When director Sam Raimi boarded the Doctor Strange sequel In The Multiverse of Madness, excitement spread across the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The director of the first Spider-Man trilogy from the early aughts is a master at blending delirious action set pieces and a touch of darkness, delivering the kind of superhero cinematic experience that elevated the entire genre. A new featurette reveals just how much Raimi got to sink his teeth into In The Multiverse of Madness as Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is set to face not only his own demons (quite literally), but an entire multiverse of characters good and evil. The new film will fully unleash Marvel’s Phase 4, setting up new stakes, new characters, and a new direction for the vaunted mega-movie franchise house.
“It’s pretty unfathomably exciting where we’re going in this film,” Cumberbatch says at the top of the brand new featurette. “It’s the most fantastic new phase of Marvel.” In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Strange will be teaming up with Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), one of the most powerful Avengers of them all, and something of a troubled case after the events in WandaVision, when she set up an alternate reality in the Hex to try and trap a version of Vision (Paul Bettany) in a suburban idyll, be damned the actual people who lived in the town of Westview, New Jersey.
“In this story, we are leaping into different universes, but unlocking the multiverse creates a big Pandora’s box,” says Olsen. Wanda and Strange will try to contend with the unleashed contents of that Pandora’s box, which include monsters, villains, and an evil version of Strange himself.
“We’re in unknown territory. I think audiences are going to be startled,” says Benedict Wong, who returns as Strange’s right-hand man, Wong. “These other realities invite a plethora of all these new characters.”
“It had to be large because had to not only paint a picture of our universe but multiple universes,” Sam Raimi says. “It was a great opportunity to pair two of the most powerful superheroes together.”
Joining Strange, Wanda, and Wong are Xochitl Gomez as superhero America Chavez, Rachel McAdams as Dr. Christine Palmer, Patrick Stewart returning as Charles Xavier, and Chiwetel Ejiofor returning as Mordo.
Check out the epic new featurette below. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness hits theaters on May 6.
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We’re just a few days away from the premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbeldore, and a new trailer highlights the stakes. It’s going to take a team of wizards (and a Muggle) to take down the rising threat of Grindewald (Mads Mikkelsen) and his growing army of Muggle-hating wizards. The Secrets of Dumbledore boasts almost an Ocean’s Eleven vibe in that Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), acting as a magical Danny Ocean, assembles a team he hopes can stop Grindewald from starting an all-out war with the non-magical Muggle population. Each member of the crew will have a particular skill they’ll bring to the table, not that all that different from how Ocean’s Eleven featured a team of non-magical but highly proficient crooks, con artists, a gymnast, a hacker, and more to pull off the perfect heist.
The Secrets of Dumbledore comes from veteran Harry Potter director David Yates, who directed six films in the Potter franchise, including the final four—and continues following the adventures of Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander. As the title suggests, The Secrets of Dumbledore will spend considerable time with Jude Law’s younger Albus Dumbledore, as he whips up the aforementioned crew to take on Grindewald.
The final trailer includes a few brand new shots and highlights folks who are taking on the most dangerous living wizard. Joining Newt is his brother Theseus (Callum Turner), Bunty (Victoria Yeates), Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam), Professor Eulalie “Lally” Hicks (Jessica Williams), and beloved Beasts veteran, the Muggle Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler). Queenie (Alison Sudol) returns, as does Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller).
The Secrets of Dumbledore was written by J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, the latter a scribe on seven of the eight Harry Potter films. Check out the trailer below. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore hits theaters on April 15. Check out the final trailer below.
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Featured image: Caption: MADS MIKKELSEN as Gellert Grindelwald in Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy adventure “FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE SECRETS OF DUMBLEDORE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
After suffering throughout his childhood from a rare blood disorder, Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) heads into the Costa Rican jungle and cuts his hand open, thereby trapping a swarm of vampire bats. The bats are the final key to the brilliant doctor’s cure, which, as we can guess by the fact that these particular bats are highly attracted to blood, means that anyone who takes said cure will themselves also come to be highly attracted to blood. Thus begins director Daniel Espinosa’s tale of Morbius, a previously lesser-known vampire denizen of the Marvel world.
It all wouldn’t be so bad, except with Morbius’s transformation into a newly cut-from-marble version of his former self, his facial features contort into something absolutely horrifying every time he gets thirsty, which starts to happen with alarming frequency. Worse, the doctor’s efforts to limit the damage wrought by his dubious cure fail completely when his childhood best friend, a rich British trust fund kid named Milo (Matt Smith), doses himself and transforms into the same thing as Morbius, only without a conscience.
Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) in Columbia Pictures’ MORBIUS.
After their sad childhoods spent in adjacent beds in a bucolic Greek children’s hospital manned by the caring and paternal Dr. Nicholas (Jared Harris), these two newly created monsters come to duke out their dueling visions of what good health should look like on a particularly mean version of the streets of New York. Throughout, a sense of doom offset by Morbius’s moral ambivalence is heightened by the film’s score, which does a ton of heavy lifting in terms of making us guess whether the well-meaning scientist will or won’t resist embracing his new bloodthirsty side. Except for one particularly memorable moment when Milo, newly healthy and feeling himself, jauntily breaks it down in front of a mirror, Morbius has almost no soundtrack to speak of. Instead, while he recorded, mixed, and co-produced composer Jon Ekstrand’s score, Jason LaRocca (The Harder They Fall, Aquaman) worked to highlight the story’s moral ambiguity by combining synths with live orchestral performances and going for grit as he made his way through what turned out to be over an hour and a half of music.
We had the chance to chat with LaRocca about how he approached this twisted new version of a hero in the recording studio.
How did you continue to develop the film’s musical themes in the recording studio? Was there a particular moment or transformation in the film that was a starting point?
Much of the film score is driven heavily by analog synths that [composer] Jon Ekstrand did in his studio in Stockholm. To further amplify and widen the sound of these themes and motifs, orchestrator Nicholas Dodd and I worked to make the live orchestral performances support those synth performances as much as possible in order to add as much size to them as we could. There are a number of synth motifs that are doubled or in some cases tripled with the full orchestra, recording them in sections once a day during the week of recording.
Morbius feels like a less well-known character in the Marvel universe (until now). Was the fact that this story was so fresh somewhat freeing in terms of techniques or approaches you could take in recording the score?
For sure! The whole idea with this score was to be a bit grittier and edgier than what you might typically expect for a Marvel film. So we approached it with a much darker tone intentionally. There’s a nice sense of freedom in getting to push things in a direction that we felt fresh and exciting.
How did you approach reflecting the ambiguity of the film’s titular character? The score really had to reflect that Morbius occupies a weird space between good and bad.
A lot of that fell on Jon’s shoulders. I think he did a great job in balancing the good and the bad in his approach to the score. It’s overall very gritty and grungy and the “hero” sense is always a little bent and distorted musically, so technically I made sure to maintain that balance as best I could.
The film has distinct locations — jungle, Greece, a particularly bleak version of New York. Did this influence your process in the studio at all?
We were definitely making extensive use of the size and space with the recordings and mixes. There are moments in the score where we take everything away and just drive right up on the close microphones of the strings and synths, while other times we pull way out and use only ambient and far perspective microphones and artificial reverbs and space. There’s a lot of perspective change to follow that sense of space and where you are in the film geographically with the music.
The movie seems to have a very limited soundtrack relative to how much score there is. Did that make the entire sound team’s job that much harder?
There was a lot of music for Jon to write for sure. All in all, it was 95 minutes of music for us to record, mix and produce, so it was definitely a challenge for everyone involved. We had a great time with it, though!
Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has revealed that two of the big stars from his global phenomenon series will be returning for another round of devilish games in season two.
Deadlinereveals that two characters you will be seeing again are SAG Award-winning actor Lee Jung-jae’s Gi-hun, season one’s main protagonist and the survivor of the deadly games, and Front Man, played by Korean superstar Lee Byung-hun, who spent almost all of the first season beneath a black mask. Front Man was the big boss of the brutal series of children’s games in which 456 desperate individuals played against each other, to the death, for the chance of being the sole survivor and winning 45.6 billion won.
Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo in “Squid Game.” S1Front Man in Squid Game. Courtesy Netflix.
These were always the two most likely returnees from season one, but this is still the first time that Hwang has confirmed their return publicly. Yet Hwang also made a major tease to Deadline a few weeks back, suggesting that HoYeon Jung’s North Korean refugee Kang Sae-byeok could return…sort of. Hwang said the actress might reprise the role, but as the character’s evil twin sister.
Jung Ho-yeon in “Squid Game.” Photo by Noh Juhan | Netflix
Squid Game reigns as Netflix’s most-watched series ever. Hwang told Deadline that he hopes the show was able to nudge Western audiences into appreciating how riveting a show can be even with subtitles.
