Best of 2019: Orange Is the New Black’s Production Designer Malchus Janocko’s Favorite Sets

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

Production designer Malchus Janocko set out to be a painter and glassblower before he discovered show business as a livelihood. Janocko art-directed the glossy Gossip Girl, then channeled small-town Americana for the first season of The Leftovers before taking a deep dive into the muted world of incarceration dramatized in Orange Is the New Black. When he started designing the Netflix production’s fourth season,...

Best of 2019: Deconstructing Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s With his Cinematographer Robert Richardson

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

When you dig past the humorous and unnerving storylines of Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you’ll find a serious tale about friendship.

Set in 1969, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a fading Western star trying to stay relevant in Tinseltown has one sure thing—his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt)...

Best of 2019: Writer/Director Noah Baumbach on his Devastating Marriage Story

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

Writer/director Noah Baumbach’s substantial body of work has often explored families in all their painful, darkly funny dysfunction, evolving from the perspective of an adolescent witness to the break-up of his parents in his 2005 second feature, the Oscar-nominated The Squid and the Whale, to the poignant, middle-aged observations of a son coming to terms with his estranged family and self-absorbed father in 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)...

Best of 2019: Watchmen’s Costume Designer Meghan Kasperlik on This Extraordinary Series

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

Now that Watchmen has made its glorious debut on HBO and confounded just about every expectation, we can say with confidence that Damon Lindelof’s adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons iconic graphic novel is a remarkable testament to the original and a bold, powerful piece of original storytelling itself. The reason is Lindelof and his incredible team of writers,...

Best of 2019: How Ford v Ferrari’s Production Designer Rebuilt the World’s Greatest Race Track Piece-by-Piece

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

James Mangold‘s Ford v Ferrari revisits one of the greatest car races in history. It began back in 1959 when Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) wins the most difficult race in the world, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in France. The problem for Shelby is his crowning achievement is also his last race—doctors tell him a heart condition makes it impossible for him to race again...

Best of 2019: Joker’s Makeup Designer on Creating the Clown Prince of Chaos

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

It’s hard to think of a more iconic look from the world of comic books than the Joker — Batman’s most nefarious adversary. Nicki Ledermann was all too aware of this when she was approached to design the makeup for Joker, director Todd Phillips’ new feature that offers up the origin as to how Arthur Fleck, a failed comedian,...

Best of 2019: Breaking Down Three Key Scenes With Ad Astra’s Editors

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

On Tuesday we published the first part of our conversation with Ad Astra editors John Axelrad and Lee Haugen. Director James Gray’s film (which he co-wrote with Ethan Gross) is the rare intimate epic. It involves some of the most breathtaking sequences in any film this year, as well as a very personal father/son story in which our hero, Brad Pitt’s astronaut Roy McBride,...

See Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin in First Teaser for Respect

There are few icons who shone as brightly and powerfully as Aretha Franklin. So when you’re making a biopic about her, casting someone to try and fill her shoes is…not easy. Yet if there was any star who could pull it off, it’s gotta be Jennifer Hudson. Now you can see Hudson in the first teaser for Respect, just released by MGM. The film will follow Franklin’s incredible life and career, from a little girl singing in the church choir to one of the most towering figures in music history...

Best of 2019: Carmen Ejogo on her Pivotal Role in True Detective’s Season Three

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

In season three of True Detective, creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto returns to the series’ Southern Gothic roots, with two detectives, Vietnam vet Wayne “Purple” Hays (Mahershala Ali) and Roland West (Stephen Dorff) trying to solve the murder of one child and the disappearance of another in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Hays takes the lead on the case in 1980 and is doing desk work and starting to lose his memory by the time we reach 1990 (West,...

Best of 2019: Makeup Designer Burton LeBlanc on Creating Misery in the Colonies in The Handmaid’s Tale

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

In Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the radioactive Colonies are more felt than described. We’re told it’s where all Gilead’s undesirables, the childless handmaids, the criminals, the sick and insane, are sent to die. In Hulu’s adaptation of Atwood’s novel, however, the Colonies became one of the show’s most fecund sources of misery in season two. As Maria Elena Fernandez described in a piece for Vulture, ...

