Featurette: Hair and makeup designer Noriko Watanabe on her work in Jane Campion’s ‘The Power of the Dog’ (EXCLUSIVE)
(l-r): Director Jane Campion with actress Kirsten Dunst and Noriko Wantanabe, hair and makeup designer for THE POWER OF THE DOG
“We have a wonderful relationship and are really loving the journey together. She’s a wild woman.”
That’s director Jane Campion at the top of this exclusive featurette about her longtime collaborator, hair and makeup designer Noriko Watanabe, who goes back with Campion to 1993’s Oscar and Cannes-winning film The Piano, on her work in her new film, The Power of the Dog.
“Jane always creates her own world, in a very authentic way,” says Watanabe, an award-winning hair and makeup artist whose credits include Memoirs of a Geisha, Muriel’s Wedding, Top of the Lake and Top of the Lake China Girl, Silence, Kill Bill, Gangs of New York, Hacksaw Ridge, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Aquaman, Taken, The Grey, Cold Pursuit, The Other Man, Spiderman 2, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and many more.
She has worked with the likes of Liam Neeson, Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet, Andrew Garfield, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst and directors including Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Michel Gondry, Sam Raimi and Mel Gibson.
In 2006 she was BAFTA-nominated for Memoirs of a Geisha and in 2016, she won the Hollywood Film Hair and Makeup of the Year Award for Hacksaw Ridge.
In this clip, Watanabe talks about creating characters through hair and makeup (Kirsten Dunst wears a wig as Rose that was boiled for eight hours to create a natural wave), the scars on Benedict Cumberbatch’s hands as Phil and creating a hairstyle for 25-year old Kodi Smit-McPhee to make him look like a teenager to play Peter.
The Power of the Dog is in select theaters and also available to stream on Netflix.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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