That family is the Paivas. In 1971, the regime that was in power from 1964 to 1985 arrested patriarch Rubens Pavia in his home on suspicion of political dissidence. His loved ones never saw him again. In the film, which is Brazil’s Oscar entry for international feature, Fernanda Torres plays Rubens’ wife, Eunice Pavia, a formidable woman who became a human rights lawyer and devoted her life to uncovering what happened to her husband (played by Selton Mello). She did not receive his death certificate until 1996; only in 2014 did a government report confirm that Rubens was one of hundreds of citizens who had been murdered by the regime. 

The screenplay, by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, is based on the 2015 memoir (“Ainda Estou Aqui”) written by Rubens and Eunice’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva. He was one of five children growing up in the Paiva house in Rio de Janeiro — a warm, welcoming bastion of culture and intellectual curiosity in Ipanema that Salles remembers vividly.

“I became very good friends with the middle sister of the five kids, and I was enamored by the family,” he said during a discussion following a showing of “I’m Still Here” that was part of TheWrap Screening Series at the Ojai Playhouse on Friday. “I was enamored by their passion for life, by the the fact that in this house, in the middle of a dictatorship, there was freedom of thought. You could discuss politics. You could discuss culture. Music was playing all the time. … It was the reverse angle of what a military dictatorship stands for, which is censorship, the lack of possibility to express yourself.”

Though Torres — who just a few days before had won a Golden Globe for her performance — did not know the Paivas personally, the movie resonated deeply with her. The daughter of renowned actress Fernanda Montenegro and actor-producer-director Fernando Torres, she too grew up in an artistic environment in Rio de Janeiro during the dictatorship. “My house was just like this,” she said, adding that censors always loomed over her parents’ plays, cutting content or shutting them down completely. “And I remember we were always afraid of the police. … Everybody was being taken. [“I’m Still Here” producer] Daniela Thomas, who works with us, her father is a very famous cartoonist. He was taken just like Rubens, for three months. Everybody was being taken. Everybody was terrified.”

The discussion took place in Ojai as wildfires continued to rage through Los Angeles. Torres said she and Salles had discussed whether it was appropriate to talk about their film when a tragedy was unfolding around them. “And he told me, ‘No, perhaps this movie, it’s a good message because this is a woman that reinvents herself and becomes herself after a tragedy,'” she said. “And her choices of not telling her children what happened to their [father] … I think by doing this, she kept the innocence of those children. Today, I saw some children on television grabbing some new toys, talking about the toys they lost. So I think this whole process of reconstructing… This woman has this power of facing a tragedy, reinventing herself, smiling. So it’s a hell of a good character for now, I think.”

Torres and Salles also spoke about how “I’m Still Here” relates to the Brazil of today. After the film’s release in Brazil in November, a police report revealed a plot by former president Jair Bolsonaro to kill the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in a military coup.

“As we started to adapt the screenplay,” Salles said, “we realized that the zeitgeist was changing. The extreme right was rising in Brazil, as it did in so many different parts of the world. And we realized that the film was not only about our past, but was also about our present. And this somehow actually textured the film. Everybody became very conscious that the film was not only about who we had been, but who we were and who we eventually wanted to be. It was a film about an identity in motion, you know. And again, this, I think, gave us a focus and a sense of urgency to the film.”

Production on “I’m Still Here” took place in a house that Salles described as the “Xerox copy” of the Paivas’ home. There, he encouraged his cast — many of whom were just beginning their careers as actors — to inhabit their characters: They cooked together, decorated their bedrooms and improvised scenes of domesticity. “When I saw the film for the first time, I was getting shocked because we didn’t look like we were acting,” Torres said. “Walter is a documentarist. … And in this film, it’s all there. It’s filming, but with the the sense of a documentarist. It was wonderful.”

The casting of a character who appears in the movie’s final moments added yet another personal dimension to “I’m Still Here.” In a moving coda, Torres’s mother, Montenegro, plays Eunice as an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, her memory largely gone but her family still rallying around her. Montenegro was nominated for an Oscar in 1999 for Salles’s “Central Station,” so her appearance here is rich with meaning.

