Tips from Oscar-Recognized Filmmakers

Robert Legato on Trying Something New

Robert Legato won Best Visual Effects awards for?The Jungle Book?(2017),?Hugo?(2012), and?Titanic?(1998); he was nominated for Best Visual Effects for?The Lion King?(2020) and?Apollo 13?(1996).

Robert Legato is full of filmmaking wisdom. He’s been captivating audiences for decades, but it’s not simply because he’s good at his job. Sure, he’s a film wizard, but you don’t achieve film wizard status by having the technical chops—you achieve it by showing audiences something entirely new, pulled seemingly out of thin air:

"When you’ve never seen something before, you’re a bit confused by it. You’re not familiar with what you’re looking at. Also, you’re being taken in by a story you’ve never heard. When we look at the old King Kong movie, we look at it with different eyes than someone who saw it in 1933," Legato says.

"Our eyes have grown accustomed to much more sophisticated things. We’ll never really know what those special effects looked like the first time they were seen. We’ll never be able to look through those eyes," he explains. "But that’s the whole point of movies: you go to see something you’ve never seen before. And that’s always my thought process when making a film: How can we tell a story in a way it’s never been told before? Because the fact is, there aren’t that many stories. There are, like, seven stories. We keep retelling them over and over again. It’s the way we’re telling them that can be new."

Rayka Zehtabchi on Speaking Up

Rayka Zehtabchi won Best Short Documentary for Period. End of Sentence. (2019).

One of the hardest things to believe as a young filmmaker is that you belong in the room. Even an Oscar-winning filmmaker can admit that she had difficulty convincing her commercial clients to listen to her advice, but once she found that confidence, Rayka Zehtabchi realized she had a voice—and that voice mattered:

"I’ve learned so much since I started commercials, even just a year ago. I was really afraid to speak up. I didn’t quite understand my place as the director or the filmmaker. I thought you have to be a servant to the client and do everything they request," she explains.

"More and more, I’m realizing now that, A, those are not the type of clients I want to be working with, and B, I also have a responsibility to voice that opinion. To be really strong-headed. If I feel like something is the right choice, the right creative choice, and it’s about pushing the brand in the right direction, I need to be vocal about that. It’s why you were hired."

Job Roggeveen on Fleshing Out Ideas

The animation studio Job, Joris, and Marieke was nominated for Best Animated Short Film for A Single Life (2015).

Job Roggeveen and his team have built their career on engaging ideas, but it doesn’t come without its fair share of difficulty. He explains how he and his team takes a film from a concept to a fully formed idea:

"The trick is the idea needs to work on multiple levels. It needs to touch your heart but also make you curious. We’ve come up with a lot of ideas that sound good but don’t have enough depth to put even a few scenes together," he says.

"For example, our latest film. We wanted to make it about a character without a head. We thought: What would it be like if a new kid walked into class and he didn’t have a head? How would the other kids respond? It was a funny idea, but it wasn’t a story. So it slowly evolved into something with a lot more depth. The kid loses his head because he puts it into a washing machine, and eventually three kids have to exchange heads and go home pretending to be each other. We added an extra layer to the simple idea of losing your head. It became: What would it be like to lose your head and have to pretend to be someone else? Now it was a story."

Daisy Jacobs on Difficulty

Daisy Jacobs was nominated for Best Animated Short Film for The Bigger Picture (2015).

For her short film, Daisy Jacobs painted life-size portraits to animate each frame. It was an incredibly difficult, tedious task. And, if you’re wondering if it takes a special type of person to take on the terror of pulling off something like that, you’re right. But that doesn’t make it any less terrifying:

"Picasso said 'A great painting comes together, just barely.' And that’s really true. I’m in intense terror throughout the entire process, especially on my latest film where we had to pay for everything," she confesses. "And that feeling never ends. You want people to like what you’ve done. And that’s terrifying. It’s not until I watch it about a year later and go, how on earth did I make that? If you’re really pushing yourself, the work will always be better than something you’re totally comfortable with. Always."

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