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THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW TO HOST AWARDS GALA TUESDAY, JANUARY 10, 2023 in New York City

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New York, NY (June 1, 2022) – The National Board of Review announced today that they will host their annual Awards Gala on Tuesday, January 10, 2023 in New York City.

The National Board of Review’s awards celebrate excellence in filmmaking with categories that include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary, Breakthrough Performance, and Directorial Debut as well as signature honors such as the Spotlight Award, Freedom of Expression, the William K. Everson Film History Award and the NBR Icon Award.

Additional details about the event will be announced at a later date.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW
Since 1909, the National Board of Review has dedicated its efforts to the support of cinema as both art and entertainment. Each year this select group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals and academics view over 250 films and participates in illuminating discussions with directors, actors, producers and screenwriters before announcing their selections for the best work of the year.  Since first citing year-end cinematic achievements in 1929, NBR has recognized a vast selection of outstanding studio, independent, foreign-language, animated and documentary films, often propelling recipients such as Peter Farrelly’s Green Book and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road into the larger awards conversation. NBR also stands out as the only film organization that bestows a film history award in honor of former member and film historian William K. Everson. In addition, one of the organization’s core values is identifying new talent and nurturing young filmmakers by awarding promising talent with ‘Directorial Debut’ and ‘Breakthrough Actor’ awards as well as grants to rising film students and by facilitating community outreach through the support of organizations such as The Ghetto Film School, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, and Educational Video Center. With its continued efforts to assist up-and-coming artists in completing and presenting their work, NBR honors its commitment to not just identifying the best that current cinema has to offer, but also ensuring the quality of films for future generations to come.

Join the conversation @NBRfilm

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Press Contacts:  SLATE PR 
Shawn Purdy / Lindsey Brown  
(212) 235-6813
shawn@slate-pr.com / lindsey@slate-pr.com

Q&A with Frank Marshall

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.

How did this film get underway, and how did you decide to co-direct it?

Frank Marshall: One of the things that happens — as you get older — is that your friends also become experienced, and rise in their careers. And one of my best friends is Jimmy Buffett. It’s great when your heroes become your friends. I like to go on the road and hang out with Jimmy. Back in 2018, we were in Denver and he was playing with the Eagles. And there was a party afterwards. And at the party, there was this gentleman named Quint Davis. I started talking to Quint, and he was a very lively and knowledgeable music fan. And it turns out he’s the co-founder of Jazz Fest! And he said, “can I pick your brain for a second?” And he told me about the impending celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jazz Fest. Fifty years! And I thought that was pretty amazing— I’d never been myself, but of course I’d heard about it. And he said that they really wanted to do something special. He either wanted to shoot a documentary, or do a series, or just cover it somehow. And I said, “I’m in! Let me do it.” And so that’s kind of how it all started.

you’re going to find things that the computer isn’t going to put in your feed

There are so many incredible moments, it’s hard to pick just one to talk about. But the scene with the Marsalis family is really special. How did you arrange that?

FM: The real key, for us, was to have Quint Davis guiding us on who we should talk to. Because there was no way we could talk to — much less actually shoot — everybody. And, you know, it took two of us to direct it, [co-director] Ryan Suffern and myself, and we would split the duties: One of us would be interviewing in one place while the other was out covering a show, or a tent. And to get the Marsalis family together and to be able to talk to each of them was truly special, and something I’ll always remember. And to be able to honor them in that way, and to show the family playing together… I just love the son’s recollections of playing with Dad, and, you know, some musicians even scaring them. So it was very honest, I thought. 

The film is structured so carefully. Can you discuss the editing process?

