Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 36B, December 2, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

In late 2018 — not long after John Volanthen and I helped free the 12 boys of the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach, Ekkaphon Chanthawong, from the flooded caves in the Tham Luang cave system in July of that year — producers P.J. van Sandwijk and Gabrielle Tana approached me about making a film about the rescue mission. At the time, we had no idea who the director would be or what the screenplay would look like, but we began to talk to a script researcher for what would eventually become Thirteen Lives. Once screenwriter William Nicholson was on board, director Ron Howard got involved and MGM decided to fund it. My diving partner and I had a Zoom call with Ron in which he shared his vision…

The Batman WARNER BROS. The Batmobile chase sequence is grounded in photography and physical special effects, which were combined with digital effects in post. Work began with special effects supervisor Dom Tuohy’s team, which built four bespoke vehicles for the sequence. Says Weta FX’s VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon: “They featured push-button-switchable two-wheel to four-wheel drivetrains and Formula One-style brakes that could be adjusted and activated at each wheel. Two of the vehicles could be driven from a pod attached to the outside of the vehicle, which allowed Robert Pattinson to be in the driver’s seat while an unseen stunt driver drove the car. For this shot, we stripped one Batmobile down to its lightest possible weight and set it up with long-throw suspension and doubled shock absorbers, allowing the Batmobile…

Hildur Gudnadóttir, who in 2020 won the Oscar for best original score for her work on Joker, is back with two film scores this year that are firmly in the awards-season conversation. With work on Todd Field’s Tár and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, she could make history as the first female composer to be nominated twice in the same season. The Icelandic musician talked to THR about her processes for both films and whether the industry is opening up more for female composers. You scored two films this year. Which came first? I started on Tár first, but I think I finished Women Talking before I finished Tár. So they were running a little bit at the same time, but in a nice way that didn’t totally overlap. I had chunks…

All Too Well: The Short Film Taylor Swift wrote and directed this 10-minute extended music video of her song “All Too Well,” telling the story of a young writer (played by Sadie Sink) who falls in love with an older man (Dylan O’Brien) — only to deal with the ramifications of the relationship as it slowly crumbles. Ball & Vase Austin Pendleton plays a lonely, widowed elderly magician, who, after learning his grandson won’t be able to visit him at Christmas, returns to the pub he used to frequent with his wife. The Blanket This Finnish drama follows 10-year-old Marja, who is sent to retrieve milk for her baby brother and encounters dangerous obstacles in the wintry, icy landscape. Burros Twenty miles from the Mexican border in southern Arizona, a…

ANIMATED FEATURE Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio This tour de force of crafts features stop-motion puppets and tons of practical effects done in camera, as well as visual effects. A Museum of Modern Art exhibit called “Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio” will begin press previews Dec. 7 and open Dec. 11. FILM EDITING Top Gun: Maverick Thirty-six years after Top Gun was nominated in this category, it’s hard to imagine that its sequel won’t be. Cut by Eddie Hamilton, who edited Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, the movie features aerial action sequences that alone are as thrilling as anything onscreen in 2022. PRODUCTION DESIGN Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths Eugenio Caballero, who previously worked on Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, teams up with Alejandro G. Iñárritu for the first…

Editor Terilyn A. Shropshire is the first to acknowledge that the The Woman King can be thought of as an action film. And indeed, with her kinetic cutting, it excels in the action scenes. But she emphasizes that from the start of the project, delving into the characters was the primary approach that she and writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood took to the story, which is set in the 1820s and follows the Agoji, a unit of female warriors in Africa’s Dahomey kingdom. “The focus was always to make sure that by the time we put them in the larger-scope moments, the battle moments, that you cared enough about these characters that you understood what was at stake for them,” she says of the editing. “It was always about finding the humanity…

Good Night Oppy PRIME VIDEO For the feature documentary about NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Exploration Rover Opportunity, Industrial Light & Magic created the extensive Mars sequences in CG, and supervising sound editor/designer Mark Mangini was tasked with creating the sound of the rover. “We wanted to make Oppy somewhat anthropomorphic,” he says. “The engineers themselves set the head of the mast-cam at the height of an average human and the cameras to capture images stereoscopically, like human eyes. However, we didn’t want Oppy to sound whimsical or ‘chatty,’ like many traditional sci-fi robots.” He decided to rely solely on sounds that the rover itself could have made, which involved recording sounds at JPL. “The cheat was in how I organized them,” adds Mangini. “I [incorporated] the sounds of computer disk…

7 Lbs 8 Oz A young Asian family moves to Jersey City and finds beauty in their newfound community. Airborne An aspiring pilot takes a job as a baggage handler so he can be in close proximity to aircraft. Amok Clyde faces trauma after his fiancee and his handsome looks are taken away from him in a freak accident. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse The titular quartet of unlikely friends embark on a relatable journey to find home. La Calesita A cheerful merry-go-round operator finds joy in spreading cheer to his community. Canary A young boy keeps watch after a canary in a coal mine but complicates things when he teaches the bird to play dead. The Cave A boy yearns for attention from his stoic…

“This year, it’s very telling that all the animated movies are concerned with death. And also fathers, sons, daughters, mothers. Really, two themes unifying all our movies,” Guillermo del Toro observed as he and his fellow animators gathered to talk shop in a virtual roundtable on Nov. 2. In the stop-motion Pinocchio, directors del Toro and Mark Gustafson reimagine the oft-told tale of the puppet who yearns to be a real boy in 1930s Fascist Italy, while Joel Crawford’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish continues the adventures of another familiar character as he confronts his ninth and possibly final life. Henry Selick’s stop-motion Wendell & Wild revolves around an orphaned girl who teams up with two demons from the underworld; Nora Twomey’s My Father’s Dragon, based on the children’s…

In re-creating the most famous of icons, one might think the approach would be to mimic the original. If only resurrecting Marilyn Monroe for director Andrew Dominik’s Blonde had been that simple. “Andrew said to me, ‘Don’t just put Marilyn’s makeup on Ana [de Armas]. You have to find Marilyn within Ana,’ ” says makeup department head Tina Roesler Kerwin. With only a few weeks to prepare for the Netflix film, Kerwin and hair department head Jaime Leigh McIntosh’s first day of production was a photo shoot creating the still images that would show Marilyn’s rise to fame throughout the film. It was while putting together the more than three dozen looks that they were able to practice perfecting the two-and-a-half-hour process of transforming de Armas into Monroe. “A lot…

Formative Friendships in Armageddon Time The 1980 backdrop of James Gray’s semiautobiographical drama feels familiar: A celebrity turned politician challenges the establishment, racial tensions simmer and socioeconomic disparities loom large. And one comforting time-honored aspect endures: Queens sixth-graders Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) and Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb) dress alike. “Because they’re best friends,” says costume designer Madeline Weeks, who kept the cast in late-’70s wardrobe, conveying the era’s pre-fast-fashion consumer mindset. Paul, from a middle-class, two-parent Jewish family, and Johnny, a Black boy confronting the daily trauma of racism at school (and in the world at large), bond over their creative aspirations. Paul fantasizes of being a “famous artist,” while Johnny yearns to join NASA and see a Sugarhill Gang concert. “Johnny and Paul love style,” says Weeks. Like the…

While this year’s animated feature contenders include three films that employ stop-motion animation — Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and Wendell & Wild — the animation technique that dates back to the mid-1800s received very little love in the category until 2005. That’s when Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit became the first (and only) stop-motion animated film to win best animated feature (stop-motion shorts are a different story, with Were-Rabbit creator Nick Park alone garnering three Oscars, for 1989’s Creature Comforts, 1993’s The Wrong Trousers and 1995’s A Close Shave, the latter two also starring Wallace and Gromit). It’s also almost certainly the only “vegetarian horror film,” as Park described Were-Rabbit, to win any Oscars at all. Wallace and Gromit’s adventures began…