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The Monocle Weekly: Oscars Special - Episode Summary
Episode Overview In this special Oscars edition of *The Monocle Weekly*, the show revisits interviews with notable nominees from this year's Academy Awards, including Christopher Nolan, Jeffrey Wright, and Celine Song. The episode provides insights into their films, creative processes, and the themes woven throughout their work.
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Key Interviews and Themes
Christopher Nolan - "Oppenheimer"
- Film Focus: "Oppenheimer" explores the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.
- Narrative Style: Nolan emphasizes a humanistic portrayal rather than a traditional biopic, focusing on the character's psychological complexities and moral dilemmas during the Manhattan Project.
- Key Points:
- Suspense and Momentum: The film captures the intense pressure Oppenheimer faced, especially during critical decisions like the Trinity Test.
- Character Complexity: Nolan suggests that Oppenheimer was both an ambitious individual and an unwilling participant in an arms race, creating an ambiguous moral landscape.
- Historical Texts: The dialogue in the film is crafted from historical transcripts and books, maintaining fidelity to Oppenheimer’s actual words where possible.
- Scale and Intimacy: While depicting large-scale events, the film also delves into intimate moments among scientists, highlighting their personal struggles against the backdrop of monumental historical events.
- Emotional Engagement: Nolan seeks to engage viewers emotionally, allowing them to understand rather than judge Oppenheimer’s actions.
Celine Song - "Past Lives"
- Film Focus: "Past Lives" centers on childhood sweethearts who reunite after 20 years, exploring themes of fate and connection.
- Key Points:
- Character Depth: Song discusses the importance of creating well-rounded characters who reflect the complexities of life, especially in romantic relationships.
- Inyon Concept: The film incorporates the Korean concept of *inyon*, which signifies the interconnectedness of past lives and relationships.
- Cinematography: The portrayal of New York and Seoul aims to resonate with the experiences of those living in these cities, emphasizing the mundane beauty of everyday life.
Jeffrey Wright - "American Fiction"
- Film Focus: Wright discusses his role in "American Fiction," a film that critiques stereotypes surrounding Black narratives in cinema.
- Key Points:
- Personal Resonance: Wright relates to the complexities of his character, drawing parallels between the character's family struggles and his own life.
- Emotional Depth: The film balances satire with deep emotional themes, portraying a multifaceted view of Black family life.
- Industry Impact: Wright hopes the film’s success will challenge perceptions of Black cinema as limited to specific narratives and open doors for diverse storytelling.
Alexander Payne - "The Holdovers"
- Film Focus: The film set in a 1970s boarding school showcases themes of education and personal growth.
- Key Points:
- Collaboration: Payne discusses his collaborative process with his writing partner, highlighting the blend of creative visions.
- Period Authenticity: The film’s 1970s setting was chosen to enhance production design and narrative depth.
Kazuhiro - Makeup Artist for "Maestro"
- Film Focus: Kazuhiro discusses his role in transforming Bradley Cooper into Leonard Bernstein for *Maestro*.
- Key Points:
- Prosthetics and Aging: The film required multiple stages of aging for Cooper’s character, showcasing the complexities of prosthetic makeup.
- Recognition: Kazuhiro expresses gratitude for the film's recognition at award shows.
John Batiste - "American Symphony"
- Film Focus: Batiste elaborates on his documentary chronicling the creation of his symphony amid personal challenges.
- Key Points:
- Integration of Life and Art: Batiste stresses the importance of intertwining personal experiences with creative expression.
- Challenges in Composition: He highlights the difficulties of collaborating with diverse musicians, emphasizing a unique system for creating music together.
Christian Friedel - "The Zone of Interest"
- Film Focus: Friedel plays Rudolf Hess, exploring the banality of evil within a family setting adjacent to Auschwitz.
- Key Points:
- Acting Approach: He discusses the challenges of portraying a character capable of monstrous actions while maintaining an ordinary facade.
- Freedom in Performance: Friedel describes how the director's approach allowed for spontaneous and human performances.
Christopher Sharp and Barbie Kyagulanyi - "Bobi Wine: The People's President"
- Film Focus: The documentary chronicles Bobby Wine's political journey in Uganda under Museveni's regime.
- Key Points:
- Crisis and Hope: Kyagulanyi articulates the aspirations of Ugandans for democracy despite ongoing struggles.
- Filming Challenges: Sharp shares the logistical difficulties faced while documenting real-life events in a volatile political environment.
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Conclusion The Oscars Special episode of *The Monocle Weekly* showcases a range of compelling narratives and creative insights from filmmakers engaged in significant storytelling. Each interview not only reflects the individual projects but also raises broader questions about morality, identity, and the power of cinema to effect change.
Next Steps: The Academy Awards are scheduled for March 10, 2024, and listeners are encouraged to tune in to see how these nominees fare.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:12Hello and welcome to a very special edition of the Monaco Weekly. It's an Oscar special. I look back at some of the interviews we did this year with the main nominees. We're gonna start with the favorite to win, let's be honest. It's Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan. Robert Baum sat down with the filmmaker to discuss the film, which tells the story of the man widely regarded as the father of the atomic bomb.
0:43All America's industrial-minded scientific innovation connected here. Secret laboratory. Keep everyone there until it's done. Let's go recruit some scientists. I think right from reading the specifics of his story, I mean, I knew about the key dramatic events of this incredible story, the Trinity Test, the way in which it changed the world forever. But coming to the book, which I've adapted, American Prometheus by Kybert and Martin Schoen, reading that, there was this incredible sense of suspense and momentum to so many different aspects of his life. There's so many things that happened to him as a young man that decades later, come back to haunt him, catch up with him in that most sort of cinematic way.
1:34And so for me, I've never really wanted to tell a story of somebody's life in some kind of traditional sense. I really wanted to just view the events of his life as an experience to be shared with the audience so that they could, I think, maybe come to some kind of understanding of him rather than judging him. And in that way, the momentum of it, I think, is very important because there are a lot of decisions being made in a very pressured environment, you know, whether or not to push the button before the Trinity test, even knowing that there was this very small possibility that it might destroy the entire world.
2:08But you have to feel that sense of momentum and pressure that's just pushing, pushing, pushing in a particular direction because that's what they're caught up in. And I want to be caught up in that as well so as not to be dispassionate and looking and, hang on, why do they do this? Why do they do that? You want to really understand the momentum of the moment they're in. And it's a very human drama, obviously, in the wider scheme of things, but in his and his circle of friends, lovers and girlfriends and all of that. And I suppose it's an intimate portrait in a way of a person that's often unwilling competitor in this arms race.
2:49You feel very much like you're on him. I felt very much like the story in your story, your telling of the story was on his side in that. Did you feel that he was a kind of unwilling competitor in this race? I think unwilling is up for debate. I think it's ambiguous. I think that the man had tremendous ambition. And he had a tremendous sense of his own theatricality, his own drama, and how to use that. And I think those things come into play in his decision making in ways that are a little frightening. when thought of in the context of, you know, the global well-being, if you want to say, and the ways in which you change the world.
