Terry Dresbach Interview with Digital Runaway

From Digital Runaway

How did you initially approach the costume design for the show?

It was interesting because with a lot of costume designers, all they want to do is the 18th century because the costumes of the 18th century are so spectacular. You think you have an idea of what that is and you end up with a preconceived notion of what it’s all going to be.

I read the books when they first came out, and I’ve read them at least a dozen times over the years, so I had an idea in my head of what the costumes were going to look like so before I even agreed to do the show my husband* had asked me to put together some ideas of what I thought the costumes should look like.

Then I moved to Scotland and all of it went in the trash because I was here for about 20mins before thinking that everyone would die if they wore this stuff I’d come up with. It wasn’t even remotely appropriate for this country.

More after the jump

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How much of a character’s personality goes into the costume that you create for them?

It’s interesting because we as costume designers, are usually the first person to see an actor on a production. Once they get hired the first thing they do is come to us and together we create a character.

When someone like Sam (Heughan) walks into the room you know there’s a reason why he’s cast. He’s cast because there’s something about him that resonated with the producers and he has certain qualities we can use. He has the physicality, he has the humour.

So when that same person walks into the room with me, my job is to know what their character needs to be and to know how to highlight that. Costumes are just a way for us to show the world who we are.

Sam’s character is a hero. We want him to be strong and heroic so he can give off a sense that he can take care of himself and you. Then you get someone like Caitriona’s (Balfe) character who is a strong modern woman, who gets propelled back in time and I need to be able to convey that she is strong and capable so in order to do that I have to know who every character is and put myself into their brain, and ask myself what choices I would make everyday.

It’s my job to understand the psychology of the character. I have to know who human beings are so I can reflect it in the character’s clothing.

What was the most challenging aspect of making costumes for the show?

Well, initially that was a week of going “Oh shit”. I didn’t want to reinvent history because there’s a lot of that on television where the assumption is that the audience would be bored if it was accurate. I had went in with the goal of it being as accurate as possible and once I did the research I realised that may not be possible so the real challenge was having to make something up and have it still feel authentic.

The other challenge was that we couldn’t rent anything and had to make 95% of what you’d see on screen. We only had seven weeks to prep the season so we just made hundreds of costumes in the first year. It was unbelievable so the real challenge was the vast, vast quantity of costumes that we had to create from scratch. It was crazy.

Read the rest of the interview at the source