Avatar: The Way of Water greatly expanded the world of the alien planet of Pandora (technically, it’s an extrasolar moon) and its native inhabitants, the Na’vi. In the first film, James Cameron introduced us to the Omaticaya, the Na’vi forest tribe. In The Way of Water, with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and their family having to flee the forest for the coast, we met the ocean-based Metkayina tribe. Both the Omaticaya and Metkayina tribes are peace-loving and noble, only resorting to warfare when attacked. Now, via an interview with France’s 20 Minutes, Cameron has revealed that Avatar 3 will expand the world of the Na’vi to reveal a tribe that’s far less noble and far more hostile.
Cameron said that Avatar 3 will reveal “different cultures from those I have already shown. The fire will be represented by the ‘Ash People.’ I want to show the Na’vi from another angle because, so far, I have only shown their good sides.”
The first two films made clear who the villains were—human beings, or “sky people” as the Na’vi referred to them—and it was up to the virtuous Omaticaya and the Metkayina tribes to repel them at all costs. In Avatar 3, the ‘Ash People’ will not only give us a darker side to the Na’vi people, but they’ll also provide viewers a glimpse into new worlds and, according to Cameron, the best parts of the entire story arc.
“In the early films, there are very negative human examples and very positive Na’vi examples,” Cameron told 20 Minutes. “In Avatar 3, we will do the opposite. We will also explore new worlds while continuing the story of the main characters. I can say that the last parts will be the best. The others were an introduction, a way to set the table before serving the meal.”
Avatar 3 has already finished filming, as it was shot concurrently with The Way of Water and is due in theaters on December 20, 2024. If all goes according to Cameron’s grand plan and we make it to Avatar 5, the action will, at least partially, come to Earth. Yet before that happens (and one can only imagine what the Na’vi might think of, say, Times Square or the Taj Mahal), we’ll get a chance to see what an evil Na’vi tribe is like.
Avatar: The Way of Water is in theaters now.
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Let’s take a moment to listen to the way the cast and director Gerard Johnstone describe the titular robot toy in M3GAN. “Best friend,” says star Violet McGraw. “Homeschool teacher,” describes Johnstone. “The ideal companion,” says star Allison Williams. Producer James Wan says, “she has so much personality.” Co-star Jen Van Epps enthuses, “She’s just this effervescent beaming ray of light.” And then, after a beat, Epps adds, “until she goes batsh*t crazy.”
M3GAN is a robot built by Gemma (Williams), a brilliant robotics engineer working at a toy company. Gemma designed the toy robot specifically to help her recently orphaned niece, Cady (McGraw), from feeling lonely. In a previous trailer, Gemma showed Cady how to press on the robot’s palm to “pair with her,” then instructed the state-of-the-art robot companion to “protect Cady from harm, both physical and emotional.” Needless to say, the robot takes this commandseriously, to the horror of all those who she feels are a threat to Cady. Whether it’s with a nail gun, a hammer, or her own freakish strength, MEGAN starts “protecting” Cady with gruesome gusto.
The script comes from Akela Cooper, with a story from horror maestro James Wan, who produces alongside his fellow horror maestros Jason Blum, Michael Clear, and Couper Samuelson. M3GAN can’t help but evoke that other homicidal toy, Chucky, yet where that creepy little murderer was the result of a human being transferring his soul into a doll, M3GAN is essentially a tale of artificial intelligence gone berserk.
M3GAN also stars Ronny Chieng (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Brian Jordan Alvarez (Will & Grace), Lori Dungey (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, extended edition) and Stephane Garneau-Monten (Straight Forward).
Check out the new featurette below. M3GAN hits theaters on January 6:
For more on Universal Pictures and Focus Features projects, check out these stories:
“Mommy loves you to death.” This is the hard-to-beat tagline for writer/director Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, a return to the horror franchise started by Sam Raimi. A new teaser for Cronin’s film reveals a little girl named Kassie (Nell Fisher) tip-toeing to the front door in the middle of the night. Who does she spy on the other side through the peephole? Her own mother, splattered in blood, looking quite unwell. “You don’t look so good, mom,” Kassie says. Yeah, kiddo, it might be time to consider running away.
Evil Dead Rise stars Lilly Sullivan (Barksins, I Met A Girl) as Beth and Alyssa Sutherland (The Mist, Vikings) as Ellie, two estranged sisters who reunite, along with Ellie’s three children, in Los Angeles. Unfortunately for them, when they find a sinister book in the basement, all hell breaks loose. The sisters and the kids find themselves thrust into the middle of a living nightmare—demons have risen and are on the loose, and the horror (and the comedy) that made the original Evil Dead, and Raimi’s follow-up, Evil Dead 2, so beloved will be unleashed.
Sam Raimi returns as executive producer, along with original Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell.
Check out the teaser below. Evil Dead Rise hits theaters on April 21:
Here’s the synopsis for Evil Dead Rise:
New Line Cinema and Renaissance Pictures present a return to the iconic horror franchise, Evil Dead Rise, from writer/director Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground). The movie stars Lily Sullivan (I Met a Girl, Barkskins), Alyssa Sutherland (The Mist, Vikings), Morgan Davies (Storm Boy, The End), Gabrielle Echols (Reminiscence) and introducing Nell Fisher (Northspur).
Moving the action out of the woods and into the city, “Evil Dead Rise” tells a twisted tale of two estranged sisters, played by Sutherland and Sullivan, whose reunion is cut short by the rise of flesh-possessing demons, thrusting them into a primal battle for survival as they face the most nightmarish version of family imaginable.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: A scene from New Line Cinema’s horror film “EVIL DEAD RISE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
For all you Marvel fans, you might have missed this announcement over the holidays, and it’s a big one—there’s a Stan Lee documentary coming to Disney+ in 2023. Marvel revealed the news on what would have been Lee’s 100th birthday on December 28. Stan Lee will explore the legendary comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer’s life and legacy, which includes some of the most iconic characters of all time. Just think about the superheroes Lee co-created; Spider-Man, Black Panther, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Thor, Wanda Maximoff, Black Widow, and more.
Lee’s work for Marvel began before Marvel was even its name—he began at Timely Comics, Marvel’s predecessor, in 1939, and eventually was the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics in the 1960s and the publisher in 1972. By the time the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a box office juggernaut, Stan Lee was the face, and the heart, of Marvel. His cameos in a slew of MCU films helped introduce him to a legion of younger fans who were meeting Iron Man, Thor, and the rest for the first time on the big screen rather than in the pages of a comic book.
Stan Lee is slated to stream on Disney+ in 2023. Check out the teaser below:
For more on all things Marvel Studios, check out these stories:
Featured image: UNIVERSAL CITY, CA – AUGUST 13: Creator Stan Lee (L) poses with Spider-Man during the Spider-Man 40th Birthday celebration at Universal Studios on August 13, 2002 in Universal City, California. (Photo by Michel Boutefeu/Getty Images)
If you’ve ever worked in corporate America, then perhaps you’ve been subject to one of the more unpleasant aspects of corporate governance; when a consultant is hired to “improve the business.” What “improve the business” often means is firing people after putting them through a review process, a dynamic that was explored, to hilarious effect, in Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space. (A cheerful colleague mock-frowning at another and saying, “Looks like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays” was one of Office Space‘s more depressingly accurate depictions of cubicle life.) In the new Amazon Prime series The Consultant, however, the lopsided power dynamic between hired corporate consultant and employee will be explored through a much darker lens, and who better to play the hired hatchet man than Christoph Waltz, one of the best in the business at depicting a wicked man with an equally wicked wit.
The first teaser for The Consultant reveals a bite-sized glimpse at Waltz as Regus Patoff, the man tasked with turning around the App-based gaming company CompWare. Patoff will put the CompWare employees through the wringer, and, as the series’ synopsis reveals and the teaser hints at, some of them might not make it through their evaluations alive.
The Consultant comes from creator/showrunner/executive producer Tony Basgallop, with a slew of excellent directors helming the series 8 episodes, including the horror maestro Karyn Kusama and WandaVision director Matt Shakman. Joining Waltz in the cast are Brittany O’Grady, Aimee Carrero, and Nat Wolff.
Check out the teaser below. The Consultant arrives on Prime Video on February 24.
For more on Amazon Prime Video, check out these stories:
She designed Paul Thomas Anderson’s flashback to 1970s-era L.A. in Licorice Pizza and shaped the fifties look inhabited by Marilyn Monroe in Blonde. Now, production designer Florencia Martin takes viewers back to 1920s Hollywood in Oscar-winning writer/director Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, which immerses Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy and Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad in the gloriously decadent early days of silent film. Chazelle, a stickler for authenticity, shot at Old Hollywood locations, including Busby Berkeley’s former home, and worked with Martin and her team to construct an old-time “Poverty Row” movie studio in the middle of the desert using lumber hammered together with nails because the Phillips screw had not yet been invented.
“Babylon‘s a love letter to filmmakers,” says Martin. “You see the craft and feel the spirit of people who just wanted to create something.” Speaking from her Los Angeles home alongside a vintage 1949 movie poster advertising James Cagney in White Heat, Martin talks to The Credits about the art of the “jewel box” movie backdrop, vintage cameras, and the “castle in the sky” featured in Babylon‘s outrageous party sequence.
Judging from your White Heat poster, you’re into Hollywood history.Did Damien have you study old movies so you could wrap your head around the vibe from that era?
We looked at a lot of silent-era movies and also relied on the archives at Paramount Studios to see how old movie sets operated. The early Poverty Row studios were built right on the dirt. There’s this beautiful photo of Charlie Chaplin sitting in a chair with an umbrella surrounded by dusty film equipment, and all you see is dirt and orange groves behind him. Damien wanted audiences to feel immersed in what early Hollywood productions really looked like.
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures. Photo credit: Scott Garfield
Margot Robbie’s character Nellie shows up for her first day of shooting at the fictional Kinoscope Studios, a noisy, chaotic environment where several movies are being shot simultaneously. What were you aiming to convey there?
We wanted to capture this ragtag kaleidoscope of sets and the kinetic cacophony that was happening. Because they weren’t recording sounds, silent filmmakers used live music to set the tempo for the camera moves and the actors. At the same time, we look over the hills at a Hollywood movie ranch where they’re staging this huge MGM battlefield epic starring Brad Pitt’s character Jack. You see cameras getting trampled on by horses and the mayhem of picture cars crashing into the towers. I remember standing at the top of a hill with our DP Linus Sandgren months before production started, looking out at this amazing ranch, seeing where the sun was going to land, and saying, “This is the spot.”
Director of Photography Linus Sandgren and Olivia Hamilton as Ruth Adler on the set of Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Not unlike filmmakers from the twenties, you constructed your own “Poverty Row” studio in the desert outside of L.A.?
Yes. We were driving around looking for a location for the battlefield when we saw some old barns on the side of the road. “Pull over; let’s go.” We went up and over a hill and saw this amazing stretch of land on a ranch surrounded by mountains and orange groves reminiscent of what we’d seen in those early Hollywood photographs. As a team, we decided this is where we’re going to build Kinoscope from the ground up.
The construction of this Poverty Row studio took about six weeks. How did you pull it off?
I had an amazing construction coordinator, Mike Diersing, and more than 160 craftsmen, art directors, set designers, illustrators, and graphic designers — everyone came together. We used digital models and constructed our road coming in, we put in light poles and our main front gate, which was inspired by Dorothea Lange’s [Depression-era] photos. We wanted people to build dreams in the most inhospitable, barren locations. You don’t think of that [environment] going hand in hand with what Damien called our little jewel boxes.
These “jewel boxes” being the movie set backdrops lined up in a row, one after another?
That’s right. We painted backdrops for a jungle warrior scene, a kitchen on fire scene inspired by Fatty Arbuckle’s film The Cook, and an “oriental” backdrop shot against a pink backdrop. Then we go into the Gold Rush western bar for Nellie’s scene, with snow made from asbestos, which was true to the times. It was funny to show these big bags of asbestos being lugged over the shoulders of these crew members and then used to put out the fire for the kitchen scene.
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy and Li Jun Li plays Lady Fay Zhu in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Babylon later transitions to the early days of talkies. It’s fascinating to see this clunky first-generation technology being used in situations where everybody seems to be making it up as they go. What was involved in replicating the process for making old-time talkies?
We did a lot of research to depict that early technology, which included this very rag-tag camera box. When talkies came along, cameras had gone from being hand-cranked to being motorized.
And these motorized cameras made noise that could be picked up by the microphones, right?
Yeah, they hadn’t yet gotten to the idea of covering the camera, so instead, they covered the operator and the entire camera in a box.
Were you able to secure vintage equipment from the period?
Oh my gosh, yes. Our set decorator Anthony Carlino and our prop master Gay Perello worked very closely with this local prop shop called History For Hire. They have a collection of old cameras that were re-furbished, so in the film, when you see close-ups of the 2709 camera, that’s from the Prop Shop. It felt great to get that layer of authenticity happening in real-time with cameras and microphones that were actually used in the twenties.
P.J. Byrne plays Max (Ruth’s AD) and Olivia Hamilton plays Ruth Adler in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Where did you shoot those early talkies?
They were all shot at Paramount [Pictures] Studios. We prepped out of the Clara Bow building [named after the silent film star]. Our wonderful costume designer Mary Zophers prepped out of the Edith Head building [named after the eight-time Oscar-winning costume designer]. So much history there! We transformed three soundstages into the twenties, which meant quilting over the modern signage and the bright yellow safety equipment.
Babylon opens with a bang, taking the audience inside the mansion of movie mogul Don Wallach, who’s hosting a huge, raucous party. How did you put together that space?
That opening sequence is stitched together from eight different locations and built settings. We’d found an image of Beverly Hills in 1926, which shows this barren road with one palm tree and a little Ford Model T. We go through three roads taking you to Don Wallach’s castle in the sky because we wanted to show the audience what it looked like to be driving through Bel Air and the Hollywood Hills toward these mansions. Wallach decided to build a Gothic castle reminiscent of the mansions built by power players like Hearst and [oil tycoon Edward L.] Doheny. His mansion was shot at a castle built in 1926 by the real estate developer of Hancock Park, an hour away from Los Angeles. We built an extension in front of the garage to serve as the entrance to the ballroom.
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
And that ballroom itself, where the crowd of coked-up revelers watches Margot Robbie do her crazy dance?
We found that at the Ace Theatre in downtown L.A. built in the 1920s by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks to showcase their films. It’s just dripping with Hollywood history and detail. The theater offered us the [sense of] compression that Damien wanted, to make the crowd feel shoulder to shoulder and wild. We had to transform this theater space into a ballroom, so my team built custom gothic doors to plug the entrances, we put in parquet flooring, and we built the bandstand. A lot of work went into restructuring this location to make it feel like an interior home.
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Before working on Babylon, you re-created various chapters of Southern California history for Blonde and Licorice Pizza. As somebody who grew up in Los Angeles, how have these film projects impacted the way you see this city?
The city’s always changing and transforming. In Babylon, we depicted Chinatown, which was replaced four years later by Union Station, and then you have the formation of the studio system that allowed for the development of all these apartments in Blonde that you see Marilyn Monroe living in as she moved around the city. With Licorice Pizza, it’s about the development of the suburbs in the San Fernando Valley. In L.A., you have old movie palaces and amazing Googie-style diners being torn down for something new, but we don’t really know our own history that well. With Babylon, it was an honor to get to preserve some of that history on film.
When the shortlist for the 2023 Oscars was announced, composer Chanda Dancy was included for her work on the film Devotion. If she is nominated, she’ll make history as the first Black female composer to be nominated for an Academy Award. Dancy brings that winning streak into 2023 with her score for the new film Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, directed by Kasi Lemmons and starring Naomi Ackie as Houston.
The film celebrates the rise of one of the greatest female pop vocalists of all time, showing both Houston’s public persona as the performer fans around the world fell in love with and the private woman who struggled with her identity, substance abuse, and her place in the world. The composer’s lush orchestral score is based on two distinct themes that represent the public and private Whitney.
In a chat with The Credits, Dancy talks about those themes, as well as her experience working with Kasi Lemmons. She also shares her own memories of hearing Whitney Houston for the first time.
Chanda Dancy. Photo by Sven Doornkaat.
What was your starting point when you began work on a film about one of the most iconic, talented stars of all time?
My view of Whitney has always been just the epitome of glamour. In my head, I imagined her cascading down staircases dripping in diamonds and with the voice of an angel. So when approaching the score, I really had a lot of that in mind, how glamorous and amazing she was. Kasi and I talked a lot about that. Whitney went through so much during her time on Earth. Fame wasn’t always kind to her, but that’s not why we fell in love with her. We didn’t fall in love with her because of the gossip, it was the spark, the voice, the glamour, that vision of the singing princess. With the score, there were two main things that we wanted to do. We wanted to rekindle for the film’s audience that glamour and the love her fans had for her, as well as respectfully address some of her darker moments.
Do you have specific memories from your own upbringing that you could call upon? Do you remember the first time you ever heard her?
Definitely. It was one of those moments you never forget. It was actually the very first time I heard her version of “I Will Always Love You”. I vividly remember I was in middle school, and we were having a field day, the kind of thing where we weren’t in class but outside doing athletics. Then we had a little party, and that was the first time we were allowed to listen to the radio on the school campus. It was sanctioned by the teachers. We were listening to our favorite radio station, and “I Will Always Love You” came on. That was the very first time I heard it. I remember in the very beginning being perplexed because it started a capella. This is my first time just really experiencing that feeling like, “Oh, she’s just singing by herself.” And then it just swells. And I’m like, “Oh, my God, this is the best song ever.”
Can you talk a little bit more about Kasi Lemmons bringing you into the project?
Kasi and I met through Zoom, where I remember we giggled and walked down nostalgia lane. I was already a huge fan of hers ever since Eve’s Bayou, so this was another “Oh, my gosh!” moment. I was hired on the spot. Essentially, Kasi said, “I’m not gonna listen to any other composers.” Our collaboration was perfect from the very beginning. The three of us sat down via Zoom; me, Kasi, and Daysha Broadway, the editor. We talked about how much Whitney meant to us and how important our roles are on this project in paying respect to not only her but also her family and the people who are still around. It’s so easy to lose sight of that, as if she was just a Greek goddess on Mount Olympus, and this was all a long time ago and nobody’s affected, but there are very real people who will be affected by what we do in this film, so it was important to us to rekindle the love people had for Whitney and tell her story without going into TMZ territory.
The score is anchored by two main themes, the genius theme and the waltz theme. How did they take shape?
The genius theme actually came out very quickly. What you hear in theaters is the first version. It didn’t take as much effort, relatively speaking. That’s obviously because I’ve always been such a fan. Coming from that standpoint, the genius theme, which represents Whitney’s onstage life, her glamour, and how we felt as fans towards her, came about very quickly. With the waltz theme, Kasi actually knew Whitney and knows her family members, so she had much better insight into how it should be. The waltz theme represents Whitney’s private life and all of its twists and turns. so had to be a bit more nuanced. It was a complicated waltz melody, and it was important that it not be too dark. It’s okay to have a little touch of maybe the angst that Whitney went through but not beat us over the head with it. It definitely did evolve to the version you hear now.
The score, on the whole, is very emotional. How did you temper the various elements not to become overly sentimental?
I have a really great example of that. This whole score is an orchestral score, and how you have the actual musicians perform on their instruments will completely change the intensity. They could play the exact notes written on the page but slightly softer, and suddenly the cue becomes not as overwhelming as if they just played the same notes a little louder. In one scene in particular, Whitney is talking with the bartender, and he’s saying, “You’re the greatest.” She has this memory of being on stage, and then you hear the genius theme on a solo piano first, in this memory flashback of her onstage, and then it turns because Whitney is nervous about actually being able to pull off performing for Clive and all these people again at Clive’s party. She hears the photographers and sees the flashes and all these celebs, and everyone has all these expectations, and she’s not sure she can do it. At that point in the cue, the orchestra comes in, and it was the exact same notes that the cue was written in, but I told the orchestra to play with their mutes on. There’s a mute that you can put on stringed instruments that make their sound softer, so it’s not overwhelming. It’s more subdued. The difference between having the orchestra playing normally and playing with those mutes was stunning. I remember Kasi was very cognizant of this cue in particular, saying, “It can’t be too much, or it’ll go into schmaltzy territory. We really don’t want that.” The first take of the cue was probably on the edge of a little too much, and then I told the orchestra to put on their mutes, and Kasi’s face, when we recorded with the mutes, said it all. It was like, “Yes. That’s it!” So those are the types of things that we, as orchestral composers, have to constantly consider.
Is there a way this film has had a lasting effect on you?
I wouldn’t say it has changed me as a composer, but it has helped me as a human by making me even more sensitive to what we do to affect one another. As I said, there’s a difference when you’re writing music for an icon whose family and everyone is still around, and still very much invested in her image, and still very much grieving. Grief is complicated, and you must be respectful. Yes, I honor Whitney, and I hope she’s smiling down from heaven, but also, there are people who are here and miss her and love her so much. They must feel loved and respected as well. That is the big thing that I can take away from this project.
Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is playing now in theaters nationwide.
When George Jones and Tammy Wynette sang, the nation listened. The chart-topping talents performed some of the most memorable songs in country music history and their love story rivaled any of their lyrics. Together, they shaped the industry amid the rise of television and against the backdrop of a rapidly changing American landscape. Showtime’s limited series George & Tammy, created by Abe Sylvia, captures the tumult and triumph of their decades in the spotlight.
Costume designer Mitchell Travers threaded the needle between life and legacy as the characters established a show business style and took their work home with them.
“George (Michael Shannon) is sort of going back to his roots and Tammy (Jessica Chastain) is on the rise,” Travers described. “So, you get to really understand that it is a show, and it is a performance from the songs to the clothing to the stage. Everything was designed for audience consumption, but then you get these really great moments of Tammy at a piano in a tank top, and it’s really human and humble and country. There’s something really wonderful about that for me that you get both sides of these very public figures.”
Opposing trajectories tug at the fray between the two from the very beginning of their relationship. Jones was well established in his career when he fastened on to Wynette’s talent, but explosive stardom lay ahead for her. An infusion of domesticity gives the series a raw glimpse into their reality.
“We have so many great instances of him just on the lawnmower, and it’s a great contrast between this man we’ve gotten to meet in rhinestones to a man in an old hunting jacket and a tee shirt on a lawnmower,” Travers noted. “For Tammy, you get to see the reverse where she starts from humble beginnings and just skyrockets to be one of the biggest names, not only in country music, but she had a foray into dance music in the 90s as well. There’s a real creation of a star that you get to experience with Tammy and the unraveling of a star with George in parallel.”
Michael Shannon as George Jones in GEORGE & TAMMY. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
Jones was an early pioneer of the infamous Nudie’s suits that came to define Nashville fashion in his time. The custom western wear played with traditional cowboy silhouettes drenched in glitzy and audacious patterns. The flashy designs were perfect for creating a dreamy aura around the larger-than-life performers who wore them.
Michael Shannon as George Jones in GEORGE & TAMMY, ìWeíre Gonna Hold Onî. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
“George’s style, I can’t believe it’s not more of a touchstone for country artists now because you look back and see some of the things that George was doing in the late 60s and the early 70s, and it was super forward,” Travers noted. “He was doing these incredibly fashionable things at the time.”
The couple played a major role in glamorizing country music as Nashville fanned out from radio to television screens. Delivering an experience that was as vivid in viewers’ living rooms as it was in person required memorable performance attire.
“Nudie famously started adding rhinestones to his suits so that when these performers would come out on stage, everyone felt like they got to see these people live, and there was a genuine star quality to country performance,” Travers described. “That’s where the idea for these Nudie suits comes from was to try to make sure that everybody in the audience got to see them and experience them in real life. I think that the television only brought that feeling closer where you could see the muscles in their neck twitch as they sang. It felt like you were right there with them.”
Michael Shannon is George Jones and Jessica Chastain is Tammy Wynette. Courtesy Showtime Networks.
Wynette’s costumes grew and evolved as her fame increased and fashion trends became bigger and bolder. “With that came bigger collars, bigger jewelry, bigger rhinestones,” Travers said. “Tammy’s sleeves get huge at a certain point in history, or the straps on some of her dresses or bows. In the beginning, they were playing for the back row of the house, but over the course of their careers, I think they started to learn how to play for the camera, which was a really important part of their fame.”
Jessica Chastain as Tammy Wynette in GEORGE & TAMMY, “The Grand Tour”. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
Jones and Wynette not only reached the highest levels of country music but also enjoyed impressive longevity. They navigated major cultural shifts from the 1960s to the 1990s while maintaining a devoted fan base and reaching new listeners. That opened Travers to a huge span of retro looks that appear on the show.
“How much plaid can you put on camera before you’re fatigued? It’s a balance,” Travers laughed. “Taking these individuals and a couple through all these decades was great fun because each decade offers you something to play with. The injection of jewelry and turquoise and silver comes up in the mid-70s, then as you start to make room for the 80s when big business starts to come in and women are working. There’s just so much history that you want to put in the show to help people feel like they’re back there. Or for people who weren’t alive then, you want to give them everything that was happening. All the history, all the trends. But we serve little snapshots of each year. It’s hard not to put everything in and just distill it to its essence in every scene.”
Both romantic and professional partners, Jones and Wynette were legendary solo acts but often appeared together – even after ending their marriage. The pair put detailed consideration into their image. That unity was often expressed through their costuming, which Travers used throughout the series to signal their ever-changing dynamic.
“There were times when they would match their costumes perfectly to one another,” Travers said. “I loved to imagine the conversations they had on a tour bus or waiting for a flight where they were planning their outfits together. I really think that one of George’s love languages was matching. I think it was his way of identity and partnership. For me, it was great fun to design these matching ensembles for the two of them when things were really good. And then when things weren’t so good, try to visually pull them apart and create some distance just with the clothes alone.”
Travers’ team built many of the costumes, but several of the pieces were truly vintage. In their search, the costume team even made a historic discovery. One vintage dealer that Travers collaborated with exclusively sources sequined and beaded gowns – attributes that would describe much of Wynette’s attire.
“She and I were working together to source items for the musical performances, and she discovered the exact gown from the ‘Tammy’s Touch’ album released in April 1970,” Travers recalled. “Jessica and I had a marathon first fitting, as she has so many costumes in the series. I, of course, pulled out Tammy’s gown to show her, and she had to try it on. I had a ‘Country Greats’ playlist going in the fitting, and just as we finished zipping up the dress, Stand By Your Man came on shuffle, and we all got goosebumps!”
After the show wrapped, Travers returned the dress to its rightful heir – Jones and Wynette’s daughter, Georgette Jones. “I’m certainly not going to hold onto that,” he insisted. “It’s not mine to keep, but I just felt like the universe was on our side as we were hunting at all these incredible vintage resources that we found some of this stuff that was as authentic as it gets.”
Travers described the wardrobe he assembled as “a little Tammy Wynette department store.” He and Chastain would wander the aisles gathering inspiration for the character.
“With each layer that we put on, a little more Tammy comes up,” Travers observed. “And every time we try something new, we learn a little bit about what we want this character to be. Obviously, there’s a ton of reference that we can lean on, but it’s really important that you help the actor find their portrayal of it.”
New episodes of George & Tammy are available to stream every Friday on the Showtime app.
For more on George & Tammy, check out this interview with series creator Abe Sylvia:
Featured image: (L-R): Jessica Chastain as Tammy Wynette and Michael Shannon as George Jones in GEORGE & TAMMY, “The Grand Tour”. Photo credit: Dana Hawley/Courtesy of SHOWTIME.
Daring adventures, illuminating discoveries, and unbelievable wonders are hallmarks of James Cameron’s blockbuster films. In trademark fashion, Avatar: The Way of Wateris a technological feat that developed new filmmaking tools in production. Yet, costume designer Deborah L. Scott (Titanic, Back to the Future, Avatar, E.T.) said that is all secondary to Cameron’s driving force. “Jim doesn’t like sci-fi that much,” she noted. “You can see it even in Aliens. He comes back to what’s plausible. What human things will always be there.”
It’s that human touch that gives the largely CGI film its credibility, which led Scott and her team to create over 2,000 garments – even though a tiny fraction of practical creations are seen on screen. “We actually made, in The Way of Water and further into Avatar 3, we’ve made every single costume,” Scott revealed. “Every costume, every prop, every piece of jewelry. I did all the hair designs, the tattooing—all that. Everything was sort of under the umbrella of the costume department.”
Pandora is a moon filled with wonder and mystery. Nowhere on Earth could stand in for the fantastical lunar world, which led to a massive motion-capture undertaking. Artists transformed the actors’ performances into the Na’vi and their costumes were drawn digitally in place of the gray motion capture suits. Scott’s work not only established the look of each character but also helped the actors define their movements for their final performance.
“You are doing reference costumes for set work because performance capture on set, you can’t occlude the markers on the body,” Scott noted. “It was important to Jim to give the actors a sense of time and place with their character. The costumes we made all to human scale for the purpose of putting them on people when needed. So that when an actor needed to know how it would be to dance around with that piece on, we put the piece on and let them dance around and shot a lot of reference for the digital people.”
Testing became a critical component of developing the film. Although the Na’vi home world is filled with mythical creatures and landscapes, departing too far from reality could prove to be a distraction. That meant grounding the physics of Pandora in familiar science. Fabrics, beads, and other materials needed to move in a believable way.
“Let’s do a proof of concept and build a costume maybe not as complex or as expensive as the real thing but something we can put in the water. See how it works. See if the fronds flow in the right way,” Scott explained.
That information could be used to program the way the costume functioned in the final scenes. The computers had to be taught how to process each piece. “Their computers don’t understand that costume because they have no reference for it,” Scott observed. “You can’t say, ‘We know in our program how a t-shirt works.’ This is like, ‘What is that?’ So the computer has to be fed – the simulators and the animators have to be fed a certain amount of information. That’s why the samples were even more important.”
The costume department’s role was so expansive that it served as inspiration across all areas. Because their work was being produced in a tactile way, other departments could study the fabrics, textures, and designs and be inspired for their own contributions.
“For the most part, my department was the one that created all the samples. So the weaving techniques, the colors, and things like that would inform the production design. Especially Dylan [Cole], who did the Pandoran world. He could come through and say, ‘Oh, this is what you’re up to. Oh, that’s an interesting weaving technique,’” Scott recalled. “That’s not necessarily in their wheelhouse. That’s costuming, and they could extract what we were doing and use us too. It was pretty hand in hand.”
Although a massive undertaking, Scott insisted that the comprehensive approach to designing beyond the characters’ clothing felt natural. “Because of the performance capture and because you’re working in this virtual world, ultimately, the door to costume design gets wider, bigger, and we can just jump in and take our place there. When I was designing characters, it was natural to design them head to toe. It was natural to put the hair in so that you’re establishing the way these people look.”
The clans of Pandora have incredible bonds with nature. Their native plants and animals provide the resources to handmake their garments. Scott noted that an even stronger tie was established in The Way of Water to reflect how they might obtain the elements of their attire.
“They draw from their environment so they’re drawing from different materials,” Scott noted. “Where you would use a snake in the forest, you’re going to use a sea snake in the ocean. You use animals. We really incorporated birds this time. We used feathers in the first one, but it was never explained. So Jim kept putting birds in shots. Like yes, especially on the ocean, we have birds. There are water birds. So there’s always a touchstone to reality.”
Every detail was researched to be as authentic as possible. Being a warm weather climate, Scott and Cameron focused on the crafting techniques of the indigenous cultures of Oceania as a guide. They then tested various elements of the costumes to be sure that they would be durable and useful as intended.
“I had an incredible team, mostly at Wētā workshop in New Zealand. These are people who really still value handicrafts. They were just constantly making samples. ‘How about this kind of knot? How about this braid? How about this color? How about this material?’ So we had all this research time to develop samples,” Scott said. “At the same time, sculpting things, carving things. ‘Is this shell too soft to carve? Is this shell going to break if you carve it?’”
Some of the film’s more futuristic pieces also tapped into the latest technology. Items like face masks could be modeled in a computer, then built, molded, and cast. Scott noted that 3D printing was “a wonderful tool, but we relied on our hands.” In the end, techniques like weaving, embroidering, beading, and braiding that Scott has mastered throughout her career proved to be the most valuable.
“As a costume designer, there was new technology being developed as we were doing it in real-time,” she noted. “I’m not used to working on a computer. We’re kind of hands-on people. So, that was different. What was absolutely the same is just trying to design costumes for characters. That’s pretty much it. Across the board, that’s always the same. These characters just happen to live on a moon.”
Avatar: The Way of Water is playing in theaters nationwide now.
For more on Avatar: The Way of Water, check out these stories:
Both 2018’s Black Panther and this year’s Wakanda Forever have hugely impacted popular culture, not least by expanding the acceptance and expression of Afro-Futurism in everything from fashion and hairstyles to architecture. Both production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth E. Carter won Oscars for their work on the first film and are in the running for a return to the podium with Wakanda Forever.
For Black Panther, hair department head Camille Friend found ways to incorporate elements of African tribal culture and expanded those influences in Wakanda Forever. She used the same trial and error and inventive thinking required to create looks that could be worn over the entire production or in challenging environments, like those underwater sequences in Talokan. How could the Mayan-inspired Talokani hairstyles look consistent when the cast members wearing them were submerged in water for over 12 hours?
In a chat with The Credits, Friend takes us through the problem-solving required to get those gorgeous looks in Wakanda Forever. She also considers the lasting effects her designs have had on pop culture and how she is helping Hollywood become more inclusive as the founder of Hair Scholars, which mentors and educates professional hair stylists about working in film and TV.
The hair design in Wakanda Forever was partly based on research into Senegalese warriors, the Zulu tribe, and the Maasai people. What are some of the direct results of that research that viewers can see expressed as part of the specific characters or specific scenes in the film?
The Jabari are definitely inspired by Senegalese warriors. Even from the first one, you know, with Winston Duke, we really talked a lot about how the Jabari were going to look, everything from the angles of the cuts to the lines in the head, even the white paint. All of that really comes from Senegalese warriors. Then you have the Himba tribe, where you have the beautiful clay look on the tribal elders. I remember on the first one, Ryan said he really wanted to do a clay wig. I thought it would be easy. It was not so easy.
Yes! We had weeks of trial and error. After a while, I just had to pray to God for the answer, and actually, the answer was going to Home Depot. We ended up making a clay wig from different substances that would hold up and last during filming. This time, we got the clay wig down. We could do a clay wig in two days, whereas it used to take us a week. So we have evolved. It’s all basically plaster of Paris. I’ll tell you the steps. We basically take a braid wig, and then we put the plaster on top of it, and we smooth it with gloves and a little water. We let that dry, and then we go in and paint it. That’s what stays and lasts forever. We’ve got it down to a science. I’m very happy about that one.
Were there any elements pulled from history for the scenes of mourning and memorial for T’Challa?
Definitely, I’ll tell you that backstory. The reason why Shuri and Ramonda’s hair ended up short is Ryan knew that in West African culture, when somebody is in mourning, they cut all their hair off. When we go into the story, it’s the year after T’Challa’s death, so how would their hair look a year later? That’s where my design began for those characters in Wakanda Forever.
How did you design the underwater sequences in Talokan? That had to be a challenge.
I’m going to say I have a whole different respect for water. In a lot of movies, you shoot them dry for wet. The hair is really dry, but we’re putting a little spritz on them. In Wakanda Forever, it was a whole different ballgame. When you have people thoroughly submerged in water for 12 hours a day, how will you make this happen? Plus, we could not put any product in the hair because hair product in water makes it cloudy. So how are we going to make this hair stay with no product in it? We had to figure it out, and again, it was through a lot of trial and error. What glues work? What glues don’t? We ended up using a lot of silicone glue because they hold up under water and they’re more of a flexible glue. We took spirit gum, broke it down with alcohol, and made it really thin. Then we made it into a hairspray that we would spray on all the pieces and let them dry. We figured out how to get it thin enough so that it wouldn’t change the color of the hair. Then we sprayed all the pieces with the glue hairspray that we’d made, and that’s how all the hair would stay up while in the water for 12 hours a day.
Can you talk about how both Black Panther and Wakanda Forever have had an influence in the real world in terms of access and expansion of hair products and designs for Black hair?
After the first one, a writer friend called and told us we made Black hair beautiful. After Black Panther, there have been so many more movies that have showcased natural hair. I’m so proud that we could have an impact in starting that movement. I have people who hit me up on Instagram and tell me, “My daughter was so happy to see somebody that looks like her onscreen.” They saw somebody whose hair texture was the same. Also, 3C or 4A, B, or C textures were very hard to find on the first one. We had to make it. We had to perm it. It was a lot of work that we had to do. On this one, every manufacturer has that now. I think culturally, that’s what’s changed. Even with products, I was doing some research recently and found over 40 Black-owned, female-owned haircare companies. That’s a beautiful thing to have that many in the marketplace.
It’s the whole spectrum of natural hair, both on the screen and off, being celebrated.
I think there’s a huge difference. And we have things like the C.R.O.W.N. Act, which has legalized wearing your hair naturally. You can wear your hair in any style that you want and still be in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lawyer, doctor, or a short-order cook; you have the right to wear your hair naturally, how it grows out of your head. The younger generation will grow up with that, without any shame about their hair. It just gives us such better body positivity and gives us so much more of a beautiful image and confirmation that Black hair is beautiful.
And to further push the needle forward in Hollywood, you founded Hair Scholars, which has its own website and is having a big impact on inclusivity in the business.
It’s one of my greatest passions. I’m a firm believer in equity and inclusion. I used to work for Warner Brothers, and that’s what I did for them. It’s about education. Education is freeing for people. What I love to teach is how to be in the business, how to treat it as a business, how to make your deals, and how to be a department head because that’s definitely what people are looking for, is equity in the business. This is how you put on a wig. This is how you do textured hair. So all those things, together, will make a better community. At this point, a lot of producers call me on movies that I don’t even do, and I help people crew up because I know the people in LA, New York, London, and Atlanta; I know all the people and what their skill sets are. I’m perfectly happy to do that. Whether you’re white, Black, Native American, Asian, or Filipino, there’s absolutely no excuse why a performer sits in the chair and you, as a professional hair artist, makeup artist, or barber, cannot do their hair. That is unacceptable in 2022 and 2023 and going forward. Every performer has a right to walk into the trailer and sit down in the chair and be taken care of and feel beautiful.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is currently in theaters nationwide.
For more on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, check out these stories:
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
The opening sequence to Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (in theaters today) hits you like one of the many lines of powder its characters will ingest. It’s eye-opening, choreographed chaos, leaving you with an intensely euphoric feeling – quite fitting for a story that revisits Hollywood’s infancy of the 1920s and ‘30s when La La Land was a sandbox of drugs, sex, and all night partying.
It’s here we meet Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a low-level “yes man” with aspirations to make it in the biz, putting together the finishing touches on an elephant-sized bash for the who’s who, including silent movie star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a party-crasher looking to make a name for herself on the silver screen. Bedlam arrives at nightfall when tux-clad half-naked men, topless women, and hundreds of drunkards and coke fiends descend on the mansion of studio boss Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), drinking and snorting anything and everything until sunrise. The mash-up has serious FOMO vibes and is glued together by the music from a live orchestra playing in the ballroom. That orchestra is led by trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), and galvanizing the moment is a tantalizing dance by Nellie, which catches the eye of a producer who needs to replace an actress who happened to die of a drug overdose in a nearby room. It’s her chance at stardom.
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Beautifully shot on anamorphic 35mm push-processed film by cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land, First Man) and exquisitely alluring production design from Florencia Martin (Licorice Pizza), the visual tapestry of Babylon invites you into the world with open arms, though it’s the sonic creativity that subliminally keeps you moving to the beat of Chazelle’s narrative drum.
“His films are very motivated by music,” says production sound mixer Steven Morrow (La La Land). “There’s a lot of discussion in preproduction about certain music hits and cues as well as the feel he [Chazelle] wants. We work heavily with the music department to make sure Damien has all the tools he needs.” Composer Justin Hurwitz returns for his fourth film with the director, and his up-tempo score helps drive the opulent soundscape.
“Damien wanted the sound to be visceral and real, to be a little larger than life,” says the multi-hyphenated supervising sound editor Ai-Ling Lee (La La Land, First Man), who collaborated alongside the likes of supervising sound editor Mildred Iatrou (La La Land, First Man) and re-recording mixer Andy Nelson (La La Land). “Because there’s a lot of action in the frame, he wanted the sound to be as immersive, in a sense, as much as the visuals.”
In filming the epic party, production sound fitted each actor with a wireless transmitter and lavalier to record their dialog. Boom operator Craig Dollinger placed an additional microphone overhead when viable, though the set walls of the Wallach location were lined with mirrors, limiting opportunities. The bigger hurdle for sound though was finding a solution to the music from the orchestra, so it didn’t trample on the dialog throughout the scene. Morrow decided to give each band member an earwig that the music would be played through, allowing them to mimic playing their instruments. The problem: there were dozens of dancers who also needed to hear the music, plus Robbie’s character. Sound utility Bryan Mendoza organized a system to give each one of them their own earwig to hear the songs and dance to the lavish choreography created by Mandy Moore (La La Land).
For Robbie’s dance number, Morrow devised another solution. “Mandy and Margot came up with the song Firestarter [by Prodigy] that she’s dancing to. Everyone else is dancing to what you hear on screen, but Margot had a separate earwig and transmitter so she could hear that specific song,” Morrow notes. “It may not look like it, but that party scene became a technical challenge where we had 42 earwigs going out on two different channels.”
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Lee admits the opening party sequence is heavily driven by music. For sonic clarity, post had to craft a visceral sound effects track that heightened the scene without overwhelming the audience. “Andy Nelson started the mix by setting what’s the loudest he can play the music for the sound effects, like the party crowd, fights, elephant, etc. I made sure not to play them too loud and be specific when we play them, rather than a bed of sounds. This way, if a small sound doesn’t overpower the music, that helps create an illusion that the music is always big, except for certain moments like the crowd cheers taking over the music on the last half of Nellie’s dance sequence,” explains Lee.
Jovan Adepo plays Sidney Palmer in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
The mantra for production sound throughout filming was to find creative ways to protect the dialogue and not let the music play over entire sequences. Another such instance was a massive battlefield scene that has multiple storylines taking place at once, including Nellie’s first day on set, where she’s asked to repeatedly shed a tear and Jack Conrad climbing a hill to kiss a princess at sunset.
Lukas Haas plays George Munn, Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad and Spike Jonze plays Otto Von Strassberger in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Supervising location manager Chris Baugh found an empty field in Simi Valley where Martin designed a number of open-air sets to represent Kinsocope studio owned by Wallach. “Kinoscope is what you’d call a Poverty Row studio,” Martin says in the production notes, “so we wanted to show how ramshackle and seat-of-your-pants the approach in those days could be. It’s really these pockets of fantasy sprouting out of the desert, where only months or weeks before nothing existed.” Every individual movie set, every painted backdrop – all were created from scratch.”
The colossal sequence had over 700 extras fighting, explosions, horse stunts, and a full orchestra. “On a traditional movie, you would blast the music and the orchestra would play along as the battle takes place. We thought since we had a large earwig count already, why not just give everyone in the orchestra an earwig, including the conductor [cameo by composer Justin Hurwitz]. This way, they can play along to the silent music, and then good sound effects of the battle and everything that’s going on could be recorded.”
Director of Photography Linus Sandgren and Olivia Hamilton as Ruth Adler on the set of Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
Lee sent two sound effects recordists to capture the aural palette during the multi-day shoot. “They were able to set up a bunch of mics around the set to record a wider perspective of the extras yelling, attacking, and the different prop sounds,” mentions Lee. “We thought it might be kind of cool to capture the sound of 1,000 extras with props weapons and hear what it sounds like.” Morrow adds, “It may seem odd to say [to Chazelle] we don’t want to play this orchestra out loud, but in the end, it helps the authenticity of the scene. It lent all that extra sound that would be very difficult to recreate where you have all these extras on the field running at each other.”
In post, the team further pushed the battle sequence, finding moments to aurally heighten the drama of the unfolding storylines. “Justin’s score is driving a lot of the scene forward,” says Lee. “For sound to play it up, we would hit the cut to play in rhythm and pitch to his score.” Mixing in Dolby Atmos created more of an immersive soundscape where they pulled sound effects from the center speaker placing them in different perspectives for viewers to hear and feel.
Morrow admits none of it would be possible without the collaborative nature of Chazelle. “Damien really cares about every aspect of a movie, and you can tell that in the small details. He has storyboards he sends out to everybody to understand what his goals are for the shoot, but he’s collaborative in the sense that he’s not locked into a specific vision. It’s a very rewarding experience working on his movies.”
For more films and series from Paramount and Paramount+, check out these stories:
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
When director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s most recent film, The Old Guard, premiered on Netflix in July of 2020, the critically acclaimed action drama became one of the top 10 original launches in the platform’s history. Prince-Bythewood is following that with one of the most anticipated films of 2022, the historical epic The Woman King, the story of the Agojie, an elite all-female warrior unit charged with protecting the African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s. Inspired by true events, The Woman King stars Viola Davis, who also executive produced the project and had a significant impact on getting the film made.
The Woman King follows Davis as General Nanisca, who is preparing a new group of young recruits and readying them for battle under the direction of King Ghezo (John Boyega). She is aided by fierce fighter and Agojie lieutenant Izogie (Lashana Lynch) and Nanisca’s second-in-command Amenza (Sheila Atim), who presides over rituals of initiation and preparation for battle. Recruits are made up of those rejected by their family, such as Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), and captives who choose to join the sisterhood of warriors, like Ode (Adrienne Warren).
There have been no previous films like The Woman King. The release of an action film starring a nearly all Black and female cast, and led by Davis, an actor over 50, is a rarity indeed, but if the advanced buzz and its 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating is any indication, it may offer proof that audiences want what The Woman King has to offer.
The Credits spoke to Gina Prince-Bythewood about the casting and filming of a project that further shows her as a director talented at integrating action with character development and storytelling.
The performances in The Woman King are so compelling. Casting is one of your superpowers. Viola was already attached to the film when you signed on, and she’s spectacular. Can you take us through the casting of Lashana, and in what ways she surprised you with her performance?
Absolutely. When I read the script, I knew immediately that I wanted Lashana Lynch in the film. I had seen the speech she gave at Essence Black Women in Hollywood, and that was also at the time when the trailers for No Time To Die had started coming out, and she just looked so badass. I believed her in those trailers, and of course, she was in Captain Marvel, but it was what she said about the type of films she wanted to do and the type of work she wanted to put in the world. I was just so inspired and felt like I wanted to work with her. Then we met, and it was such an immediate connection. What we wanted to do with the character of Izogie is so specific, and I love the character on the page, but Lashana inspired me to give her more, not only in dialogue, humor, story, and backstory but also in action. She was one that Danny [Hernandez] and I, our fight and stunt coordinator, could trust implicitly. We knew if we designed it, she could do it.
Lashana Lynch in “The Woman King.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Viola was 56 when production began, and a starring role for a Black woman in film, especially one over 50, is exceedingly rare, but she does some of her best work in The Woman King. Can you talk about some of the aspects of your collaboration with her and how the character was built and delivered through the production?
I am so grateful to her. Viola, along with [producers] Julius Tennon and Cathy Schulman, fought so hard for this film, and part of it was fighting for her to have an opportunity to play a character like this, which she’s never been offered. Nothing has ever been written like this. She’s a genius and deserves all the choices, and the reality of our industry is that you don’t get them as a Black artist, so she created her own. It was really beautiful to build her character Nanisca with the back story that Viola created. That’s a movie in itself. She goes deep into character so that she knows who she is on a molecular level. A lot of our interaction after that was building a relationship between her and Thuso. That was me having them train together to connect, to get to know each other, to rely on each other, and to push each other. And it was getting her comfortable being able to do her own fighting and stunts.
Viola Davis and Thuso Mbedu star in The Woman King.
Fighting in the way that was required as Nanisca had to be new to her.
She had some fear in terms of doing that. She hadn’t done anything like that before. She wanted to know and trust that we would make her look good, and we did. We weren’t going to put her in our box. We were going to let her build her box and build our action and fighting around it. What is Viola really good at? Well, she is hella strong, so let’s put that into Nanisca and her style of fighting. It’s going to be different than Thuso, who is small in stature, but uses speed, or Lashana as Izogie, who’s just feral and will decimate you. That was the fun part of the specificity, me being an athlete, having kickboxed for a couple of years, being able to impart that into Viola and that character and let her know what it feels like when you’re about to fight and what it feels like to be in a fight. On the acting side, she’s brilliant. It was certainly in the fighting and stunts that I was able, I think, to provide the most direction.
Viola Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of The Woman King.
The battle dance is incredibly complicated. What was involved in the training and the filming of it?
It was very funny to tell the actors, “Hey, on top of everything else you’re doing, we have a couple of dances that you have to learn.” And then they watched the choreography, and you’d see their eyes glaze over like, “Oh my God, we’re gonna do that?” But we had incredible choreographers. I told them, “They are not dancers. They all have rhythm and the passion to learn, but you are teaching them really intricate, choreographed sequences and some of them involve singing in another language at the same time.” It was a lot. I went to as many rehearsals as I could because it’s inspiring to watch the progression and to see them getting better and better. I told them on set when it came time, they’d been rehearsing in private. The choreography is only half of it. What really makes the battle dance is the aggression that you bring. All these moves like neck slashing and stabbing, that’s what they really did. And so I told them, “To bring that, you have to start on volume 10.” I remember the first time on the day we shot it, the entire crew was watching to see what it looked like. They went through the dance and went at, I would say, 80 percent, and the entire crew erupted into applause because it was so beautiful and powerful.
There’s a sense of joy and ownership among those involved in this movie. The experience must have been very positive.
So many of us knew what we were doing was special because it was different and we hadn’t seen it before. When you have collaborators like I had on this, all of whom were women and people of color, all my HODs, everyone brought such a level of passion to be able to tell the story, and everybody was empowered. They had a voice in rooms where they weren’t the only ones for the first time, amongst their own, and feeling valued. That brings out even more in people, and it was such an inspiring environment. When you believe, when it’s more than a job, you just get really great work out of people.
The Woman King is in theaters now.
For more on The Woman King, check out these stories:
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
Inside a nondescript warehouse on the outskirts of Portland, a little boy made of wood galvanized efforts by stop motion filmmakers for three years before emerging now to wow moviegoers in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. This dark stop-motion iteration of Carlo Collodi’s 1882 tale, in theaters and streaming on Netflix, takes place in 1930’s Italy, adding Mussolini and forest witches to the story’s signature evil doers: circus master Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz) and the monster whale.
Puppets were fabricated in Manchester, England, and Guadalajara, Mexico, then shipped to Portland, where 41 animators teamed with grips, gaffers, lighting designers, camera operators, and scenic artists to create the fairy tale world inhabited by Pinocchio (voiced by English 10-year-old Gregory Mann) and his father Geppetto (David Bradley). Pinocchio co-director Mark Gustafson enlisted veteran Danish stop motion artist Brian Leif Hansen to serve as the show’s animation supervisor. “We averaged 3.8 seconds of animation output per week,” says Hansen, who abandoned his early ambitions to become a chef and instead moved to England, where he helped animate Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Hansen later servedunder Gustafson on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox stop-motion feature, followed by Laika-produced Missing Link and Kubo and the Two Strings.
Speaking from Manhattan, where he helped install the Museum of Modern Art’s “Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio” exhibition, Hansen drilled into the painstaking process of bringing 12-inch tall heroes and villains to life.
Stop-motion animators move Pinocchio characters in tiny increments to build a scene. What kind of blueprint do the animators refer to as a guide?
The animators rely heavily on these [animatic] storyboards, and the voice actors have already been directed, so there’s a voice track to let them know what’s going on. The animator is like an actor. A director relies on the animator to give life to the character and to give a performance, and most times, they get it right.
This film packs such an emotional wallop. Part of that must come from the way voice actors inspire animators to synch the puppet’s movement to feelings expressed through their vocal performances.
Yeah. Emotions are a very important thing. [As an animator] You’ve got these headphones on, and you’re moving these puppets around; if you listen carefully to the voice recordings, you can hear breath and hear the actor shifting around. So you listen very carefully to the voice, and then you stuff all of that into your puppet in a way that lifts it up, enlarges it to become almost a caricature. You don’t just do it plainly. It’s crucial to have a good sound to work with when you’re creating a performance.
You worked as a hands-on animator yourself for about 15 years, and now, with Pinocchio, you’ve graduated to animation supervisor. How did that happen?
Mark Gustafson needed a wingman, somebody who’s done this many times before, to make sure he could deliver this high level of animation. That wingman being me. It turned out we work really well together.
What’s the division of labor?
Mark basically takes care of the emotion and the story, and I take care of all the technical things that need to be working so the animator could do his or her best performance. Also, I’m sort of a cheerleader, keeping up the spirit of this jolly ambiance within the animation department. Animators are artists, so they’re sometimes nervous about their work. And you need to make sure they focus on the right things rather than things that nobody’s going to see.
The puppets in Pinocchio are moved by hand 12 or 24 times per second of screen time. How do the animators make that happen?
There’s enough tension [in the gears beneath the silicone surface] to hold a pose. You go in and move the core of the body, arms, legs, then your head, then your eyes and eyelids. Then you step away from the frame and they take a picture. Then you go back in and move everything again. What’s crazy about this process, called straight ahead, is that you don’t have key poses drawn on paper to show where you’re going. The animator’s moving into unknown territory, so you have to have everything planned out in your head before your start. Otherwise, it’s going to go south really quickly.For example, if you come in too high or too low with the puppet’s heel, it’ll look like he’s got a limp. Walking a human is really difficult because the human eye easily recognizes if it’s not perfect. Dogs are easier.
In this digital age, it’s refreshing to realize that the human hand, not an algorithm, dictates exactly how high the eyebrow goes or where the finger will point.
Exactly.
Stop motion is so labor-intensive! Just to get the timeline straight, when did you start, and when did you finish?
I started in January 2019. There was only one animator at the beginning. Two weeks later, another couple started, then a third one started. We ramped up to a maximum capacity of 41 animators on 60 sets. We shot the first frame in August 2019 and the last frame this August. We were rushing big time, and everything was being shot at the same time. We had like 30 Pinocchio’s, 18 Geppetto’s, seven Volpes. If there were only one Pinocchio, it would have taken ten years to shoot the movie. [laughing]
Yeah. The Director of Photography, Frank Passingham, had four lighting and camera teams, each with ten or twelve sets. One crew did most of the church sequences. We had two and a half churches. Other people worked primarily on Geppetto’s workshop, which was actually three workshops split down the middle so we could shoot from both directions at the same time.
Count Volpe, the greedy carnival boss voiced by Christoph Waltz, has a huge physical and performance presence. What was it like bringing him to life?
In Guillermo’s terminology, Volpe is a ten. He’s very purposefully the most caricatured being. And he has a Jekyll and Hyde personality: He’s either this showman with the happy face and big arms [waving around], or he’s this narrow-focused meanie. Also, the Volpe puppet was very big, so his joints need to be tight, which made them difficult to move. Most of the time, Count Volpe had to be attached to a rig because he was too heavy to stand by himself.
Looking back at your immersion for more than three and a half years in the Pinocchio bubble, which sequence stands out as your favorite?
There are so many well-animated shots that I don’t really have a favorite. But the interaction between Geppetto and Pinocchio in the church is beautiful, the argument in the woods between them is genius, Geppetto waking up drunk and discovering Pinocchio for the first time is great, and the songs are funny and cool . . I could go on. But it’s not like there was one big mountain we climbed and everybody cheered when it was over. This was more like hedge jumps in the Olympics.
Hurdles?
In Denmark, we call them hedges but yeah, in Pinocchio, there was constant problem-solving that had to happen on the spot, but they weren’t impossible to solve because the problems came a little bit at a time. You had a whole team of collaborators, so you could just pick away at it, slowly.
You’re making progress, three or four seconds a week.
Yes, because if you had to think about the whole movie all at once, you’d just sit in the corner, shaking and crying. Here, we just had to carry on with these little bits that needed to be made, and then after you make all the little bits, you have a big thing.
For more on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, check out these stories:
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema failed to get into two Dutch film schools, so he worked in a soap factory, played in a band, and survived unemployment as a self-described “slacker” before finding his creative footing at a renowned cinema academy in Lodz, Poland. Since then, he’s made up for lost time through collaborations with A-list auteurs, including David O. Russell (The Fighter), Sam Mendes (Spectre), and Spike Jonez (Her). Working with Christoper Nolan on Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet, van Hoytema embraced the director’s passion for big-screen stories enabled by IMAX cameras, and now, he’s teamed with Jordan Peele to shoot the writer/director’s contemporary western-meets-extraterrestrial thriller Nope (opening Friday, July 22).
Hoyte van Hoytema and Jordan Peele on the set of “Nope.” Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
Speaking for undisclosed reasons from an enormous warehouse in London, van Hoytema talked about capturing the night sky, creating a sense of spectacle, and taking cues from movies that inspired Nope‘s sumptuous visuals.
Over the past ten years, you’ve demonstrated excellent taste in directors, which continues now in your first collaboration with Jordan Peele on Nope. How did you guys get together?
Jordan and I talked about previous projects, but circumstances never timed out. When Jordan came up with Nope, the stars aligned and we started talking. I had a hunch it could be a cool collaboration.
Nope deals in part with the very nature of spectacle, and given your previous IMAX projects with Chris Nolan, you would seem to be well-suited for crafting work on an epic scale. What was Jordan’s creative brief regarding Nope?
Creative briefs are never brief. When you talk to an interesting director, it’s never something where they go, “I want this and I want that.” It’s more of an ongoing conversation. But from the beginning, it was evident that Jordan wanted to expand, to make his canvas bigger, to challenge himself, to understand what spectacle is, to shoot on the big formats for the big screen. He wanted to find the best possible way to shoot this story in an uncompromising way. He never said, “Oh I want to work with you because you shoot with the biggest cameras out there,” but he liked the fact that I’d worked on 65 millimeter.
Hoyte van Hoytema and Jordan Peele on the set of “Nope.” Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
Biggest cameras out there being IMAX. Roughly how much of the movie is shot in that format?
It’s a lot. Thirty to forty percent. If you see the movie in an IMAX theater, those sequences suck you into the film in a very visceral way.
Nope feels in some ways like a western, with the wide open spaces, the big sky, the horses. To inform that look, did you and Jordan reference Hollywood westerns?
We referenced many films. Of course, we had to watch Lawrence of Arabia. Jordan projected the early King Kong movie for me in black and white We also watched the beautiful uncompromising films from the seventies and eighties. Spielberg’s Jaws and Close Encounters were huge inspirations in the way they presented original stories on a big screen so that they became events and spectacles in that way. We watched Heaven’s Gate because of the horses and the dust! We’d just throw references at each other and explored how you may unconsciously harvest certain things from movies you love. Funnily enough for us, it always came back to spectacle.
(from left) OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.
You filmed Nope in the southern California desert east of Los Angeles, outside of Santa Clarita?
Just past Santa Clarita, inAgua Dulce.
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.
And that landscape plays an important role in this movie. How did you use your cameras to bring out the power of nature?
The best example I can give you is the night shots. On one of our first [location] scouts, Jordan and I stepped out of the car at night, turned the lights out, and walked into the middle of this valley. There was a tiny red blinking light blinking on a telephone tower in the distance but otherwise, no light. So your pupils start dilating. Suddenly you start seeing details in the hills around you, the stars in the sky — you experience the expanse of nature. We loved that feeling, which also becomes a very scary feeling in the context of the film. We both thought it was very special but also impossible to film because if you light an area at night with conventional lighting, everything around it will be dead. I started obsessing over how to capture the darkness of the night but somehow see through it. We developed a new technology that went through a lot of evolutions, but in the end, we figured out technically how to do it. The result is the look of our night, which I like to believe is unique. And that all came from wanting to re-create the experience Jordan and I had on that first scout.
Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.
In addition to being DP, you generally serve as your own camera operator, and on Nope, you carried this shoulder-mounted IMAX camera, which looks pretty heavy. Was it difficult to handle?
I’m not stronger than any other DP. The myths around this camera are much bigger and heavier than the camera is, and it’s really quite doable. In fact, my incredible B camera operator Kristen Correll did a whole week of operating, and I saw her flying an IMAX camera on her shoulder. I live by the philosophy that as cinematographers, it’s not our job to make things convenient; it’s our job make the difficult and the inconvenient doable so that we can achieve shots that are extra special.
Hoyte van Hoytema on the set of “Nope.” Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
Changing subjects for a moment to your Oscar-nominated work on Dunkirk, there’s a remarkable sequence of British soldiers running along the beach as bombs drop around them, with you and your camera out of frame following right behind. The shot really pulls in the viewer.
It has to do with making the audience feel like they’re participating, and that automatically forces you, as the cinematographer, to be there physically. In the end, the most visceral cinema is very much about intimacy, about being in the middle of things. For me, it’s important to get in there, get closer, go further, be it and live it. Very often, that means allowing yourself to work more with your gut rather than just analyzing things in an intellectual way. But I also love moments that allow for contemplating and mood and distance.
With Nope and your other films, it seems that you move through different types of shots to create a visual dynamic?
Yes. You want a film to be immersive, but there are times when you want to take a breath – and then you get hooked by the next sequence and sucked in again. It’s similar to classical music, where a 20-minute sonata goes through all these different peaks and valleys, moments of sorrow, moments of resolve, less gas on the pedal, then you’re being pushed again. That dynamic is so important in filmmaking, going from being outside, observing, to being sucked in and becoming part of things, then being pushed out again so you can take a breath.
What techniques did you use in Nope to capture that contrast between epic wide shots and individual characters?
I worked with Panavision’s Dan Sasaki, an incredible engineer slash artist who can make whatever you need optically out of metal and glass. He designed custom lenses both for the Panavision and for the IMAX that tweak the focus so the camera can get physically closer to the faces of our actors. I want you to experience that space the same way you experience a landscape, and that’s always sort of been my obsession. Ultimately, I think faces are the most interesting things in film. I’m not so much interested in the expanse of nature if I don’t have the beautiful face to counteract it.
(from left) OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) and Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) in Nope, written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele.
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
Succession director Mark Mylod knows his way around family drama. Mylod’s been with the series since the first season, directing the second episode (the pilot was helmed by co-creator Adam McKay), and is now the most tenured Succession director of them all, with 12 episodes to his credit. He’s also something of an expert when it comes to palace intrigue, considering he’s a Game of Thrones alum, yet he admits that Succession‘s highly-anticipated and ultimately critically acclaimed third season presented some unique challenges.
One of those challenges was that season three would payoff the long-simmering internecine battle between the scheming Roy family that’s been boiling since the pilot. In the season two finale, the oft hapless Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) announced to the entire world at a press conference that his father, the fearsome if wounded Logan (Brian Cox) wasn’t just an inept leader of Waystar Royco, he was a criminal. Thus, two seasons and 20 episodes worth of moves and counter-moves, backstabbing and sniping had now officially given away to a father-versus-son blood feud, and Mylod was responsible for four episodes in the third season, including the crucial premiere set mere minutes after season two’s finale.
We spoke to Mylod about the challenges, and joys, of helming creator Jesse Armstrong’s brilliantly baroque family drama, how he approaches working with an ensemble cast, and why authenticity is the key to Succession‘s success.
How did you approach directing the first episode for season 3, which picks up right after season 2’s explosive finale?
The thought process was somewhat driven by fear of failure on my part. We’d made a choice that it was going to pick up ten or fifteen minutes after the end of season two’s storyline, and that really dictated the approach. Because it was apparent to me the challenge was to match the intensity and kick straight away into high gear. The beginning of season two was much less intense, it picked up with more of a slow burn. In season three, we wanted to parachute the audience right back into the level of intensity with the press conference of season two.
