First-time directors may turn awards voters’ heads

If the crush of film awards season can be good for something — really, it can! — it is simply getting people to watch films they might otherwise let slip by them. Whether it’s reaching deeper into that stack of screeners or actually checking them out in an honest-to-goodness movie theater, the wave of awards-ready titles can broaden the reach of some audience members.

Nowhere can this added attention be felt more strongly than with regard to the work of relatively new filmmakers, whether they are young or directing for the first time. This year, in particular, there are fairly recent film-school grads (and Sundance darlings) such as Sean Durkin, writer-director of “Martha Marcy May Marlene”; Dee Rees, writer and director of “Pariah”; and Drake Doremus, director and co-writer of “Like Crazy.”

There is also Mike Mills, a graphic designer and artist who made his second feature as writer-director with “Beginners.” And Ralph Fiennes, a two-time Oscar nominee for lead actor, leaped into the director’s chair for the first time with his ambitious adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus.”

Though none of these films was conceived with an awards campaign in mind, all of them stand to benefit from the extra awareness of The Season.

“My feeling is you make a film and you want people to see it,” said Durkin, during a recent phone call from his home in Brooklyn. “And anything, any connection you can be a part of that helps that, helps people to see it, then that’s great.

What’s perhaps most exciting about these particular films being given additional notice this year is that they all feature such distinctive and bold storytelling.

With “Beginners,” Mills tells a fictional version of his father’s story, about a man (played by Christopher Plummer) who comes out as gay late in life after being widowed. Yet, for Mills, it was also important to do it in a free way, with interludes about history and including his own drawings and family artifacts in the film.

“It’s not just personal,” said Mills during a recent interview in a Silver Lake coffee shop, “it was also doing it in a way that was unique, telling the story in the way that makes sense to me but doesn’t necessarily follow what the marketplace says that film should do. To break more rules, that was very emboldening. And rule-breaking ended up being the way to connect to audiences. A lot of the things I did that weren’t normal ended up being things people really liked.”

In “Pariah,” Rees tells the story of Alike, an African American teenager (played by Adepero Oduye) growing up in Brooklyn and struggling with the process of coming out to herself and her family. Using bold and expressive camera work, Rees hits upon a unique visual style to give an urgency to a story that could have descended into turgid melodrama but instead maintains an enthralling vibrancy.

“We wanted to be very expressive and lyrical,” said Rees on the phone from her home in Long Beach, “and we wanted to use the camera and lighting to heighten characterization. Alike’s a chameleon, she’s constantly painted by the light around her. Basically, the camera is always serving the character, it’s another way to tell the story. It’s more a concern with how things feel than how things actually are.”

Durkin puts viewers deep into the headspace of his main character in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” a fractured jangle that makes it unclear if a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) is being chased by the domineering cult from which she just escaped. The ambiguity of the film’s ending frequently has audiences buzzing on their way out of the theater.

“I never thought about it in terms of, ‘Oh I’m withholding this,’” Durkin said. “In some ways, you just do something the way you want to do and you don’t necessarily realize what people are going to focus on. To be honest, and I kind of hate saying this, I didn’t really know the ending would be such a big topic. I really felt like that was the only honest way to end it, where she is at at that point in time. I didn’t think it would be this whole conversation.”

Though “Like Crazy” is the third feature directed by Doremus, it has gotten leagues more attention than his previous two. The film was crafted from a detailed scenario co-written with Ben York Jones but all the dialogue was improvised, including the tender exchanges between the long-distance lovers played by Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones.

The film won the Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, with Jones picking up a special jury prize, but Doremus had a feeling early in the fest that something was happening.

“I was walking off the stage,” recalled Doremus sitting on a patio on the lot of Paramount Pictures, who bought the film at the festival, “and one of the studio heads from another studio that didn’t end up acquiring the movie came up to me and said, ‘I just put in an offer on your movie.’ I was literally walking off the stage from a Q&A. That alone was like, ‘This might be a little different year.’”

For his first film as director, Fiennes did not make it easy on himself, undertaking a modern-day interpretation of Shakespeare’s relentlessly hard-bitten war drama “Coriolanus.” He took the lead role, having played it on stage some years ago, and then rounded out his cast with such notable names as Vanessa Redgrave, Gerard Butler, Brian Cox and Jessica Chastain.

The full-blooded style Fiennes brings to the Bard is indicative of the diverse storytelling coming from this year’s crop of fresh new filmmakers.

“It was crazy,” said Fiennes during a recent promotional stopover in Beverly Hills. “I think back on it and I was a bit mad, but I couldn’t let go of the idea and then I got to a crunch point where I thought, ‘If I don’t at least try doing it, I will regret it.’”

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