“It was not CGI,” Torres quipped.

To which Salles replied, “How lucky I was to have the two Fernandas in one film!”

Watch the full discussion here.

The post Walter Salles and Fernanda Torres: ‘I’m Still Here’ Is Brazil’s Past and Future | Video appeared first on TheWrap.

The film opened to critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was named one of the National Board of Review’s best documentaries of 2024.

“How do you tell a story, which a lot of people know quite a bit about? The fact that people know about Chris’ accident and know about his death and knew he was Superman,” Bonhôte said as part of TheWrap’s Screening Series, where he was joined by Ettedgui and TheWrap’s Joe McGovern, who moderated the virtual conversation. “How do you surprise an audience with elements that are already known? We want[ed] emotion to be over information. Emotion is what we [were] looking for.”

By bringing in those who knew Reeve best and when he was at his most vulnerable.

“Super/Man” features footage of Reeve and his wife, Dana, who died in 2006 from lung cancer, as well as new interviews with his three grown children Alexandra, Matthew and Will, and Reeve’s former partner Gae Exton (who is very private and had to be wooed over a long period of time, they recall). Actors Jeff Daniels, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close and Whoopi Goldberg, among other key figures throughout Reeve’s life, also make appearances throughout the documentary, along with archival interviews of Superman director Richard Donner and Reeve’s close friend Robin Williams.

“What we discovered as we were making [the film] was the importance of people like Dana. We didn’t know about Dana’s story. We barely knew the kids,” Ettedgui admitted. “Getting to know them more and more, it became clear that it wasn’t just a Superman story, it was the story of this really beautiful family.”

Bonhôte acknowledged that the film wouldn’t have the same emotional impact without the involvement of Reeve’s family members.

“The film couldn’t be done with[out] them,” he said. “We realized that the film was going to be much more than about Chris. They became even more and more relevant to the story and discovering that Dana and the family aspect of the Reeve family was much more important than just Christopher Reeve being a successful actor and the accident. There was much more to it.”

“I think that’s why the children became so prominent,” Bonhôte continued. “We start the film with them and we finish the film with them, and probably 30 to 40% of the film is about them.”

The interview sessions with Reeve’s children were emotional, the filmmakers remembered, as they each reflected on their early memories of their father. (Each interview session took about 12 hours to complete.)

“It was the first time they’d ever really done that, either individually or as the three of them,” Ettedgui said. He relayed a moment with Matthew where he went into a “lyrical, beautiful memory of being a young boy on his dad’s shoulders.” It was then Ettedgui knew they were opening the door to something special. “They really let their emotions out. I don’t think we were expecting that would happen to the extent that it did for everybody who was there. We all felt the power of these interviews.”

As for Dana’s part in the documentary, Bonhôte conveyed the loss she endured after Reeve suffered his life-changing accident, in which he was paralyzed from the waist down and used a device to help him breathe. “She made us understand that someone having his level of disability will impact everyone in the family, will impact your partner, and that’s what she wanted to bring to the table,” Bonhôte said.

With a runtime of 104 minutes, naturally there were aspects of Reeve’s life Bonhôte and Ettedgui were unable to fully delve into, such as his involvement as a founding member of the Creative Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group made up of entertainers, and supporting the preservation of historic New York architecture and heritage.

Ultimately, “Super/Man” isn’t about Christopher Reeve, the actor, but rather the man behind the cape — and his loved ones who kept him going. “It’s about love, family and legacy,” Bonhôte said.

Watch the full discussion here.

The post ‘Super/Man’ Directors Share How Christopher Reeve’s Kids Played Emotional Role in Keeping Legacy Alive appeared first on TheWrap.

First on tap was “A Place to Fall Down,” a live action short film written and directed by Duane Hansen Fernandez that delves into the life of a mechanic struggling to deal with grief and loneliness. Those feelings and emotions were things Fernandez was interested in investigating “coming out of the pandemic,” and a 15-minute short film was an intriguing way to go about telling that story.

He acknowledged the challenges of digging into someone’s personal journey. “I can’t even describe how special it is when people share their stories with me and it creates a connection and a conversation,” Fernandez said.

