IBC
Oblique and powerful takes on the Second World War dominated Awards at the Oscars.
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Christopher Nolan’s biopic of nuclear genesis took best picture and six other honours but there was an arguably more potent anti-war perspective in The Zone of Interest (Britain’s first international film winner) while the great animator Hayao Miyazaki recalled the darkness of being bombed in Japan, something he experienced as a child. The biggest upset of the night was the best visual effects win for micro-budget Japanese movie Godzilla Minus One but this is also an exploration of post-traumatic stress that that country still feels decades after Oppenheimer’s bombs destroyed two of its cities.
A closer look
The exploding of the test bomb in the New Mexico desert is
the centrepiece of Nolan’s opus, and a crucial narrative pivot.
“This is what makes this movie special and not just another
biopic,” Oscar winning editor Jennifer Lame told CinemaEditor. “When the bomb
goes off we still have another third of the movie to run. It is this
experimental form I found so amazing when I read the script. We’ve spent time
building and building to this moment... it’s a great release for the audience
but then we have the fall out.”
In the next scene, as the trucks carrying the bombs are
driving away from Los Alamos, Oppenheimer asks Matt Damon’s U.S Army major, ‘Do
you want me to come to Washington?’ He is met with the cold response, ‘Why?’.
“It’s devastating,” Lame says, “a great punch to the gut,
and one of the great break up scenes of all time,” she says.
The last third of the
film becomes more about Lewis Strauss, the Machiavellian politician played by
Best Supporting Actor winner Robert Downey Jnr.
“Strauss is my favourite character,” Lame says. “What he did
to Oppenheimer certainly wasn’t chivalrous but it was almost immature and that
humanises him in my eyes. This is the way that power and politics work. These
guys backstab each other.”
Oppenheimer is possibly the first drama shot on IMAX
film cameras, a feat for which Dutch-Swedish director of photography Hoyte Van
Hoytema is honoured. It is his fourth collaboration with Nolan, following Interstellar,
Dunkirk, and Tenet. He shot the picture on Kodak colour and
custom-made black and white film stocks, explaining to British
Cinematographer that his challenge was to shoot large format for a film
that is effectively all about faces.
“To make close-ups consecutively interesting as a filmmaker
is one of the biggest challenges you can have because with action scenes you
can bring out the big guns, but to shoot emotions and faces and to do that for
three hours and still be able to have enough talking power in your last
close-up is the biggest challenge.”
Best Sound
Writer-director Jonathan Glazer devised The Zone of
Interest as two films; the one we see and the one we hear.
“We never go inside the [concentration] camp, but we had to
figure out how to depict the camp only in sound,” Oscar winning sound designer
and regular Glazer collaborator Johnnie Burn told IBC365. “I panicked at the
beginning since to have it all hinging on an enormous layer of sound felt an
incredible responsibility. We wouldn’t know if the film was actually going to
work until late in postproduction.”
Burn scoured the Auschwitz archive for witness testimonies that
had used descriptive language to describe what they had experienced and
drawings left behind by survivors.
For the ‘family drama’, Burn hid dozens of mics around the
house which had been built to the exact specification of the Camp commander’s
house by production designer Chris Oddy.
Burn said, “Normally in a film you want to capture the
dialogue but here it was about capturing the sound of people in a house, their
footsteps, teacups rattling.”
After six months in post, a test screening led to some
significant tweaks. “We had scenes which sounded quite pastoral with the sound
of the crematoria only on in a couple of shots. Chris suggested that it didn’t
sound as industrial as it should. He said, ‘You’ve undersold the scale of what
is going on.’
“We went back and put in more sound of the crematorium
constantly like a machine in the background. It’s not only historically
accurate but provides a shorthand that circumvents the need for more
sensationalised sound.”
Animated Feature
The darkness and shadows in Studio Ghibli’s Oscar winning
animation are a departure for director Hayao Miyazaki and give a glimpse into
the 83-year old’s personal story.
The Boy and the Heron draws from Miyazaki’s childhood
memories of being evacuated from bombed-out cities and of his
tuberculosis-stricken mother.
The muted colour palette at the beginning of the movie
explodes into a fantastical world filled with vibrant creatures and characters.
“This is a film filled with a lot of Miyazaki’s own personal
ideas,” Atsushi Okui, Miyazaki’s long time director of photography told Letterboxd.
“Until now it was all about capturing the liveliness and freedom that came with
the characters, whereas with this film it’s more about expressing their
innermost thoughts.”
In any other year, Sony Pictures Imageworks Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse would have
been a worthy winner for the animation gong. Its animators spent a lot of time
developing tools to break the photoreal CG look and mimic the handcrafted line
drawing of the original comics.
VFX
Japanese director Takashi Yamazaki was the surprise win for leading
the VFX on Godzilla Minus One. The film cost just £10 million and has
recouped ten times that amount, becoming the most successful Japanese film at
the U.S. box office. Yamazaki told Collider that just
35 people were responsible for 610 VFX shots over eight months, hinting at a
sequel.
“When you have movies that feature kaiju battles, I think
it's very easy to put the spotlight and the camera on this massive spectacle,
and it detaches itself from the human drama component. I would need to make
sure that the human drama and whatever's happening between the kaiju both have
meaning, and both are able to affect one another in terms of plot development.”
The bookies favourite was special effects expert Britain’s
Neil Corbould, nominated for three of the five shortlisted films, Napoleon,
Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 and The Creator He told The Wrap that he’s grateful that special effects craft are still recognized albeit
under the banner of VFX. "For a while we tried to get our own separate
category, for practical effects. Because we thought there was a timeline for
when practical effects would be phased out, but in the last five or six years,
practical effects have come on stronger than ever. People realise that you
can't do everything with CGI, or it looks like a cartoon and audiences lose
interest.”
Production Design
There was an early plan to film Poor Things on
location in cities like Prague before director Yorgos Lanthimos decided to
construct Bella Baxter’s fantastical world inside Origo Studios, Budapest.
Production Designers
James Price and Shona Heath took inspiration from the satirical drawings of
Albert Guillaume made during the Belle Epoque era in Paris. ‘We always tried to
imagine that this story was set in a past time, but with the vision of the future,’
Heath explained.
Baxter’s House became Heath’s favourite set piece, which was
inspired by the architect John Stone. Stone cut into walls and opened designs
up, an idea which seemed to resonate with how Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe)
would treat his own home. ‘If you are a world-leading surgeon, you are going to
create what you want. Baxter is a creator who has done something that no human
being has done before, so his house is a manifestation of that,’ Price adds.
If there was a category for Best Film Marketing then Barbie
would have won hands down. Buzz was ramped up before release when production
designer Sarah Greenwood ‘leaked’ the news that the world was running
out of pink paint because it was all being used to create Barbieland at
Warner Bros Leavesden.
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