This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on January 19. Emile Mosseri is nominated for Original Score.
Dream-like piano notes accompany the Yee family as they gaze out the windows of their beat-up station wagon, on their way to a new home in rural Arkansas. Hoping to make it as a farmer, patriarch Jacob (Steven Yeun) is in the process of uprooting his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), and American-born children, Anne (Noel Cho) and David (Alan S. Kim), from California to this sparsely populated corner of the rural South.
Steven Yeun, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn, Yeri Han, Noel Cho Director Lee Isaac Chung Credit: Josh Ethan Johnson
Minari, Lee Isaac Chung’s 2020 Sundance entry which took home the festival’s narrative feature jury prize and the audience award, is an evocative and sometimes heart-wrenching depiction of the nuts and bolts of pursuing the American dream, set to a sensitive, uplifting score by the composer Emile Mosseri.
Emile Mosseri. Photographer Credit: John Marsico
The move is difficult from day one. Husband and wife work together as chicken sexers, separating female chicks, who become egg layers and meat, from the males, which are killed, in a grim basement hatchery. Monica is desperate to move closer to a city and a Korean community. The raised mobile home Jacob bought doesn’t even have stairs to get inside. When the couple and their children are indoors, the only sounds seem to be that of strained conversation.
Steven Yeun. Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh
Outside their moribund home, however, the vast new property glows under a hot sun, and as Anne and David explore and Jacob’s Korean produce begins to sprout, Mosseri’s music seems to draw the family closer and closer to their land. The composer began working while Minari was only at the script stage, and Lachlan Milne, the DP, was still shooting when he first heard pieces of the score. “He shot more outdoor scenes that gave space to my music, which was such a cool thing for me,” Mosseri says. “It was a dream to see it all come together that way.”
Given the hand-in-hand feeling of the film’s music and its outdoor settings, did Mosseri create any of his compositions in the natural world itself? Not quite. Most of the score was already written — in his Los Angeles studio — before he headed down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the film was shot. “Directors and producers can be romantic about a composer being in the physical space outdoors to get inspiration, smelling the smells and feeling the air. I like that idea,” he says, “but most of the music was written before I went down there. But after that I like to think that being there helped. Certainly doesn’t hurt.”
Alan S. Kim, Noel Cho. Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh/A24
Unable to agree on where to live, what to do for work, or who should care for their children, Jacob and Monica compromise by bringing Monica’s mother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung) over from Korea to help care for Anne and David. She’s not, as David points out, a typical grandma. In between watching wrestling on television, however, it’s she who plants the titular minari. For the children, the creek at the edge of their property is a source of snakes and potential danger, but for Soonja, it’s an ideal incubator for her minari seeds, a versatile plant, she tells her grandchildren, which can go in almost anything.
Yuh-jung Youn. Courtesy of A24
But it’s also Soonja’s presence which leads to the most devastating occurrence in a family journey that’s already been plenty difficult. Mosseri’s score, brought in partway through this final, horrible moment, is the release — what we’re witnessing seems like it couldn’t be any worse and yet the scene transforms into a cleansing event, freeing Jacob and Monica of all the angst and unhappiness they’ve held against one other.
Minari is clearly set in the 1980s, but Mosseri avoided any overt musical reference to that era. “We didn’t want a super synthetic score. But I did want to introduce some element from the 80s that was tucked in,” he says, so if you listen carefully, in between a vintage guitar, vocals (both Mosseri’s own) and a Macedonian orchestra, you’ll hear hints of a vintage synthesizer doubled with flutes. “It felt both synthetic and organic at the same time, and there was some unsturdiness to the sound that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Which served the purpose thematically, referencing the unsturdiness of the family right at that moment but also stylistically, lightly referencing the 80s.”
Instead of looking to the time period for inspiration, the composer drew on the rich vein of the family’s own complicated dynamics. David has a heart murmur. Soonja is more wisecracking than she is tender. The all-white church everyone attends is welcoming, but also a little unintentionally racist. Jacob’s farmhand, Paul (Will Patton), is both knowledgeable and a cuckoo Evangelical who performs exorcisms around the farm fields and drags an enormous wooden cross through backcountry roads every Sunday. These disparate elements of the family’s experience all come together in Mosseri’s score. “I was shooting for a thing, as I initially described it to Isaac, as the music having this glowing, beating heart that’s essentially the heart of the family, which has beauty and is uplifting,” he says, “but also with tension, pain, struggle, and dissonance on top of it.”
Will Patton, Steven Yeun. Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh/A24
Minari will get a theatrical and on-demand release on February 12.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on March 31. For part II of this interview, click here.
Actors Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried go for their characters’ leisurely evening stroll outside San Marino’s Huntington Library, which is subbing in for William Randolph Hearst’s Hearst Castle at San Simeon.The only thing is, it’s not night – and the actors are wearing custom-tinted contact lenses to help them avoid squinting, due to the additional bright lights director of photography Erik Messerschmidt has added to make his day-for-night photography appear correct in the final image.
Day-for-night is not the only classic technique the Oscar-nominated cinematographer utilized on David Fincher’s Oscar-nominated movie, Mank. The film, which tells the tale of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz’s path to writing the screenplay for 1941’s Citizen Kane, pays homage not only to Mank himself but to that film’s legendary cinematographer, Gregg Toland. And while the two made use of some of Toland’s techniques, they did so with great care. “We refused to allow ourselves to think of Toland exclusively,” says Fincher. “We didn’t want to ape – we wanted to inhabit.”
Director of Photography Erik Messerschmidt, ASC (Photo: Nikolai Loveikis/NETFLIX
He and Messerschmidt have worked together over two seasons of the director’s intriguing crime series, Mindhunter, and Fincher had mentioned the film project, written by his father Jack Fincher, to his DP on occasion. The two were prepping another film, World War Z 2, but when the project came to halt, Messerschmidt went off to South Africa to shoot several episodes of HBO Max’s Raised by Wolves. While there, he says, “David e-mailed me and said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna do this movie, Mank, about Herman Mankiewicz. Would you like to do it?’” The answer, of course, was yes.
MANK (2020) Gary Oldman and David Fincher. Cr: Miles Crist/NETFLIX
Messerschmidt hadn’t seen Citizen Kane since his student days, so he got himself reacquainted, and not just with the look. “There are these signature moments in the movie,” he notes. “But also the plot structure, the cutting pattern, and the composition. It was something I knew I absolutely needed to revisit if we were making a movie about that time.”
Over the course of a few weeks, he built a look book, comprised of several hundred images, which he sent to Fincher, some of which the director felt fit and some not. “That’s how we built our vocabulary for the movie,” Messerschmidt says.
It was clear from the get-go that they were going to be shooting Mank in black and white. That was essentially a given, due to the subject, period, and, most importantly, the film being referenced, though there were others. “We talked about black and white photography of the period,” Fincher explains, “and then expanded our research to include some of our favorite later work, whose technique might apply,” movies like 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, shot by the legendary James Wong Howe, and In Cold Blood (1967), filmed by Conrad Hall.
Featured image: Amanda Seyfried is Marion Davies in Mank. Courtesy Netflix.
One thing they were both conscious of and concerned about was avoiding the tendency of some modern filmmakers to use black and white in such a way that it becomes a parody of itself. “I was very concerned about getting seduced by that, and going, ‘Oh, great, I can do my best Big Combo (1955) here,’” Messerschmidt says. “David was sensitive to that, too. For us, it was, ‘Okay, black and white is appropriate for the movie. Now, how do we appropriately approach it?’ It was a matter of staying sensitive to how it served the movie, and then leaning into it, and paying homage when it felt appropriate.”
Neither really considered shooting using film, but more about what film looks like. “We talked about the qualities of film that we liked, and qualities of film that we didn’t like, as well,” Messerschmidt says. “The hope was to emulate and lean into the things that we liked and exploit them.”
Though they would be shooting digitally, as they began testing, using both color and black and white cameras, it quickly became apparent that they wanted the latter. “It forces you to make certain concessions,” Messerschmidt explains. “For example, you can’t use blue screen to make tonal separations in the DI,” the digital intermediate stage, where color grading takes place since the blue tone wouldn’t appear in a black and white image. “So that decision informed a bunch of other choices.”
The filmmakers had used RED Digital Cinema’s Dragon-X, which has a 6K sensor with a frame that emulates Super 35mm, on the first season of Mindhunter, and graduated to the 8K Monstro for the second – but actually had RED make them five camera bodies with an 8K Super 35 black and white Dragon sensor for this project. “We shot Super 35, specifically, because we wanted lots of depth of field, for which the large format Monstro sensor would be been antithetical to,” the DP explains. “The camera has a tremendous tonal depth to it that you just don’t get when you shoot color and simply desaturate the image to get black and white. It’s rated at ASA 3200, and when you push it really fast, you get a little bit of noise in the signal, which looks a lot like grain,” which they supplemented in post, or even attenuated it when a scene didn’t call for it.
Messerschmidt (with glasses) and team with a pair of RED Digital Cinema black and white Dragon-X cameras L-R: B Camera Operator Will Dearborn, Messerschmidt, A Camera Operator Brian Osmond, Boom Operator Michael Primmer. (Photo: Miles Crist/NETFLIX)
For lenses, even though he spent quite a lot of time with Panavision’s Dan Sasaki, testing possible candidates, Messerschmidt eventually went with the same Summilux spherical lenses he and Fincher had been using for two seasons on Mindhunter. “We looked at larger format lenses, Master Primes, ARRI Signature Primes. I was mostly looking for lenses that would perform well at an f8.0 or f11.0 – and we even shot some at f16.0. And most modern lenses really fall apart past f5.6 or f8.0. They lose a tremendous amount of resolution. And part of that is that diffraction happens when the light is going through the really small iris producing an almost astigmatism-like blurry image. We needed lenses that would give very high resolution at deep stops, with minimal diffraction. And it was a pleasant surprise that the lenses we had used on two seasons of Mindhunter did just that.”
The aspect ratio was also one that was a carryover from Mindhunter, Fincher’s favorite, one which is midway between widescreen “Scope” and the 16:9 HD frame: 2.20:1, which Messerschmidt affectionately calls “Finchervision.” “I feel 2.40 is too ‘cropped’ for a television display,” Fincher says, “and 1.78:1 is too tall for a theater, so 2.21:1 is a good median range, to my eye.”
Featured image: Gary Oldman as Herman J. Mankiewicz, apparently outside Paramount’s historic Marathon entrance, actually recreated instead by production designer Don Burt on the studio’s New York Street (Photo: Miles Crist)
This interview with Daniel Lopez Muñoz is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on December 24, before the film was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film.
Once again Pixar tackles the subjects of the meaning of life, fearlessness in the face of change, synchronicity, and inspiration in their new film Soul. It’s the first time, however, that they have centered the story on a Black man, that of middle school band teacher and jazz pianist Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx). Daniel Lopez Muñoz has worked in such diverse roles for Pixar as a character designer for Up and Coco, color script artist for Finding Dory, production designer for The Good Dinosaur, and visual development artist for Monsters University. On Soul, he is credited as the character art director. The Credits spoke to Muñoz about how he influences the look and style of the lead character in Pixar’s most ambitious film to date.
On IMDB you are listed as character art director for Soul. Titles can mean different things at Pixar. What did your job entail?
It does tend to differ from production to production. To give you a little bit of history on my participation on Soul, the film had a core team, and I came on through the request of Pete Docter to try to find Joe Gardner, the main character of the film. There are a number of artists that came in early on in the process to try to get different perspectives for the look of the character.
Can you point to several aspects of Joe’s character that you had a hand in?
Early on, we tried different approaches. At one time he was a shorter, stockier guy. We spent a lot of time looking at jazz artists from the mid-twentieth century, to try to grasp some inspiration of a personality from famous jazz musicians like Monk, for example. We tried that, but what succeeded was when we turned to something more familiar. There was something about Pete Docter’s persona that attracted me to a taller, loose, lanky body. I thought Pete must have gone through life trying to fit into places because he’s so tall, but also seeing so much. Joe is a guy who is thinking of what’s on the horizon, what’s beyond the life that he has currently because he wants to reach further. So we thought it would be cool if he towered over people, and had his heads in the clouds most of the time when thinking about what his life could be. But also it would be fun for a character like 22 to inhabit this body that has to maneuver through a crowded city like New York. We didn’t want him to be a handsome man, we wanted him to feel more like an everyday Joe, hence the name. He had to have some imperfections that would make overcoming them that much more interesting. We imagined him having been the awkward kid, trying to play with the cool kids. We gave him a long back and a belly. He’s middle-aged. He’s almost past his prime, and he’s trying to make it in the jazz world, so that has to be apparent from the moment you first see the character, and that’s something we wanted to make sure the audience understands right away.
