PGA Awards breakfast celebrates all 10 film nominees, recalls the infamous ‘La La Land’/’Moonlight’ Oscar mix-up
Hours before the 2025 Producers Guild of America Awards officially began, the 10 nominees for the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Best Picture got together on Saturday morning for an early-bird panel at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater.
In the room were Samantha Quan for Anora, Andrew Morrison for The Brutalist, Fred Berger for A Complete Unknown, Tessa Ross for Conclave, Mary Parent for Dune: Part Two, Ali Herting for A Real Pain, Philipp Trauer for September 5, Coralie Fargeat for The Substance, and Marc Platt for Wicked. Emilia Pérez‘s Jacques Audiard, across town for the Directors Guild Awards, appeared via a pretaped clip.
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“Cinema is an education,” Audiard declared at one point while speaking about the medium he loves so much. He did not address the controversy surrounding Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón, who upended the film’s Oscar campaign after her past offensive tweets resurfaced and she subsequently botched several attempts at apology.
Guild members in attendance watched the 90-minute Q&A session after a continental breakfast of muffins, fruits, yogurts, and coffee. The panelists addressed everything from their biggest filmmaking hurdles to overseeing the writing, directing, and casting processes to what inspired them to get into the movie business.
Berger and Platt, who previously worked together on La La Land (2016), recalled the infamous Academy Awards ceremony when the wrong winner was announced. “We actually won an Oscar for a minute and 30 seconds,” Platt laughed, to which Berger cheekily responded, “Did you give yours back?” Moonlight was the rightful winner, but presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were mistakenly given the Best Actress envelope that stated, “Emma Stone, La La Land,” prompting them to read aloud that movie title instead.
SEE 2025 Producers Guild Awards announces its first round of PGA winners
Quan said that Mikey Madison was the only choice to play the titular character in Anora after seeing her in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019). “She’s a truly transformational actor and the amount of energy, the bravery, her look, everything” was perfect for the role. “And when we met her, she was so different than who she plays on screen. She’s super quiet and demure and thoughtful, and [Sean Baker and I] realized we wanted to work with this person.”
Morrison’s duties of producing a “three-and-a-half-hour-long period drama on $10 million in 34 days was challenging,” he readily admitted. The intermission midway through The Brutalist was “always written” into the script, because, “We knew it was going to be an epic. Like, that was sort of the assignment. And we thought it would be a fun way to create a communal experience, especially coming out of COVID.”
Berger called A Complete Unknown a “really complex movie” and likened it to “making two or three movies all at once” because of “its scope.” He added, “You’re preparing and producing an album, and in our case, a live album, which was not initially the plan. Our schedule kept getting pushed and so we just kept developing and redeveloping our prerecords … there’s an insane amount of music in this film.”
For Conclave, “every element was complicated,” said Ross, including assembling a cast “from all over the world.” She was responsible for putting together the screenwriter, Peter Straughan, and the director, Edward Berger, after meeting with the book’s author, Robert Harris. “I’m quite old, so I feel like I’ve done it enough to have some idea of who might make it work,” she informed the crowd.
Parent noted that Dune: Part One was just an “appetizer,” so for the sequel, “We actually have to see them ride a worm now. There’s no reference point for that. From these incredible cultures to the world building, everything [Denis Villeneuve] does is so intentional.” Regarding star Timothée Chalamet, she added, “When Timmy gets up on that worm, you’re gonna feel emotion, you’re gonna feel mastery, and it’s gonna feel real and not weird and not strange.”
Herting gave a purposeful nod to Kieran Culkin when she said A Real Pain was a “succession of small miracles.” Behind the scenes of her $5 million film from writer-director-producer Jesse Eisenberg, there was “friction” because “Kieran doesn’t rehearse,” she revealed. “He barely reads the script. He reads it moments before, and he goes, ‘Okay, I got it.’ It’s in his head. The first two days were really tense and maybe mildly unpleasant. But there was a beauty in their dynamic that comes out on the screen.”
Trauer had a one-of-a-kind challenge for September 5 in trying to obtain “the rights to this footage,” referring to the Munich massacre of 1972. “It was very, very difficult with ABC or ESPN holding the rights. It was also so many years ago, and they don’t archive everything.” Eventually, Disney CEO Bob Iger came to the rescue and helped secure the necessary footage. “OK, now we can we can actually do this movie,” Trauer knew at the time.
Fargeat was inspired by Pablo Picasso for the look of the monster at the end of The Substance, as it had “all of [Demi Moore‘s] body parts in the wrong place.” She wanted it to appear “monstrous, but to be lovable … a monster that you want to hug, that you want to protect.” In her first screening with the studio, the writer-director-producer was surprised to learn that the only thing they “didn’t like was the monster.” She chuckled, “Okay, so even a monster has to meet some kind of beauty standard.”
Platt’s experience was the opposite of many of his fellow filmmakers, as he was the hurdle that was standing in Wicked‘s way from being adapted from the popular musical. “I was the one that didn’t want to make a film for many, many years,” he confessed. “Part of it was slightly selfish, because the stage musical was expanding around the globe and I wanted to acquire a fan base. But the other was my own insecurity.” Platt added, “I had to wait for the moment where all of the clouds and stars and rainbows were aligned, and then Jon M. Chu came into my life,” followed by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Clearly, waiting made it “work out” in the end.
The 36th annual PGA Awards takes place Saturday at 7:15 p.m. PT at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Century City, Calif.
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