Deadline Hollywood - AwardsLine - Oscar Preview/Directors - 01/19/22

VOTE FOR PEDRO: CAN PENÉLOPE CRUZ WIN ANOTHER OSCAR? + JASON ISAACS: ON LIFE, DEATH, AND JEFF GOLDBLUM’S UNDIES

OSCAR PREVIEW

How the makers of Being the Ricardos fell for the TV comedy queen Lucille Ball and her playboy mogul husband

for your consideration in all categories including

BEST PICTURE • BEST DIRECTOR Maggie Gyllenhaal • BEST ACTRESS Olivia Colman

WINNER

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BEST PICTURE BEST SCREENPLAY MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

WINNER

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BEST FIRST FILM

WINNER BEST SCREENPLAY MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

“ENTHRALLING. The way Maggie Gyllenhaal translates feelings into images and words is one of the great rewards of this film. She lets faces tell the tale — particularly the face of her superb star, Olivia Colman. It’s a study of repression expressed with heartbreaking poignancy, a lost mother’s search for herself.”

Joe Morgenstern

SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD NOMINEE ®

SPIRIT AWARD NOMINATIONS

INCLUDING

BEST ACTRESS OLIVIA COLMAN

BEST PICTURE

BEST DIRECTOR MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

CRITICS CHOICE AWARD NOMINEE

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL BEST ACTRESS OLIVIA COLMAN

“THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR.”

A FILM BY

MAGGIE GYLLENHA AL

Explore more in The Lost Daughter - A Visual Companion featuring exclusive images and essays from Clare Thorp, Jessica Kiang, and Rufi Thorpe.

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CALL SHEET

First Take 4 CLOSE-UP: In Parallel Mothers, Penélope Cruz plays out a tale of parenthood packed with the signature twists of longtime collaborator Pedro Almodóvar 10 QUICK SHOTS: The cinematography of Dune; Nightmare Alley’s production designer creates a carnival 12 ON MY SCREEN: Jason Isaacs 16 THE ART OF CRAFT: The VFX of Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings 18 COLUMN: Can Disney be outrun in the animation race?

Cover Story 22 SMOKE AND MIRRORS: Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem and Aaron Sorkin describe their deep dive into an iconic couple, a beloved show, and a political fracas in Being the Ricardos

Dialogue 40 Lin-Manuel Miranda 42 Paolo Sorrentino 46 Maggie Gyllenhaal 50 Kenneth Branagh 54 Sean Baker

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FOR

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IN

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INCLUDING

BE ST

PIC TURE

THE MOST HONORED DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR W I N N E R - B E S T D I R E C T O R J A N E CA M PI O N

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INCLUDING

LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION · NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE NEW YORK FILM CRITICS ONLINE · CHICAGO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE WASHINGTON DC AREA FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR. “

The most flawless amalgam of acting, writing, direction, design and music to hit screens this year.”

PETER TR AVERS, ABC NE WS

“JANE CAMPION’S BEST FILM. She works with a full-scale, at times painterly precision and control.”

VARIET Y

“A dazzling, uncompromising work by

ONE OF THE GREATEST DIRECTORS OF ALL TIME.” AWARDS DAILY

“THE CHALLENGE OF DIRECTING, AND THE FREEDOM, IS TO OPEN UP TO WHATEVER IS IN A PROJECT THAT YOU CAN BRING. ALL YOUR DISCERNMENT, ALL YOUR PSYCHE AND ALL YOUR DREAMS.” JANE C AMPION, WRITER /DIRECTOR

10

CRITICS CHOICE AWARD NOMINATIONS INCLUDING

BEST PICTURE

BEST DIRECTOR JANE CAMPION

A FILM BY ACADEMY AWARD ® WINNER JANE CAMPION

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JASO N ISAACS’ SCREEN MEMORIES

¡Y TU, MAMA! PENÉLOPE CRUZ opens up about reconnecting with Pedro Almodóvar for the most challenging role of her career

By Damon Wise

®

SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARD NOMINEE OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A CAST IN A MOTION PICTURE

“ONE OF THE BEST PICTURES OF THE YEAR.” “IT ROCKETS INTO THE STRATOSPHERE OF HILARIOUSLY DARK SATIRES, ENTERING THE ORBIT OF ‘DR. STRANGELOVE’ AND OTHER AMERICAN CLASSICS.

ILLUMINATED BY A STELLAR CAST.” “FLAT-OUT

BRILLIANT.” MAKE-UP ARTISTS AND HAIR STYLISTS GUILD AWARDS NOMINEE FEATURE-LENGTH MOTION PICTURE

BEST CONTEMPORARY MAKE-UP

®

FROM ACADEMY AWARD WINNER ADAM M C KAY FILM.NETFLIXAWARDS.COM

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Janis, she thinks, is the hardest role she’s ever had to play. “Because she’s suffering so much, but she has to hide it. She has to become an amazing liar with people that she loves, but she does it out of survival. We cannot forget that she’s an orphan and she’s been raised by her grandmother. She’s very grateful for that, but she has grown up feeling, Why don’t I deserve a mother, a father, a family, something a little more normal in my life? Finally, when she gets pregnant, her dream is coming true, and when she’s finally happy with this baby… ” Well, that’s when things get interesting.

Almodóvar has had this story in mind for so long that when he first mentioned it to Cruz, during the press tour for 1999’s All About My Mother, she was young enough to play Ana. Surprisingly, Cruz thought nothing of it at the time. “He just has so many stories cooking in his mind,” she says. “Sometimes he will share a story, then never do it and throw it away. Sometimes we are traveling, promoting a film, and he’s writing three scripts at the same time—and he doesn’t know if he will ever do just one of those scripts or all of them. Nobody knows. So, I try not to ask him too many questions.”

The pair have known each other for nearly 30 years now, and though they are close, they don’t ever let that get in the way of the work.

“That’s why, on the set, we create a little veil of distance,” she says. “We don’t plan it, but we behave differently. Maybe it’s a way to protect the relationship and to protect the work. I asked him for the first time, a few months ago, if he realized that we were doing that—that we change with each other when we are on set. He said, ‘Yeah, it’s true. But it’s working, so let’s keep it like that.’”

If Cruz’s young self could see her now, her mind would surely be blown. As a child, she was on course to be a dancer, having trained in classical ballet, but it was seeing Almodóvar’s early films as a teenager that changed the course of her life. She even tried, for want of a better word, to stalk him. “I was taking a lot of walks in his neighborhood, just in case. I was going to the cinemas that he was going to, the bars that he was going to.

And always, when I told my friends, ‘Today we’re going to see Pedro,’ it happened.”

If not for him, would she have continued dancing?

Or would she have got into acting in a different way?

“I don’t know,” she says, “because he was such a huge influence. Movie after movie [he was] pushing me to try to become an actress, which sounded like science fiction for me and my family. Seeing Women on the Verge and then Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and High Heels was revolutionary for me, and I felt like I had to try. That’s why I looked for an agent, went to a theater school, and started to go to castings. He called me after my first two movies, Jamón Jamón and Belle Epoch, which I was very lucky to have as a calling card.” What was her reaction?

“I thought it was a joke, of course.”

In those early days, Cruz tried to have it all. On top of normal school there was theater school twice a week, and ballet classes four times, plus castings. “Now, I look back and I think, OK, that was risky,” she says. “I wasn’t interested in going out, I was so focused on studying and

Penélope Cruz is running late. It’s lunchtime in Madrid, but she hasn’t had time to eat, so she excuses herself as she nibbles on a slice of jamón.

“I need to eat something or my blood sugar goes down,” she says apologetically. Christmas is days away, but before she can even think about enjoying the break with her husband and two children there’s still a lot of work to do. In a few weeks’ time, her spy romp The 355 will hit screens, but more pressing is the U.S. release of Parallel Mothers, her seventh film with Spanish legend Pedro Almodóvar, and the very real possibility of a fourth Oscar nomination.

Parallel Mothers raised the curtain on awards season when it opened this year’s Venice film festival and, against stiff competition, it has stayed the course. It has also charmed audiences into keeping its secrets. Part love story, part political drama, it also delivers a powerful twist, which Cruz is keen to keep under wraps. In it, she plays Janis, a chic photographer who is fighting to excavate a mass grave in her family’s village where her greatgrandfather may be buried. This leads her to contact a forensic anthropologist, who leaves Janis pregnant and alone. In her maternity ward she meets Ana (Milena Smit), a young woman recovering from a traumatic sexual assault, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship. “Two fishes swimming in opposite directions,” Cruz says.

Penélope Cruz as Janis on the Parallel Mothers set with director Pedro Almodóvar.

AWARDSLINE

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Milena Smit and Cruz as soon-to-be mothers Ana and Janis.

“I was a workaholic from very early age. And then I realized that even through my twenties and my thirties, I was still like that.”

trying to work. I never stopped. I was going six days a week non-stop.

But there was a point where I was a little bit scared because I was not resting enough. I was in those years of hormonal changes and that can also have a big effect on you.

“Thank god I always stayed away from drugs, or drinking,” she says, “because I am not good with drinking. It just doesn’t work for me. It makes me fall asleep, or it makes me feel weird. But I was a workaholic from very early age. And then I realized that even through my 20s and my 30s, I was still like that. I would wake up in the middle of the night and answer emails, and that was not healthy at all. But sometimes you have to learn, I guess, from making those mistakes.” She looks around.

—Penélope Cruz “If my mother could hear me now, she would say nothing has changed.

She would say I’m still a workaholic.”

Cruz, like Almodóvar, comes from a tight-knit family. Her father died in 2015, but she remains close with her sister and brother—and especially her mother, who she cites as the biggest role model in her life. “Maybe most people would say that,” she says, “but I am so grateful to her, for her strength and her inspiration every day. She was working very hard, raising us. She had a beauty salon and she worked six days a week. She worked as hard as my dad, and they passed on very strong values to us. She’s a great feminist by nature, and that’s what I saw at home—they treated me and my sister the same as my brother. And she’s very young. She’s, like, 68, so we are best friends.”

It’s likely that this is where Cruz gets her strong sense of cultural identity.

When she first started getting offers from Hollywood, she always went with a return ticket. “My goal was to be able to combine the work there with the work in Europe,” she says. “In Europe, I was working not only in Spain, but also in Italy and in France. I moved [to the U.S.] for a few years, but I was always coming back here, many times a year to see my family and also to work. I never stopped working in my country or in my language.”

Since her children—Leo, 12, and Luna, 8—were born, Cruz has cut down on all those acting commitments. “Being a good mother is my priority,” she says, “and I don’t want to miss a second of what goes on with them.” Her husband, Javier Bardem, meanwhile, is on a winning streak of his own, after the record-breaking local success of his film The Good Boss, and critical acclaim for his portrayal of Ricky Ricardo in Being the Ricardos. Are they competitive?

“No, I don’t think so, because we never compete for the same roles or the same movies. Sometimes when we are preparing a character we talk about ideas and hear suggestions from the other person. It’s not like we can do that every day, but sometimes it happens and it’s really beautiful to be able to share that.”

AWARDSLINE

She definitely has plans to return, however, possibly even behind the camera. “That’s been my dream since I was 16 or 17,” she says. “One of my first conversations with Pedro was about that, and he said, ‘Why don’t you do it now? It doesn’t matter that you’re young.’ So, I directed some ads and a documentary about children with leukemia. Someday I would love to direct a feature film, too, but my kids are too young for that. I’m directing a documentary. I’d love to tell you what it’s about, but I can’t. It’s going to take me about two years, and it’s a real passion for me. It moves a lot of things in me.”

There is, of course, also the possibility of another reunion with Almodóvar. What is it about him that keeps her coming back? “I think he understands women,” she says. “He respects us and kind of worships us because of the relationship he had with his mom. I understood everything when I met his mother—his mother was really special, really funny, a really original character. And that’s how he grew up, always observing women, spying on their secret conversations and being fascinated by all the things that they were not saying. I know a lot about his childhood and he was always interested in that. He finds female characters fascinating, and he writes some of the greatest characters in cinema. I’m very lucky that I’m able to play so many of them.”

