The Dazzling Design of Ghost in the Shell
*We’re sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year this week in our ‘Best of 2017’ roundup.
Freakish cyborgs look right at home in Scarlett Johansson’s Ghost in the Shell sci-fi epic thanks in part to three years of ingenious design work from New Zealand-based Weta Workshop. Inspired by Masamune Shirow’s visionary Manga series and 1995 anime film, co-art director Ben Hawker, who previously channeled Middle Earth critters for the Lord of the Rings trilogy,
Writer/Director Martin McDonagh on his Dark, Brilliant Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
*We’re sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year this week in our ‘Best of 2017’ roundup.
With his thrillingly raw new film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri just released, writer/director Martin McDonagh is happy to chat about the movie,
Love & Other Illusions: How Blade Runner 2049‘s Sound Designer Played With our Heart Strings
*We’re sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year this week in our ‘Best of 2017’ roundup.
For part one of our interview with Blade Runner 2049 sound designer Theo Green, click here.
One of Blade Runner 2049’s most inspired characters is Joi (Ana de Armas), the holographic love interest of Officer K (Ryan Gosling). Joi is, in the strictest of senses,
Cinematographer Dan Laustsen on The Shape of Water‘s Fluid Fable
*We’re sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year this week in our ‘Best of 2017’ roundup.
Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen worked alongside Guillermo del Toro on and off for two decades, so when it came time to shoot The Shape of Water, he shared the director’s penchant for precision. Lush, lyrical and rich in metaphor, the film pays homage to Universal Pictures’ 1940’s-era monster as it follows Sally Hawkins’
Get Out‘s Cinematographer Reveals the Methods Behind Jordan Peele’s Brilliant Madness
*We’re sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year this week in our ‘Best of 2017’ roundup.
From the moment the first trailer for Get Out dropped, we knew this was going to be something special. We were beyond excited to see comedy genius Jordan Peele (Key & Peele) take on a horror movie and the final product exceeded all our hopes. Get Out travels from poking fun at the insecurities of race relations in America to dramatizing the terror of racism in a way that has critics becoming philosophers as they try to unpack Peele’s genius for tackling sensitive subjects with humor,
Listen to how Coco’s Composer Conjures Mexico’s Musical Heart
*We’re sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year this week in our ‘Best of 2017’ roundup.
The Handmaid’s Tale DP on Using Old Lenses, Vermeer and Drones to Conjure Dystopia
*We’re sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year this week in our ‘Best of 2017’ roundup.
Liverpool-born cinematographer Colin Watkinson quit his job as a surveyor to work as an entry-level “runner” on a British soundstage, rose through the ranks to shoot Tarsem Singh’s The Fall in 2006, and on the strength of that film’s universally hailed visuals, became one of Los Angeles’ most prolific television commercial DPs.
Alexander Payne’s Longtime Editor On Stepping into the Directing Chair for Crash Pad
If you’ve seen Sideways, About Schmidt, The Descendants, or Nebraska, you’re likely headed to the theater this weekend to see Alexander Payne’s newest project Downsizing. You have also seen the work of longtime collaborator Kevin Tent who has been the editor on all of those movies and more. After years of collaborating with Payne, Tent stepped out on his own to direct the neurotically funny Crash Pad this year.
How VFX Artists Kept Ryan Gosling’s Head From Being Smashed (and More) in Blade Runner 2049
When we interviewed Blade Runner 2049 sound designer Theo Green, one of the sequences he discussed was the very first in the film—the epic brawl between Ryan Gosling’s Officer K and Dave Bautista’s hulking replicant Sapper. Officer K is there to “retire” Sapper, a euphemism if ever there was one, and the fight that ensues is brutal, made all the more intense by the size difference in the two combatants.
Love & Other Illusions: How Blade Runner 2049‘s Sound Designer Played With our Heart Strings
For part one of our interview with Blade Runner 2049 sound designer Theo Green, click here.
