and action jonathan and i just kept asking ourselves what's the story here what's the
story we love this character but what's the story we want to build around this character
and that's when after years of exploration um we were reading this one book about the history of
savile row we found this single sentence that mentioned that the first bug in the history of
the fbi the first bug in fbi history was planted inside a tailor shop in chicago illinois in 1956
and we instantly looked at each other and we said oh well that's a movie
when we started writing the script something we were always fascinated by
was the psychology of people who spend their entire lives perfecting the art of something
so esoteric that most people cannot even tell they're experts at it someone who
someone like leonard played by mark rylance someone who is such an expert at what he does
he makes these beautiful things and no one even the people he makes them for don't even
totally realize why they're so good he's that good at it there's a loneliness to that um and
there's something about the psychology of that of someone who devotes his life to something
that esoteric and that specific and to be one of the best in the world at this extremely specific
thing is such a fascinating psychology to me and i think that's what initially drew me to the story
in the first place um before we had a story before we knew there were gangsters before we knew there
were guns and blood and the kind of thriller we have here we had this character of leonard it
all started with this character we loved the idea of the 50s of this period like the last
the last gasp of this beautiful culture that happened before fashion took over
it was also a really interesting period in terms of the gang land history of the time
once we started digging once jonathan mclean and i started digging into the gang land history of
50s chicago it was instantly captivating to us because as america was going through profound
changes so was the underworld the outfit is in many ways a chess match between all of these
different characters um and what's helped in that is there are not too many characters in this film
there's only seven speaking parts in the entire film so every character gets quite a bit of screen
time um and more than that every character gets quite a bit of listening time as we're as we're
making the films and we find a lot is that the story is not on the character who's speaking
it's on the character who's listening and trying to decide am i being lied to or not if i'm being
lied to do i need to kill this person that's where the story is and there's something so inherently
cinematic about that um you know it's set in a small space with a small cast but yet it feels
so inherently cinematic to me because those looks between the characters someone looking
very closely at someone else from just inches away and saying are you lying to me do i have
to kill you now you can't do that on stage in a piece of theater you cannot get that close
very early on in writing the script jonathan and i said to each other what if the entire
film takes place inside the taylor shop what if we never leave and like everything we do
it was an experiment it was let's do a draft where we never leave the shop
how does that feel and what we quickly found was that something that might seem constraining
opened the world up to us because we knew that it would
stay what we found is that staying inside the shop is not a kind of narrative conceit but rather it's
staying with our main character it's saying with leonard leonard never leaves the shop so neither
do we it just gets us inside his head um we don't see anything he doesn't see we don't hear anything
he doesn't hear we don't go anywhere he doesn't go the whole story takes place over about 48 hours in
the life of this shop and he never leaves the shop the entire time we're there so neither does our
neither's our story what that means i think in a really exciting way is that when new characters
enter when roy boyle enters when violet lafontaine enters they're they're coming in from another
movie that has taken place off screen um and we get to find fun ways of bringing that movie in
with them to sort of showing their whole history their whole story as they enter who is this person
who is this person where have they been who have they murdered
you know what's what is the off-screen war that is happening between these different
crime families that we sort of see glimpses of as they enter the shop
the outfit is a film about detail it is a film about a character obsessed with detail leonard
is obsessed with detail so so is our camera so so is our filmmaking process that means having
an amazing tailor on set every day to correct every single detail of what would be on every
shelf of every single movement of leonard's hands it means that mark rylance has spent a ton of time
with a tailor training and studying and making sure every movement is exactly right um so that
our camera can get that close so we can see how detailed the work is um in a way because we can't
the outfit does not have massive vistas of photographic space we don't have big sunsets
over the city skyline we don't have it's not the outfit is not lawrence the rave lawrence of
arabia we don't have these kind of massive deserts what we have is this extremely detailed work um
that leonard performs so it was really crucial to us to have an expert tailor on hand to work with a
shop like huntsman on making sure this place feels exactly real down to every last nook and cranny
the outfit is a film about clothing which means that the clothing of each character tells you a
us about them it tells us something about leonard how good is he this is how good he is um that's
why it was terribly important and it's because the suits were so important and because the
suits were built in the story of our film that we wanted to have huntsman make them for us
that we wanted to we are say we are saying in the story of the outfit that these suits are built
by one of the best suit makers in the world so the only way to achieve that
is to have some of the best suit makers in the world like we find at huntsman build them for us
in the outfit we never see where characters live we never go home
especially because they're not just tremendous especially because there's not a lot of costumes
every character only wears a couple so every single detail
matters in the costumes as in everything else in this film
the outfit is a real criminal organization that really existed in mid-century america
it is in real life the outfit was this kind of super network of criminal organizations from
different parts of the country who kind of united to form as we say in the film a kind of united
nations of crime um and so people could operate independently in different cities different gangs
could operate independently but they were still part of this overarching network um
it's it's funny when we talk about the outfit because people keep saying to me oh you must have
made that up that bit of um it's a movie about a tailor and so there's this crime organization
called the outfit you must have invented that i always have to say no that's real that was just
there um we took that from real life um but the outfit in the story of the outfit remains this
shadowy organization that's always out off screen we never see them we hear about them
we hear about things they're doing we hear about things they might be doing we hear characters
strategize about what the outfit might be doing off screen but we never see them and i think
that's important to us thematically rdp dick pope reminds me of leonard our main character
in a lot of ways these two sort of expert craftsmen who do this extremely technically
technically complicated thing that most people only kind of understand
when i watch the best of dick's lighting i only have to understand how he's able to achieve it
i can see how brilliant it is and i can say oh that's beautiful um but i will never understand
the true depth of what it takes to be able to create the effects that he does on screen
we had a very fluid process in the prep of the outfit where every department got to kind of work
with each other we got to say this is how we want to shoot it can we design a space
to be shot that way i could say to gemma jackson our production designer this is how i want to move
the actors can we put a doorway over there so i can move them in that direction or she could
say well if you move the doorway over here how does that change how they're moving and the same
obtained with the camera work it was all this kind of fluid process of designing a designing a space
that would work for camera designing camera movements that work for the space um we knew
that the aesthetics of the outfit had to reflect the aesthetics of its main character which meant
that the aesthetics were precise meticulous beautiful elegant and just perfect and then
viciously violent on top of that once our gangsters are coming in um but what that meant
was having expert craftsmen like dick pope like gemma jackson like our editor billy goldenberg
behind us in doing this the outfit is a film that
is not intended to be watched once it's a film that's intended to be watched three times
there are twists and there are turns and every time you think you figured out when someone is
lying to you and when they are telling the truth you will find out 10 minutes later that you were
wrong um and that means that we got to build in lots of fun little easter eggs and clues to
the eventual twists throughout the film um it was really fun to set something up where
i think the audience the outfit spends a lot of time going what
you think you know what's going on but maybe you're wrong and you're trying to figure it out
and that kind of mystery of who's lying to who runs through the entire film and that's part of
our ever increasing sense of tension for the film so finding it was lovely to plant lots of little
clues in there that hopefully no one catches on the first time or they watch it again and go
oh that's when they were lying about the thing and the other thing
um which should hopefully create it to create an experience of watching the outfit that is not just
watchable but endlessly re-watchable i think the outfit is a uniquely cinematic experience
because it is a white knuckle thriller it is not something you want to experience where you're
looking away or you're being pulled away it's something it's an experience that the outfit is an
experience that we want to create for the audience where they're gripping the edge of their seats
in a movie theater and they cannot let go great behind the scenes we have here from focus features
the movie the outfit and it looks phenomenal directed and co-written by graham moore and it's
really cool to see what um they were able to do in the pre-production stage with uh the screenwriting
and messing with the story and by containing the story in one place they were able to use their
limits uh to their advantage uh with storytelling and everything like that sometimes holding back
and having your limits uh be upfront and uh actually be the forefront of your story is a
very very good uh way of uh making the most out of your story and making the most out of your film so
sometimes it's good to look in and lean into your limits let me know down in the comments down below
if you've ever run into any kind of limitations in art or anything like that and do you get to see
the outfit let me know down in the comments down below i think the movie is really phenomenal
uh thriller uh has this uh mafia type mobbed stuff going on edge to it you know so let me know down
in the comments down below if this interests you if you like more making gums and behind the scenes
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