Through characters as eclectic as a kindhearted drug dealer, a woman heading to court for love, a young man searching for his mother, a psychopath out for blood, a pioneering engineer, and a man advising an unfaithful friend, the eight actors who received the Virtuosos Award from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival made a diverse and illustrious crowd.
Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Simon Helberg, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Janelle Monáe, Ruth Negga, Dev Patel and Aaron Taylor-Johnson starred in movies that dominated the conversation this award season and in many cases conquered the American box office. These breakthrough talents, who ranged from their late 20s to their late 60s, included a Golden Globe-winner and four actors with individual Academy Award-nominations. Here are some highlights from their speeches on February 4, in which they promoted acceptance, questioned outdated points of views, and commented on the human condition.
Mahershala Ali (Moonlight)
On the Subjectivity of Awards
“It’s just wonderful to be in the conversation. It’s subjective. How do you say ‘best anything?’ It’s art. We respond to what we respond to as individuals, and as a collective body. Sometimes it’s your name and sometimes it’s someone else’s name, but at the end of the day, you just want to do work that’s truthful, and that resonates with people. It’s a long process to see ourselves in this work, and it’s the seeds of what it is that inspires us and that keeps us moving forward. We get to explore the human condition, and to get awards for that, it’s all pretty amazing. I would do this for free if I could.”
On His Identity as a Muslim
“The Muslims that I know are peace-loving people. Part of the problem is somebody does something stupid in the name of Islam, but those are not the people I know. Somewhere, somebody does something violent, which Islam teaches that you’re not supposed to do. ‘If you kill one, it’s as if you killed the entire world; if you save one, it’s as if you saved the entire world.’ That aside, I have participated in peace marches, and I’ve tried to teach and be part of the conversation, but people don’t show up with cameras for peace marches. They show up for the things when people are hurt, and that’s part of the problem, that those who hurt get all the attention, and peace marches, those don’t sell tickets, so nobody’s really talking about them.”
On Moonlight’s Swimming Scene
“I didn’t know Alex [R. Hibbert, who plays young Chiron] couldn’t swim. He just couldn’t swim. There were 20 people around, so he was fine. He made it out alive! But it worked out beautifully. We were supposed to have six hours to shoot it, but we only had 90 minutes because the storm was rolling in, but it was beautiful, and I think that only added to how organic that scene felt.”
Naomie Harris (Moonlight)
On Deciding to Work with Barry Jenkins
“I saw Barry Jenkins’ first film, Medicine for Melancholy, and it’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen, and it was made for $13,000. I just thought, ‘If a filmmaker can make a film as extraordinary as that for $13,000, what’s he going to do with a proper budget and an amazing script like Moonlight?’ So what’s partly why I wanted to do it. I also wanted give a shout-out to my agent Esther, and my amazing manager Annie, because I did not want to take this role. I had pretty much said ‘no’ to it, and they said, ‘Whatever you say,’ but they were working behind the scenes to change my mind, and one of the ways they did that was by getting me to sit down with Barry. Barry is so charismatic; he is an incredible human being, and anybody who sits down with him would ultimately say yes to anything that he wants. That’s what happened to me; I got caught in Barry’s trap.”
On Playing a Broken Character
“I think the brutality that she takes out on her son is really about her self-loathing, and the awful place that she’s in, and this reminds me of having to journey to get to those really unpleasant places. Ultimately, Paula is a character who is deeply in pain, and deeply lost, and to find that was a real challenge. I think the biggest thing that I know about characters like Paula is how much compassion they desperately need, and how it’s so hard to give another human being that which you have never received yourself, at that vital moment when you’re grown up and desperately need affirmation, love and nurturing. Many people don’t get that, and as an adult without those resources, it’s incredibly difficult to raise a child and give them what they desperately need, and it requires a community of people to help people like that. It is possible to feel, but it requires other people to help.
What I learned from playing Paula is that anything is possible. I really scared myself with this role, and I really loved it, but at many points, I thought, ‘Why did I say yes?’ And I cursed Esther and Annie. The most important thing as an actor is to provide a nonjudgmental space within yourself that will allow any character to come to you. In the beginning, I had a lot of judgment about Paula’s addiction because I didn’t understand it, it was so alien to me, and I had to go on a journey to understand what addiction is about, to find the compassion to be nonjudgmental.