Director Brad Bailey’s documentary short film, “Her Fight, His Name: The Story of Gwen Carr and Eric Garner,” chronicles six years of Gwen Carr’s life following her son’s 2014 death at the hands of the NYPD. It charts her transformation from a grieving mother to a vocal activist, as she faced personal and public challenges as she continued her fight for justice. When Bailey read about the 2017 death of Erica Garner, Carr’s granddaughter, from a heart attack, it led him to contact Carr.

“I wanted to understand the real people behind some of these big stories that we see, what happens to them when the cameras go away and what happens to them in their private, intimate moments after the crowds have gone away and they have to deal with this trauma, this grief,” Bailey said. “I wanted to really understand who [Gwen] was and how she actually went through that process, and you saw the result.”

Betsy West, director of documentary short “Once Upon a Time in Ukraine,” is known for making films about Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gabby Giffords and Julia Child. But it was the harrowing stories about the children affected by and living through war that drew her in. It was seeing the footage of interviews with the Ukrainian families and children that moved her immensely.

“It takes you to a place that you haven’t seen before, and I think that’s what makes a good doc is to learn something, to see something, to be in a place that you haven’t been or experienced before,” West said. “There was something universal to me about the experience of these children.”

“A Guest in My Country” is a live action short that centers on an immigrant ride-share driver who takes a couple across town. Over the course of the drive, secrets are revealed. Written and directed by John Gray and produced by Melissa Jo Peltier, the film was inspired by the fascinating conversations they would have with their Uber, Lyft or taxi drivers about their lives and the circumstances that brought them there.

“We always hear these [stories]: I was an engineer, I was a pilot, I was a doctor. Combined with this philosophy that I’ve subscribed to… about always be kind and remember that everyone’s fighting their own battle, that’s what I wish we would all keep in mind more as we deal with each other,” Gray said of the inspiration for the film. “That we don’t know what other people have gone through, been through and we don’t know their secrets and they don’t know ours. That’s really what started it.” Peltier added that one of the biggest challenges was making “A Guest in My Country” on a “small scale” and being on a tight budget.

Director Lily Ahree Siegel’s documentary short, “Equal Play,” which fuses live action with animation, highlights the obstacles that face disabled children in sports and follows two British teenagers whose lives are forever changed by it as they fight against discrimination. “These kids have been going through it and continue to go through it,” Siegel said. “What kind of systemic things are happening in the world to limit kids accessing [sport]?”

She hoped that the film is a conversation starter for how to make movies more accessible to everyone of all walks of life. “The disabled community is roughly 20% of the population,” she said. “It’s a huge area of people being essentially left out. They want to see films too.”

Watch the full conversation here.

The post Filmmakers Behind 5 Oscar-Qualifying Shorts Discuss the Inspiration Behind Their Powerful Films appeared first on TheWrap.

Now, three years later, the completed film is Peru’s submission for International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. As part of TheWrap Screening Series, Tito Catacora spoke with us about the film, a black-and-white drama in the Aymara language about a 13-year-old girl, Yana-Wara, from a small indigenous community in Conduriri, El Collao, Puno, Peru. Her story was inspired by a young person Óscar and Tito Catacora had encountered in real life.

“We live in an Andean area where we saw this girl who was … being abused. She claimed that she could see evil spirits at night,” Catacora said in Spanish via an interpreter. From there, emerged a protagonist beset by tragedy: Yana-Wara lost her mother at birth and her father a few years later. (Spoilers ahead.) When she enrolls in her community’s local school under the encouragement of her loving grandfather Don Evaristo (played by Cecilio Quispe Charaja), her teacher rapes and impregnates her. She then begins to suffer from what her village believes to be possession by the evil spirit Anchanchu. The film is bookended by Don Evaristo standing trial for an excruciating decision he makes to save his granddaughter.

For Catacora, it was important that the film reflect the specificity of Aymara culture while also addressing more universal issues. The spirit world, for instance, is central to Aymara beliefs. While benign spirits, or deities, might be embodied in mountains, there are also evil ones, like Anchanchu, who lives in a cave and controls wealth. “On one side we deal with evil spirits, which is very different from what Christianity preaches, for example. We’re not talking about the devil, Satan or Lucifer, just evil spirits,” he said.

