In his score for The Batman, the brooding emotional tone of composer Michael Giacchino’s character theme is established from bar one in the track of the same name. No soaring violins. No muscular brass orchestra. No superhero triumphalism. In their stead, a muted piano taps its rhythm low and slow, establishing the key of B flat before quickly descending. The tonal interval—moving from the tonic down two whole tones to the minor sixth degree—is inherently menacing, invoking the image of a glowering figure emerging from the shadows. We’re off to a good start.
This two-note introduction may feel familiar. It mirrors Kurt Cobain’s guitar chords in the de facto theme song of The Batman—Nirvana’s “Something in the Way.”
Intentional or not, it also serves as an homage to the quintessential menacing icon of cinema—legendary Star Wars composer John Williams used it for “The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme).”
Four measures in, a single guitar chord rings out in Giacchino’s “The Batman” theme. Like the piano’s foundation, it is simple and precise, consisting of a B flat root note, perfect fifth and octave. There is nothing revolutionary about it, but the guitar tone is striking. The absence of low end, the subtle tremolo, and reverb—all applied to single-coil electric guitar pickups—was the signature sound of 1960s surf rock.
In the world of cinema, Ennio Morricone borrowed the surf-guitar tone extensively when he scored Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti Western” films such as 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars. The resemblance is likely not a coincidence. Other sound elements in The Batman signal a “cowboy vigilante” theme. When foley artists recorded the rattling jangle of metal when Batman takes a step, they perfectly invoked the sound of spurs on Western boots.
References to cinema milestones aside, this is not Star Wars or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This is The Batman. And in writer/director Matt Reeves’s vision, that means a monochrome world of cold, sunless light cast onto the bloodless pallor of weary faces. In other words, gothic. Cue the church bells!
When the bells arrive in bar five, they are not the handheld brassy instruments played by enrobed choir kids. This ain’t Christmas. The bells here are decidedly gothic—a heavy bronze timbre drenched in reverb, as if echoing from a cathedral tower onto concrete and limestone and hungry children.
The tragic melancholy of that sound is fitting for Batman, who fights for Gotham in anonymity like a hunchback ringing bells for masses who can’t see him. Despite all the menace of his garb and swagger of his violence, the protagonist of The Batman is ultimately a lonesome soul perched in a tower over his people, struggling to find meaning in the death of his family.
“The Batman” evolves into a lush orchestral passage alternating between hope and tragedy, but the theme’s introduction tells us much of what we need to know. In 8 bars of music over roughly 20 seconds, Michael Giacchino paints a musical portrait of a damaged, anti-heroic protagonist who is equal parts Darth Vader, Clint Eastwood, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Is there a more perfect description of Batman?
Writer/director Antonio Campos (The Devil All The Time) first began thinking about adapting the iconic docu-series The Staircase back in 2008. As a young, up-and-coming filmmaker, Campos imagined adapting the French series, centered on the sensational trial of American novelist Michael Peterson, accused of killing his wife Kathleen, in 2001, into a feature film. In fact, the French doc itself was meant to be a feature, but after director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and producer Denis Poncet embedded with the Peterson family, the twists and turns in the story were so abundant they decided they needed more runway.
The case at the center of both the doc and Campos’s brilliant adaptation for HBO Max is focused on the peculiarities surrounding Kathleen Peterson’s death after an apparent fall down the staircase of her family home in Durham, North Carolina. Michael Peterson claimed Kathleen’s fatal plunge happened out of earshot (he was sipping wine by the pool) and after a night of drinking, planting the idea that Kathleen was drunk. Yet Kathleen’s scalp had seven deep lacerations, plus she had another 35 cuts and bruises on her body, all of which seemed to tell a very different story.
If The Staircase was just about the above facts, you’d have enough for a true crime mystery. But the story only begins there, and the bizarre revelations keep coming. Campos’s meticulously crafted series revisits all the twists from the documentary but widens the scope to include the filmmakers themselves, who bicker over Peterson’s potential guilt, and even our own bottomless fascination with the domestic horrors of other people’s lives.
We spoke to Campos about what drew him to adapt an already hit documentary series, how he worked with a supremely talented cast led by Colin Firth, as Michael Peterson, and Toni Collette as Kathleen, and how Enya’s music (yes, Enya) helped him find his way to the story.
What compelled you to take on The Staircase, especially given the fact the docu-series seemed to have explored the story of Michael and Kathleen Peterson so thoroughly?
I’m a big true crime fan. I was religiously reading these crime reporting books that were coming out every year, and I was always on the hunt for a story that I hadn’t heard. So when The Staircase DVDs came to me, I had the experience that’s become so common now but wasn’t then—I binged watch them. I was completely immersed. And I’d never had that experience before.
What gaps or new territory did you initially imagine your feature adaptation exploring?
The one thing I noticed at the end of the documentary series was I felt like, ‘Oh, wow, I’ve heard everything there is to hear about this guy’s life and all his secrets and I still feel like I don’t know him.’ And that mystery intrigued me. To have that kind of unknowable figure at the center of a true-crime story felt like a puzzle within a puzzle. The other aspect that immediately jumped into my head was there was a French film crew embedded in his house throughout this trial, and that was a really interesting dynamic. Here are two people filming the story who are wrestling with the same thing I’m wrestling with, and they can have the dialogue that I’m having in my head right now. I started seeing all the possibilities with it, and then I got to know the French filmmakers and I was like, wait, these guys are characters.
Frank Feys, Vincent Vermignon. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO Max
How did you marshall everything you’d learned about this story, which includes the 13 episodes of the doc and your relationship with the filmmakers, into a tightly plotted narrative?
The feature film version would have to follow one or two characters, but I was basically looking at this story from all angles. And so by the time that I got to the point where I realized it was a series, I’d already done a lot of work and felt like I was equipped to do it.
Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sophie Turner, Olivia DeJonge, Toni Collette, Colin Firth, Odessa Young, Dane DeHaan. Photo courtesy of HBO Max.
You move back and forth through time in a very subtle way, giving Toni Collette the space to really inhabit Kathleen. How did you solve that puzzle?
I knew there were going to be different timelines, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to jump from one to the other. I had a sense of the bigger narrative and I knew the end of the bigger story, but it just came to me that the way that it had to flow was that the audience had to almost not realize that they were jumping from one timeline to another, that it all had to feel like one story. But it took a long time, and a lot of listening to Enya, to crack the pilot.
Toni Collette, Colin Firth. Photo courtesy HBO Max.
Once you wrote the pilot and sold it, you established your writer’s room—how did you break down the series in the room?
Putting the writer’s room together was so important. I got to take all this stuff that I had accumulated and absorbed and spew it out and get all these other people as obsessed with this story as I was. That was a pivotal moment, sharing all my ideas and then mapping them out. We really had to sit and map out each character in each timeline, and then look at each episode and where we were starting, where we were ending, and then figure out how we’re going to tell that part of the story in that episode. Being in the writer’s room with all these other minds that were as obsessed with the story as I was allowed us to map out this really complicated puzzle.
How long would you say the writing process was until you could start to see your path from beginning to end?
It probably was like a year of working in the writer’s room. And then once the writers’ room was over, it was really me and Maggie [Cohn, writer/executive producer/co-showrunner], and she’s such a brilliant storyteller. She comes from TV, so she’s so used to the sort of long format, whereas I’m so used to movies.
Colin Firth and Patrick Schwarzenegger in “The Staircase.” Courtesy of HBO Max.
