Deadline Hollywood - AwardsLine - Oscar Preview/Nominees - 02/21/22 by Deadline Hollywood

F E B R UA RY 2 1 , 2 0 2 4 OSCAR PREVIEW

ATOMIC BOND HOW

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN AN D

CILLIAN MURPHY BLEW UP THE B OX O F F I C E

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On The Cover

ON THE COVER: Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan photographed for Deadline by Josh Telles.

First Take 4 MARK RUFFALO: No more Mr. Nice Guy for the Poor Things star. 8 QUICK SHOTS: The Zone of Interest’s unseen Holocaust horrors and Napoleon’s revolutionary world of warcraft. 10 THE ART OF CRAFT: Barbie costume designer Jacqueline Durran plays with her dolls. 12 FRESH FACE: Society of the Snow’s Enzo Vogrincic is waiting for your script. 14 A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH: Documentary filmmakers are risking their lives to bring back stories from the frontline. 16 ON MY SCREEN: Nyad’s Annette Bening reveals her childhood home was alive with The Sound of Music.

Cover Stories 20 DROPPING SCIENCE: Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy discuss the making of Oppenheimer, and year’s biggest movie—and Oscar’s safest bet?

Dialogue 30 STERLING K. BROWN 32 AMERICA FERRERA 34 ILKER ÇATAK 36 PABLO BERGER

Handicaps 38 Pete Hammond guides you through “the first truly great crop of contenders since the pandemic”.

The Partnership

SA N D R A H ÜL L E R BY M I CH A E L BU C K N E R FO R D E A D L IN E

44 JUSTINE TRIET AND SANDRA HÜLLER: How a chance meeting led to the French awards-season smash Anatomy of a Fall.

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GOING ROGUE How Mark Ruffalo threw out expectations and changed tack with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things By Antonia Blyth

ATSU SH I N I SH I JI M A . SEA R C H LI GH T P I CT UR E S/ E VE R E TT C O LL EC TI O N P H OTO C R ED I T

B A R B I E C LOT H E S 1 0 | D E AT H LY D O C U M E N TA R I E S 1 4 | A N N E T T E B E N I N G 1 6

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A C A D E M Y

A W A R D

N O M I N A T I O N S

BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR BEST ACTOR PAUL GIAMATTI • BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS =: OBG> CHR K:G=HEIA BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY =:OB= A>FBG@LHG • BEST FILM EDITING D>OBG M>GM ACE

WINNER

G O L D E N G L O B E AWA R D C R I T I C S C H O I C E AWA R D

BEST ACTOR

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

C O M E D Y

PAUL GIAMATTI

DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH

SCREEN ACTORS PRODUCERS GUILD OF SCREEN ACTORS G U I L D AWA R D A M E R I C A AWA R D G U I L D AWA R D OUTSTANDING MALE ACTOR OUTSTANDING FEMALE ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE IN A SUPPORTING ROLE DARRYL F. ZANUCK AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING ®

NOMINEE

BEST PICTURE

PAUL GIAMATTI

PRODUCER OF THEATRICAL MOTION PICTURES

DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH

WINNER

BOSTON SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS

DALLAS-FT. WORTH FILM CRITICS ASSOC.

WINNER IOWA FILM CRITICS ASSOC.

BEST PICTURE

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Mark Ruffalo has taken a turn. “I’m so sick of being so well-behaved,” he says. “I just want to take the ship as close to the reef as I can without actually crashing it. And maybe I’ll crash it too. I don’t give a shit anymore.” It’s fair to say that prior to his Poor Things role, Ruffalo’s credits are littered with likeable men: Jen Garner’s lovely best friend Matt in 13 Going on 30; the right-side-of-justice Inspector Toschi in Zodiac; real-life environmental activist Rob Bilott in Dark Waters; the abuse-exposing journalist Mike Rezendes in Spotlight… Even his Marvel franchise Hulk is deeply loveable. That’s not to say Ruffalo’s work has remotely one-note— the man has been Oscar-nominated four times—but there’s a quality of sincerity that lends itself to the full-hearted men he has played. So, it was hard to imagine Mark Ruffalo as a cad. A proper, moustachetwirling, lock-up-your-daughters cad. But then came Yorgos Lanthimos with his Poor Things script. He was set on Ruffalo to play the predatory, pompous, all-round-awful Duncan Wedderburn—a narcissistic nightmare of a man who steals Emma Stone’s Bella away from her Frankenstein-esque ‘father’, played by Willem Dafoe. The Duncan character was so wacky, so out there, that initially, Ruffalo tried to talk Lanthimos out of casting him. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m the right person for this,’” he says now. “Yorgos said, ‘Yes, you are. You are him.’ He just laughed at me, basically.” In Poor Things, Duncan whisks the much-younger Bella away on a cruise, expecting adoration and admiration with zero complication. He is the picture of toxic masculinity with a vast ego and lots of shouty posturing, but unfortunately for him, his new girlfriend is actually resurrected from the dead with a baby’s brain implanted in her head. Bella has no knowledge of propriety, no sense of shame or societal expectations, and operates only on logic, curiosity and pure joy. So, while Duncan enjoys her enthusiastic, unapologetic love of sex, she also gives his money away to the poor and steamrolls over his machismo, unnoticing. Consequently, his psyche implodes in shock. It’s an incredible role and an utterly unexpected choice for Ruffalo.

Has Lanthimos ever said how he knew Ruffalo had it in him? “No. The last time I talked to him, he was just like, ‘You’re a terrible dancer.’” Lanthimos gave Ruffalo no notes at all. Before shooting, he encouraged Ruffalo to look at some examples of dance and movement, beginning with a Belgian dance-theater company called Peeping Tom. “There’s a thing they do called Triptych. And there’s one particular thing he showed me [in Le Salon]. It’s this beautiful dance-acting-movement piece. It’s a husband and a wife and their baby, and the whole time, they’re kissing and they’re turning and they’re on the floor and they’re up. Their mouths never leave each other, and it’s the most beautiful moving, sexy thing. Yeah, he didn’t give me any notes. He wasn’t like, ‘I think this character is like this.’ He just handed me that.” And, during shooting, there continued to be no notes. One sign that Ruffalo was on the right track was if Lanthimos laughed. The other was if Lanthimos said the words, “That’s enough of that.” In rehearsal, when Ruffalo figured out that Duncan had to be really big for it to work, Dafoe had thoughts. “Willem was like, “You’re really going to do that? Really?” Ruffalo says. “But I was kind of like, ‘Fuck it.’” And somehow, Ruffalo’s eye-roll-y physical comedy, his timing, his olde-worlde plummy English accent and puppy-dog pathos, even his dancing in an unforgettable ballroom scene, complement Stone’s unabashed Bella. The role stirred something distant and long-forgotten in Ruffalo. “It reminded me a lot of my early theater days, where I was just very courageous and kind of dangerous,” he says. “For some reason over the years, I’ve been keeping it very restrained, and

PAR AM O UN T/ PA R AM O UN T C LASS IC S./ M ARVE L ST UD IO S/ EV ER E TT C O L L EC TI O N

Mark Ruffalo in Zodiac.

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PAR AM O UN T/ PA R AM O UN T C LASS IC S./ M ARVE L ST UD IO S/ EV ER E TT C O L L EC TI O N

all the parts I’ve been playing called for that. This is a part that no one would’ve expected me in.” If Ruffalo’s previous roles were “restrained” as he puts it, it’s tempting to wonder what influenced that outlook. Back in 2001, he was riding high. His first big movie You Can Count on Me, opposite Laura Linney, had been a hit at Sundance the year before, and he’d finally been able to quit bartending after 12 years. He was on the set of The Last Castle with James Gandolfini and Robert Redford. His wife Sunrise Coigney was about to have their first baby. Life was good. Then, one night, he had a strange dream. In it came a direct message of doom. “It wasn’t even a voice or a scene playing out,” Ruffalo says. “It was just, ‘You have a brain tumor, and you have to deal with it immediately.’ It was just this clear knowledge.” That knowing was so strong that Ruffalo got a CAT scan. And he did have a brain tumor—one the size of a golf ball. Surgery followed, and he lost some feeling in his face, some hearing, and his career, all at once. “People were like, ‘He has AIDS. He’s a drug addict,’ because I disappeared,” he says. “There were all these rumors going around Hollywood, and I had to drop out. I was cast in an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I was going to co-star with Mel Gibson, and they were going to pay me a lot of money. And it just all evaporated. I thought I was going to die. We had a baby, and then 10 days later, I had my brain tumor removed. I had this newborn, and we were starting a life, and my career was now suddenly gone. So, it just was like, ‘I have to fight for this, and I have to survive somehow.’ I looked at death, but I also looked at not being an actor. What am I going to do? And really, when you spend your whole life trying to do one thing and then all of it’s gone, it just gives you a different relationship to it all.” So Ruffalo fought back, and then some. “I was just so much more desperate,” he says. Now, at 56, with a stellar career under his belt, he is, as he says, in the mood to sail close to the shore, to even crash the ship. “You get to an age in Hollywood, and it’s like you’re on the other side of it a little bit, and it’s starting to feel like that for me. I love acting, but I was also like, ‘Huh. Have I reached what I’m able to do now?’ The internet and social media brand you, and it just feels very oppressive in a way. I didn’t really realize how oppressive it was feeling until I was doing Duncan, and then I was like, ‘Oh, my god. I haven’t been able to really…’ Everything I’ve done is very creative, I think, and I’ve gotten to explore things that I wanted to explore, and express things that I wanted to express, and I don’t mean to take anything away from that, but it just started to feel a little bit like I was stuck, and it was a languishing feeling.” But the wild-card character has peeked through a little in his past choices, he says. He notes there was even a flavor of Duncan in his 2010 film The Kids Are Alright. That role was “sort of in the line of Duncan. I’ve gotten to play some characters that are reminiscent of Duncan, like the baby seeds of Duncan. Even You Can Count on Me, that character,

Ruffalo with Emma Stone in Poor Things.

From left: Ruffalo with Rory Culkin in You Can Count on Me; Ruffalo as the Incredible Hulk.

they’re these ne’er-do-wells that you sort of love.” He mentions, too, that he played The Kids Are Alright role as an homage to his brother Scott, whose murder in 2008 is still unsolved. As a father, Ruffalo has leaned into the themes of Poor Things, like what it might mean to remove all societal oppression from a young woman. “What I immediately thought was so great about it, what was so clear, was that she’s totally in control of her own sexuality. She’s a fully-grown, physically developed woman who’s never had any of the conditioning... My girls tell me, ‘It sucks being a girl.’ By age 10, they were already like, ‘I don’t want to wear girls’ clothes, because I don’t like the way I’m being treated as a girl.’ And so, they were really aware of that conditioning, and the movie slaps that in the face.” And then there’s the exposure of Duncan’s paperthin self, his toxic masculinity, and the societal expectations of men, too. As Duncan breaks down sobbing, completely shattered by Bella’s indifference, Lanthimos and Ruffalo show us something that goes well beyond plain old blame and shame. “I have women friends that I know that say, ‘I love Eve Hewson as Flora. Duncan. I was really pulling for him. I felt so bad for him,’ or guys were like, ‘Man, I didn’t know what to make of that dude. But at the end I was like, oh, god, poor guy. I felt a lot of sympathy for him.’” We’ll see Ruffalo soon in Bong Joon-ho’s muchanticipated Mickey 17, and Ruffalo pulls a thread between that role and Duncan too. It’s “another pretty brave performance”, he says. “It’s pretty far out there, and he is not a good guy. He’s a protofascist a little bit. They’re both narcissists in their own [way], and they’re timely, these characters, I feel like. These men, they’re up for discussion right now. They’re all around us, the hubris billionaire boys who just get whatever they want, but are just so fragile... It’s our shadow, it’s the unexpressed animus of the deeply fragile male psyche. I think it’s scary for a lot of men, including myself at times, but it’s all about totality, the wholeness of your personality and identity and coming into balance yourself.” He pauses and checks himself. Ruffalo can surely play the hell out of a villain, and he’s absolutely smashed the good-guy character mold, but now he stops and smiles apologetically. He can’t help it. “I’m a guy, so I might be talking out of my ass,” he says. A

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A Symphony of Horror The Zone of Interest sound designer Johnnie Burn on creating a powerful soundscape to contrast a family drama

The Zone of Interest

two was very important for director Jonathan Glazer, who told Burn that he had no interest in showing any images of the atrocities. “He said we were going to use people’s collective memory of photographs and things that people have seen to draw pictures in people’s head with sound.” Burn found the balance between too much sound and too little to be difficult to

figure out. “Initially, we put a few gunshots in and a few cries of pain throughout the whole film, but we watched that and realized that didn’t do it justice.” In his research, Burn says he became more “scientific” in his approach, learning how many executions would take place per day by gunshot and the idea that the sound from the crematorium should be omnipresent. “The

Planning A Revolution

too much, too little thing is so key, because the responsibility of getting it right for the victims and survivors was paramount. A lot of that was attention to detail in terms of volume, but also choosing sounds that could be ambiguous. Is that a train horn, someone screaming or just the baby in the house. ‘What am I hearing?’ was a powerful tool.” —Ryan Fleming

How Napoleon’s production designer Arthur Max set the stage for a torrid romance and military action

Napoleon

For Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, production designer Arthur Max needed to find a French aesthetic in the U.K. “One of the great pleasures of this project was searching for France in the United Kingdom. Architecturally, there is a great deal of late 17th century and 18th century architecture that would pass easily for the baroque style of new classical France.” To recreate the interiors

of that period, Max and set decorator Elli Griff did extensive research, with the help of a friend who had access to the Bibliothèque nationale. “Anything that came up, any sort of quirky little notion that was written about Napoleon’s habits or Josephine’s lifestyle, or anything to do with the battles or the revolution itself… we were lucky to have access to the best research possible.”

“I look at this film and describe it as a blood bath and a mud bath, because the weather in England wasn’t helping anybody.” For war scenes, such as the Battle of Waterloo, Max needed to build a landscape for the battles, as well as military tent camps. “To get the scale was a challenge, because the Battle of Waterloo involved a couple hundredthousand troops with all nations

represented… and we had 500 live extras a day and maybe 50 horses.” The planning was extensive, using physical models and accounting for visual effect extensions. “Everyone is in Ridley’s war room—he actually called it the War Room. Working with Ridley is like going to war, because there’s always the planning stage and the tactical stage of actually making the film.” —Ryan Fleming

KEV I N SCA N LO N / A 2 4 / SO N Y PI C T UR ES E N TE RTA IN M EN T

“I can’t think of another film that uses sound to such a narrative degree and with such juxtaposition,” sound designer Johnnie Burn says. For The Zone of Interest, Burn was tasked with creating the soundscape for a family drama set in the shadow of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. “We actually saw it as two films. The family drama of the people in the house, that’s the film you see, and then a second film that you hear, almost as if you shut your eyes, you’d kind of see a different movie,” he said. The separation between the

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“AN EXCEPTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT… TO MAKE AN INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCE CARE SO DEEPLY ABOUT A PLACE THAT’S TYPICALLY IGNORED BY THE WORLD’S NEWS MEDIA.” D E AD L I N E

A C A D E M Y A W A R D® N O M I N E E B E S T

D O C U M E N T A R Y

F E A T U R E

WINNER

DGA AWARDS

BAFTA

WINNER

IDA AWARDS BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

NOMINEE

OUTSTANDING DIRECTORIAL ACHIEVEMENT

BEST DEBUT BY A BRITISH DIRECTOR

CINEMA EYE HONORS AUDIENCE AWARD

“ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR.” TH E WAS H I N GTON P OST

“A PORTRAIT OF UNFATHOMABLE COURAGE...

A TESTAMENT TO THE STRENGTH OF A PEOPLE UNITED.” TH E P L AY LI ST

“RIVETING... A CLARION CALL AGAINST AUTHORITARIANISM.” SAN F RAN CI S CO CH RON I CL E

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“There are some replications in things and specific references, where it’s almost like Easter eggs for the fans, but they’re not really the same,” says costume designer Jacqueline Durran. “The main thing I wanted to happen is that I wanted Barbie fans to go to the movie and recognize Barbie as the Barbie they loved.”