He really has a jazz pianist’s fingers. There had to be conversation and consideration around that.
Oh yes, that was actually very important, because these hands were going to be onscreen in close-up. Basically, it’s the working tool of this artist, so it was important to give them enough character that they could be on the big screen. More important for us is they would also feel like the hands of a true African-American pianist. We looked at and studied nearly every famous jazz musician, and studied the way the fingernails are different. We wanted to make sure we were true to the way Joe should be, including the length of his fingers. There were a number of pianists we studied, and we put up their pictures for reference, both contemporary and from the past. Then we did a lot of drawings to guide the animators.
There is such a wide variety of Black and Brown skin represented in the characters of Soul. How did you support and help foster that?
We were very keen on representing a wide variety of skin tones and of people and mixes of people of color, because in New York you have the folks that immigrated from the North and the South, and started a whole Harlem Renaissance from the great migration, but there are also lots of people that came from the Caribbean, and there are lots of Latin influences as well, so that gives you a really great range of skin tones. For Joe, I wanted to inspire artists with what I learned from studying Harlem Renaissance artists of the 20th century. There are some great painters that were really bold with color, and what I learned from studying those paintings was that in order to create the various African American Black skin tones, you actually have to mix a number of different solid colors. I found that so interesting, because it’s like it meant including every color. You get different browns out of mixing yellows and greens and reds and blues. We wanted the picture to feel real, but certainly in animation you can get away with more pushed looks. I wanted to inspire the artists to bring some of that richness into the skin of Joe, so that it has that playfulness, and that variety that I saw represented in those paintings.
Disney animator Milt Kahl’s influence can be seen in the way Joe seems inspired by Roger from 101 Dalmatians, but the influence of British illustrator Ronald Searle can be seen in the character designs as well.
It’s so great that you noticed that. I haven’t actually discussed that with anybody when I was designing Joe. You have the character Roger in 101 Dalmatians and he is obviously a very classic, white character from a Disney film, but I really wanted to find a new character that could live on the way that character did, so there are certainly some influences there, but the artist I really narrowed my sights on was Searle. He had an incredible eye for representing people’s personalities and their interior persona onto a caricature in a wonderful, masterful way. He hadn’t done that many representations of people of color. Most of his work is of the white people surrounding him in England. We got inspiration from him, but had to find our own way, thinking of his shapes and angles, in creating the diverse characters in the New York cityscape.
The characters in this story are so well developed in both personality and look, and it makes a big difference in connecting to Soul.
I can remember the time in my career when it was very important as an artist to get some interesting shapes on the page, but that’s a given now. What’s more important now is to capture the essence or the soul. If we’ve done our work correctly with this film, people will hopefully say that that we were able to find a connection and a familiarity with the characters, and that they felt like people they knew from their own lives. That would be a wonderful response.
Soul streams on Disney+ starting on December 25th.
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This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on April 13.
Excitement was running high. The team behind Sound of Metal, Darius Marder’s offbeat drama about a punk rock drummer (Riz Ahmed) who faces life-changing decisions after losing his hearing, was gathered together via Zoom to watch the Oscar nomination announcements. Mikkel E.G. Nielsen, the film’s editor, was settled in front of his computer at his home in Copenhagen when the unthinkable happened. The screen went blank.
“My son needed some power for his phone so he unplugged the computer and everything went dead,” says Nielsen, adding with a smile. “That’s what we call certain needs for certain times.”
When the connection was re-established, Nielsen learned that the film had received six nods, including Best Picture, and that he was nominated in the Best Film Editing category. In addition to being a first for Nielsen, it’s the first time a Scandinavian-born editor has been recognized by the Academy.
Mikkel E.G. Nielsen
“It’s not anything I have ever dreamed of, so I’m honored and grateful,” continues Nielsen as he chats on the aforementioned computer. “We all are grateful that the film is getting this kind of attention.”
Nielsen, whose credits include Madame Bovary (2014) and Beasts of No Nation (2015), admits that he never imagined his work on Sound of Metal would get this reaction. As he tells it, he landed the gig by luck.
Though Sound of Metal was shot in Marder’s home state of Massachusetts, he wanted to make it an international affair. Ahmed, whose performance landed him a Best Actor nod, is from London. Cinematographer Daniël Bouquet is Dutch. The sound mix was done in Mexico, headed by French sound designer Nicolas Becker. (Becker, along with Jaime Baksht, Michelle Couttolenc, Carlos Cortés Navarrete, and Phillip Bladh, is nominated in the Best Sound category.)
Riz Ahmed is Ruben in SOUND OF METAL. Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Marder wanted a Scandinavian editor to cut the film. Principal photography was nearly finished before he started interviewing possible candidates. Nielsen wasn’t the first. After reading the script and watching dailies, he knew Sound of Metal was special. Marder, who began his career as an editor, had been developing the film for over a decade. The inspiration initially came when he signed on to cut a documentary about a punk rock band shot by Derek Cianfrance. Marder learned that Cianfrance had been a drummer but gave it up after developing tinnitus. And the idea for Sound of Metal was born. Marder wrote the screenplay with his brother Abraham Marder and shares story credit with Cianfrance. All three are nominated for Best Original Screenplay.
When Nielsen first met Marder, he detailed how he wanted the process to work. Nielsen let him talk, but after Marder finished, Nielsen surprised the director.
“I asked if he wanted to hear how it would be if I edited the film,” Nielsen remembers. “I can’t just jump into this with someone who’s had it in his system for 12 years. I have to sit with it for a while. I have to find my own thing. I’m not sure about anything. I don’t know anything but I know how to get somewhere. How else would I ever get involved in the characters?”
Turns out that’s exactly what Marder wanted to hear. He had promised himself that he would hire the first editor who challenged his vision. Nielsen got the job by insisting that Marder agree to let him do the first cut completely on his own.
“The first two or three weeks I didn’t even edit,” continues Nielsen. “I only watched and selected material to find the rhythm. How it breathes. How the DP works with the camera. How Darius is talking to his actors. What the actors do in the scene. Suddenly, you find that the film has its own language. I knew this is how I’m gonna edit it.”
The initial cut came in at three hours and 45 minutes. It was long, but it allowed Nielsen to experiment and find unique moments that weren’t obvious in the script.
“They shot a lot of extra scenes,” explains Nielsen. “I put some things together which I don’t think were as they had been intended. You could say that I made mistakes but sometimes these mistakes become hidden gems. That’s something we would never have found if Darius and I were working together.”
As an example, Nielsen cites an early scene where you see Ruben, Ahmed’s character, performing his morning routine. He wakes up in the airstream that he and his girlfriend and musical partner Lou (Olivia Cooke) live in while on tour, brews the coffee, blends a smoothie, plays an old blues song, and does push-ups. The sequence is mundane, filled with everyday sounds. But it becomes heartbreaking after Ruben loses his hearing and the same tasks are performed in complete silence.
Riz Ahmed is Ruben and Olivia Cooke is Lou in SOUND OF METAL. Courtesy of Amazon Studios
“And that’s a language we create because we want to awaken your senses. I think it’s almost the same in the first pass as it is in the final film,” adds Nielsen. “Sometimes you just hit it. That’s how the material speaks to you. This is how it wants to be put together, very clinical, just boom, boom, boom.”
Together, Marder and Nielsen shaped the initial cut into the final two-hour, ten-minute version. They strove to put the audience into Ruben’s head throughout the journey. We meet him as a cult musician and recovering addict. We feel his frustration when he loses his hearing and is pushed into entering a facility specifically designed for deaf addicts. It is run by a recovering alcoholic (Paul Raci, who was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category) who lost his hearing in Vietnam. Finally, we share Ruben’s desperation as he attempts to regain his previous life with cochlear implants and to reunite with Lou.
Riz Ahmed is Ruben and Paul Raci is Joe in SOUND OF METAL. Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Through the process, Nielsen could feel the film’s unique rhythm taking shape. Sound of Metal starts out loud and jarring with its concert scenes. The rehab sequences offer a quiet serenity that is so real, to Nielsen, they play like a documentary. The post-cochlear implant segment feels uncomfortable and disorienting as Ruben struggles to return to his previous life.
“You find the arc of the film but then you start working with the internal and the external sounds of it. Sound is so incredibly powerful from an editor’s point of view because it’s storytelling,” says Nielsen. “Early on in the process, we found out that the concert should open the film. By doing this, we have a circle, first of Ruben sitting at the drums and then Ruben sitting on a city bench. You start and end with exactly the same image. It’s like he’s eager to get started and he’s eager to find inner peace in the end. For me, it’s a circle.”
Sound of Metal is streaming now on Amazon Prime.
For more of our interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on January 25, since then, Summerville has been nominated for Best Costume Design.
David Fincher’s black and white epic, Mank, revisits the storied Hollywood era of the late 1930s when Orson Welles was writing what would go down in history as one of the best films of all time, Citizen Kane. But did he write it alone or with the help of Herman Mankiewicz, a once sought after screenwriter fallen prey to twin drinking and gambling problems? In Fincher’s version of events, based on a screenplay by his father, Jack Fincher, Mank the man (Gary Oldman) may have burned through the industry’s goodwill, but he was indubitably a co-writer on the film. However, the question isn’t central to Mank the movie.
Instead, the film’s focus is a gloves-off look at the gilded lives of Depression-era honchos Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), and the effect their political meddling and pay machinations have on the vast army of writers, grips, costume designers, and makeup artists who work beneath them. For Mank costume designer Trish Summerville (Red Sparrow, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), “one of the things I really enjoyed about the film was that we got to dress every walk of life of the 30s and 40s.” Though much of the film is set in an out-of-the-way house where Mank has been set up to heal from an injury and dry out, and spends most of his time in bed in a robe, Summerville’s work spans ample plebeian daywear to Marion Davies’s (Amanda Seyfried) furs (a high-end faux fur hand-painted to mimic silver mink) and gowns and the sharply tailored suits favored by Los Angeles power brokers of the day.
MANK (2020). Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies. Courtesy NETFLIX
Given the time period, Summerville and her team built rather than bought a slew of the costumes destined for characters at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. “A lot of times with period, it’s hard to find background things that are in good condition and that are the color palette that we needed,” she said. In addition to the grand glamor of a circus-themed costumed dinner party at the Hearst estate, Summerville designed size runs for more modest garb, including four or five women’s skirts styles and blouses as well as men’s trousers and dress shirts, the collars of which tend to wear out quickly. She was also selective about period headgear, particularly given that “there are a lot of comical, outlandish hats that women of that time would wear.” Avoiding what she jokingly referred to as an “elf hat” style of the era, Summerville worked closely with the hair team to get the film’s headgear to fit properly over wigs without casting shadows on the actors’ faces.
MANK (2020). Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies. NETFLIXMANK (2020). Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz and Tom Pelphrey as Joe Mankiewicz. Courtesy NETFLIX
What Summerville’s team was able to buy or rent came from a vast array of vendors. “At the time we were doing Mank, there were about nine or ten other productions that were also doing from the 30s to 40s,” she said, and a network of costume designers helped each other out, connecting one other with collectors and reproduction specialists. “You end up in the craziest of places because people are also driving from wherever they are to meet you somewhere,” said Summerville. “At one point my assistant and I would laugh because we ended up in the back of a U-Haul looking at clothes, we were in storage lockers, one day I was like, I’m going to drop a pin because where we’re going, no one may ever find us if this isn’t a real vendor.”
MANK (2020). Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz. Courtesy NETFLIX.
Mank was the first project Summerville worked at length in black and white, and she prepped by designing a color scheme over three different black and white settings on her phone. The palette was key not just in terms of translating well on screen into a range of grays, blacks, and whites that were neither dingy not screamingly bright, but needed to function in a way “that’s pleasing and that works to keep everyone in character during shooting,” she noted. “Even though we’re going to be in black and white, what colors do we want to see with our eyes on set every day? I tended to go to a lot of jewel tones, then took those colors and did pastels and muted versions of those.”
