Working on instinct

THEO PANAYIDES meets a costume designer who says the creative flow is always open, there’s no agonizing over it

Jo Katsaras isn’t really her name, it turns out, at least not her birth name. The woman sitting opposite me on a sunny but breezy afternoon in Nicosia was born Ioanna Constantinides, but married a Mr Katsaras in a rather impulsive-sounding union when she was only 22 (she turns 50 in November). The marriage lasted no more than a year, but it did produce a son – now 26, and a graphic designer in Cape Town – and “I didn’t want to have a different surname to my son,” she explains, “so I kept it. And then I made it famous, and now I can’t change it”. And what about that ill-fated marriage? Jo frowns, drawing down the blinds on that particular window: “I’d rather not get into the personal stuff”.

She looks tired, to be honest. Her voice is slightly hoarse, as if from too much talking or too much partying – both plausible scenarios since she’s president of the jury at Cyprus Film Days, the annual movie festival, and has presumably endured (or enjoyed) some busy days and late nights over the past week. I also get the sense that her default expression isn’t carefree, a vague worried frown tending to predominate over a small, rather rabbity smile – and she may also be thinking of the masterclass she’s about to give at the Point Centre for Contemporary Art, where we sit in the empty patio trying to hear each other talk above the cacophonous din of cars and motorbikes screeching down Griva Digeni.

The masterclass is on Costume Design – specifically the relationship between costume designer and director – because that’s what she does. When Jo mentions that she’s made her surname famous, it’s no idle quip – indeed, when it comes to Cypriots in show business, she’s among the small tier of locally-born artists who can truly be said to have made it on the world stage. She’s been Emmy-nominated (for The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency a few years ago), and has dressed the likes of Juliette Binoche, Samuel L Jackson, Stephen Fry and Hilary Swank. Just in the past two years, she’s spent six months in Morocco, one in Barcelona and eight in Austin, Texas. Why Austin? “I was doing a show called The Leftovers” – an HBO drama by Damon Lindelof, who also wrote Lost, that’s among the most-talked-about series of the past few years.

Jo works all the time – though, crucially, not all the time. Partly it’s a conscious decision that she took in 2009, the year of her Emmy nomination, when too much work started taking a toll on her health – a decision to strike a balance between working, mostly in the US and UK, and retreating for creative renewal to her two home bases in Cape Town and Limassol – but she also turns down a lot of work, and not just because of time constraints. “If I don’t see the images when I first read a script, then I won’t touch the project,” she explains. “It doesn’t matter if I’m starving, I won’t do it”. It sounds surprising, after all these years in the business; surely, with her vast experience, you’d think she’d have found a way to make costume designs take shape in her head, even if they didn’t appear straight away – but Jo, it seems, works on instinct, which is why she works so easily. “It’s like playtime for me,” she says of her process. “It’s very much ‘creative tap is open’. It flows. And I trust and believe – and have experienced – that everything I need comes to me.”

That’s remarkable, and pretty unusual. Creative types are often tormented; creativity is hard (if it were easy, everyone would do it) – but Jo seems to be one of those people with a God-given talent that simply takes over, at least when the material speaks to her. She’s always overflowed with ideas, even as a girl: “My mother tells stories of how she used to buy me these beautiful dresses, and then I would chop them up and make other things! So, yes – I was always covered in paint, or making jewellery. I was always doing something”. Her mum was a hairdresser, her late father an inspiring figure who encouraged her “on a soul level”, instilling the belief that Jo could do anything she wanted if she put her mind to it – and it also helped that the family emigrated to South Africa when she was five, going back and forth throughout her childhood, so she always felt connected to Cyprus (they visited in summer, and came back for two years in her early teens) but was able to keep some distance from the small-island mindset that so often stifles artistic dreams.

Did she ever feel like an outsider in childhood?

She smiles, in a sort of affectionate salute to her younger self. “Umm… I had to find my tribe. Yes. I did. I was often misunderstood… But it didn’t take long,” she adds. “Once you understand that you’re different – and you’re sensitive. My sensitivity’s a huge thing. People who know me, and are close to me, know how sensitive I am. And I know that if I switch that sensitivity off, and become a hard person, it cuts off my creativity.”

‘Sensitivity’ is perhaps a mixed blessing. I think of her worried countenance, that semi-permanent frown playing at the edge of her expression; I imagine her as one of those people who pick up on everything, not just what others say but non-verbal cues and body language and hidden tensions and the atmosphere in a room. “It’s almost like I have these antennas,” she confirms, “like I’ll walk into a place and feel out and absorb. I’m like a flokko [Cypriot for ‘mop’], I absorb everything – the good and the bad. And sometimes you get very drained from that. Especially in Cyprus, where I find that people have a fear, and they resonate on a negative energy – like ‘What will people say?’ or ‘You can’t do it that way’. There’s rules, unspoken rules. And I often think, if I’d stayed here what would have become of me, because Africa gave me – almost a freedom to roam and explore. And it’s not a criticism, I do love Cyprus, but I think the mentality, especially of the older generation, is like ‘An artist? You’re going to die broke!’. You know what I mean?… You have to clean yourself of that negativity. You’ve got to believe in the dream”.

