2012-2013 AwardsLine Oscar Print Editions: Issue 03

O S C A R S E AS O N 2 0 1 2 — 2 0 1 3

ANIMATION SONG & SCORE

21 TOONS IN THE RACE PETE HAMMOND’S FULL ANALYSIS

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SCORES SPOTLIGHTED

PLUS ORIGINAL SONG CONTENDERS

OFFICIAL SELECTION AFI FILM FESTIVAL

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WINNER

AUDIENCE FAVORITE CHILDREN’S FILM

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL

WINNER

VANITY FAIR INT’L AWARD FOR CINEMATIC EXCELLENCE

ROME INT’L FILM FESTIVAL

WINNER

OFFICIAL SELECTION

HOLLYWOOD FILM FESTIVAL

SAVANNAH FILM FESTIVAL

HOLLYWOOD ANIMATION AWARD

OSCAR SEASON 2012—2013

E d i t or i a l Tea m

AWARDS | LINE EDITOR

Christy Grosz

AWARDS | LINE MANAGING EDITOR & CONTRIBUTOR

Anthony D’Alessandro

DEADLINE AWARDS COLUMNIST

Pete Hammond

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ANIMATION SONG & SCORE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEADLINE FILM EDITOR

Mike Fleming DEADLINE TV EDITOR

Nellie Andreeva DEADLINE EDITORS

Patrick Hipes Denise Petski Kinsey Lowe AWARDS| LINE CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Brownfield Diane Haithman Monica Corcoran Harel Ari Karpel Cari Lynn Thomas J. McLean David Mermelstein Craig Modderno Ray Richmond

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Des i g n , P ro d u c t i on & Mar k e t i n g

AWARDS| LINE CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Jason Farrell

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Erik Denno MARKETING CONSULTANT

Madelyn Hammond

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Historic Proportions

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Child’s Play

Anna Karenina composer Dario Marianelli discusses the challenges of working with a period setting.

Using indigenous instruments kept the Beasts of the Southern Wild score eclectic and playful.

14)

A Quintet

16)

Idol Chatter

Cham Kim Jeff Vespa

EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

08)

The original song race is peppered with pop-music icons.

Digital Master

AWARDS| LINE CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Jay Penske

IN TUNE

12)

SR. DIRECTOR, ADVERTISING OPERATIONS

FOUNDER, CHAIRMAN & CEO

04)

Mychael Danna didn’t have visual cues for many of the complicated scenes he scored in Life of Pi.

Composer Alexandre Desplat created the music behind five films this season.

Danny Elfman was inspired by the partnership between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann for his latest score.

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Circles and Lines

24)

Arcade Fire

28)

24)

Paul Woolnough SVP ENTERTAINMENT SALES

Nic Paul VP PARTNERSHIPS & PRODUCT

Craig Perreault VP FINANCE

Ken DelAlcazar GM ENTV/PMC STUDIOS

Michael Davis

32)

The animation race is packed with 21 films that qualify to compete for gold.

Wreck-It Ralph realizes Disney’s long-held belief that an animated movie about videogames would work.

Creature Comforts

Focusing on character development gives Rise of the Guardians a timeless charm.

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Supernatural Wonder

36)

Effecting Change

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Style Counsel

ParaNorman walks a fine line between spooky and funny.

Visual effects have gotten so seamless that even the experts can’t always tell the real from the digital.

The Academy now pairs hairstyling with makeup in the below-the-line Oscar category.

VP ENTERTAINMENT SALES

Shelby Haro SR. ENTERTAINMENT SALES DIRECTOR

Cathy Goepfert CONSUMER SALES DIRECTORS

Debbie Goldberg ACCOUNT DIRECTOR

Carra Fenton ACCOUNT MANAGER

Tiffany Windju Lauren Stagg ADVERTISING INQUIRIES

Nic Paul 310-484-2517/npaul@pmc.com

IS THE PARENT COMPANY AND OWNER OF:

36)

40)

On a Role

42)

Tool Box

Casting can make or break a film, yet it’s not a part of Oscar’s process.

The Hobbit breaks new ground in terms of how its visual effects were created.

Rattle & H Composers and Lyricists Discuss Their Entries in the Original Song Race ACT OF VALOR “For You” After watching Act of Valor, country music icon Keith Urban sat down at his Nashville home with his cowriter Monty Powell to discuss their feelings about the military action film they just saw; an anomaly that specifically cast active U.S. Navy Seals performing fictionalized missions.

“I asked myself, ‘Was there something I would die for?’

Certainly, in my case, it was my family. That was the spirit of the song for me,” explains Urban about the film’s sacrificial theme. “It’s easy to watch a military film and have an opinion, but for me it wasn’t about those things, rather, if I had to take a bullet, I would do it for them.”

It was that kind of heart that brought soul to the end-titles song for Relativity’s hit winter film ($70 million), not to mention resonating with Urban’s fanbase and sending “For You” to the No. 6 slot on Billboard’s Country Songs chart.

When writing the opening lines of “For You,” the duo drew inspiration from a moment in which one of the Navy SEALS jumps on a grenade and gives his life for the team. “We decided to start the song seconds after he died, and that if he came back from the dead, here’s what he would have to say,” explains Urban.

Monty Powell & Keith Urban Urban and Powell used banjo to construct an up-tempo signature riff to pull the listener in before segueing to acoustic guitar and climaxing with a Strat guitar solo to “respond to the epic landscape of the music,” says Urban.

Shooting the music video proved exhilarating, as a number of the Bandito Brothers production crew reconvened on the original California desert site, the Silurian Dry Lake, where they shot Act of Valor four years prior. A particular high point during the video was the detonation of explosives in the background of Urban’s performance.

Given the amount of music-themed films that his wife, Nicole Kidman, has headlined, Urban looks forward to contributing a track to one of her projects down the road. In fact, director Lee Daniels reached out to him about the possibility of contributing a song for Kidman’s latest movie, The Paperboy.

But when you’re a country recording artist with 15 million album sales under your hat, a world tour, and American Idol judging duties, timing is key.

—Anthony D’Alessandro Keith Urban

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Hum

CHASING ICE “Before My Time”

J. Ralph

Composer J. Ralph, who has scored two Oscar-winning documentaries, The Cove and Man on Wire, was drawn to his latest project by a somewhat difficult challenge. In working on the climate-change doc Chasing Ice, he wanted to bring a voice to the ice.

“I wanted to create an awareness of feeling, a spiritual and visceral projection of the ice breaking up,” says Ralph, who enlisted the vocal talent of his friend Scarlett Johansson for the title track, “Before My Time.”

Johansson is paired with violinist Joshua Bell on the song, which brings an emotional close to the powerful examination of the changing glaciers. “I wrote the song as a meditative and endless look at the feelings we face daily when governments and corporations neglect the changes in climate control,” Ralph says. “Scarlett provided the Mother Earth feeling that I wanted to express in the song. She knew where to find and emphasize the specific emotional beats in the tune. The one instrument that spoke to me was the violin, and that’s where Joshua Bell complemented Scarlett’s voice so well. Her voice and his violin are the only two instruments you hear on ‘Before My Time.’ ” Ralph admits he was tempted to ask Carly Simon or other well-known singers he’s worked with to sing “Before My Time,” but the first person he played Johansson’s vocals for—rock legend Stephen Stills—echoed his enthusiasm.

“She can really sing and knows how to act out the song,” Stills says.

Ralph, who would love to write an original score for a feature film, realized from the beginning of Chasing Ice that audiences would have to pay attention to the scientific details discussed on screen. “You can have any opinion you desire on climate control, but when you see glaciers physically disappearing before your eyes, it’s hard not to be emotionally moved,” he explains. “The movie grinds to a halt at the end then becomes surreal, so the song gives clarity to the audience. I wanted the lyrics to say that you can’t protest or think you are bigger than Mother Nature. Just look at the news footage of Hurricane Sandy.”

—Craig Modderno

J. Ralph seated at the piano.

LES MISÉRABLES “Suddenly” Alain Boublil & Claude-Michel Schönberg

After nearly 30 years and one of the longest runs in musical history, the much-touted film version of Les Misérables includes a new song, penned and composed by the musical’s original lyricist, Alain Boublil, and original composer, Claude-Michel Schönberg.

Both Boublil and Schönberg are quick to credit the notion of adding a new song to the film’s director Tom Hooper, who’d pinpointed a chapter he wanted to incorporate from Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, upon which the eponymous musical is based.

“It is the first time Jean Valjean meets the young Cosette, just as he rescues her from the Inn of the Thénardiers,” explains Boublil. “We called the song ‘Suddenly’ because (Jean Valjean) suddenly discovers the world is not all bad, it’s not about revenge and hatred. Hugo described how two people who’d been unhappy—the girl and Jean Valjean, who was in jail for 19 years for nothing—can come together to create happiness.

This song is a discovery of love.”

From left: Les Mis creator Cameron Mackintosh with composers Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg.

“There’s a good reason for this very tender, very moving song,” Schönberg adds, “and it’s much easier to show this on the camera, with a hand stroking the head of a little girl, than it is to capture that (detail) on stage.”

Both Boublil and Schönberg started out as pop songwriters in France, and throughout their three decades of collaborating— which also included the musical blockbuster Miss Saigon—their process has remained unchanged. First, they discuss at great length what a song is going to be about, then Schönberg composes the music, and last, Boublil writes the lyrics.

Both claim they’ve always been open to a film version of their musical Les Mis, but nothing ever came to fruition. “We went as far as we could, but projects have their own strength, they carry on or they don’t,” says Boublil. Then they were introduced to Hooper, who’d just won the Oscar for The King’s Speech. Hooper insisted the film version of Les Mis be the musical in its entirety and not a movie crafted around songs.

He also insisted it be shot live rather than lip-synched, which had been the standard method for filming songs.

“We were working with a director for a new medium with new avenues for ways things couldn’t be said on stage,” Boublil says.

Aside from the addition of “Suddenly,” the film remains true to the original musical. “No songs have been removed,” assures Boublil. “That would have been a sacrilege.”

—Cari Lynn

Continued on next page...

Rattle and Hum

STAND UP GUYS “Old Habits Die Hard” & “Not Running Anymore”

...from previous

Jon Bon Jovi Diane Warren

When Jon Bon Jovi received an Oscar nomination almost 22 years ago for his composition “Blaze of Glory” from Young Guns II, he didn’t think it would take him that long to try again. “I was watching an awards show earlier this year, and I thought to myself, Why haven’t I written a film score lately? Oh, yeah, it’s because I made six albums in the past decade, and I forgot about my film work,” he says, somewhat amused at his benign neglect of his scoring and promising acting career.

(Though he had a small part last year in director Garry Marshall’s New Year’s Eve.) But Bon Jovi has finally turned back to his film work, writing two songs—“Old Habits Die Hard” and “Not Running Anymore”—for the gangster movie Stand Jon Bon Jovi Up Guys, starring Al Pacino and Christopher Walken. Though he wrote them off the script prior to shooting, the New Jersey rocker’s follow-through was quite unconventional.

“Originally, I played my guitar and sung my songs on my iPod for the filmmakers. Then, when they started shooting, I went on location, and I became these guys in my head. I was very low-key and absorbed the atmosphere to fine-tune the songs, which are very specific to the action onscreen.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK “Silver Lining” Diane Warren “When it comes to the Academy Award, I feel like Susan Lucci,” jokes songwriter Diane Warren, who has six best song Oscar nominations but no wins. Her last nom was in 2002 for a song featured in Pearl Harbor, but Warren has a good chance again this year for penning “Silver Lining,” the romantic theme song for director David O. Russell’s offbeat comedy-drama Silver Linings Playbook. Warren’s lyrics, performed by Jessie J, highlight a dance-rehearsal scene between Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence at a crucial moment late in the picture.

“The funny thing is, I love writing songs for films,” Bon Jovi continues. “My band is very supportive of me doing this because it teaches me humility. Musicians are in awe of actors and both respect each other’s craft. After he saw the film, Al wrote me a nice letter saying it was the best song he heard in a movie since Bang the Drum Slowly. That’s the kind of compliment that makes me want to do more movies.”

Bon Jovi admits his life would change a bit if either of his songs were to get attention from the Academy. “I may have to shift some things since my band will be on the road then. I can afford to give up the day job (for that)!”

—Craig Modderno

WRECK-IT RALPH “When Can I See You Again?”

Adam Young & Matt Thiessen Adam Young

Though she wasn’t able to see the completed film before setting to work, Warren says she loved the script. “As soon as I read the script, the computer in my brain started putting together the song, which was a little more up-tempo and soulful and more retro than the version in the film,” Warren explains. “The idea was to show an important change in the temperamental relationship between the two leads that reflected the fun and romantic joy of going crazy.”

Warren’s hardest problem was convincing executive producer Harvey Weinstein to let her friend Jessie J sing the song in the film. “Harvey kept saying, ‘Get me Beyoncé or Adele.’ Harvey wanted a name, a star to sing it. Later on, he suggested turning it into a duet with Bruno Mars and any female singer the public would know. When Jessie J closed the Olympics, Harvey, to his credit, claimed she was now a star and gave us permission to use her.”

Warren, who has written songs for three different testosterone-driven Jerry Bruckheimer-produced action films, enjoyed the challenge of writing for a gentler film. “You get big-bucks royalties from writing songs for extremely popular malebonding movies like Con Air, Pearl Harbor, and Armageddon,” she says. “This time, it was nice to do a zany romantic song that showed more of my feminine side.”

—Craig Modderno

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Matt Thiessen

When Adam Young received a call from Disney Animation asking him to pen an original song for the animated film Wreck-It Ralph, it almost seemed too good to be true. It hadn’t been that long since Young was an anonymous kid experimenting in his parents’ Minnesota basement with some keyboards and his computer, then uploading the resulting songs to MySpace. A longtime fan of Alan Menken, who scored Disney’s Aladdin among others, Young was told it was his electronica sound that would be a perfect fit to close the 3D film about videogame characters.

Tapping his friend and frequent collaborator Matt Thiessen, of the Christian rock band Relient K (the two are so close they refer to each other as Brother Bear), they were shown only a handful of storyboards and the last five minutes of the film. “(Disney) said, ‘We don’t want to show you too much because that can sometimes be counterproductive,’ ” Young explains. “I agree, and it was great to have just broad strokes and the general feeling.” Thiessen, too, felt that the sentiment in the clip was enough to inspire, and they set about creating a song that was optimistic but somewhat open-ended.

On past collaborations, they worked together in the same room, but this time, they were both on separate tours with their bands so they had to make do. “Adam cooked up a track and sent it my way, and I started singing over it, then sent it his way,” says Thiessen, who wanted to focus the lyrics around the exploration of new worlds, of getting out there and living. The track went back and forth via email as they both changed and added elements, and an MP3 demo eventually went to Disney.

“They were very open-minded to how rough the quality was,” Young says. “They weren’t quick to criticize anything, which I hadn’t expected because there’s nobody who does this better than they do.”

When asked about the Oscar buzz surrounding their song, both were genuinely humble. “It’s hard to grasp what it means just to have a song in a Disney Animation film,” says Young, “and you can see it in the theater and see my name in the credits. To bring in the subject of Oscars, it’s crazy.”

“It’s one dream outshining another dream,” says Thiessen.

—Cari Lynn

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For the titular hero Norman, the filmmakers created 8,800 faces, with the range of individual pieces of brows and mouths to give him

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z limbing C Walt the From left: Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina director Joe Wright, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Alicia Vikander

By David Mermelstein

Anna Karenina Proved a Lengthy—But Rewarding—Challenge for Dario Marianelli For Dario Marianelli, who has scored all but one of Joe Wright’s five films, Anna Karenina presented exciting challenges. Wright’s fragmented telling of Tolstoy’s great novel afforded the composer new opportunities for musical expression—even as the film hewed to the story’s period setting.

“There were huge opportunities by the film not being literal,” says Marianelli, who recently spoke by phone from England. “But because those opportunities were opened up, they had to be taken, and that’s hard work. I can’t remember a film where I worked so hard and so long. For more than a year, on and off.”

Beyond that, Wright’s film was heavily choreographed, so Marianelli’s music had to be ready especially early. “It was a lot of work up front, written before the script was even finished, particularly the two waltzes.

I had to write them first, then adjust them when they were shot and then adjust them again during the editing. It was an inordinate amount of work, but all worth it.”

The freedom extended to the kind of music Marianelli would write, and its instrumentation, including a surprising amount of brass. Anyone expecting buttoned-up strains will be surprised by the pulsing passion and robust comic flair of the composer’s score, which despite such indulgences remains appealingly tasteful and elegant.

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“We started with the idea of two opposites,” Marianelli says, “the folk music, the earthy music toward which the character of Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) is attracted, and then the more sophisticated music of the aristocracy and also the pretense, the life on a stage. Then gradually more ideas came in, and they started interbreeding. We ended up with a lot less folk music and more of this new entity of the bands— rougher sounds coming into the sophisticated orchestra but still very pure high violin over simple piano or music-box notes.”

‘‘

I can’t remember a film where I worked so hard and so long.

’’

But a third element soon forced its way into Marianelli’s musical consciousness. “There was a necessity to have something that could give voice to the aspirations Anna (Keira Knightley) and Levin have to lead a life away from the stage. So I have a compass with three points, the third being this otherworldly music that had to be very pure and simple, and that represented the truth of a life they all wanted but couldn’t have—the escape they desired.”

The hardest part, of course, was getting started, and Marianelli points to that first waltz with particular affection. “I remembered recently that was the very first tune when I put my hands on the keyboard and wanted to send something to Joe to start the conversation,” the composer recalls. “This was May of last year, a full four or five months before the scene was shot. But I wanted to find something tender that could be danced to but that I could use at the end as well for when Anna dies. That slowly descending harmony—I’ll whistle it badly for you—that theme is particularly dear to me because it’s the first.”

He is equally partial to the clarity—rare for him, he says—that accompanied its articulation. “At that point, it was clear that it had to be something that could take this whirling moment when Anna falls in love with Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), when she’s enraptured or entrapped by him, but could also be used as a mournful commentary on her death.

And I never let go of that in the months that followed.

I found variations on the piano, in the orchestra, but substantially it was the same tune I had from day one.

It’s like an old friend now. And if I have to go to the piano and play a bit from Anna Karenina, that’s what I will play.”

z

Eclectic

Company

From left: director, cocomposer Benh Zeitlin and cocomposer Dan Romer.

By David Mermelstein

Conveying a Childlike Wonder Was the Key to the Sound of Beasts of the Southern Wild Convincingly relating a child’s sense of wonder in a movie for grownups is never easy. But Benh Zeitlin and Dan Romer managed it handily in the music for Beasts of the Southern Wild, which Zeitlin also directed and cowrote.

Set in the wetlands of the deep South immediately before a major storm (presumably Hurricane Katrina), the film combines expected musical choices—country fiddle, accordion—with some unconventional ones—celesta and pop-music beats— to create a satisfying gumbo rich in character, mood, and atmosphere.

“I think the world looks down on these places,” Zeitlin says of his film’s setting. “I wanted to make this film about why people stay, about how beautiful and how much freedom there is in this culture. I want audiences to understand that places like this have found freedom and joy, and the music takes you there.”

To convey that sense Zeitlin and Romer used music of indigenous Cajun bands, especially the celebrated Balfa Brothers, but they also didn’t shy from incorporating other elements from their eclectic playbook.

“Me and Dan have diverse taste,” Zeitlin explains.

“We listen to a lot of Rachmaninoff and Michael Nyman. We both write pop music. Kate Bush was a big influence on us, also Beyoncé and Rihanna.”

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Their big challenge was creating a sound that simultaneously incorporated a sense of place with a child’s sense of self. “Our star (Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy) is 6 years old, and modern pop music is what she loves,” Zeitlin says. “We wanted the score to have an indigenous texture, but also have kick-youin-the-face energy that modern pop music is so good at, and we wanted to find a bridge to all those things.”

They found it toward the beginning of the film, as a parade makes its way through the area affectionately known as the Bathtub in the movie. The scene culminates in a fireworks celebration that also serves as the film’s title sequence. “That was pretty much the first idea we had when we sat down,” Romer recalls.

“Benh wrote me that there would be a Cajun band early on. He asked what musicians should be there at the shoot. We talked about two violins and a guitar. We wanted a Cajun band playing in the scene, but then something else is playing in Hushpuppy’s head. We wanted Hushpuppy to augment the live music in her brain. To the rest of the world, it’s just a Cajun band, but in her head it’s reharmonized and orchestrated.”

The pair got the Lost Bayou Ramblers to play Balfa Brothers songs, including “Balfa Waltz” (or “Valse de Balfa”). “When I listened to that song, I realized we can do so much with it because it’s basically only one

chord,” Romer says. “We can completely reharmonize this. We can add cellos or whatever. It just worked out perfectly. That was our first big idea together. The fireworks sequence is the big takeoff, blending the traditional music with the Bathtub anthem. The full anthem doesn’t come back until the credits, though it does come back in smaller bits in between.”

‘‘ ’’

WE WANTED THE SCORE TO HAVE AN INDIGENOUS TEXTURE, BUT ALSO HAVE KICK-YOUIN-THE-FACE ENERGY.

For Zeitlin, that cue was the movie in nutshell. “The purpose was to make you fall in love with this town and culture in a very short period of time,” he said.

“We had to sell audiences on this place that they might normally be afraid of. And music was a key to making that happen. This world may look reckless or dangerous, but for Hushpuppy it’s what she loves more than anything else in the world.”

–CBS-TV, Bryan Erdy

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BEST ORIGINAL SONG “WHEN CAN I SEE YOU AGAIN?” WRITTEN BY WaltDisneyStudiosAwards.com ©2012 Disney

Adam Young & Matthew Thiessen

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BEST ORIGINAL SCORE Henry Jackman

Slice of ‘Pi’ Background: Suraj Sharma in a still from Life of Pi. Foreground: composer Mychael Danna.

By David Mermelstein

Mychael Danna Says Life of Pi’s CGI Elements Made Scoring the Film a Little Scary For Life of Pi, his third collaboration with director Ang Lee, composer Mychael Danna incorporated the sounds of Asia—especially India—into a multicultural stew of a score. Along with a full studio orchestra, accordion, piano, celesta, and mandolin, Danna added Balinese gamelan, Persian ney, basuri (an Indian transverse flute), Indian percussion, and, of course, the sitar. Plus, the venerable Pandit Jasraj (still going strong at 82) contributed vocals.

“Pi is a 21st-century citizen; he belongs nowhere and everywhere,” says Danna of the lead character in the film, based on an acclaimed novel that blends adventure and spirituality. “It’s set in India but in a French colonial town. So we have accordions and mandolins playing Indian melodies and sitars playing French melodies. We also have an English boys’ choir singing Sanskrit and a Tibetan chorus singing in Latin. The goal was to carefully—and, hopefully, artfully—blend every culture that Pi comes across and then makes part of his own essence.”

‘‘

It was very wild, with everyone playing with abandon and a great deal of power and passion.

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Combining the tale’s fantasy elements with its more profound truths didn’t come easy. “Most of the film depicts Pi as a young boy or young man,” Danna says, “and for the music to connect to him, we needed that sense of boyish wonder, that sense of awe and youth to the sonorities. My first drafts didn’t have that.”

Complicating matters for the composer was the film’s great reliance on CGI. “It technically makes it much more difficult to score,” Danna explains, “because those elements don’t come in until the very end of the process. So for a lot of things, I had to rely on Ang’s descriptions. I’d be working with storyboard or crude versions of a scene. There’s an extra layer of removal from what you’re scoring when you work like that. I think it worked out fine, but it was a bit scary.”

The biggest challenge came in the “Storm of God” scene, in which Pi and a tiger named Richard Parker lose the raft of supplies roped to their rowboat. “It’s a very complicated scene in the sense that the CGI was crude when I wrote the music. The score has to get harsh and big—this concept was very important to Ang—because the God of the storm is the real true God, and that God has no personal connection to Pi, no compassion for him. He’s a God far removed from puny human endeavors—as opposed to the gods Pi knew as a child, the mythological Indian gods. And Ang wanted a big transfer here, a shift to awesome

and frightening and powerful and overwhelming That’s a shift in color and theme, and it had to be anchored in other places in the score where Pi comes to know God with a big ‘G.’ And we wanted to do this on a very big scale, with big orchestra and big choir, because Pi kind of has a Job-like moment, and God smashes him with the back of his hand into the water and crushes him. That scope was very challenging to do. It’s the biggest group of musicians we used, with a large percussion section and choir. It was very wild, with everyone playing with abandon and a great deal of power and passion.”

To get there, Danna worked closely with Lee. “He’s very involved,” the composer says. “It’s a true collaboration. We did a lot of talking about the best role for the music before shooting, but when we saw the film, we shifted our ideas of what the music should be doing. It’s a film about big questions, and it seemed that the music had to acknowledge that. But underlying it had to be a kind of simplicity and a line that helps join everything together from beginning to end and emotionally guides us through Pi’s life. That’s something we worked on very carefully, music as a compassionate guide. And we wanted to show that compassion to both Pi and the viewer.”

Energetic Performance

Alexandre Desplat

Composer Alexandre Desplat’s Busy Year Has Included Scoring Five Awards-Season Films find a way through cinema to develop a style like no one else. There’s a word we use with Jacques, ‘modest grandeur’—something really noble but still modest. And I wanted to find that in the music. It couldn’t be symphonic or emphatic. It had to be constrained, restrained, but with fire burning. And it had to be emotional. This is a story about love and how it comes toward you without you noticing.”

By David Mermelstein

Rise of the Guardians

Alexandre Desplat is nothing if not prolific. This year the quadruple Oscar-nominated composer will have five films in theaters. And, as is typical for him, each score is completely different from the others—much like the movies themselves. “If I only did thrillers, I would kill myself,” he said by phone recently from Majorca. “Seriously, I would want to change jobs.”

What keeps him in the game is the opportunity to play with various styles in different genres and compose music that challenges and delights him. “They’re all my babies and all so different,” he says of his scores.

“They have different faces and shapes and costumes.

Some are big, some are small—and some are huge.

Some are talkative, and some are quiet. But I try to give the best of my energy to all of them.”

The most time consuming of these recent projects was his soaring music to DreamWorks’ Rise of the Guardians, which marked the first time Desplat wrote for animation on such a vast scale. “It was three months altogether, writing and recording,” the composer says. “When you work on animation, the music has a great task: to create a sound and melodies and mood and atmosphere and energy dedicated to these extraordinary characters. And you see they are very specific, very clearly designed. Each has a personality that is different. It’s fun and moving and very emotional.”

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Argo

For Ben Affleck’s Argo, Desplat merged western and eastern sounds to evoke the film’s Iranian setting.

“As soon as I heard about the project,” Desplat says, “I got masters of the ney, oud, kemenche, and Persian percussion. And we also had vocals by the Persian pop singer Sussan Deyhim. I could write anything because these are incredible musicians.”

But the driving element was never exotica for its own sake. “Ben was mainly interested in emotion,” Desplat says. “He wanted to hear despair, fear, hope. That was always the main thing with Ben.” With Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Desplat’s challenge was finding room for his own voice in a film dominated by the strains of Benjamin Britten.

“Britten became this thread through the film,” Desplat explains. “And I had to be smart and get inspired by that and convey the love story, the quirkiness, the adventure—but in a weird, restrained, childlike way. I couldn’t have music that would be too adult in terms of harmonies. I tried to stick to what the picture was offering me and be in the heads of the characters and almost in the landscape.”

The French-language Rust and Bone marks Desplat’s sixth film for writer-director Jacques Audiard, their most recent before this being the Oscar-nominated A Prophet (2009). “There’s something that makes a real collaboration,” Desplat says. “You can tell it’s the same director and composer. There’s a real continuity in the work, the style, the orchestration. It allows both director and composer to blossom and

Desplat wraps up his fecund year with one of the most awaited films of the season, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, her follow up to the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008). “It’s a very delicate subject,” Desplat explains, referring to the killing of Osama bin Laden. “There is this sense of inexorability. But it’s also about a war between two cunning and ruthless camps with no limits. Kathryn doesn’t show evil and good battling. The audience is wise enough and adult enough to choose. War is ugly, and both sides are ugly. Never mind who started the war. So the music is very dark. Many times I mentioned (director Akira) Kurosawa to Kathryn, and the musical world Toru Takemitsu created for him in Ran. We use no violins.

I use only the low side of the strings. And for brass, the same—so 12 trombones, 12 horns, three tubas. It creates an army of sound, dark and earthy. And I think that works pretty well for a film about desert war.”

The composer makes an unexpected comparison when describing his career at this stage. “As I get further along, I feel more like an actor in these films. I try to disappear with everyone else. I’m not detached but rather part of the game. And when music is not a character, it’s an issue.”

‘‘

I’m not detached but rather part of the game. And when music is not a character, it’s an issue.

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BEST DIRECTOR

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CHRIS TERRIO

BEN AFFLECK

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY RODRIGO PRIETO, ASC, AMC

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE ALEXANDRE DESPLAT

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BEST SOUND MIXING

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR BRYAN CRANSTON ALAN ARKIN JOHN GOODMAN

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PRODUCTION DESIGNER

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SHARON SEYMOUR

JOSE ANTONIO GARCIA

SET DECORATOR JAN PASCALE, SDSA

RE-RECORDING MIXERS

BEST FILM EDITING WILLIAM GOLDENBERG, A.C.E.

BEST ACTOR

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JOHN REITZ GREGG RUDLOFF

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

BEST SOUND EDITING ERIK AADAHL

HAIR DEPARTMENT HEAD

MAKEUP DEPARTMENT HEAD

KATE BISCOE

KELVIN R. TRAHAN

Composer Alexandre Desplat’s Busy Year Has Included Scoring Five Awards-Season Films

“ARGO IS PROOF THAT HOLLYWOOD CAN STILL MAKE A CROWD - PLEASING MOVIE THAT’S SMART, FUNNY AND RELEVANT ALL AT ONCE.” LEONARD MALTIN,

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Hero Worship

By ANTHONY D’ALESSANDRO

For Danny Elfman, It Always Comes Back to His Idol, Bernard Herrmann After composing five film scores straight, without a weekend off, it’s fair to say that Danny Elfman has had a very long year. Still, there was no limit to what he would do to work on a film about his idol, Alfred Hitchcock.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I have to do this,” Elfman recalls about committing to Fox Searchlight’s Hitchcock, which was scheduled for delivery right before his opus on Disney’s Oz: The Great and Powerful. “I wouldn’t have a film-music career if it wasn’t for Bernard Herrmann, who has inspired me since the age of 12.”

It would be an understatement to say that Elfman is a big fan of the Master of Suspense and his longtime music collaborator. Never mind the large photograph of Hitch that hangs in Elfman’s office (as observed

by Hitchcock helmer Sacha Gervasi), Elfman is the only composer who has handled the sacred scrolls: Herrmann’s original manuscript for Psycho, which Elfman deftly adapted for Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake. For his current project, Elfman was so stoked to visit the Hitchcock set where they were shooting the Psycho editing-bay scene with Anthony Hopkins (as Hitch) and Helen Mirren (as his wife, Alma) that he asked if he could come back for a second day.

But idolization has no boundaries and, though the production was strapped for cash, Elfman wasn’t going to compromise the score to a movie about his favorite filmmaker.

“He literally bought sections of the orchestra out of his own pocket,” says a gobsmacked Gervasi. “We were recording with the top musicians in London, and we couldn’t afford to keep them through lunch.

Danny asked the orchestrator, ‘How much do the violas cost? 3,000£? I’ll take them. How much for the French horns?’ And Danny held the musicians through lunch.”

An adult gesture for a composer not always recognized for his adult scores, despite having credits on a multitude of dramas like Dolores Claiborne, A Simple Plan, and last year’s Restless. We all know the gothic, orchestral stylings from Elfman’s Tim Burton fare (for instance,

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this year’s Dark Shadows and stopmotion Frankenweenie) to his summer tentpoles (Men in Black 3, the first of which earned him a comedy score Oscar nom), however, this is arguably the first awards season in a long time that Elfman has had an abundance of adult-themed scores, a trend that he says “isn’t intentional.” As the new kid on the block in the late ’80s, his splashy Dvorak-like score for Burton’s 1989 Batman was overlooked by the Academy, but it’s been his grownup themes for Good Will Hunting (1997), Big Fish (2003), and Milk (2008) that have garnered Oscar nominations.

In addition to Hitchcock—which Elfman committed to under the condition that he didn’t have to turn in a Herrmann-esque score, rather a romantic, classical sound—the former Oingo Boingo frontman churned out his seventh score for Van Sant, an eclectic guitarstringed mood for the environmental political drama Promised Land. Then there’s David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, which represents a departure for Elfman in terms of his process and contemporary sound.

Employing drums, stringed-pads (that Elfman created), guitar as well as his own vocals, the score to Silver Linings Playbook is a synthesis of late-’60s harmonized sunshine pop coupled with a coffee-house acoustic vibe.

“What saved me was that these scores were different and there were no overlapping of styles. If I had two scores that were in a similar genre, I would have gone through a mental meltdown,” Elfman humbly admits. “I didn’t get log-jammed, but I had to be more focused than ever before.”

‘‘ ’’

Sometimes he has to take a journey to find out where the musical heart of his film is.

Also keeping Elfman at the top of his game is the company he keeps with offbeat directors who challenge him. At first, when Elfman heard Silver Linings Playbook was a romantic comedy, he resisted. “That is the genre that I feel no affinity toward at all, and it’s the only one I stay away from. I did a few early on in my career, and they were incredibly difficult.”

But after watching a cut of the film, Elfman was drawn to the actors’ chemistry. Upon agreeing to work with Russell, Elfman says, “He didn’t even know if he needed music in the movie. It was a total journey for him, and I learned with David, you just take that journey. I said to myself, ‘If at the end, I served no purpose but to show him that he doesn’t need a score, well, that’s fine.’ ” That ride entailed Elfman actually stepping inside the recording booth. Typically, during a scoring session, the composer is on the other side of the glass.

“I was playing around with instruments and put my vocals onto one piece as a goof, and David was like, ‘Do more of that! Do more of that!’, like he was producing me. Before we knew it, that’s what we were doing,” Elfman says with a laugh. “It was really crazy and off the track of what I’m usually doing, which is writing very intense, big scores.”

Russell says of their first-time partnership, “He was working with a simple arsenal of instruments due to budget. The end result seamlessly blends with the source and the emotion of the characters. I think that was the challenge, to find the voice of his music that would do that.”

Elfman says Van Sant is another director who “pushes me in strange directions.” Originally on Milk, Elfman wrote 15-18 minutes of opera-like music, inspired by the fact that Harvey Milk was a fan of the genre. After playing it several times for Van Sant, “He said, ‘You know, it’s not working,’ so we went back to square one,” Elfman recounts.

And while Burton is one director with whom Elfman can easily employ his Herrmann-esque and monstermovie side, specifically the classic horror organ wafting in Frankenweenie, it comes as a surprise to learn that Elfman and Burton still don’t have a shorthand after working together for 27 years.

“Every film is like starting over. I’ve never written a cue for Tim yet where I’m like, ‘He’s going to love this!’ He’s extremely unpredictable, and I never know how he’s going to react. Sometimes he has to take a journey to find out where the musical heart of his film is,” explains Elfman.

Previous page: Danny Elfman (right) with Hitchcock director Sacha Gervasi.

This page: Elfman wrote the scores to Silver Linings Playbook (above) and Hitchcock (right).

Nevertheless, the pair has a director-composer partnership that’s second only to Steven Spielberg and John Williams, yet one that the Academy doesn’t often recognize.

“I have a simple philosophy about (Oscar politics): I don’t think about it at all. I’m a big supporter of what the Academy does for films, but when it comes to the awards part of it, I stay as far removed as possible. It’s like elections—you can go crazy trying to anticipate what’s going to happen, but how people vote is still a great mystery,” says Elfman.

As one of the few scoresmiths who can churn out a panoramic orchestral creation, Elfman will likely get his due from the Academy one day. Already his eighth reteaming with Sam Raimi, Oz: The Great and Powerful, sounds like the type of epic, á la Lawrence of Arabia, that voters crave.

“The movie has this big, blustery old-fashioned feel, and I wanted to give it a big, effective, narrative score,” Elfman says. “It’s huge—105 minutes of music.”

And no matter what road Elfman embarks on musically with a director, it always comes back to Herrmann. “If anything, I’ll evoke more Herrmannesque sounds in Oz: The Great and Powerful than I did in Hitchcock,” says Elfman. “At times I can’t help it, I have to try not to be Herrmann-esque because his music is so much a part of my musical DNA. For that is from whence I sprung.”

By Pete Hammond

Together

In fact, since the animated-feature category was created in 2001, the list of winners—beginning with DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek through last year’s victor Paramount’s Rango—has been dominated by the major studios, particularly Disney/Pixar, which won four of the past five animated-feature Oscars and six overall. Last year’s Cars 2 was the first time a Pixar entry failed to make the cut, even with five nominations in the category. Even the two independent productions that have won in the category, Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2002) and Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the WereRabbit (2005), were still distributed by major studios, Disney and DreamWorks Animation, respectively. So seeing indie distributors making headway in the animation race is causing big trouble for the majors and their expensive tentpole toons that desire domination.

Chief among these indie players is tiny New York distributor GKIDS, which is also the producer of the New York International Children’s Film Festival, an Oscar-qualifying event. The company scours the world for titles appropriate not only for the festival but also for distribution. Now a big part of that process is picking films that might be Oscar friendly, as well. GKIDS first received surprise Oscar recognition for its 2010 entry, The Secret of Kells, and then really hit paydirt last year by becoming the first indie distributor to land two nominations, for Chico & Rita and A Cat in Paris, over a lot of heavyweight contenders, including Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s The Adventures of Tintin.

This year, GKIDS leads the indie charge with four qualifying movies (From Up on Poppy Hill, The Painting, The Rabbi’s Cat, and Zarafa), and the company has already announced two more for the 2013 awards year.

Eric Beckman, founder of GKIDS and artistic director of the NYICFF told me after winning those two noms last season, “for us, our whole purpose is to help expand the market for what I find artful and thoughtful, sophisticated animated films for adults and kids. (It’s) an art form that exists with more economic success outside the U.S. than inside.” He says he doesn’t have nearly the budget of the majors but still finds a way to compete. “Our challenge is just getting the film into the hands of the Academy and getting them to put the damn thing in their DVD player. We’re an indie film company; we’re not going to spend a half-million dollars on an awards campaign. We can’t,” he explains.

Those who can, though, likely will, especially in this year’s hotly contested race. Disney finds themselves in the ticklish situation of having three genuine contenders in Pixar’s Brave, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, and Wreck-It Ralph possibly dividing votes and putting a burden on the studio to support all three equally. That’s something DreamWorks Animation’s Jeffrey Katzenberg is trying to avoid by putting most of his company’s Oscar strategy toward the holiday release, Rise of the Guardians, rather than the summer hit Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, which has turned out to be the biggest film in the history of the franchise. Still it makes sense. Neither previous Madagascar got a nomination, and it’s unlikely the third film in the franchise will change the trajectory, despite being generally acknowledged as the best in the series. Last year, surprisingly, DWA got nominations for both their entries, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots, which likely split the vote, allowing Rango a clear path to victory.

With hit toons from Universal (The Lorax), Sony (Hotel Transylvania), and Fox (Ice Age: Continental Drift), there is a strong studio presence to fight off the new wave of indie love the nominating committee seems to have. The animated field sports 21 titles that have been entered into the competition, meaning it is virtually certain there will be five nominees for only the fourth time in the history of the award. Here is a snapshot of the contenders for those five slots.

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The Animated-Feature Race Is No Longer Strictly for the Major Studios

A new trend has begun to creep into a category that’s been mostly major-studio territory since its creation a decade ago. The animated-feature lineup is seeing more independent distributors finding their way into the Oscar race and enjoying real success in winning those coveted nominations.

ADVENTURES IN ZAMBEZIA

From South Africa, this story about a naïve falcon who flies to bird-friendly Zambezia might remind some viewers of last year’s Rio, but with its likable protagonist and a good voice cast led by Abigail Breslin, Jeff Goldblum, and Samuel L. Jackson, it could be a sleeper.

BRAVE

This Disney/Pixar entry was a summertime hit for the studio and a welcome return to some critical enthusiasm after last year’s Cars 2 detour. It has meticulous animation but didn’t seem to generate the same level of enthusiasm as many past Pixar winners.

However, artistry just might be enough here to make the grade.

DELHI SAFARI

The first Indian 3D animated film, in which a bunch of jungle animals team up to save themselves from human intervention, could remind some of the Madagascar franchise, but the Bollywood flavor sets the tone and sets the film apart. Christopher Lloyd and Jane Lynch are among the voices in the English-version indie to be released in the U.S. by Applied Art Productions.

DR. SEUSS’ THE LORAX

ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFT

Another in the successful transformation of Dr. Seuss from book to animated smash, this huge spring hit with a strong pro-environment message came from Christopher Meledandri, who is turning out to be Universal’s most reliable hit maker. Critical indifference won’t help gain awards traction here, though, making its Oscar prospects a little cloudy.

FRANKENWEENIE

HEY KRISHNA

Tim Burton’s most personal film is adapted from a live-action short he made at the beginning of his film career and turned into a black-and-white 3D animation wonder. Boxoffice reception was chilly, but Burton might have enough aficionados on the animation committee to serve up a second nomination for him in the category after first hitting paydirt with 2006’s Corpse Bride.

Yet another entry from India, this one is touted as India’s first fully animated stereoscopic film and is a grand epic adventure tracing the exciting journey of its title character as he battles the forces of evil. Could it be Bollywood’s year in this category?

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA FROM UP ON POPPY HILL

GKIDS distributes this Japanese entry from legendary Studio Ghibli and Oscar-winning director Hayao Miyazaki and Goro Miyazaki.

The 1963-set love story centers on a young couple hellbent on saving their high-school clubhouse from destruction. Never underestimate animators’ love for the Miyazaki brand.

One of several horror-themed entries, Sony Animation’s fall hit features Adam Sandler as Dracula, who operates a plush resort that caters to the monster crowd and is designed to keep humans away. Sony Animation hasn’t been in the race since Surf ’s Up, but this is one of the more high-profile films on the list—though critics didn’t bite.

The fourth film in the wildly successful series from Blue Sky and Fox was a cash cow for the studio, but generally was perceived to be a by-thenumbers entry that wasn’t distinguished by any “wow” factor that would help gain it entry into the golden circle of five. A case of been there, done that, as far as Oscars go this year.

A LIAR’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE UNTRUE STORY OF MONTY PYTHON’S GRAHAM CHAPMAN

A 3D animation romp through the late, great Graham Chapman’s life as seen through the eyes of his fellow Monty Python gang. It is one of the most distinctive entries this year, and Python fans should spark to the storytelling.

MADAGASCAR 3: EUROPE’S MOST WANTED

Three is the charm, as this not only became the most successful and critically admired edition of the zoo gang’s tales but also the series’ biggest hit. Nevertheless what movie with a “3” in the title gets Oscar recognition here besides Toy Story?

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...from previous

THE PIRATES! BAND OF MISFITS

Together

Aardman strikes again with the fiendishly clever and engaging pirate saga. It was not a boxoffice smash for Sony in the U.S., but its distinctly British sensibility and hip script make it one of the year’s most entertaining toons, one that could surprise pundits who might have written off its chances.

THE MYSTICAL LAWS

This Japanese scifi entry envisions a world where Asia has become the Earth’s superpower, against a weakened and powerless United States. This type of action anime rarely wins nominations, and that’s unlikely to change this year.

THE PAINTING

THE RABBI’S CAT

WALTER & TANDOORI’S CHRISTMAS

Another GKIDS product from France, this 1930s-set trifle concerns a rabbi and his talking philosopher of a cat, who gains the power of speech by dining on the family parrot. Clever, but weird. Last year, the company scored with a Sam Spade-like cat in the noir takeoff A Cat in Paris, so why not turn to the felines again?

With a nice message and a holiday spirit, this entry from Sylvain Viau concerns the pair’s efforts to save their town from an ecological disaster just before Christmas. If Arthur Christmas couldn’t make the cut last year, don’t expect Walter Christmas to do the trick, either.

RISE OF THE GUARDIANS

GKIDS is qualifying the original French-language version of this beautifully animated piece from auteur Jean-Francois Laguionie. The film is almost painterly in nature and, therefore, the artiest entry of all 21 films in contention. With animated worlds inside of each painting, Laguionie creates a unique visual look. A real threat to grab an indie slot and steal a spot from a major.

PARANORMAN

It’s The Avengers of animation, and DreamWorks can only hope to grab just part of that boxoffice.

Bringing together childhood icons the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Jack Frost, and Sandman to fight the evil boogieman Pitch, this is gorgeously animated stuff from William Joyce’s books. Expect DreamWorks Animation to really make a play for the gold here.

WRECK-IT RALPH

A terrifically funny and clever toon about videogame villain Ralph trying to become a good guy for a change. Great voice work from John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman, plus a really amusing script, make this one for the hip crowd and a potential spoiler in the race for the triumphant return of the Disney Animation label.

ZARAFA SECRET OF THE WINGS

From Focus and Laika, the groups responsible for past nominee Coraline, comes the tale of Norman, who fights off zombies, parents, and other distractions to save his town in this clever horror spoof that is one of the best reviewed animated films of the year. Can lightning strike twice for Laika?

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Yet another in the direct-to-video Tinker Bell series for Disney. The company played it for a week in Hollywood to qualify, just to make sure there would be enough entries in the category to have the maximum five nominees. Disney’s money is on their other three films, not this one.

GKIDS’ Belgium-produced French boxoffice hit centers on a true story of a giraffe given as a gift to France’s King Charles X from the Pasha of Egypt. Shown in the original French-language version, this film has at least one awards consultant worried that it could charm its way into contention. A possible sleeper?

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Game PLAN

By Thomas J. McLean

Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph Realized the Studio’s Long-Gestating Idea to Create an Animated Feature About Videogames

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By THOMAS J. McLEAN

For Wreck-It Ralph, Disney’s animated hit about an arcade

videogame villain who wants more out of life, the movie hit its critical mass and graduated from an idea to becoming a real movie came via a tool borrowed from TV animation: the table read.

Director and cowriter Rich Moore, who spent the better part of two decades working on series from The Simpsons and Futurama to The Critic, Drawn Together, and Sit Down, Shut Up, imported the practice for the spring 2010 meeting at Pixar that included cast members Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch, and Alan Tudyk. “It’s a very, very useful tool for the filmmakers—to hear the characters come to life and to hear the dialogue, and to get a good pace for the movie, a feeling for the movie,” Moore says.

The result was so well received—even by absent lead actor John C. Reilly and executive producer John Lasseter—that the studio brought in producer Clark Spencer and a storyboarding team to kickstart the 3D CGI movie into full production.

Thanks to that energizing read in 2010, Wreck-It Ralph has become an animated hit for Disney, earning rave reviews since its Nov. 2 release and a $49 million opening weekend domestic gross. There’s also some Oscar-season buzz surrounding the film, despite an already-impressive animated slate from Disney that includes Brave and Frankenweenie.

Awards talk aside, Wreck-It Ralph’s success vindicates Disney’s long-held faith in the idea of an animated feature about videogames, which stretches back to the 1990s when

the studio tried to develop projects with titles like Game On and Joe Jump. The idea still appealed to Disney Features Animation chief Lasseter in 2008, when he suggested it to studio newcomer Moore.

While Moore shares Lasseter’s affection for vintage arcade games, Moore says it was his teenage son who assured him youngsters still know Pac-Man and Space Invaders. “I never saw a Laurel and Hardy movie in a theater in my life, but I knew who they were as a kid,” says Moore. “And I think it’s kind of similar with these game characters.”

Moore passed on looking at previous attempts to develop a gaming movie and began with the characters. “I fell in love with this idea of telling a very kind of personal, internal story about a character that’s wondering, ‘Is this all there is to life?’ ” Moore brought on writer Phil Johnston to flesh out the characters and come up with a story—often going down some admittedly weird roads on the way. “There were several days where we were convinced the best way for them to travel from game to game was through a portal in the toilet, like a vortex in the toilet,” says Johnston. “And that made sense to us for at least a week.”

“There was no screenplay at that point, it was a bunch of index cards and ideas being

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Game PLAN

...from previous

Clockwise from above: John C. Reilly strikes a pose with Wreck-It Ralph; The Wreck-It Ralph team surrounded by inspirational elements; Director Rich Moore (left) and producer Clark Spencer (right) discuss the film; Calhoun (Jane Lynch) surveys the scene in the videogame Hero’s Duty.

told through talking in the room,” says Moore. “Once we had those beats down, once we kind of knew what our story was and how we were going to get there, and the different worlds we have, Phil went about writing the screenplay.”

The characters were the key for the writing crew, which grew to include Jim Reardon and Jennifer Lee. Moore says they knew so early on they wanted Reilly, Silverman, McBrayer, and Lynch that they were able to tailor the characters to them. “It’s so rare for animation, but I knew the voices I was writing from the beginning,” says Johnston.

Positive reaction to the 2010 table read pushed the story from development into production. “We always knew that this was a movie that was probably going to get made, but the table read is kind of the moment where John (Lasseter) and the company say yes,” Spencer says.

As is the norm for today’s animated features, the story was constantly tested and revised: Spencer says it was put up on reels about seven times over an 18-month span. “I think that this is what makes animated films—when they’re done well—sharp, and gives them depth, because we are really going in and making each scene the best it can be and testing the relationships between the characters in a way that I don’t think exists in live action,” Moore explains.

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Moore says the animation process for a feature differs little from television, save for the amount of time available. Production went so smoothly on the picture that Moore and Spencer were able to accommodate an earlier release date so the studio could give more time to Pixar’s upcoming Monsters University.

“Otherwise, we would have been coming out in spring of 2013, and it just seemed like a holiday release date better suited the movie, and it felt like we were in a place where we could pull it off,” says Moore.

Much of the buzz around the film stems from a wide range of videogame cameos, a move that was inspired

by Moore’s affection for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? “I wanted to use the actual game characters in it, rather than creating kind of stand-in characters that evoke certain characters or that felt like they were an ersatz version of characters that people knew, because it really seemed like that would really lend an authenticity to the whole idea,” he says.

The filmmakers approached the story as though they had the rights to any game character they wanted, then Moore and Spencer themselves pitched the story to the game companies personally and got permission to use virtually every character they asked for.

While Ralph features fun moments for classic gaming characters from Pac-Man to Street Fighter, there was one obvious candidate—Nintendo’s Mario—who is not in the movie because the right moment for him just never came up. (Reports that Nintendo turned the movie down on financial grounds are false, Moore says, stemming from a joke Reilly made during a ComicCon panel about Mario wanting too much money.)

Mario might get his chance to face Fix-It Felix Jr. and Wreck-It Ralph in a sequel, which Moore says he would be happy to tackle again for Disney; a work place he arrived at late in his career. “It was never someplace that I said, ‘In my career, I must work at Disney,’ ” Moore says. “But to be here now, I really feel like I am in the right place. Creatively it’s been the most satisfying project and job that I’ve ever had, and this is after working on amazing projects with wonderful people.”

‘‘

It’s so rare for animation, but I knew the voices I was writing from the beginning.

WaltDisneyStudiosAwards.com Š2012 Disney/Pixar

Not Child photo: Mathieu Young/DWA

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hild’s Play

By Thomas J. McLean

Rise of the Guardians Hits Its Stride by Steering Clear of Satire and Focusing on Character Development As

a child, William Joyce wanted more answers about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and other holiday figures than his parents were able to give him.

“I know where Superman came from—from planet Krypton!—so what about this guy, the Easter Bunny?” says Joyce. The typical parental answer to queries about how Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy did what they do was, “They just do,” which Joyce found dissatisfying, even years later when he became a father.

