The Envelope, January 09, 2024

A S P EC I A L I SS U E

JA N UA RY 9, 2 0 24 VOL. CXLIII NO. 37

+ WHO AFFLECK TRUSTS + MAKING IT LOOK WESTERN + PORTMAN SHADOWS MOORE

THE SOUL SEARCHER MARTIN SCORSESE KEEPS A POSITIVE THOUGHT ABOUT HUMANITY’S HEALING AND EVEN TRIES TO HELP IT ALONG.

ULTIMATE AWARDS GUIDE

What’s Inside

01.09.24

14 Added fuel to the fire

Toil without the tension

Gold Standard

Danielle Brooks took Oprah’s 1985 Sofia to the next level in the newest “Color Purple.”

P. 8

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore work calmly for a fraught “May December.”

P. 18

Who knows what from Sundance will break out? Glenn Whipp has ideas.

P. 38

Hero and villain

Man with a mission

Executives Roundtable

Colman Domingo’s roles in “Rustin” and “The Color Purple” took a toll on him.

P. 14

Martin Scorsese is doing his part to get humanity to a more evolved state.

P. 26

Ben Affleck hears them

Changing the map

ON THE COVER: Martin Scorsese photo by Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

Not all on this panel agree on what the immediate future holds for the industry.

P. 40

The director of “Air” isn’t afraid to listen to advice from his actors, including his wife.

P. 16

The American West’s look comes from the real thing ... or Spain ... or England.

P. 36

ON THIS PAGE: Colman Domingo photo by Maya Iman / For The Times

Wide Shot A dimmer 2024 box office forecast doesn’t call for doomsaying, Ryan Faughnder says.

P. 47

MAYA IMAN / L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 3 FOR THE TIMES

LOS ANGELES TIMES

BuzzMeter (Our panel of Oscar experts share their picks.)

CLAUDIA PUIG LAIST 89.3’S FILMWEEK

Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”) Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”) Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”) Paul Giamatti (“The Holdovers”) Colman Domingo (“Rustin”)

Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”) Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”) Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) Leonardo DiCaprio (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) Teo Yoo (“Past Lives”)

Best actor, by all rights, should go to Andrew Scott for his masterfully nu­ anced and soulful performance in “All of Us Strangers,” closely followed by Col­ man Domingo’s dazzling turn in “Rustin” and Jeffrey Wright’s witty portrayal in “American Fiction.” But don’t count out Paul Giamatti and Nicolas Cage.

Basically, there’s Andrew Scott in “All of Us Strangers” and there’s everyone else.

But that everyone else does include some terrific lead actors whom I wish had more of a chance, including Christian Friedel (“The Zone of Interest”) and other actors from international films.

TIM COGSHELL

ANNE THOMPSON

LAIST 89.3’S FILMWEEK

INDIEWIRE

Barry Keoghan (“Saltburn”) Nicolas Cage (“Dream Scenario”) Jamie Foxx (“The Burial”) Paul Giamatti (“The Holdovers”) Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”)

Barry Keoghan is b— out in “Saltburn” (literally). Colman Domingo is also daring in “Rustin.” I still love Paul Gia­ matti in “The Holdovers.” In “American Fiction,” Jeffrey Wright plays a character appropriately named for a virtuoso. My dark horse nod goes to Nic Cage for a great performance in “Dream Scenario.”

DAVE KARGER TCM

Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”) Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) Colman Domingo (“Rustin”) Leonardo DiCaprio (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”)

Nine­time nominee Bradley Cooper delivers a career­best performance in “Maestro” and could be a 12­ or 13­time nominee within a few weeks. He’ll have to fend off Cillian Murphy and Colman Domingo. And worthy underdogs An­ drew Scott, Barry Keoghan and Nic Cage.

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Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”) Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”) Leonardo DiCaprio (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) Colman Domingo (“Rustin”)

C ILLIAN MURPHY LEAD ACTOR

C

I L L I A N M U R P H Y takes over the top spot in Round 2 of weighted nominations predictions, ahead of Andrew Scott and Bradley Cooper, and not by a nose: Murphy has about 150% of the total at which those two are tied.

“For now, it’s Cillian Murphy’s to lose, while Andrew Scott (the Hot Priest in ‘Fleabag’) could move up in the rankings as more people see his bravura performance,” says Anne Thompson. “Nine­time nominee Bradley Cooper delivers a career­best performance ... and could be a 12­ or 13­time nominee within a few weeks,” says Dave Karger. “Could this finally be his year?” Nicolas Cage, Paul Giamatti and others make Tim Cogshell’s list, though he saves the top spot for Barry Keoghan, who “is b— out in ‘Saltburn,’ literally.” You can find all our picks at latimes.com/buzzmeter, where you can also vote for your own slate in our weekly polls.

For now, it’s Cillian Murphy’s to lose, while Andrew Scott (the Hot Priest in “Fleabag”) could move up in the rankings as more people see his bravura perform­ ance. Bradley Cooper is earning raves for his portrayal of composer­conductor Leonard Bernstein.

GLENN WHIPP LOS ANGELES TIMES

Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”) Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) Leonardo DiCaprio (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”) Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”)

Andrew Scott is 47 and boasts a long résumé of distinguished credits. He finally has a film role worthy of his talent, playing a solitary man dealing with the ghosts of his past. It’s a soul­ stirring turn filled with vulnerability, openness and a beauty that shatters.

“ O P P E N H E I M E R ” P H OTO F RO M U N I V E R SA L P I C T U R ES

JUSTIN CHANG

THE CONTENDERS

There’s a heart in his mean professor

EDITOR IN CHIEF ELENA NELSON HOWE CREATIVE DIRECTOR AMY KING DESIGN DIRECTOR TAYLOR LE SENIOR DEPUTY DESIGN DIRECTOR FAITH STAFFORD

Paul Giamatti plays another blunt character in ‘The Holdovers.’ But this one is kind — deep down.

By Robert Abele

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WENTY YEARS AFTER fulminating under the Napa Valley sun as a dyspeptic wine snob in Alexander Payne’s “Sideways,” Paul Giamatti is back with the filmmaker for “The Holdovers,” this time in the unforgiving Massachusetts winter of 1970. “Everybody’s had a Mr. Hunham type,” says Giamatti of his haughty, dis­ missive character, an irritable prep school teacher trapped on campus over Christ­ mas break. “I had a biology teacher very much like this guy.” The actor’s famil­ iarity with East Coast academia extends beyond just attending schools like the film’s: His dad was a professor. “My father wasn’t like [Hunham], but there were colleagues of my father who were so pleased by their own wit and intelligence, when nobody knows what they’re talking about. That oblivion is funny to me.”

At the beginning, Mr. Hunham isn’t all Scrooge, is he?

He’s not a bad guy. I don’t think he’s wrong in a lot of what he says right off the bat to the headmaster. He tells that racist little jerk to shut up. Alexander Payne makes a great distinction between nice and kind. And this guy, he may not be nice, but underneath, he’s kind.

But he does relish the meanness he wields in the classroom.

I do think he takes pleasure in being an ass—. He’s presenting as one of those British schoolmaster guys, he’s playing up to that type. They’re performing for you a little bit. That’s what he likes about it.

That pedagogy where you convey ideas through a kind of harsh cruelty. But my biggest concern was that it be clear he

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SENIOR ART DIRECTOR ERICA BONKOWSKI

El Segundo, CA ­ November 19: Oscar­ contending actor Paul Giamatti poses for a group portrait on Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023 in El Segundo, CA. ( Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

ART DIRECTORS ELIZABETH BURR JUDY PRYOR SUSANA SANCHEZ PHOTO EDITORS JEROME ADAMSTEIN BRANDON CHOE COPY CHIEF BLAKE HENNON STAFF WRITER/COLUMNIST GLENN WHIPP WRITERS J. CLARA CHAN RYAN FAUGHNDER MICHAEL ORDOÑA COPY EDITOR JOAN FANTAZIA

wasn’t such a bad guy from the get­go.

I’ve had to play a lot of unpleasant people like this, and sometimes I feel like I hit it too hard. And I wanted to make sure, because it was important for the tone of this Christmas movie, being about empa­ thy, that as much as the guy’s off­putting you’re on board with it.

When he’s popping off insults to students, I imagine he thinks his favorite historical figures are laughing with him in spirit.

That’s exactly what I hoped to convey, the great wits of classical history gath­ ered around, and he’s in that lineage.

Those are his friends; they’re who is living and vibrant to him. He lives in the wrong century. Profoundly.

Outside of what the script gives you, what did you add in any given scene?

Everything is sort of there. It’s so well written I don’t know what I bring to it other than what I’m getting from the script. Whistling “Ride of the Valkyries” when I’m handing their papers back?

That just happened. He thinks he’s whistling a jaunty tune, but it’s Wagner.

That hilarious insert of Hunham encountering a football and confidently flinging it with no skill whatsoever is like a gag from the silent era.

I enjoyed that. Again, it’s a fantasy, being like Cicero on his morning consti­ tutional around the Forum or whatever.

Alexander Payne is a big silent comedy guy. He’s always telling me to watch Harold Lloyd. We had to shoot it a bunch of times, because Alexander kept telling me I was throwing it too well. Then finally, I thought, in his mind, it was a shot put, like out of the Romans.

It’s more believable that these charac­ ters get somewhere affecting but not radical. Hunham learns to care about two people, not everyone.

And it facilitates some sort of freeing of himself, because he’s a guy who wanted to be free without even really knowing it or knowing how to be.

That’s also Alexander. It’s not some huge transformation suddenly. It’s incremental change. With any of them, you don’t know what’s really going to happen.

P H OTO BY JA S O N A R M O N D / LOS A N G E L ES T I M ES

PHOTOGRAPHERS JASON ARMOND JAY L. CLENDENIN CAROLYN COLE ROBERT GAUTHIER CHRISTINA HOUSE ADVERTISING CHIEF OF STAFF TO EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, HEAD OF STRATEGY AND REVENUE ANNA MAGZANYAN MARKETING DIRECTOR DAVE PURDUE EXECUTIVE SALES DIRECTOR, ENTERTAINMENT HEIDI LINNEBACH SENIOR SALES EXECUTIVE BETH ZELMAN OPERATIONS KATRINA TEN EDITION PLANNING JULIE BYER JAVIER CHAVEZ RUDY FLORES DAVE NOVOTNEY ELIZABETH GHRER­JONES

She looked like me. She was a plus­ size woman. But it was also getting to see all these different shades of Black excellence. Coming from my little high school, I was the only Black girl chosen for the acting program. And so I always had that mentality that there was only room for one of us.

Did studying at Juilliard change your outlook?

There, it was only me and another Black girl in the class, but it opened my world to, like, “There can be two.”

Then I go to “Orange Is the New Black,” and I’m like, “There can be five or six!”

THE CONTENDERS

Beyond Oprah, Sofia 2.0 Danielle Brooks, who had the Broadway role, notes iconic moments in the ’85 version of ‘Color Purple’ — a certain walk, a clenched fist — that had to be in the new film. By Margy Rochlin

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A N I E L L E B RO O K S A S S U M E D that her Tony­nominated, Grammy­winning performance as the strong­willed, blunt­ talking Sofia Butler in the Broadway revival of “The Color Pur­ ple” might make her an obvious front­runner when director Blitz Bazawule began casting the big­screen adaptation of the musical version of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize­winning novel. Instead, she became engaged in a half­year audition process involving Zoom meetings, a self­tape of her belting out Sofia’s showstopping “Hell No!,” chemistry reads and agoniz­ ingly protracted silences from production. ❡“It’s called removing your ego, that’s what it’s called,” Brooks says of the experience. “I was like, ‘This is going to be a journey, and it might be a long one.’ ” Now with Golden Globe and Crit­ ics Choice supporting actress nominations on the books, there’s increasing talk about Brooks’ Oscar nod chances and how every time her Sofia stomps into frame, gives a piece of her mind or flashes her wraparound smile, she becomes the absolute center of the scene.

Not many actors get the chance to act in different mediums with the same role. Talk about going from commanding a black box theater to hitting marks on a film set.

When we did the John Doyle pro­ duction in 2015, we had nothing.

Wooden chairs on a stage. And that was so much fun, because that’s what you do in school. You figure it out.

You imagine the audience goes on a journey with [you] every night, that Sofia is actually holding a baby, or a mob of white men are attacking her.

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But when you actually get to do it on the soil of a true plantation in Geor­ gia, surrounded by trees and imagin­ ing, “How many women or men were hung off those trees?” to actually have a 10­pound baby in my hand that I have to take care of, to have 10, 15 men actually coming at me?

Now I get to use all of my senses, to feel the hot Georgia sun on my skin, to leave [the character] Harpo on an actual wagon, not just to walk back into the wings. That changes the game.

Between Broadway and the movie, you had your first child. Did that bring fresh insight into Sofia?

It completely opened up another well of depth for me. Sofia had six children. And to give of your body that many times? I only did it one time, and I know the fear. I had an emergency C­section. At one moment there were, like, 10 doctors rushing in to tell me that she had flat­lined. So to think of what this woman went through giving birth six times, the sacrifice, and the love that she has for her children. And not only did I have a child, I got married. So there’s the addition of knowing what it is to be in a committed relationship. With Sofia and Harpo, their whole thing is to break generational curses, to really change what it is to have to live in gender norms. And that’s what I’m striving to do with my marriage.

In 2005, your father took you to see “The Color Purple” with the original Broadway cast. Which character caught teenage Dan­ ielle’s eye?

Felicia P. Fields, who played Sofia.

Your mother is a pastor, your dad, a deacon. Is there a connection between growing up in the church and being drawn to the theater?

One hundred percent. It gave me my foundation spiritually, which is so connected to “The Color Purple,” which is all about “God is inside of me and everyone else.” Then the element of performance is embedded in church. The choir is the ensemble.

You have musicians. The program is like the Playbill. The Bible, the word, is like the script. You’re able to see what worked and what didn’t. The delivery from the pastor. You’re try­ ing to evoke an emotion within the audience. Or when somebody prayed, just the cadences, their rhythms. How they moved people or didn’t move people. I wasn’t in church just on Sundays, it was Monday through Friday either Bible study or choir rehearsal, which is where I learned to sing. Memorizing for Easter church services taught me how to memorize [lines]. It was like, “This makes total sense why I love the theater so much.”

You’ve always been open about how parts of your more expressive Sofia honors Oprah Winfrey’s performance in the 1985 film.

She was brilliant in that movie.

