“Barry” Cinematographer Carl Herse on Lighting Season 3’s Dark Path
Barry cinematographer Carl Herse has his fingerprints all of season three in what is turning out to be a reckoning for the titular hitman (played by co-creator/writer/director Bill Hader). Herse joined the Barry team and lensed five of season three’s 8 episodes (1, 2, 6, 7, and 8) in what has turned out to be the darkest stretch of Barry’s decidedly pitch black journey thus far.
Citing influences as wide-ranging as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood,...
Breaking Down the Astonishing Technology Behind Ava DuVernay’s “One Perfect Shot”
The cathedral wedding in John M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians. Diana Prince boldly crossing a World War I battlefield in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Lisa stuck on a zip-line suspended above a raucous crowd in downtown New Orleans, in Malcolm D. Lee’s Girls’ Trip. Cathartic, lovely, or almost distressingly hilarious, these scenes are indelible. What did their directors do to make them tick?
In One Perfect Shot,...
Netflix Reveals “Squid Game” Season 2 Teaser While Creator Reveals Clues
Netflix revealed a brief but beguiling new teaser for Squid Game and a letter from creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, who teases some season two character reveals. These are the kind of actual details we’ve been waiting for.
You’re well aware by now that Squid Game‘s first season was an international sensation, so there’s been a lot of interest, and speculation, about what Hwang Dong-hyuk would do for season two. Hwang has been hard at work writing the follow-up,...
First “The Last Of Us” Image Reveals Peek at HBO’s Hugely Ambitious New Series
We’ve got our first image from HBO’s hotly-anticipated upcoming series The Last Of Us, with the show’s two leads, Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) as Joel and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) as Ellie, looking haunted but resilient as they try to get to safety. The image was revealed during Thursday’s Summer Game Fest (the series is based on Naughty Dog’s PlayStation game of the name), when Neil Druckmann,...
“Ozark” Director Amanda Marsalis on Ruth, Wendy, and Bittersweet Goodbyes
When Ozark came to its bloody, sin-soaked end this year, you might have found yourself, Marty Byrd (Jason Bateman) style, sitting there quietly for a moment to do some accounting. The Byrd family had, against all odds, survived the chaos they’d been plunged into four seasons back when Marty’s business partner in Chicago made the mistake of cheating the wrong client. That put Marty in a life-or-death situation that would carry on for over a year—make matters right by laundering money for a powerful Mexican cartel,...
“Stranger Things” Cinematographer Caleb Heymann on Season 4’s Monstrous Mayhem
*Spoilers below for the first seven episodes of season 4!
The first seven episodes — the last two are expected in July — of Stranger Things Season 4 go big. Hopper (David Harbour) is alive but in a Soviet prison. The kids are split up, with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Will (Noah Schnapp) living the opposite of a teenage dream out in California. The rest of the gang are still in Hawkins,...
“Stranger Things” Casting Director Carmen Cuba on Finding Season 4’s New Faces
*There are spoilers for season 4 below, so proceed with caution if you’re not caught up!
With every new season of Stranger Things comes a new crop of teens to replace those ill-fated in prior seasons to the predations of the Upside Down that lurks under Hawkins. In addition, in Season 4, the show’s beloved original members are scattered across the globe, leaving room for new cast members to take on feature roles in Hawkins’ latest rescue...
“The Boys” Season 3 Arrives on Amazon With Hype to Spare
In one narrative thread of season two of Amazon’s gleefully unhinged superhero sendup The Boys, Homelander (Antony Starr) pursued a very messy relationship with Stormfront (Aya Cash). Their budding romance became problematic when Stormfront was revealed to be a full-blown Nazi, a public relations nightmare for the slightly more subtly sadistic Homelander, and it ended, as many relationships do in this show, in an abundance of gore.
Season three has now arrived, with Homelander out there trying to tell anyone who will listen that he’s been chastened by falling for the wrong girl and has learned invaluable lessons...
“The Staircase” Writer/Director Antonio Campos’s Dazzling Twist on True Crime
Writer/director Antonio Campos (The Devil All The Time) first began thinking about adapting the iconic docu-series The Staircase back in 2008. As a young, up-and-coming filmmaker, Campos imagined adapting the French series, centered on the sensational trial of American novelist Michael Peterson, accused of killing his wife Kathleen, in 2001, into a feature film. In fact, the French doc itself was meant to be a feature, but after director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and producer Denis Poncet embedded with the Peterson family,...
“Severance” Production Designer Jeremy Hindle’s Dystopian Office Space
“Large room, four desks.” That’s the only description production designer Jeremy Hindle had to work with when he came up with this TV season’s most spookily immaculate office, as seen in Apple TV + series Severance. The high-concept sci-fi thriller, partially directed and executive produced by Ben Stiller from a script by first-timer Dan Ericson, centers on the tyrannical Lumon Industries corporation whose employees (played by Adam Scott, John Turturro, Britt Lower, and Zach Cherry) partition off personal memories each time they enter the building...
