Hercules Stunt Coordinator Greg Powell Talks Epic Battles

Greg Powell was born to do stunts. “I’ve been doing stunts since I was fourteen, so that’s forty-five years now,” he says. “I wake up a little bit stiff in the morning, but that’s the name of the game, and I still enjoy it." His father, Frederick “Nosher” Powell, was a stuntman, actor and boxer—he was once was a sparring partner for Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali. Greg’s uncle Dennis, Nosher’s younger brother, was also a stuntman,...

Exec Producer & Writer on FX’s Tyrant Talks About Groundbreaking Show

FX's new show Tyrant is unlike anything currently on television. Showcasing Arab characters and cultures, set in the Middle East, the 10-episode first season is a bold step towards showing American audiences people and situations rarely depicted. While Netflix's Orange is the New Black is deservedly lauded for filling the frame with three dimensional female characters who are black, brown, gay and transgendered, Tyrant will put faces on our screen who have too often been portrayed as villains or marginal characters at best...

Taiwan, Paris & the Presidio: A Global Village Creates Lucy

Filmmaker Luc Besson has a thing for dangerous women. In 1990 Besson gave us Nikita, a felon-turned-assassin in La Feme Nikita. Four years later he came back with The Professional, in which a young girl named Mathilda (Natalie Portman) is trained by professional assassin Léon (Jean Reno) after her family is killed in a police raid. And three short years after that, Besson created his most powerful woman to date, Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), in his color saturated sci-fi romp The Fifth Element...

Monkey See, Monkey Do: Fifty Years of Politics Surrounding the Apes Franchise

The hype for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is unavoidable. Rave reviews are already flooding the internet and much has been made about the cutting-edge motion capture technology that renders the apes shockingly realistic, but the parallels of violence and struggles for peace have also captured viewers’ attentions. The Apes movies have always served as allegories, influenced by the political, social, economic and environmental issues of their times,...

Summer’s Pleasant Surprises

For those in the film prognostication business, this summer’s been a bit baffling. Many people assumed Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow would be a bust, and, regardless of it’s box office numbers, the film has been a critical smash. And Emily Blunt, Cruise’s ass-kicking co-star, is perhaps the most unexpected action hero of the summer.

It wasn’t terribly surprising that X-Men: Days of Future Past would be so good,...

Evolving Man into Ape: Simian Choreographer & Actor Terry Notary

This summer’s most highly anticipated sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, packs a serious blockbuster punch: it has state-of-the-art digital effects, sweeping apocalyptic scenes, and a cast and crew of thousands. But one man alone is responsible for the most crucial element of the film—teaching actors to convincingly portray apes.

Actor and movement coach Terry Notary is Hollywood’s resident go-to ape expert, as well as one of the most sought after movement specialists in the business...

Tech Evolution: The Wild Ambition of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

When director Matt Reeves took the helm on Dawn of the Planets of the Apes, he wanted his apes, which would far exceed their numbers in Rupert Wyatt's excellent 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, to have an even greater level of emotional reality. Reeves was starting fresh with an entirely new cast of humans, but he retained some crucial actors from Wyatt's film, including performance capture extraordinaire Andy Serkis and two other notable ape performers,...

Writer/Director David Cronenberg on Technology, Transformation & Money

David Cronenberg has a new short film , The Nest, that was recently commissioned by the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. The film is a single shot, 9-minute take in which a woman (Evelyne Brochu) is undergoing a surgery consultation with an unseen doctor (voiced by Cronenberg). The short doesn’t have any of Cronenberg’s trademark visual potency—nothing molts, explodes, or mutates—but what it does deliver, in spades, is his fascination with technology, insects and the transformation of the body...

Comedy Power Couple: Ben Falcone & Melissa McCarthy Make Tammy

The Groundlings, the legendary improv group based in Los Angeles, recently celebrated their fortieth anniversary. This milestone coincides nicely with today's release of Tammy, a film created by two of their alums, Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. The two met in the group (subsequently married), and are now poised to become the new power couple of comedy, joining Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann in the funny and married pantheon.

McCarthy and Falcone’s history of hysterical chemistry that began in the Groundlings and has carried on through the years in smaller projects,...

How Transformers Construction Coordinator Jonas Kirk Managed a Crew of 200

The role of the construction coordinator is a massive one. For Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, Jonas Kirk was the man responsible for the building and manufacturing of the massive sets the film required, which meant bringing in all the equipment, building and moving massive structures, managing the production budget and keeping his 200-man crew on schedule and on budget.

This was a tall order considering the production took place in Texas, Illinois, Utah and Washington. One of the more intricate construction projects the film required of Kirk and his team was the interior of the alien ship you see at 1:05 in the below clip:

“We had to build these parts that could be moved around on dollies and reconfigured,”...

