2016 Calvin Awards: Best Director

By Kim Hollis

February 26, 2016

I like making movies about pigs, penguins and post-apocalyptic wastelands!

Directors are the backbone of film. Not only do they interpret the writing within a screenplay, but they must also work with disparate actors, set designers, costumers, effects artists, sound designers and more to craft what will hopefully become the ideal representation of their vision. This year, we found plenty of such visions that were worthy of recognition.

We missed having a repeat winner by a slim margin of just nine points. You can probably ascertain by this statement that Alejandro González Iñárritu did not finish in first place for The Revenant. Instead, we selected the great George Miller as our Calvin winner for Best Director. We’ve long been fans of his gonzo, eclectic style, dating all the way back to the original Mad Max days in the late 1970s. Of course, since then he’s done a lot of varied projects before returning the the franchise where he got his start, including such films as The Witches of Eastwick, Lorenzo’s Oil, Babe and its sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, and both Happy Feet films. To say that Miller is unpredictable is a bit of an understatement.

There had long been rumblings of a Mad Max resurrection, and with Miller back at the helm, he took Fury Road in madcap and extreme new directions to suit our current era. The set pieces and the effects are seamless and elaborate, while the story itself has such a feminist bent that many viewers wondered why the film was even called “Mad Max” in the first place. It was a refreshing reexamination of the post-nuclear universe where survivors are driven to extremes simply to exist. No director could have handled this with the audacity that Miller did, and we’ll be forever grateful that he came back for another go.




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With Miller in the top position, that means Iñárritu finishes in second. After winning last year for Birdman, it would have been an impressive feat indeed to claim two in a row. Peter Jackson will stay safe as our only repeat winner ever (he won for all three Lord of the Rings films). Iñárritu wowed us this year as he went from coloring outside traditional Hollywood lines with Birdman to a true big-time Hollywood production with the revenant. Not only does it have a huge budget and feature one of the biggest stars in the industry (Leonardo DiCaprio), it also has awe-inspiring special effects and a classic Western-style tale of revenge. It’s impossible not to watch the movie and pause at moments to revel in its artistry. Our top two selections for director really do make for an amazing one-two punch.

Next up in third place is Adam McKay, who managed to take a hard non-fiction book in The Big Short and turn it into a captivating film that is simultaneously hilarious and devastating. That it comes from the man previously responsible for such stuff as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby only makes this feat all the more remarkable - those movies are terrific, but not what we typically consider when we think of “award worthy.” The Big Short makes the housing collapse of the 2000s easier to comprehend, and even as it’s making us sick over what happened, the film is still entertaining to watch.


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