Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle Puts us in a Trance
Chances are you’ve seen the trailer to this weekend’s Trance, and while it may be an incredibly intense three minutes, you’re likely left with several questions. Fear not, many of them might never get answered. But that’s okay, according to the film’s director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle. Trance tracks what is a largely internalized journey taken on by an art auctioneer-turned art thief (James McAvoy) forced to see a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) to help him recall where he’s stashed his latest haul.
House of Sound: Composer Jeff Beal Talks David Fincher, Scoring Netflix’s Breakout Hit, and Jazz
When composer Jeff Beal heard that director David Fincher was involved in an intriguing television project with Netflix, he wanted in. That project was House of Cards, an original series starring Kevin Spacey as House Majority Whip Frank Underwood, a vengeful political animal with scores to settle. Fincher asked Beal to submit some musical sketches, and what Beal created ended up becoming the basis for the show’s theme,
Are you a Joffrey, a Cersei, or a Jon Snow? Take our Game of Thrones Personality Quiz
Season three of Game of Thrones is finally, mercifully here. Of the many, many reasons to love GOT (dragons, palace intrigue, a Tolkien-esque commitment to mythical cartography with a Cinemax After Dark commitment to carnal relations), we've found that it’s the fantastically divergent (and huge) cast of characters that makes it endlessly enjoyable, week after week. Millions of fans would no doubt agree.These characters!
Writer-Director Derek Cianfrance on The Place Beyond the Pines
Ryan Gosling may have recently suggested that he is taking a break from acting, but fans can still find solace in this weekend’s release of The Place Beyond the Pines, a triptych that reunites him with Blue Valentine writer-director Derek Cianfrance.
The cops and robbers caper—costarring Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, and Ray Liotta—traces the ramifications caused when Gosling’s character, a drifter-cum-motorcycle stunt driver,
The Art of Armory: Chatting With Game of Thrones Costume Designer Michele Clapton
Emmy and BAFTA award winning costume designer Michele Clapton has perhaps one of the most demanding, and most fun, jobs in TV—she clothes the wild, epic world of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Clapton, who works in Belfast, Ireland, heads up a team of weavers, embroiderers and armorers as she creates the costumes, most of them from scratch (they have their own loom in which they weave the fabric) for a show unrivaled in its scope,
Triple Threat: Chatting With Film/TV/Video Game Composer Christopher Lennertz of NBC’s Revolution
Christopher Lennertz’s composing career has settled nicely across three mediums, making him one of the busiest musicians in Hollywood. His most recent film successes includes scoring a string star-studded comedies like Identity Thief, Think Like a Man and Horrible Bosses. For scoring TV, his credits include NBC’s new series Revolution, about a family struggling to reunite in a totally powerless American landscape–and we mean that literally,
The Art of Adaptation: Talking With Karen Croner, Admission Screenwriter
Best known for her adaptations of Olive Ann Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree and Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing, screenwriter Karen Croner is, above all things, a writer’s screenwriter if there is such a thing. Croner’s first stab at comedy hits the screen this weekend in the ever-capable hands of Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in Admission. Focused largely on the nervous breakdown suffered by a Princeton University admissions officer played by Fey,
From Making Hats to 3D Cats: Self-Taught Animator TJ Nabors Helps Create The Croods
TJ Nabors has taken your typical road to becoming a top animator in Hollywood—she started out designing hats. She was in theater at the University of Texas, and was focusing on textiles and costume, when she took a particular shine to the creation of hats. "There was a distilled and theatrical power to transform the wearer," she says. The power to transform one thing into another would become a theme in Nabors professional life, as she transformed herself into a self-taught animator,
Composer John Debney Answers The Call, and Goes Really Dark
Incorporating ‘found sound’ into his score for director Brad Anderson’s The Call, Oscar nominated composer John Debney wasn’t afraid to get weird. From slapping the tops of pianos to creating a bizarre engine revving sound for the film’s deranged lunatic, he took risks. The result is a truly unsettling soundscape–from the same man who wrote the score for Elf, no less.
The Call,
Meet William Corso, Oscar Winning Makeup Artist Behind The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
With a formidable resume that includes five Steven Spielberg movies (from Amistad to Munich), eight Jim Carrey movies (from The Majestic to this Friday’s The Incredible Burt Wonderstone), and dozens of film and television projects in between (from Jackass: The Movie to Grey Gardens), makeup artist William Corso has become one of the most esteemed—and in-demand—behind-the-scenes guys in Hollywood.
