While productions are more or less still on hold across much of the globe (save for Avatar 2, which has resumed filming in New Zealand), there is a lot of big film news lately. Some of that has been made by HBO Max, which officially launched yesterday, and last week announced the 2021 release of the “Snyder Cut” of Justice League. In that news, Zack Snyder, the original director of DC’s biggest film to date (it was taken over halfway through production by Joss Whedon) will be releasing his vision for the film on the streaming service in 2021, complete with new effects, a new score, and, apparently, a new villain. Now Deadlinebreaks the story that Warner Bros. is in talks with Superman himself, Henry Cavill, to take up the red cape again.
You should know that this does not mean there’s a Man of Steel sequel coming your way. Instead, word is that Cavill will reprise the role in another project. Warner Bros. and DC have a bunch of big films already in the can that don’t include Superman—Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 and James Gunn’s Suicide Squad. It also doesn’t sound like there’s room for Superman in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which was about a quarter of the way through filming when production shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That leaves David F. Sandberg’s Shazam 2 and Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam, starring Dwayne Johnson.
The world of Shazam already hinted at Superman—there was a cameo by the son of Krypton at the end of the first film (although he’s not actually seen). Despite it being now three years since Cavill donned the cape in Justice League, there’s a lot of support and love for his take on the iconic character. Seeing him get to reprise a role he filled out admirably, perhaps in a film a whole lot less dark than Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Justice League, could be a lot of fun. Plus, the whole world would love to see a Cavill v. The Rock showdown in Black Adam.
Featured image: Henry Cavill in ‘Batman v Superman.’ Courtesy Warner Bros.
It looks like one of the biggest film projects in Hollywood has finally found a home. After a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating, Deadline reports that Martin Scorsese‘s Killer of the Flower Moon has landed at Apple, with Paramount distributing the film theatrically worldwide. Scorsese’s project is based on the 2017 book by journalist David Grann, the full title of which is “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” The book investigates a series of murders of wealthy members of the Osage people in Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1920s after massive oil deposits were discovered beneath their land. The investigation into the crime helped establish the FBI and was considered a turning point for the country in shedding its frontier past. Grann is a phenomenal investigative journalist; his intrepid “The Lost City of Z” was adapted by James Gray in 2016.
Scorsese’s adaptation, from a script by Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), includes two of his favorite collaborators, DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The project was acquired by Paramount, and then ultimately became the subject of an intense bidding war between the major studios and streamers, including Netflix, who last produced Scorsese’s epic The Irishman. This new deal with Apple and Paramount gives Scorsese what amounts to a dream scenario—the film will get a wide theatrical release via Paramount before it streams on Apple, instantly becoming their most marquee film yet. Deadline reports that one of the key parameters for a deal was that Scorsese, De Niro, and DiCaprio, along with producers Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas, wanted Killers of the Flower Moon to be a “large scale Western.”
This will mark the first time that De Niro and DiCaprio have worked together since This Boy’s Life, in 1993. This is a huge, huge get for Apple, and a great thing for not only Scorsese fans, but all of us who want to see his work on a big screen.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 19: Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio attend The Museum Of Modern Art Film Benefit Presented By CHANEL: A Tribute To Martin Scorsese on November 19, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Museum of Modern Art)
With the launch of HBO Max today, it’s fair to say the new streaming service has entered a very crowded market with some seriously strong momentum. That’s due not only to the huge trove of films, series, and more HBO Max will be offering, but because of what’s coming next year. Yup, we’re talking about the Justice League Snyder Cut, that years-in-the-tweeting dream of seeing director Zack Snyder’s fully-realized vision for the film he had to leave in the middle of production. Snyder and HBO Max announced that release of his special, possibly four hour Justice League cut last week (it’ll premiere in 2021), and now, the director has revealed a glimpse at his new-ish film’s big bad, Darkseid.
Now, for those of you who aren’t fully versed in the specifics of the entire Justice League #ReleaseTheSnyderCut intrigue, here’s a brief recap. The hashtag began trending globally during Justice League‘s 2-year anniversary (the film premiered on November 17, 2017). The film that was released into theaters was co-directed by Snyder and Joss Whedon, who had to step in when Snyder left to attend to family issues. Since that hashtag became a thing, and countless articles and additional tweets kept bringing up the mysterious, mythical Synder Cut, Warner Media eventually heeded the call. Working with Snyder and his wife and producer Deborah Snyder, Warner Media agreed to fund Snyder’s full vision for the film. That includes assembling the cast for ADR (additional dialogue), as well as the original postproduction crew for all of the VFX, score, and editing work that will be necessary. “ReleaseTheSnyderCut first became a passionate rallying social media cry among fans in 2017 and has not let up,” Warner Media said in a press release. “From countless press articles and hundreds of thousands of social media mentions, it became a powerful global movement among cinephiles and comic book fans.”
And now that movement has led us to Darkseid, who is no doubt a big part of Snyder’s vision. Although he was never seen in Joss Whedon’s theatrical cut—the main villain in that version was Steppenwolf, voiced by Ciarán Hinds—it has long been rumored that Darkseid, voiced by Ray Porter, was Snyder’s main bad guy. And now he’s made that official:
It’ll be a while until we see what kind of villain Darkseid is, and how he differs from Steppenwolf, but at least we now know it’s all happening. As we’ve said before, never underestimate the power of a globally trending hashtag.
Featured image: The Snyder Cut is real. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is coming to HBO Max. Courtesy Warner Bros./HBO
Back in early May word got out that Tom Cruise—of course it would be Tom Cruise—was going to be the first person ever to shoot a feature film in outer space. Now we know who will be going on this mission with Cruise, his longtime collaborator Doug Liman, who directed him in Edge of Tomorrow and American Made. Cruise and Liman will be teaming up with Elon Musk’s Space X and NASA to pull this off. (Incidentally, today marks the first time SpaceX will be running the launch of two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station today aboard their SpaceX Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.)
This project is still in the early stages, so there aren’t any plot details to share, but Deadlinereports that this isn’t some pie in the sky notion they’ve dashed off. Cruise and Liman hatched this plan together, and Liman wrote the first draft of the script and will be producing the film alongside Cruise. Both of these guys are pilots, and “bonded over an adventurous spirit,” Deadline‘s Mike Fleming Jr. reports.
How Cruise, Liman, and their SpaceX and NASA collaborators pull this off will be the subject of many feature stories of the future. Training cast and crew to not only make it into outer space but also perform is going to be a huge challenge. We already know that Cruise loves a challenge—and perform some genuinely crazy stunts. These include holding onto the side of a plane as it took off, and piloting his own helicopter during a fantastically insane chase in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. As Cruise’s longtime collaborator and ace stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood says of him, “He just loves his job and wants to be good at it, so the audience is engaged and stays with the character.”
It seems the logical next step in Cruise’s mission to keep the audience engaged requires leaving Earth.
Avatar 2has returned to production in New Zealand after shutting down—along with every other film and TV production, more or less—due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Producer Jon Landau, a longtime collaborator with director James Cameron, shared some details with RNZabout re-starting production:
“We feel very comfortable because of the actions of your government and also the responsibility the people took to really curb the virus there. So we feel we’re coming back to the safest place in the world possible thanks to a team of people that we’ve worked with. We believe we have a very thoughtful, detailed, and diligent safety plan that will keep everybody as safe as possible in these unprecedented times.”
Landau went on to praise the team in New Zealand that’s helping Cameron and the massive Avatar crew get back to work:
“The calibre of talent that New Zealand has and the artisans who are bringing the world of Pandora to life at a higher level and higher quality than one could ever imagine. It’s one of there reasons that we’re so thankful that we started the production there and thankful that we’re coming back. We don’t need the locations of New Zealand to make our movie. We need the people, the talented crew, craftsmen, and technicians who work on the film.”
As for the film itself, Landau hinted that we’ll be seeing a lot more Pandora this time around. He also mentioned as any good producer would, that this film might be the perfect entertainment for when we’re all able to rejoin the world, post-pandemic:
“This is the story of the Sully family and what one does to keep their family together. Jake and Neytiri have a family in this movie, they are forced to leave their home, they go out and explore the different regions of Pandora, including spending quite a bit of time on the water, around the water, in the water. I think, why do people turn to entertainment today, more so than ever? I think it’s to escape, to escape the world we’re in, to escape the other pressures they have in their lives. I think with Avatar, we have an opportunity to allow people to escape to an incredible world with incredible characters that they will follow, in much the same way as Peter Jackson was able to do with Lord of the Rings, so that’s what we’re looking forward to doing.”
The sequels to Cameron’s 2009 Avatar have been a long time coming, but with Avatar 2 back in production, it seems we’re actually getting close to re-visiting Pandora.
Featured image: Concept art for James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ sequels. Courtesy 20th Century Fox/Walt Disney Studios
When Warner Bros. dropped the new trailer for Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet last Friday, we were, to put it mildly, enthused. Nolan’s latest is a sci-fi epic on the scale of his brilliant, beguiling 2010 dreams-within-dreams caper Inception. In fact, according to star John David Washington, Tenet is even bigger. In an interview on Twitch TV on the gaming platform Fortnite, Washington said Tenet was far ahead of even Nolan’s past features: “We’re familiar with [Nolan’s] films, but this seems like something different. It seems like this is where he’s about to take us for the next 10, 15 years of filmmaking,” he said.
In the new trailer, there’s a ton of intriguing stuff happening and all very quickly. We’ve got Washington’s character, simply called Protagonist, joining an elite team of special agents to take part in some time-inverting international espionage. Their goal is to try and stop armageddon from happening. “You’re not shooting the bullet,” Clémence Poésy’s Q-like character says at one point in the trailer, handing Protagonist a pistol, “you’re catching it.” And that’s precisely what happens; Protagonist re-shells a bullet that flies out of a target and back into his gun. It was awesome.
Yet the biggest moment in the trailer belonged to the film’s biggest prop—a 747 jet, which Robert Pattinson’s character explains to Washington’s Protagonist that they’ll need to blow it up in order to pull off their plan. When Protagonist asks him, “how big a plane?” the answer he gets from Pattison is, “That part is…a little dramatic.” We then see a glimpse of this moment—a massive 747 is driven into a hangar at night, and the glories of CGI make it all seem so real.
But wait, what if it was real? Nolan revealed to Games Radarthat when they were prepping the scene, they had initially planned on pulling it off via a more traditional route: “I planned to do it using miniatures and set-piece builds and a combination of visual effects and all the rest,” Nolan says, until he discovered a bunch of older planes on location in Victorville, California, “We started to run the numbers… It became apparent that it would actually be more efficient to buy a real plane of the real size, and perform this sequence for real in-camera, rather than build miniatures or go the CG route.”
Working with special effects supervisor Scott Fisher and production designer Nathan Crowley, the Tenet team pulled off one colossal practical effect. “It was a very exciting thing to be a part of,” Nolan said. Yeah, we bet.
Tenet will be in theaters soon. Or we should say, eventually. The original release date was July 17, 2020, but we’ll let you know more about that when we do.
Here’s the official synopsis from Warner Bros.:
John David Washington is the new Protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s original sci-fi action spectacle “Tenet.”
Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real-time. Not time travel. Inversion.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON and ROBERT PATTINSON and in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action epic “TENET,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon.
There is some good news to savor on this otherwise bleak post-holiday Tuesday; FX has renewed It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for its 15th season, breaking The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet‘s record as the longest-running live-action comedy ever. Of course the gang made TV history!
FX’s gleefully insane, inane, and yet oh-so-brilliantly written and performed stalwart has somehow, miraculously, remained funny and charming for all of these years. The stellar cast—Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, Charlie Day, and Danny DeVito—have made history while appearing to have a genuinely fantastic time doing so. For viewers who have been there since the beginning, you could have been forgiven for thinking “The Nightman Cometh,” that season 4 classic, would have been the high-water mark. Nope, they’ve kept on churning out hilarious episodes, year after year after year after year. How they’ve kept the series fresh over the course of the past 4,015-years is truly incredible. Imagining what they’ll do in season 15 with the grim material that is our current reality is, well, at least one thing we have to look forward to.
How long has this show been on? It began its historic run during the beginning of President George W. Bush’s second term. Think about that. August 2005 was when we introduced to Philadelphia’s most dangerous business owners. Aside from DeVito, who’s been a legend forever, the rest of the cast can count the show as their breakout roles, and even as they’ve all done a ton of other stuff since 2005, they’ve maintained this special series and their irrefutably incredible bond throughout.
Obviously, when It’s Always Sunny can actually start production is unclear at the moment, but the writing process has already begun. You can be sure the gang will deal with the world-changing coronavirus pandemic in the worst way possible, making last weekend’s party-goers in the Ozarks look like paragons of social distancing.
If you’ve not yet dipped your toe in his now record-setting comedy, you’re in luck; every season is currently available to stream on Hulu. That’s a lot of laughs you’ve got to look forward.
