SBIFF’s Variety Artisans Awards Honors Expert Professionals Behind the Scenes

Spotlighting work from The Brutalist, The Wild Robot, Emilia Pérez, Conclave, Nickel Boys, A Complete Unknown, The Substance, Wicked, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the Variety Artisans Awards was truly a highlight of the 40th Annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival. This event, hosted by Variety, recognizes behind-the-scenes artists and their work that make the awards season films so intricately immersive and special. Each year, a select number of talented artisans are awarded for their dedication to their respective crafts.This year’s awards on February 8 was hosted by Variety Senior Artisans Editor Jazz Tangcay.  

Judy Becker was honored for her work on production design in The Brutalist. Becker spoke of creating a believable world through portraying Brutalist architecture in the movie, noting that the story felt so immersive she had to remind herself that the fictitious main character was not real. Crediting director Brady Corbet, she felt that his direction was inspiring and a hard act to follow.

Awarded for his work on the original score in The Wild Robot, Kris Bowers said that his compositional work spanned over two years, mainly working with sketches of concept art. He said that the work demanded imagination to iterate and enhance the animator’s vision, leading him to hone his craft to capture imperfection and the magic of being human. 

Clement Ducol and Camille were awarded for their original songwriting for Emilia Pérez. Both worked on this film for two years. When they were introduced to the work, director Jacques Audiard said that the film “might be a musical.” It was — and stylistically they spoke of transitioning from electronic to a more rock-based approach when crafting the music. The cast was key to the magic, and notably Camille compared Selena Gomez’s voice to the Milky Way. 

Nick Emerson was awarded for his work in editing Conclave. He described the film as a “peek behind the curtain” of the pope selection process through the cardinals. Emerson described how he intricately chose each shot to avoid repetition and that the talent of the actors made it easier to do so. He described Ralph Fiennes’s acting performance as truthful and that his eyes are a window to a character’s soul. 

Jomo Fray was awarded for his work in cinematography in Nickel Boys. He spoke of how he used the point-of-view perspective to capture the feeling of memory and the effects of trauma over time. Fray leaned into the point of view by working with subjective depth, creating a scale that compared to the perception of a child.

Tod Maitland was awarded for his work in sound in A Complete Unknown. He said the main goal with this film was to capture the natural environment of New York, even though it was shot in New Jersey. Maitland didn’t use a playback track when filming, so sound effects and performances were live. Additionally, Maitland noted that Timothée Chalamet’s live performances were actually mic’ed through his hair. 

Pierre-Olivier Persin was awarded for his work in hair and makeup for The Substance. His directorial instruction was to go crazy and create without limits. So, Persin did this by mirroring the emotion coming through each character through creating elaborate monstrous body-horror exteriors, some of which took six to seven hours to create.

Paul Tazewell was awarded for his work in costume design for Wicked. He said that he drew on what existed in the “Oz” universe and also brought a newness to the look of the costumes for the film. Each color of every costume was deliberate to accentuate the exciting highlights of the film, such as the arrival in the metropolitan Emerald City, which Tazewell compared to his own experience seeing New York City for the first time.

Finally, Erik Winquist was awarded for his work in VFX for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. He says that this movie called for more visual effect work because the apes talk more in this movie compared to the previous ones; Winquist used a special machine leveraging technology to correlate live acting to computerized portrayals. He explained how virtual effects could be a useful resource to capture what you are otherwise incapable of capturing on screen.

The night was graced with emotional performances by both Kris Bowers (The Wild Robot) and Clement Ducol and Camille (Emilia Pérez). To end this evening, there was a group panel discussion following the individual artist spotlights in which all the honorees recommended stepping out into real world experiences when in a creative slump. The ceremony concluded with and cemented that these awardees are important to the film industry because those behind the camera are the true artisans who pull everything together.