Ruth E. Carter on making Oscars history with ‘Black Panther’: ‘We were examining Afrofuture’
If Ruth E. Carter didn’t get a role in a college play, she might never had become the first black woman to win Best Costume Design at the Oscars for 2018’s “Black Panther”; she repeated four years later for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” Both films celebrate Afrofuturism, which has been described as an “intersection of imagination, technology in the future, and liberation.”
Carter, 63, started acting while a special education major at Hampton University. “I loved the theater,” she said during a Zoom conversation with the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart about her new book, “The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and Afrofuture from ‘Do the Right Thing” to ‘Black Panther.’”
The theater, she noted, “was a place of cathartic experience for me. The theater was a place that I found a home in where I loved to perform and get into characters. I changed from special education to theater arts my sophomore year. One time I auditioned for a play and didn’t get the part. I went to the professor’s office to ask him what happened because I thought I was a pretty good actress. He said ‘Well, we don’t t have anyone to do the costumes, do you want to try?’ I thought-‘okay, the consolation prize.’ But I realized when I opened the door to the little costume shop at Hampton University and there was no one occupying that space, it became a learning lab for me. I realized I could explore all the characters and not just one”
Though she found that there was a huge difference between designing costumes for theater and movies, she discovered her foundation in tn theater helped her to focus on what those differences and similarities were. One difference, she related, is that with film you “see everything up close. So, there’s a lot of detail that you can actually add to the costumes or the look of the production. With theater those details are lost.”
Spike Lee gave Carter her start in films with his 1988 college comedy “School Daze.” They have since collaborated on several films including 1989’s “Do the Right Thing” and 1992’s “Malcolm X,” for which she became the first black female costume designer to earn an Oscar nomination.
Lee, she said, was the fearless leader on “School Daze.” “We relied on him to give us the guidance we needed,” she explained. “We were a film family from the start. It became recreating what we had experienced in college. So that part of it was kind of like the easy part. At that time, there were a lot of companies that were willing to support young filmmakers like Spike Lee, so we had Nike and so many other people that came in and gave us book bags and all kinds of stuff. So, we were supported as this little tribe of young filmmakers that were creating a story about their own experiences in college. We really did have a lot of fun. I think that the film stands the test of time because it was done with so much heart. It was done with so much promise and hope for the future.
Carter does a tremendous amount of research on historical films such as “Malcolm X” and Ava DuVernay’s 2014 “Selma.” “You do want to replicate the research exactly,” she said “It’s not unlike me to be on set with my research, with my photographs and comparing what we are presenting to what was there. We’re constantly surrounded by research when we’re getting the background dressed, when we ‘re talking to sometimes the descendants of the march or people who were there when they were children at the march. Then there are those occasions when you don’t have the reference. With ‘Malcolm X.” I went to the Department of Corrections and asked to see his files that he had when he was imprisoned in Massachusetts. I read all of his letters that he wrote to the commissioner to get transferred to other prisons that had better libraries. I saw his medical records. I felt like there was a tone to him and that I could make some decisions on what he might wear when we had no research to actually compare it to.”
Just as with historical movies, Carter does research for fictional films such as “Black Panther” such as going back to the original comics. “You are having conversations with the director (Ryan Coogler). We were examining Afrofuture. But you could see in the comics that were done so long ago in the 1960s by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby that Wakanda was a melting pot of tribes.”
“So, with that information, they selected 12 tribes which they researched in depth and came up with “these illustrations that depicted their culture, their culture of colonization, of honoring the tribal elders, of honoring their history, but also bringing it into the the Afrofuture, infusing technology and becoming very modernized with the look. So, when you combine all of those elements together, they kind of show you all the possibilities that you can explore. We explored 3D printing when we made the Queen’s crown. That way we combined the technology, the tradition to show that Wakanda was in Africa, it was forward thinking, it had the latest technology, but it also honored their culture.”