Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 1 40B December 2019 i The Hollywood Reporter

In Hustlers, a gang of down-on-their-luck strippers, led by the luminous Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), con Wall Street fat cats out of their ill-gotten gains. In Todd Phillips’ Joker, the alienated, disturbed Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), stripped of his job, dignity and mental health support, turns violently against the callous elite, embodied by billionaire Thomas Wayne. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out uses the tools of the Agatha Christie murder mystery to explore a tale of American entitlement, contrasting the dysfunctional wealthy Thrombeys — one of whom murdered the family patriarch — with its decidedly less-well-off staff. And in Parasite, from South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, the destitute, basement-dwelling Kims strive to climb the social ladder by leeching off the fabulously monied Park clan. Welcome to this year’s Oscar season, where, as…

ACID RAIN  A teenage girl runs away from her eastern European village and makes a new friend under a bridge. THE CURSE OF THE MONKEY BIRD  In the vein of Golden Age theatrical cartoons, this Warner Bros. short follows Porky Pig and Daffy Duck as they track down the rare Monkey Bird. FLOAT  A father discovers his son can float and questions whether to run or hide when the extraordinary ability becomes public in this SparkShort. HAIR LOVE  Matthew Cherry’s seven-minute short chronicles an African American father’s attempt to do his daughter’s hair for the first time. LA NORIA  The Spanish short depicts a young boy who loves drawing and building Ferris wheels, but he meets odd creatures that upend his world. PURL  Purl, a bubbly pink ball of yarn,…

Taylor Swift teaming up with Andrew Lloyd Webber on a new song for Cats — Universal’s adaptation of the Broadway hit — sounds like, well, awards-season catnip. But Webber, the British musical theater legend and creator and composer of the original production, told THR that he’s not stressing over their ballad becoming a part of the trophy race. “Of course we’d love it to be noticed and we’d love to have an Oscar, but it wasn’t the first thing on our minds when we sat down and wrote it,” says Webber, who won (with Tim Rice) the Oscar for original song for “You Must Love Me” from 1996’s Evita. “It’s because the movie actually needs a song.” The haunting new tune, “Beautiful Ghosts,” is sung by the graceful white cat…

ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (FOX)  The focus was on capturing the performance of Rosa Salazar, who portrays Alita — a CG character that appears in 2,400 shots. “Adding another camera to Rosa’s helmet allowed us to capture depth information for her facial performance,” says Weta VFX supervisor Eric Saindon. “With this extra amount of information, we get proper lip depth and pull, and wrinkle information that we have always made assumptions for in the past.” AVENGERS: ENDGAME (MARVEL/DISNEY)  The conclusion to the Avengers saga involved 2,500 VFX shots, including the creation of the new CG “smart Hulk.” Says Industrial Light & Magic VFX supervisor Russell Earl, “While this Hulk likely weighed several hundred pounds less than the original Avengers Hulk, animators were still very careful to make sure his actions always…

1917 UNIVERSAL “I got the script with a cover letter from Sam Mendes saying the film must appear to be one shot, and he basically prepped me beforehand by saying, ‘You’ll laugh when you read the cover letter,’ ” says editor Lee Smith. “And I did. I laughed. Then I read the script. I loved it.” Smith (an Oscar winner for Dunkirk) had teamed with the director on his last James Bond film, Spectre, which opened with a Day of the Dead-set sequence that was also shot to appear as one continuous take. But while there were some lessons Smith learned that he carried with him into 1917, Mendes’ ambitious World War I drama was an entirely different challenge that changed the editing process as Smith knew it. 1917, which…

Paul Walter Hauser had a breakout moment playing the bumbling sidekick in 2017’s I, Tonya, but he’s stepped into a much bigger spotlight (complete with awards buzz) with his vulnerable, layered performance in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell. Michigan native Hauser, 33, who portrays the real-life security guard wrongly accused of planting a bomb during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, spoke with THR about connecting with Jewell’s family, a powerful scene involving a doughnut and what he hopes to do next. What was it like to spend time with Richard Jewell’s mother, Bobi? The first time I met Bobi Jewell was on the Warner Bros. lot. I was more nervous about meeting Bobi than I was Clint, because Clint and I have a certain commonality based on what we do for a…