Ewan McGregor, “Star Wars” & “Star Trek” Family Defend “Obi-Wan Kenobi” Star Moses Ingram
You might recall back in 2017 when Star Wars: The Last Jedi premiered and some Star Wars “fans” began bullying Kelly Marie Train, one of the film’s stars, often using horrific language. “I won’t be marginalized by online harassment,” Tran wrote shortly thereafter, in an essay for The New York Times. “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them. Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces,...
Bill Hader on Bringing Up “Barry”
For eight seasons, Bill Hader gained a legion of fans with the hilarious characters he brought to life on Saturday Night Live. Since then, his popularity has only grown with his Emmy-winning portrayal of the manic hitman/aspiring actor in the HBO series Barry. But to hear Hader tell it, performing wasn’t his initial goal. For as long as he can remember, he wanted to direct.
“Since I was fairly young…I would say 10 or 11 was when I first started to notice the ‘directed-by’ name,” Hader says during a recent Zoom interview...
“Stranger Things” Season 4 Smashes Netflix Record With 287 Million Hours Viewed
Sorry, Bridgerton season 2, but Stranger Things just turned Netflix’s record books upside down. The fourth season of the Duffer Brothers’ beloved series has smashed the record for the best premiere for an English-language series, with viewers notching 286.79 million hours of viewing time from May 25 to 27. Bridgerton was the previous record-holder for an English-language series with a healthy 193 million hours over its premiere weekend this past March.
Now Stranger Things has its sight set on the next record—also held by Bridgerton—for most-watched English language series over its first 28 days of release...
“Star Wars: The Bad Batch” Season 2 Trailer Reveals Chaos in the Galaxy
The Bad Batch is back. Disney+ has revealed the season 2 trailer for the animated series, which finds our favorite clone mercenaries getting back into the business of taking on dangerous missions to try and help who they can in a galaxy gone berserk. The members of The Bad Batch were first introduced in the animated series The Clone Wars and under the guidance of The Mandalorian director and executive producer Dave Filoni and head writer Jennifer Corbett (Star Wars Resistance)...
“Willow” Trailer Reveals Disney+’s Epic Fantasy Series
The trailer for Willow is extremely promising, both for us (ahem, older) fans of the original 1988 film, and for newcomers to the fantasy epic.
The trailer begins with some stage setting. A voiceover tells us “There is a story of a child destined to be an empress and the unlikely hero who would protect her.” That unlikely hero, as fans of Ron Howard’s original film know, is a farmer named Willow (Warwick Davis),...
First “Andor” Trailer Reveals Diego Luna’s Big “Star Wars” Return
The first Andor trailer is here, revealing a glimpse, at long last, at the origin story of Diego Luna’s heroic pilot Cassian Andor before he took on the fateful mission to steal the Death Star plans depicted in Rogue One. There are those of us out there who believe that Rogue One is, by far, the best Star Wars spinoff yet, and the reasons are myriad, and they include Luna’s resourceful Andor...
Going Down the Rabbit Hole With “Russian Doll” Editor Todd Downing
One of the best descriptions we’ve heard of Russian Doll, the consistently surprising, genuinely hilarious series from co-creator and star Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler comes from the show’s most tenured editor, Todd Downing. Describing a moment in season two, episode six, “Schrödinger’s Ruth,” in which nearly every character who has been in the series shows up on a Subway platform in a crucial moment, Downing said he had a realization. “Oh, this is the inside of Natasha’s head.”...
“1883” Costume Designer Janie Bryant on Elsa’s Epic Journey
The farther west her family’s pioneer caravan travels, the heavier a burden customs become, narrates Elsa (Isabel May), the heroine of 1883 on Paramount+. Observant and headstrong, she is the missing link from the series Yellowstone, a presence felt but not seen. Over the course of this ten-episode prequel, we follow her family’s journey leading to their stewardship of Montana’s biggest ranch and to Elsa’s ignominious fate.
The Dutton’s arduous move from Tennessee begins thanks to Elsa’s father,...
From “Pachinko” to “Severance,” Costume Designers Discuss Their Apple TV Series
Last Year, Apple TV+ won seven Creative Arts Emmys and landed four Primetime Emmy Awards. They have kicked off this year’s Emmy FYC season with a number of events that will take place at The Grove in Los Angeles.
Last Thursday evening (5/19) a panel of costume designers took the stage to pull back the creative curtain of their series. The artisans making the journey were Jane Petrie from The Essex Serpent, Sarah Edwards of Severance,...
“Russian Doll” Costume Designer Jennifer Rogien Travels Through Time in Style in Season 2
During Russian Doll’s first season, hapless downtown New Yorker Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) can’t escape her own birthday party. In Season 2, she finds herself trapped by missing laws of space and time yet again, except now she’s a full-on time traveler. Stepping onto the 6 train, she gets off in her own neighborhood in 1982, where, she is understandably disconcerted to learn that she is her mother, Nora (Chloe Sevigny). Just as she gets used to firsthand insight into Nora’s crappy relationships and pregnancy with her own self,...
