Production Designer Akin McKenzie on Recreating Reality in When They See Us

When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s four-part series on the 25-year aftermath of a 1989 rape and assault that took place in Central Park, was originally going to be titled Central Park Five. That moniker quickly became the shorthand for the five boys from Harlem — four African-American, one Latino — who were wrongly accused and convicted of the attack. Instead of a name reflecting only how these teenagers were viewed by the media and public,

Meet the Man Who Provided the Vintage Props for The Sopranos Prequel

When a movie takes place in the past the filmmakers have to recreate a whole bygone world. We might not notice if a telephone, neon sign, or cash register is right for the period, but if it’s wrong it can be a distraction. Prop Specialties provides all kinds of items to film and television productions set any time in the 20th century and even in the present, as most settings today include older or vintage items.

Longtime X-Men Scribe Simon Kinberg on Directing Dark Phoenix

He wrote Sherlock Holmes, produced The Martian and guided six X-Men movies to fruition from his vantage point as a writer and producer. But Simon Kinberg never actually directed anything until he took the reins of Dark Phoenix. Opening Friday, June 7, the movie reunites X-Men fixtures Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, and Michael Fassbender along Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones),

Getting a Mutant Makeover With Dark Phoenix‘s Makeup Department Head

Dark Phoenix is the last film in the nearly two-decade-old X-Men franchise. Yet by dropping X-Men from the title, co-writer/director Simon Kinberg, one of the franchise’s most tenured creatives, put the focus squarely on Jean Grey (Sophie Turner). The film is centered on a space rescue mission gone horribly awry, and the resultant transformation of Jean Grey from an already potent member of the X-men into the titular cosmic force with nearly unimaginable powers.

How Rocketman Soundtrack Mixer Evoked Elton John’s State of Mind

What does a nervous breakdown sound like? To be more specific, how can audio be manipulated to approximate Elton John’s headspace when he overdoses midway through the fantastical bio-pic Rocketman? That’s the kind of question re-recording mixer Mike Prestwood Smith faced on a daily basis while shaping the sonic highs and lows embodied by Taron Egerton‘s portrayal of the iconic piano man. Rocketman director Dexter Fletcher also helped make the Queen bio-pic Bohemian Rhapsody but takes a distinctly different approach to the subject of rock stardom this time around.

Building Beasts With Godzilla: King of the Monsters‘ Production Designer

There hasn’t been a film that has lived up to its title quite as thoroughly as Godzilla: King of the Monsters. In director Michael Dougherty’s Kaiju cage match, Godzilla goes clawed toe to clawed toe with some of the biggest beasts on the planet, including King Ghidorah, a three-headed dragon whose provenance is one of the film’s many twists. Every time these monsters clash—and the film doesn’t skimp on these colossal skirmishes—they do so in increasingly inspired locations.

How Smart Instincts Led Booksmart Producer to Actress-Turned Director Olivia Wilde

The original Booksmart script started making the rounds in Hollywood ten years ago after writers Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins imagined two straight-A high school girls gone wild the night before graduation. By the time producer Jennifer Elbaum came on board four years ago, the story had been acquired by producer Annapurna Pictures boss Megan Ellison with Short Term 12 star Kaitlyn Dever attached to co-star as wry, gay, Columbia University-bound Amy.

Tolkien Director on Tracing Iconic Author’s Life From War to Middle Earth

The Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s biopic Tolkien traces the future of the “Lord of the Rings” author’s path from his peripatetic tween years through his Oxford attendance, intercut with his nightmarish experience fighting in the Battle of the Somme during World War I. Throughout, Karukoski offers a poetic depiction of the author’s fomenting imagination, seen through Tolkien’s eyes in the shadows of a child’s spinning light globe or marauding in the battlefield as Tolkien,

The Handmaid’s Tale Makeup Designer on Creating Misery in the Colonies

In Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the radioactive Colonies are more felt than described. We’re told it’s where all Gilead’s undesirables, the childless handmaids, the criminals, the sick and insane, are sent to die. In Hulu’s adaptation of Atwood’s novel, however, the Colonies became one of the show’s most fecund sources of misery in season two. As Maria Elena Fernandez described in a piece for Vulture, The Handmaid’s Tales creators did something brilliant when they set out to create the location—the asked Atwood what she had in mind when she wrote about them.

How the The Simpsons new Composers Took on Springfield

The Simpsons boasts not only the longest run of any scripted primetime series, along with catch-phrases and characters that have been part of popular culture for almost two generations, but theme music recognizable within its first few notes—on a short list with Star Trek, Hawaii Five-O, Batman, Sesame Street, and a handful of others.

And now that series has new composers.

