Clint Ramos on “Respect” and Costume Design
Costume and set designer Clint Ramos. (Photo: Dimitrious Kambouris)
The last time I talked to Tony-winning costume and set designer Clint Ramos, he had recently opened the Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford-led “Sunday In The Park With George” revival and was working on Michael Arden’s reimagining of “Once On This Island.” Since then, his Broadway portfolio has grown to include “Burn This,” “Grand Horizons,” “The Rose Tattoo” and “Slave Play.” His work on the last two resulted in Tony nominations for the upcoming ceremony. But Ramos has also branched out into film. He served as costume designer and production designer for the 2019 indie “Lingua Franca,” an engaging portrait of an undocumented trans woman working as a caretaker in Coney Island. The beautiful film, which RogerEbert.com film critic Christy Lemire called “intimate and specific, yet applicable to so many people living their lives in fear and flux all over the country,” is a modest, quiet piece that’s well worth seeking out on Netflix. His next project is anything but modest and quiet.
“Respect,” the Aretha Franklin biopic, opens August 13 with a murderer’s row of talent like Jennifer Hudson, Forrest Whitaker, Audra McDonald, Hailey Kilgore, Titus Burgess, and Marc Maron.
To learn more, I spoke to Ramos over Zoom. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
“Lingua Franca” marked your first feature film and you did both costume and production design, what was that experience like?
Clint Ramos [CR]: I’m very proud of that film. That movie was so personal because it is about a Filipino immigrant. Here’s this Filipino trans immigrant who is also undocumented. She goes through different masks of identity. But she’s also placed in a very insular society, which is the Russian emigre community in Coney Island. It’s different boxes of othering. I really got attracted to how intimate that was. To me, it was really about just plunging myself into research. We spent a lot of time observing people in Coney Island. Looking at a lot of locations that seemed appropriate. There’s a unique quality in immigrant spaces. It was really just about getting these people right. Looking at house dresses for the late [actress] Lynn Cohen. The key is to shop where they would shop.
You went from a small-budget film like “Lingua Franca” to the upcoming Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect.” How did those experiences differ?
[CR]: It was unbelievable. I got to work with a lot of really talented people on a large scale that I’ve never done before. We had crowd scenes with more than a thousand people at a time. Going from churches to concerts, recreating her seminal Madison Square Garden concert in 1968. We go from the late ‘40s into the early ‘70s, from Europe to America. Just the amount of period clothes that we went through was really exciting, but also just being able to examine African American popular culture during that time. Making a dress is the same whether you do it for theater or film, but it’s always about scale. There were somewhere between 60 to 70 looks [for Aretha]. I don’t know how many will make it to the finished film. The gowns, the glamorous stuff were a lot of fun. For me, what was equally exciting was trying to figure out what she wore when she was down and out. What she wore when she was doubting herself or battling her demons. That is what really excites me about costuming.
Jennifer Hudson and Clint Ramos on the set of ‘Respect’ (Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc)
How big a role does research play in your designing process, whether for stage or screen?
[CR]: Research is always an enormous part of my process. It’s really what fuels the design. I go in with an open slate and let the research send me down rabbit holes. Particularly for historical figures or non-historical figures that are based on real life, I always find that part of the costume designer’s responsibility is to honor these characters in a way that’s meaningful. You can’t just make stuff up. You just literally go through a lot of photographs. With “Respect,” for instance, we did very extensive research. Aretha was very photographed. [We also looked at] Black churches in the ‘40s or ‘50s. You can find a little bit on the internet, but if you go to Black churches, they have archives of photographs of what their parishioners looked like. It’s just getting as much information as you can. You’re building a world.
You’re also Tony-nominated for your work on “Slave Play.” Can you walk me through your process of designing the set?
[CR]: That was a product of really great collaboration between myself, Jeremy O. Harris, and [director] Robert O’Hara. It deals with slavery and racism in America. It’s set on a plantation. A lot of the play is very raw and it’s very intellectually confrontational. A lot of our discussions were, ‘how do we make this set reflect what the play is trying to say?’ Through a lot of drafts, I came up with this concept of an entire wall of mirrors and reflecting the plantation through it. It also alludes to the fact that when we really talk about plantations, we’re really talking about American society that has not come to terms with the effects slavery has had on it. I got excited about the idea of reflecting the audience to themselves and just looking at their complicity to the whole system. You walk into the theater and you saw yourself. I’m very proud of that design, because it was conceptual and yet it felt correct. It didn’t feel decorative or just weird for weird’s sake.
All three projects we talked about have political themes and feature protagonists who are BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+. Is that something you look at when picking projects?
[CR]: [It’s] probably the most important thing to me. I have to care deeply about the characters that are being portrayed. I am attracted to stories about people who are the underdog, if you will. How the spirit of human resiliency can actually overcome that. I’m most interested in telling the truth and getting to what will make us all better as a country, as human beings.
“Respect” opens nationally on August 13.