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
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,
