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,
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.
Music for the Mind: Composer Alexandre Desplat on The Imitation Game
Composer Alexandre Desplat has been nominated for six Academy Awards, starting with his work on The Queen in 2006. He bookended his take on the music beneath royal narratives with his nomination for The King’s Speech in 2010. He’s also the man behind the score for franchise blockbusters (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, The Twilight Saga: New Moon), international sagas (Zero Dark Thirty,
From Scream to Snowpiercer: Composer Marco Beltrami
At the age of 30, composer Marco Beltrami was the composer on a little film by horror master Wes Craven called Scream. It was 1996, and it was the first horror film he had ever worked on. It was also the first horror film he had ever seen.
This might explain why his approach to the score didn't follow the typical conventions of horror, and might go some way to explaining how he's built his impressive career on his thoughtful, searching approach to a film without worrying about its'
The Middleburg Film Festival to Honor Two Below-the-Line Giants
The Middleburg Film Festival, at just two years old, offers a strong program of films and an appreciation for the many talented craftsmen and women who make them. This year, the festival is honoring two below-the-line filmmakers, our raison d'être, who are both giants in their field. The Credits is heading down to Virginia today to get in on the action.
The honorees are costume designer Colleen Atwood and composer Marco Beltrami. The Distinguished Costume Designer Award will be presented to Atwood on Friday night with a retrospective of her most memorable costumes, followed by a masquerade ball in her honor.
Interstellar’s Out of This World Crew
In a little over two weeks, on November 7, Christopher Nolan’s long awaited Interstellar will finally hit screens across the country. Jeff Jensen’s cover story for Entertainment Weekly uncovered a lot of juicy details which add up to what sounds like the director's most personal, and possibly ambitious, film yet. When Jensen was on set in October of 2013, the film's code name was Flora's Letter. As Jessica Chastain told Jensen at the time,
Composer Steven Price on Scoring Sacrifice in Fury
It’s a rare thing for a composer to begin work on a film before the film has wrapped. Rarer still for that composer to find himself on set, watching the action he will underlay with music unfold before his eyes. Yet very little about the making of David Ayer’s World War II film Fury was typical, and for Oscar-winning composer Steven Price (Gravity), this meant getting a chance to be a part of the filmmaking process as it was happening.
Drummer Antonio Sanchez Gives Birdman it’s Essential Beat
Comedy relies on timing, as everyone knows. For a comedy film (especially one as soulful as Birdman), the timing comes not just from the actors abilities to land a joke but from the way the film is edited. Skilled editors help create juxtapositions, perfectly timed cuts and unexpected shots that give a particular scene a lot of its comedic punch.
By now you likely know at least a bit about what
Longtime Collaborators Helped David Fincher Find Gone Girl
The New York Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of David Fincher’s Gone Girl last Friday, and boy, did it deliver. Fincher’s directing chops are never in question, and Gillian Flynn’s novel is perhaps perfectly suited for his particular skill set. Gone Girl combines his instinctual way around pitch-black thrillers (Se7en, Zodiac, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), and offbeat, grimy comedies (Fight Club) and delivers 148 compelling minutes without any evident lull.
Composers Stand Out in Fall’s Most Exciting Films
Whiplash composer Justin Hurwitz recently told us that one his primary influences was legendary French musician Michel Legrand. "The early work he did during the French New Wave period, and on the Jacques Demy musicals, is some of my favorite film music ever. He's one of the most creative and inventive orchestrators alive."
This is coming from a creative and inventive orchestrator himself, who is a huge part of one of the most musically inventive films in recent memory.
Whiplash Composer Justin Hurwitz Settles the Score
Director Damien Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz met at Harvard playing in the same band. By sophomore year they were roommates, and soon enough the two were taking time off from school to create what they thought was just a student film, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. “The idea for the film was to do a sixteen millimeter black and white vérité style movie, but juxtaposed with this big,
From Stage to Screen: Adapting Jersey Boys
Jersey Boys is the story of the rise and fall of The Four Seasons, the “clean-cut,” all-American rock band that actually had two ex-cons and enough mob connections to satisfy a Scorsese film. Yet in the early 1960s the band sold themselves as the (Jersey) boys next door, and created some deathless tunes in the process.
Jersey Boys began it’s life, of course, as the Tony Award-winning juggernaut that became the 13th longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 3,487th performance this past April 9th.
From The Dark Knight Rises to Divergent: Composer Junkie XL
Composer Tom Holkenborg goes by the name Junkie XL. He is a musician, producer, engineer and composer with a tinkerer's compulsion to experiment. His collaboration with the legendary Hans Zimmer on The Dark Knight Rises led Zimmer to recommend him for the recently released blockbuster Divergent. Holkenborg began his music career at the ripe old age of four, when he started playing piano at the behest of his mother,
Missing 87-Year old John Ford Film Upstream Found, Screened With Live Score
This past Monday, composer Michael Mortilla and Nicole Garcia brought a slew of instruments (a piano, violin, kazoo, handbell, even a bag filled with aluminum cans) and performed a live score accompanying a screening of the 1927 John Ford film Upstream. “My basic role is to provide a soundtrack for a film that never had a soundtrack,” Mortilla says. He and Garcia performed their Upstream score in front of a live audience in the screening room at the Motion Picture of Association’s headquarters on Eye Street in Washington D.C.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s Composer Henry Jackman on Scoring a Superhero
The versatile Henry Jackman follows his scores for Seth Rogan's apocalyptic comedy End of the World and the animated NASCAR-racing snail film Turbo with a full-on superhero, Marvel's Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He took time for an interview to talk about the superhero who finds himself something of a Rip Van Winkle, dealing with a world more than 60 years after he was frozen in WWII.
How do you approach a score for a superhero?
SXSW 2014: Home‘s Ronen Landa, the Horror Film Composer Scared of Horror
Composer Ronen Landa first came to SXSW in 2005. He was here with a documentary called The Dreams of Sparrows, a remarkable film shot in Iraq at the outset of the war. First time director Haydar Daffar collaborated with a team of Iraqi directors to capture life in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. Landa had worked with the film’s producer, Aaron Raskin, who brought him in to compose.
Looking Back on Some of our Favorite Stories of 2013
When we launched The Credits a little more than a year ago, we aimed to shed a light on the many talented filmmakers who often don’t get much press for their work. While we’ve occasionally spoken to folks who need no introduction (John Waters, for example), most of the filmmakers we’ve focused on have a little less name recognition but a huge amount of talent. We interviewed a lot of people, so the below roundup is really just a taste—there were far too many people to mention in a single post.
Multi-Instrumentalist Mark Orton on Composing Alexander Payne’s Nebraska
Mark Orton is a man of many talents. He can play on any type of guitar, keyboard and percussion instrument. He’s a trained sound engineer and composer. He’s provided scores for feature films, documentaries, experimental radio, video/art installations, concert halls, modern dance, theater and, wait for it—the circus. He’s a co-founder of Tin Hat, a composer/improviser collective that is internationally renown.
Orton’s path to becoming the composer for Alexander Payne’s critically acclaimed Nebraska is an unusual one,
Walt Disney a Movie Character for 1st Time in Delightful Saving Mr. Banks
In the tradition of the behind-the-scenes Hollywood story comes Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks. The crowd-pleaser, set for a December 20 release, employs the studio’s time-tested, multi-layered storytelling approach to the tale of how Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) managed in 1961 to convince prickly Australian author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) to release the rights to her successful books about a nanny named Mary Poppins.
It’s a departure for the stalwart studio,