“On the other side, we’re incorporating other themes such as gender-based violence, where unfortunately women are the victims. But this has been happening throughout history, in every culture. And still happens. … We also deal with other subjects, like justice — ordinary and community justice — also medicine and in this case, Andean medicine. Every culture has their own particularities, but as human beings we also have the same problems.”

“Yana-Wara” was shot entirely on location in the mountainous Conduriri region, with a cast made up entirely of local non-actors, including Luz Diana Mamami, the extraordinary young woman who plays the title character.

“We couldn’t work with professional actors because they only speak English or Spanish,” Catacora said. So they embedded themselves in the Aymara community, where a field producer eventually found Mamami. “She was (interested in) the opportunity, so we immediately spoke with her parents,” the director said. “After this, we had to train the actors — we have double the work in that sense. We have to train them to act and to perform the specific roles of their characters.”

Early in the film, Don Evaristo tells his granddaughter that everything surrounding them is living: wind, rivers, caves, rocks, even houses. The movie’s lush cinematography and spare soundtrack (there is no music) reflects this philosophy, with the setting, an area about 4,500 meters above sea level known as the Enchanted City, very much brought to life.

“In our culture, the Andean (person), the Aymara (person), his knowledge is bidirectional, not like the western (person), who is unidirectional, meaning that they see, make a judgment and then declare, ‘It’s a being,’ ‘It’s a house,’ etc.,” Catacora said. “Not the Andean, they’re bidirectional. He sees something and does some introspection. He feels, sees things through emotion. That’s why for us the rivers are living beings. So I have to feel: ‘Is this river happy, sad or angry?’ A house for example, I can see a house and make the assessment, ‘The house is happy, sad… I wonder if it’s hungry or thirsty.’

“Those were my thoughts for this film,” he continued. “I don’t hear music or song in nature. I just wanted to interpret, to feel and to make the audience feel how the house of the Anchanchu feels — how that cave feels. That’s the atmosphere I wanted to convey.”

Watch the full discussion here.

The post ‘Yana-Wara’ Director on Violence, Nature and Spirits Both Good and Evil appeared first on TheWrap.

For the conversation, which followed a virtual showing of the film as part of TheWrap Screening Series, Verdin was joined by “Americans With No Address” narrator William Baldwin and featured talent Xander Berkeley. “Our goal with the film is to share our learnings with the audience because I learned more than I ever thought I would,” Verdin said. “I had no idea of the complexity of this problem. I hope that what we learned will be helpful to others.”

“Americans With No Address” is from Robert Craig Films and is a companion to the narrative feature “No Address,” which follows a group of characters who fall into homelessness. The feature-length doc, which was initially meant to be a short educational supplement to complement the narrative film, was born after producers visited 20 U.S. major cities over a three-week span for research. A wide range of people are featured in “Americans With No Address,” from individuals living on the streets to folks in organizations helping the homeless to government officials to health care workers.

Baldwin, who stars in “No Address,” credited nonprofit organizations and programs for doing “remarkable work” in shining a light on homelessness. “Where people have to get hip to and accepting is that the only way we’re going to resolve this is looking at it more as a mental health crisis rather than a homelessness crisis,” he said.

Berkeley, who co-stars in “No Address” and is featured in the doc, said it’s crucial for all sides of the political spectrum to band together to find common ground in order to “work together to find a solution.” Noting that “Americans With No Address” is meant to be a apolitical, Verdin added, “This crisis isn’t about politics.”

Deciding who to feature in the doc was challenging, she said, because “there were so many great stories.” She and the team interviewed “way more people than you see in the film.” One of them was a woman she hugged at a homeless shelter—which brought the woman to tears. “She said, ‘You’re the first person who’s treated me as a human being,'” Verdin said. “It’s very important that we remember that these are human beings out on our streets. Most of them didn’t get there by choice… and they need to be lifted up, given the tools of recovery and helped.”

“It’s about us coming together as a society and saying we have this problem. Billy’s very right in pointing out [that] this is a mental health crisis but it’s also a crisis of broken hearts, of people who, for various reasons, have but ended up there. We as a society need to come together and find solutions.”

