Watch Hugh Jackman’s Evil Logan Clone X-24 Come to Life
James Mangold‘s Logan was special. It recently made Oscar history as the first comic book-based screenplay nominated for an Academy Award, and in fashioning a brutal, brilliant and pared down story for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine (his real name is, of course, Logan), it was perhaps the most fitting farewell a superhero has ever gotten. One of the film’s signature achievements was giving Jackman’s ailing Logan a nemesis worthy of the notoriously resilient mutant, and Mangold and his writing team did that in spades with X-24...
Tomb Raider‘s Production Designer on Creating a Grittier, More Realistic Adventure
Tomb Raider is back, with a leaner, grittier, younger, and altogether more relatable Lara Croft, played by Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, at its center. As with the first two Tomb Raider films, which came out in 2001 and 2003, starring Angeline Jolie as the aristocratic Croft, both how to make and how to interpret the movie as it relates to its wildly popular video game source material has remained a present factor. Outside that shared aspect,...
Lean on Pete‘s Composer on why This Gorgeous Film Needed a Live Score
Though the score created for Lean on Pete is placed only in chosen scenes, those scenes are chosen expertly. The score is a powerful element that helps bring cohesion to the emotional and physical journey taking place in the movie. Lean on Pete is by acclaimed filmmaker Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), and is based on the novel by Willy Vlautin. The story’s centered on fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer),...
Writer/Director/Producer Rosemary Rodriguez Continues on Continuing her Scorching TV Career With NBC’s Rise
Rosemary Rodriguez, the award-winning writer/director of the feature films Acts of Worship and Silver Skies, has been directing on the small screen for over a decade. She has helmed episodes on some of the best TV shows currently or recently part of the cultural conversation, including The Good Wife, Rescue Me, Law & Order, Empire, The Walking Dead, and Jessica Jones. Now she’s focusing her talent on the upcoming series Rise,...
A Wrinkle in Time‘s Producer on her 55-Year Journey to Bring This Film to Life
Since its publication in 1962, Madeleine L’Engle’s novel “A Wrinkle in Time” has earned the affection of millions of fans. In fact, many of the people who worked on Disney’s new cinematic adaptation have loved the book for years.
It seems impossible though that any of them have loved the book as much as producer Catherine Hand, who wanted to make it a feature film when she first read it in 1963. At the time,...
Watch This Incredibly Impressive & Very Gory VFX Reel for Fear the Walking Dead
A major disclaimer before you watch the fascinating VFX reel for Fear the Walking Dead below—do it before lunch. Or don’t do it at all if you’re not a fan of gore. This look at the very impressive visual effects, created by Goodbye Kansas Studios, is not for the squeamish. Then again, neither is the show (or its progenitor, The Walking Dead), so if you’re curious how they turn actors into slobbering, oozing zombies,...
The Looming Tower‘s Stars on Tackling Terror, Real People, & Recent History on TV
The Looming Tower is a new Hulu series based on Lawrence Wright’s non-fiction book about the events leading up to the attack on the United States on 9/11. The focus is on the heads of the CIA and FBI operations investigating Al-Qaeda, played by Peter Sarsgaard and Jeff Daniels, and how their often-petty animosity and territoriality prevented the sharing of critical information that could have prevented the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. In an interview,...
Composer Chris Willis on Scoring Armando Iannucci’s Darkly Hilarious The Death of Stalin
Armando Iannucci said that he wanted to take a break from the insanity of American politics after creating the critically acclaimed, depressingly believable satire Veep on HBO. After five years of looking at the inanities and insanities of Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus)’s rise, fall, rise and fall in Washington D.C., Iannucci needed a palate cleanser—so he turned his attention to the very end Stalin’s ruthless, murderous grip on the Soviet Union with The Death of Stalin...
Writer/Director Atsuko Hirayanagi on Synchronicity & Inspiration in her Feature Oh Lucy!
Originally, writer/director Atsuko Hirayanagi’s Oh, Lucy! was written and produced as a short, winning the Jury Prize for International Fiction at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Now she has expanded it into a full-length feature, and Oh, Lucy! has just been released across the country to universally positive reviews.
Shinobu Terajima, an A-list actress in her native Japan, was nominated for a Best Female Lead Independent Spirit Award for her role as Setkuko,...
Meet the Man Behind the Fish in Best Picture Winner The Shape of Water
While Andy Serkis has become a superstar utilizing performance capture technology to become The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, King Kong and the Planet of the Apes’ chimpanzee hero Caesar, another incredibly talented performer has also had a stellar career being utterly unrecognizable. Only this actor mostly performs behind latex masks and within very heavy, hot body suits, and he’s finally getting his due. His name is Doug Jones, and he has been the largely unheralded hero Guillermo del Toro’s Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water...
Detective Turned Producer on Revisiting Murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls in Unsolved
Though he’s no longer a detective, Greg Kading continues to deal with his 2006 investigation, when he led a task force charged with figuring out who killed Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace. Now retired from the Los Angeles Police Department, Kading co-executive produces USA Network’s limited series Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. (Tuesdays starting Feb. 27). Based on his self-published book “Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls &...
