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Noah interview round-up: Oscar buzz, lessons learned, musical links between Aronofsky’s films, and more

Noah interview round-up: Oscar buzz, lessons learned, musical links between Aronofsky’s films, and more

Last updated on: December 15, 2014 at 10:01 pm by Peter T. Chattaway

Noah interview round-up: Oscar buzz, lessons learned, musical links between Aronofsky’s films, and more 2014-12-15T22:01:27-08:00 Peter T. Chattaway

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As far as I can tell, there have been three times in the Academy’s history when it nominated two different Bible movies for Oscars in the same year: in 1951, when Quo Vadis and David and Bathsheba received over a dozen nominations combined (neither film won anything); in 1959, when Ben-Hur won a record-setting 11 awards and The Big Fisherman also scored a few nominations; and in 1966, when arthouse favorite The Gospel According to St. Matthew received three nominations while the big-budget film The Bible: In the Beginning… received just one.

Could it happen again this year? It’s a sign of how strong the Bible-movie revival is right now that Oscar buzz has followed both of the year’s major entries in that genre. Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings comes out in December, right in the thick of awards season, and while it might not be a front-runner just yet, no one can forget how, the last time Scott made an ancient epic (i.e. Gladiator), it won Best Picture. And then there is Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

There was some Oscar buzz when Noah first came out in March, but that was seven months ago. Now the film’s publicists are working to reintroduce the film into the awards-season discussion — arranging interviews with key creative personnel, hosting screenings of the film followed by Q&As with the filmmakers, and so on.

The ball started rolling last week when Patti Smith gave a few interviews to discuss her work on the film’s theme song, ‘Mercy Is’. Then, on Friday night, Aronofsky took part in a post-screening Q&A with sound mixers Craig Henighan and Skip Lievsay.

Since then, Aronofsky has done award-themed interviews with Oscar pundits like Kristopher Tapley at Hitfix and Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere.

It doesn’t sound like Aronofsky or anyone else expects the film to win Best Picture or anything like that. But Aronofsky has said he hopes the Academy will recognize some of the talent who worked on it, such as production designer Mark Friedberg, who designed the film’s massive Ark, as well as cinematographer Matthew Libatique, costume designer Mike Wilkinson, composer Clint Mansell and others.

In a non-awards vein, Aronofsky also spoke to IndieWire this week about how he is still “processing” the various reactions to his film:

Speaking of “Noah,” which was an incredible film that elicited some really strong and very mixed responses, and then went on to be this huge box office success in the U.S. and internationally, what did you learn from that experience? The reception of the film, did that go at all like you expected?

It was strange because I’m still learning from it. And I think the studio which has done this many times is learning from it. It was a very very different experience for everyone involved. And things didn’t play out in any way that was expected or seen before. And that happened with the making of the film as well as the release of the film. So I’m still processing to be honest about it all. There were a lot of vocal people who had a lot of different opinions. It didn’t matter if you were a believer or a non-believer or a filmgoer, the reactions were really really varied. But I think I get that on all my movies. This was just on a much bigger scale, and because when you’re working on a title that has a lot of preconceptions to it, it just magnified it. But I think if you look at everything I’ve done before, the reactions are always all over the map. For me that’s what’s exciting is having discussion.

A big goal for me was to take this Bible story, which really belongs — it’s one of humanity’s oldest stories and it belongs to not just the three main religions that subscribe to it but it belongs to everyone on the planet because it’s one of the great antiquities, one of the great treasures, one of the great literary works, like “Ulysses,” like “The Odyssey.” So taking that kind of source material and translating it to the big screen for the first time was to hopefully present it in a way that belonged to everyone, not just one group. And I think that suddenly a lot of the groups that had felt they had ownership of it got very disturbed by that. I think that was going to happen because the exercise itself was to say this is a mythology that belongs to everyone and anyone can take these stories and interpret it to make meaning out of their life, out of their experiences, and out of the world like we do with all myths. Sort of like you take the story of Icarus and apply it to “don’t have too much hubris.” There are great messages in these ancient myths that can apply to us and the reason we’ve been telling these stories over and over again is because they’re so rich with ideas that can apply to us.

Would you be inspired to return to those old stories in the Bible to adapt something else?

Look, I think they’re such great, powerful stories and I think…most of my films reference parts of the Bible so I imagine it will be a source of inspiration for a long time.

In related news, Tapley also interviewed Clint Mansell last week. An excerpt:

. . . unlike “Black Swan” or “The Wrestler,” which had music that went in completely different directions, the “Noah” score feels like it’s working from a similar emotional spectrum to “The Fountain.”

Yes, very much so, to be honest. I don’t know whether we’ll ever get an opportunity to do part three but I feel that it’s there somewhere. I mean there are sort of musical phrases, whilst not the same, but are related to stuff from “The Fountain,” and that was a very conscious choice, really. It felt of that world, you know? And yeah it would be cool to see if there was a third element.

You favor strings a lot in your compositions, I’ve noticed. Why is that?

