The Revenant's Jack Fisk on Outdoor Movies & His Life with Sissy Spacek

Jack Fisk at the Oscars for "There Will Be Blood" with his Best Actress wife Sissy SpacekThe Revenant, just nominated for eight (!) BAFTAs, opens nationwide today so here's our last interview of the week to celebrate this wilderness epic. 

Jack Fisk, the Oscar-nominated Production Designer (There Will Be Blood) is no stranger to outdoor challenges. Many of his most famous films, due in no small part to his long collaboration with Terrence Malick, feel the spiritual pull of nature as does the man who designs them. He prefers to build on location and with the tools that would have been present at the time, whatever time the movie happens to take place in.

When he signed on for The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu gave him a copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev which he used for inspiration of scale and detail. His longtime collaborators Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki (Cinematographer) and Jacqueline West (Costumes) Fisk -- who he had worked with on many projects though only once altogether (The New World, 2005) were also on hand to realize this brutal of frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) surviving bear attacks, bloody skirmishes, and mercenary Tom Hardy.  

I asked Fisk about his onscreen life with auteur collaborators, his offscreen life with one of the great screen actresses, and his preference for outdoor cinema. Our conversation is after the jump...

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Watching the Documentary Finalists Part 2 - The Political Edge

Glenn here looking at each of the 15 Academy’s documentary finalists from which five will be nominated for the Oscar.

In the first part of this three-part series, we looked at social activists, rape survivors and famous artists in documentaries that took us from Pakistan to America to Britain to Africa. This selection of films is even more globe-trotting as we look at a group of documentaries that show us the conflict across several continents and the personal traumas that come with it. They include some of the best and worst films of the year.

WHERE TO INVADE NEXT
Director: Michael Moore (one nomination, one win)
Synopsis: In typically irreverent fashion, Michael Moore visits foreign nations in an effort to learn how they deal with social problems differently to the United States.
Festivals: Toronto (premiere), New York, Chicago, Hamptons
Awards: Chicago International Film Festival (Audience Choice Award), Hamptons International Film Festival (Audience Award)
Nominations: BFCA, Austin Film Critics, Chicago Film Critics, Houston Film Critics, Phoenix Film Critics, Satellite Awards
Box-Office: Qualifying run; theatrical release in February, 2016.
Review: Manuel was more forgiving, but I thought it was utterly disgraceful!

More about Invade plus we go to Ukraine, Mexico, Africa and the streets of Florida after the jump.

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A Very Batty Birthday

Today is the inception date of one of the world's all time most compelling screen characters. It's Replicant, Roy Batty (of Blade Runner fame). Oh the places he'll go... 

Or, rather the things he'll see in his short life: Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; C-beams glittering in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate.

We speak of course of Replicant N6MAA10816 Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) of Blade Runner fame. Who will be incepted at some point... today (gulp). Given how prescient so much of Blade Runner was, particularly in its inarguably genius production design (which hilariously lost the Oscar to Gandhi - okay, Hollywood *rotflmao* you do you!), this shouldn't surprise us.

With Alicia Vikander's gloriously sly Ex Machina performance winning recent honors (BAFTA & Globe nominations) for a brand new potentially classic synthetic antagonist, this is a perfect time for us to honor Rutger Hauer's greatest performance yet again. Hauer's work as Roy Batty has long since become a personal symbol of what heights actors who are in tune with their film's message, their auteur's vision, and their genre's style can soar to... even if awards bodies have historically always had trouble understanding the level of difficulty and the mad genius that shapes the best genre acting, nearly always to their detriment since these performances often become classics examples of great screen acting nearly the very second people are done cordoning of the movies that house them as "sci-fi" or "horror" or "comedy" and have started thinking of them as simply "a classic."

After the jump a slight reworking of a tribute written by yours truly in 2007 on the occasion of his film's then 25th birthday...

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BAFTA Nominations: Bridge of Spies and Carol lead

With the Oscar nominees less than a week away, the British Academy of Film and Television Awards, or BAFTA as they're more easily referred to, can often be a real indicator of where AMPAS might be headed come Thursday morning. It used to be that the British were quite idiosyncratic in their tastes, picking homegrown, grassroots produce like Fish Tank. Unfortunately recent years have seen even the Best British Film category taken a much more populist bent. Therefore, it's their taste in American films that can often be a huge indicator of what energy the British contingent might inject into their Oscar votes.

Eligibility rules can often cause an issue - Murtada gave a rundown of any possible hiccups the other day - but recent years have seen studios keen to align the two continents as much as possible, to avoid situations like Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning turn in Monster turning up a whole year later at BAFTA. So, never fear - Trumbo's still here!

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Interview: Affonso Gonçalves and the Art of Editing Great Actresses

Affonso Gonçalves with this ACE win for editing True Detective (2014)Affonso Gonçalves is a man that every actress lover ought to both thank and envy. Over the course of his career in TV and film he has been privvy to a consisently vivid series of strong and sometimes downright iconic performances by several of our greatest actress. He's helped shape the way we see them, too.

His career began in earnest with as an assisant editor on Todd Solondz's cult hit about a nerdy teenager Dawn Weiner in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and soon thereafter he was editing multiple films for Ira Sachs and other independent minded directors. In the 20 years since his debut he's edited performances by Tilda Swinton (Only Lovers Left Alive), Kate Winslet (Mildred Pierce), Kerry Washington (Night Catches Us), Michelle Williams (The Hawk is Dying), Kim Basinger (The Door in the Floor), and  Patricia Clarkson (Married Life). More famously he's edited two star-making young performances that went on to be Oscar nominated for Best Actress in Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone (2010) and Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Next week he'll likely be able to add two more Oscar nominated performances to his editing triumphs with Cate Blanchett & Rooney Mara's duet in Carol.

I had the pleasure recently of grilling him about watching and shaping these Best Actress performances in Winter's Bone, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Carol. Here's our conversation (edited for length and clarity) with very mild Carol spoilers if you haven't yet seen it. The film opens in additional theaters this weekend. More after the jump...

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