Two films based on books claimed top trophies at the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday evening.
One Battle After Another, which is loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, won four Globes, including the prize for best picture, musical or comedy. The film, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, has a sprawling cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, and Teyana Taylor.
Anderson received the best director and best screenplay awards for the film, while Taylor won the award for best actress in a supporting role in any motion picture.
Accepting the screenwriting award, Anderson said, “Writers, we’re magpies. We steal all the bits and pieces that everybody says as best we can.…I stole a lot of words from Thomas Pynchon, who wrote a great book that we adapted.”
The other adaptation to win at the Globes was Chloé Zhao’s film based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet. The movie won the trophy for best motion picture, drama, and Jessie Buckley claimed the prize for best actress in a motion picture, drama.
Steven Spielberg, one of the producers of Hamnet, shouted out another of the film’s producers in an acceptance speech, saying, “Sam Mendes…sent me the book by Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet, and I loved the book, but I felt there was really only one filmmaker on the face of the planet who could tell this story of Agnes and Will and the spirits of the earth and the forest, and that was the exceptional, exceptional, exceptional Chloé Zhao.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
