Best of Summer 2023: Gina Prince-Bythewood, MPA Creator Award Recipient, Tells Her Story

*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.

An elite force of female soldiers,

Best of Summer 2023: Christopher Nolan on Exploding Myths & Exposing Humanity in “Oppenheimer”

*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.

Spoilers below; approach with extreme caution if you haven’t seen the film yet.

“Red, White, & Royal Blue” Co-Writer/Director Matthew Lopez on Crafting a Modern Love Story

First-time feature director Matthew López also co-wrote the script of Red, White, & Royal Blue, based on the popular novel by Casey McQuiston, which arrives just in time to add a dash of romance to the end of your summer. It’s a love story about Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the President of the United States Ellen Claremont (Uma Thurman), and Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the grandson of the British King (Stephen Fry),

“Heart of Stone” Director Tom Harper on Accepting an Impossible Mission With Gal Gadot

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has had success both with critics and audiences and Barbie is breaking box office records. It makes good sense, then, that Skydance, the production company behind the M:I franchise, would want to partner with global superstar Gal Gadot to create a female-fronted action film. Enter Heart of Stone, the new Netflix release that puts Gadot front and center as intelligence operative Rachel Stone,

“Talk To Me” Directors Danny & Michael Philippou on Crafting the Year’s Most Unsettling Horror Film

Danny and Michael Philippou do not pull their punches in their chilling feature film directorial debut Talk to Me. Having honed their craft over years making short films, the twins crafted a horror movie that screams with confidence and passion, where not a single scare seems to miss the mark. There’s a reason the powerhouse mini-major studio A24, behind some of the best horror films of the last decade, got behind these two.

“Brother” Writer/Director Clement Virgo on Returning to Filmmaking With His Quietly Devastating Adaptation

Writer/director Clement Virgo followed his instincts when he returned to feature filmmaking. Since his last feature, Poor Boy’s Game (2007), Virgo has been directing TV, working more or less nonstop. He’s directed episodes of Empire, Netflix’s Dahmer- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and OWN’s megachurch drama Greenleaf. He was thinking about getting back into features when a friend handed him a copy of David Chariandy’s novel “Brother,”

Christopher Nolan on Exploding Myths & Exposing Humanity in “Oppenheimer”

Spoilers below; approach with extreme caution if you haven’t seen the film yet.

Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) stares wide-eyed into the pond spread out in front of him; his last conversation with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) on the potential catalytic effects of the atomic bomb has rendered him speechless. The music swells as the screen fades to black — the final scene of Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated Oppenheimer.

A “singularly dramatic moment in history” — That’s how Nolan describes the motivation behind his desire in telling the story of Robert Oppenheimer. 

“Lakota Nation vs. United States” Director Jesse Short Bull & Editor Laura Tomaselli Bring a Profound Injustice to Life

Director Jesse Short Bull knew he’d found the right collaborator in editor Laura Tomaselli when he watched her early cut of Lakota Nation vs. United States, their documentary about the Lakota’s ongoing quest to reclaim the Black Hills of South Dakota, sacred land that was stolen by the government in violation of the Black Hills treaty of 1868.

“Laura cut an amazing scene with a ‘50s western where a man and woman are in a wagon signing about the Black Hills and why ‘the Indians fight so hard for their land,’” recalled Short Bull.

“Extraction 2” Director Sam Hargrave on Lighting Chris Hemsworth on Fire, That Helicopter Scene & More

Extraction 2 is one of the most relentlessly action-packed movies of the summer, with the excitement of an 80s action epic paired with explosive, cutting-edge stunts that rival the thrills of Mission: Impossible and John Wick. In the second installment of the smash hit Netflix franchise, Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) is back from the brink of death and lets his emotions lead him into another dangerous covert operation.

“Swagger” Creator Reggie Rock Bythewood on Soaring to New Narrative Heights in Season 2

When looking for their next favorite series, fans of engaging drama—bonus points if you’re a lover of basketball—should look no further than creator and director Reggie Rock Bythewood’s series Swagger, which just premiered its second season on Apple TV+.

