Upon reading Cord Jefferson’s script for American Fiction (Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios), editor Hilda Rasula said it was “clear from the get-go” that this was a film she deeply wanted to work on. “I believed in the story and his tone of writing, mixing comedy and drama. It was very cool and very special, a good fit for my skills.”
Based on the 2001 novel “Erasure” by Percivil Everett, American Fiction confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes. Jeffrey Wright stars as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a professor of English literature. He is both a respected and frustrated novelist, fed up and disillusioned with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own which propels him to a lucrative publishing deal, the promise of a feature film adaptation–and in the process into the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain. The cast also includes Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae and Erika Alexander.
At AFI Fest back in October right after a screening of American Fiction, Jefferson recalled that upon reading the first 20 pages of “Erasure,” he knew that this was a story he wanted to adapt. Fifty pages in, he felt strongly that this was a film he should also direct. Jefferson reached out to Everett who–apparently feeling the aspiring director’s passion for the story–gave him the rights to the book free of charge for six months. This gave Jefferson time to write his adaptation, at which point the two could confer and then arrive at a deal if they felt the project was properly progressing. Jefferson said he remains indebted to and appreciative of Everett’s graciousness and generosity in giving him the chance to delve into the story and lay the foundation for the film.
Editor Rasula knew of Jefferson’s writing chops, which were already well established–and well reflected in the script for American Fiction. For Watchmen, Jefferson won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series alongside Damon Lindelof. Jefferson’s writing credits also include Succession and the philosophical comedy, The Good Place–shows for which he garnered two Writers Guild Awards and an NAACP Image Award. His other work spans such shows as Station Eleven, Master of None, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, and Survivor’s Remorse.
At the same time, though, Rasula acknowledged that it can a risk to work with a first-time director. However, in the case of American Fiction, she affirmed it was “a risk that paid off.” Rasula described Jefferson as “a wonderfully quick study. His instincts are great. He’s sensitive, a good listener to all the crafts people.”
Rasula added that Jefferson is “open to collaboration on every single level. He respected my expertise and what I had to say.” Rasula was further impressed by how willing Jefferson was to go into the trenches with her and in some instances “kill his darlings,” which can be rare for a first-time director. She conjectured that because of his writing sensibilities, Jefferson was willing to roll up his sleeves with her and leave some wonderful work on the cutting room floor in order to best serve the story and its characters.
The character of “Monk” particularly resonated with Rasula. She liked his persona as a sort of “lovable grump.” And she related to his resistance to more commercially viable writing as opposed to the artsy, esoteric fare that was his first love and came more naturally to him. As an artist in Hollywood, she observed that this art versus commerce quandary is universal. “That internal debate lives inside all of us.”
Not so debatable for Rasula was her decision to hold off reading “Erasure” before editing American Fiction. She noted that “unless a director explicitly wants me to read the source material, I don’t until the picture is locked.” She explained that getting too close to the book runs the risk of her getting tied to the intentions of the original author or work, leading to her having concerns or worries that may not matter to the adaptation. “I decided it’s better to take the screenplay as my North Star” and commit to finding “what the screenplay is going to become as a work of cinema.”
The challenge to arriving at that “work of cinema,” observed Rasula, entailed at times the delicate balancing act needed in order to do justice to “a satire with some sharp elbows.” When dealing with “smart and pointed comedy,” said Rasula, you want it “to be as funny as possible without letting it become farce.”
The satiric also needs to be properly prioritized in relation to the big picture. There’s a layer of satire running along the top line of the film, she continued. But underneath it is really the heart of the film, a family drama, elements of romance, “the story of an artist learning who he is and finding his voice.” Rasula described American Fiction as an embarrassment of riches, telling a lot of different stories instead of one. That was exactly the challenge. Finding the right tone and rhythm to it, akin to deftly keeping “a lot of plates spinning in the air…to keep them moving, to have each one feel organic and meaningful as they flow one into the other,” swinging between comedy and drama, hilarity and pathos.
American Fiction adds to a body of work for Rasula which spans theatrical films and television. On the latter front, her credits include multiple episodes of Transparent, Sorry for Your Loss, Little America and Our Flag Means Death.
Félix Bergés
The Oscar shortlists have been long on good news for Society of the Snow (Netflix). First off, it is one of 15 films to make the shortlist for Best International Feature Film. Society of the Snow was selected by Spain as its official submission in that Oscar category.
Additionally, Society of the Snow is one of 10 films on the Oscar shortlist for Best Visual Effects.
Directed by J.A. Bayona (for a screenplay he teamed on with Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego based on the book of the same title by Pablo Vierci), Society of the Snow tells the story of the October 1972 plane crash in the snowy heart of the Andes in the Valley of Tears. The flight from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile had among its passengers the Old Christians Club rugby team. They were on route to a game that never took place. The plane carried 45 passengers. Twenty-nine of the 45 survived the impact. They faced extreme cold, thirst and hunger and were forced to take extreme measures to stay alive. Some of the survivors died in the ensuing days. On December 23, 1972, two-and-a-half months after the crash, 16 were rescued alive.
Vierci’s book was written 36 years after the plane crash. It gives a voice to the survivors as well as those who didn’t make it out alive. Though it took place 50-plus years ago, the disaster has impacted–and continues to affect–generations of people.
In an earlier installment of this SHOOT Road To Oscar Series, Bayona described Society of the Snow as “a journey of self-discovery.” He observed that the film is akin to people discovering themselves in their “own shadows.” At the outset, Bayona said he found himself “trying to find out what was missing, what was left to be told.” He recalled the first time he met the actual survivors, he left with the “impression that they needed the film more than me. There was something that still needed to be told.” A large part of that was centered on those who didn’t survive. Rescuing those names from the past carried a level of importance–it was as if the survivors wanted a conversation between the living and the dead, related Bayona.
Among those Bayona enlisted to help bring that conversation to pass was visual effects supervisor Félix Bergés. Bayona and Bergés have a collaborative bond. Society of the Snow is their third film together–the other two being The Impossible in 2012 (for which Bergés served as digital effect supervisor) and A Monster Calls in 2016 (with Bergés as VFX supervisor). And across all three of these films, Bergés noted that there’s been a consistency of approach and philosophy–namely striving to do “invisible effects” so that audiences aren’t at all aware of any VFX work in scenes, making them as real as possible.
That is an essential part of Society of the Snow as the filmmakers aimed to make audience members feel like they are at the crash scene–at one with those who survived, 13 of whom would subsequently die while waiting to be rescued. Authenticity was key, meaning that the movie could not resort to trying to give the illusion of being amidst snowy mountains by filming in a studio using green screens.
The first stage of shooting took place in the Valley of Tears in Argentina. A team adept at mountain shoots navigated the difficult-to-reach area to film the scenery at different times of day and in different lighting conditions. A VFX team studied the area from all angles so that the proper scale and scope would be reflected on screen. There was also some photogrammetry work that captured the 3D geometry of the site. That was key in order to later put the realities of that space together with what would be filmed in Sierra Nevada, Granada, during ski season in Spain. Combining footage from the Andes, Sierra Nevada and a digital component in a seamless fashion–conveying a setting that was beautiful and brutal at the same time, and of epic nature’s scale–was a prime challenge faced and met by the VFX ensemble. Actual snowfall was lensed, as were different kinds of fabricated snow to help create a realism placing the audience with the main characters. Bayona especially valued real snow–some of which was transported to the set–so that actors could literally feel the cold.
Effects were done under the aegis of El Ranchito with Bergés and VFX supervisor Laura Pedro working closely together. (Bergés is a founder of El Ranchito, a VFX studio with operations in Madrid and Barcelona; Pedro is a VFX supervisor there.) Bergés and Pedro too have a shorthand–with each other and with Bayona–as they first teamed on A Monster Calls (for which Pedro supervised on-set VFX). Bergés said of Pedro, with whom he’s worked on multiple projects, “We have a special relationship. She’s very fast and hard-working. In some ways we have the same character and same way of doing things.” Pedro’s youth and energy were particularly advantageous for Society of the Snow. Now in his 60s, Bergés was told by climbers that he could not go the Valley of the Tears due to the arduous conditions. Pedro, though, was up to the physical challenge and her work in the Andes dovetailed with Bergés as they collaborated to do justice to the story.
Bergés and Pedro are also accustomed to collaborating with special effects supervisor Pau Costa whose credits include four Bayona films–The Orphanage, The Impossible, A Monster Calls and Society of the Snow. Among the high-profile responsibilities for Costa on Society of the Snow was the plane crash, trying to be as accurate as possible in the context of what the survivors remembered–such as the chain reaction across the seats as the plane starts falling and then upon impact. The energy pushes itself from the back to all the way to the front of the plane. Bergés described Costa as being a wizard with mechanical effects–using gimbal and cable systems to pull off scenes realistically, and helping to design the plane to facilitate them. Additionally, air canons were deployed to recreate the avalanches that bury the characters beneath the snow. Fake snow and other objects were loaded into the cannons and with pressurized air created an explosion-like effect. “You feel the dynamic, you feel the forces," affirmed Bergés.
While the challenges are great and multi-faceted, Bergés noted that helping to make them doable is a director like Bayona who “tells you want he wants. This is the best thing you can ask for. He knows the images he wants. He understands the visual effects.”
Richard King
Also making its mark on the Oscar shortlist front is sound designer/supervising sound editor Richard King. Two films he worked on, Maestro (Netflix) and Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures), made the Sound shortlist, which consists of just 10 movies.
King delved into Oppenheimer with SHOOT but at the time of our interview wasn’t yet at liberty to discuss Maestro. Oppenheimer continues what has been a fruitful collaborative relationship between King and writer-director Christopher Nolan. King is a four-time Oscar winner for Best Achievement in Sound Editing–three of them coming for Nolan films: The Dark Knight in 2009. Inception in 2011, and Dunkirk in 2018. King’s first Oscar win came for director Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in 2004.
That latter film led to King first connecting with Nolan. Master and Commander editor Lee Smith, who has a long track record with Nolan, introduced King to the director–during pre-pro on Nolan’s The Prestige. King got The Prestige gig and from that has sprung an ongoing collaborative bond.
The word “ongoing” also applies to Nolan’s process, shared King. “The creative work doesn’t end until the last day of the mix,” he said, noting that Nolan and he “keep trying to find better ways of doing things.” They are seemingly always looking for “more rules we can break, trying to do things in a fresh way.”
And there’s much research to be done up front as King tries to be as knowledgeable as possible about the subject matter. After reading Nolan’s script, King felt the need to check out the book from which it was adapted–Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The authors of that book, which came out in 2005, spent some 25 years researching theoretical physicist Oppenheimer (portrayed by Cillian Murphy in Nolan’s film), known as “the father of the atomic bomb” in his capacity as director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico during World War II.
Beyond that, King read every book about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project that he could get his hands on. Acknowledging that Nolan’s Oppenheimer is not a documentary, King nonetheless observed, “I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have some command of the facts,” including what he could absorb about quantum physics. And in his research, King related that he found “tidbits of gold,” including descriptions of what the Trinity test, the world’s first nuclear explosion, in 1945 sounded like. This knowledge helped inform his work on the soundscape of the film.
At the same time, much more than research and knowledge goes into sound design. “To me, sound design is a lot like comedy. It’s difficult to explain why something works but you know in your gut when it does.”
And that gut feeling is attained through an extensive discovery process with Nolan. “I’m very proud of the film,” said King. “We had tried everything…literally gone down so many roads and tried every which way of approaching any given scene. And to me that’s very satisfying, to not go in with any kind of preconceived ideas of how a scene should work, to kind of discover it. That discovery process is in all of Chris’ films.”
King described it as “happening upon the right combination of sounds that tells the story in that moment” and that “makes the point that Chris is trying to make in that moment. It’s a series of epiphanies…not dictated by any sort of rulebook or that things should be this way or things should sound a certain way. It’s a discovery process. That’s how art is made.”
King shared that he tries to approach every project with that orientation. “I start any movie by trying to feel like a beginner, fresh.” That means going in with the intent to “not use any tried-and-true methods” and “without a playbook.” This discovery process is “what makes this work for me so continuously exciting and fun.”
King’s body of work is full of such discovery. In addition to the four Best Achievement in Sound Editing Oscars he’s won, King was nominated for two more–for Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds in 2006, and Nolan’s Interstellar in 2015. King has also won four Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) Awards–for Inception, The Dark Knight, War of the Worlds, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. And King has been honored with the MPSE Career Achievement Award.
(This is the 11th installment of a 16-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies and on SHOOTonline.com, with select installments also in print issues. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards gala ceremony. Nominations for the 96th Academy Awards will be announced on January 23, 2024, The 96th Oscars will be held on Sunday, March 10, 2024.)