What does she mean by ‘becoming a hard person’?

“Becoming desensitised. Growing a thick skin, you might say.”

But then, if she doesn’t have a thick skin – well, isn’t she likely to get hurt sometimes?

“It’s my risk,” she admits. “But I’d rather have my creativity than be thick-skinned and not feel. Like, my friend Stelana” – film director Stelana Kliris, who’s also involved in Cyprus Film Days – “was just playing me the song which she’s chosen for her wedding, and I was crying in the taxi. It was touching, you know? So it’s that. I’ll cry at the drop of a hat”.

There’s a balance, of course. Being super-sensitive is all well and good – but, as the costume designer on a major film or TV series, she might have 50 people to manage and motivate (and occasionally yell at). “I take no nonsense,” she affirms. “I’m very straight down the line. I have high expectations, and I expect the same of my team”. There’s also the very specific “people skill” of working with famous names, gaining their trust and stepping around their famous egos – though of course it’s usually fine, because stars are professional and the bigger they are, the more professional they tend to be.

Does she chat with celebs during costume fittings and so on?

“Absolutely. You get to know each other. I mean, think about it – I see them in their nakedness! I know what’s going on in their lives.”

So she’s like a confidant?

“Of course. And lips are sealed,” she adds significantly – but then semi-relents, telling a rather endearing story of Juliette Binoche at the pre-production party for Country of My Skull in 2004. “Every actress goes through this thing of, like, ‘I can’t act’,” laughs Jo, “and I found her at the party, under a tree, and she was crying and saying ‘I can’t act, I can’t act’. I’m like, ‘Juliette, you’ve won an Oscar’, and she said ‘Yes, but that was long ago! It was so long ago, I can’t do this!’…” Jo shakes her head like a fond auntie: “Actors are like you and me,” she concludes, “it’s just their job is different. They have to access a huge well of emotion – and we’re the support crew, we’re there to support them.”

What about her, though? Who supports the support crew? As already mentioned, Jo isn’t prone to Binoche-type insecurities – if she’s on the set in the first place, it’s because she’s already seen the images of the costumes she wants to design dancing in her head – but she also takes certain precautions, to maintain creativity. When she was younger she’d take on any job, however challenging, but “now I think twice, and I think about how a job will be emotionally”. She also has a life outside work: she cooks, plays pirimba, does a lot of painting and illustrating (mostly for herself, though that may change), hangs out with family and friends – she calls herself a “connector”, the kind of person who has friends all over the world – and goes to the beach as often as she can: “I just find that water sort of soothes me and cleanses me, and takes away all the bad energy”. Cyprus, she says, is her motherland, South Africa her spiritual home; she loves both – and even now, in between star-studded projects in Texas or Morocco, she comes back often. “I love the smell of cedar. I love the light here, I love the sea. I do love the people – even though they’re some of the most paranoid, complex-ridden people I’ve ever met!… And it feeds me, it feeds me spiritually.”

How does she feel about turning 50 this year?

“Do I have a choice? I don’t. I’m ageing, I’m going to be 50. I’m quite excited, actually.”

Is it just a number?

“It is a number – but it’s also…” She thinks about it: “I think, as I got older in life, I just became more and more comfortable in my skin, and who I am. I’ve also, of course, hit pre-menopause,” she adds – a hormonal change that’s made for some emotional changes. “My tolerance level of bullshit has disappeared, and that’s been such a huge relief… It’s like you don’t have to pussyfoot around anybody, or be nice to somebody who is unprofessional”. Just this morning, she reports, a plumber stood her up after promising to come by – so she calmly told him not to bother coming by at all. “I used to give somebody 23 chances. No more.”

Looks like we ended up getting into ‘the personal stuff’ after all – and in fact Jo Katsaras (née Constantinides) is entirely happy to discuss her feelings, just like most creative types. In the end, Mr Katsaras is the only aspect she’s reluctant to talk about, a youthful mistake she’d rather not dwell on. She never remarried, though she’s come close. “I haven’t met the man who speaks Jo yet,” she quips, adding however that she was involved for about seven years with “a lovely Australian man” (his name is Steve E Andrews, according to the Internet Movie Database which wrongly claims they were married) – but the practical problems of holding down a relationship while they both worked in the film industry proved insuperable, so “we’ve kept the love and friendship, and we let the relationship part go”, she recalls with perhaps a touch of ruefulness.

Almost time for the masterclass. She plans to talk about “mood boards”, she explains, her secret weapon when working on a movie – a kind of visual collage that evokes the mood she has in mind, like a map of the inside of her head. It occurs to me that life itself is a mood board for Jo, her antennae picking up vibes wherever she goes. She’s like an open wound, sensitive to the slightest pressure – but that doesn’t sound very nice so instead let’s call her an open heart, which is the phrase she herself uses. “I strive to always keep an open heart,” she says, adding that she’ll quit her job if she ever finds herself becoming cynical, and losing that openness: “The day I become bitter about the film industry is the day I stop”. Or perhaps when the pictures stop coming, the images of elegant frocks that have danced in her head since childhood.