3:32But that's what's wonderfully evolving to me about his story. Reading the book, you know, I get to the moment where I realize that Los Alamos, this place that lives in infamy, really, I mean, today is still one of the key sites of the development of present-day nuclear weapons. that was a place he liked to go camping with his brother and you know you first hear the name and you're like it's that personal and he says you know if I could find a way to combine physics in New Mexico my life would be complete you think okay this this desire this idiosyncratic you know simple human feeling about things is going to change the world forever yeah yes it does feel like that it feels like uh if it happened in a british context the new forest would never be the same or something like that beware exactly where you where you spend your summer holidays exactly and in that human sense there's a there's a sort of it's quite a chamber piece a lot of it happens in rooms and cocktail parties in lecture theaters and in classrooms and things as much as that broad New Town, which kind of Los Alamos becomes, I suppose.
4:44What was, and obviously set against the vastness of the ambition of the project and what it laid waste to, I suppose, you're quite sparing with the pyrotechnics in this movie. And I wondered, again, a bit like my first question, how early that was written into your plan for the film to, it's not a crash, bang, wallop situation that we find ourselves in, despite the largeness of it. Well, scale and, you know, we talked about momentum, but scale in cinema is a hard thing to pin down. It's not just about the literal scale of a set you build or the world you're trying to create. It's often about the humanity involved.
5:26And we knew we needed and we got, you know, the huge vistas of New Mexico in contrast with the people, you know, the thunderous nature of the weather there and everything that prefigures and so forth. But ultimately, a lot of the scale comes from the group of people who are assembled, the disparate points of view that come together, the community of scientists, the military community, how they interact. And, you know, very early on, it was apparent to me that having got Killian to play the lead, I now needed to people this world with a lot of extraordinary actors. We have Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, many others.
6:09But also a lot of fresher faces, young actors coming together to portray, you know, it's Richard Feynman or Robert Serba. You know, these guys coming together to get across a couple of interesting facts about this story. The average age of everyone in Los Alamos is about 28. the number of Americans involved in making the bombs that were dropped on the Russian men. Now, you saw he's about 600 ,000. So this was the ultimate sort of group effort. You know, the team at Los Alamos, which was 1 ,000 strong, Oppenheim was having to wrangle this. And we wanted to feel the scale of that problem. So I didn't write any composite characters, which is what people often do when they're adapting real life.
6:50I just wrote a lot of names and faces that were going to come in and do their thing. And what I wanted to trust is that if we could cast them right and give everybody their own sort of unique energy, the audience would remember what they needed to remember. They wouldn't necessarily know people's names, but they'd know that, OK, that guy is that bit of the story. That guy is that bit of the story. But you wanted to get this feeling of tremendous scale to the personalities involved. Well, those personalities ring true. And it must be that is, I guess, yeah, those are the people that populate the film.
7:23it is their hopes and fears and their idiosyncrasies as you say coming from the top down I suppose there's frailties as well how and as you mentioned this comes from American Prometheus the Kybird and Martin Sherwin book how easy what sort of feat was it to write dialogue from a history book because there can't be much in that book well you have to breathe life into those historical characters well the dialogue's a very specific and interesting facet of this experience for me as a filmmaker because there are things in the book. A lot of it, as you say, is reported. But there are the occasional bits of dialogue that really stick with you from the book.
8:03And then the book points you to the transcripts. So when it came to the security hearings in 1954, I'm reading 1 ,000 pages of transcripts, which whilst they won't give you tone of voice or anything, it's kind of interesting. You have to interpret it kind of if you were adapting a Shakespeare play or something. You have to interpret, you know, how do you say the line, as it were? But the lines themselves, oh my God. I mean, the drama of these transcripts is just so far beyond anything that I would ever dare to put on paper. It's amazing source material. Amazing source material. So my job was to pick and choose, to edit, to take, I would call them highlights because it's not that kind of story, but the important parts of these thousand pages.
8:51and really I used the transcript and so a lot of what the characters say in the film is verbatim. You tidy it up so that it fits the sort of movie vernacular because we're not making a documentary, we're interpreting and making a dramatic feature. But I really try to be guided by the transcripts because they were simply, they were just so dramatic. I mean, there are things that Oppenheimer says, some which I don't want to say because they're spoilers or things that when Kitty testifies, those things are taken right from the transcript. Those must be, reading that stuff as well, and knowing, seeing it on the screen.
9:25Well, there's a thing that Niels Bohr says in sort of Act 1 of the film, a Danish scientist. And he said, I'm going to have to paraphrase this, but he says something like, it's like sheet music. It doesn't matter if you can read every individual note, it's about being able to hear the music. And that feels like he's talking about quantum physics or quantum mechanics or mathematics. And I wondered if that's a sort of bit of a note to self, to a movie director, Christopher, you know what I mean? You've got so much at your disposal. Yeah, how do you? I mean, it is, but it's also a sort of, well, it's a truth that the audience needs to hear in this kind of story, which is that these scientists, whatever their individual brilliance and their facility in things that we can never understand or relate to, what they do involves intuition and visualization.
10:20And working with Kip Thorne, who helped me with this as well, but was actually the ideas man behind Interstellar. Kip's a Nobel Prize winning physicist of great standing. And he's very good at explaining things to me. We had all kinds of amazing conversations over the course of the three films we've worked on together. But one of the key things that I learned from him in Interstellar is that the process of an artist or a writer, filmmaker, is not so different from that of a physicist. because yes, they're dealing with algebra, you know, everything. But intuition, feeling something, feeling and understanding something is massively important to them.
10:58And so that's really what that's aimed at. And that, I think, for me, I grab onto that. It's like, that's relatable. I can't understand quantum physics, but I can understand that. And I can understand being threatened by a new way of looking at the world that looks at the world completely differently. It says all the old rules are wrong. He's a new rule. It's like magic. You know, these are wizards. You know, he's meeting Niels Bohr and it's like Luke Skywalker meeting Obi-Wan Kenobi or something. He's sort of like, let's take this thing that you can do and let's channel it into something productive, which ultimately becomes incredibly destructive.
11:32Yeah. But that's the paradox of the Manhattan Project and the bomb itself. It's a massive achievement of creative thinking and creativity that leads to utter destruction. When I was letting the film settle in on the way home after the screening, I was making notes, as you do, and thinking about the difference between, in Oppenheimer's mind, and in the world we now live in, the difference between theory and reality, the difference between theory and practice, I suppose. He loves the idea of the theory of an electron rubbing on another electron and doing these things, but the reality is so different.
12:07That bears itself out in his human relationship, some of them, and in how the Manhattan Project was to turn out. Did anything like that appear to you, that these themes were running too speed in his private life, as you might say, and his top secret work for the US military? Yeah, definitely. I mean, really, to me, it all goes back to the earliest images in the film where you're seeing him sort of almost haunted by, we almost present them as visions of this world within a world, of this vibration of quantum energy. And we try and follow that thread with images, but also with sound. To me, that represents who he is as a young man.
12:50He was a late bloomer, and he was a neurotic individual. He was very complicated, incredibly brilliant. But where do you put that energy? So there's a kind of vibration in his soul almost that it's instability. And instability is energy and power. and ultimately in the quantum realm it leads him to the ultimate destructive force. But it's there in him as well as a man, as somebody trying to harness that power so that it can be useful to him. But we always feel, we always wanted to feel in the film this threat of instability, this just like the world's going to come apart at any second. And so I think for me the things are linked very directly.
13:33Yeah, we see all those shaking and shattering of electrons and atoms. And they might be poetry in his head as a young man. They might be, he might be looking into his own future almost and seeing what he might end up doing and what he gained notoriety for doing. Just one last one for you, Christopher, is, yeah, well, it's obviously a film with a deep conscience and wrestles with the conscience of its main protagonist. is it a rehabilitation or is that just how it has ended up in the final telling of it? Was it intended as such? I don't want to give away the ending. No, it's not intended as such.
