Oscars: ‘Sinners,’ ‘Sentimental Value’ and ‘Hamnet’ vie for Best Picture and more

0:00Chloe Zhao:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

0:24Joachim Trier:The directors know what we do The producers know what we do I just don't know if the audience Fully realized What we do For the first time Casting directors get their flowers At the Academy Awards

0:48Joachim Trier:It's Friday, March 13th And this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBOR Boston. I'm Chico Theuri. Today on the show, it's all things Oscars. We have conversations with the people behind three films nominated for Best Picture, including Sinners, Sentimental Value and Hamnet. Jesse Buckley describes the magnitude of playing William Shakespeare's wife, Agnes. To think about who were the people and the love and the deep relationships around him that might have inspired some of his greatest humanist plays like Hamlet. You know, who might these people be? And I just, I don't know, I think I was meant to meet this story at this moment in my life.

1:31Joachim Trier:But first, this weekend's Academy Awards will feature the brand new category of Best Casting. Francie Maisler is one of the nominees. She was the casting director for the blockbuster hit Sinners. It has a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, and Best Director for Ryan Coogler. Francie Maisler begins her conversation with Peter O'Dowd by explaining the particular skill and art a casting director like her brings to the screen. Well, I think it's my taste. I think every director has to trust that we're on the same wavelength in terms of, because my job is to be able to fulfill the vision he wants to put on film.

2:15Joachim Trier:And I'm the one that brings him all of the possibilities, giving opportunities to new people, to seasoned actors, just giving opportunity to people. Yeah, giving opportunity. That makes sense. Listen, let's talk about this movie. It takes place in the 1930s in the Jim Crow South. Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack who've been working as mobsters in Chicago. They return to their hometown in Clarksdale, Mississippi to start a juke joint. I want to play some tape here. This is some of Jordan as Smoke. I've seen men die ways I didn't even know was possible.

2:52Francine Maisler:I ain't never saw no roots, no demons, no ghosts, no magic. Just power. And only money can give you that.

3:08Joachim Trier:As a casting director, your thoughts on his portrayal of two different characters in the same movie? What I can say is some people have asked me who the other actor was. So I just think it's an extraordinary performance that I'm so glad is getting recognized because it's just incredible. Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler, the director, as we've said, they've worked together before. They have a close relationship. In a situation like that, what kind of role does a casting director have? Well, I have to make sure that everybody I put forth is good enough to play with Michael B., you know. To give an example, Ryan called me and said that he was going to make this small little movie.

3:56Joachim Trier:but he needed me to start this search for the role of Sammy because without us finding this role, he couldn't make the movie. So that's a lot of pressure. We did this worldwide search, which included going to music schools, colleges, blues clubs. There was just a ton of outreach to find him. Yeah. You're referring to the musician Miles Caton, who plays Sammy in this film. He's the cousin of the Smokestack Brothers, and he offers a few just absolutely stunning musical performances. Let's listen to this scene from the juke joint. They called me preacher boy, counting my daddy being the pastor. I wrote this song for him.

4:53Something I've been wanting to tell you for a long time.

4:57Joachim Trier:It might hurt you. Hope you don't lose your mind. This man is 19 years old. He'd never acted before, and he just nails this part. How did you find Miles Caden? We really did a worldwide search for this and got in thousands of tapes. And then as we're, myself and my team, are looking at tapes and we were staying up all night because we just don't want to miss anybody. Our job is to give everybody the opportunity, everybody at every university, anybody who's in a play, anybody who's overseas that could possibly do this. And then we got in this tape, and it was very dark, and we could barely see him.

5:39Joachim Trier:But what came through in that tape was this voice. Did you know right away that that was your guy? I didn't know it was our guy, but I knew, oh, my God, I called Ryan and the producers and said, please take a look at this guy immediately. And then Ryan, because he's got such a great sense of humor, said, well, do you think you could have him do it again with the lights on? And Miles says, I was set in the mood, you know, I thought I was a really cool, dark mood that I was setting. And so he did it again, and he turned on the lights, and then we gave him a scene to read because he could be the greatest singer ever, but we needed an actor too.

6:22Joachim Trier:And he was just so damn truthful when he did the scene. He did not have a false moment. And the surprising part was he didn't know how to play the guitar. and he learned in three months. Wow, he certainly did. I want to give just some quick recognition to the other casting directors who were nominated for this inaugural round of Best Casting Awards in the Oscars. Hamnet, The Secret Agent, One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme. All of these movies got nods for Best Casting Director and also for Acting Awards. I wonder what you think of that. Do you think that going forward in this new category, you're going to see that synergy between casting and acting?

