Awards Special The Crafts 5
Where Have All the Indie Oscar Contenders Gone?
10 Cynthia Erivo, Out of This World The double Oscar nominee (and Tony winner) teams with stylist Jason Bolden for looks that channel fantasy, strength and romance.
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‘I’m Writing My Best Songs Right Now’ Eleven-time nominee Diane Warren has made history by not nabbing even one Oscar — but is grateful to be invited.
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Thomas Newman’s ‘Proud,’ Petrifying Path
20 Drawing Them ‘Just Right’ Animated feature directors describe how they captured their characters.
22 Finding the Perfect Sartorial Spark See the eclectic mood boards and faded family photos, impressionist art and muscle cars that inspired the nominated costume designers.
26 The Photos That ‘Put Me in the World’ Oscar-nominated production designers share the inspirations behind their films’ visions, from personal family relics to Bauhaus furniture.
30 A Perfect Shot, Weather Permitting 32 Bridging the Sounds of Groovy L.A. and Outer Space Double nominee Mark Ulano talks the art of recording in tight spots, from a car to a spacecraft.
36 The Seamless VFX Stitchery of 1917 In the live-action and animated shorts races, two nominated films emphasize the bonds of sisterhood — by blood and by circumstance.
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Clockwise from top: Saoirse Ronan, Laura Dern, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women. Inset: Winslow Homer’s Backgammon (1877) and other American impressionist paintings of the late 19th century inspired the costumes in Greta Gerwig’s film.
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ART: ART COLLECTION 3/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO. LITTLE: WILSON WEBB/COLUMBIA PICTURES.
38 A Tale of Two Sisters
2020
AWARDS SE A SON
THE R ACE | STEPHEN GALLOWAY
Where Have All the Indie Oscar Contenders Gone? There was a time when studio films struggled to find a place in the best picture race. But the 2020 crop includes only one true independent. The shortened awards season and a shift in studio thinking may be to blame
RABBIT: KIMBERLEY FRENCH/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. PARASITE: COURTESY OF NEON + CJ ENTERTAINMENT.
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funny thing happened on the way to this year’s Oscar nominations: The indie business got punched in the gut. A decade after the movie Academy changed its rules, allowing up to 10 best picture nominees instead of the previous five (a direct response to The Dark Knight’s absence from the final lineup), the policy may have had a more far-ranging effect than some expected. True, it hasn’t achieved its original goal: to boost Oscar ratings by acknowledging more mainstream pictures with wider audience appeal — ratings hit an all-time low in 2018, with 26.5 million viewers, but bounced back a bit in 2019 to 29.6 million, still the secondsmallest audience ever. Instead the rule change has achieved something else: placing the studios front and center of the Oscars and edging the indies out. It’s been almost a century since Louis B. Mayer and other studio chiefs invented the idea of the Academy Awards as a means to boost revenue and prestige, and almost a quarter-century since a wave of anxiety swept through Hollywood when Columbia’s Jerry Maguire (1996) was the only best picture nominee from the majors. This year, there’s only one true indie among the nine best picture nominees: Neon’s Parasite. The only other contender that could be considered quasi-independent is Jojo Rabbit from Searchlight, the specialty label that’s now a division of the Walt Disney Co.
Six of the nine nominees (including Jojo) come from the majors: Sony’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Little Women; Warner Bros.’ Joker; Fox’s Ford v Ferrari and Universal’s 1917. The two remaining nominees are from Netflix: Marriage Story and The Irishman. The question is: why? One factor may be the shorter awards season, which has provided less time for members to watch screeners. When forced to choose among a slew of movies, they tend to opt for the most visible and highly publicized, which often means those with the biggest marketing budgets. “Nobody had time to watch all the movies,” laments one strategist, “so they ended up choosing the ones at the top of the pile.” A second factor is the beginning of a shift in studio thinking, a move away from the all-franchise, all-tentpole philosophy that has dominated the majors for much of the 21st century; now most of the majors are leaning into a more varied slate, including non-series titles with somewhat lower budgets and A-list talent. Partly this is a result of necessity and the difficulty in finding strong enough IP
to launch multiple films; partly it’s a question of budget; and partly it’s a strategic decision, offering an alternative to Disney’s multiple brands. Once Upon a Time, Joker and 1917 are cases in point. Each was made for less than $100 million (in Joker’s case, roughly half that) and each was driven by an A-list director (respectively Quentin Tarantino, Todd Phillips and Sam Mendes). The fact that these movies have done so well is likely to encourage greenlight committees to back more of them — meaning, we may see a host of studio entries dominate the Oscars for the next few years. That’s good news for the majors and filmmakers who’d all but given up on their willingness to fund daring features. But it’s vexing for the indie and specialty companies whose economics are driven by awards season. Financier-distributors such as A24, Neon, Searchlight and Focus depend on the massive free publicity they receive between late August and February, starting with three festivals (Venice, Telluride and Toronto) and moving all the way to the Academy Awards. Roundtables, profiles, making-ofs and Q&As generate an enormous amount of attention for low-budget pictures that otherwise might get none at all; and stars (often hired at a fraction of their usual salary) are willing to contribute massively more of their time than they otherwise would in the hope of landing an Oscar. Now few of their efforts will receive the Oscar box office bump they counted on. While Jojo Rabbit (with $44 million so far) and Parasite ($143 million) will likely benefit from the nominations — and Parasite’s unexpected win at the Jan. 19 SAG Awards — a host of other contenders will fail to do so. They include such admirable efforts as Amazon’s Honey Boy, along with A24’s Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse and The Farewell, none of which will get the kind of Oscar bounce that propelled La La Land to a global gross of $446 million. Any sector of the industry can swallow a bad year, but the indies can only hope 2020 is an exception and not the new rule.
From left: The Koreanlanguage film Parasite and Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit each earned six Oscar nominations.
STEPHEN GALLOWAY is executive editor
at The Hollywood Reporter. Illustration by Tim Peacock
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2020
AWARDS SE A SON
FEINBERG FORECAST
Smear Campaigns and Last-Ditch Swings With time ticking down, contenders hosted VIP screenings and Q&As while some guild awards muddied the frontrunner status of several films BY SCOTT FEINBERG
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Quentin Tarantino’s 1960s revisionist Hollywood tale starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt came up short for the main prizes at both the PGA and SAG Awards. It was also the target of a Jan. 13 Daily Beast piece titled “The Big Harvey Weinstein Problem With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
1917 Parasite’s win of the best ensemble SAG Award has some doubting this World War I drama’s frontrunner status (although Sam Mendes’ pic wasn’t nominated), despite its PGA Award victory. A Jan. 20 Variety column, “Why 1917 Is the Last Film That Should Be Winning the Oscar,” hasn’t helped, either.
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
COSTUME DESIGN
The Cave ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, who has reported on Syria, hosted a Jan. 22 screening of Feras Fayyad’s portrait of a female doctor working in the war-torn country. Fayyad, not currently allowed into the U.S. due to visa issues, participated in the New York event via Skype.
The Irishman Sandy Powell, a three-time Oscar winner (for Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator and The Young Victoria), and her co-nominee, Christopher Peterson, were among the recipients of the Santa Barbara Film Fest’s Artisans Award on Jan. 19.
Toy Story 4 On the heels of its shocking loss to Laika’s Missing Link for best animated feature at the Golden Globes, Pixar’s fourth installment of its hallmark film franchise claimed the PGA Awards’ animation prize, beating out not only Missing Link, but also Abominable, Frozen 2 and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.
PRODUCTION DESIGN
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Barbara Ling, who helped re-create 1969 Hollywood for Tarantino’s period piece, was honored at the Santa Barbara Film Fest on Jan. 19 with the Artisans Award, along with several other honorees.
“Stand Up” Harriet Cynthia Erivo, only the third person ever Oscar-nominated for acting and songwriting in one year, was one of the Santa Barbara Film Fest’s Virtuoso Award honorees Jan. 18; her tune also played over a montage of all the honorees at the start of the ceremony.
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ANIMATED SHORT
Hair Love Ex-NFL player Matthew A. Cherry was toasted on Twitter by one of the film’s EPs, Jordan Peele (Cherry works at Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions), and Ava DuVernay, and received the AfricanAmerican Film Critics Association’s breakthrough filmmaker award Jan. 22.
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
“I’m Standing With You” Breakthrough Diane Warren’s tune from a tiny faithbased film got a double boost: It was announced that Chrissy Metz (who stars in the film) will perform it on the Oscars telecast, and she and Warren did a Beverly Hills Q&A on Jan. 25.
I Lost My Body Director Jeremy Clapin, producer Marc Du Pontavice, and their film about a disembodied hand looking for its owner — one of two Netflix Oscar nominees in this category, the other being Klaus — are set for a Jan. 29 American Cinematheque screening and Q&A at the Aero Theatre.
“I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away” Toy Story 4 The good news is that a Randy Newman Toy Story 4 song was nominated for a Grammy. The bad news? It was “The Ballad of the Lonesome Cowboy,” not this Oscar nominee.
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Joker Icelandic composer Hildur Gudnadóttir, the first female ever to receive a solo nomination in this category, was a best score soundtrack for visual media Grammy nominee Jan. 26 for her work on Chernobyl (she previously won an Emmy for her work on the HBO series).
HOLLYWOOD: ANDREW COOPER/SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT (2). TOY: DISNEY/PIXAR (2). BODY, IRISHMAN: COURTESY OF NETFLIX. CAVE: COURTESY OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. HAIR: COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES ANIMATION. BREAKTHROUGH: ALLEN FRASER/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. HARRIET: GLEN WILSON/FOCUS FEATURES. JOKER: NIKO TAVERNISE/WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT.
BEST PICTURE
2020
AWARDS SE A SON
BEHIND THE SCREEN | CAROLY N GIARDINA
Honoring the ‘Richness of Acting’ With Editing Thelma Schoonmaker, who has worked with Martin Scorsese for 50 years, reveals how she cut a scene in The Irishman in which Robert De Niro’s character has a devastating realization
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helma Schoonmaker has been one of Martin Scorsese’s most trusted collaborators for half a century, and with her eighth Academy Award nomination, for Netflix’s The Irishman, she ties a record held by Michael Kahn (1994’s Schindler’s List) as the most nominated editor in Oscar history. She also holds three Oscar statuettes — for 1980’s Raging Bull, 2004’s The Aviator and 2006’s The Departed — a record she shares with Steven Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Kahn, as well as the late Daniel Mandell and Ralph Dawson. She may have all those projects and accolades under her belt, but Schoonmaker, 80, says her latest project with Scorsese, The Irishman, was “as important to me as I think Raging Bull was so many years ago. It’s wonderful that Scorsese is making great movies at his age and my age. I’m so lucky to work for him.” The boxing drama Raging Bull was also the first time that Schoonmaker worked with Robert De Niro (when he was just 35). She says that it was a highlight to
leader Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino. Structurally, the film — which has a three-hour-and30-minute run time — moves between older and younger versions of the characters, “intercut with a long drive to Detroit, which nobody realizes in the beginning is actually a doomed drive,” says Schoonmaker. “The De Niro character doesn’t know [the real purpose of the trip]. He’s just driving to Detroit. Intercutting that, I was worried whether the audience would get lost, but Marty was quite adamant. He said, ‘No, it’ll work.’ ” One of her favorite scenes, setting the stage for the movie’s climax, is what she calls the “salad” scene. “You see Joe Pesci making salad and hinting to De Niro that Jimmy Hoffa is going to be killed, which is absolutely devastating for De Niro because Hoffa is his best friend, along with the Joe Pesci character,” Schoonmaker explains. “It’s very simple, and the language is oblique. They never say, ‘You’re going to kill somebody.’ ” The tension continues to rise in a scene that takes place the
reunite with him for The Irishman and watch him, at the age of 76, play Frank Sheeran, the hitman at the center of Scorsese’s epic. “He was just so in this part,” she says. “Bob’s acting is mysterious and brilliant in a way I’ve never seen before.” Based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, The Irishman follows Sheeran and his entanglements in the matters of crime boss Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, and Teamsters
Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker in 2011.
