Deadline Hollywood - Disruptors + Cannes Film Festival - 05/13/25

MAY 13, 2025 SPECIAL ISSUE

DEADLINE DISRUPTORS OUR 2025 CLASS OF MOVERS AND SHAKERS, INCLUDING...

BONO ANG

LEE VIDYA

BALAN JEAN-PASCAL

ZADI

CHIOMA

UDE ALEX

GIBNEY ...and many more

Man on a Mission

EIGHT IMPOSSIBLE ACTION MOVIES, ONLY ONE TOM CRUISE

Love at First Bite

STEVEN SPIELBERG’S SHARK TALE JAWS STILL THRILLS 50 YEARS ON

Sex on the Beach

FROM BIKINIS TO BALLGOWNS: THE BARE ESSENTIALS OF CANNES FASHION

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HOLLYWOOD’S MOST FEARLESS STAR MAKES HER LONG-AWAITED DIRECTORIAL DEBUT WITH ELEANOR THE GREAT

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C O-E DI T OR S -I N -C HI E F

Nellie Andreeva (Television) Mike Fleming Jr. (Film) P R I N T E DI T OR I AL EX ECUT IVE E D IT OR , A WA R D SLIN E Antonia Blyth D E SIGN D IR E C T OR Fah Sakharet FILM E D IT OR Damon Wise D OC UME N T A R Y E D IT OR Matthew Carey C R A FT S E D IT OR Ryan Fleming PR OD UC T ION E D IT OR David Morgan A WA R D S WR IT E R Destiny Jackson DE ADLI N E .C OM E DI T OR I AL AW AR D S COLUMNIST & C HIE F FILM C R IT IC Pete Hammond COLUMNIS T & INTER N ATI ON A L E D IT OR - A T - LA R GE Baz Bamigboye EX EC UT IVE MA N A GIN G E D IT OR Patrick Hipes ED ITOR IAL D IR ECTOR & BO X OFFIC E E D IT OR Anthony D’Alessandro EXE C UT IVE E D IT OR , T E LE VISION Peter White EXECUTIVE ED ITOR , LE GA L, LA B OR & POLIT IC S Dominic Patten EX ECUTIVE ED ITOR , IN TERN A T ION A L & ST R A T E GY Andreas Wiseman S E N IOR MA N A GIN G E D IT OR Denise Petski MA N A GIN G E D IT OR Erik Pedersen D E PUT Y MA N A GIN G E D IT OR Tom Tapp PHOT O E D IT OR Robert Lang E D IT OR - A T - LA R GE Peter Bart S ENIOR VICE P R ES ID ENT, C ON T E N T , IN T E R N A T ION A L Stewart Clarke IN TERN ATION A L FE A T UR E S E D IT OR Diana Lodderhose B USIN E SS E D IT OR Dade Hayes C O- B USIN E SS E D IT OR Jill Goldsmith POLIT IC A L E D IT OR Ted Johnson FILM E D IT OR Justin Kroll N EW YOR K & B R OA D WA Y E D IT OR Greg Evans AS S O C IA T E E D IT OR , T E LE VISION Rosy Cordero SE N IOR T E LE VISION WR IT E R Lynette Rice T E LE VISION R E POR T E R Katie Campione SE N IOR FILM R E POR T E R Matt Grobar IN TERN ATION A L IN VE ST IGA T ION S E D IT OR Jake Kanter I NTERN ATION AL BOX OFFICE ED ITOR & SE N IOR C ON T R IB UT OR Nancy Tartaglione S ENIOR INTER N ATION AL FILM C OR R E SPON D E N T Melanie Goodfellow INTER N ATION A L T E LE VISION C O- E D IT OR Max Goldbart IN TERN ATION A L T E LE VISION C O- E D IT OR Jesse Whittock IN T E R N A T ION A L R E POR T E R Zac Ntim CON T R IB UT IN G E D IT OR , A SIA Liz Shackleton A SIA R E POR T E R Sara Merican A SSOC IA T E E D IT OR Glenn Garner ST A FF WR IT E R Dessi Gomez N IGHT A N D WE E KE N D E D IT OR Armando Tinoco WE E KE N D E D IT OR Natalie Oganesyan

P R E S I DE N T

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Official Selection Competition ‘Renoir’ by Chie Hayakawa Spring Grants 2025

Congratulations to our supported filmmakers selected for the 78th Festival de Cannes. Un Certain Regard ‘Aisha Can’t Fly Away’ by Morad Mostafa Spring Grants 2023

La Quinzaine des Cinéastes ‘The President’s Cake’ by Hasan Hadi Fall Grants 2023

‘Promised Sky’ by Erige Sehiri Spring Grants 2024

La Semaine de la Critique

ACID

‘Sleepless City’ by Guillermo Galoe Fall Grants 2024

‘Life After Siham’ by Namir Abdel Messeeh Fall Grants 2024

‘L’mina’ by Randa Maroufi Spring Grants 2023

‘Once Upon a Time in Gaza’ by Tarzan & Arab Nasser Spring Grants 2025

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MAY 13, 2025

CALL SHEET

ON THE COVER Scarlett Johansson photographed exclusively for Deadline by Andrew Zaeh. Shot on location at Jack Studios, New York. Cover look by Dolce & Gabbana. Inside look: Dress by Jacquemus, shoes by Christen. Styled by Kate Young.

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On the eve of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the directors behind the blockbuster franchise look back at a spectacular journey. By Mike Fleming Jr.

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C HI A BE L L A JA M ES

Cannes Film Festival 2025

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Scarlett Johansson details the making of her multilayered directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, starring powerhouse nonagenarian June Squibb. By Antonia Blyth

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ONES TO WATCH Deadline celebrates its annual list of Cannes up-and-comers. 18 T HE PORN ULTIMATUM Pushing the limits of screen sex with Nagisa Ōshima's The Realm of the Senses. 22 SHOCK AND D'OR Who could have foreseen the Palme becoming a major milestone on the road to Oscar? 34 MAD MEN Michael Douglas looks back at the stormy shoot of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 40 RETURN, WE WILL... After years of setbacks, Brazil’s film and TV industry is making a dramatic comeback.

Dialogue

Snapshot

126 D EADLINE CONTENDERS TV The stars shine at Deadline's Contenders TV event.

74 BONO 82 LA FIRES 84 DEI SUSTAINABILITY 88 ADOLESCENCE 90 AI OVERVIEW 92 CHIOMA UDE 94 ETHOS 96 JEAN-PASCAL ZADI 98 MUBI 100 TONY GILROY 102 ALEX GIBNEY 104 ANG LEE 110 INDEPENDANT ANIMATION 112 MEDIAWAN 114 VIDYA BALAN 118 RANGE MEDIA PARTNERS 120 JAWS ANNIVERSARY

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ADOLESCENCE How a shocking story became a call to action. By Max Goldbart

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VIDYA BALAN The Bollywood star broke the mold for women. By Sunil Sadarangani

JAWS ANNIVERSARY Steven Soderbergh on his love for the fish tale. By Mike Fleming Jr.

J OS H T EL L E S F O R D EA DL I N E / BE N BL A C K BA L L / N ET F L I X/ C OU R TE S Y OF I DH Y A H / EV ER ET T C O L L EC T I ON

44 DAKOTA JOHNSON 48 JOSH O'CONNOR 54 HARRIS DICKINSON 58 CLAES BANG

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WHAT’S HOT, WHAT’S NOT, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN AT THE 78TH CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

PREMIERE Davika Hoorne

Akinola Davies Jr.

Mascha Schilinski

Deadline Anoints The Five Names Destined to Rock This Year’s Croisette

Antonia Desplat

Deadline’s annual group of Ones to Watch in Cannes is made up of actors and filmmakers who are all bringing something fresh to the festival. The distinction isn’t always reserved for brand new faces; rather, we’ve selected people who are branching out, or who find themselves in waters where they are liable to make waves. Cannes can be a place of reinvention, after all.

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G E TT Y I M A G ES

Laetitia Ky

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01 Antonia Desplat

P A S C A L L E S E GR ET A I N / G E TTY I M A G ES

The French actress reveals her memorable experience on the set of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme

Over coffee in Soho, Antonia Desplat is describing her journey to Wes Anderson’s set for The Phoenician Scheme—the espionage drama that marks his fourth picture to compete for the Palme d’Or. Desplat was working on French TV drama Made in France when the email arrived: “Wes wants to know if you want to come to Potsdam next week to play one of Benicio del Toro’s dead wives.” One year before being beckoned to Germany by Anderson, Desplat had played the female lead in Johnny Depp’s Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness, opening in June, which chronicles Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani’s rampage through pre-World War I Paris. Desplat plays Modigliani’s lover, the formidable writer and poet Beatrice Hastings. In response to that email request, Desplat says, “I literally just jumped on a plane, went to Potsdam, then next to Berlin, and had two days on set with these geniuses. I had dinner with Bill Murray, Benicio del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Mia Threapleton and I was just like, ‘What?’ I mean, it never gets normal because Wes is a genius. So, seeing him at work is incredible.” As Desplat points out, “Everybody wants to be in a Wes Anderson.” She herself is there as “a glorified extra”, she says. “I don’t even have a line, but I’m just happy to be there. And I think Charlotte Gainsbourg has one line.”

One of Anderson’s signatures is his precision. “Your costumes are magnificent,” Desplat says. “Milena Canonero, the costume designer, she makes every single costume by hand, even for one frame. It’s unbelievable; every little detail. And it’s wonderful just to be part of it.” Breathlessly, she reels off a few more of the cast: Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Michael Cera, Richard Ayoade, Riz Ahmed, Hope Davis, Mathieu Amalric, Jason Watkins and Alex Jennings. “There’s 30-plus ridiculously talented, famous actors on this cast, minimum. It’s nuts,” she says. Desplat did her scenes with Del Toro, Gainsbourg and Threapleton. Murray was hanging about too. “I was having breakfast, and I was done, and he came to my table. He was like, ‘Hi, good morning,’ and he just started taking my plate away! He crumbed my table and just walked off. And I was like, ‘What the fuck just happened?’” she says, laughing. She already knew some of Anderson’s crew, including Sanjay Sami, a grip who worked on the Apple TV+ drama Shantaram, for which she spent four months in India. She describes the experience on Anderson’s set as feeling “like a family”. “Family” is the key word here. Her father is the composer Alexandre Desplat, who

Cannes Film Festival 2025

won Oscars for Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and for Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Phoenician Scheme marks the sixth film Desplat pére has scored for the director. “I’ve known Wes since I’m a little girl, all the way back to The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Desplat says. “My dad used to have his studio in our house so the directors would come and listen.” Desplat doesn’t for a minute feel sorry for herself but, when pushed, will admit to having had “quite a hard time with being the daughter of someone,” but nowadays, “with the nepo baby thing,” she feels “I’ve actually come to peace with it, whereas when I was younger, particularly in France, there’s such a thing with the daughter of and son of. I think I came here [to the U.K.] to really be my own person.” Desplat studied acting and

contemporary theater at the East 15 school in Essex, and at The Drama Centre, where she startled passersby in a park while practicing writhing around like a lizard, then afterward went to her Shakespeare class caked in mud. “It’s so very much about the craft and where you’ve trained and not who you know, and by doing that I created my own thing,” she says. After Depp saw her audition tape for Modi, he was struck by her perfect British accent, and by the fact that she was smoking a “brown rollie”—a hand-rolled cigarette with liquorice paper—a passion both share. Depp met her on Zoom to tell her she had the part. Now she’s more comfortable with the idea of doing a film where her father is also working on the score. “That’s fine,” she says, “I think my work speaks for itself.” And then she’s off, riding her Lime electric bike to her next adventure. —BAZ BAMIGBOYE DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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PREMIERE Ones To Watch

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The Thai actress finds her energy as a haunted Hoover

“I’ve never been a vacuum cleaner before… it’s very out of my comfort zone,” says Thai model and actress Davika Hoorne on her role in Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s Cannes Critics’ Week title A Useful Ghost. She plays a woman who dies of dust pollution and then returns as a ghost in the form of a vacuum cleaner, determined to save her family from a similar fate. “I had to get to know the vacuum cleaner, my partner,” says Hoorne, adding she put herself in the hands of the director to pull off the performance. “His picture was very clear. There was a bit of improv but mostly it was what he wanted.” It is not the first time Hoorne—who is one of Thailand’s best-known actresses and influencers with strong followings on Instagram and TikTok—has played a ghost. Having forged a successful career as a model, she broke through as an actress in 2013 Thai folklore-inspired horror comedy Pee Mak, playing a woman called Nak, who dies while her husband is away at war but remains in their village to welcome him back. Pee Mak remains Thailand’s all-time second highest grossing feature. Hoorne’s performance won her the epithet of ‘Thailand’s most beautiful ghost’ and she has since starred in a string of mainstream shows and 14

movies, including My Ambulance, Heart Attack, Astrophile and The Empress of Ayodhaya. Lead produced by Cattleya Paosrijareon and Soros Sukhum at Bangkok-based 185 Films, the credits of which also include Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria and Kristen Tan’s Pop Aye, A Useful Ghost marks quite a departure for Hoorne. “I’m incredibly thankful for this opportunity, but I admit it’s crazy that I accepted it. It’s not something you usually see in Thailand,” she says. “I normally do stories that are predictable, that make money, but this one is fulfilling my actress energy. The team working on it is incredible and so many people were rooting for it to get made. The first time I read the script, I said yes right away. I felt the movie had the potential to go far, and even if it doesn’t, I’m still very proud of this project.” As well as introducing Hoorne to audiences outside of Asia, traveling to Cannes with A Useful Ghost also fulfils a long-held ambition for the actress, who says she has turned down offers to walk the festival’s red carpet as a model in the past. “A lot of people go there for the fame, for the fashion, but I told myself that I’m not going to walk the red carpet without a movie. I’ve been waiting for 10 years, and now this is like a dream come true.” —MELANIE GOODFELLOW

The German troublemaker lands a competition slot with her second feature

“My way into directing was a bit unusual,” says Mascha Schilinski. “It’s not like someone gave me a camera, and I always knew I wanted to be a director, and then it just went from there. In my teenage years, I was something of a troublemaker, and I didn’t integrate terribly well.” Schilinski went on to become something of a late bloomer, working as an agent for young actors, writing scripts for TV soaps, and finally making her feature debut with the 2017 festival hit Dark Blue Girl. With her second film Sound of Falling, Schilinski is not only bringing her first film to the Cannes competition, she’s coming to the festival for the very first time ever. The story is fictional, she says, but has its roots in reality. “My co-writer Louise Peter and I spent a summer in the Altmark, near the Elbe river,” she explains. “We happened upon a farm, and it seemed like time had stood still there. The house had been empty for 50 years, and by chance, we found a snapshot from 1920 in which three women, kind of unusually for the time, were looking straight at the camera. We were standing right where the camera would have stood, and we saw these women looking at us. So, we asked ourselves, ‘What happened here?’ ‘What were their stories?’” That, she says, “got us thinking about the idea of synchronicity of time,” resulting in an ambitious project that took five years to make. “In essence, it’s about four girls over the course of the century on a farm in Northern Germany and throughout the process of the film, their lives begin to mirror one another.” Schilinski’s film was snapped up early by the festival and created a lot of buzz under its original title: The Doctor Says I’ll Be Alright, But I’m Feelin’ Blue. “We really loved our working title, I have to say. We really, really would’ve liked to have kept it going under that title. And frankly, when Thierry Frémaux announced the title at the press conference and asked, ‘Mascha, why did you change that beautiful title?’ I felt a little stitch in my heart. It was emotional. But at the same time it was also clear that the title was just too complex and too long, and when we tried that out with friends, no one could ever remember it.” Hence the change to Sound of Falling. “It expresses something very important about the film,” she smiles, “but perhaps in a more concise way.” —DAMON WISE

V I C TO R BO Y KO / G ET T Y I M A G ES / FA BI A N GA M P E R

02 Davika Hoorne

Mascha Schilinski

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PREMIERE Ones To Watch

The Ivorian artist and actress sets her sights on the super hero world Having found fame in international art circles for her natural hair sculptures championing African culture, Black beauty and women’s rights, Laetitia Ky has now set her sights on building a cinema career. “I’ve always had a fascination for super heroes,” says the globe-trotting Ivorian artist and activist on a Zoom call from Monaco, where she is currently midway through a residency at the principality’s Quai Art Studios. “I’ve watched nearly all the Marvel and DC Comic movies and read all the comics,” she continues, explaining that it is the non-reality of the super hero worlds that fuels her passion.

The Marvel and DC Comic protagonists also chime with the message of empowerment implicit in Ky’s elaborate hair-based works— depicting everything from a vacuum cleaner to a butterfly. Ky is in Cannes as one of three actresses in Tunisian-French director Erige Sehiri’s Un Certain Regard title Promised Sky. The migrant drama, about three Ivorian women living together in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, is Sehri’s second fiction feature after 2022 Directors’ Fortnight selection Under the Fig Trees. Sehiri contacted Ky on Instagram, where she has half a million followers, after reading about her in the French edition of Elle magazine, as

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Akinola Davies Jr. For his highly personal feature debut, the filmmaker teamed with his brother to tell a Nigerian family story Akinola Davies Jr. initially declined BBC Film head Eva Yates’ suggestion that he make a feature film. Instead, he shot the 18-minute Lizard, which won the 2021 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Grand Jury Prize. However, Yates got her wish eventually, and the result is My Father’s Shadow—Davies’ feature directorial debut, which is premiering at Cannes in Un Certain Regard. Davies co-wrote with 16

his brother Wale Davies, who came up with the story before they collaborated on Lizard. Shot in Lagos, Nigeria, it stars stage and screen actor Sopé Dìrísù as a dad who takes his two young sons into the bustling metropolis as unrest erupts over the country’s controversial June 12th, 1993 presidential election. Davies started out as a runner, then self-financed music videos for others, before attending the New York Film

Academy and shooting commercials and music videos. He realized that if he were to make a film it would be about something that has “a sense of urgency” for him. He read the My Father’s Shadow script his brother had sent him and was moved to tears. “I’d never really conceived of the idea of spending a day with my father… for someone I am named after and never got to know.” Davies was 20 months old when his father died.

In working on the script together—with Davies in London and his older brother in Lagos, “It took a while for us to process a lot of our intentions of what we’re trying to do,” says Davies, “because obviously it’s kind of semi-biographical, but also not. So, it’s really trying to decide, where are we borrowing from?” They asked, what was real, and what was fiction? ”We were leaning on memory,” Davies says. “We also did an extensive amount of research, more so about the politics of the time. We were really young during the events of 1993.” His brother Wale notes that the election serves as more than a backdrop. “It was speaking to a lot of unresolved questions around fatherhood

and also nationhood,” he says, adding that the film reflects “the actual Lagos I’ve seen just looking outside my window. Every day is a film to me.” Nodding, Davies notes, “There’s really good storytelling in Nigeria. There’s a global sense of how we’re trying to position African stories.”

My Father’s Shadow is presented by BBC Film and the BFI in association with the Match Factory, Fremantle, Electric Theatre Collective and MUBI. It is also an Element Pictures production and is in association with Crybaby and Fatherland Productions. —BAZ BAMIGBOYE

A N D R EA S R EN T Z / G E TTY I M A G ES / S A L I M U DA W I

04 Laetitia Ky

she was on the verge of traveling to the Ivorian capital of Abidjan to scout for actors. Ky’s resulting role as a directionless Ivorian student who finds refuge in the home of a former journalist turned evangelist pastor, does not play heavily on her hair. “It was important for me that if I’m going to do cinema, it’s not only so that productions can use my hair again and again. I want to be valued as an actress as much as the other actresses on the set,” she says. Ky was previously seen on the big screen in Giacomo Abbruzzese’s 2023 drama Disco Boy and also played the queen in Philippe Lacôte’s 2020 fantasy Night of the Kings. Her next cinema goal is to secure an English-language speaking role, while she is also developing a screenplay about a contemporary female African super hero based on Ivory Coast folklore. “I spent a few months researching it, going to certain places in the interior of the country, to talk to village chiefs who have a strong knowledge of the culture. There are now still 60 ethnic groups in Ivory Coast, each with their own customs and beliefs. So I’ve mixed modern elements with what I heard.” —MELANIE GOODFELLOW

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PREMIERE Sex on the Beach Cannes Film Festival 2025

From left: Brigitte Bardot on the Croisette; Bardot on the beach.

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Sex on the Beach

On the sand and on the screen, Cannes is the place where sex and cinema go hand in hand BY DAMON WISE

Although the bikini was an immediate postwar invention—named after the nuclear testing that took place on Bikini Atoll, a coral island in the Pacific Ocean—it had taken its time to catch on. In Hollywood, naked navels were a no-no and specifically outlawed by the censorious Hays Code that policed the studios until 1968. Fashion guru Diana Vreeland first championed them in a 1947 edition of Harper’s Bazaar. “Bikinis were the biggest thing since the atom bomb,” she said later. “America wasn’t ready for it yet but I’m a reporter, I know news when I see it.” Six years later, B.B. proved her right. At that time, Bardot was

—understandably, as a young woman—nonplussed by the reaction. She claimed very innocently later that she’d been picked “at random, for want of anyone better,” and, at a stretch, it’s perhaps true, but only insofar as her bikini was rather demure, especially by modern standards. Nevertheless, a door had been opened; almost immediately, the concept of sex was now in the festival’s DNA, if not on its screens. The idea of actual sex, however, would, like the bikini, take longer to bed in. Fast forward 60 years, and Cannes is, by now, well known for how far it is prepared to go. The 2006 post-premiere beachside

party after John Cameron Mitchell’s XXX-rated polysexual comedy Shortbus engaged the press much more than the film’s graphic scenes of intimacy. Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 graphic lesbian love story Blue Is the Warmest Color confounded cynics by winning over a jury headed by, of all people, Steven Spielberg. And the festival regularly welcomes Gaspar Noé, whose 3D film Love literally ejaculated all over a rapturous midnight audience in 2015. Last year, the Palme d’Or went to Sean Baker’s Anora, the story of a New York lap-dancer. One film, however, still stands out, nearly half a century later.

E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N / W A T F O R D/ M IR RO R P I X V I A G ET T Y I M A G ES

For more than 70 years, the Cannes Film Festival has been synonymous with sex, and we can credit an 18-year-old Brigitte Bardot for bringing them together. Bizarrely, though, this had nothing to do with movies. Despite her global fame as a sex symbol, the actress, now 90, has only ever had one contemporary film accepted by the festival. Even then, it was as part of an ensemble, in a section of a three-part 1968 portmanteau called Spirits of the Dead, directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. All three stories were based on stories by Edgar Allen Poe, and Bardot appeared in Malle’s section, William Wilson, the macabre story of a man (Alain Delon) haunted, and taunted, by his double. It never screened, though. As part of a countrywide protest— ironically, brought to boiling point in Cannes by Malle himself—the whole event was cancelled. But, by then, Bardot had already established her place in Cannes history; just like Marilyn Monroe— chosen for the poster of the festival’s 2012 edition without ever having been to France, let alone the south of it—she represented a moment in time. In Bardot’s case, it was the emergence from the doldrums of the Second World War, posing on the beach in 1953 to promote her starring role in the otherwise inauspicious Manina, the Girl in the Bikini. The film was quickly forgotten but the beachwear was not. DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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Below: Lindsay Beamish and Adam Hardman in Shortbus; from left, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color; Karl Glusman and Aomi Muyock in Love..

TH I N K F I L M / I F C F I L M S / A L C HE M Y / E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N

Directed by Japan’s Nagisa Ōshima, the fifty-something star of the country’s new wave, In the Realm of the Senses debuted outside the official selection, in Directors’ Fortnight, in 1976, a year after Chantal Akerman’s now-acclaimed Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles premiered there. The two films might seem worlds apart, but they are very much connected. Both depict women involved in sex work and both result in equally disturbing ends— but for very different reasons. The seed of the film was sown at the Venice Film Festival, where Ōshima premiered his film Dear Summer Sister in 1972. Though shot in an untypically breezy style, this story of a young girl from Tokyo going to meet her half-brother in Okinawa packed a surprisingly political punch, especially in the way it brought up the still-raw issues of the way Japan seemingly abandoned the latter territory in 1945. One admirer in particular was French producer Anatole Dauman, a staunch defender of the avant garde in his homeland, having worked with the likes of Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson. “Dauman suggested that we collaborate on new film, an idea I naturally found very exciting, although I had no idea what kind of film he had in mind,” said Ōshima, who died in 2013. “When I asked, he said, ‘Let’s make a porno flick!’ This surprised me at first, but when I stopped to think, I realized it could be a very good idea to take a shot at something like that.” The timing of such talk was not at all coincidental. In the States, a few months earlier, Deep Throat had made a star of Linda Lovelace and created a phenomenon soon to be known as “porno chic”.

Writing about the film in the New York Times in 1973, Ralph Blumenthal said, “It has drawn an average of 5,000 people weekly to the New Mature World Theater on West 49th Street here, including celebrities, diplomats, critics, businessmen, women alone and dating couples, few of whom, it might be presumed, would previously have gone to see a film of sexual intercourse, fellatio and cunnilingus.” Author Truman Capote, he reported, caught it after dinner one night with a bunch of friends, adding that he went because “Mike Nichols told me I just had to see it.” Meanwhile, something similar was happening in Ōshima’s homeland. Just as America’s sex film industry had started out with tame but boundary-pushing nudity, Japan had its own equivalent, starting with the “pink films” of the ’60s and moving into the “roman porno” films of the early ’70s. There was, however, one vital difference: Japan was perfectly happy to stay in the world of softcore and had no plans to take things further. Ōshima came up with two ideas, the first being a short story called What I Found Under the Papering in the Little Room by Nagai Kafu. Dauman nixed it, but, as you’ll see, its influence carried over. The author, noted Taipei Times writer Bradley Winterton in 2008, “is a fascinating figure. Originally an editor of literary magazines specializing in the newly fashionable French naturalism, [Kafu] abandoned that work in order to embark on a life investigating Tokyo’s erotic underworld. This was partly done, no doubt, for its own sake, but it was also undertaken in a spirit of devotion to the ethos of the old, pre-modern Japan, the traditions of which Kafu felt were in part preserved in the

teahouses and theaters around which the geishas and other women of the night circulated.” The second suggestion was the one that captured Dauman’s attention. It was the true story of Sada Abe, a Tokyo geisha who, in May of 1936, became the most wanted woman in the country. Having fallen into a torrid relationship

with her former boss, Kichizō Ishida, Abe had become obsessed with him—and he with her. Finally, things became so intense that Ishida developed a fascination for erotic asphyxiation, which is how Abe came to strangle him to death in a love hotel one night. Faced with her lover’s lifeless body, Abe cut off his genitals with a kitchen DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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PREMIERE Sex on the Beach

Below left: Meika Seri and Eiko Matsuda in In the Realm of the Senses; writer/director Nagisa Ōshima on the set of In the Realm of the Senses in 1976. Bottom: Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.

Sada Abe’s story might seem like a gift from the gods, but Ōshima was stymied as to how he would do it. For three whole years, until summer 1975, when the French authorities removed all restrictions on the making of pornography. “The moment I heard that,” he said, “I thought, ‘Alright!’ Since our film was planned as a coproduction between France and Japan, if we called it a French film, we would have perfect freedom to show whatever we wanted. In that case, why not make something hardcore? What had once seemed so 20

“The thing I regret the most about this is that I have come to be misunderstood as some kind of sexual pervert.” SADA ABE

difficult now seemed terribly easy: I could shoot the film in Japan and then have it developed and edited in France. Even the final cut could be done there.” The more obvious problem, however, was finding two leads that would be prepared to have sex on camera. Ōshima was astonished when his own wife, Akiko Koyama, expressed an interest. “I was floored by this,” he said later, “but she later explained that she had only said it to help the process— that if word got out that she was willing, then other actors would know it was a good role.” Eiko Matsuda, who plays Sada Abe, was the first actor to audition for the part. “She had delicate skin, to be sure,” said Ōshima,” but it was the delicacy of her heart,

something one could see right off the bat, that made me want her in this role.” Kichizō, however, was more problematic. Said Ōshima, “It shocked me how hung up men are about the size of their penis. It might have come across as cute if they had said, ‘I’m a bit on the small side,’ and stopped there. But, no, they had to add that they were ‘bigger than most’ when they were ‘in action’, a lame excuse if there ever was one. The experience made me feel that men are really pitiful creatures who get hung up on the most trivial things. Later I realized that the confident ones were the few who said, ‘I’m just average.’” The actor he cast was Tatsuya Fuji, then in his mid-thirties and a familiar face in Nikkatsu’s pulpy Stray Cat Rock series. He, too, was

slow to commit. “My initial reaction was, ‘Page after page of just sex scenes?! Whoa… Has Nagisa Ōshima lost his mind?’ I bingeread the whole thing, and then, experiencing a somewhat mysterious emotion that I couldn’t pin down, read it through about twice, more at a furious pace, after which I felt a jolt as if I had been struck on the head. What had become distinctly visible beyond the many sex scenes was the story of one woman and one man’s life-staking love. It was a screenplay that depicted irrepressible human pathos.” The set, naturally, was closed. “Outsiders were strictly banned,” said Ōshima. “We were extremely worried that, given our film’s unprecedented nature, the police might come barging into the Daiei Kyoto Studio at any time.” And with good reason; the scenes depicted in the film still pack a punch in 2025, and the like won’t be seen again in a hurry. The result, though, is a mesmerizing study of what we now call toxic codependency, and, once seen, it’s impossible to think how Sada Abe’s story could ever be realistically told without the intensity of the film’s sex scenes (the film’s original title was said to translate as Bullfight of Love, which would have given fair warning). Inevitably, the film was immediately banned in Japan, but a book containing the film’s script and a dozen stills—in an echo of the case made in Italy about Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris— was tried for obscenity. Ōshima

E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N

knife, wrapped them inside a magazine cover, and vanished in the early hours. In the two or three days that she was deemed to be at large, Abe, literally, caused panic wherever a lookalike was spotted. But after she was arrested, handing over Kichizō’s missing items as proof, a very different picture began to emerge. Abe gave herself up to police and admitted that she was planning to commit suicide, all the while holding onto her lover’s penis. Why did she take it? “Because I couldn't take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories.” At trial, Abe was willing to accept the death penalty. “The thing I regret most about this incident,” she said, “is that I have come to be misunderstood as some kind of sexual pervert… There had never been a man in my life like Ishida. There were men I liked, and with whom I slept without accepting money, but none made me feel the way I did toward him.” This reframing of the murder as a crime of passion proved surprisingly successful, especially with the public’s opinion. Abe was out within five years. Indeed, anticipating America’s Lorena Bobbit many decades later, she was now a celebrity.

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CROISETTIQUETTE

ARE YOU RED-CARPET READY?

C I N DY O R D/ A N DR E A S R EN TZ / G E TT Y I M A G E S

Since it had a major redesign in 1984, when it took inspiration from the Academy Awards in Hollywood, the Cannes film festival has been synonymous with its famous red carpet, a 60-meter stretch of fabric that covers the 24 steps leading up to the Palais. Originally changed three times a day and nowadays just the more eco-friendly once, the carpet is actually two slightly different shades of red: Rosso in the center and Teatro at the sides. Fiercely patrolled by French security guards, the red carpet is a micro-state within a city, complete with its own set of rules and regulations.

requested that the high court explain their definition of obscenity, but no reply was forthcoming, and the charges were dropped. What’s more surprising is the difference between real life and history. After leaving prison, Sada Abe parlayed her notoriety [called “Sada mania”] into a kind of cabaret act, descending from a spiral staircase and glaring at men who playfully yelled, “Hide the knives!” behind her back. Despite her infamy, nothing is known about her after 1970, and even rumors that Ōshima tracked her down to a Kansai nunnery are unconfirmed. Time was not so kind, however, to the woman who played her; while Fuji went on to make many more films, returning to Cannes twice and winning Best Actor at the 2023 San Sebastian Film Festival for his performance in Kei Chika-ura’s dementia drama Great Absence, his equally daring screen partner, also a professional, only made six more films before retiring from the screen in 1982, after receiving only offers for actual porn films and nude dancing. As a headline for a piece by writer Erika X Eisen, put it, “Matsuda Eiko’s career illustrates the erasure that occurs when women’s creative work is falsely reduced to autobiography.” The actress, however, bore no malice, moving to Europe until her death from a brain tumor in 2011, aged 58. “Many women who’ve done less have had it worse,” she said. ★

PHOTOGRAPHY Cannes Do: Put your phone away. Cannes Don’t: Take a selfie on the steps. Festival director Thierry Frémaux first waged war on the selfie in 2015, before instituting an outright ban in 2018, referring to the practice as “touristy”, “ridiculous” and “vulgar”. He specifically cited the logjam effect that it created when 2,300 people were trying to take their seats. “At the top of the red carpet,” he said, “the triviality and slowdown of flow provoked by the disorder of selfies ruins the quality of the red carpet, and thus the festival entirely.” Naturally, this rule tends not to apply to celebrities.

a dressy top with black trousers [or] a black dress.” There are no accounts of female celebrities being turned away, even in 1988 when Italian porn star Ilona Staller, A.K.A. La Cicciolina, arrived almost naked, holding a plush toy and wearing strips of material that left her breasts exposed ( French newspaper Télé Star witheringly described it as a “dress” in inverted commas). French male DJ Kiddy Smile struck a successful blow for sartorial equality in 2019, walking the red carpet in a silver glitter jump suit and a bright orange floral gown the next. “There’s something very old school about Cannes,” he said. “I’m a cis man but if you’re gender-fluid or nonbinary, there is no space for you to exist within this protocol.”

MENSWEAR Cannes Do: Wear a tux. Cannes Don’t: Rock up in smart casual. In Cannes, there is a strict dress code for men. As the festival says on its website, “Out of consideration for the artists and film crews who have come to preview the culmination of their long work, the festival asks you to come in a dinner jacket with bow tie or in evening dress.” This applies to everyone, as American novelist Henry Miller found in 1960 when the 68-year-old turned up in his tweeds and was turned away from opening night, despite being a member of the jury. Pablo Picasso knew the score when he gained admission to a screening of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear in 1953. His outfit was made of corduroy, and he had a sheepskin jacket on top of it, but it was a tux. He was also wearing a bow tie, part of the fledgling dress code that was first established in 1949. To give attendees time to change, not every major screening in those days required a tie, causing producers to complain if their films weren’t deemed worthy. Certain journalists, meanwhile, called it “snobisme”, much as they still do today.

