Lesley Vanderwalt’s Mad Max Work up for BAFTA

If the hair and makeup from the post-apocalyptic science-fiction film Mad Max: Fury Road looks out of this world, it very well might be, according to the Los Angeles Times. That’s because hair and makeup designer Lesley Vanderwalt, who has been nominated for a BAFTA, grew up in a faraway land known as New Zealand.

“In those days, we were far removed,” Vanderwalt said. “They’d ship everything over, so you’d get magazines four months after they’d been released in the United States and Europe, so we were always quite a way behind the trends. But Kiwis are really innovative people, and we try to make up a lot of our own things.”

After launching her career in New Zealand, Vanderwalt moved to Australia to work with director George Miller on 1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Since then, she has become both a longtime resident of Australia and a frequent collaborator on Miller’s films, having worked with him on 1998’s Babe: Pig in the City, 2006’s Happy Feet and, most recently, 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which was filmed in the Namibian desert.

“[The challenge of filming in the desert] was extreme temperatures, extreme conditions,” Vanderwalt said.

“We were doing white makeup and white clothes and pale girls and all that. Because the dust coming off the desert was this incredible red color, we’d dust them all off, clean them all up, hopefully get them white again. And then some days you’d have sandstorms out there, so a major exfoliation that would just remove everything. And the hair lace of the wigs, all the sand would get stuck in it. So it was constant maintenance and constant laundering of everything that turned red during the day with the desert dust.”

Mad Max: Fury Road has been nominated for makeup and hair at this year’s BAFTAs which takes place on 14 February at London’s Royal Opera House.

Original article by Cristy Lytal, Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2016.