14:11It's what we're aiming for in the storytelling is engagement with him and seeing all these events through his eyes. And to me, that leads to understanding, not judgment. If you're judging a character, you're sort of separating from them emotionally. I want to be engaged with them emotionally. But then as you leave the cinema, as the end credits roll, if we've done our jobs right, you're left with an unsettling sense of, hang on a second. Well, wait a second. What did we just see? What was all this? And I think that's the nature of the subject matter, and I'm trusting. As I have with some of my earlier films, I think this is very much the case with Dunkirk.
14:51We sort of trusted the freighted emotion of that story, So we created a telling of it that was very objective and neutral and kind of not filled with backstories and romanticism. It was really just quite mechanical because the story itself is so emotional. In the case of Oppenheim, the story is so dark. The way in which it changes the world is so terrifying that you can afford to actually lean into the positive aspects of everything, the entertainment of it, the glamour of it. He was a very glamorous, charismatic figure who became a celebrity and everything. And you can enjoy that. I mean, I always come back to that wonderful moment of Ridley Scott's Gladiator where Russell Crowe's character dispatches this victim very quickly and says, are you not entertained?
15:40At that moment, you have this appalling feeling of, well, I am a victim, but I shouldn't be. And I think that hangs over this film completely. And I think that's appropriate because I think that's true to the reality of it. The questions it raises, there's just no way around them. There's no way to not think about them, you know, through this story. And so, you know, I feel that we can afford to understand Oppenheimer, I'll put it that way. Thank you very much, Rob. And of course, Christopher Nolan, the favorite to win for Best Picture and Best Director as well. And now we change the tone here.
16:14Let's talk about Past Lives. What a moving, beautiful film. Monaco's Lillian Fawcett interviewed the director, Celine Song. What a good story this is. Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later and realize they were meant for each other. In the story, I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny. Shut up. Well, I think that I am thinking more than ever about how to make sure that these characters are deep and full characters. And I think the other part of it is I wanted to feel like they're the kind of characters that you might run into in your life. And I think that part of that is that you actually don't need to make the characters into one flat thing just because of the perspective of certain character or even the audience.
17:03You're actually just looking for humanity in these characters. And I think that's just true about life. in our lives, especially in our romantic lives, there are no villains. And I think that that is the, or like, you know, everybody's trying to not be a villain. There is a word in Korean, inyon.
17:25It means providence or fate. The Korean word inyon is a kind of recurring motif in past lives. And it refers to this Korean concept about how our interactions in our past lives, and obviously that's where the film gets its title from, can kind of build up to bring us together in the current life. Tell me a bit more about what is actually meant by the term Inyon. And also, was that something that inspired you from the beginning or did the concept come into your writing later on? Well, I think that the concept of Inyon is about the way that we are all interconnected. Even every single person who enters your life, no matter how big or small the connection, it could be the person who brings you a cup of water at a restaurant.
18:11All of those things are, all of those connections are actually called yin-yang. But it's really just something that people say. So to just acknowledge the complete miracle that you and this other person are in the same room at the same time on the same day and are bumping into each other in some way. and how that is probably a result of the universe putting them in that position, which is already miraculous. And I think the idea also is like it is connected to the many, many past lives that you must have also run into each other that then led up to this particular moment. And I think that the concept of it I wanted to introduce to the movie because it was, first of all, the only real answer to the question that is posed in the movie in the first scene, which is who are these people to each other the main characters haesong and nora are you know they're not quite exes they're not quite because all they did was hold hands as children right they're not they're not really friends because uh they don't i think friends talk more regularly and are closer and but they're not acquaintances it's not so distant like that it's actually that they are it's much deeper than that but there is no real way to describe who they are to each other except this word 인연, which is as mysterious as the question itself, who are these people to each other?
19:29And I think, of course, eventually Hyesung and Arthur, Nora's husband, they start talking about how they themselves are 인연 as well. And I think that that's also true because, I mean, who are they to each other? So I think the concept really came in because I didn't know what other words really accurately describe this very nebulous but tangible and very deep connection that these characters have with each other. And I'd like to talk a bit about the cinematography as well because the film is set mostly between New York and Seoul. Talk to me a bit about the cinematography. How did you decide to portray New York?
20:08Well, I think it really was connected to what you're saying about it's for people who live there. I think that it's for people who actually have been there and are standing there. you know like the thing that for example when it comes to Statue of Liberty I didn't want it to be shot from a drone or some from some spectacular place even though maybe that would have resulted in a prettier view of Statue of Liberty because I wanted to feel like it was on the boat because the characters are on the boat so so much of it had to do with that it has to be from the eye level of the characters themselves it just has to come from like a deeper place of ordinary ordinary or the mundane i think that some of it had to be seen beautifully from kind of a mundane place so it had to be both an amazing thing of like what's beautiful about our everyday lives and it had to be sort of reflected in the way that we were shooting this city these cities and it had to feel connected to the people who live there and how they might experience the city as opposed to how a helicopter might.
21:08Is he attractive? I think so. He's really masculine in this way that I think is so Korean.
21:21Are you attracted to him? Finally, one of the, I think, interesting things that the film explores is the kind of immigrant experience. And when Nora sees Haesung again, she's talking to her husband about how he's just very Korean and she says he's Korean in a way that she doesn't relate to. And she has Korean-American friends, but they're Korean-American. He's very Korean. How did you go about writing that? And I know obviously you moved to Canada from Korea, a similar age as Nora does in the film. How did some of your personal experience come into that? Well, I think that, you know, I think the movie is so much about the immigrant experience and also it's about like the way that you, I mean, you leave a language behind and then you will also recover it in some parts of your life.
22:03But I think that the truth is, is that, you know, this story is also a pretty universal one, because I think that as long as you have left one place and gone to another, and sometimes it can be a job too, it can be like you leave one job and do another job, you know, maybe you're, you know, you're a chef, and then, you know, you change your job to being a lawyer, you know, and then we can be like, well, I had a whole past life of being a chef, you know, and similarly, I think you can have that for so much, you can, it can be towns, it can be a relationship. it can be like well I had a lover that's that was a past life right it can feel like your own story whether you have as dramatic of an immigration story as the one that I have or the character of Nora has but it can also be something as simple as like oh actually you know six years ago I was just a different person and I think that because we all at the end of the day live through time and space at the end of the day we're going to feel connected in some way to what the movie is about, even though, of course, this movie is about a very dramatic moving, which is you leave a whole country and a culture and a language, and then you go to a whole other one.
23:12And there are some things that you leave behind there, including in the case of Nora, Hyesung. That was Celine Song, director of Past Lives. And now I had the pleasure to speak with the great actor Jeffrey Wright. He was here in London talking about his film American Fiction, which was nominated for five Oscars. had the pleasure to speak with him and he tells me more about the idea of the film we sold a book no we believe mr lee has written a bestseller it's a joke the most lucrative joke you've ever told now is stag a pseudonym yeah mr lee can't use his real name is this based on your actual life yeah you think some bitch-ass college boy can come up with that shit no no no i don't Jeffrey, first of all, pleasure to be here.
