With the movie awards season now in the industry’s proverbial rearview mirror, reflections on what transpired abound. But perhaps most telling are the observations of the Oscar-winning artisans themselves backstage after accepting their statuettes. Here’s a sampling of their feedback.
Editor William Goldenberg, A.C.E., had a better chance of winning his first Oscar than the other nominees–because he was nominated twice, for Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, the latter which had him collaborating with fellow cutter Dylan Tichenor, A.C.E. Goldenberg wound up winning for Argo, with the fourth time proving to be the charm. He has four career Best Editing Academy Award nominations, the first two coming for The Insider (2000) and then four years later for Seabiscuit.
Backstage clutching the Oscar for Argo, Goldenberg reflected on his working relationship with director/producer Ben Affleck as well as producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov. “Working with Ben is a dream. We did Gone Baby Gone [Affleck’s feature directorial debut] together and we got along great. And he invited me to do this movie. Ben leads by being inspiring and positive and helpful, and he’s my partner in this. We edited this movie together.”
As for Clooney and Heslov, Goldenberg observed, “They do what producers should do…they always stayed back and let us do our jobs. And they came in and said really smart things at the right times, and just guided us in a way that I feel like great producers do.”
Regarding the 1970s setting for Argo and how he dealt with that aesthetic, Goldenberg related, “I watched a lot of films from the ’70s that Ben references [Network, All The President’s Men, Sunday Bloody Sunday]…but when I was cutting, I was merely just trying to tell a great story, trying to get the best performances. So, I mean, so much of that feel of the ’70s was done by all the great people who were in production design and makeup and hair and costumes. And so, once the footage got to me, I just tried to tell a great story with it.”
Lincoln
Speaking of production design, Rick Carter won the Oscar in that discipline for the second consecutive year, both for Steven Spielberg-directed movies: War Horse in 2012 (shared with set decorator Lee Sandales), followed by Lincoln (shared with set decorator Jim Erickson). Backstage, Carter acknowledged Erickson’s integral contributions. “So much of what is in Lincoln, visually, that is seen, that creates the intimacy of the sets and the setting, is Jim’s work. And we’re the same age and we’re like brothers who have shared a common history to get to this time now. I was called on by Steven [Spielberg] to being work on Lincoln all the way back in 2001, even before 9/11, and it’s been literally a journey to be in the pursuit of trying to find a way to honor his legacy. At first, it was a broad canvas and it was narrowed over time to be reflective of the last three months of Lincoln’s life.”
Carter cited Best Oscar winner Daniel Day Lewis “who came in and personified President Lincoln so completely” for affording him as a production designer the opportunity to help “create a portrait that was very much from the soul.” (Lewis made history by becoming the first to win three Lead Actor Academy Awards in his career.)
A rare tie
With Spielberg films accounting for Carter’s two career Oscars, similarly a pair of Kathryn Bigelow-directed pictures, The Hurt Locker, and now Zero Dark Thirty have garnered three Academy Awards in audio categories for Paul N.J. Ottosson. For The Hurt Locker in 2010, he won Oscars in Sound Editing and Sound Mixing (the latter shared with Ray Beckett). And this year Zero Dark Thirty scored Ottosson another Academy Award for Sound Editing. Ottosson said of Bigelow, “She’s a fantastic storyteller and a fantastic director. I love the movies she’s done in the past. I love the movies she’s currently working on when I’ve been on board. She’s very different from most directors I’ve worked with. She’s an extraordinary person, an extraordinary director and I’m blessed to work with her.”
Ottosson’s work on Zero Dark Thirty tied for this year’s Sound Editing Oscar with Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers for their work on Skyfall, the James Bond picture directed by Sam Mendes. Hallberg said of Mendes, “He’s one of the great storytellers in movies right now that works a lot with emotion and feeling and subtleties, and that’s not normally what Bond is all about…I think we ended up with this great middle ground of giving the audience the feel of the Bond movie, but still a lot of that sensitivity and emotional feeling that Sam needs and wants in his movies.”