You have such an incredible cast, not just Colin Firth and Toni Collette, but Parker Posey, Michael Stuhlbarg, Olivia DeJonge, and Rosemarie DeWitt. It’s a long list. How did you approach your work with them?
As a director, you want to focus moment by moment with actors, but at the same time in a TV show this big, you’re always considering the implication of every moment to the bigger picture. A lot of the actors already loved the documentary, so the bar was pretty high. They had their character’s voices in their heads already, and so much of why people love the doc is not just the story, but the characters, the personalities. So, when they read the scripts, they got a sense right away that we were up to something and that there was bigger stuff than just kind of trying to retell a story that had already been told.
Did you give them any notes on how close they should stick to their real-life counterparts?
The main direction was for them to take whatever aspects of the real person that spoke to them, see where you meet that person, but feel free to add to the mix. That’s how we’ll find your version of that person. It was very important that everyone knew we weren’t trying to do impersonations. And I think they’ve done such a good job that they feel like they are that person. I don’t think Colin really looks like Michael Peterson, but I think he’s captured the essence of Michael Peterson, or at least the essence that we all took from the documentary.
Colin Firth, Michael Stuhlbarg, Courtesy HBO Max.
The performances are really astonishing. What have you learned through this long but I imagine very rewarding process?
The thing that I’ve learned over the years about directing is that people don’t necessarily like to be told what to do. People want ownership over what they’re doing. They don’t want to feel like they’re just colors that you’re painting with. And at this level, they’re insanely intelligent. They’re so good at what they do. They’re so perceptive and they’re such good storytellers themselves that it’s stupid to not take advantage of that. See where your actors are going, plant some ideas in their head through the script, and, a lot of times, an actor will say, ‘This idea came to me, and I don’t know where it came from.’ Well, it’s actually in the second paragraph of the first page there, but it’s not about where the idea comes from, it’s about getting to a place that feels exciting and interesting. I’m just excited about working with really talented people and giving them the room to play. If you just let them play, where do they go?
The Staircase episode 7 airs on June 7 on HBO Max.
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“Large room, four desks.” That’s the only description production designer Jeremy Hindle had to work with when he came up with this TV season’s most spookily immaculate office, as seen in Apple TV + series Severance. The high-concept sci-fi thriller, partially directed and executive produced by Ben Stiller from a script by first-timer Dan Ericson, centers on the tyrannical Lumon Industries corporation whose employees (played by Adam Scott, John Turturro, Britt Lower, and Zach Cherry) partition off personal memories each time they enter the building.
Britt Lower, Zach Cherry and John Turturro in “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Managed from afar by creepy boss Cobel (Patricia Arquette), the Macro Data Refinement room accommodates only four computer-equipped desks surrounded by a vast expanse of green carpet.
Designer Jeremy Hindle, who dropped out of film school in his native Canada to work on TV commercials before landing his first feature project in Zero Dark Thirty, gravitated immediately to the surreal Severance story. “I loved the script,” Hindle recalls. “I was like, this is my Twin Peaks!”
Hindle, who also designed Top Gun: Maverick, spoke from his Los Angeles home to offer a deep dive into Severance’s design influences ranging from modernist architect Erin Saarinen’s tractor factory to Fargo and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
You designed a spectacularly stark office surrounded by seemingly endless hallways that seem well-suited to Lumon Industries’ emotionally disconnected characters. People watching Severance for the first time might think “What the hell is going on here?” With that in mind, I’m curious about your first reaction to Dan Erikson’s Severance script?
When I first read the script, I thought “Wow, we’re watching somebody walk down the hallway for two minutes—that’s going to be interesting.” And I remember meeting Ben [Stiller] over the phone and saying “We really have to nail the tone” because this show was just screaming for a well-defined, very particular look.”
You created a lookbook for Ben laying out your visual ideas for Severance. What were the key influences?
Playtime, the [1967] French movie by Jacque Tati was a really big reference for both of us. It’s set in an airport, and everything was fabricated on massive sets with two-dimensional planes going by. And the extras were cardboard cut-outs, which I love. Playtime had this playful mood, and it’s the same with Severance, where we needed to build this world so pretty much everything was custom designed. So yeah, Playtime was a big influence, and also the Coen Brothers.
Which Coen Brothers movie?
Fargo, when William H. Macy’s in the parking lot with all that snow? The opening of Severance starts with Mark [Adam Scott] in his car in this snowy parking lot. To me, snow always makes you feel isolated and alone. So that image of Macy’s tiny little character in a parking lot — that was the first page in my lookbook. Here’s this character [Mark] who’s so severed he can’t even handle the being alone part.
Inside Lumon Industries’ massive corporate headquarters, these emotionally “severed” characters perform computer calculations in the Macro Data Refinement room, which has zero décor beyond desks and computers. How did you conceptualize such a spartan workspace?
When human resources when HR took over the office in the eighties, it became about “Bring pictures of your family to the office, here’s some plants,” which was really so people would stay longer. But if you look at offices in the sixties, you had a pen, a stapler, and a phone. You sat at this beautiful desk, you dressed immaculately, and you went to work. I felt like we had to get back to that.
Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, Britt Lower and Adam Scott in “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Did you have a model in mind?
The John Deere company in Illinois, which was designed by Erin Saarinen and Kevin Roche. It’s a tractor office! And yet it was so beautiful, all about the importance of design, the ethics of work.
You bunch this quartet of desks right up against each other in the center of the room surrounded by a huge amount of empty space. Where did you get that notion?
It had to be a single cord, almost like an umbilical cord, from the desks to wherever these numbers go underground. It’s like a tree growing up [through the floor]. For me, the office is a big playroom and the workers are like babies. They don’t know anything and now here they are, born into this office.
There’s hardly any color at Lumon Industries. How did you arrive at the perfect shade of white?
When we did the camera tests, I tested about 50 whites. I laid them all out four by fours, beige white, the grey whites, the blue whites, the green whites, the red whites. We all sat in a room watching them through the projectors with the colorist and two hours later, there were just two colors that really worked.
Adam Scott in “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
One color being white and the second color being used for the extremely green office floor?
We tested so many, and one green was disturbingly horrible. It was this fluorescent lime green that you would never think would work, not to your eye, but the way [cinematographer] Jessica [Lee Gagné] wanted to grade it, it was perfect.
Tramell Tillman and Britt Lower in “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
The hallways to and from the central office seem to go on forever.
I knew Ben wanted to walk forever and wanted it to be real, so we built hundreds of feet of hallway.
Where?
Soundstages in the Bronx. And the hallways would jog. “Let’s go left,” and again, and again, almost like [a maze by M.C.] Escher. The hallways just kept going. You come out of this narrow elevator, go into this little room, the first hallway’s narrow, the further you go, the wider it gets, making it feel less claustrophobic as they move through the space. Then you’ve got the “Break Room” which is really narrow, torturous like there’s no turning back. The language of the hallways took a lot of work, a lot of tests, and tons of concept art.
Adam Scott and Britt Lower in “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
The monumental Lumon Industries building really puts employees in their place. Did you find a real-life location to represent corporate headquarters?
Yes, that’s Bell Labs in New Jersey. The funny thing is that the same guys who designed the John Deere building in my look book also did the Bell Building. I thought it was defunct, but actually, someone bought the building from the state and turned it into basically an indoor mall, but for living. So we drove out to see it and oh my god. As a designer, you have these moments where you’re like: “If I don’t get this I’ll die. I can’t live without this.” As a bonus, no one had ever shot a film there, ever. We were adamant that everything in Severance had to be unseen by the world, which, in New York, is really hard.
