The thriller September 5, directed and co-written by Tim Fehlbaum, revisits the day the Palestinian militant group Black September took nine Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the script, which Fehlbaum wrote with Moritz Binder, is a tightly-paced journalism procedural centered on the ABC Sports studio’s broadcast of the attack as it happened.
Peter Sarsgaard stars as Roone Arledge, the television executive overseeing the busy control room headed on the ground by Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), who makes the key decision to have the crew cover the hostage crisis as it unfolds. In Munich to report on events like swimming and track and field, the ABC Sports team winds up becoming the sole broadcaster of the hostage situation, which, in both reality and noted in the film, was watched by approximately 900 million people.
September 5 conveys the events of the day with a pressing immediacy, yet we understand them almost entirely through the lens of the studio, a setting Fehlbaum likened to a submarine. He and Binder had started off broadly researching aspects like police files. It was during that process that they came to understand the importance of the media’s role that day—at one point, the ABC team realizes the terrorists are watching their broadcast, possibly foiling a rescue—and an eyewitness they spoke with suggested contacting ABC’s Geoffrey Mason.
“The way he told his 22 hours was so intriguing, and so thrilling, that after that two hours, Tim and I looked at each other and said, well, maybe it’s not about the media. Maybe it’s about that room,” Binder said. Making a movie almost entirely set in the ABC Sports studio appealed to Fehlbaum. “I admire a movie that draws certain strength from a limitation in perspective and location and time,” he said.
After hearing gunshots and listening to a police broadcast, the ABC team gets a crew member into the restricted Olympic Village where the hostages are being held, negotiates for a better time slot with their network, and even sends German translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) to the nearby military airport where the hostages have been taken by their captors. The mood in the control room is initially intense but exhilarated, as the crew gears up to cover the situation and then comes to believe, incorrectly, that the hostages have been saved.
“There was one moment that was crucial, actually, in that very first conversation that we had with Geoffrey Mason when we asked him how it felt for them, how he experienced those 22 hours. And he said for them, it was a complete rush. They didn’t reflect too much because there was no time for that,” Fehlbaum said. Mason told the writers that they were focused on reacting to events as they unfolded, and it was only afterward that reflection came. “And that made it clear for us that our film should feel the same,” Fehlbaum added.
Early on, the writers also knew they wanted September 5 to focus on the control room’s environment. Visually, the production is a testament to the analog age, a tactile jumble of monitors and dials and phones and paper. “We wanted to portray a whole apparatus, that whole machinery of that studio that was just reporting a few hours before on a serene Olympics and is now reporting on this crisis,” the director said. To further drive home the reality of the studio, he and Binder also wrote an entire background script for the extras and any cast without lines. “They needed names, they needed a profession, and they needed to know what they’re doing so that they’re not just scrambling some paper in the background. They really have purpose in every scene,” Binder said.
Among September 5’s main characters, almost everyone represents a real person who was there that day, with a few small details changed (it wasn’t really Geoffrey Mason’s first day on the job, for example). But Marianne, the studio’s local German translator, is semi-fictional. “We found out that that day, ABC really tried to grab every German they could grab. They even had Roone Arledge’s driver do some translations and get some information,” Binder said. The writers condensed these experiences into the character of Marianne, whom they also imbued with the forward-looking mindset of a younger German generation who had put such high hopes into the Munich Olympics. Binder’s parents are from Munich, and would have been the same age as Marianne at the time of the 1972 Olympics. “They really took me through their experience back then, their hopes and their devastation when this tragedy happened,” he said.
Jacques Lesgardes (Zinedine Soualem), Marianne Gebhard (Leonie Benesch), Geoff Mason (John Magaro), Carter (Marcus Rutherford) star in Paramount Pictures’ “SEPTEMBER 5.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.
September 5 isn’t the first movie about the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes that day (as well as one West German police officer and five members of Black September). Fehlbaum acknowledges being inspired by Kevin Macdonald’s One Day in September when he saw it in a Basel cinema as a teenager. Of course, he and Binder are familiar with Steven Spielberg’s Munich. What sets this film apart is its tight focus on what was also a turning point in media history. When the ABC crew finally learns their reporting that the hostages have been freed is incorrect, Marianne mourns the loss of life. Mason has the broadcast corrected. But in terms of the events within the studio itself, Arledge essentially commends a job well done.
For more films and series from Paramount and Paramount+, check out these stories:
Featured image: L-r, Gladys Deist (Georgina Rich), Hank Hanson (Corey Johnson, Geoff Mason (John Magaro), Jacques Lesgardes (Zinedine Soualem) star in Paramount Pictures’ “SEPTEMBER 5,” the film that unveils the decisive moment that forever changed media coverage and continues to impact live news today, set during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.
Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof wanted to tell a big story — so he went small. The Seed of the Sacred Fig explores his country’s authoritarian rule, repressive justice, patriarchal dominance, and women’s rights through its impact on one family.
Taking place during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, a nationwide protest sparked by the arrest of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman jailed for not wearing a hijab and beaten to death while in custody, the film revolves around Tehranian lawyer Iman (Missagh Zareh), his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and their two daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).
A regime loyalist, Iman has recently been promoted to investigating judge in Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court. Tasked with charging government dissidents, he quickly learns his role is to simply rubber stamp indictments, guilt or innocence be damned. The job also puts him in danger. So much so that he is given a gun for protection.
Missagh Zareh. Courtesy Neon.
Ignoring justice begins to weigh on Iman, and his home life takes a toll. He grows distant from Najmeh and alienates himself from his daughters, angered that their friends are being beaten and arrested. Tensions escalate. Iman’s gun goes missing, threatening to tear his family apart.
Under government scrutiny himself, writer/director Rasoulof had to leave Iran and finish his film in Germany. To avoid prison, he now lives in exile. Hailed for its searing narrative, taut filmmaking, and uncompromising examination of Iranian rule, The Seed of the Sacred Fig has gained worldwide acclaim and has been nominated to represent Germany in the Best International Feature Film category at this year’s Oscars.
In a candid conversation deftly interpreted by scholar Sheida Dayani, Rasoulof details shooting in secret, incorporating footage shot by protestors, and why it was important to tell this story.
What did you think when you learned the film was nominated for an Oscar?
It was a very strange feeling because Iam Iranian, but I’m traveling with a travel document from Germany. And the moment I heard the news, I felt like the same was happening to my film. It was made in Iran but it has surpassed all kinds of borders and languages and nationalities.
How did you come up with the idea?
After years of dealing with security agents, interrogations, going to courts, and distinguishing myself from these people, I questioned what made them different from me. How are they able to do the kinds of things they do and I am not? I was in prison when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement was at its peak. A prison official told me that he really hates his job. He doesn’t like the way his family treats him because of it. He’s thinking about suicide. That conversation sparked the idea of making a film about a family with a deep chasm.
What were the challenges in assembling your cast and crew?
This is always an issue for me when I make an underground film. How am I going to find people who think like me? This time was different. After the movement, a lot of people told me that if I needed help, they would be game… actors, technicians, and cinematographers. The movement had a huge influence on the way people found each other and wanted to work with each other. They wanted to participate in films that would defy censorship. By doing so, they reclaimed a sense of integrity.
I understand that Soheila, your lead actress, is prohibited from leaving Iran. Have you spoken with her? How is she doing?
I was actually speaking to her a few moments ago right before joining this meeting. She’s doing very well. She’s a very strong person even though she’s under a lot of pressure. She’s banned from working. She’s banned from leaving the country. Still, she is doing wonderfully.
Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani. Courtesy Neon.
But Iran has taken action against the film.
We were all in a court together. She was there in person. A few of us outside Iran were tried in absentia. We were prosecuted for disseminating lies against the regime and for disseminating what they consider prostitution. This is not a translation lapse. These are the words they’re using.
It must make you think you’re doing something right.
That’s absolutely true. It does make me feel I’m doing something right. This kind of filmmaking and this kind of resistance — defying a dictatorship and a system of repression — gives you a sense of integrity. That’s how the crew felt. Pooyan Aghababaei, my cinematographer, had many good offers, all for a lot more money. Instead, he decided to work on this.
You filmed in secret. What difficulties did that present?
It’s a very good question. Sometimes, we were on schedule. Sometimes, everything got canceled because everything got really complicated. We had three values we stuck to. One: always have a small crew. Two: have little equipment. And three: I needed to direct at a distance.
L-r: Mahsa Rostami, Missagh Zareh, and Setareh Maleki. Courtesy Neon.
Please explain this
I was connected through a monitor with a safe connection by way of safe audio. I would tell my assistants what to do on set. Sometimes I was kilometers from the set. Sometimes I was closer and I could speak through a walkie-talkie. But even when I was closer, I was never on set myself.
That sounds challenging.
Sometimes it got complicated. My voice would be broadcast and there was always an eerie feeling. The crew members joked that it felt like talking to God because it was only one way. They couldn’t talk back. It was quite difficult in the beginning. But it gradually turned into a method of its own, and we evolved from that process. It resembled when we were under lockdown for the pandemic. We learned how to connect from afar.
Why did you do it this way?
The shooting of any film, through prearrangement, is monitored by the police. On paper, this project looks fine. But if they saw me, we would get into trouble. If I were under surveillance, the project would be disclosed and we wouldn’t be able to continue. I always made sure not to take any electronics with me. If I did, they would show my location as if I were at home.
You used actual footage of the protests.
In Iran, journalists are under a lot of pressure, especially when there are demonstrations. There is nothing they can do. In the absence of journalism, the demonstrators recorded the images themselves and broadcast them on social media and out to the world. It shows the necessity of social media for the Iranian people. I also realized there was no way I could reconstruct those scenes. Even if I could, it wouldn’t have the same impact as the real ones would have on the viewer.
L-r: Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki. Courtesy Neon.
The final sequence is very tense and impactful. It reminded me of an Alfred Hitchcock film.
Initially, I envisioned a war in my mind. But when I found the location where I shot, I saw that it had great pathways and hidden spots.
And became a standoff.
The story of this film is greater than just a story of a family. It’s a story of a family happening in modern Iran. But it has its roots in the past. Patriarchy in Iran has very deep roots in tradition and culture. At the same time, the women’s movement is just as strong. And so I realized that the final sequence could show that the patriarchy and the women’s movement have been fighting one another throughout Iranian history. And this fight, this war, has always been under the shadow of religion. If you look at the final scene, there’s a shrine overlooking everything that’s happening.
It’s a really nice piece of filmmaking.
Thank you so much.
What do you hope audiences will take away from The Seed of the Sacred Fig?
It’s really important for me that the audience sees how devotion turns into prejudice and prejudice leads to violence.
Featured image: A scene from The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Courtesy Neon.
Conclave is great, gripping entertainment from the first shot to the last. It’s a drama, both honest and escapist, deftly shot, performed, and staged by artists at the top of their respective games. In the hands of Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Peter Straughan, Edward Berger’s contemplative film moves briskly within the Vatican walls. A movie that takes us into one of the most secretive rituals on Earth – about the search for a new pope – is remarkably light on its holy feet.
Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is the eyes, ears, and heart for the audience. After the loss of the pope, the faith-in-crisis cardinal heads the conclave. He digs through the past of the nominees for pope as he does what he can to rally a nomination for his trusted friend, a more forward-thinking man of faith, Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci). Conclave is not just a drama, but a detective story about unearthing secrets and sins.
Straughan is no stranger to crafting worlds shrouded in secrecy and fueled by ambitious, mistrustful men. He tackled espionage in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the indie music world with the undersung Frank. With Conclave, he tells the story of men in power who find themselves powerless in the eyes of God.
Let’s start with Lawrence’s homily about doubt. It’s beautiful. What did your first pass at that scene look like?
That homily has stayed the same pretty much throughout the drafts, and it’s quite close to the book. I mean, that was the reason I wanted to do this. When I was reading the book, I remember reaching that point and thinking, “I definitely want to do this.” I really loved that homily. It was quietly radical to be uncertain and to be okay with that. Generally, with dialogue and monologues from books, the adaptation process is just one of hearing it and thinking about it: Is it going to feel awkward for an actor, or is it going to feel smooth? It’s obviously easier with the homily because it’s meant to be a delivered sermon rather than naturalistic dialogue. You’ve got a bit of flexibility.
Is it interesting to you that, even though the homily in the movie is divisive, most Catholics are moved by that scene?
I’ve been pleased, in general, by the response to the movie. I wasn’t sure how much pushback there might be from Catholics or how much pushback there might be about the ending from other communities. Overwhelmingly, the response I’ve had personally has been very positive, which has been lovely. I find it heartwarming that people have embraced that message because it’s a hopeful message. Maybe in the world we find ourselves in now, that’s become a more and more attractive message. We’ve seen the evils of certainty.
