The first reactions for director Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine have arrived, and critics and everyone else with a press screening and social media account are weighing in. The overall sentiment appears to be LFG. The long-awaited pairing of Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with the Mouth and Hugh Jackman’s mutant berserker and iconic X-Man has been high on the MCU fan wishlist, and it seems like they’ve delivered. And while sure, the two faced off 15 years ago in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, as far as fans are concerned, that portion of Wolverine’s timeline isn’t as important as the one we’ll be faced with in Deadpool & Wolverine, which marks the true first, proper mash-up of the “new” Deadpool, lovingly created by Reynolds and the Deadpool creative team (including writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese), and Jackman’s legendary bruiser. Now, the Deadpool brain trust are back, with Levy directing the franchise for the first time and Zeb Wells joining Wernick and Reese on scripting duties, and the result is a new two-hander that posits a world in which Deadpool recruits a very different Wolverine from the hero who died tragically but heroically in James Mangold’s 2017 banger Logan to try and help him save the people he loves.
Monday night marked the first chance critics got a look at the movie, and with their reactions pouring in online and full reviews coming later today, tet’s have a glance at what the folks are saying so far. Deadpool & Wolverine slashes into theaters on July 26.
LFG! Absolutely loved #DeadpoolAndWolverine – yes the cameos and surprises are epic, and the humor, action, blood-soaked fights and needle drops are tremendous, too… but it’s the respect and love for the characters that win you over.
Deadpool and Wolverine is a game changer for the MCU as it is the biggest, boldest, and most badass MCU film since Infinity War and Endgame. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are the ultimate duo we’ve all been waiting for! #DeadpoolAndWolverine@MarvelStudiospic.twitter.com/p5wrNqD4rk
Deadpool and Wolverine is a game changer for the MCU as it is the biggest, boldest, and most badass MCU film since Infinity War and Endgame. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are the ultimate duo we’ve all been waiting for! #DeadpoolAndWolverine@MarvelStudiospic.twitter.com/p5wrNqD4rk
DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE feels miraculous. A high energy ode to superhero cinema past that goes beyond nostalgia into kid in a candy store madness, the Ryan Reynolds/Hugh Jackman is everything you wanted and more, despite some grating toilet humor.
DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE is the best Marvel film in many years. It’s funny, violent as hell, and has a really big heart. The scene where Hugh Jackman looks to the camera and says, “LOGAN was never good to begin with” elicited gasps from my audience. Cannot recommend this enough. pic.twitter.com/GGzD766I8x
LETS F**KING GO!!!!#DeadpoolAndWolverine WAS A BLAST!! The chemistry between Hugh and Ryan is DYNAMITE! Exquisite action sequences, undeniable comedy and cameos that enhanced the story!
The movie is absolutely perfect, a masterfully crafted, action-packed spectacle that exceeds all expectations. It’s a return to form for Marvel, filled with surprises. The casting and performances are exceptional, delivering a truly mind-blowing experience! pic.twitter.com/IUSKvqaHyN
— Deadpool And Wolverine (@CineMundoUS) July 23, 2024
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First, we got this brief but potent teaser that offered a fresh, deeply unnerving glimpse at the return of Joquin Phoenix’s sad sack comedian turned killer clown Arthur Fleck crying/laughing (or laughing/crying) in the rain. Next, we got the first full trailer, which revealed Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn and the first cinematic portrayal of the most demented romance in comics history since Margot Robbie and Jared Leto played the demonic pair in David Ayer’s 2016 Suicide Squad. Now comes the second trailer, revealing more of director Todd Phillips’s sequel, which has taken the bold step of leaping from the overwhelming successful formula of the original Joker, which was a realist, decidedly dark, R-rated psychological portrait of a man succumbing to his own madness by offering up something entirely new; a jukebox musical.
Joker: Folie à Deux unites Oscar winners Phoenix and Gaga in one of the year’s most must-see releases. In the official trailer, we’re back with Arthur as the police are escorting him through a Gotham he helped set on fire in the first film. We’re quickly taken to Arkham Asylum, one of the most iconic locations in all of Gotham, where Gaga’s Harley Quinn describes her reaction to first seeing Joker. “For once in my life, I didn’t feel so alone anymore,” she says. Uh oh.
What follows are firey images of a romance brewing in madness (which brings us back to the film’s title, a medical reference for two or more people suffering the same mental malady). The film’s promise of a jukebox musical begins, and the music starts. Arthur finds himself softly singing a tune, and soon, we see the Joker and Harley dancing in the moonlight and the Joker defending himself in clown paint in his trial.
The trailer gets dark, diabolical, and decidedly action-packed as it reaches its conclusion, the most fulsome look yet at the movie everybody will be talking about this fall.
Check out the trailer below. Joker: Folie à Deux arrives on October 4:
For more on Joker: Folie à Deux, check out these stories:
Director Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters blew into theaters this past weekend and dazzled audiences, spinning up a big box office along with rave critical reviews and audience scores. Filming entirely on location in Oklahoma, Twisters is centered on storm chasers Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), Javi (Anthony Ramos), and more who track a series of increasingly dangerous tornadoes across the state. The production was a boon for local businesses—Chung, a native Arkansasan whose last film, the Oscar-nominated Minari, compassionately depicted farm life in his home state, knew it was crucial to ground Twisters in the state where the original was set and where devastating storms like the ones depicted in the film are a real-life occurrence.
(from left) Daisy Edgar-Jones and director Lee Isaac Chung on the set of Twisters.
To that end, Twisters didn’t just film in Oklahoma and craft a winning sequel to the beloved 1996 original; it also partnered with the American Red Cross to increase awareness of the need for blood donors after a sharp decrease in donations since late Spring. That included this past weekend’s premiere, where guests were able to round up their box office concessions and purchases at Regal theaters, which went to support American Red Cross Disaster Relief.
While Chung and his talented team were able to whip up massive storefronts and terrifying tornadoes without actually bending a blade of grass, the threat of tornadoes and the damage they do in communities across states like Oklahoma are very real. The Red Cross’s crucial mission is to help prevent and alleviate suffering from a range of destructive disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and more. Unfortunately, these disasters are becoming more common as the effects of global warming intensify them. In recent months, swarms of tornadoes and extreme flooding have taken lives and destroyed entire communities. We have also endured one of the longest-lasting and strongest heat waves in years, which has included large portions of the Midwest. We’ve also recently endured the second most active tornado season on record.
As for the kinds of superstorms that Twisters depict, the Red Cross responded to 20 tornado-related disasters across 13 states in just the first five months of 2024. Meteorologists don’t see this letting up; they expect more powerful and destructive storms to continue in the months to come as the effects of the climate crisis continue. This continues a trend of more frequent and intense climate disasters in recent years, so keeping the Red Cross’s work in the public spotlight is key.
“The Red Cross is grateful to have partners like Universal Pictures who are not only lending this support to encourage blood donations during this critical time of year but have also generously donated to help support disaster relief,” said Jennifer Pipa, vice president of Disaster Programs for the Red Cross, in a statement. “Because of the climate crisis, the Red Cross is now launching twice as many relief operations for major disasters than we did a decade ago. And disasters are straining not only our relief operations but also our ability to collect lifesaving blood donations. So far this year, we have collected 20,000 fewer blood donations due to severe weather.”
This is precisely why it’s so important for a beloved film franchise to lend its reach and star power toward helping the American Red Cross make up that gap. If you want to help keep lifesaving blood products stocked on hospital shelves and book a time to give blood or platelets, you can do that via RedCrossBlood.org, calling 1-800-RED CROSS, or using the Red Cross Blood Donor App. Anyone who gives blood or platelets through July 31 will get a Fandango Movie Ticket by email.
For editor Terilyn A. Shropshire, Twisters was a homecoming. Director Lee Isaac Chung shot the satisfying popcorn picture on 35mm, and Shropshire, who cut her teeth on 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm, was thrilled to see flash frames again on Twisters. Most of the excitement came in color timing and seeing the end results, but still, the texture alone of the footage shot by cinematographer Dan Mindel, was a thrill to cut.
Twisters is a long-awaited sequel that prioritizes character-driven spectacle over familiar nostalgia. In it, storm chasers in Oklahoma, namely Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), and Javi (Anthony Ramos), track a series of increasingly dangerous tornadoes. The characters are grounded heroes seeking to not only track tornadoes but also prevent disasters in small towns.
The well-rounded characters were well-protected by Shropshire, known for Eve’s Bayou, Love & Basketball, and The Woman King. Recently, she told The Credits how she made the action feel both personal and visceral.
The opening shots are so Spielbergian. You all say a lot with a few shots of silence of Kate in the field. What did you want those opening moments to establish?
It was important for Isaac to shoot this film in Oklahoma. As someone who grew up in Arkansas and grew up in that type of world of the farm and broad expanse, I think that’s how he wanted to bring you into the film. I had never really been to Oklahoma before, and I swear I’ll never look at the sky the same way again. So, it was very important to him to have that scope from the very beginning so that you could see the world in which Kate grew up and that she truly loved this place, this space. And so, with Dan Mindel, the decision to shoot it on film, the decision to shoot it anamorphic was a product of wanting to be viscerally immersive as far as the country, the sky and the landscape of the environment.
Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate in Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung.
Tell me if I misread this, but Isaac filmed drone photography of tornadoes, and they found their way into the movie. Is that true?
Oh yeah. Basically, we had first, second, and C units, but there were also stormchasers who were literally out in the field. Some of the photography they were doing would come back to us, and there had been an agreement, I guess, to license certain things. What was great is we had what we had shot, but we also had material that they had shot. We had resources, whether it was for just references for visual effects or whether it was something that ultimately we thought that we could use within the film.
Where’d you use that storm chasers’ footage in the film?
Actually, when you see Kate and when the first team goes out. The character Addy (Kiernan Shipka) has her head out the window and is like, whoa, taking photographs. There’s literally a passing shot there. It wasn’t a drone shot, but it was a shot that was from one of the storm chasers. Then there’s the drone stuff that was shot. Basically, when you saw a lot of the windmill photography, that was drone photography, and some of it was helicopter photography, so we had both going. We had all kinds of things flying in the air.
You were on set, cutting the film. When Isaac was shooting, what key questions did you have for each other?
Basically, maybe the second unit had to have shot something first, and then the first unit came in after them, and Isaac might want to come in and see something the second unit shot or vice versa. Sometimes, it was something where the main unit shot first, and the second unit fell behind in getting additional photography. And so, to the degree that I could, I kept everybody aware of continuity and consistency. Isaac would just come sit on the couch, maybe look at dailies. If it was for a scene he was about to shoot, sometimes it was just looking at what preceded it. If I had what preceded it or what followed it, he’d sometimes come in and take a look.
(from left) Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler (Glen Powell) in Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung.
One shot people are talking about already is Tyler Owens walking outside in the rain, stoic with his cowboy hat. It’s a great movie star moment, but you also feel the weight on the character’s shoulders. How’d you want to pace that shot just right?
What’s great about it is that I got to be one of the first audiences to see the film in its raw form. When I watch dailies for the first time, unless I’m under some crazy time constraint, I try not to pick up a pen and literally sit there—I’m in a theater watching it. So, you see dailies come in like that, and you’re like, “Damn, it’s good.” It just said so much about who this guy was. One of my favorite moments is literally when he looks to the window, obviously after he and Kate have had a bit of an argument. It’s just so beautiful because Tyler, he’s got this bravura, but you get to see him evolve and see his vulnerabilities and see his fear.
Glen Powell as Tyler in Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung.
You let the moment breathe.
That’s one of those moments when, for me as an audience member, I really started to fall in love with this character. It is when you see the other side of someone, something that they may not initially show you. You feel like you have a little private moment with them with, of course, 200 other people in the theater. This is what’s great about being in a movie theater and sharing these intimate moments privately but collectively. So, for that moment, let him walk all the way and not cut… I mean, that’s the thing as an editor: sometimes it’s not about when you’re cutting, but when you’re not cutting and letting a moment like that happen.
There is so much character growth and chaos in the final act. With all the moving pieces, what did you hope to accomplish with the third act in Twisters?
