Other films on a very European-centric list include Finland’s “Fallen Leaves,” Denmark’s “The Promised Land,” Italy’s “Io Caitano,” Japan’s “Perfect Days” and three documentaries, Ukraine’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” and Tunisia’s “Four Daughters” and Morocco’s “The Mother of All Lies.”

Overall, nine of the 15 films on the list are European. Three are from Asia, two from Africa and one from the Americas.

For the most part, the highest-profile films advanced in the race, with few surprises on the shortlist. Armenia’s “Amerikatsi” is the closest thing to a dark-horse candidate, with Bhutan’s “The Monk and the Gun” following in the footsteps of director Pawo Choyning Dorji’s last film, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” which was a surprise nominee two years ago.

Eighty-eight films qualified in the category this year. To come up with the shortlist, volunteers from all branches of the Academy were separated into seven separate groups, and each group was assigned 12 or 13 films as required viewing. Members were free to watch as many films as they wanted from outside their group, but they had to watch everything in their group in order for their votes to count.

Voters then listed as many as 15 films in order of preference, with the ranked-choice system used to compile the shortlist. A second round of voting, which is open to all Academy members who watch all 15 shortlisted films, will produce the five nominees.

The voting system, which has been changed repeatedly over the past two decades, now favors the highest-profile films, which clearly draw the most voters and have the best chances to end up on a lot of ballots.

Here is the list of films that are advancing in the race.

Armenia, “Amerikatsi”
Bhutan, “The Monk and the Gun”
Denmark, “The Promised Land”
Finland, “Fallen Leaves”
France, “The Taste of Things”
Germany, “The Teachers’ Lounge”
Iceland, “Godland”
Italy, “Io Capitano”
Japan, “Perfect Days”
Mexico, “Totem”
Morocco, “The Mother of All Lies”
Spain, “Society of the Snow”
Tunisia, “Four Daughters”
Ukraine, “20 Days in Mariupol”
United Kingdom, “The Zone of Interest”

See all of the shortlists here:

Best Documentary Feature, Best Documentary Short

Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound

Best Original Score, Best Original Song

Best Animated Short, Best Live Action Short

The post ‘The Taste of Things,’ ‘The Zone of Interest’ Make Heavily European Shortlist in Oscars International Category appeared first on TheWrap.

Giamatti will receive the award for his performance in Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers,” in which he plays a cranky teacher at a New England boarding school who must spend his Christmas break with students whose families aren’t able to take them for the holidays. His costar Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who plays the school cook, has previously been announced as the recipient of Palm Springs’ Breakthrough Performance Award.

Past winners of the Icon Award include Willem Dafoe, Glenn Close, Lady Gaga and Michael Douglas.

In a statement, Palm Springs International Film Festival Chairman Nachhattar Singh Chandi said, “In ‘The Holdovers,’ Paul Giamatti inhabits a complex character who is both challenging and rewarding, and ultimately reminds us of what it means to be connected as human beings.”

Giamatti’s other performances include Payne’s “Sideways,” as well as the films “Cinderella Man,” “12 Years a Slave,” “American Splendour,” “The Truman Show” and “Barney’s Version” and the television series “Billions,” “John Adams” and “Too Big to Fail.” He has won four Screen Actors Guild Awards, one Primetime Emmy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, two Critics Choice Awards and one Independent Spirit Award.   

Other honorees this year include Randolph, Danielle Brooks, Colman Domingo, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, Greta Gerwig, Carey Mulligan, Cillian Murphy, Emma Stone, Jeffrey Wright and “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The awards ceremony will be held at the Palm Springs Convention Center and will take place on the first day of the 2024 Palm Springs International Film Festival, which will run through Jan. 15.  

The post Paul Giamatti to Receive Icon Award at Palm Springs International Film Awards appeared first on TheWrap.

The films will be saluted at the Cinema Eye ceremony at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City on Jan. 12, but Spheeris will receive the award at a later date following a screening at Vidiots in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles.

Spheeris’ three “The Decline of Western Civilization” films, made over the course of 17 years, delved into three raucous and vibrant musical subcultures. The original 1981 film chronicled the Los Angeles punk movement of the early 1980s and was later selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. The second film, “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years,” covered the metal scene in L.A. later in that decade, while “The Decline of Western Civilization Part III” delved into the gutter punk scene of the late 1990s.  

