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:
Composer Brandon Campbell remains busy despite the worldwide shutdown of just about every film and TV production due to COVID-19. “I’m doing alright, all things considered, ” he says. Although he can’t give us the names of his current projects, he’s got two he’s still scoring and a third that might follow. Campbell’s relatively full plate makes him one of the lucky ones in the film and TV world at the moment, but it’s still a precarious position. “I’m fortunate that at least right now I’m staying busy. I’m anxious and curious to see how this summer will pan out because nothing’s in production right now.”
Campbell recently took part in our first virtual event, Film School Friday, alongside fellow filmmakers who were also trying to make the most of the slow down in work. Campbell joined Star Trek: Picard actress Tamlyn Tomita, Fear of the Walking Dead cinematographer Andrew Strahorn, and Watchmen writer Stacy Osei-Kuffour to discuss their craft amidst this unprecedented stoppage of work. They also discussed how they got to the point in their careers where they could take part in a virtual panel and discuss work that millions of people have seen.
Campbell’s story of how he became a working composer in Hollywood is camera-ready itself. He came to California the day after he graduated from the University of Rochester to become a tech assistant at the legendary Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions. While there, he began collaborating with Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi, with whom he’d ultimately collaborate with on that hugely popular show and one of HBO’s other extremely ambitious series, Westworld. Campbell went on to work on CBS’s Person of Interest, A Wrinkle in Time, and more. He recently scored Apple TV’s reboot of Amazing Stories and Netflix’s The Letter for the King.
While COVID-19 has essentially frozen film production, some work continues on series and films that were already shot, as Campbell’s own day-to-day attests. He says that because post-production is already a fairly isolated endeavor, with people working in small groups or alone, some of this work can carry on. Yet there are still significant limits.
Brandon Campbell in the studio
“One thing that’s been affected on my end is if I wanted to hire a live orchestra right now, it takes a little bit of creativity for that,” he says. “The only thing I can do here in Los Angeles is to ask musicians record from home, so if I have feedback, unfortunately, they have to go back and re-record stuff. Yet it’s actually been working great for small ensembles and solos. For larger scale orchestras, some places have slowly opened. I think in Berlin they’re recording up to 20 musicians at once, in Prague, about the same thing. So we can record sections of the orchestra, like violas and violins, then in a separate section do the bass, then the brass, so it’s not ideal, but it’s a workaround.”
Campbell charts his career path as taking a considerable turn around the time he was working on CBS’s Person of Interest. “That was really towards the beginning of my career, it’s when I transitioned from a tech assistant to writing full time,” he says. “I wasn’t just helping out on the music tech side, preparing parts and getting stuff out, but actually writing music. Most of the music fell on me for that show.”
Scoring Netflix’s sprawling new fantasy series Letter for the King was another big milestone. The show tracks the quest of a young knight in training named Tiuri (Amir Wilson) whose mission is to deliver a secret letter to the king in an effort to thwart the machinations of a ruthless, evil prince. [You can listen to snippets of Campbell’s work here.]
“I’m proud of The Letter For The King score, and that we did this more western-influenced type of music; trumpets and guitars, it’s just so not expected, but then once you get used to it, I can’t imagine the show without it,” Campbell says. “In episode two, when our main character rides through this valley and rides out onto the top of a hill and sees bad guys, it’s a big music moment, no dialogue, and it starts off with this spaghetti western type of vocal, then the full orchestra comes in, and the showrunner absolutely loved that scene. The Letter For the King was a big one for me, and while that was going on Amazing Stories came together, then several other projects. So it’s the first time in my solo career where I have some kind of momentum, with one project lined up after another. It’s been very recently in the last year or so.” That was, of course, until everything stopped.
Campbell fondly recalls starting off his career at Hans Zimmer’s studio and meeting Ramen Djawadi. “I was his tech and writing assistant for four or five years when I took my first step out of the door,” Campbell says. “We get along really well, we’re really good friends, he was a groomsman at my wedding. He’s also kind of my mentor in a way, when I write a piece of music, if it’s not working for him he’ll explain why, so I get to see how to approach film and music through his perspective, which was wildly helpful. I saw the way he ran an orchestral session and the way he ran his business, which is actually a big part of it. He’s helped me transition to the next phase of my career.”
Campbell’s background isn’t that of the pure music geek. He grew up loving film scores, but he never imagined a career in it. He was just as into sports as he was into listening to orchestral music, and he went to college to play soccer. The one thing that may have made you wonder if this athlete was a budding composer was the fact that, between soccer practices, he was listening to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack.
“The University of Rochester has an amazing music school, so I doubled majored in economics and music composition, with the latter really just a creative hobby for me,” Campbell says. “When I was stressed out, I wrote music on the side for myself. While I was in school, I knew someone who knew someone at Hans Zimmer’s studio, and I got an internship winter break of junior year, which led to a summer internship, which led to a paid position. Hans Zimmer was a massive inspiration for me, him and John Williams were the composers I listened to the most often. Once I stepped foot in that internship, I knew it what’s I had to do with my life.”
When he was growing up, the scores that got to him were Back to the Future, Braveheart, Forrest Gump—hallmarks of a kid of the 80s and 90s. Yet Campbell also says that the first time he heard the soundtrack for Lawrence of Arabia, director David Lean’s 1962 epic, he was hooked. “I was like, ‘Oh my god,” he says. He had the same feeling the first time he heard E.T. “Even at 9 or 10 years old, the music grabbed me.”
Then there are Zimmer’s scores, like his work on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. “This is when I started thinking that there’s actually someone who has written this music for a movie and it’s incredible,” he says. “Then I first showed up in Los Angeles, Inception had just come out [directed by Christoper Nolan and scored by Zimmer]. That was another score that just blew me away.”
Now it’s Campbell’s turn to blow people away with his work, which he fully intends to continue to do…whenever work starts back up again in earnest.
Featured image: Amir Wilson in THE LETTER FOR THE KING. Photo by Nicola Dove/Netflix
The first glimpse at Spike Lee’s new feature Da 5 Bloodsis here, and it immediately claims our attention as every Spike Lee joint does. Da 5 Bloods sees the tirelessly inventive, always curious Lee delivering a Vietnam war movie, a caper, and a story of brotherhood all in one. Lee directed from a script he co-wrote with Paul De Meo, Danny Bilson, and Kevin Wilmott. Wilmott recently shared an Oscar with Lee fro co-writing their excellent BlacKkKlansman with fellow scribes Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz. Da 5 Bloods looks like a possibly perfect mixture of Lee’s strengths and gives us perhaps something to look forward to as we head into a very uncertain summer season.
Da 5 Bloods follows four Vietnam war veterans returning to the country to search for the remains of their squad leader. That leader is played by Chadwick Boseman, and the scenes of Boseman and the four soldiers during the war are shot in a format that appealingly recalls films from the era, and iconic Vietnam films like Apolcalypse Now, which gets referenced here. The soldiers, as older men are played by Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.,) return to Vietnam not only out of a profound sense of duty; they’ve also got treasure on their minds. During the war, they came upon a huge cachet of gold, and they buried it with the promise of coming back to retrieve the loot later.
The trailer sees Lee doing what he’s done so incredibly well over his career—take America’s brutal history of racial strife, and the political and social fallout from our collective refusal to face this history, and use it as fuel for narratives that play out on city streets (Do the RightThing), in suburban basements (BlacKkKlansman), and now in the jungles of Vietnam. The trailer for Da 5 Bloods leaves no question who the filmmaker is—it could only be a Spike Lee joint—and it gives us a reason to look forward to June 12, even if in an ideal world we’d be watching this film in the theater.
Check out the trailer here:
Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:
From Academy Award® Winner Spike Lee comes a New Joint: the story of four African-American Vets — Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) — who return to Vietnam. Searching for the remains of their fallen Squad Leader (Chadwick Boseman) and the promise of buried treasure, our heroes, joined by Paul’s concerned son (Jonathan Majors), battle forces of Man and Nature — while confronted by the lasting ravages of The Immorality of The Vietnam War.
Featured image: Key art for Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods.’ Courtesy Netflix.
What if a Silicon Valley behemoth ran a top-secret project that threatened the well-being of unwitting civilians? That’s the not entirely outlandish premise underlying Devs, now streaming on FX on Hulu. Created by Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland, the sci-fi limited series largely takes place at a sleek big tech “campus” surrounded by woods.
DEVS — Pictured: Forest set. CR: Raymond Liu/FX
The exteriors evoke Google, Apple, and Facebook headquarters, but the fictional “Amaya Corporation” also incorporates weird twists to reflecting the obsessions of its revered founder Forest (Nick Offerman). Trees are encircled by halo-like rings of light while a floating “Cube” provides workspace to researchers attempting to master time and space; The entire enterprise is dominated by a giant sculpture of a six-year-old girl that looms over the campus like a saucer-eyed Statue of Liberty.
The colossal sculpture of Amaya, the company’s name and namesake of the dead child at the heart of the series. Courtesy FX.
Filmmakers staged interiors in Manchester, England, and shot exteriors in the Palo Alto area. To burnish the bucolic northern California locations with surreal touches, Garland turned to production designer Mark Digby. BAFTA-nominated for his contributions to Slumdog Millionaire, Digby, who previously teamed with Garland on Ex Machina and Annihilation, talks about how he and his collaborators nudged big tech architectural aesthetics to the next level.
What was your creative brief for the look and feel of Amaya, the tech company at the heart of the series?
We wanted the architecture and the setting to reflect current Silicon Valley tech companies. We also talked about Amaya Campus being the next incarnation of those companies with interior playgrounds and exotic meeting spaces. We found this powerful modernist science-based concrete geometric campus that was, importantly, set in a Californian Redwood forest. That setting allowed us to impose strong visuals of the natural redwood trees with the man-made elements.
Like Apple headquarters, Amaya is super-sleek and surrounded by greenery. Did you visit Apple in Cupertino?
Yes. We looked at all the leading players in Silicon Valley. “Integrity research” is an important element of our design approach.
Adding mystery to the Amaya campus is the giant sculpture of the little girl that looms over the campus. How did you develop that sculpture?
Amaya was fully created through computer modeling and visual effects. A child actress was scanned and photographed in a few poses We then chose the pose, the size, and the photo-realistic look with our visual effects team led by Andrew Whitehurst. It was a big technical challenge because a structure of that size has all kinds of shadow and lighting implications during shooting, and the tone of its texture is very important.
The trees at Amaya seem to be encircled by rings of light. Were those lights added digitally or built practically?
The lights around the trees were practical. Alex, [set director] Michelle Day and I had initially gone down the route of doing Christmas tree fairy lights or carnival lighting threads, but then we decided to do something more visually and dramatically interesting. Achieving the rings practically was wildly challenging because it required a big electrical build by the practical lighting team led by Kevin Fitzpatrick and the on-set lighting team led by Lee Walters.
The floating “Cube” building connects to a corridor leading to the outside world via this glass elevator evidently supported by an invisible force field. It’s all very elegant to look at but must have been complicated to create.
The lift needed to move as if floating across the void with a dock on either side. It had to have working practical doors, and it needed to have enough structural integrity to safely carry actors and crew 20 feet above the studio floor. The Devs floating building that the lift docks onto has a specific geometry known as Menger Sponge.
Since the lift stood between the floating cube and the entrance corridor, we reduced any lines, joins, or pillars that might obscure or distract the visual throughline looking from the corridor through to the floating cube. All the framework around the door and door mechanics were made as slim or invisible as possible. It was also important to film simple traveling and action/drama scenes in what could have otherwise been a claustrophobic environment if the walls had been made of non-see-thru material. A glass-walled cube was our solution. There’s nowhere to hide people or equipment in a 360-degree room, but creatively we’ve always embraced the visual opportunities that come from transparent and reflective surfaces, so we felt well equipped to deal with that.
DEVS — Pictured: Cube set. CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
How did you get the lift to look like it was floating?
We placed the 12-foot cubed glass and metal structure on a giant trolley, which was later removed with CGI in post. It sits 15 feet off the ground and rolls when pushed manually, across the void before docking perfectly on either side. This required highly precise construction of the lift and its rolling mechanism as well as the docking points on the main sets of the corridor and floating cube. Anything less than perfect would show as a shudder and undermine the quality of the Devs building that we, as the audience, are buying into.
The glittering quantum computer at the heart of the mission possesses an almost mystical grandeur, in keeping with the CEO’s ambitious quest. What went into the design of this showpiece computer?
The starting point is the quantum computer technology that actually exists, so we went to see the real machines. They were far larger and more visually stimulating than we expected, with very fine circuitry, cooling tubes, wires, and highly finished materials including gold, aluminum, glass, and copper. It looked like a fine chandelier in shape and composition. We then took all of that even further to multiply the scale and magical beauty. Our final piece was more than 12 feet high and five feet in diameter, heavy but also very delicate. Its fabrication required craftsmen, 3D printing, laser cutting, fine lathe and metalwork, mirror quality metal surface polishing, complex electronic circuitry, delicate ally pipes with replicated bends, and intricate steel wirework. We transported the piece from our workshop in London to a studio in Manchester and from there, installed it at the Devs studio set 20 feet in the air, which was challenging.
DEVS – Pictured: Devs set. CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
Additional to real-life quantum computers, what did you draw on for visual inspiration while designing the Devs machine?
We looked at historical and modern architecture, cathedrals, mosques, temples, grand lighting, and chandelier designs. We studied fine art structures and sculptures, fluid motion, motion photography, jewelry, microscopic organisms, interstellar photography, fine electronics and so much more. Our computer needed to be elegant and finely crafted, like a giant piece of practical electronic jewelry.
Featured image: DEVS “Episode 8” (Airs Thursday, April 16) — Pictured: (left) Sonoya Mizuno as Lily. CR: Miya Mizuno/FX
Unlike Snowpiercer the train, which hurtles non-stop around the globe during a post-apocalyptic Ice Age, Snowpiercer the series has encountered numerous stops and starts en route to its May 17 premiere on TNT. Based on Parasite‘s Oscar-winning co-writer/director Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 film adaptation of a 1982 French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige, the TV version of Snowpiercer was initially developed by writer-producer Josh Friedman (Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles, War of the Worlds), who spent two years fleshing out the storyline. Sets were built and actors cast for the pilot episode shot by director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange).
But in early 2018, Snowpiercer screeched to a halt when Friedman and TNT parted ways over “creative differences.” Orphan Black creator Graeme Manson came on board to re-boot the entire show with Hamilton star Daveed Diggs and Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly remaining in place. The series premieres this Sunday, May 17 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Then, three episodes into the new iteration of Snowpiercer, costume designer Cynthia Ann Summers departed, and Vancouver-based Caroline Cranstoun joined the production. She now oversees the wardrobe that helps define the class divide between rich people swathed in luxury at the front of the train and the drably attired poor folks who inhabit “the tail.”
L-r: At the front of the train are Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly) and Ruth Wardell (Alison Wright). Photo by Justina Mintz/TNT.L-r: At the back of the train are Andrey Layton (Daveed Diggs) and Josie Wellstead (Katie McGuinness). Photograph by Justina Mintz/TNT
Stepping into the production mid-stream proved to be something of a challenge, Cranstoun recalls. “I had to put together a very big crew and at first it was kind of like, ‘What am I doing? This show is huge!’ There was a lot to get a handle on in a short period of time but I had total support from the Snowpiercer team and after a few months, I realized I had made the right decision and was thrilled to be a part of such a creative team.”
Among Cranstoun’s chief tasks: making sure that impoverished passengers in the back of the train, like Diggs’ Andrey Layton, dress in a suitably downtrodden fashion. “That has a lot to do with our breakdown department,” she says. “They’re a lovely and talented group of artists who add texture to the costumes with paints. They add highlights and low lights to give the clothes a very worn look. It takes a great deal of time and manipulation because when we do the fittings, we often use new pieces. Then, the aging is done afterward.”
“Tail” dwellers wear earth-toned cotton and wool because, Cranstoun explains, “Textiles made of natural fibers age much more nicely than synthetic fabrics.” In terms of palette, she says, “We don’t have black in the tail and we don’t use anything very light either. We use a grey-brown palette with a very small amount of muted color to bring the clothes to life. The environment designed by production designer Barry Robison also gives us this very dark, scavenged feel.”
At the front of the train, “first-class” passengers flaunt their wealth. “We want it to be very obvious that these are the rich people so we use jewel-toned clothes that look clean and crisp,” Cranstoun says. “They’re at the top of the pecking order so they embellish themselves in furs and jewelry so everyone can see they have the best, the most, the finest.”
“Hospitality” staffer Melanie Cavill, played by Connelly, wears a blue quasi-military uniform when she announces rules and regulations through the train’s public address PA system. Cranstoun singles out the actress as being an especially thoughtful performer. “Jennifer Connolly thinks things through very carefully. She inspired me with her work ethic and was very collaborative in [figuring out] ways the costume could be worn and used.”
L-r: Sam Otto, Daveed Diggs, Jennifer Connelly, and Alison Wright. Photograph by Justina Mintz/TNT
Snowpiercer marks an intriguing mid-career milestone for Cranstoun, who started sewing at age nine not long after being exposed to the outrageous costumes worn by Cher on her TV variety series. “One of my earliest memories as a kid is watching the Sonny and Cher Show, seeing Cher’s costumes and going, ‘Oh my god!’ They were so over the top and fantastic.”
Later, Cranstoun took fashion courses at Kwantlen University College n British Colombia, then worked her way through the wardrobe department ranks to become costume designer on long-running Superman show Smallville and other series filmed in and around Vancouver. Until recently, costuming gigs have flowed steadily but in March, production on Snowpiercer‘s second season shut down due to COVID-19 concerns. Cranstoun describes a sense of déjà vu as she observes real-world catastrophes mimicking the worst-case sci-fi scenario dramatized in Snowpiercer. “It kind of makes you go: ‘Wow, I feel like I’ve seen this before,” she says. “There have been so many [post-apocalyptic] shows and films we’ve seen over the years that were interesting to watch and now all of sudden you’re going ‘Wait a minute, this is weird.’ It’s a strange time, that’s for sure.”
Featured image: L-r: Daveed Diggs and Sheila Vand in ‘Snowpiercer.’ Photo by Justina Mintz/TNT
At this point, all news surrounding the reopening of our economy, and film productions, in particular, is incredibly fluid. Yet a new report from Varietyat least suggests that studios are seeing some potential to begin filming—or in many cases to resume filming—in the near future. Variety’s Marc Malkin has the exclusive that The Matrix 4 cast has signed eight-week extensions, keeping the actors available until at least July 6. That includes original Matrix stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity respectively, as well as newcomers Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Brian J. Smith, and Neil Patrick Harris.
Filming had begun on Lana Wachowski’s fourth installment in her groundbreaking sci-fi saga back in February, starting in San Francisco and then moving to Berlin in mid-March. You know what happened next—production was halted on this and essentially every other film due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Matrix 4 is currently slated for a 2021 release, but like all films that were halted mid-production (or never got out of the pre-production phase), the release schedule is fluid, too. Thus far, Warner Bros. hasn’t specified an exact release date for the film, yet with news of the cast extensions, there are hopes the film might re-start production in July. If that happens, perhaps The Matrix 4 does hit theaters (oh please let there be theaters!) next year.
We were living in an entirely different world when the news that The Matrix 4 was happening, last August. At the time, Warner Bros. Picture Group chairman Toby Emmerich shared his excitement about the project with Variety: “We could not be more excited to be re-entering The Matrix with Lana. Lana is a true visionary — a singular and original creative filmmaker — and we are thrilled that she is writing, directing and producing this new chapter in The Matrix universe.”
It’s exciting to hear that Warner Bros. thinks there’s a universe in the near future where The Matrix 4 gets back to filming.
Featured image: Carrie-Anne, Moss Laurence Fishburne, and Keanu Reeves standing against brick wall in a scene from the film ‘The Matrix Reloaded’, 2003. (Photo by Warner Brothers/Getty Images)
Years and years ago, before “meme” wasn’t even a word, before the internet itself, I was teaching a college film course called Critical Approach to Cinema. The title alone stood as a warning that it was time to get attentive to the art of film.
One of the movies I showed the class was Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I knew that getting them to watch a film whose slow and deliberate unfolding of sound and image would require wholesale changes in their viewing reflexes. If I could sum up in today’s jive what I tried to tell them it amounted to: chillax your [posteriors], pull over into the slow lane, and learn to enjoy the ride, baby.
They watched the movie. They wrote in their journals. (Also long ago, people wrote in textbooks with pens and paper. Ask your parents.). The response was almost universally the same: the movie was “too slow.”
I admit, I was frustrated. I had fantasies of actually sending them up into spaceships where they’d really learn what chillaxing was. I can’t help thinking of that now, as we have been forced to explore and expand the boundaries and bandwidths of our patience as life minimizes our options.
Could this be the time to recommend everyone sees 2001? And could this also be the time to recommend 10 movies that, most of the time, might have felt too slow, too contemplative, too friggin’ spiritual, to watch? I have taken the liberty of answering those questions in the affirmative.
Of course, you should start with Kubrick’s masterwork. That will get you a straight “A,” should I ever teach again. (Uh, I won’t. I’ve read 500 too many journals to ever return to academe.)
So let me move on to 10 films that ask things of you, starting with a chiller viewing metabolism. This is because they are spiritual in theme, or more deliberative in pacing, or maybe a mix of both. I’m merely suggesting that, with a lot more time on your viewing hands, these movies might affect you differently, might find you in different places.
If not, then please feel free to text 2SLO.
In no particular order:
Atarnajuat: The Fast Runner (2001: R; 161 minutes): Winner of the 2001 Camera d’Or at Cannes, this was the first feature made in the Inuktitut language, and also the first with an almost entirely Inuit cast and crew. It’s a mythic shamanistic melodrama set thousand years ago in the settlement of Igloolik near the Arctic Circle, in which the title character finds himself in a tribal rivalry that forces him to run for his life. It’s mesmerizing and powerful.
Into Great Silence (2007; unrated; 162 minutes): Maybe you’ll never be ready to watch a nearly three-hour German documentary about the monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery praying, reading the Bible, or simply sitting in quiet contemplation. But the whispering of snow outside, the occasional clearing of a throat and – sweet mercy! – the clanging of a bell summoning the befrocked Carthusians to prayer reached my ears with a resounding purity.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring (Unrated, 103 minutes) I guess you could say the title is kind of a spoiler alert. Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk’s Buddhist fable is the account of a long life from boyhood to adulthood, told in seasons, and representing an evolution through the straits of folly and sadness to dawning consciousness and rebirth. With heart-stopping setting, gorgeous images, and a lovely little story, it’s about the slow boomerang trajectory of existence – the way it curves away from you and yet ever toward you. In Korean with subtitles.
Rivers and Tides (2003, unrated, 90 minutes): Director Thomas Reidelsheimer follows environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy as he constructs his own sculptures entirely from nature. Built into the concept of these creations is the ephemerality of time and nature: these works made of driftwood, ice, leaves, stones, or twigs, are usually destroyed by rising tides, wind, and so forth. “When I make a work, I go to the very edge of its collapse,” says this Scottish sculptor whose awe-inspiring process made me think of the Buddhist sand mandalas which are deliberately destroyed after they are created.
The Straight Story (2000; G; 111 minutes): One of David Lynch’s most underrated movies. It’s about 73-year-old Alvin (Richard Farnsworth in the role of his life) who travels from Laurenz, Iowa, to Mount Zion, Wisc., to visit his ailing brother and patch up a 10-year feud. His land speed? Five miles an hour. He can only afford to make the trip on a 1966 John Deere lawnmower. Like the mower under Alvin, the movie cuts a swathe directly to the heart. Lynch’s movie, serenely bereft of postmodern cynicism, is about what’s best in people.
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2005; G, 83 minutes): In this sweet little documentary, these cherry-headed, blue-crowned and mitred charmers are escapees from opened bird cages or transportation compartments at airports around the US. They have also become the fluttery friends of the ponytailed Mark Bittner, a San Francisco musician-turned-Francis of Assisi, who looks after, and spends most of his time with, them. It’s a beautiful story of lost souls finding one another in a new home.
My Own Private Idaho (1991; R; 105 minutes): Director Gus Van Sant’s tone poem is a respin of Orson Welles’s Shakespearean film Chimes at Midnight, with homeless youth conversing in bard-speak. The late great River Phoenix exudes sleepy, princely naivete as a chronically narcoleptic loner who drifts into private oblivion all the time. “This road,” he says of the route that he returns to with surrealistic repetition, “it probably goes around the world.” He is speaking as much about the movie as the road before him.
The Road Home (Wo De Fu Qin Mu Qin)(2001; G; 89 minutes): Zhang Yimou’s fable-like story is about an 18-year-old woman who is giddily in love with her village’s 20-year-old new teacher. Filmmaker Zhang, screenwriter Bao Shi and cinematographer Hou Yong have taken a small tale – we’re talking about a burial and an old story, not much more – and made it almost transcendental. There are few faces more delicate and arresting than Zhang Ziyi as the young woman in love. She sticks like a daguerreotype to your retina – and then your heart.
Into the Wild (2007; R: 148 minutes): Sean Penn’s movie tells the story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who abandons his upper-middle-class life and family to live in complete solitude in the Yukon in the early 1990s. The film, based on Jon Krakauer’s bestselling nonfiction work, pulls you into the slow circling spiral of the central character’s mission, not just to experience majestic loneliness but to discover his true identity. And Hirsch gives the perfect performance: all gritty determination as he tries to reclaim his spot in the Garden of Eden.
Babette’s Feast (Babettes Gæstebud) (1987; G; 102 minutes): Gabriel Axel’s Danish film won the Oscar as Best Foreign Language film. Set in 19th Century rural Denmark, it follows a mysterious Parisian woman (Stéphane Audran) who takes a job as a housekeeper for a pair of dour, elderly women who run a congregation. After working for them for 14 years, she wins a lottery and uses the money to prepare a sumptuous meal for the women and the congregation. A former chef, she makes this meal her own personal masterpiece. This film is not only guaranteed to make you want to order a huge meal. It’s also beautiful as a parable for life’s lost opportunities. In Danish and French with subtitles.
Featured image: A scene from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ In the film, the sentient computer HAL is the villain. Courtesy ASC/MGM.
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, and Filipino filmmaker Keith Sicat.
Today, we chat with Thai filmmaker Nirattisai Ratphithak about his path from public health to filmmaking, the state of the Thai film industry, and how the pandemic is giving him a change of perspective.
Tell me about your background—how did you get into filmmaking?
When I was young, I used to watch films with my grandfather out of curiosity. The films were in English, which I wasn’t able to understand at all, and I couldn’t catch the subtitles either, so my grandfather helped me to understand the film. Then my mother used to read bedtime stories to me. Before I knew it, we had a house full of books. I used to imagine how these stories could end differently or imagine how different stories can be combined together. I started to experiment with different ways of storytelling. I tried drawing and writing. And lastly, I tried the motion pictures. I fell in love with filmmaking. To quote Mark Twain, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” I felt that it was my purpose to tell the stories. With motion pictures, there are no limits to my imagination.
Yet you didn’t initially start out studying film…
Right, I studied public health because of my family, especially my mother. In Asian culture, being a doctor or an engineer is considered more respectable with a more stable income. Being a filmmaker is not.
How did you convince your family you had to follow your dreams?
After having fights with my family countless times, I gave up fighting with them. I had to study public health even though I am afraid of blood! Secretly, I still had plans to make films. I broke down when I had to suture wounds and give vaccine shots and take care of any blood-related operations. I was struggling to keep my mind straight. I was almost fainting every 10 minutes. It wasn’t fun at all. I realized that I had enough.
And you were studying and making films on your own at this time, too?
In my early years, I shot my films with the help of my friends who studied public health. I asked everyone to volunteer, to hold the camera, and to act. Most of my films during that time were health campaigns to promote and educate people about exercising and not drinking when driving. Looking back, the films weren’t good due to the lack of skills and experience. After learning from my failures, I kept studying from books, masterclasses, online classes. I saved money to enroll in the film course at Bangkok film school. I continued to experiment. After that, I attended the University of Wisconsin’s student exchange program for a semester, with the hidden purpose of finding any opportunity to study film, because I had no chance of really studying it in Thailand. It was my first time studying film in person and not with books or online. I was excited.
Budding filmmaker Nirattisai Ratphithak
Tell me about the thriller you wrote. How did you come up with the concept? How long did it take to write?
Who’s the Liar is the working title for the thriller in development. The inspiration came when I bought my life insurance. In case of death, the insurer will pay a sum of money to your beneficiaries. But I realized that I wouldn’t need that money which I could never use. That became an idea of the main character of this film who tries to claim his life insurance money when he is still alive. Unfortunately, he isn’t the only one who wants that money. While it has been developing for more than a year, I am hoping that a producer will pick the project up soon.
Who are the people in the industry you look up to? Favorite films? Favorite directors?
Personally, my film Idol is Nattawut “Baz” Poonpiriya who directed Bad Genius (2017) which is also my favorite film. It’s a thriller about students cheating on tests. The first time I watched his film, I was at the edge of my seat. The director took the risk of coming out of the Thai film comfort zone which are romantic comedies, comedies, and horror. The film was the highest-grossing Thai film of 2017. It was also loved by international audiences.
What do you love about it?
Nattawut’s style makes the film intense and suspenseful. He also sprinkled in comedy and a little mixture of romance. He was able to mix all the features together seamlessly. I was amazed that even though he had a lot less budget than many western films, he was able to express his ideas and execute the story he wanted. With his skills and his work, he set a new standard for the industry. Then there’s The SecretLife of Walter Mitty (2013) by Ben Stiller, another favorite of mine. The film is an adaptation of James Thurber’s 1939 short story. The film is very inspiring. It adds new meaning and a new value to life. I felt like I want to make a film that makes my audience feel the same way.
What is it like making films in Thailand?
In Thailand, the productions are more flexible and negotiable compared to the US or Korea where the time and the schedule are more strict. Due to the lack of time and the amount of workload, we might not be as well prepared. Instead, we need to focus a lot on solving problems on the spot. The Thai film industry as a whole lacks support from the Thai audience. The audience would choose foreign films instead of Thai films when it comes to the cinema. With the lack of support, Thai films are getting less budget from the investors.
However, many Thai films are being distributed to other countries, both in cinemas and online, and are getting positive feedback. This draws the attention of overseas investors, which gives us more opportunities. I hope this makes our industry stronger as a whole and gets us more support from Thai people.
Tell me about how your work and life has changed since the spread of COVID-19? How are you handling it?