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following morning — which Schoonmaker calls the “breakfast scene” — in which Sheeran and Bufalino seem to be simply having breakfast together. “It starts out with such a banal line, ‘Cornflakes or Total?’ ” says Schoonmaker. “Then, gradually, De Niro begins to realize from what Joe Pesci, in an oblique way, is telling him, that he’s the person who’s going to have to kill his best friend. … He doesn’t move, but you can feel on his face everything he’s going through. Only at the end of the scene, he sits back and there are tears in his eyes.” Schoonmaker says the powerful scenes were “very simply edited.” When Sheeran later heads to the plane that’s going to fly him to the place where he’ll kill Hoffa, “we held on the shot of him in the plane far longer than we should in the ordinary pacing of a movie, because it was so powerful. We just couldn’t cut it.” Schoonmaker says the edit “came together incredibly quickly. We didn’t have to struggle, rewrite. We did rewrite the voiceover a little, but not a lot.” She says that her focus was on what De Niro, Pesci and Pacino were bringing to the table. “The job really was, aside from the very interesting style that Scorsese conceptually had for this movie, the richness of the acting,” she says. “It was our job to make sure that we honored that and that we got the absolute best out of it.”
PODCAST!
The weekly show Behind the Screen, hosted by tech editor Carolyn Giardina, features conversations with cinematographers, editors, composers and other artists behind the magic of motion pictures. Listen and subscribe at THR.com/podcasts.
SCHOONMAKER: DAVE M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES. PESCI: NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX. PACINO: COURTESY OF NETFLIX.
Left: Martin Scorsese (right) directs Robert De Niro (left) and Joe Pesci in The Irishman. Below: Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino, left) and Frank Sheeran (De Niro) debate Hoffa’s next move.
— AWARDS DAILY
— TORONTO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION
“An Instant
masterpiece
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el. v r a m n o i t o A stop-m one by winning the e d e v e ry s LAIKA surpris the gorgeou r o f r a e y is e th Golden Glob ly deserve in a t r e c y e h and t Missing Link of criminally s r a e y r o f an Oscar due.” rk. It’s over o w d e k o o l r ove -SCREENRANT
Go behind the scenes and explore a special interactive booklet celebrating the world class artists who brought Missing Link to life. insidemissinglink.com For more on this extraordinary film and a schedule of where you can see it go to missinglinkguilds.com.
Also available to stream now on
Style
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Red Carpet
Cynthia Erivo, Out of This World The double Oscar nominee (and Tony winner) teams with stylist Jason Bolden for looks that channel fantasy, strength and romance By Falen Hardge
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The Harriet star’s Golden Globes look, a custom Thom Browne dress, took 800 hours and 11 artisans to make. The designer created custom footwear for her, too — an invisible heel covered in crystals. “It was really beautiful, [with a] tiny, tiny, tiny waist and exaggerated hips,” says Bolden. She also wore (and always wears on every red carpet) a ring that features Harriet Tubman’s face, which Bolden describes as a way of “carrying her with her everywhere she goes.”
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For this cathedral stained-glass motif gown by Fendi at the Jan. 12 Critics’ Choice Awards, Erivo had a “rapid fitting” with Bolden while filming her next project, the limited series Genius: Aretha. They were debating among 12 looks but landed on the Fendi because, as Bolden tells THR, “she likes the idea of the art and drama of it all, but there is something still very chic, sophisticated and easy about it.”
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Bolden says this multicolored feathered gown from Marc Jacobs was “the hardest dress to wear.” Recalls Bolden of the look, which she wore to the Oct. 29 Harriet premiere in L.A.: “I told her, ‘Either it will be the most amazing thing ever or it’s going to be the most horrible thing ever.’ It fit like perfection. Cynthia has that thing where she makes something [that] seems so out of this world [be] so right for the planet.”
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Her custom two-piece Schiaparelli ensemble for the Jan. 19 SAG Awards came about by happenstance after Bolden and the dress’ creative designer, Daniel Roseberry, serendipitously ran into each other at L.A. hotspot Chateau Marmont. The design includes a petticoat-like element to “pay homage to that time period [and] Harriet Tubman as an iconic superhero.”
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Bolden calls Erivo’s Versace dress for the Nov. 3 Hollywood Film Awards the “LPD — the little pink dress.” He adds: “We altered [the] dress to be skintight, but it was quintessential Versace. It was perfect.”
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“We’d been doing so many dresses, let’s switch it up,” says Bolden of his thoughts on this gold look for the Nov. 7 Patron of Artists Awards. He adds that Erivo “is the closest thing to a quintessential black girl who’s not afraid to shave her head — she owns it and she lives in it.”
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Erivo sported this monochromatic green chiffon cape Valentino dress to the Governors Awards in October. Bolden says he’s proud of the fashionable moments Erivo is experiencing in Hollywood but also disappointed because “she is one of the only women of color on these carpets. Everything we do is not for us, it’s for people who haven’t had the opportunity and making sure the door stays wide open. She’s the example of what dreams are made of.”
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GLOBE: GEORGE PIMENTEL/WIREIMAGE. CRITICS, SAG 2019: STEVE GRANITZ/WIREIMAGE. LACMA, HOLLYWOOD: AXELLE/BAUER-GRIFFIN/FILMMAGIC. HARRIET: LEON BENNETT/WIREIMAGE. GOVERNORS: CHRIS DELMAS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES. SAG 2020: DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES.
Erivo brought royal glam to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Gala on Nov. 2 with this Gucci gown. “It was old world glamour, sexy and regal,” says Bolden. To top off the look, she wore a dyed purple haircut by Coree Moreno to match the dress.
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2020
AWARDS SE A SON QUIZ!
How Well Do You Know the Oscar Nominees? By Craigh Barboza
Director Martin Scorsese opens The Irishman with a nearly two-minute tracking shot that floats down the halls of an assisted-living facility, to wheelchair-bound Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro). Which vintage doo-wop hit plays over the scene?
C
D
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2
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months months months
A John Lithgow
C Richard Jewell D The Two Popes
1 The World Will Know His Name and the Truth 2 Inspired by True Events
3 Based on a True Fantasy
4 Based on a Real Scandal
month
(Roger Ailes)
9 B Nicole Kidman (Gretchen Carlson)
C Margot Robbie (Kayla Pospisil)
D Charlize Theron (Megyn Kelly)
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Before filming the show’s opening-night performance, in which she belts out the 1930s standard “By Myself,” what was Judy star Renée Zellweger asked to do to channel the song’s emotional power?
TRUE OR FALSE The imaginary Hitler character in Jojo Rabbit does not appear in the novel Caging Skies, which was the basis for Taika Waititi’s Nazi-age comedy. A True B False
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Which statement about Disney’s remake of The Lion King is not true?
A All 1,600 shots are computer-generated. B Director Jon Favreau used the same software tools as the Fortnite video game developers. C DP Caleb Deschanel shot the movie using VR goggles in a 3D environment. D The movie was developed through Disney’s live-action division.
A Have a few cocktails B Repeat her list of intensity keywords in the mirror C Sing while trying to push a piano around the room D Listen to an audio clip of thunderous applause
Unscramble the name of this acting nominee: YO I CARVE THIN
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GERWIG: ROY ROCHLIN/WIREIMAGE. ONCE: ANDREW COOPER/ SONY PICTURES. BOMBSHELL (4): HILARY B GAYLE/LIONSGATE. JUDY: COURTESY OF ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS. IRISHMAN: NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX. CAGING: COURTESY OF HARRY N. ABRAMS. JOJO: KIMBERLEY FRENCH/ TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. LION: COURTESY OF DISNEY.
B
A Rocketman B Bombshell
1 False. In 2017, producers Jenno Topping (Hidden Figures) and Chris Moore (Manchester by the Sea) vied for best picture. Moonlight won.
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Match each tagline with its nominated film:
2 A. Scorsese said “In the Still of the Night” is the only song he heard in his head when filming the scene.
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With 1917’s one-shot premise, it was essential to block the scenes in detail so filmmakers could determine the precise layout of the World War I sets and map DP Roger Deakins’ intricate camera movements. How long was the rehearsal period for the 65-day shoot?
3 D. Production designer Jess Gonchor wanted the home to be “dark and tarnished on the outside but full of beautiful jewels, color and creativity on the inside.”
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C “Searchin’,” by The Coasters
C A mushroom in the woods D An old jewelry box
4 C. Lancer ran on CBS and NBC for two seasons.
D “Oh, What a Night,” by The Dells
A New England schoolhouse B A brougham, or horsedrawn carriage
B “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers
5 C. Robbie said she wanted to understand her character’s fanaticism.
Who created a secret Twitter account and followed as many young right-wing conservatives as possible as research for their role in Bombshell, the drama about sexual harassment at Fox News?
A “In the Still of the Night,” by The Five Satins
6 C. She sang while trying to push a piano around the room.
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Greta Gerwig shot Little Women in the same New England town in which Louisa May Alcott wrote her beloved novel about the March sisters. What was the full-scale replica of the family’s Orchard House designed to resemble?
7 A. Director Sam Mendes and Deakins created 40 pages of maps (with schematics of actor and camera movements) to accompany the script.
A The cult classic war movie 14 Fists of McCluskey (1966) B The black-and-white TV Western Bounty Law (1958-63) C The family-Western TV drama Lancer (1968-70) D The Euro-spy action comedy Operazione Dy-no-mite! (1970)
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8 A (3), B (4), C (1), D (2)
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Leonardo DiCaprio’s boozing, former Western star Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has a long list of credits. But only one of his titles was an actual production with an IMDb page, not an invention of Quentin Tarantino.
ANSWERS
9 True. Waititi dreamed up the character for the film.
A True B False
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10 A. Favreau snuck in one non-CG shot, which he will not reveal.
TRUE OR FALSE Greta Gerwig (Little Women) and Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) made Oscar history this year by becoming the first romantically linked couple to have movies vying for best picture in the same year.
Bonus Cynthia Erivo
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ORIGINAL SONG
‘I’m Writing My Best Songs Right Now’ E L E V E N -T I M E N O M I N E E D I A N E WA R R E N H A S M A D E H I S T O R Y B Y NOT NABBING EV EN ONE OSCAR — BU T IS GR ATEFU L TO BE IN V ITED: ‘W INNING WOULD BE A MIR ACLE’ By Naveen Kumar
a 14-year-old who falls through thin ice on a Missouri lake, stays under for more than 15 minutes and remains unconscious after his rescue. He stuns doctors by regaining a pulse, and the faith and prayers of town residents are credited for his recovery from a coma. This Is Us star Chrissy Metz, who recently inked a record deal with Universal Nashville, plays his adoptive mother, Joyce, and recorded vocals on “I’m Standing With You” for the film. “The scene that stood out is when the preacher asks everybody to stand who believed, who had faith that [the boy] would get through and supported him,” Warren says of a climactic
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moment toward the end of the film. “To see the community rally around him, that stayed with me.” Warren doesn’t consider herself an expert musician or singer but rather a songwriter who works on instinct. “The next day, I sat at the piano and started singing that chorus,” she says. “The chorus wrote itself. It made me cry. It’s simple, but it resonates.” The song especially resonates at a time when society seems more fractured than ever. “It’s about standing with somebody: Whatever you go through, I’m standing with you,” Warren adds, echoing the song’s lyrics. “That’s a powerful statement. We’re all so connected, but we’re all so
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alone,” she says, referring to the isolation bred by digital culture. “I write something that I want to move me. Hopefully, if it moves me, it’s going to move somebody else.” Warren also considers that the sentiments in “I’m Standing With You” apply in broader terms: “We live in really divided times. It seems like we’re so far apart. So that kind of message, it’s healing.” “I’m Standing With You” follows in a progression of Warren’s recently nominated songs that have been embraced for their heartfelt social messaging. Metz has performed “I’m Standing With You” at events supporting the ACLU and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. “Till
BREAKTHROUGH: ALLEN FRAZER/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. LOPEZ: NOAM GALAI/GETTY IMAGES FOR AMERICAN THEATRE WING. CAMPBELL: DOMINIK BINDL/WIREIMAGE. ERIVO: JEMAL COUNTESS/FILMMAGIC. WARREN: SHERRY RAYN BARNETT/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES. TAUPIN: MICHAEL KOVAC/GETTY IMAGES. NEWMAN: DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES.
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ith her latest best original song nomination for “I’m Standing With You” from the Fox feature Breakthrough, Diane Warren now holds an Oscar record — if not yet an Oscar. Her 11th career mention makes her the most-nominated woman in Oscar history without a single win. Her first nom came back in 1987, for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from the comedy Mannequin. On Feb. 9, she’ll have attended the ceremony as a nominee across five decades. Whether or not the prolific songwriter gets a breakthrough of her own this year, she says the recognition itself is always a thrill. “The novelty has never worn off,” says Warren, 63, who hosted a “sleepless sleepover” with friends to watch the early morning nominees announcement. Though the song had been shortlisted — and she’s been nominated four out of the past five years — she considered herself a long shot. “I’m never not grateful, and I’m never jaded about it,” she says. Warren also doesn’t mind her songs doubling as her passport to Hollywood’s biggest night. “I was not a popular kid. I didn’t really get invited to a lot of parties,” the Van Nuys native says. “So it’s fun for me. I love it.” Tasked with writing an endcredits song for Breakthrough, Warren screened the faith-based drama one day and sat down at her piano the next. Based on a true story, the movie recounts the unlikely survival of John Smith (played by Marcel Ruiz),
Multiple Winners Back in the Race Again A m o n g t h e o r i g i n a l s o n g n o m i n e e s i s a n E G O T, a To ny - w i n n i n g a c t r e s s , a p a i r o f s o n g w r i t i n g i c o n s a nd t wo 2020 double nom i nees B Y K AT I E C A M PION E
Above: Chrissy Metz and Marcel Ruiz star in Breakthrough. Left: Diane Warren performed at a Women Who Score event at Grand Performances in 2016 in Los Angeles.
It Happens to You,” co-written with and performed by Lady Gaga for the 2015 campus sexual assault documentary The Hunting Ground, coincided with the start of the #MeToo movement and was accompanied by a PSA-style video that Warren helped finance. “Stand Up for Something,” from Marshall (2017), has been adopted as a sort of theme song by Stand Up to Cancer. And “I’ll Fight,” from the 2018 documentary RBG and performed by Jennifer Hudson at last year’s Oscars, also has become a clarion call for social justice causes. “I’m always thinking when I write a song for a movie [that it] can live outside of the movie as
KRISTEN ANDERSONLOPEZ AND ROBERT LOPEZ • FROZEN 2
well,” Warren says. “It means a lot because they touch people. Nothing’s more powerful than music because it doesn’t go to your mind. It goes to your heart.” Though she’s also behind some of the late 20th century’s most memorable and personal ballads — including Trisha Yearwood’s “How Do I Live” and Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me,” both of which earned Oscar nominations, too — Warren says it’s the anthems about perseverance and overcoming obstacles that really reflect her personal feelings. “Songs like [‘I’ll Fight’ and ‘I’m Standing With You’], I’m really in there,” she says. “That’s how I live my life. To become successful, even as a songwriter, you just need that determination. That’s really part of my DNA.” That determination has more than paid off. Warren has been the sole owner of her publishing company, Realsongs, since 1986, and her songs have been featured in more than 100 films. She’s written for many of the biggest names in pop, including Beyoncé, Adele and Justin Bieber. And she’s not looking toward retirement any time soon. “I really do think I’m writing my best songs right now,” she says. Her upcoming slate includes songwriting for film, television and the stage in addition to collaborations with recording artists. Her awards mantel already includes a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Grammy and numerous other trophies. “I’m not going to be one of those people who say, ‘Well, I don’t care if I win.’ I’d fucking love to win,” she says. “I think winning the Oscar would be a miracle. But you know what? I believe in them, so you never know.”
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This husband-and-wife songwriting duo has two Oscars under their belt, having won best original song in 2014 for Frozen’s “Let It Go” and in 2017 for Coco’s “Remember Me.” As one of only 15 people who have became an EGOT, Robert Lopez is no awards-circuit stranger, with several accolades for The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q. The couple is back to compete again this year for Queen Elsa’s Frozen 2 anthem, “Into the Unknown.”
JOSHUAH BRI A N CAMPBELL AND CYNTHIA ERIVO HARRIET Campbell graduated from Harvard in 2016 and brings a fresh face to the original song category with his first nomination. He teamed with Erivo to write “Stand Up,” which Erivo performs for the Harriet Tubman biopic; she’ll also be singing the song at the Oscars. Erivo is a double nominee this year and has Tony, Grammy and Daytime Emmy wins for Broadway’s The Color Purple.
ELTON JOH N A N D BER N IE TAU PIN ROCKETMAN With 34 Grammy Award nominations for John’s vast songbook, the duo is competing for best original song with a new tune written for Rocketman, the jukebox musical about John’s life. “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” gives John his fourth Oscar nomination. In 1995, he lost to himself when The Lion King’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” beat both “Hakuna Matata” and “Circle of Life” for the statuette.
R ANDY NEW MAN TOY STORY 4 Nominated for best original song for every Toy Story movie, the composer keeps the streak going this year with his nomination for “I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away” from the fourth installment. Newman also is nominated in the best original score category for Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, giving him 22 noms for his career. The last time he competed in both categories in the same year was 2002, when he was nominated for Monsters, Inc.
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Thomas Newman’s ‘Proud,’ Petrifying Path W I T H 1 917, T H E P R O L I F I C C O M P O S E R H A S E A R N E D H I S 15T H O S C A R NOM I NAT ION. OV ER A N HOU R L ONG CH AT, H E S H A R E D W I T H T H R H I S FAVOR I T E M E M O R I E S O F CR AFTING EACH SCORE, INCLUDING FOUR W ITH SAM MENDES By Tara Bitran
L I T T L E W O M E N (19 9 4)
T H E S H AW S H A N K R E D E M P T I O N (19 9 4)
Little Women was the first time I went to London to record at Abbey Road with the London Symphony Orchestra. It was slightly intimidating, having not spent much time on a podium, period, so getting in front of that group was crazy. I did read Little Women, but decades ago. There is something Christmasy about that movie, with the snow and New England. I don’t think I specifically thought of Christmas — maybe insofar as trumpets and bells and some baroque brass writing, which can put you in a Christmasy place, with the metals and hand bells and song bells. So I take it back. I was thinking a little bit of Christmas because it imbued me with that feeling.
I was double nominated that year with Little Women [directed by Gillian Armstrong]. It was so unexpected. Very dreamy. Shawshank was the first time I worked with [DP] Roger Deakins. It was like, “Wow, this looks great.” There are moments where you just take for granted what’s put in front of you. Shawshank always looked so beautiful. We’ve gotten to know each other better by virtue of proximity with Jarhead, Skyfall, Wall-E [on which Roger Deakins worked as a visual consultant]. [Director] Frank Darabont showed me a three-hour version of Shawshank early on without a stitch of music in it, and it was riveting. The question was: How could I not make this a worse movie, with no less character and personality? We often start that way.
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ORIGINAL SCORE
A M E R I C A N B E A U T Y (19 9 9)
This was Sam Mendes’ first movie. He was eager and such a quick learner, an amazingly quick study. You could see his eyes darting as we would work together; he would see that music was malleable and fluid. It just built from there. He’s just a smart, smart guy. He has been very loyal to many of his collaborators, so you have to love that about him. All the percussion instruments began with a Sam concept. He’d been listening to some of my music, one score was Unstrung Heroes, and he liked how it pulsed. Rhythm in movies gives pace but also neutrality. It’s not necessarily pointing toward feeling, but it’s laying a rhythmic base for how feeling can be interpreted. Sam came in with some very specific ideas.
R OA D T O P E R D I T I O N (20 02)
NEWMAN: JOHN WILSON/UNIVERSAL PICTURES AND DREAMWORKS PICTURES. LITTLE: COLUMBIA PICTURES/PHOTOFEST. AMERICAN, ROAD: DREAMWORKS/PHOTOFEST. NEMO: WALT DISNEY PICTURES/PHOTOFEST. UNFORTUNATE: PARAMOUNT PICTURES/DREAMWORKS/PHOTOFEST.
UNSTRUNG H E R O E S (19 9 5) I just remember meeting with [director] Diane Keaton and thinking what a lovely person she was. I’ve always been such an admirer of her comedy and of her as an actress. The title of it interested me because, “All right, it’s ‘unstrung.’ What kind of whacky thwackys can I put into this that will give character and allow me to explore color and phrase and shape?” In Diane’s case, I shared ideas and got a sense of what she likes and doesn’t like. You try to make sure [you’re] ultimately respectful of the decisions she makes, because it’s her movie. I have to always remember that, that as good an idea as I think I might have, it’s still in service of an idea that I did not create. Therefore, I have to be respectful to the creator even if I’m in disagreement, without being a doormat.
We were in post and 9/11 happened. We had a little more time by accident because of that. I don’t think they wanted to come out with the movie right away because of its subject matter [mob vengeance] and the state of the union. I remember because of the Irish heritage in it, all the way through the making of it and in post, Sam [Mendes] didn’t want the music to reflect anything Irish. I think he thought that might be mundane or prescriptive. And Jill Bilcock, his editor, asked why. He finally loosened up and I was able to use an uilleann [bag]pipe, this beautiful Irish bagpipe, that really unlocked a sense of the vocabulary of that movie. Suddenly penny whistles and things like that weren’t off-limits. It was a huge help.
F I N D I N G N E M O (2 0 03)
At the time, I’d say, “It’s my first and last animated project.” It was so terrifying because it was so new. And when you get through it and you realize you did get through it and that you battled the brute fear of, “I’m going to fail and it’s going to be a very public failure,” and it doesn’t happen, you’re relieved and proud that your muscles were bigger than you’d ever imagined. Doing Finding Nemo was a big moment in my career, in terms of what was I able to do, being able to adapt to projects that weren’t necessarily right down my alley. My cousin Randy [Newman] had scored I think every Pixar movie up to that point and here I was coming in. He told me, “Just look at the next 10 minutes. If you look at the next 50, you’re sunk.” So I got some good advice from my cousin.
LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF U N FORT U NAT E E V E N T S (20 0 4) I’m very proud of that score. They had this end title coming in, but [director] Brad Silberling said they’d probably use something that exists because it was coming in so late. When we saw this gorgeous, animated end title, there was just no way that there was going to be any piece of music that would work effectively under this new image. I had a small germ of an idea that had been sitting there and Brad said it was great. So I very quickly sketched out a shape and we executed it in a single day. More time is not necessarily better time. Sometimes in less time, you really crystallize your sense of who you are, your sense of what something needs, and you go for it.
WA L L -E (2 0 0 8)
I come from a musical family. My father was [nine-time Oscarwinning composer] Alfred Newman. He died when I was quite young. He started in the ’30s, worked all the way to 1969. In a funny way, I never wanted to do movie music the way he’d done it because I could never be that way or that good. But I studied music in school and had the right harmonic vocabulary to handle it, and there it was. [Director] Steven Soderbergh, who is very brave, and this was certainly stylistically very courageous [harking back to that noir genre], had temped it with Max Steiner and music from the era. It needed to feel like it was all done with orchestra, and essentially it was. There may have been a couple of pre-lays I had done, but to that end, it was great to use chromatic harmony and be expressively melodic. In the end? Quite fun. Going through it? Holy crap.
S AV I N G M R . B A N K S ( 2 01 3)
S K Y FA L L ( 2 012) That was real terror. Sam [Mendes] has been so loyal, he really wanted me to do this movie. I never in a million years would’ve imagined myself scoring a Bond movie, because it’s very English and it’s just action. If there are moments of reflection and musical personality, it’s the smaller part of the score. You’d think about, what’s English elegance on the one hand? Martini glass, bow tie, tuxedo. On the other, what’s muscular energy? Skyfall was so demanding that when I got to London, I didn’t see Sam for three weeks. The “Skyfall” song was a fait accompli. It was so strong to begin with, I don’t think they thought there was any need for Adele and I to collaborate. We were going to try, but that never worked out. My orchestrator Jack Redford did orchestrate and arrange the strings.
The Mary Poppins movie has such beautiful songs. They have so much flavor. It’s like being next to a warm fire in terms of sidling up to it. As I remember it, the challenging thing was doing the transitions from past to present and how [Mary Poppins author] P.L. Travers as an adult was remembering what it was to have this relationship with her father. So there was something deeply sentimental and sad about it, because she was such a lonely adult and adored her father. You could tap into those feelings and the idea that there was going to be this magical moment, how the writing of this book was a way for her to have something that she could depend on emotionally. I scored an early Tom Hanks movie that probably he’d want to forget called The Man With One Red Shoe (1985). I’ve ended up scoring a lot of Tom Hanks movies quite by accident.
1 917 ( 2 01 9 ) GERMAN: MELINDA SUE GORDON/WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT. SKYFALL: COURTESY OF COLUMBIA PICTURES. BANKS: FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/WALT DISNEY PICTURES. WALL-E: COURTESY OF WALT DISNEY PICTURES. PASSENGERS: COURTESY OF SONY PICTURES. 1917: FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/UNIVERSAL PICTURES. BRIDGE: JAAP BUITENDIJK/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX.
THE GOOD GERMAN (20 0 6)
There was a moment when [director] Andrew Stanton said, “Would you like to work with Peter Gabriel?” Of course, my jaw dropped. A lot of my interest in high metal rhythm came out of his album So. I wrote him an email saying as much. We flew out to London to meet with him. I knew there was a good chance this wouldn’t happen if we didn’t click. But we emerged with enough of an idea to go forward with what became “Down to Earth.” But Wall-E was tough, just 20 minutes of pretty much no dialogue at the beginning of the movie, the music setting tone and the mood of the character. I love that “First Date” track. Andrew was interested in evoking that ’70s, Brady Bunch vibe.
Sam [Mendes] comes from this amazing theater background. 1917 combines all of his best instincts as a cinematic director and as a stage director. He was in command from the word “go.” The movie wasn’t discovered, it was born. When Schofield [George MacKay] is running on the grass, Sam gave me very specific instructions: He’s going to make it. Sam’s idea was that the music would have an arc. It had to land at the moment that he goes up the trench and decides to run. I first saw the movie at the L.A. premiere. Sam asked, “Have you not seen it yet?” I said no. And he told me, “You’re such a chicken!” It was just so much work and it’s hard to step away. But finally seeing it was great. I really enjoyed it.
ORIGINAL SCORE
B R I D G E O F S P I E S ( 2 01 5 ) This was pretty much a departure for [director] Steven [Spielberg]. And it was really circumstantial because I think John [Williams, Spielberg’s longtime composer] had had some back issues or something and had been away from work and he had other obligations. So there was going to be no way that he could work on it. Steven was a very able collaborator and a very courteous one. When he came over to my studio and he would like something, you could tell he liked it because he was a member of an audience liking the movie that was in front of him. He’s very honest emotionally that way. If something works, he is so delighted that it works, like a kid. And very patient. Yes, there were 45-minute meetings or an hour and 15 even because he was going to be flying to Vancouver or something like that, but I never sensed an impatient person in him. He was a great collaborator.
PA S S E N G E R S ( 2 016)
I’ve done a couple of space films in my career. I think the way you make each one different is you have to take the movie and ask what’s exciting about the movie and then see what that means in terms of the musical language. I love the idea of a spaceship hurtling through space on an endless voyage and this idea of bows and whistles and dreamy bows and whistles, the “being lost at sea” kind of thing. So the existential aspect of that was compelling to me, and I guess I just took it from there. A lot of the time, when you do these things, you’re not thinking. You’re just surviving, and you’re saying, “What makes this scene more interesting?” Then in retrospect, you can look back and say, “Ah, I kind of saw what I was getting at,” but at the time you’re just following with your nose. And I think I enjoy that. I enjoy intuiting more than intellectualizing.
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ANIM ATED FEATURE
Drawing Them ‘Just Right’ A N IM ATED FEAT U R E DIR ECTORS DESCR IBE HOW THEY USED DETA ILS T O C A P T U R E T H E I R PRO TAG ON I ST S — BE T H E Y A DR AG ON, T OY, Y E T I , SANTA OR EV EN A SEV ERED HAND By Carolyn Giardina
her own destiny.” he notes. “Bo embraced the idea of being a lost toy — the very thing that terrified Woody for the previous three films.”
LIGHT FU RY H o w t o T r a i n Yo u r D r a g o n : T h e H i d d e n Wo r l d Toothless’ love interest, the Light Fury, was conceived to be the “engine of change” in the story, explains writer-director Dean DeBlois. “She provides a new life direction for Toothless — a call of the wild — and a potential future that deviates from his loyal bond with his human companion, Hiccup,” he says. “It was important to present her as charming, mature and wild — uncorrupted by contact with humans. We
didn’t want our audience to resent her for disrupting the partnership between Hiccup and Toothless, so the courtship had to be playful and sweet.” Toothless gave the filmmakers a starting point for the look of the female dragon. “She excels at stealth, so we smoothed out her features,” DeBlois says. “We made her skin and scales iridescent, with a mother-ofpearl finish. And we gave her the ability to disappear by flying through her own fire blasts, heating up her skin and scales to become mirrorlike and virtually vanish into her environment. Our animators channeled the movements and mannerisms of large cats, studying snow leopards and lionesses. As such, the Light Fury is the only other
dragon in our universe to exhibit mammalian qualities.” DeBlois adds that she also was given a wide range of movement and expressions to enable nuanced pantomime interactions.
MR. LINK Missing Link The yeti Mr. Link — or Susan, as he prefers to be called — is “in many ways the heart of the movie,” says writer-director Chris Butler. “In a world full of humans, he’s actually the most humane, and he earns the most sympathy from the audience. For that reason, he needed to be lovable. And I don’t mean mawkish. He earns the audience’s support by being a genuinely warm, downto-earth guy.”
DRAGON: COURTESY OF DREAMWORKS ANIMATION. LOST, KLAUS: COURTESY OF NETFLIX. LINK: LAIKA STUDIOS/ANNAPURNA PICTURES. TOY: DINSEY/PIXAR. UNCLE: COURTESY OF FILM/AGENCIA.
BO PEEP Toy Story 4 For director Josh Cooley, Bo was critically important because she is the catalyst for Woody’s change. “Her re-introduction into the Toy Story world had to be just right,” he says. “We wanted to show that even though she is the same Bo Peep from years earlier, she has adapted and is thriving as a lost toy. Her fractured and bandaged porcelain reveals that she has repaired herself, her dress is altered so that it can also become a cape that allows her to move quickly and undetected, and she’s built a remote-control skunk that allows her to go anywhere with complete freedom.” “Clever” and “resourceful” are two of the words that Cooley uses to underscore her design. “She took control of
The filmmakers shied away from a design that was too cute for the 8-foot-tall character, instead leaning toward a “slightly awkward and goofy” look. “There’s a softness to him,” Butler explains. “He spends roughly half of the movie in his naked state, so a big part of his design became about how to realize all that hair and have it move realistically in such a stylized world.” His clothing has bold patterns and textures, but it also was about how the clothes fit. Says Butler, “I think the first brief I gave our costume designer was, ‘He should look like a gorilla squeezed into a threepiece suit.’ ”
THE HAND I Lost My Body How do you create empathy for a severed hand in search of its body? “She discovers the world through the tip of her fingers. When you think of it, from early childhood, it is through the hand and the sense of touch that we experience the world that surrounds us,” relates director and
co-writer Jérémy Clapin of the approach to “Rosalie” (the name the filmmakers gave the hand during production). “I wanted audiences to feel that this hand had had a life,” Clapin says. “Its nails are a little too short, a sign of anxiety from the human it belongs to. She has no eyes, no mouth, so we had to leverage this lack of facial expression to reinforce the sensorial aspect of this central character.” She also received a beauty mark, to “help identify Rosalie when she is connected to [the hand’s owner] Naoufel. Its role is critical to bridge the two parallel stories of the movie.” The hand’s body language also was key to the character, “very primal in crisis moments (for instance, a subway scene with rats) and very delicate in calmer and more emotional scenes (the reunion with Naoufel).”
