This is just an excerpt of Robin Matthews' interview , where she talked about getting that very specific look for Kristen as Mallory in 'Welcome to the Rileys'.
Jake is very visually creative. He’s also an artist. (It’s actually his hands you see when Lois is painting in the movie). He had this beautiful photograph of a young European girl he found. She was sad but had much depth in her eyes. I put it up on the wall of the make-up trailer as reference for what Mallory would look like. Of course the look of the character developed further as Kristen and I worked on it. She had to learn how to pole dance for the role and had been practicing every day before we started shooting, and as a result, was covered in huge bruises. Because that’s what really happened from her pole dancing, of course we wanted to keep it in the movie. People forget that we shoot movies “out of sequence” of real life, so I had to re-create the bruises everyday to make them look the same once they had faded.
The other huge influence for Mallory’s look was the real strippers in New Orleans that worked at the club where Mallory was supposed to work. This was no high end club by any means. (It’s the real club that you see in the movie but we actually cleaned it up a bit for the shoot!) The girls that worked there are rough, really rough. They are real prostitutes, runaways, transvestites. Kristen and I (separately) both spent time with these girls researching them. I took my key make-up artist with me and we just hung out in those clubs for a few nights in a row. I had to tip the girls for most of them to talk to me at first because they were not giving anything up for free, even time just talking about themselves. After they got to know me, they told me their stories, told me about their pimps; they let me take photos of them, their tattoos, etc. It was amazing research, and it showed us just how far we had to go to make Mallory realistic, exactly how rough we had to make her look. As you can see we made her look as though she never ate properly, made her look dirty and as though she never washed her make-up off, just piled more on top. I added acne, a rash around her lips, circles under her eyes, old cutting scars on her arms, and of course those bruises.
How long have you been doing Kristen's makeup?
As I mentioned before, I first met Kristen when I was working for Sean Penn. I was the Make-Up Department Head for his movie Into the Wild and Kristen played Emile Hirsh’s friend/admirer “Tracy”. Kristen was 15 at the time.
We met up again in 2008, for Welcome to the Rileys. Kristen shot some of her scenes and had to leave for a few weeks to do press for Twilight, which came out while we were shooting Rileys. As I remember it, when she came back, that was the beginning of the end of her being able to walk around without being mobbed by fans. It seemed like she left as a regular girl and came back as the exact same regular girl but with the whole world watching her every move.
Somewhere in that time period, Kristen asked me to be her personal make-up artist, and a few months later, we were in Vancouver starting New Moon. A week after leaving Italy, The Runaways and Eclipse followed back to back in what was a very busy year for us.
Read the full interview at WTTR Saturday -lots more very interesting details. Ms. Matthews also shared these photos from her personal collection. Love those New Moon seats. Yey! Thanks also to kstewartfans
