This Movie's Spent Only $250 On Make-Up, Still Won an Oscar
Money management skills are a must for anyone in today's world. And sometimes they can be appreciated at the highest level.
Like it happened in 2014, when the movie with a $250 dollar budget won an Oscar for Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling.
The movie we are talking about is Dallas Buyers Club. Makeup supervisor Robin Mathews actually only had $250 to spend during the entire 28-day production.
During that time, she had to change looks for Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, turning them from near-death AIDS patients back into average healthy humans.
Sometimes, she had to do that five times a day. Moreover, she was tasked with recreating the skin rashes that AIDS patients had in the 1980s. And let's not forget about the movie's extras!
She did a magnificent research that helped her realize how the patients should look like. She approached doctors so they explained to her what physical changes people with AIDS are going through.
For example, muscle wasting which makes faces look very skeletal. Or dermatitis, which may be a cause of rash on some parts of one's face.
In order not to go over the budget, she had to be creative. To make characters look like they suffered from the dermatitis rash, Mathews decided to use cornmeal and grits. Guess where she found it all? In her mother's house.
"As I was applying this mixture of grits and cornmeal to Matthew McConaughey, I was thinking this could be the end of my career or it's going to be OK, but I had no idea which way it was going to go.
When I saw it on camera, I could breathe again. We tried it ... and it worked. Had I had my choice, I would have used prosthetics, but we didn't have the time, help or the money for that," Robin Mathews said in the interview with Deadline.
Jared Leto's make-up was even more difficult. When his character also catches the disease, Mathews' work becomes ten times harder.
Not only did she have to apply the same makeup that she did for McConaughey, but also to cover it with one more layer of makeup, to make him look like a drug queen. Still, making sure that he somehow still has a "near to death" vibe.
So no wonder why, as Mathews claims, the Academy just gasped when they knew about the 250-dollar budget, and then awarded her with an Oscar. What she did was truly a work of art!