Now we know the title of the 8th Mission: Impossible movie, which carries the weight of the franchise’s history and the possible final mission for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning’s first trailer is an action epic through and through. The film’s logline reads, “Every choice has led to this.”
The trailer has many hallmarks of a classic Mission: Impossible movie: Cruise’s Hunt sprinting on foot always toward danger or the hope of saving somebody (or everybody). Hunt hanging precariously off the side of a plane. Hunt tangling with bad guys who seem to know precisely what makes him tick, yet they can never totally get the upper hand. WIth The Final Reckoning picking up after the events in Dead Reckoning, we’ve got Hunt on a dangerous dive mission in scuba gear, presumably going after the artificial intelligence called The Entity that could give unlimited power to the wrong person. And the trailer has got Hunt’s closest allies—Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell. From Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, we have the newest member of the team, Hayley Atwell’s Grace.
In Dead Reckoning, Hunt and his team faced the Entity, which seemed capable of predicting his every move. The film ended with Hunt tracking the Entity on board a Russian submarine, followed by an enemy from Hunt’s long history in the agency, Garbiel (Esai Morales).
The Final Reckoning also includes Vanessa Kirby as the White Widow, Holt McCallany as Secretary of Defence Berstein, Pom Klementieff as Paris, Angela Bassett as CIA Director Erika Sloane, and Shea Whigham’s Jasper Briggs. Newcomers also include Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, and Tramell Tillman.
Christopher McQuarrie returns as co-writer and director, having helmed Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning. McQuarrie co-wrote the script for The Final Reckoning with Erik Jendresen and Bruce Geller.
Check out the trailer below. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning hits theaters on May 23, 2025.
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From the sprawling, brawling world of mutants on X-Men to the intergalactic intrigue in a galaxy far, far away—this is the path for former X-Men writer, director, and producer Simon Kinberg. Although it’s a path that Kinberg knows well.
News broke that Kinberg is working with Lucasfilm on a brand-new Star Wars trilogy alongside Lucasfilm studio chief Kathleen Kennedy, which will kickstart a whole new set of characters separate from the previous trilogy, which ended in 2019 with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and starred Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac. Kinberg initially helped launch the new Star Wars trilogy, 2015’s The Force Awakens, acting as a consultant to the J.J. Abrams-directed film. Deadline initially reported that Kinberg’s trilogy would bring us back to George Lucas’s mega-story, which he started (and helped usher in a new era of cinema, too) with his 1977 game-changer Star Wars: A New Hope. That film introduced us to Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, characters that would appear in the last trilogy, beginning with Ford in The Force Awakens and Hamill and Fisher in The Last Jedi. Hamill would then reappear in Force Ghost form in The Rise of Skywalker.
So Kinberg is no stranger to spaceships and alien battles—he also co-created the animated series Star Wars: Rebels with Dave Filoni and Carrie Beck, which ran for four seasons from 2014 to 2018. He’s also part of that other iconic franchise that deals in hyperspace, Star Trek, as he’s attached to produce Paramount’s upcoming Star Trek film directed by Toby Haynes and written by Seth Grahame-Smith. Kinberg will be one of the rare folks to brandish a lightsaber and phaser creatively and possibly the first to do so simultaneously.
Details about Kinberg’s Star Wars project are frozen in carbonite for the time being, but Lucasfilm has said it’s decidedly not a continuation of the 9-film arc of the Skywalker saga, which included Lucas’s original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, and the most recent trilogy. New characters and a new adventure will give Star Wars a chance to expand on the big screen in a way it hasn’t before—and how it is on the small screen in the live-action Disney+ series.
Kinberg was a major part of Fox’s run of X-Men movies, including producing James Mangold’s beloved Logan and the first two Deadpool films. His next film is Edgar Wright’s reboot of Stephen King’s The Running Man, which previously was given a big screen adaptation in a 1987 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The next Star Wars saga will be on the small screen in the Jude Law-led Skeleton Crew, which arrives on Disney+ on December 3.
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Cinematographer Don Burgess earned an Oscar nomination and helped make an American classic when she shot Forrest Gump in 1994. He’s since re-teamed with star Tom Hanks and director Bob Zemeckis on The Polar Express, Cast Away, and Disney’s live-action remake of Pinocchio. Now, he’s the man behind the camera in Here (in theaters) which pairs Hanks and his Gump co-star Robin Wright in a story that mainly unfolds across ten decades within one New Jersey living room.
True to its single-location theme, Here was filmed entirely at Pinewood Studios near London, where the cast, including Paul Bettany (WandaVision), Kelly Reilly (Yellowstone) and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) gathered under Zemeckis’ watchful eye. Making a Zemeckis movie is “not easy,” Burgess laughs. “Our running gag is Bob saying, ‘Anybody could do it that way, but how about we try something else?'” Here also offered Burgess the perk of getting to hang out with Hanks. Burgess says. “Tom’s a lovely man to be around and very dedicated to the craft of making movies.”
Speaking from Los Angeles, Burgess talks about his unmovable camera and how the Here team deployed AI technologies as a de-aging fountain of digital youth.
Here represents another adventure in experimental cinema from Bob Zemeckis. When you guys first talked about the project, what was your creative brief?
The goal was to do as much in-camera as we could by combining all the different technologies to record the image in-camera so that what we see in the final movie is captured in that first recording.
The picture window in the living room conveys what’s going on outdoors from 1907, when the house was built, to the present day in 2022. How did you prep the lighting for that scenery?
We used LED Wall technology as the backing for our window. The script supervisor and I came up with the exact day and time for every scene in the movie, so I had the room lighting pre-programmed in the computer 24/7, 365 days a year. We might say “It’s summer, we’re in New Jersey at 8:30 at night so it’s still light out.” We had our go-to settings for overcast, rain, snow, and wind, as well as the seasons, but the lighting was never done until we were ready to shoot, in case Bob wanted to call an audible and change something. Then we’d dial it in, block the scene and shoot.
Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright on the set of HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures
That sounds like a lot of pre-planning.
The issue is that you have to build the entire asset before you start shooting, and then you need to be in command of the entire image from minimum focus to infinity on any given shot. Rather than pushing those decisions off into post-production, it all has to be front-loaded before you start shooting.
Once you did start shooting, how did you approach camera placement?
For Bob, it was important that the camera be invisible. He didn’t want the audience to notice camera movement, and he didn’t want you to pull focus. What he was really talking about was depth of field. We didn’t want the camera to exaggerate anything. You keep coming back to the same location, but it’s a completely different scene, from dinosaurs to indigenous people to the building of the house. Everything keeps evolving at exactly the same spot on the planet.
How did you arrive at your ideal depth of field?
Once I grasped what Bob was trying to get at, I figured out how to limit my exposure to a certain ASA [light-sensitive film speed] with a certain f-stop on the lens to create the right depth of field. And then there’s the LED wall to consider: What does that need to be exposed at? To come up with the best-looking image, I tested different lenses different cameras, and put all that stuff in a bowl, and stirred it around to come up with hopefully the best package to shoot the film.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Which was…?
We ended up using a Panavision P70 35-millimeter lens set to a 5.6 f-stop. That became our sweet spot.
And camera?
The RED Raptor, with a digital 8 K resolution chip. In combination with the P70, which is a large format lens, we pushed the ASA to [the maximum] 1600, and that allowed me to expose the LED wall.
It’s interesting that your camera remains stationary throughout the film. Did you just put it on a tripod and leave it there?
Bob didn’t want anything underneath the camera or on either side of it. He didn’t want a dolly, a tripod, or the camera to move at all, so we bolted it to the floor with some box steel bracing and hung it from above. Mounting the rig and building the set around it became quite a challenge, making sure we could get the camera back to that exact same spot every single day.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
You have now shot five Zemeckis movies starring starring Tom Hanks. What’s it like to observe one of America’s finest actors at close hand?
It’s a pleasure sitting in the front row and watching what Tom does because he really brings it for every take. He’s not fooling around out there. He’s done his homework, he knows what his character’s about, but he is also willing [to take direction]. Many times, I’ve seen the director say, for example, “Tom, I need you to go to the window” because the audience has got to see out this window, and Tom will say, “Watch this.” He’ll take it as a challenge! And he’s smart about it. He’ll convince us that he needs to go to that window.
And, of course, Hanks shares a special rapport with Zemeckis.
They’re both so good at what they do. Tom and Bob make it look easy. It’s not easy.
Bob Zemeckis is known for pioneering new filmmaking tools. In The Polar Express, he became one of the first directors to use motion capture technology. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has played an increasingly important role in the culture. How did AI impact your work on Here?
The big AI challenge for this movie was de-aging the actors so they could play their characters at the age they needed to be. AI technology enabled us to take the [actor’s] live image and basically show us, a little glitchy, what they looked like when they were young. We had two monitors right next to each other so you could see what Tom and Robin really look like today and what they’re going to look like when the movie’s done.
Wow. Instead of applying makeup or prosthetics, you’re essentially placing an AI-sourced young face on the actor.
Yeah, and it’s kind of mind-blowing when you first see this happen on the spot. I think it stimulated the actors to see themselves at that age, and for some of us who knew Tom and Robin when they were [30 years] younger, it was, “Oh my God!”
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Netflix has revealed a new Stranger Things teaser that reveals the titles for the fifth and final season’s episodes and that the gang will have one last adventure in 2025. November 6 is a special day in the Stranger Things verse; it was November 6, 1983, when Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) was abducted and taken to the Upside Down. Now, we know the titles for the series’ final eight episodes thanks to Netflix’s little taster, and they also revealed that the final season takes place in the fall of 1987, four years after Will Byers was first abducted. The Stranger Things crew has had one heckuva ride.
The episode titles are “The Crawl,” “The Vanishing of…,” “The Turnbow Trap,” “Sorcerer,” “Shock Jock,” “Escape From Camazotz,” “The Bridge,” and “The Rightside Up.” Many of these titles speak to earlier titles and details from the series.
The first episode of the entire series was “The Vanishing of Will Byers,” and now that we’re somewhat revisiting that title with “The Vanishing of…”, the fan speculation engine has ramped up regarding who the new missing person will be. The scuttlebutt is that the missing person will be Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) younger sister, Holly Wheeler, recently recast with Evil Dead Rise actor Nell Fisher. Naturally, Netflix hasn’t revealed a thing. Then there’s the reveal of the season finale’s title, “The Rightside Up,” which echoes the season 1 finale “The Upside Down.”
Stranger Things fans will also probably recall a business in Hawkins called Turnbow Land Development & Realty, which would lend credence to the belief that “The Turnbow Trap” will involve the business. Fans of Madeline L’Engle’s iconic sci-fi novel “A Wrinkle in Time” will notice the name of a planet from that book, Camaztoz, which is controlled by the evil Black Thing and IT, in the title “Escape From Camaztoz.”
Check out the teaser below. Stranger Things 5 premieres on Netflix in 2025.
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While researching Small Axe, a riveting series about the political awakening of London’s West Indian community, director Steven McQueen found a photograph of a young Black boy standing on a train platform holding a large suitcase. The stark image had the director questioning who the child was and what his story was during the London Blitz, a period in World War II when the city was bombed by Germany over eight long months. The image inspired McQueen’s latest film, Blitz, starring Saoirse Ronan as Rita, a widowed mother terrified of what might happen to her only son George (Elliott Heffernan).
Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
The poetically kinetic narrative unfolds as a mother and son trying to reunite after she sends him away from the danger. Visually, we are transported to the harrowing period events through production design, cinematography, and costumes, but elevating the intensity of the film is a dynamic soundscape that immerses viewers in the emotions of the characters.
