As well as bagging four Oscars and nine BAFTAs, Edward Berger’s WW1 drama All Quiet on the Western Front cemented its place in pop-culture history by becoming an internet meme. Under ‘how it started’, the meme shows the film’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), as a laughing, idealistic new recruit. But then, under ‘how it’s going’, we see the same young soldier, now hollowed out, filthy, and traumatized by the carnage he’s seen.

For Berger, however, everything’s going just fine. Hours after celebrating his BAFTA win at London’s Royal Festival Hall, the director was on a flight to Italy to resume work on his follow-up, Conclave. Adapted by screenwriter Peter Straughan and based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, it stars Ralph Fiennes in a modern-day thriller about the power struggle that ensues after the death of a fictional pope. Filming inside the 15^th-century Vatican is forbidden, but Berger found a place that’s just as holy: the legendary Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where Stage 15 has become a full-scale replica of the interior of the Sistine Chapel.

The ceiling will be added in post, but the attention to detail is extraordinary, especially when the extras arrive. The day we meet, Berger is directing the vote for a new pope, and the set is awash with men in white cassocks and scarlet zucchettos. It’s a simple scene, but Berger has it all storyboarded, and his perfectionism starts to show when one of the featured background artists fails to hit his mark (“Find me someone who can walk normally,” he whispers to his First A.D.). Oscar night is less than three weeks away, but Berger isn’t stressing about that either, as the room is given a top-up spray of “atmos”.

In person, he is a cheerful, unassuming chap in his early 50s, but this easygoing exterior is deceptive: Edward Berger is not afraid to say no. And the first thing he said no to was what life seemed to have in store for him. “I come from Wolfsburg, a fairly small city in Germany,” he says. “They build Volkswagen cars there, and that’s all they do. Everyone works for Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, so, usually, in that city, you become an engineer, a teacher, a doctor, or a lawyer. You get a proper job.” The third of four children — three boys and a girl — Berger thought he’d do that too; his father was an engineer (at Volkswagen), as were his older brothers. Still, they were an arts-leaning family, and they encouraged Berger in his love of theater. “I always loved movies, too, but I didn’t have a clue how they were made. I thought the actors made them.”

He was 14 when the scales fell from his eyes after a trip to the art school in nearby Braunschweig. “They had a film course,” he recalls, “and people were walking around with cameras. It was the first time I realized how you make a movie.”

His teenage awakening, however, wasn’t like The Fabelmans. “I started slowly, not like Spielberg re-enacting movies. I had a Super-8 camera and a video camera. It was all awfully terrible and not full-time.” He also started writing, and the play he wrote at 15 offers some clues to his later decision to adapt Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet. “It was terribly pretentious,” he admits. “It was called Carthage. I had the idea from [playwright] Bertolt Brecht, who said that the great state of Carthage fought three wars: after the first war, it crumbled; after the second war, it was barely existent; and in the third war, it was destroyed. It was obviously a metaphor for Germany.”

At 18, Berger surprised his father by enrolling in an engineering degree in Berlin (“He was like, ‘Really? Engineering?’”). His father’s instincts proved right. “I went for the first day, which was a prep course in math. I sat and listened to it and thought, ‘That’s not for me.’ So, I left and went to that art school in Braunschweig.”

After Braunschweig, Berger moved to New York in the early ’90s to study film at the Tisch School, but after graduating in ’94, he was at a loose end. “I’d watched a lot of independent movies in school, and New York was the independent hub. A lot of the movies I loved came from one company in particular, Good Machine, and so I knocked on their door.” Anthony Bregman, now an acclaimed producer, opened it. It was a tiny company that employed just eight people. “I started as an unpaid intern,” says Berger. “I did photocopies and errands for three months, and that turned into my first job.”

He stayed there for a year and a half, earning $400 a week, and the crunch came when he was offered a job as a production supervisor on Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. “It was, like, $2,400 a week or some insane amount of money. I started stuttering, and I said, ‘I can’t do it.’” Why not? “If I’d taken it, I wouldn’t be a director today.”

Berger, quite correctly, knew it was time to go. “It was the best time,” he says. “But you also felt you were at the end of it. I had an apartment on the Bowery, and the Angelika Film Center was around the corner. There was a film market there every year or so. I saw all these independent filmmakers, with their flyers, running by my apartment, and I could see their desperation, like wet soap was slipping from their fingers. Most of them ended up with a massive credit card bill and an unsold movie.”

Like Fritz Lang before him, Berger decided to go home. “I went back one summer and thought, ‘Wow, life is happening here, and it’s cheap.’ I also thought, ‘I’m not American; what am I doing in New York? I don’t have a story to tell there.’” A summer in Berlin inspired him to write a film called Gomez: Heads or Tails, that took place there and got it funded very quickly. “It was about a kid growing up in Berlin who ends up in a knife fight in the subway. I forget what happens in the end.” He shrugs. “I think he dies.”

Immediately, he hit a rock. “I realized I didn’t have anything to say afterward.” And though his next film, a romantic comedy, cost 10 times as much (“I had four million Deutschmarks back then, which was a lot”), he still wasn’t satisfied. “It was shallow,” he sighs. “It did OK, but it was just mediocre. It wasn’t the movie I’d hoped I was making, and I also realized that I didn’t quite know yet how to use storytelling tools.”

Television was a good place for him to learn that, but a dangerously seductive one. “The German system sucks you up,” he says, “because television is so powerful, and there’s hardly any movies made. You get opportunities with actors that you’ve grown up with, which is amazing. But you don’t realize how, bit by bit, you’re drifting away from your ideals, like the ones I had at Good Machine. You get excited, and then when it’s finished, you realize, ‘Oh, it’s just a television movie. Let’s do the next one, and it’ll be better.’ So, you put all your heart and soul into it — and you make another television movie. Now, I learned a lot about directing in that time. But after 10 years, I realized if I continued doing that, I’d just be a television director.”

The biggest lesson he’d learned was that the movie has to come from inside you, and inspiration finally struck when he gave up on the next script he was writing. “I had a crisis,” he says. “I couldn’t finish it, so I played soccer with my son in the garden instead. And one Sunday afternoon, I saw a kid walking by with a backpack. My kid said, ‘Oh, that’s Jack. He’s in my class. On Friday nights, he goes to stay with his mom, and on Sunday nights, he goes back to the children’s home.’ I was so moved by this kid — he was smiling and waving and walking towards the sunset — I thought, ‘Look at him. Stop complaining about your stupid script and write another one.’”

The new script, Jack, told the story of a 10-year-old boy struggling to hold his single-parent family together and premiered in Competition at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival, giving Berger his first taste of legitimacy. It also set the director on a new course when he read the script for a mini-series called Deutschland ’83, about a young East German sent to the West as a spy by the Stasi. “It was the first script I’d read in Germany that felt international,” he says. “All the other offers felt kind of smaller, but this one was more irreverent toward history, more fun, and that’s what attracted me.”

Ironically, although Berger thought he was trying to leave TV behind, the success of Deutschland ’83 coincided with the rise of a new, upmarket kind of TV and actually led to more. He followed it in 2018 with AMC’s The Terror and, the series closest to his heart, Showtime’s Patrick Melrose, based on Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical novels about a privileged man from a broken home. “I’d read those books when I was at Good Machine, rollerblading home from work, and I just became such a fan.”

Berger soon learned to trust his instincts, and when producer Malte Grunert came to him in 2020 with All Quiet he jumped at the chance. It was “an urge”, he says. “We wanted to tell that story and share it. We wanted to speak of our youth and the feelings we’d grown up with. The guilt and the shame. The responsibility. It all went into that movie.”

Looking back, does he see a pattern? “Different projects pull me in different directions,” he says. “That’s my compass. I’m not catering to an audience. After All Quiet I thought, you know what? Next time, I want to make something entertaining. At the end of All Quiet it’s just silence. There’s no music. I really had the urge to make a movie where I could put a pop song on and have people get up and say, ‘That was fun. Let’s go have a drink.’” And after Conclave? “I’ll probably want to do something different again.”

Whether Lily Gladstone decides to campaign for lead actress or supporting (and there’s a case for either), a spot will be reserved for her in a lineup. That’s because her powerfully complex role in Apple Original Films’ “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival on a rainy Saturday night, is too good to ignore.

Gladstone delivers an uncompromising portrayal as Mollie, an Indigenous woman whose family and tribal community are being murdered at the hands of a sinister group of white men, driven by their thirst for greed and power. She’s a magnificent force.

It became clear almost 10 minutes into Martin Scorsese’s epic adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” that the audience of attendees were witnessing the birth of a star.

The film tells the tragic true story of members of the Osage tribe, who are murdered under mysterious circumstances during the 1920s. The events spark a major investigation that give birth to the FBI under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover.

At the center is Gladstone’s Mollie, along with her husband Ernest (played by a remarkable Leonardo DiCaprio) and his Uncle “King” (played by a visceral Robert DeNiro in his best performance in more than a decade).

When it comes to Gladstone, 36, the truth is she’s already demonstrated a remarkable range with an impressive body of work. Some of those include 2013’s “Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of Plain Indians” and 2020’s “First Cow.” In fact, I believe she should have already been the recipient of an Oscar statuette for supporting actress for her remarkable turn in Kelly Reichardt’s multi-narrative 2016 drama “Certain Women.”

Indigenous representation in the Academy (and Hollywood) has been virtually nonexistent in the history of cinema. Assuming supporting actress is in the cards for her (that’s where pundits including Variety have been tracking her), she would be only the second Indigenous actress ever nominated in the category after Jocelyne LaGarde for 1966’s “Hawaii.” It’s well overdue (and first ever winner perhaps?).

When it comes to Scorsese’s frequent collaborators — DiCaprio and DeNiro — expect to see them in the mix for another trip around the awards circuit.

DiCaprio, a best actor winner for “The Revenant,” has never played a character so grotesque. An Actors Branch favorite, if he were to be overlooked, it would be due to the vile nature of the real life man he portrays, which could turn off voters. It would have nothing to do with the quality.

The same goes for DeNiro, who chews up the scenery with a villainous twang, and his most terrifying turn since 1991’s “Cape Fear.” A two time winner for “Raging Bull” (1980) and “The Godfather Part II” (1974). Much like Ralph Fiennes’ nominated turn as a Nazi commander in “Schindler’s List,” there is such a thing as being “too evil” for voters.

Jesse Plemons, who plays agent Tom White, is the leading character in the book. However, he takes a substantial backseat in the tale, and doesn’t have the screen time to pop (unless the Academy falls over themselves with nominations). The Oscar nominated actor of “The Power of the Dog” doesn’t show up on screen until nearly two and half hours into the tale. Last year’s best actor winner Brendan Fraser is only in the final 20 minutes or so.

Scorsese’s shot at walking away with his second Oscar for directing — after 2006’s best picture winner “The Departed” — have largely increased. At 80 years old, the auteur filmmaker, along with co-scribe Eric Roth, maneuver the difficult subject matter with respect. That will put them on the table for what is already looking like a jam-packed adapted screenplay race (coming after “The Zone of Interest”).

Rodrigo Prieto will be eyeballing his first win for cinematography after coming up short for “Brokeback Mountain,” “Silence” and “The Irishman.”

Three time winner and editing legend Thelma Schoonmaker will be an interesting part of the awards puzzle to watch closely. Based on initial reactions, even those who liked the movie were vocal about its robust runtime. She could be the “fault person” if that becomes an increasing consensus. For the moment, I feel the movie only works because of its epic scope, demanding the audience to witness the revolting horror of both physical, and cultural genocide, that’s still occurring more than 500 years after Christopher Columbus stole America from its rightful inhabitants.

Best picture will be a viable option for the streamer. The greatest hurdle will be sustaining the buzz and noise for the next 10 grueling months.

No matter the outcome, Gladstone could (and should), at minimum, carry the Oscar torch for this impeccably moving motion picture.

The hot ticket at Cannes — Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour opus “Killers of the Flower Moon,” adapted by the director and Eric Roth from David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction bestseller — screened ahead of its Saturday festival premiere in New York and Los Angeles to give critics a head start on writing their reviews. It’s clear why Apple chose not to play the film in Competition: it’s earning a range of reactions.

Sumptuously produced, the $200-million western crime saga transports the viewer to ’20s Oklahoma, where vast oil fields have brought immense wealth to the Osage Nation. While Grann’s book focuses on the procedural aspects of solving the so-called Reign of Terror that led to dozens of mysterious Osage deaths, Scorsese and Roth create a three-hander centered on the uncle and nephew played by Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio (Scorsese regulars united for the first time with their favorite director) and Native American actress Lily Gladstone (Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women”) as Ernest Burkhart’s wise and suspicious Osage wife, Mollie Kyle, who identifies her husband as a “coyote.”

These three actors will dominate Oscar talk at year’s end. Oscar-winner De Niro (“Raging Bull,” “The Godfather Part II”) is formidable in a supporting role as the William “King” Hale, the charming and relentless master manipulator behind the murders who persuades his slow-witted World War I veteran nephew to not only marry the statuesque Kyle, but hire minions to carry out the murders of her two sisters, among others, in order to eventually score her family’s headrights.

Two hours into the slow-paced epic, Texas Ranger hero turned FBI agent for J. Edgar Hoover, Thomas Bruce White (Jesse Plemons), arrives on the scene with a cadre of agents who swiftly piece the sordid murder plot together and proceed to trial. While Roth’s original script, like Grann’s book, played out like a police procedural as White (originally to be played by DiCaprio) solves the intricacies of the crime, Roth pivoted to give the Osage more gravitas in the narrative. Oscar-winner DiCaprio (“The Revenant”) found the role of Ernest Burkhart, a man who loves a woman while ordering the murder of her family, more complex and fascinating than the FBI man, who could play like a white saviour. If Plemons therefore does not carry enough screen time to warrant Oscar consideration, DiCaprio is scoring kudos for his layered performance as a blind follower who does what he is told, even if it means poisoning someone he cares for deeply.

Gladstone steals the show. An actress who was on the verge of giving up her profession, she holds the screen against two powerful movie stars. In one compelling scene, as Burkhart is clumsily wooing her, a thunder storm descends on the house. He wants to keep talking. Kyle tells him to be quiet and listen to the storm.

Revered auteur Scorsese, who could certainly have trimmed the length of his western gangster story, should nonetheless wind up in Oscar contention for the 15th time. He has been nominated 14 times, nine for Best Director, two writing nods shared with Jay Cocks, and three Best Picture nominations. He and his Oscar-winning co-screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) could also land an Adapted Screenplay slot.

Much like Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” or Scorsese’s own “The Irishman,” which scored ten Oscar nominations, Oscar voters will surely wind up singing “Killer Moon”‘s extraordinary crafts: thrice-nominated cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (“The Irishman,” “The Silence,” “Brokeback Mountain”), three-time winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Scorsese’s “The Departed,” “The Aviator,” and “Raging Bull”), two-time nominee production designer Jack Fisk (“The Revenant,” “There Will Be Blood”), four-time nominee costume designer Jacqueline West (“Dune,” “The Revenant,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Quills”), and never-nominated composer Robbie Robertson (Scorsese’s documentary “The Last Waltz”), whose mother was Cayuga and Mohawk.

While the Apple Studios production will see October theatrical release by Paramount Pictures before it goes online, many Academy voters will wind up watching it on the screening portal, which is far from an ideal viewing experience for this immersive epic.