Anthony D'Alessandro is Managing Editor of AwardsLine.
'I think she had to be in there for 20 minutes before I yelled action.' Quentin Tarantino is referring to the time that Kerry Washington spent in the 'hotbox' ' a hole in the ground on a plantation where slaves were sent when they tried to escape. It's where Washington's character Broomhilda is locked up when her husband, Django (Jamie Foxx), arrives at Candyland ' the vast Southern estate owned by her owner Calvin 
Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Tarantino's Django Unchained. Her voice parched from screaming and her body weakened, Broomhilda doesn't know that Django has come to rescue her with the help of dentist-cum-bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz).
'Kerry is very game to make things as real as possible,' says Tarantino, who as Waltz points out, can often inspire actors with their characters' back stories, 'Leaving her in the box for 30 seconds and then yelling action wouldn't work. Nor would sticking her in the box for hours. But 10 minutes in the box could feel like 30. The idea was for Kerry to become disoriented, lose track of time in there, and contemplate what eight hours in the box would feel like. She could yell or scream.'
'But there was a safe word,' adds Washington, 'so that the crew knew when I was panicking as a person, and not as an actor. This is how a lot of the film went ' taking the reality as far as we could.'
Related: Samuel L. Jackson Lets Loose On 'Django', Tarantino, Slavery, Oscars & Golden Globes
Welcome to Tarantino's Antebellum South. But instead of the Jewish soldiers bashing Nazi skulls in Inglourious Basterds, it's Southern slave Django slaying a slew of white devils to get to his wife who has been sold down the river.
Tarantino is considered a master of cool. But after his box office/Oscar breakout Pulp Fiction ($214 million, seven Oscar noms, with an Original Screenplay win for Tarantino and Roger Avary), he hit a lull. Some of his cinematic homages were relegated to cult status: His double feature with Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse collapsed at $25 million Stateside, and the blaxploitation film Jackie Brown took in $40 million at
the North American box office.
Related: Quentin Tarantino To Receive Rome Fest Life Achievement Award
What happened? His style hadn't changed. Tarantino was still the same ultraviolent, cinema vérité absurdist guy. He struck a nerve, however, with audiences with his own branded subgenre: the historical wish-fulfillment tale in which the oppressed exact revenge. Basterds minted more than $320 million worldwide; earned eight Oscar noms, including director and picture; and turned unknown Austrian star Waltz into a supporting actor Oscar winner. When news broke in April 2011 that Tarantino was prepping a Southern tale much in the same fashion as Basterds, studios and marquee actors wanted in.
'Basterds was something audiences didn't know that they wanted, and that can be a cool thing ' to have something that wasn't articulated to them before,' Tarantino says. 'They knew what other World War II movies were like and didn't want to see the same old tired film again. The same (resonance) could follow through with Django.'
In the same way that Basterds was related to the 1978 Enzo G. Castellari film in title only, so is Django, in regards to the original Sergio Corbucci spaghetti western series (the original Django, actor Franco Nero, makes a cameo opposite Foxx in the film).
Related: Mike Fleming: My Playboy Interview With Quentin
'I am only influenced by Corbucci's oeuvre in terms of the bleak, pitiless, surrealistic West he got across. It wasn't so much Django itself,' says Tarantino, 'As the genre moved on; the name Django became synonymous with all spaghetti westerns. There wasn't even a character named Django in some of these movies.'
Even though Tarantino turns archetypes on their heads, quite often laced with humor ' i.e. Django as the bounty hunter wears a green coat a la Little Joe's get-up on TV's Bonanza while a bunch of pre-KKK men clownishly complain that they can't see through their hoods ' the protagonist's bedrock rests on the life of pre-Civil War African-Americans. Approaching the severity of the material proved to be a grueling dramatic process for the cast.
'I don't know how anyone lived like this in any real way. We barely made it through for nine months,' Washington explains about the emotional pain of shooting on the Evergreen Plantation outside of New Orleans. 'It just added to the resonance of things that we were embodying and portraying these crimes against humanity; that this happened on this sacred ground. There was always this dance between reality and storytelling and the heartache of both.'
