Estelle Daniel, Producer | Christopher Hobbs, Production Designer Andy Wilson, Director | Odile Dicks-Mireaux, Costume Designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux Costume Designer In many productions, the costume and set designers work separately. On Gormenghast, however, costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux collaborated closely with production designer Christopher Hobbs to create a credible fantasy world. "We had to convince the audience that this is a completely different world where they will enjoy being taken," explains Dicks-Mireaux. To create this world, she began searching through centuries of design for compatible elements. The men's costumes, for example, were based on Hungarian photographs from the end of the 19th century. She then added an Elizabethan look before cutting them in a 16th-century style. And she finally wove in Asian touches to reflect Mervyn Peake's birthplace. All the costumes were designed in this timeless, eclectic fashion. "She has created Gormenghast motifs that run through all the costumes, pulling bits from East and West and different periods," says producer Estelle Daniel. "We printed and dyed our own fabrics and hand-embroidered and finished them, with technology just as it would have been in Gormenghast." Dicks-Mireaux first encountered Gormenghast in college. "I even went to see an exhibition of [Peake's] illustrations," she says. "I was a big fan. I've still got the books in my dad's house." While in college, Dicks-Mireaux studied theater design, but eventually became more interested in costumes, working with off-off-Broadway-style fringe theater companies and finally winning a contract with the BBC. "I decided that I liked going back into the past and studying how people lived ... and trying to recreate things with what you've got in the modern world," she says. "I'm attracted to patterns, textures, appliquéd things, and nice colors. The silhouette, how the quality of light affects the costumes, and how they move is quite important." For the past 30 years, Dicks-Mireaux has designed costumes for both television and feature films. Her Gormenghast creations earned her nominations for the Royal Television Society (RTS) and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards for Best Costume Design, and her designs for ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre's Great Expectations won the 1999 BAFTA Award for Best Costume Design. Her work has been seen most recently in Buffalo Soldiers, Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang), and A Certain Justice, and she has designed costumes for the classic British series Blackadder and Doctor Who.

Crew Bios: Estelle Daniel, Producer | Christopher Hobbs, Production Designer Andy Wilson, Director | Odile Dicks-Mireaux, Costume Designer

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