Writer/Producer’s Ron Leshem on His Groundbreaking HBO Max Series “Valley of Tears”
Writer/producer Ron Leshem has gained international recognition as the creator of the Israeli TV series Euphoria and executive producer of its U.S. adaptation. Along with his longtime collaborator Amit Cohen, Leshem is also known for creating the series The Gordin Cell, Allegiance, and No Man’s Land. But for a decade, the Israeli-born duo have been wanting to produce a story about one of the most important moments in their homeland’s history — the Yom Kippur War.
Documentarian John Dower on “The Mystery of D.B. Cooper”
In 1971, a Boeing 727 flying out of Portland, Oregon was hijacked by a single middle-aged man, operating under the name Dan Cooper. Clad in black, wearing dark sunglasses, and using a bomb in a briefcase as leverage, Cooper demanded four parachutes but only $200,000, and he let the flight’s passengers go in Seattle, where the cash and parachutes were brought aboard. After demanding the pilots fly to Mexico City, he opened the aircraft’s back door over the woods in Washington State,
“Run” Cinematographer Hillary Spera on Creating Hulu’s Breathless Thriller
Co-writer and director Aneesh Chaganty’s Run moves like a thoroughbred thriller thanks to all its constituent parts working in perfect unison. The stellar cast, led by Sarah Paulson and newcomer Kiera Allen, Chagnaty’s lean script, co-written with Sev Ohanian, and Chagnaty and his crew’s exacting execution. The film is centered on the too-close-for-comfort relationship between a mother in daughter—Diane (Paulson) is a zealously devoted guardian of her daughter Chloe (Allen), who is paralyzed from the waist down and also deals with a variety of other ailments,
Editor Michelle Tesoro on Checkmate Pacing in “The Queen’s Gambit”
A girl triumphing in a boys’ world of midcentury competitive chess is at the crux of Netflix’s limited series The Queen’s Gambit, which manages to make the board game not only thrilling but evocatively stylish, spanning Beth Harmon’s (Anya Taylor-Joy and Isla Johnston, as young Beth) bleak 1950s-era childhood in a Kentucky orphanage through her jet-setting young adulthood during the 1960s. Beth, drawn from Walter Tevis’s novel of the same name,
Documentarian Nathan Grossman Captures a Teenage Icon in “I Am Greta”
Swedish documentarian Nathan Grossman made a leap of faith in 2018 when he decided to film an unknown 15-year-old with a sign staging a one-person strike outside the Stockholm Parliament in order to bring attention to the global climate crisis.
Over the course of 18 months of filming, Greta Thunberg became an international figure and an icon to an increasingly energized youth movement around the world demanding immediate action to address climate change.
Supervising Sound Editor on Capturing the Sound of “Ted Lasso” Remotely
Ted Lasso began life nearly a decade ago, in what must now seem like a more innocent time, as a character in a series of promos for NBC as they embarked on coverage of Britain’s Premier League. That character, created and portrayed by SNL alum Jason Sudeikis, is an American football coach, hot off a miracle season with a perpetually struggling college, who is hired by England’s mythical AFC Richmond squad to coach,
Editor Marco Capalbo on Cutting Werner Herzog’s Cosmic New Doc “Fireball”
Editor Marco Capalbo has been working with the inimitable German director Werner Herzog for the past eight years, most recently on Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, which premieres on Apple TV+ on November 13. We chat with Marco, who specializes in editing documentaries, about tackling the vast subject matter of meteors, comets and their influence on ancient religions, and how he looks for those “Herzogian moments” that make Herzog’s documentaries unique.
Producer Brad Feinstein Moves Audiences With Dramas “Jungleland” and “Dreamland”
Although only a few years old, Romulus Entertainment already boasts an admirable slate of what founder and CEO Brad Feinstein describes as “socially conscious prestige dramas and action thrillers” — City of Lies, Driven, and American Woman, to name just a few. The roster is also a lengthy one: At the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, Feinstein noted in an interview that the company had produced 12 films in just 24 months.
Writer/Director Francis Lee on His Hard Scrabble Love Story “Ammonite”
Writer-director Francis Lee’s acclaimed 2017 debut feature God’s Own Country and his follow-up, Ammonite (Neon), unabashedly center on queer, working-class characters. So it may come as a bit of a surprise that Lee cites 1980s studio movies as among his all-time favorite films.
“In my head, when I’m making my films, I’m making my version of An Officer and a Gentleman or Pretty Woman or Working Girl;
Cinematographer Andy Rydzewski on Lighting the Horrors of Middle School in “Pen15”
We’ve hit the apex of spooky season, so let’s talk about one of the creepiest shows on television: Pen15. Yep, co-creators Maya Erskine’s and Anna Konkle’s adult foray back to seventh grade, rife with slut-shaming, passive aggression, and surprise three-way phone calls. Now in the first half of its second season (the next seven episodes will likely air on Hulu in the spring), the women are once again ensconced among their young peers,
“You Should Have Left” Production Designer on the Lasting Allure of the Haunted House
The haunted house has been a staple of the horror genre since the early days of silent films. There’s just something about creaky doors and shadows dancing around in dimly lit hallways that send shivers up our spines — especially when it’s a dark and stormy night.
And with most of us homebound for Halloween, what better time to celebrate the haunted house?
“You never know what’s around the corner,” says production designer Sophie Becher during a zoom interview.
“His House” Writer/Director Remi Weekes on his Gut Punch Feature Debut
Back another lifetime ago, writer/director Remi Weekes‘ His House celebrated its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this past January. Netflix quickly acquired it, and the future was looking bright for the talented filmmaker and his debut feature. You know what happened next.
Yet here we are, months later and living in our nightmarish world, with Weekes’ stunning horror film set to debut on October 30. “I’m excited,” Weekes said from London when I asked him what it felt like to finally see his film released into the wild,
Composer Steven Price on Scoring David Attenborough’s Plea to Humanity & Glen Keane’s “Over the Moon”
Those who work in the arts have an innate ability to invoke emotions through their work— to cause an audience to connect with a certain theme or issue. But what if that issue is the inevitable destruction of the planet told through the life story of one famed historian and world traveler? That was the daunting task presented to Oscar-winning composer Steven Price (Gravity, Suicide Squad, Baby Driver).
David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet serves dual purposes as both Attenborough’s witness statement — his plea to humanity to save the Earth — and an autobiography of sorts.
“One Night In Miami” DP Tami Reiker on Regina King’s Stunning Directorial Debut
Tami Reiker has had a very busy year. She was the cinematographer on Gina Prince-Bythewood‘s The Old Guard, one of the most-viewed movies ever on Netflix, and just finished work on One Night in Miami, Regina King’s feature debut as a director. The fact-based story is about the night four friends, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, Cassius Clay, and Sam Cooke spent together on February 25th,
“A New York Christmas Wedding” Writer/Director Otoja Abit on His Debut Feature
When we attended the Savannah Film Festival in 2018, one of the filmmakers we covered was Otoja Abit, an actor who had roles in television series (The Defenders, The Night Of) and film (Stonewall), who was in Savannah to screen his short, Jitters. The 12-minute film centered on Abit’s central character, a man undergoing some last-second concerns in the moments before his wedding.
Screenwriter Madhuri Shekar on Adapting Her Own Audio Play for Blumhouse’s “Evil Eye”
This month, Blumhouse Productions has released a collection of unsettling thrillers in partnership with Amazon Prime, just in time for Halloween. One of these films is Evil Eye, in which a romance turns dark when a mother becomes convinced her daughter’s ‘perfect’ new boyfriend has supernatural connections to her own past. The story is centered in Indian and Indian-American culture, with a cast of actors that are of Indian descent,
Co-Director Lisa Cortés on Voting Rights Past & Present in “All In: The Fight for Democracy”
Amazon’s recent documentary about voting rights and voter suppression, All In: The Fight for Democracy, opens to newscast audio from November 6, 2018, covering the Georgia governor’s race between Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp. That election, which would have seen Abrams become the country’s first African-American woman governor had she been elected, became a flashpoint for a nationwide recognizance of contemporary issues surrounding the closure of polling stations, deliberate under-training of poll monitors,
Production Designer Talks Riots & Courtrooms in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7”
The Trial of the Chicago 7 revisits the circus-like legal proceedings that pitted anti-war activists including Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), and lawyer Bill Kunstler (Mark Ryland) against a hard-nosed judge (Frank Langella) over charges that they conspired to incite violent riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the movie (which came out on October 16 on Netflix) features the dramatist’s famously sharp dialogue along with shots of tear gas,
DP Phedon Papamichael on Designing for Dialogue in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7”
Aaron Sorkin is well-known for his densely-packed dialogue, and The Trial of the Chicago 7, his retelling of the 1969 trial that saw counter-culture luminaries like Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale tried for conspiracy and inciting a riot, the writer-director is true to form. The film, which debuts on Netflix on October 16th, swerves between the trial and the defendants’ memories, to revisit what each of the seven accused was doing the day the police went after previously peaceful protestors outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Writer/Director Miranda July on Her Joyously Original Third Feature “Kajillionaire”
Miranda July wears many hats—writer, filmmaker, actress, performance artist, and more. Indeed, her name appears as bylines on magazine articles, as director, writer, and actor in feature-film credits, and as an author on book covers (she has penned an award-winning collection of short stories and published both fiction and nonfiction). Her artistic diversity is perhaps what makes her projects so unique and nuanced and wonderful to engage with.
July’s breakthrough on the big screen came with the 2005 release of Me and You and Everyone We Know,