There’s some iconic moments that you have to have in there. You have to have Sofia’s iconic walk when she first enters with Harpo. You have to have the [clenched] fist, because that’s symbolic of who she is — strong, resilient. It was like, “[Oprah] gave me the permission to do my thing, and I’m grateful for that.” It’s almost like she lit the fire, I just added fuel.

P H OTO BY RO B E RT GAU T H I E R / LOS A N G E L ES T I M ES

T H E D I R EC TO R S

It’s not just his big break — it could open the door for others Cord Jefferson is hoping that his success with ‘American Fiction,’ a satire dealing with race, will eventually lead to further projects whose subjects are considered untouchable. By Gregory Ellwood

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started crying,” Jefferson says. “I was so just overcome. I really thought that I might never get to make something that I wanted to make.”

Jefferson had fallen for “Erasure,” Percival Everett’s 2001 novel skewering publishing industry attitudes about Black literature, after reading it in December 2020. With Everett’s bless­ ing, Jefferson spent four months dur­ ing the pandemic adapting it into a screenplay. The film landed in theaters almost exactly three years from his reading of the book, a rare speedy turnaround in the film business, let alone for someone’s directorial debut.

The social satire centers on The­ lonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a professor of English litera­ ture at a well­respected West Coast university. After finding himself at

JEFFREY Wright and Erika Alexander star.

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odds with his students and peers, Monk takes a leave of absence to return home to Boston to assist his mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who is suffer­ ing from dementia. As he deals with a fractious relationship with his brother (Sterling K. Brown) and sister (Tracee Ellis Ross), he becomes increasingly frustrated that his latest novel cannot find a legitimate publisher.

Raging at the success of a competing author whose work he judges as pan­ dering, he decides to write a stereotyp­ ical novel about the Black experience as a way to vent his anger. Written under a pseudonym and filled with inner­city clichés, he insists his agent submit “My Pafology” to all the major book publishers. When he gets a mas­ sive financial offer that could assist his mother’s care, he finds himself forced to go along with its publication.

“To me, it was very, very important to have those family moments and those more grounded, poignant mo­ ments in order to make sure that the film didn’t collapse under the weight of the comedy and the satire,” Jefferson says. “I never wanted it to feel silly.

That was deeply important to me.”

Despite progress since “Erasure” was published, the material is still relevant. Jefferson notes that is a “little heartbreaking,” but more so when you consider his “spiritual predecessor” for “Fiction,” Robert Townsend’s “Holly­

wood Shuffle,” was released in 1987. “It was sort of a real epiphany for me, because it was one of the first movies that I saw that was like, ‘Oh, OK, this is a serious issue. This guy’s talking about race and racism and these painful issues for him, but it’s really, really funny,’ ” he says.

In that context, the audition process for the role of Agnes provided one of the most gratifying moments for Jeffer­ son. He recalls, “One of these actors [auditioning was asked], ‘Do you have any questions for Cord before we start?’ And she said, ‘No, but I just want to say I cannot believe they’re letting you make this movie.’ This is a Black woman in her 70s and she said, ‘I’ve been doing this for half a century, and you’re talking about things that we’ve been talking about for half a century, but they’ve never let us say.

I’m so delighted that this is going to

be in the world.’ ” After initially just being thrilled to have his film accepted into the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, Jefferson saw the Amazon MGM Studios release receive an awards season jump by winning the festival’s prestigious People’s Choice Award, an honor that has often led to a best picture Oscar nomination.

Awards often bring a larger spot­ light, and Jefferson is hoping that any continuing success “American Fiction” earns allows someone else to make a film that “right now people think is crazy and outlandish” down the road.

“Hopefully, what this movie can do is crack the door open so that in 2033 or 2043, somebody who’s seen this film is then allowed to make a thing that people think these days is prepos­ terous to make. I’m here because of the legacy of those kinds of people.”

P O RT RA I T BY JAY L . C L E N D E N I N / LOS A N G E L ES T I M ES

“A M E R I CA N F I C T I O N ” P H OTO BY C L A I R E FO LG E R / M G M ­ O R I O N R E L E A S I N G V I A A P

E S P I T E W H AT M A N Y would consider notable success in Hollywood, Cord Jefferson says he started to believe that his dream just wasn’t going to happen for him. Jefferson has an Emmy Award for writing an episode of “Watchmen” and two WGA Awards for that miniseries and “Succession” in his pos­ session, but those were honors for contributing to other people’s shows. When he would propose his own projects, he found himself failing over and over again to get a pickup from streamers or networks. ❡He began to wonder if he’d just end up as a co­executive producer on some other showrunners’ series and that would be that. Life took an incredible turn when he met with T­Street, Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman’s production entity, to pitch the feature film “Ameri­ can Fiction.” ❡ “When they told me they were going to greenlight the film, I

T H E D I R EC TO R S

Healing is the gift from a unique take on grief and loss Andrew Haigh added extra personal levels of depth for ‘All of Us Strangers.’ His stars understood the assignment. By Emily Zemler

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L L O F U S S T R A N G E R S ,” about a lonely screenwriter named Adam who starts a relationship with a mysterious neigh­ bor as he begins to revisit his childhood home, draws intimately from director Andrew Haigh’s own life and experiences despite being loosely adapted from Japanese novelist Taichi Yamada’s 1987 book “Strangers.” Haigh was sent the book several years ago but began writing the screenplay in the midst of the pandemic while living in L.A. and feeling distanced from his family in the UK. ❡ “I brought a lot of my own life into it,” Haigh says, speaking in London during the London Film Festival. “I dealt 12 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

with my own relationships with my parents within the story. So it took an emotional toll at the time as I was writing. But in a good, cathartic way.”

Yamada’s novel is a ghost story about a man who meets a couple who appear to be his dead parents and begins to visit them until they start depleting his life force. In Haigh’s version, Adam (Andrew Scott) visits his childhood home and reunites with his long­dead parents, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. During these encounters, for which Haigh never offers an explanation, Adam comes to terms with trauma and loss.

At the same time, he begins a relation­ ship with Henry (Paul Mescal), a neighbor who appears to be the only other resident of Adam’s high­rise apartment building.

“It was that very central idea of meeting your parents again after they’ve gone,” says Haigh, whose parents are still alive. “I couldn’t get that idea out of my head. It’s such an unusual, strange idea and something that I think we all wish we could do, whether our parents are actually alive or dead. It took me some time to realize how I would turn this story into something that was for me. Be­ cause in the novel, there’s a female character, and it’s a love affair be­ tween a man and a woman. So it was about bringing elements of myself and the way that I see the world into it.”

The film hinged on perfect casting, which was something Haigh knew from the beginning. He and the cast­ ing director spent a long time going through numerous possibilities but eventually landed on Scott (“Fleabag”), who hasn’t previously had the starring role in a movie. Scott instinctively understood Adam, Haigh says, and the theme of the movie, which touches on how gay men of a certain age have felt isolated since the AIDS epidemic.

“What that did to a generation of gay men and how it made them terri­ fied of intimacy were all elements I wanted to look at,” Haigh says. “And Andrew understood that. He had such a guttural, emotional effect on me. In certain scenes, I could feel what was happening to him. Sometimes I think it was even a surprise for him how much it affected him. That was beau­ tiful to watch, because it feels so real and so honest.”

“All of Us Strangers” was shot in six weeks in 2022. The scenes in the family home, which was Haigh’s actual childhood home, were com­ pleted first, and then the production moved on to the apartment scenes, done primarily on a soundstage. “I couldn’t remember exactly where it was,” Haigh says of the house. “And then I found it and we knocked on their door and asked to film there. It was literally going into the past while still being very much in the present, which is what the film does. It’s about how you’re always drifting or being pulled into the past even though you’re existing in the present.”

For Haigh, the film meditates on a lot of personal ideas, but it’s ulti­ mately about grief. It’s a subject he says fascinates him because it’s not just about the loss of a person.

“It’s about how we lose so much as we go through life,” Haigh says.

“There are relationships that we have lost. We can grieve our childhood not being how we wanted it to be. We can grieve the things that we never got to say to each other. I think grief encom­ passes so much of our day­to­day existence. That’s what I wanted the film to be about, not specifically about someone who has lost his par­ ents at a young age. But at the same time, I also wanted it to be about that.”

T

H E R E I S a supernatural element to the story, particu­ larly in the gut­punch of the ending, but Haigh doesn’t see “All of Us Strangers” as a traditional ghost story. Instead, he uses the concept of the narrative to explore these themes of grief and loss and what he calls “aloneness,” something that was mag­ nified for many during the pandemic.

He sees the ending of the film, which is open to emotional interpretation, as uplifting. For Haigh, the literal ghosts of the story represent something more significant.

“Our memories and our pasts remain, and they are the ghosts in our lives,” he says. “If I think about people who are no longer with me, they exist and I can feel them and I can almost see them and I can feel the love I had for them. That strength of feeling is so intense that the love can grow even though you’ve lost that person. That, to me, is the key that unlocked some­ thing in this story.”

P H OTO BY DA R R E N VA RGA S / FO R T H E T I M ES

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P O RT RA I T BY M AYA I M A N / FO R T H E T I M ES

THE CONTENDERS

2 key but brutal roles required off-screen support Colman Domingo is the hero of ‘Rustin,’ villain of ‘Color Purple.’

Both parts tap into his own trauma. By Diedre Johnson

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ST I L L BY DAV I D L E E / N E T F L I X

T ’ S E A R LY EV E N I N G on a Friday when I catch up with Colman Domingo at the L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills. We greet each other in the dimly lit lobby and find a private place to talk. It’s been a long week of promo for his latest projects, Netflix’s currently streaming “Rustin,” based on the life of civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and the recently released remake of “The Color Purple,” adapted from the Broadway musical version of Alice Walker’s book, with Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones signed on as producers. ❡ In the last few days, there have been appearances at various red carpets across Los Angeles culminating in a large screening for press and industry insiders the night before we meet. It’s a tiring schedule, to be sure, but only fitting for the work that went into the production.

Domingo plays the domineering but painfully insecure Mister in one of the hardest shoots he’s ever been on, he says. “Making a movie musical is very difficult. It’s not just making a film. You have musical elements; you have singing, dancing, rehearsals and choreography and then these huge set pieces as well. So it requires a lot, and then you have the depth of character and trauma, detail and relationships you have to navigate,” he adds.

While Mister is a taxing role, “it’s really about these three women. And Mister supports these women in the most tricky, violent, abusive, painful way, where they have to navigate this trepidatious territory in order to find some healing redemption themselves.

But he’s the catalyst for that, because he is carrying his trauma. So we had to find a really delicate balance to actu­ ally just be … to have someone’s love on set every day.”

Domingo says that he tapped into his own traumas for the role and that the cast found going to some emotional places so difficult that they reached out for emotional and spiritual sup­

port. “Fantasia [Barrino] and I had to find moments just to pray with each other, to hold each other between takes, knowing that we have to do some really horrific work but it’s necessary so that people can see them­ selves and find ways and access to get out of the situation. Oprah would call me to check in on the cast. I wanted to make sure that I did not only do her but Quincy Jones and our fellow pro­

ducers right, and to do Alice Walker right. So I didn’t take that on lightly.”

Not taking his career too lightly has resulted in a number of triumphs for the 54­year­old Philadelphia native who majored in journalism at Temple University. “I was on my school news­ paper at Overbrook High School, same high school as Will Smith,” he recalls.

“That’s where I found a lot of joy. I love putting newspapers together and getting stories and finding out the story. So I went to news writing at first,” he says, but soon found he couldn’t stick to it.

“I was very fluid in my writing.

That was my impulse. How do I tell a story and reflect the times? So I was a [journalism] major for five minutes,” he says with a laugh. “No, I would say for two semesters. I switched to RTF, which is radio, television and film, which sounds lofty as you’re exploring critical theory, but then that’s when I took an acting class as an elective. One of my teachers told me, ‘I think you’re gifted, I’d be very curious to see what happened if you explored it.’ ”

THE ACTOR stars as the inspirational, embattled title character, above.

He did, and it took over. “More than anything, my roots are solid in the theater. I wanted to be a child of the theater — Shakespeare and musi­ cals and Ibsen and Chekhov. So I really went down that lane, and that’s what led me to the other things that I do.”

His career path includes writing plays and performing on Broadway, the West End and the Old Globe thea­ ter in San Diego. His Edith Produc­ tions, the partnership he launched with his husband, Raul, has a series set up with Showtime and first­look deals with AMC, plus other projects out later this year. He’s also been a steady presence on popular television with AMC’s “Fear the Walking Dead,” which ended its eight­season run in the fall, and HBO’s teen drama “Euphoria.”

“Rustin” was a coming together of the “north star,” as Domingo is fond of saying about good fortune. Dustin Lance Black and Julian Breece had written the script and were looking for the right producers just as Barack and Michelle Obama signed a deal be­ tween their Higher Ground produc­ tion company and Netflix.

It turns out Bayard Rustin had been an inspiration to the former president and the greenlight was given. Director­playwright George C. Wolfe, whom Domingo had worked with on “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” signed on to direct.

“And he decided I’d be his Bayard, which I felt so blessed,” Domingo says.

“I feel like for me, for my career, ‘Rustin’ is a pure expression of what I’m trying to say in the world — with his impact — and also ‘Color Purple.’ I feel very proud that both of them are happening at the same time … and maybe came at this time in my life when I’m ready for it.”

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Listening is one of his superpowers ‘Air’ director Ben Affleck encourages input from his stars, an ethic that extends within his production company. By Jordan Riefe

T

H E R E ’ S A N ensemble scene late in Ben Af­ fleck’s shoe­centric saga, “Air,” in which principal cast members, including Affleck as Nike founder Phil Knight, are seated at a boardroom table as rookie Michael Jordan decides whether to sign with the underdog shoe company.

“They already know the story, they already know Michael Jordan, they already know how it ends,” Affleck tells The Envelope about building drama in a scene that everyone al­ ready knows the outcome to. “They better be learning information that’s new and kind of interesting or has to be genuinely funny. And it all has to be rooted in reality.”

The tipping point comes when Nike executive Sonny Vaccaro, played by Matt Damon, addresses Jordan di­ rectly. “A shoe is just a shoe until 16 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

somebody steps into it, and then it has meaning. The rest of us just want a chance to touch that greatness. We need you in these shoes not so you have meaning in your life, so we have meaning in ours. Everyone at this table will be forgotten as soon as our time here is up, except for you. You’re going to be remembered forever, because some things are eternal.

