Deadline Hollywood - AwardsLine - Oscar Preview - 01/26/22

ONE, TWO… FLEE: THE TRIPLE THREAT FROM DENMARK + JANE CAMPION: BACK IN THE SADDLE AFTER 12 YEARS

OSCAR PREVIEW

How Lady Gaga made peace with her personal demons to play the “Black Widow” in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci

“THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR. The most flawless amalgam of acting, writing, direction, design and music to hit screens this year.”

PETER TRAVERS,

“GORGEOUS. A movie as big as the open sky, but one where human emotions are still distinctly visible, as fine and sharp as a blade of grass.”

T H E

M O S T

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A C C L A I M E D

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NEW YORK FILM CRITICS ONLINE

BEST DIRECTOR

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Y E A R

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CHICAGO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

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SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

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BOSTON ONLINE FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

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SAN DIEGO FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

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JANE CAMPION

JANE CAMPION

JANE CAMPION

JANE CAMPION

JANE CAMPION

WASHINGTON DC AREA FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

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TORONTO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

ATLANTA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

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BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

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BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

ATLANTA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

CHICAGO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS ONLINE

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

WINNER

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

KODI SMIT-MCPHEE

KODI SMIT-MCPHEE

KODI SMIT-MCPHEE

KODI SMIT-MCPHEE

KODI SMIT-MCPHEE

AUSTIN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

WASHINGTON DC AREA FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

WINNER

WINNER

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

KIRSTEN DUNST ATLANTA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

WINNER

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BEST ACTOR

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

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KIRSTEN DUNST

KIRSTEN DUNST

KIRSTEN DUNST

KIRSTEN DUNST

AUSTIN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

BOSTON ONLINE FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

PHOENIX CRITICS CIRCLE

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

WINNER

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BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

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ATLANTA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

BOSTON SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS

CHICAGO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS ONLINE

WINNER

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A RI WEGNER

A RI WEGNER

A RI WEGNER

A RI WEGNER

A RI WEGNER

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

AUSTIN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

CHICAGO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

COLUMBUS FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

PHILADELPHIA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

JONNY GREENWOOD

JONNY GREENWOOD

JONNY GREENWOOD

JONNY GREENWOOD

JONNY GREENWOOD

A FILM BY ACADEMY AWARD® WINNER JANE CAMPION

Go Behind the Scenes with Legendary Director JANE CAMPION.

SCAN HERE FILM.NETFLIXAWARDS.COM

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Young Ko

CALL SHEET First Take 4 CLOSE-UP: Jane Campion goes West with her cowboy-driven drama The Power of the Dog 8 QUICK SHOTS: Scoring Being the Ricardos; bringing “bullet time” back for The Matrix Resurrection 10 FIVE THINGS: Why Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson didn’t “Tyler Perry” Summer of Soul 12 INTERNATIONAL: The fare in the shortlist mix 16 IN DEPTH: How Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee became an Oscar triple threat 20 DOCUMENTARY: The full doc race breakdown, from The First Wave to The Rescue 24 THE ART OF CRAFT: Creating a punk fashion rebel for Cruella

Cover Story 26 HAUS OF PAIN: Multihyphenate Lady Gaga on how she cemented a path from artist, musician and fashion maven to her leading role in House of Gucci

Dialogue

ON THE COVER: Lady Gaga photographed exclusively for Deadline by Josh Telles

M IC H AE L BU CK N E R

CONTENDERS 40 Asghar Farhadi 41 Kristen Stewart & Pablo Larraín 42 Jonathan Majors 44 Ruth Negga 46 Kirsten Dunst 48 Benedict Cumberbatch 50 Rebecca Ferguson 52 Kenneth Branagh, Caitríona Balfe & Jamie Dornan 54 56 Maggie Gyllenhaal 58 Reinaldo Marcus Green 60 Martha Plimpton 62 Simon Rex 64 Olga Merediz

®

SCREEN AC TORS GUILD AWARD NOMINEE OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

RUTH NEGGA

WINNER BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS RUTH NEGGA CHICAGO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION • COLUMBUS FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION • NEW YORK FILM CRITICS ONLINE PHILADELPHIA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE • CHICAGO INDIE CRITICS • GREATER WESTERN NEW YORK FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION SAN DIEGO FILM CRITICS SOCIETY • NATIONAL SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS

“ONE

OF THE BEST PICTURES OF THE YE AR.”

“RUTH NEGGA GIVES ONE OF THE BEST PERFORMANCES OF THE YEAR. Her exquisite performance provides the pulsing, emotionally heightened center to REBECCA HALL’s assured move behind the camera.”

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

“RUTH NEGGA executes a masterful performance that challenges what and how we think about color, identity, sexuality, envy and obsession.”

BLACKFILM

A FILM BY REBECCA HALL FILM.NETFLIXAWARDS.COM

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FIVE THINGS: SUMMER OF SOUL

GO WEST With The Power of the Dog, JANE CAMPION explores a toxic trap of traditional masculinity

P H OTO C RE D IT

By Antonia Blyth

rancher in Montana, it’s a Cain and Abel tale of two brothers that challenges hyper-masculinity, exposing “the vulnerability, the brutality, and the fear, and even the femininity underneath it,” Campion says.

“I think I really fell in love with his subversive voice.

That was the first thing. And then this sense of extraordinary detail within the story. Here he was starting off with a scene of castration, and you couldn’t get more hyper-masculine than the ranch of Montana.”

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Phil, a cruel, cutting bully, while Jesse Plemons is his mild, kind brother George, who marries widow Rose, played

by Kirsten Dunst. When Rose comes to live on the ranch, Phil mercilessly taunts her and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee)—a watchful teenager who crafts paper flowers for his beloved mother.

But the deeply repressed Phil is unexpectedly drawn to the boy, and they bond as Phil teaches Peter skills like making a rope from hide.

Campion was interested in the concealment within Phil, who has been forced to hide his sexuality behind masculinity. “He always had to be secretive, he always had to know that his essential self was considered disgusting, a criminal, debased,” she says.

She also relished the attention to detail the novel contained. “I feel a sense for the details, like the paper flowers, and the braiding of the rope, which becomes such an enriched object. Not only is a rope made from a cow which is brought up on the property, but it’s a symbol of masculinity. Because with this rope, you make submissive the animals.”

Campion lit on Cumberbatch to play Phil because, she says, he’s “an amazing actor who could be very

P H OTO C RE D IT

“I have tennis elbow” Jane Campion says, stretching an arm out across the Zoom screen from her temporary Joshua Tree home. She’s in California for the release of her film The Power of the Dog—a Western set in Montana and shot in her native New Zealand.

Despite what her repetitive strain injury might suggest, Campion is by no means Wimbledon-ready. She has only learned tennis very recently during the pandemic and seems delighted by the humbling surrender of trying something new.

“I just can’t tell you the excitement I felt one night when I was playing with my coach and I hit the ball over about five times in a row,” she says.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, that was great, I can’t believe I’m hitting it.’”

But perhaps this gung-ho, game-on attitude provides some insight into who Campion is in a broader sense. In 1993, she became the first woman in Cannes history to win a Palme d’Or, having written and directed her singular film The Piano, which also netted several Oscars, and made her the second woman ever to receive a Best Director nomination.

As a young student starting out, she says, “I had a lot of energy and nowhere to put it.” Studying first art, then film, she turned to the Super 8 camera her theater-director dad taught her to use. Suddenly, she was galvanized. “I was so excited by the process. That’s what I connected to, my energy. It was so palpably different.”

But in an almost entirely male-dominated industry, the odds were stacked crushingly against her. Looking back, what does she think kept her going? It’s like with the tennis: why does one person keep trying, leaning into the risk of failure, while another avoids it and does nothing?

“I had made this decision while I was at art school that I was going to discover what my potential was, that I was sick of sitting on the fence thinking, ‘If I really tried hard maybe I’d be good.’ Nursing that idea of potential rather than really testing it. And obviously I was afraid of testing. I think everybody is, because they feel like, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to come up so much shorter than my dream of it was.’ But at that point I was so fed up, I thought, ‘I want to find out.’ And just with that decision, the energy in my body completely changed and I had so much energy, I could work, and I did work, 18 hours a day.”

Riding that buzz, Campion kept going, despite “mistakes and stupid things”, she says. “The energy just goes, ‘Oh, well, I have to work, let’s try the next thing.’”

She’s still led by this creative energy today and is very much attuned to it on a deep level. This is why she hired a dream coach named Kim Gillingham on the set of The Power of the Dog. “She works with dreams and psyche, and she says about the psyche that you can’t begin to do creative work until the psyche is engaged. And I call that the energy flow. When the psyche is involved, everything changes, and you don’t relate to fear. You’re wild, really. It’s feeding you from the inside, you are in the bubble of the work. And it’s a very enriching, empowering place to come from… It changes the balance of what you need to do between fear and enthusiasm.”

It was her dad’s second wife who sent her Thomas Savage’s 1967 book The Power of the Dog. Loosely based on his own experience as a gay

Director Jane Campion at the UK premier of The Power of the Dog.

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From left: Jane Campion, right, with cinematographer Ari Wegner on set; Benedict Cumberbatch as rancher Phil Burbank.

“I’m just training my intuition so that when I get on set, I may have a starting point, but I have got confidence to dance with the circumstances.”

tender and who took risks. Also, I think in Sherlock you see how flamboyant he can be, which we really do need. He has to have a vocal capacity where he can speak really fast. And I think he’s very handsome. He’s this really sexy guy in a way too, and also vulnerable and tender. And he’s not afraid of these things.”

Although they are married in real-life, Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst very much worked as separate entities for Campion.

“I didn’t really think about them as a duo, but as [Dunst] pointed out to me endlessly, ‘It’s incredibly money-saving, Jane,’ because they were in the same accommodation,” she laughs. Calling Dunst “a luscious woman”, Campion enjoyed a truth-telling quality —Jane Campion in her. “I just love that about some women, that they are this beautiful chaos of, ‘This is me and I’m present and you can’t shut me up.’ I really love that about her and what she brings to the story, which is this wildness.”

