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Q&A with Greg Barker and Wagner Moura

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

The story of how this film came to fruition is really remarkable: You directed a documentary of the same name in 2009, based on a book by Samantha Power. Since then, you’ve directed several more documentaries. But now you’ve returned to this story, and this time you’re doing so through narrative filmmaking.

Greg Barker: When you look back, it’s kind of hard to believe it took about fifteen years from the time I encountered the details of what ultimately became the documentary— Samantha Power was writing her book, I had spent a lot of my life living and working overseas, first doing journalism and then doing documentaries, and I knew people who had known Sergio serving in Rwanda and East Timor and elsewhere. And I knew Samantha from some work I had done on the Rwandan genocide, which dovetailed with her first book. And she was sharing these chapters about a book she was writing about Sergio. There was something about the scope of his life— the choices he made, the personal struggles that he had, his ability to see the world in all its complexity but his inability to see himself that really spoke to me. At the time I was making documentaries for Frontline, and I saw this as a feature doc that we could take to HBO. And we made it, and it worked, but there was something about the story, and Sergio’s internal story, that always spoke to me. And eventually, the narrative rights to Samantha’s book came up in 2011. I got those rights, and then started trying to make a movie. And eventually, three years ago or so, I found out that Wagner Moura was interested! And we kind of found each other, and obviously, that was like this perfect coincidence of events. And we realized on a long Skype call that we had the same ideas about the world, and about the film, and about the character that we wanted to unpack… and now here we are.

I’m just letting her story move me, because what she was saying was so truthful and so profound. 

There is a scene with an East Timorese woman, a non-actor named Senhorinha Gama Da Costa Lobo, that is completely amazing. Wagner, can you talk about that scene, and about casting that role?

Wagner Moura: I think that’s my favorite scene in the film. That was the most difficult casting we did. Because what she says in that beautiful monologue… those lines were taken from Samantha’s book; it was something a woman had said to Sergio in a refuge camp in central Asia. I personally think it’s very weird when you see a film about refugees, or human rights abuses, or other types of vulnerable people, and you never actually meet the people. You only talk about them. So it was very important for us to have a scene, where Sergio, who was a person with tremendous reserves of empathy and who had a great ability to connect with other people, it was very important for us to have a scene where we could see Sergio engaging with the people everyone is saying he’s there to defend or to help. All the extras in that village were from East Timor. Even though we shot in Thailand, we brought them in for that scene. For me, that was the most emotional part of making the film. Because all of them knew who Sergio was (he’s a very important person in their history), and many had even met him personally, and they were eager to share the stories they had about him. That particular woman’s role was very hard to cast, because no one actually speaks that way. But when we saw her, we just knew we had found the one. And what she did in that scene was actually pretty high-level acting: she connected her personal experience with the lines she was asked to say, which is actually very difficult to do. This was the only scene in the entire film that wasn’t rehearsed at all— it was a one-shot scene. We shot her dialog, and then we moved the camera and shot mine. And that was it. And as you can see in the film, I’m just basically playing myself in that scene. I’m just letting her story move me, because what she was saying was so truthful and so profound. 

Sergio has a remarkable ability to connect deeply with people he meets in the course of his work, but then seems almost totally incapable of connecting with his own family. Can you discuss how you approached this dual nature of the character?

GB: That was his great struggle. He was so effective politically precisely because he could absorb the experiences he learned from civilians in the field and then apply that to actually making and changing policy. But he almost had a blind spot when it came to his personal life. And since I had spent a lot of time overseas with journalists, I could understand the idea that makes someone think, “well, what I’m doing is so important and so immersive… my personal life will take care of itself.” A lot of people feel that way. And they can become cynical and jaded. And he was never cynical, but he was blind and sort of running away from his personal life. And we were very interested in that from the outset.

