Kermode & Mayo’s Take - Awards Schmawards

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Awards season spinning your head? The Good Doctors have got you covered... Welcome to our awards special, where we’ll be giving you the lowdown on all the big players in this years awards nominations, all in one super-Take from Simon & Mark. We’ve brought together reviews of the titles everyone’s talking about—like Emilia Pérez, The Brutalist, Nosferatu and more—and interviews with the filmmaking & acting talents behind them. Sean Baker, James Mangold, Robert Eggers, RaMell Ross, Ralph Fiennes & Stanley Tucci... we’ve got a list of names longer than a yawn-inducing acceptance speech. From the bottom of our hearts, thanks to our agent, our mums, God, and you loyal Wittertainees. Now go forth and impress your pals at the Oscars watch-party. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by MUBI, a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI is the place to discover ambitious films by visionary filmmakers, all carefully handpicked, so you can explore the best of cinema streaming anytime, anywhere. Mark, what can people discover on MUBI this month? So we have The Girl with the Needle, which was nominated for Best International Film at the Golden Globes, which is an absolutely chilling based on a true story by Magnus von Horn. We reviewed it here on the show,

we talked about how it looked extraordinary. It was really, really disturbing, really, really got under my skin. There's also the first films first collection, which is now streaming on movie, which includes things like hunger, the debut feature from Steve McQueen with a standout performance by Michael Fassbender

and also Pepe Lucy Bum, which is the debut feature from Pedro Almodovar and is an absolutely anarchic riot. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com slash Kermode and Mayo. That's Well, welcome to our awards special, taking a look at the pictures primed to pick up the prizes at this year's awards. We're covering all the front runners for Best Picture across the major upcoming awards, some of the best director categories from guests we've had on the show and a few others nominated for different categories. We're looking across the board at BAFTAs and SAGs and Oscars. Mark, explain what on earth is going on and who these organisations are. SAGs, Screen Actors Guild, Oscars, I think we all know, Oscar Shmoska, and BAFTAs, which are the British awards, which for ages and

ages everyone had to explain, yes, it's not just the British awards for British films. It's the British awards for films, some of which are British and therefore have a slightly more British flavour in some categories, but they are, yes, including all those movies that are up for Oscar Shmoska and were up for Golden Globe. Mason- Okay. Well, I thought I understood them and now I don't. But anyway, thank you. In this first section, you're going to hear Mark's review of Amelia Perez, my chat with James Mangold, plus the review of A Complete Unknown, followed by Mark's review of The Substance. Mason- It is really a quite breathtaking feat. It swings from scary crime drama, genuinely scary

crime drama at the beginning when she's kidnapped and taken to meet the crime boss, to domestic melodrama, somebody who is in a house with their kids, the kids don't know that this is a parent, they think it's an aunt, to a nail-biting thriller at one point, and also a weird thwarted love story, all played out with songs. Now, as with Joker, Folly, or Deux, I think for me, it's the collision of genres that makes the music elements work so well.

I mean, at one point, I was watching it thinking of Leos Carracks' genre-bending films like Annette and Holy Motes, and actually to some extent Polar X. The song set pieces are terrific and crucially they draw us into the world of the drama rather than taking us out of it. If you remember when we were talking about Joker, Folly, I Do and you asked the director, Todd Phillips, whether somehow the songs leavened the dark elements. He said, no, no, no, they amplify them.

Well, in this particular case, what the songs do is that they sweep us along with the drama so that this thing that actually sounds like it shouldn't work at all really, really does. I mean, the best thing about it is you find yourself forgetting just how audacious the story is and simply going with it. And I knew very little about it going in. Obviously, people will know more about it because you don't just go to the cinema to see something blind. But I really thought this is an example of the way in which storytelling is changing in the modern moment. It felt like the old constraints had lifted and the gloves were off and a story could

go wherever it wanted and cinema was up to it and the possibilities of the future are wide open. I genuinely had one of those senses that I did not expect any of this and I'm completely swept up with it. I love musicals anyway, but I just love the way in which it takes all these different elements and throws them all together and it works because it works emotionally. On an emotional level, you absolutely engage with the characters.

It's a very fine piece of cinema and people currently talking about it as a big awards contender, which is be interesting to see whether, you know, whether any of that actually plays out because it's definitely one of the most exciting films of the year. James, hello, and thank you for joining us. My pleasure, Simon. It's nice to be with you today. This particular part of the Bob Dylan story begins with the Elijah Wald book in 2015. Dylan goes electric with that splendid subtitle, Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the 60s, which

kind of tells you a lot about the territory here. When does this become a James Mangold project? Right then. I was mid-2019, I was given the book and an early pass on the screenplay by Jay Cox. And the moment before I'd even read the script, I was like, I want to do this. I was already writing it. I was on my way to the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado with Lamont 66. And I started writing it at the high altitude, oxygen-deprived altitude of Telluride, Colorado, literally during that festival, rewriting and writing notes on the

script. And by the time I got to the Toronto Film Festival, which is only about 10 days later, I was meeting with Timmy and we were forming an alliance to make the picture. That's now almost six years ago, but the, um, um, so that's how long it's been percolating in my life. So why did you go so quickly to, to Timothy Chalamet? Well, I think the answer is in the movie. That is, that is correct. But you, but you knew something about Timothy Chalamet that made you go straight there.

Well, Timmy is one of the most gifted actors of his generation. So there's that. Put that over here. Then he's also the right age. He's scrawny, brilliant, quick-minded, gifted musically, all things that Bob was at that time. And one of the things that I'm most conscious of, particularly when making biopics like this one, is we're making a movie about Bob Dylan between the ages of 19 and 24. So I really need, although our image of Bob Dylan, our kind of mental cultural image of Bob Dylan

is not that young, I needed a way to kind of shock the audience into understanding that this young volcanic talent who wrote at least two dozen of the most important songs of the 20th century did all that before he crossed the threshold of his 24th birthday. And I needed someone young and brilliant and quick-minded, who when the camera looked in their eyes, we not only felt how they felt about what was in front of them in the scene, but we also saw this clockwork, the gears spinning behind the eyes. Because I personally feel like Dylan was living in two universes at this time. One was the present with the people around him and one was also riding this kind

of volcanic talent he had inside him. He had a kind of internal tiger by the tail and these songs were coming out of him and required tending even if that world only existed in his mind. And that was something I felt instinctually that Timmy could capture. It's been in the pipe work for six years, finally comes to our screens, a complete unknown. I know what you think. So let me say two things. Firstly, that was a great interview with James Mangold, not least because he's a very good

filmmaker. I'm a fan of his work right back to the days of Heavy and Copland and of course, a fan of pop biopics. I think Walk the Line was an absolutely exemplary offering. This, as you said, the screenplay by Mangold and Jay Cox, inspired by the book Dylan Goes Electric. In that interview, Mangold said a couple of really interesting things. Perhaps the most interesting thing was the thing about the transactional nature of Bob Dylan's relationships at this time. Specifically, his relationship with the folk scene and how the scene that had supported him wanted something from him and he wanted something else. And Mangold makes an interesting point about in the end,

we get what we want because they didn't get what they want. He described in that interview, dying in Minnesota, rebirthed himself in New York. I was reminded of that thing in the recent Roger Moore documentary about Roger Moore saying that the greatest character he ever created was the character of Roger Moore. So part of this is about the creation of a character. You mentioned very astutely Amadeus, which I think is something that will be in people's minds because what's the line in Amadeus? I'm a vulgar man, but my music is not. It's kind of why this vessel? And it is absolutely true that what Chalamet gets in his performance is the arrogance, the narcissism, the studied cool. His version of Dylan is, as Joan Baez says to him and as you quoted in that interview,

a bit of an asshole. Yes, very much. And I think he does get that. And of course, like in Walk the line, there's the thing about doing your doing your own performances, which is remarkable hats off to me, it's a very, very good Dylan impression. I confess that at times, at times, it felt like an impression. But for most of the time, I thought it felt like an embodiment of what the what this story needs, which is somebody who is touched by greatness, but whose personal relationships are, you know, he's not likable. It's just interesting to have that element.

And of course, Bob Dylan, you know, read the script and approved it. So at the moment, Timothee Chalamet's second favorite to win best actor after Adrian Brody and I think he's ahead of Ray Fiennes in the bookie stuff. Elle Fanning, I think, makes the most of the role of the character who is a renamed fictionalized version of Suzra Tolla who apparently, you know, I think as I understand, because I saw her on the stage with Mangold, Dylan didn't want that name in the film and that's perfectly fine. I have some issues and here's what they are. Firstly, the whole period that we're talking about has been addressed, well actually Dylan has been addressed in many different ways. There is of course, I mean everybody who's a Dylan fan and you're a Dylan fan, I'm not a big

Dylan fan so correct me if I get details wrong. The D.A. Pennebaker doc, Don't Look Back, which is the, it comes out in 67, but it's the 65 tour, is I think pretty much the definitive document of Dylan at that period. And it's weird that when Mangold said he might have been a brilliant musician, but he wasn't a great celebrity. Because actually in Don't Look Back, I mean, he kind of runs circles around the press. He's a bit like the Beatles in Hard Day's Night. I mean, he is funny. And he knows he's funny. Um, the other film, which of course, is at the background, this and I'm not the first person to mention this, but there is Todd Haynes

is film. I'm not there, which is a film about Dylan that isn't about Dylan. And we reviewed this when it when it first came out, that is a film about Dylan that isn't about Dylan. And we reviewed this when it first came out. That is a film in which the cultural figure of Bob Dylan is played by a number of actors, ranging from an 11-year-old African-American boy called Woody, played by Marcus Cole Franklin, to a folk singer called Jude Quinn, played by Cate Blanchett, and then Richard Gere as this kind of embodiment of Billy the Kid. And of course, you know, Dylan co-starred in, you know, Pat Garron, Billy the Kid for which he wrote Knockin' on Heaven's Door. And what Todd Haynes' film does is take this kind of kaleidoscopic

approach to what it says at the beginning, inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan. And but that's the only mention you get of Dylan, then there's a bit of concert footage at the end. Now, I think that pop biopics are, they're always a bit of a, there's a bit of concert footage at the end. Now, I think that pop biopics are, they're always a bit of a, it's a bit of a cleft stick, you know, there's, there's always the chubby moments, but you know, I love the Buddy Holly story. I like great balls of fire. Um, you know, I have, I love Slade in Flame. My own feeling is that the more fictional they become, the more interesting they become. And I can't help but think that I was more interested, more intrigued by what Todd Haynes was doing. Todd Haynes started out by doing Superstar the Karen Carpenter story,

as told by animated Barbie dolls, and then also did Velvet Goldmine, which is a much derided film, but I think is a really interesting film about glam rock, although I seem to be singly alone in that. To me, I think that approach is more interesting than simply telling the story which is fairly well rehearsed of how Dylan, in inverted commas, went electric and how that annoyed the crowd at Newport. I admired a complete unknown, although I thought at times it should be called a complete known because surely this is a well rehearsed story. As a piece of body horror cinema, this is really impressively audacious stuff. I mean, it's surreal in its substance.

It's outrageous in its execution. The effects are fabulously jaw-dropping. I mean, it's like the invention of Rob Boteen's work. There's some of the thing in there. You think of Dick Smith's bodysuits for altered states, all that kind of emotional heft of Jeff Goldblum transforming in the fly. I mean, that stuff is really wonderfully out there. And as with all the best body horror things, all the effects are metaphors made flesh. I mean, the central idea is a satirical deconstruction of ideas of

youth and beauty and of a world in which, as Dennis Quaid says, pretty girls should always smile and young flesh is a saleable commodity. It's also a grand guignol pastiche, the cannibalism of a consumerist society in which desire feeds upon and eats itself. But it's done in a way which is absolutely full of moments of really full-on, and I mean really full-on gasp inducing horror that makes you go, I mean, thematically there's riffs on Frankenstein, top Browning's freaks, the elephant man, hunchback of Notre Dame. You can feel the spirit of Julie de Corneau's Titane, which is a film that I know you absolutely loved, Simon. I enjoyed the hell out of it. It was unbelievably squishy and disgusting in some ways in a way that made me smile and wince and laugh. Like I said, it was like a real sort of

feast of body horror. But all the way through, it's got a point. It's got a really great down to earth, satirical, kind of cynical point about the way in which these things are commodified and the way in which somebody can be at war with themselves and with the world around them. The third act is one of the most deranged things I have seen in the cinema in a long time. The film is over two hours long, I think it's like two hours 15 or something like that, but the time just flew by. Believe me, you were going to come out of it going, blimey Charlie, I didn't think I was going to get that.

So these films plus their nominations, the list is Emilia Perez, 11 Bafta Noms, 3 Sag Noms, 13 Oscar Noms. Wow. A complete unknown. 6 BAFTA noms, 4 SAG noms, 8 OSCA noms. The substance, 5 for the BAFTAs, 1 for the SAG, duck for the oyster and 5 OSCAs. Duck for the oyster, duck, duck, duck. Dig for the clam, dig, dig, dig. Dig a hole in the Elton can. Diddle-dee-dee-dee-dee. This is Malcolm McLaren for you.

Hey Simon, there's a bit of an international theme to the Oscars this year, wouldn't you say? Uh, explain? Well, you've got Avian Brody emigrating to America. You've got Rafe Fiennes in the Vatican. You've got Zoe Saldana hunting, singing gangsters in Mexico. I know what you're going to say. Oh, here we go. You're going to mention the substance again, somehow. Exactly.. I know what you're going to say. Here we go.

You're going to mention the substance again, somehow. Exactly. A French British American body horror co-production. Well, wherever those international titles are taking me or wherever I'm tuning in from NordVPN can help me unlock geo-restricted films and enhanced streaming. It keeps my online activity safe with encryption and threat protection. And it's the fastest on the market, providing smooth streams with no lagging. What's more, it's available in 111 countries.

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Well, I've been thinking about that cushion that we gave away at our live show. Yeah. That and the pencil case. Imagine if we had a load more that we needed to shift. Imagine the riches. Every bottom or pencil case in the country would be graced in some way by our presence. Mason from a shopfront ready POS system to its all-in-one e-commerce platform. It gets you selling across social media marketplaces. Oh, and it's full of the industry-leading tools ready to ignite your growth. Shopify gives you complete control over your business and your brand

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Hiring Indeed is all you need. Okay, welcome back. Here's your highlights package for our next batch of contenders, including our sibling podcast now in Ben's interview with Sean Baker, as done by Ben Baby-Smith on his film, Anora, followed by Mark's review, my interview with Brady Corbett, followed by Mark's review of The Brutalist, finishing off with Mark's review of Hard Truths by Mike Chuckles Lee. The casting process. I mean, sometimes you just know, right? I'm sure with Annie, you just knew. Yes, yes, she was precast essentially. Yeah, but with casting and I never want there to be a weak link.

