DECEMBER 6, 2023 / OSCAR PREVIEW
YUMMY MUMMY Juliette Binoche samples The Taste of Things
CRASH COURSE J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow
ROAR POWER To Kill a Tiger shines a light
Leonard Bernstein performs once more as Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan bring Maestro back to Carnegie Hall
P L U S : T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L I S S U E Zone of Interest • Perfect Days • Cassandro • Shayda • Bye Bye Tiberias
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MASTHEAD updated 1102.indd 1
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First Take
On The Cover
4 JULIETTE BINOCHE: The star of Aga saga The Taste of Things gets a grilling. 8 QUICK SHOTS: Creating a bomb sight in Oppenheimer and breathing life into the score for Poor Things. 10 FIERCE CREATURE: Why women’s rights documentary To Kill a Tiger could change Indian culture forever.
Cover Story 14 THE MUSIC LOVERS: Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan on Leonard Bernstein, the genius composer whose Bohemian marriage was the talk of New York.
ON THE COVER: Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan photographed by Jason McDonald at Carnegie Hall exclusively for Deadline.
Dialogue 24 NOORA NIASARI 28 CHRISTIAN FRIEDEL 32 GAEL GARCÍA BERNAL 36 KŌJI YAKUSHO 40 LINA SOUALEM & HIAM ABBASS
Craft Services 44 IN THE THICK OF IT: The DoPs behind Creed III, Nyad and Ferrari want to put you in the picture.
The Partnership 52 J.A. BAYONA & PABLO VIERCI: The astonishing true story behind Society of the Snow and the 1972 plane crash that stunned the world.
Flash Mob
V IO L E TA SO F IA FO R D E A D LI N E
58 CONTENDERS FILM LA: The Deadline team highlights the best and brightest lights in the race for an Oscar.
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A F I L M B Y J . A . B AYO N A
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ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR.” “
“
SPECTACULAR.” “
EMOTIONAL.”
THRILLING.” “
VISCERAL.”
“
A REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT and J.A. Bayona’s best f ilm.”
IN SELECT THEATERS DECEMBER
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SPLENDOR IN THE FOIS GRAS With Trần Anh Hùng’s French foodie saga The Taste of Things, Juliette Binoche proves her appetite for adventure is as voracious as ever
I FC FI LM S / EV E R E TT C O L LECTI O N P H OTO C R ED I T
By Damon Wise
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F O R YO U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N EGY P T ’ S O F F I C I A L S U B M I S S I O N F O R B E S T I N T E R N AT I O N A L F E AT U R E F I L M AT T H E 9 6 T H A C A D E M Y A W A R D S
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At first sight, the film the French chose to represent them at the Oscars next year couldn’t be any more French. A chaste romantic drama starring Juliette Binoche as Eugénie, an unsung, genius-level private chef, The Taste of Things takes place in the kitchen at the sprawling rustic home of the famous restauranteur Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), and features every culinary delight known to mankind. Food is braised, broiled, blanched, poached and sautéed, in carefully curated banquets that can take anything up to a waistline-busting 24 hours. Needless to say, audiences at the Cannes film festival savored every bite. Binoche says she got the script simply because she knew the producer. But the reason she decided to make it was the director, Trần Anh Hùng, the Vietnamese-born auteur who first made his name with The Scent of Green Papaya in 1993. “I knew Hùng a little bit because he came on set of a film I was shooting with Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwanese director, called The Flight of the Red Balloon,” she says. “We chatted, and I liked him very much. I knew his films and I wanted to work with him because I like to have an ‘eastern’ feeling of life.” Which explains why, other than Hou, she’s also been working with Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nobuhira Suwa, and Naomi Kawase. “I like to have another point of view of our world,” she says, “and Hùng is one of these directors that has another pace. He sees things always from within, and that’s what I love about his work. It’s not only about the surface of things. He’s connected to what he’s filming in a special way, in a loving way.” Though Eugénie cooks in industrial quantities, Binoche claims no boot camp was needed. “I didn’t have to prepare, in the sense that I’ve been cooking all my life,” she says. “Well, a good part of my life, because I have children and I like cooking. Having said that, I sometimes dislike it, because when it’s every day it becomes a duty. And sometimes I don’t have the patience.” Aside from Hùng, another big draw for this project was the chance to reunite with her ex, Magimel. “There was something joyful about it and very emotional,” she says, “because I was acting with Benoît, who’s my daughter’s father, and we hadn’t worked together since we did Les enfants
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Juliette Binoche on the red carpet in Rome.
du siècle which was nearly 25 years before. I was a little nervous about working with him again because we hadn’t seen each other that much, and there hadn’t been a lot of words or conversation since. “So, the fact of being able to make a film together and speak to each other through Hùng’s writing, and expressing our emotions through the emotions that we had to go through in the film, was a wonderful tool, in a way, to...” She pauses. “Well, for me, anyway, to reconcile, and say to him, ‘I love you no matter what happened.’” Binoche will turn 60 next year, and she’s packed an incredible amount into nearly 40 years of acting. She’s worked with legends and rising stars alike, and it’s hard to find a film on her filmography where her impeccable taste has failed her. “Well, I’m not thinking about taste when I’m choosing the project,” she says. “I’m just choosing the person I want to spend time with, in an artful situation.” “Sometimes I say yes to a film because I love the films the director’s been doing,” she adds, “but sometimes it’s because I want to take a risk with that film. I don’t know what the result will be, but I want to take the risk because I like the subject. Sometimes you just use your intuition. You have to dare your intuition, because otherwise, if you’re mentally calculating the yes or the no of your choices, you can be disappointed at the end, because it has to come from the heart. Because then you never regret anything.” Given her tendency to put her heart and soul into a movie, has she ever gone too far? “No,” she says firmly. “I’m not thinking about that. I’ve felt sometimes that it went so far that I’m amazed I survived it, but I always knew that we’d captured something. I might wobble at the end of it all. I might feel like, ‘Oh my god, it’s been so rough.’ But… regrets? it’s not in my vocabulary. I just learn when there’s a mistake. You learn from it, and you say, ‘OK.’ So, I don’t really live with regrets. I use them as wisdom at the end of the day.”
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Some of that wisdom came from The Lovers on the Bridge, the film she made with Leos Carax. Released in 1991, it took two and a half years to make, with logistical issues ranging from serious onset accidents (co-star Denis Lavant injured his hand) to being dropped by its producers—twice. “It was endless,” she recalls, “but I learned to be willing to go until the end and have the faith to make it, no matter what. It was hard, but it taught me that you go till the end. But life is more important than anything. Meaning, I almost killed myself in one of the scenes. I almost drowned. That was a turning point, where I thought, ‘Art is wonderful, but life is more important than anything else.’” Surprisingly, Binoche has mostly resisted the siren call of Hollywood, even after her breakout in Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. Did she consider that a step towards Hollywood? “Not at all, because we shot it in Paris and Lyon. And so, to me, it was a very European film. I had no reference for what Hollywood meant. It was just an idea, and I had no idea what the system meant. I have a sense of it today, of course, because I understand the industry, the challenges, and how much money is involved. And how much the mindset is to conquer the world, to conquer money, to conquer the box office.” “But at the time, I was not aware of it. I was only interested in telling the story with my tool, which is my body, mind and soul. I had no idea of the outside consequences, because I was not interested in that. I only knew, when I was reading the scripts that came from my American agent, whether or not I could relate to them. That was my only way to say yes or no: If it reached my heart, my mind, my enthusiasm, or my need for acting. That I knew. But as to the consequences of my choices? I had no idea.” One script that came to her that way was Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient (1996), which brought her an Oscar. “It took me a while to read it,” she says. “And I remember Anthony teasing me about that. But reading in English at the time was not that easy. It took me a while. And when you’re busy in your life… I had a child, I was working quite a lot, and I was working with Lancôme, so I had a lot of engagements. But when I read it, I was very touched by his writing. They were very readable, his scripts, and the dialogues related to some inner place that I really enjoyed.”
Did she expect it to be such a big phenomenon? “No, I didn’t expect that at all. We knew it was a quite expensive film, but no, we had no way to know that it was going to be that much of a success.” And when awards season came around? “I had no idea. They just asked me, ‘Do you want to go here? Do you want to go there?’ And I said yes because I was happy to go for the journey. But I didn’t know how political it was. It was like a political campaign. I realized that years after, but, in the moment, I was just following Anthony and Caroline, his wife. I went all over the world, because I wanted to be part of the journey, but I didn’t understand the consequences of it all.” Since then, Binoche has shown her lighter side, with a small role in Godzilla and a self-deprecating cameo as herself in French comedy series Call My Agent. But she will always be more famous for her work with such austere European masters such as Krzysztof Kieślowski, Michael Haneke and Bruno Dumont, with whom she made Camille Claudel 1915 in 2013, about the mental collapse of Rodin’s sculptress lover. It’s a harsh story, but Binoche has surprisingly fond memories. “It was intense, definitely, because Claudel’s life was very intense,” she says. “To tell you the truth, for the first half of the film, I was really frightened about playing her. Waking up in the middle of the night, sweating. The second half of the film, I felt like she was with me.” Indeed, two weeks after the shoot, Binoche did a play in the Picardy region, not far from Claudel’s family home (“The place where, in her letters, she would say, ‘Take me back, take me back.’ And she was never taken back”). So, Binoche reached out to Claudel’s nephew and asked if she could visit. “He made it happen, and it was the most powerful experience I’ve ever had,” she says. “I could touch the furniture she lived with as a young adult, with her parents. There was a pastel drawing of her sister she had made that was just beautiful, and some of her sculptures were also in the garden.” The memory still haunts her. “Beyond the film itself, there’s always a story,” she says. “Something that nourishes your soul and validates your reasons for making it.” A
Binoche at San Sebastian.
“Sometimes I say yes to a film because I love the films the director’s been doing, but sometimes it’s because I want to take a risk with that film.” Binoche with Benoît Magimel.
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Boom Town Production designer Ruth De Jong rebuilt a full-scale Los Alamos without using any CGI for Oppenheimer with plans and elevations, and made foam core architectural models in a quarter-inch scale.” De Jong and her team landed on Ghost Ranch, which is along the same mountain range as the existing Los Alamos. “We had this epic town that we wanted to do,” she says, “but the U.S. government had $2 million and a few years and I had nowhere near that.” Neither De Jong nor director Christopher
Nolan wanted to use CGI for extensions on the town, so De Jong opted for building exteriors and shooting the interiors at the actual Los Alamos, like Oppenheimer’s house, which has been largely untouched since he lived there. Building the physical exteriors, rather than relying on CGI, helped the actors immerse themselves in the era and also gave the art departments room
to work close by while staying out of everyone’s way. “As Oppenheimer is walking down Main Street, each department is hunkered down in one of those houses with additional gear,” De Jong says. “I tried to set up and design all the spaces so we weren’t wasting time because of how efficient we needed to be. There were no monitors, but this meant you’re always in earshot.” —Ryan Fleming
Going With The Wind How Poor Things composer Jerskin Fendrix scored the “rawness and honesty” of its heroine’s surreal but surprisingly emotional journey
Emma Stone in Poor Things.
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The initial advice that Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos gave composer Jerskin Fendrix was to have no references to any other piece of media. “We didn’t talk about any other films, any other composers, any other music… It was very off-limits,” says Fendrix. “Yorgos’ vision from the beginning was that this film had to be very exclusive to itself, very self-contained.” For his first time scoring a film, he found that writing music for the film was easy due to the story’s “intensity of emotion and feeling”. Although he wasn’t able to reference any previous work, Fendrix was given a large number of art designs to aid him. “The artistic documents showed me that it was cosmetically going to be really quite intense, quite surreal, and exaggerated,” he says. But it was the unique tone
of the script, in which a woman named Bella is reanimated by a Victorian scientist, that really inspired him. “I wanted the score to have this rawness and honesty,” he says. “She’s such an unusual character and obviously her development is so unusual that I don’t think it could have been described with traditional musical methods.” To match the artificial nature of how Bella was brought to life, Fendrix played with the idea of how to artificially manipulate wind and breath, which he says was “somatically pivotal” to the score. “I focused a lot on wind instruments, like woodwinds and other instruments that generate wind or have wind generated for them,” he says. “It’s the idea of breath and life, and the questions around what is Bella’s life.” —Ryan Fleming
M EL I N DA SU E GO R D O N / UN I V E R SA L P CTU R ES / C O URT ESY E V ER ET T C O LL ECT IO N / SE A RC H LI GH T P I CTU R ES / KAY E SO N G
When location scouting for Oppenheimer, production designer Ruth De Jong was tasked with finding a location to recreate Los Alamos. Although the actual town of Los Alamos was too modernized to use for the period piece, De Jong and her team spent some time there for research. “I began laying out the expanse of the town with our set designer Jim Hewitt,” she says. “We took these drawings,
The Oppenheimer cast on the Los Alamos set.
