“The Day of the Jackal” Cinematographer Christopher Ross Lenses Fatal Game of Spy vs Assassin

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Eddie Redmayne stars as an unrivaled, anonymous assassin in The Day of the Jackal, a new Peacock series inspired by Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel. Reimagined in a contemporary setting, the Jackal is an English hitman pursued across Europe by Bianca (Lashana Lynch), a British intelligence officer determined to apprehend her target before he gets to his next hit.

Written by Top Boy’s Ronan Bennett and lensed for the first three of ten episodes by cinematographer Christopher Ross, BSC (Shogun, Terminal), The Day of the Jackal is big, cinematic television. Pushed on by the Jackal’s prowess, Bianca, an arms specialist, goes to unexpected lengths to hunt her prey, and the story turns into a twisting, cat-and-mouse thriller shot across London, Vienna, Budapest, Zagreb, and the Croatian coast. The hitman has an extraordinary talent for his work, but so does the MI6 operative, and as they each dig into their assignments, Ross creates a visual complement between their two worlds. 

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL — — Pictured: Lashana Lynch as Bianca — (Photo by: Marcell Piti/PEACOCK)

Both are living double lives necessary for their work and when they clock out, their visual environments change completely. We spoke with Ross about the inspiration he found in vintage spy thrillers, the complicated sets that gave the show its cinematic quality, and how he brought the audience into the Jackal’s world with a view down the same rifle site used by the assassin.

 

Did you know going in how cinematic the show would turn out?

I’ve worked with Brian Kirk, the director, a couple of times before, and with Ronan Bennett, the writer, and so when I first read the script, I could see that it had an interior style to the characterization, and then there was the potential to expand that to a big exterior style. The one thing I know about Brian is that he loves to make bold statements, so that’s what we were trying to do.

Given the range of filming locations across Europe, was there one location that was particularly memorable or difficult?

Austria had its two challenges. One of the first main assassination attempts in the opening half an hour was on a rooftop in Vienna. The big challenge was to do the cable cam drop down the side of the building. We had a decelerator rigged, and it was constructed for the stunt performer to do the cable maneuver. We had to build a special rig off a construction crane off the side of the building to repeat the move. With shots like that, it’s always really simple to have the idea. I go, Oh, wouldn’t it be fun if we just jumped off the side of the building with the character? That idea then involves a thousand emails to various building contractors, architects, and engineering companies to sign off on our ability to do it. And then, at the Austro-Hungarian border, we had to reignite the scene at the border crossing between Germany and France in the first episode. That border crossing was closed down about 25 years ago when Hungary joined the European Union. We had to rebuild the derelict buildings and re-fire up all of the power. The challenge was to bring it to life back from the dead. It’s one of my favorite sequences. It’s the first time you get a really tense moment of cat and mouse in the Jackal storyline.

 

There’s also a real sense of intimacy as the Jackal plies his trade. How did you develop that?

One of the big references for anyone who wants to make any form of espionage thriller are the films of Alan Pakula, such as The Parallax View. One of the things we wanted to play with was the concept of being watched and not being watched, of being inside someone’s universe and outside their universe. The Jackal, because he’s such a lone wolf, has basically no one tracking him. When he’s carrying out his assassinations, we’re very much in his sphere of influence, inside his mind. And then, at times, we feel he’s on the cusp of being spotted; that’s when we transition into a more voyeuristic perspective. That was a very conscious choice of lens design. We wanted the audience to feel they were in each protagonist’s shoes. That first-person visceral narrative was a conscious choice so we could jump into a more espionage-style technique. Another reference we used a lot, although we didn’t use zooms anywhere near as much as they did, was the Spielberg film Munich. That film has a beautiful, casual espionage business to personal life transition, and we wanted to echo that. The Jackal’s quite a conundrum of a character. He’s an exceptional liar who’s almost permanently playing some kind of pantomime. We wanted to blur the lines for that character as to what is the real truth and does he even believe his real truth.

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL — — Pictured: Eddie Redmayne as The Jackal — (Photo by: Marcell Piti/Carnival Film & Television Limited)

How did you create the visual contrast between the Jackal’s work and personal life?