24:01I loved American fiction. What an excellent film. Thank you. My first question to you, before you accepted the role or before you spoke to Cor Jefferson, the director, have you heard about the novel Erasure or have you perhaps read after you accepted the role? What was your relationship with the novel, first of all? I hadn't heard of the book and obviously hadn't read it. So my first introduction to the character to the story was through Cord's script, which was just wonderfully drawn. I picked up the book and I read a bit of it, and it was clear that Cord had reshaped it in his own image. The book is set in Washington, D.C., which is my hometown, and certain of the catalyzing moments in the book had, the chord had changed in considerable ways.
25:01So the script was more useful to me. I read the book later in the process. There were certain things early that were helpful to me. There are these lovely moments in the book where Monk steps away from the first narrative and muses on things like fly fishing and the intricacies of outsmarting a fish or woodworking and the smell of cut wood and things like that, which are really kind of these lovely meditations and quiet, like solitudinous moments that told me something about, one, the peculiarities of his interests and also about his desire for a type of idealized isolation. but it was really Cord's script that I focused on more so and also in some ways the book of my life because there were these overlaps between Monk's circumstances and my own particularly as relate to his family and his family in crisis and what it implies for him and the position that he is asked to take in the midst of all that.
26:36And one thing that I was perhaps even surprised but positively about the film, I was I mean, of course, it's also a satire but incredibly emotional. It is the portrait of a family. There's grieving, there's your brother in the film who's gay. So it's quite interesting. It's very much a portrait of a family. I'm not even saying a black family here as well. And I think that's quite special. I think some people might think it is a satire but there's also quite this heavy emotional element to it. I think the satire in some ways is tragedy in disguise. And yes, the family for me was really or is the heart and soul of this film.
27:17And it's also in some ways a kind of response to the absurdity of the satirical aspects of the film in that while he's leading this double life and he's fighting against the outside perceptions of who he should be or who he is, He's leading in real time a kind of ordinary life that is extraordinary even in its ordinariness in that we don't often see it portrayed on film with characters such as these. Yes, it's a family of black folks, but it's a family that's messy and beautiful and functional and dysfunctional and loving in spite of itself. There's a universality to it and there's a welcoming quality to it for audience members.
28:18And our hope is that they find, no matter what background or country, for that matter, that they come from, that they find something of themselves inside of it. It seems that that's happening and it's gratifying. You know, the thing that we're told often by the powers that be in America, you know, who have the hold the purse strings for films like this is that our films, films featuring black characters don't travel, don't translate outside of the quote unquote black community. But I think this film is a human story. And I'm looking forward to getting it out there so we can prove too often naysayers wrong.
29:09I think the film will travel very well, by the way. Tell us about the cast. I must ask this. I mean, you worked with Leslie Huggins as well, who played your mother. I mean, you were a massive fan of her. So how was it to play with her in the film? And, of course, the other actors. I mean, you have Issa Rae and Sterling K. Brown, Tracy Ellie Ross. Excellent cost. And Erica Alexander and John Ortiz and Myra Lucretia Taylor, who plays Lorraine, the caretaker of the family. And it was so wonderful. But Leslie is an absolute joy to work with. She, like all of us, was so passionate about this story and about being in this film.
29:49She's an absolute legend, absolute pro as well. and for example there's a scene that we filmed outside with her and you know she's you see the film you'll know and she's it was very cold we were near the ocean uh we were in you know Massachusetts in the early fall so it was it was not warm it was cold and it was at night and we had to do take after take and I was concerned you know that she not get sick but at the same time we that we get the necessary shots for the scene and I was calling up to cord our director because the crew was up on this seawall while we were you know we were by the water and I'd say yes she's okay she can do another one and I'd say Leslie are you okay she'd you know yeah oh yeah she's fine let's do another one.
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30:49And then, you know, went on. And finally, I said, Leslie, do you think we can do one more? She said, yeah, of course, we're making a movie. And it was just so telling of who she is, just an absolute pro and totally committed to what we were doing. It's just wonderful to work with her. Wonderful. And Jeffrey, are you happy that a film like American Fiction is finally kind of being done and getting so much attention? Let's be honest, I mean, it's been nominated for the Golden Globes. I have a feeling you'll be nominated for many others, awards to come. How do you feel? Because, of course, the film talks about this kind of stereotype of black movies, but perhaps, I mean, hopefully this will change, right?
31:31Well,
31:35if our movie is successful, then maybe it cracks open the door for other movies that may, you know, have been considered not saleable or marketable or whatever term you want to choose. It's a bit meta that our film is receiving so much attention in this way, but we're little film. Of the films that have been nominated, I think our budget is smaller than all of them. And we're punching above our weight, I suppose. But while we were making this film, we got the sense that maybe we were doing something interesting. Certainly it was interesting to us. And, you know, maybe audiences will agree and will have opportunity or others will have opportunity to make more films like this.
32:26Thank you very much, Jeffrey. And another great name of the cinema world that I managed to speak this year was Alexander Payne, the film director for The Holdovers, also nominated for five Oscars. Let's hear my conversation with Anne. Mr. Hunnam. Hello, Mary. I heard you got stuck with babysitting duty this year. How'd you manage that? You know, he used to be a student, right? Yeah, that's why he knows how to inflict maximum pain on him. I thought all the Nazis were hiding in Argentina. Stifle it, Tully. Filmmakers are always just looking for a decent premise. I just need a hook on which to hang the meat of the rest of the film.
33:04About a dozen years ago, I was at a film festival and caught a little-known Marcel Pagnol film from 1935, which had the same essential premise, not the same story at all. The stories are going wildly different directions, but the premise was good. And I left the cinema thinking, oh, that's a good, I'll bet another movie could be made off that same general premise. But I didn't do anything with it for years until I met David Hemmingson, who had written a pilot, which I had read that took place in a boarding school. So I contacted him and I said, hey, I've read your pilot. Would you consider writing a feature in that world?
33:42Because it was a world I myself didn't know, nor had I begun the research. It was a minor miracle finding David Hemmingson. What about the script? Because you usually write the script for your own films. How was your collaboration with him? How did this work out? It was my first experience, let's say, directing a writer. I asked him if he would write a script based on a premise I gave him. We worked together for the general storyline, which is to say he proposed three, four, five different storylines, and I selected the one I thought was most interesting to me. And then as he was writing drafts or even sections of drafts, he'd run them by me and I'd read them and give notes or suggest this or that.
34:28And then when we had a finished script, I would do some rewriting myself and then give it back to him. It was a lovely collaboration between the two of us. And apparently something that you, I mean, changed a minor, of, well, not a minor thing, but it's the decade, right? That is that you wanted the 70s, not the 80s in a way. I didn't even remember that his pilot was set in the 80s. He and I just had this premise and we knew it couldn't be contemporary because there are no more single sex boarding schools. So it had to be a period film just mechanically. And then I've always wanted to start making period films.
35:03I haven't just hadn't gotten to it yet. And the selection of 1970 just felt right to the both of us. It gave him tools to work with. I mean, in the production design, cinematography, even the way it was filmed, it felt very much like a movie from the 70s, but even the way you filmed, right? I mean, which I thought it was quite a sweet touch as well. Thanks for thinking it was a sweet touch. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to have the film not just set in 1970, but to some degree made to look and sound as though it had been made in 1970. What about the cast? I mean, of course, your relationship with Paul Giamatti.
