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Contents
OSCAR NOMINATIONS | JANUARY 29, 2016
F E A T URE S
16 WHAT A YEAR
Meet Alicia Vikander:
not just another It Girl
20 A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
Stars glitter in
our annual Palm
Springs portfolio
32 GRIN AND BEAR IT
How Inarritu and Chivo
wrestled The Revenant
into shape
34 SHE’S GOT THE LOOK
Charlotte Rampling,
 ago, a night of firsts
first-time nominee at 69
1 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016
16
Alicia Vikander visits
with editor-in-chief
Sharon Waxman at
TheWrap’s photo studio
at the Palm Springs
International Film
Festival; cover and other
photographs by
Patrick Fraser.
DE P A R T ME N T S
2 Awards Beat: The curious
Oscars-money nexus THE WRAP MAGAZINE
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
4 By the Numbers: Adding up Sharon Waxman
the nominations EDITOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Steve Pond Ada Guerin
6 #OscarsSoEmbattled: It’s time DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR
for real change Thom Geier
DEPUTY EDITOR
8 Shindigs & Soirees: Globes- Tim Appelo
trotting on the path to Oscar VICE PRESIDENT, SALES
SALES Nicole Winters,
Caren Gibbens Mattie Reyes
10 Special Section: Underdog
DISTRIBUTION CREATIVE ASSISTANTS
animation, real stories and a
Trevor Tivenan Laura Geiser, Eric Hernandez
desert saga
GO TO THEWRAP.COM
36 Oscar’s Back Pages: 80 years For more of our coverage of awards season and all other facets of the
entertainment industry visit us at TheWrap.com. For advertising inquiries,
contact sales@thewrap.com or call (424) 248-0662
 FRONT & CENTER / Awards Beat
FOR LOVE
or MONEY
A few thoughts on the
curious nexus where the
Oscars meet the box office
BY TODD CUNNINGHAM
1.
An Academy Award can help a movie at
the box office, but the converse is definitely
not true.
This year’s nominations prove it. Among the
signs that Oscar voters don’t read the Monday-
morning trades as much as everyone else in
Hollywood:
• J.J. Abrams’ blockbuster Star Wars: The Force
Awakens, the top-grossing film in U.S. history,
didn’t get a Best Picture nomination. A24’s
Room, which had made less than $6 million at
the time of nominations, did.
• Only one of last year’s 10 top-grossing movies
made the Best Picture list: The Martian, which
came in at No. 8 at the box office for the year
with $227 million.
• Actors in hit movies don’t fare any better with
the Academy, it seems. Although The Martian
star Matt Damon secured a Best Actor nod,
the top-grossing film to produce a nominee in
either of the actress categories was the Jennifer
Lawrence dramedy Joy, which has earned less
than $60 million and barely cracked the Top 50.
• In 2015, Universal Pictures had the highest
domestic, foreign and worldwide box office
totals that any studio has ever had, but the
studio mustered just four nominations: two for
the actors in Steve Jobs, one for the screenplay
for Straight Outta Compton and one for the song
from Fifty Shades of Grey. The studio’s biggest
hits—Jurassic World, Furious 7 and Minions—
were completely shut out, even in the technical
and animated feature categories.
2 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016
2.
The films that stand to get the biggest
Best Picture bump are the little ones, not
the big ones.
Fox’s The Martian and Warner Bros.’ Mad
Max: Fury Road, both of which have passed
$150 million domestically, are out on DVD and
mainly played out in theaters. Another Fox
film, The Revenant, led the nominations and
may have the most momentum of any film
right now. “It’s not going to do what American
Sniper did last year,” Exhibitor Relations
media analyst Jeff Bock told TheWrap, “but
Only one of last
year’s 10 top-grossing
movies made the
Best Picture list
between the big debut, Leo [DiCaprio] and
Alejandro [Inarritu], The Revenant is becoming
a water-cooler film. It’s pretty arty to put up
huge numbers with the mainstream, but we’ll
see.”
Paramount is biding its time with The Big
Short and actually dropped the film’s screen
count from more than 2,500 to 1,765 the
weekend after nominations, its fourth in wide
release. With around $50 million banked
already, The Big Short could hit $100 million
if everything breaks right. Bridge of Spies
has grossed $70 million since opening in mid
October, but is out on DVD on Feb. 2.
But the films with the most to gain are
likely the three indies: Brooklyn, Spotlight and
Room. The first two had made $24 million
and $29 million since opening when they
were nominated; Fox Searchlight doubled the
screen count on Brooklyn to 681 theaters the
weekend after nominations, while Open Road
aggressively expanded Spotlight from 368 to
973 locations. And A24 has plenty of room to
grow with Room, which had never cracked $1
million or been in more than 200 theaters in
14 weeks of release.
3.
Since the Academy expanded up to 10
Best Picture nominees in 2009, the
top-grossing nominee has never won.
The best showing came when the
fourth-highest grossing nominee, Argo, won
in 2012—but more often than not, the winner
has come from the bottom half of the best-pic
grosses, with The Artist and The Hurt Locker
being the seventh and eighth-highest grossing
films in the category their respective years.
Curiously, though, before the expansion
the Best Picture winner was almost invariably
the first or second highest-grossing nominee:
Only once in the preceding 26 years was the
winner not in the top half of the nominees’
grosses. Go figure. W
IL LUSTRATE D BY B R IA N TAYLOR
FRONT & CENTER / Do the Math

IL LUSTRATE D BY SIMON DA RGA N

Oscar Nominations
By the Numbers

8 First-time acting nominees: Bryan Cranston, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance,

Brie Larson, Charlotte Rampling, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rachel McAdams,
Alicia Vikander

5 Previous acting winners: Eddie Redmayne, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett,

Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Winslet

7 Previous acting nominees who haven’t won: Saoirse Ronan, Rooney Mara,
Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Fassbender, Mark Ruffalo, Sylvester Stallone,
Matt Damon (won for screenwriting)

69 Age of oldest acting nominee, Charlotte Rampling

21 Age of youngest acting nominee, Saoirse Ronan
25 Age of Jennifer Lawrence, the youngest ever four-time acting nominee
37 Average age of Best Actress nominee

43 Average age of Best Actor nominee

35 Average age of Best Supporting Actress nominees

50 Average age of Best Supporting Actor nominees

1 Number of Best Picture nominees released prior to October: Mad Max: Fury Road

3 Number released in October: The Martian, Bridge of Spies, Room

2 Number released in November: Brooklyn, Spotlight

2 Number released in December: The Big Short, The Revenant

4 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

 $61.4
$75.8 2 MILLION
MILLION Number of Best Picture Average gross of films
Average gross of Best nominees to have crossed $100 containing Best Actor and Best
Picture nominees at time of million on nominations day: Supporting Actor nominees
nomination Mad Max: Fury Road,
The Martian

1 $18.9
$265.6 Number of best-pic nominees to MILLION
MILLION have grossed less than $10 mil- Average gross of films containing
Average gross of Best Sound lion on nominations day: Room Best Actress and Best Supporting
Mixing nominees at time of Actress nominees
nomination

Nominees who set new records this year as the most-nominated living
3 person in their category: Roger Deakins, 13 for cinematography; Sandy
Powell, 12 for costume design; John Williams, 45 for musical score