In the final scene that I have in the movie, I’m supposed to be in the rehab center, and I’m lighting a cigarette, but I’ve never smoked, and I couldn’t actually light the cigarette. I was useless at it, so Barry, without telling me, told Trevante, who plays my son, to reach over and light the cigarette for me, and it’s this amazing moment in the movie. He reaches over, and it just brings tears to my eyes, because it’s the first time that my son is touching me in a loving way, and I just went with it, and I just improvised, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and I broke down. So that’s a good reason not to smoke, actually.”
On Performing Her Role Over Just Three Days of Shooting
“To be honest, in those three days, I didn’t have time to process that. I wasn’t really thinking about how great this is, I was just in the madness of it all. Because I never meant to shoot all my scenes in three days. I had visa issues. For some reason I couldn’t get a visa. It was originally going to be three weeks, and then it just kept getting condensed. I have to give another shout out to my amazing team, because it was touch and go on whether or not I would ultimately end up doing the movie.
I got a call after midnight one night, and they said, ‘You have to sign this release form for your visa.’ I got up and signed, and that’s the only reason why I ended up being in this movie, because everybody was working so hard to get a bleeding visa! It was very intense, and I really have to thank my director Barry, because he made it feel like it was perfectly doable to condense 15 years into three days, to shoot out of sequence, and jump backwards and forwards between different stages in one day.
He said, ‘I’m fine. I’m calm about it. You’ve got this.’ That made me think, ‘OK, he’s not worried about it,’ even though he was actually shaking and thinking, how am I going to get this done? He never conveyed that to me at all, so I had these amazing, special moments with the three actors who played my sons. They’re all incredibly special. They look so different, but they all have the same sensitivity, the same soulful eyes, and they’re such generous performers. I was incredibly lucky.”
Simon Helberg (Florence Foster Jenkins)
On Getting to Work with Meryl Streep
“It wasn’t as much groveling as I’m used to. I had been in a tiny, tiny movie called We’ll Never Have Paris, that I wrote and my wife directed, and the casting director was named Kathleen Chopin—appropriately so—and a year later I got an email from her that I thought was from a Nigerian Prince, because it had Meryl Streep’s name, and Stephen Frears’, and ‘Would you consider reading this?’ I went home and cried reading this. I told her, ‘Did you know I play piano?’ It was meant to be, because she didn’t even know.
I met with Stephen Frears, who’s an eccentric and doesn’t have a large attention span, and whom I think wanted this to work. He didn’t really know me, and wanted to know how well I could play the piano, and could I act while playing the piano? I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, all those things—when can I meet Meryl?’ He asks me, ‘What are you doing December 3rd? Can you come to London to meet Meryl?’ I said, ‘Yes, I was going to head out that way anyway.’ He wanted to prove that I wasn’t just a psychopath, so I sent in a tape. I’d played jazz, and popular music, and rock bands, but I wasn’t un-cool enough to play opera or classical music, so I crammed, and I sent in the tape from my iPhone, and I got the part.”
On Laughing and Crying Interchangeably
“I cried during all the funny lines, and I laughed at her death scene—spoiler alert. That’s kind of the brilliance of both Stephen and Meryl. They’re humanists, so they mine those moments. That death scene is almost as uplifting as anything else in the film. Meryl delivers these lines that could be very heavy with levity, because life is funny that way. Stephen is the master of stopping you in the gut when you’re laughing, and making you laugh when you think you might break down. Philomena, and all of his films, even Dangerous Liaisons, has all this humor to it. If you watch Meryl’s work, she’s as hilarious as she is heartbreaking. That’s the genius of those people.”
Stephen McKinley Henderson (Fences)
On Realizing His Dreams Through Effort
“You just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I had the great fortune to direct a play about the life of Muhammad Ali. I accepted it, and this young man had written it along with a newspaperman from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it lead us to a place where the Champ came to see the show. Then I saw a play called Joe Turner’s Come And Gone, and I heard those words and exalted language and poetic text, and I said, ‘I want to do that.’ Then I got a chance to audition for it in Pittsburgh. It just comes around. Then Denzel was doing Fences. I had done a quite a few August Wilson plays, and a friend of mine said, ‘You’re going to go audition to be in an August Wilson play?’ I said, “There’s only one reason to audition, and that’s because you want to play the part.’ I said, ‘If I didn’t care whether I play it or not, I wouldn’t.’ I really wanted to do it and I really wanted to work with Denzel, since I had seen his body of work. If you stay on the train, it’s going to come into the station.”
