Spike Jonze’s Soulful, Searching Sci-Fi Romance Her
A Spike Jonze film is always an event. He’s made four features in fourteen years—starting with Being John Malkovich (1999), a film so singularly peculiar and original (a puppeteer finds a portal that leads into the actual mind of John Malkovich), that the long-time music video director found himself nominated for an Academy Award at the ripe old age of 30.
Malkovich was written by Charlie Kaufman,
Alexander Payne’s Nebraska Delights at the New York Film Festival
Alexander Payne first got Bob Nelson's script for Nebraska back in 2003 or 2004 (he isn’t quite sure). He liked it, and he immediately thought of Bruce Dern for the lead role, so he sent it to him. Dern liked it, and was surprised Payne had thought of him for the lead. Dern was so excited, in fact, he went to Toys R Us and bought a toy truck (a new truck has a lot of significance in the plot) and sent it to Payne,
The U.S. Premiere of 12 Years a Slave at the New York Film Festival
Screening in the United States for the first time, Steve McQueen’s powerful, heart rending 12 Years a Slave once again left a festival audience in silence and many viewers weeping in their seats. The story of Solomon Northup’s betrayal, his years of horror while a slave in Georgia, and his desperation to return home to his family in New York requires the viewer to face an unflinching portrayal of humanity at its worst trying to break a man taken at his best.
Chatting With Director Jim Mickle of We Are What We Are
For a key scene in the new drama We Are What We Are (opened Sept. 27), director/co-writer/editor Jim Mickle found himself up a creek holding a pile of bones.
“At some point, I think it was myself, it was a bunch of PAs, it was the prop gang, it was the art department, everyone had a stack of bones and they were just upcreek, just throwing it into the water,”
A Visual Guide to the 51st New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival was created in 1963 at the Lincoln Center as the non-competitive "festival of festivals." As Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote, "it was a time when the medium was still struggling to be taken seriously as an art form. Lincoln Center's own chairman, John D. Rockefeller III, thought the event had no business being there, protesting, 'Movies are like baseball.' " Film no longer has that problem,
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 & 7 Delicious Food Films
You might find it odd to begin a brief glimpse into some amazing films about, or crucially influenced by, food by starting with an animated film for children. But you’d be forgetting that one of the great food films of this age, or any other, was Pixar’s Ratatouille.
Sony Pictures' Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 premise is almost The Island of Dr. Moreau-esque—inventor Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) finds out that his infamous water-into-food invention survived his attempt to destroy it,
An Evening With Haifaa Al Mansour, Writer/Director of the Historic Wadjda
There have been many objects of fascination that have been a crucial part of great films. Think of the Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story, or, to use an even more famous example, Rosebud from Citizen Kane. In Haifaa Al Mansour’s fantastic, ground-breaking Wadjda (the first feature length film to be shot entirely in the Kingdom), the object is a beautiful green bicycle.
Building the Perfect Engine: The Filmmakers Behind Universal’s Rush
Ron Howard’s Rush hits theaters September 20, and early reviews are hailing it as one of the greatest racing movies of all time. Centered on the intense, often brutal rivalry between Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) and James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) during the 1976 Formula 1 season, Rush itself was built with the scrutiny and care of a great race car team. Once Peter Morgan's script made the rounds, an incredible team of filmmakers was assembled to create one of the year's most exciting films,
Bras in Space: The Incredible True Story Behind Upcoming Film Spacesuit
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others,
Director David Twohy on how he Crafted the Riddick Trilogy’s Exoplanets
The basic premise behind each installment of writer and director David Twohy’s sci-fi film trilogy—Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick—is pretty straightforward. Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, finds himself on a hostile alien planet inhabited by creatures that want to kill him. To add flare to what otherwise could become a tired storyline, Twohy constructs his films around dramatic human storylines and builds them up from a foundation of real-world science.
Could This Fall be the Best Film Season in Years?
There are major themes being explored in film in the coming months, in what looks to be a diverse and deeply challenging (in a good way) season of releases. Just going by the excitement of audiences at TIFF, there is reason to hope that we’re looking at one of the most quality-packed stretches in recent cinematic memory.
