How Director Mimi Leder Shaped Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show”

Hollywood has become somewhat more diverse since the eighties when director Mimi Leder became the first woman to graduate from the American Film Institute. And yet, as her latest drama The Morning Show illustrates, some male entertainment moguls still give talented women a hard time. Originally inspired by Brian Stelter’s book “Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV,”  showrunner Kerry Ehrin (Friday Night Lights) re-tooled the Apple TV+ series as a #MeToo saga centered on the firing of popular infotainment anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) for sexual misconduct.

“Cursed” Director/Producer Zetna Fuentes on Remixing Arthurian Legend for Netflix

Cursed, which premieres today on Netflix, reframes the King Arthur legend to center on the mysterious Lady of the Lake and fae, Nimue, played by Katherine Langford. The show is created by Tom Wheeler and Frank Miller, based on their illustrated novel. The Credits spoke to Zetna Fuentes, who executive produced and directed the pilot and second episode of the series. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Directors of “Mucho Mucho Amor” Give Latino Legend Walter Mercado his Due

Described as equal parts Liberace, Norma Desmond, and Oprah, the wildly popular, gender-bending Puerto Rican TV astrologer Walter Mercado was so larger than life that only a documentary could do him justice. The filmmakers behind Netflix’s Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, like millions of Latinx viewers around the globe, grew up watching Mercado deliver daily horoscopes on TV. Wearing his trademark bejeweled capes, Mercado’s flamboyance coupled with upbeat astrological predictions helped make him a beloved cultural icon.

Director Gina Prince-Bythewood on her Netflix Epic The Old Guard

The Old Guard, premiering today on Netflix, is a completely engrossing female-fronted action film that just might blow the doors off your summer. Helmed by director Gina Prince-Bythewood, it also marks the milestone of the first major superhero film directed by a Black woman. Prince-Bythewood, who first made her name as writer/director of the classic Love & Basketball, has become one of the most thoroughly interesting directors working in Hollywood.

Director/Producer Dawn Porter on Capturing a Legend in “John Lewis: Good Trouble”

Director/producer Dawn Porter’s documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble is an inspirational look at the life and career of the legendary Georgia Democratic representative and civil rights activist John Lewis. Congressman Lewis, now 80 years old, has been instrumental in creating foundational change in the United States, from voting rights to equal rights for all Americans. To this day, he continues to be a voice for positive change.

The Credits spoke to Porter about the film,

“Unsettled” Looks at LGBTQ Refugees Seeking a Home in America

June celebrations, even virtual ones in this pandemic year, commemorate the birth of the modern LGBTQ liberation movement and the progress made over five decades since Stonewall, from marriage equality to the recent Supreme Court ruling protecting LGBTQ rights in the workplace.

But in many countries outside the U.S., LGBTQ rights mean only the right to survive.

San Francisco-based filmmaker Tom Shepard, whose many credits include the award-winning Scout’s Honor (2001) about the struggle to overturn the anti-gay policies of the Boy Scouts of America,

David France on the Terror Facing the LGBTQ+ Community in Welcome to Chechnya

Oscar-nominated filmmaker and former investigative journalist David France has a new documentary, Welcome To Chechnya, debuting on HBO June 30th, which has already won multiple awards on the film festival circuit. His film reveals the ongoing danger to LGBTQ Chechens targeted for persecution and death in a campaign to ‘cleanse’ the republic. France follows the activities of heroic activists, and profiles the people they hope to rescue out of harm’s way,

Director Ivy Meeropol on Her Deeply Personal HBO Documentary About Roy Cohn

After Ivy Meeropol directed her powerful and deeply personal HBO documentary Heir to an Execution (2004) about her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for alleged espionage in 1953 with prosecutor Roy Cohn leading the charge, she felt she’d finally put the subject behind her.

“I thought for years that a film about Roy Cohn was in order, that it should be done and I couldn’t believe no one had done it.

Sam Feder Takes a Revealing Look at Transgender Depiction in Hollywood in Disclosure

Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen offers an eye-opening look at the history of transgender depiction in two universal media: film and television. The story is told through the perspectives and memories of trans people in the entertainment industry — Laverne Cox (also an executive producer of Disclosure), Lilly Wachowski and Jen Richards among them — and features clips and images that shed light on how American culture has dehumanized and made assumptions about the transgender community.

Writer/Director JD Chua & Producer Juan Foo on Singapore’s First Creature Feature Circle Line

JD Chua had the distinction of being director Michael Mann’s only intern when he was in Hollywood, the man who made, in a seven-year period, three of the best films of the 1990s—The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), and The Insider (1999). As a child, one of Chua’s favorite films was Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. “I remember immersing myself in the laserdisc,”

Think Like a Dog Writer/Director Gil Junger on his Family Friendly Canine Comedy

Think Like a Dog is a warm-hearted fantasy adventure about a boy who invents a contraption that enables him to read his dog’s mind. It is reminiscent of Disney live-action classics like The Absent-Minded Professor and The Shaggy Dog. In an interview, writer/director Gil Junger talked about the pleasures of ignoring the show business adage about never working with children or dogs and how the film is a love letter inspired by his own experience of re-connection to his family.

