New images for Spider-Man: No Way Home have arrived just in time to…start thinking about a brand new Spidey trilogy starring Tom Holland? Well, it’s the Holiday season, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this overabundance of gifts.
With tickets for Spider-Man: No Way Home now available (and selling like hotcakes) it probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Sony Pictures is interested in keeping star Tom Holland in their Spider-Man Universe. Sony Pictures producer Amy Pascal revealed that Sony and Marvel Studios have big plans for Holland’s beloved version of the young web-slinger. Speaking to Fandango, Pascal had this to say about Holland’s future as Peter Parker:
“This is not the last movie that we are going to make with Marvel — [this is not] the last ‘Spider-Man’ movie. We are getting ready to make the next ‘Spider-Man’ movie with Tom Holland and Marvel. We’re thinking of this as three films, and now we’re going to go onto the next three. This is not the last of our MCU movies.”
With No Way Home representing the third and final film in Holland’s first trilogy as Peter Parker, all directed by Jon Watts, it could have been the case that the Spider-Man Universe, which now contains Tom Hardy’s Venom and Jared Leto’s Morbius, would have connected to a brand new Spider-Man. With Pascal confirming that Holland’s got a whole new trilogy brewing, fans of his iteration of Peter Parker and his growing influence within the MCU have a lot to celebrate. Ditto those of us who want to see Holland’s Parker meet Hardy’s Eddie Brock and Leto’s blood-sucking Dr. Michael Morbius. Instead of keeping Peter Parker perennially a high schooler, it sounds like Sony plans to let Holland take Peter Parker into early adulthood and mix it up within the MCU and in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, too.
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A slew of new images from director Jon Watt’s upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home have arrived, putting Spidey’s troubles front-and-center. And those troubles have names—Doc Ock, Electro, the Green Goblin are just a few of the sinister souls Peter Parker will be squaring off against.
By now you’ve likely heard the main synopsis for No Way Home, the third film in Watts and Tom Holland’s Spidey-trilogy. After the cataclysmic events in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter finds himself in a position no cinematic Spider-Man has ever faced—his identity has been revealed. So, Peter enlists the help of Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to help erase everyone’s memory who now knows that he’s the world’s most famous web-slinger. The problem is the spell the good Doctor casts goes wrong, unleashing supervillains from the multiverse—bursting from Spider-Man past films that starred Andrew Garfield and Toby Maguire as Peter Parker—who now become Peter’s problem. Thus, he’ll find himself facing Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), Electro (Jamie Foxx), the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) and more.
Tickets are already on sale for No Way Home, and they’re selling like hotcakes. No surprise there, Holland has already promised that No Way Home is the most epic Spider-Man movie ever made.
Check out the new images below. Spider-Man: No Way Home hits theaters on December 17, 2021.
Tom Holland is Spider-Man in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Tom Holland is Spider-Man and Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Tom Holland is Spider-Man and Zendaya is MJ in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Tom Holland is Spider-Man in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Tom Holland is Spider-Man in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Tom Holland is Spider-Man in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Alfred Molina is Doc Ock and Tom Holland is Spider-Man in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Alfred Molina is Doc Ock and Tom Holland is Spider-Man in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Tom Holland is Spider-Man and Alfred Molina is Doc Ock in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Tom Holland is Spider-Man and Jamie Foxx is Electro in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Jamie Foxx is Electro in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Willem Dafoe is the Green Goblin in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.A still image from “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
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There are plenty of recognizable names in The Harder They Fall. For his Western epic, director-writer Jeymes Samuel references historical figures like mail carrier Mary Fields, cowboy Nat Love, outlaw Rufus Buck, sharpshooter Bill Pickett, and lawman Bass Reeves. In Samuel’s modern update, however, the film’s characters align with their historical reference points’ careers (with the exception of Mary, now a saloon owner), but otherwise, the story is all new.
Upon learning that Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) is being transported from prison, his young nemesis Nat (Jonathan Majors) gathers his posse, including Mary (Zazie Beetz) and Cuffee (Danielle Deadwyler) to go after the man who murdered his parents. Led by Trudy (Regina King) and Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield), Buck’s group frees him from a cadre of white soldiers, and from there, the chase ensues. Shot primarily on location in New Mexico, the rival groups go after each other across the plains before ending up in Redwood City, the real prize. There, the fight begins in earnest.
While the characters are given storylines that diverge from their historical namesakes, to get the styling just right, hair department head Araxi Lindsey (After Earth, Black-ish, The Matrix Reloaded) embraced those historic figures and eschewed contemporary styling techniques in order to achieve a sense of authenticity. From Trudy’s braids to Mary’s loose, natural texture, Lindsey cultivated a mix of styles fitting the time period and which still worked with cowboy hats. We got to speak with the hair department head about the products she embraced and avoided, her historical reference points, and getting back onto set during the Covid-19 pandemic.
What kind of references did you look to do define the main characters’ hairstyles?
I got the hair inspirations from looking at historical photos — photos of people during Western times in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and actually looking up the true characters, and trying to make a hodgepodge, or have a soft compliment, from each actual historic figure to the castmates who would be playing those people. I also took the time to read the script forward and backward and converse with Jeymes Samuel and other producers and writers and see what they had in mind for the cast. [Between] the actors, the writers, the historic points, and everything else, I just made my own personal lovechild.
Were there specific requests from Jeymes Samuel or the writers?
For Jeymes and I, we live in agreement on a lot of things, and one of them was to be as natural and as authentic as possible, and to show the natural beauty of each character, and to highlight our African culture as well as the influences, for myself, of embracing the Native American culture that was clearly popularized at that time. Our [goal] in its truest form of a Western is to show some sense of authenticity to the Black cowboys and cowgirls and the Native Americans that were around during that time. I guess in short, to be as authentic and natural with the hairstyles, not doing a lot of wigs or over-coloring.
Did you also shy away from contemporary techniques?
Oh yes. I didn’t use heat styling on anyone. I didn’t use a lot of heavy, thick products. I tried to be as apothecary as I could, using a lot of herbal things or natural wonders that people have used over the years. Primarily, I love water and oil and a good brush. We did a lot of finger styling, wet-set styling, twist-outs, and just used a lot of natural texture.
Can you tell me a bit about how you came up with styles that balanced modernity and the past?
Primarily it was just reading, doing the research, and making sure that everyone was happy. As a hairstylist working in the industry, you want to make sure your actors are comfortable, because they, too, have an idea of what their character should look like. Even though the writers have envisioned something, now they’ve actually chosen a human spirit to portray these people who’ve been on paper, so I like to be as respectful as possible to the actors, to the writers, to the producers, and to the actual historic figures we’re paying homage to. I just put a little bit of everything and a lot of consideration and skill into creating these people. I like to make sure everyone’s happy, that’s my goal.
In designing the characters’ looks, did you think about them in terms of how they’d fit with one another? For example, Trudy and Mary in combat at the end of the film contrast and complement one another so well.
Yes. Jeymes, it didn’t matter where I put it in the frame, but he definitely wanted Trudy to wear Native braids on each side and since everything else is pretty much established, I was like you know what, how about if I give Jeymes the braids during the fight scene. How would that be, to have two feminine energies in combat, where they still look natural and [like] an ode to women, but at the same time, they’re showing their strength. Then, naturally, for Zazie, we wanted to celebrate texture, and Afro texture in particular. In the beginning, you’ll see that her mane is more tamed, in a sense, but once she gets on that horse and she’s looking for Nat, everything goes out the window, unless the morning dew happens to kiss her curls and form them back. So, yes, that was intentional, to have the hair tell the story as well as the characters and the writing.
How much in terms of designing the hair did you have to account for hats?
I had the idea that maybe their hats would fly off. I remember having a conversation with Edi Gathegi and I said Edi, what if your hat comes off? He said oh no, this isn’t coming off. All the gentlemen made sure their hats were on except for the request of Jim Beckwourth’s hat falling off at his death. We had to make sure his hair was still coiled as you saw at the beginning, for continuity. Even though the gentlemen and the women were wearing hats, we wanted to make sure that their hair was still styled underneath. They didn’t just wake up and put their hats back on. We wanted to celebrate texture with that as well.
Danielle Deadwyler as Cuffee — it was kind of a challenge because Danielle is so beautiful. She’s such a beautiful spirit. Jeymes was like, we have to make her look harder, we don’t want anyone to know right off the bat that she’s a woman, we want them to guess. We went through so many different hairstyles and Jeymes was like, eh, still beautiful. No matter what I did to her, you still saw this natural beauty. She embodied Cuffee and I think that is what people took out of the theaters. It’s not the outfit that Cuffee wore, it’s the energy that Cuffee gave you. I said, we’re just going to have to hide this hair, brush it up, and do it in a sense of, what would Cuffee have done back then? How would she hide her hair? You don’t want to put edge tamer or all this extra waxy stuff on there, because Cuffee isn’t that character. Cuffee is more so a protector and a supporter of Mary. Her story is more, I want to live this life and not be picked on because I’m a woman or because I’m smaller than most.
And throughout, you were working before and then after a pandemic delay, right?
I’m so thankful for my team. No one was thinking that this would have been something people would be whispering about for Oscar nominations. No one would think that the film would be as big as it is right now. And my team could have said no, I would much rather stay home with my family and my children, I have no idea what this virus is going to do to us, this is really weird that we’re the first ones back for Netflix. I’m so happy that everyone said yes, including the actors. They could have said forget this, I’m out of here. Jeymes Samuel is a beast. This is his first and he’s going to have so many more to come, and I’m so happy to be part of that as well.
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On November 1, we got the first trailer for The Book of Boba Fett, revealing the upcoming Disney+ series centered on the iconic bounty hunter’s return to his old hunting grounds. Then, we got a glimpse at some still images from the series, which gave us a look at a maskless Boba (Temura Morrison), Boba’s ally Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), and some of the colorful characters Boba will be up against as he returns to Tatooine and the underworld once ruled with a blubbery fist by Jabba the Hutt. Now, a new teaser shows us just how much trouble Boba and Fennec will find themselves in when they shake the hornet’s nest that is Tatooine in Boba’s quest to reign over Jabba’s former dominion.
We’ve been waiting for The Book of Boba Fett since the series was first revealed in an end-credits scene during the finale of The Mandalorian season 2. The Book of Boba Fett will be centered on Boba’s return to Tatooine and his attempts to create a power-sharing agreement in Jabba’s former territory and create something like a crime world democracy. Jabba, of course, has been dead a long time (he was choked out by Leia in Return of the Jedi), and now Boba’s resurrection is miraculous in itself, and likely feels suspicious to the underworld types who have long thought him dead. Perhaps we’ll get a flashback that’ll show us just how he survived being thrown into the Sarlacc pit by Luke, also in Return of the Jedi. His ideas for power-sharing among the surviving underworld bosses seems only to raise their suspicions further. His one true ally appears to be Fennec Shand, and it looks like Boba will need her help. Tatooine’s thriving crime world doesn’t look prepared to accept, or believe, that the legendary bounty hunter comes in peace.
