The farther west her family’s pioneer caravan travels, the heavier a burden customs become, narrates Elsa (Isabel May), the heroine of 1883 on Paramount+. Observant and headstrong, she is the missing link from the series Yellowstone, a presence felt but not seen. Over the course of this ten-episode prequel, we follow her family’s journey leading to their stewardship of Montana’s biggest ranch and to Elsa’s ignominious fate.
The Dutton’s arduous move from Tennessee begins thanks to Elsa’s father, James (Tim McGraw), who joins Civil War captain Shea (Sam Elliott) as an ersatz third hand, helping him and Thomas (LaMonica Garrett) lead a combined immigrant wagon train and cattle herd to Oregon. James’s wife, Margaret (Faith Hill) is reluctant but stoic, in turn horrified by and resigned to the trail’s effect on her daughter. The story is as much a coming-of-age tale for 18-year-old Elsa as it is a Western adventure, with her evolution from a resentfully buttoned-up young lady to daring, lusty cowgirl told not just through her reflective voice-overs but through her clothing. “I had to design costumes for her that could make a transformation into her new life,” says Janie Bryant (Mad Men, It, Deadwood), the series’ costume designer. She put Elsa in four primary looks, building them to be able to metamorphose piece by piece through the different stages of the character’s journey.
We meet Elsa in a state of absolute distress. Out on the plains, somewhere, a wagon is on fire, she’s been shot through with an arrow, and inexplicably, she’s in a high-necked, full-bustled white floral dress which would be curiously pristine but for her mortal injury. Shifting back to the events leading to this nightmarish scene, she’s on a train from Tennessee, in a somewhat more practical slim blue dress with a long jacket known as a polonaise. “This was more of a Baroque-style garment, but the Victorians were inspired by the Baroque period, so the polonaise made a comeback in the 1880s,” says Bryant, who designed the jacket to use its length to signal Elsa’s adjustment to her drastically changing surroundings. “The polonaise could be cut off with each episode, depending on what her action was, to have her transformation happen.” Disappearing bit by bit, by the time she loses the formal jacket all together, the bodice of Elsa’s dress is basically an early iteration of a t-shirt and she’s traded a gold charm off her bracelet for a pair of pants.
This is the outfit we associate with her first love, cowboy Ennis (Eric Nelsen). By the time she’s left by her second paramour, Sam (Martin Sensmeier), she’s lost all vestiges of her pre-trip self. “It was written that Sam gives her a Comanche vest. The design I created and each part of the vest has a significant meaning, like with the beaded birds, the horsehair, and the elk teeth. And then with the leggings, those are indicative of the Comanche style during that period, with the long fringe on the side,” says Bryant. The costume designer worked with consultants from the Comanche and Lakota (whom the Duttons encounter next along their journey) to get Elsa’s adopted Comanche look and that of the other character’s period correct.
While Elsa shrugs off the day’s customs and mores, she’s surrounded by recent immigrants with more limited means to transform along the trail. The caravan is populated by small groups from Prussia, Romania, Germany, and Russia, mostly just trying to ford rivers and hang on to their food supplies. From the men’s trousers to their diverse headgear and the varied cuts of women’s blouses, “I researched each group and what was happening in the clothing at that time,” says Bryant. But at the heart of a huge undertaking of building, aging, and dying, it was Elsa and her mother, Margaret, whose look grows grimmer every mile she travels, at the core of Bryant’s design process. “Where I started would be with Margaret and Elsa, and I expanded from there. It’s just like a puzzle you put together.”
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Last Year, Apple TV+ won seven Creative Arts Emmys and landed four Primetime Emmy Awards. They have kicked off this year’s Emmy FYC season with a number of events that will take place at The Grove in Los Angeles.
Last Thursday evening (5/19) a panel of costume designers took the stage to pull back the creative curtain of their series. The artisans making the journey were Jane Petrie from The Essex Serpent, Sarah Edwards of Severance, Kameron Lennox from Physical, Natalie Bronfman from See, andKyunghwa Chae of Pachinko. The moderated panel introduced each designer to roaring applause before showing a clip of each series that was followed up with questions.
For Petrie, she collaborated closely with production designer Alice Normington to define the color palette of the miniseries The Essex Serpent, which stars Claire Danes as the widow Cora who leaves London for Essex to search for a gigantic serpent that’s said to have returned to the marshes. The palette subliminal ties into the shifting storyline as it moves from one city to the next.
Warm hues and deep burgundy reds find their way into the costumes as Cora contends with an abusive relationship. As she recovers and journeys to Essex, where meets Tom Hiddleston’s character Will, it brings out “earthy textures” to the designs before channeling a smattering of blues. To further separate Essex from London, Petrie supplied Dutch costumes to the people roaming the village as she “didn’t want it to feel like a regular English town.”
Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in “The Essex Serpent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
In creating the costumes for Severance, a slow-burn psychological thriller where its characters submit to a “severance” program where their non-work memories are separated from work memories, Edwards considered the two different worlds: the inside corporate environment of Lumon Industries and the world beyond its walls. She designed costumes for both, referring to them as the “innies and outies.”
“The innie world is a very controlled world. The directive was that it should be ambiguous as to what time and place it could be. In my mind, there was an employee handbook that had a dress code and that really helped to rein it in and keep it very spare and simple and minimal. The clothes also function as another layer of control down there. They were all mutually oppressed by this dress code,” she says. “The outside world has warmer tones. The characters are their true selves and you see more texture and color. Everything is easier fitting.”
John Turturro, Britt Lower, Christopher Walken and Adam Scott in “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
With Physical, Lennox honed in on the story’s time period which takes place during 1981 well before the neon colors that spring up later in the decade. “It takes place before the aerobics big boom,” she says. “We tried to recreate this sweet spot in time when women were starting to empower themselves through movement and dance. During that time they were just wearing their ballet gear. Then after it progressed, and as people started to get more creative, it became something else.” The costume designer was inspired by the early looks of Jane Fonda and curated a color palette of muted dusty pinks, lavenders, and teals. A favorite color combo that was popular at the time was baby pink and gray. All found their way into the costumes as the series follows Sheila’s (Rose Byrne) journey of self-discovery through aerobics.
The challenges in the dystopian series See were layered. Bronfman not only designed period piece costumes but created them for characters that are blind. The first hurdle was figuring out what type of fabrics and materials could be used in a world where humans have lost their eyesight. Working with the largest department she has ever collaborated with – including leather workers, fabric dyers, jewelers, and footwear makers – they crafted costumes from material that would have “not disintegrated in the last 500 years.” Plastics, car parts, and radio diodes made for much of the jewelry.
When it came to fabrics the way they felt took precedent and garment details were not overlooked. For the Trivantian army, a small symbol was added to their right boot which helped them move together – an idea Bronfman borrowed from ancient Roman times. For the merciless Queen Kane (Sylvia Hoeks), her costumes paralleled the story, starting out in a “lighter red and progressively getting darker, like dried blood, from all the bloodshed she created.”