“My hope is that a work like Squid Game in a little way has opened the door. I hope American audiences give the piece a chance and that you read the subtitles and watch without dubbing. We’re hoping that we open that opportunity,” Hwang told Deadline.
As for the way Hwang plans on approaching both season 2 and his future projects, he told Deadline he can’t look away from the larger world and will continue to focus on themes like economic inequality and more.
“For this project and in future projects, it’s impossible not to consider the political polarization, the cultural differences, and difficulties, as well as environmental climate changes that have been happening. I will be forced to observe and criticize and continue to handle these topics in future projects,” he said.
You could probably never guess where Jurassic World: Dominion writer/director Colin Trevorrow drew inspiration from for his the biggest, meanest new dinosaur. Trevorrow has revealed to Empire Magazinethat there’s a new alpha predator on the prowl in Dominion and its name is the Giganotosaurus. In keeping with the Jurassic tradition of incorporating new dinos into each installment, Trevorrow has gone one better and drawn on some unusual inspiration for the Giganotosaurus, known as the ‘Giga.’ The source of his inspiration? One of cinema’s greatest villains of all time—the Joker.
Unlike previous genetic hybrids like the Indominus Rex and the Indoraptor, which were designed to be extremely dangerous, the Giga actually roamed the planet back in the Late Cretaceous period. Yet the colossal beast will not be happy to be woken from its eons-long slumber to find itself stomping about in the modern world. “I wanted something that felt like the Joker,” Trevorrow told Empire Magazine. “It just wants to watch the world burn.”
The folks on hand to try and stop this apparently chaos-loving dinosaur from doing just that are returning champions Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). They’re joined by the original Jurassic Park trip of Sam Neill’s Alan Grant, Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler, and Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm. Newcomers include Maisie (Isabella Sermon) and Kayla (DeWanda Wise).
Empire reveals that the Giga will be roaming the BioSyn Valley, a name that’s derived from the original Jurassic Park. BioSyn was the rival to InGen, the company that created the park, and it was BioSyn that paid Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) to steal the dino embryos and caused all that mayhem in the original film. Trevorrow reveals a bit of Dominion‘s plot, which finds BioSyn winning a contract to house all the dinosaurs that are captured by the world’s governments. “They claim it’s a research facility where they can study the pharmaceutical values of the animals. But there’s some other stuff going on,” he tells Empire.
Dominion promises a different kind of Jurassic romp, one in which the entire world is learning to live with dinosaurs in their backyards. We’re guessing it’ll be mighty hard to keep the peace.
Jurassic World: Dominion hits theaters on June 10.
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When we spoke with Winning Time co-creator, writer, and executive producer Jim Hecht, he said he and his fellow writers were already at work on season two. Well, it seems like Hecht and the Winning Time team got out on a fast break a few steps ahead. HBO has officially renewed Winning Time for a season second, which will pick up where season one left off, with Magic (Quincy Isaiah) having joined Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes) and the Lakers as Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) positions the team to become not only perennial champions but the team that reshapes the NBA entirely.
“It’s been a thrill to bring Winning Time to life with Adam McKay, Max Borenstein, our phenomenal producing team, and this incredible cast,” said Francesa Orsi, Executive Vice President of HBO Programming. “This series not only tells the riveting story of the Lakers’ rise, but is also a look back at a transformative era in basketball, celebrity, and the city of Los Angeles. We can’t wait to see how this team will tell the next chapter of this dynasty.”
L-r: John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Jason Clarke. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
While the actual Los Angeles Lakers were officially eliminated from the NBA playoffs this week, their dazzling fictional counterparts have led one of the most entertaining new series of the year. The cast is led by Isaiah, Hughes, Reilly, Jason Clarke as Lakers legend Jerry West, Adrien Brody as Pat Riley, Gaby Hoffmann as the Lakers number cruncher Claire Rothman, Hadley Robinson as Jerry Buss’s daughter Jeanie, and Sally Field as his mother, Jessie. Winning Time was adapted by Hecht, co-creator and showrunner Max Borenstein, and writer Rodney Barnes from Jeff Pearlman’s book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s.” Pearlman wrote a follow-up book about the Shaquille O’Neal/Kobe Bryant era of the Lakers titled “Three-Ring Circus,” which HBO has just optioned. If that turned into an actual series, and the two series were connected, that would mean there would be a bunch of Winning Time seasons to get us from season one’s 1979-1980 to the early 2000s. Lakers fans, rejoice.
Winning Time is currently streaming on HBO Max, with the sixth episode set to arrive this Sunday at 9 pm E.T.
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“The universe finally found something worse than death,” Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) says at the top of the first trailer for Russian Doll, season two. “I broke time.” And a nation rejoices at the sound of Lyonne’s inimitable voice as she reprises the role she was born to play. Created by Lyonne, Lesley Headland, and Amy Poehler, Russian Doll appeared on Netflix in 2019, right before the real world became a time-subverting nightmare, and was centered on an ingenious plot contrivance—a cynical young New Yorker (Lyonne) keeps dying, and dying, and dying, only to return to the very same party on the very same night that’s being thrown in her honor. Trapped in a time loop, Russian Doll gave us Groundhog Day-like pleasures, only filtered through the brilliant comedic lens of its three creators. Season two promises to transcend the death-obsessed lunacies of the first season by exploring a fate even worse than death.
“You’re a time traveler,” a bar patron asks Nadia towards the end of the trailer. “I prefer the term ‘time prisoner,'” she quips, reminding us of one of the many pleasures this series has to offer—Natasha Lyonne’s line readings. Pleasures abound, in fact, from the pitch-perfect New York production design to the cinematography to the costumes, and that’s to say nothing about Russian Doll‘s delicious extended cast, which includes Charlie Barnett as Nadia’s fellow time-traveling buddy Alan, and her two besties, Greta Lee and Rebecca Henderson, as Maxine and Lizzy respectively.
Season two will unleash Nadia and Alan along not only various timelines, but eras. God knows what kind of shenanigans they’ll get into in the past, but we’ll be watching.
Check out the trailer below. Russian Doll time skips onto Netflix on April 20.
Here’s the synopsis for season two:
Set four years after Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) and Alan (Charlie Barnett) escaped mortality’s time loop together, season two of Russian Doll will continue to explore existential thematics through an often humorous and sci-fi lens. Discovering a fate even worse than endless death, this season finds Nadia and Alan delving deeper into their pasts through an unexpected time portal located in one of Manhattan’s most notorious locations. At first they experience this as an ever-expanding, era-spanning, intergenerational adventure but they soon discover this extraordinary event might be more than they bargained for and, together, must search for a way out.
For more on Russian Doll, check out this interview:
Hulu’s limited biographical series The Dropout, which stars Amanda Seyfried as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, has been getting rave reviews for both Seyfried’s performance and for its sharp take on the shocking real-life story of corporate and personal hubris. The show follows Holmes from her beginnings as an ambitious college student with Steve Jobs as her role model, through her attempts to develop healthcare technology, and then to her astonishingly fast rise to fame and fortune as CEO of a billion-dollar company. If you know anything about the Holmes story, you know she’s a modern Icarus, and her story, at least for now, ends in disgrace and indictments after putting millions of patients at risk with faulty medical tests.
When showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether chose Anne Nikitin to score The Dropout, the composer set out to create a musical counterpart to the almost mythic rise and fall of Holmes, determined to capture the ex-CEO’s energy and ambition, as well as the varied perspectives of those in her inner and outer circles. Nikitin chose to create her first entirely inorganic, all-electronic score and found the challenge exciting as an artist.
Anne Nikitin.
The Credits spoke to Nikitin about her process, and how she took inspiration from Holmes and the real-world cautionary tale of how ambition and optimism led to the downfall of a billion-dollar company.
This is your first all synth score. What, apart from it being the first, was your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge, I suppose, was coming up with the sound of the show. It didn’t start off being a synth score. I just had some time to mess around, and the first idea was to have strings and organic instruments for part of the score and some of the themes, and then use synth sounds whenever Elizabeth is in the lab or doing her thing duping people. But luckily I had quite a lot of time at the beginning of the series to play around with ideas, and I came up with one track that was just purely synth-based, called “Beijing,” and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a bit weird. It’s a bit kooky and quirky, but I’m going to throw it at them.’ Liz, the showrunner said, ‘This is it. This is the one.’ So that’s how it came about, but it was sort of getting to that point that was probably the biggest challenge, and then after that, it seemed to go quite smoothly.
You knew as much about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos as the rest of us when you started. What did you learn in the course of the project that impacted or influenced the direction of the score?
I did quite a bit of research on her, and I realized she was just living this lie. I think she’d got herself into a little bit of a muddle and couldn’t get out of it. It just exploded like we’ve never seen before. It was insane. When we decided that synths were working for her, it all sort of made sense. None of the organic music was working for her. It just seemed that her life was synthetic, and the music should reflect that as well.
