If a film’s visuals tickle the eye, scorch the heart, or linger in the consciousness long after the credits roll, you can thank the production designer. Whether the project is a blockbuster or a low-budget indie, the production designer is tasked with creating that elusive “look” of the film and translating the director’s vision into visual reality.
“A complaint often raised with production designers, like other ‘below the line’ [artisans], is that we feel often that our work when successful is invisible,” said production designer Inbal Weinberg, whose many credits include Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017); Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door (2024); and Derek Cianfrance’s latest, Roofman, set in theaters now. “People don’t understand what we do. Production design is hard to explain to people; most know that a cinematographer uses a camera or a costume designer gets clothes on the actors. Production design is more abstract [because] it involves so many kinds of skills; you put on many hats. Even within the industry, people don’t understand what we do. We run a very complex department that often has hundreds of people in it. It’s a mini-universe.”
For that reason, Weinberg and production designer Kalina Ivanov(Peacemaker, The Penguin, The Boys in the Boat) founded the Production Designers Collective, a group of more than 1100 colleagues dedicated to mutual support through sharing knowledge, encouragement, and experience. Weinberg said that after the first-ever gathering of designers in 2022, which generated “so much success, goodwill, gratitude, excitement, and inspiration about our profession,” the organizers “wanted to expand and involve more of the public.”
Colin Farrell, Rhenzy Feliz in The Penguin. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
The collective then launched International Production Design Week, a celebration of the art department’s work in film and TV across countries worldwide.
The initiative takes place this year from October 17 to 26 worldwide, with events held both in person and online. The program includes panels, workshops, screenings, masterclasses, guided tours, set visits, and social gatherings, and it will be open to filmmakers, industry collaborators, students, and the general public. For instance, the Metrograph in New York City hosts production designers Grace Yun (Past Lives, Hereditary, Beef) and Wynn Thomas(Da 5 Bloods, Hidden Figures,Devotion) to discuss their work and films. Yun will appear in person on October 18 to introduce Hereditary and engage in a Q&A following Past Lives. On October 26, Thomas will introduce Mars Attacks! and join in a Q&A following Cinderella Man.
L-r: Teo Yoo, Greta Lee, and John Magaro in “Past Lives.” Courtesy A24
“Part of Production Design Week is for us to share work we’re doing and to welcome the industry and the public. We’re opening the door to the art department and helping people understand our process and advocate for ourselves in the industry,” said Weinberg. “The film industry has been in crisis for a few years; more [productions] are shooting abroad because of tax incentives. So it’s important to have conversations and exchange information about working in other countries.”
Ivanov said that when she and Weinberg “hatched a plan of organizing designers from all over the world” a decade ago, the global scope was intentional. “We are both foreigners; Inbal is from Israel, and I am from Bulgaria. Originally, we both worked in New York and had a hunger for an exchange of ideas. We decided, with the collective, that there would be no fees, no awards; we didn’t want to host a festival and screen movies. We started two years ago with a gathering, and it went so brilliantly that we found ourselves with a baby.”
Clancy Brown, Cristin Milioti in The Penguin. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO.
Ivanov came to production design from a theater background. In 1979, she and her family fled communist Bulgaria for New York, where Ivanov ended up studying at New York University’s theater design program. “Bulgaria doesn’t have much cinema to speak of, but I loved the theater so much. Little by little, I fell in love with film and went as a graduate student to NYU’s film program.” After meeting Jonathan Demme in film school, she was hired as a storyboard artist, creating detailed renderings of individual shot sequences, for Demme’s 1991 horror classic, The Silence of the Lambs. After that, “I was hooked,” said Ivanov, who credits Demme as a mentor and still storyboards her designs.
A sketch of the Iceberg Lounge from The Penguin. Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
Ivanov has gone on to a genre-spanning career that includes her Emmy Award-winning production design for HBO’s Grey Gardens (2009). Most recently, she earned an Emmy nomination for the 2024 TV miniseries The Penguin with Colin Farrell. “I could spend an hour talking about The Penguin and all the layers to the [production design], such as the forty pounds of dirt we put on the street to create a mess,” she said.
The Iceberg Lounge mock-up, courtesy Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max.
The issues and challenges facing production designers transcend regions, genres, and budgets. “Coming up in the indie world and knowing people from our collective, the amount of work is not necessarily connected to the budget level,” said Weinberg. “It’s the same struggle when the budget is five dollars as it is for the designer of Wicked (Nathan Crowley). It’s just a different scale. The comforting part is that we all seem to struggle with the same issues. The problem is the gap between the dream and the resources.”
The idea of a global conference, with events and panels taking place in cities such as Athens, Mexico City, Vancouver, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Bogota, helps designers “advocate for ourselves and build solidarity,” said Weinberg. “It’s inclusive and expansive…we notice large gaps in structures of industries, between established and smaller communities, so advice from experienced designers working under different conditions can be eye-opening to certain communities. If you feel you’re out there without a compass, hearing from others about more structured environments and better practices elevates the entire profession. It’s about bringing everybody up.”
The Age of Disclosure, director/producer Dan Farah’s chillingly compelling alien doc that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival (read our reaction to the film here), has set a worldwide release on Prime Video, as well as an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run in New York City, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles, on November 21. Prime Video has secured an exclusive VOD window for the film, which is now available for pre-order.
Farah’s film is the product of three years of working in secrecy to gain access to highly-placed government officials to discuss a highly sensitive and historically taboo subject—the existence of non-human intelligent life and a nearly century-long global coverup to keep the details of our knowledge, and contact with, intelligent alien life a secret. The Age of Disclosure features testimony from military and intelligence personnel and members of the U.S. Government, going on the record about an 80-year worldwide cover-up, and reveals a secret arms race by major nations to reverse-engineer non-human technology in their possession. All of the interviewees have direct knowledge of UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) information thanks to their positions within the U.S. Government, the U.S. military, NASA, and intelligence agencies. Some of the interviewees include current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, General Jim Clapper (the former Director of National Intelligence), Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator Mike Rounds (a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), and Congressman André Carson (House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence). Their collective concern over the potential threats posed by non-human entities with capabilities beyond our own lends the film considerable heft.
L-r: Congressman André Carson, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Senator Mike Rounds, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Courtesy The Age of Disclosure/Amazon Prime.
Some of the most shocking testimony about the extent of the cover-up comes from Lue Elizondo, a former Department of Defense official and member of the U.S. Government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program; Jay Stratton, a former Director of the U.S. Government’s UAP Task Force, who says in the new trailer, “I have seen, with my own eyes, non-human craft and non-human beings”; and Mike Gold, a member of NASA’s UAP Study Team. These are just a few of the highly placed individuals who discuss what we already know about alien incursions into our sovereign airspace, their technology, and the frantic designs of governments worldwide to harness it for their own purposes.
Farah’s film has already received support from two Academy Award winners—Oliver Stone called the film, “Monumental… A once-in-a-generation cultural flashpoint.” Academy Award-winning documentarian Bryan Fogel added, “An expertly crafted and extraordinary film.”
The initial trailer for The Age of Disclosure garnered more than 20 million views across all platforms. Ryan Pirozzi, Head of Prime Video Marketplace, stated, “We are thrilled to broaden our selection of premium entertainment by offering The Age of Disclosure to our global Prime Video customers.”
Farah is joining host Thom Powers and several other of the year’s most acclaimed documentarians at the Documentary Spotlight in Hollywood, which features the filmmakers whose non-fiction features are likely front-runners for Oscar nominations. Farah will join a discussion that includes The Alabama Solution (HBO) directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kauffman, Come See Me in the Good Light (Apple Original Films) producer Jessica Hargrave, Cutting Through Rocks (Gandom Films) director Mohammadreza Eyni, The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix) producer Alisa Payne, and more.
When we surveyed the list of offerings at SXSW ahead of this year’s festival, ‘The Age of Disclosure caught our eye due to a massive sea change in the way government officials, military personnel, and scientists began discussing the possibilities for intelligent life beyond Earth in the past few years. Journalist and author Leslie Keane, who wrote the deeply researched and well regarded “UFOS: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On The Record,” published in 2010, broke through years later in her reporting for the New York Times, along with other journalists like Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal, about Navy Pilots encountering aircraft that had “no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes,” yet could reach 30,000 feet and move at hypersonic speeds.” Even the term UFO, which was long associated with quacks and fringe figures—by design, you learn after reading Keane’s book—has been replaced by the more appropriate UAP, as more and more senior officials in the government, military, and intelligence communities have come forward in recent years to reveal what they know. There have been countless run-ins with UAP by pilots in the Air Force, Navy, and civilians flying commercial planes. There have been countless credible eye-witness accounts by soldiers and scientists stationed at military bases and nuclear missile sites around the world. U.S. Air Force pilots had, on camera, experienced run-ins with aerial phenomena they couldn’t classify or understand, which has led to high-level bipartisan congressional sessions and, for the first time, the admission from the U.S. government that they are studying UAPs.
Farah’s doc makes all of the above clear and takes the steady drumbeat of serious discussion and revelation surrounding the UAP phenomenon a step further. The idea that governments around the world possess alien technology is, in a word, chilling. Now, on November 21, audiences worldwide will get a glimpse inside the halls of power and hear from individuals with direct knowledge of just how seriously they’re taking the UAP issue. Farah’s film is a must-see.
Netflix’s hit series Black Rabbit brings viewers into the vibey, chaotic world of New York City nightlife in a breathless eight-episode sprint that left this viewer spent and satisfied, like after a particularly long and indulgent night in the city it lovingly, if somewhat dementedly, portrays. Starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman as Jake and Vince Friedken, respectively, brothers who try to slough off a particularly rough upbringing by opening the titular Black Rabbit restaurant together, the series is a showcase for their considerable acting chops, but also for the kind of nervy New York-set thrillers that creators Kate Susman and Zach Baylin grew up loving.
Susman and Baylin, former New Yorkers themselves and real-life partners, were adamant about having their series filmed on location in New York. The series opens with Jake now in full command of a seemingly unstoppable restaurant scene at the Black Rabbit, where reservations are near impossible to come by and guests on the first floor are jealous of those in the private club on the third. Enter Vince, returning to New York a wounded, haunted older brother looking for some purchase on a life gone decidedly south. Over the course of eight episodes, the brothers’ dreams of becoming big machers in the Big Apple finds them ranging across the city, from the South Seaport where the Black Rabbit is located, to Coney Island, where they grew up and Vincent has returned, to the 10th Street Russian & Turkish Baths in the East Village, where the mobsters Vince still owns money to operate their business.
The series is a kind of greasy, tear-soaked love letter to the city itself, and Baylin and Susman, along with key members of their team, including location manager (and native New Yorker) Paul Eskenazi, drew from their own experiences to create a world that earns its New York City bona fides.
We chat with Baylin and Susman about shooting in real New York locations, their collaboration with Law and Bateman, and the bittersweet ending that has left viewers reeling. Spoilers below.
Looking back at the reception the show has received, how does it feel to finally have this out in the world after working on it for so long?
Kate Susman: We lived in New York for 20 years. The idea for this show germinated from living there, and then it actually crystallized into a pitch, a script, and a shoot. We’ve been waiting for so long for it to come out. We just wanted everyone to see it. It feels so close to us and our experience. I think it’s a side of New York that not everyone gets to see, and it’s kind of representative of the things that we loved there and the kind of shows that we like to watch. So it’s been a total thrill. We’re beyond happy with the reception that we’ve gotten and that it’s connecting with people.
Zach Baylin: For me, it’s much more personal than anything I’ve ever written. We didn’t have bookies chasing us while we were in New York, but a lot of the relationships are drawn very closely from people in my life and Kate’s life. It feels different to have something out there that’s a big expression of things that we’ve been through. I can’t believe we were able to do it on this scale and with the resources we were given. We’re just very proud of it and very interested to hear the conversation around it.
The series captures a distinct slice of New York life, particularly the restaurant and nightlife scenes in Manhattan. Can you walk me through shooting on location in New York?
Baylin: It was essential to us. There was never a conversation that we wouldn’t shoot in New York. We talked in depth with every actor about their character’s New York lives. For example, we talked about Abbey Lee’s character Anna, the bartender—what was her career before she became a bartender? Where would a bartender who worked in a restaurant in the South Street Seaport, who had probably been a model and partied really hard, live? What would her commute be? What grocery store or bodega did she go to? So that when she sits with Roxy [Amaka Okafor] in that park and they have a conversation in episode two [about why she left the Black Rabbit], she’s on her way home from picking up her daily stuff. We wanted that to feel really spot on and for the characters to be people that we recognize and New Yorkers would recognize as just the kind of people you pass on the street every day.
Susman: We wrote to a lot of locations that were very familiar to us. We spent a lot of time at the 10th Street baths and all around the East Village. From the beginning, the crew that we got for our show, almost to a person, was very keyed in—like, ‘Oh, I had lunch at this place,’ or ‘Tompkins Square Park is meaningful to me.’ Everyone on our whole crew felt similarly to us that this felt like a space they wanted to be in and represent. Netflix was an incredibly supportive partner. We had a great location manager [Paul Eskenazi] and line producer [Erica Kay], and everyone just tackled it by asking, ‘How are we going to get these locations and make this feeling real?’
The production design was also really fantastic, especially the Black Rabbit restaurant itself.