THE ART OF CRAFT How costume designer Jacqueline Durran brought a nostalgic flair to new designs in Barbie BY RYAN FLEMING

Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) enter Venice Beach from Barbie Land.

“The idea was that Barbie and Ken arrive in Venice and they look really weird, and the thing is, there’s not much you could do in Venice that would make you stand out and look really weird.” Barbie’s outfit is based on the Hot Skatin’ Barbie doll, but Ken’s outfit was created to match Barbie and wasn’t based on any existing Ken dolls.

The color palette was kept “harmonious” at the beginning to replicate the perfection of Barbie Land, before Ken brought patriarchal influences back with him from the real world.

WA R N ER B R O S .

The neon colors were added to make the pair stand out and the pattern was based on the doll, but created by textile artists.

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“Barbie is always perfectly dressed for whatever she does. So, what would Barbie think would make them fit in America? They think country, so a Western Barbie outfit is going to fit in. It is all following a logic of a set of rules we invented early on.”

“The Barbies at the block party are all in different versions of white and gold disco costumes and reinventions from the ’80s. But all of the Kens are just in a jumpsuit because no one [in Barbie Land] really minds what Ken wears to the party. He just has to match Barbie.”

Ken and Barbie at the block party.

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“Greta [Gerwig] showed me a photo of Sylvester Stallone in a fur coat—he did a bunch of adverts in the ’80s—and it was such a great style statement. I thought, if Ryan [Gosling]’s willing to wear the fur coat, then we can use that as the starting point for Ken’s style.”

Ken after taking over Barbie Land.

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FRESH FACE By Destiny Jackson

Enzo Vogrincic Age: 30 Hometown: Montevideo, Uruguay

WHAT

Bringing to the screen the tragic true story of one of Latin America’s most famous disasters was no easy feat. Nevertheless, the Uruguayan rising star Enzo Vogrincic took on the pressures of grueling pain, fleeting signs of hope and thoughts of imminent death to honor the deceased and the survivors of that accident. In J.A. Bayona’s film Society of the Snow, Vogrincic stars as Numa Turcatti, a passender on board an ill-fated 1972 flight in 1972. When the plane collides with a moutain in the Andes, the survivors find themselves stranded on a glacier for more than two months. Numa serves as both the story’s protagonist and narrator. “This is a story that you know about from the time you’re born,” Vogrincic says, when asked what the role meant to him. “When I heard about casting for this film, I knew it was a story I wanted to tell, because it fills you a sense of pride because they’re Uruguayan, but as you get deeper into the story, you realize it’s much bigger than that.”

WHY

Despite not coming from a line of creatives and thespians, Vogrincic somehow felt an innate pull to the profession. “It’s something that I always ask myself, why I act,” he reflects. “It was something unavoidable for me. I’ve searched the family tree up and down, I can’t find actors, writers, poets… I almost think I did it almost in opposition to them. But it’s very personal; I am creative in everything I do. It’s part of my being. I can’t help it.” The actor credits his time and rigorous six-day-a-week training at the prestigious Uruguayan performing arts school EMAD for giving him the tools to take on the most dramatic roles. From short films to plays to eventually landing his first feature playing a Cristiano Ronaldo-esque soccer star in Martín Barrenechea and Nicolás Branca’s Uruguayan sports drama 9, Vogrincic managed to steel himself in the process of making the jump from theater to silver screen. “It’s quite complex to jump from theater to film acting because you have to turn the acting you do in front of a large audience into a camera right in front of you. And that feels like the camera is seeing your soul.” He says, “That feeling takes time because it’s almost like jumping into the void. You need to pay attention. You need

to be prepared and understand how you can make that change.” When it came to filming Society of the Snow, Vogrincic’s dedication to the craft was put to the ultimate test as the cast and crew braved inclement weather conditions for the grueling five-month shoot. “The hardest thing was the avalanche sequence because it was two weeks and the space on the plane was small. There were 25 people in a very confined space buried in the snow, so it was on our body and skin, and that caused anxiety and that makes you feel a tired and claustrophobic feeling. I even filmed with a fever,” he says. “So, these were very challenging circumstances to film, and the only way to get through it was to know that it was real and that people actually lived through this and had it so much worse. We had to focus and keep filming, because the quicker we did it, the quicker we would be out of there.”

WHEN & WHERE

As for where we’ll see Vogrincic next, the actor explains that he’s still considering his options, but for now, his focus is on enjoying this finite moment and on gearing up for the Oscars. “This movie has been like a window where people can see me and then decide if they want to work with me, and call me for projects. I’m deciding to enjoy the whole process from the beginning to the end, all the way to the Oscars, because I don’t know when something like this might come again. Vogrincic says he is excited to see what roles might come his way next. “I will start reading scripts pretty soon because I’m ready to start acting again,” he says. While he loves the thought-provoking and soulstirring depths of drama that make an actor go “deep within yourself”, he wants to change things up and break bad. “I’d love to play a bad guy. It doesn’t matter the genre, but a character that has an evil side, a dark side, that deep pain.” A

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ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE ®

best documentary short film

Sean Wang’s delightful, gentle film is a celebration of becoming older

“

but also having someone to share your days with. It has an infectious, affectionate energy. What a gloriously sweet and fun film.” AWARDSDAILY

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DEATH-DEFYING DOCS From war zones to dictatorships, Oscar-nominated filmmakers risk their lives to bring the truth to light By Matthew Carey

Moses Bwayo was shot at while making Bobi Wine: The People’s President.

To Kill a Tiger

Director Evgeny Afineevsky headed into the heart of the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine to make his 2015 Oscarnominated film Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom. Peaceful protests against the Russian-allied government turned violent when troops opened fire on demonstrators, killing dozens of people. “I was too busy documenting to worry about the bullets flying over my head or the batons coming down,” Afineevsky has said. In recent years, Feras Fayyad (Last Men in Aleppo), Talal Derki (Of Fathers and Sons), Waad Al-Kateab (For Sama), and Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land) have put themselves in jeopardy to complete their Oscar-nominated films. Going further back, combat cameraman Pierre Schoendoerffer filmed battles between American and North Vietnamese soldiers for his 1967 Oscar-winning film The Anderson Platoon. Chernov is not the only Oscar-nominated filmmaker this year to have faced mortal peril while shooting his film. If not for his camera, Ugandan filmmaker Moses Bwayo might have been killed while making Bobi Wine: The People’s President, which he co-directed with Christopher Sharp. A potentially fatal incident unfolded in November 2020 as Bwayo traveled alongside a motorcade transporting Bobi Wine, the Ugandan pop star-turned-politician who was running for president against the country’s dictator, Yoweri Museveni. “I was on a motorcycle and filming,” Bwayo says. Ahead, security forces loyal to Museveni had erected a barricade. “They started shooting teargas, bullets. This military man makes eye contact with me. And then he puts his gun up, cocks the gun. I had a camera in my hand, so I just put it up to my face. And the guy shot. I was shocked. The projectile hit the camera, and the camera helped change its direction [but the bullet] still hit me in the cheek… I hit the ground, blacked out for a few minutes. I had never felt such excruciating pain.

N AT I O NA L FI LM B OA R D O F CA N A DA / N AT I O N A L G EO GR A P H I C / PB S D I STR IB UT IO N / EV E RE TT C O L LEC T IO N

In the opening moments of 20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov’s chilling account of the siege of the Ukrainian port city, a Russian tank marked with the ominous ‘Z’ swivels its turret toward a hospital. On an upper floor of the building, Chernov and his small team record as the cannon slowly rotates towards them, preparing to fire. “The tank did shoot the hospital right above the floor we were at,” he says. “It hit between the fifth and sixth floors and a patient was killed with that shell.” It was one of many times he put his life at risk to show the Russian army’s destruction of the city and its systematic targeting of civilians. He remembers feeling his life was about to end. “Exactly in that moment in the film, this moment of uncertainty, the moment when tanks are shooting at the residential areas, when the hospital is surrounded and we are trapped, that’s what I’m thinking about,” he recalls. “I’m thinking about my family, about my daughters, the fact that I probably will not make it out alive.” For as long as documentaries have been made, filmmakers have been willing to sacrifice their own safety to tell stories rippling with danger. A number of those films have gone on to earn Academy Award nominations. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington captured ferocious firefights in Afghanistan between the Taliban and U.S. forces for their 2010 film Restrepo (a year later, Hetherington would be killed covering the civil war in Libya).

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“My face swelled, and I was bleeding,” he says. “I just woke myself up very quickly. But shockingly, the guy was literally standing right on top of me, and he was aiming for another shot. And that’s when I started running. And there was a motorcycle going past. I jumped on it and told the guy to drive away. And that’s how I got out of that situation.” His loved ones urged him to abandon the documentary, he says. “Everyone was calling and saying, ‘Look, Moses, you don’t have to do this. This is a brutal regime. This is not going to change.’ But this story, it’s a national story. For the first time in the history of our country, here was a charismatic leader, young, who was offering himself to lead the youth… and the oppressed people of Uganda, to liberate themselves. The story overshadowed the risk.” For Indian Canadian filmmaker Nisha Pahuja, director of To Kill a Tiger, risks mounted the more she pursued her documentary, set in 20 Days in Mariupol India’s state of Jharkhand. The film tells the story of Ranjit, a poor farmer, whose 13-yearold daughter Kiran became the victim of a brutal sexual assault by three young men. Ranjit and his wife Jiganti came under enormous pressure from villagers to absolve the attackers and marry off their daughter to one of her assailants. They refused. “As the case progressed and as it became apparent to everyone in the community that in spite of all of their efforts, the family was not going to drop the case and that they were going to pursue justice, things started to become increasingly intense,” Pahuja says. “The family was threatened, the crew was threatened… There were many, many different ways to try to get the family to drop the charges, but they persevered.” Pahuja and her team were filming in Ranjit’s humble dwelling when angry villagers converged, threatening to burn down the house with the family and film crew inside. It was the culmination of a growing sense of unease for the director, who had rented a house outside the village while making To Kill a Tiger. “I was a woman; I was by myself. I knew that things were tense. I knew that it was problematic. I knew what I was doing was rocking the boat. I was living in this house on my own,” she says. “I was definitely conscious and looking over my shoulder…” On To Kill a Tiger, the presence of cameras served both to provoke and protect. “Our primary concern was the family and how did they feel, and what did they want us to do? Did they want us to keep filming? Should we stop? And they didn’t,” Pahuja says. “They wanted us to keep filming… They understood that the camera actually afforded them a kind of protection. They felt that because we were filming, nobody would ever do anything. They would think twice.” By contrast, Chernov knew that carrying a camera—and wearing a bulletproof vest marked “Press”—would not shield him in Mariupol. The Ukrainian filmmaker says for countries like Russia, “information is a weapon. And by extension, journalists are soldiers, which is a very disturbing thing because that makes us a target, that makes documentary filmmakers and journalists—every person with a camera—a target.” His long experience in conflict journalism—covering wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh and elsewhere for the Associated Press— told him that Mariupol was likely to be a hotspot if Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He headed there hours before Russia attacked, but not before making last-minute preparations to mitigate risk. “We bought extra spare tires; we bought a lot of food. And I remember the night before the invasion, everybody looked at us as crazy people and they were asking, ‘What are you doing? Why do you need two spare

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tires at 3 o’clock in the morning? Why are you buying kilos and kilos of food and dozens of cans of food in the middle of the night?’” he remembers. “And my answer was, “Well, the war is going to start.” We rented at least two places where we could stay in different sides of the city depending on where Russians would be coming from, or if the electricity was [out] in one neighborhood and not in another one. Making Bobi Wine: The People’s President confronted Bwayo with a dilemma—stay in Uganda and tempt fate or leave his homeland and his extended family behind. He says after his wife twice became the target of attempted kidnappings, he made a decision. “That was the point when [co-director] Christopher Sharp, myself, and [producer] John Battsek realized we had to flee the country,” he recalls. “In March 2022, after I shot the last scene of the film, we left Uganda not knowing if we would return.” A sense of a higher obligation took Chernov away from his family to make 20 Days in Mariupol. His youngest daughter was only six months old when the war erupted. After international journalists evacuated Mariupol for safety reasons, the director and his team remained behind, understanding that without visual documentation the world would not grasp the scale of the tragedy—the thousands of innocent children, women and men killed in Russia’s merciless assault. “The worst thing is that when you don’t have a record of anything, this empty space is filled by false narratives generated by the perpetrators,” Chernov says. “I think it is incredibly important to make sure that every shot, every minute that was recorded in Mariupol—but also in other places in Ukraine now, that we don’t necessarily see in the news—is being recorded and preserved, because the time will come when everything will be questioned, everything will be denied. And in that moment, having these records is crucial for Ukraine’s history and for the world’s history.” A

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Annette Bening in Nyad.

ANNETTE BENING By Antonia Blyth

Annette Bening still likes to swim, despite the brutal eight hours a day she spent in the water for her Netflix film Nyad. Bening stars as Diana Nyad, who, at 64, became the first person ever to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. Bening trained for a year to perfect her stroke, and got to know Nyad herself, with Jodie Foster alongside her, starring as Nyad’s real-life friend and coach, Bonnie Stoll. “I swim all the time, it’s become part of my staying sane,” Bening says now, adding that she learned from Nyad that pushing oneself beyond what you thought you could do is “a way to know yourself, and that’s a way to expand your own idea about yourself in the world, and also increase your joy, and increase your appreciation.” Here, Bening looks back over some favorite moments in her career, from The Grifters, to American Beauty The Grifters and beyond. 16

My First Film Lesson It was on my third movie, The Grifters. We were doing a scene outside, and I’m teetering along on these high heels. Stephen Frears said to me, “I want you to stop, then look, then start walking.” So, we did it again, and I didn’t do it, this technical thing he asked me to do. And he came up to me after the take, and he said, “Hey, you didn’t do it.” And I said, “Oh, I forgot.” And he said, “You’re paid to remember.” He was entirely justified. So that was one little thing.

The Best Advice I Ever Received Don’t worry, be happy. It’s a Hindu thing. It’s an ancient thing. It’s a little simplistic, but there’s something to it. My dad just died four months ago, and he was 97. He was a very ‘power of positive thinking’ kind of guy and he had a lot of aphorisms, but one of the things he would say was, “You don’t change people,” and that’s actually really, really deep and smart.

The Part That I Always Wanted I would’ve liked to have played Nora in A Doll’s House. I studied it a lot, and I did some of the play. We worked on it for some project stuff in my acting school. I think Ibsen is such a brilliant writer for everybody, but certainly for women, and that he really did change everything. He changed the way women

N ET FLI X / M I R A M A X / EV E R E TT C O L LEC T I O N

The Nyad star recalls the jobs that challenged her, changed her and made her laugh the most

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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

ACADEMY AWARD ® NOMINEE BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“The Fire Inside” FROM THE MOTION PICTURE

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American Beauty

The Great British Baking Show

My Toughest Role Certainly Nyad was up there. I’ve done a lot of things that were really tough for me. That’s a wonderful thing to be able to say. Challenging is such an important thing, whatever we do, that’s how we grow. Those things are also very gratifying when you try to go out on a limb and do something really different. That’s why when I read Nyad, I just grabbed it and then I had

to figure out, “Oh, shit, now I’ve actually got to do all this swimming.”

The Films That Make Me Cry I love to cry, and I love to cry when I’m watching a movie. Recently, over the holidays, we watched Love Actually. We had a bunch of us all together. And then we also watched, It’s a Wonderful Life, which we’ve done at holidays often. We did it as a family and it was a group sob. We were all crying. What a wonderful feeling that is, I love it.

The Most Fun I’ve Had On Set When we made Ameri-

Love Actually

can Beauty, I had a scene in the bedroom with Peter Gallagher, who’s the king of real estate. I was laughing so hard I thought I was going to die. And he was also laughing. You can’t really see our faces, so it didn’t really matter because it’s sort of from behind. And the fact that made it even funnier was they put up a big sheet, for the light, and the crew were also hiding behind it. Peter is also a very funny person in life. He’s really handsome and really funny, which is such a great combo. I just saw him the other night in New York and we were laughing about that.

The Character That’s Most Like Me I think about 20th Century Women, I think about Nyad, I think about The Kids Are All Right. I think about The Grifters. That’s me. Yeah, I would say I’m in all of them for sure. it’s a curious thing, the skill, the practice, because in a way, you’re escaping yourself, and then in a way, you’re in the most contact with

Kate Winslet

yourself at the same time. That’s all acting is. It’s what you’ve been through and what you can imagine.