“The ‘Decline of Western Civilization’ trilogy is a landmark achievement in the history of documentary filmmaking and there is no one in film history who has explored and illuminated subcultures in the way that Penelope Spheeris has,” Cinema Eye founding director AJ Schnack said in a statement announcing the award. “Her groundbreaking work in these three films annoyed the establishment when the films were released, and decades later, continues to inspire filmmakers to create truly independent nonfiction films.”

Past winners of Cinema Eye’s Legacy Award include Barbara Kopple’s “Harland County, USA,” Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies,” David and Albert Maysles’ “Grey Gardens,” Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s “The War Room,” Jennie Livingston’s “Paris Is Burning” and Terry Zwigoff’s “Crumb.”

“To be honored with Cinema Eye’s Legacy Award is astounding to me,” Spheeris said in a statement. “All these years, I was just trying to make a living by doing something I loved, making movies. Most of them, except ‘Wayne’s World,’ had little or no distribution, including ‘The Decline’ series. In retrospect, I realize I was kicking down heavy doors, and hanging in there when it would have been easier to walk away. However, to receive this award makes it all worthwhile.”

Cinema Eye Honors also announced that voting for its annual Audience Choice Prize has begun. The 10 nominees are “American Symphony,” “20 Days in Mariupol,” “The Eternal Memory,” “Beyond Utopia,” “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood,” “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” “The Deepest Breath,” “Invisible Beauty” and “Joan Baez I Am a Noise.”

Votes can be cast at cinemaeyehonors.com until Wednesday.

The post Penelope Spheeris’ ‘Decline of Western Civilization’ Trilogy Wins Legacy Award From Cinema Eye Honors | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.

If you were paying attention last year, you already know the answer, more or less.  Three of the categories require exactly the same number of votes as they did a year ago, while the magic number in 15 of the 23 categories is within two votes of the 2022 figures.

The Academy grew in size by less than 200 voters over the past year, and the biggest influx came in a new branch, Production and Technology, that doesn’t have its own category. Most of the 18 branches grew only modestly, and that means most categories take about the same number votes as before.  

The biggest change, naturally, was in the only category where everybody can vote in the nominating round, Best Picture. If everybody votes, it’ll take 891 votes to secure a nomination this year, 20 more than the 871 it took last year.

Before we get into the category-by-category breakdown, a reminder: When we say it takes 891 votes for a Best Picture nomination, we’re talking about first-place votes. Under the Oscars preferential or ranked-choice system, a voter typically lists his or her top five choices in order of preference. (In the Best Picture category, they are allowed to list up to 10 choices.) After the first-place votes are added up, the lowest-ranking films are eliminated from contention, and their ballots are redistributed to the film ranked second on each ballot.

(If the second choice has also been eliminated, or if it’s already hit the magic number and secured a nomination, the vote goes to the next highest contender on the ballot.)

The redistribution continues until the field is narrowed to the final five nominees, or the final 10 for Best Picture.

To figure out the magic number for each category, you take the number of potential voters in that category and divide by the number of nominees, plus one. (In every case except Best Picture, that means you divide by six, or 5+1.) You round the result up to the next highest number, and that gives you a “magic number” that ensures a film or achievement will be in the top five.

Here’s the breakdown of what it’ll take to land a nomination in each category when voting begins on Jan. 11. Note: as the count goes on, the magic number can decrease. 

Best Picture
If all 9,797 eligible voters cast ballots in this category, it would take 891 No. 1 votes to guarantee a nomination. But while it’s unrealistic to expect many films to have that many first-place votes in the initial count, contenders will probably have many rounds to pick up additional votes as other films are eliminated. 

Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress
The size of the Actors Branch fell from 1,302 to 1,294 members this year, which means that the magic number fell as well, from 218 to 217. If every one of the voters in the Academy’s largest branch casts a ballot, that’s how many votes it’ll take to land a nomination in each of the Oscars’ four acting categories.  

Best Animated Feature
The Short Films and Feature Animation Branch has 888 voting members, making it the second-largest Academy branch. Normally that would mean that 178 votes would secure a nomination.

But voting in this category is open not only to all members of the branch, but to all Academy members outside the branch who volunteer to take part in the voting.