Pachinko is a historical epic based on the novel of the same name which unravels an era when Korea was under Japanese rule through the eyes of a single Korean family. The timeline of the story jumps, crossing multiple generations, and begins in 1915. Sunja is the central character who we see as a girl (Yu-na Jeon), a young woman (Minha Kim), and as an aging mother (Yuh-jung Youn, who won an Oscar for Minari).
Kyunghwa Chae designed Sunja’s costumes to reflect her age. When younger, she wanted her to “look free.” Then as she gets older, “more feminine” looks were introduced even when Sunja wears Korean traditional dress. A palette of white hues was used to create warmth, beauty, and innocence. Then as Sunja journeys to Japan and adjusts her way of life, Chae places her more in Western clothing.
You can watch each series on Apple TV+ now.
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In an electrifying new trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder, we get to see the precise moment when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) thinks he’s about to be reunited with his magical hammer Mjolnir, only to find it belongs to somebody else now. You know who that new somebody is—her old name was Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), but in Love and Thunder, she’s Mighty Thor, and she’s worthy of wielding Mjolnir and a whole lot more.
While seeing Thor deal with this new reality in which there’s another, even Mightier Thor in town, the new trailer’s main focus is the proper introduction of Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale). “The only thing Gods care about is themselves,” Gorr informs us as he emerges from the thickets draped in a white shroud, looking ghoulishly gaunt, ghostly pale, and covered in scars. Handsome he is not, but creepy? Yes. Gorr’s vow? “All Gods will die.” And that includes, you’ve likely guessed, Thor himself. Well, both Thors, we imagine. Thus Thor and Mighty Thor are going to have to team up and grab a few of their pals if they’re gonna take down Gorr.
The trailer is pretty marvelous from start to finish, but you’ll want to stay for the big finish, a moment of pure absurdity delivered by none other than Zeus (Russell Crowe) that leaves regular old Thor, well, a bit exposed.
Joining Hemsworth, Portman, Bale, and Crowe are Tessa Thompson, returning as Valkryie, and writer/director Taika Waititi, returning as Korg. Also onboard are a few of your favorite Guardians of the Galaxy—Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord, Dave Bautista’s Drax, Bradley Cooper’s Rocket, Pom Klementieff’s Mantis, and Karen Gillan’s Nebula
Check out the trailer below. Thor: Love and Thunder arrives on July 8.
Here’s the official synopsis for Thor: Love and Thunder:
Marvel Studios’ “Thor: Love and Thunder” finds the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) on a journey unlike anything he’s ever faced – a quest for inner peace. But Thor’s retirement is interrupted by a galactic killer known as Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who seeks the extinction of the gods. To combat the threat, Thor enlists the help of King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Korg (Taika Waititi) and ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who – to Thor’s surprise – inexplicably wields his magical hammer, Mjolnir, as the Mighty Thor. Together, they embark upon a harrowing cosmic adventure to uncover the mystery of the God Butcher’s vengeance and stop him before it’s too late. Directed by Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok,” “Jojo Rabbit”) and produced by Kevin Feige and Brad Winderbaum, “Thor: Love and Thunder” opens in U.S. theaters July 8, 2022.
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It’s Tom Cruise month, folks. While Cruise is still flying high from the stellar reviews for Top Gun: Maverick (which zooms into theaters on May 27), Paramount has just dropped the first trailer for Cruise’s other massive franchise, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Cruise returns as super spy Ethan Hunt, and he’s joined by the modern Mission: Impossible mainstays, with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie at the helm and Cruise’s longtime co-stars returning. These include Rebecca Ferguson as Isla Faust, Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn, and Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell. Vanesa Kirby also returns, as the White Widow, and the cast gets a boost with newcomers Pom Klementieff, Hayley Atwell, Shea Whigham, Indira Varma, and Cary Elwes.
The trailer opens with Ethan Hunt getting some harsh news—his days of “fighting for the greater good are over” he’s told. What’s more, he’s been fighting to save an ideal that “doesn’t exist,” and he’s told he’ll have to pick a side. The trailer doesn’t give us much more of the plot than that, but it does give us glimpses of the action, which has become the hallmark of the franchise. Dead Reckoning Part One is the 7th Mission: Impossible film Cruise has led, and as with every new installment, the stunts promise to be bigger, more complex, and crazier. The trailer includes a look at a stunt involving a train plunging off a cliff that writer/director McQuarrie has mentioned as one of the most insane in the franchise’s history, which is saying a lot considering Cruise once held onto a plane—as it took off—in a previous installment.
Check out the stunt-heavy trailer below. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One arrives on July 14, 2023.
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“Questions have arisen such as is who he is, what is he, where did he come from, is he a creature of a foreign power, is he a creep, is he dangerous, smart, dumb, nice to his parents, real, a put-on, crazy, sane, man, woman, robot—what is this?”
These are the words that open the chills-inducing first trailer for Moonage Daydream, the first-ever feature-length film about David Bowie and sanctioned by his estate. Capturing such an uncategorizable colossus in a single film might sound nigh on impossible, but Morgen had unlimited access to Bowie’s archives, which included thousands of hours of rare performance footage, as well as access to all of Bowie’s master recordings.
Bowie will be remembered first and foremost as one of the most pivotal musicians of his generation, a genre, and gender-bending genius, but he was much more than just a rock god. He was also an actor, painter, sculptor, screenwriter, and more, and Morgen’s task was trying to capture all that without containing Bowie as any one thing. Speaking at CinemaCon about taking on David Bowie as his subject, Morgen told the crowd that “Bowie cannot be defined, he can be experienced.”
Morgen is no stranger to tackling larger-than-life musical gods. His film Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck artfully unpacked Cobain’s legacy in masterful fashion. He’s also directed the much-admired docs The Kid Stays in the Picture, about the legendary film producer Robert Evans, and Jane, which looked at the legendary (and ongoing) life and work of primatologist Jane Goodall.
Morgen and his team have spent five years working on the film. At long last, the world will get to see this unprecedented look at one of the greatest artists of the last century.
The film is having its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival tonight in their Midnight Screenings section. Check out the trailer below. Moonage Daydream arrives in theaters in September.
Here’s the synopsis for Moonage Daydream:
A cinematic odyssey exploring David Bowie’s creative and musical journey. From visionary filmmaker Brett Morgen and sanctioned by the Bowie estate. Five years in the making and featuring never-before-seen footage, experience it in theaters and IMAX this Fall.
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One of the most bittersweet intrigues in 2022’s film slate is how Black Panther: Wakanda Forever co-writer/director Ryan Coogler and his talented cast and crew handled the passing of Chadwick Boseman, the franchise’s star, in crafting the sequel without him. One person who certainly knows the answer to this question is Letitia Wright, Boseman’s co-star in the first Black Panther and one of the major returning figures in the sequel. Now, Varietyhas spoken with Wright about how the cast and crew dealt with Boseman’s absence from the sequel.