My Most Quoted Role Certainly, “I will sell this house today,” is one of them from American Beauty. A lot of people, like general public kind of people, talk to me about The American President. I would say probably those two. But, “I will sell this house today,” for sure.

My Guilty Pleasure Well, it’s not a guilty pleasure, I don’t feel guilty about watching, but The Great British Baking Show. I love it, it’s so fun. It’s also because they’re so kind to the people and they don’t humiliate them. Because I can’t bear the [shows] where they humiliate people. I bake a bit here and there and I enjoy it. I find it really therapeutic.

Who Would Play Me In My Biopic How old am I at the time of the biopic? I would say Kate Winslet. She can play me from 20 to 80, even though I’m not 80 yet. She can do anything. I am such a fan of hers. I mean, there’s a lot of people I love to watch, but I’ve got to say she’s right up there at the top. I think she’s just phenomenal.

My Karaoke Playlist God, I don’t do karaoke. I am so not good at karaoke, and I think the reason I feel that is because I always think I’m going to be better than I am, and then once I start, I’m like, “Oh.” I mean, I used to lip-sync along to albums for sure, when I was a kid. I would lip-sync to The Sound of Music because I had the album and I was obsessed with it. A

D R E AM WO R K S/ N E TF LI X/ A M A ZO N / U N IV ER SA L / EV ER E TT C O L L EC TI O N

were seen. I’d like to play Yelena—too late now—in Uncle Vanya. Are there any that I really want to play that I haven’t, that I still could play? I don’t know, maybe [Hamlet’s mother] Gertrude.

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THE

BIG

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BANG

T H E O RY

OPPENHEIMER is the end result of a chain reaction that began in the mid-1980s, when CHRISTOPHER NOLAN first heard the name in a song by Sting about the Cold War. It continued when he read American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a biography of the father of the atom bomb. Detonation arrived when Nolan began to see the the lead role fit for CILLIAN MURPHY, the Irish actor and frequent collaborator he’d once considered to play Batman. He and Murphy explain to MIKE FLEMING JR. how the stars aligned to build a masterpiece.

Photographed By J O S H T E L L E S

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M EL IN DA S UE G O R D O N / U N I V ER S AL P IC TU R ES / E V E R ETT C O LLEC T IO N

In some ways, Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biggest non-superhero movie, was a product of the pandemic. Until the winter of 2020, the director had been loyal to Warner Bros., and their logo was to be found on every film that Nolan either wrote, directed or produced. While he was never formally tethered to that studio, Nolan had been monogamous as its cornerstone tentpole filmmaker, ever since his 1999 breakout indie film Memento led him to create Insomnia there. That year, however, everything changed. The usually mild-mannered director was outraged by the decision of former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar to perpetrate a blindside dumping of the studio’s entire slate onto its HBO Max streaming service. This attempt to build subscribers for its streaming service at a time few were going to theaters incensed Nolan and many others. The filmmaker was still wounded by the studio’s decision to release Tenet while the world had yet to fully emerge from lockdown. In fact, he didn’t even have a film in the bunch being dumped, but he was nevertheless upset to see films made for the big screen—like Dune, The Matrix Resurrections, Wonder Woman 1984 and future Oscar-winner King Richard—drop day and date. As much a warrior for the traditional theatrical experience as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, Nolan decided he would look elsewhere; no idle threat when you consider that the movies he directed there grossed north of $6 billion (more when you consider the DC films he produced or godfathered). When Deadline revealed that Nolan would make Oppenheimer, and that Cillian Murphy—still riding high on the success of showrunner Steven Knight’s period gangster series Peaky Blinders— would likely play the title role, the news landed like a bombshell. Every studio responded by chasing it, and there were rumors that Warner

Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy on set.

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JOSH TELLES

“ I K N E W I T WA S H U G E. T H I S WA S N ’ T J U S T A PAR T YO U C O U L D T U R N U P AT A N D G E T G O I N G. ” - CILLIAN MURPHY

WAR NE R B R O S ./ N E TFLI X / E VE R E TT C OL LEC TI O N

Bros. might not even get a meeting. The lucky winner was Donna Langley, NBCUniversal Studio Group Chairman, who, like several other studios, agreed to Nolan’s ask for $100 million to make his movie, along with creative control and a massive global theatrical release. “I’d wanted to be in business with Chris for a long time,” she says, “and he was always near the top of my blue-sky wishlist of directors. Just as movie fans, whose movies do we love? Chris’s name was always close to the top of that. And from a strategic standpoint, as we were coming out of the pandemic, it was very clear to us that the cinematic experience needed to be undeniable in order to get people back into movie theaters. Chris’s work is undeniably cinematic. He makes films for the audience to see in the movie theater. And so that became a strategic imperative for us.” Her determination to land the project increased when she read the script. Juggling multiple timeframes, Oppenheimer explains how the work done by scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the early 1940s—the top-secret Manhattan Project, based in Los Alamos—led to the creation of the atomic bomb and the end of the Second World War. It also deals with Oppenheimer’s guilt, and how the American establishment turned on him once he’d served his purpose. In there were two career roles, one for Irish actor Murphy as Oppenheimer, and another for Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the bureaucrat nominated to be Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Strauss was so insecure about being snubbed by Oppenheimer, Einstein and other geniuses while a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that he would try to play silent assassin to Oppenheimer’s reputation by staging a controversial hearing to revoke his security clearance and render him a pariah. “I was just transported by it,” Langley says. “I was so relieved that it wasn’t a mind-bending, twisty-turny, science fiction extravaganza that I needed an encyclopedia to understand. This was a story about a living person and a moment of time and history. It’s one of the best screenplays I’ve read in my career.” It was a script with all the trappings of a Christopher Nolan movie—shifting timeframes, complex characters—and it had an emotional core that struck Langley deeply. “It’s very intimate on the one hand, but it also has a giant scope,” she notes. “The world is on the point of collapse, there’s technology and innovation being chased after by multiple countries, and America has to be first in the race to get there. At the time, being deep into the Ukraine war, I was really struck by how resonant and relevant the story was. And as Chris put it to me, ‘This is the greatest American story never told in cinema.’” Kilar is long gone now, and Warner Bros. is a

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more theatrical-friendly place, as theatrical has become the priority for event films once again. Nolan won’t say whether this was a one-time fling, but it is hard to deny he saved his best film for Universal. Unusually for a three-hour, non-franchise film released in July, it has made a near-billion-dollar gross and is widely believed to be the Oscar favorite, receiving 13 Oscar nominations that put the film in the frame for Best Picture while recognizing Nolan for writing and directing, and Murphy, Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt for their work in the acting categories.

hristopher Nolan vividly remembers the time first he ever saw Cillian Murphy: it was a photograph in a newspaper, probably the San Francisco Chronicle. The director was staying in a hotel in the Bay Area, writing and rewriting the script for Batman Begins, while at the same time scheduling screen tests for the lead role. At the time, he didn’t know who was going to play Batman. He was, he says, “just looking to see who was out there.” What caught his eye was an image from Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie thriller 28 Days Later: though Murphy was covered in blood, the actor’s bright blue eyes provided stark contrast to the bleakness of a new reality spent eluding flesheaters. “It was a cool photo,” says Nolan, turning to Murphy. “You could see your eyes, and your presence. I was just very struck by it.” “Had you seen the movie then?” asks Murphy. “No,” says Nolan. “I literally just saw a picture. I then watched the movie, but the truth is, I already was interested. These things are very instinctive, and that’s the relationship that an audience has with an actor as well. It’s an instinctive and instant connection. So, yeah, love at first sight. I see the picture and I’m like, ‘Man, that guy’s got something.’” Nolan invited him to LA for a meeting. They met, connected, and suddenly Murphy was on the Caped Crusader shortlist of actors Nolan tested for the role that ultimately went to Christian Bale. “But I think at the time you were quite a bit… more slight than you are now,” recalls Nolan. “You walked in, and I remember thinking, ‘Are you really going to be able to be Batman?’” Still, Nolan was interested to see what Murphy was capable of, shooting a screentest with the actor reading some of Bruce Wayne’s scenes. He shot them in 35mm on a Warners soundstage with full, professional lighting—“Because I really wanted the studio to really be able to see what this was going to be”—and the results surprised him. “I just remember a sort of ripple of excitement going through the crew,” he says.

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“Hollywood crews, particularly, they’re very professional, but quite jaded. They’ve seen a lot of stuff, so you don’t often get that kind of thing where you feel everyone is paying attention.” Murphy wasn’t expecting to get the part. “I remember knowing it was a test,” he says. “From my point of view, I was already a fan of Chris’s work and I just wanted to get in the room and audition. That would have been enough. I was totally content at that stage of my career just to say, ‘Oh man, I was in a room with Christopher Nolan, and we worked on some scenes.’ And then he called me out of the blue. I did not expect him to say, ‘Well, how about this other part?’” That other part was the film’s main villain, the Scarecrow, which marked a significant shift in the Batman franchise. “I don’t remember having any resistance whatsoever to having a relative unknown take on a big part like that,” Nolan says. “And previously all those villains were played by actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jack Nicholson. They were the biggest stars in the films. But no, [the studio] got it. They were all blown away by the test.” So, what made him right for the villain but not Batman? “I don’t think he had the physicality at

is we’re talking about here, you’d figured it out. That’s an iconic character with an oppressive presence, where he walks into the room, and everything goes quiet, and he owns that space. In the way Batman does, or an iconic character of that kind. There’s a physicality that’s extremely confident and strong in everything he does, in every gesture.” He pauses. “Is that a conscious thing you’ve developed over the years, or was it just looking at that part and thinking, ‘How do I do that?’” “I think it was both,” says Murphy. “But I also think I felt, back then, that that was a part I hadn’t really explored before, that kind of physically imposing character. I’d never been offered those parts. But I always think, Chris, that one of your underrated strengths is casting. Everyone knows all of your amazing strengths, but you cast things exquisitely. And I think the Scarecrow was the right part for me to be in at that time in my career.” So, what makes an actor right for the type of role he was wrong for earlier? “I’ll tell you a story,” says Nolan. “I was talking to one of the crew, Nathan Crowley, who designed the Batman films. He told me he had seen Peaky Blinders. I

From left: Murphy with Christian Bale in Batman Begins; as Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders.

the time,” says Nolan. “We tested everyone as Bruce Wayne and we tested them as Batman, and the thing that Christian had that was so striking was that he understood that so much of acting is about reality. So much of acting is about emotional truth. And when you put on a costume like the Batsuit, you have to become this icon. Christian had this crazy energy that he just directed. He’d figured out how that worked and what that would be—the way Bruce Wayne does in the film. He adopts this persona. It’s a very specific thing. And he tore a hole on the screen as Batman. It was like, there was no question.” Nolan turns to Murphy. “But it was interesting watching Peaky Blinders years later and seeing you play Tommy Shelby,” he says. “Whatever it

hadn’t. And he said to me, ‘Yeah, Cillian put on all this weight for the part. He’s big.’ I watch it, and I’m like, ‘That’s not what it is, it’s not that.’ I mean, maybe he did put some bulk on, maybe he’s just getting older and more filled out. But that’s not what I saw. I was like, ‘No, this is physically the same guy, but he is using his gift, his instrument, to project scale in a way that I hadn’t seen before.’” While it took him time to summon that presence, Murphy agrees that it had more to do with craft than physical bulk. “When I was a kid, about 16, I had the great privilege of seeing Jonathan Pryce play Macbeth at the National Theatre in London,” he says. “I had only seen him in films like Brazil, and he was a fairly slight guy. I watched him in real

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life play this huge role and he just seemed like this enormous force. It was about projecting.” “I don’t know how you do that,” says Nolan. “And it’s probably something you don’t like to be too self-conscious about, but what I saw you do, what Tommy showed me, that’s what I saw, was an ability to transcend your own physicality, your body, and work beyond that and make people see this character in a different way. I mean, that’s the gift of great actors. And I don’t know how it works, but I’ve seen it.” “I don’t know what it is either,” says Murphy.

hatever that elusive quality was, Nolan knew he needed it to tell the story of Robert Oppenheimer. From his feature-length debut, the sleight-of-hand thriller Memento, to the Dark Knight Trilogy, and the boundary-bending likes of Inception, Interstellar and Tenet, Nolan has always been unafraid to tackle ambitious and complex narratives. But framing Oppenheimer as a modern-day Prometheus was to be the biggest challenge of his career. Nolan grew up in the U.K. in the 1980s, during the Cold War and the continued concern over the danger of the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. His curiosity about Oppenheimer began with a lyric in Sting’s 1985 song “Russians”, in the which the singer asks, “How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?” “I’m a little older than Cillian here, but he probably remembers growing up in the U.K. in the ’80s,” says Nolan. “It was a time of great fear of nuclear weapons. I talked to Steven Spielberg about this. It was like growing up in the ’60s, with the Cuban missile crisis. The ’80s were a very similar thing. There were protests, and there was a lot in the pop culture about nuclear weapons. But it was Sting’s song ‘Russians’ where I first heard Oppenheimer’s name, and there was this

very palpable fear of nuclear Armageddon.” The 2005 book American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, captured Nolan’s interest further (in Greek mythology, Prometheus defied the Olympian gods by giving man the gift of fire). “It was after reading American Prometheus that I started to see a way in which you could tell this as a story, by taking on Oppenheimer and seeing it really from his point of view. And everything else followed after that. With something like the fear of nuclear weapons, you have to have a human way into that, and, for me, that was Oppenheimer.” What struck Nolan in reading the book was hearing that Oppenheimer and his brother would go to Los Alamos as children to camp. “The connection between Los Alamos and the nuclear weapon he was developing, that comes from Oppenheimer’s childhood,” he notes. “He wanted to combine his interest in New Mexico—playing cowboy like he did, that love of the outdoors— with physics, and that’s what he did with the Manhattan Project.” More so than the propulsive elements of the story, that the Americans were in a race against time to beat the Nazis, it was that element that convinced Nolan he, indeed, had a movie. “Once I’d read that, that’s where I started to see a personal connection,” he says. “And once you have the personal, then you start looking at the events, this thriller aspect to it that just kept coming in with everything that happened to Oppenheimer after 1945. It was a bunch of different things coming together.” Indeed, Oppenheimer was later subjected to a politically charged tribunal that stripped his security clearance and rendered him a pariah, adding to his burden of having unleashed a weapon that, in the wrong hands, could destroy the world and had already cost over 100,000 lives when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII. “American Prometheus is such a remarkable

book,” Nolan muses. “Martin Sherwin worked on it for 20 years before Kai Bird joined. They did another five years. It’s a quarter of a century of research and interviews. I got the benefit of that, which was wonderful.” Key to the story’s attraction was Oppenheimer himself, and Nolan was determined to unravel the scientist’s enigma. We’ve seen depictions of the fragility of genius in films like Shine, A Beautiful Mind, even Good Will Hunting, and how the brightest intellects can come unstuck. But Oppenheimer seemed to enjoy his post-WWII fame on the covers on Time and Life magazines, and in speeches. Was he a narcissist or a hero? “I think he was definitely a hero, definitely a narcissist,” Nolan concludes. “He was a lot of different things. Very theatrical. What I got from American Prometheus, and what I started to get interested in is, he was someone who had a lot of neurosis and a lot of trouble very early in life, as he came of age at the same time that he was wrestling with these incredibly abstract concepts. We tried to fuse those things, show this kind of energy inside him and show how he masters that. And all the imagery of atoms and splitting atoms to me, they’re very related to his internal state, as a young man in particular. There’s a lot of dangerous tension inside this guy. A lot of dangerous mental energy.”

urphy proved to be a strong physical match for Robert Oppenheimer; his handsome looks lent themselves to the theoretical physicist’s status as a womanizer, and those blue eyes were an ideal cipher for the wildness of those early scholarly years, when Oppenheimer was trying to harness his genius. All this came as a surprise to Murphy, back when Deadline revealed that Oppenheimer was Nolan’s next secret project and that he wanted Murphy to be number one on his call

From left: Robert Downey Jr. with Murphy in Oppenheimer; Murphy on the set of Inception with Nolan and Leonardo DiCaprio; Nolan and Emma Thomas.