I know, you know, it's so important. A lot of my films have ensemble casts, almost all of them. So, the goal is never a weak link. I know it's so important. A lot of my films have ensemble casts, almost all of them. So the goal is never a weak link. So I don't wanna be in a place where I'm blaming a casting agent or director down the line, like, oh, they didn't give me a 100% perfect cast. It'll be on me if that weak link is in there. So, and also, it's not that I, a lot of my casting sometimes takes place years earlier.

Like we just mentioned Mikey, but also Yura and Karin, Yura Borisov who plays Igor in the film, and Karin Karagoulian who plays Toros, they were both precast too before I wrote the screenplay. I had the idea in my mind that I knew their characters and therefore I was able to say I want them to be in. So as I was writing the screenplay I had those three actors in my head. I saw their faces as I was fleshing out their characters and that really really helped. Helps the writing process.

So it's like, it's kind of, it's an unorthodox casting process. You know, I kind of just pick and choose actors I wanna work with or people that I know who I feel that they can, they'll be able to tackle this character and get it right. And then as we're getting closer to production, there's all the background. And the background I have help with. You know, Samantha is also doing additional casting.

And we're in the moment, you know, reaching out to sometimes locals and sometimes we're street casting, sometimes Instagram. Instagram is a great way of casting. Thank God. Instagram has really helped me. You know, Bria Vinaitha from Florida Project comes from Instagram, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So that's been another wonderful resource for us. I recognize one of the actors as well well who sort of helps maybe with security at the club. Oh, yeah.

She's also sort of sidekick with the weed dealer in Red Rocket. Oh, Brittany Rodriguez. Yes. Yeah, yeah. She's great. Oh, that was complete street casting. We were driving around Houston. I kind of feel that.

I didn't even know, but I felt it. Yep. Yep. We were on Red Rocket. We had such a tiny crew. It was eight people. So really, it was really up to us to do everything. And I remember driving around Houston one day and seeing Brittany walking her dog around.

And I like chihuahuas. I have a chihuahua. Look at this interesting person walking this chihuahua. I can't picture her with this chihuahua. I can't be sure if it's a chihuahua. Yeah, we drove up beside her and we said, we're making an independent film in town and are you interested? And she goes, I'm an artist, I'm very interested. That's crazy.

And that's how it happened. And so with this film, we were able to bring her back for a supporting role. I was also able to bring back a lot of, there are lots of cameos in there from people from my previous films. Mickey O'Hagan, who plays Dinah in Tangerine, she's in the film. Charles Jang from Take Out, he's in the film. So it was really nice to have a reunion. And with the bigger characters, and specifically with Mikey's, with the Inora character, how

much collaboration was going on? I mean, obviously you said you knew how long the film was gonna be, you knew from the page count, the writing's clearly very specific. The only time that my actors could really improvise was when there was some air. You know, like, okay, there's a little gap there,

I'm gonna throw in an expletive or I'm gonna throw in a one-liner. And sometimes they would give me gold, you know, but there were other sections in the film where I would actually rely heavily on improvisation. And, um, so for example, the beginning of the movie, right? In the beginning, before she meets Yvonne, we just wanted to show the mechanics and mechanics of the club and what a night in the life of Annie would be like.

And I relied entirely on improvisation from Mikey. And the thing is that she had done so much research, she spent time in the club, she shadowed dancers, she understood what these interactions would be like and all the variations of these interactions because each one is different. You know, it's a dancer interacting with a client and they're both trying to figure out

whether or not they want to proceed and actually get a lap dance together. So it's like, so it's, there's some psychology in there too. She has to read a person and sort of gauge their interest and how much small talk has to happen and what she has to focus on in order to get that guy interested. And she did so much of that homework, that immersion that she did,

that I was able to rely on her for that opening. And we shot it like a Robert Altman scene, where I just had her with a wireless mic and an earpiece, and we had the club up and running. Like we had my producer in the DJ booth blasting music, which is usually a no-no because you don't want to marry music with dialogue. But we pre cleared this music so that we could cut it up. And I knew I was going to be cutting it up in a social realist way. So jump cuts were allowed. And we just on the earpiece, I would say, Hey,

okay, Mikey, approach the guy on the right over there. And she would go over and have and just improvise this transaction with him, this interaction. And it was really incredible to watch. And she would always bring humor to each one. And you want to go to the ATM? Yeah, it was great. It was wonderful. Yep. She would like twist the guy's words and quickly like whatever would get that guy to the private

as fast as possible. Um, and then when I felt I had enough of, of her with one, one of those background actors, I would say, okay, now move on and go across the room to that guy on the left. And we would just with a telephoto lens, just follow her. And sometimes we do, I think we did a handheld, we walked around with her too. And that was really wonderful. I mean, for my actor to have done so much research

that I could rely on 30 minutes of improvisation from her, it was just incredible. I've never worked with an actor who did that much prep. I mean, really, it was so impressive. So, Mikey Madison, who was the Mance Knight, Susan Atkins in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is an aura, but calls herself Annie. That's the name that she likes.

She's an exotic dancer in, um, in a Brooklyn club in the Brighton beach area. So one night she's sent to tend to a party of Russians because she is from Russian family and she, she sort of speaks the language, although she says, I understand it, but I don't really speak it, but she does. She meets Vanya, who is a young man with tons and tons of money and loads of drunk friends. She dances for him, he takes a shine to her. He invites her to a party at a mansion, like a mansion the likes of which you have never seen, a massive sort of glass cathedral. He's the son of an oligarch, but he's a big kid. He plays video games, drinks,

takes drugs, does nothing with his young life other than be feckless. And they seem to have a spark. And then she agrees to make a kind of pretty woman style bargain with him that he will pay her to be his girlfriend for a week. And so they party in New York and then he flies her and his crew to Las Vegas where they promptly check into a swanky hotel where he acts like he owns the place. So the partying continues, the bond between them sees to grow. He thinks he's fallen in love with her. The whole thing is a fairy tale, but Vegas isn't real life. When they get back to Brooklyn, they discover that his parents have heard about them and they want the relationship stopped. They want everything annulled. To this end, they send Taurus to

sort it out, the godfather to sort it out. So the rest of the film then plays out with the kind of breathless energy of Jonathan Demme's something wild and the impending threat of Cronenberg's Eastern promises. And weirdly enough, the kind of the screwball wit of something like, you know, it happened one night. I mean, it's a long film, but it never feels long because it's absolutely breathless in terms of its energy. You're pulled from pillar to post with these characters who feel palpably real and empathetic. There's a number of reasons why it works. One of them is, I mean, Sean Baker has done dramas that deal with sex work before. Indeed, you talked to him about that

with Red Rocket. He's made it his mission to mission to destigmatize it and to tell stories, which are universal stories. And that's exactly what he does here. I mean, okay, on the one hand, you could say, oh, well, okay, the narrative is about a Brooklyn stripper who falls in love with a Russian oligarch or who gets involved with a Russian oligarch's son. But that's not what it's about at all. It's about a tough-spirited young person making her way in the world who comes across a spoiled man-child who is still tied to his very scary mother's apron strings and the drama that then unfolds. André Wurhahn, who's a Canadian writer and actress who is best known for the 2018 memoir

