If you pay very close attention during Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-contender The Fabelmans, you might be able to spot the subtle little easter eggs that costume designer Mark Bridges snuck into Michelle Williams and Paul Dano’s costumes.
Metaphorical easter eggs, that is.
From turquoise earrings to a special bolo tie, the iconic costume designer behind films like Joker, Phantom Thread, Licorice Pizza, The Artist, There Will Be Blood, and Silver Linings Playbook took great care to pay homage to Steven Spielberg’s parents by giving a secret little nod to their personal senses of style.
In The Fabelmans, Williams plays Mitzi Fabelman, a fictionalized version of Spielberg’s real-life mother Leah, while Paul Dano plays Burt Fabelman, based on Spielberg’s father, Arnold. The movie tells the story of Spielberg’s childhood, from moving to California and pursuing his love of making movies to watching his parents’ marriage implode.
“There are photos of Arnold, the father, wearing a bolo tie that has a little scorpion embedded in lucite, and I actually happen to own one, so I was able to use it on Paul,” Bridges tells MovieMaker. “Those little easter eggs I love putting in there, just for a quiet sense of recognition for Steven and his sisters to notice that we’re dropping in touches of his parents.”
Bridges had a ball recreating Spielberg’s mother’s unique sense of style on Michelle Williams.
“I tried to use a pair of his mother’s earrings on Michelle, and they were beautiful and they were cool, and I had his sister Sue loan them to me and I had them in my possession,” Mark Bridges says.
“Sadly, they weren’t really photogenic. They would kind of distract from Michelle. We actually went with something that was inspired by Leah’s love of Southwest turquoise jewelry. She designed jewelry and things so we found things that were… very beautiful and intricate, but less distracting for photography. I always have to streamline my designs… so that they don’t take you out of the scene.”
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Bridges was able to piece together an image of the way Leah dressed through 8-millimeter film and family photos.
“There’s her love of white, her love of pearls, her love of a peter pan collar,” Mark Bridges says. “What she wears changes from the ’50s and ’60s to even the last scene. The scale kind of tells the story of time passing. She loved a one-piece bib overall — we use that kind of garment a couple of times. I recreated a dress that she wore during holidays, or I have a photo of her playing piano in that yellow organdy dress that she wears.”
He also had Spielberg’s sisters, Nancy, Sue, and Anne, to bounce ideas off of and gather a more in-depth portrait of Leah’s fashion sense and personality.
“I also was fortunate enough to have a conference call with all of the sisters and just pick their brain, like, ‘What do you remember about what your mother used to wear?’ One thing was a Bernardo sandal, which is like a string sandal that she used to wear, or a Lands’ [End] nightgown,” he says. “So every little piece of clue that I find out, where can I put that? Where can I use that to tell a story about her but have it be a beautiful moment on screen?”
The Fabelmans is now playing in theaters.
Main Image: Paul Dano and Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans
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