THE REST IS SILENCE
Chloé Zhao, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal on the kismet behind Hamnet
BLOOD BROTHERS
Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan do a double take
WEIRD SCIENCE
The nuts and bolts of Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein
LEONARDO DICAPRIO
WHY THE ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER STAR IS TEAMING UP AGAIN WITH MICHAEL MANN AND MARTIN SCORSESE TO FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE OF CINEMA
20th Century Faux
THE MADE-UP STARS THAT PRECEDED JAY KELLY
CYNTHIA ERIVO LEO WOODALL KERRY CONDON YORGOS LANTHIMOS
JESSE PLEMONS NIA DACOSTA
JOACHIM TRIER RENATE REINSVE HIKARI
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“IMPASSIONED AND POWERFUL
“A COURTROOM THRILLER WITH AN ACTIVIST’S BEATING HEART ” ” BASED ON A TRUE STORY
CALL SHEET
ON THE COVER Leonardo DiCaprio photographed exclusively for Deadline by Josh Telles.
One Battle After Another star Leonardo DiCaprio goes all in on giving movie lovers a reason to go to the theater.
By Mike Fleming Jr.
Shot on location in Los Angeles.
“ The movie Guillermo del Toro was born to make.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
“A titanic piece of work.” THEWRAP
“A stunning epic with piercing humanity.”
TORONTO STAR
A film by Guillermo del Toro
Premiere
12 COULD IT BE MAGIC?
How Cynthia Erivo has cast a spell over Hollywood.
18 BETTER THAN THE REAL THING
Ten fictional movie stars to rival George Clooney's Jay Kelly
22 PAST LIVES
How Oscar Isaac made history with Julian Schnabel.
28 CARTOON TRIPS
The psychedelic contenders for Best Animated Feature.
32 QUILL BILL
Shakespeare’s true-life tragedy and the making of Hamnet
40 BEST IN SHOW
The world’s a stage for Hamnet’s production design team.
44 FULL STREAM AHEAD!
After a dry spell, Netflix is back in the Best Documentary race.
52 THE GREAT BAKE-OFF
Can The President’s Cake cook the International competition?
Cover Story
60 HIS ART WILL GO ON Leonardo DiCaprio looks back on his 30-year career and One Battle After Another
Craft Services
74 MAKING A MONSTER
How Guillermo del Toro’s dream team brought Frankenstein to life.
Dialogue
KERRY CONDON
Dynamic Duos
100
Ryan Coogler & Michael B. Jordan
112 BUGONIA
Yorgos Lanthimos & Jesse Plemons
122 SENTIMENTAL VALUE
Joachim Trier & Renate Reinsve
Snapshot
Oscar Isaac crosses the centuries in three new movies.
By Pete Hammond
Chloé Zhao, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal on the making of Hamnet. By Antonia Blyth
Hedda director Nia DaCosta takes a fresh look at Henrik Ibsen's classic play.
By Baz Bamigboye
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE BEST ORIGINAL SONG “GOLDEN” FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
INCLUDING SONG OF THE YEAR 5
GRAMMY ® NOMINATIONS
“THE BEST ANIMATED FILM OF THE YEAR .”
“A LOVE LETTER to the power of voices bringing people together.”
“A
HEARTFELT STORY about generational burdens and the eventual embracing of your identity.”
WHAT’S HOT, WHAT’S NOT, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN THIS AWARDS SEASON
PREMIERE
Power Player
BY BAZ BAMIGBOYE
In the wake of Wicked Cynthia Erivo has the world at her fingertips
For Your Consideration in All Categoes including Best Pictu
“A FULLY- FORMED KNOCKOUT.”
“PERFECTION ALL THE WAY THROUGH.”
“+++++” “+++++”
“Adam Sandler is SUPERB.”
“ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF THE
YEAR.”
“George Clooney gives the PERFORMANCE of a LIFETIME.”
There’s an uncommon commotion emanating from the front row of the refurbished Town Hall across from Kings Cross railway station where Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo has been discussing her book Simply More with Doctor Who and Barbie actor Ncuti Gatwa.
Some in the audience crane forward, as others, closer to whatever’s going on, leap from their seats fearing that the beloved Wicked Witch of the West might be in some danger. Was someone attempting to attack her?
Erivo didn’t shy away. She rose from her chair and moved downstage and leant over the apron. The ear-splitting wails came from a little girl trying to get the star’s attention. “She just shot up, waving her hands … It didn’t feel like she was moving off her own accord,” Erivo says the following day as we sit in a private loft at London’s swanky Langan Hotel.
Soothing words were offered to the girl and all was calm. “She gave me a little doll that she had customized. It was a little me. Not as Elphaba, but as me. It was just a really sweet, very human moment,” she says. Does that happen a lot? “Human moments with people? Yes.”
Erivo adds: “There’s a comfortability that people have now and they just want to share what they’re feeling, what they’re going through, what they’ve experienced, what the work means to them, how it’s changed things for them.”
You’re a force for good on and off screen, I tell her. Her face brightens. “I’d like to be,” she says.
People seated around me at the event seemed almost evangelical about Erivo. After it was over, several hundred of them scrambled to collect pre-ordered copies of Simply More. They then raced to the stage door to await Erivo’s departure, where, of course, pandemonium ensued when she greeted them.
Wicked director Jon M. Chu says that when we first see Elphaba in Wicked: For Good, he wanted to ensure that she was seen as “all powerful,” not wanting her to have to fit into a guy’s perception of what a superhero is.
How were she and Chu able to manifest that?
Shooting both films at the same time, Erivo wanted to know what Elphaba’s power actually was. “In the stage show [still running on Broadway and in London] the power is literally not really even discussed. It’s like, the broom flies… And I thought, It has to be more than that… So I want to get specific about what power is. And then he and I had a conversation that her power is dominion over gravity. So she can take or give, she can remove the force of gravity from things, or she can give the force of gravity. So she makes things land. And then beyond that, she has visions which we see, which we explore in the second movie as well. And because we keep talking
about this unlimited power, what we see her do is grow it.
“If she has dominion over gravity, she doesn’t actually need anything to fly, but that broom allows her to move faster. It’s like a motorbike for someone who could already drive…”
With all that power, how could it be finessed? The last time we saw her in Wicked: Part I she’s defying gravity realizing that she can actually fly, and now it should be second nature that she can move and she can maneuver. “And there’s a little fun in it for her, almost,” Erivo says.
Chu likes to call Elphaba a “badass”. Erivo nods knowingly.
“She’s fierce now, she’s in her own power. She has a particular kind of strength over it. She’s a superhero.” Her hair has grown, it’s wilder. Erivo says that her habit was to flick her hair to the side, we see her do that in the first movie when she steps off the launch upon her arrival at Shiz.
That was just an accidental thing, but Chu liked what he saw and he shot her moving her hair to one side and the gesture’s repeated in Wicked: For Good.
“Now it’s free and it’s loose and it’s wild, it’s out. And I don’t know if I was necessarily channeling any one person, but I actually think I just sort of found her language and vocabulary, because I knew that my hands were something that we both knew was sort of like a character,” she says flashing her long nails, all dressed up. “They are a character,” she laughs.
Part of the storytelling is how Elphaba moves her hands as she makes spells. The hair and the nails are what she calls “detailed nuances” of who the Wicked Witch of the West is.
3 Elphaba in custody.
Erivo with Grande as Glinda.
“My job as an actor isn't to repeat myself, my job as an actor is to be someone who wants to tell stories, to tell different stories. So once this story has been told, the story has been told.”
There are hints of Shakespearean heroines banished by society because they can’t handle or control her. What’s underpinning this story is a woman against… As I search for the right word, Erivo instantly offers, “Fascism.”
On the day that I saw Wicked: For Good for the first time, I noted the scenes of Oz’s animal creatures being rounded up and herded towards a land beneath the Earth’s crust and Elphaba is trying to ease their plight by swooping down on Emerald City’s Praetorian Guard. That image became juxtaposed in my head with footage seen of ICE officers in balaclavas rounding up people in Chicago. “It just hits right at the time it’s needed and we didn’t know it was going to do that,” says Erivo of the film’s potency. “But we did know that we didn’t want it just to be candy. And
CYNTHIA ERIVO
I knew I didn’t want this character to be candy. I knew I didn’t want her to be two dimensional. I knew I wanted her to have depth. I knew I wanted her to really matter.”
Elphaba reminds one, to an extent, of someone like, say, Nancy Pelosi, who made decisions that really mattered.
Where do Elphaba and Erivo herself meet, I ask.
Considering the question, Erivo remarks: ”I think they meet very firmly in the middle. I think that Elphaba is someone whose decisions matter. And I think the decisions I make matter, to be honest. I think the decision to play her mattered. I think that the choices I make about the characters I choose to play matter, because they either will shift perspective or disturb perspective. Hopefully both. Because
even though there is movement forward for performers and actors and whatnot, there is still a place where we’re kind of stuck, and the shifts haven’t shifted enough just yet. And I’m lucky because of the decisions I’ve made thus far, which have not boxed me in, which have forced people to go: ‘Well, I guess we have to find something interesting, present something that’s different to her.’ And that gives me a chance to go, ‘Actually, yeah, I will play the Samurai [in Karoshi] I will actually play the Wicked Wicked of the West. Oh yeah. I’ll do this film where she’s a lawyer [Prima Facie]. I can do that!’’’
Sorry, you play a Samurai?!
“She is a Samurai who is a CEO in a big entrepreneurial firm… And essentially would be a villain in this piece, like an actual villain. But she’s like a gray area because she
thinks everything she’s doing is justified. And in a way it is, but it’s far more sinister. But I love it because she looks essentially exactly like me. There is no wig,” Erivo says.
“She fights. Speaks Japanese, the whole lot,” she adds, as she pulls up a pair of custom-made super-funky Louis Vuitton boots that encase the length of her legs. “There are swords… It’s full on.”
Karoshi was shot in Vancouver.
Prima Facie, adapted from Suzie Miller’s West End and Broadway hit that garnered Tony and Olivier Award honors for Jodie Comer, is about Tessa, an attorney who goes after the man who raped her. It’s almost gladiatorial but the arena in this instance is a courtroom.
For the screen the script “has to become something else. And Suzie was so open to shifting it and changing it where it needed to, and opening the aperture a little bit for me,” she says.
“And you’ll recognize it, but it won’t be someone stepping in the role that Jodie has played. This is Tessa for screen, that’s Tessa for the stage, and we’re two different Tessas.”
It was important for her to move on, and to remind people that this graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art has a full panoply of thespian artistry at her elongated fingertips.
“Because I think sometimes we find it hard to let go of a thing we really love. My job as an actor isn’t to repeat myself, my job as an actor is to be someone who wants to tell stories, to tell different stories. So once this story has been told, this story has been told. I love her [Elphaba] so much and she has changed my life, but there are other women to meet. There are other characters to meet. There are other stories to tell… And I want to challenge myself. I also want to grow as a performer. I want to grow as someone who
1 Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in Wicked: For Good 2 Erivo and Ariana Grande on set with director Jon M. Chu.
loves this craft. I want to give myself hard jobs to do so that I can be better. I constantly want to be exploring who I am as a performer.”
Sipping her tea now, she says that she “refuses” to be boxed in “because doing the same thing twice,” she says, [while reminding me that Wicked: Part I and Wicked: For Good is one story in two films], “doesn’t make sense to me.”
When Chu and I first started talking about his Wicked films, he described the South Londoner as “our Barbra Streisand.” Now he corrects himself and hails her as “Our Cynthia Erivo,” appropriately so because the landscape is unlimited for her.
Just before Thanksgiving, Erivo traveled back to Los Angeles, to start rehearsals to play Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Australian
“If she has dominion over gravity, she doesn't need anything to fly, but that broom allows her to move faster.”
ERIVO ON ELPHABA
director Kip Williams. He’s the guy who staged The Picture of Dorian Gray with Succession star Sarah Snook playing multiple parts.
In Dracula, Erivo will take on a similar task, performing all 23 roles in the story.
Rehearsals will then shift over in late December to London in preparation for a first performance at the Noel Coward Theatre on February 4. What made her return to the London stage for the first time in over a decade?
Simple. “Because it scared the shit out of me, that’s why,” she says. “I
was terrified of it.”
She viewed archival footage of Dracula’s Australian production.
“And I knew we were going to shift and change it. I knew it was going to become deeper. I knew all of those things and my manager [Jessica Morgulis] sent it to me. She said, ‘Listen, hey, I think you should look at this. I think it might be something that you want to do.’ I looked at it and I said, ‘Jess, it scares me shitless. It frightens the hell out of me. I think I’m going to do it.’
And we left it alone for a couple of months, and then I saw The
of Dorian Gray in New York. I sat and chatted with Kip and just a part of me was hoping that something would convince me not to do it. And I left thinking, ‘Gosh, I have to do this. Fine. I have to do this.’ So that’s why I’m doing it.”
Her name is above the title in big, black, bold letters. Ten years ago, she couldn’t get arrested in London. The Royal National Theatre wouldn’t give her the time of day. Even after her success on Broadway in The Color Purple, the National Theatre demanded she audition for the tiny role of the Blue Fairy in a production of Pinocchio. No thank you, was her answer.
The show was ultimately an artistic flop.
How does it feel to be returning to the West End with her name in lights?
Close to tears now, she says that it’s “crazy, really wonderful.” It feels like “a full circle. I’ve not been on the stage in the U.K. since The Color Purple.”
Recently, the National Theatre has put out discreet feelers to see if they might persuade her to perform on one of its stages. She remarks approvingly that Indhu Rubasingham is now the artistic director of the National and Erivo certainly does not rule out the possibility of appearing there one day. And there are other theatrical passions that she might pursue in the near future too.
Picture
1 Grande, Chu and Erivo on set; 2 Erivo at the opening night curtain call for The Color Purple
3 Erivo in Wicked: For Good
“To say this is an important film for our time is an understatement.
ONE HELL OF A MOTION PICTURE ACHIEVEMENT.
Exceptionally powerful and brilliantly directed.” “ SMART, EMOTIONAL AND INGENIOUSLY CONSTRUCTED.”
“KATHRYN BIGELOW’S WORK HERE IS SUPERB.”
“A CRACKLING THRILLER. A TIGHTLY WOUND DYNAMO.” “HHHHH. A TOUR DE FORCE. AN UNSHAKEABLE FILM. KATHRYN BIGELOW IS A DIRECTOR OF VIRTUOSO TALENT.”
“A WORK OF APOCALYPTIC POWER.”
FROM ACADEMY AWARD® -WINNING DIRECTOR KATHRYN BIGELOW
DIRECTED BY NOAH OPPENHEIM WRITTEN BY
KATHRYN BIGELOW
Fake It Till You Make It
In Jay Kelly a real world-famous A-lister plays a completely made-up world-famous A-lister. But George Clooney isn’t the first actor to take on the Hollywood star system…
BY DAMON WISE
When was the last time you saw a major studio release about a living movie star?
In the last year, folk, rock and pop fans might have seen A Complete Unknown, with Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, or Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, about the making of The Boss’s “difficult” 1982 album Nebraska. Or maybe you went deeper and saw Better Man, in which British singer Robbie Williams is played by an animated chimpanzee. It seems that movie stars, however, must wait—even Judy Garland, whose first and only big-screen biopic, Judy, arrived in 2019, 50 years after her death.
In the absence of a real flesh-and-blood A-lister, we have Jay Kelly, played by George Clooney in Noah Baumbach’s Netflix drama of the same name. Clooney himself has acknowledged that it was a tough role to cast (“Tom Cruise was busy”), but then, playing a fictional Hollywood movie star has always been a hard act to pull off. Here are 10 of the more noteworthy attempts—and, before you mention it, no, All About Eve doesn’t count. Fictional Broadway stars would be a whole other Top Ten…
Norma Desmond
GLORIA SWANSON IN SUNSET
BOULEVARD, 1950
Gloria Swanson was just 50 years old when
she appeared as Norma Desmond, the crazy washed-up relic of silent-era Hollywood in this famous film noir directed by Billy Wilder, in which she embarks on a deadly affair with Joe Gillis (William Holden), a younger, down-onhis-luck screenwriter, who she thinks will help her make a sensational comeback. Wilder’s film still packs a punch, now with an added and more timely subtext about the way Hollywood throws older actresses on the scrapheap, and Swanson plays a part that should have been way beyond her years. By this time, however, she had already been in the movie game for more than 30 years, making it perfectly acceptable for postwar viewers to believe the film’s most famous line of dialogue, one that resonates today: running by chance into her driveway, aspiring screenwriter, recognizes her and says, “You used to be big.” “I am big,” she replies. “It’s the pictures that got small.”
Alan Swann
PETER O’TOOLE IN MY FAVORITE YEAR, 1982 Strictly speaking, this is a movie about the golden age of television, but at the center of it is Alan Swann, a movie star on the way down who is booked to appear on a comedy show and entrusted to the care of a junior writer to keep him sober. Though the story was entirely fictional, the character of Swann was loosely based
on Australian American actor Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling star of the ’30s and ’40s whose hellraising antics gave rise to the phrase “in like Flynn” and who wrote an autobiography appropriately called My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Much like Jay Kelly, the casting pool was limited, if the audience was going to buy into the character. Luckily, Peter O’Toole was available, the (hard) drinking buddy of such hedonistic legends as Richard Burton and Richard Harris. An early casualty of O’Toole’s lifestyle was Michael Caine, who went for dinner with the actor in 1959 and woke up two days later to find they had been banned from the restaurant. “Never ask what you did,” O’Toole told Caine. “It’s better not to know.”
Elsa Brinkmann
KIM NOVAK IN THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE, 1968
Just as she did in Vertigo, Kim Novak does double-duty in this almost hallucinogenic behind-the-scenes exposé of high-testosterone studio filmmaking (“A story of Hollywood as you always knew it would be,” warns the trailer). Only Rainer Werner Fassbinder could have made such a bizarre story into art, and director Robert Aldrich succeeded mainly in making a cult camp classic, but Novak’s performance is dazzling as a young actress who is plucked from
From left: Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard; Peter O'Toole in My Favorite Year; Kim Novak in The Legend of Lylah Clare; Natalie Wood in Inside Daisy Clover; Alden Ehrenreich in Hail Caesar; Joan Crawford in Whaever Happened to Baby Jane?; Jeff Daniel in The Purple Rose of Cairo
Billy Wilder's film still packs a punch now with the timely subtext about the way Hollywood throws older actresses on the scrapheap.
obscurity to play the lead in a biopic of a major star who died in mysterious circumstances some 20 years before. In echoes of Vertigo, Novak’s character becomes consumed with the role she has been given, driven to drink and drugs by the men who try to control her. “What am I supposed to feel?” she asks the director of the movie-within-a-movie, played by Peter Finch. “Feel, you stupid cow?” he explodes. “All you have to do is what I say, and your feelings will be up on the screen.”
Hobart “Hobie” Doyle
ALDEN EHRENREICH IN HAIL CAESAR!, 2016
The Coens first broached Hollywood in their macabre 1991 Cannes hit Barton Fink, in which a pretentious New York playwright suffers a breakdown while trying to write a commercial script, and their return to la-la land was just as perverse. To anchor Hail Caesar!, a tale set in the Golden Age of the early ’50s, the brothers devised a character based on Eddie Mannix, an MGM executive who worked behind the scenes as a firefighting “fixer”, keeping the indiscretions of his studio’s talent out of the gossip columns. Played with grim determination by Josh Brolin, Mannix has a lot of news to bury, including a kidnapping and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but perhaps his biggest challenge involves trying to persuade director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) to cast cowboy superstar, Hobart “Hobie” Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) in lieu of Clark Gable. “This is a drama, Mannix, a real drama,” Laurentz protests. “It’s an adaptation of a Broadway smash.
It requires the skills of a trained thespian, not a rodeo clown.” Hobie proves him right, and Ehrenreich has a great time mangling the line “Would that it were so simple!”
Blanche Hudson
JOAN CRAWFORD IN WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, 1962
In Hollywood movies about Hollywood, filmmaking has a bizarre effect on women’s sanity that doesn’t seem to affect men, and it’s sobering to reflect that its warring stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were 54 and 58 respectively when Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was first released, starting a trend now cruelly known as “hagsploitation”. Though Davis played the title role—on the skids like Norma Desmond, a precocious music-hall child prodigy who no one now remembers—the real star is her disabled sister Blanche (Crawford), an actress whose fame is being revived by reruns of her old movies on TV. In a reversal of Baby Jane’s fortunes, Davis got the limelight and an Oscar nom, which her co-star grudgingly accepted. “Sure, she stole some of my big scenes,” said Crawford, “but the funny thing is, when I see the movie again, she stole them because she looks like a parody of herself—and I still looked like something of a star.”
Gil Shepherd
JEFF DANIELS IN THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, 1985
In happier times for Woody Allen and Mia Farrow they made The Purple Rose of Cairo,
a return of sorts to the “early, funny” movies that he referenced himself in 1980’s Stardust Memories. The conceit is one of Allen’s best, and, unlike a lot of his later films, it holds up all the way through. In 1935, New Jersey waitress Cecilia (Farrow) escapes the harsh reality of her unhappily married life by going to the movies. Watching a hokey adventure movie, also called The Purple Rose of Cairo, she falls in love with the film’s hero, Tom Baxter. It’s all just fantasy until one day Baxter meets her eye and comes out from the screen, even inviting her back into the film for “a madcap Manhattan weekend” (cue a ’30s-style montage of dancing, neon signs and corks popping). This does not sit well with the studio, which sends Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels)—the actor who plays Tom Baxter—to sort it all out. Shepherd convinces Cecilia she is in love with him, not Tom Baxter, giving a bravura performance that proves as fake as the palm trees in his movie.
Daisy Clover
NATALIE WOOD IN INSIDE DAISY CLOVER, 1968
“Wish me luck—I’m gonna make some noise in the world!” Natalie Wood certainly turns up the volume in this seamy exposé of the tinseltown production line, playing a teenage girl plucked from the rundown beachside shack she shares with her elderly mother and propelled toward the big time. Despite being a sassy, violent tomboy, her hair cut short into a scruffy, dirty-blonde beatnik bob, Daisy falls for all the traps that come her way, from the manipulative
producer-manager (Christopher Plummer) to the unfaithful, predatory lover (Robert Redford). Wood certainly knows how to go from rags to riches, scrubbing up well for the inevitable transformation, even if some the musical numbers—notably “The Circus is a Wacky World”—leave a lot to be desired.
Rick Dalton
LEONARDO DICAPRIO IN ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD, 2019
In 1969, in stark counterpoint to the likes of Norma Desmond and Baby Jane Hudson, TV western star Rick Dalton, played by a middle-aged Leonardo DiCaprio, manages to accept the unwelcome news of his waning fame without becoming a) delusional and b) homicidal. “It’s official, old buddy—I’m a has-been,” his character tells his friend and long-time stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) at the start of Quentin Tarantino’s still most recent film.
Bowfinger. The conceit is that director Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) has promised Universal Pictures a movie that will bring the legendary Kit Ramsey (Murphy) out of semi-retirement. But when Ramsey turns him down, Bowfinger hires a lookalike (also Murphy) and shoots his movie guerilla-style, without Ramsey’s knowledge, using a cast of extras—who all believe that Ramsey is deep in character—to spin a story about an alien invasion (“Did you know Tom Cruise had no idea he was in that vampire movie ’til two years later?” Bowfinger tells them). The result is one of Murphy’s most underrated and certainly most self-deprecating performances.
Doris Mann
SHIRLEY MACLAINE IN POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, 1990
Carrie Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds were as close in death as they
But like a lot of actors of his generation, Dalton learns that sometimes you have to go away to come back, which is why he parlays his skills into the burgeoning Italian exploitation market, following the trail blazed by Clint Eastwood, in films like the spaghetti western Nebraska Jim and the police thriller Operazione Dyno-O-Mite.