FOOTWEAR Cannes Do: Use common sense. Cannes Don’t: Come straight from the beach. Cannes being a classy joint, has a simple policy for men: no trainers. But for women, the issue of footwear lay dormant for many years until it exploded in 2015—appropriately enough, at a screening of Todd Haynes’ feminist drama Carol. That night, a number of women were refused entry on the grounds that they were wearing flat shoes. The pushback caused the festival to rethink the issue going forward, and at the 70th edition in 2017 the festival made fun of itself by issuing a promotional badge with the words: “My dream: to walk the red carpet in flip-flops” (this actually happened in 2023, when Jennifer Lawrence slipped out of her designer shoes for a photo opp, moments before the premiere of Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall). Today, the festival insists that the “no flats” protocol came from a rogue doorman acting alone, and the official line is simply that “elegant shoes, with or without heels, are required.”

WOMENSWEAR Cannes Do: Whatever you want (sort of). Cannes has a reputation for being a festival that is much tougher on men than it is on women, insisting that male photographers wear black tie for the red carpet, without even going into the auditorium. The festival is much more vague on sartorial matters for women, saying, “You can wear a cocktail dress,

ACCESSORIES Cannes Do: Think Chanel, Gucci, Versace or Louis Vuitton. Cannes Don’t: Think North Face. Although guests of all persuasions may well be tempted to smuggle a pair of comfy shoes or a sweater into the cinema, attendees are warned to avoid bringing “rucksacks, totebags or large bags.” –DAMON WISE

From left: Gala goers queue on the red carpet; Elle Fanning ascends the Palais steps.

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PREMIERE Cannes Awards

NEON Dreams

CEO Tom Quinn explains how the indie production and distribution company rode the Cannes wave to disrupt the Oscar race BY PETE HAMMOND

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Splitsville

is just not happenstance. The Cannes Film Festival head is certainly aware of the shifting sands, as he pointed out while announcing this year’s films, even though he stated that a year ago he would not be able to imagine the Oscar success of Cannes debuts like Anora, Emilia Pérez, The Substance and, for that matter, a whopping 31 nominations overall for Cannes titles. “If you look at the last seven, eight years, Cannes was great. I mean Cannes and the films of Cannes were great and awarded everywhere,” Frémaux said. “For the films I have just announced this morning, I really don’t know, but what I’m really happy about is the link between Cannes in May and the Academy Awards in March. You can arrive in Cannes in May and be still alive in March almost one year later.” It is definitely something Tom Quinn

understands well and that is one reason why NEON will be back on the Croisette this year with no less than four selections in the official lineups: Orwell, Splitsville, Sentimental Value and Alpha. The fact is, Quinn never had a master plan, and even going back to Parasite, says it never crossed his mind after seeing it in the late-night slot, following Quentin Tarantino's much more hyped and anticipated studio juggernaut Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood (which went on to earn 10 nominations itself) that it would go on to win both the Palme and Best Picture. Impossible, right? “There wasn’t a direct intention behind it,” Quinn says. “But what I will tell you, what has always been large in my head, about Cannes, and it’s my favorite festival, absolutely, by far. Granted, the Riviera certainly helps. The Lumiere helps. Incredible programming team,

Tom Quinn

From left: Parasite; Triangle of Sadness.

N E O N / A R T UR O HO L M ES / G E TT Y IM A G ES

There was time when studios thought premiering a film in Cannes in May could turn out to be a major hindrance to that movie’s Oscar chances nine months later. It was a logical assumption. Voters have short memories, and also if the film doesn’t make a splash on the Croisette, it could be all over for its awards dreams. The Fall Festival trifecta of Venice/Telluride/Toronto became much ‘safer’ (financially and otherwise), and a more logical bet to launch an Oscar campaign, requiring only six months post-launch to keep the contender alive, rather than nine. After all, the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Picture had matched only once since Marty won the first Palme in 1955. That all changed in 2019, when Palme d’Or winner, South Korea’s Parasite, upset conventional thinking and went on to also triumph big time at the Oscars, ultimately taking the top prize there. It was the first time a foreign language picture won the top Oscar and the top international film, and it has turned out to be a game-changer led by NEON founder and CEO Tom Quinn. Now, NEON has distributed in U.S. the past five—count ‘em, five—Palme d’Or winners in a row, beginning with Parasite, then Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, and Anora. The latter became the second NEON film to win both the Palme and the Best Picture Oscar. Additionally, both Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall went on to receive Best Picture Oscar nominations, among other categories. Quite a track record and proof positive that NEON has been instrumental in smashing the Cannes curse for Oscar (if it ever existed). Quinn gives Thierry Frémaux much of the credit for selecting the lineups and saying it DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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PREMIERE Cannes Awards

Titane

Sentimental Value

Orwell

but the films that have always seemed large for me were Wild at Heart, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Apocalypse Now. I always had this very romanticized, nostalgic vision of what it meant for these huge American juggernauts. But that was the place that you got validated. The birthplace of cinema—France—and you know, to this day, France for me represents, I think, the safest harbor for cinema.” With all NEON’s success at Cannes, and in particular winning the Palme d’Or, the company later tests each of their films in the San Fernando Valley, and Quinn says that increasingly the fact they won the Palme is the number one driver of audience attendance at those previews. “And you have to remember that a lot of voters, while it may only be sending jury members that sit on that committee in Cannes, they’re all, if not the vast majority, also 24

Academy voters. So, I think it makes perfect sense, combined with having a really nice lead time, to be able to build a significant campaign, to focus on the theatrical window, and position your film properly. So, each of these films have been released, essentially, the same release date in October. You know, I’m happy to share our play book because it’s so obvious.” In the case of Anora, he says they had not even tested the film before Cannes and had only seen it in early cuts. “Winning the Palme d’Or, having been there four times previous, you know, we went in to do the work, the work that we do. We go and test the movie, we obviously combine that with where we are critically, and then, we do an assessment of where the prognosticators sit, you know, the 80-plus prognosticators, where do they sit across the Oscar race?” he says. ”And so, all of

those things collectively, in any one silo, may not mean a lot. But if you take that dataset, and you compare it to four other movies, three of which have already been Best Picture nominees, one of which had won, you have a really good concept of where you’re going. We knew back in July that this had a really strong path towards securing six Oscar nominations… And I have to say it was pretty stressful. You know, be careful what you wish for, and to hold steadfast, and be confident. It’s a marathon. We went through the ebbs and flows of the campaign but always believed that we could get where we got to. So, getting these six Oscar nominations was a celebration, but also a relief that we weren’t crazy back in July.” Quinn also credits Cannes premieres and wins in other categories for eventual success getting to the Oscars such as the Best Actor win in Cannes for Perfect Days which went on to be nominated for the International Film Oscar, or the exposure for a sleeper, Robot Dreams, which cashed in goodwill at Cannes for a surprise Best Animated Feature nomination. He compared it to Flow which was a hit in Cannes and went on to win for Animated Feature for indie sideshow Janus against huge well-oiled competition from DreamWorks, Disney/Pixar and Netflix. Flow was also up for Best International Feature from first-timer Latvia. Does Quinn think the increased international voting bloc in the Academy is making a difference now and making it easier for Cannes to become such a big player? “I think it’s definitely a swing vote, but I would say it still only represents less than 25% of over 9,000 voters,” he says. “The Academy overall has increased quite rapidly in size, but not just new international voters, but also younger voters. Regardless of age, newer voters, I think, are more energized and participate more, and watch more, and vote first. I would say that new membership, younger membership, overlaps I think pretty extensively with international membership, and it’s having a big decisive impact on where these awards are going, because they watch the movies, because they are voting.” At any rate, there is no doubt we will be seeing a lot of Quinn and his NEON team all over Cannes, whether promoting the films they are bringing or looking to find the next Parasite and Anora that just might travel all the way from the Grand Lumière in the South of France to the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. ★

K A S P E R T U XE N / N E O N / EV E R ET T C O L L EC TI ON

Thierry Frémaux

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PREMIERE In Depth

Mission: Accomplished As the final installment of Mission: Impossible premieres at Cannes, all five directors of the franchise reflect on the making of an American James Bond BY MIKE FLEMING JR.

After seven movies, nearly 30 years and more than $4 billion in global grosses, Tom Cruise will retire his Ethan Hunt character with the eighth climactic installment, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. And with a Cannes premiere, the franchise’s farewell is set for plenty of fanfare—in contrast to the way its seventh movie, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, was stunted by the almost simultaneous ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon two years ago.

Here, the five directors who helmed the eight Mission: Impossible films look back at their part in the evolution of Ethan Hunt into America’s answer to James Bond. They recall shooting such missions impossible as breaking into the CIA and Kremlin headquarters, running alongside the exterior of the world’s tallest building in Dubai, hanging off the side of a cargo jet, and motorcycle sequences executed by Cruise that would have most actors calling for a stuntman, or their agent.

Tom Cruise with director Christopher McQuarrie on the set of Mission: Impossible - Fallout.

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Brian De Palma

P A RA M OU N T P I C TU R ES / S KY D A N C E P R OD U C TI O N S / M U RR A Y C L OS E

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Mission’s progression from spy craft to death-defying action with Cruise at the center of every stunt started almost by accident. Brian De Palma says that after watching the disappointing returns of Carlito’s Way, he needed a hit, and when Sydney Pollack pulled out of Mission to direct a Sabrina remake, superagent Mike Ovitz pounced. De Palma had never watched the original television series, but he came recommended to Cruise by Steven Spielberg, and so, the match was made. And De Palma had a radical plotline: “The first problem was that Tom wanted Mission: Impossible to be about five guys doing impossible tasks. First thing I said was, ‘We got to kill all the other guys so we can start with Tom as the leader of a new group.’” Paramount tried to hire the original TV actors, but Peter Graves, the incorruptible lead operative Jim Phelps in the show, reacted angrily upon learning he would become a turncoat in the movie. “I had nothing to do with that,” De Palma says. “Who knows what [co-producers] Paula Wagner and Tom were doing? Feeling out different actors for those parts? I had no knowledge of the original series, never saw an episode. All I knew was there were four or five guys with different specialties that did something on each mission. No characters, just technicians.” De Palma had other problems. He’d cracked the script after convincing his Carlito’s Way scribe David Koepp to write it with him. “I got Tom finally to commit to the script David had written, and then Paula called me the next day and said, ‘We’ve gotten a go from Paramount, but we want to fire David and hire Bob Towne.’ Paula and Tom thought he was going to bring something more

to the script, but that became a big problem.” Luckily, De Palma kept the fired Koepp close at hand. “I had two screenwriters in different hotel rooms in London while I was building sets, each working on their script. David used some of Towne’s ideas in the script he rewrote, and that became the movie.” As for Cruise and those notorious stunts, De Palma recalls exactly when his star’s fuse got lit. A scene in which Hunt flees after exploding a giant fish tank in a restaurant didn’t look right with the stuntman. “I said to Tom, ‘You’ve got to do this to make it really work.’ I remember when we were just about to shoot it, he came over to me. There was going to be so much water coming out, and glass, and this was really scary. He walked over and said, ‘I’m just an actor.’ I said, ‘Tom, you gotta try.’ And he did it. I think he got into doing all the stunts himself when he realized he could probably do it better than a stuntman.” By the end, Cruise executed the signature spider web scene where he drops into a vault full of alarm sensors in the CIA’s headquarters, strung from a wire. “He worked out a way to be still when he was so close to the floor, and when we lowered him, he’d flip over, but he figured out that by putting some coins in his shoes to balance his

“I think he got into doing all the stunts himself when he realized he could probably do it better than a stuntman.” BRIAN DE PALMA

body when held on the rig, he didn’t flip. It was his genius that finally made it work. And then he put his body in quite dangerous situations with the train stunt.” That “train stunt” is the climax where a speeding train, with Cruise hanging off the side, is chased into The Channel Tunnel by a helicopter. “The wind is blowing by him, at god knows how many miles an hour. You had to tie people down or they’d fly off the set. Then Tom does this flip, and we didn’t get it the first time. So, he did it again.” De Palma showed a rough cut to his friend George Lucas. “I was mixing at the Skywalker Ranch, and showed it to George,” he says. “We had a very complicated

From top: Cruise with director Brian De Palma; Cruise in Mission: Impossible.

setup scene with Jim Phelps [Jon Voight], having to do with him going to Chicago and setting something up at the hotel. George says, ‘Where’s the scene where they’re all sitting at the kitchen table and Phelps is telling everybody what they’re supposed to do?’” So, De Palma brought back the cast. “That was a great advantage when our group of directors would look at each other’s movies and say, ‘Wait, you’ve forgotten something.’ Our group was George, Steven [Spielberg], Marty [Scorsese] and myself, and sometimes Francis [Coppola]. I wish that tradition was carried on.” A romantic angle between Hunt and Phelps’ wife (Emmanuelle Béart) was also scrapped. “This plot was complicated enough,” De Palma says. De Palma and Towne had a harsh disagreement over the climax. The director favored the train action scene, while Towne wanted a character-based conclusion between Hunt and Phelps, inside the train. “We got into a knock-down dragout argument in front of Tom that ended when I said, ‘You want to play this scene out in the boxcar? Fine. I think it stinks.’ Tom called me up and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and I think we should do DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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the helicopter chase.’ Tom ultimately made the decision, and he’s a very smart producer. He went with what he thought would be more effective, and fortunately, it was the idea I had come up with.” The movie grossed $457 million worldwide and De Palma was invited back for the sequel, but he could see it would scale more toward action, and outside of The French Connection, he’s never seen a car chase he admires. “When Tom asked me to direct the second one, I said, ‘A re you kidding? Who wants to do another one of these things again?’ I accomplished what I wanted, which was to make the biggest hit I ever had. And I have no belief you should spend your time making sequels.”

John Woo

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 (2000)

The first Mission may have been strong on spy craft sleight-ofhand, but it was light on gunplay. But that changed when Cruise became fascinated by Hong Kong directing legend John Woo, whose balletic, exceptionally violent films like The Killer (1989) were widely emulated in Hollywood. While a gentle soul—Woo quietly endured the indignity of Jean-Claude Van Damme locking him out of the edit room and making his own cut

of his first Hollywood film Hard Target—the filmmaker had found a way to turn a preposterous premise into the action hit Face/Off with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. Cruise loved that film and visited Woo in Brazil where the filmmaker was making a commercial. Woo came away smitten and with a clear picture of what he wanted to do with Cruise’s signature Mission character. “Tom had said he wanted each film to have a different style,” Woo says. “I decided to really focus on the character Ethan Hunt. I have always been a big fan of Cary Grant’s films in the ’60s. He always had a good sense of humor, very classy and very cool and I wanted to bring that to Ethan Hunt. I wanted to make Tom Cruise the modern-day Cary Grant. Since I didn’t have to follow the style of the first Mission: Impossible, I was able to achieve it by adding those elements into creating Ethan. I wanted him to be very active and energetic and to have long hair which would make him look very cool during slo-mo. During filming, I felt like I was filming an idol instead of a secret agent.” While Woo grew up making Hong Kong films where stars were more likely to do some stunts, Woo caught Cruise at the time when

he’d decided to do it all himself. In the opening sequence, Ethan Hunt is free climbing and hanging precariously off a rock, sometimes holding his weight with a single arm. “When we were filming in Utah on the red rocks, typically in Hollywood you would [film] the double from all sides, then build a side of the mountain in a safe area and film the star’s close-ups,” Woo says. “Tom wants to do everything himself. I didn’t want him to. It’s so dangerous, the cliff was 2,000 feet high.” Cruise told the director he’d worked it all out with their stunt coordinator, and there would be a safety chain attached to him. “I told him, ‘What if the chain snaps? There is nothing stopping you from falling.’ And that’s when I see the look.” It was a look that future Mission: Impossible directors would come to know, and they usually succumbed, despite the inherent risk of becoming known for killing a movie star. Says Woo, “I had become very close with Tom and his family. Sometimes he would bring his kids to the set, and they would sit on my lap in front of the monitor while he did those motorcycle scenes. I’d sit there and tell his kids how brave their dad is. During the climbing sequence, his mom was there. We’re looking at him climbing the

Mission: Impossible 2, from left: Director John Woo and Cruise on set; Cruise on the mountain in Utah. 28

rocks, and we are holding hands, scared senseless. The only time he was hurt was a scratch on his hand while we were doing some fight sequences on flat ground.” Woo could see how much Cruise’s meticulous preparation might get him through anything. “Sometimes I was very surprised by the amount of his prep work during filming. Since the story is about bioweapons, he would have study material piled two-feet high on his desk. He could go into detail about bio and chemical weapons, and he even brought up the Japanese Unit 731 in 1937, testing their chemical and bioweapon on civilians in China. I was shocked to find out that he actually knew that part of history.” Woo’s signature style shootouts had his heroes firing two guns simultaneously, presaged by doves taking flight. “I suggested for him to use two guns,” Woo says. “Tom was concerned about the amount of shooting in the film as he wanted to keep it PG-13 rather than R. He didn’t want it to be so violent. Later, the stunt team told him, ‘You don’t use two guns, why would you want John Woo to direct it?’ I had also reassured him that I would make him look very good and be mindful of the amount of shooting. He finally agreed and I remember him sliding out with two guns. Before I could say anything, Tom came to me and said, ‘That was awesome, can I do more of that?’ He didn’t want to look like Chow Yun-fat from my films, but he was a great admirer of Bruce Lee and wanted to do something like the style of Bruce Lee during the final battle.” “Something that I am really proud of is that we successfully tailored some of the best action sequences for Tom as Ethan,” Woo says. “This provided a very good foundation for him to build his character and try to tackle more

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Left: Cruise with J.J. Abrams on the Mission: Impossible III set; Below: Cruise on top of the Burj Khalifa—the world's tallest building—in Dubai.

and more breathtaking and fantastic stunts which then shaped into this massive and successful global franchise. He was able to bring his fans a better and better spectacle for every film.”

J.J. Abrams

S T EP HE N V A U G H N / D A V I D JA M ES

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III (2006)

Sticking with his resolve to broaden Ethan Hunt by making each movie with a different director, Cruise first had David Fincher and then Joe Carnahan drop in and out, before he went with an up-and-comer who had never made a film before. J.J. Abrams was a TV guy who directed episodes of Felicity and Alias. Who would tap a director unproven on a feature level to direct a taut action thriller movie with a $150 million budget? Cruise, of course. “I met Tom just before we shot the pilot for Lost,” says Abrams. “My assistant gave Tom the DVDs of Alias, a spy show that I had created.” Unlike with De Palma, the original TV series had been a north star for Abrams, who says it was part of the inspiration for Alias. “[Tom] enjoyed the pilot, which I had directed, and the first two seasons, and we began talking about the Mission series. I just thought we were becoming friends, I had no idea he was going to offer me that movie to direct.” While the plan was originally for Cruise and Abrams to find their way through the script they had, and which had attachments from Kenneth Branagh, Carrie Ann Moss and Scarlett Johansson, they would go in a new direction and explore Ethan Hunt falling in love. “It was clear that Tom really wanted to start over with the plot of the film,” Abrams says. “The

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roles that those amazing actors were going to play were no longer part of the equation.” But Abrams quickly got on board. “No one understands story structure, keeping pressure on a character, more than Tom Cruise,” he says. “He gave me such an incredible opportunity, not just to direct my first feature, but to work with someone who is as disciplined, focused and relentless in getting the very best out of every moment. Given that it was my first movie, I was immediately spoiled working with someone as invested and generous as Tom. He was excited by the prospect of adding additional human dimension to Ethan’s character, getting to see what his home life was like and giving him personal stakes.” Cruise also showed his acting chops in going mano a mano with never-more-fierce Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman was fresh from his Capote Oscar when he summoned a ferocious and sadistic arms dealer who, after crossing paths with Hunt, vows to find and cruelly kill anyone Hunt loves. “A friend had introduced me to Philip after college,” Abrams said. “I consider myself incredibly lucky to have had a chance to direct that impossibly gifted actor. I just love how cruel that character is to Ethan, and how he pushes every button to make Ethan do his bidding. I just remember being on set and seeing the two of them, just pushing each other to the limit.” Abrams also had to rely on his instincts and save Cruise from himself when the stunts got too perilous. “Tom will do any possible stunt,” Abrams says. “I can’t tell you how many times I had to actually pray on set that things would

go well. Of course, no one is more prepared and safety-conscious than Tom, but I do remember one stunt, relatively small in comparison, where he was meant to crash through a window. I begged him not to do it because as much as you control that stunt, you cannot predict where the safety glass will go. It is very easy to get sliced up, even if you do everything right. Anyway, while he didn’t do that one, he did everything else. And of course, since that film, the movies have gone on to become increasingly outrageous with the remarkable stunt work. I don’t think there has been better action work done on a movie than in Dead Reckoning. I love that movie.” Abrams would go on to resurrect Star Wars and Star Trek and become one of Hollywood’s biggest movie directors, while he continued on with the Mission franchise as a producer. He says of Cruise: “He is the person who gave me that shot, and I will never forget it. I

remember working nonstop with him to try and make some of the story sharper. The scene in which Billy Crudup’s character confronts Ethan, he and I were rewriting Billy’s big speech that morning. And it was a huge speech. When we shot the scene, Tom was holding up cue cards over the right side of his face just off-camera so Billy could get the lines. It was vaguely hilarious, but that was the sort of relentlessness and joy of working with someone who cares as much as Tom does.”

Brad Bird

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE GHOST PROTOCOL (2011)

While Ghost Protocol would feature Cruise in one of his most envelope-pushing stunts as he hung from and scaled the exterior of the world’s tallest building in Dubai, most of the turbulence actually preceded the movie. Cruise had a falling out with his long-time home studio,

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Paramount. Some felt Cruise’s uncharacteristic public bragging about Scientology and love for future wife Katie Holmes hurt his image, others believed that the actor-producer’s deal was too rich for studio owner Sumner Redstone. Cruise controlled over 30% of first dollar gross, some of which he was to bestow on his directors. Because Abrams was on his directing debut, he was not first dollar gross, so Paramount was paying Cruise at a higher rate even before the studio earned back production and marketing costs. That explains the five-year gap between films. The property languished until Cruise and Abrams (now a producer), revived it with terms that were more favorable to the studio. They also got uncredited help from Cruise’s Valkyrie scribe Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning writer of The Usual Suspects. The directing job went to Brad Bird, who, like Abrams, was making his narrative live action feature directing debut. He was also no stranger to blockbusters: The Iron Giant, The Incredibles 30

and many other Pixar hits bore his fingerprints. He was not cowed by a script that called for Cruise to climb an estimated 1,700 feet up the world’s tallest building, scaling four floors along the building’s glass exterior. “Animation was my gateway drug to film,” Bird says. It was The Incredibles that made Cruise hire Bird. “We had this fantastic couple of hours discussion about movies and what made them great,” Bird says. “We ended up talking about silent movie people like Harold Lloyd, who doesn’t come up a lot. It’s very clear from The Incredibles that I love spy films and here was one that was different from others, because of its embrace of the different styles between directors. There wasn’t the house style you needed to conform to. Tom didn’t have any trouble making the leap that because I could direct an animated action sequence, I could direct one in live action, too. When things got tough, he was always there, just 100% into the movie, and liking the fact I was also 100% into the movie.” Early on, the director was treated as a first-timer by crew when he wanted a shot and they stalled, knowing it would fall by the wayside. “I got mad and said, ‘Hey. I’ve done all this stuff responsibly and you’re going to start playing me on these shots? You fucking direct the picture.’ I didn’t know where Tom was, but he was

nowhere in the vicinity, and it was like a dog whistle only he could hear. He was there in 10 seconds, and he’s like, ‘Well let’s do the fucking shot.’ And everyone instantly fell in line and indulged me.” Bird threw in a lot of ideas. “I wanted all the hi-tech things to fail, so they would be forced to improvise,” he says. “I thought it was a funny idea to take a film in a series known for tricky technology, and have that tech not work for them. I also wanted more of a team movie, where everyone has a specific place. People think that Tom being the big star, he would not want to give good lines to others, but he is not that way at all. He wants the movie to be good. He’s just this incredibly enthusiastic guy who wants it to be great. And then of course, I wanted to do a chase in a sandstorm that was inspired by North by Northwest, and then [the tallest building in the world] Burj Khalifa, which started with small ambitions where we asked to break two double-paned windows to get a couple shots, and the rest would Cruise and McQuarrie on the set of The Final Reckoning.

Christopher McQuarrie

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION (2015) – FALLOUT (2018) - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (2023) – THE FINAL RECKONING (2025)

After Ghost Protocol, Cruise abandoned his desire to make each film with a different director, bowing instead to the shorthand he developed with McQuarrie on other projects. And so, they were joined at the hip for the final four Mission: Impossible films, facing real-life hurdles, ranging from the broken ankle suffered in a jump on Mission: Impossible – Fallout, to the difficult process of filming the final two installments when Hollywood was cautiously putting pictures back into production following the global pandemic.

DA V I D JA M E S / KE I TH BE R N S T EI N

From top: Cruise with director Brad Bird on set for Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol; production on Ghost Protocol.

be special effects. We ended up breaking 36 windows, and you see the results.” But not the stress. “There was a moment where I woke up at three in the morning going, ‘A h what am I doing? My star is on a very thin wire, a mile and a half up in the air. What am I doing?’ But Tom and I would connect it with Harold Lloyd, when he’s hanging from the clock tower. You can get comedy and suspense together without one selling out the other. What I remember most fondly is when you pitched him an idea, if he liked it, he’d light up like a kid on Christmas morning.”

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PREMIERE In Depth

Right: Cruise performing a stunt on Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation; below left and right, Cruise and McQuarrie on Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One.

“With each movie we’ve gone deeper, not just into Ethan, but with the supporting cast.” Cruise and McQuarrie put rigid guidelines into place to avoid a shutdown. And when Cruise scolded his crew and reminded them everyone was watching—not knowing they were also listening, after someone on set recorded his diatribe and released it online— the reaction in Hollywood was largely positive. Final Reckoning brings together the culmination of all the R&D that went into the stunts over the course of the previous four films. That includes hanging from yet another airplane mid-air, jumping off the deck of an aircraft carrier, and scuba diving. Cruise mistimed a rooftop leap and broke his ankle during Fallout, but now he has made it to the very end in one piece. “I absolutely feel relief on this one,” McQuarrie says. “You’ve heard us say it before with every Mission: This is the most complicated thing we’ve ever done; this is the most

dangerous thing we’ve ever done; it’s the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done. It’s always true. This is the first time when we did that twice in one movie. The submarine sequence represents something, and the aerial scene represents something, that each, in their own way, is the most complicated, most difficult thing that we’ve done.” McQuarrie looks back at what they’ve achieved and is “both astonished and relieved that we’re here,” he says. “I thought what we were doing on Jack Reacher was the limit, these ambitious car chases, with very little time and very little budget. Rogue Nation, I couldn’t imagine anything bigger than that. Once you’ve done that a few times, you start to realize it’s not that you can’t imagine it, you just haven’t imagined it yet. And particularly where we are coming from, which is a place of getting people to come to the theater, keeping the big screen experience

alive, showing people something they haven’t seen before. Audiences now are very, very sophisticated and they’re very hard to please.” McQuarrie notes that as bold as the stunts are, they spent as much time over the last quartet of movies evolving the Ethan Hunt character to be unlike, say, the ruthless secret agents in Bond films. “You’re stiking on the emotion and depth, delving deeper into Ethan with every movie and pushing the emotions that much harder… And with each movie we’ve gone deeper, not just into Ethan, but with the supporting cast. And you’ll see that in this movie as well.” That has been a big responsibility, “and it’s a lot of stress,” he says. “We had safety protocols on this film that centered around the aerial sequence, which was the first thing we shot for this chapter in terms of action. We would have these briefings before every flight, and they were very, very

Lores

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meticulous, very careful. We went over it many, many times with all the pilots. And at the end of every safety briefing, our safety guy would say, ‘Does anyone have any ducks?’ And a duck was anything in your life that was causing you stress, anxiety that was distracting you. It didn’t matter if it was on the film or outside of the film, if there were three ducks in a safety debriefing, you didn’t fly. I asked the safety guy, ‘Where does the term duck come from?’ And he said, ‘It’s not the lion that eats you, it’s the thousands of ducks that peck you to death.’ Where accidents happen is when multiple people are distracted by multiple things, it’s never one factor that leads to it. It’s actually a series of factors, a series of distractions. And I realized I couldn’t have any ducks at all. I could not be afraid of time. I couldn’t be afraid of the usual pressures of production. I had to be as open-minded as humanly possible, so that I knew I wasn’t overlooking anything.” That lesson was freeing, somehow. “Everything we did was the accumulation of all of this knowledge, of having made these multiple movies over such a long period of time, which is the difference between somebody coming in to direct a Mission: Impossible and someone who has directed four of them.” ★

C HR I S T I A N BL A C K/ G I L ES KEY T E

CHRISTOPHER MCQUARRIE

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PREMIERE On Set

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the New Hollywood classic adapted from Ken Kesey’s book, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with a special screening at Cannes and a stateside re-release by Fathom Films in July. Michael Douglas served as producer of Miloš Forman’s anti-establishment firecracker, which remains one of just three movies ever to win all five major Academy Awards—Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay. Thirteen years in the making and knocked back by countless A-list actors and studios, the movie overcame myriad challenges to become 1975’s second highest-grossing U.S. film (over $100 million worldwide), beaten only by Jaws. Jack Nicholson serves as Randle McMurphy, a role that had been played by Douglas’ father Kirk in the Broadway play version. Randall is a rebellious new patient at a mental institution who does battle with Louise Fletcher’s domineering head nurse Mildred Ratched. Will Sampson, Danny DeVito, Sydney Lassick, William Redfield, Christopher Lloyd and Brad Dourif also star, the latter two making their feature debuts. Here, Douglas recalls the remarkable journey behind the film, his father’s role in bringing it to him, and the ways in which it remains relevant to this day.

Going Cuckoo

A half-century later, Michael Douglas reflects on the battle to make iconic indie film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest BY ANDREAS WISEMAN

Michael, how do you view One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest today?

I think the movie reflects what’s happening in America right now, in terms of the Presidency and a struggle that we never anticipated we would see in our country: a struggle for democracy. There is a parallel between Nurse Ratched and the system she operates within and what’s happening in America today. But I also look back on the production as a magical process and with the greatest satisfaction for how much I learned and how important it was for my career as a producer. Saul Zaentz, my fellow producer on the movie, was an amazing man, a three-time Best Picture winner, which perhaps doesn’t get the credit it should. How fired up were you by the material when your dad was trying to get it made in the ’60s?

I was taking a freshman course in 20th century American literature at the time. I was a hippie in California and Ken’s book just floored me. I saw dad in the play, and years after, I heard 34

Behind the scenes on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, clockwise from top: Michael Douglas and director Miloš Forman; Jack Nicholson and Douglas; Douglas and William Redfield, who played the role of Dale Harding.

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From left: Jack Nicholson and Will Sampson; Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched; producer Michael Douglas, director Miloš Forman, Best Actress Fletcher, Best Actor Nicholson and producer Saul Zaentz with their Oscars.

M A R Y E L L E N M A R K/ W IS CO N S I N C EN T ER F O R FI L M A N D T HE A T ER R ES EA R C H / EV ER E TT C O L L EC T IO N / P A U L Z A E N T Z

“The casting of Will Sampson came about after he was recommended to me by a used car dealer and rodeo announcer I sat next to one time on a flight.”

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PREMIERE On Set

by chance that he was in the process of selling the rights to the book after not being able to get it made as a movie. I said, “I’ll make my best effort for you to be in it.” He was very sweet and agreed to give the kid a chance. Your dad really struggled to let it go, though. He even said the process “destroyed” him. How challenging was that?

He was proud of his son producing it, but the aspect he struggled to let go of was not playing the part. It was extremely difficult for him. When you look back as an actor, maybe you get four great parts in your career. R.P. McMurphy was one of those parts. We joked about it later, that it was my responsibility he didn’t star in our film, but I reminded him that the director has the final say. I tried, but it wasn’t possible. Too much time had passed. When Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando turned it down, I thought there might be more of a chance, but then Miloš really wanted Burt Reynolds. Later on, Hal Ashby showed us some outtakes of Jack Nicholson from The Last Detail and that was that. He wasn’t the only Douglas interested in a part, right. You had wanted to play Billy?

That was a brief moment in time, early on in production, but as soon as we auditioned Brad Dourif that thought disappeared. I soon realized producing was a full-time job, anyway. Both Saul and I were pretty much virgin producers but we soon both learned to go with our instincts. And Saul financed the whole thing?

He did. We started at around $1.4 million and ended up close to $4 million. His partners at his music and production label Fantasy Records [whose success with Creedence Clearwater Revival helped fund the movie] were outraged. They thought I was hustling. But Saul played poker and pool, he had a gambler’s instinct. It was years and years looking for finance and a director and cast. And then Miloš had a mental health episode in the Chelsea Hotel.

Finding Miloš had been so cathartic for us. We had spoken to other filmmakers, but they kept their cards so close to their chests. Miloš was collaborative and open with us, despite his European background where the auteur director is top of the pyramid... 36

You must have been so relieved when you finally got to production in Oregon. But there were plenty of ups and downs to come, from illness to actors’ mental health crises, and key players not seeing eye to eye…

There’s no question about it. We had to wait for Jack for another six months before shooting due to a prior commitment, and that gave us more time to audition, which was so vital. To give you an idea of how disparate the search was, the casting of Will Sampson came about after he was recommended to me by a used car dealer and rodeo announcer I sat next to one time on a f light. Jack, Saul and I went up to meet Will in Washington where he was working as a forest fire ranger. When he walked through the arrival gate, all seven feet of him, Jack said, “That’s the Chief.” We f lew back down to Oregon in a tiny plane, so Jack basically had to sit on Will’s lap. It was an ecstatic moment to have the casting finally complete.

We went through three DoPs on the film. Haskell Wexler, our original DoP, was very talented. He had also been a director and had strong thoughts on how things should go, some of which Miloš took on board, some he didn’t. But he started to undermine Miloš a little so that didn’t end well. There were other challenges. One Friday, a couple of us were having a few drinks when we learnt that Bill Redfield, who played Harding, was diagnosed with leukemia after showing symptoms on set. I met his wife soon after and she told me they had known before Bill started filming but kept it secret because he had wanted to do the part so much. We were terrified. We were told Bill wasn’t long for this world. We had a real quandary as to whether to continue with Bill or recast. But he and his wife begged us to continue and that’s what we did. Sadly, he passed away not long after we wrapped shoot. The boat scene was another major issue. It was horrendous for a lot of the actors. We were out

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M A R Y E L L EN M A R K/ W I S C O N S I N CE N TE R F O R F I L M A ND T H EA T ER R ES E A RC H

From Left: Zaentz (left) joins scene prep on the ward; Douglas and Forman; Cinematographer William A. Fraker with Douglas.