One of the tricky elements of the Jackal is to try, without throwing up a huge chyron that says Spain or Munich, [was to make it so] that you immediately know that the blue and the blacks are Munich, the golden highlight and bronze in the mid-tones is Spain. The idea was to delineate the spaces in a geographical sense and also delineate the two sides of Jackal’s life. The scene where that is most prevalent is in a FaceTime phone call between Nuria and the Jackal. He’s framed in an idiosyncratic way; she’s framed more conventionally. It’s a way to press some psychological buttons that allow an audience into his twisted mind.

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL — Episode 104 — Pictured: Eddie Redmayne as The Jackal — (Photo by: Marcell Piti/Carnival Film & Television Limited)

There’s a parallel between the Jackal’s work and Bianca’s. Was that intentional?

Absolutely—the idea being that if you are a hired assassin and execute people for business reasons, or you work for MI6 or the CIA, then your business is fabrication, your business is lies. The work-life balance you have will always be off-kilter because if you’re undercover as an MI6 operative, your family will never know that half of your life. He’s the hunted, she’s the hunter, and they switch and flip, and that was the idea behind creating that duality.

 

How do you approach the shots we see through the gun site?

I get really nerdy about these sorts of things. In episode one, the Jackal takes the longest shot that’s ever been taken, which, from memory, is 3.8 kilometers, I think. At that sort of distance, there are so many things that affect the shot. Eddie and I geeked out over some old textbooks about rifle sites and riflery from the First World War. Ultimately, all those things are about trying to match the focal length of the rifle site and then composite the graticule that we like the most over the imagery. For that hit, it was a 1200mm lens on a stabilized head that we rigged on the roof of a building. I think we were only 400 meters away, so nowhere near the actual distance the shot was supposed to be, but that’s the idea, trying to channel, as I’m operating the camera, my inner sniper. You get to play a little character all of your own.

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL — Episode 101 — Pictured: Eddie Redmayne as the Jackal — (Photo by: Marcell Piti/Carnival Film & Television Limited)
THE DAY OF THE JACKAL — — Pictured: Eddie Redmayne as the Jackal — (Photo by: Marcell Piti/PEACOCK)

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Featured image: THE DAY OF THE JACKAL — Episode 105 — Pictured: Eddie Redmayne as The Jackal — (Photo by: Marcell Piti/Carnival Film & Television Limited)

 

 

 

 

“The Penguin” Hair Department Head Brian Badie on Styling Gotham’s Gruesome Twosome

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Spoiler warning…

The Penguin capped its remarkable eight-part run this past Sunday night and accomplished a rare feat—it’s a series set in a comic book world, boasting characters well known to the genre’s most read-in fans, that delivered a profoundly satisfying drama for a person unfamiliar with DC Comics or unenthused by Gotham’s most iconic resident, Bruce Wayne. The Penguin doesn’t even whisper Batman’s name nor allude to his presence until the very last shot in the series (a bat-signal, naturally), instead focusing on a rivalry between two remarkably coherent, tragically flawed villains.

Developed by Lauren LeFranc and starring a once again unrecognizable Colin Farrell in the title role, reprising his turn as Oz Cobb from Matt Reeves’ film The Batman, The Penguin burst out of the gate with critical comparisons to HBO’s deathless The Sopranos. After a deeply satisfying conclusion to its eight-episode arc, those comparisons don’t seem as far-fetched as they might have on first blush. Oz’s uncomfortably close relationship with his domineering, fragile mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell), bears some common pathology with Tony Soprano’s (the late, great James Gandolfini) tortured relationship with his mother, Livia (the late, great Nancy Marchand.) Oz’s paternal, paristic relationship with his surrogate son, Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) could be compared, with a straight face, to Tony’s mentoring and eventual murder of Christopher (Michael Imperioli). In fact, both Tony and Oz strangle their surrogates in twin acts of heartless calculation.

Deirdre O’Connell, Colin Farrell, Rhenzy Feliz. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

Yet while The Sopranos and other mob classics, from Goodfellas to The Godfather, had memorable female roles, you’d also be forgiven for arguing that The Penguin might have delivered one of the most unforgettable thanks to the sizzling, kinetic performance by Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone, a crime boss’s daughter turned brutalized scapegoat and eventual avenging dark angel. It turns out you can tell a story about Gotham that includes neither the story of Bruce Wayne’s tragic childhood, a piece of Americana as deeply baked into our collective consciousness as anything that happened in our actual history, or the Joker, the perpetually unstable, cackling sociopath in clown paint, and keep people riveted and DC Comics fans happy. That’s quite a feat.

“I think everybody involved, from the producers on down, made [this series] the adult version,” says hair department head Brian Badie. “This particular DC world comes from The Batman and Matt Reeves and [executive producer] Dylan Clark. Matt was the genius behind this world, so I knew the bar was set high, and I did not want to disappoint him. I worked closely with Dylan, who was on set daily throughout the design process. He was my go-to when it came down to design approval anytime I knew I was entering The Batman side of this show, and he was amazing to work with.”

Colin Farrell. Photograph by Courtesy of Max

The Penguin was filmed in New York (The Batman duped London for Gotham), and Badie took advantage of this fact by hiring local talent to round out his team, bringing in key hairstylist Jenn Vasilopoulos and additional hairstylist Mariko Miyagi. “I wanted to see what newer talent was out there in NYC. They both turned out to be amazing! I’m so happy to have met them, so now I have even more amazing talent to work with.” 

Badie was integral in keeping the peace between the adult crime drama that was The Penguin’s dark heart and the DC Comics-inspired world of Gotham embedded in The Penguin‘s soul. Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb isn’t so much a departure from the Batman foil created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane but a roughed-up, pathologically insecure, mother-obsessed gangster. He’s no longer named Oswald Cobblepot as he was in the comics and previous cinematic iterations, and he no longer comes from a rich family, like Bruce Wayne, but instead was raised in the rough and tumble Crown Point, on Gotham’s east side, destroyed at the end of The Batman. Farrell’s transformation into the scar-faced, barrel-chested, savagely canny brute began in The Batman, but that scene-stealing performance in the film was also brief—he was only in the movie for a handful of minutes. Leading his own series required him to be on set savagely early, and for Badie and The Penguin‘s creative team, including makeup designer Mike Marino, to work for hours every day to ensure he remained perfectly unrecognizable until he became utterly unforgettable.

Colin Farrell. Photograph by Courtesy of Max

“Colin had a three-hour pre-process before my pre-call,” Badie says. “So, let’s say the crew call is at seven in the morning, my crew call might be at five, and Colin’s call time might be three or four in the morning. I loved bringing the Penguin to life and working with Mike Marino and his team because he’s a genius.”

Marino had worked out the look for the Penguin in The Batman, but the requirements to do that day after day for eight months were different and far more arduous. “They shaved his head into a halo, and he was completely bald because they shot him for less time in the film,” Badie says. “But we shot for eight months in the series, so Colin didn’t want to shave his head. So now we had to figure out a way to plaster down this circular halo shape of his own hair using glue, spirit gum, and things like that. Once we plastered it down to a bald cap, Diana Choi made the wig”

Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

For the first month of filming The Penguin, Badie helped apply Farrell’s wig and secure it, and then razor cut it to ensure it blended in on the sides and the color match was perfect. Then came the hairspray. “That was a daily chore, and it took some time to match it with the length of Colin’s hair and that topper piece we put on him,” Badie says. “It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, especially with the Penguin’s movements and elements like the wind, which could all be obstacles. The challenge was to get rid of his hair in a perfect, smooth formation as if he were bald. Then, once it’s gelled down, special effects get involved, and I step back.”

Colin Farrell in “The Penguin.” Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

With Farrell’s performance, Oz Cobb’s relentless pursuit of more power, seeded by an impoverished childhood and a homicidal need for approval from his mother, would have made for a fine series, but The Penguin thrives because his chief rival, Milioti’s Sofia Falcone, exposes him in a way no other character can. Oz began his climb up the underworld ladder as Sofia’s driver and is the reason she eventually ended up in Gotham’s seventh circle of hell, Arkham Asylum. This betrayal was the accelerant that lit The Penguin from within.