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From left: Emily Blunt, Nolan and Murphy on the Oppenheimer set.

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“ I T H I N K H E WA S D E F I N I T E LY A H E R O, D E F I N I T E LY A N AR C I S S I S T. H E WA S A L O T O F D I F F E R E N T T H I N G S . ” sheet, after five other movies with the director. “I tried to ignore your story because I hadn’t heard from Chris or Emma [Thomas, Nolan’s partner and producer],” Murphy says. “It came out, everyone was texting me, and I said, ‘No, there must be some sort of mistake,’ or, ‘It’s just a rumor,’ because I hadn’t heard from those guys. A day or two later, Chris called me. This was out of the blue. Because Chris doesn’t write the script with actors in mind, which, when you think about it, is really, really smart because he doesn’t put any limitation on himself as a writer, or on the actor. So, it came out of the blue, and in the best way possible because I was unemployed. I hadn’t any work lined up.” “It was perfect timing,” says Nolan. “He could have easily said, ‘Well, I’ve got a thing…’” Murphy remembers that he had just finished up work on Peaky Blinders. “Bear in mind I said yes before I read the script,” he says, “because I always do that with Chris.” Then it was Nolan’s turn to sweat, when he showed Murphy the script. “I said, ‘How about it?’ After Cillian said he was in, I flew to Dublin, and he came to my hotel and sat and read the script. I went off to the Hugh Lane Gallery and looked at Francis Bacon’s Studio, which I’d always wanted to see. And then we came back, and we had a chat about it. I remember doing this with Heath [Ledger] on The Dark Knight. He’d signed up for it, and then I showed him the script. There’s that moment of, like, ‘Are you going to feel good about that commitment?’”

He turns to Murphy. “But you seemed very into the script. You seemed very… I wouldn’t say relieved, I’d say you seemed excited.” At this, Murphy breaks into a big smile. “It was one of the greatest scripts I’d ever read,” he says. “It was just astounding. But I knew it was huge. I knew this wasn’t just a part you could turn up at next week and get going. I was immediately going, ‘All right, fuck, fuck, fuck. I’ve got to do all of this. This is huge.’ And, in fact, I was already working, getting going before I read the script. I knew I just had to go at it meticulously and make a strategy to go at it because there was just so much to do, emotionally, physically and intellectually.” Murphy did more than just try on Oppenheimer’s signature hat. “I immediately started reducing calories,” he says, “which was a stupid thing to do, like, six months away from shooting. But I wanted to start feeling like him. I watched all the historical materials. I read the book, obviously. I started looking at all his lectures online. Any other stuff that was around. All the accounts from people that knew him were really, really interesting to me. Talking to [physicist] Kip Thorne, who was the scientific advisor on it. He had been lectured by Oppenheimer, which was really, really useful.” Nolan interrupts. “That was a good thing,” he says, “because I’ve done a couple films with Kip; Interstellar was Kip’s original idea. I’d called him because I needed his help on the whole quantum physics thing. And in the course of

the conversation, I realized that when he was at Princeton, he’d attended Oppenheimer’s lectures at the IAS. So immediately I was like, ‘Well, will you get on the phone with Cillian and talk to him about how he taught?’ Those testimonials helped Oppenheimer capture gestures and mannerisms that most of the audience for the film wouldn’t register.” Says Murphy, “Kip talked about how Oppenheimer held his pipe on stage, and how he had the cigarette in one hand and the chalk in the other hand; We talked about how he was very aware of his presence, his legend, and his theatricality, all of that stuff.” “I remember you telling me after you spoke to Kip, and we incorporated it into the staging as well,” says Nolan, “that Oppenheimer would let people talk. He was very good at summarizing a discussion. Which I think became absolutely key to the whole, to all of the Manhattan Project scenes.” “He was an excellent synthesizer and manager,” Murphy agrees. “He didn’t seem the obvious choice for it, but he was.” Together, Nolan and Murphy found the physical style for the lanky Oppenheimer, and one of the style influences was David Bowie, circa 1976. “Everything about him was constructed,” says Nolan. “Oppenheimer constructed his entire persona, his entire self. That’s why I threw the David Bowie photographs at you, Cillian. This was the Thin White Duke era. David Bowie has these crazy

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high-waisted trousers that were very, very similar in proportion to what Oppenheimer would wear at the end of Los Alamos. Bowie was always the ultimate self-constructed pop icon, and I think Oppenheimer was similar, in his own way. Obviously, it’s a completely different world, but he used his persona to achieve a mass of things.” Murphy, who started out with the intention of a music career until he turned down a record deal and chose the acting life, sparked to the

He says, ‘You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’ I read it in his draft, and I was like, ‘All right, I’ll keep it in there, but I don’t really know what it means. Is that really a thing?’ And then, over the years since that film’s come out, it just seems truer and truer. In this story, it’s absolutely that. Build them up, tear them down. It’s the way we treat people.” Murphy believes that the security of 20 years working together emboldened him. “If you don’t have that history, or that level of trust,

was like, ‘He’s exhausted.’ And I said, ‘Thanks, Robert, he’ll be fine.’ And he was fine. But the point was taken that, yeah, I was able to take what he was doing on set for granted because I knew how great the work was. But the reality is, I didn’t realize the magnitude of the performance until I put it together in the edit suite. This is true, I think, of all great performances; you see what you see on set. But then, in the edit, you actually see it the way the actor has performed it. Even though you have been shooting in a crazy order, he’s figured out how all these pieces go together, and then you start to see it come together. It’s a really pretty magical thing.”

ne of the first filmmakers Nolan showed the film to said something that really stuck with him. “There’s never that moment where you see the actor realize how great the part is,” he recalls this director telling him. Nolan knew exactly what he was talking about. “Because that’s the thing,” he says. “Particularly with serious movies, or when an actor has a great opportunity, you see them enjoying the taste of it a little too much. There’s always that moment. And that is not in this performance. This performance is totally pure. To me, this performance is much more about the real world, the way people are flawed, continuously flawed. There’s not one little thing they do wrong—we’re all good and bad, and there are layers of that. Oppenheimer is the absolute essence of that. The performance embraces that and carries the audience. But if the performance didn’t unselfconsciously embrace that, it wouldn’t work at all.” Murphy is flattered. “It’s the nicest thing you could say,” he smiles. “But for me, I remember when I was doing it, if at any point I ever felt, I don’t know, anxious or insecure, I would always think, ‘No, Chris has seen something in me, and he’s drawing something in me out that I didn’t know was there really before.’ And I remember saying to him before we started shooting— because he’s always really pushed me in the best way, and he pushes all his performers in the best way—‘Push me as hard as you possibly can on this one,’ because I knew we had to do that.” The payoff comes in the ending, when the audience learns what Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) actually says to Oppenheimer. Strauss looks on, but Einstein walks past and ignores him. That Strauss was insecure and petty enough to believe their chat was about him, instead of being an intimate moment between geniuses who each bore the burden of creating weapons of mass destruction that pulled the world into a dangerous new age, is… Well, let Murphy describe it.

Murphy takes direction from Nolan on set.

influence. “When Chris sent me that, I printed that picture out and I put it on my script,” Murphy says. “He sent it to me with no context, and I knew exactly what he meant, because I’m a music nerd and I could see the crossover. So, it was there in the back of my script for the whole shoot.” More important, however, was getting Murphy ready for the emotional toll that playing Oppenheimer would bring, particularly after his triumph in Los Alamos. History hasn’t been kind to war heroes, as was seen when British mathematician/computer scientist Alan Turing cracked the Nazi enigma machine code—a breakthrough that shortened the Second World War—only to be punished for his homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. Similarly, Oppenheimer became a punching bag in a politically charged kangaroo court. “I’m plagued by a line from The Dark Knight, and I’m plagued by it because I didn’t write it,” says Nolan. “My brother [ Jonathan] wrote it. It kills me, because it’s the line that most resonates. And at the time, I didn’t even understand it.

with a filmmaker,” he says, “I don’t know if you can be as brave or can dive in like I was able to on this one.” Nolan has his own theory. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he says to Murphy, “but I feel like, after finishing Peaky Blinders, you were in a peculiar place in your career, because you’d been playing the same character for a lot of years. Very, very well with massive success, creative success and artistic success, and also people recognizing the success. You must have felt very comfortable in that character. Steven Knight’s writing is beautiful, and is always challenging the character, but it’s still a second skin that you’d developed that you were slipping into. But then you’re moving to an arena where all that’s gone. This was a true ‘out of the hot tub and into the cold plunge’ moment.” Nolan appreciated the effort it took. “For me, particularly with such a big cast, Cillian was the element I was able to completely take for granted,” he says, “to the point where on Downey’s last day, he came up to me and said, ‘Do you understand how hard this guy is working for you?’ It was towards the end of the shoot. He

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“I’m all about third acts and endings,” he says, “and when I read the script, that time in Dublin, knowing that’s one thing Chris always nails, I remember thinking, ‘What a fucking ending.’ It’s extraordinary. And that’s from Chris’s imagination. It’s not from history, but it’s just genius. You can write an extraordinary script, but you can write yourself into a corner and the audience feels shortchanged if you don’t nail the fucking ending.” Says Nolan: “We talked very carefully about the moment where Kitty [Emily Blunt] says, ‘Did you think if you let them tar and feather you the world would forgive you? It won’t.’ I love the way Cillian performs in that moment, it was so important to me that it hit this exact note. And I didn’t know what that exact note was. I just knew that I’d know it when we hit it, because it needed to be sort of self-conscious in a slightly more open way. “In the rest of the film, everything Oppenheimer does that’s a little bit vain or a little bit self-conscious, it’s almost as if he’s unaware of it,” Nolan says. “And I feel like in that moment, he opens up to the audience just a hair more, and says, ‘We’ll see.’ Because he puts the question to the audience, in a way. ‘Do you think the world will forgive you?’ ‘We’ll see.’ And I think the jury’s still out very much, but I think he’s definitely better thought of than he would be if he hadn’t been made to suffer.” To Nolan, putting Oppenheimer, and Murphy, through the wringer in the latter part of the film evoked many higher themes. “When I showed it to Kai Bird for the first time, I said, ‘Look, this is my idea of who he is. This is who I feel he is. I feel that he’s ahead of those people in that room who are torturing him. I feel like he does have a vision to the world beyond that. And it’s partly a vision of fear, and a vision of the idea of the chain reaction. But it’s also partly how history will judge him. And if he fights too hard, or even if he won that fight...’ “It’s a bit Christ-like really, isn’t it?” he suggests. “It’s sort of knowing that the way to win is actually to lose. That was what I felt was inside him, and then the way you played it, Cillian. But there’s also great suffering. And I thought, I mean, Jason Clarke does such a wonderful job in the scene. And what nobody knows, because they weren’t there, but when we were filming your side, he just went nuts.” Murphy interrupts. “Well, you fucking made him go nuts! I thought at one point he was actually going to punch me out. It was like this big push in on me, each one, and I said to Chris, ‘I don’t know what you said to him, but he was like a fucking animal, man.’ And then you used that take.” Nolan lights up at the memory: “He was throwing stuff, and that’s mostly the take we

From left: Nolan and Downey Jr. on set; Murphy and Downey Jr. backstage at the Golden Globes.

used. It’s a combination of different takes, but that one was absolutely key. I just thought it was wonderful, but he hadn’t shot his side yet, and I worried he was going to lose his voice. But we came back the next day to do his side.” “This is a case in point,” says Murphy, “where we were doing that big push. I remember going, ‘Do you think we got it, Chris?’ And you were like, ‘Eh. Let’s go again.’ I love that. You could say, ‘We can all go home now,’ but instead, you said, ‘Let’s just go again.’ Sometimes it doesn’t work, but that time it did.”

hen the atomic bomb test succeeds, Oppenheimer is carried on the shoulders of others like a football coach who’s just won the Super Bowl. There’s even a scene in which Harry Truman (Gary Oldman), the president who dropped Oppenheimer’s bombs on Japan, is shown to be disgusted by the physicist’s remorse. But his role in the destruction and massive loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have left Nolan with a real balancing act. “As you put a script together,” he says, “you try and focus in on things like, what’s the key idea that has to work here? What are the key shifts that you need the audience to be struck by? And in the case of Oppenheimer, it was very clear to me that the whole purpose of the screenplay is to go from the absolute highest high of triumph, with Trinity, to the sheer lowest low of the realization of Hiroshima, in as short a time as possible. “That was always going to be just a crazy shift,” he continues. “We talked about this a lot, in the moment where, earlier in the film, the atom is split. And then when Luis Alvarez [Alex Wolff] reproduces the experiment, in the script Oppenheimer immediately, as he did in real life, jumped to the idea that, you could make a bomb from this. The way in which Cillian performed that, it was very precise because it couldn’t be

portentous. Obviously, he’s playing an intelligent man and he’s talking about bombs, but we couldn’t signal to the audience the negativity of where that was going to go, in terms of his frankly existential dilemma, the burden he’s going to carry later. You don’t want to foreshadow that in the performance. It was very important that the performance not foreshadow that, that it’d just be part of his journey that he’s interested in. To him, it’s actually exciting.” In Nolan’s mind, the job is to paint a picture to help the audience form its own opinion about nukes, rather than betray his own morals and have it amount to feeding the audience cinematic spinach. “For me,” he says, “cinema can never be didactic, because as soon as it tells you what to think, you reject the art, you reject the storytelling. You see that a lot, particularly this time of year. It’s like people want movies to be able to send messages. But the truth is, I’m with whichever mogul who said, ‘Call Western Union if you want to send a message.’ In taking on Oppenheimer’s story, I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that nuclear weapons are a good thing, so there’s not much point in telling the audience that.” He pauses. “I’m sorry I’m going on a bit about this, but it’s a really interesting question. I had to explain this to everybody very early on: I’m not interested in making a story about how naive scientists accidentally created something that’s terrible for the world and then felt bad about it. Oppenheimer was one of the smartest people who ever lived. He knew exactly where this was going. The point is, they had to do it. They were put in a position where they believed that if the Nazis got the bomb, it would be the worst thing imaginable for the world. And so, they had to do what they had to do. But they did it knowing that the consequences would be potentially awful. “That’s what makes the story so compelling from a human point of view. It’s not that they didn’t realize where this was going. It was that they felt they had no choice.” ★

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Sterling K.

BROW N

The American Fiction actor explains why you should always listen to the “still, small voice” within BY DESTINY JACKSON

Prior to American Fiction, Sterling K. Brown was best known as Randall Pearson in the long-running, award-winning NBC family drama series This is Us. The part that director Cord Jefferson was offering him couldn’t have been more different: in Jefferson’s adaptation of the satirical novel by Percival Everett, Brown plays Clifford ‘Cliff’ Ellison, a caustic plastic surgeon and brother to the film’s protagonist, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright). After divorcing his wife, Cliff comes out as gay, further estranging him from his uptight family. This nuanced role allowed Brown to explore the many facets of Blackness and the challenges of the LGBTQ+ community.

You studied economics at Stanford

education was a guaranteed pathway

and interned at the Federal Reserve,

to upward mobility. When I went to

among other things that mesh with

Stanford—and my wife and I have had

this upper echelon of the Black expe-

this conversation before— she went

rience. American Fiction also touches

full ride. Her father was in informa-

on other avenues of the Black experi-

tion systems and worked at different

ence. How did you relate?

Fortune 500 companies. He paid her

Cliff comes from a very upper-middle-

tuition in full. As for me, Uncle Sam

class family. My mom was a school-

helped me tremendously during the

teacher, my dad was a grocery clerk,

Clinton years, and I left Stanford with

but I think the emphasis on education

$12,000 total [debt].

was very big in our family because

So, I had this feeling when I went to

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Stanford that all the Black people are

Biosphere has to do with someone

kept you going and was there ever

going to be like me, hustlers who’re

who thinks that they are an evolved,

did you determine how you would

another option for you?

striving beyond odds. And my wife

enlightened human being, being faced

play him?

