Child murder is nothing new to the world of Game of Thrones, and so it must go for House of the Dragon. The first Game of Thrones spinoff to make it to air, House of the Dragon has proven itself a satisfying slow burn that metes out its corporeal punishments judiciously, but when they come, they’re all the more brutal for it. In the season 2 premiere, the scheming, impatient Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) wanted to exact revenge against Prince Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) for killing Prince Lucerys Velaryon (Elliot Grihault) at the end of season 1, so he accomplishes this by paying two assassins to murder King Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney)’s successor, his baby son Jaehaerys Targaryen.
Daemon’s lethal decision is yet another bloody move in the increasingly brutal war between two former friends, Princess Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), and their respective families and allies. The would-be queen Rhaenyra and Queen Alicent have consistently believed they could outmaneuver one another without resorting to the wholesale slaughter that usually arises when two or more men squabble for the Iron Throne. Yet their respective families and allies, like Daemon and Aemond, are not the patient types. There will be blood, to put it mildly.
The scene of the baby Jaehaerys’ murder in the season 2 premiere was thankfully handled off-screen (although we can hear the assassin’s foul work)—episode 2 includes the funeral, one of the most common gatherings for characters in the world George R. R. Martin built considering all the untimely deaths. HBO released a Behind the Scenes look at the creation of the royal funeral in episode 2, which unsurprisingly took a massive amount of detailed work to craft a proper funeral for a young royal and heir to the throne. The pomp and circumstance, the barely sublimated rage coursing beneath the gathering, and the long processional through King’s Landing managed to simultaneously remind us how well we’ve come to know the world of Westeros, yet how subtly different it was during the Targaryen reign 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. The funeral also shifted the focus firmly on Queen Alicent, an intimate portrayal of her grief set against the very public backdrop of King’s Landing.
It was a moody way to open episode 2 and a reminder of just how much bloodier this war between Rhaenyra and Alicent is going to get. The Greens, aligned with Alicent and Aegon II, are now more likely to wage total war against the Rhaenyra and the Blacks. While they’ve got plenty of men whispering—or demanding—they prosecute this war in the most brutal, expeditious manner possible, these two women aren’t easily bullied or cajoled. Yet, as we learned time and time again on Game of Thrones, even the most meticulous plans made with the intention of causing the least amount of harm have a way of devolving into carnage.
Check out the Behind the Scenes Video here. House of the Dragon season 2, episode 3 arrives on Sunday, June 30, on HBO. The first two episodes are streaming now on HBO Max.
For more on House of the Dragon, check out these stories:
The first reactions are pouring in (or are they purring in?) for Paramount’s prequel A Quiet Place: Day One, indicating that writer/director Michael Sarnoski has pulled off a properly satisfying lens-widener on the sci-fi horror franchise created by John Krasinski. Krasinski established the after-effects of a world dominated by blind but exquisitely lethal aliens who hunt by sound inA Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place: Part II (2020). Those films captured the reign of the blind, sound-hunting aliens 472 days and more after their arrival on Earth—now, we finally get to see what the world was right as the alien invasion was underway. It’s not pretty.
Led by Lupita Nyong’o and starring Joseph Quinn, Djimon Hounsou, Alex Wolff, and a cat named Frodo—played by two kitties, Nico and Schnitzel—Day One expands the scope of the franchise even further than Krasinski’s killer follow-up, Part II, did. In Part II, Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) and her children meet other survivors of the alien scourge. In Day One, we’ll see how New York City reacted to their arrival, with Nyong’o’s Sam and Quinn’s Eric coming together under the most insane of circumstances in attempt to survive in the explicable and very sudden alien attack.
“A Quiet Place: Day One is extraordinarily raw exploring the resilience and underestimation of simple human interaction,” writes Critic Carla Renata. “Once again I could hear a pin drop in the theater because everyone was so invested in what would happen to Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, and the cat,” writes Collider‘s Steven Weintraub.
Let’s have a peek at what the critics are saying. A Quiet Place: Day One is in theaters on June 28.
Loved #AQuietPlaceDayOne. It ups the tension from the first two by adding a slew of aliens to the mix. But at its heart, this an emotional story of two lost people finding themselves again. Schnitzel the 🐈 totally steals the show. The ending is outstanding. #aquietplace#nycpic.twitter.com/t8NMWGKkdI
A Quiet Place Day 1 is just as effectively terrifying as the two Krasinski movies and a lot of that has to do with Lupita Nyong’o’s performance which is on par with Blunt’s in those movies. I loved it!
#AQuietPlace DAY ONE is perfect. Michael Sarnoski understood the assignment + didnt miss. As nerve wracking as the scares are they don’t hold a candle to the gut-wrenching, beautiful story at the heart of the movie. Lupita Nyong’o is astonishing + her performance had me in tears. pic.twitter.com/xT95G0LN9o
— Shannon | #FreePalestine 🇵🇸 (@shannon_mcgrew) June 23, 2024
@AQuietPlace is extraordinarily raw exploring the resilience and underestimation of simple human interaction. My favorite of the franchise thus far and a star showcase for Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn. #AQuietPlace#DayOnepic.twitter.com/snyqQAQ6TE
A Quiet Place: Day One is easily my favorite in this franchise. It’s human & raw & is a story about the desperation that exists when all hope is lost & how that turns into a deep connection with each other. Joseph Quinn, you movie star! Lupita Nyong’o has an Oscar for a REASON. pic.twitter.com/Mm4XffHHLs
@AQuietPlace#DayOne shows the Quiet Place universe still has a lot left to explore. Once again I could hear a pin drop in the theater because everyone was so invested in what would happen to Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, and the cat.
How about a one-two punch of excellent horror trilogies … because #AQuietPlaceDayOne is quite good, too!
I loved the first two films, their sky-high tension and their more contained settings, but I also love an epic big city disaster film. Day One delivers that while making the… pic.twitter.com/W0ThLwPT5j
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE might be my favorite of the series. The city setting brings new thrills and nail-biting suspense.
But what truly sets this apart is Lupita Nyong’o and director Michael Sarnoski telling a poignant story about finding inner peace, even during the apocalypse. pic.twitter.com/ja8PBehO7G
Loved #AQuietPlace. Left me with some questions but it was this movie takes the heart pounding tense moments on a grander scale compared to the first two films.
Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn were fantastic and yes that damn cat will have you screaming at the screen. pic.twitter.com/eFPzyF62lO
— B E A N Z (Miss U Mom) (@BeanzGotGamez) June 23, 2024
For more on A Quiet Place: Day One, check out these stories:
There are few people alive with more Star Wars experience than composer Kevin Kiner. While Kiner would be the first to point out that the legendary John Williams has him beat, when it comes to the number of minutes—and hours—of music composed for a galaxy far, far away, Kiner is a proper Jedi. For more than a decade, Kiner has been working with George Lucas and Dave Filoni to score every season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and has added to his endless Star Wars credits scroll Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, and Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi.
Which brings us to Kiner’s work on Filoni’s critically acclaimed Ahsokaon Disney+, the first live-action Star Wars show to spring from one of the franchise’s animated series (Star Wars: Rebels). Ahsoka follows its titular heroine, the rebel Jedi Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), dealing with the rumored return of a terrifically powerful adversary, Grand Admiral Thrawn, played by Lars Mikkelsen (who also voiced him in Rebels).The series is set in the aftermath of the fall of the Galactic Empire, and Ahsoka, a loner by nature, still has a few allies she can rely on. They include her former padawan Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), a capable, if wayward, warrior who Ahsoka worries about and tries to push away in equal measure. Then there’s her trusty droid Huyang (voiced by David Tennant) and General Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), two steadfast companions in a dangerous world. Along with Thrawn, her chief antagonists are the formidable Baylan Skoll (the late Ray Stevenson), his protege Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), and an assortment of galactic ghouls, including ferocious droids and would-be assassins, all working in concert to aid the return of Thrawn.
We spoke to Kiner about taking on the assignment of a lifetime, his hard-to-describe process, and scoring the thrilling arrival of Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen, reprising his role), who’s featured prominently in episode 5, “Shadow Warrior,” as he and Ahsoka plunge into a deeply satisfying trip down memory lane.
What was it like jumping from the animated Star Wars world into live-action?
I co-wrote with my two children, Sean and Dina, and they were a big help in putting together. First, we put together a playlist of stuff we liked, from Max Richter to John Williams. We gave those to Dave [Filoni] and then started thinking, what does a mature Ahsoka sound like? It took a while. It started with Tales of the Jedi. We came up with this samurai vibe. The first three episodes of Tales of the Jedi are about Ahsoka’s birth and growing up. We wound up slowing that groove down quite a lot and then taking her melody, which is a very simple melody, and stretching it out. I guess you could say it’s a level of sophistication, a Ronin samurai vibe that we kept. Funny enough, when I wrote the first cue in the theme for the first time, I wrote it for shakuhachi, a Japanese flute.
Were you inspired by any scores from other live-action Star Wars shows?
I thought what Ludwig Göransson had done with The Mandalorian was super groundbreaking. We’d been experimenting quite a lot with not being John Williams all the time, and I’ve written more music than anyone on Earth for Star Wars, starting with Clone Wars and then going through Rebels and then The Bad Batch and Tales of the Jedi. So when you write that much, you don’t want the music to get stale. So, we started using synthesizers and textures that are not what you would not find in a John Williams score. Star Wars always stays grounded in a way to the Williams legacy because there’s richness, there’s grandness, and there’s a willingness to be very, very broad. I mean, think about “The Imperial March”–that is broad as heck. I saw an interview with John about when he played the Jaws theme to Steven Spielberg, and Spielberg thought it was a joke. And John’s like, no, this is really it. But John Williams can pull that off.
And Ludwig went a different way.
Ludwig took it in a new direction. He set the bar for what we call “main on ends,” which is the end credits theme, because everybody listens to that and knows that’s the theme. That was a big challenge for us—we wanted our theme to be equally iconic.
What’s it like for you as the composer shaping Ahsoka’s emotional journey? We learn how she became a rebel Jedi, her connection to Anakin Skywalker, and her fear of having a Padawan—it’s very emotional.
That’s kind of Scoring 101 because Rosario gave it to us, and Dave Filoni gave it to us in his writing. We flashback to young Ahsoka, and that actress [Ariana Greenblatt] is absolutely perfect and wonderful. The whole job of the score is to inform the audience in a musical way of what is going on, and that information can be about very deep things that you don’t necessarily see or hear in the dialogue. Ahsoka is a young girl in that flashback. She’s tired of life as a warrior; that’s all she has known. Then, further on in that episode, you can see that the older Ahsoka is very conflicted about having a Padawan in Sabine, and she’s conflicted about what she’s going to become because her Master became Darth Vader. There’s a saying that “talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” and it’s very difficult for me to elucidate exactly how I do it. Writing music for me is a very emotional thing; it’s kind of like jazz. You just jam with the feelings, and Dave Filoni arms me with really good information about the characters, and I have to just go through what I’m feeling and try to communicate that.
Let’s discuss the episode you’re talking about, episode 5, “Shadow Warrior,” in which we travel back to a young Ahsoka and her master, Anakin Skywalker.
I was proud of a couple of places in that episode. There’s a spot where Anakin is at the end of the siege of Mandalore, and young Ahsoka is saying, “I don’t want to do this,” and then he says, “Then you will die. She keeps reiterating, “I’m going to stop,” and he’s like, “Wrong answer.” It’s just before they go back to the world between worlds. We do this build with French horns and trombones, which I was very satisfied to hear. With the way the cue works when Ahsoka’s lightsaber is at Anakin’s neck—Dave and I worked on that particular moment for a very long time because he wasn’t positive if he was going to use the sound of the lightsaber for her; he wanted the audience to feel like she was about to chop his head off.
What about your music for the space whales scene?
You talk about the fine line of Star Wars; I mean, space whales that could have gone really wrong, right? And to pull that off, to have the cojones to go for that—I feel like the music helped support the magic of these marvelous creatures. I’m a very ocean-centric person, I’m always surfing and things like that, going out and looking at the whales when they’re around. When Ahsoka has her arms out and she’s commuting with that giant creature, I was very satisfied with how that cue turned out.
What’s it like being a part of the Star Wars family?
You just gave me goosebumps, I swear to God. If you had told me in 1977 when I was in that theater in Westwood that I’d be a part of the Star Wars family—holy crap.
They never achieved the notoriety of the Hell’s Angels, but during the 1960s, when the California biker gang became infamous outlaws, the Vandals were wreaking their own brand of hog-riding havoc in Chicago. The Bikeriders (in theaters June 21) dramatizes the rise and fall of the Midwest club led by Tom Hardy’s “Johnny” and his violent right-hand man Benny (Austin Butler), as observed through the often-astonished eyes of Benny’s wife Kathy (Jodie Comer).
Writer/director Jeff Nichols’s film, shot in Ohio and based on photojournalist Danny Lyon’s “The Bikeriders” book, evokes the Vandals’ 1965-1973 heyday through the expert curation of period motorcycles and music as well as vintage biker outfits from Nichols’ go-to costume designer Erin Benach. The graphic designer turned costumer, whose most recent projects include Birds of Prey and A Star is Born, outfitted some 200 actors in well-worn jeans and biker jackets.
Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, Erin tells The Credits about sourcing all that vintage gear, explains how she costumed Austin Butler’s “I don’t care” character, and reveals her trick for aging the jeans worn by “Vandals” like Zipco (Michael Shannon), Corky (Karl Glusman) and Wahoo (Beau Knapp).
In the movie’s big set piece, 200 bikers gather for a rowdy picnic, all looking period-perfect grungy. How did you pull that off?
It’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my career. We sourced a ton of vintage, hand-made 200 [denim vest] cuts, and also made the [Vandals] patches.
The Vandals wear blue jeans that look very broken in—nothing crisp or new. How did you make the pants look old?
It was really important that everything was aged down, so we over-dyed all the denim with this blue-green tint to make the jeans feel road-weary. Nothing went to camera without going through my ager-dyer Troy David, who’s a real artisan. We looked at the dirt they’d be driving over and made this paint. Troy used a spray bottle and sprayed it on everything so it looked like it was covered in dust from the road. Sometimes, we’d use a brush to paint on the dirt and mud. That way, you can wash the jeans, and it won’t wash away, so you don’t have to worry about continuity issues.
Where’d you get all those 1960s-era leather jackets?