As dialogue-heavy as the movie is, the silences – the breath, especially – say a lot. On the page, what did you want to leave unsaid?
With adaptation, or just with screenwriting generally, it’s about what has to be said and what can be left unsaid. The more you can leave unsaid, the more interesting it is. Generally, I think the difference between a good script and a bad script is that a bad script has everything on the surface, whereas a good script works with subtext and engages the audience. Then they’re reading, they’re decoding the scene, and working out what’s going on.
Actors of this caliber understand that well, too, right?
With actors like John [Lithgow], Stanley, Ralph, and Isabella [Rossellini], I was there on set cutting lines a lot because you don’t need them with those actors. Sometimes, the dialogue can feel like scaffolding – it’s being put up for the scene – but the stronger the actor is, the more you can dismantle some of that scaffolding and let them do it just with their eyes or small expressions.
Was the act of listening a major theme for you when writing?
In a way, Ralph’s character is struggling with doubt. He prays and doesn’t feel that he gets an answer, and he’s listening all the time for an answer. Silence felt important from the beginning, and listening felt like an important trope that we were going to use throughout the film. I was always aware of people listening through doors or walls or listening and only hearing silence. Edward picked that up and ran with it as well. After we’d shot it, he had Ralph record his breathing throughout the whole film so that Ralph would be present there. It’s a lovely soundscape that he created.
As close as we are to the main character, Lawrence, he’s still such a mystery. Did you see the questions around him as the detective work for the audience?
I’ll tell you, Lawrence was a mystery to himself. When we start with him in the film, he’s been burdened. He’s stuck with this job of having to run the conclave, which he didn’t want. He wants to leave Rome altogether. He’s struggling with his faith. He feels as if the Pope doesn’t respect him. The Pope says he’s a manager, not a shepherd. And he says he has no ambition whatsoever of being Pope. But then what he discovers, kind of like the ring in The Lord of the Rings: If you’re there long enough, it’ll seduce you in the end.
Do you think that desire was always there from the beginning, that maybe he was fooling himself?
I always think it’s interesting because he says to Stanley’s character at one point, “Not me. I don’t want to be Pope.” And Stanley says, “Every cardinal wants to be Pope.” And later on, Lawrence says, “If I were Pope, I’d be called John.” You realize that he has thought about it, that it has been in his head so that he didn’t really realize that ambition. He wasn’t very different from the others. The detective isn’t that different from the criminals. But then the other thing I love about it is that he’s essentially a conservative. He wanted to run the conclave with as little drama as possible. Initially, he’s horrified that there’s any scandal. He wishes it would go away and doesn’t want to do anything about it. But there’s some spark of conscience and genuineness, the courage of faith, that wakes up in him. He ends up being this conservative man disrupting the whole system.
It’s also a hilarious movie about the comedy of ego. How’d you approach the comedic timing and behavior?
There’s something about them being these serious and solemn, supposedly important people. As someone said, it’s basically Mean Girls in the Vatican, and that’s great. Because the flip side of Mean Girls is that they’re just people. They’re flawed people like us. I have sympathy for them. They’re not operatic villains; they’re just ordinary, deeply flawed individuals.
With the detective work, audiences question every move and every image. For example, the ending: There’s hope there, but a lot left to question, maybe even fear. Was that always the final image?
That’s one of the reasons why I love cinema. Even though I’m a writer – so primarily, I deal with words – I love the inflected image because it’s so powerful. You can read into it in so many ways. That shot of the three nuns is the closing shot of the film. It was just a shot that Edward sort of came up with, and then, in the edit, we found it. It wasn’t originally going to be how the film ended, but it made sense. Everything had been shut down and closed for the conclave, and now, finally, the shutters are opening. With this new Pope, is everything going to be different? And then something about these women – who have been silent throughout the film and forced to be in the background – seeing those three young nuns skipping down the stairs, chatting and laughing with each other, I thought it was a beautiful way of hinting at optimism and new hope.
Toronto-born filmmaker and investigative journalist Emily Kassie has covered conflict around the globe, from the Taliban’s crackdown on women to child labor in Turkey. “But I had never turned the lens on my own country,” says Kassie. That’s changed with Sugarcane, which mixes a grassroots investigation with personal and collective reckoning of years of forced separation, assimilation, and abuse of Indigenous children by Catholic priests at St. Joseph’s Mission Indian residential school in British Columbia, Canada.
The film which Kassie shot and co-directed with Julian Brave NoiseCat, won the Directing Award for Documentary after its premiere at Sundance last year and is now nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, making it the first time that a film with an Indigenous director from North America has been nominated. Acquired by National Geographic Documentary Films, it is streaming on Disney + and Hulu.
Kassie, in 2021, decided to focus her investigation on St. Joseph’s Mission Indian residential school in Williams Lake, British Columbia, where unmarked graves had just been discovered at the site of the former mission. She reached out to NoiseCat, a colleague when both of them began their careers as journalists. “I knew he was an incredible writer and reporter on Indigenous life. I knew he’d been good to work with,” Kassie said. What she didn’t know was that NoiseCat, who’d been raised by his mother in Oakland far from his Indigenous Canadian father, had deep roots in Williams Lake.
St. Joseph’s Mission Indian Residential School in summer. (Credit: Sugarcane Film LLC)
“Julian said, ‘That’s crazy; that’s the school my family attended, and my father was born nearby.’ That floored me,” Kassie recalled. Despite that connection, Kassie considered NoiseCat her creative partner, not a subject in the film. But as shooting progressed, and the filmmakers built trust with Williams Lake First Nation members who shared their harrowing stories, Kassie understood that “should Julian choose to participate, the film would go to another level. It took more than a year before Julian and his father would hop in a car and search for answers. It felt fated in many ways, but it was a choice only Julian could make.”
NoiseCat said he began to understand his personal stake in the ongoing trauma and injustice that destroyed and damaged generations on the Sugarcane Indian Reserve, including that of his father and grandmother.
“It became clear that my dad had a lot of questions about his birth, his upbringing, and the impact of the schools. Here, I was in a position to help him address, if not answer, those questions and, in so doing, help myself address my own enduring questions that begin with the schools,” said NoiseCat.
Sugarcane offers a brief but essential history of how the Canadian government in 1894 created a network of boarding schools run by the Catholic church. Tens of thousands of Indigenous children were separated from their families and forced into these institutions with the official purpose of eliminating the “Indian problem.” The abusive environment was designed to dehumanize the children, strip them of their language and all connections to their culture, and force them to follow Christianity.
Messages, some dating back a century, written by children on the walls of a barn on the site of the former St. Joseph’s Mission Indian residential school. (Credit: Christopher LaMarca/Sugarcane Film LLC)
In the film, Julian’s grandmother struggles to even talk about what happened to her as a child after she was forced, like other Indigenous children, to attend St. Joseph’s Mission residential school. Most children were sexually and emotionally abused by priests who ran the school and nuns who were complicit. Children died, some while trying to escape, their bodies buried in unmarked graves. Girls raped by priests gave birth shrouded in secrecy and shame, their newborns tossed into incinerators as witnessed by one survivor who is still haunted by the memory.
The Catholic Church on the Sugarcane Indian Reserve. (Credit: Sugarcane Film LLC)
Julian’s father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, was born at the school but knows little else except the pain that’s engulfed and ruined his entire life. Sugarcane reveals Julian and Ed grappling with how the unspeakable has scarred their relationship. The film is also a road movie as father and son travel, literally and metaphorically, to confront the past and try to heal.
Ed Archie NoiseCat grapples with the shocking truth of his secretive birth at St. Joseph’s Mission Indian residential school. (Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)
“I saw the bravery of survivors who were willing to trust us with painful, traumatic stories that have haunted them their entire lives. I thought, if they are willing to trust us and as the son of the only known survivor of the incinerator at the mission, I had a responsibility to other survivors and to the community,” said Julian NoiseCat. “They gave so much; I felt I had to give back. But I didn’t know it would be healing. I thought it might be harmful. But ultimately, it was a healing thing for me, for them, and for the community.”
NoiseCat expanded on the road trip and the rebuilding of his relationship with his father for his first book, We Survived the Night, out this year from Alfred A. Knopf.
Williams Lake First Nation investigator and survivor Charlene Belleau, who’s been fighting for decades to bring attention to the victims of St. Joseph’s despite institutional apathy, is a compelling figure in the film. In one of many riveting scenes, Belleau and NoiseCat discover initials and dates carved by children, as if delivering silent testimony, into the walls and beams of a boarded-up, dusty barn on the site of St. Joseph’s, which operated from 1896 to as late as 1981.
Investigator and survivor Charlene Belleau calls on Julian Brave NoiseCat to help document the search at St. Joseph’s Mission Indian residential school. (Credit: Christopher LaMarca/Sugarcane Film LLC)
Kassie was shooting that day and calls it one of the most transformative experiences she’s had as a filmmaker. “The barn was a place of horror and a place of refuge, and you could feel it in the space, the way the wind picks up, the little holes in the roof where light spills in, the sound of birds screeching through the rafters,” she said. “When Charlene starts to pray and brings Julian in, it felt like the world broke open in that moment. You can’t fully capture what it was to have witnessed it. It was life-changing and spirit-altering. It was hard to capture [in the film], but we got as close as we could to what happened in the barn that day.”
Sugarcane’s Oscar nomination connects the film to an even wider audience and provides, at long last, some acknowledgment for what happened at Williams Lake and beyond.
“Survivors are so proud of this movement and this film. Everyone feels that they are finally being heard,” said Kassie. “The film screened in the [Biden] White House and Canadian Parliament and across indigenous communities. It’s the first time a film with an indigenous director from North America has been nominated, which is historic in Hollywood and is breaking barriers. Everyone in the community around Sugarcane feels proud of what we made with thought and care. It’s not just a story of the past.”
For NoiseCat, past and present are inseparable; for his family and in his own reckoning with what happened to them and to him. “We all have ways of coping with this history of genocide,” he said. “I hope the film helps people of my generation to get a better understanding of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation.”
For more conversations with Oscar-nominees, check out these stories:
Featured image: Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father Ed Archie NoiseCat look down at the Williams Lake Stampede from the top of “Indian Hill” on their roadtrip back to St. Joseph’s Mission, where Ed was born. (Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)
In 1964, a coup d’état overthrew Brazilian president João Goulart, initiating a military dictatorship that lasted until 1985. The former congressman Rubens Paiva went into self-exile at the time of the coup but returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1970, where he settled into a pleasant household near Leblon Beach with his wife, Eunice Paiva, and their five children. Rubens continued quietly supporting dissident Brazilian expatriates and, in January 1971, was arrested and disappeared during a military raid. Eunice’s efforts to learn what became of her husband led to her own arrest and torture over the course of 12 days, with Rubens’ death certificate withheld until 1996 (and the five people implicated in his death were never prosecuted). In the interim, Eunice not only held her family together, but she graduated from law school at age 48 and went on to become one of Brazil’s most distinguished experts on Indigenous rights.
Her son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, chronicled what happened to his family and what his mother accomplished in his book “I’m Still Here,” which became the basis fordirector Walter Salles’ film of the same name. That movie is now the first-ever Brazilian-produced film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. Up for Best Actress is Fernanda Torres, who stars as Eunice (Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro, plays Eunice in her eighties).
Salles’ depiction of the Paivas family life, both before and after Rubens’ arrest, is vivid and tender. It’s almost hard to believe these are actors playing a family—their tranquil affection for one another and the film’s calm, keen view into their home life at times feels more like a self-possessed documentary than a historical political drama. Audiences are brought into the beachy idyll of 1970s Leblon, which only serves to make the political prison where Eunice and, briefly, her teenage daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski) are held even more horrifying. Mother and children eventually move away from their house in Leblon, and the film jumps forward in time to 1996, when Eunice finally receives Rubens’ death certificate from the Brazilian state, then to 2014, when an 85-year-old Eunice, living with Alzheimer’s, sees a televised news report about her husband and seems to briefly reconnect to the past.
Executive producer Maria Carlota Bruno (Mariner of the Mountains, I Owe You a Letter About Brazil) filled us in on the challenges of recreating Leblon from a half-century ago, how Eunice’s adult children helped ensure the veracity of what we see on screen, and the echoes the themes of I’m Still Here have in the present day.
How was the process of recreating early 1970s Brazil? Were there particular challenges?
The first major challenge was research. The Paiva family lost a significant portion of their family photos in a fire, leaving us with very little personal archive to reference. The only existing photo of their home was an external shot taken after the family had moved out—by then, the house had already been converted into a restaurant. In 2019, we began an extensive search for archival footage in both national and international archives to gather details about Leblon in the 1970s. While Rio de Janeiro was well-documented in the 1960s, there was far less footage available from the following decade, making it even more difficult to find visual references of the Paiva family home and neighborhood.
Paiva family and friends in ‘I’m Still Here.’ Image: Alile Onawale. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
How did you proceed?
Once we gathered enough images, the next major challenge was location scouting. It was a long and meticulous process, but we eventually found a house that bore an incredible resemblance to the real one—not only in its external features but also in the layout of its rooms. The scenes that took place in the streets were particularly challenging because the city’s geography has changed drastically over the years. The beachfront area has undergone a major architectural transformation—back in the 1970s, most of the properties facing the ocean were houses, whereas today, they have been replaced by large apartment complexes. To restore the look and feel of that era, our VFX team, led by Cláudio Peralta, worked closely with Walter to digitally reconstruct key locations, including positioning the Paiva family home as it originally stood, facing the beach.
What kind of research was necessary to accurately recreate the horrors of the prison where Eunice is held?
Daniela Thomas, associate producer and Walter Salles’ creative partner in directing the film conducted extensive research, delving into books that documented firsthand accounts from individuals who were also detained at DOI-CODI [Department of Information Operations – Center for Internal Defense Operations]. These vivid testimonies were crucial in reconstructing the emotional and sonic textures of the environment. Additionally, the art department, led by production designer Carlos Conti, meticulously recreated every detail of the prison, from the cell, corridors, and interrogation room to the photo albums and documents handled by the actors on set.
Was Marcelo Rubens Paiva involved on set, or did he offer any creative direction to ensure the film stayed true to his mother’s story?
Marcelo collaborated on the screenplay and was in constant contact with screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, as well as with Walter Salles throughout the scriptwriting process. His involvement extended beyond writing—he also worked closely with the screenwriters and Daniela Thomas during filming, as the script underwent numerous changes throughout production. Marcelo and his sisters were incredibly generous in sharing their family’s personal archives, including photographs, and providing detailed descriptions of the furniture and objects in their home. They even helped reconstruct the layout of the house—Marcelo’s sister, Nalu, hand-drew the floor plan from memory. From the very beginning, he and his sisters offered unwavering support to ensure that Eunice’s story was portrayed with authenticity and respect. One particular scene depicting the military occupation of their home was initially rehearsed with books scattered across the floor to suggest a more violent intrusion. However, Marcelo pointed out to Walter that the military behaved in a more composed manner; in fact, one even played foosball with the the boy, and that scene was added to the film.
FERNANDA TORRES, Director WALTER SALLES on the set of ‘I’m Still Here.’ Image: Sofia Paciullo. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Fernanda Torres is superb. Was she who the production envisioned playing Eunice Paiva early on?
Fernanda Torres has been Walter’s longtime collaborator. In 1995, they worked together on Foreign Land, Walter’s first feature film, co-directed with Daniela Thomas. In 2000, they reunited for a film produced for French television, a series in which various directors explored stories about the turn of the millennium. Throughout the years, they remained close friends. Fernanda had read the script early on but was engaged in other projects at the time. Initially, another actress was considered for the role, but due to personal reasons, she had to leave the project just as pre-production was about to begin. Fernanda, who had recently finished a series, was then invited to take on the role alongside her mother, Fernanda Montenegro.
Director WALTER SALLES, FERNANDA TORRES on the set of ‘I’m Still Here.’ Image: Sofia Paciullo. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
While making this film, did you see the subject matter echoed or paralleled in the present day?
Very much so. The film was shot during a time when the country was governed by the far right, which made the need to tell this story even more urgent. Though it depicts events from our past, it felt deeply connected to the present moment we were experiencing. By the time the film was completed, the government had changed, but we had come dangerously close to returning to that era—just as many other countries are facing similar threats today. While the film speaks about the past, it increasingly resonates with the reality unfolding in many parts of the world right now.
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
An introspective, promising teenager hitchhiking to college gets a ride in a car that turns out to be stolen. The driver is Black, and so is the boy. Deemed an accomplice despite his innocence, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is remanded to Nickel Academy, a segregated Florida reform school. Nickel Boys, the Oscar-nominated film based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, follows the harrowing path Elwood is placed on by the Jim Crow South. Written by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes and directed by Ross, this stunning, elegiac film shows the brutality and neglect perpetrated on the Black boys at the abusive school, as well as their youth, friendship, and efforts to survive.
The Nickel Academy of the film and Whitehead’s novel are both rooted in the real history of the Dozier School, a reformatory outside Marianna, Florida, that operated from 1900 to 2011, when it was shut down due to allegations of horrific cruelty. In addition to Whitehead’s novel, Ross and Barnes turned to Erin Kimmerle’s We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School, a forensic accounting of the school’s abuses, from farming boys out as indentured labor to death—there are 31 graves marked at the former school, but researchers found evidence of at least 55 on-site burials. The Black boys at Dozier were treated far more violently than the white ones and received little in the way of formal education.
Against this frightening, deadly environment, Ross’s film poignantly depicts Elwood’s close relationship with his grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), and his friendship with Turner (Brandon Wilson), a more steely-eyed foil to Elwood’s earnest nature. Using point-of-view framing, Ross also invites his audience to see the boys’ lives as they do, which makes for an intimate, immediate way of viewing.
We had the chance to talk to Ross about the influence of his documentary experience while making Nickel Boys, the sensitive way he approached the violence the boys faced, and how he and his crew developed a technical language to support the film’s unique, lovely creative choices.
Knowing going into the writing that you wanted to shoot from a point-of-view, did that affect how you approached the script?
I’ve never written a screenplay before. The process that I did with Joslyn is now the only way I know how to do it. And it comes from, funny enough, George Miller’s Mad Max. I found out that he had just made a film of all the images, and then he went toward making a more traditional script. And Joslyn, being my co-writer and the support that she is, said to lean into my strengths. And my strengths are visualizing. Taking the point-of-view approach and the image-based approach allowed us to actually write from what a person is seeing and not from seeing the person in the scene. I think the traditional writing process may start with being in the character’s head, but then you abstract them to being an object in the frame. I think it’s quite beautiful to actually order a person’s gaze in a moment in the context of the larger narrative, to align their meaning-making process as a character with the meaning-making process as the viewer.
When it came to shooting, how did you further develop this language?
I made this film Hale County This Morning, This Evening. In that film, I essentially did point-of-view, but its name while I was shooting was observational logic. The idea was to make the camera an organ and to use the camera as an extension of consciousness. I adapted that to Nickel Boys and used observational logic language as well as extensive consciousness language. But in the writing process, it didn’t feel like point-of-view, and it obviously didn’t feel like normal camera language. With Joslyn, I talked about sentience a bunch. Then, developing it with Jomo [Fray, the cinematographer], we looked for another frame of reference for what we were doing. And sentient perspective was what we both agreed approximated what we were trying.
How did you achieve a sentient perspective, technically?
I had a really clear vision of what the film would look like and the way the camera would move, but I didn’t know how to do it or the technical possibilities. Jomo is a genuine wiz. He came up with adapting all of these rigs that are used on jibs that are high in the sky and these camera systems that have mimic mode. He suggested this camera called a Sony Venice that could shoot 6k, shoot IMAX quality, but be small enough to be close to the body. Dan Sasaki from Arri made custom lenses to give us these aberrations and this density that can approximate my large-format photography. He made a couple more for a couple of scenes because we needed some specific focal lengths.
Were the actors also holding cameras?
Yeah. Of course, the camera that we were using is not supposed to be on the body. So Jomo’s team had to come up with these custom rigs that could hold the weight and be balanced correctly so that we could get the movements. It’s really cool.
How did you decide to use the 4:3 aspect ratio for the film?
It’s interesting how one decision has multiple meanings. In the approach, I wrote that I wanted to shoot a 4:3. The first reason was because there was so much archival that was going to be in the film. You’d have to be popping out the aspect ratio or going in and zooming. And that would just be so distracting with the camera language. But then it takes on another meaning. 4:3 is television. Television was the first disseminator outside of cinema. And also, shooting point-of-view, it’s going to be a narrower frame, so that makes sense as well. But the initial reason was practical.
The pacing and beats of the film are so beautiful, but I can imagine the editing process to weave archival footage into the story was painstaking. What was the process like?
Framing is quite natural and fluid, but the editing is something that had to be found. There’s no estimation of the power of two images until you put them together, and then you have to find the right image, and then it has to align with the larger narrative thrust. Nick Monsour was our editor, and what a guy he was. [With] our archival producer, Allison Brandin, and her two assistants, Alex Westfall and Gala Prudent, I think [it took] three-and-a-half, four years of researching images and us going through them, trying to find these interstitial moments to connect to the larger narrative.
How did you initially approach depicting the violence the boys face?
It’s manifold. Because Black people, in general, are over-indexed with images of violence. Cinema also has historically shown the violence—maybe more so in documentary and early photo history, and even civil rights photo history—as a necessity for proof. There was actual evidence; it was almost pedagogical.
And here, we don’t see that violence on-screen. But as a viewer, you’re still incredibly aware of it.
When you’re a human being in these situations, you turn away from these things. Or it’s rare that you see something this gruesome happen. It’s not something I think is quote-unquote normal. But television and cinema have made it normal. And we become voyeurs and participants in at least the aesthetic dehumanization of, or the aesthetic violence onto, people’s bodies. And so when thinking about this film, considering all those things, you have to ask why? You realize not only is it not necessary, but there are more ways to not do it than to do it. I think it allows it to explore things beyond the act, where the act doesn’t become the priority, it becomes the way in which its affects ripple backward and forward in time. And then, to be literal about it, if you make the camera an organ, as we did, and you shoot as an extension of consciousness, you’re actually just not seeing it. So, it would be unrealistic and, in fact, betray the language of the film to see it.
For more on Amazon MGM and Amazon Prime Video, check out these stories:
Following his Oscar-winning WWI epic, All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s latest, Conclave, focuses on a different kind of battle, dropping us into the Vatican in his twisty ecclesiastical thriller. After the death of the current Pontiff, the honorable and evenhanded Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is charged with convening one of the most secretive rituals in the world, the conclave, where over 100 cardinals from around the world are sequestered until they decide who amongst them will be the next leader of the Catholic Church. The gathering soon derails into a brutal squirmish of succession between the liberal camp, led by Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), against hardline conservatives such as Cardinal Tedesco of Venice (Sergio Castellitto).
The film has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, writing, Production Design, and a second Oscar nod for German costume designer Lisy Christl. After almost a year of developing ideas with Berger, Christl led a crew of Italian, German, Greek, and Austrian artisans working in three workshops over five months to bring Berger’s vision to life. Juxtaposing the opulence of the parade of rituals against the Cardinals’ Spartan day-to-day life in the dormitories at Casa Santa Maria, her team designed and made every item of clothing seen on the screen, all the way down to the men’s belts, crosses, rings, shoes, and hats.
We recently talked to Christl about how the rings and crosses reveal each man’s character and political leanings and how one artisan found her when they were looking for a company to produce all the clergie’s hats and headgear for the film.
First of all, I was thrilled to see that you worked on one of my favorite action comedies, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down! It’s one of those fun movies that I can watch over and over again.
Oh wow! This is wonderful. I loved working on it.
Can you talk about the shorthand that you have developed with Edward after working on four projects with him? What qualities of his filmmaking style make it easier for you to do your job?
Edward is an extremely reliable man—one answer, one question. He’s always there for you. He’s hard-working, extremely smart, and nice.
I’ve recently interviewed Conclave’s editor, Nick Emerson [who is also nominated for the film], and he talked about how Edward is very detailed with shot lists and storyboards, especially for the voting scenes. How did those help your process?
This is how he works. He knows his script very well. For every scene, you have a storyboard, so he knows what he needs during the shoot. He knows what he’s doing and what he wants.
What was your research process for this film?
I read a lot and had a ton of questions because I just had no clue about the procedure [of the conclave] when we first started. After many months of research, I talked to [liturgical consultant] Francesco Bonomo to clarify what we could do. In 1962, the Catholic Church changed many of the rules [referring to the Second Vatican Council]. So, Francesco clarified how much freedom we had within these rules to still deliver what we wanted for the film. He also advised Edward, Ralph, and all of us.
Sketch provided by Lisy Christl. Courtesy Focus Features.
What weresome of the things that you learned from your research and discussions with other experts?
As you know, the Catholic Church is a very old institution. The last conclave was held in 2013 and there is a ton of material available on that. The more I studied that conclave and its history, I had questions about the changes in color and fabric throughout history. Before synthetics were available, you had wool and linen, and later on, cotton, but there was no polyester. After the Industrial Revolution, things got cheaper and more affordable. It’s also very important to understand that not every Cardinal comes from a rich diocese. So, all these factors went into their attire and the changes made over time.