Prospective voters were divided into four groups, and each group was required to see an assigned group of eight or nine films out of the 33 that qualified. The number required to land a nomination depends entirely on how many members participated in that process.

Best Cinematography
The branch has 293 current voting members, three more than last year. That means 49 first-place votes lands a nomination, the same as the last two years.

Best Costume Design
With 172 members, costume designers make up the smallest Academy branch that votes for its own award. (The Casting Directors Branch is smaller, but there’s no casting award at the Oscars.) While the size of the branch increased by three members since last year, the magic number remained unchanged: A costume-design nomination can still be secured with only 29 votes, fewer than any other category.

Best Director
There are now 587 voters in the Directors Branch, which means that 98 votes will guarantee a nomination if they all vote. (That’s two more than last year.)

Best Documentary Feature
After a first round of voting narrows the field of 167 qualifying films to a 15-film shortlist, the 680 members of the Documentary Branch will pick their five favorites. If they all cast ballots, it’ll take 114 votes to be nominated, six more than last year.

Best Documentary Short
The same 680 members of the doc branch will be eligible to vote once the 114 doc-short contenders have been narrowed to a 15-film shortlist. It’s highly unlikely that everyone in the branch will watch the eligible shorts and vote — but if they were to do that, the magic number would again be 114.

Best Film Editing
With 377 members of the Film Editors Branch, you need 63 votes to secure a nod.

Best International Feature Film
This category is also open to volunteer members from all branches of the Academy. AMPAS never reveals how many participate, though it’s likely to be fewer than 1,000 members, and possibly significantly fewer. After the field of 88 contenders is narrowed to a 15-film shortlist, voting will be open to any member who sees all 15 of those films, which are available on the Academy’s members website. The magic number will depend entirely on how many members see all the films and vote.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling
The branch has 242 voting members. Voting is restricted to members who viewed a special presentation of clips, or members who have seen all 10 shortlisted films. If every member of the branch participates in one of those ways, it would take 41 votes to secure a nomination, one more than last year.

Best Original Score, Best Original Song
The Music Branch contains 394 voting members. The 147 eligible scores and 94 eligible songs are going through an initial round of voting that will narrow the contenders to two shortlists of 15. In the nomination round of voting, the magic number for Diane Warren to land her 15th nomination or Thomas Newman to receive his 16th will be 66, assuming they’re shortlisted and everybody votes.

Best Production Design
The branch has 403 members, so 68 votes will be enough for a nomination.

Best Sound
With 556 members in the Sound Branch, an increase of seven since last year, the nomination threshold goes up one to 93 votes.

Best Visual Effects
There are 637 members of the branch, which would mean a magic number of 107 if the Visual Effects Branch calculated nominations the way most of the other branches do. But it doesn’t.

An executive committee first narrows the field down to 20 films, and then to a shortlist of 10. Clips from those films are then screened virtually for members of the branch, followed by brief discussions with the VFX artists responsible for the work.

Members then cast ballots to select the five nominees – but instead of the ranked-choice system, the branch uses reweighted range voting, which divides each individual score by the total score given to all candidates on that ballot. The idea is to identify the films that score strongest against the rest of the field. At no point in the count does a magic number come into play.

Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay
The Writers Branch has 522 voting members, meaning it requires 87 votes to guarantee a writing nomination.

Best Animated Short, Best Live Action Short
The Short Films and Feature Animation Branch has 888 voting members. All of them are eligible to score the qualifying films to determine two 15-film shortlists, one for animated shorts and one for live-action shorts. Members of the branch who see all the shortlisted films can then vote for the final five nominees. Members of the all other branches are also invited to participate in voting in the Best Live Action Short category.

In the unlikely event that the entire branch participates in the animated category and the entire Academy membership votes in live action, that would mean a magic number of 148 votes in animation and 891 in live action. But in reality, it’s far lower.  

Nomination voting will begin on Thursday, Jan. 11 and close on Tuesday, Jan. 16.  Nominations will be announced on Tuesday, Jan. 23.

The post How Many Votes Does It Take to Get an Oscar Nomination in 2024? appeared first on TheWrap.

A record 9,797 members are eligible to cast ballots beginning on Thursday, Jan. 11. That’s an increase of 218 over last year, when 9,579 members were eligible to vote. In June of 2023, the Academy invited 398 film professionals to join, but that influx was likely counterbalanced by existing Academy members who died or moved to nonvoting status.