At long last, the Roys were finally at war with each other, with family members being forced to choose a side, Logan or Kendall. What were some of the challenges of filming this battle we’ve been waiting for?
My part, in particular, while also trying to shoot in the middle of the pandemic, was to match that intensity. In the writer’s room, we decided the season really was going to be about civil war, and we wanted to ramp this up. This had been the undertone in the first two seasons and now it was outright conflict. So it was a ramping up of scale, which in production terms was tricky to achieve. We were very limited in terms of the number of people we could have on set at that time. As the season progressed, we structured it so that we could scale up in the hope that Covid would drop to the point where we could get more people in the shots. The last two episodes were set in Italy, but we weren’t remotely sure we would be able to shoot in there, so we were running two models, one with production in Italy, and another with production in North America.
Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Alexander Skarsgård. Photograph by Graeme Hunter/HBOJeremy Strong. Photograph by Graeme Hunter/HBO
How were you going to play those Italy scenes in North America?
It was quite sad because we couldn’t decide where that would be. Maybe up in Maine, then we thought about going to Rhode Island, but Gilded Age was cranking into production for HBO and we felt we’d be stealing their locations, so we went away from that. We thought about going to Martha’s Vineyard, and then south to Florida, but it all felt like such a stretch for where their mother would get married. Everything kept pushing back to Chianti, Italy.
You’re working with such a talented ensemble cast that we could really just go through the list one by one, but I’d like to start with what it’s like to work with Brian Cox.
Brian Cox’s presence is extraordinary, and as intimidating as he is, when there’s a big scene to shoot, he’ll come to set as nervous as a kitten because he’s so keyed up and wants to get it right.
One of the show’s strengths is the way these actors all seem to thrive as warring siblings, spouses, or in-laws. How do you harness their varied styles and skills?
With this ensemble, a huge part of my job is to facilitate each of those actors who have their own ways of working, and a lot of our scenes are big ensemble scenes. That’s what I get paid for, to set up an atmosphere where they can all thrive and work. It can be tricky, as they do have disparate ways of working. Whatever allowances we make for each other, hopefully, the results speak for themselves. Whatever comes out, the truth is when we’re on set we’re all working towards the same goal.
Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, and Brian Cox. Photograph by Graeme Hunter/HBO
You really got to lean into your ensemble chops with the final two episodes of the season, where we’re charging towards the endgame with either Logan or Kendall coming out on top.
Because season three was about that war, the great dramatic opportunity in episodes eight and nine was to bring them all together, force them into the same space, and let sparks fly. As soon as we got that setup, Jesse [Armstrong] wrote two brilliant episodes, so by that point, we know where the whole season is heading. So through the final two episodes, eight and nine, we’re calibrating the ride of those actors. We tried to play it throughout the season that there was a sense of Kendall being on the rise, particularly at the beginning of the season, then hitting those challenges as the Teflon-coated Logan refuses to be knocked down. Whether it’s Logan wielding his power with the DOJ or something else, he always finds a way to win. As Tom says to Kendall, “I’ve never seen Logan get f*cked.” By the time we get to episode eight, Kendall’s just had this terrible dawning truth that he can never win, he can never beat his father, that’s his fate, he can never escape that gilded cage or his place in the hierarchy. So the tragedy for Kendall is that terrible realization that he will never win.
There was a sense in the beginning that Logan could actually lose, as he began the season looking more than a little vulnerable, too.
Logan’s arc through the season was that we start him at his lowest point in episodes one and two when he’s forced to head off to Sarajevo, then he gradually uses all the grit and experience and power he has to come out as the winner. There’s a Shakespearean inevitability about that, even with the ups and downs, that eventually, Logan will find a way to be the last person standing.
What kind of conversations do you have with Jesse Armstrong about stuff like that, the Shakespearean elements to the series, the patriarchial battles, the specter of aging and losing your power, the toying with your children about who will inherit the throne…
We rarely talk in terms of attempting to compare Succession with Shakespeare because that would be sad [laughs], but, what we do talk about is the dynamics of power, the dynamics of family, and the authenticity of what we’re doing. We’re one step removed from reality because we’re not writing about Rupert Murdock or Summer Redstone, but we’re drawing from that type. So every choice, performance, and location is a reflection of the reality of dynamics of power in modern America and modern capitalistic society.
Much has been made about how Jesse’s British, and that remove has given him more clarity on the subject of America’s capitalistic cruelties than an American might be able to bring to bear. Do you agree with that?
I don’t think it’s the case that we see this clearly because we’re British. The old Churchill thing about how we’re two countries separated by a common language, but in fact, America and England are so similar, and Jesse has a lifelong passionate interest in American culture and politics, he’s incredibly well informed. It’s more a question of his passion for the subject matter. We’re very aware of our limitations as foreigners—I’ve lived in New York for 12-years, but I don’t know the heartbeat of the city as a proper New Yorker, so we put in a lot of work into research, we talk to consultants, we go over every word that an English person would use but not an American, what someone wears, and we speak to the right people and put the work into the end game, which is authenticity. So ultimately I don’t agree that our being British gave us special clarity. Perhaps Ang Lee was perfect for Sense andSensibility because he was looking at the culture from the outside in, but for us, it’s just about doing the work to be as authentic as possible.
Succession was renewed for a fourth season by HBO.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
When Chadwick Boseman died unexpectedly after leading the cast as the title character in 2018’s Black Panther, it shocked and saddened the world. There was, understandably, some doubt as to whether a sequel could succeed without him. What director and co-screenwriter Ryan Coogler did with Wakanda Forever, however, honored the actor’s legacy while balancing the excitement of a Marvel superhero-driven adventure with a story centered on resilience in the face of loss.
The burden of carrying on without T’Challa fell largely to the women of Wakanda. Wakanda Forever finds Queen Remonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), Okoye (Danai Gurira), and the Dora Milaje trying to keep Wakanda safe from global threat after King T’Challa (Boseman)’s death. Namor, the superhuman ruler of Talokan, a secret underwater civilization whose citizens have their own special powers, sees a threat to the existence of his own world in Wakanda’s newfound openness to the “surface world” that came about at the end of the first film. Wakanda and Talokan must band together; otherwise, Namor will take matters into his own hands and put everyone on Earth, including Wakanda, at risk.
Early in the production for Wakanda Forever, Oscar-winning production designer Hannah Beachler wrote a 400-page guide to the fictional world of Talokan for herself, Coogler, and all their collaborators on the film. She shared a few elements of that guide in conversation with The Credits and spoke about an important way in which her adoptive city of New Orleans offered inspiration for the new film.
The world of Talokan took two years to develop. There’s a whole mythology, history, and culture built for the civilization, which is in part inspired by the Mayan world. What are a few examples of what you included in your 400-page guide that helped to create the undersea kingdom?
As far as the hard research goes, one of the things I really wanted to understand was the path they traveled through the ocean. I needed to know where they started, migrated to, and why? When they went into the ocean, what was the path they traveled to get to where they are? Where were they? So we got a map, we got some satellite shots of the Yucatan, of the gulf, and all the way out to the Atlantic, a big overhead shot. We started to trace, really beaming into where we thought that they could be. We were looking at shipping routes between 1750 and the turn of the century, which would have taken them almost into the Atlantic. We needed to understand that.
So figuring out how long they took to get where they wound up and their path determines their culture.
Right. Every spot, how long were they there? What was their architecture like when they were at that point? What were they using when they were in shallower waters in the Gulf? They were in the world of Grand Cayman. What were the materials that they were using just to sustain life? What were they eating? Were they fishing? How were they building? How did they have lighting? The Puerto Rican trench a thousand miles off of the Puerto Rican coast is where they ended up. James Cameron shot The Abyss as the Puerto Rican trench, even though no one’s ever been down in it. It’s 26,000 feet deep, and Talokan is at 12,000 in the abyssal layer. That’s all in there.
There was also the growth rate of their population. I did a lot of studies on different population growth rates, so I could understand that in 1792, they went into the ocean with this many people, and in over 500 years, how had their population grown? I looked at different rates around the world between the 1900s and present day, to understand how people move and grow. There are different speeds of development around the world. Then I did a breakdown of 300 years of the evolution of architecture from the time they went into the time they landed in the Puerto Rican trench, so we could understand the different eras. They are 500 years separated from Maya by the time they were in the Puerto Rican trench, so what did that look like? How do they have color, have lighting, how do they travel underwater? How do they heat? They would be in very cold circumstances. We started studying hydrothermal vents. How might they harness that power over 300 years, because they’re utilizing them to heat and move people through the city and to power the hydro-currents as well, that take them through the city at high speeds? There was all of that and more in the guide.
You collaborated and worked very intentionally with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw and costume designer Ruth E. Carter, especially on the color palettes and how the look of Wakanda can help project the story forward. Can you give specific details on that?
I think it was a really important partnership. For Ruth and I, we’d sit down and talk about colorways. For Wakanda, we had a grip on what those color stories were going to be. It was more about how we were going to expand on that in fresh and new ways. Then what did Autumn see for it, her and Ryan? What’s the tone of the film? Because we’re dealing with grief and mourning, and there are some parts of that that wanted to be a little more contrasted in the lighting, so then how did the sets need to change? Even the sets we saw in the last movie changed a bit, so that was a huge conversation. When we’re in Shuri’s lab, you can tell that it’s a little bit different than the punchiness of the first one.
Can you talk about the sacred grove? Those scenes are so gorgeous and moving.
When we were moving to the sacred grove, which is the traditional communal area, I came to Autumn and told her I wanted it to be punchy green. I wanted it to feel like an old and sacred place, and have the trees and ground covered in moss, and be this punchy green around them. We just came from Shuri’s lab, and we were in this very dark place, and then we’re coming into this letting-the-grief-in place, with them in white. That’s renewing for people. We punched the color down on the green a little bit but turned the color up on the white. When we get to North Triangle in the procession, you can see the color elevate in the buildings and in the world around you, which goes back to what we remember of Wakanda. People are singing and dancing in the procession, very much like a second line. Me being from New Orleans, it’s very much in that manner of a jazz funeral, where grief is also about the celebration of life. We didn’t want it to have the fog of grief but the hope of moving forward through the grief. And that’s why that seems a little punchier, in the way that it’s shot and the colors that we use in the buildings.
In New Orleans, grief is so much a part of life, and celebration is always part of honoring the dead.
I grew up in rural Ohio, but I’ve been in New Orleans for 20 years, so I feel like I am a local at this point. I believe when I moved to New Orleans, I found home. A lot of what the first Black Panther was about was Killmonger searching for home. It was Shuri and T’Challa asking who they are, and what home means, and if it should be exposed to the world. I think even from the first one; it was very much a part of the experiences of my life.
So jazz funerals in New Orleans were an inspiration?
When we first started talking about a procession, the first thing I said to Ryan was a jazz funeral. I had shown him some video of what that looked like, so he could see the grief that you do still experience in a jazz funeral, with the brass band playing. What that is, in the diaspora, in the Caribbean communities, and in many countries in the African communities, specifically West African communities, and of course, a lot of African Americans that were trafficked here came from West Africa, they brought those same traditions with them. It’s clear that that’s where the second line, and jazz funeral, and that way of grief came from. We worked with experts of West Africa on the many different cultures and how they grieve, as well, and we wanted to connect the people of the diaspora in that way.
Wakanda Foreveris now playing in theaters across the country.
For more on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, check out these stories:
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
From the get-go,Netflix hit Stranger Things has excelled in the art and craft of needle drops. Encompassing eighties classics from David Bowie’s “Heroes” in Season One to “Everlasting Love” in Season Three, song choices curated by three-time Emmy-nominated music supervisor Nora Felder have consistently amplified the characters’ emotions to uncanny effect.
But nothing in Stranger Things’ previous hit list prepared audiences for this summer’s zeitgeist-smashing anthem “Running Up That Hill.” Recorded in 1985 by British singer-songwriter-producer Kate Bush, the track drives Episode Four’s heart-rending montage featuring Max (Sadie Sink) as she fends off the monster Vecna. Viewers were swept away by the psychodrama and propelled “Running Up That Hill” to the top of the charts 38 years after its release. A video of the sequence posted on YouTube has generated more than ten million views and counting.
Like many viewers of Stranger Things, the series’ music editor Lena Glikson had never heard “Running Up That Hill” until she was tasked with synching the song to the picture. She explains, “I didn’t grow up in America so certain songs in the show that were internationally famous I definitely recognized, but some of the songs, like “Running Up That Hill,” were completely new to me.”
A Russian native, Glikson played piano and sang from an early age, moved to the U.S. to study film composing at Berklee College of Music, then found her way to Los Angeles, where she worked her way up to become a music editor on Joker and A Star Is Born before joining the Stranger Things team for Season Four. Speaking from her Los Angeles home, Glikson talked about cutting “Running Up That Hill,” making the move from Russia to Hollywood, and working with the Duffer Brothers to “massage” Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s Emmy-winning synth scores.
Vintage pop songs are embedded in Stranger Things’ DNA but “Running Up That Hill”introduced Kate Bush to a whole new audience, including yourself. What was your reaction when you first heard the song?
