's just so good he's such a good actor um always felt very lucky on those days what i think craig is really doing with this is something very fast-paced very fun filled with music um you know filled with great dogs that are very expressive in a way that is just i love watching um and yeah i just hope it's a it's a real blast for people craig gillespie is
a extraordinary director um it's like okay so this is quite a big budget movie but craig is directing it as though it's an independent movie so you have so much um collaborative time and you can have so much fun going oh why don't we let's try this and there's no constraints and he loves working fast and loose and changing things and and being a bit risky um with the material and i love that she is the reason for cruella unfortunately and that's very sad but it's a wonderful idea a wonderful idea to see why someone
becomes what they become and um [Music] so m's got a lot to do with without me um and of course for her the baroness is um a kind of dream personage as someone who doesn't really exist you know she's the figure behind this extraordinary house of fashion and so when she sees her she she's overwhelmed by her and dazzled by her but it doesn't take long before she understands quite who she's dealing with what drives her is not wanting ever to come second and not wanting ever to share the limelight with anybody else so what
drives her is her narcissistic um and balefully difficult personality you know what drives her is her personality disorder essentially she's not well i mean she's really really not well so um and that energy that comes from her i mean she's she's obviously a very very very creative woman and i'm brilliant she's a brilliant designer but then this other person comes along who's better and modern and hip and chic and young and everything she can't bear it was quite hard for me to be have any friction with em stone because we we're sort of such good
friends and love each other so and i'd met her long before so i knew that we were gonna have a good time um so yes she's my favorite young american so i i just feel very lucky it's just what you always remember is just that coat and the hands the hands and the gloves and the these huge eyes um so i mean m's got these massive kind of car headlamp eyes so she couldn't be more right for it but also because she's her you're very drawn to her and that's very important you couldn't make this
film if you didn't really want to watch that person oh wonderful actors there's so many fandom in joel fry paul walter hauser mark strong every single part is so beautifully played i mean i can't tell you how much fun we've had when someone just comes on and gives of their is a turn you know and it's just brilliant and funny terribly funny so he's cast it wonderfully well as well but it is a two-hand it is a i mean the two leads are women who are working and who are adversaries in their work and you
don't see that very often john the valley is a mysterious character because he's part of the baroness entourage um he's with her often at the most important moments of the movie and you're never really quite sure i think who he is or what his agenda is because essentially it's quite he's quite a silent character but there's a point in the movie where there's a twist and you discover something very interesting about him and i think it was that that made me want to play him because i felt like the audience were being led down a
certain path of expectation of that character that's then undermined and slightly changed and he ends up being not what you think he is she's got great like evil character to get her teeth into and she plays it with a sort of combination of real charm and sort of seductive you know um wickedness that i think is just right it's just delicious to watch i'm really really excited to be involved uh in cruella it's it's a really cool project and i remember watching the cartoon as a kid and feeling like being very uh i don't know
i think very intrigued by the idea of this this kind of like woman slightly manic woman on the edge and i think just the way she looked was always so fun so the fact that a live action movie has been made and i can be part of it is really really cool we first meet anita at one of the baroness's balls and she's a reporter she's a sort of young up-and-comer she's very ambitious um she's also pretty smart and she she kind of falls in between these the the two ladies you know you've got the
baroness who is kind of really calculated and really i mean they're all i think what's lovely is that all the women are very intelligent in this but she's very you know she's kind of like i guess the baddie and then you have a stella who also kind of has this slightly dark side and i think anita falls right in between where she kind of understands them both but isn't the same as either of them i think what's brilliant about it is that you think you know the cruella de vil story because we've had a couple
of movies and we had the the i think it was 1961 the original um so i think people's idea of cruella is that she is this sort of really mean unhinged woman and she treats animals fully and things like that but i think what they're gonna get from this that they maybe didn't expect was seeing how she came to be seeing like the human side of her i think this the movie is really good at showing like a fully fleshed out human being rather than just somewhat a caricature that we've seen in in in previous
iterations he's one of these directors who can kind of come up yourself really quickly as well if something's not working or this the set doesn't know the the building that we're in doesn't work for what the script was saying you can just come up with these ideas that i'm like often i've been like that's not going to work and then i look at them and that totally worked and i think that's probably i asked him actually i think it's his background in advertising means that he can think on his feet he doesn't get too entrenched
in like old ideas and it's really worked out working with paul has been really easy uh yeah he's like probably a he's like a genuinely good guy and uh i trust him lots which you know this doesn't usually happen and he's just brilliant improvising as well he's kind of fearless so he can just kind of when you have something like that in a scene you're like you never really know what's going to happen which always helps the scene because it just means that no one's just no blah blah blah blah you don't know what's gonna
