Celebrating the ASC’s Top 10 Films of the 20th Century
The American Society of Cinematographers recently released their “100 Milestone Films in Cinematography of 20th Century.” For the uninitiated (which is 99% of the viewing public), the ASC is “an honorary organization made up of the best cinematographers in the world,” says cinematographer Richard Crudo, ASC (this explains why you often see an “ASC” after a cinematographer’s name in the credits.) “Membership is by invitation only and is extended after the candidate has been proposed by members and has passed a screening process.”
The titles in the ASC’s list were compiled through an internal poll conducted by the Society...
Star Trek: Discovery‘s Art Director Gives you the VIP Tour
When Art Director Jody Clement stepped in to work on CBS’s Star Trek: Discovery, she was no stranger to ambitious sci-fi television series. She’d already worked on Guillermo del Toro’s deliciously creepy The Strain, as well as BBC America’s narratively complex Orphan Black. For Star Trek: Discovery, Clement was stepping into both a major new show and TV history simultaneously.
“We do our initial research based on canon,...
Star Trek: Discovery Set Designer on Developing New Worlds
Since 1966, Star Trek has been boldly going where no one has gone before. Through dozens of planets and vast reaches of space, the series has explored the most wonderful and most fearsome places the universe has to offer. Set designer Emilie Poulin is charting the Starfleet’s newest adventures on Star Trek: Discovery.
The locations on Star Trek: Discovery are very active. Because the storylines are rooted in exploration,...
Cold Pursuit Director Hans Petter Moland on Liam Neeson’s Killer Plowman
In Hans Petter Moland‘s Cold Pursuit, Liam Neeson plays a humble snowplow driver named Nels Coxman living in the winter wonderland of Kehoe, Colorado. The film opens with Nels receiving Kehoe’s ‘Citizen of the Year’ award, which hs gratefully (and awkwardly) accepts. His beaming wife, Grace (Laura Dern) looks on. All is well. For roughly four minutes or so. In no time at all, the fuzzy, warm feelings give way to the title’s promise; the Coxman’s son Kyle is found dead of an apparent drug overdose...
Director Catherine Hardwicke Delivers Gina Rodriguez as Action Star in Miss Bala
Catherine Hardwicke was 48 years old when she directed her first feature-length film. That movie, Thirteen, a dark look at a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, garnered Golden Globe nominations for its stars, Holly Hunter and Evan Rachel Wood, as well as an Oscar nod for Hunter and an Independent Spirit Award for Nikki Reed.
Though by Hollywood standards she came a bit late to directing, the success of Thirteen demonstrated she was meant to be at the helm...
Bird Box‘s VFX Supervisor on the Monster You Can’t See
What happens when Marcus Taormina tells people that he was the visual effects supervisor on the wildly popular Netflix film Bird Box?
“People have a ton of questions,” Taormina says, “but the central one is the creature question. I tell them that there is a lot on the editing room floor.”
What Bird Box’s invisible malefactors actually look like is one of the many ambiguities in the film that have preoccupied the Internet since Bird Box bowed over the Christmas holidays...
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, massage, amplify, dilute,...
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, considered by many to be a prime suspect in the killing...
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, A Dog’s Way Home,...
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, I promise myself I’ll never do it again...
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? The main characters themselves are unsure—as the film opens,...
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. Dr. Staple’s specialty? Superhero delusions...
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, 12-year-old Zain Al Rafeea leads a cast of non-professional performers who improvise much of their dialogue...
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, for example, who mark a combination of lost pregnancies and infants who died young...
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, for filmmaker Adam McKay...
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.
“It allowed us to delve into this first-person subjective type of storytelling where you feel like you are climbing into the space capsule or you feel like it is your hands on the rung of the ladder as you climb down and step on the moon,” Cross described...
