Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 34A - December 8, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

Director Alexander Payne’s nearly three-decade collaboration with editor Kevin Tent is one that people don’t often see in Hollywood. Tent has cut every one of Payne’s movies since they first teamed on 1995’s Citizen Ruth, and this includes their most recent, The Holdovers. One reason for this enduring creative partnership might be the amount of time Payne spends with Tent at the Avid. “He loves the cutting room,” says Tent, who was Oscar-nominated for Payne’s The Descendants. “It’s one of his happy places, I would say.” The Holdovers, written by David Hemingson, follows curmudgeonly teacher Paul Hunham, played by Paul Giamatti, who reluctantly remains on campus at a New England boarding school during Christmas break with a bright but troubled student, Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa), and with the school’s…

Six directors of standout 2023 documentary features gathered at The Hollywood Reporter’s Los Angeles offices in mid-November for THR’s annual Documentary Roundtable. Among them were two revered veterans with Oscars to their name: Davis Guggenheim (2006’s An Inconvenient Truth), who helmed Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, a film about the life and struggles of the beloved actor who was stricken at a young age with Parkinson’s disease; and Roger Ross Williams (2009’s Music by Prudence), director of Stamped From the Beginning, a film about the history of anti-Black racism in America. Meanwhile, the first-time filmmaker, twice-Grammy-nominated producer D. Smith profiled four Black transgender women who have performed sex work in Kokomo City. Nicole Newnham made a documentary portrait of a person once famous but now largely forgotten: The Disappearance…

Although Namibia provided locations for two major Oscar-winning films — 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1969 winner for best visual effects, and Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2016 winner for best editing, costume design, makeup and hairstyling, sound mixing and sound editing, and production design — the southern African country’s film industry is still a burgeoning one. This year, Namibia has submitted its first entry for the Oscars’ best international feature category: Under the Hanging Tree, written, directed and produced by Perivi Katjavivi. Set in present-day Namibia, Katjavivi’s third feature film follows Christina Mureti (Girley Jazama), a police officer called to investigate a murder in a small village where the descendants of the country’s original German settlers still farm the land. The victim is a German farmer, whose body is…

German director Wim Wenders has proven adept at both narrative and documentary films. This year, his Perfect Days is Japan’s official selection for the Oscars’ international feature category, while his documentary Anselm, about the painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, is also in the awards conversation. Wenders was first recognized by the Academy 23 years ago, when it nominated Buena Vista Social Club for best documentary feature. Until then, the director had been known for his ground-breaking work in indie narrative film (at Cannes, he won the Palme d’Or for Paris, Texas in 1984 and best director for Wings of Desire in 1987) and came to Buena Vista in an unusual way. As Wenders recently recalled to THR’s Scott Feinberg, he’d been working with music producer and guitarist Ry Cooder, a…

It often feels as if there are no truly happy marriages in the movies. This awards season, like so many others before it, you’re more likely to land on a huge argument than you are on an uncomplicated relationship. Drag-out, heartbreaking wars of words between people who once had love for each another are filmmakers’ favorites — and, in turn, favorites of Oscar voters. Movies about marriages crumbling have won trophies and nominations throughout the years and range from 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer, 1999’s American Beauty, 2010’s Blue Valentine and 2019’s Marriage Story. This year, many more could join that acidic club. Take Maestro, for example. Bradley Cooper’s film makes the case that conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan), had a…

How, given the weight of history, and the history of all the other films on the subject, can you make a new film about the Holocaust? That was the central challenge facing British writer-director Jonathan Glazer and the creative team behind A24’s The Zone of Interest. “When Jon and I started, back in 2014, to talk about this, about making a film on this subject, we of course knew Schindler’s List and Son of Saul and everything in between,” says Zone producer James Wilson. “And our conversations were all about, ‘What new is there to say about the Holocaust?’ Except that it was evil, which everyone knows and which felt like a straw target.” Glazer had been “circling around” the idea of doing a Holocaust film for years. “But because…

Maestro costume designer Mark Bridges had worked with Bradley Cooper as an actor on several films, but this marked the first time the pair collaborated when Cooper was in the director’s chair. “There was already a great deal of trust,” says Bridges. In this scene from the film — about the life of composer Leonard Bernstein and his marriage to Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, played by Carey Mulligan — Felicia, in an emotional fulcrum point of the film, is returning to Bernstein’s side after the couple have spent a great deal of time fighting. “I’m always trying to be very specific to time and place and what is happening emotionally in the scene,” says Bridges. “This is 1976. Very soon after that, Felicia [is diagnosed with] cancer. She’s coming back to…

Alma Pöysti agreed to star in Fallen Leaves, Finland’s Oscar entry, before there was a script. It was enough to know that local directing legend Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past) wanted her for his latest working-class love story, playing Ansa, a shy and lonely supermarket shelf stocker who falls for Holappa, a construction worker, played by Jussi Vatanen. How were you cast for this film? I got a phone call that Aki wanted to meet for lunch. We met, and Jussi Vatanen, my co-star, was there as well. Aki presented this idea of the movie. There wasn’t a script yet, but he mumbled something about a love story. Then he wanted to talk about the forest and about growing vegetables and politics. All he said about my character…

n her documentary To Kill a Tiger, which won the prize for best Canadian film at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, filmmaker Nisha Pahuja tackles the most harrowing subject of her career: the fight of an Indian farmer to demand justice for his 13-year-old daughter, Kiran, after she was gang-raped by three men in 2017. Pahuja — who was born in New Delhi and raised in Toronto — reveals how it felt to capture Ranjit’s unprecedented journey and what his fight means for women suffering from India’s epidemic of violence. When and how did you first hear about the heinous crimes committed against Ranjit’s daughter Kiran? I’d been following the work of activists in northeastern India from the Srijan Foundation and the Centre for Health and Social Justice. They’d implemented…