Since the epidemic started early this year, the productions are on hold. Since there are no productions, we are focusing on the pre-production aspects. Scriptwriting is now my focus since I couldn’t go outside. We’re getting more time to prepare. However, a lot of people are being affected by the virus, especially the production crew. With the lack of income, a lot of us are saving money and hope for the best.
Do you think this pandemic will change the way you work? Or change the industry?
There will definitely be a change. We can clearly see that we need more safety and health measures. For example, cleaning the equipment, taking the crew’s temperature, etcetera. This could help us lower the chance of the virus spreading. A lot of the filmmakers are now switching to online conferences instead of meeting in person, which saves time and resources. However, there are concerns with the cinemas. Since the spread of COVID-19, the cinemas have been closed. Many people turned to online sources which would change the culture of film watching. As the audiences are watching separately, there might be new inventions that could satisfy the audience, such as the use of VR to mimic the experience of watching in a cinema.
What positives have come up out of this pandemic for you?
The pandemic can be difficult for a lot of people. But as a workaholic, I feel that this gives me a breather and gives me a chance to rest, which improves both my physical and mental health. I can take time to find new inspirations and watch the films and TV shows that I haven’t had a chance to. I could also take more time to write and prepare for my future films.
Nirattisai won the MPA Script to Screen Film Workshop in Thailand in 2019.
Featured image: L-r: A friend and Nirattisai Ratphithak. Courtesy Nirattisai Ratphithak.
In part 2 of our interview with the costume designers for Amazon Prime’s anti-hero superhero series The Boys, Laura Jean Shannon and Carrie Grace talked about the mechanics as well as the artistry involved in creating the superhero costumes—and the titular Boys’ more regular-guy clothes—for the hit series. Each super-suit requires a ton of work and enough duplicates that the actors and stunt performers can keep looking good. Season 2 of The Boys will be available later this year.
The Boys has a lot of action. What does that mean in terms of the number of doubles of each suit that you have to have, and how do you design the suits to make sure that the actors and stunt people can move the way they need to in the action scenes?
Laura Jean Shannon: I always say: They play superhero suits on TV. But in real life, they’re actually unconventional materials and custom fabrics fused together in interesting ways, in innovative ways. We start by creating a design that not only takes into account making it look like a badass superhero suit but knowing that this is not a massive film where we have a giant CGI budget, where you can basically paint everything in we need to. This is a TV project that has a limited amount of time and money and resources to get each episode, and each episode is chock full of fighting and violence. So, we really need to make these suits wearable, and the actors and the stunt people really need to be able to wear these suits comfortably enough that they can facilitate all of this action.
And how do you do that?
Laura Jean Shannon: Each suit has a very different technological approach, and we make multiples of each one of them. We have several suits for each actor and stunt person so that while we’re shooting our fight sequences, we can swap suits out while one is being repaired. Each suit has very different needs, in terms of keeping it looking spiffy and ready to roll. And then, of course, there’s also crazy things that the writer’s room dreams up, that the directors are all excited to shoot the hell out of, that require even more work on our part to create different molds and sculpt things that we can add to the suit, panels that we can take out and replace for various needs, depending on the script and the scene.
Can you give me an example?
Laura Jean Shannon: Homelander’s suit was created in this very classic superhero way. Antony Starr wears a suit that is foam latex, like a rubber that the fabric is fused onto, so his musculature is actually part of the suit, and he slips right into the whole thing.
Chace Crawford is The Deep and Antony Starr is Homelander. Photo by: Jan Thijs. Courtesy Amazon.
Queen Maeve has her armor corset that looks metallic, but we actually created out of a semi-flexible lightweight resin. Pretty much every single one of the characters has at least a handful of sculpted elements on their suit, be it their belts or their inlaid stars, or their eagle epaulets. The way that we create those pieces is different per piece. For instance, all of Queen Maeve’s pieces were actually created by conventional sculpting techniques. I had this amazing sculptor working at Creative Character Engineering using her artistry to create each one of those pieces by hand. But a lot of other pieces, like the eagle epaulets for instance on Homelander, are done in a 3D model, and I’ve gotten really good at letting go of having everything done conventionally and classically, and learning how to read those 3D models. Part of what makes that really helps is that we scan each of our actors. So, the 3D models that we make are all created literally right on the body of the actors themselves. Oftentimes we’ll rescan them with their muscle suits on, if necessary, as well. So basically, the same approach is taken when we do our model in the 3D digital platform.
Dominique McElligott is Queen Maeve. Photo by: Jan Thijs. Courtesy Amazon.
How do you approach the challenge of making what the messy, un-heroic-looking guys wear communicate to the audience that we’re supposed to root for them?
Carrie Grace: Butcher (Karl Urban) is a total scoundrel, and I love the irony of him being the one who’s almost all in black because he looks like the bad guy, but he’s actually complicated. Since I was the designer for the first two episodes, I had the honor to design the costumes for Butcher, for Hughie (Jack Quaid), and Frenchie (Tomer Capon). They were the real people. They were supposed to look like real people. Butcher was certainly the underbelly; he looks like he’s a sleazy guy. The intention was to give him the look of a sleazy guy who can’t be trusted. But in a world where the heroes that are there to protect us really aren’t, it’s almost like he becomes the person to look to. He steps out of the system. He’s rejected the system of normalcy that everyone’s trying to promote.
Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), Butcher (Karl Urban), and Frenchie (Tomer Capon). Photo by Jan Thijs. Courtesy Amazon.
And then Hughie with his normalcy, he’s the underdog, the everyman. He is almost like a lost soul who doesn’t know what his purpose is, and then Butcher gives him this purpose. Then there’s Frenchie—a rogue, psychotic, drug-addled weapons expert, and is, I think, one of the most interesting characters in the comic book. And to have this ragtag crew, who are saying, “There’s something wrong here,” and owning it in their own way. They become the superheroes in some ways, to me.
Each one has a signature jacket. Butcher’s got his long coat and Hughie’s got his 60’s-style racing jacket, and Frenchie’s got his military jacket. Those jackets, to me, become their capes. They turn them into archetypes, and it becomes their uniform. Each of them has a signature look under that cape of sorts. Butcher wears these Hawaiian shirts, which are off-putting and confusing with the rest of this look that he’s got going on. He looks like a total tough badass but he’s wearing this Hawaiian shirt. Is he laughing at us? Is he messing with us? I love that confusing detail about him.
Then with Hughie, he’s always wearing his classic rock or band t-shirts underneath his grunge-style, or his chambray shirt from work with a hoodie and corduroys, just that kind of slacker look. His jacket probably came from a Salvation Army or Goodwill. He grew up without money. It was next door to the record store. I always try to come up with a backstory about where they got their pieces of clothing. With Butcher, one of the backstories was that when this is all over, he wanted to retire on the beach. That’s not one that I came up with, that was Dan Trachtenberg, who directed the first episode. He’s the one who suggested the Hawaiian shirt and I was not on board with it at first. Then I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. His idea was that when this was all over, he wanted to retire on a beach,” which is something that the audience may never know.
Butcher (Karl Urban), Frenchie (Tomer Capon), Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso), and Hughie (Jack Quaid). Photo by Jan Thijs. Courtesy Amazon.
Karl Urban certainly looks cool—especially that jacket.
Carrie Grace: With Butcher’s jacket, it looks like a leather trench, but it was actually an oilskin jacket. All the jackets were constructed so that we could control how many multiples we had. With these guys, we were definitely going to need multiples, but we wanted to make these iconic jackets last. For Butcher, we constructed this oilskin, badass looking jacket, and then we distressed it down. At one point, I said, “Can we put a piece of duct tape on the back shoulder? Like he slid on the ground, and it opened up a hole, and he just patched it with a piece of duct tape.” And so that’s what we did, just to give it some idea of history and past battles.
Butcher (Karl Urban). Photo by Jan Thijs. Courtesy Amazon.
Featured image: Hughie (Jack Quaid), Butcher (Karl Urban), and Frenchie (Tomer Capon). Photo by Jan Thijs. Courtesy Amazon.
A comic book artist has the luxury of creating superhero costumes that have to meet just one standard—looking cool. But when it comes time to translate those looks to screen, the costume designer has challenges that require more than imagination and a pencil.Superhero costumes worn by actors have to look real, even in hi-def. They have to withstand action scenes and they inevitably have to be cleaned and repaired afterward. But they can’t appear too brand-new; often they have to look just enough worn to seem as though they exist in the real world. The costumes often require complicated construction involving everything from hand-sewing to 3D printing.
For The Boys, with its second season coming this year to Amazon Prime, costume designers Carrie Grace and Laura Jean Shannon had an additional challenge they had not faced before. The “heroes” in this story are a kind of alternate version of the Justice League, known as The Seven, with equivalents of iconic superheroes like Superman, Aquaman, the Flash, and Supergirl. But in this world, they are arrogant, entitled, corporate, and careless, and it is the scruffy, bad attitude lesser-powered group known as “The Boys” who are the good guys. So, Grace and Shannon had to not only figure out a way to make the iconic looks in the comic come to life, they had to make them tell that complex, multi-layered story about heroes and anti-heroes.
In part one of their interview with The Credits, Grace and Shannon talk about constructing the look for the only member of the Seven who actually qualifies as wholesome—Starlight, played by Erin Moriarty, and how her look was shaped both behind-the-scenes and in the actual show.
There’s a character in the show who’s almost a stand-in for you both, Isadora (played by Débora Demestre), who designs superhero costumes. She meets with Starlight to re-do her look and show a lot more skin. That shows that the series really acknowledges the importance of presentation and iconography. How does her judgment reflect your judgment, and what about her character seems real to you as a costume designer?
Carrie Grace: When this project happened, it was right on the cusp of MeToo, when we were getting greenlit. What we’ve done with the series is we’ve taken some of the aspects of the original story and brought them to light in a way that really does show the woman’s struggle in the workplace. A lot of times as a costume designer, you are promoting a fantasy, as well as a reality. I think it’s really interesting, watching that scene, it’s the two men sitting on the couch who are selling the story, selling the pitch to Starlight. Telling her how this is the development of her character, and how she’s owning her sexuality and stepping out, showing any skin that she wants and everything. It is a costume that the character wears in the comic book. It’s a variation because what the comic book character wore when she wore the sexy outfit was kind of impossible to actually create.
Isadora (Débora Demestre) is fashioning a new look for Starlight (Erin Moriarty). Courtesy Amazon.
It’s the most interesting scene, where they’re trying to sell her on her new reality, which involves her sexuality, and I love that Erin Moriarty’s character just is like: “That is not me.” But also, it acknowledges that the Isadora character has to be selling something. She believes in it because that’s the status quo, that’s the way things have always been. I don’t know if that’s the same answer I would have had before MeToo. It’s just interesting that there’s this narrative that’s been fed to women about what they should wear and why, whether it’s to be more aesthetically sexual or whether it’s to cover up. A lot of times, it’s everyone else who’s trying to tell a woman how to dress, other than the woman who’s actually in her own skin and knows herself better than these other people.I appreciate that they’re still really highlighting the fact that the way we present ourselves is so important to the world, and that’s exactly what costumes are. We wear costumes every day of our lives.
Laura Jean Shannon: That’s an interesting one to bring up, and of course that was definitely a conversation that was very integral to my role on the show. Starlight started out very wholesome and pure. The first scene that we shot of the entire show, in the pilot episode, is where she goes for her Seven casting call. Erin is such a great actress, and I had chills watching it. They ask her questions, and it’s sort of almost like watching a Miss America pageant. But she was very heartfelt and grounded in this authenticity that she wanted to use her superpowers for good, to make the world a better place, to champion the underprivileged, and to truly be what we all have been raised to think of superheroes as representing.
And when you designed Starlight’s look, her original costume is very wholesome.
Laura Jean Shannon: When we were designing what we call her Starlight classic look, we had to really delve into the head of the character and figure out how to create something that was a classic superhero suit, that had a wholesome bent to it, where she could still be a badass, but also that she came from middle America and didn’t necessarily have the budget that they have at Vought International to create these highly technologically advanced superhero suits.
We really focused on having there be some fabrics that you could literally buy at Jo-Ann’s, combined with some fabrics that were very much part and parcel with the fabrics that we used for the Seven that were high-density screen printed and had various different unconventional methodologies. By doing that, we had this hybrid look for her, that she could roll with the Seven, but that there was definitely a little bit of a wholesome vibe. The audience is made to think: great, this is cool, they’re embracing who she is and that’s going to be such a nice way to appeal to the wholesome folks in the world. And then comes that scene, where they unveil Starlight 2.0, we call it.
The Deep (Chace Crawford) introduces Starlight (Erin Moriarty) to the world. Photo credit: Jan Thijs. Courtesy Amazon
This makeover is a storyline that they did actually take from the books. I think that Eric Kripke is a genius in terms of knowing just how much of the DNA from the source material to infuse into the storyline for the fans to grasp onto, but then also knowing how to ground it in reality, update it, spin it, twist it, and then bring it into this modern lens. So, he did take the thread from the books, where they push her, after some pretty horrific hazing, into the Seven. And they force her into this new—for her, grotesque—look. They unveil this Starlight 2.0, and she says “I just can’t wear it,” and they figure out a way to actually convince her that not only can she, but she must. So, it’s this really sad moment where Starlight, in all her wholesome goodness, sort of gets the memo that the Seven really isn’t about what she thought they were about. That it’s really monetized, big business, corporate, presentational. It’s like: we want that wholesome superhero to look like every guy in America wants to take her to bed. She ends up having to wear it for a while and making the best of it. It’s another example of the brilliant writing on this show.
You have worked on lots of superheroes. What makes The Boys special?
Laura Jean Shannon: What I loved about The Boys from the very get-go was that it was very important to Eric Kripke and our other executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, that we create a very legitimate superhero universe, much like ones that I’ve worked on in the Marvel and DC cinematic universes. We’re creating our own Vought cinematic universe with our suits, and yet it’s also this really interesting social commentary that I think is very poignant for the moment in time that we happen to be residing in as a nation and the world. Really looking at how superheroes can be politically and financially motivated, and this kind of underlying fascism that can sprout in a world whose priorities are not always on track with right and wrong. It’s a very unique take on your classic superhero.
Featured image: Erin Moriarty is Annie January, better known as Starlight. Photo by Jan Thijs. Courtesy Amazon.
Spaceship Earth tells the fascinating, timely story of eight men and women who, in 1991, stepped into a sealed replica of Earth’s ecosystem to live a fully sustainable life for 24 months. Their world was called Biosphere 2, engineered by inventor/investor John Allen, and the experiment in which they participated, deemed a global media phenomenon. Spaceship Earth is available now on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, FandangoNow, Vudu, DIRECTV, DISH, and longtime NEON partner Hulu.
Spaceship Earth’s director Matt Wolf (Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project) was just a young boy when the “biospherians” began their historic research and had no memory of it. When a few years ago he came across images of the group and learned about their experience, he knew he wanted to make a documentary that told the entire tale. He and co-producer Stacey Reiss (The Perfection) combed through hundreds of hours of archival footage for the film, a 2020 Sundance premiere that is being distributed by NEON (Parasite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire) via a unique and expansive platform given the coronavirus shutdown.
“While making this film, I never could have imagined that a pandemic would require the entire world to be quarantined. Like all of us today, the biospherians lived confined inside…often under great interpersonal stress,” wrote Wolf in his director’s statement. “But when they re-entered the world, they were forever transformed. In light of COVID-19, we are all living like biospherians, and we too will re-enter a new world.”
The Credits spoke with Wolf about having NEON support the film, sharing producer responsibilities, and detailing a narrative that during its time was marred somewhat by controversy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
It’s an interesting time to be releasing this movie.
You know, it’s a real boon to have a project like this to focus on right now. It’s up and down, but I’m happy to be focused on getting the film out there because I hope it starts a conversation to make some sense out of what’s happening.
You must be thrilled to have NEON behind Spaceship Earth, what with the distribution platform it’s offering. Everyone is going digital and streaming, but this plan is quite extensive and even goes beyond with drive-ins, safely accessible city pop-ups, etc.
Yeah, I was so excited when NEON came to us with this idea of releasing the film quickly to respond to the situation at hand and to recognize this kind of uncanny connection with the story. It’s not just dropping the film on streaming sites, it’s really thinking in an outside-the-box and more expanded way about what moviegoing means, what’s that collective experience, and how can we emulate that in times when people are isolated. Obviously drive-ins and pop-up projections are super cool, but what NEON is also doing is allowing small businesses, organizations, and institutions, anything from a little restaurant to the Smithsonian Museum, to host virtual screenings and events. So people who are constituents or customers or community members of these groups can choose to stream the film from their websites and that supports both the business as well as NEON, so it’s an interesting kind of partnership.
The Biosphere. Courtesy of Neon.
Fortunately, you had a treasure trove of archival footage and images to work with: 600 hours of footage alone. What was the process for going through all this material? Was it daunting at times? Was there anything you would have liked to included but didn’t?
Yeah, I make films that have a lot of archival footage, so 600 hours is a lot, but it’s not impossible in terms of the work that I do. I have the fortune of working with a great team who also shares our enthusiasm for archival footage. So we were able to wrangle that material and, of course, there’s lots of stuff that didn’t make the cut. What was so remarkable is that this is a story that has so many twists and turns, somewhat byzantine in its complexity, and there was footage that covered every beat of the story. That is so unusual and very extraordinary. It was really a process of collaboration to mine the material in a way that allowed us to discover the story and to shape it based on what exists.
Linda Leigh and tourists interacting from either side of the Biosphere. Courtesy of NEON
How did you and your co-producer, Stacey Reiss, work together? Did you share or divide responsibilities?
Stacey is an incredible, creative producer. She is my partner hand-in-hand in the development of the film, from its earliest genesis to its completion. The second I found images of the biospherians that sparked this idea, I was texting her frantically saying we have to make a film out of this material, and from that point on we had a very copacetic partnership in which we divided and conquered. She is really gifted at forging and managing key relationships to allow a project of this scope and complexity with so many stakeholders involved. She facilitates collaboration in a really brilliant way.
Were any of the biospherians resistant at first and were you given any stipulations about what materials could or could not be used?
There was a lot of trust, I think, by stating our intentions and being clear that we wanted to tell a story with nuance that took a long view of the project, as opposed to something sensational or something that replicated the prevailing narratives out there about Biosphere 2. We gained a lot of trust that we would use this material in a responsible and thoughtful way, and we’re so grateful for that.
Candidates for (1990)’s Biosphere 2 project. Dr. Roy Walford (bald) is front and center. Biosphere 2 was a privately funded experiment, designed to investigate the way in which humans interact with a small self-sufficient ecological environment and to look at possibilities for future planetary colonization. The $30 million Biosphere covers 2.5 acres near Tucson, Arizona, and was entirely self- contained. The eight ‘Biospherian’s’ shared their air- and the water-tight world with 3,800 species of plant and animal life during their two-year isolation experiment. The project had problems with oxygen levels and food supply and has been criticized over its scientific validity. (1989)
They seem like a group that would want their story told.
In some ways, yes, they were very eager to have their story told. But then they had been burned by the media, which had rebuked them and had torn down their life’s work, so it’s a mixed feeling of a desire to be recognized and also a reservation about having their work misconstrued.
You wrote in your director’s statement that part of your goal with this film was “to tell a story that we believe has been misunderstood.” Was this difficult given some of the controversies that arose about the project’s authenticity?
To me, the fundamental flaw of the project was a crisis of public relations. There was a lack of clarity in defining the ground rules for the experiment; there were many unknown aspects about what would happen. And unfortunately in the media, the management and the participants to some extent put up the expectations that they were gonna be sealed in there, nothing would go in and out, and that was the core goal of the experiment, and that wasn’t the core goal. So to me, it was important to represent their shortcomings in terms of communication and public relations, and also to report truthfully on what actually happened and what some of the obstacles they faced were, and how the media’s perception of the project ultimately impacted the outcome of it as well.
Courtesy of Neon
In addition to sustainability, science, transformation, and family, what other themes do you hope shine through?
I think that one of the really special elements of the film is that you can pursue incredible things, you can achieve incredible things, and they may not work as planned. They may not be defined as successful as you wished. But if relationships around those collaborations last, there’s something very profound about that and I think that is an inspiring aspect of the story that drew me in as well.
Featured image: The ‘Biospherians’ pose for the camera during the final construction phase of the Biosphere 2 project in 1990. Left to right are: Mark Nelson, Linda Leigh, Taber MacCallum, Abigail Alling, Mark Van Thillo, Sally Silverstone, Roy Walford, and Jayne Poynter. The 3.1-acre air- and the water-tight building became their home for two years. Biosphere 2 was designed to allow the study of human survival in a sealed ecosystem. The costs of this controversial, $150 million project were met from private funds. The Biosphere 2 project building is at Oracle, Arizona.
Good news is few and far between these days, so we’ll take it where we can get it. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is good news. The movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is arriving on Disney+ a full year (and change) earlier than originally planned. Hamilton will now stream on July 3, 2020, instead of the originally slated release of October 15, 2021. Miranda himself shared the news on Twitter:
Disney fast-tracking the film version of the Broadway juggernaut is the kind of news we can use right now, especially considering we really don’t know when we’ll be able to go back to theaters. Here’s what Miranda said in a press release:
“I’m so proud of how beautifully Tommy Kail has brought Hamilton to the screen. He’s given everyone who watches this film the best seat in the house. I’m so grateful to Disney and Disney+ for reimagining and moving up our release to July 4th weekend of this year, in light of the world turning upside down. I’m so grateful to all the fans who asked for this, and I’m so glad that we’re able to make it happen. I’m so proud of this show. I can’t wait for you to see it.”
So there you have it, for all of us who never got a chance to see the musical, we only have to wait two months to see Hamilton with the original Broadway cast. The film is a “live capture” of the musical, with Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Leslie Odom, Jr., Christopher Jackson, Jonathan Groff, Phillipa Soo, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Okieriete Onaodowan, and Anthony Ramos all reprising their roles. The footage was shot at the Richard Rogers Theater in New York City. Now, one of the biggest cultural phenomenons of the past decade is coming to your TV or computer screen—where we can all “raise a glass to freedom” even if we’re still stuck in our homes.
Featured image: NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 12: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Christopher Jackson of ‘Hamilton’ perform onstage during the 70th Annual Tony Awards at The Beacon Theatre on June 12, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)
It’s often two-thirty in the afternoon before actor, writer, and director Tannishtha Chatterjee finds time to turn her attention to creative pursuits. “Till lunchtime…I’m cooking, cutting vegetables, cleaning, dusting and bathing Radhika.”
Radhika is Chatterjee’s four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. For the last six weeks, it’s been just the two of them tucked away in her Mumbai apartment. “She’s actually become quite independent in the last one and a half months. She’s learned many new things. Because she has to. Which is a good thing! I’ve been spending a lot of time with her and she’s very happy.”
Tannishtha Chatterjee and her daughter Radhika
Authorities took strict measures in March, requesting people to stay put and not to leave home — for any reason. When we spoke to cinematographer Priyanka Singh, the order had just been given. Six weeks later, Chatterjee explains why social distancing measures and a little flexibility of movement like you see here in some parts of the world don’t really work in Mumbai. “Mumbai is so crowded that the government decided that if you allow people to step out at all…social distancing will just not work.”
Once lunch is finished, mother and daughter embark on their creative pursuits. “My daughter has her piano, she has her drawing… and that’s when I’ll sit in my room and start reading and then writing. Then from around 7pm I have to do a little bit of cooking, like — what are we going to eat? I’m thinking, if this lockdown extends, I’m going to reduce our meals from three to two per day!”
Chatterjee was all set to direct all ten episodes of the third season of Amazon’s incredibly popular television seriesFour More Shots Please, featuring four female friends from different walks of life who deal with romance, work-life conflict, ambitions, and anxieties in modern-day India. Think Sex and the City for the 2020s Mumbai set. “We were due to shoot from March 15… so four or five days before we were about to begin, we anticipated that there would be an announcement of a lockdown. Everything was prepared. Our locations were done. Our casting complete. Rehearsals were done. Contracts signed. Advances settled. We were ready.”
“Four More Shots Please” on Amazon.
A well-respected actor (Lion, Brick Lane, Anna Karenina, Parched), Chatterjee took on the mammoth task of writing, directing, and acting in her own feature Roam Rome Mein, touring it to much acclaim around festivals in 2019. Four More Shots Please was the opportunity to hone her directing craft. “I have alovely relationship with all of the actors whom I’ve previously worked with on various productions,” she says.
A quick look at the trailer of the R18-rated show will tell you just how difficult it might be to shoot these characters getting hot and heavy with various companions in our current climate of social distancing. “We were talking about protocols,” Chatterjee says. “How is this going to play out? How will actors maintain the one-meter distancing rule?”
Health precautions for productions in Mumbai present a huge headache for the producers. Plus, the crew can number 300 or more. Lighting and sound crews may be taking public transport to and from set every day. Then there are the locations. “We were due to take the show to various destinations, but that is all up in the air now.”
Back at home, Chatterjee has turned to her third passion, writing. “The first few weeks, I couldn’t find any inspiration to write at all. I am an actress, so I need to go out…be inspired by something that hits me from the outside. Now there are ideas coming back to me about something that happened in the past. I am starting to write, but I still need to get out for fresh ideas.”
Like many others yearning for connection, Chatterjee joined a Zoom party with 34 friends across the world – from Australia, the U.S., Singapore, Switzerland, and India, hosted by a friend who runs a big Indian film festival in England. A friend joining the party had stayed on in a small Indian village after wrapping up a production shoot. “He’s got a little house near the village where the electricity only comes on for four hours per day,” she says. “He was conferencing in with us but had to use his 4G. He warned us that as soon as his phone dies, he’s out! It was interesting. He said, ‘I have no rush to go back to civilization. I want to be here for the rest of my life.’”
On May 5, the Producers Guild of India announced a set of production guidelines for getting back onto set with the necessary health and safety protocols, although they were quick to clarify that production would not start up before discussions with government authorities were concluded. Chatterjee says that she and her team will watch with intense interest as productions gear up both in India and abroad, in anticipation of adopting best practices for Four More Shots Please. Until then, she’ll sit at her writing desk allowing her imagination to take flight.
Tannishtha Chatterjee is an independent actor, writer, and director. She joined the Motion Picture Association’s APSA Academy Film Fund jury in 2017.
Featured image: CANNES, FRANCE – MAY 18: Actress Tannishtha Chatterjee attends the ‘Monsoon Shootout’ Premiere during the 66th Annual Cannes Film Festival at the Palais des Festivals on May 18, 2013 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)
Just premiered on HBO, Long Gone By is the story of the hardworking single mother and undocumented immigrant Ana, played by Erica Mūnoz, who is trying to create the best life for her brainy teen daughter Izzy (Izzy Hau’ula) in their adoptive small town of Warsaw, Indiana. When a deportation order demands Ana return to Nicaragua, it puts not only her own future in jeopardy, it makes Izzy attending Indiana University nearly impossible. Because of her immigration status, she doesn’t qualify for scholarships or financial aid, and every avenue that Ana tries is blocked. For Ana, if she has to leave and live a lifetime without seeing her daughter, she must find a way to make Izzy’s dream come true, even if it means risking everything.
The Credits spoke to Mūnoz about being both the lead and associate producer on the project, working closely with director Andrew Morgan. “Andrew and my husband went to film school together, so we were all a very close-knit group of friends. He and his wife Emily have children, and actually she and I were pregnant at the same time. I’d been away from the business for some years, but was slowly coming back. Andrew and I had a really good rapport and are very similar. He had just premiered The True Cost, which is a documentary about fast fashion. He has a passion for putting a spotlight on untold stories, using his position of privilege to shine a light on important issues. He was working on this new documentary series on undocumented immigrants, and he asked me to produce it.”
They worked on several stories together, one on sanctuary churches, focusing on a mother who was being protected and housed in the church by the community to keep her from being deported, and another on a medical student who couldn’t get financial aid. Working on that together led to conversations about what choices people would make if they were backed into a corner. What might people do in the name of something really important, or for someone they love, even if it’s technically illegal?
Erica Munoz on the set of ‘Long Gone By.’ Courtesy HBO
Mūnoz says that, even at the beginning, Morgan wanted her to be part of it. “When The True Cost came out, he was meeting with some really well-known actors, and I really don’t take offense at the fact that I’m not a big name. Even though I’ve been in this business for a long time, there just haven’t been the roles for me or the opportunities. I don’t know why he was so committed to me, but he said he wanted to write the movie and put me in it. This is a couple of years ago, and he was already in the mind space of nothing about us without us. That was before the hashtag was popular, which is about telling our stories but keeping us involved. He said, ‘I want to tell the story, but I need you involved from the beginning in order to do it. It can’t just be my perspective, because this isn’t my story.’ So he just wrote the film, and insisted that I play the part.”
As an associate producer, Mūnoz always felt she was being heard, and that her ideas were not only considered, but often implemented. She points to several examples. “I was talking to Andrew about the fact that in the undocumented community, for a lot of people, there’s an element of invisibility. The feeling is, ‘I’m here, but nobody’s really seeing me’.” She goes on to say, “There are scenes where people have said to us that Ana would definitely be recognized or remembered. I know different. Not in this world. Not in this space. There are a lot of Latinx folks who are doing work, doing hard labor for a long time and are disappearing inside of communities. There’s another example, towards the end of the movie when Ana is talking to Izzy, and it’s the climax of the film. In the original version, Ana was breaking down in front of her daughter, and telling her how hard and awful it all is, and saying she doesn’t know how she’ll do it. I told Andrew I didn’t think a mother would ever do that. I think a mother wouldn’t want her daughter to feel the guilt of what she was going through. She would want to instill in her daughter that she could do anything. With my kids, I would be telling them, ‘You can do this. You can handle this’. I would hold everything else in until I was alone. Andrew and Emily both agreed.”
Erica Munoz on the set of ‘Long Gone By.’ Courtesy HBO
The film had its premiere at HBO’s New York Latino Film Festival, which is right down the street from where Mūnoz got her start, playing on Broadway in the famed musical Rent. “Long Gone By premiered in Times Square. It was a dream. I started my career in New York. I was like Mary Tyler Moore, with my suitcases in the middle of Times Square. Here I was again. It was through the festival that HBO stepped in. They started having conversations with Andrew. We knew about this a year ago, but we couldn’t really talk about it.” Mūnoz believes their commitment to this film, and this Latinx story, sets HBO apart. She explains, “All of us, I think, were waiting for it to not be real, because it was such a dream that HBO, with the platform it has, would invest in a film like this. It just says so much to me about how they’re putting their money where their mouth is. There are so many people making noise about needing more Latinx representation, and about needing more Latinx people in front of the camera, and yet the only films being looked at are if you have a star or a name. Here you have a major company saying they’ll give us that visibility, willing to shine a bright light on us. It was really just organic, and completely based on the merit of the film, which feels really good.”
The girl in Caitlin Moran’s rowdy coming of age comedy How to Build a Girl, which the popular British author adapted from her 2014 semi-autobiographical debut novel, is so uniquely larger than life that finding the right actress proved problematic — at least for a while. The film is now available on-demand.
“We scoured Britain trying to find a British actress who could do it,” says Moran from her home in London where she’s “been in lockdown for weeks so just talking to another human being that isn’t someone I gave birth to or someone I married is a genuine thrill,” she says.
“I didn’t realize when I was writing it that it was impossible to cast a teenage actress who can be in every scene, who can go from being clever and funny but very innocent then go to London and be this massive bitch with a huge persona, then go to this massive low point and come out the other side having learned something.”
Then the production team saw Lady Bird and Beanie Feldstein, who played Saoirse Ronan’s best friend.
“The minute she came on screen, it was like, ‘That’s not just an actor; that’s a phenomenon,’” says Moran, an executive producer on the film which is directed by Coky Goidroyc. “One of the great thrills of my life is that I can text Beanie Feldstein whenever I want.”
Laurie Kynaston as “Krissi Morrigan” and Beanie Feldstein as “Johanna Morrigan” in Coky Giedroyc’s HOW TO BUILD A GIRL. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.
Feldstein anchors the film as Johanna Korrigan, a whip-smart 16-year-old misfit in the mid-1990s who’s eager to use her literary gifts to break out of the Midlands projects where she lives with her mother Angie (Sarah Solemani), her dad Pat (Paddy Considine) and four younger brothers. She nabs a gig writing rock and roll reviews for a London music publication run by a bunch of arrogant young guys, writing snarky columns under the pseudonym “Dolly Wilde.” Adopting a punk/goth look and raucous persona, Dolly soon earns the cool kid status she’s been craving and the friendship of sweet Irish alt-rocker John Kite (Alfie Allen). But eventually, the pretense of viciousness crashes around her.
Dolly/Johanna’s coming of age mirrors that of Moran who gained celebrity status writing for Melody Maker as a teenager in mid-90s London when few women had that kind of platform. “At one point, I was going to call [the novel] “Almost, Almost Famous.” You had to construct a persona to be around men; those boys at that time, in those industries [like music], were so unused to women being around that you had to turn into a kind of half-boy/half-girl. You had to out-drink, out-smoke, and out-shag everybody. Otherwise, you had to reveal how innocent and naive you were and men would not know how to deal with that or they would take advantage of that,” she says.
Beanie Feldstein as “Johanna Morrigan” and Cast in Coky Giedroyc’s HOW TO BUILD A GIRL. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.
“Right around the time I made my first rock star cry, I was like, ‘This isn’t me. This is horrible and I’m going to have to try to find the balls to be different from everyone else here and be positive again.’”
Moran sees How To Build a Girl as both a nostalgic look at the ‘90s and as relevant to today’s teenagers who often construct mean personas on social media.
“You go on [social media] all optimistic and cheerful and someone goes, ‘You look fat’ and you become more cynical and start attacking people,” she says. “This isn’t what communication is about; this isn’t what language is for; and why are we using this to be horrible to each other? [The movie] is a story about what’s happening to every teenager now. That was the main drive because I like to be useful,” Moran says. “I want funny and sexy and I want to put stars in it but I want it to be useful so you can walk away and say, ‘I learned things; that saved me a bit of time.’”
It was Moran’s 2011 memoir How To Be a Woman that first nabbed her a movie deal. But adapting her feminist musings into a screenplay proved difficult, she says, so she wrote the more plot-driven How To Build a Girl “because I knew I had to write something to make into a movie.”
Moran was also driven to give onscreen life to “Fat, working-class, clever, funny girls who don’t get tortured or punished for their sexuality or for who they are, who don’t get bullied or run out of town. They go out and make their way in the world, they encounter some problems but they find their way through it.”
It’s a model Moran says she learned from movie musicals like Johanna’s favorite, Annie.
“If you look at lists of the greatest movies of all time, it’s like The Godfather — all men, shooting each other, gangs, money. But when you look at the greatest musicals, it’s always about girls; usually weird girls, poor girls who’ve got a talent. They can dance, sing, do something instead of standing silently and mysteriously while men are doing things. They get right in and sing and dance and run rings around the men and they’re doing it backward and in heels and, always, unfailingly optimistic,” she says.
“So the thrill now of putting girls in movies that other girls can see and go, ‘That’s someone who reflects me,’ that’s the thrill. I want it to be useful to some girls out there, to be able to look at the screen and go, ‘I get that girl. That girl is a bit of me.”
Featured image: Beanie Feldstein as “Johanna Morrigan” in Coky Giedroyc’s HOW TO BUILD A GIRL. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.
The versatile composerVivek Maddala recently shifted gears from his zany Emmy-winning music for Cartoon Network series The Tom and Jerry Show to score PBS’ somber documentary Asian Americans (debuting May 11). A musical prodigy, Maddala enrolled in Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music at age 15 with dreams of becoming a jazz drummer but switched to electrical engineering at Georgia Tech before earning a graduate degree in applied physics. “I’d been the hotshot drummer in my home town but when I got to Berklee in the late eighties, there were a million other guys just like me,” Maddala laughs. “With the proliferation of drum machines, it didn’t make a lot of sense for me to pursue drumming. And also, I realized my strengths were in composing and producing.”
While finding his groove as a film and TV composer for projects including Peabody Award-winning documentary American Revolutionary, Maddala built his own recording studio in the backyard of his West Los Angeles home. That’s where he produced four and a half hours of music for the five-episode Asian Americans series. “This was pre-quarantine, so I was able to bring string, woodwind, and brass players over here in small sections to record the score,” Maddala says. “I played all the percussion, piano, bass, and drums myself.”
Featured image: Vivek Maddala on the drums. Courtesy Vivek Maddala.
Speaking from home with his grand piano within plinking distance, Vivek delves into the inspirations behind his score for PBS’ examination of American racism directed at immigrants from China, Japan, India, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia.
Your Asian American music draws on a lot of different styles. What was the overall approach for utilizing these sounds?
The thing about scoring documentaries is that you have to calibrate very precisely what you’re saying with the music, and what you’re not saying. We live in this propagandized world where everything’s being spun in all kinds of crazy directions, so modern audiences are very sensitive to being manipulated by music. I wanted the music to half-pose a question and invite the audience to complete the circle themselves.
Episode One’s Angel Island sequence, for example, documents how badly Chinese people were treated when they arrived in San Francisco?
Asian immigrants coming over in the early 1900s landed in Angels Island, this brutal environment where parents were separated from their children. It’s not a huge leap to connect the dots to what ‘s happening right now, but how much do we want to punctuate that with the music? It was a particularly tricky cue because director Leo Chiang’s aesthetics are very austere. We ended up doing the main melody as a single violin, which can be schmaltzy depending on how it’s executed. But here, we wanted to gently nudge the audience in a particular direction without hitting them over the head.
Featured image: Vivek Maddala at the Piano. Courtesy Vivek Maddala.
How did you go about creating the musical theme that recurs throughout the series?
Episode One talks about The Chinese Exclusion Act, where people of Chinese origin were not allowed to become American citizens. If you’re from China, you could try to change the system. Or, you could navigate the system to improve your own personal situation and that of your family. The director called this “resigned acceptance,” where people just make the best of a really difficult situation. As a musical analog for this idea, I based my theme on a perfect fifth, which is a very comfortable interval. But then it alternates between an augmented fifth and a diminished fifth, which creates this slightly unsettling dissonance when the contrapuntal lines rub up against each other. [Maddala demonstrates on the piano]. At one point it’s played on bass clarinet and harp. At another point, flute and piano. In creating this musical motif of resigned acceptance, we’re inviting the audience, on a subliminal level, to understand the connection between these [oppressive] situations without explicitly telling them what to think.
Storefront of Chinatown meat and vegetable market, San Francisco, California, 1895. “ASIAN AMERICANS” premieres May 11, 2020, on PBS. Photo Courtesy of the University of Washington, Special Collections, Hester 11128Man and Woman (siblings, Philip & Susan Anh) in uniform facing camera. ASIAN AMERICANS premieres May 11 2020, on PBS. Photo courtesy of Flip Cuddy
Your music takes a different direction in the story about Sikh men who moved from India to America, where they played up their ethnicity to work as street peddlers.
Generally, we didn’t want the score to sound “Korean” or “Filipino,” for example, in terms of being geographically specific to the cultures. But this particular section of the documentary talked about how men from south Asia came to America and became part of this peddler network that played into this orientalist concept of the “exotic.” So here, the music is overtly south Asian sounding in a way that’s almost a parody of what people at that time period might have associated with India.
Bhagat Singh Thind as a young man in U.S. Army uniform with a rifle, Camp Lewis 1918 (WWI). Thind, a Sikh American, was the first U.S. serviceman to be allowed for religious reasons to wear a turban as part of their military uniform. “ASIAN AMERICANS” premieres May 11, 2020, on PBS. Photo Courtesy of the Dr. Bhagat Singh Thind Spiritual Science Foundation
How’d you achieve that sound?
I played the tambura, an Indian drone instrument, and this kind of clay pot called the ghatam, as well as the kanjira and the bowed string instrument called the sarangi.
You must have a nice collection of instruments in your backyard studio?
I do. I’ve got a lot of stuff from around the world, and I also have my beloved Gretsch drum kit, which you hear in the New Orleans stuff and the big band transition going into Anna May Wong’s story. I mostly use a Black Beauty snare, designed in 1922, which was featured on all those great Motown records.
Anna May Wong – Certificate of Identity, Passport photo. “ASIAN AMERICANS” premieres May 11, 2020, on PBS. Photo courtesy of the National Archives. Identifier: 5720287
Episode 4, which deals with the Asian American experience Vietnam War era, called for a different kind of feel?
I’m a huge fan of the Tower of Power brass section – – one trumpet, one trombone and tenor, alto and bari saxophones. There’s something grittier, slinkier, and kind of dirty about the sound, so I went for that sax-heavy sound for the things that happen in the sixties and seventies. For some reason, the saxophones sit better in the back of the dialogue.
As this documentary reminds us, America is very much a nation of immigrants. What about your family?
My parents are from India. There were a lot of experiences described throughout this documentary that were familiar to me in terms of my understanding of history and also in terms of my personal experiences. But I like to think that people are empathetic enough to understand human suffering and struggle without experiencing it firsthand.
Featured image: Vivek Maddala on the guitar. Courtesy Vivek Maddala.
Featured image: Vivek Maddala at the Piano. Courtesy Vivek Maddala.
Like every other major production, filming on Matt Reeves‘ hotly-anticipated The Batman was suspended in mid-March. Reeves and his talented cast and crew had begun production in London and had filmed around 25% of the total feature before production had to be shut down due to the spread of the novel coronavirus. The Batman is now slated for an October 1, 2020 release date—which we argued was the perfect time to unleash the new Batman on the world. While we wait to fully flatten the COVID-19 curve and for productions to start up again, Andy Serski, who plays Alfred Pennyworth in Reeves’s upcoming reboot, shared a few intriguing new details about the film.
Serkis was speaking to LADbibleand he told writer Dominic Smithers that, per Reeves hints the script he’s written is a noir detective story (rather than an origin story), his reboot will be “darker” than previous Batman films. While Serkis was careful not to spill too many narrative beans, he did concede that The Batman will be “darker, broodier” than its predecessors. That’s saying something considering Christopher Nolan’s beloved Dark Knight trilogy wasn’t exactly a sunny walk in the park, and Ben Affleck’s embodiment of Bruce Wayne in both Batman v Superman and Justice League was reliably brooding. Yet Serkis says what Reeves and his star, Robert Pattinson, are going for is darker. He also says Alfred’s relationship with Bruce Wayne is an important piece of the puzzle:
“It’s very much about the emotional connection between Alfred and Bruce,” Serkis told LADbible. “That’s really at the center of it. And it is a really exquisite script that Matt has written.”
Pattinson isn’t the only one stepping into a role with big shoes to fill. The two men who played Alfred previously are British acting legends—Jeremy Irons in Justice League and Batman v Superman, and Michael Caine in Nolan’s trilogy. Speaking of Caine, Serkis said “He was fantastic. His Alfred was legendary. I couldn’t even begin to go there, really. You find it for yourself. It’s like playing these iconic roles in Shakespeare, you go back, you revisit them and you have to make it your own, and see what is about the character that connects with you and your personal Venn diagram.”
When discussing going back to filming, whenever that can be, Serkis said “It’s going to be a beautiful film. I for one can’t wait to see where they take the story. But for now, we’ll have to settle with the very little footage that we have.”
Here’s the official synopsis from Warner Bros.:
Principal photography has begun (editorial note: and was suspended, of course) on Warner Bros. Pictures’ “The Batman.” Director Matt Reeves (the “Planet of the Apes” films) is at the helm, with Robert Pattinson (upcoming “Tenet,” “The Lighthouse,” “Good Time”) starring as Gotham City’s vigilante detective, Batman, and billionaire Bruce Wayne.
Starring alongside Pattinson as Gotham’s famous and infamous cast of characters are Zoë Kravitz (“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald,” “Mad Max: Fury Road”) as Selina Kyle; Paul Dano (“Love & Mercy,” “12 Years a Slave”) as Edward Nashton; Jeffrey Wright (the “Hunger Games” films) as the GCPD’s James Gordon; John Turturro (the “Transformers” films) as Carmine Falcone; Peter Sarsgaard (“The Magnificent Seven,” “Black Mass”) as Gotham D.A. Gil Colson; Jayme Lawson (“Farewell Amor”) as mayoral candidate Bella Reál; with Andy Serkis (the “Planet of the Apes” films, “Black Panther”) as Alfred; and Colin Farrell (“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” “Dumbo”) as Oswald Cobblepot.
Featured image: An image from writer/director Matt Reeves ‘The Batman.’ Courtesy Reeves/Warner Bros.
The combination of Saturday Night Live‘s most offbeat cast member, the lovable if occasionally troubled Adam Davidson and comedy’s most reliable, sturdy father figure, writer/director Judd Apatow seems like a perfect match. Apatow has nurtured the career of a slew of promising comedic talents, including Seth Rogen, Amy Schumer, and Kumail Nanjiani. With Davidson, Apatow’s steady hand has found perhaps the perfect live wire.
The two teamed up for The King of Staten Island, which they wrote together (along with former SNL writer Dave Sirus), and which features Davidson in a role tailor-made to his talents. He plays Scott, a weed-smoking 24-year old with a love of tattoos and little else. Scott dreams of becoming a tattoo artist but his skills aren’t quite there (there’s a great sight gag in the trailer that proves this). What Scott has is a serious case of arrested development, sad-laughing through life while still living with his mother Margie (the always-welcome Marisa Tomei), sanding down the edges of his ennui with weed. The trailer reveals that the Davidson/Apatow dream team looks, well, quite dreamy! There are laughs, of course, but also a surprising amount of feelings here, too.
The story of Scott is more complicated than just some loser who won’t move out of his mom’s place. His father, a New York City firefighter, died when Scott was seven. Scott’s younger sister (Maude Apatow) is heading off to college and implores her older brother to get a grip. Scott’s already aged out of the cute and careless bracket and is steadily moving into becoming a sad adult. Then his mom Margie starts dating the fairly obnoxious Ray (Bill Burr), a firefighter who dredges up all of Scott’s feelings about the force, his father, and his own life.
The cast is rounded out by some spectacular performers, chief among them are Steve Buscemi (he plays a veteran firefighter—Buscemi is a former firefighter himself) and the always fantastic Pamela Adlon.
Check out the trailer here. The King of Staten Island will be available on-demand on June 12.
Featured image: Pete Davidson as Scott Carlin in The King of Staten Island, directed by Judd Apatow.
You have to love a surprise Spike Lee film announcement, which is what the news of Da 5 Bloods will be for most folks. Lee teased his new Netflix film in a Tweet, revealing both the poster and the June 12 release date. The film tracks four African-American Vietnam veterans who return to the country to search for the remains of their squad leaders. Also, to try and track down some buried treasure.
The cast, as is always the case in a Spike Lee joint, is excellent. Chadwick Boseman, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Johnathan Majors, Paul Walter Hauser, and Jean Reno are on hand here. Lee’s been working on Da 5 Bloods for a while now, and he directs from a script he co-wrote with Paul De Meo, Danny Bilson, and Kevin Wilmott. It was with Wilmott that Lee co-wrote, and won an Oscar for, the script for the excellent BlacKkKlansman. They shared that best adapted screenplay award with fellow scribes Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz.
Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:
From Academy Award® Winner Spike Lee comes a New Joint: the story of four African-American Vets — Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) — who return to Vietnam. Searching for the remains of their fallen Squad Leader (Chadwick Boseman) and the promise of buried treasure, our heroes, joined by Paul’s concerned son (Jonathan Majors), battle forces of Man and Nature — while confronted by the lasting ravages of The Immorality of The Vietnam War.
Here’s the full poster:
Key art for Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods.’ Courtesy Netflix.
“The beautiful thing is, you have to keep occupied right?” So says Filipino writer/director Keith Sicat, speaking from the six-week-long lockdown in Manila.
With three projects primed to go into production at the beginning of the year, Sicat now spends in time between project development, teaching filmmaking, and keeping his creative juices flowing on mini-projects with his young sons. “We started animating his toys, doing stop motion stuff around the house. It was something really fun and it was creative. It didn’t come with the pressure, or the attachment, or the baggage of my professional work.”
Keith Sicat, his sons, and the makings of a new film project.
Sicat was shooting day one on a new documentary with his co-director and spouse, filmmaker Sari Dalena, celebrating the 70th anniversary of a pop culture trend icon unique to in the Philippines – he can’t reveal the title for giving too much away – when the pandemic closed everything down, and Manila was put under strict Don’t Leave Home measures. “It’s very real. We know actors and filmmakers and crew who have passed from the virus.”
For the close-knit Filipino screen community, staying home did not equate to stopping work. Friends set up the Lockdown Cinema Club to help raise funds for the many freelancers that make up the industry. Filmmakers shared short films and screenplays, asking viewers to contribute whatever they could spare. Says Sicat, “I contacted the producers about the last sci-fi film I made Alimuom (Vapours) and asked if we could make it available.” The producers backed the request, and as of April 22, the initiative had raised USD $75,000 (3.8 Million Pesos) for filmmakers in need.
Mirroring many screen communities around the world, Sicat has monitored a flurry of correspondence between industry guilds and government agencies looking at devising a protocol to help production get started – the Film Development Association of the Philippines recently hosted a scheduled one-hour video-conference call that stretched to five. In Sicat’s mind, the idea raises more questions than answers: “Do you take everyone’s temperature every morning? How do we replot scenes (with social distancing)? Do you scale down to just a skeleton crew? How do you sanitize an entire set? Do you put in place shifts for lunch breaks?” Many are eager to get back to work, but there are others, including Sicat himself, who are fearful to resume work too soon.
Sicat continues to teach a weekly production class, moving to Zoom and Skype during the lockdown. Adaptation is the name of the game. “We’ve come up with really fun ways to do it. Let’s say you don’t have any camera equipment – so use your cell phone! Let’s say you don’t have access to Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro – how about you make a still frame film?” Sicat says he’s been inspired to see students, all of them digital natives, go back to basics. There’s a great lesson, he says, in sharing with his students that the battle is won in the preparation. “In terms of getting people to rethink the process, if there’s anything that this pandemic is showing us, is that those who succeed are the ones with the plan. If you have a plan, you might just make it to the other side!”
Sicat knows about having a plan and making it work. He’s been an award-winning independent filmmaker, concepts head, and comic book creator whose films have screened in the Philippines and at international film festivals. He was runner up in the MPA-FDCP Feature Film Pitch Competition in 2019. And Sicat’s giving back with his film Alimuom (Vapours), which is now raising funds for film industry workers in the Philippines. The film is set in a future where farming on Earth is outlawed due to the toxic environment and all agriculture is produced off-world. In Sicat’s film, despite the ban, some scientists and farmers resist.
Featured image: Keith Sicat and his sons making the most of their quarantine in Manila. Courtesy Keith Sicat.