Total nominations in all categories for John Williams, the most-nominated

50 living person

4 Number of Williams’ nominations that he received for Star Wars films

Percentage of Brad Pitt’s Oscar nominations that have come for producing
50 (The Big Short, 12 Years a Slave, Moneyball) vs. acting (12 Monkeys, The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Moneyball)

Theron: Jasin Boland/ © 2014 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.; Williams: Paul Morigi/
Double nominees who are competing against themselves in a category:
3

Getty Images for Capital Concerts; Powell: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Steve Golin, picture; Sandy Powell, costume design; Andy Nelson, sound mixing

Non-acting categories with no female nominees: cinematography, directing,

5 score, sound mixing and sound editing

4 Non-acting categories in which female nominees equal or outnumber male

nominees: costume design, documentary short, film editing, makeup and
hairstyling

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 5
FRONT & CENTER / Open Letter
Time for
a Real
Change
An appeal to readers
and Academy members to
#MakeOscarsDiverse
BY SHARON WAXMAN
B
ehind the scenes, I’m hearing
lots of conversations about
the supposed silliness of the
#OscarsSoWhite protest.
I’m hearing insiders—people who know
how the Oscars work, who know the land-
scape of this year’s films, who care about
diversity but understand you can’t snap
your fingers and make it happen—saying
this is a ridiculous debate.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts
& Sciences is made up of 6,261 individual
voters who cast ballots for the best, most
deserving work in the movie industry
every year. It’s fair to believe that those
individuals vote their consciences, and
take their responsibilities seriously. We
know many of those individuals. They’re
good people. They believe in diversity.
But as a group, they’re 94 percent
Caucasian. Fact.
The other reality is that there were not
enough standout performances in 2015
from people of color—African-Americans,
Latinos, and, my God, when does someone
finally mention the absence of Asians? We
all know that the acting nominees, all of
them white for the second year in a row,
are extremely deserving.
Yes, there are performances that might
have made the cut. But while Idris Elba
gave a strong performance in Beasts of No
Nation, he probably didn’t get nominated
because not enough people thought his
6 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016
performance was better than those of the
nominees. It had nothing to do with his
being black, and something to do with the
fact that it was a brutal movie about an
African warlord that not enough AMPAS
members were in a hurry to watch. The
Spike Lees and Michael Moores of the
world—both filmmakers are skipping the
Oscars over the lack of nominees of color—
understand these reasons
“
perfectly well.
But what’s happening
here is about the bigger
picture. It’s not about the
micro reasons why there are
This is about
no black nominees—there’s the bigger
always some reason, some picture, not the
perfectly good excuse. After
watching this issue and
micro reasons
chronicling it for nearly for no black
two decades, it’s clear to me
that the African-American
nominees.”
community as a whole is just
plain tired of having to fight
this battle.
Tokenism isn’t the way. Voting for
people of color just because doesn’t cut it.
There’s a fatigue with the whole system.
Those who want change have had it with
the lip service and the earnest promises
and the only occasional triumphs like
those of Halle Berry, Denzel Washington,
12 Years a Slave—which now give way to
two years in a row of all-white nominees.
I think people of color are just fed up,
and they want a change. Thankfully, the
Academy has Cheryl Boone Isaacs at the
helm. She heard the frustration and made
a bold statement promising “big changes.”
We all want to see them, and that probably
means the Academy admitting an extraor-
dinary number of minority (and women,
please!) members in the coming year.
To that end, TheWrap
is soliciting from our
readers potential candi-
dates for admission to
AMPAS—people who will
make the group more
diverse and broaden
its perspective. Please
email or tweet us your
suggestions and include
the names and pro-
fessions of the candi-
dates with the hashtag
#MakeOscarsDiverse.
And to our many readers
in the Academy, take these suggestions
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY PIXEL PUSHER
in the positive light in which they are
offered, and work to make your organiza-
tion one that represents not only every-
one who makes films, but everyone who
watches them, too.
We look forward to all of us playing a
role in bringing real, definitive change to
the most important body that represents
the movie industry.W
 PARTY REPORT / Mikey Glazer

THE STRETCH RUN

2.

THE OSCAR ENDGAME ZOOMS INTO FOCUS WITH TROPHIES, SPEECHES AND SMOOCHES
AT THE GOLDEN GLOBES AND CRITICS’ CHOICE AWARDS ON NOMINATIONS WEEK
BY MIKEY GLAZER

1. Creed writer-director 1.
Ryan Coogler did not forget
Sylvester Stallone at the
National Board of Review.
2. ”Hello, Ms. Mirren. My 3.
name is Bryan Cranston,
and I’ll be your waiter at the
Golden Globes.” 3. Lady Gaga
enters the winners’ circle
backstage at the Globes.

STARPIX (1); MICHAEL KOVAC/GETTY IMAGES (2); GETTY IMAGES (3); MICHAEL KOVAC/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE GREAT BRITAIN CAMPAIGN (4); KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES (5); ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES FOR
4. Best Actress nominees Brie
Larson and Saoirse Ronan
come cheek-to-cheek at
BAFTA’s Tea Party. 5. Adam
McKay and Christian Bale
make out like bandits at
the Critics’ Choice Awards,
winning three trophies
for The Big Short. 6. Room
wunderkind Jacob Tremblay
auditions for the next Star 6.
Wars at the Critics’ Choice
Awards. 7. Fox’s stratospheric 4. 5.

THE CRITICS’ CHOICE AWARDS (6); TODD WILLIAMSON/GETTY IMAGES FOR FOX (7); RICH POLK/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY (8)
Golden Globes night preceded
its industry-leading 26 Oscar
nominations: Jim Gianopulos,
Giannina Facio, Ridley Scott,
Matt Damon and Stacey
Snider celebrate The Martian
on Globes night. 8. Is that
a Big Kahuna Burger you’re
eating there, Quentin? No, it’s
Fatburger at the Globes.

7. 8.

8 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

 ANIMATION/DOC/FOREIGN-LANGUAGE

BY STEVE POND

While most of the attention on Academy Awards night goes to the heavy
hitters nominated in the Best Picture and acting categories, cinematic gold
lurks in other corners of the Oscar universe. Here’s TheWrap’s annual
look at the nominees in the Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary
Feature and Best Foreign Language Film categories.

T H E NOMINEES Anomalisa
It’s typical Charlie
Boy and the
World
Kaufman weirdness, Brazilian animator
but transplanted into Ale Abreu started
an odd, melancholy with the line draw-
and touching piece ing of a little boy
of stop-motion he found in one of
animation about a his sketchbooks—
salesman in desper- and that boy, Photo illustration: Pixel Pusher
ate search for human connection. “We liked the handmade through his interactions with the
quality, and it added a dreamlike quality and a soulfulness increasingly chaotic modern world, developed into a
to the characters, and a delicate, fractured quality as well,” wordless, entirely hand-drawn film made without a
said co-director Duke Johnson. “Also, it implies the influence script. “I had the feeling that he was calling me to dis-
of the animators and the creators on the performances. cover his history,” said Abreu, “so I felt like a
With stop motion, you’re able to distill human emotion and detective as I tried to put together moments and sensa-
interaction down to the essentials.” tions that I was feeling.”

10 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

 Who You Callin’ Underdog?

