Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 4 39A November 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

A hot-button question that society — or at least Twitter — has been debating for years enveloped the Oscar race last season: Who is allowed to tell which stories? Many were angered that Green Book, a film largely about Don Shirley, a once-famous and now deceased black concert pianist, had been made not by people who knew the black experience firsthand but rather by white screenwriters and a white director. They also were upset that it was told not through Shirley’s eyes but rather through those of a white character who knew him. The response of the filmmakers — one of whom, Nick Vallelonga, was the son of Tony Lip, the white character — essentially was that nobody had stopped or could stop anyone else from making a film about…

Continuing the Golden Globes’ longstanding tradition of enlisting A-listers’ children to help hand out awards, Dylan Brosnan, 22, and Paris Brosnan, 18 — sons of Pierce and Keely Brosnan — will represent the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as 2020’s Golden Globe Ambassadors on Jan. 5. The aspiring filmmakers — Dylan is a student at USC, Paris at Loyola Marymount University — will be the first set of brothers to take on the role, which was rebranded from Miss (or Mr.) Golden Globe in 2017 to highlight a philanthropic aspect. For their personal cause, the Brosnans are supporting FEED Projects, an organization founded by Lauren Bush Lauren that tackles childhood hunger and has provided more than 100 million meals since 2007. Ahead of the Globes, they spoke to THR about the…

ALADDIN “Speechless” DIsney’s live-action take on the animated classic brought back many of the original songs but also introduced a feminist ballad for Jasmine (played by Naomi Scott). The song is written by the 1992 film’s composer, Alan Menken, with La La Land’s Oscarwinning lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. CATS “Beautiful Ghosts” Taylor Swift not only stars in Universal’s Dec. 20adaptationofthe Broadway classic, she also penned a new song with original composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. While Swift sings the melancholy tune over the end credits, Francesca Hayward’s cat, Victoria, performs it. THE LION KING “Spirit” Beyoncé’s new song was originally slotted for the end credits but was added as part of the story in Disney’s photo-realistic adaptation of the animated film. Written and produced by Ilya Salmanzadeh, Labrinth and…

Filmmakers have been turning the lens on their own lives for decades, as so many artists do. Following in the footsteps of Alfonso Cuarón’s very personal Roma (which won three Oscars and two Golden Globes), this year’s hopefuls include an array of films that are unusually insightful about the lives of their makers. Noah Baumbach’s Netflix film Marriage Story, starring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, is at least partly inspired by his own 2013 divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh and his parents’ divorce, though the director says he drew on multiple sources. Other films hew closer to true characters and events, blurring distinctions between reality and representation. Lulu Wang’s Sundance breakout The Farewell closely aligns with the extraordinary circumstances of a family secret. Pain and Glory is Pedro Almodóvar’s…

Tom Hanks’ first movie was really cheesy. Seventh-billed in a 1980 stalker “thriller” called He Knows You’re Alone, the 24-year-old actor played a bushy-haired psych student who tries to impress young women at an amusement park with his alleged ability to spot the criminal type. There’s absolutely nothing here to suggest that this seemingly affable but unprepossessing fellow would go any further than the other young actors in this defiantly talent-free film, none of whom was ever heard from again. But the kid with a vagabond California childhood pressed on, soon winning roles on popular shows such as The Love Boat, Taxi, Happy Days and Family Ties and, for two seasons, on Bosom Buddies (he turned down Fantasy Island). As Hanks told Oprah Winfrey in 2001: “Several things always separated…

It turns out that when you put six accomplished composers in a room and ask them how they conjured some of the best film scores of the last year, they can’t fully explain where the music comes from. That might be why there was plenty of talk of magic at the 2019 edition of THR’s annual Composer Roundtable. In fact, calmly embracing the unknown was a consistent theme. For Hildur Gudnadóttir, 37, that meant a moment of inspiration that felt like a “lightning bolt” while she composed the score for Todd Phillips’ Joker. For Kathryn Bostic, 52, it meant producing delicate, ambient “textures” that wouldn’t overpower the intimacy of Chinonye Chukwu’s stark prison drama Clemency. Nicholas Britell, 39, came to David Michôd’s period drama The King with a trial-and-error approach…

Composer Robbie Robertson has worked with Martin Scorsese for more than 40 years (they were even roommates in the ’70s when Robertson moved into Scorsese’s house on Mulholland Drive). But for The Irishman, Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour gangster epic, the filmmaker gave Robertson a new, unique request: “Marty wasn’t interested in a traditional movie score. Big bum-dah-ba-dum-brrrring, you know — when they’re driving fast, it’s going bum-bum-bum, shit like that,” Robertson, 76, tells THR. Instead, Scorsese wanted Robertson to create music that fit the tone — the movie is probably best described as a character drama more than a traditional mobster movie. “It’s a very strong mood, and I’ve never seen a gangster movie with this kind of tonality before,” says Robertson. “It was tricky.” It was made trickier by the fact…

For screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, their decadelong journey writing the script for the Fred Rogers movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood began with something as innocuous as a child admiring the cardigan-wearing icon on a computer screen. “I was sort of struggling with how to communicate with a very stubborn toddler and also looking for interesting people to write about,” recalls Harpster. “I put an episode of Mister Rogers on my computer and my daughter turned to the screen and started listening in a way that she had never and still has never listened to me. I called Micah and I said, ‘There’s this warlock named Mr. Rogers and he speaks toddler.’ ” What followed was a deep dive into the world of Fred Rogers, who hosted…

Sterling K. Brown has stretched himself a bit this year. The Emmy-winning This Is Us actor has turned his focus to other projects beyond the NBC show, such as a guest arc on Amazon Studios’ The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and lending his voice to Frozen 2 as Lieutenant Destin Mattias. Plus, in A24’s Waves he took on a father figure who’s very different from Randall Pearson, playing a demanding dad with high expectations of his son, Tyler (played by Kelvin Harrison Jr.). The drama, helmed by Trey Edward Shults, debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in August to strong reviews and opened in theaters Nov. 15. The 43-year-old St. Louis native and father of two sons spoke to THR about his process for picking characters, his new role as a…

Several years ago, Netflix passed on Sergio Pablos’ origin story about Santa Claus. “We found that what we thought was the film’s strong point — it was an [animated] Christmas film — was a deterrent,” Pablos tells THR. The filmmaker, who is the cocreator of Universal’s blockbuster Despicable Me franchise, was perplexed, given an appetite for origin stories at the box office. “I was particularly interested when I saw Batman Begins,” recalls Pablos. “I thought, what a great storytelling exercise, to take a character that’s already well established … and bring it to today’s audience.” He considered characters from Napoleon to Dracula before landing on St. Nick. “He has many origin stories,” says Pablos, “but in the end I thought that there was not one canon-accepted origin story.” In 2016,…

Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Bobby Lopez’s list of accomplishments as a couple includes 16 years of marriage, two daughters, two Oscars and two Grammy Awards. While they’ve been collaborating for years, their career hit a new level after the breakout success of Frozen and the ballad “Let It Go” (for which they won their first Oscar). For the sequel, the pair wrote seven new songs, ranging from the fun ’80s homage “Lost in the Woods” to the powerful ballad “Into the Unknown.” What were your first thoughts when it came to your approach on the sequel? BOBBY LOPEZ It all starts with story. We got a call from [directors] Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, who pitched us the basic idea behind what would become the story. It was all about the…

Jamie Bell’s journey to playing Bernie Taupin begins when he was 14 years old, starring in Billy Elliot, a film written by Lee Hall. It was then that he met Elton John (who would team with Hall to adapt the film into a stage show). And, nearly 20 years down the road, Hall would be the one to write Paramount’s musical Elton John biopic, Rocketman. “It just felt written in the stars somehow that I would portray his best mate, Bernie,” Bell, 33, tells THR on Oct. 17. Bell is reuniting with Bernie Taupin, 69, on the Paramount lot months after Rocketman’s splashy Cannes debut and May 31 release, because they’re both in town for a tribute to the musical biopic at the Greek Theatre later that evening. The two…

The morning after the 2018 Oscars — the one in which her film Lady Bird had been up for five awards, including best director and screenplay — Greta Gerwig loaded up her car and drove north on Highway 1 toward Big Sur. For the next couple of weeks, she hunkered down in a cabin, tapping out a screenplay for the adaptation she’d been waiting literally her entire life to film. “Little Women was just a part of me,” she says. “These girls felt like my sisters and their memories felt like my memories. It was the book for me.” Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel following the romantic and social adventures of the four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth — hasn’t just been a literary classic for generations.…

For a novel written in 1868, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women has had an exceptionally good run at the Oscars. George Cukor’s 1933 version starring Katharine Hepburn was nominated for best picture and director and won for adapted screenplay. Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 adaptation starring June Allyson won for best art director/set decoration and was nominated for color cinematography. And Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version received nominations for costume design and original score and brought Winona Ryder, then 23, a best actress nom for playing Jo March, the young woman who yearns to break away from family constraints and become a successful writer. Armstrong says she’d read the novel as a child and was drawn to the material because of Alcott’s “insight into the psyche of young women coming of age and…