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CA – MAY 23: (L-R) Actors Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olson, Danny DeVito and Charlie Day act during a dance scene on the set of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” on May 23, 2007 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images)
We’ve got a new official release date for co-writer and director Edgar Wright’s time-traveling psychological thriller Last Night in Soho. Focus Features will now release Wright’s latest, which he co-wrote with Oscar-nominated scribe Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917), on April 23, 2021. Last Night in Soho was originally due in theaters on September 25, 2020, until, well, you know.
The details surrounding Last Night in Soho are slim, but we know from Wright’s previous work that he’s a genuine master at bending a genre to his own relentlessly ambitious aims. Think about what he did for the heist and car chase genre in Baby Driver, and zombie flicks in his 2004 hit Shaun of the Dead, and buddy-cop procedurals in his 2007 flick Hot Fuzz, and sci-fi thrillers in 2013’s The World’s End. You get the point. Now Wright has set his sights on the psychological thriller, and he’s got a great cast to help him pull it off, including Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, and Jojo Rabbit’s scene-stealer Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie. So yeah, we’ve got high hopes for Last Night in Soho.
Here’s the official synopsis from Focus Features:
The Edgar Wright directed, London-set psychological thriller stars Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma), Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie (Jo Jo Rabbit), Matt Smith (The Crown), Michael Ajao, Synnøve Karlsen, Diana Rigg, Terence Stamp, and Rita Tushingham.
Edgar Wright and Penny Dreadful scribe Krysty Wilson-Cairns co-wrote the screenplay, produced by Nira Park, Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, and Wright. Focus Features and Film4 co-financed the film.
Featured image: Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith in Last Night in Soho. Courtesy Focus Features.
If you’re going to replace Steven Spielberg—and let’s be honest, nobody could ever replace him—you could hardly do better than director James Mangold. Spielberg stepped aside from directing Indiana Jones 5 so that the Logan and Ford v Ferrari auteur could take a crack. This makes Mangold the first person to direct an Indy movie not named Steven Spielberg. Indiana Jonesis currently slated for 2022 release for Disney, and while that feels very far away considering time seemed to have stopped around mid-March, the news about the Mangold-led project sounds promising.
Colliderhas spoken to the film’s producer (and longtime Indy creative) Frank Marshall, who had good things to say about Mangold, of course. On Indiana Jones 5 getting Mangold in the director’s chair, Marshall says that his “love for the franchise” was one key element. Also, the guy’s “a wonderful filmmaker” who happens to also have a great relationship with star Harrison Ford. Meanwhile, Spielberg is not leaving the Indy-verse (apologies); he’ll be staying on as a producer.
As for the script, Solo: A Star Wars Story scribe Jonathan Kasdan and longtime screenwriter David Koepp have just begun. One would imagine that Mangold himself will be an active participant in the scripting process, considering his own considerable writing chops.
Marshall stressed that right now when thinking about getting Indy 5 into production, safety relating to COVID-19 is paramount:
“The number one thing, obviously, is the safety of everybody – the cast, the crew, and all of us,” he told Collider. “So, we’re looking at the guidelines that are coming slowly, from the health experts and the studios and the different parts of the business, and we’re just trying to incorporate everything, so we can move forward and be safe. It’s going to obviously slow things down, so we’re trying to adjust. You won’t see a lot of big crowd scenes, for example, for a while. There won’t be any more craft service, so maybe that’ll be good for people, in keeping more fit. It’s a moving target right now. There are a lot of people working on the solutions, to be able to work and be safe.”
Here’s to dreaming of a future when James Mangold’s Indiana Jones 5 opens to packed theaters in a safe, pandemic-free environment. One can dream.
Featured image: Harrison Ford walks through cobwebs in a scene from the film ‘Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade’, 1989. (Photo by Paramount/Getty Images)
We don’t know when, or even if, the 2020 major league baseball season will happen this year, threatening to leave the beloved Yankee Stadium eerily quiet this summer. Luckily for Bronx residents, MASC Hospitality Group decided to tap into their enterprising New York spirit and bring the borough the block party of a lifetime.
The food-focused event company specializes in food and beverage gatherings like the Bronx Night Market and Bronx Beer Festival. When the spread of COVID-19 began closing the country in mid-March, they were suddenly canceling events that had been planned since October. Rather than fold, they began reinventing. “We won’t be able to do 500 people at an event anymore, but what if that 500 people were 500 cars?” MASC Hospitality partner Marco Shalma wondered.
With people unable to gather, event planning has been hit particularly hard. “We just wanted to let the world know we were looking and give people something to look forward to,” Shalma said. “We wanted to be innovating in a time when innovation has completely stopped and pushing the envelope in a time where it’s almost hard to keep going.” From that brainstorm, the Uptown Drive-In Experience was born.
The term “drive-in” typically connotes a movie screening, but demand quickly drove the idea into something larger. Within days of announcing their plans, more than 20,000 people joined a waitlist to be notified when tickets would go on sale. With such outstanding demand, Shalma and his colleagues soon envisioned a full evening of entertainment.
Shalma described an experience vastly different than a typical indoor movie theater. Each car will receive a “small platter” of food from vendors who have a relationship with MASC Hospitality. Background music will give way to short performances from musicians or standup comics. In the great tradition of drive-in movies, Shalma also has a pre-show audience participation element in mind. “Maybe a game presentation or karaoke where 200 cars are singing. I was thinking about playing New York, New York. I’m just visualizing that,” he said dreamily.
As for the feature presentation, Shalma is hoping to screen New York-themed flicks like A Bronx Tale, Mean Streets, or King of New York. “Some classic, old school New York movies,” he added. “Sometimes we’ll do short films based in New York or the state.” Shedding a light on local short films would be a warm tribute to a state that has always been a leader in film production and devastated by COVID this year. In 2018, New York’s film production created over 105,000 jobs and contributed more than $12 billion in wages to the economy.
As for the iconic location, MASC Hospitality had previously booked a parking lot outside the Yankee Stadium to host the Bronx Beer Festival. It will now host the drive-in movie event. As a normal parking lot, the space can hold 700 cars. Shalma said they would limit entrance to 200 cars and space them each 10 feet apart to guarantee proper COVID precautions.
The ambitious project has garnered an overwhelming response. The concept is unlike anything MASC Hospitality Group has previously tackled, but to that end, Shalma has an entirely New York attitude. “For us, throughout the years, we haven’t done anything until we’ve done it. You don’t know how to do something and then you go and do it and now you know how to do it.”
If you’re within driving distance of Yankee Stadium and want to join the thousands of interested moviegoers, you can subscribe now. MASC Hospitality announced that discounted early bird tickets will go on sale Sunday morning, May 31. However, there may be a chance to get a jump on sales if you’ve been on the frontlines of the pandemic. Shalma says priority parking and free tickets will be reserved for first responders. Good news for the general public, however. Ticket prices will be all-inclusive and depending on your carload, will likely cost less than an average indoor theater. That’s the drive-in benefit of pay-by-car over individual ticketing.
Adapting to this uncertain era is difficult, but communities pulling together are allowing for magic moments where people can find ways to gather and enjoy movies together. “There are a lot more people willing to contribute right now and be involved and volunteer,” Shalma said gratefully. “So we can give back and share something with the community and really put smiles on people’s faces.”
Listen, we got the memo about social distancing. Really. But the houseguests are really starting to proliferate, and I’ve run out of courtesy masks.
Let me tell you who’s over right now. Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, that’s who. Man are they yuge. And you know who was also recently over? Doron Kavillio, the most dynamic counter-terrorist agent I’ve ever met. He’s a stubbled tough guy who smokes so many cigarettes it was hard for us to see the living room sometimes. We love all his friends too: the sweetest group of ninja soldiers able to kill targets that you could ever hope to meet on a sunny day in Tel Aviv. I’m especially fond of Amira, a dark-haired interrogator whose user-friendly line of inquiry can get even the most hardened cases to ’fess up.
We had a terrific recent visit with Esty, a 19-year-old Jewish woman who had a lot of trouble in her ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn. I guess this is out already, so it’s okay to spill: She’s hiding out in Germany, on the run from her husband, and looking for her long-lost mom. We especially appreciated her taking off her sheitel to show us her shorn hair.
I’ll have to breeze through some other recent and recurring guests. The seriously ripped Uhtred, a Saxon who was raised by Vikings (now there’s a backstory), who promises to return. I must get the name of his physical trainer. Other current houseguests include two of the most adorable Neapolitan young women ever created: doe-eyed Lenù and pouty Lila whose pluckiness despite having the short end of the patriarchal stick is very inspiring.
We always have time for Marty and Wendy Byrde, a lovely husband and wife, but we worry about them. They’re obviously caught up in something.Always stealing off to check their phones. Word is, they’re connected to some kind of Mexican cartel. We just hope they don’t bring that business into our house. Same with Jimmy McGill, although now he’s going by the name Saul Goodman. Lovely man. We’re very fond of his dynamic lawyer-wife Kim Wexler too. But he’s in deep trouble, too, with some shady people. If things ever calmer for him, I do plan to talk to him about his serious vocal fry. Again, we worry.
If it isn’t already abundantly clear by now, I’m talking about characters in TV shows like The Last Dance (albeit real-life characters), Fauda, The Last Kingdom, Unorthodox, My Brilliant Friend, Ozark, and Better Call Saul. I could mention so many more – and so could so many of us in TV controller-clicking lockdown.
They come over, they spend time in our hearts, sometimes weeks or even months. But then sadly they’re gone. It feels like a real loss. Saying goodbye to Carrie Mathison and Saul Berenson of Homeland, that was a tough one because we knew they weren’t coming back. (No, nothing we said.) But there’s every indication they’re still working together and doing what they do best: warding off threats to the American heartland, so there’s always that.
(L-R): Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison and Jacqueline Antaramian as Dorit in HOMELAND, “Prisoners of War”. Photo Credit: Sifeddine Elamine/SHOWTIME.
We love them. They’re getting to us so much, they are actually coming alive in our brains and staying there, even more so than they did before.
“I’m just so sad and depressed about [character name withheld to avoid scene spoilers],” I tell my wife about a tragedy that takes place in Season 2 of Fauda. That’s the show with Doron, by the way. I felt the same way about Beocca in The Last Kingdom, a priest from back in the days of King Alfred who was over at our house for a long spell. Won’t say what happened, but it shook us up.
Now, my wife is no sports fan. (Once when I took her to a professional soccer game in a stadium she said “Everyone is so loud.”) But she and I are both entranced as we continue to watch The Last Dance, which is ESPN’s edge-of-the-seat documentary about the Chicago Bulls’ iconic run of form in the 1990s, as well as a fascinating rumination about Michael Jordan and the inner game of celebrity.
“I like that guy Doug,” she says to me at one point.
“Who?” I ask.
“You know,” she explains. “The tall coach of the Chicago Bulls.”
“Oh, close,” I say. “You mean Phil Jackson.”
MIAMI – APRIL 2: Michael Jordan #23 and Phil Jackson of the Chicago Bulls look on against the Miami Heat on April 2, 1996 at Miami Arena in Miami, Florida. Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)
This is not to gloss over the incredibly tragic loss of human life and the devastating effect the Covid-19 Era has had on the film and television industry, not to mention the entire planet. But on another level, our former busyness of life all too often interrupted the life of the mind. We were forever having to put down our mental tools, and get to the studio, the office, the movie theater, the store, the bar, the restaurant, or wherever we work.
Right now, that life of the mind – the story viewing mind. – never had it so good. We are giving so much more of ourselves, and for longer periods of time, into these fictional characters and their dilemmas, as we sit glued to screens on our iPhones, laptops, and TVs. They are mattering to us perhaps in ways they never mattered before. This experience of letting the stories seep into our souls is one of the most positive outcomes of this global crisis.
By investing more time with fictional houseguests, we are investing more time into thinking about our own lives. These visitors are inspiring us to workshop our own humanity. While theater owners are rightly concerned about what this may or may not portend for theater-going, it’s certainly a good push for the power of entertainment. A lot of people will remember how these shows and movies weren’t just time diversions; they were lifelines to our sanity. When we get back to the real world, one fine day, more people than ever will recognize that entertainment is more … than entertainment.
Featured image: DETROIT – 1989: Michael Jordan #23 of the Chicago Bulls drives to basket against the Detroit Pistons during the 1989 season NBA game in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)
If you want a one-word reason for why there simply is no substitute for seeing a film in a movie theater, we give you Tenet,Christopher Nolan‘s latest. Nolan is one of those filmmakers who relishes the opportunities the biggest screens and the most pristine sound systems can deliver. This is why, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe and productions and movie theaters worldwide were closing, Nolan penned this tribute to movie theaters and the folks who work at them for the Washington Post. Now Warner Bros. has delivered the new trailer for his latest film, and it reminds us, once again, how eager we are to get back to watching movies on the big screen once it’s safe to do so.
“As I understand it, we’re trying to prevent World War III,” says Clémence Poésy’s character at the start of the new trailer, swiftly setting up the stakes for Nolan’s latest sci-fi epic. Tenet stars John David Washington as the Protagonist (yup, that’s what they’re calling him), a man who plunges into the world of time-inverting international espionage to try and stop armageddon from happening. “You’re not shooting the bullet,” Poésy’s Q-like character says later, “you’re catching it.” And that’s precisely what happens; the Protagonist re-shells a bullet that flies out of a target and back into his gun. Yup, we’re firmly in Nolan Country, and we’re so happy to be back.
Tenet will doubtlessly recall Nolan’s Inception, which played with the notion of dreams-within-dreams in a massive, ingeniously crafted sci-fi caper that firmly established him as one of the most ambitious filmmakers alive today. Like the lead-up to that film’s release, Tenet is not going to reveal many of its secrets in the trailer. Yet as we’re all itching—safely and smartly, one hopes—to re-enter a world in which you could see a Christopher Nolan movie in the theater, Tenet feels like the perfect film for whenever that occasion arrives. Co-starring alongside Washington is Robert Pattinson, playing his partner in their attempts to save the world by “catching the bullet.” You couldn’t ask for two more charismatic leads. Joining Washington, Pattison, and Poésy are a bunch of stellar actors, including Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, and Nolan’s longtime collaborator Michael Caine.
Check out the trailer here. Tenet was due in theaters on July 17, but the trailer leaves out any specific release date. We’ll let you know when we do.
Here’s the official synopsis from Warner Bros.:
John David Washington is the new Protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s original sci-fi action spectacle “Tenet.”
Armed with only one word—Tenet—and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real-time. Not time travel. Inversion.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) ELIZABETH DEBICKI and JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action epic “TENET,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Ever since Charlize Theron pulled off one of the great lead performances in an action movie in Mad Max: Fury Road (in our humble estimation, the action movie of the century) playing the literal road warrior Furiosa, we’ve thrilled at seeing her in roles that utilize her action chops. She was dynamite in David Leitch’s Atomic Blondeand was the villain to beat all villains as Cipher in The Fate of the Furious that same year. Now, she’s starring in Netflix’s latest action epic The Old Guard, from director Gina Prince-Bythewood and based on the graphic novel series of the same name by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernandez (and adapted by Rucka). The first trailer reveals Theron as Andy, the leader of a covert group mercenaries who have some very special skills, one of which is they’re essentially unkillable. They’ve been around for a long, long time, plying their deadly trade in the shadows. Until now. In a world that’s become increasingly hard to disappear in, Andy and her titular Old Guard are on the run. A new potential recruit, Nile (If Beale Street Could Talk‘s Kiki Layne) might be the key to their survival.
With a cool concept, a great cast (joining Theron and Layne are Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Harry Melling, Van Veronica Ngo, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Chiwetel Ejiofor), the key to all of this is director Gina Prince-Bythewood. She did incredible work in Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights, and it’ll be great to see what she’s done here with such a stellar cast and a cool story.
Check out The Old Guard trailer below. It’ll premiere on Netflix on July 10th.
Here’s the synopsis from Netflix:
Led by a warrior named Andy (Charlize Theron), a covert group of tight-knit mercenaries with a mysterious inability to die have fought to protect the mortal world for centuries. But when the team is recruited to take on an emergency mission and their extraordinary abilities are suddenly exposed, it’s up to Andy and Nile (KiKi Layne), the newest soldier to join their ranks, to help the group eliminate the threat of those who seek to replicate and monetize their power by any means necessary. Based on the acclaimed graphic novel by Greg Rucka and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (LOVE & BASKETBALL, BEYOND THE LIGHTS), THE OLD GUARD is a gritty, grounded, action-packed story that shows living forever is harder than it looks.
In a truly shocking announcement yesterday, HBO Max revealed that they were releasing Zack Snyder’s Justice League cut in 2021. The brand new streaming service—launching on May 27—will be showing Snyder’s version of the film in what The Hollywood Reportersays could be a four-hour director’s cut, or, possibly, in six different TV-style chapters. Snyder is reuniting with his original postproduction crew to work on new visual effects, score, and edit his vision for the film.
Here’s a portion of what Warner Media had to say about the legitimately surprising news:
“After global passionate fan calls to action and the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement, HBO Max and Warner Bros. Pictures announced today that it will exclusively world premiere Zack Snyder’s director’s cut of the Warner Bros. Pictures/DC feature film Justice League in 2021. Snyder surprised fans with the news this morning during a live online commentary of his film Man of Steel with Henry Cavill. #ReleaseTheSnyderCut first became a passionate rallying social media cry among fans in 2017 and has not let up. From countless press articles and hundreds of thousands of social media mentions, it became a powerful global movement among cinephiles and comic book fans.”
“I want to thank HBO Max and Warner Brothers for this brave gesture of supporting artists and allowing their true visions to be realized. Also a special thank you to all of those involved in the SnyderCut movement for making this a reality,” said Snyder.
Then, three of the film’s stars—Henry Cavill, Jason Momoa, and Ray Fisher revealed their own excitement via Instagram:
Once again, the power of the hashtag reveals itself. It’s incredible to think that two years after #ReleaseTheSnyderCut trended worldwide on Justice League‘s two-year anniversary, this is happening. As THR reported, Warner Bros. chairman Toby Emmerich called Synder and said, “This is real. People out there want it. Would you guys ever consider doing something?”
That something will be a completely novel alternate release of a major motion picture on a streaming platform four years after the film was released. The Snyder Cut will require Snyder and Deborah Snyder, his wife and producing partner, to pull off some feats worthy of Superman himself. They’ll need to figure out how to assemble the cast for ADR (additional dialogue) and their original postproduction crew for all of the VFX, score, and editing work, and do so during a global pandemic that has essentially shuttered filmmaking worldwide. Yet the fact that Warner Bros. and HBO Max are behind this means that this can, and will, happen.
“It will be an entirely new thing, and, especially talking to those who have seen the released movie, a new experience apart from that movie,” Snyder told The Hollywood Reporter. He also told THR he still hasn’t seen the version of Justice League that was released into theaters in November of 2017.
“When Zack and Debbie shared the extraordinary vision of where Zack wanted to take Justice League, my team and our counterparts at Warner Bros. took it as a mission to solve the many issues that stood in the way,” said Kevin Reilly, Chief Content Officer at HBO Max, President, TNT, TBS, and truTV, in the Warner Media release. “Thanks to the partnership at Warner Bros. and the relentless pursuit of the entire WarnerMax team we are able to deliver this incredibly exciting moment for Zack, the fans, and HBO Max.”
“Thanks to the efforts of a lot of people, we’re excited to bring fans this highly anticipated version of Justice League,” said Toby Emmerich, Chairman, Warner Bros. Pictures Group, in the same release. “This feels like the right time to share Zack’s story, and HBO Max is the perfect platform for it. We’re glad the creative planets aligned, allowing us to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut.”
Joseph Stephens is the composer behind Danny McBride’s HBO series The Righteous Gemstones, and he helped craft one of the show’s funniest moments—the song “Misbehavin”—which he co-wrote with McBride and co-star Edi Patterson. In the show, “Misbehavin” is performed by the sibling musical duo of Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) and Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles). Watching it now feels like a musical blast from an alternate dimension when laughs were easy to come by and the sight of seeing musicians perform shoulder-to-shoulder was commonplace.
In a sense, the contours of Stephens’ working life haven’t changed that dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic froze life in place for all non-essential workers, and mothballed film and TV productions all over the globe. Because his work is done during post-production and is performed largely in the studio in his home, pandemic work looks a little like pre-pandemic work, if superficially.
“I’ve got my ups and downs, it’s not truly that different from my normal day-to-day,” he says. “I work out of a studio from my home. There are times where I don’t leave my house for days on end. Yet everything is so odd, shopping, people walking around outside of my house nonstop. The weather’s nice and that helps, there’s some pros and cons, but mostly cons.”
Stephens’ studio
Thinking back on brighter times, Stephens recalls the creation of “Misbehavin,” which happened in a dervish of collaborative creative energy.
“In the script, there’s this backstory involving Baby Billy Freeman (Goggins) and Aimee-Leight (Nettles) where ‘Misbehavin’ is this song they made famous when they were kids in the 1960s,” he says. “You see an album cover in the background that hints at it. As Gemstones progressed, they decided to make this song a reality within the show, and that’s when Danny tasked me with writing it. The only real direction he gave me was that the song would be called ‘Misbehavin,’ that it was originally performed by kids, and that it should sound like it’s from the 60s. Danny and Edi [Patterson] had been spitballing ideas in the writer’s room, so Danny sent me a voice memo of Edi singing part of the song. That was what I ran with. I sat down for about three hours, put everything into a chord progression, wrote a bunch of lyrics, and created a whole narrative. Then I sent them this demo with me playing guitar and singing to Danny, and it never really changed after that. It was so much fun, getting into this 60s vibe, kind of like a Johnny Cash song, but sung by kids.”
Stephens and McBride have been working together for a long time, including on Vice Principals and Eastbound & Down, so their shorthand is well-tuned, and their mutual trust is total.
“I’ve had ideas I’ve pitched for projects that get completely rejected,” Stephens says. “I think obviously Danny and I know each other very well, our sensibilities are the same in a lot of ways. I understand what he wants, but he also gives me a lot of latitude to experiment. So when after I sent ‘Misbehavin’ to him, we met for a lunch meeting and I asked what I should change about it, and he said don’t change anything. We’d both fallen in love with it. The rapport he and I have does have a lot to do with it.”
Stephens recently scored Mindy Kaling’s new Netflix series Never Have I Ever, and he says the key to the composer/creator relationship is understanding precisely what people are looking for. “If I know what they’re looking for, I can find my way through it and have fun with it. The more notes you get, the more it gets picked apart, that’s where a lot of pieces of art or creative things kind of lose some of their punch. I’m hesitant to say that totally, because you look at the Disney movies or musicals which have a ton of credited musicians, and they obviously work on so many levels, so it’s not true for all films, but for me, for whatever reason, I haven’t gotten a lot of pushback. We have stuff that we’re working on for season two of Gemstones that’s very different, song-wise, that have all been pretty well received.”
Our conversation turned to the music he was inspired by growing up. Stephens grew up playing guitar and loving the legends—Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Neil Young. “I was into singer-songwriter types, people that have stories to tell, like Nick Cave. That’s very firmly in my background and informed my musical foundation in high school and college. Then after college, I got into weirder territory, experimental stuff, scores, nonvocal. For something like The Righteous Gemstones, there’s a certain kind of aesthetic that needs to happen, as it’s supposed to be from a certain era and cover certain ground, and it needed to represent a specific piece of the backstory for these characters. That was more involved then I’d done in the past. I’ve written songs for end credits where I was asked for a certain vibe to get across, something mysterious, poetic.”
We turned to a legendary singer-songwriter who recently died due to complications from COVID-19, John Prine. He didn’t have the same name recognition of a Dylan or a Neil Young for the masses, but his loss rippled all through the music community and revealed not only his phenomenal legacy but legions of Prine fans online.
“There’s a lot of guys out there who missed Prine,” Stephens says, speaking about himself and his interviewer, who only started listening to Prine after he passed. “He was one of those guys I discovered later in life. When I listen to Prine now, the lyrics, the structures, they’re all just really stunning. I feel lucky in a way I’m discovering him now. It’s just beautiful. I’m jumping around different albums and you can tell the change in his voice after his surgery [Prine had surgery on his neck following a diagnosis of squamous cell cancer], you can also identify what era in his career these songs are coming from. The later stuff, he never really let up with his ability to craft super great lyrics and put them in progressions that are still interesting.”
As for The Righteous Gemstones, they were a week into filming season two when everything got shut down. In his downtime, Stephens has been doing some maintenance on his studio, which he says he neglected for too long, and he’s been writing, too.
“I’ve read seven of the nine episodes for season two, and there’s a good deal of onscreen song material that’ll need to be written,” he says. “Who knows when it’ll come back, but I’ll keep my ducks in a row. It doesn’t ever really feel like work, and now there’s not really deadlines, which is kind of a bad thing for me. I don’t mind a deadline.”
Featured image: Adam Devine, Danny McBride, John Goodman and Edi Patterson. Courtesy HBO
The news broke last week that Timothy Olyphant would be joining season two The Mandalorian, Disney+’s wildly popular live-action Star Wars series. Then, /Film shared the scoop that Olyphant’s mysterious character will be wearing—wait for it—Boba Fett’s iconic armor. But hold on, it doesn’t appear that Olyphant is playing the legendary bounty hunter who first appeared in The Empire Strikes Back, as that role seems to have already been filled. Confused yet?
The Hollywood Reporterconfirmed that not only was the Deadwood and Justified star Olyphant joining the cast of The Mandalorian‘s second season but that Temuera Morrison, the actor who played Boba Fett’s father Jango Fett in George Lucas’s prequels, is also joining the cast, presumably to play his cloned son from those films in the series. That means Morrison is playing Boba, but then if Olyphant is wearing Boba’s armor…
This is where things become pure speculation, and where you should stop reading if you’re looking to go into the second season knowing nothing.
So, the theory of how Olyphant can don Boba Fett’s armor but not be Boba Fett is if he’s playing a totally different character from the Star Wars canon that had done just that—Cobb Vanth. Vanth first appeared in Chuck Wendig’s trilogy of novels, “Star Wars: Aftermath.” In those, this minor character is a lawman. Yet he’s a very particular lawman—he was once a slave, and after freeing himself, he managed to get his hands on some beaten up Beskar armor from some Jawas that the novel implies belonged to Boba Fett. You’ll recall that Fett was swallowed—presumably, to death—by the sarlacc in Return to the Jedi. Now, technically, we’ve never had Boba Fett’s death confirmed, but things that go into the sarlacc’s dusty, fanged, massive mouth don’t usually come back out again as anything other than bones.
So Vanth uses Boba Fett’s armor in the books and becomes the protector of a small settlement called Freetown on Tatooine. This sounds like a role that Olyphant could do in his sleep, considering how ably he embodied the morally stout but ready-to-rumble Sheriff Bullock in Deadwood.
If Olyphant is Vanth and Morrison is Boba Fett in some capacity, then there’s an infinite number of potentially intriguing storylines that would force these two together. For example, if the notorious bounty hunter and law un-abider Fett somehow survived the sarlacc but without his armor, and then found some other dude using his armor to be a cop, well, we imagine he might have some issues with that.
Featured image: The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) in his ship the Falcon Crest. Courtesy Walt Disney Studios
What does a freelance film critic do when there are no films to release? For South Korea’s Youn Sung-eun, the situation forced her hand to dive into a new business venture earlier than she anticipated – only this time she’ll be the one creating the content.
“I’m not naturally an optimistic person, so I don’t think people will return to the cinema as they used to. I had been planning a new business for a while, but with the coronavirus situation, I realized I should hurry to make online content.”
Sung-eun’s new venture is a production company for webtoons, digital comics that are easily read on a variety of devices and optimized for smartphones and tablets – hugely popular in South Korea, along with online TV drama shows and mobile games.
“I started as a one-person business, but now I’m searching for writers so that I can operate much like writers agency, and I’m working with a webtoon drawing artist company and various businesses.”
The focus on webtoons is a practical one. Webtoons, unlike scripting for film and television, is a faster process.
Sung-eun says she’s splitting her time between this new business, and some of the more traditional film criticism that once kept her busy. “Maybe being a film critic is no longer an ideal job in Korea, more like a part-time job, so I’m trying to focus on my new business now.”
Highly respected for her film criticism, and a familiar face at film festivals (she has moderated Motion Picture Association film workshops and pitching competitions during the Busan International Film Festival), Sung-eun regularly appears on radio and television to give her expert opinion on independent Korean films.
Youn Sung-eun (top middle) moderated the MPA / Asia Pacific Screen Awards / Busan International Film Festival Pitch Competition in Busan in 2015.
“I continue to appear in the media. They check our body temperature at the front gate and provide hand sanitizer, and of course, we wear masks… except when I talk on screen.”
With theatrical releases all but dried up, Sung-eun was recently called on to write a review for director Sung-hyun Yoon’s Time to Hunt, a gritty, dystopian film originally planned for a theatrical release but now on Netflix.
While feature film production was, for the most part, put on hold, it appears that many of the popular television series have found workarounds to continue shooting throughout the country’s lockdown.
“I’m curious! I heard that no other country has managed to do this. I found it strange given Koreans are kind of obsessed with health issues. Many actors and actresses did not pause for rest throughout the coronavirus situation.”
Sung-eun says that the industry is working through formal production guidelines coordinated by their leading industry body, the Korean Film Council (KOFIC), which sits under the Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism. She, like many in the industry, has been surveyed to provide input into the guidelines.
The more we talk, the more it seems Sung-eun fits into her busy day. Along with fellow film critic, Darcy Paquet (known for providing the English subtitles on Parasite, and a previous contributor to Variety and Screen International), she’s curating the Wildflower Film Awards, a grassroots effort to recognize the achievements of Korean independent and low-budget films.
It’s hosted on May 22, and we’re all ‘virtually’ invited. Not surprisingly, the ever passionate Sung-eun is happy to share her love of Korean films with the wider world.
Like nearly every other industry, the filmmaking world has undergone an unprecedented global shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve been talking to filmmakers all over the world to find out how they’ve been handling the stoppage in work, making the most of their quarantine, and their hopes for the future. Those interviews have included chats with Indian filmmakers Tannishtha Chatterjee and Priyanka Singh, Filipino filmmaker Keith Sicat, and Thai filmmaker Nirattisai Ratphithak.
Featured image: Youn Sung-eun moderated the MPA-BIFF Film Workshop in 2015
Remember four and a half million years ago, last July, when Marvel revealed that Mahershala Ali would playing Blade in a new film about their half-vampire superhero? It was another lifetime and a very different world, but that doesn’t mean that Ali isn’t still hyped to play the character whenever we’re finally able to get back to making movies and enjoying a semblance of regular life. Ali shared an illustration of himself as the daywalking vampire-hunting superhero, and it’s a thing of streamlined beauty:
It’s unclear whether this glimpse at Blade is direct from a Marvel concept artist or just something Ali whipped up himself. Regardless, this is a character we’d very much like to see in the near future, on the big screen no less. You can see just a hint of Blade’s fang in the image, reminding us that he’s a very different kind of Marvel hero.
Ali is taking on a role first made famous by Wesley Snipes way back in 1998, in director Stephen Norrington’s Blade. Snipes was excellent as the half-vampire, half-mortal protector of humanity, yet at the time, superhero movies were in something of a middle period. There was that game-changing run in the late 70s through the 80s with some legendary comic-book films, most notably Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman and Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. Those films were colorful, occasionally campy, but also technically brilliant and gorgeously constructed. By the time Blade hit in 1998, superhero films were moving towards realism, and Snipes’ fanged protector felt new. Here was a black actor in the central role, playing a hybrid vampire creature who could hunt in the daylight. The best film in the Blade trilogy was 2002’s Blade II. The final film in the trilogy, Blade: Trinity, hit theaters in 2004. Little did anyone know that only a year later the superhero genre would enter a brand new phase with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins.
Meanwhile, Blade’s future was dimming. There was a brief TV series, Blade: The Series in 2006 starring Sticky Fingaz. It lasted for one season. Once the rights to Blade reverted to Marvel Studios, our vampire-hunter seemed to be at eternal rest. Until last July’s Comic-Con.
While all our best-laid plans have been dashed during the pandemic, Marvel will eventually get back to making movies, and Ali as a revamped (pun intended) Blade will be a big part of that. Until that happens, we’ve got this illustration and our imaginations, the latter getting a real workout these past few months.
Featured image: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 20: Mahershala Ali and President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige at the San Diego Comic-Con International 2019 Marvel Studios Panel in Hall H on July 20, 2019 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
Lesli Linka Glatter has spent the last several years being alarmed by what she’s heard in intelligence briefings. This doesn’t just set her apart from many of the current apparatchiks in Washington, but also from many of her fellow directors. Not because her colleagues lack the capacity to be alarmed, but because her work as a director and an executive producer on Showtime’s Homeland would bring her, on an annual basis, to something that series creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa would call “Spy Camp,” in the D.C. area.
There, the creative team—producers, writers, and performers—would meet with intelligence officials, in what Glatter calls “an amazing, amazing experience, also terrifying.” There, the group would ask them “What keeps you up at night? What’s your biggest fear?”
(L-R): Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison and Jacqueline Antaramian as Dorit in HOMELAND, “Prisoners of War”. Photo Credit: Sifeddine Elamine/SHOWTIME.
One of the answers that really surprised them was that “Russia is everywhere,” this coming about seven years ago after they’d figured, as Glatter put it, that “Russia was over.” And yet investigations of hacked elections and multi-pronged social media manipulation were still a glint on the horizon, even if the series was able to incorporate a lot of those ideas first.
Lesli Linka Glatter and Claire Danes on set of ‘Homeland.’ Courtesy of Showtime.
In fact, the series finale even ends in Mother Russia, with Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison pulling a kind of “triple-axle” character arc. Glatter directed that last episode and called it “an amazing responsibility, a terrifying responsibility,” thus emulating some of the emotional ups and downs of Spy Camp itself. Particularly as “the whole intention of this season was to come full circle” to its starting point.
Lesli Linka Glatter on the set of Homeland. Courtesy Showtime.
In that first season, Nicholas Brody, a Marine Corps sniper, played by Damian Lewis, had just come back from a long captivity by al-Qaeda. The question then was whether he’d been “turned.” And with that circle, it’s a question that haunted the show again, after Mathison returns, in the last season, from captivity in Russia.
War, meanwhile, brews in the Mideast as the American President’s chopper has gone down in Afghanistan.
Given that the series was born out the anxieties and aftermath of 9/11 while being based on the Israeli TV series Prisoners of War (which was the title of Homeland’s final installment), Glatter notes that part of that full circling was to ask “what America learned since 9/11?” especially “given what we’re in right now from this horrifying pandemic.”
Glatter doesn’t need to go to Spy Camp anymore to hear how people are working behind the scenes to deal with, and head off further crisis; she’s also currently on the DGA’s COVID-19 Task Force. They are trying to figure out how (when) to reopen the business of making shows.
“The world has to calm down a bit more, we don’t have a national policy,” she observed, perhaps understating the case. And while she mentioned the DGA was working with epidemiologists,she wasn’t at liberty to talk, yet, about what the specifics of a “safe set” might be, at least from an official Guild perspective (the IA, SAG-AFTRA, and other entities would all have to come to an agreement on this, too).
The news, then, really, is that alas, there is no specific news about when production, as we knew it, might resume.
“Everyone wants to get back,” she agreed, “but I don’t see how anyone can give a timeline at this point. There are so many smart people working on this. Everyone is trying to figure this out. We’ll find a way to be back,” she concludes.“I feel like I’m a realistic optimist.”
Another thing she keeps working on figuring out is how to get more women into directors’ chairs, particularly on TV sets.It has been perhaps a tad harder to stay unreservedly optimistic about that. She started directing after an Oscar-nominated short brought her to the attention of both Steven Spielberg and David Lynch, and episodes of Amazing Stories and Twin Peaks followed.
Lesli Linka Glatter and David Lynch on the set of ‘Twin Peaks.’
Originally, though, she’d planned on a career in dance and choreography, but it was a grant to perform abroad that changed everything. It led to her to places like Paris and London, and eventually the Far East, and specifically Japan, which she describes as “life-changing, like being dropped on another planet.”
The true life change came when she found herself in front of two different coffee shops one morning, in dire need of a cup. In a Robert Frost-like moment of choosing paths, she “picked the one on the right.”
In the crowded shop, she found herself waved over to an open spot on at a table by an older man, “which was a little unusual,” she allows. He was 75, she was 25, and he’d been a war correspondent, Buddhist monk, and was currently head of cultural affairs for Japan’s largest newspaper.
They spent hours talking, and as their friendship grew, he told her stories from different wars. Glatter knew she had to do something with them. “I thought maybe it was a theater piece,” she says, but then came another chance meeting with George Miller, yes, that one, of Mad Max fame, and he convinced her what she had was a film.
And eventually, after applying to the AFI Directing Workshop for women, which she didn’t think she qualified for since she was lacking previous credits, she made it. The resulting film, Tales of Meeting and Parting, was “three-fourths in Japanese, had flashbacks, was partially set in WWII (and) had one Caucasian actor,” and as unlikely as that was, eventually had its Oscar nod in the short film category in 1985. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“No one has the same path to directing,” she reiterates. “You have to learn the things you don’t know. (But) we never stop learning; we’re always learning.”
Right now, she’s waiting to learn when she can head to Hungary to direct her series for Amazon, The Banker’s Wife, about the machinations of international finance, money laundering, and more. She’s unpacked her bags once, and now stays in touch with cinematographer John Conroy, who recently won an ASC award for his work on the series The Terror.
“Even though we’re shut down, I have a weekly conversation with him,” she says. They look at films together, exchange photographs, and work toward coming up with “a visual style with the story we are telling.” Which shares, with Homeland, the fact it’s also a political thriller.
And in that genre, in particular, she says, “there’s a level of anxiety in absolutely everything.”
Which might be said of life in the 21st century, as well.
Featured image: (L-R): Lesli Linka Glatter on the set of Homeland with Mandy Patinkin. Courtesy Showtime.
New images and a new poster remind us that there is a world in which director Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot reveal Wonder Woman 1984to us in a theater. Whether or not that world exists in 2020, well, that’s yet to be determined. The current release date for Jenkins and Gadot’s highly anticipated sequel is August 14, 2020, after the original release date of June 5 began untenable due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The new images are a hoot, plunging us into Diana Prince (Gadot)’s new world—1984 America. That was a time of big hair, shoulder pads, Ronald Reagan, and the belief that nothing in the world was as important or fair as unfettered capitalism. Luckily, that version of America gets to have a Wonder Woman there to right some wrongs.
Joining Gadot and her magically returned paramour from the original film, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) are two new antagonists. The first is Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), otherwise known as The Cheetah. The second is Max Lord (Pedro Pascal), as a super capitalist and budding villain himself.
We’re very excited to see Jenkins’ and Gadot back in the saddle, whenever that turns out to be. For now, check out the new images and posters here:
