Watch Mark Hamill React to his Original Star Wars Audition Tape
Watching the always game Mark Hamill watching himself is a uniquely delightful experience. The talented veteran of screens big and small knows full well that he’ll always be best known as Luke Skywalker, and here we get to watch Hamill watching himself—in what feels like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—in his original audition tape for Star Wars: IV – A New Hope.
The year was 1976. Star Wars was but a glimmer in George Lucas’s eye,...
These Rescue Dogs Will Steal Your Heart in new Lady and the Tramp Featurette
While Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Lady and the Tramp for their brand new streaming service Disney + features the voice work of a lot of famous actors—Tessa Thompson, Janelle Monáe, Sam Elliot, and Justin Theroux to name a few—yet the real stars of this new featurette are the rescue dogs that were a big part of the cast. It turns out that finding the right dogs to play your two leads, let alone the rest of the canine cast,...
Avengers: Endgame Executive Producer Trinh Tran on Capping Off a Decade’s Worth of Work
Last spring, Avengers: Endgame wrapped up Marvel’s Infinity War saga. The three-hour epic spanning space to Wakanda and back again impressed the critics, exceeded audience expectations, and raked in $2.78 billion in gross global earnings. The movie’s length was only one unusual development within the world of superhero fare, with Endgame representing the culmination of 11 years’ worth of work, bringing about the deaths of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.),...
Colin Farrell Could be Your New Penguin in The Batman
No one said the Penguin had to look, well, like an actual penguin. For most of us (of a certain age), when we think of someone portraying the Penguin in a Batman movie, we see Danny DeVito in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns way back in 1992. Under Penguin-like prosthetics including a beakish nose, and making the most of his short stature, DeVito’s excellent take on one of Batman’s most iconic villains owed quite a bit to his flightless polar bird namesake...
It’s an Epic Bear Attack in new His Dark Materials Trailer
Now that HBO’s new epic fantasy series His Dark Materials has bowed (spectacularly, we might add), we’ve got a fresh trailer on our hands that looks at the weeks ahead. And while we’re thrilled to follow Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen) as her adventure becomes wilder and more dangerous, there’s one particular moment everyone’s waiting for—the armored bear attack.
The premiere episode “Lyra’s Jordan” delivered in a big way, and by the end, we had Lyra heading to London on a journey to find her buddy Roger (Lewin Lloyd) with her new “friend”...
The Irishman Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto on Crafting Scorsese’s Masterpiece
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. Based on “I Heard You Paint Houses,” the narrative nonfiction book by homicide detective Charles Brandt, the story centers on Frank Sheeran (De Niro) who,...
From Sunset Boulevard to Gemini Man With Paramount Archivist Andrea Kalas
Say you’re in charge of Paramount Pictures archives, and someone on your team unearths some unsigned sheet music from the era of silent films (yes, silent films included sheet music, more on that in a minute), what would you do? If you’re Andrea Kalas, Senior Vice President of Paramount’s Archives, you simply hand it over to your music archivist and ask her to play it.
“My music archivist has a piano in her office because she sometimes has to pick up a piece of sheet music to identify something,”...
Writer/Director Rian Johnson on Going From Star Wars to Knives Out
Director Rian Johnson wanted to do something “completely different” from Star Wars with his new movie, Knives Out (released Nov. 27).
“It’s not a heavy movie, it’s not like an incredibly dark movie or anything, it’s kind of going for just giving you a blast of fun,” he told The Credits at the Denver Film Festival screening. “So that was kind of refreshing honestly, to make and work on.”
Knives Out is a “whodunit” murder mystery starring a host of well-known actors including Jamie Lee Curtis,...
Motherless Brooklyn Costume Designer Amy Roth’s Period Perfect Detail
Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn takes the spirit, and many of the characters, from Jonathan Lethem’s excellent 1999 novel of the same name, but from there goes in an entirely new direction. That direction included setting the film some 45-years earlier, in the mid-1950s New York.
Lethem’s most indelible character, a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel, remains (played by Norton), but the setting, story, and stakes are all different. In Norton’s telling, Lionel’s case involves a man so powerful,...
Does His Dark Materials Title Sequence Rival Game Of Thrones?
The excitement surrounding HBO’s big-budget adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s beloved novel series has been growing steadily for a while now. His Dark Materials was one of the most buzzed-about projects not coming from Marvel at this past summer’s Comic-Con, and the early reviews have been very, very positive. With the show premiering tonight at 9 pm EST, we’ve got a look at the title sequence, and it’s fantastic. One can’t watch this beauty and not think of that other big-budget HBO fantasy series, ...