O
ver the last seven years, it’s clear American market and enters them in the
that Disney/Pixar has ruled the Oscar race. The company was founded
Oscar animation field with nine in 2008 as an offshoot of the New York
nominations and five wins. But International Children’s Film Festival,
you’d probably be surprised to learn with a specific mission statement. “Our
who comes in second: not DreamWorks whole reason for being is to help expand
Animation or Illumination or Blue Sky and elevate the notion of what animation
or Laika, but a small, eight-year-old New can be,” Beckman said. “As wonderful as
York-based company called the Hollywood animated
GKIDS. Since it launched films can be, they’re mostly
in 2008, the company has
ANIMATION CG, PG-rated comedies
landed a startling eight with big budgets aiming for
nominations with the kind of films that four-quadrant audiences. And there’s so
fly under the radar right up until the much more the art form can be.”
moment they’re announced as nominees. With this year’s nominees including
GKIDS has two of the five nominees four films from outside the Hollywood
this year, Boy and the World and When system—Charlie Kaufman’s odd
Marie Was There; they also notched two Anomalisa, Aardman Animation’s
of the five last year with Song of the stop-motion Shaun the Sheep Movie, Ale
Sea and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Abreu’s hand-drawn Boy and the World
and two in 2011 with A Cat in Paris and and Studio Ghibli’s When Marnie Was
Chico and Rita. They’ve also scored nods Here—Beckman is confident the message
for 2009’s The Secret of Kells and 2013’s is getting across. “The medium has so
Ernest & Celestine. much untapped possibility, and people
“God forbid we should ever be any- are opening their minds to the idea that
thing other than the underdog,” said there’s a world of animation that isn’t
GKIDS president Eric Beckman with a what you think animation is,” he said. “In
laugh the morning after the nominations. live action, you have every imaginable
“Everyone asks, ‘What’s the secret, what’s type of picture, from popcorn movies to
the secret?’ And there is no secret. The rom-coms to nonlinear pictures. And in
voters sit in a darkened room and watch animation, there’s no reason you can’t
the movies and rate them. So you just have the exact same range—if anything,
need a great film.” you’re more freed up to do anything.
Unlike the other companies, GKIDS “Every year it’s amusing to me that
doesn’t bankroll or produce its own films; our films get nominated and people say,
instead, it scours the world for worthy ‘What a surprise!’ If you watch the mov-
animated films, picks them up for the ies, it shouldn’t be a surprise.”

Inside Out Shaun When

The only the Sheep Marnie Was
contender Movie There
to also be “Some people The legend-
nominated might think ary Japanese
outside the stop-mo- animation
animation tion is old house Studio
category fashioned, Ghibli won
(for Best but it’s about an Oscar for
Original the stories and the characters,” said Shaun the Spirited Away
Photo illustration: Pixel Pusher

Screenplay), Inside Out is also the category’s
biggest hit, a moving journey through the mind of
a young girl. “As a parent, you mourn the loss of
the stage your kids have already gone through,”
said director Pete Docter. “That was the case with
me watching my kids, and we tried to find ways to
represent that story arc in the film.”
Sheep Movie co-director Mark Burton. For Shaun,
the team at Aardman Animation opted to do
away with dialogue to tell the story of a rebellious
barnyard creature, based on the British TV series.
Added co-director Richard Starzak, “Putting
ideas forward without dialogue was extremely
challenging.”
and has been nominated four other times, including
for this film by Hiromasa Yonebayashi about a young
girl communing with a mysterious blonde girl in an
abandoned mansion. Yonebayashi, the youngest
director at Studio Ghibli, has said he placed his
emphasis “on the recreation of what we can feel
with our senses.”

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 11
 ANIMATION/DOC/FOREIGN-LANGUAGE

T H E NO M INEES A War, Denmark

Tobias Lindholm’s film
Embrace of the
Serpent, Colombia
deals with a Danish Ciro Guerra’s dramatic
commander put on film is a hallucinatory
trial back home for trip up the Amazon,
orders that caused chronicling two sepa-
the death of civilians rate trips made by early
in the heat of battle in 20th century explorers.
Afghanistan. It’s part visceral war movie, part family Filmed in gorgeous Photo illustration: Pixel Pusher
drama and part courtroom procedural. “The idea 35mm black and white, it looks nothing like any of the
was to start out by jumping between the war in other contenders. “To me, cinema is a way of explor-
Afghanistan and home, and then go home with the ing, and it’s a way of knowledge,” said Guerra. “I think
guy and sit in a cold room and wait for the verdict,” cinema should be an experience—that’s the prom-
said Lindholm. “My goal was that I wanted my mom, ise we get when we sit down and the lights go out.
a classic Scandinavian socialist, to cheer for a guy It should be an experience for the audience, and it
who might have killed civilians.” should be an experience for those of us who make it.”

12 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

 Blood and Sand learning about their history and lifestyle and decid-
ing that they needed to use real Bedouins rather

N
aji Abu Nowar’s Theeb is the least-known of the than professional actors in the lead roles. That led
foreign-language nominees, and the film that to eight months of acting workshops before produc-
may have come as the biggest surprise to those tion began.
who weren’t following closely enough to know The film did include one English actor, Jack Fox,
that it earned strong reviews outside the U.S. and who plays a military man traveling across the desert
won the audience award at last year’s Palm Springs with a mysterious box that turns out to contain a
International Film Festival. Only the second Oscar detonator that could be used to blow up newly built
entry ever from Jordan, the film is the story of a train tracks across the desert. The plot device has
young Bedouin boy who accompanies his brother to led some to call Theeb the flip side of Lawrence of
escort a mysterious Englishman across the forbidding Arabia, where the hero was an Englishman—and
desert, bound by the Bedouin custom of hospitality at while Nowar doesn’t completely agree, he said, “I
any cost. completely understand why people might think
Set in the 1910s, during the Arab Revolt—essen- that. The only reason anybody in the Western
tially, the same time and place film world knows about the Arab Revolt is
audiences saw from a much dif- FOREIGN because of Lawrence of Arabia, which
ferent perspective in Lawrence of LANGUAGE is a phenomenal film. But the reason
Arabia—the film has the trappings of we chose to set the film in that time
a Western, but is also a document of a time gone by is that having lived with the Bedouin, a lot of their
and a nuanced coming-of-age tale, though one that stories are about what they call ‘the dark time,’
turns dark and bloody. when the Ottomans built the railroad and destroyed
“I love the films where Kurosawa adapted the the income they’d been making from guiding pil-
style of the John Ford Westerns to the samurai grims and protecting the trade routes.
culture, and I thought, ‘Why can’t that be adapted to “Obviously, because the Middle East is full of con-
the Bedouin culture?’” said Nowar. “I thought I could flict, those stories have been forgotten. You can pick
make a Bedouin Western type thing. It was the first your conflict in the region—everyone is fighting and
thing I ever tried to write, and it was really awful. killing each other, and there are so many tragedies
I abandoned it in tears and went on to write other that theirs has been forgotten. But I saw the par-
things and develop my craft over the next allels with what is happening today, and the larger
eight years.” context.”
But Nowar later went back to the idea with a Many of the Bedouin people, he added, had never
co-writer and a different approach—an intimate even seen a film before. It was only their “incred-
character drama focusing on two Bedouin brothers. ibile culture of hospitality to any stranger” that kept
“We didn’t want to make a generic, clichéd movie them from scoffing at the whole enterprise. “They
taking tropes from the Western genre and forcing did admit to me later that they thought we were
them on the culture,” he said. “We wanted to move crazy, stupid young guys who didn’t know what
away from genre, find out what’s going on in the we were doing,” he said. “But they’re so polite and
Bedouin culture and learn about it. I love the pro- generous and hospitable that they couldn’t say that
cess of research and discovery.” or reject us, so they kind of humored us until they
He lived in a Bedouin community for a year, realized that it was actually happening.” —SP

Mustang, France Son of Saul, Hungary Theeb, Jordan

Of the 18 films screened in “Films that try to show the See main article,
TheWrap’s foreign-language entire event only diminish above.
screening series, nothing got the scope of it by making
the audience reaction of Deniz it into a spectacle,” said
Gamze Erguven’s sobering but director Laszlo Nemes of
ultimately triumphant look at a his decision to shoot a
family of young girls struggling Holocaust movie almost
against a repressive upbringing entirely in tight closeups on his lead actor, Geza Rohrig. The
Photo illustration: Pixel Pusher

in Turkey. “There is a filter of sexualization through which wom-
en are perceived in Turkey, and it starts very early when girls are
starting to be teenagers,” said Erguven, who lived in both Turkey
and Paris growing up. “I was a complete coward and didn’t speak
out when it happened to me—so I made these characters my
heroes, who do what I never had the guts to do.”
result was the most acclaimed foreign-language film of the
year, and one that won the Jury Prize at Cannes. “I wanted
something immersive and very visceral, and I wanted to
focus on the experience of one person,” said Nemes. “That
way you can convey something about the experience of
the camps, the frenzy and the narrowness and the horror.”

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 13
 ANIMATION/DOC/FOREIGN-LANGUAGE
Why This
Movie?
In our conversations with the directors of the
nominated feature documentaries, which took
place over the last several months, we asked
them all the same thing: Why were you driven to
make this movie? Here are their answers.
ALL INTERVIEWS BY STEVE POND
DOCUMENTARIES
Film: Amy
Director: Asif Kapadia
Subject: The talented but self-destructive
singer Amy Winehouse.
Kapadia: “I lived around the area where she
lived in London. Amy’s story was happening half
a mile away from my door. But we also kind of
ignored it for that reason: ‘Oh, her again.’ To me,
she really was the girl next door—very ordinary,
down-to-earth, just like us, with all of the inse-
curities that all of us have. Broken hearts, love,
family—all of these simple, ordinary things that
played out in her life affect people.
“I was aware of her being messed up on stage,
outside a pub, in newspapers—there was one
court case after another and one bad thing after
another. I was just thinking, ‘Why are you being
seen on stage in that state? Why is no one stop-
ping it?’ It never really made sense to me. And
those questions were part of reasons I wanted
to make the film, and the things that I suppose I
wanted to answer.
“I wasn’t the world’s biggest Amy fan, never
saw her live. It was just an instinct that there
was a story here—and it was a story about her,
but also about London, about now, about how we
treat people.”
14 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016
Film: Cartel Land
Director: Matthew Heineman
Subject: Two different vigilante groups on
opposite sides of the U.S./Mexican border:
a group of U.S. citizens trying to police the
border in Arizona, and the autodefensas, a citi-
zen’s group formed to combat the drug cartels
in Mexico.
Heineman: “I had started shooting in Arizona,
and I thought the film was going to be about that
group. But my father sent an article about the
autodefensas, and right when I read it, I knew I
wanted to create this parallel story of vigilantism
on both sides of the border. Two weeks later I
was in Mexico, and what was supposed to be a
few weeks turned into months turned into nine
months.
“I originally thought, especially on the
Mexican side of the story, that I was telling this
very simple hero/villain story, of guys in white
shirts fighting guys in black hats, in the classic
Western sense. And over time, I realized that the
lines between good and evil were much more
blurry. And that blurriness and murkiness fasci-
nated me. I almost became obsessed with trying
to understand what was really happening, who
these guys really were and where this movement
was actually going. That’s what led me to go
down there.”
Film: The Look of Silence
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Subject: Families whose members were killed
during the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s,
in a companion piece to the 2013 Oscar-
nominated film The Act of Killing.
Oppenheimer: “When I started filming families
who lost people in the genocide, people would be
crying out of fright at the idea of talking. And after
three weeks, knowing how vulnerable and fright-
ened everyone was, the army came and threatened
them not to talk. So the people called me to a secret
midnight meeting and said, ‘Please don’t give up.
Try to film the perpetrators.’ That’s how The Act
of Killing happened. But I always knew I would go
back and film the familes.
“I spent two years filming every perpetrator
that I could find, and it was like they were reading
from a shared script. I had to let go of this idea that
they were monsters. If there’s monstrosity here, it’s
collective, and it’s political. It’s impunity. It occurred
to me, this is like wandering into Germany 40
years after the Holocaust if the Nazis were still in
power, and if the rest of the world had celebrated
the Holocaust while it took place.
“And I knew that this was one of many, many
massacres that had taken place across the global
south, while perpetrators remained in power, and
people live under authoritarian regimes in fear. I
felt impunity is the story of our times, and I will
stop everything I’m doing to address this.”
Film: What Happened, Miss Simone?
Director: Liz Garbus
Subject: The troubled life and glorious art of
singer, musician and civil rights activist Nina
Simone.
Garbus: “I had been a huge Nina Simone fan.
I had found her in college and everyone was
listening to her. She was very cool, but I didn’t
know anything about her life. And I knew her
political songs, but I didn’t know the strength of
her activism. But when Radical Media invited me
to pitch myself as a director, I bought her autobi-
ography and I read it and I was like, ‘Please!’
“And at some point along the line I figured out
that I could think of the film as a musical, from
an editing standpoint. The songs could be used
to provide narrative momentum—they were
not just a demonstration of her art, they could
illuminate the chapters in her life.
“Incredible music doesn’t always make an
incredible film, and just because someone is a
really great artist doesn’t mean they have a great
film about them. But Nina had everything. I can’t
think of another artist that would allow me to
make a film that could be as rich from an artistic
point of view, a psychological point of view and a
political point of view.”
Film: Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight
for Freedom
Director: Evgeny Afineevsky
Subject: The protests in the Ukranian capital
of Kiev in 2013, which led to bloodshed at the
hands of the police but ultimately toppled the
country’s government.
Afineevsky: “I was at home in Los Angeles, and
friends called me from Ukraine. They said, ‘You
have to get over here, you have to come see what’s
happening in Maidan Square.’ The youth came out
and they wanted to stand their ground and not let
politicians into the square. So I hired two camera-
men and started to film.
“It was literally a festival at the beginning, and
all of a sudden everything happened spontaneous-
ly, in nine days. The police started getting violent,
and everything changed. At four in the morning,
me and all my team got beaten horribly by the
police. I realized history was happening there.
“I was surrounded with these real filmmakers
all on the front lines. There were GoPros, cell-
phones, camcorders, drones… All of them wanted
to share their stories, and they all came to me. In
some moments I was able to angle the camera, to
be in the director’s shoes, and at some points I was
just facilitating what they were bringing in. I was
committed [to shooting] for two weeks and stayed
six months. I felt responsible for documenting the
history.”
OSCAR NOMINATIONS 15
STA ND BACK:

ALI CIA
VI KA N D ER
H AS A R R IV ED
T HE S W E DI S H A C T RE S S H A S H A D A Y E A R T O RE ME MBE R ,
BU T S HE ’ S JU S T GE T T ING S TA R T E D
N B Y S H A R O N WA X M A N

P H OTO G R A P H E D B Y PAT R I C K F R A S E R

Not long ago, few would have recognized the name

or face of Alicia Vikander. Now it seems as if the
27-year-old actress is everywhere, appearing in four
movies in 2015, on magazine covers and at every
awards show of the season for her performances
in The Danish Girl and Ex Machina. Now Oscar-
nominated for her heartfelt and funny performance
as Gerda in The Danish Girl, the Swedish-born actress
discussed the challenges of being thrust into the
spotlight, the thrill of recognition and what it’s like to
be a first-time nominee.

Congratulations on your first Academy relaxed, interestingly enough, doing all

Award nomination.
That still sounds so surreal, especially
when someone says it out loud. I can’t
really get that my name is in the same sen-
tence. But it’s really wonderful, it’s beyond
anything I would have ever dreamed of.
I met you at the Cannes Film Festival
last year and I had a notion that you
were about to have your moment. What
does it feel like to go from relative
obscurity to being the person everyone
wants to talk to?
It is very overwhelming in the sense that
it’s been a very big change for the last
few months. I think it’s something you
can’t really prepare for. But I feel very
these interviews and going to awards
shows to present or go up and do a
speech for the first time in my life.
Can you just be yourself in those
situations?
I think “be yourself” is something
everybody is struggling to be. It’s that
thing of knowing what grounds you and
what brings you back to normality. It’s
realizing that it’s wonderful to do these
things, and then in my off time I call my
friends, I read my books, I take my walks.
I get excited about finding new projects
or work that I want to develop or that
I dreamed of doing. What I mean is to
not fear what doesn’t need to change.

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 17
 Whatever has been you the whole time will probably continue to be
that way.

Last year, you were in a period film that is getting so much acclaim,
The Danish Girl. You did a thoughtful sci-fi thriller, Ex Machina. Now
you’re doing an action movie, the new Bourne. You’re playing across
so many genres, but where do you really live as an actress? There’s a lot of
When it comes to my art, acting is something that makes me feel very
comfortable. You want to take on challenging roles, because that is
emotions that you
normally heading into something you haven’t really done before. I love don’t allow yourself
that I learn so much about myself when acting, getting to try out differ-
ent roles and try to understand characters. Also having to dig down
in life because of
and find those emotions. Normally in life, there’s a lot of emotions that morals or society,
you don’t allow yourself because of morals or because of society. In
everyday life, you live a certain way. But in acting you actually get to but in acting you
just go wild and crazy and explore. I feel it’s very liberating. Sometimes
emotions that I never thought I had access to suddenly feel very inter-
get to go wild and
esting and close to me. When I’m in scenes and I get to experience that crazy and explore.
thrill is when I enjoy it the most.
It’s very liberating.”
Is there a specific scene you’re thinking of?
It’s something I’ve done since my first role, in a movie called Pure. I
played a troubled young girl, and trying to find the complexity and the
anger within her, which was very not me—to come into that and let go
was very freeing.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of Gerda in The Danish Girl. You have a
wonderful partner in the film with Eddie Redmayne.
He’s an extraordinary actor, and an incredible friend and man. He
really pushes himself. To see the work that he put into creating Lili was
extraordinary. A lot of people had been involved for a long time in this
film and I know that Eddie read the script several years ago, so I was
kind of the last one in, the newbie. And to see, when I came in for my
audition, the amount of work that he had put in, I was so impressed.

What scene did you audition?

It was the scene after the first night when they’ve both been to the
ball, Lili and Gerda, and Lili kisses another man. So it’s a scene when
they wake up the day after. I had done a reading and met with [direc-
tor] Tom [Hooper] before I was called in to do a chemistry read with
Eddie. It was really nerve-wracking. I had met Eddie a few months
earlier at the BAFTAs, where we had presented an award together. He
was so sweet, he said, “I know that you’re nervous, sorry to put you in
this situation.” Then we just sat down on the floor and had a chat for a Alicia Vikander’s
extraordinary 2015
while about the scene, about the roles and what we wanted to do.
included The Danish Girl,
Ex Machina, The Man
When you did the scene, did you feel that you got it? From U.N.C.L.E., Burnt
and the narration for
We got completely silent afterward. I was trying to read Eddie and
Ingrid Bergman: In Her
Tom. Then Eddie looked up and he had apparently gotten quite emo- Own Words. Up next:
tional. It was lovely to work with him because he went all the way Tulip Fever, The Light
Between Oceans and the
even though he had the part, and we did that scene and we both felt it.
next Bourne film.
But then I walked out and all I could do was just wish that I would get a
call saying that I got it.

I think that also tells you the difference between acting and just
playing a part, when you tap into a real emotion like that.
When I hear the word “cut” or when the scene’s over and I don’t really
know what just happened, that’s the best. I love to do rehearsals, and
with The Danish Girl, Tom actually gave us the gift of two or three

18 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

weeks of rehearsals, more than I’ve ever had on a film. So wonderfully
enough you build this big framework of realizing what world you’re in
and knowing who your character is. And when you do the scene and
you let go, it’s a wonderful feeling when you get lost.

One of the things that’s so remarkable about Gerda is how complex

what she’s dealing with is. She loves her husband, but she has to give
him up in order for him to become who he needs to be, which is Lili.
What I thought was remarkable with her was the feeling that she
always knew who the person was that she loved. I love that the art
in a way was where that started to come through—the drawings and
paintings of Einar, or Lili as Einar. And I love that she was a very mod-
ern woman who could see things for what they were but she could
also, in a time when there was no reference for this, see who Lili was
from the beginning.

It’s a real love.

Exactly, and I love that it was so pure. I look up to her for always
standing by and being so supportive. Of course, the journey was
tough and she must have been terrified at many points of losing the
person she loved. And she knew that the relationship was never
going to be the same.

She’s so strong and funny and smart and self-confident from the first
moment you see her. She’s already this image of modern woman.
It was amazing to see Lili and Gerda together. You could see in a photo
the kind of bond that they had, and how playful and artistic they
were. And a lot of humor, and a lot of laughter between them. I love
that we got to discover, what is true love? Is it friendship? Is it passion?
Is it understanding? Is it giving? I assume it’s all of that, but that’s also
why it made this story so wonderful because they go through all these
stages together.

When you have time, are you able to walk around on the street
without being harassed?
Yes. Mostly, I’ve been working. When I haven’t, I’ve been to my
friends’ houses. I haven’t been out that much, I must say. I try to just
hang out with my family and friends. I like to be out in nature, but
I also very much like to be at home, cook food and have my friends
over.

Just a normal movie star.

It’s weird, because when I grew up in Sweden, I couldn’t even dream
of it. I didn’t really think it existed, because I didn’t know you could
work abroad and it felt like a very far distant dream.