Asked what it meant to be the lone woman nominated in the Sound Editing category, Landers said, “I don’t think about it that much until I get asked the question, but it is really an honor to be a woman and to represent women in the industry and to be able to hang with the big boys and to do these films, so it means a lot to me.”
Winning this year’s Sound Mixing Oscar were Andy Nelson, Mark Patterson and Simon Hayes for Les Miserables directed by Tom Hooper. Nelson noted that their collaboration with Hooper and the actors entailed “an incredible amount of trust. Before we started shooting Les Miserables, we just said, ‘Guys, we’re just going to have to hold hands and jump off this cliff together.’ And all of the actors knew what we were doing was groundbreaking…They had to sing for 10 to 12 hours a day everyday, take after take, and it was our job to capture them and make sure that what we recorded was good enough to make it into the movie, because Tom Hooper’s vision was to never re-record any vocals at all. And what we managed to do was to make sure that those performances on the set made it into the theater.”
Raising awareness
Oscar recipients were also hoping to raise awareness of issues related to their films, one being the financial stability–or lack thereof–for the visual effects business. Rhythm & Hues’ recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy declaration (SHOOTonline, 2/15) was a topic touched upon briefly on stage during the Academy Awards ceremony and expounded upon backstage a little later that same evening (SHOOTonline, 2/26). Sparking the discussion was Life of Pi winning the Visual Effects Oscar with Bill Westenhofer of Rhythm & Hues serving as the overall VFX supervisor on the film. At the tail end of his Oscar acceptance remarks, Westenhofer started to talk about Rhythm & Hues, noting that the studio was “suffering severe financial difficulties right now.” But he was then cut off in mid-sentence as his time on stage ran out.
Shortly thereafter, though, Westenhofer completed his thoughts backstage, noting, “What I was trying to say up there is that it’s at a time when visual effects movies are dominating the box office, that visual effects are struggling….Visual effects is not just a commodity that’s being done by people pushing buttons. We’re artists and if we don’t find a way to fix the business model, we start to lose the artistry. If anything, Life of Pi shows that we’re artists and not just technicians.”
Westenhofer described Rhythm & Hues as a place that caters to and supports artists. “We’re hopeful that we can pull through the bankruptcy but it’s a concern in all of our minds that the culture is preserved. As long as the key people are maintained in that environment, I think it will carry on.”
As for other issues, these of a broader societal nature, Jennifer Lawrence, who won the Best Leading Actress Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, was asked what the movie means to people who suffer from bipolar disorder and other mental problems. She responded, “I don’t think that we’re going to stop until we get rid of the stigma for mental illness. I know David [Silver Linings Playbook director/writer O’Russell] won’t, and I hope this helps. It’s so bizarre how in this world…if you have asthma, you take asthma medicine; if you have diabetes, you take diabetes medicine. If you have to take medication for your mind, there’s such a stigma behind it.”
Quentin Tarantino, who directed Django Unchained, won the Original Screenplay Academy Award for the film. Backstage he remarked that the criticism he has received for Django Unchained was “kind of a good thing because one of the things that I wanted to do is actually start a conversation about slavery, about America’s role in it, and to actually take an audience member from the 21st century and stick them in the Antebellum South and see whether they would have a sense of what America was like back then. A lot of people don’t like it [the movie] and I can understand that, but a lot of people do like it, and they have been kind of going back and forth. And that back and forth is really what I wanted for the end of the day of this movie and I hope that actually even continues for the next few years.”
The husband-and-wife directing team of Sean and Andrea Fine won the Best Short Subject Documentary Oscar on the strength of INOCENTE, which tells the story of a homeless girl who’s an artist. This homeless teen came on stage with the directors when they accepted their Academy Awards. Backstage, Andrea Fine noted that the teen, named Inocente, had two weeks earlier been in Washington, D.C., talking to senators and congressmen and women in the House of Congress. “She [Inocente] is really giving a face to what’s an invisible population. One in 45 kids in this country is homeless and that doesn’t make sense. That’s like you take two classes in school and one kid in each classroom is homeless and when you add that up, that’s a hell of a lot of kids. So I think we feel very connected to Washington as being able to say, ‘Look, maybe we can do something about this.'”
