Deadline Hollywood - AwardsLine - Oscar Preview/Nominees - 03/16/22

MAGNIFICENT 007: EXPECT BILLIE EILISH TO TALK + YOU WIN AGAIN: THE ROLES THAT DOUBLED DOWN ON OSCAR

OSCAR NOMINEES

WINNER BAFTA AWARDS

BEST FILM

BEST DIRECTOR JANE CAMPION

4 WINNER

CRITICS CHOICE AWARDS

BEST PICTURE

DIRECTOR | ADAPTED SCREENPLAY | CINEMATOGRAPHY

WINNER DGA AWARD

FE ATUR E FIL M D IR EC TOR

JANE CAMPION

“A

36 BEST PICTURE WINS

THE YEAR’S BEST PICTURE.”

INCLUDING

WINNER

WINNER

BEST PICTURE

BEST PICTURE

LONDON CRITICS’ CIRCLE FILM AWARDS

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS ONLINE

FILM FOR THE AGES.

WINNER

BEST PICTURE

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

PARADE

12

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS ®

INCLUDING

BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR

A FILM BY JANE CAMPION FILM.NETFLIXAWARDS.COM

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D E A D L I N E ,CO M

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Young Ko

CALL SHEET First Take 4 BILLIE EILISH: Breaking down the making of a Bond anthem, with pop’s hottest talent and collaborators Finneas O’Connell and Hans Zimmer 8 QUICK SHOTS: Editing Don’t Look Up; designing a minimalist look for The Tragedy of Macbeth 10 THE ART OF CRAFT: The creation of ‘Katie Vision’ for The Mitchells vs. the Machines 12 LOVE ME TWO TIMES: Sometimes the Academy just can’t get enough of a character 14 FIVE THINGS: Writer-director Joachim Trier keeps it very real with The Worst Person in the World

Cover Story 16 FAMILY TIES: How CODA’s Siân Heder, Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant told a heartfelt story that moved the needle for Deaf representation in Hollywood 26 SIGNS OF PROGRESS: CODA star Troy Kotsur meets the Deaf cast of Oscar-nominated short documentary Audible

Feature 30 THE LONG ROAD TO OSCAR: From idea to Academy accolade.

The creation story behind each of the Best Picture nominees

Dialogue THE NOMINEES: 42 Benedict Cumberbatch 46 Javier Bardem 50 Ryûsuke Hamaguchi 54 Ariana DeBose

Handicaps BEST PICTURE 58 Deadline’s Pete Hammond picks his odds-on favorites ON THE COVER: Siân Heder, Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, and Daniel Durant photographed exclusively for Deadline by Josh Telles

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE ®

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM

“A LOVE LETTER TO THE MOVIES.

‘The Hand of God’ creates a reality that is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and remarkable for its buoyancy and grace.”

“THIS IS PAOLO SORRENTINO’S ‘ROMA’, a picture-perfect take on a time and a place.”

A

beautiful love letter to family, football and FILMMAKING

A Film by

PAOLO SORRENTINO Director of Academy Award

®

THE GREAT BEAUTY FILM.NETFLIXAWARDS.COM

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THEIR STRANGE ADDICTION How BILLIE EILISH, FINNEAS O’CONNELL and HANS ZIMMER turned No Time to Die’s title song into an Oscar-nominated anthem for our time

By Joe Utichi

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from the bombastic action adventure for which it was intended, the song had added resonance that meant, when it was finally heard over the credits for No Time to Die, it was like reuniting with an old friend.

At the time Eilish and O’Connell wrote the track, of course, none of this was in the cards.

Instead, “We kind of threw our hat in the ring,” O’Connell says simply and rather modestly.

“We just told them how excited we were by the idea of writing a Bond song.”

“And it was actually kind of fun to write,” Eilish says. “Sometimes writing songs is a horrible experience. But on this… I remember, I was reading the lyrics after, trying to figure out whether it was me or Finneas who wrote this line or that line, but you just kind of forget.

You totally forget because, really, we wrote it together. And it was fun.”

“I was surprised by that,” adds O’Connell.

“We felt so beholden to writing a great Bond theme. The best setup is to write without any expectations. Really, when you write with no expectations, that’s how you get a song like ‘Bad Guy’. You go, ‘Let’s try this, try that, mess around with it.’ With ‘No Time to Die’, we were like, ‘Oh god, we have to write a great song.’

But we became aware how weird it was that we were having just a wonderful time writing it.”

You don’t deliver a franchise centered around the world’s most famous spy without strict secrecy, though, and Eilish and O’Connell had only the film’s pre-credit sequence, in script form, to guide their initial writing process. It was from this, Eilish says, that she and O’Connell weaved a narrative, recognizing that the best Bond themes had followed a similar pattern, casting the singers as characters who might have crossed paths with Bond or the films’ other characters.

“It feels like it has to make sense in the context of the movie,” says Eilish. “I don’t really want to see a Bond movie where the main title song doesn’t have anything to do with the film. That’s going to be super unsatisfying. And what was cool about writing a song from the perspective of the movie itself was that we love writing characters and narratives into our music, and I feel the music we’re most proud of is the music where we’ve come up with a plot for the song ahead of writing it.”

Indeed, what has made Eilish’s music so definitive for a generation of fans has been the ease with which she has worn her triumphs and tragedies in the lyrics she has composed with her brother, relating her audience to her their own struggles in the world. And so, she says, the personal had to find its place here too.

“I wrote the song from the perspective of somebody I had hurt,” Eilish explains. “It was a really interesting situation for me, because honestly, we never think about how our own actions are perceived from other people’s point of view. Or, we do, but we don’t do it enough. It taught me a lot, to put myself in somebody else’s shoes, and it was fun, too, because you can create a character and write about something other than yourself. You don’t have to expose yourself; you don’t have to be telling your truth.”

“But it is truth,” Zimmer interjects, and Eilish

As Boromir might have said in some unorthodox, parallel universe adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: One does not simply walk into a Bond movie. For most artists, recording a signature song for a feature film is a task performed once the contract is signed. Not so on Bond, with its long history of iconic musical credit sequences.

On a Bond movie, artists line up for a shot at winning the gig, writing and recording songs on spec in the hopes they’ll get picked.

No lesser musician than Johnny Cash, for instance, recorded a song for Thunderball, which was nixed in favor of Tom Jones, who also beat Dionne Warwick to the gig. Alice Cooper’s “The Man with the Golden Gun” lost out to Lulu’s song of the same name. Blondie had to step aside for Sheena Easton on For Your Eyes Only. The Pet Shop Boys, Radiohead, Muse and Pulp have all recorded songs that didn’t make the cut. And those are the ones we know about. Some get released anyway, others languish on some dusty record cabinet in the sky, never to be heard from again.

All of which to say, earning a spot on that coveted playlist of official Bond themes is not just highly prized, it’s highly contested, and it has been as long as Ian Fleming’s superspy has been a big-screen staple.

So, when Hans Zimmer landed the gig to compose the soundtrack for No Time to Die, the choice fell to him to pick the song that would best fit his score. “As soon as I heard this song, I really tried to listen to the others, but…

I thought, to have such elegance and such beauty in a Bond movie could be just fantastic.”

The song that floored Zimmer was, of course, a ballad

by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell. It was the song that would become ubiquitous on radio stations and Spotify playlists long before No Time to Die ever found a pandemic-light window in which to premiere.

Indeed, “No Time to Die” took on a new life as an oddly apt elegy to lead us through the early days of the pandemic. Divorced Left: Finneas O’Connell and Billie Eilish.

Above: Hans Zimmer.

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choices. “We’re good at pushing back at that,” Zimmer notes, “But we need those people around to protect us.”

“Yeah, that’s one of the things we’ve been successful in fighting off in Billie’s solo career,” says O’Connell. “We have a very insular team, and we don’t play anything until it’s almost entirely done. I sometimes think people at record labels feel that they’re paid to give feedback.

The reason we hold off playing it until the very end is we go, ‘Here it is, and we’re done unless you have a fantastic idea.’ We’re always fighting the culture of, ‘How can you make yourself feel smart today by giving us a task?’”

On Bond, they say, producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson are the ones serving as the vanguard in the fight to protect their artists from that kind of interference. “It feels incredibly intimate,” says Zimmer. “They’re at every session, but they’re brilliant at hiding what an enormous machine it is to make a Bond movie.”

So, then, as they make music that tackles their own personal truths and Finneas O’Connell and Billie Eilish at the world premiere of No Time to Die. insecurities, even as filtered through narrative, or movies, or character creations, is the process therapeutic? “No!” Eilish exclaims. “I feel like people always say making music is therapeutic, and I genuinely don’t agree. I don’t really enjoy it. I only enjoy it afterwards, when I play it. I’m sure both of them do.”

“I find it therapeutic,” confirms O’Connell.

“Oh yeah,” says Zimmer.

“See? I don’t,” insists Eilish. “I love —Hans Zimmer listening to what I’ve made. I love having made music. I love performing it and singing it and dancing to it. The process for me is far from therapeutic. The difference is, they’re nerds for the process, and I’m not.”

“Nerds!” laughs O’Connell. “No, but it is therapeutic.

I’ve been to stints of therapy in my life, and I think the only reason that I haven’t been to more is because of the songwriting.”

“I think the only reason I survived is because I got to play the piano,” says Zimmer. “I wouldn’t have cared if nobody listened at all. I didn’t make this career. Nobody understands this, but I think you two will. People ask me, ‘Bond?’ And I go, ‘Yes.’ Then I’m like, ‘I have no idea how to do this, and it’s really scary because I don’t want to ruin it for everybody.’”

“It’s so true,” says Eilish. “A huge part of this crazy life that we now live is being terrified to do something, but knowing that you just gotta say, ‘Yes’. Not because other people are telling you to but because you know that it’s right. ‘Will you write a Bond song?’ ‘Hell yeah, we will!’ But, fuck, now we’ve got to do the Bond song, and how do you even start?”

“And when are they going to find out I’m a fraud?” adds Zimmer, with a laugh.

“You can actually hear it in this song, how Billie and Finneas support each other.

It isn’t about how well you play; it’s about how well you listen.” agrees. “It’s a different path to truth.”

Once Zimmer heard their demo, he insisted they be given the full script, and the trio worked to refine the song further. They all struggle to remember what, specifically, changed—such being the organic nature of the collaboration—but Zimmer says he wanted to find the “colors” of the piece. “When I composed the music for The Lion King, I was composing with only black and white images, and there’s a chord in the score that clashes with the color so badly,” he says. “It sounds bad to admit it, but I had to do the remake just so that I could sort this one chord out, because it had been bugging me since 1994. I’m the only person in the world who notices.”

The key, they say, was to listen. To listen to the music, to each other, to themselves. “You can actually hear it in this song, how Billie and Finneas support each other,” Zimmer says. “It isn’t about how well you play; it’s about how well you listen.”

Finneas says that’s something he and Eilish are always working on. “We have a song called ‘When the Party’s Over’. We played that live first, halfway out of naivety, but it ended up being advantageous. We played it for about a year before we put it out. And the whole song hinges on these moments we found when we played it live, where Billie’s vocal comes in. It was because we were both listening to the gravity that was there, letting it build.”

Zimmer asks O’Connell how they deal with listening when it comes to the notes they must inevitably receive from music executives, citing his own dalliances with movie executives when they failed to understand his

AWARDSLINE

4B E S T P I C T U R E A C A D E M Y

A W A R D

WRITERS GUILD AWARD NOMINEE

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Screenplay by Adam McKay | Story by Adam McKay & David Sirota

INCLUDING

®

N O M I N A T I O N S B E S T OR IGIN A L S C R E E NP L AY Adam McKay & David Sirota

PRODUCERS GUILD AWARD NOMINEE

BEST PICTURE

WE REALLY DID

HAVE EVERYTHING,

DIDN’T WE?

“IT’S ADAM MCKAY DOING WHAT HE DOES BEST,

KNOCKING SATIRE OUT OF THE PARK.”

FILM.NETFLIXAWARDS.COM

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Q U I C K

S H OTS Jennifer Lawrence as Kate Dibiasky and Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Mindy in Don’t Look Up.

Charted Territory

for us, when we were cutting you couldn’t really tell until you had the

At press time, here is how Gold Derby’s experts ranked the Oscar chances in the Best Picture race. Get up-to-date rankings and make your own predictions at GoldDerby.com

Working closely with writ-

Best Picture says they decided that they would

1 The Power of the Dog

Tonal Shift

ODDS .................................

used a lot of stock footage in the

2

Don’t Look Up humor amid an apocalypse

CODA

says. “You lose the luster and the

Finding the right tone of Don’t Look Up editor Hank Corwin. “I’ve never lenging in this way,” Corwin says, “I could have cut an entirely different

ODDS ...................................

3

honesty of it.” —Ryan Fleming

Belfast ODDS ...................................

4 West Side Story ODDS ...................................

as an editor, was I didn’t go for the -

Don’t Look Up is a satirical

5 Dune ODDS .................................

Abstract Minimalism

6 creating the abstraction. How do

King Richard ODDS ...................................

The Tragedy of Macbeth’s production designer Stefan Dechant’s took a minimalist approach to create a psychological experience

-

7 actually are.”

Licorice Pizza ODDS .................................

From the start, production designer Stefan Dechant knew that of light and shadow,” he says, “so

8 Drive My Car

of The Tragedy of Macbeth. “He wanted to create a hybrid of

The sets for The Tragedy of Macbeth

ODDS .................................

we can see if that’s what we want right away. We could even light

9 Don’t Look Up ODDS .................................

gave the actors that on set. “I only

10 there was no need to do color.

Nightmare Alley ODDS .................................

From left: Writer-director Joel Coen and Frances McDormand; Stefan Dechant.

AWARDSLINE

actors to already see that it was abstract.” —Ryan Fleming

3

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS ®

INCLUDING

BEST ACTRESS OLIVIA COLMAN BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

3

S P I R I T

A W A R D S

W I N N E R

BEST PICTURE

B E S T D I R E C TO R M AG G I E GY LLE N H A A L

B E S T S C R E E N PL AY M AG G I E GY LLE N H A A L

WINNER

WINNER

WINNER

BEST SCREENPLAY

FIRST-TIME FEATURE FILM

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL ELENA FERRANTE

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

W I N N E R

DGA AWARD

MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL

USC SCRIPTER AWARD

BEST ACTRESS OLIVIA COLMAN

GOTHAM AWARD TORONTO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION LONDON CRITICS’ CIRCLE FILM AWARDS ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY VANCOUVER FILM CRITICS CIRCLE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE KANSAS CITY FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

“Olivia Colman gives the

BEST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR.” “IS THERE ANYTHING SHE CAN’T DO?”

W R I T T E N A N D D I R E C T E D BY Scan here to watch Academy Award® nominees Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in conversation.

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“Conceptually and philosophically, it should be like Katie did it. It should feel like something that Katie could draw on her phone with tools that are a little bit more primitive.”

—Lindsey Olivares

The Mitchells vs. the Machines production designer Lindsey Olivares perspective with “Katie Vision”

By Ryan Fleming

AWARDSLINE

The story of The Mitchells vs. the Machines is told from the perspective of Katie Mitchell,

had the edges sanded off and hasn’t had anything

SPA I

THE ART OF CRAFT

The idea of “Katie Vision” was bounced around until production designer Lindsey Olivares got her hands on one of the team’s animation tests. “I went to school for computer animation,” she says, “so I learned how to animate traditionally first, and then 3D. So, I collaged in these animated 3D renders, but statics so they weren’t in 3D animation. I did 2D animation of badgers and possums and I got one of our artists to help me do some text for it. Then we had a test that was, ‘This is what we mean when we talk about Katie Vision and drawing on the screen.’”

“JAVIER BARDEM CAPTURES DESI’S AURA AND MAGNETISM” “JAVIER BARDEM HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER”

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F I L M

FO C U S :

OSCA R

H I STO RY

GOLDEN ROLES Some characters are so beloved they get multiple turns at Oscar

By Matthew Carey

In

Good Guys

troubled mother Leda in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s psychological drama The Lost Daughter—Colman for Lead Actress, and Buckley for Supporting.

Father Chuck O’Malley

the history of the Academy Awards, the Oscars have repeat-honored the same movie character on a surprising number of occasions—and it’s happened twice in 2022. First, Ariana DeBose is nominated in the Supporting Actress category for playing Anita in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Broadway musical West Side Story, the very same role that earned the same Academy Award for Rita Moreno in 1962. Secondly, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley are nominated for playing the same character in the

DeBose, Colman and Buckley join a group of stars nominated for playing the same movie characters—and here’s a handy checklist of the times lightning struck twice…

In 1945 this role won Bing Crosby lead actor for Going My Way. And it got him nominated again the following year for The Bells of St. Mary’s.

U.S. Marshal Reuben J. ‘Rooster’ Cogburn John Wayne won lead actor for this True Grit role in 1970, and Jeff Bridges was nominated for the 2011 remake. But there was no love for Cogburn’s 1975 standalone movie.

