Writer/Director James Vanderbilt on Turning Recent History Into Truth
In Truth, opening Friday, writer and first time director James Vanderbilt, who wrote, among other scripts, the screenplay for Zodiac, has taken a tough, hard, look at the behind-the-scenes story of the CBS 60 Minutes II news staff that reported on President George W. Bush’s late 60’s and early 70’s National Guard duty in the run up to his re-election in 2004. It’s a compelling procedural which dramatizes the personal and professional costs of news reporting in the already fast paced TV news cycle at the historical moment when Internet blogging entered the political and cultural arena...
New The Last Witch Hunter Clip Emphasizes Sound Design
Vin Diesel’s voice alone qualifies as a marvel of sound design. The man’s deep, gravely timber is so absurdly manly that moviegoers about lost their minds when it was paired with the sentient tree-creature Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. Diesel says all of five words in the movie, yet his work helped turn Groot into one of the most beloved sci-fi brutes since Chewbacca.
From the Fast &...
Director Cary Fukunaga on Filming the Haunting Beasts of No Nation
Although he's probably best known for directing the first season of True Detective, Cary Fukunaga is most likely to be found making movies on the front lines of contemporary conflicts. The California-bred Japanese-American filmmaker's first feature, Sin Nombre, chronicled the quest of Central American immigrants to reach the United States. His latest is Beasts of No Nation, set during a civil war in an unnamed West African country,...
Turning Mad Max: Fury Road Into an 8 Bit Video Game
Back in August we shared with you CineFix’s great rendering of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke as an 8-bit video game. (Okay, you can’t technically play these 8 bit videos, so it’s more like they’ve been turned into old video game films). The gang is back and they’ve turned one of the best films of 2015 into a classic 1980s video game. The whole gang’s here, including the polecats, Furiosa,...
Race Chases the Man Who Changed History in 10.3 Seconds
Jesse Owens was already a legend before he took the world stage at the 1936 Olympics. A year prior he set three world records and tied another at the 1935 Big Ten track meet—in less than an hour. It was, and still is, "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sports."
Owens was the greatest track and field athlete alive, specializing in sprints, hurdles and long jumps. When he flew to Berlin to participate in the 1936 Olympics, he became the most iconic athlete in the world,...
The 10 Best Star Wars Sound Effects (& Where They Come From)
The StarWars.com editorial staff like to huddle to discuss and debate their favorite elements of the Star Wars franchise, ranking the best starfighters, best bounty hunters and best Yoda quotes, to name just a few.
Their most recent topic of debate speaks to the importance of post production, and specifically, how the filmmakers involved in sound design make a huge impact on how a viewer relates to the film...
Composer Tom Holkenborg (Junkie XL) on Black Mass
Dutch composer Tom Holkenborg, also known as Junkie XL, is one of the most prolific film composers working today, and one of the most impressively wide-ranging. He recently scored George Miller's wildly imaginative Mad Max: Fury Road, and will be the man behind the mixer on the highly anticipated films Deadpool and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. His most recent effort was Scott Cooper's gritty, real-life crime story Black Mass...
Watch How Filmmakers Use Color to Elicit Specific Emotions
Filmmakers are expert emotional manipulators. Nearly every decision made during the production of a film, from wardrobe to lighting to set design, is done to convey, and manipulate, emotions. The same is true during post production, when editors, sound designers and color graders shape the film into it’s final, and hopefully most moving, iteration.
When it comes to color grading, it’s probably the least understood and most subtlety effective means of making an audience feel a certain way...
The Coen Brothers Return to Comedy With Hail, Caesar!
Joel and Ethan Coen are probably best known for their dark, twisting crime dramas like the impeccable western No Country For Old Men and their brilliant, snowbound Fargo. But as many fans know, and as the enduring legacies of The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou? attests, they excel at comedy, too. Particularly comedy with a bit of screwball menace baked in,...
New Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer Coming Soon?
The Internet, specifically the site StarWars7News.com, is speculating that a new, full Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer is coming next Monday, October 19. The site, run by very well connected Star Wars super fans, note that during Comic-Con this past July, director J.J. Abrams said that the official full trailer for The Force Awakens would be released during the fall. There followed a lot of speculation on what was happening in fall that they could peg the trailer release to...
NYFF: In Where to Invade Next Michael Moore Picks Flowers, Not Weeds
After a six year hiatus, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is back with a kind of travel journal – Where to Invade Next. Moore’s mission was to find the best ideas from each country he visited, claim them as his own, and bring them home to America to help solve some of our biggest problems. The film is not about pointing finger or placing certain nations on a pedestal – its purpose is to serve as idea factory and catalyst for change...
Batman v Superman: Check Out Lex Luthor’s New Operating System
Lex Luthor Jr. is really implementing an aggressive media campaign lately. First, there was the fawning profile of the young genius in Fortune Magazine, and now there’s this—LexCorp released an ad announcing their brand new “LexOS…the world’s most private and secure operating system.” The ad is hilariously spot-on, from the smoky, so-earnest-it’s-weirdly-threatening voiceover to the geometric nonsense of the visuals, Warner Bros. is crushing the tech company parodies in these last two viral marketing promos for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice...
How Joseph Gordon-Levitt Followed Impossible Footsteps in The Walk
When Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis prepared for their performances in the 2010 psychological thriller Black Swan, they trained intensely to take on the dual roles of battling ballerinas. Every movement during their performances had to be meticulously choreographed. One misstep could’ve ruined their entire routine.
The same could be said for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s latest performance, which he too had to meticulously prepare his body for. The thirty-four year old actor —...
NYFF: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet & More Talk Steve Jobs
Last Saturday we attended the New York Film Festival’s (NYFF) powerful panel discussion on and screening of Steve Job in anticipation of the film’s wide release on October 23. Earlier today, as part of our coverage of the Festival, we focused on the insights of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, director Danny Boyle and author Walter Isaacson.
Today we are turning to the actors – their thoughts in their words. The panelists: Michael Fassbender as the eponymous legend;...
Danny Boyle, Aaron Sorkin & Walter Isaacson Talk Steve Jobs at NYFF
This past weekend we attended a panel discussion of Steve Jobs at the 53rd New York Film Festival (NYFF). Steve Jobs, like The Social Network (about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg), is a masterfully crafted story of one of the most influential men of the last fifty years. The film, directed by Academy Award winner Danny Boyle, written by Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin (who also wrote the The ...
Watch This Conceptual Video for Avengers: Age of Ultron End Credits
As any film lover knows, there's not a single moment of screen time that wasn't conceived of and laboriously created by scores of people. This is especially true for end credits, and it's extra especially true for Marvel films, where extra scenes and crucial information is often embedded. We've all seen the shawarma scene in the credits from 2012's The Avengers. Title sequences and end credits are the first and last thing you see in a film,...
Halloween How-To: Make a Kylo Ren Costume, Including the Light Saber
Sure, you could buy a Kylo Ren costume, but where's the fun in that? Homemade costumes allow for much more creativity and give your costume a personal touch so you'll know that your Kylo Ren won't be exactly like anybody else's. But how do you make one, especially a credible light saber? This is one of the things the folks at CineFix do. Their how-to videos give you a step-by-step tutorial on what you'll need and how to do it...
Here’s How They Created the Ingenious Structure of Steve Jobs
One of the difficulties of making a film about historical figures or events can be deciding how to remain faithful to the subject but still tell a good story. Real life doesn’t always follow a neat narrative arc. In fact it almost never does. Danny Boyle’s latest film Steve Jobs is an interesting example of a way to approach that predicament.
One way the film avoids the dangers of becoming a plodding account of history is that it’s only loosely based on real events: “We’re deeply indebted to Walter Isaacson’s [biography of Jobs] and the depth of his research,...
30th Anniversary Promo for Back to the Future Includes Jaws 19 Trailer
The 30th anniversary of Back to the Future has brought with it some hilarious promotions for things that don’t actually exist, but did in the future the film predicted. One of those things is an insane amount of Jaws movies.
One of the things that Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) encounters in the town square of Hill Valley in 2015, is a 3D advertisement for Jaws 19. Don’t remember that particular moment?...
Batman v Superman: Lex Luthor Jr. Grants an Interview to Fortune Mag
It’s a pretty clever piece of viral marketing: Fortune Magazine has published an exclusive interview with Lex Luthor Jr. , the “31-year-old wunderkind who transformed an aging petrochemical and heavy machinery dinosaur into a tech darling of the Fortune 500 in what some call a superhuman feat.” There were rumors that Warner Bros. was going to drop a new trailer for Batman v Superman on us sometime this month, but nobody was expecting this...