I loved it. Just the fact that “Running Up That Hill” is so unique, we had to make sure that it plays beautifully so there were many many revisions I did just to make it fit the picture. [Producer] Shawn Levy, who actually picked the song, and the Duffer Brothers and the picture editor Dean Zimmerman—they all had to agree on the way it should sound within the episode, so there was a long process in getting to that point.
My job was to massage the edits and so all the cuts match the picture 100 percent. For me, it was also about creating the build toward the end, because it’s not only the song—there are additional orchestral stems composed by Rob Simonsen and recorded by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Dean created a little mock-up and then building in additional tracks from these different stems, and different orchestral instruments, became a big part of my job. Especially during the [flashback] montage with Eleven and Max, it was very emotional for me because I really love those characters.
At the end of the sequence, this quiet piano solo reprises the song’s melody as the sun sets. Was it exciting to edit that shift in dynamics?
One of the arrangements already contained those piano notes, which sound so gentle, so delicate. They have a lot to do with who Max is and bring us back to the essence of her character in a way. Especially in this scene, the dread, the pain, and then the fact that she got saved — I was so worried about Max not coming back to life, it’s an amazing moment to hear how this quiet piano brings such a tumultuous scene to a close.
Besides working on “Running Up That Hill” and songs like “Psycho Killer,” Journey’s “Separate Ways” and The Cramps’ “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” you also edited scores by Emmy-winning composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. What was that like?
Working with Kyle and Mike was very interesting because they don’t come from the film world; they come from a band. That gives them a certain kind of flexibility about trying different things. I interacted with them quite a lot because I was kind of the bridge between the Duffer Brothers and the composers, to make sure Kyle and Mike knew exactly what they wanted. I’d translate the brothers’ notes into musical language, technical stuff like “Let’s use sixteenth notes here instead of quarter notes.”
Those pulsating sequencers create such a spooky vibe.
In terms of tone, it’s pretty dark, for sure. And even though we all know Stranger Things for having lots of synth music, I also cut some nice classical pieces. For instance in Episode Six when everyone’s playing at Suzie’s house, we have Violin Concerto in D Major by Korngold playing on top of that scene. I loved cutting that to make sure it lines up with all the little changes. I also cut a long piece by Philip Glass when Nancy’s walking through Victor Creel’s s house.
That’s a thoughtful tip of the hat, given that Glass pioneered the style of sequencer-based music that Kyle and Michael specialize in for the show.
Yeah.
Long before Stranger Things came along, you studied piano and voice from the age of six in your hometown of Voronezh, Russia. Then you got into Berklee College of Music, one of the best music schools in the United States. How did that happen?
I wanted to become a jazz singer and I also acted in musicals. I figured the best place to embrace this culture was the United States.
Musical theater! What was your favorite role?
I was part of a company that did original music by this incredibly talented composer from Kyiv and a director from St. Petersburg. My favorite role was playing the godmother in our vampire remake of Cinderella called Halloween Story. It was pretty dark.
Evil characters are so fun to play.
Oh yeah. And what I do now on the post-production side as a music editor—part of why I’m able to do movies like A Star is Born is that I have that background as a vocalist. I know how your face looks when you sing a certain sound and what the vocal position is, so doing lip-synch for musicals is my huge specialty.
How did you transition from Berklee to Hollywood?
After graduation, I came to Los Angeles, sent out sixty or seventy applications, and got a wonderful internship with music editor Nick South who’s worked a lot with composer Rolfe Kent on romcoms like Freaky Friday and Illegally Blond. Nick taught me all the key command shortcuts and talked about the diplomatic parts of our job, like, literally, how to write an email. After a couple of months, he offered me a position as an assistant in his studio, which I did for a year and a half.
And now you can add Stranger Things to your resume. What’s the key lesson you’ve learned along the way about what it takes to be a good music editor?
It’s a hard skill to develop because you only learn by practicing, cutting, temping, tracking, and assembling things to fit the scene better. You have to serve the picture. Sometimes there are tiny things you do to make the cut work, like a tiny bit of time-stretching so the downbeat happens exactly on the cut. It’s a very kind of OCD type of work to make sure everything’s perfect. And of course, you’re talking to the director or showrunners so you understand the emotional content of the scene. It’s always about empathy.
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It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
For eight seasons, Bill Hader gained a legion of fans with the hilarious characters he brought to life on Saturday Night Live. Since then, his popularity has only grown with his Emmy-winning portrayal of the manic hitman/aspiring actor in the HBO series Barry. But to hear Hader tell it, performing wasn’t his initial goal. For as long as he can remember, he wanted to direct.
“Since I was fairly young…I would say 10 or 11 was when I first started to notice the ‘directed-by’ name,” Hader says during a recent Zoom interview. “I remember John McTiernan — realizing, ‘Oh, the guy who did Die Hard, did Predator. This director’s name is on the movies I like.’ These types of things.”
Likening it to being in a band and hearing punk music for the first time, Harder’s perspective changed completely. “‘Oh, that’s effective.’ And ‘I think I know how they did that,’” he continues. “And then trying to do it myself.”
Bill Hader directing Sarah Goldberg in “Barry” season 3. Courtesy HBO.
For Hader, that meant commandeering his dad’s video camera and making Evil Dead-inspired horror shorts featuring his sisters. Though they fueled his filmmaking ambitions, they’re destined to remain in Hader’s past. “Oh, no, no…no one will ever see these,” he says with a laugh when asked about their whereabouts.
Hader’s career start took several turns. The Oklahoma native relocated to Los Angeles in 1999 with an eye toward writing and directing. Initially, he found work as a PA, honing his scripting skills during off-hours. But after several years with little traction, Hader changed course. A friend, who was a member of The Second City Hollywood, encouraged Hader to perform. He joined the troupe in 2003 and comically blossomed onstage. One night, Megan Mullally caught him in action and steered Hader to his SNL gig.
Itmade Hader a star, earning him Emmy nominations in 2012 and 2013 for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Simultaneously, he wrote and contributed voices for South Park, winning an Emmy in 2009 when the series was named Outstanding Animated Program. He acted on the big screen in such features as Adventureland (2009), The Skeleton Twins (2014), Trainwreck (2015), and IT: Chapter Two (2019).
L-r) BILL HADER as Richie Tozier, JESSICA CHASTAIN as Beverly Marsh, JAMES MCAVOY as Bill Denbrough, JAMES RANSONE as Eddie Kaspbrak, ISAIAH MUSTAFA as Mike Hanlon, and JAY RYAN as Ben Hascomb in New Line Cinema’s horror thriller “IT CHAPTER TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
But Hader never lost sight of his directing ambitions. So when talks turned serious about greenlighting Barry, he seized on the opportunity. The move even caught series cocreator, Alec Berg, off guard.
“I was in a meeting with Alec Berg and the people from HBO and just said, ‘I’d really like to direct this,’” Hader remembers. “And he kind of looked at me, ‘You would? We haven’t talked about this.’ I was like, ‘No man, I think I could do it.’ So yeah, it was what I’ve always wanted to do.”
Hader directed Barry’s March 2018 premiere episode and was hooked. Now in its third season, he has directed nine more.
“I love it,” explains Hader. “I mean it’s exhausting, but it’s a lot of fun.”
Bill Hader directing Elsie Fisher in “Barry” season 3. Courtesy Merick Morton/ HBO.
Not surprisingly, Hader has excelled as a director. Barry’s debut episode earned him an Emmy nomination. He won a DGA award for the second season episode Ronny/Lily. Hader admits that finding his directing style has been an evolving process.
“I was incredibly prepared to an insane degree when I directed the pilot,” says Hader. Every shot was figured out. Every cut was figured out. And as time has gone on, I think I’ve gotten a little bit more confident. Every single piece of it doesn’t need to be that thought out. I don’t actually need all these shots. This one shot can make it work.”
Hader finds his acting experience has helped to make him a better director. He often uses lessons learned to make shoots run smoother. He avoids doing too many takes, believing they wear down a cast and crew. He strives to keep the days short for the same reason. If a scene needs to be shot at night, he schedules it over two nights. An all-nighter, in Hader’s words, “Just makes people insane.”
Henry Winkler and Bill Hader in “Barry” season 3. Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
“Keep it simple and try to encourage people,” Hader explains. “So much of it is giving people the confidence to go for it. As an actor, you don’t want to look like an idiot. You have to be brave to put yourself out there in a way that might look silly. I can see people relax after a take when I tell them, ‘We got it. Let’s try this or that. This is the time to have fun.’”
When asked to name some of his favorite filmmakers, Martin Scorsese and Akira Kurosawa readily come to mind. Hader adds that regular viewers of Barry can easily see the influence the Coen brothers have had on his directing.
However, don’t be surprised if you get a Sergio Leone feeling when watching forgiving jeff, the Hader-directed first episode of Season 3. Reminiscent of a scene from Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, it opens with Barry standing on a desolate Southern California cliffside framed by a giant dead oak tree.
Bill Hader in the episode “forgiving feff.” Photograph by Merrick Morton/HBO
Barry and another man are watching the Jeff of the title dig his own grave. Turns out, Jeff has slept with the other man’s wife and the cuckold husband has contracted Barry, via social media, to kill Jeff. The husband makes a macabre request. He wants Barry to slice off Jeff’s eyelids so he has to watch Barry pull the trigger. Barry goes to his car to find a pair of clippers. But when he returns, the husband has had a change of heart. Jeff has apologized and the husband is ready to forgive him. Barry doesn’t take the news well. As the sunrise peeks over Barry’s shoulder, he turns his smothering rage on both men.
“So we shot that at dawn. It had to be shot in about 30minutes because it was all natural light” Hader details. “We set up when it was dark and the sun was coming up. When we were on my close-up, we wanted the sun to start peeking out behind this hill. The minute it did, I could see Carl Herse, the DP, getting excited. I was doing the take and he was like, ‘It’s happening! It’s happening!’ We were running. We were gunning. And it worked out perfectly.”
It’s moments such as these that make Hader glad he made the move to directing.
“I really do like being on set with the crew,” continues Hader. “I just love the energy — especially when things are going well. It’s a long process, long days, and it takes people away from their families. It can be arduous, so you want to make sure you’re doing something that is worthwhile and hopefully having fun.”
Hader also enjoys that directing keeps him involved throughout the entire process. To him, it’s hard to beat being on a mixing stage and seeing the final results. “The mix is the last moment. You actually get to sit there and say, ‘It’s finished. I’m looking at it. Wow,’” says Hader. “It’s like, ‘Okay, I sat down with an idea. Now here we are. We got it.’”
Hader has written a script — a dark comedy – and hopes that one day it will serve as his feature directing debut. But as Barry heads towards its Season 3 finale on June 12, it appears that those plans are on hold. HBO recently announced that it’s picking up Barry for a fourth season and Hader will direct all eight episodes of it.
“I mean Barry’s my whole life,” says Hader. “I would love to make a feature, so whenever that happens…we’ll see.”
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
The first season of House of the Dragon has come to a close as an unqualified success. The premiere saw the largest single-day viewership for a series debut in HBO’s history and continued to land consistently in the top five titles streamed across all platforms through its last episode. The show was renewed before the second episode of the series even aired.
House of the Dragon is a prequel to Game of Thrones—created by George R.R. Martin, Miguel Sapochnik, and Ryan Condal—and like Game of Thrones, is based on the “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels by Martin. Set nearly 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, it follows the beginning of the end of House Targaryen.
At its center is the conflict between members of House Targaryen, not least who will become the ruler after King Viserys (Paddy Considine) dies. Viserys steadfastly commits to placing his daughter, Princess Rheanyra, on the Iron Throne, but members of his inner circle and his young wife Alicent, who bears the king a son, have other ideas.
The Credits spoke to executive producer and co-showrunner Ryan Condal about power and patriarchy, and he shares his thoughts on season one and his hopes for season two. As a longtime collector and lover of movie props, Condal also discusses some of the great designs and props created for the series.
Ryan Condal and Matt Smith on the set of House of the Dragon. Photo courtesy of HBO.
In House of the Dragon, the dragons are that world’s version of nuclear weapons. There are 17 of them, right?
I mean, at the very peak, if you count everybody, yes, but right now, in our world, there are probably 12, let’s say. Some of those are counted as hatchlings that become young dragons.
They’ll be more in Season 2?
We’ll definitely introduce more of them as we go along. I think that’s part of the fun of doing the show. They are characters, and in Season two, they’re needed for their most famous purpose, which is to decimate and cause death and destruction. Design-wise, we really do go through quite a process with them. In Season one, the dragons were designed over the course of a year, where we did a lot of early concepting on basic things like how our dragons are different from what you saw in the original series, and honoring what they did with Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion, then figuring out in a time when there were many more dragons, was there just one breed? We came up with these three different genotypes of them, where they’re all the same species, but they just have different breeds that have different shapes, colors, and sizes. We worked with these two designers, who are really great because they’re working with similar software, so they would actually just switch off the design. They would pull the dragon up to a certain point and then switch, and the other one would take over because both had a different way into it. Now that we’re working on Season two, they’re back at it because we need more dragons!