Modern Whore, was brought on as a consultant to make sure that any of the stuff they were dealing with in terms of the sex work in the film was done properly and responsibly. And I think it does pay dividends because I think you do feel that what you're watching is a drama that actually knows the area it's talking about. It's also a film,

and this is true of all of Sean Baker's films, in which characters on the periphery, and a lot of the time he deals with characters on the periphery of mainstream life, they are all drawn with the same density and fluidity so that when somebody who is on the periphery becomes centre stage, it doesn't seem odd at all. It's like that real thing in the real world, when somebody who is part of a group who doesn't seem to be the most significant character can then become a very significant character and they've already been drawn adequately enough that that's the case. It's really well shot by Drew Daniels who shot Red Rocket and also Waves and also It Comes at Night, which I loved. Brilliant central performance by Mikey Madsen, who is just

pure cinema dynamite in terms of the way in which she brings you into the world of this character, and then you barrel along with her. She is full on, absolutely like 100% energy, and you can see like 100% energy and you can see why it is that she kind of freaks people out. Anyway, it's a wild ride. It's really well done. It's very sensitive. It's very moving. It's also very exciting and often funny and sometimes kind of crazy in app control and definitely, definitely one of the films of the year.

Brady, hello. How are you, sir? I'm very well. Thanks for having me. You look as though you're in a cinema somewhere. Indeed I am. I'm at the Curzon Soho where the film opened earlier this week. I've seen it more times actually than anything else I've ever made.

Just because the film is premiering in so many formats, we had to approve each 70mm print, each 35mm print, and of course the DCPs, as well as the network grades. So I really learned my lesson and was punished for making such a long film. Well, you've been punished by 10 Oscar nominations. There's a moment in your movie, In The Brutalist, where Guy Pearce's Van Buren says to Adrian Brody's Laszlo Todd, why architecture? So that's where I'm starting there. I just want to say that to you too.

Why architecture? Why did you decide on this as a theme? Well, for a variety of reasons. All of my films, my first film, for example, The Childhood of a Leader was about the interwar period and the six months leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. It too was a post-war film about post-war psychology following the First World War. Vox Lux was a film about post-Columbine and post-911 psychology in America. And so, of course, I'd wanted to do something on the post-war years after the Second War for some time.

And Brutalism felt like the right visual allegory to explore that period of time because brutalism came about in the 1950s. And it's such a hotly debated, even to this day, style of architecture, especially with the context that this came from the era of, you know, I love Lucy, you know, and I mean these buildings must have appeared to be especially radical at that time. And so, you know, I also felt that there were not a lot of films strangely on the subject of architecture. You know, prior to, you know, Francis's movie, Megalopolis, this year, the last movie I could really think of was Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect

and then King Vador's film, The Fountainhead before that. I'm sure I'm missing a few here and there, but there's surprisingly few films on the subject. So I thought that, you know, it would be a great subject to tackle. The other thing of course is that filmmaking and architecture have a lot in common. It is not something that you can do by yourself in your bedroom or by yourself in your studio.

It is something that requires a lot of capital. It requires a lot of social management, usually with hundreds of individuals that have never worked together before. Those parallels drew me to it because I felt that it was something that more or less was a medium I really understood. I came to see and think about Guy Pearce's Harrison Van Buren as Harrison Van Netflix. That he's the guy with the money and then he just wants to tell you what to do. Unfair? Well, no comment because I think it's on a case by case basis and there are certainly many films that would not exist without their

support but I also think it really, it's about the individual. I've worked with executives on projects that were the best people I've ever worked with and were incredibly supportive and I've also worked with real antagonists and this film is of course based on a lot of those antagonistic relationships and experiences that my partner Mona and I have had over the years. So this film is made in the style of a 1950s melodrama. So our antagonist is the sort of antagonist that you might find in a 1950s melodrama. Joseph Gott and James Mason sort of come to mind.

And it comes, your movie comes, even though it's been on the way for seven years, it comes out at a time when emigration and immigration is at the very heart of an awful lot of political conversation in, around Europe and particularly in the US at the moment. Your movie will be seen as part of that conversation, won't it? It has some very strong things to say about the role of the other and what they bring to us in inverted commas. Yeah, I mean, you know, in 2017, of course, there was a different immigration crisis that was happening at the time.

And so, I mean, sadly, I think that this film could be released at any time, and it would, you know, still be relevant. And I try to choose material and themes that, you know, will never not be relevant, you know, because I never know when these movies are ultimately going to get made when I finish writing them. And I certainly don't know when people are going to watch them. I don't know if they're watching them this season, next year, or a hundred years from now. So I think that sadly history, as we all know, repeats itself and that this is a very, very ugly cycle that our film is trying to explore,

how, what, and why, how do we get here? As you look to storytelling in the future and your next movie and so on, Brady, what have you learned about how useful or otherwise AI is to the filmmaking process? Should we be excited or should we be scared about what it brings to moviemaking? The answer is absolutely both. It depends on how it's being handled. If it's being handled ethically, then it's fantastic. If it's being handled unethically, then it's extremely nerve-racking. In our case, what was of the utmost importance to Felicity Adrian and myself was representation. We wanted Hungarians to be able to watch this Adrian and myself was, you know, representation.

So we wanted Hungarians to be able to watch this film and have the Hungarian dialogue be absolutely flawless. So Adrian and Felicity still had to learn how to speak Hungarian for their roles, but we used the technology to dialogue, edit vowels, consonants, and certain aggressive sounds to remove anything that would give away in their Hungarian dialogue an English or American accent.

And so, you know, I think it's very exciting technology. Also Adrian and Felicity own their own vocal models in perpetuity. So you know, no one can use it without their permission. And the company that worked on it is an extraordinary company called Respeacher based out of Kyiv, Ukraine. And this was a manual process. So, you know, I think that there's an automatic assumption that it's eliminating jobs as opposed to creating jobs, but many, many engineers were working on this. It added an additional seven or eight people to the sound team. Corbeis described The Brutalist as, this is a quote, he said,

a film which celebrates the triumphs of the most daring and accomplished visionaries are ancestors. The project, he said, that is closest to his heart and family history. Whilst you're watching it, it is very tempting to think this must be based on a real story because it does, it kind of has that feel to it, although it is a work of fiction. On the one hand, there is an element of the fountainhead in it, the Aymarand novel, which was filmed in late 40s with Gary Cooper as an architect who would rather destroy a building than accept that changes have been made to his design.

