From Sunset Boulevard to Gemini Man With Paramount Archivist Andrea Kalas

Say you’re in charge of Paramount Pictures archives, and someone on your team unearths some unsigned sheet music from the era of silent films (yes, silent films included sheet music, more on that in a minute), what would you do? If you’re Andrea Kalas, Senior Vice President of Paramount’s Archives, you simply hand it over to your music archivist and ask her to play it.

“My music archivist has a piano in her office because she sometimes has to pick up a piece of sheet music to identify something,”

Writer/Director Rian Johnson on Going From Star Wars to Knives Out

Director Rian Johnson wanted to do something “completely different” from Star Wars with his new movie, Knives Out (released Nov. 27).

“It’s not a heavy movie, it’s not like an incredibly dark movie or anything, it’s kind of going for just giving you a blast of fun,” he told The Credits at the Denver Film Festival screening. “So that was kind of refreshing honestly,

Motherless Brooklyn Costume Designer Amy Roth’s Period Perfect Detail

Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn takes the spirit, and many of the characters, from Jonathan Lethem’s excellent 1999 novel of the same name, but from there goes in an entirely new direction. That direction included setting the film some 45-years earlier, in the mid-1950s New York. 

Lethem’s most indelible character, a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel, remains (played by Norton), but the setting, story, and stakes are all different.

Ed Skrein & Luke Kleintank on Playing Legendary Fighter Pilots in Midway

Midway is a stirring tribute to the immeasurable courage of the men we now call part of the Greatest Generation. Premiering on November 8, Veteran’s Day weekend, it is the story of the early days of WWII, from Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor to America’s first major battle victory in the Pacific, the battle of Midway. The all-star cast includes Woody Harrelson as Admiral Chester Nimitz, Dennis Quaid as Admiral William “Bull”

How Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter Detailed the Look of Dolemite is My Name

If you ever meet Ruth E. Carter you’ll be enamored by her kindness. Her humbleness. The costume designer has seen her name pinned on multiple Spike Lee films like Malcolm X, Summer of Sam and Chi-Raq. She detailed Spielberg’s Amistad and Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay’s Selma. In February of this year, she won the Academy Award in costume design for her meticulous efforts in Black Panther,

Composer Alan Silvestri on Going Big in Avengers: Endgame

There’s hardly a movie-goer alive who hasn’t heard at least something of Alan Silvestri’s body of work. The composer started making music in Hollywood in the early 1970s, he’s scored all 17 of Robert Zemicki’s films—including the Back to the Future trilogy—and in 2011, he entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Captain America: The First Avenger. The following year, he scored The Avengers, and strains of that theme music can be heard in his newer work in the back-to-back epics capping off this superhero saga,

Motherless Brooklyn Production Designer Beth Mickle on Bringing Back Old New York

Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn is a hugely ambitious adaptation of the seminal 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem. While it borrows heavily from Lethem’s huge cast of characters—a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel (played by Norton himself) and the folks he calls friends and foes alike—it charts its own path with a more or less completely original story. The era is no longer the late 90s but rather the 1950s New York.

How Us Costume Designer Kym Barrett Spooked Audiences With Jumpsuits

Happy Halloween! Quick, how many of you are donning red overalls and going as the deadly doppelgangers from Us? Even if writer/director Jordan Peele isn’t really into the idea, there’s no denying the power of this simple garb to instill terror. The monsters in Us are hatched not from labs or lagoons or outer space, but from all-American inequities, so it’s only fitting that they wear all-American denim.

How Joker’s Production Designer Brought New York Back to Its Past

If one thing is certain about Joker, director Todd Phillips’ half-billion-dollars-and-growing grossing dark take on the origin story of Batman’s chief supervillain, it’s that the film means about as many different things to its audience as there are people who’ve seen it. Is the Joker a compelling vigilante or simply a have-not gone mad? Are Arthur Fleck and Batman actually half-brothers? Does Fleck’s never-ending downward spiral speak for incels everywhere? (Absolutely not.) What’s certain is that Arthur is a more than down on his luck middle-aged stand-up comic wannabe working a miserable day job as a clown for hire in a particularly gritty take on Gotham City,

Universal Archivist Jeff Pirtle Knows his Monsters

The world of the Hollywood studio archivist is one in which you must keep one eye towards the future and one eye back to the past. You’re responsible for some of the most coveted assets in the film world, but you are always looking ahead—to upcoming productions and fresh opportunities—for those assets to once again become the stuff of movie magic. Jeff Pirtle, Director, Archives & Collections at NBCUniversal, in both temperament and training, is uniquely suited for this role.

