Director Alexander Payne publicly expressed his happiness over a recent Academy Award nomination–and it wasn’t for any of his three this year for Best Director, Best Picture (as a producer along with Jim Burke and Jim Taylor) or Best Adapted Screenplay (with Nat Faxon, Jim Rash) for The Descendants.
Instead he talked of Kevin Tent, whose work on The Descendants has earned him his first career Best Editing Oscar nomination. “I was thrilled he was recognized this year. He [Kevin] is indispensable to me,” affirmed Payne, noting that Tent has teamed with him on all of his features, a filmography which also includes Sideways, About Schmidt, Election and Citizen Ruth.
Payne recalled how he came to meet Tent. The director related that years ago he asked an editor who was “too expensive and unavailable” for him at the time for other editors she would recommend. “She gave me two names,” said Payne. “One was Kevin–I met him and that was it.”
Payne’s remarks about Tent came during the Directors Guild of America’s 21st annual session in which the year’s DGA Award nominees for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film discuss their movies. Held late last month (1/28) at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles and moderated by director Jeremy Kagan–with a simultaneous live video feed to an East Coast gathering at the DGA’s New York Theatre–the session featured Payne, David Fincher who garnered a DGA Award nomination this year for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Michel Hazanavicius who that night won the DGA Award for The Artist, and Martin Scorsese, nominated for Hugo. The remaining DGA Award feature nominee, Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris, was not in attendance.
Allen, Hazanavicius, Payne and Scorsese are all nominated for this year’s Best Director Oscar. The fifth Academy Award nominee is Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life.
Fincher did not receive an Oscar nomination in the directing category but his The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo earned Academy Award nominations for Actress in a Leading Role (Rooney Mara), Cinematography (Jeff Cronenweth, ASC), Editing (Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall), Sound Editing (Ren Klyce) and Sound Mixing (Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick, Bo Persson).
Academy Award frontrunner Winning the DGA Award bodes well for Hazanavicius’ Oscar prospects as the Guild honoree often goes on to earn the Best Directing Academy Award. Only six times since the DGA Awards began in 1948 has the feature film winner not gone on to win the corresponding Oscar.
As for lessons learned from The Artist which might spark advice he’d offer to a new director, Hazanavicius observed that the popularity of the dog in the movie came as quite a surprise.
“People adore the dog. I could not expect that,” he said, then conjecturing as to why. Hazanavicius observed that the main human character in The Artist, silent film star Georg Valentine (portrayed by Best Leading Actor Oscar nominee Jean Dujardin) is “selfish, egocentric, afraid of the future, and doesn’t see a positive future” [with the advent of talkies imminent]. Yet the dog trusts him. If a dog loves the guy, audiences figure that guy has to have something somewhere. The dog thus has put himself in the center of our silent movie,” noted Hazanavicius, leading to the valuable lesson for a director of “how you can tell something about a character through another character,” in this case a dog whom Hazanavicius originally viewed as little more than a means toward some comedic relief.
3D Scorsese’s learning curve on Hugo centered on 3D, and the advice it translates to for young directors is simply, “Keep an open mind about technique. It will always be about storytelling but other things are changing.”
Scorsese sees celluloid film as diminishing, with new digital tools coming to the forefront. Even venues are different, noted Scorsese, observing that the big screen may soon be joined by exhibition venues like “wrist watches.”
At the same time, an old-time, often taken-for-granted toy initially sparked Scorsese’s visual imagination as a lad, now underscoring his love for finally getting the chance to be on the cutting edge of 3D today.
“I’m a 3D fanatic–going back to when I was a kid looking through a View-Master,” he shared.
Casting Relative to casting, Fincher noted that he works “to find someone you can unleash as opposed to someone who needs to be coddled.” Letting actors go for it, actors who can unleash their talent on a role, makes a director’s job infinitely easier, he observed.
Fincher said he had that ideal performer in Best Leading Actress Oscar nominee Mara.
Fincher described the character she portrayed, Lisbeth Salander, as simply, “she’s not a wound, she’s a scar.” Mara indeed went for it, bringing that character to life in every way.
Scorsese recollected that when he saw Asa Butterfield audition for the role of Hugo Cabret, he was instantly drawn to him. “He hesitated, you could see him thinking,” said Scorsese of Butterfield. That reticence and penchant for thought were simpatico, noted Scorsese, with Cabret’s character–a boy who was hiding, a boy who was broken inside and had to be fixed.
Similarly Scorsese saw in child actress Chloë Grace Moretz qualities that were compatible with the character of Isabelle. “She was expressive, irrepressible,” related Scorsese. “I loved working with these children. He [Asa] is the heart of the picture…He was instinctual. He always dealt with the truth of the moment. He dealt with it from the other person, worked off of others. This kid was on and so was she. His reactions in the scenes with Ben [Kingsley] were true emotionally.”
Payne observed that he tries not to have a preconceived notion of what emotions should look like, which proved helpful in working with young performers on The Descendants. He noted that with billions of people, there are billions of ways people react and express their emotions. So those feelings don’t have to come out any certain way. Instead he affirmed, “I’m happy with whatever comes out if I believe it.”
As for parents of aspiring child actors, Payne offered one bit of advice to foster spontaneity and believability of performance. “Make sure the child knows the dialogue but do not rehearse the child.”
Payne also believes in using a single casting director rather that multiple ones with each having a specialty–one for stars, another for extras. He said he got tired of having the same discussion with three different casting directors on the same film. Instead he finds it far better to have one casting director “in charge of all of the flesh.”
Of extras, Payne said he has an assistant director on “torpedo control,” noting that extras paint the picture of the world you’re trying to create. If one extra is off, he or she can ruin the painting. Thus having an a.d. vigilant as to the performance of extras is essential. Continuing with the “torpedo” analogy, Payne quipped that if you don’t find out an extra was deficient until you’re in dailies, then “you’ve been hit.”
Cutting remarks Like Payne at the top of this story, other director panelists touched upon editing. Hazanavicius set out to serve as editor on The Artist, originally bringing on an assistant, Anne-Sophie Bion, who performed so well that she and the director have a co-credit on the editing of the film–as well as a shared Oscar nomination for Best Editing.
Hazanavicius quipped that during shooting everyone raves about what was captured on camera. “They say it’s great but I know I will be crying in the editing room.”
The director noted that he loves shooting but is seemingly always thinking about the editing. In fact, he set a desired length for The Artist going into the shoot and adhered to it–one hour and 40 minutes. The first cut, he recalled was two hours, and he and Bion eventualy got it down to the targeted length.
Hugo, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Moneyball join The Artist and The Descendants as this year’s field of Oscar nominees in the Editing category. Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller (whose commercialmaking roost is Smuggler), was edited by Christopher Tellefsen. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was cut by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, who are both known for their spot work at editorial house Rock Paper Scissors. (Baxter and Wall won the Oscar last year for Fincher’s The Social Network.) And Hugo was cut by Scorsese’s long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
For Hugo, Scorsese said that Schoonmaker cut some scenes in 2D and when they were shown in 3D, the edits weren’t as good as they had appeared in 2D. So all the editing was done in 3D, with Schoonmaker deploying Lightworks which has become her editorial system of choice. After multiple screenings of the work in progress, Scorsese said that he and Schoonmaker saw what needed to be done, rolled up their sleeves and tackled the project at hand.
“We attacked it. For four weeks, we didn’t answer the phone. We were behind locked doors,” said Scorsese who said that ultimately much of what was cut from the film was the expository dialogue and scenes. “The visuals took over in 3D,” assessed Scorsese, and thus eliminated the need for explanatory exposition.
Silent color Hazanavicius said that the black-and-white silent film The Artist was shot on 35mm color film and then “color-corrected” to appear in its final black-and-white form. The Artist’s cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman, AFC, explained that black-and-white stock was too sharp for the desired silent film era look so the decision was made to lens on Kodak color stock. (See separate Cinematographers feature story in this issue).
Schiffman earned his first career Best Cinematography Oscar nomination for The Artist. He is part of an Academy Award nominee field that also consists of Jeff Cronenweth, ASC for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Robert Richardson, ASC, for Hugo; Janusz Kaminski for War Horse; and Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC for The Tree of Life.
Four of these five DPs earned nominations in the feature film category of the ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards, the only exception being Kaminski. That remaining ASC Award nom this year went to Hoyte van Hoytema, FSF, NSC, for Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. This past Sunday (2/12), the ASC Award was bestowed upon Lubezki, perhaps giving him a leg up come Academy Award night.
In the big picture, Hugo led the way this year with a total of 11 Oscar nominations, followed by The Artist with 10, Moneyball and War Horse with six apiece, The Descendants and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo each tallying five, and The Help scoring four.
In the acting categories, The Help got a big boost from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards, winning three of the four categories in which it was nominated. (The four noms were the most of any feature film.) Viola Davis won the SAG Award for Best Actress while Octavia Spencer was named Best Supporting Actress. And The Help won the SAG honor for Best Cast in a motion picture. Prognosticators keep a close watch on SAG Award results in that actors comprise the largest voting group at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which picks the ultimate Oscar acting category winners.
Rango has also performed well on the awards show circuit, arguably enhancing its Oscar prospects in the Best Animated Feature Film category, which also consists of nominees A Cat in Paris, Chico & Rita, Kung Fu Panda 2, and Puss in Boots. Earlier this month Rango took top honors as the Best Animated Feature at the 39th annual Annie Awards. Additionally during the Annies ceremony, the newly created “Members Favorite” award, voted on by the entire ASIFA-Holywood community, went to Rango. Just a few days later, Rango set the pace at the 10th annual Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards competition with four wins, earning distinction for Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature Motion Picture, Best Virtual Cinematography in an Animated Movie, Outstanding Created Environment (Main Street Dirt Saloon) in an Animated Feature, and Best Animated Character (Rango himself) in an Animated Movie.
Meanwhile three Best Visual Effects Oscar nominees–Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Hugo, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon–earned two VES Awards apiece, the biggest win coming for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which took the honor for Outstanding Visual Effects in a VFX-Driven Feature Motion Picture.
Apes’ other VES win was for Caesar as Best Animated Character in a Live-Action Feature.
Transformers copped VES Awards for Outstanding Models and for Outstanding Created Environment (155 Wacker Drive) in a Live Action Feature.
And Hugo’s pair of VES wins came for Outstanding Supporting VFX in a Feature and Best Virtual Cinematography In a Live Action Feature Motion Picture.
Rounding out the field of nominees for the Best Visual Effects Oscar are Harry Potter and the Deathly hallows Part 2, and Real Steel.
As for crystal balling this year’s Art Direction Oscar, a couple of clues emerged during the Art Directors Guild’s (ADG) 16th annual Excellence in Production Design Awards on Feb. 4. The top ADG honors for Period Film and Fantasy Film went, respectively, to Hugo (production designer Dante Ferretti) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (production designer Stuart Craig). Hugo (Ferretti and set decorator Francesca Lo Schiavo) and Harry Potter (Craig, with set decoration by Stephenie McMillan) are both nominated for Art Direction Oscars. The three remaining nominees are The Artist (production design by Laurence Bennett, set decoration by Robert Gould), Midnight in Paris (production design by Anne Seibel, set decoration by Helene Durbreuil) and War Horse (production design by Rick Carter, set decoration by Lee Sandales).
Incidentally, the third major ADG feature award, in the Contemporary Film category, went to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its production designer Donald Graham Burt.
Short takes Sundance too can be a precursor of Oscar recognition. If that proves true this year, it will be in two short film categories as The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom last month won the Sundance Jury Prize in Short Film, Non-Fiction, and A Morning Stroll garnered the Sundance Jury Prize in Animated Short Film.
Directed by Lucy Walker whose spotmaking roost is Supply&Demand Integrated, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom is nominated for a Documentary Short Subject Oscar. And A Morning Stroll–directed by Grant Orchard who helms spots via Studio AKA, London–earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film.
Supply&Demand Integrated produced The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom while Studio AKA produced A Morning Stroll.
Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2011 will be presented on Sunday, Feb. 26, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, Calif., and televised live by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar presentation will also be televised live in more than 225 countries worldwide.