The plots are diverse, the casts are a mix of globally renown stars and newcomers, but the themes are universal.
Creativity in Hollywood: Film Visionaries On Creative Process And Inspiration
Unlike most films and television shows, inspiration is not available on-demand. In the highly creative realm of movie-making, a good idea can catapult careers, spark motion picture franchises, and make cinematic history.
Inventing the next film can mean laying the groundwork for brilliant movies and television, from Inception, Taxi Driver, The Master, or Edward Scissorhands.
Of course, caveats abound.
The World’s End: What’s Behind our Apocalypse Obsession?
Edgar Wright’s The World’s End (premiering August 23) is not the first, second, third or fourth film to come out this year about an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic world. A cursory glance of 2013's film slate would suggest we are currently suffering from a collective panic attack about our prospects on the planet. This is the End, World War Z,
Your Big Break: Hollywood Studio Programs for Emerging Writers
How hard is it to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood? Watch the Coen brothers Barton Fink or Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard or last year’s Seven Psychopaths for a clue. All three films focus on a struggling screenwriter. All three, while wildly different and wonderfully perverse (in their own specific ways) get at the beating black heart of the unknown screenwriter’s soul—that your soul is for sale, so long as you can get your script made.
George Mastras on Writing & Directing One of Breaking Bad’s Best Episodes
George Mastras has been a criminal investigator for the public defender’s office in Washington D.C., a counselor at a juvenile correctional facility during the crack epidemic of the 1990s, a litigator in New York, and a defense attorney in Los Angeles. Then he quit, bought a one-way ticket to China and backpacked around the world for two years. He wrote a novel while he was in Indonesia that was published by Scribner in early 2009 to very good reviews.
Writer/Director/Producer/Star Lake Bell on In a World…
In the dramedy 'In a World…', out August 9, writer/director/producer/star Lake Bell visits the voiceover industry as a newbie competing for the same gig as her industry-veteran father. Here, Bell, who has delivered memorable acting turns in such movies as No Strings Attached and It’s Complicated, talks about writing the script for her feature-film directorial debut, why she loves trailers, and what “voice” annoys her most.
The Credits: What insight can you offer about voices and accents?
Disasters in Space: Hollywood’s History of Co-Opting NASA’s Real Fears
In a way, outer space is like a vast movie screen–we project our hopes, our dreams, and our worst fears onto it. A lesser species might stare into the glittering stars and see randomness—we have been looking up at the night sky for millennia and have seen a near endless array of characters; lions, bulls, twins, a sea monster, a chained princess, a centaur–gods.
It’s no wonder, then, that space has been the setting for some of Hollywood’s most iconic movies—Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
An Evening With Fruitvale Station Writer/Director Ryan Coogler
Few directors fresh out of film school can boast their first feature-length movie is a likely Oscar contender, but Ryan Coogler could be one of the few with Fruitvale Station. The movie, which Coogler wrote and directed, won the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Feature and Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic Film at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and also won the Avenir Prize – Un Certain Regard at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
Walt Disney Studios Reimagines The Lone Ranger & Breathes Life Into Westerns
“So who was that masked man, anyway?” A question invariably asked at the end of every episode of The Lone Ranger television series. Armie Hammer, Johnny Depp, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski hope to provide a definitive answer to that question with the brand-new film The Lone Ranger, their reinvention of both the Western genre and the titular hero, in theaters today.
John Reid,
Oscar Winners Nat Faxon & Jim Rash on Reading, Writing, & The Way Way Back
After winning an Oscar for their screenplay for The Descendants, the screenwriting duo of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash appeared to have burst onto the scene as a couple of unknowns. In reality the writing and directing team have been on Hollywood filmmakers’ short list since 2007, when their script for The Way Way Back was being read and praised by insiders. The Credits sat down with the old friends and collaborators in advance of their already well reviewed coming-of-age comedy to find out about their process,
