The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  On the other hand, Atlantic writer Mark Bowden argued that “No, Zero Dark Thirty Is Not Pro-Torture.” Bowden, himself an expert on the subject (his most recent book is The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden), wrote that “torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America’s messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact.”

  While it’s to be expected that Washington politicians and even Gibney, who is open about his anti-torture views, would step up to present their version of the facts, the more damaging story, in terms of the film’s Oscar standing, was the one Kim Masters wrote for the Hollywood Reporter: “The Unorthodox Relationship Between Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal.”

  The story reported that on the set of Zero Dark Thirty, the cast and crew “were frustrated not only by the difficult subject matter and a challenging, secretive environment but also by sometimes-conflicting instructions from director Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal,” who is described as “so abrasive that sources say Chastain, who plays CIA operative Maya, once considered leaving the project,” which was of course disputed by Chastain herself. And Ellison too “was upset at Boal’s treatment of her,” Masters reported.

  While Boal admitted to some “spirited discussions” on the set and to having “sharp elbows,” he insisted that his relationships with Chastain and Ellison are now good. “The duo [Bigelow and Boal] simultaneously seem to seek and repel Hollywood’s embrace,” Masters wrote. “They are widely admired for their talent and have created one of the most exciting film partnerships in recent memory. But, with Boal more comfortable out front, they also have a reputation for antagonizing cast and crew and alienating important allies.”

  About the Bigelow-Boal relationship, Masters wrote, “There has been speculation in media reports that they were romantically involved, but they have declined to discuss it, and even those on the sets of their films say they saw no outward signs. The duo is said to have split as production of Zero Dark Thirty got under way, but they have revealed nothing—even to associates. ‘Even if you know them really well, you don’t go there,’ says one.

  Asked to characterize their partnership, Boal hesitates. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, adding, ‘Look, to me, it’s been the creative collaboration of a lifetime . . . It’s been a huge gift.’ ”

  It was fascinating to see, after the Hollywood Reporter piece ran, how often discussions of the duo’s on-off romantic relationship and Boal’s supposed bad behavior on the set came up in casual holiday cocktail conversation. In Hollywood’s insular community, these viral memes can be lethal. Clearly, Bigelow and Boal were no longer the scrappy indies that could.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE HOLIDAY DRAMAS

  LES MISÉRABLES, DJANGO UNCHAINED

  What a difference an Oscar season makes. Back during the crash of 2008, when the indie market was in free fall, a new set of rules took hold: no one was willing to take a chance on dramas. That’s how a little movie called The King’s Speech was turned down by most Brit and Hollywood distributors, except for UK’s Momentum and Harvey Weinstein, who didn’t need to get anyone’s approval. He knew a likely Oscar contender when he saw one. The 2010 period drama about a prince-turned-king with a profound stutter scored four Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay, and grossed $430 million worldwide.

  Another producer who has the luxury of being able to listen and act according to his own taste is New Yorker Scott Rudin. Like his archrival Weinstein, Rudin likes to chase Oscar-worthy quality films, often literary adaptations. He has trimmed his expectations in the new landscape, closing his L.A. office and pitching his diverse projects at strictly modest budget levels to Sony’s Amy Pascal, with whom he has a deal, and to other studios and their specialty labels. (He has also maintained a second career as a top-flight Broadway producer of such hit shows as The Book of Mormon and the revival of August Wilson’s Fences, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis.)

  Rudin has produced a slew of Oscar contenders in the past decade, including the Coens’ Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men and remake of True Grit; theater/film director Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, The Reader, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; David Fincher’s The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom.

  Weinstein and Rudin are among the chosen few who still have enough clout to execute smart dramas. Also in that elite group are producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner of Working Title, a boutique production company that since 1999 has been partnered with Universal, which competes with Weinstein and Rudin for the top directors and literary properties. Based in London and Beverly Hills, Working Title, with a staff of thirty, has risen to the top of the British and American movie industries by delivering a mix of globally commercial titles and smart movies, many of them Oscar winners.

  They produced Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, starring the young Daniel Day-Lewis, and Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliott, which spawned a global musical smash, as well as their own set of Coen brothers movies (Barton Fink, Fargo, Burn After Reading, and A Serious Man). They cast the young Cate Blanchett in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth and its sequel, and produced the intense Tim Robbins drama Dead Man Walking, starring Oscar winner Susan Sarandon and Oscar nominee Sean Penn. Their go-to writer is Richard Curtis, who penned the Hugh Grant vehicles Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. Another Working Title favorite is Joe Wright, who directed the literary adaptations Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, both starring Keira Knightley.

  After 2008 when Universal was frowning on dramas, Working Title survived on a diet of franchises such as Curtis’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean and Johnny English, and Emma Thompson’s Nanny McPhee. Instead of greenlighting the modest-budget dramas Working Title does best, Universal went ahead with Kevin Macdonald’s pricey but unmemorable American remake of the superb Brit TV series State of Play, with Russell Crowe filling in at the last minute for Brad Pitt, as well as Paul Greengrass’s $130 million Iraq War movie Green Zone, featuring his Bourne star Matt Damon. Audiences shied away from both movies, which, while well made, were not produced on a budget. Both could have made it into the black had they had cost far less.

