The last few days have brought a lot of exciting news about Marvel’s next big Disney+ series The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, and we’ve compiled it all together for you for a little Friday feast. There’s a new, action-packed teaser. There’s a bevy of new photos. And, there’s the reaction from assorted critics who have gotten a sneak peek at the series. All of this combines into some excellent pre-release hype. If you were only marginally interested in the series, we’re guessing that’s about to change. If you were looking forward to it, prepare to be properly enthused.
First, a brief primer. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is almost like a bizarro negative image to Marvel’s first Disney+ series, WandaVision. In that series, superhero couple Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) are living in a sitcom world that’s way more sinister than one might expect at first blush. And while WandaVision has gotten increasingly dark and twisted, the series still functions as a comedy-drama with a Marvel twist. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, on the other hand, features another superpowered couple (of sorts), only this duo replaces romance for bickering, and comedy/drama for straight-up action.
The Falcon, known to his family and friends as Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), has never gotten along all that well with Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan). They were enemies in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), and frenemies in Captain America: Civil War (2016). Yet begrudgingly, the two have become very capable partners when it comes to fighting bad guys. Heck, at the end of Avengers: Endgame, it was Bucky who seemed to know what was about to happen—that Cap (Chris Evans) was about to hand over his shield to Sam, and he supported the decision. Also, unlike WandaVision, which runs at around 30 minutes an episode, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier will consist of six hour-long eps. That’s essentially two Avengers: Endgames worth of Falcon/Winter Soldier action.
Let’s have a look at yesterday’s teaser. In just half a minute, quite a bit of adrenalin going on here. It speaks to what the folks who have seen a bit of the series have been reporting—The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is hardcore action.
Now let’s take a look at what some of the folks who have seen bits of the series have said:
Sam Wilson is getting the most brutal (and bloody!?) action scenes we’ve seen in the MCU to date. Wouldn’t call it Hard R, per se, but the action does go HARD. (1/2) #TCA21pic.twitter.com/BL9xrdLeTf
I’ve seen a sum total of sixteen (16) minutes of #FalconAndWinterSoldier, so it’s hard to form a full judgment from that.
But! Off the two clips, it’s action on the scale of any MCU film, and Mackie and Stan are killing it, of course. Sam and Bucky fans should be pleased. pic.twitter.com/qzaz0YLKg8
Got to see two pretty great scenes from #TheFalconAndTheWinterSoldier and surprised by how hard it hits. More blood than I was expecting; getting – appropriately – Cap and Winter Soldier vibes.
This series sounds like it’s a very hard pivot from the sublime, sitcom-situated weirdness of WandaVision, which is a great thing. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier arrives on Disney+ on March 19. Check out the photos below:
Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan in “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.” Courtesy Marvel StudiosSebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie in “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.” Courtesy Marvel StudiosSebastian Stan in “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.” Courtesy Marvel StudiosAnthony Mackie in “The Winter Soldier.” Courtesy Marvel Studios
Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan in “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.” Courtesy Marvel Studios
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Writer/director Tiller Russell was ideally suited to take on the crime thriller Silk Road. As the director of The Last Narc and Netflix’s Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, Russell is no stranger to looking squarely at the darker corners of the human soul. For Silk Road, which was inspired by David Kushner’s Rolling Stone article “Dead End on Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall,” Tiller found himself digging into one of the wildest criminal cases of the last few years, and arguably one of the most brazen attempts to bootstrap the internet into the foundation of an international criminal enterprise in history.
“As someone who goes back and forth between nonfiction and narrative work, it’s a careful calculation,” Tiller says about adapting Kushner’s article into his ripping narrative feature. “I began this with the rigorous, journalistic prep, as if I was making a doc series. I pulled every court filing, I had Ross’s girlfriend as a script consultant, I had the narrative constructed by law enforcement, the US Attorney, DEA, Treasury, there was this vast historical archive from which to work.”
If you’re not familiar with Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road, here’s a brief primer. Ulbricht created, essentially, an Amazon for drugs, where buyers and dealers could connect in an invisible, unregulated marketplace on the darknet. Whether you wanted pharmaceutical-grade cocaine or high-octane cannabis, Silk Road was where you could go to have your drug of choice delivered to your door—by the U.S. Postal Service. At the height of Silk Road’s operation (it only lasted for two years), all that was known about its creator was his moniker, the Dread Pirate Roberts, a name lifted from The Princess Bride, of all films. No one yet knew that the Dread Pirate Roberts was a 26-year-old kid from Austin, Texas, who believed his darknet drug ring was a righteous blow against the system. Ulbricht wasn’t alone in believing the internet’s potential and promise had been commoditized and lobotomized, and what it needed was a place that was actually free. Yet what he created ultimately had little to do with freedom and a whole lot to do with money.
“What’s interesting to me is here’s this young guy who starts out as a dreamer and wants to change the world, and who in the course of 18-months has this meteoric ascendancy and metamorphosis from dreamer to gangster to legend,” Tiller says. Tiller dug into Ulbricht’s diaries on his laptop and his public postings under his pseudonym. “So there was access to his voice in a fundamental documentary way. And 99.99% of the voiceover is all drawn from that. My editor and I sifted through all that material so it would hew very closely to who he was.”
Nick Robinson as Ross Ulbricht and Alexandra Shipp as Julia in Silk Road. Photo Credit: Catherine Kanavy
Ulbricht is played by Nick Robinson (Love, Simon), whose performance as the idealist turned international criminal is one of the two fulcrums around which the film turns. The second is Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), the Baltimore DEA agent hunting Ulbricht, and far from a saint himself. “The cat and mouse dynamic between them give you a natural propulsive drama,” Tiller says. “The film is a two-hander, a collision course between two men, these two exact wrong people who are like missiles fired right at one another.”
Jason Clarke as Rick Bowden in Silk Road. Cr. Courtesy of Lionsgate
Piecing together a narrative feature out of the Byzantine nature of Ulbricht’s rise and fall was no easy task. “I didn’t have Ross as a source, a subject, or a consultant, and I had all of these conflicting accounts,” he says. “I had law enforcement’s version and the family’s version from David’s brilliant Rolling Stone piece. So from these conflicting narratives, my goal was to triangulate it.”
Here’s where Tiller made an intriguing choice—he took the overwhelming amount of reportage, done by Kushner, law enforcement, and his own work, metabolized it, and then tried to forget it.
“I felt like after doing all this research I’m going to throw it all away and be in the shoes of Ross Ulricht and Bowden,” he says. “I needed to understand it from the inside, the feeling of lying to certain people, the feeling of burning with ambition or fear or arrogance. So to fill those gaps in the historical record, I wanted to make something that was really personal and evocative. Human truth as I know it. So it was using parts of myself and my psyche to fill that in, while still being spiritually true to the characters.”
Ulbricht’s path from idealist to wanted criminal also charts, in a way, the rise of the internet from a tool to an all-encompassing, nearly all-consuming medium for going about one’s life. “It’s such a weird transformation culturally and globally that all of this tech has wrought for us,” Tiller says. “The great drama of our time is when you’re staring at your iPhone at the three dots in a text bubble, that’s become what the drama is. Early on I asked myself if we were going to do an impressionistic rendering of the internet’s reach, like Tron, and I thought no, it’s a simple human story. Waiting for an incoming message on your phone, that really is how we live our lives and experience drama now. I wanted to make Silk Road very naturalistic and grounded. With these two characters riven with internal conflicts, that’s what it’s all about above everything else. Yes, there’s a driving plot, but it’s about the characters.”
In Silk Road, while Ulbricht is creating an online emporium where his libertarian crusade turned into a transnational drug smuggling ring, Jason Clarke’s DEA agent seems like possibly the last man for the job of cracking this tech-driven case. “You’ve got this Sam Peckinpah character, out of step with the times, not keeping up, being flushed down the toilet with the changing of the guards,” Tiller says of Bowden. “Then when this case arrives, it turns out his old school knock-around skillset becomes the key to unlocking this global criminal enterprise.”
Although Ulbricht remained anonymous in the creation of Sil Road, in actuality, his run from anonymity to darknet kingpin to the notorious criminal was shockingly brief. “He was jacked into the zeitgeist instantly and irrevocably,” Tiller says. “That’s the disruptive nature of these technologies, someone goes from an anonymous stranger to a famous person in what feels like moments. The metastasis of Silk Road from ordering a bag of mushrooms to being a transnational criminal enterprise in that compressed period of time, that can only happen right now. This guy’s entire dramatic arc was compressed into 20 months, from the inception of an idea to worldwide global penetration, to completely changing the war on drugs, to being incarcerated with an incredibly draconian sentence.”
While Tiller is hardly championing what Ulbricht did with Silk Road, his film’s look at one misguided, would-be missionary’s descent into outright criminality invites us to ask some larger questions about the systems that undergird our lives, online and off. Jason Clarke’s DEA agent is far from a saint, and one could watch Silk Road and reasonably wonder if there isn’t a message about a middle way embedded in the battle between Ulbricht and Bowden.
“There’s an element where this is about generational conflict, political conflict, the things roiling America, I’m trying to explore obliquely in these characters,” Tiller says. “Millennial versus the dinosaur, the bomb the system libertarian versus the law and order ethos. The individualist versus someone holding and abusing the public trust. So many issues that were bubbling under the surface.”
Ulbricht is currently incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, where he’s serving a double life sentence, plus 40-years, after having lost his appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court. The issues Tiller gets at in Silk Road, both overtly and covertly, still remain.
Silk Road is available on Digital, On Demand, select theaters, and on Blu-Ray and DVD.
Featured image: Alexandra Shipp as Julia, Nick Robinson as Ross Ulbricht, and Daniel David Stewart as Max in Silk Road. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Most of the buzz around Zack Snyder these days has been about his upcoming Justice Leaguerefresh. Snyder’s second crack at DC’s biggest superhero film has understandably garnered a lot of attention, but he’s got another big movie coming out for Netflix, and it’s worth paying attention to. Behold, the first teaser for Snyder’s zombie flick Army of the Dead, which mashes two beloved cinematic genres into one epic—it’s a zombie heist movie.
Army of the Dead imagines what would happen if a zombie outbreak occurred in Las Vegas, and the folks most likely to survive it decided to go all-in for the biggest cash grab of their lives instead. The film stars Dave Bautista as Scott Ward, the leader of a group of mercenaries who are risking life and limb to push into the zombie quarantine zone in order to pull off a once-in-a-lifetime score. Snyder’s no newcomer to the zombie genre—his 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead was quite excellent. While the teaser is brief, it offers a glimpse of the world Snyder has created here. If you think the aesthetic will be like his superhero films—darker tones, lashing rain, gloomy—think again. Army of the Dead is set in the glitziest city in America, and Vegas still sparkles and shines even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.
Check out the teaser below. Army of the Dead arrives on Netflix on May 21, 2021.
Here’s the brief synopsis from Netflix:
Following a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, a group of mercenaries take the ultimate gamble, venturing into the quarantine zone to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted.
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And now we have an official title for Spider-Man 3, and it turns out, one of those fake titles we wrote about this morning was closer to the truth than we realized. Tom Holland, Jacob Batalon, and Zendaya all shared absurd titles on social media, but the one Holland offered was somewhat close to reality. So no, Spider-Man: 3 is not Spider-Man: Phone Home, but it is…Spider-Man: No Way Home. In case you haven’t been keeping score, this now marks the third film in director Jon Watts trilogy (as in, all of them) to use “Home” in the title. We’ve had Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and now Spider-Man: No Way Home. Poor Peter Parker is getting further and further from Aunt May and his beloved Queens with every fresh adventure.
Sony revealed the title via this video featuring the Holland/Batalon/Zendaya trio. They have fun with Holland’s now well-known affinity for spilling secrets, and provide the title, via a whiteboard the gang walks by, at the end of the reveal:
So what might “No Way Home” mean for Peter Parker and his pals? Remember that the last time we left Parker in Far From Home, he was in Europe and had been successfully framed by Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal)’s murder. This puts him in a pretty severe predicament, considering he’s presumably now a wanted criminal. So, the most obvious conclusion is to take “No Way Home” literally and assume we might find Parker literally unable to return home thanks to the whole Mysterio meshugaas. Poor Peter’s possibly being hunted by Interpol (or Nick Fury). We’ve already written about how Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange will be involved, ditto Jamie Foxx’s Electro and Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, the latter two from completely different Spidey worlds. Could Spider-Man find himself trapped in another dimension? Or, will he need Doctor Strange’s help to pop up in other dimensions in order to clear his name? The possibilities are almost literally infinite!
When we learn more, we’ll share more. Spider-Man: No Way Home is slated for a December 17, 2021 release.
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America had its eyes locked on Mars this past week as the NASA rover, Perseverance, landed on the red planet and sent color photos back to Earth. It’s an optimistic step in space exploration that may expand human understanding of the Milky Way, but things don’t rest so peacefully in the galaxy on the first season of Star Trek: Picard.
The latest critically acclaimed series in the Star Trek franchise follows a synthetic attack on Mars that set the planet ablaze and propelled former admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) into retirement. Director Hanelle Culpepper was charged with navigating the fallout that had widespread effects on the galaxy as she sculpted the first three episodes of Picard. Her work on the standout series pilot “Remembrance” landed her a nomination for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Director in a Drama Series.
Hanelle Culpepper on the set of “Star Trek: Picard.” Courtesy CBS.
As the first female director to be at the helm of a new Star Trek series, Culpepper had a lot of decisions to make. “We have flexibility, but I think because I and the other creative people I work with are all Star Trek fans, we really love what has come before. It is a matter of taking what has been established and pushing it a bit. You want to expand the canon and add to it.” Like a true Captain, Culpepper relies on her crew. “It is a big undertaking, but you have to surround yourself with a team who appreciates and loves the work as much as you do who also bring their A+ game.”
Of course, the franchise has expanded infinitely and real-life technology has rapidly developed since the original series premiered in 1966. Wireless “communicators” used by Captain Kirk and his crew have become a reality with what we now know as cell phones. That means Culpepper has to keep peering into the future to get a clear signal for what life will be like in 250 years.
She laces each scene with savory sci-fi details even when they aren’t plot-driven. “A lot of those touches that you see are based on giving the audience an authentic flavor of that world and fully immersing them.” The results are incredibly effective. Paired with the gorgeous cinematography and production design, the scenes are truly transcendent. “[We’re] trying to pick what are the details that are interesting for futuristic things. What will we do that’s different? If we’re going to do something that’s the same as we do now, what is a fun way that we can play around with that and give it a future element? It’s a hard balancing act.”
It can be challenging to catch all the spectacular details. Fans may consider it elementary trivia to recite the registry of the USS Enterprise or identify what color a character’s uniform indicates, but no one knows the secrets of an episode quite like the director. Culpepper pointed out a few Easter Eggs that fans may have missed. “Recreating Ten Forward was one of my favorite details,” she said of the ship’s lounge on Picard. “Obviously, that’s not a small thing, but you’re really trying to bring as much from that actual room as possible. We were looking at stuff to bring in details from the poker game that Picard always plays. The flute is buried in his bedroom. His flute is from one of my favorite episodes and you can barely see it.” Culpepper added with a laugh, “I love that his dog is named Number One.”
One of the most special homages to the franchise’s history is a sentimental one that Culpepper planned with care. “Actually, one of my favorite details was when we were trying to figure out what costume he should be wearing and what costume Data should be wearing when we find them. Should they be in the uniform from the movies or from the series? What we went with, Data is in the uniform from the last time that Picard saw him.”
In nearly every scene, Culpepper features sweeping vistas of a gorgeous and sometimes terrible world that’s centuries away. Panoramic views give way to intimate exchanges between characters embroiled in personal and political conflicts. “To me, whenever I read a script, it’s that human story, the humanity of it that grabs me first,” Culpepper revealed. “To me, those wide shots are composed around what is happening to the character as well. They’re a key part of the storytelling. I leave more time in my day for shooting closeups, obviously, because it gives the actor time to warm up. Even if someone is amazing on take one, you just want to go again so they can try to explore different things. In a pilot when you’re establishing characters, the writers want to try different types of performances so we can craft the entire arc of the character. It’s all important, but I love wide shots. I love that scope. And I love jumping right into the character and getting right with them.”
Star Trek: Picard is centered around the Romulans, synthetics, and a wide range of characters beyond humans, but still makes a point to feature a diverse and talented cast. Culpepper reminds us that representation in entertainment can have an impact far beyond Hollywood. “When you learn that Nichelle Nichols inspired a young Black girl to become an astronaut, it really hammers home how images of representation are so powerful. They can change hearts and minds for the better and, sadly as we have also seen, for the worst. I’m always thinking about that when I’m casting and creating these environments. We hopefully have people seeing characters of different races and even different species work together and respectfully settle their differences. I hope that kind of behavior will carry more and more into our own society. “
When asked what it means to be nominated for her second NAACP Image Award, Culpepper points to fellow creators who inspired her work. “I am just always striving to do the very best that I can so that I don’t mess up any opportunities for people who come after me. The true trailblazers came before me.” Oscar Micheaux, Melvin Van Peebles, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, and Robert Townsend are just a few who influenced her creative journey. “They’re the true trailblazers and I’m just following behind them to make sure the weeds don’t grow again. Keeping that path clear for any directors coming up after me.”
Culpepper steadfastly bears the torch of telling stories from diverse perspectives. She’s currently in the casting phase of the upcoming film 1000 Miles based on the real-life slave couple, Ellen and William Craft, who made a daring escape to freedom in the 1800s. “[Ellen] could pass for white, so she dressed as a white man and her husband as her slave,” Culpepper explained. “They traveled first class on trains and steamers and arrived in the north and got to freedom on Christmas Day. As exciting and as tense as that journey was, even when they got to freedom, their story doesn’t end. Two years later, you get the Fugitive Slave Act where slave owners were able to send people to the north to bring their slaves back home, so the Crafts were on the run again. It’s just one of many true stories from Black history that haven’t made it onto the silver screen.”
Whether the script stems from history or an imagined future worlds away, preparation and research are the primary ingredients in Culpepper’s captivating stories. “When you’re doing something historically based, then it is just a lot more digging deep into all those little details that would be true to that time. Some of it the audience won’t even notice. It will just feel right as they watch it. Part of the reason why it will feel right is because when the actors go into this space, it feels right for them. As much as I can transport them back into that time, that gives us even more from their performance, which then, of course, brings the audience even deeper into that time.”
Culpepper’s body of work is strikingly varied. Just before the pandemic hit, she was four days into shooting her upcoming pilot, Kung Fu. The project emphasizes her range that includes credits on N0S4A2, Criminal Minds, and Supergirl. “It really would make my life less complicated if I just loved one genre and I could just be an expert on that genre,” Culpepper joked. “Ultimately, that’s why I became a director, right? I became a director so that I could spend time in other shoes and other worlds. The audience gets to do that when they tune in for two hours of a movie or the 42 minutes of a TV show. But as a director, I get to live in that world for weeks or months, or even years. I get a chance to step into a completely new world for a while.”
Season one of Star Trek: Picard is available to stream on CBS All Access and the NAACP Image Awards are presented on BET Sunday, March 27 at 8:00pm/7:00pm CT.
We’ve got our first look at the still-untitledSpider-Man 3 (more on the title in a moment), revealing the dynamic trio of Peter Parker (Tom Holland), Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), and MJ (Zendaya). The follow-up to Spider-Man: Far From Home is set to be the biggest film in the Tom Holland-led trilogy yet.
We’ve shared all the news up to this point that has made Spider-Man 3 sound like something director Jon Watts and his writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have been dreaming about for years. Leaving aside the rumors that former Spider-Men Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield might make an appearance (!!), it’s already been confirmed that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange is involved. And considering that so, too, are Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock (from Sam Raimi’s 2004 Spider-Man 2) and Jamie Foxx’s Electro (from Marc Webb’s 2024 The Amazing Spider-Man 2), clearly there’s some multi-verse magic going on here. (Which means perhaps Maguire and Garfield really are making cameos).
While we can speculate all we like about what’s going to go down in Spider-Man 3, at least now we have a few glimpses from the actual film courtesy Holland, Batalon, and Zendaya. Check those out below, plus the fake titles they shared.
Batalon shared this image and one of the proposed “confirmed titles” with fans on his Instagram page:
And finally, Holland himself shared a new image and yet another confirmed title, a direct shoutout to a Mr. Steven Spielberg, while also making fun of the new trilogy’s own use of “home” in the first two films:
Minari is a moving portrait of a young family setting out on a new life in the Ozarks. It will invite you in with its photography (the work of Lachlan Milne) and production design (by Yong Ok Lee), pull at your heartstrings with its “sensitive and uplifting” score, and keep you wholly absorbed in the world of the Yis thanks to masterful editing by Harry Yoon.
Yoon spoke to us about how he approached cutting this film, whose screenplay draws heavily from the childhood memories of director Lee Isaac Chung, who grew up in rural Arkansas during the 1980s. Like Chung, Yoon is the son of Korean immigrants and grew up in California around the same time. His intimacy with the cultures, landscapes, and languages of two countries — as well as the spaces in between — is a boon to the project. It translates into sensitivity and precision, palpable in every scene.
Harry Yoon. Photo by Lee Isaac Chung
Yoon, along with other department heads, worked hard to “get it right” when it came to capturing the particulars of the Yi family’s story, which often required drawing on their own memories and experiences. The result is a triumph of a film that speaks to the joy, sorrow, and even comedy of chasing the American Dream.
Editing an editor is no easy feat, but we present to you an abridged Q&A with Harry Yoon about how he came to be involved in Minari, an alternate ending that just wasn’t meant to be, and the magic that keeps him enamored with his job.
What were your early conversations like with director Lee Isaac Chung? How did you guys work together?
What was great about working with Isaac was that, from the very beginning, he was very collaborative. He was open to notes and really sought my ideas and thoughts on what was working and maybe not working in the script. And so we kind of dove right in. Sometimes when you speak to a director, particularly a writer-director, you know they appreciate your notes, but you don’t necessarily see them incorporating them because they’ve got a thousand other things to think about as they head towards casting and pre-production. But Isaac was very interactive, very receptive, and actually started making changes to the script based upon the conversations we had.
Do you remember any of those script suggestions, big or small?
We talked about certain concerns that I had about an ending for the script that was more of an epilogue — so, it actually jumped forward in time by several years. We re-met the characters, David and his sister, when they were in junior high school or high school, and they were visiting Youn Yuh-jung’s character in a convalescent hospital. It was a lovely ending, but my biggest concern was that we’ve kind of fallen in love with and identified with these children. They’ve been our points of contact and identification through the film, and I wondered if we see a whole new set of actors, even though we intellectually know who these people are, I don’t know if we’ll have the same kind of emotional response.
Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn. Credit: Josh Ethan Johnson/A24
So what was the solution?
We talked about something more open-ended, an ending that didn’t lose that emotional thread that we have with these performers. And he [Isaac] came up with something literally overnight, and it just blew me away for a couple of reasons. One, that he would even consider changing something as important as the ending while in pre-production — they were already casting the other actors. And two, what he wrote was just so perfect. It’s a jewel of a scene. So, I was just really, really impressed with his openness to collaboration but also his remarkable talent.
L-r: Alan S. Kim and Steven Yeun in “Minari.” Photo by Melissa Lukenbaugh, Courtesy of A24
How did you prepare for this project, if you needed to prepare at all, considering the personal connection you felt with the script?
I feel like I was kind of born to make this film. It speaks so much to not only my experience as an immigrant in America with parents who struggled in their efforts to achieve the American Dream through small businesses and entrepreneurship but also to my experiences specifically as a Korean American. As it is for so many of the Korean American department heads who worked on this film, this is a mirror of our childhood or moments in our childhood. Isaac’s writing and his pure curation of memories were so specific and so true that they were like little explosions of memory for all of us. I think sometimes, especially if you’re working in fantasy or science fiction, it’s your imagination that leads you to your true north. Here, for me, it was very much my life, my life experiences.
Yoon (bottom right) with his sister, Helen; father, Karl; and mother, Susan; circa 1980. Mr. Yoon hat bears a resemblance to the one Jacob wears in the film.
The scenes are just so beautiful — they flow so elegantly. What was your approach to editing like? Were there any sequences that you had to revisit over and over again, or were there any that came together without so much toil?
I think the real work on this film was the construction of a film in which every sequence felt essential. This is a film in which time is a little bit elliptical — the timeline isn’t absolutely clear. So, it’s very easy to get caught lingering in places that aren’t necessarily telling you something new, either emotionally or about the characters or about the story of this family. Also, we wanted to try to create a portrait of a family. So with those considerations in mind, I think the hard work of the film was in crafting something where every scene, every moment, felt essential.
Alan S. Kim, Noel Cho. Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh/A24
Was there any shot or sequence that stood out for you?
Even though we got rid of a lot of different scenes, there were also shots and beats that were actually unscripted that ended up being really important, pivot points editorially. One shot in particular is this really beautiful shot at dusk of Steven Yeun’s character just smoking out in the field. And that was a total accidental shot. Lachlan Milne, our amazing cinematographer, was out shooting some landscapes at dusk as they were waiting to finish the day. Steven just walked up in costume, and they just went along with it. A shot like that can play a role at different points in the film, but where we ended up using it was at this pivotal point where he realizes he’s reaching a kind of breaking point with how things are going. And so I think part of the challenge was in deciding where we place these elements. What feels essential, what doesn’t feel essential?
Does that work of whittling down ever leave you with a sense of loss? Is it painful to you on an emotional level or just part of the job?
I think they’re less painful when you see the results. I think if that decision is being imposed by, let’s say a commercial mandate that the film be a certain length and you know that the film is less than as a result — that’s one thing. But I think if the results feel more muscular, if you remove a scene and the juxtaposition of what’s left ends up being beautiful or meaningful, then I think it’s hard to mourn since that’s just the process. As you edit more, you realize that everything is on the table and everything should be tried because that’s the gift of the process. You can have happy accidents as a result of lifting things, moving things. I think that’s what gives you a sense of like, hey, there’s still magic in this process. It’s nice when your work surprises you. It’s why I love being an editor.
Steven Yeun, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-Jung Youn, Yeri Han, Noel Cho Director Lee Isaac Chung Credit: Josh Ethan Johnson
You and I actually went to the same liberal arts college — and I know there’s no official film program. Becoming a film and television editor must have been a somewhat self-directed journey. What was your parents’ response to your choice of career?
I think they already had the sense that I was a Korean kid that made unusual decisions. They saw me grow up and ever since elementary school, I was performing in school musicals and plays and things like that. So, I think they knew that I gravitated toward the arts. But at the same time, because I was the first son of an immigrant family, I approached this decision to fully commit to a career in the arts with a tremendous amount of ambivalence. In fact, I took all the way to the age of 30 before I finally full-on committed. When 9/11 happened, it was a wake-up call. I was like, wait, we only have one life and I think I will regret it forever if I don’t make this decision. I think by that time, my parents had seen that I was responsible — it wasn’t a spontaneous decision. They saw I had a game plan and they blessed my decision to sell everything and then start over at the age of thirty-one in Los Angeles.
Years later, I had a conversation with my dad. I asked ‘Why did you say yes to that decision? Why did you bless the decision?’ And he said, ‘When I moved to the States, it wasn’t just so that you would have financial security, the way other parents hope for, which is why they push their children into law or medicine. The primary reason I wanted to come here was so that you’d have the freedom to choose what you wanted to do because that’s not something that I had growing up.’ I was really moved by that answer. In the end, I think that’s what won out over their concerns, that desire for me to have the freedom to choose my path.
In making this film, what an incredible way to honor him and your mother and really all parents who do what they need to do to make a life for themselves and their kids.
That’s why this film is like a dream come true. I told my wife, I was like, you know, Jane, if I don’t get to work on anything else, like, it may have been worth it.
Minari was released in theaters in the United States on February 12 and will be available via streaming on February 26.
Although it’s a short film, director Jon Alston’s Augustus tackles a monumental subject: human rights and the centuries-long injustice and racism faced by the Black community. Alston, a former record-setting linebacker in the NFL, served as an executive producer as well, along with the film’s writer and lead actor, Ayinde Howell.
The film plays from the point of view of Frederick Douglass, the noted abolitionist who escaped slavery. As Douglass suffers from nightmares depicting the death of his son, he also witnesses a future in which the bias and brutality of his era continue.
Alston spoke with The Credits about Augustus, which has picked up several awards on the festival circuit and will soon come to streaming services for wider viewership. The following interview has been edited.
Ayinde Howell in “Augustus.”
How did this project come together? Did you and Ayinde Howell know each other beforehand?
I met Ayinde when I was at USC. I did a short film that I didn’t put out. It’s called Sell Out! and he did a great job as its lead actor. Two years after that, he came to me with an idea he had and wanted me to get involved. I read it and there were a lot of wonderful ideas, and I said let’s go, let’s do this. And then we spent a couple of months building our team. We workshopped the screenplay, rewrote it about 20 times, and eventually got to the point where we had a couple of days to shoot over the July 4th holiday.
A plantation scene in “Augutus.”
In Augustus’ recurring dream, he is tormented that he can’t save his son. There’s one scene in the dream featuring both the people of his era and people of today, like a prophecy that racism will continue. Tell me about that decision.
I believe it’s the first real dream that we see Augustus in, where he’s chained to the fence. He’s in the modern-day, but he is dealing with the people of his time. We are making the literal linkage between his era, pre-Civil War, and our time right now. Obviously, we’re nodding to the death of Trayvon Martin, we’re nodding to Sandra Bland in the film. But we wanted to personalize it and not just be on the nose with it. We’re saying, what if Frederick Douglass experienced what life was like today and we went back and we told him that they were still tearing down his statues in July of 2020. How would he feel and would he continue to do the same things that he did? And yes, the bystanders, which sit there and watch what he’s going on and do nothing, we thought it was very, very important to put that in there, to show the history, and that we are still living this nightmare ourselves.
What were the production challenges of shooting this short?
This one was a labor of love. There are period elements in it and, while I’m located in Los Angeles and our whole team, the core team, is basically in Los Angeles, we had to go on location in Virginia. We scouted and we knew, on our budget, we had to shoot it there to do it right. That was very difficult, understanding that I’m working a day job writing on All American at the time and trying to get ready to do this short film and I’ve only got a small window to be able to do it, not to mention the fact that we had to bring in crew and cast members from New York and Georgia and Florida and Los Angeles.
Were your sets built or did you find existing buildings?
The beauty of that area in Virginia is it’s rich with wonderful locations. We shot a lot of the stuff at Henricus Historical Park, which served as a location for Augustus’ home and some of the running scenes. We shot at a plantation that was there, which was not too far from our home base. These locations were just already there and they were wonderful. And the people there in Virginia were so nice. The Virginia Production Office was great.
Ayinde Howell in “Augustus.”
The color palette, was it meant to be muted?
I think we kind of run the gamut. When you’re looking at the entire film, you’re going to see the black and white and the blue’s a lot in the dreams, or when you’re dealing with the dungeon, obviously, because they’re tied thematically. And then there was a lot of green, there’s a lot of brown. There’s a romantic light that I put on this in post-production that kind of flows through the film that gives us a little bit of nostalgia, and it also represents the dreaminess of the story.
A scene from “Augustus.”
I thought it was interesting that Augustus’ identity is not fully revealed until the end of the film. Was the objective to add impact or surprise audiences?
Yeah, that was because sometimes when you say something, like Frederick Douglass, people have their own biases. And we want to entertain. But there are a lot of Easter eggs that tell us within the story who this is — like the little boy at the beginning of the film is reading the book, TheLady of the Lake, that Frederick Douglass took his last name from. And from a character standpoint, the end is also the moment where he accepts who he is. He makes a statement, he’s stepping into that role, so it seemed also duly appropriate that it was both a reveal for the audience, but also a coming to for the character of Augustus.
Daniel Kaluuya is such a comedian it’s hard to imagine he’s made a career out of acting in some of the most profound dramas of the past five years—a fact that he too, seems to frequently forget.
“A lot of times it surprises me,” Kaluuya said. “I was driving around LA and I saw myself on a poster and I was like, ‘Oh sh*t!’ I thought I was just acting and I’m on a poster! I just forget. I don’t see those things as anything to do with my career.”