“We hadn’t anticipated just how much it would connect all around the world.” there for a week and people were dry heaving, nauseous, that was a tough one to get through. But this was such a tight group. That was the best thing about it. The ensemble. It was a truly great thing to watch the dailies.

Miloš was a disciplinarian. He would say “And cut! Perfect, perfect… Now let’s do it one more time.” We would joke about that.

How difficult was it when Jack and Miloš had their falling out?

We knew what we had was incredible. I could show you a 10-minute reaction scene of Jack’s, just his reaction in a group therapy section, and you would watch it mesmerized.

That was largely related to Miloš not letting the actors see the dailies. They patched it up in the end. When Jack arrived on set after his previous commitment, the other actors were really deep into their characters, and some had even been living in the mental hospital for weeks by that time. Jack was taken aback, but quickly realized how serious the production was.

Did you know at the time that what you had was great?

Someone who didn’t ever come round was the author Ken Kesey who ultimately disavowed the film. How disappointing was that for you?

Yeah, that was the one. That was the one real

sadness. Ken’s script kept a lot of the literary qualities of his novel, so it didn’t quite work. The argument began under the auspices that we had screwed him somehow in his deal, but that wasn’t the case. We felt we had been very generous in offering him 3%, but he wanted 6%. It eventually led to a lawsuit. And by the time this came around, a couple of years after the movie was released, Ken’s 3% was worth around $3 million. We finally came to a settlement. I felt bad at the Oscars. I think Miloš was the only person who mentioned Ken. I had worshipped him. He was an important part of my generation and I had spent a lot of time with him. Despite knowing the material you had was great, you can’t have foreseen that level of box office?

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PREMIERE On Set

Forman and Douglas on set, with Brad Dourif lying prone in the role of Billy Bibbit.

After the film’s enormous success, did you hear from any of the well-known actors who had turned down the roles of Murphy or Nurse Ratched?

I know that Anne Bancroft, who turned the part of Nurse Ratched down, was at a cocktail party with her husband Mel Brooks shortly after the movie’s release and she read him the riot act there and then for influencing her to turn it down. I heard that from some people who were there at the party.

Well, Cuckoo’s Nest was an entirely independent production. The studios all passed on it. Maybe they didn’t like the deal we offered, because we had already financed it. But they were also skeptical about the material. Today, streaming has taken over. It has inhaled Hollywood. Silicon Valley made us look like paupers. For Amazon and Apple, movies are a side business. At the same time, many of the great screenwriters went to work in TV and streaming. But you’re right, if you compare the five Best Picture nominees from our year [also nominated in 1976 were Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws and Nashville], with some of the recent years… Theatrically it has become very difficult. Look at that Apple movie Wolfs. It was meant to be theatrical, and it turned into a one-week release. I’m working on a small movie right now that I’m going to produce and I’m aware how difficult it’s going to be to get it into theaters for any length of time. The issue is whether the movie theater experience can hang in there. It’s a tough time for theater owners. A couple of years ago you acted with your son Cameron in the movie Blood Knot? When might we see that?

I don’t know. I believe it’s looking for distribution. 38

“Today, streaming has taken over. It has inhaled Hollywood. Silicon Valley made us look like paupers.” You were in three of the Ant-Man movies and appeared in Avengers: Endgame. Would you do another Marvel movie?

I don’t think so. I had the experience, and I was excited to do it. I’d never done a green screen picture before. I did the The Kominsky Method because I wanted to work with Chuck Lorre and try some comedy. But I’m

enjoying my hiatus and enjoying my life. It was overwhelming running the production company and acting at the same time. Will you act again?

Yes, if something good comes up that I really like. But I don’t feel a burning desire. I’m still producing. I still love bringing people together. ★

M A R Y E L L EN M A R K/ W I S C O N S I N CE N TE R F O R F I L M A ND T H EA T ER R ES E A RC H

The major studios don’t often want to get behind movies with social or political consciences today. They’re even rare in the independent space. There were so many remarkable U.S. films in this vein in the ’70s, from Five Easy Pieces, to The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. The quality of moviemaking and the longevity of so many of the movies in that decade is remarkable. Why were movies so potent from that time and why do you think we have seen a dip in that type of U.S. moviemaking in recent years?

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FOR YOUR EMM Y ® CONSIDER ATION

OUT S TANDING DR AM A SERIE S LE AD AC TRE S S ELIS A BE TH MOS S

“A POWERFUL FINALE

FOR ONE OF TV’S BEST SHOWS.

Elisabeth Moss is fantastic. This is a masterclass in how to end a sharp, politically imperative show in times of moral crisis.” COLLIDER

“ELISABETH MOSS

IS STELLAR.

She opens the gates of her ferocity and vulnerability, reminding us why this is such a career-defining role.” A.V. CLUB

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PREMIERE Brazil

I'm Still Here

New Order, More Progress

Having survived Bolsonaro and Covid, Brazil's filmmakers are back and ready to follow up the success of Walter Salles’ I'm Still Here BY MELANIE GOODFELLOW AND ZAC NTIM

The scenes of celebration across Brazil in Carnival season when Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here won the Best International Feature Film Academy Award in March, were akin to the country winning the World Cup. The excitement followed a post-pandemic record-breaking $35.6 million box office in Brazil for the drama starring Fernanda Torres as real-life figure Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens Paiva disappeared from their home in the early years of Brazil’s 196485 military dictatorship. “That explosion of joy in the middle of the Carnival, which is the peak of our popular culture and the best of Brazil, the best of our collective capacity to actually say who we are, was extraordinary,” says Salles. The victory came hot on the heels of the Berlinale Grand Jury Prize win for Brazilian filmmaker and visual artist Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail, a dystopian drama about a 77-year-old retiree’s life-changing journey through the Amazon rainforest. Three months later, Brazil is out in force at the Cannes Film Festival 40

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio with the selection of Kleber Lula da Silva’s promise on his Mendonça Filho’s political thriller arrival in power in October 2022 to The Secret Agent starring Mauro bolster the cultural sector. Wagner in the main competition. Aside from his ideological belief It is also the Country of Honor at in the importance of culture, Lula the Cannes Marché du Film, with also wants to make it a key part of a delegation of film professionals the economy and job creation, parexpected on the Croisette, led by ticularly for younger generations. Minister of Culture Margareth “Audiovisual production is the Menezes, who also happens to be strength of our cultural sector,” the queen of Brazilian Afropop. Menezes says. “Despite Elsewhere on the Croisette, political persecution and a Marianna Brennand, lack of robust investment, whose female-driven the technical quality drama Manas earned and talent of the sector’s the Director’s Award in artistic community are Venice’s parallel section undeniable.” Giornate degli Autori in Under this drive, $295 2024, is being feted with the Sturm million has been earmarked Women in Motion Emerging for the film and TV sector to date. Talent Award. Lula’s investment plans are astute. “It’s not just a coincidence, it’s According to the national cinema an astral connection,” jokes André agency Ancine, the audiovisual Sturm, founder and President of sector added $5 billion to GDP in promotional body Cinema Do 2023, and this figure is set to rise. Brasil, on the market honor. The drive also makes Brazil “We were first offered the honor an outlier in Latin America, by the market two years ago… We didn’t know about the Walter Salles where many other territories are slashing cultural budgets and movie. We couldn’t have imagined censorship is on the rise. The the success,” he explains. most acute example is Argentina, The acceptance of the offer where the far-right President was spurred rather by left-wing

Javier Milei has decimated the film sector. Brazil’s cinema industry is recovering from its own brush with populism and authoritarianism under the 2019-2022 rule of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. During his time in power, which coincided with the pandemic, Bolsonaro disbanded the Ministry of Culture, cut cinema funding, and censored publicly funded projects. Menezes describes the federal government’s $295 million investment as a “rescue operation for the sector” following years of Bolsonaro’s cuts. “When we arrived, we found a wasteland of investments, a true chaos that was not easy to build,” the Minister says. Producer Tatiana Leite moved to France during Covid, “exactly because of the lack of everything during the Bolsonaro government.” “I could not work,” says the producer. She is now co-producing the latest feature from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour), which will be a big-budget historical drama set to shoot next year in Brazil, and developing projects from newcomers Pedro Pinho (The Nothing Factory) and Pedro Freire (Malu). Cinema do Brasil also lost most of its funding for four years but stayed afloat by piecing together financing from a variety of other sources. “People understood the importance of what we do… after the pandemic, our booths at Cannes and Berlin looked like a Formula 1 driver’s jersey. We had many different small supporters who helped us continue our work,” says Sturm. Veteran producer Rodrigo Teixeira suggests the Bolsonaro years were a blip in an otherwise upward trajectory for Brazilian cinema going back 25 years. “It all really started when Central Station opened the Berlin Film Festival. From then until today,

S O N Y P I C TU R E S C L A S S I C S / E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N

Cannes Film Festival 2025

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FO R YO U R E M M Y C O N S I D E R AT I O N ®

O U TSTA N D I N G D RA M A S E R I E S

“A PROPULSIVE, FIENDISHLY ADDICTIVE THRILLER. Sterling K. Brown gives a grounding performance – charismatic, steely-eyed and painfully raw.” + EMPIRE +

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PREMIERE Brazil

there have been a lot of great filmmakers, investment by the state, tax incentives, international partnerships, and people winning prizes outside of Brazil,” he says, who has half a dozen projects on the boil, including Gabe Klinger’s Isabel. 2019 was a bumper year for Brazilian cinema. Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau won the Cannes Jury Prize, while Karim Aïnouz’s The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão clinched the Un Certain Regard award. At Venice, two Brazilian directors, Bárbara Paz and Ricardo Laganaro, won awards, and in San Sebastián, the Brazil-set drama Pacified, backed by Darren Aronofsky, won the top film prize. “Bolsonaro in power combined with the pandemic killed the industry for two or three years, but we are lucky enough to have great projects, filmmakers, producers, crews, writers and stories, and we’ve started working again,” says Teixeira. It is too soon to assess whether Lula’s audiovisual investments are bearing fruit. So far, the government has prioritized broad investments, like pushing cash into regions of the country that do not have a tradition of filmmaking. Only a portion is being used directly to fund or support projects that will ultimately land in the marketplace. “It’s a matter of public policy. But an important part of this money will arrive in the industry, so there is excitement,” Sturm says. There is currently an open call in the country for producers and filmmakers to submit projects for public funding, which has ignited a frenzy in the local industry. “The last call attracted something like 1,200 applications for a 42

“After the pandemic, our booths at Cannes and Berlin looked like a Formula 1 jersey.” ANDRÉ STURM

national grant that will pick only a few projects, so it’s very competitive,” Leite says. “But at least we have this. Under Bolsonaro, we didn’t have anything.” São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro remain Brazil’s central hubs for film production. Salles’ I’m Still Here was shot entirely in the latter, which Leonardo Edde, President of RioFilme, says reinforces the city’s reputation as the “birthplace of Brazilian cinema.” “In 2024 alone, we registered nearly 9,000 shooting days, making us the most filmed city in Latin America,” Edde says. Lula has also spearheaded a decentralized approach to local production, opening autonomous film offices with their own funds in each of the country’s 27 states. The Secret Agent, for example, is shot in the director’s home city of Recife, capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, which is also home to a growing cinema scene. “That is huge in a country with many realities like Brazil,” Liete says. Still, funding projects and supporting local infrastructure is only part of the equation. When these films are made, where will they find their audience? Leite argues that this is where the picture becomes less clear, suggesting that bottlenecks in the distribution chain are also holding local cinema up. “One of the biggest fragilities of our cinema is that we don’t have many independent distribution companies. We don’t have any incentives for distribution

companies either. They have to fight hard to still exist,” Leite says. “For our population, we also don’t have enough movie theaters.” As of last year, Ancine listed 3,510 operational cinema screens in Brazil. The country has a population of around 211 million. In comparison, the U.K., with a population of around 68 million, has 4,587 screens. In the backdrop, there are also questions around the impact on independent producers and the box office of the global streamers, with two bills currently passing through the legislature that would increase tax contributions and introduce quotas on national productions. Menezes says streaming regulation is an imperative that her office is broaching with great care to protect workers’ rights and the health of the local production environment. “It is good for those who produce, for those who finance, and for those who consume. We don’t want to tax anything; we want what is fair,” she says. In the meantime, local streamer Globoplay recently embraced a theatrical strategy for its first two feature originals, I’m Still Here and Andrucha Waddington and Breno Silveira’s Vitória, giving them long cinema windows. Tatiana Costa, director of content for digital products at Globo, says the strategy was coordinated with all the parties on the film with the group promoting the theatrical release across all its platforms. “We don’t want to cannibalize the cinema and vice-versa,” she says.

Commenting on the government’s film and TV drive, Globoplay Originals head of drama Alex Medeiros says it goes beyond direct subsidies, noting how a raising of the cap on state money that can be spent on an individual production had also been a game changer. Teixeira also believes the global spotlight placed on Brazilian cinema by I’m Still Here will encourage more international investment. He is also predicting an uptick in non-Brazilian directors coming to the country to shoot, especially out of the U.S., in the current political climate. “I was talking to an American filmmaker who told me it’s impossible for independent filmmakers to do films in the U.S. right now, because the costs are too high, and the streamers are aligned with Donald Trump… There could be options for those filmmakers here in Brazil,” he suggests. Brazil does not currently offer a nationwide incentive, but there are a number of state and city-based rebate schemes, notably those run by SPcine in São Paulo and RioFilme in Rio de Janeiro. In the backdrop to this positive wave, the spectre of Bolsonaro as well as that of the military junta captured in I’m Still Here remains in the air. While Bolsonaro failed to kill off Brazilian cinema, the former stopped the country’s Cinema Nova in its tracks, leaving a void that would not be filled again until the 1990s and early ’00s with films like Central Station and City of God. “Continuity is at the core of what will ensue, but we’re certainly living in a moment of vitality,” says Salles. Edde describes the current moment as “a new era for the Brazilian audiovisual sector.” “And more than just celebrating this moment,” he says. “We are ready to turn it into concrete business opportunities and social and economic development.” ★

M K 2 / G UI L L E R M O G A R Z A / D ES V IA

From left: The Secret Agent; The Blue Trail.

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®

FOR YOUR EMMY CONSIDERATION

OUTSTANDING COMEDY SERIES • LEAD ACTOR NATHAN LANE SUPPORTING ACTOR MATT BOMER, NATHAN LEE GRAHAM • SUPPORTING ACTRESS LINDA LAVIN

“ WILDLY FUNNY W ITH A TOP-SHELF CAST.

” STELLAR . COLLIDER

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Dialogue

IN CONVERSTION WITH SOME OF THE HOTTEST NAMES IN CANNES.

Dakota Johnson

The actor-producer explores romantic complexity in Cannes comedy Splitsville, with Celine Song’s Materialists and Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity to follow

Josh O'Connor

Arty monster The star gets cultured in The Mastermind and The History of Sound. 48 44

Harris Dickinson

Street cred The story behind his longgestating London-set directorial debut Urchin. 54

Claes Bang

Square deal The Danish actor goes back to the drawing board for The Great Arch. 58

M I KE C OP P OL A / G ET TY I M A G ES

BY ANTONIA BLYTH

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How would you describe the premise of Splitsville? Gosh, it’s an interesting tone because I guess, off the bat, it reads as a comedy, but it’s a very soulful, unique comedy about two couples and the challenging dynamics of their relationships individually, and then their relationships intertwined with each other. It’s about the complexities of love. So, Carey starts hanging out with your character Julie and her partner Paul who are in an open relationship. Are we talking a love triangle? It’s less of a love triangle and more of a love experiment. it’s enmeshed, codependent, incestuous, and all the while really deeply loving ultimately, but pretty fucked up a lot of the time. I know a lot of people believe that non-monogamy is the future and that’s the evolution of where we’re going in terms of how 46

From left: Michael Angelo Covino, Simon Webster and Dakota Johnson in Splitsville.

human relationships will survive. What were your thoughts about the themes of this film? I think it’s such an interesting topic because I don’t feel like there’s one right way to love, or one right way to live your life, and I think human beings are being allowed to evolve. I think it’s rare that we hear of people being in a partnership or a relationship that’s like, “Yeah, and then we grow together and separately, and it’s super

healthy and fun.” It’s rare that that happens. I don’t think there’s any right way. I feel like, if you want to have multiple relationships in your life, great. If you want to go really deep with one person, great. If you want to have both of those at the same time, great. Why not, really? But also scary, you know? I think people are trying to find a new way and it’s a very interesting subject.

But is it a new way? Because I feel like we could look at that in a really positive way, or say someone says they want to explore every version of themselves and they want to have as many experiences as possible, and whatever that is in this short life we have. Or, is it that, as humanity, we are starting to evolve into people who don’t tolerate each other and don’t tolerate each other’s flaws and don’t heal and don’t grow? A lot of times I see relationships break up when it’s either or both people in a phase of immense challenge, which leads to immense growth. But if you just split up all the time, or if you’re like, “You’re sucking right now, so I’m going to go and be with my other boyfriend.” How am I growing and how am I actually loving you? But I don’t know. I don’t know the answer. I think everything works, or it can. As my mother would say, “It’s horses for courses,” meaning each to their own and whatever works for you. How did you come to the film and why was it also the right producing project for TeaTime? So it came around actually quite a while before I signed on to do it. It was brought to TeaTime and I was really busy. I don’t remember what was happening, but maybe we were releasing Daddio and it was just a really crazy time. And then it came back around for me to play Julie. First of all, I met with Mike and Kyle ages ago, and it was not a fully fleshed-out idea, and then they went away and did a lot of work. They just are such amazing partners and so brilliant together at being extremely funny, but also weird and soulful at the same time. And Adria was signing on as well, and it just made sense. And we really like to work with filmmakers that have a really fresh interesting voice. I don’t know if you saw their movie, The Climb? I was like, “How is this movie not massive?” It’s so good. And Mike,

NEON

Dakota Johnson has never been to Cannes before. “Somebody told me that people wear gowns and flip-flops and run into hotels,” she laughs, “That sounds like something I’d love to do.” In the past, she’s been more of a Venice person, she says, with The Lost Daughter, Black Mass, A Bigger Splash and Suspiria premiering at the Italian fest, rather than the French one. “I feel like I was branded as Italian cinema-only and I’m so excited,” she says. Splitsville, screening in Cannes Premiere, is also the first time Johnson’s production company TeaTime Pictures has had a film at Cannes. Directed by Michael Angelo Covino and co-written and produced with his longtime The Climb collaborator Kyle Marvin, Splitsville follows two couples in a friendship group. When Ashley (Adria Arjona) asks for a divorce from Carey (Marvin), Carey seeks solace in his happily coupled friends Julie (Johnson) and Paul (Covino). But when he realizes they are in an open marriage, he crosses a line, and things become more complicated. Johnson recently directed Loser Baby, her first short, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, and she’s also appearing in Celine Song’s June release Materialists as a matchmaker caught in a love triangle with an affluent businessman (Pedro Pascal) and an old flame (Chris Evans). She describes Song’s film as “really reminiscent of rom-coms that were my jam growing up. Very Jim Brooks, Nora Ephron.” And she’s just wrapped shooting on Verity, the latest Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us) novel adaptation. Directed by Michael Showalter, Johnson stars as a ghostwriter hired by Josh Hartnett’s character to finish his writer wife Verity (Anne Hathaway)’s novels. “I’m basically the bad guy I think,” Johnson says. “It’s so fun.”

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and in her filmmaking. She’s really a true real deal filmmaker and it’s just an amazing to see that. It’s rare and I think it’s amazing to be like, “Oh, you’re going to make a lot of really incredible things in this life.” I just felt so lucky to be there. And filming in New York in the spring was just magical. Cannes Film And yeah, I’m excited Festival for people to see 2025 that movie.

Johnson on the set of Splitsville.

he has such a director’s mind. He really has artistry in that way, coupled with understanding comedic beats, and those things don’t always come together. Really it just felt very right, and I like being really in the trenches with the people I work with. So being able to sit with them for a few weeks before, and go through the script and write jokes and make Julia a strange person, and give her a different kind of a character, I don’t know, it was very TeaTime, I think. What does it mean to you to be at Cannes? Well, truly, I honestly thought I would never go to Cannes. I was like, “There must be some weird curse on me where I'll just never get to do it.”

NEON

It’s a scene for sure. A lot of crowds waiting outside of hotels. So, I won't be just strolling along in my bikini? That's really what I was picturing. It's going to be a bit crazier than that I’m afraid. There is something so magical about... I remember the first time I

went to Venice. Every time I have gone to Venice, it’s like the most magical time because I just think there’s something ineffable in the air around film festivals where it’s the artistry and the excitement about what the movies have made people feel, and you can really feel that there. And then of course, the glamour and it’s so beautiful and opulent. But for me, it’s really being around all of those other artists and being around people who are like, “Oh, I’ve just seen this.” That to me is so fun. It’s so exciting. With Michael and Kyle, it sounds like you had a great collaboration on building your character. What was the process like? Yes, we did, and then it was really funnily combative on set. I think they are so used to working with each other that they have a very specific cadence. It’s a very specific dance they do. And I would butt heads with both of them a lot, but in a healthy way, I think. Just from the creative process, you mean? Yeah. At least I’m honest about it.

Yes. Not everyone tells you the nitty gritty of those combative moments, but that can often be a part of the creative process. Yeah. I’ve been on sets where the nitty gritty leads to a great movie and then I’ve been on sets where it doesn’t and that sucks a lot more.

How was working with Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans? Chris and Pedro were wonderful. They’re both pretty funny dudes. They both really make me laugh. I really make Chris laugh, which I like a lot. And Pedro and I were friends before, so just being able to hang out all day was really fun. Because when you’re on set, you’re just like, “Oh, I’m in movie prison and I can’t do anything, and I can’t see anybody and I live on set.” So, it was just so fun to have a friend there. But they’re both, I think, really wonderful in this movie.

Where did you shoot the film and for how long? We shot it in Montreal and I want to say it was 25 days. It was pretty short.

And then next year we’ll see Verity that you’re also executive producing. Yes, we just finished filming. I didn’t know what Verity was before I was sent the script, and it’s based on a Colleen Hoover novel that I guess is quite popular. People are really into it.

I’m also so excited about Materialists. How was working with Celine Song on that? Oh, God, that was really a magical, magical, magical time. Talk about not combative at all. We were of one mind. It was so beautiful, really, really beautiful. I think, because of her background as a playwright, she is really in the space with you, and it almost felt like she was in the scenes with me. If this was the shot, she’d be down here on the floor right next to me, just out of frame. So, it was very, very close. And she’s so poetic in her writing

It’s very big. She has such a huge following. I know. And she’s such a funny person as well. She’s a really cool person. But yeah, it’s Josh Hartnett, Anne Hathaway and me. I mean, obviously, everyone knows what it’s about from the book, but it’s about a ghostwriter or a writer who goes to finish the novels of this very established writer because she had been in an accident. So, she moves into the house with her and her husband and their kid and then all of these really weird twists and turns take place. It’s juicy. ★ DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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Josh O’Connor experienced the splendor of Cannes in 2023, when he was there with Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. This year, he’s back with two movies in contention for the Palme d’Or: Kelly Reichardt’s art heist picture, The Mastermind, and Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound, in which O’Connor stars with Paul Mescal. While en route to the New York set of the untitled Steven Spielberg/ Amblin/Universal film, O’Connor said of Spielberg, “He’s great. He is the dream, the best in the world,” but he admits being on set makes him miss home and tending to his fig trees and vegetables.

Josh O'Connor The actor returns to Cannes on double duty with Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind and Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound BY BAZ BAMIGBOYE

What are you able to say about the Spielberg movie? I’ll tell you what I’ll say. It’s like oldschool Spielberg. I think people will be excited. When you say old-school Spielberg, what does that mean? Close Encounters, E.T.; that world.

Which brings us neatly to Reichardt’s The Mastermind. It’s the 1970s. The Vietnam War was going on. Kelly’s really one of my favorite filmmakers in the world. Truly. There’s a handful of directors that I have dreamt of working with, and Kelly’s one of them. So, I’ve had the best time working with her. It’s in the traditional Kelly fashion. It’s looking at the world through the people that fall between the cracks and 48

J OS H T EL L E S F O R D EA DL I N E

And do you play an American? I guess I’m in my American period at the moment.

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not necessarily the people you’d expect. Often, she’s looking at artists and stuff like that, and it’s got that vibe. It’s almost like she’s looking at the Vietnam War, but averting her eyes.

Cannes

How so? Film It’s in the background, Festival Really. It’s about this 2025 guy James Mooney who’s desperately trying to support his family and make a name for himself. He’s sort of a failed artist. He works as a carpenter. Reichardt has spoken in the past about looking at characters located in the perimeters of society. Is James in that category, do you think? I guess in my head, when I hear “perimeters of society”, I would normally pick someone ostracized in some way or left behind. And in many ways, this character isn’t that. He’s middle-class, he’s from a perfectly good family, but he’s in the outside of society insofar as he lives quite a plain life, an unfulfilled life. That’s what’s pulling him to make a name for himself. It’s almost more tragic in that he just feels forgotten. He just feels like a regular Joe. And I guess Kelly’s asking, “What’s worse than being regular Joe?” For someone who has a big ego, that’s not great.

Where does Reichardt set the story? Outside of Boston, in the Cambridge area, but we shot in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is architecturally very interesting for the period we’re in, the ’70s. Again, it’s that middletown, quiet suburbia. He sounds like the forgotten white man who in contemporary terms might have voted for Donald Trump. 50

If you’re looking at the moment in time, that’s the relevance. An interesting angle on it, is that shooting somewhere like Ohio as the election was just going on was a very interesting place to be, and that’s where J.D. Vance is from. I think, politically, that period in the ’70s for America and the Vietnam War was really interesting. Kelly is diverting her eyes to the politics always in every film. It’s there in the background and she is talking about it, but she isn’t. It’s like, she’s never crude about it. It’s not obvious like in so many scripts I read, and in many movies, and I

understand why. They are movies that are built to, “How can we get these things awards?” [With Kelly] a tear would be welling up in a scene and she’d be like, “Cut! What are you doing? We don’t cry in these movies.” She’s the antithesis of that. She wants to keep it real. She doesn’t want to get too earnest about things. There’s a lightness to it. There’s comedy, but there’s depth. Yeah, I think Reichardt would rather be teaching film class at Bard College than chasing awards, right?

That’s not the primary purpose. She’s not seeking that. So is James the leader of the art thieves? I see John Magaro, a Reichardt regular, is also in it. Is he in the gang of thieves? The majority of the film is my character on the run. We come across John Magaro, who is an old friend of mine from art school, and there are all sorts of characters I come into play with. Todd Haynes had this great quote about Kelly, where he said, “The thing about a Kelly Reichardt movie, is it’s like a road movie

M I C H A EL BU C K N ER F O R DEA DL I N E

Does he have a family to raise? He’s got two kids, two boys and a wife. Alana Haim plays my wife in it.

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HONOREE

TELEVISION ACADEMY HONORS®

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And what kind of artwork does he steal? Is it contemporary? Are they Old Masters…? It’s someone who is the perfect answer for this, because it’s someone who is not headline-grabbing at all. It’s someone worth a bit of money, but not quite worth what they should be worth. It’s Arthur Dove [a pioneer of American abstraction]. His artwork is kind of surreal, but it’s also, well, in my opinion, not that attractive. It’s funny because he is brilliant and he would sell for money, but it’s not stealing a Picasso. Even in his grand thievery it’s sort of underwhelming.

The Mastermind

“I guess Kelly is asking, ’What's worse than being a regular Joe?’”

loves that mystery. She loves that she doesn’t understand what we do, but I think she understands more than she makes out. I think actually she has a very clear idea of who the characters are. But, like any brilliant director, and I’ve Reichardt’s father was a crime been fortunate enough to witness scene investigator—do you think this, there’s this real gift you can his profession influenced the film have as a director where you say in some way? you have an idea. And rather I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that than go to the actor and makes sense to me,’ just say, “This is my idea, OK? for someone who is led Cannes Do it.” You just find a way by story to have grown Film Festival of allowing the actor to up in that environment. 2025 discover the same idea But once we got to work you always had in the it wasn’t talked about an first place, because we then awful lot. So, I think it’s in the feel like we have an ownership background. These aren’t stoover it. And that’s not to downries that come from her father or play what actors do in any way. anything like that, but I imagine it She’s worked with some of the must’ve had an influence on her. greats, like Michelle [Williams]. It’s just that I think Kelly undervalues Some have commented, “This her talent and she does have doesn’t sound like a Kelly those ideas. What you’re doing is Reichardt movie.” fitting into a Kelly Reichardt vision, I would say as a Kelly fan, I and it’s a negotiation, of course, watched this movie, and you can but she is somehow imprintsee Kelly Reichardt in it. You can ing these ideas in us. That’s my see all of the humor. You can see belief anyway. the messaging that’s not overt or crude. I think people won’t How does she infuse her films be disappointed. with the disparate stripes of her life: teaching, what she views in Reichardt once commented that art galleries, her longtime friendwhat actors do “remains very ship with Todd Haynes? mysterious to me. I try and stay First of all, she’s an art lover. She out of their way. We’re together loves film so very much. She’s in search of a character.” one of those filmmakers that has That really resonates with me. I an encyclopedic knowledge of think that’s so true. Although, just movies, particularly old movies. to counter it a little bit, I would We’ve often forgotten with Kelly, say, the thing is that first of all, she 52

she does teach at Bard. She’s a great teacher. Again, that’s a similar thing to being a great director. She worked with Todd Haynes at the start. She’s worked in film for years in different roles and capacities. She went to art school, she’s got all that history there, and it just comes through in all of her movies. It’s just Kelly. It’s so obviously her. Did she screen any old movies for you? She sent me some documentary footage from the ’70s. I can’t remember the name of it, but that was more just to get this idea of how families are together. There’s a couple of scenes [in The Mastermind] where it’s Bill Camp, Hope Davis, me, Alana, and we all sat around the table. Where is Vietnam in the movie? It’s kind of an undercurrent of the movie. We don’t go to Vietnam. We don’t ever really talk about it. There might be a brief moment over the dinner table where Bill Camp comments on it. And the reason it’s an undercurrent is like, here is a man of age who isn’t at war. You’re also in The History of Sound, which is based on a 2018 short story by Ben Shattuck. You play David and Paul Mescal is Lionel, and they meet in a Cambridge, Massachusetts bar in 1916 and bond over regional folk songs.

Then they go on this journey. The film follows Lionel who has this synesthesia, where he can see color and see and feel emotions when he listens to music. He also has an incredible singing voice. And David is like an archivist and has a fascination with collecting the old folk songs of America. And then they go on this very beautiful journey together. And I go missing for a long time. David plays the piano. Can you play it? I couldn’t play the piano until I did this movie. I still can’t, but I can play it better than I could. I took a few lessons and I just learned in the end. I’d like to think the truth is I didn’t have an awfully long time to prep for this movie, and I jumped in between projects. He’s a very beautiful character that is so meaningful to me and to the movie, of course, but I didn’t have an awful lot of time, so I just learned those songs on piano. The original short story is about time and memory and the little things that matter over time. I think it’s that thing of what the film does incredibly well is it plays into that feeling of nostalgia and regret and loss. I came in and they shot all of my stuff, which is mostly this traveling through America which is very beautiful. So that was really just lovely. We did that for a couple of weeks, then I left. Then I was on Challengers, and then I was shooting Knives Out [Wake Up Dead Man]. So it was all kind of busy and I felt like that movie was over. But of course they had all of the rest of the movie to shoot. And when I saw it, seeing what they’d done, what they created without me was just… I was so proud of them. It was such a nice feeling. But what’s so beautiful about it is this feeling of song and of music. When you listen to a piece of music and it transports you to a certain place or a time, and if you close your eyes, you can feel like you are actually there. ★

2 0 2 5 M A S TE R M I N D M O V I E I N C

that never quite hits the road.” They never quite get that joy.

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F O R YO U R E M M Y ® C O N S I D E R AT I O N I N A L L C AT E G O R I E S I N C L U D I N G

OUTSTANDING COMEDY SERIES

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Harris Dickinson As he prepares to imagine what it’s like to be John Lennon, the actor unveils his directing debut Urchin

BY DAMON WISE

Since his 2017 breakout in Sundance hit Beach Rats, Harris Dickinson has been keeping busy, averaging two or three films a year in projects as diverse as Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, Steve McQueen’s Blitz and Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, in which he co-starred with Nicole Kidman. Somehow, though, he found time to write and direct a movie of his own; starring Fear the Walking Dead’s Frank Dillane, Urchin tells the story of Michael, a homeless young man who winds up in prison after an unprovoked assault. Simultaneously hard-hitting and achingly lyrical, it’s an impressive achievement for any director, let alone a first-timer. 54

What was the inspiration? I think I was becoming a little bit disgruntled with politics and with legislation in general, and I was trying to find a way to find mobilization within my community and get involved in causes that felt meaningful and effective. Like, what can I do locally that maybe lends a hand on a smaller level? So, just before the first lockdown, before Covid kicked off, I was working at a local thing in Walthamstow called Project Parker. I was really a small cog in a much bigger machine. It was a community project that was giving a safe haven for people sleeping rough, and I got close to the issue there. And then I continued that by working with Under One Sky, which is a volunteer-led organization that works all over London. They go out each day of the week in different areas, in groups of four, five, six volunteers, and basically refer people to Streetlink and hand out food supplies, teas, coffees, take requests, things like that. So, it’s effective and immediate help for people that are vulnerable; people that are sleeping on the streets and people who are vulnerable regardless of their housing situation. I was writing as well, so it became a bit of an impetus to try and encapsulate a young man’s journey as he tries to break free of those circumstances. So,

it became more than just about homelessness, it became about cyclical behavior. I think I just wanted to really try and tap into a character study that tracked someone’s struggle to break free of their own habits. Mike is an interesting character. He’s kind of charismatic, but not terribly sympathetic. Was that your intention? It was important that he was likeable, I mean I didn’t want him to just be another sort of cantankerous, unruly stereotype of British cinema. I thought it was important that he was endearing and that he was kind of charming as well. I think you sort of have to be charming to survive in that world, so it kind of becomes an innate part of your character. A lot of the people I encountered along the way, and still do, have an immense charm to them. Because they have to, you know? The opening scenes in the film look very spontaneous. Did you put Frank, in character, into real situations? Or is it all scripted and choreographed? That’s all scripted, but there are a few interactions with real members of the public who aren’t aware what’s going on. Obviously, we had the official signs up, but there were certain people that didn’t realize Frank was an actor. But, yeah, the rest of it was scripted. I mean, it was loose. We’d have moments where Frank could do what he wants. We’d give him the guardrails and then he would do what he wanted. What kind of research did Frank do for the role? We had a whole team of various different advisors in different fields, like probation, prison reform, addiction, homelessness. We had a few different people that we linked him up with, and then he also started to work with Under One Sky simultaneously, so we gave him some infrastructure and then he also went off and did his own work.

