Netflix has just given us our first glimpse of Stranger Things season four, volume one. That’s right, the long-awaited return of the gang from Hawkins is coming to us in two parts thanks to the fact that Duffer Brothers simply couldn’t fit everything they wanted to do with the next installment in a traditional single-volume season. The images reveal that, as promised, season 4’s two parts will lead us into darker territory, as the show’s ambitions grow and its characters grow up.
“It’s been a little while. With nine scripts, over eight hundred pages, almost two years of filming, thousands of visual effects shots, and a runtime nearly twice the length of any previous season, Stranger Things 4 was the most challenging season yet, but also the most rewarding one,” the Duffer Brothers said in a statement back in February. “Everyone involved is incredibly proud of the results, and we can’t wait to share it with you. Given the unprecedented length, and to get it to you as soon as possible, Season 4 will be released in two volumes.”
The new images definitely speak to the evolution of the series from mid-80s Spielbergian adventure to a scarier, more angsty horror vibe. Our characters were scattered at the end of season 3, and the new images give us a sneak peek at where they’ve landed. The Byers Family finally had enough of Hawkins and moved out of town, while Sheriff Jim Hopper was forcibly moved, via some nefarious henchmen, to an undisclosed location in Russia. Meanwhile, the rest of the gang is dealing with both the fallout from the Battle of Starcourt at the end of the last season, the fact that they’re all separated, and the pressures of high school.
Season 4 will also deal with the creeptastic Creel House that was teased last season, where Victor Creel and his family were subject to some of the supernatural horrors that our main characters have been experiencing the past few years. Finally, season 4 will also move far beyond Hawkins—our crew will be spread out across Indiana, California, and, in Hopper’s case, Russia.
Here are some of the new photos Netflix has just made available. Stranger Things season four, volume one, streams on May 27:
It’s been six months since the Battle of Starcourt, which brought terror and destruction to Hawkins. Struggling with the aftermath, our group of friends are separated for the first time — and navigating the complexities of high school hasn’t made things any easier. In this most vulnerable time, a new and horrifying supernatural threat surfaces, presenting a gruesome mystery that, if solved, might finally put an end to the horrors of the Upside Down.
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Denis Villeneuve is the director to finally tame a film version of Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel that, over the decades, accidentally spawned a cottage industry of unsuccessful visual projects (see: David Lynch’s 1984 Dune, the SyFy channel’s attempt in 2000, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, which never saw the light of day). Casting Timothée Chalamet as young prince Paul Atreides and Zendaya as Chani of the Fremen, the original native inhabitants of Arrakis, the center of a lucrative interstellar spice trade, Villeneuve reined in the first half of Herbert’s sprawling story through a grand yet visually minimalist epic anchored on the Atreides compound, their new home on Arrakis, and the surrounding desert from whence spice is mined.
Both audiences and critics agreed this is the Dune that finally works, and the Academy nominated Dune for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, and alongside Villeneuve and producers Mary Parent and Cale Boyter, there are Villeneuve’s immensely talented, Oscar-nominated crew: Patrice Vermette and Zsuzsanna Sipos for production design and set decoration, Joe Walker for editing, the visual effects team led by Paul Lambert, and Greig Fraser for his cinematography.
Fraser, whose background includes The Batman, The Mandalorian, and Rogue One, gave Dune an immediate visual appeal that reeled in audiences by helping them quickly make sense of this complicated story. The spaces Paul and his family occupy are moody, beautiful, and above all, realistic: a dimly lit, grim palace, a bleak and dangerous desert under a killer sun. To get a better handle on this visually clutter-free film, we spoke with Fraser about his extensive experience shooting in Jordan’s Wadi Rum, why one film set in the desert is hardly the same as all the ones that came before, and the visual effects-cinematography synchronicity that made this Dune such an aesthetic success.
Caption: A scene from Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
How was your approach with Dune different from traditional big-budget sci-fi films?
It’s funny because when you enter any film, there’s always the shadow of the budget that sticks over you. I don’t actually approach a film and say, there are going to be this many theaters showing it, so I’ll do this. But one thing really early on that Denis and I spoke about was that we wanted people to see this film. Denis loved this story when he first read it when he was a youngster. So when I read the [script] and heard about Denis’s passion for it, I was like yeah, people need to see this, people need to understand what this is, and they need to have the same love. So I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a film that was so left-of-center visually that it burned people’s appeal. It had to be interesting enough but simple enough to appeal to a large audience. There are a few films that have done that in the past. The elephant in the room is Star Wars because Star Wars has a similar concept but it appealed to a large audience. Dune up until this point hadn’t done that, because it had been an art film and art book. So my approach to it was kind of to keep it simple. I wanted it to have everything I’d learned about making images over the last twenty-plus years come to the fore, where I wasn’t going to over-light or over-complicate or over-theorize my work, but I was also going to come up with the right amount of soul, the right amount of heart. It was kind of complicated, it wasn’t the simplest approach, but I wanted to simplify and appeal to a larger audience.
Caption: (Far left) REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Chiabella James
In terms of working in the desert, how did your approach here differ from, say, your work on The Mandalorian?
Well, technically you could say it’s similar, yes: to put a camera and a person in the sand, with wind, it’s technically very similar. But aesthetically it was like night and day. Without undermining any process or dismissing either process, it was very different, because you come from a different point in the story, so you end up in a different place. Aesthetically you might be standing on sand that in theory could be over a number of different films, it could be Mission Impossible, it could be Star Wars, because frankly, there aren’t many locations left in the world. There are forests, there are deserts, there are cities. So many different films are going to shoot in the desert. It’s kind of about coming to it from a different place. The desert is a character unto itself, but to put it in the same simple box saying that we’re in the desert, therefore it must be the same, is like saying that Tom Hanks or Marlon Brando only played one character, because they’re one human. So it’s [about] trying to suck the best out of those locations from a character perspective.
Caption: A scene from Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
And how about shooting in Wadi Rum, specifically?
I’ve been fortunate to have been there a number of times. We’ve shot Zero Dark Thirty in Jordan, and whilst we didn’t shoot in Wadi Rum, I visited. We shot some of Rogue One in Wadi Rum. We shot Dune in Wadi Rum. So I now feel like I’m a bit of a local — I kind of know my way around Wadi Rum. But one thing, when you go to Wadi Rum and you see the incredible mountain ranges and the soil, you start to understand the spirituality of human beings and how early on in humanity’s history, we started to develop a spirituality that could come out in many different ways, be it religious or internal, or whatever that might be. But the spirituality that occurs in that place is very impactful. When you see a sunrise in Wadi Rum, you really understand how an earlier civilization could have taken something from that and understood something very deeply and profoundly about our planet, about our existence. So to take a film like Dune, which is a deep film written with the best intentions, to a place like Wadi Rum, it’s an amazing opportunity for us to put those two pieces of the puzzle together and see what the planet has in store for us.
Caption: SHARON DUNCAN-BREWSTER as Liet Kynes in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
How did you approach blending practical and visual effects in Dune?
I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have the ear of some amazing VFX supervisors. VFX supervisors often come from being compositors or being in the VFX world. They don’t get out into the world, they don’t make images. The good thing about Paul [Lambert], who was nominated this year for visual effects and is an incredible VFX supervisor, is that he understands that the right lighting is as important as anything because if you don’t get the right feel and the right lighting for a scene, there’s no way in post you can make it look great. So he was very much an advocate for making sure the lighting was accurate, which meant that on the set, I wasn’t having to make up lighting rules because of things we couldn’t see. It was a very enjoyable experience from my perspective. We’re four to seven brains all combining to create one product, which is what you see, and everybody was aligned, which is a very important thing which you’d think would be common in the film business, but it’s not. Often minds are not aligned in the way they see a film. In this case, we were fully aligned behind Denis’s vision and able to fulfill it.
Caption: A scene from Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
Were you a Dune fan going in? Had you read the book, watched the earlier film?
I hadn’t read the book. I wasn’t a fan per se. I knew the story and I was a fan of the story. But it wasn’t something where Denis called me about it and I said you’re doing Dune? Awesome. What I did say was great, tell me about Dune, and he told me, and I said, I’m going to do this film because I could see the passion the filmmaker had for the story. It wasn’t one of those things where it was a story that I had to tell. But when Denis spoke to me about the story that he wanted to tell, I absolutely had to be involved. He’s an incredible director. We know that. But on this film he took what was an out-of-control, unruly story that was written by Frank Herbert, the story is about how unwieldy the story is, and he made it into a cinematic film. He deserves massive kudos for that because he’s just tamed the unimaginable.
Featured image: Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
The magic of live theatre is a precious element that is often elusive to the lens. Countless legendary Broadway performances have sparkled and faded in a night, rarely ever recorded. Even a long run of a popular musical will never see the exact same show cross the stage twice.
Many movie adaptations of musicals are enormous affairs with extravagant sets, costumes, and visual details that fill in the gaps that exist only in the imagination of a live audience. The transition isn’t always a smooth one. It is rare to capture that electric exchange between audience and performer that tick, tick…BOOM!carefully contains. The project, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, is both a mythic and factual look at the struggle and legacy of Rent creator Jonathan Larson’s career.
Oscar nominated editors Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum were tasked with untangling the many pieces that tell Larson’s story. The movie tick, tick…BOOM! hosts a musical – Superbia – couched in a musical – tick, tick…BOOM! – that acknowledges the cultural touchstone of a musical yet to come – Rent. That’s a lot to pack in a runtime just shy of two hours.
“I kept pushing, once I started working on the film, to screen it for other people because I wanted to know where people were confused and what music are we focusing on,” Kerstein explained. “Is it tick, tick…BOOM!?Is it Superbia? Is this about Rent? There were just a lot of questions that I wanted answers to.”
The film flows through fantasy and reality, past and present, lonely preparation, and public performance. In the space of a single song, Jonathan (Andrew Garfield) can bounce between wiping tables at a diner, dancing on his apartment furniture, browsing library shelves, and leading a live rendition of the number. The editing required precision to define each of the elements.
