I, Tonya‘s Oscar-Nominated Editor Tatiana S. Riegel on What Makes a Scene Work and Why

One could make a case that the most competitive category in the upcoming Oscars isn’t for best picture or best director, but for film editing. Your nominees represent a fantastic cross section of genres and styles—Baby Driver‘s insanely perfect music-to-mayhem editing; the gorgeously cut, perspective-swapping World War II epic Dunkirk; the feverish revenge drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; and the perfectly paced, dreamy and dread filled The Shape of Water.

Talking Frank Capra and Marmalade Addiction with Paddington 2 Director Paul King

Paul King, the director behind Paddington 2 is 100% lovely. Fitting for a gent who created a film with 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, right?

For the sequel to 2015’s hit Paddington, King collaborated with writer Simon Farnaby on the script and reunited the core cast of Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins and Ben Whishaw. This go around, he adds Hugh Grant to the mix,

Cinematographer Neville Kidd on Visualizing Netflix’s Epic New Sci-Fi Series Altered Carbon

In sci-fi series Altered Carbon (streaming Friday, Feb 2, on Netflix), the streets of San Francisco 350 years in the future teem with pulsating 3D ads, flying cop cars, prostitute holograms and “sleeves,” formerly known as human bodies, embedded with “cortical stacks” of consciousness that enable rich people to live forever. Inhabiting one of those sleeves is recently resurrected rebel soldier Takishi Kovacs (Joel Kinnamen of The Killing),

Actress Daniela Vega & Writer/Director Sebastian Lelio on Their Oscar-Nominated Film A Fantastic Woman

Chile-bred, Berlin-based director Sebastian Lelio has become an international filmmaker who moves between styles and countries. He’s also exceptionally prolific, with not one but three movies awaiting release. First up is A Fantastic Woman, one of this year’s five foreign-film Oscar contenders, which will be released today, Feb. 2, in the U.S. It’s the tale of a transgender woman, played by Daniela Vega, who fights for her right to grieve her older lover after his sudden death.

Early Man Co-composer on Collaboration & Finding The Right Caveman Yells

To soundtrack fans, British composer Tom Howe may not be a household name, but he’s been clocking eighteen hour workdays for over a decade, and has over sixty IMDB credits to his name. He believes some of the most rewarding and successful projects on that list have been collaborations. Howe got on the international radar by creating theme music for The Great British Bake-Off. In 2017, he scored the music for Professor Marston and the Wonder Women and created additional music on the blockbuster Wonder Woman itself.  

Costume Designer April Napier on Crafting Early Aughts Authenticity in Lady Bird

It’d be an understatement to say Lady Bird has taken the country by storm. After quietly positive bows at Telluride and TIFF earlier this year, Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut has gone on to become one of the best-reviewed film of all time on Rotten Tomatoes (until a certain someone got the score lowered from a perfect 100 to a near-perfect 99), score five Oscar nominations in a heavily competitive year and stack up a $40M+ box office against a shoestring budget.

A Peek Inside the Baby Driver Sound Editing Bay

We recently spoke with Julian Slater who provided the sound design, editing, and mixing for Baby Driver. In conjunction with the amazing work of Oscar nominated editor, Paul Machliss, Baby Driver was one of the most stunning films of the year. Slater has since scored two Oscar nominations for his epic feat that synched the killer soundtrack with an incredible array of effects. IndieWire released a short video that will take you inside Slater’s editing bay to witness the magic in action.

Writers/Directors The Spierig Brothers on Their Deliciously Detailed Horror Winchester

What makes an enduring haunted house classic? Much can be said for dread-inducing camera work, eerie sound design or clever ghostly effects, but for the Spierig brothers, it’s the human story underneath that can transform a horror flick from simply scary to downright legendary. Enter Winchester, a dramatization of the curious true-life mystery of Sarah Winchester and her fascinating, illogical home known as the Winchester Mystery House. And while the details of the true story are sketchy at best,

Baby Driver‘s Oscar Nominated Editor Paul Machliss on Marrying Music to Mayhem

Of all the masterly edited films of 2017, it would be hard to argue any were quite as revolutionary as Baby Driver. Edgar Wright’s music-charged heist flick was so flawlessly designed and edited it seemed almost as if the songs on the soundtrack had been recorded specifically for the scenes they amplified. In our interview with supervising sound editor Julian Slater, we learned, among other things, that the brilliantly matched music-and-turbo-charged-getaways were so complicated,

Living Biblically‘s Showrunner on Bringing the Bible to CBS—in a Comedy

A.J. Jacobs’ best seller, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, is now a new television sit-com that premiered on CBS on February 26, 2018. Mad Men’s Jay R. Ferguson plays Chip, a journalist who consults a priest (Ian Gomez) and a rabbi (David Krumholtz) for guidance when he is rocked by two life-changing events, the death of a friend and the news that his wife is having a baby.

Inside how The Final Year Looks Back on President Obama’s Swan Song

There once was a time, not long ago, when the sum of US foreign policy goals couldn’t be distilled to an acronym that fit on a hat. Simply stating such a thing might inspire yearning for eighteen months past — or stoke the fires of long-burning vitriol. The Final Year, director Greg Barker’s evenhanded front-row look at a swath of the last Presidential administration’s policies being enacted, or at least striven for,

Director Paul McGuigan on Nabbing the Perfect Actress to Play Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

Scottish director Paul McGuigan, whose credits include Lucky Number Slevin and Victor Frankenstein, says he tries not to watch his own films too often “because you start to go nuts.” But his latest, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, was different.  “I’ve watched it more than any of them because I still find it moving myself, the pairing of Annette [Bening] and Jamie [Bell]. I find it moving and touching because they were real people.”

Those real people are Hollywood icon Gloria Grahame (Bening) who starred in numerous films in the 40s and 50s and won an Oscar in 1952 for The Bad and the Beautiful and Peter Turner,

Hostiles Actor Wes Studi on Capturing an Audience Without Speaking Their Language

The stars of writer-director Scott Cooper’s Hostiles are Christian Bale, playing U.S. Army Capt. Joseph Blocker, and Rosamund Pike, as Rosalie Quaid, the lone survivor of a Comanche massacre. But this stark Western relies just as much on Wes Studi, whose dying Chief Yellow Hawk is released from prison to be escorted to Montana by a very reluctant Blocker. The movie, which opened wide on Jan. 26, charts both a geographical journey and an inner one: the reconciliation of Yellow Hawk and Blocker,

The Title Sequence Isn’t Disappearing – It’s Headed Back To The Big Screen

It appeared quietly, in the right corner of your Netflix screen a few months ago: the “skip intro” button. A translucent shortcut customized by the streaming service built to work both with any series, cold open or no, meant to allow binge-watchers to expedite their viewing experience. In the past, new features and redesigns have come and gone on the site without a word, but the button almost immediately created quite a stir. Most notably,

Costume Designer Lou Eyrich Outfits Iconic Designer in Style for The Assassination of Gianni Versace

Costume designer Lou Eyrich‘s handiwork dominates the opening of Ryan Murphy’s new series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (Wednesdays on FX) when the titular fashion designer begins his last day on earth swaddled in the lap of luxury. Versace (Edgar Ramirez), in silk pajamas, dresses for breakfast by slipping on a pink robe and, of course, Versace-branded slippers. Without a word of dialogue, Eyrich and creator-producer-director-writer Ryan Murphy establish Versace’s luxurious life in Miami shortly before he’s murdered by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss).

Sundance 2018: A Conversation with the Director and Cast of Daring Heist Film American Animals

Whether it’s the reluctant exploitation of a super skill in Baby Driver or the stylish and sophisticated execution of Ocean’s Eleven, heist movies are an American cinematic staple. The masterminded plans, daring escapes, and thrilling shootouts look easy on screen, but what would happen in a real life do-it-yourself caper? Enter Sundance selection, American Animals.

In 2004, Warren Lipka, Spencer Reinhard, Chas Allen, and Eric Borsuk fell headlong into a reckless amateur effort to break out of the mundanity of their lives.

Screenwriter Michael Golamco on Please Stand By’s Heroine on the Spectrum

Wendy, the blonde heroine of Please Stand By, lives in northern California and writes Star Trek fan fiction. Played by Dakota Fanning, she’s hardly the only pretty, Trekkie protagonist in film history, but she is likely the first one dealing with autism and living in a group therapy home. Ben Lewin directs this Magnolia Pictures film, out tomorrow, which co-stars Toni Colette as Scottie, Wendy’s no-nonsense therapist, and Alice Eve as Audrey,

Writer Ed Solomon Puts the Pieces Together for HBO Thriller Mosaic

As the guy who broke rules to mesh comedy and sci-fi with his now-classic Men in Black script, Ed Solomon knows how to pull off experiments in entertainment. Still, when he and Steven Soderbergh co-created Mosaic, Solomon had to wrap his head around a lot of unknown variables. The murder mystery debuted this past Monday on HBO for five consecutive nights in tandem with a free app that re-structures the same whodunit in interactive flow chart form for smart phones.

Sundance 2018: American Animals Composer Captures Four Students’ Wild Alter Egos

A tribal orchestration sprinkled with sounds of the wild opens American Animals to the contrasting sight of establishing shots of Lexington, Kentucky. Composer Anne Nikitin immediately sets the tone for the rambunctious docudrama about a daydream gone too far. A group of college aged men concoct a movie style plan to steal valuables from a university, to initially hilarious result. As the events grow more sobering, Nikitin dials up the drama and brings us back to reality where the scheme collides with consequences.

Sundance 2018: The Tale Composer Delicately Threads a Fragile Story of Adolescent Abuse

For decades, documentarian Jennifer Fox had convinced herself that the sexual abuse she’d suffered as a child was consensual. In revisiting her memories and the events under the light of adulthood, Fox had a reckoning with the true nature of the events. Her memoir, starring Laura Dern as Jennifer, is laid bare in Sundance premiere The Tale. After decades of employing coping mechanisms to avoid the atrocities of sexual abuse she experienced as a child,