K L AUS Klaus As a Santa Claus origin story, it’s no surprise that the title character was the trickiest to
design. “We’re talking about one of the most beloved, well-known figures in popular culture, and creating a whole new iteration of Santa was no small task,” says writer-director Sergio Pablos. When audiences first meet Klaus, he’s a reclusive toymaker who lives in a remote northern village. “We knew that Klaus — like every other character in a story about transformation such as this one — had to undergo a lot of changes until he came close to the Santa that people would expect to see on the screen,” Pablos says, adding that the animators started with the opposite of what one might imagine: “A taciturn, axe-wielding, scarylooking lumberjack. … His hair looks wild; he has a tool belt that would be the envy of any slasherfilm villain; he has dark, thick eyebrows framing icy blue eyes; and hooded to boot.” As the story unfolds, the filmmakers gradually softened his look. “His frown would give way to reveal a pair of eyes full of gentleness and sorrow … and eventually, we would re-encounter Santa.”
Annie Awards Winners Revealed O n Ja n . 25, A S I FA-H o l l y w o o d recognized the top fi lms for their c r e a t i v it y a n d memora ble ch a rac t ers
Best Animated Feature
K L AUS Best Animated Feature (Independent)
I LOST MY BODY Best Animated Special Production
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DR AGON: HOMECOMING Best Animated Short Subject
UNCLE THOMAS: ACCOUNTING FOR THE DAYS▲ Animated Effects in an Animated Feature Production
FROZEN 2 Character Animation in an Animated Feature Production
K L AUS Character Animation in a Live-Action Production
AV E N G E R S : ENDGAME Character Design in an Animated Feature Production
K L AUS Directing in an Animated Feature Production
K L AUS Music in an Animated Feature Production
I LOST MY BODY From left: Toy Story 4, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Missing Link, I Lost My Body and Klaus.
Production Design in an Animated Feature Production
K L AUS Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production
FROZEN 2 Writing in an Animated Feature Production
I LOST MY BODY
COSTUME DESIGN
Finding the Perfect Sartorial Spark SEE T H E ECL ECT IC MOOD BOA R DS A N D FA DED FA M I LY PHOTOS, IMPRESSIONIST ART AND MUSCLE CARS TH AT EVOK ED ER AS A N D I NSPI R ED T H IS Y E A R’S OSC A R-NOM I NAT ED COST U M E DESIGN ERS By Scott Huver
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From left: Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) dances to the biggest hits of 1969, as heard on L.A. Top 40 station KHJ; a KHJ playlist from August 1969.
ONCE UPON A TIME I N HOL LY WO OD Reading Quentin Tarantino’s script and love letter to 1969 Los Angeles, Arianne Phillips was captivated by the rich car-radio culture evoked by reference material from local Top 40 station KHJ. “I was lucky enough to find some of the playlists from the specific time that our story takes place,” says Phillips. “I made mix CDs and listened to them constantly when I was prepping, and it really set the tone for me.” The costume pro adds, “Music is such a great way to immerse myself in a time and a place.” She notes that the chart diversity reflected the transitional era. “This is a culture explosion … beautifully reflected in this playlist. It’s a cross section of pop songs at the time, from folk to country to pop to R&B. And that was the essence of what I wanted to express in the costumes.” Whether it’s Sharon Tate’s (Margot Robbie) hip Hollywood scene, the industry establishment at Musso & Frank or the Topanga Canyon hippie crowd, “being able to experience what perhaps any one of our characters in our film would have been listening to really helped guide me on my way,” she says.
JOJO RABBIT Knowing that, as seen through the eyes of Jojo Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), the vision of his chic, sophisticated mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), would be far more vivacious than standard sad, drab, washed-out World War II palettes, Mayes C. Rubeo turned to the avant-garde Parisian textile artist Sonia Delaunay and her bold design work for inspiration. “She was the co-founder of a very important artistic wave,” says Rubeo. “Her work is so abstract in different shapes of geometrics, and it was really ahead of her time — very colorful. I thought, ‘Who
better to represent Jojo’s mother?’ We like to believe that Frau Betzler was a part of a very interesting, eclectic group of artists before the war.” Delaunay’s textile patterns were directly translated into Rosie’s wardrobe. “The geometric forms were applied to her costumes in an artful way,” Rubeo says, via strikingly patterned and vibrantly colored clothing — which were especially ideal for camouflaging Rosie’s hidden anti-Nazi agendas. “Her disguise was not concealing, because concealed was not what she always was: This eclectic, fantastic, intellectual artist [was] happy for life and happy for color.”
Above: Scarlett Johansson and Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit. Left and below: Mayes C. Rubeo’s inspiration boards for Johansson’s character, including designs from Parisian textile artist Sonia Delaunay.
THE IRISHMAN When crafting the look for the aged mob foot soldier Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), Sandy Powell and Christopher Peterson opted for intimate authenticity. “There’s a group of wonderful photos that we received from the Sheeran family that really provided a bit of a Rosetta stone for the direction that we took,” says Peterson. “They were faded photographs, family snapshots [that] showed his vulnerability,” says Powell, who sketched a nursing home style contrary to the sharply dressed, intimidating younger Frank. “They were quite inspiring. It actually felt like this
was the real man.” Stylish, blingy talismans worn by Frank throughout his life contrasted with ugly sneakers and track pants “up to his chest … that came from Goodwill for about 20 cents,” chuckles Powell. “He’s still the best turned out in the nursing home … even though he’s looking particularly pathetic and vulnerable at the same time.” The screen interpretation of Sheeran’s style embodies “what happens at the end of your life when you don’t go down in a spectacular blaze of glory,” says Peterson. “You have to actually live out your days knowing everything that you’ve done.”
Frank Sheeran (far left), the mob hitman played by Robert De Niro (left) in The Irishman. Above: Costume designer Sandy Powell’s sketch of an aging Sheeran, who narrates his life story in the film.
Below: Aristide Maillol’s Woman With a Parasol. Right: Emma Watson (left) as Meg March in Little Women.
LITTLE WOMEN To envision a fresh interpretation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, Jacqueline Durran embraced the gauzily rendered, bright watercolor American impressionism of the late 19th century, embodied by artists like Winslow Homer. “It was the right date and the right geographical place,” says Durran, “and just totally perfect for expressing the idea of young people living in a natural environment away from
the city, having a freedom, a life and a geography that you don’t generally associate with people of that period.” For a particular dress worn by Meg March (Emma Watson), Durran was directly inspired by French artist Aristide Maillol’s
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Woman With a Parasol, created slightly after impressionism’s heyday. “The spirit of it was just so perfect that I just cheated and made Meg’s beach dress,” she says. “With a little bit more of Meg’s styling so that she had the kind of crochet petticoat and
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a few more Meg details — but essentially I wanted to capture the feeling in that painting.” “The very pale pistachio color of her dress is something that is repeated in different ways throughout Meg’s wardrobe again and again,” notes Durran.
COSTUME DESIGN
How to ‘Dirty Down’ 7,000 Extras
PREVIOUS SPREAD: RABBIT: LARRY HORRICKS/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. RABBIT INSPIRATION: COURTESY OF SUBJECT (3). HOLLYWOOD: ANDREW COOPER/SONY. THIS SPREAD: 1917: FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/UNIVERSAL PICTURES AND DREAMWORKS PICTURES. SHEERAN: COURTESY OF NETFLIX. DONNE: DAVID M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES. BOOK: COURTESY OF STEIDL. LITTLE: WILSON WEBB/COLUMBIA PICTURES. CAR: LANGDON CLAY - CARS- NEW YORK CITY, 1974-1976 BY LANGDON CLAY/PUBLISHED BY STEIDL/WWW.STEIDL.DE. PAINTING: ABBUS ACASTRA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO. JOKER: NIKO TAVERNISE/WARNER BROS. SKETCH: COURTESY OF SANDY POWELL. IRISHMAN: NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX.
1917 r e q u i r e d it s h a i r a n d m a k eu p t e a m t o p ay ex t r a at t ent ion t o c ont i nu it y B Y L I N D S AY W E I N B E RG
JOKER Mark Bridges found “the DNA” for Gotham City clothing circa 1981 when production designer Mark Friedberg shared photographer Langdon Clay’s book featuring distinctly hued, shopworn ’70s-era cars set against stark, gritty streets. “As soon as I saw them, I knew what the jumping-off point would be,” says Bridges. “Odd period colors with a layer of soot on it, and everything having seen better days.” Adds Bridges, “The cars are incredibly vibrant in this desolate urban landscape … there’s a lot of color in the vapor lighting, and it feels kind of dirty. It really seemed like I found the key to the secret garden with these images.” The vehicular aesthetic
Naomi Donne on set.
O translated into items like the dingy mustard hoodie, grimy blue-gray trousers and grungy wine-colored vest worn by Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). “We did lots of aging and dying and searching out period colors to create the overall feel of these photographs,” Bridges says. One specially crafted textile was dubbed “Dirty Laundry.” “Arthur would probably just shove all of his laundry — no matter what color it was — and his mom’s together: It becomes a mush.”
Above: An image from photographer Langdon Clay’s book Cars: New York City, 1974–1976. Left: Zazie Beetz and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker.