Given the realm in which they operate, it stands to reason that animators would have their own unique take on reality. The real world, to the five multihyphenates on THR’s Animation Roundtable, is merely a starting point for a creative process that allows for virtually anything the imagination can conjure. It’s what allows Olaf the snowman to talk (not to mention sing) in Frozen 2, the sequel to Disney’s 2013 blockbuster directed by Jennifer Lee, 48 (with Chris Buck). It’s how a spork comes to life in Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 4, the latest installment of the beloved franchise, directed by Josh Cooley, 40. Netflix’s Christmas title Klaus — the streamer’s first original animated feature, produced by Jinko Gotoh, 62 — may be based in a real climate (the Arctic), but…

ALL CATS ARE GREY IN THE DARK  Lasse Linder won the IWC Short Cuts Award for best short film at TIFF with this tale of a man’s love for his cats. BALLOON  Jeremy Merrifield explores gender and toxic masculinity by subverting the superhero myth. DARLING  An erotic dance theater is the backdrop for a missing sacrificial goat, a trans girl searching for the spotlight and a boy falling in love. DELPHINE  The TIFF best Canadian short film winner follows a Lebanese Canadian girl, who is bullied for her ethnicity, and her sympathetic peer. THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US AND THE SKY  In the Greek-French entry, which won the Cannes Palme d’Or for best short film, two strangers debate money and existence at a gas station. MILLER & SON  Nonbinary director Asher…

The partnership between famed car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and British driver-engineer Ken Miles (Christian Bale) is the driving force behind Ford v Ferrari, James Mangold’s racing drama chronicling the lead-up to the 1966 24-hour Le Mans race. Paralleling that onscreen partnership is one behind the scenes between composer Marco Beltrami and his longtime engineer Buck Sanders, who’ve worked together for two decades, with Sanders crafting the electronic sound palette for each Beltrami-scored film. However, this fourth collaboration with Mangold is particularly special for Beltrami, a passionate racer himself. The pair spoke to THR about recording the 1960s-inspired score for the film and the evolution of their own collaborative partnership. How would you describe your own racing experience, and how did that get started? MARCO BELTRAMI When my eldest…

THE TWO POPES NETFLIX César Charlone, an Oscar nominee for Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, reteamed with his longtime collaborator on The Two Popes, an intimate story based on the transfer of power from Pope Benedict (Anthony Hopkins) to Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce). The key to the film was the dialogue between the leads. “With Fernando, we had a tendency to say, ‘Let’s find a different way.’ So, when you think of a film with churches and popes, a typical thing would be shafts of light, smoke coming through the windows — stuff like that. So, we said, ‘OK, none of that.’ ” Instead, Charlone and his team looked at the works of painters such as Michelangelo. “How do they light? They don’t — they flat-light. So I said, ‘OK,…

ADASTRA FOX Supervising sound editor, designer and rerecording mixer Gary Rydstrom explains that the sound editing and mixing teams for the space-set Ad Astra blended realism with subliminal sounds. “It’s a father-son story and it’s very internal,” Skywalker Sound’s seventime Oscar winner says, noting that the team took Tommy Lee Jones’ dialogue from later in the movie, looped it and turned it into sound effects. “So in the very beginning, when we see Brad Pitt, we’re actually hearing bits of dialogue from the future of the movie.” “One of the major motifs of the movie, which was designed into it by [director] James Gray, was the use of silence,” Rydstrom continues. “When you were inside the spacecraft, you hear all these rattles and engine stuff, and we cut outside and…

DreamWorks’ Abominable isn’t the first studio animation production to star a yeti, which is the Tibetan word for the mythical abominable snowman. In 1961, Warner Bros. released the six-minute Looney Tunes cartoon The Abominable Snow Rabbit starring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Directed by Chuck Jones, Rabbit had Bugs and Daffy tunneling their way to Palm Springs but somehow ending up in the Himalayas. “I told you to turn west in East St. Louis,” says Daffy after he dives into a frozen pond. In short order, Daffy meets an abominable snowman named Hugo, who believes the duck is a rabbit and his new best friend. (This is a sly allusion to the bunnyloving Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.) Mistaken identity jokes go back and forth until Bugs tunnels…