7:17Joachim Trier:I think it's always been there. It's just being recognized right now. I think the directors know what we do. The producers know what we do. I just don't know if the audience fully realized what we do. And I have great respect for the other. I mean, I'm just honored to be among those other nominees in this inaugural category because I think it's outstanding work each of them have done. The awards will be March 15th. Do you go into the night with a speech prepared just in case you win? What's your strategy? Oh, I think you have to. Oh, my God. I couldn't imagine. I'm not somebody who can just off the top of my head.

7:58Joachim Trier:But, you know, I'll probably go in thinking I'm going to lose because that's just my way. But if there's a great surprise, at least, I want to make sure I articulate what this award means for me and the casting community that I would recognize. That is Francine Maisler, casting director of the film Sinners, nominated for a new category of Academy Award Best Casting this year. Francine, thank you and congratulations. Thank you.

8:36Joachim Trier:Coming up next, a Norwegian film is up for nine awards. Indira Lakshmanan finds out what makes it so special after the break.

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9:24Joachim Trier:One of the most nominated films of this year's Oscar race is Sentimental Value from Norway. The movie earned nine nods, including Best Picture and Best International Feature Film. It centers around sisters Nora and Agnes, long estranged from their father Gustav, a distinguished film director who left the family home after divorcing their mother. Their mother's death brings him back to their lives. Gustav offers Nora, his elder daughter and an acclaimed stage actress, a starring role in his new film. He says he wrote the script for her and that she's the only one who can play it. I want you to play the role.

10:05Francine Maisler:I wrote it to you.

10:09Francine Maisler:It's just you who can play the role.

10:12Joachim Trier:That's Academy Award nominee Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav. Nora replies that she'd never work with him, and Gustav casts an American movie star instead. But the film is set in their childhood home, forcing the sisters to deal with him and their memories. Sentimental Value was directed and co-written by Joachim Trier, who's received Academy Award nominations for both. He joins us now. Welcome and congratulations. Oh, thank you very much. So first, Joachim, what gave you the idea for this film?

10:41Francine Maisler:I think it started with the sisters. It started with the sort of mysterious thing that a lot of us experience that you are born in the same family under the same roof, but you have such different stories about who you are or who your parents were. And the negotiation of that was the starting point. But then I thought, you know, after a while, the father character was a bit strange when we brought him into the mix and also told his story in a subjective way. The kind of counterpoints of that became a more ensemble piece. And that's kind of when we knew we had a film.

11:16Joachim Trier:Renata Reinsve plays Nora. Inga Ibsdottor Lilius is the younger daughter Agnes. And Stellan Skarsgård is Gustav the father. Each had so much subtlety in their facial expressions. To me, they said so much without even opening their mouths. And Stellan Skarsgård has said that you have a fixation with actors' faces. So what were you trying to capture with your camera and your close-ups?

11:40Francine Maisler:The close-up is a filmic device that I think has its own tradition in the Scandinavian countries. Carl T.H. Dreyer, the great Dane who did Jean-Arc, but also Bergman. You know, the idea that there is a possibility when you go to a theater and watch a big close-up on a big screen where you're allowed to stare and look and be curious of the mysteries of the other people in the world, but also empathy can come into play at best. And with these wonderful actors, you know, it's so interesting. I don't look at a monitor when I shoot. I sit next to the camera and I look at them with my own eyes, trying to judge what's happening, how I can help them hopefully.

12:20Francine Maisler:And these incredible actors, it's also about not getting in the way. But I think they really went to some vulnerable and interesting places in themselves to find these human portrayals. I think that those close-ups is some of what I'm the most proud about.

12:34Joachim Trier:Well, you should be. The facial expressions were incredible. You mentioned Swedish master Ingmar Bergman. There was a shot in Sentimental Value where we see Gustav's, Nora's, and Agnes' faces changing and overlaid, blending into each other. It reminded me right away of that famous scene in Bergman's persona. Was that intentional?

12:55Francine Maisler:It's embarrassing to say, and I love persona more than most films, but I didn't even think about it. It's so unconscious. I don't know if I should be proud or embarrassed, but yes, I see now that you're right. It resembles the Bergman shot.

13:07Joachim Trier:Don't tell me I'm the one bringing it to your attention. No, no, no, no.

