Director Stephen Frears first worked with actress Judi Dench on Going Gentry, a BBC2 teleplay in 1981. They have since reunited three times—in 1983’s telefilm Saigon: Year of the Cat, 2005’s Mrs. Henderson Presents for which Dench received Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, and now Philomena for which she earned her seventh career Oscar nomination.
Dench won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love. Her other noms were for Lead Actress in Mrs. Brown in 1998, Iris in 2002, and Notes on a Scandal in 2007, and for Best Supporting Actress in Chocolat in 2001.
“She is a brilliant performer and I guess I’m on that list of people she trusts, which I’m quite proud of,” said Frears, himself a two-time Best Director Academy Award nominee for The Grifters in 1991 and The Queen in 2006.
Dench plays the title character in Philomena which is based on Martin Sixsmith’s book “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee” which tells the true story of a young Catholic woman in 1950s Ireland who is sent to a convent when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock. As her penance, she is “sentenced” to one of the Irish Catholic Church’s Magdalene laundries where unmarried mothers worked to pay back the church for having taken them in. She has limited access to her son, Anthony, until he is three years old when he is adopted (sold by the church) to an American couple.
Some 50 years later, Philomena meets former BBC reporter Sixsmith (portrayed by Steve Coogan who along with Jeff Pope wrote the screenplay adapted from Sixsmith’s book), telling him about the child taken from her and her attempts to find him which have been to no avail. Even though the church obstructs her quest to find her son at every turn, Philomena remains a devout Catholic, a striking contrast to the secular, often cynical Sixsmith. Figuratively worlds apart, the two come together on a trip to the U.S. to find Anthony.
“There are responsibilities dealing with a real story and the people involved,” said Frears. “I very much felt that responsibility and Judi did as well. She was very concerned about doing justice to the story and to the real Philomena.”
Frears noted, though, that what really drew him to the story was “the opportunity to balance tragedy and comedy.” While the script conveys profound sadness, it also has assorted moments of levity, largely centered on how the dramatically different attitudes and perspectives of Philomena and Sixsmith co-exist, somehow mesh and eventually find common ground. Each influences the other in an ultimately positive way.
Philomena also earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Achievement in Music (Original Score—Alexandre Desplat).
While Frears has a track record with Dench, Philomena represented his first time collaborating with cinematographer Robbie Ryan and editor Valerio Bonelli. Frears said he was drawn to Ryan’s work and knew Bonelli from serving as his teacher at the U.K.’s National Film and Television School. Bonelli’s prior editing credits include Redemption, The Cold Light of Day and Without Gorky.
DP Ryan won a Bronze Frog at Camerimage in 2011 for the Andrea Arnold-directed Wuthering Heights, and his cinematography was nominated for a British Independent Film Award in 2009 for Fish Tank (also directed by Arnold) and in 2012 for the Sally Potter-directed Ginger & Rosa.
As for Frears, his next project is an untitled biopic on cyclist Lance Armstrong, with Ben Foster in the lead role.
Joe Walker
Like cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, BSC (see The Road To Oscar, Part 1, SHOOT, 10/18/13), editor Joe Walker has worked on all three of director Steve McQueen’s feature films: Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave. Last week the latter earned nine Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Director, Editing, Lead Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender), Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o), Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley), Production Design (production design by Adam Stockhausen, set decoration by Alice Baker) and Costume Design (Patricia Norris).
Set in the 1840s, 12 Years a Slave is based on the memoirs of Solomon Northrop, a New York violinist who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Based on a true story told in Northrop’s memoirs, the film is a harrowing look at the physical and psychological trauma he endured during his dozen years in slavery.
“Solomon’s journey is very internal and we had to draw that out in a visual way,” related Walker. “Steve [McQueen] has such sensitivity to the nonverbal, the tactile and to texture. There’s a period when Solomon is cutting cane and we wanted to emphasize his longing for family—things all going on in his head but which needed to be drawn out for the audience. There’s an amazing shot of him playing his violin back when he was a free man. And we then see the degraded shadow of this same man. Solomon scratches the name of his family onto his violin. He’s forbidden to write. But he’s trying to keep his mind together against the onslaught. He tenderly crooks the violin—his family—under his neck. There’s a strong symbolism when he breaks the violin, which represents the past. It’s a way to remember in the middle of the film the family he was taken from—a reminder to the audience of what he has lost.”