Did you need to tweak the Bell Labs location to fit the story?
There were a ton of visual effects to paint things out because there are houses and trees everywhere now. I wanted it to just be a parking lot, glass building, and forest.
Outside of work, Adam Scott’s Mark and his boss Kordel (Patricia Arquette) live next door to each other in these nearly identical houses. What were you going for there?
It’s Lumon corporate housing. I looked at least 80 locations. We could have done the Pleasantville thing or the Tim Burton [Edward Scissorhands] thing where everything’s perfect. But we wanted houses that were somehow built wrongly. Like Mark’s brain, everything is fractured.
Pre-pandemic, before working on Severance, you designed Top Gun: Maverick. What were you going for in terms of representing the military world?
I wouldn’t say it’s a military movie at all. For me, Top Gun is romance. Not sexually but how it’s lit, and the way it feels warm and emotional. Tom said to me at the beginning. “Jeremy, this movie’s about family.” Navy family, film family, your family. It’s what people need.
Were you tasked with re-creating Navy bases, aircraft, things like that?
Not really. We had real jets all the time and had access across the board to whatever we wanted. What I liked the most about working on Top Gun Maverick is that people from the Navy want to push it to the limit but they’re also trained to look after each other.
GLEN POWELL PLAYS “HANGMAN” IN TOP GUN: MAVERICK FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES, SKYDANCE AND JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILMS.
Getting back to Severance for one more question: New employee Helly (Britt Lesser) wakes up from her memory-erasing surgery on this gorgeous table. Where did you get that?
We had to build the table like we had to build everything. The computers, the trackballs, the keypad, the touch screen, we even built our own programming for the computers. I felt the show deserved its own look because I think it’s one of the most original things anyone’s written in years. But I do remember asking Dan, “Why is Helly waking up on this board room table?” He says “It’s the birthplace of the office. It’s the womb.” So that’s what you’re seeing there: the birthplace of the office space.
Britt Lower in “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
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Mad Max: Fury Road fans, start your engines. Chris Hemsworth has revealed on Twitter that the Furiosaprequel has finally begun filming. Like so many other movies, Furiosa was delayed due to the pandemic, and the original release date of June 2023 got pushed to May 2024. But now, the stars have literally aligned as the cast has finally assembled and filming is underway on George Miller’s highly-anticipated prequel, exploring the conditions and context that made Charlize Theron’s deathless Furiosa character in Fury Road possible.
Here’s Hemsworth’s tweet, revealing a film slate against a very Mad Max-ian background:
That backdrop looks familiar to Mad Max fans—a scorched landscape, bereft of water but possibly perfect for speeding across in a souped-up vehicle welded together from spare parts and fitted to a massive, fire-belching engine. Franchise mastermind George Miller returns to direct, of course, co-writing the script with his Fury Road collaborator Nick Lathouris. In the crucial role of the young Furiosa is Anya Taylor-Joy, while Hemsworth, Angus Sampson, and Tom Burke all have unknown roles.
In Mad Max: Fury Road, Theron’s Furiosa was the real hero of the film, despite Tom Hardy’s indestructible Max getting title billing. She was the one who risked everything to defy Immortan Joe and secret five of his wives out of the Citadel towards a potential sanctuary beyond his reach. For you Fury Road fans, you know that the sanctuary didn’t exist, and the film was essentially one long, breathless chase, with Max and Furiosa teaming up to try and save the wives and put an end to Immortan Joe’s tyranny. Mad Max: Fury Road was, simply put, one of the best action movies of the century, and simply a great film, full stop.
This is why there’s such excitement over Furiosa. Taylor-Joy has the chops to step into Theron’s boots—no easy task there—having done incredible work in films like The Northman, Last Night in Soho, and The Witch, and starring in Netflix’s smash hit series The Queen’s Gambit. And Hemsworth, of course, knows his way around a blockbuster, an intense film schedule, and high expectations. With George Miller at the helm, these capable performers will have every opportunity to make Furiosa pure fire.
For more on Furiosa and Mad Max: Fury Road, check out these stories:
You might recall back in 2017 when Star Wars: The Last Jedi premiered and some Star Wars “fans” began bullying Kelly Marie Train, one of the film’s stars, often using horrific language. “I won’t be marginalized by online harassment,” Tran wrote shortly thereafter, in an essay for The New York Times. “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them. Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.”
Sadly, history is repeating itself, with current Obi-Wan Kenobistar Moses Ingram, a sensational talent whose breakout performance in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit got the attention of casting directors everywhere, is now on the receiving end of racist invective being spewed at her on social media.
In Obi-Wan Kenobi, the new live-action Star Wars series on Disney+, Ingram plays the crucial character of Reva Sevander, aka the Third Sister, who is on a mission to track down Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) for Darth Vader. In what should be a moment of joy, with Obi-Wan making a massive splash with its Disney+ premiere on Friday, May 27, it has instead turned into yet another example of emotionally stunted, racist cowards bullying a star online. Here’s what Ingram shared on her Instagram account:
“There’s nothing anybody can do about this. There’s nothing anybody can do to stop this hate. I question my purpose in even being here in front of you saying that this is happening. I don’t really know. The thing that bothers me is this feeling inside of myself, that no one has told me, but this feeling that I have to shut up and take it, that I have to grin and bear it. And I’m not built like that. So, I wanted to come on and say thank you to the people who show up for me in the comments and the places that I’m not going to put myself. And to the rest of y’all, y’all weird.”
The official Star Wars Instagram and Twitter accounts responded with this statement in support of Ingram on Monday night:
We are proud to welcome Moses Ingram to the Star Wars family and excited for Reva’s story to unfold. If anyone intends to make her feel in any way unwelcome, we have only one thing to say: we resist. pic.twitter.com/lZW0yvseBk
This message was then followed by Ewan McGregor’s response, which was posted to the official Star Wars Twitter account, which included this sentiment: “I just want to say as the lead actor in the series, as the executive producer on the series, that we stand with Moses. We love Moses. And if you’re sending her bullying messages, you’re no Star Wars fan in my mind. There’s no place for racism in this world. And I totally stand with Moses.”
Others rushed to Ingram’s defense, including Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount, who posted a message of support on Instagram on Tuesday that included this: “This is Moses Ingram. She is a singular talent and a recent addition to the @starwars universe. She has also been targeted by racists pretending to be fans because her mere existence threatens a skewed, dystopian fantasy that selectively omits the likes of @therealbillydee and others. We, the Trek Family, have her back.”
The immediate response to these so-called racist “fans” who use a series or film’s casting choices as yet another occasion to vent their toxic worldview is heartening, but it’s hard to watch it happen over and over again. What to make of the kind of person who believes that Star Wars should exist, much like their preferred version of the United States or even the world, as a place of white racial hegemony? Nothing much, one could argue, yet they’ve managed to darken what should be a beautiful moment for Ingram. Obi-Wan Kenobi is the most-watched Disney+ series premiere ever, and Ingram, a rising star and integral part of the show, should be allowed to enjoy its success, not defend herself from racists who, if they existed within an actual Star Wars galaxy, would be stooges of a dying Empire, too dim and dull to even appear onscreen.
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.”
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Sorry, Bridgerton season 2, but Stranger Things just turned Netflix’s record books upside down. The fourth season of the Duffer Brothers’ beloved series has smashed the record for the best premiere for an English-language series, with viewers notching 286.79 million hours of viewing time from May 25 to 27. Bridgerton was the previous record-holder for an English-language series with a healthy 193 million hours over its premiere weekend this past March.