13:11Francine Maisler:I know many people have asked about it, and I'm kind of proudly admitting my stupidity of not realizing what I was doing. But no, maybe I shouldn't be ashamed. You know, maybe we should tip our hat to the great master of Bergman who taught us. Also, you can look at stories of characters that aren't perfect and yet identify and try to understand them.

13:30Joachim Trier:I interpreted the overlaid faces as also showing how much of each of them was in one another, and that even if the daughter didn't see it, she was so much her father's daughter, and even if she didn't appreciate it, her father understood her in ways that she couldn't perceive.

13:49Francine Maisler:That's beautiful. Thank you for that. I feel that that's a wonderful interpretation. And I mean, the film is dealing with generational trauma. I myself come from a family background where my grandfather on one side in Norway was captured during the war because he was a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupying forces. But he survived and it affected him tremendously. But he became a filmmaker after the war, I think, to survive somehow. And he created some wonderful films. And I think somehow that idea of how those things affect even three generations later in ways that are unspoken, that's something that is kind of in the background of this film, but certainly at the core of the themes we want to explore.

14:34Joachim Trier:Well, thank you for bringing that up because Gustav's mother in this story had been arrested and tortured by Nazis during the occupation. And to know that that comes from your own family history, you're also opening a door for viewers where you have the historian daughter who goes and pulls the archives and looks at very difficult to see pictures and reports written by her own grandmother, who she never knew because the woman took her own life. when Gustav was a small boy.

15:05Francine Maisler:Yeah, I think it's an inherent human thing that we need to put ourselves into context. And that's the idea of story or narrative is at the core of our sense of self. And in a way, we have two sisters here. One is a historian, and she's looking back to try to understand where they come from through those historical factual documents. The other sister is trying to find truth or understanding of herself through working in the theater as an actor. And the big mirroring of the fictional narratives that we also need to try to get to the core of what we're going through as human beings. So I think we need both.

15:38Francine Maisler:We need to have a sense of truth and we need to have a clear sense of a freely told fiction to create a society.

15:46Joachim Trier:There's a scene where Gustav is working with the actress played by Elle Fanning, who he casts in the role that he wrote for Nora when she refuses to do it. he's coaching the American through a speech. He's loving, patient, encouraging. Later in the film, his younger daughter, Agnes, who as a child starred in one of Gustav's films, talks about being closer to her father when she was a child actress than as his child. And I wonder, you're a director, you're the father of two daughters. Do you ever worry that you get wrapped up in your work and that you might lose contact with your family or communicate better through film?

16:25Francine Maisler:Sure. Perhaps on some level when Eskil Fucht, who also has kids and my co-writer, we talked about maybe we're exercising some anxiety of being those storytellers that get too engaged in control, you know, and trying to go home and let work be at work, you know. So the work-life balance theme is big in this one. My two daughters are so young, they're two and five. So I still, you know, I haven't messed it up quite yet. I hope I won't.

16:52Joachim Trier:Hopefully you won't. It feels as though Gustav is using this comeback film of his as a way to bridge the gap between himself and his daughters, who he clearly loves, but he was not there for them after the divorce. Do you think art has that power to bridge the gap and heal the wounds that leave lasting scars as we discover through the daughters?

17:19Francine Maisler:I think I'm trying to talk about the alternative language, at least, that art can represent, an alternative representation to the social language. The social language between people in a family, this father character, Gustav Borg, certainly doesn't master that. He says the wrong things. He's caught in his own, I think, guilt also about his own lack of being there. But as a filmmaker, he has a different kind of openness. And I think somehow thematically, there is a relationship between trauma and the sublime in our lives and in society. There are those unspoken things that have hurt us that we don't have a language for quite.

18:01Francine Maisler:But on the other hand, also in art, there can be rooms that can express things that we don't know how to put into words either. And Gustav Borg has a lot of trauma as the story proceeds, but he clearly also uses it in some way as his only alternative to try to reach his daughters. And without giving away the ending too much, I think the final part of the film, I hope, plays this in an honest way. I'm not saying with this film that everything will be fine in this family, But I think and hope we found an original way to resolve what maybe at best could be between these people. And I wanted to end on a hopeful note.

18:38Joachim Trier:That's Oscar-nominated director and co-writer Joachim Trier. His film's sentimental value is up for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. Joachim Trier, thank you so much for joining us.

18:51Francine Maisler:Thanks for having me.