They admittedly made the final escape more thrilling than it actually was. In real life, Mendez and the six “houseguests” wound up stranded at the airport as their flight was delayed for three hours; the CIA agent kept them calm. “Tonally each part of the film meshed together,” says Goldenberg. “This time we got it right.”
While Affleck knew that the film would be timely—unrest in the Middle East has not dissipated over the decades—he could not have anticipated that a September 11 mob assault on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would make news headlines three days after his film’s debut in Toronto, the week after the Telluride premiere. Argo is “a tribute to the diplomats who work overseas,” he says. And recognizing the Canadian sensitivity to his rewrite of history, he swiftly moves to change a card at the end of the movie so as not to undercut the heroism of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. At the Toronto after party, Affleck celebrates with cast and crew, producer Heslov, and buddy Damon, as well as Warner president Jeff Robinov, who after Gone Baby Gone chased after Affleck to direct when nobody else did.
At the film’s post-Toronto premiere at the Academy’s Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, the industry audience accords the retired Mendez a standing ovation. Being able to cheer a real American hero—as well as Hollywood ingenuity—clearly helped Argo to ride the zeitgeist, not only at the box office but in the awards race. Movies that tell us something both about us and our world tend to do well with Oscar voters.
Affleck’s only Oscar nomination was that 1998 Original Screenplay win with Damon for Good Will Hunting. Since then his best performances have been in his own films. Multiple nominations were clearly inevitable for Argo after Telluride and Toronto, as the film surged to the top of early Oscar contenders lists and went on to deliver strong opening weekend numbers and a rare A-plus Cinemascore from audiences.
The trick was to hang on through the thick and thin of the most competitive Oscar field in years. One obvious rival, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, tackled another timely topic, the capture of Osama bin Laden, not to mention other perceived front-runners Steven Spielberg (Lincoln), Ang Lee (Life of Pi), Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained), and Tom Hooper (Les Misérables).
THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
Another arch competitor swiftly becomes apparent at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival (September 6–16, 2012), where David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook is given its world premiere by the Weinstein Company and immediately earns raves. Harvey Weinstein’s preview footage at Cannes had not captured the poignant depths of the full-length family dramedy, which reached its final form after a series of audience previews and some down-to-the-wire editing-room tweaking.
Russell first broke out at Sundance 1994 with taboo-breaking first feature Spanking the Monkey. He went on to build his reputation for pulling strong comedy performances from his actors with family ensembles Flirting with Disaster and I Heart Huckabees, taking a detour into the heart of darkness with the Iraq war film Three Kings, during which he managed to alienate his usually affable leading man Clooney, who publicly protested Russell’s rough treatment of extras on set. Russell returned to family dysfunction in 2010 with The Fighter, based on a true story. Out of seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, the gritty Lowell, Massachusetts–based dramedy picked up two supporting Oscars: for Christian Bale, who plays a meth-head former boxer, and for the actress who played his hard-as-nails mom, Melissa Leo.
It was in 2007 that producer-directors Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella showed Russell the manuscript for Matthew Quick’s novel about another addlepated working-class family, this time from Philadelphia. (Alas, both Pollack and Minghella succumbed to cancer before seeing the film come to life.) Russell related to the struggles of Pat Solitano (played by Bradley Cooper), a young man with bipolar disorder who is trying to recover his equilibrium at home with his parents after four years in a mental hospital.
Russell, whose own bipolar son Matthew was then twelve, was at the time actively searching “for a film that would make my son feel like he was part of the world,” he told the London Telegraph. “Because my son has wrangled with many of the same challenges as the Bradley Cooper character . . . There were so many ways to get it wrong. Because mental illness shouldn’t be the whole focus of the thing. It’s really just a part of the fabric of life, and it resonates with how we all are.”
Russell, who adapted the novel himself, originally planned to cast as his two romantic leads Vince Vaughn and, as Tiffany, who deals with her policeman husband’s death by sleeping with most of the men in her office, Zooey Deschanel. He wound up with two bankable names with franchises behind them, The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper and The Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence.