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STAND AND FIGHT
In a village in the Indian state of Jharkhand, Ranjit and his wife Jiganti keep vigil at night over their home, a simple dwelling with packed-earth floors. If they don’t, anything could happen: Their neighbors have threatened to kill the couple and their children. Ranjit and Jiganti have done nothing to warrant such terror, other than to go against village customs. After their 13-year-old daughter Kiran was sexually assaulted by three local youths, they resisted intense pressure to remain silent—to excuse the crime and the perpetrators. Instead, they demanded justice. Their struggle plays out in the documentary To Kill a Tiger, directed by Nisha Pahuja and executive produced by a prominent team including Dev Patel, Mindy Kaling and Dr. Atul Gawande, the surgeon and bestselling author. The film, winner of more than 20 awards at festivals around the world, situates the story in an alarming cultural context: By one estimate, 71 percent of rapes in India go unreported. Those who dare to speak out, like Kiran and her parents, risk a scornful backlash. As the film documents, Ranjit’s attempt to gain assistance from local officials met with hostility. “If the girl wasn’t there, would this have happened?” the local ward leader demands of him. “This is a major thing we should focus on… A girl always bears some blame.” Pahuja, who was born in India but raised in Canada, spent eight years working on the film. Over that time, she gained a sense of the dynamics in a tiny, rural enclave like Bero. “You’re understanding the intricacies of what this village is, the fact that it is kind of an ecosystem, a very complex ecosystem that is rooted in survival… India is a culture that is not based necessarily on the individual. It emphasizes community.” What the community wanted soon became clear. They demanded Kiran’s parents marry the girl to one of her three assailants. “Marriage is the only solution,” one village woman insists. “Her house has been shamed by that boy, so how can having him marry her be a bad thing? She can’t marry another man now. She has to marry him.” Ranjit and Jiganti, refusing to go along, are ostracized. “We are alone,” Jiganti says. “They raped my daughter,” Ranjit says forlornly, “but they shamed me.” Authorities took Kiran’s alleged attackers into custody. But whether the case would move forward depended largely on Ranjit’s willingness to press ahead. Pahuja says it was painful to watch Ranjit, a low-caste man, try to navigate India’s legal system. She winces as she recalls “seeing Ranjit humiliated at court, the way he was dismissed, the way he was
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Ranjit’s daughter in a field.
mistreated by the public prosecutor at times. We didn’t put it in the film, but there was a scene where they went in to get a new court date and they had to pay a bribe just for the guy to do their paperwork. And it was that kind of relentless humiliation that Ranjit was subjected to that was very difficult to witness.” Scenes like those resonated for Patel, the star of Slumdog Millionaire who was born in England to parents of Indian descent. “It really is a David and Goliath story. Everything is stacked against this father and his daughter,” he says, “and I think it speaks a lot to the system in India which is so overloaded. There’s corruption. Any attempt at justice can feel impossible for someone in that status in society. So, you really are sitting at the edge of your seat wondering if this man is going to ever achieve any justice.” Patel agreed to come on board as an EP after watching a cut of the film. “I had a visceral reaction to it, a very physical reaction,” he recalls, noting that he immediately contacted Pahuja to discuss it. “We had a phone conversation that went on for over an hour, and I was deeply moved and in awe of what she’d achieved for this.” The actor says the story told in To Kill a Tiger hit him on a personal level. “I’ve spent most of my career traveling, living, filming and exploring in India, and it’s hard to ignore the cases of sexual violence against women and minors that flood the papers every day,” he says. “Many of the friends that I’ve made there have been exposed to some form of predatory behavior. I lost a friend called Monica who was raped and murdered, and to see such potential extinguished—Monica, to me, represented a kind of modern, new India… It really is an issue of huge proportions in India and globally.” It’s not an accident that bold face names like Patel and Kaling became attached to the documentary. “I’ve known
C O URTE SY O F TH E N FB A N D N OT IC E P I CT UR E S
By Matt Carey
To Kill A Tiger, from director Nisha Pahuja & EP Dev Patel, follows an Indian family’s tenacious pursuit of justice in the wake of a violent sexual assault
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for over a year that if this film was going to get out into the world, it would use undisguised footage of her in the film. The only need the support of celebrities, people like Mindy and Dev… because it’s concession to protecting her identity is her name; a tough subject. It’s a hard subject,” Pahuja says. “It’s about a survivor Kiran is a pseudonym. who’s 13 years old. It’s a Canadian film, but it’s an Indian story, and it’s “She saw the film and said, ‘‘No need to hide me. subtitled. But I think it’s just so important.” Absolutely. I don’t want to be hidden,’” Pahuja says. “I “Part of me wanting to get behind the movie,” Patel says, “is we had asked her why she decided to come forward. And she this sort of stigma with Slumdog when the film got dropped by a major said it was because she couldn’t believe the courage studio [Warner Bros.]. I guess to the naked eye, it looks like something she had at that age. And she felt if she could come that’s going to be not cinematic. It looks like something that’s going to be forward at the age of 13, if she could stand up and a real drag to get through. Poor Indian villagers out in the dusty center fight for justice, then surely other people could also of some village in India—it’s hard to get an audience to sit for, but once come forward… It is so courageous.” people get in front of this film, it will grip you and the filmmaking and Pahuja is working on an impact campaign around the story speaks for itself really. So, my mission has been getting behind the film in collaboration with Equality Now, an NGO Nisha and trying to get as many people to watch it. And stories like these that promotes human rights for women and girls. need male advocates as much as they need female advocates too.” “One goal is to create a fund for survivors who are Drama builds throughout To Kill a Tiger, as Ranjit appears on the edge seeking justice, so they don’t have to suffer the way of losing his nerve. He begins to drink more and misses a few critical [Ranjit’s] family did,” Pahuja says. “A second is to court dates. create, especially in India, a coalition of survivors, “There were lots of times where I thought, I don’t know if he’s going encouraging people who’ve experienced sexual to be able to make it. As you see, there’s just so much pressure on him violence to come forward and to stand together so and it’s perpetual and the tenor of it keeps rising,” Pahuja says. “What that they’re not alone. The stigma that survivors of was so interesting about it is that when Ranjit was in the dumps, mom sexual violence experience is global. It’s universal. In was kind of bolstering his courage, or Kiran was… They were so unified India, there’s something kind of pathological about as a family. They were kind of marching together and really determined it… Stepping out of those shadows of shame that are to see it through.” imposed upon you is really important.” As Kiran prepared to give testimony in the trial of her alleged attackAnother focus of the campaign is “to really start ers, tensions in the village reached a boiling point. Villagers descended this conversation on masculinity and understanding that it’s something that is a prison for all of us, on the family home, directing their ire at the film crew. They threatened because that’s what constructs are, right? Just by to set fire to the house and immolate everyone inside. their very nature, they impose something on you. “I felt fear for the crew. I felt fear for the family. But I think the overriding emotion was one of shame… shame at [the situation] I had created,” They tell you what you should be. And as men, there’s Pahuja says, explaining that by pursuing the documentary project she felt this feeling that there’s a tremendous power—and she had exposed Ranjit and his family and the film team to danger. “I felt there is on the one hand, but it comes at a cost. It very responsible.” comes at a price, and we all pay the price for it. So, Ethical quandaries arose throughout the shoot, Pahuja says, noting it’s getting all of us to see that.” that she checked in regularly Patel says he’s trying to enlist more with Ranjit to make sure he prominent people to support the film and was going after justice for his what it stands for. daughter’s sake and not for the “I’m kind of here as the hype man,” filmmakers’. Perhaps the bighe says, “and we’re hoping to get some gest dilemma for Pahuja was courageous Indian stars to join us on this how to depict Kiran on screen. so we can affect the everyman out there “We tried many different too. And that’s the goal with this. I know things,” Panhuja says. “We success for this documentary globally will worked with a couple of really start to turn heads in India and it animators to come up with will help change policy. And that’s great. something.” After abandoning That’s a step in the right direction.” A Ranjit and Jaganti talk with NGO activist Amit Singh. animation, they considered adopting an approach similar to the documentary Welcome to Chechnya, where a “facial replacement technique” was used to superimpose the face of a double over the true protagonist, whose life was in danger. “We found an actress, a really lovely Tamil actress in Toronto who was willing to be the face of Kiran,” Pahuja explains. “And we did those tests and that was really interesting. But at the same time, we were having these audience screenings, and what was so clear was [the response] of, ‘Please don’t hide her… Let her humanity and who she is shine through.’ And so I just started this conversation with the family, and Kiran very intelligently said, ‘Let me see the film, and I’ll tell you what I think.’” Ranjit and Jaganti talk with lawyer Lakhan Lal. Kiran, who is now almost 20, gave her blessing to
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LET’S FACE Bradley Cooper’s Maestro explores the unorthodox, decades-spanning love story between New York composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia. Cooper and Carey Mulligan discuss their passion project with Baz Bamigboye.
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THE MUSIC... Ph ot og ra ph e d b y Ja son Mc D on a l d a t Ca r n e g i e Ha l l e x c l u si ve l y for D e a d l i n e
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Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan as Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Bernstein in a scene from Maestro.
West Side Story and considered one of the world’s greatest conductors—has lived rent-free in Bradley Cooper’s head since 2018, when Steven Spielberg met with him about what was going to be a straightforward biopic of a musical genius. Somehow, Spielberg knew that Cooper had been obsessed with conducting since he was a child. Not because he was some kind of musical prodigy, but because of an episode of The Bugs Bunny Show in which the hero conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, arms flailing wildly.
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L E O N A R D B E R N S T E I N —the composer of
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I’ve been prepping this character since I was little.” —BRADLEY CO OPER
“ G R O W I N G U P, there was always classical music playing in the house,” Cooper recalls. “So, because of the cartoons I was watching, I used to wave my hands about and pretend that I was creating the music that I was hearing. One Christmas I asked Santa, and all of a sudden I had a baton that I was able to wield.” He spent hundreds of hours waving his arms, conducting, just like Bugs. “So, I always knew that, in a way, I’ve been prepping this character since I was little. I guess it was the same thing with my last movie, A Star is Born: I’d been playing air guitar since I was a kid.” Spielberg elected not to advance with the project, but when he reached that conclusion, Cooper, who’d initially known nothing about the composer and conductor other than “what he looked like and that he was an icon”, was already hooked. The timing was perfect: having just finished A Star is Born with Lady Gaga, he’d come to realize something about himself: “What I really love is to write and direct movies and
spend a lot of time on a piece of art.” It was with some trepidation, then, that he went to Spielberg and asked, “Would you consider giving me this project?” On seeing an early cut of A Star is Born, Spielberg willingly handed over the reins. “If you can get the rights to the music,” he warned, “because they’re about to lapse.” That was a fact Cooper hadn’t been aware of, so he arranged to meet the “the Bernstein kids”, as he calls them, in New York, having recently moved there. He screened A Star is Born for them, and he shared his enthusiasm and curiosity about their dad with them. “Luckily, they went with us. And that’s when it began. Lenny just sort of took hold of me, as did Felicia.” The movie was born in the research. Poring over their correspondence, private papers, home movies and the like, Cooper discovered so much more about Lenny and Felicia. As the classical music world knew very well, Leonard Bernstein was bisexual, and continued having homosexual affairs throughout his marriage to Felicia Montealegre, a classically-trained actress. But this was not a marriage of convenience; it was a partnership of equals, albeit one that suffered bitter ups and downs. So, Cooper went back to the Bernstein kids and informed them that this was going to be no ordinary biopic. “In order to make a movie,” he told them, “there has to be something else. And I think that what moves me in your father’s story is this relationship between your parents.” “That really stunned them,” Cooper says. “They didn’t quite believe I was actually going to focus on their mother too. But that’s all I was interested in.” Not quite all, though, because there was always going to be a focus on Bernstein’s music, which he considers to be another major character in the story. “I always thought, ‘This has to be symphonic—the film itself, in its structure—and it’s got to be sympathetic to his music. I mean, what better way to show his impact than to play his music?” Cooper immediately dove into Felicia’s life, listening to recordings of her radio shows and appear-
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From top: Ita ommo es hos ina, quis crum ne atuus, consi ce publis non Etrehens M. Verion
what more do we have to tell you?!’ I got the chills. It was Felicia who came right out onto the stage. Then she started to talk, and I was like, ‘I have to talk to her about this.’” When the play was over, he leapt from his seat and raced backstage to Mulligan’s tiny dressing room—only to find the actor lying on the floor, sobbing.
