SHOOT puts the focus on two directors whose films made their debut screenings at the recently wrapped Telluride Film Festival immediately followed by the Toronto International Film Festival. One of the directors won a best feature documentary Oscar in 2004 for his acclaimed The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. The other has seen his historical drama The King’s Speech generate arguably the biggest Oscar contender buzz of this festival season. Furthermore, both directors have spotmaking ties–one maintaining his longstanding relationship with Moxie Pictures, the other just signing on with Smuggler.
The latter is Tom Hooper who has demonstrated a penchant for history, perhaps most notably with his HBO miniseries John Adams, which won a record high 13 Emmy Awards in a single year, including for best miniseries and outstanding directorial achievement in movies for TV or miniseries.
Now Hooper’s latest theatrical feature tells the story of King George VI (Colin Firth stars as the World War II monarch) whose stammering is treated by a speech therapist (portrayed by Geoffrey Rush). While a period piece, the film centers primarily on the friendship that develops between the two characters and the life’s lessons that come from confronting and overcoming obstacles. The therapist gets to the psychological roots of the stuttering as we ultimately see King George VI put his fears aside to formally address the U.K. people, informing them of the nation’s declaration of war against Germany.
The exposure at the Telluride and Toronto festivals has spurred predictions of multiple Oscar nominations for The King’s Speech spanning best picture, best actor and best director, among other categories. The movie was named the fan favorite at the Toronto International Film Festival. Previous recipients of the audience award at the Toronto fest include Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire and Slumdog Millionaire, which both went on to score multiple Academy Award nominations.
Hooper described part of his approach to The King’s Speech and period pieces in general as using historical accuracy to dispel viewers’ preconceived notions of what a particular era was like. He cited a speech at Wembley Stadium made when Firth’s character was a prince, not yet a king. The popular notion today might picture the prince decked out in sartorial splendor, replete with royal family trappings, separating him from those who surround him. But the historical record shows that he wore a black suit, black tie and black hat, as did those in the stadium audience. “The scene looks like he’s going to a funeral,” related Hooper. “So the film starts out by subverting the idea of what a movie about the royal family should be. I’m not a subversive person. But subversion is in my work.”
The director explained that this subversion can be a critical dynamic to building drama. “How do you create suspense over who is going to win the Revolutionary War?” he asked regarding his John Adams miniseries. “Viewers know the outcome. But if you can show historically how that world, that period, actually was–making it quite different from cliches envisioned by the audience–you create an unfamiliarity that is more helpful to generating a viewer’s sense that he or she doesn’t quite know where the story is going.”
Smuggler clearly knew where it was going when it pursued and ultimately signed Hooper for commercials. Having watched the premiere of The King’s Speech at the Toronto Festival, Smuggler executive producer Patrick Milling Smith observed that Hooper “brings an elegance and delicate nuanced touch to everything he does across any genre. He is a rare talent with a contagious hunger for film, ideas, and the ability to show you the truth and authenticity in his stories.”
As for his attraction to commercials, Hooper–who helmed some spot work years ago, including for John Hegarty of Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London–explained, “The more I work on feature films, I find myself on a scene-by-scene basis exploring the best way to express the DNA of a story through almost the simplest possible execution of a shot. Sometimes you can fall into the trap of trying to be so visually interesting that you don’t express the DNA of the moment–and that’s the kind of work that ends up on the cutting room floor. I am constantly working at distilling into compositional framing all the information I need to express the moment, to capture the performance of the actors and use their space to do justice to the story. I am constantly asking myself, ‘What’s the one shot that can give you the right information in a simple way?’
“Because I’ve gone on that journey of trying to find a really pure way to encode the story and the movie in each frame, I’m very much intrigued with how to accomplish that within 30 or 60 seconds,” continued Hooper. “With fewer shots, each image in a commercial must work efficiently to tell the story, to develop the character. It’s all about stripping out the waste. Commercials are a very pure form of communication. Commercials are like poems–the purest form of short form at their best. I’m interested in commercials that tell stories.”
At press time, Hooper was at the Toronto Festival. SHOOT asked him to compare the Telluride and Toronto experiences.