Of the 17 Academy branches that existed at the beginning of the year, 16 showed increases in membership, with the Executives Branch having the largest increase, 46. Other branches with double-digit increases were Documentary (32), Visual Effects (22), Short Films and Feature Animation (21), Marketing and Public Relations (16), Directors (14) Producers (13) and Writers (12).

Only one branch dropped in size. The Actors Branch, the Academy’s largest, fell by eight members over the last year, dropping from 1,302 members to 1,294. While the branch increased in size during the aggressive five-year AMPAS membership drive that began in 2016 in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, its numbers have fallen for three straight years as the Academy has gone back to inviting fewer new members. The Actors Branch also suffered losses for three straight years in 2013-2015, before the drive began.

One major change came with the establishment of a new branch, the Production and Technology Branch. Its 378 members came predominantly from the group that was previously classified as Members at Large, which lost 362 members and now consists mainly of “artists representatives,” agents and managers.

Counting 43 nonvoting associate members, the Academy now has a total active membership of 9,840 – and if you add an additional 932 emeritus members, the total reaches 10,772.

Here are the branch counts as of Dec. 14, the final count before Oscar nomination voting begins. The change in size since last year’s final pre-nomination count is indicated in parentheses.

Actors: 1,294 (-8)
Casting Directors: 158 (+4)
Cinematographers: 293 (+3)
Costume Designers: 172 (+3)
Directors: 587 (+14)
Documentary: 680 (+32)
Executives: 740 (+46)
Film Editors: 377 (+1)
Makeup Artists and Hairstylists: 242 (+6)
Marketing and Public Relations: 630 (+16)
Music: 394 (+6)
Producers: 652 (+4)
Production and Technology: 378 (new branch)
Production Design: 403 (+13)
Short Films and Feature Animation: 888 (+21)
Sound: 556 (+7)
Visual Effects: 637 (+22)
Writers: 522 (+12)
Members-at-Large: 194 (-362)

Total voting members: 9,797 (+218)

Associate members: 43 (-38)

Total active members: 9,840 (+180)

Emeritus members: 932 (-1)

Total active and inactive members: 10,772 (+179)

The post Oscars Gain More Than 200 Voters – but Actors Branch Keeps Shrinking appeared first on TheWrap.

“FERRARI”
To come up with the rev and roar of engines in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” the film’s sound team had to start with a couple of formidable tasks. First, they had to find a number of rare sports cars that could give them the sound of the vintage Ferraris and Maseratis in a film set in the 1950s. And then they had to convince the owners of those vehicles to let them crank up the engines full bore for a film that showcased the cars driving at high speeds and occasionally getting in horrific crashes. 

“We had to do car recording sessions because the replicas that Michael had built for the rigors of shooting were modern engines so they could run them all day long and not have issues,” re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor Tony Lamberti said. “The older cars make a beautiful mechanical music that we’re just not used to hearing out of today’s cars, but you try to tell collectors and museums who have cars that are worth millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, that you want to go out and run them hard and record them.” He laughed. “That’s a very challenging task.”

It was helped, though, by geography. “American (car) collectors buy them to put them in the garage and look at them,” Lamberti said. “The Europeans like to bring them out and put them on track and drive them around and have a good time.” Working from a detailed “racecraft” plan that spelled out all the sounds they’d need in the film — acceleration, deceleration, upshifts, downshifts, cornering — they did two or three days of recording at a private track in Europe, using multiple microphones under the hood, in the cockpit and all around the cars.

But the sound team’s job also extended to much quieter scenes. “We needed to make sure that the dialogue was clean enough that it could be mixed in post with the proper engine sounds,” said supervising sound mixer Lee Orloff. And with that dialogue mostly spoken in English with Italian accents, intelligibility could be a problem unless the sound team got into the minutiae of working with each line and sometimes each word. 

“You had Italian actors speaking English with very heavy accents, which were hard to understand,” supervising sound editor Bernard Weiser said. “And then you had American actors trying to do Italian accents, which had its own challenges. I found that the pacing of the sentence was very important and also the pacing of the words themselves. Oftentimes, it was just a matter of moving syllables around—maybe just taking one syllable, dropping it or pacing it, and all of a sudden you understand.”

“SOCIETY OF THE SNOW”
The setting for J.A. Bayona’s harrowing story of a real-life plane crash in 1972 is 12,000 feet high in a remote valley in the Andes, where the main thing you hear is the sound of silence. “The challenge was to make a film with very few elements,” said sound designer Oriol Tarragó. “When you’re in the Andes, it’s the sound of snow, the sound of the wind and silence. The silence is so deep that when the wind stops, you’re so far away from civilization that you start hearing yourself — your breathing, your heart.”

Tarragó and the sound team experimented with using heartbeat sounds but found they were distracting, so they stuck to using sound editing for every breath in the movie and every footstep through the snow. For the sequences that took place inside the fuselage of the shattered airplane, which the survivors used as a shelter, they added the squeaks and thumps of the makeshift home.

“The fuselage is a new element that has never been in the mountains before,” he said. “The snow, the wind, the silence and the breathing are elements, but the fuselage has to be another character.” 

The most harrowing sequence, though, was the plane crash. “Bayona told me, ‘I’m not going to use music,’” Tarragó said. “‘We have to make it work through the sound.’” For the initial part of the crash, they used the sound of the engine to give the audience false hope, raising the pitch in a way that suggested the plane might clear the mountains; after impact, when the aircraft comes apart and slides down the slope in pieces, they brought in countless different metal sounds.

“We also built a small fuselage, filled it with microphones and pulled it through the snow using a pulley system, so we could record tons of sliding sounds,” he said. “There were so many different sounds we put together to make it work.”

Many of the real survivors of the crash were around the production, and Tarragó flew to Uruguay to meet with them as he was working on the film. “I had dinner with all of them, and then separate meetings with the ones who were open to talk privately,” he said. “One of them was an engineer, and he gave me more detailed information about the sound inside the fuselage. But the more important thing was understanding how they felt. On a deeper level, that changed the whole process.”

“THE KILLER”
David Fincher’s methodical examination of an assassin for hire (Michael Fassbender) takes place in a number of locations around the world, from Paris to the Dominican Republic to New Orleans. But the main location might be inside the title character’s head, which meant that longtime Fincher sound designer Ren Klyce couldn’t rely on recordings he’d made on vacation in Paris or location recordings in the Caribbean.

“The voiceover was the starting point,” said Klyce of the interior monologue that runs throughout the film. “There’s so much voiceover and so little actual dialogue spoken on camera by the killer himself that it inadvertently created a rhythm, which is the rhythm inside his head.”

Fincher had Fassbender do multiple takes of the voiceover (and the director even recorded a version himself), and Klyce enhanced them to make the voice feel loud but intimate. He and his team also used sound to call attention to shifts in perspective. When we’re looking through the killer’s eyes, we hear what he hears, which is often one of the many songs by the Smiths he incessantly listens to on earbuds; when the camera is on the character, the sound shifts accordingly.

“Typically with sound, you don’t want to draw attention to picture cuts,” Klyce said. “But in this case, David wanted to make a point of shaping the soundtrack to draw attention to the cuts.”

One of the showcase sequences in the film is a brutal fight in a darkened house. “They had very little lighting, and (cinematographer) Erik Messerschmidt was very nervous about that,” Klyce said. “But David told Erik, ‘Don’t worry — the things we cannot see, we’ll hear.’”

Of course, that put the onus on the sound team to make the chaos decipherable. “It was all-hands-on-deck with the sound team. There was a point where I thought, I don’t know if we’re ever going to finish this scene and move on to the rest of the mix.”

In the middle of the thuds, grunts and crashing furniture, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score offers its own perspective on the action in a way that scarcely seems like music. “It had a strange, rhythmic, hypnotic, pulsing and clicking sound to it,” Klyce said. “And these dissonant synthetic sounds would waft in and out of this distorted rhythmic sound that I just mimicked. That music was composed on a rhythmic grid, and it would inevitably align somehow with a punch or a fall or a smashing glass or an explosion of some sort.”

This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post ‘Ferrari,’ ‘Society of the Snow’ and ‘The Killer’ Deliver the Sound of Trouble appeared first on TheWrap.

At the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, “20 Days” won the audience award in the World Cinema Documentary category. Since then, it has won the Critics Choice Documentary Award in the Best First Documentary Feature category, been nominated for five Cinema Eye Honors and been named to the National Board of Review’s list of the top five nonfiction films of 2023.

