Interview

Composer

Feeling the Music of Fargo With Composer Jeff Russo

You would have been excused for wondering how in the world the folks behind FX's Fargo were going to take a classic Coen Brothers film and turn it into a viable television series. The challenge of adapting something beloved is hard enough when what you're adapting is a book, but to take an award winning and critically acclaimed film and turn it into a television series? That takes guts.

One of the ways in which 

By  |  June 22, 2015

Interview

Director, Screenwriter

Dope Debuts in Theaters After Smashing Sundance Premiere

One of the buzziest crowd-pleasers to come out of Sundance, Dope tells the story of Malcolm, a 90s hip-hop obsessed geek from Inglewood with dreams of studying at Harvard. After a wild night there’s suddenly a backpack of drugs standing in his way and only his two nerdy friends to help him offload them. (Hint: their plan involves bitcoin).

We talk to writer-director Rick Famuyiwa, who grew up in Inglewood,

By  |  June 19, 2015

Interview

Screenwriter

How Inside Out Writer Meg LeFauve Created An Emotional Battle Inside The Mind

Inside Out comes with all the classic marks of a great Pixar movie. An all-ages storyline? Check. Beautiful animation paired with an unexpected, off-kilter premise? Check. Tears? Check and check.

The story takes place inside the mind of Riley, a pre-teen girl whose family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, a transition that unleashes a flurry of upheaval among her five main emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust.

By  |  June 18, 2015

Interview

Director, Producer

Battle of the Titans: Robert Gordon on William Buckley vs. Gore Vidal in Best of Enemies

Playing at the BAMcineamaFest in Brooklyn and AFI Docs in Los Angeles tonight, Magnolia Pictures' Best of Enemies is a riveting behind-the-scenes account of the explosive 1968 televised debates between liberal Gore Vidal and conservative William F. Buckley Jr., where these two intellectual heavyweights clobbered each other over their views about God, sex, and politics.

We spoke with co-director and producer Robert Gordon about how this film came to be,

By  |  June 17, 2015

Interview

Actor, Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Aligning Past, Present & Future in Terminator Genisys

Director Alan Taylor and writers Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier had a lot to juggle when they went to work on Terminator Genisys. With the four previous Terminator films and their corkscrewing stories, the filmmakers had to find a way to honor the universe the franchise has already built while setting off on their own, singular path. At what part of the saga of man's battle with machines would they pick up,

By  |  June 15, 2015

Interview

Animator, Art Director, Director, Producer, Production Designer, Special/Visual Effects

Meet the Crew That Worked on Both Jurassic Park & Jurassic World

Universal's new Jurassic World is being heralded as a proper folllow-up to Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic Jurassic Park, the film that raised the bar for what CGI could accomplish and blew the minds of kids and adults alike. When director Colin Trevorrow took the helm of Jurassic World, the first film in the franchise in 14-years, both he and executive producer Steven Spielberg wanted to recapture the magic of that first film.

By  |  June 11, 2015

Interview

Composer

A Look at the Career of Brian Eno, Me and Earl and The Dying Girl‘s Composer

Tell me about a new Brian Eno record – one he recorded, wrote and/or produced – and yeah, I’ll hear it. What, he made a mobile app? Hold the phone. He has a new art installation? Take me. A deck of cards? A published diary?

You get it: I’m pro-Eno, 24/7.

This week another Eno project arrives in the form of an indie film score.

By  |  June 10, 2015

Interview

Actor

Katniss is Done Giving Speeches:The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Trailer

“Ladies and gentleman welcome to the 76th Hunger Games.” We just got our first look at the new trailer for Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 and the word that comes to mind is payback. Of all the mega-jerks in the suite of dystopian films we've seen in the past few years, none are as sneeringly obnoxious as President Snow(Donald Sutherland). 

The new trailer starts with an enormous, glamorous wedding filled with celebration,

By  |  June 10, 2015

Interview

Director

Me and Earl and The Dying Girl Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon has faced rejection before in the movie business. In 2014, his horror film The Town that Dreaded Sundown was only released in a few theaters nationwide and then went straight to video on demand. He wanted a chance for that film to build an audience but never had the opportunity. The Texas born filmmaker had steadily worked his way up through the ranks, starting as a personal assistant for some of Hollywood's biggest stars (Nora Ephron,

By  |  June 8, 2015

Interview

Composer

Listen to the Work of American Horror Story: Freak Show‘s Composer

It’s not like composer Mac Quayle got into this line of work exclusively to score seriously demented moments, but the Grammy® nominated musician has done just that for one of TV’s most wild shows. Quayle has written music for more than 30 films and television shows, and has made a name for himself as a dance re-mixer and multi-instrumentalist, but you might have encountered his work most recently on FX’s hit series American Horror Story: Freak Show.

By  |  June 5, 2015

Interview

Actor, Special/Visual Effects

Is Tom Cruise’s Plane Stunt in the new Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation his Craziest?

Tom Cruise’s stunt exploits are legendary, and in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, he might of completed his most insane stunt ever. Cruise hung off the side of a an Airbus A400M as it rose 5,000 feet in the air above the British countryside. Is this Cruise’s stunt masterpiece, and can it ever be topped?

Previously, in Mission: Impossible 2 (in which he tore a shoulder muscle jumping between rocks),

By  |  June 4, 2015

Interview

Actor, Director, Screenwriter

Melissa McCarthy Continues Tradition of Screwball Spy Comedies in Grand Fashion

In writer-director Paul Feig’s Spy, Melissa McCarthy takes the reins as the latest bumbling protagonist in that tried and tested movie genre: the spy comedy. McCarthy plays CIA desk-jockey Susan Cooper who is unexpectedly called up to go undercover in the field. (See our interview with stunt coordinator J.J. Perry here about turning McCarthy into a proper, butt-kicking spy.)

Unlike the slick, womanizing James Bond, who navigates his way through each world-saving assignment improbably unruffled,

By  |  June 4, 2015

Interview

Actor

Suffragette: “We Don’t Want to be Lawbreakers, We Want to be Lawmakers”

"All my life I've been doing what men told me. Well, I can't have that anymore."

So says Maud (Carey Mulligan), a laundress who joins an activist group bravely agitating for women's right to vote. The recently released trailer has action, violence, bombs, politics, power, and a thumping score…the stuff of female focused movie trailers? Yes; director (Sarah Gavron Brick Lane) and writer (Abi Morgan, The Iron Lady) are bucking convention in the trailer for their historical drama  

By  |  June 4, 2015

Interview

Actor, Animator

Down the Rabbit Hole: Why Inside Out is Unlike Any Other Pixar Film

Their story creation process at Pixar is notoriously labor intensive and exacting. The men and women behind these films craft their narratives for years (and years), until they are satisfied they are telling the best version of that story possible.

Pete Docter, the director of Pixar’s latest, Inside Out, knows better than anyone what it takes to pass Pixar muster. Docter was the co-writer of the original treatment of Toy Story,

By  |  June 3, 2015

Interview

Actor

Summer is Here, so are the Hot, New Flicks

The official start of summer may be June 21st (summer solstice), but we've already had our engines revved and our worlds destroyed at the cinema recently. This past weekend we were treated to the release of two very disparate but entertaining films, Warner Bros. San Andreas, starring perhaps Dwayne Johnson, our reigning action king (it was only this past April Johnson co-starred in the critical and commercial darling, Universal Pictures' 

By  |  June 2, 2015

Interview

Actor

Revelations, Winter & the new Power Couple: Inside Game of Thrones “Hardhome”

Last night’s episode “Hardhome” might not have been the season's penultimate episode, but it played like one. Like those penultimate mindblowers Blackwater, The Red Wedding and The Battle of Castle Black before it, this third-to-last episode in season five had one extended, terrifically shot set piece that was as satisfying as it was intense. Yet before the thrilling last fifteen minutes of "Hardhome," there was plenty to enjoy.

The Queen Bey &

By  |  June 1, 2015

Interview

Stunt Coordinator/Stunt Person

Spy’s Stunt Coordinator on Melissa McCarthy’s Butt Kicking

A chance introduction to Jean-Claude Van Damme in the late ‘80s led to Spy’s stunt coordinator J.J. Perry’s long career in the movies. Perry, who was on the Atlanta set of Ang Lee’s latest film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk when we spoke, has worked on countless films, including Divergent, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Warrior. He tells The Credits about how he battled to make sure he sent Spy’s star Melissa McCarthy,

By  |  June 1, 2015

Interview

Actor

5 Ideas on Andy Serkis’s Stars Wars: The Force Awakens Character

The internet was aflame with fresh news about Star Wars: The Force Awakens—the reveal of Andy Serkis’s character, one Supreme Leader Snoke, and the Vanity Fair photo by Annie Leibovitz of Serkis in his performance capture gear.

There is really no more information about Serkis’s character, but of course that hasn’t stopped people, including us, from speculating. Take the featured image above—might that figure on the stage behind the Stormtroopers be Serkis's character?

By  |  May 29, 2015

Interview

Actor, Screenwriter

From Rolling Stone To Aloha: The Odyssey of Cameron Crowe

The story of Aloha is, to grossly simplify it, about a man torn between a woman he thought he had moved beyond and a woman who might be his future. Military contractor Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) returns to Honolulu, Hawaii, which is the site of his greatest career triumph, and reconnects with a former love (Rachel McAdams). Because he’s at a military site, he’s assigned an Air Force minder (Emma Stone), who he begins to fall for.

By  |  May 29, 2015

Interview

Actor, Director, Special/Visual Effects, Stunt Coordinator/Stunt Person

How’d They Film That? Inside the Fault Lines on San Andreas

When your film is about the San Andreas fault giving way and a magnitude 9-plus earthquake turning California into so many dominoes and sinkholes, decimating cities and their historic landmarks, you’re going to need some serious CGI. Yet you’d be surprised how much of San Andreas was shot in camera, using practical stunts and a lot of old fashioned movie magic (and a whole lot of chutzpah from the stunt professionals).

By  |  May 28, 2015