IBC
article here
It was the greatest day for Sean Baker at the 97th Academy Awards as the American auteur’s freewheeling sex comedy Anora took home five Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Screenplay, as well as Best Actress for Mikey Madison’s effervescent performance.
Added to the Palm D’Or, his win is a triumph for indie cinema, made avowedly outside the studio system and with a low budget as a consequence of retaining creative control. He refused to test screen Anora and didn’t even let the film’s chief financier, FilmNation, see a cut of the film until it was complete.
Here’s a rundown of select winners:
Best Editing: Anora
Sean Baker had two scenes clearly in mind when creating Anora. The first was a fight scene which pivots the movie, Tarantino-style, into darker territory. “It was meant to be shockingly funny,” he told IBC365. “I knew I wanted it to take place in real-time in the middle of the film, so the screenplay was structured around that. We were covering every second. It couldn’t be montaged. Every angle was calculated, shot-listed, stunt coordinated.”
The second was the final shot which slowly closes in on Anora in the front of a car while the windows cake up with snow. “It’s important for me to figure out the endings before I ever write a word,” he says. “We actually wrote an epilogue. I won’t tell you what happened, but it was for me and the actors to sort of understand what I was thinking about.”
To CinemaEditor he admitted: “I don't think my script would get past day one of notes from any sort of studio or mini studio, let alone the edit. To be honest, even people that we trust within our team, like our financiers and distributors, were seriously questioning whether I wanted to keep the ending to Anora. I knew I would hear that criticism eventually. But because I don't have to rely on a studio to give me a greenlight I told producer Sam Quan, ‘We're gonna make this film, put it out into the world and pray that it connects’.”
Baker won for editing despite an early struggle with the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA). “Writing, directing and editing are indivisible and equally important to me yet I wasn't able to credit myself the way I wanted to on this film as ‘written, directed and edited by’,” he said.
Best Cinematography: The Brutalist
British Director of Photography Lol Crawley BSC landed his first Academy Award for this haunting and raw epic. His initial discussions with writer-director Brady Corbet were about how to use a motion picture art form to capture another art form (architecture) that is essentially static. “We needed to find a visual language that could capture the monumental quality of moving through the spaces which László designs,” he explained.
That took them to VistaVision, a 8-perf 35mm format that had its heyday in the 1950s. “Brady wanted to use a camera system from the 1950s which seems to make perfect sense, but what liberates it from being a sort of an affectation are the two primary benefits of shooting on VistaVision; a higher resolution image and being able to capture incredible landscapes.”
The VistaVision vogue continues with multiple movies shooting in the format including P.T Anderson’s untitled Leonard DiCaprio drama; Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia starring Emma Stone, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest project starring Tom Cruise [due in 2026].
Best Production design: Wicked
Director Jon M Chu wanted the same tactile feeling of a lived in Munchkinland that he felt watching The Wizard of Oz and got Universal to write him a budget for physically building Wicked's huge sets at Sky Studios Elstree. British production designer Nathan Crowley finally landed an Oscar after six previous nominations, mainly for Christopher Nolan movies like Interstellar.
This included planting nine million tulips on a Norfolk farm and transplanting them to the Studio and the Italianate Shiz University.
“There were so many traps design-wise, like images of Hobbits and French Alpine villages,” Crowley explained. “The first thing was, ‘Well, what do they do apart from sing and dance?’ We gave them a business – they grow tulips and then they use the dye to make cloth, so every house is a different colour.”
Sound: Dune: Part Two
Director Denis Villeneuve wanted his epic sci-fi adaptation to feel like a “documentary” which the sound team interpreted as meaning “very tactile, very recognizably real” according to Supervising Sound Editor/Sound Designer Richard King. “Like in Star Wars movies, everything’s quite exaggerated and there’s a certain aesthetic that they adhere to that keeps you at arm’s length a little bit. It’s clearly a fable being told to you from a long time ago, far away.”
To that end, King sent sound recordists working for Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services in Burbank to capture field recordings of sand and wind in Death Valley and the Sahara Desert.
“We did everything that we could possibly do or imagine that we would need involving sand with different kinds of sand, and different textures of sand. We’re on Arrakis for almost the entire film in Dune: Part Two and in different parts of the planet, so we needed different qualities of sand with different textures.”
There was a lot of field recording too of the sounds of machinery that were then manipulated for the harvesters and the ornithopters. “We did a lot of R&D to see what sorts of sounds would be appropriate, and to have that kind of gritty feeling that we wanted.”
Best Visual Effects: Dune: Part 2
Following its Oscar-winning work on Dune: Part One, Villeneuve returned to Dneg to help bring his ambitious sequel to life. The London-based facility’s work included complex sand and pyro sims, large-scale CG environments and detailed creature animation – from the giant sandworms down to the tiny desert mice.
The final battle where the Fremen take on the Emperor’s military (the Sardaukar), became one of the most challenging VFX sequences in the film. It featured a 30-second one-take near-full-CG action shot that Dneg’s team dubbed the ‘Chani-oner’ and follows Chani (Zendayer) fighting through the Sardaukar ranks. DNEG VFX Supervisor Rhys Salcombe explained: “The choreography for this was performed on a massive mocap stage, mixing performances from Zendaya and stunt actors. This required extensive hand-animation to blend mocap actions, which were then adjusted with virtual camera work to create a handheld documentary feel.”
The action was then expanded by adding large crowd simulations, dust effects from flying Ornithopters and multiple sandworms animated to plough through structures, vehicles and armies.
Dune: Messiah starts production in Budapest and Iceland this summer with a likely 2026 release date.
Best Documentary Feature: No Other Land
The remarkable story of a Palestinian activist (Basil al-Adarra) who teams up with an Israeli investigative journalist (Yuval Abraham) to document the injustices faced daily by Palestinians in the West Bank, culminating in the harrowing attack of October 7, 2023 and its aftermath. Remarkably too, this story was filmed over five years by two Palestinian and two Israeli filmmakers and has a dual narrative which highlights the possibility of finding common ground amidst profound cultural and political divides. No Other Land was co-produced by Norwegian indie Antipode Films and Palestinian producers Yabayay Media.
Yuval received death threats after his acceptance speech for the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival last February in which he criticised a "situation of apartheid" and called for a ceasefire in Gaza.
"I don't have an illusion that films are going to change the world, but I know they can change individuals, and I know that they can be part of a bigger change, and we really need this now," Yuval told the BBC.
No comments:
Post a Comment