How Aquaman‘s Colorist Battled Mera’s Red Hair—and Won

Aquaman made history over the weekend, becoming the highest-grossing film in DC Comics history. Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa)’s journey from high-seas crusader to King of Atlantis surpassed Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in his Batman trilogy.

FotoKem colorist Mark Griffith was one of the many, many people who had a huge-but-invisible role in Aquaman’s success. The colorist’s job is to tweak,

How I Am the Night‘s Creator Built Noir Series Around a Nearly Mythic True Crime

True crime fans have long obsessed over the “Black Dahlia” murder that first made headlines in 1947 when 22-year old aspiring actress Elizabeth Short turned up mutilated on the streets of Los Angeles. Mystery writer James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) authored a book about the case after his own mother was murdered in a similar fashion. A 2006 Black Dahlia movie further chronicled the mystery surrounding wealthy doctor George Hodel,

How A Dog’s Way Home‘s Director Found his Path

Remember Terry the Toad, the adorable nerdy high school kid who had a wild night in American Graffiti? And the government researcher out in the remote, bonding with the wolves out in the Arctic in Never Cry Wolf? Both were played by Charles Martin Smith, now a director who has specialized in films about kids and animals including the two Dolphin Tale movies and the current release,

Serenity Writer/Director Steven Knight on Creating a Twist no one Will See Coming

Writer-director Steven Knight is no stranger to making unconventional films. In the 2013 thriller Locke starring Tom Hardy, the entire plot takes place inside a car. For Serenity, underneath the allegory about a fisherman obsessed over catching an elusive bluefin tuna, lie deeper existential themes.

Knight admits directing can be daunting in a phone call having wrapped Peaky Blinders Season 5. “Every time I do,

How The Favourite‘s Oscar-Nominated Co-Writer Tony McNamara Twisted History

With 10 Oscar-nominations, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite was matched only by Alfonso Cuaron’s elegiac masterpiece Roma for the largest haul of the year. The films couldn’t be much more different, but then again, every film Lanthimos makes couldn’t be much more different from his peers. The Favourite is nothing like anything the Oscar-nominated Lanthimos has made in the past, either, concerning itself with two rivals, Lady Sarah (Oscar-nominated Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Oscar-nominated Emma Stone) for the affection and patronage of Queen Anne (Oscar-nominated Olivia Colman) in 18th century England.

Aquaman‘s DP on the Challenge of People Talking & Fighting Underwater

Of all the superheroes (and there are a lot of superheroes if you haven’t noticed), cinematographer Don Burgess was challenged to lens the one with the most problematic superpowers and origin story. Unlike Batman’s gritty Gotham, Superman’s soaring Metropolis or even Black Panther’s glorious Wakanda, there is no superhero who presents a tougher challenge to a filmmaker than Aquaman and his underwater kingdom of Atlantis.

“When When I met Sam Raimi to interview for Spider-Man,

How Glass‘s Stunt Coordinator Channeled James McAvoy’s Inner Beast

M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable came out in 2000, and to get the movie made, the director deliberately billed it as a film about anything other than superheroes. Nineteen years on, a slew of superhero films have erupted from Hollywood, and they are by and large nothing like Shyamalan’s trilogy, which also includes 2016’s Split, and now, Glass. Is this final chapter even a superhero movie?

How Glass’s Production Designer Utilized a Defunct Psychiatric Ward

Are superheroes real? The central characters in Glass, M. Night Shyamalan’s conclusion to the trilogy that began with Unbreakable 19 years ago and was followed by Split in 2016, aim to find out. Chief among them is Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), an unorthodox psychiatric doctor who places David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) under her care in a sparsely populated Philadelphia sanitarium.

Oscar Watch: Writer/Director Nadine Labaki on her Riveting Drama Capernaum

Lebanese writer-director Nadine Labaki took to the streets to make her third feature, Capernaum, which centers on a neglected young boy. Furious with his parents after they sell his barely pubescent sister to an older man, the boy runs away from his ramshackle home. He befriends an Ethiopian refugee and then becomes the caretaker for her baby after the woman is arrested.

Playing a child who shares his own first name,

Oscar Watch: Black Panther Co-Editor Michael Shawver on the key to Cutting Fight Scenes

Editor Michael Shawver goes way back with writer/director Ryan Coogler. In fact, he edited Coogler’s first two films, his 2013 breakout film Fruitvale Station, and his deft resurrection of the Rocky franchise with 2015’s Creed. His work on Creed turned out to be the perfect training for his next Coogler project; the epic, game-changing Black Panther. 

Shawver’s gut—and keen eye—led him to feel very connected to the hand-to-hand combat scenes that took place at Warrior Falls.

A Grieving Detective Drives the Action in Film Noir State Like Sleep

Like her brooding State Like Sleep heroine Katherine Grand, filmmaker Meredith Danluck lost a close friend to suicide. Like Katherine, she moved from the United States to Belgium to live with a highly secretive partner. And like Katherine, Danluck rushed to a Brussels hospital after her mother suffered a stroke. Now currently available on Digital, On Demand, and in select theaters, State Like Sleep may draw many of its plot points from Danluck’s adult life but one of its most offbeat sequences comes straight out of a movie she saw at the age of seven.

Oscar Watch: The Favourite‘s Production Designer Re-Designs History With a Flourish

England’s Queen Anne, who only reigned from 1707 to 1714, is hardly the most notable female British sovereign, but to watch her played by Olivia Colman in director Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, one might wonder why this the first we’re hearing of her in so long. True to history, Lanthimos’s depiction of the queen shows her nearly constantly ill and in other ways unwell—she is in possession of 17 rabbits,

Oscar Watch: Composer Nicholas Britell on Nailing the Tone for Vice and If Beale Street Could Talk

Juilliard-trained New York composer Nicholas Britell worked non-stop in 2018 and now he’s got two Oscar shortlisted movie scores to show for it. Early in the year, he teamed with Moonlight director Barry Jenkins to write the music for If Beale Street Could Talk, the tragic love story set in early-’70s Harlem. Then he scored Dick Cheney bio-pic Vice, featuring Oscar front runner Christian Bale,

Oscar Watch: How NASA Footage Inspired the First Man Editor’s Style

The moon landing was welcomed as a shared triumph in American history, but no one had more at stake than the men who traveled there. The mission’s success was as much a feat of will as of science. First Man captures the danger and courage of pioneering space travel in both broad historic and intensely microscopic ways. Editor Tom Cross was inspired by the movie’s ambition of telling a famous story from a human perspective.

Oscar Watch: How BlacKkKlansman‘s Composer Channeled Jimi Hendrix’s Iconic Riffs

Terence Blanchard landed on this year’s Best Original Score Oscar shortlist by crafting the stirring score for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. Based on a true story and set in 1971, the movie casts John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, a black cop who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan with his Jewish colleague (Adam Driver) by impersonating a white supremacist over the phone. Blanchard, a jazz trumpeter who grew up in New Orleans alongside Wynton Marsalis,

Oscar Watch: A Quiet Place‘s Sound Designers on Triggering our Brain’s Reptilian Fear Response

Supervising sound editors Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van Der Ryn had the unusual challenge of applying their expertise to a film that would be so quiet, it had the word in its title. John Krasinski’s thrilling, chilling A Quiet Place was predicated on a brilliant idea; alien monsters have turned the planet into one giant Amtrak quiet car. Only in this world, if you make a sound you’ll suffer a fate far worse than the annoyance of your fellow train passengers.

Director Matthew Carnahan on Valley of the Boom & the Internet’s Wild West Early Days

“I certainly didn’t see it coming,” says Matthew Carnahan of the dot-com boom—as well as the bust—that he cleverly chronicles in Valley of the Boom, a National Geographic limited series premiering on January 13 that combines a scripted narrative along with documentary-style interviews.

Flashing back to his own introduction to the web in the 1990s, Carnahan recalls a friend excitedly telling him about how he was able to talk to a woman through his computer when it was hooked up to his phone line because of this thing called the Internet.

Oscar Watch: Justin Hurwitz on Composing the Emotional Toll of Reaching For The Moon in First Man

Oscar and Golden Globe-winning composer Justin Hurwitz crafts scores that feature stirring and beautiful notes and chord progressions, but they are born from human experiences. Hurwitz mines melodies alongside his longtime creative partner, Damien Chazelle, who directs with music in mind. Their first three films together examined the human condition through musicians including a jazz trumpeter (Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench), a drum student (Whiplash),

Oscar Watch: A Quiet Place‘s Production Designer on Creating Killer Spaces

In John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place, sound kills. Yet it’s not only what one might say (or scream) that can get you killed, but anything you come into contact with. This means the spaces within the world of A Quiet Place can go from a sanctuary to a trap in a heartbeat. In order to create an environment that was as claustrophobic and terrifying as the film’s brilliant premise,

Oscar Watch: DP James Laxton on Creating Radical Intimacy in If Beale Street Could Talk

Oscar-nominated cinematographer James Laxton (Moonlight) and his longtime collaborator director Barry Jenkins did something novel with If Beale Street Could Talk, and we’re not just talking about the fact the film is adapted from the legendary James Baldwin’s titular novel. Unlike their previous collaborations, 2008’s Medicine for Melancholy, set in San Francisco, and 2016’s Oscar-winning Moonlight, set in Miami, Beale Street unfolds in a city neither had an intimate knowledge of—New York.