WM: It was such a massive contradiction: here was a guy who was literally trying to save the world, but couldn’t organize his personal life. He wasn’t able to be totally present in his own personal life. And this is something I see that happens a lot with people who get to a certain place in their careers. They’re completely dedicated to their profession. Sergio was sort of in that path. It’s sort of contradictory that a man like him, an intellectual, a graduate of the Sorbonne, a man who had the greatest education and training anyone could ever have, who was the biggest problem-solver in the history of the United Nations… had such a chaotic personal life. I would even say he displayed emotionally immature behavior. And that was actually important to show that in how we portrayed him, because when you’re making a film about a historical figure of great renown, one of the struggles is not to portray them as a saint. To not make a hagiography. Luckily for us, he had so many contradictions. And the story itself, the history itself, of the U.N. being in Iraq, and the U.N. being against the invasion, and Sergio being personally against the invasion, but at the same time having to be there… So the film is so full of contradictions that, in terms of filmmaking, I think it was a very well chosen story and character.

Q&A With Spike Lee

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The characters in the film are so complex and nuanced. Delroy Lindo’s character really defied convention.  Can you talk about working with your cast?

You have to have great actors. You have to cast great people to get great performances. I know it sounds basic and simple, but it is basic and simple. Not only Delroy. Isiah Whitlock, Clarke Peters, Norman Lewis, Jonathan Majors. They were doing work. And not under the best conditions either. We shot this in the jungles of Thailand. There wasn’t a day that was under 100 degrees. We were shooting in the jungle, and it was no joke. Jungles have snakes. We had to have a snake wrangler on set.  Snakes in a jungle don’t play. Snakes in a jungle have venom. We had a two-week boot camp in addition to the rehearsal process.

This is fourth time I’ve worked with Delroy Lindo, but it’s been a minute. When I sent him the script, he had trepidations. He couldn’t get around wearing that [MAGA] hat. He said “Spike, I’ll call you back you in a couple days.” Then he asked if we could make the character neo-conservative, and I said we can’t do that. He had to wear the hat. He said, “I’ll have to call you back in a couple days.” And he called me back and he got to a place where he could play that guy with that hat. What he did in that role… he did the damn thing.

This war never goes away.

What was it like collaborating with your Cinematographer Thomas Sigel? You play with formats and aspect ratios and film stock.

Tom and I are about the same age. The Vietnam War was televised in American living rooms. I was ten years-old; Tom was eleven. What we saw on the news was 16mm footage. So we shot with Super 16mm cameras for that footage. Norm Lewis’s character [Eddie] has a Super-8 camera, so the Super-8 stuff you saw was Norm’s stuff. In fact, he gets a credit in the film as a camera operator! Aspect ratios… we were feeling it. There was a lot of stuff we tried in the edit room that didn’t work. I have to shout-out to my editor, Adam Gough. We were exploring. We did not want to put creative handcuffs on ourselves.

I’d love to talk about the soundtrack and particularly the importance of that Marvin Gaye album throughout the film. I understand you got together with the cast to read the lyrics from that entire album?

I think Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album is one of the great albums of all time. Marvin Gaye had an older brother named Franklin who did three tours in Vietnam. He was a raid operator so he was writing to Marvin a lot. Writing his firsthand experiences seeing that war is hell. Marvin’s reading that and he’s also seeing the black soldiers come back home to Detroit. That album came out in 1971, right in the middle of the Vietnam War. This is the album people were listening to. I was in high school. It’s always been a very memorable album. I’m old; it came out on vinyl! You had to flip it over. The way Marvin did it with the songs, they segue seamlessly from one to the other.

The actors knew that Marvin Gaye was a character in this movie. He’s the voice, the heart, the soul, the humanity.

Can you talk about the scene where Paul leaves the group and gives that incredible monologue directly to the camera?

That was scripted. It was one of those moments where Delroy was in the zone. The first take he had this big machete and it’s a close-up.  Not Steadicam, but handheld. As we’re doing the take, he’s chopping down all these trees. I said to the art department, “Find some more trees.” Every take we had to find more trees. I was hurting because he was on fire, and when actors are going, they want to go right away. But that scene, oh my god. He tore that up. People write to me and say “Spike, I had a father like Paul. My uncle, my father, my cousin… they were in Vietnam.” And the person that went to Vietnam was not the same person that came back. One of the best lines in the film is that this war never goes away. Families are still torn because of this amoral war.  

Q&A With Fisher Stevens and Malcolm Venville

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Fisher, I understand that this film had a pretty unique origin story?
Fisher Stevens: Leo [DiCaprio] called me and told me he was in Brooklyn, and that I should come meet him for lunch at the racetrack in Brooklyn. I told him there was no race track in Brooklyn! He said, “yes there is! They’re building an electric car racetrack, come meet me, you’ve got to come check this out.” So I Vespa’d over there, and sure enough, there was a racetrack being built in Red Hook Brooklyn for this thing called “Formula E,” which I had never heard of. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know anything about any kind of racing, period, and I was shocked that Leo was into it. But he was focused on the fact that they were electric cars— he felt strongly that it was a great event, and he said right then we should make a documentary. I just said… Slow down! What? And then this crazy guy Alejandro [Agag] comes up to me and says, “Fisher, nice to meet you, Leo says you’re gonna make a movie about this.” And I just said, “Whoa whoa whoa… slow it down man.” So we have this amazing lunch, by they way… Alejandro had it all laid out. And I said I had to think about it. And Leo was saying that we could make an environmental film with sports. And I thought that was interesting. So I called Maclcolm [Venville] immediately— I knew he knows everything about Formula 1 and racing. And he’s a great director; he’s filmed many commercials shooting cars. I asked him if he had heard of this project, and he had. And I convinced Alejandro to fly Malcolm and me to Valencia to see if we wanted to do this— they were testing the cars there, and we could meet the drivers. Malcolm and I flew over and, essentially, we decided there was in fact a movie here after meeting the drivers. We basically started a casting session on the spot. We knew that was the beginning right there.

their journeys became a redemption story.

The fact that this starts in New York is so important, because it moves the film into brand new territory for a racing film. But it all comes down to casting. I’m interested to hear about that process.
Malcolm Venville: When we arrived in Valencia, we knew we were going to make a feature film that chronicled a season of ten or twelve races, and at the end we’d discover who would become champion. And when I arrived there, Fisher was already going to work— he’s been acting since he was a kid, and it was really interesting seeing him looking at the drivers, almost as if he was auditioning for a play. And he pointed out Jean-Éric Vergne and he said, “he’s cool— let’s follow him.” He was operating from a very instinctual level. And it turns out they became really interesting. You know, it’s so exciting working on docs because there is this very kind of pivoting, nimble, shape-shifting aspect to making a one— you don’t know exactly what direction you’re going to go in at the start, and that’s really exciting.

FS: There were just some really exciting, fortuitous characters. For instance, the fact that there was a guy named André Lotterer who was Jean’s teammate, who was eleven years older than him, who had won La Mans 3 times in a row (and I didn’t know how important that was, but Malcolm made it clear how major an accomplishment that really is). And we see their relationship, and there was Nelson Piquet Jr., and Lucas di Grassi, who were the two Brazilian type-A personalities… we knew they had a history and hated each other— we had done our research! They had been driving against each other since they were eleven years old, and there was a lot of animosity there. So we knew we wanted to key in on those relationships. We knew Piquet had been thrown out of Formula 1, because he had thrown a race in order to sign a new contract (he let his partner win), and we knew there was a cool Formula 1 connection there, and Formula 1 is the precursor to Formula E… and it was just exciting. Originally, Malcolm and I were thinking that maybe Alejandro would narrate the whole movie. He’d be our guide. But what we realized was that Alejandro needed to be one of the characters the same way that the drivers were. So we made him a character in the film, just like the drivers. Because we didn’t need him to narrate— we didn’t even need a narrator. Let the audience see it through the characters’ eyes. The tricky part was, there was a guy named Felix Rosenqvist, who started out really strong in the championship. After the first four races he was in first place. And Malcolm and I said to ourselves, “he’s a nice guy, but he’s a little standoffish, not the most charismatic guy…” And we interviewed him and we tried to get it out of him, and we realized we’d be in trouble if he won the championship! He couldn’t have carried the movie. But then, thank goodness, the documentary gods were smiling on us and he started fading a bit. And this guy Sam Bird started coming up. And Sam had this whole history with the other racers (they hated him). So thank goodness that drama could play out at the end of the movie. So we had a lot of gods smiling down on us… and it really worked out. The only thing is, we had originally planned to make it more informative about the state of the planet. We thought it would have a lot more messaging about the environmental aspects of racing, and the imminent danger the world is in due to climate change. But we moved away from that. I think you still understand the environmental problems with the world, so it’s definitely there.

MV: The most interesting drivers in Formula E are the guys who have been fired from Formula 1. They’ve all been rejected; they’re bitter; they’re angry. And their journeys became a redemption story.

NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW ANNOUNCES 2019 AWARD WINNERS

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THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW NAMES 2019 HONOREES
INCLUDING
THE IRISHMAN FOR BEST FILM OF THE YEAR
&
QUENTIN TARANTINO FOR BEST DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR

The Organization’s Gala will be held on Wednesday, January 8, 2020 in New York City

New York, NY (December 3, 2019) – The National Board of Review today announced their 2019 honorees, with top awards including The Irishman for Best Film, Quentin Tarantino for Best Director for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Renée Zellweger for Best Actress for Judy, and Adam Sandler for Best Actor for Uncut Gems. The organization has also unveiled the NBR Icon Award, an honor that celebrates the work of leading cinematic artists who have contributed meaningfully to the history, culture, and excellence of motion pictures.

NBR President Annie Schulhof said, “We are thrilled to award The Irishman as our Best Film – Martin Scorsese’s masterful mob epic is a rich, moving, beautifully textured movie that represents the best in what cinema can be. We are also excited to be presenting Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino with our inaugural Icon Award – they are the true definition of cinematic icons, each with their own exceptional body of work, and all in top form in The Irishman.”

The 2019 awards continue the NBR’s tradition of recognizing excellence in filmmaking, going back 110 years. This year 285 films were viewed by a select group of film enthusiasts, filmmakers, professionals, academics, and students, many of which were followed by in-depth discussions with directors, actors, producers, and screenwriters. Voting ballots were tabulated by the accounting firm of Lutz & Carr, LLP.

The National Board of Review’s awards celebrate the art of cinema, with categories that include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, Breakthrough Performance, and Directorial Debut, as well as signature honors such as Freedom of Expression.

The honorees will be feted at the NBR Awards Gala, hosted by Willie Geist, on Wednesday, January 8, 2020 at Cipriani 42nd Street. To request credentials to the evening’s red carpet, please fill out the application here by December 27, 2019.

Below is a full list of the 2019 award recipients, announced by the National Board of Review:

Best Film: THE IRISHMAN
Best Director: Quentin Tarantino, ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD
Best Actor: Adam Sandler, UNCUT GEMS
Best Actress: Renée Zellweger, JUDY
Best Supporting Actor: Brad Pitt, ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD
Best Supporting Actress: Kathy Bates, RICHARD JEWELL
Best Original Screenplay: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, Ronald Bronstein, UNCUT GEMS
Best Adapted Screenplay: Steven Zaillian, THE IRISHMAN
Breakthrough Performance: Paul Walter Hauser, RICHARD JEWELL
Best Directorial Debut: Melina Matsoukas, QUEEN & SLIM
Best Animated Feature: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD
Best Foreign Language Film: PARASITE
Best Documentary: MAIDEN
Best Ensemble: KNIVES OUT
Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography: Roger Deakins, 1917
NBR Icon Award: Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino
NBR Freedom of Expression Award: FOR SAMA
NBR Freedom of Expression Award: JUST MERCY

Top Films (in alphabetical order)

1917
Dolemite is My Name
Ford v Ferrari
Jojo Rabbit
Knives Out
Marriage Story
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Richard Jewell
Uncut Gems
Waves

Top 5 Foreign Language Films (in alphabetical order)

Atlantics
Invisible Life
Pain and Glory
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Transit

Top 5 Documentaries (in alphabetical order)

American Factory
Apollo 11
The Black Godfather
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
Wrestle

Top 10 Independent Films (in alphabetical order)

The Farewell
Give Me Liberty
A Hidden Life
Judy
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Midsommar
The Nightingale
The Peanut Butter Falcon
The Souvenir
Wild Rose

ABOUT THE NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW
For 110 years, 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 of varying ages and backgrounds watches 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