Lots of the speculation on how Coogler and the Marvel team would handle the loss of Black Panther himself have swirled around Wright, who was such a pivotal figure in the first film playing T’Challa (Boseman)’s brilliant sister Shuri. Would the mantel of Black Panther fall to Shuri? While we surely won’t know the answer to that question for some time, Wright was able to give Variety some insight into what the day-to-day filming was like without Boseman, and how they made sure to keep him front and center.
Wright has had some of her own struggles during the production of the sequel, including a shoulder injury and concussion she sustained during filming. Yet despite the many hurdles, with Boseman’s passing being by far the largest, she told Variety that Boseman’s legacy was honored every day. “We honored him by committing ourselves to the story that he started, the legacy that he started with this franchise,” Wright told Variety while at Cannes for her film The Silent Twins. Hear more below:
Letitia Wright reveals how “Black Panther 2” honored Chadwick Boseman on set, “We committed everyday to working hard, no matter what circumstances we faced. And we faced a lot of circumstances. A lot of difficult situations, but we came together as a team.” pic.twitter.com/9UsXU31wBS
Letitia Wright reveals what she learned during pandemic, “In life you just have to keep going, strong with what you believe in in terms of your talent, in terms of your desire to impact the world with your art.” pic.twitter.com/4mF2BbUvTX
During Russian Doll’s first season, hapless downtown New Yorker Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) can’t escape her own birthday party. In Season 2, she finds herself trapped by missing laws of space and time yet again, except now she’s a full-on time traveler. Stepping onto the 6 train, she gets off in her own neighborhood in 1982, where, she is understandably disconcerted to learn that she is her mother, Nora (Chloe Sevigny). Just as she gets used to firsthand insight into Nora’s crappy relationships and pregnancy with her own self, Nadia’s next subway ride disembarks much farther down the matrilineal line, to the mid-war Budapest of her grandmother Vera’s early twenties.
Meanwhile, Natasha’s partner in unwittingly defying the space-time conundrum, Alan (Charlie Barnett) gets on the subway and becomes his grandmother, Agnes (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a college student in the early 1960s East Berlin. Both Charlie and Nadia figure out they’re being sent back to solve longstanding family mysteries, with Nadia, first as Nora, then a young Vera, using her forays into her mother’s and grandmother’s lives to try to recover her family’s fortune, a set of Hungarian heirlooms somehow converted to thousands of dollars worth of Krugerrands lost by a dissolute Nora. Along the way, Nadia also tries to further improve the course of history by getting young Ruth (Annie Murphy), her mother’s best friend, to give up smoking, and she gives birth to herself on a subway platform.
The costume design by Jennifer Rogien does a ton of work here, shepherding what’s otherwise been a very modern show into the realm of a multi-period piece. Rogien’s costumes, which are deliberately muted in terms of color, with silhouettes true to time and place, work with their environments to evoke a niche moment in downtown New York history, the middle of World War II-era Europe, and the unusual environment that would have been East Berlin right after the Wall went up. We spoke with Rogien about her first impressions going in, tying different eras together through color, and bringing the season to a head in the last episode’s cathartic final scene.
What was your first thought when you initially read the script for season 2?
It was sort of massively overwhelming knowing what we were about to undertake in terms of five time periods, all of our known characters, all of our new characters, and an international unit. It was a little bit of a wow, this is going to be epic.
Did you start in a particular location/time period and build out from there, or look at these disparate settings as their own silos?
It was more by character. Everything is so schedule-driven in episodic production that I started with all the notes — so Nadia, Maxine, Lizzy, Ruth — because we knew we’d be starting with our contemporary characters from a scheduling standpoint and from a story standpoint. The introduction of episode one is when we see everyone again, except for Alan. From there, it was more about working in the order of the schedule. I believe we were starting with the 80s first. So it was this parallel process of the known entities and then the 80s. You’re never able to do one thing at a time. But for the most part, my shop actually looked like an 80s period piece, because that’s where we spent a lot of time in all of the episodes. As we started shooting and including scheduled elements like the 40s or 60s, then we’d start to pull those groups and characters and stock pieces in.
Were there ways you tried to tie Nadia to the younger versions of her mother and grandmother through clothing?
Definitely a little bit of thinking about that, and a lot of thinking about the color palette. Because at the production level, not just with costumes, we had color palettes for each era. For the 80s there was a bit of desaturated version of our contemporary color palette. There was another version that would take us back into the 60s. With Nadia, her color palette is very well established — black, red, white, gray, that’s it. So there isn’t much of a color palette overlap with Nora, because we’d seen Nora before, with her color palette established more in the 80s. So it was more of a language of color and tone than drawing exact parallels through costume. The krugerrand is one of the few things that is an exact parallel that is a deep part of the story. We see Nadia wear it, we see Nora wear it, we see Vera give it to Nora. That’s the real specific through-line in terms of costume.
Were there colors in any era you avoided completely?
In our contemporary world, we still followed our rule of minimizing blue and green. That was something we’d set up in Season 1, to help our world feel a bit skewed. Blue is the most common color anywhere in the world, between sky and water, so taking that out of the color palette really tilts things a bit. That’s something we leveraged in Season 1 with the exception of Maxine, who’s a notable rule breaker. And Nora was in a lot of blue in Season 1 as well to help reflect that she wasn’t in our contemporary world. But in terms of the palette for this season, that was something that Natasha, Diane Lederman, our production designer, and I all talked about more globally. I tried very hard to make sure the costume color palette matched overall what we were doing with the production.
Did you have set rules for establishing the different period costumes?
One of the things we talked a lot about was that we definitely didn’t want to do 1980s businesswear in New York. We wanted to do the Lower East Side in 1980s New York, which is a very different vibe than what you see in a lot of catalogs. The research materials you can get for the fashion of the era is a lot of J.C. Penny and Sears catalogs and Vogue, which is actually not relevant to the snow-globe that is the Lower East Side and Tompkins Square Park in Russian Doll. One of the things we tried really hard not to do was the 80s iconic yuppie vibe that we see a lot in movies because it’s really fun, the shoulders are strong, everything is oversized, and the neons are bright, but that was not us at all. We actually tried very hard to stay gritty, stay New York, and even step it back to the late 70s. You even see that in Nora’s wardrobe. It’s actually 1982 in the story, which tends to look more like the late 70s. So there weren’t really hard and fast rules, but it was things that were right for our story and our setting.
How did the early 60s in East Berlin and post-war Budapest come together — tons of research?
Absolutely. A lot of research specifically to Alan’s grandmother’s storyline. She’s in university and she’s from Ghana. We talked a lot about whether she had completely westernized to blend into her surroundings, and we ended up making the choice that she’s really invested in her education and is really trying to move forward in her life. We did some rentals but we also found some great tiny vintage shops in and around the Lower East Side that had some 60s pieces. It was really a search to find things that worked for her character, storyline, time period, and color palette. There’s also an amazing vintage supplier out of Chicago who has amazing 60s pieces, including coats and hats. Then for the 40s, that was primarily rental houses. We did shoot a lot of the 40s in Budapest, so I partnered with my local team to work with Paris Costumes, which is one of the big costume rental places in Europe, and we pulled from their local Hungarian place and had some costumes shipped in. The uniforms were actually sourced with an expert who is in Budapest who specializes in European uniforms for the early 1900s. The amount of expertise was absolutely incredible. Laszlo and his team helped us not only with the research, but he then maintains and recreates historically accurate uniforms. He’s also Hungarian, so he knows that history insanely well. His team also came and helped us dress all of the extras and actors on the day.