I N M U S I C T E R M S , you could say it was a drammatico moment. Mulligan knew Cooper would be coming to see her at some point during her five-week run in the summer of 2018, performing Dennis Kelly’s monologue Girls & Boys at the Off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. But she didn’t know when. “And then he had to come on the first preview, which is always when you want people to come and see your work. The very first time,” she recalls, a little sarcastically, but with a smile. What Cooper was about to find out, as he headed backstage, was that a piece of the set had struck Mulligan on the head during a change that takes place in the dark. “I didn’t know that,” he recalls. “And they said, ‘Well, she’s lying prone on the floor, but just wait a second.’ She was in really dire straits, not doing well.” Mulligan winces at the memory. “The wooden frame of the set hit me on the head, and it sort of dazed me. I mean, it really, really hurt. But no one saw it happen, because it happened in the blackout.” Like the trouper she is, she carried on. “But when I walked off stage, I suddenly felt like I was
It was something that I thought could be really life-changing for both of us.” —BRADLEY CO OPER
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ances on television. Her top billing over Charlton Heston in a 1949 live TV version of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage especially intrigued him when he realized that, at that time, she was a bigger star than her future husband. Cooper didn’t have anyone earmarked for the role of Felicia. He’d known Carey Mulligan for a while, but mostly from the circuit. He thinks they might have met for the first time in around 2009, possibly at The Council of Fashion Designers of America Fashion Awards. Mulligan was just starting out, garnering accolades—including a best actress BAFTA win and her first Academy Award nomination—for her breakthrough role in An Education. Over the years they saw each other around and about, and though he was, he confesses, “A huge fan of her work,” that was all. As Cooper continued with his research, hearing Felicia’s voice in audio tapes and seeing her face in movies and photographs, he began to develop a stronger idea of the actor he needed. “Carey just kept coming into my head,” he says. So, he reached out to a mutual friend and wondered whether Mulligan would ever be open to talk. “The friend said, ‘Well, she’s in New York. She’s doing a play.’ I was like, ‘When?” And it was the following week. So I went, and I was sitting in the audience…” He beams. Clearly, the memory is as fresh as the day it happened. “It’s a one-woman show, and it starts with a spotlight that shines right on the character. For some reason she happened to have blonde hair at that time and for much of her life, Felicia had blonde hair. And she was wearing it up, literally, like Felicia. It was as if Lenny and Felicia were saying to me, ‘Come on,
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From top: Ita ommo es hos ina, quis crum ne atuus, consi ce publis non Etrehens M. Verion publiam. Ul hintem
going to faint. I was panicking. I was having a massive panic, thinking that I was in real trouble. I mean, you know what can happen with head injuries. It hurt so much, I was crying on the floor in my dressing room.” And then in walks Bradley Cooper. “He came in and saw the state of me, and he was like, ‘Right we’re off to hospital.’ So off we went to the hospital, much to the delight of the nurses who worked there.” But although the actress was happy that Cooper had come to her aid, she was entirely clueless as to why he’d come. And Cooper didn’t even have anything he could show her: at the time, the film was almost entirely in his head. “There was no script, there was nothing,” he says. “All I knew was that it was going to be about the two of them.” Mulligan interrupts. “He said, ‘I want to make a film about marriage.’” But, for a short time, conversation had to wait. Not long after that fateful night, they met again for breakfast at Cafe Cluny in the West Village. “I just sort of shared my thoughts and feelings about this project,” says Cooper. “It was something that I thought could be really life-changing for both of us, if
she was willing to put the work in.” He asked her to listen to “Make Our Garden Grow”, the closing number from Bernstein’s opera Candide. It’s a song about young lovers understanding the imperfection of life and the need to face it head on. The aria was pertinent because it points somewhat toward how the composer and the actress understood clearly (or at least Felicia did), what they needed to face head on. In letters that the couple’s three children—Nina, Jamie and Alexander—donated to the Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress, Felicia makes it clear that she understood her husband’s complicated
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C O O P E R A N D M U L L I G A N are sitting side-by-side in a hideaway suite at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard. Both listening, waiting their turn with a grace that’s lost on the younger wannabes who want their turn now—right now. To reach this level of artistry doesn’t just happen by chance: both have honed and refined their craft. I have watched both be brave enough to tread the boards, she perhaps more than him, in back-breaking work by playwrights both famous and obscure. It’s as if she was suspicious of that early acclaim for An Education and had—or needed—to prove that it wasn’t a fluke. But it definitely wasn’t a fluke. That was evident in her early screen appearances; as Ada Carstone
—CAREY MULLIGAN in the 15-part Bleak House the BBC aired in 2005, and her Kitty Bennett in the Pride & Prejudice movie released the same year. The first time she performed at the Royal Court in London’s Sloane Square was in 2004, in director Katie Mitchell’s production of Kevin Elyot’s Forty Winks. Mulligan excelled playing a possibly abused, narcoleptic teenager. My own battered copy of the play text, which I still have at home, is annotated with the words, “Must find out what she’s doing next. Future star?” Well, yes. If An Education gave notice, then her Nina opposite Kristin Scott Thomas and Chiwetel Ejiofor in director Ian Rickson’s memorable 2007 production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, also at the Royal Court, yelled out that Mulligan had arrived. Scott Thomas led the company to Broadway where critics did cartwheels. That’s why Cooper’s comment about her
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sexual identity (“If your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern, what can you do?” she asked, rhetorically). As a result, she gave Bernstein permission to indulge his “double life”, as she put it, but discretion was key, and the movie is underpinned with that delicate level of understanding. A week after that, Cooper asked Mulligan if she wanted to come to Philadelphia and work for free, narrating Candide with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who was going to conduct it. “And she said, ‘Yeah.’ Straight away. I was like, ‘You do know it’s for free? We’re not getting paid.’ But she came anyway and spent five days in Philadelphia, doing three performances. And it was wonderful. That was the beginning of us, brick by brick, becoming closer. Because we’d only known each other on the periphery. But she was willing to go deeper and deeper, and I asked so much of her. I asked as much of her as I asked of myself.” They did an intensive six-day workshop, or rather, what they refer to as a “dream workshop”—a oneperson show for each other—just the two of them, no cameras, in his apartment in TriBeCa. It included an interrogation of their own lives revealed in a ritual they performed in front of each other “based on our dreams and work on our character. It’s really kind of a beautiful thing, but it’s scary. I saw her bare her soul for Felicia and for me. And she made me feel safe enough that I could do the same for her.” At the end of that exercise, he knew, as a filmmaker, that they could pull this off. “And that was it,” Mulligan adds gleefully.
If I’d gone in there and not delivered, I would have been letting everybody down.”
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LOST IN MUSIC Left to right: Cooper conducting as Bernstein, following six years tuition so that the actor could authentically lead the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance at England’s ancient Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire.
Maestro’s centerpiece is a re-enactment on Leonard Bernstein’s legendary 1973 performance conducting Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at Ely Cathedral in England. Six years ago, while browsing through YouTube, Cooper came across director Humphrey Burton’s famous film of the landmark concert that saw Leonard Bernstein joining with The London Symphony Orchestra to perform Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. When it finally came time to make Maestro, he knew he would need a “pillar” of classical music to bolster it, and Mahler’s Requiem came straight to mind. “To me,” he says, “there’s nothing more powerful than the end of the “Resurrection”, of any piece of music that I’ve ever heard. And then I found out where Burton’s film was shot, and I was like, ‘Oh, Ely Cathedral, I’ve got to go there. So, four and a half years ago, I went there. Luckily, somebody knew somebody, and they let me in at night with my friend George and we just walked around.” After that, he returned to the abbey several more times before they went there to scout for Maestro. He was adamant about shooting on the actual location for what would become a six minute and 23 second scene. Wouldn’t it have been more economical to have created the cathedral’s nave on a soundstage in the U.S.? “Well, Netflix certainly wanted us to,” says Cooper. “They were like, ‘Can’t you just shoot it with green screen?’” Luckily, Netflix caved and a couple of summers ago the production took over what
felt like the whole town. “We just sort of took over and it changed back to the ’70s,” says Cooper. Not only did he want to shoot on location, but he also wanted to shoot the sequence live. “On A Star is Born, I learned that if you do it live, the camera sees everything. It’s alive. But then I thought, ‘OK, but how the heck am I going to do it?’” The answer was to surround himself with conductors like Gustavo Dudamel and Yannick NézetSéguin. Cooper crisscrossed the country following Dudamel, then over to Germany to be by his side as he rehearsed “Resurrection” with the Berlin Philharmonic. In the meantime, Nézet-Séguin made him videos showing baton movements for the piece. On the day of the shoot, he wore an earpiece, to help him count the tempo changes, though Cooper couldn’t hear them anyway, “because it was so fucking loud. And I kept messing up the whole first day of shooting. I kept messing it up, and it was only the last take when I actually recomposed the whole shot, quite fearlessly. I knew I was scared going into that day, and the movie does not have a lot of cuts in it. I had seven setups just to get myself out of jail, so that I would at least have something I could cut together.” That was Cooper thinking as the director. “But, as Lenny, I kept messing up every single take
in front of the London Symphony Orchestra. In my head, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I just spent six years preparing for this and I’m fucking it up. Everybody’s trusting me and I’m blowing it.” Nézet-Séguin remembers it differently. By the end of the sessions at Ely, he says, the musicians of the L.S.O. were transported. “And you could see it on their faces,” he recalls. “Their faces were like, ‘Is that Bradley Cooper? Or is it really Lenny back?’ There was something eerie about the whole thing that was very moving for everyone. Because some of them had played under Lenny’s baton, and some of them knew someone who had been part of that performance in ’73. But they all recognized how miraculously he could really embody one of the most inspiring but also idiosyncratic conductors of all time.” Nézet-Séguin emphasized the point that attempting “Resurrection” is not for the faint of heart. “It’s one of the biggest and most complex works of the repertoire. It’s difficult for an experienced conductor, so it was very impressive that he wanted to conduct this. But also very meaningful for the film.” [When I later tell Cooper that Nézet-Séguin told me the musicians were understanding, and even impressed, Cooper is having none of it. “Well, it didn’t matter to me because I knew I was messing up and it killed me,” he snapped.]
The following day, he was in at the crack of dawn for make-up to turn him into old Lenny, and he had a little bit of quiet time to walk through the cathedral before anybody else got there. “I had a conversation with Lenny,” he recalls. “I know that sounds crazy, but he said, ‘Just do one more.’ Now, we weren’t scheduled to shoot there that day. Theoretically, we’d already got the shot. We were supposed to shoot an exterior scene, a night-time driving scene with Felicia, which I didn’t end up putting in the movie.” Instead, he asked 300 people to come back to Ely. “I said a prayer, publicly, in front of everybody, thanking them and thanking Lenny. And then, for whatever reason, this time I was able to conduct them. I stayed on tempo. I knew everything that was happening, and I conducted them. And that’s what’s in the movie. It was one take.” Mulligan’s role that day was to stand on one spot. She laughs. “There’s no other film where I’ve stood and stared at something for that long where I haven’t started thinking about my dinner. But I was standing there rooted to the spot, just watching him. And what’s so funny is that he talks about fucking it up. Well, I had no idea he was fucking it up. I just thought, ‘OK, so we’re doing it again.’ But there was no sense that he was fucking it up. The only people who would have known if he was fucking it up were him, Yannick, and the L.S.O. Everyone else in the room was like, ‘This is fucking amazing.’” A
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ness, and what that means for someone who is also an artist. If she’d been a lawyer or if she didn’t have career ambitions at all, it would be a different story. But here you have two artists who fall in love and spend their lives together. One of them is touched by god and the other is an artist. There was a moment where she was more famous than him, but they fell in love as soon as she met him.” Mulligan feels that Felicia’s tactics for dealing with Bernstein’s behavior would’ve changed a lot over the years, as Bernstein’s philandering lifestyle became more overt. “But she was adamant—from all the recordings that we heard, and from everyone who knew her—that she was never a victim. That was not her. She refused to be a victim.” She notes that, often, when the couple were backstage at shows, Lenny would be lauded by ladies falling over themselves to get into his dressing room. Felicia, meanwhile, would just sit in the corner and chain-smoke. “It was always Lenny and Felicia, always unsolicited. That’s how it was spoken about, the two of them, two alphas, two worthy adversaries. So that was always clear. The reason why I wanted to make this movie is that it’s not about this deceitful husband and the victim wife. He doesn’t lie. He is exactly the same person. He doesn’t change, actually. He’s the antagonist. She’s the protagonist. She’s the one who sort of comes to this realization about how she’s lived her life and who she is and what her choices really have meant to her.” Mulligan cites tapes of Felicia and Lenny where they’re talking about their relationship and how they communicate. “And the interviewer says, ‘Do you tell each other everything?’ And she says, ‘If there’s something that needs to be said, then we say it.’ I think it was a roundabout way of saying, ‘If there’s stuff out there about our relationship or relationships with other people that has to be confronted, then we will confront it.” She mentions a moment in Maestro when, after the triumph of the first performance of Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz’s huge dramatic pageant “Mass”, a piece that Felicia had championed and encouraged as he labored to complete it, the person he goes to for comfort is not Felicia. He takes his close friend’s hand and not hers. “That’s the betrayal,” says Mulligan. “That’s a heartbreak, because until that moment, she had been that comfort, and that was everything to her. But suddenly he’s taking someone else’s hand for reassurance.” And that’s the moment where Mulligan nails it. Nails the performance. Nails the movie. Cooper concurs, and says that when he and Spielberg were talking about it, Spielberg had said, “Well, she made Lenny her art. That’s exactly right. In that scene, she’s saying, ‘This is my art.’ It’s killing her.”
W H E N I L I V E D in New York in the early 1980s there came an invitation to Bernstein’s apartment at the Dakota for a reception for a music charity. On arrival, I was introduced, as were other attendees, to Bernstein, and his arms enveloped me in a sort of bear hug. I’ve never forgotten the intensity or the warmth of it. The same thing happened a few years later in 1986 when a revival of Wonderful Town transferred from the Palace Theatre, Watford into the Queen’s on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue,
N E TFL IX
being prepared to put in the work to portray Felicia surprised me, slightly, because the evidence suggests she has always been prepared to put in the work, which has always been evident to those who have followed her. Mulligan insists, however, that “I’ve never worked like this before.” What does she mean by that? “First of all, I’ve never been as prepared, probably, as I was [to play Felicia]. And I did that because I knew that I had to live up to the real privilege of being asked to do it by him, and to honor the family as well. But, largely, he had invested so much of his life into this epic that I didn’t want to, frankly, fuck it up for him.” “I mean, it’s about a marriage. It’s about the two of them. So, if I’d gone in there and not delivered, I would’ve been letting everybody down. It would’ve been a complete imbalance. It wouldn’t have worked. So, I did the work.” Her interpretation of what they refer to as the “dream workshop” is similar to Cooper’s, although one senses it was tougher for her than it was for him. “It was genuinely soul-baring stuff,” she remembers. “It was deeply, deeply personal. But by the end of the week, I felt that there was nothing I could do that could be wrong or embarrassing. I think the biggest gift a director can give you is the feeling that you can’t fail, that you’ve got complete and utter support. That’s not to say you get a free pass, just that all of your slightest instincts you’re allowed to play on. You don’t need to have inhibitions; you don’t need to be self-aware.” As a result, the performance flowed organically. “Very early on into filming, I realized I just wasn’t thinking, and didn’t have to think, because I’d put the work in.” And when the two of them were acting together, she notes, “even less thought was required.” Slowly exhaling, she explains a little further. “To be directed by an actor that is living and breathing his character just takes all of the effort out of it. You look and you see Leonard Bernstein. There was just so much faith and trust in between us.” Cooper agrees. “It didn’t feel like acting. It wasn’t acting, I have to say. I know that sounds like…” He laughs. “I don’t know what that sounds like! But it did not feel like acting. We’d get to set, and I’d tell her everything that was going to be in the shot, the way everything was going to be. Nothing was ever forced [on her]. And anything that I felt was hard going for her, I knew about, because I knew it was also hard for Felicia.” Through the workshop and all the rehearsals, Mulligan began to see, quite clearly, that Felicia was more than just a spouse. “I mean, there’s nothing interesting to me about playing the wife of a great man,” she says, her eyes narrowing. “The script was so clear about who she was. And from the very beginning there was this idea of what it’s like to be in close proximity to great-
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It was always Lenny and Felicia ... two alphas, two worthy adversaries.” —CAREY MULLIGAN
since renamed the Sondheim. I met Bernstein again and he gave me another bear hug. Watching Cooper in the movie, enthusiastically greeting people the same way, gave me chills. I tell Cooper that I felt as if I’d seen a ghost. Suddenly we’re interrupted by loud buzzing at the door. Cooper gets up to answer it and returns with what Mulligan describes as a “chocolatey tower” with a note that reads, “Welcome back, Mr. Merrick.” It’s a gift for Cooper from the hotel management. “Mr. Merrick” is a reference to Joseph Merrick, the subject of Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man. Cooper starred in a 2012 revival that played at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, followed by transfers to Broadway and London’s West End. I remember interviewing Cooper backstage in his dressing room at the Booth Theatre in New York as he was changing out of his Elephant Man costume, so the note strikes a chord with both of us. Cooper laughs at the coincidence. “Joseph’s like, ‘Don’t forget me! It’s not just Lenny—there are other ghosts.’” On stage, Cooper effortlessly transformed, somehow almost rearranging his ligaments to portray the disfigured Joseph Merrick [called John in the play]. To play Bernstein on the big screen, though, a physical transformation required some aid. To this end, Cooper met with Kazu Hiro, the Oscar-garlanded make-up designer, four and a half years ago, to explore how to age Bernstein from his twenties into his seventies. They worked so closely that Cooper sometimes stayed over at Kazu’s house for weekends at a time. First, they studied his features. “I have a very pronounced nose,” Cooper says, “so we didn’t do much to my nose. There wasn’t a nose we put on, so [the fuss] was just sort of ridiculous.” He snorts, referring to the absurd hullabaloo
when a trailer was released, and people were endlessly debating the size of his proboscis. “I actually look a lot like young Lenny,” he says. “We were lucky, and I said that to Kazu. We would look at photographs of me younger and him younger, and I’d say, ‘Our faces are the same. Our nose is the same. Our lips aren’t the same, but the nose…’ If I showed you the nose I wore in the film, you’d see it’s basically a silk sheet. It wasn’t really a nose as such, but I had to do something otherwise it didn’t look human. It’s all about balance. And then as he ages, the prosthetics come out and then, by the end, when I’m old Lenny, it’s the full face, the whole head, the arms, and everything.” On the day of his daughter’s graduation, Cooper was shooting close by, and had scheduled it so he could be there. “But we were still shooting. So, I attended her graduation in full make-up as Lenny. So much so that some of the mothers must have thought, ‘Who is that guy?’ Seriously. I was Lenny. Full Lenny. It was crazy.” There’ll be no such craziness for the next film, a “tiny little $10 million movie” that he will direct for Searchlight, called Is This Thing On? starring Will Arnett. He’s keen to work with Spielberg as a director, finally, hopefully on a sofar untitled Frank Bullitt project, based on the character Steve McQueen played in the 1968 classic Bullitt. Rumors of a Matt Helm movie are incorrect, however (“It’s not happening, no”). As for Mulligan, she says she has “nothing for now”. She yearns to return to the stage but it’s tricky with three kids. “I’d love to,” she sighs. “I’m desperate to get back on stage, but missing bedtime is rough at their age.” We say our goodbyes and the pair make their way to a Maestro screening up at the architectural Ross House on Mount Olympus. It seems an appropriate destination. A
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What made you want to tell this deeply personal story based on your own childhood? The whole experience must have been very emotional and difficult. Yeah, absolutely. I lived in the women’s shelter with my mother when I was 5 years old, and it’s an experience that always stayed with me because we actually lived there for eight months, contrary to the film. The film takes place over a couple of weeks, but we lived there for eight months, and it was a very formative experience. When I became a filmmaker, I started thinking about what was going to be my first feature. And I guess if it wasn’t my first, it would’ve been my third. It’s one of those stories that had to be told, and I knew that I could be the person to do that, because it comes from a place of authenticity and lived experience rather than from an outsider’s point of view of that world. And the women’s shelter is not a world we’ve seen on screen before. I was also
Noora
really passionate about capturing
NIASARI
that. And for me, telling stories of
Inspired by her own childhood, the Shayda director explores a story of adversity and empowerment
The camaraderie of the women in the shelter was so apparent from the get-go. That sense of mutual support was the glue that held everybody together.
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women overcoming adversity and finding their place in the world, these stories are always inspiring to me. So, it felt right to start from my own.
women are coming from distinct backgrounds, because domestic
A 5-year-old Iranian child and her mother find refuge in an Australian women’s shelter while on the run from an abusive ex in Noora Niasari’s Shayda. It’s a very personal story for Niasari because she was that little girl, played in the film by new discovery Selina Zahednia, with Zar Amir Ebrahimi starring as her mom, Shayda. Niasari knew it was a risk to make her debut with a project so close to her heart. “There’s a really deep challenge when making work about one’s trauma,” she says. Produced by Cate Blanchett’s Dirty Films, the film is Australia’s Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film.
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violence doesn’t discriminate, it affects everyone. And despite their differences, they’re really united by this shared experience of escaping the trauma of domestic violence. And so, there’s an unspoken bond, and that’s something that I remember
FRAZ ER H AR R I SO N / G ET TY IM AGE S
Yeah, exactly. Even though all the
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feeling living in the shelter. In fact,
something that she described to me
so much with her gaze and how
the woman who plays the shelter
in terms of her filmmaking process,
she was able to really drop into the
manager, Joyce, the real-life person,
which really resonated with me, that
character seamlessly and just bring
became my mother’s best friend after
it’s emotionally autobiographical.
so much of her own experience
You’ve been doing the festival circuit with Shayda. How’s that been for you?
vulnerability at the same moment,
I’ve been touring since January. It’s
best actress at Cannes, and then she
You said you tried to protect her, you didn’t want to traumatize her, but she was in some really emotional scenes, especially the scenes with Shayda and her father. Were those very difficult scenes to work through?
When you’re directing something that this personal, this emotional, how do you distance yourself from it? Or do you not even try to?
been a whirlwind. I never anticipated
flew to Australia to make Shayda. It
For example, there’s a scene where
the film to be so well-received in so
was the perfect outcome for us, and
Shayda and Hossein get a little bit
many different parts of the world.
she was incredible to work with, so
physical, and he’s chasing her and
And it’s just been so overwhelming
committed to the role, and so open-
whatnot. Selina’s not there. She’s not
and beautiful, because the way that
hearted with Selina. And Selina, again,
there. We shot her shots without the
I mean, it was a constant battle
it resonates with Korean women is
I searched all of Australia. It’s such a
father character being around. So, we
in terms of I felt like I was living
not dissimilar to the way it resonates
small pool of Farsi-speaking little girls.
shot her reactions separate from the
two identities in a way. One was
with women in Utah.
But we did a whole grassroots search
mother-father altercation. It’s movie
the shelter. And she’s kind of like a godmother to me still, after 30 years. She was also very involved during the writing process.
to it. She has this strength and which is really, really strong. I was really lucky because she won
as this director trying to lead the
But it’s not just women. There’s
through all the Persian schools and
magic, you know what I’m saying?
crew and cast and also be strong,
also a lot of young men who come
the capital cities. Selina was luckily
But you can’t tell. I mean, when you
and the other side of me was
up to me at the end of the screening
from Melbourne, which is where we
edit things, that’s what I mean about
being triggered and taken back
saying that they experienced
shot, and as soon as she walked into
substitute situations. It’s like I knew
to my 5-year-old self. So yeah,
domestic violence as a kid, and they
the audition room, she had this air of
the reaction that I needed, and I knew
there were days on set where, just
never knew how to articulate what
confidence and playfulness about
that I can’t have her in that situation.
because the performances were
they went through until they saw the
her, and I gave her a situation, and she
So, we came up with a scenario that’s
so good, honestly, I was really
film, which is so beautiful.
cried without me prompting her. It was
relatable to her as a child, and we
triggered by that, and it just felt
just the way she felt, and 10 minutes
capture it, and then she’s off playing
so real at times. So, after a take,
instances like that of people sharing
later, she was able to dance and sing,
with her toys while we’re filming the
if I felt too emotional, I’d have to
their stories, and I think people
and so she understood acting. She
more intense scene. So, it’s things
take a step away into another room
feel really seen. I think there’s so
understood the shifting of emotions
like that that are important. I think the
and meditate a little bit and then
much shame and silence in the
and that it was play.
most challenging times were when
come back and direct. It was really
experiences shown in the film
challenging. I had an on-set therapist
that I really wanted to instigate
that I had to protect her from the
behaving in a certain way. And so, the
for part of the time as well. She was
a conversation and for people to
themes of the film. In no way did I
trickery around that was far more
not only helpful to me, but for other
be able to speak up and to share
want to traumatize a child through
challenging, I would say, because it
people in the cast and crew.
what they’re going through and
the process of this film. So, I spent
really meant that Hossein, the father
to hopefully trigger some kind of
two months in rehearsals with her
character, he was usually playing
change in that way.
and my assistant, finding substitute
against a double who couldn’t speak
But there’s a really deep challenge when making work that’s about one’s
There have been so many
trauma, and I think it’s something
I cast her immediately, but I knew
it was her and the father, and he was
situations for the darker scenes and
Farsi, so she couldn’t understand what
building a framework around how to
he was saying to her.
stories. But in terms of the actual
Tell me about the casting process for Zar Amir Ebrahimi and Selina Zahednia.
nuts and bolts of protecting an artist
Yeah, they’re the stars. They’re
huge process and challenge.
and telling that story, it's a whole
incredible. I searched all of Australia
other thing, I think that needs to be
for Shayda, and I couldn’t find her.
studied and considered a bit more
After a year of searching, I started
when it comes to these personal
looking abroad, and I shared
filmmaking processes.
the screenplay with a French-
people underestimate. Obviously people want to see these kinds of
make sure she didn’t get exposed to unnecessary things. So, that was a
So, it’s things like that. I mean, I felt terrible for him because he couldn’t
Do you consider the film autobiographical or is it more ‘inspired by’?
Farahani, who recommended Zahra
There were moments where there were no words. It was just the two of them, looking at each other and through their expressions, you knew exactly what they were saying.
[professionally known as Zar]. It was
Exactly. And for me, the heart of the
before Zahra won best actress at
film is in their relationship, in their
I would actually consider it to be
Cannes, before Holy Spider came
bond, because ultimately, it’s a love
more inspired by, but I would say
out, so she was lesser known. But
letter to mothers and daughters, and
it’s emotionally autobiographical.
as soon as I saw her audition, I just
they’re really the anchor. We see the
I’ve been having a friendship with
knew she was Shayda. It was within
whole world through their eyes, and
Charlotte Wells, the writer-director
the first 10 seconds of seeing her
we’re alongside them the whole time.
of Aftersun, and we talk about
on screen. It was just astonishing to
So, it was of utmost importance to
Noora Niasari and her mom Yazdaneh
this a lot. And yeah, I think that’s
me the way she was able to express
capture the magic that was between
on the red carpet in Melbourne.
Iranian actress called Golshifteh
FRAZ ER H AR R I SO N / G ET TY IM AGE S
the two of them.
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play against Selina as much as he
really important for an audience to
wanted to. But I guess that’s why he’s
feel the highs. You have to feel the
such a great actor. I think he was able
lows as well. And I found that they
to tap into what he needed to, despite
came with the right moments, those
the challenges of those restrictions.
laughs, because it’s a release. And I think you need that in order to really
You went to your mom and asked her to write a journal of those events from your childhood because you were so young, and 5-year-olds don’t remember everything with the full perspective of an adult.
ride this journey through the film.
Exactly.
the first, and the second is called
So, I’m glad that it made you laugh. That’s good.
What’s next for you? I’m actually working on a trilogy about Iranian women, and Shayda’s Raya. It’s an adaptation of an Iranian-
What was her reaction to that?
American novel of the same title.
I think she had a feeling. I think I had
It’s being produced by Gary Foster
mentioned it a few times. We had a lot
and Sister, and it’s set in France. And
of difficult chats around making the
it’s a kind of Thelma & Louise, but
film or not, because I had to get her
with two Iranian women in exile, and Zar Amir Ebrahimi and Selina Zahednia in Shayda.
approval, because I was never going to do something that was something she
one happens to be a former queen of Iran. So, it’s a really dreamlike,
But ultimately, she’s so proud of the
film that’s believable to an audience,
beautiful, wistful film. And yeah,
didn’t want to do, because obviously,
film. She’s been involved every step
but it’s that whole thing of real life
we’re going to have a casting
the film affects both of us in terms of
of the way. She loves the film, and
being stranger than fiction. So those
announcement soon because,
it being in the world. But ultimately,
she’s been doing Q&As with me.
were challenging things to process,
thankfully, the strike is over.
she started writing this memoir, and I
She came to Sundance, and people
but ultimately it just made me be
think it was a really healing process for
loved her. She was great on stage,
more and more in awe of her and how
market, they’re financing it, and I’m
her, because she was revisiting a lot
and I didn’t anticipate how much
she survived and prevailed. And now
really excited to shoot that in the fall
that she’d kind of put in a box and set
she would love the attention and
she’s running a business, and she’s
of next year.
aside for a long time. So, it was a very
people celebrating her.
got a doctorate, and she is a very
emotional process for her writing it, and I was supporting her and guiding her through all of that. I think once she
successful woman, and she was able
It was emotional for her to write this journal, but it must’ve been emotional for you to read it because there had to have been things in there that you didn’t remember and obviously were very important to her.
to do all of that against the odds.
But to be honest, with my mom, it
Yeah, there was a lot I didn’t know.
was really about navigating that blurry
Obviously, over the years, she’s told
You’ve talked a little bit about the dark element of the film, but there were some really wonderful lighter moments. The dancing was so joyful, and I laughed out loud at the knockknock joke.
line between fiction and reality when
me stories here and there, but it was
I’m so glad.
it came to making the film because,
like uncovering a history. She would
obviously, she was quite attached to
actually read it to me every night, and
how things really happened and how
I would translate it as we went along.
people said things a certain way. And
So, it’s like we were in it together, and
I had to create that separation of,
I was discovering it alongside her, but
like, OK but we’re making a film, and this is best for the film, and you have
finished writing that, which took around six months, it was around 10 years of her life that she ended up writing, and she’s a beautiful writer, so I think it was something that came naturally to her.