happen and he can say something that doesn't even make sense but he's not scared to do that and that's that's a really that's a really cool thing it's pretty much as close you get to a sure thing really i think emma thompson is she's like since i've been like knowingly wanting to be an actor or being an actor i've known about her because in here she's like she's like it's untouchable really she's yeah she's one of those and you can't really say that about many people i'm not really a car person but this i was
looking i was like whoa this is like yeah it looks it took reminded me of the animation actually because it looks just like you just never see a car like that apparently there's only 11 of them or something like this there's some story behind it there's hardly any there's not many of them at all and it looks serious i don't know what the two soups are they think it soups it up a bit off but yeah it looks like it looks serious you can go as well man craig the director and i had had a
conversation actually at the beginning about how why arty's relationship to cruella was specific in the sense that creative people can be temperamental um and she has her first share of mood swings uh because she's so filled with passion and life that that's sometimes something that jasper and horace have a harder time understanding as to why and i think there's also some statement in there about a woman being the boss over these two men and how comfortable they are with that but i think my character archie really understands where that is coming from because when you
have all these ideas bursting to get out and they can't sometimes it comes out in the wrong avenue with a bit of attitude but ultimately she's just desperate to show the world who she is what's been wonderful about shooting this has been the scale of it because um and and the varying scale of it because someday you can be on a massive set like in the interior of helmand hall or at the at the fashion show and then other days you could be shooting a really intimate scene like in arty shop um and just because
the scale does get really really massive doesn't mean that any of the intimacies get lost because all that character work is is really embedded in into it so it's just another brilliant element that's added on top of everything else you really do feel like you're stepping into a time warp i guess um cruella's is it's vast and shabby and and um downtrodden but also still has that element of punk and and um anarchic freedom to it um and and then my shop was one of my favorite places to shoot obviously because it was just filled
with these little trinkets and details down to the very last you know tiny minute thing that perhaps you wouldn't notice at first glance but if you really had a great great look around you'd see how much work went into stuff like that the music really informs the film because of the period and the period being the 70s which is such an interesting time visually but also sonically because looking doing my research into the character it was kind of hard to work out who was feeding into who the most i think the fashion was really influencing
the music and the music was really influencing the fashion when i first read the script i noticed that the film like it built everything was building to these big moments and with a movie like this like that's what you want you're putting your head in the mind of the moviegoer and saying how do i feel on this journey and i think it's a really sort of twisty turny journey that builds to all these big moments and events that are run by the baroness that of course horus and jasper and estella are crashing the whole film
um so i think i just responded to how big and fun it was and the fact that there was an actual story woven throughout it's not just uh slipping on banana peels it's like it's there's like a lot of heart and there's uh and there's a lot of humor and room for humor because as craig will tell you he loves improv so we're always showing up trying to think of something funny there's power in numbers so the young horus and young jasper were probably somewhat self-sufficient but i think estella is the real creative genius in
that group they're really more the sweat equity she's the brain behind the operation so when she joins their group and it becomes a trio that's when they kind of find their uh they're outwitting of everyone and and they kind of come up together in the world of of cd crime but i think the way the dynamic changes is when you see uh estella start to change without giving anything away as estella starts to change the friendship starts to change and suddenly um horace and jasper aren't sure if they like uh where the friendship is headed
it's like they're more employees rather than friends i think the casting was really cool putting us next to each other i think we look different enough that we look really good next to each other as far as the comedy you know joel fry joel fry is one of those joel fry who plays jasper is one of those guys who doesn't have to do that much to be really funny um and i think that's also a british thing british humor it can be minimalist and it's uproariously funny so i was really happy when i met joel
and the moment we started playing around we kind of got a feel for what the chemistry could be the dogs are gorgeous they're adorable they're livening up the set every day and making it playful and making it more exciting and the work has been impressive the dalmatians have such a presence in this film unlike that of the cartoon animated feature the dalmatians are different in this movie compared to the animated feature and the new editions of buddy and wink are like classic sidekicks i think people are going to fall in love with the little eye
patch on wink pretty sure wink i'm pretty sure kids are going to dress up as wink for halloween and people be like are you a pirate and they're like no i'm the dog from cruel um there's some new characters that i think are going to be pretty beloved and they're all dogs i i couldn't imagine anybody else doing this it's like the one thing i i loved and it was in tony's writing and emma really wanted her as well is this dance between the humor and the drama and i can't think of anybody that can
do it better and like dramatically she's she's amazing and she's so accessible and and just moving to watch and she's also about like a lucille ball of our generation where but she has both so it's this unbelievable delight as a director that there's really nothing you can't do with her and uh she she's such good instincts on you know both the comedic level and you know where to land the drama and it was just a joy all the time and she also which was great on the set too it's like we had the freedom that