I decided to be an actor in sophomore

thought they would all be like her

with something they never thought

I thought he was loveable to the

year of college. I’m pretty good at

[with rich parents]. So, my proximity

they would be faced with, and then

people he loved. I thought that Cliff

staying the course once I set my mind

to [the upper-middle-class lifestyle in

finding out how their programming

coming back home was like him going

on something. The only time I felt

the film] probably has more to do with

can come back into play.

into enemy territory because the fond

[unsure] was when I did a TV show

And then, in American Fiction,

memories that Monk might have don’t

for six years called Army Wives. After

you’re just talking about somebody

match his own. Cliff’s childhood was

about three years, I felt I had done

my wife than my own upbringing. I’m bougie by association. But, in choosing a lifestyle [like

seeking to live their authentic truth

different because he knew he wasn’t

everything I could with this character.

Cliff], when I went to Stanford and de-

and tired of other people telling him

accepted for who he was. If his sister

If they needed to bring in fresh blood

cided to take the path to acting, most

how he should be or shouldn’t be.

hadn’t passed away, I don’t think Cliff

and wanted to take somebody out,

people in my family looked at me like,

He’s comfortable with being messy

would’ve come home. His sister was

I even told my showrunner, “If you

really? Not many people understood

because he knows at the end of the

the person he was connected to.

have to take somebody out for like

it, except for my mom, who’s seen me

mess, he can find some form of happi-

So, I saw him as someone who was

May sweeps or something, your boy’s

act since high school. It’s not a perfect

ness that he wasn’t able to have up to

constantly on the back burner be-

offering himself up.” And he was like,

comparison, but it’s the best one that I

that point in his life. In all three cases,

cause he was just waiting for people

“Dude, no, I’m not going to do that.”

have to my own personal life experi-

they’re all funny, satirical things and

to invalidate his existence, because

So, I did the show for another three

ence regarding Cliff being gay, and not

comedies that come from the truth of

that’s what his experience had been

years, and while other people were

even a decision he was able to articu-

exploring a real subject.

until that point.

renegotiating to go beyond, I knew

late because I think he knew not to

I like comedy that’s based on char-

So, this humor he has is a way for

that I wasn’t going to go beyond. And

articulate it because he probably had

acter, that’s based in truth. And I’m

Cliff to keep his feelings at bay. He

so, we parted amicably. Then, I did

enough indicators around him that

not trying to do a bit just to do a bit. I

uses a certain aloofness to protect

three years of guest spots on shows

it wouldn’t be the thing to be. I think

think Lee-Curtis [in Honk For Jesus]

himself. And you could say the same

like Person of Interest and a pilot for

everybody, to a certain extent, has this

was probably the closest, that when

about the drugs or anything else. He

AMC that didn’t get picked up.

feeling of being on the outside, that

the cameras are on him, he probably

does not want to be close to anyone

everybody else understands what it’s

enjoyed the performative aspects. But

in his family because closeness

we’d bought a house at that time. And

like to be a part of the club, and then

I think each one was a gift because I

other than that of his sister causes

I was like, “Man, I wonder if I made the

you feel like you’re on the outside of

got a chance to flex my comedy bone,

him pain. So, there’s a little bit of the

right decision.” And I was talking to a

the club. I think I’ve had that feeling

which is always fun. These films also

tears of a clown in him because he’s

friend, and she said, “Of course, you

when choosing to be an actor. I think

just ask some really deep questions

sharp, and that keeps him safe until

made the right decision. You did ev-

Cliff has that in being gay and finding

too, but because you’re laughing while

Lorraine hugs him and says, “You are

erything you wanted to do artistically,

a way of finding your tribe and accep-

exploring the characters, you can also

family.” You can feel Cliff exhale and

and you’re not in this for the cash. You

tance and feeling comfortable with

catch people off-guard. So, I liked that,

feel that thing of, “I can be myself

do this because you love expressing

yourself. So, it really doesn’t matter

and I think I honored myself in terms

here.” And that feels good.

the human condition.”

if people agree with your decision or

of that mandate of trying to do some-

agree with your lifestyle, because your

thing different with each one, not

Another scene that happens just

appreciate that.” Things weren’t

comfort allows you to be whatever

being on the surface where people

after that that I can’t stop thinking

destitute, but they were getting to a

you need to be, and to move through

thought it was going to be, and then

about is when Cliff explains to Monk

place... My wife likes a certain style of

the world regardless.

coming out of me like, “Damn, I didn’t

how he wishes their father got to

living, and she’s been accustomed to

expect that.”

know the real him before he passed

it. And I’m like, “Oh man, I got to make

Post-This is Us, you vowed to get

C L AI R E FO LGE R / MG M / E V ER E TT C O LLEC T IO N

did you think of him initially, and how

Meanwhile, I had my first son and

And I was like, “You’re right. I

away, even if he would have rejected

sure I keep this woman.” And so, it

roles different from Randall Pearson,

Cliff oscillates between spouting

his lifestyle. How did you person-

was right after I had this conversa-

between Honk for Jesus. Save Your

cold one-liners and heart-wrenching

ally connect to that? Maybe in your

tion, the next pilot season that I

Soul., Biosphere and American Fic-

gems at his brother, being both an-

experience as an actor having to

auditioned for was [The People v. O. J.

tion, it seems you’ve got this knack

tagonistic and misunderstood. What

power through rejection? What

Simpson: American Crime Story], and

for satirically relevant projects now.

then things happened from there,

It’s interesting because those three

but in those three years, I wondered,

movies, in their own way, address

“Oh, should I have done something

things around LGBTQ+ lifestyles, but

else? Made a smarter decision?”

each from a very different angle. Honk

And I think at the end of the day, the

for Jesus dealing with the church and

universe, god, nature have shown

the church’s stance on homosexual-

me that if I listen to the still, small

ity and lack of acceptance, and a

voice and am obedient in that way

preacher wrestling with the fact that

of trusting that you are where you’re

he’s gay and how he can still do god’s

supposed to be on purpose, not by

work but sees those things as being at

happenstance, that good things tend

odds with one another.

From left, Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown in American Fiction.

to come my way. A

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America

FERRERA

The Barbie star explains why she believed in the pink plastic magic and why she’s proud of her younger self BY DESTINY JACKSON

Post-Barbie, have you been able to

Sometimes, I have to whisper it if I’m

look back at 23 years of a career.

car, and I couldn’t afford to put gas

fully wrap your mind around being a

telling somebody because it sounds

I think the thing that I feel the

in it. I couldn’t even afford my books

part of the girlhood lexicon forever?

wild whenever I say it out loud. I think

most blessed about in my career is

because I mainly paid for my own

But of course, you have been since

a lot about my 5-year-old self, my

how much I have loved the things I’ve

tuition and everything. I got an offer to

Real Women Have Curves, The Sis-

9-year-old self, my 12-year-old self, my

gotten to be a part of. I think that it

do a legal procedural pilot and was be-

terhood of the Traveling Pants and

16-year-old self, and how she had this

is an enormous amount of luck and

ing offered more money than I’d ever

Ugly Betty. Looking back, do you

insane dream that was so improbable

getting to be in the right place at the

seen in my bank account. I remem-

think this was intentional?

for a poor, short, fat, brown daughter

right time. But at the same time, even

ber thinking that I really needed this

There is a lot of looking back and

of Honduran immigrants. I had no way

when I was really young, I had such a

money, but I wasn’t willing to say yes

thinking, ‘Damn, I did that,’ espe-

of knowing how to get there from

strong sense of what was a ‘yes’ and

to something that felt like a no, even

cially when you get nominated for an

where I was, and you can’t see [your

a ‘no’ for me. I remember specifically,

when I needed it.

Academy Award, which is still very

career] living it forward. You can only

while in college, I did a really stupid

So, I think back to moments like

hard for me to say with a straight face.

see it looking back, and it’s amazing to

thing and bought a really expensive

that and am proud of the work I chose

M IC HA EL BU C K NE R FO R D E A D LI N E/ WA R N ER BR O S .

By her own admission, America Ferrara was not a Barbie girl growing up. But now, two decades into her career, Ferrera will be forever bathed in the warm pink glow of the Mattel brand thanks to her role in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Ferrara plays a central role as Gloria, a Mattel employee dealing with an existential crisis in the real world, that sends a ripple into Barbie Land and awakens Margot Robbie’s stereotypical Barbie. After Barbie’s female utopia falls prey to a patriarchal coup spearheaded by Ryan Gosling’s Ken, Gloria steps in to set things right. Here, Ferrera reflects on womanhood, her career and making her directorial debut.

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to be a part of. I’m proud of young

some tools and learn how to carry

America, who made good choices.

the toolbox. I remember calling my

I’m proud of her because she worked

manager to ask for an acting teacher

hard to be prepared when the luck

so I could figure out how to be on a

and opportunities came her way.

TV show for multiple years and not

Because I do think luck and opportu-

hate myself and know how to keep

nity is the majority of it, but also being

growing and evolving the character.

prepared for it and knowing what’s

I then met my creative coach, Kim

right for you is also part of the game,

Gillingham, and I’ve been with her for

so I’m proud of it.

about 17 years. Working with her and a community of artists to understand

You’ve talked about not having a personal attachment to Barbie dolls as a

that acting is a craft that I step in and From left: America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt and Margot Robbie in Barbie.

child. How did you find your way into

I open my veins and walk around

the Barbie movie and playing Gloria?

be a grown adult woman who’s taken

You can see that connection in the

hoping that this time I’ll get to where

It’s true. I didn’t play with Barbies

seriously and who can hold reality, and

scene where Gloria pulls up to Mattel

I need to get, which was a lot of my

growing up. I didn’t have any strong

the frustrations and disappointments

headquarters, and the camera pushes

early career because I didn’t know

feelings about Barbie one way or the

of being a real grown-up woman in this

in on both of them, and it’s that meet-

any other way. That process helped

other because I didn’t feel that con-

world, but at the same time not deprive

cute moment where they stare at

me evolve as an actress and to get to

nected or represented in it, so unless

yourself of access to what brings you

each other like, “It’s you, it’s always

explore more facets of myself as an

I was at my cousin’s house, we’d play

joy and what makes you feel like a child

been you.”

actress through process.

with her Barbies. But when I first read

again. It felt like I’m always looking for

the script after Greta Gerwig emailed

that permission to be a grown-up who’s

Gloria’s monologue touches on how

Next, you’re working on your feature

me, “We wrote this character of

taken seriously and loves to play, imag-

women try to exist in the world

directorial debut, I Am Not Your

Gloria with your voice in our head, just

ine and create unabashedly.

while navigating a lot of societal

Perfect Mexican Daughter. What

constraints placed on woman. How

can you share about that project

read it,” it then became obvious how hilarious and subversive it was, and

Gloria and Barbie’s relationship is

did you personally relate to that in

and how it evolved? Why was it

the utter surprise and delight that I felt

unique because Gloria reverts to

terms of your acting journey? How

important for you to make this book

when I met the character Gloria in the

nostalgic childhood memories to get

did you navigate your self-doubts

adaptation your debut?

script and discovered that Greta and

through her current listlessness. But

and stay on this path?

This beautiful novel by Erika L. Sán-

Noah [Baumbach] made this choice

then, Barbie is this source of em-

When I started out, I had an irrational

chez is a coming-of-age story about

to not only include a real-life grown

powerment for Gloria too, because

level of confidence. I didn’t know

a young Mexican American girl who

woman’s perspective of womanhood

they work together to dismantle the

what I didn’t know, but everything was

is an artist and poet struggling with

but also make her the driving force of

newly introduced patriarchy. How did

just sheer force of will and instinct. I

mental health. There’s a tragic ac-

the action.

you work with Margot and Greta to

never went to acting school. I acted

cident where she loses her sister, and

Seeing Gloria’s climax, where she

M IC HA EL BU C K NE R FO R D E A D LI N E/ WA R N ER BR O S .

out of, and not just something where

facilitate this relationship?

in my public middle and high school

she and her whole family are dealing

says what she needs to hear for her-

Our earliest conversations were about

programs and community college, but

with grief. Essentially, it’s about being

self, but also that all the Barbies need

how the love story, if there was going

it was on a wing and prayer where I

an incredibly sensitive young person

to hear, and that all of us need to hear,

to be one, was really between Barbie

believed in myself. I remember it was

who feels a lot without the support of

which was about pulling the curtain on

and Gloria. This isn’t a Barbie and

the second season of Ugly Betty,

how to survive living in a brutal world.

this insane assignment that we take

Ken love story. These two women,

where we did 24 episodes a season

I loved this book so much that I met

on as women. It was so insanely unex-

real and imagined, are calling to each

for an hour-long television show. We

with Erika to get to know her. Then,

pected to open a Barbie script and get

other. They need each other to move

were into the second season, and I

years later, it came to me as a script

there with it, so by the time I was done

forward to become the fuller version

remember getting to this point where

written by Linda Yvette Chávez, who I

with the script, it wasn’t really about

of themselves. I know there are a lot

I was sick of myself. I could feel myself

executive produced for her TV show

whether I love Barbie. It was about us.

of people on the internet who ship

doing all my tricks, and it felt like I

Gentefied for Netflix.

All the feelings we have about Barbie

Barbie and Greta. And I love that

was on autopilot. I’d never been on a

I wasn’t necessarily looking to

are about us. Humans made her. Hu-

reading of it. But I think they’re picking

TV show before. I never had to play

direct a feature film, but this felt like

mans give her meaning.

up on what we all talked about: Gloria

a character for a year, much less for

an opportunity to tell a coming-of-

falling in love with possibility again and

multiple seasons. And I thought, “I

age story from the perspective of the

have love and feelings for Barbie, which

Barbie falling in love with imperfec-

don’t know how to do this.” I’ve never

girls that Erika, Linda and I were. The

I do because it’s brilliant storytelling,

tion. Barbie falling in love with what it

built a creative process because I

opportunity to tell that story for all the

but [I related to Gloria because] I’m very

means to be human. And they do fall

never went to acting school.

other kids who feel that way, all the

earnest, I love my work, and I love to

in love with each other in each other’s

play, and the permission to be able to

worlds. They changed each other.

So in the end, it wasn’t about do I

That was my “oh shit” moment of, like, I’ve got to get a toolbox, get

other bleeding-heart artists out there, is just like such a dream. A

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‘

Ilker

ÇATAK

The director of The Teachers’ Lounge reflects on the international appeal of his intense psychological thriller BY DAMON WISE

Of the five international films shortlisted for the Oscars, The Teachers’ Lounge has had the longest legs. Debuting at the 2023 Berlinale—and not even in competition—Ilker Çatak’s provocative thriller has been a fixture on the festival circuit ever since. Channeling the dark spirit of Michael Haneke, it stars Leonie Benesch as Carla Nowak, a teacher at a public school where a series of thefts have been taking place. Non-white students are immediately targeted, and Carla is disgusted by the blatant racism on display. But when she sets a trap to find the real culprit, things don’t go according to plan. The Teachers’ Lounge has had an

And the beauty of it is that it’s all been

aware of our rights back then. We

have anything to hide, then you don’t

incredible journey. It’s been a year

so unexpected.

thought this could be a good kickoff

have anything to fear.” And so, we

for a story, and so we started writing it.

started digging.

now, so you’re probably tired of talking about it…

How did it start? What was the origi-

We talked about it with some educa-

Yeah, but it’s also been a pleasant

nal inspiration?

tors we knew, and they said, “Well, this

Did you workshop it in any way? Or

journey and I’m glad to answer all the

I started writing this film with Jo-

happens on an everyday basis, but the

did you just purely write it and then

questions. When you start making a

hannes Duncker, my co-writer. We

difference is that nowadays you can’t

finesse it as you got closer to pro-

film, it’s always a bit of a gamble: Is it

went to school together, and we expe-

just frisk the staff or the students. You

duction? It feels very authentic.

going to land with an audience or not?

rienced a very similar incident to the

have to say that it’s voluntary.” And

Well, the script kind of started flying

And this one did, which is, of course,

one at the beginning of the film—we

we thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting,’

when we decided to just keep it in the

the spot that you want to be in as a

got frisked when we were students.

because it reminded us of the kinds of

school and not go outside of it. That

filmmaker. So yeah, that’s been crazy.

