Ilan Gabai, FX Technical Director of Rio 2, Talks Digital Wonders

Typically, the job of digital effects animator does not require previous experience working with live explosives. But it certainly looks good on a résumé.

Ilan Gabai, an effects technical director (FX TD) with Blue Sky Studios, can claim that experience. The 33-year-old grew up in Israel and served three years in his country’s defense forces where he handled grenades, mortars, and RPGs. “I got to blow up a lot of things during my training,”

Sundance: Getting Low Down With John Hawkes & Elle Fanning

Elle Fanning is fantastic in Low Down, a film filled with superb actors. Fanning holds the center of a film as loose and atmospheric as the music it portrays, playing Amy-Jo Albany, the daughter of the brilliant, smack addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany (one of the best character actors in the business, John Hawkes.) It’s a beautifully shot film by experimental filmmaker and cinematographer Jeff Preiss about a perfectly ugly situation.

Novelist Joyce Maynard on Jason Reitman’s Adaptation of her Labor Day

Joyce Maynard is a rarity in the movie world: a writer who’s thrilled with the film adaptation of her novel. Maynard’s “Labor Day” was adapted for the screen and directed by Jason Reitman. It’s about a reclusive single mother (Kate Winslet), her 13-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith) and the escaped convict (Josh Brolin) who hides out in their rundown New England house and creates, at least for a long weekend, an unorthodox family that fill a need in all three people.

Writer/Director John Slattery on Scouting, Casting & Shooting God’s Pocket

If you’re going to peel yourself out of bed at the crack of dawn to attend a screening, it might as well be of John Slattery’s feature length directorial debut, God’s Pocket. Adapted from the novel by Peter Dexter, Slattery has recruited fellow Mad Men star Christina Hendricks as Jeannie Scarpano, and a slew of heavyweight male actors to inhabit the insular, violent, and often very funny world of the titular South Philadelphia neighborhood where the film is set.

Sundance: Film Scholar Noah Isenberg on One of 1st Indie Filmmakers, Edgar G. Ulmer

Long considered as something of a guilty pleasure among filmmakers, critics, and fans, director Edgar G. Ulmer finally gets the attention and scholarship he deserves in Noah Isenberg’s new book: Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker At The Margins. Ulmer was ambitious, and a teller of tall tales about his career: it might never be possible to untangle fact from fiction on his early years in Vienna and (maybe) Berlin.

Sundance: Kristen Wiig & Bill Hader Dig Deep in Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins

You go in to The Skeleton Twins expecting to laugh because it stars Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, and you do, you laugh quite a lot. But then you end up feeling almost blindsided by this bracing look at adult lives gone horribly awry, a story of estranged two siblings who have been so thoroughly messed up from the suicide of their father and their own failed lives. Craig Johnson has created something remarkable here,

Sundance: Trouble in Texas in Jim Mickle’s Thrilling Cold in July

Director Jim Mickle is back at Sundance for a second year in a row with the dark, thrilling Cold in July, based on the novel by Joe R. Landale. After serving up last year’s compelling cannibal family film We Are What We Are, Mickle seems right at home in this neo-noir set in a small Texas town sometime in the 1980s.

Cold in July wastes no time plunging you into an ordinary man’s extraordinary dilemma.

Sundance: Steve James’s Doc Life Itself Captures Spirit of Roger Ebert

For half of the history of cinema, Roger Ebert has been writing about film. This point is made by Richard Corliss, the Film Comment critic, who wrote the infamous piece “All Thumbs,” arguing that the Siskel & Ebert show, along with the rising culture of 'rating' movies with letter grades or thumbs, was damaging true film criticism. That this same man is such a big presence in James' documentary tells you that the scope of the subject's career is too big,

Sundance: Aubrey Plaza’s Deadly Turn in Life After Beth

Last year we interviewed Jeff Levine, the director of Warm Bodies, a zom-rom-com (excuse us) about a young woman and the zombie she falls for. The premise was fresh and the execution commendable. Julie (Teresa Palmer) finds herself falling for R (Nicholas Hoult), a zombie who still seems to retain some flicker of his sweet human soul.

In writer/director Jeff Baena’s directorial debut, Life After Beth, that premised is tweaked slightly,

Sundance: Jenny Slate Charms in Writer/Director Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child

Gillian Robespierre’s first crack at Obvious Child was as a short that she filmed in the winter of 2009. “We were frustrated by the limited representations of young women’s experience with pregnancy, let alone growing up,” she wrote on her Kickstarter page. “We were waiting to see a more honest film, or at least, a story that was closer to many of the stories we knew.” The short starred comedian Jenny Slate, the ex-SNL cast member (who infamously dropped the f-bomb on her very first show),

Sundance: Macon Blair’s Melancholy Assassin in Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin

Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin was a hell of a way to spend an afternoon in the theater here at Sundance. Saulnier’s film is a revenge story marked not by the mindless pursuit of retribution but rather a sad, resigned commitment to a dark task. Our protagonist, Dwight (Macon Blair, outstanding), openly acknowledges the pointlessness of his task while nonetheless trudging along its bloody contours to its bleak endpoint.

