Karen Allen on her new Film Year by the Sea (and yes, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Too)

Karen Allen shows a different kind of courage in Year by the Sea than she did in her most iconic role as Marian in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  But she looks just a few years older and still shows the same fearless engagement in the world in the story based on the memoir by Joan Anderson, A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman.

The Deuce Costume Designer on Dressing the Pimps & Working Girls of 1970s Times Square

When it came to crafting an authentic look for the Times Square hustlers at the center of HBO’s birth-of-pornography series The Deuce (debuting Sunday), costume designer Anna Terrazas enjoyed an invaluable resource in the person of show co-creator George Pelecanos. Long before he teamed with David Simon (The Wire) to produce this 1971 period piece, Pelecanos sold shoes. “George used to work in a shoe store in the seventies,

Flatliners Composer Nathan Barr on Using Nails as an Instrument, Hans Zimmer & More

Likely best known for scoring the entirety of HBO’s now-culturally iconic True Blood, composer Nathan Barr’s career is hardly limited to accompaniment music for genteel Southern vampires. He’s currently working on projects as diverse as a new version of Flatliners (out September 29th and starring Keifer Sutherland and Ellen Page), AMC’s new western series The Son, and the ongoing The Americans. With films like The Boy Next Door,

Trophy Doc Takes Unflinching Look at World of Big Game Hunting

It takes a lot to rattle Brooklyn-based documentary maker Shaul Schwarz, who mingled with drug dealers to make his earlier feature Narco Cultura and weathered numerous war zones in his earlier career as a photojournalist. But two years ago, Schwarz was shaken to the core when he filmed game hunters killing an elephant in the wilds of Namibia. “That was really tough to be honest, because I’d never seen elephants before in the wild,”

Atomic Blonde Production Designer on Recreating Cold War Berlin

Summer 2017 got its second kickass female lead in David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde. Based on the Cold War-era thriller graphic novel The Coldest City, the film stars Charlize Theron as MI6 spy Lorraine Broughton headed to Berlin in November 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Wall. A fellow undercover MI6 operative has been killed, a death Broughton needs to untangle before all hell can break loose in the imminently reunifying country.

TIFF 2017: What We’re Excited About This Year in Toronto

It’s not the only major film festival this season — Venice and Telluride rolled out first and boasted many of the same marquee titles. But the Toronto International Film Festival, running for 11 days, beginning this Thursday, September 7, and carrying on until the 17th, has a ton of cache. Not only does it take place in one of the friendliest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world, but TIFF has a strong record of showcasing eventual awards-season winners,

The Kong: Skull Island VFX Team Reveals Their Design Secrets

Seeing our favorite monsters come to life on screen gets more incredible each year as technology makes them bigger, scarier, and more realistic. King Kong is one of the most sympathetic monsters to stomp onto movie screens since Frankenstein. Sometimes enemy, other times hero, Kong often displays human emotions and can be both fearsome and gentle. The overgrown gorilla has evolved through many iterations since his original 1933 appearance. The visual effects masters that developed Kong for 

Emmy-Nominated VFX Designer on Creating Terrible Worlds in The Man in the High Castle

Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle portrays a comprehensive and convincing alternate reality in which the Nazi Reich was victorious in World War II. It’s a disturbing world that fortunately never was, but the show is a hearty visual feast that dives unrestrained into the terror. Visual effects supervisor Lawson Deming guided his team to build entire cityscapes outside Hitler’s window, reimagines where technology would lead in an America controlled by the Nazi Reich,

The Man in the High Castle‘s Emmy-Nominated Production Designer on Building a Nightmare America

Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 novel Man in the High Castle imagined the horrors of living in an America where the Allies were defeated in World War II. The series follows Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) who refuses to accept the terrible outcome and believes that things could be another way. Production Designer Drew Boughton has received two Emmy nominations for his harrowing interpretation of a world in which Nazi Germany has seized most of the United States while Imperial Japan controls the west coast.

Composer Christopher Willis on Mickey Mouse Shorts, The Death of Stalin & More

From London’s Royal Academy of Music to Mickey Mouse? Why yes — for composer Christopher Willis, it’s all part of an extensive, varied resume that’s seen him receive a PhD in Musicology from Cambridge as well as score everyone’s favorite series in political satire, Veep. We sat down to chat about the rather complicated music going on in those Mickey Mouse Shorts, why creating a soundtrack to a Disney ride is so tricky,

Looking Back at the VFX of Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The 1980s were a pinnacle for practical effects, but CGI was still in its infancy by the time Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991. James Cameron is one of the most successful filmmakers of all time, but also tops the list for one of the most pioneering. Terminator 2 is being re-released in 3D and VFXBog did a super deep dive speaking with the effects team about what it took to make the film.

