“I come to set every day with a smile on my face because we’re making Captain America,” Anthony Mackie says at the top of this brand-new glimpse behind the scenes of Captain America: Brave New World. Mackie goes on to say how much it meant to him to be handed the shield, which previously (not that you need a reminder) was wielded by Chris Evans during his long tenure as Steve Rogers. The official cinematic handoff happened at the end of Avengers: Endgame, and Mackie’s Sam Wilson then carried it on into Marvel’s Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which revealed just how hard of a transition it was. Now, Mackie’s getting his first stand-alone film as the new Cap, having “made the decision to become unabashedly Captain America,” as Marvel president Kevin Feige says in the new look.
Director Julius Onah’s film will not only center Sam Wilson, but will unveil Harrison Ford as President Thaddeus Ross (taking over the character from the late William Hurt). In a recent teaser, Thaddeus Ross unleashed his inner beast as the Red Hulk. This is the first time the Red Hulk has appeared onscreen, introduced on the pages of the comics in 2008. Onah recently told Fandangohe was thrilled when he found out introducing the character was a possibility.
“It’s surreal, it’s incredible, it’s exciting,” Onah told Fandango. “I gotta tell you, when Red Hulk first became a possibility in this film, I just smiled. I was smiling like a kid, and that’s when I knew it was the right idea and right moment to put it out into the world.”
In the new look, Mackie mentions how the film is “old-school Marvel,” and Feige had already revealed at last year’s Comic-Con that the Brave New World‘s tone would be a more grounded, gritty action flick, akin to the Russo Brothers’ beloved Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which, not for nothing, was Mackie’s introduction as Sam Wilson.
Joining Mackie and Ford are Danny Ramirez, who reprises his role from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as Joaquin Torres, the young man who takes over from Sam as the Falcon; Liv Tyler as Betty Ross; Tim Blake Nelson as Samuel Sterns/The Leader; Carl Lumbly (also reprising his role of Isaiah Bradley from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), Shira Haas as Ruth Bat-Serpha/Sabra, and Giancarlo Esposito as the villain Sidewinder.
Check out the new look below. Captain America: Brave New World smashes into theaters on February 14:
Shot over 37 days in New York, one of this year’s awards darlings is Sean Baker’s compulsively riveting Anora, a lap-dancing underworld version of Cinderella. Mikey Madison plays the titular stripper, Anora/”Ani,” who thinks she has hit the jackpot when playboy and heir to a Russian oligarch, Ivan “Vanya” (Mark Eydelshteyn), falls in love with her. In an instant, she is plunged into a world of immense wealth, but will she be able to hang on to the rags-to-riches fantasy when forces outside of their budding romance are pressed into service to tear them apart? Furious about their marriage, Vanya’s father orders his enforcer, led by Toros (Karren Karagulian), to get the marriage annulled ASAP and by any means necessary.
Recently snagging seven BAFTA nominations, this gritty tale of ambition and misguided love is cinematographer Drew Daniels’ second feature with Baker after their 2021 collaboration on Baker’s Red Rocket. Here, Daniels discusses the beauty and risk of shooting on film, that phenomenal last sequence, and more.
What’s the shorthand that you’ve developed with Sean Baker after working on Red Rocket?
We connected on Red Rocket in an intimate way because it’s a very small production. So, I understand Sean’s taste as an artist. Part of the cinematographer’s job is to meld minds with the director, become a detective, and try to understand what he wants without having to say it. You’re always searching for emotions and things that aren’t articulated. So, if you understand him and the writing, you can dig deep.
Mikey Madison as Ani and Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan in “ANORA.” Courtesy of NEON.
How did all that translate to the Anora set?
Sean included me from the very beginning when he started writing it and bounced some ideas off me. So, I understood the story’s evolution. We didn’t have unlimited time with him during production and prep was very quick. So, our connection from Red Rock really helped me understand what he was going for. I’m really proud of that—the goal as a DP is always to be able to get in the head of the director. I feel pretty confident that I shot the film that he wanted to make.
Did you choose the 35mm format over digital to capture the vibe of the story and the nostalgic romanticism of celluloid, or do you just prefer the grainy look of film?
It’s a bit of everything. It’s almost a no-brainer for us—if we can afford it, we’re shooting on film. It just feels right. Sean and I really enjoy the process, which is very different from digital. Film focuses the energy and gets everybody excited. Every day, you get your dailies, and it’s kind of like Christmas. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and it can feel like the Wild West. There’s this magic when you expose a negative, and everybody’s hard work comes together on this little frame. With digital, everybody can see exactly what the lighting will look like and what the finished product will be.
Mikey Madison as Ani and Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan in “ANORA.” Courtesy of NEON.
So with the precision of digital, you may lose some of that magic?
Kind of, and the happy accidents, too, it’s something we try to make space for. There’s also this impossible-ness of shooting a film like this in New York City on 35mm anamorphic that’s very attractive to me. We never had enough light or time, never enough of anything. Shooting with old, vintage Russian anamorphic lenses on the streets of New York added an interesting challenge. 35mm was what Hollywood movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s shot on—making our little movie on that format felt like a nice contrast.
“Anora.” Courtesy NEON.
It’s meshing the modern with the old.
Exactly, a modern story with an old Hollywood format and old lenses—we have this gritty, indie story in a romantic, large format. I just loved the contrast on many levels.
What lenses and cameras did you use?
The ARRI Arricam LT with LOMO anamorphic lenses. I like the imperfections and unpredictability of film.
How big was your camera crew?
Very small, just me, a first and second [assistant camera] and a loader, plus lighting and grips.
What visual style were you and Sean going for?
Sean prefers the elegance of the camera, minimalism, and shooting for the edit. He likes to use the camera almost as an observer, like cinéma verité, instead of using it to steer the audience’s psychology. I enjoy subjective filmmaking, using the camera language to get into a character’s head. Some moments are very subjective, like when Ani and Igor look into the cameras at the end, or the camera might push in on a certain moment or zoom in really fast. The camera language here is naturalism, objectivity, and verité—it’s also a bit of Sean’s personality and a bit of mine.
The opening sequence establishes Ani’s slice of life in the lap dancing club. What was it like to shoot that?
The slow-motion tracking shot following the girls dancing is one of my favorites. While Sean and I were scouting, we stumbled upon this hallway in the back where lap dances were performed just three feet away. As soon as we saw that, we knew it had to be in the movie! It was very dark, and I didn’t have enough light to make it look natural. The low light levels were tough but I also didn’t want it to feel artificial. I try to obey the lighting of the space and enhance certain aspects. I wanted it to still feel dark, with lots of reds and warm colors. You’re trying to make it feel real for the actors, too. We gave Mikey the space to roam around the entire club while she improvised; she had an earpiece with Sean feeding her some lines and directing her.
Mikey Madison in “Anora.” Courtesy NEON.
How long did you shoot there?
Six days, half of that was shooting Ani lap dancing in the opening.
What was the most memorable sequence?
The most memorable and most difficult was the home invasion sequence. It was just a beast to tackle—30 pages that we shot over eight days in the middle of the winter in a house with windows and mirrors in every direction. We used natural light, so you lose the light eight or nine hours into your day. We had to figure out other stuff to shoot for the rest of the day, which was often lighting some of the shots where you didn’t see any windows. Many shots in that sequence were actually shot at night. The windows were very tinted, so even though it’s light outside, you’re still underexposed. We had to maintain that low light level consistently across eight days through every kind of weather—rain, sun, clouds, and storms—which was a huge challenge. But we didn’t have any snow, which we wanted.
Mikey Madison in “Anora.” Courtesy NEON
When Toros calls in two enforcers to detain Ani at the house—Igor (Yura Borisov) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan)—all hell breaks loose as she bites, headbutts, and kicks them trying to break free. How did you maintain that level of chaos for days?
It was a challenge blocking that because they fought everywhere: the living room, upstairs, and then back to the door. We sliced it into sections based on the blocking. We want an evolution of the camera language—they started with this calm, grounded language. Once it gets chaotic, we used handheld. We shot it in script order, so as Ani’s struggle progressed, we learned more about who these characters were.
There’s a frenetic sequence where Torosdrags Ani and the men around the city looking for Vanya. What was it like to shoot that?
That was chaotic. We traveled in the size of a documentary crew because we wanted to be small and still shoot in as many locations as possible with existing light. With all those places, we wanted to show how much partying Ani and Vanya did together and get a sense of what it feels like in Brighton Beach. There’s so much texture in that community.
That sequence showed just how terrified Toros was of Vanya’s parents, nothing could stop him from resolving this before they arrive. He was going out of his mind—even walking out in the middle of a baptism!
It’s about the hierarchy of power dynamics that’s obeyed in Vanya’s world. As the son of the oligarch, he is superior to Toros, a grown man with a family. Ani is at the bottom of that, even though she thought she was finally getting to the top. We explored that with the camera without being too obvious.
Yura Borisov as Igor, Vache Tovmasyan as Garnick. Courtesy NEON.
After Ani loses everything, Igor drops her off at her apartment, and they have a very emotional and bittersweet experience in the car.
It was shot inside an old Mercedes over three days at two different locations due to the logistics of shooting in New York and the intimacy required for that scene. It’s a miracle the actors maintained that level of emotion. It was nerve-wracking for Sean because there are only so many places to put a camera inside a car.
Was that shot on a handheld?
No, we were always on a tripod. Once Igor comes back in the car, we switch to their perspectives. He settles down into the shot, closes the door, turns to look at the camera, and then she looks at the camera; I just love that. That was Sean’s idea—I don’t think it would be nearly as emotional if they weren’t looking right at the camera. It’s a very privileged perspective to put the audience in—it finally gives the audience the intimacy and genuine connection they’ve been denied the whole film. It hits you because it’s unexpected. When they do have sex, it’s slow and messy; all you’re hearing is the windshield wipers. After such a chaotic story, you finally have this calm that’s earned.
The ending is left ambiguous. How do you think it ends for them?
In all my favorite movies, the ending isn’t buttoned up; everyone goes home with different ideas. Do they end up together? What did the sex mean? Was it transactional? Was it real? It waits till the very end to rip your heart out a bit in this subtle way and leaves you with a million questions. To me, that’s a good ending and a good film.
Anora is playing in select theaters and is available on PVOD.
Featured image: Mikey Madison as Ani and Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan in “ANORA.” Courtesy of NEON.
Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is a putrid feast for the eyes. In writer/director Robert Eggers’ brilliant Nosferatu remake, the iconic creature of the night is a decaying figure – nightmarish precisely because his living death was wrought with such chilling reality. Whether the Count is deep in the shadows or full view, his monstrosity remains mortifyingly intoxicating. It makes you feel even more empathy for Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter as she becomes enraptured by the Count’s deathless spell.
The Count’s physical effect is so potent in large part because Eggers and Special Makeup Effects Designer David White didn’t approach the vampire as a monster. The duo saw the Count as an ancient character as he attempts to lure young Ellen into his twisted world, which was meticulously created by production designer Craig Lathrop and his team. Eggers and White wanted real beauty in the Count’s decay, a connection to the delights of this world that makes being seduced into the terrors of the next world so believable.
Recently, Eggers and White spoke with The Credits about designing a character that they found more beautiful than scary.
David, for Count Orlok, are there any design details audiences might not catch that speak to his history, whether it’s scars or more advanced decay?
David: No scars, but there’s a little tweak that I had with the hair – with the mustache or with a little silver. There’s a little whisper of silver that runs through the hair. It just gives him an extra element there. It heightens him a tad, but not so that it’s noticeable. His coloration is extremely pale, waxing. It does change – obviously, in the sarcophagus, where it’s really milky and dead. And then, when he’s up and about and clothed, it’s a much more sensitive approach. A very believable character, not just a creature or monster. He’s just one of the other characters.
How else did you try to ground the creature in reality?
Robert: He is a dead human. David did a lot of research on how human bodies decay. Obviously, there was a map of how much of him needed to be decayed to tell the story we needed to tell because of the slow reveal of Orlok and what parts of him needed to be preserved. But at the end of the day, he needs to be a believable dead human being.
David: I remember your notes, Robert, at the beginning, where you wanted him to have a sense of power, so the upper body is slightly more buff and slightly more sinewy. I was looking at mid-17th-century illustrations on autopsy subjects and how they used to have cadavers that were quite romantic in their look. It’s a really strange thing, but they had the muscle structure and the skeletal thing, yet they were always presented as something…not charming, but with a playfulness about them and a romanticist sort of feel. That was included in the sculpture of the body sections as well.
Robert: Maybe this says more about my perversity than David’s work, but I remember seeing Bill in the coffin, fully rendered, and just saying, “It’s beautiful.”
What did you learn about decaying bodies that informed, say, the fingers?
Robert: The whole reason why vampires have long fingernails in folklore and cinema is because, as bodies decay and the skin recedes, it looks like the fingernails are growing. And obviously, with the makeup design for Max Schreck in the 1922 film, that fingernail extension goes very far. It is something that we wanted to acknowledge in this design.
David: They say that nails continue to grow even when the body is dead for a while. There is that element. It’s incredible. They’re very delicate and quite beautiful in their spidery nature.
What did you learn from the first camera test when Bill was fully in makeup and costume?
Robert: The first test was really the first time Bill put on the makeup when it wasn’t quite finished. Bill was very apprehensive. I know when I showed Bill the sculpture that I was proud of, he said, “Rob, this guy didn’t look anything like me when he was alive. How the hell am I going to pull this off?” And when he was getting the makeup put on him, I don’t know, David, if he was saying how annoyed he was, but he was definitely feeling frustrated. But then, funnily enough, once the mustache came on, you could see the inspiration in his eyes light up.
David: There was a definite point where everything changed. And Bill, being so used to that process of prosthetics, was very chirpy and funny. And then he started to get quite serious about it, and I’m like, Oh my God, what’s going on? Where’s he going? But he was studying it as well, and he was trying to figure out how he could use it. He was going to the lights and looking at angles and things. So, he was kind of test-running it in his own special way. By the end of it, when the mustache did go on and the full look came together, he began to turn into that character. He was very mean and moody, I can tell you that, for whatever reason [Laughs].
[Laughs] Did you do a lot of camera tests to determine how to best shoot Orlock in the moonlight and shadows?
Robert: We did a tremendous amount of on-camera tests to see how it would work in the moonlight and how it would work in the firelight. The most challenging part was that whenever you’re doing a monster, you have the most success if you follow something like Alien, where you barely show the xenomorph and keep it in shadows. You see bits and pieces. But we knew that while we were doing that, the movie’s climax would be in bright sunlight. Suddenly, this big hunk of artifice would be seen with the most immense amount of scrutiny possible. And so we definitely wanted to test a lot, and we did.
What were some trial-and-error moments for both of you in that climactic scene?
David: The coloration was something I remember we discussed – where should we go with the color on this? I remember that it was a question of pulling back all those rich tones and making him slightly more attractive in a strange way because he’s in this kind of dark romance scene, and his hair is in good condition at that point. Normally, in the sarcophagus and everything, he’s covered in grease, dirt, and grime, which is great. But he’s actually a much more appealing character in that very last scene, on his best behavior.
Robert: Also, I think the more we drew attention to the decay in that setup, the more it became that you were looking at makeup instead of the character.
Robert, what conversations did you have with Bill about how you wanted Orlok to move and what you wanted that physicality to be?
Robert: The only thing I said to Bill was that I didn’t want the Max Schreck hand position with the hands clenched below the chin. We would need to find other things. We were working with Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, the choreographer, who specializes in the Japanese dance art form of butoh. And there are some male butoh dancers whom I particularly liked and thought might have some influence on Orlok. But, at the end of the day, the makeup design is so powerful, and the costume design is so powerful. Both of them are, for lack of a better word, architectural. In any case, they give him extreme lines. They tell you so much about the character, the character’s shape, the shoes, and the weight of the cloak that it influences the movement.
The fires in southern California are ongoing. A bit of bright news, however, is that as of this past Wednesday evening, January 15, the red-flag warnings had expired in much of Southern California. The desert winds are expected to shift and offer the region some reprieve after a nightmare stretch. Yet forecasters have warned that daunting conditions could resume early next week and are predicting the Santa Ana winds might change direction on Thursday. The situation remains fluid.
Firefighters and first responders are still working around the clock, fighting ongoing blazes and assessing the damage. These wildfires have been the most destructive in state history, displacing more than 100,000 people, destroying over 12,000 structures, and killing at least 25. The latest conditions show the largest fire, the Palisades, is, as of this writing, 27% contained, having already burned over 23,700 acres and still threatening residential areas. The Eaton fire, covering more than 14,000 acres, is now 55% contained. In the nightmare scenario that these wildfires have brought to Southern California, these numbers count as decent news. It was only a week ago when both fires were entirely uncontained. A favorable shift in wind and herculean efforts by those fighting the fires have helped create real progress.
The major studios have been mobilizing their own relief efforts for both immediate and long-term recovery, collaborating with organizations like the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, the Screen Actors Guild, the Entertainment Industry Foundation, World Central Kitchen, and more.
Deadlinereported that Comcast NBCUniversal is donating $10 million to support L.A.’s recovery. The Comcast NBCU donation includes $2.5 million to the Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles’ ReBUILD LA initiative—Comcast NBCU is a corporate partner. The money will also go to organizations working tirelessly on the ground, including the aforementioned Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, the American Red Cross, and the Entertainment Industry Foundation SoCal Fire Fund. The Comcast NBCUniversal Employee Disaster Assistance Fund provides grants to employees and double-matches employee donations to the fund. Comcast NBCU also provides emergency financial funds, including health and welfare benefits, temporary housing, and hotels at discounted rates for employees affected by the wildfire.
“Our hearts go out to all who have been impacted by these devastating fires, including many in our Comcast NBCUniversal family,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement. “We extend our deep appreciation to the first responders for their tireless and courageous efforts and to our news teams, including NBC4 and KVEA, who are providing vital coverage during this time. We stand ready to support our employees and the broader Los Angeles community as we recover and rebuild from these tragic events.”
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 14: A California Conservation Corps fire crew clears brush away from the side of Pacific Coast Highway on January 14, 2025, in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Comcast NBCUniversal joined Disney, who, on Friday, January 10, announced they were donating $15 million for rebuilding efforts.
“As this tragedy continues to unfold, The Walt Disney Company is committed to supporting our community and our employees as we all work together to recover and rebuild from this unbelievable devastation,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said at the end of last week. “Walt Disney came to Los Angeles with little more than his limitless imagination, and it was here that he chose to make his home, pursue his dreams, and create extraordinary storytelling that means so much to so many people around the world. We are proud to provide assistance to this resilient and vibrant community in this moment of need.”
Disney has also opened its wardrobe warehouse for employees affected by wildfires. Disney’s wardrobe warehouse is located in North Hollywood, and employees can access new or gently used clothing and shoes from recent film and TV productions at no expense.
“Most companies are not sitting on an entire warehouse full of wardrobe — some of which has been barely used, if it’s been used at all,” said Heidi Chong, Vice President of Production Shared Services for Disney Entertainment Television. “We really want to emphasize to the families: ‘If you come here, we’ve already organized everything for you. It’s all on display on the racks. You can find what you need.’ There are no limits to the amounts that people are getting; it’s really about what they need.”
Warner Bros. Discovery has pledged an immediate donation of $15 million for rebuilding and response efforts. WBD is also offering employees temporary housing, with an astonishing 1,300 staffers being evacuated, with 20 having lost their homes entirely. WBD has blocked off and paid for hotel rooms for affected employees and offered to pay for meals for any staffer who has taken in displaced friends and family members. “Our studio has called Burbank home for more than 100 years, and we are focused on what needs to be done to help those impacted rebound from this disaster and rebuild in the weeks, months, and years ahead,” a spokesperson for WBD wrote.
Paramount Global‘s co-chiefs, Brian Robbins, Chris McCarthy, and George Cheeks, wrote a memo to their staff stating the company would donate $1 million to various relief efforts, including the Red Cross, World Central Kitchen, and the Los Angeles Fire Department. Paramount is also providing cash grants and temporary housing to employees displaced by the wildfires through the company’s Employee Assistance Fund.
Amazon, Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios‘ parent company, said it would be committing $10 million from its entertainment division to the American Red Cross of Southern California, FireAid, MusiCares Fire Relief Effort, World Central Kitchen, the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation and more. Amazon Web Services, Ring, and Whole Foods Market are contributing essential items through its Disaster Relief hubs. In addition to supporting organizations like FireAid, MusiCares Fire Relief Effort, and Habitat for Los Angeles Wildfire Fund, donations will also fund in-kind advertising opportunities on Prime Video for non-profits supporting LA fire relief efforts.
Amazon also created the Wildfire Relief Hub, which is based two hours east of LA and stocked with over 6,000 essential items—to deliver them to organizations working on the relief effort. Those items include tools for firefighters and first responders, including goggles, masks, axes, smoke pumps, high-particulate-matter filtration respirators, hydration packets, and shelter kits.
Netflix has said it will donate $10 million to support the relief and recovery efforts of the Los Angeles wildfire disaster. CEO Ted Sarandos said the company would split its $10 million donation between the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, California Community Fund Wildfire Recovery Fund, World Central Kitchen, Motion Picture and Television Fund, and the Entertainment Community Fund.
“For many people who aren’t familiar with it, Los Angeles conjures images of palm trees and red carpets; mansions and movie stars,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos wrote in a memo to staff on Monday. “But for those of us lucky enough to call this city home, Los Angeles is far more than that. It’s a family — one made up of extraordinarily talented, hardworking people from all over the world and all walks of life, many of whom came here chasing a dream.”
Sony has stated they’ll donate $5 million to unspecified groups aiding relief efforts. “Los Angeles has been the home of our entertainment business for more than 35 years,” said Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida and president Hiroki Totoki, adding: “We will continue work with our local business leadership to determine how best Sony Group can support relief and recovery efforts in the days ahead. Our thoughts go out to those who are impacted by this devastating situation.”
There will be a long road to recovery. Firefighters, first responders, and regular citizens—often neighbors helping neighbors—have done heroic work in the past two weeks. Meanwhile, the entertainment community has demonstrated remarkable solidarity, and these initial contributions will undoubtedly play a crucial role in supporting those affected. As the situation evolves, continued support and a focus on long-term recovery will be essential for the affected communities to rebuild and thrive. One thing that has become evident through this nightmare is the resilience of the Los Angeles community. With the continued support of individuals, organizations, and the entertainment industry, the path to recovery will be paved one day at a time.
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 12 : Fire Fighters from Woodland Hills searches for hotspots in a burned home at Pacific Coast Highway on January 12, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Multiple wildfires fueled by intense Santa Ana Winds are still burning across Los Angeles County while some containment has been achieved. At least 16 people have died and over 100,000 people are still under evacuation orders. Over 12,000 structures have been destroyed in the fires. (Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
The great David Lynch passed away at 78 yesterday, leaving behind masterworks that dared to leave questions unanswered. Those films, from his breakout Eraserhead (1977), which baffled and even offended critics (Variety wrote at the time that it was a “sickening bad-taste exercise”) that thrilled audiences, to the era-defining Blue Velvet (1986), that forever seared the image of a severed ear covered in ants into the psyche of mid-80s America, to his brilliant, beguiling neo-noir Mulholland Drive (2001) showcased Lynch’s absolutely singular vision, a filmmaker in connection with the darkest aspects of the human soul who translated that connection into lasting works. When Lynch brought his distinctive worldview to the small screen, the result was one of the defining television series of its time, Twin Peaks (1990-91), one that would go on to inspire filmmakers and TV creators, the latter of whom saw Lynch’s bold, twisted tale as proof that even audiences sitting on their couches were ready to travel the darkest roads if led by a guiding light. Lynch’s influence was such that his name became an adjective.
There are wonderful tributes and in-depth obituaries that paint a fuller picture of the life of David Lynch, a painter who turned to film to express himself more fully and, in doing so, left a legacy all his own on the big screen and small. You can find no shortage of these deep dives into Lynch’s life and work and we encourage you to read them when you can.
One of the most moving tributes to Lynch, and one that captures the impish spirit of a born collaborator, was actually created six years ago. Lynch’s longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti, scored Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive, and in 2019 he sat down at his piano to explain what it was like to sit with Lynch as he worked out his vision of Twin Peaks and its tragic central figure, Laura Palmer, and gently directed Badalamenti in how it might sound. It’s a gorgeous tribute.
For longer looks at David Lynch’s impact on film and television, his influences, and more, you couldn’t do much better than Dennis Lim’s monograph “David Lynch: The Man From Another Place.” For recent pieces on Lynch, you can read about how some of Hollywood’s most successful directors, including Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and James Gunn, have talked about what he meant to them. Unlike the mercurial Lynch, whose presence in Hollywood and beyond was felt everywhere but who remained only and ever himself, the tributes are easy to find and easier to understand. They attest to perhaps the most graspable thing about the man—there was one, and only one, David Lynch, and he will be missed.
Featured image: LONDON – OCTOBER 23: Director David Lynch hosts a Q & A ‘Catching The Big Fish’ at the National Film Theatre as part of the BFI 51st London Film Festival on October 23, 2007 in London, England. (Photo by Stuart Wilson / Getty Images)
Australian director Michael Gracey skyrocketed to success after releasing his debut feature, the 2017 Hugh Jackman-led musical The Greatest Showman. For his second narrative feature, Better Man, which is also a musical, he has tackled the life story of English pop singer Robbie Williams. There’s a twist, though. For the entirety of the film, Williams is portrayed as a CGI-animated chimpanzee. Gracey co-wrote the film and has a producing credit, with the story based on over a year’s worth of interviews with Williams, which he originally conducted without the making of a film in mind. As a result, the pop star’s experiences with addiction and mental health are related in an unfiltered and authentic way that makes for a compelling musical drama.
The idea of using a chimp as Robbie Williams is in part because the self-described cabaret singer has always seen himself as less evolved than other people, and it is actor Jonno Davies, performing in motion capture, who brings the pop star-as-chimp biopic to believable and dramatic life.
The Credits spoke to Michael Gracey about his unusual storytelling device and how he pulled off that eye-popping musical number with hundreds of performers in the middle of London’s Regent Street.
How did using a chimp to portray Robbie Williams work, practically speaking?
This film wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the support of Wētā Workshop, which is in New Zealand, but they set up a studio in Melbourne, Australia, to do this film. They were unbelievably supportive. David Conley, who was the head of Wētā at the time, put together this team of incredible artists, and it became a passion project for them.
Jonno Davies as “Robbie Williams”, Choreographer Ashley Wallen, and Director Michael Gracey in Better Man from Paramount Pictures.
Jonno Davies was the man behind the chimp/Robbie—how important was it to find someone who could inhabit Robbie in that way?
His work was instrumental to the film. It’s his voice and motion capture. Besides the singing, which is obviously Rob, that performance is all Jonno, and it’s breathtaking. His study of the nuances and little things that really get at who Robbie is was just spot on, and Jonno’s just a beast when it comes to the evolution of teenage Robbie through to the end of the film.
Jonno Davies as “Robbie Williams” in Better Man from Paramount Pictures.
There’s an incredible dance sequence that was actually filmed on Regent Street in London. How did that come about?
I used to walk down Regent Street, and I always thought, “Why has no one done a musical number down this street? It’s wide, it’s curved, it’s so iconically London, and it’s the bus route, so you’ve got all the double-decker busses going down.” Well, there’s a reason no one’s done a musical number on that street. It took a year and a half with Westminster Council and the backing of the Crown Estate, because it’s Crown land, to pull that off.
What was the process to get to what we see onscreen in that number? There must have been hundreds of performers and crew involved.
We would go down the street at 2 am, grab our iPhones, and just dance it out, and then we would just iterate and figure out how it could be better. There’s a gumball machine outside of Hamley’s, and since we go past it, we can have the gumballs go across the street, which sparks another bit of choreography as people are trying to get their balance. We’d use the environment to inspire the moments. There’s a souvenir shop, and they grab pogo sticks from there. Everything was a collaboration between Ashley Wallen, the choreographer, Jenny Griffin, the assistant choreographer, Joel Chang, the production designer, and Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole, who were writing on it. We would watch these very rough iPhone nighttime rehearsals, and we’d keep iterating and do it again and went from that to actual rehearsals for real because we had four nights where we were shutting down Regent Street, but we didn’t have time to rehearse, we’d just have to go shoot, shoot, shoot! We had to rehearse the camera crew, too, because it’s so choreographed.
Jonno Davies as “Robbie Williams” on Regent Street in Better Man from Paramount Pictures.
So you rehearsed somewhere else and then brought it to London when it was ready?
We went into the studio space outside of London, and we taped out Regent Street, every bus stop, and every doorway we were running in and out of; we brought in the taxis and the double-decker bus. We brought in the full camera crew and 500 dancers. It was an enormous rehearsal. We spent a week just running it over and over, in the exact time we had each night. We had Patrick Correll, who was associate producer, sitting with his laptop overlaying what we rehearsed with what we shot, to make sure it was a lock. If it wasn’t, we’d go again. So we did that all week in prep to shoot on location. Then the Queen died, and we were told we couldn’t film. We’re an independent film. We’d already paid everyone involved. There’s no insurance for the death of the Queen. We had 10 days of mourning where we couldn’t shoot, then the funeral, and the coronation. It took another 5 months to raise the money again to get back onto Regent Street. We came incredibly close to that number never happening at all, but it was essential to the story of the boys going from nobodies to having people chase them down the street.
The film deals with issues around addiction and mental illness, which is definitely something a lot of people can relate to, even if Robbie is far more in the public eye than most.
Yes. Rob talked a lot about his mental health during that time, the anxiety, depression, and self-medication, all the forms of abuse he was into to numb the voices in his head, and how much he fought himself. You would think a moment like Knebworth would be the highlight of a career, with 125,000 people screaming your name. He doesn’t remember any of it. That’s how plagued his thoughts were at that time. It was just terrifying. I wanted a way to illustrate that battle. It’s a very real battle, and it used to be one that was confined to famous people who felt constantly judged by the world and who were reliant on others to validate their self-worth, which is a very dangerous place to be.
Jonno Davies as “Robbie Williams” in Better Man from Paramount Pictures.Jonno Davies as “Robbie Williams” in Better Man from Paramount Pictures.
Those feelings of being constantly surveilled or judged have been amplified by social media, too.
Exactly. Thanks to social media, now that includes anyone who puts an image up online of themselves and hopes for a like or a thumbs up. They hope the comments aren’t derogatory. The battles Rob goes through as someone in the public eye are now battles anyone who is a teenager might go through. I see it in my nieces and nephews. Rob put it very simply. “If you don’t love me, neither do I.” That’s a dark place to be in, and because now Rob has had some distance from it, he’s very articulate about what it was like for him then. He had a feeling of worthlessness, and anything someone said about him would torment him, adding to his depression.
Robbie Williams on othe set of Better Man from Paramount Pictures.
How did you approach those subjects without sensationalizing them?
It’s a really important thing to talk about and get across on film. We didn’t want to sugarcoat it, and we were really fortunate that Rob let us go to those places. It’s also fortunate for viewers who see it, who might know someone dealing with those challenges. That’s why there’s a warning at the end of the film: You never know who might be feeling those feelings and having those issues. There’s a scene with Robbie standing in the snow, bleeding out, and that’s a true story. He has no idea how he got there; he just remembers looking down and seeing it. We wanted to show it without glorifying or making it cinematic. Again, the credit goes to Jonno because he really went to those places. There were moments we were filming traumatic scenes, and during Jonno’s performance, you could hear a pin drop. The whole crew was mesmerized. Everything, the performances and what you see onscreen, is all born of taking on the statement, “If you don’t love me, neither do it.” It’s a devastating statement, and I was very protective of that and what it means for people who struggle with those feelings, whether they’re in the public eye or not.
Better Man is in theaters now
Featured image: Jonno Davies as “Robbie Williams” in Better Man from Paramount Pictures.
The official trailer for Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again has dropped, reinstating Charlie Cox’s sight-impaired superhero, Matt Murdock, into his own series after a few tantalizing cameos in other Marvel films and series.
Daredevil: Born Again reunites Cox’s superhero and Vincent D’Onofrio’s brutal criminal super-boss Kingpin for the first time since they clashed back when Daredevil was a Netflix series from 2015 to 2018. Matt Murdock had a brief, quite funny cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home and a meatier role in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, while D’Onofrio’s Kingpin has appeared in both Hawkeye and the spinoff series Echo.
Daredevil: Born Again will follow the grittier tone established in Echo, which was led by Alaqua Cox’s Maya Lopez and centered on her tortured past and her relationship with Kingpin. The trailer features not only D’Onofrio’s Kingpin but also the return of one of the most brutal of all of Marvel’s antiheroes, Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher, as well as former Daredevil cast members Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Wilson Bethel as Bullseye, and Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson.
Born Again has the distinction of being the first Marvel series on Disney+ to feature a showrunner (previous series were led by head writers and directors), Dario Scardapane, a writer on the original The Punisher. To ensure the new series matched the original Daredevil’s gritty, rough-and-tumble tone, Marvel brought on fight and stunt coordinator Philip Silvera, a veteran of the original Netflix series, who serves as both stunt coordinator and second unit director for the new series. Loki directors Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson were brought in to guide the show.
Check out the trailer below. Daredevil: Born Again streams on Disney+ on March 4.
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Halfway through Sean Baker’s Anora, there’s a scene where exotic dancer turned newlywed Ani (Mickey Madison) is tied up and gagged with a red scarf. The dilemma is a response to her breaking the nose and slap-boxing two men questioning her marriage to a silver-spooned Russian rich boy named Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). The scarf (and its color) can easily be overlooked during the unfolding chaos that plays out as a real-time home invasion lasting for roughly 25 minutes and sees Ivan run away from his bride. But the accessory has a deeper meaning and is part of a painterly motif that runs through the visual veins of the film – one that received the top prize at Cannes and has been nominated with seven BAFTA nominations and will likely figure into the Oscar race as well.
Baker’s influence for the look came from a catalog of ‘70s Italian, Spanish, and Japanese cinema as well as the work of cinematographer Owen Roizman, who shot The French Connection (1971) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). The material helped guide a “controlled aesthetic” with “a deliberate color scheme and unobtrusive but stylish lighting” for Anora. Adding to the allure was the decision to shoot 35mm film (Kodak 5219 and 5213 negative) with Lomo Round Front anamorphic lenses originating from Soviet-era Russia of the 1970s. The lens choice embellishes a wide angle period flair, but they’re also a clever nod to the Russian storyline that sees Ivan’s oligarch parents (played by Darya Ekamasova and Aleksey Serebryakov) rush to bring their marriage to an end.
Rooted in the visual style is a rich palette of white, black, and gray hues with punctuating reds found in the interiors, set decoration, artwork, wardrobe, and the car of Igor (an aforementioned henchman played by Yura Borisov) that receives screen time during the climatic farewell of Baker’s unanticipated love story. Cinematographer Drew Daniels, who shot Baker’s Red Rocket with actor Simon Rex as a struggling porn star, says the palette reminded him ofSaul Leiter’s 1950 photograph Footsteps, which depicts an overhead shot of someone walking in the cold, slushy streets of New York holding a red umbrella. “Red is in a lot of ways symbolic. It’s very much in Red Rocket, and it’s in Anora in a strong way,” Daniels says.
Mikey Madison in “Anora.” Courtesy NEON.Yura Borisov as Igor, Vache Tovmasyan as Garnick. Courtesy NEON.
The imagery of Ani tied up received plenty of attention in preproduction. “It’s a shot that we did a specific camera test on in Los Angeles,” notes Daniels. “We gagged her and set up a similar frame where we tested lenses, tested lighting, tested everything. It’s one of those images you just can’t get out of your head that became an iconic image for the film. We really put a lot of work into it, and I just love the way it’s cut into this sequence.”
The home invasion surrounding the striking moment was shot over ten days inside a Brooklyn mansion where production designer Stephen Phelps combined existing furnishings with acquired pieces to portray the exuberant wealth of the family. “I wanted there to be a cold kind of feeling to the interiors – big empty spaces and a lot of space between people,” Phelps says via the production notes. “It feels more like a showplace than a home. There’s a lot of glass and neutral colors. That kind of expensive, austere style worked with the outside of the building, which is almost Brutalist in its architecture.”
For Daniels, it was the “hardest sequence in the whole movie to shoot,” partly because he had to create a continuous look over multiple shooting days that had “every weather imaginable.” Juggling the shooting order, controlling daylight (with help from gaffer Chris Hill and key grip Harrison Rusk), and evolving the camera movement with the pulsing narrative were just some of the hurdles. He approached covering the ambitious sequence like chapters in a book, starting with a tightly composed frame and then turning to looser handheld movements as the intensity ratchets – the unstable frame subliminally provoking the scene’s uneasiness. The dramatic peak: Ani screaming “Rape!” after her wedding ring is ripped from her finger. It then hard cuts to a close-up of Ani’s centered frame with the scarf covering her mouth, her blistering defiance silenced… for now.
Mikey Madison in “Anora.” Courtesy NEON
The New York portion of the production took place over 37 days. Practical locations like the Rosewood Theater and HQ KONY in Manhattan stood in for Ani’s workplace, a gentleman’s club dubbed Headquarters. It’s here where Ani first meets the Russian-speaking Ivan, who invites her back to his home. Other key spots were Williams Candy in Brooklyn, the Tatiana Grill in Brighton Beach, and Coney Island – all three were used for locations while Ani and the men searched for Ivan.
“Anora.” Courtesy NEON.
Three days were also spent in Las Vegas as a jumping-off point for the whirlwind romance between Ani and Ivan. The bright lights of Sin City illuminated a contrast in color and saturation from the second half of the film. Here, Daniels allowed the camera to move freely as a way to connect viewers to Ani’s overjoyed emotions in places like Freemont Street and The Palms Hotel and Casino.
Mikey Madison as Ani and Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan in “ANORA.” Courtesy of NEON copyMikey Madison as Ani and Mark Eydelshteyn as Ivan in “ANORA.” Courtesy of NEON copy
In framing the narrative, the cinematographer aimed to deliberate with his compositions and camera movements from an objective point of view. But Daniels admits the film turns more subjective as the story changes. “I tend to be much more subjective and get excited by subjective shots and getting into the characters’ head and seeing the world through their eyes. But Sean’s films are more objective in many ways, so I love the challenge,” he says. “His approach can often be very traditional, very classic steady compositions with minimal coverage. He really loves a wide shot, simple, elegant invisible camera moves, or no moves at all. And that’s what I also love, too. But it was always a balance because the movie is called Anora. I wanted it to lend to the subjectivity, but it had to be very slight and subtle. We ended up with a mostly objective film with a little hint of her subjective reality.”
Mikey Madison as Ani. Courtesy of NEON copy
When Ivan’s finally found back where it all started – Ani’s former club – she begins to realize he’s not going to stand up for their marriage – he’s too much of a scared boy under the thumb of his parents. In a last moment of hope while signing their annulment papers, Ani gives Ivan a look, only for him to ignore her as he puts on a pair of sunglasses. The tension boils over when Igor asks Ivan to apologize to Ani, a request the mother refuses for him to do. She then insults Ani, telling her the red scarf she’s wearing is actually hers. It’s then Ani fires back at the mother with a remark so menacing the husband cannot help but laugh. Guess they can no longer keep Ani quiet.
Anora is in select theaters now and is available on demand.
Featured image: Mikey Madison as Ani. Courtesy of NEON
The British Academy has officially blessed Edward Berger‘s delightfully claustrophobic Vatican thriller Conclave with 12 BAFTA film nominations, which leads all other films.
We had a chance to chat with Berger and one of the film’s stars, Isabella Rossellini, who plays Sister Agnes in the adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel. Drawing on her own experience of going to a school run by nuns, Rossellini told us, “I remember they were very direct but also very respectful, and so when I played Sister Agnes, I thought of them and was very glad to have had that experience, so I didn’t hesitate. I knew them well.” Rossellini is nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Berger, meanwhile, revealed to us the key to Ralph Fiennes Cardinal Lawrence, who is tasked with running the conclave that will select the new pope. “Ralph’s character is basically based in doubt. He says at some point, “I have difficulty with prayer.” Just imagine. That’s like me saying I have difficulty believing in the power of the camera I’m using, or a writer saying, “I don’t believe my words anymore.”
Conclave’s 12 nominations include Best Film, Best Director for Berger, outstanding British Film, Best Leading Actor for Ralph Fiennes, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Peter Straughan. In 2023, Berger’s World War I drama All Quiet on the Western Front landed a record-tying 14 BAFTA nominations for a non-English language film, which he shares with Ang Lee’s masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Writer/director Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez was close behind with 11 nominations with his tale about four remarkable women in Mexico pursuing their own dreams no matter the costs. Meanwhile, writer/director Brady Corbet’s American epic The Brutalist, which tracks visionary architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) fleeing post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild his legacy in the U.S., carved out 9 nominations.
Sean Baker’s cracked, courageous take on Cinderella, Anora, received seven BAFTA nominations, which included Mikey Madison landing one for leading actress, playing Anora, a sex worker who elopes with a billionaire Russian whose family is very unmoved by the seriousness of their union or Anora belonging in the family.
This year’s BAFTA Film Awards are blessed with a wider variety of genres than ever before, including horror (The Substance, Heretic), historical epics (Corbet’s The Brutalist and Steve McQueen’s Blitz), musicals or music-centric (Wicked, A Complete Unknown), and big-budget spectacles, be they sci-fi (Dune: Part Two) or sand-and-sword epics (Gladiator II).
Fiennes is joined in the hunt for the leading actor category with Hugh Grant (Heretic), Adrien Brody (The Brutalist), Colman Domingo (Sing Sing), Timothée Chalamet (A Complete Unknown), and Sebastian Stan (TheApprentice).
Emilia Pérez‘s three main actresses, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Zoe Saldaña, are all nominees for their performance. In the best leading actress BAFTA race, Gascon is joined by Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) — her first-ever main BAFTA award nomination, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths), Mikey Madison (Anora), Demi Moore (The Substance), and Saoirse Ronan (The Outrun).
For the full list of the nominations, check out BAFTA’s site.
Writer/director Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu continues his streak of delivering singular, stunning cinematic spectacles that have ranged in scale from the terrifyingly intimate (The Witch) to psychotically intimate (TheLighthouse) to the rousingly epic (The Northman). With Nosferatu, Eggers has found perhaps the perfect material for his sensibilities—rich in detail, steeped in myth, and drenched in pathos, with each sequence building upon the last in this delicious gothic nightmare. Aiding Eggers’ efforts was production designer Craig Lathrop, who helped build a cold and lonely world in which characters can get as lost in their physical reality as they can in their own heads.
In the case of Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård), we’re dealing with a creature out of place and out of time, a wondrous grotesque haunting his decaying castle. It’s where young, opportunistic Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) goes to strike a deal with the Count. As the classic tale goes, Hutter’s world turns upside down, as does his beloved wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), who becomes an object of the Count’s obsession, less so his love.
It’s another chilling achievement from Eggers, with whom Lathrop has worked on all his films. Once again, they created a world that feels as real as the slick grime on the castle walls but as otherworldly as the Count’s terrifying hold on the people he encounters. Recently, Lathrop spoke with The Credits about recreating Wisborg, Germany, in the 1880s and building a world of shadows for the auteur.
What did you find most fulfilling about creating this world? What was new for you?
The streets. They’re probably the largest single sets I’ve ever done. They were so tall and so many blocks of streets. I wanted all the buildings to have their own personality and individuality, so it’s a lot of detail. I was able to grade the streets so people were going uphill when they should be, whenever I wanted them to feel like they had extra effort to get someplace. But then I also got to do a castle. The monastery was not a small set by any means, but for one of the smaller sets, that was exciting to do, primarily because I talked people into doing that style of the monastery when I wasn’t sure how I was going to get it painted.
The real solution was a company in Italy. They have a product with a terrible name called Tattoo Wall. They print on a very thin, flexible membrane. When you put it on uneven surfaces and around corners, it stretches a little and has a more forgiving nature. It’s thin enough that the texture of the plaster underneath it actually transfers through, so the wall looks real. Then, there’s a proprietary flat matte covering that goes over it as well.
On top of that, we did a little bit of painting. It pushed a lot of the effort onto graphics. We used a lot of actual frescoes from which we sourced imaging, but the ceiling was bespoke. We had to design and push things around to make that work. I thought it turned out great, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it. I originally thought maybe we could afford to paint it. Even then, if we could afford it and if we had the time – which we didn’t have either – it’s a big task. I have great scenic artists, but it’s asking them to recreate a 15th-century masterpiece.
Did you want to use any building techniques from that time period? Was it a combination of the past and present?
It’s always a combination, depending on what you need to do. On this one, we didn’t have as much where I’m trying to figure out how to recreate the old styles in the way that we build sets, because most of the stuff is straightforward in terms of set building. You’re still asking carpenters to build things that aren’t plumb or square, and that’s always challenging. For instance, the tiles in the castle are basically castle tiles. That’s what they call them. They’re thick terracotta tiles. We put that on a sand bed, so it was uneven. We painted a lot of them as well. We stenciled them so they would look like medieval tiles. They were actually not dissimilar from the tiles they would’ve used in the day. The grips weren’t so happy with me because there was nothing they could roll on, but it would’ve looked terrible if I had done it differently.
Where did your imagination immediately go when you first read the script and thought about the castle?
The main thing is that it should be not just unkempt – it should be falling apart. It should be deteriorating, much like Orlock. You have a few items, more inside the tower room, which was the Hutter bedroom. I was thinking of the castle as being 100 or 200 years old. I looked at the 16th century as if it had just sat there for 150 years. It couldn’t be what we were seeing, these beautifully whitewashed, spit-shined old castles. They are gorgeous, but they look like they’re ready for tourists to visit.
Orlock is not a creature with many possessions, but what items in the house did you think said a lot about him?
Everything was examined. Some of the stuff we made – certainly his ring, the little chest he opens up to get the coins out to give to Hutter when they’re signing the contract, the contract itself and all of the paperwork, the sarcophagus, the carriage. We built the carriage, too. We call it the ghost carriage. There were some little details that you’ll never see.
Any other details you hope audiences catch on repeat viewings?
On the carriage, there are bas-reliefs of a giant battle, which is basically a Vlad the Impaler battle. You can’t see it all, but there it is. There were a lot of areas where I knew it would be unlikely that we would catch it, but I knew the actors would see it.
Robert Eggers initially wanted to make Nosferatu more expressionistic, but over time, he grounded it. For the both of you, how else did the vision evolve?
By the time we started, we decided to make this world as real as possible, as authentic to the period as possible. I mean, you can never be completely authentic. The idea for him, which I agree with, is that the more supernatural events going on, the harder they hit if the world is real. I started off with the period that we were talking about as being the base level. I had to do a lot of research to try to find all the little bits and bobs and learn more about the architecture, the props of the period, and the lighting, which is where you start. On top of that, you start doing all the regular design ideas where you’re thinking about the character and the emotional beats of the film and how you would design a contemporary film – only now are you doing it as if contemporary is 1838. You don’t know anything that happens after it.
The family pulls into a gas station for a quick fill-up and some snacks, a very common vignette for millions of people across the world. The difference here is that the parents, Cameron Diaz’s Emily and Jamie Foxx’s Matt, are not your usual PTA-attending, Girl Scout Cookie-drive leading ma and pa, and when they dispatch two bad guys in full view of their shocked children, the jig is up. At one point deeper into the trailer, the kids say, “I can’t believe they were spies…they were in a pickleball league.” Fair point.
As dad Matt tries to explain to the kids, fifteen years ago, he and mom were nonofficial covert operatives for the CIA. Yet, instead of toiling within the massive agency forever, the two went off the grid to start an actual family of their own. This is, we’re guessing, not quite protocol. When their enemies find out the pair aren’t just alive but sitting ducks living the suburban life, the entire family is in danger.
Back in Action marks Diaz’s return to the big screen after an 11-year hiatus from acting and reminds us, with a few well-timed barbs, how much a weary nation needs her comedic chops. The new trailer packs plenty of thrills—flame throwers, car chases, parachute escapes, plane crashes, the great Glenn Close—and is a good reminder of what made Diaz such a star in the first place.
Diaz and Foxx are joined by Kyle Chandler, the aforementioned Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Jamie Demetriou, McKenna Roberts, and Rylan Jackson. Seth Gordon directs from a script he co-wrote with Brendan O’Brien, one of the co-writers of Gordon’s Neighbors.
Diaz hasn’t been exactly resting in her time away from movies since she announced her retirement in 2014. She’s appeared in episodes of The Drew Barrymore Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race and launched her successful wine brand Avaline. She’ll also be heard voicing Princess Fiona again in the upcoming Shrek 5.
It’ll be especially great to see Diaz and Foxx paired together, considering this marks Foxx’s return after a medical emergency last year.
Check out the trailer for Back in Action, which arrives on January 17.
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Director Leigh Whannell is a veteran of the horror genre, and that includes taking on iconic characters from Universal’s deep bench of monsters. His 2020 thriller The Invisible Mancame amid a global pandemic when the terror of fighting an enemy you couldn’t see was all too real. Now, on January 17, Universal will release his latest twist on a classic monster with Wolf Man.
The film features Christopher Abbott as Blake, a San Francisco-based husband and father who comes into a strange inheritance—his father has left him his remote childhood home deep in the Oregon woods. That would be all well and good, but the handoff isn’t without mystery. Dad has vanished and has been presumed dead—not the most auspicious way to inherit a home—yet Blake convinces his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), to take a break from their busy city life and make it a family trip, bringing along their daughter Ginger (Matlida Firth) to their new little house in the woods. What could possibly go wrong?
Things go immediately wrong. An unseen animal attacks them before they’ve even stepped foot on the property, and they’re forced to barricade themselves within the house while the creature prowls just outside. Worse still, Blake sustained an injury while defending the family in the initial attack, and you can probably guess what starts to happen from here. Poor Blake begins to feel strange and then looks like a stranger. Soon enough, Charlotte will have to decide what to do with a husband who is no longer himself, retaining only the faintest connection to the sweet guy she married as he transforms into a wolf, man.
While werewolves have long been a big part of folklore and myths dating back centuries, in the cinematic world, they burst onto the screen in director George Waggner’s iconic 1941 movie The Wolf Man for Universal. Here, Whannell was determined to create Blake’s transformation from husband into a creature using as many practical effects as possible. Forget relying on computer wizardry to turn the sweet-faced Abbott into a monster, this was a hand-crafted effort.
“I wanted to actually see it,” Whannell said in this behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Wolf Man. “I needed it to exist as if it was happening right in front of you. For the look of Wolf Man, I knew I wanted to do something very different,” Whannell said.
To that end, Whannell deployed special make-up effects designer Arjen Tuiten to create something novel and terrifying.
(from left) Charlotte (Julia Garner), Blake (Christopher Abbott) and Ginger (Matilda Firth) in Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell. Photo Credit: Nicola Dove/Universal Pictures
Tuiten did some thinking on what they could do a little bit differently in Wolf Man to “dare to step away from what had been done in the past.” Some serious legends have worked on previous iterations of the character, including 7-time Oscar winner Rick Baker, who won one of those Academy Awards for his work on director Joe Johnston’s 2010 film The Wolf Man, turning Benecio del Toro into the hybrid beast. Whannell and Tuiten knew trying to one-up Baker was a mug’s game, so their strategy was to take it in a completely different direction.
Christopher Abbott as Blake in Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell. Photo Credit: Nicola Dove/Universal Pictures
Inspired by films like John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, they the job of understanding what would happen if “two anatomies tried to mix that don’t quite go together” seriously, as Tuiten put it.
The results of the work that Tuiten and his team did were so convincing that co-star Julia Garner said she was speechless when Christopher Abbott got out of his trailer. Tuiten explains that even the crew, who have seen it all, came up to him to tell him Abbott’s transformation had them properly spooked.
“Creepy and absolutely crazy,” Matilda Firth, the youngest performer on set, confirmed. It’s labor-intensive work to turn a performer into a monster, with craftspeople working on every last detail, from single hair to nails to every inch of deformed skin. “It’s not the Wolf Man you’ve seen before,” Whannell promises.
Check out the Wolf Man monster’s workshop here:
Check out the results of their tireless efforts here:
Wolf Man howls into theaters on January 17.
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Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist has found its way into all the awards conversation, with everything from Corbert’s masterful direction to the performances by Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce, Dávid Jancsó’s editing, Lol Crawley’s cinematography, Judy Becker’s production design, and Daniel Blumberg’s score getting notice. The film is centered on visionary architect László Toth (Brody), who flees post-war Europe after experiencing the ravages and suffering of the Holocaust. He finds his way to the US, where he spends decades in the struggles to build his artistic legacy, lauded and stymied by industrialist millionaire Harrison Lee Van Buren (Pearce).
The film’s composer, Daniel Blumberg, is discovering what it’s like to rocket to the top of Hollywood’s A list. His work is being mentioned alongside seasoned Oscar winners Kris Bowers, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross as a potential winner at the Academy Awards with only his second feature film score. The London visual artist and indie musician/composer replaced Corbet’s longtime collaborator Scott Walker, who passed away before production and to whom the film is dedicated.
Blumberg and Corbet have been friends for years, and this film is a close collaboration between them. Blumberg and other musicians often played live on set during the filming. The Credits spoke to Blumberg about that, as well as working with 88-year-old renowned classical pianist John Tilbury, leveraging multiple musical eras and instrumentation to capture the scope of Corbet’s epic film.
You lived in the same space as director Brady Corbet in pre-production and through much of the filming. In what practical ways did that immediacy impact the finished music?
We’ve been very close ever since we met. I’ve stayed on his sofa many times, and we’re used to sharing spaces. When I finish a record, he’s one of the first people I show it to, and during his writing of the script, we talked about it a lot. I lived with him during pre-production and filming. Brady wanted to shoot to music on set, so I had a little room with my keyboard and a single bed. The demo for the opening of the film was done a few nights before being shot. It was great; instead of having to send it to him or have a more distant interaction, I could do it in real-time. Being on set, having the actors and the environments, and being near Brady gave me a sense of the temperature of a scene or what he wanted it to be. When doing a score, I don’t want it to feel like this alien thing stuck on top of something else, I want it to be part of a whole picture, and have it all make sense as one piece of art.
Daniel Blumberg. Courtesy of A24
Mission accomplished.
Thanks. I have a good example of where living on set made a difference. Since I don’t read music, I always have to work it all out practically, so I try chords to see how they can build together. I always record on my Dictaphone, and there were lots of stops and starts. Brady heard me through the wall, struggling to find my way. He came in and said, “That’s what it should sound like: an artist working it out.”
Music in The Brutalist is doing so much through the 3 1/2 hours. It’s a great example of the balance of minimalism and maximalism. The use of piano feels at times traditional or nostalgic, but you also use it in the context of found sound or industrial noise.
Using a prepared piano was an idea that came from reading the script, with all its architecture and construction. I love that when you use screws and interfere with the strings of the piano and the hammers hit those strings; it’s like a percussive instrument. The piano also has huge acoustic potential. Where you put microphones can change the sound, and I used a lot of microphones on the low end.
And you have this colossal talent in pianist John Tilbury.
Yes, and he brought so much. Nostalgia is a great word for it. He’s 88, and I recorded him in his garden. He’s got a Steinway in his garden in Kent. His studio is this pretty shed out there. I had a mic on him so you could hear his stool shuffling. The idea was you could hear the presence of the artist throughout. I also had two microphones in the room, so you could even hear the birds walking or the rain falling on the roof. John was playing so beautifully, it just all ending up going in the recording.
There’s also this balance of emotional instrumentation and a sort of alienating dissonance, sometimes from the same instrument in the same cue.
Right. Brady and I talked a lot about that. For example, for the opening, he wanted it to be quite optimistic, and brass instruments can be really warm but also very harsh. We worked on finding that balance.
You hear both comfort and isolation.
Axel Dörner, who is just an exceptional and unique trumpet player, could offer both of those qualities. There were times he was playing his trumpet to sound almost like it was a drill, and we ended up putting a lot of that on the building site. Part of the responsibility of scoring is zooming in on László Tóth, Adrien’s character. That’s why I wanted to use sounds of John Tilbury’s playing because we wanted to follow László’s journey as an artist and find that intimacy.
The theme is used in very different ways throughout the score.
We loved the main theme and were trying to figure out where it could go from there. It was so simple, and it felt like it could be flexible. At one point, it develops into Erzsébet’s theme. It becomes something very romantic. Then, the whole second part of the film gets more and more intense, and that’s when you hear it at its most dramatic. Towards the end, there’s one cue where it’s stretched, where I used a live recording, and it’s based on the theme, but it’s me on the piano, a double bass, and two trumpets. So it’s definitely referred to a lot if you’re listening.
The jazz club cue is a fascinating mix of 40s jazz, then bebop, and then this crazy devolution.
When I first got the schedule, I saw the first day of shooting was that scene, and it was so scary for me. I wanted to evoke the 40s, and I got this group of independent musicians together, all of who are brilliant improvisationalists. That’s their musical field. Pierre Borel, the saxophonist, Joel Grip on the double bass, Antonin Gerbal on the drums, and Simon Sieger on piano, who is from the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They all know how to play jazz and can evoke that era. Then, in that scene, once the characters do drugs, Brady wanted to do a Vista Vision effect that stretches the light out, and I knew they could play like that, stretching things out musically. I didn’t want to do it as an after-effect; I wanted it to be part of the experience of the scene. That way, Adrian and Isaac, as László and Gordon, could move to the music. That it was done the first day of shooting and doing it live was crazy, but it brought together all the departments in a wonderful way.
All that live acoustic music is in such contrast to the cue with synths in the 80s scene at the end of the film.
I knew Brady, just like he did Vista Vision, wanted to switch visually to an early digital process for the 80s, and it just made sense to use synths. Vince Clarke came to mind because he defined the era of the 80s with Depeche Mode and Erasure. We’re label buddies. We both release music on Mute Records. Daniel Miller, who runs Mute, introduced us. I went to New York to work with him and brought all these themes that I heard throughout the film, and they’re all on that track. You hear them all again. Then I finished it with Brady in London. We literally got two bottles of wine, and I got my Moog out. No microphones. I just plugged in a synthesizer.
People are really responding to the score. You’ve been in the conversation for an Oscar nomination.
It’s so thrilling that people are enjoying the film. We just made what we thought was right. I love Brady. We’ve been through great times and bad times, and he just made the film he needed to make. I’m just so happy for him. Sometimes art is made, and no one or almost no one sees it, but to know Brady’s work and the work of so many talented people is finding an audience that loves it, it’s just amazing.
The Brutalist is in theaters nationwide.
Featured image: Adrien Brody in “The Brutalist.” Courtesy of A24
For a film set in Las Vegas, it’s surprising that director Gia Coppola chose grit over glitz for The Last Showgirl.
“I wanted to make a movie in an intimate way. I adore [John] Cassavetes and how he made movies,” says Coppola, who cites Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie as “one movie I looked at for sure.”
Coppola worked from a script by Kate Gersten, who adapted her own play. “By staying intimate, I get to keep my creative autonomy. When I came across Kate’s play, it lends itself structurally to doing a movie in that way. There are not a lot of locations and a small cast, so you can be insulated,” says Coppola, granddaughter of filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and the late Eleanor Coppola. She began collaborating with producer and Coppola cousin Robert Schwartzman in 2021, opting for a modest budget and an 18-day shoot to keep creative control.
The Last Showgirl pulls back the curtain on a fading Las Vegas act called Le Razzle Dazzle, a Follies-like extravaganza featuring scantily clad chorus girls in giant headdresses. Le Razzle Dazzle is based on Jubilee, the last show of its kind in Vegas, which closed in 2016 after 35 years.
Pamela Anderson in “The Last Showgirl.” Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
The film is anchored by Pamela Anderson’s tour de force as Shelley, who’s been with Le Razzle Dazzle for three decades and proudly sees herself as carrying the tradition of Les Folies Bergere. Shelley may be a bit delusional, but her dedication, professionalism, and pure heart are endearing and even noble. Anderson is being lauded for a role that mirrors her own career and reveals a depth few knew she had. But with the show about to close, Shelley is dismissed by the entertainment industry since she’s no longer useful and treated as a joke since she’s no longer young. Her college-age daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) arrives to question her mother’s choices, and Shelley makes no apologies despite being painfully aware of the price she’s paid by focusing more on her career than on motherhood.
Billie Lourd in “The Last Showgirl.” Courtesy Roadside Attractions.
“I wanted to tell a mother-daughter story for a long time. I was raised by a single mom, so it’s very meaningful, and then I became a mother myself, so I understand that aspect of motherhood,” Coppola says. “But it’s also a story of chosen family and the workplace family, and a lot of people can relate to that.”
Coppola said she’s been drawn to “the landscape of Las Vegas” for a long time. “I always wanted to tell a story there. I was a photography major in college; I would drive cross country and always stop in Las Vegas to take pictures and wonder what the day-to-day life was like there. So, for all of that to be in one script, I couldn’t ask for anything better. I was like, ‘Please, Kate, let me be the one to do this.’”
Pamela Anderson in “The Last Showgirl.” Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
Coppola was inspired by nonfiction views of Vegas, from documentaries to the work of the late journalist and art critic Dave Hickey, who lived in Las Vegas from 1992 to 2010.
“I didn’t look to movies for inspiration on this project; I was looking to photography. I knew this world because of that,” she says.
For the textured, intimate look of the film, Coppola reunited with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who shot Coppola’s 2013 directorial feature film debut, Palo Alto, and her most recent, Mainstream, in 2020. Arkapaw shot The Last Showgirl on 16mm film to capture a raw, grainy quality, the director says, with Arkapaw using a handheld camera and custom anamorphic lenses.
Pamela Anderson in “The Last Showgirl.” Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
“We came up together in some ways; she’s gone off and done Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, so we were fortunate to get her back for our small film,” says Coppola. “She used a handheld and stripped off the lighting budget so we could shoot on film. I trust her wholeheartedly. She can do whatever she wants, and I can focus on the actors and story. Most of the crew were women; it was who I gravitate toward and what felt right for this project.”
That includes Coppola’s mother, costume designer Jacqueline Getty, who coordinated all the contemporary outfits and selected various showgirl outfits. But Le Razzle Dazzle‘s actual costumes and headdresses are the original Bob Mackie pieces from Jubilee “that have not left the building in thirty years,” says Coppola. “We were fortunate that we got to use these pieces; otherwise, this would not have worked. A lot of choreography went into making it look like the dancers had been doing this for thirty years. We had a lot of Jubilee dancers come in and show us how to handle the headdresses. The dancers usually walk for just three minutes, but we were doing a movie so [the actors] must hold for longer. Their necks were cranking; they are giant and heavy pieces.”
Pamela Anderson in “The Last Showgirl.” Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
The focus on character and the intimacy of the setting serves The Last Showgirl’s themes about how the entertainment business discards women as they age.
“I see it all around me. It’s a systemic issue,” Coppola says. “I see it with working mothers; I feel it in my own life as a working mother. It’s a juggling act and a sacrifice, and it’s hard to do both. I see it economically. I see it culturally, even as simple as going to the market and a machine taking over someone’s job. As things get older, whether it’s architecture to humans, it’s only more interesting. Why has our culture so easily discarded all that in exchange for consumerism or something overly sexualized? I hope my journey with this project is about how we can find a way to embolden the past and pay tribute as we forge our modern paths.”
Pamela Anderson in “The Last Showgirl.” Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
The Last Showgirl is in theaters now.
Featured image: Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl. Photo by Zoey Grossman
The devastating wildfires burning across Los Angeles reached the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday night, nearing iconic landmarks like the Hollywood Bowl. At the same time, fires have already impacted communities and thousands of people, including in the Palisades, Altadena, the San Fernando Valley, and Malibu. As of Wednesday night, the L.A. Fire Department reported that the Palisades Fire was zero percent contained and is the most destructive fire in L.A. history, destroying more than 1,000 structures and leading to at least five deaths. There are six active wildfires in the Los Angeles area—the Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, Woodley, Lidia, and the latest Sunset Fire, which broke out Wednesday night in the Hills and is close to other iconic spots like the Hollywood sign and Walk of Fame. Famous residents, like Mark Hamill, who fled Malibu with his family, have shared on social media how terrifying the fires have been and called it “the most horrific fire since ’93.”
Various organizations have begun to mobilize aid efforts for the city, with fires leading to a reported 130,000 residents under evacuation orders. These efforts include aid intended for first responders, members of the entertainment community impacted by the fires, and more. Below is a list of some of the organizations that are collecting donations and offering aid:
The Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation issued a funding alert calling for donations on Tuesday to help keep LAFD firefighters safe by covering the costs of tools and safety equipment for LAFD firefighters, with the raised funds for safety equipment and crucial tools like hydration backpacks and emergency fire shelters. As noted in The Hollywood Reporter, The Annenberg and Wasserman foundations immediately provided $1 million to the fund, which helps equip LAFD members with supplies like emergency fire shelters and hydration backpacks.
The Screen Actors Guild: SAG canceled their live, in-person announcement of the SAG Awards nominations on Wednesday due to the fires. They are now accepting donations to the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s natural disaster relief fund, which goes directly to the SAG-AFTRA community.
The Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF)’s Defy:Disaster is now accepting donations from members of the entertainment community and the public to support first responders, firefighters, and neighborhoods affected by the fires. EIF has been around since 1942 and has raised and directed millions of dollars in the past that have gone to first responders across the state, including after the deadly Camp and Woolsey fires in 2018. “Our hearts go out to all who have lost their homes and those who are uncertain what the days ahead will hold,” EIF president and CEO Nicole Sexton said in a statement. “There is an urgent need to provide shelter, food and water, medical care for individuals and families, as well as care for pets that have been displaced.” The EIF administered Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson’s People’s Fund of Maui, which was launched in 2023 in response to the devastating fires in Kula and Lahaina. The effort led to $60 million in residents’ bank accounts in six months.
Wildlife philanthropies and funds are being set up, including across GoFundMe, which has created a central hub for all of its verified accounts that are raising funds for wildfire relief efforts. GlobalGiving works with local organizations to assist with disasters. In the short term, GlobalGiving is providing food and emergency medical supplies to impacted residents and their pets, as well as aid to front-line workers. They’ve also launched the California Wildlife Relief Fund to support the longer-term needs that will arise once the fires are contained.
Chef José Andrés’ food relief nonprofit World Central Kitchen is in L.A., providing first responders and evacuees with water and sandwiches and is accepting donations to help them provide fresh meals to communities in need in California.
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 8: Firefighters battle flames from the Palisades Fire on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)
The devastating fires raging across Los Angeles have caught the world’s attention with their ferocity and unpredictability.
The toll of the damage will take months to assess, but even last night, fresh fires were breaking out; the latest, named the Sunset Fire, broke out in Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills at around 5:30 p.m. The fires have already hit the Palisades, Altadena, the San Fernando Valley, and Malibu. The Sunset Fires now raging in Runyon Canon in the Hollywood Hills are close to iconic locations, such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Hollywood Boulevard, which puts it near everything from the TCL Chinese Theater to the Magic Castile and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The Sunset Fire is also close to the Hollywood Bowl, one of the city’s most enduring landmarks.
While city officials and firefighters race to try to control the spread of the fires, small measures are being taken further afield that impact the city’s marquee business—Hollywood itself. The deadline for the Oscar nomination has been extended two days, to January 19, due to the fires. The nearly 10,000 Academy members voting window opened on January 8 and was originally set to close on January 12. That voting deadline has been pushed to January 14, with the nominations to follow five days later. The ceremony is set to take place on March 2, with Conan O’Brien hosting.
The Academy’s CEO, Bill Kramer, sent an email to members on Wednesday afternoon outlining the date changes: “We want to offer our deepest condolences to those who have been impacted by the devastating fires across Southern California,” the email read, in part. “So many of our members and industry colleagues live and work in the Los Angeles area, and we are thinking of you.”
The voting extension follows premiers and events that have been postponed or canceled. Those include the planned Tuesday premieres for AmazonMGM’s Unstoppable and Universal’s Wolf Man, while Paramount canceled their Better Man premiere and Max canceled their The Pitt premiere for Wednesday.
More cancellations and postponements have come, including the 30th annual Critics Choice Awards ceremony, which has been moved from January 12 to the 26th.
Featured image: NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 25: Overview of Oscar statues on display at “Meet the Oscars” at the Time Warner Center on February 25, 2010 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)
Writer/director James Mangold currently has a major movie in theaters, his Timothée Chalamet-led Bob Dylan film A Complete Unknown. Mangold’s evocative look at Dylan’s early years in New York paints a vivid picture of one of the most iconic artists in American history as he finds his footing, voice, and singularly chameleonic approach to stardom. Mangold’s got another huge project on the horizon that, while not completely unknown, certainly classifies as intriguingly mysterious and is far, far away from Greenwich Village in the early 60s—a Star Wars film that will take viewers to a time never before captured in any film or TV series in franchise history.
Mangold is working on the script with co-writer Beau Willimon, and they’ve set themselves a massive challenge—they’re going to eschew the Skywalker Saga entirely. Mangold and Willimon plan to take viewers back millennia before Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala—and their kids, Luke and Leia—and explore the galaxy’s deep past. This offers them a lot of narrative flexibility and a Death Star’s worth of risks.
Speaking with MovieWeb, Mangold revealed a bit about how he’s approaching the challenge. While he and Willimon aren’t ignoring the Star Wars canon, the film is currently titled Dawn of the Jedi, after all, they are attempting to tell a completely new story, which means taking the risk of relying far less on the well-known mythos and narratives of the franchise. Here’s how Mangold put it to MovieWeb:
“The Star Wars movie would be taking place 25,000 years before any known Star Wars movies takes place. It’s an area and a playground that I’ve always [wanted to explore] and that I was inspired by as a teenager. I’m not that interested in being handcuffed by so much lore at this point that it’s almost immovable, and you can’t please anybody.”
This is, of course, a bold move given the history of Star Wars mega-fans finding fault when a story veers from the canon or what they feel are the unbreakable tenets of the franchise as it was first conceived by George Lucas. Rian Johnson and his cast faced backlash from vocal fans for his narrative choices—and casting choices, sadly—in The Last Jedi, and that was despite continuing the Skywalker Saga and including iconic characters like Luke and Yoda.
“Success is never guaranteed, but the reality is that the way to get most people to agree is to move them; to somehow find the humanity in a situation,” Mangold said. “Whether it’s a mega-franchise or a smaller dramatic movie, whatever they are, usually the movies you remember are the ones that move you.”
At the Star Wars Celebration last year, Mangold said his approach to the film was thinking of it as a “biblical epic,” name-checking Cecil B. Demille’s TheTen Commandments as inspiration. There’s no doubt that as he and Willimon have been working on the script, they’ve made changes and found new areas of intrigue, so there’s no telling if the movie they end up writing takes the same approach. Yet what certainly hasn’t changed is Mangold’s desire to bring something new to the galaxy. As he told MovieWeb, twhat he and Willimon are after, most of all, is emotional impact.
“The ones that leave you cold, even if they’re clever, even if they’re spectacular, even if they’re dazzling, somehow just become replaced by the next dazzling object a year later. It’s the feelings, it’s ‘the feels,’ right? That truly defines how we feel about these movies and whether we care to visit them again.”
Featured image: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – DECEMBER 10: James Mangold attends the Los Angeles Premiere of Searchlight Pictures “A Complete Unknown” at Dolby Theatre on December 10, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)
Production designer Inbal Weinberg perfected her meticulous eye over years of collaborations with filmmakers who “are serious about every detail,” including Derek Cianfrance, Luca Guadagnino, and Martin McDonagh. However, meticulousness took on a whole new level when Weinberg worked alongside renowned Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar on his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door, which opened in Los Angeles and New York on December 20 and expands to select cities on January 10.
Based on the novel “What Are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez, the film boasts many of Almodóvar’s signature touches, such as saturated color, melodramatic flourishes, and a plot that centers on the inner lives of women.
Oscar winners Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as writers and old friends who reconnect in New York. Swinton’s Martha is a former war correspondent now battling untreatable cancer. She explains to Moore’s Ingrid, a novelist who fears death, that she’s decided to end her life before cancer does. Martha asks Ingrid to simply be in the next room of a rented house in upstate New York so Martha won’t have to die alone.
It was important for Almodóvar, working in a culture and language outside his own, to have someone familiar with New York City exterior and interior locations. “I relished in my responsibility of being the New York representative. I’ve lived there for 20 years; it’s my favorite place in the world,” says Weinberg over Zoom from North Carolina, where she’s on location shooting Cianfrance’s latest,Roofman.
The Room Next Door has two crucial living spaces: Martha’s Manhattan apartment and the upstate house she retreats to with Ingrid. “I contacted friends and colleagues who are writers and artists, and I photographed the interiors of the apartments of female reporters and war correspondents to have interesting photos for Pedro to look at when I traveled to Spain,” Weinberg says. “He is always super curious about how people live. He was open to exploring, so we went back to some of these homes with his team.”
Weinberg researched many houses in upstate New York, Long Island, and New England, where the script had originally set the house that Martha rents. She presented these ideas and options to Almodóvar, who, not surprisingly, gravitated quickly to a contemporary, modernist home. “We went into that world of modernism. I sent him references of contemporary or iconic mid-century homes. We traveled to three or four modernist houses built by architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer, and Gerald Luss, who was one that he really enjoyed,” says Weinberg.
Almodóvar decided to recreate a modernist house in Spain. “I would have gladly built a house in Spain, but it was a huge endeavor for a fairly small film. It was too risky,” says Weinberg. As the team scouted contemporary houses in Spain, the production designer had to consider and point out to the Spanish crew that the landscaping and vegetation had to pass for upstate New York.
“Their world is Mediterranean. I grew up in Israel, and the vegetation in Spain is similar. But the Northeast [of the US] is wildly different; it looks nothing like the vegetation in Spain,” she says. “We found an area with pines. They were not the same pines as in New York, but it could pass. Then we had to do the exteriors. It isn’t easy to express to a production company why they had to spend money to [replace] flowers and plants that were too Mediterranean and too manicured. No one thinks of landscaping with production design.”
The modernist house they settled on for shooting was called Casa Szoke, nestled at the base of mountains in Madrid near the historic town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Both Weinberg and Almodóvar were drawn to the house’s “unusual angles and sloping ceiling” and “something interesting about breakage in the views, the extreme angles,” says Weinberg. “There was a lot going on … so much tension. So the architecture mirrored the drama.”
Since contemporary architecture can sometimes seem cold, she noted, the design team repainted the house’s white walls with color, replaced blonde wood with darker, warmer wood, and clad the existing built-in furniture in bright colors. Much of these touches are movie-set temporary, so everything is put back to its original state when the homeowners return, Weinberg says.
Then there are the tiny, specific details that likely escape all but the most eagle-eyed of moviegoers but that give Almodóvar movies their aesthetic.
“Pedro is very tactile. He always has to feel a fabric, whether it’s for wardrobe or for furnishings. He has the eye of a decorator,” Weinberg says. “He really loves the richness of fabrics and color, so it is an enjoyable part of filmmaking for him being embedded in the design process.”
Since The Room Next Door is about two writers, it comes as no surprise that Almodóvar would be “extremely specific” about every book in both houses, even if they would never be seen on screen.
“He cares so much about the bookshelves. Martha was a war correspondent, so I took pictures of the books in the homes of war correspondents. We purchased those titles and shipped them in crates to Spain,” says Weinberg. “Pedro reads so much; he is super on top of current literature. He trusted me, I think, because I am also a voracious reader. It was a huge effort. Even the coffee table books were carefully picked. He needs to see about fifty titles before choosing.”
Even for often monochromatic New York City, Almodóvar almost always opted for the most colorful option for the sets, furniture, and decor, says Weinberg.
“I come from a social realism background but I reassured myself that this was not a documentary, it was an Almodóvar film and people are expecting certain things,” she says. “They are not going to scrutinize; he’s managed to build his own universe at this point. So we are inviting people into his version of the story in New York.”
The Room Next Door opens in select cities on January 10.
Directors Alex García López and Laura Mora have undertaken the historic feat of adapting Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, into a sixteen-part Netflix series, the first half of which was released on December 11. Unlike the book, which moves back and forth in time across seven generations of the Buendía family, the show is chronological (and it was shot chronologically, too), but beyond the change in timing, the series is loyal to Márquez’s magical realism, which is woven as a beautiful matter of course into the show’s naturalistic aesthetic.
The story opens at the wedding of José Arcadio Buendía (Marco González) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales), cousins who are warned by Úrsula’s mother that their union will produce an offspring with a pig’s tail. Úrsula avoids sex with her new husband, and during a cockfight, José Arcadio’s adversary, Prudencio Aguilar, calls him impotent. He kills Prudencio, who appears as a bloodied ghost around the couple’s home until they leave their village behind. Leading a small group, José Arcadio founds Macondo, a utopian town unconnected from the world but for a group of Gypsies who pass by every few years.
The Gypsies’ leader, Melquiades (Moreno Borja), introduces the townspeople to wonders like magnets and ice, and his influence pushes José Arcadio, already an idealist and a dreamer, into a life of scholarly withdrawal that eventually becomes madness. Before then, José Arcadio and Úrsula have three children. The oldest, also José Arcadio, disappears with one of the Gypsy women. Aureliano, who eventually becomes a colonel fighting against the Conservative government in Colombia’s civil war, has accurate premonitions of many things, but not his own death by firing squad. The youngest, Amaranta, finds herself in a love triangle with her stepsister, Rebeca, a once-silent orphan delivered to the Buendía household along with a sack of her deceased parents’ bones. The sack remains in the house intact, trundling from room to room on its own.
The series was shot by cinematographers Paulo Perez (episodes 1, 2, 3, 7, and 8) and María Sarasvati Herrera (episodes 4, 5, and 6). Whether indoors or out, the show feels close to the natural world, the nights lit by candles and the days by bright equatorial sunshine. The voice of Aureliano Babilonia, a sixth-generation Buendía and the one to decipher Melquiades’ writings about his family, narrates the story as he learns it, an element which Perez reflects in the cinematography’s flexibility. “Babilonia doesn’t know what’s going to happen, so it has to be a very free camera,” Perez said. His episodes make use of a handheld camera, and we feel part of the characters’ action as they embark on what begins, at least, as an adventure. “We wanted to feel the freedom of the people of the [Caribbean],” Perez said. “In this moment, it was the diaspora, the dream of a new time, of a new civilization. We wanted to feel this type of energy in the camera.”
After many years in Macondo, the rest of the world eventually makes contact with the first two generations of the Buendías. “When my block arrives, religion and the government enter Macondo, and many things change,” said Herrera. “Paulo’s block was about discovery, about freedom. Ours was much more controlled, even the Steadicam, the sequence shots.” Herrera worked with director Laura Mora to establish a framed, pictorial language that highlights what the characters experience as their individual lives and town undergo radical change.
Both before and after Macondo’s discovery by the outside world, significant action takes place at night. “We talked a lot about how moonlight should be — which color, which texture? Every night is different,” Herrera said. Perez lit much of his block with fire from candles and torches, while Herrera, who shot more nighttime interiors, relied on LEDs. Both cinematographers aimed for a realistic sense of darkness. “I like the darkness,” Perez pointed out. “You see what’s important in the frame, and that feels natural.” And at five square kilometers, the entirety of Macondo couldn’t be lit, anyway.
All the different versions of Macondo were built on a farm about four hours from Bogota. The Buendías’ house, which grows through the episodes to accommodate the expanding family, was protected under a hangar-size tent. The tent couldn’t support lights, so the cinematographers worked with cherrypickers and balloons to hang lighting. For the exteriors, they worked with available light, shooting early and late to avoid the harshness of the equatorial sun directly overhead. Both inside and out, there was an emphasis on the genuine. “The magic realism happened very naturally,” Perez said, and the cinematographers carried that ethos over to how One Hundred Years of Solitude was shot.
Perez and Herrera also worked to keep the cinematography consistent between episodes. “There were these gaps between blocks where many things changed in the town over the years,” Herrera said. “So we had to find a way to respond to what was happening in the story, but at the same time, merge between blocks so it didn’t look like a completely different show.” She and Perez watched each other’s work to create a consistent language, matching colors and contrast between the episodic leaps. A focus on Marquez’s original work also brings consistency. “We worked a lot with the book,” Perez said, with the pair looking at how they could recreate this monumental work of literature in a way that would help people understand it. As we watch a full frame of characters disappear to leave behind a single Buendía, or get close to another family member, isolated in a close-up, anamorphic lenses and a diaptor bring to life the Buendías’ fate first set out by Marquez’s words. As for the cinematographers’ relationship to the original work? “We know it by memory,” Herrera said.
The second season of HBO and Sony Pictures TV’s gripping drama The Last of Us will sink its teeth into our eyeballs this April, Sony confirmed Monday night at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
A riveting new one-minute teaser for the series was released on Monday, revealing glimpses of what’s to come and confirming that April showers will also bring April zombies (one assumes that in the world of The Last of Us, flowers still bloom in May.) The teaser gives us a look at Kaitlyn Dever playing Abby, a well-known character from the video game series who is new to the show. “It doesn’t matter if you have a code like me,” she says, walking down a shadowy hallway with a gun in her hand. “There are some things everyone agrees are just wrong.”
We also see a glimpse of Jeffrey Wright’s Isaac, another character from the video game series who is making his first appearance in the show. The teaser gives us glimpses of season one stars Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and ends with hundreds, if not thousands, of the infected slamming themselves into a snowy refuge’s protect walls.
We’ve learned in the full trailer for season 2 that the action picks up five years after the first season’s events. Season 2’s logline confirms that “Joel and Ellie are drawn into conflict with each other and a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind.” In the full-length trailer, we were also introduced to Catherine O’Hara’s new character, seemingly playing a therapist who we find working with Joel. We all know Joel needs therapy—he’s done things he never thought he’d have to to survive the outbreak. Once Ellie was made his charge, he only had to dig deeper and go darker, including capping season one with a vengeful bloodbath at a hospital where Ellie was moments away from being dissected for the zombie serum she seemed to possess in her blood.
The trailer also revealed Ellie in her new home in the mountains, safely secured there by Joel after he went on his rampage to free her. Although everyone appears to be in a better place than the one we left them, the trailer also gave us a glimpse of one of the infected—at one of the later, more terrifying stages of mutation—crawling toward an unsuspected potential victim.
In The Last of Us, safety is an illusion, and most codes, even codes of morality, eventually get broken.
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