The sonic journey started with production sound mixer John Casali filming across practical locations and stages in London before the post team guided by supervising sound editors and rerecording mixers James Harrison and Paul Cotterell. The trio discusses how they approached and developed the aural landscape of the moving story and how they hope audiences respond to the film.
McQueen tells a layered story, but at times, it’s told through the eyes of George. How did you want to treat that perspective sonically?
Sound editor/rerecording mixer James Harrison: We spoke very early on about just that play on perspectives. You know, a lot of the film is seen from a nine-year-old’s point of view. And Steve was quite interested in just playing, not going over the top, but just playing with that and portraying the sort of normal sounds of London as being slightly heightened and slightly over the top, as seen through George’s eyes. I think somewhere like the train station is quite a good example of that. When you get in, you get the real hustle and bustle; it’s really quite chaotic. And then the huge slamming doors and the furnace and things like that, just things like that, where a nine-year-old’s just slightly overwhelmed by all of those noises that’s going on around him. So it’s definitely something that we were really playing with.
Sound editor/rerecording mixer Paul Cotterell: Steve was very clear on what he wanted and knew exactly what kind of film he was making. And in that sense, he could be really prescriptive at times, but he’s also completely open to things that he may not have considered. He’s a Londoner, and he tells us stories or memories. For example, he talked about his mum taking him to the markets as a little kid. So he would describe what he’d seen and heard as a little kid around those markets. Those kinds of memories and things gave us an interesting way into scenes.
What was your approach in recording the production sound?
Production and sound mixer John Casali: In the ideal world, you want to boom everything, but the way we shot, there were a lot of radio mics used on most scenes. Steve wants us to approach what we do quietly and not disrupt the actors, especially when we have children involved. And with Steve he demands a quiet set which is fantastic for me and everyone stays focused.
What went into micing Elliott Heffernan, who plays George, with a wireless transmitter?
John Casali: We had some sound shorts to put the transmitter discretely close to his body without him feeling it or the microphone. Fortunately we didn’t have to do much messing around with it. You want to do as little as possible to not distract or take them out of scenes.
Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
Adding to the looming danger are the air-raid sirens. How did the team create them for Blitz?
James Harrison: We went through sound libraries and previous effects we had but realized we needed to get decent recordings of an actual hand crank siren. So we got some manual sirens to record on stage, which I thoroughly regretted after spending two hours turning this thing around in my arm. Oh, I thought I was fit. Then we layered it with electronically controlled sirens so you have many sirens going off at these different points. So we created this 3D layer of things going on in the background with the sirens, the planes, and the panic of the crowds. It’s amazing to hear, especially in Dolby Atmos.
There’s a resonating scene where Rita and Jack sing in a bomb shelter. How did you want to drive the emotion of that sequence aurally?
Paul Cotterell: It’s pretty much all production sound, certainly for the principles. Then we picked up a few lines of ADR of individuals as the camera moved past their faces to emphasize their lips so you felt a bit of contact with them. It took some balancing because it’s a subdued rendition of the song and we wanted the feeling that his room is almost moving.
Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
One of the more heroic scenes takes place in a subway station where water rapidly fills the tunnel, sweeping people away. It’s up to George to get help. How did you approach the production and sound of the scene in post?
John Casali:We were fortunate that Hayley Williams, our special effects supervisor, put all the pumps for the flooding off the stage. So when the water came through, we got a lot of good sound effects of the water coming in so it didn’t feel like we were on the stage. The set was amazing, and it felt like you were in the tube because it was built lower down. So you went downstairs to get to the set, and it felt like we were able to achieve something acoustically that was true to life at that time. The team was in wetsuits for three days, but it felt like we’d really achieved something.
Elliott Heffernan and Steve McQueen on the set of “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
James Harrison: For us, it was a lot of trial and error. Water is very difficult to work with because it’s just sheer white noise. And when you’re trying to get all the different things through the screams and those frequencies and the music playing, the footsteps, it can be hard. The difficulty was trying to shape things while keeping the energy up, keeping it chaotic, and keeping the narrative going. It took a lot of work to carve out those little bits we wanted to poke through. Then, when the music takes over, there’s a lot of ebb and flow, especially with the extras. It was definitely one of the trickier sequences to track and mix.
Paul Cotterell: Steve was really keen on tracking George all the way through the water scene. So we just got layers and layers and layers of breathing and breaths from him. We did that by getting his father to stand before him, and he was kind of wrestling his dad to get all these grunts and noises out. And then, we gave him a lightweight dumbbell and recorded him running with it. It was all really good fun, and he’s a brilliant kid.
In another scene, we’re inside a jazz club with a lively crowd listening to and dancing to a band on stage. How did you approach the production sound?
John Casali: That scene was done with playback because it had to be loud. We wanted everyone to dance and to be consumed by the party feel. And then we had Pro Tools playback of the sirens so everyone could react. It worked well because it really focused everybody.
How did you find moments to Hans Zimmer’s emotional telling score?
Paul Cotterell: We used temp music throughout the process, and Steve would listen to everything, so it was a very full, very dense track, especially during the bigger sequences. Hans had a sound effects track to work against for his score, and for us, it became a question of choice. But I think the sound design and the music from Hans slotted together like a dream really.
James Harrison: I remember getting some of his temp music for the jewelry store scene with George, and I’d done quite a lot of sound design to create this otherworldly effect to make it spooky, and Han’s music fit in like a glove. It was like, oh great, we don’t have anything to worry about; we’re all on the same wavelength.
There’s a touching moment where Rita and George lay in bed, and she asks him to make a wish. In light of that, what’s one wish you’d like the audience to take away from this movie?
James Harrison: Wow, interesting question. For me, one of the things that this film is filled with is little snippets of history, historical elements, and stories like the Café de Paris, that’s based on a club in SoHo. Little details like that can get lost in time if it wasn’t for films, documentaries, and things like that bringing them to the fore again. Hopefully, a few audience members do some research on a character or a place. For us, and probably for Steve, it’s this idea to keep these memories alive a little bit longer. It’s important that we don’t forget.
Paul Cotterell: When we were setting up for a screening in the West End in London on an enormous screen, it was stunning to see its scale and detail, and we hope the sound lives nicely alongside that. So our hope is that audiences can watch this film in a big place.
When he was nine years old, James M. Churchman bought his first motorcycle and started riding the backroads of his native Florida. A few years later, he became a professional stuntman, and by the late nineties, he’d invented a computerized flying system that is still in use today. In the 2000s, Churchman emerged as a go-to stunt coordinator for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, winning the 2014 Taurus World Stunt Award for staging Iron Man 3‘s 14-man free-fall spectacle. He’s also supervised stunt sequences for X-Men, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, and Doctor Strange movies. Most recently, he served as stunt coordinator for Venom: The Last Dance (now in theaters) starring Tom Hardy.
Written and directed by Kelly Marcel, this third installment of the Venom trilogy, co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, and Rhys Ifans, follows everyman Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his guttural-voiced parasite Venom as they road-trip through America with alien “symbiotes” in hot pursuit.
Speaking from the Sony Pictures backlot, where he’s working on an undisclosed new project, Churchman describes Tom Hardy as a quick study, deconstructs Venom‘s insane horse stunt, and shares the origins story of his Flying Hero Club.
Tom Hardy is widely viewed as one of the best actors of his generation. What does he bring to the table as the anchor of this Venom franchise?
For me, Tom brings heart. He’s been through his trials, and I was going through mine. We’ve had a lot of in-depth conversations about life, not just acting and whatnot. The way he connects to the real world and emotes—I think that’s what he brought to Venom. Tom’s a movie star, 100 percent, but he’s also this grounded dude.
What kind of learning curve did you expect from Tom when it came to prepping him for action sequences?
The second Venom movie [Carnage] was my first time working with Tom. He was coming off two knee surgeries, so we had to limit what we did, but even in Carnage, he did a lot of the wire work himself. The great thing about coming back for The Last Dance is that we had this foundation of trust so we could push further. He’s also in better physical condition, so we were flying him all over the place — he’s leaping 30 feet in the air, hitting the ground, sliding on his feet. And talk about a learning curve! There’s some motorcycle work in the third act where Tom has to drive a motorcycle, slide it sideways, come to a stop, deliver dialogue, and take off. To get prepared, Tom’s double Jake and I took him out to a dirt field. The first day, Tom’s like, “I don’t like the height of the bike” — dirt bikes tend to be taller – “I don’t like the gravel, I don’t like these tires.” I get it, so I say, “Let’s just spend some time getting used to it.” The next day, Tom comes back and nails it perfectly. I’ve never seen a learning curve like that.
SPOILER ALERT
The Last Dance builds toward this wild sequence where a horse suddenly grows Venom-like teeth and flies through the air with “Nick” barely staying on his back. How did you design that stunt?
Basically, the horse is real, up to the point where Venom takes it over. And Tom is real for the majority of that sequence because we did all his elements on wires. When the horse jumps off a cliff and Tom’s hanging on for dear life, we did that on stage using a plate we shot of a real mountain [as background]. Then [VFX coordinator] John Moffat put in the horse.
Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock/Venom in Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANCE.
The hand-off between physical stunts and digital effects has come a long way since you started doing stunts professionally in 1993. How have you seen stunt technology evolve over the course of your own career?
I don’t want to talk about myself too much, but I want to talk a little bit about history – my father and grandfather built drive-in movie theaters. When I decided to become a stuntman, it was in Kentucky; I was 12 or 13 when they had a private showing of a Lee Majors movie called Steel. End of the movie, they had a dedication to a guy named A.J. Bakunas. He did a world record high fall, hit the airbag; the stitching blew open on the airbag, he went through it, hit the ground, and died. It just dawned on me, “Oh, that’s a job. That’s what I’m going to do.” My dad wasn’t too stoked about it.
The stuntman died —you get that part, right?
[Laughing]. That’s the irony. I know.
Early on, you didn’t just perform stunts. You also built your own gear.
Yeah. Because I was raised in a machine shop doing all kinds of fabrication, I saw the equipment involved in the stunt world. It was pretty rudimentary, and I thought I could have made it better. So, I started making air ramps. In 1998, I started building what I think was the first set of computerized flying winches in the industry. My buddies and I designed this system, which is completely programmed, repeatable, and controllable. Once you rehearse it a few times, it’s the same flight path doing exactly the same thing. That allows actors like Tom Hardy to concentrate on their performance along with the physical action.
Director Kelly Marcel and Tom Hardy on the set of Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANXE. photo by: Laura Radford
Sounds like a big step forward.
The first movie I got it up and running on was Underworld 2 with Kate Beckinsale. It changed how far we could go because, to me, the best shots are when we push the physical stunts in the real world as far as we can before the visual effects take over to complete the action with something we couldn’t do safely [with practical stunts]. Together, we can create just about anything.
Venom in Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANCE. Photo Courtesy: Sony Pictures
I imagine you worked closely with VFX on Eddie/Venom’s big third-act river sequence. How did you guys put that together?
We’d been shooting just outside of London at the Leavesdenstudio where the special effects team built this huge pool, 150 feet long, 25 feet wide, eight feet deep with controllable rapids and rubber rocks — it was great. When I watched the movie, I thought, “If you don’t know it’s not a river, you believe you’re in a river.” So we were going to do the real part of that sequence in the northern UK, but the union went on strike for four months, and that pushed us into winter. We had to find a better climate, so we found a river, a whitewater-rafting mecca, in northern Spain. Combined, I think we were two weeks in the pool and then shot for a week in the [Spanish] location, where we pre-rigged for a week and a half to set it up.
Venom in Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANCE. Photo Courtesy: Sony Pictures
When you’re not supervising stunts on movies you run the Flying Hero Club for kids. How does that work?
I got the idea when I was doing an X-Men movie in Montreal and became friendly with the restaurant owner out in the woods called the Au Pied du Cochon. He has two kids, a boy and a girl who was five then, so I invited them to come by [the set] after hours and take a ride on the rig. They started flying together, and they were laughing. I looked over at their mom, and her face was full of tears. She says, “Our daughter is a two-time cancer survivor. I haven’t heard her laugh in a year because it’s been nothing but doctors and treatments, so for me to hear Sacha laugh right now is just the biggest gift.” I’m tearing up now just thinking about it. But at that moment, I listened to the universe and realized I could use my profession to help kids who are facing challenges in life so they can forget about all that for a day and just have fun. That’s when I started the Flying Hero Club.
What happens at a Flying Hero Club event?
We give the kids tee-shirts, masks, and capes, and a guitarist sings their names while they’re flying on billboards so when they get their video, it has their name in it. To date, we’ve had eleven events and flown over 700 kids. Tom Hardy helped me put one on in London when we did Venom 2, and the stunt community always shows up as if you wouldn’t believe it. And now we’re going to make a docu-series. Hopefully, it will effect a positive change for families struggling with the financial cost of medical care.
Repurposing your movie-making skills to give sick children a stunt-flying experience must be gratifying.
Those are my favorite days on the planet.
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Robert Zemeckis’ new film Here is based on an unusual concept: the entire movie takes place in one location, and the camera never moves. The living room at the center of the film is set in an early 20th-century house in New England, although as the story revisits different eras, the set also transforms into a forest and a colonial-era drive, both of which represent the same site before the house’s construction in 1907.
But for the most part, we’re in a living room that touches almost every decade from the early 20th century to the present as different families move in and out, raise their children, and encounter joy and tragedy. The story focuses on one family in particular: the Youngs, starting with Rose (Kelly Reilly) and Al (Paul Bettany), who buy the house at the end of World War II and wind up sharing the home with their oldest son, Richard (Tom Hanks) and his girlfriend, Margaret (Robin Wright) when the couple become teen parents. Much to Margaret’s chagrin, she and Richard and their daughter put down roots in Richard’s parents’ home, establishing a multigenerational setup conveyed as much by Margaret’s slow takeover of the space as by the decades that appear on the actors’ faces.
In addition to the Youngs, there are the house’s buttoned-up first occupants, Pauline (Michelle Dockery) and John (Gwilym Lee), followed by the happy-go-lucky Lee (David Fynn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond), who move into the charged space in 1925 and stay on until 1944, when Lee, the inventor of the Laz-E-Boy chair, makes it big. And in the present day, Helen (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) grapple with the Covid pandemic and raising their son, Justin (Cache Vanderpuye), to stay safe in the face of police violence.
For production designer Ashley Lamont, who previously worked with Zemeckis on Pinocchio, getting a single room right through the ages took meticulous planning and precise detail work across doubled sets. We spoke with Lamont about the unusual process, from centuries of timeline maps to recreating identical sets:
Did you start with a particular time period and work your way out from there?
It’s very important to lock down what Bob and I call the constants of our show and the relationship between them — them being the colonial house in the background, the position of the window, how that colonial house interacts with it, and our camera. Once we locked them in, we could only move on to any specifics. Then we could jump into the key elements we come across, the whole exterior outside of our window and room, and what that looks like before the street and house arrive. Then we started moving into the overall design of the room, which, being 100 years old, gave us what era we should be building it in. Once we had that laid in, we moved on to the general looks of each family, their colorways, and the positions of their furniture within the same space. Obviously, we knew most things couldn’t move — the fireplace, the window, the door. So, we tried to come up with unique ways to address each era, which would complement said era and allow fluidity throughout the scene and space.
Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright on the set of HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures
How did you plan one look as it related to another?
We started with the Youngs, Tom and Robin’s family. We spend the majority of our time with them. That brought about a family timeline that evolved into a whole timeline for the entire film. We had a huge timeline, which would literally go all the way around my office, mapping out all these periods. So you could look at a block or an era with that family or spanning between them and assign a different look or colorway. Once we’d landed on some key elements, we broke down what should be specific to that era, which immediately gives you the sense that you’re in the Sixties or the Eighties. It was quite fun trying to come up with clear, decisive, definitive looks for each family and era, getting them all on the wall, and mapping your way through the entire show.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
How did you manage to coordinate all the different objects for each era?
Our timeline for the entire show grew into timelines for just about every single item that would come and go in the room. Obviously, sofas come and go, and fashion and shape change and you have to keep up with that. So we ended up having timelines for everything: a timeline for a couch, timelines for armchairs, televisions, and magazine racks, knowing you need to understand the complexities between all of those items.
What’s the set like for a project like this?
We actually had two rooms built on two different sound stages, both absolutely identical. The reason we had two is so we could we could turn around one to a different era while shooting simultaneously on the other stage. That allowed us to get through our shooting day. On paper, if someone said to you, oh, we need two of the sets, absolutely identical, [you’d think] absolutely, no problem, and start building it. And to your eye, it looks absolutely identical, but once you get the camera on, and you start fading one in and one out to start to try and see where those imperfections are, you very quickly realize that a millimeter out here or there, you can really see. We were quite particular about making sure everything lined up all the way down to the smallest details like an architrave turning around the door properly. It was quite something.
Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Did you keep the eras separate by assigning each family a colorway?
I suppose in my head I did. In the early years, everything would tend to be quite dark. So we have this dark wood wainscot moving around the bottom of the room and a dark red wallpaper, quite reminiscent of the time and fashion. For whatever reason, I always associate the Youngs’ colorway as being pink. Although they have many different looks throughout their lifespan there, the room that I could relate to the most was the pink room with the brown sofa. We might have even had both of our sets dressed in the same way for a short time, sharing a few items of dressing here and there.
How did you source items from different eras?
The film is set on the East Coast. And that clearly means that everything has to be American, quintessential Americana. We wanted to make sure we had the biggest scope of choice we could possibly get, so we ended up sourcing a lot of stuff in LA and shipping it over here. Our set decorator, Anna Lynch-Robinson, and her team put together a wonderful lot of stuff that was brought over that really meant you could be immersed in this sort of Americana-wonder.
How much was already on the page as you started working?
I always felt like Bob knew exactly what he wanted. So, it was very clear both what was on the page and from meeting with Bob that specific things had to be there, be it a model of car in our exterior driving past the window, or the TV, or some small item of dressing. And so, actually, being able to take what you got in the script became very easy to source. It was quite remarkable how much Bob could draw from his memories and life experiences through the years and eras. His vast experience working in the movies meant his knowledge was just impeccable.
Here is playing in theaters now.
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Emmy and Oscar-winning composer Kris Bowers has become one of the go-to composers in Hollywood. Known for his work on films and TV shows like King Richard, The Color Purple, The Last Repair Shop, and Bridgerton, he has created well-known scores for a wide diversity of genres. For writer/director Chris Sanders‘ The Wild Robot, Bowers has added feature animation to his list of credits. The music for the film has placed him as a leading contender for an Oscar nomination.
The Wild Robot tells the story of service robot Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), who must adapt to her new surroundings after being shipwrecked on an island inhabited only by its native animals. That includes orphaned gosling Brightbill (voiced by Kit Conor), who she builds a parental bond with as she works to prepare the undersized goose for winter migration.
The Credits spoke to Bowers about his foray into composing for animation, including his experience watching cartoons and how parenthood helped shape his emotional and spirited score for the film.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 25: Kris Bowers attends “The Wild Robot” Los Angeles screening and tastemaker event presented by DreamWorks Animation at Ross House on September 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images for DreamWorks Animation)
Early in the production, the first 20 minutes of The Wild Robot had almost no dialogue – and even the finished film has large swaths in which little is said. How did that impact the structure of your composition?
One of the things I looked forward to on The Wild Robot was knowing how much music can do in film and TV from watching cartoons when I was a kid. I remember sitting and watching Tom and Jerry, Silly Symphonies, and Looney Tunes, and seeing how much the music dictates the shape of how you feel. When Chris told me there would be these sequences that wouldn’t have much dialogue, it was just exciting for me to create something that was going to be very active while being supportive of the story and interesting compositionally enough that it doesn’t feel boring to listen to, while there’s nothing else going on, at least in terms of dialogue.
DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders.
You have a theme for Roz that mirrors the fact she is technology in an organic environment. How did you approach the way she starts to merge with her environment and become more organic over the course of the story?
With Roz’s theme, I was actually thinking a lot about these products that we interact with. When Lupita talks about her voice work, which is so incredible and very subtle, she says she began trying to emulate what she calls this programmed optimism that you hear in Siri and Alexa. They always sound very bright, bubbly, and happy. She starts in that place and then continues to add her own warmth and humanity to the sound. With that in mind, for Roz’s theme, we started with a piece that could function as her commercial music, which she plays off of her speaker at the very beginning of the film. We wanted to have a little chime like your LG washing machine, so there’s a little thing that plays that is her “task acquired” chime, and then there’s a B side to her theme that, for me, represents the moments where she’s going beyond her programming. You hear that in the rescue mission and in the more heroic aspects of the winter storm. The main theme started as advertising music, and then I tried to see if that same melody would function as Roz became more.
Sandbox Percussion uses percussive elements based on more “found sounds,” like playing on tree branches and scrap metal. These are all live musical elements. In what practical ways did you collaborate with them?
When Chris and I discussed what the sound of the score would be, we talked about wanting to have this balance of the organic and the synthetic and something that represented the wild of the island. My first instinct, which was stereotypical, was to have ethnic flutes, but I immediately started questioning, “Where are we?” and “What culture is this?” Are we saying we’re in that place? So I wanted to find something with that kind of tactile quality but felt like you couldn’t place it in terms of geography. A friend of mine, classical composer Thomas Kotcheff, told me about Sandbox Percussion, a primarily classical percussion ensemble, but they play in this unorthodox way. It’s four guys, and they set up these crazy workstations that are tuned metal pipes, wood planks, an oxygen tank, and a tea kettle and tea cups and bottles. It’s more like foley and sound design, but then they play those as instruments.
How did you incorporate their instrumentation with your own choices?
First I wrote a demo cue to experiment with their sound, then I also wrote music to the raccoon sequence early in the film, where the raccoons are stealing part of Roz’s body, and I thought those would be two great moments to have this tactile sound. I took those recordings and made my own library, essentially, to use with their sound throughout the rest of the film. Then we went back and recorded with them. For example, there was this sound I had been calling “the rusty bucket.” We were trying to figure out what that would be, and they’d say, “That sounds like a tam-tam played with a metal stick, but then we can also play a cymbal covered with a towel, and then we’ll do that together, and that’ll be the sound for the rusty bucket.”
It also feels like where they land in the mix is very intentional.
Exactly. There was a lot of collaboration to figure out how to reproduce some of these unorthodox percussion sounds creatively, but I recorded them separately, so they were functioning almost like ASMR on top of the orchestra. They were always mixed differently than all the other percussion, the orchestra, and everything else so that they had their own place to live in the soundscape.
How did the main theme used in the migration sequence develop or change over time? Was there trial and error?
