To get into the mood for tonight’s Academy Awards presentation, here are recent comments by a few of this year’s nominees and some past winners:
Although she was absolutely radiant in a Chanel Couture dress embellished with crystals and sequins, Julianne Moore—nominated for best actress in a leading role for her performance in Still Alice and considered a likely winner (this is the fifth time she’s received a nomination)—jokingly discussed her mortality at a recent salute to her career by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
After being lauded on video by her The Kids Are All Right co-star Mark Ruffalo, and in person by luminaries ranging from Ellen Barkin and Billy Crudup to Ethan Hawke, Steve Buscemi and her husband, director Bart Freundlich, Moore kidded, “This is not something I ever expected to happen to me—certainly not while I was alive to see it. I received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last year, and I made a lot of jokes to my family, and to anyone else who would listen, about how I don’t need a tombstone. Now I feel like I don’t need a memorial service, either. Thank you. You’ve saved my family a lot of money.”
Previous honorees celebrated by the museum include Tom Hanks, Hugh Jackman, Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman, Sidney Poitier, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
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In a recent conversation at the 92nd Street Y in New York with Annette Insdorf, director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University, Pawel Pawlikowski, director and co-writer of Ida--nominated for best foreign language film and the story of a young novice who discovers in 1962 Poland that she is the daughter of Jews slaughtered during World War II, after meeting her aunt, a former state prosecutor and participant in the Communist government’s early 1950’s show trails--said that he had discovered Agata Trzebuchowska, who portrays the novice, after searching “months and months,” through a friend who had seen her in a Warsaw café and sent him her photo.
“She looked nothing like what I was looking for, a typical Warsaw hipster” and she was not an actor, he said, adding that she is a “total atheist” and “basically strong” in person.
Trzebuchowska, he added, “is really intelligent. She asked all the right questions about her character.” He also said she is “not interested in acting. She’s really interested in the process, really interested in documentaries.”
Discussing his use of black and white film and an Alexa 4:3 camera to make Ida, Pawlikowski said “the idea was to suggest as much as possible by showing as little as possible. I wanted to keep a balance between the performance and image, so the image was not there for its own sake.”
Pawlikowski, who lives in the U.K., also said the character of the aunt was inspired, in part, by the wife of one of his professors at Oxford, who he said was “lovely,” though rumored to have been in the Communist underground and to have done “all sorts of unsavory things.”
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Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino was joined by Academy Award-winning director Barry Levinson in another recent conversation at the 92nd Street Y to discuss The Humbling, a new film, based on a Philip Roth novel, about an aging actor grappling with his decline.
Pacino said he saw Roth—whose work he said he’s “loved forever”—at a party, approached him, and said to him, “’I’m really so enamored with (the book). We’re going to do it as a movie, it can be so funny.’ As I said funny, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me and simply said, ‘It’s not funny.’”
Levinson characterized the film as a “real departure in that regard from the book. We evolved it into what you see on the screen.”
“We thought we’d lend a buoyancy to it, make the dark stuff more palatable,” Pacino added.
Pacino also said he got the idea for his legendary “hooah” call from his Academy Award-winning portrayal of a blind lieutenant colonel in Scent of a Woman from a lieutenant colonel “who came up to my office every other day” to help him assemble and disassemble a 45 gun as if he were blind.
“When it started to work a little, he'd go, ‘Hooah.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He says, ‘With the troops, when they line up and they do something, I’d go hooah.’”
“That’s going somewhere, man. I said, ‘Thank you very much.’”
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Academy Award-winning director and actor Kevin Costner spoke at the 92nd St. Y recently about his new film, Black or White, for which he was a producer and in which he stars as a grieving widower fighting for custody of his biracial granddaughter.
Costner said he “made it because I believed it could move people. . . Sometimes you make a movie about the moment you’re swimming in. I thought the screenplay was incredibly even. It’s a very even-handed movie.”
Costner said the film's screenplay by Mike Blinder, who was also its director, was inspired, in part, by the life of Blinder's sister, who died of AIDS contracted from a bad blood transfusion and had a biracial baby whose “father was not in his life. Mike and his wife raised the boy, who’s now 34 years old. He’s loved by both families.”
Although Costner directed and starred in Dances with Wolves—winning Oscars for both and also for best film—he said he was "really happy when the director comes every day. I was really happy with Mike directing this.”
Asked how he felt about giving up his matinee-idol image in Black or White—in which he portrays a paunchy, middle-aged, alcoholic lawyer—Costner said, “You do have to give it up. And it’s OK to do that. I have had my day.”
