Just a couple of weeks ago, director/writer Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (Fox Searchlight Pictures) topped the European Film Awards competition with five nominations–for Best Film, Directing, and Screenplay, as well as acting nominations for Michael Caine and Rachel Weisz. The strong showing generated awards season momentum for the feature, which follows Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2014 and Best Non-English Language Film at the 2014 BAFTA Awards.
Youth is Sorrentino’s second English-language film, the first being This Must Be the Place, a 2011 release. Youth stars Caine as a famous orchestra conductor in his later years. He’s on an extended stay at an elegant Swiss mountain resort, along with his equally elderly friend (Harvey Keitel) who’s nearing the end of his career as a filmmaker. The hybrid comedy-drama is bittersweet, delving into people and their relationships, including that of Caine’s character with his daughter (portrayed by Weisz). It’s a film about getting old, gracefully and not so gracefully, with a wry, frequently self-deprecating humor.
Talking to SHOOT via a translator, the Italian filmmaker explained that what motivated him to write Youth was “the recurring question I have, which is if one has a chance to become really old, what does that person think about his future? Are there any expectations about his future? In this film, we explore old individuals and their relationships with both the future and the past.”
Sorrentino said that in Youth he was blessed with a great cast. “The script was beautifully supported by the performances of great actors.” He added that he felt comfortable directing just his second English-language film. “I don’t feel different shooting in English or Italian. English is a melodic language, a musical language. When actors perform, I can understand the melody they express. I can evaluate their performances.”
Asked about the performance of his cinematographer Luca Bigazzi whom he first collaborated with some 10 years ago on The Consequences of Love–with the relationship extending through such films as This Must Be The Place, the short In The Mirror and The Great Beauty–Sorrentino assessed that their creative rapport is “based on a similar view of cinema that we share. Since we have a shared vision, our relationship can often be silent. We don’t really talk much. We work together out of intuition and instinct. Often, there’s no need for discussion.”
However, there’s always need for Sorrentino and Bigazzi to break new ground. At press time they were teaming on The Young Pope, an eight-episode HBO series that tells the controversial story of the beginning of Pius XIII’s tenure. Jude Law stars as Pius XIII, the first American pope. The cast also includes Diane Keaton as Sister Mary, an American nun living in Vatican City, and Silvio Orlando, Scott Shepherd, Cécile de France, Javier Cámara, Ludivine Sagnier, Toni Bertorelli and James Cromwell.
Sorrentino said he was halfway through shooting the HBO series. “So far I’m happy with the results.”
Paco Delgado
Costume designer Paco Delgado garnered Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Critics’ Choice Movie Award, Costume Designers Guild Award and Satellite Award nominations–among other accolades–for the epic musical Les Misérables, his first film with director Tom Hooper. Now a return engagement with Hooper has yielded The Danish Girl (Focus Features), a love story inspired by the lives of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, portrayed in the film respectively by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) and Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina).
In 1926 in Copenhagen, artist Einar Wegener is married to Gerda Wegener and is revered for landscape paintings. Gerda is also an artist, less renowned but steadily working as a portraitist of prominent citizens. On deadline for a portrait, Gerda one day asks her husband to fill in for a model by putting on a dress so that she can finish the painting. The experience is transformative, as Einar soon realizes that being Lili is an expression of her truest self, and she begins living her life as a woman. Gerda unexpectedly finds that she has a new muse, and renewed creative inspiration. But the couple soon feels society’s disapproval.
They leave their homeland for the more open-minded world of Paris. There, it is Gerda’s career that continues to flourish. The couple’s marriage evolves–and not without strain. But Gerda consistently supports Lili during her journey as a transgender woman. Through the other, each of them finds the courage to be who they are at heart.
Delgado said as an artist he had to be conscious of who Lili was and what she represented. “She led an amazing life and was an example of bravery for a lot of people–and for society in general. You have to be aware of that as a costume designer and try to be the most faithful to story and character, and to her as a real person, that you can possibly be.”
Delgado related, “We wanted to see ultimately a real woman, not an artificial one; we wanted very little make-up. To avoid caricature, we experimented with shapes, color, and hair–and Lili herself had to experiment with her look, to find what is best for her; what enhances the woman? At first there is maybe going to be hyper-feminization, followed by–after becoming more assured–relaxing into naturalism. The ballroom sequence is like a first effort with a fancy dress, but little by little more belongs to her. We thought of this for the clothes and also the hair.”
The attraction of The Danish Girl was two-pronged for Delgado–the opportunity to tell a story about a fascinating subject, and being able to again collaborate with director Hooper. Delgado first worked with Hooper on a Captain Morgan commercial. (Hooper is handled for spots and branded content by production house Smuggler.) “He liked my work on that commercial and I liked working with him,” recalled Delgado. “Tom mentioned to me that he had a big project in the works [which turned out to be Les Misérables] and asked if I’d be interested. I said yes and he said he’d mention my name to the production company. At the time, I didn’t know if anything would come of that. A year later I got a call from Universal asking me if I’d be interested [in Les Misérables]. It was a wonderful opportunity.”
Regarding what it is like to work with Hooper, Delgado shared, “He very much knows what he wants. He tells you more or less the big concepts about the characters and the way he wants them to look. At the same time, within those parameters you feel tremendous creative freedom. He’s someone I work well with personally and he gives you a stake in creating the world he’s envisioned. It’s a dream to work with him. He is a great collaborator–and the work of a costume designer is done in collaboration with a lot of people: the director, the actors, the writer, and so on. It’s good to have a director with a clear vision–a director who gives you guidance as well as freedom.”
Delgado’s filmography, though, extends well beyond Hooper. Delgado was costume designer, for example, on the recently released The 33 directed by Patricia Riggen and starring Antonio Banderas and Juliette Binoche. Earlier he was costume designer for writer/director Álex de la Iglesia on assorted noteworthy movies. These include Las brujas de Zugarramurdi [Witching and Bitching], for which Delgado won a Goya Award – Spain’s Academy Award equivalent; Balada triste de trompeta [The Last Circus], for which he received a Goya Award nomination; The Oxford Murders, starring John Hurt and Elijah Wood; El Crimen Ferpecto [The Perfect Crime]; 800 Bullets; and La comunidad [Common Wealth], for which he received his first Goya Award nomination.
Delgado was the costume designer on writer/director Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In, for which he was again a Goya Award nominee, and Bad Education. Delgado won a Goya Award, as well as Gaudí and European Film Awards, as costume designer on writer/director Pablo Berger’s black-and-white film Blancanieves [Snow White]. Delgado was an Ariel Award nominee for costume design on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, starring Javier Bardem.
As for what’s next for Delgado, at press time he was on a shoot in Philadelphia for Split, a feature from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan.
This is the second 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 December and January print issues (and PDF versions) and on SHOOTonline.com. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards. The 88th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 14, 2016. The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 28, 2016, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
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