OCTAVIA SPENCER TO RECEIVE CINEMACON® DIRECTORS OF THE YEAR AWARD
Universal Pictures to release Ma
on May 31, 2019
WASHINGTON D.C. (March 18, 2019) – Oscar® winner Octavia Spencer will receive this year’s “CinemaCon® Spotlight Award.” Mitch Neuhauser, Managing Director of CinemaCon, announced the award today. CinemaCon, the official convention of NATO, will be held April 1-4, 2019 at Caesars Palace Las Vegas Hotel and Casino. Spencer will be presented with this special honor at the “CinemaCon Big Screen Achievement Awards” ceremony taking place on the evening of Thursday, April 4, at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, hosted by the Coca-Cola Company, the official presenting sponsor of CinemaCon.
“From the moment she appeared on screen as Minny Jackson in The Help, Octavia Spencer put Hollywood and movie audiences on-notice, leaving no doubt she would become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after talents,” Neuhauser said. “With her upcoming performance in the thriller Ma, Spencer will prove once again that there is no role or genre that she cannot conquer, and we are honored to be able to present her with this year’s ‘CinemaCon Spotlight Award.’”
Spencer will next star in Ma, to be released by Universal Pictures on May 31, 2019. Sue Ann (Spencer) is a loner who keeps to herself in her quiet Ohio town. One day, she is asked by Maggie (Diana Silvers), a teenager new to town, to buy some booze for her and her friends. Seeing the chance to make some unsuspecting friends of her own, Sue Ann, offers the kids the chance to avoid drinking and driving by hanging out in the basement of her home. But there are some house rules: One of the kids has to stay sober. Don’t curse. Never go upstairs. And call her “Ma.” But as Ma’s hospitality starts to curdle into obsession, what began as a teenage dream turns into a terrorizing nightmare. Ma also stars Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans, McKaley Miller, Missi Pyle, Corey Fogelmanis, Gianni Paolo and Dante Brown. Directed by Tate Taylor, Ma, is written by Scotty Landes and is produced by Jason Blum for his Blumhouse Productions, and by Taylor and John Norris.
In addition to Ma, Spencer will star in several upcoming film projects including, The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle with Robert Downey, Jr., Oscar® winners Rami Malek and Emma Thompson, and Antonio Banderas and Selena Gomez; the animated Onward, with Chris Pratt, Tom Holland and Julia Louis-Dreyfus; and Spencer will soon begin production on The Witches, Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic, which also stars Oscar® winner Anne Hathaway. Spencer recently starred in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, for which she received Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Academy Award® nominations. Her previous film credits include Instant Family; Hidden Figures, for which she received Academy Award®, SAG Awards, Golden Globe and NAACP Image Award nominations; Gifted; the Divergent franchise; Zootopia; The Help, for which she won the Academy Award®, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, SAG Award and Broadcast Film Critic’s Choice Award; Fruitvale Station, and Get on Up, just to name a few. She recently served as an executive producer on Green Book, which won the Oscar® for Best Picture, and she is set to produce the upcoming film Coffee Will Make You Black, which stars Gabrielle Union.
CinemaCon will attract upwards of 6,000 motion picture professionals from all facets of the industry--from exhibition and distribution, to the equipment and concession areas--all on hand to celebrate the moviegoing experience and the cinema industry. From exclusive Hollywood product presentations highlighting a slate of upcoming films, to must-see premiere feature screenings, to the biggest stars, producers and directors, CinemaCon will help jumpstart the excitement and buzz that surrounds the summer season at the box office.
The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) is the largest exhibition trade organization in the world, representing more than 33,393 movie screens in all 50 states, and additional cinemas in 94 countries worldwide. NATO’s membership includes the largest cinema chains in the world and hundreds of independent theatre owners, too.
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Stuart Hazeldine's adaptation of William Paul Young's bestselling novel The Shack is, by textbook definition, a Christian film, centering around the crisis of faith of one Mack Phillips (Sam Worthington) after he loses one of his children--and himself--in an unspeakable tragedy. But as seen in Young's novel and now Hazeldine's film, Mack's journey to greater spiritual understanding and enlightenment is unlike most depictions of such stories and explorations of such themes, for it comes by way of a weekend trip to the secluded shack of the title, where no less than God Himself--or, rather, Herself, in the very female form of Octavia Spencer, going by the name of "Papa"--resides with Jesus (Avraham Aviv Alush) and the Holy Spirit (Sumire). Young and Spencer discussed that atypical approach along with the overarching universal themes and intent of its story at a press day last month in Beverly Hills.