I want you not to think. I want you to live in the moment. Sometimes, when we’re watching a film, we try to be ahead of the filmmaker. You’re trying to jump ahead; oh, this will be so predictable. When you get to that point in the film, I want you to be with Kate. I want you to be with all of them. By the time you get to that final moment, I want you to have imprinted on every single person that is either in that truck or in that theater and really be feeling all the feels, the anxiousness, the anxiety, the hope, the fear, all of it, the excitement, that sense of this woman overcoming the one fear that she had. She’s facing her fear in a heroic way. At the end of it, I want people to have this big sigh and sense that they went through something immersive, visceral, and exciting. That’s why we go to the movies, right? We just want to be taken to someplace and not know how we got there.
(from left) Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler (Glen Powell) in Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung.
For those who haven’t watched House of the Dragon since its debut in 2022, the show is based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire and Blood. The story chronicles the early days of the Targaryen dynasty in the time of Aegon the Conqueror, a forefather to the much-beloved Game of Thrones heroine Daenerys. The new series has developed its own enthusiastic fandom, one that was thrilled to see the premiere of new weekly episodes as of June 16th of this year.
Season two is bigger, bloodier, and more bombastic as it explores the Dance of the Dragons, a civil war that promises to leave a wide swath of both dead dragons and humans in its wake. Following the departure of the show’s co-creator, Miguel Sapochnik, the reins are now held by sole showrunner Ryan Condal. Condal is known for his encyclopedic knowledge and love of Martin’s world of epic battles, Shakespearean and incestuous families, and deadly dragons.
The Credits spoke to Condal about the powerful women of House of the Dragon in front of and behind the camera. Be advised that spoilers are ahead for those who haven’t watched through the fifth episode of this season.
House of the Dragon interrogates misogyny and patriarchy through several main characters, especially regarding power given and denied. You made the decision early on to have powerful women represented in front of and behind the camera. Can you talk a bit about how that is specifically at play as we move closer to the end of Season 2?
Strong women existing in a heavily patriarchal, monarchical society is, I think, one of the key things that sets House of the Dragon apart from Game of Thrones. Not that there weren’t strong women in Game of Thrones, but it was not about a war that was kicked off to deny a woman absolute power in the form of being the sovereign, the person that actually wears the crown and sits on the throne, and this war is very much about that. You could debate who deserves to sit on the throne more and who would become a better sovereign, but none of that matters in a medieval society. It was always about primogeniture and who was meant to sit on the throne by the gods or God. In this case, there’s a split decision in the sense that half the realm believes it should have been who Viserys decreed, and half believes that it should be as it always was, which was that a male sits on the throne. So one of the many things we wanted to do in this series is interrogate what it is like to live as powerful women, specifically through the eyes of two of the very most powerful women in this story, against this overwhelming tradition and societal structure of keeping men in power and keeping women in their place. That’s not to say that women don’t have power. You can have a certain amount of power, but you can’t have THE power.
Photograph by Liam Daniel/HBO
You certainly expand on that in season two.
Season two continues to explore the fallout of what happens in season one because now we’re witnessing a war being fought over this disagreement. It’s gonna be very bloody, and it’s a nuclear conflict because we have dragons on either side of it, which is also unique when you hold it up to the original series. On one side, you have a woman who is the Commander in Chief in Rhaenyra [Emma D’Arcy], who is prosecuting her side of the war. As you’ve seen, it has been difficult for her to get her point across and be a good democratic sovereign the way she learned to be from Viserys [Paddy Considine], studying as his cupbearer. Viserys always listened to the counselors around him. You see how much Rhaenyra struggles with that, and part of her arc this season as it continues to unfold is how she starts to really run against that particular grain as that methodology continues to fail for her.
Harry Collett, Emma D’Aarcy. Photograph by Theo Whiteman/HBO
We are seeing her trying to be a good queen.
Yes. That’s definitely a theme that Viserys struggled with, and we’ll see Rhaenyra and the Greens, Aegon, and his side struggle with it. Can you be a great king or queen, a great sovereign and leader, and be a good person at the same time? One of the things this hyper-patriarchal and feudal society teaches us is this world wants and demands of these people that they become ruthless autocrats because that’s the only really effective way to win, stay alive, and stay in power. That’s a theme of the series that goes for both the men and the women, but we always really liked the idea of dramatizing it through the eyes of a woman and seeing what those societal pressures would do to a woman like Rhaenyra, who is intelligent, independent, powerful, but also very flawed.
Clare Kilner directed Episodes 2 and 5 this season. What were some of her creative choices that point to her aesthetic? Do you have a specific example from Episode 5?
Clare’s fantastic. Women directed half of our episodes this season, which we’re very proud of. Four of the eight were directed by female hands. With five total, Clare has directed more episodes of this show than anybody else and will be directing more. For example, this really fantastic shot wasn’t expressly in the script in that great scene at the council table after we realize that Aegon is fighting for his life and indisposed after the battle of Rook’s Rest. There’s a need to put a regent in place to at least carry forward power and rule in Aegon’s absence and possibly to take over if he either passes away or cannot return to the throne or council table. Alcient [Olivia Cooke]’s saying, “It should be me, and let Aemond be the sword and dragon rider in the field.” The idea of that scene was always to watch as Alicent presents herself, and then one by one, the men around the table betray her, ending with Larys and then finally with Criston Cole. They all push their chips over to the side with Aemond. Larys says this devastating thing, “After we started this war over not wanting Rhaenyra to sit on the throne, what would it say now if we raised up a woman of our own?” It’s a very cold and calculating line, and then Criston Cole turns against Alicent himself. It’s Cole’s betrayal of her that is ultimately what the scene is really about. It’s about this sudden and massive transfer of power, as Aemond goes from being the rider of the biggest dragon in the world and possibly having mortally injured his brother to getting to sit in the biggest, most important seat in the realm. Our idea going into the scene and the way we toned it was always that once it’s decided that it’s Aemond, he simply gets up from his seat at the foot of the table, walks around, grabs the king’s ball, sits in the king’s chair and puts the ball in place, then immediately begins making edicts. We wanted to watch this sudden and almost banal transfer of power happen through Aemond.
And how did Clare shift that scene?
She did this really interesting thing when she was shooting it. From the moment Cole says it must be Aemond, Alicent goes into this fugue state. She sits back in her chair and realizes, “All of this stuff that I’ve done to put my son on the throne, all the moral compromises I’ve made, the way I gave up my body and everything along the years to see my line rise, this is where it’s led me, to be thrown out the back door as soon as I’m inconvenient to anybody.” Clare just did this great shot that’s just a very slow push in on Alicent, so from the moment that Aemond sits down and starts making his proclamations as essentially the new king, you cut away from all of that. There’s this whole conversation that happens around Alicent and you hear it happening around her, but the camera is just pushing it on her. And this wonderful performance that Olivia Cooke gives, which is very subtle, where you just see her breaking inside, that was the thing that Clare brought. She shot that shot. She brought it to the scene. We loved it, and decided to cut the the rest of the scene around it. So it goes from being a scene about this massive transfer of power to Aemond, and yes, that happens, but then the second half of the scene is this great character moment for Alicent, as you see her just completely stripped of every other remaining reason that she would have had to continue as she was, trying to hold this very fractured Green side of the kingdom together.
Olivia Cooke. Courtesy. HBO.
New episodes of House of the Dragon air Sundays on MAX.
Featured image: Olivia Cook, Emma D’Aarcy in “House of the Dragon.” Courtesy HBO
Is Wade Wilson getting emo on us? In the final trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds’ notoriously childish superhero is feeling the emotions as he looks on at his new partner-in-crime, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), and tearfully tells him, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this team-up.”Wade goes on to tell Wolverine that, regardless of what he thinks about himself in his world, in the world Wade comes from, he’s not just a highly regarded member of the X-Men; he’s the X-man. However, this isn’t quite what this particular Wolverine believes because this isn’t the same version of the character we saw die a hero in James Mangold’s stellar 2017 film Logan. In fact, his reply is as curt as possible: “Yeah, well…he ain’t sh*t in mine.”
We’re now a week away from the long-awaited team-up of Reynolds’ Merc with the Mouth and Hugh Jackman’s mutant berserker. (Re-pairing, if you want to be technical about it—they appeared in character in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but it was a very different version of Reynolds’ Wade Wilson). The final trailer includes some new footage and a major cameo from Dafne Keen’s Laura, the little girl who was molded in Wolverine’s image in Logan and who he died protecting. This reveals that Shawn Levy’s upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine will, in fact, deal directly with Logan and keep its nearly flawless narrative intact.
This final look also includes a few glimpses at Wade’s own iterations—Lady Deadpool and Cowboy Deadpool specifically. All this time-hopping is connected to the Time Variance Authority, introduced in Loki, and embodied here by Matthew MacFayden’s Mr. Paradox.
It’s a stellar final glimpse at what will likely be one of summer’s big hits. The excitement is real and the emotions, even for notorious joker Wade Wilson, are running high.
Check out the final trailer below. Deadpool & Wolverine arrives on July 26
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“You wish to serve the great houses and shape the flow of power; you first must exert power over yourself.”
This is how the second teaser for HBO’s Dune: Prophecy begins, with Emily Watson’s Valya Harkonnen explaining the power dynamics of a time 10,000 years before the events depicted in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films before the Great Houses were influenced by the Bene Gesserit, a powerful, secretive sisterhood that factored so hugely in Frank Herbert’s original novel and Villeneuve’s films. Prophecy will track how the Bene Gesserit came to be and eventually went on to become the whispering power that shaped so much of the intergalactic world order.
Dune: Prophecy is centered on two Harkonnen sisters, Valya and Tula (Olivia Williams), who go on to found the Bene Gesserit, two later members of which were played so vividly by Rebecca Ferguson and Charlotte Rampling in Villeneuve’s films. Prophecy is based on the work of Frank Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert, and his co-author, Kevin J. Anderson, in their book “Sisterhood of Dune.”Prophecy will give the many fans of Villeneuve’s films a look at how the imploding intergalactic community setting itself up for a massive war during the time of Paul Atreides (played in the films, of course, by Timothée Chalamet) was shaped eons ago by the likes of women like Valya and Tula.
Watson and Williams are joined by Travis Fimmel, Jodhi May, Mark Strong, Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, Josh Heuston, Chloe Lea, Jade Anouka, Faoileann Cunningham, Edward Davis, Aoife Hinds, Chris Mason, Shalom Brune-Franklin, Jihae, Tabu, Charithra Chandran, Jessica Barden, Emma Canning, and Yerin Ha.
The series hails from showrunner and executive producer Alison Schapker. Anna Foerster directed multiple episodes, including the all-important pilot, and serves as executive producer. Jordan Goldberg, Mark Tobey, John Cameron, Matthew King, Scott Z. Burns, and Dune and Dune: Part Two screenwriter Jon Spaihts executive produce alongside Brian Herbert. Byron Merritt and Kim Herbert are executive producers for the Frank Herbert estate.
Check out the teaser below. Dune: Prophecy arrives on HBO in November—a specific date will be announced later.
For more on the world of Dune, check out these stories:
“It was really about getting out of your own way and allowing these men’s story to come to the forefront,” cinematographer Pat Scola tells The Credits about the emotionally stirring film Sing Sing from director Greg Kwedar, which shines a delicate light on the arts rehabilitation program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. “Greg was the one who led from the front on this, and we were there to help tell the story without putting our hands all over it,” Scola says. “That was a huge goal of ours, and it was a really humbling reminder to just step out of the way. I felt privileged to be there to craft a way to capture it.”
The film stars Colman Domingo (recently nominated for an Oscar for Rustin) as someone who’s been wrongfully convicted of a crime but finds his path in a theater group, acting alongside other men who have been incarcerated. The screenplay is a true story written by Kwedar and Clint Bentley, who capture a powerful story of grace and goodwill that is equally exquisite in its imagery. Scola curated a near documentary feel to the frame that follows the characters, including formerly incarcerated actors, breathing life into their journeys with a cinematic touch of a bygone era.
Part of crafting the visual language was the decision to shoot on Super 16 paired with Super Speed lenses to capture the intimacy of the characters and the spaces. “The experience that we’re trying to tell about these men is about finding their humanity and being humans inside this oppressive place. That was something that we wanted to lift up,” mentions Scola, who also photographed AQuiet Place: Day One the same year.