Walker noted that select fine touches were added during a brief planned shoot after principal photography and editing. Walker explained that this way of working started during McQueen’s first feature Hunger, which focuses on Irish republican Bobby Sands who leads prison inmates on a hunger strike. There was a break in shooting so actor Fassbender could lose weight. During that time, Walker cut what had been shot. When production resumed, McQueen, Bobbitt and Walker went into the final week of shooting with a better defined understanding of what else he needed to capture to advance and enhance the story.
McQueen, Bobbitt and Walker adopted that same workflow to realize a similar dynamic on 12 Years a Slave. Additional shoot days were planned from the outset to facilitate story-enhancing touches. Walker explained, “This was not extensive reshooting—instead we used the additional shoot days for images that could finesse the cut and shed light on the inner life of the characters, particularly Solomon.”
Walker recalled his first meeting with McQueen. The editor came in for an interview on the director’s pending project, Hunger. “We hit it off. The script of Hunger had made such an impression on me. It sounds cliche but I felt that if they make this film exactly as in the script, the result would be brilliant. Steve did that while adding so much more. I feel fortunate that we connected. We both lived in a suburb of London, a stone’s throw from Ealing Studios. We were just naturally on the same wavelength. At the same time, he opened my eyes about things. I grew up in a household with a right-wing bent, where the hunger strikers were viewed as terrorists, their acts considered suicide and as doing a great disservice to Catholics worldwide. I saw the other side of the story through Steve, to see that it wasn’t suicide, it wasn’t terrorism. It was a freedom fight. Steve’s film doesn’t condemn anybody. It promotes understanding and delves into the inner workings of the people involved.”
Walker described working with McQueen as a joy. “If I won the lottery tonight and didn’t ever have to work again, I’d show up on Monday to work with Steve. He wants you to have good ideas, He is open to those ideas. He cares about you. He keeps you on your toes. He treats everybody like an artist. He expects everyone to have and bring inspiration.”
In addition to the Oscar nomination for 12 Years a Slave, Walker has earned such honors as an European Film Award for Best Editor on the strength of Shame, and a British Independent Film Award nomination, also for Shame.
At press time, Walker was in the midst of teaming with a couple of other editors on an action crime drama for another high-profile filmmaker, Michael Mann.
Sanders, DeMicco
Last week when The Croods earned a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, it was the third of Chris Sanders’ career. He was a nominee for Lilo & Stich in 2003 and How to Train Your Dragon in 2011. Another common bond among these films is that Sanders co-directed them—Lilo & Stich and How to Train Your Dragon with Dean DeBlois, and The Croods with Kirk DeMicco.
“There’s no clear delineation as to a division of labor,’ related DeMicco when asked about his teaming with Sanders to direct. “I would write, Chris would direct. Chris would write. I would direct. When you write, you have a deep understanding of the material and what you need to accomplish as directors. I write, he rewrites, we do an outline together and know what we want from each scene.”
Sanders welcomes the collaboration. “Animated features are gigantic, have long schedules, and to have another director to bounce ideas off of, share responsibilities with, is great. It’s a valuable partnership.”
The Croods introduces us to a caveman’s family who have to deal with a changing world, literally coming out of their cave to encounter life’s challenges and a planet that’s seismically evolving. The Croods are one of the few families to survive, mainly due to an overprotective father, Grug (voiced by Nicholas Cage), who views exploration and new things as a threat to survival. His family—wife Ugga, son Thunk, baby daughter Sandy, and mother-in-law Gran—agrees, except for teenage daughter Eep (Emma Stone), a curious, rebellious adventurer. She finds a kindred spirit in Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a clever and inventive caveboy. As the Earth changes and the Croods are forced out of their cave sanctuary, so too does the hierarchy as Grug seems less capable than Guy—who is resourceful and can create fire—at protecting everyone. Grug comes to grips with change, life, the importance of family and his loved ones’ quality of life.
The Croods was initially planned as a stop-motion animation film with DeMicco and John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) teaming on a script. However, when stop motion shop Aardman Animations and DreamWorks parted ways, DeMicco came together with Sanders to develop the story which evolved into the Croods clan as we now know them. However, Sanders’ other project commitments at the time meant that wheels turned slowly in The Croods getting formally underway. This is why The Croods, which ultimately became a CG film, wound up taking eight years to come to fruition.
Sanders grew up in traditional animation, making the transition to CG with How to Train Your Dragon. “CG was new and unknown to me until How to Train Your Dragon which was my crash course in CG,” said Sanders. “I brought the knowledge from that film back over to The Croods. We needed the CG to be realistic and less cartoony because The Croods is a very human story. The characters are human yet they’re quite outrageous, fast, strong, very different than you and I. They are so different that we needed viewers to understand that they still were mortal and lived in our world. That’s why at the beginning of the film it was important to share that all their neighbors are dead, that the Croods are the only ones in their neighborhood to survive in the real world.”