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scar-nominated hair and makeup designer Naomi Donne had a few tricks up her sleeve when trying to keep bloody wounds, explosive powder and dirt stains looking the same in each take to maintain the continuity of Universal’s 1917. The single-shot style of the war film inspired her and prosthetics designer Tristan Versluis to use an unorthodox remote-controlled blood pump to depict Lance Corporal Blake’s (Dean-Charles Chapman) stab wound in real time. Normally, Donne says, the crew would cut the take “and throw a load of blood on and then carry on.” But since the scene was filmed in one go, she relied on a pump, activated from a distance: “It had to be timed perfectly. It had to have the right amount of blood. You pray that it happens OK, because it’s a huge deal to go again.” The challenge was setting up the remote control at “exactly the right moment, so that the blood would squirt,” which they rehearsed in the makeup room beforehand. “Things like that are very complicated. When you’re doing a lot of takes, you’re not always going to guarantee the same result each take,” Donne says. She employed another makeup trick during the explosion that buries Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay): Donne poured a custom-made, sugar-based powder into his mouth to imitate chalky rubble. She tasked special effects makeup master David Stoneman with making “quite a lot of sacks” of a safe substance that matched the chalk dust used by the visual effects team. “It was seamless,” she says Donne of her first time using the sugar substance. “We could pour it in George’s mouth, and it was actually quite pleasant. It’s sugary and didn’t cause any problems … or affect his lungs.” Thought also went into details as minute as which dirt was used to begrime the soldiers. Stoneman helped color-match samples of the dirt from where the trenches were dug on set and translated the mud’s yellow-orange hues into faux-dirt makeup for actors (which required 17,000 biodegradable towels to clean off). “When you dirty down the extras, when they’re in the trenches and they’re covered in ground and dirt and muck, the dirt matches the landscape,” Donne says. “They look like they’ve been there forever.” All 7,000 background actors had individualized hairstyles, too. Their “really funny haircuts” reflected the reality that soldiers have grown out “long bits on the top,” but since the men weren’t allowed to have hair showing under their helmets, their hair was cut across in front, leading to “strange” choppy bangs. Using no wigs, Donne and her team cut every single person’s hair based on a reference of a specific soldier from World War I. “We had hundreds and hundreds of pictures of real soldiers, and everyone was matched to one, so they maintained their haircut throughout the film,” she says. “It wasn’t just a sea of men. These are real men who all had different lives.”
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PRODUCTION DESIGN
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The Photos That ‘Put Me Into the World’ OSC A R-NOM I NAT ED PRODUCT ION DESIGN ERS SH A R E T H E I NSPI R AT IONS BEH I N D T H EI R F I L MS’ V ISIONS,F ROM PERSONAL FA M I LY R E L I C S T O B AU H AU S F U R N I T U R E B y T y l e r C o a t e s
1 917 When Dennis Gassner received the script for 1917, he was on vacation with his wife in Alaska. “I had gone on this long, long wander to become very primal again,” he says. “In a complicated world, I wanted to find a sense of reality with nature.” One morning, “at the end of the road,” Gassner got a message from Sam Mendes about his ambitious war film — and soon the script. “I read it in an hour and 58 minutes, and I immediately rang Sam back and told him I had to do it.” Waiting for Gassner when he
arrived in London for preproduction was a collection of 50,000 images from World War I. “I immersed myself daily into this horrific thing,” he says. That may have been a very different primal experience than the one he had sought out in Alaska, but the savagery of war and rawness of nature seemed to work together creatively. “One set of rules I set for myself in Alaska was that I had to approach this [film] as [laid out in the book] The Art of War. It’s the methodology of how you approach a project, through refinement of the massive history of conflict.”
Left: The camera captures George MacKay (center) leaping into a trench during 1917’s climactic battle sequence. Above: storyboards for 1917, incorporating production designer Dennis Gassner’s stark vision of the war-torn French countryside as seen in the final film.
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THE IRISHMAN When production designer Bob Shaw received Steven Zaillian’s script for The Irishman, the first act of which is largely set in South Philadelphia in the 1950s, the film “came into focus for me on the first reading,” he says. The Philadelphia native could easily recapture images from his youth as he pictured the film in his mind, and Shaw quickly pulled out his own personal archives. “The first place I turned to for research was the family photo album,” Shaw tells THR. “I found many wonderful details in the picture of my mother in front of the family home on her wedding day. The house number was painted in black and gold on a diagonal, right on the brick, as was the style in South Philly. … As a child I had marveled at the
variety of doors on my grandmother’s block. The striped awnings were looser in structure and hung lower than they would be today.” Although Martin Scorsese’s crime epic spans six decades and scenes also take place in Chicago and Washington, D.C., Shaw’s ’50s-era family photo sparked the setting for Frank Sheeran’s (Robert De Niro) origins as a mob hitman. “Even in black and white, the photo brought back the memory of the color and texture of the bricks,” he says. “All of these things immediately started to put me into the world of The Irishman.”
Above: Bobby Cannavale as Felix “Skinny Razor” Ditullio in The Irishman, standing on his front stoop in South Philadelphia. Left: A photo from Philadelphia native Bob Shaw’s family album, depicting his parents’ wedding day.
PRODUCTION DESIGN
ONC E U P ON A T I M E I N HOL LY WO OD In Quentin Tarantino’s 1969-set film, fading TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) drive down Hollywood Boulevard, with the bustling street serving as a backdrop that represents the city at a moment of cultural change. Production designer Barbara Ling was tasked with evoking its glamour by re-creating the marquees and storefronts that lined the street. “Hollywood Boulevard in the ’60s was a transitional place,” Ling explains. “You’d still go there to see big movie openings at the Egyptian or the Pantages. But you also had the opening of the [adult movie house] Pussycat Theatre, tattoo parlors and lingerie stores — all glamorous in their own way.” But beyond the “fabulous” movie marquees and signage, Ling also captured everyday life in the neighborhood. “There was a TV repair shop right there, and an Orange Julius tucked in between two theaters.” Most vital was retaining the historical context of Hollywood design. “The most important thing to me was the architecture of these buildings from the ’20s and ’30s,” Ling says. “We wanted it to be the history of Hollywood Boulevard, even though it takes place in 1969.”
PREVIOUS SPREAD: 1917: FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/UNIVERSAL PICTURES. STORY BOARDS: C/O UNIVERSAL PICTURES (2). THIS SPREAD: ONCE: SHUTTERSTOCK. HOLLYWOOD: AP PHOTO/GEORGE BRICH. WEDDING: COURTESY OF BOB SHAW. IRISHMAN: NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX. JOJO PRODUCTION: COURTESY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX (2). RABBIT: KIMBERLEY FRENCH/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX.
Left: Storefronts on Hollywood Boulevard, re-created for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Right: Hollywood and Vine, circa 1969.
JOJO RABBIT The home of Rosie Betzler (Scarlett Johansson) provides much of the setting for Jojo Rabbit, as the young Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) and his imaginary friend Adolf Hitler (writer-director Taika Waititi) are caught off guard by the young Jewish girl that Rosie is hiding in her attic. The Betzler home not only serves as a safe haven for Thomasin McKenzie’s Elsa — the interiors are also domestic symbols for Frau Betzler’s own resistance against the Nazi party. “I was initially inspired by a staircase I saw on a location scout in Prague,” production designer Ra Vincent tells THR. “It was an art deco staircase that leant itself to another story: the aesthetic of the film I wanted to explore.” Vincent’s research led him to the
Left: Production designer Ra Vincent’s vision board and sketches for Rosie Betzler’s home. Below: Taika Waititi (right) directs Scarlett Johansson and Roman Griffin Davis in a scene from Jojo Rabbit.
design movement that grew out of the Bauhaus school before it was shut down by the Nazis in the early 1930s. “A lot of the furniture was derivative of the Bauhaus movement,” Vincent says. “There’s a simplicity and elegance, which ties into the Germanic design experience of the time, just before Nazi rule. It explained more about Rosie’s character, in that she is bucking current trends by appreciating the aesthetic.”
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RODRIGO PRIETO The Irishman In Martin Scorsese’s lengthy crime epic with the many technical feats, the director still managed to surprise cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. The challenging scene he didn’t anticipate: a quick shot of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) helping Jimmy Hoffa’s (Al Pacino) Teamsters push some taxis into the Chicago River. Scorsese’s vision for the scene required operating the camera from a crane that could fly over the action. “This was a big challenge, because [after] Prieto take one, now the taxis are in the water,” says Prieto. “What if something went wrong and now you have to do another take?” Turns out, the answer was they’d have to wait three hours while a crane on a barge reset each car before going again. “So really, we had one shot at it,” he says. Which is why, when the first taxi got stuck and barely made it into the water before the camera passed, Prieto kept going. “The camera move ended up being slower than Scorsese expected, but the struggle made it realistic,” he says.
A Perfect Shot, Weather Permitting W I T H E ACH F I L M OF F E R I NG U P I T S OW N PA RT IC U L A R CH A L L E NGE S , FROM HIGH TIDES TO A 73-FOOT TELESCOPIC CR A N E FOR A SINGLE SHO T, T H E F I V E O S C A R-NOM I NAT ED CI N E M AT O GR A PH ER S SH A R E T H EI R MOST DI F F ICU LT MOM EN TS TO C A P T U R E ONSCR EEN By Katie Campione
ROGER DEAKINS 1 917 When shooting a film that’s meant to look like one continuous shot, every scene is equally difficult, says 1917 cinematographer Roger Deakins. From camera movements to lighting to Deakins choreography, each component of the film had to come together seamlessly to create the whole. “I can honestly say, every section was difficult,” Deakins tells THR. Since the film takes place on the battlefield, one of the most important aspects of filming was something that production couldn’t control, no matter how much they wished they could: the weather. “The film was shot in the U.K. after all!” he jokes.
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LIGHTHOUSE: COURTESY OF A24 FILMS. 1917: FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/UNIVERSAL PITCTURES. BLASCHKE: DAN STEINBERG/INVISION FOR A24/AP IMAGES. RICHARDSON: GREGG DEGUIRE/GETTY IMAGES. PRIETO, SHER: JAMIE MCCARTHY/GETTY IMAGES FOR FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER. DEAKINS: DAVE J HOGAN/GETTY IMAGES. HOLLYWOOD: ANDREW COOPER/SONY. JOKER: NIKO TAVERNISE/WARNER BROS. IRISHMAN: NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX.
CINEM ATOGR APH Y
L AW R E N C E S H E R Joker Joker cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s greatest challenge in filming Todd Phillips’ dramatic thriller was chasing magic hour, the window of time with golden light between when the sun has dropped below the horizon and true night. “The juxtaposition of color that happens [at that time of day] is beautiful and ethereal,” says Sher. With such a short amount of time to get the shots accomplished, Scher Sher says rehearsals earlier in the day ran “like a military operation” to make sure everyone had their duties down pat. “Any hiccups or mistakes, and it’s over,” he says. “The time has passed and the door is closed. It’s stressful but thrilling, and when it works, it’s worth it. As they say: No risk, no reward.”
JA RIN BL ASCHK E, The Lighthouse The Lighthouse cinematographer Jarin Blaschke didn’t just face technical challenges with a tricky scene in which a pursued Robert Pattinson launches a boat during a brutal storm. “The scene could only be shot with a particular alignment: high tide for a water source to create crashing waves, dusk for proper exposure ratios and an overcast day,” Blaschke says. But even when the scene’s environmental needs aligned, the equipment just wouldn’t cooperate. High Blaschke artificial winds and a faulty rain deflector made the camera difficult to operate, forcing the crew to retry the scene several times across three different days. Says Blaschke, “We lost our dusk-tideovercast window a few times, and it took ages to accomplish this scene.”