Susman: Our production designer, Alex DiGerlando, shared photographs of some of the bars and restaurants that inspired us and informed the story. He immediately got the vibe and location of what the Black Rabbit might be. He found that exterior, found that location in the South Street Seaport, which is one of the oldest buildings—
Baylin: —the oldest wooden restaurant in New York. It predates the Brooklyn Bridge by 100 years. [The real location is the exterior of the Bridge Cafe, on 279 Water Street in the South Street Seaport, which was a saloon in the 1800s called “The Hole in the Wall.” It was also the site of the first known female bouncer, Gallus Mag.]
And the Black Rabbit building is just sitting vacant?
Susman: It’s vacant right now. It’s actually in really bad condition. In the flashback in episode two, when it flashes back to Vince and Jake seeing the space—that’s what it looks like. That’s the actual interior of it.
Baylin: It had been a thousand different restaurants, but it was functioning until Hurricane Sandy, and it got flooded.
Susman: I think it was called The Lighthouse.
What aesthetic were you trying to achieve with the restaurant?
Baylin: We had a very specific aesthetic that we were trying to achieve, which was a three-story corner brick building with the first two floors serving as the restaurant and the third as the upstairs VIP area, set on cobblestone streets. Paul Eskenazi found it, and then Alex [DiGerlando] and Jason Bateman, who directed the first two episodes, really designed what that would become. I’d say too, on the New York thing—we love New York movies. It was really an honor to get to try to make our version of it. We talked about so many movies that are set in New York. Even in episode six, when Vince’s character misses the Chinatown bus because he ends up in a bender at this bar—that bar is called 7B or the Horseshoe Bar, which is on the corner of Tompkins Square Park, which is also the bar that Paul Newman’s character goes to in The Verdict. Sidney Lumet’s movies were also extremely inspirational to us.
Susman: We also spent a decent amount of time in that bar ourselves.
And the exterior of the Black Rabbit—that has some film history too, right?
Baylin: The restaurant exterior is from the end of French Connection when Gene Hackman throws the guy up against the gate on the side of the building. That’s the gate that Vince and the robbers—spoiler—go up at the end of the series. It was really cool to get to sort of play in that arena.
What was the process like working with New York’s film commission and dealing with location permits?
Susman: We were very lucky. In full transparency, it didn’t cross our line of sight that often. Erica Kay, our line producer, and Paul Eskenazi handled that. We got very few nos, including shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge so that Jason could run across it. We had a lot of car chases on the Brooklyn Bridge. I’m sure it was harder than it seemed behind the scenes, but it didn’t rise to the level of making us want to pivot anything.
Baylin: We wrote the first two scripts just before the writers’ strike, and then everything shut down. We found out we were greenlit shortly after the strike, and there wasn’t a ton of production in New York at the time. We felt like we got so lucky with the crew, and people were excited to be working on something that was well-funded. The city and New York production really opened up to us.
You had a lot of local crew?
Baylin: Yeah, everyone really. I was in Local 52—I worked in the props dressing department for years and was based in New York, where I worked on tons of shows. Some of my best friends are department heads. The prop master on Black Rabbit was someone I was an assistant to for a long time. He was the first must-hire when Jason came on—we told him that we knew who the prop master was going to be. [Laughs].
The Black Rabbit restaurant feels incredibly authentic and meticulously designed. Can you talk about building that world?
Baylin: We had tasting menus when we were designing what the menu for the restaurant was going to be. We had rounds of tastings with the chef and working with Amaka, who plays Roxie, to sort of figure out what someone from her heritage would bring into the cuisine of the restaurant that would partner with what Jake and Vince’s idea of what a downtown restaurant might serve, but then bringing in someone who actually knows what they’re doing? We had restaurant consultants who had worked all over New York who built that menu for us and—
Susman: —and built the kitchen. They really opened a restaurant, truly. The space contributed to everyone’s performance because that place was very vibey—it was a shame that the alcohol behind the bar was not alcohol because everyone wanted to sit and have a drink. It was super evocative.
Can you discuss crafting this tragic narrative, not only about Anna, but also about Jake and Vince?
Susman: We always knew it was going to be a tragedy about the brothers’ relationship. But then in terms of telling the story in the world we wanted to live in—that thriller element, something that grabs you by your collar and doesn’t let you go is the kind of stuff that we like to watch. We didn’t want to waste any time doing anything but creating a plot and story, and keeping people watching. That was the scaffolding around what is essentially just a dramatic story about two very damaged, tragic brothers.
Baylin: Someone asked me today if we talked about having a more open-ended ending, and we never did. Even when we pitched it to Jason and Jude, and later to Netflix, it was always going to be a very tragic and bittersweet story. But hopefully, there’s this relief at the end that we feel that’s not the fabricated change that a character goes through, where everything is different, and they can achieve everything they ever wanted. The steps that Jake takes at the end of the show felt very human to us—a human scale of what moving on might feel like. That was always the tone we wanted to end the show with, which was something that felt heartbreaking, but that made the normal struggles in people’s lives feel somewhat operatic. That’s how we talked about it in the room and with Jason and Jude. I just think they’re so good in the show, and they gave so much and really pushed the characters further than we had initially had on the page. We rewrote constantly with them, seeing what they were doing on set. Kate and I wrote basically all of episodes seven and eight in one of the booths at Black Rabbit. We got to see how they embodied those characters and then try to write to that.
Susman: We got to write to the real love that those guys have. You can see it in Jude’s and Jason’s performances. Against all odds, they really love each other.
Jon Bokenkamp may have made it in Hollywood, but he hasn’t lost his Midwestern roots. The Nebraska native, best known for creating the spy thriller The Blacklist, is the type of person who still has a letter from George Lucas’s office taped to his wall, saying, “Mr. Lucas is sorry, but he’s unable to attend the screening of your movie.” This was a movie Bokenkamp made when he was a teenager.
The Last Frontier, an Apple TV series he co-created with fellow Blacklist alum Richard D’Ovidio (there’s no + after Apple TV anymore, in case you haven’t heard), takes that small town energy and pours gasoline on it, igniting a tense drama about a crashed plane full of violent criminals descending on a calm Alaskan town. The pilot, directed by Sam Hargrave (Extraction), touts some Con Air vibes, but its Nic Cage savior comes in the form of a U.S. Marshall named Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke). What follows is an eight-episode sprint to protect a town while uncovering the truth behind a crash that was anything but accidental. (And without spoiling too much, episodes three and seven are must-sees.)
During a video call, Bokenkamp tells The Credits where the idea came from, what went into casting the leads, and more.
Before we dive into the series, I wanted to ask aboutThe World’s Theater, a local theater in Kearney you revived and reopened in 2012. It’s reminiscent of Tarantino saving theNew Beverly andVista Theater in Los Feliz. How is it doing?
It’s a thing that’s close to my heart. It’s the theater where I grew up going to movies, and it closed down. So we renovated it, and the theater’s doing great. It’s just a good vibe and a great place to watch a movie. We try to do things that are not super typical for the area. We’re actually going to do a screening for the premiere of the show, so it will be cool to share it with everyone. Thanks for asking.
With The Last Frontier, did the idea come to you after stepping down on TheBlacklist, or was it shaped before?
I had pitched this with a dear friend, Richard D’Ovidio, back in 2006. Originally, the concept was like, a plane goes down, they close down an island, and they look for these inmates. It didn’t work. As time went by and I returned home, I started to understand the things I liked about a rural community. It felt like maybe that’s a really fun way to approach the show and make it more about that than taking place in a city. And in leaving Blacklist, I wanted to do something that was equally as fun and big and unabashedly commercial.
How did you land on casting Jason Clarke and Haley Bennett as the de facto leads?
I’ve been a fan of his for a long time. We often joked early on in the process that whoever plays Frank, he’s got to be somebody that you believe knows how to change a tire. Somebody who is physical and very tactile. Jason comes from a small community in Australia and he is a very physical guy, both in his work and in what he portrays on the screen. So there’s something a little bit romantic about the character that I think Jason brings to that.
Jason Clarke and Haley Bennett in “The Last Frontier,” now streaming on Apple TV.
And Haley?
With Haley, I think in a very different but similar way. I think she has a very mysterious way about her, and that’s something we wanted to lean into as we meet this guy, Frank, who’s very open, very warm, and very community-minded. When you juxtapose him with a woman from a place that is very different, with a very different approach to community, and one who is a little more mysterious and guarded, it yields the best results. I think both of them breathed life into the show in ways that make the scripts look better than they are because of those performances.
What did you talk to director Sam Hargrave about creating the look?
One thing I asked him in a meeting about was his film Extraction. I asked him how that show ended up feeling so sweaty and sort of hot. And he said, ‘Well, you go there and get sweaty and hot.’ He wants everything to be practical, so we went after it. When we see the breath at night, when people are yelling, it’s cold. There’s a reality to those things that you only get by going to a place like that. The landscape served us well. It might not have been comfortable for us all the time, but I think it reads well on screen.
What went into making the show’s small-town Alaskan vibe?
There are a couple of things we were reaching for. One word we used a lot was analog. The show, in general, whether it’s rotary phones ringing, or F-150 trucks that are gas guzzlers, or things that are very tactile in the show. We took a very specific approach to keep things out of the digital world, and in that way, it’s a little bit of a throwback.
Jason Clarke in “The Last Frontier,” now streaming on Apple TV.
The other?
I think the town of Fairbanks, at least our version of Fairbanks, is fairly romantic. It’s a little bit of what America used to be. It’s a place that feels a little bit like a time capsule in ways. We aimed to create a warm, inviting, and comfortable community, knowing that we would have all these inmates descending upon it. We wanted to be as lovely as possible before we went wreaking havoc, and we were very specific about building a place that felt a little bit trapped in time. I think taking an approach that felt very analog was a way that helped us do that.
Haley Bennett and Jason Clarke in “The Last Frontier,” now streaming on Apple TV.
Oftentimes, a series can find its pace and tone in the edit. How did The Last Frontier take shape in the cutting room?
From the beginning, one of our writers, Albert Kim, said to me after reading the pilot, ‘Well, it’s hyper-aggressive storytelling.’ And I was like, ‘Is that a compliment or an insult?’ I’m always nervous about things unfolding too slowly or being disrespectful of the audience’s time. So, we wanted to do something that, from the beginning, really grabs you. Beyond that, the pace and energy of the show are very frenetic. It’s very real-time. In fact, if you go through and look at all of the episodes, it’s almost one episode a day. It unfolds over almost a week, and I think that pace was very intentional within the scripts.
Haley Bennett in “The Last Frontier,” now streaming on Apple TV.
But then, when we turned it over to our editors to recontextualize, they did a really nice job finding the show. They would say things like, ‘You don’t need this scene, or ‘Let’s live in this moment a little more.’ I’d like to imagine it was all in the scripts, but I do have to tip my hat to the editors, the composer [Ariel Marx], and our music supervisor [Ciara Elwis], who also helped, in a really important way, to find and define the tone and pace.
The Last Frontier is streaming now on Apple TV.
Featured image: Jason Clarke and Haley Bennett in “The Last Frontier,” now streaming on Apple TV.
The third installment in the Tron series, which broke new ground in 1982 with a film set in the digital world, sees AI beings cross over from the grid into the physical realm. Directed by Joachim Rønning, Tron: Ares stars Jared Leto as Ares, an AI soldier generatively laser printed by Dillinger scion Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) to take on rival corporation Encom. Encom CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee) has cracked the permanence code, which would allow figures like Ares, or any living entity hatched via AI, to make the leap from virtual reality to the human world and survive.
But Eve breaks the hard drive holding the permanence code and chucks it into the harbor, and Julian adapts, with a new directive to capture Eve herself and extract the code within the Dillinger grid. Ares rebels, and the corporate rivalry turns into a furious chase from one world to the next. Set to a hammering techno score by Nine Inch Nails, Tron: Ares leaps between human and virtual reality, where different spheres are defined by color—red for Dillinger, white for Encom, and finally, the blues and purples of original Tron programmer Kevin Flynn’s (Jeff Bridges) 1980s-inflected grid.
Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, whose range of credits includes The Social Network, Fight Club, and music videos for David Bowie, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift, among many others, collaborated with the visual effects team on an overlapping effort to get the film’s stunning visual effects on screen. We had the chance to speak with Cronenweth about that process, as well as shooting for IMAX, filming surprising sequences practically, and pushing the imagery in new directions based on the NIN score to come.
How did you first approach the cinematography, in terms of delineating the real world from the system worlds?
You look back at the history of the Tron franchise, and you see where it evolved from. There’s this clinical, mechanical precision to the grid. That was a great starting point for me, to go into it knowing that the world would be so different from the real world. Other than the end of Legacy, this is the first time they have ever spent any time in the real world. The real world is based on all the imperfections of humanity, and so it was a wonderful balance between precision and imprecision. We had three grids, Encom, Dillinger, and Flynn. You take those three worlds and make them different, but all within this controlled precision, and then you get into the grittiness of the real world.
The different worlds were really defined by color. How did that apply to the cinematography?
In a way, that was established in Legacy and the original 1982 film. Red was not the world of the good guys, and white or blue was the Flynn world, which was the world of the good guys. In a way, it was our black hat versus white hat. The thing we got to add was the Encom grid. The Flynn grid was desaturated and added quite a bit of grain to emulate the limitations of the technology available in 1982.