“I had never been at Telluride before–it’s the best kept industry secret,” he said. “It’s a festival really for the filmmaker and the audience. It doesn’t exist as a marketing vehicle. There was a dinner which only actors and directors were allowed to come to–no agents, no PR people, no one else. I had serious time with other filmmakers, including Peter Weir whose work has been an incredible influence on me over the years. During the four days [at Telluride], I did just two hours of press interviews and had time to actually see some movies and to get to know other directors.”
The Toronto International Film Festival, by contrast, had Hooper doing some 25 hours of press.
“It’s incredibly intense but it serves an important purpose–generating press and word of mouth for your movie. The two festivals complement each other. Telluride is a gentle way to introduce your film. Toronto is where you get the opportunity to do the serious promotion. In both places the audiences are incredibly film centric. You feel the people in the audiences know your work, how you’re developing as a filmmaker, that you have an informed community watching what you’re doing.”
Errol Morris
Back in 1999, Errol Morris saw his films honored with a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While retrospectives are often reserved for those whose best work is behind them, not so for Morris who has scored acclaim for several films since (including the aforementioned Oscar for The Fog of War)–and most recently at both Telluride and Toronto for his ninth career feature-length documentary, Tabloid, which centers on Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, a convicted rapist, and a dog-cloning supporter. While offbeat, McKinney is highly intelligent. On making a movie about McKinney’s stranger than fiction life, Morris said, “Tabloid is a return to my favorite genre–sick, sad and funny–but of course, it’s more than that. It is a meditation on how we are shaped by media and even more powerfully, by ourselves. Joyce is a woman profoundly influenced by her dreams, and in a sense, she was living in a movie long before she came to star in my film.”
Tabloid has been compared to some of Morris’ earlier humorous, quirky character work such as Gates of Heaven. On the surface, Tabloid seems a departure from Morris’ serious issue-driven documentary fare such as The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure, which examines the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
However, Morris said Tabloid contains elements and sensibilities that are “very much in keeping with what I do. I don’t see Tabloid as a break from anything although this is a really funny movie. I hope that does not vitiate its underlying content and complexity. It’s a really rich, interesting story–deeply romantic albeit crazy. I’m fond of pointing out to various people that part of Abu Ghraib was a tabloid story.”
Furthermore Morris sees a connection between Tabloid and his documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. “I read about Fred Leuchter in a page one New York Times story posing the question, ‘Can capital punishment be humane?’ Buried in the story about him,” recalled Morris, “was a brief mention of his denying the Holocaust. The combination of those two elements made me want to make the movie.
“Likewise with Joyce McKinney, there was an article about her in The Boston Globe connecting dog cloning with a 32-year-old sex and chain story. Her story captured my interest. If it hadn’t been for those two seemingly disparate elements put together in one newspaper article, I wouldn’t have made Tabloid–nor would Mr. Death have been made.”
Tabloid is a Moxie Pictures project, with Moxie CEO Robert Fernandez serving as an executive producer of the film. Morris cited Fernandez as being “consistently supportive and an enormous help to me throughout my career” spanning commercials and documentary work.
Moxie is also Morris’ commercialmaking home. He estimates that he’s directed more than 1,000 commercials thus far in his career, including about 100 over the years for the now classic, tongue-in-cheek manly vignette “Miller High Life Man” campaign for Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Among Morris’ other notable spot credits is PBS’ “Photo Booth” built around an opera-loving guy with a talent for flip-card animation. Produced by @radical.media (Morris’ spotmaking home prior to Moxie) for Fallon, Minneapolis, “Photo Booth” won the primetime commercial Emmy Award in 2001.
Morris remains extremely active in the ad arena, having most recently directed an eHarmony campaign for which he estimates some 40 spots were cut.
“I’ve done seven or eight different campaigns this year,” related Morris. “I’m literally working constantly. With commercials,you get chances to work with the camera, which I wouldn’t get nearly as much of if I just confined myself to documentaries. You hone your craft even more, working with actors and doing a lot of what would be considered non-documentary work which is of great interest and value to me as a filmmaker.”