The Book of BobaFett is executive produced by The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau, directors Robert Rodriguez and Dave Filioni, and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. Your directors are Rodriguez, Favreau, Filoni, and Bryce Dallas Howard.
The Book of Boba Fett hits Disney+ on December 29. Check out the teaser below:
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With the release of Disney’s Encanto, Charise Castro Smith (The Haunting of Hill House, Devious Maids) has broken through not one but two ceilings: as the first Latina to receive a directing credit on a Disney animated feature, and only the second woman ever to do so.
“I am glad this milestone has been reached. I wish it had been reached earlier and I wish this weren’t such a small club,” said Castro Smith, who worked on the movie for a little over three years, co-directing it with Zootopia’s Byron Howard (also Tangled) and Jared Bush (also Moana), and co-writing with Bush. “My hope is that the membership of this very exclusive little situation I find myself in will expand rapidly. It is very exciting.”
Encanto, Disney’s 60th animated feature, centers on 15-year-old Mirabel, the sole member of her magical family to not inherit a special power. When the extraordinary gifts of the Madrigals and their hidden life in the mountains of Colombia are threatened, it is Mirabel who may be the only one with the ability to set things right. The lush, authentic animation is complemented by catchy, original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
In a conversation with The Credits, Castro Smith spoke about relating to her main character, collaborating with Howard and Bush, and conveying the story through the music of Miranda. The following interview has been condensed and edited.
How did you imbue Mirabel with your own experiences as a Latina woman, daughter, and granddaughter?
Yes, there’s a lot of aspects of the film which feel really, really close to me personally. As soon as Byron and Jared told me that they were making a movie about the one girl in a magical family who didn’t have any magical powers, I was like OK, I know how that girl feels. It was really important to me, from the very beginning, to put on screen Mirabel doubting herself, misunderstanding her worth, and going on this journey, where she really recognizes her own worth and knows it and believes it and her family sees it and she doesn’t question that for herself anymore — especially as this really fallible, human protagonist of color. She’s the first Latin Disney musical lead, and that was one really important aspect of the movie.
I read a statement from you that your maternal grandmother really encouraged you to pursue a career in the performing arts. Mirabel also has a relationship with her “abuela,” or grandmother.
My grandmother was sweet, very encouraging, not like “abuela” — but that feeling of precariousness, that feeling of pressure to succeed was definitely a part of my family’s story. My family immigrated from Cuba in the 60s, and my mom came when she was a kid.
Often the main character is the one with the power who may feel like an outsider. This story flips that concept. Why take this route?
Something we talked about a lot as we were developing this film was how everyone is so invested in these personas on social media right now, and how we all have this pressure on us to project these perfect lives. Like you don’t post a picture on Instagram of being up at 3:00 in the morning with your screaming baby. You post a cute picture where everybody’s happy, everything looks amazing. And so this idea of Mirabel as the person who doesn’t have that amazing persona to project, who feels left out, and having her as the underdog, as the person who is struggling to fit in, felt extremely relatable and felt like what everyone’s experiencing.
When Jared Bush and Byron Howard came to you, where did the story come from? Was it commissioned by Disney or was it their story?
I think they were interested in and developing this idea for a couple of years before I came on to the project, and started by really asking questions about their families, about how well they actually knew their family members, how well they understood the layers beyond the roles that we all sort of slip into in our families. And so it was really that initial curiosity that was the impetus.
You co-wrote Encanto with Jared Bush. How did you work together?
Jared and I worked very, very closely. I would write a draft, he would do some notes on it. And then he would give me a draft and I would do some notes on it. So we were sort of two brains, one script, for the last three years. And the process at Disney Animation is, I think, in some ways kind of a hybrid between a new play development workshop and a TV writers’ room, because each draft of the script is completely storyboarded, recorded, edited, made into a film, and screened. And then we would get notes from the studio leadership team. So we basically made this movie eight times over the course of the development process.
How did your background in theater help with telling this film’s story?
My theater background was immensely helpful because this is a musical and there are a lot of aspects of it that feel very theatrical. The movie takes place in one setting basically, all inside the Madrigal home really, except for a couple of scenes. And so thinking about how to use space in interesting ways became a really interesting challenge. It also kind of drew on some of my TV experience, in that in animation the storyboarders — there was a team of about 10 or 12 that was always storyboarding as we were writing new pages — in some ways function as a writers’ room because they’re the ones who are reading the pages, making intensive notes about them, and pitching new ideas.
And how did you collaborate with Jared and Byron as directors, in this case for an animated film?
I had never worked in animation before and I had also never directed on this scale before. The thing about animation is there’s such a vast amount of work to do: managing the design teams, directing the animation, directing the vocal performances, working with Lin on the songs, continuously evolving the script. There were 800 people who worked on this movie from start to finish, as opposed to live-action, and absolutely every single thing that is on screen is created by someone — every single leaf, every single hair, someone has to think about deeply and make. Byron has been at the studio for something like 30 years — he started as a storyboard artist — so he has an intense and deep knowledge of directing animation. I would say Byron was primarily the person who was directing animation. Jared and I both come from more live-action backgrounds, so we were really directing the vocal performances, helping with design, heavily in the edit room almost every day, working with Lin on songs. But we all sort of had our hands in everything.
We must talk about Lin-Manuel Miranda. What impact did his songs have on the story, both in writing and directing it?
I think the first song that we got from Lin was actually the first song in the movie, the “Family Madrigal” song, and it was actually Lin’s idea to try to musicalize this huge extended family — there’s a tremendous amount of exposition in this song — and have it just feel like a whirlwind journey through this town, where we just get to know everyone and get to meet this place and meet Mirabel. And then from there, it was a really organic collaboration. With some songs Lin had a very strong feeling, like the Luisa song, “Surface Pressure,” he knew that Luisa had to have a reggaeton-inspired song, so he was really driving on that one. Other ones, like Mirabel’s song, “Waiting on a Miracle,” took a lot of development and a lot of back and forth of Jared and Byron and I really zoning in on exactly what that song needed to convey. That was actually the last song that was finished in the entire movie because I think we needed to see the entire movie to know what that song really had to carry. And so there were songs that were very easy and songs that took more development, but Lin is a genius. Every time we got an email with a new song from him, I felt like I was getting a secret treasure.
Encanto hits theaters on November 24, and Disney+ on December 24.
Let’s say you’re a director, and you’ve been called in for a “general meeting” at Marvel Studios. A general meeting is a chance for studio executives to get to know a particular filmmaker, see what they’re like and what they’re interested in, but they’re not pegged to a specific project. Not yet. Obviously, a general meeting with Marvel is a big deal, and the number of Marvel projects percolating at any given moment is massive, which can make them a little like a high-stakes guessing game. What you’re hoping is that you’re a natural fit for one of those upcoming projects.
For director Rhys Thomas, his general meeting took place just as the powerhouse studio was just beginning to work on its Disney+ shows. “When the idea of the streaming service was introduced to me, and I was both surprised and excited to get that meeting,” Thomas says. “I’ve wanted to dip my toes in this universe because there’s a great big mythology and a scale at Marvel that no one else does.”
Thomas, a seasoned director and producer with credits ranging from Saturday Night Live to John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch met with veteran Marvel executive Trinh Tran, who asked him if there was a particular character he’d be interested in exploring.
“Quite innocently, I said Hawkeye, because I’ve always been intrigued by this human member of the Avengers with this family life,” Thomas says. “There’s something rich about the story they’ve already woven but haven’t spent much time with it. So that was kind of the serendipity of that moment.”
Thomas ultimately went on to executive produce and direct the first, second, and final episodes of Hawkeye, Marvel’s latest Disney+ series centered on Jeremy Renner’s titular Avenger and his unasked-for protegé, Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), which is now streaming. Hawkeye finds our grumpiest if still-lovable Avenger trying to spend a little quality time with his family over the holidays. The problem for Clint Barton is there are a lot of people who want him dead—recall his Ronin stage in the aftermath of the Thanos snap, a killing spree against bad guys that he was ultimately rescued from by his dear departed friend Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). Enter Kate Bishop, an ace archer whose precociousness and enthusiasm for Clint’s past heroism go from an annoyance to a necessity as the two become partners, of sorts.
When asked what his level of excitement was at the moment, he said high, but “I’m terrified, too.”
Yet Thomas wasn’t just handed the opportunity to lead Hawkeye after that initial serendipitous moment. He had to continue to prove to Marvel why he was the perfect man for the job.
“Once the idea lodged in my head that Hawkeye might be a possibility, I got really persistent with it,” Thomas says. “I kept emailing and checking in, and eventually Trinh shared the initial outlines that they were developing for the show, and I leaped in and started giving some thoughts, ideas, and notes, and that evolved into phone calls.”
Thomas also began doing extensive research, not just going through the entire Marvel catalog, but writer Matt Fraction’s “Hawkeye” comics, as well as watching every movie he felt could be relevant to the world they were building for the Avenger’s all-too-human sharpshooter and the young woman who could take place. That research paid off.
“By the time I finally met with Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios President] and Victoria [Alonso, Physical and Post Production, Visual Effects, and Animation] and pitched them, I was very much steeped in it. It was quite an organic process by the end. I had a quite clear sense of things at that point.”
As for the non-Marvel films Thomas drew inspiration from, he steeped himself in the world of 70s New York cinema. “I’ll use any excuse to go down that road,” Thomas says. “I took great pleasure dipping into 70s thrillers like Point Blank and Klute.”
Yet Hawkeye also draws inspiration from some of the biggest hits of the 1980s, too. To that end, Thomas rewatched Die Hard, Midnight Run, and Lethal Weapon.
“That’s what felt exciting, there was an opportunity for a texture and a humanity and a grounded quality to the show,” he says. “The other Marvel shows are bigger and have this scale to them, while Hawkeye is really is a character-driven show more than anything.
One of the pleasant surprises with Hawkeye is that it’s a bit looser than The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Marvel’s other more action-focused Disney+ series that also revolves around two characters who learn to love each other (so to speak).
“Die Hard and Lethal Weapon have humorous tones, and I think we have this great character with Kate Bishop, who has such contrasting energy to Clint,” Thomas says. “Clint has that world-weary energy, while she’s his number one fan, so there’s definitely a different cocktail here.”
There’s also the larger MCU to keep in mind, but Thomas says when you start working on a Marvel show, you’re not given a 1,000 page MCU story bible to learn.