she could be spontaneous and improvise and the other actors were great with that as well so we would get these little bonuses and these gems that you know when she gets to know her characters she's just leaning into that the amazing thing i've i've always been a huge fan of emma thompson and you know she's so she's she's got such a career behind her but in a strange way this is like a side of her that i hadn't seen before and to see her playing this baroness who is so formal and proper and up and
almost like rigid and and and intense and uh and fierce in a way and all done with such restraint it was a it was a character that she was having a lot of fun with and it was it was really and not and it wasn't i wouldn't say a surprise because she's such a brilliant actress but to see another thing in her arsenal that i wasn't familiar with was just a delight to like see this character come to life and just grow and really be a scene still and it's it's all emotionally uh uh uh
motivated in terms of estella to corella there's there's the first journey of like she thinks uh she's been told you know of what she believes is the right thing to do in life and the way that you're supposed to behave and it's actually a conflict with who she is as a person in the sense of what she's going after she doesn't think within the lines and she's growing up in a world that wants her to behave within the lines and not question things and not challenge things so she for a while is going against her
instincts and that's what she really suffers the most and it's not until she really leans into who she is as a person and regardless of the repercussions that she really starts to thrive and that's partly what the cruel side of her is the part that she leans into it for the motivations unfortunately are kind of dark and sinister that that's when she really needs that that superpower that she has you know with her talent so that's where it gets complex and uh you know her character gets interesting fashion was our was omnipresent in this film
and and in the beginning when we were trying to figure out who could do this job amazingly we got our academy award uh previous winner jenny bevin who i couldn't have been more excited about having you know and seen obviously mad max fury road and she'd done everything from sherlock holmes she like she's done it all and we had such a tall order with this show that i couldn't think of anybody you know more appropriate for it and she absolutely nailed it and it was it was kind of astonishing at times because she came in
with not much time honestly and the amount of outfits that she had to figure out and they really had to be a statement and i know she even said it herself this film was actually much more complex from the costume side because not only were we doing characters and having to create characters with costume they were both fashion designers so they both needed their whole fashion line that i knew the audience would be very critical about it's like and it has the risk of taking her out of the movie so in some ways we spent
more time on the fashion lines than the actual characters because that's that's you know something she's been doing forever and so trying to figure out what could we do that was felt both current and of the time and didn't take you out of the film and uh you know people's critical eye wouldn't be like like losing faith in our characters and you know their performances it was it was a tall order and she absolutely delivered isla it's it's i mean immediately when it was 1970s london it's a it's a wealth of music going on in
that period and i knew there would be a lot of music in this uh it just it it helps that it helps set up the setting of where we are and and the time period you know being able to play the clash uh you know coming into some of these scenes and blondie and like you it's like all that stuff that we're striving for with it with the sort of the attitude and that punk nature we get to lean into there and uh i also just love music and songs in the sense of like the
juxtaposition it's very much a scorsese thing you'd see where you're putting songs against scenes that you don't expect and it creates it takes it to a different level like where you're seeing something that feels like it's emotional and there's something kind of aggressive against it something that's a little chaotic and we have something that's that feels sweet and light you know um and it it sort of thrills the perception and i love doing that within the film it's like uh i think we end up having like 48 songs in the range you know we've got
darius day to the doors and the queen and it's it's literally all over the map and there was there was actually a sense of playfulness that we leaned into with the baroness with uh you know i get ideas and perhaps perhaps and that again is going against her sinister nature and i like i like that light touch that we had and it was just so much fun with corella's character that she's you know fully ingrained in this punk sensibility and there's so much music to be had for that i felt like tonally it would be
a good a film that i could i had an affinity with and then of course it's a disney film and i've never i mean i was excited to work for disney and to work on something that's so as iconic as cruella and yeah to work at this scale we i've never worked at this scale before i haven't been given this much opportunity to certainly build the amount of sets the scale of sets so for me it was a career certainly a step up for my career yeah and i guess sorry well i was just gonna
say we really liked as well that it was rooted in a reality so kind of it wasn't a fantasy film it was it had a grit to it it was like an indie disney film so for for the kind of films we've worked on together in the past that still have a relationship with what we're doing now even though it's disney and it's kind of a children's film there's an indie kind of the hods are indeed it's tony script and the reality of the spaces like being london being homes being places and streets that people
