HBO, 'Youth', Costume Designer, Camille Benda

0:00Jawad MirGoing back to Youth, what, in your view, if... Is there a small detail in any of the episodes from a costume standpoint that the audience may consciously, you know, not see it or see it, that you are very proud of?

0:16Camille BendaI think for me, little details, like tiny details that maybe the audience doesn't see but the actors really feel in fittings, is really important. For Robbie, who plays Frank, he asked me for the Ibiza scenes to decorate his hat and give him some different beads and different, like, objects that he only wears on his vacations. We went around London and got little different bits that he could add to his hat, and that, you know, he had certain beads around his neck, and some of them were vintage or in my own collection of jewelry. For Sharon, we do a lot of jewelry from her favorite jeweler, Branch on the Park. They have worked with us to either custom design or make things in gold instead of silver or change sizes or change chains. So I think jewelry is a big thing. For Sam, we did a lot of chunky, object-based jewelry.

1:15Jawad MirThank you for joining. I appreciate it. Like I was saying earlier to you…

1:19Camille BendaOf course

1:19Jawad Mir... I had the pleasure of watching the first four episodes of Youth, and it's good to see shows like that now because although, to be completely honest with you, like, I enjoy them because the… a lot of stuff now is, like, very kind of like dark and serious, which I really like, too.

1:38Camille BendaYeah.

1:38Jawad MirAnd I... Obviously, Youth now, there was another series, I had the costume designer from that show on. I forget her name. Sterling Point. It was on Amazon Prime, which is nice.

1:48Camille BendaOh, yeah, Melissa… Marisa Schwartz?

1:50Jawad MirYes. Marisa Schwartz. Yes.

1:51Camille BendaYeah.

1:51Jawad MirI had her on, and she was awesome. And, you know, similar kind of a tone type of a show, like very quirky…

1:58Camille BendaYeah

1:58Jawad Mir... Comedy and, you know, family story and all that. So I really enjoying it, so, you know, just wanna put that out there first.

2:05Camille BendaThank you. I'm glad you're enjoying it. And it does seem like people have responded to it really well.

2:13Jawad MirI think so. And I think, you know, there's always this conversation, what people, what do people want? People want superheroes or people want, you know, true crime dramas or celebrity documentaries. Yeah, people want that, but they want something that's, you know, of, different genres, of optimism and real-life stuff that we can relate to with characters, like, you know, a mother, a father, a son, a friend, you know, a husband, a wife, et cetera.

2:39Camille BendaTotally. I think why this show is so relatable, it's because it's written from Sharon Horgan's perspective, and she's literally in the middle of living that whole sort of general semi-autobiographical life. And so it's rooted in realism. And I think…

3:02Jawad Mir100%

3:03Camille Benda... That's the trick to comedy, is the more real it is, the more comic it is, and also the more tragic it is. So it's got both of those elements in the show.

3:13Jawad Mir100%. And, you know, there's another show that my wife and I just started watching on Apple, Brothers with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, which…

3:22Camille BendaOh, I haven't seen that.

3:23Jawad MirIt's actually really good.

3:23Camille BendaIs it good?

3:24Jawad MirIt's really good. It's really good.

3:26Camille BendaOkay.

3:26Jawad MirYeah. And 30-minute episodes, but anyways, we're here to talk about Youth. You know, I would love to start off with, what excited you the most when you first read Youth from a costume design perspective?

3:42Camille BendaI remember getting the script, and this was the same with Bad Sisters. I remember getting the script and sitting down with it and just not being able to put it down. Where I was just reading and reading and imagining, and there's, were moments of laughing out loud. So my first impressions was it's so fast-paced. It changes so much. There's so many different great characters that come in and out of the show. And besides the incredible sort of three-dimensional women in the show, what I really loved was all the men, all the different facets of men that we are seeing through the character Alex's eyes. So I think when I saw that kind of interplay of also different generations where, you know, Alex is sandwiched between her parents and her kids and her kids' friends. So I think I really loved that the show went many three-dimensional directions at once.