Below, read how the cinematographer found his purpose in the harrowing, heartfelt story.
This is your first time collaborating with director Greg Kwedar. How did you get involved in the project?
Greg and Clint were doing another film that didn’t end up getting made and they were shopping around looking at some cinematographers. I had just been in that Variety article they do every year, ten cinematographers to watch. I was in it for Pig. I think they saw that, and that’s how they ended up getting in touch with my agent.
How did knowing that this was based on a true story influence your decision making?
When Greg first pitched it to me, I wanted to be part of this story, and I don’t think I had read the script yet. What I got first was this wealth of Zoom videos that Greg was having with the cast, like Clarence [Maclin], Dino [Johnson], and everyone else. And many of those things that came out of those Zooms are generally in the film.
Coleman Domingo stars in “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24.
Any examples?
Someone was talking about wearing a watch on the inside. It’s a status symbol which is a big thing in prison in terms of how you assert your level of status. But they said they wore this watch but the time was always wrong. That hit me pretty hard because of how tragic that is. But it kind of launched something for how the film wanted to look a little bit.
How so?
There are very few tells in the film when the movie takes place and over how long. And time functions differently for the men inside in a big way. You’re fighting time. The sort of look that was birthed out of that was that I wanted it to feel a bit out of time. I wanted it to feel like you don’t really know when you’re looking. I was trying to make it feel old. That’s what led us to shoot on Super 16.
Coleman Domingo stars in “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24.
What was the shooting schedule for Sing Sing?
It was 19 days in total, but it was only 14 with Colman [Domingo].
How did the short schedule influence the photography?
We were clever about what we could do without Colman. Sometimes, we shot one side of conversations and then returned for them, which is not super ideal, but we did it. And we did it in ways that wouldn’t affect the other actors’ performances. We had to be intentional with everything and understand how it would be edited. There was very little of us just hosing it down with coverage.
What’s so joyous about Sing Sing is how the emotional gravity of the film pulsates through characters and onto the screen. Did you want to express the relationship between Colman and Clarence Maclin any differently visually?
I don’t think the camera treats them differently than any of the other characters. And that’s certainly a conscious choice in the film, in many ways, just in the way it was made. The way we made it as a community and told these guys stories, we wanted everybody to be as front and center and lifted up as possible. And I feel like we never made a lensing choice or something that treated Colman or Clarence differently from anybody else because this is all their stories.
How did you approach lighting the locations?
The film is split between three major locations. There’s Downstate Correctional Facility, Mid-Orange Correctional Facility, and then the Beacon High School in upstate New York. When we scouted Downstate, one of the things that I found the most oppressive about it was the number of windows. Outside those windows are these walls that keep them in, and you’re getting all this daylight, and you can’t touch it. That led us down this path of this being not your normal prison movie. We’re not trying to exploit it and have it gritty, lit with fluorescents, or a dark aesthetic. Instead, it’s warm.
That’s certainly very different from how most films set in prisons are shot.
We allowed the spaces to light themselves and speak to the visual story we were looking to tell. We were very smart and subtractive with our lighting techniques. We didn’t have big lights, and we didn’t have lots of money, so we took away light. But again, it worked for the story we were trying to tell.
How did you want to frame the theater sequences compared to the prison scenes? The former has an airier feeling.
I think a couple of things are happening there that create that feeling. You can see from the first shot where you enter the theater, the very first moment you get to see it in this long roaming one shot that basically shows all of the characters, explores the backstage and ends up on Colman at the end. You get to see everybody in this element. And there’s definitely an aspect that they’re free in this place. And I think we wanted to reflect that a little bit with the camera without being too overt about it, and so, the camera does have this traveling and floating around feeling to it.
Coleman Domingo stars in “Sing Sing.” Courtesy A24.
Is there something you want audiences to take away from the film?
I would like them to see the wealth of humans that exist behind the walls of these places. The men we worked with are particularly wonderful human beings. I just hope that their perception is open to being changed about what happens to the people who can exist inside prison.
Sing Sing is in select theaters now.
Featured image: Divine G (Colman Domingo), imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn’t commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men, including wary newcomer (Clarence Maclin). Courtesy A24.
James Gunn is close to wrapping principal photography on Superman, the first marquee feature from his new DC Studios, which he heads alongside co-chief Peter Safran.
The writer/director shared the update that Superman is “getting close” on Threads, where he spread some love to Cleveland for being such a great host city for six weeks of the production.
“#Cleveland – today we are leaving you after six amazing weeks of shooting,” Gunn wrote. “From the moment we first came here on a scout a tad less than a year ago and Terminal Tower was lit up with the colors of Superman, I knew you were a special place. I would walk down your streets and someone would stop me and tell me how grateful they were we were shooting in their city — not once, not twice but dozens of times.”
Gunn wasn’t done enthusing about how special a place Cleveland was to film Superman and how the city was central to the creation of the most iconic superhero of them all—with apologies to Batman.
“The wonderful background actors on the film were always so fun and funny and they clapped after takes, something that reminded us Hollywood cynics why we make movies in the first place. The pride you feel in being where Jerry [Siegel] and Joe [Shuster] first created Superman was invigorating. You exemplify his spirit. But just as much it’s the pride you have in your community, your hometown, your radio stations and restaurants and gathering places that touched me.”
Gunn responded to a fan’s question about whether the film was finished shooting by writing they still had a couple of weeks left, but the end was in sight. “It’s a long shoot…but we’re getting close!”
David Corenswet stars as Clark Kent/Superman, the first reboot of the character since Henry Cavill’s turn in the cape during Zack Snyder’s run of films for DC/Warner Bros. Rachel Brosnahan stars as Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult joins them as Lex Luthor, Wendell Pierce as Perry White, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer, and Gunn’s longtime collaborator Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner.
Superman is set to fly into theaters on July 11, 2025
We’re now less than ten days away from Deadpool & Wolverine, the long-awaited pairing of Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with the Mouth and Hugh Jackman’s mutant berserker. (Re-pairing, if you want to be technical about it—they appeared in character in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but it was a very different version of Reynolds’ Wade Wilson). Marvel has understandably been flooding the zone with promotional material (Deadpool & Wolverine is their only 2024 release), feeding the excitement that folks already have in spades to see Reynolds and Jackman yuk it up and fight it out on screen together. Marvel will also bring the film to San Diego’s Comic-Con next week, no doubt with new material to share. Ahead of the Con, we’ve now got a new trailer, which gives us a tantalizing glimpse at some of Deadpool’s variants, including Lady Deadpool (briefly shown in a previous trailer), who is revealed right up until the point that we see her face, as well as a decent amount of new footage.
The glimpse at Lady Deadpool begins at the 12-second mark, which is followed by a look at another Wade Wilson variant, Cowboy Deadpool—you’ll notice the spurs and side holster—which speaks to how Deadpool & Wolverine will make the most of the Time Variance Authority and their ability to traverse the multiverse. Matthew MacFayden’s Mr. Paradox will have a lot to do on that front, and the TVA’s time-hopping is how Wolverine is pulled into the action in the first place—this isn’t the same version of the character we saw die in James Mangold’s stellar 2017 film Logan.
The new trailer also includes some familiar faces in Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna), the Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), and the utterly non-superheroic yet undeniably charming Peter (Rob Delaney), who comes upon Deadpool and Wolverine in a parking lot after the dynamic duo makes a graceless entrance.
As for the new cache of photos, we’ve got fresh looks at the villain Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), Professor X’s very powerful, very bad twin. In the comics, Cassandra’s backstory is extremely gothic—while she and her twin, Charles Xavier, were gestating in the womb, Charles recognized her evil presence and killed her before she could do the same to him. But Cassandra’s mind lived on, and years later, she formed a new body and swore revenge on her twin brother. Her powers are immense.
There’s little doubt that Deadpool & Wolverine is going to be a hit, and with the premiere date clawing its way toward us, we’ll also be hearing from critics soon, after their advanced screenings and the social media embargo, and eventual review embargo, are lifted. Marvel fans, as well as Reynolds and Jackman fans, are ready for action.
Deadpool & Wolverine slashes its way into theaters on July 26:
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Roland Emmerich knows how to destroy worlds. The multi-hyphenate is behind some of the biggest disaster movies in film history, including Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, and Moonfall. But instead of depicting a cataclysm for his latest effort, he’s building an empire for the Peacock series Those About to Die (streaming on July 18), which takes place during Rome’s Flavian dynasty just as the Coliseum is receiving its finishing touches.
The 10-episode action drama has one of the greatest actors of a generation, Anthony Hopkins, as Emperor Vespasian, who ruled from 69-79 AD and decided to gift the now historic arena to the Roman people rather than the city’s political factions. Based on a book written by Daniel P Mannix, Emmerich unpacks a deliberately paced story following the charioteers who race inside the Circus Maximus and its seedy underbelly, perfectly cast with Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones) as Tenax, the man at the center of the action. When the series does step into the gladiator area, we are emotionally attached to a dynamic ensemble cast manipulating the power strings of rule.
To bring the painterly imagery to screen, the director tapped longtime collaborator Peter Travers, who served as visual effects supervisor alongside visual effects producer Tricia Mulgrew, a team that relied on virtual production techniques to pull off the immersive period piece. “I think we started in April and finished in October, and out of that, there were 100 shooting days on a virtual production stage,” says the BAFTA-nominated Travers. “This wouldn’t have worked if we didn’t have somebody like Roland, who has been pushing the latest technology during his whole career. He pushed the virtual production wall to its breaking point every day, which broke on some days. He would just then pull back a little bit to where it worked, and then he’d get the shot.”
Pushing the boundaries was just part of the visual effects work of Those About to Die. Below, Travers details how they conjured the ancient city, crashed racing chariots, and tamed ferocious lions.
You worked with Emmerich on Moonfall. Did you begin this project right after?
We knew this was on Roland’s list of future potential projects when we were doing Moonfall, but when I was on that project, I couldn’t think of a lick about it because I was knee-deep in the moon. But when Those About to Die surfaced, it was like, okay, Ancient Rome, here we go.
The series is based on a Daniel P Mannix novel. Did that become reference material for the visual language?
Yeah, it’s all heavily influenced. Rome is so well documented and some of the buildings are still here today. If we can try to capture the magic of it as much as we can, then that’s good.
How did Roland describe the overall aesthetic?
We were trying to capture an active city, not a museum. People are alive, and they’re trying to make their way in ancient Rome. The city was a melting pot of cultures, so it was a culturally rich environment. But more importantly, it was an active environment.
THOSE ABOUT TO DIE — Episode 101 — Pictured: Iwan Rheon as Tenax— (Photo by: Reiner Bajo/Peacock)
An engaging aspect of the series is this idea of sport. How did that influence you creatively?
The show’s main center is around sport. It’s evident the more we read about Rome, people haven’t changed. One of the reasons why sport is so popular today is because of the Circus Maximus games, the horse racing, and the gladiator stuff is a direct thing from an ancient past that is so relatable to the NFL, basketball, UFC fighting, and all those kinds of things. Human beings still have this kind of innate response to sport. That’s what the show is primarily about, and that’s why sports matters even today. There’s our human identity with our history; a lot of it comes through athletics, sports, and the Olympics.
THOSE ABOUT TO DIE — Episode 101 — Pictured: (l-r) Pepe Barroso as Fonsoa, Eneko Sagardoy as Andria, — (Photo by: Reiner Bajo/Peacock)
VFX producer Tricia Mulgrew worked with you on Moonfall. Did Tricia’s role change for the small screen?
Both of our jobs were that much harder on this show, in particular, because of the virtual production. It completely reorganizes the schedule, making it that much more challenging. On a typical movie, you have one deadline, which is the very end before the movie comes out. On this, we had ten deadlines with our ten episodes.
The series takes place in Rome among different regions, houses, and ports that are woven into the storytelling. What was the first step in creating the city map?
We acquired a virtual Rome model to use in Unreal Engine that we thought was the most complete, and then we started building upon it. When I first got it, I brought it to Roland, and we sat down in Unreal on my computer. We were flying around Rome, and he was like, ‘Oh my god, this totally changes everything.’ We were like, oh, look at this area, look at this area, and all that kind of stuff. It was beautiful. And it gave us a head start at being able to do virtual production.
How did virtual production affect the pipeline for other departments?
The trick to the show is that we became like this digital backbone for virtual production and visual effects. The entire show, the costumes, production design, and everything else were non-linear and broadband. It even affected scouting and where we did location scouting. With our production designer, Johannes Muecke, we were everyday working for hours going, okay, what about this model? Can you use this? And then Johannes would say, ” Okay, I talked to Roland, and we want columns that look like this. Then I would say, well, if you’re going to build those columns, then we need to scan and get them into our Unreal file. So things happened in both directions constantly.
THOSE ABOUT TO DIE — Episode 105 — Pictured: Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson as Viggo, Moe Hashim as Kwame — (Photo by: Reiner Bajo/Peacock)
What was the virtual production environment setup?
It was broken up into five nodes. I think there were ten machines in total that were synced together with the end display in Unreal. So imagine a wall with ten big TVs, all synced together and displaying a 16K image. It is multiple computers doing the work. It all had to happen in real time because we were camera tracking. So we’re building this 3D Unreal environment on the wall. And then when the camera moves parallax, the stage is on a big rotation platform, so we can rotate it. DNEG also had to bring a lot of their artists to the location because it was easier than transporting terabytes of data from the mothership in London.
THOSE ABOUT TO DIE — Episode 110 — Pictured: (l-r) Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson as Viggo, Moe Hashim as Kwame — (Photo by: Reiner Bajo/Peacock)
One of the visual stars is the Circus Maximus, the racetrack that holds the chariot racing. How did you recreate the historic location?
There was a Circus Maximus in Unreal with the right dimensions, but we rebuilt it because the things fit together because of what we shot. We had what we called the Emperor’s Balcony, where they viewed the horse racing. Production design designed a practical Emperor’s Balcony, and then we matched it virtually and fit it into the full Circus Maximus for all the virtual shots. Then, we had to have a smaller practical version of the Circus Maximus for when we used the practical horses in the photography. It’s as if we had to do a set extension, which happens quite a bit in the show. That way, we could put full crowds behind real horses around the bend. And those are some of my favorite shots because they look great. It’s real horses going around the real Circus Maximus.
THOSE ABOUT TO DIE — Episode 101 — Pictured: Dimitri Leonidas as Scorpus — (Photo by: Reiner Bajo/Peacock)
How did you approach the chariot races and consequential crashes that happen inside the Circus Maximus?
We pre-viz every shot, even the reaction shots and all the close-ups of the charioteers; all of that’s pre-viz. If you have a director that embraces previs for what it actually is, which is a preparatory tool, then you can really map it out. Then, when it came time to do the action unit stuff, I was the action unit director, so I directed all the horses going around the track. I sat down with the AD and mapped out all the sequences. I think there are eight chariot races across all ten episodes. We did block shooting, so it was like this big decoder, a spreadsheet of all the shots. And with our previs, we could bring up the shot with all the camera guys, the horse trainers, and everyone and know what we needed to do.
We also get to see the construction of the Colosseum. What steps took place to model the landmark?
We had a Colosseum model in Unreal and the general layout of the Piazza around the Colosseum. That ends up being just as important as the interior because a lot of our shots and a lot of our scenes take place outside the Colosseum when they’re building it. There was also an incredible amount of set decoration in the Colosseum. That whole environment ended up being completely designed by the production. Like the cranes and scaffolding, what stages of the marble are needed? We had to keep all of this in mind to show the different levels of construction. And it goes from, I would say, 50% completed at the beginning to 100% completed for the opening games that are in episode nine. So it was a ton of work, and we took some liberties, admittedly, because that area transformed quite a bit.
THOSE ABOUT TO DIE — Episode 103 — Pictured: Sara Martins as Cala— (Photo by: Reiner Bajo/Peacock)
We also visit Northern Africa in the pilot, where the story of Cala [Sara Martins] and her family begins. Her son Kwame [Moe Hashim] is introduced with a lion hunt that is captured. On set, there was an actor playing the lion in a suit. How did that performance help translate the visual effects?
I would think many visual effects teams and supervisors probably have their own flair with that stuff. I wouldn’t say that mine is abnormal, but my philosophy is to get the plate, not be so intrusive with the visual effects, with tracking markers and things like that, but get the performance right. Then, hopefully, most of the photography is good to go, so you’re doing less repair work. So I prefer, especially when you’re replacing a performance of a human with a CG character of some kind, with as little footprint as possible.
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Featured image: THOSE ABOUT TO DIE — Episode 103 — Pictured: (l-r) Dimitri Leonidas as Scorpus, Eneko Sagardoy as Andria — (Photo by: Reiner Bajo/Peacock)
Spoiler first: At the end of director James Mangold’s 2017 Logan, Logan died. Better known as Wolverine and synonymous with the actor who has played him many times, Hugh Jackman, the character returns on July 26th in Marvel/Disney’s Deadpool & Wolverine. The decision was Jackman’s, and apparently even Marvel boss Kevin Feige was skeptical, but thanks to the multiverse, this Logan supposedly isn’t that Logan, the one who made the ultimate sacrifice to save a young mutant, Laura (Dafne Keen), and went out in a noble, fan-approved fashion.
The X-Men can fly and miraculously heal themselves and bend metal with their minds, so someone dying and coming back to life is hardly the imaginative leap it would be in a more somber film series. Nevertheless, Wolverine’s particular timeline has perplexed Marvel super-fans and novices (raises hand) alike for some time. With all the speculation and Wolverine returning to theaters, why not try to make sense of it? Or at least lay it out in one confusing sequence:
It’s the year 2000. Director Bryan Singer’s X-Men is a critical and box-office success. The movie paves the way for one of the biggest franchises ever. Logan is an adult in the present day. He successfully destroys a mutation-inducing machine created and powered by Magneto (Ian McKellen), a complicated and sympathetic foe.
X2, also directed by Singer, was released in 2003. Logan is searching for clues to the past that have made him into the self-regenerating, adamantium-filled weapon he is. He doesn’t find much, but villain Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox) seems to know something.
Three years later, sequel X-Men: The Last Stand, directed by Brett Ratner, premieres at Cannes. Logan kills Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who, on the topic of death and rebirth, had presumably died in the previous film. She is resurrected as a dark alternative personality, the Phoenix. But vis à vis Logan, we are still progressing in time in a linear fashion.
In 2009, Logan gets his star turn. Directed by Gavin Hood, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, gets going in 1845. A boy named James (Troye Sivan) becomes aware of his mutation after watching the man he thinks is his father being killed by another man, Thomas Logan. James uses his newly discovered bone claws to kill Thomas, who tells him he is, in fact, James’s father. James and his half-brother Victor (Liev Schreiber), who is also a self-regenerating mutant with built-in bone weapons, become soldiers fighting in major wars through the 20th century. Victor is an evil half-brother and gets both of them executed by firing squad during the Vietnam War, an experience which, of course, the pair survive. Major William Stryker invites the brothers to join mutant Team X. Six years on, which puts us in the late 1970s/early 1980s territory, Wolverine gets into an-all out war with the amoral Team X after Victor, who’s allegedly gone rogue, also allegedly kills Logan’s girlfriend, Kayla (Lynn Collins). Stryker offers Logan the pivotal operation that sees his skeleton fused with adamantium, and tries and fails to conceal the memory of this from Logan. He winds up inadvertently wiping the memory later on when he shoots Wolverine in the head with adamantium bullets.
X-Men: First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn, comes out in 2011 and takes place in 1962. All we see of Logan/Wolverine is a brief cameo in a bar, in which he responds to then-partners in mutandom Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Lehnsherr/Magneto to “go f*** yourself” when they try to recruit him. Given that we know from the previous film that Logan can exist in his adult form, seemingly in perpetuity, this dot on the timeline doesn’t seem too weird.
James Mangold’s The Wolverine, which premiered in 2013, takes place a few years after X-Men: The Last Stand, from 2006. We revisit August 1945 and watch Wolverine, a Japanese POW, save a Japanese officer, Ichirō Yashida (Ken Yamamura), from the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, then cut to the present. A dying Ichirō (Hal Yamanouchi) has mutant Yukio (Rila Fukushima) bring Logan to Japan, only to fake his own death and, as the Silver Samurai, sever Wolverine’s adamantium claws and rob him of his ability to self-heal. (Wolverine regenerates his original bone claws and uses those to kill Ichirō.) In a bonus credits scene set two years later, Xavier and Lehnsherr once again approach Logan about mutant-related issues. This time, he does not tell them to “go f*** yourself.”
It’s 2014. Bryan Singer is back to direct X-Men: Days of Future Past, which takes place in 2023. Robots called Sentinels are killing mutants and any recessive-mutant-gene possessing humans. The solution is to time travel to 1973 to prevent the assassination of the Sentinels’ creator, Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage). Logan volunteers to go in Xavier’s stead, and his present-day brain inhabits his 1970s body, which does not seem to be fighting in the Vietnam War in this movie, even though it was doing that around this time in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Nothing goes to plan, and the Sentinels wind up activated in the past (it’s Richard Nixon’s fault), as well as killing mutants back in 2023. But the X-Men prevail, and Logan returns to a peaceful, Sentinel-free 2023. Back in 1973, however, after almost drowning, he gets picked up by Stryker, who is actually Raven, the mutant who originally assassinated Trask. Speaking of timelines, Jean Grey seems to be doing well, which is nice, given what happened in 2006’s The Last Stand.
2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse opens in 3600 B.C., then fast-forwards to 1983. We only see Wolverine during a Hugh Jackman cameo, trapped in Stryker’s Weapon X experimentation facility. This seems to be the movie where everyone gets most confused about Wolverine’s general dance card. Also, who put Logan in that facility — Stryker? Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) disguised as Stryker? It is simpler to write off clarity on Wolverine’s whereabouts in the 1970s through the early 1980s and instead accept that this was a pivotal period for a gruff Canadian logger who was a child in 1845. It’s a lot for an almost 150-year-old guy, even one who can self-regenerate.
Which brings us to 2017’s Logan and his death. It’s 2029, Wolverine’s healing abilities are failing him, Xavier has dementia, and Logan technically has a sudden adopted daughter, Laura, created from his DNA by a biotechnology company called Transigen, which now wants to kill off all the mutant children it produced. The company’s most effective means of enforcement is X-24, a Wolverine clone. Fighting to save Laura and the other children, Logan is killed by his clone and dies in his daughter’s arms. She then kills X-24 with an adamantium bullet. In terms of the timeline, no notes.
Featured image: Hugh Jackman in ‘Logan.’ Courtesy 20th Century Fox.
This summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine, directed by Shawn Levy, doesn’t necessarily fall outside Wolverine’s timeline. The movie is a sequel to 2018’s Deadpool 2, so if it takes place six years on, he hasn’t yet reached the dystopia of 2029. But that may not matter, anyway. Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is being brought out of retirement for a mission by the Time Variance Authority, so there will be multiverse hopping either way. On top of that, Marvel head Kevin Feige has indicated that this movie’s Logan is a Variant we haven’t seen before. Here’s hoping that will be further explained, but what seems most salient is Jackman’s enthusiasm to bring the character back for this specific arm of the franchise — Variant or original, Wolverine’s return, alongside Deadpool for the first time, should be worth some suspension of disbelief.
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When the disaster thriller Twister was released in 1996, the film turned out to be one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters and the second-highest-grossing movie of the year (the first was Independence Day). Helen Hunt starred as Jo, a meteorologist who was out to revolutionize tornado alert systems through a small, censor-filled device named Dorothy, conceived by her almost ex-husband, weatherman Bill (Bill Paxton). Almost thirty years later, a sequel is on the way: Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), due in theaters July 19th.
Hunt is not reprising her earlier role, and Paxton passed away in 2017. Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, and Anthony Ramos and written by Mark L. Smith, Twisters is a standalone film, confirmed by Powell in an interview with Vogue. However, like its predecessor, the sequel takes place in Oklahoma, where it was also filmed. The original movie, set during an unusually violent tornado spell, was unique at the time for its shooting locations, a decision driven by director Jan De Bont, who, according to Vulture, insisted on taking the production to the state instead of California and the UK. Now, Twisters has followed suit.
