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

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…

In March 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Steven Spielberg was watching his 103-year-old father, Arnold, deteriorate. After growing distant when the filmmaker, now 75, was in his 20s and early 30s, father and son had reconnected and become close. They lived near each other in Pacific Palisades, and Steven would go to Arnold’s house to watch movies, listen to music and hang out on the patio. Steven’s mother, Leah, had died in 2017 at 97, and by August 2020, Arnold would be gone, too. That spring, as Arnold’s condition worsened, Steven began to grieve. “Even before my dad left, I was missing the thought that I wouldn’t just be able to drive up to his house, as I did all the time,” Spielberg says. “For all…

The first time Gina Prince-Bythewood and Viola Davis met about The Woman King, in the offices of Davis’ production company in the spring of 2020, the filmmaker broke one of the rules of her trade. “As I started talking about my connection to the material, I lost it,” Prince-Bythewood says. “There’s no crying in directing. But I cried there. And I left going, ‘Fuck, did I just blow it? Is V going to think I’m weak?’” It’s hard to imagine Prince-Bythewood giving anyone an impression of weakness. The director, a former basketball and track star whose filmography ranges from the 2000 romantic drama Love & Basketball to the 2020 Netflix superhero movie The Old Guard, is tall and lean, and projects a quiet confidence. As she tells this story during…

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…

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 good mystery often begins with a clue that’s right out in the open, even if no one recognizes it at first. In a similar way, the extravagant Greek villa that serves as the principal setting for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery impressed production designer Rick Heinrichs when he first visited it early in his location search, but it wasn’t immediately selected for the movie’s game of murder that turns deadly. “It was a place that had a modernist take on classical architecture and had a hierarchy of stairs that led up to it, and I could see us placing a dome on top of it,” Heinrichs tells THR. “But our experience always tells us that the first place is never the one you end up with.” Instead, he…

It was the heart of winter when Tár writer-director Todd Field and editor Monika Willi unexpectedly took up residency at a 15th century Scottish nunnery outside Edinburgh. They had intended to meet up in London, but another COVID-19 lockdown in early January 2022 waylaid their plans. As it turned out, the nunnery and the silence were a perfect environment to foster the filmmaker’s storytelling tempo and sense of discipline. Amid long walks watching the seasons slowly change, he and Willi got to work, spending nearly four months stringing together the melody of his first film in 16 years. Tár stars Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, a fictional world-renowned conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic who is brought down for exploiting power to pursue relationships with younger protegées, including a woman who…

A few years ago at a book club meeting, a friend took Sarah Polley aside in the kitchen. “She told me, ‘I found this book, and you have to make it into a film,’” Polley says. “She said, ‘I’m going to tell you the backstory of what happens before the book starts and you’re not going to want to make it into a film, so I need you to just hear it and don’t freak out.’” The book, Canadian author Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel Women Talking, is loosely inspired by the story of an ultraconservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia where seven men were put on trial after being accused of drugging and raping women in their homes between 2005 and 2009. Polley’s friend was right — the story horrified her.…

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…

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…

The joy in Guillermo del Toro’s face has been abundantly apparent this awards season each time he introduces his latest big-screen outing, a deeply personal animated version of Pinocchio told in the Mexican helmer’s typically sumptuous, meticulously crafted visual style. When the Oscar-winning filmmaker was growing up, Carlo Collodi’s 1883 fable about a wooden puppet who longs to be a real boy was one of his favorites, and del Toro has now made the oft-told tale (Disney released its own ill-received live-action version, starring Tom Hanks, in September) distinctly his own: a darker, timely retelling for today’s audiences, set in fascist Italy during the 1930s. Pinocchio is del Toro’s first foray into directing stop-motion animation, an art form that dates to the early days of motion pictures and which was…

Three-quarters of the way through Till, Mamie Till, played by Danielle Deadwyler, takes the stand in a Mississippi courtroom where two men are being tried for the brutal murder of her 14-year-old son, Emmett, a Black boy from Chicago who’d been visiting relatives in the South when his life was mercilessly cut short. Filmed first in profile, then in close-up, she describes how she was able to identify her son’s mangled body and then recounts the warnings she’d given him about the necessity of acting deferential toward white Southerners. We hear the voices of the prosecutor and a defense attorney offscreen as they question her, but the focus remains steadily on Mamie for more than six excruciating minutes as the camera slowly pans around her, capturing every moment of her…