4:53Jawad MirAmazing. And, you know, when you, excuse me, when you were reading it, what was, whether it was through a character or a moment, and we don't wanna spoil the moments, but just, you know… ... Whatever you sort of wanna touch upon, was very relatable to you?

5:08Camille BendaTo me specifically? Like... So I'm a mom, a working mom. I have a 13-year-old. I've got a husband who's a designer, and we're in a busy city, and everybody's got things going on. So on the first level, I related to it in that sense. Of course, as a 50-year-old, 54-year-old woman, I related to it in the sense of it does feel like everything's changing, and sometimes you're just not even yourself. And it's really hard to describe. And it wasn't like that 10 years ago, so suddenly I'm like, "What's going on?" So I really loved seeing that perspective in the script. So to me, that was deeply relatable. And also imagining my daughter going off to college in five years and how are we gonna feel and, what will my life look like post-kids?

6:10Camille Benda'Cause for the past thirteen years it's been all kid. And so thinking about where I would be going, where she'd be going, like, how does everything readjust? So I think in the first episode of Youth, we really see Alex struggling with that.

6:30Jawad MirAmazing. You know, you said to the effect of that life is different now than it was 10 years ago, right? Like, there's a lot of… ... Go. You know, yes, we live in LA, right? That's one factor, but you probably were in LA even 10 years before that, and you can argue that, yes, it's the social media world, but it could also be a combination of those two plus the kids are older.

6:55Camille BendaYeah. Yeah, definitely. And, it's funny because I don't necessarily ever talk about myself within my work. I'm usually talking about the project. If I'm in fittings, you know, we talk with actors about everything. But, it's really interesting to do a show where the topics are so personal that it's mirroring so much of what my experience is and also the experience of so many of my mom friends.

7:33Jawad MirGot it. Awesome. When you just, you know, when you got on the set or when you were sort of doing all the prep work from a costume design standpoint, what was the visual language that you interpreted versus what the showrunner/the director and the conversation that you guys had that what are we gonna do? I mean, it's a very contemporary film, right? So a lot of people would assume…

7:57Camille BendaYeah

7:57Jawad Mir... And I was talking to Marissa about this too, with contemporary…

7:59Camille BendaYeah

7:59Jawad Mir... Films people think, "Oh, it's, there's no costume, it's just regular stuff people wear," right? But there is…

8:05Camille BendaTotally

8:05Jawad Mir... Right? So talk about that to me, please.

8:08Camille BendaYeah. So it's interesting 'cause I've actually had people say to me, "Oh, I thought the actors went and just got their own costumes for TV shows and films." So it is definitely true that if you do contemporary costume right and correctly and right for the character, sometimes people won't notice it because it is so seamless with the character and the script and the storytelling. I think with Youth it's different because Sharon's character is meant to be someone who loves clothes and fashion. So for her, part of her visual identity is the fact that she dresses well, she loves having fun with clothes, and she doesn't necessarily want to look like everybody else. She wants to look unique.

9:04Camille Benda... And I think that sets her apart when she's in the literary agency, and we spent a lot of time working on how to make Sam, her boss, just as stylish and kind of a power woman, but in her own separate way. So when we sat down with the director and... We had two directors. We had one for block one, which was four episodes, one for block two, which was four episodes. And they were Don Shadforth on the first block and Jim O'Hanlon on the second block. And when we sat down with Don, it was exciting because Don was very interested in taking it towards the East End of London, which is the most creative, cool, edgy part of London. And there are lots of musicians, designers, artists live there. So what Don did was kind of imbue the entire show with this life of creatives.

10:06Camille BendaAnd so it was very natural then to have Alex look really interesting and put together, but not in a trying too hard way. So those are some of the initial discussions. And because I've worked with Sharon on Bad Sisters, and I also did her pilot here in the US for Motherland, the English show, that pilot didn't get picked up, but I worked on that. So having worked with Sharon a number of times, we kind of know her style, her shape, what works on her, and then we kind of branched out from there in terms of figuring out this combination of professional, edgy, and also kind of East End Londony cool.

10:51Jawad MirThat's awesome. You talked about Motherland, right? So, in Hollywood, even I would say in the UK, but let's just talk about Hollywood.