That final moment, when everyone is paired with her younger self on the subway, must have been highly orchestrated, visually speaking.
Natasha and I talked a lot about that scene because of those parallels. Some of the costumes fell into place naturally. We knew that young Vera, Nadia’s grandmother, would be wearing a specific dress because she’s pretending to be in mourning during the war to evade the authorities, and so that one was set from the beginning. It was going to be a black dress with a hat with a veil. We made the dress based on a 1940s sample that we rented. As we were fitting young Ruth and Elizabeth [Ashley] as present-day Ruth, we started talking about what’s the most important factor here — is it between the two younger-older selves, or is it the point in the story when Nadia remembers this character? It’s actually most salient that Ruth is in the last thing that Nadia sees her in, which is the hospital gown. We talked a lot about it and the significance of those clothes and the moment Nadia sees these various women in her life because it’s all in Nadia’s imagination.
Carey Williams’s new film Emergency (premiering in theaters on May 20 and Amazon Prime Video on May 27) is billed as a comedy-thriller. But when college students Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler), who are Black, and their buddy Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), who is Latino, find a drunk white girl they’ve never seen before passed out on the floor of their campus housing, it feels like Emergency is about to transform into straight horror. As the boys try to figure out who this girl is, how she ended up in their house, and what the right course of action might be to keep both her and themselves safe, their elaborate Saturday night party plans give way to frustration and terror.
While the boys barely make it off campus and through the night over the course of the movie, Emergency covers vast ground. Kunle and Sean are unlikely best friends — Kunle is a budding scientist more preoccupied with his lab cultures than the realities of racism in the U.S., while Sean, a lackadaisical student, sees the world around him for what it is. Through their friendship and their mismatched efforts to deal with a drunk stranger without ending up in the hands of the police, Emergency presents both a convincing portrayal of the horrors of U.S. policing as well as the sometimes sheer idiocy of 20-year-olds (which extends to and is perhaps best encapsulated by Maddie, the drunk girl’s equally incompetent sister, played by Sabrina Carpenter). In lighter moments, the film alights on the touchstones of American campus culture – silly costume parties, dumb frat guys, that crazy vibe shift where everyone listens to techno now.
For composer René G. Boscio, relevant found sounds from the boys’ environment, from vape sticks to the shaking of a ping pong ball in a Solo cup, helped make the score, which is spare, creepy, and designed to perfectly convey the precarity and danger of the situation in which Kunle, Sean, and Carlos find themselves. We had the chance to speak with Boscio about how his unique approach to composition worked to support the characters’ journeys which, despite taking place in the course of a single night, changes all their lives forever.
What was the jumping-off point for creating the film’s score?
I think between the conversations that Carey and I had, we established early on that the music’s role was going to be to support the tension and the suspense as well as some of the emotional beats that happen later on, and to stay out of the comedy. We didn’t want music to be trying to be funny. We felt that the performances and writing already delivered on that. So it was really more about trying to find subtle ways to support that tension. We made very strategic choices as to where the score should come in and what it should start emphasizing. The first time we actually hear score is once they start debating whether or not they should call the cops. I feel like that’s when the tension and premise of the film really takes off.
Sabrina Carpenter stars in “Emergency.” Courtesy Amazon Studios.
This is a thriller, but it’s not over the top. Did you have to exercise a lot of restraint in the score?
One hundred percent. I’m the type of composer who likes just pouring out everything inside. There’s kind of a sculpture, and I start chipping away and stripping things out until I feel like, all right, this is a nuanced and well-balanced area we’ve gotten to. Carey’s also a very subtle filmmaker when it comes to music and score, in particular, so we always wanted the score to be something that you felt and not so much heard. We didn’t want it to be too musical until the third act when things really pick up. That’s also when the score is given the chance to blossom more, but before that point, we wanted there to be this tension build-up that was restrained, and then it starts leaking as tensions escalate. And then it just blows up.
RJ Cyler and Donald Elise Watkins star in “Emergency.” Courtesy Amazon Studios.
Can you explain how non-instruments worked for scoring the film?
We didn’t want the score to be too musical. We felt like using traditional instruments right off the bat was going to be going against what we wanted to do. So I experimented a lot with using sounds that were already built into the environment of the film, like sounds from the forest or sounds from [the boys’] apartment, like radiator heater sounds that I turned into drones. I invented this Solo cup and ping pong balls concoction that I would then rotate almost like a rainstick, and then make drones out of that as well. And then this other instrument with metal rods, it’s just a box with metal rods that have a contact microphone pickup — you just hit it and it makes a sound. That, processed and manipulated, became this kind of thump that started when they debate whether to call the cops, and it became this incessant thumping that was representative of what was coming, and something that no matter how much you tried to avoid was just inevitable. I loved that it looked almost like prison bars. I also thought, this could be interesting, just more from a source of inspiration and metaphor.
You also used vocals very strategically.
Later on, there’s a pivotal moment where we decided to do a vocal cue. I had been sneaking in some vocal parts but there comes a time in the film, it’s the climax of the movie, where you have this very intimate moment with one of our main characters and he’s forced to grow up right on the spot and open his eyes to this world that’s he’s been in denial of previously. Right off the bat, Carey wanted it to be a vocal cue. He wanted it to feel very grounded and like this was something that was carried on from generations. I wanted it also to feel, because of that, like a hymn or a lullaby. We’d seen earlier on Kunle’s relationship with his mom, and I wanted it to feel like those moments when, especially at that age when you’re faced with this dire situation for the first time in your life, the instinct is to want to feel like you’re not alone in it. Even though the vocal cue is like the rest of the score — very sparse and starts building very slowly within itself — I wanted it to feel like even though there’s this catharsis, that even though it’s this painful growing moment, that he wasn’t alone in it, in the sense that this has been happening.
Donald Elise Watkins stars in “Emergency.” Courtesy of Amazon Studios
How did you pick and choose when to use more traditional instruments?
Once we get into the forest, in particular, we knew that from that point onward, we wanted it to be a shift in perspective altogether. From that point on, we knew we wanted the music to feel a little more traditional but not extremely traditional. Since I don’t like just throwing things randomly in a place, I like sneaking them in beforehand, once the [group] starts going into the forest, I started using pianos, but in reverse. I would play a cue but it would swell, instead of a natural-sounding piano where you hit it and the sound decays. The further we get into the last part of the film, the strings become more prominent as well. But those traditional instruments didn’t come until the later part of the film because we wanted to establish that distinction, that first there was all this suspense and tension building up, then there’s a pivotal, cathartic moment, and then it’s a new thing, a new perspective on life, so to speak.
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The official trailer for The Umbrella Academy season 3 is here, revealing that the Academy’s adoptive father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) created another superhero team, the Sparrows. Although to be fair, Sir Reginald didn’t do that to spite the superhero family we’ve come to know and love, the Hargreeves, he did it because on the current timeline the Hargreeves find themselves in, he never adopted them in the first place.
The trailer shows us how all that time-traveling adventures in season two, which culminated with the Hargreeeves stopping a full-blown armageddon in 1963, had some unintended side effects. As we’ve learned in countless time travel stories, from Back to the Future to Avengers: Endgame, if you mess with history, you mess with the future, too. Thus, the Hargreeves siblings now find themselves in a timeline where they were never adopted by Sir Reginald. In fact, when the Hargreeves arrive at The Umbrella Academy after their victorious victory, Sir Reginald has no idea who they are or what they’re talking about. “This is the Sparrow Academy,” he tells them, and thus the Hargreeves meet their new pseudo-family members. Spoiler alert: the Sparrows aren’t happy about it.
It gets worse—it seems that the Hargreeves also inadvertently created a time paradox that could swallow the universe as they know it. The only way to stave off the potential end of reality as they know it requires the Hargreeves to find a way to work with the Sparrows, which, if you know anything about the internecine family squabbles that exist within the Hargreeves themselves, this is going to be easier said than done.
Check out the trailer below. The Umbrella Academy season 3 returns to Netflix on June 22.
Here’s the official synopsis for season 3:
After putting a stop to 1963’s doomsday, the Umbrella Academy return home to the present, convinced they prevented the initial apocalypse and fixed this godforsaken timeline once and for all. But after a brief moment of celebration, they realize things aren’t exactly (okay, not at all) how they left them. Enter the Sparrow Academy. Smart, stylish, and about as warm as a sea of icebergs, the Sparrows immediately clash with the Umbrellas in a violent face-off that turns out to be the least of everyone’s concerns. Navigating challenges, losses, and surprises of their own – and dealing with an unidentified destructive entity wreaking havoc in the Universe (something they may have caused) — now all they need to do is convince Dad’s new and possibly better family to help them put right what their arrival made wrong. Will they find a way back to their pre-apocalyptic lives? Or is this new world about to reveal more than just a hiccup in the timeline?
The cast includes Tom Hopper as Luther, David Castañeda as Diego, Emmy Raver-Lampman as Allison, Robert Sheehan as Klaus, Aidan Gallagher as Five, Elliot Page as Viktor, and Justin H. Min as Ben. Newcomers include Justin Cornwell, Britne Oldford, Jake Epstein, Genesis Rodriguez, Cazzie David, and Javon Walton.
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Love, Death + Robotshas made the first episode of season 3 available on YouTube before the series returns to Netflix. The episode, titled “3 Robots: Exit Strategies,” is the first direct sequel in the brilliant animated series’ history, hailing from the mind of sci-fi novelist John Scalzi. The three robots in question are on an educational tour, so to speak, studying the failed human survival strategies that were deployed before mankind finally fell.
The third season of Love, Death + Robots will feature 9 episodes, with co-creator and executive producer David Fincher directing his own episode, titled “Bad Traveling,” which follows a shark hunting ship that’s attacked by a colossal, highly intelligent crustacean. The new season will also feature an episode centered on an injured astronaut taking mind-warping drugs to cope with the pain of an epic moon landing fail, a zombie satire, and Kung Fu Panda 2 director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (also a supervising director on the series) helming a tale about US soldiers fighting a mysterious enemy.
Love, Death + Robots has mopped up Emmys for its striking visuals, ambitious storytelling, outstanding editing, and achievement in animation. If you love your animation with a wicked sense of humor and very adult themes, there is probably no better show on TV. Even if you don’t love animation, Love, Death + Robots is so fearlessly weird and very often brilliant that it’s worth a watch.
Check out the full “3 Robots: Exit Strategies” episode below. Love, Death + Robots returns to Netflix on May 20.
Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:
Emmy-winning animated anthology Love, Death + Robots returns with a third-volume executive produced by Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) and David Fincher (MINDHUNTER, Mank). Terror, imagination, and beauty combine in new episodes which stretch from uncovering an ancient evil to a comedic apocalypse, telling startling short stories of fantasy, horror, and science-fiction with trademark wit and visual invention.
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At long last, Stranger Things is set to return to Netflix when season 4 drops on May 27. As you likely know by now, season 4 will arrive in two parts, with the second volume arriving on July 1. Things have changed for our heroes after the epic Battle at Starcourt Mall that capped season 3, with our teenage protagonists growing up and, in the case of the Byers family, moving on, while Sheriff Jim Hopper is on another continent altogether.
The Duffer Brothers, the Stranger Things creators, have promised that season 4 (and season 5) will be bigger, more ambitious, and darker than any of the previous seasons. They’ve also now confirmed to Collider that episodes 7 and 9 in season 4 will be feature-length. As Stranger Things hurtles towards its eventual conclusion at the end of season 5, the stakes are getting higher, and thus, the episodes are getting meatier.
“Episodes 7 and 9 are very, very long episodes,” Ross Duffer told Collider. “Oh, yeah. Those are full-blown movies,” Matt Duffer added. The creators eventually told Collider that the episodes each run over an hour and fifteen minutes. In fact, season 4 was originally supposed to be eight episodes long, but the Duffer brothers realized they needed more time to tell their story. Ross Duffer explained:
“I think we were at least halfway, but I think probably over halfway through this season, were trying to squeeze the story in, and we sat down with our writers, and we said, ‘I don’t think this is feasible in eight episodes’. So we went to Netflix and said, ‘Hey, are you okay if we do one more episode?’, and luckily they were very supportive of that, but that’s how we ended up with that extra episode. But it was not originally planned that way. It wasn’t outlined that way. It was always going to be eight. And then it just ended up being too much story.”
We’ll find out just how much story the Duffer Brothers packed into season 4 when Stranger Things returns on May 27.
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Before the crowd at the Cannes was even strapped in for a second of Top Gun: Maverick, they were cheering. This was because Tom Cruise received a surprise Palme d’Or, which he accepted with what appeared to be genuine surprise. Cruise and his co-stars, including Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, and Miles Teller, had already enjoyed an epic entrance when eight fighter jets leaving red, white, and blue contrails streaked overhead as they stood on the red carpet. Red, white, and blue works for both the American and the French flags—Cruise and his fellow cast members had already won the crowd over before a single minute of the movie played.