We were in London for many of the fittings, so I started to poke around in Camden Market and talked to the guy who owns a shop with a lot of denim, “I’m doing this movie. Do you know anyone?” “Oh yeah, I know this guy who has a warehouse with a bunch of leather jackets, maybe you should call him,” and then you get in a van and drive two hours outside the city and go to this warehouse, and suddenly there’s this person who’s been hoarding leather jackets for like a hundred years and you don’t know why but it was for you really. [laughing]. It was just for me!
Benny’s as nonchalant as you can get: “I don’t care, I don’t want to look like I care.” So we wanted the jacket and the cut [vest] to be like it fell onto his body or that he just rolled out of bed with it on. His clothes are stripped down and basic because it was important that Benny didn’t have too many details, that he wasn’t over-designed, and that he wasn’t too fitted, so you feel his ambivalence of even being there. For me as a designer, it was actually about holding back with Benny. Less is more.
Danny Lyon’s picture book “The Bikeriders” inspired director Jeff Nichols to make this film. Did you also use that book as a reference?
Absolutely. Some things were a complete lift. That sleeveless black T-shirt on Benny standing by the pool table was a complete replica, but even that has its own challenges. Is it sweatshirt material? How do you get the shirt to lie right and not be flat black and feel dirty?
The movie opens with Benny in a bar refusing to take off his Vandals jacket, saying “You’ll have to kill me to get my coat off.” The denim jacket with cut-off sleeves…
The denim pieces that go over the jackets, we call them cuts.
The gang “colors” — the Vandals patch — seem to play an important role in these characters’ identity.
The cut was kind of a character unto itself. The [Vandals] logo was an embroidered patch chain-stitched onto the jackets. Some [bikers] would cut out the patch close to the letters and stitch that on, and some, like Benny, would just keep the square patch straight off the embroiderer: “Yeah, I’ll throw that thing on,” and tack it in the corners.
Tom Hardy plays the Vandal’s leader, Johnny. In the movie, Jodie Comer’s character Kathy says she heard that Johnny started the biker gang after seeing Marlon Brando in The Wild Bunch on TV. Did Brando’s famous black leather jacket inspire your look for Johnny?
I was definitely influenced by Marlon Brando’s silhouette, which is actually very similar to Johnny’s silhouette, the jeans, the boots, the belts, the jacket — very much an influence.
And the jacket?
Johnny actually wore a classic leather jacket style from the forties. I stuck with silhouettes and styles for Johnny that were specific to the forties and fifties, a little earlier than the sixties, as my way to differentiate him. The zipper thing [on the sleeves] was functional because it allowed bikers to get their gloves underneath it. And for Johnny, we did a deep pocket leather jacket that first appeared in the late thirties so bikers could keep their maps in that pocket.
Did you make Johnny’s jacket from scratch, or was that a vintage piece you sourced in London?
Secret. I will not tell. I built several of the lead characters’ leather jackets, and I sourced several of the lead character jackets if we were able to find multiple.
The Bikeriders story is told mainly from the perspective of Benny’s wife, Kathy, portrayed by Jodie Comer as a no-nonsense working-class Chicago woman. How did you express Kathy’s attitude through her clothes?
Kathy was very strong. We wanted her to not change a ton [after she meets Benny]. For us, it was important that Kathy didn’t turn into a biker chick.
At her fittings, Jodie would sort of put her hips forward, place her hands or arms in a certain position – that’s when you start to feel her character. I put shirts on her and tank tops and sweaters and knit wears and denims. At times, she’d wear this black western-style shirt with the white piping and snaps because that was actually in the reference material. Kathy is the feminine energy of the whole film and represents the experience of being a woman in this culture. It was important that she maintain who she was throughout all these experiences.
The Bikeriders is the third movie you’ve costume-designed for Jeff Nichols after Midnight Special and Loving. How did you two first get together?
I watched Jeff’s [2011 drama] Take Shelter and said to my agent I want to work with that guy. The movie blew me away — the tone, the sci-fi, the amount of detail, the psychology of the characters. So I went after him. Jeff’s really good at sharing with me everything about the characters, and that enables me to do my job of interpreting their personalities.
Based on Donald L. Miller’s 2007 book of the same name, Masters of the Air on Apple TV+ has been praised as theatrical television that’s both true to history and beautiful to watch. Created by John Shiban and John Orloff, the show marries vast set builds with painstakingly correct CGI to depict the tragedies and heroics of the 100th Bomb Group, which flew over 300 combat missions and received two Distinguished Unit Citations but also suffered heavy losses of 177 aircraft during World War II.
Navigator Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) narrates Masters of the Air, but the show frequently hinges on the 100th’s star pilots, Major John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner) and Major Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler). The pair are best friends but temperamental opposites — Cleven is reserved and serious, committed to his fiancée at home, and doesn’t drink, while Egan is a joker spoiling for a fight, at least when he first arrives at the base in England. Butler and Egan originally auditioned for each other’s roles, but then switched.
Austin Butler and Callum Turner in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Butler’s breakout role was as Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic, and he brings similar elements of a country boy who’s done good to his role as Cleven. Turner, who grew up in London, is spot on in terms of both Egan’s Wisconsin-meets-New York accent and the waggish demeanor the pilot never quite loses, even after months in a German POW camp. But we also see Egan suffer immensely, both mentally and physically, which Turner portrays in a way that builds from episode to episode, as the major internalizes the danger he faces up in the air and in turn, the destruction he is causing to civilians below.
Adam Long, Matt Gavan, Callum Turner and Austin Butler in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
By the time we reach a tragicomic moment in which Egan tries to organize a group of his fellow POWs into “home” and “away” teams in a game of prison yard baseball, the major’s transformation is complete, even if there is still a glimpse of the boy he was when he first came to fight. We had the opportunity to speak with Turner about getting the reality of Egan’s arc right, leading his crew with Butler, and the friendship that defined the real major’s time at war.
The friendship Egan and Cleven share is integral to each of their characters. How did you and Austin Butler develop your rapport to achieve that?
First off, we just fell in love with each other as human beings and respect each other enormously as actors. We committed to the idea of being best friends and spent as much time with each other as possible, and got to know each other on a deeper level than is probably usual. The actual way these two operated was yin and yang, and I think that yin and yangness really helps their cadence with each other and their friendship. They were the two best pilots of B-17s at the time. They’d both joined up before Pearl Harbor had happened, they both wanted to fight the good fight, and realized they were the leaders in a pack of men and had to stand together and stand proudly. That was their connective tissue. Once they’re bound by trust and this truth and this togetherness, you can do anything. I love the fact that they don’t spend all their time with each other. Their ways of blowing off steam are completely different. Cleven likes to relax, take it easy, and be quiet; Egan is the opposite. That balance was really fun to play with.
Callum Turner and Austin Butler in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
What was your training process like?
We started off with two weeks of boot camp with Dale Dye. He [advised on and played a role in] Platoon and has done pretty much every war epic since. What that was really about was creating what the real guys had, which was crew glue. Crew glue was the thing that kept everybody together, the ideology that kept everyone alive, that it’s not about you, it’s about the man next to you. That’s who you’re fighting for. You’re not fighting for yourself. There were really beautiful moments of togetherness. I think what we all realized very early on was the magnitude of what we were all involved in and how special it was for so many reasons — the fact that it’s legacy television and we’re in the same family as Band of Brothers and ThePacific, and people like Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks. We’re also representing people who, as far as I’m concerned, saved the world. We all realized what we were up against and what we were doing this for. Everyone was a great bunch.
Did you do any sort of accent training to get Egan’s unusual Wisconsin accent down?
About two months before we shot, I met up with Brett Tyne, who was one of two dialect coaches—the other was Helen Ashton. I said to her, I want to stay in the accent the whole time, and I need to see you for two hours a day for two months. We really worked hard on that voice and trying to find that Wisconsin thing, but also, Egan was obsessed with New York. He was a huge fan of the Yankees, and he was obsessed with Damon Runyon. “Guys and Dolls” was a book I read over and over while we shot the show. He had this offbeat way of talking, this almost New York thing he was putting on. He was a really interesting character to find. Once we started shooting, we’d do an hour a day before work just to get that in the right place. Poor Brett.
How did you start researching the role?
There’s an abundance of information out there. I found this photo of a Russian soldier from World War I. It’s a before and after. Before, he’s fresh faced, he’s proud and ready to go and serve his country. He somehow survived, and he’s come back, but he’s a shell of a man. You can see the veins in his face and the wrinkles, the sunken eyes. That was something I recognized in Egan’s journey, and which he talked about himself. His arc was coming into the war with a naivety, thinking it’s going to be over in a year, and after seven months, he doesn’t recognize who he is anymore. He realized he had no one at home to support and no one to be supported by. He was dropping bombs on people and doing something that made him question what he was doing there. That was the fascinating journey for Egan, this journey into darkness. My grandad went to war, and he would never talk about it. I think that was the question: what did these people see that makes them never want to talk about it again? That was Egan’s journey, and by the end of it, he’s changed in a way that he never really recovered, I don’t think, to anywhere near a level that was okay for him again.
Callum Turner in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Was there particular media that also helped in your research?
There’s a film collection by Frank Capra and John Huston, amongst others, who went to World War II and filmed. I think John Huston did one in a hospital afterward, when soldiers would come back, and he would show what was happening to these men, what we would now call PTSD. And there were so many books. There was a book about an English pilot who went down over Holland and tried to escape. I just tried to take on as much information before we started trying to build this human being, this character.
You also did flight training, right?
We didn’t have any real B-17s, but we had replicas that would move. We had Taigh [Ramey, the WWII aviation advisor and B17 technical advisor], who would train us. We had to know every button on the dashboard, what it meant, and how to use it. He’d put us in the cockpit, and say, okay, this is happening, what do you need to do? The funny thing about working with 200 young men is everyone’s really competitive. No one wanted to be the one who was left behind, so we were all very on it with that.
Callum Turner and Austin Butler in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
How did you fare?
I think I was probably top three. Our ranks were important. Austin and I definitely felt that we had to lead from the front. There was a lot of responsibility in that. It was our job to set the tone for these guys to follow. If I was number 11, that wouldn’t have been good.
Was there a sense of responsibility going into this role, playing a real person? Did you approach the role differently than you would a fictional character?
I don’t know if I would approach it differently, but I definitely felt the pressure. Honor is a word these men had, and that’s what we were trying to do — honor them. That’s what I love about this show; we do honor them in a way that’s truthful and honest. We don’t glamorize war and glorify them in a way that I don’t think they would want. We really look at the effects of war and what happens to these men, not just fighting against the Germans, watching their friends being blown up and falling to the ground from 25,000 feet, but also dropping bombs on people — what that does to your soul and psyche. We really show, back on the ground, how that affects their behavior and how that changes them as men. That’s one of the many things I’m really proud of about the show: that we don’t glorify this horrific moment in our history.
Masters of the Air is streaming on Apple TV+.
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Graham Yost had his work cut out for him when he set out to tackle author Hugh Howey’s apocalyptic sci-fi trilogy series “Silo,” all of which are set in the titular structure (none of Howey’s books are actually titled “Silo”) and deal with the society that lives within it’s 144 heavily monitored floors. The denizens of the Silo live in a claustrophobic brutalist tower outfitted with retrofuturistic touches that include clunky computers, a large screen in the cafeteria showing what appears to be a denuded, toxic world outside, and, suspiciously, not a single elevator. The Silo houses a society that cannot leave the premises unless they want to “clean,” a process in which they willingly step outside the Silo, take a rag to the single, dirty window facing the outside world, and promptly keel over and die. Nearly all of them choose to stay indoors and spend their entire lives there, living in the aftermath of a cataclysm that went unrecorded. To live in the Silo is to live in a blank historical slate, and to live in the Silo is to schlep everywhere, all under the watchful eye of the Watchers.
Common in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
It’s rich material to turn into a series, and Yost and his crack team of writers, directors (including Morten Tyldum), cast, and crew pulled it off. Yost led the effort to tease out deeper stories from Howey’s cast of characters, especially a gifted if emotionally guarded engineer named Juliet (a fantastic Rebecca Ferguson) who feels compelled to accept the position of sheriff—Silo successfully melds sci-fi, western, and mystery elements—to investigate the murder of her boyfriend, George (Ferdinand Kingsley).
We spoke to Yost about what it took to bring Howey’s trilogy to life, how in the world he built out the Silo’s ingenious sets, and more.
What were your initial thoughts when you got to work to adapt Hugh Howey’s book series?
Me and the writers had the books that we could refer to, so we knew where we were headed long term, we just had to make sure that we didn’t burn through it too fast or too slowly. So that’s the calibration process. I will say this: We did a lot of work in season one, setting up the world and setting up the characters. We don’t have to do that so much in season 2, so we’ve got a little more room for more story and more stuff happening.
Did it make it easier or harder that the series is exclusively set in this giant Silo?
The hard part was everything had to be built, and there’s limited stage space in England right now, which means you have to design the production around when you’re building what sets. And so there are certain big circular sets that become IT bullpen, which becomes the marketplace, which becomes any other big circular set. So it’s this big logistical nightmare of figuring out how to film the thing. On the other hand, it’s all indoors, there’s no night shooting, and barely any locations.
I’m curious how you paced out the season to the satisfyingly shocking finale. Spoiler alert.
We had a question of when we would find out that the world was really dead outside, because in the books, we’re in Holston’s point of view, and when he takes off his helmet, he sees that the world really is dead. It was Max Aronson at Apple who said, “Hey, what if we didn’t reveal that until the end, so that’s a mystery, too?” And I was like, “That’s a really good idea. Let it be Juliet who takes the audience into that.” So, once we had the ending, we knew that we wanted to start with the Sheriff and his wife, which we knew was a risky move. But we also knew that the first two episodes would be released together, and people would hopefully get hooked into the Juliette story when she shows up.
Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.Rebecca Ferguson and Chinaza Uche in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
One of the fascinating surprises for the viewer, especially for those who didn’t read the book, was when Juliette went from being an engineer to the sheriff. The show became a bit of a police procedural as she tried to figure out who killed her boyfriend, George.
When we had the beginning and the end, we knew we had to build out something for the middle. We needed to figure out Juliette’s story because she doesn’t spend that much time as sheriff in the book, so we knew we wanted to make more of a meal of that. That’s where we ended on, “Well, she wants to find out what happened to her boyfriend.” Let’s make it that.
Rebecca Ferguson and Chinaza Uche in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Can you tell me a bit about how you managed to meld various genres so well—it’s a little bit Western, a little bit of detective story, a little bit conspiracy thriller, and a whole lot of sci-fi.