35:40I mean, you reunited almost 20 years after, right? Sideways. But what about the others? I mean, of course, Da Vinci had an amazing performance. One thing I was surprised, I just want to mention his name's right, Dominique Sessol. Is it true that's his first time on screen? That's unbelievable. He had never even been in a short film before. That's great. This was his first time in front of a camera. But he was already, I mean, at his level, an accomplished actor. We found him in a high school, indeed one of the very high schools where I shot the movie. So he was a star in their drama department, was applying to acting programs at universities.
36:16So that was his path, is his path. But I just feel very lucky to have found him. And what about Paul? How was it to reunite with him after 20 years, more or less? Ever since the last day of photography on Sideways, I've been wanting to work with Paul again and he with me. and so it finally happened. It might have happened sooner if I were faster with screenplays, but it hadn't, but it didn't happen. Alexander, something we're talking off the record here, but you know about the name of the film in several countries we're discussing. I mean, are you involved with any of that? I mean, it's quite an interesting one.
36:53Like even, I just came back from Brazil, it's called The Rejected, that was Rejeitados. Are you interested in those? Absolutely. I mean, I even get involved in the dubbing and subtitling scripts in Italian, Spanish, French and German. I don't speak German, but I still worked enough to be able to figure out what was being said. But I take we put so much care into the title of and the dialogue inside these movies that I can't just leave it to these other countries to wreck it. I hope they're not doing that. Just coming back as well from one of the films, I said the film was filmed like if it was in the 70s, the score and the music was fantastic.
37:39And I think, I hope the score will do well as well. Yes. And it was a long and lovely collaboration among, we were a triumvirate, myself, Kevin Tenth, the editor, and Richard Ford, the London-born music editor we've worked with for 25 years. so that's as we're figuring everything out and then obviously the composer as well in this case a fellow named Mark Orton who had previously done my film Nebraska 10 years ago but it's a long long process of seeing what's right for the movie what supports the rhythm what supports the comedy what supports the emotion without ever calling attention to itself and then of course it with in this one an additional element, which is popular music of the period, used both as score and as music that's being played by the characters.
38:34So it all took a long time and you can get it in shape to where it works for the movie. And then you're faced with the reality of what you can afford. And then you have to switch things out, even often at the last minute. By the way, we're here in England. Labby Siffry, are you familiar with him? No, actually. So he was an English singer-songwriter who came to prominence in the early 70s. He's still alive. He lives in Spain. He was a discovery for me. And now Rolling Stone magazine has done an article on him based on his presence on the soundtrack of The Holdovers. So anyway, all along went in a way of saying we put a lot of time into that.
39:13And if it works, I'm happy. Amazing. Alexander, thank you so much. Thanks, Fernando. Thank you so much. Muito obrigado. De nada. That was Alexander Payne, the director of The Holdovers. And of course, we have to look at other Catholics, not just Best Director or Best Picture. What about Best Makeup? One film that had amazing makeup this year is Maestro. Of course, it was nominated. Monaco's Laura Kramer spoke with one of the makeup artists of the film, Kazuhiro.
39:46Two-time Academy Award winner, Kazuhiro is a master of prosthetic makeup design, renowned for his work on biopics and movies based on true stories. His ability to morph stars into historical figures is so good, audiences have to squint to try to find any resemblance of the famous face they know so well and the character they play on screen. He won the Oscar for his work on the 2017 British war drama Darkest Hour, in which he turned Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill. You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth! And 2019's Bombshell, in which he morphed several people into well-known media figures, including Charlize Theron, who played the former Fox News talk show host, Megyn Kelly.
40:38A hotline in this building is like a complaint box in occupied Paris. And now he's getting praise for yet another transformation, that of Bradley Cooper into the late great conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein in the Netflix drama Maestro, which Cooper also directed, and co-stars Carey Mulligan, who plays his wife. Hello, I'm Lenny. Hello, Felicia. Bernstein, like that one. Montalegro Cone. Montalegro Cone. Well, that's an interesting marriage of words.
41:12In a way, the film is a full circle moment for Kazu, whose fascination with the legendary composer goes back to his teenage years in Japan. Leonard Bernstein was a big inspiration when I just started makeup. And I watched the documentary about him. And I was really inspired what message he sent out to the student to inspire them to be the best. He can be the first great American conductor. Fast forward to Maestro, in which Kazu had the task of designing five stages of prosthetics for Bradley Cooper, representing different phases of his character's aging. At that time, he just finished Licorice Pizza, and his character needed to have some weight.
42:02He was quite big at that time. And Lenny had more of a gaunt look, and so I took a live cast and a scan of Bradley, including a body, because we had to change his body shape as he aged. How long did this take in the makeup chair every day? because I know he also wanted to work with a very small team to get that accomplished. So first stage, because of the facelift, it took longer than the second stage. It was like two hours and a half, and the fifth stage took about five hours. The hard work and long hours have paid off for the both of them. The film has received critical acclaim, earning nominations for seven BAFTAs and seven Oscars, including in the makeup and hair categories.
42:52And Kazu says he's overwhelmed by the recognition and beyond thankful for the opportunity. It's really meaningful because this movie was really like a passion project for both of us, for myself and Bradley. After 36 years to make my dream come true, he brought me like a great gift. From Monocle Radio, I'm Laura Kramer.
43:26Thank you, Kazuhiro, and to Laura as well. Let's move on now to the world of music. John Batiste released a new documentary on Netflix, and the documentary was nominated for Best Song. Our very own Steph Chungo spoke to him.
43:48Well that is the dulcet tones of John Baptiste who's with me in Midori House. Thank you so much for coming in today. Oh yeah. Before we begin I would like to say congrats on your Grammy nominations for World Music Radio. Oh my goodness, World Music Radio. I want to start with your music career so far. So from studying music as a child to Juilliard to band leader of the Stephen Colbert Late Night Show to now having, well, had a symphony. How are you feeling about your career so far? Like how you feel about your career point? Blessed. I've had so much. A friend of mine called me last night, and he told me he had a vision for me.
44:41He had this incredible vision that came to him after he had done ayahuasca. And he said it was a clear, clear vision, more clear than anything he's ever heard or seen. and it told him that I'm in the second quarter and the third quarter is a huge transition of life. Now, I don't know if I believe what he was saying, but he was like, you have a whole lot left to do. And I thought that was very, very harrowing. I feel like it's more like the glass is still not full. Yeah, yeah, it was like very encouraging and also daunting. Speaking of daunting American Symphony how did the concept of you composing a symphony come together?
45:36What was the first thought in your mind when wanting to compose? Spring
45:44Music is everywhere, it's in everything it's in me and sometimes it comes out at the most unexpected times It'll happen the liminal state between resting and waking life. It'll happen if I'm walking down the street or I'm in transit on a plane or on a train or something will happen in my life that will process itself in song. And I thought about this symphony. The symphony really was me processing the last 30 years of life and deciding to try to synthesize all of the ideas and musical experiences and people and trauma, all of it into a symphony because it felt like the right means of accommodating all that.
46:41What are the differences between composing a symphony to composing your albums? My albums are worlds and the symphony is a world. The difference is a symphony is something that has a range of set principles and an album has another set of different principles. So an album is much like a symphony in that it's one world that you're exploring and you're kind of creating out of nothing, built on a theme, built on a narrative, or built on some principles. But the principles are very different.
47:34Oh, the sword is there The dark and the plan I am here, you Oh, I am there The American Symphony, it wasn't a blend of your sound It was a blend of other sounds, Native America, Louisiana, all that sounds and culture blend into one piece of music. What challenges did you face when composing it? Well, I wanted to recreate the symphony. I had to hand select each musician one by one. And you have people who they read music, others who don't read music, others who play in this form of improvised music, others who don't improvise, others who play electronic modular synthesizers and samplers, some who play archaic folk instruments that have never played indoors in their entire life.
48:47how do you make a piece of music that everybody can read or everybody can be on the same page at the same time. So we had to invent a new system that has never been done in the symphonic context or in any context, really. We had to invent a new way of playing together, and I really enjoyed that, but it was also very, very difficult. It took quite a while to figure out what our systems would be so that close to 200 people from all walks of life could come together and play a piece of music together. What brought the idea to document it? You know, there's so much that, especially when you think about the heritage of people of color, women, musicians who are creating iconic works that shift things forward in the genre, in the culture, in the expression of these things is oftentimes so magnetic.
49:51It can't be put into words. It's so powerful, so profound. You can't explain it. And if it's not documented properly, it's forgotten from our collective memory. So I think that it was important for all of the incredible work that I stand on the shoulders of, the ancestors that I stand on the shoulders of, and the work of the symphonic canon to be expanded by this being documented. And so I thought, if I'm not going to document it, who will? And that was the beginning of us making American Symphony, both the piece and the film that's on Netflix. There's many scenes in the documentary. One that struck for me was the elements coming together for the first time or for the first time as a viewer.
50:41In your view, what was it like hearing the start of the symphony for the first time?
51:00It was a revelation. You know, the people had a sense of what it was when we played the music for the first time, but no one really knew exactly. Actually, I'll correct myself. People had a vision from what I'd explained to them, but no one really knew what it was. And in my mind, it was clear, but the input of the musicians is what made it complete for me. They have personalities and they have experiences that clarified the right way to do things. So it all came together in a rehearsal one day. I remember it very clearly, and everybody started to, their light turned on, and everybody said, oh, I see what we're doing.
51:50And I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then once everybody got the vision, it enhanced the piece even further and it became very, very clear that this was something that we had all never done before. The premise of American Symphony was mainly about your journey into composing the symphony. until the premise changed when your partner, Suleika Joyd, underwent treatment for her cancer diagnosis. I wanted to ask how you navigated that while composing the symphony because the scenes that the viewer will see in the documentary, it's not easy. Life is not easy. Life is not something that comes at you in a neat package.
52:36and that way I see art and life as one and the same and that way it's part of the journey. When you compose, you're processing all the things that you've ever heard. Everything that you've ever heard, everything that you've ever done makes you unique and makes you who you are and that's also why when you have tragedy, that's a part of your artistry and it's not something that for me is distracting beyond just wanting to be there for Sulika. It's not something that took away from the process of composition. It's just a part of the flow. How did you both find watching, well, a rough edit of the documentary together?
53:24How did you find that? I didn't like to watch it, but she really liked to watch it. She was into it. She liked to see the moments that she wasn't able to be in the room or to know what I was going through, to see what I was going through was really very encouraging for her, actually, because it was something that allowed for her to see that I was okay. caregivers and people who take care of people in their life who are going through tragedy often put on a strong face and they want to carry the weight of the illness with the person who they love but then behind closed doors that's when they kind of fall apart and she got a chance to see those moments behind closed doors with me and to see also how there was so much going on at that time, it was a lot to even remember a process in the moment.
54:20It was a good chronicle of the era. So I'm glad that she found it that way. I still have not really, you know, I don't really feel like it's the time for me to sit and relive that. And the Grammy goes to...
54:42We are John Baptiste!
54:55Watching the moment you won the Grammys for We Are, we see you jump higher into the spotlight and then we see the signs of yourself, the artist, the celebrity, the supporting partner, the caregiver. How hard was that to balance and see that on screen? I find that the balance of things is all about finding the integration of your life. How do you think of or how do you envision a life that is fully integrated? How do you integrate the things in your life? You know, the hard things that happen, find a way to elevate your values, things that you really value, the things you really care about. start to become very clear because you don't have room for anything else.
55:48It's no BS. It's like trial by fire. It burns away everything that's chaff. It burns away all of the weak stuff. So one of my values is family. And having family go through some of the roughest times that we can imagine, the worst-case scenarios of life happening, makes you realize that there is no balance. There's only priorities. Your priorities have to be integrated and have to be serving each other or they'll just fall away. The things that don't serve will fall away. Your key in life of moving through storms is really figuring out before you're in the storm, what are your priorities? What are the things you value?
56:34What in the moment of the storm is going to be most important for you to focus on? Because it's only going to be that. At the end of the documentary, we see the American Symphony finally played at Carnegie Hall, which is amazing, by the way. What was your first thoughts when the performance was done? after the standing ovations, and I'm assuming the immense standing ovation that you had? There were minutes and minutes and minutes. It was a very, very, very powerful moment to achieve because there had been what we see in the documentary. You see so many things that have been put into the piece coming to life.
57:16There were cancellations of the piece that are not even documented in the film. You know, there was something in the second time it was supposed to premiere that didn't make the film. And I'll tell you now, why not? No secret. I actually got COVID the day before the premiere. And this is after years and years of, you know, a couple of years of putting in work. And the premiere was supposed to happen a year prior to that. but we were in the lockdown period of the coronavirus pandemic and all of that stuff was happening. So there were so many things in history as well in this classical music space, in this space of building on the work of what Duke Ellington did and building on the work of the great composers who I admire and this being the next step.
58:15And so allowing for that to really sink in was, you know, it's hard to describe. I feel so blessed to have been able to be the person to bring this vision into the world. American Symphony is an intimate look at a creative balancing a masterpiece and being a caregiver. I'm sure many, many people who have watched this are in similar situations, would feel a tie to the documentary. I know I do myself. But for those who do not, what do they hope they take away from the documentary? I think if you have a life mission, if you have a life that is driven by a purpose, something bigger than yourself, which we all have within us, which we're all divinely constructed to carry out in our own way, as great or as small as it may seem.
59:14It's equally as important for everybody to tap into that and to pursue it. The highs and the lows of life will hit you, and that's a prerequisite. But don't lose faith. Don't be discouraged. Find your way to what is made for you, what's destined for you, and it will be glorious. Amazing. Just finally, I just want to touch on your Grammy nominations for World Music Radio. Has that surreal moment came back for you, like with We Are, or are you a bit more level-headed with your nominations? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You see? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
1:00:09Oh, man, I don't know. Like, I feel like I just make the music. I feel music all over. I feel it. I just make the music. I'm so grateful that my music and the things that I care about resonate with folks out there, and I want to keep doing that. Besides the Grammys, do you have expectations for 2024? I have been seeing there's a few chatter of American Symphony been in the running for a certain movie award that appears in March. Well, you know, that's all wonderful in the ways that we make things. We have this process, and then all of a sudden there's this incredible recognition sometimes, and I'm truly, truly grateful and honored.
1:00:57If that would be the case, I'm just so, so honored to go with Sulika this time because, you know, So the last time that I was able to go to the Grammys, we couldn't go together because she was in the hospital. But the last award show that we were able to attend together was when I won the Oscar a couple of years back in 21. And that was 2020, actually. So I think it's been a while since we've been able to share in these moments of recognition together as a family. and that would be an incredible, incredible thing to have happen back to back in particular because the song that's on the Grammys for Song of the Year is a song that I wrote for Sue Lyka when she was in the hospital.
