A new year is upon us, and while it doesn’t yet feel all that different from 2020—what with the pandemic, the election still going, etcetera, etcetera—one bit of proof we truly have entered 2021 is that we’re a mere two weeks away from WandaVision‘s premiere on Disney+. WandaVision will be the first Marvel series to make it to air since the pandemic upended production schedules and release dates, and a new trailer reminds us that this Jac Schaeffer-written, Matt Shankman-directed show promises a very unique viewing experience. It’s also come to light that the series will boast original music from the Frozen songwriting juggernauts Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez.
“WandaVision is such a cool, strange, one-of-a-kind project,” said Lopez in an official statement. “When the director, Matt Shakman—an old friend from my college days—pitched it to us, we didn’t have to think about it. We loved the bright feeling of American sitcoms mixed with the deep sense of unease the story had, and it was a really inviting challenge to help set that tone.”
“I grew up in the ’80s watching shows from every decade on the networks all day long,” said Anderson-Lopez in the same statement. “Episodes from I Love Lucy, Brady Bunch, and Family Ties shaped who I am and how I move through the world. So this project was a dream come true.”
The series will deploy these two hugely gifted songwriters for a very unique blend of classic Golden Era sitcoms and the superpowered drama of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The series finds Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany), the beloved superhero couple who were so cruelly parted forever by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, somehow living in a sitcom suburban idyll, complete with floral wallpaper and wacky neighbors. While we’ll find out just how it’s possible Vision has returned, we’ll also see where the future of the MCU is headed—WandaVision, and all the other upcoming Marvel series heading to Disney+—are all directly connected to the larger MCU. Hence characters from the MCU appearing in Wanda and Vision’s sitcom realm, including Teyonna Parris as the older version of Monica Rambeau from Captain Marvel, Kat Dennings as Darcy Lewis from Thor, and Randall Park as FBI Agent Jimmy Woo from Ant-Man and the Wasp.
WandaVision premieres on Disney+ on January 15. Check out the new trailer here:
For more on WandaVision and other Disney+ series, check out these stories:
Producer Monica Levinson might have been able to call 2020 a banner year were not for the fact such a sentiment would be in poor taste considering how atrocious 2020 was. Yet two of her films factored into the larger conversations we were having in ways that would have been unthinkable at the start of the year.
One of those films was Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, which premiered on Netflix in mid-October. The film, which is focused on the titular trial of 7 people stemming from charges around the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, revealed a country riven by political turmoil, paranoia, police brutality, and government overreach, all unfolding during a presidential election. Sound familiar? Sorkin’s long-simmering project (once intended to be a Steven Spielberg movie) came out in the middle of a year that managed to outstrip 1968 in just about every awful way. Sorkin shows us, among other disturbing echoes of 2020, the grotesque brutality of the Chicago Police descending on the protestors, and Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) literally gagging a black defendant, the Black Panther Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II).
Levinson’s second movie was Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which miraculously made its release date despite filming much of its (oft dangerous) footage during a pandemic, and became a major political flashpoint in the middle of the presidential election thanks to a cameo by Rudy Guiliani that was, even by his grim standards, breathtakingly embarrassing. And this was before he leaked some kind of brown liquid from his head in front of the now-iconic Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Northeast Philadelphia in a post-election performance baselessly claiming voter fraud.
We spoke to Levinson just as 202o was drawing to a close about her work on these two vastly different, yet equally damning portraits of America—both of which feature her longtime collaborator, Sacha Baron Cohen.
Okay, let’s start with your role in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7—a film that had nearly been made before but really found its moment in 2020.
I was working with Sacha [Baron Cohen], trying to figure out how he could do both The Trial of Chicago 7 and Borat 2. Back in 2007, we were in between Borat and Bruno, and he was trying to figure out how to do Trial with Spielberg directing, and we were working out his schedule, then the writer’s strike hit. So the movie went away. Then, at the beginning of last year, he calls me and says, ‘You won’t believe this, I’m trying to do The Trial of the Chicago 7 again.
So everything sounds like it’s finally going to plan…
Then the funding fell through. I was running a production and finance company for independent films, so I asked how much money they needed. I read the script, which I thought was brilliant, obviously, as Sorkin’s an incredible writer. It was just such a powerful story, and I felt it had to have a place. Also, this film had waited so long to get made, and it felt more relevant now than when I first heard about it. So that’s how my credit came to be, we worked on that final piece of financing to bring the film across the finish line. I was proud to help to get it to that stage.
Trial was a relative breeze compared to what you had to do to pull of Borat 2, however…
So, Sacha calls a couple of years ago about finally moving forward on a Borat sequel. I said, I think that’s a terrible idea [laughs], but then Sacha pitched me the story of how it would be about Borat and his daughter. This was at a time when women’s rights were still being litigated daily—still are—and our elected president had openly talked about grabbing women’s vaginas, so I thought, Oh, it is a good time to do this story.
There’s a moment in the film (spoiler alert) in which Borat literally collides with the early governmental response to COVID-19 when he shows up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February to “give” Vice President Pence his daughter, Tutar (the phenomenal Maria Bakalova). Yet this is also when Pence speaks about the virus—playing it down—what was that like to film?
I was watching the live feed of the Vice President at CPAC and listening to him talking about the coronavirus and how it’s under control, and I remember believing what he was saying. We didn’t know! None of us knew. I remember thinking we need to hear a little more of that speech, but we had no idea how relevant that portion would be. I almost called the crew to hold Sacha back for another minute so we could get more of the speech. Jason [Woliner] our director had that instinct as well, so we did wait a few more beats into the speech before Borat enters.
Sacha Baron Cohen dressed as President Trump and Maria Bakalova as Tutar bursting into the CPAC conference in ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.’ Courtesy of Amazon Studios.
After this, however, your film and the rest of the country run into the reality of the pandemic.
Yeah, we were on a quick hiatus because we film in little chunks, then all of a sudden the pandemic hits and we have to shut down. At that point, we didn’t know how we were going to make the movie. Sacha kept asking if we were going to be able to get this out by October. For Borat and Bruno, we had at least 8 months of post, and we were already looking at only 5 months of post for this movie, so I realized we were really at risk of not being able to release the movie.
When did you start shooting again?
On June 15. We spent the two months where we weren’t filming learning about the virus, how to be safe, what the protocols would be. I was on every phone call, at seminars, talking to epidemiologists, while Sacha became close with an epidemiologist at John Hopkins, and we ran our protocols by them. There was no way Sacha wanted any of us to go out with it being completely safe. So we took extra precautions, did extra testing, and brought this high-end testing with us on the road.
When did you wrap?
We ended up filming until September 4, and we delivered the movie before October 1st. We had put together all the material we’d already shot, but it still wasn’t everything. We shot a ton of stuff in Romania for the beginning and end of the movie, we shot the rally, we shot the lockdown house, all of which was 170 hours of footage on its own. At a certain point, we had 7 editors working on it, and we were screening the film in New Zealand so we could do our usual process and get our edit right. We took the process we usually do over an 8-month process and just did it in five weeks.
Obviously, we can’t talk about the film without talking about Rudy Guiliani…
We really couldn’t believe it. We always wanted him to be a part of this movie. When he became more prominent in September, we couldn’t believe our luck. He was really coming out in full force to the center of the election. I would not be so bold to say that we had anything to do with the outcome of the election, but I do know people seem to claim that Guiliani’s October surprise [the Hunter Biden stuff] was overshadowed by his part in our film. I got a text from a friend of a friend who was doing swing state text banking during the election, reaching out to undecided voters, and the person wrote back, Have you seen Borat 2 yet? My friend said, Yes I have, now about who you’re voting for? The person replied that they’d seen the movie and it made them decided to vote for Biden.
Maria Bakalova and Sacha Baron Cohen in ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.’ Courtesy of Amazon Studios
And the Guiliani insanity, and really the entire film, isn’t possible without the incredible performance of Maria Bakalova as Tutar.
We saw so many really talented actresses throughout the process, Sacha went out into the real world for his auditions, so we had a full field team to see how people would react to various actresses in the real world, and the people being interviewed often asked if the person claiming to be Tutar was an actress, so that didn’t work. We needed somebody who felt more authentic. We hired casting director Nancy Bishop to do a full search in Eastern Europe and the U.K., while Sacha kept traveling to do test shoots in Canada, Los Angeles, and the U.K. Maria was one of these self-tapes that came. I remember seeing it and thinking, this is kooky, she’s really going for it. I wondered if Sacha was going to react to this in the same way, and he really did connect with her tape and thought there was something there. He brought Maria to London and had her audition in the real world, and it was the first time people didn’t ask if she was an actress because she felt so authentic.
How did you prep her for the madness that was to come once filming began in earnest?
Director Jason Woliner and I did a Skype with her before she flew to Oklahoma to join the team, and we just said, Listen, this is what you’re in for. Now that you signed an NDA, we really want you to do it, but let us go through what’s going to happen in this movie and the basic scenarios, and a lot of things will come up that we don’t know. She kept saying, I’m good. She was super brave and amazing, and we were blessed that she showed up in this self-tape. When we saw the first footage, we knew she was a revelation. Sacha was thrilled to be working with her and showcase her talent.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is available on Netflix, while Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is available on Amazon Prime.
Stephen King’s The Stand, published in 1978, has eerily stood the test of time. The epic masterpiece follows the struggle between good and evil and is set against a backdrop of an apocalyptic plague called Captain Trips that has taken countless lives worldwide. The novel has been read by millions and was adapted for a four-part television series back in 1994.
Now, with showrunner, co-creator and executive producer Benjamin Cavell (Justified, Homeland) at the helm, the story of the globe’s handful of survivors who are drawn to either the “light” of Mother Abagail or the “darkness” of Randall Flagg in a battle for mankind has a new, updated treatment. King even wrote a new coda for this rendition, one he said he had been thinking about for decades.
The nine-episode limited event series, which premiered December 17 on CBS All Access, features a stellar ensemble that includes Whoopi Goldberg, James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgård, Amber Heard, Jovan Adepo, Owen Teague, Nat Wolff, Odessa Young, and Brad William Henke. The project was shot primarily in Vancouver, British Columbia, over eight-plus months.
The Credits spoke with Cavell about assembling the cast, working with the master of horror, and recreating a series that is uncomfortably timely. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This story is eerily relevant. Watching the hospital scenes are particularly chilling with what is going on today. Was the show always scheduled to stream at this time?
Oh yeah, we’ve been making this show for three years for the end of 2020, and in fact, our last day of principal photography, on our original schedule as it happened, was March 11. We wrapped on March 12 and then everything shut down. I feel very lucky that we were able to finish production. And look, you know, what’s happened is so awful, it’s hard for me to think of it in conjunction with our show, in part because honestly, I don’t think of The Stand as being a book about a pandemic really. Obviously, it features a pandemic, but The Stand is really, as King has said, his version of Lord of the Rings. That’s also the reason for our nonlinear storytelling. It felt like an honest place for us to start. Our series is about what comes after, about this elemental struggle between the forces arrayed behind Flagg and the forces arrayed behind Mother Abagail. We go back to see some of the ways in which people arrived at which side of that conflict they’re on, and to see the ways that they were affected by the collapse that led to this.
Would you say that a lot of what The Stand gets to the heart of is how societies function or crumble in times of extreme stress?
When Julie McNamara [CBS All Access EVP of Original Content] approached me about adapting it at the beginning of 2018, obviously I had no idea that there’d be a pandemic. But in early 2018, at least I and the people I knew were starting to ask questions about things that we had grown up just taking for granted: about the structure of human society, about the structure of American democracy. These questions about what society owes the individual to make up that society, what does the individual owe the society in return, what do the individuals owe to each other? I mean these really fundamental questions.
What was the impetus for this reboot?
I think Julie had always been a fan of the book and always been a fan of Stephen King. And I think these incredibly high-end limited event series are potentially a new medium — it’s not TV and it’s not a feature, but it has feature-level cast and feature-level budget and feature-level effects, and it’s kind of a nine-hour feature. I have no idea how you do The Stand as a feature. I know a number of people have tried.
What were the objectives in assembling your ensemble cast?
One thing we knew we had to do in updating a 42-year-old book was to make the cast look more like 2019 America, and King has been incredibly supportive about that and wrote a beautiful note to us about how white and male the main characters are in the original and frankly how much happier he is now that we’ve changed that.
And we also felt there were a couple of characters from the book who really needed updating, that the characterization itself needed to be updated to play in 2019, and the ones we felt most acutely about were Mother Abagail and Tom Cullen. We had the great luxury of having our first choices to play both of those roles, Whoopi Goldberg and Brad William Henke, who were just gonna be completely committed to having them be real people who felt modern. Whoopi made sure we remembered that before anything else Mother Abagail has to be a real person. Yes, she’s getting messages from some entity or some power, but she didn’t choose to, she doesn’t really know what they mean. It’s important to always give her the dignity of having her be a human being and not a kind of spiritual being.
And with Tom?
The characterization in the book to me always felt like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, kind of embodying that old idea of the child trapped in an adult body. That doesn’t really exist in at least the way I understand it, so it was very important that Tom had a level of self-awareness that he doesn’t have in the book. There is the suggestion in the book and in our series that at least part of what’s going on with Tom is an injury. The speech that I wrote for Tom, that Brad performed so beautifully, was about who he is, the fact that he’s clearly making his way in the world before Captain Trips.
Both Stephen King and his son, Owen, were on your writing team. What did Owen bring to the table? And Stephen wrote a new ending that he’d been wanting to explore; was there ever a feeling to stick with the original ending?
Owen is a wonderful writer and a wonderful guy and is really smart about story and structure, so he brought all of that to the writing staff. And also having a member of the King family there, I think more than anything, just gave us a feeling of freedom that we could really dig into the show we were making and pitch things that fit with the story we were telling, and if we started to veer too far from the book, we had somebody there who could pull us back — not that frankly we ever did.
King read every draft and signed off on it and he wrote our coda, but he wasn’t in the writer’s room. There was never any discussion of wanting to stick with our ending versus his ending. He’s Stephen King and if Stephen King says that he wanted to write more of The Stand and trust us to make it, our response was what do you need for that to happen?
The fourth episode of The Stand will stream on CBS All Access this January 7.
Featured image: The Stand on CBS All Access. Courtesy CBS.