G I L BE R T F L O R ES / GE TT Y I M A G E S

How long have you had this story in your head? I started to think about it about five or six years ago. It was originally a different concept with the same character, but it was sort of a split story, so I decided to focus in on Mike because it felt like I was trying to do too much too soon for a first feature. So, I tried to simplify it with the help of my producer, our development exec, who at the time was Rose Garnett, and then it turned into Eva Yates. So, we had quite a long road developing it. It was a while before it got made, really, but it was nice to sit with it for a while.

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Did you always anticipate playing the role of his junkie friend Nathan yourself? No. We had an actor lined up and he had to drop out for personal reasons, quite close to the shoot. We read a few people, we offered it to some people, and then in the end I just decided to do it myself. We had it boarded five days across the whole five and a half weeks, so it wasn’t the easiest role to schedule with an actor. So, it sort of made sense. I mean, I’d been reading the lines with Frank already in rehearsal, so when Frank turned around and said, “You should do it,” I did. And, yeah, it was challenging. Is your directing voice different to your acting voice? Or do you see it part of the same continuum? I think it all sort of informs each other. I mean I’ve obviously got my own taste as a filmmaker, where I want to be, and hopefully I have my own voice, which I’m still figuring out. But in terms of acting, I can sort of dance between different genres and different tones with filmmakers that work within different parameters. So, I guess they are different things,

There’s a steady drip of information about Michael’s background from the start, and it’s very carefully scripted in that respect. Did you deliberately take stuff out? I think, yeah. We started sort of over-informing in the script stage, and then as it got closer and closer to shooting, we realized there was a lot we didn’t need. You realize that you don’t want to be too heavy-handed with that stuff, because it doesn’t really help. The important stuff is happening in front of us rather than finding out what happened to him in the past. We don’t really need to know all of that stuff. It’s about the unraveling in the moment. What are your inspirations to make this kind of movie? Or were you deliberately trying to shut out the comparisons? Obviously, I grew up on the likes of Mike Leigh, Shane Meadows and Ken Loach, and I was really enthralled by that kind of cinema growing up. I related to it, and

Frank Dillane, right, in Harris Dickinson's directorial debut Urchin. 56

How quickly would you get back behind the camera? I mean obviously you’ve got the Beatles movie coming up. When could you possibly find the time to direct again? Well, I’ve got The Beatles, and then I’m going to try and make my next one. I mean I’ve started writing, or You’ve obviously worked with I’ve got an idea at least, so I can some terrific directors yourself. hopefully just slowly tinker away at Did you show it to any of them, or that and then see. It is time condid you not want to do that? suming; that’s the thing. It does Oh, god, I didn’t really want to. I take a lot of your energy from got a bit worried about hearing start to finish. Unlike acting—once too many opinions. Halina Reijn filming stops, you can go onto the watched it pretty late in the next one, but this is more edit. But it’s hard, isn’t it? encompassing. So yeah, Cannes Because you get to a it’s about the timing, but Film stage where you lose hopefully someone will Festival track of your own ideas a let me do it again. I’ve 2025 little bit, and then you’ve got another idea that I got financier opinions, started to think about as which, of course, you respect, soon as I wrapped the film. And and you entertain. But after a then I tried not to think about it, while, you sort of have to come because I thought, I need a break. back to your own feelings, I think, otherwise it gets really muddy. Are you having to clear the decks to play John Lennon? Were you surprised when it got Yeah. I think I’ll be doing that for accepted by Cannes into the the next however long it’ll be. official selection? That’s all I’ll be doing. But it is the Yeah, I was surprised. It’s not way it needs to be, really, with something you expect. I’d hoped something like that. You can’t try and dreamed, but no, never exand do a few different things at pected it. It was a cool day. the same time, no. I don’t like to work like that. What’s your enduring memory of Cannes? What do The Beatles mean to Well, the thing is, I’ve been to you, personally? Cannes twice actually. Triangle What do they mean to me? Well, of Sadness was the first time, and they’re becoming closer and closthe enduring memory of that was er. They’re becoming dearer to the applause and having to stand me, the more I go on the journey there and receive it all with all the of understanding John and the cameras in your face. That was rest of them. Yeah, they’re becompretty bonkers. And then we went ing extremely important to me. back a couple of years later to try They’re my every day right now. and get money for this film. Me and my producers went for five Do you feel particularly bound or six days, and we begged for to staying in the U.K.? You’re money six times a day in various obviously in demand overseas, different meetings, and it was but is it important to you to be in tiring—you could see when people films in the U.K. and make films were getting a bit bored with the in the U.K.? pitch. So, there are two differYeah, for sure. I mean I’ve always ent sides of Cannes that I got to said to myself and to my team, “I experience. And now I get to go want to come back to British cinback with my film, so it feels like a ema whenever possible.” I want to nice, full-circle moment. Hopefully do that and seek out the filmmakwe’ll celebrate it regardless of the ers that are working here. We’ll outcome or the inevitable mixed see. I mean I live here; I like living opinions on it. That’s something I here, and I think I’ll live here for forjust have to prepare myself for. ever. But you never know. ★ I found it really interesting and inspiring. But I also love Fellini, and Agnès Varda, and Leos Carax, and Paul Thomas Anderson. There are films that inspired it from really all types of cinema. So, I hope that shows really. I mean, yeah, we were trying to make a prototype.

BF I F I L M

But I think it was important that we really entered into the research of Mike separate from the factual stuff around his world. We entered into his world with love, and we tried to give it the most full and loving experience. That was important to us as an entry point.

aren’t they, innately? But I want to be in films that I also want to watch. That’s the thing, I want to be in films with filmmakers that push things and challenge things, and you’re safe within their world. That’s the best thing as an actor, when you can step into a world or, on a more pragmatic level, step into a set and be like, “Oh, I know what this is going to be.” Whether that’s an Ari Aster film, or a Lynne Ramsay film, or a Chloé Zhao film, you know what kind of world you’re stepping into. And I want that to be the same for me as a director. I want people to go, “Oh, great. There’s a film Harris Dickinson has made.”

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This is your first time back in Cannes since The Square… I’ve been to all the other festivals, three times to Toronto, a couple of times to Venice and Berlin but no, I haven’t been to Cannes since. The weird thing is, that the last time I was in Cannes, I was with a movie called The Square about a square. This time, I’m coming back with another movie about a square, albeit with a dimension added, so it’s a cube, but still. Also, there’s the text that comes with the art installation at the heart of The Square, about it being a sanctuary of trust and caring, a place where you can interact with people and ask for help… and then, when Johan Otto von Spreckelsen introduces his project at the press conference in The 58

Claes Bang

The Danish actor breaks the language barrier in Un Certain Regard entry The Great Arch BY MELANIE GOODFELLOW

we’ve made a movie about this extremely idealistic guy who has these high hopes and ideas for what he wants to make, and then it gets all fucked up by politics and people making all kinds of decisions. When I read it, I thought it was such a sad story. What he starts out with and what he wants to do is so cool and so great, and then he ends up withdrawing from the project. Did you know about Johan Otto von Spreckelsen and the story behind the creation of the Grand Arch before being approached for the role? Yes. This was the biggest architecture competition in the world ever at the time. It had something like 400 submissions from all over the world, and then this guy in Denmark, who is not very well-known, even at home, outside of architect circles, wins. He hadn’t built a whole lot. Some people thought he was mad and were asking, “Why is he building this cube?” I remember all of that, as well as him leaving the project and thinking, even back then, ‘What a pity that he couldn’t see it through.’ But I also remember thinking that he probably had his reasons.

Great Arch, he practically says the same thing… about it being a place for people to meet, from different walks of life, from different countries, to communicate. You’ve said that working with Ruben Östlund on The Square changed the course of your career. Did he approach you for his new airplane movie The Entertainment System Is Down? He’s quite reluctant to put actors back in his movies. I don’t think he’s ever used the same actor twice, but I would so love to work

with him again. I thought about getting in touch to say, “Should you need a cabin assistant with a little trolley handing out the wine and crisps, I’m your guy.” I never got around to it, but I did send him a photo of the exact wording from the press conference in this film, just to say that this is like a crazy coincidence.

What kind of research did you do for the project? Strangely, I have a cabin in the countryside that was made by an architect whose daughter is also an architect who used to know him [Spreckelsen]. Through her, I got in touch with a lot of people that went to Paris with him and worked on the project. The thing that struck me every time I spoke with anybody was the warmth with which they spoke of this guy. He was really, really loved. He really took care of those that he worked with.

Can you tell us a bit more about The Grand Arch? I haven’t seen the finished film yet, so I can only speak to what I think we have made. I hope

Did you get to the bottom of why he left the project? There was one couple who had worked on the project, who were still together. I ended up talking to

A N D R EA S R EN T Z / G E TTY I M A G ES

Claes Bang returns to Cannes for the first time since his role as the compromised museum curator in Ruben Östlund’s 2017 Palme d’Or-winning art world satire The Square. The Danish actor, whose credits since have included Dracula, Bad Sisters and William Tell, is back with French director Stéphane Demoustier’s Un Certain Regard title The Great Arch about Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen. The architecture professor shot to fame in 1983 when he won French President François Mitterrand’s design competition for Paris’s La Grande Arche de la Défense, but then struggled to bring his vision of a simple but monumental white cube to fruition.

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Was it a culture clash? Yes, that was totally a thing. For storytelling purposes, we’ve given this guy French, but he didn’t speak French. I think there was an enormous case of stuff being lost in translation. But this is not a documentary, that’s very important. It’s based on the book that Laurence Cossé wrote. There’s a lot of fiction here, but some of the plot points are very, very real. For instance, he wants this very, very flat surface on the building. He meets with I.M. Pei who has done this on a building that is much taller in the States, but that way of building is not allowed in France. He was also very close with his wife and had her on board almost as an advisor, but that was seen as odd in France. In that sense, I think Denmark was different. We had the beginnings of an equality here in the ’80s that they didn’t have in France. It’s a much more masculine culture. I thought all these things played so well into the story. Sidse Babett Knudsen plays Spreckelsen’s wife Karen Gerda Gustavsen. Have you two worked together before? I had done a tiny little something in Borgen with her ages ago. It was very, very brief. I thought this was actually a quite interesting and very fun relationship that this man and wife have. I loved going on that journey with her. She was most supportive and lovely. The other cast members are also impressive. You’re supported 60

Canada, and then in Europe, around June. I also did a movie with Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista for Amazon in New Zealand [The Wrecking Crew]. It’s an action comedy. The brief of it is that they’re brothers and I have played a very big part in offing their father. So, you’re a baddie again? Yeah, but they’re also not the loveliest people. They’re after me and that doesn’t end well for me.

William Tell

by Anatomy of a Fall co-star Swann Arlaud, Xavier Dolan and veteran actor Michel Fau to name but a few… Man, this was so incredible. They are the best people. This was just a dream to work with these people, but the really weird thing is I don’t speak a word of French. You really don’t? Half the film is in French? This is probably one of the most dialogue-heavy movies I have ever made and 65% of it is in French… I rehearsed the shit out of it. I obviously speak a little bit more French now. I went through the script on a daily basis. I knew it inside out. I also had to come to Xavier, Michel Fau and Swann and say to them: “Listen, people, I love and adore you, but you cannot fucking improvise, OK? I cannot follow. I can’t go where you want to go. You have to bloody say what’s in the bloody script because I’ve learned your lines. I know everything you’re saying, and I know what to react to, but if you stray from it, I’m going to be lost.” They were very, very sweet. Sometimes they did their own thing, but that often also worked really well, because then it just got really odd.

Going back to The Square, beyond the similar phrases, it does feel like there are echoes of that film in The Grand Arch, for the way they both explore the world of art and creativity. Totally, but the guy in The Square, he was sort of living on his own little planet. For me, this movie is almost an allegory for what it’s like to make a movie, in the sense that when so many people come together, everything needs to fit. Then you’ve got the money people coming in, and they’re like, “So, we promised you three days on that location but that’s not going to happen, you can have one.” Then they need to rewrite the script, and the director, or the writer goes, “Fuck, that’s the main scene, and that’s my flat glass of the movie.” All these compromises when you take on these artistic enterprises that are really, really expensive and involve so many people, it’s very much a story of what it’s like to make a movie as well. The Great Arch is due to be released in France later this year. What else do have coming up? Bonjour Tristesse, which was in Toronto, comes out at the beginning of May in the U.S. and

You’ve also been in William Tell this year. Your filmography is so broad. I really like that it’s so diverse and goes in so many different directions. With William Tell, this guy’s got his crossbow and when you start doing crossbow practice, there’s so much to get from that. Then you’ve got this story, which is crazy in another way. The big deal here was all the French. Do you think you’ll ever make another movie back home in Denmark? I might be doing one. It seems to be falling into place, for the end of May, a movie in Denmark, in Danish. I’m also doing a very cool project in Germany this summer about Heinrich Himmler’s masseur. It’s about this guy who gets summoned to go to the SS headquarters because Himmler wants to see him about cramps in his stomach. He doesn’t want to go. I mean, who wants to go to the SS headquarters? It’s such a cool story. He is able to help Himmler but because the cramps are so severe, he needs to be with him almost every morning. He gets very close to power and uses that to help people get out of Germany. After the war, he tried to make more of it, saying he saved more people than he actually did. It is directed by Felix Randau, who made Iceman, about that Ötzi person who was found in the ice in Austria. ★

C R OS S BO W F I L M S L I M IT ED

them on the phone at the same time. When I asked them whether they understood why he left the project, simultaneously they said, “yes” and “no.” The guy said he should have stayed, because it was still an amazing project, while the woman was like, there were too many compromises. It was quite interesting, because these people, who have been together for a very long time had opposite reactions to that question.

Cannes Film Festival 2025

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F OR YOUR EMMY® C ONSIDER ATIO N

O U TSTAN D I N G D R A M A S ERIES LEAD ACTOR MICHAEL FASSBEN D ER SU P P O RTI N G ACTO R RICHARD GERE, JEFFREY WRIGHT SUPP ORTING ACTRESS JODIE TURNER-SMITH

“ONE OF THE BEST TV SHOWS OF THE YEAR,

with first-rate actors and a smartly written script.”

“ SPY THRILLERS DON’T GET MUCH BETTER THAN THIS.”

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ONLY CONNECT

By ANTONIA BLYTH Photography By ANDREW ZAEH

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With her directorial feature debut Eleanor the Great, SCARLETT JOHANSSON explores universal themes of loneliness, isolation, grief and renewal through the lens of a nonagenarian played by JUNE SQUIBB, in perhaps her most dynamic and arresting role to date. Johansson’s choice to use her star power to make an indie movie about an authentic human experience is just one more way she’s proving her disruptor status.

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Scarlett Johansson photographed at Jack Studios, New York City. DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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Somehow, though, the right directing project never came along, until last year, when Johansson’s old friend Celine Rattray at Maven Screen Media gave her a script about an older, lonely woman named Eleanor who moves to New York after the death of her best friend. Attached to the film was 94-year-old June Squibb, the Oscar-nominated MVP of Alexander Payne’s 2013 film Nebraska. When we sit down together in a New York photo studio, Johansson has just wrapped the shoot accompanying this article, and quick as a flash, she’s wiped off all the makeup and is back in her regular clothes—a chic but low-key jacket and pants. Her only adornment is a little jewelry, including her signature multiple earrings. She’ll

shortly be off to another shoot, this time for QVC for The Outset—the clean, environmentally conscious skincare line she developed. When I tell her I’ve seen the film, she seems to feel something strangely novel, being a director putting her own feature out there, after so many years in the business. “It’s such a funny thing to have people seeing it, because I’ve lived with it for a long time,” she says. “I guess I've never had that experience of making something and not... It’s different. When you’re acting in something, it’s out of your hands, of course. Obviously, I’ve been working on this in such a bubble, that then to share it with everybody, it’s great.” She says this experience “initially felt a little nerve-wracking, but now I’m realizing, hopefully it will

be widely shared. But it’s such a different feeling than waiting to see how a director cut your performance, or what their takeaway was from the work that you guys did together. It surprises me when people say they’ve seen the film.” When she first read the script for Eleanor, she had an immediate reaction. “I cried and that almost never happens. Sometimes you’ll read a script that’s really moving. When I read Jojo Rabbit, I cried. Sometimes a script will move you like that, which is extraordinary.” “I could see there was a great possibility in it,” she continues. “I thought, ‘Oh, actually, I think I could tell this story.’ It reminded me so much of independent film from the mid to late ’90s. I was a kid of the ’90s. I was working in independent film at that time, and

From left: Johansson & Benicio del Toro in The Phoenician Scheme; Johansson on the Eleanor the Great set. 64

I watched a lot of movies in that period of time that were throughout the ’90s into the early aughts, like Crossing Delancey and movies like that I loved as a kid. Richard LaGravenese made a great movie called Living Out Loud, and then certain Woody Allen movies from that period of time, too, that are films that I gravitate toward as just a fan.” These Pictures co-producers Jonathan Lia and Keenan Flynn trusted implicitly her decision to both direct and produce. Flynn recalls: “From the word go, there was no doubt. That same day it was like, ‘OK, we’re making this.’ It was instant.” Screenwriter Tory Kamen had been battling for eight years to get her script made and was surprised when Johansson enthusiastically came on board. “Scarlett, with all of her goodwill and her power and reputation in this industry, used that capital to make this type of movie where a 95-year-old woman is ambling in the city, and it’s a character piece,” she says. “It’s small and it’s not a very loud movie. That speaks volumes to the type of artist she is, and the type of person she is. These are really hard movies to get made: small, character-driven, independent movies where nobody kisses. And she committed to doing that. That’s the power of Scarlett Johansson. She saw a movie in my script that I didn’t even see as the

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carlett Johansson has wanted to direct since she was 12 years old. On the set of Robert Redford’s 1998 film The Horse Whisperer—her seventh movie as an actor—she saw the specific way he worked, the way he understood his actors, and she had a clear thought: I want to do that someday. Obviously, in the almost 30 years since Johansson made that private wish, it’s not as though she’s been waiting for something to happen. Oscarnominated twice and a Tony winner for her work on Broadway, she serves as executive producer and stars as Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She founded her production company These Pictures in 2017, and, along with Redford, her director collaborators over the years include Christopher Nolan, Sofia Coppola, Jonathan Glazer, the Coens, Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson. She’ll reconvene with the latter at Cannes, since she’s appearing in Johansson and Robert Redford in his latest—their third go-round together—The Phoenician Scheme. The Horse Whisperer.

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But given a closer look at the way Johansson has moved through her career, perhaps her decision makes perfect sense. “She’s one of the few people who’s been able to jump from genre to genre successfully,” says Lia. “She could go do a Marvel movie and then a Woody Allen movie. Nobody bats an eye. I don’t know anybody else who could really do that.” “She’s a very decisive person,” Lia adds. “And that’s a really great quality to have as a director, and it makes our job very easy because we can go to her with anything and say, ‘What do you think? Do you like this?’ And immediately you’ll get the answer. I think that’s how she is in life, and also how she is as a director.” That decisiveness has served her well thus far. Johansson could have allowed the industry to push her into the niche of ‘blonde bombshell’ territory, but instead she has made choices that evaded specific definition. Among them, her deeply creepy role in Glazer’s 2013 sci-fi film Under the Skin, and her conflicted, imperfect character in Baumbach’s 2019 divorce drama Marriage Story. Then there’s the fact that she sued Disney—something most might be too intimidated to attempt. In 2021, Johansson cited the company for releasing Black Widow in both theaters and on streaming service Disney+. Their contract had determined an exclusive theatrical release, and without that, she would not receive her box-office bonuses. The matter was eventually settled, but collectively, the world sat up and took notice. She had taken on an industry giant, sorted

the issue, and would continue to work with them. She is an executive producer on the MCU May release Thunderbolts. Then came another example of resolve. In May of last year, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT 4.0’s new voice system named ‘Sky’, Johansson released a statement saying she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief ” that the voice sounded “eerily similar” to her own. She said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had approached her multiple times asking her to be the voice for Sky and that she had declined. She also noted that Altman tweeted the word ‘her’ when Sky was released—which she took to be a reference to Spike Jonze’s 2013 film in which she’d voiced a chat system. In response, OpenAI took down the Sky voice. Johansson’s choices to advocate for herself have raised the bar and drawn boundaries industry-wide. “She’s a fucking boss,” says Lia. “She is fearless. She is uncompromising when it comes to her morals and what really drives her. She refuses to be pushed around and can’t be pushed around. It’s amazing because you’ll see these public instances where she’s gone after things or shut things down because they weren’t right. But then for every one of those, you’ll see five more where she could do it but chooses not to.” At the time, Johansson told The New York Times that she had turned down being the ChatGPT voice because, “I just felt it went against my core values,” and she added, “I also felt for my children it would be strange. I try to be mindful of them.”

Now, asked if setting an example for them is what she has in mind when taking a stand and advocating for herself, she says, “My daughter, she’s 10, and she’s expressed to me before that she wants to be like me when she grows up. What a wonderful thing for your daughter to tell you… But I’m always so focused on my kids becoming themselves. That’s really important to me. Hopefully, I set some good examples.” ●●●

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amen was in the middle of a West Elm store fighting with her mom when the call came that Johansson would direct. She collapsed on a couch and cried while her mom told everyone in the store the good news. “Then we immediately went back to fighting,” she says. Like Squibb’s character in the film, Kamen’s own grandmother Elinore had a best friend named Bessie who was a Holocaust survivor, and when Bessie died, Elinore moved to Manhattan and was desperately lonely. “She was learning in real time that nobody really wanted to make friends with a 95-year-old, not even another 95-year-old. She was looking to change her life, and she was met with silence.” And that is where the story of the real Elinore and the fictional Eleanor firmly diverge, hence the differently spelled names. “I want to make that so clear,” says Kamen, “or I will be kicked out of the family.” In the film, the fictional Eleanor goes to extreme lengths Kamen’s

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writer, and I’d spent a long time living with it. And she elevated that movie to something that could be shown at Cannes.” The film will premiere in Un Certain Regard, with Squibb appearing alongside relative newcomer Erin Kellyman, who plays Nina, a student who befriends Eleanor; Chiwetel Ejiofor, who co-stars as Nina’s dad, and Breaking Bad’s Jessica Hecht as Eleanor’s daughter. Johansson is, of course, no stranger to Cannes herself, having made her red-carpet debut there in 2005 at the world premiere of Match Point. Before Eleanor the Great was selected for the festival, Johansson had told Lia and Flynn, “If this comes together, my dream is to see June walk the red carpet at Cannes.” But at the time, she says, “That was just a pipe dream because obviously I was still processing our footage.” Johansson has been behind the camera before, directing a 12-minute short called These Vagabond Shoes for the 2008 portmanteau film New York, I Love You—but this is the first feature she’s ever directed. And, on the face of it, an indie film about a nonagenarian might seem an unusual choice for the feature directorial debut of the highest-grossing actress of all time.

From left: Johansson on the red carpet for Match Point at Cannes in 2005; Under the Skin; with Azhy Robertson and Adam Driver in Marriage Story; Black Widow. 66

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Johansson with June Squibb on the set of Eleanor the Great.

“THESE ARE REALLY HARD MOVIES TO GET MADE: SMALL, CHARACTER-DRIVEN, INDEPENDENT MOVIES WHERE NOBODY KISSES. AND SHE COMMITTED TO DOING THAT. THAT’S THE POWER OF SCARLETT JOHANSSON.”

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real grandmother would never have considered. Eleanor inadvertently joins a Holocaust survivors’ group, which reminds her of her beloved friend Bessie and her stories of her horrific childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland. Ultimately, those memories form a significant part of the film’s narrative. Says Kamen, “We don’t have really too many films about what it looks like now, as these survivors are in the final chapter of their life, and what that looks like and what that means. It was an honor to be able to help tell some of these stories.” Johansson herself is also Jewish, with family origins in Poland and Russia, and members of her extended family were lost in the Holocaust. Both Kamen and Johansson had been very close to their grandmothers. “We had a really natural rapport,” says Kamen, “both of us telling stories about

our grandmothers who we grew up with, and how much they meant to us, and how it felt like that generation’s stories were slipping through the cracks as they were leaving us.” “Eleanor, that character, it feels like there’s pieces of everyone’s grandma in there,” says Johansson. Kamen wrote the story with Squibb in mind as Eleanor, but at the time that was a mere dream. Then her script was found by Lucy Keith, VP of development at production company Pinky Promise. Pinky Promise founder and CEO Jessamine Burgum says, “We’re female-founded and run an all-women team, and we’re drawn towards this kind of story that’s around complex, multidimensional female characters.” Squibb came on board just days after receiving the script and before Johansson joined the project. “I wasn’t looking to make the script without June,” Johansson says. “It

had to be with June.” The film’s financiers gave Johansson “full freedom”, says Pinky Promise president Kara Durr. “Everyone was on the same page of giving Scarlett full creative control of what movie she wanted to make, and she came in with such a vision and a very clear point of view. The DP that she wanted, Hélène Louvart, Scarlett was like, ‘That’s who I want to shoot this movie,’ from the beginning.” Johansson felt it had to be shot in New York and she wanted to show her home city in a real way. But this wasn’t a simple task, and her lead actress was already 94 years old. “This is a particular film because it’s a complicated subject,” she says. “It’s a small film, but you’re still shooting it in New York.” Looking back, Lia recalls one of the biggest challenges of that New York shoot was, in a roundabout way, Taylor Swift. “Funnily

enough, one of our locations was right next to Taylor Swift’s house, so ironically, there would be paparazzi showing up when we were shooting. But they would show up and not pay us any attention, which was great, because they didn’t even realize Scarlett was directing.” Johansson was conscious of the need for speed. “I had a clock because June is 94,” she says. “She was feeling up for making the movie, and I knew it would be a lot of work for her.” So, they moved at a lightning pace. “I got the script in August, and I was like, ‘We have to make it this winter.’ That was very stressful, like crazy, crazy stressful. It fell apart a thousand different times.” Then Sony Pictures Classics came in. “That was amazing,” she says. “I don’t want to say I’m a film snob, but I love Sony Pictures Classics.” And for the first time, Sony Pictures Classics and TriStar Pictures would partner. “The idea of working with TriStar was amazing, it was perfect,” she says. “I couldn’t have asked for better partners than Sony Pictures Classics and TriStar. Nicole Brown, our executive at TriStar, is incredible, a dream executive. I was lucky.” When Squibb and Johansson met, Squibb immediately knew it would work. “Scarlett is so herself,” Squibb says. “She is who she is, take it or leave it, and I love that. I hope I carry myself the same way. I just think that she is so unafraid. She was very brave to say yes to it, and I immediately was taken with her and by her. I just felt, this woman and I will work well together.” “Scarlett doesn’t ask for approval. She doesn’t, and she shouldn’t. None of us should. If we are working, we’re working, we’re where we are because we deserve to be where we are. And I think it is so important that she knows her worth as a person. It has nothing to do with being an actress, but she knows who she is. We talked about the mistakes we’ve made. God, everybody makes mistakes. But I just think she’s a brave, very strong woman, and I admire that. I think that’s what we are at our best.” Squibb personally related to some of what Eleanor experiences with a move later in life. “I lived in New York for 65 years, and then I moved DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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out here [to LA] about 20-some years ago,” she says. “And it was a big change. I didn’t come out here knowing no one, but it’s still different. It was all new and I was in my eighties when I did that.” ●●●

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espite her confidence, the New York shoot initially gave Squibb some pause. “There were things that made me think, wow, can you do this? But I always feel I can. I’m always that way. But I think I also questioned my physicality in the film, would I be able to do it?” Squibb has a walking cane but says she doesn’t always need to use it. “I brought it to the first meeting with Scarlett. I had done [2024 comedy] Thelma without the cane, so I said, ‘I can do this without the cane, or I can use the cane.’ And Scarlett said, ‘Let me see you walk without it.’ And I walked a little bit away from her and she says, ‘Use the cane.’ And so that sort of set it all up from the beginning. This is what it was going to be. And it was great. I loved that. And using the cane was wonderful. I mean, I think, in a sense it gave her a bit of frailty that I don’t [have]. I mean, I’m always told, ‘You’re too fast.’ Even at my age, they’re telling me that. So, I think Scarlett saying, ‘Use the cane,’ it helped Eleanor.” Johansson seems awed as she recalls Squibb’s energy levels. “She said to me that her friends, who are all around her age, some actors and people in the industry, are like, ‘Why are you still doing this? It’s so much work. Aren’t you over it?’ She said to me, ‘I always feel like I’m still trying to get it right. I’m still trying to figure it out.’ How amazing. That’s the curiosity of an actor, you’re still working on it.” Johansson’s love for independent filmmaking is clearly a large part of her outlook. “Everyone that signed up for this film came to it because they loved the script, and they connected with the script,” she says. “That’s an amazing thing about making independent movies, it’s not like people are coming for this huge payday, but they’re really coming because they connect deeply to the material.” 68

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“I WOULD LOVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DIRECT AGAIN. I LIKE THE IDEA OF DOING ALL DIFFERENT SCALES OF WORK. BUT I THINK THE THING THAT I WOULD HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO WOULD BE THIS HUMAN ELEMENT OF CHARACTERS THAT ARE COMPLICATED.”

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The film’s action centers mainly around a friendship between Eleanor and an early-20s student, Nina. Kellyman—most recently seen in Blitz alongside Saoirse Ronan—was cast without first meeting Squibb. “I don’t really believe in chemistry reads,” Johansson says. “I don’t think they really need them. I feel like you know. Also, if you’ve got two actors that are great, they’re going to be great together. You know what I mean? Two actors that are great are going to have chemistry, because they’re good actors.” Hecht, with whom Johansson had appeared on Broadway in a 2010 production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, would be Eleanor’s long-suffering daughter, while Ejiofor, who as Nina’s father is grieving the loss of his wife, immediately connected to the role. “I just found myself incredibly moved by this story,” he says. “And I think it’s rare for me to find myself engaged so much thematically. You can either get swept away in a plot, or you can get swept away in a single character’s journey, and that can move you and that can be an emotional experience. But really, I think for this there was something about what it was really pushing against and what it was really talking to in the human experience—that sense of isolation, of loneliness, of grief, and of hopefulness and the instinct to survive.” From early on, the team was in touch with the USC Shoah Foundation, an organization founded by Steven Spielberg shortly after his 1993 film Schindler’s List. It’s dedicated to recording the experiences of Holocaust survivors—in Hebrew, the word ‘Shoah’ refers to the Holocaust—and they helped to

create an authentic representation of Bessie’s survival story for the film, and with the process of casting real survivors for the support group attended by Eleanor. “Jessica Hecht helped us identify a couple of people, and Shoah helped us identify a couple of people,” says Johansson. “Rodeph Shalom, a temple we shot at, also helped us. Different people helped us do outreach to identify survivors living here in the city that would want to participate.” “It was always very, very intentional that we wanted to find real survivors,” says Flynn. “And it took a lot of searching. People came

from Long Island and all over and their kids drove them in, and it was multiple days.” The group of survivors, now in their eighties and nineties, Johansson says, were “so incredibly patient. We’re sitting in this circle, and I have to say, one of the unifying characteristics of the group is that everyone there was such a good listener... They just continued to be present and listen to what everybody was saying in the group. I was really moved by that. Everybody was so still. Obviously, it comes from age, experience, and also empathy. The group had such collective empathy. It was really special.” For Squibb, sitting among them, it felt, “probably as close to reality as we’re ever going to get on a film set, because they were who they said they were. And I walked into it.” By the time of shooting, Squibb and Kellyman had become true friends offscreen. “It really felt like the line of where our characters started and where me and June ended, it was just completely blurred,” Kellyman says. “I feel like how we are in the film was how we

From top: June Squibb and Erin Kellyman; Rita Zohar as Bessie with Squibb. DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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From left: Squibb, Kellyman and Chiwetel Ejiofor; Kellyman and Squibb.