Had you thought about making documentary films before this, or were you focused on being a reporter?
I did. First of all, I’m a writer. I’m a fiction and documentary writer. And I like big, complex stories. War in general is complex story, and literature in this case gives an opportunity to look deeper into motivations, meanings and so on and so forth. But for eight years, I was stuck with making short stories for a news agency. The stories are almost like a Spartan way to tell the story because there is no narration, no music, no sound manipulation, just simple editing from the beginning to the end. And that’s it.

It taught me a lot how to tell a story without words. But at the same time, it’s so limiting. I had so many questions after I was in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza and Syria and all these conflicts and wars. So many questions about journalism, about people, about war, about the general meaning of life, and no way to address any of that in the work you do. So naturally you look for an opportunity to do something bigger, to be able to ask these questions.

Also, I find it extremely frustrating that even the most important events that are happening last for a day or two or three or a week, and then they disappear in the sea of other events. There’s just too much happening, so it takes a lot of effort to actually save something important from oblivion. As a journalist, I see that every day. I do a story, I send it. It could be very important story with incredible footage. And it’s gone. If not for this film, Mariupol as a memory and as an event would be gone from the perspective of almost everyone.

So when you were in Mariupol covering the siege for the AP, were you thinking beyond that coverage to a movie?
I think I started understanding the importance of recording everything when all the other journalists left. The editors told us that no one else was reporting. And when the siege started and the city was fully encircled, I knew that I needed to record every single shot. It still wasn’t an idea of a film, but I started thinking about, how would I tell a bigger story? And fortunately for me, AP has a partnership with “Frontline.” That’s how the idea of the film was born.

Putting the film together, you had to be very careful about any kind of manipulation of the image or sound, didn’t you?
I cannot call this manipulation, but that’s right. By the end of the siege, my mic was broken and we had problems with the sound. It was not good enough for a cinematic experience. But I wanted for the viewers to experience it as close as possible to how it was, because the whole film is about bringing the audience into this experience of claustrophobic fear and loud, chaotic explosions around you. So we tried to make the sound as close as we could to what we were hearing when we were there.

But the editors told us we couldn’t do that. We had to use whatever we recorded when we were there. There was a worry that Russia might claim that we staged things or manipulated the footage. We didn’t want to give them any opportunities for propaganda about what we did in Mariupol.

Instead of talking heads, we get perspective from your narration. How did that come about?
At first, we had in mind a classic “Frontline” structure: You conduct retrospective interviews about the events, you intercut them with the footage and assemble a story with different voices. But I felt necessary to transport the viewer inside the siege. And when you have these interviews, it stopped the narrative and took away a lot of tension and fear. So we started looking for another way to connect the stories that we see inside the city.

I resisted being the narrator as long as I could. My first idea was that maybe someone would narrate something I wrote, because I did write a lot of diaries and articles during the siege. But then again, it would take away from the urgency. So we decided to let me narrate. And I finally felt that it’s acceptable because it’s ultimately also my story. I live in Eastern Ukraine in a city which is very similar to Mariupol. It all feels very personal.

You’ve reported from lots of other conflict zones. Does it change how you do your work when you’re reporting from the country you live in?
It definitely makes you much more emotional. And it definitely helps you to understand more deeply the people around you. It means you have more tools to tell a story better and deeper, but I wouldn’t say it stands in the way of the reporting. Having to report from other wars, other countries gives you a very good perspective on reporting in your own country. You don’t see it anymore as something unique.

You mentioned earlier your frustration with the fact that you can report a story and then within a couple of days everybody’s moved on to something else. This is a little different, but the war in Ukraine has been going on for quite a while…
Yeah.

…and at this point the world’s attention is more focused on the Middle East. Do you feel like films like this are necessary to keep reminding people of older conflicts that still warrant attention?
I’m a bit cautious about saying that I’m on a mission to remind the world about anything. I can hope. But then again, the most important part for me is that I saw the eyes of people who were in Mariupol and who saw the film. Only then I understood that the biggest value of this work is memory. Not memory in an urgent sense, to remind the world about the atrocities that Russia is doing in Ukraine. It’s a futile effort to try to convince the world of anything, let’s be frank. And anyone who tells you that they do that are probably trying to look better or they’re just lying to themselves.