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION IN ALL CATEGORIES INCLUDING

BEST PICTURE BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY Screenplay by William Monahan

Based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer

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AFFLECK HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER” Based on the best-selling memoir

Directed by George Clooney Screenplay by William Monahan

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Charted Territory

How Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser combined digital and analog footage to create something unique

At press time, here is how Gold Derby’s experts ranked the Oscar chances in the Director and Animated Feature races. Get up-to-date rankings and make your own predictions at GoldDerby.com

Director 1 Jane Campion The Power of the Dog ODDS ................................

2 Denis Villeneuve Dune ODDS ...................................

3

Grieg Fraser

Steven Spielberg West Side Story

digital,” Fraser says. “I think this process gives back to the digital a little bit of grain, and you get a little bit of weave.”

While he has been working on this method for a few years, Dune this technique was right for. “It niques that we used to use, but in an environment that’s controlled. to a print and then scan the print. push the neg, and you can do it after the visual effects go in. So, you’ve got the best of the analog, but you’ve also got the best of the digital. It’s the best of both worlds really.” —Ryan Fleming

AWARDSLINE

ODDS .................................

4

Staging A Sideshow Nightmare Alley production designer Tamara Deverell on building a Depression era carnival As a major element of Nightmare Alley, the carnival setting was essential for production designer Tamara Deverell. While most of the carnival is based in reality, Deverell says, “There were a few things that Guillermo [del Toro] had in his head that I helped extract, like the idea of the funhouse. I don’t think they really had anything like that in the ’30s. The funhouse was particularly challenging, with all the moving parts. Everything was hand-sculpted, and then it had to be on moving rigs.”

To replicate the color palette of the era, Deverell looked at paintings done by the artists of that time. “We looked at a lot of Edward Hopper paintings of the period, which gives a good sense of the color,” she says.

“We drew a lot from artists of that period, as well as all the banners that existed. We actually bought a couple of period banners so we could have them in the art department to get the style right.”

Color was important, but Deverell felt they really needed to take it a step further to make it feel absolutely real. “We did a huge amount of aging,” she says, “so everything had kind of a tobacco-stained quality, so it could feel like we were in the Midwest and that the winds and the dust had blown and collected.” —Ryan Fleming Tamara Deverell

Kenneth Branagh Belfast ODDS ...................................

5 Paul Thomas Anderson Licorice Pizza ODDS ...................................

Animated Feature 1 Luca ODDS ..............................

2 Encanto ODDS ...................................

3 The Mitchells vs. the Machines ODDS ...................................

4 Flee ODDS ..................................

5 Raya and the Last Dragon ODDS .................................

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For Dune, leneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser tried to shoot both digitally and with film, but neither delivered the desired result.

“The film was too rough, the digital was too clean,” Fraser says.

Luckily, Fraser had been working on a technique that could combine the clean look of digital with the allure of analog by, he says, “Taking a digital medium, spitting it out to film, and then scanning it back in.

“I’ve heard very few people who are able to articulate clearly what

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exactly what he said, and he was a very damaged, very damaging person who’d done terrible things and had terrible things done to him. It wasn’t so much that the acting was tough—though there were 10, 12, 15 pages of monologue a day. It was more living with only that in my head for weeks at a time, thinking that the world was full of people like this and that my children might one day encounter that kind of danger and ugliness in the world. It scared me. It kept me awake at night.

Mass

JASON ISAACS The star of Mass and TV favorites

By Joe Utichi

Mass might be Jason Isaacs’ most powerful role to date, as he expertly authors a father’s grief alongside Ann Dowd, Martha Plimpton and Reed Birney. But Fran Krantz’s film is just the latest in perhaps one of the world’s most varied acting careers, that has covered the gamut of human—and otherworldly—experience.

As he’ll explain, everyone has their own favorite Jason Isaacs movie…

My First Film Lesson

that he wasn’t in because it was my close-up. So,

was on Dangerous Love, and— no, I can’t tell you that. It’s too rude. My second was on The Tall Guy, with Jeff Goldblum. He wasn’t in the shot—wasn’t even in the frame—and yet he stood in a pair of undies on a chair and recited love poetry to try to get himself into the mood for the shot

learned was to

.

The Best Advice I Ever Received Oh, don’t get into the Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning psycholo-

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gist, says that happiness is everything we know it is: it’s not extra money beyond subsistence, it’s a sense of community and of purpose in your work, but also of setting goals in life that are achieveable. If you want to work with animals when you’re 14, and you’re working with animals when you’re 40, that will make you happy whether you’re wealthy or not. But he says there’s one goal that, whether achieved or not, consistently makes people unhappy, and that’s a career in the performing arts.

One director, who I won’t credit because he unpleasant man, told me there were no bits of the script that are “your” bit.

Every bit of the script is you trying to change the other people. ever lost in a scene, bring

he wants to tell them. None of it works because he doesn’t know himself, and he doesn’t know the things that he’s been sitting on. And that’s where the drama comes.

The Part I Always Wanted There never is one. There are parts I turned down that went on to be played people. But I never for a second think I would have done it as well as them, so I don’t worry about those things. It’s hard enough to in my life, which is the daily struggle, without adding into it the giant cauldron of bitterness about the things I’m not doing. I just want the next part I’m doing to do well enough to be able to do the one after that.

My Toughest Role In Mass, everything that Jay wants in that room is achieveable if only everybody else follows his plan. Jay thinks all of the solutions to his problems are outside of himself, and so that’s the energy he has in the room: what he wants these people to feel, what

Scars once, which was verbatim testimony from a man who spent his life steeped in violence, and it was based on many hours of interviews with him that we just brought to life. We couldn’t shape or sculpt the dialogue because it was

The Most Fun I’ve Had on Set

Weirdly on Mass, despite being one of the most serious things I’ve ever done, we laughed like drains. I think there’s a misconception from people when they visit sets and they see actors behaving like twats that they aren’t taking it seriously, or they remain permanently childish. But we’re not childish, we’re childlike. We were crying all day and often on Mass.

So, we were also laughing, because laughter and tears are incredibly close together. These elevated emotions course through us day and night.

I always play stupid music and dance and sing and make ridiculous jokes.

For anyone that comes to visit and thinks that a man should know better at this age, this is actually the best I know. You behave, but you have to keep yourself completely loose and such an empty conduit that anything might appear in the scene. This isn’t really a job for grownups, and I never forget how lucky I am to get to do it. Actors are often given license to behave appallingly. They’ll complain that they were called for 9 a.m. but weren’t used

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“Nicolas Cage is magnificent.

Some of the finest work of his considerable career.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

WINNER - BEST ACTOR S T. L O U I S F I L M C R I T I C S A S S O C I AT I O N NORT H T E X A S FIL M CR I T IC S A SSO CI AT ION U TA H F I L M C R I T IC S A S S O C I AT ION SA N DI E G O F I L M C R I T IC S S O CI E T Y AUSTIN FIL M CR ITICS A SSO CI ATION

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until 11 a.m. I always want to go, “You do realize that everyone else was here at 6 a.m., and they get paid a hundredth of what you’re earning to pick up

tion. Oh well, I’ll give it to you next time.”

I was offered a musical once. They offered me Guys and Dolls in the West End. I said, “Absolutely not, unless you’re trying to lose money. And can I suggest you do some research on actors before you offer

you just shut up and sit in your trailer on the internet and drink the tea that they

The Role I’ll Be Remembered For The thing that will be in the headline of obituaries about me when my plane one is Harry Potter, but actually a guy just wandered up to me today and said, “You were in Brotherhood always recognize me from Black Hawk Down. Women of a certain age watched Peter Pan when they were teenagers. Obviously, the Trekkies love my turn in Star Trek: Discovery.

Millennials love The OA. There is no one part I’m recognized for because I’m so fucking old that each new generation has seen me cavorting around doing something or other. If I died tomorrow, Harry Potter might be the shorthand for this generation of journalists. But when they’re all replaced by the next generation, it might be all devotees of The OA. I have no idea, but I won’t give a monkeys anyway, because I’ll be fucking dead.

The Character That’s Most Like Me It’s a hard question to answer because I’m not sure even I am like me. One of the reasons that I manage to make a professional asset out of my weakness of character is that I’ve always I’m talking to. Not consciously, though I am more conscious of it since I’ve

Black Hawk Down

had kids to bear witness.

I do that appalling thing of code-switching, and changing my accent all the time, whether it’s degrees of poshness in England, or literally regional accents.

I’m shooting an American show at the moment, so I’m American all day, every day for weeks at a time.

The only person I know I am for sure is Emma’s husband, and Lily and Ruby’s father. Apart from that, I can’t tell you who I am, so I don’t know who not one of the tougher characters I play, that’s for sure. I’m much more of a coward when faced with the prospect of any kind of physical danger. I’ve played a lot of soldiers, and they run directly at it. I don’t even run away; I just melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West, into a puddle of my own terror. If there’s a writer out there who wants to create the exact opposite of the traditional hero, I’m here for you.

didn’t quite process that I was an actor. And then Mr. Holland’s Opus came on and I cried for about four to pretend I had a cold, but eventually I couldn’t hide it anymore. He was so disgusted he moved seats.

see the show, and they thought I was still entertaining the notion—which I wasn’t, I just wanted free house seats—so they sent me the CD. I kept it in the car and sang it for weeks on end. My wife asked if I was seriously considering the part. I told her no, and she said, “Then stop singing those fucking songs;

the other part is lying on its back like a puppy getting its tummy tickled, and it works on me.

Who’d Play Me In My Biopic

thing. I wouldn’t mind the kid from Belfast playing the young me, he was pretty charming. And then Ian McKellen could play me in the third age. Often people online say I look like certain actors. I’m always aware of how insulted these younger and better-looking actors must be by the comparison. I’d take any of those in a heartbeat. I won’t tell you who they are or I’d

My Guilty Pleasures

say, “They were separated

Fuck. I mean, I could empty a room in a heartbeat. One of the great tragedies of my life is how much I love singing. In fact, I love musicals. I have a very musical ear… enough to know that I can’t sing for shit. Tragically, I can literally hear when I miss a note, which is often.

I’m a tennis addict, so I watch it all day, every day. But I also watch all of the singing shows. I love the hard-luck stories on Britain’s Got Talent. I feel utterly manipulated in the most boldfaced way, and I know that they cast these people for the tragic backstories and that 99% of them will never have a hope of the career they

the case I must have been dropped on the head as a baby. I love the myopia of fans sometimes. They post pictures of me 20 years ago and think that’s what I look like still. The nice thing about working nonstop is there’s no gap after which you come back and they go, “Fuck, what happened

actually, “Oh, it looks like they don’t have my selec-

while some part of my brain is behaving logically,

My Karaoke Playlist

myself on screen, the incremental deterioration won’t be too noticeable to anybody. That’s my plan.

The Films That Make Me Cry Everything. I’m such an easy litmus test for whethemotionally manipulative.

I remember sitting next to a soldier once on a plane who had recognized me for one of those roles. He

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Harry Potter

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“The most challenging part with these insane, massive, mystical and mythical creatures, is that the human mind knows that these things can’t possibly live. They can’t possibly be real, so everything that we do has to make it feel like you can touch them.” —Sean Walker 1

THE ART OF CRAFT Weta Visual Effects Supervisor Sean Walker on how they bring dragons to life in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings 2

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“ILLUMINATION HITS ALL THE RIGHT NOTES WITH ‘SING 2.’”

A N I M AT I O N M A G A Z I N E

“TOP-NOTCH ANIMATION.” FORBES

“’YOUR SONG SAVED MY LIFE’ REALLY SOARS.” DEADLINE

A N N I E AWA R D NOMINEE

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BEST ANIMATED FEATURE Produced d Byy

Chriss Meledandrii p.g.a.. Janett Healyy p.g.a.

