The First Part Is the Dreaming

I directed and edited this short film as a portrait of Kate Hawley, not simply as the costume designer behind a major film, but as an artist in the truest sense of the word. I wasn’t interested in making a standard behind-the-scenes piece or a surface-level companion film. I wanted to make something more personal — something that could hold instinct, vulnerability, atmosphere, authorship, and the fragile private act of making.

What drew me in was not just the beauty of Kate’s work, but the humanity in the way she spoke about it. In her words, I found something deeper than process. I found the inner life of an artist. She spoke about dreaming, silence, time, trust, and the need to sit with a script long enough for meaning to emerge. That became the title of the film, and ultimately its philosophy: the first part is the dreaming.

As a director, I wanted the piece to feel like a real portrait rather. As an editor, I wanted to shape the material in a way that honored rhythm, fragility, and revelation. The world of dark fairy tales and opera that shaped Kate’s imagination, the shared language she found with Guillermo del Toro, the connection to Mary Shelley as a woman artist, and the vulnerability of collaboration all became part of the film’s arc. I was less interested in explaining Frankenstein than I was in revealing the emotional architecture behind Kate’s artistry.

That was the film I felt was there from the beginning: not a recap, but an ode. A small art film about a woman artist whose work had just been recognized on the biggest stage in cinema, and whose inner world deserved to be seen with the same care as the finished work itself.