  After the Weinstein Company’s four King’s Speech Oscar wins and $414 million worldwide gross, things started to look up again for dramas. “Now everybody wants The King’s Speech,” Fellner tells me during an interview at WT’s Beverly Hills office. “The bigger problem is that the people who are able to get these films made aren’t thinking about the long-term health of our industry. There’s so much competition for leisure time—more than ever. If we don’t make good films as opposed to short-term marketable ones, attendance will continue to go down. Somebody has to invest in creating the movies of the future.”

  Universal exercised its first-look option on StudioCanal’s $18 million John le Carré adaptation Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, directed by Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson, with a top-flight cast including King’s Speech Oscar winner Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Gary Oldman as George Smiley. Universal gave the film a December 2011 release with a major Oscar campaign.

  The studio also greenlit Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which reunited Wright with Atonement’s Knightley, costarred Jude Law and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and was targeted for award season 2012. And after two years of development with British impresario Cameron Mackintosh, who produced the original show on the stage twenty-seven years earlier, and screenwriter Bill Nicholson (Gladiator), the studio approved WT’s film version of the long-running musical Les Misérables, with The King’s Speech’s Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper at the helm.

  LES MISÉRABLES

  The British director became officially involved in the Les Mis project just after he won the Academy Award in 2011. Admittedly no
t a fan of the score, when he went to see Les Misérables on stage, it moved him. He wanted to “try to find a story as, or even more, emotional,” he says in a later interview. “That way of energizing people is so satisfying. Les Misérables is a story where you feel the music with a heightened emotional reality. Live singing became a passion of mine.”

  Intrigued by Nicholson’s script, which featured spoken dialogue as well as songs, Hooper agreed to meet with Universal cochairman Donna Langley a few days after the Oscars. The two had breakfast together at the Chateau Marmont. “Okay, what’s next?” she asked him. Her agenda: Hooper wasn’t leaving that breakfast until he said yes to Les Mis. Which he shortly did.

  Langley thought Hooper was the right person for this project not only because he is able to “get incredible performances out of actors,” she tells me in an interview, but because his films, from small UK drama Longford and sprawling HBO miniseries John Adams to The King’s Speech, demonstrate that he is “an incredible storyteller, both visually and narratively. He has great respect for the material, but he is an entertainer. He’s interested in finding the right way to tell the story, in the most entertaining way, but elevating it and doing it in the most sophisticated way.”

  Les Mis also needed a visual style. Langley was impressed with Hooper’s approach to The King’s Speech, which could have been a TV movie and was in fact dismissed by many studios and financiers as being just that. “From a visual standpoint,” she says, “from the production design to the camera-work, there were so many interesting choices. He finds a way to tell a very intimate story but put it against a big epic backdrop. And I thought he was ready to take this step to a bigger canvas.”

  When Hooper first saw the stage show, he was struck by the numerous challenges they faced in adapting the material for the screen. “One that hits you straightaway is you go from the prologue when you meet the convict and bishop, and then jump forward eight years, he’s now mayor, grown into a successful entrepreneur, but he looks the same,” Hooper tells me on the phone. “I was aware that Javert, the prison guard turned policeman, is reduced by his inability to see what’s straight in front of him. Javert is just around for eight years and he’s suspicious. How come he doesn’t recognize Valjean?

  “I also found it hard to believe that this ex-convict could become a successful mayor and entrepreneur in that society. When a fight breaks out in his factory, why was he distracted from dealing with it? There’s no explanation. A number of challenges in this first transition are solved when you make him unrecognizable as the convict when see you him as mayor. So Hugh [Jackman] lost thirty pounds and went on a thirty-six-hour water fast.”

  Hooper was determined to make the idea of jumping through time utterly plausible: “Then we go to the moment when the two men meet again, and find a place where they come head to head. Javert is arriving into town as the new policeman; Valjean is changed. And in order to solve the problem of why Valjean is distracted from Fantine at a key moment, Javert is in the room to meet the mayor, suddenly the world drops out and we realize that he can think of nothing else, he’s going through free fall. Thus the descent of Fantine is directly driven by the confrontation of Javert and Valjean, who has reason to feel guilt and talks about it, but we never quite understood before why he feels so responsible. This theme from his past carries his destruction.”

  One of the dividing lines between same-old and must-see is a filmmaker who is willing to take a huge risk in pursuit of the new new thing. In this case, Hooper was attempting to do what Peter Bogdanovich had failed at so memorably with At Long Last Love—have his actors sing live on set. Both Universal and Working Title had to agree to let Hooper turn the movie into an all-singing musical, which is rare (Tommy, Evita), with the actors singing live. It was a huge risk. The studio was “very, very nervous,” admits Langley, because very few sung-through musicals have been successful.