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story centers on a couple (Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson) who go through an ugly bicoastal divorce. Driver’s Charlie is a New York theater director who wants to keep the family in New York. Johansson’s Nicole is an actress who is offered a starring role on a TV series, so she moves to Los Angeles — bringing their young son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), with her. When Charlie flies out to L.A. to see his wife and child, he’s served with divorce papers. The Netflix feature, which opened theatrically Nov. 6 ahead of its Dec. 6 streaming debut, starts off centered on the couple’s once happy life in a New York apartment near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. A typical prewar New York space, their cozy home has hardwood…

ANIMATION Right now, Rosana Sullivan can’t have a pet, despite how desperately she wants one. Her husband is allergic to cats and she has a toddler in the house, so getting a dog would be “insane,” she says. So Kitbull, her Pixar SparkShort about an unlikely friendship between a stray black kitten and an abused pit bull, fulfilled that fantasy for her. “I’ve always been obsessed with the nuances of animal behavior,” says Sullivan, who at one point studied to be a veterinarian. The short, which at first stemmed from her desire to draw a black cat engaging in funny antics in the midst of feeling creatively blocked on another project, developed into a story of connection. “I realized I wanted a pit bull, too, and for these two to…

When revamping Aladdin’s iconic songbook for Guy Ritchie’s live-action version, the decision to give Jasmine (Naomi Scott) a solo was an easy one. Working with Alan Menken, who composed songs and the score for the original, Dear Evan Hansen duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul created “Speechless,” a tune that brings to life the princess’ desire to be heard. Menken, Pasek and Paul spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about finding the perfect words for Jasmine, adding to Aladdin’s beloved soundtrack and collaborating for the first time. What went into the decision to give Jasmine her own song? ALAN MENKEN Even before I was working with Benj [Pasek] and Justin [Paul], the thought was that a song for Jasmine for the movie would be a great addition. That was always thought…

The visual effects branch has a tendency not only to highlight outstanding artistic work, but also to reward seminal technical advancements — as evidenced by past winners including Jurassic Park, Avatar and Brad Pitt aging in reverse in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This year, the intersection of art and science has generated considerable attention for virtual production (as showcased in The Lion King) and digital human/de-aging work (seen in Gemini Man and The Irishman). A new approach to virtual production — the creation of what the filmmakers describe as essentially a real-time virtual reality “game” in the making of Jon Favreau’s photoreal, fully CG retelling of Disney’s The Lion King — made the film a VFX Oscar hopeful from the moment the first images were unspooled at the…

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO A24 Made on a 25-day shooting schedule for just $2.5 million, the film follows two San Francisco friends, Jimmie (actor-writer Jimmie Fails) and Montgomery (Jonathan Majors), who attempt to reclaim the former’s family home. “The visual style needed to be romantic, elevated and magical but at the same time very grounded and human,” says cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra, who prepped for the production in just 10 days. He notes that “we tried to intercut [the dialogue scenes] with something that was flowing and elegant using montage.” The opening scene, in which the leads are skateboarding, is used to establish the “romance” connecting Jimmie to the city and the house as well as his friendship with Montgomery. “While it’s not postcard-beautiful all the time, the…

It seems fitting that Frozen 2 is a film about change. As the animated sequel was being made, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and especially Jennifer Lee — who directed the original and sequel with Chris Buck and also wrote both screenplays — were going through some pretty big metamorphoses of their own. The Oscar-winning 2013 musical Frozen, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, followed the tale of two princess sisters, Elsa and Anna, forced to grow up isolated from each other and the world because of Elsa’s potentially dangerous magic ability to conjure ice. The film grossed a whopping $1.27 billion worldwide, and fans were so charmed by the characters — voiced by Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell — that they weren’t able to “Let It Go” (the…