On Shooting in Pittsburgh’s Hill District
“We were in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and the neighbors were so proud to be a part of it. They had had Denzel come and knock on their doors and say, ‘We’re going to be in your neighborhood for a few months, do you mind?’ Of course, they embraced him. One place Denzel went—I love telling this story—he finished talking to this lady, and said to her, ‘We’re going to be here, so keep your front yard clear, and pray for me that I do right by August Wilson,’ and the lady said, ‘Baby, I’ve been praying for you for 35 years.'”
On Getting It True Rather Than Right
“You never try to get it right. You try to get it true. If you work with something right, you aren’t going to care if someone else says it’s right or wrong. If you work on a work of art, you’re just trying to get it true, so every time is the first time, the time to get it true. Six years earlier [we] did it on stage, and you had different options, because you wanted to raise or lower your performance to the audience. [In the film] we are in the backyard, with the dogs barking and the birds chirping. You just want to make sure you hear what was said to you, and respond as truthfully as you possibly can.”
Janelle Monáe (Moonlight, Hidden Figures)
On Leaving the Music Studio to Make Moonlight
“A lot of people don’t know, but I studied drama. I went to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City, fresh out of high school. I grew up doing international thespian and monologue competitions. It was music and acting my entire childhood, but Moonlight took me out of the studio. I was sent lots of scripts, but it was this script in particular, Barry’s script, that pulled me away from working on my follow-up album to The Electric Lady. I remember being on tour, and riding Delta in seat 3B, reading that script and just being in tears. I was so moved. I had a strong, visceral reaction to each page, and I knew that this was a project that I needed to be a part of. I saw so much of the messages that I had in my music in this storyline. It was about highlighting the stories of the other, that person that often times is marginalized and discriminated against because of their sexual identity, or their race or their gender. So I knew that some young boy or girl needed to see this movie, and needed to feel not alone anymore after seeing it.”
On Being an Artist with Different Tools of Expression
“I’ve always considered myself not to be just a singer or an actor, but more so an artist and a storyteller. I want to continue to tell universal, unique, untold stories in unconventional ways. That’s my motto that I live by. One of the things that I love about being an artist is you can use different tools. You can use music to tell stories. When you think about David Bowie, he had Ziggy Stardust. He was a character. He did concept albums. A lot of my work has been rooted in strong concept albums. When I’m thinking about them, I’m always thinking cinematically, I’m always thinking about the characters. It’s all a part of being an artist. I just love getting immersed in these characters.”
On How Working with Barry Jenkins Prepared Her for Hidden Figures
“I want to give a special shout out to Barry Jenkins for allowing me to have Moonlight as my first film. It was his belief in me that really gave me that extra confidence to go and do Hidden Figures. He has such a big heart, offstage and onstage. I remember going on set and being so nervous, but once I had met him, I was relaxed. He said to me, ‘You know, Janelle, there’s no such thing as making a mistake. As long as you are truthful and honest in the way you respond, every way you choose is the right way.’ That confidence and those words have stuck with me.”
Ruth Negga (Loving)
On Impressing Jeff Nichols and Preparation as Magic
“I’m a big believer in ‘right time, right situation.’ I don’t know if I did anything different, to be honest. I think we misunderstand performance as these golden fingers that come down and choose people. For me, it’s a craft, it’s work, and sometimes it doesn’t work out, but this time it did. I think the thing he recognized in me and also in Joel Edgerton, who plays Richard Loving, is a willingness to work, to prepare, and there’s something lovely about preparing, because if you do all the work beforehand, between action and cut something lovely happens. All the social baselines have been sorted out, so something magical happens. I think he recognized that we were those kind of actors. This job is something that is luck.”
On Having a Screenplay with No Prewritten Emotions
“I think there is a place for all kinds of acting styles. Every story that comes along, you have to relate to that, and figure out how you want to approach to that. It’s very individual. Jeff had written a script that had no business. By that I mean there was no indication of what actors should do. Usually there are things like, ‘She cries there,’ or ‘She feels very upset’ or ‘She feels very happy.’ There are indications of what one must feel, and this script is entirely devoid of that, and I only realized that afterwards. It just vibrated off the page, and it was like reading Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov. It was complete, and that’s a very rare thing in screenwriting. I didn’t want to change anything.
When we were actually filming, there was very little chat. It was a very strange experience, because it was actually a reflection of the symbiosis of this couple, which was a couple of little words. They just didn’t feel the need to be verbose in their interaction with each other, and that’s how we felt making this film. It was a weird sort of beautiful psychic energy that sort of descended on the set, and it was really extraordinary.”
