Here’s the latest Hollywood joke. Angelina Jolie was so determined to snag the role of Mariane Pearl, the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in the film A Mighty Heart that she was even prepared to sleep with the film’s producer ... Brad Pitt. A Mighty Heart was developed by Plan B, the production company Pitt and his former wife, Jennifer Aniston, had together until Ms Jolie appeared on the scene. Aniston got the house in the divorce; Pitt got Plan B, the movie projects and Ms Jolie.
Nobody in Hollywood is surprised that Jolie sees the film, based on Mariane Pearl’s book about the murder of her husband by Islamic extremists in Pakistan, as a great chance to win an Oscar for best actress. As Jolie and her agents well know, A Mighty Heart, which is now shooting in India with Michael Winterbottom directing, is just the kind of film the Academy has come to love. Jolie will be hoping that around this time next year, when the first DVDs are going out to Oscar voters, A Mighty Heart will be generating the kind of headline-grabbing, Oscar-enticing controversy that Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest, is now getting.
Blood Diamond, about the trade that has helped finance some of Africa’s most brutal civil wars, has the diamond industry hopping mad. Which is just great for DiCaprio’s Oscar chances. Terrified that people won’t buy diamonds this Christmas when the film comes out, the normally shadowy top executives of De Beers, the world’s largest diamond company, have been making uncharacteristic public appearances, insisting the trade in so-called “blood diamonds” has been halted. Protests which, someone should have told them, are all grist to the Oscar mill.
Nothing makes Academy members feel better about themselves than voting for movies that take politically correct stances against big multinational companies where the issues of right and wrong can be laid out in vivid, blood-spattered images on the big screen. Rachel Weisz got the best supporting actress Oscar earlier this year for the political drama The Constant Gardener, an attack on the ill deeds of pharmaceutical companies in Africa. And Syriana, which took on the oil industry, brought George Clooney a best supporting actor Oscar, despite having a narrative so nonsensical that even Edward Lear couldn’t have deciphered it.
Still, who can blame Hollywood actors if they choose roles based on real people or characters that explore real issues? According to Emanuel Levy, author of All About Oscar, nearly 35% of Oscar-winning movies have been about real people or, as Hollywood likes to say, “based on a true story”, or have been “inspired by real events”, a catch-all which includes films such as Titanic.
Biopics were distinctly unfashionable in the 1990s, but ever since Julia Roberts walked away with a best actress Oscar in 2001 for playing the crusading lawyer Erin Brockovich in a push-up bra, they have been all the rage with Oscar voters. In 2003, Nicole Kidman won the best actress Oscar as the writer Virginia Woolf in The Hours; in 2004, it was Charlize Theron as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, and earlier this year it was Reese Witherspoon’s turn, for portraying June Carter Cash, Johnny Cash’s long-suffering wife, in Walk the Line.
Among the men, it’s the same story. Russell Crowe was nominated in 2000 for his portrayal of the tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, then in 2002 for playing the schizophrenic, Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. In 2005, four of the five best actor nominees were playing real people, or Hollywood versions of real people: Don Cheadle in Hotel Rwanda, Johnny Depp as JM Barrie in Finding Neverland, DiCaprio playing mad billionaire Howard Hughes in The Aviator, and Jamie Foxx — who won — as blind jazz great Ray Charles in Ray. A year later, it was three out of the five best actor nominations: Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, David Strathairn as principled broadcaster Edward R Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Philip Seymour Hoffman — who won — as gay writer Truman Capote. Amazingly, there’s a good chance the British actor Toby Jones could soon also be nominated as Capote, in Infamous.
Beyond the search for Academy recognition, the challenge in playing real people, contemporary or historical, is tremendously exciting to actors and actresses. But the producer Laura Bickford points out that there are enormous differences between films about “artists like Virginia Woolf or Basquiat, and biopics about historical and political figures, like Patton or Gandhi”. Bickford has produced Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as the controversial American photographer Diane Arbus, which is in the Oscar running this year. She is also producing Guerrilla, the Che Guevara biopic starring Benicio Del Toro and directed by Steven Soderbergh, which she hopes will be a contender next year.
“In Fur we wanted to say right up front that these are not events that really happened,” she says. “We are showing the emotional and creative journey Diane had at a certain point in her life, but we are showing what happened in a metaphorical way, to give people the sense of the experience of what her journey into her subconscious, into her creativity, might have been like for her. Che Guevara we’re approaching in the opposite way. It’s important we are as accurate as we can be about the elements of his life we are showing. So we have done a tremendous amount of research, listening to tapes, watching as much film as we can, interviewing the people who knew Che best.”
In this search for authenticity, it is no longer enough to act. Actors have felt it increasingly important to take on the physical characteristics of the characters they are playing. This can be traced back to Robert De Niro’s Oscar-winning performance as the boxer Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, for which he put on a huge amount of weight. More recently, the prosthetic nose Kidman sported to play the writer Virginia Woolf in The Hours helped audiences suspend disbelief enough to help her win her first best actress Oscar. Such physical transformations have now begun to seem de rigueur for best actress hopefuls: Hilary Swank, who had been knocking around in TV series like Beverly Hills 90210, was catapulted to a best actress Oscar for her portrayal of a young male transvestite in Boys Don’t Cry; Charlize Theron underwent a startling transformation to win an Oscar in 2004 as the serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, putting on 30lb and wearing prosthetic teeth and chin. But Theron’s ability to channel Wuornos’s psychoses also came from studying the real-life Wuornos in documentaries made by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill.
Putting cynicism aside for a moment, actors revel in playing people such as Wuornos because there’s far more in the way of research they can get their teeth into than with a character created just for the screen. This year, Bobby, about the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated; Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, about the American “heroes” of one of the bloodiest battles of the second world war; World Trade Center, about the heroes of September 11; and The Last King of Scotland, about the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, all offer intriguing takes on real people and real events, and performances from those films are sure to figure at Oscar time. To play Idi Amin, Forest Whitaker met Amin’s family and political allies, even his mistresses, and spent months studying the way Amin moved and gestured, watching Barbet Shroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada almost 100 times. He also put on weight, changed his hairline and had his skin darkened.
Critics often complain that, despite these attempts at authenticity, Hollywood bends historical facts to its own dramatic purposes. “The truth is that in all these films you have to invent,” says Bickford. “All biopics are imaginary, and the idea that you can say ‘this actually happened’ is ridiculous. Nobody knows what Johnny Cash and his wife said in bed to each other — and they probably couldn’t even remember themselves — but it made a great scene.” And turned into a great Oscar moment for Reese Witherspoon.
Blood Diamond opens in the UK in January
