As we don't have a costume person yet, and may never have an experienced one, I started working on the costume requirements for the two main characters. Costume work seems to be one of those areas where doing it right kicks you up into a more expensive level of filmmaking. On my first project, I did costumes the easy way: I gave the actors a list of costumes for each scene, and left the rest of it up to them. This resulted in continuity errors and other terrible problems (like the lead actor wearing a Royal Burger T-shirt for almost the entire movie). The next step up in professionalism is to have a costume person select the costumes from the actors' own wardrobes, then take the costumes away from the actors and bring them to the locations. But this approach requires the early involvement of a costume person, the ability to store a lot of clothes safely, a good inventory and labeling system, and a vehicle to transport the costumes from location to location. I don't know exactly how we're going to handle it. Fortunately, the costuming for this film is simple and doesn't present a lot of continuity problems, so I'm hoping we can get away with some modified version of the simple approach.
I spoke to Dylan today about the nudity requirements of the film, because I wanted the issue to be on the table at an early stage. We wound up with a compromise, where I gave him veto power on frontal nudity. This is actually a little difficult for me, as I have always intended this film to be completely uninhibited in this regard. But I'm at the point where I have to choose between different ways of crippling my original conception, and this solution seems less damaging than using an actor I like less. I reserved the right to try to talk him into the nudity later, so I'm hoping for the best.
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