But the difference was, we weren’t

things that politicians say: “If you don’t

was one of the main rules that we set

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ourselves. Another rule was, if there’s

Turkish person, like me, you’ll under-

cameras, and shot even more tests.

of ‘safe spaces’ for students: they

no conflict in a scene, we probably

stand. My family isn’t really Muslim,

While I was shooting these tests, I

can go ahead and accuse a teacher

don’t need it. That alone created a

but, of course, people assume we’re

was talking to them, telling them what

of a tiny little thing and it immediately

sort of pressure. And we wanted to

all Muslims, and then we get racially

we were doing and asking them about

becomes a big, big shitstorm.

create pressure, because that’s what

profiled for no freaking reason. You

their lives. Then I’d go to a screening

This is the reason why many

most of the teachers told us; that this

enter the U.S. and you’re put in a room

room to look at those tests and see

teachers that we talked to said that

job is incredibly demanding, and it can

with a lot of other people who look

the chemistry.

they sometimes really can’t take

really get to you if you don’t set your

alike, and you think, ‘What the fuck

boundaries. That started us thinking

is going on? Why am I being singled

interviews with them, telling them,

so careful. Every word you say is a

about boundaries, and how a young

out? Is it because my name is Ali?

basically, “I’m not your boss, we’re

potential threat to your own safe

teacher maybe wants a little too much

Because of my brown hair?’ That’s

colleagues, and I expect some sort

space. They create safe spaces for

of what she’s looking for.

the reason why the first kid who gets

of work ethic.” I told them I expected

students, but there’s no safe space

singled out [in the film] is Turkish.

them to know their lines, that we’re a

for teachers. The other day I was

Race is a big part of the movie, but in

There’s a bunch of things that,

family, that we take care of each other

just reading about four teachers

a very subtle way. It’s arguably more

identity-wise, have made their way

and there are no extras, there are no

who committed suicide in South

about factionalism than racism.

into this film. Stuff that I’ve been

VIPs here. We’re an entity. When we

Korea because they couldn’t take

Does that strike a chord with you?

dealing with in German society, and

got to set, I would start the day with a

the pressure anymore. And the richer

Yeah, definitely. I mean, the thing is,

stuff that my co-writer Johannes also

conversation, and really just tell them

the parents are, the worse it gets. At

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to

had to deal with, because he grew up

about myself, show them my vulner-

least that’s what teachers said to us.

the subway in Berlin or in Germany

in Turkey as a German boy. We both

abilities, ask them about theirs. And at

With wealth comes confidence, and

in general, but it’s a bit different than

have this slight feeling of alienation as

some point—and I think it was a key

with confidence comes the ability to

all other cities in the world. If you go

well as a will to show everyone else

moment in this whole process—I said

criticize much more bluntly.

to London, you buy a ticket, you go

that we are one of them. I remember

to them, “We’re all going to die. That’s

through some sort of gate and you

using sophisticated language in my

the truth. But this film will be around,

The film premiered at the Berlinale

get into the metro. Same in New York,

youth, just to show everyone that I

and your kids and grandkids will see

last year, and it’s been nominated

same in Istanbul, same all over the

was one of them. I was saying, “Look,

it, so you better make sure we get this

for an Oscar. Why do you think

world. In Germany it’s different. In

I might look different, but I’m actually

story right.” [Laughs] I think they got

it’s lasted this long? And why has

Germany they say, “We trust you to

German.” A lot of that kind of stuff is

the idea…

America embraced it?

buy a ticket. We are not controlling

in the film.

G ET TY I M AG ES / J UD I TH K AU FM A N N / S O N Y P I C TU R ES C LA S S IC S

you.” But somebody might be in the

For the next step I’d have personal

this job anymore. They have to be

It is hard to say. I mean, I think the Obviously, I haven’t been to school

issues that are being tackled in this

carriage with you, dressed as one of

How did you find the children?

for a very, very long time, and some-

film are also issues affecting U.S.

your peers.” And then they go, “OK,

They’re all extraordinary. Was it a

thing that really interested me about

society: the way debate culture has

we want to see your ticket.” I think

long process?

the film is the way it shows how the

shifted, the way alternative facts have

that is a very, very German thing to do.

Thank you. Well, yeah. First, I had

power has shifted in schools. The

been introduced, the way the search

Remember, you also had this in the

these general castings where I saw,

parents now have a louder voice,

for truth has become an issue, and

GDR [German Demoncratic Republic],

like, 150 kids, and I improvised with

and so do the children. Is that at all

truth itself has become something

where people were snitching on each

them. I saw real quick which kids I

reflective of your time at school, or

elusive. It all resonates with the U.S.,

other, and were giving away informa-

could work with, which kids were

was that something new that you

maybe even stronger than it does with

tion about their best friends or family.

bright, and which were playful. And

had to research?

Europe. Especially given the fact that

And, of course, it’s about race. If

then I gathered those kids, put them

Yeah, the climate of teaching has

they have a gun-violence issue over in

you have been raised in Germany as a

in the classroom, in the presence of

changed a lot. I think the profession

the States, which is why audiences are

has had some sort of erosion over

much more vocal when they watch

the years. I remember my parents

the film. In fact, I usually ask, in those

saying, “If your teacher says so, then

Q&As after screenings, how many

it must be right. You’re not going to

people were expecting some sort of

challenge your teacher.” And now it’s

gun violence. Sadly, a lot of them raise

quite the opposite. Now it’s more like,

their arms.

Leonie Benesch as Carla Nowak in The Teachers’ Lounge.

“Why is my kid getting a bad grade?

There’s also something that is

Isn’t that your responsibility?” And of

very universal about a story about a

course, in this whole era of WhatsApp

teacher who’s trying to do good. But

groups and emails, any little incident

the road to hell is paved with good

becomes a shitstorm. Teachers have

intentions, as they say. And this is

to be much, much more precise

something that I think each and every

about what they say and how they

one of us has experienced in their life,

say it. And there’s this whole notion

at some point. A

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Pablo

BERGER

The Robot Dreams director on creating a “dialogue-free” film with a touching story and a funky beat B Y RYA N F L E M I N G

How did you first encounter the

I was in tears. I know this could sound

a very simple story. I knew that when I

Once I decided that this would be my

graphic novel for Robot Dreams?

a little bit too much, but I was visual-

was reading to make the film, I thought

next film, it was like providence. I got

I collect books with no words. When

izing the film while I was reading it. If

about friends that I lost. You know, when

an email from the Chicago Film Festival

my daughter was two or three, I want-

this book has moved me this deeply, I

you lose a friend, sometimes it’s even

inviting me to be on the jury for the of-

ed to share the experience of my love

thought maybe I should just make this

more difficult than when your heart

ficial selection, and suddenly I thought,

of books, so I could read the wordless

film. I never in my life thought about

gets broken from a love story, because

what a great time to have a layover in

books with her and she could read

making an animated film. I come from

it’s more difficult to understand why

New York, meet Sara and propose to

them by herself. So, I just started this

live-action. This is my fourth film. I

this friendship faded or broke. And I

her that I wanted to make a film.

collection, and it has become my

love animation as an audience, as

also thought about people that are not

We met on the Lower East Side in a

dearest collection of hundreds of

a cinephile, but never in my life, not

in my life anymore. In a way, I made this

coffee shop, and I just bluntly told her,

books that have no words.

even once, until I read this book and

film as a love letter to all the people that

“I love your book. I want to make a 2D

the end moved me so deeply.

have been part of my life that are not

film of Robot Dreams.” And she was

with me anymore.

like, “Oh my god.” She told me that in

I got Robot Dreams in 2010 and I loved it. I thought it was fantastic and unique and when I got to the end of

What about the book resonated

the book, I was deeply moved. And

with you?

Tell me about meeting Sara Varon,

animation studio to make a 3D film,

when I’m talking about deeply moved,

The fact that it’s wordless and that it’s

the creator of the graphic novel.

but at the end, this didn’t move on.

2008 she was approached by a big

CA R LOS ALVAR EZ / WI R EI MAG E/ N EO N / EV E R E T T C O LL EC TI O N

Director Pablo Berger never thought he’d earn his first Oscar nomination for an animated feature, mostly because he never thought he’d direct animation. That is, until one morning, when he was looking through his vast library of books and decided to read Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel Robot Dreams, the bittersweet story of the friendship between a dog and a robot. As soon as he put down the book, the multiple Goya-winning Spaniard knew he’d found his next film. That chance reading led to a premiere at Cannes, multiple awards and an Oscar nomination—all for a movie that hasn’t even seen its main U.S. release yet.

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And she was really happy that I was

did you create the soundscapes of

coming from Europe and proposing

the city?

to make a 2D film of her book, so she

The thing is that this film is dialogue-

really felt that the adaptation of her

free. It’s not a silent film. It is very

graphic novel was in good hands. So,

important, as you said, that it’s

she said, “I made the graphic novel,

dialogue-free, because the sound

and I’ll give you carte blanche to make

design of this film is the most complex

the film.”

of all my films. The sound designer, Fabiola Ordoyo, and her team recre-

I can’t imagine this film in 3D at all.

ated what New York sounded like in

Me either. I love comics and I wanted

the ’80s, and she really had to dig into

this movie, among other things, to be

old sound libraries.

a love letter to comics and to graphic

Robot Dreams

something that can identify New York

respect the ink and paint of the style,

is that it’s extremely noisy and full of

ment in the story, because it’s a theme

and feeling they were communicating

the flat colors, this ligne claire of old

all kind of alarms, sirens and also the

that appears many times in the film

truthful emotion.

comic books. Something for me that

sound of the cars of the time. It was

in many different versions. As long as

Animation is as powerful to convey

was extremely important was to have

very, very important that the audience,

they hear “September”, we know that

emotions as live-action, but there are

everything in focus. When you read a

when they come to see Robot Dreams

they’re connected.

very few films where there’s true emo-

comic book, everything is in focus, and

in the cinema, not only have a visual

in cinema you definitely play with the

experience, but also sensorial.

depth of field. But I wanted to have a

CA R LOS ALVAR EZ / WI R EI MAG E/ N EO N / EV E R E T T C O LL EC TI O N

I lived in New York for years and

novels. So that’s why I wanted to

That’s the kind of films that I want

And the amazing thing about this

tion in animation. Normally they’re

song that I didn’t realize when I start-

comedy or action. There are big ex-

ed the production, is that in the first

ceptions, of course—Hayao Miyazaki,

deep-focus animated film because

to make. I want to make sensorial

three words of the lyrics is the main

Isao Takahata, Mamoru Hosoda, Wes

we wanted every single composition

experiences. Robot Dreams, we can

theme of the film. The song starts, “Do

Anderson—but in general, we can say

to be powerful, and the camera didn’t

even say it’s a musical, or we can

you remember?” That’s something

that mainly they’re comedy and action

have to move too much unless it was

even say the audience will come to

that I really want to talk about, how

and for children. I wanted to make

absolutely necessary. I put some kind

the cinema and travel in time to New

memory can help us to overcome the

a film for adults that has emotion,

of restrictions to the animation direc-

York in the ’80s. And that was our

pain of a breakup or when you get dis-

but also humor. For me, my biggest

tor and to the team, and also when I

goal, that when the audience comes

tance from somebody that you love. It

influence and reference for this film

was making the storyboards. So, when

to the cinema, they really can forget

was very important that that element

was Charlie Chaplin and the film City

comic lovers watch this film, I want

about all their concerns, and they

in the lyrics appears very clear.

Lights, because there’s this dramedy.

them to imagine they’re really reading

can just get into the screen and be

a comic book, but it’s moving images.

Robot and Dog.

I love dramedy. I think a laugh and a When I was watching it, I connected

tear come together. Laughing and cry-

with pretty much every character.

ing, they combine perfectly. So that’s

Why did you choose to set the film in

Where did the idea come from to use

You see a bit of yourself in every

a tone that I want it to be. And for me,

New York City?

Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September”?

character, and you also just feel for

my perfect genre is a tragic comedy. I

In the graphic novel, it’s not a defined

It was very early on in the first draft of

them. I mean, that first dream se-

think it’s like life, and it reflects life. So,

city because you don’t have any

the script, when I was just doing the

quence for Robot where the bunnies

I wanted to make a very human-like

landmarks. For me, when I started

outline and the idea came in a very

come… That was heartbreaking.

experience. Even if they’re anthro-

adapting the script, I told Sara, “I am a

simple way. The film starts in Sep-

As a film director from live-action, I

pomorphic, I wanted the audience to

New Yorker at heart. I lived 10 years in

tember and it’s one year in the life of

wanted to bring amazing performanc-

really connect with them.

New York, and I want the protagonist

Robot and Dog. I also needed a song

es to animation. I wanted to make

of Robot Dreams to be a dog in New

that could be danced to in a roller

truthful, emotional performances that

many of the main characters, and for

York City. I want it to be my love letter

dance, because it was very important

were three-dimensional. For me, less

me there are four: Robot, Dog, Duck and

to the New York that I experienced.”

from the beginning that they be roller

is more in cinema.

Rascal. This film talks about relation-

Definitely, there’s a certain nostal-

dancing in Central Park. So, I needed

It’s very common in animation

ships, and in relationships sometimes

gia in this film. It’s in New York before

a song that is funky and has a beat,

that the animated characters overact

we have behaved like Dog, or Robot, or

the globalization, before internet,

and it was the ’80s, so it had to be like

instead of moving a little slower or

sometimes we’ve been Duck. Duck for

before mobile phones. The New York

the disco era. I think in the late ’70s

moving the eyes less. In live action, I’m

me is just the perfect ideal. He’s funny

that I lived in, when New York was the

and early ’80s, and even now 40 years

always next to the camera looking at

and charming, but at the end he just

cultural or the economical capital of

later, “September” is still one of those

the actor’s eyes. So, when I was work-

disappeared from the life of Dog. Rascal

the world, you know?

songs that is contagious.

ing with the animators for two years,

is just a more mature love or relation-

my obsession was to look at the eyes

ship. We wanted to have some different

I think all relationships have a song,

As you said, you connected with

Since there’s no dialogue, music and

or a musical theme. And the moment

of Robot and Dog and every single

types so that you could relate to any of

sound play a crucial role here. How

I found it, it became another key ele-

character. I was looking at their pupils

those characters. A

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OSCA R H A N D I CA PS / BY P ETE H A M M O N D

ou can probably sum it all up in just one word:

Barbenheimer. Not a word found in Webster’s, but one that’s instantly recognizable to movie fans and everyone in all areas of the entertainment industry. Now it’s probably your key entry into the closing act of the very long Oscar season, one that started in earnest over Labor Day with the fall festivals at Venice and Telluride, and just a week later at Toronto. But really, this year got a significant start at Cannes with the debuts in May of Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, Grand Prize winner The Zone of Interest, and the World Premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. All three of them have combined to claim 20 Oscar nominations and all are in the running for Best Picture. And then, shortly after Cannes, we had the one-two punch of Barbie and Oppenheimer both opening on July 21, in the heat of summer (not normally considered prime Oscar-bait timing) and between them managing 21 nominations including Best Picture. A sixth Best Picture nominee, Past Lives, goes back even further, with its debut coming at the beginning of 2023 at Sundance. Only Poor Things, The Holdovers, American Fiction, and Maestro were first seen in the normally overcrowded Fall and Holiday corridor that has a habit of crowning Oscar winners. This year is an anomaly. But it also has turned out to be the first truly great crop of contenders since the pandemic. In regard to the latter, and due to the early publishing deadline, my final predictions for winners in all 23 categories should be considered a work in progress. At press time we had yet to hear news from key precursors like BAFTA and SAG, not to mention DGA and PGA awards among other guilds that often mirror eventual Oscar winners. Still, I’m wading in, but would urge you to check Deadline closer to March 10 for my final final predictions, if you are counting on this for your Oscar pool.

BEST PICTURE Oppenheimer is the one to beat here. It has the most nominations with 13, which means the most overall support in an Academy where everyone now gets to vote on all 23 categories rather than just their branch and for Best Picture, which is the case in the nominations round. It also has gravitas: an important historical subject that also resonates in frightening ways for these times. Plus it made nearly a billion dollars worldwide, unheard of for a summer release of a three-hour adult drama that’s partially in black and white. There is also the Christopher Nolan factor, which is hard to deny—he‘s overdue. Should that not happen, it will likely be Poor Things, which has genuine fandom among some factions in the Academy and the second biggest number of nominations with 11, indicating heavy support. Searchlight’s magic touch won’t hurt here. But with the Academy’s weighted voting system for this category, some films like The Holdovers—which seems to be universally loved—could sneak in with a large number of No. 2 votes. Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon has a strong 10 nominations here, but the omission of nominations for Adapted Screenplay and lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio could be a sign of trouble.