One of Blade Runner 2049’s most inspired characters is Joi (Ana de Armas), the holographic love interest of Officer K (Ryan Gosling). Joi is, in the strictest of senses, a product, one produced by the Wallace Corp (lead by the film’s villain, Niander Wallace, played by Jared Leto),
Replicant vs. Replicant: How Blade Runner 2049’s Sound Designer Pulled no Punches
K. vs. Sapper
It’s a mismatch. One replicant is 6’0” and slender. The other is a goliath, standing at 6’3” and weighing 290lbs. They’re all alone in a creaky cabin on a distant, desolate protein farm, and they know they are about to have at it. The slender replicant, Officer K (Ryan Gosling), is there to “retire” Sapper (Dave Bautista, most well known as the lovable brute Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise),
Cinematographer Sam Levy’s Shot List Pictured Lady Bird a Year in Advance
In the beginning, there was the shot list. When Greta Gerwig organized her directorial debut, she left nothing to chance. A full year before production began on her coming-of-age story Lady Bird, the actress-turned-filmmaker sat down in New York with director of photography Sam Levy and together they planned out every shot of the movie. Levy, who got to know Gerwig when they worked on Frances Ha and Mistress America,
Mudbound Composer on the History of African-American Persistence That Inspired the Score
A man’s worth was once tied to his land, and whether they liked it or not, the families who lived and worked on that land were bound to one another. Dee Rees’ Mudbound tells the story of two such families, one black and one white, whose fates are intertwined on a Mississippi farm in the 1940s. With Mudbound, Bessie, and Pariah, Rees has picked away at painful moments in American history and found beautiful,
Set Decorator Rena DeAngelo Recreates a 1970s Newsroom in Steven Spielberg’s The Post
The Post, Steven Spielberg’s latest film opening December 22nd, recounts the Washington Post’s part in bringing the Pentagon Papers to light, on the heels of the New York Times. For the first time, Spielberg is working together with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, playing the newspaper’s first woman publisher, Katharine Graham, and its editor, Ben Bradlee. Set in the early 1970s, with much of the action taking place in the paper’s colorless newsroom,
Wonder Woman‘s Cinematographer on Capturing the Dynamic Essence of Diana Prince
Wonder Woman was exactly who we needed, exactly when we needed her, and she reframed the landscape among a crowded superhero genre. Director Patty Jenkins and her team brought to life a leading character who could feel love, fury, compassion and power in equal parts. Diana Prince and Steve Trevor’s relationship was a romance of equals (well, sort of—Diana was willing to treat him as an equal) that was charming, tender, passionate and heartbreaking.
Phantom Thread’s Costume Designer Mark Bridges on Styling Daniel Day-Lewis’s Last Performance
On Christmas, Daniel Day-Lewis takes his final on-screen bow, having declared his intention to retire after Phantom Thread, the latest from his longtime collaborator, Paul Thomas Anderson. Set in London high society in 1955, the film sees the British Day-Lewis, who has donned a wide variety of hairstyles, beards, and accents over his career, make something of a return to his own milieu, in muted tweeds, with long, slicked-back hair. He plays couturier Reynolds Woodcock,
The Goldbergs Composer on Bringing Fresh Life to 1980s Nostalgia
The 1980s were an awkward time for us all. No one escaped the fashion nightmares of track suits in bright colors, the huge hair, and an abundance of shoulder pads. Nearly all sins are forgiven with the passing of time, and The Goldbergs, now in season 5, proves there has been enough space between then and now for us to laugh at ourselves again.
The decade was, however, a golden age for nerds as cinematic classics like Ghostbusters,
I, Tonya Screenwriter Steven Rogers on the Many Sides to one of the ’90s Most Infamous Antiheroes
Steven Rogers remembers watching Tonya Harding at the televised 1994 Olympics when she complained to judges about a broken shoe lace a few weeks after being accused of ordering an attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan. “I thought, ‘Oh, she just wants attention, anything for attention,’ because that’s what I was being fed,” says Rogers. “That’s what we were all being fed.”
Two decades later, Rogers burrowed beneath the scandalous surface and wrote I,
VFX Supervisor Swaps Man For Primate in Oscar-Shortlisted War For the Planet of the Apes
“I’ve pretty much spent my last decade doing almost nothing but monkeys and apes.” That’s Oscar-winning visual effects artist Dan Lemmon talking about his adventures in motion capture on behalf of the re-booted Planet of the Apes trilogy and Peter Jackson’s 2005 gorilla spectacle King Kong. “Between that and The Jungle Book I’ve been pretty busy,” says Lemmon during a recent visit to Los Angeles. New York born,
The Last Jedi, Blade Runner 2049 & Wonder Woman Among Oscar’s Visual Effects Shortlist
The Oscar race for Best Visual Effects this year might be the stiffest in recent memory. The Academy has released this year’s shortlist, and it stands to reason that this could be the most challenging group of films they’ve had to winnow down in a few years. A few of the reasons include the wide range of genres these effects were deployed in, the culmination of a groundbreaking trilogy (the Apes franchise), and creature features from some of the most creative filmmakers on the planet.