Bad Guys

Don Vito Corleone

Michael Corleone

Richard Milhous Nixon

The Joker

Marlon Brando won lead actor as Corleone in 1973 for The Godfather; in 1975 Robert De Niro won supporting actor for The Godfather: Part II.

Al Pacino was nominated twice: for supporting actor in 1973 for The Godfather and lead actor in 1975 for The Godfather: Part II.

Anthony Hopkins was nominated for lead actor in 1996 for Nixon, and Frank Langella was nominated for lead actor for 2009’s Frost/Nixon.

Heath Ledger won posthumously for supporting actor in 2009 for The Dark Knight, while Joaquin Phoenix won lead actor for 2020’s Joker.

AWARDSLINE

Sportsmen

‘Fast Eddie’ Felson

Robert ‘Rocky’ Balboa

Paul Newman was nominated for lead actor in 1962 for The Hustler and won lead actor for the same role in 1987’s The Color of Money.

The role saw Sylvester Stallone nominated for lead actor in 1977 for Rocky, and again in 2016 for supporting actor for Creed.

Romantic Leads

Esther Blodgett AKA ‘Vicki Lester’ Janet Gaynor was nominated for lead actress in 1937 for A Star Is Born, followed by Judy Garland, who was nominated for the 1955 remake.

Authors

Professor Henry Higgins

Rose Dewitt Bukater

Iris Murdoch

Leslie Howard was nominated for lead actor in 1939 for Pygmalion, and Rex Harrison was nominated for lead actor in 1965 for My Fair Lady.

Kate Winslet was nominated as lead actress in 1998 for Titanic, and Gloria Stuart was nominated for supporting actress for playing her

Judi Dench was nominated for lead actress in 2002 for Iris, while Kate Winslet was nominated for supporting actress, playing the young

Real-life Royals

Henry VIII

Henry V

Henry II

Queen Elizabeth I

Charles Laughton won for lead role in 1934 for The Private Life of Henry VIII, and Richard Burton was nominated for lead actor in 1970 for Anne of the Thousand Days.

Laurence Olivier was nominated for lead actor in 1947 for The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fifth with his Battell Fought at Agincourt in France. Later, Kenneth Branagh was nominated for lead actor in 1990’s simpler-titled Henry V.

Peter O’Toole was lead actor-nominated in 1965 for Becket, and nominated for the same character again in 1969 for The Lion in Winter.

Judi Dench won supporting actress in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love.

Cate Blanchett was nominated for lead actress in 1999 for Elizabeth, and again, in 2008, for lead actress in Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

F T

F I V E

T H I N G S

FIVE THINGS:

JOACHIM TRIER

friendship, we are able to refer back to experiences together. I can say, “Oh my god, you remember when I was with this person or that?” and he can share his stuff. We can actually talk about a lot of honest,

there’s wind in the trees and in her hair, not a slick, cold, meticulous CGI sequence. It’s almost as if the whole city is really in a musical sequence and it will break into song and dance at any moment.

formal approach to making screenplays. I think that’s quite a unique thing to have, both that friendship

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share.

The director of The Worst Person in the World on the importance of keeping it real

2

Your location is a character, too

I realized, through being interviewed by a sociologist, that in the 15 years since Reprise, Oslo’s population has increased by 50%. There’s a point in Reprise where a character says, “We’ve got to get out of this place, it’s too stupid and small,” whereas in the beginning of The Worst Person in the World, the lead character, Julie [Renata Reinsve], is smoking cigarettes, looking down on the city and thinking, “Damn, there’s pressure here.” Oslo isn’t just a little brother in Scandinavia anymore, it’s a place that’s come more into prominence, culturally, and perhaps

By Damon Wise

big, big expansion of wealth in the middle class during the last 10, 15 years and stuff like that has really changed the demography of the city.

Maybe that’s your headline: “How the meritocracy reached Oslonians.”

But it’s true. There’s a different kind of pressure to be someone, I think.

It’s more urban than it used to be.

From top: Herbert Nordrum with Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World; writerdirector Joachim Trier.

1

Writing is truly a team effort

Eskil Vogt and I write together, and we’ve done that since I made my Reprise, in 2006. It just works, you know? It’s like a band.

We have, I think, a good collaboration that encapsulates both a sense of discussion of cinema—like, what do we like in movies? What are we missing these days that we’d like to watch ourselves? And then, on the other side, because of our long

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3

Real is better than VFX

There’s a scene where Julie runs through the streets of Oslo, and everyone she passes is frozen. I’ve gotten this question a few times, and I’m always happy to say that it’s not CG—everyone just stood still. I shoot on 35mm. I like to catch things in camera. I still like the playfulness and joy of making movies, it’s really fun. Renate has commented on this as well, how weirdly wonderful it was to have the cops stop all the middle of the street, people would just stand still, and she would run through this, as if the whole city was frozen. I wanted it to feel like a musical piece—charming and playful, like

Don’t take your actors for granted

I’ve jokingly said in the past that I feel like Anders Danielsen Lie is the Norwegian Daniel Day-Lewis, only that instead of going off to make shoes, he goes and removes people’s together, he always says to me, “I think this might be the last one, and I’m so happy we made it together.”

Now, when every cast member is done on the shoot, I always do a speech for them: I say a few words of appreciation and the whole team claps them out at the end of the day. That’s a tradition. On The Worst Person we only had a week left of shoot, and Anders was leaving early.

I ended up sobbing. I cried in front of everyone and said, “I’m so worried we won’t work together again. I hope you will come back.” And he said, “Of course I will. Just write me another part.” And I think that’s the truth of the matter, and I hope it’s OK that I say that. I think if Anders gets the right parts, he will always say yes.

5

Music matters

I come from a music family.

My grandfather was a film director, and he was also a jazz musician. My dad played jazz before he became a sound designer for films, and I grew up with musicians around me.

I DJ. I’ve done that since the 90s.

I love music, and I guess it’s the only other thing than movies that I could do, although I’m not good with instruments—I was kicked out of a punk band when I was a kid for being a bad drummer. Eskil and I write with music, and we blew half the music budget in the first third of the film. Luckily, my producers were very supportive. I said to them, “There are three things we have to invest in. We need time on set with actors because I want the greatest performances. We’ve got to shoot 35mm, and we need a good music budget.” And they were like, “But that’s what’s the most expensive— those three things!”

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3/9/22 2:10 PM

CODA’s tight-knit cast

and crew, led by director Siân Heder and actors Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant, warmed hearts and minds with a film that has substantially moved the needle for Deaf representation in Hollywood.

As awards season smiles on them, they reunite to tell Mike Fleming Jr. about the journey so far.

Photographed exclusively for Deadline by Josh Telles

inning the Academy Award

for Best Picture often demands so much more than simply making a great film. Sometimes, it comes down to peaking in the minds of awards voters in the final weeks of the season, capturing late awards and having the cast and story to charm the voters.

The film that finds itself in that enviable position of having the last-minute momentum this year is surely CODA. In addition to its Best Picture nomination, the film’s director Siân Heder is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the deaf fishing family patriarch played

by Troy Kotsur is a favorite for Best Supporting Actor after several wins including a SAG Award. Fellow cast members Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant haven’t made the nominations list, but they have been as united in awards promotion as they were when they shot the film in Gloucester, Massachusetts, reassembling in high spirits for Deadline’s cover shoot on the evening after the Oscar Nominees’ Luncheon in Los Angeles.

The late surge is uncharacteristic because CODA’s awards road began way back in January 2021, when it swept the major awards at the Sundance Film Festival and set a festival record $25 million deal from Apple.

But the cast camaraderie remained a well-kept secret; instead of a thundering audience reaction at an Eccles Theater premiere that would have created awareness, the film’s debut came at a virtual version of the festival, necessitated by the Covid pandemic.

CODA premiered last August on Apple TV+, before most of its Best Picture competitors. The performances, charm and struggles of deaf cast members Kotsur, Matlin and Durant, feel fresh. Having Matlin along for the ride is helpful. The youngest Oscar winner at age 21 for Children of a Lesser God, Matlin was also the first deaf actress to win, and she saw the realities of almost zero demand for non-hearing actors. She has turned in a career’s worth of acclaimed performances, but hers was a harder road than for most bright young actors with an Oscar, simply because Hollywood has never known what to do with deaf actors. She and Heder had to fight financiers who wanted to go with hearing actors for deaf parts. Along the way, they were helped by the dogged determination of producers Patrick Wachsberger and Philippe Rousselet, who refused to let CODA fall into the trap of tired industry cliché, even if it meant realizing the movie with one third of its original budget.

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Troy, you’ve faced many challenges on a long road to Oscar nominee. Name moments that led you to challenge your belief in yourself, and how you pushed through.

Troy Kotsur: It’s funny you ask me that question. Before CODA I started to feel like I was ready to give up because I was a bit worried about my family and I didn’t have a retirement plan. I was already in my 50s and my wife was beginning to get on me a little bit. I really was getting ready to get a regular job, maybe in the Deaf community. I was all ready to work in a cubicle in a full-time job.

The accumulative nature of my career led me to get the audition for CODA. I got offered the role after the audition and I’ll never forget it. I was typing on the computer, and I got this call. It was my former agent who texted me to inform me that I got the role and asking if I should negotiate.

It felt like this ice cube was melting into my hand.

My body temperature was starting to decrease. I just put my hand onto my desk with shock, I was just like, wow.

Of course, the computer screen just shut off because the space bar was causing all of these characters to fly across the screen. I felt ready to quit and I gave them 30 days notice, and I was able to leave that job.

I was thrilled to get started. Siân asked me not to shave or cut my hair for five months before the first day of shooting and it was very fun to transform into that character of Frank Rossi.

The longer I was in acting, the less hope I had, and the more frustration I was feeling. I didn’t see so many opportunities. I was almost getting used to the lack of opportunity. Deaf folks who could use their [speaking] voice better than I could would have more of a chance and more of a possibility to get work.

This character, Frank Rossi, really fit exactly the description of what I was looking for. I felt like I was able to dive in and that this was the right character for me. Frank Rossi wasn’t a victim or someone to have sympathy for.

It would be a challenge around how to make an audience love a character like that. With Frank Rossi, of course, I found a personal connection, and it was easy for the audience to connect with him and shift their perspectives.

I can see that Frank was such a positive character and a positive role and now I see that it’s beginning to influence Hollywood to open their hearts and minds, and this is just the beginning.

What were the movies or roles that sparked your own early passion to be an actor?

Kotsur: As a kid, I loved to read comics and fantasy and superheroes. When Star Wars came out, it just was overwhelming, it was mind-blowing. It was such a visual language. It said so much, even with me not being able to hear the dialogue. It was so fun to see all these aliens and this diversity in the characters.

I watched it again and again as a young boy. I’d go to a bookstore like Barnes & Noble and typically they have a big rack with all these film magazines. I would read everything I could about film, and I saved money because I’d just read the magazines right there. Because back then as a deaf person, I didn’t have access. TV didn’t have closed captioning. I really had to rely on magazines. And so more and more when closed captioning came onto the scene, I really loved seeing the creation and the production side of how they make movies.

From left, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant share a family dinner. Below, director Siân Heder.

“There was no

charity here in like, ‘Oh, I’m giving giving these roles to these these actors because they’re deaf.’ These are incredible actors who have craft and skill and completely disappeared into into these characters and transformed to to play them.”

—S I Â N H E D E R

Of course, I was challenged to have opportunities as a director, but I was able to be an actor on the stage and that’s where access was for deaf actors. National Theater of the Deaf and Deaf West Theater, all of them really helped me with my training as an actor. And then, of course, that became my bridge and my connection with Hollywood.

Marlee Matlin would be in the audience sometimes and I’d say hi, and then we made that bridge, we made that connection and we got to work together.

Marlee Matlin: All of the years that I’ve watched Troy work on stage, he’s one of a kind. There were so many

deaf actors who are great on stage, like Daniel here, but watching Troy in particular for longer than I’ve known Daniel, I always wondered, why wasn’t he in the Hollywood scene, making movies like I’ve been doing?

His talent just outshone everything I’d ever seen. It was so unique and every time I’d see him perform, I’d see him afterwards backstage and I’d say, “You’re great.

I’m your No. 1 fan.” And then I stopped because he knew how I felt. So, when I was talking to Siân about CODA, we both agreed he would be perfect for this role.

We’re on the way finally to get him involved in the Hollywood landscape, but it’s a long process. It takes a lot of work to break in for anyone, I’m sure you know that.

And in this particular case, it’s unusual. He mentioned that he felt that he was always passed over because he doesn’t speak well, and I get it. That’s something that we call discrimination.

Now Hollywood has the chance to see this film, to understand his work, and say, “OK, you can make it happen, you don’t have to look at things the old way and create roles for us.” Yeah, it’s a long process and I lost a job myself because a producer wanted me to speak the entire scene in a role and I can’t speak like that, so he took the role back. I get what Troy’s going through.

Siân Heder: Troy told me a story about going to an audition for a job he did get, but it was a room full of hearing actors, an entire hallway of hearing actors auditioning to play deaf. You went to that audition by accident because a friend told you about it and you were the only deaf person to audition.

Kotsur: That was for Criminal Minds. There was a friend of mine who happened to be fluent in sign language and felt like it wasn’t appropriate for him to play a deaf role.

He was extremely concerned and disgusted with that actually, so he actually gave me his audition time.

At first his agent was upset, and he said, “No, trust me, we’re sending Troy in.” I show up and that person who

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became my interpreter actually, because he was fluent in sign language, he voiced for my auditions. I sat down and I saw all these hearing people really struggling with basic finger spelling and ASL, and someone was literally covering their ears as they sat down. I was like, “How the hell can you do that? Oh, that’s a terrible choice.”

The first person they called in was me. I came in and the interpreter sat across from me and I just did it, I went for it, I put it all out there. I envisioned that the police were coming for me, and other actors would pull a gun and point it at the cops, but I pulled the gun up to shoot myself in the head. They ended up liking my audition because I wanted, as a character, to shoot myself before the cop shot me. It was really a shock and a surprise, and they actually clapped after my audition. I said, “Thank you for your time.” I left and then I was offered the role later that night. The guy who sacrificed and switched with me was my interpreter on set, which was really cool.

Heder: That’s an amazing story because all of those hearing actors were only focused on playing deaf. Troy had no interest in playing deaf, he was playing the character and he was playing the moment that the character was in. This is something that people I think don’t realize is the idea that he is an actor who’s focused on the character’s motivation.

“This is the moment I got to shoot myself quickly before the cops come in.” An entire line of hearing actors is out there trying to figure out how to pretend to be deaf.

Kotsur: But they didn’t know. There’s no excuse out there.

We’re all out there, you can’t play deaf, you should really know by this point. I think in the past, people just weren’t clued-in, they weren’t educated.

Kotsur: The Killing Fields, about Cambodia. The American photographers, and everything they go through in their

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journey, it’s truly incredible. That film is incredible. I’m obsessed with it. It’s so heavy and it’s just how to survive in that type of situation, with lack of communication and communication in different language. It’s truly interesting because they had a lot of visual communication that was so powerful in that film. I would enjoy playing a role like that in the future or any type of historical epic that was based on a true story with some serious conflict.

I don’t want to mention Marvel. It’s fun to watch the fighting, but it’s too much. They destroy buildings, the Incredible Hulk tears a car in half. I’m like, “I need to call my insurance company. The Hulk just destroyed my car.”

Matlin: I have several. When I first saw Happy Days, it was for Henry Winkler, because I was always a fan of his.

I saw Linda Bove, who was deaf and playing opposite Henry Winkler. She’s from Sesame Street. I said, “Wait a minute, she’s using my language. If she’s there, why can’t I be there?”

If you talk about films, one that really grabbed my attention was The Wizard of Oz. I’m a fan of many films, but a film that just tugged at my heart, because it’s part of my family and part of who I am, is Schindler’s List. I’m Jewish and my family, they were victims of the Holocaust. To be able to get into this story to see from their perspective the people who were victims of the Holocaust. What Steven Spielberg did with that film, really made me feel... I got a taste of what my relatives went through and the struggles they suffered.

Daniel Durant: So many. I like to watch how the actors dive deep into their character and I can’t see their person.

I can’t see who they really are, I see only the character.

Johnny Depp, he’s so good at putting on a crazy character that you can’t see Johnny Depp in there. It’s just the character, and I really enjoy that. Also, Jim Carrey. His expressions are so visual. He’s so visual with his acting.

He’s very physical and I’ve never seen another actor match that level of expression. Deaf culture tends to have exaggerated expressions while we sign, and it’s our language with our face, so that’s how we show how we feel. And Jim Carrey really fits right into our culture with his exaggerated expressions, I love him in all his movies.

Kotsur: I worked with Jim Carrey, actually.

Durant: Oh yeah? I’m so jealous.

Kotsur: Our director was Joel Schumacher, and he directed Number 23. I noticed that the director and Jim Carrey were swearing at each other with a lot of F-words going back and forth, and they were feeding each other this energy to have the character feel that anger. And so, our director asked me on my fifth take, he goes, “Tell him something like, ‘Fuck you, Jim Carrey.’” And I was like, “Are you serious?” And he goes, “Yeah.”