In a film like this, where so much relies on visual effects, how does that affect your process?
I had a very generous amount of time for preparation on this movie. There was so much to be resolved. The explorations of these worlds were still coming to fruition, and even though there were maps of what it should be and renderings of what we wanted, there were still so many choices to be made and so many sets that incorporated a lot of different types of interactive lights. It was really nice that we had that time to work our way through and eventually get to what you saw.
Were there practical elements that might surprise audiences?
A lot of the chase sequence was more practical than you’d think it would be. All the stuff that was on Eve’s bike, before she got on the light cycle, was actually on the bike, and we were chasing her through the streets of Vancouver. Once she’s on the light bike, some of the interaction was done on stage, but a lot of it was the light bikes being towed on trailers and interacting with the all the light sources in the real world.
For a film like this, do you experiment with different lenses? Or did you come in with a pretty well-set toolkit?
I think it’s both. For us, Joachim and I both thought it would be best represented anamorphically, but when IMAX showed interest in displaying it, that changed the parameters. You can’t shoot on anamorphic, so we embraced the 2.39:1 aspect ratio and went with spherical glass. I had really great success with Being the Ricardos using the RED cinema camera with the ARRI DNA large format lenses, or I would have used the regular spherical lenses. We combined them together, and they created a special mount for me that hadn’t been done before, to accommodate the RED camera with the DNA large-format lenses. Oftentimes, they don’t mind if you change formats during the show, as long as 40% is presented in IMAX, but we didn’t want the audience to have that experience. So we left room for the 1.90:1 but really composed for the 2.39:1. The DNA lenses have interesting personalities and have inherent artifacting that adds different nuances. Even though the worlds were clinical, I didn’t want the optics to be as clinical.
What were some of those specific characteristics?
The way they flare, the way they react to halations, the way they fall off, they’re tunable; you can adjust them to whatever your preference is. We brought the center of sharpness out to the edges a little bit more, which allowed us to then compose people on both extremes of a frame without losing focus on them. They maintain interesting flares and bits of distortion here and there. They really are friendly to faces.
Did your extensive experience shooting music videos play into your approach to Tron: Ares?
Only from the standpoint of once Nine Inch Nails had committed to this film, and we talked about the kind of tracks [they would do]. I’ve shot music videos for Nine Inch Nails many years ago. My brother and I directed some Batman: Arkham video game commercials, and Trent [Reznor] wrote the score for that commercial. As you know, TheSocial Network was the first one they composed, and I photographed TheSocial Network. And then they did Dragoon Tattoo, and so many movies since then. So I’m really familiar with their music. When Disney came back to us and said they’d signed Nine Inch Nails to do it, you know there was going to be more reverb, more bass, more aggression, and the studio’s attitude changed quite a bit about how much more we could push the imagery, especially in the real world, to contrast the grids of the digital world.
Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton passed away on Saturday, October 11, 2025. Following her death this past weekend, co-stars, colleagues, friends, and movie lovers shared their feelings about the iconic, singular star. This remembrance of Keaton has spread across social media, highlighting her legendary roles, kind spirit, activism, and talent.
Leonardo DiCaprio, who played Keaton’s nephew in the 1996 film Marvin’s Room, posted a remembrance on his Instagram Stories of the two together and wrote, “Diane Keaton was one of a kind. Brilliant, funny, and unapologetically herself. A legend, an icon, and a truly kind human being. I had the honor of working with her at 18. She will be deeply missed.”
Bette Midler, who starred alongside Keaton in 1996’s The First Wives Club, wrote on Instagram, “I cannot tell you how unbearably sad this makes me. She was hilarious, a complete original, and completely without guile, or any of the competitiveness one would have expected from such a star. What you saw was who she was…oh, la, lala!”
Kimberly Williams-Paisley, actress who played the daughter of Keaton’s character in Father of the Bride, shared that getting to work with Keaton “will always be one of the highlights of my life.”
Elizabeth Tulloch, an American actress, highlighted Keaton’s appreciation for animals and the importance of their fair treatment in her last Instagram post on her account. Tulloch commented on the post of Keaton and her dog, “Thank you for your talent, your animal advocacy, your immeasurable charm.”
Viola Davis wrote in a powerful Instagram caption, “The pathos, humor, levity, your ever-present youthfulness and vulnerability – you tattooed your SOUL into every role, making it impossible to imagine anyone else inhabiting them.”
Elizabeth Banks wrote on Instagram, “I am proud I have a career that allowed me to meet her and breathe her air.”
Octavia Spencer shared, “Thank you, Diane, for reminding us that authenticity never goes out of fashion.”
Reese Witherspoon shared her earliest memories of Keaton while on stage at her Hello Sunshine Shine Away event in L.A., “Diane was one of my first mentors in this business when I was 15…The thing I just loved about her is she was such an original.” Witherspoon went on to praise her work in Annie Hall, The Godfather, and Something’s Gotta Give, and ended with “For Diane, watch one of her movies and wear like a really interesting outfit.”
Francis Ford Coppola, Keaton’s director on The Godfather films, wrote on Instagram, “Words can’t express the wonder and talent of Diane Keaton. Endlessly intelligent, so beautiful. From her earliest performances in Hair and throughout her amazing career, she was an extraordinary actor.”
Steve Martin shared a humorous part of a 2021 interview with Keaton and Martin Short, her co-star in the classic 1991 film Father of the Bride, for Interview magazine. Short asks Keaton, “Who’s sexier, me or Steve Martin?” and Keaton replies, “I mean, you’re both idiots.” Martin shared this on Instagram and wrote in the caption, “Don’t know who first posted this, but it sums up our delightful relationship with Diane.”Steve Martin posted again on Sunday, sharing a personal relic, “This playbill is from a 1964 college production of Carousel. Diane ‘Hall’ (Keaton) is the lead; and I’m the stage hand (circled in the image).”
Many other stars, including Kate Hudson, Ben Stiller, Jamie Lee Curtis, Pink, Lisa Kudrow, Julia Garner, Mandy Moore, and Luke Evans, shared their love for Keaton and thoughts to her loved ones on Instagram and X.
Many fans are returning to Meryl Streep’s speech to award Diane Keaton the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement award in 2017, as it perfectly captures Keaton’s life in film. Meryl Streep starred alongside Keaton in Marvin’s Room.
onstage during American Film Institute’s 45th Life Achievement Award Gala Tribute to Diane Keaton at Dolby Theatre on June 8, 2017 in Hollywood, California. 26658_002
In her speech, Meryl Streep says, “I fell for Diane Keaton…with Annie Hall because she had the stream of consciousness of a hummingbird…She’s in flight. When she lights down, she stops your heart. She has given us so much happiness.”
The real story behind co-screenwriter and director Derek Cianfrance’s new feature Roofman (co-written with Kirt Gunn) is almost too bizarre to believe. In the late 1990s, North Carolina, a financially strapped father and army veteran, Jeffrey Manchester, broke into 45 McDonald’s locations by cutting through their roofs at night, robbing the employees at gunpoint in the morning. He gained the nickname Roofman, but was also famously very polite and kind to the employees, even giving up his coat to someone he was putting in the walk-in freezer. The police caught Manchester, and he was sent to prison for a 45-year sentence. Then, he escaped from prison and hid in a Toys R Us for months by building an enclosure for himself behind a bike display. Over the time he was in hiding, he started attending and giving toys to a local church, and even dated someone he met in bible study there. Eventually caught again, he is now serving his sentence through 2036.
Cianfrance, known for his films Blue Valentine and A Place Beyond the Pines, cast Channing Tatum as Manchester and Kirsten Dunst as Leigh Wainscott, the woman he met and dated after escaping from prison. Roofman is a story full of heart and heartbreak, narrated by Tatum, who uses many words taken directly from Manchester himself. The Creditsspoke to Derek Cianfrance about the experience of adapting this extraordinary true-life tale for the big screen.
Between 1998 and 2010, you worked on documentaries. What aspects of documentary work were the most helpful or present for you in creating and bringing Roofman to the screen?
With documentaries, I learned to become humble as a filmmaker. I grew up with the idea of a filmmaker as Cecil B. DeMille, a director with a megaphone shouting his or her orders to the world, and with documentaries that didn’t resonate with me. I noticed that I had to set the megaphone to my ear, and it was a way to funnel in the world and listen. If I were shooting a documentary and following someone around, they could pick a chair that was in the darkness, or the chair could break, and I wouldn’t be able to get a second take. So, I had to be very watchful and present. I had to listen and be on my toes. Once I got to make narrative features again, I just tried to bring all those elements of listening and presence back into those narrative features, because now I was working with great actors. I just wanted to treat them as regular people, and surround them with regular people in a sort of documentary world.
Kirsten Dunst and Channing Tatum on the set of Paramount Pictures’ “ROOFMAN.”
How is that exemplified in Roofman?
For Jeff’s story and our film, I shot it in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the events took place, using many of the real locations, including the church and the courtroom where he was sentenced. Then I tried to surround him with as many people from the real situation as possible, so that they could also validate and act as professionals in the scene, allowing my actors to be dropped into this aquarium of real life. They’re no longer faking it. They’re acting in the true way. When I was doing documentaries, I realized that these people are in action and they’re telling the truth, so why can’t I have actors do the same thing?
So you cast real people like Jeff’s real arresting officer, Katherine Scheimreif, as Sally, the retired cop at the singles brunch. Why was that important to you, and what did they bring to the film?
It was important to me because this story is so unbelievable; I wanted just to ground myself in truth. I feel like the keys to any movie are to keep the suspension of disbelief and persistence of vision, at least for narrative films. I find I need to suspend my own disbelief while I’m on set, so I just had to have a way to believe the story myself. Going down there to these environments with the real people, and hear from them that ‘Yes, this is what happened,’ really helped. Having Katherine Scheimreif, for example, at Red Lobster, made Channing nervous, which was great because I wanted someone who could smell the BS on him and make him sweat a little. Also, having these real people part of the production makes it like a homecoming. I always saw this movie as one of those Christmas movies, which are inherently nostalgic, but I think they’re also about a return home. They often take place in a small town where a big event happens and brings everyone together. This was a big event in Charlotte 20 years ago when it happened, and I just felt the need to go down there with the people who it had happened to, and let them relive it, maybe to have some personal catharsis with it or confront it.
You cast other folks, too, like Leigh Moore, who Kirsten Dunst portrays in the movie. She has a cameo as a school crossing guard, and Pastor Ron Smith plays the pawnshop employee.
Right. Some people said no, they didn’t want to be a part of it, but the people that did, I wanted them to make it with us, because the last thing I wanted to be part of was Hollywood coming to town to tell the inauthentic version of the story. I wanted them to all be proud of the movie and engage with their memories in a kind of playful way, honestly, which is why I didn’t always cast everyone as themselves. I wanted them to create other characters so that they could have a new perspective on the events. And it was a homecoming for me, too. The first time I went down to Charlotte, I was scouting for a fast-food restaurant. I went into a Popeyes’ chicken, and the manager embraced me, brought me into the kitchen, and invited me over for dinner. It made me think this is the community that would welcome this stranger in off the street and truly embrace him.
You not only met Jeffrey Manchester, you spent hundreds of hours speaking to him over the course of writing the script and the production. What is an example of an illuminating conversation that led to what we see onscreen?
There were so many conversations that meant something to me with Jeff. He has this huge heart, but he is heartbroken as well. One of the stories that really resonated with me about Jeff is that he spent nine years in solitary confinement after the events depicted in this movie, and when I spoke with him, he was incredibly optimistic. I asked him how he survived those nine years, and he said, “I filled houses. I would imagine I had $100,000, and I would think of what I could build for my family with that money, and I filled every room. All my kids had a room. I knew what the fixtures were like on the sink, and I knew what the hinges were like on the doors. I would memorize and live in these houses. It would take me six months to fully build this $100,000 house, and when I was done with that, I would give myself a million dollars and imagine I was making a million-dollar house, and I’d have a pool and a three-car garage”. He lived in these homes, and I realized that here was a guy dreaming of homes. That’s why he started robbing McDonald’s in the first place: to build a home, but then he got his home taken away. This story is, in part, one man’s search for home. Then I started to realize that Roofman is what they called him on the news, but Roofman also reminded me of what my father used to tell me, which is “I put a roof over your head.” I was thinking that Roofman is Jeff’s story about mixing up what it means to be a father and what it means to be a provider. The opening shot of the movie pans across a shopping center in the middle of the night called “Homemaker.” That all came from Jeff’s desire for home.
Channing Tatum, left, and Director Derek Cianfrance on the set of Paramount Pictures’ “ROOFMAN.”
Roofman is currently in theaters nationwide.
Featured image: Channing Tatum stars in Paramount Pictures’ “ROOFMAN.”
It’s no accident that Oscar-nominated Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino‘s movies look as elegant as they do. The Italian filmmaker has a side hustle as an interior designer. In 2017, he launched his eponymous studio and hired architect Stefano Baisi, who helped him design shops, hotels, Dior fashion shows, and luxury apartments. Last year, Baisi crossed over to film by conjuring a surreal 1950s Mexico City for Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of William Burroughs’ novel featuring Daniel Craig.
Now Guadagnino and Baisi re-unite for After the Hunt (in theaters now), starring Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield as revered Yale professors whose comfortable academic perch starts to wobble when an ambitious student (Ayo Edibiri) threatens their reputations.
