Taken 3 & Liam Neeson’s Long History of Bringing the Pain

Poor Bryan Mills. He's had a rough couple of years. This CIA operative had put in his time for his country and just wanted to enjoy his retirement. The Sunday paper. Slippers. Maybe a little light gardening. But then, his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) gets Taken (2008) in France. So that was bad. But then it got worse; she was taken by human sex traffickers. Oof. The thing is, if these monsters had made a list of all the people whose daughter it would be inadvisable to kidnap,...

Invisibly Invaluable: Birdman Editors Douglas Crise & Stephen Mirrione – PART II

Yesterday we posted Part I of our interview with Birdman editors Stephen Mirrione and Douglas Crise. As you know by now, Birdman was shot in a such an ingenious way that it made you feel like you were watching a single, 119-minute continuous shot. Watch it and try to find a single cut, a single break in the action or a clear transition that would alert you to the work of an editor. But there were editors,...

Invisibly Invaluable: Birdman Editors Douglas Crise & Stephen Mirrione – Part I

Yesterday we published our interview with Birdman writer/director Alejandor G. Iñárritu, and late last year, we spoke to the film’s composer, drummer Antonio Sanchez. Birdman was sufficiently strange and wonderful that it’s made us want to know as much as we possibly can about how it was made. The first and most obvious question one asks after seeing the film is how in the world they made it look like a single,...

Talking Risks & Rewards With Birdman Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Alejandro G. Iñárritu's first crack at directing was 2000’s Amores Perros, a complexly woven narrative surrounding three separate stories all connected by a single car accident. The film earned wide acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and the Ariel Award for Best Picture from the Mexican Academy of Film. It put the former composer and first time director on the map.

It also was the first film in his “Trilogy of Death,”...

2014 in Review: Lensers, Designers, Makeup Artists & More – PART II

The end of the year brings a few reliable reactions; promises to do x, y and z more consistently in the new year, reflection on all that you accomplished (and failed at, and regretted) this past year, and 'Year in Review' lists. Yesterday we published Part I of our look back at some of the filmmakers we interviewed in 2014. On Monday, we published an interview with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, looking back on his work in Wes Anderson's ...

2014 in Review: Portrait Artists, Sound Designers & More – Part I

As a wild year in film draws to a close, we’re looking back at some of the talented filmmakers we’ve had a chance to speak with, and all the ways they schooled on us how films really get made. Sound designers, construction crew managers, creature supervisors, production designers, a portrait artist (for Wes Anderson, naturally) and more (our first group of filmmakers are, admittedly, a bit more well known). Although these folks don’t really care how much attention they get, our whole mission is to give it to them anyway...

2014 in Review: DP Robert Yeoman on The Grand Budapest Hotel

When people think of Wes Anderson’s films, often the first thing that comes to mind is their singular look. Here is a director with a signature style, whose films look like nobody else’s. As the year draws to a close, we’re looking back on some of our favorite films and chatting with the people who helped bring them to life. Today, that means cinematographer Bob Yeoman, the man who has helped Anderson achieve his look since Anderson’s breakout 1996 debut,...

Into the Woods‘s Creative Team on Adapting Sondheim’s Hit

Witches. Heroes. Giants. Magic. Enchantments. Curses. Love. Loss. These are familiar to any Disney movie fan. But when Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Tony Award®-winning stage musical Into the Woods hits movie theaters on December 25, all of these concepts and worlds come together in unusual ways inside one Disney film – turning expectations on their head in the process.

For those unfamiliar with the musical, Into the Woods takes the traditional tales of Cinderella,...

A Most Violent Year Composer Alex Ebert

Singer-songwriter and composer Alex Ebert might still be best known as the front man for the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, but his skill as a film composer is becoming more evident with each new J.C. Chandor movie. The director and the composer recently worked on their second film together, A Most Violent Year, which has already earned rave reviews and looks poised to cement Chandor’s status as one of the most ambitious young directors of his generation...

Six New Films Offer Six Distinct Viewing Experiences

A hobbit, Teddy Roosevelt reanimated from wax, a bumbling dad, a brilliant, irascible painter, a indefatigable child, and an inveterate gambler walk into a bar. The bartender goes, oh hey, you're all starring in films this weekend.

Terrible jokes aside, we are heading into the home stretch of the holiday season, with a slew of big films set to land on Christmas Day (Unbroken, American Sniper, Selma), the very last in a wild year at the cinema...