“I wanted to come up with something better for my kids,” says Joyce. “And it really galvanized when my daughter asked me one hot August day—after her little brother lost his tooth— ‘Do the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus know each other?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ ” Joyce, a celebrated illustrator, children’s book author, and filmmaker, began filling in those blanks, creating detailed backstories and a shared universe robust enough to fill a Guardians of Childhood book series. His imaginative work ultimately provided the foundation for DreamWorks Animation’s hottest contender in this year’s Oscars race, the 3D animated Rise of the Guardians.

It is a project Joyce calls his magnum opus. He directed a Man in the Moon short film as proof of concept, but found himself turning down offers from the likes of Pixar before hearing exactly what he wanted from DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg.

“Jeffrey was the only guy from any of the studios who was willing to take on the bigger picture I wanted, which was books and a movie,” says Joyce. “Everybody else just wanted to do a movie, and they didn’t want me to do these books, and that was a deal-breaker for me.”

Joyce’s feature animation credits include concept art for the original Toy Story; he was production designer and producer on Blue Sky Studios’ Robots; and saw Disney adapt one of his books into the animated feature film Meet the Robinsons. For Rise of the Guardians, he came on as codirector but had to step back into an executive producer role when his teenage daughter, Mary Katherine, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. (She died at age 18 in 2010, and Guardians is dedicated to her memory.)

Stepping up to the director’s role was Peter Ramsey, an animation veteran who had just come off directing DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens Halloween TV special. He joined playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, who wrote the screenplay, production designer Patrick Marc Hanenberger, and producers Christina Steinberg and Nancy Bernstein in developing the project, with input from director Guillermo del Toro.

“A lot of my thinking dovetailed well with what David Lindsay-Abaire was doing, which is not doing a satirical take but actually meeting it head-on and making the core story about the belief in the characters and this new vision of what the characters actually represent and mean,” Ramsey explains.

Del Toro was particularly helpful in restructuring the story, which incorporated an idea Katzenberg pitched to Joyce in their first meeting on the project: to introduce a new Guardian.

That crystalized the story around Jack Frost and made children’s belief in these characters the central theme of the story.

Key to Joyce’s take on the characters was the need to treat them seriously and make them cool in a way that decades of bland holiday TV specials could not.

“We knew that we didn’t want to go the postmodern, winkwink route,” says del Toro. “What we aspired to was to make them feel alive, to make them really have a personality, and

Continued on next page...

...from previous

Not Child’s Play

Patrick Ecclesine/DWA

Previous spread: Producer Christina Steinberg, director Peter Ramsey, executive producer William Joyce and producer Nancy Bernstein. Clockwise from above: Alec Baldwin (North) with director Peter Ramsey; Isla Fisher (Tooth); Ramsey with Chris Pine (Jack Frost); Rise of the Guardians gang (from left), Jack Frost, Bunny, North, Sandman; North, Bunny, Tooth; Jack Frost.

that they would have a personality where you as a kid have an option of saying they were cool without sounding childish.”

Most of the characters took their cues from Joyce’s ideas, such as North, a.k.a. Santa Claus, being a swashbuckling Cossack complete with Russian accent and tattoos. The Easter Bunny changed the most, with Joyce adopting the movie’s boomerang-wielding outback warrior for his books over his original idea.

“The Easter Bunny that Bill originally had was something a bit more Beatrix Potter-y and a bit more ‘fussy professor,’ ” Ramsey says. “We just couldn’t pull him off that way, so we decided to keep him a little more in line with our superhero idea.”

Joyce, who launched Moonbot Studios in his native Shreveport, LA, and wrote and codirected the Oscarwinning short The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, says he was very comfortable with the studio’s approach. “I really felt like the studio and Peter wanted to tell the story that I wanted to tell,” says Joyce. “Then it was easy to stand back.”

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Katzenberg was essential in getting the studio’s first choices for casting: Alec Baldwin as North, Jude Law as the villain Pitch, Isla Fisher as Tooth, Hugh Jackman as E. Aster Bunnymund, and Chris Pine as Jack Frost. Voice work was new to Pine, who says the one day he worked directly with Baldwin was surprisingly counterproductive.

“I had all of my actorly hopes that it would help ground the experience, but it really didn’t help,” says Pine. “It actually worked out better, I found, after three years of doing it, to just go section by section by myself and play with the lines and with volume.”

The animators developed different styles of movement for each of the characters. Steinberg says teams were assigned to each character, but by the end of production those styles were so well defined it was second nature for animators to work on any or all of the characters.

“We started calling it ‘method animation’ because we were trying to get as much naturalism into the performances as we could,” Ramsey says.

‘‘ ’’ We started calling it

‘method animation’

because we were trying to get as much naturalism into the performances as we could.

The look of the film borrowed heavily from Joyce’s illustrations. “Most animated movies drink from the fountain of pop art,” says del Toro. “We wanted to go for a more painterly look and a look that felt like it was based on a production design more in tune with illustrated books of the past, rich and lush and embroidered and detailed.”

Joyce, whose next animated project is the feature Epic, due out next year from Blue Sky Studios, is more than pleased with Guardians and has high hopes for a sequel. “There’s two things that aren’t the way I wanted them to be: I wanted Bunny to have a cape, and I wanted the Tooth Fairy to be a little bustier. But other than that, it’s what I hoped.”

THE BEST REVIEWED ANIMATED FILM OF THE YEAR “THIS IS THE YEAR’S MOST INVENTIVE, ENDEARING ANIMATED FEATURE.” RICHARD CORLISS I TIME

“THE MARVELOUS DANNY ELFMAN HAS CERTAINLY DONE HIS PART WITH A DEVILISHLY FUN SCORE.” BETSY SHARKEY I LOS ANGELES TIMES

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

I BEST ANIMATED FEATURE Tim Burton

BEST ORIGINAL SONG “STRANGE LOVE” WRITTEN BY

K aren Orzolek

PERFORMED BY

Karen O

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Danny Elfman

WaltDisneyStudiosAwards.com ©2012 Disney Enterprises, Inc.

“Frankenweenie: An Electrifying Book” download the book for FREE at https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/frankenweenie-electrifying/id557041056?mt=11

DARKART

By Craig Modderno

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ParaNorman Strikes a Careful Balance Between

n Dark and Light in Its Storytelling

Details are everything in animation, but ParaNorman producer Arianne Sutner knows all too well how difficult it can be to get them right. Her seemingly simple suggestion to add a shower cap in a scene in the 3D stopmotion film quickly became a question of balancing creativity and schedule.

“There’s a scene where Courtney comes to the door looking for Norman and is met by Mitch, who is wearing a towel,” Sutner recounts. “I thought having Mitch wear a shower cap would be funny. The trouble came when I remembered in stopmotion you can only do a minute a week.”

Fortunately, Sutner had codirector Sam Fell, codirector and writer Chris Butler, and fellow producer Travis Knight—who’s also the CEO of the financing company Leika—on her side.

“We had an unspoken rule that if anyone had a change that could improve the film, we would try it,” Knight says. “We were working from an excellent script, so we looked at ideas like hers as basically tweaking the source material, which we all loved.”

The resulting feature film took two years to complete and is the biggest stopmotion 3D animated film ever produced, employing 320 designers, artists, and animators who worked on 52 separate shooting units. It’s also one of the 21 animated films that qualify for the 2012-13 Oscar race, an exceptionally long list of toons that will result in five nominations for only the fourth time since the category’s debut.

The film’s production team is hoping that ParaNorman will follow a successful path similar to its previous stopmotion animated effort, Coraline, a dark-themed story of a family coming apart in parallel universes that earned more than $125 million worldwide and was a 2010 Oscar nominee. In fact, Coraline’s success allowed the creative team behind ParaNorman (many of whom worked on Coraline) to selffinance and shoot in the laid-back environment of Portland, OR. Being out of the critical eye of Hollywood meant fewer egos to deal with, but they knew that having a good story is important no matter where the production is based. “The trick is to sell good scripts, no matter who the buyer is,” Sutner says. “Audiences may be attracted to a certain type of film—animation versus live action for example— but they’re always attracted to a good emotional story.”

Knight, however, thinks animation might just have to try a little harder. “Animation has been ghettoized through the years by giving the impression we only do the same kind of stories,” he says. “(But) the classic Walt Disney films have a perfect balance of darkness and light.”

Like Coraline, ParaNorman, which came out on DVD this month, strikes a similar balance between darkness and light and could be enough of a commercial and critical hit to make the Academy take notice. But two years ago, any thought of Oscar gold was the furthest thing from the minds of ParaNorman’s creative team. They needed the right voice talent.

“We wanted to have kids be kids, not over the top. We wanted naturalism and people playing the same genders. Little things are important, like having older characters sound older,” Sutner explains. “Age is really conveyed in the voice. It’s hard to fake a life fully lived through your voice. Elaine Stritch, who plays the grandmother, earned her life history!”

Continued on next page...

Previous spread: Kodi Smit-McPhee (Norman) looks at the stopmotion version of his alter-ego.

Right: ParaNorman producer Travis Knight.

Below: Anna Kendrick (Courtney).

DARKART ...from previous

“Each vocal performance is a symphony,” Knight continues, adding that they tried to cast against type when reviewing vocal performances. “When you think of the warm grandmotherly type of character, you don’t think of Elaine Stritch. But she was perfect because you could hear the rough life in her voice.”

Having a very specific vision for the type of family film they wanted to make also helped keep the production focused. “People now look at animated and stopmotion films like ParaNorman as movies with character and heart, unlike the comic-book pictures that dominated the multiplexes all summer long,” explains Fell.

“It was a film made by grownups who see themselves as kids, that is aimed at kids,” Butler continues. “We wanted to catch the suburban underbelly of a John Hughes picture and combine it with the eerie atmosphere of a John Carpenter picture. If it wasn’t so scary this might have been—with a few major adjustments, of course—a Scooby-Doo adventure.”

While Butler and Fell were in sync on the concept, their opinions diverge when it comes to how technology supported their efforts.

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“Part of the reason the film took so long to make was the emerging technology,” Fell says. “We could see the performance unfolding during the day, which made it easier to expand the film by adding big-ass special effects without harming the story. We believe ParaNorman is a game-changing film in combining new digital technology and old-craft technology.”

However, Butler says the emerging technology they employed for ParaNorman was not without its own set of challenges. “I disagree with Sam in that I think it’s not easier to film animation because of the evolving technology,” Butler reveals. “You can have digital background extras and a lot more people handling a lot more things with a lot more questions. A fundamental truth of filmmaking is just because you can do more things with the technology doesn’t mean you won’t have to face newer, more complicated problems.”

