Deadline Hollywood - AwardsLine - Oscar Preview/Directors - 11/22/23

N OV E M B E R 2 2 , 2 0 2 3 / OS CA R P R E V I E W

GREAT DANE Mads Mikkelsen inherits the Earth EMERALD FENNELL Her art will go on ADULT SWIM Behind the scenes of Nyad PLUS: Ridley Scott Justine Triet Todd Haynes Cord Jefferson Jeymes Samuel Errol Morris

When they first met, he was the biggest star on the planet, and she was still in high school.

Sofia Coppola and Cailee Spaeny travel to Graceland to bring Priscilla out of the shadow of Elvis Presley

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First Take

On The Cover

6 MADS MIKKELSEN: How The Promised Land star secured his passage to Indiana Jones.

10 QUICK SHOTS: Getting the perfect score for The Super Mario Bros. Movie and taking steps to shoot John Wick: Chapter 4 in Paris.

12 ON MY SCREEN: Saltburn director Emerald Fennell reveals why she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Jurassic Park franchise.

Cover Stories 14 WALKING IN MEMPHIS: How Sofia Coppola and Cailee Spaeny paved the road to Heartbreak Hotel with biopic Priscilla.

ON THE COVER: Sofia Coppola and Cailee Spaeny photographed

by Andrew Zaeh exclusively for Deadline.

Dialogue 26 RIDLEY SCOTT 30 TODD HAYNES 32 JUSTINE TRIET 34 JEYMES SAMUEL 38 CORD JEFFERSON 42 ERROL MORRIS

Craft Services 46 STRANGE NEW WORLDS: How the design teams behind Poor Things, The Marvels and Barbie put their movies on the map.

New TV 52 POWER MOVES: Women are kicking butt and taking names in fresh leading roles on the small screen.

The Partnership

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58 FREE DUO: Why Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin traded docs for drama with reallife swimming saga Nyad.

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Q U I C K S H OTS 1 0 | O N M Y SC R E E N : E M E RA L D F E N N E L L 1 2

Playing a provincial drug dealer’s sidekick in a low-budget Danish film turned out to be Mads Mikkelsen’s gateway to global stardom

By Damon Wise

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H E N R I K O H STE N / ZE N TRO PA P H OTO C R ED I T

A WORLD GONE MADS

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From left: Mads Mikkelsen and Simon Bennebjerg.

In his homeland, the film has a much more blunt title, Bastarden, which drills much further down into the essence of the character. “The literal meaning in English is being the illegitimate son of someone,” the actor explains, “but it also means, obviously, to be an asshole. In Denmark, it’s not so much the former meaning, so I think it’s a very appropriate title.”

He shrugs. “But that’s not in our hands, so here we are.”

That said, Mikkelsen doesn’t judge Kahlen for his behavior. “He has no choice,” he says. “He has to be determined in order to survive.” In this way, the actor sees parallels with his 2013 film Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas, in which he played the lead: a vengeful German merchant who ignites a vicious feud with 16th-century Saxony. “I think Michael Kohlhaas has a lot in common,” he says. “It’s obviously a way older story, but the theme is the same: a man who’s shaping his own destiny, who has a sense of righteousness and justice, and he’s willing to burn down the world to get his way.”

As is historically accurate, the finished film makes Jutland look miserable, but Mikkelsen maintains the shoot “was not that bad”, noting that he always had the luxury of a trailer within reach if it started raining too heavily. “I’ve had tougher work,” he says. “Obviously, we had an epic film to shoot, and then 42 days and a budget of $8 million to make it look as good as it does, which meant we always needed to get something in the can. Which meant long days, but it wasn’t the toughest shoot ever. It was actually very satisfying.”

Despite the strike, it’s been a good year for Mikkelsen, now 58. The way timing worked out, you’d think he’d been juggling The Promised Land, a Venice competition title, with his role as Jürgen Voller in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which premiered in Cannes some three months

8

before. “Oh, they didn’t overlap at all,” Mikkelsen says. “It just so happened that they came out kind of back-to-back. Indiana Jones was in the editing room for a long time, because so much stuff has to happen with CGI, whereas our film was in the editing room for a much shorter time. They didn’t overlap in the shooting period. In fact, I’ve made it a virtue not to overlap films for a lot of reasons, partly because it’s frustrating, but it also means I have to compromise [on my performance].”

Born in the Copenhagen suburb of Østerbro, Mikkelsen has been in some of the biggest movies the industry can offer, from Bond to Marvel, and yet Indiana Jones affected him more than most. “It’s interesting to make a film that you almost spend as much time doing the PR for as you do shooting it,” he says.

“That’s the nature of those big animals from America, especially this one. We were everywhere, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Why did he want to be a part of it? “Indiana Jones?” he says, almost incredulous. “I grew up with it, as did everyone in my generation, way before I started watching French films and falling in love with this category or that genre. Indiana Jones was just a milestone in moviemaking when it comes to adventure films, one of those thoroughly charming films that stays with you forever. That was the first reason. Then

H E N R I K O H STE N / ZE N TRO PA / M USI C BOX FI LM S/ WA LT D I SN EY / EV ER E TT C O L L ECT IO N

As a recent new grandfather, Mads Mikkelsen couldn’t be happier, but he doesn’t smile much in his new movie. An earthy 18th-century period piece, The Promised Land sees the Dane play a hard-up veteran, Ludvig Kahlen, who is determined to turn the blasted heaths of Jutland into a thriving farmland. It’s a Western of sorts, which becomes noticeably clearer when Kahlen starts to cross swords with a competing local landowner, but, for Mikkelsen, it’s a subversive alpha male story of the kind he does so well, from the brutal Viking fantasy Valhalla Rising to the white-cold survival drama Arctic.

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sentimental reasons. When I read it, and I realized that it was a goodbye to him, I was like, ‘Damn. I want to be part of this.’ It’s a beautiful ending for this beloved character.”

It was also a long way from the world of Nicolas Winding Refn’s 1996 film Pusher, a debut for them both, in which he played a drug dealer’s sidekick. Did he think his career would take him this far? “God, no. It would have scared me away. I hadn’t graduated when I did the first Pusher film. I was in school. When you graduate, you just hope and dream that you will be part of something that you find interesting, and a lot of things were happening in Danish cinema at that period, and one of them was Nicolas and his Pusher films. I became part of his team, and that was everything I could hope for. Step by step, it changed into something else and, all of a sudden, I landed in America as well. If I had known that, I might have been scared off. I might have just said, ‘Hold your horses.’”

Which would have been cinema’s loss. When did he realize that his career was going international? “Well, the first thing I did was King Arthur,” he says, referring to Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 adventure yarn, in which he appeared with Clive Owen, Keira Knightley and Joel Edgerton.

“Then I got the call for James Bond and, obviously, that was a gamechanger in the sense that it was the real deal, it was an established franchise, and they wanted me to be not a sidekick but the baddie. I was like, ‘OK. Stuff’s happening.’”

It’s hard to imagine now, but Casino Royale was in no way a sure thing.

By the end of Daniel Craig’s tenure as 007, audiences were begging him to stay, but at the start of that tenure he was on a hiding to nothing. “Yeah,” Mikkelsen says. “The irony of that is, obviously, insane. It’s hard for us to imagine that now. I mean, James Bond is the crown jewel of English cinema history, in many ways, so, obviously, people are going to have strong opinions of what the next Bond is going to look like.

“There was a pressure on all of us, but on Daniel it was much more so, because there was not one day he would walk down the street—before we even shot a scene—and not see a headline saying he sucked, he was blonde, or his nose was wrong, or whatever. Everything was wrong. If that was pressure on me, he must have felt it a thousand times more.

Then he showed them, and we were all high-fiving each other. We knew it was going to be a good one, but it was better than that. It was fantastic to be part of.”

Since then, Mikkelsen has popped up in quite a lot of these kinds of big movies: Star Wars prequel Rogue One, Harry Potter sequel Fantastic Beasts and Marvel’s Doctor Strange (“Magic and flying kung fu—who am

Mikkelsen in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Mikkelsen in Age of Uprising : The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas.

I to turn that down?”). What’s it like being part of a huge franchise? Does a cool Danish temperament come in handy?

“I realized quite early that everybody is quite human on a film set,” he says. “For example, you meet Daniel Craig, who is about to be the new Bond and he’s also shivering in his pants, because it is what it is, but he’s also an actor, so he comes from the same background as me. He does his best, and he tries to focus and make the experience an intimate experience, by which I mean, yes, it’s a big film, but we need to take it down.”

These international films have been a godsend, however. “Denmark is a small country,” he says. “If you make one film a year, people get really fed up with you. One film a year is two month’s work, right?

Obviously, you can’t live from that.” Nevertheless, as The Promised Land shows, Mikkelsen does still like to work at home, and, despite all his big-budget studio work, the scene that will follow him forever is the dance he does at the end of Thomas Vinterberg’s bittersweet 2020 International Oscar-winner Another Round. “I’m so happy that Thomas prevailed,” he says, “because I kept insisting on not having that part of the film in there. I wanted a different kind of ending.”

Seriously? “I didn’t like the idea of dancing. I thought it was wrong, I thought it was pretentious. It was a realistic film, and I just couldn’t fathom how we would shove that into a realistic film. He tried to persuade me in so many ways, and he ended up just saying, “Listen, I’m the director. Shut up.” I was like, “OK. Fair enough. Let’s do it.” He was so right. It is the most beautiful ending of any film I’ve been in, and, as you say, it’s got a life of its own. Boy, was I wrong and I’m glad that he insisted.”

As for the future, Mikkelsen doesn’t have a bucket list; he says he just makes the most of every opportunity that comes to him. “I don’t have a little Hamlet in me,” he grins. It is, however, “no secret” that Martin Scorsese is one of his biggest heroes.

Have they met? “A few times. He’s wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I promised myself not to talk about Taxi Driver. Then, after a couple of beers, I recited the monologue in the film, the whole thing, which I learned when I was, I don’t know, 20-something. I knew I was making the biggest fool out of myself, and I’m sure he’s heard it a million times, but I couldn’t help myself.” He laughs. “I just love that monologue.” A

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Modern Mario “There’s something really special about Mario games,” says composer Brian Tyler. As a lifelong fan of the Mario series, Tyler was excited to bring the music from all of those worlds into a new animated universe for The Super Mario Bros.

Movie. “I realized by hearing the music outside of the game, it immediately takes you back

How The Super Mario Bros. Movie composer Brian Tyler created original themes with a familiar flavor

in a way that’s different from movies,” he says. “With movies, you typically see them once or twice, whereas when you add together the playtime of any game you like, you’re in that universe for days.”

The main challenge was to take the iconic Mario sound, from the original game’s composer Koji Kondo, and

create something familiar but more expansive. “We ended up going outside of the sound of a game and into doing a full live orchestra. On top of that I used some of the sounds from the music of the games from the ’80s to early 2000s. I’d be doing a drum fill and some of the sounds would be on a drum kit from Mario Kart, so there’s this

merging of all these different kinds of things to make it sound really unique.”

In the end, Tyler says the biggest compliment he received was from the original creators of Mario at Nintendo. “I played them this 15-minute theme suite that was all original themes of mine, and by the end they said, ‘This is Mario.’” —Ryan Fleming

John Wick: Chapter 4 cinematographer Dan Laustsen on shooting on the steps of Sacré-Coeur

Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4.

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Every film in the John Wick series is more ambitious than the last. As the cinematographer of the series, starting with the second film, Dan Laustsen says the goal was to always bring it into another level. For the fourth film, “we have a lot of inspirations from Japan,” he says, “more action and more powerful. We went bigger with medium format cameras on anamorphic lenses, and the whole color palette was getting more powerful reds, more powerful greens and more black in the black.”

One of the most ambitious scenes in the film was shot in France, on the stairs leading up to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Montmartre, Paris. As Wick ascends the steps, he contends with many assailants trying to stop him from reaching the top.

In addition to the challenge of choreographing the stunts in the scene, the location itself was not easy to film.

Initially, the French location company said the production couldn’t shoot there. “They said ‘It’s impossible because it’s a big tourist area and we can’t light it.’” This was an issue for the cinematographer, as the scene takes place at night and the steel blue lighting was needed to contrast the warm tones of the streetlights. Fortunately, the team on location was able to come up with a clever fix.

“After a couple of days there, we decided to just go up to every single apartment and ask them if we can use the balconies to put lights on. We got approvals to put lights on, more or less, every balcony there.” —Ryan Fleming

JO R DA N KEL SEY KN I GH T / UN I V ER SA L/ M U R RAY C LOSE / LI O NSGATE / E VE R ET T C O LLECTI O N

Stepping It Up

D E A D L I N E . C O M / AWA R D S L I N E

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“transfixing and hypnotic, writer/director Emerald Fennell has crafted a provocative and diabolical masterpiece”

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EMERALD FENNELL The Saltburn writer-director considers retelling Jurassic Park as an erotic love story, who would will play her in her biopic and the merits of tuning into Scandoval drama

By Stevie Wong

Best Advice I Ever Received

The Part I’ve Always Wanted

After the incredible surprise and joy of winning an Academy Award two years ago, I was lining up for the PortaPotty because it was Covid times and things were like a wedding.

Frances McDormand was queuing behind me, and I was holding the Oscar, completely shellshocked. She saw me and she leaned in said, “Do you want to know my advice?” And I said, “Yes, please.” And she said, “Ken doll clothes fit him exactly.” I was like, “Oh.” And immediately in the moment when I was so shaken, just her being funny calmed me down. And it was the best advice I’ve ever had.

I think it’s got to be a super villain, right? It’s sad they’ve just done The Little Mermaid because Ursula the Sea Witch is my inspiration and my muse. I’ve always loved her. I’ve always felt she deserves her own prequel where she’s misunderstood. She’s just going to the clubs,

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in that iconic outfit, stuffing souls into little bottles and then harvesting them.

My Dream Project I honestly feel that I’ve been so lucky. I’ve been able to make my dream projects already. But my favorite film of all time is Jurassic Park, so I would love to get in on the dinosaurs. Well, first and foremost, it’s very The Little Mermaid

Saltburn writer-director Emerald Fennell.

erotic. I think humans and dinosaurs have gotten to that stage in their time together where things are starting to get quite thrilling. So, there’s a marriage between a man and a velociraptor and it’s basically a domestic drama.

My Toughest Challenge Yet I think with Promising Young Woman, it was just the best time of my life. We had so little time, 23 days in fact, and I was so pregnant.

It was a ticking clock, not just because we had a finite budget, finite time, but I mean, I gave birth three weeks after we finished principal photography. It was definitely a bit of a tightrope walk.

The Character That’s Most Like Me They’re all like me, unfortunately. They’re kind of like baby spider eggs. They live in your brain and then they get hatched and amazing actors come and make them even more interesting. Although these days, I really do feel like Oliver [in Saltburn]. His ambition and desire is a bottomless pit of want, and I can really relate to that [laughs].

The Movies That Make Me Cry It’s a Wonderful Life.

From the moment it starts, and Mr. Gower accidentally puts poison into one of the bottles at the pharmacy, and then slaps young George

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Following her Best Original Screenplay win for Promising Young Woman, Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s sophomore feature, presents a gothic tale of obsession and excess, starring Barry Keoghan as Oliver, a social-climbing Oxford student obsessed with the aristocratic Felix ( Jacob Elordi). The multi-hyphenate Fennell also pops up as the pregnant Midge doll in Barbie and is co-penning the upcoming John Wick spinoff Ballerina. Here, she agrees to revisit some best memories, or, as she puts it, “rummage around those skeletons.”

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Celine Dion

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Barbie

Bailey for not delivering the medicine. I cry the whole way through that film, it’s so beautiful.

Also, it has one of my favorite things in the world, which is in the [parallel universe] where he didn’t exist, his wife is just a plain librarian who never married. Like everyone else is dead or drunk on the street, their lives destroyed, and her ‘terrible curse’ is just to be wearing a brown coat, glasses and she’s a librarian, which is just so funny as the worst fate for a 25-year-old woman.

The Most Fun I’ve Had On Set I mean, I think watching Carey [Mulligan] and Bo Burnham dancing to Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind” was one of my favorite days of all time.

I’ve got to say Barbie

Jurassic Park

is pretty spectacular.

Walking into Barbie Land and seeing my whole childhood built with such diligence and care was so moving and amazing.

My Guilty Pleasure I don’t believe in guilty pleasure. I love reality TV, so obviously I’m hugely invested in #Scandoval. I will be watching every iteration of 90 Day Fiancé, and I am equally as invested in both. U.K. reality shows tend to be less glamorous. We have less soft focus. I just love seeing beautiful women with immaculate hair tearing each other to pieces.