When Russell first met Cooper after Wedding Crashers “he seemed like a palpably angry person to me,” he told one interviewer. “A scary angry person. So I knew that was good for Silver Linings Playbook, because it wasn’t fake, it wasn’t nice, it was just intense . . . I asked him about that. His answer told me that he could do this role because his answer was very self-revealing. His answer was that he had been unhappy at the time when he made Wedding Crashers. His life was not as fulfilled. He was thirty to forty pounds heavier like the character in the movie, he was hiding behind it, but really he was scared. So already you’re getting so much depth and it’s very much in the world of the character—he’s a very open, emotional guy.”
For Russell, directing is about fighting against fakery at all times. So he gets in his actors’ faces for multiple takes lasting twenty minutes—without yelling “cut”—until he gets to the raw realness he’s seeking.
Silver Linings joins the front-runners for the Oscar as soon as the film wins the coveted TIFF audience award, which has been nabbed previously by such crowd-pleasing Oscar winners as The King’s Speech, Precious, and Slumdog Millionaire.
Other Toronto players still in the Oscar pack include Argo, Sundance hits Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Sessions, Palme d’Or winner Amour, and The Impossible, Summit’s tsunami disaster drama starring Naomi Watts. But front and center in the Best Actor and Actress race are Cooper and Lawrence as two lost, emotionally damaged yet attractive people who draw comfort and kinship from each other. Russell, who has said he admires Billy Wilder’s tough and unsentimental approach to romance, delicately fine-tuned a relationship comedy that is both funny and moving. Even in this cynical age, we root for these two characters in pain to heal each other, win their dance contest, and find true love.
Cooper is in ebullient spirits the day after Silver Linings’ rousing debut. Russell approached him early on in the casting process, Cooper tells me, and then circled back to him right before production. Cooper, having already read the script, said yes without batting an eyelash, even though he was terrified. “I know how demanding David is,” he says. “It’s really no-bullshit acting. You have to be real. I go, ‘God, I don’t know if I can create a character that can take this audience on the arc of this movie and introduce them to all these different characters.’ I gave all that fear away and looked him in the eyes and said, ‘If you believe that I am the guy, then I will go down this road with you, because I have never seen a bad performance out of anybody in any of your movies.’ I decided I was just going to roll the dice.”
Cooper was willing to match intensity with Russell on set. “Any director worth their weight in gold is intense, because it’s an intense atmosphere,” Cooper says. “It can manifest itself in a calm way, or in a high-octane, infectious energy way. David has all of those colors. He has a very soothing voice. It worked with Jen and Bob, the three of us, it just clicked. We were all there for each other. There are chunks of truth that are born out of love that resonate in the book and script.”
Russell had two cameras going at all times, either a 35-millimeter camera, a Steadicam, or a handheld; the cinematographer lit the sets so that he could turn the cameras 360 degrees around at an
y time and shoot anywhere. “Love is what David brings, it comes from love, and there’s zero ego, he’s a collaborator,” says Cooper. “The only thing he requires of you is to really show up; don’t bring your ‘bedroom perfect’ take on character or the scene. If you do that, it’s not going to work, you’re going to have a hard day. You show up for work, take all your clothes off, get naked, and bomb! You have to get ready to rock on rehearsal: ‘Okay, camera! Ready? Cry here, cry, okay, come on, come on, come on, what’s happening? Everybody standing around, get out of your head, now!’
“Creatively, I love the way he works. Anyone who can bring you out of your comfort zone and can get you in a place quickly—he’s interested in what’s happening now, that’s all he cares about.”
Russell also coaxed the best performance in years out of De Niro, who plays obsessive-compulsive bookie Pat Solitano Sr., the father of Cooper’s character. “David is a wonderful director, and writer, a combination of that,” De Niro tells me later at the Academy nominees luncheon. “When we’re moving around in a scene, he puts the camera on a Steadicam or handheld, on you or on the next character that speaks, back to you, around here, throwing a couple lines at you here and there. But the core material is what you’ve worked on. It’s spontaneous, that energy and controlled chaos, it helps the immediacy.”
