Adams, McQueen and Riley are honored
A time to reflect for honoree Amy Adams SFFilm Awards also go to McQueen for directing and Riley for storytelling
If it weren’t for Dick Cheney, director Adam McKay might not have made it to SFFilm Awards Night at the Palace of Fine Arts on Monday, Dec. 3, to honor Amy Adams. While researching the former vice president’s heart problems for McKay’s biopic “Vice,” he learned from a doctor that a queasy stomach and tingling hands can sometimes signal a heart attack.
So when McKay found himself experiencing these symptoms earlier this year, he had his wife call 911. “Otherwise I probably would have gone upstairs and laid down. Would I have died? I don’t know. So yeah, I am indebted to Cheney,” said McKay, whose indebtedness did not stop him from creating a chilling portrait of President George W. Bush’s No. 2.
Adams plays Lynne Cheney, a driving force behind her husband’s success.
“Without Lynne I don’t know if there would be a Dick,” McKay came to believe. With Christian Bale as the title character packing an extra 40 pounds, McKay needed an actress “who can kick his butt and I thought right away of Amy,” with whom he worked on “Talladega Nights.”
“She is special. There aren’t a lot of males or females like her who have that range and force and that twinkle in their eyes mixed with the discipline and intelligence. She goes under the heading of someone who I would work with over and over and over again,” said McKay, who didn’t hesitate when invited to present her with the Peter J. Owens Award for acting Monday night.
For Adams — who wore a black Armani jumpsuit because “it seemed to suit the evening” — being singled out with a San Francisco prize “gives me an opportunity to reflect and to think about what my career means to me. I am able to make it a wonderful time of reflection,” she said.
Her performance as Mrs. Cheney has won her a place on many critics’
“Would I have died? I don’t know. So yeah, I am indebted to Cheney.” Director Adam McKay, on recognizing the signs of heart attack
lists of possible Oscar nominees. This would be the sixth nomination for the 44-year-old actress.
Asked what it is like around her house in the early morning when Oscar nominations are announced on TV, she said, “Sometimes I am asleep and sometimes I am awake, but I am not sort of waiting to see what the decisions will be. I don’t feel entitled to a nomination.”
Her 8-year-old daughter, Aviana, has been through several announcement mornings.
“She sort of understands people occasionally will interrupt a meal to talk to me,” Adams said. “She handles it with a lot of grace for someone her age.”
An invitation to be honored during SFFilm Awards Night was akin to a summons to Mecca for Steve McQueen, director of the Oscar-winning best picture “12 Years a Slave.” Coming up as a filmmaker, he was heavily influenced by San Francisco experimental directors like Bruce Conner and George Kuchar.
“Avant-garde filmmaking was my first introduction to actual filmmaking, and it led me to making different kinds of films for sure,” the British director said. “San Francisco is an amazing sort of city to let this kind of cinema bloom.”
McQueen was presented the Irving M. Levin Award for film direction by Michelle Rodriguez (whose form-fitting, slate gray, Alexander McQueen dress was so long she had to pick it up as she walked). Rodriguez stars in McQueen’s latest, “Widows,” a heist thriller where the perpetrators are the wives of the men who designed the burglary, but were murdered before they could pull it off.
“Your eyes penetrate,” she said, speaking directly to McQueen in her presentation. “You saw in me something I didn’t even know existed.”
Some critics labeled his latest work light fare after McQueen’s string of serious films like “12 Years a Slave” and “Hunger.” But McQueen believes “Widows” is political in its own way, reflected in its multiracial and ethnic female cast not often seen in studio films.
“I would say it very loud and clear. We are doing something that hasn’t been done before. I would call it quite important,” he said.
Giving Boots Riley the Kanbar Award for storytelling, Oakland poet Ishmael Reed said, “I think all past black filmmakers would be very proud of you.” Riley earned the award for his first film, “Sorry to Bother You,” shot in the Bay Area using local actors and crew. He not only wrote but directed this satire about the corporate world and how black people attempt to adjust to it. A telemarketer, for instance, is told he will sell more if he cultivates a “white voice.”
Asked if he has a “white voice,” Riley laughed and said, “I am sure I do, but it doesn’t click on and off in a quick way. The whole point of my movie is we are all performing, and the question is ‘Why?’ ”
Riley has been a rapper and frontman for hip-hop groups much of his career. He finds screenwriting easier than writing songs.
“You know with music I am trying to make you dance, and I don’t have to make you dance to a screenplay. But I am going to keep doing my music, because if I don’t, I kind of get depressed.”
He will have to squeeze it in between negotiating deals on two feature films and a TV series.
Riley’s roots in the Bay Area are so deep he can’t imagine a situation that would take him to live in Los Angeles. “Every encounter I have had in L.A. would argue even more for me to never move there,” he said.