Once again Pixar tackles the subjects of the meaning of life, fearlessness in the face of change, synchronicity, and inspiration in their new film Soul. It’s the first time, however, that they have centered the story on a Black man, that of middle school band teacher and jazz pianist Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx). Daniel Lopez Muñoz has worked in such diverse roles for Pixar as a character designer for Up and Coco, color script artist for Finding Dory, production designer for The Good Dinosaur, and visual development artist for Monsters University. On Soul, he is credited as the character art director. The Credits spoke to Muñoz about how he influences the look and style of the lead character in Pixar’s most ambitious film to date.
On IMDB you are listed as character art director for Soul. Titles can mean different things at Pixar. What did your job entail?
It does tend to differ from production to production. To give you a little bit of history on my participation on Soul, the film had a core team, and I came on through the request of Pete Docter to try to find Joe Gardner, the main character of the film. There are a number of artists that came in early on in the process to try to get different perspectives for the look of the character.
Can you point to several aspects of Joe’s character that you had a hand in?
Early on, we tried different approaches. At one time he was a shorter, stockier guy. We spent a lot of time looking at jazz artists from the mid-twentieth century, to try to grasp some inspiration of a personality from famous jazz musicians like Monk, for example. We tried that, but what succeeded was when we turned to something more familiar. There was something about Pete Docter’s persona that attracted me to a taller, loose, lanky body. I thought Pete must have gone through life trying to fit into places because he’s so tall, but also seeing so much. Joe is a guy who is thinking of what’s on the horizon, what’s beyond the life that he has currently because he wants to reach further. So we thought it would be cool if he towered over people, and had his heads in the clouds most of the time when thinking about what his life could be. But also it would be fun for a character like 22 to inhabit this body that has to maneuver through a crowded city like New York. We didn’t want him to be a handsome man, we wanted him to feel more like an everyday Joe, hence the name. He had to have some imperfections that would make overcoming them that much more interesting. We imagined him having been the awkward kid, trying to play with the cool kids. We gave him a long back and a belly. He’s middle-aged. He’s almost past his prime, and he’s trying to make it in the jazz world, so that has to be apparent from the moment you first see the character, and that’s something we wanted to make sure the audience understands right away.
He really has a jazz pianist’s fingers. There had to be conversation and consideration around that.
Oh yes, that was actually very important, because these hands were going to be onscreen in close-up. Basically, it’s the working tool of this artist, so it was important to give them enough character that they could be on the big screen. More important for us is they would also feel like the hands of a true African-American pianist. We looked at and studied nearly every famous jazz musician, and studied the way the fingernails are different. We wanted to make sure we were true to the way Joe should be, including the length of his fingers. There were a number of pianists we studied, and we put up their pictures for reference, both contemporary and from the past. Then we did a lot of drawings to guide the animators.
There is such a wide variety of Black and Brown skin represented in the characters of Soul. How did you support and help foster that?
We were very keen on representing a wide variety of skin tones and of people and mixes of people of color, because in New York you have the folks that immigrated from the North and the South, and started a whole Harlem Renaissance from the great migration, but there are also lots of people that came from the Caribbean, and there are lots of Latin influences as well, so that gives you a really great range of skin tones. For Joe, I wanted to inspire artists with what I learned from studying Harlem Renaissance artists of the 20th century. There are some great painters that were really bold with color, and what I learned from studying those paintings was that in order to create the various African American Black skin tones, you actually have to mix a number of different solid colors. I found that so interesting, because it’s like it meant including every color. You get different browns out of mixing yellows and greens and reds and blues. We wanted the picture to feel real, but certainly in animation you can get away with more pushed looks. I wanted to inspire the artists to bring some of that richness into the skin of Joe, so that it has that playfulness, and that variety that I saw represented in those paintings.
Disney animator Milt Kahl’s influence can be seen in the way Joe seems inspired by Roger from 101 Dalmatians, but the influence of British illustrator Ronald Searle can be seen in the character designs as well.
It’s so great that you noticed that. I haven’t actually discussed that with anybody when I was designing Joe. You have the character Roger in 101 Dalmatians and he is obviously a very classic, white character from a Disney film, but I really wanted to find a new character that could live on the way that character did, so there are certainly some influences there, but the artist I really narrowed my sights on was Searle. He had an incredible eye for representing people’s personalities and their interior persona onto a caricature in a wonderful, masterful way. He hadn’t done that many representations of people of color. Most of his work is of the white people surrounding him in England. We got inspiration from him, but had to find our own way, thinking of his shapes and angles, in creating the diverse characters in the New York cityscape.
The characters in this story are so well developed in both personality and look, and it makes a big difference in connecting to Soul.
I can remember the time in my career when it was very important as an artist to get some interesting shapes on the page, but that’s a given now. What’s more important now is to capture the essence or the soul. If we’ve done our work correctly with this film, people will hopefully say that that we were able to find a connection and a familiarity with the characters, and that they felt like people they knew from their own lives. That would be a wonderful response.
Soul streams on Disney+ starting on December 25th.
For more stories on what’s streaming or coming to Disney+, check these out:
We put together our annual “Best Of” list with an eye towards the conversations that weren’t just about our particular area of interest—how films and TV shows are made and the people who make them—but delved into broader discussions that were unavoidable in this historic, often heartbreaking year. These conversations include our chat with Laverne Cox about her role in Netflix’s Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen,Lovecraft Country cinematographer Michael Watson on filming during a pandemic, and our four-part series on the briefly seen and largely unknown background actors, in this case in HBO’s Perry Mason, that are such a big part of the entertainment industry.
We hope you’ve had as happy a Holiday Season as is possible right now, and here’s to a much happier, much healthier year to come.
This interview was originally published on September 29:
If you’ve been watching Lovecraft Country on HBO, you’ve seen one of the most sublimely ambitious series on TV this year. Stripping the legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft for parts (the man was a seething racist and anti-Semite), creator Misha Green’s 9-episode series is equal parts horror, drama, sci-fi, and social commentary.Lovecraft Country is the show 2020 needed but probably didn’t deserve.
Cinematographer Michael Watson lensed four of Lovecraft‘s episodes, beginning with director Cheryl Dunye‘s gangbusters fifth episode, “Strange Case,” through episode 6’s Korean War drama “Meet in Daegu,” last Sunday’s trippy sci-fi epic “I Am,” and the upcoming 9th episode, which will air on October 11.
Aunjanue Ellis in episode 7, “I Am.” Photograph by Eli Joshua Ade/HBO
Lovecraft Country is set in the Jim Crow era, and follows the surreal, often sinister, and always compulsively compelling journey of Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) and Letitia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) as they criss-cross the country in search of Atticus’s missing father, the missing pages to a mysterious book of magic, and a whole lot more.
We spoke to Watson about jumping aboard Misha Green’s crazily talented production, and what it’s like to work on a show that manages to tackle systemic racism, social justice, and the horrors of American history with thrilling gusto. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Michael Watson. Photo by Tom Griscom.
I want to start with a question about the new normal of filming in the midst of a pandemic. We’re starting to get a sense of how studios are learning to do more with less—fewer people, smaller crews, etcetera. Does that concern you?
I can tell you that for myself, working in the camera department, particularly coming up in the era that I came up in—there was no conversation of inclusion or diversity. I can tell you there were many times when I walked onto a film set as a camera assistant and I’d be the only black man on the set. Not to mention the only black man in the entire department. So the thing that you have to realize, and the way that the film industry works in particular when we talk about hiring, is it’s from the top right down to the bottom. There’s this intimate thing that happens and that is because we work so closely together, there’s a certain camaraderie there, a certain intimacy within the work environment. Because of that, individuals become familiar with each other on different levels, and then when you go to the next show, those department heads tend to hire back the individuals who are the closest to them, their own circle of people. So, if you take that concept and now you’ve been told, ‘Hey, in this world of the pandemic, crews are gonna be smaller because we can’t have as many people on set,’ that same mindset hasn’t really changed. You may get a cinematographer or a first AC that might look at their list of candidates to call in, and it’s usually going to be that first 3 to 5 names on the list. So those initial positions get filled with people that they’re comfortable with. People that they know very well and have built a certain rapport with. More often than that, those people tend to be people who look like them. So if the department heads are predominately white, then you can guarantee that the people they’ll hire will then follow suit. So my biggest concern with crews getting smaller is that it presents itself as a possibility we could still see fewer women, and fewer men and women of color on set.
I imagine your experience on the set of Lovecraft Country was quite different?
It absolutely was [a different kind of set]. The scope, first of all. The size of the show. The kind of support we got from HBO—it was amazing. The thing that was the most enjoyable for me was the sheer amount of artisans that were brought to the table on this, from every department. The creative horsepower on this show was pretty amazing.
Aunjanue Ellis in episode 7, “I Am.” Photograph by Eli Joshua Ade/HBO
Lovecraft Country is not only narratively ambitious, it also gleefully combines genres—horror, sci-fi, pulp, drama—which must make your job a lot harder (and also more fun)?
The visual effects can become a challenge for a cinematographer. I think the thing that really helped with Lovecraft was we took a lot of time in pre-production doing a lot of pre-visualization of the complex visual effects. We spent a massive amount of time doing pre-viz and concept meetings to really drill down on where we wanted to be in the world of Lovecraft. Episode five, for example, we literally have people who are changing by their skin peeling off [laughs]. That’s stuff you just haven’t seen before. White women becoming black women, black women becoming white women, men becoming women, women becoming men, it’s an intense episode. So that pre-production helped us to really keep the effects within the Lovecraft world, and stay away from any gimmicky, campy ‘horror’ type of aspect. We wanted the VFX to feel very purposefully driven. The effects do a large part in telling the story.
What were some of the early conversations you had about the series?
The early conversations evolved. Once again, a lot of them had were conversations that helped us get deeper inside of Misha [Green]’s head and embrace the vision she had for each episode. As you know, episode 6 is almost it’s own stand-alone episode. It takes place in Korea, during the Korean War, and there’s a lot going on in that episode. The characters are establishing very subtle timelines for events that are going to take place further down the road. So a lot of the conversations were really focused on each episode and what each episode wanted to emphasize the characters and what was taking place in their world.
Your episodes have tackled, thus far, body-swapping, the Korean War (through a horror POV), and time travel. How do you handle all these genres while maintaining a cohesive look for the show in general?
I do a lookbook for each episode. The lookbook depends on where that episode falls within the genre range because each episode tends to lean a little bit more towards one specific genre than the others. For example, episode 6 (“Meet Me in Daegu”) feels a little more drama driven. Episode 7 (“I Am.”) felt a little more sci-fi/pulp, and then episode 9 (titled “Rewind 1921”) felt more straight sci-fi. So with each of those episodes, I’d first and foremost do a lookbook and try to embrace the visual aesthetics of each of those genres. So if I felt like on episode was leaning a little more sci-fi, I might do things with lighting and color that might lean a little more in that direction. Whereas with episode 5 (“Strange Case”), it felt a little pulpier, a little more period-horror, so I’d go a little more in that direction in terms of lighting, color, and lens.
Wunmi Mosaku. Photograph by Eli Joshua Ade/HBOWunmi Mosaku. Photograph by Eli Joshua Ade/HBO
What’s it like to watch the series for you?
That’s a great question and I’ll tell you why. So, up until episode four, I’ve been watching all of the episodes at home, and I’ve got a pretty well-calibrated and enormous 4K television [laughs], so it’s very dialed in. On episode five, I find myself here in New Orleans, in a condo that’s been rented for the show [Watson is currently filming TNT’s Claws], and the television that’s here is HD, but I hadn’t taken the time to dig into it and set it up properly. So Sunday night, I sit down and am about to watch the episode, I start getting into the first ten minutes, and at that point, I’m almost shocked, ‘What in God’s name am I looking at? This is not the show that I color-timed!’ I’m literally about to freak out, then I grab the remote and dig into the television and all of the settings are wrong. It’s set up for sports mode or whatever, the brightness and the backlight are all cranked up, and the contrast is all dialed in a weird place. So once I finally got to calibrate the television right I could then rest easy.
And…what is color timing?
Color-timing, in the digital world, takes place in a digital intermediate suite (DI), and it’s not a whole lot different than photoshop. A lot of times on set you’re running out of time, you’re running out of light, so you may be pushed into a corner that you are not able to resolve a problem on set at that very moment. I make notes throughout the day of shots that I want to tweak in the DI. Once I’m in the DI, there’s more flexibility with the image. If I see a wall that, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take the color down on set, and it draws your eye, in the DI, I can say to my colorist, ‘I want to bring that wall down a couple of points.’ With a couple of clicks of a button, we can do that. There are lots of tools that are accessible to cinematographers in the DI suite that enable you to make better decisions on set. Where you might spend hours trying to solve a problem on set, if you know what you’re able to do in DI, you can pull back and say, ‘That’s something I can fix in post, let’s move on.’
Now with all these safety measures on set to keep everyone safe, I imagine time is stretched even thinner?
Yup. The new world of COVID and being in a pandemic has changed production meetings, too. If you hated production meetings in the past, you’re gonna really hate them now. [Laughs]. It’s about four times longer, there’s just so much information now that everybody’s got to be on board.
Featured image: Wunmi Mosaku. Photograph by Eli Joshua Ade/HBO
We put together our annual “Best Of” list with an eye towards the conversations that weren’t just about our particular area of interest—how films and TV shows are made and the people who make them—but delved into broader discussions that were unavoidable in this historic, often heartbreaking year. These conversations include our chat with Laverne Cox about her role in Netflix’s Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen,Lovecraft Country cinematographer Michael Watson on filming during a pandemic, and our four-part series on the briefly seen and largely unknown background actors, in this case in HBO’s Perry Mason, that are such a big part of the entertainment industry.
We hope you’ve had as happy a Holiday Season as is possible right now, and here’s to a much happier, much healthier year to come.
This interview was originally published on June 1
As a worthy follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2019 comedy Late Night, director Nisha Ganatra brings us The High Note, which was released this past May 29 for digital download. The film stars Dakota Johnson as aspiring producer Maggie Sherwoode, who works as personal assistant to iconic performer Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross). It’s a dramedy about women supporting each other as they reach for their highest goals and dreams. Ganatra spoke to The Credits about her new movie, perfect for movie lovers looking to watch something fresh, new, and decidedly hopeful in these profoundly difficult times.