Twister was filmed in towns like Wakita, which was also a location in the movie itself, and Fairfax, which also recently saw the production of Killers of the Flower Moon come to town. The newer film was likewise shot around the state, in locations including Chickasha, Okarche, El Reno, Spencer, and Cashion. And both Twister and Twisters relied on filming in Oklahoma City, with the crew on the latest film working with around 500 local vendors and setting up shop across ten of the city’s hotels, according to The Oklahoman, as well as spending 40 days on set at Prairie Surf Studios.
Shooting in the state where both movies take place doesn’t just give each film a credible layer of reality but has led to a few curious cases of life imitating art. A 2010 tornado tragically destroyed much of the Fairfax farm where several Twister scenes had been filmed, The Oklahomanreported (fortunately, the family who owned the farm was unhurt). Even stranger, that particular tornado blew in on the 14th anniversary of the movie’s U.S. release.
The original movie also apparently spurred real-life interest in the study of meteorology; enrollment in the meteorology department at the University of Oklahoma almost doubled after Twister’s release, and Universal Studios gave the school a grant for a mobile radar. That interest seems to have been prescient — there’s now even more to study, as tornado behavior appears to be changing. This phenomenon may be caused by climate change, which, coming full circle, Twisters screenwriter Smith wound up incorporating into the plot of the latest film, he told Collider.
Of course, it doesn’t just make sense to shoot the setting for tornadoes in locations where they’re best known to touch down. Oklahoma is also beautiful, which might be easy to forget watching a disaster thriller, but it is abundantly apparent in another Twisters connection to the state. This is director Chung’s second time shooting here. His heartbreaking, Oscar-nominated drama Minari is set in Arkansas but was filmed in and around Tulsa, and for sightseers curious to check out that film’s scenic settings for themselves, Visit Tulsa has a comprehensive list of visitable shooting locations.
But if you can’t make it to Oklahoma in person, there’s Twisters. The new film once again follows the path of committed storm chasers, both local and dropping in from out of state. Residents at least get alerts on their cell phones now, but the overall premise hasn’t changed — one of the most electrifying forces of nature out there, when it comes to tornadoes, we humans still have much to learn.
Twisters is in theaters on July 19.
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Directed by Fisher Stevens, the documentary miniseries Beckham has been a hit for Netflix, charting David Beckham’s rise as a Manchester United star, England team captain, and player for Real Madrid and the LA Galaxy. But football (we’ll call it that here, as Beckham, his family, his mentor Alex Ferguson, and dozens of teammates and fellow celebrities do throughout the miniseries) is only one way into the star’s life, with the relationship between David and his wife of almost 25 years, Victoria Beckham (née Adams, and still oft known as Posh Spice) central to framing the mind-blowing level of celebrity heaped upon the couple after they got together in the 1990s.
Beckham is considered one of the best midfielders of all time and has won league titles in England, Spain, the US, and France, but his fame transcends even this level of spectacular professional success. Through its star’s candor and sincere interviews with Victoria, his parents, and former teammates like Gary Neville and Landon Donovan, Beckham explains Beckham as a new kind of football star and celebrity in one. Explaining the toll this takes on his family is something Stevens embraces rather than elides over, and ultimately, the documentary is as compelling a commentary on the alarming downsides of global stardom as it is a biography of Beckham’s career and personal life.
Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, David Beckham, Victoria Beckham, and Will Smith. Beckham – Production Still Image. Courtesy Netflix.
Given the sheer volume of footage of the Beckhams, culling the most salient gems and matching them to over 70 interviews was a mighty undertaking. We spoke with editor Michael Harte about reworking the entire initial edit, abandoning his standard approach to archival footage, and letting Beckham’s most important relationships shape what came to life on screen.
How did you even approach such a massive amount of footage?
I’ve worked on some projects with a huge amount of archives before. I have a good method to get through it, but I’m slightly obsessive and have to watch everything. When it came to this, it was like, am I going to be able to? You’ve got the most photographed man in the world who then marries the most photographed woman in the world. I also had 30 years of football matches, the buildup before it, the celebrations after, the fallout, and the news. This was, without a doubt, my Everest in terms of archive. Every shot can change a documentary if you use it in the right way, and I can’t sleep properly unless I go through all the material and have it organized.
David Beckham and Victoria Adams in “Beckham.” Courtesy Netflix.
How, in particular, did you manage all the games?
I did have an assistant for the matches. We would go through every game he ever played, from the season before he scored the goal at Wimbledon, from 1996 onwards, and every time he touched the ball, we’d mark it. What I realized was that when I was watching the games, I got more interested in the moments when he didn’t have the ball and the camera was on him. He’d glance at his manager, Alex Ferguson, and Alex Ferguson would look at him. It was a film not just about football but about family and father figures, and Alex Ferguson really was one of his father figures. Those shots became key. That was a whole new layer of archive we needed to pull in, which was Alex Ferguson on the sidelines whenever he shouted at David or called to him.
Alex Ferguson and a young David Beckham in “Beckham.” Courtesy Netflix.David Beckham in “Beckham.” Courtesy Netflix.
At some point, Ted Beckham, David’s father, mentions that he also has every single kiddie football match David has ever played on tape.
The funny thing was, he was the last interview I watched. I’d thought I had a handle on all the material and then he dropped that line, I’ve got 1300 videotapes.
The Beckham family in “Beckham.” Courtesy Netflix.
How did you even know when it was time to move from the archive into the edit?
It sounds a little bit cheesy, but I’ll wake up one day and feel it’s time to start playing with the material. Normally, that time is when I’ve seen everything. But I realized with David’s story that there is no end. There are so many different lanes in this story that the decision was made: What are we focusing on here? And that would tell us when we’d seen enough material. You’re just not able to watch every bit of material from David Beckham. About six weeks in, I realized that my method had to go out the window.
Beckham’s image went up and down with his fans, particularly after the red card at the 1998 World Cup. How did you hit those emotional beats?
That became pivotal to the story. The reaction from the fans in England is so intense. I’m a huge football fan, and I kind of get it, but not to that extent. There was something else going on that was more than football. Everything in Episode 1 is building up to that moment. It’s an ascent to the top, and watching the dynamic between him and Victoria and Alex Ferguson is fascinating. The footage came in and it was just endless of fans almost rioting. Fisher really recreated a very comfortable space for him to discuss 1998. It almost felt like therapy. That, to me, when I watched all the interviews, was the bit that stood out the most emotionally. It felt like you could well and truly tell it was the first time he said a lot of the things he said about 1998. I wanted to lean into Fisher’s voice a little more in those sections because you wanted it to feel like he was telling someone, that it wasn’t just an interview for a camera. The relationship between Fisher and David, particularly in that section, was really important.
David Beckham in “Beckham.” Courtesy Netflix.
Were you particularly interested in the Beckhams going into this project?
I’m a Liverpool fan. And I’m from Ireland, so England, we tried to beat for years. But look, even though I was a Liverpool fan and Ireland fan, in the 90s, I dyed my hair and grew it long because I wanted to be Beckham, as many people did. He transcended football. I wanted to beat him, but I also wanted to be him. And the Spice Girls and Manchester United were huge. So when [he and Victoria] got together, we hadn’t seen that before. And I haven’t seen that again, to that extent.
David Beckham and Victoria Adams in “Beckham.” Courtesy Netflix.
The documentary really conveys that level of extreme stardom. How did you ensure that you showed the highs and the lows?
That was a big focus for us when we were cutting to really lean into that. Initially, the first cut we had was very much focused on football. It was about Manchester United and David being within that. As a football fan, it was fascinating, but I remember realizing we’re isolating so much of the audience here. This is not doing justice to David Beckham’s story. We asked, what is this actually about? Two things emerged: one is celebrity, especially in the 90s, and the second is family. The initial first cut was using David to understand football. I remember watching it with my partner; she was totally uninterested. We then leaned into his relationship with Victoria, his relationship with his family, and with his father figure, Alex Ferguson. It really helped. And then we used the celebrity world as a kind of backdrop to see how a family navigates this world, which was very intense in the 90s, especially in the UK. We didn’t ignore the football, but it became a way in as opposed to the endpoint.
David Beckham and Victoria Adams in “Beckham.” Courtesy Netflix.
I particularly loved Victoria’s interviews. Were they key to getting the story across?
I thought she was incredible. Sometimes, if I’d get stuck at story points in the edit, inevitably, the answer would be, what’s Victoria doing right now? Where is she? Are the paparazzi on her case? Ultimately, she’s very insightful and very funny, and she did give it all to Fisher in the interview. I knew the Beckhams from the 90s because they were so famous, but I didn’t really know the Beckhams. I had an image of Posh Spice, but when I started looking at her archive and interviews, I realized this is a very complex person who has gone through a huge amount that I can relate to, which is trying to make it work for your family. David was the same. That’s what it always came down to for them. Their interviews really came alive when they talked about each other and their family. I think the peak of it all is when David pops his head in the door, and it’s the “be honest” moment. You just see the dynamic between the two of them. It felt real.
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An intoxicating amalgam of courtroom thriller, relationship drama, and a whodunit, David E. Kelley’s latest entry into long-form prestige drama arrives with Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent, a cerebral puzzle steeped in betrayal, obsession, love, and ambition. Fresh off his quietly menacing turn in Amazon MGM’s wildly entertaining Road House remake, Jake Gyllenhaal (who also serves as Executive Producer) plays Rusty Sabich, Chicago’s chief deputy prosecutor and devoted family man, whose idyllic life is upended when he is accused of killing fellow prosecutor and paramour, Carolyn (Renate Reinsve) after her bloodied body is found hog-tied in her home. Set in present-day Chicago, the eight-part limited series is Hollywood’s latest attempt to claw back at the bygone era of appointment television, with new episodes released every Wednesday until the finale on July 24.
While Norwegian cinematographer Daniel Voldheim (Sonja: The White Swan) worked with director Anne Sewitsky on episodes 1, 2, and 8, cinematographer Doug Emmett (I Care A Lot) lensed the rest with director Greg Yaitanes. The visual palette has an anachronistic, retro vibe, combining a contemporary classic look with the muted and industrial tones of the 1970s to imbue the Sabich family’s ordeal with a grounded closeness and intuitive naturalistic feel.
“I’ve always been influenced by European and Hollywood films of the 1960s and 1970s. Anne and I especially love the thrillers from the ‘70s,” says Voldheim, a frequent collaborator of Sewitsky’s. “We wanted to balance a naturalistic, moody feel but also be playful while maintaining suspense. Maybe it’s a Scandinavian approach—we created something that feels real to us, a real home, a real family in every sense,” he adds. By the time Emmett came in for the third episode, it was up to him to balance the visual language already established with Yaitanes’ more stylized approach. “I tend to shoot a bit more theatrically and light more aggressively, but I also had Daniel’s lookbook seared into my brain. I think serving those two masters made for really great art.”
Not only does the opening frame immediately establish Rusty as a polished, confident, and savvy prosecutor, but it also sets up the central conceit, as he tells the jury in his closing argument in an earlier trial: “… he [the defendant] sits there not guilty, because that is what our Constitution demands. I will present evidence to show you that the accused committed this crime. Now, should you find that to be very likely, you have to set him free. My job is to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
DP Daniel Voldheim and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
“It was important to show Rusty’s brilliance as a lawyer from the beginning,” Voldheim says. “That was a very long take, a Trinity shot – a Steadicam on a rig that raises the camera up and down.”
Jake Gyllenhaal in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
To complicate matters, Rusty’s boss, close friend, and District Attorney, Raymond Horgan (Bill Camp), soon loses his job to the oleaginous rival prosecutor, Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenle), who appoints colleague Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard) to Rusty’s role. Seething with unhinged jealousy, Tommy is hell-bent on pinning the murder on Rusty. To keep the audience guessing at every turn, the series deftly maintains the ambiguity of his culpability throughout, as he wavers from sincere and remorseful one moment to arrogant and hostile the next. “With Rusty, we used a lot of close-ups and moody lighting to heighten the emotions, balancing between revealing him and keeping him hidden. Sometimes we lit him from the front to see every emotion, other times, we kept him darker and more secretive. Anne likes to start with a handheld take and let Jake work through the scene to find the emotions,” Voldheim shares.