Planning ahead helped the team face those complicated problems without the production’s pace grinding to a halt. It also helped to refine the details, such as Sutner’s shower cap addition, somewhat on the fly. “We very rarely reshot,” Fell says. “It’s a big deal in animation because we do such extensive preproduction in every department. In stopmotion, you are actually capturing the performance because we shoot on digital camera now instead of film.”

Butler and Fell ultimately found a creative shorthand in their two-year working relationship. “You play off each other’s creative energy, because you’re not cans of beans for two years,” Fell says. “You get excited when you push the story, and the next year your characters come to life. Then you look at each other, and you realize your film is giving birth to itself. It’s a joyous but difficult feeling to describe!”

“We were a good complement (to each other) really since it was my story and his vision at the start,” offers Butler. “At the beginning it was tough, but then we realized how much we liked each other. Sam and I had a marriage that worked, but now we need a little distance to enjoy our creation. I’d love for us to work together again, and Sam’s indicated the same feeling to me.”

‘‘

It was a film made by grownups who see themselves as kids that is aimed at kids.

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By Thomas J. McLean

realistic EX

Top left: Mark Ruffalo with digitizing marks to become the Hulk.

Insets: The Avengers (bottom) offers plenty of dazzle for the Academy’s VFX executive committee, however, effects-heavy tentpoles are now facing competition from such dramas as this year’s Life of Pi (top and center) that also employ VFX shots.

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XPECTATIONS Increasingly Sophisticated Visual Effects Make This a Tough Race to Call Although the visual-effects Oscar race has long been dominated by the summer season’s superhero epics and action-heavy films, a subtle shift has been taking place over the last few years that makes predicting the outcome a little more challenging than it used to be.

In addition to the compressed season that’s affecting every Oscar category, visual effects in general are no longer bound by genre. Of course, films like The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spider-Man are clearly in the running, as is Prometheus and the highly anticipated The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. However, bake-off level support is expected for a wider range of films, from Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and Cloud Atlas to Men in Black 3 and Snow White and the Huntsman.

While visual-effects artists bring ever more realistic digital characters and environments to convincing life, the effects themselves have grown increasingly sophisticated, to the point that even insiders can’t always tell how an effect was done.

“It gets really difficult for someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time in this business analyzing what’s going on to actually know what they’re looking at on the screen and how it was created and what the level of achievement was that went into it,” says Joe Letteri, a four-time Oscar winner and contender for a fifth as visual-effects supervisor on The Hobbit.

Throw in the fact that nearly every film has at least some visual effects, and the field of eligibility includes everything from Silver Linings Playbook to Ted. The Academy has responded by expanding the number of candidates in the bake-off and going to five nominees from three in 2010. Oscar-winning ILM visual-effects supervisor John Knoll, whose credits include the Star Wars prequels and the Pirates of the Caribbean series, says the expansion has been wellreceived. “We’re often one-third of the budget of a feature film these days,” Knoll says. “I think having a more substantial representation reflects the current state of movies.”

The new procedural wrinkle is Oscar’s accelerated schedule, which will see the bake-off films determined at a meeting of the executive/steering committee Nov. 27—well in advance of such key Christmas releases as The Hobbit—and the bake-off moved up to Jan. 3.

Knoll says this puts a lot of pressure on voting members, who will likely advance unseen films to the bake-off. “It’s going to be, to some extent, educated guesswork and giving the benefit of the doubt to some projects that come out at the end of the year,” he says.

The steering/executive committee is headed up by Craig Barron, who also represents the effects branch on the Board of Governors and is a renowned veteran matte painter. He says the easy-to-fill panel is made up of 40 active branch members with expertise in a wide range of disciplines, and the proceedings are open for discussion about the quality of the year’s visual effects, the innovations, and how things were done.

“We want our committee to point things out,” Barron says. “It’s important to know what’s going on, and we rely on our committee to discuss the innovations that are happening every year.”

Those innovations are increasingly technical, relating to more science underneath the creation of characters and environments. “There are still fairly significant advances going on, but they’re technical in a way that’s hard to understand in terms of what’s on the screen,” says Letteri.

Knoll says high shot count is a weighting factor, but not as great a factor as it used to be. He cites The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s much-debated art film, which made it to last year’s bake-off on the strength of a few small sequences about the creation of the universe. “That had an actually relatively small shot count, but it was very skillfully executed and really beautiful,” Knoll says.

Tree of Life and last year’s winner, Hugo, illustrate the ways in which the Academy is recognizing effects work in movies that are not thought of as effectsdriven. That’s not exactly new—the Academy has given effects Oscars to the likes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Forrest Gump, for example—but the skillful use of effects in more films will diversify the race at all levels, boding well this year for more ambitious movies like The Life of Pi and Cloud Atlas.

While genre also is a diminishing factor, eight-time Oscar-winning ILM effects supervisor Dennis Muren says sometimes it can be tough to stand out even with quantity and quality. “If you’re seeing a huge number of shots in a superhero movie, but it’s the third superhero movie that came out that summer, it’s going to be hard to be excited about it, because you’ve seen two other kinds of similar movies,” says Muren.

Similarly, there’s no direct correlation between boxoffice success and awards consideration, though it can be difficult to evaluate the technical aspects of a film’s effects completely divorced from its creative elements.

Muren sums up a common opinion that the effects are there to serve the story and help create an emotional effect—the technical cannot be considered on its own. “Some films will not get nominated because the emotion was not there when you saw the shots, and it didn’t matter what the technology is at all,” says Muren.

‘‘ ’’

they’re technical in a way that’s hard to understand in terms of what’s on the screen.

Barron echoes that sentiment when it comes to considering blockbuster movies, which are successful at the boxoffice for a reason. “Films that are successful mean that whole package was successful in communicating its ideas to the public, and they responded by going to the theater,” says Barron. ”But whether one film makes more money than another isn’t a criteria that we use.”

Still, flopping at the boxoffice is a huge obstacle to overcome for even the prettiest effects work. Witness the inability of Speed Racer to qualify for the bakeoff, and the chances of seeing a film like John Carter make the cut seem increasingly remote. It’s not a be-all, end-all situation—Poseidon surprised everyone by earning a nomination in 2006, and The Golden Compass won in 2007—meaning no one should be surprised by a bake-off appearance from Battleship.

The difficulty in judging effects is even greater once the nominees are set and the entire Academy membership is voting on the final result. “The general vote is not your peers, and that’s why I think the nomination retains a lot of value because it does come from your peers,” says Barron. “It’s our job to make sure that the five nominees, any one of them, are worthy of a visual-effects Oscar, that any one of those, the committee would be happy to see win.”

ANTHONY HOPKINS AS HITCHCOCK

Inset photos: Getty

38

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS AS LINCOLN

N OV E M B E R 2 8 , 2 0 1 2

HALLE BERRY AS OVID

BILL MURRAY AS FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

Illusions Skillful Hair and Makeup Artists Can Mean the Difference Between Good and Great

This year, the Academy tweaked the categories to include hairstyling in the makeup award for the 86th annual ceremony. It’s a smart inclusion, considering the two departments work incredibly closely, and the right period hair is essential to any film—even a post-apocalyptic one. Case in point: Hunger Games hairstylist Linda Flowers bleached 500 people’s eyebrows for the film and dyed the hair of 75 extras. With a team of 45 stylists, she also created 450 original wigs and hairpieces.

This year’s likely contenders for hair and makeup run the gamut in scope, from doctoring huge ensemble casts to refashioning lead actors into famous characters. For Hitchcock, hairstylist Martin Samuel had to recede Anthony Hopkins’ thick snowy mane with a partial shave and dye it brown at the sideburns. He also had a very sparse toupee made for the actor’s crown to simulate a balding man’s pate. “We kept it up every day for the 40 or so days of shooting, and Anthony was very patient,” says Samuel, who collaborated with Howard Berger on the prosthetics and makeup.

It took 2½ hours each morning to turn handsome Hopkins into the homely, weak-chinned director.

Of course, it’s a tricky negotiation to conceal an actor’s most important means of expressing himself.

Daniel Day-Lewis, in Lincoln, underwent just a scant hour and 15 minutes of cosmetic overhaul each morning to play the stately but physically craven 16th

‘‘

You can’t just put one face on another. It’s not like you are working on a mannequin.

president of the United States. Instead of relying on prosthetics—which could easily encumber emoting— makeup artist and longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator Lois Burwell studied photos and casts of the president and then used a method called “stretch and stipple” to age the actor 10 years. She also dyed Day-Lewis’ natural beard darker and thinned it out.

“Lincoln had a soft chin and Daniel doesn’t, so we structured the beard to give that impression,” she says, adding that the Oscar-winning actor was new to the extreme makeup process. “You can’t just put one face on another. It’s not like you are working on a mannequin.”

The team working on the science-fiction epic Cloud Atlas, which wildly spans generations, had a Herculean undertaking in that they had to metamorphose dozens of actors into myriad characters. Consider Halle Berry as an elderly Korean man or Hugo Weaving playing a blonde, female nurse and you quickly get the idea. The film’s six storylines are directed by Tom Tykwer or the Wachowskis, and makeup artists Daniel Parker and Jeremy Woodhead worked with the directors, respectively. At the same time, the two had to constantly compare their sketches and visions to be sure that they weren’t repeating looks.

To transform Berry into an Asian elder, Woodhead used a wig, implants, contact lens, facial hair, and prosthetic teeth. “There was the added complication of an implanted eyepiece that covered the whole of one of Halle’s eyes and had to look like it was embedded in her skin,” says Woodhead. “Halle just sat there and laughed with delight as each layer went on and the character gelled together.”

Parker, who delighted in re-creating Weaving as the brutish, voluptuous Nurse Noakes, adds that lastminute directorial decisions to have an actor join another sequence as a different gender, age, or ethnicity intensified the workload. Still, he insists “this was a dream project for an artist.” He adds that the actors embraced the process and didn’t grouse about the marathon makeup sessions that took as much as four hours.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Bill Murray’s portrayal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson. In this case, the director Roger Michell instructed Morag Ross to employ a subtle touch in physically refashioning the actor as the jovial president. “The M.O. for the whole look was less is more.

Nothing heavy-handed,” says makeup artist Ross,

who added a mole to Murray’s right cheek and a swath of melanoma above his left eyebrow.

A 1939 Life magazine photo of FDR became the inspiration for Murray’s hairstyle. Norma Webb made an educated guess on the hair color, as her historical references were all in black and white. “I proceeded to cut the hair as for the period,” she says.

“But the cut needed to reflect Roosevelt’s seeming disinterest in ‘conservative’ behavior and image.”

The translucent actress Olivia Williams also plays Eleanor Roosevelt with a soft wink. She’s not nearly as equine-looking as the First Lady in the end, but Ross added prosthetic teeth that altered both her profile and the shape of her face. Webb added hair wefts and colored Williams’ mane to reflect the First Lady’s unruly tresses and disdain for vanity.

Channeling Russian high society of the 1800s for Anna Karenina required some artistic license. Back then, women didn’t wear makeup but relied on creams to enhance their looks, notes makeup artist Ivana Primorac. Still, she and director Joe Wright wanted “to appeal to the modern audience without looking wrong for the period.” Actress Keira Knightley underwent a minimal change with a slight darkening of her fair coloring and hair. Jude Law, however, needed to be aged and refashioned as a bit of an “egg head.” To do that, Primorac altered the shape of his temples, receded his hairline and lengthened his jaw with a beard.

The near 40-artist team that tackled the hair, makeup and prosthetics on The Hobbit probably needs a long vacation. With 13 lead characters and stunt and scale doubles often needed, the crew helmed by lead makeup and hair artist Peter King had to oversee the transformation of no less than 36 actors. Even more challenging was the need to distinguish characters of the same race—such as dwarves—in appearance as well as silhouette. “Audiences must be able to recognize them by the head and body shape as they’re walking up a mountain,” says Richard Taylor, cofounder of special effects company Weta Workshop.

Realizing the vision of director Peter Jackson before filming even began required about 800 illustrations and 1,000 sculptures. New characters like goblins required their own physical evolution, but it was the high-resolution camera that made fabrication and application an arduous endeavor. “It’s exponential how much more challenging prosthetics and makeup have become because of the clarity of this camera,” says Taylor. “It sees everything. Everything!”

By Monica Corcoran Harel

Publicists, producers, personal trainers? Ha. Let’s face it: When it comes to nailing a role, a fantastic hairstylist and extraordinary makeup artist are an actor’s best friends. Where would Nicole Kidman be without her exuberant Virginia Woolf prosthetic nose? Oscarless.

Ditto for Meryl Streep, who even name-checked her loyal hairstylist J. Roy Helland of 37 years at last year’s Academy Awards for her The Iron Lady victory.

“I want to thank my other partner,” said the actress.

Casting Might Not Be an Oscar Category, But It’s a Key Part of a Film Coalescing

Chemistry Partners

From left: Hugo Weaving in Cloud Atlas; Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained; the Argo cast.

BY Monica Corcoran Harel

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A great film can feel a lot like a fantastic dinner party.

Actors mingle and clash in the best possible lighting, and conversation is fraught with wit and emotion.

The director usually gets the bulk of the credit. But before he or she can play the consummate host, someone must carefully select the right guests, send out the invites, and keep track of the RSVPs.

Putting together a roster of stars is just a fraction of the work, though. In the case of Lawless, the project languished in uncertainty for almost three years and various actors were forced to jettison the film for other roles during the limbo. Originally, in 2009, the Prohibition era-Goodfellas had Shia LaBeouf, Ryan Gosling, James Franco, Amy Adams, and Scarlett Johansson at the helm. Three years later, when the film premiered in Cannes, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, and Mia Wasikowska sauntered down the red carpet. Incidentally, LaBeouf never abandoned the cast and fought to attract talent.

“Every project brings its own unique challenges,” concedes casting director Francine Maisler, who sought out actors who would connect emotionally and physically with the time period. It’s a boon for the production that Lawless boasts the next generation of stars, like Chastain and Hardy. “Trying to realize (director) John Hillcoat’s vision and to present him with actors who find surprising and distinct ways of bringing the characters to life was exhilarating.”

For Victoria Thomas—who launched her career with Repo Man and cast Django Unchained—the leads are playing against type, which creates hype. “I think it was time to see Jamie in a badass spaghetti western hero role and Leonardo in a juicy bad guy role,” she says of Foxx and DiCaprio. “Jamie gets to be Clint Eastwood and Leo gets to be Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West.”

That would be the casting director, of course. It’s a job that can’t garner an Oscar, but its mighty importance is always felt behind the scenes. In his wildly amusing book If the Other Guy Isn’t Jack Nicholson, I’ve Got the Part, Ron Base writes of the near-casting decisions that would have changed film history.

Imagine The Graduate starring wry Charles Grodin, for instance. Or a gum-cracking, mustachioed Burt Reynolds playing the paunchy, debauched astronaut in Terms of Endearment.

This season, a bounty of films showcases the brilliance of casting directors who hit their marks. Case in point: Jamie Foxx as a freed slave seeking revenge in Quentin Tarantino’s socially controversial Django Unchained, Hugo Weaving playing roles outside of his gender and ethnicity—also a controversial turn—in Cloud Atlas and an assemblage of Academy Award noms and victors in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.

Ask any Scientologist about the controversy over this drama directly inspired by the life of L. Ron Hubbard.

Of course, Tarantino has a reputation for casting the most unusual of suspects. Thomas and the director artistically tangoed with a shared love for ’60s and ’70s character actors like Earl Holliman and William Devane. “I think Quentin and I were looking at the same television shows growing up, just in different houses,” she says. “So even though we were working together for the first time, I felt like there was a fairly quick connection.” For Thomas, who is AfricanAmerican, the greatest challenge was the often brutal subject matter and the rampant use of the serrated n-word. “I had to get used to hearing that word said to me a lot by white actors in casting sessions,” she adds.

Cloud Atlas, the epic and existential exploration that spans centuries with actors playing up to seven different parts, could be the longest journey for a casting director. It didn’t help that it was an independently financed movie and actors worked more for less pay.

Lora Kennedy—who worked with the Wachowskis on Speed Racer—recalls her reaction when the brother and sister team sent her the David Mitchell book.

“I was like, really? Who are we going to get to play all these multiple roles?” she recalls. Well, two years later, the complex project landed Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, and Weaving. “It morphed into a rep company with everyone taking on more and more parts.” Not everyone was thrilled with

the casting, though. The fact that Caucasian actors were transformed into Asian characters sparked some criticism online. “No matter how we did it, there never would have been a solution to please everyone,” says Kennedy. “We switch ethnicities and genders.”

Kennedy also worked with Ben Affleck on the political thriller Argo and was charged with casting 140 roles. Her biggest hurdle? “The sheer size of it. Just the magnitude of having to cast 100 speaking roles of white dudes who say one or two lines,” she says.

To cast the Iranian actors, she consulted Tehranborn actress Shohreh Aghdashloo to make sure she connected with the right Persian actors, some of whom did not have agents. Aghdashloo’s daughter accompanied Kennedy on auditions to be sure that actors spoke the appropriate dialect of Farsi.

The Master, set in the ’50s, called for more than 70 actors who could physically and emotionally convey the post-war ebullience of the decade. “That means no tattoos and no plastic surgery,” laughs casting director Cassandra Kulukundis, who has consistently worked with Anderson since Magnolia in 1999. “I looked at real soldiers and Park Avenue socialites,” she says. The exacting director Anderson, known for surrounding himself with many of the same actors in his films, wanted big names—like Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams—alongside up and comers. “I needed newcomers who could go toe to toe with Phil and Joaquin and hang with them,” she says. In order to prepare them for trading lines with such luminaries, Kulukundis worked with them like an acting teacher or a spiritual guide. “It’s more like a workshop than an audition,” she says of the exercises that they do together.

Kulukundis likens assembling a cast for an Anderson film to “building a quilt” because the actors must gel onscreen as a collective being. The combination, or constellation, of talent trumps individual stars. It also guarantees a level of trust among the performers.

“The actors must have great chemistry and no fear on the set. That is most important.”

No doubt, behind every good director is a great female casting director. Ellen Chenoweth has cast most of the Coen brothers’ films, while Juliet Taylor has worked with Woody Allen for nearly 40 years—going all the way back to Love and Death in 1975. (She suggested that he cast Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris.)

It’s time the Academy reconsidered its cap on categories and went on to reward some of these women— OK, and a few good men—with an Oscar for their vision and instincts. As John Frankenheimer once said, “Casting is 65% of directing.”

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even though we were working together for the first time, I felt like there was a fairly quick connection.

Higher

Ground The stone-giant sequence pictured here in the before (below) and after (above).

By Christy Grosz

The Hobbit’s Most Well-Known Digital Characters Might Look the Same on the Surface, but They’re Breaking New Ground Underneath Although the wait is nearly over for the familiar goblins and mystical forests of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, senior visual-effects supervisor Joe Letteri says the only thing that remains the same for this iteration of Peter Jackson’s fantasy films is on the surface. The digital tools that brought countless Orcs to life and gave Gollum his distinctive distorted face are virtually unrecognizable from those used a decade ago for the The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

“It’s changed almost completely,” Letteri says. “On the outside, you want Gollum to look like the same character, but he’s completely different (under the hood).”

The biggest change from the first set of films is the way that actor Andy Serkis’ performance is captured and analyzed in order to create the digital character, according to visual-effects supervisor Eric Saindon.

“Our facial capture has progressed leaps and bounds,” he says. “Now we actually capture all of Andy’s performance, when he’s acting with Martin (Freeman) in Gollum’s cage on set. We have a small camera attached in front of his face that captures his exact facial performance. Rather than an animator going in and doing it frame-by-frame, the computer analyzes Andy’s performance and then fires Gollum’s muscles to do the exact same thing. So the first half of the animation, which is the raw mo-cap data, is really Andy.”

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“We know so much more about how the face works,” Letteri adds. “When people communicate face to face there are so many things that are going on that you really have to study now and put into the characters.

We hope that people recognize that there’s this extra layer of depth.”

While Gollum takes a bit of a back seat to the other myriad creatures in The Hobbit, the film’s team at Weta had plenty of other digital characters to create, including the formidable stone-giant and its complex sequence. The crew shot the actors on a very small set climbing a hill along a rock wall, and every other element was added digitally after the fact, including the rain. “We did try to capture rain on set; it worked OK, but it was very easy to get rain on the mirror for the 3D, and then the stereo breaks instantly. The lighting was (also) very hard to control with the rain. So we did it for about a day and then we decided that it would be better just to do the rain

in post. Then we added the stone giants, which are basically these mountains that come to life to have a thunder battle.”

Saindon admits that sometimes it’s tough to tell the practical effects from the digital, which is exactly the level of detail the team hopes to achieve.

“Your eye is not easily fooled,” Letteri says. “We all go to the movies because we want to be fooled, but on the other hand we want to be fooled really well.”

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We all go to the movies because we want to be fooled.

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