Stars Ben Mendelsohn and Juliette Binoche discuss how they channeled Christian Dior and Coco Chanel as the team behind the Apple TV+ show, sharing thoughts on its timeliness in the post-pandemic world.
The New Look marks creator Todd A. Kessler‘s first series for Apple TV+, and first project in years without previous writing partners, his brother Glenn and collaborator Daniel Zelman, with whom he co-created Damages and Bloodline.
Kessler has partnered with vet producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, through their dB-AK production company, on the series about how Christian Dior, Coco Chanel and other French fashion designers that launched modern fashion.
The name refers to how Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow described Dior’s 1947 Collection.
“It was amazing in that we had greater ambition than Damages or Bloodline,” Kessler said about The New Look.
“For me and Lorenzo to film entirely in Paris, to recreate a time period, to have a story based on real people, to try to get the fashion right was huge ambition. And based on Lorenzo’s experience in producing and being involved with over 170 movies and having a true sense of how to bring scope and scale to production, there’s no one I would rather have done this with.”
Di Bonaventura says, “from a creative point of view, this is the most exciting thing I’ve worked on.”
He and Kessler first met more than 15 years ago working on a “script together for a film that ended up not getting made,” he says.
“We became really close friends and over the years we’ve gotten closer and closer,” Di Bonaventura says. “He had been working with two other creators and that had ended. And I was dabbling in the TV space, and I wanted to get more involved. We were sitting at lunch one day going, ‘Why aren’t we working together?’ It was literally that kind of moment.
What I find in film is, unfortunately, I don’t find the subject matter that we’re tackling all that interesting. It is not daring as an art form anymore, and television is where that’s happening. So the two of us have a lot of similarities in tastes and we come from different points of view, so it’s a really fantastic partnership.”
Kessler says, “it starts with the individuals and the relationships, and, having done eight seasons previously with Jamie and Zack, to bring them to this story I felt would be an experience that would continue to build on our relationship and deepen it.”
Di Bonaventura also appreciates the pair’s “open-mindedness” towards the series.
“This is not a straight down the middle idea, so it required some free thinking on their part,” he says. “They expressed themselves of why this was of interest was a lot of open-mindedness that gave a lot of room, particularly for Todd, in terms of letting his creativity flourish.”
Kessler’s connections with Mendelsohn and Close were key. Mendelsohn first sparked to the idea after he’d done Bloodline with Kessler, when Kessler was making pizza at his home and was telling Mendelsohn about Dior.
“He said he’d read the autobiography of Christian Dior and then he said [Dior] had this real thing about his authentic private self and his public self, and [Dior] hated the fact that he couldn’t be his authentic self. Dior had a real problem with it and a lot of self-loathing around it,” Mendelsohn recalls. “And I said ‘Oh, when do we do it? When can we do it?’”
Close had visited him and his newborn son. “I mentioned the character of Carmel Snow, just because we had spent several years researching. And she really sparked to the idea,” Kessler says. “So it was a very straight line when the opportunity arose for that character to be in the series, to be able to call Glenn and ask her if she would like to do it.”
“If Glenn wanted to play Christian Dior, she would have been Christian Dior. The opportunity to work with Glenn on anything is a life experience to be cherished. She brings so much inspiration for everyone that works with her. It was very gratifying personally to have another opportunity and also to be in Paris with her.”
Mendelsohn says his experience on The New Look: “It was such a different shoot than Bloodline, it’s hard to imagine a kind of further apart polarity in a way. The great thing about working with any of the Kesslers is, you don’t know, but you know when the result comes in. They work with great amount of open-ended uncertainty. That’s bracing. At times it’s really scary. At times you curse it. But you leave it in their hands, and they seem to come up with stuff.”