I was so nervous, and so after the fifth take I look over at our director, he’s sitting there like that and he gives me a thumbs up. So, I’m opposite Jim and the camera’s on both of us. I do my lines and say, “Fuck you!” And I’ll never forget his face. His face just sinks, and he actually dropped out of character, and he became Jim Carrey. He looked so unhappy with me. And we’re looking eye-to-eye and I go, “Hey, it wasn’t my idea. It was Joel’s idea.” And so, Jim looks over at him and he goes, “Hey, that’s a good one.” And the crew was just relieved and started cracking up. After that we were just great friends for three days.

Durant: I also loved watching Charlie Chaplin. When I was growing up, I collected all the VHSs, DVDs, they’re all at home. I watched Charlie every day. I still enjoy it, because of his physical acting. And he acts clear, it’s so obvious what he’s doing. He’s funny. He learned all that

stuff from his deaf friends. And he became very good with his physical acting, but it was deaf people behind that. I forget the name of his character in real life, he was extremely tall with a long mustache, and that actor was deaf in silent film and he acted quite frequently with Chaplin.

Kotsur: Granville Redmond.

Durant: Yeah, that’s him. A lot of people don’t realize that, because Chaplin knew how to finger spell and could actually sign a bit on set.

Emilia, people watching might think you have a strong singing background, but you had to learn to sing and sign.

What were the biggest challenges of each?

“I was very nervous nervous to sing ‘Both ‘Both Sides Now’, because because the song and and Joni Mitchell are so iconic.

She said ‘Both Sides Now’ is the work about the the end of her childhood. It’s perfect and I’m so happy it I’m worked out the worked way it did.”

— E M I L I A J O N ES

Emilia Jones: The biggest challenge was learning American Sign Language (ASL). I didn’t just want to learn my lines, I wanted to learn about the culture and the language. I had the most work to do in that area because I didn’t know any ASL coming into CODA. My dad is a singer, I grew up in a musical household, but I’d never had a singing lesson before, so I did have a lot of work to do. I was also 17 at the time, my voice was still maturing and the songs I was singing were Etta James, Marvin Gaye; they were huge songs. I found that a little bit daunting. I trained for nine months sign language, but also nine months singing. I loved it. I found it so rewarding learning these two skills.

When I got the role, I had auditioned with four dialogue scenes, and I sang “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. That was meant to be the song instead of “Both Sides Now”

by Joni Mitchell. Then I sent three more songs, which were just songs I was listening to at that moment in time.

I Skyped with Siân and I loved how she spoke about the project and how passionate she was and then I basically copied her friend signing the scene, when I tell the Rossi family that I want to go to Berklee. I copied it the best I could with no sign language training, and then two weeks later I got the role.

What were the complexities of learning to sing?

Jones: There was a lot to learn technique-wise. You know the line in the movie, when Mr. V says, “You have a pretty voice, but you have no control.” They got my singing teacher to tell Eugenio [Derbez, who plays Mr. V] what I was doing wrong, and he said, “She has no control whatsoever.”

When I was training, I had the tone, but I just didn’t know how to breathe. A lot of the songs were big songs and I had never done that before. Nine months I trained; I’m still learning now. I am not having singing lessons, but I feel like I’ve still got so much to learn.

Why did the song change from “Landslide”?

Jones: After hearing hundreds of girls audition with “Landslide”, Siân said she never wanted to hear the song again, so we changed it. Also, it’s a rights thing, too. I remember in the time that I was training with sign language and singing, I would be singing 10 different songs every week and then we’d find one that they liked and I’d start rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing, and then they’d say, “Oh, we didn’t get the rights for that.” Then you’d go back to the drawing board and get 10 new songs. It was a really long and complicated process, but I’m so happy it worked out the way it did because every song in the movie I think is lyrically perfect.

I was very nervous to sing “Both Sides Now”, because

the song and Joni Mitchell are so iconic. In a Joni Mitchell documentary that I watched, she said “Both Sides Now” is the work about the end of her childhood. It’s perfect and I’m so happy it worked out the way it did.

What was the song you most loved singing that got dropped over rights?

Jones: A lot of Etta James songs I loved, although I can’t really sing them. I loved learning them and putting my own spin on it. Stevie Wonder, too. “For Once in My Life”, I love that one.

Take me back to shooting this movie in Gloucester. What was it like for you to be immersed in this world together?

Heder: It’s a beautiful place, first of all. I think we were all living in this incredible landscape, the beach and the quarries. I remember in rehearsal Emilia and I went out and we both jumped off each cliff around the quarry. I had to do it first because I felt like if I was a director asking my actor to do that, I had to show her that I could.

Our DP jumped off too. We all went out and had rehearsal, and learning how to fish. I had gone out with Paul Vitale, who was the captain of the boat that we used, the Angela Rose, and we somehow talked Paul into letting us use his boat. We had an amazing marine crew. We had this guy, Joe Borland, who was our Marine Coordinator, and this guy Smash who was a local fisherman. Smash taught us all how to fish.

Smash and Joe and Paul Vitale took Daniel and Emilia and Troy and I out. I was going to use fishing doubles because those boats are really dangerous, and all of that equipment takes years to learn. How to pull in the winch, and deal with the nets, and there are these big iron doors that come up as you’re hauling stuff in. It’s pretty treacherous. I had fishing doubles planned, but these guys all took to it in an instant. It was amazing to watch.

Troy is from Arizona, but he looked like he’d been running that boat all his life. After a day out at sea he really looked like he knew what he was doing, and they were all learning to identify fish and separate them. Emilia was gutting cod and throwing the guts over the side of the boat and the seagulls would come down. And I think that was a real bonding experience for them.

Kotsur: Oh, we were all stuck out on the boat, and that’s really how our relationship grew and blossomed, because we were on that boat all day in really close quarters. It really was a massive benefit to us. I had never fished or even touched a fish before, so it really wasn’t easy to hold some of these slimy fish. The lobsters were alive, and I was afraid they would just clip me on the nose, and I had to be extremely careful. Daniel was pretty good at it. I really had to get used to it.

Heder: We had that location early, the house that we found which was this amazing falling down house out on Conomo Point. We did a lot of rehearsal in the house, and it was really nice. Marlee would be hanging in the kitchen and because we had so much time in the house as a family to sit around the table, it was really helpful for these guys to start to take ownership of the space and feel like a family in that house as well.

Some of those scenes at the family dinner table, like, “Tinder is something we can do as a family,” were really funny. The scene where Emilia’s character is describing

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to the doctor the problems that mom and dad are having in bed because of rashes… How much improvisation was involved?

Heder: The interesting thing is that the subtitles are not always what you’re seeing on screen in ASL. The subtitles are probably pretty close to what I wrote, but the way that Troy uses ASL and the way he improvises and expands and riffs, it’s so much fun but it’s almost like there’s no way to then subtitle it because ASL is so much more expressive in a lot of ways than English. So much of the comedy came from Troy taking the English line and then just riffing on it and improvising within it and adding all sort of color and flare to the line.

Kotsur: Sometimes as Frank Rossi I didn’t trust my CODA daughter as my interpreter, so I had to gesticulate, and I knew that my daughter wouldn’t be comfortable with that. I had to make sure it was loud and clear and that they understood me. And so sometimes it was a bit too much and they would edit it out but you could see the daughter’s reaction, cut away to the doctor’s reaction. And so, we started with the lobster, and I said, “Oh, her red pussy was the color of the lobster,” and they cut that out.

Heder: I was like, “You can’t sign pussy, Troy.” We had to tone it down.

Jones: He was also using props and he got his lighter out and everything.

Heder: At one point he was talking about his balls being on fire and he pulled out a lighter out of his pocket and he was running the lighter underneath his balls and I was like, “Let’s lose the lighter. I think we’ve crossed the line.”

Matlin: It’s also funny that he did every take differently and I thought, “OK, the next one will be fine. I won’t lose it. I won’t lose it.” But no, I still lost it after every take. It like, “Fuck, come on.” That was it.

Kotsur: It was really important to keep the energy up in that moment because it’s going to be permanent in picture when it’s printed, and so it’s extremely important to give as many options as possible rather than be robotic. But the script is a guide. We knew the intention of what was written, but we wanted it to fit our Deaf culture.

Heder: That doctor I cast was my friend from high school, and he came up and apologized to me halfway through this thing. “I’m so sorry, I swear I’m a professional actor, but I’ve never broken so much on film.” He couldn’t stop laughing every take we had because Troy was so funny.

He just couldn’t keep it together. We were so lucky. My ASL master is Anne Tomasetti, who was the person on set with me. Having Anne there at the monitor with me was so important to catch words like ‘pussy’ that I might not have caught. I mean just in terms of how we find the right level of edginess and dirtiness honestly, I needed deaf eyes behind the camera with me to be watching the ASL and how do we walk right up to the line in terms of comedy, but not go so far across it that we can’t end up having this film be for everybody?

Kotsur: And, if I may chime in, it’s really important to have a deaf eye behind the camera because as a deaf actor I feel much more freedom when I know someone’s there. If not, I might be worried if they’ll really get it, or would they keep my pussy line or not? And so, it’s

important to have that deaf eye to make sure that the deaf lines really shine.

We see the challenges the Rossis have in integrating

Kotsur: We were booked into a hotel. I saw all these tourists going back and forth outside the hotel and I felt uncomfortable in that setting, so we decided to move to an Airbnb where Daniel and I were roommates. It was a beautiful house on the water and the harbor. You could see the boats passing, and a beautiful sunset. We wanted to switch on the patio lights, and they had these light switches. We were flicking them on and off. Deaf people need to see each other to communicate in sign language.

So, we went outside on the patio, and we were watching this beautiful setting, having a drink. The police show up.

And suddenly we see all these flashing lights.

So, the guy approaches us with his shiny cop badge and a hand on his gun, and he was saying something.

So, we said, “Hey, we’re deaf. Am I in trouble?” Maybe they think we’re criminals and we broke into the house.

But they wrote down something on a pad of paper, and it said, “The foghorn has been blaring for hours.” All the neighbors were complaining and calling the police because of how loud it was. Of course, we weren’t aware of that. The policeman actually had to call the owner of the house to figure out which switch it was. When they finally found it, they taped on a piece of paper that said, “Do not touch!”

Our pizza delivery guy came at the same time the foghorn was blaring. And so, we apologized, and after that was all done, we gave a slice of pizza to the cops with a bottle of water. So that’s where all the rumors spread, and everyone knew about the deaf guys in town the next day.

Heder: Troy texted me a picture of him eating pizza with the cops. And I was like, “What is going on? Please tell me what happened.” We had so many run-ins with the cops.

Remember the cops busted our party? I had a dinner party…

Jones: It was the weekend before we were wrapping.

Heder: And the cops showed up and Marlee and Troy answered the door. It was a noise complaint. We were being too loud. Our 10-person barbecue, the cops came.

Leo are alone and don't hear them coming.

Heder: I remember talking to Marlee’s friend, Alexis Kashar, who’s a civil rights attorney. She was talking about how she was glad that scene was in the movie because I think the relationship between deaf people and law enforcement can go south very quickly. Cops are amped up and not immediately responding to verbal direction.

That Coast Guard scene in the movie felt important for a couple of reasons, just because it also represented a way of interacting. And I’m glad that the cops ended up eating pizza with Troy and Daniel. But that also could have gone another direction.

Kotsur: I suppose, yeah.

Heder: If they thought these guys had broken in...

Matlin: Didn’t the cops also get you guys for playing Frisbee in your kayaks?

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Kotsur: Oh yes, they did. We were out on the kayak and the cops asked us to put life jackets on. They came up and they were like, “You have to have your life jacket on.” And we said, “OK.” It was the same cop again and we recognized each other.

Heder: You were lucky that the Harbor Master in Gloucester [T.J. Ciarametaro] is in our movie. He’s former Coast Guard, the guy who jumps aboard the boat and does that amazing stunt, because he’s done many boardings in his life. But T.J. definitely was our good law enforcement hookup in the town. Once T.J. was in the movie, I felt like he was taking care of us.

Your get out of jail card. Sounds like your merry band

Heder: Troy was hanging out in Pratty’s bar every night.

I would be texting him, “Please get out of there...” Those boats come in, those guys start drinking at like 1 p.m., and then by 9 p.m., there’s a fight almost every night.

Troy would text me videos of these fights and I’d be like, “Why are you filming this? Get out of the parking lot and come home.”

Kotsur: It was just to study, a character study that would influence me as a fisherman.

“Before CODA I started to feel like I was ready to give up because I was a bit worried about my family and I didn’t have a retirement plan.

I was already in my 50s and my wife was beginning to get on me a little bit.”

—T ROY KOTS U R

No brawls yourself?

Kotsur: No, I wasn’t involved [laughs]. It got close a couple of times.

Heder: I got them sweatshirts from Pratty’s bar just so they can have something to remember by.

Matlin: Actually, it’s the ultimate choice by Siân to represent our point of view as deaf people when we go to things like concerts. It also conveys a message as parents watching their daughter do something that’s so completely outside of their sphere of understanding. She’s doing it because she loves it. Yet we can’t identify with it or connect with it.

It’s an examination of the journey of what is initially fear, especially from the perspective of a mother, to puzzlement, to eventually something positive.

Heder: It’s about also coming from a hearing perspective or a Deaf perspective. One of the first of those moments was in the bar when Leo goes out and he’s with a bunch of hearing guys at the table. Daniel and I were texting the night before that scene and I was asking him to tell me, what is it like when you’re at a table full of hearing people and you’re trying to follow the conversation? And he was explaining to me the way his eye moves around the room and the way he needs to almost be a detective to pick up on different clues to follow what’s happening.

Anne Tomasetti wrote me the most beautiful essay about that experience as well, about a Thanksgiving with her hearing family and trying to follow a conversation around the table. I gave that essay, and Daniel’s explanation, to my DP and then she operated camera for those moments.

She wanted to operate from the Deaf perspective. Not to

operate as a hearing person who’s imagining what this must be like, but really trying to follow those moments in the way that a deaf person would. The same was true for the concert.

Troy and Marlee both have hearing children, have CODAs, and have sat through many a concert. They described to me the way that they watch a concert, which is to pick up on the other audience members and the way they look around and see if they’re reacting emotionally or engaged. That’s amazing information to give to my DP and camera operators, because then we are not hearing people judging that moment. We are living empathetically in the Deaf experience and operating and trying to understand the visuals from that place. I think that having these collaborators was incredibly helpful for me, as a hearing person, to try to get out of my own hearing perspective.

together, and it was quite successful. And I’m thinking, if we could do it on Broadway, if we could do it on other productions, we could do it in a film like this with more than one deaf actor. I wouldn’t be sitting here, and the movie wouldn’t have been as well-received, if we had cast hearing actors in those roles.

Heder: It’s not that it was the right thing to do. It was an incredible creative opportunity. These are brilliant actors.

There was no charity here in like, “Oh, I’m giving these roles to these actors because they’re deaf.” These are incredible actors who have craft and skill and, as Daniel said, completely disappeared into these characters and transformed to play them. The ability as a director to have this rich visual language on screen that could only be expressed in this way… because Troy and Daniel and Marlee are native signers, and this is their language, and they are getting to explore and play and improvise in this language.

And Emilia’s success in signing was so dependent on having this team around her. That fight on the beach between Leo and Ruby is an amazing scene, but the speed of the sign language and the rapid-fire way that these two are fighting… Emilia’s performance was brought up in sign by having these scene partners who could bring you there in terms of the language.

Jones: There’s actually a saying that I was thinking about as you were talking about it. “Nothing about us without us.” And I think yes, full stop. And for me, as Siân said, going into this, I was so grateful I had a deaf teacher. It made me learn faster. I had Anne Tomasetti, as Siân did.

She was my rock on set. She pushed me in the two weeks of training when I got to Massachusetts. I met Troy, Daniel and Marlee, and they took me under their wing. And I learned not just the language, but about the culture. Troy was telling me stories in ASL, and I was following. I was finger spelling words that I didn’t know how to sign. And Daniel would always say, there’s a sign for that. You all just really, really helped me and I learned so much faster.

With the scene on the beach, I remember Daniel celebrating that I had my first ASL injury. We were mad in that scene. And so, I was banging my hand really hard.

I remember I had had this huge bruise and Danny was like, “This is amazing, this is so good!” I was like, “What is good about this injury?”

-

Matlin: It would’ve been essentially robbing the opportunity for deaf actors to be involved in the film. It would’ve totally changed the story. I have yet to see the French film, I just haven’t had a chance. It’s not authentic, even though they wrote the original story, and they wrote the characters and created story elements. And then they cast hearing actors to play deaf actors, except the brother. I’ve always spoken out to anyone who was willing to listen over the course of 35 years, that I’m not the only person out there. There are lots of deaf actors out there. When we did Broadway and I did Spring Awakening with Daniel here, there was a cast of both hearing and deaf people

Heder: I was originally hired just as the writer, in 2016.

They wouldn’t even commit to me as the director until they saw the script. I went into the studio and pitched my take, and I wrote the script. And in writing the script, I did a massive amount of research and became very invested in the Deaf community and in the collaborators I had; the people who I had working on the script with me. And I knew that it was not an option, both in the world, but also for me, to make the film without deaf actors playing these roles.

I had finished the script and they all flipped over it at Lionsgate. It was a weird movie for Lionsgate to be doing, because it was a small family drama. It didn’t fit into their idea, I think, of what they do.

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Patrick Wachsberger loved the movie, and it was his baby. He and Philippe Rousselet were nurturing it there.

But I think the rest of the studio wasn’t fully behind it.

Then I had to go in and pitch myself as the director, and part of my pitch was, “I want to do this with deaf actors in these roles.” Immediately, financing questions came up. “Well, there aren’t famous deaf actors, Marlee Matlin is the only one. And so how were we going to finance the movie with these actors?”

I think it wasn’t pushback, like, “No, we are creatively against that.” It was from the financing side, with the budget level it was, it was like, “Well, how are we going to do this without bankable names?” So, then they pushed me to try to have the Ruby part be some kind of pop star.

Jones: They'd have saved a lot of money on singing lessons.

Heder: Yes [laughs]. I’m truly not throwing anyone under the bus, because I think that they were a studio that had always made films a certain way and they couldn’t see how to make it. They couldn’t see a way to please all their investors with these names. So, it became, “Well, I want Ruby to be a pop star, and sure, OK, we’ll trade you, you can have your deaf actors in the deaf roles.” But I couldn’t do that either. I wanted to find this girl, and this is a really hard part. She has to sign fluently, she’s in every scene in the movie, she needs to be a brilliant actress.

So, then I started crafting that teacher part to try to go after some names. But also, it became clear that the studio was never going to make the movie the way that I wanted. It wasn’t just the deaf actors. It was pushing me to have Ruby talk through every scene, to make a hearing audience more comfortable. And, “What are we going to do with all the silence?” “Well, maybe these ASL scenes

“It “It also also conveys a message as parents parents watching watching their daughter do something something that’s that’s so completely outside of of their their sphere of understanding.

It’s an an examination examination of the journey of It’s what is is initially initially fear, especially from the what perspective of of a mother, to puzzlement, perspective to eventually eventually something positive.” to — M A R L E E M AT L I N should be shorter.” “Maybe there shouldn’t be as much of the family.”

So, I started to just get the feeling that I didn’t want that movie to exist. I’d rather see the movie die than make it the way that they wanted. And at that point I had seen Troy Kotsur on stage. I saw him in a Deaf West Production of At Home at the Zoo. I was in love with him as an actor. I met with Marlee, and Troy was her first thought as well.

We were on the same page there. And when I showed Troy’s audition to the studio, it was so undeniable that he was the guy that they were like, “OK, we agree that this is the guy, but also, we can’t finance that movie.”

There were probably six months where I thought the movie was dead at the studio. I thought I was going to sit on a shelf somewhere. I was heartbroken, but I also felt like…

Matlin: I was texting you.

Heder: Marlee would text me every day, “What’s happening, what’s happening?” And I actually took another movie because I had another indie project that I was going to get going. I thought, OK, I have to let go of this, this is tragic, but also there’s only one way this movie should exist, so it’s OK. And then Patrick left Lionsgate and he, as he says, put the movie in his luggage. It was the one project that was really important to him that he basically got as part of his exit deal from the studio. It so rarely happens like that. And then of course we had an indie movie on our hands and then we had to figure it out at a third of the budget of what it was when it was at the studio, and how do we make this movie basically for nothing, but make it the right way?

Patrick went to Cannes and got a bunch of people to sign deals on cocktail napkins. And then he called me and said, “OK, we’re going.” And I didn’t believe him that we were greenlit until we were on set, because it had been so many years of trying to get the movie made. Philippe Rousselet, his company Vendôme ended up financing the film with Pathé. So it was Philippe and Patrick together, believing in it and taking a risk. They believed in my vision, and it was completely execution-based. They gave me total freedom on set to make the movie that I wanted to make.

Marlee, usually when someone wins an Oscar, doors

a scene with Emilia Jones.

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Matlin: If you’re talking about 1987 here, there was no social media, no awareness. People weren’t clued into

my culture, my language, whatever it may be. So, it was so very small in terms of awareness, and work. It never came my way. Probably now would’ve been different, and you can see what’s happening with Troy. But for me, that was a fact that was very much the times. Now, there’s so much more awareness of our culture, awareness of using deaf actors, awareness of the fact that we even exist.

So, the first job that I was offered was a movie with Ed Harris, Walker. I grabbed it, because, first of all, I was a big fan of Ed Harris and his wife. Then I got a little movie with Jean Reno, but that was a few years later. And I was doing some episodic work in television, but it was very slow. I changed agents. I went from a small agency, Susan Smith, to ICM, and I stayed with them for 15 years. And I drowned in the big agency at ICM. I had a great deal of respect for them, but they didn’t really quite know what to do with me. I had to get the right team together. It took me a while to get the right team to help me get the work.

And that’s when I developed my own production company because that way, I could create the roles rather than wait for roles to come to me. I’ve worked consistently, but a lot of it has been in television, The West Wing and The L Word and shows like that. But it has been a struggle. I think now with CODA, I trust that things and the doors will be wide open.

Matlin: I think so. It’s fun to watch them go through the process, the journey that I went through. And I’m laughing with them, but at the same time, I have their backs. If there are questions that they might have, I’m available to answer. They’re in good places.

When I did Connecting the Dots: The Story of Feeling Through last year, I was the executive producer, and it was nominated for an Oscar last year. I started to say, “OK, I hope this isn’t the flavor of the month.” But I think I trust that this is a different process. I think this really will make a change, that people will open their eyes and their ears. I’m feeling good about this. And I hope I get to work with them all again.

Jones: I really want to be directed by Troy. I would love for him to do something where we can all be in it and he could direct and act in it.

Kotsur: I would love to.

Heder: We were at the Santa Barbara Film Festival last weekend, where Emilia and Troy were being honored. It was the first time I saw captioned clips from all the other movies, and I wanted to cry, because I couldn’t believe that awards ceremony had finally done the thing. These guys normally are sitting there and all the clips from all the other movies come up and ours is the only one that’s captioned. Well, Santa Barbara captioned all the clips.

There were interpreters on stage.

I think there’s so much fear in Hollywood about changing. I’m starting to see an opening up of people’s minds of realizing it just takes being slightly creative and asking a few questions. I remember after Sundance, when these guys won that ensemble award and the movie won four awards and I was doing the Zoom water bottle tour where you’re going around and meeting everybody… I’d meet with all these executives and they’d go, “Oh my God, these actors, I mean Daniel Durant, where did Daniel come from? He’s brilliant. He’s so hot. Oh my God, this guy’s the next...”

And I go, “Great. Why don’t you meet with him?” And they go, “Oh. How?” And I’m like, “What do you mean how?

You get an interpreter and you put it in place.”

Matlin: It takes time to teach. It takes time to collaborate.

It’s funny. We’re talking about the Oscars, we need to let the Academy know that they need to subtitle all the clips that they show. I mean, they need to do that.

starting with the acquisition at Sundance for a record amount. How keen are you that it also avoids becoming the last? That a young deaf kid might watch this movie and feel the same inspirations you were talking about it a success from a long-term standpoint for each of you?

Heder: I think that idea of representation is so important.

Troy saw Marlee on screen, he saw her win the Oscar when he was 17, 18.

Kotsur: 17.

Heder: He thought, ‘I could do that. That’s a path forward for me.’ When I was auditioning deaf actors, I was struck at how many actors Daniel’s age were working. And I really think it’s because they grew up looking at Marlee and realizing, “I could be an actor, this is something I could do.” To see yourself on screen and know that there is a world of deaf kids out there now who can watch these guys and know that this is a path forward… Hopefully Hollywood will change and there will be more roles, more representation, more stories told, because this is just one story. This is one family. It’s not every CODA story.

It’s not trying to represent the Deaf community. It’s one very specific family. And there are hundreds of incredible stories in this community that need to be told.

Kotsur: About 30 years ago until the present, I have worked at Deaf West Theater, and I would teach acting workshops to young deaf children. And some of them were at hearing schools or elementary or junior highs for many years. When CODA came out, I received all these messages, and they were pictures of these young kids. And then they’re grownups and they’re saying, “Hey Troy, I remember when you came and taught the workshop at our school.” I feel so proud that these children are now grown up and they remember those days when I visited them, teaching those acting workshops. It’s important

that young deaf kids have a role model.

Daniel is young and I’ve worked with Daniel for over five years. He reminds me of myself when I was younger. These children now have hope. They feel inspired and maybe at Gallaudet University, the teachers will be so overwhelmed by how many folks are signing up for these acting classes.

But I really want that tradition of sign language to carry on for the next generation. We won’t live forever, but it’s nice to have this moment, documented in history, and we maintain hope for these young deaf actors. Marlee being an Oscar winner gave me hope. It gave me life because she proved that to me. And now we’re hitting with CODA right now.

Heder: DJ Kurs, who’s the artistic director of Deaf West, he texted me the other day and he said, “I am being pitched so many bad ideas for Deaf movies. And I want to thank you for that. You’ve created a monster. I just got pitched Deaf Flashdance.” So, I think that was his feeling, that progress was happening. That now there was a lot of interest in... Wait, Marlee doesn’t like that.

Matlin: I’ll talk to you later about Deaf Flashdance…

See, I was inspired by Linda Bove and Phyllis Frelich and Bernard Bragg, these are actors who were a generation before me. So, they were the ones that inspired me and gave hope to be the actor that I’ve always dreamt of being.

And with Henry Winkler’s support being there since I

was 12 years old. Mentors and role models are important.

Just like Troy said, when deaf kids are little, I would visit them at schools throughout the country and the world, and would see them become adults. They’d say, “Remember me?” And I’d say, “Yes, I remember you when you were a kid, but you still look pretty much the same as you did when you were a kid.” But that’s a great feeling. I mean, it really gives you inspiration.

This movie is a feel-good movie. At the end of the day, it’s a feel-good movie. And it’s also a point of identification.

It’s for everyone. It’s not just for Deaf audiences, it’s for everyone. Even people who don’t even speak our language.

Heder: I think the universal nature of this story was so important because people see themselves in the movie.

I’ve had so many people come up to me with personal stories of how they’ve been moved by the film. I had a Korean man who was a child of immigrants, and he came up to me just bawling after a screening and said, “I just saw my story on screen.” That the CODA journey was his journey of being between two cultures and translating for his parents. So then, the deafness is not the point. The point is that this is a family just like yours. It’s a movie about a family where the family happens to be deaf.

And what about Deaf Flashdance [She groans and shakes her head.]

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CODA’s Academy

Award nominee Troy Kotsur joins the Deaf stars of Oscar-nominated short documentary

Audible to talk about life, football, and Deaf representation in Hollywood

By Matthew Carey

ctor Troy Kotsur has touched countless people with his Oscar-nominated performance in CODA, as a father who is deaf, and whose daughter is hearing and known as a CODA, or ‘child of deaf adults’. But on a Zoom conference call with the stars of the Oscar-nominated short documentary Audible, it was Kotsur who was moved. Like him, the young subjects of Audible are deaf.

Kotsur placed his hand on his chest, telling them, “When I saw Audible, it hit me hard,” his words interpreted by an ASL translator. “It hit me straight in the heart.”

Audible, directed by Matt Ogens, tells the story of three seniors at the Maryland School for the Deaf in Frederick—Amaree McKenstry-Hall, Lera Walkup, and Jazie Perry.

McKenstry-Hall, a key player on the talented MSD football team, anchors the Netflix short with undeniable gravitas, communicating a depth of feeling about his experience growing up the only person who is deaf in his family.

Kotsur, 53, said watching Audible reminded him of when he was younger. “I grew up in a hearing family myself and, really, we didn’t have much communication at times.”

He recently won the supporting actor SAG Award for his CODA role as fisherman Frank Rossi, who struggles

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Signs

at times to understand the dreams of his daughter Ruby, played by Emilia Jones. The CODA cast, including fellow deaf actors Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant, and hearing actors Jones, Eugenio Derbez and Ferdia WalshPeelo, also won the SAG Award for Best Ensemble.

In February, Kotsur became the first deaf male actor to earn an Academy Award nomination (Matlin, in 1987, became the first deaf performer ever nominated, going on to win the Oscar for Children of a Lesser God).

Kotsur’s breakthrough carries a lot of significance for the cast of Audible.

“Your achievement of getting the [nomination],” Walkup told Kotsur, “is really amazing for you but also, as a deaf person, you’re showing that our community, our Deaf community, is really huge and you represent a lot of us.”

“We’re really just touched and thrilled to know that we fought so hard to be in these spaces and different environments,” Perry added, “whether it be as actors in movies, and now that we’re finally getting the awards, and accolades and recognition, it’s really amazing to see Troy’s accomplishment happen and hopefully we’ll see more, other people behind him, whether it’s me, Amaree or Lera, following behind

in his footsteps.”

Kotsur’s performance in CODA resonated with the Audible stars in multiple ways.

“Your character as the father made me realize how much unconditional love oftentimes fathers and families have,” Walkup told Kotsur.

“Seeing Troy’s character kind of hit home for me because my mother is deaf and I do have two hearing siblings,” Perry said. “I saw a lot of similarities to my siblings, what they went through in the hearing world, but also how they navigate in a deaf world.

Just the parents [in CODA], how they interacted with their daughter, felt like home to me.”

Perry says she aspires to become the first African American, trans, deaf actress. She wanted to know how Kotsur got into Hollywood.

“How did your journey begin?” she asked. “How’d you get successful in it?”

Kotsur told her, “When I was younger, I was like you and I was thinking about, ‘Where do I get started?’ I was looking for a place that would be friendly and have access for me. And so, I found Deaf West Theatre [in Los Angeles]. I was acting for many years, in many productions. How I got into CODA was because our director,

Siân Heder, had seen me perform on stage at Deaf West Theatre four years before I auditioned for the role, but I actually didn’t know that [until later]…

I did a lot of plays and remaining persistent was how I did it. I didn’t know how much time it would take.”

Now he wants to pay his success forward to a new generation.

“I would love to establish a workshop for young deaf students to train as actors, a training ground for TV, film and stage,” Kotsur said. “I’m actually looking for the financing now to do it. That’s actually my dream to establish that workshop.”

And Perry sounds like an excellent candidate for the program.

“I just like getting out of myself and being able to put on a different character, get out of the reality I’m in, and enter another world,” she said.

“That’s kind of how my interest for acting came up.”

Walkup and McKenstry-Hall also said they too have entertained the notion of getting into acting, and given the presence they display on screen in Audible, they seem to possess that intangible ‘it’ factor.

“A lot of my [social media] followers have reached out to me, and said I should go to Hollywood, pursue Hollywood, but I didn’t know

of Progress Left to right: Amaree McKenstry-Hall, Lera Walkup, and Jazie Perry; McKenstry-Hall.

what that journey would look like,” McKenstry-Hall said. “Me being young, I’m 20, I have plenty of time, right?”

“Yes. You have plenty of time,” Kotsur said.

Walkup, a sophomore this year at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. (a school Kotsur also attended), said she “wouldn’t mind entering the theater department”.

“So, when you feel comfortable, when you feel ready, have that experience and see if you’re motivated and interested to dive in,” Kotsur told her. “And if it’s not your thing, you might want to go into something else, maybe writing or directing. You have to really search and look within. I had the opportunity to direct, write and act, and I didn’t want to feel limited.

I wanted to be a multi-hyphenate and wear many different hats… Stretch yourself and don’t have any boundaries and feel free to express yourself. It’s really important for you all to experience a bit of all these different worlds.”

Kotsur revealed he had more in common with McKenstry-Hall than appearing in Oscar-nominated films.

Back in the day, he too played football.

“I was the only deaf member of a hearing football team, and I played center,” he said.

Audible shows how a big bass drum

is used to start each play as Amaree and his teammates compete on the field. The sound waves reverberate through the ground, reaching each players’ feet. Troy, as the lone deaf player on his squad, didn’t benefit from a bass drum, so he came up with a work around.

“You know how they hike the ball, how the quarterback would signal me to hike is he would actually tap me on the butt, or on the cup,” he explained to the Audible trio. “That was the signal we developed.”

He recalled, “I’ll never forget this one time our quarterback was injured and was replaced by a second-string quarterback. He forgot that I was deaf. So, he didn’t tap me to hike the ball. And so, all of a sudden, he just got blitzed. I was like, ‘Hey, you’ve got to tap me on the butt.’ He did feel uncomfortable doing that, but he goes, ‘OK.’ So, when we were at the line of scrimmage again, again he got blitzed and I was like, ‘Listen, I didn’t feel the tap. I have pads back there. You’ve got to hit me harder so I can feel it.’ It was a bit weird for him. That’s how we communicated. That was the system we established. We were actually 10 wins and two losses on our JV team.”

Kotsur and the Audible young people may get a chance to meet

up next—not on the gridiron, but the Oscar red carpet. If it happens, Audible’s stars said they want a selfie with Kotsur.