The Dropout — “Flower of Life” – Episode 105 — With the Walgreens deadline looming, Elizabeth and Sunny scramble to find solutions to their technological failures. Ian is drawn into Elizabeth’s lawsuit against Richard. Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), shown. (Photo by: Beth Dubber/Hulu)
What was the advantage you felt not being a synth-head in creating the score?
I was intimidated a little bit by the idea that I wasn’t going to be clutching onto a sound that I’m used to, which is the organic instruments, but I think the advantage was that I didn’t have a lot of knowledge and baggage. I just decided that I would let go of everything, not care what anybody thinks or says, not have this analog-digital war going in my head, and just play around with sounds. I had the luxury of time at the beginning of the show to just find the sounds and synths that really worked for me. Some of the sounds were pure digital sounds, and other sounds were made trying to find the digital versions of the organic sounds. For example, a cowbell, snare drum, or woodblock, having the synth versions of them so they don’t sound real. And that was, again, trying to just make the score represent Elizabeth Holmes, that nothing is real, although it may appear to be so.
The Dropout — “Iron Sisters” – Episode 106 — Fresh out of college and newly employed by Theranos, Tyler Schultz and Erika Cheung discover shocking truths about Elizabeth and the company. Richard and Phyllis work with John Carreyrou to build a case against Elizabeth. Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), shown. (Photo by: Michael Desmond/Hulu)
Holmes goes through quite an arc in the show, and there are several moments of really high intensity or joy, and a lot of darkness, too. Your score weaves through an emotional quality and a sort of sterility. What were the conversations around some of those cues?
Those were long conversations with Liz. She didn’t want to play the emotional component too much. We mustn’t feel sorry for this woman for more than we need to, but we also have to realize that she is human. I think she had dreams and aspirations as well as insane ambition, but I think she was really passionate about science, and the first time she enters this lab, a proper working lab, it’s like a future is coming before her eyes. My cue for that is called “The Lab.” I tried to create a sort of magical fantasy cue with that, just to show how passionate she really was, but then creating a whole sterile world and masking the emotion and pulling the viewer out of that to remind them that actually, we can’t feel sorry for this driven woman. She knew what she was doing.
What were the discussions around each episode having a character of its own, in terms of how you structured the music accordingly?
We had conversations before every cut I was sent about what each episode was representing, and where the music should lean. For example, there’s one episode with the Walgreens men, and we decided we wanted something that harkened back to 70s music. I used a drum kit there, manipulated, but there’s a sort of beat there to represent them. I tried to come up with distinctive characters for each episode.
There’s another one with the whistleblower in Episode 6 where there’s real darkness. I tried to give her a theme that starts off light and bright. She’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when she enters Theranos, then she discovers what’s happening. I tried to give her some sort of quirky instruments to highlight how excited she is, then those quirky instruments start to just become really weird as she understands that nothing is what it seems.
What cue in The Dropout would you say best expresses your aesthetic as a composer?
I’ve always loved percussion, and love writing unusual rhythms, and having that in all of my scores, so I tried to do that with the synths, and that’s quite easy. Synths pulse. That’s what they do a lot of the time, so it was natural to have that pulsing sensation all the time. Actually, this has really opened my eyes to the versatility of using only an all synth score, because before, I thought for emotion you needed to have strings, or you needed to have a piano, or have loads of reverb. With synths, I actually had limitations, which I love. I love limitations. Being forced to work with just one palette was really fun, and it actually made me realize how versatile synths can be.
The Dropout is currently streaming on Hulu. The series finale is now streaming.
Featured image: The Dropout — “Flower of Life” – Episode 105 — With the Walgreens deadline looming, Elizabeth and Sunny scramble to find solutions to their technological failures. Ian is drawn into Elizabeth’s lawsuit against Richard. Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), shown. (Photo by: Beth Dubber/Hulu)
JimHecht‘s road to co-creating Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers began in 2014. Hecht was, by his own admission, at a low point, and he was looking for a project that really spoke to him. During his daily meditation, which he admitted with the qualifier “this sounds very LA,” he had a thought: “You gotta stop writing sh*t that you think other people would want to see and start writing the show that you would want to watch.” Hecht, a longtime feature film and TV screenwriter, naturally had film quote handy to sum up his inspiration about no longer writing stuff he merely liked. “As Jerry Maguire said, it’s a ‘soul-sucking, pride-swallowing siege,” to write that way.
The story about how Hecht ended up as the co-creator, writer, and executive producer of Winning Time, a sensationally entertaining, surprisingly moving look at not just the rise of the storied Showtime-era Lakers, but the men and women who made that era possible, began at a bookstore, Book Soup, in West Hollywood. Eight years later, Hecht, his fellow Winning Time co-creator and showrunner Max Borenstein, writer Rodney Barnes, and the rest of the Winning Time writer’s room are now at work on season two.
Season one is focused on 1979 and 1980 when Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly) buys the Lakers from the loathsome Jack Kent Cooke (Michael O’Keefe) and sets about changing the franchise from a perennial punching bag for the Boston Celtics into a dazzling, dominating force. The first big move that Buss is intent on making is drafting a 19-year old phenom from Lansing, Michigan by the name of Earvin “Magic” Johnson (Quincy Isaiah). Despite Magic’s obvious talent, Buss has to fight to get him on the team, and there are more than enough personalities, including volatile Lakers legend and tormented head coach Jerry West (Jason Clarke), the team’s star and captain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes), and a slew of other issues (including a mob hit) that make Magic’s arrival a stormy affair.
We spoke to Hecht, a lifelong Lakers fan, about how he ended up launching a fascinating ensemble character study as dazzling as a mid-80s Lakers fast break.
Taking me back to the beginning, when you got hold of a copy of Jeff Pearlman’s book “Winning Time”?
I was listening to ESPN radio in Los Angeles, and Max Kellerman was talking about how Jeff Pearlman has this new book coming out about the Showtime-era Lakers. I’m from Orange County, I met Magic at the Westminster Mall when I was 6, the Lakers were the team for me. So I went to Book Soup when it opened the next morning at around 9 am and I bought Jeff’s book and I think I was done by 11 am. I called my agent and told him that this is what I wanted to do.
How did you originally imagine adapting “Winning Time” into a series?
I happened to be watching the first season of True Detective. I didn’t have the language of a limited series, but I said to my agent, ‘I want to do this, but with the Lakers in the 80s.’ He said, ‘Jim, this is the thing that’s going to be written on your gravestone.’ So I flew to New York to meet with Jeff, it was Easter Sunday, 2014. I took the train up to New Rochelle, I went to the market and bought a tomato, a block of chocolate, and a bottle of non-alcoholic wine. I showed up at his door. Jeff, by that point, had already had a lot of stuff optioned, but nothing ever happened with it. So I walk in, and my whole track record is talking animal movies, and he was just like, ‘Well, nothing’s going to happen with it anyway, so okay, fine, take a flier on it.’ I just had a birthday party recently, and Jeff brought me a tomato, a block of chocolate, and a bottle of non-alcoholic wine. It was kind of profound, when I opened that gift I immediately cried. It was a full-circle moment.
Quincy Isaiah is Magic Johnson in “Winning Time.” Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
How did you decode the adaptation, turning this deeply researched book into a dramatic narrative arc befitting a prestige HBO series?
Well, the key piece was obviously Max Borenstein. We really only met with one showrunner, when I sat down with him I was like, ‘This is the guy.’ He grew up in the Valley. Max and I still have season tickets together—not in our names so they can’t kick us out yet—and when you talk to Max, he’s brilliant. That’s the key. Many times, Max saved me from my worst impulses. He has this big track record in drama, so it’s been like graduate school with him and [writer] Rodney Barnes. As Rodney says, ‘It’s really hard to make anything good,’ and Max just has that tenacity and perfectionism to get it there.
What were some of those impulses that you had that Max steered you away from?
I think creatively I would have steered it more towards it being a Wikipedia page, closer to a documentary, and Max, to his credit, saw the value in the personal. He really taught me how to dig into the personal struggles between the characters. What makes our show great isn’t that it’s just the Lakers in the 1980s, or that it has that Adam McKay flare and talent, but that it’s the deep dramatic Shakespearean arc that is really going to move you about these people. As we say, not all of it happened, but all of the craziest sh*t happened. Max is just in another world when it comes to digging in and finding those moments between people. And not just in the writing, but all the way through to the last edit. He just knows the moment.
How did you decide where the diving line would be between what really happened and what you had to invent to move the story along?