DeMicco noted that another challenge was that there are limited characters in the movie—”a family that is on screen all the time. That’s why the maze sequence in which they’re separated provides a nice change of pace.”
Sanders added that family members are all rich in terms of their comedic potential. The delicate balance, though, was to tap into that funny bone while maintaining the emotional core of the characters so that the serious side of the story didn’t get lost.
Another prime character, pointed out Sanders, is the setting, “the land itself, the world the Croods live in, a geologically active world. Even the interiors [caves] are exteriors. This made the scale of the project, creating this world, that much larger and incredibly ambitious.”
Sanders and DeMicco currently have two Annie Award nominations for their directing of The Croods. In total, The Croods garnered 17 Annie noms, including for Best Animated Feature. Additionally, The Croods earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Animated Film.
As for what’s next for Sanders and DeMicco, they are writing and will be directing the sequel The Croods 2.
Philippe Le Sourd
Cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd first worked with director Wong Kar-wai on a commercial in Paris. Next came short films which Le Sourd lensed for the filmmaker in China and India. On the long-form front, the duo collaborated on The Grandmaster which just earned Le Sourd a Best Cinematography Oscar nomination–on the heels of his receiving an ASC Award nom. And coming full circle Le Sourd recently wrapped another commercial for Wong Kar-wai.
The Grandmaster explores the life of Ip Man (Tony Leung), the martial arts master credited with teaching Bruce Lee how to fight. The visually rich film was originally going to entail six months of filming, recalled Le Sourd. After that stretch, two additional months were added to the schedule. When it was all said and done, though, Le Sourd spent some two years on The Grandmaster, including 20 months in China.
Le Sourd kept an extensive journal about the lighting and other details related to each scene because there were times where he’d come back to a scene a year or two later and had to recreate the original look. “It was a remarkable journey,” said Le Sourd, noting that Wong Kar-wai maintained an improvisational approach throughout the project. “When you work on something for so long, the journey becomes personal. And those personal discoveries about the story and the characters affect the process, the improvisation, as you go along. You might not want to have the same lighting. You may want to build the story with the light a different way.”
There are two versions of The Grandmaster in release. Le Sourd described the Chinese version as “slower, longer, more spiritual” than its American counterpoint which is “more straight to the point.” Le Sourd feels both versions are valid and provide different perspectives on the story of Ip Man.
Among the many other honors already picked up by The Grandmaster are inclusion by the National Board of Review in its list of the past year’s Top Five Foreign Language Films, and a Best Cinematography nomination for Le Sourd from the Online Film Critics Society Awards.
French-born, New York-based Le Sourd has amassed a body of work that extends beyond his collaborations with Wong Kar-wai. Among the DP’s notable credits are Gabriele Muccino’s Seven Pounds starring Will Smith, Ridley Scott’s A Good Year, and the French-language films Atomik Circus, Le Retour De James Bataille, Peut-Etre and Cantique De La Racaille.
Best Picture rundown
In addition to 12 Years a Slave and Philomena, the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar are: American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, and The Wolf of Wall Street. Here are nomination rundowns and/or tidbits on those last seven feature films:
The Wolf of Wall Street landed major Academy Award nominations besides Best Picture. It’s in the running for Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Lead Actor (Leonardo Di Caprio), Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill) and Adapted Screenplay (Terence Winter). The Wolf of Wall Street marks the eighth career Best Director Oscar nomination for Scorsese. He won the Best Director Oscar in 2007 for The Departed. His other Best Director nominations came for Hugo in 2011, The Aviator in 2005, Gangs of New York in 2003, Goodfellas in 1991, The Last Temptation of Christ in 1989 and Raging Bull in 1981. Scorsese also garnered a Best Motion Picture nomination for Hugo in 2012, and Best Adapted Screenplay nominations for The Age of Innocence in 1994 and Goodfellas in 1991.
Nebraska’s other Oscar noms spanned Best Director (Alexander Payne), Lead Actor (Bruce Dern), Supporting Actress (June Squibb), Cinematography (Phedon Papamichael, ASC) and Original Screenplay (Bob Nelson).