Now Stranger Things has its sight set on the next record—also held by Bridgerton—for most-watched English language series over its first 28 days of release. That number currently stands at 656.26 million hours of viewing, but Stranger Things season four has already taken a big chunk out of that, and only after three days. There are still another two episodes left in Part 2 of Season 4, and those are feature-length affairs, totaling nearly four hours combined, which will arrive on July 1.
If you’re curious why we keep using the qualifier “English-language premiere” on these numbers, that’s because the Korean juggernaut series Squid Game pulled in an astonishing 1.65 billion hours of viewing over its first 28 days of release, followed by Spain’s super popular Money Heist, part five, which gobbled up 792.23 million hours.
The excitement surrounding the return of Stranger Things after a three-year hiatus also helped supercharge the previous seasons of the series, with all three of them of hitting Netflix’s top 10. The power of Stranger Things is such that stretches into the realm of music, too. Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill” is now the number one song on Apple’s iTunes and number two on Spotify’s U.S. charter after featuring in season four’s premiere.
We’re all living in the Upside Down, and have been for some time.
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Bradley Cooper’s next project might be his most ambitious yet. Imagine being offered the plum role of playing the legendary American conductor Leonard Bernstein by Steven Spielberg, and telling Spielberg you’d take on the role, but you’d also like to write and direct it, too. This is the path Cooper took, and you’ve guessed by now that Spielberg said yes, and while the film’s not due until 2023, we have our first look at Cooper as Bernstein, and the transformation is astonishing.
Netflix has revealed four images from the film, two of which show Cooper as an older Berstein, and two of which reveal Cooper as a younger Bernstein with his wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan).
Cooper told Varietythat he was able to get Spielberg’s blessing after the latter saw an early cut of A Star is Born and realized Cooper had the chops. “Steven has a lot of interests — he’ll just choose one thing and all of the other things will be on hold. I think he knew he wasn’t going to make that movie for a while. He was kind enough to hand it off to me, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last four and a half years.”
It’ll be a while until we know just what Cooper has done with the iconic Bernstein’s life, but from the images alone we can see that the hair and makeup teams crushed their assignment. Prosthetic makeup designer Kazu Hiro (an Oscar-winner for The Darkest Hour and Bombshell), makeup designer Sian Grigg (The Revenant), and hair department head Kay Georgiou (Joker) helped turn Cooper into Bernstein, full stop.
Here are the images:
Bradley Cooper is Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro.” Courtesy Netflix.Carey Mulligan is Felicia Montealegre and Bradley Cooper is Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro.” Courtesy Netflix.Bradley Cooper is Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro.” Courtesy Netflix.Carey Mulligan is Felicia Montealegre and Bradley Cooper is Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro.” Courtesy Netflix.
Cooper co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, who won an Oscar for his work on Spotlight. The producers are, wait for it, Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. The film will focus on the relationship between Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre (Mulligan), but with Bernstein’s epic life, there’s a ton that Cooper and Singer could include. All we know is we’ll be watching when Maestro arrives in 2023.
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There are few tales as timeless as Pinocchio, the story of a wooden puppet’s quest to become a real boy, and there are few actors as beloved as Tom Hanks, so, what might happen when you put the two together? We’re about to find out in director Robert Zemeckis’s live-action Pinocchio, which stars Hanks as Geppetto, the woodcarver who treats his wooden creation, Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) as if he were his actual son. Lucky for them both, magic is in the air. In the first trailer for Zemeckis’s live-action adaptation, we see what happens when Geppetto’s wish is granted.
Joining Hanks and Ainsworth is a fantastic cast, including Cynthia Erivo as the Blue Fairy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Pinocchio’s trusty guide Jiminy Cricket, and Keegan-Michael Key as Honest John. Then there’s Lorraine Bracco playing the brand new character Sofia the Seagull, as well as Luke Evans as the Coachman, Kyanne Lamaya as Fabiana, Giuseppe Battiston as Senor Stromboli, and Lewin Lloyd as Lampwick.
Check out the trailer below. Pinocchio premieres on September 8 on Disney+.
Here’s the official synopsis for Pinocchio:
Academy Award® winner Robert Zemeckis directs this live action retelling of the beloved tale of a wooden puppet who embarks on a thrilling adventure to become a real boy. Tom Hanks stars as Geppetto, the wood carver who builds and treats Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) as if he were his own son. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Jiminy Cricket, who serves as Pinocchio’s guide as well as his “conscience”; Academy Award® nominee Cynthia Erivo is the Blue Fairy; Keegan-Michael Key is “Honest” John; Academy Award® nominee Lorraine Bracco is Sofia the Seagull, a new character, and Luke Evans is The Coachman. Also in the cast are Kyanne Lamaya as Fabiana (and her marionette Sabina), Giuseppe Battiston as Señor Stromboli and Lewin Lloyd as Lampwick.
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The Bad Batch is back. Disney+ has revealed the season 2 trailer for the animated series, which finds our favorite clone mercenaries getting back into the business of taking on dangerous missions to try and help who they can in a galaxy gone berserk. The members of The Bad Batch were first introduced in the animated series The Clone Wars and under the guidance of The Mandalorian director and executive producer Dave Filoni and head writer Jennifer Corbett (Star Wars Resistance). Filoni and Corbett return for season two.
“The entire Lucasfilm Animation team and I would like to thank Disney+ and our fans for the opportunity to continue telling the story of the Bad Batch,” said Filoni in a statement.
“Fans have enthusiastically embraced the action and drama of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, and we are excited to see the Star Wars animated universe continue to expand on Disney+,” said Michael Paull, President of Disney+ and ESPN+ in a statement. “As the dedicated streaming home for the Star Wars franchise, we can’t wait for the second season of this fan-favorite animated series.”
Brad Rau (Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars Resistance) serves as The Bad Batch‘s supervising director, while Corbett is the head writer. Executive producers are Filoni, Corbett, Rau, Athena Portillo (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels), and Carrie Beck (The Mandalorian, Star Wars Rebels).
The series is set after the Clone Wars and finds our genetically mutated clones using their vast array of skills to survive in a chaotic galaxy.
Check out the season 2 trailer below. Curious which member of The Bad Batch you are? Take this quiz. Star Wars: The Bad Batch arrives this fall.
Did you see Top Gun: Maverick this weekend? If you’re anything like us, you were one of the many, many people who eagerly went to the theater to catch Tom Cruise reprise the role of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, 36 years after the original Top Gun, and you’re a part of the astonishing $154 million haul that the film made in North America. Globally, Top Gun: Maverick pulled in a whopping $248 million. It’s not only the best Memorial Day Weekend release ever, but it’s also the best of Cruise’s career.
Top Gun: Maverick‘s massive appeal proves, or perhaps simply reminds us, that a movie can have a monster opening without superheroes. There were many reasons the film conquered the weekend, and while nostalgia no doubt played a part, it was the quality of the filmmaking (and yes, the use of real Navy jets rather than CGI), the passion of all those involved, and the commitment to making a sequel that was not just worthy of the original but dared to improve upon it that resulted in the film’s historic opening. These are the facts that helped give Maverick a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the crucial A+ CinemaScore. People were raving about the movie, which made others decide they needed to see for themselves what all the fuss was about.
