Enjoy what you do, because there are going to be bad days. Be sure this is something that really gives you pleasure; you need to be able to stand the boring and the laborious.

If you’re going into it for the awards, you’ve picked the wrong job. There’s no truer words said than everything that’s worth achieving in life is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.

Keep perspective. You’ve got to be extremely diligent about your own work and look at everything with an extreme eye for detail, but you’ve also got to be able to see the bigger picture.

Listen to your actors... Baz Luhrmann taught me an incredibly important lesson; he said if an actor is complaining about something, there’s something in the heart of the problem.

…really listen to them. I had a hard time cracking Daisy Buchanan’s wardrobe on The Great Gatsby and it was fundamentally because I didn’t understand the character. That’s the brilliance of actors – our gorgeous girl Carey Mulligan showed me who Daisy was. Once I’d seen her in a table read it was like someone had snipped the rope – I knew what to do.

Make them look great too. If you have a leading man and lady who are meant to be glamorous and gorgeous, you need to make them look good. I think you have a certain responsibility as a costume designer to deliver to the audience.

Movies and TV are the same, but different. I always thought they had some magical way of making these sets for TV that were inexpensive and fabulous. The really tough thing about making The Get Down is it’s so fast-paced. They’re so quick at making scenery. If you sign something off and leave it for four hours, it’s standing. The painters are already going.

Thrive on the connections you make. I had no idea that when I went to meet Baz all those years ago to get a job, he’d end up being my life partner. We’ve not only been able to make a shared collection of fictional stories, we’ve also shared a life story. We’ve been on the battlefield together across so many theatres of war so to speak, we have that language and ability to connect with each other. It works for some people and it doesn’t work for others.

Never leave a crappy prop on set if you don’t want them to use it. I’d wanted a tiger rug in the Elephant Red Room on Moulin Rouge and my set decorator hadn’t been able to find one but she’d got someone in the soft furnishing shop to make one. I got to the set and it looks like Nana’s fake fur has been murdered on the ground. I’m being told to get off the set and I kicked it under the canopy. I go off to do a fitting and I come back and Nicole Kidman is wrapped in this fake fur rug and I’m like, ‘how did they find it? And why is it that one?’