Interview: Makeup artist Denise Kum on working with Gong Li and Mulan's epic battles

by Nathaniel R

Gong Li and Denise Kum on the set of Mulan

Mulan may have been released in September but some of its most memorable looks -- battle scarred villains, matchmaking painted faces, Gong Li's masked face and taloned hands, and Mulan's hair flowing in battle -- are still remarkably easy to conjure up with great clarity months later. We were thrilled to speak with its gifted makeup artist Denise Kum about her career and work on the Disney epic.

We spoke over Zoom while she was in Prague completing work on a World War II drama called Operation Mincemeat before diving into full fantasy with Amazon's forthcoming series The Wheel of Time based on Robert Jordan's bestsellers. Kum's work stretches from lush period pieces, through grounded dramas, to high fantasy and superhero franchises. She likes to genre hop. One consistent throughline in her work, though, is her frequent collaborators. "I've worked with Niki since I was very young," she says with obvious love for Mulan's director Niki Caro. Mulan was also a reunion with the costume designer Bina Daigeler who she's known for years and production Designer Grant Major "I've know him since I was, god, 18 or 19. He's actually the godfather of one of my daughters." This tight-knit filmmaking family's shorthand was helpful on Mulan though she's quick to add that "That's an unnatural situation for a film of this scale."

[this interview has been edited for length and clarity]

NATHANIEL R:  People often think of prosthetic effects stuff or high glamour when they think of the makeup art but I imagine on Mulan, one of the biggest challenges must have keeping her natural in battle scenes with wigs and such. How would you know what's going to work in action? 

DENISE KUM: My background is as a fine artist and a conceptual artist. I started off making sculpture installation and films, experimental stuff. So you problem-solve and troubleshoot. And that's my attitude towards makeup. For me, makeup is paint. It's also structure to enable the actor to inhabit a certain thing. With the character of Mulan it's a incredible journey where she goes from a young child, to a teenager presented with matchmaker makeup. Then she has to pretend to be a man and be very anonymous and then a woman again and finally revealed as her true self. The performance is key for that. So everything I do has to make you aware of her performance; if you're looking at her hair, or looking at her eye shadows, I'm not doing my job. It's all about enabling the actor to inhabit the characterl  So I try to sync everything in to make the world believable.

Was the battle stuff difficult?

DENISE KUM: The natural makeup is harder to do because the dirt appears, you know. Or, you know, there's certain things I do to flatten her face, to make her look like a boy. And then what I do is I heighten all the boys around her, to make them look more feminine so that she looks more boyish.

Oh that's smart.

DENISE KUM:  Therefore you pendulum -- the matchmaker scene is more extraordinary and loud and full of color to make the rest look more natural. It's actually like choreography. You know what you want it to look like, but then you're like, 'Oh my God, she's going to be going upside down. She's on the wire. We can't use clips, it's too dangerous! We'll have to stitch it in.' You think around the problem.

Okay, that makes sense.

DENISE KUM: Whenever I break down a script, I color code everything. And I think, okay, if this is their journey, what is the other character doing? Where do they intersect? And that's when I also think about when we change the makeup. We have to run everything through and test it -- not 'will it look good? but 'will it last?' I have to make Mulan look the same in the very humid weather in New Zealand and in the snow in New Zealand and the 40 degree heat in China and in the very dry heat of the Disney lot in LA.

I assume you have a large team for this, a movie of this size?

DENISE KUM: I did have a big team, but also that's also because we had different units filming at the same time. Practically everybody on this had a wig or hair augmentation. It's... big. It's not like doing a contemporary drama.

Some makeup artists specialize in one thing, like wig-designing or prosthetics. You're the department head but do you also have a specialty?

DENISE KUM:  It's a little bit different than in the States because you guys have your unions. I've worked in America a lot where I'd have to switch out what I'm doing. But for me with Nikki, she only wants to talk to one person, so I'm the makeup and prosthetics design.  I would never put my hand up and say, I'm a fully qualified hairdresser or a wigmaker. However, I understand the language of that to say what I want the look to be like. 

I work with an amazing team. I play to their strengths and carve up the work -- what's going to make them be excited about the job?. What do they want to contribute? I also do consult with people. It's similar to if I'm making a sculpture and I don't weld and I need to use a welder, I'll say, 'I want to do this. How can I best make this? How can I construct this?' Then you workshop it and build prototypes and problem solve. When you watch your film, nobody wants to hear the excuses of why it didn't work.

I have to hear about Jason Scott Lee and Gong Li's characters, who are so visual. I assume they were fun to design.

DENISE KUM: You mentioned Gong Li and Jason. But also Cheng Pei Pei who plays the matchmaker and even the Emperor to some extent.  These are the four characters for me that are the most visual. They helped me to broaden it aesthetically to bring fantasy into it because, yes, it's a Disney film, but also Gong Li needed to be supernatural. Jason's character needed to be a badass kind of villain. And then of course, you've got the Emperor, who's the guiding light and you've got Pei-Pei who is the comic female explosive colorful element. So I kind of think of them as compasses: North, South, West, East. You can make the natural -- Mulan and the conscripts in the middle of it all -- more natural because you've got these standout, iconic locks.