We always felt a need to be true to the kinds of people we were talking about and the story we were telling. We’re grounded in fact. There’s no metric that measures this, but along the lines of [Adam McKay]’s Big Short or Vice. We don’t take wild swings. We do have Dr. Buss’s mom, Jessie Buss [Sally Field] in it, but really she’d passed away a couple of years before our story. The truth of it is she was a hugely important figure in his life, and the things we’re exploring with his character are true to the man and the relationship they had. Even though there was a transformation of what was happening by maybe two years, I think the essence of it we feel pretty good about.
What was that like to get inside these iconic people’s heads when many of them are still alive and well and, in Magic’s case, are on TV all the time?
Magic’s obviously important to me, you’re talking about my hero. These are people we really look up to. When you research these people as deeply we have, watch hundreds of hours of footage, then they start to live in your mind. Then I think the conception you have of them starts to speak through you. But it’s always a challenge. You have to constantly be conscious of this. Magic came out on TMZ and made a statement about it. You could be bummed about it, but the way it hit me was, ‘Magic Johnson’s talking about us!’ To me, that whole thing is kind of cool.
Quincy Isaiah is Magic Johnson in “Winning Time.” Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
How are you taking the response, not just as a creator, but as a lifelong Lakers fan?
To be honest, the show coming out has been my least favorite part of the whole thing [laughs]. We’re working. Season one is over for us, so we’re trying to figure out what we do next. We’re busy, and that’s really fortunate because it keeps me from tripping out on everything that’s going on. And it keeps you present. That other stuff isn’t real, what’s real is we’re working, we’re writing.
Take me inside the writer’s room for season one.
Max is super tenacious and methodical. The blessing of HBO is they’ve given us a lot of time to figure out the important parts of the story before we have to dive in and start working on scripts. I imagine that’s why HBO’s stuff is so good, they really give their writers the time to come up with something great. So it was a small writer’s room. At first, there were mainly three of us, me, Max, and Rodney. Then we brought in Ben Klein and Rebecca Bertuch, who is a superstar in her 20s, she’s exceptional. Because of the pandemic, we were supposed to shoot a lot earlier. The pilot was shot a year before the rest of the series, so we’ve been together every day, for long hours, for years now. I’ve never been in a writer’s room because I come from the feature world, and it’s what I always thought it could be, with ideas flying back and forth. I see why TV is so good right now because it’s all these people sitting around and these ideas escalate and become something better than I could have come up with myself. Max is not only a brilliant writer, but a brilliant Socratic method person, he forces you to dig deeper and pushes you, and it’s super uncomfortable in the moment, but my writing has become a completely different thing through that process. Then Rodney comes in and he’s challenging you, too, and he’s brilliant, so there’s this clash, but the end result is all these breakthroughs. I’ve learned so much from those two guys. I’m over 45, I thought, ‘I’m done learning, I’m done growing,’ and the great thing about life is there are always more of those challenges that are going to push you to go deeper than you thought you could.
What was the most challenging aspect of breaking out this story from season one?
The relationship between Dr. Buss and his mom was a tough nut to crack. How to handle those moments between them. The other tough one was the Boston Celtics of it all. You think about the 80s and Showtime, you think Magic and Larry. But there’s only so much Magic and Larry that really happened, so how do you be true to what really happened in that competitive relationship, but keep that rivalry alive? Because it’s alive in both of their minds, they’re always thinking about each other, so how do you do that for the audience and make it a driving force in the background? The Celtics are, for the Lakers, the shark that’s eventually going to come back and eat everything.
In a perfect world, you’d have three seasons? More?
In a perfect world, it would be 20 seasons. If you look at Yellowstone, you could go in a lot of different directions, the answer is I don’t know, it’s wide open, we’re going to see where the story takes us.
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers is streaming on HBO Max. New episodes air on Sunday night at 9 pm EST.
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A new Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness teaser, titled “Dreams,” hints at the mind-bending nightmare that director Sam Raimi has cooked up for MCU fans. The teaser, utilizing a cover of Roy Orbison’s deathless “In Dreams,” gives us a glimpse of the nightmare that Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) finds himself in, and highlights how much Raimi has infused the film with his special brand of horror-inflected madness. At the 47-second mark, you’ll see the Evil Doctor Strange (unleashed from the multiverse) and his third eye (or Eye of Agamotto to you Marvel-heads) opening on his forehead. It’s just one wild moment in the teaser, which also includes a nod back at WandaVision, in which Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff enslaved an entire New Jersey suburb in the Hex, all in an effort to get Vision back, with disastrous results.
The teaser focuses on the notion of dreams because Strange says he has the same one every night, involving his ex-wife, Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams). Wanda’s dreams, however, are more like nightmares, which show the twin boys she “had” with Vision during WandaVision (which was actually all, in a sense, a dream), only for them to be ripped away from her again. This nod towards WandaVision implies that Marvel’s Disney+ series held a few clues for Raimi’s film, which he directed from a script by Michael Waldron.
Check out the new teaser here:
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is set after the epic events in Spider-Man: No Way Home, when Doctor Strange tried to help Peter Parker erase everyone’s memory that he was Spider-Man, but instead ended up unleashing the multiverse. Joining Olsen and Cumberbatch are Benedict Wong as Strange’s right-hand man Wong, Xochitl Gomez as superhero America Chavez, Rachel McAdams as Dr. Christine Palmer, Patrick Stewart returning as Charles Xavier, and Chiwetel Ejiofor returning as Mordo.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness arrives on May 6.
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“The last three years were an eye-opener because of the pandemic,” said Michelle Chang, managing partner at Singapore-based Mochai Chai Laboratories. “We are the post-production house at the tail end. If the producers stop producing, we are dead. The good thing was my business partner Chai Yee Wei has the foresight of not putting all our eggs in one basket. He has built a digital restoration lab. As luck would have it, a lot of distributors came to us because streaming platforms were buying catalog content and they need to up-convert into a compatible format for the streamers. That business suddenly shot up, while the post was down. The lesson learned was to bring in new revenue streams to keep the business alive.”
Chang was one of five Southeast Asian creators who shared her insight on the challenges and opportunities amid the global pandemic at a panel to celebrate International Women’s Day. Held on March 8 at the Projector X in Singapore, it was the first in-person event organized by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) since the outbreak of the pandemic.
International Women’s Day 2022: Panel Discussion & Screening Event
Her fellow speakers were producer Angelina Marilyn Bok at Xeno Pictures, executive producer Charlyn Ng at IFA Media, creative director Jean Yeo at Ochre Pictures, and film director Nicole Midori Woodford.
Yeo, the creator of popular Singapore drama series Lion Mums and Last Madame, acknowledged that the pandemic has forced her to take a long hard look at the situation, which made her realize that being able to work became a topmost consideration.
“One of the critical decisions we made before the first lockdown was to buy a studio. We knew that locations wouldn’t be forthcoming and there would be restrictions,” she said, adding that having an in-house studio will allow her and her team to film in a comfortable, unrestricted and safe environment. “It’s been the best decision. That we’re able to work is half the battle won.”
Last Madame was named best Asian drama at Busan’s Asian Contents Award in 2020 and was on Netflix’s top 10 most-watched list for several weeks. Yeo is now working on the second season, which is a prequel titled Sisters Of The Night.
Another ongoing project is the train hijack drama Third Rail, which is billed as one of Singapore’s most expensive local dramas. Yeo’s new studio has come in handy as the set of a train operations control center and a 140-meter long tunnel.
Like Yeo, Woodford continued to work through the pandemic, getting two projects off the ground. She directed The Excursion, one of the episodes of HBO Asia’s horror anthology series Folklore 2. “The pandemic got me to be more focused,” Woodford said. She wrote the script during lockdown, and had only one month to prep before the cameras started rolling in January 2021.
She shot it in eight days on Pulau Hantu, an island in the south of Singapore, with strict COVID restrictions in place. “It’s an important learning experience. How do we create a cordial and respectful environment on set when everyone is stressed? I know the team was trying to support me. I saw a different side of production,” she continued.
When The Excursion premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival in October last year, she did an online Q&A, instead of showing up in person, due to the COVID-induced travel restrictions. No doubt she missed going to film festivals, but she was glad to know that the Japanese audiences responded well to the episode.
After The Excursion, she shot the Singapore leg of Last Shadow at First Night in November. That was her debut feature, which was pushed back for two years from 2020 during which she had to keep rewriting the script as her teenage Japanese actress was growing older. Now she is planning to finish the Japan shoot next spring.
Ng, from IFA Media, was equally productive during the pandemic, having produced a Thai drama series Forbidden for HBO Asia. The first two episodes of the eight-part series premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in October. But it was not without interruptions.
Ng explained that the filming location was in a remote village in Thailand and the shoot took longer than expected because of two lockdowns. One of the lockdowns coincided with Songkran, the Thai New Year festival, and the production team had to leave the village and travel to Bangkok to keep everyone quarantined in a hotel. She counted on the support of the Thai partners and the understanding of HBO Asia to ride out the challenges.
Ng also mentioned that prior to Forbidden, her company IFA Media, which was set up by two war journalists, has handled many foreign productions, including many acclaimed documentaries, HBO Asia’s Taiwanese drama series The Teenage Psychic and its sequel, and more recently the Vietnamese feature film Maika, which premiered in Sundance in January this year.
Mocha Chai Laboratories has recently concluded filming of the sci-fi romantic comedy Venus On Mars in Taiwan. “We’re lucky we are able to do the project,” said Chang who put together a team during the lockdown. Two months before the pandemic started in December 2019, she and Chai pitched to CJ ENM HK during Asia TV Forum & Market (ATF) where they also met Phil Tang from Taiwan’s Greener Grass Production.
Venus On Mar will subsequently become the first of three scripted series backed by CJ ENM HK (the regional office of Korean media conglomerate CJ ENM) and Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA), with Tang on board as producer. Despite the travel restrictions, Chang, who directed, and his cinematographer Derrick Loo traveled from Singapore to Taiwan where they worked with a Taiwanese cast and crew on the drama series.
Producer Bok from Xeno Pictures is currently wrapping up the post-production of three short films from different directors, with a feature film The Beast From The Trees in script development.
She has a word of advice for her female peers working in production. “It’s been a male-dominated industry for many years. Speaking from my personal point of view, sometimes I’ve been undermined when people question my capability. I have to stand up for myself as a producer and as a female in general. I have to rethink the way I produce films and extend the protection to all the female peers on my set.”
Fellow producer Ng concurred that she gets judged by her short stature and her young look, especially when working in China.
Chang advised, “Never allow yourself to be bullied. Start from the self and nip the problem in the bud when it happens. We can just say that it’s unacceptable, don’t talk to me like this. People who bully are full of insecurities. They don’t know how to deal with a talented person like you.”
The Excursion director Woodford, who also teaches film production and scriptwriting at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, is happy to have more females taking leadership roles. “It’s important to see what the next generation is coming up with. They may be shy and reserved, but they are also talented. I always encourage them to step up to direct and produce.”
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In a must-read profile of writer/director Robert Eggers by Sam Knight in The New Yorker, the visionary director of The Witch and The Lighthouseis very honest about the toll his latest, and by far biggest, film took on him. The Northman, which is being called the most realistic Viking movie ever made, is loosely based on “Hamlet,” which Shakespeare himself based on a Viking tale. A new clip, early reviews, and a reading of Knight’s profile of Eggers would make any film lover eager to see the film.
Eggers’s exacting attention to detail, which was aided by his co-writer, the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, and the experts he consulted during his research, is such that the film’s star Alexander Skarsgård marvels at the end of The New Yorker profile about a single moment that speaks to the whole. There’s a Viking transport vessel in the background of one particular shot, far away and not even in focus. “You could have used pretty much anything out there,” Skarsgård tells Knight. But instead, Eggers insisted on an obsessively-researched, museum-quality replica of the vessel. “No one would ever know,” Skarsgård told Knight. “But Rob would know.”
Skarsgård stars as Amleth (the Viking name for Hamlet), a young prince on the cusp of manhood when his father, King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) is brutally murdered by his uncle, Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who kidnaps Amleth’s mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). Amleth is forced to flee his island kingdom, but he vows revenge. The film reunites Eggers with Anya Taylor-Joy (she starred in his breakout hit The Witch), features the first film performance by Björk in 17-years, and was created alongside his longstanding collaborators like cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, editor Louise Ford, and production designer Craig Lathrop. A new clip gives you a taste of the levels that Eggers, his cast, and his crew went to in order to create a Viking epic that looks and feels like nothing we’ve seen before:
And now the early buzz has arrived, and all of the effort—and worry—that went into The Northman seems to have paid off. Ferocious, brutal, passionate, and epic, the critics are hailing The Northman as Eggers’ most astonishing work to date.
The Northman hits theaters on April 22. Here’s a quick glimpse at what the critics are saying:
#TheNorthman is Robert Eggers’ best film yet. Stunning cinematography sets the scene for the perfect merger of otherworldly Norse mythology with the brutal reality of Viking history. Bloodthirsty. Powerful. Spiritual. @TheNorthmanFilm is a magnificent and epic saga for the ages. pic.twitter.com/hSa1S0Mc3Z
— Maggie Lovitt 🔜 SWC (@maggieofthetown) April 5, 2022
#TheNorthman is BRUTAL. Skarsgård is oozing w/ revenge-fueled ferocity from start to finish. Loved the choice to capture so much — action & dialogue-heavy beats — in one shot. Lets the exceptional cast shine & ensures you feel every ounce of this movie’s passion & aggression. pic.twitter.com/7nC2kfAUGo
#TheNorthman is uncompromising, raw, and savage. It’s a ruthless revenge story set during the Viking Age, and Alexander Skarsgård is a beast of a man. pic.twitter.com/CixZXDbLO0
I’ve been a huge fan of Robert Eggers for years, but THE NORTHMAN is truly his masterpiece. Brutal, fearless, & audacious, it feels like the kind of cinematic epic we don’t see very often anymore. It’s a ferocious & stunning work of art & Alexander Skarsgård rules. #TheNorthmanpic.twitter.com/Cs8Zgbktuc
— Heather Wixson (@MMEFXBook out 10/20!) (@thehorrorchick) April 5, 2022
Robert Eggers’ #TheNorthman is hauntingly visceral & super transfixing. You definitely won’t be able to take your eyes off this blood-soaked revenge tale. Alexander Skarsgård is a BEAST & ferocious throughout. Nicole Kidman has a couple scenes that floored me. Daring & devilish pic.twitter.com/9DMX3Mm4sq
#TheNorthman is incredible. Like, fall-to-your-knees, ‘HOW the HELL did they do this?’ good. Breathtakingly gnarly too. It deserves to be a massive hit. EGGERS HIVE ASSEMBLE. pic.twitter.com/NpijhqV6g8
Based on Walter Mosley’s eponymous novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey portrays 91-year-old Ptolemy (Samuel L. Jackson), a lonely widower suffering from Alzheimer’s, as he undergoes a transformation thanks to Robyn (Dominique Fishback), the teenage daughter of a family member’s friend, and an experimental new drug, offered at a beyond questionable clinic.
Jackson, who rarely takes on television projects, is sublime as the limited series’ Papa Grey: by turns helpless, vulnerable, determined, and all-knowing. The Alzheimer’s drug proffered by the unsettling Dr. Rubin (Walton Goggins) doesn’t just restore patients’ memories, it fills them in entirely, down to everything they’ve ever eaten and every place they’ve ever been. Ptolemy’s returned memories take him back to the 1930s, to his childhood and the tragic history of a beloved uncle, Coydog (Damon Gupton), and to the 1970s and 80s, during his courtship and marriage to Sensia (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams) an occasionally stormy but loving affair.
Samuel L. Jackson, Dominique Fishback and Walton Goggins in “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Ptolemy’s restored decades-old memories of Coydog set him on a mysterious hunt for, well, something that seems to promise to greatly impact his present, but it’s teenaged Robyn who brings the change to Ptolemy’s life that matters most. Adrift and initially reluctant, she winds up moving in with Papa Grey, de-hoarding and cleaning up his Atlanta apartment and setting his experimental Alzheimer’s treatment in motion. Ptolemy’s memories come back, and we learn what a full life he once lived in tandem with witnessing his return to the world of the living in the here and now, thanks to the platonic mutual adoration that wells up between the old man and his teenage caretaker.
Warmth returns to Ptolemy’s once bleak home, where much of the action, past and present, is set. And as Ptolemy regains his lucidity, focus returns, both to his own world and in-camera. We had the chance to speak with cinematographer Shawn Peters (who split the series’ six episodes with Hilda Mercado) about how he conveyed Ptolemy’s initial dementia via the camera, visually separated the show’s period flashbacks, and of course, how the rarified experience of working with Samuel L. Jackson played out on set.
Was there either a particular setting or time period that you started with in terms of determining how the series, overall, would look?
The first episode, in Ptolemy’s apartment, is meant to be in the modern world. But what informed me most, aesthetically, was reading the novel before reading the screenplays. What I felt emotionally from reading about his world was also my initial gut reaction as to how to design the world, aesthetically. Because there are flashbacks to the 1930s, 1970s, and 1980s, Ramin [Bahrani, director of the series’ first episode] and I really thought deeply about how to separate those worlds, with color treatment, different lenses, different quality of lenses. We had three sets of lenses throughout the series.
Did you wind up separating the lenses by time period?
Time period and also, as his dementia waned as he got the medicine. We had one set of lenses for the first episode where he had full-on dementia. Those were a set of lenses called Falcons, from Camtec in Los Angeles. I really love those lenses for that space in his exterior and interior world, because they’re just dirtier. They’re less pristine. They’re loose, detuned a bit, and Camtec put a special coating on the lenses to distress them a bit. As Ptolemy got clear and Robyn became involved in his life, we changed the set of lenses.
Samuel L. Jackson and Dominique Fishback in “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
What went into the process to convey, aesthetically, someone in the throes of Alzheimer’s?
For those, we used a lot of glass optics. We would sometimes put two split diopters on the top and the bottom of the lens, to blur the bottom and top and only have the center clear. We’d have one at a 45-degree angle. We used them in different ways, and that was both for when he had a vision of someone else he remembered, and sometimes we used them on him when he was in that state.
Cynthia Kaye McWilliams in “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
We also had one very special lens from Camtec, which was an Angenieux 50mm lens that was designed originally for surveillance, so it was a really fast lens. When you put that close to someone’s face, there’s no depth of field at all. You’re getting the front of their face really clear, and then the back completely falls off. We had that lens close to him when he was going in and out of a dementia state, to bring you inside of his world and have the background fall off. And Ramin and I talked a lot about why handheld. There were a lot of why questions. Where is Ptolemy psychologically in the space? When he was really unhinged, we went handheld. We tried to improvise internal emotion with the camera. We thought about his POV, what was on his mind, and how to use optics to show that.
Samuel L. Jackson in “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
There are certain spaces that are distinct and magical, like Sensia’s bedroom, which becomes Ptolemy’s room again. How did you decide to light those?
Ramin and I drilled down with the production designer [Gregory Weimerskirch] about what her world should feel like to him. For me it was really warm, most of the lighting there feels like it’s late in the day, and the wallpaper has that gold shimmer. We thought about gold and warmer sources, later afternoon light, and tungsten and sodium light later in the nighttime scenes. Even in the skin tone, we wrapped him in warmth when he was in that room.
Cynthia Kaye McWilliams in “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
You feel acutely aware of the time of day in this show. Was that intentional?
The main set was Ptolemy’s apartment. We designed it so that we could change the direction, we could push light in the window in the direction of the sun. We also had soft sources, so I could do something that felt like an overcast day or an afternoon sun, or obviously, an evening look. There’s one scene in the first episode where Ptolemy’s lying on that bed under the table, and we change from day to night in-shot, like a time-lapse. In his apartment, other sets too, we had full control over the time of day. So much of what we think about how we feel emotionally is what’s being given to us by the atmosphere outside our houses, where we spend so much time, as Ptolemy does in his place. Having a diversity of time in that apartment was key because that apartment was a character. It had to have an emotional arc to it.
So much of the show, there’s a focus on just Ptolemy, or him and Robyn, or at most a handful of people. As the cinematographer, how does that affect what you do?
I think just as a cinematographer in general, my goal is always to have the characters I work with, whether they’re good or bad, there’s always some human empathy. I’m always thinking about how the viewer is going to empathize with this fictional character. We did a lot of that with lensing. Even in camera testing, I wanted to know which lenses were kinder, and which angles were not so kind, for the villains and other people around. Even lighting in the eyes — the direction in which light hits the eyes creates an emotional response in the viewer to who the character is. If it’s dead in the center, it’s serious. If it’s below, it’s more kind. If it’s up, it’s more questioning. No light, there’s a darkness. We thought about those kinds of things while lighting Ptolemy’s eyes as well as other characters, as well as camera position and focal points.
Samuel L. Jackson in “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Can you tell us a bit about working with Samuel L. Jackson?
Well, one, I think he’s like mensa level smart. Someone who has that much experience on set knows everybody’s job. If he sees something moving in a bit of a weird direction, he’ll point it out, because he knows my job. He’s on camera in almost every scene, and other actors, not as established as him, would flub their lines, but Sam, never. I mean, maybe one time in four months. The level of professionalism showing up in character, on and ready, was something I’d never experienced before watching an actor. It was sort of incredible for me.
How did you feel about the work as you wrapped the show?
I would just say it was really a pleasure for me to play with a character that had so much range in terms of his own emotional, internal world. Now he’s going through dementia, he has so much regret from the past, and some of that regret may have triggered that dementia. When he finally gets his memory back, not only facing the regret, the nightmares, he’s also engaging with a new young person he has to be present for. For me, it was a pleasure seeing a 90-something-year-old African-American man have that much humanity on screen. It was something that as a filmmaker, was really wonderful for me.
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is now streaming on Apple TV+. The final episode airs on April 8.
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The laugh-out-loud adventure comedy The Lost City, starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, found its way atop the box office. Directed by the Nee brothers Aaron and Adam, the punchy comedy delightfully entertains as Bullock plays a successful romance writer who has been kidnapped by an obsessed treasure hunter played by Daniel Radcliffe, who believes the world in her latest novel is real and wants her to help find it. It’s up to Tatum, the novel’s leading character and cover boy, to save her—with help from a few great guest stars in Brad Pitt and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
Piecing together the wild ride was editor Craig Alpert, who knows how to make audiences laugh having worked on Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, both Borat films, and Deadpool 2. The editor sat down with The Credits to share how he approaches comedy and what drew him to the project.
I think the most important question to begin with after watching The Lost City and knowing your credits, is who has the better butt: Sasha Baron Cohen, Ryan Reynolds, or Channing Tatum?
Well, they all have great rear-ends in their own right, but they’re also all brilliant comedic minds. I consider myself extremely lucky to have worked with all three of them and their magnificent butts. But – no pun intended – I’ll have to answer based on Sandra Bullock’s reaction in the leech scene and say Channing. And for the record, that was one hundred percent Channing and not a body double.
Nice to hear that no body doubles were needed for that hilarious scene. To change gears, you are one of the unsung heroes in the comedy editing world. It’s somewhat bananas to have been able to cut one of the films you’ve done let alone all of them. So curious, is there a film or two out there you would have loved to edit yourself?
Yes, there are so many. I was too young to work on the following two, but, it would have been amazing to work on Raiders of the Lost Ark or any of the original Star Wars films. Those were movies I grew up on and greatly influenced my career. To work on such iconic action scenes, many of which are interspersed with comedy, would’ve been a dream come true.
Adam and Aaron Nee put together an incredibly funny movie. What was your reaction to the script?
I loved it! When I first read the script for The Lost City I was immediately reminded of Romancing the Stone and other films in that genre. It was great to see this genre updated for the 21st century. It was also nice that the payoff of the adventure was more emotionally based and driven by character rather than something involving saving the world from doom and destruction. It felt very intimate and personal even though we’re on a jungle island with exploding volcanoes and fun action.
So true. In those initial meetings with the directors were there any notes on timing, rhythm, or sensitivity to performance in what they were thinking, or was it more found in the room?
It was a little of both, but mostly found in the room together. We spent a lot of time focusing on Loretta [Sandra Bullock and Dash [Channing Tatum]’s relationship. We worked hard on striking a balance with their banter. Sandra and Channing have such fantastic chemistry, but a few funny moments landed on the cutting room floor because they didn’t service the story or the characters. In the end, we want the audience to be invested in the leads’ relationship and be rooting for both of them.
How do you generally build scenes as footage comes in?
I watch the dailies in the order they were shot and notate my favorite performances and moments. There is often quite a bit of improvisation in the films I work on, so I also notate my favorite alternative lines. For scenes with a large amount of improv, I usually assemble a ‘kitchen sink’ version of the scene which can be two or three times the length of what was originally written. I’ll often make a duplicate copy of the cut scene and condense it while making adjustments to the rhythm and tempo. My fantastic assistants also organize our material in the Avid tool called “Scripting” which allows me to have every line organized in a digital script. It ends up being a hugely beneficial tool when it comes to being able to audition for alternative performances.
Sandra and Channing are fantastic in this film. When you’re building chemistry between actors or building off their natural chemistry, what are you looking for in the footage to create those moments?
I look for moments where it feels like they are really connecting with each other. Often, a physical sign in their body language like a subtle smile or the way one is looking at the other. Also, in the way they are bantering with each other. We worked hard on striking a balance with both of those facets of their performance.
Is there anything Brad Pitt can’t do on screen? He plays such a great character. When you see an actor just go for it is there anything you look to besides a gut feeling that their performance is working within the story and it’s not getting too crazy or going off the rails? Maybe off the rails is good…
I feel like they can go off the rails as long as I’m still compelled by what they’re doing and that it’s still helping move the story along. If I’m watching someone like Danny McBride in Pineapple Express improvise about his dead cat’s birthday over and over again, and it’s still making me laugh, then at that point it’s gone beyond a gut feeling and it’s more like a proven hypothesis. I’ve been lucky to work with extremely charismatic actors in my career. Their commitment is really what sells it—if they believe what they’re saying, ultimately we will too.
This film is packed with hilarious moments. An early favorite is the Jack Trainer car reveal. How do you approach moments that are funny versus funny moments that serve a narrative purpose? Do you find leaving in those laugh-out-loud moments is best no matter what because they engage with the audience so well?
They’re great to leave in as long as they don’t feel indulgent or wear out their welcome. If you chose to have three big laughs back-to-back-to-back, are they all three side-splitting worthy laughs or is the first one the true laugh and the next two are diluting it somewhat? It’s easy to overstay your welcome in a scene, even if it’s funny. A lot of our time in the edit is spent distilling the scene to its best comedic (or dramatic) moments.
There’s a great scene that uses the Peaky Blinders theme song “Red Right Hand” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. How did that find its way in?
Often, editors temporarily score scenes using soundtracks from other films. I had assembled the Brad Pitt fight scene with a traditional action cue from another film. But, it made the scene feel like it was taking itself too seriously. The Nees had the idea to use “Red Right Hand” and it fit perfectly. Throughout the post process, we tried many other cues but none were quite able to capture the tone quite how we wanted. Ultimately we went back to “Red Right Hand” and never looked back.
Beyond the laughter, there’s a treasure hunt and budding romance happening in the film that you had to navigate. Production design and cinematography generally help sell the scale of a film, but is there anything editors can do to drive home that point outside of the classic wide shots we see?
Music and sound effects go a long way towards enhancing the environments and the unseen elements around them.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s character is another joy in this film. I’m curious, when there’s a character that shows up really well on screen that may have not been a big part of the script, how do you bring more attention to their performance in the edit?
You highlight them the best you can. You might focus on adding a few more shots of them in their scenes with the leads since you want them to leave an impression during their briefer time on screen. In the finale, we had the huge wide reveal of the ship and Da’Vine while the music crescendos and then we cut to the close-ups of her as she’s trying to communicate with Sandra. So in a way Da’Vine is part of the payoff.
Some of the challenge in editing is not getting too attached to a certain edit just because it works well as an isolated scene. Do you have advice on how to move forward from something like that?
It’s easy to get attached to an edit, moment, or specific line in a scene. You have to look at how it’s affecting everything else in the film. During our test screenings, we record the audience’s reactions to the film as it plays. We often refer to the recording as we make our post-screening changes, especially in the comedic scenes. It’s a great way to know what’s working with the audience and what isn’t.
One last tough question before we go. You have to choose between McDonald’s fries or the clock wipe transition?
Definitely the clock wipe. I used it once in Pineapple Express and am looking forward to using it again. I’ll have to find a way to sneak it into the next one!
The Lost City is in theaters now.
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Writer/director James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 isn’t even done filming, yet that hasn’t stopped it from breaking a world record. Gunn himself reported that the makeup effects studio Legacy Effects, which is hard at work helping Gunn populate his intergalactic menagerie, have confirmed that Vol. 3 has broken the world record for the most makeup appliances ever created for a single production. Legacy Effects knows their stuff—they’ve won Emmys and Oscars and worked on epic blockbusters, including The Mandalorian, The Suicide Squad, Godzilla v Kong, and Avengers: Endgame—confirms that Vol. 3 topped the previous record-holder, Ron Howard’s 2000 film How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which featured nearly an entire cast in makeup effects.
Here’s Gunn’s tweet:
Just heard from our makeup folks at @LegacyEffects that yesterday #GotGVol3 officially passed the World Record for “the most makeup appliances created for a single production” (surpassing The Grinch). Congrats, guys! Thanks for keeping practical effects alive!
The use of practical effects has been a big part of the appeal of the Guardians franchise, which delights in the alien worlds and beings it depicts. While computer effects are of course crucial to this franchise (see; Groot and Rocket) and just about every other blockbuster, deploying real, tactile effects like we’ve seen in everything from Guardians to The Mandalorian to the most recent Star Wars trilogy gives these films and series a delightful, often dazzling boost.
With Vol. 3 using a world record number of makeup appliances, one has to wonder if we’ll be more deeply ensconced in alien cultures as the epic saga comes to a close. Gunn has a long history of delighting in practical effects, way back to his first film, the horror flick Slither. In Gunn’s latest effort, the HBO Max series Peacemaker (a spinoff of his first DC film, The Suicide Squad), there are practical effects galore.
For Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the little that we do know is that the film will feature the long-awaited arrival of Adam Warlock, played by MCU newcomer Will Poulter. Warlock will be an extremely formidable antagonist for our heroes, who return en masse—Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-lord, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Dave Bautista as Drax, Bradley Cooper voicing Rocket the Raccoon, Vin Diesel voicing Groot, and Karen Gillan as Nebula. It’s one of 2023’s most hotly-anticipated films, and now that we know it’s already a record-breaker, and in such a cool way, it’s only that much more of a must-see.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. arrives on May 23, 2023.
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How intense is the aerial action in Top Gun: Maverick? The Tom Cruise-led action-epic, which sees Cruise return to the role that made him an international superstar in 1986, deployed real Navy aviators and jets to capture the thrilling flying sequences. In a new teaser released by Paramount Pictures, some of that aerial insanity is on full display.
“Much like the first film, these are going to be real jets and real U.S. Naval aviators flying in these scenes,” Naval Air Forces spokesman Commander Ronald Flanders told The Credits back in 2018. “We’re excited about it.”
As we wrote back then, Top Gun: Maverick “underwent a lengthy approval process to obtain a production assistance agreement that outlines how the Navy will support the film.” This netted the use of real planes, the latest technology, and filming on a few Navy locations, to boot.
Top Gun: Maverick filmed at two locations under provisional agreements with the Navy: the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and Naval Air Station North Island, in San Diego. The new teaser shows off some of the flight sequences which will be even more high-tech, high-stakes, and realistic than the first film. That is because, of course, a lot of what you’ll be seeing is real.
The story in Top Gun: Maverick finds Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) returning to the Navy to teach the best of the best from the Top Gun class before they take on a specialized mission “the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen.” One of those pilots has a deep, personal connection to Maverick—his name is Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend Lt. Nick Bradshaw, better known as “Goose” (Anthony Edwards), whose tragic death in the original Top Gun haunted Maverick. In the new film, Maverick will be forced to come face-to-face with that tragedy when Rooster becomes one of his brashest students.
Top Gun: Maverick comes from director Joseph Kosinski, based on a screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Cruise’s longtime Mission: Impossible collaborator Christopher McQuarrie.
Top Gun: Maverick zooms into theaters on May 27.
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Marvel Studios’ youngest superhero is set to make her big debut. Ms. Marvel arrives on Disney+ in two short months and a new TV spot reveals a bit more about Iman Vellani’s teenage superhero Kamala Khan. What makes Ms. Marvel so exciting is that not only does it offer a totally different kind of Marvel series, but the first-ever Muslim superhero to lead a Marvel Studios show or film.
Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American teenager living in Jersey City, only when Ms. Marvel begins, she’s not yet a superhero, she’s just your average teenager trying to survive high school. Soon enough, however, she’ll be facing far steeper challenges than mean girls and homework. “It’s not usually brown girls from Jersey City who save the world,” Kamala says at one point, but in Ms. Marvel, that’s precisely what we’ll get a chance to see.
Ms. Marvel‘s creative team includes head writer Bisha K. Ali and Bad Boys For Life directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, along with director Meera Menon and documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. Joining Vellani in the cast are Aramis Knight, Saagar Shaikh, Rish Shah, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Matt Lintz, Yasmeen Fletcher, Laith Nakli, Azhar Usman, Travina Springer, and Nimra Bucha.
We’ll also see Vellani in Nia DaCosta’s Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels. For now, we’re excited to see her first go at Kamala Khan in what should be a summer treat.
Check out the new spot below. Ms. Marvel hits Disney+ on June 8.
Here’s the official synopsis:
“Ms. Marvel,” launching on Disney+ in Summer 2022, is a new series that introduces Kamala Khan—a 16-year-old Pakistani-American growing up in Jersey City. A great student, an avid gamer, and a voracious fan-fiction scribe, she has a special affinity for superheroes, particularly Captain Marvel. But Kamala struggles to fit in at home and at school—that is, until she gets superpowers like the heroes she’s always looked up to. Life is easier with superpowers, right?
In 1996, Australia was rocked by a mass shooting in the small, peaceful community of Port Arthur, Tasmania. The horrific incident took the lives of 35 innocent people and injured 23, and remains among the country’s greatest national tragedies.
Director-producer Justin Kurzel(True History of the Kelly Gang, The Snowtown Murders) reunites with screenwriter Shaun Grant to explore the events that led to the mass shooting in the IFC Films release, NITRAM. Caleb Landry Jones stars as the titular character, a lost soul who lives with his parents (Judy Davis and Anthony LaPaglia) and is an outcast among his peers. When he befriends an eccentric and reclusive heiress (Essie Davis), his life seemingly takes a turn for the better — until the relationship meets an untimely and heart-wrenching demise and he grows more isolated and angrier than ever before.
Shaun Grant’s script “was unexpected and revealing in its honest and genuine desire to understand and ask questions about one of the darkest chapters in Australian history,” says Kurzel, who lives in Tasmania with his family, in his director’s statement. “The forensic unpeeling of the character in the weeks leading up to the shooting was so authentic that it reached beyond the monster echoes and confronted me with someone who I felt I had known, walked past, ignored, would see but then forget.”
The film premiered at Cannes in 2021 and garnered Landry Jones the Best Actor Award. It also earned 15 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Award nominations, winning eight including Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and all four acting honors.
The Credits recently spoke with Kurzel about the haunting and riveting drama, which sparked controversy over its being made. This interview has been edited.
I know you wanted to tread gently with this film, given the pain that still runs deep. I don’t think the protagonist is ever called by his real name, even by his parents. Was this intentional?
There was a very strong feeling about the perpetrator’s name never being mentioned. But we’re making a film about this perpetrator, so it’s a very tricky place for us as filmmakers to be in, where you’re trying to make a film about why and how an event happened and at the same time you’re trying to be as respectful as possible in terms of the victims and the survivors and the families whose lives were changed forever. We found out pretty early on that one of the names that this person was called was Nitram, and it was used as a sort of bullying name that this person was teased with. I think Shaun felt there was something quite interesting about a name that someone could never run from, that there was a sense of searching for an identity that is different from who this person is. Identity for young men in Australia, especially growing up in the ’90s, is kind of everything. If you’re not part of the surf group, the alpha males, or you’re not part of the football team, you become isolated extremely quickly. So this idea of the character always being an outlier and never being able to quite be this person that they imagine they want to be was important, which fed into the title of the film and that name very much.
How did Shaun Grant’s script come your way?
I think when we were doing Snowtown together, my first film, we talked about whether there’s any way you could make a film about the Port Arthur shootings. But we both agreed that it was probably too difficult and too hard to do it. And then Shaun was living in Los Angeles and had come very, very close to two shootings that had affected him in quite a dramatic way, and he just started writing this script in a fever. I think the shootings made him think about the Port Arthur shootings in a different way. He had just discovered a lot of the laws on gun reform that had come out of Port Arthur had started to soften and there was a lot of lobbying happening in Australia for changes to happen to those laws. For him to go back and revisit this event, take you into the shoes of that individual, and for you to get to know that individual and be very intimate and close to him, and the power of then that individual walking into that gun store at his most dangerous, he felt that was the film.
Did the script change much from draft to draft?
So he very definitely wrote this film about gun reform, but I think it evolved and turned into something with more shades — about masculinity, about mental illness, about how do we treat outliers, how do we treat those that live on the fringes and fall through the cracks, and what is our relationship as a community and as individuals to those that we can see are living in those shadows. The family drama evolved as well. I think that the notion of parenting and your responsibilities as a parent and nature versus nurture and what all that is definitely became much stronger as the script developed.
You’re also a producer and oversaw the music. Tell me about juggling all your roles.
It was kind of great. I’ve found sometimes there’s a disconnect between the ambitions of a director and actually what can be achieved, and it’s always a tussle. When you’re actually a producer on a film that you’re directing, you’ve got skin in the game, so you’re in those meetings where you suddenly realize that there’s not enough money to do that or that you’ve got to shoot faster. It gives you a pretty fantastic perspective as to what’s achievable and what’s important in terms of telling the story of the film. It’s actually about being part of the solutions to how you make a film. Filmmaking is problem-solving most of the time, especially when you’re shooting.
The film features a wonderful ensemble. And your lead actor, Caleb Landry Jones, won Best Lead Actor at Cannes. How did he come to be cast?
Strangely, when Shaun finished writing the film, we just kept thinking about Caleb for some reason. I think a lot of it had to do with the visual appearance of him. And then when we went to Los Angeles, we met him and he had such extraordinary insights into the screenplay and into the character, and I could just tell that he was someone that would immerse himself in it, that would live it in a way. This was something we felt was really, really important. My only worry was the accent, to be honest. In the end, he did a pretty amazing job with that. It is very unusual for Australians to cast an American to play an Australian. British actors can do the Australian accent, it’s probably not such a big leap. But for a Texan to come to Australia and play a very, very particular Australian role was really unusual.
NITRAM is such a layered film that explores mental health issues, family dysfunction, and gun violence. What do you hope audiences will take away from it?
I find these questions really hard to answer in terms of what I want an audience to feel because everyone is going to be so different as to what they get out of it. In Australia, it was really different, people’s responses to it. There’s a whole generation in Australia that was born at the time of the event, so they never felt that seismic kind of moment. Whereas for others, it’s never faded and it’s always there. When I read the script, when Nitram walked into that gun store, I remember there was a very visceral reaction that I had to the shock of it, the horror of it, and also being aware of what is going to happen with those guns after. When we were in Cannes, there was an audible gasp with that scene. I think you felt what the film was about in that moment, which was what was so brilliant about Shaun’s writing. So in some sense, I can tell when I’m in an audience what people think of the film and a lot of it comes down to the environment. I can actually hear it. That’s probably the simplest way of answering that.
NITRAM will be in theaters, digital rental, and AMC+ on March 30.
Featured image: Caleb Landry Jones in “NITRAM.” Courtesy IFC Films.
In a brief, thrilling new teaser for director Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, we get a peek at one of the colossal villains—or really, monsters—that Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his allies will be facing. At the 18-second mark, we see Wong (Benedict Wong) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) facing off against a massive monster that has no doubt been unleashed from the multiverse.
In Raimi’s long-awaited return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (he directed the first Spider-Man trilogy starring Tobey Maguire before Marvel Studios had created their vaunted MCU), Doctor Strange will need all the help he can get. This is why he taps old friend and former Avenger Wanda Maximoff to help him try to handle what’s coming from the multiverse. “The multiverse, it’s life or death,” Strange tells Wanda during a little stroll in a park. “I could use an Avenger,” he continues. “There are other Avengers,” she tells him. Always quick with a quip, Strange says, “We can get you back on the lunch box.”
Raimi directs from a script by Michael Waldron, and we know that Multiverse of Madness is set after the epic events in Spider-Man: No Way Home, when Doctor Strange, trying to do a good deed for Peter Parker, ended up unleashing the multiverse, with its multiple Spider-Men (enter Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s versions) and bygone villains from their realms along with them. Thanks to previous trailers we also know Strange will be up against forces that are greater than any he’s previously faced, which include the monster you’ll see below. Also, an evil version of himself (and we think an evil version of Wanda), which will be a formidable challenge to say the least.
Joining Wong, Olsen, and Cumberbatch are Xochitl Gomez, an MCU newcomer playing the superhero America Chavez, Rachel McAdams as Dr. Christine Palmer, Patrick Stewart returning as Charles Xavier, and Chiwetel Ejiofor returnign as Mordo.
Check out the video below. Tickets go on sale this Wednesday, April 6. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness arrives on May 6.
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We know that when Obi-Wan Kenobi premieres on Disney+ we’ll be getting a more powerful Darth Vader, new villains, and the long-awaited return of Ewan McGregor to the title role—and now we know we’ll be getting two episodes at once. Disney+ announced yesterday, with McGregor himself doing the explaining, that Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s release date has been moved back—don’t worry, it’s just two days—from May 25 to May 27. When it does arrive on Disney+, however, it’ll be the first two episodes, which somewhat makes up for the fact that it no longer falls exactly 45-years to the day after the original Star Wars release date of May 25, 1977.
We’ll let McGregor do the explaining:
Obi-Wan Kenobi picks up 10 years after the events of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, with Obi-Wan Kenobi reeling from his defeat when he failed to keep his best friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), from turning to the dark side. Yet turn Anakin did (he was being fitted for his iconic Vader helmet at the end of the film), and by the time we meet him again in Obi-Wan Kenobi, he’ll be the Sith Lord Darth Vader.
Joining McGregor and Christensen are rising star Moses Ingram as the Inquisitor Reva, Joel Edgerton as Uncle Owen, Sung Kang as the Inquisitor Fifth Brother, and a slew of other great performers including Bonnie Piesse, Kumail Nanjiani, Indira Varma, Rupert Friend, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Simone Kessell, and Benny Safdie. The series is directed by Deborah Chow.
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