FM: The city of New Orleans really was the glue, and was a character in the movie. And so, I would use that to have a transition between the different styles of music, the different genres of music, the different foods, the different arts and crafts that are there… so, really, New Orleans is weaved through the entire movie. And I have to mention our editor, Martin Singer. He did a brilliant job. Because it has to have— editing has to have a certain rhythm. So you’re with the music, and then every once in a while you get a sound bite from somebody, but you don’t destroy the feeling of the music you’re listening to. So it doesn’t take away from it, it adds to it. Martin was incredibly important to us for that reason. There were so many times when I wished we could just let the scene play! But we had to find that balance: where do you bring in jazz? Where do you bring in gospel? What leads one thing to another? The other thing I was going to say about Jimmy Buffett: In the end-credits there’s a special reason that he’s singing The Stones “You Can’t Always Get What you Want.” And that’s because The Stones were scheduled to close Jazz Fest that year, and Mick Jagger had a throat problem, and they had to cancel. So Jimmy came in to do the closing in honor of The Rolling Stones. So there’s a little inside info for you there!

What are some of the things you remember most, from the production?

FM: Obviously, when you’re there and you’re looking out from backstage and there are 50,000 people being totally connected to the music that’s going on… you realize it really is a universal language. And just being there, amongst that, and being able to enjoy that… is special. But for me, I also really enjoyed doing some of the interviews. And when you’re talking to the artists about what’s special about Jazz Fest for them, and to hear the history, and to hear about why they’re at Jazz Fest… I thought that Boyfriend had my favorite quote. She said, “you know, you’re going to walk around Jazz Fest and you’re going to find things that the computer isn’t going to put in your feed.” And that’s a line that somebody wouldn’t have said ten years ago.

Q&A with Craig Roberts and Simon Farnaby

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Phantom of the Open.

Simon, this is an incredible true story. How did you come to write the script?

Simon Farnaby: I was brought up around golf. My father was a greenskeeper at a little club in northeast England. Golf’s a game I love, but I came at it like Maurice [Flitcroft], from a lower-class angle. The greenskeepers were the great unwashed. You were supposed to stay in the shed and not venture out onto the course. When the juniors at our club heard about Maurice, he became a folk hero. If you were a junior, or in fact a woman, you only had a small amount of time to tee off, and you were looked down upon by all the men. So, he was a huge folk hero for us all, but then I kind of forgot about him. And then I eventually realized I wasn’t good enough at golf to be a professional, unlike Maurice. I got into comedy, I got into making films, and then Maurice died in 2007 and I read the obituary in the newspaper and was reminded, oh, that guy! I hadn’t heard of him between those two periods, so I immediately did a bit of research and wrote a very bad screenplay based on very few facts. Then I thought, I’d better look into this more, so I did loads of research and teamed up with a journalist and met the family, including the twins, who are featured in the film. And the big moment came when I asked if they had any letters or postcards, any written material of their dad’s that might have given insight into his mind. And they initially they said, no, we don’t, and they offered me a drink and then about two hours later, they said, “actually we do! We’ve got his autobiography.” And they bring out from under the bed this 500-page hand-written autobiography that Maurice wrote but was never published. That was just a gold mine. It brought tears to my eyes. Everything he was thinking about, all the stuff that happens in the film, there were lots of things that are straight from the autobiography… the way he took six sugars in his coffee, the speech he gives to his wife at the end, that was glued into the book from when he had written it down in Michigan. The speech to Jean was all verbatim. He kept the letters between him and Keith Mackenzie, every word of their exchanges in the film comes from those letters, and there were more in the book! Until Mackenzie gave up corresponding. So then I wrote a better screenplay, and got an amazing director who shared my vision. He wanted it to be colorful and fun and not too kitchen-sinky, and here we are.

it’s about someone really wanting to do something in a world that tells them they can’t

Craig, how did you come to the film and what aspect of the story drew you in?

Craig Roberts: I loved Simon’s script. I had made two films before this that I had written myself, and I suppose I had this pretentious idea that I would be an auteur that would only direct his own scripts. But when I read Simon’s script, I loved it and wished I had written it myself. Sally Hawkins had played a paranoid-schizophrenic in my second film, Eternal Beauty. And much like in that film, the whole way we framed this movie was to take someone’s perceived weakness and turn it into a strength. It was a comedy, and I suppose you’re not laughing at her, you’re laughing with her, when she’s making jokes. I think that helped me understand Maurice’s story, and that’s what Simon and the producers saw in me. I pitched for it, I begged to do it, and I got it. And there were a few things that drew me in. When you’re telling a story about a real person, most of the time people know that real person, so there’s an expectation. That was fun to explore. And it’s a class story and a birth lottery story, but it’s about someone really wanting to do something in a world that tells them they can’t, and that’s what I really loved about it. It had so much heart.

The cast is phenomenal. Did you encounter any challenges during the casting process?

CR: There were no challenges in casting this film. People are really fans of Simon’s work, so that helped when sending the script. We wanted Mark Rylance because we didn’t want a comedic actor in it, we wanted a character actor that was grounded and would make it real, one who would lean into the drama. The script was very funny anyway. We sent it Mark because we thought we should try for the very best. And he’d actually never been sent a comedy before. The timing was quite good. We both know Sally Hawkins quite well, and she’s amazing. She’s really the heart of this film and the support system. The hardest thing was actually finding the twins. We were worried that we wouldn’t find the right energy, but we did some self-tapes and I when I was shown their tape [Christian and Jonah Lees], I was blown away by how much life they had. In another world, they’d probably be in the movie even more because they’re just so fun.

SF: They weren’t very good dancers though, were they?

CR: No, they were terrible! That was something they had to learn.

Simon, how did your part in the film as the French golfer come about?

SF:  Well, we needed someone who could swing a golf club. And luckily for me, there aren’t many professional golfers that are also good actors. I was forced into it, really! Jim Howard, who you see in the film, was the first Black PGA player and actually played with Maurice that day. He was so happy to be involved in the film and loved his day with Maurice. But there was another player that hated Maurice that didn’t want anything to do with the film, so I stepped in to fill his role as the one who thought Maurice was wasting everyone’s time. And it was a great excuse to dress up like one of the 1970s golfers.

Can you talk a bit collaborating with some of your crew members?

CR: It’s my favorite part of the process, really, the collaboration. When you’re making a movie—David Lynch says this—you have an idea, and when you collaborate, people put their ideas on top of your idea. I’ve worked with the same costumer designer for my past three movies now [Sian Jenkins], and interestingly the design all comes from a very weird reference… it’s Superman. When I read Simon’s script, there’s a moment where he opens his overalls, like Superman. One of my favorite movies is Punch Drunk Love by Paul Thomas Anderson, where Adam Sandler has social anxiety but it’s framed in a way that he’s an alien and he’s Superman, so I took inspiration from that. That informed the whole design of the movie. His golf attire is all diamond shapes in the colors of Superman. The hat is kind of like his cape. The dog is the same dog that Superman had, and at the beginning you see a shooting star coming down, like Superman. Because Maurice has his own superpower, and it’s his confidence in himself.

My DP was Kit Fraser. We shot on 35mm, and then on 16mm for the golf scenes. I really like to preview most of the things we’re going to shoot. I’m sure if we were improvising the whole thing, it would be a lot more expensive. We wanted a 70s feel, so we referenced Boogie Nights, the King of Comedy a little bit, all the flashing cameras and the freeze frames. In terms of music, Isobel Waller-Bridge did the score. There’s a soap in the UK called Coronation Street, and that was the choice as a reference for the score. It was a bit of a strange choice, but I grew up with it, and it felt nostalgic and romantic.

Q&A with Hanna Bergholm

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Hatching.

How did this project start, and how did you come to the story?

Hanna Bergholm: It started when the screenwriter Ilja Rautsi contacted me, and he told me he had this one sentence idea in his head: A boy hatches an evil doppelgänger out of an egg. And that is all he had so far. And I just said, “cool!” I found it so fresh and exciting; I instantly wanted to be involved. But, I said that I really wanted to change the lead character into a girl. Because I really want more stories in the world about women and girls. So then we changed the lead character into a girl, and it seemed like then the whole story really came alive to us. I started to think about just this one sentence… In the Finnish language, “hatching” is similar to “brooding,” so in my mind, she tries to “brood,” or “hatch,” some of her feelings… some sides of her character. And in Hatching, there is this idea of motherhood, of mother/daughter relations, and there’s this theme of growing up. So basically, all of the themes that are in the film came from this one sentence that Ilja brought to me in the first place… from the egg! We wrote a treatment together, and worked very closely in developing the script together.

do you get unconditional love, or not?