Did any of the characters change a lot from your initial concepts to the finished film?

DENISE KUM: We were incredibly lucky. I thought that they would keep sending things back but apart from small adjustments they loved all the initial ideas. Disney was very supportive. I had obsessed about it for a year prior to actually starting pre-production proper because, you know, we were pushed because we hadn't found Yifei yet.  I kept reading the script and then once people got cast, I looked at the faces and started to think about it and worked with Bina [Costumes] and Grant [Production Design] about color. It's a bit of a luxury that I didn't have to keep offering alternatives. Disney just kind of just let us get on with it!

I always wonder about aesthetic interference -- you've worked on other stuff like Captain America, too -- because they have billions riding on franchises.

DENISE KUM: To be fair, I didn't design those others. I've just gone in and lent a hand. But I suppose also what you're saying is they have a lot of merchandising. I think the difference with Mulan, they see the potential in the merchandising, and they want to break into China if I can be so honest, but they're also trusting, the director and the team she's put together to actually bring something new to the Disney films. 

Okay so we have to talk about Gong Li. I have been obsessed with her for years. The white mask look was very cool. Was that a thunderstrike of inspiration or did it take a while to come to be?

DENISE KUM: It was there from the beginning! It's a risk because everybody thinks, 'Oh, a mask we've seen it before' or  they think of Zorro. But she had to be very supernatural. I'm sure, you know, Nathaniel, that a lot of the characters have their animal other. For her she's the hawk...

Right.

DENISE KUM: ...so I started to look to the source, the color of feathers, the hooded eyes. We even looked at the idea of contact lenses for her. I designed the prothetic from a hawk's claws. I was trying to keep it very much as if it was from the source as if it was a natural phenomenon. I also have a penchant, as does Gong Li, for high fashion. There was a striking image that Bina and I saw from an Alexander McQueen runway show. I loved how it was kind of from another time. And as I was researching both makeup and symbolism around the Tang dynasty, one thing that always kept coming up was a central white panel on the face. 

It's just the T-zone unlike Japanese geishas, which is an all overweight white mask. In a lot of Chinese theater white is a mask but it is also seen as purity and death. And disguise. It also worked beautifully with the crown that Bina was designing with bones and feathers. Gong Li's eye makeup is designed so that when she closes her eyes -- you can't see it when her eyes are open -- it's the idea of a feather with the exact same colors of a hawk.

So cool. Was Gong Li all for it or did it take some convincing? 

DENISE KUM:  She was amazing. Obviously she had to give feedback. We sent her stuff in Paris where she lives. I made a presentation book for her, which had lots of pictures and concept drawings, color samples, and old Chinese artwork. It was a bit of a scrapbook. 

I hadn't met her before. I didn't know whether she was willing to go there because, you know, she's got other stuff going on. It could have gone either way, but because she's so self-aware and  so up for trying things. She was very responsive and just said the nicest things to me.

I'm so glad. She's such a legendary star that she's already had so many iconic looks in movies over the years. 

DENISE KUM: And she's very important in Chinese culture. She's basically the Meryl Streep of China, if I could put it that way.  But I think also what I tried to do is... okay, we know these people are famous. Jet Li, Jason Scott Lee. Cheing Pei Pei is very revered in Hong Kong. But I just thought, 'I want people to look and go 'Oh, is that Jet Li? Oh, is that Gong Li?' And I think we succeeded in that way because it's about their performance and not recognizing them as what you think they are.

Cheng Pei-pei in Mulan

You've done all sorts of things in your career: period drama, futuristic stuff, fantasy. Do you have a preference? 

DENISE KUM: I wouldn't ever say, 'Oh, I only want to do this, or I didn't want to do it.' I love the challenge. I've done a lot recently with female directors and with a really strong kick-ass female characters, which is important to me. I've done low budget films with no resources.  I love the process of filmmaking. Some people want a specialist in a certain vibe but I think realistically, our world is changing. We want to tell different stories. And I love tapping into different cultures. I was born in New Zealand. We have a real affinity for the land and for thinking about similarities and differences. I think small voices can tell big stories in some ways.

Your career definitely bears that out now. You've worked with Nikki a lot. Charlize Theron and Rosamund Pike reoccur in your career, too. Is this something where people recommend you for work on is it all happenstance? 

DENISE KUM:  It's a bit of both. Sometimes it happens like you're working on something and talking to someone 'oh my god, no, they're going to be in my next film blah blah blah.' But I wouldn't ever say that I set it up in any way. I'm just quite happy to go with the flow. But you know there are people that you gravitate towards -- people that, you know, are your kind of people, that are like-minded.

We work in a global filmmaking world now. You don't even know when you get offered a job, where you're shooting it. We're kind of celluloid gypsies at the best of times.

Mulan is currently streaming on Disney Plus.

Comments

[Pedro]

Fascinating to read about how filming is becoming a global enterprise and how to adapt to change (and about makeup too!).

[Drew]

Thanks for this interview. It's a fascinating read. I think the movie is just so so but the make up is wonderful.