The world looks where it wants to look. But when the world wants to remember what happened in the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the film will be there. And for the Russians too, if they want to see it. That is something that I also hope for.

[Laughs] I’m a bit more pessimistic than usual today.

A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from that issue here.

The post ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ Director Hopes His Film Can Go Where the News Cycle Can’t appeared first on TheWrap.

A holiday that finds them left behind at the school turns into a road trip to Boston, and over the course of the film the antagonistic relationship between Paul and Angus takes a few twists and turns.

Mary, meanwhile, is a constant reminder of the inequities and dangers of the era: She took the job at Barton Academy to ensure that her son would get a good education, but after graduation he was drafted, sent overseas and killed in the Vietnam War, while his white classmates escaped that fate. And while Randolph may be familiar for the exuberance she’s shown in films like “Dolemite Is My Name,” she breaks our hearts in “The Holdovers” with a performance grounded in grief and delivered with a quiet grace that commands our attention.

“We always see these cute holiday movies that are predictable,” Randolph said. “Things are seemingly great, something happens, they resolve it and everything’s hunky dory. I liked that this was a bit more real and grounded.

“And I liked that there was this woman whom he wanted to be the heart of this story and who was allowed to be messy, who was allowed to take up space. I love the idea that they all were seeking connection and needing to feel heard, and through all of their collective pain inadvertently they were able to be of a great support for one another. I thought that was really beautiful.”

Mary is deep in grief over the loss of her son, but for the most part Payne stayed away from big outbursts or overly emotional scenes. “For my character, parts were kind of like a silent movie,” Randolph said. “It required me to use other parts of my senses as an actor to navigate the role. How do you keep the character alive when the text isn’t there?

“It was difficult at first for me to adjust to it, because I kept feeling like I needed to do something. But Alex wanted to explore the moments when she’s still, and to be in that space was really nice.”

You might not see the connection while watching the film, but to Randolph, the early ’70s Norman Lear sitcom “The Jeffersons,” about a Black family moving to the Upper East Side in Manhattan, was a touchstone for the look of her character, particularly the hair. The bun that she wears in many scenes, for instance, comes from Isabel Sanford’s hairstyle in the earliest seasons: “You’re not seeing her wealth yet, and she’s still dressing as she was in the lower tax bracket.”

They also went for a more stylish flip when Mary gets fancier. “We got that from the character on ‘The Jeffersons’ that Lenny Kravitz’s mom played,” she said, referring to Roxie Roker, who played Helen Willis.

Playing a woman who is deeply grieving, she added, could take its toll if she permitted it to. “I don’t allow it to come home with me,” she said. “I take great measures to make sure it doesn’t, whether it’s as simple as me watching cartoons or something lighthearted when going home at the end of the night. Or speaking with family. Or cooking can be therapeutic for me, something where I get back to normalcy. I have to do it that way because if I were to dive in it, it wouldn’t be helpful for me.” She laughed. “Three months of that in cold Boston was a little too much art imitating life.  So I had to find time for myself.

“And also, I’ll say this: Grief has many facets to it. It’s not just super-sad. It can be awkward sometimes, it’s funny sometimes. So it wasn’t just one dimension. You go through the seven stages of grief, but also, there are many dimensions of grief. And that was something I tried to constantly engage and explore.”

Aside from the setting, “The Holdovers” provided another academic connection for Randolph, because she and Giamatti are both graduates of the Yale School of Drama. “We attended at different times, but the language was the same,” said Randolph, who graduated in 2011, 17 years after her co-star.

“We were able to meet each other at a very grounded place from the jump, which was a gift because this is such an intimate piece that you need to have that familiarity.” Some of her favorite scenes, she said, were the ones where Paul and Mary simply sit together on a couch and talk. “We were working with natural light, there weren’t any monitors — and being paired with Paul and having the same education, it felt like I was back in scene study in school.”

A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from that issue here.

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It’s because of the two lead actors, Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, that the audience is so shaken by the plight of these boys chasing a dream that may kill them. 

Sarr plays the lead character, Seydou, and Fall is his friend Moussa. Both were in their teens when they were cast in the film; Sarr had never acted before, while Fall had done some local theater. “My dream was soccer,” Sarr said in Wolof through a translator. “I wanted to be a soccer player, but my brother told me about this casting and I went, just casually.” 

