By Robert Goldrich | Road To Oscar Series, Part 5

This installment of our The Road To Oscar Series garners insights from leading directors and cinematographers on their films ranging from a unique coming-of-age story to a Biblical story for the ages, from a twisted suspense thriller to a historical yet highly personal portrait, from a tale of redemption to the heroic fight for civil rights, and from an ambitious adaptation of a musical to a stylish hybrid comedy/drama.

Here are filmmaker perspectives on Boyhood, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Wild, Into the Woods, Selma and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Boyhood
“Most of us directors are control freaks. That’s why films like this don’t get made,” said Richard Linklater in reference to Boyhood, the remarkable movie he wrote and directed 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. Actor 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 and his parents evolve and mature before our eyes.

“There were plenty of challenges—one of the biggest being endurance, like running a marathon,” observed Linklater. “The requirements of the movie were so unique that whatever liabilities they presented we tried to turn into assets. A lot of patience was required. Directors are accustomed to trying to bend the elements to their will of storytelling. But for this film, you had to relinquish that kind of control and instead accept the utter unpredictability of the future and make that your collaborator. You embrace some unknowns and have a certain confidence that you could collaborate with an uncertain future.”

That collaboration went swimmingly for Linklater as reflected on the awards show circuit thus far. Last week, Boyhood won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress (Patricia Arquette) honors from the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, as well as the Audience Award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards.

Additionally, Boyhood earned five Film Independent Spirit Award nominations—for Best Feature, Best Director, Sandra Adair as Best Editor, Ethan Hawke as Best Supporting Actor, and Arquette as Best Supporting Actress. Hawke and Arquette—who played Mason’s parents—were also nominated for Gotham Independent Film Awards. Plus Boyhood earned a Gotham nom for Best Film.

This early awards competition showing has understandably added to Oscar buzz for Boyhood. Linklater is no stranger to the Oscar derby, having earned two nominations for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay—the first in 2005 for Before Sunset (shared with Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke and Kim Krizan), and then in 2014 for Before Midnight (shared with Delpy and Hawke).

Among the pivotal decisions for Linklater in shaping Boyhood was the casting of Coltrane. “I was very conscious of it being a huge decision,” Linklater recalled. “Ultimately I just thought that Ellar was a thoughtful, cool kid and I felt he would grow up to be an interesting young man. His parents were also cool and I knew whichever youngster we cast would need family support. Ellar’s parents are artists and I thought they would see this experience as being a positive thing in their kid’s life. Plus Ellar had a great attitude. He looked forward to every year like he was creating an ever evolving art project.”

This project was indeed evolving, bringing a new dimension to an already strong creative collaboration that Linklater has enjoyed with editor Adair. “It’s so rare that you get to edit your movie and still be making your movie. We’re writing, directing and shooting this movie while editing it,” noted Linklater. “It makes for a very cool working arrangement. You work with an editor as you never have before. We talk and consider if we need a little more of this or that—and we can deliver this or that because we’re still making the movie. Sandra meant so much to this film. I’ve been working with her for 22 years. I know and trust her and we have such a shorthand when we work together going all the way back to Dazed and Confused [a 1993 release].”

Linklater and Adair’s shared filmography also includes Before Sunrise (1995), SubUrbia (1996), The Newton Boys (1998), Waking Life (2001), Tape (2001), Schoolhouse Rock (2003), Before Sunset (2004), Bad News Bears (2005), Fastfood Nation (2006), A Scanner Darkly (2006), Me and Orson Welles (2008), Bernie (2011) and Before Midnight (2013).

Linklater said that Adair played an instrumental role in helping him attain his goal of Boyhood “feeling like one story. While the film was about change over 12 years, we wanted a certain continuity to connect the scenes as a story. We set out simply to tell a story. We had a lot of time to think about the film but it all went towards doing justice to the story. And thankfully it seems to be a story that is resonating with people.”

Exodus: Gods and Kings
“I hadn’t made a feature film until I was 40,” recalled director Ridley Scott. “But with my years of doing TV commercials, by the time I had a feature film, I was ready. Production for me has never been that much of a hassle thanks to my experience. It’s experience that helps you spot a problem coming over the hill before it ever gets out of hand. A lot of people get in trouble today because they’re thrown into the deep end and don’t have the experience to get out. When you have the experience, you are prepped and fully ready.”