“When you start working on a Marvel show, you don’t get a briefing of what’s happening on the other shows, so a little bit of the process is this gentle prodding and seeing what takes hold. There are moments where you’ll have an idea and get excited about it, and that’s when you find out they’re already doing that on another project. Yet, it would be overwhelming if you got a map of the entire MCU, so they allow these shows to exist in their own little sandbox, and someone else knows how they all fit together. That’s helpful.”
Thomas had initially envisioned Hawkeye as a gritter New York-set series, but he learned, through gentle prodding about other Marvel projects, that the series naturally became more of a hybrid between gritty and comedy.
“Ultimately, you start to come to understand where the show fits,” he says. “The cool thing with Kevin Feige’s approach is he always seems interested in the least expected route. The policy at Marvel seems to be the best idea wins. Obviously, there’s a version of this show that could have been very dark and brooding given Clint’s backstory, so I think trying to find these less expected ways in, less expected storylines and way to watch this relationship develop.”
Hawkeye‘s stakes, Thomas says, start relatively small for an MCU installment, but that’s a bit of an illusion. “It was important to make it appear like it was low stakes at the beginning of the show, as if just one more day will solve Clint’s problem, and then you get to enjoy watching things snowball out of control,” he says.
And things do snowball out of control in Hawkeye, leading to some thrilling action set pieces. It’s hard enough creating action sequences in a film that reaches Marvel’s high standards, but doing so on a TV schedule requires not only technical skill but no small amount of courage.
“It’s hard because Marvel is clear that these shows on Disney+ are a part of the same Marvel Cinematic Universe, so they shouldn’t look and feel any different. They’re just as ambitious, so part of the gig is navigating delivering that but on a TV schedule,” Thomas says. “I came up through Saturday Night Live, where no one cared that you only had two days to make the thing, the audience doesn’t know that, so the job was to say yes and go do it. Perhaps that was an abusive relationship [laughs], but I always want to go for it. I mean ordinarily, you do a car chase for Marvel and you’d spend weeks and weeks, but here you’d have only a third of the time.”
Thomas was working with a slew of Marvel veterans, not only Renner but stunt coordinator and second unit director Heidi Moneymaker (Scarlett Johansson’s longtime stunt double) and her sister Renee (Hailee Steinfeld’s stunt double).
“Heidi and Renee are used to a certain standard, but suddenly you’d see the fear in their eyes when you start visualizing and rehearsing these set pieces, and giving notes, and then say, ‘Oh, by the way, we have to shoot the whole thing in a day!’ [Laughs]. The only thing I could do is guide things with the philosophy that he’s a human character who gets hurt, that was always the North Star for me,” Thomas says. “The action is all through the lens of someone who can’t fly and gets hurt and winded and is a little older. It was essential that the story and character are the most important thing, and to keep the truth of the character in any given moment. Like Kate is a chaotic fighter, she’s never fought in the real world before. She’s highly trained in competition, but she’s used to referees and one opponent at a time, so what happens when multiple bad guys who don’t care about rules are coming at her? I tried to come at it from that point of view, rather than ‘how do we beat Marvel doing Marvel?’”
tick, tick…Boom! may not have the name recognition of Jonathan Larson’s most famous production, Rent, but it is a theater kid’s dream for Broadway royalty to bring this story to the screen. The film interpretation of his unfinished work captures the heart and hustle of 1990s New York through Larson’s eyes. Although Larson passed away in 1996, the project was lovingly researched and reconstructed by director Lin-Manuel Miranda and screenwriter Steven Levenson. The project may closely realize Larson’s original vision thanks to cinematographer Alice Brooks, ASC who lends her own magical memories of late 20th century NYC.
Brooks spent her early childhood in New York City with her playwright father and dancer mother. She was just ten years old in January of 1990 when tick, tick…BOOM! takes place. “I started reading the script and page by page as I turned it, I thought this could be scenes from my childhood. Our apartment – we had a bathtub in the kitchen, which is exactly like Jonathan,” Brooks recalled. “We lived in 300 square feet, but it was always filled with all these wonderful artist friends of my father. They were our community. They were really our family.”
After her electric work on In the Heights, Miranda tapped Brooks for his movie directorial debut. She presented a lookbook with her vision for the film. One page resembling a family photo album drew the connection that made it obvious she was the person for the job. “The first page of my lookbook is just my childhood photos. Five minutes into the meeting Lin said, ‘Wait a minute. These are actually your pictures?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, “Well it can’t get any more personal than that.’”
Jonathan, played by Andrew Garfield, was turning 30 in 1990 while Brooks was 10, but they had a youthful perspective in common. “Since Lin and I were both 10 in this era, we both have the same memories of what New York City was. It’s a childlike memory of a 10-year-old where color and light and emotions are all heightened,” Brooks explained.
Jonathan is nearing a milestone age but is growing discouraged by his art. The musical number “30/90” captures his anxiety over the passing of time while the creativity he harbors inside is still searching for a way into the world. “Jonathan Larson had this incredible childlike quality to him where he didn’t want to grow up. He didn’t want to sell out. He wanted to hold onto his dream,” Brooks said. “It’s that childlike memory where sometimes the lines between dreams and reality are blurred. That became the place where Lin and I started creating from. It didn’t suddenly feel like we were breaking into song and dance, but rather it felt like it was coming from Jonathan Larson’s mind.”
Larson eventually secured his revered place in musical theatre history with Broadway smash Rent, but his tragic and sudden death fell on the eve of the show’s premiere for audiences. His autobiographical musical tick, tick…BOOM! was performed in various states throughout his lifetime, but there is no official edition. “This was never a final produced play. There’s not a script. There’s a lot of different iterations of tick, tick…BOOM! ,” Brooks noted. “Lin and Steven went to the Library of Congress and started going through all of Jonathan Larson’s material and finding different versions of tick, tick…BOOM! because there’s not a definitive version of it.”
Miranda and Levenson scoured Larson’s entire creative catalogue, including iterations of the play-within-a-play Superbia and jingles Larson wrote when he flirted with pursuing a more commercial career. The result is a true homage to the artist and his process. “Every piece of music except in the apartment where there’s some 90s pop songs playing during a party are songs Jonathan Larson wrote,” Brooks revealed. “There’s a car scene where they’re driving and there’s a little jingle playing on the radio. I mean every single piece of music is something that they found while they were in the Library of Congress.”
Determining the visual language for the story was crucial to bring tick, tick…BOOM! to movie audiences. Despite being created for the largest scale that the show had ever been performed, Brooks aimed to keep the story intimate. “Lin and I were designing all these really smooth, beautiful, flowing, complicated shots for the New York theatre workshop portion of the film and then we realized that was the wrong choice,” she admitted. “We actually needed to be handheld on stage and the sweeping fluid shots were actually the musical numbers that were coming in Jonathan Larson’s life vs. the stage. So the stage has this really raw, intimate quality.”
Larson’s life was also extraordinarily well documented before the era of self-broadcasting our every move online. His friend was the daughter of a documentarian who picked up the habit of carrying a camera. “We got all these amazing details that were recorded. Like, the Moondance Diner no longer exists, but we have all this video of Jonathan in the Moondance Diner.”
Incredibly, Larson also photographed and described every item in his apartment just one week before his death for insurance purposes in case of fire. These reference materials were of particular interest to Brooks’ work behind the lens. “You could see the way the apartment was lit,” she said. “All of us making this movie wanted to honor Jonathan in every possible way. We always felt like he was with us. He was whispering in our ear making the magic happen.”
A moment of serendipity hinted that Larson’s spirit was infusing the project. The crew scouted pools for the musical number “Swimming,” eventually agreeing to a picturesque location with gorgeous tiling resembling lines on a music staff. “The first time we were there, I took my iPhone and I sat on the edge of the pool and started putting it underwater,” Brooks recalled. “These tiles were beautifully, beautifully aged and had these very specific numbers – ‘30’, ‘40’, ‘50’. And these red and green stripes. But this ‘30’ was dead center in the middle of the pool.”
That’s when inspiration struck for the director that seemed to be a sign from Larson himself. “Lin was looking at the footage and looking at the pool. He said to all of us, ‘What if Jonathan puts his hands on the 30, which is the age he’s so terrified of turning, and it becomes a treble clef?” That is how ‘Swimming’ evolved into this visual demonstration of a singular moment of genius for Jonathan.”
Unbeknownst to the crew, they were bringing audiences into Larson’s world in a literal way. “It was only later on that we discovered that this was the swimming pool that Jonathan swam in every day of his life. So, when he wrote the lyrics for ‘Swimming’, he was writing specifically about details in that swimming pool.”
Constructing the scene was a logistical puzzle, but Brooks knew it would be worth the effort. “There was very narrow space on either side of the pool. So, to get our crane shots, we needed to build a deck on one side of the pool, but it takes three days for divers to do that. We shot all our crane shots and then they pulled it out. The divers had to go underwater and unhook everything and then we did all our other underwater shots with an underwater diver separately.”
Brooks says she has never let fear of the unknown control her on set. She began her career as a child actor, but she knew by age 15 she belonged behind the camera. When she lost out on a role in While You Were Sleeping after seven rigorous auditions, she announced to her mother that her true passion was cinematography. Nearly thirty years later, she’s still rising in the field. “Being a woman in this business has not been easy. It’s not easy. It’s encouraging because it’s getting better, but it was me having to stick to my dreams all the time and not give up on that dream that I’ve had for so long.”
Brooks recalls times when her artistic career goals seemed out of reach, which makes her and Larson kindred spirits once again. “I think people really, really relate to this movie because we all have a dream. There is always a moment where we can either give up on our dream or continue on and get up every day and dust ourselves off and pick ourselves up and start all over again.”
tick, tick…BOOM! is in theatres and available for streaming on Netflix now.
Featured image: Key art from “tick, tick…BOOM.” Courtesy Netflix.
Sometimes you just have to say, “F*** it all, I’ll give it a shot.”
That’s what Roberto Bentivegna did when he got his shot to write the screenplay for the new MGM Studios feature House of Gucci, opening November 24.
At the time, Bentivegna had only a handful of short-film credits and award wins from way back in film school at Columbia. But he also had something else: a great idea.
According to Bentivegna, many screenwriters had tried and failed to harness the three-decade family feud behind Gucci’s rise to global luxury brand as recounted in the movie’s main source material, Sara Gay Forden’s book “House of Gucci.” Bentivegna succeeded where others failed by taking a gamble: He made Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), the middle-class social climber who was convicted of murdering her husband, Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), the movie’s anti-heroine protagonist.
One of Bentivegna’s favorite films is Sunset Boulevard, and he remembered well from film school discussions about how the story belongs to Norma Desmond, even if it’s told from the point of William Holden’s character Joe Gillis. “My guiding principle for House of Gucci was essentially to tell the story from Patrizia’s point of view – if, let’s say, Sunset Boulevard was told from Norma’s point of view. To sympathize with the obsessive party, rather than the obsessed [over],” explains Bentivegna.
With its warring family factions, Bentivegna also imagined House of Gucci as a fashion version of a gangster movie, and, because Patrizia is such an over-the-top character, Scarface in particular. “There’s something gangster about her, and we haven’t really seen a great female gangster,” he says.
Putting Patrizia at the center of the entire story succeeds so brilliantly that it seems as if Bentivegna made the inevitable and obvious choice. At the time though, the choice seemed anything but. That’s when Bentivegna thought, “F*** it, I’ll give it a shot. And hopefully, they will hire me again.”
With the release of House of Gucci, Bentivegna will, no doubt, get hired again and again.
“It’s one of those classic stories of persevering and working on a lot of projects that were incredibly beneficial creatively but unfortunately never happened before this,” he says – and then, finally, one day getting a phone call from legendary director Ridley Scott saying he wants to direct your script. “I grew up with Blade Runner and Alien on VHS. I must’ve watched Blade Runner 20 times. It’s pure cinema. It’s one of the movies that made me want to get into this,” Bentivegna says.
Bentivegna acknowledges what he calls the “cosmic coincidence” underlying his involvement in House of Gucci. Despite being an unheralded screenwriter, his background positioned him well to write the script. He grew up in London and Milan, where he “used to play two doors down from where Maurizio Gucci was murdered.” He also grew up in the heart of Italian fashion. His mother is a designer who worked with seminal Italian designer Walter Albini, and then later with a young Giorgio Armani. “It was just my mom, Giorgio Armani, and Giorgio’s boyfriend Sergio Galeotti,” Bentivegna says, adding with a laugh, “so I grew up around mannequins.” Understandably, Mom is “thrilled” at her son’s success.
Because he is bilingual, Bentivegna also got to know the Gucci story directly from the then-and-there Italian press of the seventies and eighties. The family scandals provided ample gossip and tabloid fodder. “The chronicles of this family as it was seen by the media [gave me] a lot of little details that were not in the book, that were basically nowhere except for these articles, and so I could really use those to spice up the story,” he says.
Bentivegna’s childhood in Milan furnished him with other cultural details that give scenes priceless texture. “When Patrizia feeds Maurizio the giant panzerotto, the hot pocket – that’s food that I would eat with my Dad every Sunday after we went to the cinema,” Bentivegna recalls. He jokes, “I’m hoping that this results in an explosion of the panzerotto craze. They’re pretty delicious.”
With his Big Idea in place to anchor House of Gucci through Patrizia, Bentivegna says that the main challenge in writing the script was creating balanced characters. He knew that, on the one hand, his characters needed to be over-the-top. The high-stakes scheming of the colorful Gucci family reminded him not only of gangster films but also Shakespearean tragedies and the caricatures of opera buffa. But if characters grew too big, the audience wouldn’t relate or invest. Thus, Bentivegna reimagines Paolo Gucci (Jared Leto) as an opera buffa fool who is emotionally anchored by desperation for his family’s perpetually withheld approval.
In the case of Patrizia, Bentivegna sometimes had to elide real-life character traits that were simply too larger-than-life. “Some of the things that [Patrizia] said in the media were just not things I wanted to put in the script,” he says referring, by way of example, to her most famously outrageous quote: “I’d rather cry in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle.” Bentivegna says, “I made a choice not to put that in because I just thought it was a typical rich ass***thing to say. It was important to make her a sympathetic character.”
Because House of Gucci revolves around Patrizia’s campaign to rise to the top of the Gucci empire, the failure or success of the film would depend on whom was cast to play her. “I’ll be completely honest, as I was writing it, I think about 20 pages in, I started asking myself that question, and the only person I could think of was Lady Gaga,” he says. “I wrote it really with her in mind.” Bentivegna saw an “amazing resemblance” to the real Patrizia and felt that Gaga “can emote in incredibly quick and intense ways, and I felt like she would get the fashion of it, the glamour, the excessiveness of it.”
His vision of Lady Gaga turned out to be spot on. Her mesmerizing performance has already generated raves and Oscar talk. “I think in A Star Is Born, people said, well, she’s playing a musician, so how far is that from her real person? In this case, there is no denying that what she’s achieved is not just great for a musician who decides to act – she is just an incredible actress in her own right,” Bentivegna says.
Bentivegna got so much right about how to cinematically tell the Gucci story, it’s almost as if he were one with the project. You would think, by now, he would be dressed head-to-toe in the brand.
“I’m waiting for the free shoes,” he chuckles. “No, I don’t own any Gucci.”
What if your life was planned out even before you were born? And if you followed it with hard work and a little perseverance, not only would you be successful, but you’d be considered one of the greatest at what you do. Would you sign up for it?
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green explores that very journey in King Richard (in theaters and on HBO Max now), a story, written by Zach Baylin, which shines an unwavering light on how Venus and Serena Williams became the tennis stars and cultural icons as we know them today.
Their “GOAT” status is undeniable and it didn’t happen by chance. Growing up in Compton, California with three other sisters – Isha, Lundrea, and Tunde – it was their parents who carved a path for them, and more defiantly, it was their father Richard who wrote a 78-page document outlining how they would be successful before taking their first steps. However, it wasn’t just a playbook on footwork and backhands, but a bible on good moral character, humility, choice, respect, and more importantly, that it’s still ok to be a kid.
Caption: (L-r) WILL SMITH as Richard Williams, DEMI SINGLETON as Serena Williams and SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictur
The stirring tale focuses on Richard, played by the ever charismatic Will Smith, and serves a belly of emotional undertones about family, overcoming adversity, and persistence. Editor Pamela Martin (Battle of the Sexes, The Fighter) was tasked with bringing together the brilliant performances and layered themes to the big screen.
“It’s an inspiring story about love, family, faith, self-respect, honesty, and being a balanced human being,” says Martin. “The script was our roadmap and we talked a lot about being true to the story and the characters and how you can still find success and have balance.”
Caption: (L-r) DEMI SINGLETON as Serena Williams, SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams and WILL SMITH as Richard Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Chiabella James
Carving out the right perspective was key for the Oscar-nominated editor as the story shapes its point-of-view from Richard while still focusing on the family’s journey and brewing success of Venus and Serena. Specific beats were placed within the film to show that it is Richard’s story, including having the film open up on him, which wasn’t scripted. Other moments fixate on his persistence as he’s rejected by pro coaches, investors, and tennis clubs where he simply won’t take “no” for an answer. In scenes where the family is met with hostility, like when Richard is pressed by gangsters at the Compton tennis court who are fond of Venus’s looks, the camera centers on his emotional swell rather than his daughters.
Caption: (L background-r) SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams and WILL SMITH as Richard Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Chiabella James
“This is the origin story of Venus and Serena being successful tennis players but it started from somewhere. Knowing that, we wanted to follow Richard from the very beginning,” says Martin. “Perspective was important to the story so staying on him and understanding his feelings is why you feel something when you watch this film.”
Martin didn’t shy away from hanging on the incredibly emotional moments from Richard either. In one vivid scene where Richard is beaten up, the editor stayed on his defeated look after returning to his van bloody and bruised. “When something very serious has happened, hanging on a look becomes a very instinctual thing to do,” she says. “I want to go for a ride with the scene as a viewer and ask, ‘where do I want to go and what do I want to see?’ I think a lot of those decisions come out of those initial instincts of wondering what that person is feeling.” Depending on the crux of the moment, Martin would build emotional tensions by staying on the character or cutting to another person to show their feelings about that character or situation. With staying on Richard in the van we are consumed by his emotions and can then believe his next course of action, which is unbridled revenge.
Building believable performances was another challenge Martin weighed on. “Every line has to be truthful,” she says. “If I need to, I do go in and perform microsurgery on dialog so that the cadence, as well as their facial expression and body language, go together. You have to find the perfect combination of those things for it to feel authentic and for you to believe every moment. That includes the truthfulness in the silence and the reactions in that silence.”
aption: (L-r) JON BERNTHAL as as Rick Macci and WILL SMITH as Richard Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
As the journey unfolds we get a front-row seat to Venus and Serena taking form. Another balancing task for Martin was captivating an audience, many of whom know the history of the tennis stars. In a climactic scene, we see Venus playing a match wearing her iconic white beads in her hair as her father feverishly watches in a nearby tunnel. It’s an iconic match tennis fans know well, but the emotional ride the director and editor build lets us forget everything we may remember.
Caption: SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
“That’s the interesting thing about cutting a biopic where you know the outcome. How great it is being engrossed in the story and in the moment that you’re still at the edge of your seat. I do believe when someone is watching a moment in the movie, they are in that moment with the character if you’re doing your job right. That’s the magic of a good movie.”
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) DEMI SINGLETON as Serena Williams, WILL SMITH as Richard Williams and SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
The Ghostbusters are back, but they’ve gotten a lot younger. In Jason Reitman’s follow-up, Ghostbusters: Afterlife (in theaters now), to his father Ivan’s generation-defining classic, Egon Spengler’s (the late Harold Ramis) grandkids, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (McKenna Grace) get into the family trade after moving to the dirt farm, a dilapidated Oklahoma property where we learn that Spengler rode out his final years alone, warding off an unusually problematic ghost based in a nearby abandoned mine.
But Spengler’s descendants have no idea what they’re getting into when they show up, reluctantly, at their grandfather’s strange rural digs. Single mom Callie (Carrie Coon) is in dire financial straits, Trevor only has eyes for his crush, Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), and nerdy Phoebe just wants to fiddle with her electronics when she’s not busy with schoolwork. Given her range of endeavors, she’s put out neither about playing chess against the invisible opponent in her bedroom nor at finding herself with her first-ever friend, a new-media obsessed child named Podcast (Logan Kim).
Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and Podcast (Logan Kim) in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Phoebe’s also too smart to ignore the multiple quakes that shake these rural environs several times a day, endearing her to Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd), the local summer school teacher. A few choice discoveries back at the dirt farm later, and Phoebe and Podcast find themselves hunting for ghosts. Trevor isn’t far behind, especially once he gets the Ectomobile running. But the metal-muncher they chase down an empty main street turns out to be an easy introduction to the horrors of the next world that lie just outside of town.
The younger Reitman plays fan service to his father’s work — despite its state of disrepair, the Ectomobile is given a veritable unveiling — but shades of the original show up in Ghostbusters: Afterlife in other aspects, particularly via the film’s score. For composer Rob Simonsen (The Way Back, The Front Runner), reimagining and expanding the world of Ghostbusters was just as much a matter of channeling the broader film world of the 1980s as it was about looking to Elmer Bernstein’s original score. We chatted with Simonsen about his favorite film references, fan service, and composing for visual effects ghosts.