Director Daniel Karslake on the Shifting Battle for LGBTQ Equality in For They Know Not What They Do

Documenting the contemporary gay and transgender experience of young Americans and their families through the lens of religion isn’t easy. First, there’s the matter of finding interview subjects. For the follow-up to his Oscar-shortlisted documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, which focused on the homophobia of the religious right, filmmaker Daniel Karslake met with about thirty different families before matching with the four subjects and their parents at the center of For They Know Not What They Do,

The Many Lives of Indonesian Director Kamila Andini

Talking with multi-award-winning Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini might lead one to believe that she either possesses the power of time travel or that she’s in some way leading parallel lives, such is her unbelievably heavy workload.

When Indonesia imposed stay at home restrictions, Andini had just arrived back from Melbourne, Australia, where she had staged a theatrical performance, rich in local Indonesian traditional dance, of her 2017 film The Seen and Unseen (Sekala Niskala).

Arielle Kilker On Assembling a Largely Female Crew to Create Her Netflix Series Cheer

Arielle Kilker brings pretty much everything she’s learned in her career to bear in her Netflix‘s Cheer, the series she co-created, co-directed, edited, and produced. That includes the Emmy-nominated work she put in as editor on Chef’s Table and a supervising editor on the Peabody nominated Last Chance U. She’s also edited and written crime docuseries on projects for MSNBC, A&E, and PBS. For Cheer, 

Director Josephine Decker on Capturing American Gothic Writer Shirley Jackson’s Complex World

Layers of creative output communicate the enthrallingly choleric New England household and inner world belonging to mid-century American gothic and horror writer Shirley Jackson in Shirley, which screened at Sundance and the Berlinale prior to its streaming release on June 5. Working with Sarah Gubbins’ script based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel of the same name, the filmmaker Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) catapults her audience into the dark Vermont home shared by Shirley (Elisabeth Moss) and her philandering professor husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and two young lodgers,

Judy & Punch Writer/Director Mirrah Foulkes Turns the Tables on Her Infamous Puppets

Judy & Punch kicks off with a male marionette thrashing a female doll-on-strings as a crowd of 17th-century tavern goers roars with delight. The camera soon shifts to witches, hangings, infanticide, beatings, magic brews, and lies as filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes bloodily re-imagines how the western world’s most famous pair of hand puppets got their start.

Set in and around an English village shortly after the Bubonic Plague, Judy & Punch (June 5,

The High Note Director Nisha Ganatra on the Importance of a Diverse Cast & Crew

As a worthy follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2019 comedy Late Night, director Nisha Ganatra brings us The High Note, which was released this past May 29 for digital download. The film stars Dakota Johnson as aspiring producer Maggie Sherwoode, who works as personal assistant to iconic performer Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross). It’s a dramedy about women supporting each other as they reach for their highest goals and dreams.

Director & Executive Producer Lesli Linka Glatter on Filming Homeland’s Series Finale

Lesli Linka Glatter has spent the last several years being alarmed by what she’s heard in intelligence briefings. This doesn’t just set her apart from many of the current apparatchiks in Washington, but also from many of her fellow directors. Not because her colleagues lack the capacity to be alarmed, but because her work as a director and an executive producer on Showtime’s Homeland would bring her, on an annual basis, to something that series creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa would call “Spy Camp,” in the D.C.

Director Matt Wolf on His Uncannily Timely Documentary Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth tells the fascinating, timely story of eight men and women who, in 1991, stepped into a sealed replica of Earth’s ecosystem to live a fully sustainable life for 24 months. Their world was called Biosphere 2, engineered by inventor/investor John Allen, and the experiment in which they participated, deemed a global media phenomenon. Spaceship Earth is available now on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, FandangoNow, Vudu, DIRECTV, DISH, and longtime NEON partner Hulu.

With Her Amazon Directing Gig on Hold, Indian Filmmaker Tannishtha Chatterjee Embraces Other Creative Pursuits

It’s often two-thirty in the afternoon before actor, writer, and director Tannishtha Chatterjee finds time to turn her attention to creative pursuits. “Till lunchtime…I’m cooking, cutting vegetables, cleaning, dusting and bathing Radhika.”

Radhika is Chatterjee’s four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. For the last six weeks, it’s been just the two of them tucked away in her Mumbai apartment. “She’s actually become quite independent in the last one and a half months. She’s learned many new things.