Angela Bassett is opening up about losing an Oscar.
Last year, the 65-year-old was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever… She was on fire in the awards race leading up to the Oscars, so it seemed like she had a pretty good chance of snagging it. However, the award ultimately went to Jamie Lee Curtis for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once. And she looked MAJORLY disappointed. But a year has passed now, and she’s ready to talk about it.
While sitting down for a conversation with Oprah Winfrey last week, the Marvel star reflected on her viral reaction:
“I thought I handled it very well … And that was my intention, was to handle it very well.”
She continued:
“It was, of course, a supreme disappointment, and disappointment is human. So I thought, yes, I was disappointed and I handled it like a human being.”
So well said! We mean, we can only imagine how disappointing it would be to lose out on one of the most prestigious awards in Hollywood when you’re THAT close!
Oprah noted that she “didn’t get the whole ‘Angela Bassett face’” ordeal, adding that the Malcolm X star was “still as gracious as a queen would be.” Angela responded:
“Absolutely. For myself and for my children, who were there with me, yes. I know a pastor who says ‘technology is different — people are the same.’ There are going to be these moments of disappointment that they are going to experience. But how do you handle yourself in the midst of them? We’re going to smile, we’re going to be gracious, we’re going to be kind — we got a party, anyway.”
We love that!! Hopefully one year, Angela WILL be able to take home an Oscar.
Thoughts, Perezcious readers? Let us know down in the comments!
In 2002, the Academy Awards first honored animated features with their own Oscar category — the inaugural winner was DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek. Before then, the stance on rewarding animated features was that there were too few to warrant a separate category; honorary Oscars were given to groundbreaking films like the animated/live-action hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the computer-animated Toy Story.
But with the founding of DreamWorks — and the expansion of other studios, such as stop-motion houses Aardman and Laika, the Irish outfit Cartoon Saloon, and animation departments within Sony and Netflix — there arose an abundance of animated titles that could compete with the output of cartoon titans Disney and Pixar.
While those two studios have led the pack with the most nominees and winners since the category’s debut two decades ago (Pixar with 11 wins, Disney Animation with four), it’s still a rarity for an animated feature to find recognition outside the category, particularly best picture. This year, however, one — or even two! — animated contenders could claim a spot among the 10 best picture nominees.
Sony’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the sequel to the 2019 winner for animated feature, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which claimed the studio’s first win in the category and was the second film featuring a Marvel character to win an Oscar. (That Spider-Man iteration is not, technically, part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but its Oscar win came the same year as Black Panther’s three for original score, costume design and production design.) The film was released to critical acclaim and commercial success, with a 97 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a global box office total of $690 million.
Beyond its stellar reviews, Across the Spider-Verse — co-directed by Kemp Powers, who co-wrote Disney/Pixar’s Oscar-nominated Soul — has earned plenty of year-end accolades, including its placement on AFI’s list of the year’s top 10 films (alongside such live-action contenders as Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer). Following a precedent set by best picture nominee Toy Story 3 in 2011, it’s also an entry in a beloved, Oscar-winning franchise and boasts a cast of A-listers (Oscar nominees Brian Tyree Henry and Hailee Steinfeld, Oscar hopeful Greta Lee and Oscar winners Mahershala Ali and Daniel Kaluuya) and dazzling sequences.
However, GKIDS’ The Boy and the Heron could be Across the Spider-Verse’s biggest competition in both categories. Written and directed by anime master Hayao Miyazaki, the three-time Academy Award nominee who won the second animated feature Oscar for Spirited Away in 2003, the film topped the North American box office with its $12.8 million debut over the weekend of Dec. 9-10 — besting The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé and Disney’s fall animated title Wish.
Its box office performance proves the brand power of Japan’s Studio Ghibli as well as the devotion of Miyazaki’s fan base; the movie brought the 82-year-old animator out of retirement for what he says is his final film, and audiences welcomed him back in droves. The Academy has a final chance to celebrate the animation auteur with another Oscar — or a history-making best picture nomination.
This story first appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Charles Melton is explaining how his six-year, almost 100-episode Riverdale run prepared him for his critically acclaimed supporting performance in Todd Haynes’ May December, for which the actor is gaining serious Oscar buzz.
“Ten months out of the year, 22 episodes, eight to 10 days to film one episode … That’s a lot of work in a short amount of time, and it really took everybody on set to come together to execute this process,” Melton tells THR. “That experience alone, and working with nearly 100 directors on that show, really gave me this confidence and this foundation — as, like, my acting school in a way — to really be able to come to a set like Todd Haynes’ and just completely let go.”
The director, however, had never seen Riverdale, so Melton was an unfamiliar face to him when the actor auditioned for the role of Joe, a suburban dad who, when he was just 13 years old, became sexually involved with a married mother of three, Gracie (Julianne Moore). The scandalous romance rattled the pair’s close-knit community, but Joe and Gracie got married and had three children of their own.
Once he received the script, Melton started his “journey into the research of who Joe was,” says the actor, who discovered a process for preparation along the way. In pulling together his audition, he self-taped for six hours — a hefty time commitment, he acknowledges.
“I have to completely exhaust myself and give every fiber of my being, just so I could look back and be like, ‘OK, I gave everything I’ve got there, and there’s nothing else I would’ve done differently,’ ” says Melton. It got him through the door: Haynes sent him back notes. He self-taped again (for another six hours), which led to a chemistry read with Moore.
“I really felt like that six-week process was the best experience in my career, because I really learned how I wanted to work and how deep I wanted to go when it came to preparing to play characters like this, which was invigorating,” says Melton. “I felt so much comfort and safety and excitement of going really deep into the psychology of who this man was and really transformed into this physicality of how he navigated his own story.”
Melton gained 40 pounds for the role, although he and Haynes never discussed a certain way Joe was supposed to look. Melton calls it a “natural [and] external expression of the internal work I was doing with Joe. When you look at the facts, this is a suburban dad who’s 36 with three kids, a loving marriage, and has a job,” Melton explains. “Like, where does he really find time for his own vanity to really even look at himself?”
