As a prelude to its “The Road To Oscar” weekly series of feature stories which gets underway next month, SHOOT touches base with several artisans already generating buzz this awards season, including a documentary filmmaker poised to perhaps make history, and a writer-director whose feature gives a voice to those living in a world of silence.
The latter is Darius Marder who’s made his narrative feature directorial debut with Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios), which he also co-wrote (with his brother, Abraham Marder, from a story penned by Derek Cianfrance). In the film, Riz Ahmed portrays a heavy metal drummer, Ruben, who loses his hearing. Ahmed earned a Gotham Award nomination last month for his performance.
Rather than focus solely on Ruben’s isolation as a result of hearing loss, filmmaker Marder also shows the support and belonging that can be found in the deaf community. During the course of the film, Ruben loses his identity, then finds a new one only to struggle with trying to retain his original lifestyle before experiencing a defining self-realization.
Though Marder tells this story from his perspective as a member of the hearing world, he has family experience in deafness. His grandmother, Dorothy Marder–to whom Sound of Metal is dedicated–was late-deafened, meaning she grew up hearing, then became deaf. Her loss of hearing was triggered by an adverse reaction to an antibiotic. Dorothy was a cinephile who lost film as a result but fought for open captioning. The Marder brothers dedicated Sound of Metal to their grandmother, a Jewish gay woman who was accustomed to breaking through barriers. Darius Marder described Sound of Metal as “a film about identity” and “what that means on many levels,” particularly “what it means when those identities are challenged” and how one responds–specifically the character of Ruben who loses his hearing and along with it music, his lover and lifestyle.
Ruben, a former drug addict who’s been sober for several years, goes to a community house for the deaf, learns sign language and over time becomes part of the deaf community. Director/co-writer Marder said at the recent AFI Fest that he views Sound of Metal as not necessarily “a representation of deaf culture” but rather for the hearing world “an invitation to deaf culture,” which if accepted helps viewers to better see our shared humanity while dispelling misnomers about–and removing stigmas from–being deaf. Marder then added during a recent Zoom press conference that he regards Sound of Metal in some respects as “an empathy machine” akin to viewers donning a VR headset and being thrust into an experience. He hopes viewers will have and embrace that experience and find value in whatever it is they can relate to.
“That’s my main objective and in so doing, I think people are joined by the commonality of the human experience,” said Marder, adding that “if people are going through something that’s hard whether it be addiction or co-dependence or substance (abuse) or any number of those things which fall under that umbrella, they at least feel conjoined with the rest of humanity maybe in watching this.”
Marder praised his cast, including Ahmed as Ruben and Olivia Cooke as his bandmate and lover Lou. Ahmed, said Marder, “builds a foundation for a character so diligent, so true and so deep that you look in his eyes and see a specific character.” That character, continued Marder, is an addict, a drummer, a foster child and so much more–”and none of that is ever spoken.” To be able to do that as an actor reflects “deep artistry,” assessed Marder.
Similarly Cooke as Lou leaves the story when Ruben joins the community house. She comes back into the film when Ruben has learned sign language, developed an identity in the deaf community and had cochlear implants which help him to hear again but in a much different way. Ruben goes to Europe to reunite with Lou but at that point we see that she too has changed. Lou’s experiences during her time away have been distinctly different from those of Ruben. She is truly a different person and we see that their relationship can no longer be the same. Lou’s transformation is convincing and emotional, leaving Marder with “a lot of respect for Olivia’s process” as an actor.
Marder lauded the contributions of others, including supervising sound editor Nicolas Becker’s “incredible deep practice of capturing at most the natural sound of he world,” deploying multi-directional microphones that facilitate a deeper appreciation of what we hear but perhaps take for granted. Marder related that Becker’s work helps to “lend an almost 3-dimensional hyper naturalism that we ended up celebrating in the movie in a way that brought your attention to the hyper-natural sounds almost as a meditation of what we ignore in general.”
Time
Alluded to at the top of this story as a filmmaker perhaps on the verge of making history, Garrett Bradley–on the strength of Time (Amazon Studios)–could become the first Black woman to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Bradley broke new ground by winning the Directing Award in the U.S. documentary competition for Time, becoming the first Black woman to earn that distinction.
Time tells the story of Sibil “Fox Rich” Richardson whose husband Rob was imprisoned for what turned out to be 21 years. Time shows us the impact of Rob’s incarceration on her and their six children.
Time does more than chronicle the injustice of a far too harsh prison sentence on Rob and its profound effect on loved ones. The film serves as an almost lyrical ode blending intimate original footage captured by Bradley with archival family video taken by Fox of her kids at various stages of their lives. We see in this blend of home movies and Bradley’s footage a mom struggling to raise a family, turning her life around to become a successful professional. Yet all the while audiences feel both her enduring love for Rob and the ongoing ache she and the kids feel due to his imprisonment. He is an absent husband and father but paradoxically for Fox he is seemingly always present–in her heart and mind as she strives to have him set free one day.
Rob and Fox were high school sweethearts who married and had dreams. They planned to start a hip hop clothing store but the business fell through. Desperate, they attempted to hold up a credit union office, a caper that went south. Though no money was stolen and no one was hurt, Fox, the getaway driver, and Rob got prison sentences. At the time, Fox was three months pregnant with twins. Rob was sentenced to 60 years.
Time weaves its way through their story, showing the kids at various ages, not always advancing chronologically but rather taking us in and out of their lives at different junctures, going back and forth to create a tapestry that weaves us intimately into a family that unites and achieves yet feels the pain of a dad and spouse who’s out of sight but never out of mind.
For Bradley, a key dynamic in the film is her close-knit collaboration with editor Gabriel Rhodes. This marked the first time she had worked with an editor. “I had been cutting my own films,” related Bradley who noted that for Time it “became really critical to open up the collaborative process. I hit a ceiling with what I could do as a filmmaker and director.”
She connected with Rhodes, drawn to him in part by his work on Mantangi/Maya/M.I.A, director Stephen Loveridge’s portrait of the Sri Lankan artist and musician known as M.I.A. Bradley saw in that documentary a strong female central figure, somebody who was a mother, politically engaged and very much a leader. The film also entailed working with a treasure trove of personal archival footage akin to what Fox had on her family. Thus Rhodes “felt to me like a natural fit” for Time, assessed Bradley. “Gabe has a really brilliant mind, a way of distilling ideas and scenes that is incredibly elegant yet simple, rooted in the emotionality of the storyline. The two of us learned a lot from one another.”
Rhodes recalled that they didn’t always have to be in the same room to connect. At one point while Rhodes was in Brooklyn, Bradley was living in Rome. “We were on the phone a lot. He would send me things to watch. We had long conversations. Getting down to the wire, we were sending each other 30-second clips of things and embedding them in a sequence. We were doing the remote thing before remote was a thing.”
Indeed finding the way to best blend the archival video with contemporary footage was a prime challenge that Time posed to Bradley and Rhodes. “I was aware of the archive while shooting,” said Bradley. “That was something that Gabe and I tried to tackle. We came at it from multiple angles. How can we find interesting visual intersections between current and old footage?”
The answer in part came, continued Bradley, by being “predominantly focused on what is happening emotionally in this (archival footage) moment and connecting it to a current moment.”
Even the seemingly mundane moments leave an imprint. Fox’s perseverance and patience, for example, are evident in a series of phone calls she makes to a judge’s clerk, eager to find out if a ruling has been made that could set her husband free. She is put on hold repeatedly with call after call yielding no news. Still, she is courteous in the face of a system that has put her on hold interminably–another reflection of wasted time.
As for what her biggest takeaway or lessons learned have been from her experience on Time, Bradley cited the need of a documentary filmmaker to be “nimble, flexible, in a potential state of learning and pivoting.” She added that what she gained is perhaps less of a lesson and more of “a reinforced belief system around what it means to work with people. Filmmaking is an inherently collaborative process. The idea of an auteur director is a fallacy to a certain extent.”
Just as her short film Alone informed and inspired Time, Bradley sees being active in different forms of storytelling as a creatively rewarding catalyst. She is, for example, on the commercialmaking/branded content directorial roster of production house m ss ng p eces. Bradley said she’s excited about the prospects of “working in that [advertising] sphere.”
Bradley’s body of work also includes the short film America which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, and an episode of the primetime series Queen Sugar on Oprah Winfrey’s network OWN for executive producer/show creator Ava DuVernay.
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Phedon Papamichael, ASC, GSC enjoys a special bond with select filmmakers. For example, he’s shot four films for director Alexander Payne: Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska and Downsizing. For his gorgeous black-and-white lensing of Nebraska, Papamichael earned Oscar, BAFTA and ASC Award nominations, among other honors.
Similarly Papamichael has a special bond with director James Mangold, which spans five full films–Identity, Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, Knight and Day, and Ford v Ferrari–and a portion of another, the end sequence of Logan. Papamichael also garnered an ASC Award nod for Ford v Ferrari.
Now Papamichael is again in the awards season conversation but for a film which marks his first collaboration with a director. That movie is The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix) written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, a three-time Oscar nominated screenwriter, winning for The Social Network in 2011, and a nominee for Moneyball in 2012 and Molly’s Game in 2017. Sorkin made his feature directorial debut with Molly’s Game. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is Sorkin’s second turn as a director.
Papamichael connected with Sorkin via the latter’s producer, Stuart Besser. Papamichael had worked with Besser on 3:10 to Yuma and Identity. Chicago 7 is based on the 1969 trial of seven defendants charged by the federal government with conspiracy and more, arising from anti-Vietnam War protests which turned violent as demonstrators clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. While Sorkin’s film was in an on-again, off-again mode over the years, it came together and wound up debuting a couple of months ago on Netflix–at a time when it’s subject matter spanning such issues as police brutality and social justice have become all the more relevant as protesters gathered across the country in 2020 after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Floyd died while in the custody of a police officer (Derek Chauvin) whose knee was on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd was handcuffed face down in the street, pleading that he couldn’t breathe.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 has a stellar cast including Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron-Cohen, respectively, as revolutionary counterculture activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis as Alex Sharp (Hayden and Sharp were members of Students for a Democratic Society, John Carroll Lynch as conscientious objector David Dellinger, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as lead prosecutor Richard Schultz, Mark Rylance as defense attorney William Kunstler, Frank Langella as Judge Julius Hoffman, and John Doman as Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell.
Papamichael enjoyed collaborating with Sorkin whom he described as being very much about “language, the words on the page, pacing, the rhythm of the work” and the acting craft, giving the cinematographer the opportunity to capture the visuals in cadence with the dialogue and performances. By contrast, a director like Mangold, a photographer himself, is very much, said Papamichael, into the details of composition and camera moves.
Papamichael was drawn to Sorkin’s script. “It was a page turner with overlapping dialogue. The DP’s challenge was to “break the monotony” of a drama in which more than 60 percent of the movie takes place in a courtroom. Papamichael in part was able to successfully do this by visually reflecting the tone and tenor of each character and scene. For example in terms of lighting there is “almost an angelic glowing” as Hayden reads out the names of soldiers killed in Vietnam.
For the film, a courthouse was built in Paterson, New Jersey, under the aegis of production designer Shane Valentino. And the courtroom scenes were akin to jigsaw puzzle pieces that had to fit just right when intercut with flashbacks to the protesting, riots and other significant personal events. It was quite nonlinear, related Papamichael who also needed to show the passage of time as the trial was lengthy, extending from September 1969 into February 1970. Through the courtroom’s big windows, we could see the look change from hard summer sunlight to a moody overcast fall day to a rainy winter.
Then there was the task of recreating the riot scenes via a verite approach with an improvised feel as handheld camera operators immersed themselves in the action like a news crew. Papamichael noted that they had the good fortune of being able to shoot in Chicago’s Grant Park where the protests and civil unrest broke out in real life. This in turn had to be deftly intercut with actual event footage as well, including some shots from the late, great Haskell Wexler’s seminal feature, Medium Cool.
Papamichael, who did breakthrough experimental large-format work on Ford v Ferrari, again deployed the ARRI Alexa LF on The Trial of the Chicago 7 with expanded anamorphic lenses to cover the full sensor. Three cameras provided comprehensive coverage on the courtroom set.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 adds to a filmography for Papamichael which now numbers 46 features, including the George Clooney-directed The Monuments Men and The Ides of March, director Jon Turteltaub’s While You Were Sleeping, Cool Runnings and Phenomenon, the Babriele Muccino-helmed The Pursuit of Happyness, director Diane Keaton’s Unstrung Heroes, and the Nana Djordjadze-directed 27 Missing Kisses.
Papamichael has also lensed more than 100 commercials, among them being the Nespresso spots starring Clooney, ads for Samsung and Duralast directed by Mangold, and work for such brands as Apple, Mountain Dew, Signa, Aegean Airlines, Milco and Catzedonia.
Nomadland
Sergio Diaz, supervising sound editor and sound designer on Nomadland, has a penchant for facilitating empathy and compassion through his work, a prime example coming with his Best Achievement in Sound Editing Oscar nomination for Roma in 2019, a film which put us inside the head and heart of a domestic worker/child caregiver.
In Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures), the protagonist is Fern (portrayed by two-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand) who after the economic collapse of a company town in rural Nevada packs her van and sets off on the road as a modern-day nomad, encountering unique places in rural America and even more unique varied characters, including many real people as opposed to actors. Diaz captures the soundscape of the naturalism witnessed by Fern, a character who spends time not only in that natural world but also inside her head. We are given the treat of the sights and sounds of parts of America that are often overlooked and unheard–both the rural as well as the din of an Amazon processing plant where Fern works each holiday season. Silence and minimalism in sound also helps us to listen to Fern’s inner self as she experiences the ups and downs of a nomad existence that still has its own life-affirming roots. We even feel the isolation as well as the appreciation of a home that is a van. Diaz shared that he wanted to capture the sense of time and space inside that van.
Diaz sought to help realize the vision of Nomadland director Chloé Zhao who also wrote the screenplay based on the book by Jessica Bruder. The sound design was tailored to the specific landscapes through which Fern traveled. Diaz noted that Zhao was “very specific about sound” and what she wanted to achieve.
Zhao explained, “Very much like the music, we didn’t want to use ‘tricks’ in sound design to tell the audiences how and what to feel. We wanted to be creative, experiential in our sound design, as well as true and honest.”
Besides Zhao, another key collaborator for Diaz was re-recording mixer Zach Seivers. Diaz related that Nomadland marked his first time working with Seivers and that the two formed a creatively gratifying working rapport. Diaz noted that he and Seivers had extensive “beginning conversations about what we could do to make this happen,” laying the foundation for a collaboration that yielded soundscapes marked by authenticity, doing justice to nature as well as to the characters experiencing that nature in their own ways.
Diaz described his goal as being to create an emotional connection to the journey with a soundscape that was immersive yet minimal, helping to underscore the serenity of nature. There’s a feeling of oneness with nature and humanity in Fern’s sojourn through the American West.
Zhao joins a list of leading directors with whom Diaz has collaborated, including Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), Alejandro González Iñarritu (21 Grams, Babel), Sean Penn (Into the Wild), Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light), Jonás Cuarón (Año Uña) and Amat Escalante (Sangre).
In addition to the Oscar nomination, Roma garnered Diaz a Golden Reel Award from the Motion Picture Sound Editors in 2019; two years earlier he won his first Golden Reel honor for Pan’s Labyrinth.