Creating the Landscape & Soundscape of Harriet‘s World

Although her appearance on the $20 bill has been predictably delayed by the current administration, Harriet Tubman is still a recurring presence in American culture. An escaped slave herself, she became, as the New Yorker noted a couple of years back, “the most famous conductor” on the Underground Railroad, which itself became the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes in Colson Whitehead’s alternate history novel of the same name.

Now Tubman arrives in theaters (on November 1),

How Us Cinematographer Michael Gioulakis Captured Doppelgangers in the Dark

“I have an aversion to moonlight, at least in movies.” So says cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, who had ample opportunity to capture dark spaces in Jordan Peele‘s critically acclaimed horror film Us. Peele’s follow-up to Oscar-nominated thriller Get Out casts Lupita Nyog’o as a high-strung mother who’s being stalked, along with her husband (Winston Duke) and kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex), by homicidal doppelgangers.

Costume Designer Judianna Makovsky on Ending Avengers: Endgame on a Muted Note

What do you wear when your schedule includes traveling through the quantum realm, reversing half of humanity being killed off, and attending the funeral of one of your most iconic comrades? In Avengers: Endgame, all the remaining characters from the Marvel universe get together to undo super-villain Thanos‘s work in the preceding Infinity War when his successful collection of five infinity stones let him wipe out half of life on Earth.

Jojo Rabbit Costume Designer Mayes Rubeo on Outfitting Taika Waititi’s Vision

Writer/director Taika Waititi, who is half Polynesian, half Jewish, had a very clear vision for his new film Jojo Rabbit. Inspired by the novel “Caging Skies” by Christine Leunens, this coming-of-age satire follows German boy Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) during the later part of World War II, as he shifts the opinions and beliefs with which the Nazi party has indoctrinated him. This happens through the careful, loving guidance of his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson),

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil Screenwriter Linda Woolverton on Shaping Strong Female Leads

She’s back! Maleficent, the great horned fairy, is lighting up the screen once again in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, the sequel to the 2014 Disney hit. Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning return as Maleficent and Aurora, respectively, and are joined on this journey by Michelle Pfeiffer, who portrays the villainous Queen Ingrith. When Aurora becomes engaged to the queen’s son, Ingrith sets in motion a diabolical plan to take the Moors,

Super Producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff on Pulling Off The Irishman and Joker

As a producer, Emma Tillinger Koskoff is eminently searchable, or IMDB-able, with her name affixed on projects ranging from The Departed (as an associate producer) to Hugo, to executive producer on HBO’s Vinyl, and upcoming projects like Roosevelt.

A glance reveals a particularly impressive autumn-into-winter, as she has producer credits on two of the season’s most anticipated films: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman,

How Jojo Rabbit’s VFX Supervisor Helped Taika Waititi Create the Year’s Wildest Comedy

The most startling visuals in Jojo Rabbit (which opened last Friday) takes the shape of writer-director Taika Waititi dressed up as Adolph Hitler, the imaginary best friend conjured by a German boy (Roman Griffin Davis) during the waning days of World War II. But while “Hitler” commands the foreground, VFX supervisor Jason Chen worked a more subtle brand of filmmaking magic by using digital tools to seamlessly build out Jojo’s world. Chen says,

How Harriet Costume Designer Paul Tazewell Helped Portray an American Icon

For the last two decades, costume designer Paul Tazewell has been conquering Broadway. His eclectic range of work spans from revivals of such classics as A Streetcar Named Desire, Jesus Christ Superstar, A Raisin in the Sun and Guys and Dolls to newer hits like The Color Purple, In the Heights, Memphis and Ain’t Too Proud.

The Lighthouse Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke on Capturing Madness

When I caught Robert Eggers The Lighthouse at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was, to put it mildly, enthused. Relentlessly original, hypnotic, and gleefully insane, it was the work of an artist and a long list of collaborators going full tilt. The performances from the two leads, Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, the score from Mark Korven, the production design from Craig Lathrop—everyone listed in the credits helped turn Eggers and his brother Max’s script into the fever dream depicted on screen.

Jojo Rabbit‘s Production Designer Ra Vincent on Building Taika Waititi’s Anti-Hate Satire

One of the most buzzed about films at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival was Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. The film earned an enthusiastic ovation from the large audience at its premiere and is currently sitting at an 80% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes. Some compared Waititi’s “anti-hate satire” to Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust drama Life is Beautiful as a high wire act of humor and pathos set during one of the darkest periods in history.