The actor ate a lot of Five Guys, pizza and ice cream alongside his best friend, Kelvin Harrison Jr., who was prepping to play Martin Luther King Jr. in Disney+’s Genius: MLK/X. “We were inspiring each other, watching a bunch of films, talking about our characters and eating well,” he says.
There was no rehearsal time before the 23-day shoot, so Melton didn’t practice his scenes with Natalie Portman, who in the film plays an actress portraying Gracie in a movie about her life. He often had dinners with Portman, Moore and Haynes, however, where they got to know each other on a “human level.”
Given the subject matter, Melton says his way to decompress after shooting was watching Abbott Elementary every day, as well as football on Sundays and the Japanese anime television series Demon Slayer. “That was part of my ritualistic comedown, and then I did acupuncture three times a week to really relax, because we carry emotions in our body. So keeping my body as calm and as relaxed as possible not only helped me, but helped what I would do when it came to allowing the technical work I did for Joe to really exist when I was on set.”
Looking back, Melton was never intimidated by the subject matter or his character’s complexities. “There’s just something about repression and tragedy and loneliness that I’m attracted to in characters, and Joe had a complex mix of all those things,” he says. “In spite of whatever the subject matter was, just understanding this human without any sort of formulated opinion or judgment and complete empathy really allowed me to just go to places that I always hoped are possible with Todd, Julie and Natalie.”
This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Hair designer Francesco Pegoretti and makeup designer Jana Carboni worked as a team to focus on the two leads of Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon, about the eponymous French general and emperor (Joaquin Phoenix) and his free-spirited first wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). In the scene pictured above, Napoleon meets Josephine for the first time at a candlelit party, days after she’s escaped beheading during the French Revolution.
“For the first part of the movie, she has to have short hair because she was in the prison waiting for the guillotine,” explains Pegoretti. In the real story of Josephine’s life, she was saved from beheading by only one day and had cut her hair off herself to prevent it from getting caught by the blade. “In the longer version [of the film, the director’s cut to be released on Apple TV+], we are going to see the scene when she’s cutting her hair off, hopefully,” Pegoretti adds.
To achieve the right cut on the wig, Pegoretti balanced historical accuracy and modern flair. “Ridley asked me [not] to be academic, to find something more natural and messy, to follow the character,” he says. “It’s like [she’s] going to a Cure concert,” adds Carboni: “The concept was to go with something edgy and decadent, kind of pixie punk. Josephine was so wild. Even when she becomes empress, she’s never going to be like the other [aristocrats].”
Josephine’s hair grows out later in the film, requiring another wig. “She created a new style for the hair,” explains Pegoretti. “She was very fancy, very fashion. [I needed something reminiscent of] the beginning of the 19th century but also more natural, sometimes messy, to follow the character.”
Josephine was raised outside the aristocracy in Martinique, infiltrating her way into the French elite as an adult. As such, “we decided to keep her eyebrow quite strong because that’s part of the wildness she’s always been and she’s always going to be,” says Carboni.
Kirby is a natural blond, so hair designer Francesco Pegoretti had to work on the dark tones of the wig: “Dark, but not too solid,” he says.
Courtesy of Apple
Josephine wore her makeup heavy, almost as a coat of armor. “She has a very ‘lady of the night’ look. In a way, it’s almost to hide behind that makeup,” says Carboni. “She’s just coming out from prison. She uses beauty and sex appeal to survive.” She adds: “I didn’t want to do anything clownish because she still had to look sexy, but I wanted the heaviness of the makeup.”
When she first meets Napoleon, Josephine glistens as she crosses the room. For her body, Carboni confesses: “Vanessa has the most beautiful skin ever. That was a big help. But still, I put translucent [product] on her skin because the ambient lighting was very dark candlelight. I still wanted her skin to catch the light.”
For the smudgy black eye, Carboni applied shadow mostly with her finger “because it had to look like she did it so she didn’t have to be perfect.” She used a crimson red on Kirby’s cheeks and lip to flush Josephine with sensuality.
Pegoretti and Carboni say Scott films with as many as 11 cameras shooting at once, with very few takes. “You really have to know what you’re doing, and you cannot be sloppy,” Carboni notes. “He only does one or two takes, so you don’t have the chance to say, ‘Oops, sorry.’ You have to be 100 percent right on the first take.”
This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Our ancestors left this here for us,” a member of the North Carolina-based Reels family says in the documentary Silver Dollar Road, referring to the 65-acre waterfront property that had long been their financial and spiritual haven. In the late 1970s, a relative of the Reelses cited a legal loophole to claim that he was the land’s rightful owner, after which an investment group called Adams Creek Associates purchased it, presumably intending to build golf courses and luxury homes there. Refusing to let white businessmen displace them, the Reelses ignited a long battle to retain their ancestors’ tract — one that resulted in the eight-year imprisonment of two family members whom courts deemed trespassers because they wouldn’t vacate.
Raoul Peck, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes, chronicles the Reelses’ story in the Amazon documentary. The movie’s foundation is a 2019 ProPublica article written by Lizzie Presser, who introduced Peck to the family. Throughout, he uses interstitial text to contextualize the Reelses’ struggle, at one point stating that Black Americans lost about 90 percent of their farmland during the 20th century.
Although it shares topical parallels with his previous work, the film is more stylistically forthright. Peck tells THR that’s for good reason.
Your last couple of documentaries were much more sprawling than Silver Dollar Road. They were sort of operatic.
They were much more conceptual.
Silver Dollar Road is straightforward, even if the legal story is quite thorny. For you, was part of the appeal being able to zero in on one family instead of making something more open-ended?
Yes. Indeed, it’s a different way of approaching a subject for me. I thought about that before I accepted it. American documentary filmmaking is about going into a private story and having a good guy and a bad guy — basically staying in the three-act approach of Hollywood cinema, usually with some sort of climax. I’ve never done that in my whole life as a filmmaker. It’s really key to me to not be a prisoner of a story. The family’s story is compelling and emotional and strong, but I didn’t feel that I was stuck in that little bubble. I had ways to feel the complexity and the bigger picture of the land history.
