Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 8A March 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

In the golden age of Hollywood, the Academy Awards reconnomination gized costume design with two categories: color film and black-and-white. Since the categories merged in 1967, only three contemporary-set films have won the best costume design Oscar: Travels With My Aunt in 1973, All That Jazz in 1980 and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1995. Subsequent nominations have been scarce: The Devil Wears Prada and The Queen in 2006, I Am Love in 2011 and La La Land in 2017. Oscar voters overwhelmingly recognize period, often honoring the same set of designers. Fifteen-time nominee Sandy Powell even dedicated her third win for 2010’s The Young Victoria to the “costume designers that don’t do movies about dead monarchs or glittery musicals.” Should the Academy return to the…

Paul Greengrass is best known as the director of three installments of the popular Bourne film franchise, each starring Matt Damon, that helped reinvent the action genre — 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum and 2016’s Jason Bourne — around which he also has directed several acclaimed, ripped-from-the-headlines dramas about terrorism: 2002’s Bloody Sunday; 2006’s United 93; 2010’s Green Zone, with Damon; 2013’s Captain Phillips; and 2018’s 22 July. The 65-year-old Brit’s latest film, Universal’s News of the World, is unlike anything he has done before — it’s a Western, mostly deliberately paced, about a Civil War veteran (Tom Hanks) who makes his living as a traveling news reader and winds up with a surrogate child (Helena Zengel) along the way. Here, Greengrass reflects on his life and…

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow has some of the things you’d expect from a 19th century frontier drama, like brutish men fighting over limited resources. But at the center of her story is a pair of outsiders — Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee) — whose gentle personalities seem at odds with the ruthlessness of the world around them. Reichardt and Magaro reveal how this unexpected take on a sweet friendship came together, what’s involved in casting the perfect bovine, and the lasting effects the experience has had on them. What was your first impression of each other? JOHN MAGARO It was over video chat, Skype or something like that. Now I guess we’re all used to that, but then I think we were still novices. I had seen…

Don’t attempt to solve the puzzle of The Father. Actually, do — this is exactly how writer-director Florian Zeller styled his debut film. Just don’t expect to find a solution. Confusion is key. Chronicling the painful descent into dementia of an elderly Englishman, Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), and its devastating emotional impact on his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), the drama doesn’t simply put viewers behind the lens as outsiders watching a story unfold from afar. In a clever storytelling twist, Zeller’s film — based on his acclaimed stage play and co-adapted by Oscar-winning scriptwriting icon Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons) — makes them part of what the director describes as his “immersive experience,” akin to collaborators in the narrative. “My idea was to try to put the audience in a unique position…

As hooks go, The Painter and the Thief has a great one: The Oscar-shortlisted documentary, by 31-year-old Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree, follows a friendship between a Czech painter and the tattooed gangster who stole two of her most valuable works from an Oslo art gallery. What begins as a caper with a twist, however, soon reveals itself to be a much deeper rumination on things like friendship, self-destructiveness and the artistic impulse. “I read about the robbery from newspapers in Norway,” explains Ree via a Zoom call from his home in Oslo, where he’s seated beside a sun-mimicking lamp. (Winter nights in Norway are 18 hours long.) Ree introduced himself to the artist, Barbora Kysilkova, who’d recently moved to Oslo, and convinced her to let him start following her for…

When Amazon’s One Night in Miami wrapped principal photography in New Orleans early last year, the plan was to quickly shoot a few scenes in Los Angeles before wrapping. “There were a few locations we felt like we could get better matches for in Los Angeles,” says producer Keith Calder of the 1964-set film, which takes place largely in the Florida city. With production nearing its end, Calder and his wife/producing partner Jess Wu Calder didn’t expect anything beyond the typical obstacles that come with an independent shoot. But that was in mid-March, and, well, everything suddenly ground to a halt. Fast-forward to July. The pandemic continued to rage on, but so did a collective anger that was sparked by the shooting of George Floyd in Minneapolis. With film and…

For Minari, writer-director Lee Isaac Chung mined his unusual Korean American childhood in rural Arkansas, where his father took his family for a chance at a homesteading dream. The result is an intimate yet visually sweeping tale about an immigrant couple, Jacob and Monica (played by Steven Yeun and Yeri Han), with two young children (newcomers Noel Cho and Alan Kim), whose dreams will make or break their fragile marriage. Chung, 42, spoke with THR about the many ways he made sure “to not leave anything behind” in the making of Minari, the Golden Globes’ snubbing of his actors and the personal experiences that he brought to his critique of the American dream. There’s a dominant cultural narrative about Asian Americans as the model minority or pursuers of the American…

What if I will film animals which normally you meet on the plate?” was the question that Russian director Victor Kossakovsky asked when he set out to make Gunda, a black-and-white documentary feature that follows the lives of a pig named Gunda, her piglets, a one-legged chicken and some cows. The filmmaker, who as a child hoped to be a ranger and protect nature himself, spoke to THR about how he pulled off the intimate film, which required him to film the daily lives of farm animals for several months. Where did the idea for this film come from? I was thinking about it all my life. When I was a kid, I spent a winter once in the countryside between what was Leningrad at that time and is now…

Chung Mong-hong’s A Sun explores the various personal and societal pressures a family of four endures after their youngest son is arrested for his part in a violent crime and sent to juvenile detention. The Taiwanese filmmaker spoke with THR about the making of his fifth narrative feature. What were your goals with the film’s cinematographic style, which includes rich contrast and high saturation? I wanted to portray the shadows on our land under the sunshine. To create this contrast, our work schedules followed sunrises, sunsets and even weather forecasts. I want to show an ordinary life under the ordinary sunshine and everything happening between light and shadow. Can you talk about a memorable moment from set? When I was making this movie, I felt more pressure than ever before.…

One of the most striking scenes, and one of the trickiest to shoot, in Hulu’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday involves a roughly three-and-a-half-minute Steadicam shot that follows the titular character, played by Andra Day, on an emotional journey that summons up painful memories as she discovers a lynching. Cinematographer Andrew Dunn reteamed with director Lee Daniels, with whom he’d collaborated on such films as The Butler and best picture Oscar-nominated Precious, to tell the emotional story of jazz singer and civil rights advocate Billie Holiday. He lensed the movie in Kodak 35mm film, using 50-year-old anamorphic lenses to give the story, set largely in New York during the 1940s, “a sort of life and breadth to it and a definite texture.” He took inspiration from footage of the…

In Hulu/Neon’s Palm Springs, two single wedding guests played by Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti find themselves caught in an endless time loop, reliving the same manic day over and over again. The romantic comedy was a smash at last year’s Sundance, selling for a then-festival record $17.5 million (and 69 cents). It was up for a Golden Globe for best picture, musical or comedy, and for Samberg’s lead performance. The film’s stars spoke with THR about the existential comedy that proved to be the perfect entertainment amid a pandemic. What were your first impressions of the script, and why were you excited to do this movie? ANDY SAMBERG It kept surprising me and making me laugh. Every character had turns in it I wasn’t expecting, which is always my…

Todd Black MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM “Whenever you have a period film, they’re tough. And Ma Rainey was a public figure with very little information on her. We were able to find a total of seven pictures of her, which is crazy when you think about it. The goal for us was to be as authentic as we could be and to really make it come across both for her character and what she stood for and believed in.” Gregory Goodman NEWS OF THE WORLD “The biggest challenge making this film was in creating an authentic tapestry of time, place and journey — 1870 Texas — within a tight budget and schedule. The challenge was overcome with the collaboration of a top-notch team whose collective focus never wavered. Without the…