By now, the crafts behind Mank are approaching legendary status. Each department needed to retrain their eye, rethink their typical approaches, to create the gorgeous designs for David Fincher’s black and white period film. Makeup department head Gigi Williams was certainly no exception.
Williams, who last worked with Fincher on Gone Girl, calls herself a subtle makeup artist. Her designs typically eschew loud, broad strokes in favor of a more subtle approach.
But a subtle approach would not work with the film’s black and white palate.
“For me, I had a lot of dark gel in men’s eyebrows. I used black mascara on every single man, and I piled it on because that’s how they looked in their photographs for the period. Even though they weren’t wearing mascara, but was the only way I could recreate that look,” Williams shared. “I found myself really having to push myself to a place that I wasn’t comfortable with which was a lot of makeup, oddly enough.”
Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz.
Cr: NETFLIX
To tackle the ruddy, near-alcoholic complexion of Gary Oldman’s Herman Mankiewicz, Williams needed to make Oldman look bad. Really bad. And Fincher wanted nothing to do with prosthetics as he wanted Gary as real and unhidden as possible. To achieve this unenviable look, she actually used less traditional make up on him. Instead, she used shiny moisturizer, created dark circles under his eyes, painted on capillaries, and accentuated the jowls he gained from the added weight.
At first, Oldman thought he didn’t look quite bad enough, but Williams proved him wrong.
“There were a couple of times where he looked at me, and he goes, ‘I was supposed to be really hung over. I don’t look bad enough,’ ” Williams explained. “Gisele, his wife, and I are going, ‘Oh, no, honey! You look bad.’ So, I took a photo of him and showed him. He said, ‘Oh, God, I look bad!’ ”
Looking bad, however, was not an option for the ladies of the film, particularly Amanda Seyfried’s Marion Davies.
First and foremost in the look for Davies was Fincher’s “no ultra-thin eyebrows” policy, despite thin eyebrows very in-style for the early 1930s when the film begins. To achieve that look, Williams crafted a curved eyebrow that slants down like a crescent moon. She also constantly updated lipstick shades to ensure they were dark enough to appear correctly on the black and white footage. Additionally, she wanted to shape Seyfried’s eyes and make them rounder, using eyelash length and placement to create that illusion.
Overall, Williams created over 100 test runs of Seyfried’s Marion Davies makeup to perfect her style.
For Lily Collins, however, Fincher originally wanted her Rita Alexander to appear completely without makeup. Williams had different ideas.
“I kept saying, ‘David, it’s 1940. No woman in their right mind ever would go to the steno pool without lipstick. My mother gets up in the morning, and she puts on eyebrows and lipstick. She’s of that age. They can’t be seen without it,” Williams laughed. “David is a master of every craft. So you just do it and do it and do it and do it until it works for him. He doesn’t tell you how to do it. He just just go back and do it some more.”
And how did Williams create all of these makeup profiles for a black and white film? Lots and lots of testing and photographing various hues using various camera settings on an iPhone. The makeup department, according to Williams, tested somewhere around 150 lipstick shades.
Williams found the difference and treatment of the colors by the black and white photography quite stunning.
“So say I’m wearing red lipstick. That red lipstick could come out in black and white either black, depending on how much pigment is in it, or become invisible. I don’t even know how to explain it, but it’s all about the tone,” Williams shared. “I mean, when you finally get it, when you finally got out and see in the monitor, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, it’s so beautiful.’ And David says it’s beautiful. And the DP says it’s beautiful. And costumes comes up and says it’s beautiful. It’s so thrilling to know that you’ve achieved something different. I’ve always wanted to shoot black and white. It’s been my dream.”