Rob Simonsen
How did you decide what to keep and what to leave behind in the score?
From the beginning, Jason Reitman was very clear that this should feel like an extension of the original. So we knew that we’d be working with material from the original and Elmer’s wonderful themes that he wrote. I think the question that we had for ourselves was how could we stretch that into new moods and new moments that don’t exist in the first? We knew that there was a lot of action in a style that wasn’t in the original, and we wanted it to feel like a mid-Eighties movie. In a way, this is an homage to the Eighties films that I grew up watching. So it was very much, let’s take the material from the original, let’s give an homage to the spirit of mid-Eighties films, and let’s do it with new material. It was about finding that balance. And I think it was very important to Jason to have the theme utilized in places that really helped the audience to feel like they’re in the universe of the original.
Any particular Eighties movies that you used as a reference?
Explorers, Gremlins, ET, of course, Back to the Future, of course. Those were really big films for me growing up. And they all have this enchanted quality, this wondrous, kind of inspiring tone to them. Those composers and those scores made a big imprint on me when I was young. It was really fun to go back and watch a lot of those movies again, and really have more time and energy to do more study of the way that those films were scored. It was just a very free time, the mid-Eighties. People dreamt really big.
In terms of the original Ghostbusters, was there any aspect of the score where you worked in some fan service?
There’s the ondes Martenot, which is a very early synthesizer-type of instrument that Elmer used extensively in a lot of his work. But specifically, it’s one of the characteristic sounds that he used in the original Ghostbusters, so we knew that we were going to have to use that. We sought out the woman who played it for the original, Cynthia Millar, and we had her play the ondes Martenot for us on the new score. So that was really cool, very satisfying. We knew we wanted a big orchestra. And we had a rule that we weren’t going to use any synthesizers that weren’t used in the original, so those were all sounds from a very infamous keyboard called the Yamaha DX7. Those were pretty big contributors to the sound of the original, as well as the very brash, apocalyptic brass that’s in the original. We worked very hard to try to get close to that same kind of brash sound. So many things have changed since that score was recorded, we did a lot of research and experimentation. But that’s what we were trying to get to.
Did the fact that most of the main characters were kids influence your scoring process?
For sure. We needed a sense of wonder and discovery for the kids and that was, I think really for me, such a touchstone for a lot of mid-Eighties films that record that feeling so well. And how do you play the Ghostbusters theme for kids and for emotional parts? The main Ghostbusters theme from the original is this kind of comedic, quirky, piano-driven, slightly jazzy, very New York sounding tune which was for a bunch of middle-aged men, comedians going and fighting ghosts. There’s inherent comedic value in that. And so trying to take that material and apply it to kids in rural America and emotional scenes, there was experimentation there. And it was cool. We got to reharmonize the melody of the original, put new chords underneath so it gave it a different flavor, and try to develop it in new ways. It was a really fun exercise.
How closely do you work with the visual effects team? Were you able to see any of the ghosts for whom you were composing?
When Covid hit, we got a lot more time to work on the film, so I had more visual shots done from VFX that showed what these things were looking like. But for a long time, they were very rudimentary versions. But I think that the vocalizations from the ghosts really helped me to understand what their character was. I know Jason worked really hard on nailing the voices of the Stay-Pufts and that was a tricky one to crack, musically — I think just tonally in general, to get them to be the right amount of menace and playful, these little chaotic terrorizing creatures that you like and they’re so cute — there are a lot of critter movies from the Eighties that ride that line, as well. Jason did a great job of explaining how they should feel, and that’s what I went on. I think it all worked out.
A Stay-Puft marshmallow man from “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Featured image: The theatrical poster for Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Courtesy Sony Pictures
Yesterday, Marvel revealed a behind-the-scenes video focused on the comedic chemistry between Hawkeye stars Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld. Now, we’ve got an actual clip from the upcoming Disney+ series that shows us what happens when Kate Bishop (Steinfeld) brings home Clint Barton (Renner) to meet her parents. Well, technically, it seems they only showed up to use the bathroom, but the scene becomes an awkward mess either way for all involved.
The source of that awkwardness? It’s the tension between the peppy Kate and the surly Clint. Clint is in full Grumpy Avenger mode, refuting Kate’s claim to her parents that they’re partners, or even friends, and shutting down her attempt at creating a new nickname for him—C.B. One—which we think is actually kind of great. Kate’s parents, Eleanor (Vera Farmiga) and Jack (Tony Dalton) respond in different ways. Eleanor is put off by the fact that someone seems to have hacked her computer and thinks it was her daughter. Jack is excited to have an Avenger at the table, and even thanks him, almost as an aside, for saving the world.
The clip gives you a sense of the grumpy uncle/precocious niece vibe that’ll open the series, but eventually, we can be sure that Clint will come to like Kate, even rely on her, and will eventually become a mentor to the young markswoman.
Check out the clip below. Hawkeye is heading like an arrow (apologies) for Disney+ on November 24.
The new film King Richard (Warner Bros.) halted shooting in March 2020 during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Although his work was done, Rich Delia, one of the project’s casting directors, was “sitting at home freaking out” over one thing:
“What if one of the girls goes through a growth spurt?”
The girls are, of course, Venus and Serena Williams. King Richard tells the astonishing story of how Richard Williams struggled and then succeeded in transforming his daughters into two of the greatest tennis players of all time. Over the course of 2018 and 2019, Delia and Avy Kaufman, the film’s other casting director, auditioned no fewer than 1,000 aspiring actors for the roles of Venus and Serena Williams as young girls. Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton snagged the coveted roles.
Caption: (L-r) DEMI SINGLETON as Serena Williams and SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Even under normal circumstances, Delia explains, growth spurts can wreck the best-laid plans when it comes to casting kids. “You’re casting them as they are today on Tuesday, but by Thursday, you’re hoping they are still that kid you cast from Tuesday. You just don’t know.”
Will Smith may well receive a deserved Oscar nomination for his compelling portrait of Richard Williams, who gate-crashed the largely white sport of tennis with his ultra-talented daughters. That said, Sidney and Singleton light up the movie, convincingly and engagingly embodying the young girls who, for better and for worse, lived out their father’s ambitions. Without the right actors playing the iconic sisters, this feel-good movie wouldn’t have felt nearly as good.
Caption: (L-r) DEMI SINGLETON as Serena Williams, SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams and WILL SMITH as Richard Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Chiabella James
No one was more keenly aware of that fact than Delia. In his own words, Delia is “obsessed” with the Williams family. “Venus and Serena have been heroes of mine since they came on the scene,” he says. In a turn of events that might have come out of a Hollywood movie, Delia heard producer Tim White talking about a script called King Richard at a lunch, and his ears pricked up. “I turned to him, and I said, ‘Is this by any chance about Richard Williams?’” The two hit it off and eventually, Delia found himself at a meeting with Isha and Lyndrea Price, Venus and Serena’s two sisters (Isha is an executive producers on the film.) They hit it off, too, and, in a remarkable move, Delia asked Rice if he could start looking for the young actors to play Venus and Serena – even though the film hadn’t been greenlit. Says Delia, “This one kind of just started with grit and passion and heart.”
Veteran casting director Kaufman came on the project at the behest of the film’s director Reinaldo Marcus Green, with whom she developed a close connection working on past projects. Like Delia, she can be relentless. “We’re always digging. Submissions come in and agents come in, but I’m still reaching out there to go, Who else is there?”
Caption: (L-r) DEMI SINGLETON as Serena Williams, WILL SMITH as Richard Williams and SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
That question was, according to Delia, “a large concern amongst the producers.” Delia and Kaufman had the same concern for different reasons. Casting real-life people – who happen to be globally beloved living legends – ramps up the pressure on casting directors in particular. They worry about the reaction of both the real-life subjects – more added pressure: Venus and Serena are also executive producers on the film – and the millions-strong audience. That audience has a clear picture in their minds of who these “characters” are, both in the literal physical sense and the symbolic one.
“I passed on a lot of other projects while I was working on [King Richard]. I needed to focus,” Delia explains. You might call it his own version of Wimbledon. “Anytime I felt down or wasn’t sure it was going to work out, all I had to do was turn around to my office walls and look at Venus and Serena. Because when you think of the adversity they have faced in life and how they have overcome it, and how successful they have been, it was like, ‘Well, I have nothing to complain about. All I have to do is just continue working and try to do one zillionth of what they’ve done.”
Caption: (L-r) WILL SMITH as Richard Williams, SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams, AUNJANUE ELLIS as Oracene “Brandy” Williams, DANIELE LAWSON as Isha Price, DEMI SINGLETON as Serena Williams, LAYLA CRAWFORD as Lyndrea Price and MIKAYLA BARTHOLOMEW as Tunde Price in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Delia and Kaufman held casting calls at tennis camps run by the United States Tennis Association and in Compton, California, where Venus and Serena grew up and legendarily practiced on broken-down public courts. A physical resemblance to the real-life tennis stars was the “goalpost,” says Delia. However, they also needed actors who were athletic enough to plausibly play tennis on-screen and have convincing sister chemistry with each other, as well as with the actors who portray the famously tightknit Williams family.
Although historically there have been fewer lead roles for African-American actors in Hollywood, Delia hopes that over the last decade, increasing opportunities have “increased the numbers of [African-American] actors who feel, ‘I’ve got a shot in this, too.’” The possibly shifting paradigm in Hollywood reminds him of how Venus and Serena shifted the paradigm in tennis. “There’s a wonderful scene in the movie where they’re walking into a tennis tournament and they are the only black family in a sea of white families. That can’t have been easy, but just by virtue of them taking those steps, other black girls out there were able to see that and go, I can do that, too.” Numerous African-American women have followed Venus and Serena into the top rungs of pro tennis, including U.S. Open winner Sloane Stephens and U.S. Open finalist Madison Keys.
Delia and Kaufman say that not only great on-camera reads but off-camera observations help them envision Sidney and Singleton in their roles.
“The two of them just felt like sisters. They were talking in between takes and improving. There was a familiarity there that you would believe of people who’ve known each other their whole lives,” Delia says. Kaufman took especially careful note of their body language because she was casting real-life athletes. “I really wanted to see how these girls even stood, what’s their stance, how do they move with their hands when they walk into a room,” she said.
Caption: SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. PicturesCaption: SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Singleton bears a resemblance to Serena, but Sidney less so. Still, Delia and Kaufman saw striking poise and confidence – qualities for which Venus has always been known. “Sometimes there’s an X factor when you’re casting people and especially a real person…the performance supersedes any physical thing,” Delia says. Kaufman concurs that “casting is a kind of a gut process.”