I connect it as a triangle between Exterminate All the Brutes, I Am Not Your Negro and Silver Dollar Road. It’s almost part of a trilogy for me. Everything comes back to the core story of this country: land that was stolen from the get-go. Even the idea of owning land is an important European concept that developed in the 16th century. Indigenous people never say, “We own that land.” They say, “We are the caretakers of the land.” Now, land becomes a commodity, the same way that European concept was used to enslave people. The connection is the DNA of America. If it was not tragic, I would smile at the irony of saying, “Pull yourself up from your bootstraps.” There were programs, like the Homestead Act of 1862, that allowed the population to have access to land. But you could only have access to land if you were a citizen, which the Black population was not until the 14th Amendment. So, wherever you turn, we come back to that core story.
You use historical context to illuminate the family’s story instead of using the family’s story to illuminate history. There are no talking-head experts, for example. Was that structure immediately clear to you?
The model of the talking heads, I found out, is not the proper tool for a lot of the things I want to do. In my early documentaries, I did use talking heads, sometimes for sheer credibility reasons. Today, I feel that I’m allowed to speak in my own voice. I have my strong opinions, always based on very strict and comprehensive research — so I can indulge in my own subjectivity, but my homework is done. In this particular story, I found the perfect characters to tell the story. The Reelses are extraordinary characters. I gave them the stage because those kinds of people never have the stage. There’s always someone speaking for them, which puts them in the role of victims. I don’t want to make the comparison with Martin Scorsese’s film [Killers of the Flower Moon], but some of the criticism about that is, well, the point of view is key. As filmmakers, we are big manipulators. Who’s speaking, and for whom? Film after film, I learned to ask, “Who has the power to tell the story?”
Was your initial involvement with the family after the ProPublica article was published?
Pretty much. The article was bought by JuVee Productions, Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s production company. Together with Amazon, they offered me the project as an executive producer. I thought it was a key story where I could give it more layers, because it’s so tragic and so emotional — and, at the same time, I don’t see those two men [who went to prison] as victims. I feel they are heroes. It’s not a happy end because there is no end in that story. For me, it aligned itself in that long trail of mismanagement, misappropriation, bias, a retelling of history and the whole nonsense of the American dream. It’s the whole absurdity of Make America Great Again. When was it great, and for whom? If you don’t understand the land problem, you don’t understand why there are so many Black people in prison or why the wealth gap is so huge, because there are not many ways to acquire wealth.
How receptive was the family to having cameras observe them, and to sharing their story that way?
That’s my job, to make sure I’m accepted, that they trust me. I want them to be able to continue their life without feeling the camera all the time. But that part was already done by Lizzie Presser and her team. ProPublica had sent different camera crews over many months, especially in special moments, like when the two brothers came out of prison. Those images existed. That’s one of the things that authorized me to say, “Well, that can be an incredible film.” I’ve worked all my life with archives. When I was introduced to the family, I went with Lizzie the first time, and I could see how Lizzie was totally accepted and was considered part of the family. And don’t forget, the family has been struggling for at least three decades. They were very conscious that as long as they could not tell the story beyond Carteret County [in North Carolina], they were trapped.
They saw what you were doing as a tool.
Yeah. I could feel in the first conversation there was doubt: Are you really going to make this film? Most people think a reporter coming in means there will be something on the TV the next evening. The context of documentary filmmaking is much more difficult to grasp, and they would see these DPs coming and filming. They’d open their doors, they’d open their hearts. So when I came, there was also a feeling of “Oh, yes, it’s really going to be a film.”
The Reels family, the subjects of Amazon’s ‘Silver Dollar Road.’
Courtesy of Prime Video
By DPs, do you mean the ProPublica videographers? Or had other people attempted to make this documentary previously?
Those were people hired by ProPublica. They documented the family over more than two years. There were at least 90 hours of footage. That’s a lot. Even before I went to shoot myself, I made sure that I had a first edit of 40 minutes because I wanted to know: What is the story that those archives tell me? Finding my own story with what existed already was a comfortable, or less complicated, matter. Then I knew exactly what was missing. I had to make the story more current. After all the interviews were made, I could say, “I don’t want any talking heads.” The only ones I kept were the family, the lawyer and Anita Earls, who is a very well-known Supreme Court judge in North Carolina. She represents one of the rare clear voices in the whole mess, from the justice side.
At the end, we see a kind of denial or obfuscation from the Adams Creek investment group via text. Did you attempt to get somebody from there on camera?
I refused to go into that because it’s not part of the film. I didn’t want to identify anyone specific because in reality it’s the system — the laws, the history of this country. It’s a more complex response. That’s what we do a lot of the time in filmmaking. It’s easy to find the bad guys and then say, “OK, it’s done.” The concept of showing both sides — all my life, my side was never on the screen. For me, it’s a political decision to say, “No, I want my side to have the full one hour and 30 minutes.” Those are precious minutes. I have, for once, the authorization to tell that story. Why would I waste any minutes to deal with that other side of the story? For what? I wanted to make a film where the Black audience would feel at ease watching, the same way the Reelses felt at ease and safe on their beach. People are angry watching it, but it’s a different type of anger.
It’s not the same anger that might be conjured up in the true-crime version of this, the four-part series on Netflix that plays into all the tropes we’ve come to expect of that mostly hollow genre.
Exactly. It was also a key decision not to start with the crime. I started by entering the family compound, being with them, and creating empathy for them and seeing them as real human beings before the drama occurs. If you do the contrary, you are basically pushing them as victims from the get-go, especially for a white, or let’s say dominant, audience. That’s where that anger comes from, because you are with them, whether you are Black or white. You feel it could be your grandmother, it could be your uncle. It was important to establish that, and when injustice comes, that breaks your heart because they’re not just people at a distance.
What was it like to show the family the completed film for the first time?