“IT REALLY FELT LIKE THE LINE OF WHERE OUR CHARACTERS STARTED AND WHERE ME AND JUNE ENDED, IT WAS JUST COMPLETELY BLURRED. I FEEL LIKE HOW WE ARE IN THE FILM WAS HOW WE WERE IN REAL LIFE, WHICH I THINK JUST MAKES THE FILM THAT MUCH MORE SPECIAL.” ERIN K EL LY MAN

Of course, almost 30 years ago, it was Redford that inspired Johansson to do this job her way. “He was so actor-focused,” she recalls. “He was so patient and would take the time to familiarize me with where my character was at that moment, what happened, where I was coming from in the story. He would tell me the story, the whole story, all the way up until that point. It was so helpful. It was so insightful, too, because I was also a young actor. I was working on a big film, and a lot was going on, and he would take the time. He created an intimate space in a big overwhelming production. “I’ve worked with different directors that have different ways of working, of course, and that’s great. It’s great to work with all different types of people. Some people, you could talk forever about the work that you’re doing. Noah [Baumbach] is like that, or Spike [Jonze] is like that. I’ve worked with Jon Favreau, who’s an amazing, amazing artist, and is so both visually adept and then is so emotionally plugged in. I remember when we were doing Iron Man 2 and I was working with him for the first time, we had such a diverse cast as far as different types of actors. It’s like, Robert Downey’s work [is] very particular

that way; Mickey Rourke is his own special animal, then I’m there and Gwyneth [Paltrow] and Sam Rockwell—very, very, very different kinds of actors—and the way they work are all so different. He was so flexible. I remember in a break, I said, ‘How do you do it? How do you know how to work with all these different people?’ He said it’s almost like being a therapist in a way where you understand the language that someone else is speaking and how they need to communicate to get what you need out of them. It’s about identifying that and adjusting yourself in that way. “I think what I realized on this job is that, as an actor, that ability is innately in you, because my work has been with other actors for as long as I can remember. So, while you’re understanding some of the technical parts of it—I’ve never been in the process of sound editing, but that I can learn—but the other part, I think, as far as the acting, the sensitivity to actors, and what their process is, is something that I obviously have learned over 30 years. So that part is not necessarily absorbing how other directors do, but it’s kind of baked in because it’s a part of my DNA at this point.” Ejiofor says, “If you told me this

was her 50th film, I would’ve believed you. There was just nothing that was phasing her about the process in that way, and she felt very comfortable in her own style of directing, which is something that is not always easy to find. And I think that that translates into the film itself. It’s immediately clear that she’s very in control of this craft.” Johansson’s care ultimately rubbed off on Kellyman in the best way. “I think she just gave me so much confidence in myself and in my capabilities that I can do this. I found that on my next job, I was like, ‘Wow, I actually feel OK.’” That next job? Danny Boyle’s hotly-awaited 28 Years Later, which Kellyman has seen only snippets of during ADR, but says is “insane. Holy shit, people are not going to be able... I just don’t feel like they’re ready for the storm that’s coming.” Johansson has also recently been doing ADR on a much-anticipated sequel: Jurassic Rebirth, which was another of her dreams made real. “I’m a humongous Jurassic fan,” she says. “I have been trying to weasel my way into the Jurassic universe for a very long time, probably 15 years. The whole Jurassic piece came together while I was making Eleanor. It was the exact

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were in real life, which I think just makes the film that much more special, because it is real, and I think you can see that it’s real too. Even in our downtime, we’d just be hanging out all the time because we lived in the same apartment building, and she would just leave the door open for me to come over and we’d have pizza parties.” For Johansson, Squibb was a joy to work with. “She’s so capable in this way where she’d do one take, it was immediately great, and then she would make some adjustments and do the second. She would do maybe three or four takes, and then, every single part of her coverage would have a completely perfect take, which is crazy. But she would apply every note, continuity, any kind of dialogue change. It was just like, that’s how you do it. This is the only thing June ever wanted to do, it’s the only thing she pursued, and she worked at it for her entire lifetime. And you see that when you work with her. It has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with experience. It was amazingly inspiring.” Kellyman’s first scene was where Nina, upset, locks herself in a bathroom. “When I got onto set, honestly you could hear a pin drop,” says Kellyman. “It was so silent. And I was like, ‘What is going on?’ But obviously, Scarlett had just created that environment that was just very respectful to the scene that we were about to shoot. I came off set that day and was like, ‘Thank you so much,’ because she had created an environment that enabled me to do what I needed to do in that moment, and I felt safe to do so as well. The way that she handled that whole situation was just nothing like I’ve ever experienced before. She is someone who understands what it’s like to be an actor as well, I think it’s just a whole different experience.” Squibb also observes that Johansson is 100% an actors’ director. “She would watch me, and she would say something to me that just opened up everything. Of course it was directing, but it came from the fact that she knew where I was, what I was going through at this point in my trajectory of trying to get somewhere. And I think that that is her strong point.” DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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same time we were shooting.” She had a meeting with Spielberg and told him, “‘I don’t know how aware you are, but I’m a massive Jurassic fan,’ and he was like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘I am. I actually really am, and I want to be in any part of this film.’ It was so surreal.” Johannson’s character is Zora Bennett. “She’s a member of the Armed Forces. She is privately contracted at this stage. She’s dedicated her life to helping other people, and she is worn down, to say the very least. We find her in a moment where she’s burnt out, and this opportunity comes up that’s impossible to pass up because it’s life-changing for her. I’ve had the good fortune to meet a lot of members of the Armed Forces. I’ve done several USO tours, and met with literally thousands of troops and met people that have incredible military careers... I created this character inspired by my time spent with people that have dedicated their lives to the military, and that ingredient is in there.” In addition, she is executive producing and starring in her first major television project, Amazon’s limited series Just Cause. Based on John Katzenbach’s 1992 novel, it’s a reimagining of the 1995 film of the same name, in which Johansson played the daughter of Sean Connery’s character when

she was just 10 years old. In this TV iteration, she is a Madison ‘Madi’ Cowart, a Florida newspaper reporter covering the final days of an inmate on death row. And that’s not all. On May 17th, she will host Saturday Night Live for the seventh time. Will she be getting her revenge on husband Colin Jost for his bawdy “roast beef sandwich” joke at her expense in SNL’s Christmas episode? “Revenge?” she muses. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. Retribution? I have my sources. I’ve planted some seeds.” At Cannes she will also appear in Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, an ensemble piece starring Benicio del Toro as a wealthy businessman of dubious means. “This is my third film with Wes,” she says. “He could talk about character stuff forever. He has the most incredible imagination, and he really loves all the nuance. And he’s so hilarious, he has such a great sense of humor. We just both laugh a lot together. It’s a different way of working than many other people that I work with, but it’s unique to Wes. It’s just great because you also have this wonderful camaraderie with all the cast, and he builds this whole world around the production. It feels like you’re doing black box theater or something.”

It seems likely that Eleanor the Great might be the beginning of a whole new directing career. “I would love the opportunity to direct again,” Johansson says. “I like the idea of doing all different scales of work. But I think the thing that I would have to be connected to would be this human element of characters that are complicated. I like the complications of human behavior. I’m interested in all the gray areas of that.” For now, what better story to bring to the international community in the current climate than one of empathy and connection? “It’s complicated,” says Johansson, “because the film to me very much is a movie about grief, it’s about human connectivity, and it’s also about forgiveness. It’s also about the truth versus reality, and it’s also about who has the right to tell someone else’s story, or do we have the right to tell someone else’s story? There’s a lot in it. Certainly, Jewish identity is a part of that.” Says Lia: “I think one of the things that drew us to this story in the first place is that it’s just a human story. It doesn’t matter what religion you are or what color you are… We felt it was a universal story. Even though it is so specifically New York and specifically about the Jewish experience.”

“SCARLETT DOESN’T ASK FOR APPROVAL. SHE DOESN’T, AND SHE SHOULDN’T. NONE OF US SHOULD.” JUNE SQUIB B Left: Squibb and Johansson presenting at the 2025 Oscars.

Of the Holocaust survivor stories within the film, Ejiofor says, “I think it’s always incredibly important to be reminded of periods in history where there has been a profound absence of humanity, and what the human cost of that is. I just think it’s necessary to keep talking and to keep communicating, to keep understanding that this is an idea of, when we talk about life, when we talk about loss, we’re talking about the experiences of a human family. And as a human family, we’ve gone through these extraordinary periods, horrific things have happened, horrific things continue to happen. And really, it’s reconnecting and understanding, and not losing sight of that. Understanding our human connection is something that I value in all my work, and it’s something that really sits in the heartbeat of this story.” Now at last, Johansson’s hope for the film is about to come to fruition, as the prospect of Squibb walking that Cannes red carpet rolls near. “It really is a dream come true,” Johansson says. “She was there when she was 85. Now she was coming here at 95.” When she called Squibb to tell her the good news, Johansson told her, “You’ve got to make it an every-decade thing.” It seems Squibb certainly has the energy for the trip. Ejiofor recalls attending her birthday party: “You think you’re going to go to a 95th birthday party and it’s going to be a slightly sedate affair, but it was an incredibly lively afternoon. We had to duck out and it was still going. She was right in the middle of it. It was tons of people, a completely crammed place.” He notes Squibb’s capacity for connection, her willingness to throw herself into new experiences. “She is just full of life and full of beans,” he says. “There’s just a great energy to her.” As Johansson muses on her cast and the larger themes of her film, she stresses the importance of staying open. “We’re so affected by one another,” she says. “We can move through being stuck by connecting with one another. I hope that that’s how the audience feels when they see the movie… The world needs June now more than ever.” ★ DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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BONO The rock star brings his documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender to Cannes. Back cover photographed by Olaf Heine 72

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BONO'S STAGE IS MORE THAN JUST HIS MUSIC • ANG LEE IS REVITALIZED BY BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN JAWS GETS THE SODERBERGH TREATMENT • ADOLESCENCE SPARKS GROWN UP CONVERSATION

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FOR YOUR EMMY CONSIDER ATION ®

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Bono

WHY APPLE VISION PRO WAS THE RIGHT VEHICLE FOR DEEPLY PERSONAL DOCUMENTARY BONO: STORIES OF SURRENDER, HIS FAVORITE FILMS, AND HOW SPIELBERG BECAME A VERY BIG NAME IN THE HEWSON HOUSEHOLD

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e laid bare his transformation from Dublin lad Paul Hewson into global rock star Bono in his memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Now, premiering at Cannes, comes the Andrew Dominik-directed documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender, depicting the U2 frontman’s 2023 one-man show at New York’s Beacon Theater. We see the musician perform songs, dig into his memoir, and describe such personal experiences as losing his mother Iris to a brain aneurysm that ruptured while the family 74

buried her father, and Bono’s own dad’s consequent withdrawal. Born in Dublin in 1960, Bono was just 16 when he met his wife Alison and joined up with guitarist Dave Evans (The Edge), bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. to form U2. The band would, of course, go on to become one of the biggest bands in history, selling 170 million albums worldwide and winning a record-breaking 22 Grammys. Bono’s lifelong activism began early too. In 1983, U2 released the album War, and the polemically charged song “Sunday Bloody

Sunday” about the futility of violence with occupying British forces in Ireland. Then, in 1985, they answered pal Bob Geldof ’s call to perform at Live Aid, which raised hundreds of millions to feed starving refugees in Ethiopia. And when told that the $250 million raised would only cover interest payments starving third world countries were paying to superpower debtor nations, Bono and his friends pushed those nations to wipe the debts. Bono: Stories of Surrender begins with him recalling when a congenital heart condition very nearly

killed him in 2016, then expands into an intimate and moving tale of father-son dynamics. The film is the latest move in a long and innovative alliance between Bono and Apple, first with Steve Jobs and later, his CEO successor Tim Cook. It began with Bono convincing Jobs to issue an ipod pre-loaded with U2’s music. The relationship took a controversial turn—with an apology from Bono—when the singer crashed the catalogues of Apple Music iTunes customers with free copies of the U2 album Songs of Innocence, whether they wanted it or not. And now, the relationship

RICH FURY

By Mike Fleming Jr.

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very excited about Europe, at the moment. In America, you’re going through some difficult times. What do you mean specifically?

You’re fighting with yourself, about the identity of America, and Europe feels somewhat abandoned. We have a land war on European territory, and it could spread. People are preparing for the thought that America might not be with us if this land war spreads, and Putin follows in the role of the Soviet Union and puts tanks in Czechoslovakia and just takes over. So, this is a feeling for me, for Europe, that this is a time when Europe is going to draw together. At this festival, you’re going to feel that… I’m really proud this tiny little film about my little family and the early days of U2 is getting its outing in Europe. I want it to be embraced by America, and I think it will. I’ve had other incredibly encouraging words from friends and people like Sean Penn who were there giving advice. There’s something poetic about it being in Cannes. There is a universality to the Hewson family story that comes through in the film.

Bono in the vintage elevator at the Beacon Theatre in New York.

continues as the documentary will not only screen on Apple TV+ post-Cannes, but it will be available to watch on Apple Vision Pro. Viewing the film through those goggles is a uniquely close and personal experience, complete with Bono’s own drawings and intricate details. Here Bono discusses why he felt this was the right vehicle for the medium, how he wants to push the envelope on immersive technology, and much more… What does it mean to have this very personal documentary premiering in Cannes?

Apart from the reward that they offer us in terms of good weather if you’re Irish, what I love about the French is their love of cinema. It’s the highest art in the French public’s mind. The Cannes Film Festival became this phenomenon, formed because the Venice Film Festival had been taken over by Mussolini and his German mate with the funny Charlie Chaplin mustache. They were getting to choose who won the big prize in Venice. So, the French said in 1939, “We’re going to replace the film festival in Italy, which has been taken over by the

fascists, and we are going to have a free film festival.” They didn’t get to do it until after the war, but this was an amazing idea of freedom of expression. It’s always a wonder to see this Oscars on the sea, the Palme d’Or. I remember Penelope Cruz winning the best actress. There was a whole bunch of people around in a busy restaurant. She walked in and as I was trying to get out of the table, she just stood up on the chair and stood up on the table and walked down it, sat down and said, “So what are you drinking?” And the whole of France is at her feet… I’m

I will say, even I’ve gotten sick of the protagonist. It’s that old line you fear most: “Here’s another great thing about me!” And no matter what you do, what you say about your flaws, your fault lines, and all the blood and guts of the story, it can still come across as, “Here’s another great thing about me.” How did you protect against that?

I had to dig quite deep and just go for a family story. All families are little operas, some bigger than others. There’s always the soap opera, and there’s suds here. There are tenors; there’s the figure of my father, which kind of dominates. And the band. People wouldn’t be turning up to hear my story if it wasn’t for them. Overall, as excruciating as it’s been—and I’m glad it’s over—this is a great close to it. To come from The Sphere [in Las Vegas], to the intimacy of the Beacon, is quite a shift. And this Vision Pro brings it back to an immersive experience. But intimacy is at the heart, I would say, of all of those projects. I tell DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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I understand challenging yourself to rise to the occasion, knowing you could and should fail. Add self-loathing that my own father left me with, and well, maybe this is in fact an Irish thing.

Well, there we go. Insecurity is your best security. I make this joke about Italians and Irish, and actually Jimmy Iovine told me it was true. He said, “I was [my father’s] son. I couldn’t put a foot wrong. Every idea I ever had was the greatest idea ever.” His father just loved him and convinced him everything’s possible, in an Italian [household], these are clichés. In my home and it sounds like yours too, that’s not how it worked. I was competitive with my father. That must’ve been annoying for everyone around us, especially him. And that’s the

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reason for my singing, at the end of the film, becoming him, me becoming the tenor. “You’re a baritone who thinks he’s a tenor,” my dad would say. And he was exactly right, it was an accurate description. So, becoming him at the end of the film, it was a big moment of release for me, my way of saying, “Thank you for the voice that you gave me.” When he passed, something freed up in me, for sure. And something changed in my voice. But the thing was that playing him night after night, just the turn of his head [depicting conversations with him in the one-man show]... I always loved my father, but I started to really like him. And I started to realize his put-downs were much funnier than I, the rebellious teenager, had credited him for… Being him, I just started to really like him, and he started making me laugh. I wish I’d gotten the jokes when I was younger. Tell me about your father for a second. A good Irishman, grew up a drinker, stopped cold one day. Always fearful for his job, and any praise toward me was faint praise, not dissimilar to what you got. Cut

to, I go see, in Mel Gibson’s office, The Passion of the Christ and am so profoundly moved by Christ’s suffering that I say to my parents, “See this movie, and let’s go back to St. Patrick’s Church in Bay Shore, Long Island.” Most Sundays for two years we did that. My son and I had a couple of years with my father that broke down barriers like you describe with your dad in this film. Then Hurricane Sandy hit Long Island, and when the power went out, he opened the screen door at the worst moment, hung onto the handle when a gust of wind blew it open. He cracks his head on the concrete landing. At 80 and on blood thinners, he died as abruptly as you watched your mother die when she collapsed at her dad’s gravesite and died from an aneurysm. As a coping mechanism, I turned to stone so my kids could grieve around me. I lost my faith because I’d arranged for that stoop to be demolished that very day. It felt like a cruel joke. It wasn’t until I saw the film Fruitvale Station and saw my dad in the young dying man Michael B. Jordan played, and I fell apart. This is supposed to be about you and your father, not

mine, but you asked, and there you go. I miss him terribly, and every song you sang about your father after he died, I felt losing my father and I realize it is why I identify so strongly with the compelling father-son story you tell in this film.

I’ve been writing about grief for a while. And we have a song on Songs of Innocence called “California”, and it goes something like, “There’s no end to grief. That’s how we know there’s no end to love.” You know you will never get over it, by the way. I’m here to deliver you the good and the bad of that. What was an icy, chilling feeling eventually over time gets replaced by this warm ache that you would miss, were it not there. Now, when I think of my father, I have a really beautiful warm feeling, and the same with my mother. But the laughter is also important to find, because I bet you and your father had some funny... He comes from that [Irish] point of view. There’s some funny shit. There was a lot of that. He was always quick with a good joke.

Laughing about it is really important. And being there, as you say,

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my friends, “Intimacy is the new punk rock.” If I’m going to do one of these memoirs, I’d better really go there. It shouldn’t be the same approach others have taken. We performed in the Sphere and that is what got me to Vision Pro. The core of this is, “Can we make this radical intimacy?” Does that sound pretentious? Probably.

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for your own kids, but not turning to stone. We start out that way and then we have to dissolve and allow them to see the strength that comes from owning up to your vulnerabilities. That’s what my father never got to. And now I can use words like stoicism, I can use words like heroic, and now I can feel guilty for being such a pain in the ass. But I think it would’ve been OK for him to say, “I’m terrified. I don’t know what to do. I’ve got two kids. I have no mother for you. I can’t replace her.” There are other complications, but I’m free and just so grateful for my origin story, and I hope it’s of any use to anybody. In the film you admit your mom’s memory was expunged to where you felt like you, your dad and brother essentially “disappeared” her. What toll did that take on you?

That was [dad’s] way of dealing with it. I’ve no resentment, but I don’t think it’s a good strategy. Because when you talk about somebody when they’re gone, they stay alive. Otherwise, you actually lose memories. There were a few reasons for writing the book, but one was largely to explain myself to

myself, but also to my family, and [create] a record of what was going on whilst they were alive. We try to get things out in the open in our house. We actually have a feisty table, but it’s also a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. But about the disappearing of Iris: I almost wrote the book to retrieve memories of her. We lost, my brother Norman and I, so much, just removing her

There wasn’t a family anymore. And what a circus it turned out to be. I married what I thought was the tightrope walker, the girl on the pony. She turned out to be the ringmaster. That’s Ali. I was probably the tightrope walker. In Bruce Springsteen’s early concerts, he would talk about the battles he had with his father, who

“Yes, I ran away with the circus. And what a circus it turned out to be.” BONO

name from the conversation. You’ve got to talk about these people. I mean, I think you can overdo it, too, but no, [silence] was not the right strategy. But I do not hold that against my father, Bob, the Da. How much of that unspoken hole in your life led you to form such early permanent bonds with your future wife Ali, and your bandmates?

Well, look, it’s psychology 101, but yes, I ran away with the circus.

tortured and ridiculed a young man trying to find himself. Would we have Springsteen’s album Darkness on the Edge of Town if he’d grown up with that unconditional love and support like Jimmy Iovine did? Without that edge, would he have worked in a garage all week, and been a wedding singer on the weekends? And then in the film we hear you telling your opera-obsessed dad that Pavarotti asked you and The Edge to collaborate

with him and he asks if the world’s most famous opera singer had knocked on the wrong door. How driven were you to seek your father’s approval and how did that serve you?

I mean, Bruce gets married every night to his audience, so in that sense he is the greatest wedding singer ever, and they’re the greatest wedding band. U2 are definitely weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs. Yeah, the wailing, this thing of singing... We’ve a song called “The Showman”. The opening lyric is, “Baby’s crying ‘cause it’s born to sing/ Singers cry about everything/ Still in the playground falling off a swing.” When I started out with U2, I wouldn’t have called it singing exactly, either. I would’ve called it shouting, but it is a kind of wail, and part of it is that primal thing that we’ve been talking about, but part of it is just not being ignored. But there’s something about singing. I was learning about singing from my father. This is not scientific, but he, I feel, bequeaths me in his passing an extra tone to my voice, and as I let go of all that resentment and rage, I changed. I just loosened up, and the voice

Scenes from Bono: Stories of Surrender.

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away from me before I got to know her, or she me, but I fell in love with my father. Is that Italian or Irish enough for you?

loosened up. Singing is not just for entertainment. The blues, that’s another thing that came out of wailing, you know? The Irish word for grief, it’s called keening. You’ll hear it in Africa. It’s bloodcurdling, [occurring during] the loss of life. In Ireland, in our history, we’ve all seen it in the present day in exceptional situations, but it was part of the ritual. There’s something about, you sing yourself out of your situation. You breathe.

You’ve hovered around movies a long time, supplying songs for Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders and many other directors. What’s the closest you came to taking a leap into acting or directing, and what held you back?

The opening of the film is about breathing, right, and the fear I felt when I was on the operating table, I was having heart surgery, and I hallucinated. It was this guy from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it turned out to be a very nice man called David Adams, a surgeon with a Texas accent, who saved my life. I think that I had no fear of the surgery or anything like that, but I remember the loss of air and feeling like my lungs were flooding or filling up. I’m a singer, so those lungs are really necessary, and that was the closest thing I came to losing my faith, as you were talking about earlier. It was the closest thing I’d had to panic, since I was a child. It wasn’t about the heart surgery. I thought I was suffocating. When you told your father about Pavarotti you were fishing for some validation. How did you take the slight when he joked it must be a mistake?

I think that’s right at the root of this story, for sure. But we end the film at the Teatro di San Carlo, the oldest opera house in the world. It sounds like the most mad idea, “By the way, it’s all set in the Beacon, but for one scene we just need to get to Naples, because this would blow my father’s mind. I’m going to become him, and I’ll be the opera singer that he had inside of him, but we have to do it here. The pub we met at all the time is called the Sorrento Lounge in Finnegan’s, and we need to finish in the bay of Sorrento. It’s all going to make sense.” Andrew Dominik, of course, gets it totally, but the people at Apple… You would expect a very 78

Bono performs at Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Italy.

serious, puzzled look on their faces. They said, “Yes. If this is that important to you, then we’re doing this. We’re in with you all the way.” It’s preposterous, but finishing in Italy in one of the most sacred places of music, and the most beautiful thing happens. Was there ever a moment where you felt validated by your father?

That happened in Texas where U2 was playing in the ’90s and I’d set up the spotlight to shine on him. This is his first time in the United States, in Texas, which is a whole other thing, more American than the Americans themselves. He comes and it’s like the sound of 10 747s, the roar of the crowd in Texas. And in the bright point in the show, I go, “Listen, I’ve got a person here today that means a lot

to me. It’s his first time in America and it’s his first time in the state of Texas and it is my father. And he’s right over there.” And everyone turns around, they see the spotlight and my da. He shakes his fist. But afterwards he comes back[stage] and I can see he’s a bit shaken. He shakes my hand and he says, “You’re very professional.” Probably the only compliment a former punk rock singer wants to hear, or the only compliment you don’t want to hear, rather. But of course it’s a whole other language, and it was beautiful. And the more we talk about this, I can see it touches you as it touches me for our personal reasons. The book was a love story to my missus in a way. But the film is a love story, to my mother, but it’s different because I never fell out with my mother. She was taken

U2 has done such ambitious multi-media presentations in concerts and the Sphere residency. Here, you make do with a simple table and chairs.

It’s the operating theater, the table, but it’s also the dining table in our house on Cedarwood Road in Dublin. Also, the chairs are the members of the band, and one of them’s Ali. These are props. We’ve been on tour with 250 trucks and now I’m down to four chairs. You could fit all the props in a station wagon.

K EV I N M A Z U N / G E TTY I M A G ES F O R L I V E N A TI O N

That is quite a scene you create at the start of the movie, when you almost died on the operating table, unable to breathe because a blister on your heart had burst.

I could never be an actor. The reason I wanted to work with Andrew Dominik was not just that he was a great painter of scenes and of story, but he was a great director of actors, and non-actors. His first film Chopper, that was Eric Bana, a comedian who had been on TV a bit. He takes that role and becomes the Eric Bana that we now know of. That film Chopper is the most like Andrew Dominik, meaning it’s as serious and funny as he is, and the humor of it is bewitching. Andrew drove me mad, though some people say I was there already. Asking me to say goodbye to my father, five times in one day we did that scene… And I was like, “I couldn’t do this.” I was in bits. “I do this five times?” And he goes, “Yeah, the lens is a lie detector, Bono.” And I’m saying, “Andrew, didn’t Marlon Brando say he lied for a living?” “Not on this set.” He knows what you think, in the lens, and you’d better be all there. That’s why I couldn’t be an actor, though for certain scenes it is great fun. My daughter Eve [Hewson] is an unbelievable actor, but in a funny way, when you’re in U2, you’ve got all the bells and whistles, the big productions and fireworks going off in your head and in your heart when you’re singing.

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How does it feel to see Eve’s emerging star, considering the way you followed your dad’s tenor dreams?

Following her career is a kind of an adventure in itself because you just never know where she’s going to go next. Single mother, comedian, femme fatale. She can be big, and then small. Even her family, honestly, we have no clue where she’s going next. When she takes [on a role], boom, she’s gone in there. Our son [Elijah] who’s out in public, he’s a guitar player and singer [in the band Inhaler] and an inhaler of life. He’s got the internal mental discipline to be a good songwriter. I’m certainly proud when I see [Eve on screen]. She does this thing where she puts the evolution of her character all over her apartment, the bathroom wall, to find the face she’s thinking about. Maybe this is normal, I don’t

Bono's daugher Eve Hewson in Tesla.

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“We've been on tour with 250 trucks and now I'm down to four chairs.” BONO

Bono on stage at the Mediolanum Forum in Milan, Italy.

know. And I saw her at her table for one of her characters and there was a picture of my mother, and I said, “Oh, it’s Iris.” She said, “Yeah, her look and her vibe. I need some of it. So, I have her there when I’m getting my makeup on every day.” Isn’t that wild? The first time I saw the film on Apple Vision Pro, I was the proverbial caveman looking at fire. I felt like I was onstage with you. What sparked you to put in that work here to help advance this technology, and where do you see it going in terms of disruptive storytelling?

Apple have this new sonic innovation commitment to fidelity of sound. Sounds are becoming really important in movies, in people’s home cinemas. The Vision Pro, it’s a commitment. You’re getting into a world, and there are extraordinary things I’ve seen through the Vision Pro... We had this idea of, well, the camera can be on stage and walking around you. We couldn’t light it as easy as we

thought, but we successfully got the viewer on stage. I took out my drawings from the stage show for the filming, and they’re not in the 2D Apple TV+ version of Stories of Surrender, but they are in Vision Pro. Those childlike drawings—no one would like to be able to draw as badly as me—but it’s like a signature, a fingerprint. How did it help to personalize an already personal story?

It made it really playful. I know Apple are dying to make the Vision Pro more affordable and more democratic, but they’re committed to innovation, they’re committed to experimenting. They know not everyone can afford this, but they’re still going for it, believing that some way down the line, it’ll make financial sense for them. But the fact that they may have to wait a while is not putting them off. What’s your favorite movie, and what stars helped you shape what you wanted to look like onstage?

I think my favorite film is Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. It just changed me, because it was this idea that angels would die to feel some of the ache and the pain of falling in love, because grief is the price we pay for love. The other one for me, growing up, was Peter Sellers and Being There, a genius meditation to me. Jim Sheridan is, to me, one of the great directors of all time. His first film was with Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot. That blew my mind. He’d come

from theater. I said to him, “How’d you do that? How did you know how to be on set with all these very technical things that were so very different than theater?” He said, “Eh. I just walked up to the DP and when he said to me, ‘How do I set this next shot up?’ I said, ‘You tell me. I’m here to learn.’ I did the same with Daniel, the same with everybody.” He said, “It’s amazing, if you ask people what they think, they sometimes tell you.” Yeah, he’s a psychological genius. His understanding of people, his understanding of great stories, deep structure in Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, he’s a very big brain. He’d give you hope that you could come from one discipline into another. Sam Mendes is also incredible, he moved from theater into cinema. You’ve waited until this film to really bare yourself on a screen. Maybe you had to wait for the right vehicle?

Steven Spielberg just flashed into my mind. Because Eve is working with him now, and I’m fed up hearing about Steven this, Steven that, and that Steven Spielberg is now the adult in the room in our house. And I would have to say the morality of his films was and is a North Star, not just for Eve, but for our family. As I say, I’m annoyed, I’m a little hurt that I come second as a sort of male figure or authority figure. Not that I was ever an authority figure for Eve, but the only person she’d probably listen to now, is him. ★

S E R G I ON E I N F U S O / C O RB I S V I A G E TT Y IM A G ES / I F C F I L M S / EV ER E TT C O L L EC T IO N

When my father offers his last words to me, which indeed were an expletive… I don’t think he was telling me to fuck off. I’m not ruling it out, but [I think it was directed at] the monkey on his back. But it’s that table. The table. Just no matter where you are, a nice little cottage or Cedarwood Road, there’s something about that kitchen table. That’s where it all comes out. The funny, funny shit, or those arguments. I mean, talking about faith, Christmas morning in our place, that’s when it really went off and we’d be at each other’s throats. So much for Prince of Peace, right? Even Santa Claus would’ve got a thump. Always politics and religion, the two things you’re not supposed to talk about. That’s all we were interested in talking about. And Irish people. There was one other thing we were really interested in talking about, except we don’t, and that is sex.

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California Dreamin' THE ORGANIZERS TRYING TO REKINDLE THE STATE'S FILM AND TV PRODUCTION BUSINESS

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or Los Angeles-based production workers, 2025 was supposed to be the light at the end of the tunnel. Instead, the year quickly fell into a pattern that has become all too familiar for the local industry when the hopes that things might finally return to normal were squandered yet again by an unprecedented, devastating event. In January, two historic wildfires ravaged the city, swallowing thousands of homes and leaving more than $250 billion in damages in its wake. After succumbing to runaway production for decades, which avalanched in the last five years following pandemic-related shutdowns and 2023’s historically long, dual strikes, California’s film and television production had been brought to its knees. But rather than view this latest tragedy as a death knell, it was almost as if it became the jolt the local industry needed to fight back. “I think that really renewed our commitment to doing everything we could to keep this industry vibrant and thriving here in California,” says Rebecca Rhine, the western executive director and associate national executive director of the Directors Guild of America. Rhine is leading the Entertainment Union Coalition in one of two prominent campaigns 82

From above: The destruction on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu; filming in Culver City.

that have emerged after the fires, aimed at returning to the Golden Age of Hollywood. The coalition’s primary goal with its own campaign, called Keep California Rolling, has been to lobby federal and state government officials to codify solutions. Meanwhile, Alexandra Pechman and Sarah Smith’s Stay in LA campaign is not only appealing to lawmakers but also to famous faces who can wield their own influence to keep production in Los Angeles. Even as firefighters were still battling the flames, the pair amassed more than 6,000 signatures, including from the likes of A-listers like LeVar Burton and Alison Brie, in support of their initiative. “This isn’t just a Hollywood issue. This isn’t just something that affects the biggest names you know,” Pechman says. “This affects florists,

small business owners, dry cleaners—all the people of our city really feel the ripple effect when this key, iconic industry is hurting.” From 2015 to 2020, about 50% of the 312 productions that did not qualify for California’s tax credit incentive relocated to another area, resulting in an approximate loss of 28,000 jobs and $7.7 billion in economic activity, according to a recent report from the EUC. The coalition makes the case that runaway production has widespread impact beyond direct job loss, affecting tourism, hospitality and more local industries. That doesn’t mean that those big names don’t help the cause. In fact, stars speaking out might be the only way to really get people to listen, Pechman and Smith say. “That’s why people do stay. Someone powerful enough, either in front of or behind the camera, just says, ‘Well, I’m not going to make the project unless it’s shot here,’ and so that is hugely influential,” Smith says. Earlier this year, DGA President Lesli Linka Glatter answered that call herself during an impassioned speech at the guild’s award ceremony, advocating that productions be filmed where they are set, at the very least. She also promised her next project would film in LA.

J OS H E DE L S O N / A F P / T I M O T HY N O R R I S . G E TTY I M A G ES

By Katie Campione

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“I think our superpower in the film business is our resilience and our sense of community.” LESLI LINKA GLATTER

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The show is Imperfect Women with Kerry Washington, Elizabeth Moss and Kate Mara, who Linka Glatter says were instrumental in the push to have the production remain local. “There are many people that have the power to make those kinds of changes, and now is the time to do it. We cannot wait. We cannot wait until we have lost the business,” she says. State officials had already begun exploring potential solutions to the years-long production exodus in California and, in October, Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a substantial increase to the state’s Film & TV Tax Credit Program to $750 million annually, which would make it the second largest in the country. Lawmakers have also introduced a pair of bills aimed at “modernizing” the program by allowing a wider range of projects to qualify and offering more funds to each individual production. Nearly everyone interviewed agreed that, while the state’s response is a good start, additional funding alone will not be enough to staunch the bleeding of this particular issue. On a local level, Pechman and Smith have also been focused on making Los Angeles “feel more production friendly and welcome productions back home,” via overhauls to the onerous and expensive permitting system that deters many filmmakers from attempting to shoot in the city. “It’s also about encouraging studios, whose businesses are headquartered here, to invest in the creative community where they live. I mean, we have such a rich community and history of generational craftspeople, and I think that’s such an undervalued resource,” Smith says. “We have artists who are the best in their game, and if we lose them to other places… it’s almost like giving away the rich soil that this place has been growing forever.” Rhine also says the EUC is “looking at every tool available on the federal level” to bolster statewide incentives and help states compete

Rebecca Rhine and Alexandra Pechman

with international territories like the U.K. and Canada, which have been steadily poaching production from the U.S. for decades. Each state incentive program is designed to compete internationally, but given the unique challenges facing the U.S., the unions argue a federal tax incentive is also necessary. The reality is that the Hollywood unions represent workers across the country who have been impacted by a global production contraction. Per a 2023 report from the Motion Picture Association, the U.S. film and television industry alone supports more than 2 million jobs and contributes over $180 billion in total wages, encompassing 122,000 businesses nationwide. A report from ProdPro suggests that, while the number of global productions increased by 18% and generated an additional $16.2 billion in 2024, production levels last year still “fell short of expectations”. Some have wondered whether throwing money at the issue is nothing more than a race to the bottom. With so many competing territories that might just increase their own incentives in response to any moves by California and the United States, will the state eventually find itself behind the ball again? “It’s not just tax incentives that are luring productions away,” Smith warns. “The cost of labor, obviously, the cost of goods, the fact that a lot of places have universal health care and pensions. It’s tough for Americans to compete and for Californians to compete, given a lot of those factors, but we’ve just reached a point where it’s compete or die,” Smith warned. “We must take action to preserve an industry that has huge cultural impact and is such an important part of our identity and legacy in Los Angeles and throughout California. I think we’ve been taking it for granted for too long.” These four women are not alone in sounding the alarm on the bleak state of film and television production in California and across the U.S. In a recent episode of his podcast, Rob Lowe joked with his Parks and Recreation co-star Adam Scott that, if it were made today, the NBC sitcom likely would’ve been shot in Budapest. He also revealed that his game show The Floor shoots in Ireland, despite having American contestants. In short, things are looking bleak, he complained. It’s true, Los Angeles is not the bustling production town it once was. According to a recent report from FilmLA, production in Los Angeles was down more than 30% over five-year averages in 2024. But, there are still a few lone high-profile productions that remain in the city, including

From top: DGA President Lesli Linka Glatter; on the Hacks set; the destroyed Hacks house in Altadena.

ABC’s High Potential, Amazon’s Jury Duty and HBO’s Hacks. “The whole show is a little bit like our love letter to show business and to comedy and the entertainment industry at large,” Hacks co-creator Paul W. Downs told Deadline in a recent conversation, explaining the desire to film in Hollywood even though much of the show is set in Las Vegas. Hacks lost an iconic filming location when the Altadena home introduced in Season 2 as Deborah Vance (Jean Smart)’s “side mansion” was engulfed in flames. It is one of several famous structures that are now gone, only adding to the bleakness surrounding the state of film and television in the city that was once the mecca of production. Though the path back is uncertain, the glimmer of hope remains that this will one day ring true again. “I think our superpower in the film business is our resilience and our sense of community, and that is powerful,” Linka Glatter says. “I do think in the worst of times, hopefully people’s best selves come forward. ★ DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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DONALD TRUMP DECLARED WAR ON DEI. THE INDUSTRY RESPONDED By Ted Johnson

From above: Rachel Zegler as Snow White; Marissa Bode and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked.

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ust outside the Motion Picture Association in Washington D.C., the street-wide, two-block letters that spelled out “Black Lives Matter” have been removed. The disappearance of the streetscape, put in place following the George Floyd protests in 2020, is indicative of what’s happened in Trump 2.0—an all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, in the government and outside of it. Hollywood has had a varied response, with some entertainment figures speaking out, while studios and their corporate parents have tried to lay low, for now. But there’s quite a contrast between pre- and post-Trump. Universal’s Wicked, which premiered in November, is still promoted on Comcast’s corporate page for its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), including a lead character who uses a wheelchair. By contrast, the March release of Snow White, with Rachel Zegler, a Latina actress, in the lead, put Disney into a bit of a crisis mode amid a loud and emboldened rightwing casting backlash. Under Trump, the backlash has morphed into one with regulatory implications. The President’s appointee to lead the FCC, Brendan Carr, has launched investigations into the so-called “discriminatory” DEI practices of Comcast and Disney, while suggesting that he would move to block planned

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Why the fight for inclusivity means thinking outside the box By Destiny Jackson

s the founder and CEO of Love My Productions, a company dedicated to championing films made with or by disabled creatives, Asha Chai-Chang is working to make the industry more inclusive. The company, she says, was “born out of the idea of supporting other disabled filmmakers.” However, as a first-generation Afro-Latina and Caribbean-Asian American, she also ran into intersectionality roadblocks. “When I met someone as a business creative, they would [assume], ‘Oh, you’re Black, so you’ll make those types of films,’” she says. But the truth is that her interests were multifaceted, from anime to family and children’s content. “They told me, not asked me, what I was making. So, I just

said, ‘I’m not asking for permission anymore. I’ll just start my own production company and show you what we want to make.’” Chai-Chang, whose recent credits include the sports drama Unstoppable about the life of disabled wrestler Anthony Robles, also works as a production accessibility coordinator for studios such as Apple TV+, Amazon and ABC. Behind the scenes, she carves out spaces so that employees can thrive in their work environments. What are the challenges on set? “It’s lack of access to get in the room and say, ‘Hey, productions, you should consider this before you start filming,’” she says. “It can be anything from building codes to map systems and using dark mode for documents. Or communicating properly when a location

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mergers of companies still engaged in the practices. “I want to make sure that your companies are not promoting invidious forms of discrimination in violation of FCC regulations and civil rights laws,” Carr wrote to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, citing language on Comcast’s website calling DEI a “core value of our business”. In recent months, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global and Disney have altered policies. In the case of WBD, they ended participation in third-party surveys, while Disney ended a Reimagine Tomorrow initiative, which highlighted stories from underrepresented communities. But despite those changes, Carr wrote in a letter to CEO Bob Iger that he wanted “to ensure that Disney ends all discriminatory practices in substance, not just name.” He went on to cite inclusion standards at ABC that “50% of regular and recurring characters” come from underrepresented groups, something he wrote “may have forced racial and identity quotas into every level of production.” A Disney spokesperson said, “We are reviewing the Federal Communications Commission’s letter, and we look forward to engaging with the commission to answer its questions.” A Comcast spokesperson said, “We have received an inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission and will be cooperating with the FCC to answer their questions. For decades, our company has been built on a foundation of

Jharrel Jerome as Anthony Robles in Unstoppable.

integrity and respect for all of our employees and customers.” That the companies delivered a neutral response is no surprise: In these early days of the Trump administration, media companies are largely hunkering down and hoping for the best. Trump’s executive order on January 21st doesn’t just eliminate DEI policies in the federal government, but it directs each federal agency to identify up to nine potential investigations or large corporations, non-profits and foundations for their practices. When it comes to the FCC, though, there are questions of just how far the agency can reach into the private sector, although Carr has emphasized the FCC’s regulatory authority over broadcast stations. The FCC’s rules “prohibit discrimination in hiring on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin or gender” by broadcasters and cable and satellite providers, but the potential punishment for companies upholding their DEI policies—like rejecting a broadcast license—may be years away, as the next renewal dates are not until 2028. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, said during an appearance at the National Association of Broadcasters convention: “With all of these efforts, the harassment is really the point, not the end goal, because in the end, this is not defensible under our authority. So, when you see companies capitulating, that is the end goal, and we are seeing that.”

like craft services has changed to a farther walk and you have people with limb difference, wheelchair users or people like me with respiratory disabilities.” During the era of DEI backslide, how is ChaiChang navigating growing fears in the industry? “I’m proud of seeing what we’ve been able to produce. We have projects that are studio funded and the collaborations continue from there,” she says. “Everyone’s always treated disability like a bad word. But weirdly, I think the conversations about taking away policy is what we needed to bring us back together.” She adds, “Women of color and disabled people are usually the last ones thought of when it comes to gaining access to opportunities. That’s why I have [my company]. Disabled people have always been a part of history moving the needle. I’m not going to pretend these changes weren’t discouraging at first, but I’m choosing to stay encouraged about the future. Even if studios say they aren’t doing it anymore, we’ve always been independent and found ways to get our voices heard.”

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ROGER ROSS WILLIAMS One Story Up holds tight to its DEI roots

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cold wind blowing from Washington won’t knock Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams off course. “Let’s just say DEI is alive and well at One Story Up,” he says of the production company he co-founded with Geoff Martz. “This is our mission. It’s always been our mission, and we will always give opportunities to people from marginalized communities, outsiders.” Major American corporations have scaled back or eliminated DEI programs and so have Hollywood studios from Disney, to Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery. But Williams says he’s still seeking diverse talent. “I search them out,” he comments. “It’s not so hard to find people who have not been offered opportunities. They’re actually everywhere… Me and my team, we’re constantly out there. I go to festivals. I watch shorts. There are many places to go and find young talent.” In April, Williams received the Impact Award from the Miami Film Festival. While in town, he spent time at the 1st Take Youth Film Program, “an organization that teaches kids from all across Miami, Black kids, filmmaking experience… I had an amazing conversation, really inspiring them that even though they may come from situations where they don’t have opportunities or mentorship to become filmmakers, that

“It’s not so hard to find people who have not been offered opportunities. They’re actually everywhere.” DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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From left: Logan Marmino in Best Foot Forward; Mech Cadets.

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ASHLEY EAKIN The DGA Disability alt co-chair fosters hope for the future of accessible filmmaking

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etween polishing scripts and holding the fort on set, writer-director Ashley Eakin also serves as alt co-chair on the DGA’s Disability Committee. Started in 2023, after fellow directors wrote a letter in support of creating an official group, DGA President Lesli Linka Glatter designated the committee’s permanence. In 2020, companies formed a unified front promising to champion DEI initiatives moving forward. However, when the DGA began tracking inclusionary hiring in episodic television in 2022, the results revealed that only 0.6% of directors who self-identify as members of the disabled community were hired. Born with a rare bone disease, Eakin understood the importance of accessibility in her career. “DEI opened the door for me absolutely,” she says. “People realized that disabled stories were told without disabled people. Then they wanted more authentic perspectives.” Her first writers’ room was Netflix’s Mech Cadets where the team adapted an existing character to have a disability. She also directed episodes of Apple TV+’s Best Foot Forward, which follows the everyday life of a preteen boy with a prosthetic leg. She attributes these “authentic and inclusive” experiences working with actors and crew with disabilities as the reason she ended up joining the DGA. Amid recent political condemnation of DEI, studios have rolled back their efforts. “We need dismantling of the bias,” Eakin says. “I love that there’s many directors with a huge career, who have a disability, but were hiding in plain sight. That’s one

of the reasons I encourage people to identify. We’re in a tricky time right now, so I get it. I felt called to helping this community and being a part of leadership because I can’t hide my disability. There are positive ripple effects that can happen if you disclose. The great thing is that the DGA is not the only place advocating for disabled filmmakers. There are other organizations also trying to make our industry more diverse and include disabled people.” During these dark times of DEI rollback, inclusive unions are a beacon of light. “This community has been so valuable because people working in the trade can come talk about things they’re dealing with,” Eakin says. “When I was younger, I didn’t see anyone with a disability directing. Of course there were. Now that I’m in the community and know people that are incredible filmmakers doing this work before any of us started, it’s been great to see. This is a place to show that we belong in this industry.”

Ashley Eakin

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they can do it too. Because I came from nothing, and I did it.” Williams grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, raised by a single mom who worked as a housekeeper. Despite a lack of connections, he got a foothold in television production. In 2010, he became the first African American director to win an Oscar, for his short documentary Music by Prudence. He earned a second Oscar nomination for his 2016 documentary feature Life, Animated. Last year, Stamped from the Beginning, his documentary based on the book by Ibram X. Kendi, earned an Emmy nomination. The year before, The 1619 Project, his series based on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, won an Emmy. Stamped and The 1619 Project earned acclaim for dissecting structural racism and examining the foundational contributions of African Americans to the nation’s economic prosperity and artistic richness. The film and the series were so incisive, in fact, that they played a key role triggering the defensive, anti-DEI backlash. “We’re looking at the pendulum swing, but there will be a resistance to that,” Williams affirms. “The pendulum will swing back the other way. So, this isn’t permanent, what’s happening.”

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Adolescence WITH ITS SHOCKING SUBJECT MATTER, POWERFUL ACTING AND TECHNICAL BRILLIANCE, THE NETFLIX SMASH HAS THE WHOLE WORLD TALKING By Max Goldbart Graham recalls spending his teenage years in youth centers playing soccer with friends and compares this to a reckoning he and Hannah Walters, his wife and fellow Matriarch Productions founder, experienced during the pandemic with their kids. “There was a disjoint at a point in my life between me and Hannah and both of our teenagers,” he adds. “We had to work very hard to mend that and understand why they were spending so much time in their rooms. We put a lot of effort in and started to ask questions and find things out.” Having journeyed through a lengthy development pathway with Amazon, before being snubbed by now-ex Amazon MGM content boss Jennifer Salke, Netflix speedily snapped up the show and the jigsaw fell into place. Graham had worked with Barantini on the BAFTA-nominated Boiling Point, which took a similar one-shot approach, albeit in a smaller precinct, while Graham and Thorne had collaborated plenty down the years, including on gut-punching shows like The Virtues. So much of the discussion around Adolescence has correctly highlighted the one-shot direction, but creators Thorne and Graham took a fresh approach to the writing too. “Stephen knew I was a serious bugger who was into the darker issues of the world,” Thorne says. “He called me and asked me to write it, and it was me who said, ‘Why don’t we try and write it together?’ It was my keyboard, and Stephen

would just talk to me, and I told him that it would be his responsibility to challenge me and unpack his brain with me.” Thorne and Graham’s speak-and-type writing process could be replicated on future projects, Thorne thinks, although he stresses that there needs to be an “intimacy” between the pair, and they need to “care about each other” in order for it to work properly. He points to Adolescence’s third episode, arguably the most painful, in which Cooper’s Jamie Miller spends an hour with child psychologist Briony Ariston (Doherty) who is trying to better understand his motivations. Virtually the entire episode is spent in one room with just Cooper and Doherty. “I don’t know if I’d have had the guts to do this if it wasn’t for Stephen saying, ‘OK, write a David Mamet play,’” Thorne says. “I would have found ways to get out of that room, but Stephen said, ‘It needs to be one conversation,’ and his belief kicked me up the ass.” With help from execs, Thorne and Graham combined to make the Adolescence scripts feel as real, nuanced and simultaneously dramatic as possible. And it’s here that the director stepped in. Barantini was always clear that each episode would need to be filmed in one continuous take to up the ante and urgency. That process has been covered in the press plentifully over past weeks, but it bears repeating. Featuring around 320 extras, each episode was filmed in a fourweek block that mostly comprised technical practices and rehearsals. The final week would

BE N BL A CK A L L / N ET FL I X/ JA C K TA Y L OR / G E TT Y IM A G ES

ince it premiered in March, Netflix’s breakout TV hit of the year has reverberated through homes, schools and political discussions around the world. At the time of this interview, co-creator Jack Thorne has just visited 10 Downing Street—the home of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer—to discuss both Adolescence’s outsized impact on the public consciousness, and what can be done to help solve the societal ills examined by the limited series. Starmer has recently taken the rare step of pronouncing his love for a Netflix show and simultaneously making it part of the nationwide school curriculum, deeming it vital viewing for all young people. However, others, such as Elon Musk, and Starmer’s opposite number, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, have spread an unfounded conspiracy theory about its main character. Predictably, the media has been in overdrive. Away from Adolescence being used as a political football, the show, produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B, Warp Films and Matriarch Productions, has in the past few weeks been redefining the notion of a breakout hit. At the time of writing, this local British series about a murder committed by an extremely troubled teen and the ensuing fallout, starring its co-creator Stephen Graham, Erin Doherty, Ashley Walters and rising star phenomenon Owen Cooper, had become the third most-watched Englishlanguage Netflix series of all time. When one considers how quickly this milestone was crossed and ponders the show’s subject matter, this achievement almost defies belief. “I’m still massively surprised,” says director Philip Barantini, the pioneer behind Adolescence’s disruptive one-shot style and a man whose stock has risen enormously. “You make a little series in a specific northern town in the U.K. and hope people get it, and suddenly you are getting messages from India, Venezuela and the U.S. But the themes are common across the globe, and I think that’s why it has resonated.” Those themes are where it all began. Adolescence started with Graham’s shock at the stabbing of a young girl by a teenager in his home city of Liverpool. This set the Peaky Blinders star thinking about why modern society was driving teenagers to behave in this way, the terrifying role of social media and what could be done. Fast-forward several years, and it could be argued his show has done more than any politician in recent memory to begin addressing the problem.

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1 Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty on the set of Adolescence. 2 British PM Keir Starmer and Jack Thorne. 3 Stephen Graham, director Philip Barantini and cinematographer Matthew Lewis. 4 Graham.

feature two takes per day, leaving the team with at least 10 to choose from at the end of the week. During takes, Barantini would mostly watch on from a vehicle disguised as a police van for the purposes of the show. Scenes where actors were moving between locations were particularly tough. When Adolescence first started gaining word-of-mouth traction, audiences marvelled at a drone shot moving from the school to a memorial site for Jamie’s victim Katie. People couldn’t understand how a camera had seemingly broken through a window, and they were flabbergasted by the way in which Graham’s character seemed able to calmly drive a van while performing one of Adolescence’s most emotive scenes. Barantini has unsurprisingly landed himself the status of a one-shot pioneer, but he stresses that there have been many before him. He pays tribute to Hitchcock classics like Rope and 2015 single-take German crime thriller Victoria, while pointing to innovative techniques such as those deployed by Jonathan Glazer’s CCTV-like The Zone of Interest. “Victoria just blew my mind,” he says. “It was the feeling I got from it and what it did to me. I’d never experienced that before. It’s about being bold and saying, ‘Do we really need to see this person’s face, or can it just be played out in a wide angle while we’re staring at an apple on the table?’” Barantini has been on quite the journey, having started out working in restaurants and bars before acting in shows like Band of Brothers, The Responder and Chernobyl. It was the passing of his mother nearly a decade ago that pushed him to go after directing, he says. “That was the moment where I said to myself, ‘I don’t give a shit. I’m literally going to give it everything, and I’m not going to stop until I know that I’ve worked so hard to get where I want to be.’” Barantini is currently directing Enola Holmes 3.

He stresses that he “doesn’t want to be known as the one-take guy,” noting that there are “massive limitations” when it comes to one-shot. “Unless you’re going to stitch it together and fake it, you can’t play with time,” he adds. “You’ve got a window, a moment in time, a slice of life and a slice of this specific moment. It’s very limiting and doesn’t lend itself to everything.” But it certainly lends itself to the subject matter that Barantini, Graham and Thorne are passionate about tackling. Along with Boiling Point, Barantini has made a short, Seconds Out, about a young man learning to cope with his mental health issues, and Netflix feature Accused, which, like Adolescence, deals with a world of social media pile-ons. “I always say that everybody has at least two masks they wear,” he says. “One is the mask which puts on a front, and the other is that mask at home.” These themes will out in Adolescence, but in something of a case of life imitating art, social media conspiracies have gripped the show’s discourse, with the likes of Musk and Badenoch engaging with a disproven theory that Jamie Miller is based on the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana, but had his race changed in the show from Black to white. Graham and others involved with the show have since been accused of being “woke” and “anti-white”, yet Rudakubana’s crimes happened long after the idea for Adolescence had been put down on paper. “That was a really strange experience,” says Graham. “I find it interesting to hear some of the theories people are coming up with when this was something that came from my own head. But that’s the thing about art, it can always be subjective and can always be twisted to make a certain agenda.” Given that the show explores the crushing impact of social media, Graham highlights the irony of the criticism coming from keyboard warriors, while at the same time, he says, “You’ve got people coming up to you in [British supermarket] Tesco saying, ‘Oh my god it’s magnificent, thank you so much.’ No one has approached me and called me anti-white to my face or said I’m pushing a negative agenda.” Partly for this reason, and despite Plan B saying that they are chatting to Barantini about Adolescence’s “next iteration”, Graham rejects the notion of an imminent second season. “Nothing is ever going to have the impact that this has had,” he says. Thorne remembers that day at the prime minister’s home and ponders how the most crucial element of the meeting was that it was not just him and the other creators speaking with Starmer and his entourage, but also stakeholders who had been campaigning on these issues way before Adolescence was in the ether. “It’s extraordinary that we have attracted [Starmer’s] attention, but the good thing about Downing Street was that it wasn’t just us around that table,” says Thorne. “This is the beginning of a conversation. It’s clear people are desperate to talk and are hungry for a prime minister that listens. And I hope that he keeps listening.” ★

THE RIGHT TOUCH Meet Ita O’Brien, the industry’s go-to intimacy coordinator By Diana Lodderhose

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ong considered the pioneer of the intimacy coordinator role, Ita O’Brien has been guiding the film and television industries on best practices for intimate scenes which may involve nudity or sexual content ever since she published her ‘Intimacy on Set’ guidelines in 2017. At the time, no such guidelines existed. The U.K. native founded her company Intimacy on Set the following year, providing services to TV, film and theater, with training in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. She has worked across projects such as Normal People, Sex Education, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and I May Destroy You, and the latter resulted in creator and star Michaela Coel crediting O'Brien in her Best Actress BAFTA award acceptance speech. “Thank you for your existence in our industry; for making the space safe; for creating physical, emotional and professional boundaries so that we can make work about exploitation, loss of respect, about abuse of power without being exploited or abused in the process,” Coel said on stage. It was a timely dedication given that the show, which followed a victim of sexual assault, aired amid a growing #MeToo scandal in the U.K. TV industry. O’Brien, a former dancer and drama school teacher, has dedicated herself to “creating safe spaces for physical, emotional and professional boundaries” in the industry and her guidelines have been supported by a number of organizations and individuals. And she’s adamant that these guidelines are not a constraint, but more an “improvement on current practice. They free the actor to embody the character whilst delivering repeatable and safe scenes that facilitate the director’s vision,” she has said publicly. Through her work, O’Brien engages in a careful process with the actors whereby the lines are clear on what they consent to in the role and where they can and cannot be touched. She’s often referred to her work as being much like choreography, and she often leans into her dance background. Earlier this year, she published her first book, Intimacy, which delves into her work on set and challenges outdated ways of exploring sexual connection on screen. Ita O’Brien

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Intelligence Assets HAS HOLLYWOOD LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE AI? By Dade Hayes

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fter running a gauntlet in 2023, with dual strikes thwarting the recovery from Covid, Hollywood has entered a different phase with respect to AI. Perhaps not a radically different phase—plenty of anxiety and doubt remains in the wake of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA’s fight with studios and streamers to win protections against unethical uses of artificial intelligence. Spasms of unchecked innovation like OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli generator, which remade the internet into one big Miyazaki film, raised unsettling questions about the agency of individual artists in a world of machines. Even so, a sense of curiosity and pragmatism has gradually seeped into the creative community, especially as technology keeps improving. “The whole industry is going through a transformation, and it’s not because of AI,” says Andrew Hevia, head of film and TV at Fabula North America (Pablo and Juan de

Dios Larraín’s production company). “Theatrical is being challenged and audience viewing patterns are changing… The outsized blockbuster budgets aren’t sustainable. You have all these other, way bigger forces. If this is a tool that allows us to increase our ambition while still allowing the industry to survive and thrive and make stories engaging in a way that hadn’t really been possible before, that feels like a net good.” In that spirit, Hevia helped spearhead a partnership between Fabula and Runway, a rising AI startup valued at $3 billion. Runway also has collaborations in place with Lionsgate and Harmony Korine’s studio EDGLRD. The firm’s tools are being used on Sundance prize-winning director Cutter Hodierne’s film The Shepherd, set to shoot in 2026 in the Andes Mountains. The filmmakers are striving for a Terrence Malick-style, nature-based aesthetic without having to fund a full-on mountaineering expedition.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all opportunity. It’s still a very human-driven process,” Hevia says. “You really have to refine it and speak to it to understand what you want to get out of it that’s really meaningful. That’s where there’s opportunity.” Asked at a recent CNBC conference about her view of AI, NBCUniversal Chairman Donna Langley described the prevailing response to it in recent years as a “panic” that was “a bit overdone”. The industry has a choice, she said. “We could be really scared of it and run for the hills, or we could embrace it as a technology that could actually enable efficiency or just a better set of processes.” One thing is clear: A vast amount of money is being pumped into AI. Not only are Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Meta and Nvidia planning to spend hundreds of billions on it across a broad set of areas, but AI-oriented entertainment shops are booming. Companies like Asteria and Flawless are making their mark.

ASTERIA A new AI film and animation studio is rising on the foundations of old Hollywood

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By Matt Carey

steria, the company founded by Oscar-nominated producer-director Bryn Mooser and actress-producer Natasha Lyonne, occupies the vintage Mack Sennett Studios in Los Angeles, built in the early 20th century when the movie business was in its infancy. Now, more than a century later, the industry faces revolutionary change with dynamic advances in generative artificial intelligence. “What we’re seeing with this technology,” says Mooser, “is probably the most significant leap, certainly in my lifetime, in terms of what it's going to mean for how we make things.” Existing AI companies, like OpenAI, train their video generation models at least 90

in part on “publicly available data” like YouTube videos, without compensating or acknowledging the content creators. But Asteria, working in partnership with tech startup Moonvalley, promises “the first clean and ethical AI model.” They call their model “Marey”, after 19th-century French scientist and cinema pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey. “We’ve trained it only on data that we have paid filmmakers or rights holders to license,” Mooser says. “Nobody else is training a model like this.” It’s a filmmaker-first approach, Mooser insists, and solves a major concern for Hollywood­copyright issues. Studios can’t slap AI-generated images on screen that

Studio Ghibli's 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies

Langley

Hastings

have been co-opted from someone else’s work without inviting a lawsuit. “If we can come out with a model that’s as powerful as everything else, but is trained ethically and legally, then we can get that model through the [Hollywood] legal departments,” Mooser says. “And on the studio side, we hope Marey can become the foundational model for the industry.” The Marey model unleashes stunning possibilities. Take an animator who wants to turn 2D illustrations into a film. By ingesting artwork into the model, Marey can take care of animation and more—saving huge amounts of labor. “The technology that we have under it, which is this clean model, is then going to help scale it,” Mooser explains. “More characters, more Trillo backgrounds, but all in the style of what the artist has done.” In a live-action context, material shot by a filmmaker can be uploaded into Marey to generate sequences that weren’t captured in camera. “We want to work with studios to

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N ET F L I X / TR I C OA ST WO R L DWI DE / G E T T Y I MAG E S/ XY Z FI L MS

Stability AI turned heads last year by getting James Cameron to join its board. Joe and Anthony Russo’s independent studio AGBO is not only implementing AI across its business, but it also hired former Apple exec and Stanford professor Dominic Hughes as chief scientific officer to oversee AI efforts. In a recent report on the state of AI studios, consulting firm FBRC. ai found the focus shifting from gee-whiz tech to traditionally rigorous storytelling. “This re-centering around narrative within the AI space is a welcome relief from the hype and overstatements that drove some of the conversations in the last two years,” the report’s author, Rachel Joy Victor, wrote. “The gleeful ‘press a button and make a whole film’ narrative that drove conversations (both positively and negatively) for much of 2023 was spearheaded by tech companies, not by the studios they hoped would implement them.” Innovation can happen at scale, given that a D.W. Griffith-sized period epic doesn’t have to involve a cast of thousands. That explosive capacity is one reason unions and other stakeholders are wary. But a number of optimists see virtue in that speed to market. One is Staircase Studios, a new maker of films, TV series and video games founded by Divergent producer

Asteria's Bryn Mooser and Natasha Lyonne

Pouya Shahbazian. It is promising to deliver “near-major-studio” levels of quality at budgets under $500,000. Staircase points to the caliber of its pipeline, which is stocked with Black List scripts and overseen by animation veterans. Former studio production chief Lorenzo di Bonaventura has come aboard as an advisor. Shahbazian says his experience of packaging and selling some 150 projects into the traditional studio system over the past 15 years revealed “far too much inefficiency to continue the status quo.” At Staircase, he says he will be “pairing ethical AI usage with our industry’s most underutilized assets—overlooked stories waiting to be produced from fantastic writers and directors.” One industry titan who is tracking the evolution of AI closely is Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, who segued from co-CEO to executive chairman of the streaming giant in 2023. He recently gave $50 million to his alma mater, Bowdoin College in Maine, to establish the AI and Humanity Initiative. The effort’s objectives are broader than the entertainment industry, but they are grappling with challenges that resonate with the uncertainty in the film and TV world. “As AI becomes smarter than humans, we are going to need some deep thinking to keep us flourishing,” Hastings says.

take their dailies, after they’ve wrapped production,” notes Paul Trillo, Asteria’s strategic partner and senior creative director. Based on that “data set”, Marey can create “an insert shot, get B-roll shots that they couldn’t have gotten on set, impossible camera angles, whatever, on top of the filmmaker’s [original] material.” One fear voiced about AI is that it might somehow render the filming process obsolete. But Asteria proposes quite the opposite. “It’s about expanding that footage infinitely,” Trillo says. “And the edit room becomes, for better or worse, very malleable where it’s like all things are on the table and hopefully empowers editors to audition ideas. So, an editor could be like, ‘I think this would flow better if we cut here, if we insert this.’ The editor can have some agency in the storytelling too.” Inferior AI models could potentially homogenize cinema by generating imagery from stale, generic prompts. “AI can really throw away a lot of craft,” Trillo observes. “There is a risk on the cultural and creative side. And so, we’re trying to show another path.”

Watch the Skies

FLAWLESS AI

Scott Mann and Nick Lynes are changing the future for dubbed films

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By Diana Lodderhose

ilmmaker Scott Mann was watching a foreign version of his 2015 Robert DeNiro starrer Heist, when he noticed something odd. “All the dialogue had been changed, and the lines were very different,” he says. “I then learned that to try and get synchronicity, the dialogue is rewritten to try and fit the wrong mouth movements and I just thought, ‘Well, no wonder the international markets get hurt so badly and films don’t sell for as much outside of their home markets.’” At the time, the British writer-director was growing increasingly frustrated at the health of the film industry—“It was getting harder and harder to make good movies because it was so expensive, so constrained and the budgets were going down”—before he stumbled upon an article about deep video portraits at major science and tech conference Siggraph in 2018. “These guys Hyeongwoo Kim and Pablo Garrido at the Max Planck Institute in Germany presented this new video editing technique at Siggraph, which is what we now call generative AI. I knew it was going to change how we make films, and it would fix the film dubbing problem.” Mann then joined forces with tech entrepreneur Nick Lynes to launch Flawless AI, a company that provides what they describe as “the world’s most advanced and artist-friendly film technology.” The duo, who are both co-founders and co-CEOs, say the mission is to integrate transformational, AI-powered technology into the film industry that will enhance creativity, and it believes this is the most profitable long-term approach. Since starting in 2019, the company has spent $100 million on building out its technology platform and filmmaking tools, which currently consist of three main aspects: Its visual dubbing tool TrueSync, which was named one of TIME Magazine’s Lynes Best Inventions; DeepEditor, a tool which allows for dialogue and performance changes without costly reshoots, synchronizing actors’ mouths to new lines; and then its rights management platform Artistic Rights Treasury. “The difference with the track we have taken is that we’re looking at this from a filmmaker perspective,” Mann says. “We look at it from a copyright and rights perspective. There are two Mann routes the technologies can go: It can go in the theft of copyright route and destroy things, or it can be a useful tool if these things are provided. We have taken the harder path, but we know its worth it.” Its dubbing technology was recently used in Swedish sci-fi hit Watch the Skies, making it the first theatrical full-length feature to use immersive AI dubbing. Flawless partnered with XYZ Films to release the English-language version of the film in U.S. theaters. And this will be the first of many. “We’ve been doing this really quietly because it’s a great test bed for our technology,” he says. So far they've picked up Michel Gondry’s The Book of Solutions, Judo thriller Tatami, South Korean title Smugglers, Stéphan Castang’s Vincent Must Die and Berlin Film Festival opener The Light. All will have a U.S. theatrical release after dubbing. “The language of cinema is universal, but the barrier of a different language can sometimes hurt a film,” says Mann. “Utilizing technology to knock that barrier down and have a truly immersive experience, as if the actors performed it in English, means that you end up really watching the performance rather than reading subtitles on the bottom.” DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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Chioma Ude

THE TRAILBLAZING AFRICA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL IS READY TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP

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hen Chioma Ude founded the Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF) in 2010, her mission was clear: Create a hub for the African filmmaking community that would connect new and existing African talent with the global film business while also, crucially, providing a place that would empower and train the next generation of the continent’s storytellers. Already a prolific entrepreneur with a background in marketing and logistics, Ude was making a name for herself in the African entertainment space at the time. After doing a road show for the Nigeria Film and Videos Censors Board in London, she was brought aboard as a project manager for the ION International Film festival, a global touring festival which was headed to Nigeria. Her work impressed local government officials and the experience, says Ude, gave her the idea to launch a Lagosbased international film

festival with a wider focus on the African continent. “It was important for me that the focus was on the continent as a whole, rather than just Nigeria,” says Ude. “I felt there was room for a festival that would be inclusive of everything the African diaspora has to offer.” Fifteen years later and Ude has successfully positioned AFRIFF as a pivotal event on the film festival calendar. Taking place annually in November, the event has trained more than 10,000 young adults in 12 African countries through its AFRIFF Talent Development Program (ADTP) and has connected them with mentors from all over the world. The festival has now become a key platform for facilitating international co-productions and has welcomed stars such as John Boyega, Ryan Coogler and Ini Edo, among others. In 2022, Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever had its African premiere there, with the director offering a masterclass to attendees. Ude says Africa’s young

From left: The African premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; A panel discussion at AFRIFF. 92

population—70% of Africans are under the age of 30—is a big driver for the creative sector in the region. “Young people’s interest lies in the creative sector,” she says. “So, widening that horizon for them in film was something that was really important to me. I could see how people would get engaged very quickly, so, from the get-go, it’s always been about training.” But it hasn’t been without its challenges. Ude, who has also co-founded the Africa Foundation for the Development of Motion Pictures, Arts and Culture (AFDMAC) as well as production outfit LaVida Studios, says some of the biggest hurdles have been “teaching people what the festival is about and what its benefits are as well as sourcing funding.” “If people don’t see value in the festival, funding becomes more difficult,” she says. “The political situation is up and down in Nigeria and when I started, I quickly realized that to rely on government funding would be challenging. So, I decided to build the industry of the festival itself and grow it to a level that the government could not possibly ignore.” And it has worked. The festival, which relies on sponsorship and private funding, has grown from strength to strength. For organizations looking to get more of a foothold in Africa, they often look to partner with AFRIFF. “With sponsorship, we historically have gravitated more to the West. For example, if Amazon comes in, they’ll partner with you to do many

things. I look more towards organizations that need relevance in Nigeria because that works for us.” Next year, Ude plans to introduce a formal market component to sit alongside the film lineup, something she is convinced will take AFRIFF to the next level. “We are ripe for a film market,” says Ude. “What we are doing now is getting ourselves ready for the next phase of economic growth, so it’s right that we have a film market that runs concurrently.” The festival has become an increasingly hot destination for international delegates over the years, but in 2024, Ude noticed an uptick in the number of attendees coming from the African diaspora. “It’s changed the way I was looking at the trajectory of the festival,” she says. “Before now, it was more about us going global in the sense of partnering more with the West, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but now I’m having many more conversations with companies in the diaspora and it’s opened my eyes to new partnerships. I’m really encouraged by the interest from other African nations— growth in this area is the next goal.” She continues: “It’s important to keep going to other festivals so that we can feel the pulse of the industry at large, and look at what the new trends are and what people are looking for—we don’t want it to be the same every year. Growth is continuous and learning is continuous, so you have to add those elements to the festival.” ★

G E TT Y I M A G ES / A F RI FF

By Diana Lodderhose

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Greg Kwedar (left) and Clint Bentley.

SING SING’S GREG KWEDAR AND CLINT BENTLEY EXPLAIN THEIR EQUAL PAY AND EQUITY INITIATIVE By Antonia Blyth

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hat if there was a way to cut filmmaking costs, while empowering every member of your cast and crew with the promise of equality, transparency, vested interest and potential pay on the backend? Oscar-nominated Sing Sing filmmaking duo Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley are doing just that, with a plan that could save independent filmmaking and even disrupt the entire industry. They created Ethos—their equal pay initiative that also pays back investors, cast and crew in a way that brings everyone into a form of partnership—and they want to share it with the industry. Kwedar and Bentley began making features with Transpecos, directed by Kwedar, then Jockey, directed by Bentley, then the Kwedar-directed Sing Sing led by Colman Domingo. Next, they have Train Dreams, starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones. The idea for Ethos came “starting with everybody’s going to get paid the same rates,” says Bentley. “Then it got more exciting, thinking about the creative equity side of independent film and cleaning 94

that up in the same way that the investor side is very clean, and standardizing it to where it can be as transparent as possible. Everybody knows where everybody stands.” He calls this “a lightbulb moment. You’re actually telling cast and crew that there is going to be money, even if there’s no profit. There’s going to be something. It might just be a little bit, but there’s going to be something that comes back to you from this. It’s an ownership mindset.” “We also knew the way we made Transpecos didn’t really yield a success for our investors or ourselves,” Kwedar says. “We hadn’t seen any

a distributor, we would still have something to share with the cast and crew for that sweat equity.” The trade-off to the investors, Kwedar adds is, “Well, you didn’t have to put up as much money as you normally would to pay for this film, and so this is what we need to do to reward the artists involved.” Bentley acknowledges this doesn’t work for everyone. “There were some crew who were like, ‘Listen, I have to make a certain amount for my family and I can’t take that hit.’ Some investors pushed back, but “I think that’s a testament to Black Bear that they were on Sing Sing, but we didn’t have as hard of a time on Sing Sing because we had proved [the concept].” One actor’s representative was very reticent. But after Jockey became a success, “They got nice checks. And that rep was like, ‘Oh my god, what a beautiful film.’” Says Kwedar, “For Colman on Sing Sing, “It was a chance to be involved in building something from the ground up, or a prestige role that could have awards potential.” The actor was indeed Oscar nominated. They hope Ethos could “matriculate in the broader industry” Kwedar says. They’re also raising money. “Ideally movies on the Sing Sing scale that traditionally would be $5 million, you can make for under $2 million on a model like this, or first features like Jockey that normally you would make for $1.5 million, you can make for under half a million because of a parity structure model. We want to fully finance those films.” ★

From left: Clifton Collins Jr. in Jockey; Colman Domingo, center, with the Sing Sing cast.

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Ethos

profit from it. Our investors hadn’t been made whole. So, we were like, ‘We have to figure out how to lower the risk, but we don’t want to just make a cheaper film.’ We wanted to actually push the quality further but make it for less money. And so that was like, OK, well now we need a new paradigm.” Bentley lays it out as a three-tenet plan. The first is equitable pay structure. “Everybody is paid the same rate from the writer, director, the star all the way through the PA, and then all the way through post as well.” Everyone is paid according to the time they put in. “Nobody has a bonus that everybody else isn’t privy to. It’s standardized.” The second tenet is standardizing the equity. “The only differential is how long you work on the movie. So, everybody who qualifies, who works a minimum amount, is party to the backend equity of the film on the creative side.” The third point is, Bentley says, “Finding a way to split money off the gross rather than the net of the film with cast and crew.” Kwedar explains how this worked on Jockey as an example. “The first money that comes in— that normally would just recoup the investors plus 120% and then you split the profit 50/50. That’s the standard waterfall. We changed the waterfall for first money to come in, we would split 60% to investors, 40% to cast and crew, until the investors got 120% back. And then we split it 50/50 in perpetuity. If the movie was just a modest success or only got a small minimum guarantee from

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Jean-Pascal Zadi

HOW THE ACTOR-DIRECTOR IS BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS AND TACKLING FRENCH BLACK IDENTITY By Melanie Goodfellow

This comes as a surprise given his recent achievements which include the Netflix series Represent, which he created with Lupin writer François Uzan, and stars in as a youth leader who runs to become France’s first Black president, as well as roles in films such as Final Cut, Smoking Causes Coughing, Beating Hearts, Dog on Trial and most recently Prosper. One of 10 siblings, Zadi was born in the Paris suburb of Bondy in 1980 to parents hailing from the Ivory Coast. He grew up in the Normandy port city of Caen. “We were the only Black family. There wasn’t segregation but we lived some difficult things,” says Zadi. “My mother anchored in us from very early on the fact that we were Black and that that was going to turn our destinies upside-down.” “She would make us watch films like Cry Freedom and A Dry White Season. She introduced us to Black culture and the fact that we were going to have to fight in life. When I was small, with my brothers, we found her a bit crazy,” he continues. As a student, Zadi came to realize his mother had prepared him well, after a shop-owner, advertising a vacancy in the window for which he was qualified, denied they were looking for someone when he walked in off the street to enquire. “That day, the penny dropped,” recalls Zadi. “I understood that

From left: Represent; Le grand déplacement. 96

Jean-Pascal Zadi

rather than asking for things, I was going to have to act.” He bought a camera on credit and made his first documentary Des halls aux bacs, about the French rap scene. “It came out on DVD in 2005, and I haven’t stopped since,” he says. “I understood what I was capable of.” He followed the documentary with ultra-low budget features Cramé, African Gangster and Sans pudeur ni morale, at the same time as breaking into television as a contributor on the Canal+ show Le before du grand journal. Zadi reveals he bluffed his way through the pitch for Simply Black, suggesting he had secured the participation of stars such as Omar Sy, Eric Judor and Fabrice Eboué when he had not even approached them at that point. “I signed the contract, and I was in a panic… I hadn’t even written a scene for Omar Sy. He was working in the U.S., while I was an unknown. I wrote a scene anyway and sent it to his agent. One night he calls me, it was about midnight, I was in bed, and he says, ‘Your film,

we’re going to make it. We’re going to show them we’re united.’” Zadi suggests that the project struck a chord with the roster of French Black actors who signed up for the film. “Black French identity hasn’t been tackled that much. We talk a lot about Black American identity, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, segregation, while French Black identity is tied up with colonization, which brings us together, but also separates us at the same time,” he says. Zadi is now gearing up for the June release of Abidjan-shot feature Le grand déplacement, about a space mission with an all-African crew, and developing an adaptation of Boris Vian’s novel I Spit On Your Graves, about a Black man in the U.S., whose white complexion allows him to cross racial barriers, to be set in the French Antilles. Zadi says questions of French Black identity are likely to remain at the heart of his work. “Unfortunately, or fortunately, the fact of being Black and living in France has marked me deeply and for now, this is what is easiest for me to recount, these visceral things I have lived,” he says. ★

F R A N C O I S DU R A N D/ G E TTY I M A G ES / N ET F L I X/ M I KA C O TE L L ON / G A U M ON T

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hen Julia Roberts attended the French Césars this March, Jean-Pascal Zadi was given the task of introducing the Erin Brockovich Oscar-winning actress. The comic actor and director had Roberts in fits as he drew comparisons between their big toothy smiles and explained she could apply for political asylum if she were feeling the heat back home, suggesting she could get tips from actor Abou Sangaré, who was sitting a few seats behind. Guinea-born Sangaré, who won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Best Actor prize in 2024 for his performance as an undocumented migrant in Souleymane's Story and would be feted with Best Male Revelation that evening, had just escaped deportation from France after securing a work permit in January. The tone of the humor was typical of Zadi, who four years previously also won Best Male Revelation for Simply Black, his riotously, impolitically correct comedy tackling the experiences of Black people in France. Zadi’s spot at the César Awards as well as his starring role in a skitbased trailer promoting the 50th edition, suggest he is now part of mainstream French culture. “I like the fact that you say that because I still feel a bit on the margins,” says Zadi.

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MUBI

U.K., Latin America, Germany and term commercial viability given Benelux, scored its first Oscar nom- that core value. But investment inations this year with breakout hit keeps rolling in—we understand The Substance and Danish drama that between 2021-2024, private The Girl with the Needle. The forequity backing comfortably exceedmer garnered the company’s first ed $100 million. And ambitions are THE GLOBAL STREAMER PUMPS ARTHOUSE Academy win. After making a sky-high at the company, which splashy eight-figure acquiaims to be a regular in the SUBSTANCE INTO THE SPECIALTY UNIVERSE sition of Coralie Fargeat’s Best Picture conversaBy Andreas Wiseman body horror, acquiring it tion. The audacious from Universal ahead of play for The Substance last year’s Cannes Film wasn’t the first time the Festival, the movie has known as The Auteurs—back in voracious festival buyer his is MUBI’s time. With gone on to rake in a com2007. These days, the headcount had bid eight-figures for a studio specialty divisions pany record $84 million at stands at more than 400 globalmovie, and it likely won’t be almost a relic of the past Ropell the global box office. ly across 14 offices. And Cakarel the last. and international and “The unique element of our believes that MUBI can become Significant recent deals include independent cinema soaring on model is the global scale and “many times its current size” in North American rights for Paul the awards stage, the arthouse Mescal Cannes Competition pic mini-studio founded by Efe Cakarel coming years. “We’re confident that capabilities that we’ve built in a market that has traditionally our growth potential remains vast The History of Sound, multiple is cutting a growing swathe across been serviced by boutique compobecause the global audience for markets on Cannes movies Senthe film landscape. MUBI is back nents of major studios or regional specialty films is both substantial timental Value and My Father's on the Croisette with three films players,” explains Jason Ropell, the Shadow and worldwide rights to and underserved,” he says. “Unlike in Competition and another in Un former Amazon film chief who has Paolo Sorrentino’s next film La mass-market platforms, we don’t Certain Regard. been MUBI’s chief content officer need to spend billions annually on Grazia, about the final days of a Director Luca Guadagnino, a since 2020. mainstream content.” fictional Italian Presidency. Preprevious collaborator, is one of the MUBI’s mission has remained The theatrical and SVOD compavious high-profile multi-territory company’s many fans in high placunabashedly arthouse and some buys include Queer, Perfect Days, es: “MUBI is a great and passionate ny, which now has direct distribuhave doubted the company’s longtion operations in North America, Fallen Leaves, Decision to Leave, company,” he says. “They will grow Aftersun, The Worst Person in the a lot as a business.” World and Priscilla. Eye-catching growth has certainly After acquiring German bluebeen a hallmark of the company’s chip sales firm The Match Factory last few years. in 2022 and Benelux distributor Former investment banker and Cineart in 2024, MUBI has also MIT graduate Cakarel founded begun producing its own movies. the London-based company—then EFE CAKAREL

“We don't need to spend billions annually on mainstream content.”

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Paul Raschid

READY, STEADY, GLOW! Tired of films with predictable storylines? Paul and Neville Raschid want to hand things over to you. Literally…

M U BI / E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N

E Michael Weber’s connections as longtime boss at The Match Factory have helped paved the way. Among these, are Kelly Reichardt’s Cannes entry The Mastermind, its first full-finance picture, and co-pros including Jim Jarmusch’s Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, starring Adam Driver and Cate Blanchett, and Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning. The company is also investing in bricks and mortar. MUBI’s first cinema is being built in Mexico, and there are rumors of a planned cinema in LA. There is also a publishing arm, cinema-going app and three podcasts. MUBI is fiercely guarded about its subscriber numbers, but internal sources say that gross margins are “a lot higher” than those of bigger streamers. Cakarel says data dumps aren’t on the horizon, however. Chinese billionaire Zhang Xin recently joined the board of directors after her outfit Closer Media made a “significant” investment in the company. Previous investors have included Silver Lake Management executives, Working Title co-chief Eric Fellner, and a host of city and venture capital firms. Italy, France and Brazil are among the countries being eyed for

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the next wave of growth for theatrical distribution, organically or through corporate acquisition. The company has also explored, and continues to explore, large corporate acquisitions in U.S. (deals we hear that would dwarf the Match Factory acquisition). So what does the industry make of MUBI? One French sales executive said: “MUBI provides much-needed oxygen in the theatrical arthouse space, especially in the Anglo-Saxon territories.” A packaging agent added: “The industry needs this company. They’re good people. They aren’t overspending, but they are shrewd and taking advantage of the moment.” Their ambition and speed of growth remains a source of speculation, with one industry vet saying, “The only danger is how much they’ve accelerated. Is there too much on their plate?” But Cakarel counters with this: “We understand the economics of specialty film intimately and have built our business model to sustainably support ambitious projects. Our biggest challenge, and simultaneously our greatest opportunity, is scaling sustainably without compromising our distinct identity.” ★

By DAMON WISE

ver zoned out of a movie because a character made a stupid decision? British director Paul Raschid has been thinking about that, and in the five years since his debut feature The Complex, he has become fascinated with the concept of viewer choice. This, of course, isn’t new in terms of gaming, but it’s a bold frontier in terms of exhibition—Raschid’s films involve audience participation, offering cinemagoers the chance to guide the drama whenever his characters face life-changing dilemmas. “We’ve reached a point in cinema discourse,” he says, “where audiences have consumed so much content that they’ve become over-familiar with the traditional structures of filmmaking. They know what choices a screenwriter would make, so I think a lot of them like the idea of being able to explore the other options when they’re given two, three, or four alternatives.” Gaming platforms are a given for this, but with his festival-feted films The Gallery (2022) and last year’s Hello Stranger, Paul and his producer father Neville are keen to parlay the concept into a live experience, handing audiences glow sticks to vote thumbs up or thumbs down, Roman Empire-style, at key moments. Will they ever trade up? Not any time soon. “Literally, I was the one that fought against it,” laughs Neville. “I said, ‘Glow sticks? Are you crazy? People are expecting something really snazzy. But we’ve tested apps and we found that it worked against us. Wi-fi was the first problem. But the second one was, the moment you look at your mobile, you’re out of the story.” Says Paul, “It’s a psychological thing. I realized that when I’m gaming, I don’t take my eyes off the screen.” Unlike 3D or IMAX, this will be a truly grassroots revolution if it catches on. “When Tom Cruise decides to make an interactive Mission: Impossible, then this will go mainstream,” says Neville, stressing that he is being tongue-in-cheek about the prospect. “Or if there’s a James Bond that’s interactive, it’ll go mainstream. But right now, it’s there to give audiences a new participative experience. It’s obviously a convergence of film and video games, but it’s got a good dash of live theater as well. You’re not spending 90 minutes disappearing into the darkness with your own thoughts.” ★

Hello Stranger

R O BE R TO RI CC I U TI / G E TT Y IM A G ES / A V I A R Y F I L M S

Clockwise from left: MUBI founder Efe Cakarel; The Girl with the Needle; My Father's Shadow; Demi Moore in The Substance.

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S

In your granular storytelling, you have disrupted the Star Wars canon. What did you feel the series was lacking?

I think it was a marriage of two appetites. The attraction was the opportunity to work on this scale. The first decades of my career have been as a short story writer, and I feel like this is an epic novel. It was also the opportunity to use all the self-education I’d done over 40 years on history. All of the stuff that had been banging around in my head all these years—Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, Zapata, I got to go deep on. I had no place to put that, and this was like, wow, they want me to do a show that takes place over a five-year period about a revolution and the people inside it. You're from a family of writers. Your father is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilroy with Genevieve O'Reilly in Andor.

superpower. No one is teaching you how to write at the kitchen table. What happened to Cassian’s sister, the one he was looking for in Season 1, Episode 1? There wasn’t any closure on that?

Traveling to the Beat of a Different Drum TONY GILROY DOES STAR WARS HIS WAY IN THE SECOND SEASON OF DISNEY+’S ANDOR. By Anthony D’Alessandro

playwright. What’s some advice he shared?

He moved out of Hollywood so that no one would go into it. There was a great library in the house. Our mother was much more influential on us because we were always making stuff pre-cognition, like painting rooms, knitting and making walls. She made the process of creation so fundamental to us. My father didn’t teach us how to write at all. But what you do get… this is what I think people ignore about

the nepotism thing: No one is going to make your movie because you know somebody. You’ve got to deliver. It’s not the people that you meet. What you learn is what the life looks like. It makes sense to me, a writer’s life. My father would be home for three months, then gone for three months. We’d be fabulously wealthy one year and dead broke the next. He’d have a big hit, then have his teeth kicked in; the play closes on opening night. You learn what the life is. I think that is the

No, there wasn’t. I did it in the beginning because I’m always leaving things for myself to try to pick up on. There are all kinds of things that I do to pick up on later, or things that I lay down so writers will pick up on them in the room. But what I found was, with the sister, when I put it in there, I didn’t know how I was going to resolve it, and at one point, I had some melodramatic version of how that would play out in a Season 2. But as I went along, I realized, as I got to know Cassian, a very important absence in his life; the fact that he left her behind is a hole that will never be filled. When you watch the show, how many times does he go back for people? In fact, Bix even says, when they take off and escape from Ferrix, “Cassian will find us.” He goes back for Maarva. He goes back for Kleya. The savior component of him is much more interesting to me than some resolution. How many things in your life are unresolved?

Unlike the Season 1 finale of Andor, it seemed quieter this time.

We were always going to take our foot off the gas. It was about making sure that the linkage was proper to Rogue One, that it was a summing up of all of the characters that we carried along. So much of Season 2 at the end is about the endurance and fortitude and the price that everybody has paid over time. Neither Grand Moff Tarkin nor Darth Vader show up. Why?

If I’d needed them, I would've brought them in.

Is there more Star Wars for you?

I don’t think so. I’ve been doing it for 10 years now, between Rogue and this. What’s next?

I wrote a movie Behemoth that I’m trying to get off the ground. It’s about movie music, the people who make it. I have Oscar Isaac. I’ve been trying to raise the money, but I’ve been having a lot of trouble. ★

A L B ER T O E . R O D RI GU E Z / G ET T Y I M A G ES / DI S N EY + / L U C A S FI L M / EV ER E TT C O L L EC T IO N

tar Wars fans can be a finicky bunch, but Tony Gilroy has been fearless, much like the series creator George Lucas, in delivering to them. His Andor is altogether jawdropping in production design, overly layered in its rebel spies and architects’ motivations to unite as one against the Empire and unabashed to get down into the nitty gritty details. Forget about lightsaber fights, at one point during Season 2 there’s a discussion about interest rates in the galaxy. Gilory started the season on an intentionally fiery note with Diego Luna’s future rebel leader Cassian Andor crashing around in a Tie-Fighter. It was his response to fans saying that Andor Season 1 began to slow. However, as the series ends, Gilroy has opted to end Cassian’s segue into Rogue One with an ease more than a bang.

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4/28/25 2:34 PM

WENDY SCHMIDT AND ALEX GIBNEY MEAN BUSINESS WITH THEIR NEW STRATEGY TO SUPPORT “IMPACT STORYTELLING” By Matt Carey

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ro tip: If you get an invitation to dine with Wendy Schmidt, say yes. It was over lunch in Nantucket that Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney and Schmidt, the billionaire philanthropist, discovered they shared a common cause. Both believe in the power of storytelling to illuminate urgent challenges confronting society. They continued the conversation and in February announced Schmidt would buy a controlling interest in Jigsaw Productions, Gibney’s company, “to expand the production company and deepen its focus on impact storytelling and public interest journalism.” “He was looking for a way to go forward and I was looking for a way to invest,” Schmidt explains, “and so we just kind of hit it off.” Their partnership could become a game changer for a documentary industry faced with declining enthusiasm from streamers and

big distributors for hard-hitting material—the very thing for which Gibney is best known. The filmmaker notes drily, “The landscape for being able to release stories that are somewhat controversial has been constrained.” Case in point, The Bibi Files, a documentary produced by Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom that exposed never-before-seen video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu undergoing interrogation by Israeli authorities on corruption charges. Not so long ago, a hot property like that likely would have snapped up by a major U.S. distributor. But Gibney struggled to sell it. “It was and is frustrating,” Gibney concedes. But the venture with Schmidt, wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, offers the chance to change that narrative. The expanded company plans to produce scripted and unscripted content, some of it to focus on

areas of longstanding interest to Schmidt—ocean health, the environment, and climate change. “I think the largest story of our time is the planet changing,” Schmidt observes, “and I think if we make stories that don’t acknowledge that, we’re missing an enormous opportunity to not only save the planet, but to change the way people think about the resources of the world.” The creative approach doesn’t need to be didactic, Schmidt suggests. “Whether we make documentary films or we tell human stories that are scripted… you don’t have to go at it with an arrow. You can tack your way towards the goal and bring people with you.” Schmidt earned a master’s degree in journalism and worked briefly as a journalist, then in marketing communications in Silicon Valley before segueing to philanthropy. She describes her investment in Jigsaw not as philanthropy but as a dollars-and-cents proposition. “It’s a business,” she says. “We’re going to run it like a business.” One piece of the puzzle for Jigsaw, and the documentary field generally, is how to connect audiences to content of the sort the company wants to make. “We’re going to crack the nut in distribution,” Schmidt insists. “We’re going to figure out how to do that.” Gibney sees hopeful signs in the success of No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary that self-distributed theatrically in the U.S. and Canada and pulled in more than $2 million. “You can see from what’s being done with No Other Land that there

is a hunger for the content,” the filmmaker comments. “And now between, I would say a reviving of the independent theatrical market, and new experiments like Jolt.film [where The Bibi Files landed] and a couple of others, we’re beginning to explore innovative new sets of paradigms. They’re going to allow us to reach the audiences that really want to see these films.” Schmidt’s fellow multi-billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs is the lead investor and board chair of The Atlantic and through the Emerson Collective supports Concordia Studio, a “talent-first film and television studio” founded by Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim. But for every Schmidt and Powell Jobs there is the example of Jeff Bezos to consider. The Amazon founder appeared to be the savior of the Washington Post when he bought it, but he recently intervened in its editorial processes, abandoning presidential endorsements and ordaining that the opinion page would henceforth focus on “personal liberties and free markets”. Meanwhile, billionaire Jeffrey Skoll last year abruptly folded Participant, the social impact-focused production company, after 20 years in business. “We went after Participant to acquire it,” Schmidt says. “The work at Participant pretty much tracked along a lot of work we were doing in the [Schmidt Family] foundation almost issue by issue… I don’t think Jeff Skoll wanted to sell the company.” Joining forces with a person of enormous wealth can open opportunities, but comes with no guarantee of the investor’s continued interest or alignment politically. “At Jigsaw,” Gibney says, “we have Wendy’s full-throated support in terms of our own editorial independence to be able to pursue films that we believe are important, and that is the goal for the company.” ★

G ET T Y I M A G ES / TR U S T A N F EW IN G S / G E TTY I M A GE S F OR BF I / DO G W OO F / E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N

The Billionaire Piece Of The Jigsaw Puzzle

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All You Need is Love

ANG LEE RECALLS HOW DIRECTING BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN RESTORED HIS FAITH IN FILMMAKING By Mike Fleming, Jr.

Bruce Lee movie that will star the director’s son, Mason. He hopes to revolutionize fight choreography one more time. He certainly accomplished that with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film had non-martial artist actors Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang soaring in Cirque du Soleilstyle aerial battles woven into a 19th-century China-based drama about duty, honor, vengeance, repressed desires and lost love, mixed seamlessly into the ass-kicking wuxia genre. It was a marked contrast to Brokeback Mountain, another forbidden love story powered by the performances of Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway. The aerial combat and wire fighting in Crouching Tiger fit loosely into the wuxia genre of martial arts films but turned out like nothing seen before in Hollywood. What ground are you hoping to break 25 years later?

I hope I can revolutionize something in action shooting.

“I thought I'd retire after Crouching Tiger because I was literally spent.” F O C US F EA T U R ES / S ON Y P I C TU R ES C L A S S I C S / 2 0 TH C E NT U R Y F OX/ E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N

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wo of Ang Lee’s most disruptive films celebrate anniversaries this year; they may be five years apart, but the connective tissue between them is undeniable. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) was such an intense highwire act, the grueling shoot in China left Lee barely able to stand and fully intending to give it all up. It was Lee’s father who made his son promise to try one more time, because retirement, he thought, would set a bad example for the filmmaker’s son. Lee’s father died in 2004, weeks after making his son promise to give it one more go, and Lee kept that promise with 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, an experience that made the filmmaker fall back in love with storytelling, fueling everything he has done since, including Life of Pi, which brought him his second Oscar for directing. When I meet Lee in his Manhattan offices, he is struggling to hit a budget number and a green light from Sony Pictures on a 104 D E A D L I N E . C O M / A W A R D S L I N E

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Crouching Tiger was my first taste of martial arts filming, and I learned the hard way that it’s not about martial arts, it’s about choreography. It’s a two-person dance, in the form of fighting. They collaborate with each other instead of trying to kill each other. [The Bruce Lee project] is different. It’s not about choreography, although he did that extremely well. It’s very different from Crouching Tiger, more like Sense and Sensibility in an ass-kicking form. Bruce Lee was the first and probably only person, even now, that put expression and thought into his fighting instead of just dazzling you. Nobody had done that with such dramatic effect, such a visceral impact.

F O C US F EA T U R ES / S ON Y P I C TU R ES C L A S S I C S / 2 0 TH C E NT U R Y F OX/ E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N

You shot Crouching Tiger in China when that country was just opening itself up to outsiders. Why was it such a hard film to make?

I didn’t know how to do it. I believe I’m a pretty quick learner in any kind of filmmaking, like the previous movie, Ride with the Devil. Horses, guns. Also, it was the first time I’d tried using an anamorphic lens, which is very different than your normal lens, and I picked it up in two weeks. The first action sequence, I didn’t know what I was doing, I was flabbergasted, but the next one I did quite well, and in two weeks I’d figured out gunfights, action, how to frame horses. On the other hand, it took me two and a half months on Crouching Tiger to even know what I should be looking at for action in a martial arts film, even though the choreography team were among the most brilliant filmmakers I know. None of the stars of Crouching Tiger were martial artists. Chow Yun-fat was known for John Woo's films and their stylized two-handed gunplay. Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang trained as dancers. What was the biggest challenge there?

Clockwise from top: Director Ang Lee with his stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal on the Brokeback Mountain set; Lee on the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon set; Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang; Suraj Sharma in Life of Pi.

Michelle can act. I know she can act. She may not act the way I like, because she picked it up from Hong Kong action crews. Nobody talks about acting in action movies, because you have to count the beats, otherwise you get hit. That’s

all you think about if you don’t want to get hit or poked in the eye. I wanted to build in performances. [Wuxia] is a great form of art if you know how to use it. I would sacrifice a little bit on swiftness of movement to go for the acting. It was a great challenge for the greatest choreographer, Mr. Yuen Woo-ping, I’m glad he has such a heart for drama, for art, that he was willing to compromise the visual effect—of which he’s a master—for the dramatic effect. So, that’s something different from that movie, I would say. The formal martial art [film] is full of regulations. They’re supposed to do this or that, it’s preachy and pulpy. I wanted to make great cinema out of that. That was my yearning, to grab the Chinese tradition. My fantasy China does not exist in Taiwan or Hong Kong or China anymore. It’s a lost thing. But I was brought up by that culture. With that movie, I’m tracing my cultural roots. You certainly don’t see that in martial art movies. Little hints, but not really. By nature, I’m like Michelle’s character. I was never rebellious. As a child, I was very obedient, extremely docile and shy. I behaved well, but my mind was drifting. I didn’t know where my focus was, until I start making movies. But filmmakers didn’t get respect from my father’s generation. There were no role models. My father loved me. He loved drama, and he loved movies like everybody else. It’s just that his son having a filmmaker’s life was hard for him. He was a very respected person, a high-school principal. But he still supported me. To go to film school, that cost a lot of money back then. When did you feel you’d paid off on that faith?

Well, finally he caved in. At first, he thought, “OK, if you have to make a movie, go make a movie. But once you get that out of your system, you can do something more serious.” I remember he said that to me after Sense and Sensibility. It was being treated like a national treasure, winning awards—though not me, because nobody knew who I was yet—and he said, “I think, at this D E A D L I N E . C O M / A W A R D S L I N E 105

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Why did Crouching Tiger take such a toll on you?

“I don't know what it is about that movie. It's a sad movie but it's about love. It's so nurturing. Everybody's in love.”

From top: Gyllenhaal and Lee; Michelle Williams and Ledger; Eric Bana in Hulk.

It took a little bit over five months to shoot, and they were long days because we traveled to many places and those martial arts scenes take a long time. Each fight scene would take at least two weeks, from 16 to 20 hours a day. For the first two months I shot over 12 hours a day. If a non-martial arts director did that, they’d leave the martial arts team to do their thing. But I wanted to do everything myself, because I wanted the drama in there. So, I’d be shooting drama, then move and set up the wire work, which took hours. I’d go to the other set, which was an hour away, and at night I’d do night-fighting until five o’clock in the morning. Traveling back, I’d doze off in the car, take a shower, sleep maybe an hour and go to the next 12 hours. I’d shoot six days a week, and my Sunday involved doing only 12 hours of shooting and watching dailies. Plus, there was another nearly five months in prep. We lived in a hotel. My room was $13 a day. There were, like, eight months where I didn’t have more than three hours of rest. It’s the hardest movie I ever made. I cannot do that anymore. But it’s very memorable. We had a blast. We were very inventive [with the wire work]. After our movie, I don’t think anybody is allowed to do that anymore. It’s all digital. It doesn’t risk somebody’s life, let alone the lives of the biggest stars in Asia. That was really dangerous. You followed Crouching Tiger with Hulk, another big movie…

I thought I’d retire after Crouching Tiger because I was literally spent. At the end when I was mixing sound, I couldn’t even sit down. I was lying down on the couch. It was that bad. I said, “I’ve had enough. My dad was right.” And then three months later, what am I doing? I’m doing Hulk. That

was another exhausting fivemonth shoot, but I found a new playground. For the first time in my career, I learned about visual effects. After that, I was really tired, and I wanted to retire. Why didn’t you?

My father, for the first time in his life said, “Go ahead and make another movie. You’re only 49. It’s a bad example for your boy.” And then two weeks later, he passed away. I’d taken Hulk over Brokeback Mountain. I thought it was the little movie that I’d missed. I assumed it had gotten made. So, I asked [producer] James Schamus, “Remember Brokeback Mountain? How did it turn out?” James went out right away and bought the rights. When the father who resisted your film path becomes the reason you didn’t give up, that sounds like divine intervention.

I wanted to retire. I think Brokeback Mountain brought me back, nursing me back to love life, to love filmmaking. And I’m still standing, still making movies, thanks to that movie. That was the one movie where I felt, “There’s a movie god who loves me. He wants me to keep going.” And the movie was so perfect. What have I done to deserve that movie? Everything about it was good. At first, I didn’t even want to go back to work. I was so emotionally drained, because my father had passed away, and I was exhausted after the other two movies. Physically, I was drained. I got Achilles tendonitis. My body just gave up. I don’t know what it is about that movie. It’s a sad movie, but it’s about love. It’s so nurturing. Everybody’s in love. And it was great. Every actor turned out to be great. I didn’t do much, I just did the coverage. I didn’t have a cinematic ambition. I just basically made the day and secured the performances. And then, in the first cut, I realized I’d got something. People are so affected by it. You can never plan how people feel about the movie. It never happens as you’d expect. But people swoon

F O C US F EA T U R ES / UN I V ER S A L / EV ER E TT C O L L EC T IO N

rate, you might get an Oscar when you’re 50. Then you can think about something serious.” But I’m pretty sure he was proud of me even then.

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The movie premiered in Venice and soon became an Oscar frontrunner. How surprised were you by the warm embrace?

I knew it was a good movie because, from the first cut, which I showed to friends and family, I could see that it had an effect on people. Then, at Venice, people were gushing. I did not expect to win there, so I flew to Toronto for the festival. I thought, “There’s no way we’re going to win.” When I landed in Toronto, my publicist was at the airport. I walked off the plane, and he said, “Turn around, they want you to go back.” I’d won the Golden Lion. I’m always uptight when I get awards, never happy. I’m a shy person. Except that one time. Everybody was smiling at me. The movie had so much love. I was very happy. And then Toronto, of course,

Honest to god, I never held any grudge because Crouching Tiger didn’t get me the director award. I was winning straight up, until the Oscars. But it didn’t really bother me. Even that little grudge I had was because I was the leader of the pack. I represented the movie. So many people worked on it, I wanted it to win. So, it takes a few seconds for that to pass. How many people get to experience that? How many filmmakers? Not many. complained because I wasn’t on the red carpet. But it was all good; I knew I had a winner of a movie. I still didn’t imagine it would go to the shopping malls. That was really a surprise. When a film takes off, you see it go up in the box office, and suddenly everybody is going to see it. I remember the LA Times ran a headline saying, “Ang Lee Breaks the Last American Frontier.” I was like, “Kill me!” I was very nervous. I’m a shy person. A foreigner. I got nervous when they started describing me as a hero. And then it stopped, at $80 million. Maybe everybody who wanted to watch it had watched it. But it stopped right there. In the heat of the Oscar campaign. You’d think it would keep going, but everything just stopped. Why?

I don’t know. I guess there was only so much tolerance in America at the time.

After winning most major awards, Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash in a big upset.

When I got my award [for Best Director] right before [the Best Picture announcement], the stage manager said, “Just stay here.” We were by the curtain. Then he was like, “Uh. Oh my god…” So, everybody expected us to win. He looked genuinely surprised.

You must have wondered why. Was it the limits of tolerance, aversion to a gay love affair in the Oscar voting body?

Your guess is as good as mine. There are times when I feel like there’s an unlimited willingness to watch the movie. There’s so much love for it. Generally, you feel like it’s a breakthrough, that it broke all barriers. People seem to melt down. And you cannot even define it as gay cinema. It’s not gay cinema, right? It’s a love story. I guess they weren’t ready to give it the Best Picture at that time…

I’m nothing but grateful. I have no bitterness. It never occurred to me. Maybe just for one second, when Jack Nicholson opened the envelope, and then it disappeared.

Clockwise from top: Gyllenhaal and Ledger; Anne Hathaway and Gyllenhaal; Ledger with Lee on the Brokeback Mountain set.

When did you realize you had something with Crouching Tiger?

It was late. After the movie was done, we still had four months of post-production. Most of the time it was doing looping, recording Michelle and Chow Yun-fat’s Mandarin dialogue. And then we had the visual effects. The post team was only me, my editor, and my assistant editor. Only three of us. None of us had visual effects experience. It was all over the place. Back then, there were no preview screenings, just friends and family, and we couldn’t even show it with subtitles. So, unless they were Chinese, they wouldn’t really know what was going on. So, no, I didn’t know [we had something], until we went to Cannes, where people cheered. They applauded; they screamed. These are two risky movies, and we haven’t focused on the others, like Life of Pi, which brought your second Best Director Oscar, or Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which didn’t catch on with audiences but broke ground with high-resolution formats. How much harder would it be for you to make either movie now?

It was hard before, but it was possible. Right now, it’s impossible. You are not allowed to take risks and find something new, but if you don’t change, you’re dead. I don’t get it. I’m going to keep fighting. And if it takes longer, then it takes longer. I think the world was more open-minded then. Today, it’s hard. The whole world has turned so hostile. I wish it was different. I miss those days. I miss the good old days. ★

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over the movie. I thought it was a small arthouse movie. I thought no American company would want it. I thought nobody would see it, so I could do whatever I wanted. And coming from Hulk, there was practically no budget. So, I learned that the effectiveness of a movie is literally something you cannot predict. It doesn’t correspond with how much effort you put in it. Making Crouching Tiger was a thousand times harder than making Brokeback Mountain. And Brokeback Mountain was a great success that just seemed to happen on its own.

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BUYERS ARE COMING TO CANNES TO FIND THE UNDERDOGS TAKING OVER THE AWARDS RACE By Ryan Fleming

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n the animated film space, two things naturally come to mind: stories for children and big-budget, formulaic projects. The former idea is something directors have been fighting for years, a recent example being the successful and not-so-child-friendly Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, but the formulaic factor has recently been challenged too—by an uprising in independent animation—and it’s changing the awards landscape. One of the first films to break through in this way was Flee, a 2021 animated documentary film from Denmark about a gay man looking back on his life as a child refugee from Afghanistan. The film received widespread acclaim for its LGBTQ representation, archival footage and subject matter, leading to many festival awards and three Oscar nominations. Competing against three Disney films—Encanto, Luca and Raya and the Last Dragon—and Netflix’s The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Flee was the sole indie nominee in the Animated feature

Memoir of a Snail

category in 2021. While the NEON-distributed film didn’t win any Academy Awards, Flee was the first film to ever be nominated for Oscars in the Documentary, International and Animated Feature categories. Since then, there have been a few independent animated films that have broken through the crowd of big-budget movies. One of the most disruptive was Pablo Berger’s 2023 film Robot Dreams, a dialogue-free story of companionship between a dog and a robot living in Manhattan. The film earned an Oscar nomination before even scheduling a U.S. release date, surprising a lot of people on Oscar nomination morning. This year saw the most recent and successful example to date with Oscar-winning animated film Flow. Produced by independent animation company Dream Well Studio, and distributed by Janus Films and Sideshow Pictures, Flow follows a solitary cat that loses its home following a great flood. When Sideshow partner Jonathan Sehring

JA N U S FI L M / NE ON / IF C F I L M S / E V E RE TT C OL L E C TI O N

Independent Animation Uprising

first saw the animation, he almost couldn’t believe this was an indie film. “I probably watched two or three times just thinking this is a studio movie,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that somebody from Latvia had been able to make this on their own.” When Sideshow Pictures launched in 2021, the sole focus for the company was international films, but Sehring says they happened to come to Cannes with an eye out for something new last year. “We thought there might be an opportunity at Cannes to expand beyond our original mandate and see if there were any animated films that might be of interest to us,” he says. “When we saw the material on Flow and watched the movie, we were all kind of stunned at the movie that they were selling. And it seemed to fly a bit under the radar, even though we knew it was going to be a hit.” It’s not just notable that Flow won; it’s more notable what it won against. Among the other nominees was DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot, which had a successful premiere at TIFF and opened to critical acclaim. Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out 2 was, at the time, the highest-grossing animated film ever, earning over $1.69 billion worldwide on a budget of $200 million. Although both The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2 benefited from a larger budget and bigger studio backing, Flow managed to pull ahead of both films in the Oscar race. Not only was this director Gints Zilbalodis’ first Oscar nomination and win, but also the first nomination and win for the country of Latvia as well. “This is the first time a film from Latvia has ever been nominated so it truly means a lot for us,” he said in his Oscar acceptance speech. “We are very inspired and we hope to be back soon.” “I don’t think Gints will be the last [indie animation director] we see win,” says Sehring. “I think the days of [award shows] being dominated by the obvious studios is changing… especially with the Academy changing and more international members, I think it’s a more dramatic change.” Though his film Memoir of a Snail may have lost, director Adam Elliot says Zilbalodis’ Oscar win is a welcome sign for the future. “It was a great moment for independent animation because it just showed that there’s this whole

Flee

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Flow

“I probably watched Flow two or three times just thinking this is a studio movie. I couldn’t believe that somebody from Latvia had been able to make this on their own.” JONATHAN SEHRING, SIDESHOW PICTURES

other body of work out there,” says Elliot. “I was so thrilled that Flow won and Gints, like myself, wants to remain independent. We just want slightly bigger budgets, not for ourselves. We just want to be able to pay our animators and our artists properly.” Another indie animation film that made it into the running this year, Memoir of a Snail is a melancholic adult stop-motion animation of a snail hoarding woman named Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook). Produced by Arenamedia and distributed by IFC Films, the film follows the lonely life of Grace from childhood to adulthood, in a story loosely based on Elliot’s life. Nominations and awards recognition may seem like a pursuit of vanity for some, but Elliot

says awards are vital for independent filmmakers. “It’s about validation and visibility, and just showing that we are out there,” he says. “We have been making films for decades, and we need our audiences.” Although Elliot says both his and Zilbalodis’ Oscar campaigns were “run on the smell of an oily rag” compared to the big-studio budgets of the other films, both films managed to earn nominations. “It’s pretty remarkable that both Gints and I even made it to the top five,” he says. “We didn’t have the mega-budgets that Netflix, DreamWorks and Pixar had, yet we gained traction, particularly Flow, in the later months leading up to the ceremony.” Boasting a nearly 30-year career, Elliot is a

Robot Dreams

director firmly rooted in the independent space. “I’ve been meeting with the studios for 30 years, and they all say how much they love what I do and how they want to work with me… but then they never do,” laughs Elliot. “They would rather I direct one of their IPs or franchises, and I don’t want to do that.” As someone who works on stop-motion and animation with adult themes, Elliot’s ideas don’t necessarily fit into that kid-friendly, formulaic structure that most studios are looking for. “I’m certainly not anti-studio,” he says. “I just want to make films my way, with creative control, creative freedom… I want my endings to be how I want them, and I don’t want to have the edges taken off my projects.” Elliot has seen a recent change in the landscape for animation. While his job has mostly stayed the same, other than evolving with technology, he has found the industry more receptive than they used to be. “It has been interesting to observe how things have changed in terms of the industry’s attitude toward people like myself and my good friend Gints, who made Flow,” he says. “Because of things like streaming, there’s certainly a greater awareness of adult animation, or animation that is more challenging, so that certainly has made my life easier and hopefully will continue to do so.” Though he acknowledges there are still many challenges, Elliot says, “I feel that it’s probably never been a better time to be an independent animation director.” ★ DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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Mediawan’s Moment HOW A FRENCH PRODUCER BECAME A MAGNET FOR THE STORYTELLERS BEHIND ADOLESCENCE & SLOW HORSES By Jake Kanter

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sk Elisabeth d’Arvieu about the movies that inspire her and she suddenly sparkles with enthusiasm. “The Godfather, obviously,” the Mediawan Pictures CEO offers, before reminiscing about childhood memories of “all the Hitchcocks” and Brian De Palma’s early work. By this point, she’s late for her next appointment, but can’t help unspooling a list that spans Parasite and Emilia Pérez, the latter of which she has seen three times. “I’ve been obsessed with movies since I was a little child,” d'Arvieu laughs. It’s a small window on what is making Mediawan magnetic for some of the world’s top creatives, not least Brad Pitt’s Plan B and

Florian Zeller’s Blue Morning Pictures. Those within the group talk animatedly about the light-touch leadership of d’Arvieu and CEO Pierre-Antoine Capton, as well as the simple, straightforward creative conversations they share. “They are good people in it for the right reasons,” says Roanna Benn, coCEO of Drama Republic, the U.K. producer behind Netflix hit series One Day. Founded a decade ago, Mediawan may not be the young pretender it once was, but it remains a disruptor. The company enters the Cannes Film Festival with a couple of fresh feathers in its cap: Plan B’s Netflix smash hit Adolescence, which reframed the conversation around male violence;

From top: Gary Oldman in Slow Horses; The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol.

Leonine Studios in 2024, Mediawan revealed that it had sales of €1 billion, which is less than a third of its French compatriot, Banijay. D’Arvieu says private equity backers, including KKR, “continue to support” and are not looking for an exit after investing as part of Mediawan’s de-listing from the Paris Euronext in 2020. Others note that five years can be a point at which venture capitalists get itchy feet. “KKR wants to send a message that scale will bring higher margins,” says François Godard, a senior media analyst at Enders Analysis. “The M&A scene will continue to be dynamic, so we can expect Mediawan to keep growing.” The company refinanced last year, raising a €500 million loan and a €225 million revolving credit facility, which analysts say will fund acquisitions. D’Arvieu says Mediawan is unlikely to embark on a shopping “frenzy”, but will instead target partners that share the same “artistic vision as us”. D’Arvieu spoke to Deadline on the day that Cannes unveiled its 2025 official selection. Mediawan has two titles in the mix: Bono: Stories of Surrender, Plan B’s Apple TV+ documentary about the U2 frontman; and Sylvain Chomet’s animation The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol. D’Arvieu says the latter is “super exciting” because it speaks to Mediawan’s DNA, melding a talented (and Oscar-nominated) director with a French cultural icon, the late writer and director Pagnol. And with that, d’Arvieu’s mind is once again in the movies. ★

DE A D L IN E/ A P P L E TV + / S ON Y P I CT U RE S C L A S S I CS / EV ER E TT C O L L EC T IO N

Mediawan Pictures CEO Elisabeth d'Arvieu

and its latest acquisition, See-Saw, the British-Australian production company behind Slow Horses and The King’s Speech. Deadline understands that Mediawan’s 51% stake in See-Saw values the company at around £100 million ($130 million) after it posted revenues of £116 million last year. Thomas Dey, the CEO of ACF, the investment bank that brokered the See-Saw deal, describes the Heartstopper producer as being quietly multifaceted. He points to its bases in London and Australia, its film and TV slate, and its “treasure trove” of IP, which includes The NeverEnding Story, a franchise currently being readied for a bigscreen revival. “Some of the buyers came in and almost learned about how [See-Saw is set up],” Dey adds. When asked for her elevator pitch to potential new partners, d’Arvieu launches into a 10-minute monologue in which she espouses “complete independence” finance for IP buys, a sales arm that can bridge funding gaps, and direct access to Mediawan’s leadership team. Mediawan also tends to acquire with cash and share options, an uncommon offer that it hopes incentivizes production partners to strive for group growth. Plan B’s co-president Dede Gardner says: “They’ve been supportive and very true to their word. When we first met, they said: ‘We just want you guys to keep being you and doing what you do.’ They’ve honored that.” “A couple of years ago, we were not the first studio [sellers] would think of,” d’Arvieu continues. “Now, as we’ve been growing and building our reputation in the market, more of them reach out to us naturally.” Dey, who regularly deals with all the major European production groups, says Mediawan was firm but fair in negotiations. “We did all our dancing and waving our hands, and they cut through the middle of it,” he says. Mediawan’s website says it was founded with one goal: to “create a space where creativity could thrive.” But what does commercial success look like? D’Arvieu is emphatic that Mediawan does not have a revenue target like some rivals (maybe wise after Fremantle’s €3 billion—$3.4 billion—target was kicked into the long grass earlier this year). After combining with German giant

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Vidya Balan HOW THE BOLLYWOOD STAR CARVED OUT NEW SPACE FOR NUANCED FEMALE CHARACTERS By Sunil Sadarangani

“The few films that I enjoyed where women were leading the story were in arthouse cinema.” Among Balan’s other successful films boasting lead female characters: The Dirty Picture, inspired by the life of South Indian actress Silk Smitha, who defied the norm in the ’80s doing sexually driven roles. Balan, who played Smitha, received wide acclaim as one of the boldest female performances in the history of Indian cinema; and Kahaani, which explored the impact of grief, the transformative power of trauma, and complexities of revenge. Balan’s character in Kahaani, Vidya Bagchi, is represented as the female hero who is portrayed, in parallel, as the all-powerful Goddess Durga of the Hindu pantheon.

Back when she was first starting out in Bollywood, there was no clear path for Balan to find the compelling roles she wanted, because those kinds of female characters were simply not being written. “There was no question of strategizing [to play strong characters] because one had never really seen women take center stage in mainstream films,” she says. “The few films that I enjoyed where women were leading the story were in art house cinema. The only film I can think of which was commercially viable and led by a woman was Chaalbaaz.”—a 1989 film starring the wellknown actress Sridevi in dual leading roles.

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idya Balan has long been a pioneer in Hindi Cinema—or Bollywood as it’s more often called—inciting change in the portrayal of women through her mold-breaking leading roles. “Generally in Hindi cinema, women characters are not very layered, robbing them of their humanity,” says Balan. Last year, she reprised her iconic character of Manjulika in the horror comedy Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3—which became the second-highest grossing Hindi film of 2024, earning approximately $50 million. Balan’s Manjulika, a 19th century royal court dancer who returns as an unforgiving spirit to avenge her murder, strikes a balance between fragility and fury. The character is a powerful metaphor of oppressed women, challenging patriarchal norms, and has emerged as a symbol of female strength and resilience within the Indian horror genre. 114 D E A D L I N E . C O M / A W A R D S L I N E

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Balan wanted to find a way to bring central female characters more into the mainstream of Hindi cinema. But she “never imagined that it was actually possible.” But then came her debut in Parineeta, with her role based on a well-rounded character in a popular novella. The film was a critical and commercial hit, so Balan had proven a commercial Bollywood film could have a compelling woman as a central character. She was now in a position to push for engaging, nuanced roles for herself, even if those hadn’t been widely available to actresses before. “I began getting roles with some amount of

sense, even within regular mainstream films,” Balan says. She went on to play a single mother grappling to raise a 12-year-old son in Paa, a seductive, manipulative widow in Ishqiya, the titular role in Shakuntala Devi, and an ambitious housewife who becomes a radio jockey for a late-night relationship advice show in Tumhari Sulu. “In each of these films, there was an opportunity for me to do something different as an actor,” says Balan. “They were well fleshed-out characters, and yet they were great scripts and very engaging, entertaining films.” As winner of the Indian National Film Award

and seven Filmfare Awards, Balan’s star power has expanded globally. She served on the 2013 Cannes jury and became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2021. And these days, she’s looking for new and juicy roles on a global scale too. “I’d love to play [a character like] the therapist in Adolescence. That’s on the top of my mind at this point,” she says. “I would love to do comedy. I absolutely loved Kate Winslet in The Regime. I also love the work Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon are doing.” But in India, after almost two decades of reimagining female roles, Balan feels that more change is definitely needed in terms of gender equality in cinema, and that the financial pinch created by Covid has set things back somewhat. “Post-pandemic, people in India have lost the habit of going to the theaters to watch films,” she says. “The studios feel it would be safer to bet on the historically male-led films. In my opinion, this calls for a reinvention in the female-led film space.” ★

BEYOND THE GATES Sheila Ducksworth and Michele Val Jean team up for CBS’s first Black soap opera

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ome two decades ago, a TV producer by the name of Sheila Ducksworth struck up an instant friendship with a writer on The Bold and the Beautiful over their love of daytime dramas. That writer was Michele Val Jean, one of the first Black women to ever write for the genre. The two felt an instant kinship because Val Jean had previously written for NBC’s Generations, Ducksworth’s favorite show growing up, and the first ever daytime drama on broadcast TV to feature a prominent Black family. Ducksworth always wanted to do a Black soap opera, and Val Jean seemed like the only person who could pull it off. “She said, ‘We’re going to work together one 116

By Lynette Rice day,’” remembers Val Jean. “So here we are.” The here she is talking about is Beyond the Gates, TV’s first Black soap opera for CBS. Val Jean is the creator and head writer of the sudser that revolves around an affluent African American county in Maryland.

It’s also the first soap to launch since 1999’s Passions that’s landing at a time when only three soaps—B&B, The Young and the Restless and General Hospital—remain on broadcast TV. In other words, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Ducksworth and Val Jean, who now split their time

between Los Angeles and Atlanta where Gates is in production. But they’re not about to let anyone pop their soap bubble. “Everybody doing a soap knows exactly how hard it is to make a soap happen,” says Ducksworth, the president of CBS’s production venture with the NAACP. “Not just to give birth to a new one, but also to keep it running. We shoot close to 100 pages every day, we’re doing new scenes every 10 minutes, and going from stage to stage in five minutes. It’s the most coordinated dance that you could ever imagine and it’s incredibly difficult, and it’s the most incredibly different genre I’ve ever put my toe into. But it’s amazing. The support we have received from CBS and the other four soaps has been heartwarming and incredible. Everybody wants to see us win.” ★ From left: Sheila Ducksworth and Michele Val Jean; Najah Jackson and Colby Muhammad in Beyond the Gates.

A M A Z O N / T S E R I ES / EV E R ET T C O L L EC TI O N / Q U A N T R E L L C OL B E RT / C BS

From left: Balan in Shakuntala Devi; Balan in Tumhari Sulu.

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Range Media Partners

HOW THE HYBRID AGENCY IS WEATHERING THE STORM BY CREATIVELY EMPOWERING ITS CLIENTS By Justin Kroll and Mike Fleming Jr.

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ive years ago this August, a handful of the best and brightest agents from CAA and WME stunned the town by abruptly leaving high-profile jobs to start a new company that sought to be a hybrid between the agencies where they grew up, repping their clients as managers. Even before the major agencies were driven out of packaging and affiliated production businesses following the WGA standoff, management companies bore fewer shackles in areas like the ability to produce and be more hands on and entrepreneurial in helping clients be the same. Range was a company born out of the

pandemic, which shut down Hollywood and gave entrepreneurial dealmakers the time to confront the existential question: Is this all there is for me? On August 23rd, 2020, Deadline revealed that former CAA and Entertainment One executive Peter Micelli, CAA talent agents Jack Whigham, Michael Cooper, Mick Sullivan and Dave Bugliari, WME literary agent Rich Cook, and a few others, came together to form Range Media Partners, taking most of their high-profile client lists with them. For a town still emerging from the devastating Covid quarantine that reduced agency revenues from production and live events to a trickle, the

venture was a seismic risk. Nothing like this had been attempted in 25 years, and Range’s Micelli termed it a third revolution, harkening back to a couple of covert formations that transformed the rep business. That would be CAA’s creation in 1975 by Mike Ovitz, Ron Meyer and a few others who left WME, and then later, when Ari Emanuel, Tom Strickler and others made their exit from ICM to form Endeavor in 1995. Endeavor would go on to swallow William Morris, turning CAA vs. WME into the rep business’s version of Coke vs. Pepsi. Range started out on a strong footing, with major investment from hedge fund titan and

R EZ ET A V E L I U

From left: Kai Gayoso, co-head of digital; Rich Cook, founding partner; Jack Whigham, founding partner; Michael Cooper, founding partner; Eman Redwan, co-head of digital; Matt Graham, co-head of music.

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future New York Mets owner Steve Cohen and his Point72 group. Disruption always creates chaos and bitterness. While Emanuel wished those leaving for Range well, noting he would be a hypocrite to feel otherwise, CAA’s brain trust had an opposite reaction. The agency sued Range—an ongoing lawsuit that claims, among other things, that exiting partners didn’t deserve equity they held in the agency and asks the courts to decide whether Range is a management company, or an agency in disguise. It is worth noting that despite that litigation, CAA and Range share about 125 clients. Fast forward to 2025. Range has gone from a small group of reps working out of Micelli’s house in the Hollywood Hills to a tiered company featuring three other offices across the country (as well as an international office in London). Its headquarters in Santa Monica is something to see. It was designed by celebrated director and Range client Luca Guadagnino, so excited by his rep’s new venture that he created a wide-open workspace with different styles and a fishbowl second floor conference room. The aura is hip, with a wide-open two-floor plan that breaks down traditional barriers and invites collaboration. “Once Rich got me into the newly chosen headquarters of Range, then we started dreaming of me and my studio of interior design to contribute a creation of the new spaces,” Guadagnino says. The director teamed with his project manager, Pablo Molezún, with whom he co-authored the space’s aesthetic. Guadagnino says they chose to go with “a mid-century modernism mixed with the Hitchcockian flair for surfaces and color blocking.” While the unique office space and long list of A-list clients make Range a power player among the typical representation company, their strength lies in supporting their clients through both their professional aspirations and their passion plays. One example is Halle Berry. In 2023, during an exploratory meeting at Range, Berry brought up her journey through hormonal changes, lamenting how perimenopause and menopause are not discussed openly enough. She referenced that this stigma and disconnect had moved her to speak more about it both publicly, in both interviews and on her health and wellness media website, Respin, which she had softlaunched during Covid. Her candid, authentic comments in that meeting sparked an idea in the room. The Range team cited a deep dive they had recently put together with similar thinking, largely focused on how menopause (and women’s longevity overall) was an enormous opportunity that few were meaningfully addressing. Over the ensuing months, Berry and an extended team worked to build out a broader brand vision and business strategy for how to “own the lane” around Halle’s key insight—that

in standing up and advocating for better care for herself, she could also positively impact the lives of many more women. Roughly 18 months later, Berry launched Respin Health to the public in February 2025, with nationally televised appearances on the Today show and The Drew Barrymore Show. Now supported by a founding team of healthcare and media veterans, and a multimillion dollar seed round backing by leading investors and partners Khosla Ventures (early backers in OpenAI), Night Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Able Partners, Range and more, Respin’s launch week also celebrated The Respin Reset, a threemonth structured menopause program designed by menopause clinicians, scientists and holistic experts—with 90% of participants reporting symptom improvement and nearly two-thirds of participants reporting clinically significant improvement in just weeks. Another example involved client Shane Gillis and his recent Bud Light ad campaign. In 2023, the beer company was dealing with some tough times after they teamed with TikTok influencer and trans activist Dylan Mulvaney to promote the brand’s Easy Carry Contest. Mulvaney’s involvement immediately sparked outrage from right-wing commentators, who went after the brand for working with a transgender influencer. “They were really in trouble and their market share was down. They were trying to find the right person that was authentic to the brand,” says Carol Goll, the head of Range’s endorsements division. Enter Gillis, one of the top stand-up

comedians in the world and a Bud Light enthusiast. Range suggested to the client Anheuser-Busch that Gillis would be the ideal choice to help turn things around. Range also arranged for their production team and Gillis to write and come up with the spots, and they ultimately produced content for the 2024 college football season. “I’ve never in all my years had that type of creative control and storytelling from a company, and they wanted that,” Goll says. “And so, the fact that they were so open to that, and they took the guardrails off, and we worked together, and really let Shane let his creative voice speak, and then did so well? It was a test for them. They had never done that before.” As for the future of Range, a lot of that depends on what happens in the industry during these tumultuous times, as various elements of the business are either at, or coming to, a crossroads. Even so, Cook believes as long as there is creativity and people who put in the work, not just at Range, but across the entire industry, then the opportunities are endless for what is to come many years from now. “More than ever, the business demands a higher degree of hustle and creativity and that really motivates all the divisions across Range,” Cook says. “There is tremendous opportunity on the horizon and we’re going to continue to grow strategically and synergistically as the industry evolves. We’re committed to raising the bar for our clients, creating an inspiring workplace for our colleagues and having an absolute blast as we build. We won’t have it any other way.” ★

“The business demands a higher degree of hustle and creativity and that really motivates all the divisions across Range.” RICH COOK

Clockwise from left: Carol Goll, head of endorsements; Mark Herwick, co-president of non-scripted, Range Studios; Will Funk, co-president of sports; Greg Luckman, co-president of sports; Jessica Lacy, head of Range Select; Peter Micelli, CEO; Mick Sullivan, founding partner. DEADLINE.COM/AWARDSLINE

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Love at First Bite STEVEN SODERBERGH WAS JUST 12 YEARS OLD WHEN JAWS MANIA SWEPT THE WORLD—AND A HALF-CENTURY LATER, HE'S STILL OBSESSED WITH IT By Mike Fleming, Jr.

out the book’s myriad subplots to focus on New England police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) and the team he assembles to stop a great white shark that is terrorizing Amity Island: intellectual oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and salty, no-nonsense shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw). In Spielberg’s hands, Jaws was a lot more than a terrifying great white shark; the characters of Quint, Hooper and Brody are indelible, their grudging camaraderie bolstered by the film’s centerpiece: the chilling tale of the USS Indianapolis. Devised by script doctor Howard Sackler and punched up in a later draft by John Milius (with some finessing from Shaw himself), Quint’s gruesome monologue

explained the fisherman’s hatred for sharks, having been on board the ill-fated ship when it went down in shark-infested waters in July 1945 (“The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and they rip you to pieces”). An early admirer of the film was 12-year-old Steven Soderbergh, who came out the screening with two questions: “What does ‘directed by’ mean? And who is Steven Spielberg?” Spielberg’s giant shark hooked Soderbergh not only enough to fuel his own disruptive filmmaking career, but also to start work on a long-gestating book that reconstructs each day of shooting what must have seemed like an impossible task: making a movie

“The thing that I think separates it from most movies before or since is the character work.” STEVEN SODERBERGH

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1 Cast and crew on the set in 1975. 2 Concept illustration. 3 Jaws clapperboard. 4 Roy Scheider. 5 Robert Shaw, Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss. 6 The original Jaws poster.

on open water with a mechanical shark that just would not work. Here, he reflects on his enduring admiration for the film. I watch Jaws at least once a year and fixate on something different each time. Describe how you felt as a kid in a movie theater, seeing Jaws for the first time?

Overwhelmed, on a lot of levels. It was probably the moviest movie I’d ever seen at that point, this incredibly combustible combination of super-high concept and bravura filmmaking. But the thing that I think separates it from most movies before or since is the character work. And the clear understanding on the part of Spielberg of what Stanley Kubrick used to call the submersible units of narrative. When you look at how the narrative of the movie is built, what each scene or sequence is accomplishing, it’s just a model of movie storytelling, combined with what was, at

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n its 50th anniversary, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws can claim to be the most disruptive film of the last half-century, maybe even ever. While predecessors like The Godfather and The Exorcist drew theater lines around the block through word-of-mouth, Jaws was the one for which the term summer blockbuster was coined. Opening on a then-unheard-of 409 screens, the film caught the zeitgeist in an unprecedented manner, helped by marketing techniques that would center escapism as a staple of the summer movie season. Spielberg’s film followed hard on the heels of Peter Benchley’s best-selling 1974 novel, with screenwriter Carl Gottlieb throwing

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E V E R ET T C OL L E C TI ON / M A R GA R ET HA R R I C K L I B R AR T

Steven Spielberg, (kneeling) on set.

the time, unprecedented hype and expectation. And then, that expectation is not only met, it’s exceeded, and he makes an instant classic, which nobody was anticipating. It was already, at that point, a sort of legendarily difficult production. And until the first preview in Dallas, nobody knew what was going to happen. But you’ve got these forces that are smashing into each other—cultural and artistic forces—that result in this kind of nuclear detonation of popularity. But also, you’ve got a singular,

multi-generational talent emerging with this film that everybody in the world is going to see. There was just so much fissionable material there to generate an explosion, and that’s what happened. But what makes it unique even in retrospect is this: Let’s say you look at the five movies nominated for best picture that year: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All of them are great. I would argue, though, that of the other four films that aren’t

Jaws, there are other filmmakers that could have made versions of those movies. They may not have been as good or distinctive, but they are possible to be made by other filmmakers. But there was no other director on the planet who could have survived and made Jaws. None of those other four directors could have made Jaws. Whereas I think Spielberg could have made a variation of any of those other films. It was just a totally unique property and a totally unique talent blowing

up, and that’s why I think it still resonates, and it just keeps getting better because it’s all in camera. What do you mean by that?

There’s no C.G. They were out there in the middle of a fucking ocean. There’s a reason people don’t do that. There is no technological advance that has happened since that would make it any easier to do what they were doing. That shark was just a pneumatic mechanical device, in the actual ocean. There’s no shortcut to that, and nobody’s

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What was the most calamitous thing that those choices brought?

Going through the production reports, there’s a period of a few weeks where the shark’s not working. And it’s not working to an extent that they’re beginning to confront the real possibility that what they’re attempting to do justphysically cannot be done. It’s a testament to the studio, the producers and Spielberg, that they continued to shoot, and continued to believe that essentially, they would figure it out. But when they first got the thing in the water and tried to make it work, they were looking at the real possibility that they’d made a mistake. Beyond those logistical challenges, how did they find the handle that wasn’t really in Peter Benchley’s soapy novel with subplots that included Hooper fooling around with Brody’s bored wife? How did screenwriter Carl Gottlieb find the gold as he discarded things that got in the way?

From what I’ve read, it was obvious very early on, they would have to take the basic premise of the book, and those three characters, and just start over. It makes sense that in the course of talking about this story, somebody would say, “Hey, why does Quint hate sharks so much?” And that they should try to answer that. My understanding, which could be wrong, is that Howard Sackler was the one who came up with the idea of him telling that story. He’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who did an uncredited rewrite, right?

As is well-documented, it went through many, many iterations. But the audacity of stopping the movie—for nine minutes—to have

that scene! It starts out as a very funny scene and then morphs into something much darker. It is just still amazing to contemplate today. Can you imagine, in the middle of a Star Wars movie, a nine-minute dialogue scene? It’s unthinkable. And so, again, the fact that Spielberg understood this. He’s like, “We’ve got to do it, and this is the time to do it. The night of day one when you need a breather—we’re going to give you that breather, but then we’re going to slip this other thing in there too, something that’s going to make Quint an unforgettable character, through a story that is also unforgettable and true.” So, just the fact that, under enormous pressure, everybody continued to do their best work and to make the best version of that movie is, to me, a real clinic for a young filmmaker about the kinds of obstacles that you encounter. If you’re going to make a movie, this is the most extreme example, but as a portrayal of the idea, “never panic and never give up,” it’s pretty hard to beat.

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The Exorcist and The Godfather came out and lines formed around the block, mostly to the surprise of the studios that booked them in limited amounts of theaters. Why is Jaws the one that goes down as the one that birthed the summer blockbuster, generating unimaginable amounts of money in a remarkably short period of time?

You have to attribute that to Universal, recognizing they had a rocket in their pocket and tripling down, quadrupling down, on this wide release strategy. If it’s not this movie by this filmmaker, it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. You can’t just do it with any film. It was the beneficiary of a lot of different elements coming together in this one circumstance, and the studio saying, “We should really weaponize this movie, because there’s 100%

“He’s a singular talent who was going to emerge one way or another. He was unstoppable.” STEVEN SODERBERGH

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been able to come up with an easier, better way to do it, which is why people have stopped doing it.

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1 Spielberg on set with CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite. 2 Scheider and the shark. 3 Spielberg and Scheieder on set. 4 Susan Backlinie in the opening. sequence.

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awareness and 100% want to see. And the guy made a masterpiece. So, we throw everything at it.” That was the right call. Of course, when it works, everybody goes, “OK, let’s do that too.” The problem is, you’ve got to have a movie like Jaws to pull it off. Also, an idea big enough that people didn’t want to swim in the ocean, just like Psycho made people nervous in the shower.

Well, to your point, it’s a huge idea. It’s a really big hook, and everybody who came into contact with the novel knew it. It’s a testament to how big the idea is that the novel was as big as it was, because it’s not a great novel. It’s just got this massive hook in it that keeps you reading. Those are rare, those high-concept horror movies that are applicable to experiences that you have in everyday life. Psycho was one of them. This is another, and whether they all have to involve water, I don’t know. But it’s the equivalent of finding a horror movie that makes people afraid to step off the curb, or something that they do multiple times a day and now they will never do without some amount of anxiety. Those are really hard to come by—and, believe me, there are lots of writers sitting around trying to come up with them.

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After Jaws, Dino De Laurentiis made Orca in 1977, with the boast that the creature was bigger than a shark. People saw through it. You’d have to go to Star Wars as the successor to Spielberg’s blockbuster. How much did that film owe to the infrastructure set up by Jaws, forcing studios to adjust how much business could be done in a couple weekends?

The component that needs to be present for these two to become something other than single-use plastic is great storytelling. And so, two years later, Star Wars meets both those metrics and that’s why it blew up in the same way Jaws did. But we’re talking about a period of time when it was still conceivable that the most popular films of the year were also the best films of the year. And

I don’t know that that’s been true for some time. What about Spielberg, flying so close to the sun at such a young age? Not only didn’t his wings melt, he’d also continue soaring with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and others. I heard his origins at Universal were modest: he was a stowaway on the Uni lot, hanging around and sponging up lessons like a mascot for Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg, then emerged as their most important discovery. What does it say about him, going from humble origins to surviving such a nightmare shoot on a movie we’re still talking about 50 years later?

He’s a singular talent who was going to emerge one way or another. He was unstoppable. A born filmmaker, and everybody that interacted with him knew it. The weird thing is, despite being the most successful director in history, I still think he’s taken for granted. He has generated so much astonishing material, and some doesn’t get its due because he’s prolific and unpretentious in the way that he works and the things that he makes and the way that he talks about his work. There are things that he’s done that if any other filmmaker had made them, these would be their career best. But he’s done it so often that he gets taken for granted. I mean, there’s no filmmaker that I’m aware of that can wrap their head around what he did on Ready Player One [2018]. You get any group of directors together, and they’re like, “I don’t even understand how that’s possible, what he did in that film.” And that’s just one of two films he made back-to-back [after 2017’s The Post]. Anybody else after any one of these things he’d done would be on bed rest for three years. Certainly, after the year in which he directed Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List…

That’s ridiculous. Either one of those would put another filmmaker in the hospital. So, for his facility and, like I said, his lack of pretension, I just still think he’s taken for granted, strangely. ★

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