That’s all I want.

Who’d Play Me In My Biopic?

Oh god. Well, if it’s a biopic, I’m just going to

choose Margot Robbie and have everyone be like, “Wow, she was so much more beautiful than we remembered.”

I’m just going to give myself a glow-up. Margot’s such an amazing actress and I would just make sure that in every scene she was in slow motion with a wind machine. So, every moment of my life will be remade, but with her looking and being perfect in it.

The First Time I Experienced Extreme Fandom Someone got a tattoo of my character Nurse Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife. I remember that, very strongly being like, wow, that’s dedicated and cool and amazing. Again, they’d given me a significant glow-

up, so I really appreciated that. I just looked like a million dollars.

My Karaoke Playlist Well, it used to be Celine Dion’s “Think Twice”, which was a huge hit in England. And I found out when I did it in America that it was not a single in America. So, it was crickets and I’m not a good singer. Obviously, the thing of tackling Celine Dion when you’re not a good singer is a joke in and of itself. And then to sing to grave silence at an event with people you don’t know very well, that was quite tough. So now I sing the Bond theme, “Golden Eye” by Tina Turner. It’s a telling song. It really takes you on a journey.

It also gets very much out of my range, which is minimal, but I think

that only adds to things.

And depending on the room, I like to do Enya.

An erotic Enya routine.

The Song I Always Have To Dance To I’m pretty sure we played “Murder on the Dance Floor” [by Sophie Ellis-Bextor] at our wedding. There’s never a time when I won’t listen to that song and dance to it. It’s all day, every day. When I wrote it into Saltburn, it was going to be a walk instead of a dance. But we realized it wasn’t going to have the same joy and gleeful evil. So, it had to be a dance [for Barry Keoghan]. These days, every time I hear it, which is all the time, because it’s usually playing just before I go out and do a Q&A, I will do a little dance. A

Promising Young Woman

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When Priscilla Beaulieu met Elvis Presley in 1959, it was love at first sight. By 1973, it was all over. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla takes us inside the gilded cage that was life with the world’s biggest star…

ICAN IDOL

BY JOE UTICHI

PORTRAITS BY ANDREW ZAEH

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Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla with Jacob Elordi as Elvis Presley.

Priscilla Presley has been asked the same question over and over again: “What was it really like living with Elvis?” This year, we’ve been able to see for ourselves in Sofia Coppola’s tender biopic Priscilla, the story of a young girl swept off her feet by the most famous man on the planet, the first and most enduring rock’n’roll icon, a legend whose luminous fame has not dimmed one iota since his untimely death in 1977, aged just 42.

It’s a fairytale of sorts, in the most romantic and also the darkest sense of the word. In the world outside the musical gates at Graceland, the Memphis estate that Elvis bought for his mother, Priscilla Beaulieu was thought to be living the dream. The reality, however, was different, something that piqued Coppola’s curiosity. Indeed, strong but lonely women are a recurrent theme for the director, and one could make a case for Priscilla being the third in an unofficial trilogy alongside Lost In Translation (2001) and Marie Antoinette (2006).

But although it bears all the hallmarks of a Sofia Coppola movie, it is different in a crucial way: Adapting Priscilla’s memoir for the screen would mark her first real foray into living history. Marie Antoinette was guillotined more than 200 years before Coppola’s film of the same name was crucified, rather unjustly, upon its Cannes Film Festival premiere, and The Bling Ring was only loosely inspired by an article in Vanity Fair. Telling Priscilla’s story would give her access to the source, a chance to see behind the rhinestones and the glamor.

That was not a project without its fair share of perils, especially with regard to Elvis Presley’s estate and the guardians that protect it, but Coppola is also not a director overly troubled by fear. Especially not when confronted with a story that brought together so many of her passions: Music, fashion, and the peculiarities of American pop culture.

As she sits down now to discuss the film, she says she has yet to find the appropriate distance to fully process her experience, let alone to think about what she might do next. But she is ready to reflect on what drew her to Priscilla’s story in the first place, and how she got to the truth about one of the most mythologized marriages of the 20th century…

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For 50 years,

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When did it become your next project?

During the pandemic, I spent a long time adapting an Edith Wharton project [The Custom of the Country], and it was this massive undertaking. It was a five-hour TV thing that kind of fell apart.

So, when I picked this up again I was ready for a palette change. It was something that I felt I just knew how to do. It was in my world, but it was still challenging. So, I got excited about jumping in, just to create this world and tell this story that I felt was so unknown. I had no idea she was in high school when she started living at Graceland. It was full of surprises; she’s such a famous figure in American pop history, but we know so little about her and what it was really like. How could anybody let their kid go and live in Graceland with Elvis Presley while they’re still in high school?

It’s mad. But as you lay out, it’s also kind of weirdly understandable. The aura and allure that Elvis Presley held was…

Irresistible. There weren’t as many stars back then as today. The idea of his fame was so overwhelming.

I mean, I tried to be sensitive with all of the characters. I’m looking at the parents’ point of view, but really looking through her eyes. I know when I was 15, if I had a crush on a rock star that started flirting with me—or even if there was an older man flirting with me—I’d have thought I was pretty special. You’d think you were special, and really sophisticated and smart. You wouldn’t see something that might be inappropriate. I really tried to connect it with that teenage crush feeling, and what it must have been like for her to be in his orbit, and how she described it. It’s so hard to fathom that her first kiss was Elvis Presley.

Meeting Priscilla, what did you make of how she’d processed it all over the years?

I don’t want to speak for her, but I think it was such a different time that the terminology we use today wasn’t even used. She doesn’t look back on the experience in any kind of damaging way. She had a full relationship with him, they were married, and they had a child.

She still looks at it as the great love of her life.

I was just so interested in being at that point in life where you’re trying to form your identity, and then to be with someone with such a strong opinion of how a woman should be. I wanted to focus on the struggles and pressure I felt she must have been under to be this ideal woman.

And even when she’s nine months pregnant, she was riding motorcycles and trying to be fun for Elvis, really invested in being his ideal woman.

I was impressed she found the strength to leave him and find her own way. She said she didn’t even know what her taste was until that point, and then she started her whole life. For some people, it would be too hard to get away from that. I can understand how alluring it’d be for someone to say, “Come into my world.” As opposed to trying to figure out your identity on your own, such a hard journey. I really tried hard to translate it just as she expresses the experience.

Clockwise from above left: Priscilla and Elvis welcome baby Lisa Marie; in happier times; waiting for Elvis.

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How did this story come to you?

I don’t know how I originally ended up with it, but I had the book maybe 10 years ago. I remember it had this great cover. The original cover is mass paperback with a heart-shaped frame and the words, Elvis and Me. I think I picked it up for a fun read, and I didn’t quite expect to be so moved by it. But around the time, my first thought was, ‘I love this kind of character, but is it too much like Marie Antoinette to think about as a film?’

Then, a couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend about Priscilla’s story, and remembering it made me pick the book back up. Re-reading it, it grabbed me in a way where I could see this enticing, inspiring visual world of Graceland and 1960s Memphis. It was something I’d never done, and it was so Americana.

The themes resonated with me again, and I kept thinking about how relatable it was. I thought it said so much about the women of my mother’s generation, who I was raised by, and the expectations of them to stay at home, as though that’s supposed to be fulfilling as her whole life.

You’re not didactic, but you don’t condone anything either. You leave it up to us.

People accuse you of being superficial for that, but to do it any other way would be to betray either your own feeling about it, or Priscilla’s.

I do like movies where things aren’t all spelled out. I really

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what I’ve inherited from her. That side of myself is deeply connected to her.

She also exposed us to contemporary art that she was into, and showed us things. People don’t see it as much, but she’s definitely had a big impact on me, and I feel lucky that I have sides of my personality and my approach that come from each of them—my mother and my father.

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just wanted to show this experience through her eyes, and then let the audience take it in however it affects them. It’s tricky, because you don’t want to be condoning things, but I thought her experience was unique and interesting enough just to present. There are elements of it that are also so relatable, so why not let the audience take from it what they want? I didn’t want to villainize Elvis, but I did want to make it clear it was another era, and to show him as the human that she saw.

You mentioned that Priscilla was a woman of your mother’s generation, and that those women had certain expectations placed upon them by marriage. A few years back, your mother spoke to me about those expectations when she made her own debut feature film, after 81 years of life. I know you’re often asked how your father shapes your worldview and your filmmaking. But I wonder how you’d characterize your mother’s impact?

She definitely made a big impact. On this movie, I was thinking about her and the kind of struggles that she would talk about of being of that generation. When Priscilla wants to get a job, Elvis says, “No, I need you to be at home.”

That resonated with the kind of expectation of my mom’s generation. I know that she struggled with having a creative life of her own, and was expected to be a mother and a wife; or at least, those were the priorities.

At that time, I guess wanting something outside of being a mother and a wife was looked at as unusual. It wasn’t just expected, as it is today, that you would want to express yourself outside of that.

But even today, there are still remnants of how women see themselves through other eyes, which I think was what made it a rich vein to explore.

My mom is more of a quiet observer, which I think I’ve taken from her into my work. I think that comes through; that aspect of her personality, or

You touched on meeting Priscilla.

I’m curious how exposed you feel when you first sit down with a person whose story you’re going to adapt. You obviously weren’t able to do that when you set out to make Marie Antoinette. How did that conversation go?

It really was the first time I’ve ever had that experience. It was nervewracking and it felt like a responsibility.

But I also felt so lucky to have had access to the person who the story is about, and to be able to fill in the blanks and get more insight and detail from her. And she definitely filled in details that helped me tell her story.

She’s very private, although in the book she reveals personal things. So, it was a sort of balance. I never wanted to pry, but I wanted to get some personal detail from her. As a writer, it was the first time I’d ever had to think about someone’s view of the movie besides my own.

I wanted her to like what I came up with, but I also felt I had to make something that felt true to me, and it was a balancing act to match what felt truthful to what she felt comfortable sharing, and what represented her story.

You received an email from the late Lisa Marie Presley before production began. She expressed frustration for the way your script portrayed events and suggested she would “go against you” publicly if you continued. She died four months later, so never saw the movie. What went through your mind when those emails came?

I was really stunned to hear that, a couple of weeks before shooting. I felt like it was something between the family that I had no idea about. I felt like it was between them. And of course, I didn’t want to do anything that was going to make anyone uncomfortable. The book had been out for decades by then.

I was really surprised, and I wish she had a chance to see it because I don’t think Elvis comes off badly. I admire him, and I wanted to show the private side, but it is Priscilla’s story. I definitely was always meaning to be sensitive, and I wasn’t trying to take him down in a way that she would be worried about.

Did it change your approach at all?

No, because I had always wanted to be sensitive and really show how I interpreted Priscilla talking

about him, which was not damning at all. I felt like I was really focused on bringing her story to light.

I can understand that there’s a business there, and a brand, but I just didn’t expect to find myself… I would never want to intrude on a family. I was always planning to approach it with sensitivity, because that’s just the way I do things.

It doesn’t feel to me that acknowledging the struggles that Priscilla went through and appreciating the impact and artistry of Elvis Presley are mutually exclusive propositions.

Yeah, my music supervisor Randall [Poster] was like, “I still love Elvis.” The point was never to take him down. It was to tell her story in a truthful way. I thought I learned more about him as an artist and where his struggles came from.

Were there certain areas of the story that were harder to navigate than others?

I definitely needed to balance the dark with the light, and I wanted it to be the rollercoaster that Priscilla described it to be. Elvis’s use of prescription pills is a big part of his story, but she never wanted that to be overemphasized.

She always wanted to make sure that the love between them was clear, and there really was a great love there. It was there even in the dark times, and I totally understood the ups and downs of navigating a complex relationship. The love is always there, and you feel it in the way she tells the story.

Part of it was casting Jacob Elordi, who is so charming and lovable. That’s how people describe Elvis. It was important, because it was also why he was able to get away with behavior that wasn’t always the best, or always mature. I felt empathy that she explained where his struggles were coming from and his artistic frustrations.

I thought that was important to understand, that it’s not just a guy having a temper, but to understand the pressure he was under.

I was impressed she found the strength to leave him and find her own way. She said she didn’t even know what her own taste was until that point, and then she started her whole life.”

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Doing something that’s a little more unusual is harder to do now than when I started, for sure. But as long as there are filmmakers wanting to tell those stories , I think we’ll keep slipping through the net.”

—S O F I A C O PP O L A

Did you feel the breath of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis on your back?

I’d written my script before seeing anything about that, but then I saw it just before going into production. It’s just a totally different kind of movie. I didn’t feel like people said, “Oh, there’s another Elvis movie coming out,” that was a problem for me. It’s like, OK, and then next year you get to hear Priscilla’s story. She’s such a small character in the Baz Luhrmann movie, and

it just felt cool to be providing this counterpoint, looking at a similar story from a different side.

Maybe it’s like enough time has passed [to examine this story]. It’s such a big part of our history. My feeling was the two could make a double feature and that it was cool to look at the same story from that flipside while it’s still fresh in our minds.

Cailee and Jacob feel invested in the story they’re telling. Is it important for you to create space for your actors to feel that sense of investment? That they’re not playing roles but collaborating in what you’re creating?

I always think of them as that, and I try to set it up that way. I know that they’re putting their necks on the line, and I’m just there to help. We’re all kind of in it together. And we were all taking on something ambitious and scary and just all jumping in together.

With Jacob, I didn’t want a caricature. I wanted him just to embody the essence of Elvis enough to tell her story and give the impression, and the whole thing was just to give an impression of what this moment in time for her was like. So, I think casting good actors and then setting it up in a way that feels always like an intimate set—we spent a lot of time in that bedroom together with Philippe [Le Sourd], the cinematographer—and finding our way and exploring it. It helps to have a sensitive cinematographer too, to create that space to play around and figure it out together.

How much joy did you find in the Americana of it all? Rebuilding Graceland?

To me, that’s what the exciting part of being a director and adapting a book is: translating it to the visuals and creating this whole world.

Working with the art department and the costumes and making this vivid world.

I love movies that you can just get lost in, and feel like you’re in someone else’s world for two hours. It’s fun. And we had a lot of movie magic.

We built it all on set, so just walking onto stage and they’re building Graceland and putting in the shag carpet, and it’s just all the kind of magic of movies.

I think that inspires everyone to come together.

Were you tempted to add some personal touches or was it very much about being accurate to the history?

I wanted it to feel authentic, and in fact Priscilla said that we got it right. It looked right to her, so I’m glad about that. But then our whole team was like, “We’re not making a documentary.”

We could open ourselves to interpretation while just staying within this world that’s believable.

With the bedroom, there weren’t any photos of the bedroom, so that we had to invent, which was fun for the art department to be like, “What would his man cave at Graceland be?”

We have clues that there were some padded doors. They were maybe from another era, but we built on that. In the book, she describes going in his bedroom the first time and how big the bed was and intimidating; thinking about all the women that had been there before her. So, we made the bed extra tall and had this black velvet bedspread. It’s always taking cues from her and her emotional state; the impression of this place through her eyes. There was kind of an Alice in Wonderland feeling of her going into this world. A fairytale that sort of starts melting.

In large part, there were so many photos and home movies and things that we could draw on because it’s such a part of our culture.

And it felt so exotic to me. It wasn’t really my world that I grew up in at all. So, I think it has an interesting appeal because it’s so American.

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You mentioned Jacob; I hadn’t been familiar with Cailee’s work before this movie.

I hadn’t seen much myself. I’m so grateful that the financiers let me cast an unknown in the lead, and it also makes it more believable than someone you know playing her.

I was really daunted by the question of who I was going to cast that could believably pull off a journey from the age of 14 to 29. I’m so glad my casting people told me about Cailee, and so I watched her in Mare of Easttown. She made a real impression, but it’s another thing to carry a whole movie.

When I met Cailee in person, I found her to be thoughtful and sensitive. And then talking to Kirsten Dunst helped, because they had just worked together. Kirsten said how talented she was and how great she was to work with. I felt I could embark on this with her by my side.

We were going to do a chemistry test with her and Jacob, but we never got around to it. When we jumped into shooting, it was such a relief to see them together, and see that chemistry come off the screen.

But casting Elvis felt impossible too. Nobody looks like Elvis. Jacob’s charisma and sensitivity was important, because that’s how Priscilla described him when she first met him. He was in a vulnerable state, wanting to be a serious actor.

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I’d say it was pretty exotic to most of us.

Elvis’s tastes in interior design were…

Pretty unique [laughs].

Does the fairytale aspect come into the fashion?

I love spending time in the costume department because it’s so much fun. It’s always something I’ve been into, but also, it’s such a great way to express a character, and especially her transformation from a little girl to trying to be his ideal woman, to finding her own self at the end in the ’70s. So, it really helped us so much with the characters’ transitions, the hair and makeup, and the clothes, and the colors, and the fact that he was so particular and that you could see that she was more rebellious. She’s wearing bold patterns that he didn’t like. He had such an opinion about style. It seemed to be fun, too. And then also could be oppressive after a while. I can see both sides of it, and how that piled on the pressure.

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This movie opened strong. We are constantly told the desire for independent cinema is dying out, but this movie has clearly connected.

You’ve been on the other side, too, where a film like Marie Antoinette doesn’t resonate immediately. It’s taken 17 years, but that movie is finally getting its just reappraisal.

Yeah, thank you for saying that, we worked so hard on it. We were happy with the way it turned out, and then they were like, “Well, people don’t get it, and think the music’s weird.” It’s hard to hear that.

It was hard for me to understand, too, because I was into it, and I thought we pulled off what we were trying to do. I know it was not for everyone.

But yeah, I’m used to not being part of the main culture because I grew up in the time when there were subcultures, so it’s just that movies are so expensive that there’s the moneymaking aspect of it. It was disappointing that it didn’t find,

especially, the audience of young women that I thought would connect with it. I think that the studio didn’t really know what to do with it, and it didn’t find its audience until years later. So, it’s really satisfying now that girls are watching it.

And it’s also really exciting that people went to see this, because that’s definitely not a given with my work. So, I’m just happy that I’ve been able to keep making them, and it’s a bonus that people connect. I just try to make enough money that you can make another movie. It was hard to get financing, and I want to come through for financiers who took a risk on this, and it makes me really happy that people are seeming to connect to it.

Art isn’t always ready at the moment people are ready to receive it.

Definitely. It’s an expensive artform, filmmaking, but I feel lucky I’ve been able to keep making stuff exactly as I imagined it, and it has been nice recently to feel like people are appreciating the early work that didn’t get seen.

Does it get harder to carve your small piece of the pie?

I do think independent film is in a really fragile state, so I think it needs all the support it can get right now. Doing something that’s a little more unusual is harder now than when I started, for sure. But as long as there are filmmakers wanting to tell those stories, I think we’ll keep slipping through the net.

People are checking the algorithm now.

That wasn’t a thing that anybody cared about

when I was starting out. That’s what it’s all about. I think it’ll help that Priscilla seemed to work, but I haven’t really thought much beyond this week about what I might do next.

Do you still finish a movie and tell your husband you’ll never make another one?

I always say that [laughs]. And he’s like, “Oh, you always say that.” I think I’m just tired by the end, and you put yourself so completely into them that it takes a second to regroup. I’m still at that stage with this movie, but I mean, I love making them.

There’s nothing like getting your team together and seeing things come to life in front of your camera. I’m just not one of these people that has a bunch of things cooking all at once. I kind of put my heart totally into one thing, and then I have to get my energy back before going back in.

Does your relationship to your past work change at all?

I don’t really rewatch them, unless I happen to catch something on TV, we might watch it for a little bit. I showed my kids Lost in Translation before we went to Japan, so I do revisit things by showing them. I do remember seeing The Virgin Suicides a couple of years ago in the theater and thinking how much I loved working with Ed Lachman, and how much I still appreciate his photography. I don’t know, I’m sentimental about them. I remember the experience of making them, and I can never really look at them objectively. ★

Through the years: From the ’60 to the ’70s.

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Cailee

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e Spaeny The star of Priscilla on why she couldn’t help falling in love with the first lady of rock’n’roll

AN D R EW Z AE H FO R D EA D LI N E / SA BR I N A LA NTOS / A2 4

BY ANTONIA BLYTH When Cailee Spaeny was 13 she reached a crossroads: she could carry on the way she was going or walk away from a normal life forever.

Quitting high school to become an actor might not work out, she knew that, but Spaeny took the hard road; the exciting and risky one. And such was the choice the teenage Priscilla Presley made in 1963, leaving her family stationed in Germany to move in with Elvis at his home. Graceland, under the protective care of the singer’s father, Vernon.

So, when Spaeny was cast in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, perhaps the two women, actor and subject, had more in common than they knew.

“We were the same age when we had this conviction, ‘Well, this is my life and I want this and I’m a teenager, but…,’ Spaeny says. “Like Priscilla’s family, my family made incredible sacrifices to support that decision. And you’re not only having to get it right for yourself, but also make sure that you don’t let them down.”

At their first meeting, in a Los Angeles –– restaurant, Presley told Spaeny, “I would’ve found a way to get to Graceland to be with Elvis, whether they helped me or not.” Says Spaeny, “I probably would’ve done the same thing if my parents didn’t help me get to LA. I would’ve found some person and I would’ve jumped in their car, and I would’ve made it work. I was hell-bent on that decision. I grew up really quickly and I started bringing income to my family when I was a very young age. It wasn’t a sort of cute, ‘I’ll try this out.’ It was like, ‘I have to make this work.’”

In casting Priscilla, Coppola had been searching for someone who could play 14 to late twenties, and Spaeny was vouched for by Coppola’s muse of sorts, Kirsten Dunst, who had worked with the young actor on Alex’s Garland’s upcoming Civil War—Spaeny’s second go-round with Garland after starring in his Hulu series Devs.

“I guess she just saw something in me and Jacob and she pulled the trigger,” Spaeny says. There was no chemistry read with Jacob Elordi, who would play Elvis. “The thing about Sofia is that when she knows what she wants, she really goes for it and trusts her gut.”

Spaeny emailed Elordi and together they

connected over their love of cinema. “The first night we met, we went and saw Gilda, the Rita Hayworth film, which ended up being one of the Sofia’s references. Then we just hung out. We were in London at the same time, and we just became really close. Very quickly, I learned that he approaches roles in the same way that I do.

Basically, we’re just two nerds. We’re really intense about these things. We barely ever hung out when we were filming because we were just so in it.”

Then there were the meetings with Presley herself. “She’s a woman of a different generation,” Spaeny says. “She holds herself so differently. She still dresses in a way that she really is so elegant, and my go-to is jeans and a T-shirt and my vocal register sits down here. I’m a girl of a different age. She is royalty. She holds herself in that.”

Presley was soft-spoken and a little shy, Spaeny says. But she was also fiercely protective of her family and her story. “If there was something I was getting wrong about the way I perceived it, she would go, ‘What do you mean by that? No, that’s not right, that’s not it.’ But she’d do it in a kind way.”

Sometimes the two women would just talk about dogs. “I mean, we ended up talking for four hours, and then we got into talking about her time with Elvis, and there’d just be these amazing details to the story that, coming from the woman herself, they were like gold. It was so special, and her eyes would light up like she was back there with him and she would laugh at a joke that he told. It was really these precious moments that I’ll always take with me.”

Spaeny understood the delicacy of the material and its deeply personal telling in Presley’s book Elvis and Me. And she connected to Presley’s experience of first love, she says. “I think the baseline emotional journey that she went through, it’s probably times 10 anything that I’ve gone through, because it was out there for the world to see, but [it’s about] just falling in love for the first time and doing anything to hold onto that feeling. When you’re so young, when you fall in love like that, you don’t know who you are to begin with. So, when [your partner] says, ‘I like women like this,’ or, ‘I prefer that,’ I know in my

Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla.

I guess she just saw something in me and Jacob and she pulled the trigger. The thing about Sofia is that when she knows what she wants, she really goes for it and trusts her gut.”

— C A I L E E SPA E N Y

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own experience, I’ve definitely gone, ‘Well, I don’t know who I am anyway, so I might as well be that, because I’m in love.’ You want to hold on.”

Apart from reading everything she could, Spaeny studied every photo she could find, and watched every film. “I watched her interviews after she had released the book. I even watched her Naked Gun movies, which I laughed about with her.” Starring Leslie Nielsen, the Naked Gun movies revealed that Priscilla had great comic timing and a surprisingly risqué sense of humor to boot. “I was like, ‘I can’t pin you down! You’re so interesting.’ And she thought that was funny.”

Spaeny and Elordi also studied the home movies that the Presleys made. “They were really great for Jacob and I. Her on the tour bus or her on a beach vacation with him, and they really just looked like two kids in love. All the glitz and glam was gone, and they were just rolling around in the sand, or she’s there hanging around the guys and the boys are playing tag with each other right next to the tour bus. Those were really special. Or there’s an amazing one of her where Elvis threw a surprise 21st birthday for her, which is so sweet.”

There was one piece of research that became her go-to reference. “I memorized it like a monologue and would say it over and over again. It was the only audio that I had of her that was closest to the time I was playing her, so I would just listen to it because she sits in a different vocal register than I do. She’s much higher, much breathier, and so I would play that over and over in my head just to have it in there as an entryway before a scene.”

Presley’s story raises some uncomfortable truths: Her astounding youth when she and Elvis met—she was 14, he 24; a horrifying scene in a Vegas motel when Elvis aggressively pins Priscilla to the bed; a scene in the studio where he angrily throws something near her head, and more generally, his infidelity and oppressive expectations of his wife. So how did Spaeny come to see these issues?

“There are definitely some shocking details in there… I mean, if you just had to do a one-minute breakdown of the most shocking moments in their relationship, it’s going to sound like one thing, but then she’s so candid in the way that she tells the story, and it’s complicated, and it does sit in a gray area, but I think if you were actually there and you were in her shoes, every choice she made along the way is completely understandable.

“It’s a very tricky story we’re telling, and I think we did our best to try to make it human and just take the facts and put them on screen. I’m really proud of the way that Sofia and all of us tried to handle it with grace and care and thoughtfulness.”

At the film’s Venice premiere, Elordi sat sandwiched between Presley and a very anxious Spaeny, who felt she might faint from fear.

She tried to tell herself that whatever Presley thought of her performance, she would survive it. But then, as the lights came up, Presley turned to her. “That was a great performance,” she said. “I watched my life through you.” ★

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Ridley

SCOTT

The Napoleon director celebrates the chemistry between Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby and the benefits of a brisk on-set pace

BY MIKE FLEMING JR.

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No director can build a world quite like Ridley Scott, and with Napoleon he takes us into the orbit of the historical French conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte. Initially regarded as a ruffian, Bonaparte found his way to the top of French society due to his superior skills as a military tactician. He became obsessed with two things: a thirst for power, and a passionate love for Joséphine de Beauharnais, a noblewoman unlike anyone he had ever met, and the scenes between Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby are as moving as the film’s epic battles are intense. Bonaparte’s story has been an obsession for Scott since his debut in 1977 with The Duellists, and here he explains why.

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Mine has nothing to do with Stanley.

about 20 years before Brigitte

French summers. And as I developed

I’ve always admired the French way

Bardot. I lay in the sun, enjoying the

into being a successful commercial

of life, from my very first trip down

best French food I could afford, which

director, I loved Paris so much that

when I was 18 years old with three

was steak frites and dodgy wine. I lay

I had an office there. I got deeper

other buddies. We drove down in this

on the beach and slathered myself

and deeper into the French history

ramshackle car and found a village

with olive oil, roasting myself, and I

and their national awareness of who

with rattling chicane and fishing

had the worst sunburn I’ve ever had

and what they are. My first film was

cottages. It was called St. Tropez,

in my life. So I’ve never forgotten the

about Napoleon Bonaparte, even

AI DA N M O N AG H AN

You’ve told me 2001: A Space Odyssey was a big influence on your film Alien. Kubrick finished that movie and spent two years trying to make a Napoleon movie.

He eventually dropped it for A Clockwork Orange. How did you pull it off when he could not?

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Duellists. It won a prize at Cannes,

lying in the sand of the arena were victims?

and from that was the kickstart to my

Yes. Maximus and Commodus.

Napoleon rises from nothing to the country’s leader. How long did all this take?

career. That always stayed with me. I

Don’t forget, Maximus is the person

I shot it in 62 days. Normally it would

because Napoleon went out there

was in a beautiful area, in France, the

who didn’t want it. He wanted to go

take you 110, but I discovered in

allowing himself time to return. But

Dordogne. Years later, I did The Last

home. Interesting how things evolve

recent years, or actually two years ago,

he stayed there too long, and in

Duel there, shooting less than five

when Marcus Aurelius first meets

that two cameras are twice as fast,

that extra six weeks, midsummer

kilometers from where I did my first

him, he said, I want you to take

four cameras are four and six, and

just disappears. When you start

movie. In that time, I thought, let me

over, or to be the prince of Rome,

eight cameras are eight times faster.

the journey back to 2,000 miles on

do the greatest Frenchman in history,

the surrogate principal of Rome. I

So you’re scheduling a scene for the

foot and you start late, you’re going

Napoleon Bonaparte.

can’t do that. Why not? Because my

day, and I’ll be finished at 11 o’clock.

to meet the Russian winter, and it

though he wasn’t in it. That was The

home, my wife, our kid. Tell me about

Joaquin played your villain in Gladiator, and then he went on to win the Best Actor Oscar for Joker. What made you see him as your Napoleon?

your home. So then he starts telling

Hitler to make the same mistake as Napoleon seemed to be crazy

will kill your ass. And he misjudged it terribly. But taking Russia was

him about it, and what he’s actually

The biggest challenge to working that quickly?

talking about is heaven. That’s where

Every department has to keep up

anything. He knew what the Russian

he wants to be. And so it all worked

with the speed that I work. Actors

winter could do, but he didn’t want

backwards and some of it wasn’t

do not want to hear the story of

to face it. Now that becomes the

I’m going to correct you. I saw him as

planned. Marcus says, it sounds like

life before each take, and they do

danger for somebody like that. He

the most sympathetic character of

a place worth fighting for. And then

not want to actually do nine takes. I

can attain anything, just by his will.

all in Gladiator. He was a product of

Marcus is that day assassinated by

got that early on. One major actor, I

When he was in Moscow, they

neglect, total neglect of a father that

his son.

won’t say who, but it was the biggest

were there quite a while, and then

he adored. Then finally in the film, the

Then Russell’s character is

personal, an ego trip. I can do

compliment, he said, “Boy, I love

one evening he saw it starting to

father would say, I’m going to neglect

suddenly told that this has happened

what you do because you move so

burn, and he could not believe the

you even further. You will not be the

and he’s not going to join the club

quickly.” He said, “I love two takes.”

Russians would burn their own

prince of Rome. And then the father

and he knows there’s a problem. His

realizes in his old age that he needs

wife and son are then slaughtered

some form of absolute. So he does

and we see where they’re in that

something fatal. He kneels before the

capital. To him, it was the ultimate act of courage and ferocity. You’re

avenue of trees where they are

Many directors would fear they haven’t got the shot, and they repeat over and over…

boy asking for forgiveness. That was

coming up to get rid of them. When

Well, 39 takes is ridiculous. Hand-in-

way out because you’ve left too late.

fatal because the boy has never seen

Russell dies and goes to heaven, we

hand with using many cameras, you

On the way out, farms were burned,

his father ask for that kind of close

go see the same woman and child;

have to know what you are going to

no livestock, and it’s autumn and

discussion. So he suffocates him.

it’s the place he described to Marcus.

do next and know the geometry of

you’ve got no supplies, nothing. They

the scene. You’ve got to walk in in the

were constantly hit by Russians and

So from that moment on, I thought

going to have nothing but scorched earth, and you’re going to die on the

Joaquin was the most sympathetic

Back to Napoleon. Why Joaquin?

morning knowing exactly what you’re

Cossacks who could live off the land.

person during the movie.

I’m thinking, who can Napoleon be?

going to do so you can position your

They’d eat a wolf, they’d eat each

Joaquin looks like Napoleon. I didn’t

cameras accordingly. If you don’t, it’ll

other. He took out 600,000 men.

I’m going to have to watch that movie again…

say that to him, I didn’t want to make

be 3 o’clock before your first shot.

I think they returned with 40,000.

him feel too important. I was blown

That’s not a good idea.

That is a massive, massive loss. That

You fucking well better. Marcus

away by his outrageous performance

Aurelius could not have taken

as Joker. I didn’t like the way the

Europe through a benevolence.

film condoned violence, celebrated

It’s going to be war and steel, and

violence. I didn’t like that. But he

many deaths and devastation. You

was remarkable, and the fact he’d

can’t control commanders who

done that already made him a very

are over the hill and far away, and

good asset to sell Napoleon. I’m also

say, do not slaughter these women

thinking commercial. It could only

and kids. None of what happened

have been two people and I won’t

was benevolent, right? But I think with age, Marcus Aurelius felt his neglected son, the product of complete neglect. And then to be told, you can’t follow me, and here is who will take my place? That is more than a slap in the head. It’s terrible.

You’re saying that at the end of that movie, both of the bodies

Russian trip was a fucking disaster.

So, he had to be taken away and sent

mention the other actor because

The evolution of Napoleon is fascinating. He starts out this ruffian with superior war skills who becomes savior to France.

But when his obsession with conquering Russia to find peace fails, the French make him a pariah. Why didn’t Napoleon succeed there?

they may get pissed off.

He misjudged. Hitler should have

I don’t want to get into politics, I’ve

crossed the channel when he was

got to be careful, but you have this

there, and bizarrely he didn’t. I’ve

man there who has an illusion of his

heard that Hitler didn’t cross the

invincibility. I don’t want to go deeper

channel because he was very much

into that then that, but he thinks he’s

guided by a spiritual entity. A person

invincible. Hopefully, he’s not.

own fragility. Commodus was the

AI DA N M O N AG H AN

deteriorated into a disaster. For

You’ve got incredible battle scenes, especially the ones in Leningrad where you see cannonballs plunging through the ice and soldiers falling through and drowning. You’ve got all the costumed decadence of the French upper class as

away. They want to get rid of him but put him in exile because there were too many people in quiet support of him, though many were against him.

Politics don’t change. It’s kind of like America, right now.

What do you mean?

who was fundamentally stupid, said, don’t cross water in September.

Napoleon went for Russia bizarrely way too late in the year and it

Josephine was his obsession, he craved her as much as taking ground in Europe. Then he more

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or less exiles her because she can’t provide an heir for him?

Once she was gone, he seemed alone and lost. Would he have escalated his campaign in Russia if she was still in his life? For Josephine, there was safety and some power, being at Napoleon’s side. Did she love him?

an excuse for actors to make a lot

I think she was always becoming

Sigourney Weaver’s a superhero

an influence on him. Did she love

in Aliens. I think Russell Crowe’s a

him initially? I don’t think so. By

superhero in Gladiator. And Harrison

the time they came to the idea of

Ford is the super anti-hero in Blade

of money on the side from playing these superheroes.

Ever been offered one you were tempted to say yes to?

Yeah, been offered, but just said, “No, thank you. Not for me.” I’ve done two or three superhero films. I think

you cannot give me a successor, I have to divorce you… that was kind

Runner. The difference is, the Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby in Napoleon.

fucking stories are better.

of tragic. She thinks she’s going

There is a scene where Napoleon’s in Egypt and he gets up close with a corpse in a sarcophagus. Why did you do that? Was the corpse a Pharaoh?

had become an emperor and she

Napoleon story and take the narrative license, as long as the audience goes along with you.

I saw the movie, and wasn’t sure what the complaints were, beyond historical nitpicking.

You had the good grace not to dress Napoleon in spandex and give him the power to fly, which perhaps is what people want in this digital age. Does the digital micromanagement trouble you?

therefore was empress, she had to

You’ve got three questions. I think we

Napoleon in those foreign places like

about them, but I can’t believe it

have adjusted in terms of at least

are partly responsible for the, how do

Italy, where they took all the fine art

would be that personal to the point

admiration. Is that next to fondness?

I call it, the frustration of the younger

out of the cathedral in Milan. I saw

where he needed to take Russia

Is that next to the possibility of love?

generation that goes hand-in-hand

these wonderful two paintings. One

because the prince may have been

I think it got to possibility of love, and

with the confusion of politics, and

was of a man sitting on a horse staring

bonking his wife.

then he said, “We cannot continue, I

hand-in-hand with the devices they

at the Sphinx, and it was Napoleon. So

need a successor. Are you going to

have at their fingertips where they

I thought I had to have that because

But it’s clear those images of her and the Russian prince drove Napoleon crazy and the chemistry between Joaquin and Vanessa Kirby is palpable.

give me a child?” She said, “I cannot,”

can play games all day instead of

no one has done the Egyptian

because she’d had years of abortions

climbing a fucking tree, and go for

campaign. And the truth is, they took it

that were done with sulfur and

a swim in the river and even fall out

over pretty easily. I think the Egyptians

arsenic, so there’s nothing left.

the tree and break a leg occasionally.

threw in the towel immediately.

You can feel it.

Sulfur and arsenic?

There’s this idolization of the

were doing it, Napoleon, Joaquin,

Oh yeah. The abortion kit would be

superheroes, which really is just a

gets this box to stand on, he took off

sulfur and arsenic. There was no real

comic strip extension. And from that,

his hat, put it on top of the casket,

contraception. So women then would

it’s very difficult to write a comic strip

and stared closely at the Pharaoh.

adopt methods invented by doctors

story and carry it out successfully on

Then he reached out gently to touch

to abort. Can you imagine how scary

film. That said, I’m not a superhero

the surface of this skin that looks

that was?

fan, even though I used to love the

like brown paper at this point. And

comic strips.

the Pharaoh suddenly slipped to

of her living off his newfound wealth.

walks away with an estate, 2 million

How long could that last? It could

francs, and an “I’ll visit you when I

have lasted for as long as she was

can.” She could not see other men.

entertaining, put it that way. Was she

She did anyway, that’s why I had

good in the bedroom? Of course.

the young Russian prince go in

Would he have ever experienced

and say, “You cannot hide yourself

anything like that? Not at all. She

away because he’s no longer with

was a very smart woman. I think she

you.” The Russian prince was a

was particularly beautiful, but very

young, handsome guy who actually

imposing, physically imposing and

was later called the Wolf of Siberia.

powerful. And I think by the time he

He evolved as being really ruthless and really brutal. Napoleon knew

You make us understand how Napoleon, this guy who was just kind of a rough thug, would gravitate toward a woman who’d grown up well above his station but lost her wealth and her husband and did what she had to do to survive. If she could smooth out this man’s ways, perhaps she could be back in high society.

I’m not sure she was that invested in him, more that he was invested in her, and that she saw it as a way

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It’s all internalized entertainment.

Now you’re not so easily wounded, but you just did a lengthy profile in the New Yorker. You had some historian knocking the veracity of your Napoleon trailer on TikTok, and you more or less said, you have the right to tell your

I think there are a couple of pretty

He wouldn’t be Tutankhamun, maybe a less important Pharaoh. They did raids and found and brought back a lot of wonderful artifacts from Egypt, including the Needles of Cleopatra that are standing now in Paris. There was a lot of plundering done by

What’s interesting though, as we

one side and gave Joaquin a hell of a

good Batmans, and that Superman

shock. But I let it run. And he played

movie by Dick Donner captured

with that momentarily, got down off

the tradition of the comic strip. As

the box, and when I said, “Cut,” he

we’ve enlarged upon our capabilities

said, “Did you do that?” I said, “No, it

visually, I think funnily enough,

was an accident.” It was fantastic. It

everything gets less real and less

scared the shit out of him. I said, “No,

real. And now it seemed to become

no, no, I didn’t do that.” A

A I DA N M O N AGH A N

to be cast out and she’s not. She

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Todd

HAYNES

How the May December director turned a lurid tabloid story into a powerhouse acting showcase for Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore

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The title of Todd Haynes’ latest drama reflects its staying power: having opened in Cannes, May December has been a buzzy awards title ever since. Its two stars, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, are the draw, but what keeps the film playing in people’s minds is the moral maze it lays out. Inspired by the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Seattle teacher who went to prison for molesting a pupil and then, upon release, married him, the film stars Portman as Elizabeth Berry, an actress soon to play the part of the seemingly charming Gracie (Moore), now a mother of two, in a TV biopic.

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May December seems so much like a classic Todd Haynes movie, it was a surprise to discover that you didn’t actually write it yourself…

the height of Covid when everything

No, it came fully intact out of the

coming to me—interesting books,

mind of Samy Burch. There was a bit

or ideas from actors, or this or that.

of a buzz about this script. I didn’t

I had time to read, and so I read

know any of this at the time, but at

May December. It was a completely

was shut down, a lot of stuff was being circulated, speculatively, for when we would all get back to work.

I was reading a lot of stuff that was

FRAN C O IS D U HA M EL/ N ETF LI X / E V E R ETT C O LL ECTI O N

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singular endeavor that really made

you can’t avoid and they’re just there,

about female characters. It was

face, so that the terms of the film,

an impression on me. I just thought it

or they keep reproducing themselves

really about these women whose

the cinematic language, were going

was really smart, so I was very happy

in one way or another, so no, I didn’t

desires and convictions and wills

to have meaning, and that’s why

to take it to the next step.

know that much about it.

were driving the train in their lives.

the music was going to have extra

When I read May December, my

This is certainly true for Gracie

meaning, and extra volume and extra

How did it come to you?

initial instincts were a bit protective,

and her backstory, but as more is

presence, but the restraint was also

It came through Natalie’s producing

in terms of the choices that Samy

revealed about Elizabeth through

going to reveal things by holding

company, with me in mind as

had taken away from the Mary Kay

the course of the film, you find

back. It means that when you do cut,

director. There was an interest in

Letourneau story and the distinctions

similarities in her that are troubling

it matters. You notice it.

us finding something someday to

in her script from that case. My

and fascinating, and you feel that

do together, but we didn’t know

feeling was, “Let’s start with this as a

she met her match in the character

what that would be, or when. Based

fiction, and let’s really focus on that.”

of Gracie. In all those ways, it really

on this script, we started to talk,

Yeah, I thought that was the best way

felt different, and how much female

and we talked about the script and

to begin. Then when the time came,

desire was really calling the shots.

what we liked about it. I found her

the Mary Kay Letourneau research

That’s not necessarily the case in

to be so remarkable, and so bold

was actually very informative.

films of mine about women.

and what drove her. Like, pushing

How did it help?

people, pushing viewers, into places

I think it was specifically through

that were not comfortable. She

conversations that I started to have

was very mischievous about the

with Julianne about how this kind of

Well, that’s certainly shown visually: There are rhymes, echoes and visual duplications.

Was any of that spontaneous?

idea that people might project onto

a relationship could have begun, and

No, no, no. Nothing about this was

in the film. I think it trusts that

her aspects of Elizabeth Berry as

what aspects there were in Gracie

spontaneous. We shot the movie in

you’re going to be OK not knowing

an actress, and that this would be

that may or may not have foretold

23 days, so there was no room for

what you think, and grappling a

some insight into Natalie Portman

this relationship or predicted this

spontaneity of any kind whatsoever,

bit, and that there might even be

herself. She relished playing around

relationship, or been predictive of

except in what the actors themselves

a quotient of pleasure involved in

with that.

this kind of behavior, and how that

did once I said, “Action.” Where the

that vacillation around your moral

was played out or supported by the

camera was and how many setups

certitude around these kinds of

How did you move it along?

Mary Kay Letourneau example. What

there would be per day and what the

themes. I think that’s where the

Basically, we talked to Samy, which

was really great was how clearly

visual language of the movie was,

humor gets paid off, because it’s

was all, of course, done remotely.

Julianne saw Gracie. At the same

and how we were going to tell the

humor that’s situational. It’s not like

Natalie was still in Australia, working

time, she was the one who was like,

story… It was all planned. To a degree

jokes or gags. You’re observing life

at the time [on Thor: Love and

“OK, I watched the A&E doc last

that is still incomparable to anything

and you’re observing these people

Thunder]. I loved talking to Samy.

night. You’ve got to watch this. You’re

I’ve done before.

who don’t have a very keen sense of

So bright, so excited about having it

going to freak out.” I was like, “OK, I

be in the hands of Natalie Portman

guess it’s time. Here we go.”

and so risky in what interested her

and myself. She did another draft

I think it respects the audience. I felt that as a reader of the script, and I wanted that to come through

self-regard. They don’t really know

How aware were you of constructing a film that would eventually leave people’s minds reeling, in terms of what to make of all this? How do you manage to balance that?

how to examine themselves. We are

I felt that a couple of very strong

really happened, you suspect that

decisions needed to be made at

she has as hard a time really looking

the outset, and then it was just time

at herself as Gracie does.

there to examine them because they

but we didn’t know when we were

It really fits into the lineage of Superstar, Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, in that it’s an intelligent, meta take on a specific form of storytelling, which in this case could be a sensationalist ‘movie of the week’. Was it that factor that attracted you?

into my house all of the creative

of them sees. They each see that in

going to do it. We were all busy, and

No, I didn’t have ambitions in that

partnerships that I always need to

the other, but not in themselves. Yet

nobody was working, so it just went

regard. I didn’t necessarily plug it

make a film. In this case, it was just

they’re kind of these mirror images.

on to the top of the shelf, basically.

into established themes, or other

all done in a much tighter and more

I think that’s something we all share,

really quickly, based on our thoughts.

Very quickly after that, I just started to sort of court Julianne on the sly for the other role. Then, when I felt like I could count on that, I shared that idea with Natalie. She was completely exhilarated by it. So, we FRAN C O IS D U HA M EL/ N ETF LI X / E V E R ETT C O LL ECTI O N

It’s rare to see a film like this, in that it critiques what you’re viewing, but it doesn’t actually critique the viewer at all. It invites you to ask a lot of questions about what you’re watching, but not in an accusatory way.

had a really compelling package,

to facilitate and realize it and bring

can’t. They are ill-equipped to do so.

Even though it’s about an actress who’s coming to see the truth and find the truth and penetrate what

That’s the one thing that neither

films of mine, and find immediate

accelerated schedule. I wanted to

the inability or the disinclination

Did you know about the Mary Kay Letourneau story?

correlations. It came to me as its

have the visual language be spare,

to self-examine, to question our

own strange concoction. The thing

slightly removed, austere. We were

choices. This is a kind of extreme

I did, but I was not that well-versed

that excited me is that I felt like it

going to be using Zooms, but we

case, but I think that’s where the film

on it. Unlike friends of mine, who

presented problems and challenges

were going to be very selective

says, “We all understand this. Even if

were much more tracking it at

that I hadn’t undertaken before. It

about when and how. There was

we’re not exactly these people and

the time. I’m not quite sure why

was very much specific to its own

going to be a minimum of cutting in

haven’t made exactly these choices,

or when—I’m not a big tabloid

time and place. In this way, it was

the film, so when a cut does happen,

this is part of a kind of aspect of

consumer. But there are some things

distinct from other films of mine

it wakes you up, it pricks you in the

human nature.”A

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Justine

TRIET

The Anatomy of a Fall director on star Sandra Hüller and the “mini revolution” for women in film

BY NADIA NEOPHYTOU

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You wrote the part with Sandra Hüller in mind, having worked with her on your previous film, Sibyl. Was there anything she brought to the role that surprised you? A moment you perhaps weren’t expecting?

erase once and for all. Because she

level. I think that although this was

difficult to experience—her eyes

had this really interesting paradox

something that I led her toward in the

were crying but something else; it’s

that I think exists within herself,

way that I was directing her, it’s also

almost like a child was crying. She

in the way that she is as a person

truly something that she brought into

had this incredibly genuine quality.

also, and the kind of sincerity and

the role herself.

That was just a day on set that I

an extremely genuine person. She

a concrete scene, an example, the

of performance that I was receiving

Writing with Sandra in mind, even

always says exactly what she means.

scene where she cries in the car

from her.

though Arthur and I were quite clear

So playing this one character, which

was one where I was really baffled.

that we were trying to avoid certain

is a character that is quite opaque

Because it's exactly an example of

stylistic tropes that would have to

in such a raw way, allowed for the

something that tends to be kind of

do with the genre film, we still had

kind of attention of this transparent

tedious to do with actors. Making

certain reflexes as authors that

opacity to really be something that

actors cry can be quite a difficult

Sandra’s performance came to really

brought the character to a new

thing. And the way she did it, it's

32

transparency that she has. She’s

More specifically, if I were to give

remember being stunned by the kind

The sound design of this film is so vital to the story. You allow us to see how visually impaired Daniel relies so much on sound, and we as the viewer also, in a way,

STEP H AN E CA R D IN A LE / C O R B IS V IA G ETTY / N EO N

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall has given her an experience unlike any other she’s had over her 15-year career—one that includes winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. “I would say that the job I've been doing since May is a job that I had never done before. It's a new craft entirely,” she says. Anatomy of a Fall, which she co-wrote with her partner Arthur Harari, eschews the traditional courtroom drama to explore familial relationships when an ambitious, sexually self-assured novelist, played by Sandra Hüller, is put on trial for the suspicious death of her husband Samuel at their home in the French Alps.

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come to rely on it. What guided your approach to that—even from early on in the film with the decision to use the instrumental 50 Cent song “P.I.M.P.” which Samuel pays on repeat at full-blast?

rehabilitated, which is a fantastic

I make the distinction between two

can come up in some kind of virtue

different theories of sound, and two

signaling. Whether in narratives that

different kinds of sound in the film.

we're seeing from men that have so

Sound was [important] from the very,

obviously been ranked to find a way

very beginning. It's always been a

to make them into the right kind of

central concern of ours in creating

narrative that needs to be heard today.

this film. The question of the song,

Or from women who sometimes will

the song that is the “P.I.M.P.” song,

just go into these power reversal

which of course is this basic standard

stories, which to me are just not what

at this point that is so recognizable

the collective progress and process

for so many people. It can be brought,

should be about.

thing, but it's also coming with its load of societal guilt.

With that comes a baggage of less interesting and sometimes full-on dumb ways of trying to mediate and repair the history that was, which

and it is brought, in the courtroom

That being said, I think these are

at some point to be analyzed for its

just the beginnings; I’m sure it’s the

linguistic content and the misogyny

beginning of the mini revolution

of it; it’s possible to read into it in that direction. It’s not that the song itself

that is underway. Some of these Sandra shields son Daniel from his dead father's body in Anatomy of a Fall.

doesn’t carry any kind of semantic

The choice of this kind of music was important because it carries this

I think the idea of this dog was very

tension; there’s aggressive sympathy

much in the original seed of this

to it, and maybe to Samuel’s character

film. It was always clear to us that

altogether. Which is very different,

this dog was going to be treated as

and for us much more effective, than

a point of view, in and of himself.

the kind of aggression that one would

And that his gaze and, I was going

be putting out by using metal music,

to say personhood—it's not exactly

for example. Or, more cliché yet, by

that, but that his status as an

using classical music, which of course

think more importantly, the song at large becomes this: the words of the absent, the words of the dead. It's the only direct sound that is emitted by Samuel as he’s alive.

STEP H AN E CA R D IN A LE / C O R B IS V IA G ETTY / N EO N

what we need to get through to go

Another view we’re often given through the film is that of the dog, who’s essentially the fourth family member. We can’t hear from him, but we can almost see what he sees. Can you talk more about bringing him into the story?

value. But more generally, and I

unfortunate forms of it are just

of our profession. The dog cannot

further. And when I started being

help but look at the camera, cannot be

involved with the movement 50/50,

made to understand the stakes of this

which is a movement for parity in

make-belief in this way. That’s always

cinema, what it was, was really to

a real addition to the set dynamics.

just look at the numbers. When I saw the numbers after #MeToo—this was taking the logical conclusion

observer was going to be the link

You became the third woman to win the Palme D’or, which is a great achievement and also speaks to how far the industry still has to go in undoing the imbalance with excluding women.

How do you feel about the industry, as a woman filmmaker, and is it improving in the way you’d like it to?

since the ’90s has been used to stage

also somehow between the different

Saying I’m honored to have this

creation because I will be allowed like

scenes of violence and torture.

of #MeToo—I was flabbergasted.

I realized that I had also been participating in the ignorance as to the actual size of the absence of women in the field.

Of course I dream of a day that these things won't be a question. That one’s gender will not be something that is brought up in moments of

members of the family. And also the

prize is not doing it justice. This prize

anybody else, the way that men are

And then more generally in terms

fact that he probably is the only one

and the way that I was to receive

today, to stand in for the universal

of the sound recording that we hear

who actually saw what happened…

it, is beyond me. Of course, getting

gaze. I believe that we’ll get there.

in court, and generally the relationship

This was something in the beginning

this prize and being told that I was

I think that there are really things

to sound that is based on a lack of

that we found through the editing,

the third woman to receive it, was

that are underway and changing in

vision, that was a whole other plot line

that the lack of judgment of the

both moving and surreal. I was

the countries that I dwell in, where

for sound in our minds. We wanted to

animal was perhaps the closest

incredibly proud of it. But it’s also an

there has been a certain amount of

have this relationship between sound

thing we could have to something

extremely worrying statistic. When

progress in women’s rights. Where

and the lack of images that would allow

that represented and reflected the

I was younger, I felt that I was very

we see the people now, I think who

us to make it visible to the audience

complexity of the situation.

much lacking in female role models

are between the ages of 10 and 15

in cinema and beyond. I had to learn,

years old, are really growing up with a different sense of something.

that in the absence of image, fantasy

And then on a more selfish note, I

comes in. Which is basically to say,

really just love to work with animals.

as I’m sure that many of us did, to

when there is a trace of truth left, it

Because of the discomfort they place

detect the women behind the men

So, I have a lot of hope for the

has to be filled with judgment and

me in, and the way in which their

that I admired. And to find all of the

ways in which the integration of this

interpretation. And that becomes one

presence brings back to me, and to

places and ways in which women

new knowledge will soon come to

of the ways to bring the point of the

everyone, the absurdity of what the

were present this whole time, but

be able to be taken for granted, and

film home, which is to say that truth is

job that we're trying to do is. It levels

just outside of public view and

we’re really going to be able to move

very complex to be attained.

out and levels down the seriousness

recognition. So today that’s being

forward from there. A

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all those other epics by Cecil B. DeMille and William Wyler who made Ben-Hur. Yeah. For me, I wanted to tell a story based on the environment that I grew up in but based in the Biblical era, right? I’m from a Nigerian background, my dad was Roman Catholic. So they’ll be telling us these stories and then you’d look at the films and although I loved those films, the environment and the people just looked nothing like the environment and the people I was growing up in. So, I wanted to tell a story about the environment that I grew up in, but set in those days and to show how nothing’s changed and how alike we all are. I feel that the Bible, just as a book, [there's] so much minutia it doesn’t cover, like where Jesus bought his sandals from, or where people get

Jeymes

their hair done. I’m fascinated by those

SAMUEL

things just because of the everyday necessities in life. I just thought this was a brilliant way to show how much we are all similar, how much really nothing’s changed, whilst showing how

The Book of Clarence director puts his hands on the Bible for a messianic tale

much I love that genre.

Absolutely. That’s the thing, I could see it through the everyday but also as a spectacle.

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Exactly. Exactly. You meet your friend having a fight with him, right?

Jeymes Samuel was intent on bringing a fresh vibe into his Biblical epic The Book of Clarence, starring LaKeith Stanfield as the eponymous Clarence, a local lad in the Holy Land who gets by dealing weed and holding chariot races against a no-nonsense Mary Magdalene. Clarence soon sees an opening to make some bucks in the Messiah business but then he realizes that miracles can happen when you least expect them. The Book of Clarence, which also features RJ Cyler, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Omar Sy, David Oyelowo, Teyana Taylor, Anna Diop and Michael Ward, follows the director’s debut feature, The Harder They Fall, which spiced up the Western genre.

You might have a fight in a school playground. In those days you meet your best friend, maybe in a gladiator fight or a chariot race, right? People race cars illegally all the time. Where I grew up, the fastest person in the hood was a girl called Chantelle. She was the fastest driver. She was a getaway driver.

All praise to you because I usually run so fast from Biblical movies, but this one actually answered my prayers.

Westerns.” And yet now I’m seeing

that’s what happens a lot with the

Well, in this film it’s very regular,

little girls, cheerleaders, doing whole

Bible as well, with the Biblical era.

right? So there’s so much you can

routines to the soundtrack and the

do with that era. If you place us,

and time that we’ve never been. I

just the geographical time and place

think the reason why we tune out of

the story is set. If you set the Hughes

these things, just like with Westerns,

Brothers movie Menace II Society,

it’s because we’re never fed. People

which was released in 1993, a hundred

like us are never fed the nourishment

years earlier, it was Western, right?

and the vitamins and the ingredients

The cars become horses, the guns are

OK, I get it. What’s so funny about The Book of Clarence is how, for instance, you’ve put Black faces in roles that back in the day would have been played by white actors. Omar Sy, the minute I spotted him in your film I thought of Victor Mature…

that we need to make this an all-

still the same. Now the guys are going

Exactly, my brother. Samson and

from our perspective. There’s always

encompassing genre. So it’s easy to

to become cowboys. So it’s not that

Delilah. Because Victor Mature was in

been, I feel, a veil of non-allowance

tune out of these things. The number

you hate Westerns, it’s that you’re not

some of those films that I watched.

where we as Black people aren’t

of women I would speak to that say, “I

fed the ingredients you need to tell

hate Westerns, I hate Westerns, I hate

the story to include you. And I think

Yeah, we know we’re just in a place

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scenes of The Harder They Fall.

People love Westerns. A Western is

Jeymes and Baz, in space, there’s so much we can do that we’ve not seen before in space. If you place us in the cowboy days, there’s so much we can do. Place us in a Biblical era, there’s so much we can do and so many more stories we can tell that’ve never been told before. And

allowed to go. It’s almost like an

Yeah, and Charlton Heston and

unwritten rule—we’re not allowed

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to go into these genres. We’re not

dreams. When you get rid of those

freezes, and [Jesus] feeds Ben-Hur, he

allowed to go into the Old West

things, then we are able to make The

quenches his thirst. In the end, Ben-

where one fourth of every cowboy

Harder They Fall. A $90-million movie

Hur comes back and he goes to see

was Black. The main cowboy was

is your debut. We’re able to make The

this man that everyone’s talking about

What were the parallels? Was LaKeith as Clarence modeled ever so slightly on a Charlton Heston and a Kirk Douglas?

for Black people. White people were

Book of Clarence. We’re able to tell

being beaten on the stairs, carrying his

The thing that I didn’t relate to with

called cowhands.

stories where we take them from the

crucifix. “I know that man. He gave me

the Charlton Hestons and the Kirk

Old West to the New Testament.

water once.” I’ve always loved those

Douglasses and the Victor Matures,

You’ve made this point to me before that it’s down to us to make these films, to make these plays, to make the music or whatever you want to do and not wait to be asked or told. And you jumped in.

things. And Jesus dying in Ben-Hur,

which is why LaKeith isn’t modeled on

Where were you watching those Biblical spectaculars when you were a kid? Were you at home on a Sunday afternoon, and then The Ten Commandments would just come on?

cured his whole family of leprosy, cured

those guys, is because they were not

all the lepers.

around-the-way guys. Charlton Heston

We had to, Baz. Everything I stand for

looked like his face was born for The

they take a bit of liberty with the Bible

Magnificent. Kirk Douglas looked like

because the story runs alongside it.

his face was born for The Magnificent.

Those are the ones I was drawn to

Victor Mature, his face was born for The

I was watching them exactly how

the most because then I know I can

Magnificent. My favorite actor of all time

as a storyteller, everything I stand for

you said. Over Easter, they’ll always

tell a really, really cool tale that we

is Charles Laughton. He looked like a

as a human being is about inclusion,

show The Ten Commandments or

can all relate to. A man trying to prove

regular guy from around the corner.

diversity and freedom—the most

Ben-Hur. If you’re fortunate enough,

he’s a nobody, a man that believes he

What LaKeith is based on is us.

important things to me as a storyteller.

they’ll show Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus

can do anything. And this belief gets

LaKeith is a guy from the hood. The first

Whether I have a guitar in my hand, or

of Nazareth with Robert Powell,

him in trouble with the neighborhood

conversation we ever had, I knew he was

I’m opening the final draft. It’s all about

all six parts of it, with every single

terrorists, so to speak. Then he ends up

Clarence. Because Clarence is about a

inclusion, diversity and freedom.

dope actor on the planet that wasn’t

on a path of self-discovery, redemption

regular dude that lives around the way.

Freedom to tell the stories that we

Black. I’ll watch them like I watched

and awakening.

want to want tell. And I believe that

the Westerns, and I would just be

that freedom isn’t given, it’s taken.

marveling at these movies. But I was

Precisely. You take it, you go after it, and you can’t sit there moaning, “Oh, they don’t do this for me. They don’t do that.” You do it yourself.

We have to take it. I think a really

drawn to the stories that were Bible-

So, maybe, this is Jeymes Samuel’s Book of Genesis?

adjacent, so not necessarily the ones

Yeah, this is Jeymes Samuel’s Ben-Hur.

about the Bible, but where the Bible

It being my foray into the Bible era, I had

was kind of running alongside them

to throw everything, I wanted to throw

I love how you include conversation about race, but not in a heavy-handed way. When Clarence and his friends confront the Roman centurions, it just seems organic.

and they would do their whole thing,

everything. I wanted to throw chariot

Thank you. I wanted to show that because

like Ben-Hur.

races, I wanted to throw gladiator fights. I

it was the Roman Empire. The whole

wanted to throw a nightclub scene. They

world was Rome. They conquered and

misguided, misinformed, but influential

influential, of wealth, and then enslaved

He was enslaved, he was kind of

go to the club. What does it look like

colonized everywhere. They were going

human being a long time ago changed

and then became a chariot racer and

when we’re in the building? When we’re

into everywhere, making trouble in the

the words, plans, aims and intention

influential and wealthy again. I was

young. You know how many people from

villages. It’s not as if they were welcome.

into dreams, right? You cannot change

always drawn to those stories where

the hood are in the building, not just the

The whole world was being overrun by

the words, plans, aims and intentions

Jesus may just pop up in there. Ben-

rich, not just King Herod and his cohorts

the Roman Empire. So I really wanted to

into dreams. And then we started

Hur is being whipped by a Roman

and his concubines. What’s that place

show that, but also show the modernity

embracing words like “my dream

and they’re like, “No water for him.”

look like when we are in the building? Let

and how prevalent those issues still are.

project.” and “It’s a dream for me to do

You hear the music and singing, and

me just give them some nice overeating.

this.” But no dream is attainable. You

he looks at the Roman, the Roman

It just gives us so much scope.

It wasn’t my dream to become a

Yeah. And I thought it was very, very astute to cast Michael Ward as Judas, but against type, as it were. He’s so dashing that you almost don’t expect him to be the one. Right? And that was really very funny.

filmmaker. It wasn’t my dream to sell

Yeah, to be the little rascal, Judas. Also, I

a Biblical feature. It was my plan, my

wanted to show the Apostles with youth.

aims and my intention. I’m going to

Michael Ward is a hero to the youth, from

make a Western. I’m going to make a

Top Boy and Blue Story. He's a hero. I

Biblical-era film.

wanted everyone to be able to watch this

have dreams while you are awake. As soon as we embrace the word ‘dream’ for plans, aims and intentions, we embrace the word ‘failure’. None of these are dreams. It’s not my dream.

None of us, no human being, no

film and be able to lock onto someone

man, woman or child should ever

that they in everyday life relate to. This

embrace the word ‘dreams’ for things

homeboy from Top Boy, OK, but now

they want to do in real life. They’re not

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From left: Alfre Woodard and LaKeith Stanfield in The Book of Clarence.

we’re in the Biblical era. A

TR I STAR P I CTU R E S

I’ve always loved those things where

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a method to the madness. There’s a reason why it could be called Fuck, and for a while, I was like, “The movie should be called Fuck.” It was this hill to die on where I was like, “No, it’s good. It’ll be shocking.”

It took probably two or three meetings to talk me out of calling it Fuck and trying to do that, and at the last meeting, they were like, “Look, there’s a bunch of reasons we can tell you. The MPA won’t rate the movie; there’s going to be people who don’t want to carry the movie in their theaters if it’s called Fuck.” But they were like, “The number one reason is that, when you Google ‘Fuck Movie’, it’s just going to be pornography.

Nobody’s going to find the film.” That was actually a pretty practical concern that I understood.

Once we had moved past that, that was just the first step because

Cord

then it was a months-long process to

JEFFERSON

come up with the title after that. We batted around, I think, probably 20 to 30 different titles. One night, I was like, “Tonight’s the night, man. We’re going to do it.” And I went home and

The American Fiction director on why sometimes you just have to get stoned and read poetry

I smoked a joint and I started reading poetry. I was like, “I’m going to get high, I’m going to read poetry, and

B Y RYA N F L E M I N G

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something’s going to come to me.”

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And so, I read this Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again”, and I was like, “OK, America.”

Encountering Percival Everett’s novel Erasure was serendipitous for Cord Jefferson, as he saw many similarities between himself and the character of Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison. He knew he needed to write and direct the film adaptation, and discovered the perfect casting when he began reading it in the voice of Jeffrey Wright. He ran into some difficulty finding studios willing to take a “risk” on a comedic satire focused on how the establishment profits from offensive tropes in Black entertainment. Luckily, T-Street Productions and Orion Pictures were willing to back the first-time director, and from there American Fiction was born.

There’s a long line of good titles, like American History X, American Movie, American Beauty and American Splendor… there’s all these movies that I really like with America or American in the title. And then, American Fiction, I started thinking it’s a good publishing pun, obviously,

How did you first find Percival Everett’s book Erasure?

Chinatown, and the review said that

I started reading the novel in Jeffrey

deals with the big fiction of America

it was a satire reminiscent of Percival

Wright’s voice. That’s how early I

and one of our biggest fictions in

I, like most people in the world,

Everett’s Erasure. I didn’t read Interior

started thinking of Jeffrey for the

society, which is just race.

had a very terrible 2020. Besides

Chinatown, but I went and bought

character of Monk.

just COVID, I had this really huge

Erasure and fell in love with it almost

professional failure in my life that

instantly. I’m a pretty slow reader

year, where I thought I was very, very

Race is this fictional thing. Race is both real and not real. It’s like every scientist will tell you that our, quote-

normally, but every time that I wasn’t

Where did the title American Fiction come from?

close to getting a TV show on the

there with it, I needed to go back to it

The title was originally Fuck when

negligible, that we’re just human

air, and at the very last minute it was

and continue reading it.

unquote, racial differences are very

I sent out the script. It was Fuck by

beings. The idea of race is manmade

killed. They pulled the plug, and I was

Pretty soon into reading it, I knew

Cord Jefferson, based on Erasure by

and we know that, but then we’ve

just devastated by it and was really

that I wanted to write the screenplay.

Percival Everett. I kind of sent it out

also structured our world in ways that

feeling creatively adrift .

A little after that, I knew that I wanted

as a joke, just as a shocking gimmick

suggest that race is real. We believe in

So, that December, I was reading

to write and direct it. And then, at

to get people to read the screenplay.

this thing that is fictional, so it’s both

this review for a book called Interior

some point, I don’t remember when,

But, as you’ve seen in the film, there’s

real and not real. It felt like the inherent

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C LAI R E FOLGE R / MG M / E V ER E TT C O LLECTI ON

that’s a bookstore pun, but also it

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and it’s also easily Googleable. It hadn’t

who’s queer, seeing all these films that are like, OK, the queer person dies, or they’re gay and that’s the entire conflict of the story. Like, come on man.

been used before. I sent it in the next

Exactly. I have Mexican friends who

morning, and that was the one that

say, “Why is everything about Mexico

everybody immediately was like, “Yes,

drug cartels or somebody fleeing

we found it.” Sometimes you just got to

their horrible circumstances in their

absurdity there is one of the things that the movie takes aim at. And so American Fiction just felt more layered than you might think just looking at it

get stoned and read poetry. That’s the

small Mexican village to escape to the

moral of the story.

Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction.

promised land of the United States?”

This film has a great balance between satire and comedy in a way that doesn’t go into making it a farce. How did you do that?

who’s smart asks about a project that

hypothesis.” For me, maintaining the

real, but also there’s a whole lot of

they’re considering. And the things

spirit of the novel meant not being

Mexico that has been unexplored, and

that he asked me made me only more

didactic, not trying to tell anybody,

it doesn’t have to be shot in this weird

confident that he was the right guy for

“Here’s the moral of the story. This is

orange-ish brown color, the gel that

I said at the outset that I wanted to

the job, because it showed me that

the lesson you’re supposed to take

they put on all the shots in Mexico.

make a satire that didn’t ever become

he was thinking about these things

away.” It’s not a persuasive essay. It

Something that I try to clarify for

farcical. And I think that that’s the

in a way that I was thinking about

was a film that, like the book, I wanted

people is that, yes, this movie follows

problem for me with a lot of the

these things, and also very excited to

to present a series of characters and

a Black author and a Black family, but

satires, sometimes intentionally but

collaborate on these things.

ideas and scenes and then let people

hopefully, the themes are applicable

make their own decisions.

to a lot of other people’s lives.

It’s like, yeah, certainly that stuff is

other times unintentionally. People

I was semi-worried that he’s Jeffrey

set out to make satires that become

Wright. He’s been in Angels in America.

farcical and it just collapses under the

He’s on Wes Anderson’s speed dial.

didactic. At the beginning of the story,

weight of the comedy and gets silly. I

He’s in Batman. He’s in James Bond.

Monk is arguing with everybody.

What were some of the biggest challenges for you making this?

never wanted to do that. That was my

He’s in Westworld. He’s literally in

He’s arguing with his students, his

To be honest, just getting people on

goal from the outset. That being said,

the biggest movies and TV shows

colleagues, his family, his romantic

board. This movie was made relatively

once we were on set, sometimes we

in the world. That is his pedigree. So,

partners… He’s just a pugnacious guy

quickly thanks to T-Street Productions

didn’t hit that goal. Sometimes it did

I was a little worried I was going to

who’s just constantly bickering with

and Orion Pictures, but if it weren’t for

become a little farcical or a little too

meet somebody who was going to

everybody, and he’s bickering with

T-Street and Orion, there’s a world in

broad, or conversely, it became a little

steamroll me and just be like, “OK, if

everybody because he believes that

which this movie doesn’t get made.

too dark and morose, and we got to a

you want me to be the star of the film,

he’s right.

This is a movie that, when I took it out,

point where it was so low that it was

I’m going to run the ship.” Instead,

Another thing that we didn’t want

the people were very excited about

difficult to pull out of that dip.

he came in and was just immediately

to do in the film was police Blackness

the script and it was like, “Oh, my god,

super collaborative, super interested

or police art. I never wanted this to

the script is so great. Oh, my god, you

and engaged with the material and

feel like respectability politics, like, this

got Jeffrey Wright. What a project. Oh,

excited to talk about the vision that I

is how you need to speak and behave.

we’re so excited.” And I met with 14

had and was just an incredible artistic

That’s the farthest thing from what we

different distributors, all of whom had

collaborator from day one.

wanted to accomplish. Monk, on the

nothing but glowing things to say in

other hand, does feel like he knows

all the meetings, and then, after all the

the best way for everybody to live.

meetings were done over the course

somebody who’s probing a director

Let’s talk about his character, Monk. He has a justified annoyance with the fact that the only stories that are selling are of horrible Black experiences, but in the same way, he’s also dictating to other Black people what is unacceptable for them to do. Can you talk about the dichotomy of that character?

and saying, “What’s the tone you’re

He was the first person that we went to when the script was done. I was like, “Jeffrey or nothing.” He read it and he asked to meet me, so I went to meet

Monk has a few bits of growth by the end of the film. One of the ways that I think you see Monk change

of a week and a half or two weeks, nobody really made an offer.

Two people made an offer. Orion

is when he comes out at the end of

made an offer, and then another

the film, and he has that very final

company made an offer for millions

moment with the guy who’s playing

of dollars less than the production

the slave in Plantation Annihilation

budget of the film. And the response of

and Monk gives him that head nod

the places that didn’t was always, “Oh,

and they have that shared look. The

my god, I love this script. I really wish

On the last page of the book,

way that I interpret that moment is

I worked at a place where we could

going for? What other actors are you

there’s this Latin phrase that I had

Monk has finally grown to realize that

make this movie. We just can’t make it.”

thinking of? What about this scene?

never encountered before, but

he’s not on an island anymore.

What interested you about this

it’s apparently used in relation to

project? Why are you excited about

complex mathematical equations,

it?”—all the things that somebody

and the rough translation is “I offer no

I also feel like that experience is universal for a lot of different groups of people. As someone

him for a few hours one day, and we chatted for two or three hours about the script and about the book, and he asked very, very good questions, like

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But they can make the movie, they just don’t have the will to make the movie. They don’t want to risk anything. A

C LAI R E FOLGE R / MG M / E V ER E TT C O LLECTI ON

You mentioned, when you were reading the book, you were reading it in Jeffrey Wright’s voice. I can’t imagine a better actor to play that character. How did he get involved?

Unlike me however, Monk is very

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Errol

MORRIS

The Pigeon Tunnel director on the suspicious mind of spy-turned-novelist David Cornwell, aka John le Carré B Y M AT T H E W C A R E Y

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What did you think of David Cornwell’s opening move with that question?

relationship. Even Le Carré himself

For the set of your interview, you created a background of mirrors, a bifurcated or split visual motif.

Can you say what you were communicating by that?

wants to define the process as

I'm happy to try to explain—that is, if

some kind of interrogation. It’s not

I myself understand what I’m doing,

interview. He starts examining,

an interrogation. Honest to God, I’m

and I may not. His world is a fractured

unpacking, if you will, the difference

not a cop. It’s not as if I think he’s

world. He tells us that again and again

between interrogations and

hiding something from me and it’s

and again, and I wanted to find a way

interviews. Is there any difference?

my job to get him to confess. “OK, I’ll

of mirroring that in the way that the

Well, I’m not sure. I remember being

get it out of you, come clean.” It’s a

film was shot. I’m always looking for

shocked during the interview and I

completely different process. I believe

new ways of doing things. Having this

have thought about it a great deal

it’s the process of creating a situation

writer, a writer who talks endlessly

ever since. What exactly is the

where people are talking to each

about duplicity, betrayal, lying, is a way

difference between an interrogation

other and, dare I say it, maybe even

of forcing the images to double back

and an interview?

communicating. Can that happen?

on themselves, and I hope it works.

answer—I think it’s a fair answer—is I

intent behind telling you that.

But it certainly is revelatory about Cornwell, indicating a fundamental degree of suspicion about others, about whomever might be sitting across from him.

tell him, “I don’t think I can answer that

Such a strange way to begin an

question. Not because I don’t want to, but maybe I don’t know who I am.”

When someone looks at you and says, “Who are you? Who are you?” My

He sought you out to do the documentary, and yet he also told you at the start of the interview that he had investigated you beforehand. I think if that were me, that would put me back on my heels, which perhaps is the

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I’m always puzzled—I think that’s the right word—by descriptions of interviews as being some kind of contest, some kind of adversarial

AP P E L TV +

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris had just begun his interview with David Cornwell for The Pigeon Tunnel when his subject—the former spy-turned-author better known by his pen name John le Carré—threw him a curveball. Or a left hook. Choose your metaphor.

Cornwell eschewed the usual niceties reserved for such circumstances in favor of a riposte, demanding to know of his interlocutor, “Who are you?” Morris, the Oscar-winning director of The Fog of War, struggled to formulate a response. Maybe, he felt, at some philosophical level it was a question he truly couldn’t answer.

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becomes very disillusioned about what's going on in Germany.

despite all of these stories about moral

I look at movies as an opportunity

that he had a sense of good and evil, of

to learn something, and I learned an

right and wrong, and he was unbudging

enormous amount through making

about it.

myself and others that we think

The title of the film comes from Cornwell’s memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. It relates to a memory of his childhood, when he would accompany his father to Monte Carlo. His dad and these other men would fire on pigeons that were released from cages on the casino’s roof. The birds would scoot through a tunnel before being shot at. As a metaphor, what do you think the pigeon tunnel means?

that because our brains, our minds,

One always hopes that what one’s doing makes sense ultimately, at least for some people.

In the film, Cornwell suggests there’s an unknowability about every individual. His answer in the end is that he can identify himself as an artist. In other words, he can describe his identity by what he does, but not who he is, per se.

this movie, just listening to David

ambiguity, I felt very keenly in this man

There’s right and wrong in history,

talking about being in Germany. So, he

who’s good and evil in history. He was

has this dual role. He’s this ostensible

a person of really strong convictions.

civil servant, but he’s also working as

I knew him in the last years of his

a spy. And he looks around him and

life, totally opposed to Brexit, totally

in the [West German] government, in

disappointed with his government in

the Bundesrepublik there, there are

Britain. He actually believed in queen

all these Nazis, call them ex-Nazis,

and country. I’d often say to myself,

It’s more than a metaphor. It is a

whatever you want to call them. But

here’s a man far less cynical than I am.

are sitting inside of our skulls, that

metaphor for something, but a

there are all these people who had

What a surprise.

we have privileged access to them.

metaphor for what? It’s a parable,

positions in the Third Reich. And he

But I think I’m as unknowable to

like a Kafka parable, that seems to

says to himself, “Didn’t we fight a war

myself as I am to other people, and

suggest a lot of different meanings,

about this? Wasn’t there this so-called

there’s some deep mystery about

but not one specific meaning. It’s

World War II? And now the guy who

There is perhaps some overlap between you and Cornwell in your absurdist view of history.

personality and identity, and part of

certainly Sisyphean in the sense that

was part of defining the Holocaust

I was just thinking earlier today, I had

the story of The Pigeon Tunnel is

you have these pigeons flying out from

is second-in-command in the new

done a film with a Kennedy assassination

exploring that mystery.

tunnels out over the Mediterranean

German Republic. What is that about?”

investigator, ‘Tink’ Thompson, talking

David gives us fractured pieces

being shot at by disgruntled gamblers.

He taught me—maybe I knew it in

about the ‘umbrella man’ and how the

of his autobiography, a lot about his

Some of them are killed, some of them

some form already—but he certainly

presence of a man holding an umbrella

father, less about his mother. He

are winged, some of them emerge

taught me very powerfully that history

in Dealey Plaza, right at the time of the

makes connections between his

unscathed and return to their coops

is not about remembering. History is

assassination, had to be a clue to some

biography and the books that he

and then repeat the whole circuit

about forgetting, and sometimes to

underlying conspiracy, but maybe it

produced. And there are, of course,

the following day. You could call it a

use his language, “enforced forgetting”.

wasn’t. Maybe it was just some absurd

connections to be made between the

metaphor for life, endlessly doing

When he was a student at Oxford,

accidental detail in history. I mean, in

history that he experienced all around

the same things until we drop dead…

Cornwell joined a Communist student

principle, all mysteries should be solvable

him in the books that he produced.

Sometimes even shot out of the sky.

organization and he [later] betrayed

if we work hard enough. If we search

his fellow students. He wrote down

long enough, we should be able to come

names, identified them as Communist

up with the goods that allow us to put

sympathizers. And I ask him in the film,

the jigsaw puzzle together. But there

“Do you regret doing that? Do you regret,

are often pieces missing or they have

I suppose on some level, betraying your

been adulterated in some unspeakable

fellow students? ” And he says, “No.”

way. What I like about my own movie,

Basically, they’re on the wrong side of

if I can be so bold, is it starts off talking

history. They’re committed to Stalin, and

about string-pullers and dupes. It’s the

for David, they’re committed to evil.

spy version of history. There are people

One of the things that really

who either are tricking people or are

I agree. I’m fond of pointing out to

But there is an inherent mystery about us as people. He tells us he didn’t ever want to be psychoanalyzed because he felt if he was psychoanalyzed, he would lose the ability to write. He couldn’t create his espionage novels.

Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but it’s something that I believe was honestly expressed. Almost, “I’d like to know less about myself, but maybe I could find out something

In some ways, the film is about conviction. We see when Cornwell was working for Britain’s MI6—the foreign surveillance service—he was posted in Bonn in the early 1960s. Presumably, as an agent of the British government, he was acting in furtherance of a set of beliefs about the world. Yet, he

fascinated me about him [was that],

about myself by writing.”

tricked by people. And by the end of the movie, it’s something much closer to my way of seeing the world. It’s chaos. I

That moment you refer to where he says he didn’t want to subject himself to psychoanalysis, he brings two fingers to his chin. I found this a fascinating gesture, gentle yet slightly guarded, self-protective.

have this very simple argument against

I agree. I remember when he was

is a madhouse. Look at what’s going

doing that during the filming, he was

on in the world today. I don’t see

driving me crazy. I thought, “Take your

conspiracies. I see just garden variety,

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around. They’re too confused, too much at cross purposes with each other to actually ever effectively conspire to do anything. It’s hard enough to agree with a group of people on where to have lunch. And if anything, history

From left: David Cromwell (John le Carré) and Errol Morris.

human insanity. A

AP P L E TV +

hands off your face, OK?”

conspiracies: just look at the people

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“A POSITIVELY CAPRAESQUE DAVID VS GOLIATH STORY” “A TAUT AND THRILLING SCRIPT”

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY LAUREN SCHUKER BLUM & REBECCA ANGELO BASED ON THE BOOK “THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK” BY BEN MEZRICH

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CRAFT SERVICES Production Design

New Perspectives

Production designers Shona Heath, James Price, Cara Brower, Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer on creating fantastical worlds through innocent eyes

By Ryan Fleming

From top: Aladna palace in The Marvels; Barbie and Ken boating in Barbie; Bella at home in Poor Things.

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S E ARC HL I GH T P ICTU R ES / WA R N ER BROS . / M A RV E L STU D IOS

In most fantasy movies, the job of the production team is to create a breathtaking new world that dazzles the viewer, but this Oscar season shows a new trend: stories in which the characters themselves are taken on a journey of discovery and adventure. In Poor Things, a young woman named Bella is brought back to life by a mad surgeon and goes sightseeing in Europe. In The Marvels, the MCU’s new worlds are seen through the awed eyes of Captain Marvel’s protégée, Kamala Khan. And in Barbie, the Mattel superstar leaves her perfect life to sample the unknown pleasures of the real world…

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From Top: Bella dancing at a restaurant in Lisbon; A view of the fully built Lisbon set.

S E ARC HL I GH T P ICTU R ES / WA R N ER BROS . / M A RV E L STU D IOS

Poor Things For Yorgos Lanthimos’ screen adaptation of Poor Things, the director was interested in the premise of making a 1930s-style movie with the technology of today. This meant that production designers Shona Heath and James Price were given the directive of crafting every set with the idea of creating a bespoke world no one had seen before. “It’s like looking through a child’s eyes with kaleidoscopic lenses on,” says Heath.

“He wanted it to feel handmade, but not photorealistic, which is what you strive toward,” Price says. “But he also didn’t want it to go down a stylistic way for the sake of being stylistic. You can’t just make a surreal world for the sake of it. It has to come from the story and the characters and everything has to be believable.”

The four main sets—London, Lisbon, Paris and a cruise ship—had a basis in the real world, but needed to create the same surreal wonder for the audience that Bella would feel. “We tried to capture the essence of each city and distill it into our own small world,” Heath says. Focusing on the unusual elements of each area, Heath says they spliced them together in a manner similar to how the surgeon Godwin Baxter did with

living things. “In Lisbon, there are archways that we just chopped the middles out of, and buildings that were two buildings cut in half and shoved together,” she says. “That added a slightly contemporary, brutalist edge to the fairytale of the city.”

While all of the sets were grandiose and expansive, Price says the most challenging in terms of engineering was Lisbon. “It was a studio build in the biggest sound stage in continental Europe,” he says. “It had undulating floors, there was a water tank and a wraparound 70-foot-long scenic backdrop that had to be painted.”

Every building had to be built from scratch, painted and aged to look like a storied, old city. “Then you put a concrete pour with a stamp for each cobblestone, and the stones were painted in complex, acidy colors that were a play on the tiles of Lisbon.”

“The whole of Lisbon had 15 streets with alleys and stairways that all linked up,” says Heath. “The amount of buildings that went four stories high was extraordinary and it was sort of never ending. That was a real world, a real city in a build.”

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CRAFT SERVICES Production Design

The Marvels

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From top: Interior of the Aladna palace; Aerial view of the planet Aladna; Skrulls fleeing from their refugee planet as the atmosphere is sucked away.

M ARV EL STU D IOS

While Captain Marvel has traveled the universe and visited many strange worlds, The Marvels director Nia DaCosta wanted the audience to see these worlds for the first time through the eyes of Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan. “She wanted everything to feel as otherworldly as possible,” says production designer Cara Brower, “and to have a sparkle to it and a magical quality.”

With that in mind, Brower designed what she would want to see if she was in Kamala’s shoes. For the musical planet of Aladna, the goal was to have an explosion of color. “[DaCosta] wanted the fashion of all the people to be really outrageous,” says Brower. “She wanted it to feel like Positano, Italy but with alien technology.” With that in mind, Brower treated the design like a work of art, taking inspiration from the unusual, surreal look of the 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates and the designs of Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill. “We tried to make it really sculptural,” she says. “There’s lots of curves because I wanted it to feel like there’s a musicality to all the buildings.”

When Dar-Benn is taking resources from other planets, she pulls the atmosphere from the Skrull refugee planet. “It’s supposed to be their hidden, secret new home,” Brower says. Taking visual cues from previous films, she found that Skrull architecture was more organic and fluid. “We put them in this hidden, rocky valley, and developed the look for them.”

Brower’s main goal was to create planets that really contrast with each other, which was achieved with the design of the dying Kree home world, Hala. “Hala was also featured in the first Captain Marvel, but we really wanted ours to have our own stamp on it related to the story,” she says. Brower took inspiration from the Saudi Arabian city NEOM, which is being built in the desert with plans to integrate artificial intelligence, similar to how Hala was run by an A.I. called the Supreme Intelligence. “We wanted the city to look like it was designed by A.I.—very blocky, with every inch of space developed into a vertical high-rise. I wanted all the buildings also to look not quite right—like they had been generated by a computer, so there is a lot of repetition and it is a bit soulless. In the past we wanted to show that the A.I. had incorporated green spaces and, now that the planet is dying, it’s very much a colossal urban sprawl.”

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F O R YO U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“The Fire Inside” FROM THE MOTION PICTURE

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CRAFT SERVICES Production Design

From top: Barbie overlooking Barbie Land; Ken after the Kens take over Barbie Land; Barbie and Ken transitioning to the real world through a field of tulips.

Barbie presented an opposite challenge of the other films, where the main character goes into the real world with the same sense of wonder as when the audience enters her world. For production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer, creating a plastic world had some surprising difficulties. “We are creating a world that has no elements,” says Greenwood. “It has no water, no fire, no electricity, no light, no wind…

It’s just full of lots of things that aren’t there.”

“Because it looks so simple, there’s nowhere to hide,” says Spencer. “It was very much the absence of things, which was a new challenge. Not just the absence of major things like walls, but the absence of how actors interact with each other and the environment.”

Since director Greta Gerwig wanted to use as little green screen as possible, everything needed to be built with an artificial look, down to the blades of grass.

“Nowadays you can get fake grass that looks very real,” says Greenwood, “but it was too real. We had to go four grades down from the best to get the perfect, artificial green grass look.” The swimming pool was hand-painted with two inches of resin layered on top, which allowed for a scene where Margot Robbie, as Barbie, walked on water and added to the artificial nature of the world.

The artificial nature was then broken by Ken when he brought back items from the real world, which gave the interesting task of designing something with no taste.

“It’s like an anti-aesthetic,” Spencer says. “What was so wonderful is that when you put all these very ugly things together, and you have those televisions all showing the same footage of horses in slow motion, it’s so melancholic that it formed its own beauty.”

The transition between Barbie Land and the real world presented another creative challenge, as the pair needed to represent a transition from a plastic, artificial world into reality. After many rounds of ideas, they decided to consider the transitions like dioramas. “The camera, backdrop and actors are in static viewpoints, and everything else is moving at different speeds,” says Greenwood. “So, in the foreground you have the tulips, then you’ve got other tulips, the windmills are going and the balloons are going up. The whole time all of this is moving, but the camera and the actors and the final cloth are all static.” Once they had the concept figured out, they came up with new, interesting transitions, like the snowmobile, rocket, and boat with spinning dolphins.★

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WA R N ER BROS .

Barbie

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Keri Russell in The Diplomat.

THE SMALL SCREEN BECOMES THE BIG PLATFORM FOR WOMEN TO STEP INTO ASS-KICKING LEADING ROLES

BY LYNETTE RICE

Thank goodness the trend didn’t stop with The Morning Show, Hacks and Yellowjackets. A whole new crop of shows with groovy female leads debuted in 2023, from the impressive effort by The Big Bang Theory’s Melissa Rauch to bring back Night Court to NBC (with her playing the daughter of Harry Anderson from the original version), to The Americans’ Keri Russell in Netflix’s political thriller The Diplomat and AMC’s Mayfair Witches starring Alexandra Daddario, Annabeth Gish and woefully under-appreciated Beth Grant. In all, at least 11 new series with strong female leads debuted this year to give SAG and Emmy voters more than enough choices come awards time.

The noisiest of the lot? Most definitely Poker Face, a

the aching back of Peacock, which has yet to feature a

(I know, it’s as weird for us to write that as it is for you

case-of-the-week mystery series on Peacock that features

bonafide breakout since launching in 2020. The Rian

to read) about a diehard fan of a Beyoncé-like pop

Natasha Lyonne as a Plymouth-driving truth seeker

Johnson dramedy earned four Emmy nominations

star whose obsession takes a bloody turn when she

who encounters a new crime—and a guilty cast of mis-

this year, including one for it’s-hers-to-lose Lyonne. Mrs.

launches her own murder spree. The Prime Video

fits—in every town she visits. With an impressive roster

Davis, Peacock’s other female-led charmer that dropped

limited series was so distressing for star Dominique

of cameos by the likes of Adrien Brody, Angel Desai,

this year, rustled up a single nod for sound editing. Star

Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah) that she

Benjamin Bratt, Cherry Jones, Chloë Sevigny and Joseph

Betty Gilpin was robbed! Now’s your chance, SAG.

asked for an on-set therapist before spending her

Gordon-Levitt, Poker Face was a much-needed salve on

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Then came Swarm, a dark and disturbing comedy

hiatus meditating in a Costa Rican jungle.

AL EX BAI L EY / N E TF LI X / KA RO LI N A WOJTAS I K / P EAC O C K / A P P LE T V + / P R IM E V I D EO

NEW WORLD ORDER

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From top: Natasha Lyonne in Poker Face; Brie Larson in Lessons in Chemistry;

AL EX BAI L EY / N E TF LI X / KA RO LI N A WOJTAS I K / P EAC O C K / A P P LE T V + / P R IM E V I D EO

Dominique Fishback in Swarm.

And speaking of grim roles, Rebecca Ferguson was

real breakout is newcomer Laysla De Oliveira, a

masterful in Silo, Apple’s expert adaptation of Hugh

former model-turned-actress who plays Saldana’s

Howey’s dystopian novels about a community that

young and ballsy recruit in the country’s ongoing

exists in a massive underground depot with 144 floors.

battle against terrorism.

If you liked her as Ilsa Faust in the Mission Impos-

And in the mother of all ironies, a truly mesmer-

sible franchise, you’ll love her as Juliette Nichols, an

izing performance came courtesy of Brie Larson in the

engineer who seeks answers about a loved one’s mur-

period piece Lessons in Chemistry, a book adaptation

der and stumbles onto a mystery that goes far deeper

for Apple that’s about inequality, sexism and all the

than she could have ever imagined.

ways that men can destroy a woman’s spirit. Larson

Two more performances are worth your perusal

is Elizabeth Zott, a chemist who can’t catch a break

should you find yourself devoid of a bingeable

in those all-male labs so she creates her own kind of

drama on a Friday night: Be sure to check out Spe-

experiment in daytime television—a cooking show

cial Ops: Lioness, the latest installment from the

that’s as much about science as it is making the perfect

mind of Taylor Sheridan for Paramount + . The

roast. If Russell, Lyonne, Ferguson and De Oliveira

military drama is positively sick with ass-kicking

were the first four courses, Larson was most definitely

females (Zoe Saldana and Nicole Kidman), but the

the dessert in this tasty year of television.★

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Clockwise from top: Graham Yost; Gary Oldman in Slow Horses; Rebecca Ferguson in Silo.

GRAHAM YOST

SILO

picked up 10 episodes, while recruiting other stars like Tim Robbins, Common and Will Patton to co-star.

(The drama has already been renewed for a second season.) “The thing that got me was, wait a second,

BY LYNETTE RICE

what happened? Why are they there? When can they hit, Slow Horses. “As a reader of the books, I kept turning the pages. I wanted to find out, and I felt that Hugh did an incredible and smart version of answering those questions in a satisfying way. So that’s been our guiding star in the writers' room. Let’s never forget this is a mystery.”

The mystery, of course, is why no one chooses to go outside, despite what they may see from the silo windows. Season 1 ends with Ferguson’s character,

“For me, it’s fantasy, it’s whatever. It’s alternate reality,

After Howey self-published Wool, the first book

Juliette, making the much-anticipated trek. We won’t

all that stuff. But the key is to make it feel real and

in his dystopian series in 2011, 20th Century Fox

spoil what happens but suffice it to say she uncovers a

lived-in. I mean honestly, if you pick at the science

snatched up the rights with Ridley Scott and Steven

whole new mystery beyond her subterranean fortress.

too much, it falls apart.” Several studios tried to

Zaillian attached to produce. But the project was

“There are more twists to come—not so much that it’s

pick apart Howey’s tomes before Silo—which also

shelved when Disney purchased the studio, so AMC

nice outside, but there are far more that the audience

features don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss them cameos by

Studios stepped in to rustle up a new version for its

will learn. We get a big punch at the end of the season

David Oyelowo and Rashida Jones—eventually pre-

sister cable network.

where Juliette gets to the top of a hill. Now she sees

miered on Apple in May.

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Apple eventually became the proper home and

the truth and it’s like, ‘Oh my god’”. ★

DAV E B EN E TT/ G E TTY I MAG ES FO R A P P LE TV

It seems to tickle Graham Yost when people refer to Silo as a sci-fi drama. Though the Apple series is as high-concept as it gets—the adaptation of Hugh Howey’s novels is about a futuristic community that exists in a massive underground vault with 144 floors—there are no spaceships in Silo. And there are certainly no lasers. “It’s not science-heavy,” says Yost, the clever mind behind FX’s Justified, who created this new Rebecca Ferguson starrer for the streamer.

go out?” says Yost, who also EPs Apple’s other sleeper

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LAYSLA DE OLIVEIRA

SPECIAL OPS: LIONESS

BY LYNETTE RICE

In Taylor Sheridan’s Special Ops: Lioness on Paramount+, Laysla De Oliveira shocks and awes as Cruz Manuelos, a military recruit who escapes the mean streets to help fight in the CIA’s war against terrorism. Here, the Ontario-born newcomer talks about how painful it was—both literally and figuratively—to kick ass in the drama that also stars Zoë Saldaña and Nicole Kidman.

How did this role find you?

I got a call from Taylor that he wanted to meet me. It was at the peak of Covid. I had to fly to Montana where they were shooting Yellowstone.

I performed the entire first episode for him on the set while he was directing an episode. It was really exhilarating.

Cruz really doesn’t like her boss, Joe, who is played by Saldaña.

I think people think Joe is really cold, but it’s part of her job. She’s not spending time with her children at home. She has to guide Cruz and spend all that time with her, and Cruz doesn’t have parents. So, it’s an interesting dynamic. I couldn’t love Zoë more in real life, though.

Your character is quite the fighter. Did it hurt to play her?

It physically hurt, and it emotionally hurt, too.

Cruz hides from terrorists during a mission.

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The physical aspect is the part that completely

terrorist that you are supposed to kill. Did

terrified me. I was not used to being physical

you know that arc was coming when you

like that, so everything was new to me, and I

booked the role?

learned so much through the strength training

No! There were only two episodes written at the

and stunt process. My very first day was running

time. Taylor writes based on the people he casts,

from my boyfriend, so I ran for 14 hours straight

which is why I think he writes so brilliantly. He

that day and I was like, OK, this is what I trained

said I would have to kill her father, and that she

for. The emotional part was tough too, and I

would be the only friend I’ve ever had. So I knew

think sometimes that ends up being harder,

it was going to be something deep. It’s such a

once the show is done, to shed that.

tragic love story.

You are talking about the romantic rela-

So you’re the Lioness in this situation, right?

tionship your character develops with

Cruz is the Lioness now. Joe was the lioness but

Aaliyah (Stephanie Nur), whose father is a

now she’s the head of the Lioness team. ★

LU K E VA R LE Y/ PA RAM O U N T+

From top: Laysla De Oliveira in Special Ops: Lioness; Zoë Saldaña and Nicole Kidman.

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Interior Designer for the Oscars and Emmys CONTENDERS VIP Lounges www.juliawongdesigns.com | 818.223.8886 | Los Angeles

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Endurance

and single-minded determination have been the focus of filmmaking duo Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin with their documentary films Free Solo, Meru and The Rescue, and now, with Nyad, they examine those themes in a narrative feature, with Annette Bening in the starring role of long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, and Jodie Foster as her coach and best friend Bonnie Stoll. Based on Nyad’s memoir, Find a Way, the film follows Nyad’s multiple attempts to make the 110-mile open ocean swim from Cuba to Florida, dodging sharks and dangerous jellyfish and weathering brutal waves. When Nyad finally succeeds at the age of 64, her message is, “It’s never too late to follow your dream.” Here, in conversation with Antonia Blyth, Vasarhelyi and Chin look back on how their documentarian skills fed into recreating an epic seafaring experience, and how both their marriage and their working relationship evolved as a result.

How did you first connect to Diana Nyad’s story?

CHAI VASARHELYI: I vividly remember when she did [the swim] in 2013. I was eight and-a-half months pregnant with our daughter, and it was our first child. I was going through that phase where I was thinking, Britney Spears has three kids, how hard could it be?