We wanted it to feel as grounded as possible so that all the bits of world-building would stand out. Like Sheriff Holston [David Oyelowo] and Allison [Rashida Jones] are a married couple who love each other, and they get into squabbles and have workplace and home life conflicts, and all this stuff. They want to have a baby, that’s very understandable. And then we start putting the spin on it. Juliette becomes the new sheriff in town, and there’s something that’s almost noir, like in Hitchcock, where you would get the amateur detective. Someone who’s not a detective, not a cop, but who’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I just watched Foreign Correspondent again recently, and Joel McCrea is trying to figure out what the hell’s happening, but he’s not a law enforcement guy. And Juliet is technically a law enforcement person, but she’s really an engineer, so we figured that is a wonderful engine to pull people through.
How much of Juliette’s investigation are you pulling from the book versus how much of that is you in the writers’ room, kind of figuring out the puzzles puzzle pieces?
You know, it’s really both. I was part of a Sony attempt to get the rights eight years ago or more nine years ago, and then I got a second chance with Apple. What hooked me about the books was that it’s an unconventional mystery story, and the mystery is, “Why the hell are they in an asylum? Who built the asylum? What happened? There’s something wrong. It’s not an open society. What’s the hell is going on?” So that’s fun. And then I love the way Hugh slowly revealed that without it being programmatic in any way. It evolves over the three books, so that appealed to me. It felt like there was enough stuff that you could do multiple seasons and have more revealed along the way without it being something where we’d be stretching where we should have found this out in Episode 4, but instead, you’re finding out in Episode 8.
Yet you created a lot of Juliette’s story yourselves? Spoiler alert.
There’s not a lot in the first half of the first book for Juliet to do after she becomes sheriff—it’s not long before she’s sent out the clean in the book. So we built more of a story for her, trying to find out what happened to her boyfriend, which also just gave up a nice engine for that character and something personal because I love the idea that Juliet never, ever set out to be the hero of the silo. That was preposterous to her. All she wanted to find out is what happened to her boyfriend.
Rebecca Ferguson in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Silo is currently streaming on Apple TV.
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Praised for its authenticity, beauty, and sensitive storytelling, FX’s Shōgun has just been renewed for two more seasons. Created by Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, the show follows the plot of James Clavell’s 1975 novel, set in Japan in 1600. English pilot John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and his ship’s crew run aground in a Japanese fishing village, and after a brief imprisonment, Blackthorne is taken on by Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada, also one of the series’ producers) to share his knowledge on European warfare and the Portuguese merchants and priests insinuating themselves into Japanese society. As Blackthorne comes to embrace the country where he finds himself indefinitely marooned, he also gets into a power struggle with the Catholic Church-backed Portuguese and falls quietly in love with his translator, Lady Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), a married noblewoman and Catholic convert. But these tribulations are secondary to those of the lord Blackthorne comes to serve. Toranaga rules over the country’s Kanto region, but is increasingly isolated by his fellow council of regents, over whom Ishido (Takehiro Hira) is attempting to consolidate power. Blackthorne’s presence becomes key to Toranaga’s own machinations, to not only escape but emerge triumphant from an otherwise dire fate.
Whether in the courtyards of Osaka Castle, outdoors in the hot springs of a small fishing village, or sequestered in hushed, tatami-mat-lined rooms, Shōgun’s acute attention to detail encompasses not just its visuals but its sound. “Authenticity is what the creators were looking for from top to bottom,” said sound supervisor Brian Armstrong. “That was our guiding post, to take what we typically do and really focus it on the specificity of everything, from the dishes to the nature.”
The sound team was given a handbook, which “almost puts the original text of Shōgun to shame, with how much information was contained in this thing,” Armstrong joked. Outside a few heightened scenes like a cannon attack, which the team set about making sound extra “ghoulish,” or slow-motion, theatrical moments in which Mariko’s husband, Buntaro (Shinnosuke Abe), deliberately fires an arrow a hair past his wife’s nose, for Armstrong and re-recording mixers Steve Pederson and Greg P. Russell, faithfulness to both history and the natural world drove their process. “We found scientific recordings of birds that had a time of year and location. Jim Gallivan, one of our sound designers, would research the migrational patterns of the birds just so that all of that was accurate,” Armstrong said.
Sourcing recordings of the natural world wasn’t easy — many had either technological noises foreign to the 17th century or voices that were too modern, given that the show’s Japanese dialogue is period language akin to Shakespeare. Yet unlike so much dialogue in contemporary television, every syllable in Shōgun is crisply audible, a meticulous undertaking, even though none of the sound team speaks Japanese.
“We talked very early on that we were never going to use the subtitles as a crutch. We’re going to treat this as if they weren’t there. Because clarity is king,” Armstrong said. He handed Pederson a challenge, sometimes cutting in a single syllable of ADR or using the first part of a word from ADR and the last half from production, in an effort to be “surgical and precise about what we’re trying to fix while keeping as much of the original performance as possible.” Producers Hiroyuki Sanada and Eriko Miyagawa were in every single group session, making sure the cast of villagers’ lines suited the time and place. “These little things, a syllable or an inflection that the production determined to be incorrect — we had to correct it in post, and audiences would not have gotten that, especially if it’s in Japanese. But the filmmakers were aware, and it just points out their zeal to be as authentic as possible. And it was our challenge to help them get there and match the beautiful visuals,” Pederson said.
An intense level of collaboration permeated the process. “Had we not had the Japanese film editors and their input, we would have attacked this entire thing as us, and it would have been different,” Russell said. “The notes that we got back, the tailoring to their taste and for authenticity, and respecting the culture, really shaped how we went about our job. We made a lot of changes.” Even the sound of the samurais’ swords had to be updated to sound right, having started off life too bright and overly Westernized when what they needed to be expressed correctly was a sense of heaviness.
The show’s spare, period-correct interiors were also a focal point for the team’s efforts. No detail was too small — they discussed whether paper sounded too thick or too thin with creator Justin Marks, who “even talked about how the tatami mats have a weave pattern, that if you’re going one way across them, sounds different than if you’re going the opposite way,” Armstrong pointed out. The show’s score, by Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross, and Nick Chuba, followed a similar pattern, with a Japanese arranger in Tokyo recording period-correct instruments according to a 17th-century style of music called gagaku. The composers took these recordings, distorted them, and incorporated them into their score. “You’re thinking, is that done on a synth? And you find out, no, it’s actually a meditation bowl,” Pederson said.
Indoors, restrained but revealing discussions complement the vastness of the natural world outside. Mariko explains early on to Blackthorne that Japan is at the mercy of the elements, and its people conduct their lives and build their homes accordingly. When an earthquake comes, the destruction is a measured, realistic shock. “That’s a sequence near and dear to our hearts,” Armstrong said, to which he and his team took an approach of addition by subtraction. The sound of horses, a distant army, and music disappear one by one, “and all we’re left with are these winds and this eerie silence that Toranaga picks up on as he’s standing on the cliff. And then there’s practically nothing before that big flock of birds comes up that signifies something big is coming.” Toranaga’s near-death in the landslide that results is terrifyingly real. “I think it might have been Justin who said, can we can we see if there’s a way to lose the music? Let’s put the audience on a mountain with an earthquake,” Pederson recalled. The event becomes an arc rather than a blow, with a bigger sense of sound saved for the post-quake landslide and Toranaga’s rescue, followed by the painful calls at varying distances from villagers who survived.
An auditory sense of distance also drives home the terror of another moment: Ishido’s hired assassins who come to Osaka Palace to murder Toranaga’s supporters, eventually penning Mariko, Blackthorne, and several others in a store room. We hardly see them and we hardly hear them, either, given that the Shinobi work silently, yet there’s an auditory sense of their approach. “There’s stuff close up that’s right outside the door. Then there’s stuff, 80 feet, 100 feet back. All of those relationships give you a sense of the scale of the threat,” Russell said. Well-placed footsteps and hushed voices portray the Shinobi surrounding them until Mariko and Blackthorne realize there is no escape, leading to one of the series’ most painfully iconic moments.
But in Shōgun, those sorts of big moments are on an equal footing in terms of their importance to the story with scenes where much less happens, whether it’s a convoy leaving Osaka Castle or a conversation between Blackthorne and one of his vassals on a mountaintop. “When you look at the beauty of these shots, and the space and the scale of things, even small intimate moments have this very rich look,” Russell said. “And we needed to marry that — we needed to sonically be as pretty, as delicate, and as rich.” The result is a show that not only looks completely different from anything else currently on television but possesses its own unique sense of sound, too.
Inside Out earned its co-writer Meg LeFauve a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination en route to becoming 2015’s seventh-highest-grossing movie. Last weekend, Inside Out 2 hit the box office jackpot again. Directed by Kelsey Mann, the Pixar sequel opened with $295 million worldwide by animating the emotional roller coaster experienced by 13-year-old Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) when she enters puberty amid an avalanche of new feelings. Joy (Amy Poehler) tries to maintain a semblance of normality with her sidekicks: Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale), and Disgust (Liza Lapira). But when Riley goes to hockey camp and gets the chance to hang with older, cooler girls led by Valentina (Lilimar Hernandez), she becomes overwhelmed by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Envy (Ayo Edebiri) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).
Speaking from her Studio City home in Los Angeles, LeFauve, who co-wrote the sequel with Dave Holstein, de-constructs the big emotions that wreak havoc on Inside Out 2’s heroine and pulls back the curtain on Pixar’s famously meticulous story-building process.
It was a stroke of high-strung genius to introduce Anxiety as Inside Out 2‘slead disrupter. It’s a feeling well-suited to adolescence in particular and, more generally, to the times we’re living in right now. How did Anxiety emerge as the dominant emotion once Riley hits puberty?
Our director Kelsey Mann pitched [executive producer] Pete Docter the idea to bring in Anxiety and make Riley thirteen. Kelsey had a very personal connection to that [emotion] in terms of his own childhood, and Pete really liked the idea. Then I came on, and we did a ton of research about anxiety. The script changed many times, but Anxiety was always going to be predominant.
Besides all the research, did you also draw on your own experiences as a teenager?
My dad used to call me Moody Meg. I was a very emotional child, and I was really bad at hiding it. What I didn’t understand at the time is that when I started coming online as an artist and writer, imagination land was getting bigger: The tap is turned on, but what do you do with it? Well, anxiety says, “I know what to do: let’s just tap into that imagination and start projecting what could possibly go wrong!” So I became very good at that. I was a worry wart. My grandfather used to say, “You have early grey hair. You worry so much.” But it’s just because your imagination is being funneled through anxiety. You want to feel safe because everything feels so disjointed. “What’s happening to me?!”
The movie opens with Riley as a happy 12-year-old. Then she falls asleep, and literally overnight, Riley wakes up yelling at her mom and acting like a cranky teenager now that the frizzy-haired Anxiety has taken over her brain.
Anxiety comes on pretty hard, and it sure feels like it happens overnight both when you are that [teenager] person and again when you have a kid: “Wait a minute, who just walked down for breakfast today? Holy smokes!”
Do you have kids?
Two boys, twenty and eighteen now, but they were teenagers when I was writing the script. It’s that time in your life when your parents, brothers, and sisters recede in importance. Your sense of self starts moving into friend groups. You become self-conscious. It’s a very intense time, and we wanted to capture that.
When Anxiety takes over Riley’s brain, she’s accompanied by Ennui, Envy, and Embarrassment. How did you connect with these new emotions of adolescence?
Well, I mostly relate to ennui when raising teenagers because—the eye-rolling! I’m sure I did a lot of eye-rolling when I was a teenager, but boy, when you’re a parent, you really feel that one.
Then there’s Envy.
The truth is that Envy tells you what you want. It’s good to tap into that because it’s a way of knowing yourself and being aware of yourself.
Come on! If Embarrassment is the biggest emotion, just like he is on the screen. And the idea that Embarrassment doesn’t talk because…he’s embarrassed. He was fun to write.
The original Inside Out established the basic architecture of Riley’s brain—spheres of memory, pneumatic tubes to transport long-term memories, and the control board where emotions gather. This time, Joy and her gang encounter The Vault, Mount Crushmore, and other new features. How did you approach the new design elements?
I loved Kelsey’s idea of the wrecking ball, that [puberty] can feel like you’re going to pieces. And it was tremendous fun to work with Pixar artists throwing all these wonderful ideas about where we could go. My job as the writer was to make sure it all fits into Joy’s journey because her character movement creates the structure, everything she realizes about herself and, therefore, about Riley and her relationship with Anxiety.
There were days when I wondered, “Who came up with this rule that we have to follow?” Oh, right, don’t worry—that was me. We could always go into fun worlds, but I need to know why we’re there for Joy. The other emotions have moments that help Joy see something because her belief system is changing.
Meanwhile, in Riley’s world, all the kids are pretty nice. Did you want to avoid mean-girl villains?
Kelsey clearly didn’t want to do Mean Girls—by the way, I love that movie—but we worked very hard to ensure there were no mean girls here. And I love the idea of the girl crush.
SPOILER
With Riley idolizing the older hockey star Valentina. . .
I think that’s a real thing because you want to be that girl. Yet Val cares a lot about Riley; she’s the one reaching out and telling her friends, “Come on, give her a break.” That was very intentional.
Toward the end of the big hockey game, Riley scores goals, but she’s haunted by this inner voice saying, “I’m not good enough.” What’s that about?
The thinking was that anxiety can drive you to do things that look like success to the outside world. You can get the goal, you can get the money, and you can get the big job title. But [at this point in the movie] Riley’s not playing hockey for the joy of it; she’s playing hockey to impress other people. It’s not about, “I love this,” but “Will they accept me?” That does happen in adolescence, and trust me, there were moments at Pixar [meetings] where I was like, “Wait a minute, feel your feet, Meg, because your sense of self is moving outside of yourself. Go back to the story. Get back to your body.” It’s normal to want other people to view you a certain way, but it’s important to remember joy and self-compassion.
You mention Pixar, which is well known forrigorous story-building methods.Did you enjoy being part of that process?
You get a lot of notes. You get a lot of hard questions. But everybody knows it’s all in service of the story because Pixar is about iterations, about letting go, and allowing things to blow up, especially in the early stages, about being brave and starting over. Our executive producer, Pete Docter, is a genius who created all of this [the Inside Out universe] to begin with, so if you want new emotions, you go to Pete and ask why these emotions, where they come from, how they help the journey of the characters. So yes, there’s that rigor. At the same time, Pixar wants you on the edge, trying things and learning from failure. For example, we had Shame in the movie for a long time as an antagonist, but it just didn’t feel right to Kelsey. As much as Shame gave us, it took too much away. So we went back to just Anxiety as the center.
You had to address feedback not just from Pixar creatives but also from a group of nine teenagers called Riley’s Crew, who watched early versions of the film. What was it like getting notes from a 14-year-old?
It was amazing! First of all, they came so prepared. They brought notes, and they wanted to talk about what they liked, which people always forget to do. They were really direct about what didn’t work, which was incredibly helpful.
You started working on Inside Out 2 in pre-pandemic 2020 and attended the red carpet premiere just a few days ago. How do you look back on this deep immersion in the world of teen emotions?
It’s been a privilege to be part of these movies that have rippled into the world. Having people talk to you about how they see themselves and how they see their kids so that we don’t feel so alone—to me, that’s what storytelling is all about.
Inside Out 2 is in theaters now.
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It’s the week of April 13th and on the call sheet to host the 17th episode of SNL’s 49th season is Ryan Gosling, an actor who’s been capturing the hearts of hopeless romantics since The Notebook. The Canadian’s filmography is a treasure trove of unforgettable performances, from Blue Valentine, Drive, The Big Short, La La Land, and Blade Runner 2049; Gosling has pretty much established his own Hollywood Walk of Fame. But for obvious reasons, let’s not overlook Barbie, where his magnetic charm captured a new generation of fans (and critics) with a supporting role that bagged him his third Oscar nomination.
(L-R) RYAN GOSLING as Ken and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Hosting for a third time since 2015, Gosling was at 30 Rockefeller Plaza promoting the action-comedy The Fall Guy, where during the hour-long episode, he would perform a showstopping monologue, appear in six hilarious live sketches as well as a digital exclusive dubbed Papyrus 2 that cleverly calls back a season 43 sketch where his character Steven has a pathological disdain for the Avatar title font.
Dressing Gosling for what would become a standout episode of the season was costume designer Tom Broecker and his wardrobe team, including co-costume designers Cristina Natividad and Ashley Dudek. Wednesday kicked off the strenuous week for the tight-knit behind-the-scenes crew, where a table read of roughly forty sketches is dwindled down to about fifteen. “The reading is normally divided into two sessions where we will do the first half, take a little break, and then do the second half,” notes Broecker, who has been part of SNL since 1994. “The show then gets chosen, and everyone scatters to break into their individual groups before we all come back and start talking about specific things. Like what the writer’s hopes, wishes, desires, and dreams are in terms of hair, makeup, and wardrobe.”
Broecker’s early focus was on the musical monologue that recreated the Barbenheimer phenomenon in glorious song and dance. The performance has Gosling playing piano before breaking out into an extravagant song and dance number that’s interrupted by The Fall Guy co-star Emily Blunt, who played the wife of the Atomic Bomb mastermind in Christopher Nolan’s biopic. The costume designer had to pin down the visuals of the sketch, which had cameos from Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, and multiple background dancers.
“It just so happens that Ellen Mirojnick [costume designer on Oppenheimer] is a friend of mine, so the research on Oppenheimer was easy,” he says. “She gave the name of the person from whom she got that hat, which was in Los Angeles. We also talked to Universal, who has the Oppenheimer suit, and they were able to send us some really amazing pictures. And because it needed to be so specifically Oppenheimer, we ended up having a tailor in the city make the suits.”
The costume team sourced suits for the female dancers and another for Mikey Day, who filled in for Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer. Hats were also custom-made, boots hand-painted, and the smallest detail was not overlooked. “We were never going to find his belt buckle anywhere,” he says. “And our makeup artist Louie [Zakarian] has been 3D printing a lot of things we can’t find, so we gave him a picture of the buckle and the dimensions to 3D print them. Then Ashley [Dudek] and my other crew went in and painted them to look exactly like the Oppenheimer buckle.”
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE — Episode 1861 — Pictured: (l-r) Surprise guest Emily Blunt and host Ryan Gosling during the Monologue on Saturday, April 13, 2024 — (Photo by: Will Heath/NBC)
For the Barbie portion, the costume department found the exact pink and white checkered fabric and made dresses from it featuring a bow on the front. They also hand-painted and hand-dyed the pink shoes.
Another highlight moment of Gosling’s monologue is when he’s given his iconic Barbie coat to wear after playing the piano. “We did ask Universal if they had it, but it’s in a case somewhere, so we ended up having to make the coat. And in fact, we even made the Barbie lining on the inside,” says Broecker. To do so, the lining fabric was printed at a fabric shop to match the lining in the movie. Costumes also shaved part of the fur and highlighted it to give it a similar feel. Topping off the look, they also found the exact Saint Laurent sunglasses. “I feel like my team does such an amazing job recreating things to make it look exactly how it’s supposed to. I think so many times people think we just went out and bought it, but everything except for Ryan’s suit and Emily’s outfit was basically made,” Broecker continues. “My team knew that this was going to be such a big, big moment, and so they worked their asses off. And we do it all in about 36 hours.”
Episode 1861 — Pictured: Host Ryan Gosling during the Monologue on Saturday, April 13, 2024 — (Photo by: Will Heath/NBC)
Other costumes created for the episode included an alien-probing cold open that sees the return of Kate McKinnon wearing a quintessential mom outfit, replicating the cartoon misfits Beavis (Gosling) and Butt-Head (Mikey Day) set in a town hall backdrop, a medical procedure gone wrong with two high-fashion doctors, and a deleted scene from Erin Brockovich with Gosling and Chloe Fineman playing the entangled neighbors.
The mantra for costumes is that if it’s not part of their existing stock, they try to make it. Such is the case for Bowen Yang’s white leather trench coat that was made by a tailor in twelve hours for the doctor sketch. The same goes for Gosling’s leather scrubs that are covered in blood. “The thing about SNL, which is great, is there’s such collaboration between the actors and different departments. You can’t really separate the hair and the makeup from the costume. It’s all a unified whole.”
Saturday Night Live will air its 50th Anniversary season later this year. When asked if Broecker can share anything about it, he says, “I wish there were something to talk about. We are still in the abstract planning of the whole thing. And all I know and all I can really say is I think it’s going to be epic and amazing and interesting and incredibly hard to figure out how to distill 50 years of a TV program into 3.5 hours.”
Featured image: Ryan Gosling on “SNL.” Courtesy NBC.
Apple TV+’s Silo, created by Graham Yost, is an ingeniously constructed sci-fi series that nevertheless opens with a shot worthy of any classic western—a Sheriff’s badge—and goes on to meld elements of that genre, along with police procedural and conspiracy thriller, in 10 satisfying episodes. The series’ claustrophobic setting, the titular Silo, serves as a character almost every bit important as Rebecca Ferguson’s resourceful, remorseful Juliet, an engineer plucked from the obscurity of the Silo’s lowest levels to take over for the last lawman, David Oyelowo’s Sheriff Holston, after he makes the fateful decision to follow his wife (Rashida Jones’ Allison) out of the Silo’s relentlessly rulebound safety for the toxic, ruined wastelands outside.
Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Helping shepherd the cast and crew through the first three episodes of the series was director and executive producer Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game, Passengers), a director with plenty of experience crafting realistic sci-fi worlds, thrillers, and more. Tyldum and his talented crew built out the world of the Silo and its baffling retrofuturistic details—why are there no elevators, why do the computers look like first-generation Ataris, and what, on Earth, is up with those banished to “clean”?—with rigorous attention to detail and the rules of their world. Once Sheriff Holston makes his fateful decision to leave the Silo, and Juliet is called up from running the massive, spinning source of the bunker’s power to lead an investigation into a string of unusual deaths, the show confidently moves towards its satisfyingly surprising conclusion.
We spoke to Tyldum about the retrofuturistic design, the melding of genres, and why Rebecca Ferguson is sci-fi’s undisputed queen.
You directed episodes 1, 2, and 3—can you talk about establishing the world of Silo.
One of the things that drew me to Silo is I really loved Graham’s pilot, which is one of the best I’ve read. Apple reached out because they wanted a director to help with world-building, and it’s such a rare opportunity where we spent 10 months before we shot anything just figuring out how this world worked. We looked at everything from brutalist architecture to the old city of Barcelona. It was so fun to make the design based on practicality. If you’re going to make many silos and they’re this huge, you want building blocks that fit. Everything should be rounded, including doors and windows. The aesthetics are based on functionality. We wanted it to be a lived-in world. An old city, several hundred years old, so everything’s been used, reused, and repaired. There are limited resources. It’s a sci-fi show that looks back. You should watch Silo and in a few seconds recognize it.
There’s a similar aesthetic to the Mad Max world, where everything is beaten up, repurposed, taped or welded together. Even the computers in Silo are big and blocky. It brought me back to my Atari days…
Why is it like that? The watchers’ room has flat screens; why do they get high-tech stuff and no one else does? There’s a clear idea behind it, and it’s very linked to the purpose of the Silo. Why is there no elevator? Yes, it’s on purpose. The functionality of the Silo, the purpose of it, will be revealed later. Then you’ve got the giant digger, this giant machine that looks almost like a big dead iron spider. This obviously belongs to the future, yet at the same time, it’s so old. Computers are one by one, there’s no video or graphic art, they don’t have photographs, everything on the walls is like drawings or paintings. It was so fun—everything has a purpose; it’s coming from the book or how the silo would be created.
Tim Robbins in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Can you walk me through the idea of people having to go clean when they’re banished from the silo and that view of the outside of the silo.
For them, it’s almost a religion. If you look at the cell, it’s more like a chapel, in a way. This is a society that has no history or knowledge of why they’re there. All they have is this one book called The Pact, which is the Laws of the Silo. It’s become cult-like, this idea of cleaning. For example, nothing in the silo can be white because the resources to make something white is too much except for the cleaning; that’s the one thing they have. They’re read the verdict, asked the clean, sent out, and you’re going to die, but you do this last sacrifice for the community. We wanted it to stand out. The only people dressed in white in the show are those who have to go clean.
I’ll admit I didn’t even notice the lack of white, but now it’s so obvious.
It’s every color you have there—how would you Mae blue? Brown? Red? So either it has to be stuff they had before they went down into the silo, or they have to make it there. This is why you hardly see any zippers; zippers are hard to make, you make buttons instead. All the textures, the wardrobe, and everything else have to be either things they had before or something they can create. I had such great department heads, and everybody was really drilling down on it. Does this feel Silo? This color green feels wrong, but this feels Silo.
Rebecca Ferguson and David Oyelowo in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Let’s talk about this great cast, including Rebecca Ferguson, who is becoming a sci-fi legend given her incredible role in the Dune franchise.
She brings so much to the character. She’s so expressive. I had these ideas to have the camera be really close to her. I said this is something we should do more of, because first of all, it’s her story, and second, she’s so expressive, she’s so good at showing a lot while doing very little. She’s also great at action. She’s very physical; she embodies Juliet as someone who has all this strength and aggressiveness but simultaneously is scared, hurt, and a loner. She’s withdrawing and aggressive. I couldn’t be happier with Rebecca as Juliet.
Rebecca Ferguson in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
There’s also a bit of genre-melding, combining sci-fi and Western as David Oyelowo’s Sheriff Holston taps Rebecca Ferguson’s Juliet to replace him.
Very much. The show starts with the sheriff badge, which is very Western. That’s the first shot. It’s a western, a little bit of a noir mystery. It’s a meld of things. And the Silo is a character. When we shot this, I always wanted to remember the silo is always present. No long lens; the background should be sharp so you always see the silo. Sometimes you’re not following the actors, you’re just showing the silo. This is the true main character that you’re fighting against.
Rebecca Ferguson in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Tell me about building the set.
Gavin Boucquet, our production designer, built some of the biggest sets I’ve ever seen. You can literally get lost. There are alleyways and a giant stairway and floors; sometimes, it was a challenge to shoot it because you’re communicating with hundreds of extras. I was in one place, and you could barely see people because so much was happening so far away. When we were building it, we had a problem; there wasn’t enough steel in England. We took all the steel we could because we needed a foundation to hold so many people.
Common in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Where was the set created?
In Hoddesdon, an industrial area north of London. We built eight soundstages, and we had about 75 sets. Which is a lot for a TV show. The logistics are hard; you start out in one scene on one set with people walking out, and it’s supposed to continue, but the next set they’re walking into will be built in three months. It was a challenging shoot in many ways for everybody. We had one day outside. We shot David going out, Rashida going out, and Rebecca going out. The rest of the time, we were in the Silo.
Talk about putting your cast and crew into the world you were building.
This is why we didn’t want it to be a blue or green screen set. It was so easy for them to immerse themselves as actors because the set was so big and there were so many details. The set dressers and the prop people created so many details. The market stalls, the books, the posters, the maps, there are so many things the camera didn’t even pick up.
Oscar Coleman and Alexandria Riley in “Silo,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
How much time was your crew given to create these sets?
Several hundred people, and it’s hard. A set might take four weeks to build, then three weeks to take down, and you shoot for two days. You have to make sure there’s always a set ready. The production people were amazing. The logistics of all this to keep it moving, it’s very complicated, it’s a huge machine to make this. If you want something done, get a film crew to do it. It just has to happen. There’s a deadline, we’re coming in a shooting that day. It’s part of the stress but also part of the fun. So many people are working to achieve the same thing. Everybody wants the show to be great.
Any favorite sequence you shot?
Shooting Rashida going out and the reactions to her. We played her on the big screen, a real screen, and we had all the footage of her going out and all these hundreds of extras there. I told them what was happening, the tradition of someone having to go out and clean. The extras were like people living in the silo, reacting to her, being emotional, then she stumbles and can’t get up. It was like, Jesus, this doesn’t look like 200 extras; it looks like people who actually live in the silo. You’d never get that with a giant blue screen. We shot that on day one, and it really felt like watching citizens of the silo reacting to Rashida going out and dying.
Silo season 1 is streaming on Apple TV.
For more stories on Apple TV+ series and films, check these out:
Masters of the Air, starring Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan,is the latest celebrated WWII epic from Band of Brothers and The Pacific executive producers Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman. The intense drama inspired by the 100th Bomb Group is the most detailed on-screen depiction of B-17 planes ever. The visual effects teams from DNEG studios, led by VVFX Supervisor Xavier Bernasconi and VFX Producer Abigal Everard were provided with thousands of hours of research materials about the aircrafts and battles they flew from the Production Designer Chris Seagers and his show researcher Jessica Bradbury.
“The Production Art and VFX departments provided us with mission books that each pilot flew,” Virtual Production Executive Steve Jelley explained. “The actual altitudes and the logbooks. They plotted everything to be consistent with the actual historical records. There’s very little material.”
Barry Keoghan in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Every detail they uncovered was utilized to increase the series’ accuracy. An early episode depicts the bombing of the Norwegian city of Trondheim. On that day, German forces employed a smokescreen technique to occlude their location from the air. VFX artists duplicated the exact way the smoke hung in the air.
“We went as far as to research the wind direction of that time and that day in that particular geographical location that was annotated in the log files,” Bernasconi revealed. “There’s still notes about that. We found it, and we actually simulated our smoke in the visual effects to match the wind direction of that day and that time exactly.”
Creating realistic VFX requires a keen observation of the world. In addition to historical accuracy, the team had to consider physics and meteorology. Aerodynamics, cloud formations, and weather patterns all played heavily into their designs.
“We had to simulate all of these missions and make sure that the clouds were the same clouds that you would encounter at 10,000 feet vs 30,000 feet,” Jelley noted. “Xavier had to build a cloud atlas twice. Once for [3D graphics software] Unreal Engine with us. Another one in [3D animation software] Houdini with true weather simulation for the visual effects process. I don’t think you necessarily want to see another cloud again.”
“It’s funny because then I went on to do Furiosa, so I went from clouds to dry desert,” Bernasconi laughed.
Nearly every episode of the nine-hour series features an aerial battle. The complex flight patterns, plane formations, and combat were all created or enhanced by the VFX teams. They offer several visual clues to help the audience keep up with the fast-paced action across the flight units and strive to keep the shots steady.
“The mandate from [visual effects supervisor] Stephen [Rosenbaum] was very much, ‘Keep all the cameras grounded to a plane,’” Bernasconi said. “Adding a challenge to it because suddenly you can’t go from this plane to the other plane. You need to find cinematography choices that allow you to hand over to a different plane but within the rules of the lenses and the camera moves we established. If there was a camera outside a plane, we were thinking of it as if it was locked on a witness plane that would travel together with the rest of the group.”
For decades, the green screen was king among visual effects. New worlds, monsters, dangerous heights, or crashing waves could be painted digitally after a performance had been recorded. Anywhere characters found themselves that crews couldn’t feasibly go relied on the technology. Actors, however, are left performing to a blank space with only a rudimentary eyeline to interact with. Virtual Production LED walls, like those used on Masters of the Air, are changing how VFX scenes are filmed by immersing the performers in simulated environments.
“The crucial thing about the on-set process is that it allowed us to prioritize the actors, the performances, and the shot-making,” Jelley explained. “And to make sure that there were digital proxies and realistic lighting to allow the visual effects process to complete the shot later. So, we call it a full end-to-end production.”
Anyone who has ever gripped the armrests during a bout of turbulence knows that flying can feel perilous even in the safest conditions. These young pilots were speeding across Nazi-occupied airspace at the risk of being gunned down. BIG Supplies Stuart Heath and FX Supervisor Neil Corbould built life-size animatronic cockpits for the actors to perform in, allowing them to see nearby planes projected on LED walls outside their windows.
“They were 18 years old, 19 years old, 20 years old, that never flew before, and suddenly they were 20,000 feet in the air surrounded by a fuselage that was as thick as a can of Coca-Cola with literal shrapnel exploding around them and piercing the fuselage,” Bernasconi reflected. “There is a difference between being on a static seat in front of a green screen and then having a full B-17 motion-based cockpit that would react to explosions that you visually see in front of you or German fighters blasting past them. So, they really feel like their performances were enhanced because of this technology.”
Acting in a more visceral space translates on screen. The performances are more authentic in channeling the emotions of the young, inexperienced soldiers who faced death each time they flew.
“Virtual Production Supervisor Phil Galler could trigger the flash at the director’s call,” Jelley detailed. “That would rock the motion base, which would create the force of the explosion. Then, in many cases, the amazing special effects department would do things like shatter glass, and then, of course, the lighting is affecting the glass, which is affecting the action, which is affecting the performance, and that’s kind of what you’re looking for. That brought that realism that I think you really feel in the show.”
The scenes were tightly choreographed and coordinated in advance by the previz team The Third Floor, led by Matt Smart. Most of what was created for filming was for the actors’ benefit. If something could be captured in camera, all the better, but the majority went through a process after filming of increasing the resolution and replacing temporary images. One of the most involved elements was mapping Europe and eliminating any modern landmarks.
“We literally remodeled the entirety of Europe. That’s how we did it,” Bernasconi said. “Each grid had the texture of the ground with some low resolution, broad stroke elevation models, so we would have some hills and stuff. Then, the logbooks would tell us exactly the flight path. We overlayed this flight path on our broad-stroke representation of Europe, extracted the grids, and modeled them at high resolution. Not only that, but the fact is that any satellite image that we have now obviously includes modern features. Highways and modern buildings. So, we have to go in there and remove all of those throughout thousands of kilometers and recreate the look of Berlin during the 1940s and so on.”
The series ended with detailed, cutting-edge technology, but Jelley and Bernasconi laughed recalling that they also used rudimentary tools in preparation phases.
“It was a massive piece of planning right from the very start by VFX Supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum and his team,” Jelley recalled. “There were those little models on sticks in the production office. There was a big chart on a big table of us positioning various things. We thought that this was a bit of fun, but it actually became totally necessary because it’s a really complex bit of action to figure out.”
Over the course of the two-and-a-half-year production, the DNEG team members working on Masters of the Air numbered in the hundreds. Bernasconi emphasized that the show was truly a group effort.
“Of course, a big shoutout to the team,” he praised. “All of the team was huge. Some of the technologies, especially on the DP side with Steve’s team and motion capture that was going at the same time as the virtual production for capturing the movement of the B-17, it was incredible.”
Masters of the Air is now streaming on Apple TV+.
Featured image: Nate Mann and Josh Bolt in “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Amidst an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, audiences united in crowning Baby Reindeer the breakout hit TV series of the year. Series creator and star Richard Gadd mined his real-life trauma to create Donny Dunn, who yearns for adoration to catastrophic results. The aspiring comedian discovers that meaning well doesn’t always end well. In a time when there’s immense societal pressure for everyone to have rigid, binary opinions on every issue, and mistakes are often condemned while ignoring intention, Baby Reindeer spreads a message of compassion and mercy.
The most likely cause for the show’s spectacular success is a phenomenal collision of talent on screen and off. Gadd leads a stellar cast, including unforgettable performances by Jessica Gunning as Martha Scott and Nava Mau as Teri. As for that chilling feeling you experience as the harrowing tale unfolds from inside Donny’s mind, you can thank cinematographer Krzysztof Trojnar for setting that claustrophobic, immersive tone. Trojnar worked on the first four episodes of Baby Reindeer, which was, in fact, his first TV series.
“It was just an amazing experience to do it,” he reflected. “It was quite a lucky situation where it was my first TV show. Getting such a good script, it all really came from the script, to be honest. It was fantastic being able to read Richard’s words, which were very visual. It’s probably one of the best scripts I’ve read so far.”
The production team seemed to benefit from being free from scrutiny before they became international sensations. Trojnar made bold choices that paid off big time. Donny’s paranoia and isolation are evident in the camera’s perspective. As Donny seeks affirmation, he receives it in unsavory ways.
Richard Gadd as Donny, Jessica Gunning as Martha. Ed Miller/Netflix
“We definitely wanted to put Donny in the center of the frame as he talks about it almost in the spotlight – something he is searching for in his life – and obviously also being sort of entrapped sometimes in compositions,” Trojnar noted. “That was one idea. It kind of puts Martha as a visual intruder in the sense of how close people are to Donny or how close the eyeline is to the camera. You almost feel their presence, and the camera is sort of between Donny and Martha.”
Jessica Gunning beautifully captures Donny’s lonely yet unstable stalker, Martha. Her explosive laugh became a hallmark of the character revealing her cheerful, yet dangerous fixation on the comedian. Trojnar framed Martha in those moments to be uncomfortably invasive.
“We definitely wanted to portray Martha and her mad laugh and intrude it in a way,” he explained. “We used wide angle lenses so we could get close that’s abrasive in a way. It’s not something you would maybe do in a normal dialogue scene where you’re that close, but that gave this effect of intensity and intrusion that you almost can’t escape.”
While many viewers were hooked by the stalking drama, the emotional crux of the series takes place in episode 4. Donny is groomed and assaulted by an influential screenwriter, Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill). The foreboding scene of the crime is Darrien’s apartment, which seems to devour Donny every visit.
“We actually used the widest range of lenses on the show in that apartment,” Trojnar revealed. “It’s not like he’s in front of the camera. He’s not almost touching the lens. He’s more sort of portrayed in the cold abyss of his apartment. The wider end of the spectrum of lenses gave us this feeling. It’s sort of entrapping but in this vacuous space. There’s something unsettling about the atmosphere as soon as Donny enters the apartment.”
As Darrien increases his manipulative tactics and drugs Donny, the room turns more sinister and hallucinogenic. It may look like postproduction manipulation, but most of the effect was actually created on set. Trojnar’s team specially choreographed the scene’s color shift.
“The light changes in the apartment in episode four. We wanted to make the transition as subtle as possible,” he recalled. “You almost don’t notice the change, and then suddenly they’re in this world that they haven’t been before, and it’s all happening during one take. That’s when Donny was sitting on the sofa and watching Darrien doing the phoenix dance. We installed these special lights that had this transition lighting cue over a minute and a half, where it changed from a domestic light into this red, pulsing light. So, it was all done in camera.”
When Donny staggers to his desperate and delirious escape, the walls seem to stretch on discouragingly. The idea was conceived between Trojnar and the production design team. After specially modifying the set, Gadd himself was equipped with a RED KOMODO camera.
“We talked to Debbie Burton, the production designer, and we made the corridor double length to what it usually was,” Trojnar explained. “We installed a camera on Richard’s head so when he was running down the corridor looking down at his hands, that was actually filmed without me operating the camera. That was installed like a micro camera. He is trying to escape, and we get that tunnel vision kind of effect.”
In the difficult aftermath of the assault, Donny breaks down in the shower, where Trojnar, again, specially installed a camera on set for a very specific shot. The shot captures Donny’s face from inside the cascading water.
“We just wanted to change perspective because it’s such a drastic moment in the story,” Trojnar said. “You can’t get worse than that, but it’s also a point of realization. You have to get close to Donny. It’s also like he’s suddenly in a different environment, and he realizes what happened. So, we used this special lens that we installed inside the shower head. We asked the special effects department to make a special shower head that was hollow inside, then through the hole, we could put this special, very long, thin lens that is like a periscope lens. It’s called Optex Excellence. We used that so you almost have the perspective of the water falling down on Donny.”
Gadd is fearless about sharing Donny’s triumphs and failures, including painfully awkward reactions to his floundering standup sets. One gig gets off on the wrong foot, and Donny is left to anxiously wait in the wings for his cue.
“Our idea was always to be with Donny,” Trojnar told us. “That scene is the longest take we’ve done uninterrupted. He waits to be announced onto the stage, and we don’t really want to interrupt it. We hear the lady announcing him in some kind of mental act, and we’re with him, then go on the stage. When it becomes awkward, we go to the very back of the stage and show in an objective way where he’s the most stripped of his comedy hour. It gets very awkward.”
Richard Gad as Donny. Ed Miller/Netflix
Gadd has referenced the catharsis of sharing his suffering in interviews, and audiences have related in a big way. In turning his darkest moments into art, fellow victims have found strength in reporting their own abusers. Trojnar admits the reaction has been more powerful than the team ever anticipated.
“It’s not something we were expecting at all,” he confesses. “I’ve been saying it was meant to be a little niche show that maybe some people will watch, but then suddenly, it’s a complete surprise. I mean, we loved the script. I think everyone who read it was very excited about it, but we didn’t expect what happened for sure.”
Baby Reindeer is now streaming on Netflix.
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Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are back as Miami buddy cops Mike and Marcus, respectively, in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the fourth installation of the franchise and the second directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. In 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, Mike and Marcus dealt with the murder of their friend and mentor, Captain Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano). In Ride or Die, the pair are out to clear his good name. Working with a cartel to launder money, former Army Ranger and DEA agent James McGrath (Eric Dane) transfers millions into an account owned by the late Captain Howard, leading Mike and Marcus’s colleagues at the Miami Police Department to believe the captain was the source of a corruption scandal they were already investigating.
The search for the real culprit reunites Mike with his incarcerated son, Armando (Jacob Scipio), the only person alive who knows the face, if not the name, of the turncoat mercenary. The trio’s efforts end with Mike, Armando, and Marcus on the run, sheltering in, fleeing from, and engaging in gunfights in locations ranging from a neon-art-filled warehouse, a Chinook helicopter, and an abandoned amusement park where alligators were once and as it turns out, still are the main attraction.
Ride or Die’s action moves at a rapid, assured pace, intercut with funny and tender moments. After making them both late by stopping for snacks, Marcus survives a heart attack at Mike’s wedding to Christine (Melanie Liburd) and comes out of a coma with a serene new lease on life. Armando and Mike have a father-son breakthrough moment heavily facilitated by Marcus, who explains to the confused pair what they’re experiencing as it’s happening. And the flippant but loving banter between Mike and Marcus remains a hallmark of the franchise. We spoke with the film’s editors, Dan Lebental and Asaf Eisenberg, about getting the dual pacing of action and comedy right, incorporating drone and security camera footage, and coming up with a much-lauded set piece—a shootout set to Barry White.
A few spoilers ahead!
How does the editing on a high-octane film like this support the energy without taking it too far?
Dan Lebental: We know from what the directors told us that they wanted it to be a breakneck speed. If there was any excess slowness to the pacing, we got rid of it.
Asaf Eisenberg: It was very clear from the beginning what the pacing would be, definitely for the action. They swim in action. We just followed their lead.
DL: It’s like boxing — stick and move, stick and move.
There’s also a lot of humor in this movie, and the relationship between Mike and Marcus can be very tender. How did the editing support their funnier, softer sides?
DL: They’ve evolved. The last one dealt with their getting older, and this one is almost like going past the old into the young again. When you mix comedy and action, you have to have a constant pace. If you go too far without one or the other, you lose it, and then it feels weird. The intervals are everything. It supplies the rhythm for continual enjoyment.
AE: There was a big scene, and we were asking if it was worth it to keep buzzing through at breakneck speed or slow down for a joke. A lot of times, the funny has to come in because the balance gets off if you don’t.
DL: And that then sets you up for the poignant moments. There’s the beautiful moment where Marcus sings to Mike. You want to ride those emotional waves. You want to be breakneck and then stop and let it ruminate a little bit.