I showed them in a special screening I did in Raleigh for them before picture lock, because that’s what I do. For me, it’s a testimony of our mutual trust.
It gives them the opportunity to let you know how they feel about it before you’ve decided it’s completely finished.
Of course, because all these decisions we’ve talked about are really personal, political decisions. I have to feel that they are on board with that. It was an incredible moment because they were crying, laughing, reacting. And [central family member] Mamie said something that she repeated in Toronto at the Q&A. For her, she felt much lighter because she didn’t feel she still had the weight of the story on her shoulder. The film was going to tell the story for her.
This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Erika Alexander and Jeffrey Wright in Orion/Amazon MGM Studios’ American Fiction.
Claire Folger/MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
Producer Jermaine Johnson worked primarily as a literary manager for clients like first-time movie writer-director Cord Jefferson (whom he’s represented for close to a decade) before the pair collaborated on Jefferson’s darkly comic adaptation of the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, which Jefferson wrote on spec with Johnson’s encouragement.
Naturally, first-time filmmaking meant an inherent learning curve. “Day one was a tough day because Cord didn’t really feel qualified to tell Jeffrey Wright how to act,” Johnson recalls. “He did not feel like he was the guy for the job.” That meant adding pep talks to Johnson’s job description. “The conversation was, ‘Hey, man, Jeffrey wants to be directed. Actors want to collaborate and get in the clay with you,’ ” he says. “Next thing, he’s just in there, between takes, talking to Jeffrey, playing around with it. And they established a rapport, from day two on.”
Shooting constraints prompted production to relocate from New York to the Boston area, where Jefferson would be able to film the scenes at Monk’s (Wright) family beach house in the Massachusetts coastal town of Scituate. “You start to crunch the numbers and think about what it takes to shoot in New York,” Johnson says. “Once we landed on Boston, it was a very quick yes.”
Northeastern weather, however, proved one of the main production challenges. “I learned what it takes to light a beach at night. That is an extremely difficult task,” Johnson says of a scene in which Leslie Uggams, as Monk’s aging mother, wanders away from her home. Rigging lights amid 20-mile-an-hour winds proved nearly impossible. But for the 80-year-old actress, the wind was no problem. “We’ve got Leslie the legend out in this weather, and she is such a professional that she did as many takes as we needed,” Johnson says, adding that Uggams was “just the brightest light there.”
From left: Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Paul Giamatti in Focus Features’ The Holdovers.
Seacia Pavao/Focus Features
An Oscar winner for Rain Man, Mark Johnson wasn’t cowed by Alexander Payne’s rigorous commitment to getting his story right. But The Holdovers, set in a New England boarding school over Christmas break, proved a particular exercise in patience. “With Alexander, the script is understandably the most important part of moviemaking,” Johnson says. “He spent a lot of time [giving first-time feature writer David Hemingson feedback] on it.” One of the main developmental changes was expanding the character of grieving chef Mary, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. “I really do believe her performance is the heart of the movie,” he adds.
Finding financing for a story on this scale — an intimate, humanist dramedy centered on Mary along with Paul Giamatti’s weathered teacher Paul Hunham and troubled schoolboy Angus (newcomer Dominic Sessa) — also proved a challenge: “It’s not a big, bombastic subject. Paul Giamatti has such great respect, but is he a big box office name? No,” says Johnson. But midscale films about life are “the movies that so many of us really enjoy,” he says. “These movies are harder and harder to put together. Movies that I’ve made from the very beginning, like Diner or even, quite frankly, Rain Man, I wonder how we would go about putting them together today?”
Another challenge was location: The preppy Barton Academy where most of the movie takes place is actually a composite of multiple New England schools — though all that snow is, remarkably, very real (about “85 percent” of it, anyway). “I’ve had people come up to me after screenings saying, ‘Oh, I went to that school,’ ” says Johnson. “Well, no, they didn’t, because that school didn’t exist.”
From left: Harris Dickinson, Zac Efron, Stanley Simons and Jeremy Allen White in A24’s The Iron Claw.
Eric Chakeen/A24
Writer-director-producer Sean Durkin had been obsessed with his drama’s subject matter — the Von Erich wrestling family — since an early age, having read about them in magazines and watched old tapes of their matches. When he began writing the script, he was very conscious of the constraints he would need to adhere to. “When I started out, I really did all the line producing myself,” says Durkin, whose films include Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) and The Nest (2020). “I’ve never been able to separate financials. I’m so envious of writers who can just not worry about it. I’m very conscious of how to craft a world and to be aware of the type of budget [for] the film I’m making.”
Most of the film takes place in the wrestling arena known as the Sportatorium or on the Von Erichs’ Texas ranch, and simulating those spots proved surprisingly difficult. Preparing to shoot in Louisiana, the scouting team had their work cut out for them. “We really covered the entire state to find the right feel for the ranch,” Durkin says. After landing in the Baton Rouge area, finding a warehouse that could house a wrestling stadium was equally tough. Production designer James Price “was going into every single building that could work size-wise, but it’d be the wrong shape inside, or the wrong texture.” The solution was found in a furniture showroom. “It was just a bunch of fake living rooms. We had to convince the place to let us clear out everything, knock down all the walls.”
Zac Efron and the cast worked intensely to transform physically to play the Von Erichs, though Durkin didn’t require it. “I wanted them to feel comfortable getting to whatever shape they felt was best for the character,” he says. But for the wrestling, authenticity was key. “They had to learn how to wrestle all the way through from top to bottom, and do multiple takes,” he says, noting that he filmed matches live in front of an audience. “We got really lucky with the Baton Rouge crowd, because they were really into wrestling. It was really quite beautiful, that energy between the background [performers] and the actors.”
Kristie Macosko Krieger was originally planning to produce a Leonard Bernstein biopic directed by her longtime collaborator, Steven Spielberg, with Bradley Cooper signed on to star as the famed conductor and composer. When Spielberg made the decision to step away from the director’s chair, Cooper offered his own name as a replacement, and asked Spielberg and Krieger to watch an early cut of his directorial debut, A Star Is Born.