And it's a very, very famous book and a famous film adaptation. On the other hand, there's an element of Once Upon a Time in America, because it is an epic tale of immigration, of people being in America where dreams are meant to flourish, but actually the American way of life has a strange effect on them. This is shot by Kobe's regular DP, Law Crawley. It's shot in VistaVision. The way VistaVision works is it's 35 mil stop, but you shoot horizontally

and then you, anyway, complicated process, but it means that it's got a grand, a grand feel to it. And a lot of people will be interested in which format it is that they see it in when it's projected. And Kobe said that the reason they did this was it was the best way to access the period the reason they did this was it was the best way to access the period of the film. And it's beautifully production designed. It's got great music. I read a couple of reviews of it because it premiered a while ago now. And there was one negative review which said it is an idea for a movie about ideas. And I think that phrase is interesting because I think that if that's not a criticism, it is full of ideas. Exactly which idea is paramount, I think, does depend on the viewer. I mean, you could say it's about art versus capitalism. It's about anti-Semitism and Israel and Zionism. It's about

love and jealousy. It's about admiration and assault. It's about the difference between patronage and patronisation and, you know, to take the title of the film, brutalism and brutality. And it is about an America in the past, but he's also about the America of today. And as I said, this the Oscar talk for Adrienne Brody, I think Felicity Jones nearly steals the show. I mean, considering that she's, her screen time is much less. I mean, I think she, her presence in the film is quite devastating. There's a thing, if you've seen the poster, one of the posters for it has a statue of Liberty turned upside down because when he gets off the boat, he looks up and he sees the

statue. And just because of the angle of the thing, it looks like it's upside down because when he gets off the boat, he looks up and he sees the statue. Just because of the angle of the thing, it looks like it's upside down. You could maybe read that as Liberty turned on its head or the world turned upside down. I think the most remarkable thing is about it. Firstly, it's a very inexpensive movie. The budget for it is apparently 9.6 million. Now I know there's been some scuttle recently about use of AI and I haven't really followed it and honestly I'm not that interested. This is a $10 million movie that's expansive and has that vision and it's extraordinary

that it got made for that much. It is long but I confess that it did not feel long to me. I don't know that all of it works, but certainly there is, there is enough going on that, I mean, you spend a lot of the movie thinking what is this actually about? And I think that's a debate that will rage for a long time afterwards about what you actually take away from it. But I thought it was a genuinely heartfelt and really well-crafted film that managed to be full of ideas. Even as I said, that negative review saying

it's an idea of a movie about ideas. I think it is a movie of ideas. And I think that he's found a way of telling this story. I think it's his most accomplished feature. And I really liked it. Yeah, so this is the latest from Mike Chucklesley, who's the guy behind Nuts in May, Life is Sweet, Secrets and Lies, Topsy Turvy, Peterloo. Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who was so brilliant in Secrets and Lies as Pansy,

she's got a fantastically dyspeptic view of the world. She's a tortured soul filled with bitterness and anger. That is gradually revealed to be the symptoms of a sort of underlying traumatic deep-seated depression, although crucially, it's never explained exactly why she is like she is. You have to kind of infer it. She lives with her partner and her son, both of whom she hectares and belittles. She seems to dislike everything and everyone, rails against the world. When she goes to the supermarket, she gets into a fight with the till assistant by just telling her off.

Even when her sister Chantelle, brilliantly played by Michelle Austin, cuts her hair, she has a go at her as well. I have to call you to tell you to go and get stuff for me from Kilburn. I have to call you to tell you to cut my hair. So at times she's a bit like the David Thewlis Johnny from Naked, except her anger and depression seems far more debilitating. Or, you know, maybe she's like the flip side of, you remember we interviewed Sally Hawkins when Happy Go Lucky came out and she plays Poppy and Poppy is relentlessly kind of upbeat. And I said at one point that, you know, the hard truths could be called unhappy go unlucky. Chantelle on the other hand, her sister is sort of happy go lucky and the two sisters

grew up in the same house, utterly different worldviews and how they have become such different people. As I said, it's never kind of explained away, but you are encouraged to decide for yourself what's happened. Now, this is, as you said in the interview, it's the last feature to be shot by Dick Pope, who was Lee's longtime cinematographer and he's a great cinematographer, died in October.

And the way that these characters are arrived at, and again, it is worth listening to that interview because despite the grumpiness at the beginning of it, Simon did get Mike to sort of talk about his process, which really involves getting actors to find their own characters. So that when they put them together in a drama, the actors completely believe in their characters and the characters are completely three-dimensional. I think that is the most important thing about Hard Truths is you believe in these two sisters, you believe in their world, you believe in their families because the actors completely believe in them. There's a famous story that when Tim Spall played Turner in Mr. Turner, he learned to paint because he thought, how am I going to play a painter if I can't paint? Then of course, he carried on being a painter afterwards. So I think you completely believe in the characters. However, what's interesting is the way in which you react to the characters can be very different.

So Pansy is, she's full of this bitterness and anger, but she's often very funny, but she doesn't think she's funny. And she doesn't see the funniness in, you know, when she's doing the thing about, you know, yeah, with your belly showing out, you're in your yoga and you're not even in the gym. And rightly in that interview referred to them as like, you know, pansies and the pansies are funny. But I've seen the film a couple of times now, the first time I saw it, I saw it on my own. And I did find it a kind of a sort of a bleak portrait of somebody who's completely engulfed by depression. The next time I saw it, I saw it at a festival with an

audience and they were laughing at the pansies. Oh, actually there's a lot of comedy in this. I think that one of the reasons that the comedy works is because pansy doesn't, Marianne Jean-Baptiste playing pansy doesn't find it funny at the time. So it's completely straight face. So it's like that kind of, you know, that the same deadpan comedy that goes right back to Nuts in May and Abigail's Party. It's painful, but it is funny. Comedy and tragedy are intertwined as, you know, in art, as in life. I mean, I think this is a really fine film. I'm sort of, you know, there was a, there was talk about it possibly being an Oscar contender, but you know, that was, I think was always a bit of an outside thing. But I don't really think in the end, this is something you

judge. I mean, I said to, we were talking last week about, you know, whether or not this is a classic, I think this is, I think this is one of the essential Lees. And I think it is a kind of distilled essence of what it is that Mike Lee does when he's at the top of his game. But it is, I said, tragedy and comedy intertwined. It's got all those things in it. It can be great and sweet, but it can also bite. That's what I think. So that was Anora, seven BAFTAs, three SAGs and six Oscars. The Brutalist, nine BAFTAs, one SAG and 10 Oscars. And Hard Truths, two BAFTAs.

Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay two nights and get a $50 Best Western gift card. Life's the trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. Clear your schedule for U-time with a handcrafted espresso beverage from Starbucks. Savor the new small and mighty Cortado.

Cozy up with the familiar flavors of pistachio or shake up your mood with an iced brown sugar oat shaken espresso. Whatever you choose, your espresso will be handcrafted with care at Starbucks. So we're into our last round. You're going to hear the interview with Ray Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, followed by Mark's review of Conclave, Mark's review of Wicked, Mark's review of Nickel Boys, followed by my interview with the director, Rommel Ross, and my chat with Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, although to be honest they took care of a lot of the interview entirely by themselves.

Most of the interview. No sane man would want the paper scene. Some of our colleagues seem to want it. What if I know in my heart that I am not worthy? You are more worthy than any of us. I'm not. Well then tell your supporters not to vote for you, to pass the chalice. And let it go to him?

I could never live with myself. So where do you join this story then, Rafe? Well I hadn't read the book. I was sent Peter Strawn's wonderful screenplay, Tessa Ross producing, and Edward Berger, whose work I'd seen of the series with Benedict Cumberbatch on television, and loved his work then, but was having, I met him for this, loved the screenplay, loved the part of Cardinal Lawrence, who is, I suppose, the figure who's guiding the conclave. Yes And then had saw Edward burgers all quiet on the Western Front which blew me away I thought there was were extraordinary piece of filmmaking so was doubly excited to be approached to play

So Lawrence, so you we're putting all the ducks in a row here. So we've got a Robert Harris novel We've got Peter Straughn screenplay. We've got Edward Berger directing. We've got Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini. That's enough, people are going, okay, I want to see it, I want to see that film. It must have felt an extreme, it felt almost as though we were watching a play

because you're all locked in. Was it fun to make when you're all in the gear? When the cameras stopped rolling are you having a good time? I think what was I think we both agreed that the writing, the dialogue, the scenes we got to play was so great and like great writing for a play too, but this was a film, but there were scenes, meaty scenes where the tension and the antagonism or the competition or the the playoff, the standoff I should say between characters was really wonderful to play. I mean when you get a screenplay I think you

quickly look at the dialogue and you get a taste of how it's playable, what can be said, what can be not said actually around lines, and it's all the possibility of what the face can say in and around the spoken word. And that's what Peter's, so that's the first thing that's exciting is it's alive with the acting challenges and the sort of the stuff you can do with your screen partner. That was all there sort of sizzling on the page.