Cooper drove down to the set in Philadelphia before production to rehearse the dance contest with Lawrence. They had three weeks to nail it. “She’s twenty-two years old, she has this quality, like Bob, that is really powerful,” Cooper says. “It’s not so much that he’s a great actor, which he is, but he has this quality, as does she. She’s a chameleon, but I do see this similar quality in all her work. She’s forty-five and twenty-five at same time, and so much so that when I hang out with her I realize she’s just a kid. Physically she’s built like a throwback movie star. She doesn’t look like a child; she moves like a beautiful woman.”
As strong as Kentucky-bred Lawrence has been so far—from her Oscar-nominated role in Winter’s Bone to her turn as iconic action heroine Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games—she came into her own in Silver Linings Playbook. An actress who relies on her own instincts on how to read a character and make her real, Lawrence blossomed under Debra Granik’s tutelage on Winter’s Bone and proved she was not a one-trick pony when she also popped in Jodie Foster’s The Beaver.
After landing the coveted Silver Linings role via a Skype audition from Louisville, Lawrence embraced Russell’s hardboiled directing style, she tells me in Toronto. If he told her something sucked, she did it again. And yes, she memorized the scene-stopping monologue that drew cheers at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall—even if she got her sports teams mixed up at first. (She and Cooper not only go on to costar again in Susanne Bier’s period drama Serena, but rejoin De Niro in Russell’s 2013 FBI sting drama American Hustle, which also stars Christian Bale and Jeremy Renner.)
THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: LIFE OF PI AND LINCOLN
Following Toronto on the fall fest calendar circuit is the prestigious New York Film Festival (September 28–October 14, 2012). The NYFF is a classy, smaller-scale Oscar-launch venue for the studios and the independents, with cred. The highbrow selection committee only picks about twenty-five top movies for the main program, with three or four key slots going to studio debuts, such as David Fincher’s The Social Network in 2010 (Sony), and a work-in-progress screening of Martin Scorsese’s 3-D Hugo in 2011 (Paramount).
Life of Pi
In 2012, Twentieth Century Fox booked its $120 million epic Life of Pi to open the NYFF. Fox 2000, a quality label run by veteran Elizabeth Gabler, had pushed for a decade to adapt Yann Martel’s international bestselling novel. For years it was considered impossible.
Life of Pi marked a high-degree-of-difficulty dive off the high board for director Ang Lee. And given the technology required to achieve the ambitious computer-graphic visual effects, the film couldn’t have gotten made any sooner than it did. Lee wasn’t even sure he had pulled it off when he was finishing up the print of the 127-minute 3-D movie he was going to show at Lincoln Center. “Three days before the New York Film Festival, for the first time, I had all the images rendered, music done, and mixing,” he tells me in an L.A. interview before the opening. “And I see it put together, I started to cry. I think it worked! It’s emotion, you know?”
Lee, more than any director working today, is a filmmaker for the world. He left Taiwan and moved to America to make such independent art films as The Ice Storm, and his three great love stories—martial arts romance Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, gay love tragedy Brokeback Mountain, and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility—were accessible to multiple cultures. He’s capable of a wide range of storytelling, from Marvel comic-book movie Hulk to NC-17 period romance Lust, Caution.
And with Life of Pi, Lee fashioned a love story that transcends borders. In this case, it’s love between a seventeen-year-old young man (nonpro Suraj Sharma) from India and a Bengal tiger. The movie asks, is it possible for a wild animal to love a human being? And vice versa?
A universal story that resonates in a world where religion can tear people and societies apart, Martel’s story of a Hindu/Christian/Muslim who is the sole human survivor of an ocean shipwreck reminds us that film can both heal and inspire. But it is also a stunning technological triumph. Conceived a decade ago, long before the 2009 arrival of the 3-D Avatar, this movie is a live-action/animation hybrid, as major characters like the threatening tiger and sublime phosphorescent Pacific seascapes could only be created by artists in the digital realm.
The 3-D film boasts scenes of breathtaking beauty: a simple shot of the tiger in the moonlight, several surreal mergers of sea and sky, fully realized scenes (that had previewed months earlier at CinemaCon) of Pi watching the ship—and his family—going down, a luminescent whale breach, and silver fish in whirring flight. Lee mastered the aesthetics of 3-D, considering every detail in terms of its impact on the viewer. Never have spatial relationships been more dramatic: Pi maneuvers with an oar and a large tiger in a small lifeboat on a huge ocean.
The film’s $120 million final cost far exceeded its planned $70 million budget, partly because Lee insisted on shooting in 3-D. “I just have this hunch against everybody,” he recalls, “including Fox, that 3-D might pull this off. I don’t think it could be 2-D. They were like, ‘It’s a literature property! Why do you want to spend that money? If it was an action movie, we’d push you to do it, but it’s like $25 million more dollars! What are you talking about?’ ”
Lee told them: “I just have this feeling, with this movie.” He thought, “It might open up the space. Your mind-set is different. Because 2-D is so sophisticated, you’re so used to it, it doesn’t open up the imagination and it doesn’t bring the extra innocence or whatever. And also I have to wow the audience because there’s this talk about the power of God. When you talk about God, the first thing that comes along is not love, it’s fear. You have to fear, and be in awe. You have to be scared.”
In fact, Lee’s longtime editor Tim Squyres, who had never worked in 3-D before, decided very early on that in cutting the film, they would do everything in 3-D. So from the first day of assembly they only ever worked in 3-D. “We cut it thinking, this was a 3-D movie,” says Squyres. He never saw the film any other way.
The movie begins with a stunning series of shots of animals in their natural glory at a zoo in Pondicherry, India (one of the film’s shooting locations, along with a huge water tank in Taiwan). The movie revels in the lush colors and textures of India as Lee sets up his through-lines. His narrator, the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan of Slumdog Millionaire), tells his improbable survival story to a young Canadian novelist (Anonymous actor Rafe Spall, who replaced Tobey Maguire mid-film—Lee admitted that he realized the Spider-Man star was too well known and would be distracting in the role).
We meet Pi’s family, who doesn’t understand his attraction to three of the world’s religions—Hinduism, Christianity, and I
slam—and we encounter the fierce zoo tiger Richard Parker, who ravages a goat in front of Pi’s eyes. Pi’s belief in both God and the soul of a tiger play out as he uses his wits (and a shipwreck survivor instruction manual) to outsmart Richard Parker on a lifeboat for 227 days. “Thank you, Vishnu, for introducing me to Christ,” says Pi at one point. “God wasn’t finished with me yet,” he says at another.
Fox cochairman Tom Rothman (who left the studio before the film was released), Gabler, and producer Gil Netter (The Blind Side) all accept credit for standing behind Lee’s quest to make the film. “It has a gigantic visual effects component,” Gabler told me as she was trying to convince Fox to give it the green light. “You can’t put a live tiger in a boat with a child. It has elements of Cast Away, when the kid is alone in the boat. You don’t need language to convey what’s on the screen. We need to make the movie for the whole world.” That they did.
THE SCREENPLAY
After ten long years of painstaking development, Life of Pi finally made it to the screen. There were many times when Gabler, who optioned Yann Martel’s bestselling novel right after it was published in 2001, did not think that it would happen. Only when Lee came along in 2008 did it become possible. The device of using the older Pi as the window into the story came from screenwriter David Magee, who was hired on the basis of his moving Oscar-nominated screenplay for the J. M. Barrie biopic Finding Neverland, which “was a good adaptation,” Gabler explains in an interview. “It had adult and child protagonists. It was mystical to a large degree, very dramatic and emotional.”
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