Building the Sets of Middle-Earth for The Battle of the Five Armies

Peter Jackson and his crew shot The Hobbit trilogy concurrently over 266 days (the same total number of days it took to shoot The Lord of the Rings trilogy). Another 10 weeks was needed for cast and crew for pickup shooting for The Battle of the Five Armies on the performance capture stage, which ends the Middle-earth saga that Jackson and his team have been working on since last century.

Building the sets for Jackson's Hobbit ...

Cinematographer Dion Beebe Takes us Into the Woods

Academy Award winning cinematographer Dion Beebe is now on his fourth film with Rob Marshall. He won an Oscar for his work on Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005. He was nominated for lensing Marshall’s Chicago in 2002. He was nominated for an ASC Award (American Society of Cinematographers) for another Marshall film, Nine, in 2009. And for their fourth collaboration, Into the Woods, Beebee has helped translate Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Broadway musical into a lush,...

Big Eyes Screenwriters Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski

It's sometime in the 1950s when Margaret (Amy Adams) quickly packs her things, grabs her daughter Jane, and leaves her husband. In short order she finds herself in San Francisco, applying for a job painting Humpty Dumpty's on cribs for a manufacturer. Margaret's passion is painting, specifically small children, looking straight at you, with very, very big eyes.

The paintings were a touch creepy, on the very fringes of what could be considered real art, and would have stayed there had she not meant a man by the named Walter (Christoph Waltz),...

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies A Final Curtain Call for Middle-earth

Set 60-years before the start of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies premieres this Friday, December 19. Whether or not you’ve been a fan of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth sextet, there is no denying the awesome amount of love and effort he and his huge creative team have poured into this franchise. This has been a filmmaking enterprise every bit as epic as what the peripatetic Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo endured...

Indian Paintbrush’s Peter McPartlin on Producing The Grand Budapest Hotel & More

The actual business of making films, from acquiring insurance to dealing with lawyers to the Byzantine permits, permissions and contact stipulations can be, in the right storyteller’s hands, entirely entertaining. Indian Paintbrush’s COO Peter McPartlin is one of those storytellers.

There have been books about the business of Hollywood (Peter Biskund’s Down and Dirty Pictures comes to mind) that reveal the huge personalities orbiting behind the filmmakers and the stars, acting upon them like a gravity,...

Paul Thomas Anderson & his Team Tweak Los Angeles in Inherent Vice

There can be few novelists more daunting to adapt for the screen than Thomas Pynchon. The worlds he creates, with their sprawling casts and Ouroboros-like narratives, present major problems for any filmmaker looking to keep his or her film coherent and under nine hours. Paul Thomas Anderson, the man who riffed on Upton Sinclair's "Oil" and turned it into the mesmerizing There Will Be Blood, is as good a candidate as you'd likely find to handle such an assignment...

The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Editor Barney Pilling

Editor Barney Pilling began his film career as a location scout on 24 Hour Party People, in 2002. A few years later, he’d become an editor, and worked on a string of narratively complex films, including An Education in 2009, the haunting adaptation Never Let me Go, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s difficult, daring novel, and One Day, in 2011, based on David Nichols novel which shows its two characters on the same date,...

Writer/Director Scott Cohen on Filming Red Knot at Sea

The story of how Red Knot was made is uncannily similar to the film Red Knot itself, a product of writer/director Scott Cohen’s novel approach and the willingness of his cast and crew to join him on this incredible journey.

The film’s premise is deceptively simple; young newlyweds Chloe (Olivia Thirlby) and Peter (Vincent Kartheiser) take a novel approach to their honeymoon by spending it aboard the Red Knot, a research vessel that’s going from the southern tip of Argentina to Antarctica...

Unbroken & The Imitation Game Editor Billy Goldenberg

In 2012, Billy Goldenberg won an Oscar for his editing work on Argo. A thrilling moment, of course, but perhaps in this case it was slightly dulled by the fact that Goldenberg's odds for a win were a mite better than everyone else in the category; he and Dylan Tichenor were also up for Zero Dark Thirty. 

There is a chance that Goldenberg could enhance his odds again this year, although he'd probably rather not even think about it...

Wild’s Cinematographer Yves Bélanger on Framing Face of America

Director Jean-Marc Vallée gathered a lot of his favorite collaborators for the upcoming Wild, which comes out this Friday, Dec 5. This includes his fantastic makeup department head, Robin Mathews, as well as his cinematographer Yves Bélanger. “I’ve known him twenty years,” Belanger says, “but there was always some reason we couldn’t work together.” Bélanger was wrapping up Laurence Anyway in 2012 when Vallée phoned him. “He said he had this great film, very low budget...