Based on the youth basketball experience of NBA superstar Kevin Durant, the story is centered around the Maryland-based team “Swagger DMV,” coached by Ike Edwards (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), a man committed to making both great ballers and world citizens of his team,

“The Perfect Find” Director Numa Perrier on Creating Space For Romance With Gabrielle Union

The Perfect Find (now streaming on Netflix) begins with Gabrielle Union’s New York City fashionista Jenna recovering from a bad breakup at her mother’s house. What makes matter most is this is happening in the wake of the humiliating collapse of her high-profile career. But Jenna’s not the type to pout, so she stages a comeback and, along the way, falls for a much younger man, Eric (Keith Powers). As rom-com fate would have it,

“Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” Director Steven Caple Jr. on Getting Gritty With It

Director Steven Caple Jr. steps into a large, alien robot-strewn sandbox with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts for his biggest feature yet. For decades, the Autobots and Decepticons have captured fans’ imaginations in Michael Bay’s franchise. To keep the series alive and well, Caple Jr. wanted to ground the famous robot characters, including Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, in the particulars of a specific, still quite human world in the 1990s. Rise of the Beasts is one of the earliest-set films in the franchise,

Gina Prince-Bythewood, MPA Creator Award Recipient, Tells Her Story

An elite force of female soldiers, the Agojie, is all that stands between the African Kingdom of Dahomey and the combined forces of the Oyo Empire and Mahi people. The Oyo and Mahi plan to raid Dahomey villages and sell their captives to European slavers. We open on a Mahi village where raiders heat their machetes over a fire at night. Their leader hears something in the tall grass surrounding them and quiets his men,

“The Other Two” Cinematographer / Director Charlie Gruet on the Show’s Signature Absurdity

Millennials have been the target of some harsh criticism from all sides, but no other generation has become technologically obsolete quite so quickly. Older generations think we’re whizzes on the computer, but there’s a difference between spending your middle school years figuring out how to instant message your crush and being trained to write code. Yet, going viral over a certain (very young) age almost seems more shameful than being irrelevant. This displacement is brilliantly captured in the comedy series The Other Two,

“It Ain’t Over” Director Sean Mullin on Capturing the Brilliance of Yogi Berra

Even though It Ain’t Over is about Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s preeminent figures during his 18 seasons as catcher with the New York Yankees and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, director Sean Mullin says the “last thing I wanted to do was make a sports movie.” Instead, Mullin took as inspiration the Oscar-winning 1955 film Marty starring Ernest Borgnine as an Italian-American butcher from the Bronx.

“It’s one of my all-time favorite films and a beautiful love story,” says Mullin.

Director Dawn Porter Details a Complex First Lady in “The Lady Bird Diaries”

In filmmaker Dawn Porter’s newest documentary, The Lady Bird Diaries, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson speaks for herself. Porter’s film is based on 123 hours of audio diaries that Lady Bird recorded during the presidency of her husband, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The personal, often poignant diaries reveal the First Lady’s key role as her husband’s advisor and confidante during his tumultuous presidency.

“I knew very little about Lady Bird, though I knew a lot about President Johnson,” says Porter,

“A Small Light” Executive Producer & Director Susanna Fogel on Disney+’s Illuminating New Miniseries

With Holocaust Remembrance Day having just passed and with antisemitism on the rise around the world, the release of National Geographic’s new eight-part miniseries A Small Light couldn’t come at a more apt time. The series is based on the true story of Miep and Jan Gies, who risked everything to hide Otto Frank and his family from the Nazis during World War II. Miep Gies discovered and kept Anne Frank’s famous diary safe until after the war. 

“Love & Death” Director Lesli Linka Glatter on HBO’s Deadly Sharp New Crime Drama

Love & Death, which debuted on April 27 on HBO/Max, begins with faith, family, and infidelity. It concludes with a criminal investigation and a gripping courtroom trial. In the middle is a gruesome axe murder. And once Emmy-nominated producer/director Lesli Linka Glatter had read the script, she wanted in on it.

“I was totally swept up in the material,” says Glatter during a recent interview. “To me, this is the dark side of the American dream.

“Polite Society” Writer/Director Nida Manzoor on Her Genre-Melding Feature Debut

Writer/director Nida Manzoor grew up on martial arts, action, and Bollywood, so it makes sense that her feature directorial debut Polite Society would be a genre mashup that includes all that and more. An idea she’s been kicking around since her teen years, the film is a celebration of sisterhood, inspired, in part, by her experiences as a kid learning karate with real-life sister Sanya. Though you might know Manzoor for her iconoclastic and very feminist series We Are Lady Parts,

A Legend Lives Again in Lisa Cortés’s Sparkling New Documentary “Little Richard: I Am Everything”

Little Richard liked to call himself the King of Rock and Roll, and it’s hard to argue with that claim after seeing the new documentary about the incendiary singer’s wild music and even wilder life. Little Richard, born Richard Penniman, not only pioneered rock attitude with piano-pounding hits like “Lucille” and “Long Tall Sally, but” he also flaunted a gender-bending persona that continues to resonate in the culture three years after his death in 2020 at age 87.