On screen, a laid-up Mank meets with Orson Welles (Tom Burke) in the film’s present, but in flashbacks we witness him crash and ruin a Hearst estate dinner party, fight the studio cronyism that destroyed Upton Sinclair’s (Bill Nye) burgeoning political career, and enjoy a few heart-to-hearts, unexpectedly thoughtful on both sides, with Marion Davies. Though Summerville rewatched Citizen Kane before diving in, the only aspect of the film she referenced was its backstage, drawing from photos of Orson Welles on the film’s set. Otherwise, the designer turned to historical resources through the Film Academy in Los Angeles, work by photographers like Hedda Harper, and “even with Mank, there’s quite a lot with him on set, there are family photos, I found Bar Mitzvah photos, photos of his kids, there was a lot of daily life photos of him as well.” And of course, there is a slew of books afforded by the fame of Mank’s main characters. “What was nice was that each of the actors who would come in, if there was a book about their character, they were also reading it,” Summerville added.
Finally, the balance of designing in present-day Hollywood for a new take on its well-documented past all came together working with director Fincher, an icon in his own right. “He’s already seen the whole film in his head completed start to finish,” said Summerville. “So when he’s explaining what he wants to you, he’s thought about it for so long his comments are very, very clear, and then he just lets you run with that.”
Mank is streaming now on Netflix.
For more of our interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on March 17.
I got a chance to speak to hair department head Mia Neal and makeup artist Sergio Lopez-Rivera about their work in George C. Wolfe’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom before the Oscar nominations were announced. Tasked with, among other challenges, turning Oscar-nominee Viola Davis into the real-life Ma was no easy feat, least of all because there wasn’t a ton of photographic evidence to work with. Add to that scorching temperatures during much of the shoot (they filmed in Pittsburgh in the summer of 2019) and the heavy makeup, wigs, and wardrobe required by the part, and Neal and Lopez-Rivera had their work cut out for them.
Spoiler alert—they succeeded. Neal, Lopez-Rivera, and hairstylist Jamika Wilson were nominated for Oscars for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Even though they were surrounded by huge talents (and a slew of other future Oscar nominees), neither of them could have guessed at how meaningful this film would have been to them at the time, or how much the world would change shortly after they wrapped. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was the late, great Chadwick Boseman’s last performance, for which he earned an Oscar nomination. By the time the news of his passing became public, we were in the midst of a global pandemic.
Neal and Lopez-Rivera discuss Boseman, Davis, the power of specificity and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Looking back on the film knowing all that’s come to pass since 2019, what are some of your feelings?
Sergio: When I first saw it, which was well after a year of working on it, I was just so emotional. Chadwick’s performance killed me, and then I just started to feel super proud to be a part of this. Just the role of Levee, the way that role is written, I believe it’s one of the greatest characters of all time. When I got the news, Viola actually called me because we were quarantining in Vancouver, we were going to be working on another movie, and I was devastated. Devastated because of the news, of course, but also devastated because I just couldn’t leave my room and go and give her a hug or anything. We had no idea. It was just absolutely awful. He just did an incredible job. I expect him to win absolutely everything.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): (L to R) Viola Davis as Ma Rainey, Director George C. Wolfe, and Chadwick Boseman as Levee. Cr. David Lee / Netflix
In designing the makeup for Ma Rainey, how much of the historical record did you have to go on?
Sergio: You can create a character from one piece of information. For Ma Rainey, I couldn’t find a lot of material about her. There was an 8×10 photo that would have been a headshot that gave me enough to be able to design the eye makeup. You can also see in this grainy black and white photograph that’s she has gold teeth in her mouth, and you also know that she had the intention of rounding out her eyes on the bottom. I saw that the liner was detached from the water table, meaning the bottom lashes of your eye, on a downward scoop. That gave me the idea that this story that this woman was trying to do what was trendy at that time. What was beautiful for a woman in the 1920s was to have big eyes and small mouths. So I told myself this story that she was applying this makeup robotically as a matter of routine because she’d done it her whole life. She comes from Vaudville, and I wanted the makeup to be very jittery and badly applied and to sit on her face. I wanted it to speak a little bit about the struggle to be her, in this life, on this hot day in Chicago in the summer. I needed to service the character without it being distracting to the audience. It works, though, because I’m respecting those lines, and also because if you put anything in Viola Davis, she’s going to make it work [laughs].
Ma Rainey makeup sketch. Courtesy Sergio Lopez-Rivera
Is it harder to transform someone as recognizable as Viola?
Mia: Viola specifically gave me permission to really go there. Everything she had read about Ma Rainey really spoke to the fact that this was not an attractive woman, and so she did not want to try to make her pretty. I think that released any boundaries around really trying to create Ma Rainey and not factoring Viola into it, just focusing on the character and knowing that as long as I get this story right around her hair, and I can articulate that to Viola, that I know it’ll be a green light and I won’t get resistance.
Sergio: I can’t stress it enough what a different experience you’re having as makeup and hair artists when you know you don’t have to handle the vanity of the actor. When you don’t have to be precious about that, when somebody releases you from that, which is exactly what Viola did. It’s the most freeing thing because you can’t hide behind anything. This powerhouse of a performer is giving you permission to go there. There was this final push I needed which was on the first day after we’ve already done the camera tests and she’s familiar with what I’m about to do, I must have been a little hesitant, and she said to me, ‘Sergio, just think of Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She could not have given me a better gift. First, because I love that movie, and second, because somebody told me that Bette Davis did her own makeup, and the reason was because no makeup artist would have the b*lls to do this to her [laughs]. I love that. I understand that logic. She couldn’t rely on another person to do this because no one would take it as far as she would.
Sergio and Jamika Wilson working on Viola on set. Courtesy Netflix.
Mia, tell me about crafting Ma’s hair.
Mia: It’s funny, Viola wore two wigs, and one of them was made of horsehair and the other was made of European hair. The night before we shot the tent scene it rained, so when we got there it was wet outside, muddy, and the humidity was definitely at 100 percent. This was the first day we were filming with the horsehair wig. I’ve never worked with horsehair, I have no idea how this wig is going to hold up, and Jamika came up to me and said, ‘The wig is not moving.’ Crazy enough, we realized that this is probably why Ma Rainey wore horsehair wigs. This thing maintained its continuity. It’s cut and formed and set into a style and you don’t have to worry about it changing. So for Ma Rainey, it was essential for her to have a wig she could travel with.
Viola getting a hair touch-up on set. Courtesy Mia Neal/Netflix.
It’s interesting how often you both used products and materials Ma would have used.
Mia: If you don’t get inside the head of these characters, it will read as fake. You have to know specifically why this person had this, why they made this decision, and if you don’t, and it’s just like, Oh this is cute! Or, Oh, that’s pretty!, when you watch a movie you’ll think, ‘This doesn’t feel right. Something about this is off.’
Sergio: When you design a character, specificity is your friend. The way you fail at this is when you’re telling the story of the makeup artist or the hairdresser, what they perceive as pretty or not pretty. You lose the authenticity of the moment. When you start to map out a character, the first thing I do is go into history. What’s the socioeconomics of this particular character? Does she come from money? Did she get an education? What does she have access to? As a black woman in the 1920s that was performing, that needed makeup, her choices were super limited. Also, she had darker skin, which was looked down upon even in her own community. The desire was always to be lighter than you are, that’s why one of the first cosmetics available to people of color was bleaching creams. You start to get these bits of actual historical truths, and then you have a foundation to build someone and make decisions on their behalf.
Chadwick Boseman as Levee, Colman Domingo as Cutler, Viola Davis as Ma Rainey, Michael Potts as Slow Drag and Glynn Turman as Toledo. Cr. David Lee/NETFLIX
So you’ve got Viola using products that would have been available in the 1920s?
Sergio: With Viola, it was relatively easy because the things I have to erase from her are the smooth skin of a 21st-century woman that has access to facials and skincare, and that 21st-century smile, which is beautiful and white and perfect. Then another trick that helps is to change their eyebrows. Because in the 1920s eyebrows are so specific, and because Ma comes from the theater, I had this idea that she would have shaved her eyebrows like a lot of women did at the time, only to draw them back with a doll-like expression that was considered very beautiful in the 1920s. I was having her trying to mimic something and not quite succeed.
Mia: Once I spoke with [Oscar-nominated costume designer] Ann Roth, and watching how Ann put Ma in a fur coat during the summertime, that gives you an idea. This woman is very decadent. She does not follow the rules, and you know that from the research—she’s married and she has a girlfriend. We know that part. Something about seeing her in the summertime with a fur coat on set me off. It spoke to the psychology behind this character, in which this is the first generation of her family in this country that’s free. She was from a sharecropper family in Georgia, she changes her name, she moves, she travels, she sings, she breaks every rule of that time period. So that’s where the hair comes in, her second wig had to be made of European hair because that’s what she sees when she looks in the magazines and she thinks, I want that. She’s not going to be denied that.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. Cr. David Lee / Netflix
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is available on Netflix.
For more on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, check out our interview with Branford Marsalis, and Oscar-nominated production designer Mark Ricker.
For more of our interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on March 23.
David Fincher‘s Mank is the most Oscar-nominated film of the year, amassing ten, thanks to the beauty and brilliance of its black-and-white execution. One of those nominations belongs to makeup department head Gigi Williams, a veteran who picks her work based on her belief in the director. In Fincher, she was collaborating with one of the most precise filmmakers in the business, and in Mank, working off a script from his father Jack Fincher, Williams had caught the director on what was likely his most personal project to date.
“If your makeup is too loud, you take away from the performance and you don’t belong in this artist’s picture, because Mank is a piece of art that everyone has dabbled in,” Williams says. “Everyone has put their piece into it, and everyone flows together so that nobody stands out. My whole career, I don’t like makeup that’s too big, that makes a statement, if you see my makeup, I’ve failed. I want to see the actor, I want to see the essence of the actor. I love the process of acting. I’m there to facilitate that.”
MANK (2020) Gary Oldman and David Fincher. Cr: Miles Crist/NETFLIX
Mank revolves around the titular Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and his efforts to write the script for what would become one of the most influential films of all time, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Mank’s task is to scribble while quarantined in the desert while he recuperates from a lifelong battle with alcoholism and a bum leg from a car accident. His efforts are simultaneously fueled and thwarted by his wunderkind director and supposed co-writer Welles (Tom Burke) and a rogue’s gallery of big-name, real-life heavies of the era, from William Hearst (Charles Dance) to Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard). Kinder souls grace Mank’s glitzy cosmos, too, including figures like Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) and his typist, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins).
Williams spoke to me via Zoom (of course), and I was briefly caught short by a piece of art on her wall behind her. It was an original Warhol, gifted to her by the man himself. “I was a Factory Girl,” Williams says. “It’s signed to me and my husband [Ronnie Cutrone], he’s dead now, he was Andy’s art assistant, so literally, for fifteen years, I was at the Factory every day. I’m still connected to all those people. The ones who are alive.”
We had to table this discussion—clearly worthy of its own story—to maintain our focus on her work in Mank. This meant setting aside her babysitting for Frank Zappa, her hanging out with Jimi Hendrix, her working with Diane Von Furstenberg. We shifted to discuss the first and most obvious question one would have for a makeup artist with an impeccable eye for color working on a black-and-white film—how does that work?
“First of all, thinking of it as a black and white movie is the wrong way to look at it,” Williams says. “It’s really a grey movie. It’s shades and tones of grey. Black is at one end, white is at the other, in the middle are just thousands of tones and values of grey. That’s really where you’re working.”
When Williams started, she and her team used the Noir filter on their iPhones to take photos of everything on set. “You get to a point where you know that Fuschia and lime green really photograph the best in Noir, but you can’t put that on somebody’s face, and you can’t put that on the set because it would be, like, what the f? I literally walked around with one of those grey charts.”
MANK (2020). Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz. Cr: NETFLIX
In order to figure out what would play well, Williams tested around 300 lipsticks, smearing them on an arm and filming them with the Noir filter. Through this method, she was able to get a sense of how each shade would translate, which would shine too much or not enough, what the values of each color and their luminescence were. After this massive trial and error effort, she narrowed her 300 lipsticks down to around eight.
Featured image: Amanda Seyfried is Marion Davies in Mank. Courtesy Netflix.
“It seemed like we all went towards the middle, because the really dark reds start to look, in your muscle memory, like goth,” Williams says. “Then you go out on the set, you think, that’s got to be even darker and we need to go further. With Lily [Collins]’s character, David didn’t want any makeup on her at all. ‘She doesn’t wear makeup,’ he said. So he and I went back and forth for a long time, I kept saying, ‘This is 1940, she’s in the steno pool, my mother didn’t get out of bed without putting her eyebrows and lips on.’ He relented.”
