Avengers: Infinity War‘s Production Designer on Helping Build the Film’s Heartbreaking Drama
By now, audiences have gotten to know the newly complex Marvel villain Thanos (Josh Brolin), thwarter of the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Wakandans, the soulful psychopath who has haunted the Marvel Cinematic Universe practically from its inception. The third film in Disney’s Avengers franchise (and the 19th in the MCU), Avengers: Infinity War, is setting both box office records and (spoiler alert) records for how many beloved main characters can be killed off — at least seemingly so — in one 2.5 hour stretch.
Nailing the “Regular People Look” on Tully
For Jason Reitman’s new movie Tully (opening Friday), Charlize Theron gained 50 pounds to play Marlo, the bedraggled mother of three. By design, Marlo’s unkempt house reflects a character who’s way too exhausted to keep the place looking neat and tidy. Canadian production designer Anastasia Masaro explains the backstory. “Marlo’s home is meant to feel like she and her husband bought the house when their first kid was on the way and they really meant to fix it up.”
Howard Director Don Hahn on the Legendary Composer Howard Ashman
The name Howard Ashman — the subject of the new documentary, Howard, that premiered at the recent Tribeca Film Festival — might not immediately ring a bell. But you probably have hummed along to the timeless lyrics he wrote in collaboration with composer Alan Menken for the now-animated classics that led to Disney’s ‘toon revival in the late 80s and early ‘90s and continue to endure today.
The catchy words he penned for the Calypso ballad Kiss the Girl from 1989’s The Little Mermaid and the Oscar-winning title tune from 1991’s Beauty and the Beast just helped two American Idol contestants to advance to the next round of voting earlier this week.
The Music of Lizzie Strikes a Sympathetic Tone for the Famous Killer
The four-line Lizzie Borden rhyme is graphic, if not particularly sympathetic. A woman commits a double homicide and the victims are her own parents. The real Borden was acquitted of the 1892 murders, but her legacy was condemned to the role of cold-blooded killer. Sundance selection Lizzie, starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart, revisited the infamous crime with a compassion for Borden and explored the motivation that drove her to pick up the axe.
RBG Co-Directors/Producers on Their Groundbreaking Subject – Part 2
In Part 2 of our two-part interview with Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the filmmaking team behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary RBG that opens May 4, the pair discusses what they learned while doing their research (the justice is a huge opera fan), her nearly 56-year fairy-tale marriage to her incredibly supportive college sweetheart Martin Ginsburg and how they got around not being able to film the Supreme Court in session.
RBG Co-Directors/Producers on Their Groundbreaking Subject – Part I
Ruth Bader Ginsburg – the Brooklyn-born, 85-year-old grandmother of four who became the second female to be appointed as a Supreme Court justice in 1993 – has been having a pop-cultural moment since 2015 or so. That’s when the liberal-leaning Harvard grad was cheekily dubbed The Notorious RBG (a play on the late rapper Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. The Notorious BIG) by a pair of young female writers who saluted this petite powerhouse’s stealthy sense of bad-assery in book form.
Tully‘s Production Designer Anastasia Masaro on Finding Magic in Life’s Mess
It’s been seven years since Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, the creative forces behind Juno and Young Adult, last collaborated. Now, with Tully, the pair close out a thematic trilogy of sorts – stories that have, at least in some way, been autobiographical for the pair of creatives. “They have this kind of connective tissue between all of them,” Reitman said at the New York premiere of the film.
Striking a Balance of Cruelty and Whimsy for the Score of A Series of Unfortunate Events
Child marriage, infant abuse, insatiable greed, and murder plots do not seem like the makings of a family program. And yet, Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events achieves just that by channeling the highly stylized essence of Daniel Handler’s classic thirteen book series for young adults. Now in season 2, the plots have grown wackier and darker. The show is reliant on composer Jim Dooley to maintain levity. Dooley can attest to the music’s influence,
Dawn Porter on her Netflix Docuseries Bobby Kennedy for President
It’s been 50 years since the turbulence of 1968 changed this nation forever. From the escalating Vietnam War to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the riots outside the Democratic convention, that year was one of the most difficult our nation has ever faced, and that serves as measuring stick anytime a particular year in America feels especially fraught. Last year was one such year. So was 2016. The same could said of 2018.
Director Sebastian Lelio on Capturing Forbidden Love in his Urgent new Film Disobedience
Director Sebastian Lelio has had quite the exciting past few months. Lelio’s last film, A Fantastic Woman, about a transgender woman whose partner tragically dies, swept the awards circuit. It won 17 awards including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film—which was the first Chilean film to do so. Right now, there’s no stopping Lelio and his work.
In theaters today, Lelio is tackling another story about women’s interior lives.
Cult or Cultural Utopia? The Directors of Wild Wild Country Let Viewers Decide
You would be forgiven for having difficulty placing the term ‘Rajneeshpuram.’ The violent clash between the followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and the residents of Antelope Oregon in the mid-1980s seems like the makings of a famous event, but it has somehow faded from cultural memory. Directors Chapman and Maclain Way admitted the incident did not ring a bell to them either when they began their research for breakout Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country.
The Handmaid’s Tale’s Samira Wiley Talks Religion, Love, and Season 2
Fresh from their Peabody Award win, The Handmaid’s Tale returns for a highly anticipated 2nd season. Season 1, which was filmed before Donald Trump was elected, became more than just a cautionary tale after his campaign and first year in office. Though sometimes difficult to watch, it represents some of the best writing and acting on the small screen. It also affirms just how successful and multi-layered a show with a strong female presence,
Director & Cinematographer Warwick Thornton on his Outback Western Sweet Country
Growing up in the Australian outback, director and cinematographer Warwick Thornton wasn’t exposed to many big screen movies.
“We had a drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights. I remember Star Wars four or five years after was released; that’s how long it took that print [to travel to the outback],” says Thornton, 48. “So that’s the Hollywood cinema I grew up on. I never watched westerns in cinemas because [the cinemas played] just big,
Super Troopers 2 Star Kevin Heffernan Discusses The Gleefully Insane Sequel
If for no other reason than sheer longevity, comedy collective Broken Lizard deserves a shout-out for sticking together. The five guys who specialize in “low brow humor for high-brow people,” as ensemble member Kevin Heffernan puts it, started cracking each other up around 1990 as undergrads at Colgate University. Twenty-eight years later, they’ve created R-rated Super Troopers 2 (opening today), which aims to outdo the raunchy slapstick featured in their 2001 sleeper hit.
Mudbound & Come Sunday Composer Tamar-kali’s Singular Path
At less than 2% of all composers, the percentage of female scoring artists working in the film industry is the lowest and most out of balance with the number of men getting hired. There isn’t any official data on how many of those are women of color, but it’s an even smaller fraction. With her critically acclaimed score for Mudbound, and now with her new work for the film Come Sunday,
Kay Cannon on her Hilarious Directorial Debut Blockers
If you’ve ever been a Teen Movie fan, the last several years haven’t really been for you. While the late 90s and early aughts had more than their fair share of teen movies (many now classics), it’s been few and far between for a studio coming-of-age flick. But in the last month, we’ve been blessed with not one, but two studio teen films: Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon and Kay Cannon’s Blockers—both that have made progressive new changes to the teen film formula.
The Good Wife Costume Designer Dan Lawson Brings his Skill to New Detective Series Instinct
Dan Lawson certainly possesses the gift of garb. The established costume designer is an Emmy nominee for his work on CBS’s The Good Wife, and now brings his winning style to that show’s spinoff The Good Fight. He also is a recipient of the Theater Development Fund’s Irene Sharaff Young Master Award for excellence in costume design — the first to be honored for television.
Because wardrobe is so essential to character and story,
Writer/Director Chloe Zhao on Her Tender Look at a Real American Indian Cowboy in The Rider
The Rider, a meditative half-fictional drama set on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, first premiered at Cannes last year, where it won the Art Cinema Award. The second feature film from the Chinese director Chloe Zhao, it opened in wide release this past Friday. Zhao, who attended undergraduate and film school in the U.S., was living in New York before she decamped to South Dakota, where she made Songs My Brother Taught Me,
Director Brad Silberling’s An Ordinary Man Takes on a Notorious Bosnian War Criminal
Filmmaker Brad Silberling first became fascinated with natural-born monsters in 2008 when he learned about Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. Known as “The Butcher of Bosnia,” General Mladić commanded the massacre of some 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the Yugoslav civil wars. Following the atrocities, Maleic and politician Karadžić, aided by loyalists, hid from Hague-based International Criminal Court prosecutors for 14 years, shuffled about by loyalists through a succession of low-rent Belgrade safe houses. After reading testimony from Mladić‘s former body guards,
Blockers Actor Jimmy Bellinger Promises This Isn’t the Prom Night You Remember
Parents have long agonized over the question of when their child is old enough to make mature decisions. The real answer is that it’s different for everybody, but that doesn’t make parenting any easier. There is a lot of worrying and well-intended intervention that happens when kids come of age. And if your parents are Leslie Mann, John Cena, or Ike Barinholtz, there are also a lot of laughs. Jimmy Bellinger stars in the wild new comedy Blockers as high school senior,
