Face off

Costume designer

“There’s a scene where we first introduce []. It had originally been written with him and a henchmen, and they both]. We went through a whole process of custom-making that, but the thing that Cary pointed out about that very spiky mask, was the expression beneath the spikes, it had this creepy serenity to it. An image of a Noh mask came to mind for the second mask, it’s got that same serenity; it’s almost expressionless and so pure in its execution, it’s really elemental, it doesn’t give away anything. It was a good foil to that other mask, but still felt in the same world. As we got closer to shooting it became clear the first mask was doing too much of the work at that point in the film, and maybe the aggression we were looking for needed to be not so literally in your face. In the end Cary cut the henchmen out of that scene, and was like, ‘Could you try and make that other costume work?’ We had to completely re-tailor it, completely re-size the [] mask, but it ended up being the right decision. And it ended up becoming something we kept harkening back to when we moved forward with Rami’s character. It became a touchstone for everything that happened after with his look, so it was a happy accident.”