ROBERT RICHARDSON Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to Hollywood is full of thrilling sequences, but none of those are the scenes that kept cinematographer Robert Richardson up at night. Instead, his most challenging scene featured a tricky camera move that started with Rick Dalton in the pool rehearsing his lines and flew back over the house to capture Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate racing off to the Playboy Mansion. “I had nightmares about this shot for weeks, never actually believing we could accomplish it,” says Richardson. This speedy shot is not a handoff to visual effects, but Richardson one single camera move that was accomplished after scouring every option — a 73-foot telescopic crane that could move the camera to every position it needed to be in, from closely settling in on Dalton to whisking over homes. Says Richardson, “I am proud of what we did as a team and believe it adds to the vocabulary of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
SOUND
Bridging the Sounds of Groovy L.A. and Outer Space EARNING R ARE DOUBLE OSCAR NOMINATIONS FOR ONCE U PON A T I M E I N HOL LY WOOD A N D A D AST R A, M ARK U L ANO TALKS THE ART OF RECORDING IN TIGHT SPOTS, F ROM A C A R T O A SPACECR A F T By Caroly n Giardina
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hen this year’s Oscar contenders were announced, Mark Ulano scored a rare double nomination in sound mixing for Fox/Disney’s Ad Astra and Sony’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which also garnered a sound editing nom). “I had no expectation because there are some very good films out there this year,” admits the veteran sound mixer, who won an Oscar for James Cameron’s historical drama Titanic and nabbed an additional nomination for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. He’s also the former president of the Cinema Audio Society, a nonprofit devoted to advancing the sound mixing community. “For this to happen was really amazing,” he says of his two nominations, which, he emphasizes, he shares with his
good point of departure for our relationship, which I would call friendship at this point.” When it came to production sound, the sci-fi drama Ad Astra and 1969-set Once Upon a Time both involved notable logistics even though the stories are vastly different. As a space movie, Ad Astra required its actors to wear spacesuits with helmets equipped with interior fans, accompanied by wire work to simulate zero-gravity environments. “The complexity had to do with, how do you do sound in that environment and keep the sound so organic that the team — including his wife, sound audience never loses connection pro Petrushka Mierzwa. with the characters?” he explains, Ulano has a long history of colUlano noting that the team did plenty of laboration with Tarantino (he has testing for the suits and inside the spacecraft, worked on all the director’s films since 1997’s where “you have the physical, organic aspect Jackie Brown), while Ad Astra was Ulano’s of human beings in artificial environments, first time working with director James Gray. breathing,” as well as outside the spacecraft, “James Gray’s a really brilliant guy and has a to capture the isolation and silence of space. great sense of humor,” Ulano says. “Similar to Quentin, he’s encyclopedic in his knowledge of “We were building multiple microphones into the suit, into the helmet and into the spacefilms. He’s also a mad Beatles fan.” ship, which are very cramped and difficult Ulano says that when he met Gray, what quarters to maneuver for camera, lighting he expected would be an initial 15-minute and sound.” meeting with the director became a two-hour For Once Upon a Time, Ulano says the discussion. “Not so much about the film,” nearly 200 locations and 107 speaking parts he explains. “We started talking about [The offered a wide range of opportunities for Beatles’] Ringo [Starr] as the greatest drumcreative approaches to sound, though “the mer. And I’m a drummer, so it was a really
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ULANO: UNIQUE NICOLE/FILMMAGIC. ONCE: ANDREW COOPER/SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT (2).
Left: Brad Pitt (left) and Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE ®
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Produced By BRADFORD LEWIS p.g.a. | BONNIE ARNOLD p.g.a. Written And Directed By DEAN D E BLOIS
“DEAN DEBLOIS BRINGS HIS WONDROUS DRAGON TRILOGY TO A SPECTACULAR FINISH. THE COURTSHIP BETWEEN TOOTHLESS AND LIGHT FURY IS A THING OF BALLETIC BEAUTY THAT BRINGS OUT THE DAZZLING ARTISTRY OF THE ANIMATION.”
WINNER
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW
universalpicturesawards.com
© 2018 DREAMWORKS ANIMATION LLC.
SOUND
The suit Brad Pitt wears in Ad Astra required multiple microphones as he maneuvered inside a claustrophobic spacecraft.
of recognition of the changes and the transitions. It’s not about microphones and sound levels and technology. Those are hammers and nails. It’s about connection with the character that drives everything.” Of working on the set of a Tarantino movie, Ulano sums up, “If you had to imagine the best circumstances to do the thing you love to do the most, with the people you love doing it the most with — that was what it was like working on this movie.” He notes that
particularly memorable moments during the production included recording the dynamic repartee between Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and young Julia Butters’ Trudi, and with Al Pacino’s Hollywood agent Schwarz. “I got to sit alone with Mr. Pacino, waiting for a setup at one point,” he says. “We have common ground in New York. There was this lovely conversation about [a past] time and place in the journey of New York as a community. I treasure that time.”
Aural Adventures Through Space and Mind T h e s e f i l m s nom i n at e d for s o u n d e d it i n g a n d m i x i n g re q u i r e d aud io ex p er t s t o vent u r e i nt o t h e f a r r e a c h e s o f s p a c e , d e s c e n d i nt o m a d n e s s a n d r e v i s it t h e v io l e nt b at t l e f i e l d s o f Wor l d Wa r I
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“The main aim of this ‘one-shot’ approach was to lock the audience in with what [soldiers] Blake and Schofield are experiencing, so we designed the ambience to slowly unravel in the same way that you would experience it in real life,” says supervising sound editor Oliver Tarney of the World War I drama. “Sometimes the intensity would be building over a 10-minute period; other arcs would play out much more quickly.” Production sound mixer Stuart Wilson adds that keeping the connection to the characters was crucial. “Our two leads were mostly wearing three microphones each, to capture different emphasis of breaths, equipment and footsteps,” he says.
The biggest challenge for the sound team on Fox/Disney’s Ford v Ferrari was finding vintage cars to record authentic sounds. “We had mics on the transmission housing and transaxles that gave us whines and different interior sounds,” sound designer and rerecording mixer David Giammarco says, adding that they recorded additional classic cars “as a base, and we augmented them.” Of the final mix for the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, which is roughly 25 minutes of the movie, rerecording mixer Paul Massey relates, “You couldn’t have them driving with music the whole way, and you couldn’t have driving with just effects the entire way. We had to pick and choose the moments [to give the race] a feeling of emotion.”
To follow the-man-who-wouldbe-Joker’s “descent into madness, everything would start off normal and then our sound effects reacted to what was going on with Arthur [Fleck],” explains supervising sound editor Alan Robert Murray. When Joaquin Phoenix’s character is harassed by, and kills, three Wall Street bankers, the sound grows more sinister as the scene progresses. “It was … starting at a normal atmosphere and then amping it up as the torment increased,” Murray says, adding that this included such sounds as a subway car’s screech: “And the trains going by took on a sinister sound. They were made up of processed jets and roller coasters and anything that was dark and gritty.”
E Nominated for sound editing
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STA R WA R S: T H E R ISE OF SK Y WA L K ER Integrating new sounds into the Star Wars legacy meant looking back at the work of famed sound designer Ben Burtt, who created many of the original film’s iconic sounds. “That’s the trick, if you’re going to make a new TIE fighter sound, is to examine Ben’s recipes for what a TIE fighter sound is and make that the thing, but with your own ingredients,” says supervising sound editor/designer David Acord. Supervising sound editor Matthew Wood adds that because Carrie Fisher died before production, her scenes involved “respectful” use of previously unused footage — both picture and sound. “I think it honored her character and also worked on a technical level.” — C.G.
AD: FRANCOIS DUHAMEL/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. 1917: COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL. FORD: MERRICK MORTON/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. JOKER: NIKO TAVERNISE/WARNER BROS. RISE: COURTESY OF LUCASFILM LTD.
hardest thing was the driving work,” because Tarantino films “in real vehicles, in real time on the road, and throws all kinds of challenges into that situation — open windows, high rates of speed.” Citing the scene in which Margaret Qualley’s Manson follower Pussycat hitches a ride with Brad Pitt’s stuntman Cliff Booth — and moves around inside the vintage Cadillac’s front seat — Ulano says he needed to give the actors freedom to perform, while at the same time using multiple unobtrusive approaches to record sound. “You need to be ready for the unexpected, so I’ll put mics in strategic places within the vehicle based on my interpretation of what I’ve seen so far,” he says. “I try to preemptively make it a free zone for the actors to do what they think they need to do. And if there are interactive components, I let the actors know and we work it out. That’s a collaboration.” Mixing this on-set sound, he adds, is about creating “a unifying factor amongst all of those little pieces that makes it a single piece of cloth, so that when the audience hears that performance, they’re not engaged in any kind
INDIEWIRE
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V ISUAL EFFECTS
The Seamless VFX Stitchery of 1917
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hile Universal’s 1917 may not seem like a visualeffects-heavy movie, director Sam Mendes’ decision to make his World War I epic appear as a single, uninterrupted shot created a considerable challenge for the Oscar-nominated VFX team that had to invisibly stitch together individual takes. What amounts to unseen work was so extensive that visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron estimates that 91 percent of the final film was touched by the effects team. Collaboration was critical and began in preproduction, and execution of filming and postproduction came down to meticulous planning by Mendes, cinematographer Roger Deakins and other members of the filmmaking team. Numerous approaches were applied to connecting takes, including wipes at, for instance, a tree or a building; morphing on
floats down the river, there are close-ups of an actor; replacing additional stitches of individual part of a shot with a computertakes. The full sequence includes generated element; and creating “some of the hardest stitching in fully digital shots to join one take the movie.” with the next. Another tricky sequence For Rocheron, one of the most for the VFX team, working challenging portions of the film out of the Technicolor-owned is a sequence in which Lance Cpl. MPC’s Montreal, London and Schofield (George MacKay), after Bangalore facilities, was when running through a destroyed Schofield and Lance city (a location at Cpl. Blake (DeanShepperton Studios), Charles Chapman) jumps off a bridge cross No Man’s Land, into a river. The leap which was filmed on into the river is fully location in the U.K.’s CG, including a digital Salisbury Plain. “We double of the actor. It replaced and created then picks up with the Rocheron a lot of the environactual MacKay in the ment because there was no way water — filmed in a water park to build a No Man’s Land up to the that also underwent its own techhorizon,” Rocheron explains. “No nical manipulations. “It gave us Man’s Land is a vast area that was a wonderful base to put the actor desolated. There were no trees in the water, but we had to extend left, there was nothing that had the water digitally to make the life that the eye could see.” Fog river wider and then create the and mist were added to enhance whole environment,” Rocheron the ambience. says, adding that as the actor
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“There was a stitch in No Man’s Land that really kept me up at night,” Rocheron admits, citing a moment when Schofield and Blake hide in a sub-trench and then walk out onto the open field. “Inside the trench, Roger [shot] the actors on a Technocrane so that the move would be really smooth. But the terrain had to be shot with the Trinity rig to follow the actors for a long period of time on the open terrain. So we did a transition from one camera rig to the other. This transition was hard because it was really slow and you really have time to see it. We went from a fully digital shot in the middle to make the transition completely seamless. It’s all about the details.” Those details, of course, only work if they go unnoticed. “If anything looks like a transition, you are giving away the magic trick behind the movie,” Rocheron says. “Our job is well done if the viewer never questions it.”