Basio, visiting Los Angeles from his native Milan, talks to The Credits about replicating New Haven in London and taking inspiration from the Upper West Side apartment building where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed.
For After the Hunt, what did Luca Guadagninowant to communicate, through your designs, about Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield’s Alma and Frederik [Michael Stuhlbarg] characters?
He wanted to express the power that these people hold in society, the power they aspire to, and the social position they have achieved. The academy, the university, the institution – all these things form the backdrop of this movie, together with the Wharf on the industrial side of the city, which represents the other side of Alma.
The story is set at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, but it was actually shot in London. How did you accomplish that swap?
I went to New Haven for three or four days, where I had access to Yale classrooms and offices. I also visited the outskirts of the city, the Wharf, and began to build my vision of the place. We thought Fredrick and Alma’s home should be sort of like an Upper West Side apartment in New York City. We designed an apartment inspired by the Dakota and Langham buildings. Rosemary’s Baby was shot in the Dakota.
Alma and Frederik, being members of the academic elite, demonstrate good taste in their home environment. We’re not looking at self-assembled furniture from a big box store.
We wanted to tell a story through the way we treated their apartment, giving depth to the characters by evoking a sense of history. We figured Frederik inherited the apartment from his parents, who had inherited it from their grandparents, so we created three layers of time. The grandparents may have come from Europe, so they brought this kind of [minimalist] Bauhaus style to the apartment, which you see in the kitchen. Frederik’s parents lived there during the Jaqueline Kennedy era. After that Fredrick and Alma wrote their personalities onto the apartment.
Where do these layers of history peek through in the furnishings?
You can spot some [Austrian designer] Josef Hoffmann furniture in their apartment, like the dining room table. We found that during a visit to LobMyer, a historic glassware company in Vienna. We had a meeting around this beautiful, massive wooden table and thought the piece would work very well in Alma’s dining room. We thought the flowered upholstery created a link to the Jacqueline Kennedy era, making the furniture look more American. We decided that Alma and Frederik would bring their own experience to the home by reupholstering furniture, adding different covers to the bedroom walls, and displaying art from their travels around the world, including places like Haiti and North Africa.
The apartment reveals something about who these people are, not through expositional dialogue, but through their furnishings.
Exactly! That’s what Luca wanted to do with the apartment. Instead of creating a generic space, we wanted to be very precise. Every item in their study and every book was selected in relation to the characters, Frederik being a psychoanalyst, Alma being a professor of philosophy. It’s all very specific.
Luca had input on the books?
Of course! We did our research, and then Luca personally picked the books.
Beyond the confines of Alma and Frederik’s apartment, how did you go about replicating Yale University inLondon?
We shot everything at Shepperton Studios. We had nine soundstage sets plus huge sets in the backlot.
The Indian restaurant in the movie was built on the backlot, complete with sidewalks, tarmac, signs, the facade of the building. Everything is an exact replica of a real place in New Haven, which we measured and photographed.
In the Wharf neighborhood, Alma rents a bare-bones place in stark contrast to her richly furnished main home. What were you going for with her “Wharf” apartment?
That’s a simple apartment representing a sort of interior space where Alma can work and hide her secrets and lies. We wanted to show the difference between this industrial part of town and the university, which is a very clean and polished bubble with neo-Gothic towers and a few modernist buildings, such as the Beinecke Library. Whereas in the Wharf [neighborhood], you see smokestacks and industrial buildings. We designed Alma’s apartment from scratch, thinking it should be the kind of place you’d find in the eye of the city.
You shot some scenes at Cambridge University, right?
Only one, where Alma is walking through a gate to the campus, and we filmed some establishing shots without actors at Cambridge. But on the Shepperton backlot, we built a very large [campus] quad. We used real iron for the fence, wood for the benches, and real grass. We did molds and used concrete to create the stone sidewalks. And the trees – part of them were built with Styrofoam-type material, which we painted.
Your architectural background must have come in handy.
For sure. But also, in a project of this scale, you’re working with a very good team where the only way to communicate is to speak and to draw.
If you were on set during filming, did you enjoy watching the actors go through their paces in your custom-built environments?
I’m almost always on set with Luca. It’s important to be there with him in case there are questions, or maybe he asks if you can move a wall. And I love to see the actors in these spaces. With Luca, you never know where he will put the camera. He’s guided by the actors and whatever inspires him on the day, so it’s a big responsibility for me to give him a 360-degree set.
You’ve been working alongside Luca Guadagnino for nearly a decade, first at his design studio, then Queer, and now After the Hunt. Being in close creative proximity to Mr. Guadagnino all these years, what do you see as his prime virtues as an artist?
First of all, Luca’s knowledge of cinema history is incredible. He really knows and respects the master filmmakers of the past, so that’s the first thing. The other thing is that he pushes you over your limits in favor of what the movie needs. That’s very motivating.
Pushing you past your limits – – does that create stress?
[Laughing] Of course. If you do a movie like After the Hunt in the time we did it, there’s going to be a bit of stress.
A new star-studded caper in the Ocean’s Eleven universe is currently being assembled, and Bradley Cooper and Margot Robbie are likely going to be your leads. Cooper is currently in talks to join the prequel with Robbie.
The new project would be a prequel to Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 heist comedy Ocean’s Eleven, set before the events in that film. Soderbergh’s Ocean’s remake—the original, which premiered in 1960, starred Frank Sinatra as Danny Ocean and the iconic Rat Pack—featured George Clooney as Danny Ocean, Brad Pitt as his right-hand man Rusty Ryan, and a slew of other big-name stars, including Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Andy Garcia, and Don Cheadle. The film followed Clooney’s Ocean assembling a crack team of con artists to rob Terry Benedict’s (Garcia) casino in Las Vegas. The remake was a smash, and two sequels and a spin-off followed: Ocean’s Twelve in 2004, Ocean’s Thirteen in 2007, and Ocean’s Eight in 2018, starring Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, and Rihanna. Clooney has said he has plans to direct Ocean’s Fourteen next year with Pitt, Roberts, and Damon.
The prequel will be helmed by Twistersand Minaridirector Lee Isaac Chung, with the script, from Carrie Solomon, reported to be set in 1960s Europe. There’s no word yet on what the title of the film will be—they’ve got plenty of numbers left to choose from—but the period setting and the star power of the two leads are a good start.
Cooper’s third directorial effort, Is This Thing On?, will have its world premiere on Friday at the New York Film Festival. The story is inspired by the trials and tribulations of British comedian John Bishop, and was written by Cooper, co-star Will Arnett, John Bishop, and Mark Chappell. Cooper and Arnett are joined in the cast by Laura Dern, Andra Day, Ciarán Hinds, and Sean Hayes.
Robbie is currently starring in director Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and will next be seen in Emerald Fennel’s eagerly anticipated adaptation of Wuthering Heights, where she stars as Emily Brontë’s iconic Catherine Earnshaw, opposite Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff. That film is set for a February 13, 2026, release.
Featured image: L-r: PARIS, FRANCE – JUNE 24: Bradley Cooper wears aviator sunglasses, a blue suede shirt, and attends the Louis Vuitton Menswear Spring/Summer 2026 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on June 24, 2025 in Paris, France. (Photo by Edward Berthelot/Getty Images). NEW YORK, NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 15: Margot Robbie attends “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” New York Premiere at AMC Lincoln Square Theater on September 15, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/WireImage)
“I was squired to Sir Arlan of Pennytree,” says Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) in the opening seconds of the first trailer for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a new Game of Thrones spinoff coming to HBO. “He charged me to be a good knight, to defend the weak and the innocent, and I swore that I would.”
It only takes a mere twenty seconds or so to catch a name Game of Thrones and House of the Dragonfans are very familiar with—Targaryen—when a young man asks Ser Dunance whether he’s Baelor Targaryen (Bertie Carvel). He’s not, so he’s told, in more colorful language than we’ll repeat here, to move out of the way.
Ser Duncan soon meets Egg (Exter Sol Ansell), a young squire with nary a hair on his head (hence the nickname) who will soon join Ser Duncan as they wander a Westeros a century before the events in Game of Thrones. The new series is set during the Targaryens’ reign on the Iron Throne, but after the last of their dragons have gone.
Ser Duncan is a good soul, but naive, and we all know how quickly naivete will get you killed in Westeros. With the clever Egg at his side, however, the two unlikely friends might just find their way yet. The series is based on George R.R. Martin’s novellas “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” and along with Claffey, Carvel, and Ansell, the series stars Daniel Ings as Ser Lyonel Baratheon, Danny Webb as Ser Arlan of Pennytree, Sam Spruell as Maekar Targaryen, Shaun Thomas as Raymun Fossoway, Finn Bennett as Aerion Targaryen, Edward Ashley as Ser Steffon Fossoway, Tanzyn Crawford as Tanselle, Henry Ashton as Daeron Targaryen, Youssef Kerkour as Steely Pate, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Plummer and Daniel Monks as Ser Manfred Dondarrion.
Martin serves as co-creator and executive producer, alongside showrunner and executive producer Ira Parker. The directors are Owen Harris and Sarah Adina Smith. Unlike Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will feature half-hour episodes, six in all.
Check out the trailer below. A Knight of the Seven Kindgoms premieres on January 18.
Featured image: Peter Claffey. Photograph by Steffan Hill/HBO
Director Paul Thomas Anderson wants audiences to see One Battle After Another‘s stellar ensemble cast, warts and all. As a result, makeup department head Heba Thorisdottir and special effects makeup artist and prosthetics designer Arjen Tuiten knew that less would be more, with the only exception being Sean Penn’s Col. Stephen Lockjaw, whose shocking third-act disfigurement is the result of a masterclass of makeup and prosthetics design from Thorisdottir and Tuiten.
One Battle After Another stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a washed-up and permanently stoned revolutionary who lives off the grid with his daughter, Willa, played by Chase Infiniti. However, his nemesis, Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, resurfaces after almost two decades during his bid to become a member of a secretive fascist country club of sorts, the Christmas Adventurers. The catch for Lockjaw is his relationship with Bob’s former flame and Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), which could scuttle his chances for membership. So, Lockjaw infiltrates Bob and Willa’s Northern California town, Bactan Cross, and soon enough, he’s got Willa. This jolts Bob out of retirement, setting him on a collision course with his past to save his only child.
Here, Thorisdottir, known for her work on Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and Babylon, and two-time Oscar nominee Tuiten, whose work includes Pan’s Labyrinth and Maleficent, share about deconstructing Penn’s face, why the production was so unique, and Anderson’s desire to keep his performers as makeup-free as possible.
What were the very first conversations you had with Paul Thomas Anderson about how to approach this?
Heba Thorisdottir: I worked with Paul on Licorice Pizza, so I knew he was not keen on having makeup and hair around. Therefore, my initial conversation with him was about how I take care of the actors in the morning, I can clean them up at night, but he takes care of them in between. He had a very clear vision of how he wanted to have absolutely no makeup. If there is acne or any other issue, he wants to see it, and any scarring is a bonus for him. It was about where he wanted me to be and when he wanted me to be there.
Arjen Tuiten: I was on location for another film when I got a request for a Zoom from Sarah [Murphy], one of our producers, and that’s how I met Paul and Sean together. Paul explained the idea for this character. I hadn’t read the script, but from what he was telling me, I knew what he was looking for, and we did some concept designs. I sent them to him, and by the second attempt, he was basically like, ‘This is it. That’s what I want.’ Because he was clear on what he wanted, it wasn’t that hard, but it was just finding it on Sean’s face. Sean had some requests, I spoke to Heba, and then I got to work on building the pieces.
What references did he give you?
Tuiten: He sent me a few references, but they were all drawings and paintings that he saw. He wanted it to be real. There’s a difference between prosthetic makeup effects, which are generally seen in films, and creating an illusion with the use of prosthetics. In other words, it needs to look real, and I understood that right away. He wanted to shock. Every time we’ve seen the film, there has been a big gasp in the audience when Lockjaw appears after the crash.
What was the process of creating the prosthetics for Sean Penn?
Tuiten: Nowadays, we tend to 3D scan actors for face casts, but Sean actually specifically requested not to do that on this and requested an old-fashioned head cast. It doesn’t make a significant difference; the process remains the same. We created another version of that when, in the story, he receives another wound, but it’s a little less visible and more covered by blood. That was another sculpture, but the primary focus was on the climax.
Many of the locations in this are dry and dusty, especially the desert in the third act. When it came to the materials that you were using, did you have to factor that in?
Tuiten: Most of the climax work, if not all of it, was filmed inside and was climate-controlled. That actually was a huge help because it wasn’t an easy makeup, as he tends to sweat, so maintaining it can be hard. He also had a dental piece, so it’s a bit tricky. We also shot in El Paso, Texas, and it was something like 110 degrees outside. It was hot. I was happy we’re inside for the final bits.
How many different pieces were involved in Lockjaw’s prosthetic?
Tuiten: It was several pieces. Jessica Nelson designed the contact lens that he has in and does amazing paint work. She makes the lenses, and she came with us on location with Heba and me. The pieces consist of one cheek piece with a nose piece and a brow, as well as the lenses and the dental piece. I believe that after the camera test we did with Paul, Sean requested to add three caps of white teeth, as if they were fake. I added those after we did the initial camera test. I did a complete resculpt and remolding because I had some technical things I wanted to change with the texture. Paul and I discussed that, and it makes it better.