Contacts:

Andy Gelb / Shawn Purdy/ Mariena Wise
SLATE PR
(212) 235-6814
andy@slate-pr.com / shawn@slate-pr.com / mariena@slate-pr.com

Q&A with Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Daniel Craig, and Rian Johnson

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Can you talk about writing this film and bringing these characters to life?
Rian Johnson: It all started with me loving Agatha Christie growing up. I always wanted to do a “who done it.” I thought it would be really interesting; I’m a “who done it” junkie. I watch all of them that come out. I love them all. Usually when you see them today, they’re period pieces, because they’re usually Christie adaptations. The idea of doing a “who done it” set in America in 2019, and really using that to plug into America in 2019 and to draw the characters the way Christie drew the characters from British society when she was writing, to draw that out of today and right now, seemed really interesting. Tonally, you need really good actors to ride that line of going as big as we did with this movie and still having it feel grounded to work as a movie and not tip over into parody. That’s why you hire the best actors on the planet and then it all sorts itself out.

make it feel like a roller coaster ride and not a crossword puzzle

Don, can you talk about the characters and how all of their misanthropy is tempered by some sort of internal pain?
Don Johnson: Well all of them except for my character, who does nothing happily. He’s kind of the personification of the entitled family vibe. It was fun for me to do, because I have never played a character like that before, I loved how obsequious he was and how deferential he was to Jamie Lee’s character. It was fun.

Daniel, can you talk about your character and the way he carries himself and his accent?
Daniel Craig: I was just lucky to get a script that was as richly and as well drawn out as this one. I read it and I saw it. I think it has a lot to do with Rian and I sharing a love for “who done it” films. I grew up watching the same movies as he did and watched them religiously over and over again. I kind of understood the language that Rian was using. So we looked it up and it was a gentle southern language. I inhabited the character immediately in one reading, I talked about this the other day, about as actors and how arrogant we are, we go and change this and that during our first read-through, as though we know for sure… but that did not happen when I read this script. I just read it and said to myself, “I know who this is.” I want to play it. I sort of then picked a few people, Tennesse Williams, his voice has a high pitched accent and was not very suited. Then I landed on Shelby Foote, the historian, who has this beautiful Mississippi rolling accent. He speaks slowly, but has this incredible speed of thought. He talks about things with authority and I nailed it with a great accent coach. We sat for a few hours a day for months on end. Then when we got to set, and Jenny our costume designer, whom I’ve worked with before and is great to work with, gave me the physical material and we paired the two together.

Did you have to change anything in the language so that the characters and the house functioned in the plot together?
RJ: These guys clicked into it really easily. The only thing we would adjust on set were expository scenes. I wanted to be really tuned in if the actors could not follow the through line of what was happening in any given scene. I wanted to make sure every scene was clear to everybody, because I figured if it was clear to you guys then it would be clear to the audience. That’s where ninety percent of the work on a script like this goes into is making it feel easy for the audience, making it feel like a roller coaster ride and not a crossword puzzle at the end of the day. That was the main way we did tweaks on set.

Knowing that you’re in a “Who Done It,” do you play up to that and twirl your spiritual mustache a bit?
Jamie Lee Curtis: When I first had a phone call with Rian, the only questions I had were about tone. I had done a few different types of things, I just wanted to know where he was on the scale of tone. Because it does not matter where he is. I’ll go to whatever place he wanted. He said he wanted it to be heightened reality. Very much real, but with a slight accent of heightened reality. For me as an actor, the only question is how to tell the truth. It doesn’t matter to me, I don’t care what it is. Also I’m just like Don, I’m not a fan of the genre, I don’t care about the genre, I don’t watch those movies. There are other movies that I enjoy very much, but I’m not a particular fan of this genre, but it doesn’t matter. That is the beauty of this collaborative medium. It doesn’t matter if I’m a fan or not. As an actor, it’s simply my job to tell the truth. If you’re telling the truth through Linda’s point of view, she’s in grief. She loved her father. I think she may be the only one in the family who really loved him and she lost him. That was my truth, and the rest of it was just dross as we say. It was just hilarious.