Marcus’s near-death experience is trippy and otherworldly. Was that a very different editing process from the rest of the project?
DL: Asaf did about 193 versions of that.
AE: The near-death experience was something that Will [Smith] specifically dived very deep into. Will was very clear on what he wanted the experience to be. It was just about fine-tuning, and the fine-tuning went all the way to the end.
We get a lot of unusual footage — from a drone’s point of view or a security camera. How did you edit that to the best effect?
DL: That’s the directors’ thing. They wanted something visually exciting. Drones are a very important thing, and then there’s the Snorricam, going in and out of monitors. We’d experimented on that in the previous Bad Boys.
AE: It’s like a superpower, the way the [directors] approach a different point of view. There was one shot in the previous movie — I didn’t work on that — where they changed the angle of perspective. You don’t do that in film. And they did it. They like to give visual content a new light.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
How did you approach editing the shootout in the dark, neon art installation?
AE: That took us a long time, and interestingly enough, it’s about the geography. The directors were very clear about wanting to understand the geography. They had one shot, which is the drone shot, which allows you to see where everything is. It allowed you to be aware of everything that’s going on.
DL: Let’s tell the truth, though. Asaf came up with the Barry White jelly beans thing. Everyone saw it and went oh my God, and then music had to clear it because it was so fun. Because of the strike, the back end of the scene, where they go outside, wasn’t shot until much later. Once we got the scene outside, we realized we’d doubled up on beats. Then, we had to reconvene closer to Asaf’s original assembly. Every scene relates to every other scene, and you don’t want to have a movie that repeats the same beats over and over again.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
Spoiler alert. The military plane shootout while transporting Armando seems like it must have been a fairly involved process.
AE: One of the superpowers of Jerry Bruckheimer is a very simple statement that becomes the compass, and that is cause and effect. You don’t have to see what happens to every bullet, but everything has a trajectory that means something. That scene started a lot bigger. It had to find its way into a tight formation, where you feel the pressure and the tension of the centrifugal force. The Chinook, the helicopter that they’re on, is an unusual transport for anything. The approach is like everything else. The footage speaks for itself. As Dan calls it, what’s your picture card when you’re playing poker? What is best, lands.
DL: There were so many discussions about this scene. It was probably the scene the studio also cared about the most. One of the things we had to weigh was where it was to our advantage to not have people know what the cause and effect was—it’s just so wild, and the guys are flying off and hitting the ceiling. We had to find the balance of why that happened, or is it just the mayhem and confusion of the moment?
Dan, having worked on Bad Boys for Life, was there anything you wanted to keep or leave behind?
DL: One of the challenges was that the story related so much to the previous one in that Armando is the key to the character arc for Mike Lowrey. We had to find a way to get enough information across that the audience wasn’t lost. It required a lot of first-act restructuring because our leaders at Sony told us no recaps. So we had to kind of be in the present as we let people know.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
What was a total departure in this movie?
DL: Normally, in a movie like this, you’d end with the gunfight on the beach. But we’re saying the last scene that’s not part of the coda is Mike sending his son off. That’s slightly unconventional in that we decided the most important thing was landing the emotional beat. [There’s] this sense that you don’t know what’s going to happen, but the important thing is they’ve gone through this journey.
Bad Boys: Ride or Die is in theaters now.
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
Ke Huy Quan was driving when he got a call from Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige two years ago. Having just seen Quan’s (eventually Oscar-winning) turn in the record-breaking A24 epic Everything Everywhere All At Once, Feige — with whom Quan had crossed paths on 2000’s X-Men, working as assistant action choreographer in his first job out of college — offered him the role of the quirky, diligent Ouroboros on Loki Season 2.
“He spent a long time talking about how great that movie is, said some really flattering things about my performance, which got me really emotional … My eyes were watering, and I couldn’t see where I was going,” Quan recounted in an interview with The Credits.
The Academy Award winner, who made his feature film debut as a child actor in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, burst back onto the scene in 2022, sweeping awards season with his supporting role in the Michelle Yeoh action-dramedy vehicle. Having been a longtime fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since its inaugural Iron Man, Quan said that joining the franchise occupied the highest spot on his wish list since his return to acting.
“Every time [Feige and I] talked about X-Men or any Marvel characters, he would always have this big smile on his face, and he was really energetic and very enthusiastic, talking about this universe. So, little did I know that I would have to wait only 22 years to work with him,” Quan said, chuckling.
A month or so later, Quan was flown out to London, where he would join Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson on set at Pinewood Studios. “I remember that meeting vividly,” he said. “Even though I was meeting them for the first time, [I’d] seen the show and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki on the screens for so many years, so instantly I felt there was this connection I had with them, so I couldn’t help but [jump] up and [give] them a big hug. I think I scared them, but that was how enthusiastic I was about joining not only the MCU but also the Loki family.”
Like many viewers, Quan devoured the first season of Loki on Disney+ amid the pandemic and thought it was “one of the best television shows ever.” His casting as O.B. was the first he didn’t have to audition for, and Quan said he felt somewhat daunted stepping into the role, excited as he was, because of the responsibility he felt to the series’ creatives and fans. Quan felt the pressure at the reading rehearsal — which he had never partaken in before — on his first set day.
“I was, like, jumping over the lines. My line reading was really clunky. It was bad,” he said. “And I told them I was so embarrassed, and I said, ‘Tom, oh my God, I’m sorry, I’m not prepared for this, but I promise you I will be.’ And on the first day of shooting — after the first shot — Tom came up to me and [said], ‘Ke, that was incredible.’ Hearing it from him, because he is Loki and that’s his show, and getting that encouragement from Tom meant the world to me. I had the most amazing time.”
O.B. is a devoted Time Variance Authority engineer who has quietly and diligently ensured the organization’s smooth operation 24/7 for the past 400 hundred years. Following the catastrophic timeline destabilization in the Season 1 finale, O.B.’s wealth of knowledge proves instrumental in helping Loki, Mobius (Wilson), and the team restore the TVA.
As a new character in Season 2, Quan said he wasn’t certain how to approach the role at first, taking meetings with the writers, showrunner Eric Martin, and Hiddleston to see how they envisioned O.B. But it wasn’t until another full-circle moment that it fully clicked for Quan: Stepping onto the Roger Moore stage, where the Ouroboros set had been built, the actor realized O.B. could be a Variant of his character from The Goonies — Data, who was an ardent fan of James Bond, portrayed by Moore.
“That was when I was very clear on how to play him,” Quan said. “And I wanted to bring that passion and that enthusiasm — Data loves being part of the gang.”
Apart from this fictional connection Quan had to the character, the actor channeled a significant portion of his personal story into his portrayal of O.B. Since his triumphant second act, Quan has been vocal about his struggles to reach success as an actor — from his beginnings in the U.S. as a refugee to losing health insurance for not meeting SAG-AFTRA requirements after filming EEAAO. In Episode 5 of Loki’s sophomore season, it’s revealed that Ouroboros is a Variant of A.D. Doug, a PhD-level engineer and aspiring science fiction writer who refuses to give up on his dreams, opting to self-publish his novels and sneak them onto bookstore shelves in hopes of gaining a readership.
“I think it is that determination, that passion, that not willing to give up, that perseverance, [continuing] to do something nobody really cares about,” Quan said. “Nobody cares about what he wants — that I really resonated with.”
He added, “And also, he just loves what he does. It’s the same thing: Every time I’ve walked on a movie set, I wanted to remember how hard it is to be here and maintain that sense of gratitude … It was a true gift playing him.”
Now, in consideration for an Emmy for the role, Quan is positively beaming at the opportunity to discuss his love for Loki and O.B., following the secrecy necessitated around taking on a Marvel project and its premiere during the joint WGA and SAG strikes last year.
“When we finished the show, I was so happy and so proud of what we [had] created. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t wait for the show to come out and tell the entire world how happy we are.’ And I was really excited, and of course, when it came out and not being able to promote it and meet with the fans and talk about the show — that was hard. And I can only watch it like everybody else on Disney+ while keeping my mouth shut. It was not easy. So it feels really good to be able to do this right now,” he said, adding that the fan reception “brings a big smile to my face.”
Quan, who finds it an “honor” to be a part of the FYC conversation, has remained true to his origins. With upcoming films Electric State (from The Avengers directors the Russo brothers) and With Love, the actor said he is vigilant about approaching every project with the same immense gratitude and humility he has carried from childhood.
“It is so cool, I gotta tell you. For the longest time, I always worried about [whether] I would ever get another opportunity to act again. So, ever since Everything Everywhere, everything has just been incredible. My phone works now, and it rings. I get emails from my agents. I get to meet with some of our industry’s most incredible and talented people.”
Conducting this interview just a few days out from wrapping filming on With Love, where he is No. 1 on the call sheet for a big studio picture for the first time, Quan’s world is a whirlwind. “I just got back to LA, we shot the entire movie in Canada,” he said. “It’s a big action movie. And I still have bruises on my body. It was a very physically demanding movie. And I could not be more happy.”
Some days, he said, he still can’t believe it: “It’s very surreal … I’ll be in a meeting and I would hear, ‘This producer, this filmmaker says we would love to work with you.’ Even just that sometimes feels really foreign to me.”
When talking about what the future might have in store for him as a performer, Quan’s vision is simple: to work with “great people” who inspire him. “I have a long list of people I’m trying to check off,” he said.
“I don’t ever want to forget what it was like, because it helps me maintain this sense of gratitude,” Quan said of his journey back to the screens. “Every time I walk on a movie set I want to have that same feeling that I had when I was a kid and also when I did Everything Everywhere All At Once. I was just so hungry for that, and I want to always remember that. I don’t want to take anything for granted.”
Netflix’s adaption of the first book in Liu Cixin’s hit Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, 3 Body Problem, is more than science fiction. Facing a slew of inexplicable suicides, a group of scientists and friends begin to uncover the future arrival of an alien race, the San-Ti, and learn of the Cultural Revolution-era events in China that set this gradual but hostile takeover in motion.
The series is primarily set in contemporary London and the English countryside, with the goings-on of today explained through period flashbacks to Beijing and rural China in the 1960s. With Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with Alexander Woo (True Blood, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) at the helm, 3 Body Problem is as visually arresting as it is plot-driven, with particular attention paid to the show’s period elements as well as the immersive, virtual reality game the San-Ti use to communicate with their chosen earthlings.
The show opens during a struggle session in Beijing in which a young scientist, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), sees her professor’s father murdered. “I think that’s something people underestimate—how difficult that was,” said production designer Deborah Riley (Riley previously worked with Benioff and Weiss on Game of Thrones). Visual images from the Cultural Revolution, particularly in color, are rare. “We were very fortunate because we had Derek Tsang, who was our director for those first two episodes, and he was our guiding light through all of that,” Riley said. She also worked with art director Chapman Kan and several graphic artists to ensure the show’s scenes of this side of history were authentic. At the same time, it was important “that they be something horrifying enough for Ye Wenjie to then tell the aliens to come,” she said.
After her father’s death, Ye Wenjie is arrested and consigned to hard labor. An astrophysicist, she’s taken to a secret facility where the military is trying to contact extraterrestrial life. “That’s actually my favorite set of the whole season,” Riley said of the location, which was built on a mountain range in Spain. The huge dish the lab used to signal the universe was created by visual effects, but the base and interior were built.
“We were very careful to make sure the facility looked like it worked,” the production designer said, to the extent that she and the art director created a user guide and floor plan of the set and set decorator Andrew McCarthy traveled to Budapest to find Cold War-era buttons, lights, and oscilloscopes. The trickiest aspect wasn’t the rooms full of machines but the small output device with which Ye Wenjie responds to alien contact. “In the dark corners of the internet somewhere, I actually found a keyboard that was similar to our QWERTY keyboard, which was based on stroke order. It was really embarrassing, because the Chinese guys just laughed at it and said, we’ll never be allowed back in China if you use that, that is terrible,” Riley said. They went around and around, finally landing on a numeral keypad with an accompanying manual that Ye Wenjie uses to convert numbers to characters. “And it’s now become a kind of iconic scene, I guess, of her pressing send,” Riley said.
In 2024, thanks to the San-Ti, the technology at hand advances considerably. Looking for help with their mission on Earth, select scientists receive a personalized headset, their entry to an immersive game where they must solve the conundrum the alien race faces. The showrunners wanted the headset to be completely seamless. “When you pick it up and look at it, to us in 2024, we would have absolutely no idea how it works. There’s no power source, no cables, no jacks, no nothing,” Riley said. “To book readers, the mirror finish is something you understand later. But it caused an awful lot of trouble to VFX, as you can imagine, because the mirror was reflecting the crew and the lights and everything else. So every time you see a headset, just think of the work that those guys had to do.”
Once inside the game, whether Jin (Jess Hong) and Jack (John Bradley) are in Shang Dynasty China, Kublai Khan’s palace, or Pope Gregory VIII’s cathedral, the sets needed to be grounded in reality. Riley and her team built the intricate balcony at Kublai Khan’s palace and shot it at Wells Cathedral in Somerset to represent the papal era. “I felt very sacrilegious, I have to say, asking the person responsible for the cathedral if we could remove all of the stations of the cross,” the production designer joked. The canopy the pope sits under was a build, which the crew brought back to Shepperton Studios to singe and burn later. “Obviously, all the fire sequences were visual effects, and there was no horse. No part of the building was harmed in the process,” Riley said.
Outside major locations like the virtual reality game, Cultural Revolution-era China, and Judgment Day, the massive ship where the San-Ti’s followers await their arrival (which Riley referred to as an achievement of all the series’ departments coming together), no set is too small to be overlooked, seen best in MI6 officer Wade’s (Liam Cunningham) stark offices. “The showrunners were very particular in wanting Wade to have a very clean, simple, Steve Jobs-like environment where there’s no clutter whatsoever. Andrew, the set decorator, and I tried putting in various other pieces of furniture, but it was all taken out,” Riley said.
In Wade’s first windowless, creepily modern space, he and Clarence “Da” Shi (Benedict Wong) make decisions that will change the course of human history. When the project to save Earth moves to a secret location (shot at the 17th-century mansion Bramshill House), Wade’s office vibe repeats, only now surrounded by moulding and tapestries. “He still had the same setup of a big room, single desk, and him, waiting. And Liam’s the kind of actor who knows how to use those kinds of spaces, so it was actually quite fun to see,” Riley said.