  Most movie musicals cut back and forth between dialogue and song, and most don’t feature live singing. Before Hooper came on board, the script of Les Mis was packed with dialogue. Mackintosh supported Hooper’s belief that the movie version of the musical should be all-sung, says Langley: “The way to tell Les Mis was an expression of the music and all the soliloquies delivered musically; that’s the power of the story.”

  Hooper told Langley: “My goal is to make a film where the audience is immediately okay with the fact that the characters are singing, rather than to create the scenario where I make them feel okay by having dialogue.”

  Hooper believed that by not going back and forth there would be less disjunction, less jarring between “real” dialogue and “fake” singing. Certainly Hooper had the benefit of newer technology to pipe live accompanying music into his actors’ ears, as well as better singers. But he liked to run the songs in long takes, which exposed the live singing, with all its flaws, even more. This was not your standard polished movie musical. The question was whether audiences would be willing to embrace high-voltage heart-on-sleeve emotion in moist close-up. A lot of people tried to talk him out of it, Hooper says. And Working Title’s Fellner admits that they were not sure if it would work until they saw the finished film.

  Which is why Hooper had to work within a modest budget, by Hollywood standards, of just $62 million. (Universal wasn’t going down the road of Weinstein’s $90 million flop Nine.) Musical pro Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway (whose mother played Fantine on Broadway), and sometime rock singer Russell Crowe, who had to audition for the film along with everyone else, did not command their usual prices. Unusually, the studio did not chase Crowe, so he called them. “He fought for the role and won it,” says Langley, adding that Mackintosh and original composers Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil were integral to the casting process.

  Just as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced and sang accompanied by a live RKO orchestra, Hooper had a pianist on his London set who was watching a video monitor, accompanying the singers live, and tuning in to their rhythm and cadence as they acted and sang. They could hear the piano in their molded earpieces, but to everyone else on set they sounded as if they were singing a cappella. Because the seventy-piece orchestra was added later, the singers did not have to sync to a prerecorded track. When Hooper recorded multiple vocal harmonies, the actors had to count to a marked tempo.

  “Good acting is being in the moment,” Hooper says after the film’s first screening in L.A. for the Screen Actors Guild. “It’s the pure language of the present. Arthur Miller said that if you sing to playback your choices are predecided, you don’t have freedom in real time. Acting is generating the illusion that you are creating these lines from your soul, inventing them.” This way, Hooper argues, his actors were allowed to become emotional, and control the tempo, which was “vital to the process.”

  Anyone who has seen this rigorously demanding show on stage recognizes the degree of difficulty this music would present for the actors, who would have to train their voices to last through multiple takes. That’s why Hooper insisted on auditioning every actor for the film, including Jackman and Crowe. “No exceptions,” he says. “They had to not just be able to sing but act and hold a close-up, they had to turn it into storytelling. It was exciting at early auditions to meet a man who showed me how it could be done. Hugh Jackman was on a short list of one for Valjean. Hugh sang around a piano at a three-hour audition. I realized he unleashed a huge power when acting through song. You allow an entire different, hidden self to emerge.”

  Jackman, who starved himself to play the prisoner Valjean, not drinking water for days to make his skin parchment thin, brought a spirituality to the role, says Hooper. “He’d go through tough times, tired, under pressure. He’s kind of saintly, always gracious, never snaps. He’s a great leader, has inner grace as a human being. To be a good man is a lot of hard work. To practice being good is a daily struggle. He fundamentally understood that inherent conflict and brought it to the role.”

  Hooper bored in on the actors with two cameras, one al
ways close in on the faces, in long, often uninterrupted takes—Hathaway was an instant Oscar front-runner for her wrenching, uncut rendition of Fantine’s tour-de-force “I Dreamed a Dream”—because he couldn’t do the standard coverage. Even so, he tells me after the screening, some numbers went as long as fifteen and twenty-one takes: “We didn’t do them all right away. Maybe we’d do a turnaround.”

  Hathaway nailed “I Dreamed a Dream” on the fourth take. Hooper knew he had it and told Hathaway they could move on to the next scene. But as Hathaway told Jon Stewart in an interview just before the Oscar nominations, she wasn’t convinced. She worked herself to the bone (having already shed twenty-five pounds to play the impoverished factory worker forced into prostitution) doing a total of eight takes on the song. The one you see on screen, the no-doubter ticket to an Oscar? Take four.

  Even onstage, a performer doesn’t do the same song over and over. But they do sing many songs a night, eight performances a week. So not surprisingly the theater-trained actors fared best, especially Jackman, Hathaway, and Brit film rookie Samantha Barks, who traveled for four years with the show as Éponine. Hooper had seen her in the show two years earlier but made her go through the arduous process of beating out the intense competition for the role. “This girl is fearless,” he says. Many among the supporting cast were drawn from the ranks of Les Mis vets.

  Jackman’s fine tenor was strained under these conditions, especially on the most challenging song, “Bring Him Home.” His worst memory, he told me, was having to hold a perilously high G during that song—again and again—as Hooper’s camera swooped away from a steep cliff in a trickily difficult move.