Ed Skrein & Luke Kleintank on Playing Legendary Fighter Pilots in Midway
Midway is a stirring tribute to the immeasurable courage of the men we now call part of the Greatest Generation. Premiering on November 8, Veteran’s Day weekend, it is the story of the early days of WWII, from Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor to America’s first major battle victory in the Pacific, the battle of Midway. The all-star cast includes Woody Harrelson as Admiral Chester Nimitz, Dennis Quaid as Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, and Aaron Eckhart as Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle...
How Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter Detailed the Look of Dolemite is My Name
If you ever meet Ruth E. Carter you’ll be enamored by her kindness. Her humbleness. The costume designer has seen her name pinned on multiple Spike Lee films like Malcolm X, Summer of Sam and Chi-Raq. She detailed Spielberg’s Amistad and Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay’s Selma. In February of this year, she won the Academy Award in costume design for her meticulous efforts in Black Panther,...
Composer Alan Silvestri on Going Big in Avengers: Endgame
There’s hardly a movie-goer alive who hasn’t heard at least something of Alan Silvestri’s body of work. The composer started making music in Hollywood in the early 1970s, he’s scored all 17 of Robert Zemicki’s films—including the Back to the Future trilogy—and in 2011, he entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Captain America: The First Avenger. The following year, he scored The Avengers, and strains of that theme music can be heard in his newer work in the back-to-back epics capping off this superhero saga,...
Behold the Epic new Trailer for The Witcher
Now this should get folks excited. For all you awaiting a closer look at The Witcher, Netflix has released a new trailer that dives way deeper into the mythology of this story than the previous trailer. One of the buzziest projects at this past Comic-Con, The Witcher is based on the popular fantasy books by Andrzej Sapkowski and centers on Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), a monster hunter more comfortable with the beasts he slays than the people he meets...
Doctor Sleep Earning Praise as Excellent Follow-up to The Shining
While Andy Muschietti’s IT: Chapter Two understandably was dominating the Stephen King adaptation conversation, writer/director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House)’s Doctor Sleep is earning some rave reviews now that critics have seen the film.
Doctor Sleep catches up with Danny Torrance (played here by Ewan McGregor) some forty years after the events of The Shining, in which,...
Motherless Brooklyn Production Designer Beth Mickle on Bringing Back Old New York
Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn is a hugely ambitious adaptation of the seminal 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem. While it borrows heavily from Lethem’s huge cast of characters—a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel (played by Norton himself) and the folks he calls friends and foes alike—it charts its own path with a more or less completely original story. The era is no longer the late 90s but rather the 1950s New York. Lionel becomes ensnared in a web of corruption,...
How Us Costume Designer Kym Barrett Spooked Audiences With Jumpsuits
Happy Halloween! Quick, how many of you are donning red overalls and going as the deadly doppelgangers from Us? Even if writer/director Jordan Peele isn’t really into the idea, there’s no denying the power of this simple garb to instill terror. The monsters in Us are hatched not from labs or lagoons or outer space, but from all-American inequities, so it’s only fitting that they wear all-American denim. At least that’s how costume designer Kym Barrett figured it,...
It’s Official—the Game of Thrones Prequel House of the Dragon Coming to HBO
HBO has made it official in a tweet heard around the world (and Westeros)—they’ve ordered House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones prequel dealing with the Targaryens, straight to series.
#HouseOfTheDragon, a #GameofThrones prequel is coming to @HBO.
The series is co-created by @GRRMSpeaking and Ryan Condal. Miguel Sapochnik will partner with Condal as showrunner and will direct the pilot and additional episodes...
How Joker’s Production Designer Brought New York Back to Its Past
If one thing is certain about Joker, director Todd Phillips’ half-billion-dollars-and-growing grossing dark take on the origin story of Batman’s chief supervillain, it’s that the film means about as many different things to its audience as there are people who’ve seen it. Is the Joker a compelling vigilante or simply a have-not gone mad? Are Arthur Fleck and Batman actually half-brothers? Does Fleck’s never-ending downward spiral speak for incels everywhere? (Absolutely not.) What’s certain is that Arthur is a more than down on his luck middle-aged stand-up comic wannabe working a miserable day job as a clown for hire in a particularly gritty take on Gotham City,...
Here’s Everything You Should Know Before Seeing Terminator: Dark Fate
A new clip from Paramount shows us two old frenemies back together again. We’re talking about Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) getting back to Terminator-killing business in this new Terminator: Dark Fate clip. Perhaps you’ve heard that Dark Fate is the best installment in the Terminator franchise since James Cameron’s game-changing 1991 hit T2: Judgement Day? Perhaps you’re also wondering what you should know before you go see Dark Fate,...
