To recreate the wonderfully vivid and authentic 1980s look and feel the film required, the filmmakers turned again to their trusted superpowered creative teams, led by director of photography Matthew Jensen, production designer Aline Bonetto, costume designer Lindy Hemming and editor Richard Pearson.
Bonetto recalls, “I was in my twenties in the `80s, so I remember the music, the colors, the punk. In the `80s I was quite punky, and it’s funny because Patty showed me a picture of her from then, and we had more or less the same look.”
It was important though, to both Jenkins and Bonetto, not to let the design become a caricature of the time, so despite her own vivid memories, Bonetto and her team gathered together a large library of images from which to draw upon for inspiration. “We found so many amazing pictures,” says Bonetto. “They were a trove of information not just for the sets, but also for the costumes and details like what people were doing, how they ate, how they sat, how they talked on the phone. You need these kinds of details. You have the characters and action of the script, but you also need to tell the story of the people around them in a way that the audience will feel it’s a real place.”
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the mall sequence. For the location of a jewelry store heist scene, the production rented the nearly empty Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia. Originally built in 1965, it had been operational until 2017, so the designer and her team had to change out everything from the light fixtures to the signs in the mall’s walkway.
“When we scouted the Landmark Mall,” says Roven, “we were thrilled to find an empty mall that was still functional: the escalators worked, the elevators worked, the bathrooms worked, the plumbing was there, so we were very enthused about that.”
However, Roven furthers, “After talking with our design team, we realized this blessing might also be a bit of a curse because the action takes place over three floors. Every single one of those floors had shops we had to fill, and with names of companies that may or may not still exist today. That was a really big job, more than any of us had thought about, but Aline hit it out of the park.”
In total, the production team dressed 65 stores with period merchandise and fixtures, “right down to the cash registers and the seller’s notebook on the sales counters,” says Bonetto. “Every shop where we could potentially see in was fully dressed.”
The mall set turned out to be a personal favorite for the designer. “When the cast and crew were at our redressed version of the mall, it was the talk of the set,” says Bonetto. “Some remembered certain toys, for others it was the telephones or the clothes. Everyone was finding something that reminded them of their past. It was really fun bringing that back to life for everyone.”
Despite being an aesthetic win, the mall scene presented a challenge for the stunt department, who were tasked with having Wonder Woman crash through the atrium, swoop down to save a young girl, then swing beneath a bridge. Normally, says Inch, “To do something like that we would be on a stage with huge steelwork to rig to. But in the shopping mall we had this atrium that was surrounded by escalators, and there was nothing to rig from, so we had to build it.” The process of rigging for the important sequence took several weeks and a team of 15 strong. “I think there was something like six kilometers [3.7 miles] of line that went in there to feed it all around the place and hide it. So, yeah, that was a big challenge.”
Shooting in the nearby capital of Washington, DC was another matter. According to Jones, “DC is an interesting place to film. There are several different authorities you have to deal with depending on whether it’s a building, a footpath, a park, a road. But our terrific locations department made it work.”
The complexities of the process can perhaps best be summed up by noting that for filming at the National Air and Space Museum, locations dealt with the U.S. Park Police; just outside, for a scene in which Diana and Steve are walking toward the National Mall, the jurisdiction went to the Metropolitan Police Department; but once they touched the grass of the National Mall, it was the purview of the National Parks Service. Thus an area of about 40 feet entailed three overlapping agencies.
The filmmakers credit the Washington Film Office with helping them through the maze of agencies and permits required and making it possible to film at or near the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian, the Federal Triangle, Georgetown’s Hirshhorn Museum, at a foreign embassy, a subway station, and McPherson Square, which doubled for the always-hectic Dupont Circle, and even closing down a small portion of Pennsylvania Avenue for two days.
Once shooting in Virginia and DC was completed, cast and key crew then headed to the Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden in England for soundstage work. There, the crew recreated the interiors of the White House Oval Office and the Smithsonian Museum. They would later utilize a number of locations in England as well, including the Legal and General House in Surrey; Boston Manor Park, Brentford; the Imperial War Museum in Duxford; the Bovington Airfield, Heydon Grange Golf & Country Club, Berry Farm, and RAF Marsworth, all in Hertfordshire; and London’s RAF Halton, Buckinghamshire, the Royal College of Physicians, City Place House, Aldermanbury Square, Hyde Park, Adelphi Terrace, Torrington Square and Schwartz Wharf.
The production traveled to Spain, including the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco, to film several sequences, including those that take place in Cairo and at Emir Said Bin Abydos’s palace, and the massive Amazon Games sequence taking place on Diana’s home island of Themyscira. Southern Spain proved very flexible, providing for an Egyptian landscape, with its Moorish architecture and the striking Alcazaba of AlmerÃa; in the Canaries, shooting was divided between the two largest islands of Tenerife and Fuerteventura.
Built in the tenth century by the Caliph of Cordoba, Abd al-Rahman III, the Alcazaba was a small, walled medina: a city complex that included royal and private residences, soldiers’ quarters, a mosque, bath houses, storage rooms, a public square and government offices. For the film, it served as the location of the Emir’s palatial compound and provided a view of the city of “Cairo” and the country beyond. The nearby Calle Cruces Bajas stood in for a street in the Egyptian capital.
The island of Tenerife filled in for the mountainous race path along which Diana and the Amazons compete. Mainly shot in the Valle Olvido (ominously known as the “Valley of Death”), the road consisted of a single-lane track going down to a dead end. Therefore, maneuvering 150 to 200 crew members into the location—as well as several horses involved in the competition—was a logistical challenge made even more so by the heavy 65 mm IMAX cameras used to capture the incredible sequence. “The film’s prologue piece is one of the sequences that was shot entirely in IMAX,” says Roven.
The stadium portion of the Amazon Games, where scores of Amazons cheer on the competitors, was shot on nearby Fuerteventura. The complexity of the Games was matched only
by another shoot in this location, where a convoy battle takes place on the outskirts of Cairo. The filmmakers referred to it as the open-road sequence, and it is a key example of Jenkins’ desire to shoot as much as possible in-camera. The filmmakers were thankful, then, to the island of Fuerteventura for allowing the production to shut down a major road for several weeks in order to plan, rehearse and film.
Indeed, so complex was the shoot that the team mapped it out at a disused airstrip back in England over the span of two months before shipping everything out to Fuerteventura for tests and rehearsals there. The scene required vehicles to be flipped, for Wonder Woman to run alongside a speeding vehicle, and then for her to use her lasso to propel herself skyward. “I’ve shot many car chases,” says Inch, “but not many with somebody actually running beside a vehicle.”
The vehicle flips were accomplished courtesy of special effects supervisor Mark Holt and his team of about 50 core crew. “The open-road sequence is like a film in itself,” says Holt. “It was so involved, it took us a long while to plan our every shot and, as with so many things on this film, we wanted to do something that hasn’t been done before to make it more visually stunning for the audience. So we decided to try to get the truck to do a three-sixty, where it drives along, flips one-eighty, then does another continuous flip and lands back on its wheels again. We prepped probably about six months for that 360-degree aerial truck flip. It had never been done before, but we managed to do it.”
While the open-road sequence was the most difficult, the most popular and anticipated scene for cast and crew was the epic battle between Wonder Woman and the Cheetah. “Patty’s directive was that she wanted to create an aerial battle with a Cirque du Soleil feel to it,” Holt says. Without giving too much away, he elaborates, “Wonder Woman comes flying in, fights several guards, spots the Cheetah, and we go into this ground-based fight that ends up in an aerial sequence. And there’s an underwater portion as well.”
Jenkins was also “very specific about how Gal and I fight,” recalls Kristen Wiig. “She didn’t want to have two people just punching each other; everything comes from the character, and when I watch a superhero movie, my favorite part is when they are discovering their powers and strengths, so getting to do that was really exciting for me.”
Wiig relied heavily on her workout regime with trainer Jenny Pacey, which began pre-production and lasted for around eight months. “With me being the Cheetah,” Wiig continues, “we had to incorporate these predatory feline movements—shoulder movements and sweeping claws, curling my back and such. I didn’t want to bulk up in any way because Cheetah is very long and lean, and Jenny was amazing. She worked really closely with the stunt team to know
what kinds of movements I would have to do and developed a very intentional way to work pretty much every muscle in my body.”
Also working closely with Jenkins to interpret the visual elements of the film, costume designer Lindy Hemming, another “Wonder Woman” alumna, was very familiar with the character’s hero suit. However, to complement the colorfulness of the era, the director asked her to also glam up Wonder Woman’s costume. “Patty decided that she definitely wanted the Wonder Woman suit to be more red, blue, and gold like the original, more jewel-like to reflect the period that we were in,” says Hemming. “So, our new Wonder Woman costume is deliciously shiny and much more vibrant than before.”
While the film maintained continuity with the first one by reusing the armor for its lead Amazons, Queen Hippolyta and General Antiope, new costumes were required for the Amazon Games spectators and competitors. Hemming relates, “We had to create a festive look for all our spectators in white and gold to match the theme. There were seven variations of the white dress and ten variations of gold leatherwork, which allowed for many permutations and the appearance of individualism.
“For the athletes,” she continues, “we had to come up with a single costume that could be believably worn to ride a horse and go through the brush and climb mountains and swim in the sea. The idea came to us to print what looked like leather onto Lycra, which was executed by the genius fabric printer Steve Gell (who also created the under suit armored catsuit for the Golden Armor). We made body-hugging, cover-all suits, which have a golden sheen to them that ties in with the golden theme of the Games. They look wonderful, so strong and so fit but not exposed in any way.”
While Bonetto had to be era-specific, to achieve the same authenticity Hemming had to draw upon not just the mainstream looks from the 1980s but also the preceding decades and micro-cultures like the punk rockers and those in Western wear. She explains, “There were lots of ordinary people who were still dressing from the late ’70s, some still dressing from the ’50s. There were the punks. We see Stetsons and cowboy boots and some bolos on people who have come into town from somewhere in Virginia to go shopping at the mall. There are Memphis print shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the extreme Jane Fonda-type workout leotards, leg and wrist warmers and headbands, as well as zip-up jackets tied around the waist with the arms hanging down. And of course the `80s ladies: I loved the original leather tailored suits—the ones with the puffy shoulders and different patterns of leather. There’s one with faux snakeskin panels set into a pink leather jacket with piped edges and a tight skirt. To make a proper cross-section of people in the region at that time, we had to create a whole range of clothing.”
It is only when Diana attends a Smithsonian fundraiser that Hemming felt free to go full-on `80s. “At the fundraiser you see more metallic fabrics, which had become popular just then. In secondhand shops we found loads of really terrifying metallic dresses with frills and bows and such, so we created a mixture of younger people dressed like that and then older, more matronly ladies with “Dynasty”-style shoulders and draped dresses. We looked at photos of Nancy and Ronald Reagan’s parties at the White House—parties that wealthy people had attended, which doesn’t necessarily mean they looked tasteful, it just means they were all trying to conform to this new `80s silhouette.”
Gadot says, “It was fun to go through the process with Lindy of finding the right looks for Diana during the ‘80s, because we wanted to keep the tones very specific. She keeps very much to herself, so she wouldn’t wear pink or orange or yellow or green or red. We wanted her to be cool and elegant and not to draw attention to herself. I ended up loving the blue suit that she wears to work at the Smithsonian, and the three-piece suit that she wears. I even liked the air base jumpsuit; it was very comfortable!”
“Something we worked very hard on with Lindy, who is just an incredible designer, was to not only incorporate the fun and humor and the colorful qualities of the `80s looks—a lot of which you’ll see on Kristen as Barbara—but to also bring in the elegant and beautiful styles we had then,” Jenkins comments. “Diana has impeccable taste and Gal looks so stunning in the wardrobe Lindy put together, I just loved all of it. It really took me back in time in the best way.”
Hemming also took Barbara Minerva through several wardrobe transitions to reflect the changes in the character. Wiig states, “Lindy is one of the best costume designers I’ve ever worked with, and she and Patty make such a great team. Patty is so involved with every aspect of how an outfit looks, fits, falls on you, the hues. Every little detail in Barbara’s wardrobe is so thought out, because each look is a symbol of how she’s changing—even her second outfit, where she sort of just takes off her skirt and makes her shirt into a dress. All of a sudden, she looks kind of good, but it’s by accident.” Wiig’s favorite look? “Having the punk-style long hair with the shaved sides, the dark makeup and the ripped clothes. I loved that.”
Naturally, Hemming was not only tasked with devising looks for lead females. Pedro Pascal as Maxwell Lord donned suits reflective of the era and Lord’s desire to look the part of a wealthy businessman. The film also contains a montage of looks for Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor designed to entertain the audience with a showcase of men’s options from the era.
“We had fun with it, of course, but in the end, for his ultimate outfit, it was not unlike our thought process for Diana: what were people wearing back then that you could put on now and look good?” Jenkins asks. “We found the black Members Only jacket and pleated dress pants, and sneakers seemed perfect for Steve. All of it had to appeal to the military man in him who wants function and efficiency—movement, pockets, and obviously the most comfortable shoes he’s ever put on in his life. And the fanny pack, which makes perfect sense to him and gave us a great ‘80s touchstone moment.”
“The fanny pack was great!” Pine laughs. “The look Patty wanted for Steve in this film was I believe an ode to the popular films of the era: the baggy-ish pants with pleats, the scarf. Lindy is a brilliant costume designer and she gave me all of these wonderfully bizarre `80s things to try on in a scene that Patty crafted to be a sort of callback to the first film, when Diana first comes into the human world and goes and tries on all those clothes. The comfort level was terrific after the 40 pounds of early 20th century wool I wore in the first film.”
The actor found Steve’s primary accessory so handy that he actually bought one for himself. “I actually ended up getting my own fanny pack and used it constantly while I was biking around Washington, DC,” he relates.
As with most period films, the extras could not supply their own wardrobe, and between just the mall and fundraising scenes, Hemming’s team dressed over 600 extras. “Our massive team of tailors, cutters, printers, distressers, agers, dyers, leather workers, metal workers and jewelry makers made the vast majority of the costumes on this film,” she says. “There are hardly any hired costumes, everything is either vintage-bought or we made it.”
The circumstances were similar for makeup & hair designer Jan Sewell and her stylists. “We had tons of wigs,” she says, “because the hairstyles that people have now have nothing to do with the `80s at all.” Inspired by the new romantic movement and bands like Duran Duran, “We just went to town with them! We were perming them, cutting them, gelling them, blow-drying them, bringing back the mullet and spraying some to death doing our big hairdos—all those hairstyles that you thought looked like wigs anyway. And putting the blond in, of course, because highlighting was really popular in the era.”
For the makeup, Sewell says, “Our color palette was absolutely true to the period. All those intense colors… There were some really beautiful greens and blues, and the eye makeup had a sheen to it then.”
The climactic fight scene with Wonder Woman marks the height of Barbara Minerva’s transformation into the Cheetah, and it is reflected not just in her clothes but also her physical being. Working with prosthetics expert Mark Coulier, casts were made of Wiig’s face, and then Coulier began modeling up different shapes, working closely with Jenkins to gauge how much of Barbara’s face needed to change. The result was a piece that fit over the top of her face and ended just before the tip of her nose, augmented by facial hair and tattoos that run down her neck. From there Sewell and Coulier designed the wig, which they modeled after a king cheetah.