Director Nisha Ganatra on the set of her film THE HIGH NOTE, a Focus Features release. Credit: Glen Wilson / Focus Features
The casting in this film is inspired. For Kelvin Harrison, performing as a musician onscreen is something new. He is also the romantic lead, which fans get to see for the first time.
Kelvin has it all. He’s funny, he’s charming, and he can do dramatic work, but I really wanted to see him as a romantic leading man. I think he could be a real rom-com star. He might be the new Hugh Grant we’ve all been looking for. He’s witty, and smart, and also a little self-deprecating and cocky. That’s a wonderful combination, so finding out that he could sing, on top of it all, was great. He has a really beautiful voice and a really strong work ethic. He worked really hard in the studio to make his songs as good as they are. He was a composing major in school, so he really knows what he’s doing. He knows so much about music, that he could help point out exactly the way it’s supposed to be, so every detail in the movie is spot-on for discerning musicians that might watch and take us to task if it’s not accurate.
Kelvin Harrison Jr. stars as David Cliff and Dakota Johnson as Maggie Sherwoode in THE HIGH NOTE, a Focus Features release. Credit: Glen Wilson / Focus Features
Tracee Ellis Ross is so magnetic as Grace Davis. How did she take on the role? No one has ever heard her sing, and it had to be scary for her, given she’s Diana Ross’s daughter!
She had never been in a feature film before but also had never sung in public. She was very trepidatious and scared about letting anyone hear her voice. I’d cast her before I heard her sing, so I was a little worried. I figured if she couldn’t sing, there are tools to make people sound good, but it really would have been a shame. What wound up being captured was the emotion of her character as she was singing. Being able to be really present with all the emotion was really moving. It was really beautiful to watch her coming into her own. She had hidden her voice from the world, and we are so lucky she was able to share it with us now.
You make a point of hiring a diverse, gender-balanced cast and crew. Can you talk about your collaboration with production designer Theresa Guleserian and costume designer Jenny Eagan in creating the iconic looks that span Grace Davis’s career?
If you don’t believe Grace Davis as a movie icon, the whole movie falls apart. That was our biggest challenge, getting that right, and making it believable. When I was just trying to get the job as director, I made a lot of album covers of Tracee Ellis Ross, just to see if people bought her as a music icon. I made them for fun, and it was really great because it really showed me how diverse her looks are, and that you really could track her throughout the years as a music icon. Theresa and I set about doing that in a much more professional way, with Theresa tracking her whole career. What was she wearing in the 80s? What about the 90s? What do her album covers look like now? We worked with Jenny to put together all those looks. We ultimately had one day to shoot all those album covers and take Tracee through a 20-year arc of her career as Grace Davis. We were lucky she was able to nail all those looks so quickly from her modeling experience. I think that day, as grueling and challenging as it was, was really key to finding the character in her head. She walked out of that photoshoot as Grace Davis from that day forward. I think that was an inadvertent but great rehearsal.
(l to r) Dakota Johnson stars as Maggie Sherwoode, Ice Cube as Jack Robertson and Tracee Ellis Ross as Grace Davis in THE HIGH NOTE, a Focus Features release. Credit: Glen Wilson / Focus Features
You also worked with female composerAmie Doherty, music supervisor Linda Cohen, and songwriter Sarah Aarons, which had to be valuable, since music and film run parallel in terms of the challenges to women in the business.
It was really important to have a female composer, because who else could give voice to Grace Davis being an icon in a male-dominated field, and Maggie wanting to break into it, then a female composer who goes through that every single day? Amie’s music was so unique and beautiful. Linda Cohen and I have been collaborating since my very first film. She has since become a legend. After Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, she became the most sought-after music supervisor in the business. I knew I didn’t want to make this movie without her. Sarah Aarons came in during a stage when we were listening to thousands of demos. She came in, I met her, and every demo she sent sounded like a hit song on the radio. When she asked me which song I’d like to use, I said, “All of them!”
The High Note is full of risk, hope, and commitment. For those reasons and more, why do you think people should seek it out?
I guess it’s one of those old school studio movies that you watch, and you feel happy, and lifted, and hopeful. It’s definitely a movie that tells you to go after your dreams, and that everything’s going to be ok. You come away from it smiling and feeling joy. That might make it the perfect movie for this time. We could all use messages of hope, and this movie is a real feel-good ride.
Featured image: Tracee Ellis Ross stars as Grace Davis in THE HIGH NOTE, a Focus Features release. Credit: Glen Wilson / Focus Features
We put together our annual “Best Of” list with an eye towards the conversations that weren’t just about our particular area of interest—how films and TV shows are made and the people who make them—but delved into broader discussions that were unavoidable in this historic, often heartbreaking year. These conversations include our chat with Laverne Cox about her role in Netflix’s Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen,Lovecraft Country cinematographer Michael Watson on filming during a pandemic, and our four-part series on the briefly seen and largely unknown background actors, in this case in HBO’s Perry Mason, that are such a big part of the entertainment industry.
We hope you’ve had as happy a Holiday Season as is possible right now, and here’s to a much happier, much healthier year to come.
This interview was originally published on August 26, 2020.
One big reason for that was cinematographer Greig Fraser, a previous Oscar nominee for his work on Lion, and now sharing an Emmy nom with Barry “Baz” Idoine on the Disney+ series, in particular its gunslinging penultimate episode, The Reckoning.
The nomination, though could be considered a stand-in for the whole season, on which Fraser also shares a co-producer credit, in part because of his already storied work in helping series creator Jon Favreau set up the LED-based “volume,” as certain 21st century sound stages have come to be known, where around half of the series was shot. Meaning that locations all over the galaxy were realistically rendered, in real time, on this futuristic, but here-right-now, version of a green screen. And also meaning that what used to happen only in post can now take place as you’re shooting it, with backgrounds moving as the camera does, thanks to an amplified Unreal gaming engine making all the necessary calculations, giving you, as Fraser says, “all that beautiful parallax you’d get in real life.”
On the set of THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+Behind the scenes of THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+
You also get a technology that Fraser reckons “will eventually play a role in everything we do. It could be tiny,” he allows, even if it’s a view through a window on a traditionally built set, but “it’s going to be incredibly pervasive.”
And while he allows that, pervasive as it may eventually be, “the technology didn’t drive the story, the technology was helpful in telling that story,” that same breakthrough tech, or perhaps “the magic, the background on the LED screens,” also dictated some additional choices on gear side, like a large frame ALEXA camera, with Panavision Ultra Vista glass. “I think this was the first show they’ve been on,” Fraser says of the lenses. “You get all the beauty of anamorphic and all the depth.”
Behind the scenes of THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+
But Fraser wasn’t always able to be there to wield those cameras, since he “needed to go off and do Denis’ movie,” by which he means the already highly-anticipated adaptation of Dune from director Denis Villeneuve. So he “needed someone to fully understand” how to shoot in this new environment, and that someone turned out to be Idoine, “who came in halfway through my preproduction period.” He notes that DPs rarely collaborate with their counterparts on series episodes, it’s usually just directors. But in this case, he needed someone who could be a quick study in how to “space things in the volume.” But it wasn’t just Idoine (who was also second unit DP on Rogue One, which was Fraser’s entree into the Star Wars galaxy), who was an early collaborator. With so much rendering in cinema now, and particularly on a show like this, “visual effects is now heavily involved in preproduction.” Indeed, the show’s visual effects team was also nominated for an earlier episode.
Dave Filoni, Greig Fraser and Baz Idoine on the set of THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+
As for early involvement, Idoine “came on halfway through my preproduction,” since Fraser “needed someone to fully understand what was going on. “We figured out how we can space things in the volume,” Fraser says, and why a sunset, for example, was in a certain place. All of which were part of the loads that go into the volume.
As for “loads,” think “programs,” showing the various alien worlds and topography, and how they were lit, whether via LED sunsets, or otherwise. As for the nominated episode, Fraser considers that he “might have been responsible for some of what was loaded in the volume,” in preproduction, but “Baz was all over” them, as DP, when it came time to shoot.
Behind the scenes of THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+
And whether virtual sunrise, or sunset, to wax a little “Fiddler”-like, Fraser says the whole reason something like Mandalorian can be shot so efficiently for how sumptuous and exotic it looks is that “you’re not scheduling to shoot in one direction in the morning.” Magic hour, he notes, can last as many hours as you need it to.
But the question about the live renderingisn’t whether it’s “good for the DP? Or is it good for post?” Ideally, Fraser says, “it should be good for both.” And to a much larger degree than in other VFX-heavy opuses, “what goes on the screen is hopefully able to be in-camera final.”Also, by minimizing set up times, “it allows directors to spend more time with their actors on set.” Even if that set is ostensibly located several light years away.
“I continue watching the growth of virtual volumes and virtual filming right now,” Fraser says. “Once the cap was opened on the bottle, the genie would be out, and it would be unstoppable. I’m not saying it’s going to replace real filming, I don’t think it should.Nothing quite replaces mother nature, but this augments mother nature. We still need our Lawrence of Arabia.”
Meanwhile, when we talked to him, Fraser was in London, waiting to embark on another epic, namely The Batman.
Fraser allows that he’s done a bit of filming during the pandemic. “An Apple commercial, and another commercial about a month ago,” he says. These were smaller crews, of course, but he found that it wasn’t important simply to wear masks, but to constantly wash your hands and clean your equipment. “It’s just been common sense. It’s what all the smart people have been saying.”
Including, perhaps, some of the smart people working on “volumes,” at the galaxy’s edge.
Featured image: Cinematographer Greig Fraser the set of THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+.
We put together our annual “Best Of” list with an eye towards the conversations that weren’t just about our particular area of interest—how films and TV shows are made and the people who make them—but delved into broader discussions that were unavoidable in this historic, often heartbreaking year. These conversations include our chat with Laverne Cox about her role in Netflix’s Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen,Lovecraft Country cinematographer Michael Watson on filming during a pandemic, and our four-part series on the briefly seen and largely unknown background actors, in this case in HBO’s Perry Mason, that are such a big part of the entertainment industry.
We hope you’ve had as happy a Holiday Season as is possible right now, and here’s to a much happier, much healthier year to come.
This interview was originally published on July 7, 2020.
Laverne Cox serves as the guide of director Sam Feder’s crucial new documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen. The film offers a vivid, frankly startling history of the portrayal of transgender lives on screen, and Cox (also an executive producer) captains a compelling cast of influential trans creators, cultural critics, and thinkers. They include The Matrix creator Lilly Wachowski, Pose star Mj Rodriguez, Transparent stars Trace Lysette and Alexandra Billings, Chaz Bono, and more. Using footage spanning more than 100 years of media, Disclosure reveals how American culture has dehumanized the transgender community in show after show, film after film. In one of the film’s gasp-out-loud moments, we watch Billings die of testicular cancer on an episode of ER and breast cancer in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Both aired in 2005. Her experience of being cast to die on screen is hardly rare; we learn that actress Alexandra Grey died twice on screen in 2016—on the medical dramas Chicago Med and Code Black—roles she booked on the same day.
We were then lucky enough to have Cox take part in our recent Film School Friday virtual panel, in which she joined Feder, Amy Scholder (Disclosure producer), and Nick Adams (GLAAD’s director of transgender representation and a Disclosure consultant) to discuss the documentary and talk more broadly about the experience of trans people all over the country. Like the film itself, our conversation was as joyous as it was serious, and we were left wanting more.
To that end, Cox joined us for a follow-up conversation to discuss the film, her career, and to hone in on a point she made during our discussion about the intersection between attraction and violence that costs trans people their lives. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the things Disclosure does so well is crystallize how often trans characters are victimized on screen. Was the extent of this reality a surprise at all to you?
I was personally aware of how we often were cast to play the victim—I’ve auditioned for these parts. I’ve also consumed a lot of television, so I filled in a lot of Sam’s TV gap in some of our early research. I’ve seen these stories over and over again, as a trans person I look for them. I was familiar with GLAAD’s work on how trans folks have been represented, but I do think seeing these tropes back to back—seeing Alexandra Grey auditioning for the same part in two different shows on the same day, or to look at Alexandra Billings’ reel and see three or four different parts where she’s a patient whose hormones are killing her—is startling.
Disclosure. Alexandra Billings in Disclosure. Cr. Ava Benjamin Shorr/Netflix.
The film gets at these grim realities, but it’s also funny and hopeful, too. Do you feel optimistic at all about where we’re headed as a society?
What I’m heartened and encouraged by is my industry. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that there is a willingness from a lot of my colleagues to tell trans stories, to hire trans writers. There’s a willingness and openness to get this right, and a willingness to learn. Television is coming along faster because it’s more collaborative. You’ve got a writers’ room, for one thing, and there’s a different kind of accountability that happens with television that doesn’t maybe happen for a lone filmmaker working on a story and then releasing it to the world. I’m excited that my colleagues are willing to grow.
Disclosure is not only novel in its subject matter, but it’s novel in the way it was produced with a primarily trans crew. How would you like to see the industry evolve?
What Disclosure feels like is the next level of the awakening. We want to do better, but we didn’t even realize how bad it was. Over the years, Nick [Adams] talks about it all the time, I’ve gotten scripts with the best of intentions, but they’ve got all the same trans tropes. So you explain that to them, and then they do a rewrite and they still don’t get it right. Disclosure feels like a major disruption to how people see trans lives on screen. There’s finally a clarity about our humanity, and we can begin to see and understand our humanity and how to not participate in the dehumanizing process. I’m excited and hopeful about that, I really am. We have a long way to go, of course. For the majority of Black and brown trans folks experiencing violence and homelessness and unemployment, just getting from point A to point B is fraught. I get that, and I hope that with what we can produce in our industry, we can begin to make inroads into hearts and minds, to get people to stop killing us and stop seeing us as a threat as to their existence.
You mentioned during our virtual panel that one thing straight men need to figure out is their attraction to trans women and their violent reaction to that. I was hoping you could speak more to that.
Their attraction to trans women is my lived experience. So often, particularly in New York where I lived for 23 years, I was being catcalled ferociously. It was a daily occurrence. And sometimes one of these men would realize I was trans, and the catcalling would turn into transphobic harassment. Suddenly there were jokes and laughter and derision. These are the moments that can turn violent, that have turned violent. You were just attracted to me, you were just catcalling me, I’m still the woman you were catcalling. It’s that tension between the attraction and the realization of my trans-ness, that intersection of attraction and misogyny, where trans women are losing their lives.