To me they’re so emotive, really, and I think the thing with “Noah” was it’s sort of difficult to totally place them, whereas I think if you hear piano on the film score, it has a certain thing about it. There are so many sort of textural things you can do with strings, from being emotive to being jarring to being, you know, atonal. It feels like you’ve got quite a palette to play with.

Meanwhile, in a completely non-awards-oriented context, The Wrap spoke a couple weeks ago to Marton Csokas, a New Zealander who has appeared in several films this year including Noah, where he played the title character’s father, Lamech:

And what about “Noah?” What was it like working with Darren Aronofsky?
My time was brief. We shot that in Iceland and I had a blast. Darren is very particular in the casting process, so it was quite a long journey. I didn’t know what he was going to be like on set, but I found him very present and easy to work with. I didn’t have anything to do with Russell [Crowe] directly but I studied some of his physical mannerisms, since I was playing his father.

Finally, last week Ray Winstone discussed his career at a BAFTA event in London, and he had this to say about his character in Noah:

When it came to his villainous character Tubal-cain, matched opposite Russell Crowe in Noah, Winstone had an interesting take. “I actually thought I was the good guy in that,” Winstone said. “My character wants to save the human race. Noah just wanted to save the animals.”

As for why he finds himself attracted to playing gangsters and bad guys, Winstone had the perfect answer: “There’s a bit of bad guy in all of us.”

If I find any other awards-season interviews, I will add them to this post.

November 29 update: Noah’s Michael Wilkinson is one of the costumer designers profiled in a new Oscar-themed Hollywood Reporter article:

The directive Darren Aronofsky gave to Wilkinson on the antediluvian epic starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly and Anthony Hopkins was: "No robes. No sandals." Recalls the costume designer, "The challenge was the inherent ambiguity about whether the film takes place 5,000 years in the past or 5,000 years into the future."

Wilkinson designed mix-and-match pieces from rough, raw textiles, a style he calls "modern primitive." He says, "For Noah, everything was knit, woven, distressed, aged, dyed and boiled by hand." Utilitarian silhouettes were distinguished by touches of high-tech outdoor gear, cowl-neck scarves and black vinyl hoods. Subliminal clues of chronological ambiguity were woven in, from plastic straws to loose cassette tape, which Wilkinson felt could have survived the apocalypse.

Examined closely, some costumes look similar to the work of Martin Margiela, an avant-garde designer Wilkinson long has admired. That was intentional: "We wanted to create something that today's audiences could relate to," he says.

There are two groups in the film with differing worldviews. Noah's nomadic, vegan survivalists colored their clothes with berry dyes, while the marauders led by Tubal-cain sported bones, skins, feathers, even horse tails to display dominance over beasts. One of Wilkinson's favorite costumes stands apart: Hopkins' Methuselah. "We laminated a silver fabric, scraped it away, painted then cracked it. It looked as if he had become one with his costume and the costume was becoming one with his cave."

Aronofsky also spoke to Variety a few weeks ago about the work that cinematographer Matthew Libatique, production designer Mark Friedberg, editor Andrew Weisblum, visual effects supervisor Dan Schrecker, composer Clint Mansell and songwriter Patti Smith contributed to the film, again with an eye towards the Oscars.

December 1 update: Aronofsky spoke to Gold Derby, the awards prognostication website, about the film’s Oscar-worthy merits (the production design, etc.):

December 5 update: I forgot to link to this article that Deadline posted last week on the film’s visual effects (the article also looks at Exodus: Gods and Kings):

For Noah, VFX supervisor Ben Snow took his cues from two orders on high: the book of Genesis and Darren Aronofsky.

The Bible part was pretty straightforward. The flood narrative takes up only three chapters of Genesis but gets specific about the boat: It’s to be 450 feet long, 50 feet wide and 30 feet high, with three decks and a side entrance.

Aronofsky’s vision was less detailed. The director, whose visual feasts include Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, was not a fan of classic sword-and-sandal filmmaking.

“Part of the challenge was meeting Darren’s vision of visual fury,” Snow says. “From the start, he said, ‘I don’t want to make your father’s Bible movie. I want to reinvent the Bible movie for the modern audience.’ He didn’t want Noah on a boat with two giraffes sticking out the back. He wanted to tweak the world, which gives you a lot of room to get creative.”

For Noah, Aronofsky and Snow combed over dozens of religious paintings to get a sense of the iconography of the period. “It’s not like other special effects, because most people already have their own visions of what things should look like,” Snow says. Religious-themed films require “an integration of faith you don’t have to worry about in other movies.”

So Snow began by establishing a historical foundation from which audiences could leap, employing sets so large they would have made Cecil B. DeMille proud. . . .

Alas, the Academy revealed today that Noah is not on the visual-effects shortlist, and will thus not be nominated for an Oscar in that category come January 15.

December 12 update: Cinematographer Matthew Libatique did a brief interview with Variety, which I have added to my Libatique interview round-up.

December 15 update: The film made the makeup & hairstyling shortlist.

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