What did?
Hollywood, or the movie industry and all that. Even though I had
a mom who was an actress, I dreamed of maybe being on stage in
Sweden and maybe doing a film in Sweden every fourth year. Then,
of course, you come out here and the wonderful thing is that I realized
that, working-wise, it’s not such a big difference.
I thought it would be a lot different when I came on my first studio
film. Then when the first day came, it was the director and my co-ac-
tors and we met in a tiny room without windows. I was like, “This
looks like a closet and we’re just going to do some rehearsals like we
normally do.” Then you walk on set and it’s a lot more people, but the
actual work is not much different. W

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 19
N
o sooner had the new
year dawned than
the trek began. They
headed east from Los
Angeles into the desert
for the Palm Springs
International Film
Festival’s Awards Gala, which
a quirk of the calendar had
put on only the second day of
2016. With the homestretch
of Oscar nomination voting
suitably jump-started, the
contenders came to shine
and were met with a storm of
flash and finery—and before
two weeks were up, almost
all of them would be Oscar
nominees, and their films
would have accounted for 38
nominations.
Before they stepped into
the cavernous Palm Springs BY STEVE POND
Convention Center, they
stopped by TheWrap’s photo P H OTO G R A P H E D B Y PAT R I C K F R A S E R

DESERT
studio and hospitality area.
Saoirse Ronan, on the verge of
heading to New York to star
in a Broadway production of
The Crucible, quizzed Bryan
Cranston about that play’s
director, with whom he had
worked. Rooney Mara wait-
ed patiently while her Carol
co-star Cate Blanchett chatted
away with Steve Carell, then

STORM
Matt Damon. Brie Larson
came in wearing a spaghet-
ti-strap gown, her bare arms
and hands freezing from her
trip down the red carpet on
a cold desert night. And, of
course, they posed for the pho-
tos you see on these pages.

20 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

 ◄ JEREMY STRONG,
STEVE CARELL,
FINN WITTROCK,
CHRISTIAN BALE &
ADAM MCKAY,
THE BIG SHORT

Director Adam McKay, far

right, was best known for the
comedy of Anchorman and
Talladega Nights when he tackled
The Big Short, which required
him to make the financial crisis
comprehensible and also wrangle
a cast that included, left to right,
Jeremy Strong, Steve Carell,
Finn Wittrock and nominee
Christian Bale, as well as Ryan
Gosling and Brad Pitt. Bale
summed up the entertaining
but sobering film this way:
“Let’s hope that in some small
way this can help the people who
were shat on by the fat cats.”

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 21
 ▼ PHYLLIS NAGY, CAROL

“It was a love story that wasn’t just about two

women,” said playwright and screenwriter
Phyllis Nagy of The Prince of Salt, the Patricia
Highsmith novel (later retitled Carol) she
adapted and shepherded for 18 years. “It was a
larger statement about the nature of love—that
everyone’s actions are motivated by love, and
the more restrained it is, the more emotionally
powerful it could be.”

▲ ED LACHMAN, CAROL

Cinematographer Ed Lachman started

with Todd Haynes’ elaborate “look
book” when planning the visual style
of Carol, which relied on photography
of the early 1950s. “We were trying to
create an emotion-based reality for the
actors visually, without referencing
the cinema or noir or melodrama,” said
the Oscar nominee.

22 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

CATE BLANCHETT &
ROONEY MARA, CAROL ►

Todd Haynes' exquisite period

piece is a subtle duet between
Cate Blanchett and Rooney
Mara, an intimate love story
treated with surpassing delica-
cy. “I don’t really know where
to go from here as an actress,”
said two-time Oscar winner
Blanchett, “because Carol set
the bar so very high.”

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 23
SAOIRSE RONAN, BROOKLYN ►

“I thank my lucky stars daily that this film

has been seen by real live human beings,” said
Irish actress Saoirse Ronan of Brooklyn, the
touching indie about a young woman leaving
her home for New York City in the 1950s.
She made the highly personal film, she adds,
shortly after moving out of her own home,
“when homesickness was my default emotion.”

24 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

◄ TOM MCCARTHY, SPOTLIGHT

“I mostly like engaging an audience,

provoking them to see the world just
slightly differently than they did
before,” said Spotlight director and
co-writer Tom McCarthy, who did just
that with his drama about the Boston
Globe’s investigation into clergy sexual
abuse and coverup in the Catholic
Church. The film got six nominations,
including two for McCarthy.
▼ LENNY ABRAHAMSON,
JACOB TREMBLAY
& BRIE LARSON, ROOM

Going into the dark drama Room,

Brie Larson knew that director Lenny
Abrahamson, below left, would be
focused on getting a performance out
of 8-year-old co-star Jacob Tremblay.
“I knew that I couldn’t be precious
about my performance at all,” said the
Oscar-nominated actress.

26 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

▲ PAUL DANO, LOVE & MERCY

Paul Dano’s eerie performance as the young

Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, which landed
him a Spirit Awards nomination, started not
by meeting the Beach Boys mastermind, but by
listening to his work. “I didn’t want to mimic
him,” said Dano. “The gateway to him had to be
his amazing music.”

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 27
 ▼ DENIZ GAMZE ERGUVEN, MUSTANG

“This is pioneer territory," Mustang director

Deniz Gamze Erguven said of her nominated
film about young women pushing against the
strictures of fundamentalist Islam. "In cinema
history, we are used to seeing the world
through the eyes of men."

28 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

◄ MICHAEL FASSBENDER, STEVE JOBS

“I believe you have a movie that will stand

the test of time,” Best Actor nominee Michael
Fassbender told Universal Pictures about the
acclaimed if underperforming Steve Jobs in
his Palm Springs speech—adding, with a grin,
“It’s unfortunate about the box-office figures,
but at least you have Jurassic World.”

▲ BRYAN CRANSTON, TRUMBO

Portraying an over-the-top, theatrical char-

acter like blacklisted screenwriter Dalton
Trumbo initially terrified Bryan Cranston,
but it also connected him to Trumbo’s fight
for freedom of expression. “We do not just
tolerate differences of opinion [in America],
we embrace them,” he said. “That is what
makes us a great nation.”

OSCAR NOMINATIONS 29
▲ RIDLEY SCOTT & MATT DAMON,
THE MARTIAN

“Frequently, when you have fun on

the set, the movies are pretty bad,” said
director Ridley Scott, who escaped that
fate working on The Martian with Best
Actor nominee Matt Damon. Scott may
have lost out on a Best Director nomi-
nation, but he’s still in the running as
producer of the Best Picture nominee—
and working with the veteran director,
said Damon, “is like a mecca for actors.”