The New Zealand shoot was interrupted by Covid for several months, but, says Campion, that turned out to be something of a boon, giving her time to re-think the ending. Where once she had Peter returning to making his paper flowers at the end, now she knew she wanted the final scene to be the deeply symbolic rope being placed under Peter’s bed.

Phil had for years romanticized and relished the memory of his mentor ‘Bronco Henry’. And, says Campion, this new ending underlined how Phil would, in turn, become Peter’s own Bronco Henry. The rope was their connection, the secret between them, and longing for lost love was not only less dangerous than a real relationship for a gay man at that time, but it’s emotionally relatable across the board too. “It is easier to love a ghost than a real person,” Campion says, simply.

Then came the edit. Campion worked for the first time with “very, very skilled” editor Peter Sciberras, whom she says taught her “an amazing amount of what you can do technically with energy that’s not quite as you wanted, cutting off part of the screen and use a part of the tape from another place. I mean, I knew some of that, but I just didn’t know it could go as far as he showed me.”

The experience was intense. “I think even now we love each other,” she says. “It was one of those love affairs that’s not a love affair of course, but of different minds, if you like. It’s really hard to say with editing what is happening, but you have to stay so nimble and so intuitive to what’s going on. You can have your plan, but usually you find out that doesn’t work.”

And letting go of the plan is part of Campion’s mission as a filmmaker. As she puts it, “I’m just training my intuition so that when I get on set, I may have

AWARDSLINE

a starting point, but I have got confidence to dance with the circumstances. And there is nothing else, if you want this to be alive, because you have to respond to what the actors are doing in front of you. You don’t know what they’re going to do, so you have to learn, as Muhammad Ali said, to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”

Next, she’ll be putting her energies into starting a film school in New Zealand. She feels driven to give something back, she says, “because I wouldn’t be where I am without the generosity of the Australian government, and the people who created the film school there.

And it was free for us, and we were paid to go. That opportunity is what people should have.”

She also notes the progress of women in the film industry since she began her career. “Everybody is really straining to make sure that they hear the female voice.

And I think the women are coming into the industry now, as it opens to them, with so much energy and daring. I think they’re the interesting voices at the moment, and they are doing super well, especially in festivals. You can see that. I would say that is no longer charitable to think about hiring women, it’s actually good business, which is fantastic.”

So perhaps now, all these years after that Palme d’Or, she can relax a little, and enjoy the trail she blazed?

“I can put a rope under my bed, yeah,” she says.

F

ation In All C

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e

W I N N E R GRAND JURY PRIZE

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

OREIGN LANGUAGE FILM PHOENIX FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

OREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

DIRECTOR

INTERNATIONAL PICTURE

HAWAII FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

CAPRI, HOLLYWOOD FESTIVAL

CAPRI, HOLLYWOOD FESTIVAL

INTERNATIONAL FILM

OREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

FOREIGN FILM

NEWPOR CH FILM FESTIVAL

FLORIDA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

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Italy’s Official Submission for International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards® “ONE OF THE BEST PICTURES OF THE YEAR. A SHIMMERING, ECSTATIC LOVE LETTER TO FAMILY.”

“++++

THIS IS PAOLO SORRENTINO’S ‘ROMA’, A PICTURE-PERFECT TAKE ON A TIME AND A PLACE.”

“A LOVE LETTER TO THE MOVIES. Joyous. By turns hilarious, heartbreaking and remarkable for its buoyancy and grace.

It’s a film from the hand of a master.”

A Film by

PAOLO SORRENTINO Director of Academy Award

®

Winning film

VIEW “THE HAND OF GOD: THROUGH THE EYES OF SORRENTINO.” DIRECTOR PAOLO SORRENTINO RETURNS TO NAPLES, HIS HOMETOWN, AND REFLECTS ON HIS YOUTH IN AN EXCLUSIVE TOUR OF THE LOCATIONS IN THE FILM.

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THE GREAT BEAUTY FILM.NETFLIXAWARDS.COM

1/19/22 5:27 PM

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S H OTS

Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos.

for something beautiful that you Pemberton found the scenes where Lucille is planning out the show to be the most challenging to score. “Originally, I’d scored those lighter for an element of nostalgia, which Aaron didn’t want.

He wanted this to be about Lucille working these scenes out. So it became a challenge of, how do we get the audience into this process of her thinking about these iconic

A Perfect Dream

without focusing on the comedic scene? Those are weirdly the most

Being the Ricardos composer Daniel Pemberton on scoring the complex mind of Lucille Ball

small, musically, but we spent a long time trying to get the tone of those just right.” —Ryan Fleming

Charted Territory At press time, here is how Gold Derby’s experts ranked the Oscar chances in the Best Picture race. Get up-to-date rankings and make your own predictions at GoldDerby.com

Best Picture 1 The Power of the Dog ODDS .................................

2 Belfast ODDS .................................

3 West Side Story

For Being the Ricardos, it was important to both writer-director Aaron Sorkin and composer Daniel Pemberton that the focus always be on what is happening in Lucile Ball’s head. “Musically it was important that we were really concentrating on her,” Pemberton

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

about her dream of the perfect life, which is a family and a house.

4 King Richard

bittersweet and melancholic is the fact that that dream is not realized. I wanted the music to

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

5 Dune ODDS ...................................

Having worked with director Lana Wachowski on the last two Matrix knew that he needed to step up the effects for The Matrix Resurrections One iconic effect from the original trilogy, “Bullet Time,” is back but with updates. “Coming up with a way of doing bullet time without trying to

initially at underwater photography

which normally would be used for shooting a left and a right eye, but we aligned the cameras and shot them at different frame rates so that we could capture The Analyst’s motion-blurred look at the same time as Neo’s slow-motion look,

and then they’re carefully cut apart and reseamed together. The other are in the same space, so it feels a lot more integrated than if we’d

6 Licorice Pizza ODDS .................................

7 of them.” —Ryan Fleming

Slow-Motion Blur How The Matrix Resurrection’s VFX supervisor Dan Glass took “Bullet Time” a step further

CODA ODDS .................................

8 The Tragedy of Macbeth ODDS .................................

9 quickly under water, you feel the resistance and struggle.”

Since they couldn’t actually shoot the scenes underwater,

Don’t Look Up

a different approach. “We shot it dry for wet, but we did use some

tick, tick... Boom!

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

10

technology. We used a stereo rig,

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

Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity in The Matrix Resurrections.

for your consideration in all categories including

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

INCLUDING

BEST PICTURE

O U T S TA N D I N G L E A D P E R F O R M A N C E

OLIVIA COLMAN

SCREEN ACTORS G U I L D A W A R D® NOMINEE

BEST ACTRESS

OLIVIA COLMAN

“Maggie Gyllenhaal’s astonishing directorial debut is

THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR. ‘The Lost Daughter’ is an incredible first film, an incredible film in general, but its finest quality may be how very adult it is in its perspective on its characters.”

“Olivia Colman’s best performance ever.”

“SEDUCTIVE. A sophisticated psychological thriller.”

“A DELICIOUS DRAMA. Olivia Colman gives a powerhouse turn.

You can’t take your eyes off her for a second.”

“THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR.

BEST SCREENPLAY

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

4

S PI R IT AWA R D NOMINATIONS

BEST PICTURE BEST DIRECTOR MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

2

CRITICS CHOICE AWA R D

NOMINATIONS

INCLUDING

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Writer/Director Maggie Gyllenhaal has given everything she’s got to her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel.

A film unafraid to blow up the premise of maternity in the very act of celebrating it.”

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SCAN HERE Go Behind-The-Scenes with Olivia Colman and Maggie Gyllenhaal as they explore motherhood’s unspoken truth.

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top of that, we were in the [presidential] election.”

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The Summer of Soul

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the concert audience]. These are -

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As the Best International Feature race comes to a close, it’s fairly clear to see who the favorites are. Since it premiered at Cannes last year, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car has dominated the landscape, featuring highly in international critics’ awards and even penetrating the consciousness of the Golden Globes. But—as we saw at Cannes, where Hamaguchi only went home with Best Screenplay—critical mass doesn’t always impact on industry juries. It’s just as possible, then, that the Oscar might go to Norway’s The Worst Person in the World, a gently subversive romcom by Joachim Trier that captures the exact moment in a director’s career when they nail their style.

To add a third alternative, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s sobering emigrant story Flee has been quietly making history, a feat that will be cemented if it becomes, as many think it might, the first film to compete in the International, Documentary and Animation fields.

But while the competition at the top is strong, perhaps as a result of Parasite’s win two years ago, this section has seen a surge in more experimental, personal and genre fare. A good example of one of the smaller films is Laura Wandel’s Playground (Belgium), which captivated audiences at Cannes with its bittersweet story of a seven-year-old girl trying to make sense of elementary school and its hierarchies of friends and enemies. Filmed entirely from its lead character’s eyeline, it rests on an extraordinary performance by seven-year-old Maya Vanderbeque, who auditioned for the film with steely determination (“I want to give all my strength to this film,” she told the director).

The film was a labor of love for Wandel. “It took me seven years to make this film,” she says, “including five years of writing. Then, because of the pandemic, we had to put it in the fridge for a year.” After Cannes, where it premiered in Un Certain Regard, it toured the world, collecting prizes at festivals in Pingyao, London and Guanajuato—“Which shows that the film moves people in a universal way,” she says.

Interestingly, this kind of universality is precisely what Wandel set out to achieve.

“I wanted to tell a story about the world of school, because it is a place that we’ve all known, a place that forges us as adults and which determines—more than we think—our later view of the world, of life. To tell this story, I drew on my own personal memories but also on a lot of research, to make the story as universal and as realistic as possible: I made observations in the playgrounds, I had discussions with teachers and also the parents of pupils. I talked to children, had meetings with psychologists who specialized in the question of bullying, and I read a lot.”