11:01Camille BendaYeah.

11:01Jawad MirA lot of stuff doesn't get picked up, right? Like after pilot, like things just disappear.

11:06Camille BendaYeah.

11:06Jawad MirHow often has that happened to you? Yes, you're not the creator, yes, you're not the director or the showrunner, but you are involved in it as a heavy part of, you know, the visual look from a costume standpoint. H… has that happened more often to you? Have you gotten used to it, or is it like a bummer all the time or?

11:23Camille BendaMotherland was a bummer. I have to say that was, that was something that everyone was so passionate about. And I remember when I was kind of, showing the mood boards to the network and everyone, my daughter was sick, and so I had to bring her with me to work, and she was napping like down there next to me while I was on the Zoom. So I'll never forget that because, again, it reflected real life so much. I've been really lucky that not many projects I've been on haven't gone forward. So I came to LA sort of in 2013 at the… End of, or sort of when the pilot season wasn't just one season specifically, and they were happening all the time. So I haven't done that many pilots.

12:17Jawad MirGot it. So, you know, you worked on different, in dif… in different genres, right? So Bad Sisters was comedy. Youth is kind of, you know, s… w-witty humor I would like to call it. I wouldn't say comedy…

12:28Jawad Mir... Per se. But you worked on drama as well, I'm sure. Like, how is it different for you, and you may have touched upon it, designing costume with your team for a humorous project versus a dramatic project?

12:45Camille BendaYeah. So for a humorous project, I think it is really about finding the real characters. For a dramatic project, it's about reflecting the feeling of the show as it relates to production design and locations and lighting, and you're creating these sort of tableaus. So I would say my approach to comedy is always to get in the fitting room with the actors and find out where they think the beats are in terms of how to use the clothes. And one good example was Eve Hewson in Bad Sisters, and she's just so brilliant at thinking through how she uses clothes in a scene and how she kind of moves through that. So yeah, I think for comedy drama, that's kind of more the perspective. But then I've done some period films, and that's very different in terms of being able to set the time and place and give the actors a completely different shape to make with their visual appearance.

13:55Jawad MirGot it. Since you said that this show was very relatable, and I'm sure you learn… ... A lot from those shows you work on that are not per se a lot relatable from a professional standpoint and personal, but what was one thing that you learned about yourself, whether it's personal…

14:13Camille BendaOh, wow. Okay.

14:14Jawad Mir... Personal or professional, a bit of both, while you're working on the show and/or after, you know, it was done and now that it's out?

14:23Camille BendaYeah. Oh gosh, that's such a good question, and I have not ever thought about that necessarily. So, I think Youth very much taught me not to go back to my usual favorites. So typically I will have go-to things, and especially because I worked with Sharon on Bad Sisters, we did develop shapes, styles, and brands that we really liked. For Youth, we were intentional about doing something different. So for me, it was about pushing myself out of my own box of, "Oh, hey, I love this shape of trouser on Sharon," or, "This kind of blazer works really well." It was more about finding shapes that were maybe more unusual or directional that pushed us in different ways. So we went to a lot of our favorite vintage designers all over London, which is one of the best things you can do in London, is scouring markets and thrift shops and going to all the different neighborhoods.

15:31Camille BendaAnd so I think going to those same vintage dealers, but really looking for pieces that pushed us in a different direction. And same thing with the character of Sam. Our director suggested, using some Black British designers, so we did that. We went full into designers like Wales Bonner and Tolu Coker and Kemi Telford to show that Sam was really a very strong identity and had her own separate world from Alex.

16:09Jawad MirOkay. No, that... Thank you for sharing that. On a personal note, anything that you learned or you don't wanna go there?

16:16Camille BendaOh, I see. On a personal note for me.

16:18Jawad MirThat's good, too. That's good, too. What I, what you just said was fantastic, but just as a human being, like, what, maybe a character taught you something or a situation that episode taught you something.

16:31Camille BendaI think on this show especially, what I learned was that everybody on the team is doing their absolute best. And a lot of times, even if there are personal circumstances or shifts, somebody goes off. We had our crowd supervisor who's brilliant, she went off to do her own design.

16:56Camille BendaAnd so one of the things I learned was the show does go on. When she was leaving, I thought, "Oh gosh, how are we gonna do this without her? She's so fantastic." And so it was a really good experience for me of just thinking, "We will get this done. It's gonna work. There's so many amazing, talented costume crew in London that we will figure it out." And, we did the same thing in Frankfurt when we went to Germany. There was a whole crew of costume people who dressed all the crowd, made certain scenes look incredibly realistic. And same in Mallorca. We had another incredible team who just pitched in, were locals or coming from the Spanish mainland. This is for episode five of the Ibiza scenes. And, on that episode, we dressed about 400 or more, maybe, yeah, probably 400 extras in, Ibiza club gear.

18:03Camille BendaSo that was maybe 20 extra costume team on top of everybody who was already there. So I think that was the biggest lesson for me on this one, is that… It's, it's such a big project and multi-country project across Europe that I really had to have faith in the incredible team that was working on it.

18:31Jawad MirAmazing. You mentioned Europe. What's your favorite city in Europe?

18:34Camille BendaOh my gosh. Well, my parents were Czech immigrants. They escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1968, so Prague is still probably my favorite city. And, my husband and I got married there, and, I've worked there a couple times, so it's a really special place for me.

18:55Jawad MirPrague is one of my top three favorite cities as well.

18:58Camille BendaOh, really?

18:59Jawad MirAnd…

18:59Camille BendaWhat are your other ones?

19:01Jawad MirI lo… I love Olomouc, which is beautiful. Right? Which is in... A university city.

19:07Camille BendaYeah.

19:07Jawad MirI love Berlin. I love Amsterdam. I love Vienna. I mean, notice you men… I didn't mention London and Paris because those cities are so overrated now. Like, everybody's been there, and I've been there so many times.

19:19Camille BendaYeah.

19:19Jawad MirBut yeah, those four cities I really enjoy. Also Lisbon, I would say. Yeah, Lisbon as well.

19:26Camille BendaOh, I've never been to Lisbon, but, Berlin's one of my favorite cities too.

19:31Jawad MirYeah. It's amazing. It's so historical. I mean…

19:34Camille BendaYeah

19:35Jawad Mir... It's like almost like a walking museum, second to Rome, right? Rome is great too. But, yeah…

19:40Camille BendaYeah

19:40Jawad Mir... Prague is, Prague is awesome. Prague is amazing. I love it.

19:44Camille BendaAnd I think the first time I went, it was the early '80s, and I've been going ever since with family or on my own, and we brought my daughter two years ago, and it was really interesting to see how the city's changed and also see it through her eyes.

20:01Jawad MirYeah. One of the most amazing things about Prague is that depending on where you are, but where I stayed s… a few times I was there, so when you get out, you can see, like, all the roof tops, like, of the, of the building, like, all, like, reddish orange colors, like a whole sea of them, and it looks absolutely amazing.

20:20Camille BendaYeah. And the view from... I don't know if you went up to the big, church on the top of the hill.

20:26Jawad MirYes.

20:26Camille BendaAnd you can just see all the way down. It's, like, cascading down and yeah, it's such a cool city.

20:33Jawad MirIt is. It is. On that note, I would love to sort of go back in time to find out what exactly inspired you to be a costume designer. Was it a movie? What was a catalyst? Was it a stage show, TV show?

20:49Camille BendaI think the biggest catalyst... I grew up in Seattle, Washington, so mid-sized city way before, all the tech came into Seattle. So it was a aerospace city with Boeing, and it was kind of a post-lumber and Pacific Northwest sort of Wild West feeling place. As I grew up a Czech immigrant kid, like the kid of Czech immigrants, I think one of the things that I noticed was I was always watching people from the outside to understand how they behaved differently from how my parents behaved, and I always spoke Czech, so I had a, another language, and people were very curious about my parents' accents. So I think that kind of set me on the path of observing people and trying to understand psychology and belonging and otherness and all of these big concepts that you have in the US. And so then as a teenager, I started getting into fashion, and this was way before social media, way before cell phones or the internet really.