30 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016

 Q
&
A

‘IT ALMOST
KILLED ME’
“Maybe it was a crazy, irresponsible
idea,” Alejandro G. Inarritu
admits of The Revenant
BY STEVE POND

W
e know that The Revenant was a tough shoot.
By now, we’ve all heard stories of how tem-
peratures in the film’s remote locations in the
Canadian Rockies reached 40 below zero,
until suddenly the snow unexpectedly melted
and the entire production had to move to South America
to shoot the final scenes. Stories of how the brutal condi-
tions took its toll on the actors, how Leonardo DiCaprio
ate a real bison liver onscreen, how director Alejandro G.
Inarritu was limited to shooting for only a few hours a
day because he and cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo”
Lubezki were insistent on only using the few hours of
natural light in their location.
A dozen Oscar nominations later, Inarritu has a com-
fortable seat from which to look back on the filming of his
brutal epic, which was based on the true story of 19th-cen- pixel-izing our world in cinema so much that go anywhere. And that is scary. It’s scary
tury frontiersman Hugh Glass, who was left for dead by people are shocked that I would even attempt because now ambition is punished. You
his companions after being mauled by a bear. to risk going to the real locations. But that attempt to do something out of the box, you
was our duty and that was our pleasure and are risking the whole fucking agreement
What drew you to this story? that’s what an artist is supposed to do. that we all have that everything should be
I think the real event was very brutal, very primitive, very And when people ask me if what I shot predictable and comfortable.
biblical in a sense—the survival of somebody about to die. was real—yes, real life, with light from the
And the opportunity to explore it in this open space of nature, sun. There can’t be more beautiful light You shot your last movie, Birdman, to look
in this time 200 years ago that doesn’t exist anymore—to than the sun gives. So why would I put a like one take. It strikes me that you’re most
explore that cinematically and personally was a great oppor- shitty film light on my actors that they will comfortable as a filmmaker when you’re
tunity that I had never done in my life. look artificial? setting yourself challenges that complicate
the task in front of you.
Most of your films are set in urban environments. But did you ever wonder if it’s fair to put It’s exciting to attempt something that can
I have never had one tree in any of my films, never. I hate your crew and your actors through this? fail terribly, don’t you think? If you can
trees in my films. You will never see green. I had nightmares Anybody that signed up for this film knew explore something technically or emotion-
about how to shoot the forest. This was absolutely uncharted where we were going. Some of them felt ally that takes you out of your comfortable
territory for me. uncomfortable about it. We were extremely zone, it can be more powerful. I find myself
high, and shooting too long, and not in the a little bit bored when I do things that are
Did you ever consider filming in less remote locations? comfortable zone that they were used to—so a little bit too easy or too predictable or too
I will ask you a question: What do you prefer, to bite and taste yeah, it was very demanding, very rigorous, obvious. Maybe is a weakness, but that’s
real corn, or to bite GMO corn? What I am saying is, we are and not for everybody. exactly who I am.
now so used to the GMO food that we can’t remember when This was a fucking animal on another
the real flavors of food were available to us. We have been planet—a big canvas with no frame. It could If Birdman was a jazz song, this is a huge

32 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016


dark opera, massive and immersive and
implacable.
I always thought about Caravaggio. Sometimes
when I go to the Metropolitan [Museum], I think,
“Why is the impact so much?” It’s because of the
light, and because those landscapes and every-
thing seem like a dream. This film has to do with
dreams and paintings and memories and ghosts.
Maybe because of that dreamy quality, The
Revenant has been compared to Terrence
Malick at times. Is that a fair comparison?
I love Terrence Malick’s films, especially the
first ones, and I’m honored to be mentioned
with Malick. Obviously it has been compared to
Malick because Chivo and him have worked on
so many films, and obviously Terrence likes too
to shoot at the right time of the day. But other
than that, I don’t think so. I think the narrative
and the storytelling of Terrence, lately especial-
ly, with voiceover and the fragmented time and
space that he creates, is far from what I’m trying
to do here with the narrative and dramatic
ATTACK
PLAN
Emmanuel Lubezki on
shooting two brutal
Revenant scenes
C
inematographer Emmanuel “Chivo”
Lubezki was 0-for-5 at the Oscars
three years ago, despite having
photographed such landmark films as A Little
Princess, Children of Men and The Tree of Life.
Now, after back-to-back wins for Gravity and
Birdman, he’s going for his record-breaking
third consecutive win for The Revenant. He
talked to TheWrap about two of the film’s
signature scenes.
How did you plan and shoot the American
Indian attack at the beginning of the film?
We wanted the attack to be very immersive, to
plunge the audience into that environment. So
we decided to use very wide lenses and smaller
cameras that allowed us to move around.
We called it an elastic shot, moving from the
objective to the subjective. Alejandro had a
very clear map of how he wanted to start from
the point of view of the audience, and then go
© Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
to these characters, Leo and the Indian chief
Alejandro G. Inarritu, who’s looking for his daughter. The stories are
far left, on the set of
interconnected, which is why the shot almost
The Revenant with
Leonardo DiCaprio.
doesn’t cut. You can see what’s happening, and
“People are shocked then feel the desperation of the characters.
that I would go to the
It’s the horror of war. We definitely didn’t
real locations,” he says.
want to glamorize violence—I’m a bit sick
of that, because Hollywood movies overdo
it. That’s always a fear I have when I shoot
violence.
tension that is created in this film.
What I had in mind was Andrei Rublev by What were the particular challenges of shoot-
Tarkovsky. Dersu Uzala by Kurosawa. Aguirre, ing the bear attack, which was a blend of the
Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo by Herzog. real actors, stuntmen and a CG bear?
Apocalypse Now. Films that deal with men The toughest thing is that when you have
against nature and men against men in vast, the empty canvas in front of you, there are
spectacular landscapes, with action but also a so many possibilities. How can you create a
very spiritual dimension. language to tell the story of the bear attack? It
took a lot of talking, watching a few examples
I think you’re probably a little nuts for of real attacks. We met [trained] grizzly bear
trying to make this film, but it’s quite an actors, and decided we didn’t want to do it with
accomplishment. bear actors, because they’ve been in captivity
Yeah, I’m very proud of it. There’s absolutely and don’t even act like real bears anymore.
nothing that I kept in my pockets—that’s all that Little by little, all these situations tell you
I’ve got to give. It almost killed me, too. how you should shoot the thing. We wanted
It was a very ambitious film. It was always to do it with very few cuts, because again we
conceived with high standards, and it was may- wanted to be very immersive, and we want-
be a very crazy, irresponsible idea to have made. ed to feel the randomness of the attack. We
I expected it to be hard, but I never expected it to wanted to tell a little about real bear behavior,
be as challenging as it was in reality. But having and we wanted the audience to be right there,
survived it, maybe having died and been reborn as if they were watching or even suffering the
many times during the shooting, I feel extraordi- attack. —SP
narily proud. W
OSCAR NOMINATIONS 33
 AT
LONG
LAST
LOVE
It’s taken Charlotte Rampling
50 years to get Oscar
recognition, but she was
never very interested in playing
the Hollywood game