“There’s a constant back and forth between your music editors and director and your VFX department,” Kerstein explained. “It gets very complex. I think that we made it feel very organic and simple like you were sitting in that audience and just seeing a performance as if you were there when Jonathan Larson did it.”
tick, tick…BOOM! has both starkly pragmatic and romantically dreamy sides that can alternate by the second. Kerstein and Weisblum were careful to ground the song and dance breaks as much as possible. When a character breaks into a musical number, the plot advances.
“My philosophy has always been that lyrics and dialogue are the same thing,” Kerstein said. “There’s no difference in the movie. You don’t ever want to take the audience out of the film and say, ‘The song is starting! We’re not storytellers anymore.’ We’re treating it as storytelling no different than any other scene. We’re still painting a conflict and action in our own way. There’s just no difference with what we’re doing than any other film we work on.”
What the audience sees and hears must work in harmony. That proved to be a real challenge when songs ping pong through several different settings and tones. “In general on films, I’m pretty focused on sound because I think it’s half the battle,” Weisblum said. “I mean, I want to get the picture right first, but then sound can really influence and redirect the pace and the story and a whole lot of other things. You can do a lot of subliminal highlighting with the right sound job. But on a film that’s a musical, there are some other rules that come into play.”
Instruments, lyrics, sound effects, and dialogue could easily clash, but the editors were careful to strive for clarity. tick, tick…BOOM! is such a personal piece to Jonathan. The audience is invited inside the composer’s creative mind, which can be an unpredictable place. “There’s a funny thing that happens with musical numbers and sound effects is that if they start to pop out or get too specific, the music becomes less internal in a way,” Weisblum said. “If someone is singing, they’re not thinking about the close-ups and all these other details. Those are the things that sell it for us.”
Throughout the film, Jonathan scrambles to add a song that will anchor his musical Superbia before a scheduled workshop. Hours and days tick by until he is finally struck by inspiration during his routine swim. Sometimes artistic genius can be represented in highly visual ways, but other times it is more abstract. “How are we going to keep this visually dynamic and interesting watching this guy swim laps?” Weisblum wondered. “There’s nothing else that’s going on. It’s just the song, but it has to build to a climax.”
Weisblum discussed the problem with Miranda and cinematographer Alice Brooks. Brainstorm sessions included a concept in which Jonathan finds inspiration through a woman on the sidelines who reminds him of his girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp). “We played around with a lot of ideas for that. But ultimately, simple was better.”
Lines in the tiling on the bottom of the pool evoked music staffs and inspired a concept for music notes to appear as Jonathan was struck by inspiration. “The whole idea of the musical number appearing on the ground, that was an idea that was there,” Weisblum recounted. “But the thing that wasn’t there was the idea of the lyrics. That tied together one day in my mind. We had these pauses in the action where he gets these song inspirations and he’s writing in his pad, which is not particularly visually interesting as a movie moment, but we decided to use text on the screen, and we can bring that back underwater. That brings the whole idea of lyrics on the screen, lyrics in his head, lyrics on the pad and just heightened the whole motif together, which was found in editing and not really a design thing at first.”
tick, tick…BOOM! ANDREW GARFIELD as JONATHAN LARSON in tick, tick…BOOM!. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX
The song that finally propels Jonathan across the finish line to complete Superbia is the powerful duet ballad Come to Your Senses. His personal and professional planes sync at this moment with Susan and Karessa (Vanessa Hudgens) sharing the spotlight. “I think that Andy had put a great version together and my task was two things,” Kerstein recalled. “One was to recut it again because Andy had combined verses and did speed changes. I had to unravel it all and put it back together. But also, try to give a little more balance to Susan. We give Susan the first chorus, versus originally both Susan and Karessa would share the first chorus, so we would do really subtle things to balance it out, and then they could join in together and try to make everything on the roof side somewhat Jonathan’s point of view.”
Prior to filming, Weisblum and Brooks discussed options for transitioning between Karessa in the workshop and Susan on the roof. Several of the ideas were filmed to give the editors options in the cutting room. “Before the singing actually starts, Jonathan used to close his eyes and open them and the workshop room was empty and it’s just him and Karessa alone,” Weisblum revealed. “There were two problems with it. One, it was kind of a hallucination on top of a hallucination. That put him in a fantasy in the room and a fantasy in his head on the roof. The second thing is it made this private moment between Jonathan and Karessa, which was a dangerous thing in terms of suggesting that there is a romance or something going on there, which is not what’s happening at all. Myron spotted right away that that could be a problem. There was a lot of simplification that I think made it click ultimately.”
Larson’s songs lend themselves to grand artistic fantasies, but tick, tick…BOOM! still feels as close to a live performance as a film can. “I think the most difficult thing I’ve ever cut is musicals,” Kerstein admitted. “Both In the Heights and tick, tick…BOOM! You may have three, four, eight takes just per angle. Then you have multiple cameras and then you’re trying to make it all feel grounded and real and, in our case, make it feel half the time like it’s a live performance.”
The only thing missing from the film version is a curtain call. Perhaps Kerstein and Weisblum will be taking their bows soon at the Academy Awards.
tick,tick…BOOM! is available to stream on Netflix.
Featured image: tick, tick…BOOM! (L-R) ANDREW GARFIELD as JONATHAN LARSON in tick, tick…BOOM!. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Chris Hemsworth knows his way around an action scene, but his work as Tyler Rake in the first Extraction was about as intense as it gets. Now, Hemsworth has teased a scene from Extraction 2, which will pick up sometime after the end of the first film, you know, after Rake was shot, fell off a bridge, and presumably died. Tyler Rake’s survival in director Sam Hargrave’s hit film seemed likely but was far from definite when the credits rolled—then Netflix made Hemsworth’s return to the role in the sequel official at their big Tudum event this past September. During that event, a teaser showed Rake opening his eyes underwater.
Hemsworth took to Instagram to give us a peek at a scene from the sequel, with what appears to be some kind of trouble breaking out in a city square, complete with fire. “Just another day on Extraction 2,” Hemsworth tells us. Is this a riot, a brawl, or something else? Hemsworth is wearing a tactical jacket and appears to be back in Tyler Rake’s mercenary world.
Director Sam Hargrave returns, working off a script from Joe Russo. Extraction 2 promises to reveal not only how, exactly, Rake survived at the end of the first film, but what his new mission in the second in. The first film was centered on Rake’s job to try and rescue the son of an imprisoned international crime lord. The sequel began filming back in December, with Hemsworth’s old pals the Russo Brothers (producers and writers on both films) tweeting a video from day one of filming in Prague.
The experience of seeing writer/director Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated epic Dune was, for this viewer, as much an auditory experience as it was a visual one. The sounds of the alien world depicted in part one of Villeneuve’s two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel are mesmerizing, from the whispering sands shifting across the desert planet of Arrakis to the oddly soothing purr of the dragon fly-winged aircraft, the ornithopter. For supervising sound editor Mark Mangini and supervising sound editor and sound designer Theo Green, two of the four members of the Oscar-nominated Dune sound team (the others are Doug Hemphill and Ron Bartlett), the soundscape of Dune demanded these ace technicians find the alien in the familiar, and the familiar in the alien.
“The misconception is that when you go to the cinema and you take in a film, it’s as if everything you’re hearing was captured while the movie was filmed,” says Mangini. “Like somebody was there with a microphone and captured all of it. Yet that’s so far afield from the way it actually works, especially in science fiction, which is populated by things that we see that don’t exist in reality. Visual effects, especially in a movie like Dune, take years to create from whole cloth. So, too, do we have to invent a universe of sound for things we’ve never seen or heard before.”
Caption: (L-r) REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica Atreides, ZENDAYA as Chani, JAVIER BARDEM as Stilgar, and TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Chiabella James
This misconception—that a film’s sound is largely captured during principal photography—is probably easier to dispel on a movie like Dune, yet it’s still revelatory to find out just how much of a movie like this is stitched together, one sound at a time, in post-production. “We’re given a movie that’s only populated by the dialogue, but everything else that you hear, even the atmospheric sounds in the desert, the sounds of the characters walking on spice, the sounds of a sword hitting a shield, all of that has to be invented,” Mangini says. “Then when the visual effects are completed, we synchronize them to the image.”
Those visual effects, which were also nominated for one of Dune‘s ten Oscars, include the aforementioned dragonfly-like ornithopters that the film’s central clan, the Atreides, use to move about the resource-rich, highly dangerous planet Arrakis. Then there are Dune‘s alpha predators, the sandworms, which tunnel beneath the planet’s vast desert like subterranean gods. To the planet’s native inhabitants, the Fremen, they are gods. Yet for Mangini and Green, the key to creating a soundscape that immersed the viewer in the world of Dune was by creating an almost eerie sense of sonic familiarity with these alien creatures, vehicles, and landscapes.
Caption: (L-r) JOSH BROLIN as Gurney Halleck and TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Chiabella James
“One of the things Theo and I wanted to do is rethink the sound of science fiction,” Mangini says. “Arguably the joy is in seeing things you’ve never seen before, a Wookie or a special spaceship, and the temptation is to make fantastical sounds to go along with those fantastical images, and to achieve that through the use of electronic equipment. We wanted to avoid that trope by having everything sound as though it was in a grounded acoustic reality. We developed 3,200 individual, bespoke sounds for this film, and 99% of them are made from things you could hear around the house. I think that’s counter-intuitive. I think the average moviegoer would assume we used complex computer algorithms to create these sounds, but far from it, we want out with microphones and captured everyday items. The sound of the sandworms, ornithopters and the shields had to sound believable enough so it doesn’t take you out of the movie,” Mangini says. “We have to make these sounds feel as though you’ve heard them before.”
So how do you make a helicopter with dragonfly wings and a 1,300-foot-long alien sandworm sound like something you’ve heard before? “It’s kind of dark art,” Mangini says.
Designing the Ornithopter Sound
Caption: Ornithopters in a scene from Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
In designing the crucial transport vehicles that play such a vital role in the film, Mangini and Green looked first to the natural world.
“We knew visually that the ornithopters are patterned after dragonflies, and we had a desire for them to feel insect-like,” Mangini says. “We also didn’t want them to sound like helicopters. Helicopter’s blades spin and an ornithopter’s blades flutter. We wanted to make sure we weren’t accused of simply taking the sound of a helicopter’s blades.”
Green bought a large species of beetle online and had it shipped to him in dry ice. Once it arrived safely and woke from its sleep state, Green recorded the sound of it’s wings fluttering. It sounded great and was a good start, but the job was only beginning.
“So now we have this lovely insect-fluttering sound, but it didn’t have the size or girth that we wanted,” Mangini says. “We knew that the fluttering itself reminded us of another organic sound—a cat purring. So we married beetle wings with a cat purring. We wanted that deep fluttering sound you get from a cat that would also give it a more animal, organic component.”
Once they created this hybrid animal sound, they still weren’t done. Sound designer David Whitehead recorded a canvass strap strung out in a 65 mile-per-hour windstorm, which mimicked the violence of the vibrations a metal dragonfly wing would make. Those three elements were combined, but the work on this one piece of the vast sonic puzzle was still not done. They needed to figure out how to create the sounds of the ornithopter moving through space, starting and stopping, drawing near or flying away. “We had to process the sounds to add doppler shift and distance damping to make them sound like they were moving,” Mangini says.
Then there were the sounds the ornithopter makes that we hear from inside the cockpit. Mangini found a solution close to home—his electric Chevy Volt, which he says makes a “wonderful powering-up sound” when he turns it on. These sounds were manipulated and slotted in for the ornithopter’s landing gear.
“All of these sounds are organic, acoustic sounds,” Mangini says. “You might recognize them if you heard them divorced from the imagery, but combined they blend into a whole that becomes the ornithopter.”
The Sound of Sandworms
Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
While the movie’s central battle is between House Atreides, led by Oscar Isaac’s Duke Atreides and his son, Paul (Timothée Chalamet), and House Harkonnen, led by Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron Harkonnen, there is no greater power on Arrakis than the sandworms. To create the sounds of these 1,300-foot-long alien beasts, Mangini and Green understandably first went big. It didn’t work for Villeneuve, however.
“Our first attempt, especially for the money shot when it rises out of the desert to confront Paul and Jessica and shows its maw, was to overwhelm the audience with the Godzilla roar,” Mangini says. “We wanted to blast the audience with a huge, terrifying, feral voice.”
“Something like this,” Green adds, then roars (convincingly, too.)
“What we discovered is from a narrative standpoint is that this was an improper approach,” Mangini says. The worm is a revered being, a god of the desert, and we wanted to inspire not fear but awe on the part of Paul and Jessica. We went in a very different direction. Denis described the worm as this 400-meter-long hollow tube that has to have the driest sounding utterances because it spends its life under the sand in a water-depleted environment. We ended up with what we called the gunk gunk sound, which was derived from whale songs.”
In the film, as in the books, mechanical devices called “thumpers” are used to summon sandworms by creating the vibrations they’re attracted to. The sounds of a thumper and a sandworm are very similar—Maginini likened the device to a futuristic duck call—and helped the sound team hone the sound the colossal beasts would make.
“How does a gigantic worm get through the sand?” Green asks. “One of the things we thought about, after seeing the sand melting like quicksand, was that it’s clear the sandworm moves through vibrations, so that gave us the idea that vibration is a very important thing in this movie. The shields can’t be used in the desert because they attract the worms, and then for the worm, the way it displaces all this sand is through vibration. Denis picked up on what’s described in the book as ‘worm sign,’ the inkling a worm is on its way.”
The paradoxical approach to the sandworm’s sound design is how delicate it is. “It’s described as being like a little fluttering insect,” Green says of the sound of an approaching sandworm. “Mark and I had always imagined the incoming worm would be a huge thunderous roar, and it was Denis who wanted to go after a paradoxically smaller sound, like a tiny insect beating its wing, and it confuses you because the scale is so different from what’s actually coming. As the worm gets closer, we started to combine the sound of sand moving with [re-recording mixer] Doug Henphill’s recordings he made 30 years ago of his assistant sliding down a sand dune that he’d buried microphones in. They’re hugely resonant, it makes this deep groaning song. So we recorded our own, we used Doug’s recordings, and that strange groaning of the sand dunes is something you hear.”
There are two really epic sandworm moments in the film, each that comes with a “worm sign.” The first occurs early on when House Atreides has just arrived on Arrakis and Duke, Paul, Duncan Idaho (Jason Mamoa) and others are out in an ornithopter surveying one of the spice crawlers at work in the desert. That’s until a sandworm, drawn by the vibrations the extractor is making, barrels underneath it and swallows it whole.
“When that worm finally arrives to suck the spice crawler down, we had to devise the sound of a giant suction,” Mangini says. “Short of finding actual 400-meter-long worms to record, I had to do it myself. I took a microscope and put it down my throat and made the giant suction sound the worm might make. Then that sound went into the studio to give it the size and depth and bass frequencies to give us some of the sand worm’s sound.”
The second sound is a more nuanced, mysterious vocalization that one sandworm, in particular, makes when it comes in direct contact with Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). The sandworm rises up above them and looks ready to devour them whole, but it stops short and seems to almost talk to them.
“There’s a particular moment when Paul and Jessica are stranded in the desert and you hear these strange sounds and you realize the desert is alive. The obvious is always to think a massive creature needs massive sounds, but like its vocalizations, the beauty is to go the other way.”
Featured image: Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
“Summon the suit,” May Calamawy’s Layla El-Faouly says at the start of a brand new Moon Knight clip, only the second we’ve seen of Marvel’s upcoming series on Disney+. Layla is talking to Stephen Grant (Oscar Isaac), a decidedly unheroic gift shop employee who doesn’t yet know he’s also a mercenary named Marc Spector who has a super-suit, and a superhero alter ego, that turns him into Moon Knight. The clip reveals a few things, including that Calamawy’s Layla can throw a punch, and that Ethan Hawke’s villain Arthur Harrow has some skills of his own.
Arthur Harrow is going to be a formidable foil for Moon Knight. This new clip offers the first glimpse we’ve seen of Harrow’s abilities, which include being able to summon beings from another realm with the tap of his cane. Back in January, Hawke revealed on Late Night With Seth Meyers that when working on the character he thought about, and partly modeled him on, the late Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, who got a whole bunch of his followers killed in the Siege of Wach in 1993. In the comics, Arthur Harrow is a very bad dude who appeared in a single 1985 issue of “Moon Knight” by Chris Warner and Alan Zelenetz, where he was revealed to be a scientist eager to carry on the work of the Nazis and continue experimenting with trying to make a human body immune to pain. Harrow himself had a chronic ailment, and part of his sadistic work was to cure himself.
It’s not yet known just exactly how much Moon Knight will borrow from that single issue, or, whether Hawke’s Arthur Harrow will have abilities and designs that are drawn from more than just the single source (which seems likely). We do know that Moon Knight will be “louder and more brutal than anything we’ve done before,” as Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige toldEmpire Magazine.
In this new clip, Isaac’s Stephen Grant hasn’t yet absorbed the reality of his dissociative identity disorder or the fact that he can, in fact, “summon the suit” as Layla is pressing him to do. Eventually, however, Stephen/Marc will become Moon Knight, and he’ll be able to do a whole lot more than just run for his life, as he’s doing here.
Check out the new clip below. Moon Knight arrives on Disney+ on March 30.
The development of The Adam Project has its own time-traveling origin story, one that dates back roughly ten years. Screenwriter Jonathan Tropper says the production took flight, in part, because of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) which stars Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, and Dwayne Johnson in a reboot of the beloved Robin Williams’ film that sucks them into a video game in an adventurous fight for survival.
“Before Jumanji came out, what I was hearing at that time was family movies were essentially the Marvel films and people weren’t making the Amblin style family adventures anymore. The success of Jumanji convinced the studios that family-friendly movies were possible,” Tropper tells The Credits.
The Adam Project very much captures the spirit of Spielberg’s E.T. and Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future films of the ‘80s and ‘90s that are rife with entertainment, but also, beneath the surface, their characters express a tapestry of genuine emotions. Grief is the resonating tenor of The Adam Project which is set against a time-traveling story where Ryan Reynolds plays Adam, a pilot who goes back in time to meet his younger self (Walker Scobell), who then team up to save the future. Along the way, they come to terms with the loss of their father, an ambitious scientist obsessed with work played by Mark Ruffalo.
Tropper, known for the hit television series Banshee and Warrior (season three starts production in July)as well as being the showrunner for Apple TV’s See (season three to air end of summer) was first introduced to the project after receiving a call from director David Yates. “David and Tom Cruise were attached then and he was looking for a writer to get into some of the family dynamics of the script,” he notes.
The initial screenplay was penned by T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin, however, when Tropper came aboard, he dove into a page one rewrite. “The basic premise of the original script is the same but what I wanted to do was make it about Adam at his two different ages needing to find his dead father. The father hadn’t been a character in the original script and I just felt that if you got this time machine you have to make the story about making peace with dad. That became the creative impetus for me to jump on and then I started reforming the story to make it more about that.”
After spending several years developing it with Yates, the project stalled as the Harry Potter director got involved with the Fantastic Beasts prequels and the success of Mission Impossible exploded for Tom Cruise. Tropper kept working with producers over at Skydance Media to keep it alive. The success of Jumanji introduced a new round of rewrites and a few years later he read the company was making a movie with Ryan Reynolds. “I called them and said, ‘How about I do another rewrite aiming for Ryan Reynolds’ voice and you share it with him.’” His persistence paid off as Reynolds, who was making a movie with Shawn Levy at the time, both jumped on board – a process about eight years in the making for Tropper.
Coincidentally, the writer has worked with Levy on previous projects, including the father-son road trip film Kodachrome with Ed Harris and Jason Sudekis. The rapport allowed them to further deepen the story. “Once Shawn and Ryan got involved you had three men, all roughly the same age, with all sorts of complicated daddy issues,” says Tropper. “We spent a lot of time talking about our relationships with our fathers. It was almost like group therapy, and through our personal experiences, we were able to inform the story from very specific emotional moments that the three of us had.”
Part of the journey was showing the dichotomy of feelings young and old Adam experience through the loss of their father. “You have these two characters who are supposed to be the same person but have such different points of view about themselves and about their father,” says Tropper. “The challenge was finding what would make 40-something Adam really angry with his father while 12-year-old Adam, who had the same experience, is not. Ultimately what it had to be was something within themselves. The boy is still young and feeling the fresh loss and is missing his father. Older Adam has had 30 years to build up a defense mechanism of getting angry at his father to avoid grieving him.”
What resonates in watching the movie is the number of scenes that allow us to experience the characters’ emotions. In a moment early on, a young Adam is being picked up by his mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner) after being suspended because of a fight at school. It’s not the first time and we hear her say, “It’s barely been a year since we lost his father,” as Adam’s eyes gaze a look of loneliness. In another, older Adam sits across from Ellie at a bar unsure of who he is. He asks, “Aren’t you grieving too? “Yes.” But she keeps it from her son. “You should tell him. You think you’re being strong for him and the problem with acting like you have it all together is he believes it. Maybe he needs to know that you don’t.” Hearing Adam say those things plays as a moment of healing for Ellie.
Another happens —spoiler alert— when the father unexpectedly saves older Adam during the climactic finale – a favorite of Tropper’s. “He’s choosing to be a father rather than a scientist, maybe for the first time,” he says. “After all the resentment you feel from older Adam that his father was always too caught up in his work, at that moment, the father is saying regardless of the science [behind the dangers of time travel] I am going to be a father now.”
“For me, it was a big adventure movie but also about making peace with grief. With the Adam characters, you are experiencing the primary grief of them losing their father, and then you have Ellie who has lost her husband. What it takes to come to terms with your grief was the heart of the script.”
The Adam Project is now streaming on Netflix.
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“This is the best worst day of my life,” says Stephen Grant (Oscar Isaac), a mild-mannered gift shop employee who makes a fantastic discovery in Moon Knight. That discovery is that he’s also Marc Spector, a mercenary whose dangerous life as a superpowered avenging angel is the polar opposite of Stephen’s quiet existence. Marc is, in every sense, a completely unexpected doppelganger, one who is all mixed up with everything from supervillains to the Egyptian gods. In a new video, the Stephen/Marc dynamic is teased out as Marvel Studios further draws back the curtain on their next, highly ambitious series on Disney+.
Moon Knight will properly explore the mental health issues that Stephen grapples with. Are his visions real, like when he seemingly comes face-to-face with the Egyptian moon god Khonshu? Is he actually a mercenary with fantastic powers who should listen to the likes of the mysterious Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke), who tells him to embrace his inner chaos? Isaac said in a previous featurette that Moon Knight is “a real, legitimate character study” that takes the mental health aspect of his character “incredibly seriously.” Co-star May Calamawy says that the tone of Moon Knight is “like Fight Club meets Indiana Jones,” which is the kind of Marvel series we didn’t know we needed.
“For me what’s really exciting is that it’s totally unpredictable,” Isaac has said about his new series and his first go-round as a Marvel superhero. We’ll find out soon enough. Moon Knight arrives on Disney+ on March 30. Check out the new featurette below.
“Morbius is and always has been a standout persona in the Marvel lore,” says Jared Leto at the top of a new Morbius vignette. Leto takes on the role of Dr. Michael Morbius, one of the strangest, most misunderstood characters in Marvel’s vast canon. In the film, from director Daniel Espinosa, Leto’s Dr. Morbius is a decent if monstrously ambitious man trying to cure the world of a rare blood disorder. The catch is the good doctor suffers from the disorder himself, and he’s dying. Yet when he finds a cure and subjects himself to a clearly non-FDA-approved clinical trial as the only patient, Dr. Morbius becomes a “living vampire,” and his thirst for blood, along with his newfound superhuman abilities, make him more than he bargained for.
“There’s a lot of mystery around this character,” Leto says, explaining how because there’s never been a film that’s featured Morbius, there’s a ton of world-building in store for audiences. But Morbius isn’t just a one-off character who exists in a vacuum—Leto promises he’s part of a much larger universe, one that includes both Sony Pictures’ two other Marvel properties, Venom and Spider-Man, with crossover appearances all but certain down the road. “The multiverse has officially opened,” Leto says.
In Morbius, we’ll see Michael Keaton reprise his role as Adrian Toomes, better known as the villain the Vulture, who he first played in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Joining Leto and Keaton are Adria Arjona, Jared Harris, Matt Smith, and Tyrese Gibson. Espinosa directs from a script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless.
Check out the new video below. Morbius swoops into theaters on April 1.
When she co-hosts ABC’s Oscar telecast on March 27, Amy Schumer will likely deliver the kind of withering punch lines that forged her reputation as one of America’s most daring comedians. But in her new Hulu series Life & Beth (which debuted on March 18)Schumer brings unexpected angst to her title character, an unhappy wine salesperson trying to make a fresh start in the face of death, disapproval, and dysfunctional family ties. Like Ricky Gervais in his existential After Life, or former SNL star Bill Hader as a guilt-ridden hitman Barry, Schumer tills deeper, darker territory in the show, filmed by cinematographer Jonathan Furmanski.
Life & Beth serves as a homecoming of sorts for Furmanski, who served as DP for Inside Amy Schumer back in 2013. “Amy’s a very loyal person,” says Furmanski, whose recent work includes four seasons of Search Party and two episodes of The Drop Out about Silicon Valley con artist Elizabeth Holmes. “Amy wants a family atmosphere and if she likes somebody — editors, producers, directors — she does what she can to keep them around. The majority of the cast are her friends, either from the stand-up world or just friends who work in radiology or something and come in for a day to do a bit part.”
Speaking from his home in Long Beach, Furmanski breaks down his favorite Life & Beth shot, describes The Graduate as an influence, and explains why he likes to operate the A camera himself.
How did you get started with Amy Schumer?
I was shooting a show called Delocated for Jon Glazer, who’s a fixture in the New York comedy community. He brought on Amy for a bit part and that’s where we met. When Inside Amy Schumer got greenlit by Comedy Central, I think was the only DP she knew. She asked me if I’d like to shoot her show and of course, I said yes.
Inside Amy Schumerreally put her on the map. As DP, what was your approach in making the comedy pop?
I never approach comedy as something you shoot in a certain way. When I did the “12 Angry Men” sketch, the comedy came from the [black and white] camera work mimicking what that original film was. It wasn’t like, “Oh here’s the funny shot.” It was about: “We’re trying to make that movie again, and it just happens to be the funny version, where the jury’s debating if Amy’s hot enough to be on television.”
Those sketches are so crazy. How do you contrast that with the tone for Life & Beth?
In the last few years, Amy’s done projects about her pregnancy or in the cooking show she did with her husband. I think she’s been going more for truth in storytelling as opposed to screwball comedy. Life & Beth is rooted in her real-life experience. Because of that, in a lot of ways, it’s more of a drama that has comedic elements.
Life and Beth — “Leonard” – Episode 107 — Ann helps Beth move the last of her things out of her and Matt’s apartment. Beth enlists her father’s help in wining and dining a big client. Beth (Amy Schumer), Matt (Kevin Kane) and Cinematographer Jonathan Furmanski, shown. (Photo by: Marcus Price/Hulu)
How did you go about evoking this somewhat more dramatic tone?
The directors and executive producers wanted the show to be shot more like a movie from the seventies as if we were doing The Graduate or Manhattan or something like that. How can we get an aesthetic that feels a little more thoughtful, rather than having it be just about coverage and wide shots and two-shots.
Life & Beth — “We’re Grieving” – Episode 102 — Beth and Matt head to Long Island to arrange a fast funeral for her mother. Beth starts to dig through her past. Ann (Susannah Flood), Beth (Amy Schumer) and Matt (Kevin Kane), shown. (Photo by: Marcus Price/Hulu)
For example?
Toward the end of the pilot, there’s this handheld shot that follows Amy into a bar, she meets her co-workers, gets this dramatic phone call – – I don’t want to spoil it – – and then has to go up on stage and sing this borderline silly karaoke song. From a production standpoint, it was challenging because you spend the first half of the day figuring out how you’re going to do the shot. We did I think four takes, each time all the way through. That was a fun way to get into Beth’s headspace. With that one shot, we got the dynamism, we got the drama, we got the comedy. It opened up this whole world of options.
Life & Beth — “The Sign” – Episode 101 — The cracks in every aspect of Beth’s seemingly great but unfulfilling life are starting to show when she gets earth-shattering news that will upend it altogether. Beth (Amy Schumer), shown. (Photo by: Marcus Price/Hulu)
Life & Beth has quite a few flashbacks to our hero’s childhood. Did you change lenses or switch up the palette when you filmed scenes set in the past?
I didn’t want there to be a big shift from the present day to the mid-nineties because I didn’t really want it to feel like we were going back in time. What happens in the flashbacks are the seeds of Beth’s emotional state right now and I wanted those memories to feel fresh.
Episode 102 — Beth and Matt head to Long Island to arrange a fast funeral for her mother. Beth starts to dig through her past. Young Liz (Grace Power) and Young Beth (Violet Young), shown. (Photo by: Marcus Price/Hulu)
Where did you film the show?
Long Island, Manhattan, and upstate New York.
Can you talk about that sequence in the countryside when Beth’s potential boyfriend John – – Michael Cera – – shows her around his farm.
This vineyard area allowed us to do a beautiful dolly shot. We’re moving through the trees, far from Beth and John, almost like we’re eavesdropping. It’s a big swing, covering two and a half pages of dialogue from 100 feet away. We can’t see their faces at all, just their body language but it’s more about the environment than the emotion. I think the shot works because it supports in an observational way how Beth has been suffering as a character, professionally, romantically, just in life. And then we came back close again. But it was important to spend time in the environment rather than just do close-ups on people the whole time or doing Steadicam shots. Nothing wrong with Steadicam, but that would be more of an expected choice compared to the way we did it.
Ep 104: Beth’s friends encourage her to get back into the hookup game now that she’s back on the Island, but Beth has formed a crush on a farmer at the vineyard she now reps. Beth (Amy Schumer) and John (Michael Cera), shown. (Photo by:Marcus Price/Hulu)
Which lenses did you use to shoot Life & Beth?
I used new lenses from Panavision which don’t have a name yet, but they had a little bit of warmth and wouldn’t look too sharp on a modern digital camera sensor. I also used Sphereo lenses, which blew me away. [Three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer] Robert Richardson helped design them. They give you texture and a certain amount of curvature that I wanted
What kind of camera?
Sony Venice which is not quite 6K [resolution]. We shot probably 75 percent of the show with one camera.
Which you operated yourself?
Yes. If I’m being totally honest, I think operating is the best job on the set. Maybe it comes from my documentary background, but you can get involved in every shot without the stress of taking your work home with you. For Life & Beth, I told the producers I wanted to operate the A camera because I want to be close to Amy. I want to hear everything she talks about so I can think about what she’s thinking about. Except for the Steadicam stuff, I felt physically connected to everything we shot. After a while, the camera becomes an extension of your body and you feel kind of naked without it. Shooting Life & Beth, I wasn’t just a cog in the machine. In a way, I was the machine.
I imagine when you operate the camera yourself, it allows for more spontaneity with cast and crew?
Sure. I can come up with ideas and think on my feet quickly because I’m right there. “How about we try this?” You change a couple of marks, talk to the camera assistant and in thirty seconds you have a brand new shot. It’s nice to work like that. When my eye is on the eyepiece, it’s like I’m in the story.
Episode 106 — Beth traps Ann into spending the day with her and John on John’s boat. Cinematographer Jonathan Furmanski, shown. (Photo by: Jeong Park/Hulu)
When you’re literally closer to the actors, you’re going to feel the scene in maybe a more intimate way?
I’m not a spiritual person but sometimes there’s an energy in the room you can grab onto, and that propels you in a certain direction. Operating the camera enables you to react in ways that you might not be able to acknowledge when you’re sitting 40 feet away.
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Featured imag: Life & Beth — “We’re Grieving” – Episode 102 — Beth and Matt head to Long Island to arrange a fast funeral for her mother. Beth starts to dig through her past. Beth (Amy Schumer), shown. (Photo by: Marcus Price/Hulu)
IMAX, the best large-format camera developer in the world, is working with some of the most tech-savvy, talented filmmakers on the planet to develop new film cameras. The Hollywood Reporterscoops that writer/directors Jordan Peele and Christopher Nolan are just two of the filmmakers giving the company feedback. They’re joined by some of the best cinematographers in the business, including Rachel Morrison (Black Panther), Bradford Young (Arrival), Linus Sandgren (No Time To Die), and Nolan’s longtime collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema. IMAX will be working with their input in an effort that includes Kodak, Panavision, and the post-production company Fotokem.
We’ll be getting another peek at what Peele can do with an IMAX camera when his hotly-anticipated third film Nopehits theaters this July 22. Peele’s hush-hush upcoming feature (we’re guessing it’s got sci-fi/alien elements) was filmed, in part, with their current generation of IMAX film cameras. Nolan has been a longtime user of IMAX’s hardware, and he’s using their technology again while he shoots his current film, Oppenheimer.
IMAX said in a press statement that they’re planning on adding four new film cameras in the next two years, with the first going into the market as soon as 2023. The main improvement in their new generation of cameras will have to do with “usability,” which we take to mean they’ll likely be smaller, lighter, and more nimble. Aside from the price, one huge hindrance for filmmakers using IMAX cameras is their size and weight.
IMAX doesn’t just make film cameras—their digital cameras, created alongside the camera maker ARRI, are deployed in film productions all over the world. Yet for auteurs like Nolan, Peele, and the above-mentioned DPs, there remains an almost intangible quality to film stock, especially shot on a camera that offers the kind of sweeping, majestic large-format look that IMAX does. Their film cameras use 15 perforations per frame, with a horizontal 65mm frame size.
The breakdown in production appears to be that IMAX produces the cameras, Kodak the film stock, Panavision the camera services, and Fotokem the post-production and lab services.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) Director/writer/producer CHRISTOPHER NOLAN and JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ action epic “TENET,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon
Graham Moore, who won both an Oscar and a Writers Guild of America award for his adaptation of The Imitation Game, has joined a growing list of scribes going behind the camera to helm a production. The Outfit, his feature film directorial debut, has arrived, which the longtime scribe co-wrote with Jonathan McClain.
The movie follows a highly skilled English tailor, played by Academy Award winner Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies), who has relocated from London to Chicago after a personal tragedy. In his small shop, he quietly goes about crafting fine, bespoke suits for his new clientele: a family of mobsters. When events take a dangerous turn, he must keep his wits about him to stay above the fray.
As Moore tells The Credits, The Outfit was inspired by his grandfather, a caring, small-town physician with a less-than-lawful patient. Like many other films, it experienced delays due to the pandemic. But looking back on it, Moore relished collaborating with the actors and the various department heads, remarking, “There’s nothing I want to do more right now than direct another film.”
Here he talks as well about debuting as a director, choosing to set the story in a single location, and creating a very precise lead character. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Did you write The Outfit knowing you would direct, or write it and then decide to direct it?
I always knew from the very beginning stages that I wanted to direct this film myself. It felt so personal to me. It actually started, in a way, with my grandfather. When I was a kid, my parents split up and my grandfather became a huge parental figure in my life and my brother’s life. He was the kindest, most gentle person I’ve ever known. He was a small-town doctor in New Jersey, and one of his patients was a notorious mobster. I was always sort of captivated by the strangeness of what it must have been like, how could this kind, sweet person work for someone he knows was a killer? It’s one of the reasons I wanted to make this film, to make something about the idea of complicity. How closely can you work in the service to a monster without becoming a monster yourself, and when does the monstrousness of the person you’re serving become so apparent that you can’t take it anymore and you have to do something about it.
Director Graham Moore on the set of THE OUTFIT, a Focus Features release. Courtesy of Rob Youngson / Focus Features
By the way, great title. I assume it has a double meaning.
Yes, very much so. The Outfit refers to the clothes and then a very real criminal organization that was based in Chicago in the 1950s. Much of this film is, while a fictional story, taken from real things that were going on in the mob world of Chicago in the 1950s. For example, the first bug ever planted in the history of the FBI was planted in 1956 inside a tailor shop in Chicago.
Mark Rylance stars as “Leonard” in director Graham Moore’s THE OUTFIT, a Focus Features release. Courtesy of Nick Wall / Focus Features
Mark Rylance was perfectly cast as Leonard, who is so precise. I recall the scene in which he and his assistant are folding pocket squares and he is so careful while she is slapdash. Also, he often corrects other characters with the line, “I’m not a tailor, I’m a cutter.” Is this language of that time, or is it the character?
I think his philosophy of making things and the way he describes himself as a cutter and not a tailor is very accurate to the time, and to the psychology of people who do that kind of work. In the preproduction phase, we got to spend a lot of time at the shop Huntsman on Savile Row, which is a 300-year-old cutting house. Mark actually got to train with their head cutter for a while and he used some of the moves in the opening sequence where he’s building a suit. We spent a lot of time making all of the work that he does extremely accurate, I think because it was important for the psychology of the character. This is a guy who’s locked himself away in the shop where he just spends all day and all night every day, crafting these impeccable, beautiful objects.
I found it interesting that the film takes place in a single setting: the tailor shop. The reasoning behind this for you then was obviously the story?
It was. When we were plotting out the story, we said let’s try sketching a version of it where we never leave the tailor shop, where it all takes place in this one space. I believe very much in constraint as a creator. I think it can be so helpful. We quickly found that staying in one place helped put the audience inside the emotional state of our lead character. We’re not staying in the shop out of some filmmaking conceit. We’re staying there because he’s staying there. He doesn’t leave, so neither do we. We only see things that he sees, we only hear things that he hears. Mark Rylance is in almost every frame of every scene, so anything we could do to keep ourselves inside the emotional space of this character’s head felt incredibly compelling to us.
Johnny Flynn (left) stars as “Francis” and Mark Rylance (right) stars as “Leonard” in director Graham Moore’s THE OUTFIT, a Focus Features release. Courtesy of Rob Youngson / Focus Features
You filmed at the Troubador Wembley Park Theatre in London. Was that a set or a storefront designed for the film?
It was very important to me very early on to shoot on a proper studio set, and working with our wonderful production designer, Gemma Jackson, she agreed very quickly. We wanted to design the space so we could shoot the way we wanted, so there could be a real interplay for specificness of blocking, specificness of camerawork that would allow for that camera motion. We also wanted to design a space from scratch that would really tell us something about Leonard and create the atmosphere that we wanted. Gemma did so many brilliant things, but one of my favorites was that nothing in the shop is ever symmetrical. There’s this ever-so-subtle ‘offness’ to the whole space. Everything feels slightly mysterious, slightly spooky, like there’s something hidden around the other side. Which is all to say that to be able to completely control every inch of that space from soup to nuts was really important to us, and that’s why we had to shoot it on a studio lot.
Zoey Deutch (left) stars as “Mable” and Mark Rylance (right) stars as “Leonard” in director Graham Moore’s THE OUTFIT, a Focus Features release. Courtesy of Focus Features
Are there other directors’ styles you emulated?
Yeah, this film owes such a debt to the great noirs of the 40s and 50s. Obviously, it’s very much soaked in the world of Hitchcockian dramas. I mean we talked about Hitchcock almost every day on the film, in part because it’s a film that takes place in a single space on a single set, and Hitchcock had made a number of great single-set films. But at the same time, we knew that aesthetically we didn’t want to make a pastiche. We didn’t want to make something that looked like it had been shot in 1956, as we knew that would look like mimicry. We wanted to see if we could use the particular aesthetics of a tailor shop and the particular aesthetics of a film about a tailor to find a new visual language for noir crime storytelling. It’s interesting when you have a film in which the lead character has his own very strong sense of aesthetics. Our visual language is his visual language, so you’ll never find a single moment of handheld camerawork in the film. Everything is on a dolly track. The camera moves a lot, but very smoothly and in conjunction with the actors’ blocking. There’s this kind of beautiful precision to it because that is how Leonard would build a suit. That’s how we had to approach shooting the film.
The Outfit is in theaters now.
Featured image: Zoey Deutch (left) stars as “Mable” and Mark Rylance (right) stars as “Leonard” in director Graham Moore’s THE OUTFIT, a Focus Features release. Courtesy of Nick Wall / Focus Features
Marvel Studios has revealed the first official clip from Moon Knight, their upcoming Disney+ series starring Oscar Isaac as the titular superhero. Isaac’s character, Stephen Grant, believes himself to be a mild-mannered gift shop employee, a man whose life is anything but extraordinary. Yet Stephen’s got a secret—one he’s been keeping from himself—he’s also Marc Spector, a mercenary whose life is the dangerous polar opposite of Stephen’s quiet existence. In the first clip, we see Stephen having a serious panic attack (well earned, we might add) as he watches what appears to be a monster coming down the hallway towards the elevator he’s cowering in. In one reality, that monster is Khonshu, the Egyptian god of the Moon. In another reality, the one Stephen has been living in, when the monster makes it to the elevator doors, it turns into a kindly older woman.
Moon Knight will explore the Stephen/Marc dynamic, and the mental health issues that Stephen grapples with. Are his visions real? Is he actually a mercenary with a connection to dangerous villains and Egyptian gods? Isaac said in a previous featurette that the new series is “a real, legitimate character study” that akes the mental health aspect of his character “incredibly seriously.” Co-star May Calamawy says that the tone of Moon Knight is “like Fight Club meets Indiana Jones,” which is certainly something we’ve never seen before in a Marvel series.
Moon Knight also ushers in Marvel’s expansion into the supernatural realm, which will include the upcoming films Morbius, starring Jared Leto, and the Blade reboot starring Mahershala Ali.
“For me what’s really exciting is that it’s totally unpredictable,” Isaac says. That sounds like our kind of series. Check out the new featurette below. Moon Knight arrives on Disney+ on March 30.
Now that we’ve seen the first Ms. Marvel trailer and gotten a glimpse at newcomer Iman Vellani in the title role, Marvel Studios is having a little fun with us. In a new Ms. Marvel teaser posted recently, Vellani talks about the excitement she feels over the world finally seeing a look at her upcoming series on Disney+. Vellani stars as Kamala Khan, Marvel Studios’ first-ever Muslim superhero. Only in the series, Kamala isn’t aware she’s a superhero at the outset. In fact, she’s just a regular teenager, trying to get through high school, and that’s made a touch more difficult by the fact that she’s mocked for her love of superheroes, Captain Marvel in particular.
Yet Kamala will soon discover that she’s a superhero herself, and her connection to Captain Marvel and the rest of the Marvel legends is soon to shift from idolization to membership amongst them. It’s at the very end of the new video where Iman reveals one such connection to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it’s a doozy.
Yup, you saw that correctly, that was the Infinity Gauntlet, formerly possessed by none other than the Mad Titan himself, Thanos, then wrested away in a team effort by the Avengers and, in his final act, Iron Man, in Avengers: Endgame. It’s a clever little twist to end the teaser, and a nice reminder that all of Marvel’s series on Disney+ are connected to the larger MCU.
Ms. Marvel‘s creative team includes head writer Bisha K. Ali and the series directors—Bad Boys For Life helmers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, 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.
Ms. Marvel arrives on Disney+ on June 8.
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Outside of The Batman writer/director Matt Reeves (who co-wrote the script with Peter Craig), Glyn Dillon and David Crossman probably have The Batman‘s coolest credits attached to their names. Both share the title of Batsuit costume designers, with Dillon serving as chief concept artist and Crossman the costume supervisor. In terms of superhero icons, it doesn’t get much better than designing the Caped Crusader, and the tandem created a unique silhouette for a younger Bruce Wayne, played by Robert Pattinson, with resonating realism.
“When Matt was talking about Batman, he wanted a character that could fight like an MMA fighter. The suit was never going down the route of a big muscle suit. It had to be something practical that you could really beat someone up in and be comfortable at the same time,” Dillon tells The Credits over the phone.
The costume designers have a collaborative shorthand with each other having worked on Rogue One, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and several other projects together. What they brought to the table was a sense of reality to the Batsuit. Instead of a costume feel or a high-tech utility belt as seen in past iterations, this Batman would use police-issued items and have a suit that he himself would have been able to build as a 30-year-old Bruce Wayne. It’s why you see Batman wearing things like police ammo pouches on his utility belt – they are intentional choices to reflect a Batman roughly two years in the making.
In starting the process, the designers scanned Pattinson’s body, who at the time, was shooting Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. They then took concepts drawn by Dillon and refined them using digital software before creating a rough print of each element. Once printed, it was then molded by the team led by supervising costume effects modeler Piere Bohmaned. Each piece was further refined until all the elements came together. The entire suit was then brought to Reeves for approval before going into full-scale production. The costume team created roughly 20 final versions of the Batsuit for the film.
The cowl in particular, which is Batman’s mask, was sculpted in a computer and then printed. The mask was made to look like leather, but in reality, it’s a polyurethane rubber material. Real thread was then sewn into the indentations of the mask to give it a life-like hand-made look. “I like Batman having the feel of the Grim Reaper,” says Dillon. “The cowl has a skull shape, and if you look at the neck from the front, there are these cervical vertebrates that are grouped together. It has that skeleton feel to it which hasn’t really been played with before. It’s that darker element that appears in a lot of the comics.”
Close-up of the cowl via “The Batman” art. Courtesy Warner Bros.
Like the cowl, which was made to articulate in different places so the head could look around, the body portion of the suit was made for mobility as well. “We wanted it to feel like he could be looking all over, in any direction and be movable and flexible,” says Crossman. “It drove me nuts in some Batman films, the lack of movement or the way you could feel the man in the suit wasn’t able to do a certain thing.” The body armor is based on real-world armor and kevlar plating, which plays well with a storyline that has Batman being shot at from all directions. “We took apart bulletproof vests and examined the insides and it’s actually fabric layers of kevlar,” notes Crossman. “So we used that concept creating individual plates on the body. The cape itself is this kind of faux Japanese leather. If we used real leather it would have been a huge weighty prospect and it wouldn’t really work. This is more of a synthetic which emulates leather and matches the cowl while being more practical.”
No detail was left unturned. The Batsuit has a patina to it with a number of bloodstains, nicks, and ricochets from bullets to highlight Batman’s unscathed altercations. The color choice was a collaboration between Reeves, cinematographer Greig Fraser, and the costume team. “Matt and Greig talked about how the cowl on previous versions wasn’t completely black but it was maybe dark silver when it came out of the darkness and into the light. They talked to us about if we could do something similar,” says Dillon.
After creating several versions of the cowl from black to light gray, they camera tested to see what worked best. They landed on a mix of dark grays with body armor that had hints of green and a touch of yellow. “We call it the Darth Vader effect,” says Crossman. “The face of Darth Vader is actually silver but it reads as black. We deliberately did a gray suit and mixed different levels of blacks so it doesn’t get lost on screen.” Even the boots were curated with a military feel using Austrian combat boots that were embellished by costume prop maker Ian Jones with a leather gator fixed on top so they could work for fight scenes or when Batman rode a motorbike.
However, the duo didn’t remove every single fantasy element of the Batsuit. They were keen on keeping the Batarang, which is embedded into the chest, darts were added to the gauntlets and a grapple gun would spring from his wrist. “Everything had a purpose and nothing was wasted,” says Crossman. “We tried to apply that to every item on the Batsuit with nothing to spare.”
In a scene where Batman jumps off a roof to escape the Gotham Police, the Batsuit transforms into a wingsuit which adds fabric between the legs and the arms allowing Batman to glide through the air. To create the look, a Seattle-based wingsuit company was brought on to fabricate a wingsuit from Batsuit material. Then, with the help of special effects, they were able to create the realistic stunt on set where visual effects took over in post.
Another sequence called for last-minute alterations to the Batsuit during a climactic moment inside Gotham Stadium. The city is flooding and Batman is fighting off a number of henchmen but seems to be fading fast. He then pulls out a mysterious green serum from his utility belt and injects himself. “The scene was shot during one of the last days of filming and Matt asked us to make a special port,” says Crossman. “Toby Hawkes in our costume prop department made this port that you could flip up and put the pen in, which ended up being on his leg. This was all done before the film finished shooting so it was a dramatic afternoon.”
In creating the Batsuit the two look back saying, “We think the great thing about Batman as a character is that he can survive being so many different iterations. As long as he has ears and a cape, he’s one of those iconic characters that can take a lot of different versions being made of him. Matt really wanted this one to feel real, which is great because that’s the kind of thing we like to do as well.”
The Marvel Cinematic and Television Universe is expanding on Disney+. Long before Disney+ existed, Marvel Studios had a bunch of strong, darker live-action series on Netflix. Those series— Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist, The Punisher,Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and The Defenders offered a different point of entry for Marvel fans, often focusing on the darker storylines, and characters, in their vast canon. Now, those series are available on Disney+, and a new trailer gives us more of the details.
The inclusion of these series means there’s now a greatly expanded world of Marvel content on Disney+, which includes the major movies, the new series (with the Oscar Isaac-led Moon Knight due up next), and these older shows. What’s interesting is these older Marvel shows were a lot grittier than you might recall, and to that end, Michael Paul, the President of Disney Streaming, has said that the streaming service’s features will ensure that the parents of younger viewers will be able to make sure their kids aren’t watching a series that might not be suitable for them.
Yet Marvel Studios is also starting to wade into darker waters. The aforementioned Moon Knight deals directly with mental health, the occult, and is, according to Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, occasionally brutal. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, while a rollicking action-adventure series, also dealt with weighty issues, including racial tension and extremism. In the darker light of these new stories, hard-hitting series like Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and The Punisher feel almost ahead of their time for Marvel.
In any event, they’re all now on Disney+ for your viewing pleasure. Check out the new trailer below.
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Working on Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty didn’t require an advanced degree in NBA fandom in general and Lakes lore specifically, yet a lot of the folks involved had both. Hecht himself is a lifelong Lakers fan, and writer Rodney Barnes has loved basketball his whole life, and everyone likes Magic Johnson. Yet, one of the key people who helped give Winning Time its period-perfect look admits she was neither a massive b-ball fan or a follower of the NBA.
“The honest answer is, no,” says costume designer Emma Potter when asked about her basketball bonafides. Yet Potter, a veteran British costume designer whose work has helped shape material as dark and twisted as Antonio Campos’s southern thriller The Devil All the Time to James Ponsoldt’s sci-fi drama The Circle, finds value in coming into new material with fresh eyes and little personal history with the subject. “I found it exciting that I wasn’t coming to it with any established ideas of what everybody should look like.”
One of the many challenges Potter faced was creating looks for some of the most iconic people on the planet, during an era (the late 1970s and early 80s) where styles were often loud, large, and unsubtle. Wining Time tells the story of the Lakers at the beginning of their dynasty when they set out to change the NBA, from the style of play to the nature of NBA stardom itself, and, incredibly, succeeded. The main players involved are the Lakers’ two larger-than-life stars, Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes), as well as the movers and shakers who helped shape the Lakers dynasty. Those include real estate tycoon and Lakers owner Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), and a pre-icon Pat Riley (Adrian Brody). All of these individuals were photographed roughly a billion times when the Lakers ascendancy began in earnest, yet creating their looks for the show required Potter to imagine these people before they were bathed in glory. It also demanded a whole lot more than aping old photographs.
“I find when you talk about this era, people have this understanding of who these people are, and then I realized that what they’re imagining is actually later than the moment we’re meeting them in the series,” Potter says. Her research included poring through every photograph, interview, game tape, and YouTube clip she could find. “Then I realized, it’s not just the games but these documentaries that showed those moments in practices that weren’t public at the time.” It was in those in-between moments that Potter found a way into each character’s specific look.
Because Winning Time covers the personal and professional lives of these larger-than-life figures, Potter had to connect the sartorial dots between outfitting Magic, Kareem, and the team in the Lakers’ iconic purple and gold to the quieter moments (for Kareem) and crazier moments (for Magic) off the court.
“I put together all these images from around 1977 to 1983 to really get a snapshot of who these people were,” Potter says. That included Magic’s already blossoming sense of style when he was a star at Michigan State. “Magic has some very well-known, iconic looks back in 1979, right before he began playing for the Lakers. Yet after that, there’s not as much out there when his first season with the Lakers started. The exciting thing is who is Magic when we first meet him in Lansing, Michigan compared to the Magic who we see at the end of the season in Los Angeles. Not just what he’s wearing, but all the worlds he’s in and how he’s presented.”
Quincy Isaiah. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Potter helped craft Magic’s growing sense of style as his confidence off the court grew to match his ability on it. Magic helped transform the Lakers into Showtime (fan era that lasted from 1979 to 1991, at which point a certain team from Chicago took over), the mesmerizing, sui generis force of fast-breaking dominance that reshaped the entire league. This was also happening against the backdrop of Los Angeles, and Potter’s charge was capturing all of this, but not in the way we think we remember the era seeming, but how it actually looked.
“For Magic, that transition as he gets settled in L.A. and gets more comfortable and starts embracing what he thinks is cool, but coming at it coming from his Michigan background, was key. And watching Quincy inhabit that as well and wear it so well is really exciting.”
John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah, Kirk Bovill. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Kareem was the quiet Ying to Magic’s ebullient Yang, the introspective superstar with his Muslim faith and his intellectual bent. Yet Kareem had a keen sartorial sense, too, which Potter teased out by showing him in leather jackets, silk shirts, and polyester pants.
Solomon Hughes. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBOSolomon Hughes, Sarah Ramos. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
“There are a couple of really fantastic archives like Calisphere, the big one in California, that I leaned into,” Potter says. “Through there you can find a lot of photography from newspapers of the time period. What comes up if I search for the Beverly Hilton or Inglewood or Venice beach or 1979? Slowly, I put together all of these L.A. images. The late 70s to early 80s is my favorite period in time in terms of clothing. Personally, I loved the silhouettes and shapes that came out of this period. One of the things I liked about it was not just the L.A. side of it, but L.A. juxtaposed against Lansing, Michigan. You can see so much shine and spandex and glitter and heavy jewelry and nightclubs and discos and glamour in L.A., and then looking at photos of Lansing, where there’s still so much style to it, but it feels less modern, so the silhouettes and shapes are from a previous era. You find this often when you’re dealing with a turn of the decade.”
DeVaughn Nixon, Quincy Isiah. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Potter says that any time she’s tasked with representing real people, she feels extra weight. “You want to tell the story with honesty and be respectful,” she says. “The goal is to think about what these people would be wearing when our script takes place.”
Before the Lakers were The Lakers, the most exciting team in the NBA, the people who made them icons weren’t nearly as well-known, let alone fashion icons, as Magic, Kareem, and coach Pat Riley eventually became. For Riley, Potter found tons of images of him playing, and then tons of images of him as the dapper head coach, but Winning Time reveals a pre-icon Riley, and that made her job both more difficult and more interesting. Yet Potter’s not only creating Riley in his proto-icon phase but also melding him to Adrien Brody.
“Riley is a real iconic figure, and we have Adrien Brody, so you’re molding people together to create the Pat Riley we have in the show,” Potter says. “It’s creating a third person in a sense.”
Adrien Brody. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Potter isn’t creating these looks in a vacuum of pure research—she’s having an ongoing conversation with the creators and performers, too. “I always brought all the images and we’d sit and pore over the photos of what these people were wearing,” she says. “I had meetings with Quincy or Solomon about their Magic and Kareem clothes, where we’d look at these big boards of anything I could find when they’re not in their uniform, and we’d pick things that felt iconic to their characters. There was this idea of them creating their sense of celebrity. When we start to see the Lakers going to the Forum Club together, as celebrities, we start to see more of that Lakers style, the tracksuits, and ringer tees. We’re now seeing the Lakers as a brand coming to fruition.”
Potter loved creating the look for John C. Reilly’s Jerry Buss, the mastermind behind the creation of the team. “We built everything he wears. There’s this quote where someone comments that Jerry’s wearing $3000 Brioni suits and cut-up jeans, and that was essence we brought out consistently throughout the whole show, subtly trying to inch towards the perfect version of that,” Potter says. “He’d wear these very worn jeans that were frayed perfectly at the bottom because he’d cut the hems off, and pair those with a lot of silk shirts and beautiful wool and silk sport coats. Working with John to think about how to capture that very iconic Jerry Buss look, there are some moments I’m very proud.”
John C. Reilly, Gaby Hoffmann, Hadley Robinson. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
Then there were the Lakers uniforms. You might assume (as I wrongly did) that the NBA simply gave the show a bunch of the Lakers old uniforms, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, creating the uniforms, from scratch, was one of Potter’s biggest challenges.
“Even getting the exact fabric knit for us to make the uniforms was hard,” Potter says. “Within our greater costume department, there was a department focused solely on making the basketball uniforms that required a lot of work to make sure every single detail was correct, down to the texture of the fabric and the colors.”
Quincy Isaiah, Solomon Hughes. Photograph by Warrick Page/HBO
“The Lakers color scheme — now I love it, it’s such a wonderful, iconic color palette,” Potter says. “When I first got onto the show, I thought, I’m going to be so overwhelmed by yellow and purple. But it’s a certain yellow that they use. It’s not sport gold, but something along those lines, that very particular, bright vibrant shade of yellow. For me, I gravitated towards that color when I thought about Los Angeles, more so than the purple. We played with keeping that color away from when we’re out in Michigan or Boston, so we really saved this bright, luminous gold color that’s part of Magic’s world and the Lakers.”
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty is now streaming on HBO Max.
At a gripping three hours, The Batman isn’t so much an endurance test as it is a lengthy visual puzzle, one that takes place primarily after hours. Director Matt Reeves’s take on Batman (Robert Pattinson) may be the franchise’s most disaffected nocturnal not-so-superhero yet. Working, brooding, and convening with Alfred (Andy Serkis) from dusk ’til dawn, this Bruce Wayne is consumed by trying to undo a complex web of official corruption hidden by Gotham City’s entrenched crop of violent mafiosos.
Batman’s also working against the Riddler (Paul Dano), an incel type serial killer who, thinking himself more clever than his ploys would otherwise suggest, has deluded himself into believing he is simultaneously working with Batman to bring Gotham into the light while dragging Bruce Wayne’s late parents into the city’s eternal muck. But Batman works alone and besides, if ever he were to be tempted to take on an associate, it would be Selina (Zoë Kravitz), an employee at the Iceberg Lounge (which manages to be a credible techno club, mafioso-run den of iniquity, and crooked bureaucrat hangout zone in one.) Selina, a devoted Catwoman to both her feline and human friends, is working on what Gotham really needs: seeking clarity and vengeance for her missing colleague Annika, just one of many women harmed by Gotham’s politician-criminal partnership from hell.
Among the film’s many plaudits is the fact that you can actually see it: despite everyone’s favorite masked vigilante’s predilection for darkness, we can always tell where Batman is and what he’s doing. The Batman’s moody and effective low-light cinematography comes courtesy of Greig Fraser, of Dune, Rogue One, and Zero Dark Thirty. We had the chance to sit down with Fraser and talk about the 1970s films that influenced today’s Batman, where and how he scrupulously plugged in flashes of light, and the process behind orchestrating seamless action sequences.
You and Matt Reeves have worked together before. How did you get started on The Batman and develop a language for its distinct aesthetic?
I’ve known Matt for a long time now. We stayed very close after we finished Let Me In. We’re two peas in a pod when it comes to our visual language and our aesthetics. Even before Matt’s first meeting, we started talking. As a DP, it doesn’t always happen like that. You’re not always at the beginning of the journey. Often it’s that the director’s been through the meetings, they’ve got the job, they then have to look for a DP. Or, if it’s a director you’ve worked with in the past, they normally don’t engage with the DP until they’ve got the job. So to be engaged before the job was got was fantastic because it just meant that from that day, we were constantly riffing action sequences, set pieces, and coming up with what this Gotham should look and feel like.
What were some of the references you looked at together?
I can’t specify directly that there was this shot by this photographer. But there are a number of photographers that do some work in that dark environment, and there are a number of films. We’re both very big fans of noir 70s cinema — you know, Chinatown, All the Presidents Men, Heat, The Godfather. Obviously, some of those are set in downtown, some of them are not. We looked at a number of photographers — not necessarily name photographers, some hobbyists doing shots of urban landscapes. I can’t name who they were. If I was scrolling Instagram or researching urban landscapes, I might have come across something that had just the right amount of rain, just the right amount of mist, just that kind of feel that felt cinematic and didn’t feel like it was contrived or controlled.
We have to talk about how on earth you did your job given that Batman is nocturnal to the extreme this time around.
You’re right, that was a talking point early on. Because the Batman is a dark guy, isn’t he? He comes out late at night. So one would assume he’s not walking around often in the morning, in the cold light of day. We were all very careful. We knew this could potentially be so dark it becomes unwatchable. So part of the job that I had, along with Matt, we went, ‘all right, it’s got to be bright enough that we can see but not dark enough that we lose the mood.’ So that was the biggest challenge that we had. We tried to walk that tight rope, where every scene we did had pockets of bright light. The diner scene, for example — a diner is what you would call bright. In our movie, it’s bright but not garishly bright. But Batman doesn’t ever come into the diner. Batman stays outside in the shadows, in the darkness. So that’s how we staged a scene like that, knowing that if Batman walked into that diner, that might not really be his character, that he wants to stay in the background. Whenever we were thinking about staging scenes, we had to think about what Batman was going to be seen in. For example, inside the Iceberg Lounge, we had to make sure it was suitably down in tone that he would not feel out of place in that environment.
In addition, the club seemed to be going for real nightlife bona fides.
We set up a real club, effectively. In London there’s a place called Printworks, which, funny enough, I’d been there a few times when it was an event venue. We worked with an events company and our gaffer to light it. We wanted to make a really interesting lighting environment that we could control. As Batman comes down the stairs the lights flash brightly, and again, that goes back to making sure the whole thing wasn’t one tone of darkness. At the bottom of the stairs, as he lands or receives the first hit, we deliberately flashed the blinders in the back so that the whole place lights up. In that scene, even though it was dark up to that point, you get these flashes of brightness, so hopefully, your eyes don’t become exhausted by watching too much darkness.
That said, the action sequences don’t feel overly jumpy or flashy. We particularly liked the moment Selina confronts Carmine Falcone.
One of the things that we tried to make sure we did was that we didn’t cut too many times. Matt’s very economical when it comes to the shots he wants to get. He knows the shots he needs. He doesn’t shoot coverage for the sake of shooting coverage. He knows what her close-up is. He knows the shot where she’s going to fire the gun. We shoot coverage before and after that moment, obviously, but he knows that’s the moment he’s there to get. He’s very efficient when it comes to shot structure, and it means that we can work really hard at getting that shot right: getting the timing right, getting the flash right, getting the sync right. It’s quite fun doing those scenes because it involves a lot of timing and performance beats.
The big car chase scene also seemed like it required intense planning.
The car chase was a pretty interesting process. Matt’s very involved with every frame of this film and the car chase was one of those. We luckily had a couple of units going at once at that time. So my second unit DP, Danny Vilar, took the reins on that. He did all the preliminary testing, mounting to motorbikes, mounting to cars, crash tests, and we took a bit of a different approach where, as you saw, we strapped cameras to the motor vehicles. It may seem easy to do but it was actually quite hard to get the angles we wanted. It took a lot of R&D, it took a lot of takes, and we bought ourselves some older Arri Alexas to use as crash cameras. It meant that we were able to bring cameras closer to the point of destruction, knowing that if we did break them, it would be a write-off anyway. We had lenses rehoused by a company called Iron Glass, and they made these smaller lenses that were a bit more nimble and could be easily mounted to these cars. Danny Vilar and Iron Glass and our grip, Guy Micheletti, put that together.
You stay aware of the characters in those moments — they don’t get lost in a blur of action.
Everything has a purpose in this film. Every shot, every pan, every motion, there’s very much a reason to exist and there’s no filler, in the sense that there are no shots that you could do without. This is very much a well-orchestrated machine. The way I see it, it’s like a Rolex watch. If you take the back off a Rolex watch, every single piece in that Rolex watch has a really important purpose. That’s the same with this film. It’s a very complicated machine that has lots of cogs, lots of turning wheels, lots of minuscule movement, and all of it is essential to each other. If you take out one of those cogs in that Rolex, for example, the whole thing doesn’t work. It’s the same with us. And I think with our movie, what was great was refining every single one of those cogs to help make the final piece come to life.
This film feels like a real departure from other Batman movies. What were some aspects you wanted to keep or leave behind?
Batman’s an iconic character. Most of the world knows what that symbol is. So from my perspective, we are batting with heavyweights of the industry. Some of those Batman films are some of the best films made, historically. What was honest about this was we didn’t tackle it and look at any other Batman film and go, okay, he does that, so we’ll do this, or we’ll be the same as what they do. We did not do that. We looked at other films to look at what we wanted to do. It just so happens instead of Marlon Brando onscreen we’ve got Robert Pattinson or the Penguin in all his glory. We didn’t look at the previous Batman films to reference, and that wasn’t out of disrespect for them. It was probably more out of respect for them that we didn’t feel set in those worlds. We didn’t want to make a part four. That wasn’t even a conversation. There was no ego involved, which is the thing that I love about Matt. It’s not about being better. Although I will say this: there wouldn’t have been a pressure to be better than any of the other Batman films, but if we do get a chance to do something else, of course there’s going to be a big pressure on ourselves to further explore this world, which is really rich. I think we touched upon some things in this film we can grow upon. Regardless of whether I’m involved in it or not, that’s something I’m really interested in seeing.
Kamala Khan has arrived. The first Muslim superhero to appear in a Marvel Studios series or film, Ms. Marvel is centered on the teenage superhero and her journey from dreamy, superhero-loving teen to a superhero herself. The first trailer reveals newcomer Iman Vellani in the title role as the New Jersey high school student who idolizes Captain Marvel and is just about as big of a fan of superheroes as you can be—to the detriment of her social life. Like Peter Parker before her, Kamala has all the pressures a teenager faces; social, schoolwork, parents, advisors, (also boys). And like Peter, her life is about to change—in a major way—when she discovers she’s got superpowers of her own.
The trailer for Ms. Marvel makes clear, as each previous Marvel series has on Disney+, that it’s got its own signature style and tone. It’s about as far away as you can get from the gritty, apparently gruesome upcoming Moon Knight, or, say, the globe-trotting buddy-action vibe in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and that’s a good thing. Centered on the teenage Kamala, the stylistic choices by head writer Bisha K. Ali and the series directors—Bad Boys For Life helmers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Meera Menon, and documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy—are suited to a poppier, more comic book vibe.
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.
This is only the beginning for Iman Vellani’s as Kamala Khan, she’ll also appear opposite Captain Marvel herself, Brie Larson, in director Nia DaCosta’s upcoming Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels, due in theaters on February 17, 2023.
Check out the Ms. Marvel trailer below. The series arrives on June 8.
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“We are a nation of visionaries,” Vice President Kamala Harris says at the top of her remarks about the Motion Picture Association’s centennial. The Vice President was one of nine leading lawmakers to speak about the centennial and the importance of the MPA’s work advocating on behalf of the film and television industry. “Members of the Motion Picture Association, for a century you have written the lines we will never stop quoting. You have created the images we will never forget. You have put moments on screen that take us back and guide us forward. You have connected us with each other and with the world. Just think that for a child growing up in a country far away, America can feel very distant, but because of your work, American culture, American values, American aspiration are just a click away.”
“The film and television industry has been such an important social, cultural, and economic force in the communities I’m privileged to represent, in the city of New York and throughout the country,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries says in his remarks. Representative Jeffries reminds us that in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, a crucial power was bestowed upon Congress—the power to create a “robust intellectual property system.” This power was created by the Framers to promote “the progress of science and useful arts.” Simply put, the Framers knew that a robust creative community, and therefore a robust culture and economy, could only exist if those creatives could benefit from their work.
From an economic standpoint, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the film and television industry, which employs more than two million people in the United States, “You are an engine of economic growth for communities big and small,” the Vice President says. From a global vantage point, the film and television industry are two of the most important exports of the United States, as Representative Judy Chu explains in her remarks. Our films and television series are more than just the finished products of a robust industry, they represent our hopes and dreams, our struggles and our ambitions, and make a massive, positive impact on the way the rest of the world sees America.
Hear for yourself what these leading lawmakers have to say about the industry on our special 100-year anniversary page, which includes personal stories about how they’ve been shaped by the stories they’ve seen on screen. One such story, from Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, is about how director Ivan Reitman’s 1993 film Dave inspired him. Dave, you probably remember, stars Kevin Kline as Dave Kovic, the spitting image of Bill Mitchell, the President of the United States. When Dave has to step in for President Mitchell, thanks to some nifty screenwriting magic from Gary Ross, he decides he wants to do more than just look the part. As Coons recalls, watching this “earnest small businessman who runs a hiring agency” roll up his sleeves and fix the federal budget made a lasting impression on him.
For 100-years, the Motion Picture Association has been committed to defending and supporting creatives. The mission here at The Credits has been to highlight some of the people that the MPA has been advocating for, primarily the lesser-known—but absolutely vital—artists, technicians, and craftspeople who make the films and television series you love. For more stories on the industry, including in-depth interviews with filmmakers and TV creators, check out The Credits, including an interview with our MPA Creator Award Recipient, writer/director Nikyatu Jusu.
Featured image: Vice President Kamala Harris. Courtesy The White House.