Krieger recalls, “Twenty minutes into the film, Spielberg got up and walked over to Bradley and said, ‘You’re directing this fucking movie.’ ”
Cooper had a clear vision of the details he wanted to bring to Maestro, and he would not budge on any of them. “He was like, ‘We’re absolutely going to go over many time periods,’ ” Krieger says. (The film spans from the 1940s through the 1980s.) Cooper also worked with prosthetics designer Kazu Hiro for three and a half years to transform his face into Bernstein’s. “He wouldn’t stop until he got it right,” Krieger says.
The film was shot on location in New York’s Carnegie Hall and Central Park, in England’s Ely Cathedral and at Massachusetts’ Tanglewood Estate. Some desired locations, however, were impossible to get. “We could not shoot in the Dakota apartment [on Central Park West],” she says. “Bradley wanted to re-create that to almost exactly what it looked like. He enlisted Kevin Thompson, our production designer, to build the entire Dakota set.”
Cooper also insisted they shoot with live orchestras, which meant that the film could not shoot during the height of COVID and had to be postponed. “But again, he wasn’t compromising,” says Krieger. “He was like, ‘It will look better, it will be better, it will be the movie that I want to make.’ He made all of us better as department heads in figuring out this film, so none of us were settling, either.”
Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy in Universal’s Oppenheimer.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Emma Thomas has worked as a producer for her husband, Christopher Nolan, “on pretty much all of his films, ever,” as she puts it. “When I first read Chris’ script, I thought it was the best he’d ever written. It was very clear that he was approaching the story with a large scope in mind, as a blockbuster.”
But despite Nolan’s pedigree and Oppenheimer’s seemingly endless scale, the biggest production challenge was working on a minimal budget. “It’s about very difficult and weighty subjects,” Thomas explains. “I wasn’t daunted by the things he was proposing shooting, but I knew that the only responsible way to make a film this challenging, that was inevitably going to be R-rated and three hours long, was to make it for a reasonable amount of money. And a reasonable amount of money was probably going to be about half of what anyone else would do it for.”
Proposing a budget cut in half to department heads meant each sector of the crew had to find creative ways to consolidate resources. “Our production designer, Ruth De Jong, got really smart about ways in which she could build things, with a very targeted eye, building only what was necessary for the shots,” says Thomas. “Our DP, Hoyte van Hoytema, said, ‘There are things that I can do to go faster: to only have one camera, to do as much handheld as possible.’ Our actors were all on set all the time, ready to go as soon as the camera was ready. Those are things that added up to us being able to finish the film on this incredibly punishing schedule.”
Building Los Alamos, the site of the atomic bomb’s creation, meant battling freezing temperatures in the mesas of New Mexico. “The weather was so cold, it was impossible to dig into the ground because it was frozen,” says Thomas. “We had snowstorms and windstorms. And that was just when we were building the town. Once we got the shoot there, we had another great big windstorm, and we weren’t even sure that the tents were going to stand.” But the production ultimately used the weather to its advantage. “It looks amazing on film — that shot of Cillian when he walks up to the Trinity Tower, and climbs up it, that’s real wind.”
Jon Bernthal and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Neon’s Origin.
Courtesy Array Filmworks
Paul Garnes had worked as a producer with writer-director Ava DuVernay in the past, but it had been some time since the pair had operated outside the studio system. “In the early days, we were at Netflix,” he says. “[Origin] got caught up in the industry slowdown. Ava made the really bold choice to go out and make this independently.”
That decision made things more exhilarating and terrifying, Garnes says. “In every production, there’s some executive that you can call and say, ‘Hey, this is happening, what do we do?’ We didn’t have that. It was just me and Ava. We could really only depend on each other.”
The film spans centuries and continents, with scenes in Berlin at the height of World War II, aboard slave ships in the 1600s and in the streets of contemporary India. The decision to finance independently meant working with local governments to shoot in as many historical locations as possible. “We weren’t going to build a bunch of sets on soundstages,” Garnes says. “Outside of the slave ship sequence, because obviously slave ships don’t exist, we shot everything else pretty much on location.”
That made for some awkward asks. “Could we shoot a Nazi rally in downtown Berlin, in the place where that book burning in the Bebelplatz really happened?” says Garnes. “We didn’t know at the time, but they had never let anyone film there.” Filming also took place at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. “It’s a sensitive place. You don’t want to cause any stress or damage or anything to a place people visit in very solemn moments.”
As a home base, production landed on Savannah, Georgia, where they were able to re-create a concentration camp. Bringing in those extras meant “Ava [taking] very careful time to get the background talent to understand what they were doing, who they were,” says Garnes. A sequence portraying the murder of Trayvon Martin was also filmed in that area, as well as scenes set in cotton fields in the 1930s South.
This story first appeared in the Dec. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
In Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan stars as Oliver Quick, a middle-class student at Oxford University who becomes infatuated with his handsome and wealthy classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). As the school year ends, Felix invites him to spend the summer with him and his idiosyncratic family at their massive country estate — the eponymous Saltburn.
Fennell’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning debut, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is a psychological black comedy inspired by Gothic literature, tracing Oliver’s struggle to fit in with the strange and rich family that hosts him at their home. But twists and turns abound in Fennell’s satire of the British class system, which she describes as “Barry Lyndon meets indie sleaze.”
Emerald Fennell
Mike Marsland/WireImage
Calling out other films set in similar environs (including Oscar-winning features The Remains of the Day and Atonement), Fennell deliberately plays with preconceived notions of British identity. “What happens when we take the most restrained genre about the most restrained people — to restrain it to the extent that it’s just pure, visceral madness?” Fennell asks.
The result is a wild and seductive tale of debauchery, eroticism and power, slowly unraveling to reveal that few of its characters are who they appear to be. Creating the world those figures inhabit proved great fun for Fennell, who turned to some of her favorite films, books and art to construct a mood board for Saltburn’s aesthetic.
Here, she shares with THR the inspirations for the film’s visual style as well as its expertly plotted screenplay, built on the bones of a particularly British kind of storytelling.