Kit Ramsey
EDDIE MURPHY IN BOWFINGER, 1999
On the basis of Saturday Night Live alone, Eddie Murphy was a household name in the USA, celebrating his 21st birthday in 1982 with an all-star party at New York’s Studio 54. After the subsequent success of the Beverly Hills Cop movies he became an even bigger deal, something he was able to satirize even before he turned 40 in the Steve Martin-scripted comedy
were in life, the latter passing away just one day after her daughter. It wasn’t always plain sailing, however, as Fisher suggested in her debut novel, Postcards From the Edge, the semi-autobiographical story of an actress in recovery after a drug overdose. Turning the book into a film was an inevitability, but who could fill those shoes? In retrospect, the answer now seems blindingly obvious: Meryl Streep as Fisher’s heroine Suzanne Vale and Shirley MacLaine as her overbearing actress mother Doris. Streep was on fire at the time, and the role brought with it her ninth Oscar nomination. But it’s MacLaine who steals the show as the wily and not-entirely-blameless Doris. “I know that she does these things because she loves me,” laments her daughter. “I just can’t believe it.” ★
Building Bruises
How The Smashing Machine prosthetics designer Kazu Hiro used a subtle approach for Dwayne Johnson’s look
When designing prosthetics for an actor to match a living person, achieving the right balance between the actor and the character can be a challenge. For The Smashing Machine, prosthetics designer Kazu Hiro decided to go with a subtler approach in turning Dwayne Johnson into MMA fighter Mark Kerr.
“What Benny [Safdie] wanted was to give an essence of Mark Kerr on Dwayne’s face,” he says. “We decided to go to a subtler version, which ended up being a cauliflower ear and eyebrow cover, changing Dwayne’s eyelid shape and the nose and the wig and several body scars.” The prosthetics process normally took about two and a half hours, though that could jump to as long as four hours as Kerr got into more fights and had bruises in a “progressively swollen-up phase”.
The most important thing for Hiro is making sure the actor is able to act freely without having to worry about the prosthetics. “I always think about their comfort, because they’re the one who has to go to set and they work more than eight hours every day.”
A great example is how he created a prosthetic to match Kerr’s more pronounced brow. “Mark Kerr had a really prominent brow bone that also changed his eyelid shape, because Dwayne’s eye shape was quite different compared to Mark’s,” says Hiro. “You can imagine if you put a tape on your eyelid, you can feel it making it harder to move, so I made a hollow core inside of the brow piece, so when his eyes move, there won’t be as much stress.”
—RYAN FLEMING
Quick Shot
Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine
From left: Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood; Eddie Murphy in Bowfinger; Shirley MacClaine in Postcards From the Edge
“THE
BEST FILM OF THE YEAR.”
JOEL EDGERTON
FELICITY JONES
KERRY CONDON
WILLIAM H. MACY
“TIMELESS AND DEEPLY AFFECTING. A respite from a world that never gives us a chance to slow down and realize how beautiful it truly is.”
FROM THE ACADEMY AWARD ®-NOMINATED CO-WRITERS OF SING SING
Times Of His Life
BY PETE HAMMOND
Oscar Isaac is doing a bit of time traveling these days, cinematically at least, with three new films that all debuted at fall festivals. In current release and airing on Netflix is Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, set in the late 18th century, in which Isaac plays the title role of Victor Frankenstein. And in Julian Schnabel’s sweeping In the Hand of Dante, fresh from its debut at the Venice Film Festival in September, Isaac plays dual roles 700 years apart, ranging from the 14th to 21st centuries. Finally, in the personal documentary King Hamlet, which debuted in Telluride, his take on Hamlet in the 2017 Off Broadway Public Theater production of the 16th
century play is chronicled by none other than his wife, as real life and theater collide.
This prolific actor has been a man for all seasons on stage, screen and television, and now in his latest trio of projects he has apparently become an actor for all centuries.
Isaac has never shied away from a challenge or an era, and in fact, his first major starring role in film goes
back even further, when he played Joseph in 2006’s The Nativity Story. Since then, he has made his mark in such notable films as Ex Machina, A Most Violent Year, Inside Llewyn Davis, Drive, X Men: Apocalypse, Dune, the animated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and as Poe Dameron in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, the latter taking him across centuries
far into the future. His work in television, while less frequent, includes an Emmy-nominated performance in the HBO limited series Scenes From a Marriage. He has appeared often Off Broadway in various productions, and even on Broadway for a change in his most recent theatrical foray in 2023, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. But first and foremost is his wild take on the mad creator of The Creature (played by Jacob Elordi) in Del Toro’s long-gestating passion project and childhood dream of bringing his own version of the Mary Shelley classic to the screen. Almost musical in some ways, as Victor conducts his creation coming to life, almost like a rock star on a mission, this is not your father’s
Oscar Isaac journeys through the centuries in a trio of new films
From top: Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein; Isaac in In the Hand of Dante
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION IN ALL CATEGORIES INCLUDING BEST PICTURE
“THE BEST ‘KNIVES OUT’ YET. A pitch-perfect ensemble.”
“RIAN JOHNSON caps off what might go down as ONE OF FILM’S GREAT TRILOGIES. He continues to surprise and amaze with his ability to craft a masterful tale.”
“An enthralling puzzle-box whodunnit. FUNNY, DARK, MOVING AND MEANINGFUL.”
Frankenstein. And Isaac knows it, as we discussed when I caught up with him after he quick-tripped from the Venice premiere of Del Toro’s movie to an unannounced Sunday screening in Telluride, as well as for his Hamlet doc, where we squeezed in a conversation before he headed back to Venice for the world premiere of In the Hand of Dante.
We zeroed in on what makes this version of Victor so different from what has come before. “I came back to look at the monitor, Guillermo’s like, ‘We’re making a gothic superhero. A real gothic, Victorian superhero,’ and that’s the thing. He’s such a mutable character, so there were so many facets to be able to explore. You know, the pleasure and the sensuality of the character, the monstrosity of the character, the rage, somebody that consciously, and even unconsciously, was wounded so badly at such a young age, and the resentment for that has a stranglehold on him,” Isaac says. “And so, the need to control that, to control that pain and to not allow that heartbreak to destroy him, turns into this need
to be great, at any cost, because if I am great, then it’ll all make sense.”
Isaac is happy this version also delves into the subtext and more subtle themes this timeless tale holds, not simply as just a monster movie. “It’s a story about fathers and sons, and the way that this generational trauma just continues and continues, this pain that’s the inheritance that gets passed down,” he says. “And that’s the beautiful symbolism of what you see, all these circles everywhere in the sets because the story itself has a circularity to it. And then, when the creature begins his tale it’s also circular, but he breaks the circle at the end so that’s why there’s a glimmer of hope in this movie.”
And hope is definitely what we need now. It’s quite relevant, I suggest, mentioning that it could be interpreted as Victor creating his own AI, albeit far more primitively than today’s technology. Isaac, though, thinks it really isn’t so much about The Creature, but rather Victor’s need to create it.
“The issue with it is more man than the thing itself and how one uses that thing, and also in order to
achieve a goal what one is willing to do over an idea, and that’s why there’s this beautiful framing that Mary Shelley did, that Guillermo just really, really keys in on,” he says. “Natural stupidity rather than artificial intelligence. And also, you think about what the state of the world is in right now and what people are willing to do, and put up with, in order to achieve some ideal or some goal.”
As for working with Del Toro,
Isaac says it could not have been a better experience. “He would direct me in jokes. Just the dirtiest Mexican jokes you can possibly imagine, but they were great pieces of direction. They’re kind of non-translatable, but he found a way to infuse joy and subversiveness. I think it was important that Victor just had this kind of fire of defiance in him. And so, there is a part of you, certainly at the beginning, that you root for the guy. You’re with him, because of just that will, and then you see that will become diseased, and you see him start to lie to himself as well, and allow himself to be cruel, and the oppressed becomes the oppressor,” he says. “And Guillermo, to have these dark elements, but then at the same time, have so much joy. He’s very open. So, everyone on the set feels like they’re a part of it.
“Everyone on the set feels like they’re a part of it. Everyone’s included, so it’s just very open.”
OSCAR ISAAC
Below, left to right: Isaac; with Gal Gadot in In the Hand of Dante. Bottom: As Victor Frankenstein.
“A WILD RIDE OF A MOVIE. COLIN FARRELL IS UNFORGETTABLE.” DEADLINE
“ONE OF COLIN FARRELL’S STRONGEST AND MOST PHYSICALLY DEMANDING PERFORMANCES TO DATE.” NEXT BEST PICTURE FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
FROM ACADEMY AWARD® WINNER EDWARD BERGER DIRECTOR OF ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT AND CONCLAVE
Everyone’s included, so it’s just very open, and that was very exciting.”
While he was ever so briefly in Telluride between sojourns to Venice, Isaac may have set a record for doing intros to his movies. In one night, he ran from theater to theater doing two intros for Frankenstein and two for King Hamlet. The documentary was shot and directed by his wife, Elvira Lind, and it has been years in the making as it were, or at least in the releasing They weren’t sure if it was just going to turn out to be private home movies, but so much happened during the period he did the play in times of personal trauma and joy, and life and death.
“It was a four-hour production, two intermissions, and the other beautiful part of it is my son was born, you know, a month after my mother passed and right before we started rehearsals for it,” he says. “Elvira started filming this crazy confluence of events. And it’s this incredible remembrance of this moment in time when all these strands came together.
You know that the amazing poet David White, he wrote about the
three marriages, the marriage to a person, the marriage to a vocation, and the marriage to the self, and how there’s no such thing as balancing those things. Those things intertwine completely, and I think this movie’s a beautiful example of that. I think she was just curious what was on there. And she was looking through it, and she started slowly piecing things together, and putting it together, and seeing this story emerge, and now we have King Hamlet.”
He also does double duty in Julian Schnabel’s swing-for-thefences epic In the Hand of Dante, in which he plays both the late 20th-century author Nick Tosches, who wrote the book on which the film is based, and 14th-century Dante Alighieri, a dual role that traverses 700 years. The film is currently looking for American distribution. It divided critics in Venice, but what great art doesn’t? Isaac was all in for this one and praises Schnabel for being the painstaking artist that he always has been and remains. “You know, he’s amazing, he trusts his intuition above all else, and he paints
that way as well,” he says. “It’s like, first stroke, best stroke. And he moves in that way, and it is an uncompromising work of art. It is expressionistic. He’s not so interested in communicating ideas as expressing very big ideas, and we went really deep into that one.”
He describes the Tosches book as a bit of a “fever dream” but isn’t surprised Schnabel was drawn to the two-tiered story as he makes movies about artists. “He’s very interested in how you capture that ineffable thing of creating art in a film, you know, and do it so that it’s not what it looks like to be an artist, but it’s what does it feel like to be an artist, and what does it feel like to be an artist in a world of commerce, right?” he asks. “And the truth about what an artist is, is in a way, to be exiled. Like, part of committing to that kind of vocation is to be taken away, to be exiled, to be on the outside, to be alienated, and how often that happens. And in Dante’s case, he was quite literally exiled from Florence, and that is when he was able to come to terms and allow for this incredible masterpiece to
“My wife Elvira started filming this crazy confluence of events. And it’s this incredible remembrance of this moment in time... ”
OSCAR ISAAC
come out, The Divine Comedy. And the irony of this other person as well, who is a writer in the early 2000s, who is being squeezed by the world of commerce, by the world of gangsters, and fakes, and phonies, and selling stuff, and who is cynical, and finding his connection to the point where he is Dante.”
If that sounds somewhat challenging, it is also undoubtedly the kind of assignment Isaac likes to take on as an actor. “Yeah. In a way, there’s three Nicks that are happening. Well, there’s three characters. There’s, like, the real Nick, there’s writer Nick, there’s writer Nick kind of creating this fictional Nick, and there’s writer Nick writing Dante and then being Dante. So, there’s these twisting strands, and the way that he kind of finds his way back to himself,” he says.
And Isaac always seems to find a way back to himself to see what’s next, and what century he will find that person in. In the immediate future it is Season 2 of the Emmy winning Netflix series Beef opposite Carey Mulligan.
In many ways, Oscar Isaac is a bit like Victor Frankenstein, stirring the pot and putting the complicated pieces together of the next character he gets to create. ★
Below left: Isaac in the documentary King Hamlet with Hamlet stage director Sam Gold; Isaac with his son.
An Animated Debate
BY RYAN FLEMING
Flow winning the Best Animated Feature Oscar came as a bit of a surprise last year for a few reasons. Not only did it beat two highly grossing films—Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot—the dialogue-free film about a cat’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world further proved that animation isn’t just for children.
Beyond that, the Latvian film showed that voters are looking for something new and unique, not just whatever seems to gain the most popularity. This year has an interesting assortment of frontrunners, from new properties like Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters to highly anticipated sequels like Disney’s Zootopia 2.
KPop Demon Hunters, directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, follows K-pop girl group Huntr/x, who are secretly demon hunters, as they face off against rival boy band the Saja Boys, who are secretly demons. Drawing on Korean influences from ancient mythology to the more current K-pop, the film quickly gained popularity due to the visual style and catchy songs. One of Huntr/x’s songs, “Golden”, became so popular that it topped the Spotify charts and was nominated for four Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year.
The film started streaming in June. By July it was Netflix’s most watched original animated film and by September, KPop Demon Hunters became the most watched title on the streamer. Although the most popular title doesn’t guarantee a win, the current wave of popularity for K-pop and Korean culture has definitely aided the film in finding a massive fanbase and a lasting presence in this awards season.
Other than KPop Demon Hunters, the popularity of which came as something of a surprise to even the filmmakers, Netflix also has Erik Benson and Alex Woo’s In Your Dreams. Following a girl named Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rap-
and her brother Elliot (Elias Janssen), the story finds the pair travelling through the world of dreams to find the Sandman, who has the ability to grant wishes. While Stevie aims to wish for the perfect family, their adventure teaches her to appreciate that she has more than what she wants.
Two French-language films are also in the mix this year, with Arco and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain. The former follows a mysterious, rainbow suit-clad boy named Arco (Oscar Tresanini) from the year 2932, who accidentally travels back in time to 2075 and meets a girl named Iris (Margot Ringard Oldra) who helps
him find his way home. Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and produced by Natalie Portman, who also voices Iris’ mother in the English-language dub, the film’s hand-drawn animation style has been consistently compared to the style of Hayao Miyazaki, who won just two years ago with The Boy and the Heron
While Arco’s style may draw inspiration from Japan animation, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain takes its own approach to animation while exploring Japanese culture through the eyes of a young Belgian girl. Adapted from Amélie Nothomb’s novel The Character of Rain, and directed by Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho
From KPop Demon Hunters to Zootopia 2, the contenders for Best Animated Feature are weird and wonderful
paport)
Clockwise from top: KPop Demon Hunters; In Your Dreams; Arco; KPop Demon Hunters
Han, the story follows Amélie (Loïse Charpentier), a girl born in a vegetative state to a Belgian family living in Japan, who breaks free of her condition on her second birthday. Her transformation leads her to believe she is a god to those around her, with the film exploring heavy themes like death and war through the eyes of a small child who is coming to terms with her place in the world.
Coming from Japan, director Mamoru Hosoda, who was nominated in 2018 for Mirai, has a new film in contention as well. Scarlet is a reimagined version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, replacing the lead prince with a medieval, sword-fighting princess named Scarlet (Mana Ashida), who sets out on an adventure through time and space to avenge the death of her father. After failing and being fatally injured, she encounters a man from the present day who shows her what her life could be like without the rage of vengeance. Taking a page from his last film Belle, which was itself inspired by Beauty and the Beast, Hosoda decided to opt for 3D animation with more details than traditional CG to give the film a unique look that stands out.
Disney has two films in the race this year, Zootopia 2, the highly anticipated sequel to the 2016 Oscar winner, and Elio, Pixar’s sci-fi adventure. The latter, directed by Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi, follows an 11-year-old boy named Elio (Yonas Kibreab) obsessed with aliens. After making contact and being transported to their world, he is mistaken for Earth’s ambassador and must navigate a new and strange world.
As with almost every Pixar film, Elio once again pushes the boundaries of animation technology to create a space setting called the Communiverse, which used a new lighting system and virtual lenses to capture the scenes. While the film itself did not meet box office expectations, the reviews were generally positive and most original Pixar films do end up with an Oscar nomination.
On the other hand, Zootopia 2 was already considered one of the top picks for the Oscar even before it premiered. One factor that attributed to the excitement was the early release of Shakira’s new single from the film “Zoo”, which she wrote with Ed Sheeran and Blake Slatkin, along with a music video. Shakira also wrote single “Try Everything” for the first film and performs in both films as pop star Gazelle. A follow-up to the 2016 Oscar-winner, also
directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard, Zootopia 2 sees rabbit cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and her fox partner Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) teaming up to solve a new case, this time involving a conspiracy and a snake named Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan). The pair find their partnership put to the test as they go undercover, explore new areas of Zootopia and try to uncover the newest conspiracy.
Although the first film was beloved and netted an Oscar, that’s not usually an indicator for a repeat performance. So far, the only animated film series that has won multiple Oscars is Toy Story, which won with Toy Story 3 in 2010 and Toy Story 4 in 2019. Many other sequels of Oscar-winning films have been nominated, but are audiences looking for something new again, just like with Flow? ★
Clockwise from top: Little Amélie; Zootopia 2; Scarlet; Elio
In Heaven and Earth
How the stars aligned for Hamnet director and co-writer Chloé Zhao, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal's spiritual journey through love and loss
BY ANTONIA BLYTH
Chloé Zhao had no plans to read Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel about Shakespeare, his wife Agnes and the tragic death of their son. Back then in fact, the director felt no particular affinity for Shakespeare, and one of Zhao’s favorite anecdotes from doing Hamnet press is when she and lead actress Jessie Buckley were asked about their prior experience with The Bard. Buckley told an “epic story” says Zhao, “about her first job at the Globe Theatre, Judi Dench and all of that. And then it was my turn. I had done a Lady Macbeth speech at LA High,” she laughs. “I absolutely loved it, but that was about it.”
So Hamnet might have passed Zhao by entirely. She had been offered it and had turned it down. But just as Shakespeare so often nods
toward fate and destiny, it was, for Zhao, those same mysterious forces that brought her back to the project.
Zhao is, as she says, a person who looks for signs and serendipities that seem to nudge her. “I’m always waiting, looking for patterns of synchronicities, someone bigger than me saying, ‘This is the path,’ by sending me out these little hints,” she says. “Things where you go, ‘Wow, this is too good to be true.’ When you think, ‘Oh, this is so lucky,’ that’s usually a sign. And then I will keep moving forward when those things are coming in.”
One of these signs was meeting Buckley and Paul Mescal at Telluride.
“Do you know the river that runs through Telluride?” Mescal asks when we meet on Zoom.
He’s in the back of a car, headed home from shooting Sam Mendes’ Beatles biopic, in which he’ll play Paul McCartney. “We went for a walk around there. I'd caught wind that she was maybe going to do it.” Mescal did not know then that Zhao had just passed on the project. “We met, and Jessie was also in Telluride at the time, so it was the perfect point for us all to bump into each other.”
Despite the stars seemingly aligning for this meeting, Mescal confesses, “I had a total agenda. I wanted to meet the great Chloé Zhao, and I thought she was doing Hamnet, so I was like, ‘Please cast me in it.’ I was a massive fan of the book, so I was like, ‘I really think you should treat yourself and sit down with this wonderful book and spend time with it.’”
Right: Jessie Buckley, director Chloé Zhao and Paul Mescal on the set of Hamnet; Zhao, Mescal and Buckley talk through a scene.
For Mescal, O’Farrell's book was “trying to disarm the audience from any kind of preconceived ideas about Shakespeare, his family, or anything. It just immediately made him very, very real to me. It was like I was reading a piece of fiction not associated with Shakespeare, which is a fascinating story about love and grief, and my initial hook was I kept looking at it and thinking about how remarkable it is for any married couple to survive the death of a child.”
So Zhao finally did read the book. And then everything changed.
“He said, ‘Please read the book, please. It’s not what you think.’ And then I read the book and it was like ‘boom.’ And there’s so many things in the book that are exactly what I have been trying to explore myself in this stage of my life. So, the timeliness was amazing. And then I knew it was going to be Jessie right away. It was then about Jessie saying yes. And I knew I needed Maggie to co-write, and she also said yes. Then I thought, Maybe this is OK.”
Zhao expands on the aspects of the novel that she had herself been trying to explore personally: “One is, I have lived a life of… Well, like
Shakespeare’s, meaning I have been expressing myself through creativity, and that’s where the safe space is for me. And this inner Agnes, this feminine consciousness that exists without shame, exists with such knowing of her lineage and expresses a spectrum of emotions and does not suppress anything. That part of me, that character, does not exist in my films until this one. And particularly this mother figure. I knew I was working on bringing her through myself for about four years, and then I was ready to do this film.”
Secondly, says Zhao, there is “this fear of death that is quite strong. And I think when you’re afraid of death, you really are afraid of living. And if you’re afraid of loss, then you’re afraid of love at the same time, because how can you love with your heart open if your nervous system can’t stand loss? How can you live to the
“There’s so many things in the book that are exactly what I have been trying to explore myself in this stage of my life.”
CHLOÉ ZHAO
fullest if you’re so afraid to die? So, the paradox of this—the brighter the summer, the deeper the winter—is that’s the paradox of the human experience. It was really important for me to explore that as well.”
And then, finally, she says, there was, “My own purpose as a storyteller. I was questioning why I’m doing this. At the end of Eternals, I knew what I was trying to bring through is the importance of one-ness because at the end of Eternals, that’s what it took. You have to become one. And then there’s something about one-ness that I’m looking for where the illusion of separation dissolves. And there’s something about everybody going into a circle, a structure of the Globe Theatre, and experiencing a catharsis together.”
Buckley says: “I think Chloé did a very brave act of putting her heart in the river of the story, not objectifying it, not looking at it objectively, but actually she needed this story as much as any of us needed it in a way, to unravel something in herself and let it be seen.”
Buckley herself also references fate. She didn’t read the book until after meeting Zhao, and once she started, she could not stop. “I stayed up all night, and I read the whole book backto-back and I was like, ‘Let’s start now.’ It was extraordinary. These books, these stories, these women, this moment of my life, Chloé, what I was looking to explore, motherhood, it was such an incredible collision. I don’t know if it will ever happen to me ever again, what this was. I hope it does, but it was just so fateful and I’m so grateful for it.”
When Zhao first met O’Farrell, it was, somewhat bizarrely, inside Shakespeare’s house at Stratford-Upon-Avon. Zhao had gone there for “a very brief touristy visit,” and O’Farrell was doing an interview at the
From top: Buckley and Mescal; from left: Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet, with Bodhi Rae Breathnach and Olivia Lynes.
historic site. The meeting in that pertinent location was “very helpful” Zhao says, “in the sense that she pointed out, in the house, the fireplace. She said, ‘There’s a good chance that Hamnet died right here.’ And I remember the size of that fireplace. And I remember the void inside the fireplace. And then the ground, because it’s been stepped on for so long, it kind of dips under a little bit. That became so vivid in my mind, I took a picture, I sent it to Fiona [Crombie, production designer], just this idea of the fireplace almost like a threshold. And that helped a lot.”
The production design involved recreating the houses and the Globe Theatre. “We were building the homes and rooms around those big fireplaces,” Zhao says. “Łukasz [Żal, cinematographer] and Fiona, they basically built everything, talking to each other about how he wants to shoot it. So, she built it with the right size and the right space. I think when you have a good balance of chaos and order, that’s a sweet spot. I feel like I have HODs [heads of department] who are so incredible, and they are able to just externalize everything I’m feeling. And then they’re able to build such great structures.”
During the shooting of two pivotal moments in the story—Hamnet’s birth and his death— Mescal was not needed on set. But despite his physical distance, he seemed to be so emotionally connected to what Buckley was experiencing, it became almost a spiritual bond.
Says Zhao, “He just stayed in his little hotel room in Shoreditch, losing his mind. He didn’t
“When we go to the cinema, we go to the theater, we listen to a story, we’re holding our unspoken feelings beside each other… that’s the great mystery of why stories are important and needed in culture.”
JESSIE BUCKLEY
go out to see anybody. He didn’t go have dinner. He just sat in his room freaking out the entire time. He said it was the worst two weeks of the whole shoot for him, knowing what we were all going through, but holding the container anyways and staying very much in character and not allowing himself to break the tension. We felt him. We would send him messages. We felt him there. And that was hard to explain to people that, really, does that really matter? Yes, it does. It really does. It does for Jessie massively, knowing he’s there holding space, knowing she’s going through this.”
Mescal says of this time, “It felt like a functioning family… then I felt like I was ripped away from them, which also is exactly what happens to the characters. I hadn’t moved into my own place in London, so I was bouncing around these random accommodations that didn’t feel like home. And I knew that Jessie was going through the wringer in terms of what was being asked of her at work.”
Something that’s much talked-about is
Hamnet’s ending. Zhao keeps us on Buckley’s face in close-up for much longer than one might expect. She has discovered her apparently coldhearted husband has written a play named for their dead son. Enraged, she pushes her way to the front of the Globe Theatre and watches from the very edge of the stage. The emotions that pass over her face are of a depth and capacity that’s hard to even name, but that seem to encompass everything that is human and sad and beautiful all at once.