You’re Michael Jordan, and your story is going to make us want to fly.”

The monologue, made all the more famous after Donald Trump used it without permission in an ad for his 2024 presidential bid, was by screen­ writer Alex Convery but rewritten by Affleck and Damon. It’s part of the process for Affleck, a two­time Oscar winner, who welcomes dialogue input from all his cast members, who in­ clude Viola Davis, Chris Tucker and Jason Bateman.

“Writing is creating the word, but it

really is a process of acting, especially with great actors. The way I earned trust on this movie was by having editorial on the set,” offers Affleck, who invited his editor, William Gold­ enberg, to rough­cut scenes for actors to observe before moving on. “I think they all found a great place to be, and I think that’s because they were able to see the movie as they were filming it.”

An Oscar winner for “Argo” and veteran editor of such movies as “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Heat” and “The Imita­ tion Game,” Goldenberg had no com­ punction about letting so many cooks into the kitchen. “I don’t usually get to meet the actors, so on that level it was fun,” he says. “Ben and I have worked together for a long time. I know his sensibility, he knows mine, so we’ve developed a shorthand together.”

As lifelong friends, Affleck and Damon last appeared together in Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel.” But “Air” represents a creative collabora­ tion between them not seen since the beginning of their careers on their breakout hit, “Good Will Hunting.”

“The person who ends up with the stronger opinion tends to win out,” Affleck says about any on­set differ­ ences between himself and Damon. “I have respect for him, and I think there’s a reason why he feels so strongly about it. The fights are about who cares more about this. What’s interesting with Matt is I have to earn

EDITOR William Goldenberg rough­cut scenes for the actors.

his respect like I would with any other actor. He doesn’t want to be in a bad movie. He’s not doing me any favors.

And I wouldn’t expect him to treat this any differently.”

Their most significant collaboration to date is Artists Equity, a new produc­ tion company formed with Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital. Employ­ ing an innovative business model, they aim to streamline the production process and partner with creators who will share in the commercial success of projects. “Air” is the company’s first production, with a couple future projects in the works — “The Instiga­ tors,” starring Damon, Casey Affleck and directed by Doug Liman, and “Small Things Like These,” directed by Tim Mielants and produced by Cillian Murphy, who leads a cast starring Ciarán Hinds and Emily Watson.

“It’s very director­based, it’s very rooted in treating people fairly and

P H OTOS F RO M A M A ZO N ST U D I OS

THE CONTENDERS

W H O ’S C O U N T I N G

reflecting what people bring to the project,” Affleck says of Artists Equity, mentioning another project — “Un­ stoppable,” Goldenberg’s directorial debut, currently in production.

“It happens there’s a phenomenal part for Jennifer in it,” Goldenberg notes, mentioning Affleck’s wife, Jennifer Lopez, who plays mother to Anthony Robles, a three­time All­ American wrestler born with just one leg. “She’s extraordinary to work with.

She’s a consummate professional and so helpful to me as a first­time director, whether it’s blocking or little script changes or ideas for her character.”

Affleck has been burned in the past, working with Lopez on “Gigli,” a 2003 rom­com that got scorched by critics and was a box office flop. But that didn’t keep him from producing “Un­ stoppable,” although he won’t be appearing in the movie.

“With Jen, it was more like she would come home and talk about her day and how it’s going. And I’m se­ cretly trying to find out about dailies,” he says. “I work with my wife the same way I work with Matt or any of the other actors in a movie. The whole thing is geared around respecting the contribution of these incredible artists and what they bring, and giving them the environment and the space to do their best stuff.”

Reflecting on his Oscar wins — in 1998 for the “Good Will Hunting” screenplay, which he co­wrote with Damon, and in 2013 for best picture winner “Argo,” which he produced and directed — Affleck notes that such honors can change your work life but not your inner life.

“I won the Oscar as a very young guy,” he says. “I did appreciate how meaningful it was, and it really changed my career. My life changed overnight. Before that show and after, my life has never been the same.

And the second time, I’d been through a lot and had sort of managed to be all over the place in terms of ups and downs, and it was nice for me to be affirmed as a director. But one of the things it told me was it doesn’t make you feel any better or any differ­ ent. A lot of people go through a de­ pression, because they get the thing they thought their whole life was supposed to be a meaningful thing, and they find ‘This doesn’t change anything about how I feel.’ ”

DUE FOR AN ENCORE? Taraji P. Henson brings the brightest star wattage — and longest history of awards contention — to “The Color Purple” movie musical and could score a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her flashy blues singer Shug Avery. — Carla Meyer

2

4

2023

A “Purple” nomination would be Hen­ son’s second.

She was nomi­ nated for her supporting performance as the adoptive mother of Brad Pitt’s aging­ backward char­ acter in 2008’s “The Curious Case of Ben­ jamin Button.”

Henson has received four Emmy nomina­ tions — two as drama series lead for her indelible music mogul/ mom Cookie Lyon on Fox’s “Empire,” one as miniseries/movie lead of the 2011 Lifetime movie “Taken from Me: The Tiffany Rubin Story” and …

... an outstand­ ing comedy guest actress nomination for her role as teacher Janine’s (Quinta Brunson) ebullient mother on ABC’s “Abbott Elementary.”

1985 Henson could become the second actor to play Shug Avery to be nominated for an Academy Award: Margaret Avery received a supporting nomination for the 1985 “Color Purple” movie.

2016 ­ 2017

6

Henson’s biggest awards so far have been a lead actress in a television drama Golden Globe for “Empire,” and the Screen Actors Guild cast award the following year for the film “Hidden Figures.”

Henson’s total SAG nomina­ tions include one for film ensemble for her 2005 big­screen breakout “Hustle & Flow,” in which her sex worker character also was called Shug and also sang.

3 Henson and Margaret Avery both acted in the Henson­led 2018 action film “Proud Mary” — alongside Danny Glover, the original “Mister” from the 1985 “Color Purple.”

I L LU ST RAT I O N

BY N ATA L I A AGAT T E / FO R T H E T I M ES

Portman, left, and Moore.

THE CONTENDERS

Co-stars are unrelenting in their collegiality For Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, who play major roles in ‘May December,’ generosity is part of the joy of filmmaking.

By Tim Grierson

18 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

T

H E M O S T P I VO TA L S C E N E in Todd Haynes’ “May December” had no rehearsal and very few takes. A psychological drama about an actor, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who enters the world of Gracie (Julianne Moore), an older woman who, decades earlier, created a tabloid scandal by initiating a sexual relationship with a 13­year­old, “May De­ cember” generates considerable friction from Elizabeth’s desire to study Gracie in order to play her in a movie. That tension comes to a head when the two women stand together in Gracie’s bathroom, Gracie showing Elizabeth her makeup routine. Shockingly intimate, the single­shot scene finds the two characters metaphorically melding into one, Gracie deli­ cately applying lipstick to Elizabeth so that they look similar.

P H OTO BY B E N J O A RWA S / FO R T H E T I M ES

ST I L L BY F RA N C O I S D U H A M E L / N E T F L I X . BA Z AW U L E P H OTO BY C H R I S P I Z Z E L LO / A P ; G LU E K I T I L LU ST RAT I O N

“It’s a moment when they’re both trying to get really close to each other, and you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Moore says, sitting on a couch in a Sunset Strip hotel with her co­star. “It feels seductive. It also feels dangerous.”

Portman nods in agreement, their rapport far warmer than their charac­ ters’ in the movie chronicling a fraught power struggle between actor and reluctant subject. It was a project Portman (who also serves as a pro­ ducer) had wanted to make, sending Samy Burch’s screenplay to director Haynes, hoping it would spark some­ thing in him too.

“I had always dreamed about work­ ing with Todd,” she says. “I’m such an enormous admirer of his — his brain, his vision, his way of seeing the world. I had sent him things before that he had not taken to. But I thought he would be a brilliant mind to make this come to life.”

She and Moore knew each other — they had an especially great time hanging out at a Stevie Wonder con­ cert in London — but they’d never worked together, largely because of how Hollywood operates. “It’s so rare to have two female roles [in the same film] that are not related to each other,” Portman says. Jumping in, Moore adds, laughing, “It’s usually a family dynamic or they’re in love with each other.”

On the surface, the brittle, defen­ sive Gracie recalls Moore’s previous indelible collaborations with Haynes on “Safe” and “Far From Heaven,” the Oscar winner portraying sheltered women trapped in a rarefied bubble.

But Moore doesn’t see her characters that way.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘bubble,’ because I don’t think they’re in there by themselves,” says Moore. “I think Todd and I are interested in culture and society and identity. We’re inter­ ested in people who are responding to the world that they are born into — how they succumb to it, how they react against it or how it shapes them.”

For Portman, who earned an Acade­ my Award playing an unsettlingly committed ballerina in “Black Swan,” Elizabeth presents another opportuni­ ty to investigate an artist who goes to extremes to achieve greatness. Asked if that’s coincidence or by design, Portman replies, “Performance has

I N F LU E N C E S

BLITZ BAZAWULE DIRECTOR ‘THE COLOR PURPLE’ been central to my curiosity — how it relates to identity and how it relates to self, the public and the private. I’m sure being a public person from a very young age influenced my interest in it. It’s something I return to a lot.”

“May December” is filled with musings on self­deception, especially with Gracie, who’s raised a family with Joe (Charles Melton), clinging to the belief that their long­ago illicit love affair is now a healthy, happy marriage. Moore adored Burch’s script but initially struggled to pene­ trate the character’s mind­set.

“But then I realized that she’s someone who’s swallowed this narra­ tive of being a princess. She feels like she was rescued from her life by her prince — but her prince happened to be 13 years old. To do that, you have to elevate that prince to be your man when they’re a child, and so she remains a child.” As a result, Moore decided that Gracie needed a lisp. “A lot of people who have lisps are not children — they simply have a speech thing,” she says. “But we associate that with a childlike quality.”

It also gave Portman something physical that Elizabeth could imitate as she begins becoming her subject.

“That’s Julie’s genius,” Portman says, “and her generosity. She didn’t have to think about that [for me] — she could have just been like, ‘Good luck!’ ” Both actresses have played real people, so they have experience with the sort of transformation that Eliza­ beth is attempting. So how accurate is the film’s portrait of her vampiric feasting on Gracie’s essence?

“You’re looking into someone’s heart, but you’re also using their emo­

ELIZABETH (Portman), left, is an actor shadowing the older Gracie (Moore).

tions and story as raw materials,” Port­ man suggests. “I think all artists have that question of ‘What is that, ethically, to take someone’s feelings and turn it into entertainment?’ Obviously, I don’t think most actors’ processes cross the lines that Elizabeth’s does. But it’s very close to questions of journalism and documentary — when does depicting someone change the course of their life? Which is very embedded in the story of this movie — Gracie and Joe’s life has been completely changed by being portrayed.”

During the conversation, Portman and Moore frequently exchange com­ pliments, clearly pleased that they were finally able to team up. As much as their characters hide behind masks, these two are unreserved in their praise. “[Gracie] couldn’t be farther from Julie,” Portman insists. “There’s nothing that distinguishes Julie more than just being considerate and empa­ thetic to everyone around her — and then this character has no empathy.”

She turns to her co­star: “I was like, ‘Oh, this must be joyful,’ because it’s just the opposite of who you are.”

Moore considers that. “Well, you are playing, right? So there’s joy in playing it,” she replies. “That’s where Natalie and I are very similar — we take our work seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. It’s easy for us to engage in this work in a playful way — because it should be.” Moore’s eyes get big and excited. “We’re making a movie. It should be joyful.”

“My influences vary a bit.

Kurosawa is one of my idols in terms of filmmak­ ing; he used language and framing that I bor­ rowed a lot in creating my film, and that’s a big one. Another is Ousmane Sembène, an African filmmaker from Senegal who’s an inspiration for me in telling stories that are nonlinear and imagi­ native and the ones I grew up on. But my grandmother’s stories are the ones that are essential to how I see the world and affected my storytelling technique, especially as it relates to the ephemeral, and those stories are essential to how I use the camera.”

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 19

T H E C O ST U M E S

Bold enough to know to kick it up, tone it down ‘The Color Purple’ designer Francine Jamison­Tanchuck let hues help propel the story but also kept realism in mind.

By Randee Dawn

NOT EVERY character could get the Shug (Taraji P. Henson) treatment, above. Lighter colors were suitable elsewhere.

20 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

T ’ S N O T O F T E N T H AT A P E R S O N gets a second bite at the apple in Hollywood. But Francine Jamison­Tanchuck has a good sense of what that feels like these days: Not only is she the costume designer for “The Color Purple,” a filmed adaptation of the Broadway musical — but back in 1985, she was the costume supervisor for women on … “The Color Purple.” ❡ Jamison­Tanchuck, a veteran of the costuming world in both TV and film, spoke with The Envelope to discuss early jobs dressing only women, being influenced by “West Side Story” — and preferring to wear a “uniform” while working on set.

I

P H OTOS F RO M WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; E L I A D E / WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES

Your entree into the business was aided by an apprenticeship pro­ gram for people of color. Decades later, the industry is still creating those programs. What does that say about Hollywood’s evolution — or lack thereof?

Looking back through the years, I did not allow things to be a stumbling block for me. My mother was a surgi­ cal nurse, and my father was a classi­ cal pianist. I just came out of a family that never allowed us to say what we cannot achieve. I refuse to have some­ one say to me, “You cannot do that because of who you are.” I don’t allow it. That gives me the confidence and energy to keep going.

Was there a moment that spurred you into deciding to become a costume designer?

I loved creating characters, and I just loved movies. I remember a film on TV called “Sayonara,” and I was amazed at the costumes. I remember “West Side Story” when I was just a little kid. I learned to sew at 7 years

old; my mother taught me, but I wasn’t allowed on the [sewing] machine until I was 9. But I liked making clothing for my dolls and other people’s dolls.

Many of your early credits list you as a costume supervisor for “women,” including 1985’s “The Color Purple.” I think some of us forget that the gender division was a thing.

In some ways I can understand it, because I think some women were more comfortable around other wom­ en, and vice­versa — I guess — with men, but that’s the times we were in.

That’s how things evolved. I worked on “The Color Purple” with the won­ derful Aggie [Guerard] Rodgers, who was a dear friend.

Is that how the original “Color Purple” job came about, you knew Aggie?

She invited me on as the ladies’ supervisor. My job was to select a lot of the costumes from costume houses and line them up just like an assistant.

