Catherine Martin

Donna Karan

AS BAZ LUHRMANN UNVEILS HIS LATEST LABOR OF LOVE, A REVOLUTIONARY STAGE PRODUCTION OF LA BOHEME, DONNA KARAN TALKS TO HIS NOT-SO-SECRET WEAPON, HIS PARTNER IN LIFE AND IN CRIME, CATHERINE MARTIN.

DONNA KARAN: Hello, Catherine!

CATHERINE MARTIN: Hi, Donna! How are you?

DK: I'm fine, thank you. What a pleasure to speak to you! So, first things first: Do you prefer Catherine or CM?

CM: I don't mind either way. Baz (Luhrmann, Martin's collaborator and director of Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge, and now La Boheme] started calling me CM, and it has just become my name. Only people who knew me prior to Baz call me Catherine. And sometimes my parents call me Catherine when I'm in trouble.

DK: [laughs) There's a funny coincidence--we each have fittings to do after this conversation, right? You for the costumes that will be worn in the San Francisco previews of La Boheme, which opens on Broadway in early December, and me for the two fashion shows I have coming up this week, for my spring and summer 2003 collections.

CM: Yes. We've brought all our La Boheme costumes over from Australia, and there are some very interesting things that have come out of those bags. I look at some of them and ask, 'What drug were they on when they made that?"

DK: [laughs) Catherine, I'm a huge, huge fan of yours. Often when I want to go to another space, I put on one of the movies that you contributed to: Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge [for which Martin won two Oscars]. So tell me, how did all this begin?

CM: Well, when I was a teenager I wanted to be a fashion designer. I was very rebellious--

DK: --How were you rebellious?

CM: Well, I didn't go to school.

DK: Oh, that is rebellious. I didn't go to school either. How did your parents react?

CM: [laughs] One day one of my French teachers, who was also a Ph.D. student of my father's, asked him if we'd been away in Europe because he hadn't seen me in school. I got into very big trouble. It was the year before my final year of high school. My parents took me to a psychiatrist and got him to say--because they wanted to keep me in school--that I'd had some sort of psychotic episode.

DK: You did--you wanted to be a fashion designer! [both laugh]

CM: Anyway, I went back to school for my final year and I did very well. But I knew I wanted to work in the fine arts, so I went to art school, and it was really hopeless, because I had no ideas. I'm really great when there's a collaboration or an inspiration or a starting point, but I was 17 in a room with nothing, and I found it very difficult.

DK: Just that blank piece of paper.

CM: Right. So I dropped Out of art school and worked for a small fashion design house in Sydney called Jaoquin. I made millions of pockets, did hundreds of French seams and hems. Then I heard a radio advertisement for a theater company that was looking for someone to design their show. I rang up, and I must have been the only person to call, because I got the position. I did a rather incompetent job, but I started thinking that I could do it for a living. I knew that at the National Institute of Dramatic Art [NIDA]--which is where Baz studied as an actor, and where Mel Gibson and Cate Blanchett also studied--there was a three-year course for set designers. To audition you had to pick one of three plays--The Royal Hunt of the Sun, American Buffalo, or The Taming of the Shrew--and design the set, build the models, and do some costume drawings. I picked American Buffalo. I remember having models of cowboys and Indians sitting in the seats as audience members. [laughs]

DK: You were bringing the stage into the audience--so by then your style was already germinating.

CM: Yes. I think I'd always been impressed by being immersed in themed environments. Maybe it was that my parents took me to Disneyland when I was six. [both laugh] I like the fact that you are helping the audience understand the story. Anyway, during my second year at NIDA, I met Angus Strathie, who ended up co-costume designing with me on Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge, and now on La Boheme.

DK: Do you co-set design, or do you work alone in that capacity?

CM: I've worked alone as a set designer, which is strange because my first love really is clothes. On Moulin Rouge I was originally going to do both things myself, but circumstances were such that it ended up being too much. It became apparent to me that I would need a creative partner who really knew where we were going. And that was certainly Angus. I always think two ideas are better than one.

DK: Speaking of partnerships, let's talk about the collaboration that led to your relationship with--

CM: --Mr. Luhrmann. [laughs] It was my second year at NIDA, and I had projects with a lot of different people. Baz had gotten a grant from the government--he'd already graduated--to do a bunch of bicentennial projects, so he was looking for contemporaries to design with. Angus and I met with him and I thought he was very interesting. We talked about a sort of environmental musical called Lake Lost. And then this other director named Jim Sharman, who directed The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975] and Australian productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, was going to direct Jean Genet's The Screens. He wanted me to do the set, but I'd already agreed to work on Lake Lost with Baz. And I was going, "My career is over." [Karan laughs] How could I be so idiotic? But I said I'd do it for this guy, and I have to do it." So I went to Jim and said, "I can't do it. Why don't you get Angus to do your job, and I'll do Baz's?"

DK: Clearly you and Baz bonded.

CM: Yes. We were interested in the same things, but it wasn't like love at first sight. I was a little suspicious, because he wouldn't give me a script or any music. There was always a reason--the tape got lost in the mail, the dog ate the script. [both laugh] I remember at one point I said, "At school we never designed things without reading what we're doing. I'm supposed to read the script."

DK: What did Baz say?

CM: He said, "OK. You can come and listen to a few songs." It was absolutely fantastic music. And then we flooded a TV soundstage, built bleacher seats on three sides, and made a very shallow lake. We had a quite realistic island in the middle of the lake. And there was a scene where we cut the bottom off a rowboat, put wheels on it, and pushed it around the lake with two people singing in it. I saw that first in rehearsal, and thought it was extraordinary. Baz had something that I had never seen before.

DK: Define your style of collaboration.