Oscar nominee Papamichael, ASC, provided backstory in last month’s installment of The Road To Oscar (SHOOT, 12/13/13) as to how the decision came about to lens Nebraska in black and white. “It wasn’t really that much of an intellectual decision. It was more instinctual. Alexander [Payne] mentioned this film to me 10 years ago as we were prepping Sideways. Back then, Nebraska as a film existed in black and white for him—and it works. All that matters is communicating with the audience. And sometimes whether they can consciously express it or not, black and white somehow feels appropriate for what they’re watching. It supports all the scenes in Nebraska. Black and white allows you to focus on [lead actor] Bruce Dern in a unique way, his white hair that blows in a ghost-like manner, the textures of his face and the subtleties of his little looks without the distraction of the color palette. Black and white just seems right for the landscapes, the graphic qualities, the horizon.”
The other nominations for Dallas Buyers Club are for Best Leading Actor (Matthew McConaughey), Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender), Editing (John Mac McMurphy, Martin Pensa), Original Screenplay (Craig Borten, Melisa Wallack) and Makeup & Hairstyling (Adruitha Lee, Robin Mathews).
American Hustle’s other noms are for Best Director (David O. Russell), Lead Actor (Christian Bale), Lead Actress (Amy Adams), Supporting Actor (Bradley Cooper), Supporting Actress (Jennifer Lawrence), Original Screenplay (Eric Warren Singer, David O. Russell), Editing (Jay Cassidy, Crispin Struthers, Alan Baumgarten), Production Design (production design by Judy Becker, set decoration by Heather Loeffler), and Costume Design (Michael Wilkinson). Writer/director Russell has a long track record with many of his collaborators on American Hustle. Of his editing ensemble, he told SHOOT in last month’s The Road To Oscar feature, “Crispin was an assistant on The Fighter and became one of our team members, moving on to Silver Linings Playbook. Jay was recommended by Sean Penn for Silver Linings Playback after [editor] Pam Martin was unavailable. Jay is very dedicated and passionate. He’s sort of the captain of the editing room. We had such a short post schedule on American Hustle, that we also welcomed [editor] Alan Bumgarten aboard who I hadn’t worked with before. Alan was great. We will all work together again.”
Gravity’s 10 nominations tied with American Hustle for the most this year. Gravity was also nominated for Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón), Lead Actress (Sandra Bullock), Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC), Editing (Cuaron and Mark Sanger), Music (Original Score, Steven Price), Production Design (production design by Andy Nicholson, set decoration by Rosie Goodwin and Joanne Woollard), Sound Editing (Glenn Freemantle), Sound Mixing (Skip Lievsay, Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead, Chris Munro), and Visual Effects (Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, David Shirk, Neil Corbould). See this week’s Cameras & Cinematographers for more on Gravity from DP Lubezki, and our VES Awards preview for feedback from Webber.
Captain Phillips also garnered nominations for Supporting Actor (Barkhad Abdi), Film Editing (Christopher Rouse), Sound Editing (Oliver Tarney), Sound Mixing (Chris Burdon, Mark Taylor, Mike Prestwood Smith, Chris Munro) and Adapted Screenplay (Billy Ray).
Beyond Best Picture, Her scored nominations for Production Design (production design by K.K. Barrett, set decoration by Gene Serdena), Original Screenplay (Spike Jonze), Music (Original Song, “The Moon Song,” musuic by Karen O, Lyric by Karen O and Jonze) and Original Score (William Butler, Owen Pallett).
In last month’s installment of The Road To Oscar, nominee Barrett told SHOOT how he first connected with Jonze. “Spike and I came together in commercials oddly enough. We were both self taught so we were experimenting through videos and commercials to sharpen our sense of play in film. After a year of all kinds of projects, we rolled into Being John Malkovich and never looked back. On Her it began with him downloading his ideas to me; I get excited and flooded with thoughts of my own and begin to cut him off, we wrestle with the possibilities and hopefully all the best ones win. Spike is great in that he doesn’t want to be film referential, I’m the same, so making a film set in the future meant it couldn’t look like any other future film, but it made us look harder and longer to define what it would be. Where the Wild Things Are was the same process. We pile up buzzwords, abstract visuals and filter them until we have a feeling. Building a world starts with a feeling rather than plans.”
Barrett noted that the challenge of Her “was the same as all films, hopefully making it [the production design] visually unique to a singular story. The real challenge, given that it was a world not now but just around the corner, was making sure you didn’t dwell on visions of the future that didn’t affect the simplicity of the story. From early on I didn’t want to follow a tech or ‘surprising innovation’ path. I just used logic and focused on a few simple things I wish would change rather than what everyone said would change.”
Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2013 will be presented on Oscar Sunday, March 2, 2014, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center and televised live on the ABC Television Network. The presentation, produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
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To read "The Road To Oscar, Part 1," click here.
To read "The Road To Oscar, Part 2," click here.
To read "The Road To Oscar, Part 3," click here.
