Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/760821
DGA QUARTERLY 67 PHOTOS: (LEFT) DANIEL MCFADDEN; (RIGHT) THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY Braveheart: "I found that I often get better results if I let it process for a while." Melfi says he was "right away smelling and seeing the places in the Jim Crow South where these women in NASA were living and working," when he read the treatment of Margot Lee Shetterly's new book, also titled Hidden Figures. Melfi's comment echoes a similar sentiment by Nichols, whose film dramatizes the same Jim Crow conditions in the same state at the same time (Virginia in the early 1960s). "The sensory power of the place and time were a big part of my inspiration." Like Stone, Hancock is no stranger to the biopic, having captured the dueling creative minds of Walt Disney and author P.L. Travers during the making of Mary Poppins in Saving Mr. Banks. "Here with Kroc," he says, "you have a similar battle of wills between him and the McDonalds. You're really pulling for Ray for a while, and then you start realizing what he's doing to make an empire, and you're not so sure—sort of Horatio Alger leading to something much darker." Han- cock describes The Founder as "a movie that ties together big ideas about America, capitalism and human nature in one true story, and that's pretty nearly irresistible." W H A T A U D I E N C E S — a n d fact-obsessed observers like jour- nalists—often don't understand about moviemaking is that direc- tors are in the business of height- ening the words on the script's page. This is compounded in the biopic, since directors must also heighten the biographical facts. It may mean, in the case of Nair directing Queen of Katwe, that "Phiona's very poor mother is seen treasuring her one nice dress, but is then seen selling it to buy paraf- fin for their one household lamp so Phiona could study at night. This was invented, but was emotionally true." Stone directs the climactic scene of Snowden for explicitly height- ened tension: "When Ed finally copied the key files that were ulti- mately leaked to the press and created such a worldwide sensation, he actually did it very quietly and with no drama at all. We conflated this with another crisis involving Syria that actually happened at a dif- ferent point in time. Putting the two together didn't in fact happen, but it makes for a much better scene." Melfi has a favorite example of such creative license, in a scene in which Al Harrison, the head of NASA's launch division (a fictionally composited role played by Kevin Costner), wields a sledgehammer to knock down a sign designating a NASA campus bathroom for "colored women only." "To have Al, a no-nonsense white guy, knock down that sign is the kind of movie scene that you want and need when telling a basically true story," explains Melfi. "Most likely, a janitor was told to take it down. But where's the fun in that? You want to see the last character you're expecting to do something that's surprising. Plus, it combines drama with comedy, which is something I'm always after." Sometimes for a director, the simplest shot gets at the essence of an actual person's life. Nichols found this in a subtle POV cutaway shot, when the Loving family flees their country troubles for the urban streets of D.C. "Mildred looks at the sidewalk, and she sees a little tree in a small patch of ground around concrete," recounts Nichols. "We debated keeping this cutaway in the final edit—is it too weird?— but I realized that this shot is what she's about. She's about the land, grow- ing on it. It's those moments that you try to get in your film." ® E N T R E P R E N E U R : Above, John Lee Hancock orchestrates a scene from The Founder with his leading player, Michael Keaton, who plays McDonald's kingpin Ray Kroc; right, a scene from the film. Dramatic License