O-T Fagbenle and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
“It depends on how much access you get to an actor’s face and eyes; how you frame them creates suspense or openness, which invites you in. If you’re lighting and filling in someone’s face and approaching them with a camera straight on, you get a more trustworthy, sympathetic feel,” Emmett explains how every sinew of emotion is captured on-screen. “But if you put the camera behind Jake’s shoulder, or focus on the back of his head, or slowly push in on him, that naturally builds tension. You’re wondering, ‘What’s he hiding from us? Is he grimacing? Is he smiling?’ It makes you want to lean around and see what he’s doing in that moment. Access to an actor’s emotion depends on where you put the camera.”
Besides solving Carolyn’s brutal murder, the series is also an intimate, raw, and nuanced dissection of a tattered marriage. Updating Scott Turow’s 1987 bestseller and the 1990 film adaptation for today’s audience, the female characters are complex and three-dimensional, including Rusty’s conflicted wife, art curator Barbara (Ruth Negga). Wrestling with her decision to stay with Rusty after his affair ended, she oscillates between loving and supportive versus rage and bitterness against him for dragging their children through the anguish of a murder trial. “The book needed some updating by today’s standards, and the writers did a great job of humanizing her, making her an equal character in the story,” Emmett remarks. “One of the main things that makes this show so endlessly watchable is this very human, very real relationship between a married couple going through a challenging time.”
Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
While flashbacks to Rusty and Barbara pre-crisis are done with mesmerizing, nostalgic overtones, we mostly see him and Carolyn in fleeting, passionate, frenzied moments. “We used different lenses for the flashbacks—Panavision portrait lenses, vintage Canon FD, and rehoused Yashica lenses to give it a different feel. They have really soft corners and a swirl effect to get closer to their faces,” reveals Volheim. “We wanted those to be more intimate, so we used wide-angle lenses to be observational and get in between them.”
Emmett did the same but with the rougher, volatile scenes. “We shot some of the violent stuff between Rusty and Carolyn in her apartment, putting the cameras really close to their faces at the minimum depth of field, the shallowest focus we could find, to add a frightening quality to build tension.” At one point, it looks like someone may have been watching her in the days leading up to her death. “Shooting her from around the corner and letting the camera kind of breathe a little, feeling some of the movement from the camera operator, added a lot of tension. We also created tension by catching glimpses of her, almost in a voyeuristic way, from within her apartment, as if an intruder was inside.”
Renate Reinsve and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
One of the most heartbreaking moments happens at the Sabich’s dinner table when Rusty has to tell his daughter Jaden (newcomer Chase Infiniti) and son Kyle (Kingston Rumi Southwick) about the affair and his likely arrest. “We don’t usually do that much coverage, but for that scene, we covered every angle just to find every look on everyone, especially from Rusty’s point of view, so that he could read everyone’s reactions,” says Voldheim. Later that night, Jaden confronts her father, desperate to know why he would betray Barbara this way if he still loves her. That’s when Rusty breaks down in one of the many emotionally lacerating moments. “It was shot handheld, and I don’t think we rehearsed it before the first take. That’s how we often work; just start shooting on the first take to explore and nail the real emotions.”
Kingston Rumi Southwick, Chase Infiniti and Ruth Negga in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
To ensure maximum accuracy in depicting police procedures, homicide investigations, autopsies, and courtroom procedures, technical advisors were brought in, including veterans from the Chicago Police Department and Los Angeles attorney David Kanuth, who advised on all the courtroom details. “Almost every day we were shooting in the courtroom, a question would come up for him,” Emmett recalls, with the majority of those scenes falling within his episodes. They took weeks to shoot after Voldheim worked with production designer John Paino and the gaffer “to build a rig and ceiling pieces that could be dimmed and the color changed individually,” which gave them the flexibility to create different moods within an otherwise mundane environment, Emmett reveals.
“Greg and I discussed a lot about the time of day—I had to create as many varied looks in the courtroom as possible by exploring different times of the day, to still give it that naturalistic look,” Emmett elaborates. Since everyone is mostly seated and static in the courtroom, the challenge was “to create dynamic camera work and keep it fresh and interesting with new angles, new lenses, and a new approach to lighting. I just remember Greg—who had just come off shooting House of the Dragon, commenting on how beautiful the set was when he first walked into the courtroom set. To hear his excitement, I just knew we had something great.”
Presumed Innocent is streaming now on Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping every Wednesday.
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For Heather Rae, it’s all about heart. The award-winning producer of Frozen River, Wind Walkers, and Tallulah, and the director/producer of the acclaimed documentary Trudell, believes her place is at the heart of a production. And just as important, Rae is driven to make films with heart.
Fancy Dance, Rae’s latest film, now streaming on Apple TV+, typifies this. The feature directing debut of Erica Tremblay, Fancy Dance is a touching drama set in Oklahoma’s Seneca–Cayuga Nation. Jax (Lily Gladstone), an Indigenous grifter, takes her teenage niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) under her wing after Roki’s mother, Jax’s sister, goes missing. Defying a custody order, the duo goes on the run to search for her. Roki hopes to find her mother in time for their annual tradition of dancing together at the upcoming powwow.
In a candid Zoom conversation, Rae discusses shooting Fancy Dance, promoting Indigenous films, and protecting the craft of producing.
How did you learn about Fancy Dance?
Erica Trembly was involved in the Indigenous Program at Sundance. I advised fellows for this program during the years Bird Runningwater ran it. He supported the development of Fancy Dance. Erica also made Little Chief, a short that premiered at Sundance and starred Lily Gladstone.
What struck you about the script?
Erica is the kind of filmmaker I’m really drawn to. Her voice absolutely resonated in the way she tells this story. She co-wrote the script with Miciana Alise, another wonderful Indigenous writer. I feel that authentic is a word almost cliché, but there is something about telling a story from the place you are from that is so visceral.
Isabel Deroy-Olson and Lily Gladstone star in “Fancy Dance,” in select theaters June 21 and streaming on Apple TV+ June 28.
Can you tell me how it all came together?
The Sundance Institute’s Shira Rockowitz, who had been supporting Fancy Dance, brought in Tommy Oliver and Confluential Films. lt became the principal financier. Deidre Backs, who had produced LittleChief, approached Nina Yang Bongiovi about working on Fancy Dance. Significant Productions, which is Nina’s and Forest Whitaker‘s company, also provided financing. Nina brought me in.
How was it to film this on location in Oklahoma?
We developed the film with the idea of shooting it in Oklahoma. The Cherokee Nation Film Office has an incentive program to support films shot on Cherokee land. We were one of the first films supported. The Tulsa Office of Film offered grants during the pandemic. It would have been very hard for us to make this film without both. Those were the pieces that brought it all together.
Isabel Deroy-Olson and Lily Gladstone star in “Fancy Dance,” in select theaters June 21 and streaming on Apple TV+ June 28.
Tell me about about the shoot.
Deidre was the lead producer. It was her first feature, and she did an incredible job. The supporting cast and crew were largely Indigenous. Much of our crew came from the show Reservation Dogs. I helped run the show. So often, I feel my role is kind of like a godmother. I’m there to help think things through. I’m a veteran producer, so I’ve got a few tricks in my bag. There were always challenges—lightning all night long during a night shoot.
Isabel Deroy-Olson and Lily Gladstone star in “Fancy Dance,” in select theaters June 21 and streaming on Apple TV+ June 28.
What were your priorities?
The entire producing team was there to protect the process—to support Erica and, for that matter, Miciana in their vision. Erica chose to indigenize the process in special ways. She used her own Cayuga language for all the directions. She had laminates made up with the directing terms she’d call out.
Do you remember any of the words?
I don’t. I do remember that when the first AD arrived, she was moved to tears by it. She had never experienced anything like that. In Hollywood’s golden era, representation of different cultures — in our case, Indigenous culture — was lacking. There was no respect for language. Half the time, they were speaking Spanish.
Lily and Isabel are so impactful.
Lily is a phenom. I was actually an executive producer on Winter in the Blood, one of Lily’s very first movies, and have always been a big fan. Isabelle is an incredible discovery. Erica came across her while casting another project and rememberedthis girl. It was so beautiful to bring them together and see how uniquely and authentically they connected with one another. They really became auntie and niece.
Lily Gladstone stars in “Fancy Dance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
What do you hope audiences will take away from Fancy Dance?
Media plays a big role in representation. It’s important to look at the pervasive nature of erasure. Over the course of 130 years of cinema, there’s been a conscious or unconscious erasure of Indigenous people. The organization IllumiNative reports that in American film and television, native people make up only .10%. Native representation is less than 1%. So I think that’s important anytime there is a story told, particularly a contemporary one, that anchors the reality that Indigenous people exist today.
Can you talk about your involvement with Producers United?
Systemic change has always been an important part of my career. Producers United was founded about a year ago to create change at the studios and streamers. We’re addressing the potential extinction of producers because our role has been so challenged recently.
In what way?
At a certain point, actors, writers, directors, and managers were trying to figure out how to leverage power. Because the credit is not protected, people began reaching for it. Suddenly, everyone is a producer. There’s a running joke of an agent asking, “Well, who’s the producer, producer?” Producers United is about protecting the actual career producer who is doing the work and, by the way, carrying the responsibility.
What are your goals?
Producers United is an effort to create best practices—fair wages, commencement pay during the development period, and health care. People don’t realize that producing is one of the very few roles that’s not unionized and protected.
Switching gears, rumor has it that you’re returning to directing with your feature Pony.
There’s this story I have to tell. I think it is one of the few stories I actually have to tell. Growing up in Central Idaho with a cowboy dad, I went into the backcountry with a cousin of mine. I was 12. She was 16. A forest fire cut us off from behind. We had to keep going deeper into the wilderness. It took us two weeks to get out. This is a great coming-of-agestory. And, in my opinion, there’s just not enough girl/horse movies.
You’re developing it with your daughter Johnny (Sequoyah), who will star.
Johnny has been an actress since she was a kid. One of her first roles was in the television series Believe. She had been begging me and her dad (writer/director Russell Freedenberg) to try acting. We said, “Okay, you can go to one audition.” She got the role and played the little girl in the series.
Whose idea was it to join forces?
Johnny is 21 years old now and came to me and said, “I would like to create content as well as act.” This started a conversation about making Pony. I’ve directed three documentaries, but this would be my first time directing fiction.
What’s the status?
We’re exploring the idea. We have a screenwriter. Johnny and I visited my cousin a couple of weeks ago and started pulling up memories. She recalled crossing an ancient, swinging bridge with the Salmon River a thousand feet below. I remembered waking up to a bear over us. It was such a wild experience.
Knowing howkids can be, do you think your daughter will listen to the director?
We have an incredible foundation of mutual respect…so, yeah.
Featured image: Isabel Deroy-Olson and Lily Gladstone in “Fancy Dance.” Courtesy Apple TV+
Julio Torres wrote, directed, and stars in his new HBO series, Fantasmas, a delightfully absurdist comic fantasy loosely predicated on a search for a lost earring. Fantasmas, which means “ghosts” in Spanish, questions reality — Torres and his costars, including Emma Stone and Bernardo Velasco, with cameos by actors like Tilda Swinton, exist in a world that seems to be both multi-dimensional and missing dimensions at the same time, built entirely on frequently three-walled sets that disappear into black.
Julio needs a biopsy for a weird mole on his neck, which hinges on comparing it to the size of a lost earring, setting off a hunt that includes questioning a hamster (who dropped it in a toilet at hamster Berghain, a scaled-down version of the Berlin techno club). As he takes on the banalities of human existence in a fancifully artificial world, cinematographer Sam Levy (Mayday, Lady Bird) plays up the out-of-normal-bounds aesthetic of each scene, whether it’s as theoretically mundane as a doctor’s office or a set for Aidy Bryant hawking toilet dresses (those are dresses, for toilets).
Levy and Torres looked at a wide range of visual references for the series, from the French fashion photography team Pierre et Gilles to Lars von Trier’s Dogville. On set, Torres encouraged a supportive sense of collaboration. “He wanted everyone to have fun figuring out how to make this show,” Levy said. We spoke with the cinematographer about working entirely on studio builds, exploring what ghostliness can mean on screen, and supporting a buoyant, eccentric sense of fun.
