Big Eyes Screenwriters Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski
It's sometime in the 1950s when Margaret (Amy Adams) quickly packs her things, grabs her daughter Jane, and leaves her husband. In short order she finds herself in San Francisco, applying for a job painting Humpty Dumpty's on cribs for a manufacturer. Margaret's passion is painting, specifically small children, looking straight at you, with very, very big eyes.
The paintings were a touch creepy, on the very fringes of what could be considered real art,
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies A Final Curtain Call for Middle-earth
Set 60-years before the start of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies premieres this Friday, December 19. Whether or not you’ve been a fan of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth sextet, there is no denying the awesome amount of love and effort he and his huge creative team have poured into this franchise. This has been a filmmaking enterprise every bit as epic as what the peripatetic Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo endured.
Costume Designer Mark Bridges Makes Inherent Vice Look Nice
“She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look.”
So begins Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice,” five quick sentences that describes a change in the air and atmosphere of Los Angeles,
Indian Paintbrush’s Peter McPartlin on Producing The Grand Budapest Hotel & More
The actual business of making films, from acquiring insurance to dealing with lawyers to the Byzantine permits, permissions and contact stipulations can be, in the right storyteller’s hands, entirely entertaining. Indian Paintbrush’s COO Peter McPartlin is one of those storytellers.
There have been books about the business of Hollywood (Peter Biskund’s Down and Dirty Pictures comes to mind) that reveal the huge personalities orbiting behind the filmmakers and the stars,
Paul Thomas Anderson & his Team Tweak Los Angeles in Inherent Vice
There can be few novelists more daunting to adapt for the screen than Thomas Pynchon. The worlds he creates, with their sprawling casts and Ouroboros-like narratives, present major problems for any filmmaker looking to keep his or her film coherent and under nine hours. Paul Thomas Anderson, the man who riffed on Upton Sinclair's "Oil" and turned it into the mesmerizing There Will Be Blood, is as good a candidate as you'd likely find to handle such an assignment.
The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Editor Barney Pilling
Editor Barney Pilling began his film career as a location scout on 24 Hour Party People, in 2002. A few years later, he’d become an editor, and worked on a string of narratively complex films, including An Education in 2009, the haunting adaptation Never Let me Go, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s difficult, daring novel, and One Day, in 2011, based on David Nichols novel which shows its two characters on the same date,
Writer/Director Scott Cohen on Filming Red Knot at Sea
The story of how Red Knot was made is uncannily similar to the film Red Knot itself, a product of writer/director Scott Cohen’s novel approach and the willingness of his cast and crew to join him on this incredible journey.
The film’s premise is deceptively simple; young newlyweds Chloe (Olivia Thirlby) and Peter (Vincent Kartheiser) take a novel approach to their honeymoon by spending it aboard the Red Knot,
Unbroken & The Imitation Game Editor Billy Goldenberg
In 2012, Billy Goldenberg won an Oscar for his editing work on Argo. A thrilling moment, of course, but perhaps in this case it was slightly dulled by the fact that Goldenberg's odds for a win were a mite better than everyone else in the category; he and Dylan Tichenor were also up for Zero Dark Thirty.
There is a chance that Goldenberg could enhance his odds again this year,
Wild’s Cinematographer Yves Bélanger on Framing Face of America
Director Jean-Marc Vallée gathered a lot of his favorite collaborators for the upcoming Wild, which comes out this Friday, Dec 5. This includes his fantastic makeup department head, Robin Mathews, as well as his cinematographer Yves Bélanger. “I’ve known him twenty years,” Belanger says, “but there was always some reason we couldn’t work together.” Bélanger was wrapping up Laurence Anyway in 2012 when Vallée phoned him. “He said he had this great film,
Oscar-Winning Makeup Artist Robin Mathews on Wild
Robin Mathews is on a bit of a roll, having won her first Academy Award last year for Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling for her work on Dallas Buyers Club, where she helped Matthew McConaughey complete his physical metamorphosis into Ron Woodroof, the Texas electrician who was told he had 30 days to live when he diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-1980s. Mathews has a way with helping stars morph right in front of our eyes;
The Imitation Game’s Production Designer Maria Djurkovich – Part II
Yesterday we published Part I of our conversation with production designer Maria Djurkovich, whose work on The Imitation Game would have made its’ genius subject, Alan Turing, proud. Benedict Cumberbatch's phenomenal turn as Turing has understandably garnered much of the press, but if you were to look closely at every frame of the film (and, preferably, be able to pause it), you would begin to see how Djurkovich put in a superstar performance herself,
The Imitation Game‘s Production Designer Maria Djurkovic – Part I
All the buzz for The Imitation Game is surrounding the phenomenal performance of Benedict Cumberbatch in the role of Alan Turing, the mathematician and logistician who, along with a team of linguists, chess players and logicians helped break Germany’s Enigma code during World War II. Turing was a genius, and a difficult, unusual man, and Cumberbatch’s performance is indeed a marvel, bringing this still relatively unknown enigma (to American audiences) to vivid life.