1917: FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/UNIVERSAL PICTURES. ROCHERON: ALLEN BEREZOVSKY/WIREIMAGE.
SA M M EN DES’ WOR L D WA R I F I L M IS EDI T ED TO LOOK L I K E ON E C ON T I N UOUS SHO T. T O PU L L OF F T H I S F E AT, T H E E F F E C T S T E A M H A D TO MAKE ITS WORK AS INVISIBLE AS POSSIBLE By Carolyn Giardina
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HEAR THE STORIES BEHIND AWA R D S E A S O N ’ S L E A D I N G F I L M S .
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Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit)
Anthony McCarten ( The Two Popes)
Kasi Lemmons (Harriet)
Charles Randolph (Bombshell)
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A Tale of Two Sisters
I N T H E L I V E-AC T I O N A N D ANIM ATED SHORTS R ACES, T WO OSCARNOMINATED FILMS EMPH ASIZE THE BONDS OF SISTERHOOD — BY BLOOD AND BY CIRCUMSTANCE By Tara Bitran
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SISTER: COURTESY OF SUNDANCE (2). SOEUR: COURTESY OF THE ANIMATION SHOWCASE. SONG: AMANDA EDWARDS/GETTY IMAGES FOR FILM INDEPENDENT. GIRARD: SYLVAIN LEFEVRE/GETTY IMAGES.
Sister
when they were trying to push me to work harder or study harder,” Song says with a knowing laugh. When the one-child policy was eradicated in What’s it like to grow up with a sibling? That’s an 2015, Song was an animation student at CalArts, experience most Chinese children never knew after having studied fine arts at a Chinese college. while living under China’s one-child policy. But “I thought, ‘This is the end of an era that only director, writer and stop-motion animator Siqi our generation has experienced,’ ” she says. “We Song was one of the rare little sisters who knew are facing a different future now. We’d always the answer when all her friends would ask. thought we could only have one kid, but most of “I always feel lucky, because I was not supmy friends and family are getting married and are posed to exist,” Song says, recounting how she considering having kids. We have more options drew from her own life to craft her animated short now. The world has totally changed.” film Sister, in which an older brother And while she spent time scouring imagines how his life would have been Chinese social media for research and different if he’d in fact had a sister. sought out friends to interview about “I interviewed my brother a lot,” she their own experiences with the onesays. “The story has an annoying little child policy, she was very nervous to sister because I know that’s what my tell her own story in such a personal brother told me he felt about me. Well, way. “But one of my teachers told me, he wouldn’t say it to me, but he would ‘The more fragile you feel when you’re Siqi Song to everybody but me.” making the film, the more sincere the Song notes that most of her Western friends story that comes out from you.’ ” have asked her what it was like growing up in This sensitivity encouraged friends to open up China during that period of history, and she finds the conversation during interviews, including her her friends’ curiosity striking. “They always want CalArts peer Bingyang Liu, who voices the older to know how my parents were able to have me,” brother in the short. Song had never considered she says. using her own brother’s voice because “that For purposes of this interview, Song said she would be a lie. He has a sister.” could provide the answer, but she would be conRather, her schoolmate told her how, when he cerned about her parents. “They still live in China, was 4 years old, he was supposed to have a little and it may cause some trouble. But I’ve known sister. But she was never born. since I was a kid that they sacrificed for me, “The second half of the film was based on his because they tell me a lot. They’d always tell me experience that he told me,” Song says. “I thought at the beginning, ‘Maybe I should hire an actor.’ But I wanted him to narrate the film because that’s part of his story, too. I think the film is more sincere because of it.” Song has shown her family the film and hopes they join her as her dates to the Oscars on Feb. 9, if they are able to make the trip. “I made this film to show gratitude, as a thank-you for having me. I hope they think now that they made a great decision, that I turned out well. And it’ll be Chinese New Year during the Oscars, so it’ll be a double celebration.”
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A Sister
had met when you first see them, and there was a bit more in the script than in the final short. But it was a question between my editor [Damien Keyeux] and me when we were editDelphine Girard didn’t need to blow out her ing, thinking, ‘Maybe it’s more interesting to birthday candles to get her wish this year. let people project their own idea of what this On the eve of her 30th birthday, the writercouple is about.’ ” director of A Sister received the call that her At screenings, audience members would live-action short had been nominated for an go up to Girard, confident that they knew the Oscar. “I had gone to the sea, like, ‘OK, I’m off. couple’s story. “They’d say, ‘Oh yeah, they’re I know the decision is today, but that’s life,’ ” a married couple and that’s about she says of taking a beach vacaviolence in families.’ Some other tion around the nomination’s people would say, ‘Oh, they just announcement. “Then I was eating met.’ I really like that these people some fish when I got the call! I can discuss their own visions of couldn’t ever have wished for someviolence, not only mine.” thing like that.” But one aspect of the film that A Sister (Une Soeur) tells of the Girard was adamant about was that connection between two women — Delphine Girard the two actresses would never meet one an emergency operator and the during filming. “We thought it’d be interestother a woman in dire need of help after an ing for them not to know who the person abusive encounter in a car with a man. Girard would be that they’re talking to. You never was inspired by a recording she stumbled know if it will affect the quality of the film, across of an American emergency phone call but I like to believe it does,” she says. “When in which “a woman in a car pretends to call a they finally met at the end of shooting, it was sister, but actually calls 911.” That relationship between strangers stayed with Girard for months before she put pen to paper. “I knew it was going to be like a thriller, but what really interested me was that idea of empathy and how you can be linked to someone for 15 minutes but with such intensity.” A former actress, Girard found Veerle Baetens, her emergency dispatcher, on a film set. “I was a child coach for the young actor who played her son,” Girard tells THR. In preparation for the film, which shot in Belgium in February 2018, the two visited a real call really moving. They were like, ‘Oh, I didn’t center to gain insight. “They told us the most expect you to be like this,’ and they just fell difficult part of their work was that they never into each other’s arms.” had the end of the story with people,” she A younger sister herself, Girard considers says. “They will have somebody at their worst bonds between women paramount in her own moment asking for help, but after they hang life. “I think women have experienced things, up, they don’t know what happened.” some type of violence, for a long time. And The idea to always shoot behind the couple they’re together in that. I think sometimes in the car was tactful, in order to evoke “the there’s a lack of communication between men cold fear of what it’s like to be in those kinds and women about that.” of situations, to be in the car with her [Alie, In fact, Girard wrote her script just before played by Selma Alaoui]. In a way, it gives the the Harvey Weinstein case broke open, with audience the opportunity to be a bit like the the #MeToo movement informing producoperator, who doesn’t see exactly what is haption and conversations surrounding the film pening. She’s trying to understand, and she since. “There have been men who come up to projects about the matter in me, telling me, ‘I recognize the car.” myself in the male character,’ Girard intentionally left out and that was really weird for the couple’s backstory onscreen me,” she says. “But I don’t so that viewers could form think he realizes at all what he their own opinions, but the is putting her through. I think actors were well-informed of there is a systemic problem the history they were playing. about that. And that’s why we “We knew how often the two need to tell these stories.”
Emergency dispatchers “never have the end of the story.”
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Sam Mendes’ First Screen Effort Won Five Oscars Twenty years ago, Sam Mendes, then 34, had about as good an Oscar night as you can get. On March 26, 2000, his film directing debut, American Beauty, won five awards, including best picture and director. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Mendes as thanking DreamWorks for having “the courage to hire a bloke from the English theater.” Fittingly, he was thanking the DreamWorks co-founder who’d just handed him the directing award: Steven Spielberg, who’d won for directing the previous year with Saving Private Ryan. (Spielberg had also given Mendes what he once said was the best advice a first-time director could receive: “Wear comfortable shoes.”) Mendes
had since 1992 been the artistic director of the 251-seat Donmar Warehouse in London. “Sam had been the hottest theater director in London for many years,” says Beauty producer Dan Jinks. “What caught my eye was his production of Cabaret when it opened on Broadway. It was perfectly done.” While his theater work was almost universally respected, his efforts in film didn’t get off to a good start with THR. “People’s reaction to this crowded agenda will probably be mixed,” read THR’s Beauty review. “When moviemakers like to feel superior to their characters, it usually results in a movie that attracts a cult following rather than large box office.” (The $15 million
production went on to gross $356 million worldwide.) Since Beauty, Mendes has directed a dozen films, including the James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre. (And has been married to Kate Winslet, divorced, and remarried to trumpeter Alison Balsom.) But none of his post-Beauty films received a best picture or director nomination until 2019’s 1917, which brought him noms for best picture, director and original
screenplay. Insiders point to his theatrical background as the secret of his film success. “I’ve never seen a director as skilled at speaking with actors as him,” says Jinks. “He makes them feel so comfortable. On the set, I’d see him tell someone a story that had nothing to do with the scene, but somehow the actor then knew exactly how to play it. This is a guy actors are always going to want to work with.” — BILL HIGGINS
The Hollywood Reporter, Vol. CDXXVI, No. 4B (ISSN 0018-3660; USPS 247-580) is published weekly; 39 issues — two issues in March; three issues in February, April, June, July, August, September, October and December; four issues in May and November; and five issues in January — with 17 special issues: Jan. (7), Feb. (1), May (1),June (4) and Aug. (4) by MRC Media LLC, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., 5th floor, Los Angeles CA 90036. Subscription rates: Weekly print only, $199; weekly print and online, including daily edition PDF only, $249; online only, $199; digital replica of weekly print, $199. Single copies, $7.99. Periodical Postage paid at Los Angeles, CA and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS. Non-Postal and Military Facilities send address changes to The Hollywood Reporter, P.O. Box 125, Congers, NY 10920-0125. Under Canadian Publication Mail Agreement No. 41450540 return undeliverable Canadian addresses to MSI, PO BOX 2600, Mississauga, ON L4T OA8. Direct all other correspondence to The Hollywood Reporter, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., 5th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90036. MRC Media, LLC: Vice President, Human Resources: Alexis Capra. Advertising/Editorial Reprints: Reprints of editorial or ads can be used as effective marketing tools. For details, please contact Wright’s Media: (877) 652-5295 or email mrc@wrightsmedia.com. Permission: Looking for a one-time use of our content, as a full article, excerpt or chart? Please contact Wright’s Media, (877) 652-5295; mrc@wrightsmedia.com. Subscription inquiries: U.S. call toll-free (866) 525-2150. Outside the U.S., call (845) 267-4192, or email subscriptions@hollywoodreporter.com. Copyright ©2019 MRC Media, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the publisher. THR.com PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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DREAMWORKS/PHOTOFEST
Sam Mendes on the set of 1999’s American Beauty, which went on to win five Oscars including best picture and best director. Right: From the front page of THR on March 27, 2000.