Did you know the writer Ilja Rautsi before he reached out to you about Hatching?

HB: Yes: we had been in the same film school. I studied directing, and he studied screenwriting. But we were in different years in the film school, so we didn’t really know each other that well then. But then we really met in a directors and screenwriters speed-meeting event, and there we kind of pitched ideas to each other and found out that we have this very… similar imagination! And it seemed like some of our ideas were in the sort of horror world.

This is such a fresh take on the ‘coming of age’ story. How did you conceive of the story?

HB: I think the most important element of the story, for me, is the kind of twisted mother/daughter relationship, and especially in that relationship, it is about the fact that… our main character, the girl Tinja, is not accepted fully as she is. And she has to hide some sides of her character. The basic thing is about that: do you get unconditional love, or not? Are you fully accepted as you are? And in the end I think… well, we cannot escape our true feelings. We have to face them. Up to some point, we have to control our feelings, we can’t go around killing people. But we have to face our feelings, we have to acknowledge them. At some point, we just have to stand up and say, “this is me, with all my flaws and scars.”

The relationship between Tinja and Alli is fascinating. Alli isn’t acting out of malice; she’s manifesting Tinja’s negative thoughts. Alli is not a puppet on a string. Can you talk about the relationship between the two characters?

HB: That was something that was very early on for the screenwriter and myself: that we really wanted that this Alli character was not an evil character. She’s really acting out the girl Tinja’s sorrow and pain and anger… but she’s not evil. I think the creature also kind of feels bad, and just wants to be loved as it is. So that was something that we really… it was very important for us not to write it in this kind of… traditional “villain” mode, for the creature. And every time we kind of noticed we were starting to drift in that direction, starting to write this kind of typical “bad,” “evil,” tween character… we had gone the wrong way, and we had to come back to really tell the story about Tinja’s own emotions. And about this growing up theme… of course she’s kind of growing up in this film, and the story tells about that as well. But I really wanted the film not to simply say that just puberty itself is horrible! Because all of the horrors in this film don’t start just because she reaches puberty. She happens to be in that age, yes, but all her real terrors really come from her kind of feeling that the mother doesn’t quite accept her as she is.

Can you talk about the conception, and the execution, of the incredible creature?

HB: We started, very early on, design the look of the creature in Finland with two wonderful concept artists. So I was kind of showing them some reference images of very anorexically thin girl bodies, and some crows, and bird skin… and all those kinds of things, and explaining what I wanted, and they were drawing these concept images of it, and I really wanted the creature to be very deformed. I wanted something completely different from Tinja, this perfect gymnast girl. It had to be very disgusting. Then I knew that I didn’t want to make a digital character; I wanted it to have real physical presence. I wanted to do an animatronic puppet, kind of like E.T. Then I knew we needed the best possible person to make such a puppet… and I googled “who is the best animatronic designer in the world?” and Google told me that it’s Gustav Hoegen, who has been the lead animatronic designer in the latest Star Wars films, and Jurassic World, and Prometheus, and so on. I contacted him, and he got excited about our concept art! And the whole film. So he wanted to come onboard. He collected a wonderful team to create this puppet for us. And then we had five puppeteers, and we had rehearsals with them and the puppet, and they also contributed some ideas as to how this puppet could actually move… what little things it could do… so in the shooting, we had these five puppeteers around the puppet, moving the body with rods. And then there was Gustav moving all of the facial expressions and fingers with remote controls. And in post, we just erased the puppeteers! But basically, all you see on screen, is what we did practically on the set. There are just some little tweaks that we VFX for (maybe three shots), but otherwise, it’s all stuff we did on the set. It kind of emerges into an actual actor with special effect makeup. And then we had Conor O’Sullivan (who has two Oscar nominations; he’s done makeup for Saving Private Ryan, and The Dark Knight, and Game of Thrones, and so he and his team made this wonderful special effect makeup for us. And in the very end, the girl’s face kind of cracks open… and that was full CG effect! That was done in Belgium by a separate company.

Q&A with Audrey Diwan

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Happening.

How did you work with the writer Annie Ernaux to adapt her autobiographical book about her abortion for the screen?

Audrey Diwan: When you adapt a writer that you really like, there are measured risks. I was already at her house when I realized I had to make sure not to betray her. It was a complicated and meaningful first conversation because she tries to reach the truth of her memories. She’s not creating any legends about her past and has a brutal honestly about being the young woman at the center of this story. I told her that I wanted to make the movie a physical experience and try to reach the truth. First, she went through the book chronologically, and I asked her questions about things that were not in the book… social-political context, her family, her friends, and the fear I could feel everywhere, because of the loneliness. You can’t help a girl on that train because if you help her, you might end up in jail as well. Annie told me from the beginning, I’m not going to look at the screenplay like the book, so feel free to adapt it. But if something doesn’t feel right regarding the character or the period, I’ll tell you. It was the best way to adapt a book. I was free but I also knew she would keep me on the right track. I’m so grateful for her.

I never wanted to be shocking, but I wanted to be honest

Why do you think this story is so important to tell right now?

I think it has always been important to tell this story, and that’s because it’s a silent story. It’s the same story in a different way, but it’s the same story forever. If we have to go through that debate once again and discuss abortion once again, I think we should at least know what illegal abortion is. Otherwise we’re debating something we don’t know about. It’s not fair. I didn’t want to make a moral movie, because that can be boring and I don’t want to share my views that way. I love the book because it starts at a very interesting political moment. We don’t see the girl trying to figure out whether or not to have an abortion. It’s a work in progress of a girl trying to get one. It doesn’t make it a moral issue that we should think about, she’s made the decision and has a very strong determination about it. Illegal abortion happens. If we don’t allow women to have legal abortions, they will find a way to do it to themselves. I wanted to show that level of pain, that system, and the context that is given to those women.

The way you build tension throughout the film is incredible. How did you approach that?

In a very organic way, it’s a girl against time. Suspense comes naturally from that premise, by using the DNA of the true story. Then I used a special framing device. The farther we get into the story, the more I reverse the camera to be on Anne’s back, so we are her, walking into the unknown, opening a door that she’s opening and not knowing who will be on the other side. It’s a projection process and it builds the tension because we go more and more into that process. We would often frame the camera very close on her face, so we felt trapped with her, like she was in a jail cell. There are many tools we use with the camera not just to look at Anne, but to be Anne. And we used sound so the audience can hear her breathe. Even when she’s silent, I hoped we could share what she had in mind. My idea was to use silence as cinematic material so the audience could connect with her, as we’re the only ones that know her secret.

As Anne pursues ways to terminate her pregnancy, you don’t shy away from showing anything on screen. How did you prepare to film these very graphic and truthful scenes?

I never wanted to be shocking, but I wanted to be honest. As Annie was in her book. If I want to talk about illegal abortion, I shouldn’t look away. When Annie writes, she doesn’t look away. The whole process of the movie was don’t try to watch her, but try to be her. If you want to be her, you need to consider what she’s going through. I was trying to be in her eyes, what she wants to see, what she doesn’t want to see. Honesty was my drive. Again, I wasn’t trying to be in the middle of moral issues.

To prepare, we worked a lot with [lead actress] Anamaria Vartolomei. We had a lot of time with her because the movie was postponed due to the first lockdown of Covid. I was a bit frustrated at first because I felt I was ready to go on set. But actually, I was not. Anamaria and I began talking and exchanging references to films from Rosetta, from the Dardenne brothers, to Elephant, to Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, to Vagabond. There were many, many different kinds of references we used in order to build a common cinematic language. We found the character and the body, through Zoom actually, and then we got to know each other more and constantly talked about the meaning. What was every moment, what was its purpose? I don’t rehearse that much. But with Covid, we accepted the idea that we might not exactly find what we are looking for, but we can still try and explore. And if we don’t find what we’re looking for, we find something else. It’s the artistic process that I am interested in. We settled in. I think Anamaria never felt at risk. She trusted me and I trusted her and it’s all about working together step by step.