How did this knowledge inform your decision to change the fabric, colors, and style?
Cristóbal Balenciaga was a very faithful Catholic, and his designs were inspired by the Catholic Church. When I saw a Balenciaga couture show in 2022, at first, I wanted to send that to Edward but I thought it might be a bit too much. But a few days later, he sent me a video about the same show! We both had the same idea, especially trying to do something different than today’s look.
In the film, the Cardinals’ cassocks and vestments are a deeper red and made of heavier wool compared to what they wear now in real life. What went into that design decision?
We did not like the look of the current wardrobe, so we modified it to make it look simplified, cleaner, and minimalistic. There are clergies in Rome now who wear something different in the winter or use a different material, so there isn’t only one look for everyone. For the film, we wanted a very clean look for all of our Cardinals.
Were the costumes made from scratch or altered and rented?
We made everything from scratch. There’s nothing bought or rented. Since we changed the color [of the robes], we couldn’t buy anything.
How big was your team, including the cutters, fitters, seamstress, etc.?
We had our in-house workshop in Rome and the Cinecittà Studios, as well as two external workshops in Rome and Florence. We had 20-25 people in-house, including two cutters and three or four seamstresses. The other workshops were about the same size. The fabric is woven and dyed in factories in an Italian town called Prato. We had around 3,500 yards of fabric, so it wasn’t something we could do in-house. We made all the crosses, hats, and belts too.
Let’s talk about those crosses and the rings that each Cardinal wears.
These Cardinals can read each other when they see what kind of cross a man wears. This is based on research, not something we invented for the movie. Our Italian supervisor found this beautiful family-run goldsmith in Florence, Riccardo Penko, who made all the crosses and rings after I described the political orientation of each cardinal. Over generations, their clients have included the Archdiocese of Florence, Prato, or Venice, and the Vatican, so this is their life; they know each symbol used in the designs. As a designer, you don’t have years to prepare for a movie, and these goldsmiths have the knowledge of generations. So, I learned a lot from them.
From afar, the Cardinals’ wardrobe may look similar. How did you differentiate the looks of each man, say Lawrence versus Bellini or Tedesco?
The deeper you go into a character, the better you know how and what he should wear. Look at Tedesco, who is a very provocative character—he wants the Church to go back to the old days when everything was in Latin and is posturing all the time. All this gives you a way more dramatic character, so he has that big cape. But Lawrence is a humble and liberal man with a lot of doubts [about his faith and the Church]. For example, in the opening scene, Tedesco comes in with his big red cape and a very rich golden cross, while Lawrence is there with a very simple black overcoat and a silver cross.
An artisan, Gino Giovannetti, in Rome basically makes all the clergy hats in Europe, and he actually found me after we had gone to ask for budgets and quotes at various shops. His is another family enterprise where the whole family is in the business. So, they made all the miters, birettas, and skull caps.
Do you have a favorite sequence or scene in the movie? Mine is Cardinal Lawrence’s homily about faith versus doubt on the first day of the conclave.
Yeah, that is a wonderful scene. And then you cut outside and see Isabella Rossellini (who plays Sister Agnes, the nun in charge of running the Casa Santa Maria) how she sits there and just listens to him. I love that scene very much.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes took the franchise to new heights of photorealism and immersive filmmaking. The groundbreaking series has pushed the envelope in motion capture and beyond, starting with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes and carrying on through three subsequent films. The latest film, Wes Ball‘s 2024 epic Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards, and a large part of that achievement is thanks to VFX supervisor Erik Winquist, VFX producer Danielle Immerman, animation supervisor Paul Story, and the rest of the fine minds at Wētā FX.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes moves beyond the story of Caesar (Andy Serkis) some three hundred years after the revolutionary’s death. Now, the apes can talk and rule supreme over a dwindling and increasingly mute human population existing on the margins. Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) wants to destroy what’s left of humanity, while a young ape, Noa (Owen Teague), wants to fight for them. There are an astonishing 1,500 VFX shots and 33 digital minutes elegantly crafted to create a vivid naturalism.
Recently, Oscar-nominated VFX supervisor Erik Winquist and director Wes Ball spoke with The Credits about some of the hurdles they faced in telling the latest Apes epic.
Eric, for years, VFX artists have stated that fire, fur, and water are three of the trickiest CG challenges. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes pushes all three elements to the max. What advancements have been made through the years that helped you and the team there?
Erik Winquist: We go through this cycle. Avatar came up with all this really great stuff. And then, an Apes film comes and takes the technology outside. So, we fast-forward 10 years, and another Avatar film had years of R&D building up to improvements on the capture process. And then we took those improvements outside into Australia for this one. Ten years ago, we were using a single camera on the actors – mocap helmets. We had a robust set of mocap cameras and things that we were able to take outside into the rainforest of Vancouver.
Erik Winquist: This time, we didn’t have to contend with the heat and the elements of summertime in Australia – the bright sunshine and everything else. And so, the big thing we had on our side was the ability to keep a little lighter footprint for certain locations. That allowed us to not have to bring all the gear off all the trucks and set up with 40 people, creating this massive footprint in a confined space. We could be more fleet-footed with the actual capture process. The captures – the hardware side of it – is one thing.
Erik Winquist: By the time that information gets back to Wētā, we needed ways to handle 12 new characters in this film. Every one of them has a speaking role. In War for the Planet of the Apes, for the most part, the apes were speaking sign language. Here, with 12 characters, we had to make sure that each one of them had the fidelity in their face to be able to speak and the time to actually do all that animation. So, taking the data from what is now a pair of cameras on their face, which gives us depth and the ability to get a really precise look into every frame, seeing what their lips were doing and how much the jaw was protruding…
What’s a major focus in pulling that off?
Erik Winquist: So, there’s this intense sense of dread and apprehension on the actor’s face. Do I read that on the ape? No? Okay, why not? Then we spent all our time making sure that the emotional read the audience gets from watching the ape character exactly mirrors what we were seeing on the human actor’s face. That was the biggest focus on this one – faithfully translating the performances that Wes was capturing with these actors on set.
Wes, what questions did you have in pre-production to make Erik and the effects artists’ jobs easier?
Wes Ball: Having once been a hopeful VFX artist, I knew enough to be dangerous. I’m sure that probably helped at some points. When I was there, I’d be like, “What if we did this instead? Let’s change the shot to help that a bit.” I’m sure I made those adjustments almost subconsciously because I have a camaraderie with the VFX world. At the end of the day, we’re all in it for the same reasons – to tell a cool story with cool characters. Everyone wants to do their best to achieve that goal. If I ever asked for something that was impossible, which was several times, we’d figure it out – because it was worth it. If we were going to have this scene and change this shot, it was because it was going to help the story with Noa or the audience.
Noa (played by Owen Teague). Courtesy Walt Disney Studios/20th Century Studios
What were some of those impossible tasks?
Wes Ball: Sometimes whole scenes were invented that didn’t exist. I’d take plates that I shot for other scenes and rejigger them to serve a different purpose. I’d take a different performance and put a different take into a different shot. Like Noa racing through the tunnel, for instance, we shot a version of it, but it fell away during editing. Then at some point, we were missing that classic hero’s journey moment of a character crossing the threshold into the great new world. So, we reconceived that sequence and put it back in the movie.
Wes Ball: It meant, “Erik, you’ve got another 30 seconds or a minute of shots to animate.” You know, we had a couple of pickup shots we wanted to do. For instance, with Proximus Caesar, there’s the dinner table scene when he tells the story about humans and their tools only making them powerful. Originally, we had a very short scene there, but we wanted a little more insight into what he was thinking. So, we came up with another minute-long sequence three weeks before we had to deliver the movie. It was wild. I had to say, “I want to say upfront, I’m sorry.” And then I would show them what I wanted to do. Usually, I’d hear someone on the other end – Erik or one of the tech leads – go, “Yeah, it’s better…”
How much more difficult is the handheld camerawork for animating characters, as well as these massive landscapes?
Erik Winquist: The handheld makes the clean plate process more challenging. The mantra on this movie – people were probably getting sick of hearing me say it – was, “The clean plate is the plate.” Meaning, what we want to put in the movie is the plate that doesn’t have the human actors in it, so we can put apes into that empty plate and not have to paint someone out of it first. That’s all fine and good. But the problem is, by the time we do that, we’ve already gone through four or five takes, and Wes is totally happy with what he just saw, the camera dancing with the actors.
Wes Ball: Magic happened! I captured magic! Now do it again!
Erik Winquist: Lightning in a bottle. Actors, step out. Camera operator, do that again. Focus puller, focus on the thing that’s not there anymore. It becomes challenging for the whole camera team and everybody else. Maybe we’ll work it out in post. You drop the ape into that frame, and it’s totally misframed because you couldn’t—
Wes Ball: Like, “Oh, crap! We’re actually two inches too high.” There are all these little cheats that go into making that work.
How do you combat that?
Erik Winquist: The way to combat that is motion control. The problem is that it slows the process down. It adds pain to the process for the visual effects side of things. The end result, though, is beautiful. We would have lost something if constraints had been put on the process, like “No, we can’t do handheld.” You get these shots that dance and flow from cut to cut in this beautiful way.
For more stories on 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to
In the first partof our conversation with Oscar nominee Paul Lambert, the visual effects supervisor of Dune: Part Two emphasized the benefits of utilizing as many of the practical shots as possible to maximize believability. A veteran of more than 25 years, he is aware that his best work may well go unnoticed: “My goal with visual effects is more about trying to hide everything I do than to make it stand out.” Today, he takes us into the black-and-write gladiator fighting sequence shot in infrared and how the thrilling worm-riding sequences were accomplished.
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
How long did it take to complete VFX on this sequel?
22 months for me, from soft prep through prep, the shoot, and into post.
How big was your team?
Hundreds. I dealt directly with supervisors from each place—two supervisors at DNEG, one each at Wyley Co, Territory Studio, MPC, and RodeoFX. And each of them potentially had hundreds working for them across Vancouver, the U.K., Sydney, and Mumbai.
In the opening scene, Paul and Lady Jessica are hunted down by Harkonnen soldiers along these mountains on the desert planet Arrakis. At one point, the soldiers float up a rock face. How was that done?
We used six or seven different locations because of the light and the rock structure, so it was tricky maintaining continuity. Our stunt coordinator found positions in the sand that would work with cranes so that we could lift each soldier up on a big rope. They ran, and we took them as far as we could before it transitioned into CG. Rather than completely CG, we try to keep as much of it practical as possible until it doesn’t work, then we change to a digital version, which then goes up the mountain. When we’re looking down, we’re still pulling the Harkonnen soldiers up, but the ones further down are digital because we’ve just pushed the ground away to make it look like it’s a lot higher. For safety reasons, that was shot a lot closer to the ground.
Director of Photography GREIG FRASER on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Niko Tavernise
In the gladiator battle sequence, Fyed-Rautha (Austin Butler) fought under the black sun on Geidi Prime, and that black-and-white sequence was shot in infrared (“IR”), right?
Yes, that was an interesting one. Itwas one of the first things we did in Budapest. Denis wanted this otherworldly look for the world of Geidi Prime, and he and [cinematographer] Greig [Fraser] came up with this idea of doing everything in IR. It’s a very bold move because you can’t undo this once you’ve modified the cameras and taken out all the filters. You have to shoot in a very particular way. Greig shot everything to test every scenario. On one of the tests, two crew members were each wearing a black T-shirt, but through IR, one of them turned white, and the other one stayed black—it was impossible to figure out with the naked eye how and when the colors would change. When the costume department ran all their costumes through IR, one of the Baron’s black suits and Bene Gesserit’s black costume turned white. Denis absolutely loved it. I even tested the gaffer tape.
How did shooting in IR change your process?
That particular sequence was such a high-contrast view—we had white sand on the ground that we shot outside on sunny days in Budapest against the dark shadows, so there was massive contrast. I was worried about putting the stadium around them. But we were able to keep the shadows—every shadow you see in that sequence is the original shadow, except we’ve changed some of the shapes. We kept that because when you start changing something super high contrast, your eye picks up on it, and it no longer looks believable. We didn’t want to break the integrity of the image. Denis never wants a visual effect that takes you out of the movie. If we need to adapt something so it doesn’t make the visual effects stand out, we do that. And that’s a very rare thing. Another interesting thing that happened was that one of the soldiers fighting Fyed was covered in tattoos, and we could see it in IR, even after hair and makeup had painted them out. That didn’t fit the aesthetic of the film, so I had to deal with that in post. The tattoos were on his whole chest, arm, and back. It was quite complicated and took months to fix.