He calls it his “superpower”—his ability to separate the hype surrounding a film with his personal part in it.
“I’m a man telling a story and I just stay on that,” he said. “And if I’m honest, sometimes that goes and it resonates and it grows.”
“Judas and the Black Messiah” theatrical poster. Courtesy Warner Bros.
His latest film, Judas and the Black Messiah, is nothing short of culturally significant. Filmed in an almost documentary style, the movie tells the story of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and in particular its leader, Fred Hampton.
Kaluuya said one of the most challenging aspects of portraying Chairman Fred Hampton was “letting go” of his modern perspective.
“…Letting go of myself in order to kind of change my mindset and not approach this as a man living in 2019, but approach this as a man from 1968,” he explained. “Because sometimes my mindset from 2019 could stop me from expressing and channeling and being the best for Chairman Fred.”
(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
Kaluuya spent lots of time researching the teachings of the Black Panther party, watching old clips of Malcolm X speaking and working with an opera singer to prepare for the grueling oratory speeches he would inevitably give throughout this film. Even with all of the dedication to his performance, however, Kaluuya said he didn’t approach this role as if he were the chosen proprietor of Chairman Fred’s story, but rather that he had the “responsibility” to pay tribute to Chairman Fred’s legacy.
“I don’t engage in pressure and I don’t engage in intimidation,” he said. “There’s weight, there’s a responsibility, but in the creative process that’s my safe space, that’s my freedom. I wouldn’t want to allow pressure or intimidation or all that stuff to enter it. I banish it from the land of creativity, so I kind of just feel a weighted responsibility.”
It was a responsibility he took seriously, but one that he is sure to point out the clear distinction between his place in this narrative and Chairman Fred’s real-life place in society.
“It was clear I’m not doing an impersonation, I’m doing an interpretation,” he said.
Framing his work in this way allowed Kaluuya to let go of certain inhibitions and to act more freely. He saw himself as merely a vessel to channel Hampton’s spirit and legacy.
“This is what it is: I didn’t lose myself, I found him,” he said. “I found what I was channeling—not him like ‘Chairman Fred,’ but the energy. I just committed to that and I let it come through me.”
He committed so fully to his portrayal that he barely remembers filming the movie at all.
“I can’t remember any takes,” he said sincerely. “Like, I watched the film and I can’t remember it. Usually, you do a take and you go, ‘Oh I remember that,’ ‘Oh they used that one,’ I don’t remember any of them. So that was rewarding that I can go there—I can go into that place where I’m present, I’m just doing what I’m doing at that current moment, you know what I mean?”
(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
Whatever he did must have worked. Both Fred Hampton Jr. and “Mama Akua” (who goes by Deborah Johnson in Judas and the Black Messiah) sent Kaluuya their praises after watching the film.
“Chairman Fred Jr. said, ‘Mama Akua’s review is that you did the damn thing,’” Kaluuya said laughing.
For Kaluuya, watching the story of Chairman Fred’s life unfold on-screen was a very moving experience, something he hopes others feel when watching as well.
“I was looking at the footage and I was moved by the footage, and I was like, ‘I want people to feel as moved as I feel right now,’” he said wholeheartedly.
But for Kaluuya, there is a difference between forcing viewers to feel moved by your work and hoping to connect with them on a deeper level.
“For me, I want to connect, but I think because this was a real-life person that was my way of articulating it to myself,” he explained. “It was like that’s what I’m reaching for, that’s the energy I want. But I always want my work to connect. I want it to connect good or bad, positive or negative. I want people to feel something.”
Part of that connection in Judas and the Black Messiah comes from the powerful dialogue, profound speeches, and poetry that are delivered throughout the story.
“It‘s not a question of violence or nonviolence. It’s a question of resistance to fascism or nonexistence within fascism,” Kaluuya recited from one of Hampton’s speeches in the film. “It took me a while to get my head around it [that line], just to really grasp it. You know when you read something and go, ‘Oh sh*t! You’re operating on a higher vibration’—not me, Chairman Fred.”
When he’s not playing groundbreaking characters or paying tribute to historical figures, Kaluuya himself is a bit of a wordsmith and dabbles in the art of poetry.
“One of my favorite funniest quotes is, ‘I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it,’” he said laughing. “That makes me so happy.”
Judas and the Black Messiah is available now in theaters and on HBO Max.
For more on Judas and the Black Messiah, check out these interviews:
Featured image: Caption: (Top l-r) DARRELL BRITT-GIBSON as Bobby Rush, DANIEL KALUUYA as Chairman Fred Hampton and ASHTON SANDERS as Jimmy Palmer in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s not often there’s a Golden Globe nomination for an African American actress playing a famous blues or jazz singer. This year, there are two of them.
One is for Viola Davis, going chop-to-chop with the late, great Chadwick Boseman in the Netflix adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, playing the titular character. The other is for singer and actress Andra Day, also playing “titular” in Hulu’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday, which premieres on February 26. And by “titular,”we don’t mean “the United States,” which comes across as shockingly (or perhaps not) relentless in hounding Holiday for her addictions, all the way to her death at age 44, cuffed to a New York hospital bed.
While Davis’s range and acumen as an actor have been clearly on display and appropriately celebrated, Day, perhaps previously best known for soundtrack performances, including on the Jackie Robinson-themed short Rise, and as a voice in Cars 3, makes what is essentially an astonishing debut, fully inhabiting the dissolute, sad, yet bravely defiant persona of “Lady Day,” one of the greatest jazz singers—heck, singers—the country has ever produced.
Except that this country, the film shows, had an obsessive, laser-like focus to get her to stop singing her “subversive” song Strange Fruit, which famously took the “subversive” position that lynching was a horrific thing.
And if you think the film, a long-gestating passion project for producer/director Lee Daniels, is taking a hyperbolic approach to that obsession, personified by the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger (played by an unremitting Garret Hedlund), well, it’s all from journalist Johann Hari’s disturbing, well-sourced book “Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,” and is adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks.
Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes) and Billie Holiday (Andra Day), shown. (Photo by: Takashi Seida/Hulu)
Coarse and rage-filled lines about the need to get Holiday to stop singing “that song,” which may at first sound too on the nose, are, sadly, not so much made up, as brought into light via FOIA requests and research.
Daniels “first talked about doing this years ago,” recounts cinematographer Andrew Dunn. “It was on and off,” and Dunn confesses he “never thought we’d do it,” and in fact, they’d talked instead about a Richard Pryor biopic that had been similarly gestating. “The journey to get here was quite long,” he says, but then Daniels methodology is to “sow seeds of ideas…sometimes these seeds would germinate in a certain way (and) then this magic happens.”
Dunn has been there for that particular conjuring three times previously, with The Butler,Precious, and the pilot for Empire.
For all that journeying, Dunn likes the way each new piece is a discovery. “It wasn’t a laid-out plan,” he says of capturing the essences of certain scenes. Lighting was arranged so they could “react without looking like we have to dictate, (instead) feeding off performances and actors. Andra particularly had a relationship with the camera. She just gives this little sidelong glance drawing the audience in. (You) create this space for the actor to be inside there, and to get the audience inside. Then you punctuate it, in a Sidney Lumet way; he equated making a film with a symphony, with high moments, and lows again before the crescendos.”
L-r: Lee Daniels, DP Andrew Dunn, and production designer Daniel T. Dorrance. Courtesy Hulu.
Or perhaps improvisational jazz in this case, given the way Holliday was influenced by Louis Armstrong’s musical phrasing, and thereby changed pop vocalizing in the 20th century.
A similar improvisation was undertaken by production designer Daniel T. Dorrance.
“Once I knew the project was 90% happening,” he says, “I did a concept piece for Lee, with Andra, who dresses in retro fashion in real life.” The piece involved taking a colorized, 40’s-era Times Square shot, then photoshopping Day’s picture into it.
Not only did it suit some of the motifs and iconography Daniels was looking for, but it became an image the director wanted to recreate for the film. Which was made more challenging because Montreal was doubling for period NY throughout the shoot.
After losing a former bordello that was sold before the film company could turn it into the three different sets Dorrance had envisioned there, they “found this old hospital in Montreal that had these old interiors. That was built in the early 1920s,” and was used primarily for the proverbial G-men. “Anything government or police-like, I played as a monotone, not exciting like Billie’s world, which had a lot more color or energy.”
Trevante Rhodes, Andra Day, and Garrett Hedlund in THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY from Paramount Pictures. Photo Credit: Takashi Seida.
He also mentions a scene “in the middle of the film, when Billie has this out-of-body experience, where she stumbles into a lynching that had just happened, and goes into this shot, different friends appear that were on the (tour) bus. Are we in a dream sequence? Or where are we here?”
The sequence “culminates with her singing at Carnegie. She stumbles through this shot, through curtains, and the next thing you know she’s on stage in Carnegie Hall.”
Andra Day stars in THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY from Paramount Pictures. Photo Credit: Takashi Seida.
It’s at Carnegie Hall where, looking at the government agents in the audience, she has to decide whether to sing Strange Fruit again.
To get Day through the sequence, Dorrance says they “had to take walls away to allow the camera to walk through,” for the Steadicam work. “You kind of want this magic to happen,” he says, echoing Dunn.
To capture that magic, Dunn shot on film, using a pair of Panaflex cameras with C and E Series anamorphic glass. “Some of these lenses are fifty, sixty years old,” he notes.
Andra Day stars in THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY from Paramount Pictures. Photo Credit: Takashi Seida.
But that wasn’t the only retro flourish. They also “used a 16mm clockwork Bolex (which) will have a couple of flash frames when you pull the trigger and jump and start. So, when Billie is in some of her worst states of mind (we can) accentuate these immersions. We shot the 16mm mostly color; high-speed color, high contrast, (so it) feels like footage from way back.”
And sometimes they would even make the 35mm film “look like the 16mm Bolex stuff,” such as when Holiday is on tour in Europe, visiting cafes and boulevards with her current, and inevitably abusive, husband.
Talking from his home in England, Dunn described the film, and the whole experience, as “one of the ones you wait for to come along.”
Or, thinking of Holiday’s defiant observation to Anslinger when trapped in her hospital bed, that he’d already lost because his “grandchildren will be singing Strange Fruit,” perhaps it’s one of the ones that come back when the time is right. Like Holiday herself. If indeed, Lady Day has ever gone away at all.
For more on The United States vs. Billie Holiday, check out our interview with costume designer Paolo Nieddu.
Black is King, Beyoncé’s 2020 musical film that doubled as a visual companion to TheLion King, was lauded as dazzling, seductive, and, well, regal. Directed in tandem by Beyoncé and the directors Ibra Ake, Blitz the Ambassador, Emmanuel Adjei, and Kwasi Fordjour, the visual album dropped on Disney+ with very little fanfare, typical of the star’s preferred announcement style, or lack thereof. The film was an instant sensation thanks to its globetrotting sets and creative fashion as much as the music itself and has been nominated for Best Music Film at the 63rd Grammy Awards (which are currently delayed due to Covid until March).