I started working on the migration theme very early on because I wanted to make sure the main theme worked in the rest of the film. For the sequence where Roz is saying goodbye to Brightbill, I thought of what that experience would be like as a parent. My daughter was six months old, and I imagined dropping her off at college. I wrote this piece and shared it with Chris, and he said, “Yeah, that really isn’t right. You should try to imagine dropping your daughter off at college”, which, of course, was what I’d done. I realized that the video that played in my mind was really cute, with us waving at each other, and she’d look back, so I wrote this very sweet and nostalgic, jaunty piece. But Chris and I talked about what was happening at that moment in the film. They’re not saying goodbye or that they love each other, even though they may not see each other again. Going home, I imagined a different scenario and thought of all the inevitable complexities of what our relationship might be. No matter how hard I try, I’m going to fail her. There will be things she’ll have to forgive me for or that she has to accept about me. There are worst-case scenarios, but that’s also just part of parenting. With my own relationships with my parents, there are things I’m still trying to accept and deal with, and all those complexities brought completely different emotions. I tried again, and Chris said, “You’re really onto something here.”
The next step, then?
He told me to write away from the film, not to watch the sequence, but write, and he’d animate to that. That was really freeing and exciting to just work on building the music. So he then went to the editor, Mary Blee, and the animators and shaped it based on the music.
These days, that’s a rare gift.
Well, Chris comes from the days of 2D animation, having worked on movies like Beauty and the Beast, which speaks to his history. I found out recently that at Disney back in the day the director’s room was called “the music room,” because they were working with existing pieces of music, which is true too with Looney Tunes and music by folks like Carl Stalling. That explains his comfort with music coming first. He comes from a generation of animators who really believe music is essential to great animation. It’s just a pleasure to work with someone with that perspective.
The Wild Robot is in theaters nationwide and is now widely available on demand.
Featured image: (from left) Roz (Lupita N’yongo), and Brightbill (Kit Connor) in DreamWorks Animation’s Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders.
Warner Bros. has been quietly developing a movie based on George R.R. Martin’s juggernaut fantasy series that set HBO on fire for eight seasons and has been parlayed into a successful spinoff series, House of the Dragon. The news broke late last week and marked the first time the series had been launched on the big screen. There’s already one successful spinoff series unfolding on HBO—House of theDragon—centered on the internal strife within the powerful Hosue Targaryen and set around 172 years before the events depicted in Game of Thrones. Another series, based on Martin’s “Dunk & Egg” novella, is set to become A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, centered on the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk) and young Aegon V Targaryen (Egg), which is set 90 years before the events in Martin’s most iconic work, “A Song of Fire and Ice,” which is the series that spawned GoT. But this would be the first feature film the studio has made from Martin’s deliciously rich fantasy world, and there’s word that it might also be the first to be set after the events in the flagship series.
Season 8, episode 2 (debut 4/21/19): Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington. Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO
The Hollywood Reporterscooped that the film project is in the very early stages of development, without a director, cast, or writer yet attached. Yet the studio is serious about bringing Martin’s brawling, sprawling, bloodthirsty Westerosi denizens onto the silver screen. This wouldn’t be far afield for Warner Bros. when you consider that Martin and the co-creators of Game of Thrones, Dan Weiss and David Benioff, were all interested in exploring Game of Thrones as a feature film. Weiss and Benioff’s idea was to conclude their series with a film trilogy rather than the 8th season that aired in 2019. At the time, HBO wanted to keep Game of Thrones firmly saddled on the small screen.
Season 8, episode 6/series finale (debut 5/19/19): Emilia Clarke. photo: Courtesy of HBO
The landscape has changed since Game of Thrones concluded on May 19, 2019, with new folks at the top of the TV and film division (Casey Bloys heads HBO, while the film studio is led by Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca), with films now begetting series, like Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Warner Bros’s own The Batman spinning off into HBO’s beloved The Penguin. Warner Bros. also has another spinoff just about to premiere; Dune: Prophecyis about to arrive on November 17, derived from Denis Villeneuve’s critically acclaimed Dune and Dune: Part II but set thousands of years before the rise of House Atreides.
While there are more Game of Thrones spinoffs in the works for the small screen, they’ve all been set before the original series, and there’s a chance the film project could be set after the traumatic conclusion to the action, which saw Kit Harrington’s Jon Snow turning on Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen to save the Seven Kingdoms. What do the Seven Kingdoms look like in the aftermath of the epic battle with the Night King and Dany’s fall from power? Not even George R. R. Martin has told us that.
The Night King. Courtesy HBO.
Featured image: Season 8, episode 1 (debut 4/14/19): Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke.
photo: HBO
Costume designer Jacqueline Durran first dressed Saoirse Ronan in director Joe Wright’s sweeping English drama Atonement in 2007. She did so again for Wright’s action thriller Hanna and Greta Gerwig’s heartwarming period adaptation of Little Women, winning an Oscar for Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Aclott’s beloved book. Durran collabs with the dazzling Irish performer for a fourth time in Steve McQueen’s wartime epic Blitz which follows Ronan as a widowed mother (Rita) trying to protect her only son George (magnificently played by eleven-year-old Elliott Heffernan) from the looming atrocities by sending him on a train far away. But George is determined to find his way back home. What transpires is a journey through the eyes of a child and a distraught mother trying to reunite during the perils of war.
“It’s unbelievable how quick it goes,” the costume designer says when reminded that it’s been 18 years since Atonement. Durran’s focus for Blitz was researching World War II London during a time when Nazi Germany systematically bombed the city over eight months between September 1940 and May 1941. Period photos grounded Durran’s decision-making where she stitched a realistic tapestry of silhouettes and colors of those fighting for their lives in a crumbling city. “London was this kind of metropolis full of people having a life-changing experience, but it was so important to capture them as characters,” she tells The Credits. “We wanted to create the idea of individuality with the costumes.” What it meant was developing looks that reflected the time period but also the personality of the characters.
Below, Durran discusses her second collaboration with McQueen following the series Small Axe, how character influenced costume design in this intimate portrait of survivors of the Nazi assault on London.
Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
You mentioned you wanted to avoid the clichés of the time period. How did that affect the costume design and how you approached it?
What I tried to do was to go back to the original photographic sources. And one of the things we got our hands on was the pictures from the Imperial War Museum that had been censored. We took all the pictures that had people in, and we put them on our walls, and then we bored down into them to really see what people were wearing and the differences between the people and the characters in people. I wanted to ground it as much as I could in the references from the period instead of just doing a kind of 1940s sweep, which you can do pretty easily. I wanted to actually try and get character into it.
Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
You can see the individuality come through the costume design. It’s almost as if each person in this film is telling their own story.
One of the key things about the movie is that it’s about London, and it’s about hundreds of thousands of people. And you really wanted to feel that it was hundreds of thousands of different people who all had their own story. And at any given time, you could have gone down and examined their story instead of Rita’s story. And it would have been a different story but equally valid.
McQueen has said the inspiration for Blitz stems from an image he saw of a small black boy standing on a rail platform with a suitcase. Did he show you the photograph?
Yeah, he did. We had that picture on our wall.
Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
Did the image become an inspiration for George’s look?
In a way, it did. With that picture and with all of the children in the film, we could look at the pictures closely and take the details from what they were wearing, which wasn’t a massive range of clothing in England at that time. The children in those photos would be in shorts of different lengths and different degrees of raggedness that would either be too big or too small. It’s all about just being really observant about the details.
How did you approach grounding George’s grandfather Gerald’s (Paul Weller) costumes?
Gerald’s back story was that he had been an educated working-class man in the docks. He’d worked in physical labor, but there was a big tradition of working-class education in the UK during that period. He was part of that, so they were kind of the educated working class. That fed into what he was wearing, but now that he’s retired, he keeps things clean.
Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan and Paul Weller in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
Did that working-class vibe fall into Rita’s look?
There are all these things that you can deduce about a character from a starting point that you can thread through. The thing about Rita was that there was a lot of reference for women that were putting their kind of best face forward. They felt it was part of the war effort to keep their appearance together. And I think that was part of Rita’s character, and Rita’s friends were all part of that, really.
You can see that during the factory scene when Rita speaks to a crowd of women.
Yes. When we get to the factory and you see all of the women, they’re in their context, they’re there, but there’s another 200 of them that are the same. Everybody’s got their story, everybody’s got their character and their individuality. That was what we were aiming for, and I thought it really ended up looking like the reference pictures; it was just great.
Saoirse Ronan and Steve McQueen on the set of “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
The color red is part of Rita’s character, especially her jackets. How did that play into your thought process?
I felt like it was part of the story of the smartness that people were aiming for during the war. And when we looked at original jackets, and we pulled a whole load of things to try for the first fitting, it was remarkable how stylish and well-cut these jackets were and the quality of them. I mean, there are so many that still exist. It’s amazing, however, that many years later, they’re still there. You can still try them on. They’re really well made. They’re beautiful pieces of clothing, and they were made during the war or immediately before. I wanted to capture the fact that a good jacket was widely available. Red is a color that repeats through the 1940s, and it just felt like the kind of color that was going to work for her character and also for her in the story.
One of my favorite shots is Rita sitting on the bus, which is red with her red jacket looking out. I think it’s such a beautiful shot, and it’s such a beautiful London scene that I just loved it. So I think it was more of a feeling of an atmosphere and a period and of London and other things for me.
Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.
George meets a soldier named Ife (Benjamin Clémentine) who tries to help him return home. How did you want to approach his uniform in terms of period accuracy?
All the uniforms are pretty accurate. The color of them was going to be that navy blue. For Ife, we made some samples in different weights of cotton because it’s all about what you would have under and how it will hang. So we did that to get a great shape in the uniform. Putting the piece of knitwear under it was always about finding a way of making that uniform human. It’s someone’s choice. It’s what someone’s wearing. So we knitted the sweater for him that went underneath. It’s gray and not showy in any way, but it’s about being warm and being utility and being your work clothes.
Blitz is in theaters now and streams on Apple TV+ on November 22.
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Featured image: Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22. Courtesy Apple TV+
The first trailer for Skeleton Crew has officially landed—or, perhaps, it’s more accurate to say it’s officially lost in space.
The latest Star Wars series on Disney+ has decidedly different vibes from previous live-action series set in a galaxy far, far away—think Goonies in space, and you’re halfway there. And that’s no slight—Goonies was one of the great kid’s adventure movies of the 1980s (or ever, frankly)—only this saga is set as far from Earth as you can get. Led by Jude Law, Skeleton Crew is centered on the epic adventure of four kids whose discovery of a ship on their otherwise non-mysterious home planet launches them on a journey into a much more dangerous galaxy.
While careening through space, they come across Jod Na Nawood (Law), a stranger with the skills they’ll need to make it back home. Madcap adventures with some sinister characters await, with droids and creatures aplenty.
Law is joined by Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, Tunde Adebimpe, Kerry Condon, and Nick Frost. The series boasts a stellar list of directors, too, including Spider-Man trilogy helmer Jon Watts, The Green Knight director David Lowery, Everything Everywhere All At Once directors the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), and actor and The Mandalorian director Bryce Dallas Howard.
Check out the trailer below. Skeleton Crew arrives on Disney+ on December 3.
For more stories on 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to
A second Squid Game trailer has emerged, and it seems even more nervy and sinister than the last. Nobody thought that the second season for the contestants of the deadliest game on the planet would be any safer, but the demand to “smile” as the games begin feels extra cruel.
The new season of Squid Game brings back a familiar face—Seong Gi-hun, number 456 (Lee Jung-jae)—only his friends and foes from the first time around are, of course, no longer around. There are new contestants Seong has to manage or, to put it more bluntly, outlast, outwit, and outlive.
The new trailer reintroduces us to one of the most astonishingly brutal moments of TV in the past four years, the first time we saw Squid Games’ version of Red Light, Green Light, a classic kid’s game turned into a nightmare by the makes of the games. In this version, the contestants must make it to the other side of a field without being mowed down by a giant robot doll, Younghee, who shoots anything that moves. It’s hard to watch, and in season 2, it doesn’t look a smidge easier to bear.
Yet, in the opening seconds of the new trailer, a devilish proposition is proposed to the contestants. If they want, they can forgo the games and split the prize money, saving themselves a lot of pain and death by being just a bit less greedy.
Seong Gi-hun tries to keep the contestants alive, but why would they listen to him? So he reveals to the contestants that he’s been in the game before, a surprising fact given the circumstances. “Why the hell would you come crawling back?” one asks. Good question.
The second season of Netflix’s biggest series ever returns on December 26, usually a very active time for streaming. When the first season premiered in 2021, it brought in an astonishing 265.2 million views and a total watch-time of 2.2 billion hours—in its first 13 weeks of release.
“Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), who vowed revenge at the end of season one, returns and joins the game again,” Squid Game executive producer, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote in a press release detailing the series’ upcoming conclusion. “Will he succeed in getting his revenge? Front Man doesn’t seem to be an easy opponent this time, either. The fierce clash between their two worlds will continue into the series finale in season three, which will be brought to you next year.”
Lee Jung-Jae’s career has taken off stateside since Squid Game first bowed, starring in Disney+’s recent Star Wars series, The Acolyte, playing Master Jedi Sol. He’ll be joined in season two by returning cast members Lee Byung-hun, Wi Ha-jun, and Gong Yoo. Newcomers include Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Park Gyu-young, Lee Jin-uk, Park Sung-hoon, Yang Dong-geun, Kang Ae-sim, Lee David, Choi Seung-hyun, Roh Jae-won, Jo Yu-ri and Won Ji-an.
Check out the trailer below.
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Writer/director Parker Finn has been enjoying a whirlwind victory lap in the days since his Smile 2 opened number one at the box office to become the year’s top-grossing horror film. “It’s been very surreal and exciting,” Finn told The Credits, speaking from his Los Angeles home. In fact, the past four years have unspooled for Finn with the kind of momentum young filmmakers dream about, thanks to his mastery of nightmarish scenarios.
Finn became obsessed with horror films growing up in Ohio, where he absorbed the art and craft of the well-timed jump scare. He applied those lessons in his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept, which won a SXSW Special Jury prize after playing to festival crowds in 2020. He then signed with Paramount Pictures to make the feature-length Smile. That 2021 effort, centered on a virus-like curse that announces its presence with a terrifyingly insincere grin, earned $217 million on a $17 million budget.
For the follow-up, Finn shrewdly cast against type by picking British singer-actress Naomi Scott, who literally played a Disney princess in Aladdin, to portray haunted pop star Skye Riley. Inspired by singers like FKA Twigs, Sia, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Olivia Rodrigo, Skye is bedeviled by toxic fans and the ever-lurking “smile” demon.
On a recent afternoon, Finn, who’s a producer on the film, explained how he cracked the code for creating a fresh-feeling sequel and about how his movie helped spur local economies in New York, where Smile 2 was filmed.
Director Parker Finn on the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
Sequels can be very tough to get right. You figured out how to successfully extend the original Smile premise into fresh territory in ways that have excited horror fans of all stripes. How did you come up with pop star-meets-horror concept for Smile 2 ?
Early on, all of the ideas that initially came to me when I first thought about a sequel —I threw them all away because they felt too obvious, too expected. I really wanted to push myself to do something that nobody would see coming, and I landed on this mega-pop star character of Skye Riley. What I loved about it was that the world of this pop star felt so far from the first one. Where everything was supposed to be shiny and fun and exciting. I was curious if I could make it feel cold, frightening, and almost alien.
Naomi Scott, left, and Director Parker Finn on the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
When you say you “landed on” the idea for this character, was there a specific lightbulb moment, maybe while watching a music video, when you realized, “This is my hook?“
I don’t know if I could trace it to an exact moment. I think that right now we’re at this peak para-social relationship with fame and celebrity and fandom and stuff like that. I love pop music. I’m fascinated by how we, as humans, worship celebrities, and I guess there was just something in the air that felt interesting to me. Once I got struck by the lightning bolt, I got obsessed with it.
Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
You build your story around Skye Riley, portrayed brilliantly by Naomi Scott, who always tries to put on a happy face.
You know, once I started thinking about this incredibly famous, public-facing figure who’s expected to be “on” all the time, who’s performing and playing this persona that everybody thinks she is, I then wanted to go behind the scenes, behind that velvet rope, and explore the real human who’s trapped by her own fame and everything that she’s dealing with inside of her own head.
Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
You shot Smile 2 in New York, not, for example, in Romania or some other country where mid-budget films often get made. In addition to writing and directing, you’re also a producer on Smile 2.
Yeah.
Rosemarie DeWitt, left, and Naomi Scott star in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
So, from a producer’s standpoint, were you mindful of the impact movie productions have on local economies?
Absolutely. Even with a modestly medium-budgeted film like Smile, you’re talking about thousands of people’s jobs who are affected by this movie from the moment it’s greenlit to when it’s delivered in post. Of course, first and foremost, you have to service the film and story. What does it demand? So I needed to look at that. And I think when you are trying to work inside your box, your budget box and schedule and everything, you’ve got to see what you can make work. But I was setting this film in New York City, and we’d shot Smile One in New Jersey, so I was familiar with the crew. We’re very lucky that New York has some of the best crews in the world, in my opinion, so we brought much of the first Smile crew back for Smile 2. But we also shot much of the film upstate in the Hudson Valley, so we were thinking about how to utilize local locations and work with local small businesses and things like that.
On the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
You filmed in small towns in upstate New York, such as Newburgh, Wappinger Falls, and Poughkeepsie.When Smile 2 came to town, would the production generate business for support services like catering, car rentals, and location fees?
Definitely. You’ve got to feed a crew of 100 people every day, and sometimes not just one meal. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into that. Or if we’re in one of these towns during the week and far enough from home base, we’re putting people up in hotels. There are so many ways where [film production] has a major ripple effect.
Smile 2‘s costume designer, Alexis Forge, for example, would need to hire a team to help her execute her vision for the characters’ clothes.
Every department is obviously going to figure out how to utilize their particular budget. Our costume designer has people she loves to work with, and some are from the city. Some are from upstate, but there are even things like laundering services for costumes and stuff like that.
Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) signs a fans shirt in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
I remember when Chris Nolan shot a night scene for Oppenheimer down the street from where I live. The sequence only lasted a few seconds on screen, but for three days, vintage car wranglers, lighting technicians, set dressers, and security guards were on hand to make sure everything went smoothly. It takes a lot of man and womanpower to create the stories audiences enjoy in a movie theater!
There are a million different ways where it all intersects. In an increasingly globalized world, it feels good sometimes to have an impact locally. That’s a special part of making a film, especially an original film — I know this is a sequel, but it’s a sequel to an original film that was homegrown. You’re getting to help create jobs or sustain jobs. That’s really important because I think what we’re facing right now is a crazy time trying to make movies. I hope we keep finding ways to push and make the industry healthy, so everybody wins.
The first reactions to director Jon M. Chu’s Wicked are descending upon social media like so many flying monkeys. Chu’s adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical—itself an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel—is led by two powerhouse performers in Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda. The first reactions are mostly raves, with folks calling it one of the very best adaptations of a Broadway hit ever, and Erivo and Grande are being hailed for knockout turns as the two future, star-crossed witches that have launched them into Oscar contention.
“Jon Chu IS a musical genius and the world he creates and the performances he captures are really next level,” writes Vanity Fair’s Chris Murphy. “Wicked is the best musical-to-movie adaptation since Chicago and Mamma Mia,” writes IndieWire’s Erin Strecker. “Glinda is the role Ariana Grande was born to play. Perfectly suited and genuinely a hilarious, scene-stealing performance. Cynthia Erivo’s heavenly vocals allow her to make Elphaba her own,” writes Variety’s Clayton Davis.
Wicked is the first big-screen adaptation of the juggernaut Broadway show and reveals the world of Oz before Dorothy dropped in and changed everything. The adaptation boasts the power ballads that rocked the Broadway stage and will enroll viewers at Shiz University, where Elphaba and Glinda cross paths and form an unlikely but profound friendship, one that will change both of their lives forever.
The supporting cast includes Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero—a love interest of both Elphaba and Glinda—Michelle Yeoh’s Madame Morrible, the headmistress of Shiz University where Elphaba and Glinda meet, Marissa Bode’s Nessarose, Elphaba’s younger sister, Bronwyn James’ Shenshen and Bowen Yang’s Pfannee, Glinda’s friends at Shiz U., and Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard of Oz.
Wicked’s production team includes production designer Nathan Crowley, a six-time Oscar nominee and longtime collaborator of Christopher Nolan (The Prestige, Dunkirk, Interstellar); Oscar-nominated costume designer Paul Tazewell; cinematographer Alice Brooks; and composers John Powell (Oscar nominee) and Stephen Schwartz (three-time Oscar winner).
L to R: Director Jon M. Chu with Cynthia Erivo (as Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (as Glinda) on the set of WICKED
Let’s take a flight around the Wicked reactions below. Wicked hits theaters on November 22.
Wicked is a cinematic spectacle that serves as one of the very best big screen adaptations of a Broadway musical ever. Jon M. Chu perfectly captures the magic of the Broadway show while adding in some of his own unique flourishes to the source material. Ariana Grande and Cynthia… pic.twitter.com/KyTFJCRcKz
i have seen the Wicked movie not once not twice but three separate times now and believe me when i say it is a complete and utter slay you will be gagged beyond belief everything you think the film looks like from your cracked iphones is wrong Cynthia and Ari truly are impeccable
Happy to confirm WICKED is the best musical-to-movie adaptation since CHICAGO and MAMMA MIA. Ariana Grande….is perfection!? @hillibusterr and I kept grabbing each other’s arm in delight.
#Wicked rocks, kids. Galinda is the role Ariana Grande was born to play. Perfectly suited and genuinely a hilarious, scene-stealing performance. Cynthia Erivo’s heavenly vocals allow her to make Elphaba her own. The team of artisans assembled by Jon M. Chu all put their signature… pic.twitter.com/OIXi9bnFZz
The world is not ready for how great @wickedmovie is. Jon M. Chu, Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande have gifted us a musical masterpiece that is much more than we could have ever expected. Ariana & Cynthia will blow you away. The production design and costumes are a visual spectacle. pic.twitter.com/TizvEL8tEh
I was ‘pessimistical’ going in, but…WICKED is a masterpiece. Ariana Grande makes Glinda sparkle: she milks every moment with gusto, humor and hair flips. Jon M. Chu added so much new life to the story that I can see why it needed to be 2 parts! Well worth the 20-year wait. pic.twitter.com/dJIYdoZgPc
#WickedMovie is an Oz-some spectacle that pops and enchants on the big screen. An absolutely stunning vision. Leads Erivo and Grande knock it out of the park. While this perhaps won’t convert many anti-musical folks, genre fans and die-hard Ozians (Wickhards?) will feast on this pic.twitter.com/HhqJc9cXAK
“Hell arrives tomorrow when we bring in the cardinals,” quips the fair-minded Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the dean of the College of Cardinals, on the eve of the gathering to elect the new Pope. After the unexpected death of the current pontiff, it is Lawrence’s duty to oversee the titular Conclave, when over 100 cardinals from around the world gather to witness the cutthroat battle of succession steeped in tradition and secrecy.