Garth h Jennings

Written n And d Directed d Byy

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“ Yourr Song g Saved d Myy Life” Musicc Byy U2 2 Lyricss Byy Bono univ un ive errsa salp lpicctu ture esa sawa ard rds. s.co om

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Raya and the Last Dragon

Encanto

A ROUGH SKETCH In a category dominated by Disney, can a newcomer

By Ryan Fleming

Every year the same question is asked about the Best Animated Feature category: can anyone beat Disney? Walt Disney Studios, along with subsidiary Pixar, has won 14 Oscars in the Best Animated Feature category since the category began two decades ago, followed in a distant second by DreamWorks Animation’s two wins. 26 animated features are eligible to be nominated this year, and with only five slots, who will make the final cut?

Walt Disney Studios is coming on strong again with their competitors this year, including Pixar’s Luca. Enrico Casarosa makes his feature-length directorial debut with this coming-of-age story inspired by his childhood in Genoa, Italy. Although the theatrical release of the film was canned due to the ongoing pandemic, that didn’t hinder the film’s popularity. It tells the story of Luca Paguro ( Jacob Tremblay), a young sea monster boy who has been living a sheltered life under the water while dreaming of seeing the human world. Upon meeting another young sea monster named Alberto ( Jack Dylan Grazer), Luca discovers his ability to take human form while outside the water. The boys become fast friends and venture into the human town of Portorosso. While concealing their identities, they meet a young girl named Giulia (Emma Berman) and the three of them team up to enter a children’s triathlon to best the local bully and win enough money for the boys to buy a Vespa and travel the world. Having come from a seaside town himself, Casarosa employs the sea monster folklore of his upbringing in this story of friendship and belonging.

Another big contender for Walt Disney Studios is Encanto, which released at the end of last year. Directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard, who previously won in 2016 for Zootopia, are joined by co-director and writer Charise Castro Smith for this musical fantasy set in Colombia.

Encanto takes place in a magical town sheltered by mountains. As she is fleeing from her home, Alma Madrigal (María Cecilia Botero) loses her husband and prays for a miracle to save her three children. The candle she was holding becomes magical and builds an “encanto” around the refugees, blasts away the invaders, and builds a sentient house for her family to live in. The candle gave magical gifts to Alma’s family for 50 years, until her granddaughter Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz) mysteriously receives no gift. Mirabel starts to notice cracks forming in the house and goes on a quest to fix the magic of the candle, without the aid of any special gifts herself. Although the theatrical run was shortened due to the Covid pandemic, Encanto was still the highest-grossing animated film of 2021.

Raya and the Last Dragon brought Disney’s first Southeast Asian princess, who is also voiced by a Southeast Asian lead. Directors Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada, along with writers Qui Nguyen and Adele Lim, brought an amalgamation of Southeast Asian culture to create the mythical world of Kumandra. The story takes place in Kumandra, a once prosperous land ravaged by evil spirits called the Druun, which turn people and dragons into stone. The last dragon, Sisu (Awkwafina), gives up her physical form to create a gem that dispels the Druun and brings all of the humans back to life. A betrayal 500 years later leads to the destruction of the gem and allows the Druun to return. Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) goes on a quest to find Sisu, who she believes still exists, and save the world.

Locksmith Animation’s first feature-length film, Ron’s Gone Wrong, rounds out the contenders under the Walt Disney Studios umbrella. Writer-director Sarah Smith, along with director Jean-Philippe Vine and writer Peter Baynham, crafts a satirical look at the evolution of technology and how it affects children.

The film follows Barney Pudowski ( Jack Dylan Grazer again), a lonely middle-schooler who has trouble connecting with his classmates who all have B*Bots, a

N E T FL IX

The Mitchells vs. the Machines

“SER OUSLY HEARTWARM NG. A distinct message of love and what it means to be a family — no matter what else is going on in your life.”

KAPLAN VS KAPLAN

BEST AN MATED FEATURE F LM Produced By JEFF HERMANN p.g.a.

Directed By TOM McGRATH

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robot companion that claims to be “your best friend out of the box”. After a disappointing birthday, his father surprises him with a B*Bot named Ron (Zach Galifianakis). It soon becomes clear that Ron is defective, which leads Barney to want to return him. However, when Ron saves Barney from a bully in a way that normal B*Bots couldn’t do, the two quickly connect as Barney tries to teach Ron everything there is to know about how to be a friend. As his popularity increases among Barney’s schoolmates, Ron’s defective nature draws the eye of Bubble, the tech-giant that created B*Bots, which leads Barney on a journey to save his new friend from being erased.

While not originally a Disney film, it was co-produced and distributed by 20th Century Studios, which was acquired by Disney while the film was in production. The film has gone largely unnoticed in the Oscar race this year, despite receiving praise from both critics and viewers.

Netflix’s frontrunner The Mitchells vs. the Machines has a similar theme of the dangers of technology becoming too advanced. The sci-fi family comedy, written and directed by Mike Rianda, follows the Mitchell family, based on Rianda’s own family. Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) is an aspiring filmmaker with a dream to go to film school far away from her family. Her father Rick (Danny McBride) is an outdoorsman who doesn’t understand technology and is dismissive of her interests. After a fight leads to Rick accidentally breaking Katie’s laptop after she gets into film school, he decides to make a last-ditch effort to save his relationship with his daughter by cancelling her flight to college and taking the entire family on a cross-country road trip there instead.

They are accompanied by his wife Linda (Maya Rudolph), a mother with a fear that her family isn’t as perfect as their neighbors, his son Aaron (Rianda), a dinosaur-obsessed boy who is afraid of his sister leaving, and their dog Monchi.

While on the trip, a technology entrepreneur’s flippant choice to declare his AI, PAL (Olivia Colman), obsolete results in the AI ordering robots to capture all of humanity. As they managed to avoid capture, it falls on the dysfunctional Mitchell family to save the world as the last remaining free humans.

While Netflix has a few contenders in the race this year, none of them have been as big as Mitchells. In just the first 28 days, the film was streamed by 53 million member households, making it Netflix’s biggest original animated feature to date.

Neon’s Flee is a triple threat this year, as an international animated documentary. The film has made the shortlists for both Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature as the Danish entry for the Oscars, with critical praise for the animation as well. Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen co-wrote the script with “Amin”, the anonymous subject of the film.

Flee takes place as Amin is about to marry his husband Kasper. Amin decides to share a traumatic story about his hidden past, which he has never told anyone before. Recreated in animation, Amin tells the story of his perilous escape from his home country of Afghanistan as a refugee. The film is animated around personal one-on-one interviews between Rasmussen and Amin, where Amin tells the stories of his escape, coming out to his family,

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Belle

and living a lie in the fear that he would be deported if the truth ever came out. Flee has already won awards across the world, including the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary section at Sundance and Best Feature Film at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. With such praise on all fronts, Flee is sure to be nominated in at least one of the categories it is eligible for, if not all three.

GKIDS has another foreign language film up for consideration with Belle. Director Mamoru Hosoda, previously nominated in this category in 2019 for Mirai, tells this story inspired by the French fairy tale Beauty and the Beast set in modern-day Japan. In Belle, Suzu (Kaho Nakamura), a shy high school student, loses her ability to sing in public after her mother passes away. Her depression has led to her alienating herself from most of her classmates. When her friend Hiro (Lilas Ikuta) suggests she tries out a virtual reality program called “U”, she finds her ability to sing once again hidden behind an avatar and she becomes a global superstar. During one of her shows, a mysterious beast disrupts the event as he tries to escape from a group of vigilantes, leading Suzu to go on a journey to discover his identity and save him.

The virtual reality world of “U” was created by British architect Eric Wong, who designed the 3D virtual world as an industrial city with an ever-present twilight sky. Hosoda wanted the virtual world to be expansive and ever-growing, with a tessellating metropolis of skyscrapers to contrast the magical surrealism of the avatars. Belle was the third highest-grossing domestic film in Japan of the last year and was met with a 14-minute-long standing ovation at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

With four animated features up for contention, Walt Disney Studios will prove difficult to beat this year.

GKIDS, however, has been getting consistent nods in the category with 12 nominations since the company was founded in 2008, and a 13th nomination for Belle could prove to be the upset needed. Netflix has been nominated twice over the past two years, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines has been more successful than either of their previous nominees. Along with Neon’s Flee, Disney’s ongoing monopoly on the Best Animated Feature category will be threatened even if they do ultimately secure most of the nominations.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM Produced By KAREN FOSTER p.g.a. • Directed By ELAINE BOGAN

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In 1952, the second season of the CBS sitcom I Love Lucy set viewing records that, 70 years later, have yet to be beaten. The star was L U C I L L E B A L L , a lovable klutz from New York, and her husband Ricky was played by her real-life spouse—Cuban refugee D E S I A R N AZ . Together they founded Desilu Productions, soon to be the No. 1 independent TV company in America. In 1957, however, a scandal surfaced that threatened to tear it all down: Lucy was a registered Communist. Or was she? That fraught time is brought to life by A A RO N S O R K I N in his Amazon Studios release Being the Ricardos, starring N I C O L E K I D M A N as Lucy and J AV I E R B A R D E M as Desi. Damon Wise sits down with all three to discuss the forgotten legacy of a most unlikely power couple.

PHOTOGRAPHED BY MICHAEL BUCKNER EXCLUSIVELY FOR DEADLINE

CALLING THE SHOTS: AARON SOR IN

Being the Ricardos is Aaron Sorkin’s 10th credited feature script and his third film as director. In that 30-year period— beginning with 1992’s A Few Good Men, which he penned for Rob Reiner—a lot has changed, and a lot has stayed the same. On a surface level, his work couldn’t be more diverse, covering American baseball (Moneyball), high-stakes poker (Molly’s Game), the battle for Afghanistan (Charlie Wilson’s War), and the ethics of Facebook (The Social Network). But, over time, recurrent themes began to occur: the business of politics, the politics of entertainment, and, perhaps best shown in 2020’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, the importance of justice in a democratic society.

At the same time, Sorkin established himself as a powerhouse of American television, redefining the role of showrunner with his hit NBC White House drama The West Wing. Given all those credits, it initially seems strange to see Sorkin’s name attached to Being the Ricardos, which tells of a week in the life of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz ( Javier Bardem) at the height of their sitcom fame in 1952. Their show, I Love Lucy, is the most popular in America, but Ball’s reign as a TV queen is threatened when a news headline surfaces—in lurid red print—accusing her of joining the Communist party in her teens. But soon you can see the appeal of the story, a confluence of many of Sorkin’s interests: TV, politics, entertainment, and power. “Yes, that’s fair,” he concedes, “but it’s really the backdrop against which a story about a famous marriage is told.”

That said, Sorkin was not an easy catch. The film’s producer, Todd Black, started the courtship process in 2015, when he asked Sorkin if he was interested in writing a movie about the pair. “I was, but I didn’t know it yet,” Sorkin recalls dryly. “It would take me 18 months to get to yes. I wasn’t saying no, but I wasn’t saying yes either. He and I would meet once a month, or once every two months, and he’d kind of pepper me with more stuff. But what got me from the first meeting to the second meeting was when he said, ‘Did you know that Lucille Ball was accused of being a Communist?’ And I didn’t. The first thing I did was ask around, because I thought maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t know that she was accused of being a Communist, and I wasn’t.

Nobody knew that.”

Looking back, Sorkin still has no idea why Black, during that period of about 18 months, didn’t go to whoever was next on his list. “Maybe I was last on his list,” he says.

—LUCIE ARNAZ, LUCY AND DESI’S DAUGHTER “Maybe there was no one else to go to.” But something that happened toward the end of that year and a half sealed the deal. “I had lunch with a few people, one of whom was Lucie Arnaz, Lucy and Desi’s daughter. It was my first time meeting her. She was giving her blessing to this whole thing, and she leaned over to me and very quietly said, ‘My mother was not an easy woman. Take the gloves off.’ I thought, Great! Because the whole time I had been considering it, I was also considering the fact that the movie I want to write, her kids might not like. It turns out that’s the movie they wanted.”

Sorkin quickly decided on a structure, taking three important events from their lives, which actually happened over the course of about three years.