“We knew, even from the book, it is going to be Agnes’ experience,” Zhao says, “so we had been filming her face for about six days leading up to that. But also on her face, that is where the audience are going to be.” But once they finished the scene, it didn’t feel like the right ending. “I could tell that she looked at me, I looked at her, at the end of that day and we were like, ‘We don’t have a film. There’s no catharsis.’ Then we both went home, and for Jessie, she felt so lost and she was fighting that lostness.”
Then, driving home from set, Buckley listened
From top: Buckley as Agnes; Buckley with Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare; Buckley and Mescal.
to composer Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”. She says, “There was something about the music which made me realize that I was amongst other humans [extras in the theater] who probably had their own grief… all of these people around me had the most incredible faces that had lines and scars—old women and babies and men. And listening to this music, I just had that image of all these faces around me.”
She sent the song to Zhao, who recalls, “I was going through the end of a very important relationship. I knew it was coming to an end, and I was holding on for dear life. So, I was very much on the same path as Agnes is, holding on to her loved one. And then I couldn’t sleep and the film isn’t working. And then in the morning when I
Off the Rails
got that song in the car, I listened to the song, I started crying and my whole body was vibrating.”
That scene in the theater would ultimately include two things that had not been in the script: the character of Hamlet was on the stage and Agnes reaches out for him. And Buckley brought something else, too. She says, “I just realized exactly what I had to do was surrender to
Train Dreams cinematographer Adolpho Veloso on highlighting nature as a character
the humanity that was around me. And that in some way, when we go to the cinema, we go to the theater, we listen to a story, we’re holding our unspoken feelings beside each other, and then the play is holding them in a whole other way. And that’s the great mystery of why stories are important and needed in culture.”
Says Mescal of watching Buckley work: “Oh my god. It’s one of those acting Olympic moments where I was just like, ‘What’s happening? How are you doing it? Jesus Christ. You’re a god.’ It’s an incredible thing to watch. When I saw that, I was like, ‘That’s a crazy feat of artistic achievement.’ Not even just that shot, it’s just the film for her in general. That’s a seminal performance for me as a viewer. To be a part of it, opposite to her, I was just like, ‘This is an amazing experience.’” ★
Although Adolpho Veloso had worked with director Clint Bentley before, on 2021’s Jockey, the story of Train Dreams really connected with him: “It’s about a guy who stays several months away from home with people that he never met before that he might never see again,” says Veloso. “This is a cinematographer’s life—we stay a few months away from home doing a movie with a bunch of weirdos you might never see again, and when you go back home, it’s hard to feel like that’s actually your place.”
To help capture that sense of a railway worker being away from home, Veloso and Bentley decided to shoot everything in forested areas of Washington state. “We wanted to find those little pockets of forests that are still untouched, and also places that were destroyed so we could show that evolution of nature itself,” he says. Natural light became a key factor, since many scenes were filmed outside in the
wilderness, though that can present some problems with planning. Luckily, Veloso says he came to the project “ready to adapt and embrace” the changes. Since they built sets on location, like the cabin, they were able to transition to indoor scenes when the lighting or weather wasn’t right. “But we also embraced a lot of nature,” he says. “We wanted those different layers of snow and rain and harsh sun… a bit of everything. It was really about embracing everything special because nature was a character in the movie, so it was important to be faithful to it.”
—RYAN FLEMING
Quick Shot
Above: Adolpho Veloso; right; Train Dreams
Buckley in Hamnet's final scene.
Reinventing the Globe
BY RYAN FLEMING
“The Globe Theatre that we see today is historically a different Globe than what we wanted to have in our film. It’s actually the second Globe, the first burnt down, so we had creative freedom to make a Globe that felt appropriate for our story and also fit our aesthetic.”
FIONA CROMBIE
“The theater was built as a place to put the play on, as opposed to being a centerpiece itself, which is more like what the Globe is now. Ours was rough and rustic and simple because I wanted everybody’s eyes to be on stage.”
“Even though in the film it’s broken up and edited, we actually ran a big chunk of the play Hamlet and filmed it.”
out their
full theater, including spaces not shown in the film and areas for stage hands to deliver props to actors.
How Hamnet production designer Fiona Crombie recreated Shakespeare’s theater
Crombie built
Globe to work as a
Illustrations of the original Globe had mostly exaggerated features, so the scale was up to their interpretation.
“We dressed the backstage as though it could put on any of Shakespeare’s plays to that point, so there was a nod to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and some others.”
The dressing for the backstage inclued a full armory, costumes and oyster shells, which Crombie found were used to hold makeup.
“The biggest light bulb moment for me was discovering that the wood could have actually been stolen from another theater that had been dismantled, so it’s not bespoke. It was sort of gathered and put together to create the theater.”
The actual Globe would have Will looking at the audience from above, not backstage, but Crombie wanted to have a more personal touch.
Back In The Running
How a shocking film about neighbors put Netflix back In prime contention for Oscar’s Best Documentary Feature
BY MATT CAREY
Susan Lorincz. For many Netflix viewers, the name inspires revulsion.
Lorincz is the white woman who fired a gunshot through her front door, killing her Black neighbor, Ajike Owens in 2023, invoking Florida’s notorious “stand your ground” law. Geeta Gandbhir’s chilling documentary about the case, The Perfect Neighbor, constructed primarily from police body cam and dash cam video, won five awards at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, including Best Documentary Feature. Those honors and many others, including the documentary directing award at Sundance, have positioned The Perfect Neighbor as an Oscar favorite. For Netflix, which used to dominate the Best Documentary Feature category at the Oscars, it marks an opportunity to get back into serious contention. The streamer won in 2018 for Icarus, 2020 for American Factory, and in 2021 for My Octopus Teacher, but since then, has recorded a single Oscar nomination for Best Doc Feature—for To Kill a Tiger in 2024—a film it only acquired after it was nominated.
This year is different. Not only does Netflix contend with The Perfect Neighbor, but with two other award-winning features: Cover-Up, the exploration of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh directed by Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, and Apocalypse in the Tropics, Oscar nominee Petra Costa’s
examination of the rise of Christian Nationalism in Brazil.
“It’s an honor,” Gandbhir says of the recognition, quickly adding that she hopes the streamer keeps investing in serious, premium documentaries. “We want Netflix to continue to support our colleagues. These films that are not, again, celebrity, that are not, again, salacious, that are not, again, the types we’ve seen as the only things being bought… we’re hoping that the streamers realize that these films are commercially viable political films. Films that tackle hard topics actually do appeal to audiences.”
Netflix, naturally, will face plenty of competition in its pursuit of the golden statuette. Kino Lorber, Oscar-nominated last year for Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, fields strong contenders in Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel’s
1 The Perfect Neighbor. 2 2000 Meters to Andriivka 3 Apocalypse in the Tropics.
investigation of German director Leni Riefenstahl, and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, director Sepideh Farsi’s account of Palestinian poet and photojournalist Fatima Hassouna as she endured the Israeli siege of Gaza. Farsi and her protagonist got to know each other through video calls (the director attempted to get into Gaza to film but couldn’t cross the Egyptian border). Within hours of the documentary being accepted at the Cannes Film Festival, Hassouna was killed in an Israeli drone strike.
“This bonding [through video calls], which shaped very quickly and very deeply, all made it so at the same time beautiful and also hard because I worry for her,” Farsi explains. “And when the film was finished and it was selected for Cannes, I thought, ‘OK, we made it.’ And I tell her and she says, ‘Yes, I’m coming. I asked for the visa, everything.’ And literally the news of the selection [for Cannes], I got it the day I was pitching the film in Nyon at Visions du Reél in Switzerland, and they called me from Cannes. They say, ‘We’ve selected your film.’ And then I tell Fatima all of that, and then she gets killed the day after. She’s targeted by the Israeli army.”
Two other films that premiered at Cannes enter the Oscar race as strong contenders: My Mom Jayne, Mariska Hargitay’s HBO documentary about her mother, actress Jayne Mansfield, and Orwell: 2+2=5, from Neon, Raoul Peck’s close reading of the work of George Orwell, especially 1984, and its relevance to today with the global rise of right-wing authoritarianism.
“We are in the middle of an era of ‘Newspeak,’” Peck observes. “Orwell’s analysis was what I would say is the template of everything we’re living through right now.”
Cover-Up from Poitras and Obenhaus, and The Tale of
“We're hoping that the streamers will realize that these films are commercially viable political films.”
GEETA GANDBIR
Silyan directed by Tamara Kotevska, premiered relatively late in the year—at the Venice Film Festival. National Geographic acquired Silyan out of Venice, where it dazzled audiences with a mythic tale set in the director’s native North Macedonia, a favorite nesting area of majestic white storks. In the film, a man named Nikola is forced to give up his life of farming and instead goes to work at landfill where he comes across an injured stork picking through refuse.
“Once Nikola captured this stork and he made a decision to take care of it in front of our eyes, it started unraveling something that was just shocking and pure magic and something none of us has seen or witnessed before,” Kotevska says.
“We witnessed in real life, in real time, the story of a man saving a stork and a stork saving a man.”
Oscar winner Mstyslav Chernov returns to contention with 2000 Meters to Andriivka. The film, like his earlier 20 Days in Mariupol, plunges viewers into the war in Ukraine, this time examining the brutal meter-by-meter firefight by Ukrainian forces to retake a town occupied by Russian invaders.
“I keep the perspective very narrow—just in that forest. There is a certain claustrophobic feeling when you’re stuck in that strip of trees that are cut by shrapnel and bombs and machine guns and there is no way out. And I think this is a metaphor for the entire war,” Chernov says. “We, as Ukrainians, are stuck in this war. We can’t get out because Ukraine is under attack. And of course, people are trying to defend their home, and they just can’t stop this war. So, it’s a metaphor of the endless war. It is of a nightmare we cannot wake up from.”
1 Riefenstahl. 2 Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. 3 My Mom Jayne
Two films that examine repression in Russia, particularly as it relates to any discussion of the war in Ukraine, are making an Oscar bid: My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow, a 5-hour 24-minute documentary by Julia Loktev, and Mr. Nobody Against Putin, directed by David Borenstein and co-directed by Pavel Talankin.
In recent years, the absence of a U.S. distribution deal hasn’t prevented documentaries from earning Oscar nominations—or in the case of No Other Land, from winning the Academy Award. Many hopefuls find themselves in the same boat this year. Four of them—Coexistence, My Ass!, Cutting Through Rocks, Heightened Scrutiny
and Life After are joining forces for a DIY FYC campaign. A similar effort last year yielded Oscar documentary shortlist recognition for Hollywoodgate and Union Holding Liat, winner of the top prize for documentary at the Berlin Film Festival, lacks U.S. distribution but is mounting a vigorous Oscar bid. The film directed by Brandon Kramer and produced by Lance Kramer follows the family of an American Israeli woman, Liat Beinin Atzili, in the days and weeks after she and her husband were seized by Hamas on October 7 and spirited off to captivity in Gaza. The film doesn’t cleave along typical “pro-Israeli” or “pro-Palestinian” faultlines, but takes its lead from the parents of Liat, who insisted that Palestinians should not be dehumanized in the rush to retaliate for October 7.
“Liat’s father’s experience and his perspective… was a narrative we did not see out there in the world,” Brandon Kramer notes. “Within days of Liat being taken, he was very vocal in saying that ‘I don’t want my daughter’s or son-inlaw’s pain or the trauma that my family is going through to be used to justify further violence against Palestinians.’ And we felt that that was a perspective that was really, really urgent and needed in this moment.”
Come See Me in the Good Light, Ryan White’s documentary about poet Andrea Gibson, earned a leading six nominations for the Cinema Eye Honors. It’s got the backing of Apple TV, but another film without U.S. distribution— Brittany Shyne’s Seeds—constitutes an X factor in this year’s Oscar race. Seeds is one of the most honored documentaries of the year, earning five Cinema Eye Honors nominations and the top prize for U.S. documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, among other awards.
Kim A. Snyder is coming off a
year in which she earned her first Oscar nomination, for the short documentary Death by Numbers She’s back in contention this year with the feature documentary The Librarians, her compelling look at how many librarians at public schools and libraries in the U.S. have come under vicious attack from people who accuse them, irrationally, of grooming children. Sarah Jessica Parker, who serves as an executive producer on the film, expresses alarm over what’s been happening.
“The safety and wellbeing of these librarians who are pursuing the idea of education, the gateway to information and curiosity—for anybody to step in the way of the opportunity to learn is really tragic,” Parker says. “The consequences of them trying to protect that is incredibly serious.”
Two filmmaker brothers enter Oscar contention with award-winning projects. Andrew Jarecki, an Oscar nominee and Emmy winner, uncovers shocking conditions behind prison walls in his HBO documentary The Alabama Solution, co-directed with Charlotte Kaufman—winner of Best Political Documentary at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. His brother Eugene Jarecki, meanwhile, contends with The Six Billion Dollar Man, a Watermelon Pictures release that takes a fresh look at Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It won two awards at Cannes—the Golden Globe Prize and the L’Oeil d’or Special Jury Prize.
It’s a wide-open race for Best Documentary Feature this year, making for excitement for Academy Awards watchers and anxiety for filmmakers. Clarity will come when the Oscar shortlists for documentary feature and documentary short (as well as eight other categories) are revealed on Tuesday, December 16. ★
1 My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 - Last Air in Moscow. 2 Come See Me in the Good Light.
The Alabama Solution.
A World of Choice
With a slew of titles from Berlin, Cannes and Venice, the race for Best International Feature Film is wide open
BY DAMON WISE
Just before lockdown struck in 2020, the Best International Feature Film category was about to break wide open, with South Korea’s surprise Best Picture winner Parasite bringing director Bong Joon Ho a near-unprecedented haul of four statuettes, from six nominations. The film’s success was across the board; apart from the main prize and the inevitable Best International win, there were noms for directing, screenplay, editing and production design. All the signs seemed to suggest that
the world was about to become a much smaller, friendlier place and that the language barriers would be coming down.
Instead, the spread of Covid-19 dealt a killer blow to production everywhere, and in its aftermath some of the old prejudices crept back in, a situation not exactly helped by an increasingly isolationist mood that seemed to spread to every country around the world. This year, however, there’s a possibility that the International category is finding its feet again, and there’s no better
example of this than Brazil’s entry
The Secret Agent. The story of a teacher forced underground by the country’s military dictatorship in 1977, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s genre-mashing thriller follows hard on the heels of last year’s winner, I’m Still Here, directed by Walter Salles and starring Fernanda Torres. In Cannes, Filho’s film won him the Best Director award, plus Best Actor for his star Wagner Moura, leading some to speculate that The Secret Agent could also migrate into other categories.
The same might be said of Norway’s Sentimental Value. The story of an arthouse film director trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Joachim Trier’s film could finally see some Oscar love for Stellan Skarsgård, who plays the talented but thoughtless father, and Renate Reinsve, as his daughter, a brilliant but troubled actress. Elle Fanning could also generate buzz for her part as an American starlet who inadvertently finds herself caught in their crossfire, while the script— co-written by Trier and his regular
Right: Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning in Sentimental Value; below: Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent
collaborator Eskil Vogt offers the kind of crisp emotion that voters often go for.
As luck would have it, even with his best-received film to date, Trier finds himself back in the situation he was in with his 2021 film The Worst Person in the World. A natural Best International winner in any other year, that film was stymied at every turn by Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car History seems set to repeat itself in the form of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, a satirical Iranian drama about a former political prisoner who, after trying to live a quiet life, encounters a man he thinks tortured him in jail. Panahi’s only attempt so far at the International category, with 1995’s The White Balloon, was scuppered when the Iranian government forced him to withdraw it. This time, France is backing him and it could pay off with a Best Director nom or more.
Another film that seems a likely lock for the shortlist is Tunisia’s submission, The Voice of Hind Rajab. Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, the film recreates the last hours of a little girl caught up in the war in Gaza, using recordings of her actual voice while actors play out the circumstances that conspired to prevent aid workers from getting to her in time. The film made an impression at the Venice film festival’s Sala Grande, receiving a 23-minute ovation,
but, mysteriously, lost out to Jim Jarmusch’s sedate Father Mother Sister Brother come the prize-giving, settling for the runner-up Grand Jury Prize. It’s possible that Ben Hania’s film might be too political, or just too raw, for the Academy, and there’s a chance that the slew of celebrity execs attached (including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón and Jonathan Glazer) could do more harm than good. Those four films seem pretty safe bets to make the cut, but the battle for fifth place is going to be interesting. One would think that
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice would be a good bet, having won TIFF’s inaugural International People’s Choice Award, but the South Korean stalwart has always had trouble cracking the American market. Indeed, No Other Choice was meant to be his second English-language movie after Stoker (2013), until the financing collapsed. Starring 2016 Academy inductee Lee Byung-hun as a papermill worker who turns to murder to get his job back, it’s a socially conscious black comedy that some feel is a little too much like Bong’s breakout hit to go the distance.
However, Park is a big name, and there’s a slim chance that voters will be taken by its normally deadpan star, who gives an untypically broad, comedic performance. But the shortlist is by no means a done deal, and, once again, this year’s Cannes Film Festival proved to be fertile ground for contenders across all the sections. From the Competition come three significant contenders, and the most obvious might seem to Belgium’s selection, Young Mothers, by Luc and JeanPierre Dardenne. But although the double Palme d’Or winners are arthouse darlings, Oscars have largely eluded them, except for 2014, when French actress Marion Cotillard was nominated for Two Days, One Night. Cotillard’s star power was a rarity for the Dardennes, however, and Young Mothers, about five women in a housing shelter, sees them returning to more familiar territory, using a cast of non-professionals and unknowns.
If Cannes voters were looking to make a statement, two other European Competition entries
1 The Voice of Hind Rajab. 2 No Other Choice. 3 It Was Just an Accident.
This year, there is a possibility that the International category is finding its feet again.
stand out. Put forward by Germany, Mascha Schilinski’s hypnotic Sound of Falling, the impressionistic study of four generations of women in a rural small town, could impress more adventurous voters, and the same is true of Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt. A genuine sleeper hit with solid wordof-mouth behind it, this story of a man infiltrating an underground rave tribe in a near-future dystopia is a risk that could pay off for Spain, especially if voters get to experience its terrific sound design in cinemas. The Philippines, though, might be guilty of wishful thinking with their choice of Lav Diaz’s Cannes Premiere Magellan, a 160-minute biopic (short by Diaz’s usual standards) of a 16th-century Portuguese explorer starring Mexico’s Gael García Bernal.
But the International category isn’t necessarily a showcase for style and technique; sometimes it’s a question of relatable
world-building. Launched during Critics’ Week on the Croisette, Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl was quickly snapped up by Netflix, perhaps encouraged by the participation of this year’s Oscar winner Sean Baker as co-writer and editor. A femalefronted drama about a mother and her two daughters who set up a stall in a Taipei night market, it features a scene-stealing performance from child actress Nina Ye, whose natural charm is the film’s secret weapon. Given the amount of noise in
the International category, voters will undoubtedly want a bit of guidance. Just like Sean Baker’s imprimatur, the seal of approval from Martin Scorsese might steer many to India’s entry, Homebound by Neeraj Ghaywan, which tells the story of two small town friends with dreams of joining the police force. The film also bears the laurels of Un Certain Regard, as does Colombia’s selection, A Poet, which won the sidebar’s Jury Prize. Directed by Simón Mesa Soto, this tragicomic tale of a washed-up artist trying to mentor
a teenage girl has been ubiquitous on the festival circuit.
Similarly well-traveled is Petra Volpe’s Late Shift, which may break a dry spell for Switzerland. Premiering at the Berlinale, this low-key but high-pressure story of a nurse on the edge received some very good reviews, largely praising the performance of its breakout star Leonie Benesch.
The real underdog story this year, however, is The President’s Cake; set in 1990, it tells the picaresque story of a 9-year-old girl forced to bake a gift for Saddam Hussein in honor of the dictator’s birthday. Not only did the film score rave reviews from its first appearance in Directors’ Fortnight, but Hasan Hadi’s debut is also the first film to be nominated by Iraq since 2005. For that reason alone, the stars might yet align for it in what’s currently looking like a wide-open year. ★
1 Left-Handed Girl. 2 A Poet. 3 The President's Cake.
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WHILE OTHER STARS ARE HEADING TO TV AND STREAMERS, LEONARDO DICAPRIO REMAINS COMMITTED TO THE IN-CINEMA EXPERIENCE, NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES. HERE, HE DISCUSSES PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON’S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, THE LATEST FILM TO PUT HIM IN THE OSCAR CONVERSATION, HIS PLANS TO WORK WITH MICHAEL MANN AGAIN, AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE CHALLENGES FACING THE KINDS OF MOVIES HE LOVES TO MAKE AND WATCH.
BY MIKE FLEMING JR.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY JOSH TELLES
If Leo DiCaprio had turned down
Titanic and played Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights, who knows what might have happened? Instead, he honored his agreement with James Cameron, and the rest is history.
But although the decision turned out to be the right one, DiCaprio often wondered if he might have missed his window to work with Paul Thomas Anderson, an opportunity that no amount of money can buy. Thirty years went by, until along came the script for One Battle After Another—a satirical take on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland—with an offer for DiCaprio to star as Bob, an
Antifa-like radical gone underground who is forced out of hiding to find his missing daughter (Chase Infiniti). But, like PTA’s previous Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, there’s a lot more to it than that, including a sadistic colonel (Sean Penn), a compassionate martial-arts sensei (Benicio del Toro) and an underground cabal of murderous right-wing businessmen called The Christmas Adventurers Club. That DiCaprio’s character navigates this perilous road—replete with highspeed car chases and gun battles—clad the entire time in a tatty bathrobe and leaves most of the heroism to others in the cast is entirely consistent with how he has run one of the great star careers of his era. After all, this is the same guy who, when faced with playing a virtuous lawman in Martin Scorsese’s Native American drama Killers of the Flower Moon had the script rewritten and overhauled so he could play the existentially tortured no-good who slowly poisons the Osage wife he loves, just to please his greedy uncle. It’s been a long, steady climb to the top. Look back at many of DiCaprio’s other best turns—from The Aviator to Revolutionary Road, Catch Me If You Can, The Revenant and Inception—and you can recognize his preference for flawed characters that put him through the emotional wringer. He also has an uncanny knack for attracting the best directors in the business, from Quentin Tarantino to Alejandro González Iñárritu, Steven Spielberg, Sam Mendes and, most famous of all, Martin Scorsese, who traded Robert De Niro for him as a muse after collaborating on 2002’s Gangs of New York and will shortly be pairing him with Jennifer Lawrence for their seventh film together, What Happens at Night DiCaprio’s commitment to sophisticated, auteur-driven adult movies is much-needed—the outlook for theatrical audiences is as bleak as ever. But, as he explains here, the biggest movie star leading that space is doing his part to uphold a legacy.
The reactions to One Battle After Another have been as strong as any I’ve observed since Oppenheimer and Sinners. I cannot imagine anyone feeling that way after watching a movie on a streaming site. It’s a respite from the current climate for original movies, which is bleak. Even your movie had to overcome an earlier narrative about its budget, before anyone had seen a frame of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film. How in decline is the ambitious original film made for the theatrical experience?
This year seems like one of the most lightning-rod moments in cinema history. We’re up against it—the future of the cinematic experience—more than ever, I feel. Getting people to come to the theaters seems like more and more of a challenge. That isn’t to say it can’t happen; the Barbie-Oppenheimer summer was an amazing thing, and hats off to those two incredible movies, but it certainly seems more and more like the theatrical experience is becoming more and more minimized for original material and completely new, out-of-the-box storytelling. And that’s possibly going to be subjugated to streamers now. Whereas the theatrical experience may be for the newer technological wonders that people want to experience in the theater.
I just hope that’s not the case, and I hope that there’s still room for original material going into the future. But, at the end of the day, man, the tide is changing. It’s going to be a fight, and things are going to have to become so unique for audiences that they garner it worthy to go see it in the theater.
That was never a line drawn by me, you, and the previous generation that went to see everything in the theater…
Is it becoming like collecting vinyl? Do we have to decide what categorizes the movies we’ll wait for to see on a streamer and what categorizes the movies that are worthy enough to see in the theater? It remains to be seen, but people always have that argument constantly about, “Oh, well, I’d prefer to watch it at home, and what’s the difference anyway?” I think there’s arguments to both. I guess I’m part of the old school ilk of people that love to be in a communal experience. I think we’re primates that feed off each other, and I just love going to the theater.