Consequently, she is “very happy” that the film has been shortlisted. “This is a wonderful opportunity to introduce the film to the American public,” she

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says, “and to make it known worldwide, through the fame of the Oscars. I believe that the fact that the Academy has selected this film shows an open mind by giving a radical, demanding debut film with no star power the chance to be seen by the whole world.”

Another personal story comes from Kosovo—Blerta Basholli’s triple Sundance winner Hive—which is set in the village of Krusha e Madhe in Kosovo, seven years after an attack by Serbian forces, where Fahrije (Yllka Gashi) is struggling to raise her family after the disappearance of her husband. Since Sundance, the film has been in contention for a year now, which came as a surprise to its director. “I am always the skeptical one,” she says, “so it wasn’t until I showed it to my sister and her husband that I knew it was working. They are film lovers and are very sincere in their comments—they told me that the story really works, and they had good comments about performances and everything.

That gave me hope, and then Sundance made its life—and mine—even better.”

Like Playground, there is a sense of universality about Hive that has taken it around the world. What affects people, Basholli believes, “is the empowerment, resilience and triumph of women in a situation where giving up is knocking on your door.”

“But the best feedback that I always like to hear,” she says, “is about the sense of community that builds with the women in the film. Although they resist it at the beginning, they join together to build their future, and it’s like that in real life—it’s such a joy to see these women of Krusha working together even today, beside all the pain they went through. I think it gives people hope and strength, something we all need to be able to move on.”

As for making the shortlist, Basholli describes it as “a great experience. The film got to reach a wider audience, and the process itself gave people hope for Kosova. Artists from Kosova now believe even more that if you work hard

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Compartment No. 6

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom

and are honest with your work, it doesn’t matter if you are from a small new country and making a low-budget film. And in regard to the Oscars, I believe so too now.”

In terms of genre, possibly the most unusual film to make the shortlist is Lamb, a peculiar folk horror co-written by the Icelandic novelist, poet and musician Sjón and director Valdimar Jóhannsson. Starring Sweden’s Noomi Rapace, it concerns a childless couple in rural Iceland who find a strange creature in their barn. “I was inspired by many things,” Jóhannsson says. “Mostly visual, like paintings, drawings and photographs, but I also had a story in the back of my head, about loss and something supernatural.”

Since its premiere in Cannes, Lamb has been a cult hit worldwide, notably for A24 in the U.S. “I knew that I was taking a big risk making this my first feature film,” Jóhannsson says, “but I was surrounded by very strong, supportive and creative people. I am super-thankful for the reception of the film.”

Travelling with Lamb to multiple countries has been an eye-opener, he adds.

“It’s taught me that the closer people are to their own culture, the more they relate to the story I wanted to tell—a universal story about loss and connection to nature. I’ve enjoyed all the different interpretations of my film. That was what I wanted to achieve.”

From Finland, Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6 is equally hard to pigeonhole, being an offbeat semi-love story about a Finnish student who befriends a Russian miner on a train to the Arctic Circle. “It’s inspired by a novel that I read 10 years ago,” the director says. “We made a lot of changes—we changed the decade, the route, the age of the characters—and, obviously, we left many scenes and characters out. But regarding the author of the novel, Rosa Liksom, the essence of the novel is still there. It’s a humane story of a connection between two lonely characters.”

Of all the films on the shortlist, Kuosmanen’s film has, literally, travelled the furthest: “I counted that we did more than 25,000km on the train during the pre-production and the shoot,” he recalls. “From audiences, the feedback has been really overwhelming. It makes me happy that even though the film deals with ostensibly small things, the impact of it has been huge. Some see it more as a love story, others as an existential study, others as a portrait of Russian soul—and some think it’s hilarious. I think the core element—the humane gaze, and the relatable contradiction of the need to be loved and the fear of being seen is something that resonates in many of us. And I can also sense that the tone of the humor seems to work surprisingly well all over the world.”

Kuosmanen also welcomes the attention from the Academy. “I think we all should try to open our minds as a daily exercise,” he says. “It’s not easy, because we aren’t really that clever. We need more open-mindedness and less dogma, but the problem is that dogma is so much easier to understand and adapt to. ” In terms of journey, however, the contender with the most fascinating mileage comes from Bhutan—Pawo Choyning Dorji’s Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, in

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Lamb

which an aspiring but unambitious singer takes a job as a teacher in a rural school. Dorji’s film has had an unlikely reprieve after being turned down previously. “When the Bhutanese government first submitted the film last year, we were informed by the Academy that it couldn’t be accepted because Bhutan did not have an Academy-recognized selection committee. The Academy also told us that the country should have submitted at least one film in the previous five years to have a validity with the Academy—and Bhutan’s last submission was 23 years ago. So, the Academy advised us to form a selection committee, and resubmit the following year.”

Surprisingly, the worldwide lockdown bought Dorji the leeway he needed. “The delay actually gave us time to meet their requirements,” he says. “Another interesting note is that when we were finally approved to submit the film, there were more delays, as the Academy website didn’t have ‘Bhutan’ and ‘Dzongkha’ (our national language) as options in the online submission forms, so they had to update the website for us.”

It’s this cultural otherness that could give Dorji’s film a lift in the weeks before nominations. “I think, in the movie, audiences get a glimpse of a culture, a people and a land that’s unlike anything they have ever seen before,” he says. “It is probably the most culturally, linguistically and environmentally diverse story that they have ever seen. However, within all that diversity, the film seems to connect deeply with people because it touches upon the universal human theme of home and finding [a place] where you belong. The film has screened all over the world, and everyone has come out of it with a renewed sense of longing for their own home. I think that celebrating what makes us similar is very much needed during this time of great suffering.”

Like the others contacted for this feature, Dorji sees this year’s shortlist as a sign of increasing boldness from the Academy. It certainly came as “a big surprise for many, including myself,” he says. “More than anything, it is a celebration of the possibilities of art, creativity and cinema—that a first-time director, an amateur crew and a cast of yak herders can share with the world a story of our culture and our way of life from the remotest classroom in the world, and it can reach across the world all the way to the Academy."

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DANISH TRIPLE THREAT The animated documentary Flee stands on the precipice of Oscar history

By Matthew Carey

Monica Hellström celebrate their best documentary feature award at the Gotham Awards.

When the Oscar nominations are announced on Feb. 8, Flee could pull off an unprecedented trifecta, becoming the first film to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature, Best International Film and Best Animated Feature.

Not bad for a project that began with modest ambitions.

“It started out with me wanting to do a short animated doc about a friend of mine,” director Jonas Poher Rasmussen says. “In the beginning I just thought it would be like 20 minutes, and then from there it grew and grew.”

The film resulted from a bond between Rasmussen and Amin Nawabi that was forged a quarter century ago when a teenage Amin arrived as an Afghan refugee in the small Danish town where Rasmussen grew up. Flee is Denmark’s official entry in the International Film category, and in December it made the shortlist for that category.

“I think it’s the first documentary that’s a Danish entry, so it makes me extremely proud and just to represent my country, it does mean something special,” Rasmussen says. “I can tell that people here are really rooting for me and the film, which is a nice feeling.”

In December, Flee also earned a spot on the Documentary Feature shortlist (there is no shortlist for Animated Feature). From the film’s debut at Sundance 2021 it has gripped audiences with the tale of a gay kid growing up in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the era when the Soviets controlled the country. The government seized Amin’s father as a suspected opponent of the regime. His father was never seen again.

With the Mujahideen on the brink of seizing full control of Afghanistan in 1989, Amin and his mother and most of his siblings fled, first to Moscow.

Effectively stateless, they tried to reach the West, caught in the clutches of human traffickers. Eventually, some members of the family reached Sweden. Amin arrived in Denmark after a series of traumatic experiences, by himself, speaking no Danish.

“Making Flee gave me new insights into the drastic consequences of fleeing home, especially as a child, like Amin,” Rasmussen has written. “I began to understand the difficulties that children like them face, when their past and present are so disconnected. I understood why they tended to look ahead to the future, while keeping a safe distance from the people around them.”

The burden of keeping his past a secret weighed on Amin, yet he felt torn about divulging what he’d gone through. Rasmussen, who got into making

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radio documentaries after finishing school, waited for the moment when his friend might be ready.

“It took a long time, but I think it was actually for the better in the end, because I had to learn the craft and really needed to find the style that fitted his testimony,” Rasmussen says. “And, also, Amin needed to be ready to really open up and share his story.”

The breakthrough came when the director realized the story could be told not as a typical documentary but through animation. That would permit Amin to shield his identity (Amin is a pseudonym, another measure designed to protect his privacy).

“With the animation, we could make him anonymous,” Rasmussen says. “Because his story, it’s hard for him to talk about.”

Creatively, the challenge became settling on what kind of animation to use to tell the story.

“This is my first animation project, so I had to understand the craft and the process of making it,” Rasmussen says. “In the beginning it was just the animators showing me a lot of different stuff and me pointing, ‘OK, I like this, I like this, I like this.’ And then we did some tests but the first concepts we did, they became a little too ‘cartoon-y’. The characters had big eyes, and the line was very smooth, and everything was stylized, and it became detached from the testimony. So, we went back and did another process.”

Rasmussen and the animators, a team that included animation director Kenneth Ladekjær and art director Jess Nicholls, adhered to a set of self-imposed guidelines.

“We had these three codewords, which were ‘authenticity’, ‘organic’ and ‘subtle’,” Rasmussen recalls. “Those were key words for the process of finding the style of the animation.”

They drew inspiration from a variety of sources.

“There are a lot of different references,” the director says.

“One of them was [American artist] Edward Hopper. We have a lot of reference for his use of light and color, it was something we really brought into the film.

There’s this solitude, loneliness in his paintings.”

