Costume designer Debra McGuire, known for her work on the likes of Friends and The Morning Show, gave a rare look behind the design curtain at the Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event portion of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) on Wednesday.
She recalled working on Superbad, Freaks and Geeks and more, and with various stars, including with Dolly Parton, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Christina Applegate, and three times with Al Pacino.
The expert shared, among many other things, that John C. Reilly is one of the rare stars who likes coming to fittings. She also caused smiles among many an audience member when she showed a photo of her and a young Reese Witherspoon when they worked on a “Movie of the Week” called Desperate Choices: To Save My Child.
McGuire called Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy “definitely one of the great movies of my career,” sharing that “I didn’t realize I was going to get the gift, which is that Adam McKay had never directed a film before, so I had his undivided attention, which is the first time and the last time that that’s ever happened in my career.” She then drew laughs when showing a film still of her cameo in the movie.
How does McGuire choose her projects? It all comes down to one thing: “I only work for people I love. That was the quality of life I wanted.” She didn’t go after “the big, interesting films” since “during the years that I was raising my kids, TV was perfect,” she said. “Films in L.A. were perfect.”
And she acknowledged: “I have turned projects down, big projects — one very big one in particular — because it’s not a director I had any interest in working with. I heard he wasn’t a nice human being, and I don’t do that. When you have children at home, you want to bring good energy home.”
Summarizing the role of costume designers, McGuire said: “We are the silent storytellers, and the stories we tell are just like everybody else’s stories. Our story has to support the vision of the writers, the vision of the directors.”
McGuire also offered: “We don’t often have the ability to really utilize our own ideas, but in collaboration, we’re able to do that.”
She started doing Friends in 1994 and designing for Dolly Parton in 1995, which allowed her to open a store in California, which she shared was her dream. Speaking of boarding Friends, she shared how she began that job in her early 40s on a Monday, three days after giving birth, quipping: “Everybody was looking at the baby, wondering: Is that real?”
Of course, the show became a hit and ended up running for 10 seasons. “Did we know it was going to be successful? No,” McGuire said, also sharing: “I didn’t really care about the fashion the first couple of years. I just wanted to make great pictures. The actors were so young and didn’t really know much about fashion” until later.
Friends “pushed the limit of what we could do,” the costume guru told the Tallinn session. “We were doing 75 wardrobe changes in a 30-minute sitcom. I can’t really imagine it looking back. I have no idea how we did that.”
McGuire again had the crowd in stitches when she discussed putting Cox into a fat suit while trying to keep her cool. The actress wore in when playing the younger, overweight version of Monica Geller in flashback episodes of the series.
“What a costume designer lives for is to see in a fitting when we are giving the actor a way into who they are,” the costume designer explained. “That’s the dream for us to have the kind of trust, and it gets established in a fitting room. It’s very intimate, and I always like to hear what actors have to say about their character. But it’s very interesting that the most famous actors that I’ve worked with, the Pacinos of the world, the Helen Mirrens, the De Niros, want me to tell them who they are. And when that happens, it’s the most exciting thing that you can imagine.”
What’s next for McGuire? Her work on season five of The Morning Show, where she works exclusively with Aniston, is starting in January, she shared. The season four finale released on Wednesday. “We have been together for 31 years,” she said about the star. “We have a language together that doesn’t have to be spoken.”
Earlier in the Industry@Tallinn day, experts discussed the future of AI in the film industry, from cost and time savings, challenges, and best practices.