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Earth to Bafta W

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WENDY MITCHELL EDITOR

Gravity takes its place in Bafta’s line-up for outstanding British Film

local industry? Surely UK films are at a level that they should be compared against the biggest films of the year from all over the world, not ringfenced in their own category. (The exception to this rule is something like the British short and debut categories, which should absolutely be continued as a way of supporting new talents.)

I put the question to Bafta chief executive Amanda Berry, and she defends the category’s importance. “The British film category for us is really important,” she says. “It allows us to shine a spotlight on the full spectrum of British film… I don’t think the category confuses people, some years there is crossover [with best film], some years there isn’t.”

If the category is continued, perhaps it should become best British independent film, as a way of levelling the playing field so that The Selfish Giant doesn’t have to compete with a $100m space epic? Or as some experts suggest, a best British contribution to film category, which this year could have nominated Framestore specifically for its work on Gravity.

Absolutely the British industry should be proud for the part it has played in setting Gravity in orbit.

This film would not have been made were it not for British talent, facilities and creativity. Gravity is a hugely accomplished film and fully deserves its nominations. But should it win the Bafta for British film of the year? As George Clooney’s Kowalski would say, “I s have a bad feeling about this mission.” ■

Nymphomaniac’s fully clothed star

Screen International is part of Media Business Insight Ltd (MBI), also publisher of Broadcast and shots

Uma Thurman in Nymphomaniac

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hat do you get when you put a Mexican director and two Hollywood stars in space? A British film, evidently.

Bad jokes aside, the inclusion of Gravity in Bafta’s outstanding British film nominees was a major talking point on nominations day.

The Warner Bros production, directed

by Alfonso Cuaron and starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, passed the Department for Culture, Media & Sport’s cultural test as a British film (cited in the Bafta guidelines). It does have a strong British logistical pedigree — produced by David Heyman, shot at Pinewood and Shepperton, with VFX done by Framestore and 3D supervised by Londonbased Vision 3. It’s a great thing for the British film industry that Gravity was made here, nobody is arguing otherwise.

But the brouhaha of Gravity’s inclusion in the outstanding British film category highlights a problem with the category itself. The very nature of having an outstanding British film winner alongside a best film winner makes for some confusion — if you vote for your best film of the year and it happens to be from the UK, that logically would be the best British film, too. But as the two categories stand, it seems to encourage voters to split their allegiances.

The outstanding British film category is a symptom of the unusual position the Baftas find itself in on the world stage. Obviously these awards are now seen as the precursors to the Oscars and are the only non-US awards that have global importance. How much are the Baftas supposed to recognise the world’s best films and how much are they supposed to support the

After having seen the four-hour version of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, I can say it’s certainly an ambitious film, but for me not a masterpiece. Parts were hilarious, parts were intriguing, parts were ridiculous (only sometimes on purpose).

Shia LaBeouf’s horrible morphing accent didn’t win me over, but Jamie Bell has well and truly moved past the Billy Elliot phase with his impressive performance as an S&M enthusiast.

His scenes were some of the most compelling of the piece.

But if we had to pick a ‘star’ of Nymphomaniac, and a fully clothed one at that, it’s Uma Thurman as the wronged wife of a man who is having an affair. She looks to be having the time of her life in this fierce, scene-stealing role; casting directors please dig out her number again.

January 10, 2014 Screen International 1 ■

contents

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 Germany

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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

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hjnoh2007@gmail.com Nordic territories Jorn Rossing Jensen +45 202 333 04 jornrossing@aol.com

January 10, 2014

Scotland Allan Hunter +44 (0) 7904 698 848

Analysis

Awards countdown

4 french evolution

12 beyond the sea

20 captains courageous

Ahead of Rendez-Vous With French Cinema in Paris, Screen examines why the French film industry looks set for a challenging 2014

JC Chandor’s All Is Lost inspired Robert Redford to deliver an acclaimed solo performance, and no-one is happier about that than Chandor

Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi come from wildly different backgrounds but find truth in their roles in Captain Phillips

UK

6 The Winter’s tale

14 Brothers of the head

22 Freedom fighters

Geoffrey Macnab +44 (0) 20 7226 0516

Sundance’s John Cooper and Trevor Groth celebrate the US and international independent scene ahead of the festival’s 30th anniversary, while Screen profiles some of the hot filmmakers at this year’s event

Joel and Ethan Coen talk about the musical collaborations behind Inside Llewyn Davis, and give an insight into life on a Coen brothers’ set

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave is a box-office hit in the US and has been attracting major awards attention, including 10 Bafta nominations.

The film-maker, star Chiwetel Ejiofor and other key members of the team tell Screen about creating an unflinching film about slavery

allan@alhunter.myzen.co.uk Spain Juan Sarda +34 646 440 357 jsardafr@hotmail.com

geoffrey@macnab.demon.co.uk

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

All currencies in this issue converted according to

Regulars 30 reviews Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, plus Factory Girl and other highlights of Dubai International Film Festival

16 Angel of darkness Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of a desperate, God-fearing father searching for his abducted child in Prisoners is his rawest role yet

18 more to say Enough Said is Nicole Holofcener’s most commercial work to date, but stays true to the film-maker’s devotion to character. She talks about working with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini

26 image makers With 19 films submitted for the animated feature Oscar, Screen explores how this year’s crop points to the way animated features might evolve

exchange rates that applied in January 2014

n 2 Screen International January 10, 2014

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®

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM

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ORIGINAL SONG GOLDEN GLOBE AWARD BEST“ORDINARY LOVE” ®

LYRICS BY BONO MUSIC BY U2 & BRIAN BURTON

NOMINATIONS

BEST ACTOR IDRIS ELBA (DRAMA)

BAFTA AWARD NOMINATION

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE ALEX HEFFES

“IDRIS ELBA’S TOWERING PERFORMANCE LENDS ‘MANDELA’ A SHAKESPEAREAN BREADTH.” “THE SHEER SCOPE AND AMBITION OF THE PRODUCTION LEAVES ITS MARK AND IDRIS ELBA’S SMART, COMMITTED PERFORMANCE DOES CONVEY THE MAN’S PERSONAL CHARISMA, IMMENSE DIGNITY AND MORAL AUTHORITY.” “AMBITIOUS IN ITS SPAN, POWERFUL IN ITS RECREATION OF TUMULTUOUS TIMES, THIS SUPER-SKILFUL DRAMATIZATION IS A WORTHY CELEBRATION.”

IDRIS ELBA NAOMIE HARRIS

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GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATIONS

®

BEST PICTURE

BEST ACTRESS JUDI DENCH BEST SCREENPLAY STEVE COOGAN & JEFF POPE

4BEST FILM B A F TA NOMINATIONS

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM BEST ACTRESS ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

“THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR!” “WARM, WISE AND UNFORGETTABLE” “MASTERFULLY DIRECTED BY STEPHEN FREARS” “STEPHEN FREARS’ DIRECTION IS “LOOK, NO HANDS” MASTERLY. HE DOESN’T EDITORIALISE. SOMETIMES HE BARELY INFLECTS. HE ALLOWS A FULL TRANSPARENCY FOR NUANCE AND PARADOX, FOR SURPRISE GRACENOTES AND DEFTLY LIMNED AMBIGUITIES” “AN ABSOLUTE DELIGHT, A FILM OF SUPERB CREATIVE JUDGEMENTS AND ADMIRABLE RESTRAINT” JUDI DENCH STEVE COOGAN

★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★ ★★★★★

Pathe_BAFTAConsid_ScrDailyFP_AW2.indd 1

09/01/2014 13:19

French evolution Ahead of Rendez-Vous With French Cinema in Paris (Jan 10-20), Melanie Goodfellow examines why the French film industry looks set for a challenging 2014

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arely two years ago, the French cinema industry was riding high: record audiences, record exports and five Oscars for The Artist. French film was not only cool, it was also very, very successful.

But as the industry’s main players gather for Rendez-Vous With French Cinema in Paris (January 10-20), the mood will be gloomy: 2013 was tough at home and abroad, and 2014 threatens to be even tougher.

Some wonder how Europe’s most powerful film industry will emerge from the perfect storm of recession at home, the disruptive force of technology and threats to what was once viewed as one of the most successful film-financing systems in the world.

“The mood across the industry is very tense and nervous at the moment, whatever the sector, whether it be production, distribution or exhibition,” says producer Marc Missonnier, co-founder of Fidélité Films, the Paris-based production house behind Asterix And Obelix: God Save Britannia, On My Way and the upcoming Nicholas On Holiday.

“There is no doubt that French cinema is in crisis,” says Missonnier. “There’s a sort of paralysis across the industry as people wait to see how it plays out.”

Box office data for 2013 released earlier this month showed the French share of the local market had fallen 6.9 percentage points to 33.3% in 2013, its lowest level since the 1990s. This amounted to 18 million fewer admissions for local films over the year.

Poor performances in 2013 by a series of big-budget star vehicles, such as Dany Boonstarrer The Volcano and Turning Tide featuring Intouchables co-star Francois Cluzet, had already lowered morale.

Internationally, French films generated roughly 42 million spectators worldwide in 2013, against 144 million in 2012 and 74 million in 2011, according to data from French export agency Unifrance.

The 2012 vintage was exceptionally strong, enriched by EuropaCorp’s Taken 2, Intouchables and The Artist as well as arthouse fare such as Rust And Bone.

But even before the annual boxoffice data revelations, there were already signs the industry was in trouble.

In 2012 a record 279 films were greenlit. That is expected to be considerably lower in 2013 and 2014, top

■ 4 Screen International January 10, 2014

‘There is no doubt that French cinema is in crisis’ Marc Missonnier, Fidélité Films

Minuscule: Valley Of The Lost Ants

industry sources say. Data for last year will not be clear until later in 2014.

The number of titles due to screen or show on promo reels at Rendez-Vous is level with 2013, but there are fewer premieres and new projects.

Wild Bunch, which announced a dozen new French films prior to the meeting last year including the Palme d’Or-winner Blue Is The Warmest Colour, will roll out only one new title, focusing instead on works previously unveiled at Cannes, Venice, Toronto and AFM, such as A Promise. There will also be promo-reels for previously announced titles including Nicholas On Holiday and Colt 45.

“We’ve slowed down on French cinema because its economy does not make sense any more,” says Wild Bunch co-chief Vincent Maraval. “We will come back if it adapts itself to the market and stops ignoring it.”

The company is just one among many key French film financiers pulling back from local productions.

Pathé, which laid off nine key staff last year, also appears to be taking a more cautious approach, according to one senior industry source. Pathé did not respond to requests for information about its plans for local productions.

The company will premiere two new films at Rendez-Vous: Riad Sattouf ’s Jacky In The Kingdom Of Women and Lisa Azuelos’ Quantum Love.

Distributors cautious Independent distributors, who have been hardest hit by the box-office slump, are also changing tactics, calling for lower minimum guarantees (MGs), producing themselves or abandoning French film altogether.

In another sign that times are hard, MK2 shut its distribution department last year and handed over its slate to be serviced by Diaphana.

“French cinema is still a powerful force at home and internationally but producers have let costs get out of hand and ask for too much… there needs to be some sort of realignm e n t ,” s a y s E r i c Lagesse, head of Pyramide Distribution. “People forget that beyond the MGs we also finance the release and when a film doesn’t work we’re the ones picking up the bill,”

Jacky In The Kingdom Of Women

Colt 45

he adds. “I still pre-buy French films but I work with producers with fair and realistic expectations, who make films for a reasonable budget.”

The other drawback to buying French films is that because of the complex way they are financed, distributors sometimes end up with a small share of the profits.

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france in crisis in focus

to one bad year at the box office. Like the silent movie star at the heart of The Artist, who hits hard times with the advent of the talkies, the industry appears to be reeling as the entire media landscape undergoes deep change.

“There are multiple factors at play,” says Fidélité’s Missonnier, who is also president of the APC producers group.

“The broadcasters have less money to invest, DVD sales are down and the VoD market has softened too, following changes to piracy legislation.”

Alongside this, measures introduced by the government of president Francois Hollande are angering parts of the industry.

These include a new collective labour agreement for crew that will push up production costs, and a $204.4m (¤150m) levy on the National Cinema Centre’s budget to cut public debt.

A deal between the Ministry of Culture and exhibitors to lower cinema tariffs to $5.50 (¤4) for under-14s has also angered independent distributors who will lose out on revenues.

The measure came into force on January 1 but its impact is not expected to become clear until after the school holidays in February when a slew of family films — including Rendez-Vous screeners Minuscule: Valley Of The Lost Ants and Land Of The Bears — are due to reach French screens.

A Promise

“That’s why international titles can sometimes be more attractive,” says Lagesse, whose non-French titles include The Selfish Giant.

In another sign that production levels have fallen already, Manuel Alduy, director of cinema at pay-TV operator Canal Plus, says he has had a hard time finding suitable

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French projects to pre-buy in his current investment cycle.

“We pre-bought more French films in 2013 than in 2012 but for 2014, the number of projects we’ve received to date is lower than normal and as a result we haven’t taken much on as yet,” he tells Screen.

The current malaise is not due, however,

‘French cinema is a still a powerful force… but producers have let costs get out of hand and ask for too much’ Eric Lagesse, Pyramide

Questions over financing There is also uncertainty over the sustainability of France’s complex financing system, which obliges companies showing audiovisual or cinematic fare to reinvest in new content. Long envied throughout Europe as the engine behind sustainable production, the system has come under attack from all sides.

Few doubt it will survive the political onslaught but its biggest challenge will be how to adapt in an era of global distribution players, such as Netflix or Apple’s iTunes.

Headquartered way beyond France’s borders, they have little interest in funding local product.

Netflix has so far shunned France due to its strict media chronology laws. But pressure is building to soften the tight rules that govern where and when a film can be shown.

Netflix sent a delegation to Paris in the autumn and digital economy minister Fleur Pellerin met with CEO Reed Hastings at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

“I am not against Netflix coming to France,” Missonnier says. “It would be a good thing as long as the company was subject to the same legislation as local players.

But at the moment global operators don’t seem open to this.

“This is a critical period of transition from a traditional model of financing and distribution to a model where we can see we’ll need to make and distribute films differently, producing less expensively… It remains to be seen whether this transition will take place brutally s or gently.” n

January 10, 2014 Screen International 5 n

Sundance Institute

Main Street in Park City, Utah, home of Sundance Film Festival

The winter’s tale Sundance’s John Cooper and Trevor Groth celebrate the US and international independent scene ahead of the festival’s 30th anniversary, while Screen profiles some of the hot film-makers at this year’s event (Jan 16-26). Jeremy Kay reports

n 6 Screen International January 10, 2014

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Sundance festival focus

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ohn Cooper and Trevor Groth have about as much use for platitudes and soundbites as the Sundance Film Festival has for a studio tentpole in its annual selection.

Over the course of a 30-minute interview, the festival director and the head of programming — as knowledgeable and self-deprecating a pair as you will meet in the senior festival ranks — prefer to explore ideas and passions rather than recite tedious corporate lines that remain on message.

What becomes clear, if it were not already evident from watching the festival’s progress in recent years, is that on the eve of its 30th anniversary edition Sundance remains as committed as ever to fostering global independent voices.

“In the festival’s 30 years, independent film has become such a part of the cultural landscape,” says Cooper, who has been at Sundance for 25 years (Groth has been in situ for 20 years). “It’s an art form almost unto itself outside of Hollywood, and young people now know what independent film is. Also you cannot ignore technology and its influence on the films. Film-makers have a lot more freedom.

“A lot of the film-makers are influenced by the near past. That bar gets set every year at Sundance if you look at Fruitvale [Station] and Beasts Of The Southern Wild and Precious before that.

“They feel that; they know it. They are influenced by other American film-makers that came before them. Even 10 years ago it was looking more to the Europeans and older films for inspiration and now they’re being inspired by each other.

Groth adds: “One thing we see in this year’s group of films, versus historically from when we began, is the completeness of visions. The aesthetic excellence across the board of these films is as high as it’s ever been.”

Alongside those aesthetics, acquisitions executives will be looking for the hottest titles to acquire. These could include Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and Jim Mickle’s Cold In July in US Dramatic Competition and Stuart Murdoch’s UK musical God Help The Girl in World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

Programme evolutions Sundance is attacking on all fronts. Groth notes that the expanded NEXT section will now encompass 11 films and expresses satisfaction over the evolution of the World Cinema Dramatic programme.

“Lately it’s been taking shape the way we always hoped it would. It’s starting to mirror what we’ve tried to do in our US competitions and discover independent voices wherever they may be.

“This year we’ve discovered some in really interesting places where we don’t normally get films from, like Ethiopia, Tanzania, Bulgaria and Serbia.”

Technological advances mean Cooper, Groth and their programming team must now sift through more submissions than ever — overall there were 12,218 for this year’s festival — and watch more rough cuts.

The number of awards season wins and

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Cold In July

Life After Beth

nominations for the likes of Fruitvale Station, Blackfish and The Crash Reel serves as reminder that Sundance is the pre-eminent North American agenda-setter for independent film in the year ahead.

Yet the organisers love their audiences and film-makers and have no plans to expand the line-up. “It starts to lessen the impact of the films you’re showing,” says Groth. “How many films are people going to see in 10 days?

Forty, tops? So to add to that doesn’t make sense. And it keeps us sharp.”

“With documentaries, in particular, we’re seeing a new type of film that’s very topical now because there’s such a short window between something happening and making it on to the screen,” says Cooper. “Much more so than 10 years ago.”

“The docs are changing policy, like Blackfish — cracking issues open. Docs can go deeper and expose things for what they are sometimes, which makes people take notice.”

This year’s selection, Cooper stresses, is a corker. Potential highlights include Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman’s Human Rights Watch story E-Team, Syria-set Return To Homs by Talal Derki and Nadav Schirman’s The Green Prince about Hamas and Shin Bet. New Frontier is returning to its Main Street roots and features work by renowned multimedia artist Doug Aitken and the projectionmapping troupe Klip Collective’s eye-catching

‘The indie scene is an art form almost unto itself outside of Hollywood’ John Cooper, Sundance

‘The aesthetic excellence across the board of these films is as high as it’s ever been’ Trevor Groth, Sundance

The Trip To Italy

homage to Sundance hits on the facade of the Egyptian Theatre. “People will fall into New Frontier just by being out and about at night,” says Cooper, adding that the installations will allow the festival to reclaim the main drag. “It won’t seem like someone else’s street.”

While it is a favourite parlour game of commentators to retro-fit themes into the overall selection, Cooper notes an interesting development in the way film-makers are telling stories.

“A bit of a trend is the use of genre. It’s always been big in [Park City At] Midnight, but now a lot of film-makers use genre to get you into a story. So there’s the horror genre in Life After Beth, which is a love story with a dead girl, and Jamie Marks Is Dead has a big ghost story in it.”

Heavy hitters this year include Michael Winterbottom with The Trip To Italy reuniting Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, Anton Corbijn’s first Sundance entry A Most Wanted Man and Gareth Evans’ anticipated The Raid 2: Berandal.

Returning to the broader perspective, Sundance London enters its third year and Cooper and Groth are gratified by its reception. Long-term plans are afoot to export the festival to another part of the world. “[Sundance London] gives a lot of value and strength to the festival,” says Groth, “because we see the films can work there and » there are audiences for them.”

January 10, 2014 Screen International 7 n

Sundance: ones to watch Damien Chazelle Whiplash

Zeresenay Berhane Mehari Difret

Genre storytelling, as Sundance Film Festival’s head honcho John Cooper notes, has emerged as a device used by this year’s film-makers to suck us into otherwise non-genre stories.

Damien Chazelle’s US Dramatic entry Whiplash should fit in nicely. The feature version of the Harvard graduate’s Sundance 2013 jury prize-winning short of the same name is the tale of a ruthless music conservatory dressed up as a thriller.

“I was trying to recapture a feeling I had when I was in [a high school jazz] ensemble,” says the 28-year-old Rhode Island native, who moved to Los Angeles in 2007 to work as a jobbing screenwriter. “The movie goes a lot further then anything I went through. I set it in the world of a cut-throat musical conservatory, a la Juilliard, but we captured the feeling I was after — the sheer terror of performing and the competitiveness of that world.”

Miles Teller plays an aspiring jazz drummer tutored by JK Simmons’ brutal conductor.

For Chazelle, who never went to formal film school, the terror — and elation — of a Park City premiere might be alleviated by the knowledge he has friends in high places.

Jason Reitman liked the screenplay and helped Chazelle produce the short as a proof of concept. Reitman and genre specialist Jason Blum championed it and Bold Films stepped in to finance before the autumn 2013 production start. “I’ve always wanted to make movies,” says Chazelle. “It’s the only thing I remember ever wanting to do.”

Jeremy Kay

“Difret, in its widest meaning, is courage,” says Zeresenay Berhane Mehari. “The second meaning is the act of being raped.”

Mehari’s Ethiopian World Cinema Dramatic competition entry recounts the story of an Ethiopian lawyer who defends a 14-year-old girl charged with killing a man who attempts to abduct her into marriage.

Mehari grew up in the then-dictatorial Ethiopia. He knew from an early age that film-making was his calling and won a Diversity Visa lottery to go to the US, where he worked two jobs and got scholarships, grants and loans to pay for his University of Southern California education.

“Once I started taking classes, I discovered that not a lot of people knew about Ethiopia,” says Mehari. “I think there’s a single story about Ethiopia and that’s the 1994 famine — for us that’s not what the country is all about.”

Difret is his attempt to shed light on an event that marks a pivotal moment in his native Ethiopia — the examination of a legal case that represents a paradigm shift in the way the country views and handles bride kidnappings.

“What pushed me to make this story is that we never question the things that are handed down to us traditionally,” he says. “This is one of many — I wanted to take that and see if we could talk about it and see how the country would respond.”

When the director learned he had been accepted into Sundance he called his wife, a producer on the film, screaming with joy.

Elbert Wyche

Whiplash

Difret

Natalia Smirnoff Lock Charmer A rgent inia n direc tor Natalia Smirnoff got the idea for World Cinema Dra mat ic ent r y Lock Charmer (El Cerrajero) after she locked herself out of her house. “[The door] was completely locked with a second lock that I hadn’t locked the night before,” says Smirnoff, who fell into a kind of reverie as she sat for three hours one Sunday afternoon while her locksmith worked his magic.

Indeed there is magic in Lock Charmer.

The titular locksmith, averse to commitment and mortified to learn his girlfriend is pregnant, begins to see into people’s lives when he fixes their locks.

“Some would call it a gift,” says Smirnoff, “but for the character of Sebastian it feels more like a curse. With the help of Daisy, an unlikely assistant who very much wants to believe in his gift, Sebastian

n 8 Screen International January 10, 2014

reluctantly sets out to use his talent for his own good.”

Lock Charmer received funding from Argentina’s national film board INCAA and there was a minimum guarantee from Memento Films.

Smirnoff studied film at Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires and has worked as an assistant director and casting director for Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero, among others. This is her second feature after Berlin 2010 entry The Puzzle.

Smirnoff acquired her taste for storytelling during childhood summers in Uruguay, when her grandmother would read aloud Agatha Christie books and lead the family on adventures.

“These moments of pure imagination were so beautiful. Making films revives these memories. Also, with my films, I try to understand something deeper and new about human relationships.”

Jeremy Kay

Lock Charmer

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Sundance festival focus

Stuart Murdoch God Help The Girl Belle & Sebastian leader Stuart Murdoch makes his feature directorial debut with World Dramatic selection God Help The Girl, and says he has had film-making ambitions for a decade. “My urge was at first to write one; directing was an awkward inevitability,” he says.

The project started life as songs Murdoch wrote from 2003-09, recorded in 2008 and 2009 with a number of different female vocalists. “Actually, I started writing dialogue soon after the songs started coming along, so it was a happy yin/yang thing, from music to speech and back again,” he remembers.

He found inspiration in musicals such as Fame and Grease and musical sequences in films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is A Woman and Hal Ashby’s Harold And Maude.

Emily Browning stars as Eve, a girl who uses songwriting to combat her demons and connects with two like-minded musicians (Hannah Murray and Olly Alexander). Murdoch shot the film during a rainy summer in his hometown of Glasgow, and he says: “I enjoyed the shoot as you would a fearsome carnival ride. It was very curvy.” While he continues his music career, Murdoch has more film ambitions and says he would next like to work on “something involving sacred music for choirs, natural philosophy and a hipster girl who falls in love with a computer”.

Wendy Mitchell

God Help The Girl

Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam Web Junkie

Web Junkie

Michael Tully Ping Pong Summer You could call it fate that Michael Tully finished shooting his long-gestating love letter to Ocean City, Maryland, just hours before Hurricane Sandy hit. “We wrapped Saturday morning with our 16mm camera strapped to the Ocean City pier. On Monday morning, the hurricane landed and the pier was gone,” he remembers.

It is a poignant marker for a very personal film for Tully, the Austin, Texas-based director of Cocaine Angel, Silver Jew and Septien (the latter played in Park City at Midnight in 2011).

Growing up in Maryland, Tully started writing this screenplay in high school, some 22 years ago. “It’s not necessarily autobiographical but it’s deeply personal,” he says. “It was combining the movies I grew up with and my own loves of hip hop, ping pong and Ocean City.”

The story follows 13-year-old Rad (Marcello Conte) on his family’s summer vacation.

Tully, who also edits the indie film website Hammer To Nail, tried to pay homage to films of the era such as The Karate Kid, Krush Groove

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Ping Pong Summer

and No Retreat, No Surrender, but without being camp. “It’s not like The Wedding Singer, saying, ‘Weren’t the ’80s funny?’,” he says.

Susan Sarandon, who co-owns a New York ping pong club, plays a mentor figure to Rad. “She totally caught the groove of what we were doing,” Tully says. “Some of her best lines are right from her [not from the script].”

The professional cast also includes John Hannah, Lea Thompson and Amy Sedaris.

NEXT selection Ping Pong Summer’s “low seven-figure” budget is a jump up from his very-low-budget features, but Tully says it did not change his approach. “At no point was I making decisions that didn’t feel creative and from the gut.”

He hopes the film will appeal to those who lived through the 1980s as well as modern younger audiences. “It seems like kids of today are really connecting to the kids in the film. The fact he’s wearing parachute pants doesn’t matter… I didn’t direct them to act like they were being in the ’80s. Kids are kids.”

Next up is an Ireland-set story, Don’t Leave Home, which Tully says is in the vein of UK thrillers of the 1970s such as The Wicker Man. Wendy Mitchell

Chinese authorities granted surprising access to Israeli film-makers Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam for their World Cinema Documentary selection Web Junkie.

Professor Tao Ran, director of the pioneering rehab facility for ‘internet addicts’ at Beijing Military Hospital, opened his doors to the filmmakers. Medalia and Shlam shot for four months with unfettered access. Interviews with psychiatrists, nurses and the teenage patients and their parents provide a multi-faceted view of the subject matter.

“I had the computer when I was young so I’m using the technology much more,” says Medalia.

“I think she should be hospitalised,” says Shlam, with a laugh. Both women believe the internet has led to a breakdown in interpersonal communication.

“It happens in Israel, America and all over the world,” says Shlam.

“Kids in America and all over the world are playing the exact same games,” says Medalia.

“Those games and activities they have online are their friends; they’re social games. It becomes their way of communication.” s Elbert Wyche n

January 10, 2014 Screen International 9 n

Awards Countdown Gravity heads Bafta noms Gravity leads the Bafta nominations with 11 nods, while 12 Years A Slave and American Hustle follow closely with 10.

Captain Phillips has nine nominations while Behind The Candelabra and Saving Mr Banks have five each. Philomena, Rush and The Wolf Of Wall Street have four nominations. Blue Jasmine, The Great Gatsby, Inside Llewyn Davis and Nebraska have been nominated three times each.

Dallas Buyers Club and Her were shut out of the nominations. Idris Elba missed out on a mention for his role in Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom, as did Robert Redford for All Is Lost. Ralph Fiennes’ Dickens biopic The Invisible Woman has only one nomination for costumes and Roger Michell’s Le Week-End was shut out.

Rush picks up steam after its Bafta nods for outstanding British film, editing, sound and supporting actor for Daniel Brühl. Oprah Winfrey’s performance in The Butler, passed over by the Golden Globes, secures a supporting

actress nomination. The Coen brothers land an original screenplay nomination for Inside Llewyn Davis.

The Wolf Of Wall Street also picks up steam with its four nominations. On the other hand, August: Osage County slips in the race, securing only one Bafta nomination for Julia Roberts. Saving Mr Banks fares well but misses out on a best film mention.

Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant lands a nomination for best British film.

The Act Of Killing, the Danish-produced documentary about the legacy of Indonesia’s death squads, scores nods in both the documentary and foreign-language film categories.

With her nomination for Philomena, Judi Dench becomes Bafta’ most-nominated actor or actress ever.

Woody Allen becomes the most-nominated film-maker.

The best film nominees are 12 Years A Slave, American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Gravity and Philomena. The ceremony will be held on February 16.

DGA list includes Wolf’s Scorsese

Martin Scorsese

Gravity

12 Years A Slave

Philomena

Behind The Candelabra

Saving Mr Banks

The Directors Guild of America announced its nominees on January 7.

These are, in alphabetical order, Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity, Paul Greengrass for Captain Phillips, Steve McQueen for 12 Years A Slave, David O Russell for American Hustle and Martin Scorsese for The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Cuaron, Greengrass and McQueen earn first-time nods, while Russell has his second and Scorsese his 11th nomination.

Scorsese won the DGA honour in 2006 for The Departed and triumphed four years later in the dramatic television category for Boardwalk Empire.

The winner will be announced at the 66th annual DGA Awards on January 25 in Hollywood.

SPC picks up The Notebook

US Producers Guild Coen brothers’ film unveils 2014 nominees snubbed by WGA The Producers Guild of America has announced the nominees ahead of its 25th Annual PGA Awards on January 19.

Vying for the Darryl F Zanuck award for outstanding producer of theatrical motion pictures are, in alphabetical order, 12 Years A Slave, American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska,

American Hustle

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Saving Mr Banks and The Wolf Of Wall Street. Contenders for outstanding producer of documentary theatrical motion pictures are: A Place At The Table, Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, Life According To Sam, We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks and Which Way Is The Front Line From Here: The Life And Time Of Tim Hetherington.

Blue Jasmine

The Writers Guild of America unveiled its screen nominees on January 3, with American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Dallas Buyers Club, Her and Nebraska nominated for original screenplay; Inside Llewyn Davis and Gravity were both shut out.

The adapted screenplay nominees are: August: Osage County, Before Midnight, Captain Phillips, Lone Survivor and

The Wolf Of Wall Street. Documentary screenplay contenders are: Dirty Wars, Herblock — The Black & The White, No Place On Earth, Stories We Tell and We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks.

12 Years A Slave, Philomena, Fruitvale Station and Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom were ineligible. The awards will be held on February 1.

Dallas Buyers Club

The Notebook

Sony Pictures Classics has taken North American rights from Beta Cinema to Hungary’s shortlisted foreign-language Oscar submission, The Notebook.

Directed by Janos Szasz, the film world premiered at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival — where it received the grand prix Crystal Globe — before a North American premiere in Toronto.

Ulrich Thomsen and Ulrich Matthes star in the Second World War story of 13-year-old twins abandoned by their parents to their cruel grandmother in a village on the Hungarian border. The Intuit Pictures film, made in co-production with Hunnia Filmstudio, Amour Fou and Dolce Vita Films was adapted from Agota Kristof ’s novel of the same name.

January 10, 2014 Screen International 11 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN JC Chandor

Director JC Chandor on the set of All Is Lost

n 12 Screen International January 10, 2014

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Beyond the sea All Is Lost, JC Chandor’s follow-up to Margin Call, inspired Robert Redford to deliver an acclaimed solo performance, and nobody is happier about that than Chandor. Jeremy Kay reports

W

hen Robert Redford made his welcome speech at the annual Sundance Film Festival directors’ brunch in 2011, it was a lightbulb moment for an unknown first-time director craning his neck at the back of the room.

“When I went to Sundance with Margin Call,” writer-director JC Chandor says, “I already had 20 pages of the 31 pages [the full length of the All Is Lost screenplay] written down.

“It was always an older guy [required to play the lead] and it wasn’t until I was in that room at that brunch that he dawned on me.”

In the 10 days that followed, Chandor’s first film would establish the East Coast filmmaker as a thrilling new talent, later earning honours such as best first film from the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) and an original screenplay Oscar nomination.

Fast-forward three years and the once unknown film-maker has given Redford the role of a lifetime, turning the spotlight on the independent film demigod for his near-wordless solo performance in All Is Lost.

Redford’s role as a mysterious, skilled sailor in peril on the sea has made a splash with critics and voters, even if US box office has been muted. NYFCC awarded Redford their best actor prize and he is in the running for the Golden Globe.

All eyes, of course, are on the big one. Redford won the directing Oscar for Ordinary People in 1981 but has never laid his hands on the best actor statuette. There will not be many more chances like this one.

By a twist of fate, the Oscar nominations announcement will coincide with the first day of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, teeing up what could become the most boisterous opening day in years (see pages 6-9).

“We’re all hopeful for Mr Redford,” says Chandor. “It’s a really brave, creatively intense thing for a 77-year-old guy who has accomplished as much as he has to have taken on.”

Planning the voyage The idea for All Is Lost started in late 2010. “I was editing Margin Call. The letter [that Redford’s unnamed character reads in voiceover at the start of the film] was the first thing that started this process for me.

“One thing led to the next and one-and-ahalf years later I was shooting a movie with Robert Redford. When I wrote it, I didn’t even know how Margin Call was [going to

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turn out] and I didn’t know if I would ever work again.”

Jump ahead several months to January 2011 and there Chandor was, perched amid fajitas and film-makers in a hall in Park City, Utah.

“Redford’s in the middle of talking about the distribution challenges on Jeremiah Johnson [Sydney Pollack’s 1972 western] and suddenly I started thinking about him in this role.

When the talk ended about 250 people swarmed up to him, so I thought I should just worry about Margin Call first.

“A month later I had finished the script and I couldn’t get him out of my mind. We just sent it to him. The worst thing that could happen was somebody would say no.

“Five or six days go by and I get a call saying Robert Redford wants to meet me. I flew across the country and prepared this whole pitch and five minutes into our meeting he held up his hand and said he was in.

“The script is very, very dense, so you feel like you’ve seen the movie once you’ve read it, but the lack of dialogue… there’s no question Redford has always chosen the path less travelled and I think he admired it.

“It’s very, very clearly a survival movie,” adds Chandor. “The film is about a person coming to grips with their own mortality in front of your eyes. The bet I took was if you kept the audience engaged and a little bit scared and took them on an emotional rollercoaster for the first two acts, you might be ready by the third act to go on a fairly intense emotional journey with him.”

On the night of the US premiere of Margin Call in October 2011, Chandor and his representatives secured a US rights deal for All Is Lost with Roadside Attractions, which was releasing Margin Call.

The film-maker remembers his pitch to Steve Beeks, president of Lionsgate, which owns a 43% stake in Roadside. “I said, ‘It’s Redford in a boat struggling to survive.’”

With his Margin Call producers from Before The Door Pictures and Washington Square Films back on board, they took a bank loan to finance the entire film and found gap funding. International sales company FilmNation reportedly sold out on the project in two days at Berlin 2012.

By that point Chandor was an Oscar nominee for Margin Call. “It was that great time when you’ve

just been nominated for an Academy Award but the ceremony hasn’t happened so you haven’t lost yet,” he says.

‘There’s no question Redford has always chosen the path less travelled and I think he admired the lack of dialogue’ JC Chandor, director

Robert Redford in All Is Lost

Setting sail Production took place in summer 2012 at Fox Studios Baja in Mexico, as well as the Port of Los Angeles and the Bahamas. The film premiered at Cannes in May 2013.

“Hopefully it feels like one poor little soul bouncing around in a boat, but it was anything but. It’s a total jigsaw puzzle,” Chandor notes.

“The majority of it was shot in a tank where they shot Titanic [Fox Studios Baja]. We shot a bunch of stuff by Ensenada. The shipping sequences were shot a month later, five miles off the shore from the Port of Los Angeles.

“That tank in Mexico is actually five tanks,” says Chandor. “We had three boats we moved around and there’s a huge tank the size of four or five football fields perched on the Pacific Ocean. There was an indoor tank for the storm sequences and a clarity tank for underwater stuff.

“I hope when people are done watching this they know the character of this individual. You know who this guy is, essentially, but you don’t know what he is. The risk we took is he starts to become you, and Redford in the previous parts of his career was never a perfect everyman because he always felt a little above us all and that mystery and aloofness is what made him great.

“There’s certainly a mystery about all this but if the film is working for you, I don’t think there’s any question this is an actor who has exposed himself in front of you in a very pure and intense way.”

Shooting with Redford, Chandor says, was something else. “He was at a very interesting time in his career and his life and he was really ready to entirely hand himself over as an actor, which I was grateful for.

“It was an intense experience, very long and emotionally trying for both of us because you’re staring at the same person all day. He is a wonderful guy, a perfectly nice gent. We all ate at the restaurant and drove together and hung out but while shooting he was only interested in what the character had to go through and didn’t worry about much else.

“He trusted us almost to the point where it was a little scary and we were afraid we might not be able to do what he was expecting of us.

It was probably a directing experience the s likes of which I’ll never have again.” ■

January 10, 2014 Screen International 13 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN JOEL AND ETHAN COEN

Brothers of the head Joel and Ethan Coen tell Jeremy Kay about the musical collaborations behind Inside Llewyn Davis, and give an insight into life on a Coen brothers’ set

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nside Llewyn Davis writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen are like two halves of the

same thought, completing each other’s sentences with a flow of droll repartee.

Asked why they set their story of a fictitious musician in the early 1961 Greenwich Village folk scene and eschewed the more obvious focus on Bob Dylan, who would break out that same year, the brothers cannot resist a riff.

“Most people don’t know about it,” says Joel, slumped in a chair beside his brother at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. They know about a somewhat later period — the Dylan scene — but there was a whole interesting thing that was going on that he walked into and changed and since people don’t know as much about it, it’s interesting for that reason.”

“The later period, it all just gets harder, you know,” says Ethan. “Like long hair and love beads and stuff… That’s a less serious movie…

■ 14 Screen International January 10, 2014

‘We knew when we were writing that [T Bone Burnett] would be the first one we’d send the script to’ Ethan Coen, film-maker

I mean you put that Indian beat in there and that’s not a serious…”

Joel continues: “No, that’s not a serious time. Actually that might be a good [tempo] for whatever movie we do in that period.”

“Or just, oh come on,” says Ethan. His brother agrees: “Oh, come on.”

Joel, the more talkative of the two, describes the cultural milieu that informs Inside Llewyn Davis as an “exotic”, albeit significant, part of the DNA of US popular music.

“This [film] came from some of the music in O Brother [Where Art Thou?, the Coens’ 2000 film] and Dylan; the singer-songwriters and the people who are more popularly known to culture now from the mid-1960s came directly from the music that’s in this movie.”

The Coens had read enough about the period to feel qualified to explore further.

“Putting a story together didn’t seem like an impossible thing for us to get our heads around as it would have been, for instance,

doing something in Elizabethan England,” says Joel.

The opening scene was the first to root itself in their minds. “It was the beginning of the movie, this idea of a folk singer getting beaten up outside a club in 1961. We sort of had talked about it a number of years ago and didn’t know where it would go,” says Joel. “We would come back to it every now and again; I don’t know why. It’s hard to really impose a logical thing on that but for some reason at a certain point we just started spinning it out a little bit further… It grew on that original, weird idea.”

Cueing the music Once the brothers had a script, the first person they approached was executive music supervisor T Bone Burnett, the celebrated musician with whom they had collaborated on three earlier films.

“We knew when we were writing that he’d

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‘Directing movies is mostly just answering questions and, honestly, whoever is nearest to the person who’s asking the question, answers it’ Joel Coen, film-maker

(Left) Ethan and Joel Coen on the set of Inside Llewyn Davis (Below) Oscar Isaac and Justin Timberlake

be the first one we’d send the script to,” says Ethan. “It’s so much about the music. We sent it to him as soon as the script was done so he could start thinking about what the repertoire might be.”

Burnett helped the brothers find the man who would play Llewyn Davis, a shambolic folk singer-songwriter based loosely on the late Brooklyn musician Dave Van Ronk.

It was not an easy search. “We were going mostly to musicians because the movie being about musicians we knew we wanted long, sustained performances for whole songs,” says Joel.

“We didn’t want to post-sync and we didn’t want to dub anything, so we auditioned lots of musicians and that didn’t work out very well because they were all brilliant at the musical performances but there aren’t many of them who are skilled enough as actors that they can carry a whole movie.”

The brothers switched the focus to actors

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who had some musical ability, and found Oscar Isaac in early 2011. “It wasn’t until Oscar came into the room on an audition that we met someone who was as musically talented as he was as an actor,” says Joel. “He’s a classically trained actor who went to Juilliard and had been acting for a long time. He was right for the part and a really good actor, but he’s also a brilliant musician and was someone who could learn this style of playing and this repertoire. T Bone knew that. We sent this tape to T Bone and he said, ‘Yeah, this guy’s the real deal.’”

Isaac had to learn the Travis-picking style of guitar playing

that Davis would have mastered. “He plays it like a natural,” says Joel.

Musical pedigree surges through the veins of Inside Llewyn Davis. Justin Timberlake sings and portrays one half of a performing duo opposite Carey Mulligan, and Burnett also enlisted the help of Marcus Mumford (Mulligan’s husband) from UK folk-rock superstars Mumford & Sons.

“There is a Mumford in there in a big way,” says Ethan. “We had this long conversation before pre-production about what songs might be played. But once we started and got into the nitty-gritty of people performing and arranging these songs… T Bone decided to include Marcus, which was great.”

Joel notes how Burnett likes to collaborate with musicians of different ages who bring a fresh voice. “The fact he does that is part of what makes him such a brilliant producer.

You don’t exactly see what he’s doing, but by bringing in these different perspectives and personalities and how he deals with all of them, he comes up with what he comes up with, which is really interesting.

“When we were doing O Brother he did the same thing and brought in Gillian Welch to help co-produce the music with him. On this one it was Marcus.

“Marcus was there from the very beginning of the whole pre-recording process in the studio and he does songs for the movie with Oscar and a couple of other tracks. He was there just in terms of just playing and participating and giving his input into the rest of the music.”

The Coens remain defiantly low-key about the prospects of a movie that won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in May and by early-January was hitting its awards-season stride. It won the Gotham Award for best feature and is nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards, three Golden Globes and the original screenplay Bafta.

So how do they pull the magic together and direct their movies? “Oh man, you know,” says Ethan, looking decidedly awkward. “If you went to the set you’d go…”

“These guys don’t seem to be doing anything,” says Joel, deadpanning.

“You’d go, ‘OK, there are two people sitting around reading the newspaper instead of one.’ It comes out of that,” says Ethan, smiling now.

Joel has the final word: “Directing movies is mostly just answering questions and, honestly, whoever is nearest to the person who’s asking the question answers it and that’s kind of simple and true.” They s both grin. ■

January 10, 2014 Screen International 15 ■

AWARDS COUNTDOWN Hugh Jackman

Hugh Jackman in Prisoners

n 16 Screen International January 10, 2014

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Angel of darkness Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of a desperate, God-fearing father searching for his abducted child in Prisoners is his rawest role yet, he tells Jeremy Kay

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t will not have gone unnoticed that for such a dark film, Prisoners owes much of its power to three celebrated artists who are renowned for being particularly nice and/or jovial, none more so than Hugh Jackman.

Like director Denis Villeneuve and co-star Jake Gyllenhaal, the Australian is charm personified in conversation with Screen and has that knack of making the interviewer feel like a quick skip to the pub might be on the cards.

Jackman has made a name for himself portraying good people or mutants in turmoil.

Think of his Oscar-nominated Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, Charlie Kenton in Real Steel or, most famously, Wolverine in the X-Men series. But he has never done anything like Keller Dover.

The lead protagonist in Prisoners is a decent, God-fearing family man whose carpentry business has been ravaged by the recession, who is thrust into the ultimate parental nightmare. When Dover’s daughter is kidnapped, he becomes more ferocious than anything with adamantium claws. He tracks down a hapless innocent whom he believes holds vital clues and tortures the man.

“As a father, I can relate to a lot of it,” says Jackman. “As soon as you become a parent, you can understand almost anything someone does for the sake of their children — that’s something elemental. “[Dover is] a character I like. I have a soft spot for characters like this. I can be objective enough about my life and know a lot of stuff comes more easily to me than it does to him.

“He’s a man who has had to struggle for everything — his job, sobriety. He’s doing everything to be the best man he can… It touched me. I was drawn to him.”

The script made its way into Jackman’s hands more than a year before production on the Alcon Entertainment thriller began in early 2013 in Atlanta.

“I read it and thought this was an incredibly violent movie,” says Jackman. “But I didn’t want to do it in a gratuitous way and Denis gave it a lot of heart.”

Jackman is not alone in his high regard for Villeneuve. “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 says, adding the selfdeprecating aside, “He knows when to rein actors in and let’s face it, you don’t want to give too much rope to actors.”

Jackman threw himself into preparation for the role. “I did a lot of research on sleep deprivation. Over the course of eight days [in the Prisoners storyline], no-one sleeps.

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“Denis explored what exhaustion did to everyone. Denis allowed things to sit. I read a lot about child abduction, alcoholism, sleep deprivation. I wanted to be very specific about when your hand starts to shake and you are a lot rawer.”

There were long conversations with Villeneuve about the scenes involving Alex, the young man with learning difficulties whom Dover captures and tortures.

“I read a lot about torture. I’m sure I’m on some kind of watchlist. I looked into that.

The stuff with the hammer when I threatened to smash Alex’s hand and didn’t smash it? That was a classic Al Qaeda thing, threatening violence but not doing violence.”

Research and responsibility The extent of Dover’s religious devotion was toned down from earlier drafts of Aaron Guzikowski’s screenplay, yet it informed the man and was crucial to get right.

“I kept saying to Denis that in Australia we have this idea that we hear about extremism in religion in the US and it feels unrelatable. I didn’t want the audience to dismiss Keller as a religious nut.”

Jackman pored over videos of couples being interviewed by the police and watched footage of press conferences. “I had a feeling of responsibility knowing [child abduction] is going on now,” he says. “This is real, happening now, and we need to pay homage to those people who went through it.

“It drives people crazy, particularly for Keller, who is trying to keep control in his life but loses the one thing that he cannot control. It drives him crazy.

“There’s one woman whose children went missing and two years later she was at an intersection and found herself on top of a car demanding the driver open the trunk. She had heard they took her child away in the trunk of a car and could not stop thinking about it. She realised she had gone crazy.”

Villeneuve maintained careful control of production to protect the actors and ensured things did not get too heavy inbetween takes. Nonetheless, performances like this take their toll. “ When you’re shooting, there are very elemental emotions,” says Jackman.

“Sometimes the camera would stop and you

‘What was being required of me was something I have not been asked to do a lot — that rawness and openness’ Hugh Jackman

Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Denis Villeneuve

would still ‘be there’, but the thing about acting is it’s our job to access that elemental stuff, but most of the time I can say it felt cathartic.

“What was being required of me was something I’ve not been asked to do a lot — that rawness and openness.”

The same went for the rest of the fine ensemble. There is Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki, Paul Dano as Alex and his on-screen aunt played by Melissa Leo, Maria Bello as Dover’s wife and Viola Davis and Terrence Howard as family friends whose daughter also goes missing.

One of the most gripping scenes sees Dover take his friends to the makeshift cell in which he has incarcerated Alex — Dover’s wife, meanwhile, is bedridden with depression.

“It’s a great portrait. Four people get pulled into [the nightmare]. The most powerful thing in the movie is when Terrence and Viola are sitting in the car and Viola says, ‘We’re not going to take part in this but we’re not going to stop it.’”

Indeed Jackman believes the scene resonates most profoundly in the post-9/11 era, where societies have watched as governments implement desperate policies in the hunt for perpetrators of atrocities.

Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki goes toe-to-toe with Dover in an absorbing portrait of flawed men in parallel pursuit of resolution.

“We got on really well,” says Jackman of Gyllenhaal. “We both approach acting in a similar way. We like to talk, we like to rehearse and on the day we like to mix it up.

“What Jake did with his character was extraordinary. That sense of history. The twitches, the tattoos. The humanity he brought to it with that sense of restraint, of trying to be detached but this emotion brimming underneath. He broke my heart.”

Dover breaks hearts too. In the best performance of his career and one of the overall best performances of the season, Jackman shelved the showier aspects of his enviable talents to reveal a hitherto unseen depth and grittiness.

“He’s a fantastic actor,” says Villeneuve. “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 would want to follow him but that would take them into a moral conflict that s was quite dark.” ■

January 10, 2014 Screen International 17 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN NICOLE HOLOFCENER

Nicole Holofcener and James Gandolfini on the set of Enough Said

â– 18 Screen International January 10, 2014

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More to say Enough Said is Nicole Holofcener’s most commercial work to date, but stays true to the film-maker’s devotion to character. She talks to Wendy Mitchell about working with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini

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icole Holofcener writes what she knows: the now-famous guacamoleonion obsession in Enough Said is directly inspired by a quirk of her boyfriend’s ex-wife, she admits with a laugh.

Luckily it has not caused any friction. “He told me about this habit she had. I loved it.

She knows it, she’s seen the movie. She laughed,” says Holofcener.

Other details from the film are from her circle of family and friends as well: “My ex-husband could never keep cookies in the house.

One of my friends had a lot of mouthwashes,” she adds.

Of course, Holofcener’s films are much more than the sum of these trivial details. Enough Said is about the complications of a middleaged romance, when a woman (Julia LouisDreyfus) discovers her new boyfriend (James Gandolfini) is the ex-husband of her new friend. “This triangle of going out with someone and then hearing from the ex-wife of that person, that’s what intrigued me,” the writerdirector tells Screen over a cup of tea near her home in Venice, California. “My ex-husband began to have a long-term relationship, and of course he would be telling her stories about me, just like she would be telling stories about her ex-husband. Where reality lies was interesting to me. None of the things in the movie are actually true, but the story is close to me.”

She continues: “I want to write about myself and my world. It’s very gratifying to have a sea of middle-aged faces, male and female, saying I got it right. We’re an underrepresented group, and we’re starting to be invisible on the street. It’s certainly less sexy than writing about 25-year-olds, but so be it, I’m middle-aged and I’m glad I’m alive!”

Getting a little mainstream Enough Said is Holofcener’s most commercial work to date. It has now made more than $17.5m at the US box office (her previous biggest hit was Friends With Money at $13.4m).

The film came about when Matthew Greenfield and Claudia Lewis at Fox Searchlight asked Holofcener if she had any ideas she wanted to develop with the company.

“The stipulation was that I would make it a little more mainstream, to give it a little more plot or a hook in there somewhere. I was intrigued by the challenge. A little mainstream would never hurt a person,” she says.

But it didn’t mean Holofcener had to change totally what she brought to the table with past critical hits such as Walking And Talking, Lovely & Amazing, Friends With

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‘I want to write about myself and my world. It’s gratifying to have a sea of middleaged faces saying I got it right’ Nicole Holofcener, film-maker

Money and Please Give. “They didn’t want [from me] a Nancy Meyers movie or an Alexander Payne movie, they wanted what I had.”

She says working with Fox Searchlight was “a dream” and that she hopes to work with the company on future projects.

She remembers one piece of good advice from Searchlight: “I left the reveal of the coincidence till much later in the movie, and they asked me to bring it more up front, which seemed like a more commercial way to write this script, to get the plot in sooner, and it worked out fine.”

Once Holofcener has the germ of an idea, “I start writing quite quickly,” she says. “My writing process is kind of messy, I don’t outline, I plough through and rewrite as I go along. Two steps forward, eight steps back. I find it more fun and more productive to write that way.”

Holofcener is nominated for best screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Finding spontaneity The film sadly marks one of the late Gandolfini’s last screen roles — he died in June — and shows a new side to the actor most famous for playing Tony Soprano. “He was so lovely in person. He was sweet and he had this dry sense of humour. He was really perfect for the part,” says Holofcener. He has been nominated for SAG and Spirit Awards for best supporting actor.

Gandolfini wanted to make sure he was the right actor for this romantic leading role. Holofcener says: “He wanted to know I could bail if I decided the role wasn’t right for him. He said, ‘You know I’m fat? You know I’m big?

You know Julia is really beautiful, you know we’re mismatched?’”

Holofcener didn’t do a huge amount of preparation with the actors. “I don’t generally believe in a lot of workshopping or anything. Also I don’t like to beat a dead horse, there is something to be said for spontaneity.”

She continues: “I’m not a big backstory person. Unless an actor wants me to be. I said to Jim and Julia, ‘Do you want me to tell you your backstories?’ I’d have fun drumming up some stuff that would make sense. But neither of them asked for that. The first time we met, the three of us just sat down and went through the script. We read the scenes, and I said, ‘Tell me if something is dumb or confusing.’ The collaboration started there,” she adds.

Of the former Seinfeld star Louis-Dreyfus, who is Golden Globe nominated, Holofcener says: “I’m so lucky I cast her. You never know how deep an actor is willing to go, and how open. I thought that she was so vulnerable and real, she was just what I needed, she balances the comedy and the tragedy in the same moment. Sometimes I still tear up watching Julia’s face — do you know how many times I’ve seen it? And she can still move me.”

So what’s next? Holofcener has worked on TV shows including Parks And Recreation and Sex And The City in the past, and hopes to do more TV work, including her own pilot for HBO about a group of friends who live around Venice. “It’s about marriage, kids, sex, money, life,” she says.

There is no new feature in the pipeline quite yet. “I’ve only made five films in my whole career, so I don’t churn them out… but I s do feel anxious to start writing again.” ■

(Left) Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and (above) Toni Collette and Ben Falcone

January 10, 2014 Screen International 19 ■

AWARDS COUNTDOWN Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi

Captains courageous Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi come from wildly different backgrounds but find truth in their roles in Captain Phillips, they tell Jeremy Kay

T

om Hanks and his Captain Phillips costar Barkhad Abdi are eating lunch at Shutters On The Beach hotel in Santa Monica, talking about fear.

Hanks explains how Richard Phillips, the skipper of a hijacked US cargo ship that inspired Sony’s worldwide hit, told him the biggest day-to-day concern for mariners was Mother Nature, of which more later.

For Abdi, the 28-year-old plucked from obscurity by director Paul Greengrass to play Muse, the leader of the East African pirates who commandeered the Maersk Alabama in April 2009, the biggest fear was closer to home.

The Somali actor’s bright eyes inhabit a furiously expressive face as he chomps on fish and chips and nods to his right. “You know the scariest part was when I was first meeting Tom. That was the scariest it got in the movie.

“After that, you would have some scenes that I could not get correctly. I would have a hard time, but you know, we’d just work on it.”

This from the novice who dispensed with stunt men and — alongside his fellow Somali first-time actors, it must be said — stood tall on a skiff time and again as the small vessel crashed through the waves until Greengrass was satisfied he had his shot.

Greengrass, who is also present during the interview, praises his young actor for “flawless balance”.

Hanks remembers: “There was one point, when I saw them out there and was like, ‘Oh there’s the second team working out there on the skiffs,’ and Paul goes, ‘No, that’s not the second team.’ It was those guys.”

“I used to play soccer so I’m good on my feet,” says Abdi. “With the training I learned to feel the wave on the skiff and go with it. I was like, ‘I have to get that ship in front of me, that big thing. I’m getting it’.”

Hanks and Abdi — each now Bafta and Screen Actors Guild nominees — enjoy an easy chemistry despite a vast gulf in lifestyles.

Hanks, the double Oscar winner who can pick his roles, was approached through agents and the studio, whereas Abdi the unknown prevailed in a global casting call.

n 20 Screen International January 10, 2014

‘I always loved acting… when the casting call came, I decided to give it a chance ’ Barkhad Abdi

‘What I got from Phillips was so many of the little details of what it takes to be a captain of a ship’ Tom Hanks

Hanks was already interested in the story and jumped at the chance to work with Greengrass. “He makes movies the way I like to see them, so it was a definite. We had met each other a couple of times and discussed the possibility of working together once or twice, of which nothing ever came up… All it required was a howdy-do.”

To prepare for the role, Hanks read Phillips’ 2010 book, A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs And Dangerous Days At Sea, and he and Greengrass had several conversations about how they saw the story panning out.

“I don’t think we were taking what happened and making [events] more important or less important; we were just taking a look at the concrete realities of how all the parties ended up in that lifeboat together.”

The star wanted to understand the mind of the merchant mariner and got to know Phillips. “I talked to him quite a bit. We exchanged some e-mails and I went over to his house twice, once with Catherine Keener, who played Andrea [Phillips’ wife].

“I didn’t go in armed with anything specific really, we just talked about the entire experience. What I got mostly out of him was so many of the little details of what it takes to be a captain of the ship, essentially the neverending burden.

“He does have time to read books, he does have time to watch movies, but… he says the worst thing that has ever happened to a merchant mariner is the invention of e-mail. It used to be he could be out at sea and no-one could get to him until he would have to send off some cables, and now everyone can get to him at every single second.”

Hanks was struck by Phillips’ humility in the wake of a four-day ordeal that saw him board the Alabama’s lifeboat with the four pirates. All the cargo ship’s crew survived, while three pirates were killed in the Navy SEALs rescue, and Muse ended up in prison.

“I was asking [Phillips] about how afraid he was of getting killed by the guys. He said he had been afraid on two other occasions — one was in a typhoon at sea, where all he could do was hold on for the better part of four hours and he honestly thought [he

would die], and another was a fire in the engine room.

“He said that’s a brand of fear that you can’t do anything about, you’re fighting nature. At least this way he had an interaction with these guys and it was just different from that brand of helplessness.”

Jumping off Abdi came to the project after he turned up to a casting call staged by Sony in the expatriate Somali community in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he had lived since moving to the US at 14 years old. “Well I always loved acting, and I remember the story happening on the news,” says Abdi. “So the casting call came — Tom Hanks film casting Somali actors. So I decided to give it a chance. It was a big crowd, more than 700 people.”

After two auditions Abdi was summoned to meet Greengrass at the very same Shutters On The Beach hotel. “That’s when he told us we got the part. We jumped into the ocean there.”

Billy Ray’s screenplay went through several drafts, each addressing cut-away scenarios, such as Phillips’ home and the Pentagon.

In the end, it was Hanks who suggested they

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focus on the action at sea and the two captains.

As if to underline the precarious power struggle within the story, Abdi’s character Muse declares at one point: “I’m the captain now.” It was an ad-libbed line, made possible

by Greengrass’s routine of shooting numerous long takes. “Once you do that, other

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things get impacted and you start stretching moments out and exploring things that don’t exist per se in the dialogue because you’re capturing this emotion and behaviour,” Hanks says.

Abdi’s impromptu line allowed him to channel the desperation of the pirates under intense circumstances.

(Top) Rival captains Muse (Abdi, far left) and Phillips (Hanks). (Above) many of the actors playing the pirates performed their own stuntwork at sea

“Just like Paul [has] said, these kids get so little, like most of them don’t have parents or their parents are poor. So they have to make a living. They have no school. The country didn’t have anything, no schools and no government for the past 20 some years,” says Abdi. “These kids are being used by older guys and before [the out-of-country crime lords got involved], there were other guys in the street who manipulated these kids from the same tribe.

“One thing about Somalis is they talk a lot.

They don’t have the media, but the word of mouth gets around. There are so many stories about pirates going around and you never know which one is true and which one is a lie. In the majority of cases, [the pirates] don’t know how to use the money [they earn]. They waste it while other people make money off them.”

With a deep respect for the subject matter and a level of devotion that impressed Greengrass and the producers, Hanks and Abdi have not wasted their opportunity to bring to life one of the year’s most dramatic movies.

By early January, the fruits of their labour were abundantly clear. Captain Phillips has s crossed $213m worldwide. n

January 10, 2014 Screen International 21 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN 12 YEARS A SLAVE

Director Steve McQueen and actress Lupita Nyong’o on the set of 12 Years A Slave

■ 22 Screen International January 10, 2014

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Freedom fighters Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave is a box-office hit in the US and has been attracting major awards attention, including 10 Bafta nominations. Andreas Wiseman speaks to the film-maker, star Chiwetel Ejiofor and other key members of the team about creating an unflinching film about slavery

I

n November 2011, in the halls of the American Film Market in Santa Monica, one script above all generated buzz among distributors. 12 Years A Slave was set to be the latest project from red-hot UK film-maker Steve McQueen, whose prestige drama Shame was at that time building awards buzz: most larger independents were intrigued by the film and many were desperate to have 12 Years A Slave, which was handled by Summit Entertainment.

“It was an intense time,” recalls eOne Films UK managing director Alex Hamilton, about the ensuing bidding war for the project. eOne ended up paying somewhere between $2m-$4m to beat UK rivals StudioCanal and Momentum. “It was our number one priority at the market but each potential buyer was pointing out their respective connections to the film.”

But even with McQueen’s allure, 12 Years A Slave was not without its challenges — including its tough subject matter and a budget that, at the time, was understood to be around $20m. “The asking price is a lot of money,” one of the UK’s top independent buyers told Screen at the time. “It’s quite a risk.”

But 26 months later the film is a palpable hit in the US, with $38.5m and counting, and has amassed more than 100 awards nominations, including 10 from Bafta.

Story origins Turner-prize winning artist McQueen began ruminating on ideas for a film about slavery in 2008, the same year his debut feature Hunger took the festival circuit by storm.

Hunger caught the attention of many of the industry’s biggest independent financiers, who were soon clamouring to work with the London-born director of Grenadian descent.

Suitors included Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, whose co-presidents Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner engineered a meeting with McQueen soon after being “stunned” by Hunger. A meeting with Pitt followed.

Soon after that, Amsterdam-based McQueen began working with US writer John Ridley: “At that time the narrative for me was of a free African-American who gets kidnapped and dragged into the maze of slavery,” recalls the director. “But that’s all I had.”

McQueen’s partner, the cultural critic

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Bianca Stigter, spurred the crucial breakthrough on the script when she discovered Solomon Northup’s then little-known 19th century memoir of his own harrowing experience of slavery.

“It was astonishing,” recalls the director.

“When I finished the book I felt so angry, so upset with myself because I thought, ‘How come I didn’t know this book?’ But then I realised that no-one I knew knew the book.

Sometimes you can be a magnet, you want something so badly it comes to you.”

Northup’s memoir recounts his ordeal as an African American free man who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery. After toiling for 12 years on cotton plantations in Louisiana, he finally regained his freedom.

For McQueen, finding the actor to play Solomon was much less time-consuming than finding his source material.

“I went out to see Steve in Amsterdam after Hunger,” recalls lead actor Chiwetel Ejiofor.

“We talked about movies and drank coffee and walked the canals. We were hopeful about working together at some point and we spoke about a couple of projects. But they didn’t pan out for one reason or another.

“But then he sent me the script for 12 Years,” continues the UK actor, star of Dirty Pretty Things and Kinky Boots. “I loved it. But I felt the weight of it. I felt the significance of it.”

For a time Ejiofor doubted whether he, or anyone, could do the part justice. “I was wracked with self-doubt. But Steve was very sure he wanted me for the part. It was a bizarre role reversal.”

After reading and re-reading the book, the Londonborn Ejiofor knew he had to play Solomon. With Nigerian parents, the connection was particularly poignant for him.

“As soon as I had consciousness, I was aware of slavery, ” he remembers.

“More particularly of the slavery in Nigeria and that of the Igbos, of which I am one. Hundreds of thousands of Igbos

‘The biggest challenge was keeping the focus, keeping the buzz, through all that emotion’ Steve McQueen, director

12 Years A Slave

were taken out of Nigeria as slaves. I remember being in the Nigerian museum of Calabar looking at the entry logs for the slave ships.

Some were taken to the West Indies, some to South America and some to Louisiana. A sense of connection was always very real.”

After a period of development, US financier River Road Entertainment and Summit joined Plan B and producer Anthony Katagas on the project before the 2011 AFM. Agency CAA, which represents Pitt and McQueen, packaged the film.

Patrick Wachsberger, then Summit cochairman, had had his eye on McQueen for some time. “I was totally blown away by Shame in Toronto. I went to [CAA agent] Maha Dakhil and asked her to introduce me to this genius director. I told Steve, ‘You know what? I’m going to figure out a way to work with you.’ He probably dismissed it. But then when the project came, I talked to Bill Pohlad at River Road, with whom I’d done several movies, and it worked out.”

Wachsberger and his then Summit partner David Garrett sold the film as a package comprising McQueen, his regular collaborator Michael Fassbender — on board to play sadistic plantation owner Edwin Epps — producer Brad Pitt in a smaller role, and the talented Ejiofor in the lead.

Buyers flocked as the film’s finance structure quickly took shape. UK financier Film4, which had strong ties with McQueen having backed his first two features, was another investor determined to board the project.

Film4 head Tessa Ross was prepared to take the unusual step of investing a sizeable chunk of equity in a US production in order to maintain the connection with McQueen: “We ended up negotiating through quite a long period of time with River Road to join the financing structure. They always left a gap for us [understood to be between $1.6m-$3.3m (£1m-£2m)]… Steve always wanted us there,” says Ross.

“We have £15m [$24.6m] a year to spend on films. We spent a good proportion of that investing in 12 Years.

But we needed to know that we could be valuable beyond money, because we’re never rich enough to be useful just for money,” adds Ross Ross, who would later visit the »

January 10, 2014 Screen International 23 ■

AWARDS COUNTDOWN 12 YEARS A SLAVE

set and take a more active role during postproduction. McQueen also credits Film4 for “saving us” when the production had to do a few days of reshoots and money was tight.

Additional casting took place as the film headed towards a spring 2012 shoot.

“Casting the film was a really amazing experience — not one I’ve had often,” says producer Gardner with a laugh. “People said, ‘I’ll do whatever I can to be in the film.’ It was an echo of what our experience had been with financiers. The movie was bigger than the sum of its parts but I think Steve at the helm was the primary and fundamental draw.”

The stellar supporting cast would include Sarah Paulson, Paul Giamatti, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano and Alfre Woodard.

However, casting the role of Patsey, the film’s young female lead, was proving difficult.

“We auditioned more than 1,000 women,” remembers McQueen. “It was very difficult.

Francine Maisler [casting director] finally found Lupita [Nyong’o]. I saw her in New Orleans, and I took her to see Michael in our hotel. They did a little bit of rehearsal, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s the girl.’”

The casting of newcomer Nyong’o, a Yale School of Drama graduate who had been a production runner on Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener, was a bold move that paid off spectacularly, with Bafta and Golden Globe nominations for supporting actress, as well as a nomination for Bafta’s EE Rising Star Award.

The final partner Heading into production a US distributor had yet to be attached. Summit was a potential candidate but its imminent acquisition by Lionsgate soon ruled out the company.

Paramount, which had an output deal with Plan B since 2005 and whose chairman Brad Grey co-founded Plan B with Pitt, was also a potential distributor but ultimately was not seen as the right fit.

Pitt’s outfit would instead turn to Los Angeles-based financier New Regency, whose chairman Arnon Milchan and CEO Brad Weston separately had long-term relationships with Pitt and his executives.

“We were repositioning ourselves,” says Weston of New Regency, which up to that point had focused on mainstream comedies and action fare. “We had a strategy for the company and Steve fell into that category of a wall-to-wall brilliant film-maker that we wanted to work with.”

For New Regency and all the backers, McQueen’s film represented the ultimate in highbrow but accessible film-making.

In April 2012, a few weeks before filming began, New Regency agreed to co-finance and distribute the picture via Fox Searchlight, per its output deal with Fox. In fact, the company committed less than 48 hours after reading the script.

“New Regency were the last people in, but I think it’s fair to say they are the reason the movie got made,” acknowledges Gardner.

The production headed to Louisiana, the real-life location of

■ 24 Screen International January 10, 2014

‘Everyone was conscious a lot of the content was going to be difficult to watch, difficult to perform’ Dede Gardner, Plan B Entertainment

Sarah Paulson

Michael Fassbender and Steve McQueen

‘We were in uncharted territory. It was both an arthouse and an AfricanAmerican release pattern’ Brad Weston, New Regency

Lupita Nyong’o has been nominated for Bafta’s EE Rising Star award and supporting actress award

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Northup’s ordeal and a state now known for its attractive film tax incentives. The boost was essential as the film’s budget ended up being tighter than the $26m originally envisioned.

“We faced a $10m problem,” says Gardner.

“We had $20m gross to make the movie, which netted out to just more than $16m after the rebate.”

A tight 35-day shoot added to the need for restraint and tthe budget meant McQueen and his team would need to be savvy savvy. “Of course we wanted more money, but you take what you get and you do the best you can with it. Sometimes your limitations can be your strengths,” says McQueen.

“Fortunately I think Steve is a captain of economy,” says Gardner. “But never to the detriment of narrative.”

McQueen and his regular DoP Sean Bobbitt worked with only one camera and were spare in their number of set-ups: “If the material’s working, they just don’t think it’s necessary,” Gardner explains.

None of the original Louisiana locations of Northup’s story were available.

Instead, the film was shot primarily at four historic Louisiana plantations.

Starting the dance For Ejiofor the early period of production was vital as he began his creative dialogue with McQueen in earnest. It was a dialogue, conversely, in which his co-star Fassbender was well versed.

“I was very aware Steve and Michael had worked together. The conversations they had were more real in a way. My conversations with Steve were engaged but we hadn’t started our dance yet. That created a subtle tension in a way. I was waiting for that tension to be alleviated [come the shoot].

“That’s why I was pushing originally to shoot in chronological order but that wasn’t possible because of schedules. As it turned out we shot the first few weeks on the Epps Plantation. That was useful as I was able to observe Steve and Michael and work my way in.”

Gardner adds: “Everyone was really conscious that a lot of the content that we were going to shoot was going to be difficult to watch, difficult to perform and difficult to

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Paul Giamatti

capture in the time allotted. So it needed to be authentic.”

Much of that authenticity came from the film’s impressive crew and creative team. Ejiofor singles out costume designer Patricia Norris for praise: “She would sample different soils from different plantations and use those soils to age the clothing from each of the plantations in different ways.”

Creating an authentic sound was also key.

Without slave-era recordings, dialect coach Michael Buster suggested the actors study Vanessa Vadim’s 2002 documentary short The Quilts Of Gee’s Bend about an isolated African American community in Alabama.

While the production turned to iconic composer Hans Zimmer for the score, composer Nicholas Britell created new spiritual songs and arranged well-known ones, including a deeply moving rendition of Roll, Jordan, Roll.

In addition, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr, one of the foremost scholars on black history, was a consultant on the film.

‘Focus’ was the word most often repeated by the production when describing the atmosphere on set. Achieving that focus was

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often difficult. “The biggest challenge was keeping the focus, keeping the buzz, through all that emotion,” says McQueen.

“On set there was a heightened sense of focus,” says Ejiofor. “We’d go out on the weekends in New Orleans. We’d let loose. But it was never full release because there was a lot to do and get through. I had violin classes on the weekends, for example.”

Gardner says: “Sometimes intensity is a really wonderful, quiet kind of concentrated environment, and that’s certainly true of this film. Again, I really credit Steve as the leader of that, of setting that tone.”

“There were challenging days,” adds Ejiofor. “The hanging scene was uncomfortable, for example. But I didn’t think of it like that. I could only ever reach a fraction of Solomon’s feelings but that was my goal.”

The heat was another major factor. On the first day of the shoot, it was 106 degrees in the shade. “I was thinking, ‘My God, I need a water vest,’” confides the director. “People were saying ‘Steve, it’s hot isn’t it?’ and I was replying ‘No, it’s fine, it’s brilliant, it’s not hot, it’s good, it’s good.’ Inside I was saying to myself, ‘I don’t know if I can survive this another day.’ It drains you.”

The combination of heat, focus and emotional intensity took its toll on Fassbender, who during his visceral performance as the maniacal Epps went to places McQueen had never before seen him go. “In the rape scene with Patsey, Michael blacked out,” explains the director. “Months after I cut it, he told me he woke up and thought, ‘Who is that person in my bed?’ before turning and seeing the mic. Apparently it was the first time it had ever happened to him.”

The bond between McQueen and Fassbender is one of the most fruitful and impressive actor-director collaborations in film today. “You can’t measure Michael to most actors,” says McQueen. “He’s a once-in-a-lifetime actor. But he’s also an actor who doesn’t keep you at arm’s length. He inspires me, and I hope I inspire him. There’s a kind of connection, although sometimes we don’t really say too much. It’s very odd. I’m just happy he’s there. We have something together but I don’t really talk about it too much.”

Protecting the vision McQueen and editor Joe Walker first cut the film at McQueen’s home in Amsterdam, then in Los Angeles. The final cut was unflinching, uncompromising and brilliant: a film of remarkable energy and emotion, interspersed with moments of startlingly beautiful repose.

McQueen, who always has final cut, did not concede an inch of truth in the edit and neither was he asked to. “You think to yourself, ‘What are the movies that have moved me or charged me?’” explains Gardner. “For me those are movies which have an element of challenge. Protecting that vision was part of our job, and not letting fear of rejection or discomfort prompt you to encourage the edges to be sanded off, or lifting minutes or frames of moments that are really hard to watch.”

After one early screening Brad Weston recalls how one distributor expressed concern

‘We have $24.6m a year to spend on films. We spent a good proportion of that investing in 12 Years’ Tessa Ross, Film4

‘I was wracked with self-doubt.

But Steve was very sure he wanted me for the part. It was a bizarre role reversal’ Chiwetel Ejiofor

about the film’s commercial potential. “‘It’s so tough,’ they said.” But dissent was rare.

Positioning the film in the calendar and in the market was a key challenge. “We screened this movie more than I’ve ever seen a film screened,” acknowledges the New Regency executive. “We took the approach early on that we’d convert one person at a time.”

“We showed it to taste-makers, both African American and Caucasian; we showed it to faith-based leaders; we took it to colleges and we showed it to students, civil-rights groups and universities from Harvard down.

It was a really extensive ground game.

“We were in uncharted territory with this picture,” continues Weston. “It was both an arthouse and an African-American release pattern. We spent a long time talking about the right approach. But we ultimately chose to go after both audiences.”

Gathering momentum The film was originally dated for late December but invitations from Telluride and Toronto changed that schedule. The film went down a storm at both festivals, picking up the coveted audience award at the latter.

The US release moved up to October 18.

“We were going to platform it out, but we didn’t know at what pace we would do that because we still wanted to see the reaction to a very difficult picture,” says Weston.

By November 8, it was playing in more than 1,000 US sites. By the end of the month it had added another 500 sites. By way of comparison, 2010’s best picture winner The Hurt Locker capped at 535 sites.

“Searchlight’s strategy paid off,” says Weston. “The film was the biggest specialty release in the US in 2013 ahead of Blue Jasmine.”

To date the film has grossed $38.5m domestically and will have a re-release on January 17. Analysts predict at least $50m as a final theatrical box office for the film, which is also likely to do strong home entertainment business. “I’m pretty thrilled [with the film’s box office],” beams Gardner. “We always hoped it could catch on and its honesty could be rewarded but you never know.

God knows we’ve made some movies that don’t get seen by anybody.”

The film led the SAG and Golden Globe nominations and has already racked up 87 wins on the festival circuit. It rolls out worldwide in January.

McQueen has credited president Barack Obama’s US presidency for influencing the film industry to make more mainstream films about civil rights and racism.

Despite the flurry of mainstream films with race at their core, 12 Years A Slave was a risk. But above all, the film’s director and the power of the subject matter have inspired its backers to go the extra mile.

“We’ll spend more on this film than on films playing in almost double its number of screens,” says Hamilton of eOne, which releases the film on more than 200 UK screens this weekend. “I said to our sales guys, ‘I want to see this get up towards 400 screens.’ I consider it a duty to get this film s out there. This goes beyond my job.” n

January 10, 2014 Screen International 25 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN Animation

Image makers

With 19 films submitted for the animated feature Oscar, John Hazelton explores how this year’s crop points to the way animated features might evolve

Headline in here please Frozen

W

ith their often engaging narratives, sometimes dazzling imagery and frequently impressive box-office takes, animated features have always represented a happy marriage of art, technology and commerce.

Those elements are evident in this year’s animated feature offerings, 19 of which from around the globe have been submitted for the animated feature Academy Award (see sidebar, opposite).

But also discernible in this year’s animated feature crop are signs of how the sub-genre might evolve as it approaches — by some counts — the start of its second century.

While 2013 may not have been a vintage year for US animation, it has been a crowded and lucrative one. Of the 10 US films (all of which are 3D computer animations) submitted for the Oscar, two have made it into the genre’s post-1980 top 10 of worldwide performers — the $921.5m-grossing Despicable Me 2 and Monsters University with $743m.

That level of competition is no bad thing, suggests Monsters University director Dan

n 26 Screen International January 10, 2014

‘It’s good for us to have so many people making films. It makes us push ourselves to do better’ Dan Scanlon, director, Monsters University

Scanlon. “It is good for us as a studio to have so many people making films,” says Scanlon, who made his animated feature directing debut on the Monsters, Inc prequel from Disney-owned Pixar, whose films have won seven of the last 10 Oscars in the category. “It makes us work harder and push ourselves to do better.”

Part of the challenge on Monsters University was to make use of the latest animation technology — it was the first Pixar project, for example, to use the global illumination lighting process — while maintaining continuity with the 2001 original.

“We ended up deciding to really push the technology in creating the look of the movie,” says Scanlon, “and then in the design of our characters we kept to the deceptively simplistic look of the first film.”

Disney’s Frozen, another of this year’s notable US entries, used new technological tricks to tell an old story couched in the classic form — last used by the studio on 2010’s Tangled — of the animated musical.

Based on the fairy tale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen — whose work also

inspired Disney’s The Little Mermaid — Frozen follows what co-director Chris Buck describes as the studio’s aim of telling “a story that is timely but also timeless”. The film’s relatable characters and cleverly worded songs, says Buck, “kept it fresh and fun”.

The new technological tricks included two software tools, dubbed Matterhorn and Snow Batcher, especially designed to create the varied textures of snow, a substance that in the project’s initial tests, says Buck, “looked like styrofoam. It just didn’t look right.

“The technology just gets better and better,” Buck continues. “So we always push artists to create something that’s not necessarily realistic — which you can do in CG — but that’s believable.”

Employing subtlety The Croods, DreamWorks Animation’s first feature about a human family — albeit a Stone Age one — made use of both new and old techniques, from pyroclastic flow simulation to matte painting. “There’s a hundred years of technology in almost every single

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BEST ANIMATED FEATURE OSCAR SUBMISSIONS

The 19 features submitted for consideration in the animated feature film category for the 86th Academy Awards (in alphabetical order)

Despicable Me 2 ■ Cloudy With A Chance Of

■ A Letter To Momo

Meatballs 2 ■ The Croods ■ Despicable Me 2 ■ Epic ■ Ernest & Celestine ■ The Fake ■ Free Birds ■ Frozen ■ Khumba ■ The Legend Of Sarila

■ Monsters University ■ O Apostolo ■ Planes ■ Puella Magi Madoka Magica

The Movie — Rebellion ■ Rio 2096: A Story Of Love And

Fury ■ The Smurfs 2 ■ Turbo ■ The Wind Rises

After screening the submissions, the Academy’s animated feature film award screening committee will vote to nominate between two and five films for the Oscar, depending on how many submissions meet the theatrical release requirements.

shot,” says director Chris Sanders. But the creative challenge on the film was to animate a natural world that could act as the villain of the story, a threat against which the human family could unite. “We had to make this world fanciful and whimsical but believable enough to keep things grounded,” says Sanders’ co-director Kirk DeMicco.

That piece of ‘casting’, suggests Sanders, and the tale it helped tell, is an example of how animated features are slowly changing.

“As time goes on, we’re able to tell more subtle stories,” the director notes.

An openness to more refined animated stories certainly seems to be reflected in Epic, the first feature with human characters from Ice Age studio Blue Sky. Directed by Blue Sky co-founder Chris Wedge and based on his first feature script, this adventure is set in a fantastical forest populated by tiny warriors. It represents a deliberate departure from the animation norm, a departure not so much in technological terms — though the project did develop new animation rigs to create its more

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realistic human characters — as in tone.

“I came at this wanting to exercise the potential of what I know we can do with animation,” says Wedge, citing partially animated childhood favourites such as King Kong and Jason And The Argonauts.

“I wanted to make an action-adventure movie and I wanted to set it in a place that you could only get to with animation.”

While the US animation field may be crowded, Wedge says: “I would like to see more variety, and making Epic was a risk and an effort to put something with a different but not unfamiliar tone on the screen.” »

Monsters University

Epic and (left) The Smurfs 2 »

January 10, 2014 Screen International 27 ■

AWARDS COUNTDOWN ANIMATION

Ernest & Celestine

The Legend Of Sarila

The Wind Rises

Variety of tone — and of animation techniques — is often easier to find among animated features produced outside the US and the nine international films submitted for this year’s Oscar are evidence of that diversity.

Most notable among the international submissions is The Wind Rises, from Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, whose 2001 fantasy Spirited Away was the last nonUS film to win the animated feature Oscar.

The hand-drawn Studio Ghibli film, which Miyazaki has said will be his last feature, was a box-office smash in Japan but may be stymied in the US — where it is being released by Disney — because it is based on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer whose designs were used in Second World War Japanese fighter planes. In Japan, says Fran Krause, a faculty member in the character animation department

■ 28 Screen International January 10, 2014

O Apostolo

at the renowned California Institute of the Arts, “There are a lot of people who treat Miyazaki like a cultural hero, so he can be very risky with the films he makes.”

This year’s other Oscar submissions from the traditiona l l y s t ro n g Ja p a n e s e animation industry are A Letter To Momo, from director Hiroyuki Okiura, and TV series spin-off Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie — Rebellion.

Europe is represented by hand drawn-French film Ernest & Celestine, winner of the Cesar for best animated film and of the grand prize at New York International Children’s Film Festival, and O Apostolo, the stop-motion horror tale from Spain that won the audience award at this year’s Annency International Animation Festival.

And from Latin America, a region with a growing reputation for animation, comes Brazilian handdrawn historical drama Rio 2096: A Story Of Love

‘We always push artists to create something that’s not necessarily realistic, but that’s believable’ Chris Buck, co-director, Frozen

(Left) Khumba

And Fury, winner of the best feature Cristal at Annency (Argentinian hit Foosball is missing from this year’s list but could still be submitted next year).

Perhaps the most commercially significant of this year’s international submissions are Khumba, from South Africa’s Triggerfish Animation — which also produced last year’s Zambezia — and The Legend Of Sarila, from French Canada’s CarpeDiem. Both are 3D CG features with big — by international standards — budgets representing the ambitions of some international producers to emulate the outputs and global reach of Hollywood’s major animation studios.

Achieving those ambitions might take some time and significant increases in international animation budgets, which still tend to be a fraction of those at the disposal of US animators. But some animation industry executives suggest the international sector is already gaining ground.

“Internationally, it’s been a really strong year,” says Dave Jesteadt, head of distribution at Gkids, US distributor of Ernest & Celestine and A Letter To Momo. “We’re starting to see increasing amounts of diversity and a higher s level of quality, especially in the CG sector.” ■

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

dubai Reviews in brief Stable Unstable

Dir/scr: Mahmoud Hojeij. Leb-Qatar. 2013. 87mins

Stable Unstable (Talih Nezil) is an impressively structured drama — with subtle comedy elements — that uses the gambit of the psychiatrist’s chair to tell the stories of different patients struggling for balance in an unstable country. Writer-director Mahmoud Hojeij opts for static set-ups that give his talented performers room to work. This well-made and intriguing film had its world premiere at Dubai, and deserves further festival exposure. Set on December 31 in Beirut, the story sees seven very different people visit their psychiatrist (Camille Salameh). The psychiatrist, whose face is not revealed until late in the film, probes his patients about their feelings. Their problems are all different — one woman wants to know why she shouldn’t love two people at the same time; one man angrily stalks the room; a couple barely talk to each other; and a mother has issues with her son — but the subtext relates to issues within the country, though this aspect is handled with weary restraint.

Mark Adams CONTACT ABBOUT PRODUCTIONS www.abboutproductions.com Dubai International film festival

Traitors

Dir/scr: Sean Gullette. Mor. 2013. 84mins

US director Sean Gullette expands his 2011 30-minute short film (also called Traitors and starring Chaimae Ben Acha) to come up with a vibrant Morocco-set film about the lead singer of an all-girl punk-rock band who is lured into a drugs run to help family and also fund a recording session. It is an energetic and exciting film, with Ben Acha excellent as the young woman who favours hoodies and tight jeans over clothes expected from society. Gullette, who starred in Pi, is a directing talent to watch.

Mark Adams CONTACT REZO FILMS

www.rezofilms.com

May In The Summer

Dir/scr: Cherien Dabis. US-Jord-Qat. 2013. 100mins

Tagged as a dramatic comedy, though more dramatic than comic, Cherien Dabis’ follow-up to her acclaimed Amreeka follows a US-based Palestinian woman who returns to Jordan to face the family and country she left behind. Dabis’ decision to play the lead role suggests this may be a personal affair, and anxiety is much more in evidence than fun in this affectionate family portrait. Thirty-something May Brennan (Dabis), who lives in New York having published a warmly received book about the Middle East, is back in Amman with her divorced mother Nadine (Hiam Abbass) and two younger sisters Yasmine (Nadine Malouf ) and Dalia (Alia Shawkat).

May is awaiting the arrival of her respected lecturer boyfriend, Ziad (Alexander Siddig), and they intend to be married in the presence of their families, but it is not as simple as all that. Nadine, a devout Christian, is against her daughter marrying a Muslim, feeling mixed marriages are doomed to fail.

Dan Fainaru CONTACT ELLE DRIVER

www.elledriver.eu

n 30 Screen International January 10, 2014

Factory Girl Dir: Mohamed Khan. Egypt-UAE. 2013. 92mins

The slickly made Factory Girl (Fatat El Masnaa) may have the melodramatic trappings of a soap opera, but underneath its tale of love, longing, false accusations and recriminations there is a powerful story of a young woman longing for an independence that society is not keen to allow her. The feisty Yasmine Raees is terrific in the lead role.

Veteran director Mohamed Khan — whose credits include Supermarket and Dreams Of Hind And Camelia — is a sure hand and brings out the best from his largely female cast, with Wessam Soliman’s script both playful and blunt as it deals powerfully with the harsh results of a rumour that runs out of control. The film, which had its world premiere at Dubai, is likely to play at other festivals and has the dramatic highs to appeal to liberalminded Middle Eastern distributors.

Vivacious Hiyam (Raees) is a young worker at a cloth-

ing factory where her fellow women workers are a noisy bunch, quick to make jokes, and all taken by the arrival of a new supervisor, Salah (Hani Adel).

Hiyam is especially charmed by Saleh’s brooding looks and wastes no time in gently forcing her way into his life, even visiting the apartment he shares with his mother and sister. Hiyam starts to convince herself that they could have a relationship, despite the fact she comes from a lower social class. When the pair finally share a kiss, she is in heaven — but it is then her life starts to fall apart.

Her fellow workers start to think she is acting strangely and when she suffers stomach cramps at the same time a pregnancy-test kit is discovered at the factory, they conclude she has had sex with Salah. When her period is late, her mother accuses her of being pregnant. At the same time Salah stops returning her calls, telling her they could never marry because of their class differences.

Ostracised by all around her, Hiyam does not defend herself — even when her own grandmother brutally pins her down to cut off her long hair in one of the film’s most shocking moments — until finally the truth is revealed.

In a delightful final scene Hiyam shows her independence by revealing her short hair and dancing vibrantly — to the smiles of her co-workers — at a wedding.

Raees is excellent in the complex lead role, giving the melodramatic story a real sense of energy and passion.

Mark Adams CONTACT MAD DISTRIBUTION

diff@mad-solutions.com

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Reviews in brief

Her

Dir/scr: Spike Jonze. US. 2013. 120mins The quirkiness of director Spike Jonze’s early films takes a back seat to more emotional concerns in Her, a funny and touching — and still pretty quirky — romantic drama centred on a beautifully sustained lead performance from Joaquin Phoenix.

Sure to please critics, this futuristic love story will also be embraced by hip youngish cinema-goers.

In his first appearance since The Master, Phoenix gives another intense performance, though this time his character is less mannered and much more sympathetic. Co-star Scarlett Johansson also contributes greatly to bringing the film’s central relationship to life. Based on Jonze’s first script as a solo screenwriter, Her is set in a near-future Los Angeles where Phoenix’s Theodore is a recently separated commercial writer who really connects with Samantha, the voice-controlled operating system on his computer (voiced by Johansson).

John Hazelton

CONTACT Annapurna Pictures www.annapurnapics.com

The Class Of ’92

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues Dir: Adam McKay. US. 2013. 119mins Will Ferrell’s star power is put to the test in the form of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, the first theatrical sequel starring the funnyman. Ferrell’s epically weird collaboration with director Adam McKay, with whom he shares a screenplay credit, is a leisurely cinematic stroll with one of the comedian’s more indelible characters.

Whatever one makes of the surrounding vehicle, which has its share of lulls in addition to some high points, narcissistic television newsman Ron Burgundy commands attention in an uncanny way. The film had taken a creditable $181m from eight territories as of January 5.

Anchorman 2 picks up seven to eight years after the first film, in the early 1980s. Burgundy and his onetime rival, Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), are happily married New York City weekend newscast coanchors, and have a young son, Walter (Judah Nelson).

When Veronica receives a promotion and Ron is canned, however, his entrenched professional jealousies cause the couple to split.

Recruited to a position at GNN, the first 24-hour cable news network, Ron sets out to reassemble his old team: sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner), now running a chain of chicken restaurants that actually serve fried bats; field reporter Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), now a photographer; and simpleton weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), who is busy organising his own funeral.

Initially saddled with the indignity of the graveyard shift, Ron bridles under the thumbs of various authority figures and rivals — including Australian multi-millionaire GNN owner Kench Allenby (Josh Lawson), popular

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lead anchor Jack Lime (James Marsden) and Veronica’s new boyfriend, Gary (Greg Kinnear). Things change, however, when Ron stumbles on a formula for ratings success: jingoistic jabber, and “telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.”

Anchorman 2 is, fairly shrewdly, shot through with any number of structural and thematic parallels to the first movie, including a musical sequence, a surreal competitive professional rumble, and Ron’s decidedly unsophisticated discomfort at novel, non-white-male workplace equals, this time represented by Linda Jackson (Meagan Good), his strong-willed African-American producer and new romantic foil. And, like its predecessor, the movie at times even legitimately flirts with laying claim to serving as a metaphor for America — Ron succeeding, through a combination of bigheartedness, unfaltering struggle and plain dumb luck, despite much boorish behaviour.

Ferrell’s comedies are, of course, all built to varying degrees around improvisation. While here this produces its fair share of fantastically funny riffs, one does wish for a bit more narrative discipline, and not merely because of the 119-minute running time. Still, Ferrell and his comrades exhibit a great rapport throughout. He, Carell and Rudd in particular have not only a gift for ad-libbing, but also nonverbal, in-character lateral thinking. This makes the subtle interplay of their shared scenes a delight, and oddly rooted, despite much grade-A silliness.

Brent Simon

Dirs: Benjamin Turner, Gabe Turner. UK. 2013.

99mins Though at heart a film aimed at fans of Manchester United football club, UK documentary The Class Of ’92 is a fascinating insight into the lives and attitudes of a remarkably down-to-earth group of footballers who played a vital part in the club’s success.

The film has the additional selling point that global brand/star David Beckham is one of the six featured players. Sensibly the film focuses on the notion that great talents can come together as a team to produce something remarkable. The likes of Beckham, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes are perhaps the best known of the six — rounded out by Gary Neville, Phil Neville and Nicky Butt — but the film treats them as equals, playing on their growth together rather than individual skills or characteristics. They have plenty of time to offer opinions, but the scenes that work best see the six sat around a dinner table, sipping wine and displaying a warm camaraderie.

Mark Adams

CONTACT UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Of Horses And Men

Dir/scr: Benedikt Erlingsson. Ice-Ger. 2013. 81mins A remarkable big-screen debut, the intriguing Icelandic film Of Horses And Men (Hross I Oss) was the territory’s submission to the foreign-language Oscar category. Benedikt Erlingsson makes wonderful use of the striking landscape as he weaves together a series of interlinking stories that veer from darkly amusing tales of death and sex through to more disturbing fare. Horses may be at the core of the film, but hardship and tragedy often loom, and at times viewing can be difficult.

Mark Adams

CONTACT ICELANDIC FILM CENTRE www.icelandicfilmcentre.is

CONTACT PARAMOUNT PICTURES

January 10, 2014 Screen International 31 n

AWARDS COUNTDOWN THE PEOPLE AND THE EVENTS ON THE AWARDS CIRCUIT THIS WEEK

Steve McQueen

Sandra Bullock

Bruce Dern

Steve McQueen was among the winners at the 25th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival awards gala on January 4, picking up director of the year for 12 Years A Slave. Lupita Nyong’o received the breakthrough performance award for the film. Nebraska star Bruce Dern received the career achievement award, while Sandra Bullock received the Desert Palm

Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks achievement award, actress, for Gravity. Tom Hanks received the chairman’s award for Captain Phillips and Saving Mr Banks. Other winners included Meryl Streep (the icon award for August: Osage County), Matthew McConaughey (Desert Palm achievement award, actor, for Dallas Buyers Club) and American Hustle, which won the ensemble performance award.

Forest Whitaker (left) received Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s eighth annual Kirk Douglas award for excellence in film at a black-tie gala dinner on January 5. The star of The Butler and Out Of The Furnace was joined by his Black Nativity co-star Angela Bassett and Michael B Jordan, who stars in the Whitaker-produced Fruitvale Station.

Actors (from left) Will Poulter, Léa Seydoux and George MacKay attended the announcement of the 2014 Bafta EE Rising Star Award nominees at Bafta’s central London headquarters on January 6. Also nominated are Dane DeHaan and Lupita Nyong’o.

Nominees were selected by a group of jurors including actress Gemma Arterton, deputy chair of Bafta’s film committee Pippa Harris and film critic Mark Kermode. The winner, decided by public vote, will be announced at the Bafta film awards ceremony on February 16. Both MacKay and Poulter are former Screen International UK Stars of Tomorrow.

■ 32 Screen International January 10, 2014

Judi Dench was joined by Philomena co-star Steve Coogan (centre) and co-screenwriter Jeff Pope (left) at a screening of the film for Bafta and AMPAS members at the Vue West End in London on December 13.

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