Emmy-nominated Casting Director on Finding the Kids of Stranger Things

Supernatural thriller Stranger Things co-creators Matt and Ross Duffer not only made the inspired choice to bring Winona Ryder out of semi-retirement to star as the show’s unhinged mother-in-crisis; they also assembled primetime’s most endearing ensemble of twelve-year olds to portray four adorable boys and one mesmerizing mystery girl. Emmy-nominated casting director Carmen Cuba, teamed with co-nominees Tara Feldstein Bennett and Chase Paris, looked at more than 1000 in-person and video auditions to find the kids of Stranger Things.

How Destiny Called Gotham‘s Emmy-Nominated Sound Editor

Emmy season is in the air, and fan-favorite Gotham has certainly not disappointed, racking up three nominations this year alone. The series is no stranger to Emmy nominations either; this is the third year in a row that the show has been recognized for its sound editing. Destiny Calling was the episode put forward for consideration this year, the intense first part of Season 3’s two-part finale. Gotham’s sound supervisor,

Veteran Documentarian Joshua Z. Weinstein on his Yiddish Comedy Menashe

Making his scripted feature debut, director Joshua Z Weinstein drew not only on his background as a veteran documentary filmmaker but also on silent films. His Menashe is spoken nearly entirely in Yiddish, even though Weinstein speaks very little of the language, and it stars the largely unknown Hassidic comic and actor Menashe Lusting, whom Weinstein describes as “Chaplinesque.”

Yiddish was necessary because Menashe, a contemporary father-son story.

Gretchen Mol on Finding the Complexity in a Mother’s Story in A Family Man

In A Family Man, Gerard Butler plays an ambitious headhunter determined to win an important promotion – until his young son becomes critically ill and he has to rethink his priorities.  Gretchen Mol plays Butler’s wife and the mother of the sick child. In an interview with The Credits, she talked about what she learned from her extensive theater work (including a starring role in “Chicago” on Broadway) and how she made the too-often thankless role of the “you’re never home” wife into a real and complex character in this film.

Annabelle: Creation Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre on What Gave him Goosebumps

Films from The Conjuring universe have been scaring and thrilling audiences in equal measure for years. The fourth movie, Annabelle: Creation, hits theater today, and is sure to deliver more of the high-quality horror we have come to expect from the series. Already raking in praise and positive reviews, Annabelle: Creation undoubtedly owes part of its success to the vision of cinematographer Maxime Alexandre. Having worked on an array of terrifying films,

Double Emmy Nominee Ann Dowd Talks The Handmaid’s Tale and The Leftovers

Frightening to begin with, The Handmaid’s Tale gets even more creepy fifteen minutes into the first episode with the introduction of “Aunt Lydia.” Played with fierce authority by Ann Dowd, Lydia hectors a group of young women forced to bear children for the men who rule near-future “Gilead.” Striding around the classroom in short hair, drab gown and combat boots, Lydia stops at the desk of a surly student and abruptly jabs the handmaid with a cattle prod.

Emmy-Nominated Veep Writers Master Insult-Driven Satire in the Age of Trump

On the face of it, few things sound less intrinsically funny than “presidential library.” And yet for ten wickedly hilarious episodes this spring, HBO comedy Veep packed in more jokes per minute than any of its competition by tracking the self-glorifying quests of a narcissistic politician, expert in the art of personal attacks, who’s willing to say anything and betray anybody if it means holding onto power. Portrayed by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Selina Meyer spends most of the season on a quest to memorialize her eight-month “legacy”

Writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton on Adapting Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle

Writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton re-teamed with his Short Term 12 star Brie Larson for The Glass Castle, based on Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about her chaotic childhood. Walls’ parents struggled with substance abuse and mental illness, and their four children were often hungry and neglected. Larson plays Walls as a young adult, professionally successful as a gossip columnist in New York. As the film opens, we see her leave an elegant restaurant after dinner with her Wall Street fiancé and his prospective client. From her taxi,

The Brilliant Sound Technique That Makes Dunkirk so Viscerally Intense

We’ve written quite a bit about Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, specifically about the film’s boundary pushing technical brilliance. We explained to you why it matters that the film was shot in 70-mm (and how it affects your movie-going experience), and we wrote about how Nolan and his team’s use of IMAX cameras helped tell one of the most miraculous escapes in military history.

Now,