Best of 2019: Avengers: Endgame Visual Effects Supervisor on Happy Hulk, Lebowski Thor & More

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

The Marvel universe’s supersized super-villain Thanos (Josh Brolin, plus CG) last year dealt a heavy hand to overpopulation in Avengers: Infinity War, wiping out half of humanity with a snap of his fingers warmed by his Infinity Stone encrusted gauntlet. Five years onward the Avengers are looking stuck, with those remaining still in mourning and low on solutions. Their situation appears irreversible until Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) re-emerges from the quantum realm,...

Best of 2019: Craig Mazin on Getting the Details Right for the Shocking Chernobyl

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

In April 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded, sending radiation into the atmosphere and ultimately causing many radiation-related deaths. While the disastrous accident, attributed to faulty reactor design and insufficiently trained operators, is widely known, the details of its aftermath are less so. Screenwriter Craig Mazin looks to change this and up the knowledge base with Chernobyl, a five-part miniseries starting May 6 on HBO that is directed by Johan Renck and stars Jared Harris,...

Best of 2019: Fleabag‘s Emmy-Nominated Cinematographer on Crafting a Nearly Flawless Second Season

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019. Happy Holidays!

There’s no such thing as flawless art. Flaws are baked right into anything a human being creates, and often they are hard to disassociate from the strengths that make any art worthwhile. Yet I’ve heard several people call Fleabag‘s second season flawless, and I’ve been hard-pressed to argue the point. Few shows on television are as personal, raw, and fearless as what Phoebe Waller-Bridge has created here, ...

Best of 2019: How Us Cinematographer Michael Gioulakis Captured Doppelgangers in the Dark

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019.

“I have an aversion to moonlight, at least in movies.” So says cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, who had ample opportunity to capture dark spaces in Jordan Peele‘s critically acclaimed horror film Us. Peele’s follow-up to Oscar-nominated thriller Get Out casts Lupita Nyog’o as a high-strung mother who’s being stalked, along with her husband (Winston Duke) and kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex),...

Best of 2019: Spencer Averick on Finding Truth & Humanity in the Edit of When They See Us

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019 from some of our favorite films and shows of the year.

Netflix rarely releases viewer numbers, but on June 12th, the streaming service tweeted that Ava DuVernay’s miniseries When They See Us has been its most-watched content in the US since the show’s premiere on May 31st. In the UK, When They See Us has been running second only to Black Mirror...

Best of 2019: The Irishman Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto on Crafting Scorsese’s Masterpiece

*We’re reposting some of our favorite interviews of 2019 from some of our favorite films and shows of the year.

Beloved auteur Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman has brought Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci together onscreen for the first time in 24 years and added Al Pacino, whom he’d never worked with before, building a cast that sounds truly compelling to lovers of great acting and great film...

The First Trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Mysterious Tenet is Here

Christmas has come early, friends. Warner Bros. has just released the first trailer for Christopher Nolan‘s mysterious, extremely intriguing new film Tenet. As always with a Nolan film, the cast is sprawling and excellent. John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Clémence Poésy, and two of the writer/director’s favorites, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh. The little we’ve known about the film—editor Jennifer Lame wouldn’t say a peep when we interviewed her about Marriage Story—was that it was going to involve international espionage...

Sandler, the Safdie Brothers & Kevin Garnett Talk Uncut Gems

It was a bit of a homecoming when Uncut Gems premiered December 8 at the new ArcLight Cinemas in Boston: the Safdie brothers, who directed, went to Boston University; composer Daniel Lopatin hails from the nearby suburb of Wayland; and star Adam Sandler grew up in Manchester, NH but started his career in Boston’s comedy clubs. Then there’s Kevin Garnett, the Boston Celtics great who plays himself in the film.

At the post-screening Q&A before a packed crowd,...

What to Remember About Star Wars Before You See The Rise of Skywalker

These are the droids you’re looking for. Folks, the day has come—Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is upon us. It was 42-years ago when George Lucas started this whole thing with 1977’s Star Wars IV – A New Hope, and now we’re about to see the final chapter in the Skywalker Saga. There have been 8 films worth of lightsaber battles, Sith Lords, Rebel scum, droids, Hutts, Hans and battles on Hoth...

Here’s Your First Glimpse at A Quite Place: Part II

We’ve been waiting a long time to get our first look at A Quiet Place: Part II. Finally, Paramount has released a teaser revealing our first glimpse at John Krasinski’s followup to his surprising 2018 smash hit. Krasinki directs from a script he wrote and from the teaser it looks like the new film picks up more or less right where he left off in the first film. Part II will center on the surviving members of the Abbott family as they find themselves moving out past the boundaries of their house and into the larger world,...