The filmmaker, who calls herself “the perennial optimist,” also noted, “I’m a great believer in second chances.”

Watch the full interview here.

The post ‘Americans With No Address’ Team Hopes to Break Misconceptions About Homelessness appeared first on TheWrap.

But her wildest project yet might be “Triumph,” a dark comedy about psychics and space aliens in Bulgaria that is her home country’s selection for the Best International Feature Film Oscar this year.

Bakalova joined the film’s directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov to discuss the “crazy, unbelievable, but absolutely true” new film with Steve Pond as part of TheWrap Screening Series.

Set in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Triumph” dramatizes a real-life attempt by the Bulgarian army to unearth an alien capsule from under a field, an artifact that will bring great virtue to the country’s government. And mankind. Bakalova plays a young woman who claims to have psychic abilities, which will assist in discovering the extraterrestrial goodies.

The actress said that the film’s plot, though set three decades ago and touched by the ludicrous, resonates within our world today.

“I’ve always been curious to find a reason why [psychic hotlines] are so strongly important for Bulgarian people, for people from Eastern Europe,” she said in the clip from the conversation (above).

She opined that the popularity of psychics, even among leaders and politicians, could be explained by centuries of disappointment with the status quo.

“When people have such a long history, you develop a mindset where you become more suspicious about how things are gonna turn,” she said. “So you try to find hope and something to hold onto. And even if that’s a psychic, even if that’s something that you can recognize as otherworldly, you want to find a hope in something. You want to believe in something.”

Noting that the movie features archival news footage of Bulgaria’s lurch back to Communism after the fall of the Soviet Union, she added, “When you’re scared of making a decision, when you’re scared to take a step further, take a leap of faith and believe in something new, you go back to old habits. Even [embracing] things that you wish to get rid of, just because it feels more secure and because you’re scared of what the future is going to give you.”

And this is where alien hunting by telepathic mediums suddenly strikes a chord. “That’s why having somebody like a psychic,” she said, “gives a reason why these people might go through some sort of a madness. And apparently, not only in my country. This is happening all over the world. I think that’s important to say, is that this is a story that makes sense far outside Bulgaria.”

Watch the full discussion here.

The post Maria Bakalova’s Sci-Fi Comedy ‘Triumph’ Tells the ‘Absolutely True Story’ of Psychics and Space Aliens appeared first on TheWrap.

Adapted for the big screen by Ross and co-screenwriter Joslyn Barnes, “Nickel Boys” tells the story of two teenagers — Elwood (Herisse) and Turner (Wilson) — living in Jim Crow-era Florida who become friends while enduring physical and psychological abuse as wards of a juvenile reform center called the Nickel Academy. The academy is a fictionalized version of the infamous Dozier School for Boys, which was run by the state of Florida from 1990 until 2011. Over years of investigations, forensics documented nearly 100 deaths at the school and discovered almost as many unmarked graves on its grounds.

The film’s ensemble cast also includes Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger and Jimmie Fails. Ethan Cole Sharp portrays young Elwood.

Finding two capable actors to lead the movie was a top priority for Ross and the creative team. The filmmaker detailed why Herisse, who previously starred in Netflix’s “When They See Us,” about the Central Park Five, and Wilson, whose past credits include “The Way Back,” were right for their parts.

“I see [Brandon] as a spiritual person who is really interested in feeling and experiencing the world, and that may not necessarily rhyme with who Turner is in Colson’s narrative,” Ross said, describing Wilson’s initial reading of the character as “perfect.” “He just read as an authentic Turner and everyone else [who auditioned] read as someone who was trying to be Turner.”

“[Ethan] has an optimism and a joy for life, and also a desire to be in communion,” the director noted. Herisse auditioned through a self-tape and was brought in late in the process, “which is, I want to say, the sad part because it would have been great to have him earlier because we moved on to other things to look at a million tapes. But I can’t imagine the film without these two.”

Making “Nickel Boys” required Herisse and Wilson to break the fourth wall and look into the camera lens, with Ross choosing to utilize a subjective, first-person point of view (first Elwood’s, then Turner’s) to chronicle the abuse the characters experience and witness. That meant Herisse and Wilson had to break typical acting conventions and recalibrate their approach.

“It was definitely a lot of unlearning during the process because it’s one of the first things you learn: You’re not supposed to look at this thing that’s kind of intruding in the scene and in the moment you’re having with your scene partner,” Herisse said. “But RaMell believed in what he was doing and he trusted us, and we felt that trust and that confidence in us very early on. So when it came to doing it, it was just about diving in and believing in him as well.”

Ross didn’t have macro discussions with the actors prior to filming about the “super high concepts of the film,” instead letting them organically discover it during the process of making it. “We weren’t like, ‘Okay, when you’re looking [at] the camera, you’re really looking at the audience.’ We didn’t ask very much because you guys came in so open and we didn’t need to over-explain or try to convince you all. You guys came to play, which made it fun because it felt like a genuine experiment.”

The stylistic choice of bringing the audience directly into the characters’ POVs drove home a larger thematic point for Ross. “Cinema hasn’t necessarily given that agency to people of color’s perspectives. We haven’t allowed for whatever that power is from the silver screen to be distinctly Black, for lack of a better word.

“It’s also distinctly universal,” he said. “If you don’t even know that Elwood is a person of color, I imagine every single one of you have at least vague memories or emotional impressions of being young looking up at towering figures who are your family members. We wanted to put the camera where the child would be and in that, provide the viewer access to the life gaze that Elwood had, which we hoped was an emotional connection to him and gave you a little peek as to how he saw the world, which was quite beautiful.”

One line of dialogue spoken by Ellis-Taylor’s character, Elwood’s grandmother Hattie, is directly lifted from Whitehead’s book: “Your portion is your pain.” It prophesizes the suffering that her grandson will endure as a young Black man living in the South of the early 1960s.

“We talk about the cards you were dealt in this situation, that you’ve been confined within,” Wilson said. “I think for myself, and to speak on Turner a little bit, there’s this idea of believing in the confinement which we’ve been put in. And Turner very much believed in the reality of his portion of the universe. This idea of being trapped, being an animal; he very much believed in these walls and that his portion of the cake was only pain.

“But within that, he had the intelligence and the wit in order to figure out how to make this piece of cake a little more colorful,” the actor continued. “In meeting Elwood, the relationship helps each other to recognize that they have more than just this piece of the world. They can break out of this confinement and that the world can be much bigger than these limiting beliefs that constantly are put upon and that we adopt as our own.”

Herisse credits Whitehead’s book and their adaptation for bringing awareness to crucial points in Black American history that deserve to be told, otherwise it could “easily be swept under the rug.”

“The way people have been experiencing this movie and talking to me, RaMell, Brandon, other members of the cast and crew, has brought about a bit of hope in humanity overall and the knowledge that people do care,” he said. “[I] can only hope that this movie continues to be watched by people that care and people are able to share with others, and hopefully lead to the change that we want to see, that we imagine.”

Watch the full discussion here.

“Nickel Boys” opens in theaters Dec. 13 in New York and Dec. 20 in Los Angeles.

The post RaMell Ross Broke Rules in ‘Nickel Boys’ to Give ‘Agency to People of Color’s Perspective’ appeared first on TheWrap.

The idea for “Queens” was borne out of a conversation Berlowitz had with NatGeo executive Janet Van Hissering, who suggested they explore females in the natural world as a full-fledged series. After discovering there hadn’t been a show that explored the matriarchal side of things (“Surprise, surprise,” Berlowitz said), it was full steam ahead.

“We thought, obviously, the time was right,” she said. The first task was to put together a “brilliant” female production team.

Enter Sarosh, who was on maternity leave when she got the call from Berlowitz. The “Queens” showrunner admitted she was reticent to come aboard due to her status as a new mother. “‘This is exactly why you’re going to do it,'” Sarosh recalled Berlowitz telling her.

“We literally had to rip up the rule book and find a completely different way to make a series like this,” she said. “This is revolutionary to make this series and it wasn’t always easy. But it was a hugely satisfying thing to do—in the office, on location, in post-production. Just phenomenal women and incredible men that supported us because there actually aren’t enough women to make a series like this. But hopefully, we are the first in a real change and we’ll leave a legacy.”

