How Smart Instincts Led Booksmart Producer to Actress-Turned Director Olivia Wilde
The original Booksmart script started making the rounds in Hollywood ten years ago after writers Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins imagined two straight-A high school girls gone wild the night before graduation. By the time producer Jennifer Elbaum came on board four years ago, the story had been acquired by producer Annapurna Pictures boss Megan Ellison with Short Term 12 star Kaitlyn Dever attached to co-star as wry, gay, Columbia University-bound Amy. But the project had yet to find a director...
Tolkien Director on Tracing Iconic Author’s Life From War to Middle Earth
The Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s biopic Tolkien traces the future of the “Lord of the Rings” author’s path from his peripatetic tween years through his Oxford attendance, intercut with his nightmarish experience fighting in the Battle of the Somme during World War I. Throughout, Karukoski offers a poetic depiction of the author’s fomenting imagination, seen through Tolkien’s eyes in the shadows of a child’s spinning light globe or marauding in the battlefield as Tolkien, gripped with trench fever,...
Watch The Goldfinch‘s Potent First Trailer
It is no easy feat to take a beloved, 800-plus page novel and adapt it for the big screen. This is what director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and his team, including screenwriter Peter Straughan, have done with Donna Tartt’s 2013 novel The Goldfinch. Tartt’s novel spent more than 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Now we’re getting our first look at Crowley’s film,...
Godzilla vs. Kong Writer on Kong’s Chances in Mismatched Fight
With Godzilla: King of the Monsters opening wide this Friday, folks are already starting to ask the next logical question—how in the world will King Kong last even a single round with his lizard king counterpart in Godzilla vs. Kong? King of the Monsters pits Godzilla against fellow titans like Rodan and the three-headed super-predator King Ghidorah. The early reactions hyped the epic clashes between the Titans,...
It’s a Gnarly Brawl in Final Trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters
The early reactions to Godzilla: King of the Monsters were so positive we had some people calling it the event movie of the year, and this is after Avengers: Endgame already stormed into theaters. Comparing this kaiju battle royale to the biggest Marvel movie of all time seems a little unnecessary, but the important point is that folks were fired up about Godzilla’s epic return. Now Warner Bros. has released a final look to tease the central monster-on-monster battles in the movie...
Qualified Director Jenna Ricker on Indy’s Pioneer Janet Guthrie
“This is my first documentary,” says producer/director Jenna Ricker, of Qualified, a look at the life of Janet Guthrie, the first woman—in that pre-Danica Patrick/Pippa Mann era—to ever drive a car at the Indianapolis 500.
The doc is part of ESPN’s 30 For 30 series, in celebration of the cable pioneer’s 30th anniversary. But you have to go farther back than that, to 1977, to find Guthrie in the cockpit of a racer at Indianapolis...
Sarah Connor Returns in First Terminator: Dark Fate Trailer
The sixth installment in one of the most game-changing sci-franchises has arrived. Behold the first trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate, which is taking us back to the last truly great Terminator film and resurrecting some of the most memorable characters to boot.
Dark Fate picks up where James Cameron’s iconic 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day ended, with Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising their roles as Sarah Connor and the T-800 respectively...
Fresh Details Emerge About Christopher Nolan’s Mysterious new Film Tenet
So we’ve got a title. Christopher Nolan’s mysterious new film is called Tenet, which should fire up the internet’s vast speculation engine on what the title could possibly mean. Fresh details have emerged revealing a talented cast, including many of Nolan’s long-standing collaborators, for what will be another epic event film from the mastermind behind the Dark Knight trilogy and so much more.
We knew that John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki and Robert Pattinson were onboard,...
John Wick 3 Costume Designer Conjures Elegance Amid the Carnage
Italian-born costumer Luca Mosca pulled off a major sartorial coup in 2014 when he designed the instantly iconic suit worn by Keanu Reeves in John Wick. The elegant silhouette impacted pop culture to the point where Amazon now sells $139 “John Wick Suit” knock-offs. But to see the real deal, action fans have been flocking to director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, which toppled Avengers: Endgame last weekend...
Director Olivia Wilde & Screenwriter Katie Silberman on the Hilarious Booksmart
The creative team behind Booksmart wanted to showcase women being funny. Not one or two women, but many women.
“That’s how it is in our lives. All my female friends are as funny as my male friends. They’re not comedians; they don’t think of themselves as funny,” said screenwriter Katie Silberman, who shares writing credit with Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, and Sarah Haskins.
Silberman credited Olivia Wilde, the actress who makes her feature directorial debut on Booksmart,...
Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson on Outfitting the Live-Action Aladdin
In Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake of Aladdin, Disney revisits Agrabah, the fictional Arabian land where a plucky street thief and his incorrigible monkey sidekick cross paths with an unlikely love interest, the local sultan’s daughter, Princess Jasmine. Similar to the 2017 Beauty and the Beast remake, turning a bustling, fictional historic animated township into a three-dimensional place is a colorful, lively affair. In both, labyrinthine city streets give way to the intensity of nature,...
New Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Images, Video, & Character Details
There is always so much to learn when Vanity Fair does one of their massive cover stories on a franchise like Star Wars. They deploy famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, enjoy incredible access to the film’s stars, and they share with the rest of us fresh photos, character details and more. Vanity Fair also shot an on-set video in which Leibovitz arrived on set to join director J.J. Abrams, the cast and the crew in the Jordanian deserts...
New Dark Phoenix Clip Teases the X-Men’s Oldest Frenemies
If there were one relationship that has animated the X-Men franchise for nearly two decades, it would be between Charles Xavier and Magneto. In the first decade of the franchise, these two venerable mutants were portrayed by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, respectively. Charles, better known as Professor X, has long quarreled with Magneto about the best way to handle humanity’s distrust and hatred for the mutant kind. Charles believes they do that by respecting their laws and proving that mutants are people,...
The Early Reactions to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Any and every Quentin Tarantino film is an event movie. This is because Tarantino so reliably stirs up debate, from his 1994 game-changer Pulp Fiction to his historical epics, which gleefully rewrote or refocused history, beginning with Inglorious Basterds (2009) and through Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015). When word spread that his ninth film, set in Hollywood in 1969, would cover, in some capacity,...
Behold the Killer new Trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Oh, happy Tuesday! We’ve got a fresh look at Quentin Tarantino‘s hotly anticipated ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which delivers a bit more narrative bits and pieces than the first trailer. This new look has debuted ahead of the film’s Cannes premiere, one of the marquee films at this year’s festival. The trailer is, in a word, fantastic, and should give both Tarantino fans and movie lovers in general something to include on their must-see list...
A new Toy Story 4 Trailer Teases a Existential Journey Like no Other
The first trailer for Toy Story 4 hinted at some of life’s deepest questions. As we wrote at the time, the Toy Story gang, led by Woody (Tom Hanks), has long moved past the Andy era, in which Woody sparred with Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the big questions were mostly who Andy preferred most. We’re officially in the Bonnie era, and the latest trailer makes clear that our favorite talking toys are going on a journey that’ll be their most profound yet...
The Crawley Family Returns in First Official Downton Abbey Trailer
The first official trailer for Downton Abbey is here. The big-screen extension of the most nominated television show (not produced in the U.S.) in the history of the Emmys looks just as lush and finely appointed as it did on TV. The year here is 1927, and most of the Crawley family and their servants are back, reigniting the delicious upstairs/downstairs drama and romance that made the excellent series so irresistibly engaging. Directed by Michael Engler and written by series creator Julian Fellowes, ...
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum Director on the Film’s Epic Stunts & Real Dogs
Chad Stahelski started out as a kick-boxer, served as Keanu Reeve‘s stunt double in The Matrix and rose through the ranks as a stunt choreographer with his own 87eleven Action Design before co-launching the John Wick franchise in 2014. Directing Reeves as an indomitable assassin, Stahelski has staged most of the 54-year-old actor’s action sequences “in camera,” minimizing digital effects in favor of physical performance. The old school approach has wowed fans to the tune of $261 million in world wide box office,...
Composer Herdis Stefansdottir on her Intimate score for The Sun is Also a Star
Herdis Stefansdottir, scoring artist for the new release The Sun is Also a Star, is a rare example of a female composer working on a major studio film. She was hired when she was 7 months pregnant, and says that had a major impact on the creation of her emotional, often intimate score.
The film follows the college-bound romantic Daniel (Charles Melton) and a Jamaica-born pragmatist Natasha (Yara Shahidi) who meet—and fall in love—over one momentous day in New York City...
The Batman has Found Its Caped Crusader—Robert Pattinson
There you have it, folks. The man who became a star playing a teenage vampire in the Twilight series, Robert Pattinson, will be your next Batman. Variety‘s Justin Kroll reports that Pattison is close to closing a deal to star in Matt Reeves The Batman, playing Gotham’s dark knight in the hotly anticipated reboot. The film is slated to begin filming this summer. Reeves has been developing the project since he officially took over directing duties from Ben Affleck in 2017...
