Academy Award-winning costume designer Janty Yates talks about receiving SCAD Lacoste’s Lifetime Achievement in Costume Design Award and reveals the punk inspiration for the emperors in the upcoming Gladiator 2, out this November.
As much as costume designer Janty Yates is thrilled to be recognized by SCAD Lacoste for the Lifetime Achievement in Costume Design Award, she laughs because it also makes her feel “ancient.”
“Oh. My. God,” says Yates, who received the honor at the 2024 SCAD Lacoste Film Festival in France on June 27. “I am so overwhelmed by it. ‘Lifetime achievement.’ But it’s such a huge number. It’s blown me sideways. My god, I think I’ll just be in floods of tears tonight.”
Yates won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Gladiator in 2000 and just this year was nominated for her work in Napoleon. In all, she’s worked with director Ridley Scott more than a dozen times, including the upcoming Gladiator sequel out this November.
“Ridley is a force, and he’s going to do what he’s going to do. And if he’s asking me, I’ll do it. [Gladiator 2] is fantastic. Plus, I have the great David Crossman [costume designer] who was able to do all the gladiators. We did Kingdom of Heaven together, Enemy at the Gates. Now, I just learned he was accepted into the Academy, which is great. [Having David’s help on Gladiator 2] took a huge amount of pressure off me, and I was able to spend more time looking at trim and selecting fabrics.”
Yates is especially proud of how Denzel Washington looks in the new film, and says Scott took some punk inspiration for the emperors.
“[Denzel] loves his costumes. I think he’s gonna make this film. The two emperors are totally bats, and they were wonderful, very funny. I was able to put gold on top of gold, and their faces are white with bright orange hair. Ridley kept referring to Johnny Rotten. That was the base of the emperors, in their 20s. Denzel is the slave owner, and he’s very, very ambitious. He gets very close to the emperors.”
From American Gangster to The Last Duel, there is no typical “Ridley Scott movie,” which keeps Yates on her toes.
“We’ve gone to space three times, we’ve gone to the medieval ages a few times, to the ‘70s because both he and I were there, and we’ve done contemporary. We’ve done Roman. I never know what he’s going to do next, and I don’t think he could know either.”
Yates admits that up until March of this year, the two were working on a cowboy film.
“It’s a film that’s not going to happen because it’s set in the snow, and it’s called Freewalkers. Basically, the snow went. By the time we prepped it, we would have been shooting in mid-summer. I don’t know what will happen. We shall see. I would love if it would happen because it’s such a gorgeous script.”
At 86 and with a slew of upcoming projects on his IMDB page, Ridley Scott doesn’t appear to be retiring anytime soon, and Yates is right there with him.
“He will be taken off set in a box, as will I. What am I going to do? Golf? I don’t think so. It’s the love of your life. It’s your passion. People ring me up and ask me if I want to work. It’s the phone that does it. And when they stop ringing you, and they don’t ring you and they don’t ring you, that’s when you’re seriously retiring.”
Gladiator 2 is out this November.
