Wrapping this awards season’s The Road To Oscar series are reflections from several winners backstage at this past Sunday’s ceremony: Graham Moore who earned Best Adapted Screenplay honors for The Imitation Game (The Weinstein Company); DP Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, AMC, ASC, who garnered the Best Cinematography Oscar for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Fox Searchlight); and directors Don Hall and Chris Williams, and producer Ray Conli who took the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film for Big Hero 6 (Disney).
Moore said he felt the added pressure of telling the story of Alan Turing in that there are so few films that represent the LGBT community accurately. Portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in an Oscar-nominated performance, Turing was a computer pioneer who cracked the Nazis’ elaborate secret communication Enigma code, an accomplishment which Winston Churchill heralded as the single greatest contribution to helping to win World War II. Turing’s historic, heroic 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.
Moore related, “when you’re approaching a story of this magnitude and you’re approaching a life and a person as unique as Alan Turing, there’s this tremendous responsibility on your shoulders and I felt a tremendous responsibility on my shoulders to tell his story fairly and accurately and responsibly. Alan is someone who was so mistreated by history. He is someone who, as a gay man, was persecuted by the government on whose existence he provided for. And, as such, I always felt like he needed a film that spread his legacy, that celebrated it and brought it to a new audience of people who might not otherwise have been exposed to this man because history had treated him so poorly.”
In his acceptance speech onstage, Moore shared that when he was 16 years old, he tried to kill himself “because I felt weird and I felt different and I felt like I did not belong. And now I’m standing here and, so, I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere. Yes, you do. I promise you do. You do. Stay weird. Stay different. And then when it’s your turn and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along.”
Later backstage, Moore was asked how difficult was it for him to share something so personal with a global audience. He responded, “It’s not like I see a billion people when I’m out there looking around. No, it was really hard, but it felt‑‑I don’t know, I’m a writer, when am I ever going to be on television? This was my, like, 45 seconds in my life to get on television and say something so I felt like I might as well use it to say something meaningful.”
Regarding his approach to telling a story of invention and discovery, Turing’s internal process, in a visual filmmaking medium, Moore observed, “All wartime thrillers should really be about mathematicians, right, because nothing is so thrilling as mathematics. No, that was a definite challenge. What we wanted to do was make a film that recreated Alan Turing’s subjective experience of the war. So one of the big ideas to try and sort of take you inside Alan’s head was on our part to say, okay, so what did the process of breaking Enigma feel like for Alan? How did he experience it and how can we then sort of digest that and put it on screen in a way that the audience will experience it as well? So if you imagine, Alan Turing was 27 years old when he got to Bletchley Park. He had never been outside of a university environment in his life and all of a sudden there’s this sort of fate of the free world war going, and he’s working alongside the highest levels of MI6 to crack this incredibly important code. Ian Fleming, who was in MI6 at the time, was literally working alongside him. And so Alan Turing is literally living inside of a James Bond novel. So the idea was like, okay, let’s show the process of breaking Enigma as a thriller because Alan would have experienced it as a thriller, and so let’s show those moments of discovery and struggle the way he would have experienced them.”
Moore said of The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum, “I would work for Morten this very second if he were shooting a movie. Working with Morten was one of the greatest creative collaborations of my life and I would follow that man into the gates of hell itself. So whenever Morten wants me there, I’ll be there.”
Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki
Lubezki is the first cinematographer to have made the triple sweep of Oscar, BAFTA and ASC Awards for Cinematography two years in a row–for the Alfonso Cuaron-directed Gravity in 2014 and now for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman.
Of Birdman, Lubezki said, “this was probably the hardest movie I’ve ever worked on. And it was really hard because…the shots were very, very long. And we were not doing coverage so everybody had to do their best every time and not mess it up. And I think that brought an energy to the movie that otherwise the movie would not have. And I think that stress and that a need for concentration made the acting so powerful and the camera and everything in the movie. So, to my humble opinion, it’s so powerful because of that. And that’s something that Alejandro wanted to do since he wrote the script. He was very‑‑he really wanted the movie to be in one shot or appear to be in one shot, and he didn’t want to do any coverage because he knew that that was a way to immerse the audience in the movie, in the story, much deeper than‑‑than any other, you know, any other way we could have shot the movie. And also it would make the actors do their best every time because they are used to‑‑usually, we shoot movies with coverage, and we do a wide shot, and the actors give only 70 percent. And then when they do their close‑ups, they do 100 percent, but this time, they knew the shots were going to be in the movie, so they had to go for the whole thing.”
As for what he thought when Inarritu presented him with the idea for Birdman, Lubezki recalled, “Well, the first time he talked about the movie, he said he wanted to do a movie in one shot before I read the script. And at that moment, I truly, honestly thought I hope he doesn’t offer me this movie; I’m not interested. It sounds like a nightmare. And then when he brought the script and talked about the characters and why it had to be one shot, he ‑‑ you know, he captivated me, and I truly wanted to do the movie. And it was really, really complex, very hard. We had to‑‑you know, there’s no book that says how do it. It was like an experiment. And I have to say that is because he’s a very strong, very curious, very, very‑‑yeah, very curious artist. We went through the process and made this movie happen.”
Big Hero 6
For the second consecutive year, Disney won the Best Animated Feature Oscar–for Frozen last year and this time around for Big Hero 6. Given the success of Frozen, Big Hero 6 directors Don Hall and Chris Williams and producer Ray Conli were asked if they felt any added pressure.
Hall shared, “Can we finally say that we did feel pressure? Because we’ve been saying that we didn’t. But, no, you know, we were all thrilled by the success of Frozen because it’s a little hard for everybody to understand, but we all kind of work on each other’s films. Chris actually storyboarded on Frozen and did the voice of Oaken, and we all contributed just like Chris and Jen, the directors of that movie, contributed on this movie, giving us notes and stuff like that. So we all have ownership over everybody’s films.
Conli added, “It is such a team at Disney animation right now. It’s an amazing team that works together on every project. So I looked at it [Frozen] as just an inspiration.”
As for the challenges of doing the first super hero Marvel movie at Disney, Hall related that the biggest challenge is “always story. Whenever you’re making any kind of film, the story is really the ultimate thing that you’re trying to tackle. And for this one we had this amazing story about grief, about loss, about a 14‑year‑old who loses his brother and a robot who becomes essentially his healer, and trying to reconcile that with a super hero origin story was very difficult and it took the bulk of our time as directors. We worked at it and we worked at it and we worked at it until we finally found that Baymax himself, the character Baymax, was the link that linked those two stories together. But in our 20‑year history at Disney I think this was our most challenging film. But it makes it all the sweeter when this kind of stuff happens.”
Williams noted, “We’ve all been at Disney, each of us, for about 20 years, and every movie is hard, but they’re hard in their own way. And I think you’re getting to the heart of what was uniquely difficult about this one which was taking all the disparate elements and bringing them together. And there are two distinct genres we were taking on, a super hero origin story, and a boy and his dog or a boy and his robot story and we had to tell one without making it at the expense of the other. So yeah, I think that really was the most challenging thing is pulling all these elements together.”
Conli added, “The key issue was that we always knew that the heart of the story was that story about the boy who loses his brother and then is redeemed and actually saved by this incredible robot Baymax. So that was always the heart.”