MANK (2020) Lily Collins as Rita Alexander. Cr: NETFLIX
As for one of Williams’ main jobs, Oldman’s brilliant but fragile Mank, she had her work cut out for her. The desert is a rough spot to detox—temperatures soar well past 100 degrees, dampening Mank’s already flop-sweat-covered ruin of a body.
“It was difficult because David loves his flop sweat, so I start with a moisturizer that gives you shine when we’re out in the desert,” Williams says. “Then I do eight-hour cream, which is almost like vaseline, but it’s really a beauty product in a tube, and I put that on because it just sits on top. Then I add some glycerin that I tap on his forehead that makes little beads. Then I spritz him with Evian—under the arms, on the neck, on the hairline—so that he’s glistening. It’s supposed to be 108 degrees on top of the fact that he’s got the DTs. So when I achieve that really good DTs sweat, I’m jumping for joy.”
MANK (2020) Lily Collins as Rita Alexander and Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz. Cr. Netflix.
Then there are the big set pieces in which nearly all of the main players in Mank’s world converge at a party at Hearst’s mansion. The scene had a whopping 27 speaking parts, and it required Williams and her number two, Michelle Audrina Kim, to create a kind of makeup field hospital. Williams and Kim split up the main actors, and then they set up makeup trailers for the day players and another room for makeup artists to handle the background actors. “It was huge,” Williams says.
MANK (2020). Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies. Courtesy NETFLIX
Williams appreciated Fincher’s method of keeping his department heads huddled around him during filming. “He likes that so he can just look at you, and you already know what he’s going to say because you’re looking at the same thing,” she says. “Once we have everyone on set, I usually do everything by text. I have all my background makeup artists over here, I know where the camera’s facing, I know who’s on camera, so I’m alerting those people that these actors are going to be in the next scene. I’m busy all day. Then of course I’ve got Gary [Oldman], who I’m spritzing down between every single take, and Amanda [Seyfried] has to be touched up head-to-toe before every take. It’s a ballet, and you go home after 16 or 18 hours of that you get a little sleep and start tomorrow.”
One of Williams’ favorite characters to work on was Charles Dance’s William Hearst, the inspiration for Citizen Kane‘s central character, Charles Foster Kane. Hearst was one of the richest, most powerful men at the time, and he was, understandably, not a fan of what Mank and Orson Welles ultimately created. He was a formidable opponent and played by the silkily imposing Dance, one of the film’s most engaging characters. “I looked at a black and white photograph of these people in our research, and every photograph of Hearst had these big dark eyes, so I just made two cadaver eyes on Charles from the very first day,” Williams says. “And he was like, ‘Whoa, Gigi, don’t you think that’s a bit much?’ Charles is a very good-looking guy and that’s his image. I was like ‘No, that’s what we want.’ So we went into a camera test and it looks great. In fact, I know I can go darker, and Charles is beside himself. He still talks about it in interviews, like, ‘I don’t look at all like Hearst, but by the time Gigi finished doing all that makeup, I felt like him.'”
MANK (2020). Arliss Howard as Louis B. Mayer and Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst. Courtesy Netflix.
As for working on Oldman’s Mank, Williams is filled with fond memories. One, in particular, stands out. “One day I was deepening the dark circles under his eyes, and he’s got no foundation, and I’m painting his capillaries in, and Gary says, ‘I don’t look bad enough,'” Williams recalls. “And his wife and I took a picture of him in black and white and showed it to him, and he goes, ‘Oh. I look bad.'”
MANK (2020). Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz. Courtesy NETFLIX.
For more on Mank, check out our interview with Oscar-nominated costume designer Trish Summerville.
For more of our interviews with other Oscar nominees, check these out:
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on April 14.
“I never thought a film could be made with such a minimal amount of information,” says editorGabriel Rhodes. But not only was it made; it currently has an Oscar nomination for best feature-length documentary.
The film in question is called, simply, Time. Coming from director/artist Garrett Bradley, it chronicles a long stretch of time, twenty years’ worth, in which Louisiana-based wife and mother, Fox Rich, finds herself effectively widowed as her husband serves what was originally a 60-year term in the Bayou State’s notorious Angola Prison.
L-r: “Time” ditor Gabriel Rhodes and director Garrett Bradley
The documentary isn’t an expose of conditions at the Louisiana State pen, which were shown in a previous, also award-nominated documentary, The Farm: Angola, USA. Rather, by showing the toll that over-sentencing takes on other people and communities in general, the film challenges perceptions of what makes for “safety,” and even “rehabilitation.”
Time does this by following Rich, who also went by Sibil Fox Richardson, who raises her six sons after her husband Rob is found guilty in the attempted robbery of a credit union in Shreveport after their clothing store was about to go under during a previous economic downturn.
The film doesn’t shy away from Richardson’s guilt. Fox herself had to serve three and a half years for driving the getaway vehicle, and in one of the film’s more powerful sequences, she describes the process of making amends years later with the credit union’s employees. But the way we get that information as an audience is part of what makes Time unique.
“I’m tired of seeing these social issue documentaries that approach things in one way,” Rhodes says, and what Time does, rather than construct things more like a TV news report—here’s a recounting of the robbery, here’s a reaction to the harsh sentencing and a series of attempts in court to get it reduced, here’s a new lawyer, here are the inmate interviews in Angola, etc.—the camera stays close on Fox, whether she’s working the phones, giving talks, trying to balance work and being a single mom, or making amends for a crime which she acknowledges was reckless, thoughtless, and had the potential for great harm.
Sibil Fox Richardson in “TIME.” Courtesy Amazon Studios.
Instead, we see this amends-making being retold by Rich, as she speaks to a church group, and the narrative continues to stay close to her over the years during many other pivotal events, like the aforementioned court hearings, or new legal representation, taking place at the other end of phone calls, or at the edge of the frame.
This is because in addition to following Rich in the real-time of the doc, as she’s captured by Bradley and her cinematographers—Nisa East, Zac Manuel, and Justin Zweifach—there was, as Rhodes notes, over “a hundred hours of archival material,” which Rich herself had shot. The footage included scenes of her sons growing up, goofing around, getting ready for school, visiting family—all the small moments that Rob was missing. And indeed, Rob missed all of them, since each was a young man by the time he’s released at the film’s end.
But it was this trove, given to Bradley by Rich as she was preparing to edit what she’d originally conceived as a short film, that prompted her to rethink the narrative arc. It’s also this footage that allows viewers to wonder whether giving a man what is basically a life sentence for a thwarted robbery in which no one was hurt is actually in the best interests of society at large if six young men are going to grow up without their dad.
The boys sure had a mom. The footage shows Rich being as present as she can, filling both parental roles, during their childhoods.
“It was a hundred hours of archival material,” Rhodes says. “Fox was shooting this stuff in the early 2000s—home video became pretty ubiquitous at this time. There was an intention to document things for Rob.” Rhodes notes it was also a matter of “Fox wanting to be heard, to be seen. I think she loves the camera.” Fox wasn’t shy about documenting her family’s life, its hardships, or her views on them.
“I think aesthetically, with the archival stuff, Garrett and I had a real taste for the messy stuff,” Rhodes says, which may have been part of what drew them together in the first place. The director contacted him, having seen Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., about the Sri Lankan pop star, which “had a lot of archival home footage,” and like Fox, he adds, “M.I.A. is a very strong female character.”
In addition to the emotional messiness documented in the archival footage, there was the fact it was grainier, especially when blown up, and also had a different aspect ratio, than the documentarians’ footage; a more traditional 4:3 compared to the now standard 1:85.
“We added a little grain into the modern footage so the contrast felt a little less,” Rhodes says, but they kept the shifting ratios, which helped denote the interplay of past and present, and as he notes, “become seamless after a while.”
But not all the transitions were visual. “Our sound designer did an amazing job (creating) a soundscape,” which allowed aural aspects, like a “whoosh sound,” to accompany “a lot of transitions (that) involved kinetic motion,” such as car wheels turning. “That played into the time motif of things are moving forward.”
As for Rhodes, he kept things moving forward in the edit using Adobe Premiere. His toolbox, he says “shifts every project, (and) I’m pretty nimble between Avid and Premiere, (but) I definitely prefer working in Premiere.”
When originally designed, Avid, he reckons, more closely mimics “editing on a flatbed,” whereas Adobe’s software, now dubbed “Premiere Pro,” feels “much more akin to using a computer.”
In fact, there were other facets of tech used during the process, too. The film was shot and completed before the pandemic (though Rhodes’ next project is about a New York hospital early in the plague year), even winning a documentary directing award at last year’s Sundance, for Bradley.
“We were separated for almost the entire edit,” he says, of him and Bradley. And since “Zoom was not yet a thing, we just used Facetime a lot. I would export ten seconds of the cut and throw it into a chat window. ‘This is where I’m stopping on this frame.’ She’d screengrab something (else),” offering a different edit point. In all, Rhodes concludes, the process “worked pretty well.”
The Rich family, the film’s numerous Amazon Prime viewers, and now the Academy itself, would all seem to agree.
For more of our interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. Our conversation with Shaka King was originally published on March 30, before he was nominated for two Oscars. The film was nominated for Best Picture (the nomination includes King and producing partners Charles D. King and Ryan Coogler), and King was nominated for Best Original Screenplay along with co-writers Will Berson, Kenny & Keith Lucas.
Judas and the Black Messiah galvanized moviegoers with its fact-based story about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, whose betrayal by an FBI informant led to his 1969 death by gunfire at age 21 while sleeping in his own Chicago apartment. The film racked up six Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Director Shaka King earned a nomination for co-writing the screenplay and steered co-stars Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield to their own Oscar nods in the Best Supporting Actor category.
Judas and the Black Messiah‘s success is all the more striking given that King previously specialized in comedy, including his 2013 indie feature Newlyweeds and HBO’s blissful stoner series High Maintenance. But his ability to design Judas as a populist thriller reveals a shrewd grasp of Hollywood basics. “It was a magic trick to pull off,” King says. “Telling a story about a Black Marxist who got shot in the head by the FBI when he was 21 years old and making that a popcorn movie—can we do that? And we did!”
Raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant by school teacher parents, educated at Vassar College, and mentored by Spike Lee at NYU, King embarked on Judas nearly five years ago when comedy duo Kenny and Keith Lucas pitched him a “two-hander” premise centered on a car thief-turned FBI plant and his charismatic target. After writing a finished script with first-timer Will Berson, King enlisted heavyweight producers Ryan Coogler and Charles D. King (Mudbound, Harriet, Just Mercy), secured co-financing from Warner Bros., and filmed in Cleveland as a stand-in for Chicago during the fall of 2019.
Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, King explains how Eddie Murphy’s voice impacted Kaluuya’s rhetoric, praises the power of specificity, and delves into the darkest day on set during the making of Judas and the Black Messiah.
Caption: Director SHAKA KING on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Glen Wilson.
Congratulations on all this Oscar recognition. Starting with your nominated screenplay, it was kind of a stroke of genius to have the “bad guy”—FBI informant Bill O’Neal—front and center rather than the obvious hero Fred Hampton. How did you arrive at that idea?
It was baked into the script when the Lucas Brothers reached out to me saying they wanted to make a movie about Fred Hampton and Bill O’Neal that was like The Departed but set in the world of [FBI Counter Intelligence Program] COINTELPRO. The reason for me getting excited about the story’s potential is that I recognized it as a way of getting a movie about Fred Hampton out to the most amount of people by couching it in genre. If you look at the first trailer we put out, people who might have been unaware of the Black Panther politics still wanted to see this movie because it looked exciting and thrilling and dramatic and action-packed.
So you couch the political message within this time-honored crime genre, like The Departed. Except here, undercover guy is bad and the target, Fred Hampton is the good guy.
It’s subversion on multiple levels. First, we’re couching this political movie within a crime genre, but then we’re also flipping the genre on its head by having the fox in the hen house. It changes the way that you engage with the protagonist. You’re not rooting for O’Neal [to succeed]. You’re rooting for him to have a change of heart. You’re rooting for him to do the right thing. It’s very hard to navigate emotionally because you’re leaning on tropes and subverting tropes at the same time and as a result, you’re confusing people.
Caption: (L-r) Director SHAKA KING and LAKEITH STANFIELD on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Glen Wilson
Lakeith Stanfield, whom you directed earlier in your short film LaZercism, does a very convincing job of portraying the informant O’Neal as a bundle of nerves. Getting into character like that must have been a grueling experience for him.
In his heart, it was hard for Lakeith not to judge O’Neal. In writing the script, my co-writer Will Berson and I tried to give Lakeith a road map to do that, because as writers we went through the same process. In the first several drafts, we were labeling O’Neal as a sociopath until we realized we needed to get more interior with this guy. In doing so, we got something on the page that gave Lakeith a chance to infuse his own level of empathy into the character. Throughout the shoot, he essentially needed to click himself into the position of a 17-year-old who has to make these decisions.
Lakeith as jittery O’Neal contrasts with Daniel Kaluuya’s performance as this hyper-confident 20-year-old Chicago activist. Daniel’s from England and he’s a few years older than Hampton. How did you arrive at the idea that Daniel Kaluuya should play Fred Hampton?
It was just an intuitive decision, same with Lakeith, same with Dominique [Fishback] as Fred’s wife Deborah, same with Jesse Plemons as the FBI agent. I wrote the roles for these actors.
You’d seen Daniel in Get Out?
First thing I saw him in was Sicario and then Get Out and also Black Panther. From those three films, I could just tell he was a really good actor.
Daniel brings this ferocious eloquence to his portrayal of Fred Hampton, especially when he’s giving speeches. How did you prepare him for the demands of this role?
A year before shooting, Daniel and I got together in L.A. for four days and started to play with the dialect. I had some influences I wanted him to listen to that were all over the place.
Caption: (L-r) DANIEL KALUUYA and director SHAKA KING on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Glen Wilson
For example?
Bernie Mac, [comedian] Robin Harris, Eddie Murphy—specifically a voice he does in Eddie Murphy Raw—Busta Rhymes, Fred Hampton Junior, and obviously Fred Hampton himself. Like I say, it was all over the place. After we did that, Daniel went off on his own and worked with Audrey LeCrone, our incredible dialect coach. They did the heavy lifting. Daniel also studied with an opera instructor who taught him to essentially sing Fred’s words from his diaphragm so he could do these big speeches without blowing his voice out.
The film looks great, with this rich, almost painterly color palette. Your cinematography Sean Bobbitt earned an Oscar nomination for his work on Judas. What did you guys reference in terms of shaping the visuals?
My friend Akin McKenzie, a production designer, sent me about 300 photographs of the west side of Chicago from 1967 to 73. When I showed this stash of images to Sean we immediately agreed we wanted to replicate the Kodachrome look from those photographs. Once our production designer Sam Lisenco came on board, he found these perfect locations for us in Cleveland. That city is a time warp in a lot of ways. So it was really about trying to create a movie that felt of that era but where the cinematic language was contemporary enough that today’s viewers, especially young viewers, wouldn’t feel alienated from it.
L-r: Director Shaka King and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt. Courtesy Warner Bros.
The Black Panther Party generated a powerful iconography in the sixties and seventies. In going beyond that popular imagery, did you want Judas to deepen people’s understanding of the Black Panthers?
The primary goal was to correct the record because much misinformation has been put forth about the Black Panthers: that they were terrorists, that they were racists. In this film, we showed the community organizing, we showed survival programs in action, we showed Black Panthers in the classroom, we showed that they were thinkers, philosophers, and doers. But then you use the word icon, which is exactly what they were. To be an icon is to be two dimensional. When you make a movie about an icon, it’s your job to create the third and fourth dimensions. So my other intention was to show that yes, Fred Hampton was a gifted orator and fearless leader, but also, there was this woman he was in love with, this child he wanted to have. We wanted to show Fred Hampton as a man who makes a difficult choice, so viewers get a real sense of this incredible sacrifice.
(L-r) DANIEL KALUUYA as Chairman Fred Hampton and DOMINIQUE FISHBACK as Deborah Johnson in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Your re-creation of the night-time shoot-out when Fred Hampton gets killed in his own bed serves as the film’s bleak climax. That must have been a dark day on set?
The truth of the matter is that those sequences were so technically focused, so stunt-heavy, so ballistic heavy, that there’s a certain level of emotional distance. Really, the heaviest day of the shoot happened when Keith has to drug Fred [to sedate him before the FBI attack]. That was heavy for everyone because it was the 50th anniversary of the assassination. Heavy for Daniel because it was toward the end of the shoot. Heavy for Dominique, saying goodbye to someone she’d grown to love as a person, Daniel, and in character, to her husband Fred. But nobody was having a worse day than Lakeith.
Why is that?
In a very Method kind of way, Lakeith was digging into some personal trauma to go through with this act. He inhabited the character to such a degree that he felt like he was really poisoning this person in real life. He woke up that morning crying, and all day he was crying. In that scene where he drugs Daniel, ONeal’s supposed to be on the verge of tears. But Lakeith wasn’t on the verge. He was actually crying. I told him, ‘You gotta stop. I can’t use this. Your cover is blown if you’re crying before you do it.’ Once I was finally able to get him to pull it back just a bit, he was in the perfect place, and that’s what you see in the movie.
Caption: (L-r) LAKEITH STANFIELD and director SHAKA KING on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Glen Wilson
Before making Judas, you mainly worked on comedic stuff. How did your expertise in comedy help you direct this very somber drama?
Well, for me comedy is all about specificity. That’s what makes me laugh. I think of Kings of Comedy when Cedric the Entertainer does a joke about how [car] mechanics talk to you with a cigarette in their mouth the entire time. And then he shows it. And it’s that specificity that makes the joke play. So for me, drama is just about finding that specificity.
On a lot of levels, Judas and the Black Messiah feels very timely. How do you see Fred Hampton’s message of empowerment landing in 2021?
Essentially, the same ills remain. Kids are still hungry, there are still predatory landlords, prisons are still filled with black and brown folks that shouldn’t be there, the rich still getting richer, poor getting poorer, people still not getting access to decent health care, workers are still being exploited in the nation and worldwide. Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers were looking to address problems that are still applicable to society today.
You started working on Judas nearly five years ago. It must be gratifying to see the impact it’s having.
Absolutely it’s been gratifying to see audiences react to this movie so well, and also gratifying to see that the people who lived through this experience were really pleased. We’d been in dialogue with Fred Hampton’s son for a year and a half before cameras rolled, trying to get him on board as a consultant. He was on set every day. Same with his widow Deborah Johnson. It took a year and a half to get to know them. So that was the ultimate gratification.
For more of our interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) Director SHAKA KING and DANIEL KALUUYA on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Glen Wilson
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. Our conversation with Sean Bobbitt was first published on February 11, before he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography.
The late Fred Hampton, former chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, was renowned for his skill as an orator and his work in his community, though the American government chose to mainly view the young activist as a threat. After convincing competing and even hostile groups as disparate as Chicago’s Young Lords and the rural Young Patriots to work together with the Panthers toward the common goal of a better quality of life for all, Hampton was assassinated in his bed by the FBI and the Chicago and Cook County police in 1969. He was 21 years old.
(L-r) CALEB EBERHARDT as Bob Lee, DARRELL BRITT-GIBSON as Bobby Rush, ASHTON SANDERS as Jimmy Palmer, DANIEL KALUUYA as Chairman Fred Hampton and LAKEITH STANFIELD as Bill O’Neal in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Glen Wilson
Directed by Shaka King, Judas and the Black Messiahspotlights the mole who greased the wheels for Hampton’s (Daniel Kaluuya) brutal murder: the cooperation of a former petty crook turned FBI informant William “Bill” O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield). Supplied with a car and a disarmingly personable FBI contact, Agent Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), Bill quickly gains entry to Chairman Fred’s inner circle. Beginning with a failed car robbery that kicks off Bill’s contact with the FBI, Black Messiah contrasts the informant’s infiltration of the Panthers with Hampton’s growing list of accomplishments and his budding romance with college student Deborah Johnson (now known as Akua Njeri and played here by Dominique Fishback). Though the film is neither a documentary nor a docu-drama, “we wanted to create a believable world,” says cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave, Widows). “Shaka had amassed hundreds of photographs from that era, which we all carefully combed through. It became a no-brainer that that sort of Ektachrome, Kodachrome look of the period was what we should be going for.”
L-r: Director Shaka King and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt. Courtesy Warner Bros.
Whether it’s the chic, cozy restaurants where Agent Mitchell treats Bill during his reports or the run-down simplicity of the Panthers’ own headquarters, Black Messiah was filmed almost entirely on location and conveys a consistent sense of the late 1960s. Cleveland stood in for Chicago, and the city “is quite remarkable and rather sad in a way, in that there are an awful lot of structures that do exist from the 1960s that have been effectively untouched,” says Bobbitt. “We were given a remarkable choice of locations that absolutely fit the brief of the look we were going for.” One such memorable set piece, the site of a seminal meeting between the Panthers and the fictional gang the Crowns, was filmed in an abandoned church. Ringed by several floors of open archways, each populated by members of the hostile group, it’s in this threatening setting that Chairman Fred negotiates an agreement. “We were looking for a space that could fit that many people and had tiers of people around, just to give a sense how overwhelmed the Panthers would have been should the whole meeting go wrong, which was a distinct possibility,” Bobbitt explains of the distinct space, lit via a simple top light and a large sidelight that gives the nighttime meeting shape.
(L-r) LAKEITH STANFIELD as Bill O’Neal and JESSE PLEMONS as Roy Mitchell in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures(L-r) DARRELL BRITT-GIBSON as Bobby Rush, DANIEL KALUUYA as Chairman Fred Hampton and LAKEITH STANFIELD as Bill O’Neal in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Glen Wilson
King’s overall approach was to make Black Messiah feel like a classic movie from the 1960s, so the crew relied on “the simplicity of composition, nothing too clever in terms of movement and odd placements of the camera,” Bobbitt says. “The sheer weight of the federal government that was threatening the very existence of the Panther movement,” for example, comes through via a spotlit stage in a huge auditorium where J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) briefs hundreds of agents on his desire to take down Hampton, sinister in its simplicity. “It’s all about power and control and perception,” says Bobbitt. Back at the Panthers’ basic Chicago headquarters, women file paperwork and local kids eat free breakfast. “That’s a very important part of the film, and it’s a historical fact,” Bobbitt points out. “Most people think of the Panthers as a radical, violent organization whose only role was to kill police officers, whereas in reality, the real threat was that they were taking great care of the community around them. Free breakfasts for all the children, they also set up free clinics, they were a very powerful social movement. And through that power, Fred Hampton was able to create that rainbow coalition, and that was seen as the greatest threat to the authority of the American government.”
(L-r) DANIEL KALUUYA as Chairman Fred Hampton and DOMINIQUE FISHBACK as Deborah Johnson in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
The Feds’ way in is O’Neal, here given a fully three-dimensional treatment, both through Stanfield’s nuanced portrayal of the informant and the attention the movie gives to the ways the FBI courted their source. “O’Neal is seduced by the FBI. The money is good. And the fact that he ends up in really expensive restaurants and gets treated oddly with respect, to begin with, and even invited into the FBI agent’s own home, is a remarkable thing,” Bobbitt explains. “So there’s a warmth and an opulence to the restaurants. There’s a remarkable sort of coziness to Mitchell’s house. Everything about it is designed to show contrast. We see just a silhouetted figure of O’Neal in what we imagine to be a wreck of a room where he lives. That world that’s being dangled in front of him is a very powerful weapon used to turn him, to reinforce his decision to work with the FBI.”
Caption: (L-r) LAKEITH STANFIELD, director SHAKA KING and JESSE PLEMONS on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Glen WilsonCaption: (L-r) LAKEITH STANFIELD as Bill O’Neal and JESSE PLEMONS as Roy Mitchell in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Glen Wilson
To visually frame Hampton’s speeches as close to history as possible, Bobbitt pulled his angles from black and white documentary footage of the young speaker. “What is really powerful are these low-angle tight shots. That was something we took from that historical material and really appealed to Shaka,” says Bobbitt. The production also made every effort to remain historically true to what took place during Chairman Fred’s assassination, at home with Deborah and others. Having been acquainted with the home’s layout thanks to O’Neal, the FBI knew exactly where their target would be. “That was the only set that we built. It was very important to be as accurate as we could be to the layout of the actual apartment and as accurate as we could be to the actual assault itself,” says Bobbitt, who got a hold of one of the few existing large motion control machines with an extendable controlled bar in order to travel over the top from room to room. His gaffer, Jeremy Long, constructed a soft light that went across the set, was adjustable for color and intensity, and left no camera shadow. “There was a lot going on for that scene and it was absolutely crucial to get it all right,” Bobbitt says. “But it was also very important for it to be terrifying. Can you imagine waking up and people shooting at you with no warning at all? It’s a horrific event. The overhead shot was absolutely crucial. The important thing to show was that they were there to shoot Fred Hampton. They knew where he was, and they were shooting through the walls at where he was sleeping.”
For more on Judas and the Black Messiah, check out our interviews with co-writer/director Shaka King and costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
Featured image: DANIEL KALUUYA (right) as Chairman Fred Hampton in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Glen Wilson
Disney+ will soon be home to Spider-Man, and a whole lot more. In a new deal, Sony Pictures’ upcoming theatrical slate will hit Disney’s streaming and TV platforms after their PVOD windows on Netflix have ended. The deal is for Sony’s theatrical slate from 2022 to 2026, as well as a good chunk of Sony’s library. This will bring Sony’s films to Disney’s major streaming services, Disney+ and Hulu, as well as their TV networks, including Disney Channels, ABC, FX, and National Geographic.
This marks the second major deal involving Sony in the past few weeks. The first saw Sony films heading to Netflix for their first-pay windows—these typically arrive 18 months after a movie has premiered in theaters. The deal with Disney kicks in once that window has expired, with Sony’s films landing on Disney’s platforms for their pay 2 windows.
Sony’s library includes, of course, Spider-Man. But everybody’s favorite web-slinger isn’t the only hot commodity Sony has (although he’s a big one)—and their upcoming 2022 slate alone is worth singling out. Their slate includes director David Leitch’s star-studded action flick Bullet Train, which boasts Brad Pitt, Lady Gaga, and Sandra Bullock in the cast. There are also their non-Spidey Marvel properties, like the Jared Leto-led Morbius, and the Hotel Transylvania and Jumanji franchises. Oh, and yes, 2022 will bring Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2, the sequel to the critical and commercial smash original that gave the world a new kind of superhero film, with its candy-colored, comics-inspired animation and multiple universes of Spider-man characters.
Disney+ is home to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the Sony-released Spider-Man films, 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming and 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home are not available there. Once the upcoming Netflix window expires, however, those films will be available for Disney+.
“This groundbreaking agreement reconfirms the unique and enduring value of our movies to film lovers and the platforms and networks that serve them,” Keith Le Goy, president, worldwide distribution and networks, Sony Pictures Entertainment, said. “We are thrilled to team up with Disney on delivering our titles to their viewers and subscribers. This agreement cements a key piece of our film distribution strategy, which is to maximize the value of each of our films, by making them available to consumers across all windows with a wide range of key partners.”
Featured image: Spider-Man in Columbia Pictures’ SPIDER-MAN: ™ FAR FROM HOME. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on June 12, 2020. Terrence Blanchard is nominated for Original Score.
Spike Lee’s films’ timeliness speaks to his prescience, and to his fearless, decades-long willingness to examine the continued and persistent injustice experienced by Black Americans. His new film Da 5 Bloods lands in the midst of a pandemic disproportionately affecting Black, Hispanic, Latino, and Indigenous communities, and a wave of demonstrations protesting police brutality and systemic racism against Black people by those who are sworn to protect all Americans following the murder of George Floyd. Composer and longtime collaborator Terence Blanchard created the score for Da 5 Bloods, and he shares Lee’s desire to imbue this and all his projects with that strong sense of purpose. The film begins streaming today, June 12, on Netflix.
It has proven a successful formula, as exampled by Blanchard’s many awards and nominations from their work together, most recently with BAFTA and Oscar nominations and a Grammy win for BlacKkKlansman. The Credits spoke to Blanchard about his inspiration for Da 5 Bloods, and how his association with Spike Lee inspires him to continue growing as an artist.
The album What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye figures prominently in Da 5 Bloods.How did that influence you in creating the score?
It’s interesting with Spike’s films, he uses the source material in a way that lets you know the timeframe and gives you a flavor of the period. What it does for me, when it comes to Marvin Gaye, obviously, it inspires me to be better. What I tried to do with the score is to make the film timeless, and allow the source material to be the frame that sets the period.
“Da 5 Bloods” scoring session with Terence Blanchard and Spike Lee on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at Sony Studios. Photo by Matt Sayles for Netflix
Any art can be an act of consciousness-raising, and that’s certainly true for artisans working on a Spike Lee movie. How does your work reflect that intention?
Just by dealing in the truth of my own experiences, and in my own truths in terms of how they reflect the characters and the story. I remember the way I created the introduction to Malcolm X was remembering an experience I had as a kid. I was in a summer jazz program in the park, and a person who grew up in a church knowing Martin Luther King Jr. Somebody put on a record of Malcolm X, about ‘the blue-eyed devil’ and saying that the revolution is going to have blood. People were cheering, and it scared me to death. That’s where the heartbeat in the intro came from for Malcolm X. It’s related to my actual experience of hearing one of his speeches for the first time. The same thing applied in Da 5 Bloods. I’m old enough to have had uncles in the Vietnam War who told their stories. One scene that captures the emotion for me is the one where Martin Luther King Jr. dies. I always thought about the irony of these guys putting their lives on the line for a country that doesn’t really give a sh*t about their lives. While they are doing that, the person that’s fighting for their rights to just be is murdered. They are out there protecting the people who, in their own country, are actually killing them. The irony of that is incredible, and yet they still did their jobs. That speaks to their heroism, their bravery, and their integrity. Those are all the things that are floating through my mind while I’m writing the music for these guys. I always try to make sure that I draw on my own experience.
There’s a wind instrument used in a number of cues that is really haunting. What is it, and how did it wind up in the score?
It’s called a Duduk. The guy who played it is Pedro Eustache. He’s an amazing reed player. He’s one of those freak-of-nature dudes who can play hundreds of instruments. When he came in, he immediately fit the film, and we started adding him to places we didn’t originally have him. He brought a certain color and tone to the film that was perfect.
This is one of your most elegiac scores. It feels like it is expressing loss of innocence, the emotion of these Black men coming back from Vietnam to both racism and rejection, and the emotion of what’s happening out there right now. Can you talk about that in terms of the film?
There is the sense, when working on Spike Lee films, that these films are much bigger than us as individuals. The importance of his movies is incredible. My contribution is just writing and putting notes on a page. These guys are giving their lives. The least I can do is pay attention, and try to do my job to the best of my ability. Spike gives me the ability to do that. When I look at what’s going on in this country emotionally, that helps to drive my work too. With BlacKkKlansman, I think what shook everybody up was that montage at the end. You watch the movie and you think, ‘that was then, not now’. Then you look at the montage, and realize, ‘no, it’s right now.’ I think that’s what happens with this film Da 5 Bloods. You can watch this movie and think, ‘That was a hell of a period’. Then, you look at Delroy Lindo’s character, what he’s dealing with, and really, we are still struggling with the same issues. We have a country that likes to pride itself on being a place that is more progressive than it actually is.
Spike is conscious and very aware of what’s going on, and that’s the thing that makes it an honor to work on his films. We are trying to make these statements that are much broader than the films themselves. In terms of subjects he examines, it keeps coming back to the same thing. Aren’t people tired of dealing with this? We’ve gotten to the point now where we are all asking ‘why don’t we just fix this because your approach is not working.’ That’s the beautiful thing about watching the people in these demonstrations and protests. I love seeing people from all different backgrounds protesting this injustice because they know. It’s almost like they’re saying ‘we are not going to have this sh*t on our watch, and it’s our turn with this country, so we’re going to nip this in the bud right now.’
What is the most joyful aspect of working with Spike Lee?
He’s brilliant. This guy is unique. He has his own style, and he stretches himself with every project. He doesn’t rest on his success. He doesn’t just sit and think he’s done. No. He’s always trying to push the envelope. Like any person with curiosity, he’s always trying to better himself and learn. That makes everyone he works with reach a little higher with every project. He also gives us a lot of room. He trusts us to the point where he gives us room to do our thing. When anyone that brilliant puts that much trust in you, you just can’t f*ck it up.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check out these stories:
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on October 13, 2020. Baumgarten has since been nominated for an Oscar for Editing.
For his latest feature, writer and director Aaron Sorkin shifts his political eye from the West Wing to the US government’s judicial branch. In TheTrial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin revisits the drawn-out trial of a group of Vietnam War protestors, including Abbie Hoffmann and Tom Hayden, accused of inciting violent riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The crux of the trial turns on whether the men conspired in their actions, a particularly egregious accusation given that the police committed the violence, many of the group on trial had never previously met, and one of the defendants, Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), wasn’t even at the protests.
The film opens to a mixed montage of historic footage of President Johnson’s televised draft and each of the men preparing at home for the trial. The story then moves into scenes set in the Chicago courthouse, building to a rapid back and forth between the trial and flashbacks to what took place in the moments leading up to a wave of orchestrated police brutality. A Sorkin signature, rapid, information-dense dialogue laid over the action, marks the film’s prologue and key montage digging into the events in question. For the film’s editor, Alan Baumgarten, in sections like these, hitting the right beats starts with the actors’ lines. “The focus primarily is on getting the rhythm and tempo of the dialogue and the tone exactly the way Aaron wants it. Once we work on the dialogue and the rhythm, we then expand and continue to flesh out the film.”
Luckily, starting with the words and building from there in the editing room is a clear process for Baumgarten, who also edited the Sorkin-directed feature Molly’s Game. “Aaron’s dialogue is so beautifully written and carefully crafted, it provides a fantastic blueprint for me to work from. As long as I follow the script and the performances with that dialogue and those rhythms, I actually have a lot of freedom to portray the visual elements that go along with that,” he says. Visually, the biggest moments in The Trial of the Chicago 7 take place in court, at the defendants’ tongue-in-cheek titled Conspiracy Office, and in the park where the police let loose, but the characters’ parrying in these scenes guides the visuals, whether the actors are speaking in a scene or talking over it. “A lot of the dialogue that Aaron writes is meant to carry over. It’s not a voice-over per se, but to illustrate what’s happening with a layered approach showing other imagery that fills in the blanks or supports or coincides with what’s being said,” explains Baumgarten.
As the months-long trial drags on, Sorkin reveals the full extent of Judge Julius Hoffmann’s (Frank Langella) acrimony toward the defendants. Seale, who has no lawyer and didn’t attend the protests, winds up bound and gagged in the courtroom in one of the film’s most unsettling scenes. In flashbacks, Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) pontificates on the events to college students in a sort of macabre mix of stand-up comedy and political lecture. In the movie’s present, the divide between Hoffmann and Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) illustrates how this group not only didn’t commit conspiracy, they can’t even agree on events that already happened. They hardly know each other, much less are in agreement on how to get US troops out of Southeast Asia. “What’s fascinating to me,” says Baumgarten of these key scenes, “is [Sorkin] has an ability to capture dialogue the way people actually speak. Sometimes the dialogue is very realistic in terms of pauses and missteps or backtracks or stumbles, or a bit of irregularity in the way a line is given, which he writes in. Then at other times, it’s heightened, more complex and dense, almost the way we wish we did speak.”
For the editor, this means combining the director’s two styles, while looking out for dense moments with several characters talking at once, where another Sorkin stylistic technique sees a clever rejoinder or re-stated question ensure that key bits of information land where they’re needed. “He’s very aware how to track and make sure essential beats come through, despite having that organic sense of chaos. I find it very helpful that we don’t have to go back and say, oh boy, something important is not coming through here, we have to find a way to reiterate or restate it,” says Baumgarten. In a Sorkin drama, everything is on the page. “Joseph Gordon-Levitt said at one point, I learned every syllable, down to the comma.”
The Trial of the Chicago 7 lightly condenses and dramatizes historic events, but the film rings true, and in the wake of protests for George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, the resonance is potent. In some moments, it can feel like the biggest difference between then and now are the cops, who used to go after peaceful protestors in shirtsleeves instead of full cosplay war gear. “The timeliness of this film was something we didn’t anticipate to the extent that is happening,” Baumgarten says. “We were still finishing the film, so it was quite shocking for all of us, and chilling, to be working on a project which we had tried to make work on its own terms and in its own way, with tear gas, rioting, and police beating up on protestors, and then seeing the same thing happening on the news.” The movie does stand on its own, but viewers would be forgiven for feeling like they’re watching an educational, tightly edited prequel to what’s on the news right now.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
This interview is part of our ongoing Oscar series. The original story ran on February 2, before Kemp Powers was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Also worth noting—he co-directed Pixar’s Soul, which is nominated for Best Animated Feature.
After nearly two decades as a news reporter, Kemp Powers knew a good story when he found one. Discovering that four cultural icons — heavyweight champ Cassius Clay, soon to take the name Muhammad Ali; activist Malcolm X; crooner Sam Cooke; and NFL superstar Jim Brown — had hung out together in Miami in 1964 inspired him to recreate that night.
Powers’ play, “One Night in Miami,” enjoyed a string of regional productions before it was staged at the prestigious Donmar Warehouse in London in 2016, earning an Olivier Award nomination for Best New Play.
Powers’ script for the movie version of One Night in Miami, directed by Regina King and available from Amazon, doesn’t change the dynamic of the high octane ensemble. “I preserved the general idea that it’s a private conversation and we’re a fly on the wall. That requires it to be in a contained space but other than that, it’s really quite different,” says Powers in a telephone interview. “Only about half of the play made it into the film because it had to be a different story.”
That story centers on the 1964 night in Miami after Clay (Eli Goree) wins the Heavyweight Championship of the World. He then meets up with his friends at the Hampton House Hotel where the four men, each at a crossroads in his life, talk for hours about their positions in society as powerful Black men. Brown (Aldis Hodge) is ready to retire from football and mulling offers from Hollywood; Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is preparing to leave the Nation of Islam; Clay is about to become a Muslim; and Cooke (Leslie Odom, Jr.) is eager to expand his music stardom to a larger stage.
(L-R) Leslie Odom Jr., Eli Goree, Kingsley Ben-Adir and Aldis Hodge star in ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI
Powers conceded that along the way some tried to persuade him to make Ali the star of the show. “I would counter that by saying, ‘you’re not allowing yourself to be in this moment in 1964.’ On this night, the most famous person in the room, by far, is Sam Cooke. And the closest second is Jim Brown. You’re not even acknowledging the fame dynamic of this night, let alone the power dynamic. Ali, at 22 years old, is more of a younger brother with his three big brothers as he’s about to make the biggest decision of his life.”
ALDIS HODGE and LESLIE ODOM JR. star in ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI Photo: Patti Perret Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Powers says any suggestion that he create an unequal dynamic “makes me think people want the very thing I was trying not to do, which is write fan fiction. This is not that. It is fictionalized but it’s 100 percent powered by the facts. That’s who they were and what was happening in each of their lives in the days leading up to that night.”
Now, each of the movie’s four rising young actors is being touted for awards consideration, along with Powers and Regina King, the Emmy and Oscar-winning actress making her feature directing debut and proving she is as proficient behind the camera as she is in front of it.
One Night in Miami is one of two acclaimed big-screen projects for Powers this year. He also co-wrote and co-directed Pixar’s Soul, now on Disney+ and a frontrunner for 2020’s best-animated film awards.
Besides being a news reporter for, among others, Newsweek, Forbes, and Yahoo, Powers wrote the 2004 book, The Shooting: A Memoir, a personal account of a harrowing trauma in 1988 when he was 14. Playing with a gun he thought was unloaded in his Brooklyn home one afternoon, Powers accidentally shot and killed his friend. After publication of his memoir, Powers was doing research for another book that eventually became One Night in Miami, the African-American male experience encapsulated into a moment in time.
Director Regina King with Eli Goree on the set of ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI Credit: Patti Perret/Amazon Studios
“When I first discovered this was a real night, it was before so much was online. Research and reporting involved getting on planes and going to the Library of Congress or getting public records,” says Powers. “It is unfortunate but people don’t realize you had to go on foot to get things in print [before] digital. There was also a certain joy to that. When you come across some book that’s out of print, or some new document and you go, ‘I’m holding in my hands this tangible thing’ and it goes into the box marked ‘Jim Brown’ or “Malcolm X,’ you feel like you have this treasure trove.
“Reading FBI files is always fascinating. Several [of the men] were being tracked by the FBI and under the Freedom of Information Act, it’s possible to read the files…and read the editorializing from the federal agents in those files. That was illuminating. Jim Brown [is] so well known as an athlete and of course as a Blaxploitation star but many don’t know he actually wrote his own autobiography in the 1960s when he was still a pretty young man. That’s how I discovered that moment in the film when he visits the Beau Bridges character. That was actually a real moment that he discusses in his autobiography that most people don’t know exists.”
Aldis Hodge and Director Regina King on the set of ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI Photo: Patti Perret/Amazon Studios
But Powers also added and revised scenes once production was underway and King was at the helm as director. As such an accomplished actress, it’s not surprising that she was able to get such nuanced performances from the four leads. But Powers says her mastery went deeper.
“As a director, she brought so much. She was so inquisitive,” he says. “For example, there’s the moment in the film when Malcolm calls his daughter and has a conversation with her, and he leaves her hidden notes. That came about because Regina actually reached out to his daughter who told her that story. Regina called me and said, ‘maybe we should have that in the film.’ So I wrote the scene. It shows a tender, vulnerable moment of him as a father that would not have been there and it came from Regina feeling what was missing in certain moments [thanks to] her own inquisitiveness. Without her, the film would not be what it is.”
Kingsley Ben-Adir stars in ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI Photo: Patti Perret/Amazon Studios
For more on One Night In Miami, check out our interview with cinematographer Tami Reiker.
For more on Oscar nominees, check out these interviews:
Featured image: ELI GOREE, KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR, ALDIS HODGE, and LESLIE ODOM JR. star in ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI. Photo: Courtesy of Amazon Studios. Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Dane Larocque hails from rural British Columbia and Alberta and grew up in what he calls a “hardcore western rodeo family.” A career in visual effects, at arguably the most prestigious VFX company on the planet, wasn’t something he grew up imagining as an option. Yet Larocque had an enduring passion for film and was the type of kid who’d pore over the special features of a DVD to see how a particular film was actually made. “I think it was when I was about 14 or 15, I was like, ‘wait, people do this as a job!?”
Cut to today, with Larocque working as a senior creature artist at Industrial Light & Magic, the VFX shop created by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas. ILM was founded in May of 1975 when Lucas began work on Star Wars—40 years later,Larocque would be working on Star Wars: The Force Awakens after stints working in the oil, construction, and car restoration industry, to name a few.
We spoke with Larocque about his career, learning from the best at ILM, and using what he’s learned to make his own creature feature. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your childhood like?
I grew up in rural BC and Alberta. Jumped back and forth a bit. I come from a really hardcore, western rodeo family. We raise horses, train ‘em, break ‘em and compete with them. But I always had this really hardcore passion for film. I remember when I got Twin Towers on DVD and I watched the special features endlessly and I think when I was about 14 or 15 I clued in and I was like, ‘Wait…people do this as a job!?’ I was always fascinated with Star Wars and especially Jurassic Park. I was always a dinosaur nut, drawing monsters and creatures and stuff like that all the time.
Yet you didn’t go to film school, right?
After a while, I dropped out of high school in grade 10, went to work in the oil patch, did a whole bunch of jobs like that. I did stucco, molder mediation, construction, machinery, car restoration and I just got tired of that kind of instability. I got sick of it and took the risk, said ‘screw it,’ and packed up my truck. I moved out to Vancouver and lucked out with one of the colleges out here. They put me in the right program and because I was really into drawing, I studied 3D modeling for games and animation and it was kind of the perfect program for me to get started with because it was so art-heavy. I just fell in love with it.
How did you find your way to ILM?
After a couple of years of trying and a friend who got in, they ended up bringing me into ILM as a junior – back in the Warcraft and Star Wars: Force Awakens days. I just worked my butt off trying to make sure that they wouldn’t let me go. And now it’s about six years later.
When did it hit you that you were working at the place that George Lucas built?
I was working on The Force Awakens and I was talking with a lead and we were going through our assets and the [lead] will critique and tweak your work. And I remember this lead was like, (whispered) ‘Hey, that guy over there built the original death star!’ I was like, ‘Whaaaat?’ It blows your mind sometimes. You’re working with people who have been in the industry that long – especially for such a young industry. I mean, VFX hasn’t been around that long, so it’s cool that ILM has that lineage.
What was it like to go from being the kid who pores over DVD special features to working on a Star Wars film?
When I was working on The Force Awakens, I really didn’t want any spoilers to happen, so I purposefully tried to hide from anything happening in the film because I didn’t want to see it. And I remember going to one of our internal reviews and the first shot they showed was the moment with Han getting zilched! So I was just like, “Welp. Alright! I guess I know the film now!” That’s a very vivid memory. But it was still very cool to be a part of it.
What about your experience working on Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok?
I was someone who grew up as a hardcore Marvel fan. My older brother was crazy about Spider-Man, and he would always make me recite facts all the time. It was such a career highlight to be able to help bring Hulk to life in Thor: Ragnarok.
You also not only had a hand in Disney’s recent live-action Aladdin, but you’ve got a hilarious personal connection to the film, too.
Another career highlight. In my family, my nickname has been Abu since I was about 5 years old. My nieces and nephews know me as Uncle Abu. My brother, all my siblings and their friends know me as Abu. And it was crazy when we got Aladdin. I tapped my supervisor on the shoulder, and I was just like, ‘Can I make the monkey?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, you can do Abu.’ I got to do a good chunk of the modeling, which is sculpting the asset’s body, and a lot of the facial stuff to try and make Abu a believable monkey. And that was just a big career highlight for me. And it was super cool that they actually let me have that.
Tell me about your own project you’re working on.
I’ve always wanted to try and make my own stuff but I honestly just didn’t have the confidence. I thought, [filmmakers] are way more intelligent, I’m just some bum from the country, I can’t tell those types of stories. I’ll just stick with my drawings and my creatures. But ILM enabled me to think that maybe I can create something.
How so?
I sculpt creatures for work, for crazy amounts of hours during the day and I’ll still come home and sculpt my own stuff. I’ve learned so much from ILM, I’ve seen how everything gets built, from pre-visualization (before they’ve shot anything) all the way through to the end of a project, just before we deliver it to theatres. It lets me fathom that this is a process that can be done and it’s given me the confidence to create my own stuff with all of these things that I’ve learned from ILM, and this industry, and the amazing people that I’ve worked with.
Tell me about your project.
My personal project is called Witiko and it’s Indigenous influenced. I’m trying to stay authentic to Native American culture, because I have Cree and Sioux and a few others in me and my dad is status Chippewa. I feel like there are a lot of stories I can tell that also help empower communities to tell their story. Coming from the background I come from, I feel like a lot of the rural communities aren’t really known about, or authentically portrayed. There’s a lot of incentive for me to try and create stories that build around those experiences of growing up in those areas. To tie connections between western communities and my Indigenous heritage. A lot of those things I really want to help influence my future art and future projects.
Dane’s sketch for his creature film “Witiko.”Dane Larocque at work.
I imagine you’ve got a great creature in Witiko?
The Witiko creature is an embodiment of this darkness or even mental illness. It’s super important to me to talk about these things through storytelling and I think it actually brings a lot of authenticity to things that don’t get represented that well. Thinking back to Alien, or anything Guillermo Del Toro touches, it’s magic. Those types of stories where the creature influences the themes and ideas of the film. With my project, I really wanted to just dabble in these ideas of trauma and emotional apathy, when you close yourself off and put yourself in that dark place. Everyone can understand disconnect from community, feeling emotionally drained or apathetic, or just being in a bad place. These things can be widely understood by everybody. So, playing with these ideas and setting them into a really authentic, traditional, well-represented setting is really important.
For those of you who are eager to see director Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat reboot, you’re in luck. HBO Max has just released the first seven minutes, which are centered on one of the most beloved characters from the video game franchise and the 1995 feature film adaptation, Scorpion. McQuoid managed a major casting coup when he landed Hiroyuki Sanada in the role. Sanada’s been stealing scenes for years now, in everything from HBO’s Westworld to his brief but potent cameo in Avengers: Endgame. Here, playing Hanzo Hasashi (Scorpion to you and me), we see how his life is forever altered when his compound is attacked by a few would-be assassins. You wanted the origin of Scorpion’s iconic “Get over here!” and now you’re getting the origin of Scorpion’s iconic “Get over here!” Happy Tuesday.
