Krzysztof Gonciarz

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Bisexual

DOB: 19 June 1985

Ethnicity: White - Polish

Occupation: Youtuber, journalist, comedian, producer, director, entrepreneur, screenwriter, writer

Greta Gerwig made a film that was critically acclaimed, culturally impactful, hilarious, unique, visually exceptional, perfectly cast and acted, left people laughing, crying and thinking AND made a billion dollars at the box office.

But no Best Director nom?!

Furiosa: A Max Mad Saga

(2024, dir. George Miller)

She’s so short and cute 😭 director Scarlett please yell at me

Orson Welles: Portrait with Symbols 1945, by Irving Penn.

Director Kirk Wise, screenwriter Linda Woolverton, and actor Robby Benson on casting the Beast [x]

They gave me an incredible amount of freedom. I didn't want Beast to be a cartoon character. I played it as though I were doing a Broadway show. As if this was a living person. And I wanted him to be funny. By funny, I don't mean shtick or one-liners. I am talking about real comedy. When real comedy works, and is truthful, especially with the Beast, it comes out of the fact that he is so pathetic. For some reason, I really understood that. Ha! Because of that, they gave me a lot of leeway. [x]

My first audition was recorded on, of all things, a Sony Walkman. As a musician, I had branched out into recording engineer and loved to play with sound. When I saw the Sony Walkman I knew it had a little condenser microphone in it, and if I were to get too loud, the automatic compressor and built-in limiter would 'squash' the voice— and there would be very little dynamic range to the performance. I did a quick assessment and wondered how many people who had come in to audition for the part were making that error: playing the Beast with overwhelming decibels, compressing the vocal waveforms. I decided to give the Beast 'range.' Because of my microphone technique, and an understanding of who I wanted Beast to be, they kept asking me to come back and read different dialogue. After my fifth audition, Jeffrey Katzenberg the hands-on guardian of the film, said the part was mine…

Beauty and the Beast was so refreshingly fun and inventively creative to work on that I couldn't wait to try new approaches to every line of dialogue. Don Hahn is one of the best creative producers I have ever worked with. The two young directors, Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, were fantastic and their enthusiasm was contagious. I not only was allowed to improvise, but they encouraged it. It never entered my mind that I was playing an animated creature. I understood the torment that Beast was going through: he felt ugly; had a horrible opinion of himself, and had a trigger-temper. Those are things that, if done right, are the perfect ingredients for comedy. Painful and pathetic comedy— but honest. The kind of comedy I understood...

In the feature world of Disney animation, the actors always recorded their dialogue alone in a big studio, with only a microphone and the faint images of the producers, writers, directors and engineer through a double-paned set of acoustic glass. Paige O'Hara and I became good friends; it was her idea that for certain very intimate scenes, such as when Beast is dying, we record together. We were able to play these scenes with an honest conviction that is often absent in the voice-over world...

The success of this film was the culmination of a team effort but I must say, the honors go to the animators— and for me (Beast), that's Glen Keane — and to Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. This was the perfect example of a crew who 'cared'. And the final results (every frame) of the film represent that sentiment. [x]

S p i k e L e e

Honestly, I think any director who hurts their actors physically or psychologically because they don't trust them to, y'know, ACT is a hack. No movie is worth hurting someone or allowing someone to be hurt. Like, I like The Shining a lot. It's very creepy and tense, and Wendy Carlos' score is great. But, frankly, I think the film would have been much better if Stanley Kubrick hadn't decided to psychologically torture Shelly Duvall and just trusted her to do the thing he hired her to do.

As it is, Duvall's performance is noticeably stiff because of how terrified she is on set and that's on Kubrick. Not to mention, even if a version of the film made without hurting Shelly Duvall was legitimately worse, a director's vision is no excuse to be cruel. Part of a director's job is working with and directing the actors. You need to be able to work with people, and when you would rather hurt your actors than talk to them you are revealing a deep incompetence in how to do your job.

Maisie Richardson-Sellers

[maisiersellers]

Chantal Akerman

The wife of a famous director had her private TikTok account leaked, which lead to said director’s half sister going on Instagram live with her niece and nephew to ask for privacy.

Bill Murray & Sofia Coppola Venice, 2003

behind the scenes with sofia coppola