“Oh, definitely,” Kotsur promised.

Perry asked him how it felt to win that solo SAG award.

“I felt like Hollywood finally recognized me and recognized deaf talent and deaf actors. It seemed like they’re now willing to accept us, and they believed in my work and validated my work. They didn’t look at me like, ‘Oh, poor deaf person.’ They looked

“It’s really amazing to see Troy’s accomplishment happen and hopefully we’ll see more, other people behind him, whether it’s me, Amaree or Lera, following in his footsteps.”

—JA Z I E P E R RY

at me as a peer, as an actor who just happened to be deaf. And so, I see Hollywood beginning to open their minds and accept us as deaf actors.”

Kotsur commented on the significance of an Oscar year where two nominated films—a fictional one and a nonfiction one—explore the lives and experience of deaf people.

“Often we were marginalized, we were ignored,” he said. “But we have such a rich history of storytelling in the Deaf community… I think Hollywood is starting to wake up and open their eyes, and they’re opening their hearts and minds, and they’re more willing to work with deaf actors in stage or TV or film.”

He urged not just Hollywood, but other segments of society to really push much further, and think about innovative ways to foster a more inclusive world where deaf people can fully participate.

“There’s no limits to creativity,” Kotsur said. “Today, we have great technology with smartphones. You could develop a robotic technology that would be ‘signed-to-voice recognition,’ or some new type of futuristic technology. Let’s begin to think outside the box and let’s collapse that box and let’s spread opportunities to deaf talent.”

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3 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS ®

BEST PICTURE

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

TROY KOTSUR

SIÂN HEDER

FILM INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD Best Supporting Male

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nominees has survived a journey to cross the finish line, before ever earning the Academy’s consideration.

Here’s how they came together.

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on Belfast at the beginning of 2020, but the story itself has been growing for 50 years. “The desire to write something about Belfast had been with me ever since I left the place,” says Branagh, “but it was definitely enhanced by the idea of the lockdown. There was much more introspection at the beginning of this period.”

In casting his family, Branagh’s goal was to cast people who understood the culture of Belfast. “I admired Jamie Dornan very much for his work on The Fall,” he says, “he’s from just outside Belfast. Ciarán Hinds was brought up a half a mile from where I lived, he was about 16 when the Troubles happened. Caitríona Balfe came from a border town called Monaghan, so she really saw the tension between Catholics and Protestants up close. And then Judi Dench, I discovered, had a much more extensive Irish background than I realized. She had Belfast relatives who visited her when she was young, so she had the accent in her head from her favorite uncle.”

The most important casting choice was for Buddy, a young version of Branagh that needed to be able to keep up with the rest of the cast. “They all have this sort of firecracker quality,” he says, “and I think Jude Hill picked that up when he joined. The main reason I cast him was that he’s a phenomenal listener. He can hold the screen responding and reacting, and that was going to be half of his performance, just us watching other people’s words affect somebody whose life is being written on the page of their face.”

Even with the cast all but set, Branagh was met with some difficulty in getting the film financed. “When we shopped the movie around, we got tremendous response to the screenplay,” he says. “But it was very difficult to get people to understand how we would manage to find something lighter in such a dark situation.”

Still, he knew this was the best way to tell his story. “It was clearly a tough sell on the page, but it was something you had to see to understand, this very gallows-humor quality in the Irish, which is ‘Well, what else are you going to do?’” —Ryan Fleming

FO C U S FE AT U RES

Best Picture

riter-director Kenneth Branagh began work

to Oscar

The Long Road Each of this year’s

Belfast

7

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N O M I N A T I O N S

INCLUDING

BEST PICTURE BEST DIRECTING Kenneth Branagh • BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Kenneth Branagh

“THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR. The Perfect Cinematic Expression Of Joy And Connection.”

“KENNETH BRANAGH’S MASTERPIECE.

A Film Of Formal Beauty. Letter-Perfect Performances, Complex And Textured Writing.

An Honest And Emotionally Exposed Filmmaker Operating At His Peak.”

THE TIMES

A

KENNETH BRANAGH

FILM

GO WITH YOUR HEART

Scan here to go behind the scenes with Academy Award®-Nominated Writer/Director/Producer Kenneth Branagh and discover how his childhood experiences shaped BELFAST.

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ow do you assemble the

most illustrious star cast in memory for an allegory about climate change?

For Adam McKay, it was cloaking the passion project of the Hollywood elite in a madcap satire surrounding an extinction event, a comet hurtling to earth, with six months for leaders to figure it out and save the planet. Don’t Look Up lacerates polarized politics, social media messaging and the influence of tech giants getting in the way of sound logic and stems from McKay’s own anxieties around the response to climate change.

The biggest stars responded.

“First in the door was Jennifer Lawrence,” McKay says. “And then as every director imagines, you have the President in your movie, and you have to go to Meryl Streep. I just never imagined she would say yes, and once you get Meryl Streep… A lot of actors said they’d been waiting for a project like this, with how crazy the world has been. Meryl was in, then Cate Blanchett.

Tyler Perry. Then Jonah Hill. All along, I was having conversations with Leo.” That charmed track screeched to a halt when Covid hit. But the denial, the blame, the partisanship anti-vaxxers

and mask wearing so reflected the Don’t Look Up script that it only became more desirable. “The basic conceit of the movie held,” McKay says. “Everyone had the same reaction I had. ‘We’ve got to make this movie now more than ever.’”

The delay allowed DiCaprio to commit, with Mark Rylance, Ariana Grande and Timothée Chalamet also aboard.

“I’d always wanted to do a film about this subject matter,” DiCaprio says. “It is incredibly hard to tackle the climate crisis in a two- or three-hour format.

Adam cracked the code with this idea of it becoming a comet, and have society and the media and people make it a partisan issue. At the end of the day, doing a movie about this subject matter at this time, there are very few movies historically like that. [Reading the script] I was thinking of The Great Dictator, Network and Dr. Strangelove.”

DiCaprio figures the world has nine years rather than six months to straighten out the climate crisis. Aside from the four Oscar noms including Best Picture, Don’t Look Up became Netflix’s most watched movie globally, itself a victory. And, perhaps, a step in a hopeful direction. —Mike Fleming Jr.

Don’t Look Up When CODA writer-director

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Ann and Alexandria there to go, ‘No deaf family is putting their couch here,’ and ‘You need to kind of really think about deaf spaces and how they work, and it’s different from how a hearing family would set up their living room.’”

After CODA’s Sundance premiere, Apple acquired it for a record $25 million-plus, releasing it in theaters and on Apple TV+ on Aug. 13. And recently, the cast made SAG history as the first deaf ensemble to win, with Kotsur becoming the first deaf actor to win an individual prize. —Antonia Blyth

CODA

Siân Heder was first approached by the film’s producers Patrick Wachsberger and Philippe Rousselet, they explained their plan to remake a French film, La famille bélier, for an American audience, with financing from Pathé. The comedic drama tells the story of a deaf family and their daughter, a hearing CODA (child of deaf adults) who serves as their interpreter in life and at work.

“There was an opportunity to set it in a world that I knew really well.

I grew up in Boston, and I knew the fishing community there a little bit,” Heder says. “I was very excited to tell a story about a family that we normally don’t get to see on screen.”

From the start she knew it was vital to have deaf collaborators both in front of and behind the camera. Oscar's first deaf recipient, Marlee Matlin, was cast with deaf actors Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant. Ruby, the CODA herself, is played by breakout Emilia Jones. Like Jones, Heder made the effort to learn American Sign Language (ASL). Says Kotsur: “It’s not often where you see directors that really take the time to learn sign language.”

Heder also had two “ASL masters” on hand, Alexandria Wailes and Anne Tomasetti, who helped her adapt the script. “ASL is not translated as English. It’s its own language entirely, [with] its own grammar, syntax and a culture that goes along with it,” Heder explains.

She also needed visual help. “It was so helpful to have

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Drive My Car

Dune

istory was the greatest

obstacle for Denis Villeneuve as he set out to realize his dream of adapting Frank Herbert’s Dune for the big screen.

After all, 1984’s David Lynch version had struggled under the weight of the worldbuilding and Lynch himself had warred with his producers, delivering an end result that found only a cult fanbase. An earlier attempt by Alejandro Jodorowsky to adapt the novel into a 10-hour feature had never got to set after an expensive development process. Many considered it unfilmable.

But Villeneuve remembers coming out of the theater from seeing Lynch’s version. “I told myself somebody will do it in the future again,” he says.

He never thought it would be him, but when a journalist asked him in an interview what his dream project would be, there was no other answer.

By chance, the interview caught the eye of producer Mary Parent, then at Legendary Pictures, who had acquired the rights. “It never happened like this before and it probably never will again,” she says.

What Villeneuve eventually achieved with Dune can be considered comfortably definitive, to the degree

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that his is the name most cited as the one unjustly missing from this year’s Best Director nominations. But where Peter Jackson had been able to mount a trilogy of Lord of the Rings films to shoot back-to-back towards the end of the last century, it was a mark of how much blockbuster cinema has changed when Villeneuve didn’t receive a greenlight for a second chapter until after the movie had opened in theaters.

And Dune’s theatrical release was thrown into doubt when Warner Bros. announced that its 2021 slate would launch on HBO Max day-and-date with theatrical, owing to the pandemic. Villeneuve, a proponent of the theatrical experience, was disheartened. “There’s a level of engagement to a theatrical release,” he says. “If you’re at home watching it on your computer, you are less committed to the experience.”

Finally, as he preps the second chapter, Villeneuve can afford to be circumspect about the road to get here. “Nobody wanted the journey to end,” he says. “It would have needed a catastrophic opening to end that journey, I think. But until the light goes green, you really don’t know what can happen.” —Joe Utichi

Since his first novel, Hear the Wind

Sing in 1979, Haruki Murakami has become not only one of the most popular authors in his native Japan but in the world too: his work has published in more than 50 languages, and last year he was rumored to have been nominated—for the 16th time—for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Surprisingly, few of his novels have been adapted for the big screen, but his short stories have proven to be rich pickings. Following Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 arthouse hit Burning, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car premiered in Cannes last year and instantly became a critical favorite, motoring straight to awards season and four Oscar nominations.

Initially, Hamaguchi was asked to look at a different story from Murakami’s 2014 collection Men Without Women, but his eye was drawn to Drive My Car, in which a widowed actor is forced to hire a driver when his license is revoked.

“In Japanese, the story is only 50 pages long,” says Hamaguchi, “and it really wasn’t enough material to make a feature film. The short story ends abruptly, too, and I felt like I needed to take that story somewhere beyond where it ends on the page. I reread the other stories, and there were two I felt I could incorporate into the same storyline.

Taking story elements (but not plot points) from Scheherazade and Kino, Hamaguchi developed the script for Drive My Car in the space of two years. At the same time, he was working on a separate project, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which premiered under strict Covid protocols at the 2021 Berlinale. The first cut came in at 200 minutes, but the panic-stricken director snipped it down to 180. “I was willing to cut more,” he says, “because producers are the ones taking on the financial risk of making a film. But they agreed with me: the story was fully complete with the three-hour runtime. I was so grateful to be able to work with the producers who really understood me and saw that Drive My Car could not be a minute shorter.” —Damon Wise

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King Richard

After Phantom Thread in 2017,

Paul Thomas Anderson went AWOL, until the tail end of 2020, when reports began to surface of a mysterious project known as Soggy Bottom that was shooting in the San Fernando Valley. It seemed like an impulse project, but in fact the story had been brewing in his mind for over 20 years. It was a simple enough concept—“What happens when an eighth-grader asks a grown woman out for a date and she actually turns up to it?”—and a promising premise for a screwball comedy.

Since the idea first came to him, the director had become friends with Jonathan Demme’s producer Gary Goetzman, whose wild tales of his life as a precocious youth proved to be a goldmine of inspiration, from his time as a child actor to a bizarre stretch as a teen entrepreneur selling waterbeds and buying pinball machines. At the same time, Anderson had developed a working bond with the family band Haim, and it was while shooting some footage for their stage show at Coachella in 2018—where they opened for Beyoncé—that he had the idea of casting their younger sister Alana. “The baby of the family is always an interesting role,” he notes. “They’re fighting for survival.”

The addition of Cooper Hoffman, son of the late PTA favorite Philip Seymour Hoffman, seemed to be an obvious move, but, surprisingly, Anderson came to him late in the casting process after a procession of young career actors were deemed too slick. Hoffman fitted seamlessly into the jigsaw puzzle that Anderson was assembling in his mind, which became an early ’70s-set oddball romance that takes its title from a long-defunct LA record store.

Anderson has been accused of peddling nostalgia, but he takes it in his stride. “Nostalgia,” he says, “is the feeling that allows us to forget the difficulties.” —Damon Wise

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Licorice Pizza

he phrase “spec script” takes on a whole

new meaning in King Richard, which sees Will Smith playing Richard Williams, the Compton-based father of tennis champions Venus and Serena. When his daughters were just four years old, Williams drew up a 78-page plan for them after watching the 1980 French Open on TV and witnessing 25-year-old Romanian Virginia Ruzici win $40,000.

The Williams sisters, of course, have gone on to become two of the greatest female players in tennis history, even though there was nothing in the family history to suggest an aptitude for tennis on such an astonishing scale.

Williams’ regimen was hardcore, and he invoked the girls’ deprived background to drive them forward. “The ghetto will make you rough,” he said. “It’ll make you tough, it’ll make you strong.” Which sounds like an obvious basis for an approved, rose-tinted Hollywood film, but, surprisingly, screenwriter Zach Baylin went in cold, having been commissioned by producers Tim and Trevor White.

“I initially wrote the script based on research that I did without contacting the family,” he says. “[But] once we had a finished script, that we took it to the family and got their involvement … the little nuances of their lives really helped bring out the authenticity and the intimacy in the story.”

After it premiered at Telluride, the film immediately created buzz for Smith, landing him his third Oscar nomination after The Pursuit of Happyness (2007) and Ali (2002) for a nuanced performance of a character whose ambition comes with cost. “We see Richard throughout the film, sort of getting in his own way,” Reinaldo Marcus Green says. “I think it’s important to see the three-dimensional character that you see in Richard Williams; we were not trying to sugar-coat any of the issues that he may have had.” —Damon Wise

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS ®

BEST PICTURE • BEST DIRECTOR BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY • BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE • SPIRIT AWARDS WINNER B E S T I N T E R N AT I O N A L F I L M

3 BAFTA NOMINATIONS FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ADAPTED SCREENPLAY •

INCLUDING

•

7 WINNER • BEST PICTURE

DIRECTOR

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE • NATIONAL SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

12 WINNER • BEST SCREENPLAY

INCLUDING

NATIONAL SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS • LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION TORONTO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION • LONDON FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

WINNER

GOTHAM AWARDS

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

★★★★★

“

”

WINNER

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

BEST SCREENPLAY

A WORK OF PURE CINEMA.

“

A MASTERPIECE

ABOUT LIFE AND DEATH AND ART FROM ONE OF

THE MOST EXHILARATING DIRECTORS

TO HIT THE INTERNATIONAL FILM SCENE IN A LONG WHILE.” Manohla Dargis

A FILM BY RYUSUKE HAMAGUCHI

BASED ON THE STORY BY HARUKI MURAKAMI

GO ON LIVING.

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hen Jane Campion first read

Thomas Savage’s 1967 book The Power of the Dog— the based-on-a-true-story take of a gay rancher in Montana—she was immediately captivated.

Producer Tanya Seghatchian says Campion “found that it started to haunt her, and then she looked into whether or not the rights were available.”

But the timing was down to the wire since the rights were just about to be sold to someone else.

“After a brief meeting [Savage said], ‘You can have it if you want.’ “I think that’s part of the charm of Jane Campion: If you’re with her you will fall under her spell immediately and you can’t see the world the same way after that.”

By May 2019, the film was one of the buzz titles at the Cannes market and Netflix acquired nearglobal rights.

Although the story is set in Montana, the cast—Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst and Kodi Smit-McPhee—decamped to Campion’s home country of New Zealand for the shoot. “It’s a kind of serendipity that Jane read this book,” Cinematographer Ari Wegner says, citing New Zealand as “an incredible match for Montana.”

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Once the location was set, Campion and Wegner worked with VFX supervisor Jay Hawkins to figure out the rock formation that gives the film its name, while costume designer Kirsty Cameron and production designer Grant Major developed the color palette. Meanwhile, interiors were built on an Auckland soundstage.

Then Covid nearly derailed the film. It “came in like a hurricane, so fast, and just shut us down,” Campion says. “I didn’t really know at that point that the film would ever be finished.” Ultimately, she used the break to the film’s advantage, changing and sharpening the ending.

In the edit, Campion worked for the first time with Peter Sciberras, whom she says taught her “an amazing amount of what you can do technically.”

The experience was intense. “I think even now we love each other. It was one of those love affairs that’s not a love affair of course, but of different minds, if you like. It’s really hard to say with editing what is happening, but you have to stay so nimble and so intuitive to what’s going on. You can have your plan, but usually you find out that doesn’t work.”

—Antonia Blyth

Covid nearly derailed the film.

It “came in like a hurricane, so fast, and just shut us down,” Campion says. “I didn’t really know at that point that the film would ever be finished.”

Ultimately, she used the break to the film’s advantage, changing and sharpening the ending.

N E T F LIX

The Power of the Dog

F O R

Y O U R

10 B E S T A C A D E M Y

C O N S I D E R A T I O N

A W A R D

®

N O M I N A T I O N S

INCLUDING

PICTURE

B E S T A D A P T E D S C R E E N P L AY | B E S T C I N E M A T O G R A P H Y BEST SCORE | BEST VISUAL EFFECTS | BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN | BEST SOUND BEST EDITING | BEST COSTUME DESIGN | BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

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WINNER VISUAL EFFECTS SOCIETY AWARDS

PRODUCERS GUILD of AMERICA NOMINEE

OUTSTANDING VISUAL EFFECTS IN A PHOTOREAL FEATURE | OUTSTANDING MODEL IN A PHOTOREAL OR ANIMATED PROJECT OUTSTANDING EFFECTS SIMULATIONS IN A PHOTOREAL FEATURE | OUTSTANDING COMPOSITING & LIGHTING IN A FEATURE

BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR

INCLUDING

WINNER BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN F LO R I DA F I L M C R I T I C S | N O R T H C A R O L I N A F I L M C R I T I C S P O R T L A N D F I L M C R I T I C S A S S O C I AT I O N | WA S H I N G T O N A R E A F I L M C R I T I C S | A R T D I R E C T O R S G U I L D

WINNER BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY WASHINGTON AREA FILM CRITICS | PORTLAND CRITICS ASSOCIATION | HOUSTON FILM CRITICS SOCIETY | SUNSET FILM CRITICS CIRCLE DALLAS-FT. WORTH FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | SAN DIEGO FILM CRITICS SOCIETY | NORTH TEXAS FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | SOUTHEASTERN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION CRITICS ASSOCIATION OF CENTRAL FLORIDA | BLACK FILM CRITICS CIRCLE | GEORGIA FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | PHOENIX FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

WINNER BEST COSTUME DESIGN N O R T H C A R O L I N A F I L M C R I T I C S A S S O C I AT I O N | P O R T L A N D F I L M C R I T I C S A S S O C I AT I O N ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY | PHOENIX FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

WINNER BEST SCORE NORTH CAROLINA FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | WASHINGTON AREA FILM CRITICS | ATLANTA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE | BOSTON ONLINE FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | PORTLAND FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION ST. LOUIS FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | DALLAS-FT. WORTH FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | FLORIDA FILM CRITICS CIRCLE | CHICAGO INDIE CRITICS | CRITICS ASSOCIATION OF CENTRAL FLORIDA SEATTLE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY | HOLLYWOOD MUSIC IN MEDIA | PHOENIX FILM CRITICS SOCIETY | SOUTHEASTERN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | SUNSET FILM CRITICS CIRCLE

WINNER BEST EDITING BOSTON ONLINE FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION AUSTIN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION | PHOENIX FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

“‘ D U N E ’ T R A N S P O R T S AUDIENCES TO NEW WORLDS AND IMMERSES THEM IN A VISION S O P U R E T H AT T H E P O W E R O F A RT I S F O R E V E R P R O V E N .”

AFI

W W W. W B AWA R DS . COM

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Nightmare Alley t should have been plain sailing

for returning Oscar champion Guillermo del Toro, whose film The Shape of Water pulled off a Best Picture triumph in 2018.

The master auteur won Best Director, too, and Searchlight Pictures eagerly reteamed with him for his follow-up, Nightmare Alley, which started its shoot in the early days of 2020.

After his success, the path ahead was clear. Crews were in Toronto busily constructing a giant carnival set as del Toro’s main unit got started shooting the

back half of his screenplay, on set and on location in nearby Buffalo. And then the pandemic hit, work stopped, and del Toro was left to wonder if he’d even be able to get back into production.

Still, he was determined to make the best of the situation. “The material lived with us for those months [of shutdown], which clarified a lot of things,” del Toro says. The film, adapted from William Lindsay Gresham’s noir novel, tells the story of a drifter whose quest for money and power comes at the expense of the

Though the 1961 studio version

of West Side Story is considered to be an iconic classic for the ages, it took director Steven Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner’s modern-day vision to reinterpret the musical into a diverse and inclusive piece of art fit for a whole new generation.

Ever since Spielberg was 10 years old, the Broadway cast album of West Side Story has played an influential role in his appreciation of the musical genre both on stage and on screen. But in his long prestigious career, Spielberg has surprisingly felt that he was never ready to approach a musicbased production for the screen.

It wasn’t until 2017 when he reached out to long-time collaborator and Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner about not only adapting the 1957 stage version of West Side Story but expanding on the storyline by deepening the characters and making it culturally authentic, that Spielberg gained the confidence to take on this quintessential musical.

The biggest change came with the Sharks.

Spielberg found an exciting cast of Puerto Rican actors (Rachel Zegler, Josh Andrés Rivera, Ariana

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people who cross his path. And as del Toro was able to edit what he shot during the break, he was able to re-envision how he would introduce Stanton Carlisle, played by Bradley Cooper, as he stumbles upon the carnival world in the film’s opening scenes.

“If anything is halted, you have to hope that fire inside of you—the creative fire to invest the time in the work—is burning bright,” Cooper says. “If you’re not careful it can go out. Luckily for all of us, that fire came back even brighter during

DeBose), and Spanish language filtered into their everyday conversations, creating an immigrant community proud of its heritage, but still trying to fit into the American dream. It’s a dream that conflicts with the Jets, the Polish street gang that is struggling to keep their neighborhood from these new arrivals, setting up an underlying tension of xenophobia and racism that the original version never thought of taking on.

Spielberg also found ways to reimagine dance set pieces, giving the film a grittier and more realistic feel. Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kamiński found working on this film completely different from his other experiences with the director. “The scope of the movie was pretty big,” Kamiński says. “The biggest surprise was how generous the cast was, the young kids. There was no competition, no jealousy. There was just great camaraderie among them and love. We become possessed by the whole process to do our best.”

The end result has not only given West Side Story a fresh, meaningful take, but also seven nominations celebrating Spielberg finally making the musical of his childhood dreams. —Stevie Wong

the hiatus, because of everything we went through in order to make this movie.”

“The partnership between a director and actor when you’re working with a character like Stan is that you’re living and breathing the same air for 99.9 percent of the day,” adds del Toro.

“For six months, we introspected that character. We’re looking at him on the screen, refining, recutting. You have time to change your choices in the editorial room. And then you come back with a different understanding.” —Joe Utichi

West Side Story

6BEST PICTURE A W A R D®

A C A D E M Y

N O M I N A T I O N S

BEST ACTOR WILL SMITH | BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS AUNJANUE ELLIS | BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY ZACH BAYLIN BEST FILM EDITING PAMELA MARTIN, ƚƜƞ | BEST ORIGINAL SONG “BE ALIVE” ƛƲ BEYONCÉ ƚƧƝ DIXSON

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

“Aunjanue Ellis IS AN UNSHAKEABLE SOURCE OF LOVE AND BALANCE IN A MAGNIFICENT P O R T R AYA L .

AUNJANUE ELLIS

ABC NEWS

WINNER

WINNER

WINNER

AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE

LAS VEGAS FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS ONLINE

NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW

TOP 10

TOP 10

TOP 10

2021 TOP FILM

MOTION PICTURES OF THE YEAR

MOTION PICTURES OF THE YEAR

MOTION PICTURES OF THE YEAR

WINNER

WINNER BLACK FILM CRITICS

BEST

TOP 10 MOTION PICTURES OF THE YEAR

WASHINGTON DC AREA FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION

SUPPORTING ACTRESS AUNJANUE ELLIS

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WINNER

BEST PICTURE BEST ACTOR WILL SMITH

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS AUNJANUE ELLIS ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY ZACH BAYLIN

”

BEST ACTOR WILL SMITH BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS AUNJANUE ELLIS

WINNER

AMERICAN CINEMA EDITORS

BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (DRAMATIC)

CHAMPIONS BEGIN AT HOME

PAMELA MARTIN, ƚƜƞ

3/10/22 11:37 AM

capsule and just brought you to the place and era instantaneously.

You mentioned Jane’s ‘white witch’ traits. What did she intuitively understand about you on a personal level?

She saw the marriage of my ability as an actor and who I am with her character. And while there’s stuff that she wanted to give me security

Benedict

CU M B E R BAT C H

In The Power of the Dog, the actor embraces the dichotomy between a cowboy's hyper-masculinity and his repressed sensuality B Y A N T O N I A B LY T H

For his role in The Power of the Dog as Phil Burbank—a masculine, closeted rancher in Montana—Benedict Cumberbatch went to 'dude school' to learn such old-world cowboy skills as roping, taxidermy and even banjo playing. It was vital to him that he deeply embody the world of Thomas Savage’s 1967 based-upontruth novel, brought to the screen by writer-director Jane Campion. When Phil’s brother George (Jesse Plemons) marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), Phil torments Rose and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), but

You've said you don't really like watching yourself onscreen, so how was seeing yourself as Phil?

Obviously, that has factors. It’s a very weird relationship watching yourself, if you do it at all. But there’s no way I’m not going to watch this. watch it for that alone. Even if I was fucking it up left, right and center, I’d still watch it because of her. And the fact is, I’m sat there watching it, some of the self-consciousness because everything I’d intended to give

42

her, the best of what I’d intended for her, she’d realized. She’d seen me. And she did see me, from the down the road from where I am now talk about it. She saw me, in the way that she saw the character, in the way that she sees everybody. She’s such a profound white witch, that woman. She’s such an extraordinary gift, and she has a spiritual intuition, and obviously a lot of craft and hard work and deep thought. But it’s centered on a little bit of magic, really.

What I’m trying to say is to sit in your own audience is an uncomfortable, weird experience.

I got over that a little bit, like I said, because of Jane realizing the very best of what I tried to give her.

And seeing everything else going on around me, the score, [DP] Ari [Wegner]’s camera work on set, which actually, on the day, was a thing I totally got to work with and interact with and was blown away by. It was just so richly detailed. It was masterful, and something that was so merciful. It was an utter time

those anxieties. She just believed I could get there and do it because she’d seen enough of my range to believe there was more, and to believe that I was capable of getting there. But I think primarily she knew that I was pretty fearless, that I wasn’t going to be afraid of admitting sensitivity and sensuality, which is needed for Phil, even in his public guise. The man who can castrate a bull and then can also whittle a miniature chair.

The skills you went to ‘dude school’ to learn.

Yes. So those things are helpful with the culture, and the banjo playing as well. I guess because it’s always been a part of that pioneering life.

But they’re held in equal regard by fellow ranch hands, but it’s not seen as an effeminate skill to be able to play the banjo and whittle and perform taxidermy and even be a scholar. They all know he’s smart, those cowhands and the ranch hands. And they’re in admiration for him, in equal measure, to the hard man who drives his cattle hard and uses a knife without gloves, as they are a man who whittles and plays the banjo. And so that’s interesting. But for me, it was a real key into understanding who this person was fundamentally, that these two things existed in him, this very strong front of masculinity for your own machismo, that’s the word. And this and delicate with his hands, which are described in the book as having an intelligence in the pads of their

ACADEMY AWARD® NOMINEE BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

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PRODUCERS GUILD OF AMERICA OUTSTANDING PRODUCER OF DOCUMENTARY MOTION PICTURE

DIRECTORS GUILD OF AMERICA

NOMINEE

NOMINEE

3/9/22 2:13 PM

that he has within his psyche this deep, deep-seated lack of authentic self, this inability to express a side of himself, which has been utterly crushed by society, by the tragedy of losing [his lover and mentor] Bronco Henry in a corral stampede when he was 19, and the arrested development, and everything else that turns him and his defensiveness against the world before it could discover who he is, in that regard.

So, Jane knew that I would get there. I think she knew that side of who was more anxious about being authentically of that time and place and that skill set and learning how to rope and ride and steer cattle. To learn all of it, to practice some of it, and to just take into my body and observe it, as well as do it. Because of course, like all these things that feel far away from you, they’re not actually central to the performance.

There’s not that much of that in the very prevalent. And then, from there, to just journey into the revelation of him, as the story unfolds, and the layers of his character come off and is exposed in every way. That, I was never frightened of.

Jane has said that for her Phil is masculinity with a layer of femininity within. What about that dichotomy drew you in?

The idea that he’s a tragic character because he’s incapable of love or being loved until the very end, where a possibility opens, and then because of everything that he set in motion, it closes on him and ensnares him. I hope that people see the beauty of a man whose violence, whose aggression is to be understood, in order not to be replicated. But unless we see people and acknowledge them for who they are and accept who they are, a lot of damage can be done to both that person and the people around them. And there are exceptional qualities to this character, who’s obviously a very

people had seen the ending], I couldn’t talk about what a special acknowledgement that was, I guess, of all of our commitments to try and make it an immersive experience for me, and to bring Phil to life in an undistracted environment and to appreciate what people have done.

It was, yeah, it’s a pretty amazing story. I could hear the glasses clinklike, “Guys, what’s going on?” I mean not in a really grumpy way, but just like, “Come on. You can pull the wool over my eyes, but I know that you’re up to something.”

Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank in The Power of the Dog.

on about his brilliance, which is sort of in evidence or not, but certainly is in the book. But I feel that’s the thing. It’s the most important thing that we see each other in our life, we understand and accept who we are.

Rather than trying to crowd people into a formulation that’s about our expectations, that we open ourselves to trying to understand someone wholly.

I mean, he was shut out by an era— I say an era, I mean, it’s still something going on in the world—where homosexuality or any deviance from heteronormative behavior is viewed as ridicule-able or prejudiced against or criminalized, whether it’s morally that’s going on. I think Phil represents that. I think he also represents anyone who hasn’t been seen or heard or understood. Even his attitude towards Rose, it’s born out of his attitude as a son that has a mother that wants her son to conform, stay in lane, and be true to the type that she wants to present to the world. He’s found an authenticity in his own life, which he can’t then express to the world. Instead, he ends up hating on it and trying to control it and master it through brutal strength and a sensitivity that’s allowed. And obviously, keeping that other feminine sensuality hidden.

I did feel as though part of his

44

hatred for Rose is that he resents how kind and supportive she is to her son, Peter, when Phil didn’t have that with his own mother.

Yeah. There’s that, absolutely. I mean, it works on many, many subconscious levels. And the fact that his brother is having a heteronormative time of it and happy with a partner, not alienated, has the love of his life living under the same roof, sharing his bed. And it’s not necessarily something that he understands consciously because his hate on Rose is determined by not seeing her, because of his damage, and not being seen. And also suspecting her of skullduggery, that she’s someone on the make, and that she's someone who has to be stopped.

Phil’s mom was still trying to dress him up in knickerbockers and straighten his hair into a side parting. I reckon, when you see him in

tragedy for Phil is he’s ended in a way that is so dehumanizing to who he is and to his true nature.

I heard you were so deep in char-

the crew closed the lid on you for a minute and then reopened it, welcoming you with champagne back to your life as Benedict.

Yes, obviously, early doors [before

Could this be one of your toughest roles so far, in some ways?

Yeah. In some ways, I guess it is.

I had to further my standards for this. I had to reach into something I haven’t played with before. But I don’t know. I always feel a bit on spot with this kind of question because I can’t immediately review all of my work. And they’re not always comparable. I mean, carrying a Marvel film is pretty hefty stuff, an utterly different set of muscles.

And the same could be said of anything on stage. So, comparing them is also pointless. I feel that the idea of art being competitive is slightly… How can you compare the offerings of this year? I mean, you have to, but that’s an exercise I find very difficult.

Now you're shooting Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. How’s that going?

Amazing. I would just say that the man is everything you’d expect him to be and have heard about him being, still, and it’s just a completed lived experience, not that dissimilar to [with] Jane actually. A very differing, but everything, the curatorship of every detail, and surrendering yourself to that, to a master, it’s just a joy. It’s hard work. There’s a lot of lines. It’s the same kind of brain gym as doing Sherlock deductions. But I love that stuff. It’s a great stretch.

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wasn’t. But thank God Penélope and I are very aware of how blessed we are in life, meaning we can make a living out of our job and not only that, but we can work with some amazing, extraordinary directors in some amazing projects which is not very common. It’s been like that since we both started, so that consistency, it’s a miracle for an actor and we are aware of that at this stage of our life.

Javier

BA R D E M

The Oscar winner explores a real-life, beloved yet complex character in Being the Ricardos B Y N A N C Y TA R TA G L I O N E

Javier Bardem is enjoying a strong awards season run with a best actor nomination for Being the Ricardos—Aaron Sorkin’s exploration of I Love Lucy stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s life on and offcamera.

The Good Boss. On the day this interview was initially scheduled, Russia invaded Ukraine and Bardem made a beeline to join protestors at the Russian embassy in Madrid. Here, he discusses why that was so important to him, how he keeps a work-life balance and what the future might hold.

