The Directors and Producers of Six Oscars Shorts Contenders Discuss the Making of Their Films (original) (raw)

Stories that span genres, languages and filmmaking techniques are among the contenders for a nomination for best Oscars short this year.

Director Victoria Warmerdam‘s I’m Not a Robot opens with a familiar experience of a person attempting to successfully respond to a captcha prompt in order to access a website. However, after multiple failed tries, the woman, named Lara, discovers that she is indeed a bot.

“At first it’s such a funny thought, like, ‘What if I’m actually a robot and I find out through a captcha,’ but when I really started writing the script and thinking about it, it’s about the patriarchy and feminism and what if you’re not, in a way, in control of your own body,” Warmerdam said during a taping of THR Presents, powered by Vision Media. “I think that’s, especially now, unfortunately, still such an important topic to talk about. And I think, a genre film like this, when it’s a bit of a sci-fi dark comedy, that’s the perfect vehicle to actually address topics like that.”

Genre was an important element in relaying the message of Bottle George, a stop-motion animation story about addiction told through the eyes of a little girl living with her alcoholic father.

“I was fascinated by this fun idea of a character who is stuck in a bottle of alcohol,” said director Daisuke ‘Dice’ Tsutsumi. “It was initially a children’s book project but over time we said, let’s turn it into a short film. And when I [told producer Akihiro Nishino] that I think there is more to this story that we can dig into, I shared my personal experience, which I believe a lot of people might have, directly or indirectly, of someone close to you who struggles with a problem of addiction… I asked him if he is willing to turn the story into something a little bit more meaningful to a lot of people’s lives. And when I shared that story, Akihiro, too, had a similar personal experience and both of us said, hey, let’s make a short film that is meaningful to our personal lives and hopefully to a lot of people and their lives.

Personal experience is the cornerstone of Ripe!, a coming-of-age lesbian tale about an American girl and a Catalan teen she meets while abroad.

“We were obsessed with this kind of niche genre of a dreamlike romance, like Call Me by Your Name and Before Sunrise, these romance stories that take place in this limited amount of time in a space that feels real but like it’s detached from the world,” said Kerry Furrh, one half of the director duo Tusk. “We hadn’t really seen something like that for lesbians and we wanted to make something.”

To bring that concept to screen, the directors had to unlearn much of what they’d seen in the realm of LGBTQ storytelling, Olivia Mitchell, the other half of Tusk, explained.

“When we first started writing this film, it wasn’t so vibrant. It didn’t have the ending with the joy and the hope that the short has now. We rewrote the script time and time again, kind of like fighting our natural instinct,” she said. “All we really see is lesbian stories ending in pain. It’s so strange because we found ourselves doing that. We had to really sit back and question ourselves and be like, ‘wait a second, we want to write the ending we wish we had when we were 17.’ So we went from a painful story with a painful title to a story that felt a little bit more hopeful and triumphant and changed the title to fit that.”

Conversely, in An Odd Turn, director Francisco Lezama set out to reflect the harshness of Argentine society in the Spanish-language story of a female security guard who uses a pendulum to predict the future, and after receiving a large severance from her job at an art museum, falls in love with an employee of a money changer.

“The concept came from reality,” said Lezama. “This film is about inflation and it is about how inflation affects the possibility of projecting something into the future. It is a film is about the struggles in an economic crisis and how the characters start looping. The actors start doing the same thing over and over, like in Charlie Chaplin comedies or Buster Keaton, they always make the same mistake. There’s not a transformation.”

Transformation, however, is at the core of The Art of Weightlessness, the story of performance artist Bill Shannon, who was born with a degenerative hip, brought to the screen by director Moshe Mahler.

“Initially, I was interested in doing this abstract homage to arcs, which is a principle of animation, because Bill moves in these sweeping arcs, so that would have been interesting enough for me, but we went out for a coffee and kind of had a creative meeting and I was interested in his backstory. How did someone end up so good at using crutches to breakdance or skateboard? It was kind of a question in my mind, and he talked about his evolution from childhood to adult and the evolution of his crutches and from there, it became clear that that was the direction: the storytelling aspect of his backstory.”

In Anaïs, director Hélène Hadjiyianni and producer Shanice Mendy had to figure out how to display a lifechanging chapter of Anaïs Quemener’s story in their documentary on the French distance runner who conquered a stage III triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis in 2015, eight years before they began chronicling her journey.

“It was quite challenging, this part, because I felt like it was really a necessity to speak about it, but how can we speak about something that’s already happened and honor, in a way, everything she went through without falling into something that we would fabricate,” said Hadjiyianni, who explained she decided to approach the retelling with a mix of voiceover and a visual display of Anaïs’s medical records.

“It was a desire to be very cold, as cold as what the files were saying about her treatments every month. And the volcano [imagery], from the beginning to the end, was a reminder and a metaphor of what it’s like when we have chemotherapy inside of our bodies and how it burns the cells, the good ones and the bad ones, and how it creates marks on our bodies. I wanted to try to mix all of that very simply with the voiceover and the images of her skin and her body with marks and scars, because as women it’s something we don’t see very often, and yet it’s something we go through in life, whether it’s with a disease or anything else, we are marked, our bodies too, and I think it’s something we should celebrate deeply. It’s a force.”

For more from the filmmakers, watch the video above.

This edition of THR Presents was brought to you by Mubi (An Odd Turn), Beall Productions (Anais), Chimney Town (Bottle George), Oak Motion Pictures (I’m Not a Robot), Juxtapose Studio (Ripe!) and Carnegie Mellon University (The Art of Weightlessness).