You can’t fake that feeling, like I had walking out of Oppenheimer or at the Chinese Theater premiere of your movie, and it’s nice to be able to be moved like that. I just saw it again. There was a small crowd, but they got every line, the shock registering when PTA wanted it to, the audience laughing where he wanted them to. I guess I’m saying, “Good on you, guys,” for holding up your end of the bargain. So let me launch into some important questions…
Left: Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another
Before you do that, I’d like to say that I’m so very proud of this movie. Proud to be involved in it, and really proud that however many people actually came to the theater to see it. The ones that did so really expressed a genuine and sincere feeling that it was made to be seen in the theaters, and that they really loved watching this movie there. The VistaVision thing is even more interesting because, as we’re talking about the endangerment of the cinematic experience, this movie went even more lo-fi, picking up an endangered and nearly extinct cinematic format that has, god, I don’t know how many cameras, but I think only four projectors. One in LA, one in Boston, one in New York and one in London. But it was really cool to hear people’s appreciation for being able to see something in a completely different format. We watched it that way in London, and to see that kind of flickering light strobe through the theater…
We are so inundated with such hi-fi experiences now that it actually took me 10 minutes to adjust to the feeling of film again. But then I really got into it. It was like playing a record and feeling the warmth of it. The Brutalist is the only other film since One-Eyed Jacks in 1961 to be shot in VistaVision. That was period, ours was a modern-day film. I’m not a film expert, I couldn’t talk to you about the exact differentiation between that and 35mm, but it certainly felt like things were more tactile and real and had a warmth to them. When I saw The Brutalist—or The Master, which was shot in 65mm—I felt like I was in that era. It was raw and real, and you felt like you could jump into that world. It was really cool to watch it in that format. And I’m really appreciative that, no matter how finite, the group of people who saw it that way loved the experience too. [Laughs.] On to your important questions.
After Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, the coolest Halloween costume was the Hawaiian shirt over the Champion sparkplug T-shirt that your co-star Brad Pitt wore as Rick Dalton’s stuntman Cliff Booth. How gratifying was it to see so many trick-or-treaters and partygoers this Halloween in a bathrobe, sunglasses, wool hat and a cell phone?
Definitely a cool experience. I even saw one on a baby, which was amazing. What’s funny is, I think that print of bathrobe actually became discontinued while we were making the movie. But there were enough out there that were similar. That costume… I think we talked about that costume more than any I’ve worn. In pre-production, we had the whole team—Paul and everybody— trying to figure out what my look should be, because it was going to be Bob’s superhero outfit throughout the rest of the movie.
There was one point in which Paul and I had come up with a parka that he would have had in his emergency kit. There would be a parka with all kinds of explosives in it. And then the sound guy came up to us and said, “No. No parka, no parka.” And then Paul and I were like, “Well, Bob’s sitting at home, he’s watching The Battle of Algiers again for the 200th time, and he’s in his sweatpants and his weird wide-toed shoes that he walks around in, getting stoned. It’s a little cold out but he’s got to go. Does he think about stripping down? Does he think about becoming the revolutionary? No, he’s got weed in his system, and he’s got to go.” So that became his one look for the rest of the movie. I love that he never takes anything off. He just keeps moving forward.
Same with Benicio’s sensei character and his karate pants. Exactly, and he’s got to go, too. It’s like you get these guys in this slice-of-life moment of what their day-to-day is like, and they’re on the move. And then I had this vision of those gigantic sunglasses that I remember from the ‘80s and ‘90s, the ones you put over your reading glasses. And that became his Star Wars outfit. We had a lot of different discussions about Bob’s look— days and days and days of what that look should be like. So, it was very gratifying, Halloween and all.
The film is full of meme-worthy laugh lines, from “semen demon”, “Viva la revolution!”, and “Thank you, Sensei” to the Christmas Adventurers Club. How do you land those without interrupting the tension in that propulsive narrative? Some of them were improvised, some were written in the script. “Viva la revolution!” just came out in that moment. We had a great flow, an amazing set decorator and location scout, and that rolling carpet down to [the Sensei’s] Harriet Tubman immigration center was already set up for us and it was our last goodbye. For that
whole sequence of lines, I have to give so much credit to Benicio who I got to work with probably the most in this film. He was so very specific about what his character was. He came out right from the set of The Phoenician Scheme, and he had this cacophony of amazing ideas of who Sensei was. And that’s why we really stopped production for three months to wait for him, because we knew that there was only one Sensei in this world, and that was Benicio. And he came in with so many different ideas. That whole Harriet Tubman thing came from his imagination. We had a whole other sequence set in place where I was going to make a kill. And he was like, “Well, if this guy kills somebody, what is my allegiance to him?”
Crossing that line from idealist to killer would have changed his character? We spoke about it for days. We were like, “Yeah, true. You do admire him. You’re an admirer of the French 75. You’re a revolutionary yourself, but how much are you going to risk your life for this guy?” That propelled us all to that sort of made-up road trip we came up with in a week. The whole immigration center that he had going on in his house, his entire family unit, that was all made up within a week. A lot of those lines between he and I were just improvised. He came in with that sense of ocean waves and that inner peace. His calmness with my hysteria, it happened on day one, we could feel it was a beautiful thing. I just give so much credit to Benicio for his specificity
”TO BE ABLE TO BE THE CONDUCTOR OF MY OWN CHOICES SINCE [TITANIC] HAS BEEN JUST THE GREATEST GIFT.”
LEONARDO DICAPRIO
and his character because it gave me so much to play off of, that “Thank you Sensei!” stuff just kind of happened. And then the “Viva la revolution!” stuff happened, and then the stuff on the rooftop with his guys. He imagined [the Sensei] would have a crew, and that he would have a crew at the hospital. He’d have crews everywhere. He’s got the whole neighborhood on tap. That was all made up. A lot of this stuff was improvised and a lot was written. It was a mixed bag.
It reminded me of Brad Pitt dropping off your Rick Dalton character on set, and spontaneously reminding him, “You’re Rick fucking Dalton, and don’t you forget it.” PTA and Quentin Tarantino are writer-director auteurs. How open are they to things they didn’t write?
Writer-directors are interesting, because there’s some things that are sacrilege to try to change. I include Marty, who, to a degree, writes his own work and certainly does tons of writing on the scripts for his movies, along with Quentin and Paul, very specific writer-directors who only do their own material. It’s about finding those sweet spots, those moments. They hire us for that reason, to find those moments, but it’s about navigating that within the context of the structure that they’ve written, because sometimes they have a very specific idea of what they want done according to their script. But, yeah, it’s about the actors finding those moments. And sometimes they use them and sometimes they don’t. You’ve just got to throw it out there as much as you can, whenever you feel it’s right.
Sean Penn said he grabbed PTA’s script when he was coming out of the shower and that he sat on the floor and didn’t even dress as he ripped through it. You were in earlier; how much did PTA let you under the hood as he wrote it? Or did you read the finished product like Sean? In that case, how did you react, knowing the journey you were taking with him?
Well, I would say it was the same as Sean. I mean, the way that character was written, Sean brought this incredible vulnerability and pitifulness to the character that made it not your typical villain. He brought a humanity to it that I saw immediately on screen. This vulnerability of a guy that wants to belong to the Christmas Adventurers Club—it’s become his only identity—and yet he’s battling this voracious appetite for Teyana Taylor’s character and is so heartbroken by it, he wants to erase it. There was just so much complexity that Sean brought. But I guess your question is… what is your question specifically?
It was about your reaction when you read the script, finding out where these characters were going and how they were going to get there, in scenes that move at 90 mph. Paul had put so much thought into this—15 to 20 years of thought into all these different characters—that it was obviously very personal to him, and it really tapped into the state of the world right now, the extremism that we all feel, from both sides. He did it in such an elegant, beautiful way with these very human protagonists that were all flawed. When I first read the script, I knew it was something incredibly special right out of the gate. I just loved how he goes against the norm with so many tropes that we see in movies. He just takes the opposite direction for my character. I just love that he was very equipped as a revolutionary, and you have this expectation of him being able to utilize all these tools from his past.
But then he’s put into a situation where he’s so ill-equipped at this particular moment to try to garner whatever skills he has, because he’s inebriated and he’s become lazy and just out of touch and disconnected with the world. I just imagined this man, sitting in this tiny little shack—and we looked at 10 different shacks to find the perfect one. I just imagined him sitting there, no internet, watching DVDs, completely paranoid. Maybe he goes out to the local bar, or does some mechanical scrap work in the back
of his yard, but his main objective is, “Don’t tread on me.” No government allowed, no social media, no nothing. And the one singular idea that Paul had that made it all cook was him just not remembering his password. I couldn’t believe how long this went on, whereas maybe that would be one blip in a story, in any normal screenplay that I usually read.
It certainly becomes the gift that kept giving, prompting numerous meltdowns by your character…
It becomes my entire identity—this goddamn password! The scenes just progressively became more and more tense, and the audience comes with you on this journey, where it’s like, “Goddammit, you finally found it at that right moment when the pressure’s on.” The tension that he created in that script was unbelievable. I always talk about tension in movies and stakes, however big or small, and whether the audience is with you. Each one of these characters has their own set of tensions— and they’re all converging. It’s like a pilot landing a plane without any autopilot, and [PTA] somehow lands the ending of this movie in such a brilliant way. It’s all done analog, and without any of the traditional expectations that you have for a movie. He landed this plane on his own and he did it brilliantly. It was all right there, written in that script. And I was just so proud and excited to be a part of it, right from the beginning.
When you did Killers of the Flower Moon, you encouraged Marty and Eric Roth to turn the whole narrative on its ear, and you went from being the good guy to the conflicted guy who was slowly poisoning the woman he loved for her oil rights fortune. How much of a say do you want when you’re an actor on a movie like One Battle After Another, compared to also being producer like on Killers, where you have sway in everything we’re going to see onscreen? In other words, how do I differentiate myself from just being an actor to somebody
One Battle After Another, from left: DiCaprio as Bob with Benicio Del Toro as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos; Sean Penn as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw; Chase Infiniti as Bob's daughter Willa; DiCaprio and director Paul Thomas Anderson on set.
who’s a producer of the movie and changing the structure?
Well, yeah. With Killers, that creative overhaul that you suggested—and which Marty, Eric Roth and Robert De Niro embraced— added at least a year to the development process. But it allowed you to make something more complex. It was darker and more diabolical, and it pulled you out of the traditional hero role. To me, it was worth it. Well, thank you, I appreciate that. I mean, what can I say other than it was a real gut instinct? The screenplay initially was the Tom White character [played by Jesse Plemons after DiCaprio switched from playing white hat to black hat], and this full investigation. I think, more than anything, it took away from Lily Gladstone’s character’s evolution. And [the rewrite] brought this horrifying story more into the household, this sort of diabolical, twisted household of manipulation, and made it less the white savior thing, which I think would’ve been, in my opinion, a mistake to go down. It brought us into the family dynamic where there was a certain amount of love, guilt and a horrifying betrayal at the same time. After talking to Marty, we just felt it was just a much more interesting way to go, with the psychology of how this man could do it, under the guise of manipulation from De Niro’s character, her dilemma of wanting to keep this family together, my character’s sort of schizophrenia, and what the right thing to do is.
It was heavily influenced by Montgomery Clift movies: A Place in the Sun, The Heiress, The Search, Red River. When we saw those movies, we were like, wow. What if we could mesh these things together to try
to create some sort of twisted look at all this while being able to bring the Osage and Molly into it, and the community into it more, rather than it being purely a film about the FBI’s investigation? Even though that script was very good, and it would’ve made another interesting movie, what I thought was that it would be a film about something the audience would’ve already figured out in the first 10 minutes of the movie. This way got us into the community more, the household more, and the inner family dynamics, which I just felt was more interesting and more heartbreaking.
You’ve said your biggest regret was not doing Boogie Nights with PTA, playing the Dirk Diggler role. The one you starred in instead won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, and for the longest time was the highest grossing film ever, making $2.2 billion. It stamped you as a globally bankable star that has allowed you the leverage to make films like One Battle After Another. Choosing Titanic was a smart move, to me. Can you recall what you felt when you had to choose?
Well, I think that was my answer to a question in the guise of speaking to Paul, and, without getting too personal about my own life, the question was, “What do you regret most?” We were sitting here talking about movies. It came from the standpoint of just being a fan of his work for so long. I do remember watching that movie and it being just a lightning rod moment for my generation. It was like the arrival of a new cinematic titan, one who was speaking to my generation. Now, I don’t think anyone could have done a better job than Mark Wahlberg in that movie, so I said it from the perspective
“THERE WERE SOME STUNTS THAT I DID AND SOME STUNTS THAT I DIDN’T. IF I WOULD’VE FALLEN OFF OF THAT ROOF, WE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN ABLE TO CONTINUE PRODUCTION.”
LEONARDO DICAPRIO
of being just a really sincere fan and then watching the way Paul has progressed as a storyteller with these very esoteric, existential films he’s made since then that keep you thinking. Boogie Nights was the launching pad for a new artist. So, it’s less about that specific film and more about wanting to have worked with Paul.
Any regrets about choosing Titanic? It launched you and Kate Winslet to enviable careers, but it sounded like a hellacious experience, with James Cameron going past double the original budget and all those scenes in cold water…
No regrets. I mean, fully now in retrospect, I look back at that film and realize the thanks and the appreciation that I have for being a part of it, and to have been able to be in this incredibly fortunate position and not only to have been a part of that movie, but to be able to be the conductor of my own choices since. That has been just the greatest gift. The dilemma for me at that point, was, of course I would’ve loved to have done both movies, but it just couldn’t happen at that moment. And then, here we are, all these years later and it’s this great sort of reconnection. We’ve gone on these paths together, and then to come back around and be able to collaborate with Paul on this is just amazing. But yeah, I mean that moment, I don’t know what my ability or my career would’ve been without that film making it possible to be able to steer the course of my own career. So, I’m very thankful.
You’ve prioritized great directors in choosing your film roles, Martin Scorsese being atop the list. What can you tell us about What Happens at Night, which puts you alongside another Oscar-winner in Jennifer Lawrence? The loose description conjures comparisons to The Shining and Shutter Island. What can you say about it, and do you hope to make it next?
It’s a work in progress. But what I do know is that Marty has this incredible yearning and connection to this material. I don’t know if I could compare it to The Shining or Shutter Island. I think he’s heavily influenced by films like Vertigo, in that the film that he wants to make is about human relationships, about the acceptance of grief, the ability to let go. It’s a love story, but it’s simultaneously about accepting the reality that you’re given in this life. It’s going to be an interesting journey. We’re still putting all the pieces together, but Marty has a very firm idea of what he wants to do, and there’s going to be a lot of exploration when we make this movie, because it can go in a lot of different directions. But at the core is this relationship between a man and a dying woman. They’re put into a set of circumstances where we don’t know what’s reality and what’s not.
From left: DiCaprio with Kate Winslet in Titanic; with his Oscar for The Revenant; as Hugh Glass in The Revenant; with Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon
You’ve also been working with Michael Mann on Heat 2, either as Chris Shiherlis, the role played by the late Val Kilmer, or Vincent Hanna, the detective played by Al Pacino. What can you share, and—as a guy who doesn’t usually do sequels—what are the challenges in continuing the storyline from the revered original?
This is very much its own movie. We’re still working on it, we’re a ways away from production. It tips its hat to Heat, but it’s an homage, and it picks up the story from there. The book is already out there, so there are no big secrets that I’m divulging. It’s set in the future, and the past, from that pivotal moment in what I think is the great crime noir film of my lifetime. It’s one of those films that just keeps resonating, that we keep talking about, that has been imitated so many times and influenced so many different movies. So, we’re working on it. But it’s certainly exciting, and I think I look at it as its own silo, in a sense. We can’t duplicate what Heat was, so it’s paying homage to that film, but giving it its own unique entity.
If you wanted me to know if you will play Hanna or Shiherlis, you probably would have said.
We’re discussing it. You know the book?
Loved the book. What do you think?
It’s a tough one. Shiherlis, unable to see his wife and son again, starts over in a new criminal enterprise and he’s got the big journey. But I love the Hanna character for his dogged pursuit of Neil McCauley. I’ve seen Heat 100 times, easy, and I wish I could help your decision. You’ll have to pick one. We’re in mid-discussion.
and gave short shrift to what will be the first pairing of two of the greatest actors of this generation?” I did another story, because he was right. Now, you came close on James Dean and again on The Aviator, and now it’s happening with Heat 2. This sounds a lot like your long-held desire to work with PTA. What I love about Michael Mann as an artist and as a person—and I’ve heard this from other actors along the way—is that he is extraordinary to work with, because there’s nothing that he hasn’t thought of. He’s thought of every single nuance and detail of the character, of the world, and he’s going to have an answer for any questions you might
Marty was the guy that I took it to. He picked up the script, saw the first page with The Aviator on it, and he said, “I don’t know anything about aviation.” And then he said, “But I didn’t know anything about boxing either when I did Raging Bull.” Then he delved into the character and the screenplay that Michael had set up, which was masterful, nuanced and fully realized. It was a struggle for me, because I was so obsessed with the later Hughes too. But it took us both a while to get to this one idea, where we were just focused on the onset of his degradation and his OCD, compounded by his germ phobia. And there’s another film to do, which is later on, which is him stuck in the hotel room in Vegas with inches of dust around his apartment building. But this was the onset of it, and the aviation stuff was spectacular. Michael really was the architect of all of that. And so, yeah, I’ve always wanted to work with Michael. He’s got an incredibly brilliant mind, and there’s no stone that he leaves unturned.
This a full-circle moment for me. My first conversation with Michael Mann came when I’d broken a story in Variety about how he and you had decided that the film about James Dean you were doing with him wasn’t going to work out. Wow, that was so long ago. My god, I was 18.
So, that was my headline, and then I wrote that he would instead pair Pacino and De Niro in this movie he’d written called Heat. He called me up and was rightfully pissed. He was like, “You wrote a story about a movie that isn’t happening
have. When we did the James Dean screen test, I remember it was at Warner Bros. They put a top hat on me. I did my best. I think we had two days to shoot a screen test. I was probably just a little too young at that time. Then we moved on to developing The Aviator together. That was the Howard Hughes book I remember carrying around in my backpack for almost 10 years, while I was voraciously reading about who that man was. I had a huge passion to play him. Michael developed that entire screenplay with John Logan, and it was just masterful. He had just done Ali, and after doing one major biopic, he didn’t want to do another, he said, “It’s yours, kid.” I said, “OK, thank you.”
It sets up that race to be a pioneer before his mental illness defeats him, ending in that heartbreaking scene where he repeats the phrase “The way of the future”. That was in the script. I remember Marty and I meeting with [screenwriter] John Logan. We wanted to rip the whole script apart. John very casually sat there as we slowly went through the entire script. He was like, “Yeah, but that’s already there.” Or “Well, we could flash-forward to this, but do you see that it’s already there?” Finally, we were like, “OK, you’re right.” We shot the script that Michael and John wrote, with some minor changes, but it was just one of the best screenplays that I ever got to be a part of making.
Your character in One Battle After Another starts out a fresh-faced revolutionary, but by the time he’s called on to find his daughter, he’s no John Wick out of retirement. He’s this pothead in the bathrobe, emerging out of a cloud of weed smoke. The hero moments fall to Benicio and Chase Infiniti, who plays your daughter. He’s a flawed character tasked with being more than mediocre. He has no superpower, or, if there ever was one, it has long ago been dulled by weed. Why do you like to play these kinds of roles?
From top: DiCaprio as Bob; DiCaprio with director Martin Scorsese and producer Michael Mann, after winning a Golden Globe for The Aviator
“SYDNEY SWEENEY GIVES A GAME-CHANGING KNOCKOUT OF A PERFORMANCE.”
OWEN GLEIBERMAN , VARIETY
“SYDNEY SWEENEY DISAPPEARS INTO THE ROLE. A HELL OF A CINEMATIC WATCH.”
KATE ERBLAND , INDIEWIRE
“ MORE THAN A BOXING STORY – IT’S A TALE OF SURVIVAL. A CAREER-BEST PERFORMANCE FROM SYDNEY SWEENEY.”
REBECCA FORD , VANITY FAIR
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION IN ALL CATEGORIES INCLUDING BEST ACTRESS
I talked about one singular idea that changes the course of the entire narrative, and that being not remembering the password. That became a theme that we then carried on through the rest of the film. The original screenplay did have, certainly, one ruthless heroic moment in the beginning, and then the tail end of how the movie ended was left TBD. I give a lot of credit to Paul, because every time we came to the fork of the road of my character doing something that was traditionally heroic, we’d both hem and haw. Sometimes that was literally on the street the day of shooting, or in the dojo on that day.
It was Benicio who said, “This is too much. If he’s going to kill one of these guys, I will have blood on my hands.” We kept on working on it, and we didn’t have a distinct idea of how the movie would end. I remember the moment where we were still delineating what to do, whether Bob has a traditional heroic moment at the end of the movie. And Paul said, “No, this needs to be passed on to the next generation. Her parents’ mistakes, the ideals of her extremist revolutionary parents, all that needs to be passed on to the next generation. She’s got to be faced with something that she never asked for, which is having a gun in her hand and saving her own life, because it’s now about her.”
movie, and Chase really, she is in a lot of ways the heart of this film. We met a lot of different actresses. I don’t want to say it’s her innocence, but when you meet this young lady in person, you want to do everything you can to make sure she’s OK. That projected on screen in such a dynamic way. You knew the audience is completely OK with the idea, we’re going to stop at nothing to make sure this young lady isn’t a sacrificial lamb to Bob’s past, or [his ex] Perfidia’s past, in the movie we’re stopping at nothing to save her. And she just encapsulates not only that, but the ferocity and the fighting spirit of her mom. She had the combination of both that really makes this movie cook and work, and she did
he’s fallen down two stories and then he gets tasered.
It sounds like when it comes to those kinds of stunts, it’s best to hand over the bathrobe to the stuntman. Well put.
Were you ever going to be part of the spinoff David Fincher is making about Brad Pitt’s character from Once Upon a Time…? There were some talks about it early on. Ultimately, I cannot wait to see the Cliff Booth story, but I’m not in it. I think David Fincher’s the perfect man for the job. Quentin is a huge fan of his work, I’m a huge fan of his work, and there’s nobody better to carry on that lineage and tell that story. I think it’s the next phase of Cliff Booth’s life. I’m excited to see it.
Anderson, DiCaprio and Del Toro on set.
“IF YOU LOVE BEING AN ACTOR, YOU HAVE TO REALIZE THAT IT’S A MARATHON, IT’S NOT A SPRINT. ”
You were good with that? I got it at that moment. I was like, “He’s totally right.” And these are just the choices that a master filmmaker makes in the moment that you have to give credit where credit is due and not take the obvious choice. People that I’ve spoken to do appreciate that aspect of the Bob character, that being a father at the end of this movie is his heroism, just the mere act of moving forward, the mere act of trying his best. It’s very humanizing, being there for his daughter. And if anything, his heroic moment is putting his arm around her in that car as they’re weeping together, driving away from this horrific carnage.
The real positive of you not playing the superhero is that it leaves oxygen for Chase Infiniti, who’s making her movie debut, and for Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor, who comes shot out of a cannon and makes the most of her 40 minutes or so of screen time.
Teyana and Regina are so pivotal in this
LEONARDO DICAPRIO
such an incredible breakout performance in this film. I’m so proud of her.
Your character falls off a roof. He dives out of a moving car. Was there a part of you that thought, “Y’know what? I’m going to Tom Cruise this shit and do it myself.” [Smiles]. There were some stunts that I did and some stunts I didn’t. If I would’ve fallen off of that roof, we wouldn’t have been able to continue production. Even the stunt guy had to do it on cables. There’s no way I would’ve pulled that off. Other things, I did what I could, or rather I did what Bob could do, like his inability to catch up with those [skateboard] guys right out of the gate. You think you’re going to go on the traditional espionage thriller, and then as soon as they’re on the rooftop, 10 seconds later,
Before anyone saw a frame of One Battle After Another, the press narrative was harsh, focusing on this being a huge gamble. It put Warner Bros. production chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy on their heels. The movie came out and reviews were rhapsodic. What do you think when you see these kinds of negative articles about your upcoming projects? I try not to pay attention to it. Every time you see stuff about what the budget of the movie was, it becomes a narrative about how much it’s going to make theatrically. We haven’t even counted on what it’s going to do, into next year. It remains to be seen. But back to what we were saying earlier, yeah, there is a distinct microscope on whether artistic original films garner or deserve the theatrical experience. And what can you say? I think that’s left up to audiences, and cinema-lovers. And I think that these films are still going to be made. It’s just in what context we’re going to be able to watch them, and how we’re going to experience them is going to be the difference.