1:01:50It started out as a lullaby and obviously the movie is connected to our relationship and our family so for us to celebrate both of those things in February and in March together and her not being in the hospital, that's my favorite part. That's my literal favorite part of what could happen. Thank you, Steph, and thank you to John Batiste as well. Let's move on now to The Zone of Interest, a very bleak but very good film by UK film director Jonathan Glazer. It was loosely based on Martin Amis' novel of the same name. The film tells the story of Rudolf Hoss, Cam Commandment at Auschwitz, and his wife as they build an idyllic life for their family.
1:02:34We speak to Christian Frido, who plays Hoss.
1:02:44It was really different than other movies because Jonathan and his team, they did a really great investigation and preparation for this and we had a lot of conversations together with my lovely colleague Sandra and I think this was the most important thing for me to create this character. It was not so necessary to read the whole biography or something. I listened to his voice from the Nuremberg Tri. You can hear him at YouTube and it's not the voice of Commandant in his prime. It's more a voice of a prisoner but maybe this could be the real Rudolf Hess. We don't know it but it was interesting to hear that And then I had some technical preparations for this role, for example, to learn horseback riding or to gain weight and lose weight for different parts of the movie.
1:03:44And then it was more to be spontaneous in a way because Jonathan invites us to search for the truth, for the banality, for this ordinary life, what could be, what situations we are in. And it was more, yeah, it was more a search. And for me, Jonathan shares his vision very early. He was very transparent from the beginning. And I think this was, for me, the most important key or door opener to this character. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. You talk, Christian, about the sort of, it's been, you know, it's a phrase that's often used, the banality of evil. But there is something just sort of super ordinary about this family man, his family life with this awful death factory next door that he sort of, you know, he puts his hat on and whistles his way to work as he goes.
1:04:40It's an amazingly unnerving performance that you hold together so precisely. And what was that like working with Jonathan Glazer on set? I understand that this sort of set was built right next to, in Poland, you know, it was geographically accurate and all the rest of it. Using lots of different cameras and some really interesting on set techniques and reading around the subject a little bit. What was it like on set, you know, acting so naturalistically with Sandra and the rest of the cast? For me, this was an experience I will never forget. It was an inspiring experience, too, because to working with a multi-camera system, and Jonathan described it very often, big brother in a Nazi house.
1:05:24And that was really great because there were no technical interruptions or something. And Jonathan and his team were in a trailer outside of the set, next to the set, with 10 monitors and it was really amazing. And to be alone on set and to be alone in this house and to have all the time in the world to create the situations or to find the right tone or to have the freedom to make variations or improvisations to get into the right mood, that was really, really amazing. And Jonathan invites us to create variations. Sometimes it's better not to know so much about what's going on, to feel free, to trust your instincts.
1:06:12And then we had the run-through from the whole scene And sometimes there were someone yelling cut, but sometimes not. Sometimes we had a run-through from an hour, for example, and we decided for ourselves when we start again or what we are doing now. And that was really amazing. And then if there were someone yelling cut, then Jonathan came to us and talked to us. And sometimes he gave us really inspiring sentences and said, please search here for this or think about that. And very often he said, don't act B. That was the challenge to B because the cameras observe the characters and not follow them in the conventional way.
1:07:05And he had written a phenomenal script, but sometimes he said, maybe there's something else we don't know. Let's figure it out together. And to have this freedom and all the time to create this, this was really amazing. And you and Sandra's two German actors playing those roles has a heavy quality, obviously, to it as well. What's that like? You must have been very supportive of each other in that environment in which to be very trusting of your director. and your cast and crew, but especially with your relationship with Sandra, because it is essentially this, as we said, this kind of hyper-ordinary story of a kind of stressed-out executive and his wife wants to climb some sort of social scale in Nazi circles, doesn't she?
1:07:52So you and Sandra must have gotten very close making this film, I'd imagine. We are friends. We're becoming friends because we had another movie, I think it was 12 years ago, and we met for the first time and immediately we fall in love as colleagues, not as a couple. But we trust each other and we said, we have us here. And every day we had a phone call or a dinner or something. Yeah, it was great to have her at my side. So that was really great. And trust, it's a really important word because Jonathan, often he doesn't speak German, but he understands us. He feels if it's right or if it's wrong, and that was really amazing, and we trust him a lot.
1:08:39It's an interesting one to obviously have such another brilliant actor with you in so many of those scenes as a support off-camera as well, I suppose, as well. But I wondered how easy Christian is to act in such an ordinary, quiet way. You said, I don't want to be the best or the boldest or the sort of like the most notable actor on set or in the picture. But your performance is so effective because it is such a sort of quiet, subtle performance where you have to believe that this man is not a monster, but he is capable of monstrous things somehow. Did you have anything kind of bouncing around in the back of your mind, a mantra or something that helped you be so contained in your performance, I wonder?
1:09:23First of all, I love to transform myself in a character and to trust the director's vision. And for me, it's more important. It's the same. My first work was with Michael Haneke in The White Ribbon. And it's a film. I'm more a bystander of the story. I'm telling the story. My character is the main character. But he's telling the story. But he's like a bystander. He's listening. He's watching. and that was the most important thing and here it's the same it was more important I had some very emotional scenes but they all cut out of the movie and I really understand the decision because in Jonathan's vision we watch ordinary people sometimes boring sometimes and do they have a secret or do they know what they're doing and that's great because these two peoples or these people in this movie, this is one example for hundreds of people who act in this way, who arranged with a brutal system.
1:10:32And I think for me it was important to be there. And Jonathan said to me, you have the pictures in your mind, but keep it in your mind. Don't show me that. And feel the tension in your body that the work always, always, he's always thinking on his work. He wants to be the best in his work. But if you are in the house, if you are with the kids or in the nature, then try to be only be there. So and, and I try to be sometimes don't think so much, be there. So that was a challenge. It was really, really challenge because as an actor, you want to give all of you in all the scenes, but here it was important to be sometimes invisible or sometimes yeah and that was a real challenge and to keep all these pictures in my mind that was a tough cocktail yeah and what about i mean directors successful directors obviously are writing the scripts they're making the images they're working so so hard but a lot of it i presume is also about a mood on set a mood that's created there's there There are a few things more serious than the subject matter that's lying behind this film, Christian.
1:11:46But what about keeping a sort of collegiate and friendly mood on set? How is that achieved? And how did Jonathan Glaser, if he did, because it seems to be the film's a massive success, creative success. But how is that achieved on set by a director like that, I wonder? It's a good question because we felt the responsibility towards the victims every day. and it's a serious subject matter. It was, I was one day, I was sitting on a lovely marketplace in Osweidscham and forget where I am. And then I really immediately, oh my God, I forget where I am. How easy it is to forget where you are and how easy it is to protect yourself sometimes because I know what I had this beautiful haircut, I wear a hat in my private days and I know what the project is about and we had all these conversations about this and sometimes you forget where you are and that was really interesting.
1:12:54But on set sometimes we had, I cannot say fun in a way, but sometimes it was more a technical search or at the beginning of shooting, we were searching for the right way to work with this multi-camera system. It was more, we've spoken about how we can manage this, how is the best way to do this, how can we act in this way and what's important and what's not. And that was sometimes, yeah, really interesting what filmmaking was. Yeah, we were so close to the original set And then, for example, the scene with Sandra in the bed at night and we're giggling. And so and we ask Jonathan, is it allowed to to laugh or something?
