Costume Designer Cat Thomas on the Couture of “The Flight Attendant”
At the beginning of the HBO miniseries The Flight Attendant, based on Chris Bohjalian’s novel, Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) is a put-together first class flight attendant by day, maximalist reveler by night. She parties relentlessly wherever she lands, seemingly enjoying an endless montage of karaoke, clubs, bars, and hookups. But Cassie also encapsulates a particular sort of overgrown New York party drunk, one who’s getting a little long in the tooth for these sorts of hijinks.
Cinematographer Oliver Bokelberg on Transforming Vancouver Into Montana in “Big Sky”
This article contains light spoilers for previously aired episodes.
Big Sky, David E. Kelley’s new ratings hit for ABC, which was just picked up for another six episodes, juxtaposes Montana’s sweeping vistas with the bleak interior of a locked away trailer, where an unlikely criminal duo is holding three teenaged girls. Based on C.J. Box’s novel “The Highway,” the crime drama sets viewers up with stunning aerial shots of rural Montana before zooming in on run-down bars,
DP Bryce Fortner on Recreating the 1970s in the Propulsive Crime Drama “I’m Your Woman”
Director Julie Hart’s new thriller, I’m Your Woman, turns its attention to a figure usually overlooked in 1970s crime dramas: the housewife. Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) seems incapable and alone, dispassionately aware but otherwise innocent of her husband Eddie’s (Bill Heck) nebulous involvement in some kind of organized crime. When Eddie heads out for the night and doesn’t come back, leaving Jean with a mysterious baby boy she’s mutely accepted as their own,
Jo Ellen Pellman & Ariana DeBose on Finding Love & Acceptance in Ryan Murphy’s “The Prom”
Helmed by Ryan Murphy, the ebullient musical dramedy The Prom is bringing some much-needed holiday cheer to our December. Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells play four fading Broadway performers who reach for relevance again by championing a newsworthy cause in small-town Indiana. Queer teen Emma (newcomer Jo Ellen Pellman) wants to take her girlfriend Alyssa Greene (Ariana DeBose) to the high school prom,
Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle on Filming HBO’s “The Undoing” – Part II
As mentioned in Part I of our interview with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, a good many of The Undoing’s settings were shot on location in Manhattan, while the main interiors were built at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. Many of the locations were found in the Upper West Side, something that took some getting used to for Mantle. “We were very true to the Upper West Side, which I actually found hard to embrace because it’s not a world I’m drawn to,” he says,
Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle on Filming HBO’s “The Undoing” – Part I
When Nicole Kidman first began reading scripts for HBO’s hugely popular limited series from David E. Kelley, The Undoing, among the first things she noticed was intense scenes in which her very interior character said little, and gives away even less. When she wondered aloud about how best to handle such performances for the camera, director Susanne Bier simply replied, “I’ve got ideas.”
The limited series follows Grace (Kidman) and Jonathan Fraser (Grant),
A Poster Designer’s Career, From Tribute Art to Marvel to “The Mandalorian”
Social media might have more downs than ups these days, but even with its troublesome aspects far outweighing the good, you can still find heartwarming examples of social networks serving their original purpose: bringing together like-minded individuals over niche shared interests. For hobbyist movie poster designers working at a professional albeit non-commissioned level, finding the right community can even launch a career in the film industry.
Formerly a graphic designer working at an agency in Hannover,
Moses Ingram on her Debut role as Jolene in “The Queen’s Gambit”
Moses Ingram stepped off the stage at Yale and immediately onto the set of The Queen’s Gambit. The acting newcomer had only two weeks between graduating from the Yale School of Drama in May of last year and flying to Toronto to begin filming.
“The first scene I filmed was a little snippet of the car pulling up and [me] stepping out of the car,” Ingram said. “I definitely overthought it though because I’m like driving in this old-school,
Hans Zimmer Protégé Guillaume Roussel on Composing the “Black Beauty” Score Remotely
The good news for Guillaume Roussel: this spring he fulfilled a lifelong dream by working with the London Symphony Orchestra. The bad news: he had to supervise the Black Beauty recording sessions from his garage in Los Angeles due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. “It was just after lockdown, so the big frustration came because I was not able to fly to London for the sessions,” says Roussel. “Fortunately, my good friend Gavin Greenaway conducted and did a great job.”
Welcome to Studio Babelsberg’s Rainbow Stage—A Tribute to Lana and Lilly Wachowski
“I’ll show these people what you don’t want them to see. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.” Neo (Keanu Reeves), The Matrix, 1999
To honor the groundbreaking filmmakers Lana and Lilly Wachowski and simultaneously promote a message of tolerance, respect, and diversity, Germany’s Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam recently renamed its largest sound stage the Rainbow Stage (its previous title was number 20 of 21).
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,