At the time, neither of them knew much about the refugee routes from northern Africa to Italy. “When I was in Senegal, I’d never known anything about this trip and never knew anybody who experienced it,” Sarr said. “But when we traveled to Morocco (for the shoot), we were able to meet the people who actually lived through it.”

“For me, it was a big pleasure and pride to represent what immigrants go through,” added Fall, who did most of the interview in the English he’d been studying since he was a child. “They risk their lives to have better living conditions. If I had to do it again, I would do it without any hesitation because I learned a lot of things during this trip.”

The film was shot over three months in Africa and Italy, but Sarr said it felt like a year because the work was so difficult physically and emotionally. “The most touching part was when the lady (another passenger on the boat to Italy) was dying in my arms,” he said. “My dad died in my arms as well, and it was very difficult. When I was doing that scene, all I could think about was my father dying in my arms.”

Sarr ended up winning the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which is given to an emerging actor at the Venice Film Festival. So now that he’s accidentally found himself an acting career, does he want to do more? “If I get the possibility, I do,” he said. “The movie industry in Senegal is not that developed, so to have more opportunities we’ll probably have to go back and forth to Europe.”

Fall, though, has his sights set on a different destination. “My dream when I was young was to be here, in America,” said the actor who is also an artist and clothes designer. “That’s why I learned English. And if I have the possibility to stay here, I will stay.”

This story first appeared in the International Feature Film issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Meet the Teenage Actors Who Make Italian Oscar Entry ‘Io Capitano’ So Powerful appeared first on TheWrap.

“For example, Barbie would open the fridge, and we wanted it to feel like a refreshing cold air came out. So we’d add a woman exhaling, like the sound someone would make after they’d drunk a refreshing glass of cola. It’s almost like imagining the sounds a human would make if they were playing with these Barbies and Kens.”

The sound team also filled the movie with sonic Easter eggs, nods to early Disney or Hanna-Barbera cartoons and 1950s musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain.” But their job was an intricate one. “In a regular movie, you can get away with normal, everyday sounds,” sound designer and supervising sound editor Dan Kenyon said. “But in this movie, it had to be a little bit different, to give you a sense that you were in a different world.

“And on top of that, there’s so much really well-written dialogue and good score and pop songs. So it was challenging to create that stuff and get it to work with everything else on screen.”

Sometimes, that meant stripping out other sounds. In a climactic speech in which America Ferrera’s character describes the crippling expectations society places on women, “the level of quiet that we needed was below what the threshold would’ve been with the original dialogue recordings,” said re-recording mixer Kevin O’Connell, a 21-time Oscar nominee for sound who also worked on the other half of Barbenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” “We had to use every tool in the trade to try to bring down and suppress the normal sounds of a soundstage without affecting the tone of her dialogue.”

By contrast, the sound crew got to have fun with Weird Barbie, the raggedy, broken doll played by Kate McKinnon. “It’s in the name: She’s weird,” Kenyon said. “She’s this overplayed-with, messed-up doll. So we were able to play with Foley (sound effects) a little bit more. When she’s walking, we gave her plastic creaks and squeaks. And when she falls and does the splits or when she jumps off her second story and cartwheels over, we were able to have more fun with those moments.”

And they pulled out all the stops during the extended battle scene between two armies of Kens. “Greta and Noah (co-writer Noah Baumbach) described the scene as ‘Saving Private Ryan’ but with toys,” Lee said. “If you just play the soundtrack, you’ll hear a battle, but it’s made up of Frisbees, tennis rackets, plastic arrows, squeaky dog toys, wimpy male screams and whining sounds. Anything to help amp up the humor. That’s the fun part of this movie, that we were able to use some of the campy stereotypical sounds that people normally shy away from.”

O’Connell agreed. “We’ve all worked on these types of complicated movies before, but they’re never as fun as they are when you’re working with Greta,” he said. “She would say things to us like, ‘Put a little sparkle on it,’ and at first I didn’t get what she was saying. But after a while I got it, and we were continually trying to find moments in the movie to add a little sparkle.”

This story is part of the “Barbie” cover story in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read the rest of the “Barbie” below-the-line stories here.

Read more from the Below-the-Line issue here.  

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