Building Thousands of Years of History in Amazon’s Good Omens

“Corners are where everyone makes decisions. This is the point where you change directions.” And corners are usually located at crossroads, to boot, the very place—especially if you’re a Mississippi bluesman—where it’s said deals with the devil can be struck.

The corner in question, however, concerns an angel, and the London bookshop that he owns—part of Michael Ralph’s production design on the upcoming Amazon/BBC adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens.

Showrunner Lauren Morelli Spins New Tales of the City for Netflix

The interwoven stories of the residents of Barbary Lane are being told again. Introduced in author Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City 40 years ago, and then adapted for television several times since the 1990s, the beloved San Francisco-set saga is being revived by Netflix and starts streaming this June.

Like its predecessors, which were based on Maupin’s nine novels, the 2019 version focuses a lot on the LGBTQ community—but it does so with some new characters and a modern take.

Qualified Director Jenna Ricker on Indy’s Pioneer Janet Guthrie

“This is my first documentary,” says producer/director Jenna Ricker, of Qualified, a look at the life of Janet Guthrie, the first woman—in that pre-Danica Patrick/Pippa Mann era—to ever drive a car at the Indianapolis 500.

The doc is part of ESPN’s 30 For 30 series, in celebration of the cable pioneer’s 30th anniversary. But you have to go farther back than that, to 1977, to find Guthrie in the cockpit of a racer at Indianapolis.

Martin Ruhe on Shooting George Clooney’s Catch-22 Adaptation

“Certain things I don’t think we’d be legally allowed to do now,” observes cinematographer Martin Ruhe, ASC, when reflecting on the prior attempt to bring Joseph Heller’s classic, absurdist, and decidedly non-chronological Catch-22 to the screen.

That would be the 1970 Mike Nichols film version, which was somewhat of a commercial and critical bust at the time but has since come to be regarded in more classic “70’s cinema” terms.

John Wick 3 Costume Designer Conjures Elegance Amid the Carnage

Italian-born costumer Luca Mosca pulled off a major sartorial coup in 2014 when he designed the instantly iconic suit worn by Keanu Reeves in John Wick. The elegant silhouette impacted pop culture to the point where Amazon now sells $139 “John Wick Suit” knock-offs. But to see the real deal, action fans have been flocking to director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum,

Director Olivia Wilde & Screenwriter Katie Silberman on the Hilarious Booksmart

The creative team behind Booksmart wanted to showcase women being funny. Not one or two women, but many women.

“That’s how it is in our lives. All my female friends are as funny as my male friends. They’re not comedians; they don’t think of themselves as funny,” said screenwriter Katie Silberman, who shares writing credit with Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, and Sarah Haskins.

Silberman credited Olivia Wilde, the actress who makes her feature directorial debut on Booksmart,

Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson on Outfitting the Live-Action Aladdin

In Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake of Aladdin, Disney revisits Agrabah, the fictional Arabian land where a plucky street thief and his incorrigible monkey sidekick cross paths with an unlikely love interest, the local sultan’s daughter, Princess Jasmine. Similar to the 2017 Beauty and the Beast remake, turning a bustling, fictional historic animated township into a three-dimensional place is a colorful, lively affair. In both, labyrinthine city streets give way to the intensity of nature,

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum Director on the Film’s Epic Stunts & Real Dogs

Chad Stahelski started out as a kick-boxer, served as Keanu Reeve‘s stunt double in The Matrix and rose through the ranks as a stunt choreographer with his own 87eleven Action Design before co-launching the John Wick franchise in 2014. Directing Reeves as an indomitable assassin, Stahelski has staged most of the 54-year-old actor’s action sequences “in camera,” minimizing digital effects in favor of physical performance. The old school approach has wowed fans to the tune of $261 million in world wide box office,

Composer Herdis Stefansdottir on her Intimate score for The Sun is Also a Star

Herdis Stefansdottir, scoring artist for the new release The Sun is Also a Star, is a rare example of a female composer working on a major studio film. She was hired when she was 7 months pregnant, and says that had a major impact on the creation of her emotional, often intimate score.

The film follows the college-bound romantic Daniel (Charles Melton) and a Jamaica-born pragmatist Natasha (Yara Shahidi) who meet—and fall in love—over one momentous day in New York City.

Trial by Fire Director Edward Zwick on Revisiting a Heartbreaking Story

Cameron Todd Willingham, who’s played by British actor Jack O’Connell in director Edward Zwick‘s Trial by Fire, was not an exemplary character. But he almost certainly didn’t set the 1991 blaze that killed his three young daughters, an alleged crime for which he was executed by the state of Texas in 2004. The fire was likely accidental, as was demonstrated by the evidence presented in David Grann’s 2009 New Yorker piece and Incendiary: The Willingham Case,