Super Computing: Inside Industrial Light & Magic’s Wonder Emporium

We interviewed three different Industrial Light & Magic employees last week to find out how they helped create the visual splendor that is Transformers 4: Age of Extinction. We got so much out of the interviews we couldn’t fit it all in to last week's interviews, so we've compiled a lot of the hard facts on the magnitude of their computing powers for today's story, which have grown each year to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated computer-generated demands of directors like Michael Bay...

Two Industrial Light & Magic Wizards on Creating Destruction for Transformers

When your film centers around alien robot colossi laying waste to each other and their surroundings, it's pretty crucial that the wreckage look real. Two of the job titles responsible for making Michael Bay's latest carnival of destruction, Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, look realistic (and, in its way, beautiful) are the creature supervisor and the FX technical director, so we spoke to both, Michael Balog and Sheldon Serrao.

“My group deals with anything geometry based,” Balog says, the creature supervisor...

How Industrial Light & Magic Makes Transformers 4: Age of Extinction Shine

Michael Bay’s Transformers 4: Age of Extinction is the most technologically ambitious film in the franchise. Working again with Industrial Light and Magic, Age of Extinction showcases astonishingly fluid, realistic robotic shape-shifting—somehow they’ve managed to make robots transforming into vehicles and back again into a kind of visual poetry. Age of Extinction, which will be released in 2D, 3D, and Imax 3D, is the work of hundreds of people, with every scene,...

More Winger, Please: Talking With Icon Debra Winger at Provincetown Film Festival

Debra Winger was recently the recipient of a lifetime achievement award at the 13th annual Transylvania International Film Festival. This was a mistake on the festival’s part. Of course Winger is worthy of an award, there’s just no need to give her one with the word “lifetime” attached to it. Winger reportedly told Michael Kutza, the founder of the Chicago International Film Festival and feature film jury president in Transylvania this year, that the festival would be wise to change the award’s name to “career”...

Debra Winger & David Cronenberg Delight at Provincetown Film Festival

The 16th Annual Provincetown Film Festival (PFS) brought together iconic filmmakers, a beloved champion of LGBT rights (and much more), journalists and film lovers for another stretch of perfect weather and great cinema. Award winners David Cronenberg (Filmmaker on the Edge), Patricia Clarkson (Excellence in Acting), and Debra Winger (Faith Hubley Career Achievement) joined former congressman Barney Frank as some of the marquee names at the festival, along with, of course, John Waters, the festival’s guiding spirit. PFS is a showcase of new talent as well,...

Filmmaking on the Edge at the 2014 Provincetown Film Festival

The Credits is back at the Provincetown Film Festival, and we'd be lying if we said we weren't just a little bit thrilled. Last year, our first in Provincetown, was the type of introduction that will marry you to a place, and a festival, for life. We had the great fortune to spend some time with legendary filmmaker, writer, visual artist, wit and unofficial (but sort of official) Provincetown mayor John Waters. Interviews don't come much more enjoyable...

Dawn of the Planets of the Apes Location Manager on Filming in Rainforests

It has been ten years since the last human and ape contact. That last contact was combat, and it took place on the Golden Gate Bridge in a frenzied battle between a recently intellectually enhanced ape faction, led by the chimpanzee Caesar, and the bewildered humans who were not prepared for the coordinated assault of their suddenly intelligent, formerly captive simian subjects. The film ends with Caesar and his primate army heading into Muir Woods, north of San Francisco, where they’ll build a new society and live peaceably for a decade,...

From Stage to Screen: Adapting Jersey Boys

Jersey Boys is the story of the rise and fall of The Four Seasons, the “clean-cut,” all-American rock band that actually had two ex-cons and enough mob connections to satisfy a Scorsese film. Yet in the early 1960s the band sold themselves as the (Jersey) boys next door, and created some deathless tunes in the process.

Jersey Boys began it’s life, of course, as the Tony Award-winning juggernaut that became the 13th longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 3,487th performance this past April 9th...

Think Like A Man Too & the Greening of Hollywood Films

From a distance, the film industry appears be a well-oiled machine, operating seamlessly and churning out interest pieces for every type of audience. But rarely do we look closer at the process of creating and sharing the films we love. The film industry is modernizing in front of our faces, progressing without audiences noticing.

Behind the scenes, actors, directors, producers, and studios have begun to take note of excesses within the industry and have been on a campaign of self-reform...

Father’s Day With the Lannisters: Game of Thrones Thrilling Finale

An absolute ton of spoilers below. Just a ton. Don't read if you're not caught up.

The end of the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, “The Watchers on the Wall,” saw Jon Snow leaving Castle Black after surviving the first onslaught of Mance Rayder’s Wildling army. Giants, mammoths, Wildlings and Crows were strewn inside and outside the wall, dead and soon to be burned. Jon was leaving, alone, without his sword and, perhaps more inexplicably,...