1:13:43But it was really important that we are humans and we are there and we know what we are doing and we are capable of it. And we feel the responsibility. But but it's also filmmaking. I wonder if it felt just finally, Christian, if it felt like a sort of relief to finish the film in a certain way, despite, you know, all of the great, the great professional satisfaction you must have got for making the film and working with these great people, great directors, great actors and things like that. Was it a relief actually to finish it? absolutely it was a relief and i was thinking i'm finished my part is finished and then i had to come back one year later come back to this part and come back to this wonderful haircut and it was i was not so happy about this but i was grateful that jonathan in this post-production process he he said there are some puzzle things missing some parts are missing from this character and It's important to do this now.
1:14:44For example, the scene Rudolf say goodbye to his horse. It's an emotional scene. We had a lot of variations. It was my last scene and my last shooting scene for this movie. And it's an important scene because he said goodbye in a different way to animals than to humans. And how he is with animals than to humans, that is really an interesting point for this character and for his compartmentalization of things. And I was really grateful that Jonathan decided to do this and put this on the original script and film. And yeah, but it was a relief to talk about and now to talk about with you about this.
1:15:29And it's great to talk about this work. I'm really proud of this work. I'm really grateful to be a part of Jonathan's vision. but I'm really happy that I shake this character out of my body. Thank you, Christian. And finally, here on the Monaco Weekly Oscar Special, let's talk about Best Documentary. One of the nominees is Bobby Wine, the People's President. Our foreign editor, Alexis Self, sat down with the film director, Christopher Sharp, and Bobby Wine's wife, Barbie Chiagulangi.
1:16:08is a message to the government expressing what's exactly on the people's mind
1:16:17Barbie I just want to ask you a bit about you know what it's like in in Uganda or what it's been like growing up in Uganda under Museveni you know most of your life in common with most of your compatriots has been spent under his presidency and how would you describe his his leadership Museveni came to power through a guerrilla war in 1986. Most of us were pretty young. So we grew up knowing Museveni alone. To date, he's the only person we've known as the president of Uganda. In the beginning, he was admirable. My husband calls him a one-time role model to him. So whatever he said made a lot of sense.
1:17:00He said the right things to the people. and as time goes on, like they say, power corrupts and corrupts absolutely. So he got drunk on power and his main duty right now is to just make sure that he stays in power by force, by the use of the gun, just like he came with a gun. So he's using the gun to stick to power. And whether we will see an end to Museveni by the gun or by democracy, that's the duty of the Ugandans. But right now, he is such a nightmare. And his leadership is something that the young people are working towards relieving themselves of. And as you say, you know, he rules by the gun.
1:17:47And your documentary was shot over five years. and a lot of the time the camera people are in very dangerous situations. Christopher, what were the logistics of filming and were there any times when you considered halting production or what was that kind of process like? Well, as you say, we were filming over five years. We ended up with 4 ,000 hours of footage. We got footage from all sorts of different people. Obviously Bobby's always surrounded by people filming, some on their iPhone, some with cameras. so we had a huge amount of material. My co-director, Moses Boeo, did some pretty amazing work as well.
1:18:25He was with Bobby and Barbie a lot of the sort of crucial times. And it was violent. It was extremely difficult and violent. I think what made our job a little bit easier was there's just so many people filming around Bobby, it's very difficult for the authorities to know which ones are important and which ones aren't. The level of violence we filmed is not shown in the film. Bobby said when he first watched the film, he said, why did you make Museveni look so good? And I was like, what are you talking about? But what he was talking about is actually what people went through and the amount of murders and torture and abuse was far greater than anything you watch in the film.
1:19:12When we started editing, at one point we thought this is unwatchable. you can't, people won't be able to sit through this and take in the story. So we really scaled back the violence. But it's really horrific. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I wanted to talk to you about that because, you know, the feeling now, you know, all of these Netflix documentaries is, you know, however kind of horrific the content, you know, always seems that the kind of narrativising it, filmmakers want to always end on a happy note or a positive note. And, you know, the feeling after watching this film, there's lots of optimism in there.
1:19:49But, you know, actually, Uganda and Bobby at the end have been through all of this suffering. And there doesn't seem to be much light at the end of the tunnel. When you were making it, were you conscious of the fact that you wanted to end on an optimistic note? Or did you just want to portray events, you know, as they were? Well, I knew that it wouldn't end well. and in a way the where we got to in the end was better than I thought because I generally thought that Bobby would be killed or imprisoned so the fact that we got to the end of the film and Bobby was still alive in a way felt like a bit of a triumph I know it sounds extraordinary the other thing that Bobby and Barbie are very optimistic people and that's that's how we left it at the end with Bobby saying it's going to be all right you know I'm with you we're going to carry on we're going to pick ourselves up and eventually we're going to get rid of this guy.
1:20:45Somebody had to speak for us and people thought I had the loudest voice around not because I know everything not because I'm the most intelligent but maybe because of the music that kind of rejected our plight so when they asked me to stand and represent them I agreed
1:21:16and what about you Barbie I mean you know it's it's I've seen what you've been through for the past few years and you know that your husband and your kids have been through. What's the message of this movie for you? Just like Christopher said, the main duty of the producers and the editors was to show what is happening in Uganda, unfiltered, uncensored, and edited just the way it is. So we are hoping that this film will show the world what exactly is happening back home and the struggle of the young people for freedom and democracy and their desire to be included in the leadership of our country.
1:21:58Also want the people, especially the international community, the taxpayers, to know what they are financing back home. We want them to know that they are financing our murder and our death. We want them to know that every little contribution they make home is not actually doing what they send the money to do, but it is used to buy machines and tear gas and guns and bullets to finish us all. and then we want the world to see the hope that the young people in Uganda have. They have hope that very soon there will be an end to the dictatorship and that they will also have space to determine what they want for themselves in the leadership.
1:22:38Your film and Bobby's message is about another way between military rule and autocratic dictatorship in Africa. Are you hopeful that the arc of history is bending towards pluralism and democracy in Africa, you know, given that the past few months have been so chaotic and especially in Uganda as well, the past few years? Unless we have the democratic countries insisting and spreading democracy towards Africa, then there is not so much work that's going to be done. And we look up to the more developed countries and hope that they will teach us how to make sure democracy is done the right way. So unless we have the bigger democracies coming up and influencing and making sure democracy stays and is done the right way in Africa, then I don't see us go anywhere.
1:23:36It is sad. And, you know, the next election is scheduled for 2026. Yes. Will Bobby run and how would that be possible? 2026 is a bit far away. A lot happens in a day in Uganda. Anything can happen, anything can change. But as we stand, he has said that he would be willing to stand in 2026. But until we get on that day and he is elected or he's on the ballot paper, we cannot say that he is going to be able to stand for presidency. Remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
1:24:26Thank you very much, Christopher and Darby as well. That was the Monaco Weekly compiled by Lily Austin. And don't forget, the Oscars are taking place on the 10th of March. I'm Fernando Augusto Pacheco. Thank you for listening. Thank you.
From the publisher
For this special episode of ‘The Monocle Weekly’, we look back at interviews with some of this year’s Oscar nominees, including Christopher Nolan of ‘Oppenheimer’, Jeffrey Wright and ‘American Fiction’ to Celine Song of ‘Past Lives’.
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