Movies are a collaborative artform, where an effects-heavy film like Avengers: Endgame will have 12 minutes of end credits while thousands of names scroll by, and even a relatively lean crew like Parasite still involves over 100 people. So while the individual actors and directors who take home an Academy Award certainly deserve their share of the credit, it’s worth remembering the small army it took to get them on stage at the Oscars.
In fact, many filmmakers not only depend on a top-level crew, but they frequently rely on the same small team of trusted collaborators on movie after movie to make their vision a reality. Here are some of the lesser-known names whose behind-the-scenes work helped create this year’s slate of Oscar nominees.
Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker, and Ellen Lewis
Martin Scorsese famously tends to draw from a small pool of his favorite actors, like Robert De Niro. But while The Irishman marks the ninth time De Niro has acted in a major Scorsese movie, it’s also the first feature film Scorsese made with De Niro since Casino in 1995. As it turns out, the two people Scorsese truly relies on the most for his films are Ellen Lewis, who has been his casting director since his segment in 1989’s New York Stories, and Thelma Schoonmaker, a three-time Oscar winner who has been Scorsese’s film editor all the way back to Raging Bull. “My artistic development came through him,” Schoonmaker recently told The Guardian. “We don’t fight and it has been a wonderful collaboration.”
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Richardson
Robert Richardson is another frequent Scorsese collaborator, having served as the director of photography on a half dozen of the director’s films, including Oscar-winning work on The Aviator and Hugo. More recently, Richardson has been shooting for writer/director Quentin Tarantino on the Kill Bill movies, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and now Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. In a recent interview with Collider, Richardson noted that while he and Tarantino have built a comfortable working relationship over the years, Tarantino’s closest collaborator in his career had been Sally Menke. Menke had edited all of Tarantino’s films from Reservoir Dogs up through Inglourious Basterds, but she died tragically while hiking near Los Angeles in 2010.
Bong Joon-Ho and Song Kang-ho
Writer/director Bong Joon-ho hasn’t always relied on the same team to make his movies. To shoot Best Picture nominee Parasite, however, he reunited many of the same crewmembers from his most recent prior film, Okja. That team includes Academy Award-nominated editor Jinmo Yang, sound supervisor Tae-young Choi, production designer Ha-jun Lee, costume designer Se-yeon Choi, and set decorator Won-woo Cho. He also cast actor Song Kang-ho as the father of a struggling family who cons their way into jobs in a wealthy household. Song has appeared in most of Bong’s movies, back to 2003’s Memories of Murder, but Parasite was the first time Song had to sign a strict non-disclosure agreement just to look at the script. “We never sue each other [in Korea],” Bong joked at a recent panel appearance. “It never happens.”
James Mangold, Michael McCusker, Phedon Papamichael, Donald Sylvester, and Andrew Buckland
Best Picture nominee Ford v Ferrari was produced and directed by James Mangold, who has been building a steady team of collaborators over the past two decades. Michael McCusker, nominated this year as a film editor, has been Mangold’s go-to partner in the editing suite since his 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (which earned McCusker his first Oscar nomination). Another standby on Mangold’s filmmaking team is cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, who shot Ford v Ferrari, Logan, Knight and Day, 3:10 to Yuma, and Identity. Ford v Ferrari is also the sixth time Mangold has worked with sound editor Donald Sylvester, who also picked up an Oscar nod for the film, and the fourth time Mangold hired Andrew Buckland, who shares the editing nomination with McCusker. At a recent screening of the film, Mangold said his longtime team communicates with a kind of shorthand on set. “[Papamichael] is always looking for the same things that Mike [McCusker] is talking about,” Mangold said. “We’re all in agreement as to why we’re there.”
J.J. Abrams, Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, Dominic Tuohy, and Neal Scanlan
The visual effects team on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker collaborated to bring to life J.J. Abrams vision of Star Wars that melds practical effects with modern computer imagery — even going through the trouble of creating a new animatronic puppet for Maz Kanata after she had been entirely CGI in The Force Awakens. “When you have a director that’s actually putting the carrot out there for you or your extra expectations, it can be terrifying to try and meet that expectation,” Dominic Tuohy, who is also nominated this year for his work on 1917, told comicbook.com. “But to have somebody who is an amazing visionary and leader, you rise to the challenge.” Roger Guyett earned his sixth Academy Award nomination this year for his visual effects work on The Rise of Skywalker, and this was his sixth movie working with director J.J. Abrams. Guyett and Tuohy share their nomination with Industrial Light and Magic visual effects supervisor Patrick Tubach, along with creature effects creator Neal Scanlan.