Thunderstruck/Alamy Stock Photo
Caravaggio’s paintings of the biblical figure were numerous — and, as Fennell says, “very sexy.” The contrast of the white skin against red fabric has always caught the director’s eye, and that aesthetic went into the interiors of the Saltburn estate. “We’re framing a huge, sumptuous, almost biblical kind of place — everyone is in velvets and silks, lying on chaises in a formal setting,” she says. She also found inspiration in how Caravaggio depicted the male body: “There’s a lot of tension under the skin.”
Courtesy Image
Fennell calls L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, which tells the story of a young man who feels like an outsider within his Victorian-era boarding school, “a British staple.” She adds: “It’s exactly what makes this genre so thrilling. This is the skeleton of the story, a man going through all of his old stuff and realizing his life hasn’t gone the way he wanted it to, and he sets out to resolve things.” The novel also was adapted for film by Losey and Pinter in 1971.
Courtesy Everett Collection
This 1963 drama directed by Joseph Losey and written by Harold Pinter stars Dirk Bogarde as the servant to a wealthy Londoner. “Losey and Pinter’s collaborations are so electric, because they have an undeniable erotic power,” says Fennell. “That power relies entirely on the threat of violence — not just literal violence, but a complete chaotic upending of the status quo.”
Courtesy Image
At a late night karaoke party, Oliver is convinced to sing this Pet Shop Boys track — only to realize it’s intended to make fun of him. “It’s one of the most romantic songs ever written,” says Fennell of the tune, told from the perspective of a kept man. “The chorus is, ‘I love you, you pay my rent.’ There’s some simplicity to that transaction. You could argue it’s cold and cynical. But the underlying truth is something we’re all looking for.”
Courtesy of ACC Art Books
Dafydd Jones’ photos are both sordid and idyllic, capturing student life at Oxford in the 1980s — a direct reference for Fennell’s 2007-set social satire. “What’s so great about Oxford, Cambridge and the aristocracy is, like … pick your century, right?” she says. “Dafydd catches those moments of genuine exhilaration, wealth and youth.”
This story first appeared in a November standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
When cinematographer Eigil Bryld paired with director Alexander Payne on Focus Features’ Nov. 10 release The Holdovers, which is set at a New England boarding school in 1970, one of the first things the Sideways helmer emphasized was that he didn’t want it to “just look like a movie set the ’70s.” The DP clarifies, “He really wanted it to look and feel and sound like it was a movie that was actually made in the ’70s.”
The Holdovers follows a curmudgeonly high school history teacher named Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) who reluctantly remains on campus at the fictional boarding school Barton Academy during Christmas break. He forms unlikely bonds with a damaged but brainy student, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, in his feature debut), and the school’s grieving head cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who has lost her son in Vietnam.
Bryld and Payne turned to films from the period, including Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, for inspiration. “We saw a lot of prints. We found a small cinema in Boston with a very eccentric projectionist who could get all these original prints from his friends. That subculture is very specific,” Bryld remembers, adding that he started with — but quickly abandoned — the intent to use ’70s tools and film stock, which wasn’t readily available.
“I was thinking, ‘What is it that I really love about that era?’ ” says Bryld. “There’s a sense of a spirit of the ’70s movies — breaking away from your studios. And all the DPs of the period that I really admired would push the film stock or they would do handheld or whatever. And then I started thinking, ‘That’s really what I should be going for.’ ”
The Danish DP behind such films as 2008’s In Bruges, 2022’s Deep Water and this year’s rom-com No Hard Feelings tested both film and digital approaches and chose to shoot digitally with an ARRI Alexa. He also created a lookup table (a sort of blueprint for the color grading step) with colorist Joe Gawler. “He’s done a lot of Criterion restoration, so he really knows how the negative ages over time. So I thought, ‘Well, I’d rather build that into it.’ ”
Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Paul Giamatti in the Alexander Payne film, which takes place at Christmas in 1970.
Seacia Pavao / FOCUS FEATURES LLC
They also used Panavision H series lenses, particularly a 55mm lens, to evoke a vintage portrait look. “They had really a sense of immediacy and intimacy,” the DP says of the lens choice. “A lot of the film is done on that because the film is ultimately, in one way, a lot of portraits.
“It’s a movie about people who are forced into the frame together, and they don’t necessarily want to be in the same frame,” he adds. “They all have their own portrait. Sometimes they’re in the frame and there’s several people in the frame, but I still thought of it as individual portraits within a group photo.” As the trio become closer emotionally, the DP captures their burgeoning friendships with the camera. “Gradually over time, they come together more and more,” says Bryld. “And that was one arc we were looking for — how we would reflect that, how we framed it and where we put the camera.”
The Holdovers was filmed in Boston and western Massachusetts at Deerfield Academy, which also happens to be the high school that Sessa attended (according to the DP, the actor stayed in his former dorm room during production). “He was amazing,” Bryld says. “I mean, they’re all great, but obviously Paul and Dominic carry the movie. Paul is a pleasure to work with. He also makes things seem very easy just because he’s so good. There was sort of a calmness that Alexander has and Paul has, that, I imagine, would’ve been incredibly comforting for Dominic.”
Bryld also served as the film’s camera operator. “That’s where you should be as the DP,” he says. “You should be there, be able to look up and see what’s going on around you, but also create that little community around the camera. I think it’s incredibly important in working with the actors, that it’s familiar faces. It becomes a little bit of a dance between the camera and the actors … that is rarely something that’s put into words, but just something that has to be organic.”
This story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
All That Breathes director Shaunak Sen has shared his first reactions on social media after the film didn’t make the cut at the 95th Academy Awards. The film is a documentary that was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category.
Shaunak Sen took to his Instagram handle to share photos from the Oscars 2023. In one pic, he can be seen posing with an “L” hand sign on his forehead. He wrote, “So many chin-uppy messages of encouragement/support since yesterday. We were low for about an hour, but we’re soon distracted into equanimity amidst the whirl of glittery people and things. Brain is still to wrap around the fact that this is the end of this chapter.”