There’s a bit of history being made with “Queens” behind the camera. Musembi is the first Black Kenyan woman to direct and produce episodes of a major landmark series.

“It means everything,” Musembi said of her groundbreaking achievement. “When we talk about natural history, wildlife series or films, most of them are filmed in Africa. But the irony, up until a few years ago, is a lot of the people who make the series aren’t Africans. It blows your mind a little bit—like, why is that?

“When something’s made that way, it excludes the people who are living with the animals, the actual stakeholders. So to include black and brown voices in this, it has to happen. It’s the way forward and the world of the natural world needs it to happen.”

During the discussion, Darlington, who was responsible for framing the visuals on “Queens” as director of photography, also spoke about the lack of women in key roles such as cinematography and camera work. Kibby, who worked on the series’ arresting music score, praised Sarosh’s openness to be creative and different.

Because “Queens” is a docuseries about animals, which often has a very specific audience, it was vital that the creative team make it as accessible as possible. “We wanted it to be relatable,” Sarosh explained.

She added, “These are phenomenal, female, powerful stories and then they evolve and sometimes the characters inspire you to write. Other times you’re trying to weave (in) science in a way that feels entertaining and exciting. But we have always been unapologetically dramatic about these stories because they are. It’s not straight natural history, it’s a blended drama. It’s been incredibly fun and creatively freeing to do.”

Typical action sequences like big fights, big hunts and the flowing manes often seen in nature docs aren’t prevalent here. “It was a big risk for us to purposely turn away from the things that natural history usually does,” Sarosh said.

And also issues of consent. “It’s fundamental to a lot of the societies that we followed,” she noted. “But these queens are not all benevolent across the series. You will see some real characters and some pretty hardcore behavior as well. There are all types of female leader.” Berlowitz singled out the “badass, gangsta granny orca” as one of those characters on “Queens.”

As for the biggest challenge the team faced? It had nothing to do with being out in the field.

“It was the weight on our shoulders,” Sarosh said. “When we would got out about ‘Queens,’ there was very much a sense of, ‘Oh, that series the girls are making.’ But in that moment, we realized the weight of the fact that not only did we have to make something good, we had to make something great because everyone was waiting for us to fail across the board.”

“We’ve carried that weight for four years. We cannot tell you what a privilege it is to to see people’s reactions to these films,” she continued. “It may not be for everyone. We’ve all heaved that collective sigh when we realized it is good and people are enjoying it. Thank goodness because it was a risk, a huge risk.”

Berlowitz said they’d “like to” explore more matriarchal societies because there are “plenty more stories where these came from.”

“What’s really exciting is scientists are revising their thoughts,” she said. “They’re looking at classic patriarchal societies and going, ‘Maybe the females do have more power than we realize. We just haven’t been looking in the right way.'”

Watch the full discussion here.

The post How NatGeo’s ‘Queens’ Had to ‘Literally Rip Up the Rule Book’ appeared first on TheWrap.

Kemp Powers, one of the directors of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse;” Nick Bruno, one of the directors of “Nimona;” Peter Sohn, the director of “Elemental;” Pablo Berger, director of “Robot Dreams;” and Toshio Suzuki, producer of “The Boy and the Heron” (and co-founder of Studio Ghibli) all spoke about the process of getting their films made – and the surprises along the way.

“So much of it has been getting to know the other filmmakers on this back end of the life of a film and it just feels like a privilege and an honor. And it’s also bittersweet. This is the end days of the journey of a film,” said Sohn about what it meant to get nominated. “And as lucky as I feel, I’m already holding tight to the hand of the film like, Oh, I’m going to miss you.”

Powers even gave a shout-out to some of the other terrific movies that weren’t nominated but were really, really special: “I love all of these films. I’m a huge fan. And there’s actually several other films that weren’t nominated that I love just as much. I love ‘Suzume’ so much, I love ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.’ There were so many great films that came out this year.”

Powers, who also co-directed the Oscar-winning “Soul,” also said, “I found myself emotionally connected to and moved and honestly dazzled by the array of different styles in the animated films. I love that none of our films look like one another at all. It’s so cool.”

Berger, who had made three live-action films before pivoting to animation with the charming, heartbreaking “Robot Dreams,” said that he met Guillermo del Toro at Annecy last year and that now he’s totally hooked. “Once you try it, you cannot take it away. I’m with you guys. I’m one of us,” Berger said. “I want to keep making animated films. It really opened my mind.”

You can watch the full Q&A with the nominees here.

The post TheWrap Screening Series: Best Animated Feature Nominees on Being ‘Dazzled by the Array of Different Styles’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.

They included sibling pop duo Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, previous Original Song winners and authors of the “Barbie” smash “What Was I Made For?”, Honorary Oscar recipient and legendary songwriter Diane Warren for her song “The Fire Inside” from “Flamin’ Hot,” and composers Scott George (nominated for his triumphant conclusion song “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from “Killers of the Flower Moon), five-time Emmy winner Laura Karpman for her stirring score for “American Fiction,” and newcomer Jerskin Fendrix for his inventive compositions for “Poor Things.” The latter three are enjoying their first-ever Academy Award nominations.

As a 15-time Oscar nominee, Warren kicked off by remembering her love of movie music, particularly the title song from 1966’s “Born Free,” also an Oscar winner. “It just gutted me,” said Warren. “And there was “To Sir With Love” and “A Hard Day’s Night, and I was touched deeply as a viewer and listener. So I took a bunch of film classes, so I could just watch movies. I’d sit in the back working on my songs. And I think that by osmosis, that combination, kind of trained me in a weird way.”

Next up were Eilish and O’Connell, no strangers to the Oscars stage for their Academy-recognized Bond tune “No Time to Die” just three years ago. The former mentioned animated films such as “Over the Hedge” and “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” as influences when she was young (remember, she’s only 22), and how she loved Thomas Newman’s “American Beauty” score. “I had the whole soundtrack downloaded before I ever saw it, ” said Eilish, “and I know that like the back of my hand and I think it’s so beautiful.”

O’Connell was very much in love with Howard Shore’s “The Lord of the Rings” scores and the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross scores for films like “The Social Network” and “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” “They were super important and evocative to me and as I got a little older and started to like dabble in trying to record and make music, like seeing “The Social Network with that score was very inspiring from a kind of a standpoint of ‘like, ‘oh my God, that’s sort of the world that I like, that’s the music that I’m trying to make.”

George is brand-new to the film scene, and hails from the same Osage area that “Killers” is set in, as a longtime drummer and Native performer with various tribes and local companies. “Normally, using our music in film is sometimes out of context, you know, a score might be written or something, and they’re trying to capture some of the melodies and things like that in the score,” said George. “This is probably the first time I’ve seen it where it’s used to actually try to move the audience from one part of the movie.”

Karpman has won several Emmys for her TV compositions, especially for documentaries, and was best known as a Juilliard-trained jazz musician from her early days. “I really wanted to be a New York intellectual composer,” said Karpman, “And, you know, teach and do that kind of thing. But I got really turned on by this idea of how much music could move drama forward. And then when I wound up at Sundance, I saw that work together for the first time and then I was really committed to trying to see if I can make a life of this which I have.”

Fendrix is a British musician known for electro-pop style music with a Nick Cave-like singing style, and found himself drawn to music in TV shows such as “The Simpsons” and “Futurama,” which do not adhere to emotional rungs, and loves 1990s Disney films for their musical complexity. I really stuff like “Mulan” and “The Lion King” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” I think that’s extraordinarily high-level stuff, said Fendrix. “Like in “Mulan,” the balance between these kind of really jokey, New York cabaret kind of songs when it suddenly comes to this kind of really intense Shakuhachi kind of music. I’ve always been really drawn to those sorts of contrasts and how you express emotion musically, rather than just any one uncomplicated direction.”

You can watch the full conversation Q&A with the nominees here.

The post TheWrap Screening Series: Billie Eilish and Finneas Fell in Love With Movie Music Through ‘Social Network’ and ‘American Beauty’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.