“What’s special about the king cheetah is that it has this fabulous mane that has these dot marks and stripes in it” says Sewell. “We ended up with this wonderful wig that melds into this mane that comes up over her shoulders and is punched with these cheetah-like spots and stripes. The whole effect is just lovely. It took on average three hours to apply, but it was worth it.”
However, for fans, the true highlight of the battle scene fans may be the appearance of the Golden Armor. First seen in issue #3 of Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s seminal four-issue comics series Kingdom Come, the costume also marks the first time audiences will see Wonder Woman in a different hero ensemble. An immensely powerful suit, as Diana explains to Steve in the film, it has a rich history and holds an important place in Amazon lore. “The idea behind the Golden Armor is that it’s a magical armor that encases the Amazon’s body and is almost impenetrable,” says Hemming.
Jenkins states, “I think it’s when we feel we have to take on the whole world that we know we’ll probably lose. With Cheetah as her adversary, even Diana has to face that fact. She realizes that she will need everything in her arsenal to take on a much stronger foe. Stepping into the Golden Armor is a big part of that, and a big moment in the film.”
Dealing with the practical side of creating a costume that had to be both symbolic and cinematic, Hemming notes, “Patty and I both wanted it to be fully reflective but not shiny, so that when Wonder Woman is moving you get the play of shadows in the metal. It has a life that metal doesn’t normally have onscreen, and it radiates a wonderful glow. It was a horrible thing for Matt Jensen, our cinematographer,” she laughs, “but he worked out a way of lighting it so that you don’t see reflections, just these gentle movements, almost like waves undulating in the metal.”
In part because what works on paper can be very difficult to create in real life, the armor pays homage to drawings in the comic books—with a “nod to fashion, from McQueen to Thierry Mugler,” Hemming offers—but required a total redesign to be practical. In particular, there are wings on the armor that have to both fold in and span out like a bird. “Armor is plausible,” Hemming concedes, “but how can you make armored wings plausible? Patty had seen something where Roman soldiers had formed a circle with their shields to the front, and so to attack them you’d have to get over or you’d have to get through somehow, so she thought that instead of the wings flapping, they could be like a glider; then as soon as you land they become a defensive shield. Once we got that, we could see how to combine the look of wings with the look of a shield, and that’s where we went with it.”
Eager to see her character’s evolution in the film represented so powerfully, Gadot found much to admire in the new suit’s imagery and design. “In this movie, Diana starts out strong, but must grow into an even stronger being, and this suit and its legacy is a big part of that,” she relates. “When I first saw Lindy’s design, it was just mind blowing. And then they built it and it’s a piece of art—it could be in a museum. I couldn’t believe I would get to wear it and discover this whole new side to Diana.”
The building of the Golden Armor was organized and supervised by costume supervisor Dan Grace and the costume effects department lead by Pierre Bohanna, and it took over a year and approximately 40 people to create from concept to finish. “It was a huge challenge for us because it’s a really complicated costume,” says Grace. “Just for Gal to physically be able to wear it we had to adopt Formula One technology: every piece of the wings is made of carbon fiber, all done in-house at our workshop in Leavesden, and painted using a proprietary process. The body is polyurethane to keep it light, and there are 93 pieces to the body, plus 264 individual ‘feathers’ in the wings. Different sets of wings had to be made for different poses, such as standing still with the wings folded or full out in flight. We ended up with five different shapes and styles of wings.” In total, 14 copies of the Golden Armor had to be made for Gal and her stunt doubles.
Altogether, Hemming’s costume department dressed a grand total of about 2,850 extras throughout filming, which was accomplished by more than 100 wardrobe crew, and complemented by 48 hair and makeup artists on Sewell’s team.
Gadot was frequently wowed by the results of the creative teams’ efforts, observing, “Whether it was the colors of the movie or the style of the characters and the extras or the music and the vibe, everything was—and is—so delightful.”
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