CATWOMAN Director Talks About Helle Berry's Costume in the Film - "I Want to See Skin"
I remember the first time I saw Halle Berry’s Catwoman costume hit the Internet on Ain’t It Cool News, and I remember reading through the comments on the website and the fans all talking shit about it. The backlash was pretty intense because the costume did look ridiculous.
I mean, when you make a comic book movie, you’ve gotta make sure the costume of the superhero is right! The director of Catwoman, Pitof, found himself competing with Michelle Pfeiffer’s awesome version in Tim Burton’s Batman: Returns.
Pitof says his major contribution to the Catwoman costume design was to show as much skin as possible,
The filmmaker told CinemaBlend in an interview: “The whole thing was to get away from the traditional Catwoman character costume. The first thing that everybody agreed to was a skin.
“This costume (would) show more skin than the others. That was my first input, when they asked me, ‘How do you see the costume?’ I said, ‘I want to see skin. I want to have this organic feeling of more like an animalistic thing.’ Even though she has leather, it's a mix with leather and skin.”
Fans just wanted a cool Catwoman costume and showing more skin just didn’t work. Regarding that costume, producer Denise Di Novi previously explained their thinking:
“That was the first thing that started the negativity. It was an early shot before we’d perfected it. It was so different than what people were used to in the other movie.
“A catsuit, by definition, everything is covered up. We thought it’d be cool to be more rock & roll and bare. Halle was famous for wearing a bikini in her Bond movie, and we were like, why not?
“People had such a reaction to it, which is so ridiculous. We had the famous Colleen Atwood helping us with just that costume. Halle had a lot of input. I still think it’s cool and a lot more modern!”
Berry added: “Fans were upset about the suit. It was something different, but in our minds, why keep remaking Catwoman if you’re not going to take risks and bring something different to it? The beauty was that it was better suited for my version of her, my body, who I was, and my sensibilities.”
So, that’s what everyone was thinking regarding the Catwoman costume, and in the end it just wasn’t embraced by fans.