Ridley Scott’s 10 Commandments Making Exodus: Gods and Kings Part II
Yesterday we published part I of "Ridley Scott's 10 Commandments Making Exodus: Gods and Kings," looking at how the director and his team of hundreds of talented filmmakers managed to film God's wrath realistically, on location, and without losing the very human story at the Biblical epic's core. Here, then, is Part II, beginning with Scott's 6th commandment:
6. Thou Shalt Wear Tunics, lots and lots of Tunics.
Ridley Scott turned to his longtime
Ridley Scott’s 10 Commandments Making Exodus: Gods and Kings Part I
This holiday movie season brings us Hollywood’s next—and arguably biggest—Biblical blockbuster to date: Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. Out December 12th, Scott’s rendition of the Old Testament tale chronicles the story of Moses (Christian Bale) as he leads the Hebrews to freedom in a revolution against his pseudo-brother, the vengeful Rameses (Joel Edgerton). With the help of screenwriters Steve Zallian, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, Scott brought a film as grandiose in scale as the ancient Egyptian era itself,
Music for the Mind: Composer Alexandre Desplat on The Imitation Game
Composer Alexandre Desplat has been nominated for six Academy Awards, starting with his work on The Queen in 2006. He bookended his take on the music beneath royal narratives with his nomination for The King’s Speech in 2010. He’s also the man behind the score for franchise blockbusters (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, The Twilight Saga: New Moon), international sagas (Zero Dark Thirty,
Ava DuVernay’s Selma set to Stun Audiences on Christmas Day
Three major films about three tumultuous periods of American history will hit select theaters on Christmas Day. That two of the three films are directed by women is something to be excited about, and that one of those women is a woman of color, and that her film is covers one of the most crucial three months in American history, marks this single day as one of the most significant of the entire year in film.
You've no doubt heard about Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken (covering the story of Olympian and American soldier Louis Zamperini’s imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II),
Director Michelle MacLaren’s a Wonder Woman
It’s time to get excited about a comic-book movie that’s not directed by Christopher Nolan or Joss Whedon, that doesn’t star or co-star or have a cameo by Robert Downey Jr., and that's not centered on a brooding dude, or a rich, conflicted dude, or a bunch of dudes with various powers. We're talking about a film that’s poised to make a household name of not one woman but two. Your excitement will be warranted,
Top Flight Stunt & Effects Team Jacks Up Horrible Bosses 2
Horrible Bosses 2 is both a comedy and an action movie; its' protagonists spectacularly idiotic schemes lead to all manner of mayhem. The first Horrible Bosses, bowing in 2011, was a hit, follwing a rich cinematic tradition of pitting hopelessly maligned employees against their superiors. Some of the more memorable horrible bosses in film history include Meryl Streep's humiliator-in-chief Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Gary Cole's all to real turn as supervisor Bill Lumbergh in
At Long Last Filmgoers Will Head Into the Woods
Into the Woods began its life as a musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, debuting on Broadway on November 5, 1987 at the Martin Beck Theater. Former New York Times' theater critic Frank Rich (later an Op-Ed writer, now an editor-at-large at New York Magazine) wrote in his review, "The characters of ''Into the Woods" may be figures from children's literature, but their journey is the same painful,
Disney Animation Pushes the Boundaries of Technology With Big Hero 6
Fighting an evil villain and saving the day are probably not very high on an average teenager’s daily to-do list. But for robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, star of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ animated feature Big Hero 6, those tasks just happen to pop up on a typical weekday. With the film opening in domestic theaters this past Friday, audiences are now joining the mini mastermind and his inflatable robot sidekick, Baymax, on an action-packed adventure as they get entangled in a dangerous plot unfolding in the bustling,
