It's a minor miracle for any film to get made. A brief history of this year's Best Picture nominees, from paper to screen.
"Argo"
2007
Wired magazine publishes an article by Joshua Bearman entitled "The Canadian Caper" about the declassified aspects of the 1979 Iranian rescue operation.
The piece is optioned by George Clooney's production company.
Chris Terrio is brought on to adapt the article in a script and, after extensive research, delivers a first draft that is largely considered "ready to film."
2008–2011
The completed script floats along for years in development hell, waiting for some impetus to move it forward.
2011
February
Ben Affleck, riding high from the critical acclaim of The Town, signs on as director.
June
After Affleck gives the lead to himself, Alan Arkin becomes first cast member to sign on, quickly followed by Brian Cranston, John Goodman, and the rest of the cast.
September
Shooting begins. After a series of Middle Eastern countries turn the production away in fear of upsetting Iran, Turkey is selected as the amenable nation that could most easily stand in. A lack of Farsi speakers on hand, however, creates a problem in filling all the extras' roles and many of the film's sequences, including the climactic airport scenes, must be shot in Los Angeles, where the large local Persian-exile community is eager to jump on board.
Affleck becomes obsessive about period and regional detail to the point of having an eyeglass designer re-create the giant '70s frames worn by the actual houseguests.
2012
Argo premieres in September at the Toronto Film Festival to enormous enthusiasm, quickly becoming an Oscar favorite before fading in the race and then surging again.
After the premiere, Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador portrayed in the film, objects to a postscript at the end of the film's original version, noting sarcastically that he'd felt Canada had received all the credit for the Americans' escape. Affleck calls Taylor and promises, "If this bothers you, I'll take it out." The ironic coda was replaced by the much more somber “The involvement of the CIA complemented efforts of the Canadian embassy to free the six held in Tehran. To this day the story stands as an enduring model of international co-operation between governments.”
"Amour"
2009
Michael Haneke's previous film The White Ribbon wins Cannes' Palme d'or, the festival's highest prize. Coming off the festival circuit, the director reflects on the slow degeneration of a beloved aunt and considers a film project based on the notion of not being able to help a loved one in decline. He spends months looking into the world of stroke victims, interviewing doctors and observing speech therapy.
2010
Haneke casts Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in the leads, based on their work in the films of Bertolucci and Alain Renais, respectively. Coming off of his previous success, Haneke works with a tiny cast and crew in the most restricted of settings.
2011
Shooting begins in Paris on a soundstage where the couple's entire apartment is meticulously reconstructed. The apartment set was so complete, Riva ultimately decided to live in it during the shoot, saving herself the tiring commute.
2011–12
After shooting wraps, the obssesive Haneke spends months in the editing bay, personally crafting the film.
2012
Amour premieres in Cannes, once again winning its director the top prize.
"Beasts of the Southern Wild"
2000
Dealing with the illness of her father, Florida panhandle native and playwriting student Lucy Alibar writes Juicy and Delicious, a one-act play about a boy named Hushpuppy who confronts the illness and death of his father, a man capable of enormous love but apparently incapable of putting that love into words.
2007
Alibar's play is performed at The Tank in New York, where an old acquaintance, recent college graduate and aspiring filmmaker Behn Zeitlin, attends. Zeitlin persuades her to let him turn the play into a film.
2008
Visiting the New Orleans area, Zeitlin decides to relocate the project from its Florida setting to the Bayou, seeing its perilous post-Katrina condition as the perfect setting to illustrate "these roads that go all the way down to the bottom of America and what was at the end of them.” Zeitlin spends eight months on and off living in the area and studying its culture.
2009
Alibar and Zeitlin attend the Sundance labs in screenwriting, directing, and film music. They receive $7,500 in grants from the Annenberg Foundation to pursue the project.
2010
Zeitlin wins the 2010 Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award, which comes with a $10,000 cash prize as well as the pre-buy of Japanese broadcast rights, valued at $85,000.
A five-month shoot begins in March. The film is cast with locals — including Dwight Henry, who was discovered working at a bakery he co-owned across the street from production headquarters. Henry reads for the part just to be "friendly" to patrons of his shop. Later, however, when Zeitlin decides to cast him, Henry has moved his bakery and can't be found. When he is told they want him for the role, Henry replies he had "just opened up a new business. I can’t just close my doors and walk away from a business I worked so hard to build." Eventually — with the help of Zeitlin's accounting team — he is persuaded to come aboard.
Then-5-year-old Quevenzhané Wallis lies about her age to get into an open call for girls ages 6 through 9.
During the shoot, Zeitlin and other members of the crew live in a trailer placed in a friend of the production's backyard.
The shoot was in progress when the BP Oil spill occurred, causing the government to shut down coastal areas where the crew is filming and the team to scramble for their shots.
Lacking the funds to use CGI effects to create the aurochs sequences, the crew adopts a week-and-a-half-old pig and trains it from its very first days to follow commands in ways grown pigs would never accept.
2012
Debuts at the Sundance Festival in January. Beasts is the festival's immediate sensation, getting snatched up for distribution by Fox Searchlight instantly.
The film is released in theaters in July to ecstatic reviews, although ultimately failing to become a major breakthrough at the box office.
"Django Unchained"
2007–2010
Writer/director Quentin Tarantino is inspired silmultaneously to write a film about a slave who becomes a bounty hunter — whom he describes as "the sixth slave from the seventh on a chain gang line" — and to film a spaghetti Western and began speaking of his "Southern" film in interviews. The idea formed as he worked on a book project about Sergio Corbucci, the great spaghetti Western director, whose 1966 film Django was a not-very-subtle inspiration.
Tarantino shares the script with actor Christoph Waltz, who had starred in Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds as he was writing it, and the actor immediately becomes involved in its development.
2011
Tarantino turns in a script in April to the Weinsteins.
The title role is intended for Will Smith, but the actor, then in the midst of shooting Men in Black 3, backs out due to time commitments. Jamie Foxx signs on, followed quickly by Samuel Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio. Casting of smaller characters becomes a revolving door, with Joseph Gordon Levitt, Sasha Baron Cohen, and Jonah Hill all originally set to take parts and then exiting the production due to scheduling conflicts. Hill would eventually appear in a cameo role.
2012
The film goes into a whirlwind of production, with cameras rolling just months after the script is delivered. The 130-day shoot takes the crew from "Simi Valley, to the Alabama Hills, to the frozen Grand Tetons, to the swamps and plantations of New Orleans and back to Simi Valley," ( tweets producer Stacey Sher.
Wrapping in July, Tarantino has just five months to deliver a completed version of the epic film in order to meet the Weinstein's immovable Dec. 25 release date, a rushed job further excerbated by the fact that Tarantino's editor, Sally Mencke, had died since his last film.
The quick edit leads to, among other changes, the scrapping of a Frank Ocean song written for the film.
The film opens to largely positive reviews but comes under attack for its heavy use of the "n" word and depiction of slavery from some, including, most vocally, director Spike Lee.