might walk into he came with a series of images that sort of laid out his intent in a way and he it was i think we it was pretty clear from those images the direction that he wanted to take we certainly moved it along together but i felt tonally he was very clear from the outset and so i then took you know took those images and built on them and you know i did my own referencing and research and came up with ideas and you know sort of tried to embed the film in london in
particular i felt like you know for me i don't come from london and so it's a real gift it's lovely for me to to really investigate and look at the city and the history of it and to come up with ways of representing it and things that were interesting and new for me that i hadn't really thought about and so i um built that kind of in a way it's sort of like i do a sweep of imagery and then i um for each set and each sort of like visual beat of the film i'll
put in like a framework and then i start working with alice and um we like get into the detail and we flesh it out and you know come on we bounce a lot of you know bounce everything back and forth the house of baroness warehouse for set decoration wise was so exciting because the referencing the photographs that exist of couture houses are extensive so we could just completely absorb and look at so many images and take elements that we liked from them and then create her world from scratch which we i don't think we've ever
had the opportunity to do anything like that before and down to exactly what pencil she uses and the fabrics that are in there and how the fabrics move around and how the patterns are cut and the crossover with kind of costume and the costumes that are in there again like this huge opportunity to work with so we had a team that we had with costume they were building twirls and costumes just for the set so we would work very closely with sarah and jenny looking at these and they were essentially set dressing but they had
to be perfect they had to be her world as well as everything we made in that set we pretty much made everything we made the tables we made the cases that their pencils came in with their stools there every single thing was bespoke to that warehouse which was an unbelievable opportunity to like design and make all those things craig was very keen in the beginning for it to have this punky vibe so we were in the 70s but and for her to be quite punky but i think if you research that it's the punk that
people think because that was actually slightly later in the 80s so the punk that we were looking at it's a very kind of home done look it's not big colorful mohawks it's it's kind of just before that it's um there was a real music scene around the time and and so it's kind of in that world and it's that and actually what fits in really well is that it's very vivian westwood it's that kind of punk look um which fits in well with our fashion side as well so it was just kept making sure we
never went too far with that making sure it never became cliched and um we pushed the punk thing too much i always wanted it and if you look where they they live in the lair it has to feel like their world that it all fits within the world that they live in what i love about all our different looks is is how far we were able to go with them and how different they all are as well i always kept thinking thinking of it as a kind of master of disguise for a lot of the
film really so um the the greatest thing was the difference in all of them for the black and white ball there's a real kind of elegance to that and i like that there's a story behind everything so for the black and white ball i wanted it to be something that was maybe the hairstyle would have been something she would have gone to the black and white ball with had she been invited under different circumstances but then there's the cruella kind of real messed up punky look to it as well so um and then the red
carpet moments were just so much fun those kind of pop-up moments and i don't know what's my favorite every time we do one she steps out of this room and everyone says that's it that's my favorite it's my favorite but again i wanted them to look very different so for the future she arrives on a motorbike the costume's sort of more masculine it's harder so to have almost like a graffiti written across her face and the font that i used for that is the same font as sex pistols album so i wanted that to tie
in as well to the punk theme um and the hair then is kind of wilder as he's taken off a helmet and there's this crazy hair underneath it and for the garbage truck moment we did a play on an 18th century look so we dressed the look the wig the same as you would in 18th century but then again messed it up slightly took it to one side and i like the idea that maybe she remembers that from a child going to the 18th century ball so again it's everything's sort of slightly mimicking the the
baroness it all ties into somewhere well the baroness we wanted to make sure that she was basically the words we used a lot for her that was immaculate perfect nothing out of place there's a real everything is thought out in her look we wanted the silhouette to look the same so naomi don looked after her hair and makeup and we had discussions at the beginning about they've always been a similar silhouette so something always kind of scraped back there's back off the face and there's a kind of severity about it a hardness to it um
and but then all these beautiful shapes in the hair um we went slightly darker with it as well because when emma's blonde uh all fairer in tone there's this kind of softness and warmth to her so the harder the darker hair made her look kind of more severe so we liked that idea naomi had a great idea of putting very it's very subtle but there's very subtle kind of um blonde streaks in the wig as well and we just like that maybe there's a slight tighter to cruella there with the kind of dark the black
and the white so um and then the makeup was a classic sort of 50s style really there's that thing that women get a look and then they sort of stick with that so her her heyday and her look would have been more in the 50s and it's a classic beautiful look so you know it's a very kind of audrey hepburn sort of feel about it hey there it's lisa here with today's bonus clip now there are a lot of family movies with animals as the protagonist but not just any animal with man's best friend dogs
some of the best family movies with dogs are homewood bound benji air bud beverly hills two hour and a dog's way home what's your favorite dog movie let me know below and remember click down here to subscribe or on the side for more great content