Scott’s readiness has translated into assorted accolades, including three Best Director Oscar nominations—for Thelma & Louise in 1992, Gladiator in 2001 and Black Hawk Down in 2002. The same three films also earned Scott coveted DGA Award nominations.

Furthermore, Scott’s commercialmaking experience yielded collaborators who have proven to be key contributors to his feature filmography, a prime example being production designer Arthur Max. “I first met him [Max] in London and gave him a go on a Pepsi commercial,” said Scott. “Working with him was great fun. He’s very inventive. And from that moment on, we’ve worked a great deal together.”

It’s a working relationship that now spans 30 years and 11 feature films; the latest being The Martians, which at press time had them both on location in Budapest. The film is based on Andy Weir’s best selling novel about an astronaut (portrayed by Matt Damon)—stranded on Mars—who struggles to survive.

The Martians came on the heels of Exodus: Gods and Kings, the Scott epic that went into wide release in the U.S. today (12/12). Exodus: Gods and Kings brings new life to the story of the defiant leader Moses (portrayed by Christian Bale) as he rises up against the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses (played by Joel Edgerton), setting 400,000 slaves on a monumental journey of escape from Egypt, which is besieged by deadly plagues.

The film also posed major visual effects challenges. Yet while Scott has a collaborative track record with Max spanning several decades, the director had only worked once before with the VFX supervisor he selected for Exodus—Peter Chiang, a founder of visual effects house Double Negative.

“We had done The Vatican, a pilot for Sony, and I got a feel for what he and his studio could do, particularly with digital effects. Based on that, we got going on Exodus,” said Scott who affirmed, “You have to become aware of the best effects houses. A visual effects company has to earn its colors. You can’t take any chances because there’s so much riding on what they do on a film.”

For Exodus: Gods and Kings, Scott noted that he deployed digital visualizations “way before we got to sites. We could determine how much we had to build, how high to build each [palace] column before topping it off and extending its height with green screen. In all we had 1,300 effects shots which is pretty big. With digital visualizations, we were able to work out what we wanted to go for, which greatly benefited our digital artists and Arthur [Max]. To do that early on before the big money is spent saves a lot of time and money in the long run. It’s prudent money to spend early on.”

Gone Girl
After a recent screening of Gone Girl on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles, director David Fincher and several of his collaborators on the film—screenwriter Gillian Flynn, editor Kirk Baxter, ACE, and composers Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame) and Atticus Ross—appeared for a Q&A session. While SHOOT covered Baxter in the first installment of this Road To Oscar Series (11/13), Fincher offered some reflections on the contributions of Flynn, Reznor and Ross.

The latter two won an Oscar in 2011 for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score, on the strength of Fincher’s The Social Network, and have since gone on to score two more Fincher films, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. Fincher observed that it’s important not to think about music “in terms of house paint” or coverage, and “how many coats” will be needed. He affirmed that music is “an extension of the aural landscape of a film.” The “house paint” mindset,” continued Fincher is tantamount to “not availing yourself of what artists do…which is to think of things in a different way.”

Fincher said that Reznor and Ross have consistently thought outside the box, serving to illuminate his films and their stories for audiences. Fincher said he’s been a long-time fan of Nine Inch Nails and had been begging Reznor for years to score a film. “We kept trying and found him at a moment when his resistance was low,” said Fincher. Reznor broke into feature film scoring with The Social Network, working in tandem with Ross.

The director praised Reznor and Ross’ work on Gone Girl. Based on the best-selling novel by Flynn, the mystery thriller Gone Girl stars Ben Affleck as a man (Nick Dunne) whose wife (Amy Dunne portrayed by Rosamund Pike) goes missing. Nick soon finds himself as the prime suspect in her disappearance.

Flynn said that a female author adapting her book for a film represents a “rare” opportunity in Hollywood. Having to pare down a 500-page book and translate its story into a film was akin, said Flynn, to a game of Jenga, where you remove components and leave a basic structure in which the parts inform one another. And hopefully the script becomes “something greater than the sum of those parts…What’s left has its own narrative power,” tapping into the power of visuals orchestrated by Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, ASC.

