Writer/Director Peter Hedges on Re-Finding his Voice With Ben is Back

Writer/director Peter Hedges was in attendance at the Middleburg Film Festival to promote and talk about his new film Ben is Back, which stars Julia Roberts and Hedges’ son Lucas, as a mother and her drug-addicted son, who returns from rehab for a 24-hour visit on Christmas Eve. Holly Burns (Roberts) loves her son, even as it is clear he’s having difficulty getting his life back together. Ben seems genuinely committed to sobriety,

Writer Garrard Conely on Watching His Memoir Become Boy Erased

Writer Garrard Conley turned his experience with conversion therapy as a young gay man in Arkansas into his 2016 memoir, Boy Erased. The book was quickly snapped up as a film project with actor Joel Edgerton adapting it for the screen and directing, as well as co-starring in a supporting role.

Conley, who now lives with his husband in New York City, at first was wary about a big screen depiction of his memoir.

Roma Actress Yalitza Aparicio on Carrying Alfonso Cuarón’s Astonishing Film

Roma, the opening night film at Middleburg Film Festival, played to a sold-out crowd of film lovers. As the end credits rolled, it was greeted with rapturous applause.

The film is leaving an indelible impression and gathering accolades from audiences and critics alike. Winning the Golden Lion Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, Roma is creating Oscar buzz for auteur writer/director Alfonso Cuarón,

Green Book‘s Viggo Mortensen on the Power of a Great Script

The much-anticipated new release from director and co-screenwriter Peter Farrelly, Green Book, was just given the Audience Award for Best Narrative Film at the Middleburg Film Festival. The film has been received with equal enthusiasm at all its screenings, garnering, among others, the Grolsch People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The story, which is based on the experiences of the real people portrayed in the film, is about the development of a lifelong friendship between working-class Italian-American Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) and erudite piano virtuoso and African-American Doctor Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali),

The Vietnam War Sound Designer on Enhancing Emotional Memories of the War

The Vietnam War was a harrowing conflict with ramifications that spread far from the fighting. It was the most divisive war of the 20th century that haunted veterans and civilians alike for decades. Cameras captured the brutal battles with unprecedented access. Piecing together hundreds of hours of archival footage and interviews with survivors, celebrated documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick assembled an intimate portrait of the horror and humanity of the war. The Vietnam War created an illusion of immersion that demanded reconstruction of scenes with no or low-quality sound and gripping witness accounts.

The Mid90s Cast on Skating & Sticking to the Script in Jonah Hill’s Directorial Debut

Sunny Suljic, the young, breakout star of Mid90s, says most audiences don’t even know that he’s a proficient skater in real life. But for Suljic that’s proof that he did a convincing job playing a novice skateboarder in Jonah Hill’s directing debut.

Truth is, the pint-sized Suljic, at just 13, is as adept at extreme skateboarding as the rest of the movie’s young ensemble of non-professionals (Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt,

Rupert Everett on Writing, Directing & Starring in his Oscar Wilde Biopic The Happy Prince

Fans of both Rupert Everett and literary great Oscar Wilde have been patiently waiting for the release of the new film The Happy Prince, which has been 10 years in the making. The film Everett wrote, directed, and stars in is an unvarnished look at Wilde’s last few years, following his decline after release from a two-year imprisonment for homosexuality. We spoke to Everett about what inspired him as a first-time director,

Writer/Director Felix van Groeningen on Music, Catharsis, and Crafting Beautiful Boy

Known for his critically-acclaimed film Broken Circle Breakdown, which was the Belgian entry for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, writer/director Felix van Groeningen has been courted for years by Hollywood producers to helm his first English language film. He found the perfect project in Beautiful Boy, based on two bestselling memoirs by writers David and Nic Sheff. David’s book, from which the film gets its title, is about his journey dealing with his crystal meth and drug-addicted son Nic.

Elizabeth Chomko on her Bittersweet & Beautiful Directorial Debut What They Had

Writer and first-time director Elizabeth Chomko’s What They Had is a searingly personal film that still manages to make you laugh (a lot, actually) through your tears. The story centers on the irrevocable slide into dementia of Ruth (Blythe Danner) and her family’s attempts—conflicted, confused, and often at odds with one another—to figure out the best way to handle it.

The film opens with Ruth wandering, as if in a daydream,

Composer Dustin O’Halloran Finds Music to Express The Hate U Give

The Hate U Give premiered at TIFF one day after the first airing of the Colin Kaepernick Nike ad. That the add went viral and became such a controversy only added to the fame and buzz around the composer of the music used in the ad, Dustin O’Halloran, who also provided the score for The Hate U Give. The films follows 16-year old Starr (an outstanding Amandla Stenberg) as she goes back and forth between her working-class Garden Heights neighborhood and the predominantly white Williamson Prep School across town—until a tragedy collapses the siloed world Starr had created.

How The Hate U Give’s Cinematographer Captured an American Tragedy

Fresh out of film school, Romanian cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. jumped into the deep end when Francis Ford Coppola arrived in Bucharest eleven years ago to film his coming of age drama Youth Without Youth. “Francis shot ten days with ten different DP’s because he wanted to see who worked well with him,” Malaimare recalls. “Three of my teachers also auditioned for the job so I figured I didn’t have a chance.

First Man‘s VFX Supervisor on Archival Footage, In-Camera Effects & the Biggest LED Screen Ever

Watching Damien Chazelle’s First Man offers the earthbound viewer the chance to finally realize they don’t have the right stuff. For folks of a certain age, becoming an astronaut used to be one of the coolest possible professions, the kind of thing you said you wanted to be when you were little and didn’t know what engineering was. Or math. Or physics. And, most crucially, you didn’t realize how insanely dangerous it is.

Bad Times at the El Royale’s Production Designer’s Brilliant Build

When Laramie, a vacuum cleaner salesman with an off-sounding drawl (Jon Hamm), steps behind the bar to make a pot of a coffee in the lobby of the El Royale, no attendant to be seen, it’s clear this fancy yet faded, empty hotel isn’t your average roadside motel, no matter how welcoming the vintage neon sign outside. For a traveling salesman, Laramie seems to know an awful lot about the history of his abode for the evening,

Bad Times at the El Royale’s Art Director on Building the Lunatic Lodge

In Bad Night at the El Royale, location is everything. The titular lodge sets the mood and structures the interlocking plot twists suffered by seven shady characters who cross paths there on a stormy night in 1969. Director Drew Goddard wrote the story and production designer Martin Whist defined the vision. It was up to supervising art director Michael Diner to make sure all the physical pieces of the environment came together on time and on budget.

Ike Barinholtz on his Funny/Terrifying Directorial Debut The Oath

In a future that seems as if it could arrive tomorrow, American citizens are instructed to pledge their loyalty not to their country, but to the president. That’s the premise of The Oath, the first feature directed by Ike Barinholtz. The comic actor, known from such series as madTV and The Mindy Project, also wrote the satire, which begins as a family gathers for Thanksgiving dinner.

Barinholtz plays the host,

First Man Writer Josh Singer on how Great Moments Require Sacrifice

Screenwriter Josh Singer didn’t realize it at the time, but great things were just around the corner in 2014 when he and director Damien Chazelle first brainstormed their First Man movie about Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong’s historic 1969 mission to the moon. “It was actually a pretty low point for me,” Singer recalls. “The Fifth Estate, which I wrote, had come out and not done well at all.

Maniac Casting Director Avy Kaufman on Matching Parts and Players

Avy Kaufman segued from casting print ads to film and television 30 years ago, and based on the success and scope of her work since then; casting director is the role she was born to play. Her 256 credits, according to imdb.com, include a range of genres produced by big studios and indie filmmakers alike. Among her most notable movie projects are The Sixth Sense, Brokeback Mountain and Syriana. For television,

A Star is Born’s Sound Mixer on Capturing Brilliance Up-Close

Warner Bros.’ A Star is Born, the fourth version of the film and Bradley Cooper’s first time directing, has earned a hero’s welcome as the best iteration yet of the tale of love, talent, and the price of fame. Lady Gaga stars as Ally, a struggling musician with powerhouse pipes, and Cooper as Jackson Maine, the alcoholic rocker on the waning side of stardom who brings her into the spotlight.

VFX Artists Explain How They Made Venom Marvel’s Freakiest Character

For a superhero movie, Venom boasts an unusually strong cast of heavy hitters including Tom Hardy in the title role along with Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed. But in this Marvel Comics-based story, it’s the visual effects that drive the spectacle by transforming Hardy’s ordinary human reporter Eddie Brock into a tentacle-sprouting “symbiote” freak. To learn more about CGI-powered monster mutations, The Credits checked in with the VFX company DNEG in London,

How the Crazy Rich Asians Editor Helps Us Navigate the World of Singapore’s Elite

Crazy Rich Asians hinges on dynamics. The complicated web of relationships will either catch true love or tangle the unsuspecting couple. Rachel (Constance Wu) gets off to a rocky start with her boyfriend’s mother (Michelle Yeoh), but there are even more delicate power struggles within the family. In the elite Singapore circles of Crazy Rich Asians, a look, a gesture, or even a flower can be a symbol of judgment.