A Presidential Makeover: How Woody Harrelson Became LBJ

Woody Harrelson hated Lyndon Johnson when he was a kid, but couldn’t resist the dramatic challenge when director Rob Reiner invited him to portray the 36th president in the tumultuous months following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. LBJ required Harrelson to acquire a new accent, new mindset, new teeth, new ears, plus jowls. To aid in his transformation, the actor insisted on one key collaborator: Oscar-winning makeup designer Ve Neill. She recalls, “Woody called me and said ‘I really can’t do ‘LBJ’

How Blade Runner 2049 Used Miniatures to Build the Future

Blade Runner 2049 depicts a dark, ecologically devastated future (San Diego has been leveled and is now just a massive trash dump, for example), but the city of Los Angeles, long the center of Blade Runner mythology, is a glowing, holographic-choked megatropolis teeming with skyscrapers.

Writer/Director Richard Linklater on his Timely, Devastating Last Flag Flying

Richard Linklater originally tried to get war veterans’ drama Last Flag Flying off the ground 12 years ago, shortly after reading Daryl Ponsican’s novel of the same. “The timing wasn’t right,” he says. But the timing for the now-completed movie, which opened this past Friday, couldn’t be much more attuned to national concerns. Shot last fall, the film gained unexpected resonance two weeks ago when White House chief of staff John Kelly described the exact same process dramatized in Last Flag Flying,

Meet the Blade Runner 2049 Concept Artists Who Helped Create the Year’s Most Visually Stunning Film

Director Denis Villeneuve, cinematographer Roger Deakins, production designer Dennis Gassner, costume designer Renée April, the entire art department (really, the list is long) are all responsible for the neo-noir landscape of Blade Runner 2049 that managed to echo Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision in the original while taking it in their own,

Man Goes Ape in Director Ruben Östlund’s Surreal Satire The Square

Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund probed a family man’s ethical quandaries in acclaimed 2014 avalanche drama Force Majeure. In his new satiric drama The Square (opening Friday) the writer-director-moral philosopher critiques “civilized” people running amok in Stockholm’s art scene. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or, the movie chronicles everything that can possibly go wrong when museum curator Christian (Claes Bang) commissions a square-shaped public installation as sanctuary for citizens in need of help from passing pedestrians.

Jeff Deutchman Thinks Everyone (Especially Liberals) Should Watch his Election Doc 11/8/16

In the fall of 2008, documentary producer Jeff Deutchman had a last-minute idea: an omnibus movie that would capture election day. He sent requests to his filmmaker friends, all of whom were Obama supporters, and ended up with an account that had a relatively narrow focus. Eight years later, he started planning sooner,

Chatting With Call Me By Your Name‘s Legendary Screenwriter James Ivory

What Mercedes is to cars and Tiffany is to diamonds, Merchant Ivory is to art-house films. The brand whose heyday was in the ‘80s and the ‘90s with such titles as A Room With a View, Howards End and Remains of the Day still is synonymous with tony period pieces, top-of-line acting and a story often adapted from a literary source that engages both the head and the heart.

10 Years (and Possibly More) Worth of Star Wars Films Being Planned

For those of you who might have been worried that J.J. Abrams’ Episode IX, due in theaters in December of 2019, would be the last new film in the Star Wars franchise for a while, rest assured that the galaxy’s expanding, not contracting, after the new trilogy wraps up. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy went on the Star Wars show to discuss the upcoming The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson,

1922 Costume Designer on Bringing Stephen King’s Characters Off the Page

The ‘Roaring 20s’ are often glamourized in entertainment, but there was a more pragmatic lifestyle on farmland in the Midwest. Costume designer Claudia da Ponte gets that tone just right in the Stephen King thriller 1922, setting farmer Wilfred James and his family off on a long and gruesome descent into madness. What the characters want, and the conflict it causes with what they have, drives the course of their lives. The most visual cue of their yearning comes from their clothing,

Greta Gerwig On Moving Behind the Camera for her Solo Directorial Debut Lady Bird

Fans of Greta Gerwig know her as the go-to muse of indie filmdom’s mumblecore movement  and for her collaborations with such notable  directors as Joe Swanberg  (LOL, Nights and Weekends) and Noah Baumbach (Greenberg,

How The Ritual‘s Cinematographer Immerses You in Fear

In The Ritual, a group of friends lose one of their own in a robbery gone bad, but that’s just the beginning of the horrors in store. The atmospheric thriller pulls you deeper into the woods where they encounter sinister things they can’t explain that begin to tear their bond apart. Once they begin to turn on one another, none of them are safe. Cinematographer Andrew Shulkind’s filming style immerses you in the terror in a unique way.

Writer/Director Margaret Betts on her new Film Novitiate

What happens when a Manhattan socialite turned filmmaker (The Carrier, a  2011 doc about the AIDS pandemic in Africa) makes an impulse pre-flight purchase of a biography about Mother Teresa that contains revealing letters about her passionate relationship with God?

If you are Margaret Betts,

Director Rob Reiner Talks Upcoming Biopic LBJ

Rob Reiner’s long list of directing credits includes An American President (1995), about the romance between a fictional widowed U.S. President (Micheal Douglas) and a lobbyist (Annette Bening) that was, in many ways, a precursor to the landmark TV series The West Wing (Aaron Sorkin wrote both).

Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt on Shooting David Fincher’s Serial Killer Series Mindhunter

David Fincher does not like the color red. Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt knows this because he shot much of the new Netflix series Mindhunter, executive produced and partially directed by the famously meticulous master of suspense. “Fincher and I both have an aversion to magenta so with Mindhunter we always erred on the side of green/yellow in our color choices,” says Messerschmidt, who met Fincher on the set of his 2014 thriller Gone Girl.

Composer Carter Burwell Orchestrates Emotions for Music-Filled Wonderstruck

Carter Burwell scored 15 movies for the Coen Brothers, composed music for three Spike Jonze films and picked up an Oscar nomination for the lush score he wrote for Todd Hayne’s fifties-era melodrama Carol. But in terms of sheer magnitude, Wonderstruck marks Burwell’s biggest film scoring achievement to date. Describing his latest collaboration with Haynes on the kid-friendly adventure, Burwell says, “It’s 80 minutes of music, much more than I’ve written for a film before.”

How Battle of the Sexes Composer Nicholas Britell Uses ’70s Technology to Make Modern Score Feel Retro

Over the past five years, composer Nicholas Britell has built a name working on some of the most impressive and artful Best Picture nominees in recent memory: Twelve Years a Slave, Whiplash, The Big Short and, most recently, the stunning (and Oscar-winning) Moonlight. This year, Britell entered the Oscar race once again with Battle of the Sexes, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ charmingly vivid retelling of the historic tennis match and rivalry between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

Jigsaw Composer Dissects Why Music Scares Us

Former Nine Inch Nails band member Charlie Clouser knows how to give you a good scare. He’s composed the music for Wayward Pines, that creepy American Horror Story theme, The Stepfather, and The Neighbor, but it all began with Saw. His music is the subverbal terror you can’t name lurking in every one of Jigsaw’s torture rooms. Ever since the first Saw was released in 2004,

Happy Death Day Cinematographer on Resurrecting the Teen Slasher Genre

There’s nothing quite as horrifying as waking up in a strange dorm room after a night out in college. Except maybe being murdered in your sorority house and reliving your death over again until you identify your masked killer. Such is life for Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) in the most playful slasher film of the year, Happy Death Day. Cinematographer Toby Oliver set the tone for the coed killer movie where the scares are satisfyingly spooky.

Immersed in the Scene: Next-Gen Filmmakers Bullish on VR Storytelling

Ever since the first works of film were shown to the public around the turn of the 20th century, the experience has been largely the same. People sit in a darkened theater facing a large screen, where projected two-dimensional, still images flit past their eyes at a rate fast enough to produce the illusion of motion.

But the idea of immersing audiences in the movie’s environment—taking them from spectators peeking through the screen’s 2D window to become surrounded by the film’s three-dimensional world—has been around nearly as long as the industry’s dawn.

Ahead of Glorious Call Me By Your Name, Here are 9 LGBT Coming-of-Age Films From the ’90s

The LGBT coming-of-age film has come a long, long way. In 2016, the world watched in astonishment (and some initial confusion) as Moonlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture.