Four of the five directors nominated for the DGA Award honoring Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film are also the nominees for the Best Director Oscar. And three of the five with both DGA and Oscar noms this year were at the Directors Guild of America’s 23rd annual Meet The Nominees–Feature Film panel discussion last month (1/25) in Los Angeles: Steve McQueen who was recognized for 12 Years a Slave; David O. Russell for American Hustle; and Martin Scorsese for The Wolf of Wall Street.
The fourth director, Alfonso Cuarón, was on an international flight at the time of the session, arriving in L.A. that evening when he won the DGA Award for Gravity. This bodes well for the pull of Gravity at the Academy Awards in that the Guild feature honoree has typically gone on to win the corresponding Best Director Oscar.
Only seven times since the DGA Awards began in 1948 has the DGA Award recipient not also captured the directorial Oscar. However, that rare occurrence is fresh in the industry’s memory in that it happened just last year when Ben Affleck won the DGA Award for Argo but didn’t even garner a Best Director Oscar nomination. Still, like many DGA winners, Argo went on to earn Best Picture distinction at the Oscars.
Also on hand for the panel discussion in L.A.–moderated by director Jeremy Kagan–was Paul Greengrass, a DGA Award nominee for Captain Phillips. Greengrass, however, did not make the Best Director Oscar nominations cut; that honor instead went to Alexander Payne for Nebraska.
During the DGA session, McQueen talked of his close-knit collaborations on 12 Years a Slave, including with his cast and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, BSC. Bobbitt has shot all three of director McQueen’s features–the first being Hunger (2008) and then Shame (2011).
For 12 Years a Slave, McQueen had Bobbitt shoot in one take the brutal whipping of Patsey (portrayed by Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee Lupita Nyong’o) by slave master Edwin Epps (played by Best Supporting Actor nominee Michael Fassbender). The director explained that he wanted the audience “to be there” in a state of “witnessing everything.” McQueen added, “I wanted to keep the pressure on. If I put a cut in there, it would have allowed the audience to take a breath.” He didn’t want to provide such a respite which would have broken the intensity of the moment.
For the actors, noted McQueen, it’s all about “the foundation you hopefully can create.” He likened actors to “a thoroughbred horse” in that they can sense if something is amiss, if the environment doesn’t have the necessary trust, support and camaraderie for them to do their best work. Actors need that supportive arena to feel free to take risks. With that foundation, said McQueen, actors can “go for it.” McQueen described Epps as “a tortured character…He’s in love with a slave.” And by whipping Patsy he is somehow “trying to destroy that feeling inside him.” The scene shows human “perversity,” said McQueen who wanted the audience to fully feel the impact of this true story.
David O. Russell
Moderator Kagan observed that all five DGA nominations came for movies that are about survival in different contexts and circumstances.
Russell noted that the characters in American Hustle are constantly reinventing themselves in order to survive–and towards that end, the settings created for the movie help to put that survival into personal perspective.
Russell, for example, recalled the home of Mayor Carmine Polito (portrayed by Jeremy Renner), which had a familial feel akin in some respects to the humanity in the albeit unconventional home life captured in Russell’s previous films, Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter. Russell credited his production design team with creating a setting integral to the story and character development.
Russell related that Polito’s home reflected a family “magic and love that’s worth surviving for.”
Martin Scorsese
McQueen noted that his teenage daughter told him that she and her friends think The Wolf of Wall Street is a cool movie. Citing this ability to connect with the coveted youth demographic, McQueen marveled that at the age of 71, “Martin Scorsese is Kanye West; it’s kind of crazy.”
Scorsese said simply that he wanted to make “a ferocious picture,” a goal that for him was sparked by the December 2008 collapse of the financial market. The decadence of “an unregulated financial world,” he observed still goes merrily on, continuing to be fueled by a mindset and values centered on how much money someone makes still being the ultimate “measure of success.”
Scorsese said his film delves into the “humor in negative behavior…The whole idea of the picture is risky and dangerous.” The orgy scenes in the picture reflect sex that isn’t eroticism, said Scorsese. The sex, he affirmed, is “all about power. They did it because they could.” The main characters, he observed, “have no respect for anything–not even the money they make.”
