Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 4B, January 27, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

Tick, tick, tick … That’s the sound we hear when we’re waiting for something to happen. While we’re taking notes and working toward a goal and living in the “before.” While we’re looking at the clock and wondering — is it time yet? Anyone can be — or can accomplish — anything. This is one of the most beautiful parts of our industry, but also the most mystifying. It means no one ever tells you what date and time you’re suddenly going to become the thing you’re hoping to be. For an aspiring writer, director or producer, there’s no graduation ceremony, exam to pass or How to Succeed-type manual to memorize. When I was offered my first job as an agency assistant, I excitedly told my parents, “This is it!…

Judi Dench says she “didn’t hesitate for a single minute” when Kenneth Branagh asked his dear friend and collaborator to join Focus Features’ Belfast. It was a good thing, too, as the actor-writer-director — whom Dench met in 1987 while working together on a TV production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, sparking a long and celebrated relationship across multiple screen and stage productions — had driven to her home south of London in early 2020 to pitch his new, deeply close-to-home, semiautobiographical screenplay face-to-face. “Because I have such trouble with my eyes, he came and read it to me,” Dench explains. “We had a whole morning, quietly together, while he read it without stopping.” Dench originally had balked when she heard she was wanted to portray Branagh’s grandmother — “Good grief,…

For 20th Century Studios’ Free Guy — a movie set in the real world and in a role-playing video game — visual effects were paramount in creating the worlds and characters, particularly “Guy,” an NPC (non-player character) in the game, portrayed by Ryan Reynolds. To get the appropriate look and feel for the movie, production VFX supervisor Swen Gillberg, whose credits include Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, says he and director Shawn Levy started their process by — what else? — playing lots of video games. In the end, the film’s look is “an amalgamation of many games and it’s definitely a heightened level,” Gillberg says, citing Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite as two inspirations. Work on Reynolds — including head replacement and creation of a digital stunt double…

Catherine Apple, who edited Disney/Pixar’s Luca with Jason Hudak, admits that the opening of the film — an Italian Riviera-set story of a young sea monster who turns human on land — was a tricky one that they addressed with the storyboards. “After we see the fishermen and we go down into Luca’s world, [we tried] different things,” she says. “We spent more time under the water before we met Luca. And then we did things where we spent more time in the city meeting everybody before we came to Luca. In the end, we decided to meet Luca right away when we get into the water and see the underwater world with him. We tried so many different ways to see what worked best that if we didn’t do…

In March 2020, actor-rapper Riz Ahmed released The Long Goodbye, a concept album inspired, in part, by the rise of far-right political groups and anti-immigration rhetoric in a post-Brexit U.K. Ahmed, who was nominated for the best actor Oscar last year for Sound of Metal, says the critically acclaimed album came about after “thinking a lot about identity [and] my place in the world.” It was around the same time that Ahmed connected with filmmaker Aneil Karia. Finding a commonality in their British-Asian identities, Ahmed and Karia say they were immediately interested in collaborating on a project. The result is the short film The Long Goodbye, which incorporates music from Ahmed’s album. Ahmed also stars in the film, which depicts a South Asian family in suburban London — in the…

Lusia “Lucy” Harris was perhaps the greatest basketball player you haven’t heard of — yet. A pioneer for women in the sport, Harris led the Delta State University Lady Statesmen to three national championships during the 1970s. In 1976, when women’s basketball was added to the Olympics, Harris scored the first basket in the inaugural game; the U.S. women’s team would earn the silver medal at the Montreal Games. After the Olympics, Harris became the first — and last — woman to be officially drafted by the NBA, selected by the New Orleans Jazz. After declining to try out for the team (Harris was pregnant at the time), she later joined the Houston Angels in the Women’s Professional Basketball League and played professionally during the 1979-80 season. Now, Harris is…

To create the look of Margot Robbie’s unhinged Harley Quinn in Warner Bros.’ The Suicide Squad, the makeup and hairstyling team had to depart from the character as introduced in 2016’s Suicide Squad (which won an Oscar for makeup and hairstyling) to support the specifics of director James Gunn’s film. “She’s only really in her ‘hero’ look for the first 10 minutes of the movie, if that, and then she basically gets dunked into water and she’s wet for the rest of the movie,” explains makeup department head Heba Thorisdottir, adding that they also had to lean in to the comic’s black-and-red motif for this film. In the end, they took inspiration from rocker Alice Cooper. “That’s where all the black liner comes down, like Alice Cooper, but then we…

Isabelle Fuhrman really went all in for IFC Films’ The Novice, written and directed by Lauren Hadaway. Not only did she learn to row — and subsequently did so for six hours a day — but she also dug deep into the emotionality and complexity of portraying Alex Dall, a college freshman who joins her university’s rowing team and will not stop her efforts to become the best, no matter the cost. The outcome, she tells THR, left her completely drained. “I didn’t realize until we wrapped just how far down this rabbit hole I’d gone,” says Fuhrman. “Because it really hit me like a train. I completely crashed after doing this movie, which I can imagine Alex probably does at the end of the movie.” Fuhrman and Hadaway talked…

In A24’s Red Rocket, Simon Rex stars as a down-on-his-luck, washed-up porn actor who returns to his Texas hometown in hopes of reinvention — or, at least, a way back to L.A. Showing up on his estranged wife’s doorstep, he hustles his way back into her life with the promise of a fresh start. Unable to find a day job thanks to the conspicuous gap on his résumé, he turns to dealing weed and hanging out at a doughnut shop, where he flirts with the teenager behind the register, Strawberry (newcomer Suzanna Son), whom he hopes to break into the porn business as her manager. Mikey, played by a mesmerizing Rex, is the ultimate antihero: a charismatic grifter only looking out for himself, unable to recognize how his actions affect…

In a rare stroke involving this year’s visual effects Oscar contest, three brothers are all shortlisted for different movies. This trio of British special effects vets are Chris Corbould, special effects supervisor on MGM/United Artists’ No Time to Die; Neil Corbould, special effects supervisor on Disney/Marvel’s Eternals; and Paul Corbould, SFX supervisor on Disney/Marvel’s Black Widow. A fourth brother, Ian Corbould, also works in the business (and worked on Black Widow with Paul). Their sister, Gail, runs Neil’s SFX company, Neil Corbould Special Effects Ltd. The VFX mastery that runs in the family started with a single relation. Their uncle, Colin Chilvers, worked in special effects and received an Academy Award for his work on Richard Donner’s 1978 classic Superman, starring Christopher Reeve. “One by one, we all got into…

In Sony Pictures Animation/Netflix’s musical Vivo, the Lin-Manuel Miranda-voiced kinkajou goes on a journey with 9-year-old Gabi. The pair find themselves on a raft in the Everglades and sing Miranda’s original song “Keep the Beat.” “Initially, that wasn’t a song,” admits editor Erika Dapkewicz. “When we first built it, it was meant to be a talking-head scene. Eventually, director Kirk DiMicco wanted to make it more musical. I’m a musician myself, and I ended up coming up with a rhythmic section for the two of them to be able to play off of each other.” She adds that Miranda, who wrote original songs for the film, saw an early version of the scene and recognized the opportunity for a musical moment: “He took what we built, took a lot of…

The sweeping visuals in A24’s The Green Knight — the David Lowery-helmed epic based on the Arthurian legend that follows King Arthur’s nephew Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) in a quest to confront the titular knight — were filmed at locations, largely in Ireland’s County Wicklow, outside Dublin. “It had this really lush green and all kinds of sparse landscapes, lots of grays and these open skies, and it felt cold and wintry. Since it’s [set around Christmas], we really wanted it to feel cold,” says production designer Jade Healy of the locations, which DP Andrew Droz Palermo used to great effect. Both have already earned honors from various critic groups for their work. For the exterior of Camelot, the production used Cahir Castle in County Tipperary, a stone fortress built…

The Wachowskis’ 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix won four Academy Awards, including for its sound and sound effects editing. Two decades later, its Oscar-winning supervising sound editor and designer Dane A. Davis returned for the Lana Wachowski-helmed The Matrix Resurrections. A key question for Davis was how much to pay homage to the original. “That was my very first discussion with Lana after I read the script,” Davis admits of the story, which again follows Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, traveling between a simulation masquerading as reality and the real world. “We start from the assumption that there has to be a consistency to the two worlds, the real world and the virtual world, which ironically is more like our world. And the real world is something we don’t know…

