Avatar: The Way Of Water Costume Designer Deborah L. Scott On A Whole New Frontier [Exclusive Interview]

As far as we're talking about the technical side, it's a movie about family. In your Oscar speech, you thanked your family for inspiring you. So how does family inspire you and your choices when working on "Avatar: The Way of the Water"?

Yes, it's extremely personal because as a costume designer, you build the character, but you also help tell the story. So it's important that they ring true, that even in a fantasy world like Pandora, you have the basis of a unique individual at a time and place. I think Jim talks about that too, raising kids. Since "Titanic", my children were small, now they are adults.

Going through all of this, and seeing all of these interactions, crises, dysfunctions, wonders and beauty that a family has around it, it's important for us to remember that . It just passes. Things like Lo'ak being the rebellious son because the firstborn is the golden boy. Jim loves these classic boundaries. So with Lo'ak, it was like, "Well, we're going to shave the side of his head. Doing the hair design made him so important, those braids going down, so he could react to it. " They work hand in hand with the performance, with his character, the nature of this boy at that time.

There's so much to discuss, and obviously I want to ask you a few questions about your past work. You mentioned "Heat". For this film, how would you like to help define the characters of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro?

Well, you know it's a costume world, right? You agree to this. It will be a suit. Michael Mann really wanted to illustrate the differences, even though they both wear shirts and suits, and it's kind of like that. De Niro's character essentially comes out of the prison system. He is so precise. This guy is like, a crisp white shirt, not a wrinkle. We went through maybe 100 gray suits to get to this one. It's like it was that one, and then we adapted it to make it even more [proper]. It was pretty much no frills. He had no jewelry. It was crisp and clean. Pacino, he automatically brings more movement to his characters, sort of. De Niro can be quite still and was incredibly focused in "Heat." Just an amazing performance. Pacino could break down and do things, his Pacino thing, and his clothes were dark and moody, and he had, really, a signature ring that we found for him, that he really clung to. But this difference and yet this similarity, you take the same items, shirt, suit, pants, and you just go the opposite way in terms of character development.

Your imagination runs wild on "Minority Report", and yet you always keep two feet in reality. It's such a good movie, by the way.

I know. These two movies really hold up. I think the very technology in "Minority Report" is fantastic. It's brilliant writing. The characters are incredible. Tom is as focused as Pacino and De Niro. He's just a laser beam. I think in this movie he was allowed to show a lot of emotion that we don't often see.

I agree.

It's a really good performance, but one of the things that was different about it was that it was more of a fantasy world, but we based it, again times, in reality. What I did, when I started designing this film, there are three parts of society. There's Tom Cruise, there's the authoritarians, and then there's the underground. I used three different illustrators with different styles, so you can get that feeling organically. Tom Cruise is the real world, they're slick, they were minimal designs based on an artist who was much more of a fashion illustrator. So it's a bit gestural and very simple. The authoritarian world is a bit like the 60s. Max von Sydow's world is very much based on a 40s thing, an old movie star, classic shapes, classic colors. I used a different illustrator for this, it was just more realistic. Then the underground world with all these crazy characters, it was just that it needed more of a completely unique way of drawing and presenting the fact that you're going to take... It's just a hodgepodge of stuff. We need to be as crazy as possible, but contained and real too.

I love that you bring such film noir to it. Colin Farrell's costumes in this film are fantastic.

Yes. It fits perfectly in this centrepiece, this sharp double-breasted suit. Of course he can win. He has that physique and that stature to be clean. There is a lot of cleanliness in this film, which is juxtaposed with the underground.