The Williams family – including Venus and Serena – had to sign off on Delia and Kaufman’s choices. “I remember anxious times going, Did we hear back? Did we hear back?” Kaufman recalls. The family was happy with the casting, and ultimately, the film itself. Says Delia, “That is the ultimate paycheck. That’s really the only thing that matters.…it makes all of the blood, sweat, and tears and everything that goes into it completely worth it.”
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) WILL SMITH as Richard Williams, DEMI SINGLETON as Serena Williams and SANIYYA SIDNEY as Venus Williams in Warner Bros. Pictures’ inspiring drama “KING RICHARD,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Christmas is going to come a little early this year. The official trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley has arrived, priming us for the maestro’s latest. The filmboasts an insanely talented cast, headlined by Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett as a pair of mischievous souls who seem destined to create a nightmare for themselves and others. Cooper plays Stan Carlisle, a gifted carny who can manipulate people with nothing more than a few perfectly chosen words. Blanchett plays Dr. Lillith Ritter, a psychiatrist who possibly surpasses Carlisle’s gift for manipulation. These two will make for a sinister pair.
There are few directors as gifted at world-building as del Toro, who has delivered some of the most detailed, deliriously creative films of the century. From his Oscar-winning turn with Shape of Water to his masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro delights in the role of tour guide to the weird, wild, and fantastical. Yet what makes his films so memorable is that Del Toro clearly loves his characters, the more bizarre the better, and this affection crosses across all his work, regardless of the genre.
With Nightmare Alley, Del Toro is tackling an adaptation of the 1946 novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham. Gresham’s novel is steeped in the shadowy world of a second-rate carnival filled with schemers, dreamers, hustlers, and femme Fatales, all of which seem ideally suited for Del Toro’s abilities. Yet Nightmare Alley boasts no supernatural elements, typically a staple in Del Toro’s films. It’s a pure pulp movie. As he told Colliderin 2019, Nightmare Alley offered him the chance to “do a real underbelly of society type movie…[there are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”
Joining Cooper and Blanchett are a slew of great performers—Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins, Toni Collette, Ron Perlman, and David Strathairn to name a few.
Check out the official trailer below. Nightmare Alley hits theaters on December 17.
We got a chance to speak with Hawkeye director and executive producer Rhys Thomas this week (we’ll publish that interview right before the show premieres), but one of the things we can share is he enthused about the comedic chemistry between Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld. “I enjoy the humor and the tone and the twists and turns that it takes,” Thomas says in this new behind-the-scenes video which looks at the relationship between Clint Barton (Renner) and his unasked-for new protegé Kate Bishop (Steinfeld). The former is, of course, the crusty old Avenger who is fresh from helping save the world against Thanos. The latter is an iconic character from the comics in her own right but making her debut appearance in the MCU.
The grumpy uncle/precocious niece chemistry that we’ve seen thus far came quite easily between the two stars, this video shows. Clint and Kate are paired up because they’re both trying to survive a relentless ambush (plenty of bad folks have plenty of reason to want Hawkeye dead) and make it through the holidays. The video reveals how Renner and Steinfeld were able to make the cast and crew giggle one moment, then watch in awe as they got into their action scenes in the next.
“Collaborating with Jeremy requires a lot more strength than I think it might look like,” Steinfeld jokes towards the end of the video. Then we see a snippet from the show where Kate Bishop borrows one of Hawkeye’s arrows and blows up a van. This series looks like a very good time.
When you start watching the groundbreaking new HBO Max series Sort Of (debuting on HBO Max November 18), you might imagine that it’s yet another precocious-Millennial-auteur-driven show, starring its own creator/writer. After all, Sort Of’s real-lifecreator/writer/star, Bilal Baig, is a stylish, non-binary, Pakistani denizen of queer Toronto – just like Sabi Mehboob, the lead character they play in Sort Of.
As the story unfolds over eight episodes, however, it becomes clear that Sort Of is an ensemble show. The series traces the struggles of a racially diverse group of characters on the gender spectrum who pull apart and back together into a loving, tight-knit community. Sabi’s hard-won evolutions as a trans person exist on a continuum of human experience.
“Every person is constantly growing into another version of themselves, and another and another. We are all in transition. It’s the most natural thing in the world,” says Olympia (Cassandra James), Sabi’s trans love interest in Episode 7. “Just don’t skip your hormone pills. That feels very unnatural.”
Cassandra James, Bilal Baig. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO Max
Olympia’s words to Sabi are ideologically brave (and illustrate how well the show’s writing gets its dramatic tone right). Not everyone, progressive or right-wing, may agree that trans experience ought to be compared to other kinds of life transitions. The arresting moment also reflects the collaborative—rather than solo virtuoso—origin that animates Sort Of.
The series is, in fact, the brainchild of two people: Baig and Fab Filippo (Save Me), who is credited as creator and writer, and directed the show. Baig and Filippo met when they were both doing a play at Toronto’s legendary Tarragon Theater. “We weren’t the leads of the play, so we had a lot of offstage time,” says Filippo with a laugh. “We both had our laptops open, and we were both writing.”
At first, Filippo, who has been working in U.S. and Canadian TV, film, and theater for several decades, fell into a mentor role with the younger, aspiring Baig. But soon they were meeting at Toronto coffee shops and throwing ideas around that they might work on together. Eventually, Filippo proposed that they write a show based on a Baig-like character. “[Baig] said, ‘Ok, but why would I write that show with you?’” Filippo recalls.
At the time, Filippo was having something of a life/identity crisis. He returned to Baig with another idea. “I said, ‘What if we made a show about how everyone is in transition and that not every transition is the same, and that not every transition is seen or treated the same on a societal level?’ ” It was the seed of what Olympia says to Sabi, as Sabi struggles with their traditional Pakistani family.
Baig only had one question: “ ‘OK, If I’m me in the story, who are you?’”
Although played by actor Gray Powell, in the script Filippo “is” Paul, the cis-gender dad for whom Sabi works as a nanny. (Baig worked as a nanny for a downtown Toronto family.) With two key characters in place and a deeply felt philosophy underpinning their project, “story just felt like it was falling from the sky. It was really easy to come up with arcs and more characters and one thing linked to another. It’s amazing what happens when you turn the key, when you get the right elements that sort of make the world easy to build,” Filippo says.
Gray Powell, Grace Lynn Kung. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO Max
That world includes Sabi’s appealingly narcissistic cis-gender boyfriend/ex/stalker; hilariously and perpetually outraged mixed-race lesbian best friend who insists they move to Berlin; nosy but loving traditional mother who is getting dangerously close to finding out that Sabi is non-binary; and the progressive mixed-race family that Sabi works for that threatens to engulf Sabi in a tragic crisis.
Filippo points out that Sabi is intentionally “the least explode-y” of all of Sort Of’s characters. Baig and Filippo wanted to write a trans character “that wasn’t depicted the same way that trans characters tend to be depicted in media, which is either sort of broken, or in danger of some kind, or addicted to drugs, or overly sexualized.”
Indeed, a gentle, sweet tone permeates the series. (American viewers may just assume that it’s a Canadian thing. As one character quips, “Canada is just America after a ton of therapy.”) Filippo says, “It emanates from that notion that the world would be slightly gentler because we wanted to show the world being gentler for [Sabi]. When you look at the plots, it’s not particularly gentle, but the way we handle them, we don’t go for the jugular, the darkest part of it.”
The reluctance to go dark distinguishes the series from its most obvious antecedent, Transparent. “Transparent obviously came up. How could it not?”, says Filippo. Sort Of is, by design, less focused on gender transition itself as a subject. “I know that what’s important to Bilal is creating a lead who we felt was just kind of trying to make rent, and keep their job, and figure out how to fall in love,” he says.
Bilal Baig, Gregory Ambrose Calderone. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO Max
As much Baig and Filippo fused their creative energies, the latter says that they maintained some separate creative zones. If Filippo pitched an idea about a trans character that didn’t feel right to Baig, Filippo would drop it. Filippo, on the other hand, had greater say over the overall tone necessary to balance the elements of a dramedy. “We’ve never argued or fought over any kind of particular point. We value the partnership over any individual ideas,” he says.
The Sort Of production went to great lengths to ensure the show met its representational challenges. Not only did the real-life writers’ room reflect the racial and gender diversity of Sabi’s fictional Toronto community, the production employed consultants on transgender representation. The consultants wrote reports on the scripts and the episode rough cuts. One consultant, who was also a trans psychiatrist, wrote in a report that “this show is going to save some lives.”
Just the recollection of reading those words moves Filippo. At the time, he says, “We were like, What? That’s crazy. It seems crazy to even wrap your head around that kind of thing, to be honest. I’m not saying we approached [the show] doing that, but it was definitely a moment where I cried after I read that.”
Featured image: Bilal Baig, Kaya Kanashiro, Aden Bedard. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO Max
The Byrde family is back, and things are even more complicated, and dangerous, than ever before. In a brand new teaser for season 4, we hear the voice of Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) contemplating the cascading consequences that branch off with every fresh decision we make. This is the man who plunged his family into the bloody nightmare that is now their lives, so he knows a thing or two about what one bad decision can do. In a clever and compelling twist, the teaser gives us the footage in reverse, painting a vivid portrait of how our fates, which can feel utterly mysterious, can become a lot clearer when we look back on all the decisions we made to arrive at this point. Marty is many things, but he’s always been fairly cleared-eyed about his culpability in his family’s precarious situation. He knows his decisions, and that of his wife Wendy (Laura Linney), have consequences. This being Ozark, those consequences have often been fatal.
Ozark is nearing the finish line, with season 4 marking the end of one of TV’s most relentlessly compelling and viscerally intense series of the last few years. Season 3 ended with a (spoiler alert!) major twist—the Byrde’s overseer on behalf of the Mexican cartel they work for in the Ozarks, Helen (Janet McTeer) was positioning herself to her boss as the obvious choice to take over Marty and Wendy’s operations. In a bid to have the family executed, Marty and Wendy outmaneuvered her, and the season ended with her execution, and Marty and Wendy covered in her blood. This is Ozark, bad things happen to bad people all the time.
The Mexican cartel leader, Navarro (Felix Solis) then embraces the Byrde’s, and it seems they’ve once again escaped death and will continue to be in his employ. Now we have the 4th and final season to see if Marty and Wendy to navigate these treacherous waters and keep themselves and their children alive. This being Ozark, there’s no guarantee for a happy ending, and considering what Marty and Wendy have already done to stay afloat, they will be haunted forever if they do make it out alive.
Check out the new teaser below. Ozark returns on January 21, 2022.
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Along with the rise of visual effects, old-school practical effects, the actual exploits of human beings creating incredible spectacles in real-time and real space, have also become near to magic. From Bruce Lee to Simu Liu, star of Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and every Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Cruise, and Daniel Craig in between, fight sequences, car chases, and action scenes of truly epic proportions have become high art. Whether it’s James Bond conjuring a makeshift bungee cord and leaping off a bridge in No Time To Die, Natasha Romanoff fighting off a dozen assassins at the start of Black Widow, or Shang-Chi facing down three goons and one spectacularly colossal henchman called Razor Fist (played by real-life colossus Florian Munteanu) on a runaway bus, we now expect our action sequences to look and feel real while suspending our disbelief at what a human being, even one as skilled as Shang-Chi, is capable of.
As talented as someone as Simu Liu is, we know it takes a village to create a fight sequence that will sate our appetite for the over-the-top, incredibly realistic (if entirely impossible) fight sequence these days. Enter fight coordinator Andy Cheng, who helped conceive of and create one of Shang-Chi’s most breathless sequences, the early scene in which Shang-Chi reveals his skills to best friend Katy (Awkwafina) while taking on those aforementioned bad dudes on a bus climbing and descending the hills of San Francisco.
“We started on this sequence on day one,” Cheng says, about crafting the moment that properly introduces Marvel’s first Asian superhero into the MCU with a thrilling display of multiple martial arts. Cheng’s little brother, second unit director Brad Allan, who tragically passed away recently, was the one who brought Cheng into the fold. Cheng’s mission was to introduce Shang-Chi’s immense skill set in a very compressed space. Adding to the degree of difficulty was the fact that the space was moving, and there would be around a dozen non-combatants in the frame. “This sequence was right there in the script from the very beginning,” Cheng continues, “you’ve got this bad guy who comes to try and take Shang-Chi’s pendant. I remember from the very beginning, we don’t really have any guide on how to do this, so I came up with some ideas.”
Those ideas included the moment Shang-Chi’s problems go from bad to bonkers. The first three goons who approach Shang-Chi can certainly kick some butt, but our hero has been trained since he was a child by his father Wenwu (Tony Leung) to be a peerless fighter. After mixing it up, and momentarily besting, the three goons, Shang-Chi’s real challenge steps forward.
Enter Razor Fist. Played by the German-Romanian actor and former heavyweight boxer Florian Munteanu, who stands at 6’4″ and 245lbs of pure muscle, Razor Fist would be an issue even without his titular razored appendage. As he and Shang-Chi fight, Razor Fist ends up cutting the careening bus in half. “We storyboarded out how to cut the bus in half, how Shang-Chi jumps outside of the bus, scrambles up to the top, and comes back through the front door. We had many, many versions of this scene, maybe 20 versions,” Cheng says.
Cheng worked through the various elements of the fight, piecing them together and getting feedback from his brother Brad and director Destin Daniel Cretton. He also kept upping the stakes. Not only does Razor Fist cut the bus in half, but the brakes get cut in the process. And the bus driver gets knocked out. And Shang-Chi has to protect not only his best friend Katy but the other passengers as well.
To create the effect of a battle inside a split bus careening down the hills of San Francisco, Cheng and his team utilized two gimbals for the two sections of the bus. “We have one gimbal that’s for the little movements and normal driving, just shaking the bus,” he says. “Then we have a higher gimbal, maybe 15-feet high, and everyone has to be wired for that. We have to soft pad all the corners, and that gimbal can turn the bus 45-degrees so our characters can fall out of the window. It’s almost like a roller coaster. During the rehearsal, we spent a week testing the low gimbal and high gimbal, testing the speed and rotation, so everyone could get used to being inside the bus and feeling comfortable.”
The fight between Shang-Chi and Razor Fist is not only a thrilling example of the seamless blend of practical and visual effects, but it’s also a symphony of competing styles. Shang-Chi is a martial arts polymath, having mastered multiple disciplines. Razor Fist is a colossus of power and speed. Threaded into their balletic brutality is a bit of parkour, as Shang-Chi proves capable of scampering in, around, and over the bus, both inside and out. A lot of the fighting was done by the actors themselves.
“Simu can do everything,” Cheng says. “He’s doing the big stunts, doing the parkour, the shot on the rooftop, and coming back through, so I’d say 80-90 percent is Simu. We have stunt doubles, but Simu can do it all. He’s a very talented guy.”
And for the big guy?
“For Razor Fist, it’s 100% Florian Munteanu, we have no stunt double for him, he’s too big!” Cheng says. “So he does every single thing. It’s very hard to find a stunt double his size who can move like him. He’s a very talented actor and a tough guy. He’d hit his forehead because his head almost touches the ceiling of the bus.
As for Razor Fist’s signature weapon, in reality, Munteanu was wearing a green motion capture glove that, for a time, had a floppy plastic blade so that Liu could act against where the digitized blade would be added. Eventually, though, Cheng says, the floppy plastic razor became a nuisance, so they did away with it.
Shang-Chi’s fighting style, meanwhile, was the culmination of a lot of thought and training. Cheng says that what they didn’t want to do was make another Jackie Chan, whose legendary abilities and charisma on screen included his characteristic use of whatever was at hand as a weapon or a stalling tactic. “We know it’s very hard to avoid that comparison when Shang-Chi is dodging punches and using objects because you right away think of Jackie Chan, he’s such a legend,” Cheng says.
If Cheng was shading Shang-Chi’s skills towards any former icon, it was Bruce Lee. Shang-Chi was first introduced in Marvel comics only a few months after Lee’s death, and Marvel artist Paul Gulacy has said the character was modeled after Bruce Lee. “I pitched in the very beginning that of all the Marvel superheroes, no character is really based on kicking, so we wanted more kicking, but he’s also a master of Kung Fu, which he got from his father, and he’s a master of Tai Chi from his mother, and those combine to create a Shang-Chi style.”
“It’s everything,” Cheng says. “He can use weapons, he can do Kung Fu, Tai Chi, and by the end, he has the ten rings superhero power. We wanted to give him his own style.”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is available on Disney+ and Digital 4k, and Blu-ray and DVD on November 30.
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“Ever since I got bitten by that spider, I’ve only had one week when my life felt normal—and that’s when you found out.” This is what Peter Parker (Tom Holland) says to MJ (Zendaya) at the start of the official trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home. Things are as bad as they’ve ever been for Peter when No Way Home begins. His mentor Tony Park has been gone for a while now, and now the whole world knows who he is thanks to Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) outing him—and framing him for murder—at the end of Far From Home. Parker finds himself in a position that no Spider-Man in any film ever has; he’s been unmasked, and his beloved New York City has turned on him.
The official trailer has a slew of brand new footage and reveals Peter will be facing even more villains than we originally suspected. The thrust of Far From Home is a spell gone bad. Peter askes Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell to make people forget he’s Spider-Man, but they botch it and end up unleashing supervillains from across the multiverse. We’ve known for a while that Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) from 2004’s Spider-Man 2 and Electro (Jamie Foxx) from 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man were some of those supervillains from Spider-Man films past who would return here. This trailer gives us our first glimpse of Electro, in fact. Then there’s the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), the very first villain in Sam Raimi’s original 2002 Spider-Man who has been teased previously, and who we finally see here. We also hear Dafoe’s voice, but we still haven’t actually seen his face thus far. Then there are the othersupervillains also returning—Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) from 2007’s Spider-Man 3 and the Lizard (Rhys Ifans) from 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man.
The trailer also revealed that Doc Ock takes doesn’t think our current Spider-Man is Peter Parker. This hints at a possible return of the Peter Parker he knows, played by Tobey Maguire, which would suggest that Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker would appear, too. Yet there’s still no glimpse of Maguire and Garfield, but that hasn’t stopped Holland from hinting at their potential involvement. At a global fan event in Los Angeles, Holland said that the film contains a “true moment in cinematic history.” He continued: “We were there on the day making it happen, and it was crazy — and I would love to tell you. I was like, ‘That’s never going to work. There’s no way you’re going to be able to get that done.’ And they did.”
We likely won’t find out precisely what he’s referring to until the movie finally screens. Jon Watts returns to direct from a script by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers.
Check out the official trailer here. Spider-Man: No Way Home hits theaters on December 17.
Here’s the official synopsis:
For the first time in the cinematic history of Spider-Man, our friendly neighborhood hero’s identity is revealed, bringing his Super Hero responsibilities into conflict with his normal life and putting those he cares about most at risk. When he enlists Doctor Strange’s help to restore his secret, the spell tears a hole in their world, releasing the most powerful villains who’ve ever fought a Spider-Man in any universe. Now, Peter will have to overcome his greatest challenge yet, which will not only forever alter his own future but the future of the Multiverse.
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Wes Anderson’s dollhouse-perfect motion pictures radiate an unmistakable sensibility brought to life by a remarkably consistent team of below-the-line talent. His last four movies featured contributions from the same production designer (Adam Stockhausen), the same cinematographer (Robert Yeoman), the same music supervisor (Randall Poster), the same costume designer (Milena Canonero ), and, crucially, the same composer: Alexandre Desplat. An eleven-time Oscar nominee and winner of two Academy Awards, Desplat teamed with Anderson on Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Isle of Dogs before creating the pared-down score for his current release The French Dispatch.
Desplat’s quirky piano pieces complement the movie’s New Yorker-inspired vibe. Set in the fictitious village of Ennui-sur-Blasé, Dispatch casts Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton along with newcomers Benicio Del Toro, Timothée Chalamet, and Jeffrey Wright in three un-related stories bound together by Anderson’s eye and Desplat’s ear.
Freakishly prolific, Desplat scores up to 11 movies a year, customizing his musical palette to suit each project’s personality. Taking a rare day off in Los Angeles, Desplat explains why Wes Anderson never over-explains and how he found inspiration for The French Dispatch in Marcel Duchamp and Duke Ellington.
Alexandre Desplat.
From one film to the next, each Wes Anderson movie requires very different music. For your Oscar-winning Grand Budapest Hotel music,you drew on the Central European folk song tradition; in Isle of Dogs, Japanese Taiko drums played a defining role. What was your key influence for The French Dispatch?
It started with the script. After I finished reading The French Dispatch, I told Wes it was the most dadaistic script he’s ever written.
As in Dadaism, the European avant-garde art movement?
Yes, artists like Marcel Duchamp from around 1915 to about 1925.
How so?
There’s no logic, no linear storyline. It’s provocative, fun, surprising so to me, the script was really Dada-influenced, even though Wes didn’t know that. I told him and suggested that the score should also be as strange and sparse.
You keep it sparse right from the start, using only solo piano to accompany the story about Benicio Del Toro’s criminally insane artist.
He’s a silent man who paints abstract paintings of a naked model [Léa Seydoux] who turns out to be a prison guard in this huge empty space. It seemed very Dada to have these sparse piano notes resonating in a huge venue. The piano became the core of the score, which lends the film continuity. As the story goes along, we have different instruments joining [the piano]. Harpsichord, tuba, bassoon, mandolin, banjo. But piano – – that’s how we started.
Your most prominent theme recurs throughout the film’s climactic story about the kidnapping of a police chief’s son. For “Police Cooking,” you used a grand total of three notes played in the piano’s bass register with the left hand.
You’re probably thinking of this. [Desplat plays the piano riff].
Yeah, it’s kind of hypnotic! Why did you come up with such a simple melody?
There’s so much to watch and pay attention to with the visuals. On top of that, actors are delivering pages of lines, so if I had written a crazy full-speed bombastic score, there’d be no way you would be able to digest what’s going on. Therefore the music needed to be obsessively repetitive. It reminds me of what I did on [2004 Nicole Kidman movie] Birth. I used four flutes for the opening and repeated that, with some variations but always at this high register. That allowed me to do anything with the rest of the orchestra – – French horns, tubas, strings, bassoons. Here it’s the same concept except it’s just a few instruments.
It feels like the music leaves room for the performances to breathe?
If I’d tried to do more, it would have killed the actors, making it impossible to listen to them, follow them, be attracted to them. The music would have just taken over. That’s why I needed the music to be sparse, and uh… inexorable.
The music cues do an uncannily effective job of complementing the eccentric characters who get caught up in this zany scheme.
It shows that you don’t always have to be bombastic Sometimes you can be minimal and still be musical and efficient. That’s one of the things I learned from doing so many European movies as a young composer. Before I became a Hollywood composer.
Well, you write to the movie. If you’re scoring a Godzilla. . .
Of course. If there are buildings falling down and planes exploding, yes you have to be bigger.
In French Dispatch, the fictional singer “Tip Top” sounds like an homage to real sixties French pop star Christophe. Did French musical traditions influence your score for this film?
Aside from the [Dadaism-era composer-pianist] Eric Satie reference, no. When I saw the first edit of the film I came up with this jaunty, bouncy [singing] “doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.” There’s something almost jazzy about it, from the twenties, like very early Duke Ellington around 1928, coming from ragtime with the left hand. I gave a concert yesterday at the Wallace Annenberg theater here [in L.A.] and realized the music for this movie is actually more American than French.
That’s right. The opening number features a tuba that would sound right at home in New Orleans.
And then harpsichord. It’s a strange cocktail.
So Wes Anderson shows you a rough cut of the film, you score to picture and then, did he give you a lot of notes about what he likes, what he wants, what works, what doesn’t work?
I would say that directors who talk less are always more efficient with me. I know how to read between the lines. It gives me more freedom – – even though it’s fake freedom because there’s no freedom when you’re a film composer. But you feel as if you can express yourself much better rather than having a director explaining every shot in detail. A Wes Anderson, or a Roman Polanski, or a Stephen Frears – – they don’t talk much. They’ll give you just little hints of what you should try, and that actually allows you to fly, quicker.
Sounds like you’re already on the same wavelength.
I wrote ten or twelve pieces, maybe more, but we chose the ones that are in the film. Then Wes goes into the editing room, interweaves the music into the picture very intimately, then I go back and add another layer of instrumentation or orchestration. It goes very fast because we understand each other very well.
When you saw the French Dispatch final cut for the first time with your music, how did you react?
What really stunned me was not the music really but the virtuosity that Wes has achieved with his directing. Whew! He’s so strong. I mean, I’m not sure people understand how incredible his technique is. For what you call below the line – – cinematography, furniture, sets, costumes – – it’s mad, it’s crazy – – the hair, the makeup, and it’s all one man, all Wes, all coming from his mind. That’s very rare.
You’re in Los Angeles at the moment. Are you working on a new movie out here?
I just finished one for Stephen Frears [The Lost King] and I’m about to start a Moliere play.
Setting aside for a minute the high quality of your film scores, the sheer amount of work you produce makes most composers look like slackers by comparison. How do you create so much music?
Well, I’m given good films. If you’re given good films with good people and you work eighteen hours a day, then you’re covered.
In Red Notice, now streaming on Netflix in tandem with its theatrical run, a top FBI profiler (Dwayne Johnson) and a career criminal (Ryan Reynolds) find themselves unlikely partners to thwart a high-stakes heist and the alluring art thief (Gal Godot) at the center of it all. Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodge Ball, The Millers) wrote and directed the action-comedy, which reunites him with Johnson after the two worked together previously on Central Intelligence and Skyscraper.
Thurber describes Red Notice as a “movie for people who love movies,” crediting his inspiration for it to iconic cinema that includes Raiders of the Lost Ark, National Treasure, True Lies, Ocean’s 11, and The Thomas Crown Affair (both the original and the remake). “It’s a big cinema stew, and I tried to write a love letter to all of those films and tie a big Red Notice bow around it,” he says.
The Credits caught up with Thurber, who discussed recruiting his A-list cast, overcoming production challenges posed by the pandemic, and tapping a close connection for a cameo. Edited interview excerpts follow.
Tell me about casting this powerhouse trio. This is your third collaboration with Dwayne Johnson, so I imagine you have a shorthand with him.
Dwayne and I have worked together for 7-1/2 years now, and we’ve become friends outside of work. When we were making Skyscraper, which is my last film, we went out to dinner and I told him the story of Red Notice, I pitched him the idea, and he said I’m in. And when the biggest star in the world, according to body-mass index, says he wants to be in your movie, you better start writing. So I started working on the idea in my little notebook, writing down thoughts, different notions, and I wrote Gal Godot’s name. She was the only person I wanted for the film. I flew to London to meet her and pitch her the idea and she said yes. So I had Dwayne and I had Gal and then I went and wrote the script, writing the Nolan Booth role with Ryan Reynolds in mind, with his voice as best as I could approximate it. I had known Ryan for 10 years or more and have always been a fan. We sent him the script — he was the only person we sent the script to — he read it overnight and said yes the next day, and then I had my three No. 1 choices.
Many of the lines in the script play to perfection for the actors who are saying them or the actors they pertain to. One example is when Ryan Reynolds advises Dwayne Johnson to “lift with your neck.” So how did envisioning the actors help with the writing?
I think as we worked together, I continued to craft and hone the script to their strengths. And fortunately, all three of them have many, many strengths. You mentioned that line, “Lift with your neck,” which makes me laugh every time, and that’s just a classic Ryan improv line. I have an open-door policy on improv. I welcome it, especially when you have somebody like Ryan who is so gifted in that space. I would say the movie is 85-90% written, 10-15% improv, but that 10-15% makes all the difference, and Ryan really delivers those lines as no one else can. And Dwayne’s got a pretty good sense of humor about himself.
From the opening scenes, the camera moves fast, and the stunts are really original, especially the one with a missile going through a helicopter’s doors. What was involved in choreographing these scenes?
Well, when you deal with action at the scale that we were attempting for Red Notice, it’s all challenging. And you want to do something that is fresh, that feels like something you hadn’t quite seen before. Fortunately, when you do big action sequences, you have a lot of support. I’ve got an incredible stunt team, an incredible special effects team, a visual effects team; my cinematographer is second to none; our production designer, Andy Nicholson, is an Academy Award nominee. You preview these shots, you storyboard these shots, you have endless, endless meetings about these shots and how you’re going to execute them. So there’s so much planning and preparation that goes into not only trying to execute these actions scenes at a very, very high level but also safely, of course. The missile through the helicopter is a gag that I’ve wanted to do for 20 years probably. I’d never seen it done in any film, and I was just hopeful that I could do it before somebody else beat me to the punch. It’s a small moment of joy for me to get to do it.
In the end credits, upward of six or seven visual effects companies are listed. How were all of their contributions coordinated?
We had Craig Hammack of ILM as our lead supervisor. We had Richard Hoover, who was an Academy Award winner for Blade Runner 2049, who has impeccable taste and incredible skill, as our visual effects supervisor. The reason we had to have so many visual effects houses is when we started this movie, I think we had about 400 planned visual effects shots. But the pandemic hit and we had to shut down for six months — about halfway through our shoot, almost to the day — and when we came back we had to figure out how to shoot a film that we were supposed to go around the world for without leaving Atlanta. That ballooned our visual effects shot count from about 400 to 1,500. So when you see Dwayne and Gal dancing in Sotto Voce’s ballroom, they’re dancing by themselves, there’s nobody else in that room. We brought all of the extras in after and had to shoot plates and then digitally stitch all of that together. And we had to do that many, many, many times, where we put people together in rooms who weren’t actually there at the same time. It’s an incredible challenge and it’s incredibly expensive, incredibly time-consuming, and to make it seamless takes a really keen eye.
What other impact did the pandemic have on the production?
We were supposed to go around the world and shoot this film, but we couldn’t, so we built the CastleSant‘Angelo in a parking lot in Atlanta. We built the interiors of the museum, the jungle we go into, the lagoon, in Atlanta. When we shot the mineshaft chase at the end, we actually went to a limestone mine in northern Atlanta and spent two weeks about 400 feet underground shooting that sequence, and then came back and shot the actors on stage in the car and we put those two pieces together.
You have a cameo in the film, as Exhausted Director at Bar. Do you always make an appearance in your films?
Not every single one, but almost every single one. In Skyscraper, I’m just an extra in the background. I walk out with my wife and my firstborn child at the time. And here, I thought it’d be fun to sit next to Dwayne in a scene. It’s super fun. It’s mostly just for my kids. As they get older, they can see what I looked like before I was old and gray.
The way Red Notice ends, are we set up for a sequel?
The short answer is, yes, of course. The long answer is I love these characters, I love this world, I love this tone. And as somebody who writes and directs these things, it’s impossible for me to not tinker and think about what the next adventure would be, what the next mystery, next heist, would be. So I certainly have a pretty good idea of what would happen in the next installment, but there’s nothing official yet.
Red Notice has had a theatrical run before its premiere on Netflix. How do you view this distribution model?
It’s a first for me. It’s also my first film for Netflix, I hope the first of many. I’ve had an incredible experience. From the filmmaker’s side, it’s certainly really nice to not be stressed about box office. When you make the kind of movies I make, which are big tent studio movies, opening weekends are really nerve-wracking. I’ve had great opening weekends, I’ve had opening weekends that were tough. That part I don’t miss. What was stunning to me to learn, as I was working with Netflix and they were walking me through their model and their approach, is that more people will watch Red Notice on Netflix in the first three days than have seen all of my films in their entire theatrical release combined. And so, if your goal as a storyteller, as a filmmaker, is to have your story seen and enjoyed by the maximum amount of people, then Netflix is the only place in town, and I can’t wait for that.
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