Check it out here:
He also added that he will work with his team to get distribution for All That Breathes. He added, “For now, very very nice to share this bizarre, swollen day with the brothers, and so many members of our crew. Hugest congratulations to all the winning films from India.”
All That Breathes won much critical reception and several awards at film festivals including the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2022 and the Golden Eye at Cannes Film Festival 2022. At the Oscars 2023, the film lost the Best Documentary Feature award to Daniel Roher’s Navalny.
Meanwhile, India made history at the Oscars with two wins – RRR’s Naatu Naatu for Best Original Song and The Elephant Whisperers for Best Documentary Short.
The Stranger at the Gate executive producer, Malala Yousafzai, who is 25 years old, attended the Oscars in support of her short film, which was up for Best Documentary Short Film.
Oscars Awards 2023, which were held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, put educational activists in an uncomfortable position. But as Malala is known to make her way through, she did know how to respond to Jimmy Kimmel in a subtle way, which made fans call her out for her ‘classy’ and ‘elegant’ reply.
Here is what happened between Jimmy Kimmel and Malala Yousafzai.
Malala Yousafzai, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and an education activist, made an appearance with her husband at this year’s Oscars.
The 25-year-old attended the event as executive producer of The Stranger at the Gate in support of her short film that was up for Best Documentary Short Film. During which Malala had a strange experience with Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the 95th Academy Awards, who took the stage during the ceremony.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner was questioned by Jimmy Kimmel, who claimed to take questions from the audience regarding the turmoil surrounding Harry Styles and Chris Pine’s spit-gate incident that surfaced last year.
‘As the youngest Nobel Prize winner in history,’ Kimmel commented while asking, ‘I was wondering, do you think Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine?’
‘I only talk about peace,’ Malala Yousafzai responded to Jimmy Kimmel’s question, which was addressed to her.
Fans slammed Jimmy Kimmel for the question and applauded Malala for her response. Find out
While some Twitter users praised the Nobel laureate for her “classy” response to the “unfunny and cringe” joke, others found the question addressed to her unimpressive.
Triangle of Sadness never stood a chance as a major Oscar contender, of course. And as a skewering of the rich and a society that worships them, it was certainly not going to topple the likes of Everything Everywhere All At Once. Which, say what you will about it, is not some kind of “love letter” to moms (in the spirit of the 1942 children’s book, Runaway Bunny) or “ordinary people,” so much as a thinly-veiled push to accept your fate—no matter how mediocre—make the most of it and, obviously, never try to outsmart/dodge the IRS. Even though it seems like one ought to be able to mentally maneuver around somebody as toady as Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis, who swept up an Oscar for her part in the movie as well), Kafka long ago made it clear that bureaucracy always triumphs. And so do schmaltzy movies at the Oscars—regardless of such movies being masked as “profound” and “rooted in realism.”
That “realism” begins when Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is confronted at the IRS office by Alpha-Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), another version of her husband from the multiverse. But it’s difficult to focus on what Alpha-Waymond is saying to her about the collapse of every universe while the “voice of reason” throughout the film, Deirdre, a star IRS agent (with the butt plug-shaped Auditor of the Month awards to prove it), keeps trying to bring Evelyn back to “reality,” whatever that means. But to Deirdre, it means reminding this non-taxpayer that “hobbies” are not businesses, and that Evelyn is going to be in some serious trouble if she doesn’t get her story straight with regard to her tax return “narrative.” Notably, Everything Everywhere All at Once’s major sweep of the Oscars comes just in time for tax season—how fucking convenient is that, as Cardi B would say. Because yes, amid all the smokescreens about nihilism and how “nothing matters,” the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert) ultimately seem to want to remind viewers that nothing is ever so chaotic in any universe as to excuse away not correctly filling out and filing a tax return.
In truth, the only way to gauge whether or not a bona fide apocalypse has occurred is if people stop paying their taxes and are able to “get away with it.” This tending to refer to something like a The Last of Us scenario wherein it’s irrefutably true that nothing matters, save for basic survival (thanks to the 28 Days Theory on Humans Enduring for No Good Reason Other Than It’s Encoded Within Them). Or, in the instance of Triangle of Sadness, you find yourself in a Lord of the Flies situation, stranded on a deserted island. That’s when humanity in its most unbridled form reveals itself. But naturally, the Academy doesn’t likely care to remind viewers of such “ugly” realities, like “buying sex with the common food” as Abigail (Dolly de Lion) does in her newfound role as leader.
In contrast, while she was a cleaner on a 250-million-dollar yacht, Abigail was “valueless.” In the rough of the wild, however, her skills (what the Daniels would bill as being part of “competency porn”) are worth everything to the passengers that now depend on her for survival. Paula (Vicki Berlin), the head of staff on the yacht, makes the mistake of trying to treat Abigail the same way she does on the boat, having the gall to ask her after Abigail does all the work to finagle them a fish dinner, “Why do you get so much food? Why?” This question forces Abigail, The Little Red Hen of the outfit, to spell it out by explaining, “I caught the fish, I made the fire, I cooked. I did all the work, and everybody got something.” In capitalist existence, this is simply called a laborer. In Lord of the Flies existence, this is called running shit and everyone else without any viable skills can shut the fuck up.
When Yaya (Charlbi Dean), the proverbial hot model/influencer of the yacht’s remaining passengers, ends up hiking with Abigail over a mountain to find that they’re actually on an island that houses a bougie resort, the look on Abigail’s face is one of sheer disappointment. She doesn’t want to go back to how it used to be. To the existence, or “universe,” as Everything Everywhere All at Once would bill it, where she’s a lowly peon whose skills are rendered useless again now that money as the sole source of clout has reentered the equation. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Daniels attempt to lift up the working class by spotlighting them as the “real superheroes” in this world. Of course, what would be far more uplifting to them is if they were paid accordingly. Not given some propaganda about accepting how shitty things are and, by the way, keep paying your taxes.
Perhaps the vastly opposing messages of each film, with Everything Everywhere All at Once disguised as something it’s not, proves that the only side people want to see of themselves is the rose-colored one. With “normal” Waymond saying such dialogue as, “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind.” A more debonair Waymond in the universe where Evelyn is a film star and didn’t up marrying him finds her telling Waymond how bleak it would have been if she had opted for a life with him. As he leaves, Waymond ripostes, “In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”
This is what finally warms Evelyn’s heart back up to Waymond in the universe where they do just that, turning her back on the darkness that Jobu Tupaki a.k.a. her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), has infected Evelyn with on her journey through the multiverse. Although it seems like Joy might have won with her darkness (and the everything bagel that encompasses it), Evelyn chooses to employ Waymond’s combat style of “killing with kindness” (it was a grave error that Selena Gomez’s “Kill ‘Em With Kindness” was not used at any point during this scene). This, in turn, leads laundromat owner Evelyn to not let her daughter go even though she asks to be.
Chasing after Joy outside the laundromat, Evelyn explains that she would rather be in this universe with Joy over any other. Joy counters, “[But] here all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes sense.” Needless to say, Joy isn’t referring only to the literal way in which she and her mother have a tendency to tune their being into different universes, but the way in which none of life really makes sense to any of us. Except for those rare moments of clarity we’re meant to get by being surrounded with loved ones and friends during those precious, errant hours of time off from work. Work is what people do, after all, in order to support those around them. Including institutions that profit from (usually underpaid) labor. Especially the IRS.
“Then I will cherish these few specks of time,” Evelyn assures. As though to say that we all should do the same with vacation weeks and “leisure hours” spent recovering from the horrors of working so that said wage can be gutted like a fucking fish by the government. To act like the Daniels aren’t complicit in perpetuating this inherently flawed cycle, they have Joy announce at the end, “Taxes suck.” But, clearly, you still have to do them if you want to be considered a Viable Member of Society (meaning, ultimately, a law-abiding one—laws being a social construct created by—ding! ding! ding!—the government a.k.a. the rich people that control it).
Incidentally, the final line of the movie consists of Evelyn inquiring, “Sorry, what did you say?” It’s an appropriate question for those viewers who thought that they had heard something infinitely wise and profound when, at the core of Everything Everywhere All at Once is the longstanding societal reiteration that you must do your taxes and honor the family unit. Not just by never abandoning it, but by making sure that the same “beliefs” are imparted down the generational line. In other words, of course this would get the Academy hard as a rock compared to something as “Eat the Rich” in sentiment as the aforementioned Triangle of Sadness.
As she accepted her award, she joked that she was grateful to the Academy for not being offended by the words “women” and “talking” together.
“First of all, I just want to thank The Academy for not being mortally offended by the words ‘women’ and ‘talking’ put so close together like that. Cheers,” she said.
She also gave mention to fellow Canadian, Miriam Toews, who wrote the 2018 novel of the same name, which inspired the film.
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“Miriam Toews wrote an essential novel about a radical democracy in which people who don’t agree on every single issue managed to sit together in a room and carve out a way forward together free of violence. They do so not just by talking but also by listening,” she added.
Polley’s feature film directorial debut Away From Her was also nominated in this category in 2008, but she lost out to Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country For Old Men.
Based on a true story, Women Talking explores a remote religious colony where the male elders use a series of excuses to explain away years of drugged sexual assaults on the group’s women and girls, leaving many pregnant or dead.
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When the men responsible for the assaults are caught and put in custody, the women must decide whether to stay within the community or leave.
The story mirrors similar events that took place in a Manitoba Mennonite Colony in Bolivia.
“We felt like we were part of a movement, not a movie,” Polley said in an interview last year after the world premiere of Women Talking.
Sarah Polley attends the 95th Annual Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California.
Kayla Oaddams / WireImage
“There’s something essential that we feel is a conversation that should be part of our world, and we want to be part of it with every part of our being.”
In the male-dominated film industry, Polley said she was grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with so many talented women, but noted that people of all genders helped bring the film’s conversation to the big screen.
“Everyone on the cast and crew came to this in such a generous spirit,” she said. “It wasn’t just the women on set who wanted to bring those experiences of abuse and of feeling powerless, and of moving through it and a building a better life and hopefully a better world.”
Polley, who got her start as a child actor and rose to become an acclaimed writer and director, was competing against films Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Living, Top Gun: Maverick and All Quiet on the Western Front.
Polley was also up for the Oscar for Best Picture for the same film.
Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley on ‘Woman Talking’
The much-awaited and prestigious 95th Academy Awards are currently going on and all eyes are on it. Pan India film RRR’s song Naatu Naatu had been nominated in the Best Original Song Category and today as the main event kickstarted, there was a special performance dedicated to this song. Priyanka Chopra, who has been cheering for RRR and this song since the beginning took to her Instagram to share a video of the special performance and we cannot stop getting excited.
Priyanka Chopra shares clip of Naatu Naatu’s special performance
Taking to her Instagram stories, Priyanka Chopra shared a clip of the special performance dedicated to RRR’s Naatu Naatu. In the clip which is taken from her television of the live performance straight from the stage of 95th Academy Awards, we can see the dancers recreating the exact steps and feel of Naatu Naatu. Sharing this clip, we can hear PeeCee cheering in the background and she wrote, ‘Wohooo!!! Amazing! #RRR #standingovation.” This performance was special also for the fact that to announce it we had the gorgeous Deepika Padukone taking over the Oscars stage.
Check out the post:
Indeed. RRR’s Naatu Naatu featuring Ram Charan and Jr NTR is a song that lifts up your mood the minute you hear it. It is making all us Indians proud at the 95th Academy Awards which are being held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. We hear that the musical performance of Naatu Naatu also received a standing ovation from the crowd and that itself is proof of the fact htat how much fans are enjoying the song.
Another point to be noted is that Deepika Padukone is the third Indian star to attend the Oscars after Persis Khambatta and Priyanka Chopra.