22:08Camille BendaAnd so I was reading fashion magazines. Then I went to college and took an art history class, and I saw the clothes in the paintings, and I was like mind blown. "I can't believe this. How do I connect all this up?" And so in my last year of undergrad, I walked into the drama department and said, "What's costume design?" And the incredible, costume design teacher there handed me a book to read and said, "We don't have enough people to design plays. Do you wanna design a play in a couple weeks?" And I was like, "Of course." And so I did that, and I was just hooked.

22:50Jawad MirAmazing. You still do theater?

22:52Camille BendaYeah. So I just, couple... Well, during COVID, I did a show at the Geffen, which was Bernhard/Hamlet, but unfortunately, it got canceled the day before first rehearsal, so it never came up, but it was, turn-of-the-century Paris.

23:11Camille BendaSo it would've been really fun period costumes.

23:16Jawad MirAre you, like, a Shakespearean sort of a fan?

23:20Camille BendaI've never done... I think this is true. I don't think I've ever done a Shakespeare play…

23:28Jawad MirInteresting

23:28Camille Benda... Design-wise. I love Shakespeare, and I teach costume design and dress history at California Institute of the Arts, and so, I do teach Shakespeare a lot. In fact, we're doing Anthony and Cleopatra for a class project tomorrow.

23:45Jawad MirThat's awesome. What's your favorite Shakespeare play?

23:47Camille BendaOthello.

23:50Jawad MirThat's a good one.

23:51Camille BendaI think just 'cause it brings so many things to talk about and so many different levels and power and betrayal and all those kind of things.

24:01Jawad MirYeah, 100%, 100%. Going back to youth, what, in your view, if... Is there a small detail in any of the episode from a costume standpoint that the audience may consciously, you know, not see it or see it that you are very proud of?

24:22Camille BendaThat's a really good question. So I think for me, little details, like tiny details that maybe the audience doesn't see but the actors really feel in fittings is really important. So for Robbie, who plays Frank, he asked me for the Ibiza scenes to decorate his hat and give him some different beads and different, like, objects that he only wears on his vacations. And the implication is he goes to Ibiza a lot and parties there. So, we went around London and got little different bits that he could add to his hat, and that, you know, he had certain beads around his neck, and some of them were vintage or in my own collection of jewelry. For Sharon, we do a lot of jewelry from her favorite jeweler, Branch on the Park.

25:17Camille BendaAnd, so they have worked with us to either custom design or make things in gold instead of silver or change sizes or change chains. Like for Bad Sisters, we designed some wedding rings, which was really fun. So I think jewelry is a big thing. For Sam, we did a lot of chunky object-based jewelry, and I think one of my favorite was Libby, who plays Plum, the assistant.

25:50Camille BendaAnd, she had a necklace that was made by a kind of Gen Z young person who made these sort of silver square necklaces. And our costume assistant, who was actually Sharon's daughter, her name's Sive Rainbird, she found this jeweler and brought us this piece of jewelry, and then we incorporated it into Plum's character.

26:20Jawad MirThat's awesome.

26:21Camille BendaSo I think those tiny things. And then Libby, the actress, at the end, they gave us each a lovely necklace that had the same shape and from the same jeweler. So I think carrying through some of those tiny details is really important to me. I think one other example was Fiona Shaw on the second season of Bad Sisters. She wanted a rosary, which…

26:52Camille Benda... We never saw, but she wanted to keep in her pocket at all times and kind of use it as a talisman. So she had this coral-colored rosary in her pocket, and every morning, the costume standbys would put that in her dressing room, and she'd put it in the pocket of her costume.

27:12Jawad MirThat's incredible. You know, the importance of costume, if you look back at films that, you know, from the '80s, '90s, '70s, you know, whatever, if you know, you look at... I'm just gonna randomly mention names like The Godfather, Forrest Gump, Jurassic Park, Beverly Hills Cop, right? Like all these films. Star Wars or even more like contemporary, stuff, like, American Beauty, for example, right?

27:38Camille BendaOh, totally.