One of the joys of Top Gun: Maverick is how Cruise, director Joseph Kosinski, screenwriters Eric Warren Singer, Ehren Kruger, and Cruise’s longtime Mission: Impossible collaborator Christopher McQuarrie delivered a story that managed to thrill and soothe simultaneously. Maverick is wedded wholly to the original while also looking to the future with a new crop of Top Gun pilots that Maverick has been called upon to teach before a dangerous mission. The resonances to the original Top Gun are the film’s beating heart, with the emotional crux of the story revolving around Maverick’s relationship with one-time rival Iceman (Val Kilmer), and most crucially, his former radar intercept pilot Goose (Anthony Edwards), whose son Rooster (Miles Teller) is one of the Top Gun pilots he’s tasked with teaching this time around. Vividly shot dogfights, a love interest in Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly) whose name Top Gun aficionados will remember from the original, and a thrilling third act all safely steer Top Gun: Maverick through the danger zone and into box office history.
What’s more, Cruise and his collaborators didn’t rush to put a Top Gun sequel on the big screen. They waited, in the case of Cruise for nearly four decades, before the right story with the right cast and crew came along. While Top Gun: Maverick drew fans of the original, it offered those either too young or simply unmoved by the 1986 movie a reason to come to the theater. There was no guarantee a Top Gun sequel was going to give audiences a need for speed, but the effort put into making Maverick great made it happen.
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Featured image: TOM CRUISE PLAYS CAPT. PETE “MAVERICK” MITCHELL, MILES TELLER PLAYS LT. BRADLEY “ROOSTER” BRADSHAW, MONICA BARBARO PLAYS “PHOENIX” AND GLEN POWELL PLAYS “HANGMAN” IN TOP GUN: MAVERICK FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES, SKYDANCE AND JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILMS.
The trailer for Willow is extremely promising, both for us (ahem, older) fans of the original 1988 film, and for newcomers to the fantasy epic.
The trailer begins with some stage setting. A voiceover tells us “There is a story of a child destined to be an empress and the unlikely hero who would protect her.” That unlikely hero, as fans of Ron Howard’s original film know, is a farmer named Willow (Warwick Davis), who spent the feature film trying to protect that baby empress from the evil sorceress Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh). Howard’s film was a major event for a generation of youngsters in the 80s, with a cast that included Val Kilmer as the mercenary Madmartigan, who helped Willow on his quest.
The trailer returns the heroic Willow to the forefront, but now, the action will be led by a princess, Kit (Ruby Cruz), assembling a group to go on a quest to rescue her twin brother. Joining Davis in the cast are Tony Revolori, Amer Chadha-Patel, Ellie Bamber, Ruby Cruz, Erin Kellyman, and, crucially, Talisa Garcia, the first trans actor ever cast by Lucasfilm for one of its productions.
Willow takes place a whopping 200 years after the events of the film, and unlike the original, the series boasts the cutting-edge technology that’s made The Mandalorian and other Disney+ series so ravishing.
Check out the trailer below. Willow premieres on Disney+ on November 30.
Here’s the official synopsis for Willow:
An epic period fantasy series with a modern sensibility set in an enchanted land of breathtaking beauty, “Willow” features a diverse international cast with Jonathan Kasdan, Ron Howard, Wendy Mericle, Kathleen Kennedy, and Michelle Rejwan serving as executive producers. The story began with an aspiring magician from a Nelwyn village and an infant girl destined to unite the realms, who together helped destroy an evil queen and banish the forces of darkness. Now, in a magical world where brownies, sorcerers, trolls, and other mystical creatures flourish, the adventure continues, as an unlikely group of heroes set off on a dangerous quest to places far beyond their home, where they must face their inner demons and come together to save their world.
Harrison Ford made an appearance at the Lucasfilm panel at the Star Wars celebration to make a very big announcement—Indiana Jones 5 will hit theaters on June 30, 2023. Along with that big news, the first image from the hotly-anticipated film, from ace director James Mangold, has also been revealed. It shows us Indy in silhouette, flashlight in hand, his iconic brown fedora on his head, moving across a rickety-seeming bridge (Indy loves rickety bridges) on a fresh case.
So what is the mission Indy’s on? Plot details are non-existent at the moment, but what Ford was able to tell the crowd was the film is nearly done, and the legendary John Williams is providing the score. Williams himself joined the event to conduct a live orchestra to play the Indiana Jones theme to bring Ford to the stage. Williams also played the Obi-Wan Kenobi theme, giving the audience a two-for-one treat they won’t soon forget. Obi-Wan Kenobi arrives on Disney+ on Friday and will focus on Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) a decade after the events in Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith.
There’s a ton of excitement surrounding Indiana Jones 5 thanks to Ford’s return, the incredible supporting cast, and the involvement of Mangold, whose last two films, Ford v Ferrari and Logan, were masterclasses in taut, tension-filled storytelling.
Joining Ford in the cast are Antonio Banderas, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Boyd Holbrook, Shanuette Renée Wilson, Toby Jones, and Thomas Kretschmann. Steven Spielberg, the longtime Indy director, is on hand as a producer alongside Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and Simon Emanuel.
Check out the first image here:
Harrison Ford returns as Indiana Jones. Courtesy Lucasfilm/Walt Disney Studios.
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The first Andor trailer is here, revealing a glimpse, at long last, at the origin story of Diego Luna’s heroic pilot Cassian Andor before he took on the fateful mission to steal the Death Star plans depicted in Rogue One. There are those of us out there who believe that Rogue One is, by far, the best Star Wars spinoff yet, and the reasons are myriad, and they include Luna’s resourceful Andor. Rogue One remains the only major Star Wars film, or really any franchise vehicle we can think of, where (spoiler alert!) all the major characters die for their cause. They included Cassian Andor, which brings us back to his upcoming Disney+ series.Here, we’ll get to see what events prior to the daring Death Star caper made the man.
Andor will look at the early days of the rebellion against the Empire when regular people all throughout the galaxy started to find their voice, and their courage, to stand up to their cruel, selfish, rapacious so-called leaders. The trailer makes great use of sound, beginning with a man banging away at a gong, and ending with Maarva (Fiona Shaw) saying “this is what a reckoning sounds like.”
When you look at the full breadth of the Star Wars saga, you’re looking at a colossal story of the failures of dictatorships and those that would appease dictators for personal gain, the painful but often necessary work of rebellion, and the costs of such a constant struggle on a human (or in many cases in the franchise, alien) scale. Andor will center Luna’s character’s part in all this, but will also show what happens when people, bullied and brutalized for too long, finally fight back.
Luna is joined by cast members Genevieve O’Reilly, Stellan Skarsgård, Adria Arjona, Denise Gough, and Kyle Soller. Tony Gilroy, one of the directors of Rogue One, is the creator and showrunner.
Check out the trailer below. Andor arrives on Disney+ on August 31.
Here’s the synopsis for Andor:
The Andor series will explore a new perspective from the Star Wars galaxy, focusing on Cassian Andor’s journey to discover the difference he can make. The series brings forward the tale of the burgeoning rebellion against the Empire and how people and planets became involved. It’s an era filled with danger, deception, and intrigue where Cassian will embark on the path that is destined to turn him into a rebel hero.
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Based on everything from the reviews to the overwhelmingly positive chatter online to the 5-minute standing ovation at Cannes, Top Gun: Maverick seems destined to become Tom Cruise’s biggest weekend opening in his career, which is saying something. For the sequel to the beloved 1986 film, Cruise, the film’s executive producer and star, waited until he had a great story and the right people in front of and behind the camera, which included producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joseph Kosinski. It was also essential to Cruise and his team that the US Navy was willing to take part so that the production could be shot with practical effects, with the actors playing pilots filmed in real jets. For this incarnation, Cruise literally had a need for speed.
In Top Gun: Maverick, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) is called to train former Top Gun pilots to fly a nearly impossible mission. Mav shares a complicated past with one of the aviators, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller). Rooster is the son of Mav’s former wingman Goose (Anthony Edwards), the best friend he lost in a training accident in the original film. Helping with guidance and support is his longtime friend Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer) and old flame Penny (Jennifer Connelly).
All these pilots are the best of the best, but to ensure survival and success, Mav has to make them even better individually and as a team. Among the chosen are “Hangman” (Glen Powell), and “Coyote” (Greg Tarzan Davis). The Credits spoke to Powell and Davis about the rigorous training Cruise designed to prepare them for flying in F18s and pulling G-forces like real Top Gun pilots.
TOM CRUISE PLAYS CAPT. PETE “MAVERICK” MITCHELL, MILES TELLER PLAYS LT. BRADLEY “ROOSTER” BRADSHAW, MONICA BARBARO PLAYS “PHOENIX” AND GLEN POWELL PLAYS “HANGMAN” IN TOP GUN: MAVERICK FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES, SKYDANCE AND JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILMS.
The Navy committed to putting actors in the back of F16s to prepare you, Tom Cruise built individual flight training programs and checked the detailed forms you filled out each day as you went through it. What were some of the notes or hiccups you experienced, and how did Tom and his team adjust the program in response?
Powell: I was a sarcastic asshole in those things until I realized Tom Cruise was actually reading them. The whole preparation, his whole thing is ‘practice like you play.’ Make it harder before you have to actually go up there and act. For me, one of the hardest things to do was recover from the sustained G’s. I could pull 8 1/2 or 9 G’s when we would do those little pop-ups all day, but these sustained G’s, these death loops where you have to be doing them for as many as 30 to 45 seconds, they get harder and harder. You just get smaller, so that you’re trying to keep blood in your head over the course of almost a minute. Knowing that I didn’t recover as quickly mentally, that I had to take a second to breathe, he thought, ‘We should probably do more of those.’
Glen Powell plays “Hangman” in Top Gun: Maverick from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films
How about for you, Greg?
Davis: I wanted to make sure that I was actually capturing those moments and looking believable, and I didn’t want to pass out. So I would ask Tom, ‘How can I get better in this?’ The best way to get better is to do more of it, so I was doing it constantly, over and over, the high G pulls. You’re just trying to push yourself to feel what it’s like to blackout so that you won’t necessarily get to that point. You will know what it feels like and know how to counteract what’s going on. If we didn’t have that program, there is no way we would be able to do what we did in those jets and have that great footage. What it does to your body and your face and everything, if you’re untrained, it’s horrible. We had to look like we actually graduated from Top Gun. So with that preparation, it really helped make us look as though we’ve been doing this for years.
Do you think it’s more a physical or a mental game when you’re up there?
Davis: Both. I do think it’s mental over physical because I had the battle of, ‘I don’t want to be the one to blackout. I don’t want to be the one to throw up. This person did this many G pulls, so I want to be able to do just as many or more.’ I think we had that camaraderie of competitiveness that kept us going. On the physical side, you don’t feel that until really after the fact. I mean, sometimes during filming, you have to shake off the G’s, like, ‘let me breathe, let me shake off the sickness,’ but it was really once you get to the ground. I would need to just lie down in my car for an hour after training because you can’t drive off, you’re just so exhausted. It’s like you got into a car wreck a few times, there are times when you’re cold and you just have to sleep, so I will go with mental first, and then physical.
GREG TARZAN DAVIS PLAYS “COYOTE” IN TOP GUN: MAVERICK FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES, SKYDANCE AND JERRY BRUCKHEIMER FILMS.
Powell: I think the one thing I learned from Tom is he’s maybe the most headstrong person I’ve ever met, in terms of his ability to use mind over matter, in every case. It’s actually unbelievable the things that you can will yourself to do, and what he does will himself to do is incredible. I would say that’s the interesting thing that I also learned about Top Gun pilots in general, with flying, they have to be athletes in the air, but they’ve also got these engineer brains. They’re doing math while blood has been drained from their heads. It’s unbelievably impressive. So I do find it to be a hybrid, but I also find the ability to take that consistently, to get into that plane every time, knowing it’s gonna hurt you a little bit. Miles [Teller] left one flight and the capillaries in his whole back were burst. There was so many G’s that the blood was trying to be pulled through his back, and his whole back was a raspberry. That’s pretty consistent. It’s called G rash. That happens to a lot of people, and with Miles, his whole back looked like someone had beaten him. It was bad.
Davis: There were times when the next day you knew you had to fly, you were like, ‘Okay. Okay, yeah. Let’s go. Let’s go.’ Then you would get in, and you’re sitting on the tarmac or the taxiway for 30 minutes and you’re trying to like tell yourself, ‘Okay, only an hour and a half or two hours. I got this. I got this.’ It was definitely mental warfare that you were playing with yourself.
This is all done live. You were operating your own cameras, considering the shots, the lighting, and remembering your lines. What did the practical experience and the challenges of the shoot teach you about film that as an actor you never expected to learn?
Powell: Tom is such a great film teacher. He loves this stuff, and he loves when he can impart knowledge and experience to other people. At least for me, when he was teaching us about film for up there, where we had to be our own directors, our own crew, he would tell me right before a flight, ‘Hey, there’s gonna be a look to Phoenix and Bob. I want you to get one that’s really slow. I want you to give one where you just do your eyes to the side. I saw this Lee Marvin movie. Lee Marvin has this one thing where he almost gives, like, a side-eye, and then he keeps going. Give them a little smirk.’ We’re shooting for X amount of time up there, and he’s like, ‘Just give me as much good stuff as you possibly can.’ What you realize is, this is how he crafts a movie. It’s all intentional, but he knows the movie is going to find itself as we make it. That was one of the big things I learned up there is putting yourself out there, and trying as much stuff as possible because Tom is not afraid to look stupid. At the end of the day, we all look cool because we’re not afraid to look stupid.
Davis: Just learning everybody else’s job, and understanding why this person is doing this to help make the film look the way it looks. For example, learning why we need the lighting done a certain way, as well as learning how to edit in your head, because you’re also editing the movie while you’re up there, like, ‘I think I got that part, and if I look here, then I know they can cut it here.’ It’s being aware of the full picture. When we say it was a masterclass from Tom, it was a literal masterclass of every element of filmmaking that we’re all taking on to our next jobs, and I feel like a much wiser storyteller.
Top Gun: Maverick is playing in theaters nationwide.
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Director Baltasar Kormákur knows a few things about filming the sublime beauty and terror of the natural world, and he’s bringing all the skills he’s honed in films like his Himalayan adventure epic Everest and North Atlantic ocean adventure The Deep to South Africa. The first trailer for Beasts implies that Kormákur is just at home on the South African savanna, too.
Beast stars Idris Elba as Dr. Nate Daniels, a recent widower who returns to South Africa where he first met his wife. This time, he’s bringing their daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Sava Jeffries) to a game reserve managed by his old friend Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley). The idea is to give the girls a taste of the natural wonders of the world. The bad news is there’s a rogue lion in the park who wants a taste of them.
The lion is doing things no lion is supposed to do, namely, hunting humans for sport. Yet it turns out the lion isn’t doing it for sport, nor is he “the devil,” as is briefly suggested by one of his maimed victims, but rather the survivor of poachers now seemingly convinced all humans are trying to destroy it.