Fincher said that “if you’re halfway there in the first draft,” then you’re on your way. He assessed that Flynn’s first draft was just that, which was quite remarkable. There was also a sardonic humor to the story, leading Fincher to observe, “People laugh when they hear the truth.”

The Imitation Game
“My agent called me about this beautiful script [by Graham Moore] that he said I should read. I was blown away by it,” recalled director Morten Tyldum. “I thought I knew history pretty well but I’m ashamed about all the things I didn’t know about Alan Turing. I then went on to read everything I could about Turing. The more I read about him, the more I needed to tell this story about a phenomenal, spectacular man. His achievements were so historic; his life so rich, so fascinating, so thrilling and so heartbreaking. I wanted this movie to have the humor, the thrills, the excitement I thought his life had.”

Any embarrassment Tyldum felt initially should have diminished by now for he has since directed a film, The Imitation Game, which does justice to Turing and has garnered critical acclaim in the process, including winning the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, proven to be somewhat of a precursor to Oscar success. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, a computer pioneer who broke the Nazis’ elaborate secret communication code, an accomplishment which Winston Churchill heralded as the single greatest contribution to helping to win World War II. Turing’s historic story is also a personal tale as he was a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was criminalized in the U.K. He was prosecuted for his sexual orientation and committed suicide in 1954.

“I always wanted Benedict to play Alan Turing,” noted Tyldum, “For me he was the obvious choice. He went so deeply into Turing, he did so much research into how Alan’s mind worked, his speech being affected because his brain worked faster than his mouth. Alan was strong and driven yet so awkward and fragile. He was a young man who lost so much, who had layers and layers of secrets—and Benedict’s performance captured all of this.”

The story gave all those involved a sense of purpose—and for that matter was a prime catalyst for their involvement to begin with, observed Tyldum. “Everybody I asked said yes. For this small independent movie, we got all these incredible talents who wanted to be a part of it—William Goldenberg, one of the best editors in the world. Alexandre Desplat, an incredible composer who is so busy and so hard to get. I remember him telling me the story was inspiring and ‘I want to be a part of it.’  

“I saw The Impossible,” continued Tyldum, “and was blown away by the work of [cinematographer] Oscar Faura [the subject of this week's Chat Room]. I approached him and he wanted to come on board once he became familiar with Turing’s story. I saw Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and was so impressed by [production designer] Maria Djurkovic’s work on that film. She came on board immediately. She is able to do wonders within a budget. Our film covered different stages in Alan’s life spanning the 1930s, 1940s and ‘50s. One of the many things I love about her approach is how smart she is about time periods. So many times you see a move from the 1960s and all you see is stuff from the ‘60s. Instead Maria noted that if you have a story set in the 1940s, you should see things in a room from the 1920s and 1930s. She is so precise, so dedicated. And her creation of Christopher, Turing’s code-breaking machine [a pre-cursor to the modern computer—Tyldum and Djurkovic traveled to Bletchley Park, the main venue for the UK’s Government Code and Cypher School, to see a reproduction of the original Christopher].”

Tyldum noted that the design of the machine in the film is based on the real Christopher “but Maria took some liberties. She helped to make it a living character in the movie.”

On another front, Tyldum told SHOOT that among his concerns was how to handle the film’s “lighter scenes that contained humor. There’s a delicate balance to get the right tone, the right mix of seriousness and humor. I didn’t want to make it too light. At the same time I wanted to reflect the humor of the characters, the complexity of the characters that created the humor. Alan Turing had a genuine wit and humor about him.”

Wild
It’s been said that a telling reflection of a director is the number of high caliber acting performances he or she is able to elicit. The legendary William Wyler, for example, directed more Oscar-winning performances than anyone in the history of cinema.

Just starting a track record of his own in that regard earlier this year was director Jean-Marc Vallée whose Dallas Buyers Club yielded Best Leading Actor and Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winning performances from Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, respectively.