As a counterpoint, the spaces where Jin, Saul (Jovan Adepo), Will (Alex Sharp), and Auggie (Eiza González), drink, live, and hang out are deliberately low-key and relatable. In particular, Jin’s apartment is warm and modest, unlike any other space on the show. “For the storylines and for us to invest in these people, it seemed important to tell the truth of them,” Riley said. “She’s a regular person who’s caught up in this mess.”
The first season of Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo’s masterful Shōgun was an expertly paced slow-burn drama that plunged viewers into 17th-century Japan with a passionate obsession with the rigors and wonders of the period and location. The new Shōgun shifts its center of balance from the swashbuckling but woefully out of his depth British pirate Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) to his Japanese captors. Blackthorne has washed ashore on a land in the midst of a tectonic power shift, with Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira) plotting his takeover in Osaka while the brilliant but taciturn Lord Yoshi Toranaga (star and producer Hiroyuki Sanada) strategizes a way to keep the peace and, if possible, his own head in the process. He entrusts the brilliant, emotionally bruised Lady Mariko (Anna Sawai) to act as his translator to the “Anjin,” their name for Blackthorne, whom Toranaga sees as a potential key chess piece in his eventual move against Ishido.
All of this plays out over a perfectly paced 10-episode arc, easily one of the most captivating seasons of television this year. While editors Aika Miyake and Maria Gonzales are quick to point to the embarrassment of riches they had to work with—sensational performances, an incredible story, period-perfect details—it was their work, alongside fellow editor Thomas A. Krueger, that gave the rebooted Shōgun its perfect, haunting shape.
We spoke to Miyake and Gonzalez about what it was like cutting a series with an ensemble that included so many memorable performances and pacing a story that never felt rushed or halting but moved with its own brilliant, brutal logic.
Maria Gonzales and Aika Miyake.
What conversations were you having with showrunner Justin Marks about your approach to pacing the series?
Maria: Maybe a week before they started shooting an episode, we have these tone meetings, which for Justin are kind of legendary on his shows because they can go for hours or even sometimes a couple of days. Justin is a cinephile, so we hear a lot about movies that inspired him and what TV shows inspired him, but there’s no specific talk about pace. I think for both Aika and me, once we started getting the footage, you just sort of let the footage guide you on what it wants to be.
Aika: A funny thing about our show is that we have Japanese and English, and Japanese tends to take twice as long to be said. So I looked at the subtitles in the initial cut, and they just sat there for a long time. So I remember the moment realizing I had to cater to both Japanese and English audiences and strike a good balance so the Japanese subtitles weren’t too fast and the English subtitles weren’t too slow—that contributed to pacing. And to add to Maria’s point, we had so much great stuff that it could feel like, “I don’t want to let it go,” but you have to make difficult decisions. And Justin and the studio allowed us to experiment.
How do you make those difficult decisions about cutting sequences and scenes you love?
Maria: So initially, we do our cut, and then we work with the director of the episode for several days on their cut. And for the most part, the directors cut very few scenes. Once we get to Justin, a lot of the really big decisions get made. There was a lot of back and forth, and some lovely scenes in the first episode had to go because you’re weighing your options and asking, “Am I getting the same emotion from this other scene?” We also had lovely scripts and all the work that Justin, Rachel [Kondo], and the writers did to establish these really dynamic characters. And casting did a phenomenal job, like casting Tadanobu Asano as Yabushige. So it was just an embarrassment of riches for us when those dailies started coming in, so it was our job to give its due and do it justice. It’s inherent that information will repeat, but to Justin’s credit, he never wanted to dumb the show down for the audience. There was a trust that the audience was in on the ride and would get it.
Aika: I want to add something to what Maria said about the repetitiveness of emotions or information. We identify if two lines are actually doing the same thing, so when something felt really repetitive, I’d explain to Justin that’s why I just took this line out. We had that freedom to explore, and I really appreciated getting that space. I remember in episode 8, the initial cut was a hundred minutes or so, and I remember the shift where we had a lot of Ochiba [Fumi Nikaidô] scenes at the beginning of the episode, but while we started editing the whole thing, episode 6 was more about Ochiba, and that was doing enough of her story that we didn’t have to come back to it in episode 8. When I took it out, it felt so right. I watched episodes 5 through 8, and the flow made sense at that point.
(Spoiler alert) An interesting element of the series is that Toranaga is a step ahead of everyone, including the viewer, throughout the season. This is especially true in episode 8, when his number two guy, Toda [Tokuma Nishioka], commits seppuku in what appears to be despair at Toranaga’s decision to give up.
Aika: My understanding was there were spies everywhere. In episode 2, one of the Kosho working for Toranaga turns out to be a ninja coming to kill Blackthorne. So, understanding the world and everyone’s a spy, I understood that Toranaga had to have a poker face in that scene with Toda. Once you understand that, you understand the acting choices that Hiroyuki Sanada makes. He’s almost a guide for me to pick out the good parts and build the story. Especially the scene with Toda committing seppuku. In my first cut, I missed this close-up of Hiromatsu and Toranaga staring at each other. Toranaga flinched a little bit, and Hiromatsu realized he was doing it for real. That was something that director Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour said, “This has to be in this scene.” I understood then the way the scene was built, and that moment was so crucial. Hiromatsu didn’t exactly understand what Toranaga was doing, but he trusted him enough that he must die today. That was a huge, huge moment.
“SHŌGUN” — Pictured: Tokuma Nishioka as Toda Hiromatsu. CR: Katie Yu/FX“SHOGUN” — “Abyss of Life” — Episode 8 (Airs April 9) Pictured: Hiroyuki Sanada as Yoshii Toranaga. CR: Katie Yu/FX
Maria: I think the way Hiroyuki Sanada performs, there’s no real choice to make on our part. It’s not like we were going through a variety of takes and trying to make sure he stayed consistent; he was very consistent. He knew what this role was. So, between him and the writing, I think it was kind of inherent to the project.
Aika: The funny thing about that scene is it’s the most emotional we see Toranaga, and he’s really holding back.
Maria: It’s the only time really in the show he’s emotional, there and a little bit toward the end when Mariko dies, but for the most part he’s very consistent and on his mission.
Let’s end with Mariko, who is such an amazing character. You could argue that among all these fascinating characters, she ends up becoming the one we root for the most. I’d love to hear about what it was like cutting Anna Sawai’s amazing performance.
Maria: We’re so lucky to have Anna on the show. Most of my work was with her in episodes 1 and 4. For me, her introductory scene in 1 was one of my favorite scenes that I cut. This is when she comes to Fuji [Moeka Hoshi]’s aid. Her husband has made a misstep, and now he needs to commit seppuku and end his bloodline, and she’s holding her baby and not wanting to let it go. Mariko comes in and handles the situation, and right from the get-go, even though it’s a brief scene, so much of who she is is established in this scene. She shares a past with Fuji, that she too wants to die, she’s such a complex character. For me, as a woman cutting a character that is so complex, torn between her duty to protect her family name, her duty toward Toranaga, and her love for John Blackthorne, it just made all the scenes I had with her multilayered. Even in episode 4, which was the love story development between her and John Blackthorne, almost every scene is imbued with such complexity and tries to explain her loyalty toward her culture, but she is also torn with this love interest. You don’t always get such complex female characters.
“SHOGUN” — “Anjin” — Episode 1 (Airs February 27) Pictured: Moeka Hoshi as Usami Fuji. CR: Katie Yu/FX“SHOGUN” — “Anjin” — Episode 1 (Airs February 27) Pictured: Anna Sawai as Toda Mariko. CR: Katie Yu/FX
Aika: I have an easy answer [laughs]. So, in episode 9, I’m credited as an additional editor. I had an opportunity to do a female point-of-view cut. Thomas [Krueger] did an amazing job, and then Justin came to me later in the process and asked me to have a look and add a female point of view to the edit. At that point, episode 8’s intensity had been so high, and episode 9 needed a tweak to get it above that. So, I mainly touched on Mariko’s scenes, including when she’s fighting. A year after our job was finished, I looked back, and the scene in which I felt I contributed the most as a woman and a Japanese woman was Mariko’s fighting scene. That sequence was almost completely recut. The original choreography wasn’t long enough for us to feel like it was as intense as necessary. It felt like it needed more intensity when I watched it, so I tried to make it longer. If you look closely, she throws the naginata (the long staff with a blade at the end), and the guy catches it—that only happened once in the choreography, but if you watch the edit, you see it twice because I’m using the same choreography from different angles to make it seem like the fight was longer. I added Blackthorne and Ochiba watching and a sound layer underneath so that the sequence feels longer and more intense. Then I added Mariko’s scream at the end. I wanted to speak to the female point of view where we want to fight and we have the rebellious spirit. The writers said Mariko has this punk personality [laughs]. I relate to that and the frustration of being a woman and finding a way to fight. I really wanted Mariko to give everything in that scene.
House of the Dragons season 2 hasn’t premiered yet—that happens on June 16—but that didn’t stop HBO from topping up the successful Game of Thrones spinoff for another season. Showrunner Ryan Condal and his co-creator, author George R. R. Martin, have no doubt been plotting and planning for a third (and fourth, and fifth?) season already.
The drama centered on the scheming Tagaryen family has been renewed for season 3, proving that HBO’s first GoT spinoff to make it through the creative gantlet and onto air is a major hit. It took the entirety of season 1—which earned nine Emmy nominations, including for Outstanding Drama, and two Golden Globes, winning for Best Drama—before the series was renewed for a second run, so this fresh renewal days before the season 2 premiere is telling.
Matt Smith and Emma D’Arcy in “House of the Dragon.” Courtesy HBO.
When House of the Dragon premiered, it drew the largest premiere audience in HBO and HBO Max history. Season 1 pulled in an average of 29 million viewers per episode, linearly and on streaming. The series is based on Martin’s book “Fire & Blood” and has masterfully followed the drama within House Targaryen as family members turn on one another in a battle for power and, of course, the Iron Throne. The series is set 200 years before the events in Game of Thrones, in an era where the Targaryens have ruled the Seven Kingdoms for a century.
“George, Ryan, and the rest of our incredible executive producers, cast, and crew have reached new heights with the phenomenal second season,” said HBO’s programming and drama series chief Francesca Orsi in a statement. “We are in awe of the dragon-sized effort the entire team has put into the creation of a spectacular season two, with a scope and scale that is only rivaled by its heart. We could not be more thrilled to continue the story of House Targaryen and watch this team burn bright again for season three.”
House of the Dragon alums returning for Season 2 include Emma D’Arcy, Olivia Cooke, Matt Smith, Eve Best, Steve Toussaint, Fabien Frankel, Ewan Mitchell, Tom Glynn-Carney, Sonoya Mizuno, Rhys Ifans, Harry Collett, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell, Phia Saban, Jefferson Hall, and Matthew Needham.
Newcomers include Gayle Rankin as Alys Rivers, Freddie Fox as Ser Gwayne Hightower, Abubakar Salim as Alyn of Hull, Simon Russell Beale as Ser Simon Strong, Clinton Liberty as Addam of Hull, Jamie Kenna as Ser Alfred Broome, Kieran Bew as Hugh, Tom Bennett as Ulf, Tom Taylor as Lord Cregan Stark and Vincent Regan as Ser Rickard Thorne.
While House of the Dragon soars, HBO has another Game of Thrones spinoff in the works: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on Martin’s books “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” which are centered on Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire, Egg. Martin also announced that a pilot script for the spinoff series Ten Thousand Ships is being penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eboni Booth.
For more on House of the Dragon, check out these stories:
In Inside Out 2 (in theaters June 14), Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) is off to hockey camp in the summer before high school, no longer the little girl we remember from the sensational introduction we got nine years ago in Inside Out. Riley is now a 13-year-old tween in the liminal zone of adolescence, with a host of new emotions presenting themselves for the first time. So when the sirens go off again in the Headquarters of Riley’s brain, a new console is installed so these fresh emotions can join the original quintet from Pete Docter’s 2015 film. Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale), and Disgust (Liza Lapira) get repressed in favor of new emotions, including Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).
Key to the nearly impossible task of living up to the astonishment of the first film while forging a new emotive path was screenwriter Dave Holstein, who picked up the baton from Inside Out scribe Meg LeFauve and sprinted, fueled by the film’s most prominent new emotion, Anxiety (Maya Hawke), into dazzling new territory in the sequel. Working with director Kelsey Mann, Holstein leaped into the formidable but fecund Pixar Process (and across the Sarchasm—you’ll understand when you see the film) and made the most of the opportunity.
We spoke to Holstein about leveling up to Pixar’s high bar, what it’s like to write for comedic geniuses like Amy Poehler, and how he learned to love the challenge of scripting a movie that spoke to children and adults.
I’d love to hear about your writing process from the beginning when you mapped out the story for the sequel.
There was a strong desire not to retread the first movie and find something that felt resonant for today. I think anxiety really hit home. Anxiety is not a feeling you can destroy. There’s a certain lesson in learning to live with anxiety that had to feel different than living with sadness, you know, and that was sort of the original challenge of the piece; how to make it new and exciting and also give everyone what they love from the first film.
Was anxiety always the emotion you’d be exploring in the sequel?
We cycled through a few different ones. As with anything at Pixar, you’re constantly iterating to ensure you have the best possible collection of 800 puzzle pieces. But we all just went through this thing called COVID, and anxiety is not really an enemy you can defeat. It’s kind of something you have to learn to live with, and it felt like maybe there was a resonance to the anxiety that we’ve all experienced. I think there’s something important to the phrase: every pain needs a name. It just becomes a lot easier to talk about, especially with children, so that was a big part of anxiety as opposed to, say, shame or guilt, which were totally valid in other ways to play with antagonists. That’s how we kind of hatched that egg.
Tell me about the vaunted Pixar iteration and ideation process. I’m curious what that’s like as the writer from the inside.
Yeah. I mean, it’s like they come to you, and it’s like, “So you’ve written screenplays? Have you written screenplays inside a dishwasher?” I think that that’s always been my feeling is that you’re thrown into a process where everyone is constantly in all three stages of filmmaking at once—writing, shooting, and editing— and you’re constantly working in different parts of the movie and trying to make sure the pylons all build to something.
Writing a script inside a dishwasher sounds difficult.
It’s a very specific process because it’s a lot of pages. I think I wrote upwards of 750 pages on this movie. I guarantee you I have at least 11 drafts in my folder of the most important scenes in this film. It’s not even that hard to write a scene; there are plenty of great scenes, but the hard part is how they fit with everything around them. I kept trying to imagine myself doing the same process with a live-action film, and it doesn’t really work like that. There are just too many boxes to hit in a Pixar film.
