EPISODE 910: OF EWOKS, JOKES TO COME, AND THE PEEPING TOM DANCE COMPANY
9 STORIES OF 2024'S OSCAR NOMINEES
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow. I’m Jim McDermott, the guy who didn’t just lose this year’s Oscar pool, he got driven out of the party.
Seriously, y’all, by halfway through the night I felt like this:
In honor of the Oscars, I went digging for anecdotes and quotes from nominees that you might not already have heard. Enjoy!
WE HAVE THE EWOKS TO THANK FOR LILY GLADSTONE
When Killers of the Flower Moon Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone was 5 years old, she got to see Return of the Jedi for the first time. As they watched her parents were concerned about some of the violence in the film, particularly one scene where two Ewoks getting blasted, and only one gets back up.
(It actually is so sad!)
As a way of trying to protect her from all that, her parents told her that in fact the Ewoks were not real creatures, they were actors in costume who were just playing dead.
For Gladstone, who adored the Ewoks, this explanation was a funny kind of revelation. “If I want to be an Ewok,” she concluded, “I gotta be an actor.”
Gladstone has also described in beautiful language what it is to be from Montana.
Montanans are infused with landscape. You can sit in a landscape for hours and disappear. You can be part of the quiet. Or you hear the songs of the wind. I remember being hollowed out by the whistle of the wind as a kid. You were at the whim of your landscape and had to live with it
EDITOR JENNIFER LAME LOVES PEOPLE TALKING IN ROOMS
Oscar-winning editor Jennifer Lame got her start doing editing on films for Noah Baumbach. Her favorite thing to edit, she says, is the material most editors hate, namely “people talking in rooms.” So dedicated is she to people-in-rooms scenes, in fact, when she got hired by Christopher Nolan to do editing on the action-heavy Tenet, she could only get her head around it by thinking of it all as dialogue.
“I started having to just imagine the cars in these big action sequences as people,” she says, “giving each car a personality, and have them talk to each other; basically, treating them like dialogue scenes because I think dialogue scenes are that exciting, if that makes sense.)”
Talking about this famous argument scene from Marriage Story, she said, “It has to feel as thrilling as a car chase, because otherwise, it's just another fight scene in a movie that people are going to tune out.”
CELINE SONG’S ADVICE FOR WRITERS
Past Lives writer/director Celine Song made her directing debuting with the film. And she had this to say about doing table reads of her work:
I really don’t personally ever invite actors to the reading of my first draft. Because actors can make the script sound a lot better than it is. And we love actors and reply on them so much, but I think sometimes what happens is the actors are also auditioning for the role when they’re reading it, and that’s undo pressure on the script. So I think the performance part of it is not necessarily valuable for a script, because what you need from that reading is objectivity. What you need from that reading is the way that story and the writing itself is hitting the first very small audience. I usually invite fellow writers or people who are not in the industry, but are able to read on site. . . .You just want to see the way the script is hitting them live, because that’s where you’re going to learn if the script is working.
WHY I LOVE PAUL GIAMATTI
Holdovers star Paul Giamatti’s father was the president of Yale and the Commissioner of Major League Baseball—in fact he was the one who banned Pete Rose from baseball.
As a kid, Paul found himself fascinated with umpires. “I don’t think it had anything to do with their authority. It was more a fascination with the appearance of the home-plate umps. They wear those old-school chest protectors and the mask and they’re always dressed in black.…There’s something weirdly sinister about those cats.”
His interest in umpires has unexpected relevance to his dramatic choices. “I’ve always been drawn to the ancillary supporting players in drama. If you look at a game of baseball as a narrative of some kind, the umps are the bit players. They’re the character actors. In almost any situation, I’m invariably interested in the people that nobody pays much attention to."
THE REAL STORY BEHIND “MURDER ON THE DANCEFLOOR”
Despite the fact that everyone saw it and no one can stop talking about it, Saltburn got no love from the Academy this year, not even for its end song “Murder on the Dancefloor,” which catapulted singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor into super stardom.