BEST ACTOR This race in surprisingly competitive with indicators from precursor events that we might have a real contest. Cillian Murphy took the Drama Actor Golden Globe for his performance in Oppenheimer, and it might be hard to deny this respected veteran on what—shockingly—is his first nomination. Then again, there’s Paul Giamatti, widely felt to have been robbed of even a nomination 20 years ago for Alexander Payne’s Sideways. Only having been in the race just once (for Supporting Actor in Cinderella Man), he also won a Golden Globe in the comedy category and then went on to beat Murphy in the oftenpredictive Critics Choice Awards. Other tests coming up as we went to press may tell the tale between the two. This is a very impressive category. Voters could also find love for Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction) and Colman Domingo (Rustin), both first-time nominees, or the spectacular work of Bradley Cooper, channeling Leonard Bernstein and who became only the fourth actor to direct himself to a nomination twice. Tough choices all around. But my hunch is it may be Giamatti’s year.

THE WINNER: Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers

BEST ACTRESS Annette Bening has now been nominated five times and takes on the ridiculously overdue veteran-who-hasnever-won mantle. Her work in Nyad is fearless, risky and astonishing, but that film is the only one in the category not nominated for Best Picture, so it is a hard mountain to climb (just ask Glenn Close). Much has been made of the fact that Globe winner Gladstone is making history as the first Native American actress ever to be nominated in the category, but the recent BAFTA snub is troubling, leaving an opening for another Globe winner this year, Emma Stone, whose performance is widely felt to be the most original and inventive. Still, Stone won just a few years ago and is still young. The international contingent could want to reward Hüller who is in two Best Picture nominees (Anatomy of A Fall and The Zone of Interest). Finally, as Meryl Streep noted in her Palm Spring Film Festival speech, Carey Mulligan’s exquisite supporting turn in Maestro is a gut-wrenching portrayal that should not be denied. It likely will, though, sadly.

THE WINNER: Emma Stone, Poor Things

THE WINNER: Oppenheimer

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BEST DIRECTOR This one appears to be a lock for the ridiculously overdue Christopher Nolan, who did everything voters love with Oppenheimer. He took a big risk and proved to supporters and doubters that he is a true master of the form. He was outrageously overlooked for The Dark Knight in 2009, which prompted the Academy to double the number of Best Picture nominees the next year (presumably in a bid to avoid a repeat of that embarrassment). And though his films have won crafts awards, this is his time. Quite frankly, if he were to lose, it would be a shock. Of course, there is much love and respect for Scorsese and the challenge of making his first Western, and there is a trio of foreigners competing here too, showing the international bent of the branch. The consensus, though, is Nolan.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR What a lineup this one is. It’s likely Robert Downey Jr.’s to lose, especially since his speeches on the circuit following precursor wins have been completely winning themselves. It doesn’t hurt that he’s in Oppenheimer, the film likely to be hearing its name called many times on Oscar night. Downey, though, also has the personal story, the remarkable career survival against all odds, and he’s a genuinely nice guy whose time has come. Ryan Gosling was hilarious in Barbie, but comedy against highly dramatic performances often has a tougher time. This might also apply to Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things) who is well-liked but also faces an uphill trek. Robert De Niro, a two-time winner and frequent nominee, won’t have enough juice to get over the top for Killers of the Flower Moon, although I would vote for him just to see him go politically ape like he did at the Gothams. Sterling K. Brown (American Fiction) is terrific, but the nomination is the win for him.

THE WINNER: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer

THE WINNER: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY This race seems likely to come down to a couple of epics with 23 nominations overall between them: Hoyte van Hoytema’s Oppenheimer and Rodrigo Prieto’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Considering the latter is probably going to be a runner up in the Best Picture sweepstakes to the former, I am tempted to say this is a category where Scorsese’s important and authentic epic Western could be recognized. On the other hand, cinematography often goes to the Best Picture winner, though not always. Still, Van Hoytema’s work on Oppenheimer was stunning. After losing on his first nomination for Nolan’s Dunkirk, this could be his year.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS If you go by all the various award shows leading up to the Oscars, the victor here is obvious. Da’Vine Joy Randolph has been on a winning streak, with no losses for her wise and moving performance in The Holdovers, and I see no reason for it to stop at the Oscars. She is the overwhelming favorite at this point (as I write this the BAFTA results have yet to come in). But who can beat her? Blunt, criminally overlooked in the past and now with her first nomination, can be helped by the huge haul for Oppenheimer. Nyad’s Jodie Foster, a two-time Best Actress winner, and Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple’s only nominee, stand little chance. America Ferrera’s stirring Barbie speech got her in this game, and the nomination was a terrific endorsement of her talents. But…

THE WINNER: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

THE WINNER: Oppenheimer, Hoyte van Hoytema

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OSCA R H A N D I CA PS / BY P ETE H A M M O N D

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE Neon’s pickup of Robot Dreams, a true charmer of a ’toon, was heartening, as was its inclusion here over higher profile possibilities like Disney’s Wish, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Dreams and The Super Mario Brothers Movie. So it is a victory itself. There is much love and respect for Hayao Miyazaki and what he calls his swan song with The Boy and the Heron, and it did indeed take the Golden Globe among a slew of critics’ prizes. Still, the year’s No. 3 grossing movie—the critically acclaimed sequel to a previous Oscar winner, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse—looks to be the rare follow-up to also go into glory again at the Academy Awards. Its sheer ambition and risk-taking with the animation art will likely be enough to overcome sentiment for Miyazaki.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN Holly Waddington’s imaginative styles for the wacky Poor Things vs. Jacqueline Durran’s fashionsetting pinkness of Barbie? Or the stunning clothes from Napoleon vs. the authentic and meticulous recreation of vintage Osage nation garments in Killers of the Flower Moon? Then there’s that hat that even managed to become a popular Halloween costume thanks to Oppenheimer. This is another toss-up category with many ways to go.

THE WINNER: Poor Things, Holly Waddington

THE WINNER: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM In all the instances in which a nominee in this category was also nominated in the Best Picture category, the winner was that film. Therefore, this is where you bet big in your Oscar pool and go for the only nominee that did that this year, The Zone of Interest, which would give the award to the U.K. in a rare move since the German-language Holocaust film comes from British director Jonathan Glazer. All the nominees are good here, but France’s failure to put forward their Cannes Palme d’Or winner, Anatomy of A Fall, in favor of the non-nominated The Taste of Things, means that that unforced error has handed it to the Cannes (runner up) Grand Prize victor.

BEST FILM EDITING More often than not, this category favors the Best Picture winner. This year it seems like a no-brainer for Oppenheimer. Thelma Schoonmaker is always formidable, but some may wrongly think the threeand-a-half hour running time of Killers of the Flower Moon means it needed more editing. No—length isn’t a drawback in looking at the best-edited films, and both of the above three hour-ish movies are prime candidates for truly the best.

THE WINNER: Oppenheimer, Jennifer Lame

THE WINNER: The Zone of Interest (U.K.)

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BEST ORIGINAL SONG This one is Barbie’s to lose— that movie might have had more than two nominations had the rules allowed it. So does it come down to Billie Eilish’s Golden Globe and Grammy winning Song of the Year “What Was I Made For?” Or is it the Critics Choice Awards-winning man anthem “I’m Just Ken”, with its showcase for Ryan Gosling and male chorus in the standout production number of any movie this year. Do they cancel each other out, allowing a long shot like Diane Warren’s “The Fire Inside” to finally give her the prize on her 15th nomination? Not likely. And despite making history, “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from Killers of the Flower Moon would be a shocker to actually win. So which Barbie tune makes it? Always bet on Eilish.

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING Golda is a well-chosen nominee here, and the makeup is also a reminder that its star Helen Mirren was robbed of a much-deserved Best Actress nomination. Maybe we honor the artisans who created the look for the woman who acted it so magnificently. Personally, I would say they could win just for that, but there are two Best Picture nominees here more likely to battle this one out: Maestro, from that maestro of prosthetic makeup Kazu Hiro, and Poor Things.

THE WINNER: Maestro, Kazu Hiro, Kay Georgious and Lori McCoy-Bell

THE WINNER: “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN Barbie’s toy world really stands on its own here, simply as something so eye-poppingly fun to behold. It screams production design, but then so does the bizarre fantasy world of Poor Things, which is every bit as dazzling. Then there is the stunning epic-ness of Napoleon, the authentic and stunning recreation of the Osage Nation circa 100 years ago in Killers of the Flower Moon, and the intricate recreations of Oppenheimer. For me this is one of the most difficult categories to call. If you spend any time watching the behind-the-scenes interviews with all the artisans who created these wildly different worlds, you would probably call it a five-way tie. Flip a coin, but when in doubt go with the sweep.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE Laura Karpman’s jazz stylings in American Fiction are a standout, and the veteran just got her first nomination here. Of course, you can never ignore John Williams (and the music branch didn’t), but he has no chance for this fifth and final Indiana Jones. First-time movie composer Jerskin Fendrix should be congratulated for landing a nomination this quickly for Poor Things. After all, it took Karpman a lot longer than that. However, none of them will likely win. It is between sentiment and a legacy score for the late Robbie Robertson’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and Black Panther winner Ludwig Göransson’s stunning, Grammy-winning Oppenheimer.

THE WINNER: Oppenheimer, Ludwig Göransson

THE WINNER: Oppenheimer, Ruth De Jong, Claire Kaufman

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OSCA R H A N D I CA PS / BY P ETE H A M M O N D

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY OK, so can this be a way the Academy makes it up to Greta Gerwig for the unfair snub in Best Director and give it to her and Noah Baumbach for their wildly successful and original Barbie—even though the writers branch has made it more difficult by putting it in a category of stiff competition from Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Tony McNamara’s sharp Poor Things, and (one that should not be underrated) Cord Jefferson’s crowd-pleasing satire American Fiction. I would not be surprised at all to see that one sneak in here. Although a writing award usually goes to a Best Picture winner, indicating a victory for Nolan, I think this is where a consolation prize may be given. I am tempted to go for a long shot and give it to the one nominated film that’s actually about writing.

BEST SOUND Oppenheimer probably takes this one, but formidable competition comes from the magnificent musical sound achieved in Maestro. But did voters see this Netflix film in a theater where the sound work really shines? There is also subtle work in The Zone of Interest, perhaps too subtle for voters who don’t really know what goes into sound design in the first place. The other candidates are just what you would expect here, big and loud. If Oppenheimer does win, it would mean the second Oscar for 22-time nominee, Kevin O’Connell, who was once known as the Susan Lucci of the Oscars.

THE WINNER: Oppenheimer

THE WINNER: American Fiction, Cord Jefferson

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY If you ask me, this is the category where Barbie belongs—had it not been the victim of arcane Academy rules that say it was adapted (unlike WGA which labeled it original) it might have won. At any rate, its absence here has opened up other possibilities, particularly for Golden Globe winner Anatomy of a Fall, which could be the first French screenplay to win here since A Man and A Woman in 1966. Stiff competition comes from the much-loved The Holdovers. It appears to be a contest primarily between Justine Triet for Anatomy, which could be celebrated here as a show of support for a Palme d’Or winner controversially not selected as her country’s international entry, and David Hemingson’s moving and funny dramedy, The Holdovers. The spoiler here could be Celine Song’s Past Lives, which only has two nominations, but one of them is Best Picture.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS Interestingly, the movie that would have been the easy winner here, Oppenheimer, didn’t even make the top 20 finalists. Go figure. Branch members might have resented talk that Nolan shot so much of it in camera that it didn’t leave much for the effects wizards. Consensus is the stunning work in the A.I. sci-fi epic The Creator is best in show here. The film’s only problem will be in getting the bulk of Academy voters to actually watch it, since it was not a huge box office hit. The one I would look at as possibly the upset of all time is Godzilla Minus One, Toho International’s return to the feel and budget of their older Godzilla movies, a marvelously inventive use of effects with a tenth of the cost of the others. The movie was a hit, but did voters see it? Hope so.

THE WINNER: Godzilla Minus One

THE WINNER: Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet

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BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE The shocking thing about this category is the films that aren’t in it. No Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. No American Symphony. Once again documentary branch voters show they don’t love docs about showbusiness (and maybe don’t love seeing their choices sweep the Emmys like Still did while ballots were still out). This is a pretty heavy bunch to choose from. Bobi Wine: The People’s President is the most upbeat and hopeful of a very international list of contenders—not a single American picture in the bunch. Because of its Ukraine war themes though, the harrowing 20 Days in Mariupol could have the edge, especially since last year voters went for another anti-Putin film, Navalny.

BEST ANIMATED SHORT An eclectic set of contenders here. Our Uniform is a six minute ‘toon about the plight of females in Iran as related to their fashion restrictions, and Letter to a Pig is quite weird, not your father’s Babe. Neither made a lasting impression on this viewer. The French Pachyderme blends nice animation to tell the story of a young girl’s visit with her grandfather. Ninety-Five Senses from Jerusha and Jared Hess is for me just fantastic as it is narrated by an older man as he tells the story of his life through the five senses, twisting into an amusing, and then quite dramatic tale that takes you to unexpected places. It is original and brilliantly animated, with a great vocal performance by Tim Blake Nelson. However best in show here is the inventive, moving, enriching, and quite wonderful WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko. Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono are even executive producers for this memorable film that is a must-see, especially for these times.

THE WINNER: WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko

THE WINNER: 20 Days in Mariupol

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT This is a terrific category, with at least three films that could come out on top. The powerful yet simple The ABC’S of Book Banning, the equally strong and eye-opening The Barber of Little Rock, and the stirring and lovely The Last Repair Shop (from Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers) could all win, depending on voters’ moods. The former pair focus on burning issues and social justice, while the latter is a moving, musical and a winning look at an operation that brings damaged instruments back to life and then sends them to schools where they live to play another day. Charming as it is as it is in chronicling the friendship of two Taiwanese grandmas, Năi Nai & Wài Pó is probably too light to win, and another, heavier, Taiwan-related doc, Island In Between is fine, but it doesn’t stay with you like the frontrunners.

THE WINNER: The Last Repair Shop

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT Here we have two films dealing with men grieving the death of their wives, another about mental illness involving a teen, one about the issues involved in getting an abortion, and one showcasing Wes Anderson doing, well, Wes Anderson. The starriest is the latter film, in which Anderson’s unmistakable style takes on Roald Dahl’s whimsical short story, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar with Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes telling it. Those reasons, not to mention its prominent Venice Film Festival debut, probably makes it the frontrunner. Of the two films dealing with grief, The After provides David Oyelowo with a rich and emotional role, and the superb Danish Knight of Fortune has some marvelous deadpan acting from two excellent thesps and a twist I didn’t see coming. And then there is Red, White and Blue which stars Brittany Snow, a surprising and very powerful abortion story that truly stuns and enlightens—a must-see film that’s especially topical in light of the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. This category could provide a real upset. I call it a toss-up, but since Academy favorite Anderson hasn’t yet won an Oscar…

THE WINNER: The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar

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MICHAE L BU CKN E R FOR D E AD L IN E

JUSTINE TRIET & SANDRA HÜLLER

No.

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don’t grow on trees, so it’s small wonder that the world has fallen for Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, and the outstanding lead performance of Sandra Hüller, since it won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize. Hüller’s turn dominates the ‘sort of’ courtroom drama of the film, in which her German novelist—also called Sandra—is accused of pushing her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), also a writer, from the top floor of their alpine home. Sandra maintains he fell, or jumped, and the film spends much of its runtime chewing over the truth, though never revealing it. Triet and Hüller first met over a decade ago, when Hüller presented the director with a prize for her short film Vilaine fille, mauvais garçon (2012). Several years later they met again, this time in Cannes, where Triet’s film Victoria was premiering alongside Hüller’s prize-winning Toni Erdmann. Triet knew instinctively that she one day wished to work with Hüller, and the feeling was mutual. So, she wrote her a part in Sybil, released in 2019, and the pair’s bond developed as Hüller played a “crazy” director. Triet then wanted to fashion a film around Hüller due to the “strong connection” she felt towards her. Anatomy of a Fall was born. With the film earning five Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress for Hüller and Best Picture, the pair meet Baz Bamigboye to recall their journey together.