BY TIM APPELO Dummy Supienam

qua notabus nius
cutem andes!
Satrobus.
34 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016 Ipses inatis, nove,
etiamqu erficerit.
Aris culudam
in hoc voc tum
“I
’ve had an odd career,” said Charlotte Rampling, and
she’s not kidding. When Rampling broke into star-
dom as the icy, forbidding ingénue beauty in 1960s
hits like Georgy Girl and The Knack, few would have
predicted that she would get her first Oscar nomi-
nation in her seventh decade in Andrew Haigh’s 45
Years, and that she’d make her first stroll down the
Oscar red carpet as a Best Actress contender at the
age of 70. (She’ll hit that milestone on Feb. 5.)
Doesn’t she know that actresses are supposed to
vanish at 30? Is the patrician British actress deliber-
ately trying to break Hollywood’s rules?
“I like that theory!” said Rampling. “I didn’t go the
Hollywood trail, the conventional trail. I sought out
other types of films; cinema d’auteur, experimental films. I
didn’t want to go the big route. Whether I could’ve done
it or not I don’t know—I’m not saying that. But I didn’t
feel it was my place.
“I felt a bit out of place, for some reason. I don’t know
quite why. And I’m feeling quite in my place now.”
She’s in a fine place because of 45 Years, which brought
her best-actress awards at
the Berlin and Edinburgh
film fests and from the Los
Angeles, Boston and London
film critics. In the quiet,
emotionally wrenching film,
Rampling plays a woman
who, on the verge of her 45th
wedding anniversary, finds
out that the love of her hus-
band’s young life, who died
in a 1962 glacier plunge, has
been found dead but perfectly
preserved.
In the old days, when critic David Thomson called
Rampling’s characters “baleful gargoyles”—hard chicks
who ate men for breakfast—she might have been cast
as the beautiful corpse, or maybe the glacier itself, but
never the wounded wife whose authentically aging face
draws us into the complicated dilemmas within.
“The scenes are very simple, and we’re both react-
ing against something we don’t know how to handle,”
Rampling said about the couple played by her and fellow
‘60s Brit star Tom Courtenay. “When he’s off in this
fantasy land and reliving the youth he had with his dead
girlfriend, I’m trying to keep everything on an even keel
and not understanding—or not wanting to understand—
what’s going on.”
In real life, Rampling has faced comparably big
emotional challenges in keeping an even keel, coping
with her adored sister’s suicide at 23 (which their icy
British military father, a competitive Olympic gold medal
winner, required her to keep secret from her mother
for life), a bitter split from former husband Jean-Michel
Jarre two decades after they met in 1976, and depression
in the ‘80s and ‘90s so serious she almost quit making
Clemens Bilan/Getty Images
movies.
Rampling doesn’t talk much about personal matters,
but they inform her performance. “There always is part of
you in the people you play, the whole emotional baggage—
Charlotte’s baggage—that I give over to someone else,” she
said. She’s adept at playing someone with a secret, and
believes her secret weapon as an actor is her piercing,
hooded gaze. “What happens through the eyes [comes]
naturally,” she said. “What you are thinking can really be
felt by others, because it comes through the eyes.”
Rampling never tried to craft a popular persona with
those come-hither eyes and batting lashes. “There’s
more elasticity in your persona when you move freely
through different cultures,” he said. “I live in France, I
speak French. I’ve done all sorts of things, and I haven’t
really conformed to a system. I tend to shy away from
them. I take long breaks and don’t work, and something
brings me back.”
Indeed, Rampling is the queen of comebacks. Fleeing
Swinging London for Rome and Paris after her first burst
of fame, she became a darling of the arthouse in the
Nazi-haunted The Damned (1969) and The Night Porter
(1974), thanks to costar Dirk Bogarde, who insisted on
casting her. Woody Allen revealed a deeper aspect of her
persona, casting her as his troubled girlfriend in 1980’s
Stardust Memories. And as Paul Newman’s betrayer in
1982’s The Verdict, she helped propel the film to five
Oscar nominations for every-
one but her (including Best
Picture and Best Actor for
Newman).
But perhaps her most
crucial benefactor was
director Francois Ozon.
Rampling won Best Actress
at the European Film Awards
for Ozon’s Swimming Pool in
2003. Although she made
50 movies before Swimming
Tom Courtenay and Rampling in 45 Years Pool and 30-some since then,
all but 10 of her 60 awards
credits on IMDb came after she turned 57 that year, and
she’s never been a hotter property than right now.
Making 45 Years, Rampling said she felt particular-
ly at home opposite Courtenay, another ’60s English
beauty who fled Hollywood stardom and returned older
and wiser. Their melancholy chemistry was so great,
Haigh kept cutting dialogue and letting the faces tell the
tale. (Not for nothing is the 2011 documentary about
Rampling called The Look, and Courtenay is one of the
few who can meet it.)
“The screenplay had many more chatting scenes,”
said Rampling, “scenes where we learned more about
the day-to-day life of [the couple]. But Andrew kept
pulling these scenes out because actually what was more
interesting was the silence, and what was happening in
between the lines, in a way that did not need words. He
was surprised by it. He knew what I could do, but you
don’t know to what extent people will inhabit your lines
without saying all the words.”
Rampling said it’s “very true” that 45 Years offers
more complexity than even her most early iconic roles,
but she disputes the whole notion that you should even
call what she’s done for 50 years a career. “I don’t consid-
er the acting part of my life a career,” she said. “I consider
it a companion to my lifestyle.”
And if she wins the big prize, Rampling has no plans
to do a Hollywood victory lap. “I think I’m going to go sit
in a big field in the country and think about life.” W
OSCAR NOMINATIONS 35
OSCAR’S BACK PAGES / Drama Club
“It’s a consolation
prize.”
—Bette Davis, above, on her Oscar
win; below, Irving G. Thalberg, Clark
Gable and Frank Capra
36 THEWRAP JANUARY 29, 2016
THE ACADEMY’S
ROCKY NIGHT
OF FIRSTS
Caught between hostile unions and
indifferent studios in 1936, the Academy
piled up the milestones
BY STEVE POND
T
his isn’t the first year when the Oscars faced the threat of the boy-
cott. That happened 80 years ago, when the Oscar ceremony was as
dramatic as they come, and filled with firsts. Even before the voting
began, voters saw the first Oscar campaign ad ever—for a movie,
MGM’s Ah, Wilderness!, that didn’t get a single nomination. And for
the first time, the Academy hired outside accountants to tally the ballots,
bringing in the firm of Price, Waterhouse & Co., who still hold the job
eight decades later.
As for what the accountants put in those envelopes, there was the first
(and only) write-in winner, A Midsummer Night’s Dream cinematogra-
pher Hal Mohr, who was sitting at home when the Academy called him
after midnight to say he really ought to put on his tux and get down to
the Biltmore Hotel. And the first win for Bette Davis, who got an Oscar
for Dangerous but complained, “It’s a consolation prize,” insisting she
should have won the previous year for Of Human Bondage. And the first
winner ever to refuse an Academy Award, The Informer screenwriter
Dudley Nichols, who turned down his award to protest the Academy’s
role in helping the studios fight off the influence of the growing labor-
union movement in Hollywood.
In fact, that perceived battle between the Screen Writers Guild, the
Screen Actors Guild and the newly formed Directors Guild was the
source of the night’s biggest drama. A week before the show, the three
guilds sent their members a letter advising, “Since the Academy is defi-
nitely inimical to the best interests of the Guilds, you should not attend.”
Meanwhile, as if to prove that the Academy was in a no-win situation,
the studios had pulled their own financial support, angry that the orga-
nization hadn’t done enough to keep salaries down.
According to Mason Wiley’s Inside Oscar, the move forced the AMPAS
board members to pay for the Oscar dinner and ceremony out of their
own pockets. In an attempt to boost attendance, new Academy president
Frank Capra announced a special award to cinema pioneer D.W. Griffith,
who hadn’t been able to get a movie made in Hollywood for several
years. A decent crowd showed up on Oscar night, though it was less
star-studded than usual—and at the end of the night, after Mutiny on the
Bounty had won Best Picture, Griffith got his tribute and received what
was reportedly the first standing ovation in Oscar history.
Oh, and there was one more first: Around this time, for reasons much
disputed and lost in the mists of time, everybody started referring to the
Academy Award of Merit statuette as the Oscar. W
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