Pixar films are well regarded for operating at multiple levels and truly appealing to the entire family, including adults without children.
There are so many levels it has to work on, both comedically and emotionally. It has to work on two different eye lines—for the adults and the kids. It has to make you feel something. It has to make you laugh. It has to make you want to watch it again. It has to make you want to see it in the theater. People say 3-dimensional chess. I think it’s like 8-dimensional backgammon. I’ve done a lot of different intense pipelines, I mean, I created a show for Jim Carrey that went for two years, so I’ve gone through different versions of insanity, you know? This was a very specific brand of great, but it was a lot of work.
How do you know when you’ve gotten it just right? Or can you ever truly know that until the movie is in theaters?
Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing you’re searching for the whole time. It’s not necessarily the moment when someone is crying, but it’s the moment when you feel something so emotional that it just puts you in a place. You want people to watch this film and say, “That really hit,” because that’s what we associate with Pixar. When you’re given the keys to Pixar kingdom and the tools and budgets they have, you feel this necessity to swing really, really, really hard, you know? And that doesn’t just mean more laughs per page. It means, “Can we figure out the secret to life in the next 94 minutes?”
That’s a lot of pressure, and the fact that you’re literally writing a film about anxiety adds to it.
You’re like, damn it, I’m in this self-fulfilling prophecy of a script. But if there’s nothing that can go horribly wrong, it’s kind of boring. This is what I signed up for.
What’s it like writing for animation? Does it change anything for your approach to crafting a satisfying story arc?
You know, it’s funny. I try to think about it as a drama first and just write adult stuff to see how I can find that sort of center lane. There’s a scene I’m very proud of where Joy breaks down. She’s like, I’m sick of being Joy all the time. You have these great actors like Amy Poehler who can do that, and you want to give these characters different shades. I think the trap in a film where you have Joy, Anger, Sadness, etcetera is that Joy, Anger, and Sadness are only happy, angry, and sad. And I think that what’s sort of fun is to dimensionalize characters that are so inherently one note, which is the same in a live-action, dramatic script. You’re always trying to find what feels like a real moment.
And I imagine it’s different writing alongside artists and animators.
The trick is just writing visually. I don’t think there’s a line of dialogue in the script that’s more than two horizontal lines on the page. You start to see the math of what you’re doing, and most of what has to be conveyed has to be conveyed with the eye. When I started writing on network sitcoms, being in a joke room was like a whole different muscle to train your brain. And I think that’s the jump for me—up at Pixar, you’re sitting in a room of a dozen story artists with pens in their hands, and I’m trying to speak their language so that I can convey what’s in my head to their head—it’s a totally a translation event.
How much are the film’s stars in your head when you’re writing their characters? Are you writing in a particular way to suit Amy Poehler’s gifts, for example?
It’s great writing a sequel when you can have Disney+ open in the background and play a scene from the first movie just to get their voices. But what’s really fun and kind of unexpected is when we were recording, that writer’s brain kind of fires up, and you start to hear new lines and feed them new ideas because their cadences or where they’re headed comedically is inspiring something. I was kind of surprised that we found on the day a line that’s 20% better than what was written, you know, or 20% darker in a lot of cases, frankly, with Phyllis [Smith, as Sadness] and Lewis [Black, as Anger]. A lot of those ended up in the movie. Like in the first movie, when Sadness says something like, “I loved that movie where the dog died,” I was like, Oh, we can do that. It’s totally dark, but it works.
Considering Anxiety is the big new character, what was it like when you finally heard Maya Hawke performing the role?
She really knocks it out of the park. Maya Hawke is phenomenal. Her interpretation of Anxiety is dimensionalized. She’s had a great rhythm. She’s one of the only characters I could write more than two lines of dialogue for. I could give her a big chunk, and she would sell it really well. And she wanted tongue twisters. She wanted what Jim Carrey wanted: a lot of verbal marbles to chew on, and that was really fun because I like a challenge, and she was really good at it.
And about another newcomer, Ayo Edebiri, as Envy?
Oh man, Ayo’s great. She’s such a born voice performer as well. She’s so funny, and she gave her character so many levels. I think because her character was so short she felt she had to have moments where she was up here and then down here. She was really fun to watch; she would go off on these riffs, which were like full monologues. And I would just sit there in awe. She’s the real deal. She’s really funny.
What does it feel like to be at the end of the road and have the film finally coming out?
[Holds up a toy version of Anxiety.] That’s kind of what it feels like, you know?
Inside Out 2 is in theaters on June 14.
For more stories on 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to
It’s fair to say the youth movie genre in the 1980s was defined by the Brat Pack, the group of young actors who appeared together in such classics as Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and St. Elmo’s Fire. They are famously familiar:Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, and Andrew McCarthy, among others. What is less well known is the profound impact that moniker, coined by then New York Magazine writer David Blum, had on them personally and professionally. As McCarthy, whose feature documentary, BRATS, explores the label and its ripple effect, notes, “The paradox is that we hated it and the public loved it. To them, it represented something different than it represented for us.”
In BRATS, McCarthy, now an established director and award-winning travel writer, reconnects with some of his fellow Brat Packers after several decades to discuss the aftermath of the branding. He also gleans surprising insight from many industry figures and Blum. His documentary is raw and revealing as it traces the actors’ journey from resenting the term to embracing it.
The Credits spoke with McCarthy about the idea that sparked BRATS, the logistics of meeting up with his former co-stars, and the film’s ending, which is certain to resonate with fans of the genre. Edited interview excerpts follow.
You write about the Brat Pack in your memoir, Brat: An ’80s Story. Did you always plan to follow up your book with a film?
I had no intention. It never occurred to me to make a film about it. If you read it, then you know, it’s just very subjective about my experience. What I was interested in was that I’m a result of my beliefs about what happened then, not other people’s beliefs of what happened then. The life I’ve lived is an outgrowth of the way I reacted to all that. But then, when I finished the book because it was a seismic event in all our lives and I’d never talked to any of them since, I thought it would be really interesting to see how it had affected their lives. I knew we all hated it at the beginning, and I wanted to see how that changed over time.
Andrew McCarthy in Central Park. Courtesy ABC/Hulu.
Did you map it out at the outset, or did it evolve as you were filming?
Well, it certainly evolved. I mean, I can’t even recall what it started as. All I knew I wanted to do was be utterly transparent the whole time with it. I just wanted it to be like a homemade movie, like you’re with me, I’m going to do this, and we’ll see what the hell happens. The shock I had from it was how much affection we all had for each other when we saw each other again. That was a big surprise to me, and so that changed the way the film eventually ended up being because you just have to follow the story.
Emilio Estevez in BRATS. Courtesy ABC/Hulu.
BRATS is a road movie of sorts. How many crew members did you travel with? And when did you shoot it?
We started in March of ’22, and I filmed about 10 or 11 days over a year because you just can’t call up Rob, Demi, and Emilio and get them all in the same afternoon, as much as you would like to [laughs]. I would get a crew, but like for me and Ally, it was just me and Ally; I had my iPhone, I rented two cameras that day, and she said I can talk to you today, like OK, I can’t get a crew today but I’ll be up in an hour, and I set up everything myself. And so it was just me and her at her apartment. With other people, I had a crew. I had two cameramen and multiple cameras, and each time, we’d set the cameras up and just walk away because I wanted multiple different angles. There was also a sound man and probably a PA helping us. That was it. There were no lights, there was no makeup crew, and there was nothing like that.
Demi Moore in BRATS. Courtesy ABC/Hulu
I found it interesting that you see David Blum, who wrote the article. He didn’t think the label was negative or would have the ramifications that it did on all of you personally. You also speak with a lot of other industry figures, including Kate Erbland, Laura Shuler Donner, and Malcolm Gladwell. Did their positive takes change your perception in a good way? And why was it important for you to include them? To lend some balance?
Yeah, of course, you just want some reality check. You want perspective. To meet David, finally, I think that was really an interesting experience, for me and for him. He had never met any of us before. He’d been keeping up with all our careers. He knows more about what everyone’s doing than I certainly did. He knew he affected our lives in a deep way. He knew we didn’t like him. And so I tip my hat to him for agreeing to meet me.
I love the ending, by the way!
[Laughs] Well, I mean, it’s such an iconic Brat Pack moment with Judd pumping his fist, you know, stick it to the man. It’s so great. How else could it have ended? It wasn’t my idea. My editor [Tony Kent] did it, and when Tony put the song on there, I’m like, OK, done, we’re done here.
I believe Rob Lowe remarked that the youth movie genre made shows like Glee and Friends possible. Do you agree?
When Rob said that, I was like, really, dude, that’s a bit self-congratulatory. But what I didn’t understand before I started doing the documentary was that movies were not aimed at kids until the ’80s. They were aimed at adults, and then Hollywood realized that with the few youth movies they’d made, kids were going six or seven times to see them. So almost overnight, there was this seismic change in Hollywood about who was in movies, and we were the beneficiaries of that. And then David Blum comes along and just throws this really zingy tag on it and categorizes us. And so it was putting a label on this cultural shift that was happening. So, I don’t think it’s that far off. What is Friends but St. Elmo’s Fire, except in New York and not Washington? We were certainly at the forefront of that.
Rob Lowe in BRATS. Courtesy ABC/Hulu
What do you want the audience to take away?
Well, I think naturally, for most people, it will come down to nostalgia, but then I hope they walk away with something very different. You go, yeah, I had my walk down memory lane, but actually, I’ve got an interesting perspective on things now and maybe how that reflects on their own lives. I’m fascinated by how we look at things one way and know it to be the case, and then, in time, we look at it from 180 degrees the other way and know that to be the truth. I hope they come away with, huh, there’s a bigger thing involved here than just cool music and funny hairdos.
BRATS premieres on Hulu on June 13.
Featured image: (L-R) Actors Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy.
In the Bridgerton universe, imagination is key. One of the reasons the show skyrocketed in popularity since its season one debut is that it’s a romance and a period drama reimagined. It’s a romance set in a royal world with diverse characters, whimsical clothing, and orchestral covers of modern-day pop hits that give the period trappings a modern sensibility.
And what better way to sell a romantic, fantastical world than through the detailed costuming created by Bridgerton costume designers John Glaser, George Sayer, and Dougie Hawkes?
“The producers and the writers allowed us to veer even further away from the actual period and become a little more fantasy, a little more fashiony [this season],” Glaser says. “We broke as many rules as we could.”
Glaser describes this season as a bit more of a “rom-com.” The audience is familiar with the characters by now, and the two leads, Colin and Penelope, have been teased as a will-they-won’t-they? couple since the first season.
In season one, we were introduced to the primary family houses categorized by color palette: Bridgerton blue and Featherington orange. In season two, Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) is mostly seen in different violet hues. But in season three, costume coloring got a bit more complex.
“The audience knows the characters,” Glaser says. “They know the families and that allowed us to not have to follow such strict — I call them Disney color rules. We could break out and become a little more realistic in the colors.”
This year, it’s Penelope Featherington who is the season’s diamond — the former wallflower turned leading lady that, until now, was only ever seen in some painfully bright, citrus gown.
“We used colors that were good for her skin tone and hair color,” Glaser says. “Also, if you look at her fabrics they’re layers of blues, greens, pinks—so you’re not really sure what color it is. And that’s because people who watch the show look at color and see easter eggs, and we didn’t want to foretell the story.”
Nicola Coughlan’s starring role this season has caused somewhat of an antiquated media frenzy around her body. But the truth of the matter is that Penelope has never looked better. She absolutely lights up the screen this season, and online audiences are eating it up.
“The colors that Penelope is wearing — even though she is more mature, more powerful — allows her to still be a wallflower,” Glaser says. “She’s not sticking out. Color is no longer telling her story. She’s telling her story.”
When designing costumes for a show like Bridgerton, Glaser says they turn to “modern paintings” for inspiration.
“Like Andy Warhol, we use [Robert] Motherwell, Serjeant [Painter],” he says. “And we always say the same thing with our research that it may be modern research, it may be actual period research, or painting, but we use certain things because we extract the Regency period…and that’s how we mix things all together.”
“We’ll have that under bust line which is very much part of the Regency period,” adds Sayer. “But then we might take it in, smooth it out, and move it. We moved the line once and we added another line underneath.”
This season’s leading man is Colin Bridgerton. Fresh off the boat from his travels abroad, Colin has a revived perspective on life, and a dashing, new wardrobe to match.
“With Colin, especially, you’ve seen him since season one and season two quite pure and quite soft in his color palette,” Hawkes says. “And I always yearned a bit to escape from that color range. So to give him that transformation… He’s an incessant traveler anyway, after each season he’s on an adventurer. So it was time to make him an ultimate adventurer and come back a fully fledged man, rather than still a boy.”
Hawkes says with the men it’s almost easier to adhere to more traditional Regency era styles.
“[We] used a lot of contemporary fabrics and contemporary designers…but it has a grounding in silhouette to authenticity, historically,” he says.
This season’s other Bridgerton family lead has a bit of a different look. Inspired by Hollywood starlets like Grace Kelly and Catherine Hepburn, Francesca Bridgerton has a reserved elegance about her.
“We used a lot of sheer fabrics this year because it helps make things a little mysterious,” Glaser says.
According to Sayer, Francesca is feminine but not “in your face.” She maintains all the class of her elder sister, Daphne, but with an air of mystery. But it wasn’t Francesca that presented the biggest challenge for costuming this season.
Very true to her character, Claudia Jessie (Eloise Bridgerton) became the problem child this season. After accidentally breaking her wrist on set, the costume designers were faced with a new task: how to hide a modern-day cast in Regency-era garb.
In a few scenes, Eloise is seen wearing a muff so that the team would be able to hide her cast.
“It was a tricky one because it’s summer and you don’t wear muffs,” Glaser says. “And some people have noted that the muff looks very light and thin, and that’s all because she couldn’t have any weight on her arm. So it’s like a piece of tissue paper wrapped around.”
Because Jessie wasn’t able to put her arm into most of her outfits for the show, the costuming team had to redo much of her clothing — adding “frills and fluff” to confuse the eye and divert attention from her wrist.
“And then we split open the sleeves on her green embroidered coat…so she could actually get into the coat,” adds Sayer.
As seasoned veterans in the industry, Glaser, Sayer and Hawkes have all experienced their fair share of costume mishaps.
“If you look carefully, she’s standing in certain ways, and she’s got a scarf draped over her, or she’s behind a chair,” Glaser says. The rest of this season’s magical looks will appear with the release of the second half of season three on Thursday.
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