Production Designer Stuart Craig on Fantastic Beasts and How They Came to Be

In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Hogwarts graduate Newt (Eddie Redmayne) crashes his way through New York in 1926, fresh off a steamer ship from London, in hot pursuit of his various ill-trained magical beasts, whom he just can’t seem to keep trapped in a suitcase. After the case gets accidentally swapped with other nondescript brown luggage, Newt’s predicament grows, given that only one of the bags contains an entire fantastic beast-sanctuary.

Production Designer Ruth De Jong Talks Manchester by the Sea

When we caught up with production designer Ruth De Jong, she was on a ranch, outside of Atlanta, in the middle of a project. Considering her golden touch (De Jong has worked with Paul Thomas Anderson, Terrence Malick, and most recently Kenneth Lonergan), I briefly wondered which visionary she was working with now. She was actually working on a Super Bowl commerical.

De Jong's career has been a study in good taste. She's worked on multiple projects with Anderson,

Manchester by the Sea‘s Writer/Director Kenneth Lonergan—Part 2

In Part 2 of an interview with writer/director Kenneth Lonergan about his latest release, Manchester by the Sea, which opens Friday, the New York City native speaks about his penchant for acting in his own films, his choice of classical music to accompany a drama like Manchester by the Sea that is set in a working-class milieu and how the current political climate might affect his artistic vision in the future –

Talking to Manchester by the Sea‘s Writer/Director Kenneth Lonergan—Part 1

At 54, Kenneth Lonergan has experienced the highs and lows of the movie biz. The filmmaker has basked in the glow of having his directorial debut, 2000’s You Can Count on Me,  bestowed with rave reviews and two Academy Award nominations – one for his screenplay and the other for his leading lady, Laura Linney. And he has dealt with the frustration when  the running time of his more ambitious sophomore effort,

Costume Designer Lynn Falconer on her Vintage Designs in Ouija: Origin of Evil

Ouija: Origin of Evil taps into one of the most iconic eras for horror costumes, the 1960s. Mia Farrow’s blue nightgown in Rosemary’s Baby or Tippi Hedren’s green skirt suit in The Birds have become synonymous with terror. Costume designer Lynn Falconer mastered the era creating gorgeous vintage looks that reach the sinister standards of our favorite horror classics. We spoke with Lynn about mining estate sales for inspiration,

Loving‘s Breakout Star Ruth Negga on the Role of a Lifetime

If, as expected, Ruth Negga, the breakout star of Loving, snags a best actress nomination, it will likely be met in some corners by furrowed brows and the question, ‘Who’s Ruth Negga?’

They’ll know soon enough. Predominantly a British stage actress who’s played Ophelia at the National Theatre and legendary singer Shirley Bassey in the 2011  BBC biopic Shirley, Negga was born in Addis Ababa to an Irish mother and an Ethiopian father and lived there until she was four before being raised in Limerick and London.

Oscar Watch: Designing the Look of Loving With the DP, Costumer & Production Designer

In telling the true story of a white man and his black wife, director Jeff Nichols nails the late fifties period with uncanny precision. His Oscar-buzzed Loving (opening wide Nov. 11) begins in 1958 when police arrest Richard and Mildred Loving at their own Virginia home in the middle of the night and throw them in jail for being a mixed race couple. Banished from Virginia, Richard and Mildred (played with slow-burn intensity by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) decide to fight back and eventually win a landmark 1967 Supreme Court case declaring all anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

Hair & Makeup: Meet the People who Transform SNL Stars

Saturday Night Live is an institution, and that's always felt particularly keenly during presidential election years. This season, of course, we've witnessed Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin transform into Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Their performances have been, in short, hysterical. The nuances of their impersonations, from McKinnon's compassionate take on Hillary's struggles with connecting with audiences, and Baldwin's spot-on physical incarnation of Trump (the pursed lips,

How Arrival’s Production Designer Created an Alien Language

Oscar-nominated production designer Patrice Vermette was tasked with creating an alien language for the new movie Arrival —  and although he started by studying the languages used in other films about alien invasion, he ended up “reverse engineering” the language that Amy Adams uses to communicate with the invaders in the new film (in theaters Nov. 10). Vermette took a feelings-first approach to crafting the alien language by thinking about what it said to the audience without words.

Oscar Watch: La La Land‘s Director Damien Chazelle & Star Emma Stone on Their Moving Musical

Oscar-nominated writer/director Damien Chazelle set out to make a genre film with La La Land.  Inspired by classic song-and-dance movies such as Singin’ in the Rain and Swing Time, he wanted to create an old-fashioned musical but “keep it grounded” in realism and contemporary Los Angeles.

“It was about trying to use real locations, use a lot of real spaces,

How DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Cinematographer Films Multiple Worlds

The CW has become home for the DC comics since Arrow premiered in 2012. The show’s incredible success prompted spinoffs The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl. Cinematographer Mahlon Todd Williams designs the dynamic visual style of the time-traveling epic Legends of Tomorrow. Despite the logistical challenges that come with working on one of four interrelated shows, Williams produces visually stunning masterpieces week after week.

The Future of Film: 360 VR

Technology has been propelling storytelling techniques since the advent of the camera. Annie Lukowski and BJ Schwartz are at the forefront of the newest revolution in filmmaking. Their company, Vanishing Point Media, aims to immerse audiences in the story by surrounding them with 360 degrees of action.

Oscar Watch: DP Shoots Lush Oscar-Contender Moonlight Wide Screen Anamorphic

Action franchises like Star Trek, X-Men and Transformers exploit the wide-screen "anamorphic" format so they can showcase epic-scaled explosions. By contrast, the biggest action sequence in coming-of-age drama Moonlight happens when a 14-year old boy busts a chair over the back of his high school classmate. A Best Picture contender, Moonlight takes place in Miami's rough Liberty City neighborhood, where Chiron (portrayed in successive time periods by Alex Hibbert,

The Legendary Sonia Braga Talks Aquarius

Sonia Braga became an international star — and nearly single-handedly put Brazilian cinema on the map — when Bruno Barreto’s 1976 sexy comedy Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands) became a U.S. art-house hit with Braga as the breakout star for her earthy, sensual performance. She followed that with two of her trademark roles: Gabriela (1983) reunited her with Barreto as Braga reprised a role she’d played on a popular telenovela of the same name in Brazil that had already made her a star.

How the Trainer for Bleed For This Whipped Miles Teller into Shape

Boxing coach Darrell Foster had eight months to transform Will Smith into his Oscar-nominated version of Muhammad Ali for the 2001 bio pic Ali. With the fact-based Bleed For This (Nov. l8), he only had a few weeks to teach Miles Teller how to fight like five-time world champion Vinny Pazienza, who severed his spine in a 1991 car crash, then made an astonishing come back and reclaimed his championship belt.

Inches From an Icon: Gimme Danger Cinematographer on Filming Iggy Pop

Cinematographer Tom Krueger has filmed his share of charismatic musicians ranging from Bob Dylan and U2 to Stevie Wonder and David Bowie. But nothing prepared him for the Iggy Pop experience. Shooting Jim Jarmusch-directed documentary, Gimme Danger, Krueger captures the hair-rising misadventures of proto-punk band the Stooges as told by craggy-faced Jim Osterberg, known to the world as Iggy Pop.

Iggy Pop in GIMME DANGER.

Watch Toyko get Crushed in Godzilla: Resurgence VFX Reel

Shin Gojira—which is Godzilla Resurgence to you non Japanese speakers—is the 31st Godzilla film in the franchise, and the 29th produced by the legendary Toho Studios. Co-directed by Hideki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, this latest Godzilla film once again unleashed the most famous monster in movie history on the city of Tokyo.

The film’s premise was clever; when the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line mysteriously floods and collapses (the line is a bridge-tunnel combo that runs across Tokyo bay),

Manchester by the Sea‘s Composer on Scoring Kenneth Lonergan’s Masterpiece

Ever since screenings at the Sundance, Telluride and Toronto film festivals, and now just this past weekend at the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia, writer/director Kenneth Lonergan’s haunting Manchester by the Sea has been generating awards season buzz not just for Lonergan and the solid cast headed by Casey Affleck, but also for composer Lesley Barber.

Barber, who lives in Toronto, has earned international acclaim over the past two decades for her film scores,

Watch This Stunning, Devastating Pixar Short

Pixar animators Lou Hamou-Lhadj and Andrew Coates quietly released their short film, Borrowed Time, on Vimeo for a limited time only, just a few days ago. It's crushing. Pixar has long established itself as a studio that manages to mix the existential with the exciting, the melancholy with the mercurial. At their best, from Toy Story to Up to Wall-E, Pixar makes animated films that dont shy away from ruminating on life in all its complexity,

Designated Survivor‘s Production Designer on Creating a Dystopian D.C.

Production designer Cabot McMullen has created the settings for television series from Saturday Night Live to Scrubs, Smash, and Cougar Town.  Before the audience hears a line of dialog, sometimes before they even see a character, McMullen has to let us know immediately what world we are in.  That is not just identifying the story as gritty reality or heightened humor or fantasy;