As The Penguin got going, there appeared to be a fragile partnership between Oz and Sofia, but considering the series’ cold opening revealed Oz killing her brother Alberto (Michael Zegen), it was a partnership built to explode. It was in episode 4, “Cent’Anni,” that revealed Oz’s complicity in Sofia’s banishment to Arkham, where she spent a miserable decade of confinement.

Cristin Milioti and Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO.

“I love storytelling through the art of hairstyling. It’s not just beauty and looks—I love getting my hands dirty with the character and telling the story, and Sofia’s arc has so many moods and moments throughout the series,” Badie says. “She starts as this innocent, daddy’s girl type of thing before being thrown in Arkham. You have this whole psychotic world she has to go through, and then goes into the aftermath of Arkham when she’s plotting and presenting herself in a certain way.”

Cristin Milioti, Mark Strong. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

When we meet Sofia in flashbacks as her father’s chosen successor to his empire, Badie gave her hair an innocence, including a ponytail, “as if she just threw half her hair up, half down, which reads as a younger style.” But it’s Sofia’s clandestine meeting with Summer Gleeson (Nadine Malouf), a Gotham Gazette reporter who reveals that the serial suicides at her father’s club aren’t suicides at all—they’re murders. Sofia eventually pieces together that Carmine is the killer, and her mother might have been his first victim. When Oz reports Sofia’s meeting back to Carmine, her father frames her for the killings. Arkham awaits.

L-r: Marié Botha, Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

“In Arkham, she’s being deconstructed as they’re breaking her down,” Badie says. “It might seem like her hair’s just messy, but it really tells the story of her mood. In Cristin’s moods, I tried to match the hair with the energy she was feeling in the moment. It wasn’t so much of a hairstyle for me; it’s almost like her hair was its own conversation, its own story, that helps the audience understand what she’s feeling.”

Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO

Once out of Arkham, Sofia’s mission is revenge and capture; revenge on everyone who put her in Arkham and capture the family crime business by any means necessary. Badie gives her post-asylum look more structure as she tries to project to her family (betrayers, all) and Gotham at large that’s put together. “She has the classic up-do chignon. Her costumes were very elegant but a little conservative and unassuming, unthreatening,” he says. “But the whole time she’s plotting—her bangs are there for a reason; she’s a little bit hidden, the bangs are like claws, showing a little bit of that evilness that Oz doesn’t know, but the audience can clearly tell she’s calculating.”

Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

Sofia is the Penguin’s equal, and that is put on full display at the end of “Cent’Anni,” when she calmly takes her niece, Gia (Kenzie Grey), outside of the expansive mansion where the extended Falcone family lives so that she can return inside, in a stunning yellow dress and a gas mask, and confirm all the adults (save for Johnny Viti, played by Michael Kelly, whose window was left open as he will be useful to her later) have been gassed to death.

“I upped the energy of hair when her craziness is completely unleashed,” Badie says. “You saw that in episode four when she’s wearing the yellow dress, and we have the big reveal. I had somebody on Facebook send me a message saying, ‘When Sofia came down in that yellow dress, I knew what mood she was in by her hair.’ They knew she was about to do some crazy sh*t, and to me that’s success. It wasn’t, ‘Oh my God, I love her hairstyle.’ No, they saw her change from the previous scene to that scene and knew she was about to blow some sh*t up.”

Cristin Milioti. Courtesy Brian Badie/HBO.
Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

But Badie was careful not to turn Sofia into Carmela Soprano.

“You can just tell from the set design and the cinematography that it has a very dark underground feeling,” Badie says. “Clearly, Sofia’s Italian, and that factors in, but if I were doing a Sopranos-type show, something quintessential mob, I would have made the hair more polished because those girls believed that every hair must be in place. But Sofia’s hair never looks over-stylized, and Cristin was on board with this because she has an acute eye for fashion and and hair. Gotham looks like a tragedy. So I felt like that’s how the hair should be. I feel like Oz should be one of the most polished people in the whole story.”

As The Penguin progressed and Oz and Sofia’s partnership disintegrated into all-out war, Badie helped emphasize Sofia’s metamorphosis into a crime boss with a heaping helping of rage by taking out any hint of salon-cut hair. “She’s starting to cut her own hair; she’s going into this jaggedness because she’s a bit manic and crazy, so the hair can’t be absolutely perfect,” he says.

Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

For Oz’s surrogate son Victor, Badie made sure it looked like he had zero time to style his hair, given all the work he does for Oz. Victor starts the series trying to boost the rims of Oz’s fancy purple sports car and ends the series, having become Oz’s most dependable ally and someone Oz fears he might love, being strangled to death for his service and love for Oz.

Rhenzy Feliz. Courtesy Brian Badie/HBO

“For Victor, he’s a New York guy. He’d have his hair really faded, always perfect with sharp edges and lines, but I gave him a fade, and his hair was always a little unkempt,” Badie says. “It had a silhouette and angles, but at the same time, the texture was there, and it didn’t look like he styled it. He’s running behind Oz; when does he even go home and shower? We don’t even know that. So we’re not going to overstyle his hair like he’s Puerto Rican or Dominican in Washington Heights and is in a barber shop every two or three days. That’s how I kept the series less New York City and more Gotham.”

Colin Farrell and Rhenzy Feliz. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO

Featured image: Cristin Milioti and Colin Farrell. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO.

Cameron Diaz is “Back in Action” Alongside Jamie Foxx in the Trailer for Her First Film in 11 Years

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Cameron Diaz is literally Back in Action for the first time after an 11-year hiatus from acting and makes a quick case for how much a weary nation needs her comedic chops. Netflix has dropped the first trailer for the spy action comedy starring Diaz and Jamie Foxx as two of the most surprising parents of all time—they used to be spies for the CIA, and their kids are really confused at how this could be possible considering they’re not cool enough. “Like Jason Bourne,” one of their kids asks. “Yeah, but we remember stuff,” Foxx’s Matt replies.

It’s what they remember and the work they used to do that gets Diaz’s Emily and Foxx’s Matt into trouble. They’ve comfortably retired from their clandestine work to live a family life in the suburbs when their cover is blown, and they’re forced to fulfill the title’s promise and get back into their old line of work. The trailer packs plenty of punch—flame throwers, car chases, parachute escapes—and is a good reminder of what made Diaz such a star in the first place.

Diaz and Foxx are joined by Kyle Chandler, Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Jamie Demetriou, McKenna Roberts, and Rylan Jackson. Seth Gordon directs from a script he co-wrote with Brendan O’Brien, one of the co-writers of  Gordon’s Neighbors.

Diaz has kept very busy since she took a step back from acting and announced her retirement in 2014 so she could raise her children. She still appeared in episodes of The Drew Barrymore Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race and launched her successful wine brand Avaline. She’ll also be heard voicing Princess Fiona again in the upcoming Shrek 5. 

It’ll be especially nice to see Diaz and Foxx together, considering this marks Foxx’s return after a medical emergency last year, one he’ll address in his Netflix comedy special “What Happened Was.”

Check out the trailer for Back in Action, which arrives on January 17.

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Featured image: Back In Action. (L to R) Cameron Diaz as Emily and Jamie Foxx as Matt in Back In Action. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2024.

“The Last of Us” Season Two’s Premiere Date Coming Soon-Ish

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With HBO’s fantastic eight-part miniseries The Penguin drawing to a close this past Sunday, we got a fresh update on when one of HBO’s other fantastic series returns, the Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey-led The Last of Us. We’ve known for a while HBO’s first big swing out of the gate in 2025 is the expansion of the world of Dune, recently reinvigorated by Denis Villeneuve’s two films in the upcoming series Dune: Prophecy, which arrives on November 17. As for The Last Us, we won’t have to wait too long—the killer zombie show returns in Spring of next year.

IGN reported that the release window news came directly from HBO and Max Content CEO and Chairman Casey Bloys during a 2025 programming slate presentation to journalists.

The last look we got at what was in store for us in season two of The Last of Us was in a trailer released on September 26. The date was not randomly selected. In the terrifying world of The Last of Us, September 26 was the day when the cordyceps virus outbreak first exploded in the original game by Naughty Dog.

The trailer revealed Pedro Pascal’s Joel Miller and newcomer Catherine O’Hara sitting for a therapy session. If anyone needed therapy in the demolished world of The Last of Us, it was Joel—the last time we saw him, he was seeing red in a brutal, vengeful bloodbath at the hospital where his charge, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), was moments away from being dissected to retrieve the precious antidote to the killer virus she is, for some reason, immune.

Bella Ramsey is Ellie in “The Last of Us.” Photograph by Courtesy of HBO

The season two trailer also revealed that Ellie has found what appears to be a new, safe home in the mountains, paid for in blood during Joel’s rampage to free her. While Joel and Bella look to be in a much better position than they were at any point during season one’s arduous journey across a devastated America, no one is ever truly safe in The Last of Us. The new trailer revealed one of the infected at one of the later, more monstrous stages of mutation, crawling toward a fresh kill.

The trailer is set to a haunting version of Pearl Jam’s “Future Days” and reveals that season two picks up five years after the first season’s events. If that means that Joel and Ellie have found relative stability and peace for five years, it will be that much more difficult to see it ripped away again. Given that this is a drama series, a thriller at heart, we know that season two will not be a profile of how two death-haunted survivors handle prosperity and comfort. HBO’s official description for season two reads, “Joel and Ellie’s collective past catches up to them, drawing them into conflict with each other and a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than they left behind.” Cheery times ahead.

Season two features several talented newcomers: Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, Isabela Merced as Dina, Young Mazino as Jesse, Ariela Barer as Mel, Tati Gabrielle as Nora, Spencer Lord as Owen, Danny Ramirez as Manny, and Jeffrey Wright as Isaac.

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Featured image: Pedro Pascal in “The Last of Us.” Photograph by Courtesy of HBO

“Deadpool & Wolverine” Sound Designers on the Splatter-and-Slash Acoustics of a Honda Odyssey Brawl

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In our last conversation about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine, sound designers Craig Henighan and Ryan Cole discussed the hilarious opening sequence where Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool uses Wolverine’s adamantium claws and bones to take down some Time Variance Authority goons, all set to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” and some sound tricks to make the adamantium hits stand out. Today, they break down the savage Honda Odyssey brawl and the stunning cameo extravaganza.

 

Since you both serve as Supervising Sound Editors, how did you split up the responsibilities?

Ryan Cole: I got the first cut in January 2024 and handled dialog and ADR [automated dialogue replacement] while Craig did all the temp mixes. We give each other notes and pass sequences back and forth.

Craig Henighan: I started in June 2023 while they were shooting in London and worked on the early assemblies of the opening title and the Void fight, but then we had the strikes. I handled sound effects, sound design, and re-recording mixing, and [dialogue and re-recording mixer] Lora Hirschberg also came in during the final mix. But the core team starts with Ryan and me. We’ve worked with Shawn and [editor] Dean [Zimmerman] for a long time, so we have a shorthand. If they have issues while shooting, they lean on us to see if it’s working. It’s a pretty well-oiled machine between picture and sound at this point. Some sounds that I did riffing off the cuff last June made it into the final. With the amount of music and details that go into this movie, sound and dialogue have to be the best that it can be right out of the gate.

 

The ultra-violent yet hilarious fight inside a real Honda Odyssey minivan is a twisted heart-to-heart between the two unlikely buddies. How did you build out that sequence?

Ryan Cole: That’s my favorite fight in the movie. It’s so clever, silly, and intense! The sound effects are practical because the fight is very choreographed, which lends itself to the nasty hits, blood, and guts. We tried to cut it as sharply and precisely as possible to syncopate the sound effects with the music, Grease’s “You’re the One That I Want.” You want to hear every line, but the song is what makes it silly and fun. That’s the last song you would put a fight scene to, but that’s why it’s perfect for Deadpool. There are a couple of The Greatest Showman Easter eggs too, while he’s slamming his head on the dash, which is pretty funny.

Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

How did you make sure the dialogue and ADR weren’t lost in that messy brawl?

Ryan Cole: Production mixer Colin Nicholson miked up the car, so we had a nice base for sound and recorded ADR. Deadpool doesn’t grunt as much as Wolverine, who is the angry one and who does a lot of the stabbing. So Deadpool’s sounds are a lot more painful, whereas Wolverine does more “Grrr”s. We tried to be precise, like Craig put in seat noises for when the seat flies back. We also had a nice library of sounds from Hugh and Ryan. Hugh did a whole pass on it in ADR, even though he didn’t have to. Then, our dialogue editor, Emma Present, tightened everything up to let the effects and music sing through.

The loop group on this must have been hilarious!

Ryan Cole: Yep! I prefer to get a first cut of the entire movie before I cue anything for ADR. It was really fun because in some scenes, there are 50 cues just for all the Deadpools getting murdered. [ADR voice cast] Ashley Lambert and Ranjani Brow were a great loop group team. We had two days with 18 people on the Disney ADR stage. In the “Like a Prayer” fight against Deadpool Corps, we tried to get as many unique sounds as possible with every death on-screen and the other Deadpools running by. It sounds morbid and messed up, but it’s pretty fun to do here since it’s so cartoony and comic book. But you don’t want to hear every one, or it’d just be a scream fest. So, we took out all the loop groups and kept Ryan and Hugh, and then found the moments where your eyes are drawn to the screen for a particular death and added a sound there.

 

How did you maintain the humor and momentum in the Deadpool Corps “oner” so it doesn’t feel dragged out? Was Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” always intended for this sequence?

Craig Henighan: That sequence is basically a comic strip that comes to life—they get into the bus, and then blood splatters on the windows before they jump out of the bus, all shot as one continuing shot. We covered all the vocalizations with Cowboypool’s gunshots, Wolverine stabs, and Deadpool’s sword fighting. But at some point, all that became cacophonous, so we started taking stuff to get to the core of what the story was about. What do we need sonically to support everything we see on screen while still giving room for the song? The sound effects sat ever so slightly underneath the music so that you would catch the things you needed but not miss the beats that have a sound attached to them. You cover every single thing first, and then have to be disciplined enough to get rid of stuff where needed to make it fun and flow well.

(L-R): Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan and Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

The wild cameos really thrilled fans. What went into the fights with Gambit, Blade, Elektra, and X-23 as they battled in the Void?

Ryan Cole: Each of them had a good 30 seconds doing their solo fights, so it’s about giving them their hero moment. There wasn’t a lot of dialog and ADR, but there’s a little animal call designed for each character. It’s about getting out of the way and not sounding too repetitive. You want to feel the impact when a guy goes flying by. When Blade stabs a guy, you want to feel the blade, but you also want to hear him die, which sounds morbid and messed up, but it helps to sell it. With Craig’s sound design and Rob Simonsen’s music, we gave each hero their moment.

What were some of the things that you did to accentuate Blade or Elektra’s hero moments?

Craig Henighan: Rob built a lot of space into the track, allowing the sound effects to play out, compared to if the orchestra was sort of pounding away. What’s Blade’s boomerang supposed to sound like versus Electra’s weapons? We looked at frequencies with the impacts and metallic nature of Blade’s Boomerang and Electra’s weapons, which are higher frequency compared to Deadpool’s swords or Wolverine’s claws. You only need to hear certain things at a certain time versus 100 layers of the same thing, so it’s about being selective. Since we’re mixing and editing as soon the scenes come together, we have a good roadmap of the rhythm and what they will sound like.

 

One of the fan favorites was Gambit, who has never been in a live-action film. What was it like to design his sonic topography?

Craig Henighan: I did a deep dive on card tricks to see what core sounds we could record. Sound designer Samson Neslund recorded more playing cards, and our Foley team, including Steve Baine, recorded other card sounds, too. Then, I put them all together to match what Gambit did as he threw and unfurled the cards.