The funny thing is, the term “Murder on the Dancefloor” did not in fact mean anything when writer Gregg Alexander first wrote it down. He had been hoping to go clubbing, but his car wouldn’t start. So he started instead to noodle around with a guitar, found a melody he liked, and then made up some words to go with it, something that could be fixed later. (In the comedy writing version of this, you often put “JTC”: Joke to Come.) But then that lyric just stuck.
Ellis-Bextor did concerts from her home during the pandemic, called “Kitchen Disco.” Here’s a link to the section of one in which she and her family sing and dance to “Murder.” It’s pretty wonderful.
YORGOS LANTHIMOS LOVES TO PLAY
When Poor Things Oscar-winner Emma Stone auditioned for The Favourite, Oscar-nominated director Yorgos Lanthimos had her say her lines while she panted, as though she were going into labor. Co-star Nicholas Hoult was asked to hum through his scene partners lines, and to imagine there were force fields in the room that he could mold into different shapes.
Lanthimos’ unusual practices extend into rehearsals, as well. Before shooting scenes from The Favourite, Olivia Colman was asked to do her lines while doing log rolls and walking backwards. On Poor Things, Mark Ruffalo was given cues like “Check out the Peeping Tom dance company out of Belgium.” The power of this theater-games approach to rehearsal was only clear later. “We knew each other so well by the time we start filming,” Colman said. “There's no embarrassment, there are no inhibitions.”
BILLIE EILISH WONDERS WHAT SHE WAS MADE FOR
When Eilish got the job to write a song for Barbie, she was deep in a writing slump. Nothing was working.
But as soon as she took the job, the ideas started pouring out of Eilish and her brother, songwriter Finneas O’Connnell.
“It was as if this song was a tiny creature inside of me for years, scratching the inside of me. As soon as we got that prompt, the creature was like, ‘Okay, I’m out.’”
What suprised her more after she’d written the song was just how personal it was. “This is exactly how I feel and I didn’t even mean to be saying it. I absolutely was writing about myself and I was thinking about myself from a third person and I was thinking about myself objectively, which also made me feel really connected to her [and] me.”
The music video, which Eilish directed, stars her as a Barbie-esque character trying to take care of all her old pop star outfits in the midst of a series of natural disasters. Says Eilish, “The world is falling apart as I’m trying to keep these old versions of myself safe.”
CORD JEFFERSON PERSEVERES
American Fiction writer/director Cord Jefferson has amassed a pretty fantastic resume of work in a relatively short period of time. He wrote on The Good Place, won an Emmy for his writing on Watchmen, wrote on Station Eleven. And now he’s got an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for American Fiction.
Fiction stars Jeffrey Wright as a Black writer who finds his work being ignored in favor of hot young Black writers who are willing to lean into stereotypical tropes of Black life. Said Jefferson of the work:
There is a limited perception of what Black life looks like. People want you to stay within those confines….There’s gonna be a lot of people asking you to do things that you don’t want to do for money. Perseverance has always been the key for me when it comes to combating those kinds of rigid structures.
BARBIE’S SARAH GREENWOOD CREATES “GLORIOIUS FAKENESS”
In imagining how to create Barbie’s Dreamhouse (and world), Production Designer Sarah Greenwood and Set Designer Kate Spencer literally bought a Barbie Dreamhouse, and tried to learn as much as they could from it.
Like, for instance, says Greenwood, “What was fascinating was that Barbie doesn't fit —be it the car or the house. She's always too big.” To recreate that effect, they built the sets 23% smaller than human size (including Barbie’s car). On the one hand that made the characters look bigger in their environment, which should have made them seem more powerful. But it also became a way of showing how Barbie had in a sense outgrown her world. It literally didn’t fit her any more.
Greenwood also noted that there’s no water in Barbie Land, nor any stairs or light source. They built their Barbie Land to have exactly that same feeling of “glorious fakeness.”
I’ll be back on Wednesday for another little Lenten spiritual experience. Have a great week!
Oh goodness - I had forgotten how achingly brilliant Marriage Story was.