Dev Patel (Lion)
On Going Against His Resume to Show Range
“I was completely mesmerized by the story. The fact that it actually occurred, that this young man connected with his birth mother virtually through space—it’s just baffling. I told my team, ‘This is the journey I want to go on.’ I’d been dying for a journey like this. My great managers worked on it, but I was told very early on that ‘they don’t want that goofy kid from The Best Marigold Hotel. They want someone with a bit more depth.’ I ended up rocking up to Luke Davies, the screenwriter’s, house, and I knocked on his door. They were there with a whiteboard and all these sticky notes, and I was like, ‘Hey, I want to play Saroo!’ It was a very awkward conversation where I was very politely told to go to the back of the line and send in a tape, and that’s what I did.
I sent in a tape, and Garth liked it, and we Skyped. I was in my bathroom, because that has the best reception. I was shooting a film in London with Jeremy Irons about a mathematician, and I had been working for about two months on this South Indian dialect, and they called me and told me I was going to do a screen test with Garth in a couple of days. I was in a panic, which is my usual default setting. I went in, and we explored this character, and it’s great, because I was fighting against my resume and I knew that. It’s very easy to pigeonhole someone like me, ‘Oh, he’s the usual Indian guy.’
That was specifically why I wanted this role, because actually it’s split into two. There’s a small boy struggling for survival alone on the streets of Calcutta, and then there’s a baptism, as the screenwriter described it, where I come out of the water in Australia, really adapted and one with nature. That was exciting, to play a young Australian guy, with a bit more texture, and who goes back and learns about his roots. It’s the closest a character has been to myself that I’ve ever played.”
On a Cherished Lesson from Danny Boyle
“It was a process of introspection. I spent a lot of time isolated, traveling the trains across India, just going to these orphanages alone, which I had never done before. That makes you really confront something inside yourself. Danny Boyle always said to me, during our Slumdog Millionaire days, ‘It’s very easy to come in and display attributes, but to be still, and let that camera enter you through your eyes, that’s difficult.’ I always had that in my head.”
On Being Ready to Shoot the Climatic Final Scene
“That was the first scene that I shot in the movie. You spend eight months of sleepless nights, having nightmares about this moment and how to play it, and not to overcook it, and you know it has to work. Then I flew to India three weeks early to watch this magnificent little pocket rocket, which is Sunny Pawar, and everyone on set was like, ‘Three weeks to go till the big day!’ ‘Two weeks to go!’ or ‘A couple days to go!’ We were in a really isolated space in India, and the only person I could really interact with was Priyanka Bose, who played my mother, and we really became very close. Every night after she finished filming, we would have dinner together and talk about life. Garth, a week before that shot, said, ‘I don’t want you to spend any time together. I want you alone.’ He starved us of this friendship and energy, and the day he shot that, I experienced that scene as the audience does.”
Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Nocturnal Animals)
On Researching Serial Killers to Play a Disturbing Character
“It was pretty intense. I had three months prior to making this movie where I was diving into researching serial killers and psychopaths. I had a pretty dark aura. I was pretty hesitant to take this character on because of that, because I’m a father. I’ve got four daughters, so it was pretty daunting and scary to take on a character like this. I was very pleased when I came pack and I was able to cut my hair and clean my fingernails.
I mean, most of my scenes involved torment. When I started this project, I started having sleepless nights. I think that was more from the things I was watching. It was nerve-wracking. There’s a lot of anxiety stepping onto a set in my scenes with Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Shannon. One of my big challenges was to provoke a reaction from Jake, to get a reaction, and keep it fresh. Tom Ford demands such perfection, so I wanted to be prepared, and bring as much as I possibly could.”
On the Intensity of the Film’s Opening Scenes
“‘Intense’ seems like a weak word, but it was grueling. My main job was to push Jake to the brink of a nervous breakdown, and psychologically affecting someone in that way was torment. It affected me emotionally and physically. One of those nights, we were shooting out in Mojave, which is about three hours away from where I live in Los Angeles, and we were improvising, staying fresh and new, and trying to get different reactions out of Jake by shocking him. It was affecting us so much that, after that night shoot, I asked to be driven home, and none of the drivers were available. I had to stay at the hotel we were staying at. I tried that, and I was so shook up that I actually ended up calling a friend to come pick me up and drive me all the way back, because I needed that comfort and security. I needed to spend one night back at home, to get nurtured back. I’ve never said that before.” MM
Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Virtuosos Award was given out on February 4, 2017. Photographs by Carlos Aguilar.