“This was not a normal film,” assessed Alejandro González Iñárritu, director, producer and co-writer of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). “All the processes–all the departments, from editing to production design–had to approach things in an adventurous way. It was so unconventional that all the rules were different.”
Motion Picture Academy members proclaimed vive la différence as reflected in nine Oscar nominations–for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki), Original Screenplay (Iñárritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., Armando Bo), Actor in a Leading Role (Michael Keaton), Supporting Actor (Edward Norton), Supporting Actress (Emma Stone), Sound Editing (Martin Hernandez, Aaron Glascock), and Sound Mixing (Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montano, Thomas Varga). The nine noms tied with The Grand Budapest Hotel for most this year.
Birdman stars Michael Keaton as a washed-up actor who’s famous for portraying an iconic superhero (Birdman). He tries to shake that comic book type casting as he struggles to mount an esoteric Broadway play. In the days leading up to opening night, he battles his ego and other inner demons while attempting to recover his family, his career and himself.
The movie plays out as if it is one continuous scene with one scenario moving right into the next, an approach that’s designed to depict how people see the world in which they live. “We all open our eyes when we wake up in the morning and in everyday life it’s like a constantly running camera,” Iñárritu observed, noting that there are “no edits” and he needed to capture that perspective in order to convey something as personal as one’s ego. In order to give the feeling of an ongoing flow, extensive planning was required.
Consider the editing of the film by Stephen Mirrione, ACE and Douglas Crise. “The biggest challenge,” observed Mirrione, ACE, “is being able to remove your editorial ego so to speak in that normally you sit back and wait for everything to come in and know you will get your chance then to fix any issues or problems. You have a lot of freedom and tricks up your sleeve to go anywhere and do anything. The director knows this too and leans on you at that point. But with this movie, everything was completely reversed. Editorial decisions are made even as early as rehearsal. Doug and I were involved even before they started shooting, trying to help during table reads and rehearsals. We had to change the rhythm of how we interacted with Alejandro.”
Crise noted, “Fixing it later in post didn’t apply to this movie. We had some assemblies while we were still shooting. We were looking at different takes and trying different things all the time. I felt like I was on a toboggan ride.”
Whereas Mirrione and Crise have a track record with Iñárritu which includes a Best Editing Oscar nomination for Babel in 2007, production designer Kevin Thompson collaborated with the director for the first time on Birdman. Thompson’s filmography includes Michael Clayton for which he earned an Art Directors Guild’s Excellence in Production Design Award nomination in 2008. (Tony Gilroy directed Michael Clayton.)
When his long-time production designer Brigitte Broch was unavailable, Iñárritu turned to Thompson.
While confident in Thompson, Iñárritu found himself out of his comfort zone in another respect. “I never built sets. I was terrified of sets,” said Iñárritu. “They always look like sets to me. I hate those walls. So it was important that Kevin create walls, carpeting, wallpaper that had life and was real. The corridors [backstage in the theater] are real. I wanted this infinite narrow labyrinth that served every action. Kevin nailed it.”
Iñárritu described as “another curiosity” his desire to have those corridors start to narrow during the course of the film. “This is an actor threatened by his mediocrity,” explained Iñárritu. “I wanted the corridors to narrow and start almost trapping him towards the end. Kevin designed a mechanism to create this narrowing. The set became alive to reflect what the character was experiencing.”
Also reflecting that experience was the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, an Oscar winner last year for Gravity. “Emmanuel is an outstanding artist, a very poetic guy who understands about soul and emotion, the qualities a DP should have,” related Iñárritu. For this [Birdman], the camera was the heart and mind of the character. No single film light was used; everything was practical, actual light. The camera became an extension of the emotions of this guy [Riggan Thomson/Birdman, portrayed by Keaton].”
Iñárritu observed, “The technical aspect is nothing compared to the mental and emotional. Every member of my team thinks towards building what the audience receives emotionally from the story and its characters.”
Lubezki has moved on to lens Iñárritu’s next picture, The Revenant staring Leonardo DiCaprio. Mirrione is editing The Revenant.
Prior to Birdman, Iñárritu had two Oscar nominations, Best Picture and Best Achievement in Directing for Babel in 2007. Birdman also landed Iñárritu his third career DGA Award nomination–one for Babel, the other coming in the Commercials competition. Iñárritu won the DGA Award in 2013 for Best Commercial Director on the strength of Procter & Gamble’s emotionally moving “Best Job” out of Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Asked how his commercialmaking (via Anonymous Content) has impacted him as a movie director, Iñárritu said all his experience has proven valuable. “A pilot gets his license to fly after a certain number of hours in flight. All my hours on the set before I ever directed have meant a lot. I spent years on set doing everything and that helped me to understand the complexity of the set, how it works, the tricks, the mechanics, learning about lenses and cameras. You learn only with time and my experience in commercials and films has contributed to what I am able to do in collaboration with others.”
Wes Anderson
As referenced earlier, director/writer/producer Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel garnered nine Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay (screenplay by Anderson, story by Anderson & Hugo Guinness), Cinematography (Robert Yeoman, ASC), Editing (Barney Pilling), Production Design (production designer Adam Stockhausen, set decorator Anna Pinnock), Costume Design (Milena Canonero), Original Score (composer Alexandre Desplat), and Makeup and Hairstyling (Frances Haggnon, Mark Coulier). Prior to The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson had three career Oscar nominations–Best Original Screenplay (with Owen Wilson) for The Royal Tenenbaums in 2002, and for Moonrise Kingdom (with Roman Coppola) in 2013; and Best Animated Feature in 2010 for Fantastic Mr. Fox.
The Grand Budapest Hotel recounts the 1930s’ escapades of Gustave H., a legendary, eccentric concierge at a famous hotel in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend. The two are compatriots on a wild ride that’s part murder mystery, action adventure thriller and mostly quirky whimsical comedy.
Prior to a DGA Theater screening of the film earlier this month in Los Angeles, Anderson noted that akin to what he did for his stop-motion animation feature Fantastic Mr. Fox, animatics were created to map out the live-action for The Grand Budapest Hotel. This “cartoon version,” said Anderson, “helps everybody to know what we’re looking at tomorrow.” He added that while some actors liked the animatics, other performers were less enamored with them.
Back in December, Anderson’s long-time cinematographer Yeoman shed light on the animatics which were deployed on the director’s two most recent live-action films–Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Yeoman said that Anderson prepared by creating “crudely drawn animated cartoons which contain all the characters with Wes doing their voices. It goes through the entire film and serves as sort of an animated storyboard for what he envisions the film to be. These animated storyboards are accessible to everybody–the actors, anyone on the crew. We spend a lot of time with them. Occasionally when you get in the physical space for a shoot, things might not work as you thought. Several times during the course of making The Grand Budapest Hotel, we weren’t sure about a scene or two. We’d pull out the iPad and look back on those animated storyboards.”
Prior to Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson drew storyboards by hand. “He used to do that for every film,” said Yeoman, who’s shot nearly all of director Anderson’s films. The storyboards, continued Yeoman, “were really pretty humorous in a way–very expressive of the characters. They were crude drawings but provided a good sense of where the camera was going to be and what the actors would be doing.”
Asked if the animatics for The Grand Budapest Hotel had music, Anderson said they did, but “not great music” as he was just “making do.” Fortunately, he enlisted composer Desplat who this year has two Best Original Score Oscar nominations–for The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Imitation Game. Over the years, Anderson has worked extensively with two composers–Desplat and Mark Mothersbaugh.
Anderson quipped that Desplat is brought in early but doesn’t do much of anything because he “goes and does [the movie] Godzilla.” Yet while the composer is in demand and quite busy, ultimately the music is done at a high level of artistry and creativity. Anderson praised Desplat’s contributions to The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The director also extolled the virtues of his cast on The Grand Budapest Hotel, which included such actors as Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton and Saoirse Ronan. “It’s maybe the best cast I’ve ever had in a movie,” assessed Anderson, citing Fiennes in the role of Gustave H.
Anderson recalled first seeing Fiennes in Schindler’s List and from that point on had wanted to work with him for “years and years.” Reinforcing the casting of Fiennes as Gustave H. was Anderson seeing his performance in a London production of the play God of Carnage. “I don’t know who my second choice would have been [for Gustave H],” said Anderson who added that The Grand Budapest Hotel cast consisted of actors who are comfortable with the written word, poetry, extended dialogue and the like.
He noted that there are actors who share with feelings and movements but aren’t so expressive when “you give them paragraphs.” By contrast, Anderson said his cast was right at home with the ultra literate demands of Grand Budapest Hotel.
To inspire the cast, Anderson during production had evening screenings of assorted films which captured aspects of the feel and spirit he envisioned for The Grand Budapest Hotel. Among the films screened were director Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence, Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm and several Ernst Lubitsch classics such as To Be Or Not To Be and The Shop Around The Corner.
Anderson cited Lubitsch as having been one of the “touchstones” for The Grand Budapest Hotel, even influencing the feel of the fictitious Republic of Zubrowka as a sort of Central European country that “might have been created in Burbank.” This “Americanized kind of Europe,” said Anderson, was somewhat akin to “Freedonia,” the fictional country presided over by Rufus T. Firefly (portrayed by Groucho Marx) in the classic Marx Brothers comedy Duck Soup.
Richard Linklater
Scoring six Oscar nominations was director/writer/producer Richard Linklater’s Boyhood–for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor (Ethan Hawke), Supporting Actress (Patricia Arquette) and Editing (Sandra Adair, ACE). Linklater has also earned a DGA Award nomination for Boyhood. Prior to Boyhood, Linklater had two career Oscar nominations–both for Best Adapted Screenplay (Before Sunset in 2005 and Before Midnight in 2014).
During a SHOOT interview session just prior to an industry Guild screening of Boyhood at the Music Hall theater in Beverly Hills earlier this month, Linklater said he was fortunate to have had success in the past with IFC Films. This fostered the company’s willingness to commit financially to Boyhood, a project which, if all went well, wouldn’t yield a return on investment until 12 or 13 years down the road.
That delayed financial gratification, of course, was due to the nature of the remarkable film which presents successive episodes in the life of a boy from Austin, Texas, named Mason, starting at age 6 and tracking his growth and development until he enters college at 18. Ellar Coltrane portrays Mason in this fictional story which carries a heavy dose of chronological reality in that Boyhood was shot over a 12-year span, maintaining the same cast throughout and reuniting them every year or so to shoot scenes.
Thus we see Mason, his sister and their parents evolve and mature before our eyes.
Linklater said he was grateful for the leap of faith IFC took to help realize this coming-of-age film. At the same time he said, tongue firmly in cheek, that the appeal of his pitch was that unlike many indie films, Boyhood would not lose money in one fell swoop–instead the losses would be smaller and incrementally spread out over a dozen years. How could an investor refuse, smiled Linklater.
The director also quipped that he hadn’t matured during Boyhood while everyone else around him–particularly Coltrane–did. Pivotal to the film was the casting of Coltrane. Linklater noted that both of Coltrane’s parents are artists and were supportive of the project and their son’s involvement in it.
Linklater added that he simply had a feeling that Ellar was a thoughtful, cool kid who would grow up to be an interesting young man.
Linklater added that actors Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette–who portrayed Mason’s parents–immediately embraced the wild idea of making a film over a dozen years. While Linklater had a long collaborative track record with Hawke prior to Boyhood, this was the director’s first time working with Arquette and he was thrilled that after one meeting she agreed to take on the role–wanting to capture what a mom experiences through life, including a fair share of adversity, and with much of that parenthood occurring as a single mother.
Over the years, Boyhood grew to a cast and crew of some 450 people, according to Linklater who offered his take on the notion that these folks are family. He observed that family is blood-related and you have no say in who’s in that group. But in the case of a crew, you choose your collaborators which can make for a different variety of strong, close-knit familial bond.
One prime collaborator of choice for Linklater has been editor Sandra Adair, ACE. Their working relationship is some 22 years old and counting, all the way back to one of the director’s breakthrough indie films, Dazed and Confused (a 1993 release). Linklater related that the editing of Boyhood was happening while it was still being written, directed and shot, with Adair providing crucial input as to what was needed from one year to the next; her voice being so important–and in a much different way than their prior collaborations–that she additionally earned a co-producer credit on Boyhood.
Linklater added that he’d like to work this way all the time, having a year to reflect and ruminate over how to best edit footage. Thus far this awards season Adair has won Best Editor distinction for Boyhood from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle. She has also earned Best Editing nominations for Boyhood from the Film Independent Spirit Awards, the Critics Choice Movie Awards (won by editors Mirrione and Crise for Birdman), and the American Cinema Editors (ACE) Eddie Awards.
Lensing off and on over a 12-year span necessitated a pair of DPs to accommodate scheduling and logistics: Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly. Between the two of them, they had the availabilities to accommodate Boyhood and both cinematographers were on the same wavelength with Linklater given their prior collaborations, particularly Daniel who shot over the years such Linklater indie films as Dazed and Confused, Slacker, Fast Food Nation, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Kelly had served as a camera operator on Fast Food Nation and is serving as DP on Linklater’s next feature, That’s What I’m Talking About.
Linklater said that the impact of Boyhood was profound on the cast and crew. He observed that the “martini shot” that closes a day of shooting often carries meaning–even moreso when it’s the martini shot on the last day of production. But just imagine how much more impact and sense of accomplishment were realized in the case of Boyhood with the ultimate “martini shot” capping a 12-year journey.
Linklater recollected that after that last shot, he and Coltrane–whom he watched grow from a boy to a young man–hugged for quite a long time.
Orlando von Einsiedel
Filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel recalled that he originally set out “to tell a positive story from the Congo, a region you only hear negative stories from–stories about war and sexual violence. I felt that other narratives existed and one day I came across a story about rescuing mountain gorillas in [eastern Congo national park] Virunga. When we got there, things on the ground changed quite rapidly. We learned about this oil company [SOCO] that had come into the region. Park rangers found themselves having to protect the park and its wildlife from the oil company, poachers, rebels and armed militias. It’s not like we went into this situation blind. The region had experienced much war. But we did not expect a civil war on this scale to break out [the war declaration in May 2012 and invasion of the M23 rebel group, also known as the Congolese Revolutionary Army] and did not know the actions of the oil company. Still as a documentary filmmaker you have to allow yourself to follow the story, no matter the direction.”
The path he followed resulted in Virunga, von Einsiedel’s first theatrical feature documentary and now nominated for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar.
“I had been waiting for awhile to find a story that I cared enough about,” said von Einsiedel whose prior filmography included shorts and TV series documentaries. “I fell in love with the park and the people, the work they are doing there.”
So while there are positive aspects to the story, von Einsiedel now finds himself looking to make a positive difference in the situation. Virunga shows rangers and gorillas in peril, and shares the investigative work of journalist Malanie Gouby who with a hidden camera rig provided by von Einsiedel captures SOCO supporters attempting to bribe park workers to undermine the efforts of the park’s chief warden Emmanuel de Moerode.
Von Einsiedel described Gouby as “incredibly brave. I met her about six months into the process and she told me she knew some people who work for the oil company and asked if we might be interested in meeting them some day. It was worth the risk. She learned how to work undercover with the camera.”
Virunga introduces us not only to de Merode but others in the small corps of rangers, including an ex-child soldier who’s become a caretaker of orphan gorillas. They, the gorillas and the filmmakers themselves are caught in the crossfire when battles erupt.
The World Wildlife Fund has disputed the authority of SOCO to conduct oil exploration in Virunga, which is a World Heritage site listed by UNESCO as being in peril. The park is the roost for the world’s 800 remaining mountain gorillas. The park is also home to volcanoes, a lake, land filled with wildlife, and the Rwenzoria mountains. Von Einsiedel contends that the oil company is operating illegally in a World Heritage site.
Just days prior to the world premiere of Virunga at the Tribeca Film Festival last April, de Merode had been ambushed by gunmen, shot several times in the chest and abdomen. He survived and returned to his role as park director. SOCO condemned the attack on de Merode.
Von Einsiedel is grateful over the awards–including Best of Fest at AFI Docs–and nominations (including his first career DGA Award nom, and a BAFTA Film Award nomination) that Virunga has received. “It helps to bring great magnification to the story. More people hear about it, hopefully become engaged with it and help to do something to protect this park. We’ve already seen positive developments. M23 has been pushed out and gorilla tourism has reopened. Tourism numbers have skyrocketed the last couple of months. Tourists are coming and spending money, which helps the region.”
Von Einsiedel also cited the importance of the documentary having the Netflix platform. “Millions of homes in 50 countries–it’s the biggest reach we could have hoped for,” he said. “At the same time we’ve continued to screen the film to strategic audiences–for the European Union, the UN, the U.K. parliament, in Washington, D.C.”
The director shot much of the film himself because “we were keeping things cheap since we didn’t have any money to begin with. But when we started to raise some money, the visual ambitions went beyond my own abilities [as a cinematographer]. We brought in Franklin [DP Dow] who did many of the animal shots and the big scenic natural beauty landscapes. My material was vérité, following life on the ground. It was great to work with Franklin again. We had done a lot of short films [Aisha’s Song, My Name Is Feker, Radio Amina, Skateistan: To Live and Skate Kabul] together.”
Von Einsiedel also brought editor Masahiro Hirakubo on board. Hirakubo’s credits include such Danny Boyle films as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach. “We knew early on that we wanted this film [Virunga] to reach as wide an audience as possible,” related von Einsiedel. “A key part of that was trying to make something that feels cinematic but is also dramatic. So we went with a narrative editor rather than a documentary editor, though he has also edited documentaries [We Are Together]. That along with his editing of a lot of big dramas made him a natural choice. We had a rough cut by the time we went to him. He hit the ground running and helped the film a great deal. Our story is a ‘David versus Goliath’ battle.”
Hans Zimmer
With this year’s nomination for Best Original Score for Interstellar, composer Hans Zimmer has now amassed 10 career Academy Award nominations, having won the Oscar back in 1995 for The Lion King. Zimmer’s other noms were for Rain Man, The Preacher’s Wife, As Good as It Gets, The Thin Red Line, The Prince of Egypt, Gladiator, Sherlock Holmes and Inception.
Interstellar marks the second Oscar nomination Zimmer has earned for a Christopher Nolan film, the first coming for Inception in 2011. Interstellar takes place in the near future after a blight on Earth has left many food sources extinct. Matthew McConaughey plays a widowed pilot-turned farmer who has to leave behind his young son and daughter for a space mission through a wormhole to planets that might be fit to sustain humanity. While the saga is fraught with astrophysics surrounding a high-stakes journey to another galaxy, Interstellar at its core is the story of a father and his children who are separated by circumstance–and a time continuum in which the kids age and the dad doesn’t. Central to the film is the disconnection between McConaughey and his daughter (played by Mackenzie Foy as a young girl, and then Jessica Chastain who has grown into adulthood and become an astrophysicist also working toward the human race’s survival).
In creating the musical score for Interstellar, Zimmer observed that the movie posed “the same challenge as Inception in a certain way. The fact is that science can become daunting and incomprehensible at times and the music can help take you through it in an emotional way. My goal was for the music to make the science poetic in some way so that the audience can feel the emotion of science.”
Zimmer recalled that Nolan introduced him to Interstellar through “a one-page letter of ideas without telling me what the movie was about. It had me thinking about my relationship to my children, made me dig a little deeper so that I could make music that would do justice to this vast movie while maintaining the specificity of intimacy.”
Zimmer has enjoyed a long and fruitful collaborative relationship with writer/director Nolan, with a shared filmography that also consists of The Dark Knight Rises, The Dark Knight and their first movie together, Batman Begins.
“Chris found me for Batman Begins,” related Zimmer. “From the first time we met, I knew we could work in a highly collaborative way. He doesn’t work with a temp score and as our relationship has evolved by the time we got to Interstellar, so much of the score was written concurrently with him finishing the script and before shooting started. There’s a constant dialogue between director and composer beginning with the script–and this can only work best with a writer/director. [Interstellar was written by Christopher Nolan and his brother, Jonathan Nolan.] We’re constantly influencing each other. What’s really brilliant about Christopher is that he poses questions for me to reflect on. Our collaboration becomes a conversation. I’m starting to talk about a story without fully knowing the story and he has me fill in the blanks. We fill in the blanks together. He helps me and I help him.”
Nolan also challenged Zimmer to “reinvent our language” on Interstellar. “He wanted us to go somewhere else from where we had been on the Batman movies and Inception,” said Zimmer. “We had to take something different out of the coloring box–no more action drums or kinetic strings. I remember him suggesting pipe organ music and my immediate reaction was that it would sound too ‘church-y.’ I thought it would sound like a Gothic horror movie. But just that thought has a stimulating effect. In using organ music, I thought I must protect my director and not deliver anything that remotely resembled a Gothic horror movie score, which sparks a whole new approach. And all the while he kept me focused on the personal subtext of the story. No matter how much the movie dealt in vast space and technology, it was still at its core about a father-child relationship. That grounded everything that I did.”
As for what his latest Oscar nomination means to him personally and professionally, Zimmer noted, “This score is so personal. I’m very much writing about my relationship with my children. Christopher had me truly writing from my heart. And it’s nice that people at the Academy recognized that. This is a science-fiction movie based mostly in reality and humanity.”
This is the 12th in a multi-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. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards. The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 22, 2015 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network.
(For information on SHOOT’s Academy Season “FYC Advertising” print, digital and email blast marketing opportunities, please visit https://www.shootonline.com/pdfs/RoadToOscar20142015)