Ten years before Sam Mendes helmed 2012’s Skyfall — the first of his two James Bond films, followed by 2015’s Spectre — the director worked with Bond star Daniel Craig on Road to Perdition. The 2002 gangster film, Mendes’ follow-up to his Oscar-winning American Beauty, starred Tom Hanks as Michael Sullivan, an enforcer for an Irish mob boss named John Rooney (Paul Newman). Sullivan and his son, Michael Jr., go on the run after Sullivan’s wife and younger son are murdered by Rooney’s hotheaded heir, Connor (played by Craig). Recently on THR’s Awards Chatter podcast, Craig — who made his final outing as 007 in No Time to Die — recalled to host Scott Feinberg meeting with Mendes and learning that he was considering him for the role of Connor.…

BESTPICTURE The Harder They Fall Jeymes Samuel’s all-Black Western tied with King Richard for most African American Film Critics Association Awards wins Jan. 17 (best film, director, ensemble and music) and tied with Issa Rae’s Insecure for most NAACP Image Award noms Jan. 18 (with 12, including best picture, director, writing, ensemble and six acting noms). BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY Passing As expected, the jury for the USC Libraries’ Scripter Awards, which honor the best print-to-screen adaptations, nominated Dune, The Lost Daughter, The Power of the Dog and The Tragedy of Macbeth on Jan. 19 — but Tony Kushner’s new take on West Side Story was unexpectedly bounced by Passing, which Rebecca Hall adapted from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella. BESTINTER NATIONAL FEATURE A Hero The Palm Springs Film Fest, known for…

I’m the first deaf male actor who has been nominated for a SAG Award,” says CODA star Troy Kotsur. “That is quite a blessing.” After being sold for a record-breaking sum at Sundance last year, the Apple TV+ film has been earning historic awards recognition. Kotsur won a Gotham Award and now finds himself nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and SAG Award. In CODA (an acronym for Children of Deaf Adults), Kotsur plays Frank Rossi, a deaf man who is navigating challenges to his Massachusetts fishing business as his hearing daughter, Ruby (Emilia Jones), who acts as the family’s interpreter, mulls a move to college. The actor talked to THR about Hollywood’s response to the movie and CODA’s historic nominations. How has the audience response been to CODA? There were…

In the Sony Pictures Animation comedy, produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and released on Netflix, the Mitchell family stops a robot apocalypse en route to dropping daughter Katie off for her first year of film school. “The comedy was really fun,” says editor Greg Levitan, noting that writer-director Mike Rianda and writer Jeff Rowe “come from television, and there were no areas of dryness. So it was trying to figure out areas to actually remove, and then leaving what was working so well, and then making it even better … I would bring them in and we’d watch it and we’d work it until they basically fell off their chair with laughter.” For the more emotional moment at the end of the story, as the Mitchells finally drop…

For Joe Wright’s Cyrano, based on screenwriter Erica Schmidt’s stage musical, an adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey says he wanted to express at the onset a sort of “nascent romance and the innocence of that and the kind of yearning for love.” He notes, “We went for a much warmer tone and soft lights on the actors’ faces,” explaining that this was guided by the look of the baroque-style city of Nato in Sicily, where the movie was lensed on location. “When we went there initially to scout locations, we suddenly realized this is how the movie should look, what the Sicilian light delivers naturally. When you walk into a palazzo, for instance Roxanne’s living quarters, through shutters, there’s a really hot beam…

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe admits he was already a fan of Candyman when he was approached to score Nia DaCosta’s reboot of the 1992 film, which was directed by Bernard Rose and based on a Clive Barker short story. A bonus: It was to be produced by Monkeypaw Productions, founded by Oscar winner Jordan Peele (who co-wrote the new Candyman with DaCosta and Win Rosenfeld). “They do really thoughtful and artistic work,” says Lowe. “It was extraordinarily exciting to be involved in the process of making the film.” Lowe says he wasn’t daunted by the original film’s iconic score by Philip Glass, whose work he describes as being “imprinted on me fairly young.” If anything, Glass’ score was at the top of Lowe’s mind when he began work on the…

Robin Robin is a stop-motion animated musical from U.K.-based Wallace & Gromit studio Aardman Animations and writerdirectors Dan Ojari and Mikey Please. The film follows a robin who is raised by a loving family of mice. As she grows up, her differences become more apparent, and she plans a heist at a human family’s house to prove to her family that she can be a good mouse. “On the way, she discovers who she is and that her difference is the wonderful part of her,” Ojari says, adding that the 30-minute Oscar-shortlisted film is about “celebrating who you are and all the differences that make you you.” Aardman’s Oscar-winning work includes Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, for best animated feature; and Creature Comforts, A Close Shave and…