Now in the conversation for stellar performances this awards season are Reese Witherspoon, who portrays Cheryl Strayed, and Laura Dern, who plays her mother in Wild, also directed by Vallée. Based on Strayed’s best-selling memoir (“Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail”), the movie tells us of the author’s struggles after her mother’s death and a failed marriage. She decides to hike solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a journey of some 1,100 miles, as a sort of personal catharsis, helping her to come to grips with her problems and perhaps gain a measure of accomplishment and redemption. The movie adaptation was penned by Nick Hornby, nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2010 for An Education.

Vallée defined his role as simply “trying not to interfere. I try to keep the scene as long as possible before cutting. These actors are so good it’s hard to say ‘cut.’ How great is that? They are so devoted to their characters that the job for the director is to step back and let them do what they do best.”

Helping to facilitate these performances are varied collaborators, a shining example being cinematographer Yves Belanger. “I love his courage and humility,” said Vallée of Belanger. “He works off of available light with no electric crew. He shoots handheld in a different way and is willing to get out of his comfort zone to capture reality so that the images he gets aren’t forced or staged. Again, it’s an approach that captures actor performances in the best way possible. He’s never trying to create images for his demo reel. With his work, he’s never saying ‘look how clever and creative I am.’ His focus is on the storytelling.”

Vallée described Belanger as “an amazing collaborator.” Though their first feature together was Dallas Buyers Club, Vallée and Belanger go back some 22 years. “I met him on a commercial in Montreal and he later went on to shoot commercials for me for the past 15 years here and there. We talked about doing a feature together but that didn’t happen—until Dallas Buyers Club.

Like Belanger, editor Martin Pensa also puts story above himself, observed Vallée who teamed with Pensa on the editing of both Dallas Buyers Club and Wild. For the former, Vallée (under the assumed name of John Mac McMurphy) and Pensa earned a Best Editing Oscar nomination in 2014. “Martin was my assistant editor on Café de Flore,” recalled Vallée. “I then brought him up to cut Dallas Buyers Club and Wild with me. He has an actors’ point of view and is a great young editor. He’s not trying to steal the show as an editor. He’s not trying to be noticed by the audience. He’s just working to do justice to the story and the actors’ performances.”

Vallée noted that the book and the screenplay provided him with “powerful emotional material. It’s material that allows the director to have fun with the language, to find the right tone, rhythm and visual approach for the film. On the [Pacific Crest] trail, we had flashbacks but we didn’t want the audience to feel the flashbacks. They had to feel organic. We were subtle and used almost no sound when cutting to a flashback the first time. There’s just the ghost of some music and sound as we start to go into flashback. The sounds of the crickets are still there accompanying the flashback. We played with sound editing to give a quick feeling, a quick disconnect. There would be a disconnected image, a montage of imagery before going into a two-minute flashback with dialogue. What looks like a weird montage and puzzle all makes sense as it’s pieced together.”

Into the Woods
Bringing stage musicals to the big screen is a prominent part of director Rob Marshall’s filmography, from the dramas Chicago (winner of six Oscars, including Best Picture, in 2003) and Nine (garnering four Oscar nominations in 2010) to the upcoming fantasy Into the Woods, slated for release on Xmas day. The latter is the movie adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical (from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine), a modern,  magical, heartfelt twist on several beloved fairy tales. Lapine also wrote the screenplay for the film which interweaves the stories of Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Little Red Riding Hood (Lila Crawford), Rapunsel (MacKenzie Mauzy), and Jack and the Beanstalk (Daniel Huttlestone)—all tied together by an original tale of a baker and his wife (James Corden, Emily Blunt), their wish to begin a family and their interaction with the witch (Meryl Streep) who has put a curse on them.

“With a beloved stage piece, you have to be careful about decisions you make bringing it to the screen,” said Marshall. “We brought James Lapine on board which was incredibly helpful. He wrote both the screenplay and the stage piece. Stephen Sondheim also brought a lot to what we were trying to do. I wanted to retain as much as I could from the stage musical. I found myself being the keeper of the stage piece because I loved it so much. I was impressed by how flexible James and Stephen were in reimagining everything for the film. They were open to new ideas. It was a wonderful challenge and one that can be met as long as you approach it with integrity and are careful and meticulous. I so believe in the musical genre. It’s an American-born genre.”

Marshall also has a deep, abiding belief in his collaborators, citing editor Wyatt Smith, cinematographer Dion Beebe, ASC, costume designer Colleen Atwood and production designer Dennis Gassner, among others. “Wyatt is the perfect editor for me, especially on a musical,” said Marshall. “His musical skills are off the charts. He edits with that sensibility and achieves a fluidity. You never feel the editing. You feel it like it’s happening organically. He understands pace and performance. This is an ensemble piece and you have to get out of the way of these great performers—which Wyatt does while at the same time understanding how to maintain the fluidity and energy. I’ve worked with Wyatt in the past [Nine] but this is his first time as a solo editor for a feature film. [He was the sole editor on the Marshall-directed, Emmy-winning special Tony Bennett: An American Classic.] Wyatt understands music so well.”

Atwood has won three Oscars, two for Marshall-directed films: Chicago; and moving outside the musical genre, Memoirs of a Geisha. Her third Best Achievement in Costume Design Oscar came for the Tim Burton-directed Alice In Wonderland. “I’ve done countless projects with Colleen,” related Marshall. “She sees things from a completely different angle. For Into the Woods, a modern twist on fairy tales, she provided that modern sensibility with out-of-the-box thinking. She created a fairy tale world with no limitations. She criss-crosses between all these different stories and the costumes are inspired. Johnny Depp’s costume as a wolf was inspired by the Tex Avery cartoons of the 1940s and ‘50s—a wolf in a zoot suit, a wolf seen through a child’s eyes in a way she could accept him. Colleen has an amazing eye.”

Marshall first collaborated with DP Beebe on Chicago, then Memoirs of a Geisha (for which Beebe won the Best Cinematography Oscar in 2006), Tony Bennett: An American Classic, Nine (resulting in an ASC Award nomination) and Into the Woods. Marshall said of Beebe, “He paints with light and motion. He understands so deeply how to bring something like Into the Woods to life; he knows it needs some sort of a heightened reality. Dion understands camerawork for musicals. He’s very musical himself. I love working with him. He’s also perfect for me in terms of personality. He’s very quiet and does his work. He doesn’t have to be the biggest presence in the room, which is the only way to work, especially in a musical with unique and varied factors of so many personnel. You have to be a team player so that the best idea in the room wins.”

In sharp contrast, Into the Woods marked the first time Marshall collaborated with production designer Gassner, a Best Art Direction-Set Decoration Oscar winner in 1992 for Bugsy (shared with Nancy Haigh). Gassner has three other career Oscar nominations thus far—for Barton Fink (shared with Haigh) in 1992, for Road To Perdition (also shared with Haigh) in 2003, and for The Golden Compass (Best Achievement in Art Direction, shared with Anna Pinnock) in 2008.

“Dennis understands, especially with musicals, all about the collaboration,” noted Marshall. “The music informs the production design, the costumes are connected to the cinematography and lighting—and it’s all one. He’s a caring and thoughtful designer. He’s a craftsman who knows how to bring it all to life in an imaginative way.”

Selma; A Most Violent Year
Cinematographer Bradford Young made his first major splash at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival when he won The Cinematography Award: U.S. Dramatic for his work on a pair of films: the David Lowery-directed Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and the Andrew Dosunmu-helmed Mother of George. Fast forward to today and Young has another double dip with respect to lauded films: the Ana DuVernay-directed Selma which is slated for release in the U.S. on Xmas Day; and director J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, which goes wide on December 31.

Selma recently earned five Film Independent Spirit Award nominations: Best Feature; DuVernay as Best Director; Young for Best Cinematography; David Oyelowo as Best Male Lead; and Carmen Ejogo as Best Supporting Female. A Most Violent Year scored three nominations: Best Screenplay for director/writer Chandor; Best Supporting Female for Jessica Chastain; and Best Editing for Ron Patane. Furthermore, A Most Violent Year was recently named Best Picture by the National Board of Review.

Selma chronicles the tumultuous three-month stretch in 1965 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The epic march from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The movie reunited Young and DuVernay who first collaborated on the director’s second film, Middle of Nowhere, which won the coveted John Cassavetes Award at the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards. “We first met in the small community of independent filmmakers,” recalled Young. “We tried to connect on her first feature but I was already shooting something else. Thankfully, we were later able to get together and it’s been wonderful working with Ava.”