Beyoncé in “Mood 4 Eva” from the visual album BLACK IS KING on Disney+. (c) Parkwood Entertainment.
For a producer working on a project of this scope—Black is King was in production for over a year—it’s a surprise to learn the process, compared to more standard music video fare, isn’t vastly different. “I think the only thing that’s different is that Beyoncé is bigger than most artists,” says Jason Baum, who produced two of the album’s songs, Otherside and Don’t Jealous Me. “She might be one of the most iconic music video artists of our generation.” That he and his team would need to creatively push the envelope was thus a given, and secrecy while doing so was paramount. “It wasn’t something that we wanted anyone to know about because she has this known history to deliver projects as a surprise to her fans. I think there was a lot of pressure to not only deliver these grandiose visuals but to do it very much under wraps,” Baum added. Trying to arrange a clandestine set for a 150-person crew meant going on the hunt for space: the shoots were secured via a large perimeter, with people at every possible entrance and tents obscuring trailers.
NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 28: Producer Jason Baum attends the 60th Annual GRAMMY Awards at Madison Square Garden on January 28, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for NARAS)
The project began with just a couple of music videos intended for the album The Gift. During production, however, “they saw this grander vision of a feature film that could be made based on the narrative The Lion King,” Baum says. A production company he works with, Roman Coppola’s The Directors’ Bureau, paired him with their director Emmanuel Adjei. The videos the two created for the film, Otherside and Don’t Jealous Me, were among the first components of Black is King.
The natural beauty of Otherside presents a very different mood to the more sinister vibes and earthly temptations of Don’t Jealous Me. Despite the contrast, Baum and his team worked on both at the same time to bridge costs while still achieving a disparity in feeling between the two. “While we were trying to fit into Beyoncé’s overall vision, I think there was a desire to make sure each song had its own point of view that still fit within the larger vision,” Baum says. The producer drilled down into the two songs, interfacing mainly with Beyoncé’s longstanding producers overseeing the entire project and working independently of the teams creating other portions of the film. Despite the diversity of directors and locations, however, one of the many compelling aspects of Black is King is the viscerally consistent through-line it delivers, beyond loosely following the Lion King narrative. “I give that credit to Beyoncé and her close team,” the producer says. “They saw what the overall vision was and knew when to help steer it to be cohesive.”
Beyoncé in “Don’t Jealous Me” from the visual album BLACK IS KING, on Disney+. (c) Parkwood Entertainment
Beyond producing videos like Kendrick Lamar’s HUMBLE and Arcade Fire’s We Exist (and winning a Grammy for the former and being nominated for the latter), Baum is steeped in many of the more unusual aspects of the music industry’s aesthetic side. He was the associate producer on an independent film called Music directed by Sia almost four years ago, which will come out sometime this year. More recently, he produced the Beastie Boys Story, directed by Spike Jonze, which combined documentary footage of the group’s early years with that of Mike Diamond’s and Adam Horovitz’s oral history, performed live on stage. Access to both projects is via video on demand. It’s hard to see these kinds of uniquely formatted, feature-length, musical artist-led film projects being made possible without the mutual access streaming provides to artists and their fans. “The sort of boom of music content on these streaming services is about creating a portfolio that’s really diverse,” the producer theorizes, with this kind of content having the dual advantage of exposing audiences to artists they don’t yet know while also drawing in an already ardent fan base.
The musical film genre existed before streaming, of course, but “Beyoncé made it a very modern sort of thing,” Baum points out. “I do see a lot more artists creating things like this, and I think the interest comes from how many fans access music now through YouTube.” He sees the relationship between the visual and the auditory continuing to evolve, with interest in lyric videos and music visualizers, software that generates imagery to go with audio music, both on the rise. As for the future of the visual album itself, “right now I’d say it’s limited to larger artists that have funds they can allocate to it,” Baum says, “but it’s something that everyone finds enticing.”
Featured image: Beyoncé in “Otherside” from the visual album BLACK IS KING, on Disney+. Photo by Robin Harper. (c) Parkwood Entertainment
Writer/director Noah Hutton was due to make his narrative feature debut with his sci-fi film Lapsis at SXSW in March of 2020. You know how that turned out. Nearly a year later, Hutton’s slyly lacerating debut is now available on Virtual Cinema, VOD, and Digital. His low-budget feature debut is an impressive feat of world-building, cinematic wit, and a darkly funny critique of late-stage capitalism, specifically corporate greed and the exploitation of workers.
Hutton not only wrote and directed his debut feature, but he also served as editor and composer. Lapsis is centered on Ray Tincelli (Dean Imperial), a decent man struggling to make ends meet and take care of his ailing younger brother. Ray’s airline gig doesn’t pay enough to cover his brother’s expensive clinic, and desperate to provide for him, he takes a job in what appears to be the potentially lucrative field of quantum computing. Yet Lapsis is not the kind of sci-fi film that’s all smooth lines and elegant, Apple-like gadgets. Part of the film’s charm is how beautifully mundane the tech is, and how much of Ray’s job is old-school manual labor. Ray’s thankless labor is required to provide this technological advancement for the masses, one that promises a brighter future—for some. While the film is set in an alternative present, the depersonalizing effect of Ray’s relentless job looks squarely at the greed and quiet cruelty of the gig economy we’re living in.
“[The inspiration] came from a different few places,” Hutton says. “This high concept sci-fi world is a little mysterious, and I wasn’t inspired by one event or thing. It’s a feeling, really, that I’ve had in the last decade of being an independent contractor. That’s what got me to a place where I could make this film, the feeling of going from gig to gig. It’s a feeling that I think is shared by many people, and I wanted to capture that somehow.”
Lapsis takes direct aim at the exhausting pervasiveness of gig work, and the way the companies that this labor makes possible present themselves as merely the next stage in capitalistic evolution, where consumers and workers get precisely what they want. This is, of course, demonstrably false, and this is the thread Hutton successfully pulls on. In Lapsis, to empower this quantum computing revolution, Ray has to trudge miles through the woods dragging a cable behind him to connect it to these frankly despotic-looking cubes. Ray and his fellow cablers are in competition against robots for the most lucrative routes. As Ray schleps, and schleps, and schleps, he becomes entangled in the struggle for his fellow worker’s rights, thanks to a helpful tip from a long-time cabler Anna (Madeline Wise).
L-r: Noah Hutton and Dean Imperial on set of “Lapsis.” Courtesy Noah Hutton.
“To get from inspiration to the physical concept of cabling took a few steps, but it’s the core feeling of being on the treadmill of labor,” Hutton says. “The absurdity of the way that labor can feel when you’re engaged in it—it can feel like pulling this cable across miles of forest. Being a part of a system operating on a larger network, you’re segregated from the output of your labor, and you just kind of move onto the next gig.”
The Cube in “Lapsis.” Courtesy Noah Hutton.
Not only is the physical world-building Hutton pulled off impressive—more on that in a second—but so, too, is the sly tone of the film. It’s not shouting Uber and its ilk are inhumane! Hutton’s film takes a softer, less didactic approach, poking the bear of insatiable corporate greed with humor. Yet you can feel the outrage as Hutton builds out this world of scams upon scams upon scams.
Hutton says one source of inspiration was reading about quantum technology and this notion that despite sounding ultra-sophisticated, in order to actually work it will require new cables.
“So if we were going to run a quantum internet, it would require blue-collar labor,” Hutton says. “I’m very interested in blue-collar sci-fi, as what we usually see is white-collar sci-fi, with the focus on the people who discover or create the technology and how it becomes profitable. Rarely do we get stories about what’s happened 5-10 years later and how the technology has trickled down to affect the working class.”
The competition. Courtesy Noah Hutton.
The robots that Ray is in competition with were actually built by a team of students that Hutton engaged. The little critters you see challenging Ray and his cablers for the best routes really worked. There’s a lot of this kind of practical wizardy on display in Lapsis, which helps give the film an appealing, lived-in vibe.
As for his multiple roles on the film, Hutton says it was just a function of trying to get his first feature in the can and knowing more or less precisely what he wanted from post-production.
“It was always the intention to wear these hats, but it’s not something I’m going to be precious about needing to do in the future,” he says. “I think because I came up wearing all those hats in documentary work and this being my first time doing a narrative, these were things I not only loved doing but felt that I could do on the film. I’m interested in working with a composer in the future, but editing is near and dear to my heart. I make my living as an editor on commercial projects.”
As for working with his actors, Hutton did his homework before he began filming (there were more than 40 speaking parts in Lapsis, which is a lot for an indie film, let alone one with a modest budget). He took a masterclass at the Labyrinth Theater Company in which he worked with actors. “I also made a few narrative shorts to get into working with actors. It also helped that I come from a family of actors, my parents are actors, so I grew up with their complaints [laughs].”
Mass, which recently premiered to much acclaim at Sundance, is the screenwriting and directorial debut of actor Fran Kranz. It’s a tense, claustrophobic, dialogue-driven film that explores the long-term aftermath of a school shooting, and essentially takes place in one room. Its success rests heavily on the shoulders of the cast, and Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Reed Birney, and Ann Dowd, who form the quartet at the center of the story, do not disappoint. We talk to Kranz, who is best known for his roles in Dollhouse and The Cabin in the Woods, and editor Yang-Hua Hu (The Public), about how the movie came together.
Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, and Breeda Wool appear in “Mask.” Photo by Ryan Jackson-Healy.
This is your first film as a writer-director and you began developing it after the Parkland, Florida, shooting in 2018. What was it about that incident that compelled you to tackle this particularly thorny subject matter?
Kranz: On the day of the shooting, I just was so emotional. I was overwhelmed by it. I was listening to a parent on the radio, and I had to pull over and I thought it was strange, because we’ve become somewhat used to these events, sadly. And so after getting really emotional and overcome, I thought, What is going on? And the obvious conclusion was that now I’m a parent, my daughter was one-and-a-half years old at that time. And I thought, ‘Okay, I’m feeling this differently now because I’m a parent.’ So, there was no movie at that point. It just set in motion this course of events of, honestly, somewhat obsessively researching the subject.
At what point did the idea for a movie start to take shape?
Kranz: I’ve always wanted to make a movie. But that night, I ordered Dave Cullen’s Columbine. Then from there, Matthew Lysiak’s book “Newtown,” and Åsne Seierstad’s book about the Norway massacre. It just kind of snowballed. Then, I came across these stories of parents meeting the parents of the shooter. A few examples for Columbine, and then some in Newtown. And I had always had this interest in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. And I had always been amazed, and even a little disturbed, by the idea of families of victims meeting with families of perpetrators. And more so, the fact that they might even be able to find closure, understanding, and even reconcile or forgive.
Did you speak directly to any parents in the course of your preparation for the movie?
Kranz: No. I’m really sensitive to all that. I’m a little insecure about it all, to be totally honest. It’s a fictional film about nonfictional events. Really tragic, real events. And the motivation has always been just focusing on the human emotion of it, and having real empathy for the parents on both sides of these stories. I think that was always on our minds in the editing process, showing respect for all four characters, and the humanity for all four characters. Not having any kind of agenda other than uplifting and shining a light on the shared humanity of the foursome.
Yang-Hua Hu, when you were pulling it all together, were you on the look-out for scenes that didn’t feel authentic?
Hu: For me, it’s about the parents. They are not ready to start to talk. They are trying to argue, disagree with each other, but they are not really talking about [the shooting]. They are all trying to say something, but it’s not what was scripted. Then the character breaks and says, ‘Why are we talking about this? I’m not here to talk about this.” Then, everything shifts.
Jason Isaacs said in an interview recently, “This is a film that’s got nothing to do with school shootings. It’s about finding a way to talk to other people, and see them as human.” Would you agree with that assessment?
Kranz: It’s strange, I’m asked, Where did this come from? And the answer is: the Parkland shooting, right? So, it’s impossible for me to say it doesn’t have anything to do with school shootings. At the same time, the journey that these characters go on, the searching for answers, or trying to find blame, all the tools that they think are necessary to get what they need out of this meeting, ultimately don’t help them. What is important in the meeting is connecting with these people and finding some sort of sense of shared humanity, but, more so, shared suffering.
Ann Dowd and Reed Birne appear in “Mass>” Photo by Ryan Jackson-Healy.
The themes can relate to any kind of fractured relationship between people?
Kranz: In the United States right now it’s a really scary time where we’re seeing essentially this sort of crisis of contradiction where you have these almost two realities, and such intense disagreement. Reading about these meetings and, going back to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, I discovered that in order to sort of breach these divides and repair something that’s broken, you don’t necessarily have to agree. I think those are themes and ideas that of course go far beyond the event that sort of inspired it. So yes, of course, I understand exactly what Jason’s saying, but you’ll never hear me not bring up the events that inspired it.
Hu: I feel like the four characters were drowning in the ocean. They come to this place trying to grab onto something so they can survive. But then they realize, actually, the answer is always in their heart. They just cannot face it until the moment they are in the room.
And the film takes place almost entirely in one room. What are the challenges that that brings as a director and also from an editing perspective?
Kranz: No one was ever going to give me any money as a first-time director, so I was trying to figure out a one-location movie. I don’t know how Yang-Hua did it. I mean, it’s funny because obviously, like you said, the majority of the movie takes place in a room. I had the movie in my head so well, I could see it so well, except for the room. So we’ll get in the room… and we’ll figure it out. My Dinner with Andre works, so we’ll just set the camera up and we’ll point and shoot, and we’ll get there. Yang-Hua will tell you, I’m an actor and I was so naive about post-production. I thought you go to the wrap party and it’s over. And then when we got into the editing room and started going through this footage, I truly panicked.
Hu: It’s a pretty challenging film but I think this script is so good and the acting is phenomenal. We wanted something close to regular life instead of something fancy, and over-decorated. And we don’t need to necessarily see the person who is talking every time because all the people react in the room. It’s just like a balloon, an un-burstable balloon, the pressures keep increasing, creeping, you just don’t see it.
Fran, how does your background as an actor impact your style of directing?
Kranz: I knew what we had to create was this sense of verisimilitude, this heavy naturalism. You had to just be in the room and the director could never get in the way. I mean, there were things that I wanted to put in and Yang-Hua would remind me of this sort of mantra of, ‘We don’t want to get in the way, this shot feels like we’re making the choice, it just has to be about the room and what’s happening in there.’ It was important that the vehicle could run by itself. So, I tried to basically, to cut a long story short, have a very soft touch. And so I didn’t walk away from it thinking I’m some genius director. I felt like a game manager.
For more interviews around Sundance 2021, check these out:
Now our main image doesn’t come from James Gunn’s upcoming HBO Max seriesPeacemaker. No—the featured shot is from a little movie that introduces Peacemaker (John Cena) that we haven’t gotten a chance to see yet, Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. Yet even though the film hasn’t premiered, Gunn, Cena, and their fellow cast and crew members are already working on the spinoff in Vancouver. Folks, it looks like they’re having a bit of a good time, no?
So who do we see in the photo? Clockwise left to right, we’ve got two characters from The Suicide Squad—Steve Agee as John Economos (better known as King Shark) and Jennifer Holland as NSA agent Emilia Harcourt. Next to Holland is Chris Conrad as The Vigilante, then Cena himself, then there’s Chukwudi Iwuji as Clemson Murn, Danielle Brooks, and Gunn himself. The details of the plot are, of course, under wraps.
As for The Suicide Squad, it’s something of a reboot of David Ayer’s 2016 film, although Gunn has assured potential viewers that being familiar with Ayer’s film is not a requirement in enjoying his. Gunn’s film is, according to the cast, a gonzo riff on 1970s war films in which no character is safe and no amount of craziness is off the table. The cast is absolutely bonkers. Joining Cena’s peace-loving but war-making Peacemaker are Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller, Idris Elba’s Bloodsport, Nathan Fillion’s T.D.K., Michael Rooker’s Savant, David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man, Alice Braga’s SolSoria, Pete Davidson’s Blackguard, Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang, Sean Gunn’s Weasel, Peter Capaldi’s Thinker, and even Sylvester Stallone and Taika Waititi have roles. Once Gunn wrapped the film, Warner Bros. wondered if he had any spinoff ideas for their new streaming service HBO Max. The rest is soon-to-be-history, with Gunn whipping up a series for Cena’s character.
The Suicide Squad is due in theaters and on HBO Max on August 6, 2021, while Peacemaker is due to hit HBO Max in an eight-episode run in January of 2022.
For more on HBO and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Hold onto your winter hats, ladies and gentlemen, because Warner Bros. has revealed the red-band trailer for the live-action reboot of Mortal Kombat. The film, adapted from the iconic video game, will be making its theatrical debut on the same day it premieres on HBO Max, and from this first glimpse, it looks like it’s going to be a wild ride.
The film was directed by Simon McQuoid from a script by Greg Russo and Wonder Woman 1984 scribe Dave Callaham. Pretty much all your favorite Mortal Kombat characters are accounted for here—Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), Kano (Josh Lawson), Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee)—and the action looks as brutal as the original game.
The trailer will satisfy both fans of the game and fans of the original 1995 film directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, which didn’t shy away from the visceral fighting or the killer lines, like Scorpion’s deathless “Get over here!”
You can check out the trailer below—you’ll be redirected to YouTube as the trailer’s age-restricted due to its gnarly content. Mortal Kombat is due in theaters and on HBO Max on April 16, 2021.
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 HBO and HBO Max, check out these stories:
Featured image: Caption: TADANOBU ASANO as Lord Raiden in New Line Cinema’s action adventure “Mortal Kombat,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
When is Ava DuVernay not pushing the entertainment industry to become more inclusive? The answer is never. The powerhouse director/producer is launching a new venture in collaboration with major studios, streaming platforms, and producers to help diversify film and TV crew members. The new database tool, called ARRAY CREW, launches today and is part of DuVernay’s nonprofit organization ARRAY Alliance. The tool is aimed to help bridge a gap that has long stymied talented filmmakers—how to get their names in front of producers and production companies when they don’t already have established relationships with the insular entertainment community.
ARRAY CREW already boasts a database with more than 3,000 experienced below-the-line filmmakers in its initial launch. Here’s how it’s described on Array’s website: ARRAY CREW is an equal opportunity platform, with a mission to support professionals in the film and television industry from underrepresented populations. This includes, but is not limited to, women of all kinds and individuals of African-American, Hispanic, Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and descend from the Pacific Islands.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, DuVernay summed up the necessity for the tool in an interview this way: “We hear people say, I’d hire them if I could find them. Now will you hire them?”
Going above and beyond to make sure underrepresented filmmakers get their chance to shine is nothing new for DuVernay. Below-the-line filmmakers are our bread and butter, and we’ve interviewed folks like producer/director DeMane Davis, showrunner Kat Chandler, and cinematographer Kira Kelly, all of whose careers were given major boosts by DuVernay.
As DuVernay rose through the industry, from publicist to one of Hollywood’s leading director/producers, she saw film and television crews that were made up of mostly white men. As the WSJ reports, she went from believing this was outright prejudice to an issue stemming more from the industry’s insular nature and a lack of opportunity for talented but less connected crew.
“Hollywood is about who you know,” she said. “We have very experienced people who are overlooked because they are not in the right circles. My hope is that people have been genuine when they have said they just didn’t know how to find them.”
DuVernay’s backers on the project include some of the industry’s biggest producers, including J.J. Abrams and Katie McGrath, his wife and the co-chief of their influential production house Bad Robot. Warner Bros. TV Chairman Peter Roth is a founding partner on DuVernay’s project and helped reach out to other major Hollywood producers and platforms.
Netflix was also an early advocate. The streamer, where DuVernay made her critically acclaimed limited series When They See Us, had a similar in-house system for identifying diverse crew called ION (Inclusion Outreach Network). When DuVernay presented the idea of her platform, they decided to fold ION into her work.
DuVernay has said the database will not be Yelp —that is, it’s not designed to be a place where people can leave bad comments about a particular crew member—but rather a Yellow Pages. There’s a ton of talented, hard-working below-the-line filmmakers ready to work, and now, it’ll be that much easier to find them.
Ava DuVernay is committing to a more inclusive Hollywood with a brand new initiative.#ArrayCrew connects hiring managers and crew members in film & TV who are women and people of color.@Ava discusses @ARRAYNow and her groundbreaking series, @QueenSugarOWN. pic.twitter.com/vkMY2Vjzrr
Featured image: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 09: Ava DuVernay attends the 2020 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 09, 2020 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Zee James is an actress, a stuntwoman and stunt coordinator, and a background performer in movies and on television, ranging from Black Panther and Dolemite is My Name to Bosch and Everybody Hates Chris. She has even demonstrated an entire category of Jeopardy! clues about martial arts. James spoke to us about taking advantage of opportunities that might not be exactly what she planned, learning on the job, and the increasing sensitivity in Hollywood to making sure that stunt doubles match the gender and skin tone of the actors they are representing.
How did you get into stunts?
The writers’ strike was on and I saw my friend Michael Jai White in the gym. I said, “I want to stay in the business is there anything else that I can do?” He introduced me to a guy standing next to him, Billy Washington, who was a stunt coordinator. Six months later, he called and said, “We’re shooting in Sacramento and I think you’d be perfect to double this girl.” So, he flew me up and I did my first stunt job. It was a ratchet hand pull. That means you’re basically tethered to wire and they can yank you or drop you. I was standing in a doorway and they were on the other side. There was a rope tied to me going up top. And they were on the other side of another wall where they actually ratcheted me up into the air where I had to go back, stand up vertical, and then fall down to the concrete. So, that was my very first stunt.
What was the part that you were most nervous about? Was it the fall? Was it just remembering all the different moves?
I don’t think I was nervous at all. I was excited. There’s the adrenaline, and you’re just there to do your job. And you really want to get it right. And the most important thing is that you want to do it right the first time, so you don’t have to do it again. Well, I did it right. They came in like “Are you okay? Oh my god, you look like you died.” All the nails that I had on broke. But camera A or B missed it. So, I had to do it again. And he was like, “Zee, do you have it in you? Can you do it again?” And I did. He said, “Wow, you’re pretty badass. I’m real proud of you. But if you’re hurt or anything, don’t show it until you get to your room.” And that’s when I started training because I had never trained and taken classes. But my goal was always acting.
Zee James on the set of “Black Panther.” Courtesy Marvel Studios.
And when did that happen?
I started acting in 2000. I started out doing background work and I got my SAG card in 2000 or 2001. I had a part in one episode of Everybody Hates Chris, and it became a recurring role. This was my nervous point. And what made me nervous on this day was working with Debbie Allen. We were in the hallway of the scene and she’s like, “This is what you got to do. I want you to go in, and I want you to do it like this. And then say it like this, and then walk out to the other side.” And after that, I got into acting class so I could learn, and I did everything that I possibly could to make sure that I knew what happens behind the scenes. As a background artist, you can watch and you learn so much, but it’s not until those cameras are on you and they’re saying, “One, two, three…and action.” And then you’re hitting your mark and you’re remembering lines and all that kind of stuff—you’ve got to be ready. I love it when I can act and do my own stunts, which I just did on a show.
Zee James on set.
And now you’re doing stunt coordinating, right?
Yes. With everything that is happening, productions are looking for women in those kinds of jobs, and with my resume, they came to me. It helps because it is no longer acceptable to have a girl that is Caucasian or Latinx doubling for a Black girl. Whatever skin color you are, that’s who you double, whatever race, sex, you are, that’s who you double. It’s another tool in my belt, and I love it.
Zee’s next project, which she’s the stunt coordinator on, is My Name is Andrea, which looks at the life of legendary feminist and intellectual Andrea Dworkin, from director Pratibha Parmer.
Featured image: Zee James gives “Jeopardy” contestants a lesson on martial arts. Courtesy ABC.
Jongnic “JB” Bontemps knows how to turn emotions into a musical composition, whether it’s for a character in a narrative or a historical figure in a documentary. Composing on narrative features, documentaries, shorts, and video games, Bontemps can speak to his collaborators in whatever narrative language they need. For Creed II, he provided director Steven Caple Jr. with additional music worthy of the film’s fighting spirit. For the doc United Skates, Bontemps threaded hip-hop through the story of America’s underground roller rink subculture as it was on the verge of being erased.
Today, Bontemps has his fingerprints on some of the most intriguing documentaries coming out. These include Netflix’s docu-series Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, a Shondaland production, about Debbie Allen Dance Company’s award-winning production of “The Nutcracker,” and RBG directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s doc My Name is Pauli Murray, about the non-binary Black lawyer, activist, and poet who was a major influence on Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall. He’s also working on CNN’s The People Versus the Klan and Nat Geo’s The March on Washington, both docs requiring Bontemps to use his musical chops to unpack the violence visited upon Black Americans, and the ongoing fight for that elusive American promise, equality under the law.
Bontemps spoke to us about his work, the ways in which he collaborates, and how he scores what’s going on in America today. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jongnic Bontemps
As a composer, how do you get across your musical ideas to filmmakers who, more often than not, don’t have any music in their background?
One of the first things filmmakers always tell me is, I don’t speak music. Music is not taught to filmmakers at film school. They really get their first collaboration with a composer when they start working in the real world. A filmmaker has probably done every other job besides music on a film. They’ve held the boom mic, they’ve mixed their movie, they’ve probably done some VFX, some editing, they’ve acted, but they’ve never written the music. So my job is to first come in and we’re going to talk drama. I’m going to speak your language, and we’re going to speak in dramatic terms. And it’s going to be my job, once we take that dramatic language, to use my own voice to transform that into a piece of music. And once we have that music, we can talk about it.
Let’s start with your work on My Name is Pauli Murray, which recently premiered at Sundance. This feels like a very timely film about an American hero many people have never heard of.
Pauli had so many firsts in this country, and so many of the freedoms that I enjoy, especially as an African American, were based on Pauli’s research, writing, and struggle. So when the film’s editor, Cinque Northern, told me about Pauli’s story, I was instantly enthralled. We started having early conversations about what the music was supposed to be about. Then, I watched the directors’ other acclaimed documentary, RBG, and we had a meeting in New York, where I presented some ideas about the music.
What did you discuss in that initial meeting with directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West?
For me, when I have that initial meeting, I want to make sure that the filmmaking team feels I’m invested in the project and that I have a point of view and an opinion. My concept was that we need to celebrate Pauli as an American hero, and because Pauli did so many things the music almost had to have this frenetic pace. I talked a little bit about how I’d implement that—brass instruments, French horns specifically—which have this connotation of heroism. They enjoyed that concept and they hired me, and then we were off to the races.
Pauli Murray. “My Name is Pauli Murray.” Courtesy Sundance.
Instrumentation equals characterization, then.
There were certain loves in Pauli’s life, and I wanted to associate certain instruments to those loves, so this way they’re always in conversation and we can see this evolution as Pauli moves through life. From that perspective, I was able to give them a good enough picture. I understood the story and what they were trying to do. Then you get hired, and all that stuff I said I was going to do? Now I actually have to do it [laughs].
You’ve scored a lot of documentaries and narratives. Do you prefer one to the other?
Narrative and documentaries have different constraints, but at the end of the day, you’re still trying to tell a story. You’re trying to tell it in an entertaining, engaging, and hopefully cinematic way. Documentaries, in general, seem to rely on talking to provide crucial information, people talking about this person or this subject, and the music has to be supportive of all that talking. You can’t get as operatic because you might distract from the talking. Whereas with narrative cinema, they have spaces for music. You can tell the story without talking. What I loved about Pauli Murray is Cinque [Northern, the editor] and I talked about wanting people to experience the information, not just hear it. And the way to have them experience the information is to tell that with imagery, text on the screen, with music, with animation. So there are certain areas in this film where we were able to get a little more operatic because we were able to the story in this dynamic way that typically you don’t find in documentaries.
Switching gears, you’re scoring CNN’s upcoming docu-series The People Versus the Klan and Nat Geo’s The March on Washington—both of these deal with America’s long, ongoing struggle with race. How did you approach this topic?
This previous summer, during the Black Lives Matter protests, my family and I participated in the protests here near our home in Altadena. My son even wrote music for the protests, and we had lots and lots of discussions. I wanted my art to be a part of the movement as well, so I put it out into the universe and said, ‘I want to start working on these topics because I have a perspective, being an African American, and understanding intricately the feelings of my community in this country.’ The universe answered. When I look back, right now I’ve either scored or am in the process of scoring about seven projects that have subject matter around Black Lives Matter.
Even the Netflix doc Dance Dreams: The Chocolate Nutcracker is really about normalizing Black and Brown people who want to go into ballet. Talking about their hopes and dreams and desires to enter into an industry and art form that wasn’t made for them. With March on Washington, we’re discussing not only the historic March but the more recent marches on Washington, and how that’s also been fueled and works with the Black Lives Matter movement. In The People Versus the Klan, we’re looking at the lynching of Michael Donald in 1981 in Mobile, Alabama, and we use that as a through-line to talk about the church bombing in Alabama in 1963, and the murders of Emmett Till, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery…quite honestly it’s been a tough few months because I’ve probably scored Ahmaud Arbery being shot about four times already.
How do you cope with that?
Every time I see that footage, it’s just enraging. But, I realized that I’m equipped to do this work, I care about this work, and I have something to say about this work. So I’m honored to do it, even though it has been tough. There have been days when I’ve actually left my studio and cried because I’ve just been so enraged with what I’ve been seeing and being reminded of the treatment of Black people in this country.
How do you even approach scoring the video of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder?
With respect, honestly. I try to treat all of these unwilling sacrifices with respect. Their unwilling sacrifice brought a conversation and an awareness to the forefront, and it’s hopefully going to be a stepping stone towards progress. I don’t try to sensationalize it, I don’t try to make it dramatic, but I try to treat it with as much respect as possible, which sometimes means not doing much music at all. Allowing the imagery to tell the story by itself, and to just comment on it very lightly. It’s always coming from this place of respect for that sacrifice of Ahmaud Arbery, or George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor. It’s always about respect.
The police procedural has been a staple on television since its inception, and writer/director Tobias Lindholm felt it was time to shake things up. The Investigation, Lindholm’s six-episode miniseries currently playing on HBO, delves into one of the most sensational crimes in recent Danish history — the 2017 murder of journalist Kim Wall. And it turns the genre on its ear.
Wall went missing after meeting with an interview subject on his private submarine. After the submarine owner was taken into custody, Jens Møller (Søren Malling), lead investigator of homicide at the Copenhagen Police Headquarters, opened an investigation. Initially, the suspect claimed Wall left the submarine alive, but emerging clues told a different story. She may have been murdered. The case took a gruesome turn when a female torso was discovered on a Swedish beach. Møller and his team spent months doggedly uncovering what really happened.
Laura Christensen. Photograph by Per Arnesen/HBO
“Both the local and international press gave it, in my opinion, way too much attention. Or at least you could say, the attention was wrong,” says Lindholm during a Zoom interview. “It all focused on what you would expect — the portrayal of a perpetrator and the obsession with the darkness.”
Lindholm was bothered that the headline-grabbing sordid aspects of the murder was turning Wall into another faceless victim. After meeting with Møller, the filmmaker, best known for the Oscar-nominated film A War, wanted to change that. His script would downplay the horrific details and focus instead on what he describes as the light in the darkness.
Søren Malling is Jens Møller. Photograph by Henrik Ohsten/HBO
“We had a story about a society that worked and about complete strangers who put their own lives on pause to solve this case,” continues Lindholm. “To me, it was a proof of human strength, instead of human darkness. That made me consider doing a story about this investigation.”
Soren Malling, Pilou Asbaek. Photograph by Henrik Ohsten/HBO
Inspiration struck during conversations with Møller. The investigator told Lindholm he had never interrogated the suspect, leaving that task to his colleagues. Lindholm realized the accused didn’t need to play a prominent role in the storyline.
As Lindholm observes, a typical police procedural often treats the victim as a plot point. The dead body is forgotten as the focus shifts to the showdown between the perpetrator and the law officers. Lindholm was determined to avoid this scenario. In a unique twist, not only is the murder suspect never seen, but his name is never mentioned.
“I just turned it around and said, ‘What if we just use the perpetrator as an engine that I can throw into the story as a sort of confusion but then not pay more attention to him?’ Just leave him out,” says Lindholm. “Let’s be fascinated with the humanity instead of the darkness…with the humanity of the grieving parents, the pride they have in their daughter and our police officers.”
The result is an absorbing drama that drills down on the day-by-day beats of a murder investigation. A highpoint such as a cadaver dog barking to signal a discovery of a body part on the high seas is juxtaposed with a staid explanation of how shifting currents can impact the movement of items in the water. A pivotal breakthrough comes while an investigator sits at a table reviewing a case file. Never has minutia been so mesmerizing.
“By turning the factors around, apparently I did something drastic,” quips Lindholm.
Perhaps just as novel is the way Lindholm incorporates Wall’s parents, Ingrid (Pernilla August) and Joachim (Rolf Lassgård), into The Investigation. Their grief, their resolve and their determination to find justice for their daughter heightens the tragedy and senselessness of the murder. To achieve this, Lindholm knew he needed to involve the real Ingrid and Joachim and had Møller arrange a meeting.
“We drove over to visit them and Jens would take their dog Iso for a walk by the beach,” remembers Lindholm. ”I would sit in their garden and have a conversation with them. I didn’t say much. I just listened to what they remembered about their relationship with Jens.”
Rolf Lassgard, Pernilla August. Photograph by Per Arnesen/HBO
Lindholm discussed his ideas about never showing the perpetrator and how the story would focus on the police work. “They liked that because they had been trying to make sure that their daughter wasn’t remembered only as a victim but as the journalist she was,” he says. “And they felt great gratitude towards Jens and all the people who worked with him. And they have been part of this ever since. They have read every draft. They have been on set as much as they liked. And they’ve seen every edit.”
Lindholm credits the Walls for some of the series’ finer details. A heart-shaped memorial to Kim had been created out of stones on a beach near the Wall’s home. One of the series’ most poignant moments comes when Møller adds his own stone to the heart. Lindholm didn’t want his film crew to disturb the neighborhood and planned to recreate the memorial in another location. But the Walls insisted he shoot the real one to show everyone who built it how much it was appreciated.
“And I have to say that I had never been so careful around a location as we were that day,” adds Lindholm.
The Walls also pushed to have their dog play himself. “Iso enjoyed it,” reveals Lindholm. “He and the actor who was playing Joachim became very close friends.”
The series’ final scene was emotional for Lindholm. Kim’s parents have teamed with the International Women’s Media Foundation to establish the Kim Wall Memorial Fund. The goal is to award a $5,000 grant annually to female journalists whose reporting carries forward Kim’s legacy. Lindholm devised a scene where Ingrid addresses a forum of young journalism students.
“I wrote this speech together with Ingrid Wall. It’s her words. I asked her what she would say if she could get the last word in this whole media circus,” says Lindholm. “I wrote that into the script. She would read it and I would talk to Pernilla about it and Ingrid would chip in new thoughts. On the day we shot, the real Ingrid was by my side by the monitor. At that point, I realized how real this was. I have to say that more than once I stopped breathing and took a second to think about what was going on here. It felt very close to what we were portraying.”
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From the moment Marie (Zendaya) strides into view, entering the borrowed Los Angeles digs she’s sharing with her director boyfriend Malcolm (John David Washington), you sense trouble. The couple’s home, where they will spend the rest of the night wide awake and arguing, is spacious and stunning, and Malcolm’s movie premiere earlier that evening was an unqualified success. Too bad the auteur forgot to thank Marie in his speech, a particularly egregious omission given that his film was based on her life. As the two pace after one another through their luxurious yet eerily isolated home, it emerges that Marie was in the throes of addiction back when she and Malcolm first got together. In her view, that chapter of her life should now either be closed or hers to work with as she sees fit, but instead, it is neither, her boyfriend having taken it, without asking, into his own creative possession. Marie’s understandably foul mood simmers behind her otherwise impassive face, as she quietly observes Malcolm while he preens with joy at his triumph and rails against his reviewers, who, by bringing politics into their criticism, unforgivably fail to correctly interpret his genius.
Writer and director Sam Levinson and a limited crew shot Malcolm & Marieentirely during Covid-19, with Washington and Zendaya as the film’s sole cast members. The director teamed up with his cinematographer Marcell Rév (the pair previously shot Assassination Nation and the series Euphoria together) to film this tense romance in high-contrast black-and-white Kodak Double-X film stock. Even though the fractious couple never leave their home, both their pasts and their future as a couple are eventually laid bare. We had the opportunity to speak with Rév about shooting under such unusual circumstances, lighting a feature set entirely at night, and the precision of blocking to make the most of the film’s single location.
Can you tell us about the process that brought you to such a distinct black and white aesthetic?
When we were figuring out how this movie should look, we didn’t have a lot of time. What usually would happen is that we’d watch a lot of movies, talk about references. As opposed to that, we had to get into production really quickly with this one. I think we had a pretty clear idea that this had to be black and white—this wasn’t something where we came to a logical conclusion, it was more like a feeling or something instinctive. We shot this movie while production of Euphoria went down. On that show, we were already experimenting with certain kinds of film stocks. There’s one sequence in Euphoria that’s black and white. We came across the obvious choice of Double-X. They don’t really use it that much, especially in feature films, nowadays. What they do usually is shoot in color, even if they shoot on film, and then turn it into black and white. We tested this stock and absolutely loved the look of it, that it has strong blacks and has a very high contrast in terms of halo-y whites. It’s not an easy stock to shoot on because it doesn’t have a lot of latitude. It’s a special look. We thought we should go for it, especially because we wanted to pay homage to 50s, 60s Hollywood movies. This stock was used from the 70s or so, so it was pretty close to what they were dealing with—I think they were dealing with an even less sensitive negative at the time.
In terms of vintage films, were there particular titles you had in mind?
I think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is something you can’t avoid thinking about when you’re shooting a movie like this. But we embraced that, we didn’t want to act like it doesn’t exist. I think I came up with the reference La Notte, just the way that modern architecture works in a black and white movie. And just the general mood of that movie, I can relate to. Sam really loves the movie The Servant. I think in terms of camera moves we were talking about Bunny Lake is Missing, the Otto Preminger movie, which is the 60s or maybe early 70s. It’s about a couple who move to a new place, to a new town, and they take their daughter to preschool and when they go to pick her up in the afternoon, she’s not there anymore. It’s a very haunting movie, in my opinion. It’s nothing to do with the themes of our movie, but just technically speaking we were talking about dolly shots that were similar.
How was shooting entirely in one house? Do you find the limitations of shooting in one location creatively freeing?
I think almost every limitation is a little bit freeing because you don’t have to deal with a lot of other stuff. Obviously, it’s the middle of a pandemic, so we tried to come up with an idea we could shoot in a pandemic. This was a restriction that was given. But every restriction frees your mind a little bit from a lot of things—but I wouldn’t say it’s not a challenge. It’s definitely a challenge to shoot in one location for an hour and 45-minute movie. But it was a gorgeous house and it had a lot of opportunities. We went through a lot of houses before we picked this one. We had a really clear idea that we wanted open structure architecture, meaning that you can see everything around. [But] this house [also] has a back part, which includes the bedrooms and bathrooms, that’s a maze-like structure that can give you a little more of a claustrophobic feeling than the main living room area.
Shooting night for a DP is of course a huge challenge. It’s where you get the craft of your work. But it’s also rewarding because you get to light everything, it’s not just whatever the available light is and then extending that a little bit. Every light and shadow you’re creating yourself. It’s a huge opportunity. It was definitely a challenge on this very insensitive stock, but at the same time, it forced us to shoot in a certain kind of way that I think isn’t really shot anymore, that gave a special look to this movie, I hope. It’s a very insensitive stock, as opposed to what’s in fashion today for digital cinema, where you’re lighting a space, creating a mood, and just tweaking things when you’re moving to another shot. As opposed to that, we were really lighting every shot. It was a totally different approach to what we usually do.
And outdoors, the lights are placed in a way where you get the sense the yard just drops off a cliff. Was that intentional?
Yes. We knew that we wanted to have this interior-exterior location, not just having plain walls behind actors while they’re talking for one and a half hours, but having a landscape behind them. Obviously, at night you have to light that to have it be visible.
We occasionally view Malcolm or Marie inside, from outside the house. How did you decide when you wanted to pull back and frame them like that?
The fact that we were quarantined for two weeks prior to shooting gave us the opportunity to go through a lot of blocking and rehearsing with the actors. That’s a huge advantage of this project, I think, that we got to wrap our heads around a lot of things that we normally don’t get to. In a normal prep situation in a non-pandemic world, you try to steal those hours, when you can sit down and talk about the real important things. Most of the time it’s without the actors, it’s just the director and yourself. In this case, it was the four of us sitting and talking through, line by line, everything. That’s a huge advantage for me.
Was the crew also exceptionally small due to Covid restrictions?
Yes. It was a tiny, tiny crew. I think the last time I shot like this was in film school. There were twenty-something of us, so it was really a small, family kind of vibe. That was great, but at the same time, when you have four electricians in total for a lot of hills around the house, that slows things down a little bit. But we had an amazing crew and we knew these people from Euphoria, they’re our friends. It was a pleasure to be there with them.
There was also the intention to avoid a sense of realism, right? Though in a way, these two people, having this argument, confronting the broader issues at hand, seems very realistic.
The director would put it that it’s like watching two snakes in a jar. I wouldn’t say it’s a realistic or realist movie. I think it’s in the way of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—it’s an experiment. It’s watching two people and their relationship in a laboratory kind of environment. They’re very isolated from the world. And I think the black and white gave it a certain kind of abstraction. When you see two people talking, you’re obviously expecting something realistic. Realistic phrases or forms of speech—which I think this script includes, but at the same time, we wanted to make it more abstract than just picking up dialogue from the street.
I think part of why asense of realism comes across are the moods Zendaya projects—they’re extremely believable.
I think it’s real on an emotional level. It’s just not on a detailed, fact-check level, you know?
There’s also a pervasive sense of threat. How did you evoke that?
I think that sense creates itself when people are in a remote location by themselves. You just have to put the camera a little farther away. or sit on an image for a little bit, or move on something slowly, and it creates itself. We’re not trying to use horror movie kind of tricks to scare people. It was something that was sneaking into the movie a little bit, and we let it sneak.
Do you feel hope for Malcolm and Marie at the end?
It was always a question, where do we end this movie? I was always on the side to end it here. You could end it when they go to bed, or maybe even earlier. But I think in these times, in this world, after this huge fight, it’s important to give people a little bit of hope, at least. Even if it’s not a happy ending, it still gives you a tiny bit of hope that these people still love each other. I like the ending a lot, but you can argue about it, whether it’s necessary or not.