CANNES, FRANCE – MAY 18: Keleigh Sperry, Linda Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise and Jennifer Connelly attend the screening of “Top Gun: Maverick” during the 75th annual Cannes film festival at Palais des Festivals on May 18, 2022 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
“This is an incredible evening and an incredible time … just to see everyone’s faces,” Cruise said from the stage of the Palais, where the film played. “It’s been 36 years since the first Top Gun and we’ve had to hold it years for the pandemic. This movie was a dream. We talked about it when filming. I just want to see everyone’s faces. There are no masks and we’re in a movie theater. I’m going to take this all in and I feel very grateful. We’re here for you. I make all these movies for all of you and I’m very blessed to do what I do. Enjoy this evening. You all have made my life.”
Then it was time for the movie to begin, and the crowd’s enthusiasm and excitement never abated. The stunts, the thrill of seeing Cruise back as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and then an outpouring of love when Val Kilmer, reprising his role as Iceman (only now, he’s Admiral Kazansky), came on the screen for a scene with Cruise. When the film was over, the crowd was up on their feet for a five-minute standing ovation.
It was a wonderful end to a fantastic couple of weeks for Cruise, the film, and the talented cast and crew. Top Gun: Maverick has now wowed crowds in Las Vegas, San Diego, and Cannes, and has earned rapturous reviews from critics. It’s more or less a guaranteed blockbuster. When it arrives in theaters on May 27, it’ll be the culmination of a long, pandemic-delayed effort, 36-years after the original.
Here’s the official synopsis for Top Gun: Maverick:
After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.”
Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.
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The official trailer for director Nicholas Stoller’s (Neighbors, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) Bros is here, and it’s the comedy we’ve all been waiting for. Bros is also making history as the first rom-com about two gay men to come from a major studio (Universal), and boasts a cast made up entirely of LGBTQ+ actors. The trailer, decidedly NSFW, shows why Bros made such a splash at this year’s CinemaCon in Las Vegas.
Bros introduces us to Bobby (Billy Eichner) and Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), two gay men whose busy lives leave little room to find the time for love. Yet this being a rom-com, Bobby and Aaron are fated to meet cute (or meet funny), fall in love, fight, break up, fall back in love, and, all the while, drop in laugh-out-loud lines that we can’t repeat here. The trailer is filled with whip-smart lines that, while mostly unpublishable, are going to make for a very enjoyable viewing experience.
There are just so many reasons to be excited for Bros, not least of which is the fact that the script comes from Stoller and Eichner, the latter of whom has deserved a star vehicle like this for a while. The supporting cast is excellent and includes SNL‘s Bowen Yang, Monica Raymund, Harvey Fierstein, Amanda Bearse, Jim Rash, Guillermo Diaz, RuPaul‘s Drag Race champion Symone, and The Real Housewives of Atlanta host Miss Lawrence.
And then there’s the fact that the world needs more rom-coms right now, especially one with the potential to be this irreverently hilarious. In short, we’re ready to hang with these Bros.
Check out the trailer below. Bros hits theaters on September 30.
Here’s the official synopsis:
This fall, Universal Pictures proudly presents the first romantic comedy from a major studio about two gay men maybe, possibly, probably, stumbling towards love. Maybe. They’re both very busy.
From the ferocious comic mind of Billy Eichner (Billy on the Street, 2019’s The Lion King, Difficult People, Impeachment: American Crime Story) and the hitmaking brilliance of filmmakers Nicholas Stoller (the Neighbors films, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Judd Apatow (The King of Staten Island, Trainwreck, The Big Sick), comes Bros, a smart, swoony and heartfelt comedy about how hard it is to find another tolerable human being to go through life with.
Starring Billy Eichner, the first openly gay man to co-write and star in his own major studio film—and featuring an entirely LGBTQ+ principal cast, including Luke Macfarlane (Killjoys), Ts Madison (The Ts Madison Experience), Monica Raymund (Chicago Fire), Guillermo Díaz (Scandal), Guy Branum (The Other Two) and Amanda Bearse (Married …with Children)—Bros is directed by Nicholas Stoller from his screenplay with Eichner. The film is produced by Judd Apatow, Stoller and Joshua Church (co-producer Trainwreck, Step Brothers) and is executive produced by Eichner.
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Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige brought the goods to New York City. Speaking at Disney’s upfront presentation in the Big Apple, Feige teased a bunch of Marvel’s most eagerly-anticipated upcoming projects, including She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which just unveiled its first trailer.
Feige also revealed that Loki season 2 will be going into production in the coming weeks. What’s more, the entire cast from season one returns, and Feige said that Loki has been Marvel’s most-watched Disney+ series thus far.
Feige brought some star power to deliver the goods—Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson)—which is never a bad thing. Jackson was on hand to tease his upcoming Marvel series, Secret Invasion, which will find Nick Fury re-teaming with his Captain Marvel pal Talos (Ben Mendelsohn).
“Being part of a company like Disney provides so many incredible opportunities for customers,” Feige said at the event. “And since the launch of Disney+ in late 2019, our team has been able to extend and expand our storytelling in a whole new way. When we were first asked to start working on programming for Disney+, we knew we wanted to weave together storylines between the films and our series that are part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the MCU, as a whole. From the six series we’ve watched so far, we’ve introduced fantastic new characters, but we’ve also been able to dive deeper into the lives of the backstories of some of the MCU’s favorite superheroes.”
Feige noted how the interconnectedness between the Marvel series and the MCU films is already starting to bear fruit—the first Marvel series on Disney+, WandaVision, provided some of the most consequential components of Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which just bowed two weeks ago.
With Moon Knight‘s six-episode season wrapped, all eyes turn to Tatiana Maslany as she takes on the role of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, the next Marvel series bowing on August 17.
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Featured image: SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – APRIL 15: Kevin Feige attends the filmmakers press conference for Marvel Studios’ ‘Avengers: Endgame’ South Korea premiere on April 15, 2019 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images for Disney)
Meet Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), attorney at law. Jennifer’s got great friends, a demanding job—she’s now the face of the superhuman law division at her practice—and an interesting family life. Her cousin, you’ll see in the first trailer for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is a chill gentleman by the name of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). Yup, Ruffalo’s back as the Hulk, only now he’s using his big brain to try and help his cousin harness her own latent power. Jennifer, too, has some anger issues, and when mixed with a blood transfusion from her cousin, she unleashes them she becomes—you guessed it—She-Hulk.
The trailer also introduces us to Jameela Jamil as Titania, She-Hulk’s rival, and sees Tim Roth returning to the fold as Emil Blonsky, better known as Abomination. While the trailer keeps most of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law‘s plot specifics to a minimum, it does hint at the series’ tone, which feels a whole lot lighter than the most recent Marvel series, Moon Knight, leaning into the chemistry between Jennifer, cousin Bruce, and their assorted friends and enemies. In fact, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is being described as a legal comedy, kind of like Ally McBeal, you know, only if Ally turned into a massively powerful green superhero.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was created by Jessica Gao, with directing duties led by Kat Coiro and supplemented by Anu Valia.