Scorpion won’t be the only fan favorite on hand, of course. Mortal Kombat features pretty everyone you loved playing as (or against)—Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), Kano (Josh Lawson), Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Kung Lao (Max Huang), and Goro (Angus Sampson). The action here looks as brutal as the original game, and the cast is as international as the characters are (to be fair, many of the characters are otherworldly, but still). The opening minutes showcase not only Sanada’s deft physicality but a snapshot of the practical stunts and expert fight choreography that’ll be on display.
McQuoid directs from a script by Greg Russo and Wonder Woman 1984 scribe Dave Callaham. Check out the first seven minutes below. Mortal Kombat hits theaters and HBO Max on April 23.
Here’s the synopsis from Warner Bros:
In “Mortal Kombat,” MMA fighter Cole Young, accustomed to taking a beating for money, is unaware of his heritage—or why Outworld’s Emperor Shang Tsung has sent his best warrior, Sub-Zero, an otherworldly Cryomancer, to hunt Cole down. Fearing for his family’s safety, Cole goes in search of Sonya Blade at the direction of Jax, a Special Forces Major who bears the same strange dragon marking Cole was born with. Soon, he finds himself at the temple of Lord Raiden, an Elder God and the protector of Earthrealm, who grants sanctuary to those who bear the mark. Here, Cole trains with experienced warriors Liu Kang, Kung Lao and rogue mercenary Kano, as he prepares to stand with Earth’s greatest champions against the enemies of Outworld in a high stakes battle for the universe. But will Cole be pushed hard enough to unlock his arcana—the immense power from within his soul—in time to save not only his family, but to stop Outworld once and for all?
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) HIROYUKI SANADA as Scorpion/Hanzo Hasashi and JOE TASLIM as Sub-Zero/Bi-Han in New Line Cinema’s action adventure “Mortal Kombat,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
This interview with Yuh-jung Youn is part of our ongoing Oscar series. It was originally published on February 16, before she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Writer/director Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari is about a Korean family chasing the American dream in 1980s Arkansas. Steven Yeun and Yeri Han play parents Jacob and Monica, who have brought their two kids Ann and David to live and work on a farm, one Jacob hopes to make successful. Yuh-jung Youn plays foul-mouthed but loving grandma Soonja, who leaves Korea to come help care for the children. At first, David thinks Soonja just smells weird and doesn’t act at all the way a grandmother should, but soon they forge a bond that strengthens the whole family.
Yuh-jung Youn has had a career in South Korean film and television spanning 55 years, and is known by some as the ‘Korean Meryl Streep.’ She has won many awards in her native country and is now building another collection of them from critics associations around the country for playing Minari’s Soonja. The Credits spoke to Yuh-jung Youn about what inspired her portrayal of the frank, fearless grandmother, and her thoughts on what made the family this ensemble cast brought to life feel so authentic.
Steven Yeun, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn, Yeri Han, Noel Cho. Director Lee Isaac Chung Credit: Josh Ethan Johnson
You’ve mentioned that your great grandmother was one inspiration for your portrayal of Soonja, and that you thought of her often during the filming of Minari. Can you tell us about her?
I was not much older than David’s age, but my regret will go on through my lifetime. During the war, nothing was settled, and after the war, there were shortages of everything. We had to use the city water only at certain times of the day. It would only come out of the faucet at that time, so she had to save the water for the whole family to share. To me, at my age, she seemed dirty, washing with used water. That bothered stupid me. Then we also had to share the food. She always said she wasn’t hungry. I thought she wasn’t hungry, but no. She wanted to feed us. She was sacrificing her food for us. Then when I got to be about 60, I started thinking about her. One day I heard someone humming a song, and it seemed really familiar, and I remembered she used to sing it all the time. All the memories of her came back. My heart is still breaking, and I’m so sorry, looking back on my terrible behavior towards her.
The film and your character are sending a love note back to her since David and Soonja have such a special relationship.
I hope so. I wish and hope she can connect with me through that.
Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn. Credit: Josh Ethan Johnson/A24
In what way was Soonja compelling as a character for you to play?
A friend of mine introduced the script. The script was very real to me, and then I found out it was based on Isaac’s life story, and I loved that about the script. Everybody was very real. Isaac gave me the freedom to create or develop the character together with him. He is such a thoughtful and nice guy that he never mentioned while we were filming, but he told me later on that I don’t look like his grandmother at all. Isaac and I create a very different character together.
Much like your character in Minari, you are very straightforward and frank in your interviews. Have you always been this honest, or have you become more that way as you’ve gotten older? How has it served you as a woman in film?
With age, what happens is you become freer, in a way, and more relaxed. You don’t have the weight of responsibility. I can actually step back and enjoy, and also be more forgiving. I’m very frank about myself and in all situations. It sometimes has been a help and sometimes been a distraction in this career. Usually, I tried never to have interviews when I was working in Korea because they would misunderstand or misinterpret me, so I was afraid to have public interviews. Here in the United States, I can do more interviews, but it is more an issue of language, of my English.
Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn. Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh/A24
You are known for only needing one take, which means you are always 100% prepared. What does that preparation look like for you?
Usually, actors and actresses fall in love with theater or film, and study and learn so they can be successful, but that was not the case with me. I bumped into acting. I fell into it. So that’s why I tried to practice a lot, trying to prepare before performances, because I felt like I was not ready like they were. I had to do more. They had prepared their whole lives to be an actor. Me, I was just looking for a part-time job and I wound up being an actress. That’s why I started that habit, and I’m really grateful now that I’ve always done that. They say practice makes you perfect. That is something I really strongly believe in. As I went through my career, I found if I read lines over and over, I don’t even know how many times I’d read them, but the more I read and memorize, the more different ways I would find to play the role. That’s why I do it over and over. Some people think it’s stupid, but no. To me, it’s the best way to learn a character.
The cast of Minari feels very much like a family, and a natural ensemble. From your perspective, how was that achieved?
If there had been big money involved, we would have had separate luxury trailers, and we probably would not have had such a great ensemble. We always got together in one place. I was staying in an Airbnb, Yeri and I were roommates, and then Steven and Isaac came. Everybody was staying in that house. We also always ate together. One thing we would often talk about was how we would deliver our lines in the most natural way. Food always brings people together, and that was true for all of us.
What have you learned over your career that was most useful in playing Soonja and being part of Minari?
Now I am just crazy enough to do any role. I don’t mind whether it’s a leading or supporting role, or even a small part, I don’t care. I promised myself after I turned 60 that I would enjoy the rest of my career. I don’t have to be obsessed with doing a certain kind of role for my name or something like that. I just like to play it by ear now, and have real, true friends around me that I can trust. My dear, dear friend introduced me to Isaac, and of course, I trust her, so I said, ‘ok, I’ll do it.’ I’m very simple. I just want to enjoy myself.
Minari releases in select theaters and on the A24 Screening Room platform beginning February 12th, followed by a VOD release on February 26.
For more on Minari, check out our interview with composer Emile Mosseri.
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The critical and commercial smash that was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse proved that you can do some very special things with a trio of directors. Those fellas: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman won themselves an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, and now they’ll be passing off the web-based baton to a new trio of helmers. Enter Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson.
It wasn’t that long ago when we interviewed Kemp Powers, who is on a serious hot streak at the moment. Powers is nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing Regina King’s excellent One Night In Miami, and he also co-directed Soul, nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. Thompson, making his feature film debut here, knows the Spider-Verse world cold—he was Annie Award-winning production designer on the first film. Dos Santos, also making his feature debut, helmed episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Justice League Unlimited, and The Legend of Korra. So the man has the chops, too.
“The crew behind the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse set such a ridiculously high bar, and we’re humbled to take on the challenge of charting the next chapter in the story of Miles Morales,” the trio said in a statement.
The new directors will be working off a script from David Callaham (who wrote the upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and original Spider-Verse producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Here’s what Lord and Miller had to say about their new directors:
“We are so lucky to have Joaquim, Justin, and Kemp on the Spider-Verse team. We are huge fans of Joaquim’s work — he makes his characters so heartfelt and unique, and he can tell an emotional story with an action sequence the way a musical does through a song. Justin is a maverick filmmaker who relentlessly pursues visual innovation and surprise but always in support of the emotional storytelling. Kemp’s work is incisive and ambitious and funny — with a writer’s wisdom and a director’s heart — he just knows what matters in every scene. All three of them elevate every project they take on, and they are certainly raising our game. We honestly just like them and want to be their friends and we’re hoping working on this movie together for the next few years will totally make that happen.”
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2 is due to hit theaters on October 7, 2022.
Featured image: Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as Spider-Man in Sony Pictures Animation’s SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE. PHOTO BY: Sony Pictures Animation
Way back in January we first heard the reports that Michael Keaton would be reprising his role as Batman. The news came from an in-depth interview that DC Films president Walter Hamada gave to the New York Times, explaining how Keaton, Ben Affleck, and current Batman Robert Pattinson would all portray Gotham’s greatest hero in films set in parallel worlds. Now The Wraphas confirmed at the Keaton portion of those initial reports, with Keaton’s talent agency, ICM Partners, telling the outlet the actor is joining the production in London. The Flash began filming there yesterday, with Ezra Miller reprising his role as Barry Allen from Justice League. Keaton had recently expressed concerns about jumping into The Flash due to concerns over the COVID-19 situation in the UK.
This marks Keaton’s return to a character he first brought to the big screen 32-years ago, in Tim Burton’s 1989 game-changer Batman. It was Burton’s bold vision and Keaton’s risky casting that ultimately set the stage for the superhero dominance of our current cinematic landscape. Keaton was primarily known as a comedic actor then, and some Batman fans bristled at the idea of him playing such an iconic superhero. Yet Keaton’s portrayal of a witty Bruce Wayne fits right into today’s superhero films, where one-liners are almost as important as superpowers. Now Keaton is portraying an older Batman, one living in a parallel universe from Pattinson’s version, who we’ll see in Matt Reeves’ upcoming The Batman. This version of Keaton’s Batman we’re seeing will be based on an imagined trajectory for the character after his second (and last) turn as Bruce Wayne in Burton’s Batman Returns in 1992. Keaton left the franchise after Burton was forced out and Joel Schumacher was brought in to direct Batman Forever (1995) and then Batman & Robin (1997).
It’s also now known that The Flash will be loosely based on the DC Comics crossover event from 2011, “Flashpoint,” which sees Barry Allen travel back in time to try and prevent his mother’s death. The result of Barry’s trip is that he ends up creating another universe, one in which Keaton’s Batman will be a crucial protector.
The Flash director Andy Muschietti (It, It: Chapter Two) generated a bunch of buzz when he revealed the film had begun production via Instagram, which we’ve embedded below. The Flash is due in theaters on November 4, 2022.
Featured image: Michael Keaton attends the premiere of Columbia Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Homecoming” at TCL Chinese Theatre on June 28, 2017 in Hollywood, California. Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)
Marvel’s first Asian superhero is here. Behold the first teaser for director Destin Daniel Cretton’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Ringshas arrived, and it’s flat-out thrilling. The teaser comes out just in time for star Simu Liu’s birthday, and it’s hard to imagine a better birthday present for the soon-to-be newest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Liu plays the titular Shang-Chi, a young man who was raised by his father Wenwu (Tony Leung) to be all but invincible. While Shang-Chi is revealed here to be the apprentice to his villainous father—who leads the organization called the Ten Rings—we’re being set up for an inevitable father/son dispute, the kind of familial drama that has charged so many superhero origin stories. Shang-Chi had walked away from his father’s life, but the action in The Legend of the Ten Rings—and hoo boy does the action look good—will bring father and son together again.
There’s no question that Cretton’s film looks and feels as singular to its story and characters in a way that Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther did when we got our first initial glimpses of his now-iconic foray into the MCU. It’s obviously too soon to tell exactly what kind of film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be, but the martial arts on display in the teaser already gives the film balletic energy that feels fresh and specific. Sure, we’ve seen Marvel characters who know their way around a martial arts move before—but we’ve never seen a Marvel film steeped in martial arts itself.
Cretton directs from a script he co-wrote with David Callaham and Andrew Lanham. Joining Liu Leung are Awkwafina, Fala Chen, Meng’er Zhang, Florian Munteanu, Ronny Chieng, and Michelle Yeoh.
Check out the teaser below. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings hits theaters on September 3, 2021.
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