Shooting in IR. Lea Seydoux. Courtesy Warner Bros.
Now, let’s dig deeper into that first insane worm-riding sequence with Paul.
We spent a long time trying to find a dune for that sequence. Once we found it, there was a particular time of day when we could replicate the top section of that, when Paul is running and collapses down the dune. Our special effects supervisor set up three metal tubes in this smaller dune that we had created so the stunt guy could run along the ridge and get pulled and fall into the dune. Then, I extended the dune using aerial plates to make it feel as if we were way the heck higher. Because we were chasing the light, we could only do that at dawn. That took four attempts: we went back to the same spot on four different days to pull this off.
Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) waits for a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.High shot of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) waits for a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
Your VFX team also had to chase the light with the rest of the crew.
Yes, visual effects had to capture that same time of day, so we can replicate that using other plate photography and CGI to match it exactly. This way, you buy that this huge worm has just crashed through this dune. [Special Effects Supervisor] Gerd [Nefzer] and [production designer] Patrice [Vermette] built a section of the worm in this sand-colored enclosure. The gimbal on it allowed us to change angles on it quite violently and spin it around. The crew who shot this sequence—we called them the “worm unit”—was run by [producer] Tanya Lapointe, and they could only shoot on sunny days. So it took a good few months to shoot that; sometimes, one shot would take a few days.
Riding a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.The sandworm up close. Courtesy Warner Bros. Part Two.
Riding on this practical worm and being blasted with dust the entire day gave us some continuity issues. The stunt guy’s stillsuit was completely orange by the end of the day. So, in post, we extended some of the backgrounds and the worm, adding additional dust and all the helicopter plates. Because we had such a good capture, it’s kinda hard to mess up. But it was still a tricky sequence to integrate, and it took a long time to make it all look believable. It’s super rare to have that kind of time for a sequence like that.
Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) waits for a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya)—and Paul’s romantic partner—also has a worm-riding scene. Was that handled like Paul’s sequences?
For that 30-second shot where Chani runs through a crowd while beating everybody up, we motion-captured the stunt performers doing all of that fighting. So that’s all digital until the very end when she turns into the camera, and we shot that in the desert with Zendaya. By having something real shot, we could back-time everything to fit that. Something that doesn’t usually happen is we brought Greig Fraser back in deep into the post so that he could take a virtual camera and see all the CG in front of him. Then, he re-photographed that particular move. Even though it was all CG, Greig actually did the photography for that all-CG shot. When you’re able to bring the DP back into post, it makes all the difference.
Zendaya is Chain in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
Nominated for five Academy Awards, Dune: Part Two is available for streaming on MAX and PVOD.
“Everybody was paddling in the same direction to support Brady’s vision, from the producers, the cast, the crew,” says The Brutalist producer Nick Gordon. “It’s a very special movie, and we’re glad it’s connecting with audiences in the way that it is.”
On a call with Gordon and fellow producer Trevor Matthews, the tandem behindBrookstreet Pictures explained how they helped director Brady Corbet create his masterpiece. At Brookstreet, Matthews serves as founder and CEO, and Gordon serves as president. Since 2004, they’ve produced over a dozen films, including Michael Keaton’s directorial debut Knox Goes Away (2023), a twisting tale about a contract killer with onset dementia. For The Brutalist, they helped deliver a three hour and 35 minute (15 minutes of which is a planned intermission) VistaVision epic that follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who emigrates to post-war America to rebuild his career and reconnect with his wife (Felicity Jones). Its director, Brady Corbet, won the prestigious Silver Lion Award at Venice. Since the film debuted on the Lido, it’s received plenty of award season attention with threeGolden Globes Awards, 9 BAFTA nominations, and 10Oscar nominations, including best picture, directing, multiple acting nods, cinematography,score, andproduction design.
But with success, The Brutalist has received some online criticism over its use of generative AI, a discourse stemming from an article on production news outlet RedShark where editor Dávid Jancsó discussed the use of Respeecher, a generative voice tool, to “perfect” the Hungarian dialogue appearing in the film. Corbet released a statement on the matter, saying, “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own. They worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents. Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed. This was a manual process done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them, and done with the utmost respect for the craft.”
(L-R) Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones. Credit: Courtesy of A24
Corbet also pushed back on the use of generative technology during a sequence at the very end. “Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists. To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980.”
Asked about the situation, Matthews and Gordon agree that it’s been “overblown.” “It’s a three-and-a-half-hour film, and there are only a few moments where actual Hungarian is spoken. And not a second of either Felicity or Adrien’s spoken English with a Hungarian accent was touched,” says Gordon. Matthews added, “It’s kind of a shame. Aside from the fact that Adrien and Felicity worked so hard to develop those accents and create a believable performance—neither one of them spoke with a Hungarian accent—and so they developed one through hard work and dedication to the character for months. This is like talking about seconds of a microsecond.”
Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. Courtesy 24.
Brookstreet joined The Brutalist producing team in 2020. “This was a project that had come out of a deal with Andrew Lauren Productions because they had been involved with Vox Lux [a film directed by Corbet starring Natalie Portman as a popstar prodigy who survived a mass school shooting]. They were looking for partners, so we came on,” says Gordon. “We built the structure that got the film made.”
Discussing their motivation, Gordon says, “We like to think of ourselves as cinephiles, and we believe in championing these tougher films because these are the movies that we grew up on. We try to build every movie where we can see a path of breaking even for the investors, and if we can do that, you take the risk. It’s not a decision that happens overnight. You’re chipping away, and you’re adding pieces. As we were putting the cast together, putting the crew together…when you bring in Judy Becker, Daniel Blumberg, and Lol Crawley to the table and you’ve got Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, and Joe Alwyn…you’re like, we have to make this. We’d be insane not to, right?”
(L-R) Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce. Credit: Courtesy of A24
Helping move the project forward was the “phenomenal script” from Corbet and Mona Fastvold. “It was one of the best scripts we ever read. It just screamed quality. And Brady’s vision and his ability to communicate it and attract the right people to get involved was premium on every level,” says Matthews.
A producing hurdle was finding creative ways to maximize the money meant to go on screen, a budget Corbet says was $10 million. “Every department needed to be lean, and that applied to the producing team as well,” says Gordon. “We had to find the right places to maximize the tax credits and soft money but not sacrifice anything creatively. The great thing about Hungary is it’s almost trapped in the 1950s in a way due to the very traumatic and serious events that have historically happened there. The architecture and look of the locations and buildings that we found fit perfectly.” The producing team packaged together multiple tax rebates to stretch budgets. “We put together not just one tax rebate but two by making an international co-production. We had to try to create a post-production deal,” notes Matthews. “This film is not overtly commercial when you pitch it, so it was a real challenge. Without Brady’s understanding of the creative and exactly what he needed and what he didn’t need, we wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.”
Guy Pearce. Credit: Courtesy of A24
Following its Venice premiere, The Brutalist struck areported deal around $10 million with A24, the distributor turned studio behind Ladybird, Midsommar, Uncut Gems, and Academy Award best picture winners Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
“A24 is the cream of the crop, so we were lucky to be in the position we found ourselves in coming out of Venice. It felt like a total game changer because we were the belle of the ball,” notes Gordon. However, the A24 name wasn’t the only deciding factor. “When you’re talking about the release and distribution of something you’ve worked so hard on for so many years, there are a lot of factors,” says Matthews. “Of course, you want the investor group to get their money back, but that’s definitely not the only consideration. It’s about which company is the most motivated, the most excited about the potential for the movie, and what they’re willing to do to bring it to its intended market. Sometimes, you may have two or three very comparable companies that are all highly capable of doing the job.But one’s saying the right thing and is hungrier than the others to help bring the film to the market. And that’s motivating for us.”
Adrien Brody in “The Brutalist.” Courtesy of A24
Another factor was that A24 had no intention to change the film in front of them. “This is a very filmmaker-driven piece, and A24 supported Brady’s vision,” says Gordon. “I’ve said this in other interviews, but we really do throw the word visionary around lightly these days. But with Brady, it 100% applies. He not only had every shot of the film in his head but the storyline of how this would meet the world.”
(L-R) n/a, Joe Alwyn, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin, Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Raffey Cassidy. Credit: Courtesy of A24
Asked what’s next for Brookstreet, Matthews says, “We’d love to keep doing what we’re doing and, of course, scale it up. We’d love to go from one movie a year to two or three a year. And we’d love the quality of the partners and artists that we work alongside to continue to be at this caliber. Making both Knox Goes Away and The Brutalist kind of back-to-back definitely put some new tools in the toolkit. It showed us what we’re capable of and what we can achieve. We definitely want to roll up our sleeves and put our skills to use and keep trying to make meaningful and important cinema.” Their next film set for theatrical release is Mr. Burton, a biopic about famed Welsh actor Richard Burton.
The Brutalist is in select theaters now, and video is on demand.
Featured image: Alessandro Nivola and Adrien Brody. Courtesy A24.
Just nominated for his fourth Oscar for Dune: Part Two, VFX Supervisor Paul Lambert is a three-time Oscar winner—for Damien Chazelle’s First Man and two of director Denis Villeneuve’s films, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune: Part One. Having now worked on three of Villeneuve’s films thanks to Part Two, he has developed a shorthand with the director that makes overseeing hundreds of visual effects staff across multiple VFX houses go as smoothly as possible. “We have a very similar sensibility. We had an instant connection on the set of Blade Runner 2049,” Lambert says. “There was a day when we were both watching the screen, and he started talking about negative space, what he saw, and what it meant to him. That’s when I knew he’s a visionary director.”
We recently talked to Lambert about the exhilarating sequel that picks up after the House of Atreides was defeated by the Harkonnens following a devastating ambush in Part One. Once the heir, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), find refuge with the Fremens on the desert planet Arrakis, they combine forces to mount an insurgency against the Harkonnens’ tyrannical rule.
What makes Denis’ projects so much fun to work on?
The great thing about working with Denis is there aren’t any big egos. Everybody’s trying to do their best work, which always benefits me because I need the best in order to augment what’s been shot.
I’ve read that Denis likes to shoot practically as much as possible. How do you avoid using synthetic light to match the natural light captured in the practical shots?
We never intended to replicate the desert light in a studio, even though it would’ve been so much easier. Denis wanted natural light, so we had to chase the sun. Scenes that required sunset meant we had to keep going back to the same spot every day at the same time until we got it.
Riding a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
How much of the action sequences were extended from real shots versus entirely created digitally?
We try to add to the plate photography rather than replace it. I’m a big believer that VFX shouldn’t try to change too much. When we’re on the sand dunes, we had a lot of helicopter plates, with the helicopter flying really low to sweep across the sand. Then, we sped those up. When we had to turn the sandworm during a sequence, it was too dangerous to fly a real helicopter straight towards the dune. So, that dune was a CG dune placed on top of the aerial plate.
High shot of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) waits for a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) waits for a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
Whenever the worm travels through or crashes into the sand, we changed that section of the dune. If you can retain things in the plate, when you’re doing extensions, you always have the reference point of what was there in the first place, as opposed to never going into the desert and making it all up [digitally], because then, you’re spending all your time trying to make something believable. But if you shoot practical and then augment what you’ve shot, you’re already in a place where things are believable. So even though we had a multitude of shots that were CG, we always had a plate first, so we knew the amount of light, shadow, contrast range, etc. I always compare it to the plate, and if it feels different, then it gets kicked back.
Caption: A scene from Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
What are the major differences compared to Part One?
Since this story comes directly after Part One, you might assume it’s plug-and-play with everything we had created for the first one. But absolutely everything changed! I think there’s one shot in Dune Two that uses the original ornithopter from Dune One. Every set is in a different place now.The ornithopters became Harkonnen with the design change, so we had to build that digitally. The Harkonnen troop carrier was even bigger, and we built that digitally, too.
Ornithopter in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
We barely saw the sandworms in Part One, but now we have several pulse-pounding worm-riding sequences with Paul on Arrakis.
Since we now have Paul riding on the worm, you see its skin so much closer. So, that was redone at a much higher scale. The art department built a version of the worm with a gimbal on it for the stunt performer, Paul (Chalamet) or Chani (Zendaya), to ride on it. We could twist it around and turn it towards the sun and get all that motion. We spent a month in Jordan and another month in the UAE, compared to seven days on the first film.
Riding a sandworm in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
When Paul, Chani, and the Fremens take out the spice crawlers, that was all done in the UAE. For that, we had to build roads and concrete plates in the desert to use the cranes and tractors. Each leg on the spice crawler is a tractor with an art department leg that we moved around to get the correct shadows when the actors ran in between the legs. Then, I extended that out.
Attacking the spice crawler. Courtesy Warner Bros.Attacking the spice crawler. Courtesy Warner Bros.Attacking the spice crawler. Courtesy Warner aBros.
Speaking of sandworms, when the water master extracts the Water of Life from the baby sandworm, was that special effects or fully digital?
That was done with a practical puppet and three puppeteers with sticks and a string pulling on the puppet worm. We painted out the people in the frame and added a bit of compression to the worm skin, to make it look more like an accordion.
Lady Jessica is pregnant with baby Alia, and they communicate telepathically from inside the womb. Is that all CGI or some form of animatronic/special effects?
Baby Aliyah was a prosthetic in liquid inside a glass tank. We spent a long time coming up with the combination of the liquid, light, and movement to make that work. We shot hours of that footage to have her move in a realistic way. Then we changed her eyes in CG just to add the small sub-blink. That was a great collaboration between the practical and the digital—it’s always about what’s best for the shot.
Check back tomorrow for part two of our chat, where Lambert goes into more detail on the epic worm-riding sequences and how shooting in infrared presented an unexpected challenge.
Featured image: A shot of the sandworm during digital construction in “Dune: Part Two.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
Marvel’s antiheroes unleashed a new trailer during Sunday night’s Super Bowl (in which the Philadelphia Eagles decimated the Kansas City Chiefs). The Super Bowl trailer for Marvel’s Thunderbolts is set to Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” with Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova/Black Widow feeling a lot less confident then we’ve seen her in the past. In fact, she needs her fellow ‘Bolts to give her a pep talk and get her head back in the game.
“We can’t do this. No one here is a hero,” Yelena says, but her dear old dad, David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, has some wisdom for her: “Yelena, when I look at you, I don’t see your mistakes. That’s why we need each other.”
The Thunderbolts team is made up of Pugh’s Black Widow butt-kicker, her dad, the Red Guardian, and a slew of Marvel villains who have just enough moral flexibility to do good. Or, at least, be a little better than the even worse guys. Those include Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier (although to be fair, he’s been a good guy for a while now), Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost (from the first Ant-Man), Olga Kurlyenko’s Taskmaster (from Black Widow), and Wyatt Russell’s John Walker (from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier).
So, who assembled this bad dream team? You can thank Julia Louis-Drefyus’s Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who believes that the world is not made up of good guys and bad guys, a very pedestrian and naive way to look at things. In her sage estimation, there are bad guys, like our Thunderbolts, and there are worse guys. The bad guys are then, ipso facto, potential heroes. The worse guys need to be dealt with.
Directed by Jake Schreier, Thunderbolts is the MCU’s first proper villains-own-the-day team-up flick, like what Warner Bros. had with The Suicide Squad, and comes from a script by Black Widow writer Eric Pearson.
Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige joked way back at D23 in 2022 when Thunderbolts was introduced that the team must be pretty rough around the edges when “beloved Winter Soldier is the most stable among them.”
Thunderbolts is due in theaters on May 2, 2025. Check out all the Super Bowl trailer below:
For more on Thunderbolts, check out these stories:
Brad Pitt is suited up and strapped in for the first look at F1, unleashed during the Philadelphia Eagles domination of the reigning champs, the Kansas City Chiefs, during Sunday night’s Super Bowl.
F1 stars Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a former driver who returns to Formula 1 alongside Damson Idris as Joshua Pearce, his teammate at APXGP, a fictional team on the circuit. The feature, from Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, was shot during actual Grand Prix weekends, as Sonny and Joshua’s team competes against the titans of the sport. Kosinski worked from a script by Ethan Kruger, his collaborator on Maverick.
Idris was candid in a conversation with Vanity Fairlast year about what it was like for him to film F1. “I look to my left, it’s Brad Pitt. I look to my right, it’s Javier Bardem. I look at my hands, they’re shaking. And we shoot all of this epic stuff, and all the amazing drivers are there, from Lewis [Hamilton] to [Max] Verstappen to everyone.”
The experience was incredible but also exhausting, Idris told VF, shooting inside of race cars in Abu Dhabi. “I was in the car for 45 minutes today. It sounds normal, but it’s not. It’s very hot out here. You’re strapped in, sweating through the helmet. You lose so much weight.”
Idris also told VF that Pitt is a legitimate racecar driver. “Talk about a superstar. His humility is second to none. I don’t know if people know this, but he is really good behind that car. Really good. Too good, almost. He makes me nervous how good he is.”
Idris was equally enthused about working with Kosinski. “He is a director’s director. He is the epitome of cinema in my opinion. The feeling I felt when I walked out of Top Gun was how I felt when I was a kid and I watched E.T. or Star Wars. Those movies are just defined by one thing: entertainment. Everyone, no matter what your background, could come and watch this film.… His process is amazing.”
Joining Pitt and Idris are Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia, Sarah Niles, Joseph Balderrama, Rachel Waters, and Javier Bardem.
F1 races into theaters on June 27. Check out the teaser below.
For more on Warner Bros., DC Studios, Max, and more, check out these stories:
If this is Tom Cruise’s last mission as IMF Agent Ethan Hunt, he chose an auspicious time to unleash a furious new look—in the midst of the Philadelphia Eagles prime time demolition of the reigning champs in the Kansas City Chiefs during the Super Bowl. The game wasn’t close, but Ethan’s hunt (pun intended) to secure a rogue AI and save the world is balanced on a knife’s edge.
The fresh look at Cruise’s 8th mission in the decades-old franchise, which began with 1996’s Mission: Impossible and has become arguably the greatest showcase for practical stunts in the history of cinema, holds little back. Cruise and Co. have been teasing each installment’s defining stunt for nearly a decade at this point, from Cruise hanging off the side of an Airbus A400m in Rogue Nation to his record-breaking HALO skydive and his mastery of helicopter piloting in Fallout.
So what’s the lunatic stunt that Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie, and longtime stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood have cooked up this time? All we know thus far is it involves Cruise once again hanging on for dear life to an aircraft, this time, an upside-down propeller plane.
Cruise is joined by longtime IMF partners Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell and Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn, his two closest compatriots. The cast also includes Hayley Atwell as Grace, Esai Morales as the bad guy Gabriel, Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge, Pom Klementieff as Paris, Vanessa Kirby as the White Widow, and Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, Katy O’Brian and Tramell Tillman.
So is this Cruise’s actual final mission? He hasn’t been completely convincing either way, telling Empire “You gotta see the movie,” when asked if it was his last go-round as the unkillable agent. “It’s a hard thing for me to discuss at the moment because it really is something that you have to experience.”
Dead Reckoning left us with a very dramatic cliffhanger, with Ethan and his team doing battle against The Entity, a rogue AI that is threatening global security. The key to the AI was a literal key, one that could control or destroy the Entity, which Ethan and his team finally secured by the end of the film. Yet, Dead Reckoning ended with a reveal of a sunken submarine loaded with secrets, the AI’s original resting place, teasing audiences that Ethan’s fight to control the Entity and secure the planet was only just the beginning.
Check out the new Big Game spot below. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning arrives May 23, 2025.
Featured image: Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt and Simon Pegg plays Benji Dunn in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
By now, you’ve either seen or definitely heard about Emilia Pérez. If you haven’t yet seen the film, then likely the first thing you heard was about its accolades—it’s the most Oscar-nominated film of the year, 13 in all. The other story that you’ve definitely heard about is the attention swirling around Emilia herself, Karla Sofía Gascón, the Oscar-nominated star of the film, who is at the center of controversy over her offensive, now-deleted social media posts that have drawn outrage and led to several apologies from Gascón. Before these hurtful comments came to light, what people were drawn to was a film made up of and performed by some immensely talented people who were elevated not only by Gascón’s performance (she’s the first transgender woman to be nominated for best performance by an actress), but by performances by her Oscar-nominated counterpart Zoe Saldana, a perfectly cast Selena Gomez, and a filmmaking team that cohered to get Pérez nominated for Best Picture, along with nominations in a slew of craft categories, including makeup and hairstyling, original score, original song, adapted screenplay, sound, and a best director nomination for Jacques Audiard.
For those still not clued into what swept Emilia Pérez through this whirlwind Oscar season and why it’s been such a hot topic even long before the controversy, here’s the plot sketch: a seasoned cartel leader transitions to live as a woman, then partners with the lawyer who made it possible in order to take on an entirely new moral identity in a libretto-meets-film noir from aforementioned French director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Paris, 13th District). Zoe Saldaña stars as lawyer Rita, and when we first meet Gascón, she’s the cartel kingpin Manitas. After winning a high-profile but morally dubious murder case, Rita is enlisted to help Manita’s transition and disappear, then move her client’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and children safely to Switzerland.
“The movie had been looking for its own identity. It was drifting [between] so many possibilities. At one point, it was almost two projects, one with music, one without,” said Paul Guilhaume, Audiard’s Oscar-nominated cinematographer, who also worked with him on Paris, 13th District and The Bureau. After multiple screen tests and scouting in Mexico, Audiard arrived at the idea of making Emilia Pérez an opera and film in one. “He wanted to take the film away from reality and not make anything that would be too anchored into social or geographical reality,” said Guilhaume. Visiting clinics in Bangkok and Tel Aviv, scenes punctuated by musical numbers theatrical yet poignant, Rita completes her client’s mission, then expects never to see her again. But Emilia emerges at a dinner in London to seek out Rita’s help again. She needs her children back and entrusts Rita to be the fixer to deliver them. Jessi and Rita will be introduced to her household in Mexico, where she will be introduced as the children’s aunt.
Audiard, Guilhaume, and the VFX team progressively adjusted the film’s aesthetic, always looking for a balance between the studio setting and a sense of realism. “This was how the project itself guided its own aesthetic,” Guilhaume said. Its beating heart is the musical numbers, which vary widely in their stylistic approach. Back in Mexico and focused on anti-cartel work, for example, Rita takes the stage in an electrifying solo performance at a charity gala.
“She had to take control of the film, and visually, this translated to taking control of the lighting. She points it in different directions in space. She takes control of the camera, which seems to be almost magnetized to her face, following her movements,” Guilhaume explained. At each juncture, the story drove the idea of how to film, particularly in terms of the musical elements. “A very important thing in Jacques’ mind was that the movie would be a musical where the story is incorporated in the songs, as opposed to a story that would develop, and then we reach a musical and dance moment that just sums everything up,” the cinematographer said.
Emilia Pérez also has a distinctly different feeling in the first and second acts—the former is dark and gritty, and the second, as the women expose the cartels’ sins, is itself comparatively flooded with light. “As a DP, when you receive a script, and you have a fourth of the film, or maybe more, happening at night, you are really thrilled. But then come all the problems and the questions. How do we tell the story with the right amount of darkness but still keeps some energy?” Guilhaume said. He and Audiard achieved this by using almost entirely practical lighting in the studio setting where the film was primarily shot. In addition to creating contrast and richness, “it brings us an image that’s very dynamic, because when the camera moves, it captures a subtle flare or a shift in the contrast, it creates little accidents which can be what we miss when we film in a studio,” he said.
The film also balances theatricality with realism through movement. Whether it’s the lighting, camera, or what the actors are doing, Guilhaume explained, “the key thing is to find movement and energy in each frame, sequence, and act of the film.”
Even in the editing, “you can see that they subtly guide your eyes from one side of the screen, and then next cut, the eyes are starting from the same place. It keeps the audience on their toes in terms of movement,” he said. For Guilhaume, this temporal approach to Emilia Pérez was a new aspect of his cooperation with director Audiard, an acclaimed director as hard to categorize as the project itself. “He’d rather take huge risks on each project than do what he’s already known to be good at. He totally could have done A Prophet all of his life, you know? But he just kept on reinventing himself.” Guilhaume said. “In the process, he’s going in a direction where we don’t know anything, but we’re going to find it.”
For more on Emilia Pérez, check out these stories:
Ladies and gentlemen, Rihanna has entered her blue era.
Director Chris Miller’s Smurfs has the most potent possible Smurfette leading the new movie—yes, Rihanna—and she’s front and center in the first trailer for the film.
While Rihanna is undoubtedly the biggest star in just about any room or scene she’s in, animated or not, the heart of the Smurfs is the entire village of characters created by the Belgian comic artist and writer Peyo. Miller’s Smurf, packed with A-list talent, derived its inspiration from Peyo,who the director spoke about during a presentation last year at the Annecy Animation Festival in June. “The DNA in Peyo’s original drawings guide so many creative choices in the film. It’s the blueprint for the kind of film I want to make. All of the action lines and thought bubbles from the comics are going in the movie, and the comics have inspired the style of animation to be fun and buoyant, with plenty of squash and stretch.”
As for Rihanna, her presence on The Smurfs goes beyond just playing the beloved Smurfette—she’s also a producer and has written, produced, and sung new original songs that guide the film.
Rihanna is joined by a very talented cast, including Nick Offerman, Natasha Lyonne, Daniel Levy, Amy Sedaris, Nick Kroll, James Corden, Octavia Spencer, Hannah Waddingham, Sandra Oh, Alex Winter, Billie Lourd, Xolo Maridueña, Kurt Russell and John Goodman.
Miller’s Smurfs follows decades of popularity for the little blue humanoids and their mushroom-shaped houses, from their 1980s cartoon TV series to Sony’s 2011 The Smurfs that featured Katy Perry as Smurfette, and the sequel, Smurfs: The Lost Village, where Demi Lovato stepped into the Smurfette role.
Miller directs from a script by Pam Brandy. Smurfs hits theaters on July 18.
Here’s the official synopsis for Smurfs:
When Papa Smurf (John Goodman) is mysteriously taken by evil wizards, Razamel and Gargamel, Smurfette (Rihanna) leads the Smurfs on a mission into the real world to save him. With the help of new friends, the Smurfs must discover what defines their destiny to save the universe. SMURFS features an all-star voice cast including Rihanna, James Corden, Nick Offerman, JP Karliak, Daniel Levy, Amy Sedaris, Natasha Lyonne, Sandra Oh, Octavia Spencer, Nick Kroll, Hannah Waddingham, Alex Winter, Maya Erskine, Billie Lourd, Xolo Maridueña with Kurt Russell and John Goodman.
For more films and series from Paramount and Paramount+, check out these stories:
Featured image: LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – APRIL 27: Rihanna speaks onstage, promoting the upcoming Smurfs film, for the Paramount Pictures presentation during CinemaCon 2023, the official convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, at Caesars Palace on April 27, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for CinemaCon)
One of the unwritten rules of screenwriting is you don’t put camera direction in the script. It’s about the worst possible move for a writer, a serious no-no in Hollywood, and the number one way to guarantee your work never gets produced. But in the case of Presence, a new, propulsively effective haunted-house movie with a twist, it was possible for the screenwriter David Koepp to put such objections aside and embrace the visual possibilities because the camera, in this story, also happens to be the title character. Both are referred to as “we” in the script.
“I’ve written POV shots, of course,” said Koepp, one of the busiest and most highly regarded screenwriters in Hollywood. “But I’ve never written a whole movie from one limited point of view. The presence itself, played by the camera, is in every single scene.”
The idea for Presence, in theaters now, came from Steven Soderbergh, whose mother was a parapsychologist; she even looked like Beatrice Straight in Poltergeist. Soderbergh self-financed the production and shot and directed it. It’s the second collaboration (following KIMI, a 2022 tech-thriller with Zoe Kravitz) for the longtime friends.
Presence involves a family that moves into a house inhabited by an unknown spirit. Weird, supernatural stuff ensues following a recent death, and the family unravels as secrets are kept and exposed. Lucy Liu is the steely mother, who seems to be moving funds around in ways that aren’t entirely legal, dotting on her high school-athlete son (Eddie Maday), and ignoring her sad and confused teenage daughter (Callina Liang), who’s suffered a recent trauma. The father (Chris Sullivan) makes an effort to be the responsible parent but is too weak and fearful. The entity doesn’t know why it’s there or who these people are, but we start to think something may have happened in the house. It’s a tightly constructed story that all takes place in one location (each scene is shot as an oner), and there’s an undercurrent of mounting dread.
When it debuted at the Sundance Festival, Presence received rave reviews and a few buzzy headlines after some people at the screening walked out, too frightened to stick around for the finale of the 85-minute movie. Neon, the hip indie distributor, swooped it up for $5 million.
A tightly-wound, smaller-scale movie that gives you the shivers is a nice change of pace for Koepp, whose credits are lined with titles that tend to fill popcorn buckets, not festival lineups. Pick a title: Carlito’s Way, the original Mission: Impossible and Spider-Man movies, and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. After breaking into the movies in 1989 with Apartment Zero, a Polanskian thriller set in Argentina that he co-wrote and produced, Koepp has continued to work at a breakneck pace. He once had eight of his screenplays made into films over a five-year period.
His next film, Black Bag (out March 14 and also directed by Soderbergh), is a spy story about a married couple, played by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. This summer will have Jurassic World Rebirth, Koepp’s first return to the franchise since writing the original Jurassic Park movieand its sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, both directed by Spielberg. Koepp said, “Rebirth is a little more like the tone of the very first movie.” He’s also written a new U.F.O. movie for Spielberg that’s in pre-production.
Our conversation, which covered his fears as a parent, the movies that deserve more recognition from the Oscars, and why hope is one of his hallmarks, has been edited and condensed.
What kinds of reactions have you gotten to Presence?
They’ve been great. I’ve had a chance to see it with different audiences because it’s played at several festivals, and there’d be Q&As, so I’d end up watching the movie many times, and it plays one of my favorite ways. Unless you have a comedy where you really want to hear people, rapt attention is the best you can ask for, and that’s what it’s getting. But the calls and emails I’ve gotten from friends who’ve seen it, they’ve also been surprised. They find it quite emotional and moving, and that made me happy because it felt that way to me when I was writing it.
Much of the talk surrounding the movie has been about its POV format: the camera is the ghost. What’s the trick to writing for a character we can’t see?
Accepting that it is a character, and it’s got to be fleshed out in your mind. In the pages that [Soderbergh] sent me when he first had the idea for the movie, there would be these little moments where the presence retreats into a closet. And I said, okay, it’s shy, it’s jumpy. So then I had to keep in mind that the movie isn’t a four-character piece; this is a five-character piece, and the presence itself, played by the camera, is in every single scene. We do not see this character, but we experience the film as that character. And so, if you watch the film a second time, you see the presence getting emboldened as the movie goes on. From that opening shot, it’s very anxious and confused as it searches an empty house. Then a family comes in, and it’s drawn to them, the daughter in particular, and it gets braver. But then it gets frightened, and then it slowly learns it can maybe manipulate events a little bit.
L-r: Lucy Liu, Eddy Maday, Callina Liang, and Chris Sullivan in “Presence.” Courtesy Neon.
You said writing this kind of movie meant writing about your own fears as a parent. So how much of you is in the dad?
I certainly related to him. I have [a family], and raising four kids is a pretty wild ride. Certainly, his fears about what’s out there are very real fears I share. So, I don’t know. Quite a bit, probably.
[Start Spoiler Alert!] The issue of control looms large in this story. One scene that stuck with me is when the daughter and a guy-friend (West Mulholland) go up to her bedroom. Although he’s reassuring her that she can decide how it all goes with them, we get the sense that this guy is someone to stay away from.
Well, he’s full of shit. Ryan is a manipulator and a user of the worst kind. Certainly, for a number of years, there’s been a great deal more sensitivity to the notion of consent, particularly sexually, and I think Ryan has picked up all that lingo, and he’s using it to further his own aims, which are not so pure.
West Mulholland as Ryan and Callina Liang as Chloe in “Presence.” Courtesy Neon.
When you and Soderbergh were developing Presence, how did you see this film taking shape? Were you very clear about the stuff you didn’t want in the movie?
So much was dictated by location and budget. We wanted it to be all in one house, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly for budgetary ones, because Steve was paying for the movie himself, and $2 million is gone before you know it. We also weren’t particularly interested in jump scares. Thisis not a scary movie; it’s an eerie movie, filled with dread, and it’s quite unsettling, a really intense experience. The last 15 minutes are hard for me. In some of the screenings, I leave early because I just don’t want to go through that every time.
I noticed the idea of hope tends to come up in your screenplays. In your first film, Apartment Zero, there’s a character who talks about hope for their building’s occupants, and when doing press for Stir of Echoes, a murder mystery movie, you said the belief that ghosts exist is hopeful.
Of course, I’ve written a bunch of dark stuff, but what’s wrong with hope? It’s that great last line from “The Count of Monte Cristo,” you know, “all of human knowledge can be summed up in two words: wait and hope.” I think on a good day, I remember that when stories are hopeful, they can touch us, and that’s worth remembering.
The New Yorker once ran a piece on you with the headline: “David Koepp is a Very Nice Screenwriter. Really.” Does that mean you’re the type to welcome studio notes?
Sometimes. I think as the budget goes up, the number of notes you get and the number of sources they come from increases, and you do have to listen. It doesn’t mean you have to take the note. Your responsibility is always to write the best possible movie. My general credo is that if it makes a movie better, I’ll absolutely take that note. But I’ve learned in all the years that the best response you can have to any note is, “That’s interesting. Let me think about it.” And you should stop and do it.
What’s a common note you get?
“More sympathy for the guy,” meaning whoever. Also, “higher stakes in the third act.”
Do you have a favorite note?
On Jurassic Park, [Spielberg] gave me a great note. We were working on outlines in treatment form, and I think he called after the first draft and said, “Wait, aren’t we supposed to be having fun?” Because I had made it all dower and unpleasant. That was all he had to say. It was like, Yeah, wait, let me do a quick pass on this and get it back to you. Movie scripts are like planning a rocket launch. If you’re off by just a bit, you miss the moon by 10,000 miles. So, a little course correction like that is really useful.
Who inspires you as a screenwriter?
Well, my favorites are Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), who’s no longer with us but boy, did he have great ideas. You can’t write in his style, but the sort of freshness of his approach, the idea of the reversal — that things pivot in the middle of a scene — those are great traits. Larry Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark), I love and admire. Those were probably my heroes. My sometime writing partner, John Kamps (Premium Rush), inspires me. I think he has great insights into people.
We know you like that movie game where people guess the film based on the names of the three actors who appear in it.
Yeah. Oh, you got a hard one, don’t you?
Here’s what I got for you: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and Coleman Domingo.
[Laughs.] Well, it’s an untitled movie, but you almost got me. You’re describing the exciting Steven Spielberg film that starts shooting in four weeks. (Koepp wrote the screenplay.)
It’s the new UFO movie you wrote for Spielberg that’s going to be filmed in New Jersey. We take it you’ve been sworn to secrecy, but maybe you could tell us if the movie has anything to do with the recent drone sightings that alarmed lawmakers and local officials?
Yeah, that was us, actually. It was just a test shoot. We’re very sorry.
Seriously, is there anything you could tell us?
Not only have I been sworn to secrecy, I’ve been reprimanded for not adhering strictly enough to the secrecy.
Okay, we get it. Spielberg did feed you to the dinosaurs for your cameo in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Yeah, there’s some hostility there. No, I understand and respect the fact that Steven works very hard to make things surprising, and that’s a lot of creative value. So I’m not going to mess with it.
About that cameo, so did you actually write your own death into the script?
Yeah, [laughs] I thought it’d be really fun. I had myself in mind from the beginning and pitched myself very hard when I turned in the script.
How did your character intro read?
Well, because a lot is going on at that point in the movie, there isn’t time for a full description. I just said, ‘Some people are running down the street. One of them, an UNLUCKY BASTARD, turns left and tries to run into a store.’ So “Unlucky Bastard,” being my favorite character name, was me.
Did you like being in front of the camera?
It gave me so much respect for actors. I had to do like 12 takes and I hurt my elbow. All that waiting around, making sure you save enough energy for 4:00 in the morning, when it’s your moment. I learned a lot that I hadn’t imagined I’d learn.
The Academy Awards are coming up. Would you like to share your pick for best screenplay?
I just loved A Real Pain so much. I thought it was beautiful. I’d like to see that win for best original screenplay.
Featured image: Callina Liang as Chloe in “Presence.” Courtesy Neon.
The first trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth has arrived. unleashing a new era of dinosaurs and the star power of Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali in the seventh film in the franchise.
Jurassic World Rebirth is set five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion and involves a dangerous mission taken on for a potentially world-changing breakthrough. Here’s the official synopsis: “The planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures within that tropical biosphere hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.”
Who will extract those potentially life-saving benefits from the three most colossal creatures within this wildly dangerous biosphere? Enter Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a covert operations expert who’s contracted to locate those dinosaurs and secure those DNA samples. She’s joined by Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), a man who knows how to get people and things out of places they shouldn’t be, and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). This scientific genius will have his mettle tested in an environment he is likely unprepared for.
This mission won’t go smoothly, of course—Zora’s team comes into contact with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos. Now, Zora, her team, and the family are then stranded on an island. This means epic encounters with colossal creatures of air, land, and sea, with the team rappelling down cliffs, stalked by mosasaurs in the water, raptors on the land, and a whole lot more. The island they end up on was once the research facility for the original Jurassic Park. As Bailey’s Loomis explains, it’s where the worst of the worst were kept, the dinosaurs who were too dangerous to expose to the public.
The film comes from director Gareth Edwards, from a script written by David Koepp. The cast also includes Rupert Friend, Ed Skrein, Mahershala Ali, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, Philippine Velge, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, and Bechir Sylvain.
Check out the trailer below. Jurassic World Rebirth roars into theaters on July 2, 2025.
For more on Universal Pictures, Peacock, and Focus Features projects, check out these stories:
By now, you’ve seen the trailer for director Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, probably the most eagerly-anticipated MCU film of the year, given how long the Core Four have been gone. The Fantastic Four are, in fact, making their Marvel Cinematic Universe debut since that now ancient acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney way back in 2019. That acquisition gave Disney the film rights to Deadpool (hello, Deadpool & Wolverine), the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four, and more.
Shakman’s film, due this July 25, is a big deal to both Marvel fans and Fantastic Four aficionados, as they represent Marvel’s First Family, created by Marvel Comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1961, ushering in a new level of realism to the comics medium. Sure, we’re still talking about characters that can catch fire and fly, become invisible, stretch their bodies to nearly any length or into shape, and are, well, a rock monster, but the Fantastic Four are Marvel’s Royal Family.
The Core Four are played by Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/The Thing). The trailer revealed the film’s style and setting in a retrofuturistic 1960s New York City that might not be the same New York City we’ve seen so many times in previous MCU films.
The trailer hints at how these four good friends were, at one point, regular astronauts, but after a cosmic mishap during a mission, they returned to Earth with superpowers and became the Fantastic Four. In First Steps, we know they’ll eventually tangle with a galactic brute appropriately named Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a world-eating supervillain who we spied at the end of the trailer. We did not see Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer, however, Galactus’s mercury-quick herald, but we know she’s in the film.
Let’s take a quick tour of what we saw, including making one very big assumption about a mystery character played by John Malkovich:
We got a sense of just how smart Reed Richards is in the trailer—the above shot is cinematic shorthand for how you depict vast intelligence; put your character in front of a chalkboard filled with very long and complicated equations. Fantastic Four fans also know that Reed was once the envy of another smart guy, Viktor Von Doom, who will be appearing for the first time in the MCU, played by Robert Downey Jr. no less, in Avengers: Doomsday. Those two will inevitably tangle in Doomsday and the follow-up Avengers film, Avengers: Secret Wars. But that’s for later. For now, what we didn’t see in the trailer was Reed Richards taking the form of Mister Fantastic and showing off his brain-melting elasticity. We’ll see that soon enough.
The trailer makes quick work of showing us how Reed Richards and Sue Storm are the heart of the team and in love (they share a passionate kiss). Her powers include not only invisibility but also the ability to create force fields. It’s Sue who gets to deliver the Fantastic Four’s ethos in the trailer by saying, “Whatever life throws at us, we face it together — as a family.”
Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s The Thing is a sight to behold, the product of a tremendous amount of work by Shakman and his team to make sure Ben Grimm’s transformation into a rock monster looked as realistic as it could be.
“We want to be true to comics, but we also want to be true to life,” Shakman said during The Fantastic Four Comic-Con panel. “We talked to scientists, we talked to animal experts, we talked to everybody. We went out into the desert to find the best rock to make the Thing right.”
Honoring the Thing’s comics roots while finding a way to infuse as much biological realism as possible is something the MCU has done quite a few times. See, the Hulk. Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s transformation into the Thing involved motion capture technology, the same process that Mark Ruffalo underwent during all his years of playing the Hulk. Moss-Bachrach even received a very helpful message from Ruffalo: “I got a really nice text message from Mark Ruffalo just to demystify the process of motion capture because I’ve never done it before,” Moss-Bachrach said. “He sent a long, generous text message taking a way a bit of how I was scared of the technology.”
Ben’s transformation into The Thing is also the most tragic superhero origin story for any of the Core Four—in the comics, he long struggled with his appearance and how it kept him apart from other people. This is why he wore a trench coat and a hat all the time, which he also does in the trailer. Ben eventually finds love with a blind sculptor named Alicia Masters, and fans have already speculated she’ll be played by Natasha Lyonne in the film.
Johnny Storm is Sue’s younger brother, and the fact that his accident in space turned him into the Human Torch fits well with his hotheaded nature. We get to see him in fully flamed form in the trailer, zipping around in a blazing path through the canyons of the Manhattan skyline and then up into space.
H.E.R.B.I.E.
The friendly sauce-making robot cooking dinner alongside The Thing in the trailer is H.E.R.B.I.E., Reed Richards’ Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics. H.E.R.B.I.E. is one of the many robots that have either aided or fought against Marvel’s geniuses and superheroes, from Vision to Ultron. H.E.R.B.I.E. is definitely in the friend category, and adorable, no less.
Galactus
Toward the trailer’s end, we see Galactus, one of the longest-standing Marvel villains around, hovering over the Statue of Liberty. This cosmic crusher was created in 1966 by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and Mark Gruenwald, starting love as a mortal man but becoming a cosmic entity who needs to eat planets to stay alive. We didn’t get a peek at his surfboard-riding herald, the Silver Surfer, but we can expect her in the movie.
John Malkovich’s mystery character
There has obviously already been plenty of speculation online about who Malkovich’s mystery bearded character is, with the most plausible presumption, to our ears, anyway, landing on the villain Ivan Kragoff/the Red Ghost, a nemesis of the Fantastic Four from the comics. Kragoff was a Soviet scientist who replicated the Core Fore’s celestial mishap and gained the ability to become intangible. He also raises an army of super apes whose powers match those of the Fantastic Four. Keep in mind this is still only speculation until we get confirmation from someone from the film or Marvel, but it’s a good guess.
The Baxter Building and Fantsticar
The Baxter Building is one of the main settings in the trailer, the official residence of the Fantastic Four. It’s another iconic Manhattan skyscraper and the Core Four’s HQ, not so dissimilar from the Avengers Tower, which might not ever exist in this particular universe.
The Fantasticar is also spotted in the trailer—or, at least, it sure looks like it could be the Fantsticar. The gorgeously sleek, retro-perfect blue speedster has a 4 logo on the front, so we’re safe in assuming it is. The car even popped up briefly in Deadpool & Wolverine.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps launches into theaters on July 25, 2025.
For more on The Fantastic Four: First Steps, check out these stories:
Named after a day that will live in infamy, September 5 (in theaters now) recounts the terrorist attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics, as told from the perspective of ABC Sports broadcasters led by Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Geoff Mason (John Magaro). Confined largely to their studio control room, purpose-built just a few yards from Olympic Village, journalists watched the attack in horror, scrambling to capture the tragedy with now-antiquated gear yoked to then-new satellite technology. The ABC Sports team’s abrupt pivot to hard news reached an estimated 900 million viewers worldwide.
Directed by Tim Fehlbaum and co-starring Ben Chaplin and Leonie Benesch, September 5 blends archival footage with meticulous re-creations of ABC’s studio, no longer standing, overseen by production designer Julian R. Wagner. “I knew the basic facts of the tragedy but had no idea about the journalistic work,” Wagner tells The Credits. “Learning about it changed my perspective on this tragedy. I would say the Munich attack marked the beginning of modern terrorism.”
Speaking from a German village where he sometimes lives, Wagner talked about crafting a claustrophobic space and filling it with an enormous collection of vintage devices from around the world.
In reconstructing the coverage of this horrific event, how did you manage a responsibility to get the details right with the demands of the production?
Standing on the ground at the Olympic Village for the first time, we all felt a huge responsibility not only to the authenticity and accuracy of the space but also to the victims. Tim and I had worked before on a science fiction movie The Colony, where we created a new future world. For this project, he asked me, “Can you do the opposite and make something completely authentic?” But it wasn’t just about replicating history. I had to support the emotional work by designing this small, contained space in a way that really conveys the story.
Concept art for the production studio. Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures
Can you give an example of how you reshaped the space?
The set in the center of the studio is called the VTR [Video Tape Recorder] room. In reality, there were several very small rooms without windows, with one machine per room. This is nothing you can show [cinematically] so we designed one big room, a bit like a NASA control room, with huge windows. This was different from the reality, but this way you could see what was going on there.
Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures
How about the control room?
That huge monitor wall was stationary in 1972, but we made it movable so that if we moved it even an inch, you could make the cast feel a bit more trapped against the wall. It’s a matter of centimeters, but all those little details made a difference.
Courtesy of Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures
The control room is packed with buttons, switches, and archaic TV monitors. At the time, they were state-of-the-art, but now, these devices would look right at home in a museum. How did you amass all this vintage gear?
It was a long journey to get all that stuff, but there was no question that the props had to be precise and accurate. For example, we didn’t use modern screens, which would have been much easier, because we wanted that real feeling of the old curved monitors. The producer Geoffrey Mason [portrayed in the film by John Magaro] gave us photographs of the crew, so we had all these fragments, like a giant puzzle, of what the room looked like. We put together a giant mood board just for devices, and then our great production buyer, Johannes Pfaller, went to museums, private collectors, and hidden basements and found these pieces. We also talked to a technician from the old days who told us about this collector of old machines in the Netherlands so we went there, we went to Italy, the Czech Republic, collectors in the states.
L-r, Gladys Deist (Georgina Rich), Hank Hanson (Corey Johnson, Geoff Mason (John Magaro), Jacques Lesgardes (Zinedine Soualem) star in Paramount Pictures’ “SEPTEMBER 5,” the film that unveils the decisive moment that forever changed media coverage and continues to impact live news today, set during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.
You built the September 5 interiors on a soundstage in Munich. When all these devices arrived at Bavaria Studios, were they ready to go?
No, far from it. Those VTR machines, which transfer analog into broadcast signals, are huge monsters that weigh a ton, and none were functional. They were so big we had to put the machines in place first and then build the room, closing the walls around them. And you can’t just plug them because they’d probably explode. Also, these machines are very loud, so you can’t run them on set. To make the machine quiet, we had technicians and prop makers sitting there day and night re-wiring miles of cables.
Paramount Pictures’ “SEPTEMBER 5,” the film that unveils the decisive moment that forever changed media coverage and continues to impact live news today, set during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. the film that unveils the decisive moment that forever changed media coverage and continues to impact live news today, set during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.
Did you have access to blueprints for the original ABC Sports studio?
We found blueprints, which helped, but the floorplan we created was different because our DP, Markus Förderer,and Tim wanted to follow the actor from one room to the next like a documentary team and go 360 degrees with the flow of action. This was a 100 percent continuous set. It was cramped.
How did you make room for lighting rigs?
We integrated the lighting within the set, which happened because of this very close collaboration between the gaffer, the DP, and me.
What kind of team do you assemble to make all the gear look right and function correctly?
We had two technicians, two prop makers, two set dressers, and two consultants who came from that time in the early seventies and worked with us in the studio refurbishing these devices. They all worked night and day shifts because we only had six weeks for the build, the devices, the set decoration, the painting, and everything else. It was crowded!
Most of the action takes place in the control room, but in one exterior sequence, terrorists have transported their hostages to the airport, and interpreter Marianna [Leonie Benesch] goes outside to report. How did you set up the airport environment?
We couldn’t access the original airport because it’s a military base. This was a night scene filmed on handheld cameras, and we needed one shot of people rushing over this field with the airport in the background, so we did a very basic analog trick that plays with false perspective: we simply recreated the airport in Photoshop and printed it on cardboard, cut it out and put it on the field. Markus ran between these tanks with his camera, following a crowd of people toward this prop we’d made, and that was it. Tim, Markus, and I really like in-camera solutions rather than just saying, “Shoot something in a field and do the rest in post.”
Courtesy of Julian R. Wagner/Paramount Pictures
September 5 shows journalists at their best, working as a team. Did the making of this film reflect that same kind of spirit?
The production itself was a collaboration like I’ve never seen before. Everyone was passionate, and producers came on set every day. Tim has a very strong vision but leaves everyone space to fill this vision with their own creativity. It’s a beautiful way to work, and I think you can feel that in the movie.
For more films and series from Paramount and Paramount+, check out these stories:
Featured image: At left, facing others in Control Room, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), at the Contol Room table, Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), Geoff Mason (John Magaro), Jacques Lesgardes (Zinedine Soualem), Hank Hanson (Corey Johnson), standing, Carter (Marcus Rutherford), Gladys Deist (Georgina Rich) and Marianne Gebhard (Leonie Benesch) star in Paramount Pictures’ “SEPTEMBER 5,” the film that unveils the decisive moment that forever changed media coverage and continues to impact live news today, set during the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.