We’ve cast the leads, we’re out to
The success of Shayda has to have helped you on that front. Has it opened some new doors for you? Absolutely. It’s been really helpful. It’s definitely a step up from Shayda in terms of its budget and scope. So yeah, it feels like the right second film, and I feel really lucky to be working with Gary Foster, especially. He’s been making films for a really long time, and he’s really experienced, and he just has so
it was very... I had a lot of questions.
That was one of those scenes where she didn’t have to say anything. He said, “Knock, knock.” And the look she gave him was just like, huh?
Sometimes, it was surprising and
I’ve been in a few cinemas showing
I just feel so lucky that he brought
to trust me. And so there was that
shocking. There are certain things
Shayda, and that scene always gets
this project to me.
navigating of all of those things. And
that obviously audiences can’t
a good laugh, and I am so glad,
also, obviously, the consequences of
process when it comes to real-life
because the thing is, I didn’t want to
us making the film, of not being able
situations that are dark. You know
make a film seated in victimhood.
And what's happening with the third film in the trilogy?
to go back to Iran and those decisions
what I mean? There’s only a certain
I wanted to make a film that had
It's still in the works. It’s in the
that we made together.
amount of things you can show in a
lightness and joy. And I think it’s
research phase. A
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much kindness and integrity when it comes to the filmmaking process. And he’s just an incredible producer and an incredible human being, and SO N Y P I CT UR E S C LASSI C S
approval, obviously, and enthusiastic
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Christian
FRIEDEL
The mild-mannered actor is callous Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss in The Zone of Interest BY DAMON WISE
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The phrase “banality of evil” is the perfect description for Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes hit The Zone of Interest. Loosely inspired by the late Martin Amis’s 2014 novel, it centers on the Höss family—Rudolf (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their children—a seemingly ordinary middle-class family living in the shadow of the father’s workplace: the notorious extermination camp Auschwitz. Glazer, a master craftsman, uses sound and image to create a nerve-wracking hellscape, but it’s in Friedel and Hüller that he finds a chilling conduit for the casual barbarity of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. How did you get involved with The Zone of Interest?
only one to do it in German, Jonathan
was like a marriage proposal. I said,
inspiration. It was really important
told me later. And then I met
immediately, “Yes.”
to him, but maybe more as the
I had to do a self-tape to describe
Jonathan at a pub in London together
myself and say why I became an
with his producer and longtime
actor. I did it without knowing the
friend, Jim Wilson. He shared with
script, without knowing the potential
me his vision, the script, the potential
role, but knowing that it was for a new
role and some rare photographs.
film by Jonathan Glazer. I decided to
starting point to create his own vision. In the novel, there are
After that, I had a traditional casting
What did he tell you about his vision exactly? Because it’s based on a novel by Martin Amis, but you didn’t read the novel, did you?
do it in German, because it felt more
call together with Sandra in Berlin,
Yeah. I wanted to read the novel, but
to create his vision. He wanted
natural, in a way. I think this was what
and then Jonathan asked me, “Do
he said to me, “It’s not necessary
to change the perspective, [like
opened the door, because I was the
you want to be a part of this?” It
for our project.” The novel was an
we were] looking in through the
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three different storylines, and one storyline is based on the Höss family, but he decided to use the original Höss family, and he started
STE P HA N E CA R D I N AL E/ C O R BI S V I A G E TTY I M AG ES
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window, observing them with a
together with other colleagues
multi-camera system.
and producers, and he said to our producer, “Christian is a nice guy—
How much research did you do into the real Rudolf Höss?
does he work for you? What he’s
I listened to his voice, because
said, “No, he was the commandant,”
you can hear his voice on YouTube
and Josh was shocked. [Laughs] It’s
from the Nuremberg trials. You’re
a compliment really, because I like
hearing the voice of a prisoner, not a
to transform in different characters.
commandant, about his crime, but it
This is the reason I became an actor:
was really important for me to hear
I’m interested in transforming. It’s
doing for the movie?” The producer
him. I also listened to some excerpts
sometimes difficult to recognize the real person, but sometimes it
The Zone of Interest.
want to make a biopic, it was more
protects you. Maybe it’s difficult for
that we wanted to create our own
something like 10 cameras at the
played my cousin. We met for the
my career, but I really like the fact
interpretation of these characters.
same time, in different angles,
first time, and we had, from the
that the transformation works.
For me, the most important things
sometimes in different rooms in
beginning, a connection. We trust
were the conversations we had
the house, sometimes outside in
each other, and it’s a pleasure to
together, Jonathan, Sandra and I. And
the garden. And we shot scenes
work with her. I saw Sandra the first
When did you first want to become an actor?
we had a lot of conversations—the
without interruptions. That was really
time in the movie Requiem and I
It was just in me. I don’t know
project was postponed because of
amazing, because we came to the
was so thrilled about her, because
why. When I was a child, I liked to
the Covid situation.
set and everything was prepared.
she seems fearless, in a way. But on
entertain the whole room. Or when
And then we had only one or two
the other hand, she’s so curious and
we were on vacation, I liked to sing
What conclusions did you come to about Höss’s motivations for doing what he did?
scenes per day, and we had all
so open.
or to play with hand puppets or
The political system allowed him
because Jonathan had a phenomenal
to have power over people, and, I have to say, he was a very good
the time in the world. Sometimes
something. That was inside of me. I grew up and I always was in the
script, but he was always searching.
When you first saw The Zone of Interest, what was your reaction to it?
It’s like he was saying, “If there’s
As an actor, if you watch a movie
young, and I played piano and sang. I
bureaucrat. He was very good at
something else, let’s figure it out
for the first time, it’s always
like to entertain, or maybe I like that
organizing things. In another political
together.” And this camera system
uncomfortable, and this film was
there’s a reaction to do that what I’m
system he would be nobody, an
allowed us to do so.
even more uncomfortable. I was
doing. I don’t know why, but now I’m
surprised about the decisions
old, or older, I’m doing the same as I was when I was a child.
I describe the shoot as a search,
theater. I always dreamed of being in a movie. I had a keyboard when I was
ordinary, boring person. But here
Sometimes we wouldn’t even
he has the chance to be better than
know if the camera was running.
Jonathan made. I was really surprised
that, to have power, and to be the
Was it still recording? Was there
about the whole sound design and
king, in a way. He was not thinking
someone to yell ‘Cut’? Sometimes
the visual effects. I’ve watched the
about people as humans. I cannot
there was no one yelling ‘Cut’, and
movie four times now. It’s always
And when did you first start making films?
understand how you can think,
then we had improvisation for one
uncomfortable, but I really love to
I was dreaming of it since I was a child.
‘What’s the most efficient, and
and a half hours. And then we had
watch the movie with an audience
I had a tradition, every Sunday, to go
not brutal, way to kill people?’ It’s
the freedom to decide for ourselves
and feel the reactions in the room.
to the cinema and watch a movie and,
cynical, but he was thinking about
when to stop, when to continue, or
And every time I have more distance
after that, go to an ice-cream store.
it like that, as if he was organizing a
when to repeat the lines. That was
from myself, because I want to watch
That was the weekly tradition in my
farm or something. Maybe it was to
really great, because sometimes we
the movie as an audience too. But
childhood. Then I saw E.T. for the first
protect himself. I think this was the
had to be spontaneous—sometimes
every time I watch the movie, I think,
time, and I wanted to be a part of
motivation, to be more efficient. He
it’s good to figure things out. So, I
‘Oh my God, this could be me.’ But
this world, but my first movie as an
actually said that at the Nuremberg
really liked that there was this luxury
that’s what the movie is about: It’s
actor was very late in my career. I was
trial. He said, “This was my work, and
situation of filmmaking.
about us. We have to recognize we
29, and the movie was The White
could all be in this situation. There’s a
Ribbon with Michael Haneke. The
darkness in all of us.
White Ribbon was a door-opener for
I wanted to be the best.” But it was his choice to do this work and do it the way he did it.
Tell me about Sandra Hüller. How would you describe her, and what would you say that she brings to this movie?
international projects. I had an offer to be a part of Steven Spielberg’s War
We met many years ago for a movie
The film has only been shown at festivals so far, but do you ever get recognized?
called Amour Fou, and we had two
I was at Telluride. Josh O’Connor
faster—if Hollywood asked me, then I
Jonathan would say, “It’s Big Brother
funny scenes together. I played
was there too, and he saw the
had to immediately say, “Yes.” [Laughs]
in a Nazi house,” because we had
[writer] Heinrich von Kleist and she
movie. Afterwards, we had dinner
If it’s right, of course. A
You mentioned the camera system. Can you explain how the film was made?
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Horse, but I was not fast enough to say, “Let’s go.” I learned I have to be
A24
from his biography. But we didn’t
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Gael García
BERNAL
The star of Cassandro on wrestling in hot pants, life on the American border, and waving the flag for Mexico BY DAMON WISE
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Roger Ross Williams’s inspiring biopic Cassandro is a window on the world of Saúl Armendáriz, an amateur wrestler from Texas who made it big on Mexico’s luchador scene. Played with tenderness and charm by Gael García Bernal, the film charts how Armendáriz’s life changed when he abandoned his masked persona as El Topo (The Mole) and became an exótico, a flamboyant figure in make-up, leopard skin and spandex. Cassandro, as he now called himself, was a pioneer, showing the macho world of contact sport that gay men could be fighters too—and win. to talk for a little while, so I didn’t
things, it just started to happen little
real Cassandro? How did you win his trust?
by little. I forget what led up to that,
I guess Roger and him had
But we saw each other when we
came to me, because he’d done
but there were many, many different
conversations about that. I spoke
finished shooting. He was very
a documentary about the real
factors that helped put it together. I
with Cassandro very little before
happy, I think.
Saúl Armendáriz and his alter ego,
started training six months before—
shooting. We were going to take
Cassandro. He told me he wanted
obviously, I was eating a lot and doing
whatever we knew about Cassandro
to do a movie about him, and
a lot of weight and flexibility work,
and kind of make it our own. I mean,
immediately I remembered growing
all those kinds of things—and then, a
his character was already very
up with Cassandro and all the other
couple of months before shooting, I
stylized. It was like, “OK, we have to
The way you play him, he’s a very funny, theatrical performer. Did you study his mannerisms, or did you improvise?
luchadors, and I started to get
was doing full-on luchador training. It
make something different for the
It’s always a mix, isn’t it? Whenever
excited by it. But it was still in the
was amazing, and so much fun.
movie.” And then, while we were
somebody imitates someone else,
shooting the film, Cassandro had
there’s that other, added element
a head injury, so he was not able
that the person brings to the
eventually.” And then, like all good
The standard way. The director
works. It was one of those projects that was like, “OK, it might happen
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Did you have to be vetted by the
speak with him until afterwards.
AM AZO N P R I M E V I D EO
How did you get involved in making this movie?
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table—like a little underlining, a little
the most incredible monument for
exaggeration of their mannerisms—
the ridiculousness of humanity—a
that kind of takes them into another
wall to keep things on the other
place. So, yeah, there was a lot of
side. But life doesn’t see that as an
him, but obviously there was a lot of
impediment. Life goes back and
me as well.
forth. And what makes life blossom is the back and forth. It’s very
You’re certainly not afraid of the costumes!
interesting to see the border in that
No, no, no, no, no! [Laughs] I really,
it, because we rarely see it in films.
really couldn’t wait to get to that
It has a culture of its own. It’s like
way, and to play with that and portray
point! Because before that, the
another country. It’s not Mexico, it’s From left: Benito Antonio Martínez and Gael García Bernal.
Everything was either physical
not the United States, it’s the border and it has its own world. And so, yeah,
or psychoanalytical, in a way. But
the young up-and-coming wrestlers
example, in Mexico, it’s interesting
we wanted to make a statement out
then there comes the part of the
that were training, and so we would
that exóticos existed for a long, long
of it, because we wanted to portray
costume, which just transforms
do their training too.
time, but they were never the main
the life that happens there. It’s very
characters. Maybe a lot of people
vibrant and very curious and very community driven as well.
you immediately. And with María
I’ve got to say, this was one of the
Estela Fernández, the costume
most difficult things I’ve ever done
wanted them to be main characters,
designer… Man, we had so much fun
in my life. It was very, very hard.
but they wouldn’t dare support
putting them together. She told me,
Physically I couldn’t keep it up. For
them openly. So, if we see this as a
“Cassandro is like a colleague—he
example, as a warmup, you have to
coming-out story, I think it’s society
makes his own costumes as well!”
do 100 deadfalls on your back, so
that’s coming out in this film. All of a
We were trying out so many different
you learn how to fall and not hurt
sudden, society is saying, “Yeah, we
things. She was very hands-on, and
yourself. And they have a lot of
want Cassandro to win.”
we had some amazing costumes: the
that. They have a lot of wrestling
capes, the bodices. We were getting
training, and a lot of judo training,
changed. There was Cassandro,
really, really high with those shorts as
in order to know how to fall. It has a
but there were also others. There
When you first started out with Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu and Cuarón, did you think that you would get so far with your career, and with Mexican stories and Mexican characters? Did you realize how much impact the three of you would have?
well—like hot pants—to show my legs.
lot of techniques that are from the
was Pimpinela Escarlata, there was
Thank you for mentioning that second
acrobatic world as well, like getting
Rudy Reyna, and there were also
part, because it is very important to
You have some pretty awful hairstyles in the movie. Did you have it cut for real?
into the ring. You learn how to play
a few other exóticos at the same
me. Working with them, it was like
with the ropes, because you have
time. They were the ones that made
working with friends—we never knew
to know how to hold them, because
that shift and made that change.
how far we would get. When we
That was my hair. It was dyed in
they can really hurt you.
Everyone sort of realized. Like, “It’s
were making Amores Perros, really,
not such a big deal, is it?”
we had no idea. Maybe Alejandro
that color, and I had to live with it
That’s what shifted. That’s what
It’s not a very political film, but there’s a moment when the Mexican migrants pass Cassandro’s home. Is it important for you to have a bit of political or social relevance in the work that you do?
talented in that sense. But we didn’t
Did you go into the real world of lucha libre?
It's a refreshing change to see a gay character that doesn’t get beaten up or persecuted. Obviously Cassandro faces prejudice, but he’s in charge of his life. There’s no victimhood there. Was that an important part of the story to you?
Yes, of course. Yeah. I trained a
Absolutely, absolutely. Because it’s
It is. Because what we’re talking
to tell the stories that I can represent,
lot with an organization called La
not a first-degree kind of story about
about here with Cassandro is the
that I can interpret, that I have a lot to
Triple A, which is one of the biggest
a coming of age or someone coming
story of somebody that lives on
say about.
organizations in lucha libre in
out, it’s more like a third- or fourth-
the border, between two identities,
Mexico. They have great wrestlers,
degree moment of how society has
both of which are put together
again, and of course with Iñárritu as
and they have many teachers,
shifted. And that’s what’s interesting
by history and by an archetypical
well. That would be really nice. But
and they are very strong pillars of
about this film, because we can do
society that says, “OK, this is this
I would love to work with Guillermo
the wrestling community. There
a big sort of anthropological and
place, and that is the other place.”
del Toro too—we're from the same
were two in particular, one called
sociological analysis of how society
But what’s interesting about people
city and he’s never asked me.
Chessman and another one called
all over the world has dealt with
who are born in the border, on the
[Laughs] Next time you talk to him,
El Texano Jr. They were great, and
homosexuality, and how attitudes
side of the United States or on the
just tell him. He calls me up to chat
they helped us a lot. They invited
have changed so much in recent
side of Mexico, is that the border is
and stuff, and I’m like, “Man, you can
us to train with real wrestlers, with
years. But in the wrestling world, for
completely porous, even though it’s
call me for work as well!” A
outside of the film. People wouldn’t recognize me. Friends of mine wouldn’t recognize me when they saw me from far away. They were like, “Who is this guy?”
34
had some idea because he’s very have an idea where things were going to go. And what you mentioned about doing Mexican films: I never in my life thought, and this I promise, I never thought this was ever going to happen. That I was going to be able
I’d love to work with Alfonso
A M A ZO N P R I M E V I D EO
training and everything was hard.
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in minimalism. We don’t really know much about Hirayama outside of his dedication for his work. However, toward the end of the film, we get the smallest glimpse of what could be a complicated past via a conversation with his sister and niece. What did you make of him and his character when reading the script? With regards to Hirayama’s past, I think he was somebody who actually saw or experienced hell. And so, that was part of my thinking as I was playing this character. But halfway through the shoot, the producer and the co-writer, [Takuma] Takasaki-san asked Wim if he could share what he thought, because Wim had actually done his own biography, if you will, of the character. And so, they wanted Wim
Kōji
to share that.
YAKUSHO
Initially, Wim was resistant, saying that that was not necessary, but they were able to convince him. So, I was given a note about Hirayama’s past from Wim
The veteran actor finds peace as a humble toilet cleaner in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days
Wenders. And in very beautiful writing, it talked about his past and especially it talked about the
BY DESTINY JACKSON
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relationship between Hirayama and
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komorebi in a very specific way. And that really became the drive for me, and of course, a huge reference as I started to work on the latter
Wim Wenders mentioned in previous interviews that this role was written with you in mind and that you helped collaborate on the script. Can you talk about how you found out about this movie and how it came to be?
was asked to play this cleaner, one of
how they wanted Wim to direct it. And
the cleaning crew. So, the story was
of course, Wim is one of the masters.
going to take place in Shibuya with
And I was thinking, “Would a master
this character as the lead. But when
like him want to make that film about
it came to me, the idea was to maybe
the toilet?” But he immediately said
While watching this film, I thought of another character you played, Mikami in Under the Open Sky who is slightly similar to Hirayama in the sense that they are both on the outskirts of society and they both refuse love and help from those around them. It’s almost like the characters can be each other in a parallel universe. What exactly is drawing you to these quieter, more solitary roles?
make a short film or a photo book, but
yes to the offer. And then he actually
Well, actually, Miwa Nishikawa,
it was something that I had not done,
was the one who proposed to make
who directed Under the Open
this type of a job. So, I was immensely
a feature film. And it became this
Sky, saw Perfect Days. And she
Well, it all started firstly with the
interested in it, and I immediately said
wonderful, huge present for me.
actually said that she was so glad
Shibuya Toilet Project also known as
I’d like to be part of it.
the Tokyo Toilet Project, that involves the public toilets in Shibuya, and I
36
And the producers approached me about the film and were talking about
that Mikami, if he hadn’t died and
The nature of the film is so interesting because it thrives
if he had continued to live and was rehabilitated into society again and
D O M IN I Q U E C HA R R IAU / W I R EI M AGE
half of the film.
Since 1979, Kōji Yakusho has played stressed accountants (Shall We Dance?), avenging samurai (13 Assassins), and convicted killers (The Third Murder). Now, in Wim Wenders’ Tokyo-set film Perfect Days, the Cannes best actor winner gets to find a bit of peace and quiet, embracing the life of a toilet cleaner named Hirayama who lives by the Japanese philosophy of komorebi. It’s a word that describes the way sunshine and shadows filter through the leaves of trees, but, in a metaphorical sense, it also alludes to recognizing the happiness and sadness of everyday life. Which means a lot to Hirayama, who provides a valuable service in a world that often takes him for granted.
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had gotten a job, she thought that
not about my work, but I’m more
this is what that character would be.
inspired by the incredible work that
So, you’re absolutely right about that.
the others are creating.
The area that we shot in is called
existence, I don’t know if Hirayama
You won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival for Perfect Days, what was that like to be recognized in that way?
believes himself to be lonely or
The jury had a passionate discussion
whether he feels lonely. I think it’s
and then ultimately chose me for
true that rather than interacting
best actor, I feel incredibly fortunate.
Oshiage, which is downtown Tokyo. So, the landscape was quite similar. But with regards to the solitary
with people, he chooses to have exchanges with komorebi or trees
And I feel that award was given to us all, including Wim and the crew
Koji Yakusho in Perfect Days.
because that gives him more
and the cast. I feel like still that
comfort. And these are the things
within being fulfilled, he’s able to
that, I think, have given him the hope
quietly go to sleep, and I was very
to live. So, you might look at him and
envious of that.
think that he is solitary, but I think
somebody’s going to come from Cannes and say, “That was a mistake. Please give it back.”
Hirayama has these trees that
angriest within the whole film?”
he calls his friends. I naturally
And so, I was thinking as I was
imagined him to have seedlings,
acting these scenes that, “Well,
[these little] children of his friends,
it wasn’t in the screenplay.” But
the trees, that he would look after
then, of course, I got to see the
The ending can be interpreted in so many ways. You’ve got that Nina Simone song “Feeling Good” playing as Hirayama was being confronted about something difficult from his past, his coworker quits on him, so he’s left to pick up the slack, and he’s just driving away with this look of either happiness or sadness, sometimes both. What is your interpretation of the ending?
It was already written in the
and growing in his own home. So,
film and I understood how those
Well, actually, we did two angles. And
screenplay because the working title
that was actually something that I
subtle moments of expressions
the second setup was them shooting
was Komorebi or Perfect Days. So, it
did as a hobby, and it’s something
of him smiling or being angry was
a frontal shot of me. And the lighting
had always been a huge presence.
that I suggested. But I didn’t think
something that connected the
took so much time that I was waiting
love him, although Hirayama may not choose to have a deep relationship with them. So, I’m not sure if he is really lonely.
There are a lot of references to komorebi usage in this film to give a glimpse into his inner thoughts or something going on with him. Did this already exist in the script or was that something that you added?
In the screenplay, there were no descriptions of Hirayama smiling or laughing at all. But then when we’re actually filming, Wim would say, “OK, maybe you could suddenly smile here or show a smile. Or in this scene, can you be the most
there would be so many plants in
character to the audience. He
for a very long time in Hirayama’s
How did you end up relating to Hirayama’s lifestyle? Are there things you incorporated from your own life? Or perhaps you don’t relate to him at all?
Hirayama’s room, so that was a
became much more familiar to the
apartment toilet. And so, by the time
surprise [on set], even though it
audience. That was interesting.
they called me, I was really tired
There’s nothing actually we have in
work on my own before Wim asked
common, but Hirayama is somebody
me to do that. It was complicated
who is very content in the way he
because the cleaning depends on
lives his daily life. And I was very
the toilet, as they are all different,
envious of that, that very simple way
what tools you use or what cleaning
of life. He has a profession, a job that
was my idea.
from waiting. But in any case, you have that Nina Simone song, which
liquids you would use. And it’s not
Thinking about your own two decades-plus career trajectory and this movie’s theme of reflecting upon one’s own life, what are some of the things you think about your own legacy as an actor in your journey so far? What keeps you going?
he loves, and he puts everything that
about just washing it with water,
The motivation that continues to
Hirayama being happy. That was the
he has into it. And then he gets to
everything was done by hand. So,
work in my case is when I see other
feeling that I had when I was playing
relax, going to the baths and then
there were many steps, and it was
incredible works created by other
that scene.
have a little bit of his favorite drinks,
quite complicated to learn.
incredible peers in this industry.
As for the technical [toilet] cleaning training, I did do prep
reading his favorite books. And then when he goes to sleep, he probably doesn’t have anything that he feels that he wasn’t able to get to do that day. So, he is absolutely fulfilled. And
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Because this film focuses on the subtlety of Hirayama’s life, can you talk a bit about watching the film and how a particular scene
has a certain energy. And although because the lyrics are in English, they might not directly speak to me, I, of course, knew what it meant. And I was playing that scene reflecting on Hirayama and on my own life as well. But basically, to me, that was
But when you’re driving and you
And then I had this feeling that, “Oh,
have a favorite song come on, music
but I’m in the same profession with
has a strange power that affects us.
these wonderful people.” So, that
Doesn’t it? And suddenly, all these
galvanizes me. It gives me great
emotions well up within you. So, I
courage to go forward. For me, it’s
was reminded of that as well.A
N EO N / EV E R E TT C O L LECTI O N
there are people around him that
What did the prep work look like for this film? Did you follow around the Tokyo Toilet crew? There’s a lot of stillness, patience and peace in Hirayama’s mannerisms as well, how did you manage to tap into that?
resonated with you, that perhaps you didn’t think was going to translate well on screen when filming it, but ended up being impactful anyway.
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Lina
Hiam
SOUALEM & ABBASS
The filmmaker daughter and her actor mother explore their female lineage with Bye Bye Tiberias B Y A N T O N I A B LY T H
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Following her film, Their Algeria, documentarian Lina Soualem returns to her family once again for an in-depth look at its rich history. With Bye Bye Tiberias, Soualem focuses on several generations of women in her family, beginning with her mother, Succession star Hiam Abbass, who, as a young woman, left her home country of Palestine for France, where she still lives today. While Their Algeria followed the story of Soualem’s grandparents who decided to divorce after 62 years, Bye Bye Tiberias looks at what it means to leave your family and culture behind and the generational thread between women. 40
Hiam, how did you feel when Lina first floated the idea of you being the subject of her film?
between them, the way they each
HIAM ABBASS: No way! But in the
as a woman and as a mother, as a
beginning, of course, Lina wasn’t very
transmitter somehow.
had survived, the difficulties she had to live in order to fulfill her life
clear about what she wanted herself.
But this wasn’t enough to
She knew she wanted to do a movie,
convince me into going into my
she knew she wanted to speak
personal life in a way and just
about the women in my family, the
opening up really to the camera.
four generations, the transmissions
It was the fact that I trusted
BR I AN D E R I V E RA S I MO N / G E TTY I MAG ES
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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION | BEST DOCUMENTARY
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her cinematographic vision and
subtext, because silences mean
her engagement, her political
something. Some expressions mean
engagement, her social engagement,
something. And I needed to work
the way she really wanted to tell
with people that would understand
this story, that brought me to “yes”,
things, and to whom I didn’t have
to finally see the camera as Lina’s
to explain things. Also, I needed to
eyes, and like I was talking to Lina
be surrounded by people that were
somehow. I was talking to someone
close to me because it was a very
who is from my body and who’s from
hard film to make emotionally, and
my blood. Once I opened up, I felt like
it’s still very hard when we see the
I’m part of this narration, part of this
political context that surrounds the
importance in telling this story.
reality of our stories.
Was there undiscovered pain in you, connected to your having left home that was difficult to look at?
Given the current political situation, has it changed what you hope people take from the film?
ABBASS: Yeah, I think so. I think
SOUALEM: What’s important for
you’re right to ask that question. I
me is for these stories to be able
think once things happen to you and
to exist in the public space, for
your past is your past and whatever
these women to be visible-ized and Soualem on her mother’s lap with her grandmother in Bye Bye Tiberias.
always... even the effort of going
recognized in their full humanity. I have always spoken about dehumanization—women having to
how much they influenced me and
Hiam, how did watching the film affect your view of yourself? It must be very different from watching yourself act.
my childhood and the way I grew up.