Rasmussen discovered that using animation opened up exceptional storytelling possibilities. In a traditional documentary, what you’ve shot is what you’ve got in edit. With animation, the director might entertain the thought, “We could really use an aerial view here,” and the animators could create it.

“You can get the exact shots you want,” he says. “You can get a shot of some birds flying by [for instance]. There’s so many opportunities and you can be very precise in your storytelling. I hadn’t experienced that before, actually.”

At one point in the film, a young Amin fantasizes about actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, “the Muscles from Brussels,” hinting at a gay identity that would emerge as he got older. Rasmussen and team animated that sequence, and even put in a light touch with the animated Van Damme suddenly winking at Amin.

“I thought that was really important to have this in the film, so you don’t just see the harrowing things, but you also see the very human aspect of having a sexual attraction to Jean-Claude Van Damme,” Rasmussen says. “Everyone had their own things when they were kids, like who you fancied, and Amin’s was Jean-Claude Van Damme, and I thought that was fun. I just thought we need to have that in there to crack open the emotions that the audience would have towards the subject.”

That moment created a bit of a filmmaking dilemma, however. Apparently, you can’t just have Jean-Claude Van Damme wink at will, even in the form of an animated character.

“Fair use [applies] to this, so we needed to find a wink in one of Van Damme’s films because we couldn’t just make him wink—that would be ‘interpreting’ something,” the director explains. “I went through a lot of Jean-Claude Van Damme films to find somewhere where he winked so we could copy that and put it in the film.”

Flee has won dozens of awards around the world for best documentary, and almost as many in animation. It was named Best Animated Film at the European Film Awards, the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, and by critics’ groups in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities.

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“Being a refugee, it’s not an identity.

It’s something you live through, it’s a life situation, life circumstance.

And, yes, Amin is a refugee, but he’s so much more and I was hoping that I could show that with this film.”

—Jonas Poher Rasmussen

“It’s very cool, and I’m really happy, especially for all the animators behind it, because it’s their craft,” Rasmussen says. “That they get recognition as well is really amazing because they’ve done such an amazing job to translate Amin’s testimony into this format that you don’t normally see.”

Amin settled in Denmark in the 1990s at a time, Rasmussen says, when Danish society exhibited much more willingness to accept refugees. That has changed in recent years with the tide of migrants who have tried to cross into Europe, fleeing war and chaos in Syria and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

“The tone and debate surrounding refugees is really, really harsh here and it’s very polarized,” Rasmussen says, an observation that will sound familiar to Americans coming out of the Trump era. “I started out wanting to do the story about my friend, but then the refugee crisis hit Europe in the process of making the film. I thought, ‘OK, I really want to give refugees a human face.’ And also hoping that I could give some more nuance to refugees because it’s told from the inside of this friendship. I hope it changes people.”

He adds, “Being a refugee, it’s not an identity. It’s something you live through, it’s a life situation, life circumstance. And, yes, Amin is a refugee, but he’s so much more and I was hoping that I could show that with this film.”

That Flee has resonated with many viewers has touched both the filmmaker and his subject.

“The reception has been overwhelmingly positive.

It’s been really amazing to see how people can relate to the story, even if they’re not refugees or gay,” Rasmussen says. “I know it really means a lot to Amin, because he’s kept it a secret for so many years.”

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After they won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2019 for their thrilling Free Solo, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin went underground—in a manner of speaking.

They tunneled into the true-life story of kids trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand for their filmmaking follow up, The Rescue, a documentary that has put the married couple back in contention for an Oscar nomination.

Free Solo posed enormous cinematic challenges—capturing every angle of climber Alex Honnold’s daring ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan rock face without aid of ropes. But if anything, The Rescue presented even greater obstacles.

“So often in documentaries you come across people with tons of footage and no story,” Vasarhelyi says. “We had a great story and no footage. Period.”

A team of amateur cave divers from Britain and Australia assembled in 2018 to try to save the stranded children—members of a youth soccer club—and their coach. But very little of the brave attempt had been documented on camera.

“The cave is pitch black,” says Vasarhelyi. “The water is muddy. No civilians were allowed to film. No civilians were allowed in the cave, except for the divers. Half a world away, and then a pandemic. And then there’s also a rights grab, where one studio owned the children’s rights and their story and then another studio owned the divers’ rights. There was every possible constraint you could imagine.”

Fifteen films earned a place on the Oscar documentary feature shortlist, but only five will go on to score Oscar nominations. In that fiercely competitive race, National Geographic boasts two contenders—The Rescue, and Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave. Heineman went inside a hospital in Queens to document the impact of Covid as it decimated the New York City area in spring 2020. He admits it was “terrifying” to enter a hospital environment just as the pandemic was exploding.

“We knew so little about the disease. We knew so little about how it spread,” Heineman recalls of those early days of the outbreak. “Every day there was so much inspiration from the people we were filming with. And I think the importance of trying to humanize this issue, but also find those moments of love and connection that we were witnessing every day, pushed us to keep making this film.”

Heading toward the Oscar nomination announcement, two nonfiction features stand out as big favorites for recognition: Flee, and Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). The pair are far and away the most honored docs of the past year.

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson DJ’d the Oscar ceremony last year, but as director of Summer of Soul he could find himself with a different seat at the ceremony this time.

The Rescue

Faya Dayi

STRANGER THAN FICTION Dynamic stories jostle for position on the documentary feature shortlist

By Matthew Carey “When making this movie, I truly didn’t have an inkling that this was going to be anything above the radar of what’s sort of normal for me,” Questlove says.

“This is beyond my wildest imagination.”

The film from Disney’s Onyx Collective, Hulu and Searchlight Pictures has earned widespread acclaim for rescuing the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival from unjust oblivion. In that summer long ago, Black audiences witnessed some of the most extraordinary African American musical talent ever gathered in one place: Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, a 19-year-old Stevie Wonder, and so many more. The concert series was filmed with the idea of turning it into a television special, but at the time none of the TV networks demonstrated any interest. For more than half a century, the footage just sat around collecting dust.

“I walked into this really just wanting to tell an accurate story… about a really beautiful moment in history that got neglected,” Questlove says. “All of a sudden, the universe is opening in ways that I could never imagine before. I’m elated right now.”

Jonas Poher Rasmussen, the Danish director of Flee,

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declares himself similarly stunned by the reception for his film, winner of the top prize for international documentary at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

It uses animation to recount the journey of Rasmussen’s friend, Amin Nawabi (a pseudonym used to protect his subject’s anonymity). Amin grew up as a gender non-conforming kid in Afghanistan, then fled his homeland just before Kabul fell to the Mujahideen in 1989. After a long ordeal he arrived, alone, in the small Danish village where Rasmussen lived.

“I was 15. He was 16, and he stayed in foster care with a family, because he came all by himself,” the director remembers. “We became friends. I was always curious about why he arrived, but he didn’t want to talk about it.”

Later, after Rasmussen became a documentarian, the friends discussed the possibility of Amin sharing all he had gone through to reach the West.

“I called him up and asked him again if he wanted to tell his story [through] animation. And he finally said yes, because with the animation we could make him anonymous,” Rasmussen says. “It’s traumatic experiences that are hard for him to talk about. So, he really didn’t want to make a normal film where he would then meet people in the street who would know his innermost secrets and his traumas.”

Neither of the friends anticipated the film would ever wind up being in Oscar contention.

“I just talked to him and he said when we got started, he thought, ‘OK, if this is going to screen on local Danish TV, that’s going to be great.’ And now here we are,” Rasmussen marvels. “For both of us, it’s really a crazy ride.

Neither of us expected to be where we are today.”

Internationally themed documentaries have gained traction in the Oscar race in recent years, thanks in part to the addition of more international filmmakers to the Academy’s doc branch, which determines the shortlist and the nominees. Last year, the Romanian film Collective earned an Oscar nod, as did The Mole Agent out of Chile (the nature film My Octopus Teacher, which won Best Documentary Feature last year, came out of South Africa).

Along with Flee, the international contingent with a strong shot at Oscar nominations this year includes Faya Dayi, from Mexican-Ethiopian director Jessica Beshir. She returned to a village in Ethiopia where she lived as a child to make her film, a poetic documentation of the way khat, a chewable stimulant, weaves throughout the culture and economy.

“Shooting the film over these last 10 years became a way to reconnect with my childhood memories,” Beshir says, “as well as to bear witness to the stories and voices I encountered.”

Janus Films released Faya Dayi. HBO, meanwhile, is behind two international-themed contenders, Simple as Water and In the Same Breath.

The latter film, directed by Nanfu Wang, examines how both the Chinese and U.S. governments used propaganda to shape the narrative around the Covid crisis. Chinese authorities at first minimized the scale of infection and

Simple as Water

Flee

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In the Same Breath

punished anyone who revealed details of the spreading illness. When the virus initially arrived in the U.S., the Trump administration also downplayed its seriousness and sidelined some government experts who warned of the looming catastrophe. Social media in this country also became a cesspool for pandemic conspiracy theories and false information.

“The [political] systems seemed to be the opposite— democratic versus authoritarian. But they are making the same mistakes,” Wang says. “You see that misinformation, lack of transparency exists in China. But just because there is freedom of speech in the U.S., it doesn’t mean that there is closer free access to the truth. It just means the misinformation in the U.S. also spreads freely, too.”

Simple as Water, directed by Megan Mylan, documents four families impacted by the civil war in Syria, including a mother and her four kids stuck in a tent city on the busy dock of a Greek port. They crossed the Mediterranean in a boat full of desperate migrants, and tragically lost their youngest boy to the unforgiving seas, one of thousands of children and adults who have died on that perilous journey.

“Everybody remembers five or six years ago in the Mediterranean the crossings—Syrians and other migrants— really intensified. At the time, I was the mother of a three-year-old,” Mylan said at a recent Q&A, explaining her motivation to make the film. “I just got pulled into morning after morning reading coverage and listening to radio. Again and again, it was photographs of parents cradling their children and helping them up onto the shore… If you make documentaries for a living and something like this takes hold of you, [you think], ‘This is probably something I should do.’”

Ascension, Jessica Kingdon’s riveting exploration of modern China and its emergent class divides, is staking a strong claim to an Oscar nomination. She documented the super-rich, the highly aspirational middle class and the mass of workers streaming into cities in search of opportunities. One unforgettable sequence takes place in a factory that manufactures sex dolls.

“That one was an example of the most extreme type of exploitation. It’s like you’ve made a commodification of the human body and the commodification of this desired intimacy but can’t really buy that,” Kingdon says. “Even though it seems like it is the most [extreme] site for exploitation, the women workers seem to have a good rapport with each other, and you see them sort of tenderly caring for the dolls, in a weird way, and also caring for one another, teaching each other how to do this work.”

The 15 contenders for Oscar nominations are spread evenly between a variety of distributors: Ascension, for instance, from MTV Documentary Films, Julia from Sony Pictures Classics and CNN Films, Attica from cable network Showtime, Writing with Fire from Music Box Films, and, notably, the streaming platforms. Apple Original Films competes with two music-themed docs: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, and The Velvet Underground.

Netflix, which has claimed the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary for three of the last four years, can point to only a single contender in that category this year—Robert Greene’s Procession. The streaming juggernaut’s best shot at more Oscar doc glory this time around centers on the short documentary category, where it has four films in contention.

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“I tried to give a reality to some of the dresses.

Even though they were crazy, they did come out of some kind of reality, because I think if audiences can believe it to some extent, they actually enjoy it more. They connect more.

It was a balance.” —Jenny Bevan

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THE ART OF CRAFT How Cruella costume designer Jenny Bevan created functional looks for a punk fashion rebel

By Ryan Fleming Illustrations by Thom Botwood

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“This is from the photobomb [scene] when the dumpster truck backs up as the hapless Baroness is about to give her speech,” says Bevan. “In the original script, it says that it was the Baroness’s 1967 spring collection that [Cruella] has managed to get hold of and attached to the train. That’s why it had spring colors and pale colors on it. And then you have the newspaper because, obviously, she’s in a dumpster truck, so you want some rubbish.

“The whole thing was put together by the wonderful Kirsten Fletcher, who’s an Australian cutter-maker, and who is known for spectacular clothes. We practiced it in our workroom. We put one of our cutters in it and made her walk incredibly simple. A lot of props and a lot of fabric attached to a very long piece of calico.”

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“One of my great memories of the late ’60s, early ’70s is the use of military jackets, Bevan says. “Mine was a guard’s jacket and you wore it with jeans, or you wore it with a big skirt. I thought it’d be a great image, as she stepped onto the car, to use that that military jacket.

The skirt had to be just the right weight, so A, she could walk in it, and B, she could swish it, and it would land in the right place.

So, there were logistics involved.

There are a massive amount of man hours in the sewing, and the gluing, and sticking, and everything, particularly in [this dress]. It had the most ridiculous amount of petals, all sewn on by hand.”

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Musical savant, fashion maven, provocateur, philanthropist.

When multi-hyphenate Lady Gaga first added ‘leading actress’ to the list with 2018’s A Star is Born, she was Oscar-nominated.

Now, she’s back with House of Gucci. Can Ridley Scott’s film cement her path as a major movie player? Antonia Blyth meets Gaga to dig into the real story behind the star.

Photographed exclusively for Deadline by Josh Telles

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n the Ridley Scott-directed House of Gucci, Lady Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, the notorious ‘black widow’ who had her husband Maurizio Gucci murdered. And much has been made of Gaga’s deep dive into Patrizia—the nine months spent speaking in her accent, the ‘cloud of black flies’ she felt followed her on set, the granular research she put in—but as a conceptual artist who has always created a 360-degree experience with her music and its videos, and with a personal style that transcends trends and leans towards performance art, could there be any other way than actually living as Patrizia? Certainly, everything Gaga does has taken a full-bodied approach, including the shoot for this piece. “We were able to create something that had artistic value and life to it,” she says of the pictures. “I felt that the imagery was graphic, but also indicative of an artist, which is something that I care a lot about when I’m working. We’re not modeling, but we’re creating something that’s capturing a moment in time.”

Here she discusses the potential pitfalls of her immersive method acting, whether she plans to direct a film and the surprising historical figure she’d love to play next.

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You’ve been compared to artists like David Bowie for taking a conceptual approach. Why did you feel that urgency to essentially I don’t always know that the way that I express and articulate myself as an actor lands as close to home as it could. But the truth is, because I am such a conceptual artist, like you said, and I really inhabit my creations, it is almost entirely impossible for me to imagine being an actor in any other way than this. I’m inside of a world, and it’s like altering your reality in order to get to at the truth.

Patrizia had her own reality, and it’s not mine. So, in order to find her truth, I have to turn the knobs in my brain, my heart and my body, and I have to find the similarities between us and live it. When I’m able to live it, I feel that I can then uncover the truth of her humanity, which is that she is a killer, but at one point she wasn’t. She also was a child before she was the Patrizia that we see in the film.

So, this immersive process that I go through is something that endlessly gives to me. It’s a way for me to learn about people. And especially playing a real person, it was really essential for me to stay inside that and discover her.

Being that empathic is quite a dangerous place to live. You’ve been very open about your mental health struggles. Does it feel risky to

“PEOPLE DO LOVE TO WATCH WOMEN FALL APART. BUT THEY LOVE TO WATCH WOMEN FALL APART ON FILM AND IN TELEVISION. WHEN WOMEN FALL APART IN REAL LIFE AND ARE VIBRANT AND PASSIONATE, WE’RE CALLED CRAZY. WE’RE CALLED BITCHES.”

Above: Gaga as Patrizia, working the party circuit. Left: arguing with Gucci CEO Domenico De Sole, played by Jack Huston.

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“IN ORDER TO FIGURE OUT WHY SHE DID IT, I HAD TO TRACK IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE LENS OF SURVIVAL. SURVIVAL AS A WOMAN, I THINK, IS A VERY COMPLEX NARRATIVE.”

It’s definitely my way. I’ve definitely lived life on the edge of art.

I think that when you fully sacrifice yourself to art, there’s a real transformation that can take place where you’re able to touch painful things about yourself. I think otherwise you may not go to that place inside you, because it’s so painful. But in art, in a movie, you’re asked to embrace the pieces of yourself that are undoubtedly survival mechanisms, perspectives, childhood trauma, child brain versus adult brain.

All of your life experiences become something that’s inside of a library, and it is a dangerous process to go into that library to work.

Anyone can read lines and dress up. But to put your entire library into a character, I think is more the way that I like to work, because I know that I’m using all my books and I don’t use the books I don’t need. There are some books in my library that are not Patrizia, but there are so many that are.

I think it allows for me to tell the story of Patrizia not just in the way the world—or in the way Italy—saw her, but in the way that they saw her. Meaning, the story of many women all over the world who age and get disposed of who try to be advisors to men and get pushed down and told that they don’t belong.

How did you personally relate to that to play Patrizia, the way women are disposed of?

What part of us as women, when we’re sent into that blind rage, is activated? I believe it’s the part of us that’s protecting the little

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girl inside of us, and saying, “When I was young, I didn’t know this would happen. When I was young, I was taught to be beautiful to matter; I was taught that I needed a man to get down on one knee for me to matter; I was taught that if I married someone successful, that I would be a good woman. And I’m now being taught that none of these things matter. I’m now learning that this is all one big giant gaslight. And I’m protecting that little girl.”

From left: Patrizia forms a dubious allegiance with Maurizio's cousin Paolo Gucci, played by Jared Leto; in a dress made from the famed Gucci monogram fabric.

this way, and now you’re taking it from me because I see it that way.”

Ridley Scott approached you for this not long after A Star Is Born.

As a woman in her 30s, you’ve had these moments of, “Wait a minute, I’ve been duped,” right?

I think that it’s something I relate to deeply, certainly on a personal level. I often say women are gaslit since birth. But I think it’s something a lot of women share in common, this fear of, “Well, if I’m over 30 and I’m not married, or if I lose my looks at this time, then I’m not going to work anymore.” Or, as an actress in this industry, “My face has to be frozen in time in order to get a job.” Everything from being in the entertainment industry as well as just being a woman in the world has informed my opinion on this, and I think a lot of women can relate to that. Or the women that I’m close with, the community that I connect to.

I think also there’s this idea that radical love is valuable and that it’s painful to lose that. To feel that your whole life you had a vision for life, and to have it taken away from you because someone says you saw it wrong. And you say, “But I saw it because you taught it to me that way. I grew up in a man’s world and you taught me to see things

the dream come true in this way?

I think that the pressure that I always feel is internal. It has less to do with the nature of the project and more to do with: does this project have heart? And so, I didn’t feel pressure in any other way than to show up as a professional and do my job as the leading actress.

I think being the leader of something is important, and showing up to set prepared, knowing the way that he shoots, learning about the way that he shoots. He’s an architect, the way he sets up the cameras. And sometimes there’s rehearsal, sometimes there isn’t, and he moves [the camera] with a lot of momentum.

But when we met each other, I knew, because he said to me, “She really loved him, and he really loved her. They were really in love.” When he said that to me, I knew it would be a story that was complicated and wild and unassuming, and that it would have a ferocious nature to it in the way that it would be told, unlike the

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“I’VE BEEN CALLED ‘SPICY’ BEFORE. I REALLY DISLIKED THAT, SPICY. IT’S LIKE, WHAT IS THE FLAVOR OF A WOMAN?”

way it had been told before.

The story challenges the idea that Patrizia is just some so-called ‘crazy’ woman who went off the deep end.

I’m grateful to Ridley that he celebrated a performance that challenges that notion. Patriarchy is dangerous also for the men, because they are so toxic in this family and business system that they’re fighting over Gucci; fighting over money and privilege. They are blind to the indelible abuse and fight that they’ve put this woman through, as she’s tried to just simply belong.

So, there was a related story, where it was not about a killer that was born a killer and was just using her body her whole life to put herself in some circumstance where she would end up rich. Rather, she believed she was doing what was best and was doing what she needed to do to survive.

These patriarchal systems, they are ultimately poison, and the men were poisoned, too. So, I appreciate that Ridley allowed me to tell that story.

I think being immersive allows you to look at your life and look at what you want to say and put it into a performance that’s then bigger than me, bigger than Patrizia, bigger than the movie. It’s about the world.

The Lost Daughter. She was talking about how there’s this trope about a woman that does something objectively terrible—she leaves her children—just as Patrizia does something objectively terrible

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here. But these stories are nuanced. Patrizia is this passionate, intelligent woman who feels things so deeply. Obviously, it's not a simple case of she didn’t get what she wanted so she killed him.

No, it’s actually the opposite in a way. She did get what she wanted.

She just lost everything she loved.

The decision to play her as a passionate woman came from ethnicity and the culture of being Italian. I mean, I’m Italian-American, I come from a long lineage of Italians. And Italians are passionate, vibrant people. To Americans, who might go to Rome and hear women yelling in the piazza at each other, they would hear them as yelling when they’re simply just speaking to each other. There’s something about the way when you’re speaking to each other, it sounds like you’re yelling, but really, it’s your culture, it’s your ethnicity. It’s the culture of grind, of hard work, of the celebration of family and love. So, to me, that type of animal had to be inside of her.

When Patrizia married Maurizio, he was not rich, and when he was murdered, they were divorced. So, there was never a moment that it was only the money. So, that realness, that vibrancy, the passion…

And yet people still love to apply these labels to her, like ‘crazy’, ‘gold digger’, and so on.

People do love to watch women fall apart. But they love to watch women fall apart on film and in television. When women fall apart in real life and are vibrant and passionate, we’re called crazy. We’re called bitches. We’re told we’re too much.

I’ve been called ‘spicy’ before. I really disliked that, spicy. It’s like, what is the flavor of a woman? Patrizia’s flavor was her DNA and it was a product of her upbringing. It was also the product of being incessantly put down by this system of men.

What I always wanted was to portray her in the way that I believed, which is that she has true and real regret at this point in her life. That she regrets this murder. In order to figure out why she did it, I had to track it all the way through the lens of survival.

Survival as a woman, I think, is a very complex narrative, and I tried to weave the story of many through her.

Her pain was painful to watch. Like when she tries to give him the photo album to inspire him to return home to his family.

Thank you. I appreciate you saying that, because I really felt it deeply.

All the immersive preparation and studying you did for this role—the year and a half you spent living as Patrizia, speaking and moving like her, watching videos of her—Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates used to call that their ‘kitchen work’. Meaning, it was like chopping the vegetables for the soup.

I think that’s a beautiful metaphor. What I like about it is there’s a gentleness to it that I think is often not associated with method acting. In a way, there was not always a gentleness to the way I played Patrizia. But this idea—this sort of meditative process of making a really good soup and the alchemy of being the chemist in the kitchen—this is exactly [what it is]. I love Kathy. I worked with her on American Horror Story. That metaphor really resonates with me.

The way that I used to describe the way I worked on this to people is, I put all of the ingredients into a cauldron; I put in the biography of her that I’ve written, I put in the accent, I put in the script, I put in all of the traumas, I dig through my own library, I contribute my stories. And then I drink the soup. I study the animal. And then I show up on set and Ridley yells action—or Ray [Raymond Kirk], our AD, yells action—and I throw it all out the window and just talk to the actor.

When you were deep into your method and sense memory work on

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“WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I WAS TAUGHT TO BE BEAUTIFUL TO MATTER. I WAS TAUGHT THAT I NEEDED A MAN TO GET DOWN ON ONE KNEE FOR ME TO MATTER... I’M NOW LEARNING THAT THIS IS ALL ONE BIG GIANT GASLIGHT.”

Clockwise, from far left: With Adam Driver as Maurizio Gucci on their wedding day, and scenes from the fateful ski trip that signaled the end of their marriage.

like somebody coloring your vision. It’s like putting on glasses, tweaking your brain, tweaking your heart, and just adjusting. A new physicality. New sensibilities. And your heart center, like I said, the center of gravity.

Patrizia’s center of gravity is so different than mine. All of those things have to shift like planets, and you have to find a new orbit.

And yeah, that orbit, it will fling you around the universe when you are performing with such great actors. I mean, Adam’s an incredibly brilliant actor. And we spoke in our accents constantly to each other on set. So, I was not the only person in character the whole time.

set, and you were faced with Adam Driver as Maurizio off-camera, how did you react to him?

I faced a wide spectrum of emotions all the time, and it spanned across all the characters that I worked with. It was wild and free and exploratory and completely immersive. And because I had consent from my fellow actors, and because we had mutual consent and professionalism and trust, we were able to freely immerse ourselves in this space. I didn’t feel in any way that I had to curtail or edit my work for any other actor.

I don’t think anyone on set felt that way either. I think we were all given a sandbox to play in. But the sandbox, just to articulate it, was a real story and real lives, and something really tragic and horrible took place. So, it’s like nobody at any given moment would have said, “You’re doing this wrong,” or, “This is too much,” because we were all always working towards finding the truth of this story.

But yes, it does get complicated. You feel all sorts of things when you’re on set. And off set when you’re living in the character.

When I spent time with Paolo [ Jared Leto] on set, I was with Paolo. I was never on set as Lady Gaga, and I was never in my trailer as Lady Gaga. I wasn’t in Italy as Lady Gaga ever. And I wasn’t there as Stefani either. But I brought Stefani with me, because I needed my little girl to align with Patrizia’s little girl, so that when I was protecting her, I would protect her.

I’m inside of myself when I’m working. I’m in there. It’s just that I’m in there through the lens of somebody else. It’s

The real Patrizia has told the Italian press that she wasn’t happy about you playing her. You’ve explained previously that you didn’t want to meet her, to collude with her or enable her in any way, and that you feel for her daughters. But how did it feel to inhabit a real person without their blessing, knowing she resented it, even?

I have to be honest; I don’t think that Patrizia’s blessing would’ve been meaningful to me. Because she did this reprehensible thing, and all the research that I did of her, I watched a lot of video footage of her and all of the footage of her after his death, and she is very clearly willing to speak of him as excessive and outrageous.

Later in her life, after prison, she has this grandiose way of building herself up as this charismatic woman with lots of bravado; this powerhouse who had Maurizio Gucci murdered. She seems to me to possess this quality where she really wanted to drive the narrative of this famous story. And all of that to me was a total lie, and a total coverup for the pain that I knew was inside of her. And I’ve studied this very closely to get it right.

So, I did not feel the need to have her blessing. I think the blessing that you need is when you are on a world stage—the way that I am very often—is that of the audience. And when the audience embraces you and trusts you to tell them a story, that’s the blessing that I need. Someone sitting in a seat in the theater and trusting me that I’m going to be expansive and thoughtful and loving and true.

I don’t think the world has heard from her in a real way. So that’s why I wanted to play her in a real way. I did my best to get there.

Did you shoot chronologically? Because being method and in character, if you didn’t, how did you handle that non-linear timeline?

We did not shoot chronologically. We actually shot very much all over the place. In fact, the beginning of the film was shot at the end. But then also a lot of the beginning of the film was shot at the beginning, too. So, we had to go back and forth.

Wasn’t that stressful for you, since you were really living as Patrizia?

What anchored you?

It wasn’t stressful because I was so studied in the script, and I was very clear about each scene. I was very clear about the hair and the makeup. Everything was designed by me, as well as Haus of Gaga. My entire creative team, we pitched something to Ridley that was then ever-changing as we began to work with [costume designer] Janty Yates every day.

Just in the alchemy of being on set, things become more inspired.

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But we had a bible, essentially, that we were always referring to.

And that was a breakdown of the script in terms of the story, where she was in her life, what her hair was like at that time, the way she dressed at that time, her makeup at that time, her nails at that time.

Her accent at that time, meaning at some point, my voice lowers because she started to smoke cigarettes, so her voice dropped. Also, the more she hung out with the Guccis, the more she began to speak like them. And the more she hung out with Pina, the more that she would talk a little bit more like she had a thicker Naples edge to her.

So, I guess I would say there was a lot of preparation and precision behind the madness of also being in character. On any given day, no matter how much I was inside of Patrizia, we had a bible to refer to, but we knew exactly what we were going to do. It’s like drawing a map through the labyrinth.

My script is completely marked head to toe. And then there’s a separate script that’s just for hair and makeup alone. I mean, there’s writing on every single page. It’s my heart.

Also, all the work I did with Susan Batson, my acting teacher.

All the work I did with Beatrice Pelliccia, who was my dialect coach on set, and she worked with me every day. Your blood, sweat, and tears are in this bible and inside your body. And then you walk to set and you just get to fly because Ridley’s so ready for you. And if you’re ready for him, then it’s the runway for lots of doves to take off and fly.

I can’t help thinking the next natural step for you would be to direct a film or show. This is essentially what you’re doing in your head already.

I’ve directed my own music videos before. It’s something that I want to take my time on. I’d liken this to people asking me years ago if I would be a fashion designer because I loved fashion so much and

“IT’S THE STORY OF MANY WOMEN, MANY WOMEN ALL OVER THE WORLD WHO AGE AND GET DISPOSED OF, WHO TRY TO BE ADVISORS TO MEN AND GET PUSHED DOWN AND TOLD THAT THEY DON’T BELONG.”

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I was seen in so many high fashion editorials, as well as art pieces.

And I remember saying, “What fashion designers do is not what I do, but I do love fashion.” Meaning, I’m not a film director. But I could be. I would have to devote a significant piece of my life to that, if not all of my life, the way that a passionate artist does.

I have made short films for my own music videos and I love them and cherish them. But they’re eternally mine and inside of my own life and the rapture of my existence. To tell a story, I think, requires an authenticity and knowledge of filmmaking that I very much would want to study, the way that I’ve studied acting. I studied acting since I was 11 years old. Even younger, I started to dance and to sing. And I was a classical pianist when I was really young. I loved art. But I studied and I practiced.

So, what I would say is I’m interested in it, yes, but it’s something I would want to practice and to become nuanced and nimble. And I would never want to say that I could be great at something that I was not enough of a student of yet.

Speaking of fashion, how much you did you dig into the classic vibe of Gucci, especially the pre-Tom Ford period? Did you talk to anyone at Gucci?

I did speak to people. I don’t want to say who. I also spoke to other fashion houses and other people in fashion about the family, as well as [about] Patrizia Gucci herself. I also did a lot of research in terms of what the brand really stood for from the beginning. Guccio Gucci started Gucci and it was really a leather brand. It was all about the leather of these sacred cows in Tuscany that were raised for Gucci.

The monogram Gs—the thing we all see and know and recognize as Gucci—was actually established by Aldo Gucci.

So, I knew when Tom Ford was brought on that something really grave was taking place in terms of what was an Italian family business, which is that by bringing in Tom Ford, an outsider, and not an Italian also, and moving away from this being just an operation of the family treasures, in terms of the designs, what happened was there was a shift in gravity. The center of gravity of Gucci changed from being a family-oriented business, to now being a brand that was going to intersect with other great brands around the world.

What’s very interesting in the film—and I’m not sure if people think it’s true or not—is the moment where Patrizia confronts Aldo Gucci about the counterfeit bags that she discovers. This is something that really happened. He was profiting off of counterfeit Gucci goods and people thought that they were buying a copy when they were down in Chinatown, when in fact they were buying a replica that the family was profiting off of.

So, she’s trying to clean up the business, and keep the family together, and the joke is on her. They were going to do what they wanted to do. There was no infiltrating that system. It was really chaotic, but it was born of heart, which is something I can relate to as an Italian-American. Being inside of a family that’s passionate and chaotic, but for there to be heart that keeps everybody together, because of family. Simply the name, in and of itself, would make a Gucci cry or hug each other. They were one hell of a family.

You’re close to your own family. What was that like for them seeing you being Patrizia and speaking as her?

I started off speaking to my parents towards the beginning in my accent. And then I will say, I sort of dropped off a bit in terms of interaction with my family, just because it’s confusing. We still spoke along the way, it’s just more how much I forced them to deal with me was relatively boundaried and loving, because I understand that my process is very much that of an individual that has a way of doing things. But also, I would call my father and talk to him, and he would laugh. My family finds me interesting and

From top: The Milan premiere of House of Gucci; at New York's Lincoln Center, from left, Al Pacino, Gaga, Ridley Scott, Scott's producing partner and wife Giannina Facio and Jeremy Irons.

it helps me to not feel like an imposter, but rather to know that I’m uniquely and truly myself, wounds and all.

Did that decision to open up on the show feel especially timely?

I think my true dream for the world would be that we socialize women’s issues such as sexual assault, and maybe not use the word ‘sexual’ and just call it ‘assault’. I think that when you apply the word sexual, it implies that there’s something sexy about it. Assault is assault. And I think that women, from a young age, experience assault all the time, and our bodies sort of learn to protect ourselves.

We start surviving as we experience these assaults.

What I would wish for the world is that it would be less of a reveal from famous people in Hollywood, and that there would be a more profound conversation around the way that young people are related to in inappropriate and criminal ways—abusive ways—from when they’re very young.

All types of people experience assaults, and it’s part of the nature of society. We are so comfortable with this poison because we just say, “Well, that’s how it is.” I really challenge that and I wish to say, “But what if it was not that way? What if every time somebody was touched without consent and was assaulted, we paid attention?

What if we talked about this?”

I think a lot of people don’t feel safe in their bodies, and there’s a reason why. I wish that the conversation would shift from Hollywood—or even from people like me speaking out—and would shift more towards the everyday person who might look more closely at their life and ask themselves if they’re in an environment that is healthy for them. We have to challenge those systems, and we have to clean them, or we have to destroy them and rebuild them.

quirky, and they celebrate my quirks.

Recently on Oprah’s show The Me You Can’t See you talked about a sexual assault you experienced at age 19. How did you decide to be transparent about this trauma?

I think that for me it was just a healing process because I’m in the public eye often. At the time when I first started to come out of things that I was going through, I was in the public eye very frequently and followed all the time. I really felt like I was living this big lie by not sharing what I was experiencing. And it actually helped me to share my life experiences because then my fans—or people that were following me, people that were discovering me—they knew more of the human side of me. I just felt more comfortable in the world. It’s like living in your truth.

I was with Jake Gyllenhaal the other day, Maggie’s brother, and we were talking about his film [The Guilty]. I believe the quote at the beginning of the movie is like something like, “It’s the truth that will set you free.” And I really believe that. I think when you live in your values and your truth, it can help you. In my particular existence

Having played a real person now, is there anyone else in history you’d really love to play?

You know what, I always wanted to play Mary Magdalene. But I think that’s because I was fascinated by her growing up, because she was seen as this harlot that was essentially Jesus’s girlfriend and she washed the feet of Christ. She’s in so much iconography, she has an iconic existence, and she’s so important. She was there at the ascension. She was also there at the crucifixion. She’s this essential piece of history, but she’s also seen as a dark figure, a harlot. She’s very much The Scarlet Letter.

I wrote a song about her a long time ago called “Bloody Mary”.

And in those lyrics, it’s, “Love is just a history that they may prove/ And when you’re gone, I’ll tell them my religion’s you/ When Punk-tius comes to kill the King upon his throne/I’m ready for their stones.” So, it was all about this woman that was willing to do anything to love who she believed to be the greatest gift to Earth.

I always thought that that could be interesting, the story of her. I guess I’m interested in women’s stories.

And you said you’re interested in the value of great love.

I think love is essential. I think that kindness is the only perfect system. And yet it causes... For the yin and yang of life to occur, where there’s kindness, you will also find evil and defeat.

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BEST PICTURE BEST DIRECTOR Kenneth Branagh • BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

“THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR.” “Director Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Belfast’ stands as a monument to the power of childhood memory. A tenderly crafted cinematic memoir.”

“A SOARING CINEMATIC ACHIEVEMENT.” 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 ENSEMBLE CAST

© 1995 SAG-AFTRA

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Caitríona B a lfe , J u d i D e n c h , J a m i e Dor nan, Jude Hil l , Ci ar án Hi nds, Col i n M o r g a n Untitled-5 1

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OF THE YEAR Jamie Dornan Ciarán Hinds • BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Caitríona Balfe

WINNER National Board of Review Best Supporting Actor - Ciarán Hinds

WINNER Dallas Film Festival Audience Award

WINNER

WINNER

AFI Special Award

Montclair Film Festival Audience Award

American Film Institute

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Middleburg Film Festival Audience Award

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KENNETH BRANAGH

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WINNER

People’s Choice Award

Twin Cities Film Festival Best Feature Film Award

Toronto Film Festival

Mill Valley Film Festival Overall Audience Favorite

WINNER

FILM

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1/19/22 5:26 PM

The B e s t O f 202 1 | Con te n d e rs

Asghar

FARHADI

A HERO

Coming out of the Cannes Film Festival, where A Hero When I start writing my script at the very beginning, everything comes from my heart and there is no planning beforehand. I never thought this would be a story people would be watching in 2022 and therefore I had to make some changes to the script. But as time passes and the older I get, things happening around me have an impact on me as well. Maybe there are some angles with the story where, if it was made 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have as much impact as it does today.

How important is the rehearsal Yes, the rehearsal period is very important to me. I do rehearse a lot and most of it happens before shooting starts because during the shooting, we don’t rehearse that much. These rehearsals are not just to help the actors, I actually think it’s more to help the director and making the backstory for the actor. Usually during rehearsal, I don’t write, or touch the screenplay as much acters. When we go to the production, we don’t really rehearse that much. It’s like an orchestra that is ready, and they just go there and play their music. —Dade Hayes

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Kristen

STEWART LARRAÍN

& Pablo

SPENCER

Pablo, Jackie and Spencer are obviously telling very different stories, but the moment of Diana’s death was a seismic event for the world, as JFK’s assassination had been. Did you see any point of connection there between these two movies of yours?

Not in that sense, because I think that the royal family is a very English mythology, whereas Diana is universally personal. It’s not the same, and I think the reason why people care about the royal family is because they’re fascinated themselves on her. I think that Spencer and Jackie are very different movies. Maybe because we shot that assassination so graphically—in that movie, we wanted to do it graphically. Everyone who had shot the assassination of JFK before had done it from afar, and we put the camera right in the car because we wanted to see the impact it had on her. But with Spencer, we went in the other direction. It’s way less graphic because we’re not even in that moment [of her death].

Kristen, what was the mood like on set considering the darkness at the heart of this story?

Oh man, the weird thing was how much fun this was to me. It’s like a weird high. There was an absolute intoxication exceptionally sad and heavy. Pablo described the movie like a meteor that we were passing back and forth, and it was burning. There’s a hysterical nature to that. But also Diana was such a wonderful person that we felt her light refracted all over our set. And even if it was just our imaginations coming to life, through our imaginations she connected us to each other, and it felt like taking drugs. It felt so cool, so good. It’s so fun to be strong and powerful and funny and sexy. —Joe Utichi

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Jonathan

MAJORS

T H E H A R D E R T H E Y FA L L

Had you always wanted to be a cowboy?

I grew up in Texas, so the cowboy lifestyle, or culture, is part of the fabric there. I’ve got some people in my family who are rodeo people. There are so many facets to it, you’ve got the rodeo, you’ve got the roping, you’ve got living on the farm. I don’t think I had an inorganic egg until I went for Westerns, because it’s in my blood nity to show that and experience that.

How did the outlaw role appeal to you?

I’ve been expelled from almost every institution I’ve been in, so, again, that’s something that’s in my blood, I guess.

The gunslinging, it’s a beautiful thing.

The hero of the West, and heroines of the West, is an archetype of what it is to be free. These people are outlaws, they have no rules, they are governed by their internal workings, so in some ways it’s the most, or gives you the chance to be the most human you can be. —Tom Grater

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Ruth

NEGGA

PA S S I N G

When you read the script, what was it about your character, Clare, that got your interest?

Clare piqued my curiosity because I was sort of half in love with her, half appalled by her, and I thought that had more to do with me than her, because I think I was sort of aghast by the temerity she had to just speak her truth and be herself at the cost of appearing irritating sometimes, saying the wrong thing, being too much, which women are accused of a lot, women of color especially. I loved that.

I loved that bravery, and I loved the apparent freedom she felt to be herself. But, you know, when you look deeper, there is a cost to that, and she is very much aware of that. But you get the feeling that something in her allegiance to her own integrity is something that, to her, is priceless, and she defends it at all costs.

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What discussions did you have with co-star Myself and Tessa, we kind of have the same energy and approach in terms of being open. A lot of acting is actually just being open to receive and listening and what happens in that space between. You can prepare all you want but once you get into the set or the stage, it’s what happens then and there. I think if you’re really committed to the story, if you’re committed to a character, if you’re committed to your director, then that will come. It’s like dancing. I’d dance with Tessa anytime. —Diana Lodderhose & Dominic Patten

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Kirsten

DUNST

T H E P OW E R O F T H E D O G How did you prepare to bring your character to life and capture the torment she felt?

The shooting schedule presented some unique challenges for you as well.

Damon Wise

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Benedict

CUMBERBATCH

T H E P OW E R O F T H E D O G

Pete Hammond

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Rebecca

FERGUSON

DUNE

Did you know Frank Herbert's novel Dune before you took the part?

I didn’t have a relationship to Dune at all. It was all very new to me. But it was enough for me to sit on a Skype with [director] Denis Villeneuve. He’s cheeky, mischievous and he’s curious. Those qualities are what lure me in. When someone’s a very good talker, you’re drawn in and it has power. So, when you meet someone like Denis, who can verbalize in quirky ways and use gestures as he explains all this to you, I’m blown away. Done. I’m sold on this story. And then I read the script. I’d already said yes before I read the script, but reading it, I didn’t feel like I wanted to change a thing. I didn’t feel a female suppression, which I often do. It was a script that had been dissected so carefully that there was time to follow the journey of everyone.

Your character, Lady Jessica, is part of the Bene Gesserit, a female-led order who are basically pulling the strings of the universe.

She was ahead of her time in 1965, and still is. What’s wonderful is the fact that this male writer—Frank Herbert—was enlightened and felt the urge and necessity to describe this sisterhood who are connected ancestrally to be able to manipulate the universe. marrying off their children and making alliances to build stronger communities. That’s basically the Bene Gesserit, right? —Joe Utichi

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Kenneth

BRANAGH BALFE DORNAN

Caitríona Jamie

B E L FA ST

Kenneth, Belfast has seemed to resonate with audiences right from its opening weekend.

How did that meet with your expectations?

Curiously, with the darkness of some of the subject matter, there’s an enormous amount of joy in the

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Caitríona, what did you make of playing Ma, and how she held the family together?

One thing that was really apparent in the script was how much compassion and empathy that Ken had

Jamie, you're from Northern Ireland yourself. How did you respond to the script?

sprinkled a wee bit here and there where we had to, but so much of the work was done for us and we just Dominic Patten

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Andrew

GARFIELD

TICK, TICK… BOOM!

You had seen Hamilton so you knew the level of expectations from Lin-Manuel Miranda, and yet, when Lin asked you if you could sing, with no professional experience whatsoever, you told him yes. What were you thinking?

I know [laughs]. Foolishness, pure foolishness. You’re right.

You’re absolutely right. But I think it was the exact reason I had to say, “Sure, I can get there.” Because it was Lin, and because Hamilton was on repeat on my phone. There’s no way you can turn that down. It was in the peak of my obsession with Lin and all his brilliance, and I was just overwhelmed. I guess I knew somewhere deep down that I could get to a place where I could honor the thing. I knew I was a hard worker. It wasn’t an immediate thing. Lin said, “Go and see Liz Kaplan,” who is the vocal consultant on the movie. “Go see Liz and see how it feels.” It was basically texted Lin and said, “I think he can get there given the amount of time we have.” That was it, really. There’s also some kind of cliff-jumping, adrenaline junky thing about it for me. I love expanding, I love stretching, I love being scared. It’s not addiction, but it’s important for me.

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You said you felt a connection to Jonathan Larson. What inspired that?

So many things. The fact that I’m a creative person that has questioned, most days, whether I should be carrying on doing what I’m doing, or whether I have the chops, whether I’ll make it.

How terrifying it still is to step onto stage or onto set, every time.

Having to work through rejection and doubt. And then having that small voice inside, like Rilke talks about in Letters to a Young Poet, saying, “I must write, I must act, I must.” Whatever it is that we feel called to, that the world is testing us and really making sure we’re serious about that calling. It’s the artist’s initiatory journey. It’s like every single artist has to go through this. —Joe Utichi

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GYLLENHAAL

T H E LO ST D A U G H T E R

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Antonia Blyth

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“UTTERLY LOVABLE.

THIS IS PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON OPERATING AT FULL CAPACITY. A MASTER AT WORK. Licorice Pizza is a thrilling culmination of his talents, a film he could have only made at this point in his ludicrously virtuoso career.” – EMPIRE

“ALANA HAIM LIGHTS UP THE SCREEN IN

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WINNER

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ATLANTA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE BOSTON SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS COLUMBUS FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION FLORIDA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE GEORGIA FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION OKLAHOMA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

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BRADLEY COOPER

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1/20/22 2:47 PM

Reinaldo Marcus

GREEN

KING RICHARD

You took on the story of a very well-known person who seems like someone you don’t want to disappoint. How did you handle that?

I grew up with a father kind of like Richard, who wore those short shorts, and I know very well what it was like. In his mind, he was raising a pair of professional athletes third of our lives on a baseball diamond. I knew what it was to be out there, striving for something. It didn’t work out. Now my fastball topped out at 88. We grew up in a similar community to Compton. I’m the same age as Serena, my brother is close in age to Venus, so that upbringing spoke to me.

What kind of input did you get from the sisters?

Thank God for Isha [Serena and Venus’ sister] because she could at least show us how to hold a racket and do things with no tennis acumen at all. She introduced us to Oracene and we got to meet Serena and Venus and ask them questions. In sitting down with Venus, she said to us that Serena is the kind of sister that would miss a match to see her practice. And that's a kind of unbreakable bond. Growing up with a brother, I understood that. That’s not something that you play with, that’s real.

You don’t see that, you see sibling rivalries in a way that they’re beating each other up and they can’t stand each other, and that wasn’t their story, so why depict it in any other way? The common thread was how much Richard and Oracene loved those girls, how much time they gave to their kids.

And all the sisters say how close they were.

—Antonia Blyth

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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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Martha

PLIMPTON

M ASS

How did you prepare for the role of mother of a child killed in a school shooting?

I didn’t do much research because I didn’t want, or I didn’t feel the need, to try and reinterpret or do an interpretation of someone else’s experiences. I think Fran’s screenplay was so immaculate and so precise, and he had been so painstaking in working on it, I just felt that Gail’s story was enough. And that’s how that worked for me. I know that others might have done it differently, but that was what it was for me. And, honestly, that’s where I went back to every time. I’ve described it before as Fran’s script being like a piece of music and for a musician who reads music you can sit down and look at it before you play it. And that’s just what I think in my own way I did, and what each of what he wanted and needed.

How was working with director Fran Kranz? enough to let go and let us take the script and do with it what we needed to do, and that was a very safe room, extraordinarily safe and a brilliant, generous thing of him. —Antonia Blyth

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

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“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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Simon

REX

RED ROCKET Your character is, honestly, quite a despicable person.

How did you approach that aspect of the role?

He is a very horrible person, so I thought I needed to make him somewhat likable and charming and boyish and maybe he doesn’t mean to do these things, so the

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?

Joe Utichi

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PHOENIX FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

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VES GUILD AWARD NOMINEE

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“‘DUNE’ TRANSPORTS AUDIENCES TO NEW WORLDS AND IMMERSES THEM IN A VISION SO PURE THAT THE POWER OF ART IS FOREVER PROVEN. THIS EPIC VISION IS PAINTED WITH THE BRUSH OF A MASTER,

DENIS VILLENEUVE, WHOSE EXQUISITE ADAPTATION MINES ITS RICH SOURCE MATERIAL TO REIMAGINE ONE OF POP CULTURE’S SACRED TEXTS AS AN EXPERIENCE THAT IS TRANSPORTING, INTOXICATING – AND ENTIRELY CINEMATIC.”

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Olga

MEREDIZ

IN THE HEIGHTS

Your character Abuela Claudia delivered an emotional performance of the song “Paciencia y Fe”.

In a show, when you’re seeing a number on stage, you deliver it from beginning, middle and end and there’s a climax and subway system, three levels down over a three-day shoot, out of sequence, so it was very challenging because usually because it was shot out of sequence. So, that was very challenging. And, we did it in three days in two different subway I went in at 5:30 and came home at 7:30 in the morning after singing all night.

Jill Goldsmith

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“WILL SMITH GIVES THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS LIFE. AUNJANUE ELLIS GIVES A MAGNIFICENT PORTRAYAL.”

“THE ENTIRE CAST SERVES UP ACES.”

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