You are having quite the awards season, between the record number of Goya nominations for The Good Boss—and six wins—along with an Oscar nomination for Being the Ricardos.

It was a hell of a week. I mean there was a week with the Oscar nominations and the Goyas and you’re like, “OK, don’t get used to this because it’s not very normal.”

I don’t think you can get used to any of this and you shouldn’t; the support of your fellows and your industry is one of those things you can’t take for granted. When you’re younger, at least I had some kind of

46

anxiety to be there, to belong to the industry, which is absolutely understandable. Now, I just want to do my job right, as good as I can, and keep making a living out of it. If it turns out that people like it, even better.

When you have these nominations and wins, are you still hav-

with Before Night Falls?

[Laughs] No, unfortunately not. I was were so nice. They brought us ice for the drinks and some liquor. They

were bringing it all up through the stairs because the elevator didn’t That was a fun party.

In your house, when there are three movies shortlisted by Spain to go to the Oscars and one of them is yours and another stars your wife, do you guys just laugh about that?

Oh, yeah. I mean, we’ve been in every kind of situation you can imagine.

Talking about it, discussing it, laughing about it and also feeling sorry for the other about it when one of them was chosen and the other one

You were at Venice together for Loving Pablo, which was a real passion project for you. Do you have more of those kinds of projects ahead?

I wish I would be more productive and more like one of these people that I see often that are like a force of nature in putting things together and putting people together and moving a project. I am not that guy.

It’s not about laziness. It’s about, I guess, lack of focus on knowing what I want to do next. I love performing, that’s the thing I love most.

The production of it all… Penélope is more like that, she’s more driven, she gathers projects, puts that together with people. I love that. I admire that, but I’m not that kind of guy and when I do it, it’s exhausting [laughs]. It’s a lot of energy to put on things I don’t like. I don’t know why anybody in the world would be a producer. Why? What kind of job is always pushing the boundaries to some other people’s patience.

I had a project with Amazon called Cortes. I was proposing that project for 11 years, not every day, I did my life, but I was very focused for 11 years coming and going, coming and going. It happened, and then in two weeks we had to stop because of the pandemic and the credit was canceled. It has to do with that as well, like, “Oh, shit, really? All that work?” I understand Amazon canceled; I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how delicate all of this is, how so much work put into many years of preparation for so many

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of this, because of that, and I guess I don’t have the thick skin for that.

Also, the thing I like the most about putting projects together — which I do, especially when I do documentaries—is that I have enough

prepare and do my homework and I played the character. It was after I played the character and I saw on the set the resonance that these two people had—and still have—in the American society, or in this case the crew, where I realized how iconic they were. It was a bit of fate [that I realized afterward] because otherwise there would have been way too much weight on my shoulders.

job, so I put my attention in putting things together that are mostly documentaries about things that I’m interested in or intrigued by in life.

And there are so many you cannot approach even a third of it. The issue is that I want to be involved, I don’t want to be a producer in the backfor that you need time.

When Russia invaded Ukraine you went to protest at the Russian embassy in Madrid. Does the situation especially resonate nance for you since you lived under Franco?

Yeah, just the rise of the extreme right in the whole of Europe is very worrisome, and in Spain this has special resonance for what it is and the pain and suffering it created.

I can say that by my own name because people from my family were imprisoned because of Franco…

Thank God human beings with good will, people with hope, people with common sense, people who do really care about others and put empathy right in front of their own grief will prevail. That I know because war is always created by human beings, but those people are far from being human, and humanity. And what is going on across the border (from Ukraine) is also what took place a week ago in Spain when in a little village of some friends I know they were opening the graves of people that were killed by the dictatorship of Franco.

Like the exhumation Penélope’s Parallel Mothers?

Yes, exactly. And they found more than 40 bodies when they were but I know that it was an amazing

48

Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Bardem as Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos.

explosion of relief. When that grave opens, the truth opens, the memory takes place, the dignity is spread all over those families and the justice and the reparation—and that’s what we have to aim for, and doing what

when I started 20 years ago in English, but it’s always challenging because I have to act the phonetics, I have to act the language, I have to act the thinking of how to say the things rather than be free enough to just say it, which is what I do in my own language.

How do you balance between

Do you ever feel like a different

major Hollywood projects?

I would say that it’s exactly the same, but the difference is in the budget. I always recall the experience of myself on the set of Collateral. I only spent one evening there, I only had one scene and for such a big set. I remember being very shy, really insecure… and there was a moment where I told a guy with some headphones and a mic, “Can I get a water?” He asked for the bottle of water through the mic, and somebody else asked for the bottle of water and 20 minutes after, there was no bottle of water. So, I stood up and went to the kitchen and I got it myself. I thought, this is why it’s called a big production… But at the same time, when Michael Mann said “action” it was the same struggle, the same insecurity, the same fear.

That being said, what is not the same is to work in a foreign language. Now it’s way easier from

That’s a good point, and yes. I’ll tell you this: I’m way less shy when I speak English because I’m not so tied to the words, to the expressions. Where it’s a problem in performing in a foreign language it also becomes a gift as a performer, which means I’m not so emotionally tied to the language since I haven’t had too many experiences in that language in my life, especially growing up or as a child which is really where experiences get stuck in your DNA. So, when I speak English I am more brave in trying things or going to different ways of expressing something because I don’t care.

How familiar were you with I Love Lucy before Being the Ricardos?

Not familiar at all. I Love Lucy was shown in Spain, but it was not as popular as it was in the States. I was interested and intrigued for what it was and once I knew that the project was happening, I started to do my own research and I started to

How much of your career has been mined by fate?

My mom, who was an actress—and I saw her working since I was a kid —I learned from her indirectly: one step at a time, this is a long run if you are lucky, this is not a sprint. With Jamón Jamón I was 21 years old and it was a huge success in Spain and that was a sprint. You get to a place very fast. Well, I guess I was taught by my mom to be careful with that and to really not buy into it, to understand that it’s great to celebrate it, it’s great to embrace it and forget about it, because that’s not the goal, and that’s not going to be for sure the common way for things to go in this job. So, I never made any plan, I never put my bags together coming to the States for example to make a career; it happened naturally. If I would have planned to be where I am today professionally, I would have failed because I’ve been so lucky and so blessed by being called by so many talented, nice, caring people.

You cannot plan that.

Dune: Part Two with Denis Villeneuve.

He is such a beautiful, caring, fun man to work with. He’s super talented and the thing about him shooting Dune is he was like a little kid. It was like a dream of his youth coming true. He was so grateful to everyone involved in it for making it happen and you could see that you were part of his joy. That’s a beautiful thing to have when you go to the set. I can’t wait to put myself under his direction again.

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any way?

Other than the fact that we adapted his story, he really didn’t participate He didn’t really give any ideas or thoughts on the script either. Once he gave us the rights, I was able to work freely on the project. acter in the movie. How did you come to choose it?

In the original story, the car is a yellow Saab 900, which is also a

H AM AGUC H I

The director on Drive My Car's ride from Haruki Murakami's short story inspiration into the Academy's fast lane

BY DA M O N W I S E

Every year at the Cannes Film Festival there is a critics’ favorite. Last year, it was Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, a loose adaptation of three stories from Haruki Murakami’s 2014 compendium Men Without Women to stage a multi-language production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, where he is assigned the taciturn chauffeur Misaki and meets the dangerous young actor Takatsuki. Though it only left Cannes with an award for Best Screenplay, Drive My Car went on to be the arthouse bulldozer of 2021, leading to a surprise three nominations—for Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay—outside the at this year’s Berlinale.

from the three short stories of Haruki Murakami?

It was actually the suggestion of my producer, and I think that’s a result of there being an interview with Haruki Murakami where he said, “I can give adaptation rights to some of my short stories, but it’s really

50

for my longer novels.” I think that’s part of the reason why my producer suggested that we try to adapt a short story. But the story that the producer suggested didn’t appeal to to be able to make it into an interest-

short story of his, Drive My Car. I often deal with conversations that happen in cars already in my work, and I’ve always been interested in the theme of performing and performance. I was also very drawn to the characters, so I suggested back to the producer that we try to adapt this story instead—and he accepted.

How did you shoot the car scenes?

I decided early on that I wanted the car to be actually driving. It would have been perfectly possible to green-screen the background and have the car situated against that, and it’s possible to do that in a quite natural way with today’s technology. But I felt that to have the actors performing in a car that’s stationary would mean that there would be one more burden for them to have to think about, because they would have to pretend that the car was moving. And so, with those consid-

M EG A AG E N CY

Ryûsuke

to do was to try to use the same car, but, at the same time, I knew that it ible, because the conversations that happen in cars are very important to this movie—without a roof, it meant that there would be wind noise that we would have to worry about, and it was very important to me to record the sound in sync. But we did see some yellow Saabs. In fact, we had a coordinator who was looking at these cars for us, and one day he came riding up in this red car.

And as he was driving towards us, I remember thinking, “Oh, what a cool car.” And then I found out that this car was, in fact, a Saab 900—and it had a roof, so it was perfect. I also very much felt that the color red would pop more brightly within the landscape than yellow.

BEST AC TR E SS

F OR

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erations, I decided that I wanted to have the car to drive, so there’d be less burden for the actors.

Miura, I had found my Misaki, and I knew that I really wanted to cast her for the role. During that conversation, I also found out that she didn’t know how to drive, so I went to my producer immediately and said, “Please offer her the role. And then ask her to get a driver’s license.”

What were you looking for in the actor you cast as Kafuku?

First and foremost, I was trying to script and right for the characters, actors one piece at a time. But the second part that I was looking for is that the actors would have the ability to communicate. What I was really looking for was a sort of sincerity that I could feel from the actors themselves. I do think that sincerity is really important to acting and performing. The characters that point or other, they have a moment where they’re being very honest to themselves, and I think performing that honesty can be very hard. So, I felt that I needed to cast people who already had that quality, and so, I was choosing actors based on that as well.

Is the character of Takatsuki, the angry young actor, based on a real person?

It’s not based on anybody at all, and I really think that it’s important for me to say that. What this character is going through is quite normal for people in the Japanese entertainment industry, to some extent.

How important is Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya to the story of Drive My Car? I do think that Uncle Vanya is very in the original story, although it maybe takes up less than a page, so I did expand on that. But through reading it, I realized that Haruki Murakami added Uncle Vanya quite intentionally. Uncle Vanya’s character really

Vanya’s lines, one could interpret thinking and feeling. Because both

52

Can she drive now?

Yes. She’s a very good driver now.

Were you surprised that the Academy made Drive My Car a Reika Kirishima, left, and Hidetoshi Nishijima in Drive My Car.

who are leading lives that they didn’t necessarily want for themselves.

that I wanted to use sign language as one of the languages. We had

a character who doesn’t say too much, having him say Uncle Vanya’s lines would give us the sense that we’re understanding him better.

There’s also a mirroring that is happening between the characters

call for people who could sign. Park Yu-rim actually didn’t know how to sign when she auditioned, but when we asked her to audition, what we asked her to do was just fake the sign language during the audition, just try it out. But when she did, the expressiveness that she showed in her performance was something that was beyond anything that we had seen. It really made us believe in her, even though what she was doing was fake sign language at that time.

But after we offered her the role she found herself a coach and really trained very hard to practice the language. And I think she brought about something wonderful.

Sonya as well, because Misaki starts to learn Sonya’s lines. This mirroring between Vanya and Sonya and

upon that, and I felt that, through this expansion, the original story came out to be better. In some ways I almost see Uncle Vanya as sort of the B-side of the original story.

One of the actors in Kafuku’s staging of Uncle Vanya is played

by Korea’s Park Yu-rim, whose character uses sign language.

How did that idea come about?

There was a time in my life where I became very interested in sign language, and that was when I was everybody there was signing to each other and I was probably the only one there who wasn’t. In that experience, I realized just how beautiful of a physical language sign language is. It wasn’t a language of disability, it was this very beautiful language of its own. And so, in thinking about doing a multi-language play, I knew

actually able to drive when you gave her the part?

Yes, that’s true, she didn’t have a

casting for Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy During that, we had about an hourlong conversation, and I really felt that she was just brimming with intelligence and incredibly sincere as a person. At that time, Drive My Car was already in the works, and it was like the moment when I found the

First of all, I was very surprised to learn this. But I think I was also surprising myself as I was writing the script, because I had this sensation that I was writing something I had never written before. I know this might sound like I’m pandering to him, but I do really think that, if there’s anything I have learned, it’s the fact that the strength of Haruki Murakami’s writing is universal. Of

was trying to depict something that could live within Haruki Murakami’s worldview. I was really trying to achieve something that his novels achieved, and I think that led me to try harder with the script, and led me to be better with my directing, and I think that was the same for the performers as well. I think that knowing that we were working with Haruki Murakami’s story gave us the power to draw out something better from all of us.

How are you dealing with this awards season?

If there’s anything that I’m really trying to deal with, it’s that I’m really trying to get used to the situation I’m in right now. I never really thought I would connect in this way with places like Hollywood, this world that always felt much bigger than me. Of course, I watched Hollywood physically a part of it in this way. So, I’m very honored by the situation, and I’m really trying to enjoy it.

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meet in the middle? Didn't think it was going to be like this, which is very cool. But yeah, that was my introduction to the character and those women.

West Side Story If you look at movies made at that time, the women in so many of these typically very dependent on a man.

Then you have something like West Side Story that comes along and gives this character Anita agency.

And yes, she and Bernardo are very much a couple. But when you see her move, she moves as a soloist, unless she's being lifted by the men in “Dance at the Gym”, or the partnering is to show off the woman.

When I think back to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, there's Fred and there's Ginger, and yes, they move as a unit, but they are individuals.

Whereas for me, Anita had such a strong identity as an individual. And that was, and is, still not often seen, to this day.

Ariana

DEBOSE

West Side Story’s Ariana DeBose on how she felt the spirit of Anita manifest within her

BY S T E V I E WO N G

Ten years acting on Broadway has given Ariana DeBose a grounded approach to the swell of accolades accompanying her performance as the iconic Anita in Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. own path, giving this moment of success and critical appreciation a charming, honest, culturally modern spin. Here she recalls her childhood appreciation for Anita and her deep connection with the role.

I grew up watching West Side Story on my grandmother's television.

Turner Classic Movies was playing it and I was really into old movies as a kid. That and soap operas with my grandmother because that's what we did together.

Days of Our Lives. I'm still invested in Marlena and John.

54

I was obsessed with the woman in the purple dress. And not until my adulthood did I come to understand the storyline and what Anita went through, and that Rita Moreno Oscar, and she's Latina. And when I moved to New York, I really got into the study of musical theater because I didn't graduate with a degree

in... I don't have a degree in anything [laughs]. School of life, guys.

When I began to study in New York with different mentors, that's when I learned the name Chita Rivera and that she was the OG Anita onstage, and that she was really the quintessential triple threat on Broadway.

And since that's what I was training to become, Chita was very much like a star in my universe that I was trying to reach, and then over here is Rita I was like, what happens if I could

It was an extremely collaborative process. The way I look at it is Steven (Spielberg) came in and gave me his trust and said, “run wild”, and Tony (Kushner, screenwriter) gave me the words, and Justin (Peck) gave me the choreography, but then it really was up to me to make choices with all the tools that I'd spent all those years training to work with. So that's when artistry and my craft come into play.

Justin and his associates did so much extensive studying about the social dancing of the day. What did

“THIS IS PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON OPERATING AT FULL CAPACITY. A MASTER AT WORK.” – EMPIRE

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the mambo look like in 1957, and how does that inform how we move?

I took that knowledge, and then also had to say, what has (costume designer) Paul Tazewell put on me for this character in this moment? What dress is she wearing, and how can I use that to my advantage?

At “Dance at the Gym”, you see Anita and Bernardo (David Alvarez), Riff (Mike Faist) and Grazi (Paloma Garcia-Lee) come together in the epic dance battle, and Anita swerves in with her skirt, looks at Grazi, does an eye thing and swings her shoulder. She's not afraid to check you, but she's still just having a good time. And I was like, there she is.

That's Anita. So, it's this full-circle thing of, let me take these steps, in this dress, and see how it speaks to who Anita is. Then 10 percent is me just coming in and feeling it.

Besides the performative aspect of Anita, how did you embody all her emotional nuances? Did you give her a backstory?

I don't really know how [laughs]. I kept a journal about events on set, but I didn't go through the whole process of writing Anita's thoughts.

There are some actors who do that, that keep a journal for their character. That didn't work for me.

Tony Kushner wrote this beautiful backstory with her that informed everything. My homework was to stay very focused on what's going on in her present.

I just chose to let her live in me.

When I read Tony's script, she just jumped out to me and sat on my chest. A lot of characters do that with me, in my career. It's kind of weird. It's a very spiritual thing I've got going on with me and these humans that I bring to life. Anita just sat there, and she didn't leave until she was done. And then she revisited me recently on this awards journey, and I was like, whoa, girl!

What was that visit like?

It was at the SAG Awards and she had a lot to say. Honestly, it was my

56

Ariana DeBose as Anita in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story.

saving grace because I didn't know what to say on that stage. [The win] was not something that I foresaw happening at all, and so she showed up, which was great. But that happens to me with characters.

You really seem like someone who is grounded and embraces your cultural heritage, so how did working on West Side Story amplify your identity, especially as an Afro-Latina?

I've always instinctually known who I am, but I grew up in a largely white community in North Carolina.

I always knew I was Puerto Rican, I just never really felt like I had the opportunity to immerse myself in community in that way. Even when I moved to New York, I immediately dove into the business. And the business, I felt, told me that I wasn't Hispanic enough. So it was one of those moments where I was like, OK, well, then let me be what everyone else wants me to be. So, it's not that I turned away from my Latinidad, I just found myself in a lane where I was like, I'm going to be unapologetically me. But there was this little part of me, I sort of let simmer instead of being fully expressed, because the world told me that's what I didn't have the right to be.

West Side Story allowed me the opportunity to fully immerse myself in community, and that's a beauti-

Hispanic heritage was actually a strength, not something that was used to box me in a box I didn't claim for myself. I was able to walk in a room and it not be questioned, “Well, what are you? What's your ethnicity? How do you identify?”

We've gotten so good, in my opinion, about trying to put people in boxes and label what they are. And I just so am vehemently against that. Your

I’m sure it was exciting for you to observe all your acting colleagues experiencing the same thing too.

We all came together, Latinos from very different backgrounds. Some of us did not, but we all got to commune together and learn about each other. There were no dividing lines.

We would have dinners; we'd go out dancing. I've never eaten so much mofongo, arepas, arroz con pollo like, these are our expressions of joy.

Even our anger comes from a place of love. That's what I really learned; Hispanic culture is rooted in love in every choice we make.

The legacy of Chita Rivera on Broadway allowed for Rita Moreno to be on the big screen to then allow you to perform as Anita.

Have you connected with the next generation of Anitas?

There are many young Anitas out there, and they all come in various shapes and sizes. It's exciting to me that so many young people, young women, no matter if they're Afro-Latina, Latina, young beautiful Asians, I'm talking about young girls who identify in a myriad of ways, are seeing themselves in this work. And that's why you need to do it. That's why you tell stories like this, to show people that it's OK to work for your dreams, to play characters like this who have agency, who can show great euphoria but also can show you the breadth and the depth of your grief and that it's 100 percent OK to be exactly who you are at any given moment, otherwise, what's the point of this thing called life?

You give off this empathic energy during this chat and I was wondering how being so tuned into your emotions has served you during the past few months.

In the last couple of months, I've had to really protect my energy, because I am very aware that I do take on the feelings of others and the energies of others. I have such compassion for people in the world, and that's the thing: there's a lot going on in the world. My own personal energy has with the reality of how do we celebrate moments like these and also acknowledge that parts of the world are burning, and they need our help, and perhaps we're not doing enough?

It must be interesting to be getting all this attention.

That's been a beautiful discovery around this journey. I didn't think these. Now that I'm here, how can I participate in them in a way that is still moving us forward? It's so funny to be able to say ‘we’, because it feels like I'm in it, and I really hope that I get to stay, because I am having fun with these opportunities. I'm trying to take it all in and just see what I can do with my small little corner of the world.

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H

ERE IS AN EARLY STAB BEST ACTOR Being the Ricardos tick, tick…BOOM!, and Will Smith as Richard Williams in King Richard

BEST PICTURE

his chilling work as Phil Burbank in The Power of the Dog, and

After several years in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences vacillated between eight or THE WINNER: Will Smith, King Richard

Spider-Man or a

Dune

Belfast DIRECTOR

PRODUCERS

BEST ACTRESS

STUDIO

The Eyes of Tammy Faye Stewart managed to stand out among the growing number

OSCAR NOMINATIONS

Best Sound Best Original Song

Spencer Gaga also going real but getting overlooked in favor of the Parallel Mothers, and The Lost Daughter family and connection then, and actually now

her fourth nomination and has won once before, but is battling

THE WINNER:

PETE’S

TOSS-UP PICK

AWARDSLINE

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

CODA BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee are both nominated The Power of the Dog, so might possibly cancel each other out. However, that is not always the case when performers from the same movie are pitted against each other. Between the pair, Smit-McPhee has the upper hand having already won a boatload of early precursor awards for his haunting performance. J.K. Simmons made the cut for his realBeing the Ricardos.

Although, as the only past winner in the category with four

DIRECTOR Siân Heder PRODUCERS Fabrice Gianfermi Phillippe Rousselet Patrick Wachsberger STUDIO

OSCAR NOMINATIONS Best Supporting Actor Best Adapted Screenplay

getting his due for his warm and wonderful performance in Belfast, but he has to face SAG-winner Troy Kotsur, who could A smash hit at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival where it staged an unprecedented sweep of all four major narrative awards, CODA was picked up by Apple for $25 Million-plus, and seems to be universally beloved as

THE WINNER: Troy Kotsur, CODA

of a pandemic. In this case, it is a family with deaf parents and son, plus a hearing daughter who must balance her loyalty to them with her own desire to break out and follow her musical dreams. Based on a 2014 French winner Marlee Matlin, is authentic to its core and that may be why it has become such a crowd pleaser. It was the top movie winner at the recent

directing and editing nominations might stand in the way.

Don’t Look Up DIRECTOR Adam McKay PRODUCERS Adam McKay Kevin Messick

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

STUDIO

Belfast, performance that could gain traction due to the haunting

OSCAR NOMINATIONS

Almost just as much of a veteran in her own way, remarkably The Power of the Dog A near 40-year veteran of the business, she is way overdue.

Best Film Editing

Satire is one of the hardest things to successfully pull off, and there

for The Lost Daughter in which she so beautifully plays the

Wilder and other past greats who made it look so easy. Adam McKay, The Big Short, and Vice, even Anchorman, is undeniably one of them. Don’t Look Up uses the impending arrival of a comet bound to destroy the planet as a very funny premise to make a movie that really is about the dangers of climate change even if that isn’t in the plot at all. Genius. A hilarious movie with a strong message and an all-star cast, Don’t Look Up isn’t just one of the year’s funniest movies, it also turns out to be one of the most important, and that is why it is nominated here. A win is a long shot though.

nominated. That twofer is likely to go the way of Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart in Titanic, with both of them going down with

in West Side Story 60 years after Rita Moreno won it for the same role.

THE WINNER: West Side Story

AWARDSLINE

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

Drive My Car

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY Siân Heder is nominated for her adaptation of a 2014 French comedy that she turned into CODA, not only besting the original by a country mile, but also making it thoroughly authentic by casting Deaf actors to play the family. She competes with Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth for cracking the epic task of making Frank Herbert’s Dune out. Ryusuke Hamaguchi took a short story by Haruki Murakami and turned it into a long—three hours—but remarkable screenplay in Drive My Car. Maggie Gyllenhaal is up for The Lost Daughter, a complex adaptation of the novel by Elena Ferrante, and she made an arresting debut behind the camera as well. She won the screenplay award at Venice and again from the USC Scripter Awards, making her a real possibility here. Jane Campion, already a writing winner for 1993’s The Piano, she is widely expected to win for the complex and fascinating The Power of the Dog. This might be closer than we think, as Gyllenhaal could have a hometown advantage, or Heder could take it if CODA turns into a genuine Best Picture threat after its SAG win.

THE WINNER: Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter

DIRECTOR Ryûsuke Hamaguchi PRODUCER Teruhisa Yamamoto STUDIO Sideshow Janus Films OSCAR NOMINATIONS Best Director Best International Film Best Adapted Screenplay

Perhaps the most unexpected of all this year’s Best Picture nominees is this three-hour Japanese drama about a man ruminating on tragedy in his own life as he shares his feelings with the driver assigned to him while he travels to Hiroshima to direct a production of Uncle Vanya. Exquisitely directed and written by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car won a Best Screenplay award at Cannes where it had its world premiere, but it simply wowed the critics. New York, LA, Boston, and National Society of Critics all showered it with their Best Picture awards, making it a must see for Academy members who clearly responded. Whether this very deliberately paced movie can pull off an upset here is probably the longest of shots but it has gotten this far, so there’s that.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Kenneth Branagh has his best chance in this category to turn one of his career eight nominations into an actual win. Belfast is the kind of personal story voters love, and it seems to be sticking with moviegoers who give it a chance. I think his stiffest competition comes from Paul Thomas Anderson who really is way overdue and with Licorice Pizza already a writing Oscar winner for The Big Short, and his contender here Don’t Look Up has elements of satire mixed with social messaging that resonates. The Worst Person in the World from Eskil Vogt and Joaquim Trier is the only one of the bunch not nominated for clearly has its admirers. Zach Baylin’s King Richard takes a true-life story and distills it to the essence of not only the birth of champions on the tennis circuit, but a domineering father who drives them there, and most importantly, a heartfelt story of family, which is also the case with Belfast, which pulls out the win.

THE WINNER: Kenneth Branagh, Belfast BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) has, like Branagh, made a very

Dune

movies with the Italian entry The Hand of God, which took a major prize at Venice. Joaquim Trier brought Norway its sixth nomination with the well-loved The Worst Person in the World, a contemporary

DIRECTOR Denis Villeneuve

Bhutan called Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom from director Pawo Choyning Dorji. It is a total charmer about a teacher brought to an isolated school high in the Himalayas to educate a group of children.

Once you see it you will not be surprised it made the cut. Denmark’s 14th nomination comes for Flee, an animation/documentary hybrid that has made history of its own by landing nominations for International Film, Documentary Feature and Animated Feature. Quite a feat and that statistic is as good as a win, but it will probably lose here to Japan’s 14th nomination, Drive My Car, which has the wind at its back with nominations in writing, directing and Best Picture. This is where it wins.

THE WINNER: Japan, Drive My Car

PRODUCERS Cale Boyter Mary Parent Denis Villeneuve STUDIO Warner Bros. Pictures Legendary Pictures OSCAR NOMINATIONS Best Film Editing Best Original Score Best Adapted Screenplay Best Visual Effects Best Cinematography Best Production Design Best Costume Design Best Makeup and Hairstyling Best Sound

The only one of this year’s Best Picture nominees to make more than $100 million domestically and much more globally despite debuting on HBO Max at the same time as screening in theaters, Denis Villeneuve’s grand epic is book will likely clean up in the crafts categories where it is nominated for 10 Oscars overall. The shocking omission of Villeneuve for Best Director and ambition on display in every frame, along with strong support from members below the line, could make it a contender. At any rate it is likely to be the movie that leads in numbers of Oscar wins, even if in the end it doesn’t take the big prize. Voters may think they can still give it that reward when the sequel comes out.

AWARDSLINE

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE When in doubt in this category, just go with Disney, whether through their own Disney Animation or their Pixar brands, the mouse house is tions in the category they would be a good bet to cash in on at least one of them. Pixar, a frequent winner, is in the race with the lovely and lilting summer release Luca, which is a real charmer set in Italy with beautiful animation and all the usual Pixar touches, but is it too light.

There is also the early fall release from Disney Animation, Raya and the Last Dragon. It has much to recommend, not the least of which is a diverse lead female character and gorgeous visuals. And then there is the holiday release of Encanto which also promotes diversity with a Colombian family and again the lead female character at its center.

Plus, it has about eight Lin-Manuel Miranda-penned tunes, including a current monster hit and another all in Spanish that is Oscar category. Can it, and Disney be stopped? Phil Lord and Chris Miller managed to do just that with Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, so The Mitchells Vs. the Machines? Possibly. And then there is Flee again, the Danish to draw votes in all three but perhaps not enough to win any of them.

THE WINNER: Encanto

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BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY The Power of the Dog, so

King Richard DIRECTOR

on Dune,

PRODUCERS

highlight of The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Nightmare Alley West Side Story is as impressive

STUDIO THE WINNER:

OSCAR NOMINATIONS

The Power of the Dog

BEST COSTUME DESIGN both Cruella and Cyrano

Best Film Editing Best Original Song

Cyrano Cruella

Nightmare Alley

King Richard West Side Story

stylings of Dune THE WINNER:

Cruella

BEST FILM EDITING

Licorice Pizza

Ordinary People Birdman tick, tick…BOOM!

DIRECTOR Paul Thomas Anderson

Don’t Look Up

PRODUCERS Sara Murphy Adam Somner Paul Thomas Anderson

most impressive feat in King Richard

The Power of the Dog Dune

STUDIO MGM/UA

THE WINNER:

Dune

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING Coming 2 America

OSCAR NOMINATIONS

Paul Thomas Anderson returns to his beloved San Fernando Valley for House of Gucci got nominated largely for look in The Eyes of Tammy Faye makeup and hair team up front as it has done in the past for the is anything but.

Cruella Dune

THE WINNER: The Eyes of Tammy Faye

AWARDSLINE

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BEST ORIGINAL MUSIC SCORE Dune The Lion King

Nightmare Alley DIRECTOR

Encanto didn’t PRODUCERS

Don’t Look Up

Parallel

Mothers The Power of the Dog THE WINNER: STUDIO

Encanto

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

OSCAR NOMINATIONS Four Good Days “

West Side Story CODA

Dune

”

“ King Richard Belfast

”

“

”

“ “

” ”

Encanto

“

”

THE WINNER:

“

”

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN Nightmare Alley Dune Nightmare Alley

The Power Of The Dog

The Power of the Dog The Tragedy of Macbeth West Side Story

DIRECTOR THE WINNER:

PRODUCERS

Dune

BEST SOUND

Dune No Time to Die West Side Story STUDIO

The Power of the Dog Belfast

OSCAR NOMINATIONS THE WINNER: Dune BEST VISUAL EFFECTS Spider-Man: No Way Home Dune No Time to Die Free Guy Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Free Guy

PETE’S

TOSS-UP

THE WINNER: Dune

PICK

AWARDSLINE

Shang-Chi

Spider-Man Dune is a

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BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE nominee Flee

West Side Story

mentary feature winner and methinks they aren’t about to start now, especially since voters have two other places on the ballot Ascension, Attica and Writing with Fire are the kind of heavy subject matter movies that the doc branch loves, so their nominations are no surprise. In some

DIRECTOR Steven Spielberg

doc of the year in other awards shows, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) actually made the

PRODUCERS Kristie Macosko Krieger Steven Spielberg

presumed front runner The Rescue

STUDIO

Woodstock took place, its moment has come and struck a chord.

With Searchlight heavily behind it after a Sundance buy, and even a recent run on the ABC network for added visibility, this seems

OSCAR NOMINATIONS night TV bandleader in as many years to win an Oscar.

THE WINNER: Summer of Soul,

Best Supporting Actress Best Cinematography

Best Sound Upon hearing that none other than Steven Spielberg wanted to remake the his mind. After seeing what he managed to do with this classic musical, the

THE WINNER FOR BEST PICTURE:

a rivalry that might just resonate more today than it ever did, screenwriter Tony Kushner has given this new telling more gravitas and importance than

In the race between art and heart, and with a ranked choice voting system where your No. 2 choice may be as important

masterpiece. But with seven nominations as opposed to the original’s Belfast and The Power of the Dog.

Kenneth Branagh Belfast

On Oscar nomination day, Branagh made history by becoming the only person to ever receive Oscar nominations in seven different categories, a remarkable statistic that belies the fact that he has yet to Belfast, he has a chance to change that, and this is in fact his second ever nomination in this category after coming strong out of the gate nomination for directing 1989’s Henry V and actually take one of those gold statuettes home with him? There is a decent chance if voters love this

Rysûke Hamaguchi

Paul Thomas Anderson

This is the Japanese director’s

This is Anderson’s third nomination in this category. There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread are the other two among his overall 11 Oscar nominations. This all simply proves Anderson is kinda overdue to win something, considering the love he consistently gets here and from the writers branch. Licorice Pizza date so it would be ironic that he

Drive My Car

Adapted Screenplay), and he is in

ever nominated in this category.

Hamaguchi is the fourth consecutive director of an International Film a nomination from the director’s And one of them, Parasite’s Bong Joon Ho, actually won. Hamaguchi though should probably consider this recognition in this category the win because he has stiff competition with better odds.

Licorice Pizza

It is entirely possible, however, I think it is more likely he could win in the Original Screenplay category where Pizza has a strong chance.

BEST DIRECTOR AWARDSLINE

Jane Campion

Steven Spielberg

Campion becomes only the seventh female to win a directing nomination.

Ironically, it was Spielberg who won

to be nominated twice as she was The Piano, for which she won the Original Screenplay award and became

Oscar for Schindler’s List. He is the

d’Or at Cannes. You can tell she is a trailblazer, indeed, and also that things are looking up. If Campion wins here, she will be the third woman to win and the second in a row following last year’s victory by Chloe Zhao.

Take it to the bank that she will be.

remake of a movie that previously

The Power of the Dog

West Side Story

19th overall). Should he win, he would

should he win, it would be for the also previously won in 1998 for Saving Private Ryan. Can he make it director? My guess is it is probably

PETE’S

WINNER PICK

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