Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/760821
64 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: (TOP) MARK ROGERS; (BOTTOM) BEN ROTHSTEIN/FOCUS FEATURES (2) RUNNING EVEN more c o u n t e r t o t h e c o n - ventional notions of natural movie material, especially from a direc- tor's perspective, is how several of these films detail the workings of keen intellects often op- erating outside the bounds of societal norms. Oliver Stone, director of Snowden, about CIA whistleblower and pariah Edward Snowden, observes that "when you're dealing with a story that involves a guy who basically works at a computer all day, you have to find a way to find compelling images. There are things that computers do that you can't show. Cyber-warfare, the kind that Ed Snowden found himself involved in, is something you can't see." The solution? "You train in on the characters' faces, and see how they respond to information, and then how they process that as hu- man beings." Director Theodore Melfi landed on a similar solution for Hidden Figures, but with several variations. The title is a pun, referring both to the phenomenon of hidden figures in higher math, and how NASA's earliest manned space missions were crucially af- fected by the work of such black women as math whiz Johnson, who solved the critical problems of spaceship entry and re-entry. "She fills a chalkboard full of formulas that almost nobody in the audience can possibly understand," Melfi says. "But we get the mean- ing of Katherine's breakthroughs in the ways that her colleagues re- act. Sometimes, I wanted to just hold on a shot of her numbers and formulas just to get a sense of the enormity of her mind working away, or cutting quickly when she's rushing to get numbers out, the speed at which her mind could work." Like Snowden, Vaughan also dealt with computers, but hers was the massive, early-'60s version of the IBM computer that filled a room. "It's really easier to film than our current generation of micro- computers. You can really stage scenes that fill the screen, and you can move." With Phiona Mutesi in Queen of Katwe, director Mira Nair had to confront the matter of making the fairly abstract game of chess visual, and visceral. "I always start from the groundwork of cinéma vérité, a cinema based in reality. I live in Kampala, where Phiona's Katwe neighborhood is located, so I knew this place, and explored it with her and her mother, as if we were making a documentary. The chess was something I had to learn, and Phiona taught me. Her lines to me, like 'Mira, you must consider the other side of the board,' were put into the script, because it quickly helped explain the thinking be- hind the game so well. I wanted to create a prismatic story, told from various characters to indicate that it takes a village to foster a genius like Phiona." Jeff Nichols wrote and directed Loving with certain key physical images in mind—images that became touchstones for his storytell- ing. A filmmaker fascinated with characters in large, usually rural, Southern landscapes, Nichols nevertheless keyed in on an opening image that he felt unlocked the rest of the amazing true story of an interracial couple. "Since Richard and Mildred knew each other from childhood," Nichols says, "the first challenge was how to start the thing, since I didn't want to fall in the trap of telling their whole life story. I learned in my research that Mildred was pregnant before they married. One night, watching my brother's band on stage, her first line came to me: 'I'm pregnant.' I start close on her, we see that she's black and she seems kind. Then, I'm close on him, a white guy, and we're not so sure: He has bad teeth, has a haircut like a guy in the Klan. And his smile emerges, he tries to cover his bad teeth, and they embrace, and their foreheads touch. At that point, I felt, I'm off to the races." Nichols' subtle approach to this tender relationship—which nev- ertheless causes a fierce and nearly violent response in their Jim Crow-era Virginia community—finds visual echoes in two other key dramatic moments: "I have them embrace and their foreheads touch when Richard slips back to her family home after they're legally barred from seeing each other, and then a third time when they're sit- ting in front of the press after the Supreme Court rules in their favor, striking down anti-miscegenation laws in several states. It's maybe more interesting than a kiss." John Lee Hancock's visual conception for the saga of McDonald's fast-food mastermind Ray Kroc in The Founder stemmed from his need to create an actually functioning restaurant "from the ground up. Kroc (played by Michael Keaton) encounters this super-efficient, super-fast-food operation at a burger stand in San Bernardino, owned by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald. He's just wowed by it, and we have to be too. It was absolutely crucial that we got that visu- ally, physically right, because then we can understand how Ray gets the lightbulb idea of turning their operation into a franchise opera- tion and an empire." The re-creation of the original McDonald's store for production went to such extremes that the local officials in Geor- gia (where shooting took place) required the production to present building permits—as if it were a permanent structure, even though it was made only for the movie. N O T H I N G C O U L D B E M O R E visu- ally different from the inner worlds of Hidden Figures, Snowden or Queen of Katwe than the bloody battlefields of Okinawa near the end of World War II, and director Mel Gibson knew the key to understanding the depth of Doss' character in Hacksaw Ridge: "The real battlefield was described as 'a river of blood' by the veterans who survived it. "Over 370,000 were killed in less than 10 weeks. There was such an extreme level of death we knew we couldn't convey it. But it was essential to stage the closest thing we could to the hell of war to en- able audiences to understand what it took for a man to go in there without a weapon [Doss renounced all use of weapons, working as a medic in the Army] and to fearlessly rescue his brothers in arms. We had to stage an experience that would reduce most men to animals, and then see this individual maintain his equilibrium." Most of these directors didn't originate their projects, but once they learned about the stories they say they quickly saw movies in their heads. Gibson notes it took him some time to jump on board with the script by Robert Schenkkan, known for his masterful epic play The Kentucky Cycle, but that he had done the same thing with Visualizing the Abstract The Big Picture