In this riveting Vatican-set election thriller, director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) takes us behind the veil into one of the most clandestine events in the world. As the deliberations begin, the cardinals are sequestered in their dormitories at the Casa Santa Marta for the duration of the conclave. On the cusp of profound change for the Catholic Church, several frontrunners emerge to pit the progressive camp against the hardline conservatives.
Oscar-nominated production designer Suzie Davies (Saltburn, The Courier) had her work cut out for her on this film. Since the Vatican does not allow filming at the Sistine Chapel or the Casa Santa Marta, replicas were built at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome. “The whole film is a jigsaw puzzle of locations in Rome and studio builds. We built the elements of the Sistine Chapel with the amazing craftsmen at Cinecittà and the rooms and corridors of the Casa Santa Marta,” Davies recalls. The six-month project included a core team of 20-25 people, in addition to approximately 100 plasterers, painters, construction staff, and set decorators.
Was the crew mostly local?
Yes, the craftsmanship is absolutely out of this world. It was fantastic having people with the knowledge there. Cinecittà is an amazing studio; it felt very exciting driving through those gates every day and working across Studio 5, the famous [Federico] Fellini stage.
What was it like to bring this sacrosanct process to life for the screen?
We know so much about the Vatican, but there’s a hidden side of the conclave that no one really knows. That works to our advantage because we can do our own thing to a certain extent. The tradition is well-documented, but not what happens behind the scenes. So, we ran with our artistic license to create that more brutal fascist architecture of this prison-like Casa Santa Marta. All their secretive meetings and underhand tactics were fun to play with in the corners of these buildings.
Director Edward Berger talks about balancing light and dark, masculine and feminine, and traditional and contemporary in this film. How does that play into your designs?
This film is about juxtapositions between what we think we know and what we don’t. We discussed playing with those elements to create a more dramatic visual story. Rome is beautiful with amazing ornate architecture, but it also has contemporary architecture that we decided to play with. The feminine shapes and gold, softer side were juxtaposed against hard black lines, and the whites, blues, and blacks against the gold and rich reds.
Those long hallways at Casa Santa Marta felt stifling—you’ve talked about wanting it to feel like a posh prison.
That’s a set built in Cinecittà, along with elements from some locations. That’s so great that you get that feeling. We wanted it to feel hermetically sealed—there was no fresh air since they couldn’t open the windows. So, all you could hear was the hum of fluorescent lights and the air conditioning, and those noises clattered around those corridors. I wanted them to look great, so I built the longest corridor I could. We looked for that location but couldn’t find the scale and design. So, we built it at Cinecittà on a long rectangular stage.
What made the Cardinals’ quarters feel cold, rigid, and bleak?
With those rooms, I was inspired by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Those little squares on the doors became a theme, which I think intimate the prison door. There’s no ornamentation or decorative moldings on the walls; it’s all very neat, brutal, and sharp.
Some of the revelations and tension occur during routine activities, such as meals in the dining hall and in the stairwells and hallways.
It’s interesting to see them in all their pomp and amazing costumes in the canteen or going up the stairs. Seeing them in unusual spaces gives the sense that it’s all happening right now. Often, the images of the conclave can be a Renaissance painting, like a Caravaggio. You think it happened ages ago, but it could happen right now.
This canteen in a military academy in Rome.It had a great, low ceiling but sort of brutal vibe that suits this thriller. We cleaned it up and painted it, put some blinds on the windows. I think the soldiers were very happy with what we did and decided to keep it that way.
What are some of your favorite scenes?
There’s a beautiful choral piece in the Gold Room at the Palazzo Barberini, where Lawrence gives a big speech in Latin and Italian [the homily that marks the beginning of the conclave]. The Palazzo is a museum with this beautiful gold room with silk gold wallpaper, a massive fireplace, huge windows, and an ornate painted ceiling. Lizy Christl’s costumes are extraordinary, and the casting of all those background artists is amazing. You spin around this room of gold and listen to this wonderful music; I found that really moving. When Edward and I first visited there, we were both blown away by the scale. We just knew this needed to be part of our world. In my job, sometimes it’s just as important to know what not to do. That location already had a lot, so all I did was build a 15-foot crucifix artwork for the space.
What other locations did you augment to fit in the story?
The room of tears at the very end, when the new Pope sits and wonders about his next movie, that’s an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Rome that we tidied up and painted that bright, deep red color.That was a very white stucco room underneath the Sistine Chapel that we painted red. The Conclave itself has adapted and changed the tradition over the years anyway, so we decided we could add some changes, too.
What about recreating parts of the Sistine Chapel—was that from an existing replica in storage at Cinecittà?
Cinecittà has some elements of it and ancient Rome on the backlot. So, we put that together in a slightly different configuration because we wanted our conclave to be more like a government, so the cardinals sat opposite each other. But the Sistine Chapel’s configuration wouldn’t have allowed that if we’d recreated it for real. Another known tradition is they’d carpet the Sistine Chapel to deaden the sound so that no one could hear their deliberations, but it’s usually beige. We thought that red on red adds to the drama, a bit of an homage to Cries and Whispers.
The cardinals vote until a two-thirds majority is achieved. That may sound boring on the page, but those sequences were suspenseful. How did you make the room where they vote interesting?
Very early on, Edward knew how all the chairs would be arranged, that each cardinal gets a pen, paper, a rule book, and their hat, those wooden spheres, and burning that paper. All those were specifically made to be very graphic. The DoP Stéphane Fontaine did a wonderful job creating those close-ups to give that sense of power and tradition. The stove that burns the papers is pretty well-documented, but we added a few more LED buttons to give it more intrigue and curiosity. We spent ages debating whether the graphics should be in English or Italian or should it just be a white sticker or a black sticker.
Did you have to recreate the “turtle fountain” as well?
There are turtles at the Vatican Gardens, and we found ornamental ponds in the Museo Etrusco in Rome. Filming there was tricky—there was a mosaic next it that no one could stand on, not even a turtle. So, we had to tiptoe around with them to get them to swim and acclimatize them to the water. We also filmed at the Royal Palace of Caserta in Napoli, where we see a turtle walking across an ornate marble floor.
In the beginning, when the Pope has just passed away,they immediately seal the room with a big red ribbon on the door.
We know it is sealed, but we made up how we would seal our door. We wanted it to be a little bit more dramatic, so I added the large metal knobs on the door to give that lovely shape. And then we found that brilliant machine that melts the wax. I think some could’ve have done it in the traditional way of lighting a candle and heating the wax, it was lovely to bring a contemporary element to it.
Costume designer Helen Huang bridges reality and comic book storytelling in The Penguin, finding a brilliant balance that gives the series weight and a churlish glamour befitting a story set in Gotham’s criminal underworld. The hit series led by showrunner Lauren LeFranc is familiar—Gotham is our most explored comic version of New York City—yet heightened and deliciously detailed, blending a tactical mob story with the haunting metropolis in a period of rapid decay following the Riddler’s bombing and flooding of the city at the end of The Batman—The Penguin is set in that tragedy’s aftermath. Huang’s work, in particular, is not only a treat to the eyes but deepens the duality of the characters and the famous comic book city.
As Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) attempts to gain control of Gotham’s criminal underworld, audiences see all the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of him. The same goes for Sofia Falcone (Cristin Millioti), whose impeccable, ordered style often contrasts her intense interior life and the barely sublimated rage she has for all the men in her life who did her rotten. Characters are well-drawn through Huang’s eyes, who previously won an Emmy for Netflix’s brilliantly salty Beef.
Recently, Huang spoke with The Credits about crafting Oz, Sofia, and the titular character’s young partner-in-crime, Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz).
How do you balance showing all sides of Oz, running the gamut between his good and bad taste?
Well, with Oz, first of all, he is very concerned with masculinity. He probably grew up at a certain time, and the guys he idolized in his neighborhood represented what he viewed as masculine. So, his taste runs in that world, which is why he likes suits and structured tailoring. But he likes to think of himself as a rough-and-tough guy, so when he does more practical jobs, that’s what we designed for him.
Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBOColin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
Since it’s a comic book world, did you want to make some more heightened choices for him as well?
Something like The Penguin, you can never be totally realistic even though it’s grounded. You have to add that extra 20% of something that toes the line. We focused a lot on his silhouette, like how his lapels look. I like to think that Oz thought a lot about things like his head-to-lapel proportion. Later, in the episodes where he’s in the tunnels, we even did some classic workwear because Oz is dressing up for the part. He’s a man of the people, but I also think he likes old movies, so he gravitates toward these classic things, as well as things that might be flashy or distasteful to people like the Falcones.
Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
How did you want the clothes to move with his body?
We tried to make it very close to his body. We also made his shoulders bigger, and his lapels were more 1970s-style, with bigger lapels to fit his dimensions and give it a timeless feel. We did take the waist in more. Oz probably really likes that silhouette. There’s a sense of insecurity about how he physically looks, so we tried to imagine what he’d tell the tailor if he got his suits custom-made. He also wore these pointy shoes in the movie, and when I saw them in person, I thought, “Oh, should we get him a more comfortable shoe?” But the decision was, no, he’d cram his foot into the pointy shoes because that’s how he feels his silhouette should be.
Colin Farrell, Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
For Victor, what were some of your photo references?
For Victor and all of Crown Point, I looked at many street photographers from the late 1970s to the 1980s, like Jamel Shabazz and Richard Sandler. We wanted Gotham to feel timeless, so I looked at those references for Victor. I personally love the ’90s; it creates a good contrast between his silhouette and Oz’s.
Colin Farrell, Rhenzy Feliz. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
How’d the ‘90s influence you?
The ’90s silhouette is bigger, which is why I went in that direction with him. Everything he wears in episodes one to three was made just for him. We remade a 1990s starter jacket, something inspired by a Fila jacket. We even printed a Gotham basketball T-shirt for him. I wanted to give him the feel of someone who might have gotten a hand-me-down from his dad that he now thinks is cool.That provides contrast with Oz, who is colorful, but when he goes dark, he goes very dark. Victor, in the beginning, is more composed, so we used more color and brightness for him. He wears denim, whereas Oz doesn’t. It was all about signaling to the audience the generational contrast between Victor and Oz.
Rhenzy Feliz. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBORhenzy Feliz and Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
There’s a tangible contrast for Sofia Falcone as well. Early in the show, she’s buttoned up, but as an audience, we know there’s a lot of anger and sadness behind her eyes. How early on did you make that creative choice for Sofia?
We talked about that a lot. How should she appear when they first meet her? Lauren, the showrunner, wanted her to feel put together. They wanted to avoid the “crazy female” trope but also make her a challenge for Oz. She’s composed, so he doesn’t know where she’s at mentally. Cristin plays it very quietly but extremely threatening until she becomes openly threatening.
Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO.Cristin Milioti and Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO.
What silhouette did you want for her?
We discussed her silhouette a lot because we didn’t want to go down the traditional sexy-female-comic-book-y path. We looked at 1960s silhouettes and ’90s Kate Moss. Her skirts are shorter, but they’re still very feminine in the Falcone world because we wanted her to contrast with her uncles and the other men running the organization, even Oz. We kept her feminine but in a different way than normally seen for a character like that.
Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO.
How’d you want to show her evolution in the show?
Yeah, as her wardrobe darkened, we brought in faux furs to give her more texture. We wanted to give her a big silhouette and a lot of texture as her character grew darker. Her collars got bigger, and her shoulders got bigger. Everything was about creating a sense of dimension and power.
Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO.
There’s a fine line there. Earlier, you mentioned adding 20% exaggeration, but what would 21% look like? What’s too much for The Penguin?
21% would take her wardrobe too far. It would make it less polished. If she started looking sloppy, or if we went too far in showing more skin, it would have felt off. We consciously covered her up more in the beginning, even when we began showing more skin later. Everything is still really beautiful. It all feels like it comes from the same closet; she’s just wearing it differently. 21% would make her a completely different person, and you need her to stay in that comic-book realm.
What does that process look like for you when interpreting a character arc? Are you putting note cards along with costumes on the wall?
I always try to think about what works in the world and how you visually want to see characters interact in a frame. I map out bigger themes for the show. For example, this show is about power and institutions failing people. Whether it’s the Falcones, a big crime institution, or Gotham City itself, which is failing its citizens, I break down these larger themes into the characters and try to show that through design. For the Falcones, we did a lot of old European glamour, while Oz and the people beneath him are more street, more new money. And then Victor is in a totally different world. I also look through tons of photographs, magazines, and books and put up what interests me most. Sometimes, you’ll throw an idea away, but later, when you read another version of the script, you’ll realize it fits. My husband calls my computer desktop the “junk drawer” because it’s so chaotic. I try to organize it at first, but eventually, it just becomes one folder labeled “Episode 108,” which is a trash dump of images. It’s all part of the process.
Rhenzy Feliz, Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBOClancy Brown, Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO.
Editor’s Note: The story contains spoilers to the movie Smile 2.
Prosthetic makeup designer Jeremy Selenfriend is no stranger when it comes to creating blood-curdling horror. He grew up watching Freddy Kruger films and turned an interest of the spooky into a career of conjuring some of the most terrifying dread imaginable. “It’s a weird thing to say, but when I was eight years old, I was in love with the Nightmare on Elm Street films,” he tells The Credits. “I don’t know why that was acceptable for a kid back in the eighties, but that was it for me, and I went on from there.” For Smile 2, Selenfriend, who reunites with writer-director Parker Finn, was more than up for the challenge.
The sequel to the 2022 horror hit sees popstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) become infected with the supernatural parasite in the midst of a comeback tour following a tragic car accident that took the life of her movie star boyfriend (Ray Nicholson) and left her scarred – physically and psychologically. Now, she’s imagining everything from her dead boyfriend, fans stalking her, and her mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) turning against her. She tries everything she can to stay “in control” and make it stop. But does she?
Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
The nuanced story shines a terrifying klieg light on the music industry while giving audiences plenty of jump scares and gruesome deaths. The latter required close collaboration among Selenfriend, special effects supervisor Johann Kunz, visual effects supervisor Robert Beck, and, of course, Finn. While some of the bloody visuals were outright CG effects, most were grounded in practical effects that started with the work of Selenfriend and Kunz’s special effects team.
Below, the prosthetic makeup designer talks about working in New York, what blood is really like on set, and what goes into breaking someone’s jaw off their face. Yummy.
You’ve turned a childhood love of creating monsters into a career, eventually starting a business in New York dubbed Monster in my Closet FX. What’s the one thing you’d share about working professionally in NY after multiple decades?
That I’d rather be in New York than any other film locale. I’ve been lucky here on the East Coast that I got to grow with the size of the film industry here. It was just really taking off when I was cutting my teeth twenty-plus years ago. There are a handful of shows here, Law & Order, SNL, of course, and Broadway, but there wasn’t a whole lot of big stuff in New York. So you go to do a ton of really fun independent films where we were able to build my shop name. It’s been nice to kind of grow with the New York film community.
Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
Since you’re embedded in the New York prosthetic makeup and creature scene, how do you approach bringing in new people for a project or mentoring?
I mentor from time to time. Every season, there’s a litany of emails about wanting to work with us, and we’ll look at the books and portfolios. And if there’s something in there that jumps out at me, that really off the beaten path where they put some real effort in and done something, I can see there’s actually artistry involved, whether it’s a sculpture or mold or any aspect of what we do, we ask them to come on in and give them a shot.
The technology behind creative workflows has evolved tremendously in the last five years, with 3D printing and even more so with artificial intelligence recently. Have you considered adding any of the more digital workflows to your process?
I’ll sculpt tangibly with my hands until the day I’m told I physically can’t, just because I genuinely love it. But I also respect the hell out of what’s going on with digital sculptors. For Smile 2, Naomi [Skye], she was all digital scans by Millennium FX in the UK. Morphology did some of the lifecasting from prints of the digital scans, and Studio Gillis was also involved again, like the first film. There was a lot of teamwork between departments and other shops.
You can tell there’s a lot of teamwork involved in the Smile films. One of the things that make them thrilling to watch is that, for the most part, the gore is grounded in practical effects.
That started with our very first conversation with Parker back before the first one. I didn’t know who he was yet, and we were getting to know each other at the time and just talking about horror stuff. And he’s as into it as anyone I’ve ever met. He knows what he wants probably more than anyone I’ve ever met. He wants as much in-person on-set as he can possibly have, which we love the hell out of. It’s so great that there are still directors out there like that, but still also know there will be a healthy amount of visual effects for the film, too.
Naomi Scott, left, and Director Parker Finn on the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
Exactly. There has to be a balance since gags that are completely digital can sometimes take you out of the story because of how fake-looking they can appear.
I’m lucky in that I’ve gotten to do a lot of shows where, even if we know a gag is going to be completely VFX when all is said and done, I’ve had an actor say like, okay, but I still need to see my arm bulging up, because I’m acting and I need to know what I’m acting to and if there’s nothing there, I’m not giving the performance it deserves. So we build an entire rig for a thing, and sometimes we’re like, hey, that worked out great. We don’t even need the VFX, which is always a wonderful feeling. Parker is very good about trying it for real. We’ll get as much as we possibly can. We’ll augment later if we have to, and then some things going in are planned that way.
Lukas Gage stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
One of those visually crazy moments is the death of the character Lewis (Lukas Gage), who has been infected by the Smile demon. He smashes his face in with a weightlifting plate. What was your reaction to reading it in the script?
When I read that in the script, I was like, “Oh my god, I’ve never seen anything quite that extreme and brutal.” But because that happens within the first act, I knew we were in for a ride for the rest of it.
It’s a fantastic bloody mess. Was the disfiguration of his face something you can research?
I mean, can’t say I found any specific references. It’s tough as it’s a very imaginative thing. But we had a lot of MMA fight references, just extreme nose breaks and things like that. Relevant things, albeit nothing quite like a weight plate.
So, how did the team pull it off?
This was the one Parker was the most excited about and really wanted to nail the look for. We spent the most time with it and did a couple of different iterations of the sculptures. In the movie, there are three hits, and Parker wanted to make sure it was telling a continuous story and that each one was grander and bigger. It’s all happening simultaneously, and then, by the last one, we get to a VFX hybrid. We are actually seeing inside the head, seeing the skull, and seeing parts fall out. We also had this little puppeteer cheek flap thing tugging on a filament. That was practical. So we had practical, puppeteering, and VFX all going into that scene. It was great. We shot that over multiple days.
Lukas Gage stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn Film “SMILE 2”
The color of blood is always an interesting choice, and Smile 2 has darker, thicker blood than something like Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Do you know what went into making it?
I can say that I was the jumping-off point for that, and the other department kind of matched what the practical makeup effects department was providing. So Sasha Grossman, the makeup department head, costume designer Alexis Forte, the teams in special effects and visual effects, and down the line, all matched us. But because the special effects guys were using rigs to spray blood and everything, it had to be a different kind of blood, so we had to find a balance of the color. Blood is always one of the funniest things to me on set because it’s one person bleeding, but about seven different departments have to be involved.
Are you sourcing the blood and materials in New York?
Yes, as best I can. I bring in very little from out of state. We have amazing suppliers in New York and Pennsylvania. I try not to go further than that.
We have to talk about the scene where a character’s jaw gets ripped off by a crowbar.
Oh yes. For starters, that was my little cameo in the movie.
That is exactly why we brought it up. How cool.
Thanks. That one came up late in the game. We did a similar, albeit less extreme thing in the first movie, and I think this was ok, how do we top that one? So, we created a full silicone head with jawbones and everything embedded inside like a jigsaw puzzle. Knowing the way Parker shoots, we knew we would want to do it a bunch of times, so I developed a way to reset it quickly and easily. We got it down to like a thirty-second reset.
How did you puppeteer it on set?
My shop guy, Jared, had his arms around the front of it, holding the actual crowbar. I’m puppeteering the crowbar from underneath. So he’s just acting as if I’m aiming it in. Parker wanted us to get the nastiest, grossest version that we could possibly get. I think we must have done twenty different takes of that.
At one point in the film, we see the enormity of the Smile villain. Was that done practically as well?
The monster was all created by Alec Gillis and Studio Gillis, but my team got to be part of that and puppeteer it. There are digital alterations in post, but we had that gigantic, crazy ass monster on set. The actor really reacted to it, and it was as big on stage as it is in the movie.
That’s refreshing to hear.
Yes. Alec Gillis is the guy who inspired me and whom I looked up to when I was eight years old. He didn’t come to the set for the first film, but he was there for this one, and it was wonderful to meet him.
That’s a full-circle moment. Another interesting full-circle thing about Smile 2 is all the references to The Shining – the casting of Jack Nicholson’s son Ray being the most obvious. This film opens the door for a new generation to watch that classic film.
I actually sent an email to Parker to this extent the other day. Those were all great, but it’s amazing to think that 30 years from now, people are going to be watching this franchise. It’s a legitimate piece of the horror lexicon now, and people are going to be watching it on Halloween and all through the spooky season, and that’s such a cool thing.
Ray Nicholson in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
Smile 2 is in theaters now.
Featured image: Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn Film “SMILE 2.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Life as a pop star isn’t as great as it looks, if the smiles surrounding global sensation Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) are any indicator. Smile 2, director Parker Finn’s sequel to 2022’s surprise hit Smile, demonstrates the horror of having a public psychological breakdown triggered by the triple threat of hidden trauma, the immense pressures of fame, and a deadly curse.
After an addiction-induced meltdown and a car accident that killed her boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson), Skye is freshly sober and planning a comeback tour. But a visit to an old friend, Lewis Fregoli (Lukas Gage), for off-script painkillers exposes her to the smiling affliction, as a deeply unwell Lewis transforms into a terrifying grinning caricature who kills himself in front of Skye. Skye keeps what she witnessed a secret, but she soon experiences the same hallucinations that come with the affliction, as the evil smile comes over the faces of fans, her backup dancers, and even her assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley). Her life falls apart, and whether at rehearsal or in her penthouse apartment, the pop star is desperately alone.
Lukas Gage stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
Cinematographer Charlie Sarroff, who also lensed Smile, heightens the film’s fright factor by using the camera to deepen Skye’s sense of isolation. But the show must go on, and even as the star’s visions grow increasingly real and violent, she rehearses and performs, which means Sarroff and his crew lit and shot arena-level pop performances, in addition to a private, horror-fueled meltdown. We spoke with the cinematographer about setting the stage for a credible pop show, playing up the star’s unusual experience of the smiling affliction, and how he created a unique sense of New York City on location and on set.
As you got into planning, were there specific horror tropes you wanted to lean into or avoid?
With Smile, we don’t necessarily want to lean into as much darkness. There are certain horror tropes there — jump scares and all that sort of stuff — but we did want to try and find something unique with Smile to develop its own language. We definitely play a lot with lensing, being on wide lenses, and being very close to Skye Riley. We just feel that it gives the audience a sense of vulnerability and anxiety, being really with the protagonist and not really seeing as much from her point of view and making her feel as alone as possible.
Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
We’re also very aware that she doesn’t lead a normal life.
Obviously, this is set around a pop star, so she’s in an environment that can be quite glossy, heightened, and quite wealthy. We didn’t really want to shy away from that. We wanted to make sure that we had credibility going in and coming out. When she’s on stage, it feels like a real show. Lester Cohen, the production designer, did a really good job in helping craft the spaces that she lives in, which I was able to light to make feel unique like somewhere someone like her would actually live.
Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
How did you approach the closeups and unusual angles used in this film?
That was definitely a language we developed in the first film, but with this one, we wanted to push it and go a bit bigger and bolder. Those interesting angles, being top-down and inverted, it’s really just represent that Skye Riley’s world is flipping upside down and turning on her. Everything that she thinks could be real may or may not be real. And again, it’s just to give the audience a sense of anxiety and confusion, to really get under the skin and create more tension.
Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
How did you light and shoot Skye’s performances?
They kept me up at night. It was very important to us to create an environment that was credible. The Beyonce movie was out at the time. A few of us went to see that at the cinema in prep, and we took notes and looked at things that we liked and didn’t like. We watched a lot of shows, looking at the different designs of the stages. I think a really important thing about being a cinematographer is surrounding yourself with people who are really great at their job. One thing I made sure to do is to talk to a really good lighting designer who does live shows and bring that element in because it’s quite different from lighting a film with film lighting.
Director of Photography Charlie Sarroff on the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
Where were you shooting the performance scenes?
We shot it in Albany, New York. We were able to get the arena there for about five days. It was a really crazy experience, seeing the team turn the stage from an ice hockey game or a rock show or whatever it was the night before. It was a lot of stress, but the way that those people work is amazing. Hopefully, we pulled it off.
Director Parker Finn, left of Director of Photography Charlie Sarroff, center, on the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
How was shooting around New York?
The stages were based in Newburgh. We were in Albany for a week, and we shot a lot of different areas around two hours upstate from the city, like the Beacon area. My main camera assistants, operator, and grip had come up from New York City. My gaffer, Joel Minnich, is actually from New Jersey. I would say it’s a mix. There were some people in wardrobe that were from [upstate New York]. In Albany, a lot of the stage crew people who work with the arena were all locals. I like to try to be loyal to a crew that you love and like working with because there’s a shorthand there. I always try and fight to have people, if they’re not too far away, to have them on again.
The story also feels very New York. How did you use the cinematography to convey a sense of the city?
If the film is set in a city, I think it is very important to spend some time there shooting exteriors unless there’s an endless VFX budget and huge VFX extensions. It was really important to Parker, as well. He’s all about doing things in-camera and being authentic. We were able to spend about a week there during main principal photography. For example, the Manhattan Bridge and the bar’s exterior are actually in New York City.
On the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
How did you make Skye’s New York life feel specific to her character?
We just wanted to get a lot of scope and really feel the city and make it feel like this menacing place that could be quite lonely. That’s [conveyed through] Skye Riley’s penthouse apartment being up there on its own and having the view out to the city. We actually used LED panels for that. We opted to go shoot plates from the perspective of a building in downtown Manhattan, and then we just played them on these LED screens that PRG provided, and I feel like that helps give you that sense of realism. So all of that penthouse apartment was on stages in Newburgh, but you see the traffic moving and that atmosphere as the pollution gets in the way of lights and gives it the twinkle that you see.
Dylan Gelula, left, and Naomi Scott star in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
Something that looked really different was Skye’s flashback to the argument scene in the car before they crashed. How did you approach that?
The camera needs to be right in between them. It’s not a big car. It’s an unbroken shot. It creates suspense and certainly makes you very uncomfortable. I really enjoyed that sequence. The vast majority of the film is shot on the Alexa 65. In this case, it was the Sony Rialto. You can remove the sensor and the lens and make it very small and compact. And it’s a brilliant camera as well, suited for much smaller spaces.
We spotted “Sarroff Mints” printed on the tin where Skye hides her painkillers. Was that your Easter egg?
That was a nice little gesture by Martin, our props master, and Lester, the production designer. I’m not getting any royalties! I didn’t really know that was happening until the day and then I was like, cool.
Smile 2 is in theaters now.
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Featured image: Director of Photography Charlie Sarroff, left, and Naomi Scott on the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”
Jon Stewart isn’t going anywhere—at least through 2025. Stewart announced Monday that he’ll stay on The Daily Show as the once-a-week host on Mondays and remain an executive producer through December 2025. Stewart announced his return to the show nine months ago just as the presidential election was heating up—Stewart hosted The Daily Show from 1998 to 2015 and turned it into a cultural juggernaut—and his recent captaining of the program has boosted its ratings and profile.
When Stewart returned, the cadence was set that he’d mostly host on Monday nights through the presidential election. On Election Day, Stewart will be hosting a live, hour-long special on November 5, and the new extension means he’ll be on air for the first year of the winner’s term. Stewart will keep his Monday schedule, with The Daily Show‘s correspondents—Jordan Klepper, Ronny Chieng, Michael Kosta, and Desi Lydic—rotating hosting duties Tuesday through Thursday.
“I’ve truly enjoyed being back working with the incredible team at The Daily Show and Comedy Central,” Stewart said in a statement. “I was really hoping they’d allow me to do every other Monday, but I’ll just have to suck it up.”
The Daily Show recently won a second straight Emmy for Best Talk Series, and Stewart’s return has been a boon for the show’s ratings, which have averaged more than a million viewers since he got behind the desk again.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 15: Jon Stewart (C), cast, and crew accept the Outstanding Talk Series award for The Daily Show onstage during the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards at Peacock Theater on September 15, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
“Jon’s incisive intellect and sharp wit make him one of the most important voices in political and cultural commentary today,” said Chris McCarthy, Paramount Global Co-CEO and president/CEO of Showtime & MTV Entertainment Studios. “His ability to cut through the noise and deliver clear-eyed insights is exactly what we need, which is why we are thrilled to have him leading The Daily Show for another year.”
For more on The Daily Show, check out these stories:
Featured image: NEW YORK, NY – AUGUST 06: Jon Stewart hosts “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” #JonVoyage on August 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for Comedy Central)
Hot off Audience Award wins at both the Mill Valley and Middleburg Film Festivals, the filmConclave enjoyed phenomenal word of mouth on its way into theaters on October 25. Based on Robert Harris’ bestselling 2016 thriller, Conclave goes behind the sequestered doors of the Vatican to show the inner workings of selecting a new pope.
The story follows Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who must run the conclave after his beloved friend, the current pope, dies unexpectedly. While acting in a managerial capacity, he is also working to get Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a more progressive cardinal, nominated as pope, all while undergoing a crisis of faith. Other cardinals are vying for the job, but intrigue and surprises come into play, including the unannounced arrival of Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a cardinal whose appointment the pope kept secret from nearly everyone. Throughout the entire process, Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) is in charge of the hundreds of nuns tasked with keeping the cardinals well-fed and comfortable. She is meant to be seen and not heard, but for reasons that become clear, staying silent is impossible for her.
The visually sumptuous, exciting, and tense film is courtesy of Oscar-winning director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). Not only is the film on many shortlists for the Best Picture Oscar, but so, too, are the performances from Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci for Best Actor and Supporting Actor categories.
The Credits spoke to Edward Berger and Isabella Rossellini about their experience working on this fascinating tale of religious and political intrigue.
Isabella, Sister Agnes is expected to stay silent but is also very direct when she does speak. How did you go about building her as a character?
Isabella Rossellini: I went to a school run by nuns, and my nuns were a great inspiration. Of course it was written in the script, the way the nuns were, it’s not that I created anything, but I could identify or recognize it. The nuns at my school had a lot of authority and they weren’t coy. They are always man to man—so to speak. I remember they were very direct but also very respectful, and so when I played Sister Agnes, I thought of them and was very glad to have had that experience, so I didn’t hesitate. I knew them well.
There’s certainly a hierarchy at play, and it’s quite a contrast between them and the Cardinals. This is reflected in how Edward filmed them.
Rossellini: As an actor, I am just playing the role as written, and the nuns are everywhere the men are, but the genius was in how Ed covered it. One day, I saw how he was covering crowd movement. As actors, we are just moving from one place to another, but the camera was very high, and he had the nuns coming in, running like a school of fish or little ducklings in a row, just headed towards a destination, running in and out of the frame. They are not to disturb the men but just do their duty. The men, instead, were talking and interacting and taking up a lot of space. So you could tell what the hierarchy was through those images. Yes, we speak, and there is dialogue, but so much is said through images. Even while watching the film, I noticed that the nuns are always in the background, and sometimes they are just in shadow. There may be very little dialogue, but you always see them. They are there. That’s the director.
Isabella, in the scene where you speak up, how did you leverage the environment to capture Sister Agnes’s experience?
Rossellini: First of all, I was nervous. It was a room full of men, and I was the only woman in it. There were scenes with many nuns, but most didn’t speak Italian or English, so I felt very intimidated. I thought Sister Agnes would feel the same, so I used it for the scene. I could use that even though my heart was beating very fast; I had to steady myself and just be dignified.
Edward Berger: I remember hearing your heart in my ears.
Rossellini: I knew it would be good and would help if I was trembling and had a real fear of doing takes in front of so many men and all the technicians. It fit the character, so I was able to use it.
Edward, your films often explore the themes of doubt and liberation. How is that shown in Conclave, and how does having Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence contribute to the story?
Berger: Well, Ralph’s character is basically based in doubt. He says at some point, “I have difficulty with prayer.” Just imagine. That’s like me saying I have difficulty believing in the power of the camera I’m using, or a writer saying, “I don’t believe my words anymore”. The central part of your being is taken away. He is on unsure ground and doesn’t know if he should be there. He’s lost. As a cardinal, that means you’ve had 20 promotions. You have a very powerful top job in the church. You’re a top Catholic. With that promotion comes responsibility, but sometimes that means losing the origin of why you made it. There are so many film CEOs who say they want to go back to producing. That’s Cardinal Lawrence. He yearns for the purity of his faith, but he meets that in another cardinal and recognizes that purity in Cardinal Benitez, but he is living in doubt. That’s why I needed an actor who could show what he was thinking, and with Ralph, you could see behind his eyes. It’s magical. You put the camera on him, understand exactly what he’s thinking, and follow each thought as if it were dialogue, but he doesn’t say anything.
And are there ways in which you bring in the idea of liberation or the hope of liberation in Conclave?
Berger: The architecture is one example of that. With the Casa Santa Marta, it is almost like a jail. That’s what we’re trying to equate it to, and when the doors close, and all you hear is the hum of the fluorescent light and Ralph’s breath. It’s really silent, with no air or light coming in. I wanted everything to feel shut in and oppressive and claustrophobic. It’s called ‘The Sequester.’ They’re not to have contact, so it must be lonely. Then, at the end, when the conclave is over, there’s a moment when the shutters rise, and Ralph goes to the window and opens it, and lets the air in. He hears female laughter, and he lets the light and the future in. Ideally, because you’ve lived through this oppression and darkness with Ralph, you, too, feel that relief and liberation of breathing fresh air again.
Rossellini: I think the film really is about doubt because it celebrates the mystery, which is what religion is about. I’m not a very religious person, but I did go to a nun school. I think this, in its own way, is a very religious film. I’m interested in how people will react to it because it accepts doubt and lives in the mystery. That’s really the basis of faith.
