Will 'Anemone' get Daniel Day Lewis another Oscar?; SAG AFTRA's harsh response to Tilly Norwood

0:03Anne Thompson:This summer serve up the cookout classics. Craft mayo and dressing. Toss green salads with delicious ranch dressing or zesty Italian. Serve smooth, craveably creamy potato salads with mayo. We all know it's not a cookout without craft.

0:25Anne Thompson:Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly look at the latest developments in Hollywood. I'm Anne Thompson, and I am in the New York office in the studio. Hello, Ryan.

0:35Ryan Lattanzio:Hello, Anne. Nice to see you in person. Welcome to New York. On this week's episode of Screen Talk, we will track some new films that have played New York Film Festival and catch up on some other fall fair. and we'll also assess how one battle after another performed at the box office over the weekend. And we're also going to touch base on the latest hot ticket fall festival acquisition that's been on the hook for a distributor since the Venice Film Festival a month ago.

0:59Anne Thompson:I wonder what that is. And then there's a new synth performer stirring up controversy. So at the New York Film Festival, I did not go to opening night, Ryan. So you and I have talked about after the hunt, what was the sort of word of mouth after that opening night?

1:14Ryan Lattanzio:I think any new word of mouth doesn't necessarily have to be good. What will will help this movie. But the critics were just as mixed. I don't know. Look, I only talked to a sampling of probably 10 people or so at the at the after party. And people were also mixed on it, though. Some people appreciated the way that the movie, which just to recap, stars Julia Roberts as a Yale philosophy professor who's black student played by Iowa Debrey. levies a sexual assault accusation against a white colleague played by Andrew Garfield. So there's issues of privilege and race and power dynamics and all in the academic world.

1:53Anne Thompson:And a little bit of a sexual triangle there, too.

1:55Ryan Lattanzio:There is that as well. Right. Which I really wish the movie would have turned it up on the sort of lesbian frisson that's going on between those characters. But that said, no, people were not pleased with this movie. I don't think people are bored with it necessarily, but we all find it kind of muddled and incoherent. But I think an opportunity that the movie does have to do well could be with Golden Globes voters.

2:18Anne Thompson:Why do you say that?

2:18Ryan Lattanzio:Well, there was a press conference over the weekend, one of those virtual ones that are held for, you know, for the junket people and so forth. And this was attended, I was told, by a number of Golden Globes voters who asked really good questions and were really engaged on the movie. And I think that this movie might play better internationally and maybe with a boomer, though you're a boomer generation, right? So not necessarily, or Gen X, meaning to say people who didn't come of age in such close proximity to the sort of Me Too era issues that the movie addresses.

2:51Anne Thompson:Yeah, I think the movie believes that it's bringing up all of these issues. And I think that they tried to keep it open and ambiguous in various ways. And that's part of the problem. They don't let you know what's really going on until very late in the day. So Ryan, we'll see how that does for Amazon. I don't think it's in the Oscar race, though.

3:12Ryan Lattanzio:No, I don't. That's not happening. But we get a number of categories at the Globes that leaves some space for this movie to possibly sneak in. For Julia Roberts, who's been nominated there like 10 times.

3:22Anne Thompson:They love Julia. Yeah. So my first movie I showed up this week was Anemone, which we talked about, you talked about last week. And I just went to this very starry event at the Whitby Hotel where we all sat there and watched the movie. and then there was a panel moderated by Martin Scorsese with Daniel Day-Lewis returning after eight years of retirement to work with his son Ronan Day-Lewis and then his co-star Sean Bean and who's virtually silent through the whole movie you know but a great performance anyway I quite liked the two men together in the cabin in the woods the two brothers you know hashing out their their issues uh i had a few uh sort of directorial questions that i didn't agree with maybe some of the sound design or some of the uh music choices but i loved the look of the movie it was beautiful it was a very beautiful movie and what i loved about it too was the idea that the father and the son got together in person always when they were working on the script during the pandemic they didn't do it on zoom they they had to write it together in the same room and the idea that they just went with their creative juices.

4:37Anne Thompson:They just had a good time. And that's very apparent. And it's very unusual, actually, to see a movie like that.

