Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 1B - January 7, 2025 i The Hollywood Reporter

COLOSSEUM COLLAB Ridley Scott, in the workshop area, gives notes to Max (in sunglasses) and two art directors about the Colosseum’s main entry gate. “He loves to put in little details as he goes along — or change things in a major way,” Max says of the director. Given that Scott once worked as a production designer for the BBC, Max adds, “It’s hard to get away with anything with him.” GETTING WET The naval battle reenactment was shot in the reconstructed Colosseum on dry land, with water added digitally. The boats — on the left is the Persian ship manned by gladiators, next to the white Athenian vessel — were around 65 feet long and rested on remotely controlled hydraulic platforms. The only real water on set came out…

Bill Skarsgard isn’t new to the world of prosthetics in film — we all remember his horrifying turn as Pennywise in It. In Robert Eggers’ reimagining of the classic Nosferatu, the Swedish actor was back in the makeup chair, ready to be transformed into the title character, also known as Count Orlok. “Bill’s really tall, and he’s very slim and charming and a real kind of fun guy, and he’s got this lovely, warm personality,” prosthetic lead David White tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I remember during the first makeup session, as we’re putting this makeup on, this sweet, charming young guy began to disappear and somebody else was coming in. He transformed within the space of four hours into this very dark character.” White always begins his prosthetics work by…

The relationship between the two mismatched cousins played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain is balanced by the simple yet sophisticated score that consists almost entirely of piano pieces by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin — a purposeful decision by Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the film. “As I was writing A Real Pain, it was focused on this funny and fraught relationship between these two guys that were trying to connect to their past relationship, and in many ways, they became children around each other,” Eisenberg tells THR of his Holocaust-history dramedy. “And I wanted the tone of the movie, very specifically, to not be juvenile. I wanted the tone of the movie to be a commentary on these characters falling into old patterns against…

What’s the deal with the film Academy’s documentary branch? This season’s shortlist for the best documentary feature Oscar, released Dec. 17, was missing one of the year’s most acclaimed crowd-pleasers, Warner Bros.’ Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story — which is at 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, won the top Critics Choice documentary award and is nominated for the Producers Guild’s top doc award — and also impressive documentaries about Martha Stewart (Martha), Celine Dion (I Am: Celine Dion), James Carville (Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid) and John Williams (Music by John Williams), among others. This isn’t to say that the 15 docs that were shortlisted are lacking — to the contrary, most are excellent. But it does reconfirm the doc branch’s weird aversion, over roughly the past decade, to worthy…

Andrew Wyatt is a songwriter and producer who has worked with Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars and Miley Cyrus. Andrew Watt also is a songwriter and producer who has worked with Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars and Miley Cyrus. They often get mistaken for each other. “I get congratulated for winning an Oscar, and he doesn’t,” Watt says of Wyatt, who won the 2019 best original song Academy Award for “Shallow,” from A Star Is Born. “People come up to me and say, ‘I love your work with The Rolling Stones,’ ” Wyatt says, referring to Watt, who worked on Mick Jagger and company’s 2025 Grammy-nominated Hackney Diamonds and is nominated himself for producing songs for Pearl Jam and Gaga and Mars. He adds: “At this point, literally I’m so sick of…

For more than three decades, director Tim Burton has collaborated with costume designer Colleen Atwood to develop the darkly offbeat sensibility behind some of his greatest hits: Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Alice in Wonderland and current Netflix series Wednesday. Now the four-time Oscar-winning Atwood has taken the reins on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, following Aggie Guerard Rodgers’ designs for the original Beetlejuice 36 years ago. The new film? It involved handcrafting nearly 1,000 costumes, Atwood estimates. Among them is that iconic black-and-white striped suit for the character reprised by Michael Keaton, crafted of luxe silk sourced from heritage Italian textile company Taroni. “I actually had that fabric in my house forever because at one point I was going to cover a couch in it, but I have animals, so I realized that…

Just a few years after Ben Snow worked as a digital effects artist on Twister, he found himself hoping to have another go at crafting the violent air clouds that unleashed devastation across Oklahoma in the 1996 film. “The tool set was evolving so quickly back then that I’d wished we could go back and do it over because technology advanced so quickly,” Snow (yes, that is his real name) tells The Hollywood Reporter. Nearly 30 years later, Snow got his chance as the visual effects supervisor for this year’s stand-alone sequel Twisters, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell. The challenge this time was not technological limitations but rather viewer expectations. “Ultimately, it does have to convince an audience that is much more visually aware of what tornadoes look like…

The fact that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo sang live in Jon M. Chu’s Wicked has wowed fans (yes, Erivo belted while whizzing through the air during “Defying Gravity” and Grande didn’t rely on prerecords while swinging on a chandelier during “Popular”). But allowing the film’s two leads to go live — on which Chu and the actors insisted to capture the spirit of the Broadway musical — took a village. The sound teams had to work with the choreographers, production designers, costume department and stunt teams, among others, to make sure that the microphones didn’t pick up any noise that would hinder a clear recording of the vocals. “From the first moment Jon and I met on Zoom, he said, ‘I really feel like we have to go live,…

Adam Elliot and Gints Zilbalodis are used to being underdogs. The respective directors of Memoir of a Snail, the 1970s-set Australian claymation feature about a hoarder with a mollusk obsession, and the Latvian, cat-based CGI adventure tale Flow know that the path to Oscar-worthy animation rarely runs through Melbourne or Riga. Yet their features, made for a pittance — Flow cost $3.8 million, Memoir of a Snail $4.5 million — are two of hottest contenders in this season’s awards race, facing off against such big-budget juggernauts as Pixar’s $200 million Inside Out 2 and the deep pockets of the studio marketing machines. Notes Elliot, “Netflix’s budget for an awards campaign is more than the production budgets of both of our films, combined!” Elliot and Zilbalodis recently got on a joint…

“Kiss the Sky,” Maren Morris’ rousing anthem that anchors animated hit The Wild Robot, is ostensibly about a robot helping a goose fly. To its singer, it has a whole other layer of meaning. “If I go internal, I realize it’s about my son,” says Morris, referring to Hayes, now nearly 5. “The whole ‘You don’t know until you go’ mentality. Try it, because what’s the worst that can happen? You crash. But everyone has.” Anyone who has followed Morris’ career might be inclined to find encoded in “You don’t know until you go” a more personal artistic message, too. Morris, after all, has been taking her own deep-breath leaps lately. Despite emerging as a country star — with top 10 hits like “My Church,” “Rich” and “I Could Use…

Director Robert Eggers’ new vision of Nosferatu is in theaters, but he isn’t the first to sink his teeth into revisiting the titular vampire. The current movie remakes German director F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film of the same name — which was inspired by Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 horror novel, Dracula, but did not have the rights to the book and altered key details. The movie gained popularity in the 1960s after prints recirculated, and German filmmaker Werner Herzog set out to make his own reinterpretation: Nosferatu the Vampyre. Following the 1972 release of his historical epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog reteamed with leading man Klaus Kinski in the second of their five feature collaborations. Herzog’s version centers on Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) venturing to the castle of…