“House of the Dragon.” Photograph by Courtesy HBO
That kind of collaboration leads to much more creativity.
Exactly. I saw it as kind of similar to my writing process that I go through with Sara Hess, my writing partner on the show. We write a draft of the script, and then she takes the scenes that I don’t like to write and makes them better. She sends me a battle scene and says to ‘make it exciting.’
As a collector of movie props and art, you’re especially sensitive to the quality and workmanship of the sets and props used in the show. How did your experience as a collector and fan of film artisans impact your choices?
There was nothing more exciting for me than going into those workshops where physical things were being built for the show, whether it was sets or down to a dragon’s egg. I love the artistry that goes into the making of these things. We really had aces across the board on Season one. One in particular that I worked closely with was Peter Johnsson, who designed and then constructed the two ancestral Targaryen Valyrian steel swords, Blackfyre and Dark Sister. He is a real swordsmith who actually makes his living making swords in the old way. He makes re-creations for museums, and he actually studies finds of real medieval swords and deconstructs them to figure out what you do because usually they’re pulled out of a river, and all the leather and wood are gone or rusted away, so he figures out what it might have looked like when it was made new. They’re two of my favorite things that were built for the show.
Paddy Considine, Milly Alcock. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
It’s great fans can look for that. So many props on the show have intricate detail.
I also had a lot of fun with the big props that they made for this show, like the Iron Throne, and the Driftwood chair, the sea snake’s chair, and King Viserys’s big model of old Valyria, which is like this giant Lego build. Seeing something built on that scale, it’s almost like a mini set, you know, seeing it being built and how they, how they can conceive of it, building it in sections, and watching the throne get built, from concept to day by day, going in there and watching them actually make and cast swords, and burn them and melt them in their own prop builder way, that was a lot of fun.
Paddy Considine and Emily Carey. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBOPaddy Considine in “House of the Dragon.” Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
What conversations were there about allowing both a more diverse cast and anchor storylines, and as the first season is coming to an end, how do you think those decisions have been received and accepted?
What we wanted to do was tell the story and not let identity politics get in the way of it one way or the other. It’s a period show, and to try to tell a story about race in this particular setting would feel anachronistic and out of the time. Not that it’s undiscussed, but it’s covered and discussed in different ways. This is a world based on what your last name is and what your bloodline is. Are you true born, or are you bastard born? In this time period, there are things these people would not even have terms for, like the ideas of misogyny or feminism. Great genre storytelling holds up a mirror to us in our modern lives but does it in a way where issues and topics are cleverly disguised within the world that we’re exploring. I would say that we’re not doing anything that’s not a part of the story as George wrote it. We’re not taking something that he wrote and making it about something else. The very first story that he ever published in the Targaryen history was called “The Princess and the Queen,” about two women in a power struggle in a patriarchy, and from that come a lot of these different storylines and the things that Alicent and Rhaenyra both struggle with.
Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy. Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO.
Clare Kilner directed the penultimate episode, her 3rd for the show. “The Green Council” was helmed by a female filmmaker and also written by Sara Hess. There are lots of power dynamics at play between the women of the show, specifically in this episode. What did they bring to it in terms of undermining ‘Team Patriarchy’?
I adore both Claire and Sara. Sara is my right hand on the show, and I wouldn’t be able to survive without her. That’s entirely her episode, and Clare directed the hell out of it, so that’s one that I’m able to kind of sit back and just enjoy without looking at with all of my personal writer insecurities being brushed onto it. For me, the scene that really stands out that is very symbolic of the larger story we told this season is between Rhaenys and Alicent, where Alicent confronts her, and Rhaenys asks her if she’s ever imagined herself on the throne. It tells a story about what it’s like to be a woman of extreme power living in the world of the patriarchy, because these are both women who have their heads right up against that glass ceiling. It shows the shifting dynamic from where we started, where the men would rather put it all to the torch rather than see a woman on the Iron Throne, and here we are in episode nine, actually seeing the torch being lit. It’s a great scene written by a woman, directed by a woman, and has two women in the scene not talking about men. It would pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors.
Eve Best and Olivia Cooke. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
Looking back on the first season, in what ways has the finished show changed or surpassed what you imagined when you first envisioned it?
This show is really within degrees of what I wanted and hoped it would be. You always have a picture of something in your mind’s eye as a writer, and I think we achieved that in a big, big way in season one. In many ways, I can’t believe that it’s done and out there. After four years of us working on this with George, to be here is really incredible. It’s the thing I set out to make, and now we get to do it again on season two, and we get to learn from the things that we didn’t quite nail down or didn’t quite do right, and the things we think we could do better or make bigger, now we get to do it all over again and have a second shot at it.
House of the Dragon is currently streaming on HBO Max.
For more on House of the Dragon, check out these stories:
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
When released in 2019, Rian Johnson’s star-studded, deliciously delightful who-done-it Knives Out was met with universal acclaim and became a smash hit. In it, star Daniel Craig shed all remnants of his Bond persona to play the quirky Southern genius detective Benoit Blanc in a performance so winning and a film so enjoyable even a character’s sweater became a sensation. (Granted, that character, the spoiled viper Ranson Drysdale, was played by Chris Evans). The stage, therefore, was immediately set for Johnson’s second installment, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The new release, another darling with critics, has the envious holiday release dates of November 23rd in theaters and December 23rd on Netflix.
Much like its predecessor, Glass Onion features a stellar ensemble cast. Craig’s Benoit Blanc is invited for a lavish weekend to a private island off the Greek coast by billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton). Blanc is the odd man out in a yearly gathering of friends that includes Connecticut governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), right-wing social media star Duke (Dave Bautista), scientist and futurist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr), fashionista and former supermodel Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), and Bron’s estranged former business partner And Brand (Janelle Monáe). Each character has their secrets, and when one of them is murdered, it is down to Blanc to find the killer and separate the truth from lies while keeping himself alive.
The Credits spoke to writer/director Rian Johnson about the newest film in his Benoit Blanc series, which is inspired by the best Agatha Christie mysteries and their classic 70s and 80s cinematic interpretations. He talks about his collaboration with Daniel Craig, his love of whodunits, and how he drew from his brushes with the crazy world of billionaires and celebrities to make Glass Onion equally funny and up-to-the-minute.
How has Daniel Craig acted as your muse to collaborate in creating a 21st-century detective like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot?
The interesting thing is I had grown up with Poirot so much in my head that when I sat down to create this character, Benoit Blanc, I messed myself up a little bit because I started going down the wrong path. I started thinking in terms of like the great detectives like Poirot or Miss Marple or Nero Wolf; I started thinking in terms of quirks. I started thinking in terms of the superficiality of what I knew about them, so I started trying to build a version of Benoit Blanc, like, what’s his thing? Does he have two different colored eyes? It was awful. So I just had to clear the deck and say no quirks. I’m gonna give him a slight southern accent because he’s in the Northeast for the first movie, so that will make him a little fish out of the water. I decided to write him very straight, and then I’d find an actor. I didn’t know who it would be, or who I’d collaborate with.
Daniel really found, literally, Benoit Blanc’s voice, but also, one thing that I love that he has in common with Poirot is that he loves hearing himself talk in that slightly pompous, self-elevated, but endearing way. That, and the other thing that was important to me to capture was I always loved the moments where Poirot connects on an emotional level. There’s always a moment where he has an aside, like a heart-to-heart with one of the characters, or sees the good in someone, or even the good trying to get out from under the evil, and tries to have a sincere appeal. That heart at the center of it was something that I’ve tried in both of these movies to have Blanc always have. Whereas there’s so much cynicism in the motives for murder and money and everything, centering these movies around an emotional core where Blanc sees the good in somebody and is engaging with that is something that felt important.
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc and Janelle Monáe as Andi. Cr: John Wilson/NETFLIX
Specifically, in the Hercule Poirot novels, there is always a political element to the way that he approaches his work, where it’s about the haves and have-nots, and his heart-to-hearts tend to be about people feeling a loss, feeling like they’re been left behind. That’s certainly present in your Benoit Blanc films.
Yeah, I mean, even down to Christie’s decision to make Poirot Belgian, to make him a foreigner, and what that meant in British society at that moment, and how that meant he was seen and regarded. That was the other big ingredient for me and the motivation for making these. For such a long time, whenever you saw a whodunit, it was a period piece set in England because it was usually a Christie adaptation, but Christie wasn’t writing period pieces; she was writing to her time and to her place. The notion of doing the genre well and doing it in America, right now, and not in a message-y type way, but not being afraid to engage with the culture right now at this moment, that, to me, was a big motivating factor for what was exciting about doing this.
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Courtesy Netflix.
You started out just a normal person going to film school but have become a noted filmmaker making some pretty huge movies. You’ve probably had some experiences in the rarified air where some of the characters in Glass Onion live. How much of what you’ve seen, with celebrities or perhaps a completely over-the-top billionaire, wound up in the movie?
That’s a phenomenally perceptive question because it’s exactly the case, and it’s something that I don’t really talk about because I’m not sure how to, but just having had exposure to this other world, and feeling the way that Blanc feels when he shows up on the island of this movie, feeling completely lost, thinking, “This is a planet that operates under rules that I just don’t understand,” it’s very strange. A lot of the details of that went, in a subliminal way, into the experience of this movie. It just also felt like there was so much comedy to be mined from that. It’s also crazy because you get exposed to some of this stuff, and you realize what’s in the movie is not really that inflated; it’s probably even tamped down a little bit compared to some of the stuff that’s out there. It was fun working with Edward Norton on it, too, because he’s in the tech investor world and has been very successful, so he also knows a lot of, like, the inside baseball of this stuff. We had a lot of fun riffing and coming up with little details we could put in there and stuff to lampoon. Also, so much that we touch upon in the movie is happening everywhere around us. The big thing that was on my mind was just big blatant lies, and big blatant lies being forwarded by complicity based on self-interest, that’s also still in the air.
It’s like nuclear war and Dr. Strangelove. There’s no other way to come at it than to hopefully point out how horrible it is by laughing at it.
Some of the funniest moments were those clearly inspired by James Bond. From the score, cinematography, and then, in specific, Daniel Craig’s bathing costume. What kinds of discussions were there around those?
I loved the idea, and I actually I can’t take credit for this; a friend of mine, Michael Lerman, pitched me this joke even before I started writing the movie that Blanc never takes his shirt off. He’s the kid at the pool party who wears his shirts into the pool. That cracks me up, and so I went with that. Then Daniel worked with Jenny Eagan, our costume designer, and it was Daniel who went down this route of thinking, in terms of Blanc’s role in this movie, that he’s affecting a sort of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot-type vibe, so he’s got the hat, he’s even got his physical characteristics. There’s a lot of Tati that he’s bringing to it, and it’s Tati by way of Cary Grant by way of James Bond. Even with the setting, I think in the script when I was describing Miles Bron’s lair, I wrote, “It’s kind of like a Bond lair,” then I put in parentheses, “Sorry, Daniel.”
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Edward Norton as Miles and Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. Cr: Courtesy NETFLIX
Can you talk about the production design by Rick Heinrichs? Where was the film shot? What was the inspiration for the interior, and who made the art in the art gallery?
The exteriors were all Greece. The interiors, and all the sets, including the big room with all the art, were built on a stage in Belgrade. I worked with Rick on The Last Jedi, and he’s done a bunch of work with Tim Burton. He’s incredible at communicating nuanced character through very large palettes, through big scale, and that’s what we needed for this movie. With the artwork, Rick is very knowledgeable in terms of the art world. I’m not, actually, so I was very much relying on Rick. It’s a combination of actual reproductions of classics. There’s a Rothko, and a Hockney, although the Rothko is upside down because I feel like Miles would hang it the wrong way, then also, there are some original pieces that are kind of pastiches of different styles of art by all local Belgrade artists.
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Jessica Henwick as Peg, Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc and Janelle Monáe as Andi. Cr: John Wilson/NETFLIX
Those are all very narcissistic.
Exactly. Down to the big painting of Edward that looks like it’s out of Fight Club. I just cracked up when they showed that to me.
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Kate Hudson as Birdie, Leslie Odom Jr. as Lionel and Kathryn Hahn as Claire. Cr: Courtesy NETFLIX
Lots of writers forget to write strong female characters, especially those that are women of color, but they’re a main feature in this film series.
When you have actors like Janelle Monáe and Kathryn Hahn and Kate Hudson and Madelyn Cline and Jessica Henwick, when you’re writing, knowing that you’re going to have people like that coming up to bat, the amount that you can build into it knowing that they’re going to amplify it and take it up to another level, it’s pretty joyous. It’s pretty cool to see. So in that way, it’s an entirely selfish thing to work with fantastic actors like that, who I know are gonna take whatever I write and just make it better.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery releases in theaters on November 23rd and streams on Netflix on December 23rd.