Was there anything that you had to do to Leo as Bob? He has to look quite unhealthy; he’s an out-of-shape pot smoker.
Thorisdottir: We use a lot of reddish makeup around his eyes and accentuate that eye area to make them constantly red with broken capillaries and stuff like that. A lot of it was the clothing that made him look heavier than he actually is. The challenge with Paul is that he’s so detail-oriented that he wants to achieve a lot without noticing any of it. He wants no maintenance, so sometimes we use a little bit of menthol blowers because they keep working for a while. It’s just enough to make him look a little irritated and stoned.
What is a menthol blower?
Thorisdottir: They are little menthol crystals, like Vicks in crystal form. We have them in a little blower that will distribute them around the eyes. I do it more directly into the eye if I need to activate the tear ducts, but we didn’t need that for Leo. We only needed a little bit of irritation. There was also a minor paint job involved, with a little red lip liner added around them as well.
One Battle After Another was filmed in California and Texas. Do you know a lot of local talent you can utilize in both places?
Thorisdottir: We were basically a department of two. I had Mandy Artusato with me, who is a fellow Icelander. For the wedding party scene with Sean Penn, we also had some additional help. We shot that in San Diego, so we brought people down from LA. When we were in Texas, we didn’t really have any additional help because a lot of it was the actors maintaining their own looks. If they needed a makeup product, we would hand it to them, and they would take it into their trailer. On other films, when I shot on location, I definitely look up local talent and try to rehire people when I can, but on this one, there wasn’t any need for that.
Tuiten: Within the prosthetics world, that pool is a lot smaller. For this, also because of the location, I’m used to prepping for that. When it comes to the actual application of prosthetics, there are many skilled individuals. Still, when it comes to a certain level of realism, that pool becomes small very quickly because there’s a difference between makeup effects and prosthetic makeup, which requires delicate work. Additionally, when dealing with talent, you must be able to guide them and sense the room.
On every project, there is a challenge that might seem insurmountable, but you manage to pull it off. What was an example of that with this film?
Thorisdottir: My challenge on this movie was how Paul wanted to do it. He will have some things that he has discussed with the actors, even before I was on the movie and long before they started shooting, because he had been conducting tests for months. My challenge is to keep up and make sure the actors stay in continuity. Some of the actors we had at the beginning of the movie, and then for the last month of shooting, which was almost six months later. We had to make sure that they looked the same, so it was about contacting them beforehand, and saying, ‘Hey, you had your hair this way and had a bit of stubble. Can you grow it back so you look like this?’ It was really about getting ahead of things before they became an issue.
One Battle After Another is in theaters now.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) TEYANA TAYLOR as Perfidia and SEAN PENN as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
A scroll through cinema history reveals a selection of unique, now-iconic locations that have become synonymous with the movies they have helped bring to life.
Think David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and the sands of Jordan’s Wadi Rum (utilized for modern audiences in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films). Think the Caped Crusader on the rooftop of Hong Kong’s International Finance Centre (IFC) Tower in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Think of the spectacular chase scenes across Seoul’s Mapo Bridge in Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, and of how Black Panther made similar use of Busan’s Gwangan Bridge. These are locations that give each film an irreplaceable sense of place that can’t truly be replicated on a computer or in some other location, and they also benefit the actual destinations in which they were shot.
Actors Morgan Freeman (L) and Edison Chen (R) take part in shooting the Batman movie “The Dark Knight” in Hong Kong November 10, 2007. Film director Christopher Nolan at middle.
Governments across Asia have recognized the opportunities offered, which is why policies are now trending towards providing incentives,including rebates of up to 50 per cent on location spend. Content investment across the region is “unprecedented,” according to Bo Son, managing director, Motion Picture Association Korea.
Sharing such opportunities – along with previous experiences of hosting both large and small-scale productions – was the primary focus of the Enhancing Global Production Services in Asia seminar, co-hosted by the MPA, the Busan Film Commission (BFC), and the Asian Film Commissions Network (AFCNet) during this year’s Asian Contents & Film Market.
As Son explained in her opening address, the talent gathered represented the region’s leading markets – from Hong Kong (Chen On Chu, chief executive of October Pictures), to Japan (Misako Furukawa, producer from NLB), to Jordan (Mohannad Al Bakri, MD at the Royal Film Commission – Jordan) to Korea (Phil Kang, executive producer at Nine Tailed Fox). They were joined by Oscar-nominated director Carlos Saldanha (Ferdinand), who has extensive experience scouting locations worldwide.
“The need with animation and live action scouting is pretty much the same,” explained Saldanha, who is putting the finishing touches to the live action production 100 Days for Disney. “Find the right location, get the right incentives so you can shoot with the proper crew, but not only that, so that you can have the local support to make the best project that you can with the money that you have. As we know, some budgets can be very high, but that doesn’t mean that the movie will be a lot better. So, it’s a matter of finding the right place with the right support and the right structure, so you can make the best project with the money that you have.”
L-r: Carlos Saldanha and the Motion Picture Association’s Stephen Jenner.
Animators look for inspiration when it comes to locations, and Nine-Tailed Fox’s Phil Kang picked up on the recent case of global sensation K-pop Demon Hunters, the Netflix-Sony Pictures Animation production that has taken the world by storm. Such was creator Maggie Kang’s dedication to authenticity that she turned to Phil Kang and his team to find locations her animations could reproduce.
“When we say inspirational scouting, we usually take the producers and engineers that work on these projects around – we show them what authentic Korea really looks like,” said Phil Kang. “And you can probably see that if you’ve seen the film, a lot of the locations where the film takes place are actually existing locations. The producers were able to select some of the locations that we could recreate legally. We took care of all the legality and the location permits, either public or private locations, so that these actual existing locations could feature in the film.”
A far different challenge was found – and met – by Hong Kong’s Chen On Chu, when faced with helping the producers of Transformers: Age Of Extinction. “When we work with international productions, we try to learn from their vision how the city can be fit into their story,” he said. “For Transformers, basically, I didn’t have a script to start with. I was competing [as a possible location] with the rest of the world. I had to propose locations that are not even in the script or not even in their concept. So my job was to impress Michael Bay.”
For Misako Furukawa, who’s recently finished working with Apple TV’s Sunny, which was shot entirely in Japan for six months, much of the work comes with ensuring that everyone, locals and visitors, is on the same page.
“We know what to do,” she says. “It’s about connecting. For foreign productions, they might just see a busy Shibuya crossing or a street full of lanterns, a nice Asian landscape, but it’s not as easy as just requesting permission to shoot. We communicate with them – this is what we can do and what we cannot do.”
While Lawrence of Arabia opened the international film world to what Jordan could offer, in more recent years, the government has prioritized access to the country’s locations and its support for the film industry, explained Mohannad Al Bakri.
“If you come to Jordan, in terms of the facilitation, the government is not only giving the cash rebate and the facilitation, but also the system that we work with is a very efficient system of giving the permissions or taking the approvals from any entity, whether it’s the private sector or the public sector, within days,” he said. “For any other services or any entities that are difficult to deal with, it’s a maximum of 10 days. That’s how it is. This is what we are always bragging about: our government, the support that we have, the understanding of the value of the film industry and the economic impact, the cultural impact, and so on.”
High shot of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) waits for a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
In further terms of that cultural impact, Hong Kong’s Chen pointed to the filming of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which was released in 2008. “People still talk about Batman,” he said. “People come to Hong Kong and want to visit the sites. I’m still making a joke with the tourism board representatives. I say, how much do you spend on your publicity per year for Hong Kong, and how much would you spend to have Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, and Morgan Freeman appear in your Hong Kong promotion? I think feature films actually help to tell the story of a city.”
Actors Morgan Freeman chats with director Christopher Nolan during take part in shooting the Batman movie “The Dark Knight” in Hong Kong November 10, 2007
Featured image: A Hercules C-130, center, flies low over the evening view of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor for the filming of the latest installment of Batman series The Dark Knight on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007. 07NOV,2007
Featured image: Director of Photography GREIG FRASER on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Niko Tavernise
Production designer Scott Chambliss is known in Hollywood for big tentpole movies— Star Trek, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Mission: Impossible III are a few of his films—so he was a bit shocked in 2023 when writer-director Bill Condon called him about revamping Kiss of the Spider Woman as an old-fashioned MGM movie musical. Chambliss knew exactly how to win over the man who made Dreamgirls and wrote the movie version of Chicago. “We were on Zoom and I swiveled my laptop over to this wall right there,” Chambliss tells The Credits, pointing to a vintage poster of An American in Paris. “I told Bill, ‘This is my office, this is who you’re talking to!” Condon and Chambliss clicked, and the results of their collaboration, opening Oct. 10, stars Jennifer Lopez in the title role, along with Tonatiuh and Diego Luna as political prisoners jailed in 1983 during Argentina’s notorious military dictatorship. “It’s extremely timely,” says Chambliss, who earned an MFA at Carnegie Mellon, worked in New York’s theater scene, and served as J.J. Abrams’ go-to production designer before launching his career in movies.
Kiss of the Spider Woman, which first came to life in a 1976 novel by Manuel Puig, was adapted into a 1985 movie by director Héctor Babenco and later a 1993 Broadway musical. It found a fresh hook in 2025 thanks to Lopez’s performance as a fantasy showgirl dancing up a storm on soundstages in New Jersey. The grim prison sequences were filmed in Argentina-adjacent Uruguay. Chambliss helped conjure these disparate worlds over the course of a tight, 41-day schedule.
From his home in Los Angeles, Chambliss discusses finding inspiration in the ruins of a 19th-century penitentiary, the movies of Vincent Minnelli, and Lopez’s transformative homage to Marilyn Monroe.
As a designer known for blockbuster fare like Star Trek and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, were you surprised to hear from Bill Condon about working with him on a movie musical?
I was stunned! I’ve been so typecast as a big tentpole science fiction guy, even though I’ve always wanted to do this kind of material. Still, first off, the era of old-fashioned movie musicals is long gone. Second, the thought of anybody taking me seriously for something that has nothing to do with making spaceships and monsters and crazy future planets just seemed off the table. Kiss of the Spider Woman is very much in line with what I love, but nobody had ever tapped into that aspect of my creative being.
Kiss is a familiar pop culture property. How did Bill Condon explain his spin for making the story fresh again?
He wanted to go back to ground zero, so Bill read Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel and also dove back into the treasure chest of [Kander and Ebb] songs that had been written for the ’90s musical but had been discarded. He structured the film so that the two guys [in prison] would be integrated into the musical fantasy storyline. Rather than being a Nazi romance, as it was in the book, this was going to be an MGM musical from the 1940s!
Jennifer Lopez on set of “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Courtesy Lionsgate.
How did you go about translating that vision?
I knew the musical numbers would be so vivid in the brilliance of their Technicolor theatricality that the prison life scenes needed to be [visualized] at an operatic, melodramatic pitch. Otherwise, we’d have a really imbalanced story.
What was your approach to the prison scenes?
The original story was set in Argentina, but given its current issues, Buenos Aires was not considered the best place to film. But right across the way in Uruguay is [capital city] Montevideo, which happens to have the most dramatic and luscious ruin of a monumental old prison four or five stories tall, built in the 1890s, and completely wrecked. I loved the glamour of decay, the beautiful textures. The hardware was gone, it was stripped bare and crumbling, infested by birds, catwalks falling down, but it had this grandeur and operatic heft.
Tonatiuh and Diego Luna in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Courtesy Lionsgate.
Before you traveled to Uruguay for the prison sequences, you filmed the musical numbers at Cinelease Studios in New Jersey. What was that like?
It was like a steamroller, something new every day. On the first day, we had three different sets for three different numbers ready to go on stage. It’s exciting to deal with budgetary restraints because you have to go with your gut. Like episodic television, you don’t have time to second-guess or a re-do if you f*** it up. God bless Jennifer Lopez. She’s a perfectionist and such a hard worker. Every day, she’d arrive on stage and do her numbers perfectly.
Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez on set of “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
Would you tweak the sets to serve the choreography?
Yes! It was daily communication with Bill and the choreographer [Sergio Trujillo]. Every day, the choreography develops. You love it on Tuesday, but on Wednesday it’s not working anymore, so you have to change. Most of the musical sets changed right up until the moment we shot them.
Building these sets from scratch in New Jersey, were you mindful of the economic impact this labor-intensive soundstage construction would have on the local filmmaking community?
Of course, especially in times when there isn’t as much filmmaking happening in the U.S., one of the good things about a bad situation was that a lot of top people were available to work with us. I could go back and draw from the people I knew from my early days on Broadway with [Tony-winning designer] Tony Walton, like supervising art director Charlie Beale. He was very familiar with the top players who would know how to fabricate these sets.
A set from the soundstage in New Jersey for “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Courtesy Scott Chambliss/Lionsgate.
And those sets really pop! Director Vincent Minelli mastered the Technicolor aesthetic in An American in Paris and other mid-century movie musicals. Did you and Bill Condon have Minelli-style Technicolor in mind as an inspiration?
It was important to Bill and me that we authentically utilize Technicolor and stay close to what the color palettes were back then. To contemporary eyes, those colors can look naïve due to their lack of subtlety, but we needed to embrace that and make it work in positive ways for this film
It does seem like most modern movies are more muted when it comes to color.
Well, it was an interesting journey because we had 15 or 16 different Technicolor musical moments in our movie, and it’s second nature for me to build a color story with an arc, the same way actors need character arcs. I like to start at a certain place where we can keep revealing and revealing, but my initial offering to Bill, for that first Technicolor number, didn’t work for him at all.
A rendering of one of the sets. Courtesy Scott Chambliss.
Why?
Because I was holding back. So, I modified the starting point when we introduce Jennifer Lopez’s character in her Buenos Aires boudoir with “Her Name is Aurora.” It’s Princess Blue and buttercream – nothing else. But it’s still vivid as hell. Then we follow that to the midpoint of this very colorful South American village. Then the palette slowly becomes more restrained again to the point where this number refers to one of my favorite Vincent Minelli sequences ever, called “Limehouse Blues,” from the 1945 movie Ziegfeld Follies. Our musical number, “Only in the Movies,” is kind of a dying man’s fever dream of his own life as if it were a Technicolor musical.
Aurora’s suite. Courtesy Scott Chambliss.
One of the numbers also pays homage to Marilyn Monroe during her early career as a movie musical ingenue, right?
The number that references Marilyn Monroe directly is called “Gimme Love.” There’s also a bit of Gene Kelley, a bit of Syd Charisse. The set’s intentionally kind of cartoony and two-dimensional, very different from films now, which are very layered with set decoration because our science fiction big-canvas images are jam-packed with detail. It’s the opposite with these old musical movie numbers. Our sets were pared down, abstracted, theatrical, and artificial-looking, and all of that is intentional. If our 1940s musical numbers looked anything like real life, we would have failed miserably. [laughing].
DIego Luna and Jennifer Lopez in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Courtesy Lionsgate.
Contrasted with the musical fantasy sequences, you’ve got the two guys in a grey jail cell. Were those interiors shot in that decommissioned prison?
The cell itself is a stage set we built on a Montevideo soundstage. We spent almost three weeks in the cell with the two guys doing their scenes. We had a wonderful group of scenic artists and a construction crew who created all the wall textures and decay, the sliding doors, and the big gates. On the [real] location, our artists replicated what we’d done on the soundstage so the prison would look like it was all one thing.
Interior of the cell. Courtesy Scott Chambliss.
Having powered through this intensive Kiss of the Spider Woman production, what stands out as a high point?
My favorite day of filming happened in New Jersey, watching Jennifer Lopez do her Marilyn Monroe number on our red and black set. The environment, costume, and choreography showcased her at her best, and she was incredible. That was one of those days where you could just feel the electricity on stage, and everybody knew they were doing something special. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Jennifer Lopez on set of “Kiss of a Spider Woman.” Courtesy Scott Chambliss/Lionsgate.
Kiss of the Spider Woman is in theaters on October 10.
Featured image: Jennifer Lopez in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Courtesy Lionsgate.
About an hour into Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, a washed-up revolutionary living off the grid in Northern California, sends his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) to her first high school dance, lights a joint, and queues up The Battle of Algiers when the phone rings. “Bob, we have trouble ahead and the road isn’t clear…”
He might be a burnout perpetually be-robed in tattered leisure wear that would make Big Lewboski proud, but Bob has earned his paranoia and remembers (at least partly) the codes from his years as part of the French 75, a resistance cell where he met Willa’s mom, Perfidia Bevery Hills (a sensational Teyana Taylor). Getting this type of call means the one thing keeping Bob tethered to the world, Willa, is in danger.
Caption: (L-r) CHASE INFINITI as Willa Ferguson and REGINA HALL as Deandra in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
What follows is a breakneck, pulse-pounding sequence packed with secret tunnels, car chases, riots, firebombs, and getaways built for migrants overseen by the preternaturally cool Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), Willa’s karate instructor, who chips in to help a supremely stressed-out Bob in his time of need. When Bob comes into Sensei’s apartment and finds mulitple families living there, Sensei happily tells him he’s running “a little Harriet Tubman situation.” Bob’s racing to escape a siege on his little hamlet of Bactan Cross, orchestrated by the twisted, tweaked Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and his platoon who are hunting Bob and Willa down.
Caption: (L-r) LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson and BENICIO DEL TORO as Sensei St. Carlos in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
It all comes to a crashing halt when Bob tumbles off Sensei’s rooftop and is arrested. Cinematographer Michael Bauman (Licorice Pizza) photographed the action, doing so in VistaVision, a film format from the 1950s that produces richer, more detailed images than standard 35mm negative. Even with the scope and scale –Variety reported a budget of $130 million, PTA’s highest to date – Bauman suggested the director sought an indie feel. “There are all these elements because of the vehicles and chase scenes but he really wanted it to be as small of a footprint as possible.”
The chaotic scenes around Bob’s arrest were filmed in El Paso, Texas, a border city steeped in political history. Once a key outpost during the Mexican Revolution, it became a military hub and refuge for thousands of fleeing Mexicans, reshaping its cultural identity. Production drew inspiration from its history for the Underground Railroad storyline, with Sensei (Del Toro) operating a safe house for displaced escapees. “El Paso was very accommodating as far as letting us have access to downtown, and that was critical for the car chase and creating the riot scene. The generosity of the folks there was great,” notes Bauman.
For a scene that involved Bob hiding in Sensei’s apartment, production designer Florencia Martin (Licorice Pizza, Babylon) built a complete set within a real location. “With Paul, you’re always doing practical locations. The only thing that was built on stage for this was when he [Bob] crawls through the tunnel [at his house] and pops up at that stump,” recalls Bauman. “The whole apartment complex was the work of Florencia and Andrew Cahn, who’s our art director. They pulled some magic out of that one since we needed a space we could move through and have a bunch of different dimensionality.”
Production found a building with an abandoned upstairs close to the location that served as Sensei’s karate dojo, where Bob frantically tries to find a phone charger. “That entire apartment, the hallway, the stairs, all the rooms in the apartment were all built,” says Bauman. “Then Anthony Carlino, who did the set decoration, sourced everything locally, and it was great, because it had so much character. There was a lot of love that went into making that whole thing happen.”
Caption: BENICIO DEL TORO as Sensei St. Carlos in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
From a lighting standpoint, colors shift from fluorescent greens inside the dojo to warmer hues inside the apartment and then to cyan and blues as the military raids the complex. “It was a lot of naturalism. That was the whole thing on this job. Paul was like, ‘Look, nothing should look perfect. Nothing should look like a movie. It’s got to have this ‘70s vibe.’ So our north star was the French Connection,” says the cinematographer.
Camera language mirrors the shifting dynamics, often feeling restrained in the apartment, then more paced and urgent as Bob scrambles onto the roof. “I don’t know if it was intentional, but certainly those scenes [inside the apartment] had a lot more dialogue with the two of them. And I think it worked really well, contrasting as soon as they stepped outside the building. It’s like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, they’re just running their asses off,” says Bauman.
Plenty of other sequences caught the cinematographer’s attention, one being the climactichallucinogenic road sequence captured near Highway 78 in Borrego Springs, California. Bauman tells The Credits everyone is asking about it, and for good reason—as we described it, it’s a “sui generis chase scene” capturing “a desperate but increasingly resilient young woman trying to puzzle out how to evade the psychopath behind her.” Bauman says what stood out to him was the uniqueness of the location and how much it underscores the tone of the sequence. “I don’t know how Florencia and Mike [Glaser, supervising locations manager] found it, but as soon as they found it, it was like holy sh*t, this is something.”
Caption: LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Asked how the locations in Texas and California inspired the work, Bauman says. “I got to say hats off to Florencia, she was always looking at different stuff, and Michael, who was doing locations, was looking all over the place in California. But I think it’s a lot of trying to create a tapestry of space that is in areas that people haven’t shot before. A big thing for Paul was that it was really important to stretch the muscles and find new and unique spaces.” Something tells us those locations are going to see a lot more visitors.
One Battle AfterAnother is in theaters now.
Featured image: Caption: LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
The synopsis for co-writer/director Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is sublimely simple: “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” In the film, Timothée Chalamet plays Marty, an up-and-coming ping pong prodigy whose ambition and pluck will drive him no matter how hard the world pushes back, and push back it will. Safdie’s film, his first solo directorial work since his 2008 debut, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, without his usual partner-in-crime, his brother Benny Safdie (whose own solo effort, The Smashing Machine, just bowed this past weekend), just had its world premiere at the 2025 New York Film Festival on Monday night. This means that the first reactions to Marty Supremeare now flying across the net like so many ping-pong balls. And the reactions are overwhelmingly positive, calling Marty Supreme the kind of thrilling picture of New York striving that only a Safdie could make.
Josh and Benny Safdie have built a stellar reputation with a run of unflinching films, including Daddy Longlegs, Lenny Cooke, Heaven Knows What, Good Time, and Uncut Gems. Here, Josh Safdie has created a sports dramedy that borrows from the grifter ethos of his past films and supercharges it. Set in 1950s New York, Chalamet’s undaunted table tennis wizard will stop at nothing to achieve his dreams, yet he’s living in a city infamous for its indifference to the striving of its teeming masses. Safdie has surrounded Chalamet with an incredible support cast—Gwyneth Paltrow plays a film star that Marty is convinced he can woo, while Odessa A’zion is coming in for high praise from critics for a star-turning performance. Kevin O’Leary, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher, and Tyler Okonma are also on board.
Marty Supreme is an A24 film, meaning the studio now has two Safdie brother films that will be vying for awards. Marty Supreme is slated to open on December 25. Let’s have a peek at what the reactions are to the film:
MARTY SUPREME: yeah Josh took all that wild Safdie energy with him. To call this a sports movie isn’t enough, this is a manic, madcap odyssey that is as exhilarating as it’s exhausting. Timothee’s star power is so bright & undeniable that it’s basically a supernova. LOVED it pic.twitter.com/Nis0tWcySr
A24’s Marty Supreme is the secret screening at the NYFF. Josh Safdie going solo delivers a wild rush of nonstop adrenaline much like Uncut Gems; Timothée Chalamet’s no-holds-barred performance could be his Wolf of Wall Street. He’ll be nominated for sure.
MARTY SUPREME: Major, exhilarating filmmaking from Josh Safdie. Timothée Chalamet’s career-best performance—he was born to play this guy—with a tremendous Odessa A’Zion leading a superb supporting cast. It’s a wow.
A hometown crowd at @thenyff was the only way to welcome MARTY SUPREME into the world. So many threads to pull here, but love how Josh Safdie pulls out all the stops in tribute to the delusion and hustle required to think you can make it in NYC. It lives and breathes this city. pic.twitter.com/56ZnI4absw
MARTY SUPREME is Safdie’s best film yet. A kinetic odyssey that plays like a deranged cross between CATCH ME IF YOU CAN & UNCUT GEMS. Timothée Chalamet delivers the performance of a lifetime in this unforgettable, awe-inspiring cinematic tour-de-force that fires on all cylinders pic.twitter.com/ZGrfWGNYpo
MARTY SUPREME is a sprawling and electrifying sports epic bursting with vitality from the first frame to the last. Josh Safdie delivers a masterful slice of organized chaos on a larger scale he’s ever worked with before, propelling us through Marty’s relentless quest to prove to… pic.twitter.com/Ll3zrJnqEB
MARTY SUPREME: Can human beings sweat that much? Josh Safdie & DP Darius Khondji make ping pong cinematic by allowing the ball’s movements to dictate the contours of the frame; I was riveted by each volley & by Daniel Lopatin’s celestial, madcap score. Peak grifter-core cinema. pic.twitter.com/YnB7tlPjav
Josh Safdie reapplying his UNCUT GEMS greatest hits via MARTY SUPREME but on a larger scale in a portrait of purpose post WWII. Timothée channels that CATCH ME IF YOU CAN DiCaprio and Howard Ratner and makes for a hilarious comic performance. Fun and stressful time all around. pic.twitter.com/bmJefwsxdt
How is that Timothée Chalamet just keeps wowing me more and more with every performance? He is absolutely electrifying in #MartySupreme.
Yet again, you can feel him giving every ounce of himself and then some – a quality this role demands. Chalamet’s Marty is a guy with a… pic.twitter.com/POXymKWKC3
Marty Supreme is an absolute blast of adrenaline and the follow-up to Uncut Gems we’ve been craving. Just as demented and tense, but drunk on the confidence of youth and the arrogance to believe that talent and charm is enough. As a piece of cinema it sure as hell is. #NYFFpic.twitter.com/AKGBIT6hX4
Marty Supreme feels like the most personal movie Josh Safdie has made. A madcap ode to strivers. A great New York movie. A good dog movie. Chalamet born for this.
“That dude is unbelievable,” admits One Battle After Another cinematographer Michael Bauman to The Credits about Leonardo DiCaprio. “I mean, he’s a star and he brings people in [theaters] but his ability to expand the character is unreal.” Bauman has worked with Paul Thomas Anderson on five different features in one capacity or another, but it was the first time on set with DiCaprio on the acclaimed film, which sees the Oscar-winner as a bomb-making revolutionary turned protective father.
The scene that elicited the reaction happened during a sequence when DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson visits his teenage daughter Willa’s (Chase Infiniti) high school for a parent-teacher conference. “It’s supposed to be a history classroom, so Anthony [Carlino], our set decorator, put pictures of presidents on the wall. And so we did a bunch of takes using the original dialogue, but then Leo starts looking at the presidents, and his character says something like, ‘Oh, you got the grand wizard, Mr. Ben Franklin.’ And then he takes a vape and says, ‘Fucking slave owner.’ That was all, Leo just riffing off of what he saw, and that was our second day of shooting. I was like, ‘This is amazing. This guy brings it.”
Caption: (L-r) LEONARDO DI CAPRIO and Director/Writer/Producer PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON on the set of “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Merrick Morton
Bauman was impressed by all the actors’ ability to improvise, saying the cast brought “interesting stuff every day.” For the cinematographer, it meant lighting spaces to let the actors move freely. The approach created plenty of off-the-cuff moments. For instance, the tense sequence where Bob hides in Sensei’s (Benicio Del Toro) apartment, evading Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) as the city falls to the military. With chaos erupting, he makes a desperate call to revolutionary headquarters to learn the whereabouts of his daughter. “When Leo runs in and goes to sit down. He tries to close the curtains, but they fall down. That was never scripted or even intended. It just happened because they had rigged the curtains kinda crappy and they fell. But he just went with it, and it amped that moment even more,” notes Bauman.
Another improvised moment happens between Bob and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), the mother of Willa, as she decides to leave her then-baby daughter to continue the revolutionary fight. “Teyana is a powerhouse, and she brought game every day. I always like a sports analogy, and it was like Steph Curry and Michael Jordan playing, watching her and Leo doing stuff,” says Bauman. “When we shot the scene where she’s made that determination to go join the revolution, we cleared everybody out of the set. It was just me and Justin [Dickson], the gaffer holding one light that we could move around because they were just going to improv it. We did maybe eight takes, and every take she would just up it even more and more. And there’s this shot in the movie where the camera swings over and she looks at the baby before she heads out the door. The look on her face and the light hitting at the right moment…I said to Paul, ‘People will come here for the car chase but they’ll stay for the postpartum rant that happens’.”
Caption: (L-r) TEYANA TAYLOR as Perfidia and LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
When asked if thoseserendipitous moments are what make PTA films special, Bauman acknowledged that Anderson is a phenomenally good writer, but the spirit of this film was different. “I think a lot of it comes from his writing. But what’s an interesting difference between this movie, and say Licorice Pizza, he was really focused on the filmmaking as far as what was in his head. This thing [One Battle After Another] was way more jazz. He was open to all that [improv]. We have this running joke from Spinal Tap when they say, ‘We’re not about to do a free-form jazz exploration in front of a festival crowd.’ That’s the line we say when we’re just going to roll with what’s about to happen. And when magic is happening, he just wants to explore it. So there are moments in all of his films where you’ll be like, okay, this is what’s going to happen, but then something else happens.”
Bauman recalls one in particular on Phantom Thread, a film where Daniel Day-Lewis plays a renowned fashion designer in an obsessively controlled relationship with a strong-willed muse played by Vicky Krieps. “The first opening shot, when Vicky first comes in, she trips on the floor that we had to lay down for the dolly. She stumbles as she walks in, and Paul is like, ‘Let’s not do it again. That was great.’ That’s in the movie. There are so many times that you see those kinds of happy accidents in his films. He grabs those moments and builds off of them. He really embraces them.”
A happy accident on One Battle After Another was a diner scene that ultimately didn’t make the cut. “We’re in Eureka [California], and we broke for lunch and went to this little diner around the corner. We’re eating lunch, talking about what we’re going to do for the rest of the day, and Paul’s like, ‘What do you think about this place?’ What if we shot here after lunch?’” And literally, people are eating their food, and Mike [Glasser], our location manager, is doing a cash deal with the owner, so we can go in and shoot. And we roll in with this camera, and people are like what’s going on here? And then all of a sudden in comes Leo, Regina [Hall], and Chase, and we shoot there for about 45 minutes. It was going to be part of a montage, which didn’t make the cut. But it was that kind of vibe he was trying to imbue in this film, which is a little different from some of the precision types of things that we’ve done in the past.”
The must-see One Battle After Another is in theaters now.
Featured image: Caption: TEYANA TAYLOR as Perfidia in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Veteran prosthetic makeup designer Kazu Hiro has garnered two Oscars for his outstanding work: one for transforming actor Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for Darkest Hour, and the other for transforming Charlize Theron into Megyn Kelly for Bombshell. More recently, he was nominated for sculpting Bradley Cooper’s visage as legendary composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.
But for writer/director Benny Safdie’s biographical drama about the beginnings of mixed martial arts (“MMA”) and what would eventually become the UFC, Hiro’s team of approximately 20 makeup artists certainly had their work cut out for them. “The fighting scenes really added different elements because the prosthetics have to last for a long time. So, this project required a different approach. We can’t do just one makeup a day; it had to go through stages. For all the added elements like swollen eyes or a broken nose, I made separate pieces that we could add on to the basic look.”
Safdie’s solo directorial debut subverts the usual sports drama clichés to deliver a grounded look at the early days of the sport through the lens of real-life two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion, Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson, in a stunningly raw and vulnerable performance). As opposed to the formulaic rise-and-fall tale of ambition and destruction, a significant part of the story focuses on his tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt), as they cope with his addiction to painkillers and her need for attention. Throughout the rage, pain, and redemption, Mark is supported by his closest friend and training partner, Mark Coleman (an impressive performance by real-life MMA fighter Ryan Bader).
Winner of the Silver Lion at last month’s Venice International Film Festival, The Smashing Machine took Johnson and Safdie six years to bring to the screen. Aside from delivering the expected stomach-churning brutality in the octagon, the film may surprise audiences with its music-forward approach. Hiro recently talked to The Credits ahead of the movie’s release.
[This interview has been edited for clarity.]
This film takes a subversive approach to the sports and addiction-recovery drama template. What qualities about Mark Kerr did you want to convey through the prosthetics and makeup in service of this unique approach?
I really enjoy working on biopics, portraits, and character makeup; I’m more interested in the character as a human being. So, I focused on the contrast between his identity as a fighter and as a person, the gap between the MMA fighter and Mark—the gentle and quiet person. Dwayne is also a very nice, quiet, and gentle person. I wanted to reflect on the contrast between aggressiveness and gentleness in his look.
Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in “The Smashing Machine.” Courtesy A24
What were some of the early conversations when you started molding Mark’s look?
We started with the life cast, a 3D scan of Dwayne. When Benny and I first talked about how close he wanted Dwayne to look like Mark, there wasn’t a clear answer. So, I made a full version that looked very much like Mark, and a subtle version with an essence of both men. We chose the subtle version, which made sense because Benny wanted Dwayne to still be there while making him look like Mark. There is also a practical reason for this — since he will be sweating a lot in all the fighting scenes, if I cover up the whole face, the sweat has nowhere to go. If the actor sweats a lot, it starts to build up between the actor’s skin and the prosthetic, and it will bubble up. So, I avoided areas where he tends to sweat more and focused on the areas that reflect Mark without covering too much.
Dwayne Johnson in “The Smashing Machine.” Courtesy A24
What were some of the features that were most different when you compare Dwayne and Mark?
To make Dwayne’s face look like Mark’s, I focused on the brow bone, eyebrow shape, and nose, which are all quite different – Mark has a prominent brow bone and a cauliflower ear. Changing the hairstyle and hairline also changes the proportion of his face. There’s a big difference with their eyes — Mark has heavy eyebrows with the brow bone hanging above the eyes, and Dwayne’s are more open, you can see his eyes clearly. So, I had to bring down Dwayne’s brow bone and add a fake eyebrow. Since he has to do a lot of emotional acting in the film, I made a chamber inside the prosthetic eyelid that goes over his eyes so that he can blink naturally. Without this in between his eyelid and brow bone, or if I glued down on his eyelid, it would prevent him from blinking naturally. So, there’s space inside that piece to allow him to blink more freely and do lots of different expressions. The eyelid muscle is not as strong as the rest of the face, and it has very delicate skin, so we had to figure out how to make it movable.
The fights are as brutal as expected as Mark moves through the championship. How do you maintain that continuity as the injuries escalate for each character?
During and after a fight, there are swelling, bruises, and cuts that keep adding up. This kind of filming is always tricky, because we can’t do one makeup a day, it has to go through stages. For all the added elements, like swollen eyes or a broken nose, I made separate pieces that we could add on to the original look.
Dwayne Johnson and Andre Tricoteux in “The Smashing Machine.” Courtesy A24
This is on top of the three hours that Dwayne spent in the makeup chair every day before shooting even begins, right?
It really depends on the day. On days when he had close-ups, more time was needed because he has numerous body tattoos, so we had to cover them up and then add Mark’s tattoos on top of them. There’s a limit to how many people can be around him at one time during makeup, so we started with prosthetics on the face, and once that’s almost done, the other makeup artist came in to start the body makeup. For example, in the scene where Mark goes to the barber to shave his head, we started to film with his “normal” look. Once he’s at the barber, we added the bald cap with hair on it. Then, when we shot the scene after he gets shaved, we removed the bald cap.
Can you discuss blending the prosthetics with the wig and collaborating with the hair team?
I designed Dwayne’s wig, and our wig maker, Diana Choi, created it. Initially, I had a makeup artist on my team to work on the wig as well, but they had too much going on, so [hair department head] Mia Neal took care of all the different looks throughout filming.
Did your team work on Dwayne, Emily, and all the fighters?
No, only Dwayne. Björn Rehbein is Dwayne’s personal makeup artist who took care of most of the tattoo covering and any “normal” makeup, and Emily’s as well. Dwayne’s barber, Rachel Solow, maintained his skin conditioning and shaving every day. And prosthetic makeup artist Glen Griffin did most of the application on set.
Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in “The Smashing Machine.” Courtesy A24
How long did it take to test and finalize the look for Mark?
About a month and a half — it wasn’t the biggest budget film, so we had a pretty fast and practical process. We did two tests in Los Angeles before filming in Vancouver. I spent two months designing before the rest of the makeup team joined us on set.
With all the grappling, punching, kicking, and sweating in the octagon, how did your team make the makeup and prosthetic pieces last as long as possible?
We used three or four different kinds of medical glue. Each person has a different chemistry in their sweat — there is always salt, but some people have more oil than others, and oil dissolves the glue. If someone drinks a lot of alcohol the day before, that will come out in the sweat too. After a few days, we start to learn the chemistry of each actor’s sweat and switch around the glue, and it also depends on the area. We have to protect their skin too, especially since Dwayne was pretty much in makeup every day. We try to make it last as long as possible, but if we hurt his skin, then we can’t shoot for a few days.
Dwayne Johnson in “The Smashing Machine.” Courtesy A24
What are some of the scenes that you would like to highlight? Did anything surprise you once you saw the finished film?
Even though it’s about wrestling, Mark’s story is really about love, compassion, empathy, and the human relationship — that’s the most important part. I really like how Benny used the music, and I enjoyed each of the characters. Most of the fighters are not actors; they’re real fighters, so the authenticity of the whole film was amazing.
The Smashing Machine is playing in theaters nationwide.
Featured image: Dwayne Johnson in “The Smashing Machine.” Courtesy A24
Carlos Saldanha could well have been speaking for many of those gathered on the sidelines of this year’s 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) when the filmmaker behind such cutting-edge animated hits as Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), Rio (2011), and the Oscar-nominated Ferdinand (2017) turned his attention to the growing influence of Artificial Intelligence across the creative industries.
The Brazilian, among the generation of animators who were among the first to adapt CGI techniques to their creations, through his work at Blue Sky Studios, explained that he was still just starting to explore the pros and cons of these rapidly evolving advances in technology at present.
“AI for me is a novelty; I’m starting gradually,” said Saldanha. “I am highly interested, and as I engage with directors and creators who extensively utilize AI, I am fascinated by how it can be leveraged as a powerful tool for enhancing work, improving efficiency, and addressing the constant constraints of time, budget, and resources, which are often bottlenecks in the creative process. But I only use AI processes very cautiously and when I truly need to find a solution that I currently don’t possess.”
The impact AI is having was always bound to form part of the conversation at this year’s BIFF. Billed as Asia’s pre-eminent annual cinema industry gathering, the South Korean festival has for 30 years now prided itself on having its finger on the pulse of developments throughout the region – and often beyond – as much as it promotes the work of the region’s emerging talent.
AI is a hot topic across Asia, as elsewhere, as work continues towards ensuring best practices are followed with the use of the technology, especially in terms of safeguarding intellectual property, as well as the rights of those working within the creative and innovation industries.
The Motion Picture Association’s “AI in Filmmaking Seminar” was held in the lead-up to the MPA-KOFIC American Film Night and the announcements of this year’s Korea Location Short Film Competition.
“At the MPA, we believe deeply in encouraging constructive, thoughtful conversations around new technologies and how they intersect with the art and business of storytelling. AI is no exception,” explained Urmila Venugopalan, the MPA’s president and managing director for the Asia-Pacific region, in her opening remarks. “That’s why it is so important for us to come together at forums like this – to share perspectives, raise questions, and consider how best to move forward. We believe AI, used responsibly, can enrich audience experiences and open new frontiers for storytelling.”
L-r: Motion Picture Association’s Stephen Jenner, Carlos Saldanha (Ice Age, Rio), CEO Westworld Daniel Son, AITONIA director Antonia Kim, Director Studio Meditation with a Pencil Jae Huun Ahn and Bloomberg’s Sohee Kim.
The seminar aimed to address and explore such issues by gathering four representatives from across the industry to share their experiences with implementing AI, discuss potential uses of the technology, and identify areas where they had identified possible opportunities and concerns.
Guiding the discussion was Sohee Kim, a senior reporter covering Asia’s entertainment industry for Bloomberg, based in its Seoul office, who charted a course through the impact AI was already having, to what panelists thought lay ahead.
For his part, Saldanha remains intrigued, if tentative.
“I believe that [AI] could save time for me personally in terms of preparing and pre-visualizing shots, and getting ready for a shot, [but] It hasn’t solved some problems yet, as I still have resolution issues, including in terms of quality and consistency, but I believe it is only a matter of time,” said Saldanha, whose most recent projects have included series for Netflix (Invisible City in 2021) and Hulu (How to be a Carioca in 2023) and Disney’s 100 Days, a biopic about Brazilian explorer Amyr Klink, set for a release in late 2026.
Korean Antonia Kim prides herself on being among the early AI embracers, through her work as director/founder, and CEO of the Seoul-based independent production company Aitonia, an office that surrounds her with generative AI “colleagues.”
“It seems that the more I worked with many people, the lonelier I felt,” said Kim. “If I think about the reasons, when it comes to work, there is a very clear vision in my head, so it’s really difficult for me to compromise. So in the midst of all that, now AI appeared, and the biggest change for me now is that I think I am forming a multiverse with AI. The biggest advantage of AI is that it thinks there are no jobs that it cannot do.”
Kim’s most recent work includes the award-winning shorts CHOON and The Day I Saved a Fish, and she explained how she creates via “a proprietary optimized chatbot and a team of thirteen ‘AI employees’ with specialized creative roles.”
“I am truly doing everything freely without any borders. So, I think AI is a framework that really breaks stereotypes,” said Kim.
Daniel Son has built a career as a ground-breaker in Korea’s VFX industry, founding the Seoul-based studio Westworld Co., Ltd, and gaining acclaim for his work on the hit horror Exhuma (Best Visual Effects winner at the 18th Asian Film Awards) and the war epic Ode to My Father (Special Award for Advanced Technology at the 52nd Grand Bell Awards).
Son explained how AI had enabled his company to expand and had freed employees from mundane work, giving them more time to be creative.
“Ultimately, the market can become bigger through AI, so we have no choice but to work through AI, and we are continuously preparing for this,” he said. “This is not just about VFX, but also clearly being gradually integrated in various fields of production environments, so when it all comes together, I think that soon staff everywhere will be using AI.”
Moderator Kim posed the question of how creators would ensure AI content wouldn’t be easily identified as AI-produced work, and Jae Huun Ahn, director of the Studio Meditation with a Pencil animators (The Shaman Sorceress and the upcoming Gill), explained it was an issue that faced all studios.
“It seems like a very challenging task to utilize AI without losing uniqueness and independence,” he said. “How can one use this tool in animation while still being able to achieve those aspects that are touched by human hands in the end? I have been thinking about these concerns a lot. When you look at what this provides, by eliminating some of the processes in the earlier planning stages and at the end handing it over to people, can animation provide efficiency in certain tasks and also still offer the charm that people can provide?”
Ahn revealed generative AI had already made significant changes to his studio’s end product. “In the past, when watching animation, you could see Hollywood-style character expressions and Japanese expressions,” he said. “Our studio has often pondered what such a Korean form might be like. Interestingly, through AI, it seems that we now have many tools to expand on those aspects a bit more. There are very fast solutions, and AI provides that great element of surprise.”
Although there was considerable optimism, concerns also arose, particularly regarding issues related to IP protection. “Big projects, big studios, have legal issues concerning whether what you have created is performing someone else’s work – and how that question [of ownership] exists in people’s minds,” said Saldanha. “How to make what you use safe, how to perform with it – these are always going to present big questions.”
What Kim also wanted to share was that though she may work in an office surrounded by those ‘AI employees’, there’s never any doubt as to who is running the show.
“AI itself won’t create anything because it will always be humans as masters driving it, leading to very new forms of companies that we have never heard of, and new forms of art, and new forms of stories emerging,” she said.
Featured image: BUSAN, SOUTH KOREA – SEPTEMBER 18: Lee Byung Hun, Son Yejin, Park Hee Soon, Lee Sung Min, Yeom Hye Ran and Director Park Chan-wook attend an open talk for “No Other Choice”, during the 30th Busan International Film Festival at Busan Cinema Center on September 18, 2025 in Busan, South Korea. (Photo by Woohae Cho/Getty Images)
The official trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankensteinfinally revealed the stunning transformation of Jacob Elordi into Frankenstein’s Monster. This is the longest look yet at Del Toro’s passion project, which is firmly told from the Monster’s perspective, as he openly wrestles with the torture of having the memories of multiple people in his head and the general confusion and horror at having been stitched together and electrocuted back into a fractured life. Elordi is, of course, all but unrecognizable—the prosthetics and makeup team, made up of artists like Jordan Samuel (makeup department head who has worked with Del Toro on The Shape of Water) and Megan Many (prosthetics supervisor and key prosthetics make-up artist and a collaborator from Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley), have done excellent work. In the final trailer, the Monster—or, technically, the Creature as he’s called here—is on a mission to find his creator, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), and demands an audience with him or else. Del Toro is, of course, one of the most perfectly suited visionaries to enliven a fresh adaptation of Mary Shelley’s deathless novel, one of the most adapted stories ever told. It’s an adaptation he’s been thinking about for years.
Joining Isaac and Elordi are Mia Goth as Victor’s financée, Elisabeth, Christoph Waltz as Harlander (a new character not in Shelley’s book), Ralph Ineson as Professor Krempe, Charles Dance as Victor’s father, Leopold Frankenstein, and Felix Kammerer as Victor’s younger brother, William Frankenstein. The trailer includes plenty of icy moments, which was one of the things Del Toro was committed to doing—returning Frankenstein to the arctic climes that Shelley included in her story (it was filmed mainly throughout Scotland).
Netflix has also included new images along with the official trailer.
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney writes that it’s “One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry.” Steve Pond at TheWrap says, “it’s a filmmaker returning to his roots at a time when he has the skills to make those roots grow into something huge and singular. And Slant Magazine’s Marshall Shaffer pinpoints del Toro’s decision to follow the impact of Frankenstein’s mad science on his monster, played by Jacob Elordi, writing, “As the perspective of Frankenstein shifts to that of the creature cast out by its maker, del Toro’s concerns evolve from the cerebral to the emotional.”
Check out the official trailer and images below. Frankenstein will electrify audiences in theaters on October 17, and then stream on Netflix on November 7.
Carlos Saldanha came to Busan with one chief piece of advice for the 24 emerging filmmakers gathered from across Asia for this year’s edition of the CHANEL X BIFF Asian Film Academy.
“Every minute counts on the journey towards your objective,” was the message, and the Brazilian filmmaker has crafted a remarkable career out of following that to the letter.
The driving force behind such global hits as Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), Rio (2011), and the Oscar-nominated Ferdinand (2017), picked up the microphone at the annual MPA-BAFA Film Workshop “Bridge to Hollywood,” collaborating with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) initiative on the sidelines of the Busan International Film Festival. Saldanha took this year’s academy members on a journey through his career.
Saldanha had arrived as a wide-eyed student in New York City to find “rooms full of computers” and the life-altering discovery that those computers could be “used to make art.” From there, he gained attention with his graduation short, “Time for Love,” and soon found himself part of the game-changing Blue Sky Studios, based in New York, which was on the vanguard of animation that explored the many wonders made available through CGI technology.
The hits came, and Saldanha started to expand his own horizons, moving from animation into live action, from movies into TV series with projects for the likes of Netflix (Invisible City in 2021) and Hulu (How to be a Carioca in 2023) and, next, Disney’s 100 Days, a biopic about Brazilian explorer Amyr Klink, set for a release sometime in 2026.
“What inspires me? Good stories with good emotional heart moments,” said Saldanha. “Every time I think about a story, the first thing that I do is I think about the heart of the story. And then from that point on, I think about the fun, the comedy, and all the other things that come together with that. But if the story doesn’t have that pulsing little beat there, I’m not interested.”
Saldanha also shared what he’s learned about charting a course through the industry: “Besides just being diligent and trying to learn as much as you can, look for opportunities, keep your antennas always on, because I think that if you have a goal, you have a focus, and things start to come together.”
Later in the afternoon, Saldanha offered pitching advice before opening the floor for a Q&A.
L-r: Carlos Saldanha and the Motion Picture Association’s Stephen Jenner.
How did you approach pitching earlier in your career?
When I go to pitch, I start by presenting why I want to do this project and what inspired me about it. Your passion for your project is very important, and it’s contagious. You have to pass it on because they have to be as passionate about the project as you are. It’s very important to be truthful and be coming from the heart. If you are pitching to me, I don’t want to know how you’re going to make it, what kind of technology you’re going to use. I want to know how you can make me want to make your project. That’s how I start, and I also try to be very firm, yet humble, because once you pitch a project, it will evolve. The more money they put in, the more control they want to have, so you have to be prepared for all that, and you have to be mature enough or humble enough to acknowledge that and to leave the door open for collaboration, without losing the essence of what you want to do.
Were the changes you had to make on Rio an example of that?
I had to give up having a penguin [as the lead character], but I ended up making a better story because I added a bird, and that ended up being more interesting for the story. I created a love story and all kinds of stuff that became much more interesting than a penguin story. So again, be open. Come in with your heart in the right place and pitch your heart out. That’s the way to do it.
Did you apply animation principles to live-action filmmaking?
I tend to always talk about this because it’s all about storytelling, right? No matter what medium you use, it’s all about storytelling. So, when I approach animation, I approach it in the same way I approach live-action. I don’t talk about the technology or the cameras that I want to use, or the crew that I need to get. This is something that I will think about later in the game. With live action, I had to learn a lot because I didn’t have experience on set. But I knew a lot about animation, and we use very similar principles. We used cameras, we know how the camera moves, and we know how to compose a scene. So, all of that you apply to live action. And one thing where animation is a benefit is that I draw storyboards. I can convey some of the ideas through drawings.
What about when shooting actually starts?
I would say sometimes I’m more precise and sometimes more interactive with the DP and the crew, because I’m able to express visually what I want. I think that’s the important thing about either project. In animation, you tell the story through movement to bring things to life. And live action is the same. Get good animators, get a good crew, and you’re all set.
How do you develop your own projects? Could you shed some light on that?
With the success of the stories I decided to tell, I think people were very open to me trying something different. I would say I started small and kept things contained, pacing myself to the learning curve. With that in mind, I completed projects to build my portfolio and to build trust. I think the essential thing is building trust. If you’ve never done anything, you might want to start by doing something that’s not exactly what you want to do first, but then gain experience, build a name for yourself, and see what that turns out to be. You know, it’s the chicken and the egg. If you don’t have a movie, they’re not going to give you a movie, but to get a movie, you need to have done a movie. You get into that kind of vicious cycle that you can never get out of. So it has a lot to do with your confidence and ability to do it. I didn’t direct an animated movie before I became an animator; I became an animator, and I became a modeler. I knew the process, I made connections, I talked to people, I built trust. And then I directed a project.
Has this process evolved over the years? Are more people taking matters into their own hands?
I find that many people can successfully gather a team, independently secure funding, and undertake this as their first project. Sometimes, that first project becomes a great window of opportunity. It might not be perfect. It might not be that great. But if you put your heart and soul into it, people will look at it in a different way.
What kind of environment do you try to set up when you start, and how do you maintain that?
Especially in animation, I see myself more like a cheerleader than a leader. You can never do these projects by yourself. Time for Love I did by myself, but that was at school. I had some help from my classmates. But truly, when you get into the real business, when you take on a big project with big responsibilities, you never do it alone. I think your job is to make sure that you’re always surrounded by people who want to make the best project. It’s all about the project. You have to develop the social skills to embrace talent and listen. I think listening is much more important than talking. And even as a director, even though I have to give directions, that’s the role; most of the time, I’m quiet, I’m listening, I’m seeing what people are feeling, and I’m trying to hear what they have to say. And then I’ll make my decision. I probably already have something in my head that I want to go for, but before that I try to hear and figure out the best way to achieve that, and give people responsibility as well, allowing them to be truly teammates.
How do you approach handling the distribution side of the business?
It’s a very tricky world out there when it comes to distribution, especially if you’re doing it independently. From the get-go, I tried to have potential partners as distributors. For example, 100 Days is a partnership with Disney Latin America. Of course, we sold the project to them, and then we are doing a partnership for distribution there. So, if you don’t have that access, or if it’s challenging for you, even though you have a movie in your hands and funding to make it, you might have to consider it something you do later. Focus on making the best movie you can make. Just make the best movie that you can make with what you have, and trust in the notion that will be your calling card. That will be your way in. If people like it, you might find distribution. And it might not necessarily be a big studio, but it could be an independent distributor that you should look for, which could help you at least get your movie shown around. Festivals are good, too.
Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity
Featured image: CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – JULY 21: irector Carlos Saldanha at the Influencer Event and Screening for Sony Pictures’ “Harold And The Purple Crayon” at Culver Theater on July 21, 2024 in Culver City, California. (Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)