Beast looks like the kind of fun, relentless action flick that summers are made for. Check out the trailer below. Beast roars into theaters on August 19.
Here’s the official synopsis for Beast:
Sometimes the rustle in the bushes actually is a monster.
Idris Elba (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, The Suicide Squad) stars in a pulse-pounding new thriller about a father and his two teenage daughters who find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the savannah has but one apex predator.
Elba plays Dr. Nate Daniels, a recently widowed husband who returns to South Africa, where he first met his wife, on a long-planned trip with their daughters to a game reserve managed by Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley, Russian Doll series, Maleficent), an old family friend and wildlife biologist. But what begins as a journey of healing jolts into a fearsome fight for survival when a lion, a survivor of blood-thirsty poachers who now sees all humans as the enemy, begins stalking them.
Iyana Halley (The Hate U Give, This is Us series) plays Daniels’ 18-year-old daughter, Meredith, and Leah Sava Jeffries (Rel series, Empire series) plays his 13-year-old, Norah.
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Marvel has revealed new Thor: Love and Thunder photos, including one of a Goddess (Natalie Portman’s Mighty Thor, and one of a God Butcher (that would be Christian Bale’s Gorr)—two new sparring partners in the MCU’s hotly-anticipated next film. Following the ripping new trailer released just a few days ago, we’re now starting to get a better picture of what co-writer/director Taika Waititi’s sequel is all about.
Here’s what we’ve learned thus far: Thor (Chris Hemsworth, naturally) has grown tired of the superhero life. I mean, how many times can you save Earth, or any number of other planets, before it all starts to feel very same-y? So when Love and Thunder begins, Thor’s looking for a new path, a more peaceful path—that’s until Gorr the God Butcher shows up.
With Gorr on the scene, Thor will need to get back into battle mode, but he’s going to have help. Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) will be there, as will Thor’s buddy Korg (Taika Waititi), but he’ll get an unexpected boost from Jane Foster’s (Portman) return. Only Jane has a new name—Mighty Thor—and she’s got the magical hammer Mjolnir to prove it.
The new images show us our two Thors locked in a romantic gaze (we think) as you see in the featured image above, and then one of Portman’s Mighty Thor and Thompson’s Valkyrie. Then there’s Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher, looking like a pale wraith without an ounce of warmth to his soul. This should be a good time!
Check out the new images below. Thor: Love and Thunder arrives in theaters on July 8:
One of the best descriptions we’ve heard of Russian Doll, the consistently surprising, genuinely hilarious series from co-creator and star Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland, and Amy Poehler comes from the show’s most tenured editor, Todd Downing. Describing a moment in season two, episode six, “Schrödinger’s Ruth,” in which nearly every character who has been in the series shows up on a Subway platform in a crucial moment, Downing said he had a realization. “Oh, this is the inside of Natasha’s head.”
While Russian Doll was created by the aforementioned trio of massively talented co-creators, Lyonne is the driving force behind the show, both in front of and now behind the camera. She took over showrunning duties in season two from Headland and directed half of the episodes, and her inimitable personality infuse the show with its brilliant, offbeat charm.
Russian Doll season two departs from season one’s Groundhog Day-like conceit, where Nadia (Lyonne) was trapped in a deathly loop of reliving the same night of a party, thrown in her honor, that ends with her death. Having puzzled her way out of that existential labyrinth, Nadia is now locked in a new kind of metaphysical nightmare—she’s now unstuck in time, hopping around various timelines as she tries to uncover a long-buried secret involving missing Krugerrands and her family’s past, while her pal Alan (Charlie Barnett) finds himself whisked back to Berlin in the 1960s.
We spoke to Downing about what makes Lyonne tick, how he stays sharp after viewing hours (and hours) of footage, and the challenges of season two.
Russian Doll is such a unique show and presents what I imagine are some pretty fun challenges for an editor. How did you approach season two’s time-travel elements?
When Natasha sent me the script, I just remember writing back to her like, ‘Oh my God, you were just getting warmed up with season one.’ I think the leap in like sophistication to me is significant. Don’t get me wrong, I love season one, but I think creatively she came into her own for season two. She’s got such a singular voice. And with season two, seeing all these locations and then the body-swapping, I was using all these different editing muscles, or instincts, because there’s such a different rhythm to this season and it just felt very original.
What would was the vibe you were creating with season two?
I’d say we thought about American movies in the seventies, surrealist stuff, but whenever I try and tell people what the show is like, like it’s blah-blah meets blah, I’m like, no, it’s just Natasha Lyonne. You know what I mean? It’s just her thing.
There are two different types of editing days. There’s the editor’s cut time, when you’re by yourself and you’re going through the footage, and then there’s Natasha time, when we’re going through her director’s cut. And Natasha was the director on half of the episodes, so she was coming in right after the editor’s cut. Working with her is more interesting than an editor’s cut, where you’re just seeing what you have. And I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever cut a show like this where it’s like, holy sh*t.
What do you mean?
For example, the cinematographer Urszula Pontikos, she’s just unbelievable. When I started cutting the episodes, I was just like, wow, what she shot is so gorgeous. It was just like a painting. So that was very exciting from the beginning. And also, I’m a Chloe Sevigny fan, so seeing what a huge role she had in season two was great. She’s the master at delivering absurd lines. The way she does it with a straight face, she’s just so good.
What’s the process like when you’re cutting scenes with Natasha?
Natasha loves the editing process. She wants to see everything, she wants to try everything. And she loves music. We’re always working a lot with sound and music, even from the very beginning. She doesn’t wait until the end to be like, ‘Okay, here’s the final cut and now we’ll score it.’ She was working with composer Joe Wong from the start. There was stuff that he composed without even looking at the picture, and it was just so fantastic. Sound and picture are working in tandem rather than one being a crutch for each other.
What would you say Natasha’s aims are with the series?
She wants to make something original. She’s not interested in making something prestige-y, you know what I mean? I think she’s a little bored of that. It’s not so much avoiding prestige TV, but just not falling into the trappings of it. This show has a very New York vibe, which is very much Natasha’s vibe, and like the best TV, you end up finding yourself being emotionally moved. Natasha had the courage to change a show that was already working in season one. And she’s notoriously into puzzles—she loves crosswords and Wordle—and think that there’s something about that with this show, too.
How do you keep from becoming numb to the material considering you’re looking at it for hours and hours, day after day? E
When you’ve been with these scenes for so long, you find you like certain things so much, and you wonder, ‘Why do I like it?’ You get attached to weird things and you don’t know why you’re attached to them. So we had our re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor, Lewis Goldstein, come in and screen scenes, too. And he’d catch different things that maybe we’d become numb to. And then we had a couple of pals that came in and watched cuts and gave us really good notes. And as for me, sometimes you have to just step away for a second and try it again the next morning.
What was it like coming back for season two and finding out it was going to be this wild time-travel trip?
The shift from season one was big. Season one was, excuse the pun, like a Russian nesting doll. It was perfect, it kept going back to the apartment, to the party, to the same night, whereas season two is more open-ended and more sprawling. And I think season two was more nerve-wracking in a way because there were no expectations in season one. Back then it was like, okay, here’s another half-hour drama on Netflix! There’s going to get a little cult audience and that’s it, but then it kind of blew up. So with season two, you have that real fear. Like, oh sh*t. Can we do this again?
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It’s all about “lip flap” when it comes to quality voice dubbing for movies and TV. Voice actors make their living by synchronizing dialogue to the micro-movements that happen when on-screen characters open and close their mouths, AKA lip flap. Imprecise voice work results in cheesy-sounding foreign language adaptations. But voice dubbing, done right, has helped propel series like the Korean language Squid Game, Spanish-language Money Heist, and French-language Lupin to hit status in the United States.
According to dubbing mogul Steven Renata, foreign language entertainment surged during the pandemic when Netflix and other streamers started importing more content from overseas to appease viewers who’d burned through existing English-language inventory and wanted something new to watch. Meanwhile, animation fans in Europe and Asia sustained their appetite for foreign language versions of Moana, The Lego Movie 2, and other features. All these exports and imports helped situate New Zealand-based software app VoiceQ as a key player in the burgeoning world of dub.
VoiceQ, when paired with a desktop audio workshop like Pro Tools, enables voice actors to record dialogue from their home studios as video content unspools across their computer screen. “It’s like Karaoke for voice actors,” says Renata, managing director for VoiceQ. Speaking to The Credits from his Auckland office, Renata defines “Rythmoband,” praises cloud-based collaboration, and describes why technically perfect translations always need to be tweaked.
Voice performer working with VoiceQ.
In voice dubbing, timing is everything. How does VoiceQ make it easier for actors to match their dialogue with characters speaking in a foreign language, taking Korean-language Squid Game as an example?
The workflow begins when the original Korean language script gets translated verbatim into English. It’s imported into VoiceQ. However, each line is almost always going to be slightly longer or slightly shorter in English so if you recited the strict translation, you’d have to say it a little bit slower or faster and the lip flap wouldn’t fit. Therefore we need to adapt the translation to make the lips match, and that’s where the artistry comes in. If you’re the adaptor, in the top right-hand corner of your screen there’s the video of a Squid Game episode. To the left of that is the translated script line by line and next to that is the adapted script. Let’s say line two is a little bit off. As the script adaptor, you might put in a word, add a pause, or take away something. You can quickly make a change, check it against the video that’s playing on the screen and if it’s okay, you move on to the next line. Adapters are under a lot of pressure to get the project out the door, and our VoiceQ software makes the process faster.
A VoiceQ project.
Next, this adapted script, which should be lip-flap perfect, goes to the voice actor?
Yes. Markers give you a sense of when to inhale, exhale when to lift your or drop your voice because there are so many nuances in the rhythmoband as we call it.
What’s a rhythmoband?
It’s a really old process where the [translated] dialogue used to be hand-writtenonto a film strip that ran with the original film. VoiceQ provides this high-tech modernized version of that process.
So the voice actor sees the words on the computer screen flowing from left to right …
Or right to left if it’s Arabic, or top to bottom if it’s Japanese.
A VoiceQ recording session.
Can the actors customize the program to get, for example, a three-second prompt ahead of where they come in?
Yeah. Some actors like a lot of pre-roll, others are like, “Just give me two words prior and I’m good.” You can adapt VoiceQ to suit the actor’s preferences to be in character quicker so you can do voice acting as opposed to voice over.
That’s an important distinction because there’s nothing worse than watching and listening to a badly dubbed show with stiff dialogue that feels disconnected from the characters.
There are a lot of nuances that are required for good dubbing, and our interface allows that.
In 2016, you joined VoiceQ as managing director. How has the dubbing marketplace changed since then?
About three years ago Netflix did research and found that people will watch a series with quality dubbing all the way through, whereas if the show is subtitled, people tend to check out. That’s a massive insight. Once you’ve got the public saying “If you dub it the right way with the right voices, we will watch all this foreign content,” that’s when companies shifted their views about this slightly more expensive, slightly more complex thing. Dubbing exploded and then, just to put a bit more fire under it, along comes Covid.
Jung Ho-yeon in “Squid Game.” Photo by Noh Juhan | Netflix
How did Covid impact the marketplace?
At some point, streamers had no original content left because nobody could go anywhere to film [new projects]. When the global pandemic burned up the original libraries. There’s only one way out: dub [foreign language shows].
Did this upturn in interest inspire you to upgrade the product?
Over the course of eight months, we went to all of our clients, 50 around the world. We did webinars, we did focus groups, and we took feedback from anybody and everybody. In the space of 400 days, we made 100 product enhancements. That’s one upgrade every four days. People couldn’t believe that one, we actually listened and two, we produced what they asked for.
Do you see VoiceQ tapping into this trend of remote working, where people no longer travel to physical facilities to get their work done?
Studios spent millions on brick and mortar spaces. When Covid started to ease off, they want to go back to the physical studios but, having gone through the pandemic, when they couldn’t get voice talent into the studios, they realized there is a place for cloud technology in certain cases. For example, maybe there’s a really good voice actor down in New Zealand they only need for seven or eight lines, so let’s just do it remotely. Bang!
Same with Automatic Replacement Dialogue for a live-action movie?
Absolutely. Maybe there are 20 lines in a movie the studio needs to do pick-ups for, but the actor has flown off to China to work on his next project. They can use our cloud-based technology and have the person do the ADR as a remote. We license cloud applications as well as native [desktop] applications, which allows directors, actors, writers, and editors to work on the same version of the project. If one person on the team drops the bat, you get a sh*t result. We really want to honor the original content and the authenticity of voices, so all those people need to be looked after.
In New Zealand, the majority English-speaking population exists alongside this vibrant indigenous Māori culture which has its own language. Did your Maori heritage inform the way you connected with this tech platform that helps dismantle language barriers?
I have Māori ancestry through my father — my mother’s ancestors are from Scotland and Ireland — so I have a very real appreciation for First Nation languages. And having traveled a lot, I realize how much people appreciate hearing content in their own language. In the television and film world, you can now do this localization of content much faster without having to worry about the lip flap. That’s what created this boom in dubbing, and we happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Featured image: Omay Sy is ‘Lupin.’ Courtesy Netflix.
“What do you know about the Sierra Program?” Regé-Jean Page’s character asks CIA agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), as we see another CIA operative, Court Gentry (Ryan Gosling) stepping into the frame. Gentry also went by another name back in the day— Sierra Six—but that was when he was employed by the American government. “Reckless mystery men you guys sent in when you can’t officially send anyone else,” she replies. “The gray men.”
The first trailer for Joe and Anthony Russo’s The Gray Man is really something else, folks, revealing a deadly cat-and-mouse game between Gosling’s Gentry/Sierra Six and another former CIA man who’s possibly as lethal as he is. That would be Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans), who seems to relish the opportunity to take out the infamous Sierra Six. He relishes it so much, in fact, he’s willing to employ wet teams (CIA parlance for hit squads) to help him in his cause.
This international caper is packed, frame-to-frame, with major stars, major action, and what the Russo Brothers are calling some of the most difficult sequences they’ve ever shot in their lives. That’s saying something considering they filmed Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame back-to-back. The trailer is absolutely thrilling.
Check out the first trailer below. The Gray Man hits select theaters on July 15 and Netflix on July 22.
Here’s the official synopsis for The Gray Man:
THE GRAY MAN is CIA operative Court Gentry (Ryan Gosling), aka, Sierra Six. Plucked from a federal penitentiary and recruited by his handler, Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton), Gentry was once a highly-skilled, Agency-sanctioned merchant of death. But now the tables have turned and Six is the target, hunted across the globe by Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans), a former cohort at the CIA, who will stop at nothing to take him out. Agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas) has his back. He’ll need it.
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