Yeah, and I wonder if I think is it the is it Olivier who said once you put on the shoes you understand the character I wonder if it's one of those roles that once you wear the gear it all falls into place or had it fallen into place before that? No that pushes it over the edge I I mean, that's the thing that once you put it on, it's like putting a uniform on. Suddenly you see this completely different person. Is Lawrence a holy man? Yes. I think one of the things that I understood from doing a bit of research was that the Vatican is organizationally very complex. It has a huge bureaucratic center. It's full of men who are priests organizing, just having to organize a structure that involves

a kind of civil service. So they're not monks. They are involved with organization. There are flights to be booked and people to be invited and people to accommodation to be set up. It's huge, it's a huge structure. So all of these men are involved in a bureaucratic structure. And in a way, the debate and the argument that you're having, which is all about the Catholic Church and all about the papacy, actually is reflecting the very real political choices which are happening everywhere across the world so do we become more liberal do we become more populist do we become more reactionary that is presumably part of

the genius of Robert Harrison part of the genius yes but I'm that's true but I'm also saying they have to run a business it's it's planning it's accounting it's it's you know it's it's it's a whole stuff of structure. And so they are worldly because of that. They have to engage with the world. They can't just be meditating and praying like in a… They have to organize something like running a film studio. Yeah. And yet at the same time, there they are behaving in a way or attempting to behave in a way a monk might behave. They have to, they're at once doing these very human things as Rafe is describing and then on top of that, they're supposed to be purer than most men. How's that possible?

I think we learn quite early on that John Lithgow, he's up to no good. I think we established that and that's not a spoiler. I think we worked that out. Briefly following the death of a beloved pope, Ralph Fiennes is Cardinal, Lawrence has to lead the conclave to elect the new pope. The favorites are Bellini, played by Stanley Tucci, who you heard there, who is a progressive, determined not to let Tadesco, played by Sergio Castellito, set the church back because he's kind of reactionary right winger. Also there's Ady Yemi, played by Lucian Musmati, who is the Nigerian cardinal with very homophobic views. And then this Trent Blaise, you said

John Lithgow, who's on screen for about four seconds before you think, what was the phrase you used? He's up to no good. He's up to no good. He's such to no good. He's up to no good. He's up to no good. He's such a great actor. This is basically a religious drama as a detective story. It is everything that that absolutely imbecilic Angels and Demons, which had the skydiving pontiffs, wasn't. That was a film that wanted you to believe that the intrigue of the Vatican and all that, it's like a dead person. No, it's not. That stupid, the action shot of the white smoke going up the chimney. Here, the appointment or the

move towards the appointment of the new pope becomes almost like a murder mystery. And in fact, at one point, I felt very smugly. I know where this is going. Like in the way you were doing the mass, I know who done it. And then I was completely wrong-footed when the film did something that I completely hadn't expected it to do, but which I think it does really well and which I think it earns the right to do and actually kind of creates a very good philosophical and progressive conclusion. As both those actors said, meaty, chewy roles reminiscent of theatre, as you had pointed out, the theatre of the costume. I was thinking of Ingladiator with Denzel Washington.

What was the phrase you used? He loves the fabric. And here, there's the thing about putting on, there's the under stuff and then the various ties and knots and then the stuff going over the top of it. And that whole thing about the fabric, the uniform, you see somebody else because of the theatre of the costume, the theatre of the rituals, the sound of the location. I think the film's shot at Chinichita. The sound is absolutely brilliant. And a great script about the danger of certainty, you know, the phrase that my dad always used to use, which is the belief in a specific knowledge

of God is a horrible thing. But all this happening within the seat of power of the Catholic Church, which is absolutely dedicated to doctrine and catechism and law and rules. And so all that stuff, the machinations of politics, progress, deception, the bureaucracy of the Vatican, which is a state unto itself. So essentially almost like an, you know, effectively a country and as Ralph Lyons said, a business as well as a belief. And in the end, I think underneath it all, what it is, is a meditation on power, on that thing about power should never be given to anyone who wants power. When Stanley Tucci was saying at the end, you know, that if you have certainty, things will go wrong. And you see that all the time. And obviously this is all playing out outside the walls of the

conclave. We know that there's civil unrest, there's explosions, and, you know, there's disturbances. It's about the need to be open to change. It's about the need to have doubt. So, Holy Men Who Were Just Men, an organization which is dedicated to rules, learning that you can't be dedicated to rules, Ralph Fiennes saying, it's not so much about what's said, the meaty, chewy dialogue, as what's not said, the looks in between. I felt that the twisty turns of the plot, which at one point actually became the angels

and demons thing. Angels and demons had skydiving pontiffs. This has an explosion, but a completely justified explosion because it's in a world in which there is turmoil outside and it's about negotiating that. I thought the way it concluded, I hadn't read the book, obviously you had before, I thought that it reached an ending that was not just dramatically satisfying, but philosophically satisfying. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it was, yeah, I really enjoyed it. Robert Harris is obsessed with elections. He just loves elections. He Harris is obsessed with elections. He just loves elections. He loves the process of elections. And if ever there was an election with which we should feel very little engagement, it would be the election of a pope. And yet, because it mirrors the divisions in society, it feels as though it's enormously relevant to almost every election that you read about.

Yes. And also the fact that the way in which the ballots take place, it just seems to be, okay, we've done a ballot, do another one. And so you just keep doing this weird balloting process. It's not like there is an official debate depicted in the film. It's conversations in hushed corridors that may be being overheard in stairwells. And intrigue and deceit, like I said, it does exactly the thing that angels and demons didn't do, which is that it genuinely turns a theological process into a dramatic political thriller without being silly. Will Barron Oscar chat about Rafe, I hear.

Richard Larkin Oh, I would think so. Oscar chat about Rafe, I hear. Oh, I would think so. Lynch's version had a visual splendor, but it was in the end thematically empty. It was a film of very memorable interludes, but it didn't have a through line. And what Villeneuve's Dune proved was that you can do this. But it's very, very complicated to keep these, there is so many things going on, particularly in the second part. It takes a real storytelling clarity. Now, part one had a real clarity to it. I think what is really impressive about part two is that despite how complex and, you know,

like a miasma the plot becomes, Denis Villeneuve, who as he demonstrated in Arrival, I think one of the reasons that you love Arrival so much, and it's the same reason that I do, is the storytelling is so clear. It's a really interesting story about how you view time, whether you view time as linear or cyclical and it's how temporality affects your view of fate and of life and death, which sounds like it's completely... And yet when you watch Arrival, it's a really beautiful story. And I think the same is true of Blade Runner 2049. 2049.

