The Hollywood Reporter Awards Special 2A - January 12, 2023

A few years ago, after James Cameron finished the first Avatar film, his kids called a family meeting to deliver some notes on his parenting. Some of the kids, who today range in age from 15 to 32, had attended the MUSE school in Calabasas that Cameron’s wife, Suzy Amis Cameron, founded in 2006. At MUSE, students are encouraged to provide feedback to their teachers, and now the Cameron brood was emboldened to apply that same technique at home. Cameron is known in the film business for getting what he wants when he wants it, from release dates to budgets to the right to mount elaborate oceanic expeditions on a studio’s dime. The director admits he has sometimes brought his hard-driving style home, and there are moments when his fathering…

It was in the small courtyard of a house in Galway on the west coast of Ireland that arguably the most important audition for The Banshees of Inisherin took place. After a casting call had been put out across the country, on one grayish morning in late 2020 — a full year before shooting started — a trailer pulled up with four aspiring young hopefuls in the back. Writer-director Martin McDonagh, director of photography Ben Davis and production designer Mark Tildesley — who had been living together under lockdown while prepping for Searchlight’s period tragicomedy about a friendship gone awry on the fictional island of Inisherin in 1923 — went outside to inspect. As the four budding screen performers were paraded around, McDonagh spotted his star instantly. “She just stood…

The weekend before shooting began on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, filmmaker Ryan Coogler led about 30 people to Chadwick Boseman’s resting place in South Carolina, where actors and key crew were joined by members of the late star’s family. It was a solemn and reflective moment. Yes, it was a way to acknowledge the actor’s death, something several of them had done before at Boseman’s memorial service. But it was something deeper — reaffirming a commitment to the great undertaking ahead. “You just felt very blessed and very humbled to be able to stand there,” recalls Angela Bassett, who was reprising the role of Queen Ramonda, the onscreen mother of Boseman’s hero-king, T’Challa. Just a few days later, cameras began rolling in the Egyptian Theatre in Atlanta for a scene…

Park Chan-wook, the world-renowned South Korean auteur best known for the floridly violent films referred to as his “Vengeance Trilogy,” wanted to tell a gentler story. It was 2019 and Park was ruminating on ideas for what would become Decision to Leave, his 11th film and first feature in six years, following a period of television work and fine art creation. He began with two competing ideas. “Over the years, I’ve watched lots of detective dramas and police procedurals, and I love these kinds of films,” he says. “But I’ve always thought the depiction of the protagonists is quite far from reality, because they’re either really tough and violent, or some kind of genius detective.” Examples in this genre are particularly prevalent in Korea, where the highest-grossing movie just this…

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…

A film about a middle-aged woman undergoing a tax audit should be a relatively simple proposition, unless it’s in the collective hands of the filmmaking duo known as Daniels. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a multiverse movie, but unlike the superhero tentpoles that typically define the concept, this everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink picture — at $100.6 million worldwide, A24’s highest-grossing release ever — was made on a shoestring budget. “There’s that scene in Apollo 13 where they throw the tools they have on the table and are like, ‘That’s what they’ve got up there, we’ve got to bring them home.’ That’s how we approach filmmaking: ‘We have $14 million, we have all this stuff, how are we going to squeeze it in and make a thing?’” says producer Jonathan Wang, who, like…