Screen 29th nov 2013 lr

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Issue 1768 November 29, 2013

CASTING SHADOWS Denis Villeneuve talks Prisoners

■ Nymphomaniac ■ Anthony Chen ■ VFX special

December 4th & 5th, 2013 Centre des arts - Enghien-les-Bains

Two days dedicated to digital creation VFX • CGI • 3-D

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LEADER

Hustle shows awards muscle

A

UK office MBI, 101 Finsbury Pavement, London, EC2A 1RS Tel: +44 (0) 20 3033 4267 US office Screen International, 8581 Santa Monica Blvd, #707, West Hollywood, CA 90069 E-mail: firstname.lastname@screendaily.com (unless stated) Please note our new London phone numbers Editorial Editor Wendy Mitchell +44 (0) 20 3033 2816 US editor Jeremy Kay +1 310 922 5908 Jeremykay67@gmail.com News editor Michael Rosser +44 (0) 20 3033 2720 Chief critic and reviews editor Mark Adams +44 (0) 20 3033 4213 Group head of production and art Mark Mowbray +44 (0) 20 3638 5060 Group art director, MBI Peter Gingell +44 (0) 20 3033 4203 peter.gingell@mb-insight.com Chief reporter Andreas Wiseman +44 (0) 20 3033 2848 Asia editor Liz Shackleton, lizshackleton@gmail.com Contributing editors Sarah Cooper, Leon Forde, John Hazelton, Louise Tutt Contributing reporter Ian Sandwell +44 (0) 20 3033 4212 Advertising and publishing Commercial director Andrew Dixon +44 (0) 20 3033 2928 Sales manager Scott Benfold +44 (0) 20 3638 5050 Sales manager Nadia Romdhani (maternity leave) UK, South Africa, Middle East Andrew Dixon +44 (0) 20 3033 2928 France, Spain, Portugal, Latin America, New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Scott Benfold +44 (0) 20 3638 5050 Germany, Scandinavia, Benelux, Eastern Europe Gunter Zerbich +44 (0) 20 3033 2930 Italy, Asia, India Ingrid Hammond +39 05 7829 8768 ingridhammond@libero.it VP business development, North America Nigel Daly +1 323 654 2301 / 213 447 5120 nigeldalymail@gmail.com Production manager Jonathon Cooke +44 (0) 20 3033 4296 jonathon.cooke@mb-insight.com Group commercial director, MBI Alison Pitchford +44 (0) 20 3033 2949 alison.pitchford@mb-insight.com Subscription customer service +44 (0) 20 3033 2620 help@subscribe.screendaily.com Festival and events manager Mai Le +44 (0) 20 3033 2950 mai.le@mb-insight.com Sales administrator Justyna Zieba +44 (0) 20 3033 2694 justyna.zieba@mb-insight.com Chief Executive, MBI Conor Dignam +44 (0) 20 3033 2717 conor.dignam@mb-insight.com Screen International is part of Media Business Insight Ltd (MBI), also publisher of Broadcast and shots

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JEREMY KAY US EDITOR

American Hustle

wards watchers and voters had already sampled most of this season’s five-star menu by the time Sony invited select press including Screen International to join SAG members for the first public screening of American Hustle on November 24. Over the next two hours or so, it became clear there was a brilliant late arrival at the awards season dinner party in the shape of David O Russell’s drama inspired by an FBI investigation into political corruption.

The third entry in Russell’s exuberant suite of East Coast blue-collar tales — the other two being Oscar winners The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook — boasts the now customary high-quality work from the writer-director, as well as excellence in costume and editing and an ensemble to die for.

Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Renner deserve to be among the acting contenders this season.

That’s saying something when there is already a strong crop for consideration including Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, Sandra Bullock, Michael Fassbender, Hugh Jackman, Tom Hanks, Oscar Isaac, Jared Leto, Matthew McConaughey and Chiwetel Ejiofor, to name a few.

With American Hustle out in the open (the studio has embargoed writers from reviewing it or talking about plot points) only Red Granite’s The Wolf Of Wall Street, distributed in the US through Paramount, remains unseen, although at time of writing that was about to change.

Beyond acknowledging its obvious credentials — legendary film-maker, potent male lead cast, sexy topic — there is little point attempting to assess Wolf’s quality until it has been viewed. Any tubthumping by those who worked on it should be discounted as unreliable, so we must revert to what we know.

The popular refrain around Hollywood is that this year’s crop of awards contenders is as fine as any to emerge in a long time.

Don’t just take our word for it —

Harvey Weinstein has said as much.

It’s an exciting roster and in the weeks ahead the critics’ groups will take the lead in dictating which movies break from the pack.

What makes the field so appetising is the range of flavours. Fancy an envelope-pushing thrill ride? Watch Gravity. A finely acted thriller based on true events? Try Captain Phillips.

If excruciating historical drama or edgy genre are your thing, go for 12 Years A Slave or Prisoners. Perhaps a more broadly appealing crowdpleaser? See Saving Mr Banks.

The diversity on offer is testament to the fine talents at work in cinema today and it is gratifying to see the studios and independents well represented in the mix. And if for whatever reason a movie’s overall package doesn’t inspire the voting masses, there is individual excellence to celebrate by the bucket load.

Leaders of the pack At this fairly advanced stage of the season it’s been about posturing and promotion, yet a handful of contenders have edged in front.

Slave parlayed rave reviews from Telluride and Toronto into a steady trot to the top of people’s estimation.

Captain Phillips, the surprise boxoffice hit, and Gravity, the global smash that has left a trail of slack jaws in its wake since the Venice world premiere in August, must also stand alongside Slave. These are the three movies so far that have generated the most consistent and consistently excitable chatter.

Yet as the recent Governors Awards in Hollywood proved, it doesn’t take much to remind everybody who’s out there. The Dallas Buyers Club cast were in town and hopped over the following day to a quiet lunch with select press. Also, Weinstein is clocking up the prestige partnerships for Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom and campaign strategists are building support for those old warhorses Bruce Dern and Robert Redford through low-key events for Nebraska and All Is Lost.

It’s going to be a close-fought and s entertaining few months. ■

November 29, 2013 Screen International 1 ■

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Issue 1768 November 29, 2013

CASTING SHADOWS Denis Villeneuve talks Prisoners

■ Nymphomaniac ■ Anthony Chen ■ VFX special

november 29, 2013 cover image Denis Villeneuve on his dark thriller, Prisoners, page 16

International correspondents Asia Liz Shackleton lizshackleton@gmail.com Australia Sandy George +61 2 9557 7425 sandy.george@me.com Balkan region Vladan Petkovic +381 64 1948 948

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vladan.petkovic@gmail.com Brazil Elaine Guerini +55 11 97659915 elaineguerini@terra.com.br France Melanie Goodfellow +33 6 21 45 80 27 melanie.goodfellow@btinternet.com

20

Germany Martin Blaney +49 30 318 063 91 screen.berlin@googlemail.com Greece Alexis Grivas +30 210 64 25 261 alexisgrivas@yahoo.com Israel Edna Fainaru +972 3 5286 591 dfainaru@netvision.net.il Korea/deputy Asia editor Jean Noh +82 10 4205 0318

12

hjnoh2007@gmail.com

6

nordic territories Jorn Rossing Jensen +45 202 333 04 jornrossing@aol.com scotland

November 29, 2013

Allan Hunter +44 (0) 7904 698 848 allan@alhunter.myzen.co.uk spain Juan Sarda +34 646 440 357 jsardafr@hotmail.com UK Geoffrey Macnab +44 (0) 20 7226 0516 geoffrey@macnab.demon.co.uk

Analysis

People

Awards countdown

4 PASSION PROJECT

6 READY TO RUMBLE

12 CHARACTER DRIVEN

Nymphomaniac’s producer Louise Vesth reveals details of the two planned versions of Lars von Trier’s film, and its unique marketing strategy

After hit Why Don’t You Play In Hell?, director Sion Sono tackles hip-hop and gangs with manga adaptation Tokyo Tribe. Screen spoke to him on the set

Singaporean director Anthony Chen hits close to home by drawing on childhood memories for his debut feature, Ilo Ilo

subscriptions Screen International Subscriptions Department, 3 Queensbridge, The Lakes, Northampton NN4 7BF tel +44 1604 828 706 e-mail help@subsribe.screendaily.com Screen International ISSN 0307 4617

8 A PERFECT STORM From shooting on a remote Scottish island to finding a window in Damian Lewis’s busy schedule, Nicky Bentham talks about producing period love story The Silent Storm

14 ALONG FOR THE RIDE Oscar-winning documentary-maker Alex Gibney had recorded 200 hours of footage for his Lance Armstrong film before the doping allegations hit. He talks about rolling with events

All currencies in this issue converted according to exchange rates that applied in November 2013

n 2 Screen International November 29, 2013

www.screendaily.com

Contents

8

28

24

Regulars 16 INTO DARKNESS Denis Villeneuve delivers a harrowing child-abduction tale in Prisoners. He tells Screen about the film’s complex morality and why Hugh Jackman was the right actor to play Keller Dover

20 EUROPE’S BEST OFFER

24 THE SPECTACULAR NOW With effects-heavy films more visible than ever and films across the board including more individual visual-effects shots, Screen surveys this year’s crowded field of awards contenders

28 REVIEWS Reviews of Out Of The Furnace, Lone Survivor and The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, plus leading titles from CPH:DOX reviewed in brief

The upcoming European Film Awards will celebrate the diversity of European film-making, thanks to a voting body that refuses to follow the crowd

www.screendaily.com

November 29, 2013 Screen International 3 n

Passion project A

fter months, or years, of anticipation, the world will get two Nymphomaniacs from Lars von Trier.

Zentropa producer Louise Vesth has confirmed the shorter four-hour version will launch in Denmark on Christmas Day, followed by its release in other territories in the first quarter of 2014. Von Trier’s longer, more sexually explicit cut, of approximately five-and-a-half hours will be launched several months later. In addition to a longer running time, that version also has more close-ups of genitals.

“It was written recently this was done against his will, and that’s definitely not the case. Lars told me he was happy that we could do it this way; for him it was very important we have a long version for artistic reasons but he understands that we need to meet the wishes for distribution,” Vesth explains to Screen from Copenhagen. “This was the way to even make the film at all. If we had only one version, he would have had to make more compromises and distributors all over the world would have had to censor it themselves because of various censorship practices around the world.

It’s a way for the broader public to be able to see the film.

“Both versions are suitable for the public, but of course when you go very explicit you will squeeze the possibilities of distribution.”

As planned from the project’s inception, both versions are in two parts: the four-hour version is in two two-hour parts; the five-and-a-halfhour version is likely to be about two-and-a-half hours for part one and then three hours for part two.

“We decided the short version would go into distribution first so we can send the same film out to the whole world, and after that we will prepare the long version for distribution,” Vesth continues. “We don’t

know how and where that one will be distributed. It’ll be later in 2014.”

The shorter version is edited to be less explicit, but do not expect a Disney movie. “There’s a lot of nudity and sex in the short version,” she says. “It’s not like we put in other scenes or it’s suddenly telling another story or it’s cutting up the scenes in a different way.” In Denmark the film will receive the 15 age rating — the highest — when Nordisk launches it; even the short version is likely to be unrated or receive an NC-17 in the US, where Magnolia will release (TrustNordisk has nearly sold out the world on the film).

Lars von Trier’s vision Editing on both versions was led by Melancholia editor Molly Marlene Stensgaard, from late 2012 through to summer 2013, with final touches happening now. Von Trier did not work directly on the edit of the shorter version but only for practical reasons. “For him, it was important not to be confused,” Vesth adds.

“It was important to have a clear vision of one of the versions… We’re not sending out anything that he would not agree on.”

With all the talk about the different versions, Vesth is keen to stress

‘If we only had one version, Lars would have had to make more compromises’ Louise Vesth, Zentropa

n 4 Screen International November 29, 2013

the film’s creative achievements. “In my opinion it’s his ‘work of all times’.

He has discussed a lot of things going on in the world, with people, with sexuality, with relationships, with religion, with art and music, with nature and with civilisation.

For me, it’s a fantastic masterwork.”

The film can also benefit from a staggered marketing and publicity campaign to build up anticipation for the release by teasing out information, images and videos (all collected at nymphomaniacthemovie.com).

Vesth says the film’s timing made the groundbreaking promotions possible — usually von Trier and his team would be working up to the wire to ready a film to launch somewhere like Cannes, and there would be few images available before the film premiered in one big blast of publicity, as was the case with Antichrist and Melancholia. Having the film in post for a longer period of time allowed the assets to be created and distributed at a staggered pace from May. “Lars is a fantastic brand to do a marketing campaign on. There were so many elements and visuals for this film,” she adds. “For me it was important this time to try to broaden the campaign and use the different elements of the campaign. It used to be that there were no clips and pictures released before his films and it was very secretive. We came up with this idea that we’d do the marketing campaign with the orgasm posters and this very clear look of the actors and characters. It was a way to connect with audiences.”

There will be a press junket in early December allowing journalists to see the short version of the film so they can prepare interviews with the actors (von Trier famously has declared that he will not do interviews any more). There will be a critics’ screening later in December s with reviews embargoed. n

May

02

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Nymphomaniac’s producer Louise Vesth talks to Wendy Mitchell about the two planned versions of the film and its unique marketing strategy

Teasing the audience: How

Teaser poster released

➜

16

Ensemble photo released and Danish release confirmed for December 25

June

Chapter 1, The Compleat Angler, teaser released

28 July

Chapter 2, Jerome, teaser released

26 Aug

Chapter 3, Mrs H, teaser released

30 www.screendaily.com

Nymphomaniac in focus

ce: How Nymphomaniac built buzz

➜

Lars von Trier portrait released with chapter titles and release strategy

Sept

25

Chapter 4, Delirium, teaser released

Opens theatrically in Denmark

14 character posters released

➜

10

Writer-director Lars von Trier Country of origin Denmark Producer Louise Vesth (Zentropa) Language English Sales TrustNordisk (close to a sell-out around the world) Cast Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Jamie Bell, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, Mia Goth, Connie Nielsen, Willem Dafoe

Dec

27

Oct

Nymphomaniac

Nov

01

22

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➜

Chapter 5, The Little Organ School, teaser released

Trailer launch

20 ➜

pleat sed

31

Factfile

Theatrical posters released

DATE TBC

Coming soon Chapters 6, 7 and 8 teasers released

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November 29, 2013 Screen International 5 n

Set visit sion sono

O

ver the past 60 years, Nikkatsu’s legendary studio facility in the western Tokyo city of Chofu has hosted countless productions in its stages, from classics such as Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp and Shohei Imamura’s The Insect Woman to recent films like Zatoichi and Yatterman. But Sion Sono’s gang action film Tokyo Tribe may mark the first time the exteriors of its ageing buildings and interconnecting service roads have been converted into a giant film set.

It is an eye-popping mix of rock ’n’ roll neon, graffiti tags and murals, streetmarket bustle, and a melange of Japanese and foreign signage. The effect is that of an alternate-future Tokyo as cultural melting pot. It serves as the backdrop for Tokyo Tribe’s hip-hop gang-war tale, based on the second series of Santa Inoue’s titular cult manga.

“This is not your average Japanese movie. This is rap plus fighting action!” announces lead producer Yoshinori Chiba, who reunites with Sono after the one-two punch of 2010’s queasy serialkiller outing Cold Fish and 2011’s sexual thriller Guilty Of Romance. Tokyo Tribe marks the largest budget to date for both the genre film producer and Sono.

Sono sits at the video monitors smoking furiously as a shot is set up. He compliments production designer Yuji Hayashida (13 Assassins, Goemon), mentioning another set built outside Tokyo’s city limits for the climactic battle.

Tokyo Tribe features very little shooting on location. “Real locations don’t mesh with an original world created from scratch,” says Sono proudly.

The 51-year-old director’s confidence is running high after the overseas success of his gonzo love letter to film-making, Why Don’t You Play In Hell?. The film world premiered at Venice this year, picked up the Midnight Madness audience award in Toronto and secured North American distribution through Drafthouse Films. Nikkatsu began sales of Tokyo Tribe at AFM. Shooting wrapped in late September and the film is now in the final stages of post.

France’s Wild Side and Hong Kong’s Sundream have picked up rights.

Shoot from the hip Back in September, with the sun now set, the shot is ready. A rain machine starts up and the two sizeable gangs march towards each other, chanting

n 6 Screen International November 29, 2013

Sion Sono on the set of Tokyo Tribe

Ready to rumble After hit Why Don’t You Play In Hell?, director Sion Sono tackles hip-hop and gangs with manga adaptation Tokyo Tribe. Jason Gray visits the set their affiliation. After a tense exchange of insults, they launch into a massive rumble. The raw RED Epic footage, shot by cinematographer Daisuke Soma (Helter Skelter), is impressive even on the playback monitor.

Between takes Sono rattles off an eclectic list of cinematic influences on Tokyo Tribe: The Warriors, Asian martial-arts movies, Streets Of Fire, the surreal work of Shuji Terayama, Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols documentaries, and Scarface’s final gun battle for good measure. But Sono seems most pleased about ripping off the Cadillac with hood-top chandeliers from his beloved Escape From New York. “And I had the cast watch West Side Story before shooting. This is a rap musical,” he says.

On the surface Tokyo Tribe may recall Takashi Miike’s Crows high-school gang films, but whereas those films were populated with faces from Japan’s biggest talent agencies, Tribe’s gangs consist of real rappers, tattoo artists and stunt performers in acting roles.

“They’re good actors, too,” Sono says.

Only Ryohei Suzuki, who plays Mera, leader of the Wu-Ronz gang, has some-

‘I had the cast watch West Side Story before shooting. This is a rap musical’ Sion Sono, director

what of a name from roles in HK: Forbidden Super Hero and a string of TV series. In the role of Kai, from rival gang Musashino Saru, is Hokkaido-based rap artist Young Dais. He won the part after sending in an audition recording via the film’s open casting campaign on YouTube — typical of Sono’s rebellious approach to film-making.

Nearby, a stunt team of young men and women flip, kick and dive on each other in preparation for hand-to-hand combat. One of them looks like a 13-year-old boy, but is actually a 16-yearold girl with incredible dexterity.

Chiba explains the approach to casting: “The street-level rap performers and music give the movie its power.

We hope to boost the whole scene.”

Sono adds: “Having real stunt performers in acting roles means we see them doing all their own fighting, without cutting away.”

By shooting the Nikkatsu production on its backlot and avoiding star salaries, Tokyo Tribe’s spend will all be seen on screen. Nikkatsu is steadily building buzz for the film before its planned s summer 2014 release. n

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PRODUCTION REPORT THE SILENT STORM

A perfect Storm From the challenges of shooting on a remote Scottish island, to finding a window in Damian Lewis’s busy schedule, Nicky Bentham talks to Maria Sell about producing period love story The Silent Storm

P

roducer Nicky Bentham met writer-director Corinna VillariMcFarlane more than 10 years ago on the set of The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael, and since then the pair have been looking for a project together. They finally got their opportunity with The Silent Storm, VillariMcFarlane’s fictional directorial debut, after 2008 documentary Three Miles North Of Molkom. The project shot for five weeks this summer, the first feature to come out of Bentham’s Londonbased production company Neon Films.

Set on a remote Scottish island in the 1950s, it follows a 30-year-old woman (Andrea Riseborough) who is caught between her overbearing minister husband (Damian Lewis) and a charismatic 17-year old criminal (Ross Anderson) who is delivered to them as part of a rehabilitation scheme.

Villari-McFarlane had taken a trip to Scotland — sleeping in the back of a converted Land Rover — to retrace her ancestry, and spent nine months researching and writing her script.

Bentham read it and signed up immediately. “I fell in love with it. In many ways, it’s a classic universal love story, but it’s also a very personal story to [Villari-McFarlane] and I think that’s what makes it so special,” says Bentham, who previously worked for Duncan Jones’ production company Liberty Films on Jones’ directorial debut Moon, before setting up Neon Films in 2008.

The finance was

The Silent Storm

‘I fell in love with it. In many ways, it’s a classic universal love story but it’s also a very personal story’ Nicky Bentham, Neon Films

pieced together largely through a group of private investors, and also had the support of one of the UK’s top producers. EON Productions boarded the project after Bentham was introduced to executive producer Barbara Broccoli through mentoring scheme Guiding Lights.

“When I showed her this script, she immediately fell for it too and said she’d do whatever she could to help me make it happen. It was a process from there,” Bentham explains.

Meanwhile, after pitching the project at the Junction Market Mentor Scheme last November, Bentham convinced Welsh producer John Giwa-Amu to board as a co-producer through his company Red & Black Productions, which helped to secure funding from the Film Agency For Wales.

From the outset Bentham and VillariMcFarlane wanted Damian Lewis to play the film’s male lead, which Bentham describes as a “difficult character and quite severe on the page, but with a lot of humanity in him”.

However, considering Lewis’s Homeland schedule, they did not think their dream casting would materialise until suddenly a slot became available in the summer. “When the opening came up, we all just jumped on it,” she says.

Bentham also praises Riseborough who, she says, effortlessly fits the profile of the “beautiful, brave and wild” heroine who is “in tune with the landscape and nature”. Newcomer

Ross Anderson was discovered after gruelling casting sessions but as Bentham reveals, “We were really delighted when we found Ross — Corinna actually cried when he auditioned.” After Lewis put him through his paces a little more, Anderson was offered the role.

Shooting took place over five weeks on the remote Scottish island of Mull, which also provided the location for Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! in 1945.

“It’s a unique landscape. I don’t think everyone would necessarily think it’s in Scotland, because we’ve got beautiful Jurassic cliffs and the most stunning lush vegetation,” says Bentham. “A lot of the cinematography has a very composed painterly style.”

The crew captured the dramatic fog that occasionally descends during the day, while the island’s unspoilt coastline and period buildings made shooting the period feature fairly straightforward.

These provided an “authentic look and feel”, says Bentham.

She is also proud of successfully completing some “very demanding and dramatic” five or six minute scenes, which were shot in one take with stunts, flying props and light changes taking place concurrently.

WestEnd Films is handling international sales on the project, currently in post, with plans to showcase it at Berlin’s European Film Market in s February. ■

F O R Y O U R B A F T A® C O N S I D E R A T I O N I N A L L C AT E G O R I E S I N C LU D I N G

BEST FILM

Produced by Letty Aronson Stephen Tenenbaum Edward Walson

LEADING ACTRESS Cate Blanchett

SUPPORTING ACTRESS Sally Hawkins

LEADING ACTOR Alec Baldwin

SUPPORTING ACTOR Louis C.K. Bobby Cannavale Andrew Dice Clay Peter Sarsgaard Michael Stuhlbarg

“A work of brilliance.

A powerhouse performance from Blanchett.”

EMPIRE, Ian Nathan

“Allen has produced an outstanding movie, immensely satisfying and absorbing.

It is pure movie-going pleasure.”

HHHHH

THE GUARDIAN, Peter Bradshaw

“The performances are worthy of stand-up-and-cheer ovations all round.”

THE OBSERVER, Mark Kermode

“Hawkins is fabulous.”

HHHHH

MAIL ON SUNDAY, Matthew Bond

HHHHH THE TIMES

W W W . WA R N E R B R O S 2 0 1 3 . C O M

AWARDS COUNTDOWN Slave takes lead in Spirit Awards race

10 shorts make list for Oscars

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave is in contention for seven Spirit Awards from Film Independent, while Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is on six after nominees were announced on November 26.

McQueen earned a director nomination and will compete against Payne for Nebraska, JC Chandor for All Is Lost, Jeff Nichols for Mud and Shane Carruth for Upstream Color.

The Spirit Awards categories are strong across the board.

The Great Beauty is among a mighty crop of contenders for best international film that also includes Blue Is The Warmest Colour, Gloria, The Hunt and A Touch Of Sin. 12 Years A Slave’s Chiwetel Ejiofor will contest the lead actor race with veterans Bruce Dern for Nebraska and Robert Redford for All Is Lost, as well as Oscar Isaac for Inside Llewyn Davis, Michael B Jordan for Fruitvale Station and Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club.

Cate Blanchett leads the best actress field for Blue Jasmine and can expect stiff competition from Julie Delpy in Before Midnight. The late James Gandolfini earned a supporting actor nod for Enough Said.

Fox Searchlight leads the distributor rankings on nine, followed by IFC on eight, Sony Pictures Classics and Paramount on six, Roadside Attractions/ Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions solo on four each, and The Weinstein Company on three.

The winners will be announced on March 1, 2014.

Ten live-action short films have made the shortlist for the Oscars, chosen from a pool of 120 qualifiers.

The films are That Wasn’t Me (Aquel No Era Yo) by Esteban Crespo, Just Before Losing Everything (Avant Que De Tout Perdre) directed

by Xavier Legrand, Two (Dva) directed by Mickey Nedimovic, Helium by Anders Walter, Kush directed by Shubhashish Bhutiani, Do I Have To Take Care Of Everything? (Pitaako Mun Kaikki Hoitaa) directed by Selma Vilhunen, Record/ Play directed by Jesse Atlas, Throat

Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave

Song directed by Miranda de Pencier, Tiger Boy directed by Gabriele Mainetti and The Voorman Problem directed by Mark Gill.

The short films and feature animation branch reviewing committee viewed all eligible entries for the preliminary round of voting at screenings held in Los Angeles.

Branch members will now select three to five nominees at screenings to be held in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco in December.

Nominees will be announced on January 16.

The Voorman Problem

EFAs honour Child’s Pose producer Child’s Pose producer Ada Solomon of Romania’s HiFilm has won the European Co-Production Award — Prix Eurimages from the European Film Awards, which will be held on December 7.

Palm Springs adds stars Palm Springs has announced the latest honorees for its 25th anniversary festival. Steve McQueen will receive the best director award for 12 Years A Slave, Nebraska star Bruce Dern will receive the career achievement award and August: Osage County’s Julia Roberts will receive the Spotlight Award.

SBIFF to fete Thompson Emma Thompson, the star of Saving Mr Banks, will receive the Modern Master Award at the 29th Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) on February 8.

Do I Have To Take Care Of Everything?

That Wasn’t Me

Katzenberg and Spielberg donations boost museum Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg have each donated $10m to the planned Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

As a result, the two main galleries on the lobby floor will be named the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery and the Spielberg Family Gallery.

“Steven and Jeffrey share a passion for movie-making

■ 10 Screen International November 29, 2013

and philanthropy,” said Academy Museum campaign chair Bob Iger.

“With these incredibly generous gifts, they are combining the two, moving us closer to our goal of building a museum to preserve the history of motion pictures and inspire the next generation of filmmakers.”

Since the museum’s $300m capital campaign launched in 2012, it has secured more than half its target.

NY tribute to Gandolfini Steve Buscemi will present an award in honour of the late James Gandolfini during Gotham Independent Film Awards in New York on December 2.

BGP takes The Good Road New York-based BGP Film has picked up North American rights to Gyan Correa’s The Good Road, which is India’s official entry to the Oscars’ best foreign-language film category.

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“FILM OF THE YEAR.”

HHHHH , I A N N AT H A N

“NERVE-SHREDDING SUSPENSE.” , BENJAMIN LEE

“MESMERIZING, ABSTRACT BEAUTY.” , G E O F F R E Y M CN A H

“A CINEMATIC MASTERPIECE.” , TOM MACKLIN

“SANDRA BULLOCK IS SERIOUSLY GOOD HERE, GIVING STONE AN INNER STEELINESS THAT ONLY THE DEEPEST PANGS OF DESPAIR CAN UNSHEATHE.” , ROBBIE COLLIN

BEST FIL M P RO D U C E D BY

ALFONSO CUARÓN D AV I D H E YM A N

SU PP O RTI N G AC TO R GEORGE CLOONEY

O R I G I N A L S C R E E N P L AY

DIRECTOR

ALFONSO CUARÓN

ALFONSO CUARÓN & JONÁS CUARÓN

LE A D I N G AC TRESS

ORIGINAL MUSIC

SANDR A BULLOCK

W W W . WA R N E R B R O S 2 0 1 3 . C O M

STEVEN PRICE

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AWARDS COUNTDOWN ANTHONY CHEN

Character driven Singaporean director Anthony Chen hits close to home by drawing on childhood memories for his debut feature, Ilo Ilo. By Liz Shackleton

â– 12 Screen International November 29, 2013

www.screendaily.com

Ilo Ilo

S

ince winning the Camera d’Or at Cannes this year for his debut feature Ilo Ilo, Singaporean director Anthony Chen has been on a roll.

The film, which is Singapore’s entry to the best foreign-language film category at the Oscars, has picked up a slew of further prizes, including best first feature at the BFI London Film Festival, best film and actress (Yeo Yann Yann) at Vladivostok, and best director and actress in Mumbai. Now the film has won four prizes including best feature at the Golden Horse Awards and Chen is nominated in the Asia Pacific Screen Awards’ achievement in directing category.

In France, Ilo Ilo, has racked up more than 82,000 admissions to become the most successful Singaporean film of all time. Also a hit in Singapore, it has been sold to about 20 territories by sales agent Memento Films. Film Movement has North American rights.

A quiet family drama about a domestic helper from the Philippines and the family she works for in Singapore, Ilo Ilo packs a punch with its assured directing style and carefully drawn characters. Although the son of the family initially torments the new maid, he slowly forms a bond with her, an emotional shift that is introduced without melodrama.

Set during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the film shows the subtle ways in which big events can have an impact on ‘little’ people.

“I’ve always been interested in characters and people,” says Chen, speaking to Screen following the screening in

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Mumbai. “I’m less interested in plot — or at least in finding devices to move the story along. It’s our humanity that connects us with cinema and of course with each other as humans and individuals.”

Finding his voice The film is surprisingly mature for a 29-year-old film-maker — but then Chen is quick to point out that he started early. He made his first short film, G-23, while studying at Singapore’s Ngee Ann Polytechnic. His second short, Grandma, screened at Cannes. More award-winning shorts followed, and he was accepted into the UK’s National Film & Television School (NFTS), where he made English-language road movie Lighthouse as his graduation film. “I grew so much there.

They don’t tell you how to make films, it’s about grooming and nurturing your voice,” says Chen.

After this, he was advised to return to Singapore to make his first feature: “I felt my first film needed to be personal, about subjects or themes that I understood. That’s when all these childhood memories started coming back to me.”

He wrote Ilo Ilo based on his experiences of growing up with a Filipina maid in Singapore. “It’s not completely autobiographical but there are lots of moments that were taken from real life, like the father losing his job and the boy keeping baby chicks.”

Singapore Film Commission provided half of the film’s $500,000 budget, with Chen’s old school, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, as the other major

‘I’ve always been interested in characters and people. I’m less interested in plot’ Anthony Chen, film-maker

investor, marking the first time an educational institution in Singapore has invested in a film.

Many of Chen’s fellow NFTS students worked on the film, including French DoP Benoit Soler and co-editor Chen Hoping. Yeo Yann Yann, who plays the mother in the film, announced she was pregnant during pre-production but was keen to press ahead, and she was heavily pregnant for the shoot.

When the film made headlines after its win and standing ovation in Cannes, the press in the Philippines started a search for Chen’s former maid, Teresa.

He had an emotional reunion with her in Ilo Ilo [a district in the Philippines] and later flew her to Singapore for the premiere of the film. He was relieved to hear she was safe after Typhoon Haiyan, which hit Ilo Ilo, and is planning a charity screening in Manila for the typhoon victims.

Still based in London, Chen is planning to make an “English-language international project” as his next film, but hopes to stay involved in the Singaporean film industry, helping young directors to make their first films.

“The next five to seven years will be very interesting for Singapore, because many young film-makers are making perceptive and intelligent short films,” he says. “Looking at their work, if they’re able to make their first features on their own terms — which means being given the right funding and working with the right people — I think there will be a whole new wave for cins ema in Singapore.” ■

November 29, 2013 Screen International 13 ■

AWARDS COUNTDOWN ALEX GIBNEY

Along for the ride Oscar-winning documentary-maker Alex Gibney had recorded 200 hours of footage for his Lance Armstrong film before the doping allegations hit. He tells John Hazelton about rolling with events

n 14 Screen International November 29, 2013

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graph and also to reflect on my own role as part of this myth-making apparatus”.

The director also appears on screen from time to time, giving him a presence that he has rarely had in previous projects. “On this one, I felt it was absolutely critical for storytelling reasons and for structural reasons too,” says Gibney. “It allowed me to pursue a narrative that would go back and forth in time and space rather effortlessly.”

The formula has worked, as the film was invited to world premiere in Venice, going on to screen at Telluride and Toronto. Sony Pictures Classics released in the US on November 8.

Truth crosses over

Alex Gibney with Lance Armstrong

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he best laid plans of documentary film-makers often go awry, thanks to the tendency for real-life events to play out in unpredictable ways.

But when renowned cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong admitted in January this year to using performance-enhancing drugs, the plans of documentarian Alex Gibney seemed to have fallen apart.

Gibney started making a film about Armstrong’s comeback, following his 2005 retirement with seven consecutive Tour de France wins under his belt. The film-maker and his crew followed the Texan cyclist for a year, shooting Armstrong’s rides in the 2009 and 2010 tours with an array of cameras and ending up with 200 hours of material.

But as doping allegations against Armstrong gathered force in 2011, the nearly completed film was put on hold.

And when Armstrong finally came clean, Gibney briefly considered scrapping the footage and starting the whole project over again.

That idea was ultimately rejected because “I felt we had something in that 2009 material that was very powerful, for reasons we didn’t necessarily understand at the time,” Gibney says, recount-

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ing the difficult history of what became The Armstrong Lie. “In making his comeback [Armstrong] allowed cameras along for the ride, so you can see the myth-making machinery in action,” Gibney explains.

“Both what’s real about it and what’s fake about it. That footage allows you a front-row seat for the Armstrong lie.”

Using the old footage in the new version meant continuing a deal under which Armstrong got, in return for granting access, a cut of the film’s back end. Gibney says the deal did not become an issue because “the arrangement was always that [Armstrong] had no editorial control. There was only one thing we had to do, which was to offer him the opportunity to respond to any allegations of drug use, which I would have done in any event.”

Creating the new context meant filming additional material — including interviews with Armstrong and others shot after the cyclist’s confession — and Gibney himself becoming a character in the film.

In the new version, Gibney replaced Matt Damon as the film’s narrator, “both to allow myself to explore things that I had seen but hadn’t been able to photo-

‘I felt we had something in that 2009 material that was very powerful, for reasons we didn’t necessarily understand at the time’ Alex Gibney, film-maker

Gibney’s feel for narrative seems to be confirmed by the fact several of his films have been followed by dramatic features on the same subjects.

Three years ago his Casino Jack And The United States Of Money was followed

by Kevin Spacey feature Casino Jack, and this year Gibney’s We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks preceded WikiLeaks feature The Fifth Estate.

The Armstrong Lie, whose producer Frank Marshall originally planned to make a feature based on Armstrong’s battle with cancer, is set to be followed

by Stephen Frears’ as-yet-untitled take on the cyclist’s story, starring Ben Foster.

And Gibney’s next release, the nearly completed Finding Fela!, may be followed by a now-in-development drama about music legend Fela Kuti.

So it is not surprising that Gibney himself is now developing a documentary and a feature with common subject matter. Both projects are for Universal, but Gibney will not reveal what the films are about and says he will not necessarily direct the narrative feature version.

He sees the unusual development plan as “a good model”, and adds: “The documentary would come out first. But because it’s an original story that’s not been much covered, the idea is that along the way you’d see a portion of the story that would make sense to tease out as a fiction film.”

Gibney has a strong track record in documentaries, including winning the Oscar in 2007 for Taxi To The Dark Side, but is also open to fictional narratives.

He says: “Sometimes I think fiction films are better able to focus on a narrower bandwidth because they can more fully s explore psychological territory.” n

November 29, 2013 Screen International 15 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN denis villeneuve

Into darkness Denis Villeneuve delivers a harrowing child-abduction tale in Prisoners. He tells Jeremy Kay about the film’s complex morality and why Hugh Jackman was the right actor to play Keller Dover

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enis Villeneuve chuckles when told his sunny disposition is surprising. Watch Prisoners or the Quebecois director’s Oscar-nominated Incendies or Polytechnique and you expect a grim encounter. The reality is far from that.

Those who know him say Villeneuve is a delight to work with. Bizarrely, September’s Toronto press conference following the official world premiere of the child-abduction thriller was at times a jolly affair. Star Hugh Jackman later tells Screen: “It’s amazing that someone so happy makes films that are so dark.”

Good humour aside, it is clear Villeneuve likes to keep one foot planted firmly in a shadowy storytelling hinterland. In a season chock-full of harrowing survival stories, Prisoners does not feel out of place, although a nuanced maturity and elegant expression of hope set it apart.

It was 2009 when Villeneuve first got his hands on Aaron Guzikowski’s screenplay about a God-fearing vigilante who coaxes his friends into appalled complicity as he tortures a young man to reveal the whereabouts of their kidnapped daughters.

“The screenplay has so many layers,” the director says down the phone from Canada one October morning. “People are happy to give up their moral ideals and follow a leader. When I read it I fell in love with it but I felt it was such a dark

‘Hugh Jackman is a fantastic actor. He was willing to show an ugly side of his character’ Denis Villeneuve, director

subject as I’d been working on two very dark movies,” says the Montreal-based director. He had just completed Polytechnique and was about to shoot Incendies, so he put the script to one side.

Once Incendies wrapped, Villeneuve’s thoughts returned to Prisoners. “I was still thinking about it, even after I’d read a few dozen other scripts — it was haunting me.”

He signed on with Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson’s Los Angelesbased finance and production company Alcon Entertainment, which had seen the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale and Antoine Fuqua come and go on the project but were determined to get the film made.

A straightforward approach “When I arrived there was nobody attached to it, so I had the chance to cast the movie with the producers,” Villeneuve says of his first English-language film and first US production.

Johnson hails from Atlanta and was keen to take advantage of Georgia’s state tax incentives but also believed the setting would be appropriate. “They offered me the choice of going where I wanted if I didn’t get what I wanted in Georgia,” says the director.

They visited the state. “In January, February and March it’s like a neverending Thanksgiving. It’s cloudy with a lot of rain but no snow.” The 60-day

shoot got underway in early 2013 in the Atlanta locales of Stone Mountain and Conyers.

Villeneuve uses several superlatives when describing his experience on Prisoners and reserves one for the Alcon cofounders. “They were by far the best producers I’ve worked with,” he says.

“They’re straightforward. They’re very honest and they stick to their word.

“The idea is to make great cinema.

They protected me a lot and took decisions that allowed me to make the film I wanted to make.”

Prisoners is a shape-shifter that does not pull any punches. Part-procedural that pays homage to its genre roots and part-character study that asks bold questions about the nature of faith and love, it drew standing ovations from the industry and the public when it premiered in Telluride and Toronto.

To pull it off, Villeneuve and the producers had to find the right cast. The director says he could not have wished for better leads than Hugh Jackman as the tormented parent Keller Dover and Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki, the enigmatic lawman with whom Dover forges a strange symbiosis. “[Jackman] is a fantastic actor,” says the director. “He was willing to show an ugly side of his character. He’s very charismatic, so that’s what was so ambitious about choosing Hugh Jackman because we were aware people »

AWARDS COUNTDOWN denis villeneuve

would want to follow him but that would take them into a moral conflict that was quite dark.”

While never gratuitous, the sequences that see Dover interrogate a mentally challenged man (Alex, played

by Paul Dano), who is caught up in the investigation, make for difficult viewing.

However Villeneuve insists they raise crucial questions in the post-9/11 era.

“What Keller Dover is doing is useless because… the information he gets doesn’t lead to the finding of the kids. That says something about torture — if you read the studies they say torture is ineffective and people say what they must because they don’t want to get hurt.”

Jackman counts himself among Villeneuve’s fans. “Since I’d seen Incendies, I knew he would pull it off. He reminds me of Christopher Nolan in that he’s very collaborative and definite in his vision. You get a great relaxation on set.

“He knows when to rein actors in and let’s face it, you don’t want to give too much rope to actors,” Jackman adds with a laugh. “He treads this line between [creating] something very interesting and layered as well as being pure entertainment.”

Dark territory Villeneuve tweaked the script so the film could venture into darker places. “If you read the original screenplay, it’s the same story but the movie is closer to the inner world of Keller Dover and his inner moral conflict is present in the movie,” the director says.

This called for delicacy. “As a director I always feel like the best friend to the screenwriter. [Yet] I’m always inspired by actors and on set I like to improvise and the script was so precise that the window for improvisation was smaller.

“I try to be as faithful to the script as possible but I had to change things because images are always stronger than words, so I had to simplify some things. But I did it all with the approval of the screenwriter. I wanted to be sure this was Aaron’s Prisoners.”

The director kept the mood light between takes while maintaining control of the set. “There is a lot of concentration involved,” he says. “Cellphones were forbidden on set. I wanted everybody to be present, calm.

“There was a nice concentration level, but at the same time because everybody was concentrating there was a

n 18 Screen International November 29, 2013

Denis Villeneuve on set with cinematographer Roger Deakins

‘I try to be as faithful to the script as possible but I had to change things because images are always stronger than words’ Denis Villeneuve, director

lightness, especially when Jake was there because he’s such a clown. He’s a very funny guy.”

Gyllenhaal goes toe-to-toe with Jackman and shrouds Loki in the mystery of a backstory we never uncover. That said, Villeneuve credits the actor with drawing out the humanity in a character that could have come across as merely a device. “Jake’s twitching is a great idea because we understand his character comes from a violent past.”

The emotional tone of the story meant there was no easy day during production, but Villeneuve had his “protectors” in Kosove and Johnson and another crucial collaborator — renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins.

“It was the first time [we worked together] and I hope to have the chance to do so again because it was the most beautiful cinematic experience of my life.

Hugh Jackman and Paul Dano in Prisoners

“It was like going back to film school.

He’s a master but was willing to do my film. I felt I was protected; I owe him a lot. He brought so much strength and poetry to the film.

“It’s a very fine line that Roger and the actors and I were looking for. We wanted to show just the right amount of violence and the ugliness of this, but when it was necessary we didn’t want to be afraid of shooting the impact and the power of violence. Sometimes the perpetrators can be the victims.”

In this regard, the title of the film always struck Villeneuve as appropriate.

“It has different meanings. In some ways the characters are all prisoners of their egos or neuroses or pasts and they are trapped in their own bubbles. It’s so accurate — every human being is struggling within their own walls.”

Now that the film has earned plaudits from critics and the public, Villeneuve wants to keep the momentum going in more ways than one. He has signed a two-year deal with Alcon and the partners are exploring follow-up projects.

In the broader landscape he has found two scripts, one of which might blossom into his next project. “For me, to write a movie takes quite long. I learned so much from directing Prisoners that I’d love to go behind the camera quickly next year.”

Will it be another dark story? “You cannot fight inspiration. When I look at my filmography, it’s as if these movies had been made by someone else — you s cannot fight a river.” n

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Awards Countdown European film Awards

European Film Awards Ceremony 2012

Europe’s best offer The upcoming European Film Awards (Dec 7) will celebrate the diversity of European film-making, thanks to a voting body that refuses to follow the crowd. Louise Tutt looks at this year’s contenders

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elix Van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown leads the pack of contenders with the most nominations ahead of this year’s European Film Awards (EFAs) on December 7. Its tally of seven nominations reflects a title feted at the Berlinale earlier this year and one that has been a hit at home in Belgium.

The celebration of this small Flemishlanguage drama about love, grief and bluegrass music is a great example of why the EFAs are known for recognising a diverse range of films.

It may make for a cheerfully eccentric ceremony (Australia’s Naomi Watts in the running for European actress is one of this year’s quirks as The Impossible is an entirely Spanish production), but by refusing to follow the crowd, the European Film Academy’s 2,900 voting members from across the continent

make some fascinating choices that reflect the diversity of European filmmaking.

“Its purity makes it admirable,” says Paul Webster, the UK producer of Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, which is nominated in four categories. “It celebrates Europe. So often we look westward here in the UK and it’s great to be part of the European film industry.”

‘So often we look westward here in the UK, and it’s great to be part of the European film industry’ Paul Webster, producer

n 20 Screen International November 29, 2013

Back to Berlin The 26th annual awards, which are jointly produced by the Berlin-based European Film Academy with EFA Productions, are back on home turf this year in Berlin. Every other year the ceremony travels to a different European city — last year it was Malta, next year it is Riga in Latvia — and the awards ceremony receives a financial boost of around $1.4m (¤1m) from that year’s host city.

This year some 900 guests will be honoured, wined and dined at the Berlin theatre venue, Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The popular German TV presenter and comedian Anke Engelke is presiding over the proceedings for the fifth time. Her wit and irreverence is cited by many as helping to elevate the EFAs above other pan-European shows, such as the campy Eurovision Song Contest.

Along with The Broken Circle Breakdown, the contenders for European film of the year are Giuseppe Tornatore’s English-language debut The Best Offer, starring Geoffrey Rush, Spanish director Pablo Berger’s silent, black-andwhite Snow White story Blancanieves, Paolo Sorrentino’s luscious, bittersweet The Great Beauty, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or sensation Blue Is The Warmest Colour (known by EFA as

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EFA AWARDS FOR ACHIEVEMENT 2013 Pedro Almodovar: European achievement in world cinema award The Spanish director is one of the world’s most successful and cherished auteurs. His latest film, I’m So Excited, is nominated for both European comedy film and the People’s Choice award.

The Priest’s Children

Blue Is The Warmest Colour

Love Is All You Need

‘It is difficult to say who is the best as European cinema is so diverse’ Marion Döring, European Film Academy

I’m So Excited

Adele: Chapter 1 & 2) and Jan Ole Gerster’s German drama Oh Boy!.

The European Film Academy avoids calling this main award the best European film. “We call it European film,” explains Marion Döring, European Film Academy director and producer of the EFA awards. “It is difficult to say who is the best as European cinema is so diverse. To be one of the six nominees is like getting an award when you see just how much is being produced and how different the films are throughout Europe.”

Comic timing For the first time in its history, the Academy has introduced a separate European comedy award this year. The inaugural nominees are Pedro Almodovar’s I’m So Excited, Riccardo Milani’s Welcome Mr President!, Susanne Bier’s

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Love Is All You Need and Vinko Bresan’s The Priest’s Children.

“It is so important we also award films that have potential with the audience,” says Döring. “Many European films are of course great, but sometimes they are very serious.”

She acknowledges the knotty issue of a comedy award for a continent’s worth of films whose humour may not travel far beyond their own borders. “What is funny in one territory may not be in another,” Döring agrees. “The challenge is to identify those comedies that have the potential to travel.”

Only I’m So Excited has made a big impact beyond its home territory of Spain, grossing $3.6m in France, $2.4m in Italy and $1.3m in the UK. Bier’s Danish romantic comedy Love Is All You (Right) The Broken Circle Breakdown

Catherine Deneuve: lifetime achievement award In a career that began nearly 60 years ago and is still going strong, the French actress has collaborated with the likes of Luis Bunuel (Belle De Jour), Roman Polanski (Repulsion) and Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg) to create some of the finest films made by these legendary directors.

Need did respectable business in the UK ($1.3m), Germany ($900,000), Spain ($800,000) and Italy ($800,000) but failed to make a big impression in its near-neighbour Sweden ($400,000).

Both The Priest’s Children and Welcome Mr President! have been wildly popular in their native territories of Italy and Croatia respectively, but have not been released widely internationally.

Döring says it is too early to confirm whether the comedy category will expand permanently to four nominated films, rather than the planned three when the category was announced. The awards are always being fine-tuned and the Academy board makes all decisions jointly.

The nominations have been chosen from a shortlist of 46 films, representing 32 European countries. All films had to have had their first official screening either at a festival or a cinema after July 1, 2012. The 20 countries with the most European Film Academy members voted one national film directly into the selection list, with a committee of Academy board members and various experts choosing the rest. Since the nominations were announced on November 9, the »

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AwArds Countdown Efas

2,900 European Film Academy members have been voting for the winners in the European film, director, actor, actress and screenwriter categories.

EFA ADVANCE CRAFTS WINNERS 2013

Crafts excellence In another first for the EFAs, a sevenmember jury comprising professionals from across the European industry has deliberated over the awards recipients in the categories of European cinematographer, editor, production designer, costume designer, composer and sound designer. There are no nominations, only winners (see sidebar, right), who will receive their awards at the ceremony.

“What these people contribute is so important and we want to give them more attention,” Döring explains. “We have done this by announcing the winners earlier, by having only a winner and by giving them a platform within the ceremony.”

The jury — Finnish composer Tuomas Kantelinen, Italian film-maker Francesco Ranieri Martinotti, Czech festival programmer Karel Och, Spanish producer Simon de Santiago Areizaga, French editor Hervé Schneid, Swedish cinematographer Marek Septimus Wieser and director Jasmila Zbanic from Bosnia & Herzegovina — has selected all six advance winners.

“The idea was that a jury composed of representatives of the professions may have another view on the work that has been done,” says Döring of the decision to introduce a specialist jury. “We felt what they decided might be more diverse.”

Bringing Europe together One recent innovation that is now a popular fixture is the nominees reception, which is held the night before the main awards ceremony. It is an intimate affair at which the nominees and the known award-winners have a chance to socialise.

“They really don’t know each other as Europe is so big,” Döring says.

“They enjoy

Naomi Watts in The Impossible

n 22 Screen International November 29, 2013

‘Even though we are all coming from such different cultures, there is so much we share’

Carlo Di Palma European cinematographer award Asaf Sudry for Fill The Void

European composer Ennio Morricone for The Best Offer

European editor Cristiano Travaglioli for The Great Beauty

European sound designer Matz Müller, Erik Mischijew for Paradise: Faith

European production designer Sarah Greenwood for Anna Karenina

European costume designer Paco Delgado for Blancanieves

Marion Döring, European Film Academy

being together and this continues on into the ceremony.”

She says it is one of her favourite parts of the awards weekend. “You have the feeling, ‘Yes, European cinema really does exist. It’s not just a concept, it’s something that is really happening,’” she explains. “Even though we are all coming from such different cultures, there’s so much that we share. There’s a lot of emotion.”

“The EFAs celebrate Europe,” says Paul Webster, who believes the impressive box-office per-

formance of Anna Karenina throughout mainland Europe, particularly in Russia and the CIS ($8.4m) and throughout eastern Europe, including Poland ($1.3m) and Ukraine ($1.3m), is reflected by the film’s three nominations (actors Keira Knightley and Jude Law and writer Tom Stoppard) and one advance win (production designer Sarah Greenwood).

“The film didn’t do as well as we’d hoped in the English-language territories but very, very well in Europe,” he says of the Leo Tolstoy adaptation. “I s like to think these awards reflect that.” ■

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AWARDS COUNTDOWN Visual Effects

Oz The Great And Powerful — before (right) and after

The spectacular now With effects-heavy films more visible than ever and films across the board including more individual visual-effects shots, John Hazelton surveys this year’s crowded field of awards contenders

Gravity

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(Left) Oz The Great And Powerful called for 1,500 special-effects shots, including 60 that were all computer generated.

(Right and above) creating Tony Stark’s armour in Marvel Studios’ Iron Man 3

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ward groups considering this year’s contenders for visual effects honours should find plenty to catch the eye.

Not only are effects-heavy films more visible than ever — making up eight of the top 10 grossing live-action releases of 2013 so far — but some now include thousands rather than hundreds of individual effects shots. And in some of those shots, visual effects are now being used to create most of the image, leaving actors and the odd prop as the frame’s only physical elements.

“A trend in these movies is that the visual-effects department has become bigger and bigger,” says Victoria Alonso, executive vice-president of visual effects and post-production at Marvel Studios, talking about the company’s recent comic book-based sequels Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World, on both of which Alonso was an executive producer.

Whereas a Marvel production from a few years ago might have included 800 effects shots out of a total 1,700 shots, in the latest projects all but a hundred or so of 2,500 total shots are likely to incorporate effects, says Alonso.

While most of the foreground action in Iron Man 3’s ‘barrel of monkeys’ aer-

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ial-rescue sequence was shot practically, for example, “pretty much every environment that you see has been created in CGI”, Alonso reports. “We actually picked a look that we liked and then [effects company] Digital Domain went on and created these beautiful matte paintings with the proper terrains of the different heights, because we drop from about 30,000 feet to the water level.”

Creating new environments Fantasy adventure Oz The Great And Powerful included 1,500 effects shots — including about 60 that were all computer generated — and called on its VFX team to design 40 environments and create virtual characters including Oz’s flying monkey sidekick.

Scott Stokdyk, the film’s Oscarwinning (for Spider-Man 2) visual-effects supervisor, says, however, that “it’s not just about the quantity, it’s trying to bring a unique feel and flavour to every environment. We really had more artistic challenges than volume challenges.”

In fact, to give the film — a prequel of sorts to the classic Wizard Of Oz — a handcrafted look, the film-makers used physical sets constructed on sound stages as often as they could.

‘A trend in these movies is that the visual effects department has become bigger and bigger’ Victoria Alonso, Marvel Studios

“We took great pains to create as many sets and stages as possible and to not have it be overwhelmingly digital,” says Stokdyk, who serves as senior visual-effects supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks. To help meld the film’s digital and physical imagery, the effects team developed new technology that allowed better interaction between physical and virtual characters.

Actors voicing the virtual characters were put in a soundproof booth and wired for audio and video into the set.

On set, a monitor positioned where the virtual character would be in the scene gave the physical actors something with which to interact. The device worked, says Stokdyk, “like a virtual video conference, but it’s real time, which is important for the timing of the performance.

The actors could feel like they were actually talking to each other even though the actor [playing the monkey] can’t be 18 inches or flying up 10 feet in the air”.

Gravity defying The practice of putting physical actors in mostly digital settings was taken further than ever in space thriller Gravity, a hybrid of live action, computer animation and CGI in which sets, backgrounds »

November 29, 2013 Screen International 25 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN Visual Effects

and even some costumes were rendered digitally.

To make that big advance, the film’s visual-effects supervisor Tim Webber notes: “We had to develop new techniques and technologies in a number of areas. Some were just pushing old techniques a bit further and some were fairly groundbreaking steps forward.”

Adapting existing technologies for new purposes, Gravity’s effects team developed what it called a ‘12-wire rig’ that allowed more precision in moving actors as if they were floating in space.

The team also developed new computer code to employ a rarely used (in films) rendering programme called Arnold that allowed more natural lighting effects and helped in the film’s extensive pre-visualisation process.

Gravity’s biggest step forward, though, came with the development of the Light Box, a hollow cube, constructed at the UK’s Shepperton Studios, whose interior walls were lined with panels containing thousands of computer-controlled LED bulbs that acted like pixels on a screen.

The device allowed actors inside the cube to be precisely lit while they were going through complex and lengthy movements that would later be combined with digital backgrounds. Using the device, Webber explains, “meant we could move the lights in any way, because we weren’t actually moving anything physically, we were rearranging the pixels on the screen”.

Though the Light Box was used in very specific ways on Gravity, Webber, who is chief creative officer at UK-headquartered effects company Framestore, believes the work done to create the device could pay off in other films as well. “The general principles and techniques of what we did could be used in a great many ways,” Webber says. “It was a very successful way of lighting and it had a lot of benefits to it.”

Long-term effects In addition to helping to boost the earning power of some of 2013’s most successful films, the extent and ingenuity of this year’s effects work could also foster change in the way VFX artists and companies interact with the wider film production world. Or at least that’s what those in the globally competitive and financially precarious VFX business are hoping. VFX practitioners have long

n 26 Screen International November 29, 2013

Ender’s Game saw a visual-effects provider invest in the film

(Main picture and inset) Gravity’s Light Box

‘Things are slowly moving in the right direction and every movie like this makes a difference’ Tim Webber, Gravity

argued that keeping effects artists involved throughout the course of a project, rather than just in post-production, can make for better effects at a lower cost.

“What’s great about involving them early on,” says Jeff Okun, board chair of industry group the Visual Effects Society, “is that VFX people can show you how to get what you’re asking for much more effectively and efficiently.”

And that’s what happened on Gravity, according to Tim Webber. “One of the big differences on this movie was how the visual-effects department had to work much more closely in collaboration with most of the other departments,” he says. “Things are slowly moving in the right direction and every movie like this makes a difference.”

Where companies are concerned, the box-office potential of effects-driven films might lead to new business models, as it did on one of this year’s visual effects awards contenders. Indepen-

dently financed and produced sci-fi adventure Ender’s Game was set up with Digital Domain not only providing most of the effects but also acting as investor.

The idea, says Ed Ulbrich, producer of the film and until recently Digital Domain’s CEO, was that by being involved from the development stage the company could deliver a “completely executable plan” for the film’s production — reportedly on a budget of $125m — that could be used to help attract financiers and distributors.

Ulbrich — who left his Digital Domain post in the wake of the company’s emergence from bankruptcy and sale to a new owner — says the model points to “a way for independent filmmakers and financiers to come together around these kinds of properties that have prior to this been unattainable for them. These kinds of films can now be s made outside the studio system.” n

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26/11/2013 14:06

REVIEWS Highlights of the week’s new films in Review. For full reviews coverage, see Screendaily.com

Rome reviews in brief Tir

Dir: Alberto Fasulo. It-Cro. 2013. 85mins We learn a lot about long-distance European truck driving in Alberto Fasulo’s slowburn docudrama, which picked up the main Marco Aurelio prize at this year’s Rome Film Festival. The exhausting reality of the life lived by the film’s truck-driver protagonist — played with naturalism by Branko Zavrsan — is central to this absorbing film’s effect. That means subjecting us to long periods of the same grinding work routine that separates Branko from his home, but the end mostly justifies the means.

Lee Marshall

CONTACT FANDANGO raffaele.digiulio@fandango.it

Fear Of Falling

Dir: Jonathan Demme. US. 2013. 126mins That two old acolytes who have often cooperated in the past, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, would feel like tinkering with Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder is quite understandable. Dedicating their joint effort to the late Louis Malle, with whom they first worked in My Dinner With Andre and later in Vanya On 42nd Street, is almost natural. That the outcome of this adaptation — in the works for 14 years — would turn out to be almost a parody of the original was probably inevitable.

Dan Fainaru

CONTACT CLINICA ESTETICO info@clinica.com

Gods Behaving Badly

Dir: Marc Turtletaub. US. 2013. 90mins The real joke in Gods Behaving Badly is that it recruits a bunch of actors who are no longer being offered the roles they used to get, to play the Greek gods of Olympus, whose powers are in decline and who all live together in a New York brownstone. But this mild-mannered film is too frothy and emptyheaded to pursue the satirical point. Sharon Stone, Christopher Walken, Alicia Silverstone and the rest are left to flounder their way through an increasingly silly script.

Lee Marshall

CONTACT BIG REACH FILMS info@bigreachfilms.com

n 28 Screen International November 29, 2013

Rome film festival

Out Of The Furnace Dir: Scott Cooper. US-UK. 2013. 115mins

You could melt iron in the heat generated by Christian Bale’s sizzling performance in Scott Cooper’s dark recessionary drama, set in what is left of steel-belt America. The rest of the allstar cast of actors are pretty good too — and it is this, coupled with the visual sheen and aural punch of a professionally assembled package, that stands the best chance of making the producers’ money back.

No matter that the script is assembled from hackneyed narrative spare parts: from the bluecollar hothead who returns from active service in Iraq to a hero’s welcome of indifference and unemployment, to the inbred, violent Appalachian rednecks who are a law unto themselves; no matter that lines like “I love you, man” or “just one last fight” seem written by a script machine on the ‘American tragedy’ setting.

While Out Of The Furnace is done utterly by the book, it does deliver a tough, cathartic story, straight, no chaser. And it may be that the script’s playsafe instinct, in the way it builds character and story, was intended to balance the risk inherent in the tone of the story: are US audiences ready to plumb the depths of recessionary gloom portrayed here, just when things are possibly getting a little better?

Steelworker Russell Baze (Bale) is a good guy, tough but dependable, in a loving relationship with girlfriend Lena (Zoe Saldana). But Russell’s dad — also a steel man — is dying, and his adored younger brother Rodney (a livewire Casey Affleck) is hanging around the wrong kind of company back home between tours of duty in Iraq; company like bare-knuckle fight impresario John Petty (Willem Dafoe).

Russell is involved in a drink-driving accident which lands him in prison. When he gets out, Lena is shacked up with local police officer Wesley Barnes (Forest Whitaker), and Russell discovers Rodney has become a bare-knuckle boxer, involved with backwoods psycho Harlan DeGroat (a magnificently malicious Woody Harrelson), whose bare-knuckle bouts make Petty’s look like high-school proms.

The twilight mood is reinforced by the elegiac sunset photography of cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, whose sensitive work here could attract awards-season recognition alongside nods for Bale’s intense performance.

Lee Marshall

CONTACT RED GRANITE www.redgranitepictures.com

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MITTY

cph:dox

Awards countdown

Ben Stiller dreams of holiday season success in his updating of The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty

Reviews of leading titles from Copenhagen’s documentary film festival, including Everyday Rebellion

The people and the events on the awards circuit this week — in pictures

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» p32

» p31

Reviews in brief Delivery Man

Dir/scr: Ken Scott. US. 2013. 99mins Vince Vaughn provides the Hollywood sheen in Delivery Man, writer-director Ken Scott’s sweet but patchy US remake of his own hit French-Canadian comedy Starbuck.

The feelgood tone could be a tricky sell to fans of Vaughn’s edgier outings but it might work for a more mainstream audience looking for holiday season diversion. Vaughn plays an affable underachiever who finds out his youthful sperm donations have made him father to 533 children.

John Hazelton

CONTACT MISTER SMITH ENTERTAINMENT www.mistersmithent.com

Stalingrad 3D

Lone Survivor Dir/scr: Peter Berg. US. 2013. 121mins

After pitting the US Navy against an alien invasion in last year’s noisy summer blockbuster Battleship, director Peter Berg heads into more serious fare with Lone Survivor, tracing the reallife story of an ill-fated Navy SEALs team on a mission in Afghanistan’s Kunar province in 2005.

An unrelentingly tough and gung-ho story, the film is reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s superior Black Hawk Down in terms of its full-on battle sequences. It makes no real attempt to delve into the complexities of the situation in Afghanistan, instead focusing more on the physical prowess of a four-man SEALs team that is caught up in a deadly firefight.

The title gives away the story somewhat, and the opening scenes make it quite clear who the ‘lone survivor’ actually is, but Berg smartly bypasses the clichéd tough SEALs training scenes by rushing through these moments in the opening credits.

The film proper begins in Afghanistan, 2005, where a SEALs team is made up of Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and Axelson (Ben Foster). The four are close friends, but as their characteristics are drawn loosely, the actors rarely get a chance to portray anything more than efficient fighting men.

There is plenty clichéd bearded fighting-men

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getting ready for war dialogue, but the film at least finds its footing when the team plans its part in Operation Red Wings, a mission targeting Taliban commander Ahmad Shah (Yousuf Azami). Murphy, Luttrell, Dietz and Axelson are sent in as a surveillance-and-reconnaissance team, with the rest of the troops awaiting their call to helicopter in.

When the four SEALs are discovered by Afghan goatherds, they have a dilemma. The unarmed men do not appear connected to the Taliban, but the SEALs must decide whether to ensure the goatherds’ silence by killing them or to release them in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. They realise their mission is compromised and they are soon pursued by Taliban.

The film lapses into a few Medal Of Honor video-game moments as we see Taliban picked off via the SEALs’ gun sights, but this section is also Berg at his best as the team is beset from all sides by bullets and missiles and the soldiers tumble down steep hillsides in a series of brutal, bloody scenes, as they try to find a way to escape.

Dir: Fedor Bondarchuk. Rus. 2013. 132mins Most war films serve to make nations feel good about themselves. Russia’s first Imax 3D production, a $30m battleground love story set during the 1942 German siege of Stalingrad, is no exception. In a story based loosely on Vasily Grossman’s novel Life And Fate, but more directly on Pavlov’s House, a fortified Volga-side apartment building that became a symbol of dogged Soviet resistance, a band of heroic Russian soldiers hold out against superior German forces and try to shelter the block’s only surviving resident, an innocent young woman.

Lee Marshall

CONTACT SONY PICTURES

Drones

Dir: Rick Rosenthal. UK. 2013. 82mins Though it started life as a stage production, the ‘plucked from the headlines’ story of low-budget UK film Drones makes for perfect film material as it delves into the ethical dilemmas facing USAF drone pilots as they send their missile-carrying craft into Afghanistan or Pakistan. The film is essentially a two-hander, set at a USAF base in Nevada where experienced drone pilot Jack (Matt O’Leary) is mentoring lieutenant Sue Lawson (Eloise Mumford, who featured in TV series The River).

Mark Adams

Mark Adams

CONTACT FORESIGHT UNLIMITED www.foresight-unltd.com

CONTACT Circus Road Films www.circusroadfilms.com »

November 29, 2013 Screen International 29 n

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Reviews

CPH:dox in brief Everyday Rebellion

Dirs/scr: Arash Riahi, Arman Riahi. AustSwitz. 118mins A striking documentary that shows nonviolent forms of protest can change the world, Everyday Rebellion is made with languid grace and insight by directors and brothers Arash and Arman Riahi. While perhaps too long and repetitive at times, it gently underscores how violence is not the only answer. The film traverses the world as it demonstrates the power, history and influence of non-violent protest, showing how such disobedience is creative as boundaries are pushed. The limited narration is spoken in whispers to help emphasise the gentle nature of the system of protest, and the arguments are effective.

Mark Adams

CONTACT GOLDEN GIRLS FILMPRODUKTION www.goldengirls.at

Rohmer In Paris

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty Dir: Ben Stiller. US. 2013. 114mins

Ben Stiller’s retelling of The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty is a far cry from the James Thurber 1939 story and from the 1947 film adaptation with Danny Kaye. And while the film is a less-thanclassic treatment of a classic fable, it is wholesome holiday tentpole entertainment. Long in the planning, with an evolving series of directors and stars attached (Jim Carrey and Sacha Baron Cohen included), Mitty — as it is now being promoted — is a nerd’s-revenge repackaging of the story.

The labours of a clerk trying to win the girl, while escaping into delusions, is a warm-hearted natural for a Christmas release. Yet the embrace of the young-adult public is by no means a certainty for what, in screenwriter Steven Conrad’s update, is a sexless ode to honesty, hard work and wish fulfilment. Audiences outside the US could also be a stretch for the gentle American romance, despite some swashbuckling adventures in the Arctic Ocean and the Himalayas.

As Mitty, the self-directed Stiller toils in the basement of the Time & Life Building in New York as a photo researcher, in Life magazine’s Negative Assets office. If his field were not dead enough, a team of trimly bearded, nastily officious corporate whizz-kids are taking the company digital, which means the end to many jobs. Mitty, who habitually

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tunes out the everyday, earns his new bosses’ venom right away. Echoes of a dark Up In The Air are chilling, yet Life’s demise is old news.

On eHarmony, Walter pursues his co-worker, sweet single mum Cheryl (Kristen Wiig). When he fails to connect with her online, the love site’s customer-service line suggests he use more impressive ‘been-there-done-that’ material in his profile. That’s tough on a guy whose adventures are restricted to moving mother (Shirley MacLaine) and her piano to a retirement home.

Stiller plays Mitty as an anxious, timid innocent waiting for the corporate axe to fall, daydreaming uncontrollably while engineering awkward ways to get closer to Cheryl. In those fantasies, he tends to re-emerge as an improbable hunk, echoing Stiller’s own self-involved Zoolander.

Mitty has an honourable core as an homage to characters who work hard and stay true to themselves and their dreams in a world that, as we witness, lurches from analogue to digital for all the wrong bottom-line reasons. Its heart is in the right place; it’s too bad the ingredients do not always add up.

David D’Arcy

Dir: Richard Misek. UK. 2013. 72mins A thoughtful and engaging perambulation through Paris as seen through the eyes of French director Eric Rohmer, Richard Misek’s smartly constructed film is an amiable pleasure, and while perhaps too slight to receive a theatrical release it could well appeal to broadcasters and cinematheque/ festival programmers. The film is no simple biography, instead Misek takes a cinephile’s journey through Paris, with the film almost entirely made up of extracts from Rohmer’s Paris-set films as well as a few scenes in the countryside and by the sea.

Mark Adams

CONTACT RICHARD MISEK richardmisek@gmail.com

Atlas

Dir/scr: Antoine d’Agata. Fr. 2013. 76mins A disturbingly beautiful film that mesmerises, appals and saddens, French Magnum photographer Antoine d’Agata’s Atlas takes his camera into the world of prostitution and drugs. It is a complex and disconcerting film, shot with a stark elegance that is at odds with the dank and dingy environments. He depicts naked and partially naked women posing sadly; men and women taking drugs; animals being killed and attacked, all shot like beautifully composed oil paintings.

Mark Adams

CONTACT INDEPENDENCIA PRODUCTIONS productions@independencia-societe.com

CONTACT 20TH CENTURY FOX

November 29, 2013 Screen International 31 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN THE PEOPLE AND THE EVENTS ON THE AWARDS CIRCUIT THIS WEEK Ilo Ilo director Anthony Chen

Emma Thompson was the subject of a Bafta Life in Pictures event on November 24 in London. The Bafta and Oscar-winning actress spoke about her career, covering films such as Howards End, The Remains Of The Day and Sense And Sensibility.

Asked whether portraying Mary Poppins author PL Travers in Saving Mr Banks was the hardest role she had ever had to do, Thompson said: “Yes, it was really because she was so complicated, and she was so inconsistent. You know you look at some of those other roles and you see that essentially they have a moral arc that goes much the same way throughout the film…

You know how they’re going to behave. You didn’t know how she was going to behave. From one minute to the next.”

Film-maker Gavin Hood, Four Corners director Ian Gabriel and producer Cindy Gabriel, with actors Arnold Vosloo and Brendon Daniels

Gavin Hood, director of the Oscar-winning Tsotsi, was among the guests at a screening and reception for Ian Gabriel’s Four Corners in Beverly Hills on November 25. The film, a multithread, coming-ofage drama set in a volatile South African sub-culture, is South Africa’s submission for the foreignlanguage Oscar, a category won by Tsotsi in 2006.

Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster and Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo were among the winners at the 50th Taipei Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan on November 23. The Grandmaster, Hong Kong’s submission to the Oscars’ foreign-language category, picked up six awards. Chen’s debut Ilo Ilo, which is Singapore’s foreign-language Oscar entry, took best feature and three further awards.

Pivotal Post CEO Kevin Hyman, Amadeus editor Nena Danevic and SPC’s Tom Bernard

Kati Marton and Sebastian Junger

MC Griffin Dunne John McCain, Justin Chadwick, Naomie Harris, Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom director Justin Chadwick, star Naomie Harris and Harvey Weinstein were among the guests at a screening of the film hosted by Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell and John McCain at the The Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater in Washington, DC on November 20.

■ 32 Screen International November 29, 2013

Writer-filmmaker Sebastian Junger received an award for humanitarian service (presented by journalist Kati Marton) at FilmAid’s Annual Power of Film Benefit in New York on November 20.

Among the guests were Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard and actors Fisher Stevens and Sarita Choudhury. Griffin Dunne acted as master of ceremonies.

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BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM “One of the 10 best films of the year.”

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“Superbly constructed, skillfully acted and beautifully lensed.” - Jay Weissberg, Variety “A masterful symphony... It delivers a powerful punch.”

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SCREENING: Official AMPAS Foreign Language Film Committee • Monday, December 2, 9:05 Samuel Goldwyn Theatre 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills Awards Office: required viewing: 212 206 0118 info@requiredviewing.net

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