The Paris of 'Les Misérables'

Victor Hugo didn’t call his book Les Misérables for nothing. The misery and squalor of Paris in the 1800s is practically its own character in his epic novel, which became a hit Broadway musical in 1987. So when director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) recruited production designer Eve Stewart and costumer Paco Delgado for his big-screen adaptation of the show, the team didn’t cut any corners to evoke the grime of the period. Even if that meant, say, shipping in loads of stinking fish and brown Scottish seaweed to England’s famous Pinewood Studios to create the docks where Fantine (Anne Hathaway) sells her body to provide for her daughter, Cosette (played as an adult by Amanda Seyfried). ”People were gagging from the smell,” says Stewart. ”It was so sensory. The actors said they only had to walk on set and they felt completely immersed in that world.”

Stewart and Delgado are hoping audiences feel similarly immersed when Les Misérables hits theaters on Christmas Day, bringing the beloved musical about ex-con Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) and his policeman nemesis Javert (Russell Crowe) to the screen for the first time. But even though this iteration of Les Miz has its roots on the Great White Way (and includes Gleek-approved songs like ”On My Own” and ”I Dreamed a Dream”), the designers say Broadway theatrics took a backseat to authenticity in their work. ”The first thing Tom said was that he wanted to be very faithful to the period and Victor Hugo’s story,” says Delgado, who drew inspiration from surviving garments of the era and the work of period artists like Eugène Delacroix. ”The costumes are 90 percent authentic, and then we changed little details to make them more appealing for a musical.” Stewart used the same tactic for her sets, which include muddy Parisian alleys and revolutionary barricades. ”Tom is used to making things so realistic,” says the designer, who previously worked with Hooper to create prewar England in The King’s Speech and 1960s-70s Leeds in The Damned United. ”We had to start at the bare bones of the truth, and then slowly crank it up to make it work with the music. The buildings lean more than they would in real life. The colors are slightly enhanced.”

Befitting a story with such a grand scale, Les Miz employed tailors in four different countries — England, Italy, France, and Spain — to produce approximately 2,200 costumes, most of them for the movie’s hordes of beggars. And then came the fun part. ”We had to make the costumes and then destroy them to make them look old, like they had been worn for 10 years,” says Delgado. ”We used chemical processes like bleaching them and fading, then mechanical processes like sanding or making holes. Sometimes we even used blowtorches to burn them. We tried to re-create very quickly what would happen to a garment over years.” For the principal actors’ outfits, Delgado worked closely with Hooper to fashion garments that tell a part of each character’s story. Valjean, for example, begins the film in the scarlet red of a prisoner’s uniform (”so the guards could see anyone who tried to escape,” explains Delgado) and gradually moves to the refined suits and subdued shades that he wears as the mayor of the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer. The character also undergoes a physical transformation. ”Hugh wanted [”Valjean”] to look more bourgeois and relaxed about his appearance when he becomes the mayor, so we added padding to make it look like he had a little bit of a belly,” Delgado says. ”You can barely notice it, but Hugh asked for it specifically.”

Not all the movie’s design details are quite as subtle, though. Take, for instance, a 40-foot plaster elephant statue that Stewart built to replicate an actual unfinished monument commissioned by Napoleon to celebrate his victories in the Middle East. Hugo worked the elephant into his book as a makeshift shelter for street urchins, so Stewart constructed it to scale for the climactic standoff between the rebels — including Valjean and Marius (Eddie Redmayne) — and the French army. That sequence was shot in April in front of the majestic Old Royal Naval College in London’s Greenwich area, where — to accommodate the site’s regular tourist crowds and the city’s Olympics preparations — Stewart was required to assemble a towering barricade in just three days. ”We built a ready-prepared 30-foot barricade on three lorries [British-to-American translation: trucks],” she says. ”And then we just drove it in like a carnival [and assembled the pieces on site].”

Still, Stewart says her proudest accomplishment on Les Miz is the Parisian street she built from scratch on a second Pinewood soundstage. In accordance with descriptions in Hugo’s book, the road has puddles, cobblestones, and fully realized shops selling seafood, swords, and ink. Just don’t expect to see any classic French bakeries selling baguettes. ”That would’ve been too clichéd,” explains Stewart. And again, she made sure this set’s odeur was authentic. ”It smelled terrible because we used loads of turnips that we got really cheap. We also had a cow living there and some chickens. There was just a general stink.” In this instance, when the script called for yet another barricade, Stewart nixed the idea of a prefab structure and instead did what any good revolutionary leader would do: She rallied the masses. ”We had the extras and singers throwing [furniture] props out of fifth-floor windows to get that real feel of momentum and anarchy,” she recalls. ”When they threw a cage with a chicken out a window, we were all like, Nooo! Luckily, the chicken was safe. It was chaos. But no animals were harmed.”

Street Scenes

Production designer Eve Stewart commissioned a replica of Napoleon’s Elephant of the Bastille to help transform England’s Old Royal Naval College into a Parisian street. ”It took weeks of layers of polishes and waxes and different kinds of paints and plaster to get that effect.”

Uniformity

Delgado tried to design period military and police uniforms, like the one worn by Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe), with a high degree of accuracy. ”Our goal was always to make clothes, not costumes,” he says. But the designer found that complete authenticity wasn’t always possible. ”The specific types of cotton they used back then aren’t even available anymore.”

The Thénardiers

After sketching his vision of the evil innkeepers (a comic duo along the lines of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza), Delgado worked closely with Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen to perfect the look of their characters. Baron Cohen’s military jacket even has its own backstory: ”We decided that he probably stole it during one of the Napoleonic Wars and then pretended he had been an officer,” Delgado says.

Fantine

Anne Hathaway shed weight from her already slim frame to play the starving factory worker, but Delgado relied on optical illusions to exaggerate her size further. ”We worked with clingy fabrics and used an airbrush to darken the sides of her costumes to make her look even thinner,” he says.

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Tory Burch
CEO/designer Tory Burch
My Design Inspiration

”The overall mood of our fall 2012 collection was inspired by Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, a beautifully stylized romantic drama set in 1960s Hong Kong: polished, proper looks with slightly subversive undertones — fitted waists, keyhole necklines, and leather details.”