To ease the atmosphere during the plantation scenes, Tarantino played gospel music between takes. Nonetheless, the haunting spirits lingered. While preparing for a day's shoot, Washington remembers trying to take her mind off of one scene by taking in the beautiful trees around her on the plantation grounds. Upon noticing one tree without Spanish moss, Washington learned that it was the hanging tree for slaves.
'There were nights when I would text Jamie Foxx at 4 AM and say, 'If this goes on for any longer, I'm not going to make it',' says Washington.
'When you see Leonardo build this eloquent evil character as Calvin Candie, you want to hear those words,' says Foxx about his costar's racist character, who doles out a monologue on the phrenology of slaves. 'Hearing those words, and you hear them enough, it became second hand because that's how they talked back then. Django is the truest depiction of slavery.'
Typically, an adult film with a true depiction of slavery, or World War II, might face an uphill battle getting to the big screen. However, Tarantino is in the fortunate position of being able to finish a script, give Harvey Weinstein a call, and the project is fast-tracked from there. A meeting at the director's house follows, where his friends and the production crew relish a grand reading of his latest work. Sure, having a studio co-financier such as Columbia Pictures on Django enables Tarantino to get bigger budgets, but the director attributes any higher costs on his films 'to moviemaking becoming more expensive. Kill Bill had a huge canvas, but I wanted for nothing.'
Universal coproduced and cofinanced half of Basterds' $70 million budget, in addition to handling foreign, where they catapulted the film's overseas boxoffice to $200 million-plus. But despite the studio's passionate presentation for Django, as reported by Deadline Hollywood, the Weinstein Co. and the producers opted to go with Sony.
'Something spoke to everybody in the room when we met with Sony,' says producer Pilar Savone, who has worked with Tarantino in various capacities across five films since Jackie Brown. Despite Tarantino's early talks with Will Smith for the role of Django, 'partnering with Sony had nothing to do with the studio's connection to Will Smith,' says Django's second producer Stacey Sher who first produced with Tarantino on Pulp Fiction.
What is apparent is that Sony has always been passionate about being in business with Tarantino. 'I remember talking to Amy Pascal at Sony about Basterds. I told her, 'I want this movie to be a hit. I don't want you to do this movie because it's cool to work with me or for just the cache',' says the director. 'And her response to me was, 'We really want to work with you, and we think this will be your most commercial movie.' And the same thing with Django, so we'll see.'
When Smith didn't commit, Tarantino turned to six other candidates including Idris Elba, Chris Tucker, Terrence Howard, Michael Kenneth Williams, and Tyrese Gibson before settling on Foxx, who won the director over with his Texas roots, cowboy image, and his tolerance of racial issues in the current day South (Foxx even used his own mare Cheetah as his horse Tony). Casting Django was the opposite experience Tarantino faced on Basterds: If he hadn't found Christoph Waltz to play the multilingual Col. Hans Landa, the director would have been unable to make the movie.
Related: Harvey Weinstein Unveils 'The Master', 'Django Unchained', 'Silver Linings Playbook' In Cannes
'Quentin was clear with every studio we met with that he wrote the role with no actor in mind. If they did the movie with him, he wasn't going to cast one actor over another,' says producer Reginald Hudlin with whom Tarantino first discussed the Django concept 15 years ago.
'A studio had to be prepared to make the film with an unknown,' adds Sher.
Despite the amount of media attention Django received in its casting of Kevin Costner, Anthony LaPaglia, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Sacha Baron Cohen, these actors' inability to commit largely boiled down to scheduling conflicts as Django shot across several locales including New Orleans; Jackson, WY; Mammoth Mountain, CA; Big Sky Studios in Simi Valley, CA; and the Melody Ranch in Santa Clarita, CA. Costner was originally slotted to play Ace Woody, a Mandingo trainer at Candyland, while Baron Cohen was to play a poker player Scotty who loses his slave Broomhilda to Candie. Initially, Jonah Hill was unable to commit, however, his schedule opened up, and he makes a cameo as one of Big Daddy's (Don Johnson) klan men.
'We had huge movie stars wanting to do day-player parts,' says Sher, 'These actors are typically number one on the call sheet, so everyone schedules around them. But because of everyone else's schedule and because of snow and weather, we couldn't accommodate everyone.'
While Django was overlooked by the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Hollywood Foreign Press embraced DiCaprio's performance with a supporting actor nod along with Christoph Waltz as well as three other noms for best drama, director, and screenplay.
And with voter audiences having as much fun at Django as they did with Basterds, all this steam begs the question, does Tarantino have a sequel in mind?
'After shooting for nine months and editing for 12 weeks and going on this Mount Everest press tour, I can't imagine going back,' says Tarantino. 'But there's a story to be told there: Django and Broomhilda still have to get out of the South.'
Related: 'Django Unchained' A 'Shaft' Prequel? So Says Quentin Tarentino
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Oscar-winning sound editor Mike Hopkins drowned in an accident while he and friends were rafting in the Tararua Range in northern New Zealand. Hopkins, 53, was found dead by a helicoptor rescue team after an inflatable craft capsized on the Waiohine River on Sunday afternoon, according to The OneRing.net blog. His rafting companions, a man and a woman, survived. Police told the Australian that all three people were wearing life jackets, wetsuits and helmets and it appeared that Hopkins ran into trouble after they were thrown from the craft in a fast flowing current. Hopkins and Ethan Van der Ryn won Academy Awards for Sound Editing on director Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers and King Kong. Hopkins, pictured on left with Van der Ryn, first worked for Jackson as sound designer for the director's 1992 horror-comedy Braindead. It was the first of several collaborations over the next 20 years. Hopkins also worked on Heavenly Creatures as well as The Lord of The Rings trilogy. Hopkins and Van der Ryn were also nominated for sound editing on the first of the Transformers movies. Hopkins was also nominated for five British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards. Hopkins film credits also include ADR or dialogue editor on Public Enemies, Valkyrie, Kung Fu Panda and Dreamgirls. Hopkins is featured in this YouTube video about the sound design for The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers:
Misérables would have thought the stage production limiting, but they weren't charged with taking the longest-running musical, set in 1800s France, and blowing it out to larger-than-life size. In what was described by Working Title producers as a 'deceptively difficult' adaptation, director Tom Hooper assembled a team that included his longtime production designer Eve Stewart and veteran costume designer Paco Delgado to create a factually accurate world, sprinkled with the magic and fantasy of the beloved musical.
little CGI. 'But,' says Stewart, who was nominated for an Oscar for Hooper's The King's Speech, as well as 1999's Topsy-Turvy, 'new ideas are usually the best ones,' so the constraints didn't narrow her scope as she scouted locations for 20 weeks. She eventually settled on a pristine mountain range in the south of France; the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in England (where the HMS Victory is moored); an 18th-century rope factory in Kent (the timbers of which were so old that the crew was barred from lighting candles, so imitation flickering lights had to be used); the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich; the River Avon in Bath; as well as a set crafted at Pinewood Studios in London. In each location, Stewart's crew had to eliminate squeaky floorboards and door hinges, and horses had to be fitted with rubberized hooves. The only location Stewart didn't have to adapt was Boughton House in Northamptonshire, which dates back to the 17th century and is dubbed the 'English Versailles,' where the wedding scene was filmed.
For the set, Stewart incorporated elements of a shipyard, bringing in nine tons of seaweed along with sacks of mackerel and hake that arrived straight from the wharf at 2 a.m. every day so that even the smell was authentic. 'Everything with Tom is factual realism,' Stewart says, 'and then, after that's established, we can amplify and tweak upward.'
TV ad, and was the costume designer for the Oscar-nominated Biutiful and Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education and The Skin I Live In'had to 'mar' his designs, creating 1,500 new costumes (out of a total of more than 2,000), which he then set about destroying with mud, grease, and blowtorches. 'Paris was so poverty-stricken at that time,' Delgado explains, 'and there was an amazing secondhand market where clothes were sold and resold and resold again until they were rags. It shocked me to learn that most poor people didn't have any shoes.'
Hooper and Delgado discussed a leitmotif, so Delgado evoked the colors of the French flag throughout, using blue costumes in the early factory scene, then red for the revolution, and then moving to white for the wedding and nunnery scenes. Delgado also altered the clothes to reflect the characters' states, airbrushing shadows onto Fantine's dress to enhance her wasted frame as she grew close to death, and then moving to the opposite extreme of padding Jean Valjean's (Hugh Jackman) suits as his wealth and standing grew.
classics like Oklahoma!, won a Tony on Broadway as Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, an Emmy for hosting the Tonys, and worldwide recognition for his singing and dancing as host of the Oscars. He recently did a one-man musical show on 
Broadway, and that's one of the reasons he says he is even in Les Misérables and making his long-overdue debut as star of a musical on the big screen.
and talented, I understand everybody auditioned for it.
holiday box office reveals blockbuster successes and epic fails. For now MGM/New Line/Warner Bros' The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey crossed $200M domestic in 15 nights Friday on its way to $225M. Overseas, Peter Jackson's Middle Earth epic playing in 62 territories has an international cume of roughly $400M going into Sunday. That's about $600M worldwide and still climbing. Surprisingly, Working Title/Universal's Les Misérables placed behind Quentin Tarantino's controversial Django Unchained from The Weinstein Company, quite a feat for an R-rated pic. 'We are having a really big day on Django!' a TWC exec gushes to me Saturday. 'From what I can tell, it looks like we will be very close to Hobbit.' Yowza! Meanwhile, Tom Hooper's musical slips to #3 but crossed $100 million worldwide Saturday in 9 days. Playing this weekend in 8 international territories ' Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Hungary and Spain ' its overseas gross is $36.6M going into Sunday. Combined with the expected U.S. total of $67M, the worldwide cume should be $115+M by then. And Sony Picures' platforming Zero Dark Thirty made another $325K this weekend with a $65K per screen average for a $1.4M cume from just 5 theaters. Here are the Top Ten films based on weekend estimates:
Matt Damon and Gus Van Sant collaborate on their third project together, Promised Land, headlining the holiday weekend's specialty releases and the final round of newcomers for 2012. Van Sant came in as director after Damon tapped him to spearhead the film, which is set in small town Pennsylvania. Also headed to theaters is Sony Pictures Classics' West Of Memphis, the latest film centered on the so-called Memphis Three who many believe were wrongly convicted of a grisly murder in a notorious miscarriage of justice. The military takes the spotlight in Allegiance with Aidan Quinn and Bow Wow, which opens via XLrator Media and Adopt Films opens its foreign-language Berlin '12 pick-up Tabu.
Promised Land
West Of Memphis
Allegiance
Tabu
When Walter Parkes and his wife and partner Laurie MacDonald read the first 40 pages of John Gatins' script for Flight in 2006, the adult drama about a substance-abusing airline pilot piqued their interest. The dark, character-driven story hearkened back to the type of films the major studios used to make on a regular basis. Neither Parkes nor MacDonald envisioned a high-wattage actor like Denzel Washington taking on the role ' not only was Washington way out of the price range of a film that needed to be made on a modest budget, their main character worked in a field with few African-American pilots. Nevertheless, once the script made its way to Washington's agent, the late Ed Limato, the actor read it and was hooked, according to Parkes. 'The excellence of a project is no longer enough to get it made: It's a combination of the quality of the material, the quality of the people making it, and, honestly, the financial circumstance under 
which the movie is made,' says Parkes, who points out that Washington's enthusiasm (and, well, severe price cut) helped push Flight to the finish line. Parkes recently spoke with AwardsLine about how it all came together.
movie where everybody's going to get paid their full rate,' and he said, 'It's a great role, though; it's a great movie. Let's see if it can get done.' But still we went through probably a good year having different conversations with different directors. There was a moment there where John Gatins himself was being considered as the director, and Denzel was open to it, but I think for that role he felt that he needed a more experienced hand behind the camera. But it was all done in the very positive way of, 'How can we make this work?' I had never thought that Bob (Zemeckis) would do this small of a movie, (but) it suddenly began to make sense because he's a pilot, and he was inspired by the screenplay. Once that happened, it felt like we were finally going to make the movie. Even so, there were still fairly stringent financial circumstances that had to be met in order for the movie to be officially greenlit. But, luckily, a director as masterful and experienced as Bob can make a movie like Flight for the price that we made it for.
'It's so poorly conceived. When you think about it I probably won't vote this round as it's too much trouble. They had to reset my password as it wasn't taking it. This requires me to write everything down and know where I put it,' said one voter who has a vested interest in the race as they represent a couple of contenders. 'Next year I am signing up for a paper ballot.' This person did email me earlier today to say they finally voted but only after getting TWO security codes via text. The first was incorrect but the second finally worked and enabled them to vote, 'but I'm pissed off about it'.
nominated songwriter Diane Warren had her title song for Silver Linings Playbook ruled ineligible. The song, Silver Linings plays under one scene for about 40 seconds in the film but the Academy's Music peer group committee that decides these things (Warren herself is a member) held a vote recently and decided it wasn't enough to make it eligible. They also ruled another song in the film ineligible for similar reasons and even deep-sixed Danny Elfman's score which comprised about 15 minutes of straight underscore. Apparently the committee felt it was overwhelmed by other elements of the soundtrack, meaning a large number of songs, and wasn't 'substantial' enough. Producers of the film and The Weinstein Company were understandably miffed and Warren says Harvey Weinstein and director David O. Russell even wrote impassioned pleas on her behalf which she read to the music board, but to no avail. 'Their reason is my song wasn't substantial enough in the film, but they don't define what that is. It is a key scene in the film where Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence's characters are rehearsing their big dance. There are 75 songs eligible this year and I can't be one of them?, ' asks Warren. 'If a song says something important, and even if it is only 10 seconds, then it should be eligible. I'm not saying that I should be nominated, I just wanted to be eligible. The music is like a character in the film.'
Warren said she was the one who spoke up a couple of years ago about how ridiculous the music branch's complicated point system of voting was and that changed. She spoke up last year about returning to the ideal of having five songs nominated instead of two or three in recent years and that was changed too, but she doesn't believe her song's exclusion from eligibility was any kind of retribution for being a sqeaky wheel on the committee. She just believes in the tune and its significance for the film. 'I worked harder on this song than any other song in my career. It's the first time I've had a title song in a movie,' she said.
7 Critics Choice Movie Awards, Ben Affleck's Argo is clearly one to watch when Oscar nominations are announced on January 10th. The story, set during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, tells of a top secret CIA mission to rescue six Americans hiding out in the Canadian Embassy in Tehran by passing them off as crew members of a fake Hollywood movie production. The effort was successful and the mission was declassified in 1997 finally allowing all the key players to talk about it for the first time. Producer/Director Affleck stars as Tony Mendez, the CIA operative who hatched the wild scheme. In this exclusive featurette Mendez and the six 'house guests' as they were known, along with the actors who portray them, detail the extraordinary rescue and the movie version that has now earned over $100 million at the box office, with a major re-release reportedly planned by Warner Bros shortly after Oscar nominations are announced. The critically acclaimed October release ironically finds itself competing for Academy attention against another major studio film about a high profile CIA mission set in the mideast, Sony's Zero Dark Thirty which, though winning wide acclaim along with several Best Picture honors from critics groups and showing box office power in its initial limited release, has become a controversial political football and denounced by key Senators and the acting head of the CIA for what they claim is playing with the truth. Because the hunt for Osama bin Laden is still classified and top secret , most of the real people depicted in that film can't talk or even have their actual idenities revealed. In the battle for credibility, always an issue with fact-based movie versions, this gives Argo a distinct advantage in having the real people involved available to tell their story and directly validate the movie, precisely the point of this featurette.
Here's episode 16 of our audio podcast Deadline Big Media With David Lieberman. This week, Deadline Executive Editor Lieberman and host David Bloom ponder what are likely to be some of 2013's biggest questions in the business of Big Media: Are we headed for a fundamental restructuring of the pay-TV business? Will DirecTV and Dish merge? Will Pay-TV providers declare open season on pricey and underperforming channels? Will a cabler get out of the TV programming business altogether? Will there be an Apple TV and what does it mean for Hollywood? And can Netflix corner the streaming video market or will it risk overextending itself?
Gerry Anderson, creator of UK television series Thunderbirds and other marionette and live-action shows, died today in a nursing home near Oxfordshire, England. Anderson had suffered from Alzheimer's since 2010, and his condition had recently worsened significantly, his son Jamie wrote on his website. Anderson was 83. Although Thunderbirds aired for just two seasons on Britain's ITV after debuting in 1965, it became an international sensation. In syndication, the high-tech tales of adventurers rocketing around the world to fight evil-doers became a staple of Saturday morning and weekday afternoon kids programming in the U.S. Anderson's first work with puppets was Granada TV's The Adventures of Twizzle, about a doll that could 'twizzle' his arms and legs to greater lengths. Anderson and his associates developed a technique that became known as Supermarionation. The system used audio signals from recordings of the actors' voices to trigger electronics in the puppets' heads that enabled synchronization of dialogue with the puppets' lip movements. Anderson's other productions included Space: 1999, UFO, The Day After Tomorrow, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, Supercar and Fireball XL5, but he was best known for Thunderbirds. Its success led to two feature films, Thunderbirds Are Go (1966) and Thunderbirds 6 (1967). Anderson was not involved in the 2004 feature Thunderbirds although his ex-wife Sylvia Anderson served as a consultant. That same year, Anderson's Thunderbirds also inspired South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Team America: World Police, which depicts a similar team's efforts to quash terrorists. Celebrities paying tribute on Twitter included comedian Eddie Izzard, who wrote: 'What great creation Thunderbirds was, as it fueled the imagination of a generation.'
Don't write that obituary for film just yet. The traditional moviemaking format remains a vital tool for the top cinematographers in the field, even as digital technology improves and offers exciting possibilities for the future. AwardsLine caught up with the men who shot some of the year's top contenders to talk about how they shot their current films, working with the top directors in the field, and how to make it all come together in the end.
picture of this bunch, Ang Lee's Life of Pi; Wally Pfister, who mixed IMAX and 35mm in wrapping up Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy on The Dark Knight Rises; Rodrigo Prieto, who stitched together multiple formats for Ben Affleck's Argo; Ben Richardson, who relied on 16mm to capture Beasts of the Southern Wild for Benh Zeitlin; and Robert Richardson, who reunited with filmophile Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained.
Claudio Miranda: Ang (Lee) was really interested in 3D. He said, 'I've been really interested in 3D for almost 10 years now. Even before Avatar, I really wanted to see how to bring a new language to cinema.' It had to be digital, because with 3D it had to be really precise.
AwardsLine: Was it a challenge to make different formats work as a cohesive whole when cut together?
Ben Richardson: Working with a director I maybe knew less well, we might have had to cover a lot of ground to find the common ground. But I think we had a fairly solid understanding of each other's wishes off the bat, so our daily conversations in terms of shot lists and shot planning were very much in the realm of an established aesthetic that we both understood.
Prieto: The one that came to my mind is when the houseguests are at the bazaar. I think the cinematography there was using the light to express this feeling of vulnerability, of being scared, and they're overexposed ' the light was several stops overexposed.
AwardsLine: What makes your job easier? What makes it harder?