ABBASS: I really have to admit that
are seeing today is the same thing
I was seeing all that and I discovered
whenever I am playing a part, I never
happening: the fear of losing your
So even just thinking about
that in some of the images, my
see myself, but I really see the part,
home, your land, your family, your
having left is already something
mother didn’t feel so much at ease
I see the character that I’m playing.
story. The risk and the fear of being
that is not easy to think of. We
in these places when it was also
And I refer to that person as ‘she’
erased or not being connected
are made to be in families and to
supposed to be home. So, I started
and never like myself in a way. This
to your history anymore because
be in communities and to have
questioning again the fact that she
time, I didn’t look at myself as myself,
it’s not recognized. And I think
that belonging. So just displacing
had left, and that she never really
but I looked at the ensemble of the
that’s something that has always
yourself from there, whether it’s a
told me about her past, nor about
women as part of the narration,
accompanied me as I studied
personal choice or a forced choice
the reasons that she left. I was trying
as part of what Lina wanted to say
history and political science, and
on you, is a very complicated thing
to understand what her exile meant
about the story. And the first time
I’ve always cared a lot about what
really to live with.
for her. And what did she carry from
I watched that movie, I felt very
it means for a human being to live
back to visit the past is not a natural
really striking. The fact that they
thing really, because in order to
were dealing and administrating
continue in life and in order to get
everything. The fact that I realized
wherever you want to get, you just look forward. I left because it was too painful.
start everything anew many times again and again, having to leave everything behind. And what we
the mountains of Galilee all the way
comfortable, contrary to every time I
in societies in which you’re not fully
Lina, you had home videos as source material that your father had made from when your mom would take you back to her homeland?
to France?
watched myself playing a part.
recognized in your history. ABBASS: With all the violence
LINA SOUALEM: When I first
was seeing were actually women
thought of the film, I went to look
that have been exiled, that have
back at the home movies that I
suffered from forced displacement,
Lina, your co-writers are women, as are your cinematographer and your editor. Was that partly about going into spaces where it would feel more appropriate to have women behind the camera?
had at home that we always looked
that didn’t have always the freedom
SOUALEM: I think it was a natural
hope it will really contaminate the
at when I was younger, but really
and independence to choose their
choice because I was telling the
whole humanity in a way, because
as souvenirs of happy times, of
own path, but they have managed,
story of all the women of the
this is what we need. We need this
vacation. And it was the first time
from what I knew, to raise their
family that I worked with. Not only
tenderness, we need this hope, we
that I was seeing them as an adult.
children to transmit values of love
women, but also women from Arab
need this positiveness in life right
And I was seeing things that I had
and forgiveness. And they had
descent, Middle Eastern, that would
now. And it’s really beautiful to
never seen before. First of all,
managed to take their destiny into
understand the language, understand
know that this is part of my past and
the presence of women, that was
their hands.
the culture, and understand the
this is part of my life. A
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How does a woman find her place in the world, especially when she’s caught between worlds? How all the women of my family that I
that is going on and unfortunately still going on, I think this movie for me is just like a tender caress. A positive, hopeful way of looking at things. And it’s contagious. And I
TI F F
it is, painful, joyful, whatever, it’s just
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CINEMA EYE HONORS NOMINATIONS INCLUDING
NONFICTION FEATURE FILMMAKING
IDA DOCUMENTARY AWARD NOMINEE BEST EDITING CAROLINA SIRAQYAN
“Doctor Zhivago, Casablanca, Amour... even those classics may not rival the true love story told in The Eternal Memory.”
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CRAFT SERVICES Cinematography
In Your Face Cinematographers Kramer Morgenthau, Claudio Miranda and Erik Messerschmidt on capturing the adrenaline buzz of extreme sports
By Ryan Fleming
Clockwise from above: Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed in Creed III; Annette Bening as Diana Nyad in Nyad; Ferrari.
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N EON / EROS HOAG LA N D / N ETF LI X / M G M/ C OU RT ESY EV ER E T T C OL L ECTI O N
Sporting events captivate viewers everywhere, whether they are showing a competition or an athlete doing the impossible, but enticing an audience through a sports film in the same way can be a difficult task. It’s up to the cinematographers to bring a unique point of view that will highlight the tension and drama, and put viewers on the edge of their seats. Creed III brings a surreal visual flair to the boxing ring for Michael B. Jordan’s directorial debut. The story of Diana Nyad’s 102-mile swim comes to life through complicated lighting and camera techniques in Nyad. Michael Mann’s Ferrari documents the thrills, and very real dangers, of racing, with scenes shot at high speed with no green screen.
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F O R YO U R C O N S I D E R AT I O N
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
“The Fire Inside” FROM THE MOTION PICTURE
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From top: Michael B. Jordan and Kramer Morgenthau on set; Jordan as Adonis Creed on his way to a fight; Jonathan Majors as Damian in the boxing ring.
Creed III When working with first-time directors, bringing their vision to life can be sometimes be a challenge. However, Creed III cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau says that director Michael B. Jordan brought a “visual acuity” to the work that only enhanced the film. “I feel like this is something he’s been preparing for his whole life,” says Morgenthau. “He’s always had a really strong interest in the filmmaking process, and specifically in cinematography.” With Jordan’s interest in visuals, in addition to his intimate knowledge of the character of Adonis Creed, Morgenthau knew they could achieve something unique. When it came to the boxing matches, Morgenthau says filming a narrative in the ring presented a challenge. “It’s a very different style of filmmaking,” he says. “It’s a very choreographed, balletic and operatic kind of language.” While the rest of the film could be shot using traditional methods, the difficulty was in creating interesting and believable fights to keep the audience engaged. Using one sound stage for the three major fights, Morgenthau and his team built lighting into the stage and created the backgrounds using CGI. “You’re not seeing the whole event when you’re there, but it creates a sort of intimacy in the ring.” Since the final bout between Adonis and Damian (Jonathan Majors) needed to be set apart from the other fights, Jordan brought his own unique vision for how it should be filmed. “We called it ‘The Void’,” Morgenthau says. “It was an abstract, poetic way of showing this showdown between two childhood-friends-turned-enemies in a gladiator-type situation… He had a completely different way of approaching it. It was one of the more fun things we got to shoot and one of the more exciting pieces of boxing.” During the final round of the fight, the audience disappears from the background and the camera lenses and lighting change. “We shot it with wider-angle lenses, and the lighting was very abstract and based on what was happening in their minds.” He says Jordan’s vision for the cinematography was to connect back to certain flashbacks in the story to create a “visceral, very surreal take on a boxing match. Very subjective, but also a departure from reality that was a lot of fun to shoot.”
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Nyad Directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are well-known in the documentary filmmaking world, but Nyad marks their first foray into scripted film. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda was there to help them along, but he says they were quickly in sync. “I was there to help set up a system to get the most from the actors in the scenes. I had some normal, and nutty, ideas that they listened to, because we needed to keep the swimming interesting.” The most important thing that everyone agreed on was to always keep cameras focused on Annette Bening, who plays Diana Nyad, during the swim. To ensure that, Miranda and his underwater cameraman Pete Zuccarini, who he worked with on Life of Pi, decided to use smaller cameras that could be more nimble than larger ones. “We both agreed on forgoing the normal larger camera systems,” he says. “I did take some cues from the images, like the red guiding rope I had made which I mainly used to light Annette from the water.” The scenes where Annette is swimming alongside the boat were also supplemented with shots from underwater, which were filmed in a large water tank off the coast of the Dominican Republic. “I had worked with Pete before, so we had a shorthand for the underwater work. For the above work, I had a 250foot track on which two camera cranes would travel to follow the swim. Annette would swim and the boat would be pulled along through a pulley system.” Originally, they had planned to use the actual boat from Diana Nyad’s swim in 2013, but a couple of weeks before filming, Miranda learned they wouldn’t be able to use it. Though he says this may have been a blessing in disguise. “I worked with the art director to set camera lines between three points—Annette to Jodie [Foster], Jodie to Rhys [Ifans] and Rhys to Annette. We designed the boat specifically for this, and I incorporated lighting into the boat to light the cast.” The lighting itself was a challenge, as he wanted clear lighting of the actors without taking away the natural feel of the water, especially during the storm scene. “The red string light gave an interesting look, and the storm was very violent so I was not afraid to let it go dark. We really needed to lose Annette visually, to feed the desperation and craziness.”
N E TFL IX
From top: Jodie Foster as Bonnie Stoll and Rhys Ifans as John Bartlett in the boat; Foster and Bening on set; Bening as Nyad preparing to swim.
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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION • BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM SWITZERLAND
A FILM BY CARMEN JAQUIER
“A powerful first film,
visually majestic and precise.” - Cineuropa
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“An absorbing testament
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Ferrari
From top: Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari watching the start of the Mille Miglia race; Driver and director Michael Mann on set; a crowd cheering on the Ferrari team.
N EO N / E ROS H OAG LAN D / LO R E N ZO S I STI
Director Michael Mann has been working on creating a biopic of Enzo Ferrari since the early 2000s, which gave cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt access to an incredible amount of research once the filming began. “It’s really a library of archival footage, newsreel footage, personal accounts… an incredible collection that he’d assembled over decades,” he says. “It’s wonderful when you come into that as a cinematographer because you can piece together what the movie can be quite quickly.” One thing both Mann and Messerschmidt agreed on very early was that they would not be using green screen. “When the drivers are in the cars, they’re actually going down the road,” he says. Mann’s knowledge of how cars behave while racing, in terms of G-force and weight transference, led him to opt for the cars to drive at the actual speeds to preserve historical accuracy. “He didn’t want to see camera tricks so that we could be going only 40 miles an hour. These cars are tearing down the road at race speeds.” To capture the cars speeding down the road, Messerschmidt used mounted cameras and had hand-held cameras in the passenger seats. “We’re trying to bring the audience into that world, but we also did a lot of multi-camera,” he says. “Some of the racing sequences are four, five or six cameras shooting simultaneously. A lot of that is because the cars are traveling, in some cases, miles down the road so we could get multiple takes.” Ferrari takes place during the summer of 1957, before safety features like seat belts and airbags were mandatory for cars, which led to some of the gruesome crashes shown in the film. “We had great reference footage, not of specific crashes, but of how the cars behave in these crashes,” says Messerschmidt. “You almost don’t believe how high the cars go and how fast and violent they are.” The first crash in the film documents a driver being thrown from the car as it becomes airborne and smashes into a concrete building, while the second involved the deaths of spectators as well. “We looked at footage in terms of how the cars behave, but also how the camera work was done.” Since the majority was newsreel footage, the team chose to use a simple wide-lens camera to record. “We wanted it to feel almost objective to watch this unfold in front of you, particularly because it is so horrific. We’re always trying to be historically accurate and responsible in the depiction of how everything unfolds.” ★
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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION • BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM THE NETHERLANDS
A FILM BY ENA SENDIJAREVIC̀
Winner Best Actress
“Magnificently composed, eerily satirical.” - Variety
“Bold, imaginative and sensitive.” - Screen International
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N ET F LI X
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In 1972
a small passenger plane crashed into a mountain in the Andes, its tail and wings ripping off in the impact. When the fuselage came to rest on the snow, it contained 33 survivors, among them the young members of a Uruguayan rugby team. Over an unimaginable 72 days, they would contend with starvation, exposure, hypothermia and two avalanches, until only 16 remained alive. Ultimately, they were forced to make an agonizing choice: consume the bodies of the dead or die themselves. J.A. Bayona’s film Society of the Snow, based on Pablo Vierci’s book of the same name, takes a fresh look at the story, giving voice to both the dead and the living. Here, in conversation with Antonia Blyth, the Spanish filmmaker and the Uruguayan author discuss how they collaborated to tell a vital story of human will and sacrifice that would honor the real experience of the survivors and their dear departed friends.
Pablo, how precious and important was this story to you when you came to write it? PABLO VIERCI: Well, I went to school with the survivors and with the deceased people, and all memories of my childhood are with them. I was 22 in 1972, and something like this, a catastrophe like this, everything changed, because at 22 years old you think everybody at that age is immortal. A plane with all your friends disappeared, there was 72 days of mystery, where my friends and I, who were in Uruguay, who didn’t go in the plane, we thought that they were not alive. So, when they appeared on the 23rd of December 1972, and when we knew the list, the 16 alive, and 29 deceased, everything broke in our heads, and in my mind, and in my emotions. When they came back, [survivor] Nando Parrado, he was my classmate, he asked me to help him with his writing. I had a commitment with the survivors and fundamentally with the deceased, because there were too [few] people who knew them for 20 years, and nobody who wrote about them.
J.A., you bought the rights around the end of shooting The Impossible. I remember watching Alive, which came out in 1993, and I read the book it was based on, by Piers Paul Read. Did you? Why this story? J.A. BAYONA: The story is very popular in the Spanish-speaking world. We all know Alive. I was very little, so I only remember when I was a kid that the book was everywhere, every house that you visited. I knew about this idea of cannibalism, that was everywhere, and I was very impressed about the pictures. And I grew up watching interviews on television with the survivors. But my surprise was when I read Pablo Vierci’s book, while researching for The Impossible. I was in shock, because I was so moved by a story that I thought I knew. And I think it’s because Pablo Vierci’s book has a spiritual tone that makes it so special, so moving. The book was published because 35 years after the accident not even the survivors recognized themselves in the tale. The tale was very focused on cannibalism, the tale was focused on heroism, they didn’t recognize what they went through with those words. So, they sat down together again and wrote a different book where you can feel the weight of time, you can feel the questions that are still not answered. And the big challenge was, how can I get this spiritual book into a script, because scripts are about dialogue and action, and I was interested in the inner life of the characters.
N ET F LI X
B&PV No.
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J.A. Bayona & Pablo Vierci
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J.A. Bayona at the Venice Film Festival.
At what point did you decide on using a voiceover narration via Numa Turcatti, who ultimately passed away before the rescue? We hear his diary entries after the crash. BAYONA: By creating this kind of fantasy where you make the narrator one of the dead, and you use the voiceover of one of the dead, you create a fantasy that somehow has this spiritual take that Pablo Vierci’s book has. It becomes something more metaphysical; it becomes something more about the story on a human level, a philosophical level. So, it made sense to me, because when you think about what the story’s about in its essence, this is a story of Numa, who is one of the kids that faces the primal fears that we all have: fear of death, to be alone, to not be loved, hunger. Basically, he needs to forget the civilization he’s coming from, and adapt to the mountain to discover himself, and to process the shadow that we all have inside. And by doing so he understands what is to me the essence of the story, that you and I are the same thing. There is a moment when someone says to Roberto Canessa, “You have the best legs, you need to walk for us.” That’s the idea I’m talking about. The ones that were dying, saying, “Use the only thing that I have left, my body.” VIERCI: You can have a script with the words and the dialogue and with the action, but it was an exploration, because we are [exploring] in between life and death. After the film was screened
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With Numa, because it’s his voice narrating, you don’t expect him to pass away. Was that a story you put together from what the other survivors told you? Or was it actual diary that Numa wrote? BAYONA: No, we had more than 50 hours of conversations with the survivors, and then we met Numa’s family and Numa’s friends. I think I had a good idea of who Numa was. I think that he’s still a mystery nowadays, some of the decisions he made on the mountain. Numa never saved anything for himself, he was all the time for the other ones, and he didn’t make it. Which raises a question, what is the sense in that? What’s the meaning of that? It’s totally the opposite message of the normal stories that you see in Hollywood, that the good, the best ones survive. But he’s remembered as the best one, and he died 12 days before the rescue. So, I really like that question there, because that’s the big question in life, in art. What is the meaning of life? VIERCI: What J.A. is saying is crucial, because we spoke with the families of the deceased and the survivors, and they told us that in this story there are survivors because the dead gave their bodies so that others could live. It’s unique. In other situations, the living don’t need the dead to survive. But here there was an agreement, where the dead agreed that the living could use their bodies to carry on if they died. There is a document written by one of the passengers, Gustavo Nicolich. He died in the avalanche, on the 29th of October. He wrote, “If you need my body, I will be happy to give it to you.” So, it’s a unique situation, where there are survivors because there are dead guys. It’s very strange. So, we can go deeper into the spiritual, or into the philosophical, or into the ethical issues, because it’s unique.
Tell me about the decision to make this a Spanish language film. It’s culturally so important but I also imagine it made getting financing harder. BAYONA: Yeah, it made the financing impossible. So, it took us 10 years, until finally Netflix showed up and gave us a chance to shoot the film the way we wanted. VIERCI: The Spanish, I think, is something new to audiences today, in 2023. More and more people want the authentic, they want the truth, and the truth here must be in Spanish as it was spoken in Uruguay in the ’70s. BAYONA: We were super-perfectionist in trying to get the Spanish from the ’70s. And some of the actors were from Argentina, and Pablo here was on set correcting them. Sometimes they were using this tone from Argentina, or expressions that are modern, and we would replace them, because we really wanted to capture the music of the sound of the Spanish in that moment. VIERCI: I think that 10 years ago you could have a Russian film speaking in English, but I don’t know if today the audience wants to see the French speaking Spanish. BAYONA: You know, I love Pablo’s book, and I really wanted to capture the scope of the book, it’s a giant book. Not only about the adventure but about all the levels that the story has on the philosophical, the spiritual, the human side. So, to me it was more like we’re going to try to get inside the story, we’re going to try to tell the whole story, we’re going to go hand-in-hand with the actors, and we’re going to go through the same journey as close as possible. So, we shot it chronologically, in real locations, the same locations. You cannot tell the story without understanding the context of what is to be in the Andes. The first thing I did when we got the green light, was to go to the same place where the plane crashed, and spend a couple of nights there in the same time of the year that they were there, which is insane, because it takes you three days to get there, only to get used to the altitude. It’s a place where you sleep in a camp, and when you wake up in the morning, your bottle of water is a piece of ice. And when you’re there, you see the size of the mountains, you hear the silence, the only thing that you can hear there is yourself, then you understand the story. So, we had to tell that story to the audience, and we did it with the actors, we did it with the journey that they went through. We prepared them, we gave them the book, we gave them the contact with the survivors, or the families of the deceased, and they started to contact throughout the shoot. And they are still in contact with the survivors now, the actors, still talking to them. So, they had all the information. And then we gave them the chance of going through the same experience. We shot in the snow, in very difficult conditions, going through the hunger by doing a strict diet. Some of the actors lost more than 20 kilos.
K AT E G RE E N /C HA RLE Y G ALL AY/G E T T Y I M AG ES FO R N E T FL IX
for the families of the dead, and the survivors here in Uruguay, with J.A. and [producer] Belén Atienza, and [producer] Sandra Hermida, J.A. and I spoke with the families, and the brothers and sisters of the deceased. They understand now what happened, 51 years later.
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20 kilos? Wow. BAYONA: Yeah. So, we were going through the same things they went through, of course with a distance. You can tell how close the journey was when you see an actor dying on the story and leaving the set. Because you can tell how strong the connection was between all of them, you can see the despair in their faces, like seeing a friend, because at the moment they were already friends, leaving the film. But we did basically a very, very massive film, going hand-by-hand with the actors, trying to make everybody understand what they went through, and by doing so they will understand what they did. Which basically is what Pablo was telling you. It was incredible to see the movie with the families of the deceased, and some of them after 51 years, understood how bad it was for the other ones, and understood why they did what they did. It was super shocking to me, seeing one of the brothers of the dead hugging Gustavo Zerbino, one of the survivors, and telling him, “I don’t know if I cried for my brother, or for you.”
Pablo, how much of the shoot did you personally experience? VIERCI: I had been with J.A. and Belén and Sandra since 2016, so I knew a lot. I accompanied the shooting, and it seemed for me that I was behind J.A. Bayona and I was behind Leonardo da Vinci. It’s something very strange for me, because every day began with something very, very rough. We suffered a lot, but at the end of the day we thought that we were touching the ceiling, we were in the best place in the world.
It must have felt very emotionally heavy just to be there, at the crash site. Tell me about that. BAYONA: Yes, we went there three times. We couldn’t shoot much there because it’s not a safe place. With global warming there’s a lot less snow, so the amount of time you have snow in there every year is less and less. The first time we went there actually there was not much snow, so we shot the background, and we had a very good idea of what it was to be there, I can tell you. It was a very intense experience to be there, as you said, not only physically, but also emotionally. There are still some remains there from the plane. There is a grave full of objects. It’s unbelievable, people go there to leave objects in the summer. But we went there in the winter, we could barely see the grave because it was under the snow. And then the rest of the shoot was in a ski resort in Spain, but it was pretty high. There were moments that some of the people of the crew had to go back to the base camp, because of the altitude. I don’t know how many is in feet, but it was 2500 meters. That’s pretty high. This is where we placed the fuselage, and we
shot most of the scenes there. We had two other planes, one was in a big soundstage that we built in the ski resort, surrounded by LED panels, and then we had a third plane that was in the middle of an olive tree plantation. It was very bizarre, because we made a huge platform of snow, and in the middle there was this plane.
How did you cast these unknown actors? BAYONA: I had sat down with the survivors, so I had a very good idea of who they were. So, I was also interested in getting people that look alike somehow, but that was not the priority, the priority was always to match the idea I had of them, the way they behaved in the mountains. We auditioned for six months, during the pandemic, so most of them were self-takes that I watched, and then I started to meet them via Zoom. The other day the casting director said, “You saw 2,000 takes.”
Pablo, were you in involved with that process? VIERCI: Yes, I was, when they did it in Uruguay. BAYONA: When we went to meeting them in person, then we went to Uruguay. I went to Montevideo, Pablo was there, and most of them had to come from Argentina. During the pandemic for the regulations that were establishing in Argentina, they had to stay one week doing quarantine before doing the auditions, and one week to go back to Argentina. So, imagine what it is to have 30 guys between 18 and 26 years old, in a hotel for two weeks alone. Of course, immediately they were best friends. I’m still friends with some of the people who didn’t do the film. VIERCI: Because I knew them, the survivors and the deceased, I was right behind J.A., not in the physical [sense] but the psychological. The decisions came from J.A., but I was whispering in his ear. BAYONA: There were two ideas behind the fact that we didn’t want to have famous faces. One is that we didn’t want to have protagonists, like a famous face in the middle of the other ones. And not having popular faces would add realism, to make it look more like a documentary.
Pablo, how did you feel sitting with the survivors and families in the first screening? VIERCI: When I saw the film for the first time, it was with José Luis Inciarte, who is one of the survivors. Then he died a few months ago. J.A. came to
Uruguay to show him the film, because he was sick. J.A. made the commitment to show the film to everybody.
Obviously, José knew it was the end of his life, and it’s a very intense experience to be watching his story. What do you think he felt about the film? BAYONA: It was very impressive to see how calm he was in front of death. He told us, “Don’t worry about me, I had a 50-year bonus, so I’m OK, and I’ve been there.” He had a near-death experience during the avalanche. He was not afraid of death at all, he was totally in contact with that idea, he was very present all the time, and actually what he was more scared of was not being able to watch the film. So, that’s why I jumped [on a plane] to Uruguay from Europe and showed him the film. He saw the film twice, also with the rest of the survivors, and he was even more happy about that, to have the chance to watch it with his friends from the mountain. And what he was very impressed about in the film was the realism. He had the feeling that he was going back to the mountain, that he was again in the place, that he was going through the same, but he was happy to have something to show to [the families], and to make them understand what they went through. Also, I think it was important to show the people a different take—a take that doesn’t rely on easy ideas on heroism. There is no heroism in this story, it’s just the story of some miserable guys that crash in the Andes and have to eat the corpses of their friends. And suddenly, the incredible thing of crossing the Andes walking, and organizing a group that never left somebody behind, that was taking care of each other all the time, and did something extraordinary. It was ordinary people doing something extraordinary.
Author Pablo Vierci.
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So you not only have a survivor playing his own father in the moment he received the news of his survival, but on screen you have that survivor on the phone with the same journalist who broke the news to his father 51 years ago? That is just incredible. BAYONA: The movie is full of details like that. Like when Numa gets back home at the very beginning of the film, and there’s somebody in the street, he says, “Goodnight.” That guy is the real nephew of the real Numa Turcatti. And we are shooting in the same house where Numa Turcatti lived.
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So, because you involved the families the whole time, it not only brought authenticity, but it made the survivors and the families feel included in telling the story. BAYONA: I think you use the right word, to be included, because after so many years, and maybe the film they did before... I think I have the impression that was made too soon, so it was not possible to get to an agreement with the families of the deceased. But after 50 years, I think it was a good moment. And we did everything we could to make them feel comfortable, to trust us, even though they never read a single line of the script. They gave us everything, and of course we felt the responsibility of doing something that was at the level of what they were expecting. VIERCI: Nando Parrado, one of the survivors said, “If you want to know what happened, you must see the Bayona film, Society of the Snow.” This is the closest [version] of what happened, of that experience. As Numa said, “Tell the story.” And then the story is in the audience, and the audience complete their story with his story, and it will never end. And this is the great thing of the film, that nothing is conclusive, you keep it in your mind and in your emotions. You go out of the cinema, or the TV set, and it’s your story. You are comparing your story with, what would I do in that situation? I think it’s a story that never ends. And the film is marvelous because it opens doors that are closed.
Society of the Snow recreated an authentic experience of the freezing Andes crash site.
How do you think making this film has affected you personally? VIERCI: For me, I am older than J.A., really older. I have never grown up so quickly in the emotional sense, in the spiritual sense, [as] during this experience. This is something more than a film. Because I am so committed to what we did and what we see, I think that I’m a new person, a new guy, every time I see the film. BAYONA: It was so interesting to have the chance of trying to decipher the mystery in Pablo Vierci’s book, what was left to tell. Because the survivors had the need to tell the story again, as much as I had it. So, it was a privilege to explore this story, and it was a beautiful treasure when we found out the heart of the film. That to me is the essence of understanding, that you and I are part of the same thing, we are the same. It’s such a relevant message nowadays, in a world that is constantly pitting us against each other, to understand that we are all part of the same thing, that we are the same. I consider myself very lucky to have found this story, and to have the privilege to tell it. It’s actually something that has been healing, not only for them, because it gave them the chance of giving voice to the other ones, the ones that gave them so much, but also to heal their families. ★
Q U IM VIV ES/ N E T F LI X
They rejected this idea of heroism. All of them were happy to have a movie that was able to communicate that to the audience. VIERCI: When we saw it with all the families, and the survivors, it was the most emotional moment in my life. José, the guy that died in July, he spoke a lot about Numa to J.A. and to me. He knew perfectly that Numa sacrificed himself—he says that word, ‘sacrificed’—for the others. He was very happy that the voiceover was Numa’s. When we showed the film to all the families, it was the value of confidence. Everybody, the survivors and the family of the deceased had confidence in J.A., in Belen and Sandra and Pablo. They’ve known me since we were children, most of them. But they didn’t know J.A., and Belén and Sandra. They had confidence because of one email that J.A. sent us. They met J.A. in 2016 and they were confident that J.A. was doing a journey with them, and with the deceased, with the 45 of that trip. They were confident because J.A. was going to do something authentic, the truth. BAYONA: And also, Pablo, because one of the things that I like as a director is to provide the actor with the right atmosphere, to feed the actor with all the information, and then to provide the right atmosphere. This is why we shot in real locations. And in that sense, I really like to blend fiction with reality on set. To give you an example, Carlitos Páez, one of the survivors, is playing Carlos Páez, his father in the film. The guy who reads the list, the real list on the radio, the moment that everybody remembers, when all of them, including Pablo, realized who was dead and who was alive, it was Cárlos Paez, a famous painter in Uruguay, who was reading that list. He has a very famous face, so I thought, who has that face? His son has his face. And suddenly we have Carlitos Páez, reading his own name [from the list of survivors] on screen. And on set, he was having a conversation with the real journalist that was with his father on the other side of the phone.
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1. Alden Ehrenreich 2. Matt Bomer 3. America Ferrera 4. Fantasia Barrino 5. Seth Rogen 6. Margot Robbie 7. Greta Gerwig 8. Bradley Cooper
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