The Missouri Policeman Who Prepared Sam Rockwell for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sam Rockwell’s character, Officer Dixon, is by no means a model police officer in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. He’s violent, bigoted, temperamental and aloof. Yet, in order to play a character that gets everything wrong, sometimes you have to know what it looks like to get the job right. To research the role, Rockwell turned to Springfield, Missouri police officer Josh McMullin to learn the ropes.
Three Billboards dialect coach Liz Himelstein first contacted the Springfield Police department to research a Southwest Missouri accent...
How the Hair Design of Mudbound Became the Basis of an Oscar Nominated Performance
The heat and mud of the Mississippi farmland is palpable from the makeup to the clothing to the score in Dee Rees’ Mudbound. As the Jackson and McAllan families struggle through the muck and mire of poverty and racial tensions, they wear the Earth like badges of war. The oppressive climate was no trick of the camera, said hair department head Lawrence Davis.
“It was physically challenging just to be there walking through the mud,” Davis recalled...
Oscar-Nominated SFX Makeup Artist Arjen Tuiten on the Immense Responsibility of Working on Wonder
As part of our Oscars week coverage, we’re re-posting our conversations with some of this year’s Oscar-nominees, while publishing new interviews throughout the week. Wonder makeup SFX artist Arjen Tuiten is nominated for Makeup & Hairstyling. Also nomianted are Kazuhiro Tsjuji, David Malinowski & Lucy Sibbick (Darkest Hour) and Daniel Phillips & Lou Sheppard (Victoria Abdul).
The last time we spoke to special effects makeup artist Arjen Tuiten, he was explaining the laborious but successful transformation of Woody Harrelson into our 36th president,...
Baby Driver’s Oscar-Nominated Supervising Sound Editor Dissects the Movie’s Unique Syncopated Style
As part of our Oscars week coverage, we’re re-posting our conversations with some of this year’s Oscar-nominees, while publishing new interviews throughout the week. Baby Driver sound editor Julian Slater is nominated alongside his collaborators Tim Cavagin and Mary H. Ellis. They’re up against Ron Bartlett, Doug Hemphill & Mac Ruth (Blade Runner 2049), Mark Weingarten, Greg Landaker & Gary A Rizzo (Dunkirk), Christian Cooke, Brad Zoern & Glen Gauthier (The Shape of Water), and David Parker,...
I, Tonya‘s Oscar-Nominated Editor Tatiana S. Riegel on What Makes a Scene Work and Why
As part of our Oscars week coverage, we’re re-posting our conversations with some of this year’s Oscar-nominees, while publishing new interviews throughout the week. I, Tonya Editor Tatiana S. Riegel is nominated alongside Paul Machliss & Jonathan Amos (Baby Driver), Lee Smith (Dunkirk), Sidney Wolinsky (The Shape of Water) and Jon Gregory (Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri).
One could make a case that the most competitive category in the upcoming Oscars isn’t for best picture or best director,...
How The Last Jedi & Dunkirk‘s Colorist Subtly Manipulated Your Feelings
The son of farmers from near Turin, Italy, colorist Walter Volpatto went from studying electrical engineering at a local university to working at Italy’s national public broadcasting company, RAI. It was here he honed his chops with electronic compositing, lighting and photography. When computers became both ubiquitous and advantageous for his line of work, Volpatto jumped into the digital world with his usual passion and committment. Now, he is one of the premiere colorists working in the film industry, working at the world-renown post-production facility FotoKem...
How The Shape of Water‘s VFX Producer Turned a Monster Into a Romantic Lead
In the final part of this two-part interview, visual effects coordinator and frequent Guillermo del Toro collaborator Luke Groves reveals how he worked with the filmmaker to craft some of The Shape of Water’s most awe-inspiring sequences and reveals how he and the visual effects team at Mr. X walked the line between CG magic and practical effects to create movie magic that looks impressively real.
I want to talk about the opening sequence because I know it was shot wet-to-dry which is absolutely incredible...
The Shape of Water‘s VFX Producer on Creating the Year’s Most Unique Leading Man
For all its ambitious underwater sequences and that stunning central creature, it’s oddly easy to forget the technical majesty at work in Guillermo del Toro’s meticulous, Oscar-nominated The Shape of Water. Not for its lack of quality, in fact, quite the opposite. The work, which makes every inch of del Toro’s beguiling fantasy possible, is so seamless as to give the impression that even the film’s most outlandish design elements are through some mysterious magic,...
Love & Other Illusions: How Blade Runner 2049‘s Oscar-Nominated Sound Designer Played With our Heart Strings
As part of our Oscars week coverage, we’re re-posting our conversations with some of this year’s Oscar-nominees, as well as publishing new interviews with those vying for Oscar gold this Sunday. Sound editor Theo Green is nominated alongside his Blade Runner 2049 collaborator Mark Mangini. The Sound Editing category includes Julian Slater (Baby Driver), Richard King & Alex Gibson (Dunkirk), Nathan Robitaille & Nelson Ferreira (The Shape of Water), and Mathew Wood &...