We’re not falling short of an inundation of material and production. I think, going into the future, we’re going to see tons of original ideas, tons of movies being made, and limited series. The work is out there. It’s just the challenge of whether they’re going to be seen in theaters and how much is going to be taken over by AI and what movies are going to look like in the future. I don’t have a crystal ball, but as long as the people in our industry are going to be able to continue to
work—and hopefully they are—it’s the way of the future. [He smiles at using the Howard Hughes line.] And with anything… when television started, or the advent of radio or DVDs or MP3s or whatever, it’s all going to change. But hopefully people still want to see movies. That’s all I can hope for.
You told a story in one of our past interviews that when you were a teen, you turned down Hocus Pocus—the most money in your life you would have been paid up to then. Instead, you took a comparative pittance for the indie film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. That film helped get you to the next level. What would you say to an up-and-coming actor who’s seeing scripts that maybe are so-so but might be commercial hits and good paydays?
The thing that I could say more than anything is that if you love this profession, if you love being an actor, you have to realize that it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. And that’s not to say, “Oh, these are all pivotal choices. Don’t try something commercial. Don’t do this too early.” It’s about the idea of looking at your career 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, and putting those building blocks together to last. And maybe overexposure could be damaging. I think, if anything, I had somewhat of an instinct early on about overexposure. Granted, it was a different time. It was a time where I watched actors that kind of disappeared their personal life, and you didn’t know much about them. It’s much different now with social media. But I didn’t get to know much about them except what I saw on screen.
I got to see them build a body of great work over time, I wasn’t inundated with a massive explosion of too many films by them in one or two years. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t take the work when it’s given to you, but it’s the idea of doling it out, or maybe just taking those films that have great supporting characters that are interesting, and making your mark in the industry. I was very fortunate and very lucky, very early on. And like I said with Titanic, that was the real changing point, when I got to choose my own films. But until then, I did a lot of independent movies. I just went for the character that I thought was most interesting, and something that I could sink my teeth into.
It’s about the part. And sometimes even being in a movie that is massively successful—that isn’t about the focus on the humanity of these characters, or about making people understand something about the human condition—you don’t even get credit for. It becomes about the subject matter of the movie being successful. There are times when you can reap the rewards of that and times when you can’t. But like I said, I think for young actors it is about saying, “I want to be here for a long time. I don’t want to be overexposed.” ★
Infiniti And Beyond
How a 25-year-old unknown landed a part on the big screen opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro
BY DESTINY JACKSON
For Chase Infiniti
the future truly is limitless.
The 25-year-old Indianapolis native has achieved two major feats in the last two years: holding her own alongside Ruth Negga and Jake Gyllenhaal in Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent her first onscreen part—and then playing a key role in her first feature, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle
After Another, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor.
“You couldn’t have told me three years ago that I would be where I am now, and getting the opportunity to be in the rooms or projects that I’m in with some of the most legendary people in the industry—it’s unbelievable,” Infiniti says.
Infiniti credits the “sheer determination of a 10-year-old” and living in a “creative-forward household” for setting her on this path. Her parents often took her and her sister to theater productions, fueling a desire to emulate what she saw onstage. “I never wanted to do anything else,” she says.
“My parents showered me with so much love that I felt empowered, but they also taught me that with dedication and hard work, you get what you want.”
In high school, she threw herself into choir and theater, later joining Indianapolis’ Summer Stock Stage program, where she starred as Dragon in Shrek the Musical at 15 and the Leading Player in Pippin at 17. In 2022, just a year after earning her musical theater degree from Columbia College Chicago, her hard work paid off. She would go on to book Presumed Innocent, playing the teenage daughter of Negga and Gyllenhaal, and
while working on that she learned about the audition for One Battle After Another an opportunity she almost missed in her crowded inbox. While sifting through “a significant number of auditions,” Infiniti noticed an email about a mysterious, anonymous project. Intrigued, she submitted a self-tape and moved on, unaware that it would lead to multiple callbacks and an invitation from Anderson to attend a fourday intensive karate training class in LA. Upon completion of the class, he offered her the role. “My brain could not compute how massive this project was,” Infiniti laughs.
In the film, Infiniti plays Willa Ferguson, the fearless daughter of former revolutionaries Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor). Willa is forced to flee Bob and Perfidia’s nemesis, Colonel Lockjaw (Penn), who is determined to hunt her down.
“I didn’t get the script until halfway through auditioning,” Infiniti says. “But when I did, it was a real page-turner. Willa has no fear. I can relate to her stubbornness and resilience, but I don’t think I could handle what she goes through. Her strength is never-ending.”
One of the film’s pivotal scenes involves Willa’s verbal and physical confrontation with Lockjaw, a racist who suspects Willa may be his mixed-race daughter after a past liaison with Perfidia. His obsession with killing her is rooted in his desire to join an elite white supremacist group, where interracial relationships are forbidden.
“It was so rewarding getting to work with Sean Penn,” Infiniti says. “Paul, Sean and I created this dance of how the DNA test scene would go. We played with it in so many ways, and it became one of my favorite scenes. You finally see the two people
who should never meet come face-to-face. Willa becomes truly fearless with someone she should be terrified of, but she never shows it.”
Working with DiCaprio also shaped her process. He plays Bob as a well-meaning but paranoid, pot-addicted father struggling to raise a biracial daughter alone. “Leo taught me so much,” she says. “Watching the freedom he had with his character choices was wonderful. I feel fortunate to have worked on Paul’s set with such an incredible cast.”
Infiniti also drew from her own identity as a biracial woman, conversations with Anderson—who has a biracial family with partner Maya Rudolph—and her interactions with his children. “Paul and I talked a lot about Willa being mixed race and about his life with his kids,” she explains. “I brought my experiences as a mixed 16-year-old in spaces where you don’t feel like you see anyone who looks like you.”
Now that One Battle is behind her, Infiniti is looking ahead as she prepares for what is destined to be a meteoric rise. She has already been cast in The Handmaid’s Tale spin-off, The Testaments, and the comingof-age drama The Julia Set alongside Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
“Willa’s fearlessness is on a completely different level from mine,” Infiniti says. “But I love pushing myself, especially in acting, because it helps me discover more about who I am. I’m only 25—I have so much more life to experience. On Paul’s movie, on The Testaments, on Presumed Innocent, I learned things about myself. Every job teaches me something, and I can’t wait to keep being a student. The fearlessness with work comes from the urge to continue to learn.”
Chase Infiniti breaks out in One Battle After Another
The of
Craft
Frankenstein
How the cinematography, production design, editing, costume design & score brought Guillermo del Toro’s dream to life
By Ryan Fleming
From top: Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Chief Officer Larsen; Jacob Elordi as The Creature; Guillermo del Toro and Oscar Isaac on set; Felix Kammerer as William Frankenstein and Mia Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza in Frankenstein
or a director like Guillermo del Toro, you can only imagine what he’ll do when he gets to create his fantasy project. With Frankenstein, Del Toro and his crew of craft collaborators were finally able to achieve his years-long dream of bringing Mary Shelley’s book—in which scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a humanoid being—to life.
“It was his dream masterpiece and the summit of his triptych—the creature of The Shape of Water, the creature of Pinocchio and the creature of Frankenstein,” says composer Alexandre Desplat.
“The first time I heard about Frankenstein was many, many years ago when we shot Mimic, says cinematographer Dan Laustsen. “He talked about that as his dream project. I read and love the book, but then I got the screenplay and it was something different. I shouldn’t be surprised, that’s Guillermo del Toro’s way to look at the world and that’s what I love.”
One of the first changes that Del Toro decided early on was to move the time period from the late 18th century, from the book, to the 1850s. Even with the shift, it was important for every department to not use the period as the sole focal point for inspiration.
“We didn’t want it to be a ‘period score’, like early 19th century, but there had to be something that’s connecting us with that time,” says Desplat.
As Desplat says, if Del Toro wanted a period score, he could simply use Beethoven or another composer from the era, but what he really wanted was a modern interpretation. “It’s a tale, so there’s a fantasy about it that allows us to be away from any period reference.
“When you use violin and flutes, it sounds classical depending on how
you write it, so you keep the sound of these instruments but you try to make it sound like if it was today.”
For the sets, production designer Tamara Deverell did thorough research on what medical and scientific technology would be available at that time for Victor. “Guillermo insisted we go to the Hunterian Museum, which wasn’t even open at the time,” says Deverell. “They were under renovation, but they allowed us to look at the actual Evelyn tables and all the medical gear.”
The Evelyn tables are the oldest surviving anatomical preparations, made from real human tissue, dissected blood vessels and nerves glued to wooden boards and covered in varnish. Deverell says she took more than 3,000 images at the museum for inspiration.
1 Elordi as The Creature and Isaac as Victor Frankenstein. 2 Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza.
3 Isaac as Frankenstein in his lab. 4 Del Toro with production designer Tamara Deverell on set.
While Desplat avoided the period and Deverell embraced it, costume designer Kate Hawley chose to focus on her history with Shelley’s book and Del Toro’s script for inspiration. “My first job and allegiance are to my director and the text, that’s my bible,” says Hawley. “When you read the script and see how rich the themes are of religion and mythology and nature running wild and untamed… the tonal aspect of it still captured all of those things with the novel, the loneliness, the melancholy, the sense of memories and seasons. And when Guillermo talked about color being a way to suggest its own gothic quality and keep those links to the tone and world of writing, that all felt like part of Frankenstein.”
Crafting the color palette was a big undertaking, with a collaborative focus from Deverell, Hawley and Laustsen to achieve a consistent look throughout the film, beginning in the Arctic. “If you think about it in terms of movements, you’ve got The Creature’s story, Victor’s story and you’ve got the Arctic as the link,” says Hawley. “The Arctic’s almost all white with pale blue and gold tones, almost like a limbo space. The captain is almost evocative of Peter at the gate, listening to the story and judgment will come at the end.”
“For the ice field, we had this Caspar David Friedrich painting of an ice field that Guillermo just loved,” says Deverell. “We specifically copied those icebergs and that whole ice field.”
The color palette for Victor’s story was black and white, with a through line of a specific red that Del Toro calls pigeon blood. “The image of red is first established with Victor’s mother on the steps of the house,” says Hawley. “You hear her voice more than see her, it’s an abstract thing so that color served as part of the operatic tone of the piece.”
In contrast, Elizabeth’s palette was greener and more ethereal. “We painted all the veils and translucent layers with color suggestive of that ephemeral nature,” says Hawley. “We used a lot of layering of color, rather than flat color, because Guillermo wanted really intense colors that still had to sit tonally with depth.”
For cinematography, Laustsen’s approach to color was driven by the use of light. “When we first see The Creature in Victor’s bedroom, he opens the blinds and the very warm sunlight comes into this first meeting with father and son,” he says.
“At the beginning, the relationship was very romantic, and later in the story, when everything’s getting a bit tenser, we are going away from the warm light.”
As Victor’s opinion of The Creature grows colder, so does the light used to illuminate his holding cell, until Elizabeth meets The Creature again carrying warm light with the candles that contrast the dark, cold appearance of the room. “We like using single source lighting a lot, because we like when the highlight is bright, but the shadow has to be as dark as possible,” says Laustsen. “So, when you have candlelight, that’s going to be the key light, but we still try to have this contrasting blue in the background so it’s not completely monochromatic.”
For The Creature, the color palette of the clothing was not as important to Hawley as what each item represented and how it matched his appearance. “Guillermo was talking a lot about the translucent pallor of The
1 Mia Goth as Claire Frankenstein and Christian Convery as young Victor. 2 Lars Mikkelsen as Captain Anderson. 3 Elordi. 4 Del Toro on set with cinematographer Dan Laustsen. 5 Sofia Galasso as the Little Girl and David Bradley as the Blind Man.
GRAMMY® NOMINEE
BEST MUSIC FILM HMMA WINNER
DOCUMENTARY FILM
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
“Dear Me”
Music and Lyric by DIANE WARREN
Performed by KESHA
FROM THE DOCUMENTARY
Creature’s skin, almost the childlike waxiness, evocative of 18th century anatomy models,” she says. “The first stage of his wardrobe was a coat remnant from a dead man on the Crimean battlefield. When The Creature talks about being made up of the memories of other men, that coat does the same thing. It’s a heightened language and it’s constructed in a way that’s evocative of flayed skin.”
His clothing changes with his state of mind, as he goes to the mill and experiences love and friendship from the Blind Man. “That’s where he begins to learn language and gains eloquence, and when he gains the other external layers,” says Hawley. “He’s almost a noble or a prince in his fairytale.”
The Creature’s state of mind became a focus for Desplat, who found the most important decision in the score to be finding their sound. “With this extreme strength, this overly powerful thing created by Frankenstein, I suggested we go the opposite way and find the smallest, most fragile beautiful and precious instrument, which is the violin with its pure sound,” he says. “If you look carefully, all of these characters are seeking love, so the violin would really convey to the audience the emotions of this creature, the deeper sensations that he’s feeling and the way his emotions are blossoming.”
The emotional impact of the film actually led editor Evan Schiff to be “emotionally exhausted” when editing a few of the scenes. “One of the more emotionally involved scenes was at the very end when The Creature and Victor are coming to a level of forgiveness with each other,” says Schiff. “That’s one where you really have to invest yourself and feel what the actors are giving you in those dailies.”
Schiff worked closely with Del Toro every day on set in the edit room, which is not the norm for directors. “He comes in and edits every single day during the shoot,” he says. “By the time the shoot actually wrapped, our cut was much more advanced than normal. It was beyond where a director’s cut would be, and everything had temp music and VFX in it, so within three weeks after wrapping the shoot, we were showing it to people for notes.” ★
1 Isaac as Frankenstein.
2 Elordi and Goth.
3 Del Toro on set with Elordi. 4 Del Toro on set with costume designer Kate Hawley.
5 Prosthetic makeup effects department head Mike Hill creating The Creature.
“It was his dream masterpiece and the summit of his triptych— the creature of The Shape of Water, the creature of Pinocchio and the creature of Frankenstein.”
Alexandre Desplat
“She’s just crazy! But she writes great songs.”
P
Dialogue
Kerry Condon
With roles in both Train Dreams and F1 receiving buzz this year, the actress shows the true depth of her range
BY ANTONIA BLYTH
IN CONVERSATION WITH SOME OF THE LEADING OSCAR CONTENDERS
Leo Woodall
Hikari
Nia DaCosta
See you in court The British actor takes a bold stand in James Vanderbilt's Nazi trial drama Nuremberg 88
Hire education The director taps Japanese culture and modern loneliness with Brendan Fraser in Rental Family 92
Under the affluence The writer-director of Hedda brings a brand new take on Henrik Ibsen's iconic stage heroine. 96
This year is yet another doozy for Kerry Condon. Having earned her first Oscar nomination for her role in 2023’s The Banshees of Inisherin, this season, Condon is in contention for not one, but two films. In Train Dreams, the Clint Bentleydirected movie based on Denis Johnson’s novella, Condon is Claire Thompson, friend to Robert Grainier, Joel Edgerton’s reclusive railroad worker. Then, in Joseph Kosinski’s F1: The Movie, Condon is Kate McKenna, a racing car engineer who tangles with Brad Pitt’s driver character Sonny Hayes. Here, she digs into how her love of nature drew her to Train Dreams' rural setting, and her F1 research process alongside a real-life female Formula One engineer.
What sold you on Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s script for Train Dreams?
It was the nature aspect of the script. The nature is such a big part. It’s like a character in the movie. And I’ve always loved movies with nature being a character. I really respect nature and love nature, and I wanted it to be represented in a movie. So it was that. It was the lines that Bill Macy’s character has, some of those beautiful lines about cutting trees down and how it affects your soul—that made me think, “Oh, this is a beautiful movie.” I just wanted to be in it. I just thought it was beautiful.
You have a great speech in the fire tower with Joel where you talk about the power of nature and you help him manage his pain. The way things were phrased and said and were all connected because I suppose I’ve seen grief in other movies and stuff. So this was just so profound, the connection to nature and that was what it was.
You have a farm yourself and so you’re personally immersed in nature in your own life. How did being on the set in that Washington state environment, which was quite rustic, help you with the character of Claire? Well, it was gas because in the
script, she feels like an old friend [to Robert]. So there was something about it that immediately he felt at ease with her.
Joel and I had met when I was 19 on Ned Kelly in Australia. So it was a big time in my life to be on such a big movie. And in that movie, we were both on horses in our first scene. And then on this movie, we’re on the horse and cart in our first scene. It was just wild to me. It just felt very full circle. That stood out to me. I thought, Wow, here we are all those years later and we’re around horses again. And the Pacific Northwest is part of the country that I love and where I have my farm. The fact that I was shooting there again felt very like, this is crazy, I feel like I’m meant to do this movie.
This film is full of kismet because of Joel wanting to buy the rights years ago and then suddenly he gets this phone call. “Would you like to play this character in this really obscure novella?” And he’s like... I can believe it.
Timing is everything, isn’t it? And he admitted that had he done it years before, it might not have meant as much to him as it does now, given that he has a family.
Tell me about working with Clint as a director. Can you describe the kind of set he commands?
I remember thinking, “I think he sees the world how I see the world.” And so that was why I wanted to do it. I was like, “I just want to be in this movie. This is so beautiful.” And then he’d done a movie about a jockey. And I was like, OK, I’m already sold. Because I pretend to be a jockey in my free time. I have ex-racehorses and I’m obsessed with race riding and the discipline of being a jockey. In our meeting when we did a Zoom, we both just spoke about racehorses and horse racing and riding horses because his dad is a jockey. He’s in it for the right reasons is probably the best way to put it. He definitely is in it from an artistic perspective as opposed to, “I want to make big-name movies”—a meaningless reason for wanting to be a director. He really does want to make his art and think about working class people. And there’s a kindness to him in the way that I think he sees the world like that. There’s an empathy to him. But set-wise, he’s very respectful of every department and hires great heads of department, which is usually how you make a great movie. He didn’t take it for granted that I took time out of F1 to come and shoot it. And he was just genuinely very grateful, which was not lost on me. And then he just knew when to hide, which is hard to explain, but because we shot
with natural light, Adolpho [Veloso, the cinematographer] would hide somewhere with the camera, so you weren’t really aware of where the camera was. And I didn’t know where Clint was. He was really good at hiding.
You can tell it’s natural light. That scene on the balcony, it feels so real.
That light on our faces is the sun going down. That’s all natural light. It’s really beautiful. And that’s half of it too. If the budget of the movie isn’t big, the lighting has to be good. I mean, the minute the lighting’s not good, it just looks cheap. So that was important. Clint has good taste.
For F1, I know you met with real engineers. What was that like and how did that influence you?
The first thing they did was send me and the other guys on the pit wall to Barcelona to experience a Formula One race, because I’d never experienced it. And a lot of the heads of department were meeting with other Formula One people and we were just getting the lay of the land. And then I was introduced to a real-life strategist, Bernie Collins is her name. And in the movie, I play a technical director, who’s in charge of building the car, but we take a little artistic license in that. There’s moments where I’m playing the strategist
also, but in real life, telling [the team] we’re going to use plan A or plan B, that would be the strategist. So we married the two for the sake of the movie. And in real life, Bernie is a strategist and she is from Ireland. So it was wild. I was like, oh, my god, she has the same school background—an all-girls Catholic school kind of thing. To me, I was like, this is like girls I went to school with who were really good at physics. I just was not good at physics. I was more biology.
It was crazy how technical it was. She was really good at knowing when to stop. Because at a certain point I was like, “Bernie, what are you talking about?” I would need to go to college [to understand]. So, she would break it down very easy for me. I read a great Adrian Newey book [How to Build a Car]. It was actually really interesting, even though I’m not into physics. Then basically, we went scene by scene, and she explained things to me, particular lines and stuff. But to really master how I would make a Formula One car, I mean, Christ, I’d have to go to college for years.
The technical stuff that I had to say, I knew I had to say it in a way [as if] I say it all the time, but I also had to say it in a way the audience knew what I was saying. I couldn’t alienate a whole audience that didn’t understand Formula One. So it was a balance. I think me not knowing about Formula One was helpful because I remember thinking, “Oh, we want to reach all those people. We don’t just want to sell
the movie to people who are fans of Formula One.”
I was with you the whole time and I understand nothing about physics. OK, great. It worked.
What was it like to shoot in the real racetrack environment?
Oh, it was great. I was given the heads-up before I got the job. Joe was like, “There’s a live aspect to this. We’re going to be filming live at the races. So you’re only going to get two takes, maybe three, so your theater background’s really going to help.” And I don’t know, I’m just great with pressure. I always prefer pressure, and Joe was so prepared and our AD department were unbelievable. So you were very able to say, “This isn’t working for me,” or, “I don’t understand.”
The headset, we really had Damson [Idris] and Brad [Pitt] doing the feedback, but if we wanted particular lines gone that weren’t helpful and impeded the flow, we could get rid of them and they were very accommodating. So, we were really prepared. When it came to shooting on the day of the races, it was more like we were excited because we prepared so much. But I was aware that we were guests of Formula One too. And so I didn’t really hang around when I wasn’t working. I didn’t cause any distractions or go mingle with any particular team. I just kind of laid low and did my job and then scurried back to my trailer to just not be a nuisance.
You didn’t get a chance to drive? Everyone says that to me and I’m like, “You can’t just drive those cars.” Even Brad can’t drive a Formula One… Well, actually he did
I heard that.
Of course he did. He could do everything, but one can’t just... They’re not like a car with a gearstick and everything. It’s a whole... You have to work your way up to a Formula One car. There’s buttons and all that. It’s not like a regular car. If I sit in it, I wouldn’t even know what to do. I wouldn’t even know how to turn it on.
Also, I imagine you take one tiny wrong turn and that’s $10 million down the toilet. Well, there was a bit of that. There was some accident in Abu Dhabi. I remember I knew I was getting really into my character when I was like, “Well, how much did that cost us?” They were like, “Oh, I think it’s like $150,000.” I was like, “Fuck’s sake, guys.” Then the technical director of Mercedes, Toto Wolff was like, “That’s exactly what you think of when there’s an accident.” Obviously, if the person’s OK, but then you immediately go, “How much money is that?”
You were in the zone. I know.
The dynamic between you and Brad, it’s flirty, but your character is also powerful. How did you build that dynamic? And was there a long rehearsal process? We rehearsed all the scenes before we shot them, but they were all shot crazy out of order. My first big scene with him would’ve been the pub scene. Then we go on strike as actors for like nine months. And then we came back after nine months and the first scene I shoot with him is the last scene in the movie. The goodbye. It was just crazy. And then we did another break for two months when I went and did another movie. And then my first scene when I came back was
the balcony scene in Vegas. I was like, wait, of course. Of course it is. I knew that they appreciated that I was rolling with it because it was unfortunate. The schedule was the schedule. But that was tricky to try and figure out how flirty to be, or not flirty to be.
If you go to an all-girls school, in my experience, when you leave school, you have no experience with boys except when you’re drunk. And that’s really the only time you talk to a boy is when you’re absolutely plastered, because you just have no experience. And if somebody’s going to college and learning how to be an engineer and get into F1, they have to study like crazy. So I thought, Oh, maybe I’ll play with the idea of she’s super confident at work, but maybe she’s actually kind of shy, and shy around guys. I also wanted that to be represented because I don’t know, there are so many movies where the woman’s very confident and knows exactly what to say.
The moment in the bar where you get the guys together in order to mend fences is such a great scene.
That’s crazy because it’s so funny. When I think about that, every time people talk about that scene, all I think about is it was two days in a very small room with so much smoke to make it look pretty. And then the continuity was tricky because of the cards. So that scene was, dare I say, a bit of a headache.
These two films are obviously so different. What’s still on the list of things that you’d love to do?
It’s wild. It’s like the first time in my life, in the last few years where I’ve been in a position where I can wait and in a position where I’m being offered things. For so long, I was auditioning and then just had to work. I didn’t have the good fortune. It used to annoy me when actors were waiting. I’m like, “Well, I have to pay rent.” ★
Condon with Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams.
