Screen 7th January 2015

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Issue 1785 January 7, 2015

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WENDY MITCHELL CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

(Below) Ava DuVernay directs Selma

hen I spoke to Jessica Chastain for this issue of Screen, she pointed out that none of this year’s likely best picture nominees was told from a female point of view. My stomach sank as I realised she was right.

Then in a must-read story for The New York Times over the holidays, film critic Manohla Dargis pointed out the six major studios had released only three films directed by women in 2014.

These are the kind of statistics that could make you want to give up and go back to bed.

But beyond the numbers there are some success stories that stood out in 2014. Angelina Jolie has directed a war epic in Unbroken, which was a big hit at the US box office over the holidays (and she also showed her box-office might starring in Maleficent).

Ava DuVernay was the director who finally got Selma made after years of delays (see page 20); the film’s co-star and producer, Oprah Winfrey, is now a powerful force in the film industry.

Laura Poitras directed the magnificent and brave documentary Citizenfour, and the female-led team at Britdoc helped get it out to the world in groundbreaking ways.

Kelly Reichardt moved into thriller territory with Night Moves. Amma Asante had an audience and critical hit with Belle, about a mixed-race woman in 18thcentury society. It also put Gugu MbathaRaw on the path to stardom, alongside another female-directed film, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond The Lights.

Eliza Hittman made a name for herself with feature debut It Felt Like Love.

Thanks to The Hunger Games and X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Jennifer Lawrence was 2014’s highest-grossing actor.

Reese Witherspoon-starring Wild is an acclaimed story impressing cinemagoers of both sexes, about one woman’s epic trek and self awakening. Julianne Moore in Still Alice is a heroine dealing with the complicated diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (see page 16).

The Theory Of Everything is as much a story of Jane Hawking as her famous husband Stephen (see page 26). Ida was a female story and one of the best films of the year (foreign-language or otherwise), Obvious Child was a smart comedy unlike

anything we’ve seen before — its heroine, played by Jenny Slate, didn’t have to apologise for being funny. The Babadook, directed by Jennifer Kent, was routinely cited as the scariest film of the year. We Are The Best! demonstrated that a girls’ coming-of-age story could be about punk rock more than about boys and make-up.

Edge Of Tomorrow was that rare blockbuster which showed the woman (an excellent Emily Blunt) kicking ass, while the man (action hero himself Tom Cruise) played catch up.

Gone Girl featured a heroine that didn’t fit into easy boxes, and Rosamund Pike looked like she had a blast bringing Amy to life. Scarlett Johansson showed a new side with her revealing performance in Under The Skin.

In Cannes, there were several female highlights. Marion Cotillard shone in Two Days, One Night. Xavier Dolan’s Mommy had two complicated female roles, and Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders was another highlight of Competition. Two Israeli films showed female power in front of and behind the camera: Shira Geffen’s Self Made and Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial Of Viviane Amsalem. Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood was a critical hit.

And looking ahead to 2015, there are some bright spots to come — Sam Taylor-Wood’s 50 Shades Of Grey is sure to be a huge hit when it opens on Valentine’s Day (everyone reading this is probably among the 40 million viewers of the trailer, admit it!). You might argue the books are not feminist works, but they’ve been huge hits for a female author and it’s great to see that a woman is at the helm of such an anticipated adaptation.

I’ve had an early look at StudioCanal, Big Talk and BBC Films’ smart romantic comedy Man Up, which is a funny, touching story of a warts-and-all relationship, told refreshingly from the point of view of a 30-something woman, played with empathy and wit by Lake Bell.

A female Ghostbusters is also on the way. Pitch Perfect 2 is a female-centred sequel directed by Elizabeth Banks. Thea Sharrock directs Me Before You for MGM; Catherine Hardwicke directs Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette in Miss You Already, a drama about female friendship.

To be sure, the overall stats are depressing and embarrassing, and have to improve. But don’t let those numbers negate the positive work that is being done by women in film. It only gets better s one job, and one woman, at a time. ■

January 7, 2015 Screen International 1

Contents

International correspondents Asia Liz Shackleton lizshackleton@gmail.com Australia Sandy George +61 2 9557 7425 sandy.george@me.com Balkan region Vladan Petkovic +381 64 1948 948 vladan.petkovic@gmail.com Brazil

12

18

Elaine Guerini +55 11 97659915 elaineguerini@terra.com.br France Melanie Goodfellow +33 6 21 45 80 27 melanie.goodfellow@btinternet.com Germany Martin Blaney +49 30 318 063 91 screen.berlin@googlemail.com

20

Greece Alexis Grivas +30 210 64 25 261 alexisgrivas@yahoo.com Israel Edna Fainaru +972 3 5286 591 dfainaru@netvision.net.il Korea/deputy Asia editor Jean Noh +82 10 4205 0318

22

26

hjnoh2007@gmail.com Nordic territories Jorn Rossing Jensen +45 202 333 04 jornrossing@aol.com Scotland

January 7, 2015

Allan Hunter +44 (0) 7904 698 848 allan@alhunter.myzen.co.uk

Feature focus

Spain

04 Big-screen truths

Juan Sarda +34 646 440 357

As the UK market grows for theatrical documentary releases, distributors and exhibitors are planning event releases and dedicated screens to appeal to audiences

jsardafr@hotmail.com UK Geoffrey Macnab +44 (0) 20 7226 0516 geoffrey@macnab.demon.co.uk

06 The european outlook

Subscriptions Screen International subscriptions

Lucia Recalde Langarica on how innovation in technology, people and content can be used to realise Europe’s untapped potential

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2 Screen International January 7, 2015

16 Still strong Julianne Moore discusses the research and emotions behind her turn in Still Alice

18 the whiplash effect

08 out of the fog On the set of Michael Lennox’s debut feature, comic psychological thriller A Patch Of Fog

20 the doctor is in

Awards special 12 power play

exchange rates that applied in January 2015

Felicity Jones on her intimidating first experience with Jane Hawking, and meeting carers and families during preparation for The Theory Of Everything

JK Simmons reveals how he brought to life the brutal teacher in Whiplash and how the role may change his career forever

Screen International ISSN 0307 4617

All currencies in this issue converted according to

14 Note perfect

Jessica Chastain talks about bringing the wife out from behind the scenes in JC Chandor’s A Most Violent Year

Selma star David Oyelowo talks about being British, portraying an icon and the need to avoid impersonation

22 maximum effect Weta Digital has grown from one computer to a global VFX powerhouse employing 1,000

people. Key executives Richard Taylor and Joe Letteri analyse its success

26 theory into practice The Theory Of Everything is far more than a Stephen Hawking biopic — it’s a ‘triple helix’ of scientific breakthrough, debilitating disease and a one-of-a-kind love story

32 awards people Ethan Hawke looks back over his career and offers his take on the Sony hacking crisis; Paul Thomas Anderson keeps it light on Inherent Vice; and the co-directors of The Boxtrolls talk stop motion

Regulars 30 reviews A critical eye on the latest films including The Woman In Black: Angel Of Death and Into The Woods plus titles from Dubai International Film Festival

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Oct 1 - 10, 2015

In focus Documentaries

I Am Ali

Big-screen truths With the UK market growing for theatrical documentary releases, Geoffrey Macnab looks at how distributors and exhibitors are planning event releases and dedicated screens to appeal to documentary lovers

E

very so often a documentary juggernaut — a Michael Moore film, a Touching The Void or a The Imposter — will outperform fictional films at the box office, but they are still the exception.

At the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) at the end of last year, Esther van Messel, managing director of Switzerland-based documentary sales specialist First Hand Films, pointed out TV sales accounted for more than 90% of the company’s turnover. The bottom line still appeared to be producers who wanted to make money from their documentaries needed to present them in formats suitable for broadcasters.

That is why the UK market appears so incongruous. Look through the list of 2014 cinema releases and you will see an astonishing number of documentaries were released theatrically — around 80 titles, not including event releases of opera and theatre. Everybody was releasing documentaries: small indie distributors and the UK arms of major studios alike. The titles seen in UK cinemas last year ranged from tiny but highly inventive films such as Toby Amies’ The Man

4 Screen International January 7, 2015

Whose Mind Exploded, about a camp eccentric with no short-term memory, to heavyweights such as Universal’s I Am Ali and Sony’s Merchants Of Doubt.

There is further evidence documentary in the UK, at least, is increasingly targeted at the big screen. Remarkably, two new cinemas in London’s West End have confirmed screens will be set aside for documentaries.

Picturehouse Central — a seven-screen, 1,000-seat cinema complex housed in the West End’s Trocadero entertainment centre that will be opened by Picturehouse Cinemas in May 2015 — will have a screen reserved for documentaries.

A documentary will always be featured on one of the theatre’s screens, which will seat from 70 to 350 viewers. “There will be a full programme of documentaries running all the time,” says Picturehouse director of programming and acquisitions Clare Binns.

Picturehouse Cinemas’ distribution arm, Picturehouse Entertainment, is continuing to acquire documentaries in increasing numbers.

Meanwhile, London’s renovated Curzon

‘We get pitched docs at every market, every festival, every time we meet a sales agent or producer.

There’s so much choice’ Eve Gabereau, Soda Pictures

Bloomsbury, due to open in February, will likewise have a screen, the Bertha DocHouse Screen, reserved for documentary. This will be programmed by DocHouse, the yearround documentary ‘festival’, and supported by the global philanthropic organisation Bertha Foundation.

“We like to think of it as a documentary centre,” DocHouse director Elizabeth Wood commented of the new Curzon screen, which, she says, will be “entirely independent” in its programming.

The distribution gamble UK distributors are increasingly committed both to picking up documentaries and to ensuring the titles are seen first in cinemas.

UK theatrical buyers and sales agents are present in increasing numbers at key documentary events such as Sheffield Doc/Fest and IDFA. “We always believed that a good film should be in the theatre,” says Dogwoof founder and chairman Andy Whittaker. He points out that big name directors such as Steve James (The Interrupters), Errol Morris

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London’s Picturehouse Central will dedicate one of its seven screens to documentaries. (Right) The company’s Hockney event covered 230 screens

We Are The Giant

(The Fog Of War) and Gabriela Cowperthwaite (Blackfish) are always likely to gravitate towards distributors that are committed to putting their films in cinemas.

Another UK distributor, Kaleidoscope, has just announced it is setting up its own dedicated documentary brand, Spectrum, in early 2015.

“We are known for our documentary output, and we have been putting out documentaries for a number of years,” says Adam Sergeant, marketing director at Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment, which has released titles including Sundance selection We Are The Giant and tennis story Venus And Serena.

“So it was a natural process to create a consumer-facing brand to give our documentaries a bit more cut-through and a bit more stand-out wherever they may be seen, be that in the digital space, the theatrical space or the home-entertainment space.”

Spectrum kicks off with the January 15 theatrical launch in the UK of Libyan revolution story Point & Shoot directed by Oscar nominee Marshall Curry. Further releases will be the digital release of Oscar nominee The Square on January 17 and the theatrical release of Cold War story The Man Who Saved The World.

Sergeant is quick to point out Kaleidoscope never looks at the theatrical release of its documentaries in isolation. The “value” of any given film will be assessed on how it might work in terms of a digital release and TV potential as well as in the cinemas. The company does not release all its documentaries theatrically. “Different products that come to us will [arrive] at different stages of their life cycle. Many we get involved in at pre-production. Some may already have TV deals in place through broadcasters like Netflix. Of course, that’s going to inform our release strategy hugely.” But he adds: “We try to buy quality documentaries and quality output that will generally have a more theatrical feel to it. The majority of the product

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‘It’s a tough marketplace.

You get a handful of films a year that cut through and work in cinemas’ Rupert Preston, Vertigo Films

(Right) Point And Shoot

will certainly be intended for theatrical release.”

So why has there been this sea-change in the UK film industry’s attitude toward documentary?

Eve Gabereau, managing director of Soda Pictures, points to the explosion in the number of feature documentaries being made.

“We get pitched [documentaries] at every market, every festival, every time we meet with a sales agent or a producer. The list of documentaries is vast. There is so much choice,” she says.

Another obvious reason for documentaries turning up in such numbers in UK cinemas is that films such as Touching The Void, Man On Wire, The Imposter or One Day In September were made as if they were feature films. They set out to provide cinematic spectacle.

It is clear distributors have become much more effective at targeting specific audiences — and at using social media to promote campaigning documentaries. For example, Dogwoof was able to promote its ethical fishing docLine umentary, End Of The Line, in Waitrose supermarkets around the country.

There is also evidence cinema bookers are becoming more adventurous. “I’m a firm believer people do enjoy different content. Not everyone wants to see an action movie on a weekly basis,” says Sergeant.

A note of caution is necessary. “It’s a tough marketplace. You get a handful a year that cut through and work [in cinemas]. The vast majority don’t,” says Rupert

Preston, co-CEO of Vertigo Films. He also points out “ancillary is quite small. It’s not a genre that suddenly overperforms on ancillary compared to theatrical.”

There is also the question of economics with a TV sale. UK broadcasters can still be reluctant to take documentaries with which they are not already involved.

“Television thinks that if they haven’t already pre-bought it or were involved in commissioning it, then it’s probably not worth it,” is how one distributor puts it.

The UK broadcasters are involved in making so many documentary films themselves they are not always eager to acquire titles from theatrical distributors. Broadcasters may also want to cut the film to fit timeslots, something that is unlikely to appeal to bigname auteurs. At least distributors can now turn to ever-more TV outlets — Sky and Netflix as well as the BBC and Channel 4. event horizon Distributors also point out it is still tough to secure full-week runs for documentaries at UK cinemas. “You don’t get seven-day bookings. You get one-day bookings. It’s hard to generate any money really,” says Preston.

This is why event screenings of documentaries are becoming so important. Picturehouse recently hosted a national 230-screen showing of Hockney, about UK artist David Hockney, complete with a live satellite broadcast from his studio in Los Angeles.

Vertigo organised a similar release of its Stephen Hawking documentary, Hawking, which it is repromoting to tie in with awards favourite fiction title The Theory Of Everything. Soda is planning an event screening of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery at… the National Gallery.

“You might make much more in one day than you would in a week of shows here and there,” Gabereau says of the attraction of the multi-screen event release.

Distributors also point out documentaries can have long legs. Their fate is not determined on the opening weekend. The theatrical release is often used to alert viewers to the existence of a film. As Sergeant says: “Theatrical has a huge profiling value for good quality product.” The film will tend to be available to download or buy on DVD soon afterwards as windows tend to be shorter for documentaries than for dramatic features.

“It’s very hard for a documentary to make money theatrically,” acknowledges Kaleidoscope’s Sergeant. “We tend to look at it more as a holistic goal. We’ll run our numbers based on [the film’s] life cycle and what it can bring to us across the digital spectrum and the home entertainment spectrum as well.”

Even if very few documentaries are going to break box-office records, distributors all agree the UK’s documentary market is vibrant and potentially lucrative. That is why there is no sign of UK cinema’s documentary s gold rush ending any time soon. ■

January 7, 2015 Screen International 5

Interview Lucia Recalde Langarica

The European outlook MEDIA’s new head of unit, Lucia Recalde Langarica, talks to Martin Blaney about how innovation in technology, people and content can be used to realise Europe’s untapped potential

A

In addition, the plans for a European Film Forum, as proposed in the European Commission’s communication on ‘European film in the digital era’ in May 2014, will become more concrete.

“We have been waiting for guidance from our new political masters to determine the approach,” Langarica explains, adding that she should have more details when she attends next month’s Berlinale with Günther Oettinger, commissioner for digital economy and society, who is also now responsible for the MEDIA sub-programme.

“We will want to identify a number of issues which we consider particularly important and where there is some momentum,” Langarica continues. “The issues will determine the shape of the forum. We don’t want to re-invent the wheel or create groups for the sake of creating groups, but rather build on existing groups.

“For example, the communication highlighted the need for a complementarity between national and European funding, so that in such a case, we would rely on the expertise of the funders gathered in EFADs [European Film Agency Directors Network] to bring this dialogue forward.”

s the European Union’s Creative Europe framework programme enters its second year of operations, the MEDIA sub-programme supporting the film and television industries is set to focus more on promoting innovation following the September 2014 appointment of Lucia Recalde Langarica as head of unit.

Working in different positions at the European Commission since 1995, Langarica was most recently head of the commission’s higher education, innovation and entrepreneurship unit, and head of the European Institute of Technology (EIT).

“Something very close to my heart is fostering talent and the question of how can we make the best of the untapped potential that exists in Europe,” says Langarica, who hails from Spain’s Basque region.

“Innovation can be fostered by bringing people together from different backgrounds, disciplines and specialisations. For example, you could bring talented students from film academies, who want to become entrepreneurs, together with people who are already experienced in the business sector; or with artists from other disciplines or perhaps IT specialists who know the business from another vantage point. That is the best way to generate new ideas.

“Innovation is often seen only in technological terms, but in Creative Europe — MEDIA, one can also drive innovation through people and content,” she suggests.

Digital pilots Creative Europe — and the preceding MEDIA 2007 programme — has already been supporting the development of progressive distribution and business models in the changing digital landscape, including VoD pilot projects such as TIDE and Wild Bunch’s Speed Bunch, experimenting with simultaneous or quasi-simultaneous releases in several European territories.

This year will see the MEDIA sub-programme also launching a pilot project ‘Fostering European integration through culture’ by providing new subtitled versions of selected TV programmes across all of Europe and looking at crowdsourcing subtitles to increase the circulation of European works.

At the same time, the first half of this year will see Langarica and her team focus on the final stage of negotiations with the European Investment Fund about the implementation of the proposed cultural and creative sectors

6 Screen International January 7, 2015

‘Innovation can be fostered by bringing people together from different backgrounds and disciplines.

That’s the best way to generate new ideas’ Lucia Recalde Langarica, MEDIA

guarantee facility under the Creative Europe programme from 2016.

Although the cultural and creative industries employ more than 3.2 million people and represent nearly 4.5% of the total business economy in Europe, the sector suffers from negative stereotypes when it comes to assessing economic performance.

This new financial instrument aims to make $145m (¤121m) of guarantees available to support easier access to credit for cultural and creative small and medium-sized enterprises.

In the run-up to the launch of the facility, a programme of capacity building will be undertaken to provide financial institutions with the expertise to be able to work with cultural and creative entrepreneurs and assess their projects.

Broader policy framework Meanwhile, in response to concerns from some quarters about the responsibilities for Creative Europe having being divided up between Oettinger and Tibor Navracsics, European commissioner for education, culture, youth and sport, Langarica counters that this will not affect the running of the MEDIA sub-programme, but place it instead “within a broader policy framework”.

She points to the desire by the new European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, to “de-silo” the commission and promote more horizontal collaboration between the commissioners’ directorates.

“All in all, we see real advantages because we can contribute as well as benefit from working together with other parts of the commission,” Langarica explains. “In our case, this means us working hand in hand with the directorate general for education and culture to implement the [Creative Europe] programme.

“Moreover, we can also be closer to the colleagues preparing the review of the audiovisual media services directive and those working on plans for copyright reform in s Europe.” n

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SET REPORT A PATCH OF FOG

Conleth Hill and Stephen Graham in A Patch Of Fog

Out of the fog Michael Lennox’s debut feature, A Patch Of Fog, is a darkly comic psychological thriller. Sarah Cooper visits the Belfast set

F

or Northern Irish film-maker Michael Lennox, the news his short film Boogaloo And Graham had made this year’s Oscar shortlist came at the perfect moment: the night before he began shooting his debut feature A Patch Of Fog. “It’s funny getting a text message from the Oscars; I didn’t quite believe it. It was a great boost going into the first day,” says Lennox, a graduate of London’s National Film and Television School whose previous short, Back Of Beyond, was nominated for a European Film Award in 2012.

Shooting has now wrapped on A Patch Of Fog, a darkly comic psychological thriller about a celebrated novelist and TV presenter (Game Of Thrones’ Conleth Hill) who finds himself being blackmailed into becoming friends with a security guard (Stephen Graham) after his shoplifting habit is uncovered.

The supporting cast includes Lara Pulver

8 Screen International January 7, 2015

(Sherlock), Arsher Ali (Four Lions) and Northern Ireland’s Ian McElhinney.

The film originated with Belfast-based writers John Cairns and Michael McCartney, who have been working together for nine years. They received their big break when they won Northern Ireland Screen’s New Talent Focus scheme in 2012, a low-budget filmmaking initiative also backed by the BFI and Film4, aimed at Northern Ireland-based firsttime feature writers, which sees one script going forward for production each year.

The two writers had already attracted the attention of producers Robert Jones, Wayne Marc Godfrey and David Gilbery of London and Los Angeles-based production and finance outfit The Fyzz Facility, which boarded the project, bringing in its own finance as well as funding from Goldcrest Post Production on top of NI Screen and the BFI’s investment.

‘Everyone will be waiting for Stephen Graham to crack. But he never does’ Michael Lennox, director

“We’d come second so many times, so to win was terrific,” says Cairns of the 2012 prize.

“Nothing happened for us seven or eight years ago because we weren’t good enough.

Then we started to write films we wanted to see and we just got better as writers.”

Cairns was delighted when Lennox signed on to direct. “The Northern Irish voice has the ability to be both deadly serious and deeply funny at the same time. That was what we loved about Back Of Beyond, and A Patch Of Fog has the same sort of musical key,” he explains.

A perfect match For Lennox, it was the script’s ambiguous tone that attracted him to the project. “It’s a dark buddy movie, with thrillerish elements and mystery permeating under the surface. But at the core is the bond between those two people and their strange, screwed up relationship, which makes it extremely funny and touching,” says Lennox, who cites Michael Haneke and Danny Boyle among his influences.

“The relationship between the two men is about one-upmanship, but ultimately it’s about someone who wants what we all want — to be loved,” adds McCartney, who draws comparisons to Sleuth, Misery and dark comedy The Cable Guy. When it came to casting, Stephen Graham — best known for his performance in This Is England and as Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire — was not necessarily the obvious choice to play a lonely security guard. Which is why Lennox thought he would be perfect.

“Everyone will be waiting for Stephen Graham to crack. But he never does. I think only he could play it the way he’s playing it,” says Lennox, adding that “working with two actors from two of the best TV shows in the world has just been a brilliant experience”.

The film’s four-week shoot took place in December across 25 Belfast locations, including the city’s impressive Queen’s University.

“We love working here, we have a good rapport with everyone and the crews are world class. The amount of quality productions that are here, from Dracula Untold to Game Of Thrones, has given crews the consistency of work that they haven’t had to travel elsewhere for,” says producer Wayne Marc Godfrey, who is also producing Stephen Fingleton’s debut feature, The Survivalist, which shot last year in Belfast and also came through NI Screen’s New Talent Focus scheme. Meanwhile, The Fyzz Facility has optioned two more scripts: Sterile and the BFI-backed The Men In White Coats, from Cairns and McCartney, as part of their commitment to new talent.

Coincidentally, Northern Ireland born and based Fingleton (and good friend of Lennox) has also made the Oscar shortlist for his short SLR. As Jones points out: “The great thing for Northern Ireland is to have not one but two young directors who are interesting and different enough to warrant this kind of internas tional acclaim.” ■

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EVERY CHARACTER UNDER THE SUN

M A R C H 6 - 1 5,, 2 0 1 5

AWARDS SPECIAL ■ JESSICA CHASTAIN ■ FELICITY JONES ■ JULIANNE MOORE ■ JK SIMMONS ■ DAVID OYELOWO ■ WETA DIGITAL ■ THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Eyes on the prize

A

t this stage, it looks like Julianne Moore is front runner for the best actress Oscar as a professor with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in Still Alice. Moore was also brilliant in Maps To The Stars, so having two great — and very different — roles in one year only adds to her case. Plus, she’s been doing great work since the early 1990s and has yet to win an Oscar despite four nominations.

It feels like it’s her time, with her body of work and this year’s two strong performances.

Amy Adams has also yet to win her Oscar, despite one lead and four supporting nominations. Adams also does consistently good work and in Big Eyes her restrained performance

again shows her range. Those two will likely be going up against previous Oscar winners Hilary Swank (The Homesman) and Reese Witherspoon (Wild).

Felicity Jones for The Theory Of Everything may slide in with a nomination and she’s an impressive rising talent. But given Eddie Redmayne’s performance is the more striking in the film, it might not be her year yet. Another Brit to watch is Rosamund Pike for her English rose stereotype-shattering performance in Gone Girl.

Jennifer Aniston could be nominated for Cake, not just for famously taking off her make-up but for showing us an edgy character

we haven’t seen from her, one that further distances her from the cuteness of Friends.

Marion Cotillard for Two Days, One Night would be another worthy nominee but the Dardenne brothers’ film didn’t make the shortlist for the foreign-language race, which could be a bad sign. If Oscar voters are really up for taking chances, they just might recognise Shailene Woodley for her excellent work in The Fault In Our Stars.

In some ways the actress race this year is less competitive than for the men, but if an actress such as Moore or Adams walks away with an Oscar, you can hardly say it is a bad year.

Wendy Mitchell, contributing editor

Amy Adams in Big Eyes

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» January 7, 2015 Screen International 11

INTERVIEW JESSICA CHASTAIN

POWER PLAY Jessica Chastain talks to Wendy Mitchell about bringing the wife out from behind the scenes in JC Chandor’s A Most Violent Year

12 Screen International January 7, 2015

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hen Jessica Chastain first read JC Chandor’s script for A Most Violent Year, she had a flash of insight into her character, Anna, the daughter of a mobster and the wife of an ambitious businessman.

“For me, the inspiration for the character was Dick Cheney,” Chastain says. “When I first said that to JC, he was really surprised and shocked that’s where I would go. But she’s aligning herself with this man who is the face of the company; he’s the leader, she does all this work behind the scenes because [at that time] she couldn’t be the leader.

She’s trying to keep her husband honourable and clean. That was really interesting to me.”

It was a touchstone Chandor had not yet thought about, but it made sense to him and even helped him to revisit some key scenes.

“I was talking to JC about that and he wrote some new stuff — like this section at the end when she confronts her husband about the American dream. And the section with the deer and how she responds to it. All of that was created by JC after he and I had been working together for a while,” Chastain reveals.

A Most Violent Year

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Morality tale Chandor’s story is a powerful one about wealth, corruption, violence and restraint set against a gritty New York City in 1981. Oscar Isaac plays Abel, an ambitious immigrant trying to grow his family business. Chastain is his wife Anna, the daughter of a man more powerful than her husband. She helps out behind the scenes with the business but ends up playing a more pivotal role than expected in her family’s destiny.

“You expect it to be a very violent film with the title A Most Violent Year, and in fact it’s a morality tale,” Chastain says.

She was interested in Anna particularly because she takes the audience on a journey that does not follow the usual clichés. “JC Chandor really took the whole genre of the crime thriller and the stereotype of the wife and completely turned it on its head,” she

says. “The character is supposed to be this wife who is just a piece of eye candy.

“She wants you to underestimate her. She dresses a certain way, she has these long nails and it’s all about her sexual appeal. In fact it’s the opposite of that. The most important thing about her is not her sex, it’s her brain,” Chastain adds. That smart performance has her as a likely nominee for best supporting actress.

She was keen to work not only with Chandor but with co-star Isaac, who was a fellow student at Julliard and a long-time friend.

They immediately shared a common way of preparing.

“We rehearsed together a lot, we created backstories for the characters,” she says. “He came over to my house, we had tea and we just went through the script, line by line, asking questions.

“For example, there’s one scene in which my character hits him. So we say, ‘Has she ever hit him before? Has he hit her before?

What is the history here? How long have they been together? How did they meet?

What’s the relationship with her father?”

Chastain also helped with a personal connection to fashion house Armani, as Anna’s wardrobe is made up of vintage pieces or Armani-inspired outfits by costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone. Chastain and Walicka-Maimone were invited by Giorgio Armani’s niece, Roberta Armani, to peruse the fashion house’s archives in Milan.

“This woman’s clothing is her armour. It’s her tool in a man’s world,” Chastain says.

Chastain listened to some Brooklyn accents to prepare for the role, but more than that, she considered the place of a woman like Anna in 1980s society. “I came to the conclusion that she was maybe born 20 years too early. If she was born later she could have been the one running the company,” she says.

Although Chandor has not announced any plans for a follow-up film, Chastain remains fascinated by Anna. “I would love to see a second film about these characters; after this, where do they end up? She is taking control and putting matters in her own hands… there’s something being awakened in her. I’d love to see the future of where this family heads.”

As for Chastain’s future, she is fighting to see more great women’s roles on screen. She has a good string of them, also appearing in The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby last year and having shot Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak and now Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

“For me, I’m happy with the roles I’m getting,” she says, adding: “As an audience member I’m not happy with the roles that I’m watching. Everyone knows it. If you look at the films people are talking about for best picture, there’s not one film that’s from a female point of view, and that’s disturbing. I want to go to the movie theatre and watch s great women’s roles.” ■

January 7, 2015 Screen International 13

INTERVIEW FELICITY JONES

Felicity Jones in The Theory Of Everything

14 Screen International January 7, 2015

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Note perfect Felicity Jones tells Wendy Mitchell about her intimidating first experience with Jane Hawking, and meeting carers and families during preparation for The Theory Of Everything

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ane Hawking is not a household name. So it is perhaps even more impressive that Felicity Jones gives the first wife of famous physicist Stephen Hawking equal emotional footing in The Theory Of Everything.

Eddie Redmayne is winning rave reviews and awards buzz for his physically demanding portrayal of Hawking through various stages of motor neurone disease. But Jones, in a less showy role, commands attention as she explores Jane’s emotional evolution.

One reason Jones was attracted to Anthony McCarten’s script is that “it’s not a straightforward biopic, there was this complex, nuanced female character alongside the famous Stephen Hawking”.

Jane was not a simple stock character. She is a scholar in her own right, as well as being a wife and mother. “Jane has a very analytical mind but she also has this huge emotional depth,” Jones adds. “This woman isn’t just one thing, she’s full of opposites like all of us. For instance, she’s religious but her sexual identity is still important to her. It was always about breaking these clichés.”

Laid bare The Theory Of Everything is not really a biopic; if anything, it’s a love story. “It’s an exploration between two extraordinary people,” says Jones. “I read the script quickly in one setting. That’s always a good sign — that means there’s something good going on, on the page. There was so much story to get my teeth into, she was a fully fledged character,” Jones remembers.

Jane Hawking also happened to be a fully fledged living woman, and the 31-year-old actress admits it was “intimidating” meeting her for the first time. Best known for roles in contemporary love story Like Crazy and Dickens story The Invisible Woman, Jones had never before played a real living person.

“Jane is a phenomenal woman. When you are meeting a real person that you’re playing, my instinct is you are building up trust,” she explains. “You don’t force in there asking very intimate questions. I didn’t want it to be an impersonation; I wanted to inhabit her. It was convincing her that she was safe trusting me with her story.”

Jane Hawking opened up her heart and her

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home to Jones. Over their first cup of tea, she was showing Jones family photos and her original wedding dress, which she had saved all these decades later. “She was extraordinarily open,” the actress remembers.

There were other emotional clues. “She loves music, both her and [current husband] Jonathan do, and there was a piece of music they played on the piano for me that meant a lot. It was a serendipitous moment.”

The Theory Of Everything is also about more than just two people. “It was a story exploring larger themes about understanding why we are here,” Jones adds. “Jane was exploring that through faith and exploring that through religion, and Stephen through sciences. The film had these broader concepts.”

Jones’ research went far beyond reading about the Hawkings, meeting them and watching documentary footage of their life.

During pre-production, Jones worked with singing instructor Aleksandra Sasha Kozlov,

(From left) Jones, Stephen Hawking, Jane Hawking and Eddie Redmayne at the film’s UK premiere

‘I didn’t want it to be an impersonation; I wanted to inhabit her’ Felicity Jones

because “a huge part of Jane’s identity is singing… and I needed to bring musicality to her voice. If I get her voice and the walk right, then you feel like you’re understanding the character.”

Jones’ physical presence had to change once Redmayne was in a wheelchair (she did gym training to be able to lift a wheelchair).

“Eddie and I saw this as a dance where they become one person. We had to become highly aware of each other and sensitive to each other.”

She and Redmayne also met with carers and family members living with motor neurone disease. “Eddie and I learned about this intimate side of the struggle and also how many people make the best of it and find humour in different circumstances… It was finding how a real family could cope with this situation. They don’t pity themselves.”

Shared history The Theory Of Everything marked Jones’ first official work with Redmayne, who she knew from London auditions and working separately at the Donmar Warehouse theatre.

“I had admired and respected his work hugely. We both worked at the Donmar with Michael Grandage. We both brought a lot of techniques from Michael and the theatre to the film, including lots of rehearsal time,” explains Jones.

Jones and Redmayne’s chemistry, both on screen and off, was essential to making the story click emotionally, as she says: “We were dependent on each other to find characters separately but it needed this work together also.”

The film, now hotly tipped for Bafta and Oscar nominations, feels like a special moment in each actor’s career.

“I was very ready to push myself and Eddie felt similarly. It was not wanting to fall into the traps of doing a costume drama, to keep it fresh, to really become Jane and Stephen. It feels special in that sense. In the scene when Jane and Stephen break up, I felt completely in Jane’s head and that’s a special moment for an actor.”

More such moments are to come.

She appears in Eran Creevy’s thriller, Autobahn, and next up Jones is shooting JA Bayona’s A Monster Calls, alongside Sigours ney Weaver. ■

January 7, 2015 Screen International 15

INTERVIEW JULIANNE MOORE

‘I wanted to be really, really, really meticulous about my understanding of Alzheimer’s’ Julianne Moore

Still strong Julianne Moore talks to Jeremy Kay about the research and emotions behind her impressive turn in Still Alice

Kristin Stewart and Julianne Moore in Still Alice

16 Screen International January 7, 2015

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S

till Alice sneaked into Toronto last September without any buzz and yet by the end of the festival it had catapulted Julianne Moore to the head of the queue for Oscar consideration.

And not before time. Many would say the star of films such as The Hours, Far From Heaven and The End Of The Affair should already have Academy Awards tucked away for a string of chameleon-like turns during an impressive career. Funnily enough, she has also had awards attention this year for a very different character — a spoilt Los Angeles actress — in Maps To The Stars.

Moore herself remains disarmingly downto-earth about her performance in Still Alice, as a linguistics pioneer who slides inexorably into the grip of Alzheimer’s disease.

Of far greater interest to her is talking about the disease that is ravaging lives around the world and praising the contributions of her fellow cast and the directors.

Film-makers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland were particularly attuned to the subject of personal decline.

“Rich and Wash have been together for 18 years and they’re working partners and life partners and before we embarked on this movie Rich was diagnosed with [neurodegenerative illness] ALS,” says Moore.

“As a couple of film-makers they were dealing with this degenerative disease. Alzheimer’s is cognitive and ALS is physical. It progressed rather quickly. Rich did a lot of his direction through an iPad.” Glatzer’s presence and mental vitality were all the more remarkable given the time constraints of the shoot: just three-and-a-half weeks in New York in March.

Moore had received special dispensation from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay producer Jon Kilik to shoot Still Alice on a brief hiatus from the blockbuster franchise, in which she plays a rebel leader.

Moore on set with Still Alice co-director Wash Westmoreland

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Her research for Still Alice took four months. “I have not had any experience with the disease personally,” the actress says. “I wanted to be really, really, really meticulous about my understanding of it.”

Preparation involved regular Skype calls with three women with early onset Alzheimer’s and consultations with Alzheimer’s Association head Elizabeth Stearns and Dr Mary Sano of Mount Sinai Hospital, a leading researcher into the disease.

“I asked people what they wanted me to represent. It was an amazing process. Everybody is so incredibly committed. A journalist asked me if I felt clinical in the research but it’s impossible to feel that way when you have such a strong emotional attachment,” she says.

Slipping into the role Moore’s homework went further than the disease. Her on-screen character, Dr Alice Howland, is a pioneer in language and at the start of the film she is already in the grip of the disease, albeit unknowingly.

An early scene in which Howland momentarily loses her train of thought during a lecture is as chilling, disturbing and poignant as anything seen on screen all year.

“Even working on her speech, this is somebody who has a tremendous ability for language so that when she is on you see what she is capable of and then when you see her stumble and looking for words you see how it is. This is someone who never reaches for words.”

Another scene of stifled terror comes while Howland is jogging along a familiar path, only to lose her sense of orientation as the cameras pull focus around her.

“I talked with a lot of people about the [sensation of ] getting lost and asked them what it means, and they said it’s more of a panic attack: that feeling when your heart is beating really fast and you cannot breathe and nothing makes sense.”

Overall it is Moore’s understated portrait of a person slipping away that wields the most devastating power, as anybody with experience of the disease will know.

“There are times when someone will appear to be having a better day and they appear perfectly normal and then there’s a decline,” she says.

Moore attributes much of the film’s potency to her co-stars.

“I love her,” she says of Kristen Stewart, who plays one of Alice’s daughters, Lydia.

“She is such a wonderful actress and has so much emotional reserves at her fingertips. It was a thrill for me to work with her.”

And she has this to say of Alec Baldwin, her on-screen husband: “I talked Alec into doing it. Ever since I worked with him on 30 Rock, I have been dying to work with him again. He’s an outsize talent and everything he brings is amazing. I felt a lot of compass sion for his character.” ■

January 7, 2015 Screen International 17

INTERVIEW JK SIMMONS

The Whiplash effect JK Simmons reveals how he brought to life the brutal teacher in Whiplash and how the role may change his career forever. Michael Rosser reports

18 Screen International January 7, 2015

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wasn’t certain of was Damien’s ability as a director.”

That uncertainty was understandable since the 29-year-old film-maker had made only one previous film, Guy And Madeline On A Park Bench, compiled from student footage.

At their first meeting, Simmons and Chazelle quickly realised they were on the same page and Simmons starred in a short based on a scene from the Whiplash script, which picked up the jury prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and helped to secure finance for a feature version.

Ahead of the feature shoot, Simmons knew he had to do his homework. “To be the guy that is intimidating in that world, I needed to be able to establish musical credibility,” he states.

“I studied music in college and was a singer, conductor and composer. But I never conducted jazz and don’t play the piano well at all. So I pored over all the scores for the film and I knew the scene where I play one little tune in a jazz club would require a significant amount of homework.”

Asked who Fletcher is to him, Simmons responds: “He’s a miserable guy. He’s unhappy, frustrated and therefore angry.

He’s also a brilliant intellect and a great musical talent that doesn’t let anything stand in the way of his pursuit of the one thing he cares about.”

J

K Simmons is often unrecognisable from one role to the next. From his scene-stealing newspaper editor in Spider-Man to the brutal head of the Aryan Brotherhood in HBO prison drama Oz, Simmons has built a career out of an impressive variety of supporting parts.

But there is no missing the veteran character actor in Damien Chazelle’s music-academy thriller Whiplash. His domineering performance as Fletcher, the teacher and conductor of a jazz band at a top New York conservatoire, is fierce, intense and terrifying.

While some have compared the villainous aspects of Fletcher to his malevolent performance as Vern Schillinger in Oz, Simmons draws more parallels with a role from his 18 years in theatre.

“The character I feel is the closest in my résumé to Fletcher is the colonel in A Few Good Men, in which I was an understudy in the original production during my Broadway days,” says Simmons. “Both have been referred to as the bad guy or villain but I was able to identify with their motivation and objectives — if not their methodology.”

In Whiplash, that “methodology” includes throwing chairs, violent slaps and cutting taunts to drive his students to an almost unachievable greatness.

Simmons was first suggested for the role

by Whiplash’s executive producer Jason Reitman, who had directed Simmons in six of his films. “When I read the script I immediately fell in love and wanted to be the guy to play the character,” recalls Simmons.

“It’s such a thorough, mature, intelligent and passionate piece of writing. The thing I

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On set with director Damien Chazelle (below) with co-star Miles Teller

‘To be the guy that’s intimidating in that world, I needed to establish musical credibility’ JK Simmons

A gruelling shoot For the most part, the film is a brutal twohander between Fletcher and young jazz drummer Andrew, played by Miles Teller.

On screen the relationship is tense, uncomfortable and often violent. But when the cameras stopped rolling Simmons says: “Miles and I quickly settled into a rhythm of acting like goofballs, joking around and acting like a couple of high-school knuckleheads.”

The actor also praises Chazelle for completing the shoot in just 19 days: “It’s so impressive for a young film-maker to be able to pull that off. I had a few days off during the shoot but it was really gruelling for Damien, Miles and the crew.”

The effort paid off and Whiplash returned to Sundance in 2014, where it won the grand jury prize and audience award. Oscar buzz is now growing for Simmons, having been nominated for a Golden Globe and SAG award as well as already picking up numerous critics and festival prizes.

His upcoming roles are typically varied from big-budget features Terminator Genisys and Kong: Skull Island to an untitled romantic drama from Greek director Christoforos Papakaliatis.

“More opportunities are coming my way where I’m not the fifth guy on the list,” adds Simmons. “I’m able to pick and choose a little bit more than before. I call it the Whiplash s effect.” ■

January 7, 2015 Screen International 19

INTERVIEW DAVID OYELOWO

The doctor is in Selma star David Oyelowo tells Ian Sandwell about how being British helped his portrayal of an icon and the need to avoid impersonation

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Selma

20 Screen International January 7, 2015

roduction delays can be frustrating, but they proved a boon for UK actor David Oyelowo as he prepared for the potentially daunting task of playing Martin Luther King Jr, in Ava DuVernay’s Selma. The film focuses on the three marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. “I first read the script seven years ago and had a deep knowing that this was going to be part of my life. The preparation, both consciously and sub-consciously, began then,” recalls Oyelowo. “It [the delays] did not make the nerves worse; I was in a state of chomping at the bit, really.”

Oyelowo was cast by then-director Lee Daniels in 2010 and even went through the process of gaining weight for the part before the plug was pulled on production under Daniels. By the time the film officially went into production in May 2014, Oyelowo was

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Oyelowo and director Ava DuVernay on set; (left and below) Selma

both closer to King’s age and had the added experience of featuring in films such as Lincoln and Lee Daniels’ The Butler, that touched on what it was like to be black in America over the last 150 years.

There was an additional element for Oyelowo, which meant he was not as trepidatious at playing an icon. “Being British was hugely beneficial to me. I didn’t carry a lot of the burden I think I would have done if I were American, in terms of playing this role.

It wasn’t the equivalent of playing Jesus as a Christian for me. For better or worse, I approached him as a man as opposed to an icon,” states Oyelowo.

This approach was honed when DuVernay came on board, as the script — written by Paul Webb — was originally more focused on the politicking between King and president Lyndon B Johnson (played by Tom Wilkinson).

Selma marks the second time Oyelowo has worked with DuVernay following Middle Of

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Nowhere, which saw DuVernay win the best director prize at Sundance in 2012.

“The thing that really arrested me with Ava was that it was like what I had experienced in the UK doing theatre, says Oyelowo. “When you’re doing theatre, it’s very immersive and you’re spending a lot of time not thinking just how to play the character, but how to get inside the character and project their spirit. A lot of the time, the film-making experience is the antithesis of that, but she does this organic, far-reaching and deep work innately.

I knew that if I was going to have a remote chance of playing this guy well, I needed someone who was interested in the emotional topography of the character.”

By noting the human side of King, the speeches are given more power within the film and this aided Oyelowo to craft his portrayal.

“I didn’t want for it to feel like an impersonation. I felt that if we are able to see the man away from the pulpit, it would layer up and inform what he was like in the pulpit,” says Oyelowo. “If you see those speeches in isolation, maybe you’re just thinking, ‘Oh wow, there he is,’ but it’s a very different thing if you’ve seen the orator devoid of words with his wife because he’s caught in a situation that’s very unenviable.”

While Oyelowo had access to a

‘All you need as an actor is clues.

You need the confidence to realise he did have moments where he wasn’t transcendent’ David Oyelowo

lot of footage from the public life of King, these intimate moments were more of a challenge. He spoke to people who knew King intimately, including Andrew Young (played in the film by André Holland) who introduced him to unseen footage. “All you need as an actor is clues, really, all you need is the confidence to realise that he did have moments where he wasn’t transcendent, delivering a speech from a pulpit.”

Family support Awards season attention is building, including a Golden Globes nomination for best actor in a motion picture, drama. But Oyelowo has also received praise from a more important source. “Bernice King [King’s daughter] said that mine is the best interpretation of her dad that she’d ever seen, and no-one is more concerned with him being portrayed in a truthful way than his children.

We didn’t shy away from the man’s flaws, and yet they have still embraced it.”

Once the awards season whirlwind is over, Oyelowo is set to star with Lupita Nyong’o in the adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah. The process of making Selma has broadened his horizon.

“The lesson I’ve learnt is that if you combine tenacity with passion and with people who have a common goal and vision, then you can really do some damage in terms of getting films made that are meaningful,” he says. “I’m being given a little bit of notoriety and power right now and my hope is to parlay s that into getting these kinds of stories told.” ■

January 7, 2015 Screen International 21

AWARDS FOCUS WETA DIGITAL

Maximum effect

Weta Digital has grown from one computer to a global VFX powerhouse employing 1,000 people. John Hazelton talks to key executives Richard Taylor and Joe Letteri

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t all started with a single employee and one leased computer. That was all that was necessary to create the dozen or so digital effect shots required for Peter Jackson’s 1994 drama, Heavenly Creatures.

But even then Jackson and his film-making cohorts — among them Heavenly Creatures miniatures supervisor Richard Taylor and editor Jamie Selkirk — had bigger things in mind. Before long they had pooled their resources to buy that computer and launch Weta Digital. Today, the Wellington, New Zealand-based digital effects company — named after a grasshopper-like Kiwi insect — produces much of the global film industry’s most dazzling VFX work.

“We had aspirations to do something fairly significant,” says Taylor, who with wife Tania Rodger worked on Jackson’s earliest films and now heads Weta Digital’s design and physical effects sister company Weta Workshop. “And Peter being who he is, I’m sure he aspired to making huge movies. But in all honesty we never imagined it would become what it has become — that one computer would grow to the scale that it has now.”

Weta’s early growth was spurred by Jackson’s 1996 horror comedy The Frighteners, which required 400 digital effects shots, at the time a record tally. And though the collapse of the director’s first attempt in the mid-’90s to remake King Kong was almost a fatal blow, the company was kept going by work on its first Hollywood feature, Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 sci-fi epic Contact.

The growth forced Weta to start recruiting VFX talent from around the world; a task, Taylor recalls, that was not always easy.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers’ Gollum

22 Screen International January 7, 2015

“Right up to the beginning of The Lord Of The Rings we found it very difficult,” he says.

“I flew to the States and handed out flyers asking if anyone was interested in joining us in New Zealand. We got one person. Four years later, after the first [Rings] movie had come out, we were getting up to 40 portfolios a week.”

Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings films, which earned Weta teams the best visual effects Oscar and Bafta three years in a row, shot the company to prominence and raised the VFX bar for an entire industry.

In 2001, The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring first showed what could be done with Massive, the software program developed at Weta by Stephen Regelous (who subsequently, with the company’s blessing, used the program to launch his own Massive Software) to animate large numbers of independent characters.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (2002) illustrated big advances in character animation and the use of motion capture. It also marked the arrival at Weta of Joe Letteri, who became the company’s senior VFX supervisor and one of its directors.

Running rings Having worked in his native US for Jurassic Park effects house Industrial Light & Magic, Letteri was, he says, “interested in the idea of how you make something come alive. So Gollum was the perfect opportunity — a character who was almost human, who had a speaking part, who had to work with other actors in the same scene and be believable in that realm.”

To bring this pivotal character — modelled on the performance of actor Andy Serkis — to life in Towers Letteri and his The Two Towers, team used research on the ‘subsurface scattering’ of light to develop software for the animation of realistically translucent human skin, work that earned Letteri, the team and the researchers a technical achievement award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). »

King Kong

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‘We never imagined it would become what it has become — that one computer would grow to the scale it has now’ Richard Taylor (standing left with Joe Letteri), Weta

Weta is based in Wellington, New Zealand

Peter Jackson on the set of The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

Avatar

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

January 7, 2015 Screen International 23

AWARDS FOCUS WETA DIGITAL

The trilogy’s conclusion, 2003’s The Return Of The King, and Jackson’s successful second run at King Kong (another Oscar and Bafta visual effects award winner) helped shape an operational strategy that Weta Digital has employed ever since.

Each project required around 2,000 digital effects shots and when he divided up the work and assigned 500-shot sequences to supervisors working under him, Letteri realised he had found a model for handling multiple film projects without sacrificing quality.

“So we just stayed with that model,” he says, “and it gave us a real advantage. I could look over the work for not only consistency but also the creative and technical approach.

It allowed us to look holistically at the kinds of technologies we needed to develop.”

In 2009, James Cameron’s Avatar — which brought the Weta team yet another OscarBafta double — provided the company with its first 3D project and its first major venture into an all-digital world.

“We had to come up with tools that would allow James Cameron to direct all the aspects of the film in a virtual world,” Letteri explains, “the same way he would with a live-action film. So we put all these ideas together, along with a massive R&D phase. It took us about a year to re-invent everything that we needed to handle the scale and scope.”

New trilogy, new techniques Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, whose finale, The Battle Of The Five Armies, hit cinemas this Christmas, reaped the benefit of work and research on earlier Weta films. But it also illustrates the company’s determination to keep improving from project to project.

On The Return Of The King, Weta had experimented with performance capture on a live-action set rather than on a specially lit stage, “but it didn’t work out as well as we had hoped,” Letteri concedes.

The technique was revisited on 2011’s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and

The Frighteners

then used to full effect on The Hobbit trilogy opener An Unexpected Journey.

Says Letteri: “That was a new technology we came up with that allowed us to overlay the motion capture cameras and equipment right on top of the live-action stage. We could put Andy [Serkis, as Gollum] on stage with Martin [Freeman, playing Bilbo] and capture everything he was doing.”

Weta’s philosophy of advancing as well as using digital effects technologies is now built into its corporate structure. The company’s now 1,000-strong workforce incorporates a research group of mathematicians and computer scientists that publishes reports and partners with universities and other VFX facilities. Proprietary technologies resulting from the research work have included Tissue, a muscle simulation software program that in 2013 earned an AMPAS science and engineering award; and Manuka, Weta’s new renderer (this time named after a type of New Zealand tree).

After using Pixar’s Renderman software for a number of years, Letteri explains: “We got into more detailed research and heavier mathematics and realised that we needed our own renderer to be able to test those ideas. So we wrote a renderer that is physically accu-

rate but geared towards developing large scenes, because we work with directors like Peter and James Cameron who will point the camera somewhere and say, ‘Show me the world there.’”

‘Peter Jackson and James Cameron will point the camera and say, “Show me the world there”’ Joe Letteri, Weta

(Below) The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies; (left) Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes

Future breakthroughs Manuka and other new technologies will come into play on forthcoming Weta projects including Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice (now in post production and headed for a March 2016 release), Cameron’s three Avatar sequels (for which Weta is currently doing R&D work) and Steven Spielberg’s Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG. The latter, set for a summer 2016 release, will involve “another breakthrough in how we integrate virtual worlds”, Letteri promises.

“Steven’s really keen to try some new filmmaking techniques on that.”

As for the future of Weta Digital, the company will continue to focus on character animation, on working in close partnership with directors and, whenever possible, on projects for which it is the sole effects provider.

“I find it very satisfying to work on films like The Hobbit or the Planet Of The Apes series [Weta also did the effects for last summer’s Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes] where we are crafting the entire film with the director,” Letteri says. “Because it really allows us to create the world holistically and to look at every aspect of it.”

The VFX industry trend for international expansion is not on the cards for Weta, adds Letteri, who, like many effects practitioners since, moved from the US to New Zealand to join the company.

“We’re the only major VFX house that does not have any offshoots and that stems from the way I like to work,” says the 14-year Weta veteran. “We’ve got a really good, close-knit team. All the key creative people have been together for 10 years or more and we have a shorthand. I’d rather have people close by that can learn from this team than have a satellite team that you’re having to s bring up from scratch.” ■

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CASE STUDY THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

The Theory Of Everything

THEORY into practice

The Theory Of Everything is far more than a Stephen Hawking biopic — it’s a ‘triple helix’ of scientific breakthrough, debilitating disease and a oneof-a-kind love story. Wendy Mitchell talks to the team behind the film 26 Screen International January 7, 2015

T

he genesis of The Theory Of Everything is more akin to a series of small sparks rather than one big bang.

It all started when New Zealandborn, London-based writer Anthony McCarten was one of the 25 million people to read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time in 1988. “I was stunned by the profoundness of the ideas and inspired by the man himself,” McCarten remembers. “This guy was overcoming enormous physical setbacks and his scientific success was unprecedented. He was such a striking character, the dramatist in me was thinking, ‘What a subject for a movie or a play or a novel.’”

The next spark came when McCarten read Jane Hawking’s 2004 Music To Move The Stars (later re-issued as Travelling To Infinity). “It was an incredible one-of-a-kind love story, extraordinary in the challenges they faced and the solutions they found.”

His first port of call, nearly a decade ago,

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Director James Marsh on set with Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones

attracted Los Angeles-based producer Lisa Bruce, with whom he shares a mutual agent (Craig Bernstein at ICM). Bruce saw an early draft of the script in 2008 and knew the project represented “a wonderful opportunity”.

“As a female producer, you rarely read scripts that portray the female characters as complex or layered or interesting as males,” Bruce says. “In theatrical films you often don’t find the females to be as key to the storyline.” Also, she adds: “It’s rare to be able to make a love story anymore.”

The pair had Jane Hawking’s blessing (and book rights) and took the project to director James Marsh, an Oscar winner for documentary Man On Wire whose fictional credits included the middle film of the Red Riding trilogy and IRA drama Shadow Dancer.

Marsh said the material appealed to him because “it’s not a standard biography of Stephen. The idea was hanging the story on two central characters, to see Jane and Stephen examining their lives in a personal way.” was to try to meet Jane Hawking directly. “I jumped on a train and travelled to Cambridge where Jane was living and presented myself to her at her door as a stranger, and I explained the vision I had for this movie, and she graciously allowed me to present the concept.”

McCarten wrote it as a passion project ‘spec’ script. “It was a triple helix of three threads, the science and Stephen’s scientific breakthroughs; doing justice to the horror story of the disease, the relentless physical subtractions Stephen had to undergo and Jane’s role in helping him through those stages. And the third thing was the love story,” the writer remembers. The story we see in The Theory Of Everything spans 25 years: Hawking’s studies at Cambridge, his meeting Jane and having children, being diagnosed with motor neurone disease (commonly known as ALS in the US), his scientific breakthroughs and the dissolution of their marriage.

McCarten’s passion for the unique story

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The Working Title connection With that creative trio now set, the next spark came when Bruce sent the script to Eric Fellner — she had previously worked with Working Title on TV movie Mary And Martha. An answer came a speedy 11 hours later.

As Fellner recalls: “I read it and immediately called her and said, ‘We need to do this.’”

Working Title had never tried to develop a Hawking project of its own. “We didn’t know there was a story to be told that would be as engaging as this one,” Fellner recalls. “It was so emotional, so fascinating, so uplifting. It was everything I thought it wouldn’t be. It was really surprising.”

Working Title started financing the $15m project — a modest budget for a period film that spans 25 years — and turned to its longtime partners at Universal. “David Kosse and (Right) Redmayne as Stephen Hawking

‘You rarely read scripts that portray female characters as complex, layered or as interesting as males’ Lisa Bruce, producer

Donna Langley both loved it, and were very supportive,” Fellner explains. “Kosse in particular was very, very involved in making this film happen.” (Universal’s Focus Features came on to release the film in the US when it was in late post-production.)

“Our mantra at Working Title is to make any film feel as big as possible and as global as possible, and make it interesting and exciting for a worldwide audience. Within choices of heads of department you find people who are going to make cinema, not just a small British movie,” Fellner explains.

Fellner knew Marsh was the right director to lead such a project: “We’d always wanted to work with James. It was just a question of time and finding the right material.”

It was a fruitful collaboration. “I like to have an ongoing creative dialogue with every director I work with, some love that, some resist it,” Fellner says. “James was a fantastically collaborative partner, he took what he felt was useful and good and argued his case when he needed to. He made the film he wanted to make. We worked very well together.”

Marsh agrees he had a great dialogue with Working Title, and he pays tribute in particular to Working Title’s new VP of development, Lucas Webb.

Webb says: “What I particularly love about James is that his background in documentaries means he is always searching for the truth, the veracity, the authenticity. He was always open to ideas, always collaborative but also knew his mind, so really struck a perfect balance.”

Fellner says reteaming with Bruce was also a strong collaboration. “She’s very committed, very practical and very knowledgeable.” She was also willing to listen to advice when needed from Working Title, because The Theory Of Everything was bigger than any production she had run before.

Bruce says: “Working Title is very »

January 7, 2015 Screen International 27

CASE STUDY THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

film-maker oriented, they don’t want to take the story away. Eric particularly was honoured that we had pushed this rock up a hill [before we brought it to them], this wasn’t a troubled script that needed a lot of work.”

The perfect cast The next step was casting, and the shortlist of young UK actors who could play Hawking had always included Eddie Redmayne. Fellner had worked with him on Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables. “He was stunning in Les Mis and blew us away. If James was excited in working with him, we were on board because we knew what he could do.” But Fellner adds that the young actor “exceeded expectations… he created such an extraordinary transformation”.

Redmayne was surprised at how rich a love story the script offered. “I was sent a script and thought it was going to be a biopic of Stephen’s life but what I read was a complicated and passionate love story about two extraordinary human beings. It was unlike anything I’d read before.”

With a zeal for the material, Redmayne was determined to land the job, and then realised what he had gotten himself into, he recalls with a laugh. “You’re in that process of trying to persuade people that you can do something, you do it with a blind confidence to make them believe in you, then you get the job and you have no idea how to go about it.”

The blind confidence had worked — Marsh says once he met Redmayne he knew he had his Stephen Hawking. “The performance was demanding physically — in some scenes he was just able to use his eyebrow, cheek and lips. It’s about a man falling apart bit by bit, but the greater burden is to make the emotional life of this character available at every stage,” Marsh recalls. “To make that character as alive in a wheelchair as he is at the beginning of the film, that’s the achievement of Eddie’s performance.”

For Jane Hawking, Fellner knew the role “is not as showy but it’s so pivotal”. Bruce adds: “It was daunting to cast Jane, because towards the end of the movie she has to physically carry the movie, she becomes your active protagonist.”

As Marsh says: “I’d had my eye on Felicity [Jones] for a while, she’s such a smart actress.

“When we brought the two of them together you could see that chemistry. It felt like a good foundation for the research they had to do.”

As Jones remembers: “James, Eddie and I met in Copenhagen [Marsh’s adopted home] early on, and started discussing the characters and the film in a spirit of collaboration. It felt special to have three people having similar attitudes working with each other.”

Jones and Redmayne conducted their individual preparation and research, and brought those ideas to rehearsals.

Redmayne did his homework for four months. That meant reading Hawking’s sci-

28 Screen International January 7, 2015

entific work, watching old videos of him (and recreating tiny facial movements in the mirror), attending a motor neurone disease clinic and visiting families in their homes (Jones joined him for the latter). Redmayne also had to train his muscles, with a dance teacher, allowing him to put his body in contorted positions for hours at a time.

As much as he had to get the physical side correct, he could not let his performance become a physical impersonation. “The disease was secondary to him, and this script wasn’t about his disease,” Redmayne says.

He met Hawking for the first time only about five days before the shoot began, and the actor recalls: “It was that force of personality that came through. His humour and wit and mischief. And that was wonderful; it was the last component to take into the shoot.”

During the two weeks of official rehearsals, Redmayne said it was important he and Jones worked on having a physical “sixth sense” with each other. “Jane becomes like an extension of Stephen, physically they become almost the same person.”

Jones agrees: “We were dependent on each other to find characters separately but it needed this work together.”

“Eddie would bring back research and ideas, and Felicity was developing her own idea from the books and people she was meeting,” Marsh adds. “As we were filming I wouldn’t say we were improvising in the tra-

‘It was fascinating to see these two young actors do this dance.

Their work defines the film’ James Marsh, director

ditional sense of the word, it’s more about creating a freedom for actors to explore on set as well.”

Jones picked up on Marsh’s directing style immediately. “What’s incredible about James is he is a very sensitive director and he is highly attuned to your needs as an actor. He gave us a safety net to let us explore the characters on set.”

The approach worked, as the characters came alive on set. “It was fascinating to see these two young actors do this dance with each other. Their work defines the film,” says Marsh.

In just one example of the director empowering the actors, Jones recalled the day that shooting an emotional scene between Stephen and Jane wasn’t quite working. “We did take after take, it felt very overacted. It wasn’t very organic. So James said, ‘Forget everything we’ve been doing before, don’t say words if you don’t want to say them.’”

In another example, “The scene of them running down the hill, that came out of rehearsal, that was a moment we wanted to show this couple in a whirlwind of romance and passion. We watched scenes of Splendor In The Grass, to capture that spirit of first love,” Jones remembers.

With so much riding on their performances, the director, somewhat unusually, also let them see rushes every day. It is that kind of openness that leads Redmayne to

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The $15m budget was larger than anything director James Marsh had worked with before: ‘It had to have a certain scale.’

(Above) Felicity Jones on set

enthuse: “I’ve never worked with someone who is so emboldening; James believes in collaboration in the truest sense of the word. He encourages every department to get involved.

He encouraged everyone to have a voice, I describe him as the great maestro conductor.”

A daunting shoot That conductor was facing challenges of his own — The Theory Of Everything was the largest film Marsh had worked on, yet it felt like a natural progression for him. “It was fantastic. I had a budget and a story to allow you to put on screen what was in your head. I also had the chance for the first time to do some bigger set pieces, like the May ball scene. It had to have a certain scale.”

“We mostly needed time, and that’s what [Working Title] were giving us,” Bruce says of the 48-day shoot.

The logistical challenges included not being able to shoot in sequence — a particular hurdle for Redmayne portraying the illness’s different physical stages. That was because of the film’s 50 locations. There were only a few sets built, such as the main house interior and Stephen’s dormitory room. The production would sometimes move between locations on a single shooting day.

“It was daunting, there was a lot of location scouting,” Bruce remembers, noting that cinematographer Benoit Delhomme was also along for the scouts. “James is really great

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with choosing locations — he’s open and specific at the same time.”

Marsh did not want to use intertitles (‘two years later’) to let the audience know about the film’s timeline; instead he wanted locations, production design, costume and hair and make-up to mark the passage of time.

“We were visually jumping to know where we were [in time],” Bruce explains. “James also wanted the ageing to be seamless… you really notice Stephen’s ageing because of the disease. You see the weight of Jane’s life underneath her eyes or with her posture.”

The look of the film, shaped by Marsh and Delhomme, has an almost cheerful feel, not a gritty look at grey old England. “Benoit and I talked a lot about what nostalgic memories feel like in your head, nostalgia can have an ache to it,” Marsh explains. “There were also conscious efforts to embrace light, that’s one of the great aspects of his scientific inquiries.”

One inspiration for bold lighting was the work of Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Marsh also went back to look at Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963) because it “shot domestic space in an interesting way”.

“It’s one of those films that didn’t have obvious reference points, I didn’t want to watch science films or films about disability. For instance, I didn’t rewatch The Diving Bell And The Butterfly,”” Marsh adds.

The music, too, had to be right, and Marsh convinced Working Title to let him use Iceland-born composer Johann Johannsson, who Marsh knew from the documentary world. “Johann’s work in the film has a delicate feel,” Marsh says.

Johannsson enjoyed the collaboration and felt he

was on the same page as Marsh: “It’s a film that you could easily ruin with the wrong use of music. We’re both very much on the side of restraint. I like to write music that is emotionally affecting and moves people in some way. But I’m very aware of not going over the line into sentimentality.

“In many ways the emotion is stronger when you hold it back. There is so much emotion on the screen already from Eddie and Felicity, you don’t need to say it again with music. The music is there to heighten and underscore and to make things fly but it’s not there to create something that isn’t there already.”

Marsh wanted any emotional response from the audience to be earned by the story and performances. “It’s something I’m very conscious of, I didn’t want to make the catharsis of the film too easy,” he says. “Truth comes from the details, that keeps you honest. Emotions aren’t there to be banged like a drum, you have to earn them.”

‘It’s not a documentary, it’s a work of art.

I was lucky Jane and Stephen have the souls of artists, not parking wardens’ Anthony McCarten, screenwriter

The greater truth McCarten says he wanted the script to be “in the service of the truth. You can make the mistake of inventing too much but you can also make the mistake of inventing too little.

If you just completely take a documentarian’s approach, then you have product that doesn’t do justice to the story. The use of poetic licence is always in the service of the truth not for sensation, to enhance it.”

He told Jane early in the process that he needed artistic freedom for the story, and says “to her credit she never asked me to soften anything down… It’s not a documentary, it’s a work of art. I was very lucky that Jane and Stephen have the souls of artists, not parking wardens.”

Bruce agrees it was a “tightrope” to walk with the real-life subjects, and their children, turning over their trust for this very personal story. “It’s precarious to make a movie about people who are still alive. There are some messier truths that they wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to see on screen, but now these are in there, there is a greater truth.”

The final seal of approval came when the Hawking family watched the film. When Jane saw the film for the first time, she said she “was floating on air”. And Stephen had tears coming down his cheeks. Marsh remembers: “After he saw the film, Stephen said it was broadly true and I was really glad of that response.”

In fact, Stephen Hawking was so impressed he decided to let the production use his computer for dialogue.

Bruce explains: “When we were editing the film we just used our copy of an electronic voice. But Stephen’s electronic voice is very specific, the cadence, it’s basically copyrighted by him. He said, ‘Would you like to use my actual voice?’ So that was like the biggest present. It was the equivalent of him s hugging you.” ■

January 7, 2015 Screen International 29

REVIEWS Highlights of the week’s new films in Review. For full reviews coverage, see Screendaily.com

Dubai Film Festival in brief Nearby Sky Dir/scr Nujoom Al Ghanem. UAE. 2014. 85mins

The engaging and insightful story of Fatima Ali Alhameli — the first Emirati woman to enter her camels in the UAE’s camel beauty pageant competition and to take part in Abu Dhabi’s camel auctions — is a charming film, with Alhameli a delightfully forthright woman who juggles mobile phone, camels and family in her determination to represent Emirati women in this largely male bastion. Writer/director Al Ghanem’s Nearby Sky (Samma Qarribah) is a gently inspiring film, but best of all one that profiles a wonderfully determined woman blessed with a gritty charm and a never-give-up spirit. She is a women convinced she is right and most other people are wrong, and while blunt and obstinate there is a rather playful charm to her. She is a Bedouin woman who was married at 15 years old, never learned to read and is at her happiest living out in the desert, where she says, “I feel the sky is nearby and God is close to me.” With her loyal Sudanese camel-wrangler Mohammed Nekhair Dlemich Al Hameli, she goes against cultural expectations with her attitude and sheer confidence that her camels should be winning the pageant.

Mark Adams Contact KHALID ALBUDOOR

albudoor@gmail.com

Dolphins Dir Waleed Al Shehhi. UAE. 2014. 90mins

A gently-paced and intriguing film, Emirati director Al Shehhi’s first feature film, Dolphins — which won the IWC Filmmaker Award for a film in production at Dubai International Film Festival 2013 — marks him as a film-maker to watch.

The interweaving plot and languid pace makes clear this is very much an arthouse effort, and while this and a lack of pace and star names will likely make it a tough sell theatrically, it has the credentials to feature at further film festivals. Dolphins is based around three characters — a divorced couple and their son — as they head off on a trip of reflection and discovery. The son, Saoud (Ahmad Al Jarn), is ejected from the house of his mother (Bahraini actress Reem Erhama) as she readies herself for remarriage. Saoud and his friend Hilal ramble from beach to beach on a motorbike. Meanwhile Saoud’s ambulance-driver father, Fadel (Khalid Ameen), is largely out of the picture. Each of the threesome has to deal with their own issues and problems, and while Al Shehhi works hard to bring his characters to life, their inner struggles do not amount to a great deal in the way of exterior drama.

Mark Adams CONTACT VILLACINEMA ART villa.cinema@gmail.com

30 Screen International January 7, 2015

The Woman In Black: Angel Of Death Dir Tom Harper. UK. 2014. 98mins

A suitably spooky sequel to 2012’s surprise hit The Woman In Black, which grossed more than $127m internationally, this Second World War-set follow-up heads into familiar ghostly territory, favouring oldfashioned creepiness and ‘behind you’ jolts rather than lashings of blood ‘n’ gore. Its strong points are the sense of atmosphere and the appropriately misty backdrop, though it lacks the star quality Daniel Radcliffe brought to the original, with the characters thinly drawn as the film favours mood over well-rounded personalities.

There is a built-in awareness of the brand given the success of the original film, which itself was based on Susan Hill’s bestselling novella and the record-breaking stage play. It also benefited from production company Hammer Films’ long association with classic horror movies.

The first film was set in the late 19th century, with Radcliffe playing a young lawyer who has a series of horrifying experiences at haunted Eel Marsh House.

The sequel shifts forward some 40 years, to the early years of the war. During the Blitz of 1941, schoolteacher Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox) is sent with a class of evacuees to the now-derelict Eel Marsh House, out in East Anglia where it is isolated from the nearby village by a causeway across the marshland.

Along with staid and tough headmistress Jean Hogg (Helen McCrory), Eve tries to keep up a brave front for the frightened children, but a series of disturbing events linked to young child Edward (Oaklee Pendergast), who has not spoken since he saw his mother killed in a bombing raid, sees her delve into

the history of the house and dark revelations about the former owners.

With the help of hunky RAF pilot Harry (Jeremy Irvine) — who has wartime issues himself — Eve learns more about the dark secrets of the house and the vengeful spirit that has set its sights on the children.

Fox — a Screen International Star of Tomorrow in 2011 — is perfectly cast as the gently determined heroine whose personal traumas have an impact on her attitude towards the children and the house itself. She has an innate warmth and intelligence that helps her Eve convince as a young woman who rails against the horrors as she seeks to protect young Edward.

Irvine’s stoical RAF pilot is more of a caricature and would have benefited from being better developed, though a sequence late in the film that takes place at a strange RAF base filled with dummy decoy planes is a nice twist on the typical wartime imagery.

The excellent McCrory is rather wasted as the clichéd tough headmistress, which is a shame given her strong personality.

At heart the film replicates the original story, with the spooky Woman in Black the catalyst for a series of deaths and hauntings, and while she is a reassuringly creepy presence and the misty atmosphere is impressively sustained, the film is rarely very scary despite a smattering of chilling moments. It is elegantly shot by cinematographer George Steel while Jacqueline Abrahams’ production design helps sustain the mood.

Mark Adams CONTACT EXCLUSIVE MEDIA

www.exclusivemedia.com

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Reviews in brief Tinker Bell And The Legend Of The Neverbeast Dir Steve Loter. US. 2014. 76mins

Tinker Bell has title billing in DisneyToon Studios’ sixth feature-length visit to Pixie Hollow — the second to be released this year — but her friend Fawn (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) is the real star of the show. In an adventure aimed unapologetically at the under-sevens, chatty fairy Fawn’s love for animals leads her to befriend a sleeping giant called the Neverbeast, plunging her hamlet into peril.

Unlikely to attract any Bob The Builder crossover crowd, Tinker Bell’s girlie audience has been tried and tested and is likely to remain true to this iteration of the formula — Legend Of The Neverbeast heads straight to video in the US market but had a Christmas theatrical run in the UK and other markets. Tinker Bell, the Peter Pan prequel series, is no feminist fairy manifesto, rather a purply-pink powder-puffball of predictability, set in the primarycoloured hamlet of Pixie Hollow that is awash with bunnies and songbirds and ruled by a shimmering Queen Clarion (the pleasingly world-weary voice of Anjelica Huston). All ends well in Pixie Hollow, as might be expected, and Tinker Bell And The Legend Of The Neverbeast is competently executed without being technically groundbreaking.

Into The Woods Dir Rob Marshall. US. 2014. 124mins

Fionnuala Halligan

The audience will have a fine time — the characters, less so — in Into The Woods, a likeable adaptation of the beloved Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine musical.

A darkly comic, sneakily touching tale of a collection of fairytale icons who discover how difficult it is to find a happy ending, this big-screen version demonstrates ably the staying power of Sondheim’s 28-year-old tunes and the mythic resonance of Lapine’s storytelling.

Director Rob Marshall gives the film a professional polish, and while the results are not always inspired, the source material is strong enough that it hardly matters.

Opening on December 25, Into The Woods was a major holiday attraction in the US, catering to family audiences and musical aficionados. Between Frozen and Maleficent, Disney has tightened its grip on the fantasy/princess/fairytale market in recent times, and Into The Woods will only strengthen the company’s position. If all that were not enough, a starry cast that includes Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, Chris Pine and Johnny Depp will appeal to different demographics, making this movie one of the surer international commercial bets of the winter (it has earned $91m to date in the US).

Taking place largely in an enchanted forest, Into The Woods brings together several characters familiar from childhood. Cinderella (Kendrick) longs to go to the palace ball, where she will meet a handsome prince (Pine).

Meanwhile, a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Blunt) must collect several exotic items for an evil witch (Streep) so that she may lift a curse that has left them unable to have children. And a boy named Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) trades away his prized cow for

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some magic beans, which sprout a beanstalk that leads up to a castle owned by a fearsome giant.

Marshall (Chicago, Nine), working again with frequent collaborators cinematographer Dion Beebe and editor Wyatt Smith, does not radically re-imagine the story, and as a result this Into The Woods feels comfortable, like a dependably entertaining all-star revue.

Unfortunately, some of the casting choices are so obvious they do not offer much surprise. But others prove endlessly delightful, particularly Kendrick as the empathetic, adorable Cinderella, who, after meeting her prince, cannot decide if she would really be happy in a life of luxury. But Pine is the happiest surprise. Best known as the cocky Kirk of the new Star Trek films, he mercilessly mocks his boyish prettiness in Into The Woods, playing a handsome, dull, hollow Prince Charming. Pine may be mere comic relief, but he finds impressive flexibility in a potentially one-joke character.

The star of this adaptation, however, is Sondheim’s score. From the brilliant extended opening number, which adroitly introduces the central characters and their separate quests, Into The Woods features a bevy of rich, evocative tunes with lyrics that push the story forward, even throwing out a joke or two. The original musical managed to be both heartfelt and sardonic, mocking the innocence of fairy tales while simultaneously explaining why we still value such totemic stories.

The fine-voiced cast belt out the songs with gusto, even if some of the emotional shading is lost in translation.

Tim Grierson CONTACT DISNEY

CONTACT DISNEY

Breaking The Bank Dir Vadim Jean. UK. 2014. 96mins

Kelsey Grammer puts aside his US twangs in favour of a plummy English accent as he plays engagingly dim-witted toff Charles, who runs — and ruins — an old-fashioned private bank in freewheeling UK comedy Breaking The Bank. The film, which had its world premiere at Dubai International Film Festival, is blessed with a naïve charm. But despite the work of Grammer and costar Tamsin Greig this old-fashioned effort rarely clicks, with the muddled script offering nice ideas but little follow-through. The casting of Grammer and Greig (star of US-set sitcom Episodes), as well as a nice performance from the ever-reliable John Michael Higgins, should make it of interest to international buyers, and while there is a genial silliness to proceedings the promise is never fulfilled.

It all feels rather familiar fare but there are some nice lines (when asked if he is a 24/7 sort of guy, Charles comments: “Twenty-four hours a week, seven months a year”) and amusing moments (just as Charles insists how up-to-date he is, his secretary arrives with his “e-mails to be signed”, sheets of paper on a silver tray with a quill).

Mark Adams CONTACT BLACK HANGAR STUDIOS www.blackhangarstudios.com

January 7, 2015 Screen International 31

AWARDS PEOPLE Compiled by Andreas Wiseman

andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com

HAWKE TALK

“It was a grand experiment, a Herculean effort of patience” Ethan Hawke on Boyhood

During a retrospective of his career at BAFTA London on December 18, Ethan Hawke spoke at length about his body of work with director Richard Linklater. He praised the uniqueness of the concept of the Oscar favourite, Boyhood, which was shot over a period of 12 years. “It was a grand experiment, a Herculean effort of patience,” he said. “There is a lot of love in that movie. Dead Poets Society is a lot like Goodbye Mr Chips; Training Day owes a great debt to The French Connection, but Boyhood… I’ve never seen that movie before.” Commenting on the Sony hacking crisis, Hawke said: “Two things are to blame for that censorship — the weakness of Sony and the scumbags who are threatening people.

It creates an interesting dialogue for us, so in a way I’m grateful to it.”

“Keeping track of it all, I guess. Trying to keep it light and trying to not push too hard. It’s kind of like an American sports analogy — just make plays. Don’t be fancy. Be obtuse, clear, straight. And that’s hard to remind yourself.”

Inherent Vice director Paul Thomas Anderson on the biggest challenge during the film’s shoot

BOXING CLEVER The Boxtrolls directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi discuss stop motion and holding on to adult undercurrents Laika Entertainment’s Golden Globe-nominated stop-motion animation The Boxtrolls, based on Alan Snow’s novel, Here Be Monsters!, tells the story of a young orphaned boy — raised by underground cave-dwelling trash collectors — who tries to save his surrogate family and friends from an evil exterminator.

Laika had owned the rights to Snow’s novel — which codirector Anthony Stacchi describes as “Oliver Twist smashed up against Monty Python humour” — for the past 10 years.

“I had worked a little with stop-motion in the past and I’d always wanted to work on a full film. When I read the book, it had all the things I wanted in a stop-motion film,” says Stacchi. “It was a period film and the opportunities for the art were great. That, coupled with what I was seeing at Laika, just seemed like it would be the perfect marriage.

“I wanted to see cobblestone streets in stop motion made by the artists at Laika,” he continues.

Annable and Stacchi describe The Boxtrolls as a “hybrid film” because though the vast majority is shot using stop motion, every shot has some form of computer enhancement.

In an industry increasingly led by CGI, the directors recognise audiences have become “ho-hum” about some of the grand spectacles we see on screen. “Because of the uniqueness of its look and feel, stop motion provides something that does feel new to audiences,” says Annable.

The directors were intent on holding on to their source material’s serious themes: “There were a lot of adult undercurrents going on in the novel and we weren’t going to lose those,” says Stacchi.

“What we didn’t want to lose was this world that Eggs finds himself in where society is corrupt, where there are prejudices, where the villain is willing to vilify this entire community to get what he wants.”

Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable

Adam Woodard

32 Screen International January 7, 2015

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