CM: Well, Baz describes the relationship as a conversation that started when we met and hasn't finished yet. And I hope it never does. I enjoy the collaboration so much, though there are times I could kill him--there's a slight homicidal edge to the process. [both laugh]

DK: You obviously both have a very deep attraction to opera, an art form that many contemporary audiences have a difficult time with. So why La Boheme now?

CM: We wanted to work on the stage again, and it seemed like a really good way to finish what Baz calls the "red curtain" period of our lives. But it was also about reconnecting with the philosophical basis for why we did La Boheme in the first place in 1990. That happened because Moffatt Oxenbould, Who was then the artistic director of Opera Australia, gave it to Baz to direct, because Moffatt felt the audience for opera was literally dying off. We needed to find a new access into opera for a much broader and younger audience. What Baz did was take the old chestnuts, the staples that make opera companies millions of dollars--Tosca, La Boheme, Madame Butterfly--and approach them as if they'd never been performed before. The experience of doing La Boheme this time has been very interesting, because I thought it was just going to be this little holiday in New York, but it hasn't been. We've really worked to not lose the freshness and the spontaneity, the youthfulness of the original production, and we've tried to bring this time and place to the audiences we're now addressing. Hopefully, it's a new and reinvigorated show, because we've forced ourselves to examine every aspect of the production.

DK: In terms of references--set design references, costume references--what were you looking at? What do you want us to feel by the time we walk out of the theater?

CM: We wanted to find a way to describe Paris in the clearest possible way for the largest number of people. To do that we started by walking around the city, and what we kept seeing were all those romantic black-and-white postcards by photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau--particularly one of the most popular postcards of all time, maybe even the highest-selling poster-

DK: -Doisneau's The Kiss.

CM: Yes.

DK: And how interesting that that image hasn't lost any of its power even after it was revealed that it was a choreographed moment between a man and a woman.

CM: You know, I had a conversation with a photographer who said that when he found that out, he only had more admiration for Doisneau and the image--imagine getting that shot to look so spontaneous. Anyway, Baz kept talking about basing the background, the people who inhabited Paris, on these black-and-white photographs--only the bohemians would be in color. As the show progresses, and as their lives are tinged more and more with reality, the color starts to drain out of their clothes.

DK: This brings up an idea I've been thinking about for a while. On one side of the coin you have a postmodern artist like Robert Wilson, who is doing opera in the most contemporary way--sometimes minimalist, sometimes maximalist, sometimes both. In an odd sort of way, he's a purist. And on the opposite side is what you guys are doing, which is taking the past and making it feel extraordinarily modern, even postmodern. I mean, who else would have done Moulin Rouge and made the operatic score out of pop songs?

CM: Sometimes in our process I think, Oh, Baz, that is the most cliched thing. How could we be going there? But what he does is take a cliche, which most of the time is a sort of truth that no one can avoid, and he forces you to go inside of it and turn it around.

DK: It's obvious, but your outsider perspective must have a lot to do with your process. How do you think that has changed?

CM: Because Australians live on the very edge of the world, I think by our nature we perceive ourselves as outsiders wanting to be a part of it all. I think that's slowly changing. We're not embarrassed anymore about telling our own stories or having a perspective on other people's stories.

DK: The coexistence of multiple perspectives in contemporary opera, like Robert Wilson's and yours, parallels something that's been evident in fashion for a while now, where you can have modernism or minimalism and simultaneously have someone like John Galliano, who's completely contemporary and is as far from minimal as can be.

CM: You're exactly right. Because it is modern to wear an Inca hand-knit sweater with a beaded floor-length fishtail gown, and a weird furry hat. But is that more modern than wearing--

DK: --A black jersey nothing? They're both modern. What you and Baz do is take the vintage and not only modernize it, but drive it. Here's a question I've been dying to ask: Costume or fashion--is there a difference? Are they the same thing? Do they overlap?

CM: I know I definitely need the inspiration the fashion world provides. Basically, at the end of the day it doesn't matter how abstract the costume--it has to be clothes for the character. You're always trying to find clothes the character can wear, because you don't want the clothes wearing them. One of the interesting things about La Boheme is that the costumes are just clothes. You've got a girl in a trench coat and a cotton sun frock--you can't pump it up with a lot of va-va-voomw. So, yes, I think that the fashion world and the costume world constantly feed off each other.

DK: Could you ever imagine you and Baz doing a story about fashion?

CM: I would love to do that.

DK: In a way, aren't you about to do that with Alexander the Great, the subject of the next movie you and Baz are going to be working on?

CM: [laughs] Everyone's said to me, "It'll be very cheap--it's just togas." And I say, "Have you seen people in togas in the movies? Do you want them to look like that?" We have to work out a way where the actors don't look as if they're at a frat party or in a sheet.

DK: Togas are ways of wrapping and caressing the body that sends a message of purity and seduction. They can be totally inspirational. Tell us about the project.

CM: Baz has wanted to start on a series of epic works for a while now. I don't want to say they're more naturalistic, but maybe they have a more psychological sense to them than the pieces we've done previously.

DK: Well, I can't wait to see what you'll do with the story. One more question: What do you want to do in your career that you haven't done?

CM: It sounds like I'm being egotistical and a megalomaniac, but I want to take on a project with Baz where all the creative design responsibility rests on my shoulders. I'm curious to see if I've reached a place creatively where I can stretch to that level. It might be one mountain too high, but I want to try it.

DK: Catherine, it's been so great talking to you. As soon as you come to New York we must get together. We can play dress-up!

CM: Oh, I would love that. And it's nice to know Donna Karan is going into fittings this afternoon, just like me! [laughs]

Donna Karan interviewed Bjork for the September 2001 issue.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning