Writer/director J. Blakeson’s I Care A Lot is a gleefully cynical uppercut against late-stage capitalism that is also, incredibly, a blast to watch. The con artist at its center, Rosamund Pike’s Marla Grayson, would be hard to root for if both her performance and the film itself weren’t so infectiously committed to its amorality. One of I Care A Lot‘s central themes is that the heart of capitalism isn’t healthy competition or ingenuity or hard work—it’s exploitation. That’s why Marla’s sadism—she’s a legal guardian who bilks her elderly wards of their life’s savings—feels like more than just an empty attempt to center an “edgy” protagonist. Marla’s a reflection, as is Peter Dinklage’s con artist Roman Lunyov, of what capitalism actually is as practiced.
When it came to giving Pike the couture to match her character’s energetic vampirism, it took a minute for costume designer Deborah Newhall to find the fun in Marla. “My first take was it was a very dark story, and I thought, I don’t like these people,” Newhall says. “I really don’t like her. It’s going to be a challenge to make it interesting.” Yet make it interesting Newhall did, thanks to the realization that Blakeson’s film wasn’t meant to be some dark, brooding trip into the heart of a monster, but rather a comedy.
Newhall showed Blakeson some initial images she’d pulled after she read the script. “I told him Marla’s a really dark and aggressive person,” Newhall says. “I reflected that in a sharp silhouette, sleek lines, everything really cold and metallic. He looked at my boards and said, well they’re great, but it’s a different movie. Where’s the color? This is a comedy and it’s going to be fun.”
Blakeson told Newhall he wanted pops of color everywhere. After she chatted with production designer Michael Grasley and got a feel for the house that Marla’s next victim Jennifer [Dianne Weist] lives in, she began to see Pike’s Marla in a whole new light—and shade.
“She’s not a girly, feminine dress kind of person,” Newhall says, “and then I found the yellow suit. That was my trigger. I’d been building a sizable closet for her, it went from navy blue, gray and black, to yellow, red, and green. It was a big switch, but a fun way to go. Once I got it we were off to the races and it was great fun.”
Newhall has a theater background, and the way she approaches her work is imagining, at all times, what else will be in the frame with her clothes. “I’m looking at what color can do, how to work with the background and have things either come forward and pop, or recede and mix into the background,” she says. “Color is huge in how an audience responds to a character. Like that lilac jumpsuit, that’s the thing that kept sticking my head. This look seemed to be oddly humorous in this terrible situation, yet it also had to be real. You had to believe her, the clothing couldn’t be so out there that it wasn’t realistic.”
Eiza González as Fran and Rosamund Pike as Marla. Credit: Netflix.
Marla’s machinations to drain Jennifer of her money and steal her house ultimately lead her into contact, and conflict, with other sleazeballs. There’s mafia lawyer Dean Ericson (Chris Messina) who threatens Marla over Jennifer’s assets. There’s Dinklage’s fellow con artist, too. Marla’s practically always going toe-to-toe with someone in the film, and those battles offered Newhall more opportunities to play with color.
Peter Dinklage as Rukov and Rosamund Pike as Marla. Credit: Netflix.
“I think of it as composing a painting. I need to know the light, time of day, and what else is around them,” Newhall says. “It’s really composing a frame and how things move through the frame. Like the trenchcoat she wears. J. Blakeson wanted something that moves, a signature piece of outerwear that she can wear going to the bank, going to court, etcetera. I loved that and wanted to find a piece that would be significant and take on its thing as it glides through a scene. I found one coat and it was the right one.”
I Care A Lot: (L to R) Macon Blair as “Feldstrom” and Rosamund Pike as “Martha”. Photo Cr. Seacia Pavao / Netflix
Towards the end of the film, there’s a big shift in Marla’s color palette—she starts wearing white. [Spoiler alert.]
Deborah Newhall’s sketch for Marla’s white suit. Courtesy Deb Newhall.
“It’s a lot of color in the beginning, and then gets quieter in the last act,” Newhall says. “Her look in the hospital is a white dress and those wicked shoes. White is its own color, and it’s her biggest power moment at the very end. She’s above it all now, pure, a billionaire, away from all the riff-raff and not having to touch anything that’s unseemly or dirty.”
I CARE A LOT (2021). Peter Dinklage as Rukov and Rosamund Pike as Marla. Cr: Seacia Pavao/NETFLIX
While the looks Marla rocks in I Care A Lot are modern and suave, Newhall says that designing for contemporary films is much harder than it looks. “I will say there’s a lot more to designing contemporary films that have modern clothes in them,” she says. “People assume they know how that works, they think, ‘I get dressed every day, how hard could it be?’ No one talks the same way about a period film, and sometimes it’s easier to work on a period film. When you’re putting something on someone and the film’s set in 1880, they can’t complain and ask to wear something else—what else have you got? That’s the period we’re in and we can’t go to the Gap or Macy’s to change your look to make it more comfortable.”
I Care A Lot is now streaming on Netflix.
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We know that James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad boasts a lot of oddball characters, including a humanoid shark, so even a little bit of new information or footage is welcome. To that end, Gunn shared two new TV spots that introduce Peter Capaldi’s Thinker and reference Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher II. Unlike Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn or Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller, Thinker and Ratcatcher II are newcomers, and for non-comics readers, you probably have never heard of them before.
The first TV spot features Harley Quinn and Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) laying down the law (so to speak) for the newest member of the Squad, Thinker. He doesn’t seem especially thrilled with the mission. The Thinker is a superintelligent metahuman with telepathic abilities. Oh, he was also a supervillain, but on the Squad, he’ll be a force for good. We think:
The second spot doesn’t offer much new footage, but, Gunn is drawing our attention to what’s behind Melchior’s Ratcatcher II, namely, the film’s villain. That would be the kaiju Starro the Conquerer, a colossal alien starfish (yup) that was the first main antagonist of the original Justice League of America when they made their first appearance in the comics in 1960. But who is Ratcatcher II? She was the protégé of Otis Flannegan, the original Ratcatcher, and is a former exterminator turned criminal who controls an army of rodents. So, yeah, better to have her own your side than not.
We’ll likely be getting more specific character introductions as we get closer to the release date. The Suicide Squad is due to hit theaters and HBO Max on August 6.
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A lot of people are professing surprise at the success of Zack Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max, not only in terms of the critical praise it’s getting, being called “operatic” or as richly imagined as Lord of the Rings, but even in the calls to continue the film’s teased sequels, and pursue a #Snyderverse on HBO Max.
As this was being written, no less than the Washington Post’s opinion pages ran a column from its culture & politics writer, calling Snyder’s darker version a more necessary reflection of 21st-century trauma and angst than Marvel’s quippier, everything-might-seemed-destroyed- but-really-isn’t superhero Götterdämmerungs. Precisely the tone Joss Whedon was hired to emulate by Warners when he was brought on to rework the first version (with Snyder having departed due to a profound family tragedy), turning Justice League, round one, into the box office sinkhole that first gave rise to the legend of the Snyder Cut.
The fact that the original turns out to be the superior version, however, doesn’t surprise its original DP, Fabian Wagner. “We all knew in which direction the movie was going to go,” he says, though there was a surprise for him at the outset: Being brought on board.
He calls it a “stroke of luck” he came in to “step into (the) shoes” of Snyder’s regular cinematographer, Larry Fong, who shot most of the director’s best-known films, including 300, Watchmen, and the earlier Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, whose own dark death-of-Superman story leads straight into the current Justice League.
Henry Cavill (Superman / Clark Kent). Courtesy HBO Max.
But happily for Wagner, Snyder held some admiration for his work, too. “Zack was a big Game of Thrones fan,” he says, and Wagner shot some its most acclaimed episodes, including Hardhome, with its epic zombie battles of the north, and then surpassing that with Battle of the Bastards, which boasted one of TV’s greatest small(er) screen battle sequences.
When Wagner came on, he assumed that even if the screen was going to be larger, perhaps a lot larger, with the envisioned IMAX showings, the proportions of the superhero saga would be similar to what he used on Thrones.
“I stupidly thought he’d want to shoot the movie in 2:35 aspect ratio,” he says, being a bit hard on himself. But Snyder told him “I actually want to shoot it in 4:3.”
This may have come as a surprise to HBO’s current viewers expecting the now-traditional rectangle, but the more Wagner thought about it, the more it felt like “a great idea. The framing, though, seemed odd to me,” at least, at first, but in making all those meta-humans “taller” than they’d be in widescreen, Wagner adds that “it adds to the characters’ grandeur.”
Regardless of ratio, Wagner still found himself looking at a range of different films and imagery in preparing for the shoot, including comics – where frames often traditionally mimicked those 4:3 proportions. “I looked at Tim Burton’s (Batman films), I looked at Zack’s again (and) looked at Sin City (which, though directed by Robert Rodriguez, also came from a Frank Miller graphic novel, as did Snyder’s 300).
“It became an accumulation of all of those things, to create that look — a whole bunch of different movies. It was really a strange mixture. I guess in the end, it’s like an accumulation of everything you’ve seen of those kinds of characters. The more source material you have, the better.” But he also had Snyder to draw on too: “He knows a lot about that universe.”
Ben Affleck (Batman / Bruce Wayne), Gal Gadot (Diana Prince / Wonder Woman), Zack Snyder (Director). Courtesy HBO Max.
As for the 4:3 ratio, Snyder also knew that it approximated the proportions for those presumed IMAX showings, but instead of the 65mm film, and heavier gear, that would be required, they “shot in Super 35, shooting in full-frame, which obviously works for IMAX.”
Wagner hadn’t shot on celluloid in a while but made an easy choice to use ARRICAMs and ARRIFLEXEs, with Leica Summilux lenses, to do it. Though currently living in London, Wagner grew up in Munich, and “did my apprenticeship at ARRI when I was fifteen.” As for the lenses, he “just had a feeling I wanted to try to try the Summiluxes.” During a series of lens tests, he and Snyder looked at each other and said “‘those are the ones!’ They’re soft and sharp at the same time (and) they have a beautiful fall off.”
Gal Gadot (Diana Prince / Wonder Woman). Courtesy HBO Max.
One thing where he didn’t want fall off was in how his production footage would work with the significant rendering in post, always preferring to do some of the effects in-camera, when possible. He mentions “interactive lighting,” including perhaps its most “interactive” form of all, fire. He likes using real fire, at least in part, if a scene calls for it, even if the conflagration will be digitally amplified. “Hopefully the visual effects get turned into that, what you do on set.”
Ray Porter (Darkseid). Courtesy HBO Max.
As for those sets, designed by Patrick Tatopolous, the production designer who did 300 and the earlier Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, along with other films like Total Recall and Maleficent, they were often built practically to scale. “Even though we had so many visual effects,” Wagner says, “the sets were huge,” with things like the Kryptonian ship and many other set pieces filling “a whole stage—it was beautiful to work on (them).”
Jason Momoa (Aquaman / Arthur Curry), Gal Gadot (Diana Prince / Wonder Woman), Ray Fisher (Cyborg / Victor Stone). Courtesy HBO.
The reconstituted multi-hour epic features not only the finished effects work on the majestic sets, and the reworked action sequences, but (spoiler alert) also a new, dystopian postscript, that was filmed here in L.A. In it, the Joker, played by Jared Leto, makes a tentative truce with Ben Affleck’s Batman, as the heroes are making a stand against Henry Cavill’s now amok Superman. All of it pointing toward Snyder-esque sequels originally planned, but now as ephemeral as the Flash speeding by.
Wagner didn’t fly over to film the new epilogue (and tactfully notes he didn’t shoot Whedon’s footage either), due to Hollywood being in the throes of a resurgent virus at the time. “Plus, I had a daughter. I managed to spend a whole year at home with (her). If the world happened normally, I would’ve been away for the whole year.”
If the Snyder Cut’s reconstitution, arrival, and rapturous reviews prove anything, the world is definitely not happening “normally” anymore. Sometimes, though, this can be to the benefit of fans and viewers everywhere.
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Featured image: Ray Fisher (Cyborg / Victor Stone), Ezra Miller (The Flash / Barry Allen), Ben Affleck (Batman / Bruce Wayne), Henry Cavill (Superman / Clark Kent), Gal Gadot (Diana Prince / Wonder Woman), Jason Momoa (Aquaman / Arthur Curry). Courtesy HBO Max.
Judas and the Black Messiah opened last month and quickly 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.
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
The full cast of Disney+’s upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi has been revealed, and it boasts some well-known stars and some up-and-coming talent. The long-gestating series is really ramping up, which will catch up with the Jedi master 10 years after he bested Annakin Skywalker in a lightsaber duel in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
We’ve known for a while now that Hayden Christensen would be reprising his role of Annakin Skywalker, who ultimately became Darth Vader at the very end of Revenge of the Sith. We also recently learned that Game of Thrones alum Indira Varma had joined the cast. Now, Disney has revealed the impressive list of performers who will populate the series, including a few more faces from the prequels—Joel Edgerton and Bonnie Piesse, returning as Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, respectively. Newcomers to the Star Wars world include Kumail Nanjiani, Moses Ingram, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Rupert Friend, Simone Kessell, Sung Kang, and Benny Safdie (of the Safdie Brothers, the filmmaking duo behind Uncut Gems).
Deborah Chow is directing Obi-Wan Kenobi, coming off her work directing two episodes of Disney+’s critical and commercial hit The Mandalorian. Chow directs from Joby Harold’s scripts. The series is due to begin filming in April.
Disney shared the below image, celebrating what’s a very exciting cast announcement.
Courtesy Walt Disney Studios/Lucasfilm.
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Featured image: TOKYO, JAPAN – SEPTEMBER 05: Ewan McGregor attends the premiere of ‘Christopher Robin’ on September 5, 2018 in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo by Keith Tsuji/Getty Images for Disney)
When Warner Bros. revealed the trailer for writer/director James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad on Friday, one thing became immediately clear—King Shark was a star. It was immediately apparent that King Shark not only looked oddly adorable, but there also was something endearing, and familiar, about his voice. Then Gunn revealed to the world that King Shark’s voice comes from a little-known actor named Sylvester Stallone. Upon learning this, you couldn’t help think, of course. Who better to lend their vocal chops to the lovable lunk than Sly, the man who made Rocky Balboa’s punchdrunk way of speaking such an indelible part of the character?
In a later Twitter thread, Gunn went further, describing why King Shark isn’t a hammerhead, how he pitched Sly to do the voice, and why the character isn’t ripped, like, say, John Cena’s Peacemaker, but rather unapologetically rocks a dad bod.
I did tests with the hammerhead design, which I love & originally thought I’d use. But having eyes on the sides far apart made it incredibly awkward shooting interactions with other people. You couldn’t really see him looking at the other person & the shots tended to be too wide. https://t.co/7Pos3tZgmapic.twitter.com/GlIzjQjutU
At four hours long, HBO Max’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a reworked version of the 2017 film started by director Snyder but finished by Joss Whedon, differs most obviously from its predecessor in length. Those two extra hours, however, do much more than simply pile up the story, even if the overall plot remains mostly the same. In revisiting what started as his film and now has definitively ended as such, Snyder added context, fundamentally changed the tone, and ditched most of the bantering and gag bits. Composer Thomas Holkenborg, also known as Junkie XL, added a new score, which replaced Danny Elfman’s, which had, in turn, replaced Holkenborg’s own first score for the 2017 version of the film. The villain Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) got a redesign. Superman’s upper lip no longer looks weird, because Henry Cavill wasn’t sporting a mustache (grown for his role in Mission: Impossible — Fallout) which had to be removed with CGI.
Altering Justice League so thoroughly meant that many of the crew were also called back to redo or revise their earlier input. Among them was Scott Hecker, Supervising Sound Editor and Sound Designer on the Snyder Cut and Supervising Sound Editor on the 2017 version. Hecker, whose credits include Mad Max: Fury Road as well as titles from the DC universe, including Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Man of Steel, is a long-term collaborator with Snyder. Having developed many of the sounds consistent across this particular universe, he was able to jump right in to reprise his earlier role. We got to speak with Hecker about signature sounds that were preserved or redeveloped as needed, reworking the sound editing for a more somber film, and that haunting opening Superman sequence.
How much of the original sound and sound design were you able to keep?
Actually, a good bit of the original sound design elements were used, because the early foundation of the sounds in the theatrical release were developed and approved by Zack back in early 2017 for his director’s cut version he showed the studio before he had to leave the project. Some of those sounds were originated in Man of Steel (Superman’s sounds) and BvS (some Batman and Wonder Woman sounds). When we started back up on the Snyder Cut, all of the original sound design elements had to be altered, modified, and sweetened to accommodate Zack’s new VFX and the darker tone. And then there were two hours of footage we had never worked on, so it was an archeological dig for what we could find from three years ago, sweetening and embellishing that material, and designing two hours’ worth from scratch.
What kind of conversations did you have with Zack Snyder as you got into this? For example, how did he lay out his vision, and how did you go about achieving it?
After working with Zack on eight films since 2003, we have a great shorthand and really didn’t have specific conversations about his vision per se, initially. One of the things I love about working with Zack is that he doesn’t overwhelm you at the beginning with a lot of discussion, he frees you to see what you come up with and then reacts to that: ‘that’s really cool but I think it could be better if…’, ‘hey, in that section you should know in the DC world this means this or that and the sounds need to reflect that…’, ‘this is what I was going for here,’ etc. At the first temp mix for his director’s cut to show the studio, he hears everything and gives notes on what he’d like different for the next temp mix, and by the time we get to the final mix, everyone’s familiar and comfortable with the direction of the sound design.
Ray Fisher (Cyborg / Victor Stone), Ezra Miller (The Flash / Barry Allen), Ben Affleck (Batman / Bruce Wayne), Henry Cavill (Superman / Clark Kent), Gal Gadot (Diana Prince / Wonder Woman), Jason Momoa (Aquaman / Arthur Curry). Courtesy HBO Max.
One of the first indications that this was going to be a vastly different film from the first version appears early on, with the sound of Superman’s death cry reverberating across the entire world. How was that achieved?
Early in 2017, this is one of the first sequences we were asked to rough out for the film editor’s Avid tracks. Nothing like starting with one of the more creatively challenging sequences in the film! My co-supervisor Chuck Michael and I talked about having Superman’s death yell all around us, all the time, at every location in the universe, to signify the message was being communicated that Superman was dead. We had many production takes of his death yell from the end of BvS, but they were relatively short, so Chuck set about layering and forward and reversing many different takes together so that there was no sense of repetition in this foundational bed of his traveling death yell. As the VFX developed, we saw more and more visual ‘waves’ of the yell passing by to denote its movement through the universe. To serve that premise, Chuck dopplerized the various takes of the yell that we had and appropriately synchronized them to each visual pass-by. I think it’s a super cool way to start the film!
What changes were made to Ciarán Hinds’s voice as Steppenwolf?
Being a CG character, Zack hired Ciarán for his Shakespearian-influenced acting abilities and not his physical presence, which would have been a far cry from Steppenwolf’s 12-feet stature. He wanted Steppenwolf to be a sympathetic yet ominous villain. Ciarán’s performance was amazing, but the quality of his voice did not lend itself to sell the desired ominous and booming nature of Steppenwolf’s character. We knew Zack wanted him to sound bad-assed, so it took a bad-assed Supervising Dialogue/ADR Editor, Lauren Hadaway, to come up with a process using various plugins and software to accomplish just that. This was no ‘set it and forget it’ processing. Because of the range of Ciarán’s performance, from whispers and conversation to excitement and yelling, Lauren had to painstakingly adjust the degrees of processing from syllable to syllable, word to word, and sentence to sentence. The catch was, the more processing she did to make him sound bigger (a frequent request), the less intelligible he became, and we couldn’t have that! In the end, we pushed the processing as far as we could go without sacrificing intelligibility. Great job, Lauren!
Ciarán Hinds (Steppenwolf). Courtesy HBO Max.
Each superhero clearly has their own skillset. How did that shape your work?
It shaped our work to create a lot of crazy sound design needed for this beautiful beast of a film! Superman’s signature sounds were mostly developed in Man of Steel, Batman’s in BvS, and a few of Wonder Woman’s at the end of BvS as well. For Batman, we still had to come up with the sound design for the Night Crawler, and the Flying Fox (the Batmobile, grappling hook, and Batarang were developed in BvS), and for Wonder Woman, the sound of her magic lasso (her power blast sounds were developed in BvS). From scratch, we had to develop all of Cyborg’s sounds, his computerization, his mechanical movements, servo movements, and flying sounds. Since he was still part human, we didn’t want him to sound like a robot with typical servo sounds, so we also ended up using processed synth vocalizations, bowed guitar strings, and other interesting sounds to cover his movements.
Ray Fisher (Cyborg / Victor Stone). Courtesy HBO Max.
I imagine the Flash was no walk in the park (pun intended), or Aquaman for that matter.
We had to design all of Flash’s electrical and time warp sounds from scratch. We decided we didn’t want to just use all normal electrical arcs and zaps, so we also incorporated many different processed sounds, like dentist drills, glass breaks, tape measure whips, bullet ricochets, and synth oscillator sweeps. For Aquaman, it was mostly cool ringy-shingy sounds for his Trident and his power blast sounds that were different from Wonder Woman’s. We also needed to set the tone for his underwater world and make all the underwater action sound like it was indeed underwater. For Steppenwolf, we designed the sound of his mood-dependent percolating body armor, his humming, buzzing, and sparking battle-ax, as well as the slamming and undulating Boom Tube he used to travel from world to world. Besides Chuck and I, Casey Genton, Ando Johnson, Phil Barrie, and David Werntz contributed significantly. We had a great team.
Jason Momoa (Aquaman / Arthur Curry), Ray Fisher (Cyborg / Victor Stone), Ezra Miller (The Flash / Barry Allen). Courtesy HBO Max.
We now have an official release date for director Jaume Collet-Serra and Dwayne Johnson’s supersized superhero collaboration—Black Adam will hit theaters on July 29, 2022. “A disruptive and unstoppable force of a message from the man in black himself,” Johnson wrote in an Instagram post that revealed a teaser playing across multiple digital billboards in Times Square. “The hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is about to change.” It’s a pretty awesome way to reveal the release date.
There’s been a flurry of news surrounding both Black Adam and his archnemesis’s film, Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Two legendary actors have joined each franchise—Pierce Brosnan will play the DC hero Dr. Fate in Black Adam, while Helen Mirren is joining the Shazam! sequel to play the villain Hespera.
Black Adam features Johnson as the titular superhero, and along with Brosnan, the cast includes Noah Centineo as Atom Smasher, Quintessa Swindell as Cyclone, and Aldis Hodge as Hawkman. Production is slated to begin in April in Atlanta.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA – APRIL 05: (EDITORS NOTE: Image has been converted to black and white) Dwayne Johnson attends the 2018 LA Family Housing Awards at The Lot in West Hollywood on April 5, 2018 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
Writer/director James Gunn promised us The Suicide Squad trailer today, and voila, here it is. Our first proper look at Gunn’s vision for DC’s most unscrupulous antiheroes, villains, and weirdos looks as gonzo as promised. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller, Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang, and Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag return from 2016’s Suicide Squad and are joined by a who’s who of DC’s most offbeat characters. Sure, Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is a proper antihero, but characters like John Cena’s Peacemaker, Michael Rooker’s Savant, Nathan Fillion’s T.D.K., David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man, and Sean Gunn’s Weasel are bonafide oddballs. Oh, and King Shark is possibly the most insane character of them all. And who plays him? Let Gunn explain:
The trailer is, in a word, joyous. From an opening gambit to save Harley Quinn to the whole thing being set to Steely Dan’s groovy and highly appropriate “Dirty Work”, this first glimpse at The Suicide Squad is hitting all the right notes. Taking a page from David Ayer’s 2016 film, Amanda Waller has once again offered a reduced sentence to the Squad if they complete her mission. The catch, of course, is if they try any funny business, she’ll detonate the explosive device she’s implanted in the base of their skulls. Tough boss.
The trailer is age-restricted, which means you’ll need to head over to YouTube to check it out here.
The Suicide Squad hits theaters and HBO Max on August 6:
Here’s the official synopsis from Warner Bros.:
From writer/director James Gunn comes Warner Bros. Pictures’ superhero action adventure “The Suicide Squad,” featuring a collection of the most degenerate delinquents in the DC lineup.
Welcome to hell—a.k.a. Belle Reve, the prison with the highest mortality rate in the US of A. Where the worst Super-Villains are kept and where they will do anything to get out—even join the super-secret, super-shady Task Force X. Today’s do-or-die assignment? Assemble a collection of cons, including Bloodsport, Peacemaker, Captain Boomerang, Ratcatcher 2, Savant, King Shark, Blackguard, Javelin and everyone’s favorite psycho, Harley Quinn. Then arm them heavily and drop them (literally) on the remote, enemy-infused island of Corto Maltese. Trekking through a jungle teeming with militant adversaries and guerrilla forces at every turn, the Squad is on a search-and-destroy mission with only Colonel Rick Flag on the ground to make them behave…and Amanda Waller’s government techies in their ears, tracking their every movement. And as always, one wrong move and they’re dead (whether at the hands of their opponents, a teammate, or Waller herself). If anyone’s laying down bets, the smart money is against them—all of them.
The Suicide Squad writer/director James Gunn took to Twitter yesterday to inform us that the release date is official, and the first trailer for the movie is dropping soon. Soon as in today. March 26. As for the release date, The Suicide Squad will be hitting theaters and HBO Max on August 6. He also revealed the film’s new poster, which shows the entire gang all suited up and ready to go.
We’ve been eagerly awaiting Gunn’s first foray into the DC universe for a long time now, and everything we’ve heard about The Suicide Squad makes it feel like the wait will have been more than worth it. Gunn’s vision for his band of baddies has been compared to a 1970s war film, only one populated by a cast of bonkers supervillains, weirdos, and antiheroes. The film’s cast includes a few members of the team David Ayer assembled in 2016’s Suicide Squad—Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller, Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang, and Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag. The newcomers, of which there are many, include Idris Elba as Bloodsport, John Cena as Peacemaker, Michael Rooker as Savant, Nathan Fillion as T.D.K., and a whole lot more.
We’ll share the trailer the second it’s released. Here are Gunn’s Tweets:
From writer/director James Gunn comes Warner Bros. Pictures’ superhero action-adventure “The Suicide Squad,” featuring a collection of the most degenerate delinquents in the DC lineup.
Welcome to hell—a.k.a. Belle Reve, the prison with the highest mortality rate in the US of A. Where the worst Super-Villains are kept and where they will do anything to get out—even join the super-secret, super-shady Task Force X. Today’s do-or-die assignment? Assemble a collection of cons, including Bloodsport, Peacemaker, Captain Boomerang, Ratcatcher 2, Savant, King Shark, Blackguard, Javelin and everyone’s favorite psycho, Harley Quinn. Then arm them heavily and drop them (literally) on the remote, enemy-infused island of Corto Maltese. Trekking through a jungle teeming with militant adversaries and guerrilla forces at every turn, the Squad is on a search-and-destroy mission with only Colonel Rick Flag on the ground to make them behave…and Amanda Waller’s government techies in their ears, tracking their every movement. And as always, one wrong move and they’re dead (whether at the hands of their opponents, a teammate, or Waller herself). If anyone’s laying down bets, the smart money is against them—all of them.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Yesterday we wrote about how the great Helen Mirren was joining Shazam! Fury of the Gods. In that piece, we mentioned how Shazam’s most formidable rival, Black Adam, has his own movie in the works starring Dwayne Johnson. Black Adam is due to start filming in a matter of days. Now, Pierce Brosnan’s inclusion in Black Adam marks another heralded actor joining the DC extended universe, stepping into the role of Dr. Fate in director Jaume Collet-Serra’s hotly-anticipated upcoming film.
The Hollywood Reporterbroke the news that Brosnan would be making his first plunge into the world of superheroes as Dr. Fate, who goes by Kent Nelson in his normal life, the son of an archeologist who was schooled in sorcery and is the owner of the magical Helmet of Fate. Dr. Fate was created by Gardner Fox and Howard Sherman and is one of the oldest in DC’s canon, dating back to his first appearance in “More Fun Comics #5” in 1940. While Brosnan has never before mixed it up in the world of superheroes, he was, of course, James Bond, and therefore is no stranger to starring in blockbusters.
Black Adam boasts a really great cast, which already includes the Rock, of course, as well as Aldis Hodge as Hawkman, Quintessa Swindell as Cyclone, and Noah Centineo as Atom Smasher. Black Adam will feature the predecessors to DC’s Justice League (you might have heard of those guys), the Justice Society. As THR notes, the Society takes a more “familial and multi-generational approach to heroics.” In Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the titular League’s approach to heroics could more accurately be described as a touch slapdash, hugely dangerous, but ultimately successful.
Black Adam is slated to start production in April in Atlanta. Plot details are, as ever, being kept under wraps.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: DEAUVILLE, FRANCE – SEPTEMBER 06: Pierce Brosnan arrives at the Opening Ceremony during the 45th Deauville American Film Festival on September 06, 2019 in Deauville, France. (Photo by Francois Durand/Getty Images)
In the third installment of our Future Critics series, we raise the age range a touch but we sure don’t the passion for film on display. We’ve been schooled on composers by East Coaster Benji Cherukuri, given a crash course in the importance of female filmmakers from West Coaster Elisa Monagas, and now we head north to learn what inspires Canadian film lover, film world employee—and film and TV influencer (more on that in a second)—Kyle Perez.
Like with so many of us, Kyle’s love for movies dates back as far as he can remember. “The movies have always served as a kind of safe haven, a place to totally immerse myself in the endless array of worlds and stories,” he says. Kyle’s enthusiasm for film and TV is no longer just a personal passion—he has become the 6th most prolific poll author on the International Movie Database (IMDb), drawing more than 650,000 votes from users on the site. Over on Instagram, Kyle has become an influencer in the TV/Film space, earning more than 75,000 followers to date. Unsurprisingly, Kyle’s enthusiasm for all things film and TV is infectious.
Kyle has taken his passion into the professional world. He’s currently the distribution coordinator of Little Engine Moving Pictures, a kids and family production company, where he assists in the day-to-day development of Little Engine’s TV slate and provides both creative and administrative support for the growing distribution pipeline.
As a proud Canadian, Kyle has some thoughts on his favorite Canadian filmmakers, which he shared with us below in Part I.
Although a young guy, Kyle’s favorite films are all classics—It’s a Wonderful Life, 12 Angry Men, Casablanca, Sunset Blvd., and Psycho. In part II, Kyle takes us on a trip down memory lane and shares a bit about why these films ignited his passion.
Director Joe Penna’s upcoming film Stowaway presents an intriguing central dilemma—what do you do when a spaceship on a two-year mission to Mars with precisely enough oxygen for three people finds itself having to account for a fourth? This problem is what animates Penna’s new film, and he’s assembled a great cast to tease out its implications. Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Toni Collette, and Shamier Anderson star, working from a script from Penna and Ryan Morrison, and a new trailer from Netflix highlights the movie’s driving conundrum—how do you decide who gets to live and who must die?
Anderson plays launch support engineer Michael, the stowaway, although he didn’t hide aboard the shuttle on purpose. Rather, Michael was working on the craft before launch and got himself knocked unconscious. By the time the rest of the crew realizes he’s there, it’s too late, they’re in space. What’s worse, Michael has accidentally damaged the spaceship’s life support system, which leaves only enough oxygen for three astronauts to survive the journey to Mars. The math is brutal—either one of them has to be sacrificed, or all four will die.
Unless, perhaps, they can devise a way to tweak the life support system? Or, as the trailer seems to suggest, might they decide to forge ahead to Mars, oxygen be damned, to try and complete the mission, one way or another, despite the fact it means none of them makes it home? One has to assume that the crew only finds out about the life support system failure once it’s too late to turn back. And the film’s premise—folks trapped in a tiny space in the midst of an existential crisis—can’t help but resonate after a year’s worth of feeling much the same in real life.
Whichever way Stowaway unpacks this fretful situation, it’s got actors with the chops to make the script’s contained space and moral quandary very compelling. Stowaway premieres on Netflix on April 22. Check out the trailer below:
Here’s the synopsis from Netflix:
On a mission headed to Mars, an unintended stowaway accidentally causes severe damage to the spaceship’s life support systems. Facing dwindling resources and a potentially fatal outcome, the crew is forced to make an impossible decision.
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The Shazam! sequel just landed one of the best in the business. The Oscar-winning and all-around powerhouse performer Helen Mirren will be playing the villain Hespera in Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Poor Billy Batson won’t know what hit him.
Mirren joins another Shazam! newcomer, Rachel Zegler, who is fresh off starring in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming West Side Story, and early word is Mirren and Zegler will be playing sisters. Mirren’s character Hespera is the daughter of Atlas and figures to be a major challenge to Zachary Levi’s overgrown and superpowered Billy Batson (played in teenage form by Asher Angel).
Mirren and Zegler join Levi, Angel, and Shazam!‘s original director David F. Sandberg, who is working off a script by Henry Gayden. The Shazam! world is growing by leaps and bounds, with the character’s longtime nemesis Black Adam getting his own movie, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and starring none other than Dwayne Johnson.
This won’t be Mirren’s first foray into franchise filmmaking. She starred in both RED and RED 2, a comic book series about a team of black-ops agents. Her most notable dip into the franchise world comes in her recurring role in The Fast and the Furious franchise, playing Queenie, mom to Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw. Mirren’s reprising Queenie for F9.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 03: Helen Mirren joins L’Oréal Paris to celebrate the launch of Age Perfect Cosmetics on March 03, 2020 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Rachel Murray/Getty Images for L’Oréal Paris )
We now have a clear picture of how Disney will be approaching their release schedule this year. The headline news is that Disney has decided to release Marvel Studios hotly anticipated Black Widow in theaters and on Disney+ Premiere Access simultaneously. If you opt to watch director Cate Shortland’s film about Scarlett Johansson’s super-spy and former Avenger Natasha Romanoff at home, you’ll have to part with $30 to do so, the same price point for its recent releases Mulan and Raya and the Last Dragon. Black Widow is now premiering on July 9, a two-month delay from its previous May 7 release date.
Disney is also taking the same approach to their live-action film Cruella, starring Emma Stone in an origin story about the 101 Dalmations villain, from director Craig Gillespie. Cruella will now bow in theaters and on Disney+ Premiere Access on May 28. Meanwhile, Pixar’s upcoming film Luca will forgo a theatrical release entirely and land on Disney+ on June 18.
If it hadn’t already been clear by Disney’s ever-growing slate of offerings on Disney+, the studio is firmly committed to growing its streaming and premium VOD business.
“Today’s announcement reflects our focus on providing consumer choice and serving the evolving preferences of audiences,” said Kareem Daniel, Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution Chairman in a statement. “By leveraging a flexible distribution strategy in a dynamic marketplace that is beginning to recover from the global pandemic, we will continue to employ the best options to deliver The Walt Disney Company’s unparalleled storytelling to fans and families around the world.”
Disney also revealed that director Destin Daniel Cretton’s upcoming Marvel film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will now be opening on September 3 (moved back from its previous July 9 date). More moves revealed include Ryan Reynolds’ Free Guy (moved back to August 13), Matthew Vaughn’s The King’s Man (moved back to December 22), and Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile (moved back to February 11, 2022).
Black Widow will bow at a time when just about every American who wanted the vaccine will have already gotten their shot, and there’s good reason to imagine a scenario where folks flood to the theaters to see it. While Marvel’s series releases on Disney+, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, have been qualified successes, there’s still no better place to see a Marvel movie than the theater. Now that we’re blissfully approaching the moment where it will be entirely safe to return to theaters, Black Widow could be landing at the perfect moment to celebrate that fact.
Emerald Fennell is having a very good start to her week and a very good year, period. The talented actress, writer, and director just nabbed the WGA Award for original screenplay this past Sunday night for her feature Promising Young Woman, which also garnered five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. Then came Monday, March 22, when Deadline revealed that Fennell will be penning the DC movie Zatanna for Warner Bros. and Bad Robot.
The character Zatanna first appeared in November 1964’s “Hawkman,” and was created by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson. She has magical powers, as did her father, Zatara, and when we first meet her in the comics she’s searching for him. For those curious how Zatanna factors into the larger DC universe, she’s got a slew of direct connections to some of the biggest superheroes. Over the years Zatanna has been involved with the Justice League—she assisted them on missions and was eventually elected as a member (“Justice League of America #161, December 1978). She was romantically linked to the character Constantine and was even friends with Bruce Wayne when they were both kids. Zatanna has also already appeared on the screen—Serinda Swan played her in the final three seasons of CW’s Smallville.
As for Fennell, her time has clearly come. She was fantastic as Camila Parker Bowells in The Crown and clearly has filmmaking chops to spare. She was an executive producer and writer on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve, season two, and she made history with her Oscar nomination for Best Director, becoming the first female filmmaker to be nominated for their debut feature. She joins Nomadland director Chloé Zhao in the category, becoming only the sixth and seventh female directors ever nominated. And finally, Fennell’s three nominations make her only the third woman to ever amass such a tally, alongside Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) and producer Fran Walsh (Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).
We’ll be hearing a lot more from Fennell in the future, a happy fact.
Featured image: (L to R) Actor Carey Mulligan, writer/director Emerald Fennell and actor Bo Burnham on the set of PROMSING YOUNG WOMAN, a Focus Features release. Credit : Merie Weismiller Wallace / Focus Features
The Mitchells vs. The. Machines has the kind of A-list cast and top-flight pedigree you like to see in your animated comedies. Hailing from the folks who brought you a little film called Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the new feature focuses on the titular Mitchell family, trying to connect to each other in a world that wants them to connect to everything but each other. Sound familiar? Only the Mitchell’s battle against omnipresent technology is even more dire than our own—in their world, the technology is literally trying to take over. Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, the masterminds behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Lego Movie, are on board as producers, with directors Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe at the helm. And now, in a new video released from Netflix, we now know that their film will premiere on April 30.
The Mitchells vs. The Machine sees the titular family at a crossroads. Katie Mitchell (voiced by Broad City‘s Abbi Jacobson) has been accepted to the film school of her dreams in California, guaranteeing her some much-needed distance from her loving but overbearing parents. There’s her tech-loathing, nature-loving dad Rick (voiced by Danny McBride), and her punishingly positive mom Linda (Maya Rudolph). On the very morning Katie’s due to fly to California to start school, her dad reveals that he’s cancelled her plane ticket so the whole family—including little brother Aaron (voiced by Mike Rianda) and their pug Monchi—can drive her instead. She is not thrilled.
Things only unravel from there, when a tech uprising, spearheaded by a new line of helper robots and backed by every piece of technology in the world, threatens to not only spoil Katie’s film school dreams but, you know, plunge the world into a tech-led dictatorship. It’s like Terminator meets National Lampoon’s Vacation, an enticing mix.