The film opens with a beautiful shot of a pristine white tile bathroom filling with steam.

Sundance 2014: Young Hellraiser Fuels Kat Candler’s Impressive Hellion

The first night in Sundance required a deep breath. The Credits is a little more than a year old, so this was our first year here and it’s all slightly overwhelming at the beginning. Although the Festival is a well oiled machine at this point (free shuttles, a slew of press and industry screenings to choose from, and now Uber, expensive as ever), for a first timer here it’s a lot to take in.

We got our bearings and that initial touch of anxiety melted away once the lights went down at the Holiday Village Cinema and the first chords of heavy metal sounded in Kat Candler’s Hellion.

I, Frankenstein Digitally Re-Mastered for IMAX Premiere

“I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” So said Frankenstein’s monster, some 196 years ago in 1818 when Mary Shelley anonymously published her groundbreaking book “Frankenstein” in London. In nine days, her creation will loom larger than ever before when he enters IMAX theaters on January 24 in Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein.

Writer/director Beattie’s film,

From Darryl F. Zanuck to Christine Vachon: The Quotable Producer

Jerry Weintraub, a legendary film producer, took to the stage this past Sunday to accept the Golden Globe for best TV movie or miniseries for Behind the Candelabra. The film was the work of a slew of super talented individuals coming together to create something original and daring. Some of those people include the director Steven Soderbergh, his two stars, Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his young lover Scott Thornson,

From Taliban-Infested Pakistan to Sundance Lab to Screen:These Birds Walk

Bassam Tariq and Omar Mullick teamed up to make a documentary that would change their lives. They spent three years, on and off, in Taliban-infested Pakistan making These Birds Walk, a cinema verité look at young orphans and runaways in a Karachi children’s home. The home is run by Abdul Sattar Edhi, whose group runs about 300 centers throughout Pakistan. But the focus of the film is less on Edhi and more on the kids,

Chatting With Writer/Director Francesca Gregorini About The Truth About Emanuel

Francesca Gregorini’s film Tanner Hall marked the debut of two very talented women—Gregorini herself and her star, Rooney Mara. This coming-of-age drama focused on young women edging towards adulthood at an all-girls boarding school.

In her latest film, The Truth About Emanuel, which opens today, Gregorini gives us a portrait of two women, one just about to turn 18 (Emmanuel, played by Kaya Scoldelario), the other a young single mother (Linda,

Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke on Their Before Trilogy

Eighteen years ago, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise was released in late January of 1995. Save for a few bit speaking roles sprinkled throughout the film—a pair of Austrian theater actors, a palm reader— every minute of screen time, and every word uttered, comes from a young American, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a young French woman, Céline (Julie Delpy), who meet on a train and impulsively decide to spend the next 24 hours together in Vienna.

Stunt Coordinator Kevin Scott on Lone Survivor’s Commitment to Realism

During the making of Lone Survivor, second unit director and stunt coordinator Kevin Scott was presented with an unusual challenge. He had to show soldiers tumbling down rugged terrain with sixty-degree inclines, but he also had to make it look real. “As a stunt person, we’re used to going big and doing gags. We usually want the audience to go, ‘Whoa, that was the best stunt I’ve seen in my life!’ This movie was the exact opposite of that,”

Looking Back on Some of our Favorite Stories of 2013

When we launched The Credits a little more than a year ago, we aimed to shed a light on the many talented filmmakers who often don’t get much press for their work. While we’ve occasionally spoken to folks who need no introduction (John Waters, for example), most of the filmmakers we’ve focused on have a little less name recognition but a huge amount of talent. We interviewed a lot of people, so the below roundup is really just a taste—there were far too many people to mention in a single post.

Subtle Shorthand: Directors & Actors Who Keep Working Together—Part II

Some frequent collaborations between a director and actor are so high wattage they’re known by last name alone: Scorcese and DiCaprio. Burton and Depp. But other repeated pairings of a director and actor glow a little less brightly. Some are even under the radar. In part two of a two-part series, the Credits reveals what makes four such collaborations tick. Read part one here.

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Actor: Danny Trejo

Movies (10): Desperado (1995);