27:39Jawad MirRight? If you, it… Now with those, all this advent of AI, if people put different costumes on them, right, just hypothetically, you can't, you cannot connect to it because we are connected to those characters in many different ways, and costume…

27:55Jawad Mir... Is a part of it. Huge part of it. So, you know…

27:59Camille BendaThank you for saying that

28:01Jawad Mir... A lot of people don't understand the value of every itsy bitsy, like a little object sitting in the corner of the background, which is a production designer or art director. So…

28:10Camille BendaYeah

28:10Jawad Mir... It's fantastic work, and I… it's collaborative medium, right? That's, as everybody says, so thank you for that.

28:18Camille BendaOf course. I think it's hyper collaborative, and films for me like The Big Lebowski or…

28:25Jawad MirOh, yes

28:26Camille Benda... The Emma with Anya Taylor-Joy, those films really show how costume can also become clothes, that they're not a costume that's separated from reality. It really makes it feel like three-dimensional people.

28:45Jawad MirHundred percent. That's awesome.

28:48Camille BendaSo.

28:48Jawad MirNo, that's, that's so true. That's a great movie, too, that you just mentioned, Big Lebowski. That's, it's been a while since I've seen it. I gotta maybe re-watch it.

28:54Camille BendaOh my gosh. Brilliant. Brilliant design.

28:57Jawad MirYeah.

28:58Camille BendaAnd…

28:58Jawad MirAnd brilliant film

28:58Camille Benda... There's so many I could mention of films that just... Or TV shows where you really feel like the clothes are part of the character and resolve so many things for us as the viewer in terms of who is this person.

29:15Jawad MirI agree. I agree. With that, what's on the plate for you with coming up project, if it's something that you can chat about?

29:23Camille BendaSo right now I'm in between things.

29:26Jawad MirOkay.

29:26Camille BendaI'm teaching this whole semester, and I just had a book come out, earlier this year called Bending the Rules: Fashion Beyond the Binary, and it's about how we use gender identity, and clothing, costume, nudity, accessories for self-expression. So it kind of looks into the history of how, we use clothing to share gender identity, and then it also looks at a lot of modern examples of individuals living right now. So we did a lot of first-person interviews and things. So I'm still kind of, talking to people about the book. I think I have an Instagram Live about the book coming out, and there's a website and podcast that want to do a zine of the book, which I've never done a zine, so I think that'll be cool.

30:22Jawad MirThat's awesome. Well…

30:22Camille BendaAnd then... Yeah.

30:24Jawad MirGo on, please.

30:24Camille BendaOh, sorry.

30:24Jawad MirGo on.

30:26Camille BendaOh, I was just gonna also say, my first book came out in 2021, and it's called Dressing the Resistance, and it's about how we use clothes for protest and activism. And when I wrote it, I thought, "Oh, I don't know if this is gonna be topical anymore. It's probably by the time it's published, no one will be protesting anymore." And I was totally wrong.

30:49Jawad MirEverybody's protesting everywhere around the world, so…

30:52Camille BendaYeah

30:52Jawad Mir... I think…

30:53Camille BendaExactly. So

30:54Jawad Mir... It's timely. But what inspired you to write that book?

30:59Camille BendaI think that was really inspired by where I teach because there's this idea there of citizen artists, and kind of art as activism. So as I absorbed the culture of where I started teaching, I started understanding, oh my gosh, you can really use art for activism.

31:21Jawad MirWell said. Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Anything else you wanna add at the end about the show, about yourself or any other stuff that you wanna mention?

31:32Camille BendaNo, I think, I think I'm good. I really appreciate you talking about how important costume is to the whole process. And I suppose, yes, I would add a shout-out to the whole youth team, because our makeup artist is an absolute genius. Our production designer was amazing in creating all these spaces, so many locations. And I have to say our producing team was just incredible. So, it was, it was such a strong team, some of which came over from Bad Sisters. So there was a lot of strength in the visual language, I think.

32:14Jawad MirAmazing. Well, that's awesome. Thank you so much again for your time. Looking forward to possibly having you on again on your next project, and all the best to you.

32:22Camille BendaThat'd be amazing. Thanks for having me today. It was really fun to talk to you.

32:27Jawad MirLikewise. Take care.