A Most Violent Year Composer Alex Ebert

Singer-songwriter and composer Alex Ebert might still be best known as the front man for the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, but his skill as a film composer is becoming more evident with each new J.C. Chandor movie. The director and the composer recently worked on their second film together, A Most Violent Year, which has already earned rave reviews and looks poised to cement Chandor’s status as one of the most ambitious young directors of his generation...

Six New Films Offer Six Distinct Viewing Experiences

A hobbit, Teddy Roosevelt reanimated from wax, a bumbling dad, a brilliant, irascible painter, a indefatigable child, and an inveterate gambler walk into a bar. The bartender goes, oh hey, you're all starring in films this weekend.

Terrible jokes aside, we are heading into the home stretch of the holiday season, with a slew of big films set to land on Christmas Day (Unbroken, American Sniper, Selma), the very last in a wild year at the cinema...

Building the Sets of Middle-Earth for The Battle of the Five Armies

Peter Jackson and his crew shot The Hobbit trilogy concurrently over 266 days (the same total number of days it took to shoot The Lord of the Rings trilogy). Another 10 weeks was needed for cast and crew for pickup shooting for The Battle of the Five Armies on the performance capture stage, which ends the Middle-earth saga that Jackson and his team have been working on since last century.

Building the sets for Jackson's Hobbit ...

Cinematographer Dion Beebe Takes us Into the Woods

Academy Award winning cinematographer Dion Beebe is now on his fourth film with Rob Marshall. He won an Oscar for his work on Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005. He was nominated for lensing Marshall’s Chicago in 2002. He was nominated for an ASC Award (American Society of Cinematographers) for another Marshall film, Nine, in 2009. And for their fourth collaboration, Into the Woods, Beebee has helped translate Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Broadway musical into a lush,...

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, and would have stayed there had she not meant a man by the named Walter (Christoph Waltz),...

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, acting upon them like a gravity,...

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, a research vessel that’s going from the southern tip of Argentina to Antarctica...

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, although he'd probably rather not even think about it...

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, very low budget...

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; rent Lee Daniels' ...

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, planting her own codes all over the screen...

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. He needs no help from us to applaud his performance,...

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, Argo, for which he earned his sixth Oscar nom in 2012) and some forty-plus other films in his long,...

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),...