WARNER BROS. Warner Bros.

What I remember so vividly was [stars] Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey and all the wonderful cos­ tumes Aggie designed.

I tried to keep a little of that in this more recent version of the film — the red of [Shug’s] dress and the feathers in her headdress. I got Aggie’s permission to copy a little bit of that. She said, “Honey, go for it.”

How did you want to do things differently for this year’s musical version, what was the brief?

[Director Blitz Bazawule] is very much a color person. His influence of color, style and texture was important to him. It was even more challenging [because it was a musical] — you’re dealing with dancers and a lot of background. You cannot allow the dance outfits to be flamboyant. We had to maneuver through keeping things real but also keeping it lively.

With the principals alone, we were looking at 30 to 40 people; with the entire film, over a thousand. Thou­ sands of costumes.

The colors of the film evolve into a journey of their own — from pas­ tels to bright colors. That must have been intentional.

[Early on] you’re dealing with country summer and the period, 1909, 1920, when colors are a little bit somber. As things went on, the colors got darker, until the end when [Celie] has her [clothing] shop and it bursts with color. We’re talking 1946 by then, just before Christian Dior’s new look appeared. I wanted, and Blitz wanted, to have the color explode in a way, because it’s happier, she’s more ma­ ture, she’s breaking out of this world of trauma and finally knows who she is.

How conscious are you about what you wear every day? Or are you a “sweatpants at home” kind of person like the rest of us?

Sweatpants around the house. In fact, I have some on right now. When I work, I like to think I’m wearing a uniform — something simple, fashion­ able and nice that I don’t have to put a lot of my time into because my mind is on designing this particular film.

Is there an advantage to having a Black costume designer create clothing for Black people?

For me it helps to have a costume designer with vision. That person can be any color. Aggie Rodgers is a per­ son of Irish heritage, and she was a costume designer on the first “The Color Purple.” I like the idea that symphonies pick their musicians — they go behind a curtain and you just pick from the music. You see costumes on the screen and don’t know whether this person is someone of color, young or old. Look at my work.

Look at what I can do. Look at how it lines up on screen.

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 21

Their other job: calling the shots More women have begun launching a second career of sorts, producing the films they’re starring in.

By Daniel Vaillancourt

O N LY O N E human — Frances McDormand — has won a performance and a producing Acade­ my Award for the same film (2020’s “Nomad­ land”). ❡ This year, at least 10 actresses will eventually try to follow in fantastic Fran’s foot­ steps: Awkwafina and Sandra Oh (“Quiz Lady”), Jessica Chastain (“Mothers’ Instinct”), Cynthia Erivo (“Drift”), Dakota Johnson (“Dad­ dio”), Anna Kendrick (“Woman of the Hour”), Natalie Portman (“May December”), Margot Robbie (“Barbie”), Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Kate Winslet (“Lee”). ❡ The Envelope talked with the co­pro­ ducers of some of the top awards­contending women on this list to see what input their creative partners provided.

22 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

NATALIE PORTMAN

MARGOT ROBBIE

EMMA STONE

ELIZABETH BERRY IN “MAY DECEMBER”

BARBIE IN “BARBIE”

BELLA BAXTER IN “POOR THINGS”

Elevator pitch: An actor (Portman) doing research upends the lives of the woman she’ll portray (Julianne Moore) and her much younger husband (Charles Melton).

Director: Todd Haynes Oscar pedigree: In three nomina­ tions, Portman won lead actress for 2010’s “Black Swan.”

“Natalie brings an incredible amount of preparedness and thoughtfulness to her work, whether she is in front of or behind the camera,” says her MountainA producing partner Sophie Mas. “I have always been impressed by the risks she takes as an actress and her full commitment to the role.

“In ‘May December,’ she plays an actress researching a role for a film.

Of course, the character is nothing like Natalie is as an actress, and the subtleties and nuance she brings to the performance are revelatory.

“In particular, she delivers a monologue toward the end of the film which I truly believe people will be teaching in acting classes in years to come. But unlike some actors, Natalie can move seamlessly between shots and wear different hats. She is a chameleon.

“She can disappear into the character in one moment and in the next be handling a task as a pro­ ducer, or as a mom.

“2022 was a busy year for our production company, filming two other projects (‘Lady in the Lake’ and ‘Angel City’). There were days when we were on set filming for ‘Lady in the Lake’ where during lunch we’re having calls to solve schedule shuffling due to COVID and then looking at casting and prep for ‘May December.’ It was impres­ sive to see her so effortlessly bal­ ancing it all when we all know how much effort it truly takes.”

Elevator pitch: The iconic doll suffers an identity crisis that re­ quires her to journey from Barbie Land to the Real World, with Ken (Ryan Gosling) in tow.

Director: Greta Gerwig Oscar pedigree: Robbie earned lead actress nominations for 2017’s “I, Tonya,” and as supporting actress for 2019’s “Bombshell.”

“Margot’s ability to wear two hats and switch between them instantaneously is remarkable,” says her LuckyChap partner and “Barbie” co­producer Tom Ackerley.

“She can go from acting in any type of scene to springing off set and getting straight into a call about budgets or whichever production conversation we’re having at any given moment.

“As a producer, she has an ability to get to the root of whatever needs to be done. She’s so incredibly present, collaborative and person­ able at all times, and she gives time to — and manages — all types of personnel, from studio heads to facilities drivers. It’s a true super­ power that few have.”

Elevator pitch: A near­dead wom­ an (Stone) springs back to life and has awakenings of all sorts — espe­ cially sexual — after a scientist (Willem Dafoe) transplants a baby’s brain into her head.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Oscar pedigree: In three nomina­ tions, Stone won lead actress for 2016’s “La La Land.”

“Emma was one of the first peo­ ple I spoke to about ‘Poor Things’ when it finally felt that it was pos­ sible to put it together,” says Lanthi­ mos, who produced alongside Stone. “It was something I wanted to make for a while, and after ‘The Favourite,’ it seemed like a great opportunity to give it a go. She immediately got excited with the premise of the novel and was com­ pletely taken by the character of Bella Baxter the same way I was.

“From then on, she was hooked.

She wanted to know everything, see everything and listen to every­ thing. Her joining us as a producer on the film was inevitable. Emma believed in it from the start more than anyone. She’s the perfect sounding board about everything.

We talked about other actors, looked at the set and costumes and researched ideas and design.

“As a producer, she encouraged and gave me a lot of confidence in every aspect of making the film. At the same time, I watched her create Bella Baxter with wonder and was immensely inspired by her talent. I could never hope for a better cre­ ative partner.”

I L LU ST RAT I O N BY M A D DA L E N A CA R RA I / FO R T H E T I M ES

THE CONTENDERS

Enticed into an unconventional tale of obsession

W

I L L I A M O L D ROY D ’ S psycholo­ gical thriller “Eileen,” based on the 2015 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, is a challenging movie. But that’s exactly what drew in Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway. McKenzie, who plays a withdrawn young woman working in a boys prison in 1960s Massachusetts, recalls being completely unsure of her­ self the first few days of filming, which reflects how the New Zealand actor approaches her entire career. ❡ “I don’t ever want to feel settled,” she says, speaking over Zoom alongside Hathaway. “Maybe this is my ego talking, but I want to feel like I’m continuing to prove myself and chal­ lenge myself and put myself out there. It’s wanting to ex­ plore all the different parts of myself and all the different kinds of people out there.”

Hathaway plays Rebecca, a prison psychologist with a falsely shiny veneer, and also saw the film as a chance to push herself. The film came as part of a collection of proj­ ects she made around the same time, including “She Came to Me” and “Armageddon Time.”

“I didn’t go to drama school, so I’ve been learning on the job and trying to find parts that really, really, really scare me so I can become a better actor,” Hathaway says. “The joy of this is always: What is the scariest, most challenging, seemingly impenetrable, seemingly impossible challenge? And who are the right people to agree to try that with?”

In “Eileen,” co­written by Mosh­ fegh and Luke Goebel, the tension 24 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

came from Rebecca’s glamorous, self­assured presentation, which captivates Eileen. She’s a product of her time, when not many women were afforded the education or posi­ tion of a prison psychiatrist.

“She intends to remake the world,” Hathaway says. “She believes she knows better than everyone else.

Ottessa’s writing in the book gave me permission to make it really exag­ gerated, because I leaned into the summation of Rebecca in the book, which was ‘If she seemed affected, it’s because she was.’ I heard that line and I just went, ‘Bingo!’ It freed me up.”

She adds, “I found her devotion to her own sense of importance heart­ breaking, fascinating, hilarious and intriguing. How long has she been

this way? At what point did it cease to be a performance and it just became her, and what does it cost? She’s a puff of cigarette smoke that looks really cool, but it’s going to kill you.”

Eileen is less assured. She struggles with an alcoholic, abusive father (Shea Whigham) and a dead­end job, and often imagines killing herself.

Rebecca represents the possibility that there’s something bigger out there for her.

“I related to Eileen in a lot of ways,” McKenzie says. “I didn’t want to play that she’s weird. She’s just so isolated, and everything is through her per­ spective. You’re with her. She’s ap­ proaching the world and interacting with other characters in a very inex­ perienced, raw way. And that was quite fun.”

Hathaway was cast in 2020, in the midst of early lockdown and just months after the birth of her second child. Although she’s confident she would have accepted this role when­ ever it had arrived, there was some­ thing about being in the “hinterland of chaos” that seemed to connect with “Eileen.”

“From that specific place of just feeling so unmoored the way you do in a postpartum state and the way we all did at that point in the pandemic, it struck a nerve for me,” she recalls. “It was not at all what I expected, and I loved that. I also loved the tightrope walk of it — I had no idea how we were going to pull it off. It felt almost

experimental in nature, and that seemed really appealing to me.”

The film shot in New Jersey in late 2021. The weather was as cold as it looks in the film, which is set over Christmastime.

“Nobody had a trailer to return to after shooting,” Hathaway remembers.

“There wasn’t fanciness or pampering or anything. We were all just in it together. I really do feel like we all took care of each other on this. We looked out for each other.”

The relationship that develops between Eileen and Rebecca is uncon­ ventional, and the actors had only a

ST I L L F RO M N EO N / U N I V E R SA L P I C T U R ES / FO C U S

‘It felt almost experimental in nature,’ Anne Hathaway says of the thriller ‘Eileen,’ in which she’s a slick prison psychologist.

Thomasin McKenzie plays the film’s struggling title character.

By Emily Zemler

T H E Q U OT E

RAMY YOUSSEF ACTOR ‘POOR THINGS’

YO U SS E F P H OTO BY S C OT T A GA R F I T T / I N V I S I O N / A P ; G LU E K I T I L LU ST RAT I O N

What film or performance has had an impact on you this season? “ ‘The Zone of Interest.’ I thought it was brilliant. It feels like essential view­ ing. It should, would, can, make everyone question their own narrative. It was incred­ ibly symbolic; the re­ lationships were almost algebraic in the way that we can look past what’s happening around us for our own survival and the ways we’re kind of com­ plicit in the world. A lot of what I like exploring in comedy is guilt and my own complicit relation­ ship with systems. I think the film is timeless.

And Christian Friedel’s performance really stood out to me as a high benchmark.”

few days of rehearsal to prepare it.

Oldroyd has joked that the film was a Christmas love story, but McKenzie describes the unlikely connection as “obsession and repressed desire.”

“There’s a lot of false connection,” she says. “No one’s really listening or seeing each other. It’s a story with the guise of love.”

“It’s messy, isn’t it?” Hathaway responds. “To me, it’s more about infatuation and intoxication and obsession than it’s about love. But I think that Eileen loves as much as she can. It’s such a specific story. This is the fulcrum for her that sets out the

rest of her life.”

Both McKenzie and Hathaway found what they were looking for in the process of making “Eileen.”

Although production was isolating because of the pandemic, the duo found a common ground in the exploration of the comically dark story.

“I just keep wanting to think about [the film],” Hathaway says. “Eileen’s not likable, and maybe she doesn’t go out of her way to make herself likable and she doesn’t stand out in any particular way, and yet she still exists. She has this roar inside of her.

REBECCA (Hathaway, left) and Eileen (McKenzie).

It’s really cool that we all wanted to gather together in the middle of COVID to explore what would make someone like Eileen be someone like Eileen.”

“I could feel her pain, and I just wanted to hold her in some way,” McKenzie adds. “I loved that there is still life to her. She isn’t a victim.

It’s such a great character film. There are so many layers to each and every character.”

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 25

JAY L . C L E N D E N I N Lo s A n ge l e s Ti m e s

26 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

A F ORGIVI NG NATURE

“If we nurture forgiveness, maybe the world could change, ultimately. I’m not saying next year. It could be a thousand years from now, if we’re still around,” the director says.

Story by

GL ENN WH I PP

Photography by

JAY L. CLEND ENIN

F

O RG E T T H E G H O S T S of Christmas past. Martin Scorsese has been think­ ing lately about dearly departed friends from another holiday celebration, a Los Angeles Thanksgiving at the small home off Mulholland Drive he was sharing with musician Robbie Robertson. It was an “extraordinarily joyous” occasion, Scorsese remembers, 45 years after the fact, as he had just been released from the hospi­ tal, a surprising turn of events, seeing as he very much believed he was going to die. ❡ So, to cele­ brate, he hired someone to cook a Thanksgiving dinner — he barely knew how to boil water — invited a bunch of friends over, including an Italian producer working on Michelangelo Anto­ nioni’s next movie. Is it OK if I bring Mr. Anto­ nioni to your house, the producer asked. Of course. The more, the merrier. But as the eve­ ning wore on, Scorsese recalls that Antonioni, a filmmaker adept at conveying estrangement and emotional alienation, could not understand why Scorsese and Robertson kept laughing so much.

28 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

“Really, we could just not stop ourselves,” Scorsese says. “I was alive, for one thing. And I had started work­ ing on ‘Raging Bull.’ I was back on track after a long period of trying to find a way to continue, a reason to be excited about the prospect of going to a movie set. For a long time, I doubted if I still had enough to care about to make a movie. Now I did.”

T ’ S A R A I N Y winter day in L.A., and Scorsese is collecting his thoughts for a speech he’ll give later this night at a celebration of Robertson’s life and music. Robertson died in August, not long after his final musical collaboration with Scorsese, the score for the filmmaker’s latest masterpiece, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” had been heard by audiences at the Cannes Film Festival. After our conversation, Scorsese delivered a moving, 17­minute remembrance of his friendship with Robertson, which began with the concert film “The Last Waltz” and continued through col­ laborations on such movies as “The

I

King of Comedy,” “Silence” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Given the circumstances, our thoughts couldn’t help but drift to Robertson and the years Scorsese spent in Los Angeles in the ’70s.

