Films include The Hours, Sweeney Todd and The Other Boleyn Girl. Ivana Primorac started her career working as a hair and make-up artist in television, before moving to cinema on films such as The Land Girls, Elizabeth and Gladiator. She graduated to hair and make-up with Billy Elliot and has recently worked on such films as Atonement.

I dreamt of working at the BBC, because its training was the best and you started at the bottom and worked your way up to the design position. And I didn’t quite manage it, because at the time they were starting to get rid of that department. But I was lucky enough to hook up with BBC-trained designers and have worked with them all the way through my career. So I did exactly that – started as a trainee and worked my way up.

The job of the make-up artist and make-up designer is quite a lengthy process. You start with an initial idea or a script and then you research it, especially if it’s a period piece such as The Other Boleyn Girl. You have to go into quite a lot of historical detail – not just make-up. You properly research the period. Then you discuss with the director and the actors what you are trying to achieve. And then, and only then, you decide what these people should look like.

You have to be aware of the journey of the story – the whole story is split into days, but there could be months between shooting scenes. Someone could walk through a door one day and come out the other side four or five months later. Also, you have to be able to tell the story visually. If someone is meant to have been running, but we don’t see them, you have to make them look like they have been running when they walk through the door. So that’s part of the job – to make the look reflect the mood or whatever the character has gone through It was fun to research the period of The Other Boleyn Girl. We have only a certain amount of paintings that tell us what people used to look like at the time. In the same period across the rest of Europe, people looked very different. In England, people had a particular style. We wanted to make them look like they did in paintings. But, of course, in our film they take their headdresses off, so you see their hair, which you never see in paintings. So we kind of made it all up – we assumed that they would never have cut their hair, so they had very long hair. Men had these funny bobbed hairstyles, so we had to find a way for people not to look ridiculous. The biggest challenge was shooting on high-definition video, which is very difficult for hair and make-up people. It reveals far too much, it’s not kind to older people.

It’s difficult to give advice to aspiring make-up designers. It’s an apprenticeship and I think what young people don’t realise is that it takes five or six years. People would like to speed up that process but you can’t, so the best thing to do is to work with the designers and climb through the ranks. Theatre gives the best training, because there are quick changes. The best-trained people come from theatre to this day.

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