“I suspect that to fans of theirs it means a certain left-of-centre narrative, something ‘weird’ or ‘quirky’ in the film-making, but not quite antagonistic,” says film-maker Chad Hartigan of the A24 brand his gentle, Sundance-awarded comedy Morris From America was acquired by the company in 2016. View image in fullscreen Sea of love … Alex Hibbert (foreground) and Mahershala Ali in a scene from the film Moonlight. You go to their films and you expect something fresh, something in the maker’s voice.” “And so when you say an A24 film is recognisable, it’s kind of a misnomer because you think: ‘Oh, all these things are alike.’ I think instead what those folks have done really well is to allow film-makers to be idiosyncratic within the A24 banner. “Everything that’s happening in the industry right now is about making voices seem the same,” he says. Still, Jenkins resists the idea – propagated by industry folk – of “A24 films” as a kind of genre unto themselves. And that’s where Film Twitter starts to dunk, like, ‘Yeah, Barry Jenkins is part of the A24 cult,’” he says with a laugh. One of the really cool things they do with film-makers is that you do feel like you’re a part of this thing. Jenkins finds kinship in that loose bond: he has yet to direct another film with the studio since Moonlight, but two titles he recently produced – Aftersun, starring Paul Mescal, and Raven Jackson’s lyrical Sundance premiere All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt – are in the A24 family. The company works almost exclusively with writer-directors, and distinctiveness of tone and storytelling is the ideological theme connecting its increasingly disparate projects. “Voice” is a word that comes up a lot when you talk to people at A24 or the artists who have worked with them. You go to their films and expect something in the maker’s voice Barry Jenkins They set the trend.” What they do is allow film-makers to be idiosyncratic. “At the same time, they just have a really incredible ability to identify the zeitgeist before everybody else has. “A24’s brand is intertwined with the identities of the artists that it works with, and known for championing unique voices,” she says. It was a commercial non-starter but A24 bought it, deeming Kwan and Scheinert a team worth investing in.įilm-maker Lulu Wang, whose bittersweet Chinese-language family drama The Farewell was released by A24 in 2019, suggests that is typical of its long-game approach. Few would have seen it coming after Kwan and Scheinert’s previous film, Swiss Army Man (2016), a perverse buddy comedy between an island castaway and a farting corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/ShutterstockĪn eccentric, bawdy teacup ride set across a dizzying multiverse, with a predominantly Asian cast and a surfeit of butt-plug gags, Everything Everywhere All at Once was initially nobody’s idea of box-office gold, let alone Oscar bait. View image in fullscreen Aftersun, another A24 nominee. That made it the biggest hit in A24’s 10-year history, the crown jewel of a portfolio that includes Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018), Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020) and Ari Aster’s cultish art-horror films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). Directed by wacky duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, it’s a genre-bending fusion of comedy, action, sci-fi and immigrant family drama that surprised everyone last spring by racking up more than $100m worldwide. It was the very first film A24 had produced from the outset, after establishing itself by acquiring and distributing finished products: it could hardly believe its beginner’s luck.įast-forward to this year’s Oscar race, and A24 is no longer David but Goliath, with the heavily tipped best picture frontrunner Everything Everywhere All at Once. Moonlight was released by the hip, still-green indie studio A24, then only four years into its existence. After a now-infamous envelope mixup involving Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the megahit studio musical La La Land ultimately lost the best picture Oscar to Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ low-budget character study of a Black gay man’s coming of age. It has been six years since the Academy Awards ended with an old-guard error that culminated in a shock of the new.
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