Scorsese arrived early in 1971 at the behest of Warner Bros. executive Fred Weintraub, renting an apartment off Franklin Avenue in Hollywood be­ cause it reminded him of his native New York.

“Freddie said come out for two weeks, try it and it won’t mess you up too badly,” Scorsese says. “I spent the first year acclimating, learning how to drive. It was a new world.” He smiles.

“I started wearing jeans.”

Actor David Carradine told Scors­ ese he needed a flashier car than the rental he was driving and found a 1960 Corvette, white with red leather interior, for him to buy for $500. It was hard to handle — “you had to be a real hotshot to do it,” Scorsese says — particularly since he didn’t know how to work the clutch. But Scorsese learned and began to enjoy driving

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 29

move in my head.”

The early years in Los Angeles essentially allowed Scorsese the chance to deny where he was from and try on a new identity. He started wearing cowboy hats and boots, big belt buckles, Nudie shirts, lots of denim. People laughed at him. What?

You’re a cowboy now? But he was making “Alice Doesn’t Live Here” around Tucson, and the clothes suited the climate and the culture. Plus, Scorsese grew up watching John Ford westerns. Now he could make like he lived in one.

But by the time Scorsese moved to the home off Mulholland — his doctor told him he needed to go above the smog line to help control his asthma — he was depressed, suffering his first flop, the 1977 musical “New York, New York,” and battling creative paralysis.

All the cocaine didn’t help, either.

When he was finally admitted to the hospital with internal bleeding, right before that 1978 Thanksgiving party, Scorsese had come full circle, facing who he was and where he came from.

“It was over,” Scorsese says of his time out West. He had finally finished “The Last Waltz,” the elegiac docu­ mentary of the Band’s farewell con­ cert, which, in itself, felt like a harbin­ ger of change. “It was the end of that music and, sadly, people always use this phrase as a joke — ‘peace, love’ — but it’s not funny. Those are things to aspire to.”

C O R S E S E H A S been on a creative roll for the last dec­ ade, making an irreverent black comedy about unencumbered greed (“The Wolf of Wall Street”), a passion project about faith and doubt (“Si­ lence”), a crime epic tinged with betrayal and regret (“The Irishman”) and now “Killers of the Flower Moon,” an epic exploration of exploitation, injustice and erasure. “Freedom,” he says, when asked about the key to this late run. He has gone from being a “barbarian pounding at the gates of Rome” to an elder statesman pro­ pelled by independent financing.

“But still scrapping or scraping or however you want to put it,” Scorsese says with a laugh. “ ‘Silence,’ ‘The Irishman,’ ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ ... these were not movies stu­ dios were eager to make.”

“Do you see those three films in

S

the Corvette around town, if only to crank the radio and listen to new music from Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead.

“The music always created images that precipitated dramatic scenes and ultimately became ‘Mean Streets,’ 30 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,’ ” Scorsese says. “Driving on the freeway at 2 in the morning with no cars and listening to the Allman Brothers could inspire so many thoughts. My first connection with creativity was always music,

going back to the 78 records my father would play me when I was 5, 6 years old — Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Django Reinhardt in the Hot Club of France. Images would come into my mind as I listened.

They were abstract, but they made me

conversation with each other?” I ask.

“I tried finding with ‘Kundun’ and ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ even ‘Gangs of New York,’ to a certain extent, ways into redemption and the human condition and how we deal with the negative things inside us,” Scorsese says. “Are we decent and then learn to become indecent? Can we change? Will others accept that change? And it really is, I think, a fear of a society and culture that’s cor­ rupted because of its lack of ground­ ing in morality and spirituality. Not religion. Spirituality. Denying that.”

O F O R M E , it’s finding my own way in a ... if you want to say the term ‘religious’ sense, but I hate to use that language, be­ cause it’s misinterpreted often,” he continues. “But there’s basic funda­ mental beliefs that I have — or I’m trying to have — and I’m using these films to find it.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” tells the true story of morally reprehensi­ ble men bent on murdering dozens of members of the Osage nation to ob­ tain their rights to oil­rich land in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo Di­ Caprio, marries an Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), and then, acting on instructions from his uncle,

LEONARDO DICAPRIO and Lily Gladstone star in “Flower Moon.”

ST I L L F RO M M E L I N DA S U E G O R D O N / A P P L E T V +

S

William Hale (Robert De Niro), sets upon a scheme of helping to kill her kin. Yet Ernest seems to genuinely love Mollie. Can a man be devoted to his wife and exterminate her family?

“Yes, exterminate her family and, for all he knows, helping to extermi­

“STILL SCRAPPING OR SCRAPING OR HOWEVER YOU WANT TO P UT IT. ‘SILENCE,’ ‘THE IRISHMAN,’ ‘KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON’ ... NOT MOVIES STUDIOS WERE EAG ER TO MAKE.”

nate her,” Scorsese answers. “His weakness reminds me of the character of Kichijir in ‘Silence’ who keeps apostatizing and then keeps asking for forgiveness and then, on top of it all, informs on the priests and then goes to Confession and asks the priest for forgiveness. Hence, what is the Chris­ tian way? Must the priest forgive him?

And if he does forgive him, how does he control his own hate and anger toward this guy?”

Scorsese shakes his head, ruminat­ ing on the question for a moment.

“It’s almost an impossible goal for human beings, that kind of forgiv­ eness,” he continues, lowering his voice to a whisper. “But I really be­ lieve in it. If we nurture forgiveness, maybe the world could change, ulti­ mately. I’m not saying next year. It could be a thousand years from now, if we’re still around.”

After “Killers of the Flower Moon” premiered at Cannes in May, Scorsese traveled to Italy with his wife, Helen Morris, to attend a conference, the Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination. He then met briefly with Pope Francis and later announced, “I have responded to the pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus.”

Scorsese has completed the screenplay for that film, collaborating with critic and filmmaker Kent Jones, and plans to shoot it later this year.

They’re still “swimming in inspira­ tion,” he tells me, figuring it out. It’ll be based on Shusaku Endo’s book “A Life of Jesus.” (Endo also wrote “Si­ lence.”) And it’ll be set mostly in the present day, though Scorsese doesn’t want to be locked into a period, be­ cause he wants the film to feel time­ less. He envisions the movie to run around 80 minutes, focusing on Jesus’ core teachings in a way that explores the principles but doesn’t proselytize.

“I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion,” Scorsese says.

Every time the word “religion” has come up since we started talking, I say, you’ve tried to find a way around it.

I G H T N OW , ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese says. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life — even in rejecting it. Don’t dismiss it offhand. That’s all I’m talking about.

And I’m saying that as a person who’s going to be 81 in a couple of days. You know what I’m saying?”

He’s asking. But he’s not asking.

Who wants to go there and dwell on that? Later, though, we start talking about the scene in “Killers of the Flower Moon” where Mollie’s mother, Lizzie, dies and peacefully enters the afterlife, greeted and guided by her ancestors. The weather was perfect that day, Scorsese says, and when Lizzie walked away with her mother and father and ancestors, he kept the camera rolling for a long time.

“The whole crew could feel it.

It was the Elysian Fields,” Scorsese says. “And we thought, ‘That would be the best way to go. They just take us home.’ ”

R

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 31

THE CONTENDERS

She’s found the right narrative to fit with her film career Teyana Taylor pined for stories that music couldn’t offer. Her new phase, with the gritty ‘A Thousand and One,’ provides fulfillment. By Gary Goldstein 32 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

I

N W R I T E R­ D I R E C T O R A.V. Rockwell’s hauntingly powerful, Harlem­set family drama “A Thousand and One,” R&B star­turned­ actor Teyana Taylor plays Inez de la Paz, a former convict — and force of nature — who kidnaps her 6­year­old son, Terry, from the foster care system to raise him herself. Although it took Taylor more than a decade of film and TV appearances in such lighter fare as “Madea’s Big Happy Family,” “Coming 2 America” and “Miracles Across 125th Street” before landing her first major dramatic lead, she says the timing was simply right. ❡ “If [this role] hap­ pened right away, I just don’t feel you would have seen this version of Inez from me,” Taylor recently told The Envelope. “Inez came through some things, and my character and myself had been through some things. By the time I got to [play] Inez, I knew that I had a point to prove.” ❡ The reviews indicate she has more than proved her point, along with nominations for a Gotham Independent Film Award and an Independent Spirit Award, plus an award from the National Board of Review for breakthrough performance. ❡ The warm, lively Taylor had much more to say about her career­shifting part during a freewheeling Zoom call from her Miami home.

P H OTO BY C H R I ST I N A H O U S E / LOS A N G E L ES T I M ES

You’re no stranger to receiving attention for your work, but the acclaim for playing Inez must feel different. What’s it been like this past year?

Oh, my God, it feels amazing … especially when you’re coming from an industry [the music business] where it’s more of a popularity contest than it is an actual talent or skill situa­ tion. With acting, when you tap into a role, people feel that. It has nothing to do with who you are or how many followers you have. [Praise for acting] is all kind of new to me, so I’m so grateful.

How did you make the segue around 2010 from musical artist to actor?

Honestly, I’ve always been a charac­ ter, so even coming into the music scene … I just always wanted a narra­ tive, always wanted to be a character.

[Back then] there just weren’t a lot of narrative­based videos, so I had to take matters into my own hands and started directing my own videos.

Once I had that power, I started to make them more movie­like. Acting was like a natural next step. I was excited to step outside of me, because, you know, a lot of singers or rappers that become actors, sometimes it’s hard to separate them.

ST I L L F RO M FO C U S F E AT U R ES

Most of your earlier acting was in comedic or more glamorous roles.

What was your reaction when you learned about the part of Inez?

When the role came across my desk, well, first [like Inez] I’m from Harlem, so that was a good sign. Also, reading the script, I realized that Inez was like so many of the women in my life, including my own mom — including me as a mom. Inez is so many of us women as mothers in general, even if it’s not the same exact story. So, I was emotionally attached from the start.

Your character and the film are so vivid and intense. What was your emotional dynamic like over the weeks of shooting?

It was crazy, because I was dealing with postpartum depression — I just had my baby six months before. And then it was my first time spending

that much time in Harlem, in my hometown, in a long time, and to see how different it was. Also, I lost a lot of childhood friends [around that time]. I was going to funerals during my lunch break. So every emotion, every tear, everything you see on Inez was real­life stuff. I think doing the role was therapeutic, because for once I was able to just be vulnerable and weak. I come from having to be strong. All the women in my life have had to be strong.

Did you find you took the role home with you each night?

When I got home, it was with the understanding that I was bruised up now, but I had to “put my cape back on” and be the perfect mom, the perfect wife, the hero. There were a lot of times when everyone was asleep, everybody was full and fed, and I would just bawl crying. And I would tell myself, let me take that image to set and let it out there. Let it out in a way that would be seen and heard and applauded.

Who are some of your acting influences? Whose career would you like to emulate?

I’m not saying that I’m even half as good as Angela [Bassett] and Viola [Davis] and Mo’Nique, but they’re what I aspire to be. They played a big part in me being able to tap into this role. I want to give an honorary mention to Julia Roberts too. I love me some Julia Roberts.

THE CONTENDERS

Emotion-filled, life-changing

D

R E A M S D O C O M E T RU E . At 24, Cleveland­born, classically trained stage actor Josiah Cross won his first major screen role — playing a fraught 17­year­old opposite the formidably talented Teyana Taylor as his desperate mother in “A Thousand and One.” For Cross, now 26, his heartbreaking performance as Terry proved a knockout showcase for his rising acting skills. ❡ The actor phoned in from a bustling Brooklyn coffee shop to chat about his life­changing role.

You’re pretty astounding in the film. Can you talk a bit about how you prepared for Terry’s many deeply emotional moments?

I come from the stage, so a lot of my working character development stems from a lot of traditional, artisan type of places of theater. But this story was just undeniably true and personal to me, almost identical to my real life … particularly the single­mother aspect, the only­ child aspect and being young and Black and navigating a metropoli­ tan, impoverished city. My mom didn’t kidnap me, though! [Laughs] [That said] I don’t believe it was a cathartic experience as much as a way to explore what empathy really looks like. And that’s really just how I connected. Because as close as I was to Terry, I was still

JOSIAH CROSS and Teyana Taylor play 17­year­old son and mother in the film.

disconnected in ways. For me, that empathy was probably the biggest touchstone.

Since Terry is played at ages 6 and 13 by other actors, were you aware of how they each portrayed the character when you started filming?

No. And I think the brilliance and genius of [writer­director] A.V. Rockwell was that she kept us separated. We weren’t seeing dailies. We had no interactions, because we’re not in any scenes together. Yet because of the level of authenticity that A.V. encouraged and supported and upheld I think all three of us got to understand the [story’s] through line and the conti­ nuity between time periods.

How was it to act opposite a powerhouse like Teyana?

Teyana was stripped down of celebrity, so her being vulnerable in that sense and me being vulnera­ ble, we just threw ourselves away for the moment. Her approach was different than mine, but I think a lot of our chemistry came from that place where we were “dance part­ ners.” I would be in control, and then she would be in control. I would follow her lead, and she would follow mine. Just, like, ping­ pong, back and forth, whatever the moment called for. And I truly respect her as an artist — she can do it all. Watching her be so nimble and flexible in her artistry allowed me to do the same.

— Gary Goldstein

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 33

NAPOLEON sets

T H E C RA F T

Restaging battles from all over Europe in the UK ‘Napoleon’ production designer Arthur Max managed to find appropriate filming locations that stood in for continental sites.

By Hugh Hart

34 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

E

V E N BY H O L LY WO O D ’ S formidable location­swapping standards, Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” deserves some kind of medal for cinematic sleight­of­hand. The French conquer­ or never invaded Britain, whereas the makers of “Napoleon” largely never left Britain. Scott’s longtime production designer, Arthur Max, oversaw the effort to reimagine French chateaus, Paris riots, carnage in the Czech Republic (formerly Moravia), Russian conquests and Dutch battlefields all on UK turf. ❡ Teamed with set decorator Elli Griff, Max took his visual cues from Scott’s meticulous “Ridleygram” storyboards and frequent “War Room” meetings.