And we see this in the news all the time, with killing after killing of trans people.
That tension between attraction and fear is killing us. Take, for example, the trans woman from Mississippi [Mercedes Williamson] who was murdered by a man she was dating, a Latin King, allegedly. They were dating, her friends knew, but then he was afraid his friends would find out so he murdered her. He denies that’s the reason. When I’ve posted about a trans woman getting murdered, I’ll get comments that claim we’re fooling people and we deserve to be murdered, as if there aren’t tons of men seeking us out. A lot of them are on dating apps. I’ve had thousands of straight men come onto me on those apps. Straight men are seeking out trans women. I think that tension between attraction and whatever these men are thinking about themselves, this internalized homophobia, it comes down to their relationship to themselves. Two boyfriends ago, the guy I dated didn’t care if people thought he was gay because he was comfortable with himself. I’m a woman and he’s a man, and he was so comfortable with himself he thought it was funny that people thought he was gay. He was just secure. If a man is secure with himself, it shouldn’t matter if someone thinks he’s gay. What’s the issue? But there is an issue because people are dying. This is the work that men need to do on themselves.
It brings to mind the end of I Am Not Your Negro, where James Baldwin says one of the saddest things about America was how few people seemed to know themselves.
That’s the reckoning around race, gender, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia—they’re all linked. As a trans woman of color, I need to get from point A to point B and I don’t want you to kill me.
Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen is streaming now on Netflix. Cox can be next seen in Justin Simien’s horror-comedy Bad Hair, which premieres on Hulu this October.
Featured image: Disclosure. Laverne Cox in Disclosure. Cr. Ava Benjamin Shorr/Netflix.
We put together our annual “Best Of” list with an eye towards the conversations that weren’t just about our particular area of interest—how films and TV shows are made and the people who make them—but delved into broader discussions that were unavoidable in this historic, often heartbreaking year. These conversations include our chat with Laverne Cox about her role in Netflix’s Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen,Lovecraft Country cinematographer Michael Watson on filming during a pandemic, and our four-part series on the briefly seen and largely unknown background actors, in this case in HBO’s Perry Mason, that are such a big part of the entertainment industry.
We hope you’ve had as happy a Holiday Season as is possible right now, and here’s to a much happier, much healthier year to come.
This interview series was first published on September 9:
For more on our deep-dive into Perry Mason‘s background actors, check out parts II, III, and IVof this series.
On the west façade of Los Angeles City Hall, Perry Mason (Matthew Rhys) and Della Street (Juliet Rylance) step out of a car and begin to push their way up the long staircase, through a crowd of 200 protestors, angry about the child murder case Mason is working. But while the crowd appears to be jeering and shaking their fists, they are eerily silent.“It’s like we’re making a silent film,” says one of the extras, George Zaver, who performs as a press photographer. “It’s a little surreal, but in a really fun way.”
Zaver is one of 200 extras—referred to in the film industry as “background actors”—working that day on HBO’s hit series Perry Mason. And like his colleagues, he’s not only dressed like a 1932 Angeleno, he looks like he’s from that era. His face, his stance, even the way he holds his camera. In fact, they all do. “Whenever you’re doing a period piece,” says key second assistant director (2nd A.D.) Salvatore Sutera, “everything—the costumes, hair and makeup, production design, and our background—they sell the period. And the background is key.”
Having 200 people walk onto set early in the morning and look like they belong in a scene in 1932 isn’t simply a matter of ringing up a few folks and asking, “Are you free tomorrow?”Planning for background for a period show happens far in advance of a day’s shoot and involves many departments, all the way up to the director.“You have to paint the whole picture,” notes director Emmy–winning director Tim Van Patten (Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire), who is deeply involved in extras casting and performance.“If you’re just painting the middle of the picture, and you’re leaving the rest up to somebody else, you’re going to get in trouble.”
The process begins during prep for the series, including inviting veteran Extras Casting Director Rich King meeting with Van Patten, the show’s producers, and the heads of all departments. This is when the director spells out his or her vision for the look of the show. Each department then begins to assemble research into how every facet of life in 1932 Los Angeles appeared—including the attire and looks of everyday people, as the background actors mostly appear.
Sutera, Van Patten, and 1st A.D. Julie Bloom (who has worked for many years alongside Van Patten, and knows his preferences) then have a background concept meeting, at which the director goes through the details of each scene which will contain extras.“We go over everything, scene by scene, set by set, and learn what Tim is thinking,” Sutera states.“We break down not only what kind of people he envisions, but also the numbers of people, the feel of it.”
Matthew Rhys (Perry Mason) and Della Street (Juliet Rylance) are surrounded by a variety of background cast, portraying press, police, and other onlookers, after the verdict is read in the show’s season finale. Courtesy MERRICK MORTON/HBO.
Sutera and Bloom then further break down the makeup of background groups. “For instance, we might have a scene in downtown L.A., and, based on our research and our conversations with Tim, we might have 40 extras doing a day scene on a sidewalk. They might include businessmen in suits, maybe a batch of Eastern European immigrants, maybe a shoe shiner, a newsie on the corner, a street vendor, and a couple of female shoppers and secretaries. So we develop a detailed palette of what will be on that street. The more detailed I get, the more [extras casting director] Rich King will know what type of person Tim’s looking for, and the more the costume department will know how to dress that person, and hair and makeup department [to style them], and props will know to give an upscale female shopper a few bags or wrapped boxes.”
One additional key person who gets involved around this time is someone known as the second 2nd A.D. – Mollie Stallman. The second 2nd is the person who will be working directly with and directing the background actors on set.
But Stallman doesn’t wait until the day of the shoot to start to work on a scene. She’ll join the director and department heads on tech scout, during which the team will visit each location and the director will spell out how he or she sees the scene. “I’m always very close with the director, if I can be, during the prep process,” Stallman explains. “I’m involved with background very early on, hearing what the director is thinking about for a scene, what they’re trying to achieve, and what kind of world he’s trying to build, even helping him choose faces. Tim is very specific and vocal about what and who those faces are.”
There were two directors for Season 1 of Perry Mason—Van Patten helmed the first three and last two episodes, while Deníz Gamze Ergúven shot Episodes 4, 5, and 6, bringing her own 1st A.D., Kenny Roth, and 2nd A.D., Erik Carpenter. But Stallman’s presence throughout all eight episodes created a consistent thread, cultivating relationships with the recurring background family and carrying Van Patten’s background vision across all eight episodes, regardless of director.
Actors Juliet Rylance (Della Street) and Gayle Rankin (Emily Dodson) make their way down the L.A. City Hall’s west façade steps, passing through a mob of 200 protestors. Background cast must mime their shouts and jeers when the camera rolls, to allow the sound recorder to clearly record the principal cast’s lines. Courtesy MERRICK MORTON/HBO.
Finding Faces
Finding faces is not a simple process of going through photos of actors and finding the best looking folks. In fact, for Perry Mason, it was quite the opposite. In order to provide a sense of the reality of the time, these faces needed to look like they’d lived through some rough patches. Van Patten notes, “I told them, ‘I don’t need beautiful faces.I need interesting faces.’” King adds, “Tim wanted to see the broken nose, the weathered face—people who were living through The Great Depression. Anything that was unique, that was different, anything that wasn’t Hollywood. Tim definitely did like some character to the face.”
There were a variety of types of background actors, too. “Based on our research and Tim’s direction,” says Sutera, “we wanted to correctly represent 1932 L.A. during the Depression. We had so many categories of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as ethnic backgrounds.” Upscale women’s faces differed from the weathered look of mothers of three living in a shantytown, struggling to pull together daily meals for their families. Lawyers and other professionals were cast differently from men lined up outside a soup kitchen, requiring thinner, more gaunt-looking, war-torn men. “Someone with a more haggard face, say, we might make a street vendor,” Rich King explains.
Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany) outside L.A. City Hall’s west entrance in Episode 4, surrounded by a good variety of the 200 extras: press, press photographers, church elders & acolytes and everyday pedestrians. Courtesy MERRICK MORTON/HBO
Selections of photos from King’s research of faces from the era were assembled and sent to Van Patten for his review, as well as to Costume Designer Emma Potter. “Tim and the A.D. team and producers and I sat down with Rich and looked at lots and lots of these images, and created wish lists of the people that he would want to see and that I would want to dress, in different spaces,” Potter explains. And they had to be able to fit the authentic period costumes on hand, as well, based on a costumes size chart assembled by Potter’s team. Says King, “Back then, people were smaller, so we had to find people that were smaller to fit into what costumes we had.”
Submissions were requested, if possible, from background actors featuring little or no makeup. “The pictures, of course, are all pretty, So we told them, ‘We need hair down, and if you have roots showing, don’t dye them,’” says King, with, as Hair Dept. Head Miia Kovero notes, as much natural color as possible. And no tattoos or piercings adds King.“If they’re covered by costumes, okay, but otherwise, they were sent home.”
Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany) works a miracle inside the Radiant Assembly of God interior, at the historic Trinity Auditorium location in downtown L.A. The four-day shoot in September 2019 utilized more than 400 background actors each day, including a mass of congregants. Courtesy MERRICK MORTON/HBO
Favorite or repeat background actors were booked ahead for many scenes and episodes. “We would pick some people with really good faces to make a lawyer or a reporter or police so that each time they’re seen at the courthouse, that lawyer could be back. Or a reporter, who’s following the case would be back,” King explains. “It’s not only for consistency for the audience’s sake but for the background. This is these people’s livelihoods. This show was their primary place of employment for all those months.”
Some actors with special skills were certainly welcome. For some of the 400+ acolytes cast to appear at Sister Alice’s Radiant Assembly of God, it was helpful to have some who were SAG/AFTRA members with some improvisation background.“We wanted some people who could react to her and ‘speak in tongues,’” King explains.While some with the right look were sent to some improv training, those who already had that kind of experience were placed right upfront.
Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany) works a miracle inside the Radiant Assembly of God interior, at the historic Trinity Auditorium location in downtown L.A. Background cast with special improvisational skills were placed close to Maslany, near the stage, to be visible to the camera as they portrayed being “saved,” speaking in tongues and other activity. Courtesy HBO. Courtesy MERRICK MORTON/HBO.
“I had four years of work over at The Groundlings,” says background actor Adyr Villavicencio.“They asked me if I was okay if, when Sister Alice touched me, could I just roll on the floor or speak in tongues, and I just said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,’” then I researched Baptist church footage on YouTube to see how such people appeared in real life.”
For more on our deep-dive into Perry Mason‘s background actors, check out parts II, III, and IVof this series.
Production designer Jim Bissell landed ET: The Extraterrestrial fresh out of college. His latest, The Midnight Sky (now streaming on Netflix) marks a return to the realm of science fiction, but this time he’s forgoing adorable aliens to picture the end of the world as we know it. Director-star George Clooney plays astrophysicist Augustine Lofthouse, the last man on earth stranded in an Arctic observatory. Meanwhile, a crew of astronauts (including David Oyelowo and Felicity Jones) hurtles through the solar system in the Aether spaceship, eager to return home after years of intergalactic exploration. The film marks Bissell’s sixth Clooney collaboration including Good Night, and Good Luck, which earned him an Oscar-nomination.
Bissell, whose resume also includes Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and 300, joined The Credits from his home in Studio City, California to talk about The Midnight Sky’s gravity-defying spaceship, frosted beards in Iceland and the hyper-efficient design concept known as “topological optimization.”
Sci-fi movies usually depict spacecraft as fairly massive objects, but your ship has a different look. What’s the concept behind the Aether spaceship in Midnight Sky?
The design was prompted by George telling me “I don’t want this to look like a typical space movie.” I took that as my mandate, understanding that space movies have developed a visual language in films like Star Wars or Alien, you expect to see big, muscular ships. The Aether is more like a dragonfly. It’s an intricate, delicate structure designed to take care of its inhabitants on a long journey. So that’s where I started: How can we ground the design in some semblance of reality 25 years in the future?
Jim Bissell’s design plan for the Aether. Courtesy Netflix.
Parts of the ship rotate continuously. Why is that?
Weightlessness is really hard on the human body during long term space travel and the only way to address that is through centrifugal force. That’s how we came up with the idea of this ship being shaped like a big baton spinning round and round. The two ends of this baton [which generate centrifugal force] are sleeping living areas that then spread out to the sleeping pods, where the gravity is strongest. As you move toward the ladder at the center of the ship, the centrifugal force becomes less and less, so at a certain point, they can abandon the ladder and just sail on into work. That’s their morning commute.
The “commuting ladder” design drawing. Courtesy Netflix.
How long did it take to build this thing?
About two and a half months. Of course, we didn’t have time to build a real space ship, but we needed something that seemed feasible and also reflects the poetry of the script, which is sort of about end times. We decided to use expandable habitat technology manufactured by Bigelow Aerospace, so instead of the Aether being a steel-clad ship, it’s made of fabric.
Hold on. Fabric?
That whole baton is actually layered fabrics. The only solid structures are the exoskeletons and the endoskeletons.
Which look kind of like veins?
Yes. We imagined they’d be 3-D printed out on the moon using something called topological optimization, which uses computers to come up with the most efficient design. The best example of topological optimization is a tree. So the ship’s exoskeleton that looks so weird, like Gaudi on acid, would be used to wrap around these fabrics and hold them in, while the endoskeleton defines the flooring space and everything you see inside.
On the morning you walked onto the soundstage at Shepperton Studios and saw the completed structure, three stories tall, for the first time, how did you feel?
It scared the bejesus out of me, to be honest, because I’d gone so far away from the commonly accepted vocabulary of space travel. I didn’t know if people would get it. I didn’t know if they’d just go “This is just some kind of Hollywood mumbo jumbo bullshit.” I asked my college roommate in Atlanta who saw the movie at an advance screening earlier this month “Did you get what the ship was all about?” He said “No. But it looked cool!” [laughter].
The crew has been traveling through space for nearly three years and in that amount of time, earth has become uninhabitable. What happened?
It’s a dog pile. Global warming raised sea level causing mass migrations, Arctic thawing might have exposed new pathogens and probably somebody got a hold of a nuclear stockpile. Any number of different things could have happened to arrive at the same result.