Eleven Very Short Answers From James Franco About his Upcoming Film, Bukowski
James Franco’s appearance at Sundance this year was a stunner. But then again the risk-taking renaissance man is accustomed to surprising his critics. At Sundance’s New Frontiers the actor/director/producer/visiting professor/writer presented his collaborative effort with gay filmmaker Travis Mathews. The graphic sixty-minute documentary Interior. Leather Bar, a hard core riff on the gay leather bar scene, and two other films, Kink and Lovelace,
Documentary Filmmaker Andrew Jenks Makes Compassion Cool on MTV’s World of Jenks
Andrew Jenks wasn’t the first free spirit to drop out of college. He also wasn’t the first to do it despite having two successful parents, one of whom currently serves as the Assistant Secretary General for the United Nations. But he was certainly the first to go from the halls of NYU straight into an assisted living facility, where the documentary he shot, Andrew Jenks, Room 335, was quickly acquired by HBO,
Meet Gary Jones, the Man Behind the Fantastical Fashion of Oz The Great and Powerful
The clothes make the man, as they say. And in Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, The Evil Dead) and his team of designers found themselves with not just a man to make but a few fashionable witches, a carnival crew, some Munchkins and indeed a whole army of Winkie guards.
With Oscar® winner Robert Stromberg (Avatar,
We’re Fans of Fandor: New Streaming Platform Supports Creative Communities
Streaming content services like Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, and AmazonInstant have made the impossible plausible: we can now stream movies on our phones, iPads, and portable gaming devices in the most unlikely of places. Whether it’s watching The Wizard of Oz in the backseat of a taxi or Avatar on a leisurely gondola ride through the idyllic Venice canals—so long as you have a working Internet connection, the limitations of where, when,
Hispanic Moviegoers a Big Part of Hollywood’s Future
When population numbers are taken into account, Hispanics make up the heaviest percentage of moviegoers today. They represent 18 percent of the movie-going population but account for a solid 25 percent of all movies seen in theaters, and their attendance numbers are only going up. Hollywood, of course, has taken note.
“The overall trend is that Hispanics remain the best movie-going customers,” said Ray Ydoyaga, an executive at Nielsen, who helped put together the analytics company’s annual 2012 American Moviegoing report.
The Last Exorcism Part II’s Ashley Bell Shares Another Dance With the Devil
When we last saw Nell Sweetzer she was in the middle of the woods at the top of an altar giving virgin birth to a demon baby while the reverend who tried to save her soul suffered a fate that would make William Peter Blatty proud. If it made fans cringe, well, that was the point. Nearly three years and $68 million in box-office receipts later (against a budget of $1.8mm), The Last Exorcism has an awkwardly named but hotly anticipated sequel,
From Return of the Jedi to Jack the Giant Slayer, the Worlds of Production Designer Gavin Bocquet
Starting out as a draftsman on Return of the Jedi (1983), Gavin Bocquet’s career as a production designer coincided with the development and implementation of CGI technology into all spheres of the movie business. Bocquet was at the forefront of that revolution, working regularly for George Lucas, honing his craft on the TV show The Young Indiana Jones Adventures and the trilogy of Star Wars prequels. His career reflects the developing integration between practical production design and ever evolving CGI technology.
The Polymath: Chatting With John Ottman, Composer and Editor of Jack the Giant Slayer
Perhaps one of the most famous film sequences of the past thirty years was edited together in a living room using a splicer. By somebody who is also a composer. A composer who has gone on to score a slew of films (while somewhat begrudgingly continuing to edit, too), making him one of the few people in the film industry who is a professional at both of these demanding positions. John Ottman,
Lovesick: Comedian Natasha Leggero Knocks Our Socks Off in the Ben Stiller Produced Burning Love
Sixteen lovelorn bachelorettes bunk up in an L.A. mansion where they’ll compete for the heart of hunky firefighter Mark Orlando and, naturally, embark on some epic makeout sessions and drunken catfights along the way. If it sounds like the “plot” to just about every reality show out there, that’s because it is. But Burning Love, an instant cult classic that started as a Yahoo web series and began its TV run on E!
A Look at how our Oscars Social App Fared Predicting the Oscars (Spoiler Alert: Very Well!)
Tom O'Neil, of GoldDerby.com, got 91% of his predictions correct, according to this round-up by Slate on the most accurate (and inaccurate) Oscar prognosticators. We're not offended we weren't on their list (sniff), but we did want to settle our own accounts and see just how we fared with our social media and critic tracking app, powered by some very big brains (namely our quant, Edward Cook) over at Brandwatch.