Divine Inspiration
"I've always been a writer, but like anybody you write stuff for your friends and family, poetry, short stories. [My wife] had been saying for about four years, "Someday, as a gift for our children, just write something that puts in one place how you think because you think outside the box." And I really didn't feel healthy enough until the year I turned 50. I was working three jobs, and I had 40 minutes on the train, and I had nothing for Christmas. We were at a very great place of contentedness in not having anything, which was a huge journey in itself. I wrote [the novel] mostly on the train and got it done, made my 15 copies at Office Depot as a gift for Christmas. I'm not a trained writer. I learned to write by reading; that's where I learned. I've never taken the classes. I never intended to be a published author. So when I wrote this, it was simply a way to say--because my kids love story, because I think everybody loves story--let me tell you about the God who showed up and filled my heart, and not the religious God I grew up with." --William Paul Young
Building the Shack, Literally and Metaphorically
"We camped with the kids. I wrote it for them, so I used all kinds of places they're familiar with. We'd run into this thing in the woods, some hunter's cabin or whatever. So I started [writing the novel] with the conversations, all of the questions that I had, and this dialogue between me and God about loss and forgiveness, and those conversations became living. But then it became time [to figure out] who's asking and why, and that's where Mackenzie, who embodies my own losses, came about. So what's the setting? And in thinking about the setting, the shack suddenly made perfect sense. It's a place where you get stuck; it's our house on the inside; it's our broken soul. It's a place where I believe God has inhabited the entire time because God dwells with us. And what we do is we want to avoid the place of our darkness, where we hide our secrets, where we store our addictions. We don't want to deal with it. Our unforgiveness is there. Our shame is there. It's this broken down place we never want to go back into. But for our healing--we have to go back into that place. It is your soul, and that's what God loves, who God loves. He does not love our presentation of our best performance somewhere outside. We have to go back in here and co-create some healing, so that you can be free to be comfortable inside your own skin and at home inside your own soul." --William Paul Young
Papa Does Preach
"For me, it was a huge undertaking, and I actually had to try to figure out a way into the character. So what I did was basically boil it down to the relationship between Mack and Papa, and it felt very parental to me. So I basically did the work as if I were his foster mom who failed him, and then it was about building those bridges so that he could trust me again." --Octavia Spencer
"I cannot even imagine Papa not being Octavia. She embodies what I was wanting: this embrace but still in-your-face. It's the true understanding of what a parent's love is all about, that will constantly pursue you and won't stop even though you're pushing back, and filling up all the holes of the things we've lost along the way in maybe our own relationships with our own parents. Octavia is fantastic." --William Paul Young
"I have no second thoughts or regrets about any of the choices that were made, and I thought [they] just come across so powerfully. They really put their hearts into it. Tim McGraw [as Mack's best friend], Sam Worthington, Radha Mitchell [as Mack's wife], Sumire as the Holy Spirit, Aviv Alush--we have a Jew playing Jesus; who'd have thought, you know? [laughs] " --William Paul Young
"I'm very glad that they cast an Israeli as Jesus, and the thing about Aviv is that he has this beautiful personality. If you believe that Jesus is the light of the world, Aviv is definitely the man you want to play him because he has just this everyman light, and when you're around him he just fills the room with joy. He's devout. He's just a beautiful, beautiful person. I'm glad that I got to meet him and work together, and he was a lot of fun to work with, he and Sumire. It was wonderful working with Sam. He was a brand new father when we were doing this. I think the baby was only about six to eight weeks old; tiny. [The baby] being so young, he was exhausted because he wasn't really on a sleep schedule. And he was very vulnerable, which is what the character had to be. He was a sweetheart and very open to finding the truth in the scenes--and that's what you want in a scene partner: a person who's ready to go everywhere to get to the truth." --Octavia Spencer
The Guiding Spirit of Director Stuart Hazeldine
"Stuart is a great collaborator. We didn't have a lot of rehearsal time because we were all coming from different sets and different periods, so there was not a lot of rehearsal time prior to shooting. But while we were there, we took our time and worked on the scenes that required it. He was very collaborative and allowed us to find our footing in the scenes." --Octavia Spencer
A Story for Everyone
"I wouldn't be doing the movie if I didn't believe in the messages of it. I think we all face challenges, and I think agnostics can approach this film and learn from it as well. You realize that we all face challenges, and Mack has a huge challenge that he's facing: the loss of a child. I'm not a parent, but for my friends and family that are, their nightmare is to lose a child. So you have a man who suffers this tremendous loss; he had such a tumultuous childhood; and he loses a child, and so he loses faith. He loses faith in himself. He loses faith in God. And by doing that, he basically becomes paralyzed in his own life and shuts down. And so his family suffers from that; his daughter also shuts down. So it's about learning to forgive yourself and also learning that if you are ever a person who ever questions God, there's also a way to be able to forgive God. I don't think you necessarily have to be a religious person to understand the message about grief and guilt being a paralytic. If you don't correct that course, you will stay in a state of distress and be unable to grow. And I think that is something anybody can identify with." --Octavia Spencer
The Last Word
"Everything that matters to me--identity, work, value, significance, security, meaning, purpose, destiny, community, love--those were all in place before I wrote the book. The book didn't give me those things, for which I am so grateful because I can see what a black hole that can be. But what it did give me is it gave me an invitation into the holy ground of other people's stories. I tell people I think that's why we're born barefoot. We're designed to be inside the story of the other, and that invitation and ripples of it--I am so grateful [for that]. It is a kindness and a generosity to me that is too beautiful for words." --William Paul Young
“It’s a pleasure to have Octavia Spencer and Paula Patton join us to announce this year’s Film Independent Spirit Award Nominees,” said Josh Welsh, President of Film Independent. “This is an important moment in the independent film community calendar and we are delighted they will be with us as we announce the nominees for the year’s top independent films and artists.”
Spirit Awards are given out in the following categories: Best Feature, Best First Feature, Best First Screenplay, Best Director, Best Screenplay, John Cassavetes Award (given to the best feature made for a budget under $500,000), Best Male Lead, Best Female Lead, Best Supporting Male, Best Supporting Female, Best Cinematography, Best International Film, Best Documentary, Best Editing and the Robert Altman Award. The Filmmaker Awards include the Piaget Producers Award, the Stella Artois Truer Than Fiction Award and the Someone to Watch Award.
The Film IndependentSpirit Awards are sponsored by Premier Sponsors Piaget, the Lincoln Motor Company and IFC and by Principal Sponsor Stella Artois. WireImage is the Official Photographer and PR Newswire is the Official Breaking News Service of Film Independent.
Now in its 29th year, the Film IndependentSpirit Awards is an annual celebration honoring artist-driven films made with an economy of means by filmmakers who embody independence and originality. The Spirit Awards recognizes the achievements of American independent filmmakers and promotes the finest independent films of the year to a wider audience.
The Film IndependentSpirit Awards are sponsored by Premier Sponsors Piaget, the Lincoln Motor Company and IFC and by Principal Sponsor Stella Artois. WireImage is the Official Photographer and PR Newswire is the Official Breaking News Service of Film Independent.
Film Independent is a nonprofit arts organization that champion’s independent film and supports a community of artists who embody diversity, innovation, and uniqueness of vision. Film Independent helps filmmakers make their movies, builds an audience for their projects, and works to diversify the film industry. Film Independent’s Board of Directors, filmmakers, staff, and constituents, is comprised of an inclusive community of individuals across ability, age, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation. Anyone passionate about film can become a member, whether you are a filmmaker, industry professional, or a film lover.
Film Independent produces the Spirit Awards, the annual celebration honoring artist-driven films and recognizing the finest achievements of American independent filmmakers, as well as the Los Angeles Film Festival, celebrating its 20th anniversary of showcasing the best of American and international cinema. Film Independent also produces the Film Independent at LACMA Film Series, a year-round, weekly program that offers unique cinematic experiences for the Los Angeles creative community and the general public.
With over 250 annual screenings and events, Film Independent provides access to a network of like-minded artists who are driving creativity in the film industry. Film Independent’s Artist Development program offers free Labs for selected writers, directors, producers and documentary filmmakers and presents year-round networking opportunities. Project:Involve is Film Independent’s signature program dedicated to fostering the careers of talented filmmakers from communities traditionally underrepresented in the film industry.
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