Helping to jump start the film was actor Matthew McConaughey’s improvisation in a scene shot early on with Leonardo DiCaprio. This lent an extra special dimension to the script. “We really took off after that,” noted Scorsese.
Technically and artistically, Scorsese also credited cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC. The director related that Prieto turned him onto the Phantom digital camera to attain the high speed photography needed for an airplane sequence marked by turbulence.
Paul Greengrass
Greengrass quipped that his high seas adventure Captain Phillips was “a film drenched in vomit.”
It’s also in a more serious vein a movie in which actors were given some latitude to do what they do best.
“Drama is about collision, conflict,” Greengrass observed, adding that if a scene is “preordained, it can never be alive.” Actors are encouraged to “play out the scene” and sometimes that can result in something different than the screenplay, making for happy discovery.
Greengrass also gave credit to cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, BSC, for his many contributions to Captain Phillips. “I would feel a [camera] move [was called for] and it’s already happening. He [Ackroyd] is already there.”
That shorthand, borderline telepathic connection between director and cinematographer has been developed over time. Greengrass and Ackroyd’s narrative drama feature collaborations over the years include United 93, Green Zone and Captain Phillips.
Advice
Kagan asked the director panelists for advice they would give to young, aspiring filmmakers.
Russell is hands-on involved in the development of many such careers. Back in 2002, he joined the board of the Bronx’s Ghetto Film School, at the time a brand-new, all-volunteer local summer project with a very small budget and no presence within the film industry.
Russell helped to significantly raise that profile, getting his filmmaker friends, movie studios and industry professionals to not only give money, but also lend their time to teach classes and support the growth of young black and Latino filmmakers from the South Bronx and Harlem. Today, Ghetto Film School is New York’s first public high school for cinema, an award-winning program model that has helped more than 500 teenagers tell their stories.
“I get back way more than I give,” said Russell of his Ghetto Film School experience. Russell said he plans to hit up everyone on the panel to come and speak to the students.
In terms of advice he gives to the youngsters, Russell simply offers “tell me the story.” Russell said that every scene is “life and death” for a filmmaker and the constant goal is to “make it human” and “connect” with an audience.
Greengrass encouraged new filmmakers to find and share their “unique voice.”
“Taking a chance is the norm. We’re all going to die. Go out with both guns blazing,” offered McQueen who added that “experimenting is the norm. Try, fail, pick yourself up. Cinema has survived through risk taking.”
Scorsese said that “reinventing cinema” and “experimenting” are staples of the art.
As an example, Scorsese hearkened back to different eras such as the 1970s which were shaped in large part by filmmakers such as Paul Schrader, Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas who were “experimenting all the time.”
That “essential passion” is key, said Scorsese, noting that young directors must have that drive, “to want to make a picture because you can’t imagine not.”
Judy Becker
Production designer Judy Becker has worked with directors Russell and McQueen. For Russell, she served as production designer on The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. On the strength of the latter, she earned her first Oscar nomination (with set decorator Heather Loeffler). Becker earlier worked with McQueen on Shame.
Based on her experience on those films, Becker described McQueen as “a very different kind of filmmaker” than Russell. “Steve comes from a fine arts background. Shame had a small budget so he had to know exactly what he wanted. Everything was planned out visually. He had a greater degree of visual formality than David. David is more improvisational.” Becker affirmed that both are brilliant visonary filmmakers.
Becker first met Russell eight years ago regarding a movie that eventually wound up not getting made.
“We became friends and have a lot in common. We grew up in the same area right outside New York City but not in the same time. We have a lot of the same cinema references in terms of mood and style. We bonded as friends and collaborators. It’s been a great relationship. David is someone whom I consider a friend and a family member.”
Regarding her Oscar nomination for American Hustle, Becker related, “In my mind, this was something I hoped to achieve but I didn’t expect it this year. It’s exhilarating to be nominated. I love the work we did on the movie and am proud to be a part of it. I love the movie and to have it recognized the way it has this awards season has been gratifying.”