We’ve got the trailer here, and the announcement video embedded below:
Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:
THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES is an original animated comedy about an everyday family’s struggle to relate while technology rises up around the world! When Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), a creative outsider, is accepted into the film school of her dreams, her plans to meet “her people” at college are upended when her nature-loving dad Rick (voiced by Danny McBride) determines the whole family should drive Katie to school together and bond as a family one last time.
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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.
Featured image: MANK (2020) Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz and Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies. Cr: NETFLIX
By now you’ve seen Zack Snyder’s Justice League—if not, you’re going to want to step away from this Mother Box (JL joke!). If you did take in the Snyder Cut, you’re probably still parsing all the implications the film raised for the DCEU, and all the new stuff Snyder included in the film. The Anti-Life equation! The Martian Manhunter! Steppenwolf’s fealty, and fear, of Darkseid! And of course, that Joker cameo. Also, the fact that Snyder’s wacky aspect ratio turned out to be, at least for this viewer, pretty intriguing and not distracting at all!
The four-hour epic, which premiered on March 19 on HBO Max, was the culmination of one of the wildest creation stories in modern moviemaking. Snyder’s vision for the film turned out to be, just as he promised, wholly different from the theatrical cut of the film, released in 2017 and shepherded by director Joss Whedon after Snyder had to leave the production due to the death of his daughter, Autumn. Now, HBO Max has released a new 6-minute video that goes behind-the-scenes of Snyder’s return to his passion project.
Snyder, Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Ezra Miller, Gal Gadot, and Jason Momoa talk about their deep dives into their characters, and re-teaming for the long-awaited Snyder Cut. The film’s release on HBO Max is the happy ending that Snyder himself probably doubted would ever come. Now that it has, we’re wondering if a Justice League 2 might actually come about, and what Snyder’s future within the DCEU is.
Those questions will be answered at a later date. For now, check out the new video here:
For more on Zack Snyder’s Justice League, check out these stories:
If you’re going to make a movie called Godzilla vs. Kong, you know the most important thing to do is get the title fight right. It sounds as if director Adam Wingard succeeded in that first and most crucial respect. It almost goes without saying that in almost all of these mega-monster movies, the human characters are often filler (and also very often a snack for the titans). It’s hard to share the screen with someone forty, or four-hundred, feet taller than you are. The early reactions to Godzilla vs. Kong follow this logic—the best stuff, they say, is when Godzilla and Kong have at it.
Godzilla vs Kong takes the hero of Godzilla and Godzilla: King of Monsters and the hero of Kong: Skull Island and makes them enemies. It also, at least as far as the trailers are concerned, makes Godzilla the bad guy and Kong the hero. Having to scramble and survive amongst them are our humans, played by Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Kyle Chandler, Brian Tyree Henry, Alexander Skarsgård, Eiza González, Julian Dennison, and Demián Bichir. There’s also Kaylee Hottle, who plays an orphaned girl named Jia, who holds the key, it seems, to Kong’s heart.
Here’s the official synopsis from Warner Bros, and below that we’ll share some of the early reactions. Godzilla vs. Kong premieres in theaters and on HBO Max on March 31.
Legends collide in “Godzilla vs. Kong” as these mythic adversaries meet in a spectacular battle for the ages, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Kong and his protectors undertake a perilous journey to find his true home, and with them is Jia, a young orphaned girl with whom he has formed a unique and powerful bond. But they unexpectedly find themselves in the path of an enraged Godzilla, cutting a swath of destruction across the globe. The epic clash between the two titans—instigated by unseen forces—is only the beginning of the mystery that lies deep within the core of the Earth.
I’ve seen #GodzillaVsKong and it is grade-A awesome! The monster brawls are badass & beautiful — huge fights, all well designed & super gnarly. Solid story, strong cast, really good score. A true Midnight Monster Movie & my favorite of the four modern Godzilla/Kong movies. pic.twitter.com/zkEhbvS9pf
#GodzillaVsKong is fun, vibrant, action-packed, and energizing.
GvK lives up to the heavyweight match it advertised with amazing visual effects and action sequences. This movie is selling a spectacle, and that’s exactly what audiences will get.
#GodzillaVsKong is one hell of a ride! True, it feels like some stuff is missing &it flys by on a greased rail. But that’s part of why I love it so much, in the shadow of the plot heavy KOTM. The fights are epic, and Adam Wingard brings his style & color to the MonsterVerse. pic.twitter.com/NjnVusQCrr
As expected – and probably as it should be – the titan fights are the best parts of #GodzillaVsKong . Adam Wingard definitely has the eye to make the most of those moments! Still don’t think they’ve nailed how to incorporate human characters, but the top-notch ensemble helps. pic.twitter.com/ttpmNJOElo
#GodzillavsKong is a visual spectacle featuring jaw-dropping fight scenes btwn the two iconic titans. Wingard’s directing style is on full display in a colorful & breathtaking fashion that also harkens back to the 80s style kaiju. Needless to say, this film is a blast! pic.twitter.com/j31lc55iVO
#GodzillaVsKong is breathtaking, out of this world, and easily the best in the series! The heart of the story is Kong, and the human story complements the monsters’ adventures, allowing them to shine. Just seeing the two iconic monsters battling each other is worth it alone. pic.twitter.com/cHEe1f579M
So, #GodzillaVsKong is exactly what you expect from the film. Monsters battling it out. The CGI is the best of all the monster movies. The fighting is really great & you’re conflicted abt who to cheer for! Plot is eh. But, we all know why you’re watching this movie lol pic.twitter.com/KdMO388F8c
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) GODZILLA battles KONG in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “GODZILLA VS. KONG,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures
