Colleen Atwood’s career as an Oscar-winning costume designer has spanned from Jazz Age Chicago to a fantastical world down the rabbit hole. But with Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another , Atwood stayed firmly planted in reality, fashioning revolutionaries, white supremacists, high schoolers, migrants, skaters, weed-growing nuns, and a freedom-fighting Sensei. “It’s one of the movies I’m most proud of,” she says.

Atwood, who says she knows Anderson from “around town,” connected with the director thanks to a serendipitous lunchtime run-in. “I walked out, and he was there with his family. He said hi and goes, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m just hanging right now.’ And he goes, ‘You want to do my next project?’” Indeed, she did.

In a film that bombards the vie

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