Justine, before you had worked together, what was it that drew you to Sandra Hüller? JUSTINE TRIET: She gave me my first prize for Vilaine fille, mauvais garçon in 2012, and immediately I had a huge feeling about this woman. When I watched Toni Erdmann a few years later, it was a shock. I have to admit that in France it was something very huge. Everyone was like, “OK, did you see this actress, this director?” It suddenly felt like a new way of playing, of being. It felt like she was living this part on set and I was very impressed by her way of living it. After that, I said to myself, “I don’t know when, but I want to meet this person and possibly work with her.” I saw her as this character in Sybil, where she’s almost like a double of me, a crazy director. It felt very funny to me. And when I met her just before we started shooting, on the set of Sybil, she was very, very… Not shy, because she’s not shy, but I could not imagine the fire inside this woman before we worked together. The part was not so huge, but she was so involved and it moved me a lot. So after, I was like, “OK, I want to find a good story to continue the work between us.” And I wrote a few projects and the first two weren’t very good. The third was Anatomy of a Fall. Sandra, from your perspective, do you remember meeting Justine and presenting her with that award? SANDRA HÜLLER: Yes, I remember. There are also pictures of that moment that are really funny and some of them made it to the social media circus, to compare then and now, which is really funny. I remember that. And we both just had our children, so there was a connection. I admired her so much for making Victoria (2016), because also I had never seen anything like this before. It was very raw and at the same time, very on point, what she did. It felt like it came very easy, and at the same time it was absolutely existential, and I really love that. There was some punk to it. Everything she did felt really political from the beginning, which impressed me very much. And also, her genuine energy, which is like that to this day. The last time we spoke, Justine, you said you wanted to write Anatomy of a Fall as an apology for making Sandra play a director in Sybil. HÜLLER: [Laughs] Yeah, you should, you should apologize for that. TRIET: I don’t remember this. It’s in the transcript!

N EON /GEO J I NG /X I NH UA VI A G ET T Y IM AG ES/ E V E RE T T CO LLECT I ON

Palme d’Ors

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TRIET: [Laughs] OK, OK. Sorry. Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. For me it was two different worlds. Shooting these films was so different. Sybil was totally different in a way. But I think what I adore in our collaboration on Anatomy is... I think the second time when you are working with actresses or actors is always much more interesting. All the time it’s like this for me, because I think the second time, we’re not embarrassing ourself with politeness. Sometimes when you admire people, all that admiration between you becomes bullshit at the end of the day. You have to break that ice very strongly. What I find wonderful is to be able to find something that is really so rare, which is a way of living or experiencing something within my actors on set. So, that’s something of this relationship that is real and not a kind of nicety or politeness between an actor and a director. I think that was really the principle thing with Sandra, is how strong this connection that I feel to her has been since we met. And the way that this connection is then exploited without any manipulation, just sort of laid out bare on set, XXXXXXX so that we can harvest it. I felt that with Swann [Artaud who plays the defence attorney] also. When Samuel [Theis who plays the husband] arrived, I started feeling that there was a dynamic there that we were going to be able to use, and that was going to nourish the project very, very much. So, I think the bottom line is that I am kind of against the hygienist idea of the ways the dynamics and relations on set are supposed to be. I think that it’s not worth anything if something doesn’t happen that takes us further than the intended theme or subject of a work. HÜLLER: I was so happy that Justine talked about this possibility of us working together again after Sybil, and she kept what it would be about a secret until I received the script for Anatomy. I read it all in one reading and I was immediately sure that I wanted to be a part of it. There was no question about it. The time that we had spent before on Sybil was very special to me and I definitely wanted to find out more. I mean, you would have to come to set and shoot with us to understand it, I really cannot describe what is a very intimate process. It is very much based on mutual respect and the same sorts of fantasies that people have. Maybe speaking the same language, although we don’t. XXXXXXX And liking the same sort of process, trying things to be on the wrong path sometimes, and not being worried about things going wrong. Enjoying the process, not so much the outcome of something. Justine is a collector of material. I am too. I don’t like to work toward a certain goal that is to achieve. I find it unnatural, I must say. I think the collection of material, and the collective process of thinking about something and then

trying out things that we haven’t known before, is more the natural thing to do for me. And that’s what we do. Aside from that, there is a lot of humor, and everybody on the set has a voice, and there is no ranking in the importance of people or something. I love that very much. Language is central to Anatomy of a Fall. Samuel is French, Sandra is German, and they communicate with one another in English. How central did language become to you, Justine? TRIET: When I started to imagine something with Sandra, I started with a different project, but I was obsessed by one thing. If I was going to work with her, I had to really play with her foreign nature because it was not possible to just cancel it and pretend that she was, I don’t know, another person. So, the question of the language was really important from the beginning. I think if she had refused the part, I’d have had to find another person, I don’t know, English or American, or another European actress. But it was very important to put her in this situation. And I think we played a lot with this because she was surrounded by French people all the time. And sometimes she was lost. When she was in the courtroom, I could feel that she was totally lost sometimes. And she was very clever because I think she really uses this foreign language to personalize her character.

So, the question of language has been fundamental, as I’m experiencing right now myself in this interview [laughs]. The limit of the language that is not one’s own is something that has always recurred, and that is particularly important in the case of Sandra’s character as a writer, because of the implied, supposed, and perhaps effective mastery that she has over narrative. Being a craftswoman of narrative and going between different languages is something that all adds to what is expected of her as perhaps a duplicitous person. That the many languages that she carries within her play like a filter between her and reality, and separates her from us. What did you make of it, Sandra? HÜLLER: Reading the script, first of all, I found it thrilling. It was a really thrilling experience to read it. Even though it’s not mine, I found the language so precise, and the questions that are in this script were visible from the beginning and were so inevitable that there would’ve been no way to pass it on. There were no clichés unless they were there to show the cliché. That really astonished me. I loved to read that, and to think about that person immediately and what she could feel like. I think there were not so many discussions, which is... Justine, you have to tell me if I’m wrong. I had a lot of conversations with my French teacher, because we were

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From top: Sandra Hüller in the dock in Anatomy of a Fall; Justine Triet and Hüller in Cannes.

meeting twice a week in preparation, and while learning the lines, a lot of questions came up. And sometimes afterward I would call Justine to ask, “Do I see that in the right way?” But basically, everything was already there and on the table. There was not so much to question. There’s a scene that unfolds in court as we hear the recording of the fight between Sandra and Samuel. How was that choreographed for you, verbally and physically? HÜLLER: We shot the courtroom way after, so the two scenes aren’t really connected in my memory. We started in the house in the mountains for two or three weeks, and then we went to the courtroom to film for another three weeks. So, to me, they were really separated, these two places. This argument is so accurately written it’s almost like theater, with [playwright and poet Heinrich van] Kleist or something, that you could just take it and it would do something to you immediately. You can rely on the text very much. It’ll carry you through all of these things. And Justine has a way of marking sentences that she wants to have a bit more force. She writes them in capital letters with lots of exclamation marks, so you know where she wants you to go, which was easy at that point because I totally understood the feeling that Sandra would have at that moment. As for how we choreographed it… We just had to find out how far away they are from each

other in the beginning and how long this tension would hold until it explodes. So, we had to find the positions in the room, in the kitchen, but we didn’t have a lot of rehearsal at all. So, it was all in our imagination from the beginning. And as soon as we decided where everybody was, we immediately started recording it and then that was the shooting. Justine, how did you discuss that scene with Fantasia Barrino your actors? Because that’s the line that Sandra says in court, “According to your logic, all of Samuel’s problems are my fault.” It’s almost the crux of what occurs in the film, that this man is so fragile and weak that he blames his wife for his problems. TRIET: Yeah, exactly. This is the point. It’s because he died that she became the person who is responsible for everything. And of course, because she’s powerful, she’s much more attacked. And he seems to be the perfect victim, so of course we played with this code. Most of the time it’s the woman in this position. And I think, of course, at the end, she’s not responsible. We never know exactly all the story, but we can have a feeling in the argument scene that she’s not an angel, but she’s just deciding to take some space. HÜLLER: The sentence that you pick up on, whether or not she’d be responsible for all of his problems, is really fundamental to the film. And I think it incarnates the baseline of this

Sandra, what’s your take on women having to apologize for being successful or for having time to themselves? What is your sense of this question of women being allowed to be suns and moons in their own right? HÜLLER: You know, in my life, I’m sometimes confronted with people—men—that say, “These things don’t exist anymore, and it’s all in your head,” which is partly true because these narratives are so deep in our bodies that even we ourselves believe it sometimes that it’s not right to take time for ourselves. Take, for example, the situation now when Justine and I are promoting the film, or I’m promoting two films [Hüller also stars in Zone of Interest]. It is not easy to say, “I need a weekend away from my family because I just need to sleep.” Although I’m working all the time, at the same time, I’m away from them. So, that is something I think that maybe male friends in my environment don’t ask themselves. They just say, “I’ll stay in bed today.” Or don’t even say it. They just do it. So, of course, these things are very deep inside of our systems, and it takes a lot of awareness even to find them and to ask yourself, “Is this really my decision or is this a decision of my great-grandmother, or even before?” I think that this film is masterful to show someone who just doesn’t apologize for being there with all she is; with her talent, with her way of loving, with her way of respecting others and leaving space for the feelings of others. Which is often also criticized. Some people think she’s a bad mother; which I would love to discuss more, because I don’t think so.

N EON / VICTOR BOY KO/G E T T Y I MAGES

relationship between this man and this woman, and this woman who—and that was kind of the entire narrative device—has taken up space that she isn’t apologizing for taking up, in a way that women don’t tend to, or haven’t been portrayed as taking. And in some ways, of course, this is the trial of a woman who may or may not have committed murder, but in many other ways, as you know, that’s also what’s being tried here; the fact that she seems to have no qualms about the space that she takes up, whether it be artistically or otherwise. I think it’s a very interesting thing to observe that when you portray such a thing, it becomes kind of a litmus test for the people watching in terms of how they react to what they’re seeing. Whether they find that indeed maybe she is taking a bit too much space or not. And the ways in which the different spectators will react to her position says a lot. In some ways it’s asking a question that I was talking about just yesterday, of wondering what it costs to be free, what it costs to be courageous, what it costs to have ambition.

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movies are my food all the time. And of course, I’m obsessed by genre movies of the ’70s and ’80s ... Like all the Richard Fleischer movies, like See No Evil. I love 10 Rillington Place so much. But you know, it’s really interesting because you’re watching masters at work, and you are just like, “OK, maybe I can just find a way to not copy this thing, because it’s not interesting to just copy, but have some few influences with all the technical things.” Sometimes these guys really invent some technical way of filming. And when I watched Get Out the first time, I was really impressed. He invents some new things.

Sandra, do you share Justine’s love of these kinds of films? HÜLLER: I have to admit, I’m not so much of a cineaste. I didn’t see so many films in my life. All the things that Justine is talking about are absolutely not familiar to me. I have no idea Justine, you’ve spoken about this as being a what she’s talking about, but I really want to genre movie, but not a genre movie. What do spend some time with her so she can show me you mean by that? all these things. TRIET: Speaking about a genre of film, one has I’m not so much of a thriller fan. I think I’m to ask, “What does that mean and what kind of too easily shocked. I get disturbed by the lightest register is that?” And for me, it’s about code. It’s sense of whatever. I cannot watch horror movjust saying that a certain set of codes are availies, sometimes not even thrillers, or anything able to either be copied or to be overturned. with too much violence. I just can’t take it. But And this film, I believe, very much, surfs with the smart ones, where you have to find out the codes that it borrows, but it is also trying what’s really going on, of course I love them. hopefully to emancipate itself from it. There was a really big wave of those films, I I wasn’t interested in just making an American don’t know, in the ’90s or something. Courtthriller film, for example, but I thought that I could room dramas where we had to find out the use the tropes of a courtroom drama to create the truth. But I think that’s long ago and these portrait of a woman who is being completely dethings are not made so much anymore. Or picted from the outside by other people’s words, maybe it has moved towards TV, because there within which she is trying to redefine her narraare so many TV shows that try to entertain From left: Barrino and Taraji P. Henson on The Color Purple set. tive. And the genre would be put at the service of people with crime. this negotiation. Which is also the case for a lot of TRIET: This is what I love in working with the films that I love and find interest in. They tend Sandra, because she’s not reproducing any of to be kind of on the emancipatory ends of whatthese things. For me, she invents new chords XXXXXXX ever a thriller might be, whatever a courthouse in this movie, and she doesn’t try to surf on the drama might be, or any of these genres. You’ve cited The Boston Strangler and Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, and I’ve seen Presumed Innocent mentioned somewhere. What other films were on your mind when you and Arthur [Harari] were writing Anatomy of a Fall? TRIET: I was obsessed by White Dog from Samuel Fuller. I would have loved to make a remake of this film. I was obsessed by the shot behind the dog. And it was really funny, because we have the dog in Anatomy. I was really obsessed with how we would film the dog. And of course, The Changeling from Peter Medak was important for me. Yeah, there is a lot. Because as a spectator, I watch... 80% of my movie, it’s a genre movie all the time. I also love Jordan Peele’s Get Out. As a spectator, these

same wave. It’s the best. I love the freedom that comes from that inside our way of working. Sometimes I think people who are obsessed by genre movies are a little sick in a way. And I’m sick in a way. For me it’s like a drug. Like I need my blood all the night, like a vampire. I need some blood before I can go to sleep. It’s not so healthy. Maybe I’m a little ashamed of this, and I share it with Arthur, my partner. HÜLLER: Ah, that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll find fun in it, and maybe you can show me one day. I will stay over, and we’ll watch some horror. TRIET: I promise. Can you remember the first movie you saw that scared you? HÜLLER: I remember when I was a child, The Shining came on TV. Of course, not an original version. It was dubbed in German, blah, blah, stupid. But my parents watched it. I wanted to stay, I said, “Please, please let me.” So, my parents said, “It’s really not for you. You can try, but it’s really not for you.” And I remember spending the whole evening in front of the door looking through the little slit of the door, seeing if it was over. TRIET: No [gasps]. HÜLLER: Yes. I just couldn’t stand it. I have been dreaming of it ever since. Whenever I go into a hotel and it looks just slightly like The Shining hotel, I don’t know, it’s traumatic. Are you two going to work again a third time? HÜLLER: Yeah. I’d love to, but we don’t know when. Maybe not right now, because maybe we really have to digest the things that have happened, what we’re doing, and find out who we really are. TRIET: I would love to! I’m in. I would love that. HÜLLER: Yes, me too. Maybe a romantic comedy or something next? HÜLLER: Of course. But with a little twist. ★

N EON

Please don’t shy away from it. HÜLLER: No, but it’s not the answer to your question. The way that she loves her son is a way of respecting her son, leaving space for her son, leaving space for his own grief, not mixing it up with her own grief, not instrumentalizing him and his feelings for her own healing or grieving or whatever. Not to interfere with his own development. That is something really hard for a mother, I have to say. And it takes a lot of awareness to do it that way, to do so. I think maybe that’s also something that people connect so much with in this film. Because although it’s searching for the truth all over the place, and maybe it’s not found in this particular murder case, but it is absolutely found in these questions. And it’s something that we are not used to seeing; a woman to act that way.

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BEST DOCUMENTARY

PALM SPRINGS I N T E R N A T I O N A L

FILM FESTIVAL 2023

“An inspiring story of one family’s courage to speak out” –CNN

“Triumphant”

“Powerful”

–Vogue

–Washington post

A girl. Her father. Their fight for justice.

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ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS 5 ®

BEST PICTURE BEST DIRECTOR BEST ACTRESS BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY BEST EDITING “+++++

BREATHTAKING. THIS SCRIPT IS A DIAMOND. ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING IN IT COUNTS.” THE TELEGRAPH

WINNER BEST PICTURE WINNER BEST SCREENPLAY WINNER BEST ACTRESS GOLDEN GLOBE® AWARDS, NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE • CANNES FILM FESTIVAL • EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS VANCOUVER FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

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“SANDRA HÜLLER IS SENSATIONAL IN A CAREER-DEFINING PERFORMANCE.” IndieWire

A FILM BY JUSTINE TRIET

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