HBO Pulls Back the Curtain on Directing Legend in New Spielberg Trailer
Director Steven Spielberg reveals in a new trailer what drives his creativity, and it’s not your typical day in the office. The celebrated director has created some of the most popular, beloved, and iconic films of all time and now it’s his turn to tell his own story.
HBO documentary Spielberg puts the legend in front of the camera, along with a dizzying number of A-list stars. Documentarian Susan Lacy helmed the project,
The Last Movie: Character Actor Harry Dean Stanton, RIP, Finally Gets Lucky Title Role
Stealing scenes for more than half a century in some 200 movies and TV shows, Henry Dean Stanton has played everything from spaceship crew member (Alien) and psychotic criminal (Repo Man) to a Mormon patriarch with fourteen wives (Big Love). Instantly identifiable in his later years for haunted eyes suggesting a man who’s stared straight into the abyss and lived to tell the tale,
Designing Jake Gyllenhaal’s Look in Boston Bombing Film Stronger
The scene of two homemade bombs exploding at the Boston marathon in 2013 was devastating, but from it rose images of hope and stories of triumph. Jeff Bauman was among the crowd of victims whose lives were changed by the attack. Bauman lost both of his legs, which began his incredible journey to recovery. Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Bauman in Stronger, the emotional film that examines the pain of grief and tragedy under the public eye.
Director Stephen Frears on Directing Dame Judi Dench in Victoria & Abdul
Stephen Frears steered Helen Mirren to an Oscar as The Queen and landed Meryl Streep in the Best Actress circle last year for Florence Foster Jenkins. But when it comes to Judi Dench, who stars in his latest film Victoria & Abdul (opening Friday //Sept. 22// in New York and L.A.) the veteran British filmmaker brushes aside any suggestion that he contributed in any significant way to her bravura performance as England’s 81-year-old Queen Victoria.
Jake Gyllenhaal & Jeff Bauman on Their Bond, Using Real Pain to Fuel Stronger
When it comes to cinematic accounts of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Stronger is the flip side to last year’s Patriots Day. The earlier film – an action thriller about catching the bad guys – focused on Beantown native Mark Wahlberg’s fictional composite-character cop being celebrated as a hero. Stronger, opening this Friday, instead is an intimate look at what happens when a survivor of a tragedy is seen as a hero while trying to recover from the loss of his legs as well as his former life.
Ali Fazal on Playing Queen Victoria’s Friend & Teacher in Victoria and Abdul
Victoria and Abdul director Stephen Frears said he had to go to India to find an actor to play the Muslim who was Queen Victoria’s friend and munshi (teacher) in the last years of her life. “I knew that you needed somebody from India,” he said, to get “that sort of wide-eyed quality….When Ali [Fazal] came in, by the time he left the room I said, ‘Well, I can see why she’ll like him.’ It was really as simple as that.”
Meet the Team Behind World’s First Fully Oil Painted Film, Loving Vincent
Every once in a while, a film comes along that profoundly alters how we perceive the images that flicker on the big screen. The animated biopic Loving Vincent , which recounts the final weeks of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s life as a murder mystery, is definitely one of those game-changers. The Polish-U.K. co-production that opens Friday is the world’s first fully oil-painted feature. The project ,10 years in the making on a tight $5.5 million budget,
Talking to Legendary Organizer Dolores C. Heurta & Director Peter Bratt About Their Documentary Dolores
Not that many people know that Barack Obama’s “yes we can” slogan was translated from the Spanish “si se puede.” Even fewer know that the phrase, sometimes credited to United Farm Workers of America leader Cesar Chavez, was actually coined by the group’s co-founder, Dolores C. Huerta. This and much more is set straight in Dolores, the new documentary written and directed by Peter Bratt and executive produced by musician Carlos Santana.
Battle of the Sexes Editor Pamela Martin on Turning Emma Stone & Steve Carell Into Tennis Pros
When I heard that Emma Stone and Steve Carell were starring in a new movie about the legendary Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, I rolled my eyes. I’m both a filmmaker and a tennis nut. (I got rid of my cable TV, literally, for 10 years because I couldn’t stop myself from watching the Tennis Channel). I winced at the thought of the obvious cutaways and close-ups the editor would need to rely on to hide the fact that Stone and Carell,
How Documentary Now!’s Emmy Nominated Director Makes a Joke of Serious Films
Saturday Night Live is a mecca for comedians, where stars like Eddie Murphy, Amy Poehler, and Will Ferrell and writers like Conan O’Brien and Tina Fey took their careers to new heights. The show’s most memorable sketches have launched successful spin off projects like Wayne’s World and The Blues Brothers. Documentary Now! is one of the latest SNL inspired projects to unite the show’s alums outside Studio 8H.
Westworld‘s Emmy-Nominated Cinematographer on the Park’s Sinister Secrets
HBO’s Westworld hypnotized viewers this year. The titular park was a literal tourist trap, offering the well-heeled the opportunity to live out any fantasy without consequence, until the hosts get other ideas. Inspired by Michael Crichton’s 1973 film, the reboot was a hit featuring the clean, calm lines of the welcome center contrasted with the gritty Wild West themed park. Cinematographer Paul Cameron (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) disrupted the serene pretense upheld by the park’s producers to deliver a sense of foreboding about the sinister secrets within.
DP Captures Ugly Behavior in Sun-Dappled New Series Riviera
Boasting a resume that includes Peaky Blinders, BAFTA Award-winning London Spies and gritty indie High-Rise, British cinematographer Laurie Rose shoots most of his projects in overcast England. But not long after he spent six weeks in a dank British warehouse working on claustrophobic shoot-em-up Free Fire, Rose spent last summer in the sunny south of France filming the first two episodes of Riviera.
Here’s How They Created The Loot Train Dragon Attack in Game of Thrones
While we’ve written a lot about how extensive, incredible (and gross!) the practical effects are on Game of Thrones, the work done by the visual effects team is equally impressive. You don’t get to have a show with dragons, giants, direwolves, an exploding Sept of Baelor, and an army of 100,000 renanimated dead people without a really, really good visual effects team. As Game of Thrones has shifted from palace intrigue and mostly human concerns to the war between the living and the dead,
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