I was trying to find all these reasons not to feel sorry for myself.

JIMMY CHIN: Britney Spears has three kids? [Editor note: Spears has two children.]

VASARHELYI: Then I was like, Oh my gosh, Diana Nyad is 64. She just did this whole amazing thing. She swam 110 miles. I’ll be fine.

It was less the physical part for me about pregnancy than the psychological, like, is my life going to change? Can I still work? But we have always been like moths to a flame, and maybe it’s because of our partnership, we’re interested in these questions about individuals who push the boundaries, who have the audacity to dream and not accept no for an answer, but also the perseverance and the grit to put the work in.

After Free Solo and The Rescue and Meru, we were really committed to exploring that idea in a woman’s experience. So, we were looking around, and I think that’s where Wild Life, our most recent doc, came from. But when we were sent the script for Nyad, we looked at each other and just said, “Diana Nyad is just that. She’s not afraid to have this crazy dream. She’s not afraid to want it desperately. She’s not afraid to be entirely herself.” So that, coupled with this idea that it was clear that we had an opportunity to create two very rich roles for two extraordinary female actors of a certain age and how rare that was, we were like, “OK, we want to do this. Let’s figure it out. We’ve never made a narrative feature before, but these are the reasons why we want to do it.”

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Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin No.

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How did your experience with documentary fimmaking prepare you for making a narrative feature? You usually deal with people who don’t necessarily want to show off about what they’re doing, so was working with actors a relief in comparison?

VASARHELYI: I would say the principal difference between making a nonfiction film and a narrative feature with Jodie Foster, Annette Bening and Rhys Ifans, is that in nonfiction, our job is to be your closest listener, your best observer, and let life happen, and then afterwards, after we’re finished shooting, we make sense of it and try to put something together that honors what you witnessed. Whereas making a fiction film, we had partners who are the best of the best at what they do in their craft, and they’re as committed, if not more than you, to bringing to life this character.

So, it felt like a superpower.

In terms of the documentary instincts, we’re different because Jimmy has had a lot of commercial experience working with big crews.

And for me, we work on our docs with the same people over and over again. They know us really well. So, it was incredibly intimidating to be in front of so many people, and directing Annette Bening and Jodie Foster. But once a good decision was made, my first good decision, it was this relief because I understood that the 20 years of experience and the instincts absolutely translated. Then, additionally, when it came to the edit, coming from the gnarly, gritty edit world of nonfiction…

CHIN: I think it for sure gives you an edge, right?

VASARHELYI: I’m not trying to say it gave me an edge. I’m saying it eventually gave me an edge.

CHIN: Well, because you have to find the story and rework and break it apart over and over and over again, and I think when you have a script, you can push the edges of the edit because you have a baseline to work from.

VASARHELYI: But it’s different because in docs we have 1,000 hours of footage, so there are

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endless options, whereas in fiction, we only shot X amount of scenes, and most of our scenes are on the screen, and we probably had an incredibly limited amount of footage to work with because we were incredibly ambitious and didn’t have many takes.

Also, I think, coming from docs, the challenges always provide the opportunity. So we couldn’t afford to shoot Diana at age 28, and we didn’t know if it would work to explore the nonfiction footage of Diana [at 28]. That Johnny Carson clip of her, it’s the best character moment. Money can’t buy that. I think ultimately, it’s a real testament to Annette’s performance that she brings such truth to the character that your mind somehow accepts that there are two Dianas and they’re both true.

How do you divide tasks between you? Do you just instinctively step back and forth? Tell me how it works.

CHIN: Well, I think our process with docs... This actually goes back to your previous question, too. Even in nonfiction, you understand when a scene feels authentic and it’s heartfelt. You recognize when something is happening in front of the camera. I think that that instinct certainly carries over in narrative filmmaking.

I think we also have a lot of experience working with some of the greatest adventure athletes in the world, in the ski world, surf and skate or climbing and mountaineering, where a big part of your job as a director is just to provide the space and environment for people to perform their best. But in terms of how we work, I think this is our seventh…

VASARHELYI: Sixth.

CHIN: Sixth? Sixth [project] together.

VASARHELYI: God, the kids make it eight.

CHIN: It’s pretty clear what our strengths are. One of the strengths is just that we come from very different points of view. We have a very different outlook. So, when we attack something, I feel like

Did that test your relationship?

VASARHELYI: It’s really intense. I think, for me, at least, it was an incredibly refreshing thing to grow creatively in my 40s, after making 11 films and having a 20-year career. It was amazing to grow creatively and be pushed creatively, and have that horrible doubt, all of it. It was also amazing to grow in your marriage, where who knew, after X amount of years of marriage, you can actually change and evolve? I think it just made it clearer to us, because we needed it more, what each other does best.

What were some specific times where you were on the edge of what you could live with, and you had to trust in each other?

VASARHELYI: I think that’s every day. The biggest edgy moment I had had to do with parenting. It was really scary to take our kids out of this very stable environment that we live in and put them in local school in the Dominican Republic. But it was amazing, and it turned out to be the true silver lining of the experience.

N E T FL IX

From left: Jodie Foster and Annette Bening in Nyad.

there are no blind spots. We lean on each other in that way for every aspect of the filmmaking.

In this case, on this narrative feature though, we were forced to make these decisions in real time in front of 450 people. It was challenging.

We really had to do a lot of prep work so that we had a good sense of what we wanted out of each scene, what we wanted out of each character, what we wanted in terms of the shooting, how we wanted it to look and feel, so that we could show up on set as a unified voice. That’s different than what we’ve done before. In this case, it was a very compressed, high intensity, high pressure, very visible situation where we had to make these decisions together.

VASARHELYI: I think a good example, a way to illustrate this, is Free Solo could not have been made by either one of us alone, and that is basically the strength of the film. In a way, it’s because we’re married, because we are also managing real humans who are children, but, also, it’s like we have a fundamental trust between the two of us. If I ask for something, he knows there’s a reason. If I’m asking for some story point, it has to be shot, even if it’s really hard to do, even if it’s ethically scary, he knows I’ve thought deeply about why I’m asking for it.

At the same time, in terms of the risk assessment, which was the fundamental question of Free Solo, our reputations were on the line, or how I could live with myself as a human was on the line. I trusted Jimmy entirely. We didn’t have that friction or time that had to be spent because it was so fundamental. But with making a narrative feature, we had never been side by side for 50 days, 60 days, making decisions together in front of other people.

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But one day when the AD, who’s amazing, was on the radio, and there are 400 people listening on the radio, [he says] “Chai, your nanny wants to know if the kids were coming home for dinner or if you were coming home for dinner.” I had that complete implosion of, “Jimmy and I are the same job description. Why is he asking me?” I was embarrassed a little bit. It was OK because Annette and Jodie are both peak professionals who also are parents, but it was a real turning point for us, where I was like, “OK, we need more support on this side because if you need me to perform in that level, I can’t give all this psychic energy to the sheer logistics of parenthood.”

It was incredibly liberating as a woman and as a professional. It was incredibly meaningful for us, because me being able to be liberated from that and to be able to point to it was very meaningful. Jimmy is great, amazing about it, but just sometimes women and men are different, and we have different cultural and generational pressures. It’s just a different sort of thing. Is that fair?

CHIN: Mm-hmm [nods]...

VASARHELYI: The same thing applied when we were talking about menopause jokes when developing the script. Jimmy had tons to say.

[Laughs] CHIN: Yeah, I had a lot of input.

VASARHELYI: You can’t joke.

CHIN: There were these funny scenes where we were working on the script with Julia [Cox]. It was just you and Annette and Jodie talking about part of the script.

VASARHELYI: It was a tampon joke.

CHIN: The menopause joke. I was just sitting there, and I got up, and I was like, “Can I get anybody coffee?” That’s about as much as I could contribute.

VASARHELYI: I will say, managing 400 people, Jimmy’s amazing. He’s unfazed. For me, I’d rather, I don’t know, hide in an oil drum than try to express my ideas…

CHIN: In front of 400 people?

VASARHELYI: Even though everyone knows I’m very, very forthright, and I like to tell everyone what I’m thinking. But that was terrifying for me.

Jimmy, he’s a natural leader, and inspires great confidence and great dedication from our crew.

He’s a National Geographic photographer. He has an eye that is precise, that is beautiful, that always strives to push what we can, and that’s the whole thing that we share, is we’re both, I don’t want to say perfectionists, but if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it the best way we can. So, I never once worried about a shot. I would just try to tell him the shots I thought were important emotionally, and then it would happen. It’s not even trust. It’s an unspoken language, right?

CHIN: Yeah. We were also very lucky because we were working with [DP] Claudio Miranda. I’ve been a DP for a long time, too, so I have particular comfort with that aspect of the filming and working

with teams. I think a lot of that also comes from doing a lot of expeditions where you’re working with teams and the stakes are very high and you have to make hard decisions in very challenging situations. So that environment or that kind of tension feels very familiar. I think where I really lean on Chai is in the words and in the script and the script work and in the edit. She’s surgical. I push the DP, she pushes the editor, really pushes the editor.

VASARHELYI: I charm the DP, though.

CHIN: Yes. I guess I don’t really charm the editor.

Tell me some of the specific moments or even great moments that you had with Annette and Jodie where you just thought, “Wow.” VASARHELYI: Let me say a tiny one. We were on set, and I was like, “Do we need to bring Julia out to add a line [to the script], Jodie?” And she’s like, “I don’t need words to do that.” And she really doesn’t.

CHIN: There are scenes for sure where we were filming with Jodie where we would forget to call cut. We would just be glued, because she would just keep going and you were so present in her performance. With Annette, also, she just committed so deeply to the character and to the swimming. I think we felt a lot of awe and respect for what she brought on set every day. When she was swimming four to six to eight hours a day in the water, it just elevated the entire environment on set because nobody could complain. When your number one is coming in and is throwing down that hard, it really elevates everybody’s game. We just really respected her so much for that level of commitment.

while she swims. So, we knew she wasn’t going to drown. She’s a natural athlete, but she wasn’t a marathon swimmer. But she’s the type of actor who takes her craft so seriously that she knew that was important. The added bonus was that she’d built up this endurance that allowed us to maximize our shooting time, because even just to get her out of the water and then put her back in is 30 minutes. She was like, “Oh, I can just stay here,” and it was a baking sun. And it was freezing in the water, even though there’s baking sun. It was miserable.

CHIN: She’s badass.

VASARHELYI: Same for Jodie. We never peeked in on the training, and then I saw these costume fitting things, and I was like, “No way.”

Because she’s ripped?

VASARHELYI: Yes, I was like, are you kidding me?

New life goals, new body goals. She’s 60.

CHIN: Before we’d do takes, she’s down doing pushups.

VASARHELYI: And I’m telling some of our younger actors, “Shouldn’t you be doing that?”

Logistically speaking, you’ve done many, many challenging things in your careers in terms of practicality, but filming all this underwater and then the jellyfish mask and using prosthetics for Annette’s swollen face, tell me the most challenging aspect of all of that.

VASARHELYI: Time.

CHIN: There’s so much pressure in terms of time and scheduling on any shoot, but you add water to it, and everything takes three times, five times as long. We really wanted to try to push at least as much as we could in terms of the cinematography and how you shoot swimming. I think we’ve shot swimming in every possible way we could think of. If we didn’t have the team we had, we couldn’t have made the film. We had Pete Zuccarini underwater. We call him the merman.

She spent a year training, right? In terms of using body doubles for any of it, I understand that you didn’t really do that because she wanted to do it herself?

VASARHELYI: We had three amazing body doubles, amazing, world-class, the best of the best stunt women, including ones who were wholly age appropriate. Our first day at the tank, we had a safety check, so the three stunt doubles were there, all the water safety people were there, and she gets into the tank, and she swims, and it was a moment of awe.

Not relief, it was awe, because it was effortless. She looked like a marathon swimmer. Warren Beatty and Annette have a beautiful pool at their house, and they also have a really large Newfoundland named Scout From left: Karly Rothenberg, Chai Vasarhelyi, Annett Bening, Jodie who just sits there and barks Foster, Diana Nyad, Bonnie Stoll, Rhys Ifans and Jimmy Chin.

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What does Diana think about the film? What was her feedback?

VASARHELYI: One, she’s an incredibly intelligent person, sort of like Alex Honnold.

She speaks multiple languages. She has this illustrious career as a sports journalist, she still writes op-eds all the time. But she did something I don’t think I could do, which is, she let go. She said, “You guys need the space to make the movie you want to make. I can be the stunt double.”

I love that she offered to be stunt double.

CHIN: She wanted to be. Oh, yeah.

VASARHELYI: She 100 percent offered that. I think, in the previous iteration, she was like, “Why don’t I just play myself?” That’s Diana, right? They came down for a few days on her last day of tank, and that’s where that amazing shot in the end of the film is of her swimming next to Annette. But even with Annette swimming, she didn’t say, “Can I teach you how to get my stroke perfect?” She understood Annette needs to find her own stroke, and it has to be consistent, and that was incredibly important to Annette.

But what they did do, was both Bonnie and Diana spent an enormous amount of time with Jodie and Annette, and they also spent it together as a foursome. So, Jodie and Annette

62

Clockwise from top: Annette Bening underwater as Diana Nyad; Bening; Chin and Vasarhelyi on the set of Free Solo.

were absorbing their rapport. I think Diana really enjoys the film. She will definitely say, “I think I’m more likable than that,” but Annette Bening is pretty likable at the end of the day.

The most fun is when we asked Bonnie what it felt like when she heard that Jodie Foster was playing her.

CHIN: I think Diana likes the fact that this movie’s called Nyad. Bonnie always says, “I aspire to be the person on the screen.”

VASARHELYI: She’s like, “Do I really do this all the time?” [Rubs under nose] I’m like, “Yeah, you kind of do.”

CHIN: I think she’s pretty happy that she has Jodie Foster playing her.

VASARHELYI: I would like Jodie Foster to play me.

Me too. Next, you’re making a film about Ernest Shackleton. Can I just tell you a weird thing?

VASARHELYI: Are you Shackleton’s granddaughter?

No, but actually his son proposed to my greatgrandmother on a boat bound for Shanghai.

CHIN: No way.

She turned him down because she was promised to someone else.

VASARHELYI: Did she end up getting off the boat? Did he jump off the boat? I think there’s this generational happenstance that is amazing, as they add to the stories we tell about our lives

and how we connect to major historical events, which we should remember, which is why we’re making the Shackleton film. Them finding his boat was an opportunity to revisit the Ernest Shackleton story.

It’s wild that they found his boat, The Endurance.

VASARHELYI: It’s wild. And the boat is perfectly preserved, like a ghost ship. It’s also a climate change story because they only had access to it because the Antarctic sea ice is melting.

Will you be making more narrative films like this in the future?

CHIN: I think we’ll always make documentaries.

We love docs, but, I think that now that we’ve gotten this first one under our belt, we learned a ton. It’s like you want to take what you’ve learned and push yourself and grow as a filmmaker and a storyteller and see where you can go with another story, another film. So, we’re very interested in making another narrative, but I think, like with all of our work, it has to mean something to us. I guess it’s stating the obvious: you bleed for these films, so it has to matter.

VASARHELYI: I think for us form follows function. For Nyad, this was the right way to tell that story. But, personally, I think we should make an NC-17 gritty, gnarly film, so everyone’s surprised. And maybe we get into Cannes one day.

CHIN: That’s your goal, really?

VASARHELYI: I think it’s a good goal, yeah.★

N E T FL IX

He’s 6 foot 5, and he can take one breath and swim underwater with a camera system about 2 feet away from Annette and never get in her way, swimming backwards with huge fins.

VASARHELYI: Then we’re in the tank. Taiwan built Claudio Miranda a state-of-the-art water tank for The Life of Pi. If you were to consider that before coming to our film, he just had shot Top Gun: Maverick. On that film, the Navy turned around aircraft carriers, so he always had magic hour.

And our tank, we were very grateful for, but it was only 4 feet deep... It was like he had a Formula One car versus roller skates. I’m not joking. I think he would agree with me. But his team is so tight that they made it work.

It’s one of those things, I think, about this film. It’s like Netflix didn’t make it for kicks. Everyone was there for a real reason. They wanted to see this film made. It’s the only way Netflix went to bat with this film postpandemic. Everything’s changing, everyone’s cutting budgets. Same thing with Jodie. Jodie doesn’t play a supporting actor, but she wanted to see this film made, and she wanted to see these people brought to life, and she did. We’re really grateful.

D E A D L I N E .C O M /AWA R D S L I N E

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