The last man standing is George Clooney, alone in an Arctic observatory trying to communicate with the Aether crew. Where did you shoot the Polar icecap scenes?
We went to Greenland for two weeks and filmed on a glacier. It was real. And it was cold.
Barbeau observatory before the VFX team built the actual lab. Filmed in Greenland. Courtesy Netflix.
What did you want to achieve with those frigid locations?
We wanted to make you feel isolated in this very cold climate because it’s your portal into the interior of Augustine’s soul. He’s this cold, scientific guy just starting to get in touch with stuff he’s put on the backburner for his entire life. We picked stuff in Iceland that gave us the visceral imagery conveying this sense of atonement, as a kind of meditation on life, what’s important in life, what the end of life is really all about.
The Barbeau observatory after VFX did their work. Courtesy Netflix.
You also built an Arctic set on a Shepperton soundstage outside of London?
Right. We built this big interior exterior set so that George would walk outside his Arctic compound and you’d see the wind blowing and everything else. We filmed the beard [frosted in ice and snow] in Iceland, so makeup was able to duplicate what the beard looked like. When you go inside that set, it feels like you’re there in the Arctic Circle.
THE MIDNIGHT SKY (2020). George Clooney as Dr Augustine Lofthouse. Courtesy Netflix.
Since 2008 you’ve designed six movies for George Clooney. How did your collaboration begin?
I was going to do Confessions of a Dangerous Mind with Bryan Singer but then the whole thing blew up. Months later the producer called again and said “George Clooney wants to direct Confessions and he’d like to meet you.” I went “whoop de doo.” I remember thinking that I’d hate to see this property, which I loved, become a vanity project for a romantic leading man actor. But I went over to George’s house where we had a three-hour conversation. I was blown away because he was extremely knowledgeable. My enthusiasm lasted all the way through Confessions until they said “wrap,” which is the first movie in my entire career where I was sorry it was over. Because usually you’re just exhausted.
What do you most like about working with him?
The fact that he’s such an assured director. He has a good grasp of the material, he’s passionate about his movies and he thinks things through. Once I get a sense of what George wants, then I can bring ideas to him. He’s very open, so it’s a real collaboration and that’s exciting for me.
Your Midnight Sky environments help frame George Clooney as this melancholy figure who seems to embody some big themes. What do you hope audiences take away from Midnight Sky?
It’s about how fragile life is and how we have to pay attention. Because if we don’t pay attention, life goes away. It’s a lot more fragile than we think.
THE MIDNIGHT SKY (2020). Cr: Philippe Antonello/NETFLIX
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
Featured image: Production designer Jim Bissell helped George Clooney create the realistic, reality-based settings of “The Midnight Sky.” Courtesy Netflix.
Buckle up for Christmas Day, when Bridgerton, a romance set in England’s 19th century Regency era, debuts on Netflix. Shonda Rhimes’ first executive-produced series for the streaming service, this bright, sexy show reimagines a casually multiracial society set in a horse-drawn world of candy-colored palaces, sybaritic balls, and aristocracy on display.
Bridgerton was shot on location at storied homes like Lancaster House, where Queen Elizabeth II still holds royal functions, and on soundstages across the UK, where the colors, energies, and social mores of 1813 England are all dialed up to eleven. Based on Julia Quinn’s romance novels, the series’ first season traces the love story of two young aristocrats, complicated Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page) and earnest Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) as they attempt to navigate courtship, court life, and their august families’ lofty expectations. A mysterious, gossip newsletter-writing grand dame working under the pen name Lady Featherington (voiced by Julie Andrews) exacerbates their troubles and that of everyone in their social class, reporting on forbidden trysts, gambling addictions, unplanned pregnancies, and other skeletons these wealthy families would rather stay in their grand estates’ closets.
The series was created by Chris Van Dusen, a Shondaland veteran who worked as a producer on both Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy. We had the chance to speak with the showrunner on his addictive new show, making a period piece relatable for a modern audience, and getting Julie Andrews on board as the anonymous gossip-monger driving all the action.
Did you serendipitously come across the original Bridgerton novels and think, hey, this needs to be a series! Or were you on the lookout for a period work to turn into a show?
As Scandal was coming to an end, I was really thinking about what I wanted to do next, and really, the only thing that I knew was that I wanted to do something completely different than modern-day political intrigue. And so when Shonda told me about these books, I jumped at the opportunity. You clearly couldn’t get anything more different than what I’d done before, and it just seemed like such an exciting challenge.
You wanted to reimagine the Regency period in a way it hasn’t been seen before. Besides the fact that this is a multiracial society, what were some aspects you jettisoned or added?
Everything on the show has a contemporary sensibility to it, and the first thing you notice is our cast. But just the look of the show is different than your typical period piece, as far as things feeling youthful and joyful. There’s a little effervescence to everything. Things sparkle in this world. I think that’s true with our costumes, set design, you hear it in the music, you see it with the editing, I feel like the pace of the story is really fast. But as far as when a viewer watches the show, they’re going to notice that while things are rooted in the Regency era, it is a reimagining. There is a slightly heightened look to everything. One example is the costumes. Ellen Mirojnick, our costume designer, did such an amazing job. We spoke about ways to turn the volume up on everything, so for example, you won’t see a bonnet in the world of Bridgerton. It’s a bonnet-free world. The hats that our ladies wear are quite different. It’s things like that that make it clear this isn’t your typical period piece, and the show is for a modern audience.
How was working with Shonda Rhimes as an executive producer?
Shonda has been a tremendous resource from the beginning. She told me about the books, she thought I’d connect to the books, and she was absolutely right. She’s been a supporter not just of me as a showrunner, but of the show as well. She’s been on board with my vision from the beginning, and that was always infusing this beautiful, decadent 19th-century world with a modern sensibility.
The show presents a multiracial society in a natural, low-key way. Was that the plan from the beginning?
We knew that we wanted the show to reflect the world we live in today. Even though we’re set in the 19th century, we wanted modern audiences to relate to it, and we wanted viewers to see themselves on screen, no matter who you are. I’ve worked in Shondaland pretty much my entire career, since Grey’s Anatomy, and that’s what they do. We cast the best actors for the roles in ways that represent the world today, and we knew from the beginning that we had a similar, really interesting opportunity to do the same with this show.
In that case, which was more the overarching concept — the show as a romance, or a period piece for a contemporary audience?
We never shied away from the fact that we’re a show based on eight really delicious romance novels. So the romance was always going to be a part of the show, it was always going to be Simon and Daphne’s moving, sweeping love story as the bedrock of the first season. But underneath this glamour and escape, I wanted to have this running modern commentary about how, over the past 200 years, everything has changed but nothing has changed, and I think that goes for both women and men.
When did Julie Andrews join the cast as the voice of Lady Whistledown?
Julie Andrews was at the top of our list for Lady Whistledown from the beginning. We sent her the scripts and she ended up loving them, signing on and saying yes. Which totally surprised us, because when you go for someone like Julie Andrews, you never think in a million years it’s actually going to happen, but it did. Working with her has been incredible. She is so lovely and so charming. We did all of our sessions virtually. She gets to say the most scathing things as Lady Whistledown, but always in her bright signature Julie Andrews kind of way, which was so much fun to write to.
You’ve added a few new characters who don’t appear in the books. Do you have a favorite?
I think with any adaptation there are going to be differences from the source material. For us, it was important that we captured the spirit of the Bridgerton family and the moving and sweeping love story of Daphne and Simon, but there are new characters as well because we wanted to open up the world and be able to tell different stories. The one new character that I was really excited to add was Queen Charlotte. We are in Buckingham home a lot, we’re in palaces, and she just added such an amazingly decadent aspect to the show, it was so fun to write to. For me, the series is not just about the Bridgertons. It’s about a world and a society, and I think adding characters like Queen Charlotte helps us tell that story.
As issues of climate change continue to be front and center in every aspect of our lives, many areas of business and industry are investigating new ways in which they can mitigate their carbon footprint and become more engaged in policies that are centered on responsibility toward climate change.
Fortunately, the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of this issue for many years – in fact, a full decade! – and has consistently demonstrated its commitment to sustainability. Ten years ago, in a demonstration of solidarity and dedication to the issue of climate change, the studios recognized they could not tackle the enormity of this impending crisis on their own. Their shared belief that providing common tools, resources, and best practices across film and television productions would have a significant impact in reducing the industry’s environmental impacts across the globe, could not have been more astute. And the Sustainable Production Alliance (SPA) was born.
Founded in 2010, SPA is a consortium of the world’s leading film, television, and streaming companies dedicated to accelerating the transformation of the entertainment business into a more sustainable industry.
With members that now include Amazon Studios, Amblin Partners, Disney, Fox Corporation, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Participant Media, Sony Pictures Entertainment, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia, SPA recognized from its inception that this critically important work could not be done individually and immediately took on the mission of creating and distributing common tools and resources to film, television and streaming professionals. But where these important tools would live and how professionals would be able to easily get access to them proved to be another challenge for the young organization to overcome.
SPA found a like-minded partner in the Producers Guild of America Foundation’s PGA Green Committee and together, the two organizations created what would become their most important venture to date exactly ten years ago: The Green Production Guide. In the Green Production Guide (GPG), SPA found a way to provide tools and resources to help implement sustainable plans for production and reduce the industry’s overall environmental impact.
Once SPA and PGA Green established the GPG and the tools were created, the studios on their physical lots and stages through their various productions could do what they do best—innovate.
From the jump, the GPG offered a worldwide database of vendors that provide sustainable goods and services for film and television production. The resources on the site include the Production Environmental Accounting Report (PEAR) to calculate a production’s carbon footprint, the Production Environmental Actions Checklist (PEACH) to detail best practices for each department on a film set or television production, infographics, memo templates, and case studies on various productions that detail how it’s actually done on the ground. “Anyone who wants to create a sustainable production can go to the Green Production Guide and download signs, communications resources, vendor guidance and other things that will really help you to reduce the carbon emissions on your film,” said Katie Carpenter, Co-Chair, Producers Guild of America Green Committee.
In 2020, the GPG is more vital than ever and is widely recognized throughout the entertainment industry as the cornerstone of the collective vision of what the industry sees as its contribution to long-lasting, significant change in the sustainability efforts of film and television production.
“I think studio and collective efforts over the last decade have raised awareness and understanding,” said HBO’s Director of Sustainability, Heidi Kindberg Goss, in Variety’s “Sustainability in Hollywood” series. “So, now instead of being surprised of our efforts and our requirements, shows expect them. Also, there’s more positive competition and more positive collaboration, which demonstrates growth and interest.”
“When Twentieth Century Fox set out to adapt Jack London’s titular adventure novel as film in 2018, the studio sought to honor this legacy by producing the film in the most environmentally responsible way possible. These efforts helped “The Call of the Wild” divert more than 82% of its waste from landfill and generate significant cost and carbon savings in the process.” – Green Production Guide.
That positive collaboration includes SPA’s Sustainable Entertainment Education Series (SEEDS), virtual learning opportunities launched with PGA Green to raise awareness and call for action on a variety of topics at the intersection of the environment and the industry, expand its reach, pursue important conversations and engage the next generation of filmmakers in all aspects of sustainable production. The first session, New Climate Narratives in a World of Racial Injustice and a Global Pandemic, was held this past July in partnership with the Writers Guild of America East, the Good Energy Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Cultural Power and Sierra Club. Garnering broad audience interest, the event focused on how to successfully integrate racial, climate, and social justice storytelling in film and television.
In October, the latest installment of SEEDS took place as part of the Motion Picture Association’s “Film School Friday” series.The program, entitled Sustainability From from Studios to Students, looked at another new coalition, the Green Film School Alliance, and was quite a success with over 4,500 viewers tuning in to hear a fascinating conversation covering a wide variety of sustainable production topics on behalf of studio partners, academic institutions and students.
It’s important to point out that the Green Production Guide’s recommended best practices are not just strong recommendations without results – they’re working. One way to measure their impact is the Green (and Gold) Seals, which are awarded by the Environmental Media Association (EMA), to productions that have surpassed a variety of sustainable criteria. In 2020, the EMA awarded 205 Green and Gold Seals – the most ever. This is up from 188 in 2019 and 113 in 2018.
Now, in the midst of a pandemic, SPA’s leadership with the GPG is more crucial than ever. As film and television crews returning to production amid Covid-19, safety protocols are as important for the cast and crew’s immediate health as the sustainability protocols are for the long-term health of the planet. The GPG’s return-to-work recommendations and updated PEACH cover everything, from best practices for craft services and catering to the hygiene, sanitation, and use of personal protective equipment for the cast and crew – all as sustainably as possible.
There is significant innovation that is coming into play as the members of SPA continue to safely produce content in a pandemic, including choosing more renewable or more recyclable products if single-use water is mandated due to Covid protocols – think canned water instead of single-use plastic bottles, because aluminum is infinitely recyclable. Additionally, a lot of the work the studios have already accomplished for the purpose of sustainability has really come in handy as productions return to work and in a new environment that stresses minimal personal contact. For example, LED lighting can be adjusted and controlled remotely, which allows for fewer people on set.
John Rego, Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Vice President of Sustainability summed it up at the Variety event: “Hopefully what the pandemic has done is not set us back but accelerated a transition to more sustainable options for us.”
Through its efforts with the Green Production Guide, SPA, in partnership with the PGA, has certainly provided that hope to the industry. Those involved in this important work are confident that the next decade will bring more collaborative innovation to sustainability efforts than ever before. We are excited to have a front-row seat as SPA’s incredible story will continue to unfold for many years to come.
Featured image: Behind the scenes of “First Man.” Courtesy Universal Pictures.
Based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s acclaimed novel “Good Morning, Midnight”, the new Netflix release The Midnight Sky(streaming December 23), which is directed by George Clooney, follows scientist Augustine (played by Clooney) who navigates a post-apocalyptic world alone in the Arctic, while warning away Sully (Felicity Jones) and the other astronauts returning from deep space with her. Her fellow crewmembers include partner and flight commander Adewole (David Oyelowo), astrodynamics expert Sanchez (Demián Bichir), and pilot Mitchell (Kyle Chandler). The film’s end of the world scenario is grounded in realism, with a story that finds a balance between the isolated scientist on Earth and the astronauts returning home only to discover they may be some of humanity’s only survivors. The Credits spoke to actors Oyelowo and Bichir about working on Clooney’s latest project.
Felicity Jones and David Oyelowow. Courtesy Netflix.
David, what drew you to your role of Ade?
I read the script and I just loved the world of it, because it was not only this giant sci-fi movie, it also had this social commentary in terms of how we were treating the planet, and also it had predominately a handful of characters we zone in on. I love the film Gravity, and I love that we have this huge backdrop but it’s largely centered on Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in that film. This is a similar thing in terms of dynamics, whereby you have the opportunity to get under the skin of these characters whilst also going into this massive existential threat that they’re facing.
THE MIDNIGHT SKY (2020): Demian Bichir and Director George Clooney on the set of The Midnight Sky. Cr. Philippe Antonello/NETFLIX
Demián, what attracted you to playing Sanchez?
When George Clooney calls, for me that is an automatic yes, whatever the character is about. So when he invited me to be part of the cast, I was praying it would be good. Then I was lucky to find a fantastic script that was so well written by Mark Smith, and such a rich character. You don’t find many Mexican astrodynamicists up in space, let alone in Hollywood. That increased my will to jump into this spaceship and I’m very grateful and happy I did.
And how did you prepare or do research for your role, Demián?
You can learn anything from the internet. You’d be surprised. In the reclusion of the pandemic, I’ve been working on some music, and I’ve been doing it all only based on tutorials. You can learn anything from how to fry an egg to how to go to the moon. I’ve been learning about metaphysics and quantum physics and about Aristotle, and of course, all the research that we do is a help to the work. You try to cover as many bases as you can, so you have everything ironed out before going to set because that’s pretty much what any heavyweight director expects from you.
THE MIDNIGHT SKY (2020): Demian Bichir as Sanchez and Kyle Chandler as Mitchell. Cr. Philippe Antonello/NETFLIX
David,you all worked in mostly practical sets and with costumes based on those designed for NASA. How did the aspects of practical space and design impact your portrayal and interpretation?
It’s always incredible to have actual, tangible things to act opposite, and the great thing about the space station in this film is that it was built in exactly the same way it would be in space, in three tiers. When you see us climbing up stairs, it’s not all these tiers next to each other, it actually goes up three stories, so you felt like you were in an environment that was very organic, tangible, and very believable. Obviously, we weren’t actually in space, but the immediate environment we were in was what it would have been, and that was really really helpful. I think that is a byproduct of having an actor as a director. He knows just how helpful it is to not always have to rely on our imaginations, and so he created that environment for us.
David, your character and Felicity’s explore questions of creation and destruction. How did you approach that aspect of the story, especially as Sully and Ade are not particularly verbose.
The thing that I also love about The Midnight Sky is it allows the audience to draw their own conclusions. It’s not a bunch of dialogue. It’s a cerebral, thoughtful, grown-up sci-fi movie. Even though we are having a child together, it’s not something that we expound upon a huge amount. It’s not a lovey-dovey relationship, it’s very much a mature grown-up professional relationship, but it doesn’t shy away from the fact that there is creation in the form of a child. That was actually an aspect of the film that wasn’t originally in the script. Felicity Jones happened to be pregnant and we beautifully were able to add that to the narrative. But the destruction of our planet is a huge part of the reality of this film, and that for me was one of the things that I love about it. You can only take care of the things that are tangible and in front of you. He can he protect the woman he loves, and this unborn child, and how can he try to protect his crew, and try to fulfill this task of having found this planet to colonize for humanity, but what do you do with the fact that the world is probably on the verge of destruction? And at the same time, we are in a pandemic, and are all looking at our TV screens saying ‘what the heck?’ That is also a reality that these characters face in this film as well.
Demián, the film in a way is about the best and the worst of humanity. You are quoted as saying humans are fantastic and terrible at the same time. How do you work with that duality as Sanchez, and as an actor bringing yourself to the story?
I think we all deal with that daily, especially now in the last 10 months. It has been very clear that we are capable of fantastic phenomenal things for humanity, and I’m speaking about the doctors and nurses and every worker in every hospital around the world. That’s the best in humanity. I also think art and science and sports are the best of humanity. That’s what represents us better. Every human being, whether you’re an artist or not, we have that in our blood. We also have our demons, our dark sides. I think the trick, and that is exactly how I dealt with it in this story, is that you can’t bring your demons out if they will affect everyone else, so whatever happened in your life in the past, you need to deal with that yourself. You cannot bring that into anyone else, not your wife, kids, neighbors, or your fellow citizens. I think that’s very clear in the story in such a small crew, we are so different among us, and at the same time we know we are the same species as human beings, and we depend on each other, and that’s why we take care of each other.
David, in the time of a pandemic, what can we take away from The Midnight Sky?
You see in George Clooney’s character someone who is living with a lot of regret because he sacrificed connectivity for ambition. It’s an ambition that’s admirable because it’s for the sake of humanity, but he lost out on his own familial connection. I do believe you can have both. As a father of four who is a very busy actor, I’m very busy with my wife and kids as well. Human and familial connection and love as a point of connection are essential. Now more than ever we are seeing how much we need each other, and that is the thing to prioritize over almost everything else.
The Midnight Sky streams on Netflix starting December 23rd.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
In these trying times, what’s better than the escapism of a sweeping, old-fashioned romance? Set between the late 1950s and early 1960s, the new Amazon feature Sylvie’s Love from director Eugene Ashe (Homecoming, Home Again) is a sweet and lovely epic in the style of the vintage films from which it takes its inspiration (premiering on Amazon Prime on Christmas Day). Both a love story and a coming-of-age narrative, we meet Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) as a young television fanatic working in her father Herbert’s (Lance Reddick) Harlem record store. She quickly falls for her new co-worker, aspiring jazz musician Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha), to the dismay of her mother, Eunice (Erica Gimpel), an etiquette teacher determined to marry her daughter off to a wealthy fiancé gained through a Cotillion ball.
NNAMDI ASOMUGHA as ROBERT HALLOWAY and TESSA THOMPSON as SYLVIE PARKER in SLYVIE’S LOVE. Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Daughterly rebellion awaits any mother as prim and proper as Eunice, and Sylvie, in her own earnest, well-meaning way, delivers. She marries Lacy (Alano Miller) and starts a family, but her early affair with Robert is never far from mind. Sylvie settles for a time into married life only after Robert’s career takes him to Paris, with the arch, anything-goes Countess (Jemima Kirke) having signed herself up to manage Robert’s jazz quartet. Years on, over Lacy’s objections, Sylvie gets a foothold at a television studio and serendipitously reconnects with the newly successful Robert. For both characters, but on Sylvie in particular, her emotional coming-of-age is outwardly matched by her fashion, which evolves with the era from slacks and demure nipped waists to smart suits and glamorous gowns, several of which, it turns out, costume designer Phoenix Mellow pulled from Chanel’s archives.
TESSA THOMPSON as SYLVIE PARKER and NNAMDI ASOMUGHA as ROBERT HALLOWAY in SLYVIE’S LOVE. Courtesy of Amazon Studios
“Right from the beginning, I had a very distinct plan with Eugene that there were going to be these two different time periods in their lives,” Mellow says. For Robert, this meant well-tailored suits and aesthetic inspiration taken from John Coltrane, Sonny Rawlins, and Miles Davis. As Sylvie finds her place in the world, meanwhile, a few of the looks she dons, like a cap-sleeved, floor-length blue evening dress or a short and chic black sparkling New Year’s Eve party frock, having both been borrowed from the house of Chanel, are themselves a throwback to the Hollywood moment referenced by the film, a time when Paris’s couture houses worked closely with the major studios. “I wanted to make it really feel exactly like it should have been made then,” says Mellow of the costuming. “Givenchy did a lot for Audrey Hepburn in all her films. At the time, Tessa was working with Chanel, and it was a perfect pairing.”
TESSA THOMPSON as SYLVIE PARKER in SLYVIE’S LOVE. Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Besides Hepburn, Mellow took inspiration from a host of other mid-20th century luminaries to put together Sylvie’s costumes (the Chanel archival material fit right off the rack, but other looks were tailored, refurbished, or made to order), ranging from model Joyce Bryant, Grace Kelly, and Nathalie Wood to Nancy Wilson and Eartha Kitt. With Ashe, the costume designer watched classics like Paris Blues, Marjorie Morningstar, and Carmen Jones, and in the course of her own research, turned to vintage issues of Ebony and Jet magazines. But given the all-Black lead cast and the fact that historic footage of people of color isn’t always abundant, the crew also turned to private archives for visual reference. “A lot of it was based on Eugene’s family photos,” says Mellow.
TESSA THOMPSON as SYLVIE PARKER and NNAMDI ASOMUGHA as ROBERT HALLOWAY in SLYVIE’S LOVE. Photo credit: Nicola Goode
Working on an indie film’s budget and a tight schedule — “We had 53 or 54 costume changes and I think we shot in about 28 days,” she says — the costume designer, along with the rest of the crew, drew on contacts and past experience from other projects to make Sylvie’s Love a success. Mellow, who has worked extensively on overlapping period sets on shows like Mad Men, The Man in the High Castle, and Hollywood, describes her costuming approach as “very method. I really like everything to be as it was,” down to original shoes and correct undergarments, for both women and men. The particular period of cultural life in upper Manhattan depicted in Sylvie’s Love doesn’t get nearly as much retrospective air time as, say, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, which is regrettable, since the music and fashion are just as stunning, as is the city itself, not long before it slipped into bankruptcy. Luckily, however, like the precise, sculptural fit of any one of its heroine’s dresses, Sylvie’s Love is a meticulous throwback to some of the best of what the period had to offer.
“Uh one. Uh two. Uh you know what to do.” That’s how the band leader cues his musicians in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In fact, the actors portraying sidemen to Viola Davis’ title character did not really know what to do, musically. But thanks to Branford Marsalis, the actors in director George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of the August Wilson play manage to mimic the moves of veteran blues musicians with persuasive panache.
A Grammy-winning saxophonist, bandleader, composer and scholar, Marsalis grew up in New Orleans with his famous jazz-nurturing family including brother Wynton and father Ellis. But he only came to fully appreciate blues singer Ma Rainey after Wolfe invited him to oversee the music for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom situated around a tension-wracked 1927 Chicago recording session disrupted by a hotshot trumpet player (the late Chadwick Boseman). Marsalis says, “I’d always preferred Bessie Smith because her recordings were cleaner, but once I did a deep dive into Ma Rainey, I got it: There would be no Bessie Smith without Ma Rainey.”
Once he’d wrapped his head around Ma Rainey’s brand of rough and tumble music, Marsalis assembled a crew of ace musicians at the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music. There, he recorded the show’s soundtrack that would guide the cast members through their musical paces. Speaking from his home in Durham, North Carolina, Marsalis describes the magic of an out-of-tune piano and explains how he steered Boseman away from Miles Davis and toward Louis Armstrong when he pretended to play the trumpet.
To give credit where its due, who are the actual musicians who play the songs we hear in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom?
What was your approach for making these 21st-century musicians sound like they were banging out old-time blues in 1927?
My whole idea was to go for emotional authenticity. With the exception of Paul Whiteman, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington’s bands, a lot of musicians back then were not necessarily the best players. If you listen to music, there’s a lot of raggedy playing, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. the musicsounds and feels absolutely superb.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): (L to R) Chadwick Boseman as Levee, Glynn Turman as Toldeo, Michael Potts as Slow Drag, Colman Domingo as Cutler. Cr. David Lee / Netflix
How did you create that authenticity vibe?
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was the first song we recorded. The guys started playing and I stopped ’em. It’s not quite right. What’s missing? For literally half an hour, over and over and again, we tried to get through the song until I realized why it’s wrong: We had a grand piano but it has to be an upright. The stage manager says they have an upright but it hasn’t been tuned. “Even better!” They dragged out this upright. Started playing again, I say “Can you get me a piano tuner?” Tuner comes in, says ‘What’s the problem?’ I say, “I need the piano to be out of tune.” He laughed, de-tuned it, Shawn started playing and I said, “That’s the sound.”
Before, the piano sounded too perfect?
That’s right. The out-of-tune upright, that’s the way I heard it on the records.
MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM (2020) Composer Branford Marsalis and Glynn Turman, who plays piano player Toledo. Cr: David Lee/NETFLIX
Viola Davis does an incredible job channeling Ma Rainey. Does she do her own singing in this movie?
It was a three-tier process.
How’d that work?
Maxayn Lewis did the singing. Viola was working on another film so she couldn’t fly to New Orleans and sing with us so Maxayn gave her the template. When they filmed the movie, Viola sang to Maxayn. It looks like Viola’s actually singing because she is. And then when the filming was done, Maxayn had the benefit of watching Viola and sang to what Viola was doing.
Levee the trumpet player, played by the late great Chadwick Boseman, tries to disrupt Ma Rainey’s traditional sound.
He calls it jug band music.
Levee represents a different approach, musically?
Like a lot of musicians now who are disdainful of the past, he’s playing music to elevate himself. Levee’s driven by these painful experiences he had growing up in Mississippi. He wants to create music that can elevate him to a place where he can put away the hurt and shame of his childhood. That’s the raison d’etre for Levee. He’s carrying around all this anger at the injustice heaped upon black people in the early twentieth century, anger at his station in life. Songwriting was going to be his way out.
Levee wants to kick off “Black Bottom” with this flashy trumpet riff. You came up with that?
Yeah, I sang it to the trumpet player. The second half of that is an old Louis Armstrong riff, bad dee duh duh dee. Same song, played to a New Orleans beat.
Did you get a chance to coach the actors on how to look and act like 1920’s blues musicians?
Yes, but they were on a tight timeline. When I said I needed to meet the actors who play the band members for half an hour I was told “We don’t have time for that.” I said, “Okay, I don’t like the way they look. They look like crap. As musicians, they look awful.” So they gave me a half-hour and we got a lot of work done.
Specifically?
It’s mostly about physical presence. Little things. Visually, Chadwick was doing the famous Miles Davis stance with the arched back, but I don’t know if Miles had even been born when this story takes place. So I told Chadwick, “We can’t do Miles, you’ve got to do Louis Armstrong. Go on YouTube, look at those two videos from the thirties, study Louis Armstrong’s posture and you’re cool.” Chadwick came back the next day and he had it.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): (L to R) Glynn Turman as Toldeo, Chadwick Boseman as Levee, Michael Potts as Slow Drag, and Colman Domingo as Cutler. Cr. David Lee / Netflix
The other sidemen?
Toledo [Glynn Turman] had to get the stride piano thing down. I sang him the rhythm and told him, “This is your rhythm for all the music, just keep your shoulders moving and it’ll look right.” Coleman Domingo [portraying trombone player Cutler] had this little quirk where he’d move the slide real quick before he played. He asked me “Do trombone players not do that?” I said “Doesn’t matter, leave it alone. I think it’s great. Michael Potts, the bass player [Slow Drag] learned how to play the damned bass. I don’t know how he did it.
Just for this role, Michael Potts taught himself bass?
Walks in, tells me, “I learned how to play the bass.” I say, Yeah sure you did.” He started playing. “Oh. Okay. Yeah. I don’t have anything to say to you. Just do that.”
In addition to arranging classic Ma Rainey numbers, you also composed original instrumentals for montage sequences set on the streets of 1927 Chicago.
Toward the start of the movie, the musicians are walking from the el train. They’re country boys suddenly in the city, hearing their feet on the cement. When I watched that scene I felt the pulse of them walking. Boom boom boom boom boom. That became a bass line and I wrote everything else from that.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): (L to R) Michael Potts (“Slow Drag”), Glynn Turman (“Toldeo”), Colman Domingo (“Cutler”). Cr. David Lee / Netflix
When Viola Davis’ Ma Rainey finally gets around to singing in this film, she undergoes a complete transformation. No longer grouchy or weary she suddenly turns into this charming, sexy entertainer full of joy and desire. It seems like Ma Rainey uses music to transcend the woes of her personal life.
I think that’s [what happens with] most people who are lucky enough to perform. You take your troubles, you bring them on stage and it transforms you into a different kind of person, takes you to another place. Music can be very therapeutic.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. Cr. David Lee / Netflix
Featured image: MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM (2020) Branford Marsalis and Glynn Turman. Cr: David Lee/NETFLIX
If you’re like many, many other folks you watched the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian this past Friday and were left with this very intriguing, if slightly confusing tease—”The Book of Boba Fett Coming December 2021.” Trying to absorb all that had just happened in The Mandalorian‘s finale, you’d be forgiven if you assumed The Book of Boba Fett was what The Mandalorian‘s 3rd season was titled. It is, rather, a brand new spinoff series. Disney+ revealed the news that The Book of Boba Fett will follow Temeura Morrison as the scarred, miraculously alive Boba and Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand, with many of the creative leaders behind The Mandalorian on board. Here’s the Disney+ reveal:
The Book of Boba Fett, a new Original Series, starring Temuera Morrison and Ming-Na Wen and executive produced by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni and Robert Rodriguez, set within the timeline of The Mandalorian, is coming to @DisneyPlus Dec. 2021. pic.twitter.com/YT2zbLufI8
The Book of Boba Fett is one of those 10 Star Wars projects that were mentioned during that fruitful Disney Investor’s Presentation. That’s where we learned that Wonder Woman 1984 director Patty Jenkins’ would be helming a brand new Star Wars film titled Rogue Squadron and that there is a slew of new live-action series. Now we know that one of them will focus on Fett and that the events will take place in the same timeline as The Mandalorian, picking up where season 2 ended.
Robert Rodriguez directed “The Tragedy” in this past season of The Mandalorian, which re-introduced the legendary bounty hunter back into the fold, and he’s a great choice to led the crusty-but-potent Fett on his own journey. Meanwhile, season 3 of The Mandalorian is also due to arrive in December 2021, which means by next Christmas, we’ll have two bounty hunter-centric series on Disney+. Might these series overlap, or, will their releases be staggered enough so that they’re not competing with each other? Or, imagine if The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett offered two different perspectives of the same events? That could be incredible, if narratively complex.
What’s certain is there’s a lot more Star Wars coming to Disney+, including the Rosario Dawson-led Ahsoka, the Diego Luna-led Andor, and Ewan McGregor-led Obi-Wan Kenobi.
For more stories on what’s streaming or coming to Disney+, check these out:
Featured image: L-r: The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) in Lucasfilm’s THE MANDALORIAN, season two, exclusively on Disney+. Courtesy Lucasfilm Ltd.
During the course of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, based on the 1982 play by August Wilson, blues star Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) reveals the lengths it takes to counter the racial economic exploitation of the 1920s, while down in the practice room, her band members recount the horrors of Jim Crow. The film, directed by George C. Wolfe (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), which debuted on Netflix on December 18th, is the first of an ongoing project to produce film adaptations of all of Wilson’s 10 plays focused on Black life in different decades throughout the 20th century, collectively known as the Pittsburgh Cycle. Both Wilson’s play and the film adaptation are inspired by Ma Rainey, a 1920s blues star, with the original Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom one of the singer’s hits.
Though Wilson grew up in the city’s Hill District, “of all his plays, Ma Rainey, strangely enough, is the only one that doesn’t take place in Pittsburgh,” said production designer Mark Ricker. Nevertheless, the film was shot in the city, on stages built into a former steel factory and on two city blocks dressed to look like 1920s Chicago. These three sets are where the vast majority of the film takes place. “The source material is a play, and [with] the film version of the play, I think it was always in the back of my mind to create an environment that worked for that,” Ricker said. As such, he worked to create sets that were authentic to the period and looked like rooms where viewers would themselves want to spend time, but which otherwise took a backseat to incredible performances by Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman, who plays Levee, Ma’s youngest and most outspoken band member. Viscerally, Ricker designed the basement band room and spacious but spare recording studio to feel “slightly recessed,” he said. “We created textures that were interesting, but I hope didn’t distract from the words and what the actors were doing.”
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): (L to R) Glynn Turman as Toldeo, Chadwick Boseman as Levee, Michael Potts as Slow Drag, and Colman Domingo as Cutler. Cr. David Lee / Netflix
Upstairs, Ma arrives late, insists on having her nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown), who stutters, introduce one of her songs, and brings the session to a halt to have a few of the guys go out and get her a coke, “ice cold.” These are not the whimsical actions of a musical diva, however, but thought-out tactics to forestall economic exploitation on the part of her manager, Irvin (Jeremy Shamos), and the studio owner, Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne). Downstairs, in the practice room, Levee brightly needles his older bandmates, but when their teasing in return goes too far, all levity evaporates, with Boseman delivering a devastating monologue recounting the horrors of Levee’s childhood. Levee isn’t alone in his nightmare experiences at the hands of racist Southern whites, and as the guys go back and forth between the recording studio and the band room, further tails of oppression, violence, and abuse come out, with more to come by the end of the day. The sets where these conversations take place look continuous but aren’t, with Ricker elevating the studio and adding steps, then matching them in a stairwell, so it appears much of the band’s day is spent trundling back and forth between the practice room and the studio.
Neither upstairs nor downstairs could be described as luxurious. Ricker and Wolfe felt that the entire space should look as if the studio owners had built it into the rear corner of a factory. As such, Ricker built the practice room into the corner of the soundstage, in order to incorporate some of the steel factory’s original brick into the floor, and the camera team made it work. Upstairs, “the booth itself in my mind was once a manager’s office that peered down onto whatever was happening,” said Ricker. “As we’re going, our research showed that the studio Ma Rainey had recorded with had actually been a chair factory, so we sort of landed in the right place there.”
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): (L to R) Chadwick Boseman as Levee, Glynn Turman as Toldeo, Michael Potts as Slow Drag, Colman Domingo as Cutler. Cr. David Lee / Netflix
Outside, a fender-bender first heralds Ma’s arrival. Ricker and his team found an architecturally accurate two-block stretch of the Hill District, dressed it with billboards, awnings, and graphics, and entirely constructed an alleyway that leads between the street and the studio’s door. Beyond the area outside the studio, “visual effects did their magic to extend the street and put the skyline in. I thought they did a brilliant job with that. I owe them a debt of gratitude,” Ricker said.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): (L to R) Michael Potts (“Slow Drag”), Glynn Turman (“Toldeo”), Colman Domingo (“Cutler”). Cr. David Lee / Netflix
Though it may be for very different reasons, everyone truly wants to record, and we finally see this in action on a period-accurate, functioning record pressing machinery. “That was one of the very first things that I looked into, because I had done a fair amount of recording equipment on the James Brown movie, but nothing as early as the 1920s,” said Ricker. His set decorator found someone in Los Angeles recreating the machinery, and even brought along some original Ma Rainey recordings to play on set. To turn the machine, “there’s a giant brass weight that you see going down at one point,” said Ricker, which takes three and a half minutes to hit the floor — “still the standard for the length of a song. That’s where it all came from.”
It’s possible those kinds of details might be lost on viewers focused on Davis’s embodiment of Ma, the film’s immersive music, and the late Boseman’s magnetic turn as Levee. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was the production designer’s third project with Davis and his second with Boseman, and “to have a front row seat to see what both of them do, I count myself extremely lucky to do what I do and work with the talent they bring.” As for the music itself, Ricker described the first time hearing the band perform, in Ma’s traveling show tent which opens the movie, as a kind of magic. “It was one of those nights when you’re on set that you felt like you were there,” he said.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020): Viola Davis as Ma Rainey. Cr. David Lee / Netflix
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
Featured image: MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM(2020). Chadwick Boseman as Levee, Colman Domingo as Cutler, Viola Davis as Ma Rainey, Michael Potts as Slow Drag and Glynn Turman as Toledo. Cr. David Lee/NETFLIX
As the title suggests, Murder on Middle Beach, the four-part HBO documentary, revolves around a tragedy. On March 3, 2010, Barbara Hamburg was found stabbed to death outside her home in Madison, Connecticut, an unassuming beachfront town. An unlikely victim, police were unable to find a suspect. But what makes this unsolved murder story even more compelling is that it is being told by Madison Hamburg, Barbara’s son.
Madison was 18 years old at the time and a film student in college. Ultimately, he decided to make a documentary about his mother. He spent years interviewing his father, sister, aunt, other relatives, and law enforcement searching for answers about who his mother was and why she was killed. What he ultimately discovers is how little he knows about his family.
Framing this unsettling sojourn is a haunting title sequence that sets the tone for what’s to come. As James Lavino’s eerie theme plays, the camera pivots upward past a series of miniatures buried deep within the earth. In total, five unique dioramas detail the story arc. Intermixed are jarring flash cuts of family photos and home movies. The shot finishes on a model recreation of the house where the murder took place.
“I have a habit of skipping title sequences and wanted to create something that was more a storytelling element than a backdrop for credits,” says Hamburg. “There was intention behind every minute detail of this sequence, down to the color, shot design, and even the clothes that the subjects are wearing.”
The model for the opening was created by Thomas Doyle, an artist known for his striking miniatures. His work has appeared in galleries around the world and graced the pages of The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Time. Hamburg originally reached out to Doyle to explore the idea of using miniatures to recreate scenes that couldn’t be captured on film.
Murder on Middle Beach. Mock Up Painting. Courtesy Thomas Doyle/HBO.
“He got in touch with me because he liked my work and wanted advice about what’s possible — get the lay of the land,” remembers Doyle. “It certainly sounded like a great project. So by the end of the call, we were talking about going forward and working together.”
Concluding that recreations weren’t feasible, Hamburg conceived the idea of building a title sequence around miniatures.
“We wanted to parallel this overarching theme of duality between the outward ‘American idyllic’ setting and the darkness that lay beneath, prevalent throughout all of the major story arcs,” continues Hamburg. “Miniaturizing helped to push that idea, especially when it is done with such detail that it blurs the lines of reality. ‘Is what I’m looking at real or fake?’”
Thomas Doyle’s miniature recreation of the Hamburg house. Courtesy HBO.
For inspiration, Hamburg turned to one of Doyle’s works — Distillation. A series of miniatures depicting families and homes in various stages of disarray, it evoked the feeling the filmmaker wanted.
“Madison and his producer Solomon (Petchenik) put together a teaser reel with my work and the flash flutter cuts as a way to sell the idea. ‘It could look like this,’” says Doyle. “They brought that to me and I just fell in love with it.”
In an effort to draw viewers in, episode one opens without the title sequence. “Then, when people see episode two, they start to make the connection of things they’ve seen — like there’s a tiny birthday cake in the model that represents the first episode,” explains Doyle.
The initial plan was to only display objects. But it became apparent that the sequence would be more impactful with human figures. Model railroad shops, toy stores, and architecture kits are Doyle’s typical go-to places for figures. But since the ones here needed to evoke the documentary’s subjects, there was extensive cutting, sculpting, and painting to arrive at the Murder on Middle Beach miniatures.
All the objects were created from scratch. Doyle felt that they were so prominent in the story that they needed to be precise. “The team provided me with tons of background material, photos, the home movie imagery,” he says. “I spent a lot of time looking at that to recreate the look of her wedding dress, her computer, that mailbox. I focused on the details to that level.”
Thomas Doyle’s miniatures. Courtesy HBO.
Materials came from anywhere and everywhere. Any household item is fair game in Doyle’s mind. A lobster pot in the first scene is the top of a Chapstick tube painted silver. “There’s a lot of picking through the trash as well,” he jokes. “Don’t throw that away, it could be used for something.”
By Doyle’s estimate, the model stands over six feet tall. The dirt underground spans between four and five feet. He built it this past spring in his Westchester, New York studio. Separated by the pandemic, Doyle chronicled each step photographically and sent it to the production team. Together, they added and deleted pieces to shape what is finally seen.
“We wanted to lean into the feeling of nostalgia and familiarity,” adds Hamburg. “We wanted the compositions to feel inexplicably familiar, but not so much so that they would be discernible.”
“Obviously an artist in his or her studio is free to run off in whatever direction. In this case, we all had an understanding of what we wanted to create,” explains Doyle. “So it’s collaborative in that way and really wonderful to get feedback day to day as I documented — and then see this big thing come together.”
The final image — the house — was also built completely from scratch. “I wanted to recreate that exact house down to the mullions of the windows,” says Doyle. “Every piece of clapboard, all the siding was laid in because I wanted to be true to that house. I stuck to it very closely.”
Sharp viewers will notice subtle changes to the home as the series progresses. By the last episode, the windows are broken, there are holes in the roof. The trees are overgrown and the lawn is filled with rubbish.
Thomas Doyle’s miniature recreation of the Hamburg house, now smashed and absued. Courtesy HBO.
“The idea was to see it erode over time as Madison dives a little deeper into the family history and the secrets around that house,” says Doyle. “Some of the artwork I created evokes the sense of the house being a character. As you get to the reveal, you see the emotional toll that’s being taken on the house.”
The title sequence shoot took place at MoSoMos in Brooklyn. Knowing the pitfalls of transporting fragile art pieces, Doyle was keenly aware that eventually, his model would need to make a road trip. So he planned accordingly, designing it so that it could be broken down and packed in his car.
MoSoMos’ Bil Thompson served as cinematographer. Because of the pandemic, the crew was kept to a minimum. Doyle assembled the model, added the smaller pieces and decayed the house as needed. Hamburg was on hand to confer with Thompson. “Just to kind of talk lenses and make sure we had the moves right,” says Doyle. “I was really happy to have him there on set so he could frame things like the composition of the trees.”
MoSoMos’ specialty is stop motion animation. Thompson shot the sequence using a motion control rig. “Shoot raw images and then move the camera, shoot and move, shoot and move,” continues Doyle. “You get very high quality because you’re shooting in raw digital images. It looks like a fluid shot.”
Murder on Middle Beach marks the first time Doyle’s art has been featured in a TV series. He couldn’t be more pleased that it’s on HBO. The network’s iconic 1980s opening featuring a miniature cityscape was a big influence on his work.
“Watching that sequence as a kid was what made him want to explore the world of miniatures,” says Hamburg, remembering his first telephone conversation with Doyle. “At that moment, I knew, no matter how we incorporated miniatures into this story, Thomas was going to do it.”
Murder on Middle Beach is available now on HBO and HBO Max.
For more on HBO and HBO Max, check out these stories:
At the beginning of the HBO miniseries The Flight Attendant, based on Chris Bohjalian’s novel, Cassie (Kaley Cuoco) is a put-together first class flight attendant by day, maximalist reveler by night. She parties relentlessly wherever she lands, seemingly enjoying an endless montage of karaoke, clubs, bars, and hookups. But Cassie also encapsulates a particular sort of overgrown New York party drunk, one who’s getting a little long in the tooth for these sorts of hijinks. She winds up paying for them dearly when she wakes up in a Bangkok hotel suite next to her latest conquest, wealthy scion Alex (Michiel Huisman), who does not wake up because his throat has been slashed. She has no idea what happened.
Despite his death throwing Cassie’s already messy life into full disarray, Alex is here to help. He appears frequently in her thoughts as a hallucination endowed with the power of critical thought. Annoyingly, he also seems inclined to fix more than the fact that the FBI suspects Cassie, and a black-clad spy, Miranda (Michelle Gomez) tries to kill her on the Long Island Railroad, surely one of the most embarrassing places one could die. (Cassie only loses her shoes.) As she unravels, screwing up her relationships with her best friend Annie (Zosia Mamet) and accomplished, strait-laced brother Davey (T.R. Knight), dead Alex also has the temerity to force Cassie to confront her childhood spent boozing it up with her alcoholic dad. On top of it all, even Cassie’s closest colleague, Megan (Rosie Perez) winds up cutting her out for poor behavior, despite the fact that Megan herself is busy committing corporate espionage against her own husband.
Throughout, Cassie’s clothes belie a sort of apt confusion — in the air, she’s a crisp attendant, upon landing she breaks out the sequins, at Alex’s funeral, she’s in an over-the-top veiled fascinator, but back in New York, she tones things down considerably. Here, she transforms into an only slightly more peppy mirror image of Annie, a tightly wound lawyer with a big apartment and a devoted paramour she refuses to acknowledge as her boyfriend. It’s clear, from both her fashion choices and her organized pursuit to find out what happened to Alex, that Cassie would like to grow out of her arrested development — even if she’s mightily reluctant to take on the demons holding her back. We sat down with costume designer Cat Thomas to talk about designing for a stymied contemporary New York woman and her raft of pursuers: a spy, a crime family boss, and a best friend who truly just wants to help.
Can we kick off with those much chicer than normal flight attendant uniforms?
It’s a good departure point! Steve Yockey, who was the writer and showrunner, scripted the uniform as being a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress. It’s a fun departure point to consider how travel is different now. We really wanted it to be a throwback, luxurious, very interesting, the way travel used to be. I thought it’s actually a great silhouette, that a-line skirt, it’s very flattering to a lot of body types, so we turned it into a sort of faux wrap dress. And then the colors, the blues, greens, we thought were so beautiful, like the colors of the sky, and that was our departure point for the colors of the airline. I really wanted it to be dynamic from every angle, which is why every way you look at the dress, there’s a sort of color blocking, which keeps it interesting on camera. Then there’s a second uniform, which is a jacket that had a swoop, with a dark skirt. On different flights, they can choose, in my mind, which uniform to wear.
Kaley Cuoco. Photograph by Phil Caruso
The show uses split-screens to great effect. Did you design with these in mind?
The split-screen was a big part of our concept. When we presented to the studio and talked amongst ourselves, we knew there was going to be this constant [detail]. It’s edited so beautifully, and I think it works so well. You compartmentalize each character when you’re seeing that, which draws your focus in. It was something we had to think about a lot, definitely.
Annie’s and Cassie’s costumes often mirror each other. Was that intentional?
Annie’s an interesting character because she’s Cassie’s best friend, but she’s also this lawyer, she’s very put together. But at the same time, I think you need to understand that she and Cassie came from the same world. They’re New York women, they probably loved to hang out at the same places, they had similar friends. I wanted there to be a relationship between them in terms of how they look — that in theory, they could switch clothes. But I also think we have to understand that Annie, with little [details] like her tattoos, came from a world where she was okay doing seedy things she shouldn’t be doing. She’s not a Connecticut WASP, but it’s a subtle thing. I feel like it’s very real, too. I really wanted people to be able to connect with Cassie.
Zosia Mamet. Photograph by Phil Caruso
They both start out in good-looking wool turtlenecks and nice outerwear and end up in similar jeans and crewnecks as their situations deteriorate.
Right. In the first two episodes, you don’t really [anticipate] the emotional spiral. And it’s very intense. You’re kind of like, whoa. It was nice to be able to gradually get to that place.
Was it difficult to design for that spiraling?
It was actually a great way to do it, because it made it interesting, talking with Kaley and figuring out how we were going to do this. A lot of it was through color palette and texture. There’s this scene where she wraps this sweater — she’s very physical as an actress, so I wanted her to be able to use her clothes as a tool for that, with the AA meeting, and so on.
Kaley Cuoco. Photograph by Phil Caruso
What was your inspiration for her besides her physicality?
Kaley was really communicative. It was really great, we had this sort of open relationship where we’d text each other what we were thinking. She loves clothes, and she’s kind of a tomboy, so we went with that, a little bit of that tomboy chic. I think it suited her, and it suited Cassie and Cassie’s back story. I wanted Kaley to be able to emotionally connect with Cassie through her clothes.
Rosie Perez’s costumes are the real treat here — hats and silk robes and a great trench. What was your process behind her?
Her character was really fun. She’s living in the suburbs, she’s got this stable family. Everything that drives her to make money as a spy is because she just wants things. She wants new shoes. She wants that life she doesn’t think she has, even though she’s very happy. That’s the weird thing, she actually loves her husband, she loves her son. We wanted her to have that [sense of] ’I’m done up, when I’m not in uniform, I’m going to go to the mall and go shopping, and I’m going to put on this trench coat and sneak around with my hat.’ She was a little bit of a chameleon too, in her pretending.
THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT. Rosie Perez. Photograph by Colin Hutton
Then we have Miranda, whose look is dark and chic and simple. She’s the shadow figure. She also felt very tense sometimes. She had this Celine look that had this wrapped belt on the train, and you just feel like, is this woman going to explode? What’s going to happen? So it worked really nicely as a counterpoint, since there’s so much going on, that she was this sort of dark figure, but with little tiny details. She’s got pants that have a stripe on them, so when she’s jumping over a roof, you see it. She was chic. She’s a spy.
Michelle Gomez. Photograph by Phil Caruso
As Cassie gets deeper into trouble, she frequently wears stripes. Was this supposed to hint at a possible prison uniform?
I wasn’t thinking about that, but it does actually work since as we know, she ends up in the clink overnight. We had so many linear things going on with all the split screens, it was a nice way to break it up with just a little visual interest. And her younger self also wears stripes, and you’re always trying to tie the two together a bit, visually.
How about Cassie’s true polar opposite, Alex’s mother, the tweedy Chanel-clad matron from hell?
It was real Chanel, actually. Chanel’s very particular, so if you’re going to reference it, they actually want you to use real Chanel. Especially if it’s mentioned in the script. And I understand. Their fabrications and fabrics are so beautiful and specific, they would be able to tell. People would be able to tell.
In this broad range of looks, where you mostly buying or building?
It was a real mix. All the uniforms were built. We built quite a bit of stuff for Kaley, like her cape. But you’re also sourcing and buying. They were very generous, we had a nice budget. Sometimes you can fake it with cheaper things, but sometimes you can’t. Like that Celine coat is just so beautiful. Sometimes it’s just about the fabric, and even if you found the fabric and constructed it, the amount of time and money it would take wouldn’t be worth it. So it’s a balancing act.
For more on HBO and HBO Max, check out these stories:
This article contains light spoilers for previously aired episodes.
Big Sky, David E. Kelley’s new ratings hit for ABC, which was just picked up for another six episodes, juxtaposes Montana’s sweeping vistas with the bleak interior of a locked away trailer, where an unlikely criminal duo is holding three teenaged girls. Based on C.J. Box’s novel “The Highway,” the crime drama sets viewers up with stunning aerial shots of rural Montana before zooming in on run-down bars, woodsy back roads, and private detective Cassie’s (Kylie Bunbury) downtown office.
KYLIE BUNBURY and RYAN PHILLIPPE in “Big Sky.” (ABC/Darko Sikman)
Cassie gets involved in the case alongside Jenny (Katheryn Winnick), mother to one of the girls’ boyfriends and estranged wife to Cassie’s paramour, ex-cop Cody (Ryan Philippe), after Danielle (Natalie Alyn Lind) and her younger sister Grace (Jade Pettyjohn) fail to end a road trip at the boyfriend’s. The work brings Cassie into contact with state trooper Rick (John Carroll Lynch), interactions that sour quickly and lead her to suspect the creepy cop. Episode 5 aired this past Tuesday, and viewers are well aware that Rick and his dysfunctional truck driver henchman, Ronald (Brian Geraghty) are on a misogyny-driven quest to rid the world of girls they don’t “approve” of, with Danielle and Grace their latest victims, even if these two don’t fit the bill.
KATHERYN WINNICK in “Big Sky.” (ABC/Darko Sikman)JOHN CARROLL LYNCH in “Big Sky.” (ABC/Darko Sikman)
Between the hunt for missing teenagers, the establishing shots of Montana’s wilds and hallmarks of small-town life, and even down to the name, Big Sky comes across as reminiscent of Twin Peaks, but any similarity is coincidental. “That was some of the first really exciting television I remember,” says cinematographer Oliver Bokelberg (Scandal, Station 19), “but I didn’t draw a comparison when this started, no. I guess I could, but it didn’t come up.”
The cinematographer was focused on transforming Vancouver and its surroundings into a believable facsimile of Montana, after having shot the pilot and established a certain color palette in Albuquerque. “Whatever you commit to, you fall in love with, and we saw all these orange skies. That was our big sky. When we came up here [to Vancouver], we were trying to chase that, and it didn’t work — we couldn’t find it,” says Bokelberg. “So you adjust, find something new, and you fall in love again.” Luckily, Vancouver was an overall better fit for Montana, and the camera team leaned into the region’s rain and fog, enhancing the show’s overall sense of doom. (For a bit of the real thing, a second unit was sent to the state for establishing footage. “When you see the eagle flying across the mountain ranges and all of that, that’s Montana,” Bokelberg laughs.)
JOHN CARROLL LYNCH and JADE PETTYJOHN in “Big Sky.” (ABC/Darko Sikman)
It also took some maneuvering to light the trailer where Danielle, Grace, and Jerrie (Jesse James Keitel) are trapped. “When you get a script and it says they’re sitting in the pitch black, that’s always when you start trying to figure out how you can change this,” says the cinematographer, who wound up using yellow bulbs called bug lights to achieve the trailer’s dingy grittiness, after establishing the eery lighting scheme in tone meetings with director Paul McGuigan and Kelley. “We get to interpret pitch black, because we want to see the people, too. It’s a fine mix. How dark can you go?”
NATALIE ALYN LIND and JESSE JAMES KEITEL in “Big Sky.” (ABC/Darko Sikman)
Speaking of seeing people’s faces, the show is nominally set in our present day, with passing reference made to Covid-19. Big Sky’s lonesome rural residents don’t typically don masks, but the same can’t be said of the production, which was shot (safely) over the course of the pandemic, making it perhaps the only show with a storyline both set and filmed during our new era. Overseen by a coronavirus team, the crew worked in double PPE, in masks and face shields, alternating blocking for distance’s sake, and working fewer hours in a day to avoid getting run down. Temperature checks and testing were regular features of the set. “Even six months into it, I don’t know what half my crew looks like,” says Bokelberg. While some of the adjustments, like more efficient shooting days, would be helpful to keep after this pandemic is brought under control, at this point, he adds, everyone’s just glad to be able to keep working.
Whether the show is paying mere lip service to Covid-19 or not, there are no other patrons at Rick and Ronald’s chief meeting point, anyway. The rundown bar-slash-convenience store looks like it could have been scouted anywhere in America, and it was in — in New Mexico. “The interior we just rebuilt up here on stage in Vancouver, literally one-to-one to what we’d fallen in love with in Albuquerque,” Bokelberg says, with the exterior facade built onto a storage shed in Squamish. The exterior set is an inconvenient 90-minute drive into the forest, but “it works well here, with the low-lying fog and the rain. It’s spooky,” the cinematographer says. “I think that’s much of what the show is. All these beautiful vast landscapes — that’s sort of the art of David E. Kelley, that somewhere in that vast beauty, there’s something a little off somewhere.”
Big Sky airs on ABC on Tuesday at 10 pm ET.
Featured image: JADE PETTYJOHN in “Big Sky.” (ABC/Darko Sikman)
