Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 8A February 2018 i The Hollywood Reporter

When Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, the love story adapted from Andre Aciman’s novel about a young man (Timothee Chalamet) who falls for a research assistant (Armie Hammer) during a summer in Italy, picked up four Oscar nominations, it capped an amazing year for the film that began at the Sundance Film Festival almost exactly a year earlier. Guadagnino, 46, who was attached as a producer before coming on to direct as well (taking over from James Ivory, who penned the screenplay), earned his first Oscar nomination with the film, which he produced with Peter Spears, Emilie Georges and Marco Morabito. The Italian helmer spoke to THR about sexual politics, onscreen eroticism and that sticky peach scene. Some people are viewing the film as a standardbearer for gay…

Get Out was the come-outof- nowhere contender that launched in February 2017, after its secret Sundance premiere, and continued to surprise over and over again, transcending its horror roots to become a cultural phenomenon that spurred conversations about race relations. But its momentum continued beyond that as it stealthily became an Oscar frontrunner, generating nominations not only for best original screenplay but also for best picture, best actor for Daniel Kaluuya and best director for Jordan Peele, helming his first-ever feature. The low-budget film (it cost $5 million to make) about a young African-American man (Kaluuya) who goes to visit the family of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) and discovers troubling motives for their actions, was produced by Sean McKittrick, Peele, Edward H. Hamm Jr. and Jason Blum. Blum, 48,…

As far as Amy Pascal is concerned, she should have been fired a long time ago and become a producer. The former Sony Pictures studio chief, who was unceremoniously let go from the studio in February 2015 after the devastating Sony hack, has scored her first Oscar nomination with The Post alongside fellow producers Steven Spielberg, who also directed the Pentagon Papers drama, and Kristie Macosko Krieger, Spielberg’s producing partner (it’s Krieger’s second nomination after her 2016 nod for Bridge of Spies). Pascal also produced Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game, which is in the running for best adapted screenplay honors. She’s particularly proud of The Post, considering that the movie came together at lightning speed thanks to Spielberg putting aside The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. Pascal, 59, and Macosko Krieger, 48,…

The final scene in Agnes Varda and JR’s Faces Places sees the elusive artist JR finally take off his sunglasses, concluding what had been a touchy subject for the two throughout the film. The moment comes after they set out to visit Varda’s old friend Jean-Luc Godard, whose presence is a running theme of the film, but he stands them up with a tersely scrawled note on his window. Godard had once famously taken off his sunglasses for Varda; she’d been wanting JR to do the same. The pivotal scene comes at last — with the joke being that the 89-year-old Varda only sees JR as a blur once he finally obliges her. What she has seen clearly throughout the documentary, however, are the faces of a fading France, and…

When he was a student in film school, Feras Fayyad listed on a card the awards ceremonies he planned to attend one day and kept it in his wallet. Years later, when war broke out, the Syrian filmmaker was arrested, held for nine months and tortured. He escaped to Turkey when he was finally released and is now based in Copenhagen and California. With his latest movie, Last Men in Aleppo, about the fearless White Helmets, a citizen collective dedicated to rescuing bombing victims from rubble, Fayyad ticked off the lead item on the card in his wallet — he is the first Syrian ever to be nominated for an Oscar. “Time stopped,” he says of hearing of his nomination, “and my mind thought of the years, the tragedy, the…

“ I came away with enormous admiration for him. He’s incomparable to any figure. Here’s a man 50 years in politics, he wrote 50 books, the Nobel Prize for literature, painted 540 paintings, commanded in four wars. Certainly his mind and ingenuity — he navigated the Second World War very cleverly.”OLDMAN, ON CHURCHILL Darkest Hour, the World War II thriller set during a five-week period when the fate of Europe, if not the world, hung in the balance, saw Eric Fellner of powerhouse U.K.-based banner Working Title (which he runs with fellow nominated producer Tim Bevan) reunite with several old — and not so old — friends. First came the script from Anthony McCarten, who penned the Oscarnominated screenplay for 2014’s The Theory of Everything. Then director Joe Wright, who…

According to producer Eli Bush, he and fellow producer Scott Rudin knew they wanted to make Lady Bird — first-time feature director Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age story about a mother (Laurie Metcalf) and daughter (Saoirse Ronan) in early aughts Sacramento — after reading the first page. “It was a sensational piece of writing and we knew Greta would do it brilliantly,” says Bush, who had previously worked with Gerwig as an actress on Mistress America and Frances Ha. Bush, 31, who produced the $10 million indie dramedy with Rudin and Evelyn O’Neill, prefers to let Gerwig and the movie speak for themselves. (“The only person who should speak for Lady Bird is Greta Gerwig,” he said before surrendering the mic to the writer-director after winning best motion picture, musical or comedy,…

Guillermo del Toro had been thinking about a film centered on a romance between a woman and a sea monster since he was a child in Mexico and saw Creature From the Black Lagoon. He wasn’t able to make it until 40 years later, when he teamed with producer J. Miles Dale to create The Shape of Water. Dale, who works with del Toro on his FX series The Strain, helped the auteur put together his ambitious, 1960s-set period piece for a little less than $20 million. It debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the fest’s top prize, the Golden Lion. Now, The Shape of Water, starring Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Michael Shannon, Octavia Spencer and Doug Jones (as the fish-man), has earned 13 Oscar nominations, the…

SWEDEN Anyone who has seen The Square, Ruben Ostlund’s art satire, remembers “The Scene.” It’s just 12 minutes in the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time: Oleg, a bare-chested performance artist, terrorizes a black-tie crowd at a museum gala in Stockholm. Grunting and whooping like a chimpanzee, leaping from table to table, he turns the uppity affair into a clip from the animal kingdom. In those 12 minutes, the crowd of wealthy Swedish socialites transforms, civility drops away and they turn on Oleg with a brutality that shows them as little more than apes in tuxedoes. The scene is a perfect encapsulation of The Square’s overarching theme: that art, and the trappings of civilized society, are a thin veneer hiding our underlying brutality. For actor and movement coach Terry Notary, who plays…

Oscar history is replete with sore losers: Eddie Murphy immediately exiting the theater in 2007 after losing for supporting actor in Dreamgirls. Bette Davis coldly watching Joan Crawford in 1963 accept on Anne Bancroft’s behalf. The close-up on Sylvester Stallone’s shattered face after not getting the supporting actor statuette in 2016 for Creed. Unhappy winners, however, are a much shorter list. Topping it is the Exorcist writer William Peter Blatty. In 1974, the William Friedkin-directed film had received 10 nominations but won only sound mixing and adapted screenplay. (The Sting also had 10 noms but won seven, including best picture and director.) The day after the NBC telecast, Blatty, who had adapted his own best-selling novel, let loose with a diatribe that THR put atop its front page. The writer,…

When Skywalker Sound’s supervising sound editor, designer and rerecording mixer Ren Klyce first read director Rian Johnson’s script for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, he knew some challenging work would be required for sequences during which Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Rey (Daisy Ridley) share a unique connection, communicating across the galaxy. “We read the script and said, ‘OK, this is going to be interesting,’ and one of the first things that we asked Rian was how he wanted it to sound,” says Klyce, who is Oscar-nominated for both sound editing and mixing. “It took a long time to arrive at that, but the first thing was that he wanted Rey and Kylo to feel like they were connecting over the vastness of the galaxy. It’s not just the internet.…

ver the course of 10 films, Emma Thomas, 46, and husband Christopher Nolan, 47, have established themselves as one of the most successful producingdirecting duos in Hollywood. The pair, who met at Cambridge University, where they made short films together as students, earned their second best picture nomination (following 2010’s Inception) for Dunkirk, which follows the British forces’ efforts to rescue stranded Allied soldiers during World War II. Thomas talked to THR about the film’s appeal, how the awards experience has changed for her and whether she’ll be more nervous for the best picture announcement or the one in the best director category, where Nolan is nominated. Dunkirk has become the highestgrossing World War II movie ever. Why do you think it’s resonated so much with audiences? It’s a very…

“ He shows her a new world she would never have had access to, a world of dressmaking and all this glamour and beauty. And she, I think, shows him an inner world.”KRIEPS, ON HER CHARACTER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH WOODCOCK (DAY-LEWIS) JoAnne Sellar has been producing Paul Thomas Anderson’s films for the past 20 years, starting with Boogie Nights. She’s helped him make it rain frogs (Magnolia), blackmail Adam Sandler (Punch-Drunk Love) and seduce audiences with a charismatic cult leader (The Master). The English producer previously worked with both Anderson and Phantom Thread star Daniel Day-Lewis on 2007’s There Will Be Blood, for which she earned her first Oscar nomination for best picture. With Phantom Thread, she and fellow producers Anderson, Daniel Lupi and Megan Ellison helped Day-Lewis (in what the…

Twenty years ago, British- Irish director Martin McDonagh was riding on a Greyhound bus somewhere in the American South when he spotted a series of angry billboards, one after the other, criticizing the local police. That memory stuck with him for the next two decades until he wrote Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, his dark comedy starring Frances McDormand as grieving mother Mildred, who puts up three giant signs by the highway attacking the local police force for not finding the person who raped and murdered her daughter. McDonagh brought the script to producer Graham Broadbent while they were making their second film together, and soon enough, they were off to North Carolina to shoot the film, which also stars Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell (both of whom landed Oscar…

Director Bryan Fogel, 45, set out with the intention of using himself as a guinea pig while investigating illegal doping in sports, but as he was making his documentary Icarus, he built a relationship with Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian doctor who ended up blowing the whistle on his country’s extensive statesanctioned doping program (the results of which were recently seen when Russia was banned from the Winter Olympics). When did you realize the story had become bigger than your own? That was a slow process. I met [Rodchenkov] in February 2014, and he came under investigation after the ARD documentary [The Doping Secret: How Russia Makes Its Winners, broadcast in Germany] in December 2014, the Skype call seen in the film. That was when I was beginning to dope. When…

Yance Ford’s older brother William was killed in 1992, an unarmed African- American shot by a white man during an argument at a New York auto body shop on Long Island. The shooter claimed he’d feared for his life and was never even brought to trial. Ford’s parents passed away in the stressful aftermath. It took 14 years for Yance Ford to begin making his documentary, Strong Island, and 10 years to complete it. The passage of time helped the firsttime director come to grips with what makes the story more than just a deeply personal one — and gain the filmmaking skills to do it justice. “I’m glad I didn’t make the film when I was a 20-year-old art student who had lost their brother,” Ford says. “When I…