Check out the trailer below. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law makes its case on Disney+ on August 17.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Directed by Kat Coiro (Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9) and Anu Valia (Episodes 5, 6, 7) with Jessica Gao as head writer, “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” follows Jennifer Walters as she navigates the complicated life of a single, 30-something attorney who also happens to be a green 6-foot-7-inch superpowered hulk. The nine-episode series welcomes a host of MCU vets, including Mark Ruffalo as Smart Hulk, Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky/the Abomination, and Benedict Wong as Wong. The cast also includes Ginger Gonzaga, Josh Segarra, Jameela Jamil, Jon Bass and Renée Elise Goldsberry. Executive producers are Kevin Feige, Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Brad Winderbaum, Kat Coiro and Jessica Gao. Co-executive producers are Wendy Jacobson and Jennifer Booth.
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Director Jon Watts is taking a galactic leap. Watts, who directed all three of the Tom Holland-led Spider-Man films, is leading a brand new Star Wars series for Disney+. Vanity Fairbroke the news in their big Star Wars cover story where they tracked all the upcoming projects the franchise is seeding on the small screen. One of those projects, code name Grammar Rodeo (which is a reference to a classic Simpsons episode where Bart and his pals steal a car and run away), will be set after Return of the Jedi and will be a coming-of-age story. Vanity Fair reports that a casting notice for four kids, around 11-12 years old, has been set up by Lucasfilm. The series is being billed as “a galactic version of classic Amblin coming-of-age adventure films of the ’80s,” VF‘s Anthony Breznican writes. Watts will also executive produce the series, alongside Spider-Man: Homecoming screenwriter Chris Ford.
Watts is coming off one of the most successful films in cinematic history with No Way Home. He was slated to helm Marvel’s Fantastic Four, but he left that project recently. “Making three Spider-Man films was an incredible and life-changing experience for me. I’m eternally grateful to have been a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for seven years. I’m hopeful we’ll work together again, and I can’t wait to see the amazing vision for Fantastic Four brought to life,” Watts said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.
Watts handled the Spider-Man trilogy with aplomb, capping his tenure with the epic, box-office dominating No Way Home, which is currently the 6th highest-grossing film ever at $1.893 billion. The Spider-Man trilogy itself was a colossal coming-of-age story, focusing on the teenage Peter Parker as he matured into the kind of superhero who could credibly hold his own with the Avengers. Taking his talents to the Star Wars galaxy seems like a logical move, and will give Watts the ability to tease out an even longer story against an epic backdrop. In fact, the Star Wars realm is probably the only universe as big as the MCU—Watts should feel right at home.
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Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 13: Jon Watts attends Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: No Way Home” Los Angeles Premiere on December 13, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
There are so many reasons to be excited about Spiderhead. Let’s start with the fact that the film is an adaption of a George Saunders’ short story, “Escape From Spiderhead,” from his must-read collection “Tenth of December.” Then let’s add the fact it was directed by Top Gun: Maverick helmer Joseph Kosinski, from a script by the Deadpool screenwriting duo of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. Excited yet? Oh yeah, add Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and Jurnee Smollett and you’ve got yourself one of the most intriguing movies of the summer. With the first official trailer here, we’ve got a good look at how all these folks took one of Saunders’ most vividly imagined tales and turned it into a feature film.
Hemsworth plays Steve Abnesti, a brilliant (if morally challenged) man who runs a high-tech penitentiary called Spiderhead where prisoners undergo a unique regimen in order to have their sentences reduced. All they have to do is wear a device that administers mind-altering drugs that helps them—in theory—become better people. In this facility, you won’t find cells or prison yards or handcuffs, but what you will find are prisoners being pumped full of experimental drugs whose side effects can be, well, catastrophic. When two of those prisoners, Jeff (Miles Teller) and Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett) find solace in one another, Hemsworth’s visionary Steve Abnesti will only ratchet up his experiments until something, or many someones, have to give.
George Saunders is truly one of the most singular writers of his generation, and it’ll be thrilling to see one of his stories adapted by such a talented team. Check out the trailer below. Spiderhead crawls onto Netflix on June 17.
Here’s the official synopsis:
In a state-of-the-art penitentiary run by brilliant visionary Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth), inmates wear a surgically attached device that administers dosages of mind-altering drugs in exchange for commuted sentences. There are no bars, no cells, or orange jumpsuits. In Spiderhead, incarcerated volunteers are free to be themselves. Until they’re not. At times, they’re a better version. Need to lighten up? There’s a drug for that. At a loss for words? There’s a drug for that, too. But when two subjects, Jeff (Miles Teller) and Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), form a connection, their path to redemption take a twistier turn, as Abnesti’s experiments start to push the limits of free will altogether. Based on The New Yorker short story by George Saunders, SPIDERHEAD is a genre-bending and darkly funny psychological thriller directed by Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy, Top Gun: Maverick) and written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Deadpool, Zombieland).
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We’ve got a while to wait until Pixar’s 27th feature film, Elemental, hits theaters, but it’s never too early to get a sneak peek at what the vaunted animation studio is up to next. As you might have guessed, Elemental will focus on the four elements, only in Pixar’s hands, they’ll be living together in a city. The first image, a piece of very gorgeous concept art, depicts fire (named Ember) and water (named Wade) walking down the street of a city itself inspired by the elements. Director Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur) will helm the film, based on an idea he had.
Elemental will focus on Wade (described as, wait for it, a go-with-the-flow type of guy), and Ember, a more fiery character, as they explore the big city. They’ll also be living with two more elements representing earth and the wind, and in classic Pixar fashion, these four very different beings will come to understand that they’re not as different as they think they are.
Sohn was inspired by his upbringing in New York. “My parents emigrated from Korea in the early 1970s and built a bustling grocery store in the Bronx,” he said in a statement. “We were among many families who ventured to a new land with hopes and dreams—all of us mixing into one big salad bowl of cultures, languages, and beautiful little neighborhoods. That’s what led me to Elemental.”
The image reveals Wade and Ember enjoying the sights (at least Wade seems to be enjoying himself) in a city that’s rendered with an elemental design itself, including beautiful foliage on the buildings, water elements, and even fire, seemingly contained, in bands around a building on the right.
“Our story is based on the classic elements—fire, water, land, and air. Some elements mix with each other, and some don’t,” Sohn added in his director’s statement. “What if these elements were alive?”
We’re going to find out. Elemental is due in theaters on June 16, 2023.
Check out the full image here:
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Marvel’s Moon Knight recently concluded its first six-episode run (a second season is possible). Marvel’s latest Disney+ series centers on a mild-mannered British gift shop employee named Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac). Steven learns in the very first episode that he shares a body with an American mercenary named Marc Spector, who works as the human avatar for the ancient Egyptian god Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham). With the help of Steven and Marc’s mutual love interest Layla El-Faouly (May Calamawy), they have to stop religious zealot Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) from unleashing the Egyptian Goddess Ammit so she can purge the world of all who have ever or will ever perform an evil deed. Season one was a wild, weird, and wonderful triumph, and now fans are clamoring for confirmation that they’ll see more of Isaac as the complicated superhero, and Calamawy as El-Faouly, who is now following her own hero’s journey. There are so many unanswered questions, not least about the fate of the villain Harrow and the introduction of a new mysterious presence during the end credits.
Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Diab, who led the directing team, believed capturing the essence of both ancient and contemporary Egypt was central to the success of the show. To that end, he hired award-winning Egyptian composer Hesham Nazih to create the score for Moon Knight. It was his first major English language project and his first foray into the Marvel universe. The Credits spoke to Nazih, who is known for incorporating traditional and ancient Egyptian elements in his scores while maintaining a very contemporary sound, about capturing a world of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, Marvel superheroes, and the sounds of contemporary Cairo.
Hesham Nazih
Cairo feels so alive and present in Moon Knight, it’s like another character in the show. The city is both ancient and very contemporary. How did you go about bringing life to it, and capturing the vibrancy of the city?
If you listen to the album, there’s a cue called “She Is Here”, and halfway through it, you’ll find a kind of electronic dance music in it. It was a fight scene on the rooftops of Cairo. That’s the closest type of music for describing the life of the city. Cairo is a very vibrant, very dynamic city, a vast city. It contains so many different styles and eras. When you drive for 10 minutes outside the city, you step into a place that is thousands of years old, and then you hop on a bridge and go across the city and find yourself in a new, just developed neighborhood. It is truly the city that never sleeps. It’s always on, 24 hours a day, and it’s full of sounds like car horns, coffee shops, loud music, people talking, drinking, eating, and chatting. It’s a very upbeat scene, so describing Cairo musically, it has to be vibrant and both ancient and very modern, and that’s what I tried to do in “She Is Here”.
The music for Arthur Harrow’s theme had to be a challenge because he is not just bad, he really believes what he is doing is for the greater good.
He’s not a typical villain. It’s not just about evil, he’s pursuing his beliefs. He thinks he is serving the world, stopping the bad things from happening before they even happen. Hypothetically, this sounds like a good idea, but it’s going to create so many worse things before achieving this principle. He’s one-minded. He is one of those villains that makes some sense at the time, which is even worse because that makes him eviler without him even knowing. Musically, Ethan and I discussed many times that the theme for Harrow has to have an otherworldly motif that describes him as an accomplished man, not just an evil figure.
I opted for a very minimal motif that may resonate with listeners as building in very unsettling movements. It is very repetitive and goes in a spiral way as if someone is coming closer to you slowly but steadily, that you cannot resist or stop. This was my approach to Harrow.
Singing is such an important aspect of Egyptian music. You incorporated choirs and singing in quite a bit of the score, including chants sung in ancient Egyptian. Why is that such a valuable element to the finished score?
You’re right about the value of singing in Egyptian culture. It is so much a part of our daily activities. We are a singing people, and we sing in almost everything we do, in all ceremonies and festivities. We even have a very touching kind of singing called laments in which you mourn the deceased by singing. So when I first thought of how I would bring the Egyptian essence to the music, I thought of the vocalists. I looked for little phrases from the ancient Egyptian language to be sung within the music, and I came across the few words that are, in essence, praising words for Egyptian ancient kings on their enthronement. It’s usually carved on the cartouche and the back of the throne of the Egyptian king. I added some choir to the music, and then those elements got bigger and bigger, and halfway through I realized that the vocal element had become, not just an integral part of the music, it had become the music itself, where the orchestra plays around them and supports them. It’s an important tool that helped me deliver the sense of massiveness needed to complement the story.
There are also Egyptian instruments woven into the traditional orchestra, some of them ancient, like the Rababa, which is an ancestor to the violin, and also the Arghul and the Mizmar horn, both of which belong to the woodwind family. Why did you choose those in particular?
I’ve used them all in various recordings before, and the reason why I chose those is that there are so many Middle Eastern instruments used in a wide spectrum of the Pan-Arab and Mediterranean regions. You can find them in Moroccan and Turkish music. Those instruments you just mentioned, the ones I used, are historically Egyptian. You find them in other countries, but they are essentially Egyptian. They are very ancient, and the amazing thing about them is they haven’t changed at all since they were used back 5,000 years ago. They were engraved on the walls of the temples, and they are still used in modern music today. It’s amazing to me that they’ve existed and been used for thousands of years. They each have a very unique timbre and unique characteristic that is so Egyptian, just the sound of it and the way the players play it, no matter the theme or line you give them, will unwillingly inject the soul and spirit of Egypt towards this musical line, so they’re fantastic in all senses. What’s more, they sit perfectly well within the orchestra and blend incredibly well. So many ancient instruments across the world have a fantastic sound, but when used in the orchestra, you need to minimize or eliminate some sections of the orchestra to make room for them. These ones, no. They sit so well, in so many different orchestral domains. These are the reasons why I chose them.
You’ve said the workflow and the system at Marvel are very different than your experience as a scoring artist for Egyptian film and TV. How so?
I set my own schedule. It’s my own workflow. With Marvel, there’s a big team of music editors, and it’s more organized about deadlines. When I write music for the Egyptian audience or the Pan-Arab audience, it’s not like writing music for the Marvel audience, which is huge. There are lots of differences between Marvel and my previous experience, but we all aim for the same goal. This experience has been a joy, because we all, everywhere in the world, are aiming for those unforgettable moments that we try to create on the screen for audiences.
All 6 episodes of Moon Knight are streaming now on Disney+.
The official trailer for The Boys season three opens with Homelander (Antony Starr) on an apology tour. “I feel in love with the wrong woman,” Homelander tells one interviewer after another, referring to his partner-in-fascism and love interest from season 2, Stormfront (Aya Cash). That relationship got…messy, especially after it was revealed that Stormfront was a full-blown Nazi. So, Homelander is out there trying to tell anyone who will listen that it was all just a mistake and that he, chastened by falling for the wrong girl, has learned invaluable lessons.
As The Boys watchers know, Homelander is a very, very bad man, and while he’s hellbent on cleaning up his public image, in private, he’ll continue his murderous ways. The new trailer also reveals that he’ll now be up against a very different Billy Butcher (Karl Urban)—thanks to a serum delivered by Maeve (Dominque McElligott), Billy can become a supe (a superhuman for you not versed in Boys-speak) for 24 hours.
And then, the trailer also gives us our first glimpse at Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), who seems to have some anger issues. He’s not the only new face around. The trailer also reveals newcomers Blue Hawk (Nick Wechsler) and the Crimson Countess (Laurie Holden). Meanwhile, returning champions include Hughie (Jack Quaid), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), The Deep (Chace Crawford), Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara).
Check out the trailer below. The Boys season 3 hits Amazon Prime Video on June 3.
Here’s the official synopsis of The Boys season 3:
It’s been a year of calm. Homelander’s subdued. Butcher works for the government, supervised by Hughie of all people. But both men itch to turn this peace and quiet into blood and bone. So when The Boys learn of a mysterious anti-Supe weapon, it sends them crashing into The Seven, starting a war, and chasing the legend of the first Superhero: Soldier Boy. Season 3 arrives June 3rd, only on Prime Video.
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