“There was the accusation of being a Communist, which meant that I Love Lucy was almost canceled—that Lucille Ball herself was almost canceled; there was Lucy being pregnant, which the network didn’t like at all; and there was Desi showing up on the cover of a gossip tabloid with another woman, with the headline ‘Desi’s Wild Night Out’.

I thought, If I make those things happen in the same production week of I Love Lucy, there would be an interesting structure that would suit my style.”

By using the filming of I Love Lucy—which Sorkin depicts as a series of power struggles on every conceivable level—he adds an extra, post-modern flourish. “People, or at least people in the U.S., have a very intense relationship with Lucille and Desi—or, really, with Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.

When people picture Lucille Ball, they’re picturing Lucy Ricardo, just the way when people picture Charlie Chaplin, they’re really picturing the Little Tramp, and Charlie Chaplin isn’t anything like that. So, I thought it was interesting to contrast the real people and their lives with the comfort food of the Ricardos.”

To add another meta level, the film contains vox pops with I Love Lucy’s lead writers—but the parts are played by

Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as Lucy and Ricky.

‘MY MOTHE WAS NOT AN EASY WOMAN. T A K E T H E G L O V E S O F .’

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actors. “It turned out that there’s simply no one alive anymore from whom I could get firsthand research,” Sorkin says. “But those are all real anecdotes. What I did in those moments, seeing the older versions of the writers, was to make sure that there was nothing in the shot that could tell you what year it was when those ‘interviews’ were taking place. Because, in reality, if they were taking place today, those characters would be about 120 years old. But every story they tell is true. Everything that happens in the film happened, it just didn’t all happen in one week.”

Those oral histories were valuable, he says, “Because then you go to the dozen or so books that have been written about the two of them, and you find out that most of them aren’t very good because they were written for fans of I Love Lucy—there’s just not going to be any bad news in there.” There was, however, one, which is Desi’s own autobiography. “It’s called, simply, A Book by Desi Arnaz. He’s a fantastic storyteller. You’re reading it, and you can see the

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stiff drink that’s next to the typewriter while he’s writing. He has no problem taking you into darker places.”

It was in Arnaz’s book that Sorkin found what he was looking for: “A hairline fracture that would doom this marriage of two people in love with each other until the day they died, but who simply couldn’t make it work.” He cites the trauma of Arnaz’s teenage years in Cuba during the revolution of 1933, seeing his father go to prison, his family’s house burned down, and having to run away to a new country. “He came from a culture that has a very narrow definition of manhood, a culture in which manhood is incredibly important. So, as much as he admired, respected, protected, and promoted Lucy—because talent recognized talent—it was difficult for him to be second banana to a woman. To be second banana to his wife, well, it just wasn’t done.”

Desi, Sorkin says, “was as charming and charismatic as they come,” which is why he wanted Javier Bardem for the role. Surprisingly, the pair had only met once, for a brief moment, when Bardem handed him the Oscar for Best Screenplay for 2011’s The Social Network. “We made the movie, obviously, during Covid, so we Zoomed,” he says, “and right away, in the first minute, I knew he was right. He just is impossible not to love. He’s just so friendly, and gregarious, and funny. On top of that, obviously, he’s a world-class actor. I knew that those qualities that you can’t really fake, I knew those qualities were going to be so important for Desi in this film, because he was going to break our hearts at the end. We couldn’t be mad at him, we had to be sad for them.”

For Lucille, Sorkin wanted more than a straight impression. “We had to remember that we weren’t casting Lucy Ricardo, we were casting Lucille Ball, and that’s different” he says. “Yes, there were going to be these quick shards of I Love Lucy in there, and she was going to have to have those skills, which Nicole does have. But more importantly, what we needed was a world-class dramatic actress with a dry sense of humor. A dry sense of humor and a good handle on language, who just owns the piece of ground she’s standing on. That was Nicole.

So, when Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem raise their hands and say they want to do your movie, your casting search is pretty much over.”

Like many of his generation, Sorkin, 60, first encountered I Love Lucy when he was a child, home sick from school. “They’d have four episodes on in a row in the morning,” he remembers. “It was fun to go back and revisit those. But what was more important than watching

AWARDSLINE

Aaron Sorkin on set with Nicole Kidman, above, and with Kidman and Tony Hale, who played I Love Lucy director Jess Oppenheimer.

I Love Lucy, in terms of writing my script, was reading those scripts.

Because I had to pick the episode that they would be doing this particular week. I chose ‘Fred and Ethel Fight’ because it presented, I thought, the best opportunities for Lucy to pound on the script. I needed to show the audience that she’s a comedic genius, that she’s the funniest person in the room, that she’s a comedy chessmaster who, whether it’s at the table read in rehearsal or being pitched in the writers’ room, she can, in her head, see what this is going to look like on Friday in front of a live audience. That, to me, was the reason to do the movie—because the real Lucille Ball is nothing like Lucy Ricardo.

She doesn’t even sound like Lucy Ricardo, her voice is an octave below Lucy Ricardo’s. She’s a big smoker.”

Sorkin obviously knows a thing or two about the writers’ room, which is where we see Ball at her most cutting. “I invented those scenes, but it’s how it was,” he says. “I don’t think that there are a whole lot of people who could get away with that today, even the biggest stars. She or Desi ruled everything. And while Desi was a pat on the back—you got an amigo—guy, Lucy was withering. She could insult you and bleed you out quickly. You see it in the movie when she comes in to the table read, the way she starts treating the director. She winds up this whole thing by saying, ‘I’m hazing you. It’s just my way of saying I have no confidence in you at all.’ That’s chilling. She would jump up and down on the writers, even though they were all close friends. On the crew, everybody.”

On the other hand, Being the Ricardos shows where that motivation came from. “She was paid a fortune to do exactly what she loved doing,” Sorkin says. “As she says in the movie, ‘All I have to do to keep this life is kill every week, for 36 weeks in a row, and then do it again next year.’ So, we see why she’s like that. What she doesn’t say in that

W R I T T E N F O R T H E S C R E E N A N D D I R E C T E D BY

SIÂN HEDER

STRONG SEXUAL CONTENT AND LANGUAGE, AND DRUG USE.

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speech, but what we see in other instances, is that the only reason she did this show in the first place was so that she could be with Desi, and that little postage stamp-sized living room set of the Ricardos was going to be their home, the place where they’re happy. If that goes away, either because she’s a Communist or because people stop loving Lucy, she loses her whole life. She loses everything.”

Sorkin doesn’t see much difference between TV then and now; the technology has improved but the mechanics are the same. “What’s changed the most is how television is consumed,” he says.

“It’s pointed out, right at the beginning, that a big hit show today is 10 million viewers. I Love Lucy got 60 million viewers—at a time, by the way, when not everyone owned a television. And there would certainly not be more than one television in a house, so television shows were things that families watched together.”

To illustrate this, he tells the story of a woman who confronted I Love Lucy star William Frawley in an Los Angeles bar. “The woman said, ‘What are you doing here?’ Frawley didn’t know what she was talking about. She was confused, because she had just seen him last night in New York, where the Mertzes live, and here he was the next morning in California. He tried to explain to her, ‘No, we shoot the show here in LA,’ and the woman just couldn’t compute what ‘shoot the show’ even meant. She thought that for a half-hour a week, cameras were allowed into the home of the Ricardos and the Mertzes. Remember that in the early 1950s, television had only been around for a couple of years. It was consumed as an event thing, and many, many more millions of people watched it because there’s so many more choices now.”

One major change is that sponsors don’t have quite the same clout these days. Sorkin doesn’t labor the parallels with today’s cancel culture (“I thought the similarities were obvious, so I shouldn’t point to them,” he says), but they are clearly there. “The sponsors certainly could have shut down I Love Lucy, just for showing Lucy Ricardo being pregnant on TV. On any other show, the sponsors could have gotten their way.

But not that one, because of the power of Desi, the power of Lucy, and the power of ratings. In the case of I Love Lucy, the sponsors were Phillip Morris, who paid for the whole show; 60 million people a week. That’s a lot of eyeballs looking at your cigarettes. And, by the way, the characters back then smoked on television. Lucy Ricardo smoked and drank through her entire pregnancy. She smoked in every episode. I don’t think we knew back then that pregnant women shouldn’t smoke.”

Another way in which TV has evolved? “It was definitely the ugly stepchild of movies back then,” he says. “Which is something that only relatively recently has changed.”

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THE KING OF CONGA: JAVIER BA DEM

It’s hard to imagine an actor more rewarded or respected than Javier Bardem. At 52, his cabinet boasts an Oscar, a Bafta, an Indie Spirit, six Goyas, a SAG award, a Golden Globe and trophies from the Cannes and Venice film festivals. He’s worked right across the spectrum, making arthouse films with the likes of the Coen brothers, Terrence Malick and Darren Aronofsky, then pivoted to blockbusters such as the Bond movie Skyfall and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales with no apparent dent to his credibility.

It’s also hard to imagine an actor more humble. Though his casting in the role of Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos seems perfectly logical (to those with no objections to a Spaniard playing a Cuban), Bardem never took it for granted.

“I was always asking my agent, ‘How’s that project going?’” he says. “And then I found out that Aaron Sorkin had started to write the script, which was even more exciting. I always knew that they were going to have other options for actors, and in the meantime, I was getting on with my life. I was working on other things, but I always had my eye on that project—like, how great would it be to play that role? Because I loved him as a character, as a person, for what he represented, for what he was and for what he became.”

Bardem’s own brush with TV stardom does not quite compare with Arnaz’s, as evidenced by a ropey Superman sketch that Jay Leno excavated in 2010. “When I was 19, I did a daily TV program called The Day Ahead, very early in the morning, for a year. It was a kind of variety program with news, interviews, comedy, everything. And around 8:30 in the morning I would do a sitcom—a six- or seven-minute sitcom about a family. A father, mother, grandmother and son. It was different from I Love Lucy because there was no rehearsal. We would do an episode per day, so we would have the lines the night before.

Or even that same morning. On I Love Lucy, you had a whole week to rehearse.”

By contrast, nothing in Arnaz’s early life suggested that he was destined to become one of America’s most beloved television celebrities. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the revolution in Cuba he might have stayed there, living a very comfortable upper middle-class existence. Instead, he started his new life in America behind the counter at a branch of Woolworths in Miami, and by the 1950s, he had hit the big time: an actor, a bandleader, a producer with his own studio (Desilu), and married to the most famous woman on television, Lucille Ball. Others have made that journey from rags to riches, but few have done it so effortlessly, and this voracious drive is what intrigued Bardem.

“It’s all about energy,” he says. “It’s all Bardem as Ricky Ricardo. about the vital energy that we all carry with us. Because, that defines us, in a way. If we’re in a room and somebody comes in, we feel their energy without even thinking about it.

Is it a good vibe? A bad vibe? Are they boring? Are they fun? It’s more than an attitude, because attitudes can change all through the day. He was relentless. He was always working, and if he wasn’t working, he was having fun. He was a very impressive person, who makes you wonder: how the hell does he do it? And that comes through the movie, I think. The energy, is what attracted me the most, because it’s an energy that I haven’t played that much, or that often.”

It’s also only Bardem’s second film with a strong musical theme: he was doing The Little Mermaid with Rob Marshall when the

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MAHERSHALA ALI BEST ACTOR

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offer finally came. “Rob was the first person to trust me on that—ever—to sing, which is a brand-new thing for me, OK? And so, when the movie came along, I felt a little more confident, because I had done a lot of work for The Little Mermaid, and I knew, more or less, I could do it. That being said, the songs in the movie were not really my style. So, I was nervous. Insecure and very nervous.”

Bardem put in the hours with a singing coach, because the musical numbers had to be recorded first. Then came the musical instruments—the guitar and the congas. “That’s something that I had to learn. I mean, the congas I could more or less do in sync with the drums, because I can play drums. The guitar, I didn’t have any idea, and so I would have lessons—like everything else [during the pandemic]—by Zoom. Which is not the perfect way to learn anything, I think. Especially a musical instrument.”

Bardem’s love of music is well documented, and he’s amused by the story that he learned to speak English by listening to AC/DC. That said, he isn’t about to take his new skills to a karaoke night. “No, no, no,” he protests. “I’m actually very shy about that. I don’t know why, but I felt very exposed. It’s very intimidating to sing out loud in front of anyone. I don’t think I could do karaoke. I mean, I can have fun with that, but I’m not a guy who likes to sing.

When I’m on my own, I might take a leap of faith and start singing some of the songs I like the most, by the hard rock groups I like.”

There was also a lot of work to do on Desi’s speaking voice. “I was trying to achieve a little bit of the high pitch that he had. I would say I was more obsessed with that than with the singing. Because the singing is very technical.

When you’re singing, you have to be able to perform, and then you can go to different places, and react in different ways. But Desi’s speaking voice was a little bit higher than mine, and I was always trying to match that, knowing that I would never get there because we are so different.”

By the time shooting started, it had been nearly 20 years since Bardem had last seen Nicole Kidman, when she hosted a Hollywood screening of Alejandro Amenábar’s 2005

’IM ACTUAL Y VERY SHY ABOUT THAT. I DON’T KNOW WHY, B UT I F E LT V E RY EXPOSED. IT’S VERY INTIMIDATING TO SING—OUT LOUD— IN FRONT OF ANYONE.” —JAVIER BARDEM

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The leader of the band: Bardem stretched his musical chops for the role.

movie The Sea Inside, having starred in the director’s 2001 film The Others. “She was very nice and very helpful, and we ended up with the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture,” he says. “But that was it. And then we met for the shoot 16 years later.”

There was no time for rehearsal, just one preparatory Zoom call with Sorkin where they shared their fears and insecurities. “Because the movie really was put together very, very fast,” Bardem says. “Kudos to the production team, because it was in the middle of one of the peaks of the pandemic and everybody thought, ‘Wow, this is going to be so slow.’ But no, it was very quickly put together, and all of a sudden, we found ourselves creating these iconic characters with not so much time. Aaron was like, ‘OK. Don’t worry. I got your back.’ But the most important thing that he said to us was, ‘I don’t need an impersonation of anyone. That’s not what I’m looking for. We’re not doing I Love Lucy, we’re doing Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.’ That was a great relief, because otherwise, I know, that both of us, we were very obsessed with getting the external appearance right. I mean, it’s important but it’s not what matters.”

Bardem quickly settled into a groove with his acting partner. “She takes it seriously,” he says. “She works hard. She’s not lazy—she prepares herself very thoroughly. When you are working with her, she’s a great player. You throw the ball and she throws it back at you, and always with a sense of truth and depth.

She doesn’t get stuck. She wants ideas. And that’s very important—especially on a project like this, where we barely had time to meet, let alone rehearse. We really learned about each other through the work. We met each other through Lucy and Desi. There was not much of Nicole and Javier there, in the sense that we didn’t have the time to sit down for three days and talk. We had a lot of lines to study, so there was not much time to do anything else other than work.

“She’s a great colleague,” he says. “I always felt supported by her and absolutely—what’s the word?—completed by her performance. Half of my Desi is her Lucy. And vice versa. That was something I felt in the first scene, and I guess she felt it as well.”

It’s a testament to Sorkin’s writing that Being the Ricardos gets to the essence of the Lucy-Desi love story through the inevitability of their breakup, which gives the film its sucker punch ending. “That was a tough scene to do,” Bardem says. “I mean, we did that scene on the third day of shooting. But we jumped into it, and it worked. The relationship doesn’t end there. It will continue, just as the show continues. But there is something broken, and I guess they love each other until the end of their days. And that had to be present. That had to be there. It had to be there in every scene. It’s not a relationship that you can just move on from. It was a relationship that will stay for the rest of your life. And that had to be implied in every scene, one way or the other, in every detail. In little details of how they approach each other, how they treat each other, how they relate to each other. So, it actually was very helpful to shoot that ending.”

An interesting facet of Desi Arnaz’s life is that he was a lifelong Republican

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“THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR. A pure dose of cinematic endorphin. LICORICE PIZZA is a joy.”

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(although Sorkin is quick to note that “he wouldn’t be today”). Given Bardem’s support for left-leaning causes in his homeland, it seems likely that this is a subject he would differ on. “I wouldn’t share [his politics],” he says, “but, for sure, I get it, given where he was coming from. His family had a long history of business ownership [in Cuba], his grandfather was the founder of the rum company Bacardi. So, they had lots of wealth, and then the revolution came, and he went to America. As the script says, he was more American than any other American. He loved America so much that he would do whatever it takes to be more American than anybody else. In that era, he was a big supporter of Nixon. It’s something I didn’t share with him, but it told me something about his way of thinking—his way of navigating through the politics of the time—and his

An intimate moment: Ricky and Lucy on the I Love Lucy set.

own situation as an immigrant, dealing with American executives and bosses.”

Arnaz’s commitment to American values is reflected in the film, in his mortification when he learns of his wife’s fleeting involvement with Communism—and realizes that she might well be too stubborn to apologize. Though we know Lucy survived it, the looming threat of public opprobrium has new resonance today.

“The canceling thing has been around for a little while under different names, Bardem says. “The witch hunt, you might call it. Also, in the Franco regime in Spain, there was a Communist hunt. And it’s scary, because it’s about pointing fingers, and accusing people, and punishing them—and the law hasn’t had any say in it or taken any action about it. That’s scary because it’s a mob thing. It’s a mob movement that can create lots of pain and suffering. What is needed is real justice—not just to have an opinion about somebody’s guilt or innocence.”

Interestingly, he doesn’t quite see Lucy’s vindication—from J. Edgar Hoover, of all people—as a happy ending. “It’s sinister,” he says, “because the film is not about being Communist or not, it’s about being saved by the bell. It’s about nearly being destroyed by the machinery of lies and false accusations. When I read the script, I never felt like, ‘Oh, being Communist is a bad thing.’ Or, ‘Good Lord, she was a Communist.’ No, it’s about how Desi saves her neck from this battering. This battering built on lies and manipulations, bringing back stories from 30 years before. That’s what the movie is about, and that’s exactly what is going on today. The bottom line is: you’ve been accused—you’re done, unless you prove your innocence. And that’s a dangerous thing.”

This isn’t exactly new in Bardem’s world, and it predates his acting career— before he was even born, in fact. In the ’50s, his filmmaker uncle Juan Antonio sat in a Spanish prison cell for mocking dictator General Franco’s government while his 1955 film Death of a Cyclist picked up the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes. Has he developed a thick skin?

“Well, I’m nearly 53 years old. My skin is thicker in some places, in some ways it’s way more thinner than it was when I was 20.” He laughs. “In terms of

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being outspoken, I share my views when I’m asked or when I think it’s proper to share them. Publicly or privately, that hasn’t changed. And of course, it brings consequences— especially if it’s a political opinion. In Spain, it’s been like that for a while, but it’s all around now.”

In that way, he feels he knows a little of what Desi and Lucy went through. “Not as hard as Desi and Lucy experienced it. Not as extreme of an experience. But my family has been always very [upfront], in terms of, for example, positioning ourselves against the extreme right wing in Spain. What I’m saying is, you learn that once you have an opinion, you’re going to meet somebody that is opposed to that opinion. But does that mean that you have to cease to have any opinion about anything? You can keep it to yourself, but that’s saying you want to be liked by everyone, and that’s kind of utopian.”

Despite the pandemic, Bardem had a pretty busy 2021; aside from Being the Ricardos, he wrapped on The Little Mermaid and a lower-budget musical comedy for kids called Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. Theoretically, there will be a Dune: Part Two, but apart from that, his slate is clear, although he’s still buoyed by the success of his recent Spanish film The Good Boss, a dark workplace satire about a ruthless manager. The film recently received 20 Goya nominations—a record number—and is still in cinemas even though it premiered back in September at the San Sebastian film festival.

“It was amazing to see the reactions and see how people react to the movie so unanimously,” he says. “They laughed and they get a punch in the stomach when it comes to understanding what they were laughing about. Because the social commentary is very deep, going parallel with the dark comedy. The reactions here in the States and in London has been very in tune with how the audiences in Spain had reacted, so, the movie translates very well. Because we all know about that kind of abuse of power. We know that kind of person. We’ve heard of him, we know of him, we’ve seen him, and sometimes we even have suffered him.”

Is it important for him to carry on making films in Spain as well as the U.S.? “Yeah. Of course. It’s my country, it’s my language, my place, but I never thought of making a plan about it. We’ll see what comes in, and if it’s good I will go there.

Wherever it is, regardless of where the movie is being shot or where it’s being located. I don’t speak many languages unfortunately. So far, I can do it in Spanish and English.”

With no plans to direct (“Maybe later, man. I don’t know, but that’s a lot of work”), and nothing really on the bucket list, Bardem is happy to freewheel into the future, just as he did into the present. “Yes, there are roles that you might want to play here or there,” he says, “but, really, I take it as it comes, and that has been always the case. I wasn’t expecting to do the roles that I did, so, why would I change that, no?”

There are some exceptions, though, and he’s drawn to larger-than life historical figures, like the 16th-century Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and Colombian cocaine baron Pablo Escobar. “I tried,” he shrugs. “I played Pablo Escobar [in 2017’s Loving Pablo], and I was about to do Cortés, but unfortunately that was canceled due to Covid, although it’s going to come back. So, yeah, there are some roles you might want to do, maybe because there’s something there that you are linked to, in some funny or interesting way. But mostly I’m just open to seeing what comes next.”

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PLAYING BALL: NICOLE

IDMAN

Nicole Kidman goes way back with Aaron Sorkin, to 1992 and his big breakthrough with the script for the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men, which starred her thenhusband Tom Cruise. Their paths crossed again very soon after, on the 1993 medical thriller Malice, and after that, she mostly saw him on the awards circuit. “The Social Network, Steve Jobs, Molly’s Game…” She breathlessly reels off a list of his credits. “I’d just see his face, and I’d walk over and have a little chat to him. And that was that. I always wanted to come back into his life. I just didn’t know if it would ever happen.”

Some 30 years after that initial meeting, Kidman got her wish when Sorkin’s script for Being the Ricardos landed in her inbox. “I couldn’t put it down,” she recalls. “I just kept reading, page by page, because I was completely absorbed in the story, which was unbeknownst to me—pretty much everything in regards to her life. I knew the I Love Lucy show and Here’s Lucy, the follow-up, but that was sort of it. So, it was all an eye-opener for me, and I couldn’t put it down. I then Zoomed with Aaron, and we talked about the story and the magnitude of the role. He was like, ‘You can do it, Nicole—and I want you to do it.’ I was thrilled!”

She laughs. “And then subsequently terrified.”

The legend of Lucille Ball is huge in America but doesn’t loom so large in Sydney, Australia, where Kidman grew up in the ’70s. Like Sorkin, she dipped into reruns on daytime TV while she was off sick from school. “I’d seen snippets, but I hadn’t absorbed the show,” she says. “I mean, I knew it, but I wasn’t obsessed with it, so going back to it was a huge discovery for me. She’s a miracle. When you go back and look at every single show, you see how good each show was.

Kidman as Lucille Ball performing for CBS Radio early in her career.

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The woman was pure genius. She really was. And that’s not a word I just bandy around.”

To prepare, Kidman mostly watched the show for fun, but the really iconic sequences she watched over and over again, learning to mimic Lucy’s exquisite physical comedy. “I really became obsessed with her hands,” she says, “because her hands are very much a part of her. She had beautiful hands, beautiful nails, and she used them always to express herself and make points. I found incredible footage of her directing, where she’s on the set of the show, but she’s actually calling the shots saying, ‘Put the camera over here and do this and this.’” There was a lot to look at, “But because of the pandemic, I did have that wonderful thing: time.”

Still, as the start of production loomed, Kidman began to worry that she was running out of it. There was so much to look at, so many people to speak to. “And then, at one point, Aaron was like, ‘I want you to just leave the ghost of that and inhabit Lucy now from the position of who you are. Because a lot of these things you know. You intrinsically know many of the things that Lucy had to deal with. You know how to do this, Nicole.’” She laughs. “And he always wanted me to do it with swagger as well. He wanted sexuality. So, he would push me into not getting caught up in all of those details. I just had to go with what he was giving me and release myself into that. Respond to all the other actors, and the moments, and be alive in those moments.”

Studying I Love Lucy would obviously help in her portrayal of Lucy Ricardo, but what was the key to the real Lucy, Lucille Ball? “She’s human,” Kidman says. “She wasn’t going to be a stereotype or a caricature of what you’d expect. She was very human and fragile at times. Vulnerable. Direct.

The smartest person in the room—that was a big part of it, her razor-sharp mind. And as I said, the hands. Just the way in which she would listen and then say, ‘No, this is how you should do it.’ She wasn’t afraid to say what she thought it should be, because the one thing she knew she had was talent.”

Lucy also had Desi Arnaz, played on screen by Bardem. Had she been looking forward to working with him? “Yeah,” she says.

“Amongst actors, there’s not one person who doesn’t say, ‘I love Javier Bardem.’ I mean, the guy is the best of the best, and I never thought I’d get to act opposite him. It was intimidating, but it was inspiring, because, really, he’s fun and he’s really funny. He would dance before every take, because, obviously, music was so much a part of Desi’s life. We were very tactile, which was difficult because of Covid, even though we were tested all the time. But I would reach out and hold him, and touch him. And that was basically how we would start. We would start through touch, because we’re both intuitive and we work from feeling.”

According to Kidman, Ball had some pretty good moves of her own. “Lucy was a great dancer,” she says. “Oh my gosh, she was an amazing dancer. You see her in the films she made when she was starting out, when she was younger, and she’s a beautiful

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ALL I WANTED TO DO— AND AL HE SAID TO DO— WAS SHOW THAT THIS WAS A LIVING, REATHING WOMAN

dancer. It’s why she has such command of her body. A lot of comedians have that dance quality to them, because when you’re a physical comedian, you’re using your body the same way as a dancer. At that time, you had to be able to dance, sing and act. You had to be a triple threat. You didn’t have a career if you couldn’t do them all.”

The touching, the dancing, was important to both Bardem and Kidman. “That marriage had chemistry,” she says, “so there had to be a chemical attraction between them. They were highly attracted to each other, which is fantastic for an actor, because that’s so juxtaposed against the fast-talking, direct woman who’s leading the ship. She would then become, when she was with him, deeply emotional, fragile, and vulnerable at times. They would fight, but I think you see a lot of her desire to be loved. And she really loved him, and he really loved her. They had their flaws as a couple, but I really see that there was a great love there. Did it end the way you’d want a great love story to end? No!” Surprisingly, Kidman doesn’t see anything especially tragic about their marriage breakdown. “They went off and married other people,” she says. “They went their separate ways, but they stayed in touch. So, it fell apart. But they also created a huge wealth of entertainment together, they had two children. So, they had a very, very fulfilling relationship. I think there’s almost an antiquated view of relationships where it’s like, you get married and then that’s it for your whole life, all the way through to the end. That’s a one-in-a-million kind of thing.

And this over-a-decade relationship might have been very, very fraught, but it was also a very loving, very successful relationship.”

She laughs, again. “I believe that.

I want to believe that.”

Like Bardem and Sorkin, Kidman is on the same page when it comes to Desi, and the aching impossibility of their relationship. “He couldn’t be what she wanted him to be, ultimately. He could do many things for her, but there was one thing he couldn’t do, which was stay at home. He couldn’t be faithful to her, and he tried, I think. It’s complicated.

She wanted the white picket fence and the man that sat at home, but she also wanted a huge career.

And the one thing he could definitely do was protect her in business. He could protect her the best he could on the set. He could give her the confidence that she was the most magnetic, gorgeous Ricky and Lucy during a show break; woman in the world and the belief Lucy visits the costume department. that she should have everything she wanted. But the one thing he couldn’t do was give her the home, give her what she saw as the complete picture, you know? And that was the end.

She wasn’t willing to compromise on that. It wasn’t enough for her.”

Kidman talks a lot about Lucille Ball’s romantic side, but she says much less about the difficult woman described by her daughter, and wasn’t about to “take the gloves off” in her performance. “For me, that’s for Aaron as a director and a writer. He’s the dramaturg here. I’m the person embodying her. All I wanted to do—and all he said to do—was show that this was a living, breathing woman.

This isn’t a cardboard cut-out, this isn’t a caricature and it isn’t a skit. She’s a living, breathing human being, and the humanness of the film is what I respond

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—NICOLE KIDMAN

to. That’s actually the thing that I find gives you a film, and that’s what Aaron comes with. He comes in going, ‘I create drama. How do I do it?’ It’s all well and good to do a documentary or a wonderful biopic of these people, but, as Aaron says, ‘I don’t know how to write a biopic,’ which I think is fabulous.”

Something else that Sorkin comes with is nuance, which is especially relevant to the ticking timebomb in the story: did Ball really mean to tick the box and join the Communist party or was it just a slip of the pen? “I have to say, I love the nuance of that story,” she says. “Because the nuance of that story is, yes, she did tick the box, and she ticked the box for a reason—because of her grandfather. She ticked that box because that’s what he believed in. She was raised by him, and it was her way of saying thank you to him. She felt it was a betrayal then to do him in, because she loved him.

That’s called nuance. That’s called reading between the lines. There’s information there that needs to be digested here so you can then understand a person, and I think Aaron’s a huge believer in that. I’m a huge believer. I mean, I know all of us probably are very huge believers, ultimately, in the need for the nuance.

Particularly now.”

Inevitably, this, again, leads to a discussion of cancel culture. “It’s the strangest thing, but a lot of the people around me that have seen it, who are younger than me, they go, ‘Oh, it’s so relevant. It’s not a period film.’ And I’m like, ‘Why do you say that?’ And they go, ‘Because of cancel culture, because of gender equality, because of all the things that are in it—they’re not from the ’50s. Every single thing, we can all relate to now.’ I love that.

Which is why I think Lucy right now is so inspiring. Lucille Ball is inspiring to a lot of people, and particularly young women, because she did it. She did it against all odds—even when she got divorced from Desi. Her daughter told me that she didn’t want to be a businesswoman. She loved the creative aspect of it. The business side of it was not her passion.

But when she got divorced, she had to learn how to be a businesswoman. And she had to learn how to take care of herself and negotiate and all of those things. Because Desi had done that. So, now she had to learn it. And she did.”

At this point, the comparisons come creeping in. Kidman has also gone into production, founding her own company, Blossom Films, in 2010. Does she see anything of herself in Lucy’s story? “Well, I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my career, you know? And so, I relate very much to that, when she’s told, ‘You’re not going to be able to play that role, you’ll be too old for that.’ I mean, she was told her

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career was over at 39. I was never told my career was over, but there wasn’t really a path that was set for us as women going, ‘Well, what do we do now?’ So, a lot of those things struck a chord with me. Like having my own production company and not really enjoying the business side of it at all but having to go, ‘OK, well, how do you budget a film? How do you negotiate a location? How do you support the creative process?’

Those things I’ve had to learn, and no one’s taught them to me. So, there’s been a lot of trial and error.

Failing, then getting back up and falling down again,” she laughs once more, warming to her theme. “But on the other hand, I just love the work. I actually would love to get up at 3 a.m. like Lucy does, and work on a scene. I often wake up in the middle of the night thinking, How am I going to do this? It literally just happened to me last night. I’m about to go and finish a show that’s having a few stops and starts because of the pandemic.

But I woke up in the middle of the night going, ‘Oh, now I understand that scene.’ It came to me through a dream. So, it’s that sort of weird obsession. Those are things I totally relate to: ‘Keep going, try to get it right. Try to find it, try to find it. It’s not working. It’s not working. Stay in it, stay in it. Keep trying, keep trying.’ All of that.”

Hearing Nicole Kidman—four-time Oscar nominee Nicole Kidman, who won in 2003 for The Hours—talking about her “downs” is jarring. Surely, her career has been pretty straightforward? “Oh, but that’s sort of smoke and mirrors. When I got pregnant [in 2007], I thought, OK, well, I’ve been pretty lucky. I’d worked with some of the greatest directors, but there wasn’t a lot coming my way. I don’t want to go and shine a spotlight on the downs but let me tell you: I’ve had to create a lot of those opportunities myself. I mean, Big Little Lies came out of a dearth of work—there wasn’t really anything there.

And strangely enough, it was my mother that pulled me out of it. I said, ‘Well, I’m pretty much done then, I think.’ And she was my Desi. She was like, ‘No, you’re going to keep going. I see things in you, you still have stories you have to tell. And I don’t think you should just give everything up because you’re having a baby.’”

Is that a damning indictment of the roles available to women in the film industry right now? “Well, not right now,” she counters. “I think there is a big swell of support right now, and this film is a perfect example of that. This film is about Lucille Ball, primarily. It’s about her marriage, but it’s also very much her story. Like Big Little Lies, all of those things—they’re stories, primarily about women, that have gone through the roof in terms of people watching them.

Which is such a blessing, because it validates the necessity for them, you know?

And that’s all you need— you need the validation in terms of people and the companies around going, ‘Oh, OK. Yeah, you’re right. That can work.’ And on this film, we were lucky to have the support of Aaron Sorkin. He comes in and writes this script—and knows how to write it because he is a writer, and he did do a show 36 weeks of the year, when he was doing The West Wing— and he gives that voice to Lucy. He doesn’t give that voice to Desi. He gives it to Lucy.”

The current swell of support has also been kind to director Jane Campion, who directed Kidman over 25 years ago in Portrait of a Lady and is currently riding high on the Oscar trail with The Power of the Dog. Is a reunion finally on the cards? “No, just plans to take long hikes with her. I have a very strong friendship with Jane, separate to anything professional. So, I would take a long walk with her through the mountains of New Zealand right now. She’s coming back to Sydney, so I plan to walk and talk with her. I’d love to, yes, move into her world professionally at some point. But I’m happy just to be in her personal world as well for the rest of my life. But there’s so many people I want to work with. I’m kind of like, ‘OK, lead me somewhere now.’ I’ll keep my eyes and ears open, and my heart open, to where I might go next.”

What is next? “I’m not doing anything after this. I’m working with Lulu Wang

AWARDSLINE

“...I JUST LOVE THE WORK. I ACTUAL Y WOULD LOVE TO G T UP AT 3 A.M. LIKE LUCY DOES, AND WORK ON A SCENE, YOU KNOW? —NICOLE KIDMAN

right now. And then I’m footloose and fancy-free. Yeeeeah!

Who knows what’s next? It’s kind of… yikes! And kind of exciting as well. Free falling.” The show is called Expats, she explains, written by The Farewell director Wang and Australian writer Alice Bell. “There’s a number of other women who’ve been in the writers’ room on it, but it’s Lulu’s vision and it’s fantastic. I reached out to her and we kind of joined forces and we’re on a ride together right now. Her voice is so strong. She’s an auteur—a complete auteur.”

Like Bardem, Kidman thinks directing a movie of her own is a long way off. “I’m not good enough,” she says. “I’m good at contributing, but I don’t think I’m good at making decisions.” It is possible, however that she might one day write a script. “I do write. Maybe I’ll write something at some point. I mean I’ve written things. I have ideas. I’ve written short stories. I’ve kept journals. So, I do write. Part of my release, actually, is just writing things.” She laughs.

“Not necessarily for public consumption!”

What will she do when Expats is over? Will she start getting restless? “No. I’m just sort of taking care of my daughters, my husband, and living some life. Real life, not a creative one. Even though they do intertwine.” Did Lucille Ball ever get to do that? She smiles. “I think so. She married a man who seemed very, very loving and kind, and I think she was very happy with him. I think she found peace with him.”

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T h e B es t O f 202 1 | D irectors

Lin-Manuel

M I R AN DA

The Hamilton maestro turns to feature film with his directorial debut, tick, tick…BOOM!

BY JOE UTIC HI

40

Where better than Washington Heights to meet local hero Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Manhattan neighborhood’s most vociferous supporter? How about at the United Palace Theater, an old movie palace Miranda has been supporting for years, and in whose rehearsal rooms the cast of his debut feature tick, tick…BOOM! assembled to read through his adaptation of Rent creator Jonathan Larson’s heartfelt autobiographical musical. The story covers Larson’s life in the period immediately before he created Rent, when Broadway success felt impossible, but the drive to try would not abate. Larson died aged just 35, on the night of Rent

of tick, tick...BOOM! Yes, in this studio, because I didn’t want the Broadway theater world to catch wind of it. When they did, it was met with the usual joy and snark that the theater world greets anything [laughs]. We’re hard people to please. They were like, “Is he going to write rap numbers for Jonathan Larson?” I want to be like, “No, he already wrote one!”

So, yeah, you’re in one of the rooms where it happened.

So, it was incumbent upon us to make people understand that Jon would never reach his 40th birthday, so that they understood how prescient everything he was writing was. You needed that context.

Putting all that stuff up front had the side effect of dispatching with those cliches about biopics, and the white text on black at the end. I didn’t want to play into those tropes.

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Rent

Rent

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It’s crazy. And that, actually, became a very interesting challenge for us, not just because of the expectation of what a story like this would be, but in our early test screenings, we had people who knew Jonathan Larson’s story and people who had no idea who he was. We hadn’t quite nailed the right way to get both audiences on the same page from the beginning of the movie. In the original cut, we only revealed he was the creator of Rent right at the end of the movie. So, people would say, “Why wasn’t this the story of the creation of Rent?” It was an interesting divide because the people who did know Jon’s story even a little bit, they loved the movie in that form. about a cis white guy complaining about turning 30 without the world discovering his genius. Fuck you.

tick, tick...BOOM! more profoundly moving than I found Rent—even though Rent knocked my socks off when I was 17—because

hooks into you. I think that’s true of art in general. The great thing about art is that you can’t go backwards in life after you’ve had the feeling that you’ve actually lived in someone else’s shoes for a minute. Movies can do that and musicals can do it,

and great plays can do it too. You can’t possibly go back to the way you were before.

I was changed by seeing tick, tick...BOOM! when I was 21 years of age, and then I went on to live my own version of it when I was trying to get my shows mounted. tick, tick...

BOOM!, then, was some kind of sustenance because I knew someone else had been there before me.

It’s exactly what hit me about this story and what I wanted to take about the experience I’d had with Jonathan’s work and transfer over to the audience. For me it’s like a chicken and egg scenario when it comes to my work and Jonathan’s.

I was so inspired by his work in the musical theater space, and I think son’s ticking clock begets Alexander Hamilton’s ticking clock, absolutely.

Right. It’s much more relatable to spend a good amount of your life doing something that has no particular outcome and going, “I spent my 20s writing a musical nobody wants

Director Lin-Manuel Miranda, right, on set with Andrew Garfield.

to see. The fuck do I do with that?

Where do I go from here?” I think we all have a version of that. We surround Jon with all those future Rent written that without this process of picking himself back up.

Yeah, but I knew.

I’ve seen his work. I sat at the National Theatre in London all day and I watched him crack himself open for us in Angels in America.

That’s what I needed Jonathan to do. If you watch footage of Jonathan, he’s a pretty rough singer, although he’s an amazing musician. But he’s just cracked open. That’s the more important thing. I knew that Andrew would bring that intensity and never lose us. We’d still love him for all his faults. I also knew I’d be getting him together with Liz Caplan, who was the vocal coach, and she’s an absolute wizard.

-

Liz Caplan will tell you yes. But there’s nature and there’s nurture.

And someone—and I would like to wring their necks—told Andrew he couldn’t sing, early enough in his life.

They had to have, because to have gone this long with the instrument that he has without having ever pursued it means someone closed that door off. I think that gets in your way. I also think exposure to music is a huge factor. If you grow up in a musical household, there’s no way you don’t get into it somehow. I have family who genuinely didn’t grow up listening to music in their home, and you can tell that they just don’t have the relationship to it that the rest of us do. I can’t begin to relate.

me years ago that happened to her [laughs]. Of course, not all of us in the family believe that it was real, but she told us this story like it was a real thing that actually happened to her.

The Little Monk is—how can I say?— something that has its roots in the Neapolitan tradition. He’s kind of a ghost, something that people sometimes say that they see, but it’s a popular belief that dates back years and years.

-

Paolo

S O R R E N T I NO

The director summoned his painful past as inspiration for The Hand of God

I tried to be as realistic as I could about the Naples in my memory, and close to that city. Yes, I think it’s very realistic, because me and the people that work with me, I think we

BY DA M O N W I S E

and so the city is pretty close to the reality of the ’80s.

premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2001 and the next six competed at Cannes, a residency that brought an Oscar nomination for 2013’s The Great Beauty. But Sorrentino does not take his good fortune The Hand of God the 1980s, when a freak accident claimed the lives of both his parents. Starring Filippo Scotti as Fabietto, on his hip and an obsession with S.S.C. Napoli footballer Diego Maradona.

Oh yeah. A big city has many [aspects], so, of course there is criminality there. I grew up in a middle-class family, so my reality was different. It was quite far from the criminality.

in order to face this movie without too much pain.

I started to think about this movie 10 years ago, but I had some modesty [issues], and so I just wrote the memories and then three or four years ago I decided to write a script, just to let my son and my daughter read it. But a couple of years ago, during the pandemic, I decided to do a movie. I thought it was the right moment to do this kind of movie—I thought that I had the right distance from the events of my teenage years

42

The writing was very involving. It’s always very involving. The writing is a moment where I am alone with myself, and so I can let go of all my feelings, and this was painful. I mean, part of the movie is more joyful. But the writing was hard too, because of the pain.

Yes. A few things are invented.

Sometimes I changed the chronology in order to create a kind of dramaturgical architecture. But mostly, the things are real, and the feelings are real.

It’s something that my aunt told

No, not too much. Not too much. Afmovie to my brother and my sister.

But just this.

In the end, well. They were very moved, and, yes, in a general sort of way, they had a good reaction. I don’t know their real reaction, that’s just what they told me: that they were happy about the movie.

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One Man Up

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Sorrentino with Fillippo Scotti, who stars as Fabietto in The Hand of God.

[Love Has No Bounds The Hand of -

God

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The Hand of God -

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The Dust of Naples

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©

MOLLY & ISREAL WEINBERG Consulate General of Israel

LOS ANGELES

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DAVID WIENER and FAMILY

1/12/22 5:48 PM

The Days of Abandonment

taboo things about parenting.

Were you concerned about how people would respond?

Maggie

GY L L E N H AA L

With The Lost Daughter, the actress turns writer-director to craft a tale of motherhood and its visceral underside B Y A N T O N I A B LY T H

-

No one’s watching your face as you read it.

The Kindergarten Teacher The Lost Daughter, -

How did you, Talia and Osnat start talking about you directing on a project together?

Looking back on it now, after having

New York bookstore.

The Days of Abandonment, which is

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There’s relief when people talk about it, maybe?

The Lost You introduced Pie Films to Ferrante’s work. You took them to a

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Daughter

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possibly know.

I do think women make movies differently than men. Even tiny things. One of my favorite parts in the whole movie is when we’re super close on Jessie [Buckley], and she’s taking her bra off under her shirt, unbuttoning her skirt, and taking the pins out of her hair. Just tiny little details. But if you’ve been in that ter conference, that’s what happens when you get home. And even those little moments of truthfulness I think are valuable because we see them so rarely. Whereas for men... those kinds of little details [of men] are in that’s their experience.

Your producers told me you wrote this extraordinarily quickly. You just burned through it.

I was acting in The Deuce and doing tons of press for The Kindergarten Teacher while I was writing. So, I don’t know if it was fast, but it was very focused. And I would take a section of the book, consider it, and take it apart in a very similar way to the way that I take apart a piece of text as an actress. What do I think is the essence of the scene? And usually, if it’s a good piece of work, in my opinion, it’s not something that’s articulated directly in the scene.

That’s just not my taste. I shouldn’t say “good” or “bad”, but it’s not my taste. So, I was doing the same thing with the book, and I followed the structure of the book originally just because I thought this is a good is the purpose of this scene at this moment? And is there a purpose?”

Then there’s the riddle of, not only what the essence of the scene is, but also how to make it cinematic put you inside her head.

Without her words in your head.

You’re absolutely right. Because the way through the movie is through her mind.

48

Dakota Johnson as Nina with Olivia Colman as Leda in The Lost Daughter.

I didn’t show it to Talia and Osnat. I showed it to two writers: Amy Herzog, who’s my age, and she’s a really interesting writer, and my mother, who’s also a screenwriter. They both gave me the same note. The reveal, that she left her kids, happened much, much earlier in the book. It happened in the toy store. They both said to me, “You can’t do this. It I said, “But I love that you have to live with her for so long after knowing that she’s done this.” And they said, “Really, cinematically, it doesn’t work for a movie.”

I thought about it for a minute, and I really thought they were right.

But what that did was it exploded my script. The whole structure was was great because it was like it had cracked open into many pieces, and then into the cracks came me and my own expression.

I think the script is very different from the book. There are all sorts of things that aren’t in the book. There are a lot of things that are in the are, without a question, in conversation with each other.

I really related to her taking a solo trip. It doesn’t seem like a crazy move to me. It seems like something any woman might do.

Sure. I agree with that. And she

should be kind of every woman.

Because if she’s an outlier...

The really important thing is she can’t be is crazy. First of all, there’s a whole tradition of fascinating, really excellently made movies about crazy women. It’s like porn or something.

People love to watch powerful, intelligent women play crazy people.

But also because we are told, if we have any feelings outside of this pretty narrow spectrum of what’s acceptable, that we’re crazy or sick, or we’re way out of line. When in fact, I think the spectrum of what is normal, not just in terms of mothering, but in terms of everything—desire and intellectual life and artistic life—is way bigger. And it includes despair and terror and anxiety as well as heart-wrenching joy. It’s just, we don’t see depictions of that very much at all.

So yeah, she had to be everywoman. Really functional. But she’s so anxious when it starts, she can’t even really walk down the street without feeling dizzy. Poor thing.

How did you come to cast Olivia and Jessie as Leda? because of all the reasons I said, I needed a sane actress with a strong working mind.

And gravitas.

Yeah, exactly. I thought of Olivia. And

also, because Leda does so many things that are hard to take, from tiny things to things that cause her and her family almost unbearable pain, I wanted there to be some humor and levity, and she offers that, of course. I wanted her to have blood in her veins. Not anemic. Not metaphorically, obviously. And so, I thought of her, and I asked her, and she did it. She keeps joking that I got her drunk at lunch, and she said, yes, but, we all know who got who drunk at lunch [laughs].

And then Jessie. Olivia asked me if I knew her at that lunch; if I knew her work. Wild Rose was coming out in New York that weekend. I went by myself to see it, and I thought she was fucking amazing. She read the script and the book in a weekend, and we had a great talk. And then, in terms of the two of them together, which is an interesting thing to talk about, I think, that was probably the about doing the adaptation and then shooting the whole thing, because what do you do about this 18, 20year age difference?

When I was writing, I thought, I am not going to worry about the logistics of this... And then I thought, OK, it would be an insane thing to ask an audience to believe that Jesse Buckley and Olivia Coleman are actually the same person. They’re not, they’re two different people, and we know that. But so, the question is: can we make a kind of poetic agreement, for the purposes of watching our movie for two hours, to agree that they’re the same person, for the purposes of telling our story?

What are you thinking about with regards to your next project?

I think I am honing in on something that I want to write and direct. I’m really trying to go from that same unconscious place that actually guided me throughout a lot of this do next. I do miss acting, but not as much as I'm drawn to make another

10

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Kenneth

B R ANAG H

The Belfast writer-director on revisiting his childhood and creating its legacy for the screen B Y R YA N F L E M I N G

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Belfast Belfast

This was something of a departure for you, so what made you want to tell this story now?

As a child, what was your understanding of what was going on when the Troubles began?

Buddy has two reactions to leaving. One where he’s very, very against it and then, later on, where he seems to have accepted it. How were you feeling when you

50

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left your home in Belfast?

I didn’t want to leave. I felt that I probably was being sold a bit of a puppy on the idea of this big garden.

So, I can imagine a kind of Versailleslike, Madison Square Garden thing.

But it was, although still undoubtedly a garden, a very small garden. Not one practically big enough to play football in. And we had a neighbor who wasn’t very keen on that anyway. But I was just so thrown by the removal from my extended family.

It was the extended family of the street and of our larger family. Both my parents had many siblings, so I had many, many cousins. And so, there was a group in which you could place and you didn’t have to worry.

It wasn’t a competition. Somehow, it was very mutually supportive.

When we moved, I felt—and it was true—that there would be a much greater sense of isolation. It maybe focused my imaginative skills in a more... It sent them inward, perhaps.

In Belfast, we played on the street, games were imaginatively played, but they were outsourced into the street, and into the groups of people you played with. When I came over here, I became a much more insular, a much more inward-looking, a much more protected, and a much more guarded individual, I think. So, I lived the life of the mind a bit more.

And not long after we arrived, I really, really became a reader. That was the start of being a lifelong reader.

I felt as though I was at my freest in books and at the cinema. That’s where I could drop that sense of being on guard.

While you were shooting, where there any memories that came back to you?

We had this little park, the Grove Park between where I lived and where I went to school. And as young as we were, we did go to school ourselves. We didn’t get taken by our parents. When we went to scout the movie, the school had gone, but the park was still there.

52

and his Dad’s a great sportsman, so he’s physically very adroit, Jude.

So, that gives him a certain kind of

Kenneth Branagh gives direction to his youngest actor Jude Hill, who plays Buddy.

I took Haris Zambarloukos, our director of photography, and Jim Clay, our production designer, and we walked from where my school was, through the houses, and then through Grove Park, which is a small park, but for me it was a cornucopia of nature. I could really see there, where every idea for a Western, every idea for a story was set, because there was a little river, there was a little stream, there was a hill, there were places for cowboys to hide. There was a hill further up where you could toboggan down when the snow came... It was a great space for my imagination, and I was glad to be reminded of it.

How did you approach casting, since you were essentially casting your family?

Well, I viewed it as the point of departure, that it would be the place where, actually, it would start to be owned by other people. versation I had with Jamie Dornan, who I admired very much for his work on The Fall, the television series with Gillian Anderson, where he played a serial killer in that TV show, which could not have been further away from the character of my father, for sure. But he had incredible concentration and charisma.

He’s from just outside Belfast, he’s conversation we had about the

project, he started asking me quite And I said, “Well, I could answer these, but to be honest, I’d like to ask you some questions about your father, because I think I’d like you to own this from the inside of you, out.”

They were all very detailed because they needed to be two things.

They needed to be super prepared, because ultimately, I wanted them to be very playful... I did want them to understand the culture. Jamie understood that very well. So did Ciarán Hinds. Ciarán Hinds was brought up a half a mile from where I live. So, we were the other side of that park I’ve just been talking about.

He was on the other side of it.

Caitríona Balfe came from a border town called Monaghan. If you live on the border in Ireland, between South and North, it can be very, very volatile indeed. So, she really saw tension between Catholics and Protestants up close And then Judi Dench, I discovered, had a much more extensive Irish background than I realized. She had Belfast relations who visited quite a lot when she was young. So, she had the accent in her head and a favorite uncle who inspired her. She used to practice the accent doing a rhyme that he used to speak to her, her Uncle Peter, when he would visit her.

And this would really get her back into the accent.

Jude Hill's mother’s a great Irish

he’s a good listener. In fact, maybe the main reason I cast him was that he’s a phenomenal listener. He can hold the screen responding and reacting. That was going to be half of his performance, just us watching other people’s words affect somebody whose life is being written on the page of their face, even as we are watching it. And he was completely in that moment as a listener. I learned a lot from watching him. And I always learn from kids, particularly, this capacity to be in the moment in every scene.

An especially great part of the movie was when Pa said he doesn’t understand Catholics because it’s a religion based in fear. And then we cut to Buddy and his brother at the church getting screamed at that they’re going to go to hell.

My father used to say that all the time. My father was a very generous guy, but he would just give phrases like, “Oh, the Catholics, it’s a religion of fear.” And of course, I couldn’t at that time, but I wanted to say, “I’ll tell you about fear, Dad. You ought to come down to church with us on a Sunday night because I leave there every Sunday night absolutely terminister and, my god, they were just terrifying. But yeah, the fascination combined with the ignorance, often, it led to a lot of comic speculation about what the mysteries of the Catholic religion were. I certainly thought it seemed pretty cool that you got a free glass of raspberry juice or something and a biscuit. If you could get past the idea that you were drinking the blood and eating the body of Christ, you had a free refreshment slot every time you went to church. We didn’t have any of that.

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N O M I N A T I O N S

11BEST PICTURE INCLUDING

S C R E E N A C T O R S G U I L D A W A R D S® N O M I N A T I O N S

BEST ACTING E N S E M B L E

© 1995 SAG-AFTRA

INCLUDING

Caitríona Balfe, Judi Dench, Jam ie D o r nan, Jude Hill, Ciarán Hinds, Colin M o r g a n

WINNER Toronto Film Festival • People’s Choice Award

WINNER

WINNER

WINNER

WINNER

American Film Institute AFI Special Award

San Diego Film Festival Audience Award

Dallas Film Festival Audience Award

Middleburg Film Festival Audience Award

“Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Belfast’ bursts with life.

Visually stunning and gloriously human.”

A

KENNETH BRANAGH

FILM

F O R Y O U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N I N A L L C AT E G O R I E S I N C L U D I N G

BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR BEST DIRECTING

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Kenneth Branagh

Kenneth Branagh

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© 2022 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.

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Red Rocket further displayed the talent you showed in Tangerine for street casting. Is it now in your nature to look at people in the street and wonder if they might be useful to you?

Sean

BA K E R

The indie director shares how he gets the most bang for a few bucks with his latest film Red Rocket

BY DA M O N W I S E

Red

The Florida Project

much

Rocket

Red Rocket like

How did you get started making movies? As a kid?

Did the success of The Florida Project get you the kind of budget you wanted for Red Rocket?

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way You could have called it Suitcase Pimp but you chose Red Rocket, which apparently is slang for a dog’s erection. What was the thinking there?

cent

There’s also a lot of ambiguity in Mikey’s story.

Why Spielberg?

Florida Project

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“ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR. MIKE MILLS’ FILM WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH, CRY, AND FEEL LESS LONELY IN THE WORLD.” RODRIGO PEREZ,

“JOAQUIN PHOENIX IS MARVELOUS.” TIM GRIERSON,

“IN SCENE AFTER SCENE, PHOENIX’S BANTER WITH NORMAN BUILDS A TOWER OF TRUST.

TOGETHER THEY CREATE A COLLECTION OF TINY ACTING MIRACLES.” CARLOS AGUILAR,

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senior year, that Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch had blown up to the level where I started recognizing Amerivery different and very enticing.

What inspired you to go straight Four Letter Words?

That came about—again—because of Spike Lee. I was like, “When did he made She’s Gotta Have It at the age of 27 or so, and I said, “I’ve got to Simon Rex as Mikey Saber with Sean Baker on the set of Red Rocket.

that’s essentially what I did. Fresh how to do it. It wasn’t like NYU told you how to do this. NYU has probably changed a lot, but when I was there it was essentially like, “You’ve

because we had purchased all of this raw stock. Short ends, essentially. You could only shoot a couple minutes at a time.

because my life had gotten so out of control that the television show that I co-created, called Greg the Bunny, I my drug use.

no job fairs, there was no connecting you to the industry. So, I just stayed in New York and said, “I’m going to pursue the same career path that Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee did. I

time, I was working for a publishing company that allowed me to shoot a commercial for them, so I was able to shoot a commercial for them that made it look like I could direct a commercial. It was a slick little children’s spot, shot on 16mm, and I was able to take that and then shop it around to get more work.

We weren’t making much, we were making bottom-of-the-barrel commercials. We were trying to scrape

way of looking at my own life, which is a very French New Wave idea: do

the lives of suburban youth, focused primarily on the male psyche... So,

since, but I was just getting it out of my system. It was all based on stuff I had heard from friends, from acquaintances from high school, and it was just about the way that guys talk—you know, locker room talk.

What was Greg the Bunny?

It was a comedy show. It’s all over YouTube. It was essentially a puppet show but with puppets in the real world. An Avenue Q sort of thing.

In some ways, I think we actually Avenue Q, because we started before them. It was a show that we started on Public Access and it got picked up by IFC, and then it went to Fox and then back to IFC over the years. It didn’t make us rich—well, it didn’t make me rich— but at the same time it kept me in the industry. It actually taught me a lot about comic improvisation and how to get that out of my actors. A

we did.

these days stems from my time on Greg the Bunny.

We bought all of the raw stock off of [Terry Gilliam’s] 12 Monkeys. That’s really aging myself, right, because

What did you do after you were together in any way, shape or form. I mean, I still don’t, obviously [laughs].

I spent an entire year alone at my

and that’s what really slowed things said, “There’s all this raw stock of freezer for over a year. I think that

56

terrible version—it had a Rashomonstyle, three-story structure, and it didn’t work at all. That’s when I

were taking off. I was doing absolutely nothing. And then I decided, “Well, I guess I have nothing else to

went back, because I had graduated just before the digital revolution.

I had been cutting celluloid when I graduated college, so I had to go back to learn non-linear editing.

That’s where I met [producer] ShihChing Tsou. I decided at that point I was going to recut Four Letter Words in a linear style on the Avid, using that project to learn the Avid. And it actually ended up working out quite that it was supposed to be—plus I had learned the Avid and I had met South by Southwest, out of nowhere four years ago is suddenly good got off of drugs and my life was getting better. It wasn’t like Four Letter Words opened any doors, but it was nice, and it was out there, and it started my journey.

You used to carry copies of your do that?

Yes and no. Just the other day I gave a Starlet Blu-ray to a young woman who came out to see Red Rocket and was a big fan of Florida Project but had not seen Starlet. But, to tell you the truth, nobody has Blu-ray players anymore, it’s such a select group of people. So, no, it’s something I don’t really do much of anymore. But I used to all the time.

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BEST ACTOR - SIMON REX “A THRILLINGLY UNPREDICTABLE HIGH-WIRE ACT OF A FILM.” Jordan Cronk,

“A TRUE COMIC MIRACLE FROM SIMON REX.” Vikram Murthi,

“SIMON REX IS SENSATIONAL: FLEET AND NIMBLE, GREGARIOUS AND SHADED IN DARKNESS.” Richard Lawson,

“EXUBERANT FILMMAKING.” Jessica Kiang,

“A raucous and righteously depressing American-hustle odyssey.

SIMON REX GIVES THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS CAREER.” Justin Chang,

A FILM BY SEAN BAKER

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Deadline Contenders Film: New York

The Lost Daughter

“A MAJOR ACHIEVEMENT.” “A MARVELOUS MOVIE. I’m Your Man is funny in such a gentle way that you may not realize how WPLYJPUN P[ PZ \U[PS HM[LY [OL JYLKP[Z OH]L YVSSLK ¹

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BEST

C O N S I D E R I N T E R N AT I O N A L F E AT U R E

MAREN EGGERT

FILM

DAN STEVENS

WINNER BEST LEADING PERFORMANCE MAREN EGGERT

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Deadline Contenders Film: New York 7

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THE SOCIETY OF COMPOSERS & LYRICISTS AWARDS NOMINEE

OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SONG FOR A DRAMATIC OR DOCUMENTARY VISUAL MEDIA PRODUCTION

“SOMEHOW YOU DO”

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