The Great GatsbyLeonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann wanted to adapt The Great Gatsby for about a decade before the film was made. Did you feel a similar passion about creating a fresh adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel?

Much to Baz’s chagrin, I’m like a born-again non-smoker because when he came back about 10 years ago after a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, having listened to the talking book of The Great Gatsby across the Russian Steppes, he went, ‘This is a fantastic book, you need to read it.’ I remembered it from being a teenager and not quite connecting with the story, but he was very persuasive. I fell in love with the book. I love the way it’s written and I love the story. It’s a fantastic canvas; it’s a fantastic period; and I’m very lucky that I was convinced.

What aspects of The Great Gatsby intrigued you the most?

I think it’s Fitzgerald’s incredible way of being able to describe things both poetically and viscerally. One of my favourite passages is when he’s talking about the beginning of one of Gatsby’s parties and he talks about the yellow cocktail music. You can just feel the party and just sip the cocktail when you hear that description.

Is the 1920s a period you loved already for its style and design?

Yes. Look, I find anything historical of interest, particularly from a costume point of view. I really enjoy the whole delving into the social history aspect of clothes. And the 1920s is particularly interesting because, after the First World War, there was such an enormous social revolution. It was a time of incredible change where we basically go from a 19th-century world to a modern, mechanised world reliant on machines, in the space of five years.

Can you describe how you and Baz came up with the visual and aesthetic vocabulary for your version of Gatsby?

Baz had set a conceptual rule around the historical kind of construct that we were going to use. He felt that in order to create a 1920s world that felt as it would have felt to people in the 1920s, we couldn’t rely too much on cliches and we needed to rediscover a way of looking at the 1920s that gave people a new angle on it. So, from a historical point of view, the rule was that we could reference anything from 1922 to 1929. That’s how we approached it, by really delving into the book itself, what the author was trying to get at, the social context of the book, the reactions to the book in that period, and all of the social history that surrounded it, from Prohibition to flapperdom.

What were your sources of sartorial inspiration for costuming Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) and other key characters?

I think it’s very difficult designing costumes for men, especially anything in the 20th century because ultimately the majority of men wear suits and a tie, a shirt, pants, shoes, sweater. But you have to create character, and one of the really fantastic things that I’ve learnt from working with Baz is that he is a master at wringing out of clothes and wringing out of the costume designer— in this case, me — the subtleties, the attention to detail and the rigorousness, particularly in men’s clothes, that gives you a feeling of character. You needed to be sure that you understood that Nick Carraway was a Midwesterner who’d been to the war, was well educated and sophisticated intellectually, came from a good family, was somebody who knew how to comport himself in high society but wasn’t part of a flippant society crowd. It was about how you trace that development from the Midwestern country boy to someone who’s been hanging around Jay Gatsby for three months through those subtleties of little changes in silhouette; how you find Gatsby’s easy elegance and you find the kind of innate, boorish, masculine, physically powerful style of Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). They’re all subtleties and you just need to work them and work them.

How was it to design for Daisy, who undoubtedly offered you the widest fashion template to work with?

Someone asked me who was the most difficult character to design for and I said Daisy. And not at all because of the charming Ms Mulligan — she is a pleasure — but more because Daisy as a human and as a woman is an interesting conundrum. She is a woman who’s still defining herself and her position in society through the protection of men.

She’s also an incredibly vivacious, incredibly attractive woman, like one of those people that you meet sometimes where you just think, ‘What is it about them?’ It’s like being in a room with a tinkling bell. It’s just not enough that she’s the woman that doesn’t wait for Jay Gatsby. She is a much more complicated character and very sophisticated, too.

I think all these nuances that I describe are brought so aptly and in a much more complicated and understandable way by Carey Mulligan to the stage. You actually love Daisy and want to protect her. She’s a victim of her own life. Carey Mulligan brings a much more complicated perspective to the character and to the story and I needed to step up to the plate to fill out that very big brief.

You’ve also created the dazzling sets for this production. What was your approach with the story’s two impressive residences, the mansions owned by Gatsby and the Buchanans?

They’re the two households, not so alike in dignity, and in the book the Buchanans’ house is described as a red-brick pile. Tom Buchanan has just bought it and it has 40 acres of rolling lawn down to the sea and that white-columned, red-brick house is very much a symbol of the American establishment — old money, respectable, establishment. And then you have this sort of neo-Normandy gothic folly that belongs to Gatsby and that is a complete historical fiction. His house reflects the fictional history he’s made for himself, whereas you imagine that the Buchanans would have a case somewhere containing a piece of wood from the Mayflower.