“We had big physical models in the room, landscaping photog­ raphy, miniature people, storyboards blown up big, samples of fabrics and costumes and weaponry and artillery,” says Max, a three­time Oscar nominee who worked as an architect before shifting into production design. “There’s no limit to the amount of detail that we’d go into.” ❡ Speaking from Malta, where he’s reuniting with Scott on his “Gladiator” sequel, Max explains how he helped relocate the Napoleonic Wars from continental Europe to (mostly) British soil.

THE ROYALIST INSURRECTION Napoleon in 1795 orders his troops to shoot Roy­ alist civilians rebelling against the post­mon­ archist “Directorate” regime. The sequence was filmed at an undis­ closed London­area location. “That whole avenue in Paris where the crowd’s charging toward the cannons was [originally] a field of grass,” Max says. “Elabo­ rate steps were taken by our greens department with membranes, rubber matting and fake stone paving. It was quite bloody in [historical] fact, because grapeshot was used, which is like a very large­scale shotgun.

It just eviscerated the crowd.”

C O U RT ESY O F I L M Apple

AUSTERLITZ AND THE FROZEN LAKE DEBACLE Napoleon outsmarts the Austrian army in 1805 by luring fighters onto a snow­ covered frozen lake. Cannonballs shatter the ice, causing soldiers to drown in frigid water. Scott’s initial concept was inspired by mountain lakes in Austria, but, Max says, “we ended up in a small valley outside of London that we’d also used in ‘Gladiator.’ Napoleon’s tent was set up in the pine forest on the same hilltop where we shot Marcus Aurelius’ camp.” The frozen lake portion of the sequence was filmed separately at an airfield near London. “We exca­ vated an enormous tank in the middle of this airfield for where the army fell through the ice,” Max explains. “We used a hydraulic mechanical collapsing ice field augmented with a physical water tank filmed by underwater cam­ eras. It wasn’t two miles across the lake or whatever, it was about 200 yards, but with clever photography and lensing you create the illusion of the sort of scale you need, in combination with visual effects and extensions.”

THE BRUTAL RUSSIAN WINTER

P H OTOS F RO M A P P L E ; I L M

NAPOLEON’S FIRST BIG VICTORY IN TOULON In 1793, Napoleon successfully attacks the French seaport fortress that had been block­ aded for months by the British navy. “We looked at Malta, where we’d made ‘Gladiator’ at Fort Ricasoli at the mouth of the Grand Harbor of Valletta,” Max says. “There’s a se­ quence of island peninsulas that surround the harbor with forts on all of them, and we thought that made for rich pickings as far as the nautical side of the movie.” To populate Toulon’s coastal waters with cannon­firing “tall ships,” Max used the Étoile du Roy. “It’s an accurate replica of an 18th century French frigate and one of the few things that’s actually French in the film,” he says. “It was photo­ graphed from different angles, in different weather, repainted in different color schemes, re­rigged, re­dressed with different flags.

That’s how our one ship became many ships, both French and English, and it also goes to the sophistication of modern visual effects.”

The filmmakers’ depic­ tion of Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 includes a deserted Moscow, shot in Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace, and war­ravaged villages purpose­built in rural England. “It’s all done in horrible conditions of wind and rain, and it’s all got to be exquisitely beautiful and then it’s all trampled upon by everyone and set on fire, which was slightly out of control because of high winds and real wooden sets built with infinite care,” Max says.

“This is all part of the Ridley Scott universe, and there’s nothing else like it these days. It’s good old­fashioned filmmaking meets 21st century technology.”

A P P L E Apple

WATERLOO ON A HORSE FARM “Napoleon” culminates with the 1815 battle of Waterloo, when thousands of English soldiers famously defeat Napoleon’s equally massive army. Max studied Rod Steiger’s 1970 “Waterloo” movie, then set out to find a plot of land in England that could stand in for Belgium’s legendarily bloody killing floor. Max and his team eventually found a horse breeding farm whose owner happened to be a Ridley Scott fan. “He was happy for us to dig up his field and take down the fences,” Max recalls. “It’s a beautiful valley with lovely rolling hills high above the plains, and it had just enough distance between the two hills for infantry and cavalry to encounter each other with­ out being too far or too close.”

The perfect “Waterloo” site materialized only after numerous non­start­ ers, but Max says he savors the thrill of the hunt. “Part of the joy of my job is tromping around muddy fields in the rain, day after day, with producers breathing down my neck, telling me why it’s not a good idea to use this par­ ticular field, or the DP saying it doesn’t work for him, or the location man­ ager telling me, ‘You know, this belongs to six different owners,’ so that’s a problem. It goes on and on. But I like being in the outdoors and building locations rather than being confined to a backlot with not enough scope or green screen around to give it the scale you need.”

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 35

Let them roam to London or Spain; just don’t fence them in

‘ASTEROID CITY’

This season, A­list auteurs reconfigured western­inspired horizons to their own ends to enliven wildly diverse stories. By Hugh Hart

A

s the song says, spacious skies, amber waves of grain and purple mountains have long populated the wide, open spaces that represent America at its most expansive. The Hollywood western, of course, mythologized this country’s deserts and prairies as dramatic vistas against which such filmmakers as John Ford, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah could foreground their rugged charac­ ters. This year, A­list auteurs reconfigured west­ ern­inspired horizons to their own ends for stories set in the Southwest, Southern California and Oklahoma. Here’s a look at how Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” Wes Anderson’s “Aster­ oid City,” Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” use west­ ern landscapes to enliven wildly diverse stories.

‘OPPENHEIMER’ Director: Christopher Nolan Place in story: New Mexico desert, Los Alamos Place in real life: New Mexico desert, Ghost Ranch near Los Alamos Time: 1945 Production designer: Ruth De Jong (“Nope,” “Manchester by the Sea”) Transformation: Current­day Los Alamos, complete with Starbucks, no longer resembles its 1945 incarnation, so De Jong and her team rendered a period­perfect re­creation as a 3­D white model so massive it had to be stored outside in the production office’s backyard. Filmmakers repli­ cated the town’s exteriors at the 21,000­acre Ghost Ranch. Interiors were shot in Los Alamos where 36 L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E

Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt filmed scenes in the actual Oppenhei­ mer residence.

Key vista: White Sands Proving Ground, home to the original nuclear bomb test, remains an active military base, so filmmakers replicated the Trinity Test site’s 100­foot steel tower and bomb­proof bunkers in Belen, N.M. Palette: Dusty brown, in keeping with “our little western town,” as executive producer Thomas Hayslip describes it. Sandy terrain, scrub­brush green and pale­blue sky predominate.

Mood: Foreboding. As scientists attempt to harness subatomic energy for destructive purposes, ferocious desert storms symbolize the fearsome forces of nature.

Director: Wes Anderson Place in story: American Southwest Place in real life: Rural Spain.

Filmmakers initially considered shooting in Death Valley or Big Bend National Park, then considered Cinecittà soundstages in Rome before deciding to build the town from scratch on a watermelon field near Chinchón, Spain.

Year: circa 1955 Production designer: Adam Stock­ hausen (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Moonrise Kingdom”) Influences: Billy Wilder. He shot “Kiss Me, Stupid” mainly on a single stage set with a gas station in the center, Stockhausen told Focus Fea­ tures. “We also looked at Wilder’s ‘Ace in the Hole’ for when the carnival comes to town and ‘It Happened One Night’ for the way it stages a motor court.… That was exciting in terms of the artificiality of the world of ‘Asteroid City.’ ” Palette: Red tones, inspired by photographs of Monument Valley taken at the magic hour, define the core perspective. From there, Stock­ hausen and his team painted the diner and motel cabins in white, aqua blue, pale green and mellow yellow.

Mood: Depression. In contrast to the warm colors of their desert surround­ ings, “Asteroid City” tourists embody East Coast gloom throughout, with family man ( Jason Schwartzman) grieving the loss of his wife while the monotone movie star (Scarlett Johans­ son) grapples with career and rela­ tionship angst.

‘BARBIE’ Director: Greta Gerwig Place in story: Southern California Place in real life: Warner Bros.

Studios Leavesden, outside London Time: 1959­2023 Production designer: Sarah Greenwood (“Pride & Prejudice,” “Anna Karenina”) Influences: Mid­century modernism including Richard Neutra’s 1946 “Kaufmann House” in Palm Springs, “Pee­wee’s Big Adventure” and Holly­ wood musicals such as “An American in Paris.” Gerwig says, “I’m in love with 1950s soundstage musicals … and

I L LU ST RAT I O N S BY J ESS E STO N E / FO R T H E T I M ES

because Barbie was invented in 1959, it felt like we could ground everything in that look.” Greenwood and her team used hand­painted backdrops to portray the San Jacinto Mountains looming on the Barbie Land horizon.

Palette: Many shades of pink. “It was important to figure out where those bright pinks would live along­ side our palest, pastel pink and, of course, every tone of pink in be­ tween,” Gerwig says.

Mood: Optimism. Appropriate to a realm in which death and cellulite

are not a thing, Barbie Land revels in the bright tones of immortality. Ger­ wig says, “First and foremost, I wanted Barbie Land to feel like a happy place.”

‘KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON’ Director: Martin Scorsese Place in story: Osage Nation, Okla­ homa, in the town of Fairfax Place in real life: Osage Nation, Oklahoma, in nearby Pawhuska

Time: 1919­26 Production designer: Jack Fisk (“There Will Be Blood,” “Days of Heaven”) Influences: Director Martin Scorsese cites “Red River” (1948), “A Place in the Sun” (1951), “Giant” (1956) and “Wild River” (1960) as touchstones.

“This film is Marty’s western,” notes Fisk, who relied on nonfiction sources for inspiration. “I read journals. I look at documentaries. I look at period photographs — anything that will give me a glimpse into what it was really

like. You’re chipping away to get back to what it looked like 100 years ago.”

A taste of history: Fisk covered the streets of Pawhuska with dirt to cap­ ture the period look of Fairfax’s main drag, Kihekah Avenue. “You see the car tracks, and suddenly, you’re back in time,” he says. “We were building Fairfax from 1919 to 1926, and all the ghosts were there.”

Authenticity factor: Fisk visited the home where the movie’s real­life characters Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) and her mother, Lizzie Ne

Kah Es Sey (Tantoo Cardinal), once lived. “I looked at the placement of Lizzie’s house in Gray Horse. There was a stream and then a cemetery up to the right. The land I found had a beautiful stream, and we put the house in a similar position. We built a barn, a roundhouse and a cemetery with about 75 or 100 tombstones fash­ ioned after the original cemetery.”

Mood: Dread. Rolling hills, verdant pastures and golden fields provide a deceptively bucolic setting despoiled by greed, treachery and murder.

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G O L D STA N DA R D

What will pop big at Sundance?

No idea There’s always something striking slated for the Sundance Film Festival. It’s just hard to predict which ones they’ll be. But we have thoughts.

By Glenn Whipp

J U ST I N E Y E U N G / S U N DA N C E I N ST I T U T E " ; A 24 ; S U N DA N C E I N ST I T U T E ; A RT H U R M O L A / I N V I S I O N / A P ; G E T T Y I M AG ES

J

O R DA N P E E L E had trudged through the waist­deep snow to the Park City Library for a “secret” midnight screening of his directorial debut, “Get Out,” a secret in name only, as everyone sitting in the thea­ ter — including Malia Obama, then an in­ tern at the Weinstein Co. — knew what they were about to see. ❡ Though, of course, as the lights dimmed, no one had any idea just how sharp and powerful Peele’s 2017 horror satire about American racism was or that it would go on to become a cultural phenomenon. ❡ “This was my first movie, and I just wanted it to land with the audience,” Peele told me. “So I was thinking about the people in the theater, how — and if — they’d react to what they were seeing on screen.”

One thing Peele wasn’t thinking about: the Oscars. Such thoughts wouldn’t cross his mind until five months later when Universal Pictures threw a huge bash on the studio’s backlot, ostensibly for the film’s home video release, though, really, it was aimed to start awards buzz percolat­ ing. And even then, Peele tried to brush such talk aside.

“I’m not quite there yet,” Peele said, expressing appreciation for the Oscar consideration. “I’m such a fan of cinema. When I think of my favorite movies that have gotten that kind of prestige, I think of the best movies of all time.”

“Get Out” now has taken its place among them, standing as one of the landmark debuts from the Sundance Film Festival.

With Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and New York, you have an idea what to expect when you look at the festival lineups, particularly when it comes to zeroing in on movies that might pop at the Oscars. You have your brand­name auteurs, your big­budget historical epics and maybe a biopic or three.

Throw in a musical, as long as it’s not “Dear Evan Hansen,” and you have your road map.

At Sundance, though, you really have no idea. None. Three years ago at the virtual Sundance, an English­ language remake of a 2014 French coming­of­age drama about the teen daughter of Deaf adults premiered without a distributor. It was titled “CODA.” Two days after its opening day screening, Apple bought it for a record $25 million. Nearly 14 months

I L LU ST RAT I O N BY S U SA N A SA N C H E Z / LOS A N G E L ES T I M ES

later, it took the Oscar for best picture, one of the most unlikely winners in the history of the Academy Awards.

“I was just hoping the movie would find a buyer,” Siân Heder, the film’s director, told me months after Sundance. Then she hoped it would find an audience when it landed in theaters and on Apple TV+. By the time it won the Oscar — and Heder had collected the trophy for adapted screenplay — “CODA” had moved from being what its star, Marlee Matlin, called a “tidal wave of aware­ ness” for the Deaf community to a “tsunami” on just about every front.

“CODA” is the only Sundance mov­ ie to win the best picture Oscar, an accomplishment so brazen it was perhaps inevitable that last year’s Oscars were rather light on films from the 2022 festival. But, as has been the case so many times over the years, that Sundance showcased a brilliant performance, Bill Nighy’s moving turn in “Living” as a dying man em­ barking on a journey to leave behind a lasting impact, that went on to earn an Oscar nomination.

Celine Song’s bittersweet romance “Past Lives” wrecked audiences at the 2023 Sundance, an example of a movie that was actually highly anticipated, thanks to its release under the banner of the celebrated A24, a studio with a rabid following and a store selling a $400 designer silver heart locket tied in to “Priscilla.” A year later, “Past Lives” is in the Oscar conversation for best picture, director, screenplay and lead actress Greta Lee. It would be shocking if it didn’t land in at least one of those categories.

A24 has another movie that should have people talking this year: “A Dif­ ferent Man,” starring Sebastian Stan as an actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an operation to radically transform his features. When he wakes up, he looks like ... Sebastian Stan.

This improves his dating life, but he can’t score any jobs, because his looks are now too generic. Meanwhile, the woman who loved him pre­surgery (played by Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve, so great in “The Worst Person in the World”), dumps him and writes a play based on their relationship.

Think “Being John Malkovich” star­ ring the guy known for playing Bucky Barnes, and you’ll understand why this will break social media platforms

when it premieres.

What else? Again, this is Sundance, so movies that sound promising can go sideways in a second. But ’90s nostal­ gists will have deep feelings about Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow,” which focuses on a fictional “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”­type TV show (“The Pink Opaque”) that be­ comes a cult obsession. People in their late 30s, early 40s — the ones who get sloppy remembering their childhoods watching Brendan Fraser in “George of the Jungle” — are going to love it.

There’s also “Freaky Tales,” a multi­ part drama from Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the filmmaking duo be­ hind “Sugar,” “Half Nelson” and, sure, “Captain Marvel.” Set in 1987 Oakland and encompassing four intercon­ nected stories featuring skinheads and punks, rappers and an NBA all­star. It boasts a cast that includes Pedro Pascal, Ben Mendelsohn and the late, great Angus Cloud.

And it wouldn’t — or shouldn’t — be Sundance without Kristen Stewart, who stars in a couple of titles this year and will receive the festival’s Vision­ ary Award at an opening night gala.

Stewart co­stars with Steven Yeun in “Love Me,” billed as a sci­fi love story between a satellite and a buoy. (“It’s hard to explain,” Stewart told Enter­ tainment Weekly. I’m not going to argue.) And she’ll be in the A24 ro­ mantic thriller “Love Lies Bleeding,” playing a gym manager who falls for a female bodybuilder.

Finally, how about “Will & Harper,” a documentary about Will Ferrell learning that a close friend of 30 years is coming out as a trans woman. How to process this and move on to the next stage of their friendship? Road trip! Sounds like it might be the per­ fect movie to show your transphobic family members — you know, the ones who have watched “Elf” 83 times and forced you to sit through it again this Christmas.

KRISTEN STEWART and Steven Yeun, clockwise from top left, in “Love Me.” Sebastian Stan stars in “A Different Man.” Pedro Pascal in “Freaky Tales.” Harper Steele and Will Ferrell in “Will & Harper.”

Justice Smith and Brigitte Lundy­ Paine in “I Saw the TV Glow.”

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 39

El Segundo, CA ­ November 19: Hollywood Executives left to right ­ Sam Register, President, Warner Bros.

Animation, Jonathan Glickman, Founder, Glickman Media Group, RoyJASON Lee, CEO, Vertigo Entertainment, ARMOND Los Angeles Times Nicole Brown, President, TriStar Pictures, Fred An­ thony Smith, VP of Non­Scripted, SMAC Entertain­ ment, Chris Hart, co­head of talent, United Talent Agency pose for a portrait on Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023 in El Segundo, CA. ( Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 41

F FOR PEOPLE WHO WORK IN THE ENTERTAINMENT industry, 2023 was a year that many would prefer to forget. ❡ Hollywood’s momentum toward the recovery of the box office was quickly sapped by six months of strikes, first with the Writers Guild of America, then by the Screen Actors Guild­ American Federation of Television and Radio Art­ ists. ❡ The writers’ and actors’ walkouts — mark­ ing the first time in six decades that the two guilds’ picket lines overlapped — came as legacy media and entertainment companies grappled with their decision to charge into the streaming wars. Com­ panies that spent billions of dollars to build up di­ rect­to­consumer Netflix competitors, sacrificing profitable but declining TV networks along the way, found themselves under the increasingly critical eye of Wall Street. How many of these serv­ ices would survive, let alone turn a profit? ❡ All the while, as the strikes dragged on, the specter of artificial intelligence programs emerged from be­ ing a sideshow in the labor negotiations into one of the great existential debates roiling actors, scribes, producers and everyone in the executive suites. ❡ The Times invited a panel of top entertainment in­ dustry executives from companies including Sony’s TriStar Pictures, Warner Bros. and United Talent Agency, along with producers of hits such as “Barbarian,” “Wednesday” and “BS High,” to par­ ticipate in a wide­ranging discussion of issues.

Topics included the damage done by the strikes, the challenges facing the theatrical movie business, the uncertain future of streaming and linear tele­ vision and how studios and artists are responding to the threat of artificial intelligence technology.

The November panel discussion was moderated by Ryan Faughnder, senior editor of Company Town and author of The Wide Shot newslet­ ter. This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

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How big of an impact have the strikes had on the business at large?

ROY LEE, founder, Vertigo Enter­ tainment: Well, I had five shows and three movies shut down, some in preproduction and one halfway through production.

JONATHAN GLICKMAN, founder and CEO, Panoramic Media Co.: It’s not just production. We had a film that was supposed to come out in October starring Snoop Dogg, called “The Underdoggs,” with Amazon and MGM. And that movie had to push its release until January just because he wasn’t available to promote. It’s seis­ mic. It’s as disruptive of an event that I’ve experienced. It’s gonna take some time for the dust to settle.

FREDANTHONY SMITH, vice president of non­scripted, SMAC Entertainment: Fortunately for us in unscripted, we were able to continue to work. But you still feel it. You feel it just from talking to people. You can feel the apprehension and the tension, and we’re just glad that it’s over now.

NICOLE BROWN, president, TriStar Pictures: One of the big consequences of it was having to move a lot of releases because the films just couldn’t finish. But I think everybody’s determined to rebuild, and there’s some great movies that are going to come out [in 2024]. So, it’s just working the muscle again.

Some of the movies stayed put, though, like Tristar’s “Thanksgiv­ ing,” from Eli Roth.

BROWN: Absolutely. There were certain things that, luckily, had shot

before everybody had to put pencils down and actors had to say, “Good­ bye.” And it’s really important for the health of the businesses and for ex­ hibition that we could save some content and make sure we were still keeping exhibition fed.

GLICKMAN: But even those films were affected by not having actors promoting those movies.

CHRIS HART, partner and co­ head of talent, United Talent Agency: It’s challenging, and I felt horrible for the actors. I felt horrible for everyone. They put their blood, sweat and tears into these amazing projects and not to be able to be out there and to promote it. And we all know that if they’re out there promot­ ing it, there would probably be a different result.

How do you think we can avoid going through this again in three years?

GLICKMAN: Well, first of all, we might be going through this again in six months potentially with IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees]. I think we’re in a disruptive period in the country in general, and this is a microcosm. I guess the key is communication. I do hope that the blood that was shed for this labor strike period will ultimately make people take the pre­negotiations a lot more seriously to avoid these types of scenarios.

SMITH: Think about some of what we’re dealing with now. Ten years ago, you never could’ve even imag­ ined we’d be talking about AI. There’s a sense that peak TV is over and that the industry will be smaller, particularly on the TV side. How is that affecting you?

SAM REGISTER, president, Warn­ er Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network Studios: There was pre­ peak TV, and it doesn’t feel like we’re even back to those times yet. I think everyone’s being very careful about actually making the greenlight deci­ sion. Whereas a Netflix executive could have an idea at breakfast and have a greenlight by lunch, those days seem to be over, and things are back to a pace that maybe is a little bit slower.

HART: Our top talent and their projects are still being vied for aggres­ sively. So I think we could all agree:

JASON ARMOND Los Angeles Times

Chris Hart

great content, people will find it. It’s in high demand, and I don’t think that’s gonna go away.

GLICKMAN: I love the optimism, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “great content will always get there,” because there are fewer buyers. Espe­ cially on the theatrical side, people are very concerned about what it means to spend that kind of money marketing a film, much less making a movie. And that’s where I think it’s probably most frustrating to me is that a lot of the movies that we made our bones on, those would be tough to get made now.

LEE: Although I think video games are going to be the new comic book movies of the next generation. Be­ cause it’s like every video game com­ pany now sees what happened with

Nicole Brown

Jonathan Glickman

JASON ARMOND Los Angeles Times

L AT I M ES.C O M / T H E E N V E LO P E 43

JASON ARMOND Los Angeles Times

Roy Lee

Sam Register JASON ARMOND Los Angeles Times

JASON ARMOND Los Angeles Times

FredAnthony Smith

“Mario” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” and they want to get into the game and actually help self­finance the movies too. So, it’ll be interesting how that goes.

that, Roy, that video games are the new comic books. I think audiences are looking for what’s new. What’s a superhero they haven’t seen? What’s a story they haven’t seen?

Is there anything surprising you about what’s working right now in movie theaters?

BROWN: You know, I’m not sur­ prised. I think that what we’re seeing is that audiences are driven by origi­ nal. They’re driven by things that feel fresh and culturally relevant and culturally urgent. Like, even you said

Now there’s a climate where fin­ ished movies can get canceled at the last minute. Does that cause concern for you?

GLICKMAN: That is such a new phenomenon it’s sort of hard to even wrap your brain around what it’s like to make a movie and then just have it vanish. I feel terrible for anybody that

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that has happened to. For producers, as long as we have an opportunity to be entrepreneurial with what we have, I think that we’re OK. And so now that we’re aware that movies can disappear, we can say in a deal, “Look, if this movie is not gonna be theat­ rically released, we get the right to buy it back.”

One of the interesting things from the last year was the success of “Sound of Freedom” and the suc­ cess of Taylor Swift and that they did those outside of the traditional studio system.

REGISTER: Look at the Sphere in Vegas. I got to see ABBA Voyage in London. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’m waiting for the Prince Experience next. But I think the audi­ ences are maybe looking for some­ thing new all the time, and maybe we’ve gotten a little stuck in our ways, and maybe we need to blow it out.

HART: You can certainly see that in the music and comedy touring busi­ ness. There’s so many acts that are out there on the road and these big festi­ vals and things like that.

BROWN: Yeah. I think people are so afraid that streaming is the end of theatrical exhibition, but I actually think the two can coexist. I’ve always

said, “Just because there’s Postmates doesn’t mean we don’t go to restau­ rants.” But I do think we have a bigger expectation of what we want when we go out, when we get the baby­sitter, when we pay for parking.

GLICKMAN: But also it’s a tough thing to do. When there were 20 movies made by each studio a year, you could sort of take a shot that five of them would catch some viral mo­ ment. “Barbenheimer” was, like, a completely organic thing. And the thing that’s just scary with conserva­ tive thinking is that you can’t predict those moments.

SMITH: You never know what’s gonna get people out of their homes now, but people wanna get outta their homes. It’s always the thing that’s not expected. You know, it’s “The Matrix” versus “Star Wars: The Phantom Men­ ace.” Nobody thought the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be what it ended up being when “Iron Man” was released in 2008. But when you try to duplicate it, then that’s when you run into trouble.

BROWN: But I think what’s also interesting about the movies [ Jona­ than] referenced is that they’re also stories for underserved audiences. I don’t think young women were get­

ting enough programming. Thank God for “Barbie” as well, but I think women were looking for “what re­ flects me in the marketplace.”

LEE: In terms of the competition for film and TV, it’s constantly evolving.

We’re actually just fighting for the attention span of all the viewers. Like, my kids watch YouTube more than anything else. And then there’s the video games. There are so many new things that come up that are taking away from the pie of the attention span of the audience.

Are you using AI? Are you con­ cerned about it?

GLICKMAN: I don’t think it’s really going to affect the writing process very much for the near future, just because the quality is so far below anything that an audience would stand for. The one thing that I’m seeing that’s disturbing in terms of job creation is — you can now feed a script into the ChatGPT and get coverage of it immediately. Synopsis.

They actually do comments. That’s a job that used to go to an up­and­ coming kid who is going to learn how to analyze material.

REGISTER: Animation’s a visual medium. But so far, I haven’t seen anything AI can do visually that an artist doesn’t do better currently.

LEE: I have an example of something, which are storyboards, where we put scripts in for storyboard analysis.

REGISTER: And? LEE: It’s like pieces of art. And you could give notes, and it changes it on the fly.

GLICKMAN: That’s a series of jobs.

REGISTER: As an animation studio, I just think it’s important we protect the artists and the art form as long as we can. Because I think we should give jobs to people who really do that and so they can get their entry­ level experience.

BROWN: Same. I mean, movies are about someone’s experience, some­ one’s perspective, someone’s vision.

So, even though there was a lot of discussion about AI during strikes, as someone building content, I want to work with human beings.

HART: As an agent, we’re in the business of protecting our artists — from story editors to famous actors to writers — so to work with people, that’s what I love to do.

SMITH: And AI’s just gonna get better and better. I watched the first episode [of the recent Wilt

Chamberlain docuseries], and it’s a lot of Wilt Chamberlain narration.

I get to the second episode and there’s a disclaimer that says Wilt Chamber­ lain’s voice­over was done with AI. I had no idea that that was not Wilt Chamberlain.

“I DON’T THINK IT’S AS SIMPLE AS ‘GREAT CONTENT WILL ALWAYS GET THERE,’ BECAUSE THERE ARE FEWER BUYERS.”

Can linear TV and streaming coexist?

REGISTER: Yeah. It’s getting harder.

As part of Warner Bros., we have lots of linear networks. They’re very profitable and we’re still selling great stuff to them. But we’re also making sure there’s a place that they will live also on streaming, so we’re doing ambidextrous programming and selling.

We make everything from pre­ school to adult animation, and it’s the kids, that 6­to­11 core, that basi­ cally Cartoon Network and Nickel­ odeon and Disney all made their bones on. That is disappearing. We’re seeing a lot more YA and adult anima­ tion doing great. And we see a lot of younger content being produced.

But it’s that space in the middle, and it’s not just streaming that’s getting kids away from linear. It’s YouTube and it’s Roblox.

GLICKMAN: Linear TV faces chal­ lenges, but a lot of the mainstream shows that served everybody — shows like “Suits,” the three­camera sitcom — you’re seeing these shows working on streaming as well. And there is a chance that linear TV can come back, because they do produce that type of programming, which I think in conjunction with the streaming alter­ native, that’s what I’m hearing cer­ tainly that people want in the world of television.

SMITH: There’s going to be staples that are still on linear TV, like “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy.” And sports ... as long as sports is on linear,

there’s gonna be a place for linear.

LEE: It seems to me that the FAST [free advertising supported stream­ ing] platforms are going to be the replacement for linear TV, because at some point anyone can just go and watch whatever they want on those networks. And it’s essentially network TV, but just in a different format. Even Amazon’s Freevee and “Jury Duty.” It’s essentially a network­type show.

JONATHAN GLICKMAN

Is this still an attractive business for young people?

HART: Funny enough, I was just talking to the head of our training program the other day. And just to see the numbers and statistics of how many applicants are coming in. I think it’s still very, very vibrant. We still see a big influx of young talent.

GLICKMAN: But I would have to guess that the film and television department of your agency has gotten to be a smaller piece of the pie.

HART: Yeah. Because we’ve gotten so diversified, so you’re really seeing with some of these younger talent, they really want digital. They really want podcasting. They want to go work at Klutch Sports.

A lot of the strikes were about artists wanting to participate more on the back end for success­ ful shows. Producers have long wanted the same thing. Is that moving in the right direction for you now?

GLICKMAN: This is the primary issue that faces producers in general.

The spirit of a producer always was, “We’re gonna bet on the success of a film. We’re gonna stand side by side with whoever releases this film, however it’s released. And if there is something that becomes a spec­ tacular success, we’re gonna benefit from it.” And that is not happening in today’s world.

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ON WRITING | E M E RA L D F E N N E L L

Familiar and safe — until the end ‘Saltburn’ offers what the gothic genre often promises: Comfort.

Humor. Desire. Sex. And death.

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and its residents are the Catton family, who absorb the guileless Oliver Quick into their fantasy life over the summer of 2007.

It makes sense to me now that “Saltburn” is a project I finished writing during the lockdown of a global pandemic, a time when all of us were forced into the position of per­ manent voyeurs, where parasocial relationships became all­consuming.

There was nothing to do but watch,

poring over the details of other peo­ ple’s lives, their houses, their clothes, their food, their families.

The intimacy with which we were acquainted with these strangers was startling and unprecedented and entirely one­sided. The beautiful strangers never looked back — how could they? For a long time, these potent imaginary friendships — inevi­ tably descending into self­loathing, jealousy and a sado­masochistic in­

BARRY KEOGHAN plays Oliver, a university student who spends the summer at a school friend’s estate, mingling with the beautiful people.

ability to look away — replaced all human contact.

It was the very definition of “look but don’t touch.” We weren’t allowed to be in a room together, let alone swap the kind of fluids that humans need to swap not just for joy but for survival.

What did this do to us? What happens to someone when they can’t touch the thing they so desperately want to touch? Maybe something close to the gothic madness that consumes Oliver.

After so much isolation, I wanted to write something to be watched in a dark room with strangers. Something made for the specific, disquieting intimacy of the theater. Something that made the audience aware of the person sitting next to them, that could provoke a visceral, physical response: the kind of interaction, the sticky pleasure we’d all been denied.

“Saltburn,” like so many of the books and films that precede it, is a story about restraint and its limits and what happens after the restraints finally come off. What happens when the woman locked in the attic finally gets loose?

She burns the house down.

P O RT RA I T BY T RACY N G U Y E N / FO R T H E T I M ES

“ SA LT B U R N ” P H OTO F RO M A M A ZO N ST U D I OS

I

’ V E A LWAY S been obsessed with the gothic. Whether it was Edward Gorey’s children who are variously choked by peaches, sucked dry by leeches or smothered by rugs; Du Maurier’s imperiled heroines or the disturbing erotic power of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, the gothic world has always had me in its grip. It’s a genre where come­ dy and horror, revulsion and desire, sex and death are forever entwined, where every exchange is heavy with the threat of violence, or sex or both.

With “Saltburn,” I wanted to write a gothic story or, more specifically, a story that took its cue from the literary sub­genre of the English Country House Gothic. “Rebecca,” “Brideshead Revisited,” “The Go­Between” — these stories are so familiar to us, the beats so reassuringly consistent, we know where we are the moment the wrought­iron gates part — or at least we think we do. I like familiar stories: I like the squeak they make when you squeeze them really hard.

In this familiar story, there is always a first­person narrator, sucked into a world beyond their comprehension. A framing narrative where this person looks back on a time that froze their life completely, that left them trapped, forever combing over every detail, trying to make sense of it all. There are familiar characters too, the Innocent Bystander, the Doomed Romantic Hero, the Desperate Sister, the Jealous Rival, the All­Seeing Butler and the house itself, which is inescapably the main character, never changing, and impervious to the people who live in it.

In this case that house is Saltburn,

T H E I N D U ST RY

There’s hope at the box office The forecast isn’t all doom and gloom. Surprise hits are always a possibility. By Ryan Faughnder

B

“Oppenheimer” causing a social media chain reaction, nor were people anticipating the wild cards of “Sound of Freedom,” “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” and “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé” adding to the cinema industry’s top line.

But there’s at least one factor we know will weigh on the theatrical business over the next 52 weeks. A substantial number of movies that would’ve brought in major sums of money were pushed out of this year’s calendar, including “Captain America: Brave New World,” the next “Mission: Impossible” and “Spider­Man: Beyond the Spider­Verse.”

“ BA R B I E ” P H OTO F RO M WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES

A D N EWS F I R S T: Thanks to the wreckage inflicted on Hollywood’s production apparatus during the six months of combined actors’ and writers’ strikes, the film industry is looking at a 2024 domestic box office that, according to analyst estimates, will likely come in at around $8 billion.

That’s roughly $1 billion less than ticket sales generated last year in the U.S. and Canada, for a projected decline of 11%.

This downbeat assessment might turn out to be premature. After all, no one was counting on “Barbie” or

LOS A N G E L ES T I M ES I L LU ST RAT I O N ; P H OTO V I A G E T T Y I M AG ES

This is why the studios didn’t really want their labor morass to drag on any longer than it did, despite pervasive hype about all the money saved from not making stuff.

That said, there are good reasons for moviegoers to curb whatever sense of dread those numbers might inspire, because there are some highly antici­ pated films in store, including Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” (both transplants from 2023), George Mill­ er’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux.”

Fans can take some relief from the fact that Disney and Marvel will have some extra time to work on “Brave New World” and that Warner Bros.’s James Gunn­piloted reboot of the DC universe doesn’t start until next year with “Superman: Legacy.” This comes after a superhero car crash of disappointments that included “The Marvels,” “The Flash,” “Blue Beetle” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.”

Plus, there are surely some films that have been overlooked by, or haven’t been fed into, our intellectual property­fueled box office forecasting algorithm (if only The Times had such a thing).

Last year’s box office (up 21% from the previous year, but down 22% from pre­pandemic levels, according to Comscore data), gave some measure of hope for film fans, and not just because of the number of non­sequels at the top of the charts, as my colleagues J. Clara Chan and Christi Caras reported.

Having a diverse mix of genres and films for multiple audiences (animation, comedy, action and ever­reliable horror) remains a winning strategy for studios.

Films that might have been labeled “niche,” including Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” and Toho’s “Godzilla Minus One” (both ambitious pictures from Japan) found their audiences, grossing $36.8 million and $46.2 million, respectively, in the U.S. and Canada. Both were highly acclaimed and well­marketed by companies that understood the target market.

Even the much­eulogized specialty market showed proof of life, with Alexander Payne’s winning prep

A SOCIAL media explosion via “Barbie,” with Margot Robbie, was unexpected.

school dramedy “The Holdovers” (starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa) clocking in at about $18 million domestically. Not a blockbuster like “Sideways,” to be sure (2004 was a different time), but solid for an emotionally astute and relatively quiet Focus Features release. The title is already and somewhat jarringly available on streaming service Peacock, following its expanded theatrical release in November.

Certain musicals performed well to close out the year, perhaps despite the perceived misgivings of studio marketing departments, with holiday­timed release “Wonka” scoring $140 million and “The Color Purple” earning a promising $47 million so far. Clearly audiences don’t have any broad­based aversion to people singing on screen.

Anyway, all of that belies the often repeated canard that originality is dead and Hollywood only does sequels, remakes and toy movies. It definitely does a lot of those things, and that won’t stop, but there’s still other types of movies out there, even if it’s gotten harder. Does anyone seriously look at the slate of movies from last year (“Past Lives,” “Talk to Me,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Poor Things”) and come away with the impression that 2023 was a poor year for film?

A movie business that focuses only on swinging for the fences would certainly be a dull one, whether you’re a filmmaker, executive, audience member or journalist.

The available evidence shows that’s not where things are headed quite yet.

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T H E I N D U ST RY

Christopher Nolan’s top 10 highest­grossing features

WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; RO N P H I L L I PS / WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; M E L I N DA S U E G O R D O N / U N I V E R SA L P I C T U R ES ; ST E P H A N VAU G H N / WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; DAV I D JA M ES / WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; M E L I N DA S U E G O R D O N / WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; RO B M C E WA N / WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; M E L I N DA S U E G O R D O N / WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES ; F RA N C O I S D U H A M E L / TO U C H STO N E ; WA R N E R B ROS. P I C T U R ES.

It’s a rare filmmaker who is consistently embraced by the movie academy and at the same time can capture audiences domestically — and around the globe. By Michael Ordoña

C

HRISTOPHER NOLAN has achieved an extraordi­ narily rare and likely cov­ eted status among filmmak­ ers: His movies have often achieved blockbuster status while he has col­ lected major critic and peer awards.

Nolan already has five Oscar nomina­ tions and is a favorite to receive several more come Jan. 23 for the wildly suc­ cessful and critically acclaimed “Op­ penheimer” as its writer, director and producer. Meanwhile, the film — a challenging, adult­skewing, three­hour historical biopic (about a physicist, and not one whose exposure to gamma rays turns him into an Avenger) — has collected nearly a billion dollars worldwide and become the highest­ grossing biopic ever (beating out the previous champ, “Bohemian Rhap­ sody”). His two Batman sequels each broke the magic billion number glob­ ally, and four other of his films have grossed in the hundreds of millions, racking up huge numbers at home.

That’s rarefied air. Very few consis­ tent hit makers are also embraced by the academy. Steven Spielberg and James Cameron come to mind. Peter Jackson and Robert Zemeckis are in the club, as are the likes of David Lean and Robert Wise, after adjusting for inflation. That’s some company.

S O U RC E : A L L B OX O F F I C E F I G U R ES F RO M B OXO F F I C E M O J O.C O M . I N F L AT I O N A D J U ST M E N T V I A U. S. B U R E AU O F L A B O R STAT I ST I CS’ C P I (C O N S U M E R P R I C E I N D E X ) I N F L AT I O N CA LC U L ATO R

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T H E I N D U ST RY

A Smaller budgets, more guidance

RA JA N I A N D WA I T H E P H OTO BY JA M I E M C CA RT H Y / G E T T Y I M AG ES ; P H OTOS AT FA R R I G H T BY B R U C E G L I K A S / W I R E I M AG E ; G E T T Y I M AG ES ; CA RO LY N C O L E / L . A . T I M ES

Hillman Grad’s co­founders see a future with more inclusivity and small­stake risks. By J. Clara Chan

T A TIME WHEN studios are zeroing in on existing intellectual property and tried­and­ true storylines, Hillman Grad is look­ ing in the opposite direction.

The production company, led by writer­producer­actor Lena Waithe and Chief Executive Rishi Rajani, has put its weight behind emerging film­ makers, including Jingyi Shao (“Chang Can Dunk”), A.V. Rockwell (“A Thousand and One”) and D. Smith (“Kokomo City”) — all of whom re­ leased their directorial debuts with Hillman Grad last year.

Here, Waithe and Rajani share why they see an opportunity for more upcoming filmmakers.

How has the vision for Hillman Grad changed since you started?

Lena Waithe: The business has changed, society has changed, the way we take in content has changed.

But for me, what I want to do is really get back to the creative. Sometimes, because of everything that’s going on, we can lose sight of the creative, and it can be about commerce, which I understand. But I think there are ways that we can reinvest in the unknown.

I want to continue to find things that make people talk and that make people really lean in. My vision for Hillman Grad has been about what can we do to make sure audiences, our people, our community, really feel like they’re engaged in the work.

What does the experience with a new filmmaker look like?

Rishi Rajani: What we were find­ ing is there’s a lot of frustration with the “diversity programs” for finding new talent, because it felt like they were very performative. It was like, bring a writer on to staff on a show for one season, or bring on a filmmaker to shadow on a TV series, and there was no follow­up. It is our goal and aspira­ tion to continue building up their career. A.V. Rockwell got to direct an episode of “Boomerang,” her first episode of television. Then we devel­ oped “A Thousand and One” with her.

Now we’re looking forward and going, what are the next projects we can do?

How do you pitch projects from newer filmmakers?

Waithe: It is tough. But what we try to do is say, “Hey, this could be the next ‘Get Out.’ ” What does the studio system need to change so it’s more open to new voices?

Rajani: It’s kind of twofold. On one hand, it’s quite frankly getting more decision makers from underrepresent­ ed backgrounds into higher ranks of studios and giving people actual greenlight opportunities.

Second is to understand that, fun­ damentally, there’s a real opportunity in giving filmmakers smaller budgets and [let them] create something.

Industry predictions for 2024?

Rajani: It’s gonna be even harder to make projects. I think the contraction everyone’s a little bit afraid of is going to occur.

OUTSIDE THE OFFICE WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO NOW? Rajani: The Broadway soundtrack to “Merrily We Roll Along,” which I recently saw. I find it very resonant for the place the industry is in right now.

HOW DO YOU GET FOCUSED? Rajani: I started boxing.

You have to just be in the moment, and it helps me get really focused, energized and ready to tackle my day.

Waithe: I’ll definitely light up my own strain [of weed] called First Draft. To get focused I need to get clear, to relax, so that's what I do every time.

Boxing Gloves

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O N E S H OT

Priscilla’s the focus

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P H OTO F RO M A 24

The romance between Elvis and Priscilla Presley was not all fireworks, at least not in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” where the director tunes into the psyche of the young woman who mar­ ried the iconic singer. “Sofia was looking for something intimate,” cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd says about the film that sees Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi play the famous couple who first meet in Germany when Priscilla is 14. The use of color conveys the period locations, with Europe being cast in muted grays, whereas their time in America bursts in a kaleidoscope of pastels. To connect the audience to Priscilla, Coppola “would concentrate on Cailee, and if you look, a few times, you won’t see a reverse [shot] on Jacob. She wanted to stay with Pris­ cilla,” Le Sourd says. Heightening the point of view, he would frame “closer to Cailee and wider on Jacob. It’s more about her than him.” — Daron James