Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 1A - January 6, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

My mission to get Till made is a 29-year promise fulfilled. The reality of seeing something that I’ve wanted for my entire adulthood come to life has been both overwhelming and frightening. I realize the subject matter is not an easy one, and I was afraid that bringing this story out at this time of global racial fatigue could detract from my reasons for wanting to make this film in the first place — to awaken the consciousness for change, because the injustice that befell Emmett Louis Till in 1955 is still among us today. I grew up Black in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I learned about the murder of Emmett Louis Till when I was 10 years old while looking through an old Jet magazine in my parents’ study. So,…

It took 36 hours for producer Gail Berman to get to the Elvis set in September of 2020. It was a mini-odyssey that involved flying from Los Angeles to New York and then through Dubai and on to Brisbane, Australia, where she had to quarantine for two weeks due to then-strict COVID-19 protocols. But the wait didn’t bother Berman, since by then she had been trying to get the movie made for more than a decade and had already endured a production shutdown due to a global pandemic that saw one of the film’s leads become the early face of the then-nascent coronavirus. (More on that later.) “My kids used to like to call it my hobby,” says Berman, who developed the project in between her already prolific day jobs…

BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS NETFLIX Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s semiautobiographical musing follows documentarian Silverio, who is in the midst of an existential crisis. “[He’s] caught between the life that he left behind in his native country and the prosperous existence he has built with his family beyond the border in the U.S. The sets are not just physical manifestations of his world, they are part of his state of mind,” explains production designer Eugenio Caballero, who viewed Silverio’s Mexico City apartment as key to the drama. It was built on a stage at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City (and later transported to a desert location in Baja California). “It explains our main characters and who they are, or who they were when they left Mexico 13 years…

Goodnight Oppy, about a NASA rover alone on Mars for 15 years, won the Critics Choice documentary feature award (though it didn’t make the Oscar shortlist) and brings to mind Wall-E, the 2008 Pixar movie directed by Andrew Stanton. The idea for the intergalactic tale was born out of a 1994 Pixar lunch meeting where concepts for some of the studio’s biggest hits were first crystallized. “What if mankind left Earth and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off?” was the premise. Wall-E is a trash collector tasked with cleaning up the mess after mankind has abandoned the planet. His routine is shaken up when he befriends Eve, a sleek robot who’s been sent down to find proof that life is once again sustainable. Wall-E gets pulled into a…

For Apple TV+’s Emancipation, based on the true story of an enslaved man (played by Will Smith) known as “Whipped Peter,” director Antoine Fuqua and cinematographer Robert Richardson approached the look from the perspective of those who were enslaved: “Beautiful but brutal, in an honest way,” in the words of Fuqua, who adds: “The film is about resilience. It’s about love, it’s about faith.” As the film begins, Richardson’s camera glides over the Louisiana swamps — Peter’s path to freedom. Fuqua recalls, as the three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer was testing looks, “Bob went out and shot different stuff with his camera. That opening shot going over the water was one of the style of images Bob sent me. And I just said, ‘That’s it. That’s the look.’ ” Continues Fuqua: “This…

TILL UNITED ARTISTS Chinonye Chukwu’s Emmett Till biopic opens with a tender, carefree mother-son moment: Mamie Till (Danielle Deadwyler) and her 14-year-old (Jalyn Hall) playfully sing in the car as they drive to Chicago department store Marshall Field’s. Mamie’s rose pink dress, with floral texture coordinating with her petal-like Juliette cap, parallels the spirit of her son’s striped button-up in his signature golden yellow “to match the emotion, the vibrance and the cinematic language,” says costume designer Marci Rodgers. “I wanted it to be equal to Emmett’s shirt.” A professional working in the Air Force office, Mamie is, as always, impeccably outfitted from head to toe: white gloves, beaded bag, spotless black pumps and rhinestone jewelry favored by the real Till. Mamie knows the racism she’ll face in the store…

As far as physical transformations go, Brendan Fraser’s in The Whale is by far the most drastic this year in film. For the task of making over its highly recognizable lead actor into the obese recluse Charlie, director Darren Aronofsky enlisted his longtime collaborator, prosthetic designer Adrien Morot, to design the character as sensitively and authentically as possible. “I always try to do makeups that are subtle and unnoticeable,” explains Morot. “It should be like, ‘What? This actor was wearing prosthetics? I just thought I hadn’t seen him in a few years.’ I was hoping that it would be the same thing with the character of Charlie … to the point where, after the initial shock for fans of seeing George of the Jungle in that condition has passed, that…

Diego Calva knows that his experience on Babylon was not traditional. First of all, to get the role of Manny Torres, a wide-eyed striver who moves up the ranks of the film industry in its nascent days, the Mexican actor did “30 or 40” self-tapes. Then he moved into the Los Angeles home of director Damien Chazelle and his wife, producer and actress Olivia Hamilton, for about 12 days. “We rehearsed the whole movie in his backyard, like a bizarre kind of summer camp,” says Calva. In the evening, they’d watch movies and film clips, studying Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon or Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights. There was a “metafictional” element to Calva’s experience on Chazelle’s ambitious film. Like his character, Calva, 30, is a newbie to Hollywood…

Writer-director James Gray recreated elements of his childhood for Focus Features’ Armageddon Time, set in 1980 Queens. Banks Repeta plays Paul Graff, the onscreen avatar for Gray: an aspiring artist whose rambunctious behavior infuriates his parents (played by Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway) but delights his aging grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). The latter supports young Paul in his creative pursuits and, when Paul admits that his classmates use bad words to describe his Black friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb), orders his grandson to “be a mensch” and stick up for those who are not in a position to defend themselves. Gray naturally turned to his own family history when crafting this personal tale, poring through photo albums that he says offered “a moment frozen in irretrievable time — both sad and beautiful…

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN SEARCHLIGHT Set on a fictional island in Ireland, Martin McDonagh’s character-driven fable tells of what happens when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) ends his friendship with Pádraic (Colin Farrell). For Oscar winner Mikkel E.G. Nielsen (Sound of Metal), this delicate edit involved finding simplicity in the scenes and a balance between its narrative tones. “The more simple you get the story, the more layered [the characters] can become,” the Danish editor says. “What was interesting [was to] find that natural balance of comedy and drama where you can tonally shift, even within the scenes. Martin’s scripts are so rich. There are plenty of these moments within the scenes. Then it’s about finding the balance and when it’s too much and when to hold back. [At times] we almost…

Following the success of 2009’s groundbreaking Avatar, James Cameron began writing a new story that would take Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and their children on an emotional journey in a new region of Pandora — moving from its bioluminescent forest to its seas in the hopes of protecting their family from the Sky People. “Our family is our fortress,” Jake Sully says. The director had been working with Weta FX and its senior VFX supervisor Joe Letteri, winner of four competitive Oscars, since they first teamed on Avatar. Letteri emphasizes that everything they do from a VFX standpoint is about supporting the story, but when he saw the new script, he knew they had their work cut out for them. “We started to put a lot of…