Tom Bernard on the Art of Oscar Campaigns

“The goal has always been, if you have a good movie, to get people to see it,” Tom told us. Since the Academy developed its screening room app for members in the late 2010s, that goal has become much more achievable, making it easier for the best movie to win. “You’re not seeing those moments of ‘How did that win?’ It’s really a pretty straightforward, good deal now.” 

At Sony Pictures Classics, Bernard and his co-president, Michael Barker, have good reason to be confident in how the Oscars work these days; their recent successes include scoring a best actor nomination for Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon and an international feature win and best actress nomination for the Brazilian drama I’m Still Here. (When Chris playfully suggested that Neon had cribbed Sony Pictures Classics’ I’m Still Here strategy while pushing the Brazilian film The Secret Agent through Oscar season earlier this year, Tom joked, “Well, I guess everybody copies.”)

Right now, their big effort is behind The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, which Sony Classics and many of our Ankler Pundits hope will earn John Turturro his first-ever Oscar nomination (the excellent custom merch sure can’t hurt). Tom told us he was surprised by how few buyers were after the film following its Sundance premiere, but as they started to screen it ahead of bringing it to other festivals, “We knew we had something that was bigger than just a specialized movie. That’s something we have to learn early.” (Released last week, The Only Living Pickpocket earned $141,000 from six theaters — nearly $24,000 per venue. It will expand to more theaters throughout the month.)

It helps, too, when the lead actor is willing to play ball. As Tom noted, Hawke was everywhere last year for Blue Moon — and Turturro is following suit, attending multiple festivals (including Montclair) to support the film and sitting for numerous interviews (catch him with me on an upcoming episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast). Those broad publicity campaigns matter, Tom told us, especially for smaller movies; on the flip side, not participating can cost a nomination, as he said happened with Owen Wilson in 2011 for Midnight in Paris. “I said, ‘Owen, you’re really good in this movie, I think I can get you an Oscar nomination, but you’re going to have to show up and talk to some people. So, what do you think?’” Tom said. “He paused and said, ‘I got a lot of problems right now. I don’t want that.’” (Wilson went through a breakup with the mother of his months-old son shortly after the film came out.)

Thanks again to the festival for hosting not only me but many more of my Ankler colleagues — and thanks to audiences all over the country for what’s been an incredibly fun regional film festival season. Things are slowing down now, just in time for many major Oscar contenders to make their way to Los Angeles for the Governors Awards on Nov. 15. But don’t worry — the conclusion to our fall film festival draft is still coming on the podcast, I promise. 

Now to today’s main event: my conversation with filmmaker Sandra Wollner, whose bold, utterly captivating film Everytime has been another mainstay on the festival circuit since spring. 

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Digital Memories

Even Wollner doesn’t have all the answers about her new film.

The writer and director of the official German entry for the international feature Oscar — which won the top prize in Un Certain Regard following its Cannes premiere earlier this year — has been talking to a lot of audiences as Everytime makes its way to film festivals across the world. But she’s still not sure what counts as a spoiler for her unconventional family drama, or even whether the film’s striking poster — a glowing square sun setting over the ocean, an image that appears very late in the film — gives anything away. 

“I mean, in Jurassic Park, you know beforehand there are going to be dinosaurs, but it doesn’t keep you from being interested and waiting for it,” Wollner reasons. 

Everytime, to be clear, is nothing like Jurassic Park. Wollner’s third film introduces us to a Berlin-based family: a mother and two daughters, one a teenager insisting on her independence and the other, younger, very much in her sister’s thrall. Early in the movie, the teenage sister dies — that part isn’t a spoiler, Wollner is clear — and the remaining family unit finds themselves on a vacation with a teenage boy who is emotionally entangled with all of them. 

To keep it vague, things spin out from there in ways that sometimes feel surreal but deeply, emotionally true. Comparisons to the 2022 breakout indie hit Aftersun, which earned Paul Mescal a best actor nomination and also involves a family vacation, aren’t just surface-level; Everytime has the same cinematographer, Gregory Oke, who has a real knack for capturing the heartbreak that can hide in seemingly endless sunny days. 

But while Aftersun is a childhood story told in flashback, Everytime deliberately collides timelines as its characters remember their past selves and wish for a present they can no longer have. The Austrian-born Wollner, 43, swears she’s not an esoteric person. Still, talking about Everytime leads us both down some philosophical roads. “I sometimes feel that remembering something means imagining something that is not there yet, but that was there,” Wollner tells me. “In a way, the moment you remember something or you imagine something builds a bridge between all the times we know. Something comes together that somehow aligns past, present and even future.”

So that’s the deep metaphorical part of Everytime. Then there’s the part about iPhone videos and video game worlds, the digital detritus left behind by the teenage daughter that her mother and sister both cling to in her absence. The video game world is created in Vintage Story, which Wollner calls “the cooler version of Minecraft.” It shares similar blocky landscapes and lets the player drift through the world’s built landscapes, a cinematographic power Wollner was dying to see captured on the big screen. 

“I had the feeling that this is just kind of trippy and awesome,” Wollner says, thrilled at having seen that part of the film on a big screen during Everytime’s stop at the Chicago Film Festival. But having been built by a teenage girl who has since died, Wollner continues, the virtual world “is a memorial. It’s a place where you can hang out to kind of feel some closeness, as we sometimes do, of course, with photos or voice messages or iClouds. This had a different intimacy.”

The characters of Everytime deal with their grief by looking back through their loved one’s digital world, an experience that’s familiar even for those of us who aren’t in mourning — what parent has looked back at videos of their children as toddlers and felt the stinging pain of knowing that version of that person is now gone? I was astonished, then, to learn that Wollner was pregnant with her first child while making Everytime, somehow anticipating the shock and awe of meeting your child before she’d even gone through it herself. 

“You had your whole lifetime without that person being there, and then you wake up every morning and it’s like, ‘Where the fuck are you coming from?’ It’s a miracle that you are there,” she says. “It’s a miracle that there is this person.”

It’s completely changed the way Wollner looks at a key scene in the film, one that’s naturally almost impossible to discuss without spoiling it. But maybe we’ve teased just enough to make you want to run out and see Everytime, which is being released in the United States by upstart distributor 1-2 Special with a one-week qualifying run in early November and then a full theatrical release coming in February. But don’t just take my word for it; Wollner has seen firsthand how audiences respond. 

“I mean, first of all, it’s amazing that people got to see it,” says Wollner, whose first two films, The Impossible Picture and The Trouble with Being Born, had critical acclaim but much smaller releases. “I’m so happy how people connect to it, and that they connect on two levels —they connect emotionally with it, but also connect with the formal idea. This is just so awesome to see, especially with younger people.”