Leo Woodall
How the British actor scored a masterclass working with Russell Crowe and Rami Malek in Nuremberg
BY BAZ BAMIGBOYE
British actor Leo Woodall, aged 29, has smashed it playing Renee Zellweger’s hunk du jour in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, a heartthrob in Netflix weepie One Day and by playing leads in television dramas. Now, he excels in portraying Sergeant Howie Triest, a young U.S. interpreter tasked with translating the words uttered by Nazi war criminals in director James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, which sees him step up against Academy awardwinning stars Russell Crowe as Luftwaffe supreme commander Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley. Next year, Woodall will be seen in Daniel Roher’s Tuner opposite two-time Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman.
Howie can’t let those Nuremberg Nazis know his real background—that he’s Jewish—he has to keep it from them and that underpins your performance. I loved playing Howie, not just because he was such an extraordinary man. It’s funny because Howie, he was there in the room, and I felt like I was there in the room for Rami and Russell’s dynamic, and it was fascinating for me to get to experience that. There were so many fascinating conversations between those two, between Rami and [Rudolf] Hess and Rami and [Julius] Streicher that Howie was in the room for that no one else really necessarily got to experience firsthand. So, it was really wonderful for me to get to be there for that, but also to have this whole other thing happening that the Nazis don’t know about.
How did you ensure that your German was fluent? It’s been said that you couldn’t speak a word of the language before you heard about the movie.
I can’t fully remember how much I was given for the first round of auditioning which was just a selftape. There was lots of German and I learnt as much as I could. But there was so much of it that I remember thinking, OK, I’m going to flunk this whole tape if I try and get every single sentence in. So, I’m actually just going to do that portion and let it breathe a little bit. But then I met with Jamie [Vanderbilt] and he gave me more and more information to work with. But then it was a while before I eventually got the role and I’d kind of given up hope at that point. I’d thought about it a lot. I had tried to manifest it and it was at a point where I was like, “It’s done. It’s not going to happen.” There was a particular day where my whole team were like, “Are you free today for a call?” And whenever your whole team wants you to jump on a call, you think, “There could be some news here.” I thought, I wonder if it’s Nuremberg.
I really fucking hope it is. It was a really joyful moment.
How did you tackle the actual studying of German?
I had a German coach. Her name is Lena Lessing. She was wonderful and she was very patient with me; very encouraging. We worked once or twice a week on Zoom. We didn’t meet in person until we were on set together. And I am going to give a little bit of luck to it that I just could make some of the sounds. But it was hard work. It was one of the hardest things that I’ve had to learn to do for a role. And there were points where, because my first day was with Rami and Russell translating the first time their characters meet. That was my first day, so the nerves were beyond [stretching his arms]. And even if I was just speaking English, I would’ve still felt the nerves. But I had to nail this German. I knew Russell was going to be speaking German too. And so, I just fucking drilled and drilled and drilled and I was just talking to myself in German as much as I could. It’s funny, everyone makes mistakes on set, but I put the pressure on myself to not make a single fucking mistake.
Was that because you were working with two Academy Award-winning actors? Yeah, I put a lot of pressure on myself and I felt like there was a
Top: Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring in Nuremberg; Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley.
lot of responsibility to just step up and if I couldn’t stand next to them and act, it would’ve been a really shitty day. [Laughs].
So, how’d it go? [Smiles] It went alright.
Had you met them before that first day of shooting?
I met Russell very briefly at the table read. I had dinner with Rami once and maybe saw him again before we started shooting. But the fear of the unknown is a really powerful thing and it’s a scary thing. And watching how the two of them work on set, Russell just sits there and he thinks, and he may mutter something to himself and Rami is just like he’s thinking of the next thing to do in between every take… And it was a lot for me to feed off and learn from. I was very lucky.
And how was Russell’s German? It was good. No, it was really good. And I knew it was going to be good. That’s one of the reasons why I secretly wanted it to be better, to be up to his mark. But there was no chance of that.
When I saw you in Tuner opposite Dustin Hoffman in Telluride, the thought crossed my mind that you were getting a masterclass from Hoffman, from Russell Crowe, from Rami and Renee Zellweger and Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Bridget Jones movie. You choose well, right?
I think with all of those guys, we all knew from the get-go that they were involved. Of course, it’s always exciting to start something and find out who you’re going to be working with. This is a very small world, but at the same time there’s a lot of actors in it. There are a lot of performances that I’ve seen and admired and actors that I admire. I’m a jammy bastard that I’ve got to work with so many of the greats and learn from them as much as I can. And Dustin was… I don’t think it will get better than Dustin.
What did you learn from them? They all have their own process and their own job to do. And I never want to be annoying. If I feel like the time is right, then I will maybe pick their brain a little bit. But I think what’s wonderful about the greats is that they’re generous and they want the younger actors to join them. They want them to do well and hone their craft because they’ll come at a time where they’re maybe like, “I’m done with this now, and now I get to just sit back and watch.” And there needs to be actors who’ve learned and are doing work that is acceptable to them [chuckles] and entertaining and interesting. And they, above all else, they’re just good people. I’m lucky enough to have not encountered someone who is so secretive and protective of their own thing that they don’t want to see others soak up any of their greatness.
Were there things about these Nazi war criminals that you had not known about before?
I’d learned about the Holocaust and World War II in school and just through living life. You can’t not learn about it along the way. But the clip that they play in the courtroom, for instance, [showing footage from concentration camps] no, I hadn’t encountered that before. I’d maybe seen a snippet of that in a documentary at some point. But that was [shaking his head as if to recoil from the horror]… You’re supposed to sit there and have the longest, hardest seven minutes of your life and it doesn’t let up. The original that they played back then, I think
it’s 57 minutes long or something like that.
Howie’s journey astounded me, fleeing Germany alone, learning English relatively quickly and then passing himself off as a completely authentic American. And then joining the Army and his first deployment is on D-Day. You look at his story alone and it could be its own film.
The real Howie died in 2016, aged 93. Were you able to speak to his sons or other close relatives? Not beforehand. I didn’t know how. I had thought about it and I just thought there’s just no way I’m going to be able to get in touch. Little did I know I probably could have if I’d really used the resources. But I have since met two of his grandchildren. It was in Telluride, where I met a young woman named Katie who said, “You’ve just played my grandfather in Nuremberg.” And it was a complete out-of-body experience. Nuremberg wasn’t even screening there. She lives there. Katie has lived there for 17 years or so, and she has a birdwatching company. It’s such a small town, they all know each other. And she was told that there’s a film coming out about her grandfather. They found out who was playing him; found out it was me. I was just coming out of a screening of a movie, and there she was. I welled up and she gave me a big hug. And I arranged for her and her brother to come see the movie in Toronto. They were there and I was very nervous about a lot of it, but particularly nervous that they wouldn’t
approve, they wouldn’t like it, whatever. But they did. And they said that Howie, their grandfather, would’ve been proud. It was a very humbling experience.
I was thinking about the scene at the train station where you and Rami have this heartbreaking, unforgettable conversation that’s six or seven minutes long where you tell Howie’s story. How did you prepare for that? Well, first and foremost, I knew exactly what I was going to do. But that’s obviously basic. I think with that scene, I discussed it with Jamie [Vanderbilt] quite a bit beforehand on the tone of the scene. And obviously in movie world, it’s a scene where it has a big crescendo and it’s all emotional. But we both agreed that it didn’t need to be that. And what was most important was that he just tells Kelley the story.
Underplaying it makes it all the more powerful.
I think so, because then it meant that whatever happened in my body just happens. It doesn’t matter what, as long as I just tell the fucking story, tell him what happened. We just talked about all the inner dialogue and everything bubbling away in Howie up until that point. I was lucky that we didn’t shoot that on the first day because it was so helpful to play all those scenes in the cells and all those other scenes where I have to keep it, keep everything in, and then finally tell him the truth about Howie.
The force of those four words: “I was raised here,” delivers a jolt. And then you talk about Howie’s appearance—the blonde hair and blue eyes—and you say “I never got hassled,” because they didn’t know about Howie’s religion.
At the Toronto screening, that got quite a laugh. The blonde hair, blue eyes, and the “I never got hassled so much” got a bit of a laugh. That was surprising. ★
Dustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall in Tuner.
Hikari
The director muses on themes of isolation and selfrealization in her Brendan Fraser-starrer Rental Family
BY ANTONIA BLYTH
Hikari made her name as a director in 2019 with her first feature, 37 Seconds, which premiered at Berlin. Then she went on to direct episodes of Tokyo Vice and Beef. Now, with her latest film, Rental Family, set in Tokyo, she draws on her heritage and explores themes of exclusion and isolation. In the film, Brendan Fraser stars as struggling American expat Phillip Vandarploeg. While Phillip’s life in Toyko was initially successful, as he acted in lucrative commercials, of late it has palled, turning into loneliness, ennui and a stalled career. But when Phillip lands a job pretending to be a family member of a paying client, his life is radically changed. Hikari reveals how she landed on the film’s subject and Fraser’s dedication to understanding life in Tokyo.
When did you decide on the idea for Rental Family ? I know your co-writer Stephen Blahut was looking for jobs in Tokyo and stumbled across a rental family gig. But when did it become, “I’m going to write a screenplay about this”?
It ’s funny because when he told me about it, it was just kind of instinctive. I was like, “Oh, wow. There’s a story. We should make a movie about it.” It was just literally that instant, the inspiration. I always listen to my gut. That’s how I guide my life. So when I felt it, I was like, that has to be a story. I know there’s got to be a story. In Japan, we always had renting a girlfriend or renting older men to give you wise advice, or even renting the lap for a cuddling service.
So you knew about that before? Yeah. That’s been around for years. When I was 19, I had a job in a department store [in Japan]. The job was specifically called “mannequin”, meaning you get hired by all the departments, so I would go up to the seventh floor— the department stores are usually 13 floors, and then every department, every floor, has different stuff. On the seventh floor, they’ll be like, “OK, tomorrow you’re going to go sell shoes, but the shoes are specifically
for bunions.” So, I’d go up to the seventh floor and then pretend to be the professional of bunioned feet. I'd just go in and in the morning, I learn everything about it, and by 10 a.m. I know everything. Then the following day, I’ll go to the basement and sell salmon roe from Hokkaido, or whatever, pork cutlets, and I have to know about this pig that they’re frying etc. So, I had that job and I was like, “What’s the difference? We’re pretending.” But then for me, my question was more like why this exists, why people use these services? What’s happening socially? Why, why, why? What kind of people? Are they just lonely people, or they just want to see what is it like? So that was really us digging into why this business exists. With the rental family, this one gentleman, he was on his deathbed. This is from an interview [I read]. He didn’t have a good relationship with his daughter. He tried to reach out to her and she never responded. So before he died, he hired somebody who looks like her. She walks in and says, “I’m so sorry dad. What happened was terrible. Just please forgive me,” or maybe he was apologizing to her that he wasn’t a good father. Then I think at the end, she agreed to just watch him die, to just be there for him. But this job, watching people die so
“Through gripping footage and unf linching story telling, Trade Secret raises uncomfor table questions
You thought they were protected...
the older people don’t feel lonely, it exists in America, too. I just got on an airplane coming back [to the U.S.], and I met this gentleman. He was so kind. He told me his wife volunteers to spend time with elders who have a month left. And so, when they’re ready to go, she just goes there and hold their hands until they die. So similar jobs exist. Then even in America, in Western culture, there’s always escort services.
Yes and there’s the girlfriend experience or the boyfriend experience. Why do we accept that, but we’re surprised that people want other things? It’s interesting.
Yeah. Increasingly, people are becoming lonely. I think five, six years ago, or even 10 years ago, when social media started blooming… People just have to be on it, people were comparing themselves, so there’s a lot of depression happening even in the younger-aged kids that they’re like, “This person has this. Why don’t I have it?”
There’s a lot of suicide because people feel like they’re less than all these people on the internet. And one of my best friends that I knew forever, from college, he committed suicide a year ago. Then a year before that, my other best friend from college, he also committed suicide. They’re both white males in their 40s. It’s frightening. It’s getting very weird.
In some ways, I think this film is a really important PSA. I love the message at the end where Phillip sees himself in the mirror, because really the thing you learn as you get older is that you are with you always. Yeah. You can look for all these other parts, you can search for everything, but the answer is always within us, like you said. For example, I wanted to put that in for no religious reason whatsoever. It was just more reflecting that the divine being is us. You think you’re putting your hands
“I always listen to my gut. That's how I guide my life. So when I felt it, I was like, that has to be a story. I know there's got to be a story.”
together and you thought that there is god, but it’s actually god is within you, right?
That’s absolutely what I got from that scene. And the power to do anything you want.
Men specifically are struggling to connect in the film. There’s also the boss character (Takehiro Hira) that we find out is so lonely too. Do you think that co-writing this with Stephen helped you weave in that male perspective, or because of what happened with your friends, you already had that idea in your mind? No, I think it really helped, because he is a white male in his 40s, or 30s when he started writing. We were together as partners for many years and now were a family. We’re so close that it’s becoming brother and sister, it’s awesome. We still create together, which is great. Stephen’s been to Japan many times with me. He even shot 37 Seconds
He was your DP on that film. Yeah. I think, in some way, when he goes to Japan, he felt loneliness. He loves Japan and he loves the culture. He loves the custom of it, too.
When you studied in Utah, you’ve said that you felt like the most excluded, isolated person. Yes. Now I feel much more grounded. But for so many years… I think as I got older and I experienced more in life, and especially even work too, now I just don’t give a fuck. This is me.
Tell me about the experience of shooting with Brendan in Japan. What that was like to work with him in that context and have him be there among the Japanese cast?
He loves Japan, I think. That was a very important thing. Some people don’t like being in Japan, or I feel like American people, it’s easier for them to go to Europe, but it’s a little bit difficult to go to the East. But, fortunately, he went to Japan many times before and he really loved it. Even six months before we met, he showed me a picture. He’s like, “Yeah, I just went to Japan. I was there for three weeks. It was such a great time.” I was like, “Oh, this is perfect, because I would have to keep you there for a good three months!” So he just loved it. He loved shabu-shabu, which is a hotpot. I think shabu-shabu is his favorite thing ever. We also cooked at his house, too. But he
would also go to shabu-shabu with his family.
He would also take a train just to go, what does it look like? I asked him, “If you don’t mind, before we start shooting, just hop on the train and see what it feels like to be in this tiny mashed pit.” And so, he did that. He walked around. If he got lost, instead of checking the iPhone, he would ask people, “How do I get to from A to B?” And the people would tell him where to go. So he really did that as if he were to live in Japan for seven or 10 years, as Phillip had done. It was really helpful.
He was so respectful. He would just say good morning to every single person who he could meet on set, and he did that every single day. To me, that said something about who he is.
How were his Japanese language skills?
I asked him if he would like to take a lesson and at the same time he was like, “I want to take a lesson!” So, we set up him with a Japanese teacher in New York, and they did online meetings and sometimes in person for about three, four months. Especially because the SAG and the writers strikes happened, so we used that time for him to practice Japanese. When we were on set, we had a dialect coach so that when we had long lines, she could teach him every time, every morning, when he came in. So at least he felt comfortable. ★
Clockwise from top left: Shannon Gorman and Brendan Fraser in Rental Family; Director Hikari on set; Mari Yamamoto with Fraser.
Nia DaCosta
The Hedda writer-director puts a new twist on Henrik Ibsen’s classic stage play
BY BAZ BAMIGBOYE
For Nia DaCosta, working with Tessa Thompson as her muse has redefined Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler and made it work in purely cinematic terms. Her version is simply called Hedda, but there’s nothing simple about it. The filmmaker sets the action in 1950s England, and Thompson’s title character is no regular English housewife; she’s a force of nature who wants her academic husband (Tom Bateman) to succeed, even though that means betraying Hedda’s former lover, Eileen (Nina Hoss). It’s a far cry from the London-based New Yorker’s next film, zombie chiller 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.
Your Hedda is the version of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that I’ve waited a lifetime to see. Is it true that you referred to your star Tessa Thompson as Tessa Gabler? I kept calling her Hedda Thompson when we met… The first two weeks we were actually shooting, she didn't have a day off, and we were living in cottages next to each other but I wouldn’t see her before or after we were shooting. Then one day in week three, I saw her as herself in her normal clothes and
I kept calling her Hedda, Hedda Thompson. I hadn’t realized how tense Hedda made me.
When I was at school we would be shuttled to a few productions of Hedda Gabler, some amateur, some professional, but it would be great if this film were to become the first Hedda Gabler that kids in drama class get to see.
I would love that!
What was the driving force behind making you take this approach, setting it in the 1950s and switching the gender of one of the key characters?
In a way, there was this chasm between the play that I read and the productions that I was seeing of it. I read this play and actually the first Ibsen play I read was A Doll’s House, which is basically perfect. It’s stunning. And I thought, Wow, how brave to write this female character in the time period. But even now, it’d be controversial; a woman leaving her children, her family. And then I would read Hedda Gabler and I thought, Oh, he’s serious about wanting to depict complicated, interesting women because whereas with Nora [in A Doll’s House], you got a complete reasoning you understand. You empathize with her. With Hedda, people still hate her. They still love the play, but hate her, or can’t understand her. And I was really drawn to that. So, the muckiness of it, the humor in it.
I think she’s so funny in the play. It’s sexy as well. It’s really dark. There’s also a thriller energy to it. And I thought, I want to capture all that stuff. And I watched a production, and it was very staid and very kind of dusty. And I thought, Great gowns, beautiful gowns. But all that stuff wasn’t there. And so I thought, what if I just notched it up to 11 a bit? And that was really the beginning.
And had you at that point decided to switch the gender
of Hedda’s former lover Eilert Løvborg to Eileen Lovborg, played by Nina Hoss?
I was just thinking about this character of Eilert and I was like, “I don’t know man. I don’t know about you,” because I love their relationship, but I feel like if this character were a woman, you’d really understand the soul suffering of being brilliant and being ignored… being so much more than everyone else around you and being told, “No thank you,” because you’re a woman. And then she’s a queer woman as well because of the gender switch. So, I just felt like, “Oh, that’d be really interesting.” And also, it enabled me to dig into the themes that I was really interested in.
And I love when Eileen goes into the room full of men smoking their cigars and drinking. She doesn’t even hesitate for a moment does she?
I wanted a scene in the movie which showed why what she was doing is so dangerous and also why everyone loves her when she drinks. Because when she comes in, she has no idea that her nipples are on display, basically. They are humoring her and then they sort of fall into her spell. In the way we blocked it—with the walking around, the stops, the “I’m going to make a drink,” “I’m going to light a cigarette,” “I’m going to sit here,” “I’m going to stand here”— the performance aspect was so important to really encapsulate everything that Eileen is.
And did you have Nina Hoss in mind when you were writing it? I had no one in mind when I was writing any of the parts except for Tessa [Thompson] because I usually don’t write for anyone. And even Tessa, if she was like, “Sorry, I’m doing four or five other projects,” I would’ve been like, “OK, we’ll figure out someone else.” But I really wanted it to be Tessa and so I wrote it essentially with her in mind, which is why Hedda is mixed race. I didn’t go into
thinking Hedda needs to be Black, but since I’m Black, I tend to put Black women into the roles that I find really interesting. And Tessa is Black and she’s mixed race… We can have this element with her father, General Gabler, her white parent. It’s even more interesting that she never talks about her Black mother… There’s a lot of self-limitation Hedda does, and there’s a lot of deprivation that she does. And Tessa thought about that too in terms of, is she going to be very thin? Is she eating ever? I felt like all these elements are super interesting and they came out of: I want Tessa as Hedda and I want this character Eilert to be a woman. And then everything else flowed from there.
And it does flow, from the powerful ensemble, the heightened design elements. Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis could’ve played this Hedda. Oh my god, yes! When I was looking at Eileen in particular, my production designer and I, and my costume designer and I, separately we’re speaking about this [Hollywood golden age] period in terms of the movie version of this period and taking a lot of inspiration from films, but actually we ended up throwing the film references away. We also looked at these film stars and what
“I wanted Hedda to be a modern woman. So I thought about Katharine Hepburn who was a modern woman. Bette Davis was a modern woman in this time.”
their homes were like, because we thought they had the money that had an aiming-toward, and the relationships that Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn had with designers like Cecil Beaton. And we just really wanted to get an idea of the real world in a way through a lens of there still being some artifice. And I wanted Hedda to be a modern woman. So I thought about Katharine Hepburn who was a modern woman. Bette Davis was a modern woman in this time. And so we were really inspired by these women. And in fact, with Eileen, there was a conversation where, is she going to be a Katharine Hepburn in her suits and in her brogues, or is she going to be a Barbara Stanwyck? Is she going to be a woman who’s like, I’m in a dress? And we eventually decided, no, she’s not throwing away her femininity. She’s saying, accept this as well. She’s like, ‘I want to play with the boys, but I’m not going to
pretend to be a man. I am here as a woman and you listen to me because I’m a genius.’
What was the thinking behind featuring that ginormous chandelier. It’s like something out of Phantom of the Opera?
I was thinking about Barry Lyndon because I watched it again for the first time in a while and love that movie so much. And I didn’t realize how much it inspired a lot of my filmmaking until I watched it again in theaters for the 50th anniversary. I thought, Oh, wow. The way I look at nature, the way I think about humor in a period context in particular, the way I reference paintings as opposed to other films… But Phantom of the Opera, I remember when I watched it for the first time and saw the chandelier come toward me. It was just this moment of [waves arms]. I wonder if that was where my chandelier came from, because a chandelier’s not in the play. But that’s what I love about directing.
What are your thoughts about classic theater on stage? Are these plays there to be treated reverentially or should directors and writers adapt the heck out of them?
I love working in adaptation, and I’m a big theater head. I love a Shakespeare moment. I love Ibsen. I love these titans of classical theater. Chekhov and I have a spotty relationship, but I do the ones I love. And they are meant to be torn apart and put back together. They’re meant to last forever. And that means they’re meant to speak to our time, whatever time that’s in. ★
Nia DaCosta and Tessa Thompson on the Hedda set.
Dynamic Duos
Michael B. Jordan Ryan Coogler AND
In the 12 years since they first worked together on Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan haven’t missed the mark once, teaming on a series of hit films covering a broad spectrum. Since the Sundance sensation drama about the police killing of 22-year-old unarmed Bay Area man Oscar Grant, they moved into boxing with Creed, followed by hatching a billion-dollar franchise, Black Panther, the first and only Marvel superhero franchise to garner a Best Picture Oscar nomination.
From top: Michael B. Jordan as Smoke; Jordan and director Ryan Coogler on set for Sinners
“I got an education through this process; the movie unlocked a bunch of things I took for granted or that I hadn’t dived that deeply into. ” MICHAEL B. JORDAN
They’re squarely in the awards season conversation this year with elevated genre film Sinners, in which vampires try to crash the opening night of a deep South juke joint. The proprietors are twin brothers Smoke and Stack Moore—Jordan plays both—who return to their segregated hometown with ulterior motives, unresolved romances, money and soldiering scars from the Chicago mob.
With Sinners, Coogler explores cultural themes, from the virulent racism of the Jim Crow South in 1930s Mississippi, to the plight of Irish and Asian immigrants. Lead vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) offers to unite the twins and their blues club revelers in a union of the disenfranchised, promising immortality and equality. It’s a Faustian bargain though, as he has his own dark ulterior plans to steal the soul of Sammie (Miles Caton), a young musician.
Both Coogler and Jordan have become entrepreneurial since their first meeting. Coogler sold his script to Warner Bros. and made a deal that gives him back an ownership stake years down the road, while Jordan has his own thriving production company, made his directorial debut with Creed III, and is currently directing, producing and starring in The Thomas Crown Affair. Here, in conversation with Mike Fleming Jr. these close collaborators explain their dynamic.
Most makers of genre fare expect to sit out awards season. You changed that with the first Best Picture nomination for a superhero film, Black Panther. You’re now in the mix with your vampire film Sinners. How did you manage that again?
MICHAEL B. JORDAN: Start us off with a banger. Ryan?
RYAN COOGLER: I was able to hire some of the best people at their jobs on the planet. Told them all, “Keep your schedules clear because we got something we’re really excited about.” They brought their all to this. We found the right studio partners with Warner Bros. under Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca, who were committed to putting unconventional things in theaters in a big way. I got that that was their mission statement for the year.
All of these things lined up, and they are things that I don’t have any personal control over. This was the universe, and me being at the right place at the right time with a story that meant a lot to me. They brought their full selves. [A glass crashes onto Coogler’s hotel suite floor] Fleming, I'm going to just clean this up a bit while I talk… What they did, they said, “Hey, this story is about your uncle. It’s about your family. It’s about my history, too.” Each person, from the actors to the department heads, they found a piece of themselves in the movie, and let that motivate their work. Hailee Steinfeld would come to work every day with a binder that had a photo of her mom in it, when her mom was the same age as her. She was on set, sharing her discoveries of her grandfather’s ancestry with us when we were talking about these things. Her grandfather is no longer here. It was a sense of longing and yearning that everybody brought.
Jack O’Connell would talk about his father, who passed away when he was very young, an Irish immigrant to the U.K. He said, “Hey, when you remix singing this song, can it be this song? Can it be ’Wild Mountain Thyme’?” And I didn’t even have to ask him, but I knew it was something he listened to with his father. Look, man, that’s how the script started for me. Listening to songs that I would listen to with my uncle who’s no longer with me. Now, I got an actor playing the antagonist saying, “Hey, put this in, for my dad.” So many, many people who are great at what they do, took it personally, took it serious, brought their all. So by the time it got to audiences, what I realized was when they connected to the movie, they couldn’t help but to bring themselves to it.
That has happened for me on all your movies so far.
COOGLER: This is what we talked about when we first met, when you shared what you shared with me about
From left: Jordan, Octavia Spencer and Coogler on set for Fruitvale Station; Jordan and Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther; Coogler and cinematographer Rachel Morrison on the Black Panther set. Below: Delroy Lindo, Jordan and Coogler on the Sinners set.
Fruitvale Station and how it helped you past your dad’s tragic passing in that hurricane. Oscar Grant was a long way from you and your dad, but through cinematic language, you connected with it and it triggered something personal to you. This movie was an exercise in that. And also the epic skill of it was an exercise and a reclamation of these people’s humanity. When you look at the 1930s, you think, oh man, obviously it was a dehumanizing time, and easy to condemn [what was done to them] by an apartheid system. They were still human beings, who still loved and laughed, and they did it on an epic scale, in the way that they invented an art form that changed the world. For us, it was like, hey, let’s put the epic lens on that and let’s show the world that these people meant something. I don’t think people could get behind that in the entertainment aspect. And that’s what’s been the most rewarding, I would say: people sharing their own personal anecdotes, the things that they thought about when they watched the film.
Michael, how did those elements impact you, being immersed into this story of the Jim Crow South in 1932 Mississippi?
JORDAN: What hits me when I read the script and I guess I knew it, was that the ’30s wasn’t kind to people that looked like us. And for me, having family roots that are from Hope, Arkansas and Shreveport, Louisiana, on my dad’s side of the family. You see them as old, your grandmother’s been old your entire life, but now you understand how they grew up. Going down there to make this movie, I guess the thing that clicked was like, she was 20 once, and it was like we made a movie about my grandparents, and my great-grandparents, and my cousins, and what it was like for them, the circumstances of living in survival on a day-to-day basis. The woman that used to take care of me when my mom and dad had to go to work, who made me read scripture or sit down and meditate, or go out there and get that switch, you know what I’m saying? It made me rethink the relationship I had with her while she was living.
One of the beautiful things about making this movie was learning about other people’s personal journeys. Also, this is a side of Ryan I never got a chance to know until now, hearing about his Uncle James and the blues music and what that meant. I wasn’t as educated about the history of blues music and the global impact it had on all the things I love today. I got an education through this process; the movie unlocked a bunch of things I took for granted or hadn’t dived that deeply into.
When Ryan gave you that script and said, “I want you to play identical twins,” what was your first reaction? Was this a challenge you needed, or did you think, what are you putting me through here?
JORDAN: You hit it right on the head there. Ryan knows me very well, and for me, the challenge was definitely the main thing. It made me nervous, at first. Then, equal parts nervous and excited. I’ve also learned to trust him. He doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean, so when he pitches an idea to me, I know he thought long and hard about it and took a lot into consideration. And when he says, “Hey, yo, I wrote this for you,” how can you not respond as an artist? He’s taken the time to think it through, and he also looks at it from my perspective: I think this is going to be really great for you. This is powerful. I haven’t seen you do anything like this. This is going to be a challenge. You started hitting all these points with me as an actor, as a person? I’m always trying to grow and evolve. So when I read the script, it paid off, delivered on everything. It made me want to see if I could do this… and pay respect to and honor our friend Chadwick Boseman, who passed away.
It felt that way, specifically because of the need to keep the dialect throughout the course of a film and strive to turn in a performance that was as convincing as the ones he did. There’s a level of respect and admiration also, because there was such a connection between us. In so many ways, I am filled with this feeling of, what would he do? This was a level-up, a gear that I need to develop and have with me. So that propelled me even further into that.
I watched the shape you got yourself into for Creed, putting in another six months when Ryan scouted gyms in Philly and called you and said, “You need to come here and get their footwork down.” Do you face yourself with the possibility of failing, in order to improve yourself?
JORDAN: Yes, sir.
To me, a showstopping moment in Sinners comes when you’ve got this cracking good blues number, “I Lied to You”. You felt the heat in that barn, the sex appeal, with everyone in the room engaged. And then we see imagery from Africa and from hip-hop, to show the historical connective tissue to this art form. Where did that come from, and what reaction did you get when executives read it?
COOGLER: It was always in the script, when we took the script out [to auction]. The “Rocky Road to Dublin” scene, that actually came two
From left: Jordan and Miles Caton in Sinners: Jordan as Smoke and Stack.
“When everything is safe and measured, no risk, you lose the reason that we all got into this business.”
RYAN COOGLER
or three drafts later. But that surreal montage in the blues number was always in there, from the first time that I had written the script. It was funny. I put it all in italics, in one paragraph, because I knew it would be… I wasn’t doubting myself, but I knew it would be weird for people to read. So, I figured I could signal we wanted to do something different here. And that element worked. But people would always talk about that scene. “Hey, how are we doing this?” They ask, but it would be with a smile. I got some serious veterans, man, on this film. [Costume designer] Ruth E. Carter, she got so excited about the scene. She would talk about it in every meeting. “Hey, so what are we doing with this? What costumes do I got to get? How you seeing this?” It might be a meeting about Mary’s dress. She’s like, “Hey, that’s for real, but what about the montage?” So, I’m like, Ruth is that excited, we got something special here, because she’s seen it all. And she’s bombproof, as a person.
The studio executives all got excited. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, Jesse Ehrman, they were all behind it, even though they had no shortage of questions. They say, “So, these people, are they going to be like ghosts, or are they going to be projections?” I’m like, “I don’t think so. I think we’re going to play it like they’re fucking actually there, but the people in 1932 aren’t going to be interacting with them. You know what I mean? They’re there, but they don’t know it. It’s a little secret for the audience.” And then I realized that it should be almost like it should be a reveal. It’s actually Jack O’Connell’s [character] Remmick, his point of view, because he’s a supernatural
character who has supernatural knowledge. For me, it’s all a reveal of, this is what’s happening. I mean, [Miles Caton’s blues musician] Sammie’s got no idea. He’s just like, “I’m playing my ass off. I’m in the zone.” He doesn’t know that his ancestors are right next to him. Remmick has the sight, the knowledge of the fire-keeper culture: “I know what that is, because I exist between life and death. I exist in this plane, and I want what that kid has. I want that kid’s soul. So, I can do that and bring my folks back into the mix, and what I haven’t seen in a millennium.”
When I was writing, I was like, oh shit, man. I get to a point in the script where I’m like, do I love everybody here? Once I’m there, I know, alright, now it’s time to go make the movie. I mean, I can’t say I love everybody in the street. But as far as the principal cast, I see where they’re coming from. Even with the most despicable character. Even him and Smoke at the end, they kind of got to an understanding. It’s like, fuck you. Hey, fuck you too. You know what, even there, it’s a nice balance too.
If the writer doesn’t love his characters, who else will? Between Sinners and One Battle After Another, there’s two ambitious original films from one studio that you can’t walk out of the theater without some pep in your step for having seen what you just saw. Both films got maligned in press narratives, before anyone saw a frame, because of budgets and the fact that Sinners rights revert back to you, Ryan, far down the road. So much cynicism. What does that do to risk-taking?
COOGLER: Oh man, they put One Battle After Another in VistaVision, and it was like only four theaters could show VistaVision, and they did it anyway. I feel an immense sense of gratitude. What I try to do, I try to constantly stay cognizant of where I am and where I came from. I moved to LA in 2008, and that was the year I saw There Will Be Blood And I remember seeing No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and The Dark Knight. I was watching these movies while I was in film school and saying, “Man, if only one day I could get to a level where I could put a movie in theaters and maybe make somebody feel an inkling of what I feel, walking out of the movie after seeing these films.” It felt like I was standing, trying to look across the Pacific Ocean, you know what I’m saying? And to be here less than 20 years later, and to be having our movie being put out by Warner Bros. at the time when they putting out [Paul Thomas Anderson's] most expensive movie? And they’re betting on Director Bong [Joon Ho], and Zach Cregger and Emerald Fennell? These are bold bets that I think are necessary to continue to maintain the muscle memory of going to the movies and being surprised.
When everything is safe and measured, no risk, you lose the reason that we all got into this business. I mean, we all got into this business after walking into a dark room and having those “What the fuck?” moments in the movie theater. I could tell you where I was when the Velociraptor fucking tried to open the door on the freezer in Jurassic Park. I had no idea that was going to happen. Know what I’m saying? I had no idea. I knew dinosaurs were in the movie, but a Velociraptor opening the fucking door? We have to have somebody taking these shots.
Right: Coogler on set with cinematographer Rachel Morrison on Black Panther; Below: Jordan and Caton.
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
A
BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM – SLOVAKIA
98TH ACADEMY AWARDS®
ONAL A C ADEMY AWA
FILM BY TEREZA NVOTOVÁ
Thank god for people who care about the experience of going in there and saying,” I’ll see this Weapons movie.” And then, like, “Wait, what the hell?” That feeling of utter shock and awe that only a movie can give you. When the filmmaker has the freedom to be strange, and expose maybe the darkest parts of themselves that ain’t a place for the safe bets. We make our fair share of franchise movies. They weren’t safe bets at the beginning, but there’s a respectful place for that, and for the health of the industry, you need all of it. I love it, man. And after 20 years in, bro, I know everybody. So I’m rooting for everybody. I can’t wait for Donna Langley and those guys to put Wicked out and just blow that shit wide open. I can’t wait for Jon M. Chu to come out and just blow people’s minds. But you need a balanced meal, you know what I mean?
What Ryan just said about seeing those great films in school — Michael, when you were young, what were some performances that made you think, that could be me someday?
JORDAN: Two come to mind right away. Denzel Washington in The Hurricane. And The Beach, with Leo DiCaprio. Those performances stuck out with me. Se7en was a movie that really stuck with me, and Indiana Jones and the Batman films. James Bond. Big, big, big action and adventure and all those twists and turns. When I started, I didn’t know I wanted to be an actor, really, but then I started to fall in love with it, and I got good at it. I got a lot of early success when I was younger, thank god. And then I started to become more of a student. Foreign films like A Prophet, changed my view of what was possible in cinema. Projects like that, actors, influenced me to try to figure out how to do that. Probably around the time of The Wire, I was deciding this was going to be my one and only plan and I was going to be all in. I was doing all these television series, part of an ensemble cast and then came films. And I’m having this inner dialogue and anxiety. You try to figure out what kind of actor you want to be, or you could be, and then what could you be if things don’t work out in your favor. Then, right around that time, I swear to you, maybe a couple of weeks or a month after I really started to have those conversations
with myself, I get a call about Fruitvale from Ryan. And it completely answered the call in a way and set me off on a totally different road.
Michael, you’ve been in all of Ryan’s movies. What if Ryan was to come to you and say, “I’ve got a great script, but I’m sorry, there’s nothing here for you.” What’s that conversation going to be like? [They both laugh and lock up in a hug].
JORDAN: Nobody wants to see that day, man.
COOGLER: Mike, bro, you always got a job with me, man. I may be running out of challenges for you one day, is all. When the script supervisor walks up to him and says, “Hey, for the next movie, you’re playing triplets.” And Mike’s eyes go wide…
JORDAN: You want to do Multiplicity, Ryan? We’ll blow that out the water. I’d say, “OK, cool, thanks.”
So you’ll be like what Scorsese has with Leo and De Niro, John Woo with Chow Yun-fat?
JORDAN: Again and again and again. And vice versa. Next time I’m directing…
Michael, you are directing your second film and Ryan is a good-looking guy, with a growing family and a lot of diapers to buy. I could see him wanting to moonlight in one of your films…
COOGLER: I don’t like that, Fleming. That’s where you’ll start trashing my work.
By the way, how did that cleanup on aisle five work out with that fallen glass, Ryan?
COOGLER: [Points the camera toward the carpeted floor]. It’s fucking bad man, fucking bad. Can you see that?
It looks like you spilled red wine on that carpet. As Denzel said in American Gangster… COOGLER AND JORDAN: [In unison] “Don’t rub that shit. It’s $25,000 Alpaca. You blot that shit."★
Right: Coogler in Fruitvale Station; with Ariana Neal; Below, from left: Jayme Lawson, Wunmi Mosaku, Jordan, Miles Caton and Li Jun Li in Sinners
Yorgos Lanthimos
Jesse Plemons AND
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos burst onto the international scene in 2009 with his third feature, Dogtooth, a jet-black comedy about a messed-up family that heralded a whole series of films christened Weird Wave by the startled media. After the even more cryptic Alps, Lanthimos branched out into the English-language market, where his often cruel, unsentimental style of surrealism proved an immediate critical hit with 2015’s The Lobster. His vision is one thing, but the director’s superpower is his ability to lure A-list actors into his orbit, a prime example being Emma Stone, who came to co-star in 2018’s 18-century period piece The Favourite and has hung around ever since. The newest addition to his rep company is Jesse Plemons, who won Best Actor in Cannes last year for his three distinct parts in the troubling triptych Kinds of Kindness. Here, they tell Damon Wise why they came back together for Bugonia, a sci-fi satire in which Plemmons plays a lone conspiracy theorist convinced of an impending alien takeover.
Jesse Plemons and Yorgos Lanthimos in Cannes.
How did you two first meet?
YORGOS LANTHIMOS: How did we meet? I think we met for the first time on Skype or something.
JESSE PLEMONS: Zoom!
And what was the reason for that meeting?
LANTHIMOS: Well, I think it was for Kinds of Kindness, no? [To Jesse] It’s so weird to do [this interview] in front of you. [Laughs.] I always loved Jesse and his work. I had inquired a couple of times about his whereabouts, and I was always looking for an opportunity to work with him. So, for Kinds of Kindness it felt like it could happen. And then we met, I think we met before that film specifically. Jesse, had you read the script before we even met? Probably…
PLEMONS: Yes, for sure, I had read the script. I remember there was some talk of a small part in Poor Things, and I didn’t realize that your schedule conflicted with mine, and so I just thought you’d changed your mind. I was like, “Well, I guess that’s that.”
LANTHIMOS: We were told that Jesse was busy, so, yeah, it didn’t happen. But it happens a lot of times. But when you want to work with certain people, you just keep trying.
Jesse, how did you feel about the script for Kinds of Kindness?
PLEMONS: Man, my first thought was it would’ve been nice to ease into it, and this was definitely not that! But I was incredibly excited. Reading that script for the first time, it was definitely a standalone experience. I felt so much as I was reading it, I mean, it was very funny, it was frightening at times, really dark. And so I just remember feeling, like, “What just happened to me?” when I finished it. And then it was like seeing a movie early, and then not having anyone to talk to about it—I just had this crazy story in my head. So, I was definitely excited to just talk to Yorgos about it.
LANTHIMOS: I didn’t provide a lot of clarity.
PLEMONS: None whatsoever. None whatsoever.
Yorgos, are actors ever scared of your material when you send it to them like that?
LANTHIMOS: I wouldn’t really know—you don’t necessarily get that kind of feedback directly. Sometimes they just say it’s a “schedule conflict”. So, I wouldn’t really know. I think the people that actually I get to speak to and meet with have responded to my previous work. Usually, it’s quite straightforward. I’ve been very lucky to work with great people, not only actors, and that’s why we tend to work together more than once. There’s a certain kind of… not synchronicity, but a kind of like-mindedness about stuff. And it helps when you don’t have to explain yourself too much and you can allow each individual to do their thing and contribute creatively. You can trust them to do that, because you know they have the interest of the film in their mind. I think film needs that kind of circumstance in order to work—people working towards the same direction. So, yeah, I think the people that I’ve worked with are the people that do appreciate the material and the stuff that I do.
Jesse, when you went to work with Yorgos, what were you expecting? And how was the experience?
PLEMONS: I don’t know what I was expecting. I mean, I’d definitely heard about these unique rehearsal games and all that. And I think I had met Ramy [Youssef], who had just done Poor Things, and he told me a little bit about it. So, I was definitely nervous. But, going back to your last question, I think there probably, speaking for myself, there is a degree of fear, but it’s the kind of fear that you’re looking for. I’m always excited to work with a director that has a singular voice and vision. And Kinds of Kindness, not that it didn’t feel reminiscent of some of Yorgos’s previous work, but at the same time it felt like it was branching off in a new direction. So, I think the fear is actually the exciting element of it.
From left: Jesse Plemons in Bugonia; Aidan Delbis, Plemons and Emma Stone; Yorgos Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan.
“This was the first time I read a screenplay that I was immediately interested in getting involved with, without having developed it for years like I’ve done with my other work.” YORGOS LANTHIMOS
But to go back to the process, as Yorgos mentioned earlier, there’s not a whole lot of script analysis, breaking down A, B, C, D and all of that. Speaking personally, I think, whether it’s conscious or not, there’s a human urge to try and understand. And so, in those early weeks, you have to do your own personal work, but you can’t become too tied to any of that. So, it became more of a process of letting go and getting comfortable in not having all of the answers. And then, like Yorgos just said, enjoying this community of incredible artists who are all working towards the same story.
How soon after Kinds of Kindness did Bugonia start to come together?
LANTHIMOS: Do you remember?
PLEMONS: The first I heard of it, I want to say, was maybe between four to six months after we wrapped Kinds of Kindness. You sent the script to me. I know you and Emily [Emma Stone] had spoken before then. But something like that.
LANTHIMOS: Yeah, it was relatively quick. I guess, I had read the script at some point when I was editing Kinds of Kindness. And then there was a quick decision about getting involved. And I wanted to work with [screenwriter] Will [Tracy] on it, just to make it a little bit my own, then quickly after that, the first pass that we did, I probably sent it to Jesse.
And then we had to put it together. We actually went to Cannes with Kinds of Kindness while we were starting prep on Bugonia. We’d started a couple of weeks of prep, and then we had to go to Cannes to show Kinds of Kindness and then continue prepping Bugonia. So, in some ways it overlapped.
Jesse, was this more a straightforward acting experience than Kinds of Kindness?
LANTHIMOS: I wouldn’t say so!
PLEMONS: [Laughing.] Yeah, this was definitely a walk in the park. It was a vacation!
LANTHIMOS: Every day Jesse was coming in and going, “Can we find anything a little bit more challenging to do?”
PLEMONS: The script itself, as out-there as it is, maybe the structure of it is a little more traditional than Kinds of Kindness, and so it is maybe more linear. But I always feel the same way; each story, each part is new territory, unless you’re playing the same part over and over again. So, it’s something that is constantly being discovered. And I felt like the script was so rich and well-written and interesting. I mean, the characters really do jump off of the page. And that first read was extremely exciting. So, if anything, it’s the same process as it’s always been, and yet it’s completely different because it’s a part I’ve never played before and it’s a script that hasn’t been made yet. As was the case with Kinds of Kindness, we’re trying to find the right tone, something that is maybe reminiscent of some of Yorgos’s other films but is also its own thing. And then it was the same with Bugonia. Because I mean, the tone can shift drastically within one scene, even, which is what was exciting about it.
Yorgos, it’s modeled on a Korean film, Save the Green Planet!. Did you want your cast and crew to look at that film? Or did you ask them to keep away from it?
LANTHIMOS: I just let people do whatever they wanted to do. I told them that they didn’t have to, because it’s such a different film. I looked at it because I wanted to be sure that there was a reason
for doing this film, that it’s different enough to warrant a different version of a similar story. But I was like, “You don’t have to watch it, you can do whatever you like. What we’re doing is so different.” So yeah, I mean, I didn’t have any particular view on it.
They weren’t forbidden to watch it?
LANTHIMOS: No, no. It’s different. I said, “You don’t have to watch it, but you can if you feel like it.” Did you watch it, Jesse?
PLEMONS: No.
Jesse, the character you play—Teddy, a conspiracy theorist—is very distinct, and he’s quite a real character in this day and age. What research did you do, or what preparations did you make?
LANTHIMOS: [Laughing.] Trevor!!!
PLEMONS: You’re going to meet Trevor. You’re going to meet him in Santa Barbara.
LANTHIMOS: Great. Finally!
Who’s Trevor?
PLEMONS: One of my best friends. I’ve known him since I was 18 or so. We met in Austin. He was in the camera department on this show I did called Friday Night Lights And as soon as I read the script, my first thought was, “My god, there’s not a movie that could be made that Trevor would love more than this movie.” I have to preface this by saying he’s the lightest, most loving version of Teddy there is. But he’s a huge alien enthusiast. I mean, there have been several times in our friendship where he has, without me asking, given me a lot of information. And so now I had a reason for it. And it was extremely helpful. That was one of the first steps—talking to Trevor. And then there are a ton of documentaries exploring that subject, some books that were really helpful. That’s the fun part, when you’re just searching around in the dark for any sort of inspiration. There was a ton of different things. But Trevor was the foundation.
Yorgos, what did you have in mind when you were adapting the script? Your films are often a lot more abstract, but this is very grounded in the real world. It’s much more realistic in its approach to day-to-day life than your other work, even your period films. LANTHIMOS: Yeah. As you mentioned, some of my films are period, some of them are contemporary, they’re sometimes quite different aesthetically/visually. So, I don’t really think I did anything particularly differently. I just feel drawn to stuff, to material. And, actually, this was the first time I read a screenplay that I was immediately interested in getting involved with, without having developed it for years like I’ve done with my other work. I don’t know if it’s more realistic. I mean, I’m not the best person to describe what my films are, but I’d say it’s a little bit more directly political. It has more direct political references and contemporary references. That doesn’t mean that my other films are less political, because I think exploring human nature, society, structures and all these kind of things are political in nature. But this one has more recognizable
political references and addresses things that are very much under our radar right now. So, that was the difference I think.
But other than that—the tone, figuring out the balance between the hilarity of it and the darkness of it and how you navigate through those things—I think, in a way, it’s quite similar. And that’s why I was so interested in making the film. It’s quite different, but I also recognize a lot of the usual things that I’m interested in. And that’s why I wanted to make it. Like Jesse, I was extremely excited. I found it extremely entertaining and funny and disturbing. I immediately sent it to Emma the same night after I read it. I just think it’s a reflection of humanity—the suicidal nature of humanity and what goes on.
PLEMONS: I’d like to say something along those lines. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that it is very modern. Will’s adaptation feels very American. But what seemed more realistic to me was when we were shooting the film, outside of Atlanta, we basically didn’t have to do anything to find a location that seemed poverty-stricken and where people were struggling. That really stood out to me. And in the way that Yorgos and the team shot it, it was very much like, we just rolled up and whoever was there was now in the movie if they wished to be. And that was really exciting, because that’s not always the way people work, allowing for all these variables. But. yeah, it felt realistic in that very modern way, I guess.
You both put Emma Stone through quite a lot. Were there any limits put down? How game was she for playing the role?
Clockwise: Lanthimos and Ryan on the Bugonia set with Stone; Plemons as Teddy and Delbis as Don; Stone as Michelle Fuller.
LANTHIMOS: It was all pretty much in the script, and everything was choreographed and rehearsed. Emma was involved from the very beginning. She’s a creative partner as well as a producer, so it’s not like we’re actually putting her through any of those things. It’s a question of figuring out how we make those things impactful in whatever way is necessary, whether it’s funny or violent or a combination of both. Jesse, anything more specific you can think of?
PLEMONS: No. The day that stands out to me—of all of our days in the basement—is the scene where I discover that she is of royal descent. That was tough. I mean, that was tough. That’s just a matter of stamina and extremes in the circumstances of the scene. It’s a weird double-edged sword, because that’s what you’re looking for as an actor. But it was hard to listen to her scream all day.
I presume you’ve seen the film with an audience. How do they react to it?
LANTHIMOS: I don’t watch the film. I walk outside as soon as it starts playing.
PLEMONS: There was a screening here in LA that some of my friends went to. It was really interesting and exciting to me, just seeing people’s faces when they came out. It’s so different in the way that it affects them and what it stirs up within them. I had my friends over afterwards, and we all just chatted about the movie and the world and the themes. It was a really interesting conversation, and I think that’s the effect that reading the script—and then working on it—had on me. And so, it’s nice to see that that’s a similar experience for the audience.
LANTHIMOS: What I understand, and what’s interesting for me, is that when you do try to maintain this kind of tone—one that can tip to either side—and you get all these people that are different… Maybe they have different experiences and cultural backgrounds, or are in different moods while they’re watching the film, or the conditions in which they watch it were different. And when the balance of the tone is so
“One thing that stood out to me was the fact that it is very modern.”
JESSE PLEMONS
fine, you get quite different reactions. Maybe a person will watch the film a second time, and the conditions are different and their mood is different, so they might have a slightly different experience. That’s what I love about that kind of balancing act, tonally.
And I guess the other thing which I find interesting is when you leave space for the audience to engage with the film in that way and not be didactic in any way. Like the ending, for instance, of this film—there’s been such vastly different views of whether it’s hopeful or not, depending on how you, again, feel about the world or how you feel that specific day. So, I find that interesting, seeing people that come out of the film hopeful that there’s an opportunity for another beginning, a second chance, another life. Or there’s people that just see it as bleak or dark, because probably it says more about where they are at that point. So, I find always that interesting, that it can have such different effects on people.
One more question. Are you two going to work together again? Do you have any plans to?
PLEMONS: Not soon, because you’re taking a break, right, Yorgos?
LANTHIMOS: Yeah. I keep saying I just need a little break. I’ve made three films back-to-back now. I haven’t had a chance to think. Like I mentioned before, prep on Bugonia overlapped with the release of Kinds of Kindness. I just want to pause for a second, but we’re still promoting Bugonia. As soon as this is done, I need to take a holiday and not think about what’s next. So that’s where I am.
Jesse, what are you up to?
PLEMONS: I’ve got one more day on the prequel to The Hunger Games, which has been great. I finish that in a week or so. Then I’m going to do the same thing as Yorgos and just enjoy family time, take some photographs, play some guitar and enjoy the holidays. And then next year we’ll see. But I’m not going to think about next year until it’s here. ★
From left: Plemons and Stone on set; Delbis and Plemons with the bees.
Renate Reinsve Joachim Trier AND
Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier reunites with his Oslo neighbor, acclaimed actor Renate Reinsve for their third collaboration, Sentimental Value, a movie about two bereaved sisters—Nora, a stage actor played by Reinsve, and her younger sibling Agnes, a historian, performed by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas—whose estranged father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) a once celebrated movie director, re-enters their lives. Each copes in their own way with generational trauma. The one constant in all their lives is the historical family home, a key character, that they once all shared until Gustav abandoned them. Nora and her surviving parent communicate as if strangers; she’s unforgiving and rejects Gustav’s entreaties to star in his deeply personal comeback picture which he's written as a gift to her. Instead, he persuades Hollywood name Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning, to replace his daughter. Admiring of Reinsve’s “energy, playfulness and charisma,” Sentimental Value is the second lead role that Trier has created for her; their last picture, The Worst Person in the World won a Best Actress prize for Reinsve at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. “I feel like the luckiest actor to get to do this with Joachim,” Reinsve says.
Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value.
“I sat down and we probably had two hours where I told her the structure of the story and the themes and why I thought it would be great to do it with her,” Trier recalls. They both wept as they investigated Nora’s longing for home and the realization that she’s only at home on the stage just as Trier and Reinsve locate theirs in cinema.
Trier collected Cannes’ Grand Prix award for Sentimental Value, which he penned with longtime writing partner Eskil Vogt. Reinsve talks of “laughing so hard” when Trier larked about on set with a package of sausages before shooting a scene of such heartache that she felt she was being “punched in the stomach”.
But that’s what draws her to work with Trier. Here, the two sit down with Baz Bamigboye to talk about their partnership that began when the director cast her in Oslo, August 31st 15 years ago. The role offered Reinsve just one line but the director saw enough in her performance to forge what has emerged as an acclaimed creative partnership.
So, you did that first audition tape unaware that the camera loves you?
Joachim, Sentimental Value is your third collaboration with Renate. I want to go back to the moment you first met. When you worked together back in 2010, after you had cast her in a small role for your film Oslo, August 31st, she was totally unknown. What made you pick her?
JOACHIM TRIER: I’ll use a terrible term, but in English, I think you call it a cattle call. We basically wanted to try to find some young people that would surround the rather depressed character of Anders Danielsen Lie in that film… So we were meeting all the young actors in Norway from all the schools and everywhere, and I didn’t even know that Renate actually went to the most prestigious acting school in Norway [the Oslo National Academy of the Arts] the sort of national performance school that many great actors had gone to. I’m not saying this in retrospective romanticization of her talent, but I was looking at tapes and then immediately, I asked: “Who’s that girl in the green trousers?” There was something about her… she just broke into a laugh doing some sort of improv thing. And I just said, “OK, so let’s bring her in.”
She met Anders and we were both stunned at the energy and the charisma and the playfulness, and I immediately felt safe. We then shot her scene over eight days because we wanted to catch the sun coming out, so we had to sustain the light. So, every morning for one and a half weeks we heard her repeat the same one line of dialogue.
I was filming Anders in the center of the frame and she was creating some life over there doing autonomous character work… and I was looking at the rushes, and whenever she’s in frame she’s always doing something lifelike and interesting. After that I kept looking at her stage work, and we met socially… I was always asking: “What are you doing?” And she was being cast as the pretty girl that threatens the main cast love relationship or some funny characters and some TV shows, but smaller parts. Finally, I said, “Damn it, let’s do The Worst Person in the World,” and I wrote it for her.
RENATE REINSVE: Yeah, because I hadn’t done any movies before that and I knew that at that time he was the only director I wanted to work with. So, I kind of went into it not thinking I would get the part… And so I did the self-tape. I was just talking and being myself. And being on the set was so easy and I felt like we were hanging out all of us as friends, and I didn’t have anything to compare it to. And then I did some other roles in other productions, small parts.
I did a lot of theater and I was very lucky with my roles in theater, but that is very different. And I always wanted to go into cinema, And then doing all these other films, I realized how special the production Joachim builds is, and how I probably would never have that experience again. He had made this great movie Reprise and he was, at the time, the director everyone in Norway wanted to work with… Actually, between doing Oslo, August 31st and The Worst Person in the World, I also had this feeling I never kind of found someone to work with or a production that was stimulating enough for me as an actor. And I’ve worked in the theater… so I decided that I wanted to quit and do something else. And then the weirdest thing happened: Joachim called me the day after [about The Worst Person in the World]. And of course, that was kind of the bullseye of what I wanted to do.
You give someone a couple of lines in a film and then go on to write a whole movie for them. What could you see?
TRIER: I had seen some amazing theater work. I’d also met Renate several times… Looking back now, I think the spirit of The Worst Person in the World coincided with a lot of things in my creative development. It was a wish to throw away any kind of expectations from whatever people wanted me to do and go back to scratch. I wanted to make something about young people and the spirit of youth and joy mixed with growing up and time passing. In a strange way, I think that fits very well with the spirit of Renate in a way.
I know you; I know your life. I know you’re a person that’s very sensitive and I know that life for all of us goes up and down and you have that deep understanding of what’s difficult in life too. But I see also in your
Below: Skarsgåard and Reinsve in Sentimantal Value; Right: Reinsve with Inga Ibsdotter lilleaas.
“What moves me about Renate, like in great comedians you see that the joy and the fun is also a mechanism of being in contact with the opposite.” JOACHIM TRIER
performance in the new film that I couldn’t imagine anyone else being Nora than you without it being autographical. But I think you have this incredible range, you’re really funny. What moves me about Renate, like in great comedians, you see that the joy and the fun is also a mechanism of being in contact with the opposite. There’s a sense of, ‘Hey, we've got to make this interesting because life is not simple.’
There’s a dramatic purpose to your humor in a way. I go into a delicate area because I’m not saying that Renate walks around and is terribly depressed or anything. But you have a range in your life also. You see the whole picture of the human experience, I feel, and that’s what you bring to your performance. I know for a fact, that one of the motivations of him working on Sentimental Value was that Stellan Skarsgård was really intrigued by doing a role together with you. And when we had you two meet to do some rehearsal, Stellan, who has worked with everyone, said to me: “It’s extraordinary. Her skin changes color, in her performance, you see what she feels.” We’re getting a lot of compliments for Renate. I’m sorry I’m bragging [laughs], but I’m very proud. I mean by now you’re a superstar and you can fly off and do whatever, but I’m so proud that we keep working together.
REINSVE: You’re talking for 10 minutes about so many nice things about me. I’m getting shy and really, really moved.
TRIER: But I mean this, it’s true.
REINSVE: And I think we recognize something in each other, the playfulness, and to be able to laugh about these things and be curious and also go really deep into these themes. And we kind of have the same questions about it, not necessarily wanting an answer, but seeing the complexities and seeing what it is and the way you write your characters and your scripts. They’re so complex and they’re so dynamic and characters, they are never judged with all their chaos… But I’ve also laughed my ass off on your sets. You are so funny, Joachim, and we’ve had so much fun. I remember I almost ruined the whole take because you were pretending that this pack of sausages was the monitor.
Before one of the takes you looked at me really serious and said: “OK, let’s do this,” and you hold this package of sausages. And I was just laughing so hard.
Renate’s character is a theater actor and I’m wondering whether any of Renate’s experiences in the theater fed into the screenplay for Sentimental Value?
TRIER: Yes, several times because first of all, Renate doesn’t have this kind of stage fright [that Nora suffers from] just to make that clear, that’s her character. We know some people like that, we have a very good friend who when he plays Hamlet, he sometimes vomits before he goes out. It becomes a kind of urgent energy thrust that happens to him where he gets very anxious… And you have this other friend, a female actor, who almost tries to run away from premieres and stuff. She panics completely, but she tells everyone ahead of time that this is who I am…
I’ve never worked in theater. I look at these wonderful people, even if it’s a bad play, and sometimes I can tear up at the end because I see what they do for us. So talking about creative life, I think that’s a great way to start a film to see that the facade of it looks very controlled and crafted, but behind, if you go 180, you see that Nora’s whole dress in the play is held up with duct tape and it’s just chaos and anxiety. We thought that that was interesting. I don’t know, Renate, I mean you have this experience of going on stage.
REINSVE: Absolutely. And I really love the launch of the character in Sentimental Value because you see her core problem through this very comedic setup that is very physical. You also see all the emotional weight that she’s carrying, unable to process, unable to communicate with the people around her in her real life. And she runs away panicking… because to be a good performer, you have to access everything inside of you. Also, on the subconscious level, you kind of have to have a contact with that and let anything come up. And she physically tries to run away, but when in the end she’s pushed on stage, you can also see where she gets her force as an actor. And you also see the similarity with Gustav, her father, that they are kind of the same, that the only place they can be really sensitive and present with other people is on stage because he also lacks that ability in his life with his daughters.
What is the play she’s performing? Initially I had thought it was some sort of avant garde A Doll's House because Renate’s character is also called Nora, and in the play she runs away, right?
TRIER: This is a misunderstanding, it’s not A Doll's House, actually. The first play you see Nora perform is something that we have created from scratch, Eskil [Vogt] and I, based on an old tale by Anne Pedersdotter, The Witch, a true story of the last witch that was burned at the stake in Norway in the 1700s.
Oh, I’m glad you’ve clarified that.
TRIER: It’s actually a witch-burning kind of modern take feminist story. It’s what we imagine a strong woman yelling at these patriarchs, the priests… These men who are frozen in time… And we did a lot of research and everything. We had a lot of help and Renate helped us a lot as well.
REINSVE: And also you see her scream at a father figure from the very start. You see her anger towards this man, a priest, in that whole scene. You see so much of her core and the journey she’s got to go on.
Having discussed the idea of Sentimental Value, did you keep Renate apprised of the script’s progress?
TRIER: We started writing in late August, that must have been 2022. And by Christmas we had gotten most of the stuff in order. And I invited Renate for a cup of coffee at my house and I remember telling you what I wanted to do, and I kind of told the story a little bit from the point of view of Nora because we didn’t have all the pieces yet. But I knew her trajectory and the dynamic of her and the father and the sister. But I also told you it as if I was telling you a story about a friend… because I kind of had a sense of the character’s journey and we were both becoming quite emotional. And you really embraced the idea and physically embraced me because I remember giving you a big hug… And you were laughing and saying, “You know me so well.”
REINSVE: And also that you wanted to challenge me with a character that was more mature and was carrying more emotional weight. And I really loved the whole concept of the house surrounding the story of the family. [Trier leaves to answer the door of his hotel room.]
While Joachim’s gone, please tell me the kind of plays that you studied at drama school?
REINSVE: For the exam of the school, I did play Nora [in A Doll’s House] and I’ve done a lot of those roles both in the school and also after. I’ve done a lot of Ibsen, Shakespeare, Chekhov. I worked with a great theater director from New York, Robert Wilson [Edda at Oslo’s Norwegian Theater]. Isabelle Huppert came to see it. I’ve never been so nervous in my entire life…
TRIER: [Returns] Can I just shoot in my version of that story? I know Isabelle Huppert very well. We did Louder Than Bombs together about 10 years ago. And as we were getting into doing The Worst Person in the World, Isabelle came because she was very close to Robert Wilson… So, Isabelle and I have tea the morning after the premiere and Isabelle says, “Oh, it was a great play last night, Robert is so good and then there was this one girl, this actress, she moved in a very special way. She had some special energy,” and I said, “Who was she?” “Oh, I don’t know her name. She had a purple dress.” And I said, “Ah, yeah, the girl in the purple dress, she’s going to be the lead in my next film.” And Isabelle laughed and said, “Ah, of course, this is great.” And then when the film was done and Isabelle saw it, she really helped promote The Worst Person in the World
Renate, would anything in the world have stopped you from doing Sentimental Value?
REINSVE: I've never, ever ever had anything in the way of working with Joachim. There is no director like him. And I’ve been so moved by his
“I never as an actor have to show him what I’m doing. He trusts that it lives within me and that the camera will capture it.”
RENATE REINSVE
work, even the films that I haven’t been in, and really just had such a growing experience working with him. And for me, also, it’s about what I really love about his movies, which is the emotionality, watching it grow on you really slowly and suddenly until you kind of get punched in the stomach. And I really felt that in the script too. I was kind of in the world of this family trying to figure out how to communicate. And these two sisters loving each other so much. There is no apparent big conflict between them, but they see each other’s choices in life. There were just so much really subtle complexities about the characters and the scenes. And then for me, the point where it really punched me in the stomach was the scene between the sisters where they realized what they’ve been to each other and that the father has actually seen them this whole way without them realizing, it’s just that he struggles to express it. So that was really when the movie just got to me and it creeps up on you slowly… And I just love the way you, Joachim, collect everyone working on the set so it feels like we are really doing it together. It’s not necessarily about my role and how I will do the role because that will come from the dynamic between everyone on set. And it’s never about that one performance. It’s about what we want to talk about together in that scene or in the whole movie. And then it’s less pressure that way because it’s never about you or what you bring. It’s what occurs in the scene together with the other performers and the crew.
The whole film leads to the scene you’re referring to between Nora and Agnes where Agnes tells you of a beautiful memory she has of Nora washing her hair because you think that you haven’t contributed to the relationship. You remain silent, your face tells us your reaction. How did you and Joachim discuss that moment?
REINSVE: She realizes that she has the ability to love someone. And that is, for me... even talking about it now I get emotional. It’s such a beautifully written relationship and that realization is so fantastic. And I love playing around with what Nora knew about herself and what she didn’t know about herself, and what she realized throughout the movie is really the strength of that character, I think.
Trier and Reinsve in Cannes.
HONORING
LOCATIONS
OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY FEATURE FILM
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING (PARAMOUNT PICTURES)
Ben Firminger /LMGI, Jonas Christiansen, Morten Nelson, Niall O’Shea, Jason Roberts, Peter Bardsley, Jasmine Burridge /LMGI, Clara Butler, Sam Millner
OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD FEATURE FILM A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES)
Anthony Pisani /LMGI
OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION SERIES THE STUDIO (APPLE TV+)
Stacey Brashear /LMGI, Martin J. Cummins /LMGI
LOCATION MANAGERS GUILD INTERNATIONAL CONGRATULATES OUR HONOREES AND WINNERS WHERE STORY LIVES
OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD TELEVISION SERIES 1923 – SEASON 2 (PARAMOUNT+)
David Zachary Heine /LMGI, James Crowley, Hayden Yancer /LMGI
OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A TELEVISION ANTHOLOGY, MOW OR LIMITED SERIES THE PENGUIN (HBO MAX)
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD ILT JONES LMGI HUMANITARIAN AWARD MAKE-A-WISH, LOS ANGELES
Keith Adams /LMGI
OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A COMMERCIAL ORIENT EXPRESS: “ARTISAN OF TRAVEL” (BELMOND)
Cagdas Altun, Ozgur Oz, Bugra Baydar, Gokhan Seven
OUTSTANDING FILM COMMISSION NEW JERSEY MOTION PICTURE & TELEVISION COMMISSION A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES)
I’m fascinated that two guys wrote this, Joachim. How were you and Eskil Vogt both able to capture this haunting, unspoken depth between two sisters?
TRIER: The idea of writing women when you’re a man, I never found it problematic and I don’t know why. Eskil and I, we sit there and we’re not those characters anyway. And we both have sisters, by the way, and we both have female partners who have sisters.
I never saw it as an issue. And at the same time, I’m always interested in the vulnerability of people regardless of gender. My early films were a lot about men who felt that they were maybe too emotional to fit into the standardized kind of male machismo identity thing. So, I think it’s more about identity and characters than gender for me, if I may say so. It’s such a delicate subject, but that’s how I feel.
And for you, Renate, when you read the screenplay and saw the relationship between Agnes and Nora, was there a backstory?
REINSVE: I think there isn’t as much backstory to working with you, Joachim, or it’s maybe not that necessary. We knew that for instance, Nora was depressed and she was struggling with mental health. And then that expression of what that is needs to be very specific and not some general kind of version of what that is. But how does her face change in that? Where does she feel it? What does she specifically struggle with in her relationship when in the different stages of that depression? So those things are very specific to be able to be in the situation as your character and then really be very free about what happens in the scene with the other actor or with the whole room actually.
So, it’s more about being very detailed about the work… It’s very specific craft that we do, even though it looks very free and we do improvise on set, not just the actors, but the whole room.
TRIER: I think what you’re describing is to work from the inside. And it’s kind of a slow process because we have rehearsal, we have calm time to talk about everything and get to know each other with the other actors. There’s a lot of discussion about method acting at the moment. I could work with any technique, I think, if I can try to support an actor’s needs, but I don’t know what that is. In a way, I know that Renate becomes Nora without having to wear a mustache and a hat and speak differently over lunch. When we talk about letting something occur that’s unplanned, it’s because I know and trust that she’s done the fundamental work beforehand.
We shoot consistently so you’re in this bubble of being the character, and it’s when it all ends and we give each other a hug on the last day, and I say, “Thank you for carrying Nora. I know that was really heavy.” And we both cry and you say, “That was pretty tough. We’re letting go now.” So, I know that you get yourself into this situation. It’s like it’s not a forced thing. It just happens if you prep it properly. And then those things will
occur on the day when you shoot the scene of the dynamic. And just listening to your sister, receiving her love and knowing that Nora, who you have kind of halfway become in that moment, resists that because it’s so hard for her to feel loved and she yearns for it so much, and then something will occur… And that’s the advantage of working a couple of films together is that you know that’s what I want.
Also, Renate there’s the scene with you and Stellan in the restaurant where he shows you the script and you reject him and it. There’s rawness and cold fury behind your eyes and I thought, Christ, how does she do that?
REINSVE: I know Joachim loves working like that, and we both do, to build something in a character, like a strong emotion and then work against it and on as many levels as we can. To kind of find the dynamic between strong emotions within a character and the layers in the character. And then what I really love working with Joachim is that he will pick up on the subtleness. So, I never as an actor have to show him what I’m doing. He trusts that it lives within me and that the camera will capture it. And Stellan said something really nice about that. He said, “The camera will actually capture more than the naked eye.”
TRIER: Ingmar Bergman said it.
REINSVE: And Joachim is right there next to the camera. He’s not behind the monitor. And in that way, he can also pick up on all the little things and direct us, because you need to lose control and not be intellectualizing what you’re doing. And we can in that way, be really raw and very subtle in what we do because we never have to show him anything. And that is very unusual for a director, that when you get that amount of trust, you can really go very far within.
Joachim, what are you writing for Renate next?
TRIER: It’s so embarrassing… I don’t know. I’m letting all of these different ideas percolate. I don’t know what the story is. I’m thinking about vibe and mood, but I don’t know. When a lot of this traveling is over, I’ll get back to the writing room with Eskil. I cannot imagine not doing it. I can’t promise anyone what the next one will be because I need that free space to just think. But the best days I’ve had on set in my life have been with Renate. I have some people like Renate and Anders, several others that I know that they’ll be good days on set. And I feel that so urgently with her. Even if there’s a film that we skip, then I hope she will not give up on me.
REINSVE: Never give up on you. Never.
TRIER: I would love to see her age. I think that’s the magic of cinema as well, that she keeps developing, maturing, conquering new things. I would love to be a part of that.
REINSVE: I’m so curious also about the process around the movie with you, Joachim. If and when, next time I’m not in your movie, will you let me into your editing room just to watch a little bit?
TRIER: Yes. ★
Herbert Nordrum and Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World
From left: Stellan Skarsgård and Reinsve; Reinsve and Jonas Jacobsen.
1. Colin Farrell, Ballad of a Small Player.
2. Luca Guadagnino, Nora Garrett, Malik Hassan Sayeed and Jessica Ronane, After the Hunt.
3. Adam Sandler, Jay Kelly.
4. Nia DaCosta, Hedda.
5. Kerry Condon, Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones, Train Dreams.
6. Jon M. Chu, Wicked: For Good
7. Josh O'Connor, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
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Snapshot
Deadline Contenders Los Angeles November 15, 2025
Directors Guild of America
1. Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value.
2. Ryan Coogler, Sinners.
3. Ishaan Khatter, Neeraj Ghaywan, Vishal Jethwa, Homebound.
4. Tory Kamen, Eleanor the Great.
5. Brian Machleit, Stunt Panel
6. Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater, Blue Moon.
7. Rami Malek, Nuremberg.
8. Guillermo del Toro, Contenders Hall of Fame Award winner
9. Sydney Sweeney, Christy.
Snapshot
1. Joseph Kosinski, Al Nelson, F1.
2. Malik Hassan Sayeed, After the Hunt.
3. Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Scott Cooper and Eric Robinson, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.
4. Tessa Thompso and Nia DaCosta, Hedda.
5. Bret Howe, Francine Maisler, Susanne Scheel, Mary Vernieu, Bernard Telsey, Nina Gold, Casting Panel.
6. Isamu Imakake, Dragon Heart — Adventures Beyond This World.
7. Lee Byung-hun, Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice.
Snapshot
Deadline Sound & Screen: Film
November 5, 2025
Royce Hall, UCLA
1. EJAE and Mark Sonnenblick, KPop Demon Hunters.
2. Alice Smith, Miles Caton, Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson, Sinners.
3. Aiyana-Lee, Highest 2 Lowest.
4. Laura Karpman, Captain America: Brave New World.
5. Jeremiah Fraites, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.
6. Nathan Johnson, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
7. Volker Bertelmann, A House of Dynamite.
8. Sara Bareilles, Come See Me in the Good Light.
9. Michael Giacchino, The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
10. Kesha and Diane Warren, Diane Warren: Relentless.
11. Alexandre Desplat, Frankenstein.
Snapshot
Dancing with the Stars 20th Anniversary
November 11, 2025
CBS Television City
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
1. Kiki Nyemchek, Koko Iwasaki, Valentin Chmerkovskiy, Jenna Johnson and Alex Sander.
2. Alfonso Ribeiro, Julianne Hough
3. Marlee Matlin.
Danielle Fishel.
Hayley Erbert Hough and Derek Hough.
Chandler Kinney, Jenn Tran and Ilona Maher.
Carrie Ann Inaba.
Valentin Chmerkovskiy and Alix Earle
