Ngila Dickson: a designing woman...

Interview – 2013

Academy Award-winning costume designer Ngila Dickson has been involved in some of New Zealand's biggest screen projects. Her early work includes movies Ruby and Rata, Crush and Heavenly Creatures. Since designing costumes for TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dickson has worked on a range of international movies, including Blood Diamond and Terminator: Dark Fate.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Dickson talks about:

Creating costumes for acclaimed period piece Heavenly Creatures
Learning a life lesson from Peter Jackson on the film
How Xena: Warrior Princess provided her greatest learning curve ever
Avoiding an obsession with JRR Tolkien on The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Creating specific design features for each of the story elements
How winning an Oscar for The Lord of the Rings gave her traction in the American film industry
Trying to achieve perfection on the set of The Last Samurai
Learning the limits of CGI technology on movie Green Lantern
The frustration of working on a lot of films that never get made

This video was first uploaded on 6 May 2013, and is available under this Creative Commons licence. This licence is limited to use of ScreenTalk interview footage only and does not apply to any video content and photographs from films, television, music videos, web series and commercials used in the interview.

Interview, Camera and Editing – Andrew Whiteside

We had a tiny amount of preproduction . . . I really reached out for trying to find very specific design elements for each part of it. You know, like Celtic for the world of Rohan, and Art Nouveau and Fortuny when I was thinking about the elves . . . so you start to build a language for them, because one of the things that you really wanted, and Peter definitely wanted, was that people believed in these worlds.
– Nglia Dickson on designing the costumes for The Lord Of The Rings trilogy

Ngila's Full Profile