As for the creative challenges Selma posed to him as a cinematographer, Young noted, “The Bloody Sunday March was massive. The film sort of hinges on that march, and the brutal actions of state troopers on the marchers. We had to recreate that historic moment. We had to give it scale with relatively limited resources. What Ava decided was to go with a big major feature film intro—lots of smoke, several cameras, handheld work—but for the state trooper attack we shifted to a very simple approach like that of a photojournalist. It’s a mix of approaches that worked, that the audience could buy into. Balancing all that was a technical challenge but Ava was up to all the challenges presented. We had to be accurate with vignettes—the girl in the blue dress running from men with police batons. Within our resources, we had to deconstruct and reconstruct historical accounts.”

Young deployed ARRI Alexa XT cameras—two cameras most days, some days three. There was much handheld work to give Selma what Young described at times as “a quiet, observational feel….Certain moments called for us to put the cameras on our shoulders.”

The Alexa XT was also Young’s camera of choice for Chandor’s A Most Violent Year. This marked the first collaboration between Chandor and Young. Young recalled that Chandor was initially drawn to him by Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. “We met, ignited the conversation and it piqued his interest and mine,” said Young. “J.C. knew David Lowery from being on the festival circuit together. Again, it all comes down to talk within a small community of filmmakers.”

A drama set during the winter of 1981—statistically one of the most violent crime years in New York City’s history—A Most Violent Year stars Oscar Isaac as Abel Morales, a fuel supplier who’s trying to grow his business while staying true to his moral compass, a proposition which seems impossible in the face of rampant violence and corruption.  Both the business and Morales’ family—including his wife portrayed by Chastain—are in jeopardy.

Young observed that while corruption and violence are depicted in the movie, you don’t directly see the decay of the city. “We didn’t demonize the image but rather kept it somewhat elegant—particularly Oscar’s character who in conversation with other characters was able to transcend the instability and perils of the time.”

The Grand Budapest Hotel
Nominated for a Best Picture Gotham Award was director Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel shot by his long-time collaborator, Robert Yeoman, ASC.  Yeoman recalled that something quite special was initiated years back by a letter he received from Anderson who was set to embark on his feature directorial debut, Bottle Rocket. Anderson, 24 years old at the time, wrote Yeoman, asking if he’d consider shooting Bottle Rocket. Anderson sought out Yeoman based on the DP’s lensing of director Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy.

Anderson and Yeoman then met, hit it off and entered into a working relationship which started with Bottle Rocket and has extended through all of Anderson’s live-action features, including Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums (earning a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for Anderson and Owen Wilson in 2002), The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Moonrise Kingdom (which garnered a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination in 2013 for Anderson and Roman Coppola), and most recently The Grand Budapest Hotel. Moonrise Kingdom, incidentally, earned Yeoman his second Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Cinematography, the first coming for Drugstore Cowboy.
“Working with Wes is awesome,” assessed Yeoman. “He’s a director with a strong vision who knows exactly what he wants going in. That said, he’s very collaborative. We spend a lot of time in prep visiting locations and figuring out how we are going to do things. When it comes time to shoot, we have an exact idea as to what we’re going to be doing. This allows us to move more quickly when we are shooting.”

For his two most recent films—The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom—Anderson prepared by creating what Yeoman described as “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 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. “They 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.”

Anderson thus far has a total of three Oscar nominations. Besides the aforementioned two for his writing, the other came in 2010 for Best Animated Feature on the strength of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Yeoman’s filmography extends beyond his many collaborations with director Anderson, including such features as Permanent Midnight (director David Veloz), Dogma (directed by Kevin Smith), Get Him To The Greek (director Nicholas Stoller), Love & Mercy (director Bill Pohlad) and comedies for director Paul Feig such as Bridesmaids (nominated for two Oscars—Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Melissa McCarthy), The Heat (starring Sandra Bullock and McCarthy) and Spy (also starring McCarthy and currently in postproduction).

This is the fifth 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, SHOOT’s January print issue (and PDF version) and on SHOOTonline.com. 

The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards. The 87th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 15, 2015. 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.

MySHOOT Profiles