The show is a novel mix of reality and fantasy. Was there a specific guiding principle in how you wanted that reflected in the cinematography?
Fantasmas is really Julio Torres’s vision. It’s a very intricately written tale that’s a little bit hard to describe, but it has a lot of surrealistic qualities. We talked a little bit about German Expressionism and films like Metropolis. I would ask him what the most important thing to keep in mind is. He talked about the title and how the story is really a collection of ghostly people in a city. Whatever’s the most ghostly choice, that’s what we should do. It would come up sometimes, usually in the form of wanting an image to have a big flare or an abstract quality, to have an edge, or to look what we might call strange, but was perfectly in line for this story. Getting to shoot Fantasmas was really an exploration in ghostliness and how to get that in the cinematography and the design. We all worked really closely together. Julio described it as making a group art project. The entire thing was shot on a stage, and many of the sets don’t have four walls, so you’re looking into this black void. A lot of it was negotiating this black void.
Behind the scenes of “Fantasmas.” Courtesy HBO.
What tools did you use to get a softer focused, vintage look?
We used a modern digital camera and fairly modern lenses. We didn’t use anything that unusual in terms of tools. There was one lens that I own that’s quite old, manufactured in the 1970s, that’s called a Dream Lens. We’d put it on whenever Julio’s character was flashing back or having a poetic moment. Sometimes we’d lean into a heavy amount of diffusion in front of the lens, for the lights to glow in a way that you don’t normally see, or shy away from in more straightforward storytelling. We both wanted to have fun and make certain sequences really beautiful, but were also always thinking, do these characters really exist? Are they ghosts? Are they real?
Jabouki Young-White, Julio Torres. Photograph by Monica Lek/HBOOn set of “Fantasmas.” Courtesy HBO.
The scenes are also frequently cast in different colors. How did you approach that?
It’s all in camera. We did a lot of rear projection, which is an old Hollywood technique where we would have big screens in back of Julio and the other actors, and we’d use projectors to project onto those screens, as opposed to putting them in front of a green or blue screen and comping in backgrounds later. It’s a technique you see in old Hitchcock movies, for example. Someone is driving a car and you see the road behind them. With our 21st-century eyes, you can tell they’re not really in a car.
Steve Buscemi in “Fantasmas.” Photograph by Atsushi Nishijima/HBO
And the sets themselves seemed like they must have been complicated.
The sets are unusual in that they are frequently deconstructed, incomplete, or don’t have four walls. As you saw, there’s a lot of big black voids. Sometimes, a big color punch would help Julio stand out in this very surrealistic set. We looked a lot at Paul Schrader’s film Mishima, as well as Dogville and other films that have deconstructed sets in a theatrical sense. The episodes have to hang together in the right way, the colors have to hang together, the shots have to balance each other out, and at the same time, we have to let go of all that and just have fun because it’s a very fun story and it’s a comedy, at the end of the day. We wanted to take it seriously but not take ourselves too seriously.
On set of “Fantasmas.” Courtesy HBO.Julio’s home in “Fantasmas.” Photograph by Atsushi Nishijima/HBO
Speaking of comedy, did you really shoot Berghain for hamsters?
That was one of my favorite things when I was initially sent the script. We actually filmed hamsters. Tommaso [Ortino, the production designer] built an actual club where we put hamsters inside. My job was to figure out, okay, we want really intricate shots of hamsters inside this club. We couldn’t fit our camera in this tiny set, so we used my still camera, which is very small, and built this little rig so I could hold it upside down and follow these hamsters around. My wonderful gaffer, Jason Velez, and I went to Canal Street separately to find lights that would work in a little club. We laughed a lot that day.
And on the topic of downtown Manhattan, Fantasmas feels very representative of New York’s creative side.
Julio and I looked at a lot of photos and old videos of the experimental group The Wooster Group’s shows. They’ve been making deconstructed sets for decades. The fun thing about working with Julio is he’s very tapped into those things, as are many of his friends on the show. Martine [Gutierrez], who plays his manager, is a brilliant artist. A lot of these people are comedy performers in some form or other and have a very experimental artist bent to their performances. It was very fun to get to be a part of that. We shot this on a stage near Jersey City and created our artistic bubble in a very industrial area just outside the city.
Bernardo Velasco. Photograph by Monica Lek/HBOSam Levy on the set of “Fantasmas.” Courtesy Max.
What was shooting in the bubble like?
One thing that was great was that I’d never gotten to work on something like this that was completely designed, constructed, and controlled. There’s a lot of controlled lighting. Sometimes, we work on movies where you shoot in a house or apartment with a window, so you have this available light. We didn’t have any of that here. We had to build everything. That was exciting to get to do that. And also, I’d never worked on something where the show’s star was also the director. That was a new experience for me and a really great one, doing that with Julio. Just watching him create this world and help in my way to bring it to life was really vibrant and exciting.
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Note: this interview contains spoilers for the first three episodes.
In its newest Star Wars franchise, The Acolyte, Disney+ heads back in time to a century prior to the rise of the Galactic Empire. Amandla Stenberg stars as identical twins Osha and Mae, the former an ex-Jedi Padawan and the latter a vengeful warrior on the run. Both can use the Force, although the Jedi Order is neither twin’s birthright — the girls’ early childhood was spent in a coven of witches on Brendok, led by Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Mother Koril (Margarita Levieva). Jedi meddling seems to have brought Osha and Mae to divergent, if similarly bleak, present-day situations, without family ties or any knowledge, initially, that the other is still alive.
In The Acolyte era, the Jedi Order presides over a time of relative peace. From Carrie-Ann Moss’s Indara to Master Sol, played by Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae, we see more of the Jedi than in other recent Star Wars installments. Opposite this familiar society is that of the Brendok witches, a private, earthy sect new to this universe. In terms of dress, the two orders mirror each another, clad in natural textiles and hooded cloaks, although they share no further affinity for one another. For costume designer Jennifer L. Bryan (Better Call Saul, Genius), the show was a period piece that required costumes specific to this world that also maintained a sense of continuity with the characters we know decades on.
We spoke with Bryan about incorporating subtle differences among the various Jedi, creating the Brendok aesthetic from the ground up, and leaning into prints and fabrics we haven’t seen before.
We’re dealing with a case of identical twins. How did you dress them to subtly set them apart?
When you first see Mae in the assassin robe, she’s covered in a mask. That’s something we came up with in the later stages of the design. You just see her eyes, and her hairstyle is slightly different. She’s been on the run her whole life. Her family has been destroyed. She’s got a hit list. One of the things we did, which I presented to Leslye [Headland], our showrunner and amazing creator and director, was to have it look like she assembled this look during her journey. The purple in her robe refers to the color worn by the witches during the ascension in episode three. It’s a familial memory connection. It’s subtle. Of course, you don’t know it until you watch the third episode, but my hope is that the audience subconsciously reconnects to that really important event when the Jedi interrupt the ascension ceremony. I look at that as the last link. What was predominant that night, which a costume designer can use, is the color and a cloak that’s hooded, which reflects back to the cloaks of the Jedi. It’s a double-mirror image of her childhood. I designed that cloak with patches so it’s not cut from one solid material. It’s a fabric I created from an assortment of handwoven cottons and gauzes, and then we dyed it purple.
This story takes place 100 years before the Empire. Did you think of the costumes as “period?”
It’s tricky when you have such iconography and canon. There are decades of creatures and characters. It’s period within sci-fi. My advantage was that, because it was 100 years before, I had some design freedom to do things that hadn’t existed yet. My responsibility, story-wise, was to connect it to what we’ve already seen. There were a lot of creatures and characters that we know in Star Wars, which, in my period, didn’t exist yet. I didn’t have to consider, for example, Storm Troopers. I had that freedom, but at the same time, I had to design the robes and the Jedi with some continuity to what we already know is going to happen in Star Wars. So the Jedi, yes, I did conform to the classic lines on the garments, but one of the things I did was change the color scheme — so you see that honey-turmeric color, which I just love. It makes sense that it’s not a crazy color that wouldn’t transition into the future. But I did keep the brown mission cloak. It’s that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker connection. We don’t want to lose that.
How did you use dress to separate the individual Jedi?
One who stands out is Yord [Charlie Barnett]. He’s fastidious. He’s the first Jedi you see who steams his Jedi cloak on camera. When he first comes out of the freighter in episode one, he lifts his cape so he doesn’t sit on it and crush it. I thought that was a really great signal. I designed his cloak a little more ostentatiously — it’s got this cowl in the front, and it’s more fashion Jedi. When you see the Jedi collectively, you do see differences, especially in their Coruscant cloaks. Sol, in that opening scene, is almost ankle-length. When he turns, it’s very majestic. For Yord, everything has to be in place. And, of course, for Indara, it’s softer and more feminine.
The coven looks are elaborate but earthy. How did you approach them? They’re all new to the Star Wars world.
I used color throughout this show and maybe a little bit more intensely than we’ve seen. You’ve got the turmeric color of the Jedi. Then, with the coven, I chose purple. It’s the color of royalty. I wanted them to look elevated and show they had their own foundation as a community. In moving up the ladder in that community, you have Mother Aniseya and Mother Koril. Their clothes are the same design but set apart. When you see Jodie Turner-Smith, there’s no question, visually, that she’s a leader. Her cloak has a bit more volume. My inspiration was going into ancient civilizations that are more matriarchal than patriarchal. This society is very self-functioning. Women can run, manage, and move about, but they still look beautiful and elegant. They don’t have to look masculine; we didn’t want them to be in pants. They’re all in some dress form or cloak form. I leaned into some African prints. If you’re conscious of it, you’ll see it on an overskirt the twins wear — it’s almost between ikat and mud cloth. It’s subtle, but I intended not to have everything flat.
How do you dress the non-human creatures who populate this world?
Their faces and bodies would be designed by the creature department — it’s actually called the creature department. Then, they would send over a 3D-scanned replica of the actual body. In some cases, the shoulders are very wide, or there’s a big humpback or a big barrel torso. Certainly outside the realm of normal proportions for a human being. From there, I’d start to sketch and design for that particular shape. The second consideration with the creatures and the stunt guys in these shapes is that their clothes have to accommodate the choreography — flying over the table, fighting, almost all of them had some kind of physical interaction with Mae.
I had amazing tailors, cutters, and mold-makers. I always want to give them a little love and say what a team effort it was. Sometimes, I’d find one small thing but need thirty of them, and I bring it to the guys who’d put it into CAD, and then I could get thirty made. It’s not always just fabrics and textiles — I’m working with a variety of materials, especially on a show like this. Emblems on the Jedi belts, or Jodie Turner-Smith, in her day cloak, has these beautiful bronze cuffs that are actually a set I found in an antique shop in London. The set was from Africa, but it was just one — we had to make sets of them that were rubber-like, so they’d be comfortable for her to wear. In this case, we had rubber versions, semi-hard versions, and then we had distressors and breakdown artists who would work on these until you put them side-by-side and couldn’t tell which was which.
J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow, a reimagining of the real-life 1972 Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes Mountains that caught the world’s attention, is a viscerally astonishing feat of empathetic filmmaking. It was nominated for two Oscars: Best International Feature for Spain and Best Makeup and Hairstyling (Ana López-Puigcerver, David Martí, and Montse Ribé), a sweet coda for a filmmaker who returned to his home country of Spain for the majority of the film’s production.
“I was obsessed with reality and having the actors shooting in real snow in the mountains, in sequence,” Bayona tells us. He found those mountains in the Sierra Nevada region of Spain, which served as a base of operations.
One of the most accomplished filmmakers of his generation, JA Bayona is the Motion Picture Association’s 2024 Creator Award recipient. Bayona is no stranger to ambitious projects—his 2012 film The Impossible was centered on a tourist family in Thailand caught in the catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. His 2016 adaptation of Patrick Ness’s fantasy novel A Monster Calls was a touching, critically acclaimed, visually arresting, and emotionally cathartic family drama. In 2018, he took on the second installment of the Jurassic World franchise, Fallen Kingdom. Yet, taking on a story that’s already been told on film before (Frank Marshall’s 1993 Alive, which featured a largely American cast) and offering something both closer to the truth and populating it with a Spanish-speaking cast primarily from Uruguay and Argentina, was new kind of challenge.
While Bayona didn’t make his actors film in the Andes, he went there with a team to shoot and get a proper sense of the scale of the South American range, one of the world’s longest. “Shooting in the actual location was impossible—to bring a normal crew to those conditions was out of the equation, but we brought a crew of specialists that spent three weeks shooting all the landscapes of the Andes,” Bayona says. “Then we went to Spain and were scouting for a location that had the same kind of shape in terms of the geography.”
Bayona paid a price for his commitment to accuracy—he got altitude sickness in the Andes—which only deepened his appreciation for what the actual survivors endure. “You really cannot get an idea of what was to be there until you’re there and you experience the mountains and the altitude,” he says. “The first night, I lost a sense of time. I thought I spent the whole night, but when I looked at my watch, it was only an hour and a half that I’d spent in that tent.”
Bayona had to figure out how to tell the story of two dozen passengers who had to figure out a way to survive in the Andes for more than 72 days, narrated largely by Numa (Enzo Vogrincic Roldán), a young man from a conservative, religious family. Society of the Snow is based on Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book of the same name, and Bayona’s approach was to both deeply invest in the specific individuals who boarded that fateful flight and then reveal, with exacting detail, the catastrophe that unfolded and that impossible choices they had to make to survive. Bayona drew on both the book and conversations with the survivors to depict the moments of the crash and life deep in the mountains.
“I like to treat the context [of the crash] as something that will help you to understand the inner process of the character,” he says. “When you think about my movies The Impossible, A Monster Calls, or Society of the Snow, they deal with the moment we get conscious about the uncertainties of living. They deal with how your life can turn upside down in one second, and everything can change. We talk about death in a very straightforward way. I don’t consider these movies to be dark, even though they talk about death, because I always try to look for the light in the darkness. So in that sense, these stories believe in human beings and the better version of ourselves.”
Principal photography in the Sierra Nevadas took place at altitudes that, while not as high as the Andes, were still considerable at around 10,000 feet. Yet there were several distinct advantages of shooting in these conditions, one of which was that it created a natural visual illusion that benefited the story they were telling.
“One of the very few good things about shooting in the snow is that it’s impossible to calculate the distances when you don’t have references because everything is white,” he says. “So it didn’t matter that much that the Sierras are ten times smaller [than the Andes]. In the end, we were able to shoot in quite a high location, around 10,000 feet, and it gave us the perfect geography to do the set extensions, and it was possible to bring the actors to conditions that were similar to the ones the survivors had in the Andes. It was the perfect environment to do the visual effects.”
As Society of the Snow tracks the evolving bond between the survivors, filming in these conditions had a similar, if less potentially deadly, effect.
“I think these environments are great for creating a strong bond with the crew and the actors,” Bayona says. “As a director, you tried to help the performance, and using these conditions in these locations stimulate the performance. If we shoot a sequence in The Impossible in the same hotel where the story happened, that gives a special commitment to not only the crew but especially to the actors and the work they’re doing. I like to create a special environment to help the actors get into the performance.”
Leading a film crew at 10,000 feet was no easy task, and specialized trucks were required to haul cast, crew, and equipment at that altitude. Because the ski resort where they were based remained open, production could only film in the morning and toward the end of the day, the coldest time of any ski day. “It was almost like shooting a documentary, and that was good for the film because it increased this sense of realism that we were looking for,” Bayona says.
That realism was achieved to such a degree that the real survivors had trouble differentiating between what Bayona captured, actual photographs from their rescue, and their memories of the experience.
“They were confused, actually,” he says. “I remember that I showed the real Coche [played by Simon Hempe] a picture of the rescue scene, and he was so shocked because he told me, ‘I didn’t remember I was sitting in this moment.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, that because – that’s not you, that’s the actor. This is a shot from the movie.’ So that was the level of realism that we achieved.”
Society of the Snow – Production Still Image. Courtesy Netflix.
Bayona’s career has been marked by a consistent interest in telling stories about family bonds—those we’re born into and those we create—put to extreme stress tests.
“I like to follow my intuition, especially when I choose a project, so the film becomes a way of this decipher and to understand where the intuition comes from,” Bayona says. “Movies like The Impossible, A Monster Calls, and Society of the Snow come from the very deepest part of your soul, and if you’re able to get there during the process of making the film, I think you’re able to connect with the audience.”
Returning to Spain was especially poignant for a filmmaker who has been filming outside his home country for nearly two decades.
“I had the chance to go back to Spain and shoot in a very different way, where the shooting was more like an exploration,” Bayona says. “And I felt a lot of freedom in looking for what the film was about. The question was, what made these people who they are? It’s kind of complex to explain, I had so many different voices, there were 16 survivors telling the story in the book and they were so different, some of them believe in God, others didn’t. So, to me, it was all about finding the common denominator. By doing that, when you get that deep into the characters who are so different, you get to basically what makes us human. It’s such a big challenge when that’s the goal—it’s like suddenly you find yourself trying to give an answer to questions that these men have been asking themselves for 50 years.”
Answering that question might have been an impossible challenge, but so was what the survivors endured.
“I told the survivors, ‘Listen, you’ve spent 50 years trying to look for an answer to what happened. I have only two and a half years to do this film, so I’ll do my best,’” Bayona recalls. “But it’s interesting that since that goal was impossible, I tried to focus the story from a sensorial, emotional point of view. To me, it was more about bringing the audience into that plane and make them go through the same moments the survivors went through, and by doing so, the audience will ask themselves the same questions the survivors did in the mountains. And that, to me, was much more interesting because it was not giving the answer to the audience, but forcing them to make themselves ask the same questions, which is interesting because, in the end, the film becomes bigger in the mind of the audience. That was the kind of exploration that we proposed to ourselves when we did this film.”
Featured image: JA Bayona on location filming “Society of the Snow.” Courtesy Netflix.
It was an article about NASA’s first class of astronaut candidates in which women constituted half the participants that piqued Liz Garcia’s curiosity about the highly competitive candidacy process and ultimately prompted her to write about it. As the writer/director/producer (The Lifeguard, The Sinner) notes in her Director’s Statement, “Once I learned how astonishingly competitive it is to even get to the point that you’re being considered, I knew I wanted to set a movie in that world, because it’s so extreme” — and, which she remarks below, lends itself to a comedic touch.
The result is Space Cadet, a fun, feel-good film starring Emma Roberts (We’re the Millers) as Tiffany “Rex” Simpson, a dreamer and “DIY engineer” who is accepted into NASA’s astronaut training program. Underestimated and nothing like her elite fellow trainees, she must depend on her unstoppable drive and down-to-earth smarts to make it into space. Reminiscent of Legally Blonde, Space Cadet also features Poppy Liu (Hacks), Tom Hopper (The Umbrella Academy), and Gabrielle Union (Bad Boys II).
Garcia chatted with The Credits about creating her heroine, casting Roberts, and shooting in “space.” Following are edited interview excerpts.
You’ve written that reading about NASA’s first class of astronaut candidates being 50% female inspired you to write Space Cadet. Tell me how the story developed from there.
I read that announcement, and I just got curious, not even from a moviemaking perspective, just as a person, about what it took to become one of those people. The basic research I started was how to apply to become an astronaut at NASA, and I realized that to get to the point where you’re even in the semi-finals, you have led a life of such accomplishment on multiple fronts that it’s almost hard to believe. It struck me as a great world for comedy, with people who are that extreme and intense and focused, and who I think, in order to reach that point, have to be so competitive, have such fire. And then they get there, they’re not only going through more trials, but they’re being asked to work as a team. [Laughs] It just struck me as very funny to ask about those types of personalities. I also was thinking about what I wanted to direct next, and I wanted to make a comedy with actresses. And then it was about building a protagonist you would root for, not the person who’s had all her ducks in a row since she was a kid.
It reminds me of Legally Blonde, which you mention in your Director’s Statement. Apart from being in the world of space, what distinguishes your heroine, Rex?
Well, I had to create someone who could plausibly succeed in this environment, but not because she had gone to the right college, had a higher degree, or presented herself in any sort of polished way. So I had to look at the skills that astronauts need to have that are accessible to people who don’t have privilege at all, and that became the “Florida girl,” meaning a person who was growing up outside in the natural world and is a DIY kind of engineer. But it was also very important to me that this be a person who, by virtue of specific feminine traits, would be underestimated. For Rex, it’s that she is incredibly warm, kind, and generous, and that would make her seem like a space cadet. But actually, her ability to bond with other people, communicate with them and see their strengths would be how she’s a good leader.
Captain Jack (Andrew Call), Dr. Stacy (Desi Lydic), Miriam (Josephine Huang), and Grace (Yasha Jackson) in SPACE CADET Photo Credit: Eric Liebowitz//Prime Video
At what point was Emma Roberts cast?
I had been working with the production company, Stampede Ventures, and once we were all happy with the draft, it was time to find somebody. I’ve known Emma since she was 16, when I was trying to direct my first movie. We’d met and been sort of circling each other, trying to find something for a long time, and this was it. She’s incredibly warm, incredibly game, very, very funny. And she wanted to make a movie like Private Benjamin. She saw that she could be another one of these iconic movie blondes, and she was willing to go there and be incredibly goofy and free.
Costume design, hair, and makeup are particularly critical to the character of Rex, who is colorful, creative, a dreamer, and generally upbeat and optimistic. Tell me about your team behind the clothing and cosmetics.
I’m so glad you asked that question because that’s a big passion of mine in making movies, particularly with this movie where Rex’s look was going to be distinctive and not influenced by the times. I had worked with Evren Catlin on my second film, One Percent More Humid. Evren has this incredible imagination, is really resourceful, always under budget, goes to every random thrift store, and she really embraced this idea that Rex would DIY her own clothes – in the same way that she’s building this series of gates for the manatees in the movie, she would build the clothes that she wanted. And so Evren and her incredible team did that. They got people to custom airbrush T-shirts, cut them up, and bedazzled them. And then, translating that to hair and makeup with Carla [Gentry Osorio], who did Emma’s hair, and Nick [London], who did her makeup. I didn’t want her hair to look like other people’s hair. I saw on Pinterest that people were adding adornments to their hair, so Carla bought all these charms and ribbons and wove them into Emma’s hair. And Nick made sure that her makeup, while natural and sort of low maintenance, was also expressive and fun.
Rex (Emma Roberts) in SPACE CADET Photo Credit: Eric Liebowitz//Prime Video
Where did you film the space scenes, and what was involved in choreographing and shooting them?
Our production designer built the exterior of the capsule that Rex takes to space, and then we had rented a set that was like a replica of the exterior of the space station, and then we were shooting against black. One of our VFX supervisors was on the set, because the intention was always to composite what was practical, what we had the actors and the stunt people actually touching, with elaborate VFX that created depth and space. We had a really brilliant VFX supervisor, Bernie Kimbacher, and he was very exacting about making sure that every vantage point was real: where’s the sun, where’s the moon, where’s Earth, and what would be realistically seen, what would the light be like. And working with our cinematographer, John Inwood, and his whole camera department, they really did it.
Rex (Emma Roberts) in SPACE CADET Photo Credit: Eric Liebowitz//Prime Video
There are some great lines in the film that are so nuanced and grounded in real life. One in particular is when Rex’s father gives her a pep talk and ends it by saying, “The game is on,” and leaves to watch it. What’s your approach to writing dialogue that carries the story while entertaining the audience?
Actually, that was Sam [Robards], our actor. He improvised that line. It’s such a gift when you’ve given an actor enough information and you’ve cast the right person that then they can improv in character and it’s totally dead on. And really, all of the actors understood enough to add to their character in a convincing way. In terms of writing comedy, the way I always approach it is that characters are funny when they’re consistent, meaning the comedy comes from learning how a character behaves and sees the world, such that the audience starts to anticipate they’re probably going to react a certain way. So, something might be a funny one-liner, but if it doesn’t reflect the way the character actually sees the world, there’s no point.
Space Cadet is now streaming on Prime Video.
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