4:43Ryan Lattanzio:Well, this guy, 27-year-old Ronan Day-Lewis, who's the director, this is his first feature. He comes to this film as a painter, actually. And it's funny, I interviewed him the other day over Zoom, and just by coincidence, there was a painting that was over his head that is very similar to a sort of dreamy image that you may recall. Ah. Yeah, and I was like, okay, so that's where that came from. But anyway, obviously, he comes from a huge show business family, not just Daniel Day-Lewis. His mother is Rebecca Miller. Who is a very good director. His grandfather is Arthur Miller. And so a lot of this, obviously, you can't deny his opportunities have been afforded to him by this dynasty that he comes from.

5:25Ryan Lattanzio:But I think he still is a good filmmaker, even though the screenplay is a little blunt sometimes. And it's very, I said this in my review, it's really a movie that kind of drags you into a whirlpool of misery, which means that I think it's going to have a hard time connecting with audiences in the real world. I don't see this being a big box office draw. And there is a lot of dense material with the fact that it turns out to be about the troubles. In fact, Samantha Morton, who plays Daniel Day-Lewis' estranged partner and now Sean Bean's partner, it's very complicated. She turns to her son at one point and says, what do you know about the troubles of Northern Ireland?

6:06Ryan Lattanzio:Where it's like, okay, so now here we're going into this section. And you really have to pay attention because there are a lot of dense monologues in this movie that don't afford us the affirmation of flashback. And that was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers. I'm glad they didn't do that. I'm glad flashbacks would have been a big mistake.

6:21Anne Thompson:No, I think it's the two brothers hashing it out. That's the real essence of this movie and the power of it. And within that frame, there was actually a couple of very, very good monologues from Daniel Day Lewis, and he is a great actor. And we're happy to have him back. But it sounded like at the Q &A, he said, I just wanted to work with my son. And that was it. You know, that that was fine. That was a good reason to go back to acting. That doesn't mean he's going to go back to acting.

6:51Ryan Lattanzio:No, no. His son got him, but that doesn't mean that we do from here on out. Is this a movie that is going to get him an Oscar nomination, you think, for best actor?

6:59Anne Thompson:I don't know. It could be that it's just too small and not enough people. But he is Daniel Day-Lewis, and the actors revere him. So it's possible. But that's a very competitive category, remember. That's like super, super long. You know, Jeremy Allen White is going up against Leonardo DiCaprio. Going up against Michael B. Jordan. And George Clooney. And all these people are in there somewhere.

7:22Ryan Lattanzio:You know, something funny about Annemone, actually. So the thing I asked Rodan Day-Lewis was, so it's always reported that Daniel Day-Lewis stays in character, even when the cameras are not rolling and kind of takes that character home with him. And so I asked what that's like as a son and a father. I said, is it really like you're sitting at a restaurant and he's ordering off the menu in the accent and temperament of this character? that you've created. And he said, yes, that really is what it is.

7:52Anne Thompson:And by the way, our favorite producers, Dee Dee Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner from Plan B, produced this. They produced Hedda as well in this season. You haven't seen that one yet, but it's very good.

8:04Ryan Lattanzio:No, and they also produced that I think they maybe were hoping would be a kind of Rommel Ross story as a documentary filmmaker assigned to an adaptation of a novel for their first narrative feature was the Bing Liu movie Preparation for the Next Life, which Plan B produced and Amazon MGM released in the same way that they did Nickel Boys. It's obviously not a movie of that exact scale, but it's one they kind of just dumped in theaters a month ago. But no, I mean, there aren't a lot of movies this year.

8:35Anne Thompson:No, but Anemone is being released by Focus, so we'll see what happens with that. But basically, we were curious because it didn't play A Venice or or Kelluride or Toronto. And it just seems that they decided that this was the festival it would play best at. And I agree with that assessment, actually. I think it would not have played as well at those other festivals.

8:52Ryan Lattanzio:No, I think it would have done badly in Venice. I can picture it. I can picture it.

8:56Anne Thompson:But, you know, I mean, New Yorkers, and especially the audience at the New York Film Festival, are just more willing to embrace the sophisticated art film, and that's what this is. So the ultimate question about Daniel Day-Lewis, who would be the one to go all the way, is just how many of the actors do watch the film. But it's a great performance. So the New York Film Festival opened with After the Hunt, and then it went on. They did Jade Kelly. So how did that play here?

9:22Ryan Lattanzio:Again, I'm just talking to a few people in the world in the grand scheme, but the reaction of that is a little more mixed here. And this keeps kind of reiterating something that we've been saying for a while, is that the momentum on this movie seems to be kind of sputtering out, I would say.

9:37Anne Thompson:My question has always been how long it would sustain. I mean, I think the Netflix people believe that this movie's going to play for the Academy more than anything else because it's a show business story. It's an inside story. And it's very accurate. You know, it is. As someone who's been around the world of publicists and movie stars and film festivals for a long time, it plays very true. But I think Adam Sandler may be it.

10:01Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, it is an industry story, but tucked into that is an extended sequence on a train that is sort of screwball-like.

10:09Anne Thompson:I like that.

10:10Ryan Lattanzio:Or sort of even comic strip-like. And that seems to be the divisive segment for a lot of people I've spoken to. And so you have to be willing to hold on for that portion of the movie, which is a good chunk of it. I mean, that's kind of the entire second act of the movie.

10:26Anne Thompson:If you like that, you might. I was moved at the end of the movie. I actually was. My sense, though, we've talked about this, is that it plays for the mainstream and it doesn't play for critics. And you need critics for a movie like this to go all the way. Well, the mainstream academy.

10:41Ryan Lattanzio:I don't know if the mainstream people in the real world.

10:44Anne Thompson:I think people in the real world may enjoy the movie on Netflix.

10:48Ryan Lattanzio:I don't know if my family is going to watch this movie. You're probably right. Let's be honest.

10:52Anne Thompson:So, Ryan, there is a synth performer in our midst. And the name of this performer is Tilly Norwood. Where does this performer come from? And why are people pissed off about it?

11:04Ryan Lattanzio:Tilly Norwood is a creation of an artificial intelligence talent studio called Sequoia. Or Shacoia. It's with an X. Yeah, it's with an X. And talent agents are reportedly scrambling to rep this thing, which is not a person. It is a creation, so we're going to call it an it. Basically for the past five months, this company, which was started by a woman named Emily Vander Veldin, has been soft launching Norwood on Instagram, posting headshots, candids, and even motion graphics of it.

11:34Anne Thompson:And there's like a version of it in a thriller, a version of it in a romance. It's like they're auditioning it to be a part of some kind of bigger creation and everybody's up in arms. So it makes perfect sense that SAG-AFTRA would be upset. What did they say? They actually, SAG-AFTRA believes creativity is and should remain human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics, they said, and they said, to be clear, Tilly Norwood is not an actor. And it's a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers.

12:19Anne Thompson:Without permission or compensation, it has no life experience to draw from, no emotion. And from what we've seen, audiences aren't interested in watching computer generated content untethered from human experience. So Van Der Velden responded on Instagram. You've got that one?

12:40Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, basically saying she's not, she, oh, here I go again. She, this isn't it. This is not, this is not a person. But this is, yeah, you're right. This is what Van Der Velden said, which She is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work and a piece of art. I don't know how helpful this afterstatement is really going to be to turn the tides around on this thing. What are your thoughts? I mean, it's like this revolution is here. There's really nothing we can do about it at this point. Where there's one Tilly Norwood, there's going to be plenty more and multiplying very quickly.

13:12Anne Thompson:I'm feeling, honestly, I'm feeling like we're inside some kind of dystopian sci-fi movie. I've been watching Alien Earth. That's what that's about. And that's the most interesting part of it is the whole idea of how you can take synth bodies and put human brains inside or you can have an AI robot and all this. The problem in Hollywood is that the stable doors have been opened and the horses are flying through. There's no going back. I don't think there's a way to contain this and fix it and make it better. I don't, it just, it feels like the rest of our world right now, that all these bad things are happening and nobody's doing anything about it.