I'm so sorry, Blade Runner 2049, which I think Martin Scorsese enjoyed as well. So the thing with this is, like you said, it is beautiful. But like both Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, But like both Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, the visual beauty never obscures what's going on underneath. Sci-fi is a genre in which ideas and wonderment coincide. And sometimes science fiction on screen can just succumb to spectacle. I remember Stephen King saying that there are various levels of horror, and I think it's like, you know, terror, horror, gross out. So, you aim for one minute.

In science fiction, it's like ideas are at the top and at the bottom it's a planet blowing up. So, if nothing else works, I'll give you a planet or I'll give you a monster or something like that. This has ravishing dunes. I mean, people are talking about this, yeah, they filmed on location. In space, no, on location in sand dunes. I mean, somebody, people are talking about this, yeah, they filmed on location. What? In space? No, on location in sand dunes. The worms are breathtaking. I mean, the idea of the worms is so hard to visualize when you read the books, you find,

but the worms are absolutely breathtaking. If you've seen the trailers, you know, there's that shot of them coming to, you know, just coming out of the thing. They are breathtaking and the worm riding is breathtaking as well. You actually think that you are watching somebody riding a giant worm, which is, you know, this has gladiatorial fights to the death, but none of that spectacle ever obscures the fact that the story is what's important. Greg Fraser, who shot Dune and Batman and Creator, has talked about this technique that he uses, which is that the whole thing's shot on IMAX, but it's you shoot digital, you shoot on IMAX-approved digital cameras, and then you transfer the 35mm and then back.

And people say, well, why? And I read an interview with him and he said, well, when we were doing the tests, film looked too nostalgic and digital looked too crisp. So using this process gives us the best of both worlds. And okay, it's up to cinematographers to tell me whether there's an easy way of doing this. But what I know is that the end result looks really, really breathtaking. I think when you were talking about the space Jesus, which is what child three refers to- Child one. Child one, I beg your pardon. Space Jesus.

Space Jesus. It does sound as though part three is definitely going to be space Jesus. But it's also, and I don't mean this as a mocking thing, I mean it genuinely, it is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Because one, not Monty Python, but Monty Python's life of Brian, because one of the things that's fascinating about it is that as Denis Villeneuve was saying, the dog were becoming bigger than the message, and then the message turns into warfare. If you remember the sequence in Life of Brian when the crowd chase Brian, and one of his shoes falls off, and John Cleese, he has left us a sign, it is a shoe, and then somebody else, no, no, he's left us the gourd. We must follow the gourd.

And suddenly all these kind of plethora of ideas come out. And he's doing all the time, I'm not the Messiah. And there is a kind of I'm not the Messiah element to the Paul of Trades character, which is then sort of overwhelmed by what we are told is predestined faith. And there's a lot of very complicated philosophical stuff here about the idea of prophecy and prophecies being stories and prophecies being stories that are used to control people. And actually in the context of something we were talking about earlier on about any kind of religious fundamentalism and the way in which those ideas can be poisonous, this is a really kind of deep, dark dive descent into all of those things with giant space worms, ornithopters,

you know gladiatorial battles. I'm just so impressed that he's managed to keep all those really quite complicated themes going whilst having all this extraordinary visual spectacle whilst having moments when you're just looking at it and thinking I've been transported to another. And I would say see it in the biggest format you can. The first thing to say is that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, they're a really good double act. There's real heart and soul brought to the role of Elphaba. Grande seems to be channeling Sharpe from the high school musical films and Sharpe, always my favourite character. And that was really lovely to see. There is lots of substance in the story. Again, people who know the stage show will

know this. I had never seen it. I'd never heard any of the songs. So there's stuff about people being rejected because they're different, which I think is well judged. There is stuff about the mistreatment of animals, which goes very sort of George Orwell. There's quite complicated stuff about the suppression of language being the key to power. If you stop people speaking their language, you get power over them. There is even one speech, and bear in mind,

Wicked has been around for a while. There is one speech in which a carnival huckster, Charlotten, explains that a divided land can be brought together by being given a single scapegoat, a common enemy, which strikes an uncannily contemporary note right now, despite the fact that, you know, the story has been around for a long time. It's just, it could not have landed at a better time. Gladiator had space monkeys. This has an origin story of the flying monkeys, which were always the scariest thing about the Wizard of Oz.

Incidentally, I love silent running. Doug Trumbull's dad worked on the flying monkeys from the original Wizard of Oz. The songs are bangers and they are performed with no perfect gusto by people that can really sing. The design of the environment is enchanting. I mean, it's kind of part steampunk, metropolis, part MGM throwback homage.

The dancing is on point. And although the camera work is frenetic, it's shot by Alice Brooks, who worked with John M. Chu on the film version of In the Heights. What you don't get is a cut every second, which is very much the kind of current musical style. I mean, there's a lot of movement in the visuals, but it's not just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And here's the greatest compliment. Really didn't

feel like two hours 40. And I stayed till the very end, I stayed till the very end of the credits. Even though it's only part one, it felt to me like it had a natural arc, like the story, the end of part one, I mean, obviously, this would be the way that the play is designed. And obviously, there's stuff, there must be stuff in the film that isn't in the stage play, because it's two hours 40 long, and it only gets us to the, you know, to the interval. But it actually felt like it had a proper beginning, middle and an end, even though it is only part one. And I'm now looking forward to part two. And I say this as somebody who, who I went into this trepidatiously because I did not expect to enjoy it anything like as much as I did. And it was a real pleasant

surprise for me. Okay. So Nickel Boys, which is the new film by Rommel Ross, who you interviewed on last week's show. Although because of the way that we're pre-recording these things, I haven't yet heard the interview that you did on last week's show because actually you haven't yet done it. Anyway, this is an adaptation of a novel by Colson Whitehead, which Time magazine named as one of the great books of the decade. I haven't read it, I'm afraid. Drama plays out against backdrop of news footage of the Apollo mission going behind the moon and newsreels of Martin Luther King. Story follows two African American boys, Elwood and Turner. Elwood is a smart kid with a college future in Jim Crow era Florida, who was picked up by the police and sent to this abusive

reform school, Nickel Academy. It's a brutal institution. Inmates are denied access to their families. All manner of horrible abuse is meted out. And it's based on a real life institution that operated for over a century in which, after it had closed, numerous unmarked graves were found. I mean, in real life, there is a horrible story behind this. The thing is, the subject matter is grim. There's no getting around that.

What's remarkable about the film is how weirdly full of love it is. It's about the experience of finding love, and I mean love in the broadest sense of the word, in this brutally cold environment and being passed from one character to another. Obviously, the director was a photographer before and made Hail County this morning this evening, which we talked about. It was Oscar nominated and it was a very expressive, artistic, experiential documentary. It clearly laid the groundwork for Nickel Boys because in Nickel Boys, the story is told from this POV perspective, although not the POV, not the point of view of one character. You see the story from the point

of view of characters, plural. The way in which this was done, I only know this from reading a very long article about it, was that with the DP Jean-Baptiste Frey and the editor Nicolas Monsoor, they set out to create this experiential film, sometimes the actors would be operating the cameras themselves, sometimes, I mean, just the sheer technicals of it are quite dazzling. And I read the director saying that they started not with a script, but with a series of visual images, which they then put together as a collage storyboard from which the co-writer Jocelyn Bunsley got to work on what we would now think of more traditionally as a script. This all sounds madly contrived, but the weird thing about it is that when you watch the

film it isn't contrived at all. There is a scene in it in which Angelou Alice Taylor, who is brilliant, has to hug someone in the absence of someone else, which sounds like a narrative contrivance. And we see that hug from the point of view of the person who is receiving it and who is then going to pass on that hug or that love to somebody else. And the really weird thing about it is that if you describe it as I just did, it sounds weird and mechanical. But when you see the film, I guarantee you this is going to be one of the scenes that people will talk about for years to come. We've talked time and again about Roger Ebert saying cinema is a machine for creating empathy. What the POV perspectives of the film do, I think,

is create empathy. When cinema is done properly, it genuinely shows you the world through other people's experience, through other people's eyes. I think that's what happens here. There's also a really interesting thing that there's a section where the movie has to jump around in time in order to tell the story. The way in which the POV of the film works moves to behind one of the characters. Although it's very organic, I think what it's doing is it's flagging up. It's a different time, a different state of mind, a different state of being. I mean, in fact, even a difference of identity, fabulous score by Alex Thomas and Scott Lario,

shaping up as one of the major awards contenders of the year for 2024. Obviously, from our point of view, this is a 2025 release because it's 3rd of January. It is remarkable. Whilst I was watching it, I was thinking of the kind of response that I had to Moonlight the first time I saw Moonlight, but thinking this really is a very, very impressive piece of work. I think Nickel Boys gets you in the fields because it does something that is so visually thought through.

It is so purely cinematic in the way in which it tells its story. Like I said, the idea of starting with these photographs and images, somehow it just bypasses everything and gets right into your emotional core. Where did you spend Christmas? I spent Christmas in Northern Virginia with my dad, well, Aldi, Virginia, but yeah. So just introduce us to your picture, just in the broadest terms, because this really is a film that has to be seen to be understood, but just introduce us to what you've created here. seen to be understood, but just introduce us to what you've created here. Yes, Simon. The Nickel Boys is an adaptation based on Colson Whitehead's novel about two young boys who meet at a reform school and about their relationship over time. One of them, Elwood, is sent there unjustly and the consequences span generations,

essentially. And the film takes a century and a sort of point of view, first person camera, in order to sort of access the interior space of the characters and also allow the audience to exist simultaneously and to view the world simultaneously with those characters. Mason- Okay. So you mentioned point of view right at the beginning of our conversation, Ramel, and what if you could explain just what that looks like on the screen? So this basic, which is, you know, will occur to people immediately as astonishing cinema, is that we are used to seeing people's reactions and their body language and their facial expressions. That's how we can understand their character. With Elwood and Turner, we don't get that. We see it from, we see Elwood looking at Turner, we see Turner looking at Elwood. How did you go about making

that work when you're telling the story? Yeah, that was a real fun challenge, which is to ask the actors to do what they're not supposed to do, which is look down the barrel of the lens, to look directly into the camera when they're delivering their lines. Quite often we would have their scene partner who becomes the audience, who becomes you, the viewer, because you are the character that they're talking to. They would stand behind the camera and deliver their lines to have some sort of relation that feels relatively normal or natural, but the process of having the camera

be the character became one of having five different camera rigs. Almost all of them, you know, came up with a variety of different systems to be able to be portable enough to have the camera act as the human head and not in a literal sense, but just in its placement and its sort of fundamental movement. And then as you're kind of implying or asking me to explain, the characters would then speak to each other directly from that point of view, which was something to get used to for everyone.

So you're asking your actors to do something that seems to me to be very difficult. So there's hand acting and there's voice acting, but although they're always part of the story, they're not always on screen and we don't see their facial expression. So we have to learn about them in some other way. These will be young actors. You're asking quite a lot from them, it seems. We are, but I think that the beautiful thing about actors is at least the ones that I've encountered and the ones in this film.

Anjanu Ellis-Taylor and Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisi and Davi Diggs, Fred Hettinger, Hamish Linklater and Luke Tenney, you're, they came to play and they want to be challenged and they want to emote and they want to be their characters and they prepared for this. And so, you know, we found that the less we talked about and the less we emphasized the filmmaking process and the more we focused on the characters

that they had came to play, they tended to fall into the performance modes that they're most used to. And with that, though, I will say that each kind of exceeded one's expectation, because as you're mentioning, this is not a common way of making a film and a way of shooting. And so it's hard to speculate the power of an

ingenue Ellis Taylor staring through the barrel of the lens into the eyes of the audience with the love gaze, with the power of connection that we normally see two characters looking at each other in the third-person camera setup. It's quite striking. So, at what stage did Kieran enter your mind as the perfect person to play Benji? Right after I wrote this scene that took place on the monument where his character calls up all these characters on the monument, I wrote it at the library and my sister was watching

my kid that night. And so when I got home late, I showed my sister the scene that I had written that day. And she said, there's only one person in the world who could play this part and it's Kieran Culkin. So you cast him because your sister said so. Yeah, she's super smart. She's super smart with this kind of stuff

and she watches a lot. I don't watch anything. So a lot of times she's my, you know, link to the outside world. Presumably you've seen Kieran in various shows. No. No. He's never seen me in anything.

Didn't audition. I would have auditioned too. I don't know why. Why? Because I like auditioning because then you at least got to see me do the part and then go, well look, it's not going to be... Oh my God.

Well if I show up on set and I'm doing something and you don't like it, I'm like, well you should audition me then. Like you, like if I audition and you cast me, then you know what you're getting. There's no actor in the world you'll find who will say something like this. Really?

You must be aware that no actor wants to audition. Cyber actors say they don't want to audition. I like auditioning. I think it's kind of fun. And at least if I get the part, then you know, I know why you hired me as opposed to like, somebody told you that you need to hire me. I feel like we're in a continuation of the film.

A little bit. Yeah. And he thinks this is perfectly normal behavior. It's just not. Can you picture anybody else doing it? Like is the question. No. Exactly. How did you know if you haven't seen my work? And we met like twice in passing. I just know you are. You're in the world. I know who you are.

Yeah. But you nearly dropped out of the picture, Kieran. Yeah. Because? Oh, that was just because like I was just coming off a succession. And I remember during that season, I had to be away from my family for eight days. And I was hard but manageable.

And then later that season, I had to be away from them for 11. And I thought I was going to die in a hotel room. And I was like, OK, that's my rule, eight days. And then because of scheduling, whatever, I saw that I was going to have to be away from them for 25 days, which is a huge leap. And I had to like, wait, why am I doing this movie? Creatively, I want to. I love this movie. Why am I doing it if it's going to break me as a person, take me away from my family? So there was that. And then I went, well, I should probably stick to my rule. And I tried and thankfully failed. my rule and I tried and thankfully failed. So that rounds it out.

Conclave 12, BAFTAs 2 SAGs and 8 Oscars. Wicked 7 BAFTAs, 5 SAGs and 10 Oscars. Nickel Boys 1 BAFTA, 2 Oscars. A real pain. 2 BAFTAs, 1 SAG, 2 Oscars. Obviously we haven't had time to fit in reviews of all the nominees across all the awards, but they are all covered in our back catalogue. Just search in the feed for the title you want and it'll come up.

But that gives you our awards smorgasbord. That works. We'd love to hear who you think should be garlanded with laurels and statuettes at the various dos this year. It will be giving our thoughts and reactions in a series of special episodes for the Vanguard Premium subscribers after each ceremony, starting with BAFTAs on the 17th February, SAG, the Screen Actors Guild, 24th February and finishing with the Oscars on the 3rd March. As usual, it's correspondence at kerbinamao.com. For your emails, let us know what you think. Thank you very much for listening.