Becker observed that the biggest challenge American Hustle posed to her as a production designer turned out to be an advantage. “We were shooting in a contemporary Boston area for New York City and New Jersey. Boston is a very different city than Manhattan so I thought this would be a major challenge. But as I started location scouting and looking at suburbs, the surrounding towns and cities went back in time and were amazing, giving us the qualities we were looking for in our settings and locations.”
American Hustle also satisfied her long-time desire to do a movie set in the 1970s which she described as her “favorite cinematic era.” Becker said that American Hustle gave her the chance to portray the 1970s in a non-cliche way–the conventional depiction being a gritty, dirty New York City. “But the city wasn’t gritty and dirty everywhere. This is a more glamorous, not a down version of New York City. New York magazines from that period show a different, more glamorous side. In researching that time period, we found geometric shapes in furniture and styles that you’d think were from the 1980s if you didn’t know better.”
American Hustle has additionally earned both BAFTA and Art Directors Guild Excellence in Production Design Award nominations for Becker. Last year, she won the latter honor on the TV side for the pilot episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls (HBO). Back in 2011, Becker was nominated for an Art Directors Guild Award on the basis of The Fighter.
Editorial POV
Another close collaborator with Russell is editor Jay Cassidy who earned his third career Best Editing Oscar nomination for American Hustle. Cassidy was first nominated for director Sean Penn’s Into The Wild in 2008 and then for Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook last year.
Cassidy shares the American Hustle nomination with fellow editors Crispin Struthers and Alan Baumgarten.
Director Russell recently talked with SHOOT about this editing trio and what they brought to the table. “Crispin was an assistant on The Fighter and became one of our team members moving on to Silver Linings Playbook,” related Russell. “Jay was recommended by Sean Penn for Silver Linings Playbook after [editor] Pam Martin was unavailable. [Martin cut Russell’s The Fighter and Spanking the Monkey.]
Jay is very dedicated and passionate. He’s sort of the captain of the editing room. We had such a short post schedule on American Hustle, that we also welcomed Alan Baumgarten aboard who I hadn’t worked with before. Alan was great. We will all work together again.”
Cassidy observed that with the tight schedule and “the amount of footage David shoots, the number of iterations he likes to go through on scenes, it was clear we needed three editors. Our approach was to break the film up into sections and to try to have an editor responsible for a section of the film. That division of labor is never perfect. People end up having to recut sections they didn’t originally cut but we developed a working rhythm. And I was kind of responsible for the overall continuity and evolution of the scenes. I was the first one in and the last one out.”
Cassidy noted that Russell has described The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle as “‘an evolving trio of films.’ The tone is so his own–serious storytelling, real characters and from that comedy can emerge. But it’s not broad-based joke humor; it’s comedy that comes out of life.
“That tone was very clear to me when I first read Silver Linings Playbook and David didn’t vary from those operating principles when he went onto American Hustle,” continued Cassidy. “We knew what we were doing right from the get-go. I was involved very early on in American Hustle which was very important because we had a rushed and distracted pre-production which was going on during the hectic awards season last year [for Silver Linings Playbook].”
As for what’s next on his docket, Cassidy is currently editing Foxcatcher directed by Bennett Miller whose prior feature credits are Moneyball and Capote. (Miller is on the directorial roster of production house Smuggler for commercials and branded content.)
Cassidy is a five time American Cinema Editors (ACE) Eddie Award nominee, winning that honor three times, the most recent coming earlier this month for American Hustle (with Struthers and Baumgarten). Last year he and Struthers won the Eddie for Silver Linings Playbook. And in 2007, Cassidy took took the Eddie (shared with Dan Swietlik) for An Inconvenient Truth. Cassidy’s other two career nominations are for Into The Wild in 2008, and Waiting for Superman (shared with Greg Finton and Kim Roberts) in 2011.
Short order
Director Jeffrey Karoff is well known to the commercialmaking community. He is currently repped in the Midwest and on the West Coast for spots and branded content by Seed, industry vet Roy Skillicorn’s production house. Just prior to connecting with Seed, Karoff recently directed for such agencies as McCann Detroit, Y+R Brands Canada, Saatchi Wellness, Uniworld and Digitas Health. Over the years, Karoff’s ad filmography includes a 360-degree CircleVision film for Mercedes-Benz, a package for Ford’s “Swap Your Ride” campaign chronicling the experiences of consumers who are given a chance to trade their current vehicles for Fords, a series of PSA for Model Environment that used renowned fashion models to promote environmental causes, and fundraising films for the philanthropic Robin Hood Foundation in New York.
Last month, Karoff earned his first career Oscar nomination, in the Documentary Short Subject category for CaveDigger. Directed by Karoff and produced by his Karoffilms. the short profiles Ra Paulette, an earth artist who digs cathedral-like caves in the sandstone cliffs of New Mexico. The caves are experiential and magical yet earth artist Paulette struggles to make a living while being true to his vision.
He has differences with the people who commission his work.
Karoff noted that the film is “the story of the artist against the financiers. Even deep in the hills of Northern New Mexico working along under the earth, he’s dealing with issues that are age old. He’s creating caves that are works of art for people who have opinions of what they should be. His quest is to realize his vision, his magnum opus.”
Regarding the Oscar nomination, Karoff said, “To know that a jury of my peers looked at the film and found it worthy of that kind of recognition is personally, artistically, completely a thrill to me…I’m particularly pleased because this is not what usually gets nominated which are films about issues and hardship.” Karoff conjectured that the art vs. commerce theme may have been of some appeal to Academy voters, some of whom could identify with that same struggle as it applies to filmmaking.
But ultimately, said Karoff, the nomination is for and because Paulette.
“Not only for his skill but his willingness to reveal what’s involved in being a person who is obsessive, visionary and the price the he pays,” said Karoff. “He’s what made this a movie and not just a document of somebody’s art.”
It took Karoff three years to make CaveDigger. He first saw the artist’s work 10 years ago. “It was so striking to walk into that cave, to experience the visceral impact of a piece of art,” recalled Karoff. “It’s rare to have a piece of art strike you that deeply. I knew this was something I wanted to make a film about. It took me about 10 years to figure out how to approach making the film after the first time I saw his work. I knew that I wanted to do something that was more than simply an artist creating his art.”
Karoff credited his collaborators, including prime contributors, cinematographer Anghel Decca, editor Erin Nordstrom of Optimus, and composer Pete Min. Nordstrom and Min were new finds for Karoff while Decca has been a long-time colleague on varied jobs.
“Nordstrom was recommended by a colleague,” said Karoff. “I had never worked with her before. What a collaboration that turned out to be. She is an extraordinary storytelling talent. I saw the film she cut, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart [a documentary about the band Wilco] but I didn’t realize until I worked with her how much she brought to that film and then to mine.”
CaveDigger was released theatrically on January 31 as part of The OSCAR Nominated Short Films 2014 which contains all of this year’s nominated shorts spanning Live Action, Animation and Documentary. The compilation film opened in more than 350 theaters throughout the U.S. and Canada. Together with the theatrical run, the nominated short films are available on iTunes Stores in 54 countries, Amazon Instant Video in the U.S., and on VOD/Pay Per View platforms across the U.S.
The four other Oscar-nominated Best Documentary Short Subject films are:
• Facing Fear directed by Jason Cohen and produced by Jason Cohen Productions. Facing Fear introduces us to a gay man who as a teen was brutally attacked by a gang of neo-Nazis. Twenty-five years later, he encounters one of his attackers.
• Karama Has No Walls directed by Sarah Ishaq and produced by Hot Spot Films. This documentary centers on one brutally tragic day during the 2011 Yemeni revolution.
• The Lady In Number 6: Music Saved My Life directed by Malcolm Clarke and produced by Reed Entertainment. This portrait of 109-year-old Holocaust survivor Alice Herz Sommer shares her views on how to live a long and happy life. Clarke along with Bill Guttentag won the Short Subject Documentary Oscar back in 1989 for You Don’t Have To Die.
• Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall directed by Edgar Barnes and produced by Prison Terminal LLC. Shot over a six-month span at Iowa State Penitentiary, this documentary looks at the final months in the life of a terminally ill prisoner.
The Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2013 will be presented on March 2, 2014, and televised live on the ABC Television Network.