Channing Tatum is Gambit in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Courtesy Walt Disney Studios/Marvel Studios

Channing Tatum’s take on Gambit is now iconic, especially with his Cajun accent. Was there a lot of ADR work on that?

Ryan Cole: There wasn’t a single line of ADR from Channing. From everything I heard and what I can tell listening to the production dailies, he came to the set as prepared as you could possibly be. I think they had more of a problem with people laughing so hard while he was doing it than they had with the accent. You can’t understand what he’s saying, but that’s kind of the joke. Overall, there wasn’t a lot of technical ADR on this film since the production recordings were good.

Craig Henighan: I’m just forever grateful to everyone on this project; everybody brought their A-game every single day. During the final mix, every little bit matters. When Ryan Reynolds was on the mix stage with us, he shot a tremendous amount of last-minute ADR with Ryan [Cole] just looking for any tweaks that could move the movie forward. All these little things come together to make a film great.

(L-R): Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and Director Shawn Levy on the set of Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

 

Adorned with copious amounts of bonus material, Deadpool & Wolverine is available now in 4K Ultra HD, Blu-Ray, and DVD formats, and via digital streaming.

 

 

Lupita Nyong’o to Star in Christopher Nolan’s Top-Secret Next Film

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Lupita Nyong’o is the newest star to join Christopher Nolan’s mysterious new film for Universal Pictures.

The Hollywood Reporter scoops that Nyong’o is the latest big name to board Nolan’s next film, joining Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, and Zendaya. Of course, Nolan will direct his own script, and Universal has slated the film for a July 17, 2026, release.

Speculating what Nolan’s new film will be is part of the fun every time the writer/director starts populating his new project. Oppenheimer, his Oscar-winning juggernaut from 2023, was the rare Nolan film where the subject was well-known thanks to Nolan adapting the story from Kai Bird’s book on Robert J. Oppenheimer “American Prometheus,” but there’s no such source material as far as any insiders know at this point. There’s been thought that Nolan’s latest will be a spy thriller, a sci-fi spy thriller, or an out-and-out action thriller, but THR reports that insiders insist none of these guesses have come close to Nolan’s actual idea.

Nolan loves reuniting with former performers like Damon (in Oppenheimer and Interstellar) and Hathaway (Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises), but this will mark his first collaboration with Nyong’o. The Oscar-winning actress recently appeared in a winning Universal film, Chris Sanders‘ gorgeous animated film The Wild Robot, in which Nyong’o played the titular robot, Roz. Nyong’o also starred in Jordan Peele’s Us, in a performance that deserved an Oscar nomination, another Universal film. She won her Oscar for her performance in Steven McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and had a large part in Ryan Coogler’s two Black Panther films.

Once again, Nolan produces alongside his wife, Emma Thomas, for their Syncopy banner. Nolan and Universal’s partnership on Oppenheimer resulted in the remarkable feat of a three-hour biopic about a historical figure, a scientist at that, into a nearly billion-dollar film. Nolan earned himself the Best Director Oscar in the process, Oppenheimer won Best Picture, and the film formed half of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was released on the same day as Nolan’s Oppenheimer, on July 21, 2023.

For more on Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film and Lupita Nyong’o’s latest, check out these stories:

Could Christopher Nolan’s Next Movie Be a Spy Thriller?

“The Wild Robot” Head of Story Heidi Jo Gilbert on Motherhood’s Many Meanings

Christopher Nolan’s Next Movie Set at Universal With Matt Damon as Potential Lead

Featured image: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 27: Lupita Nyong’o poses in the IMDboat Exclusive Portrait Studio at San Diego Comic-Con 2024 at The IMDb Yacht on July 27, 2024 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for IMDb)

“Deadpool & Wolverine” Sound Designers on Turning Frozen Tea Towels Into Broken Bones

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Three months after debuting in theaters this summer, Deadpool & Wolverine’s winning streak still wasn’t over. It eventually surpassed Barbie’s domestic gross in its 13th weekend, with director Shawn Levy’s R-rated box office juggernaut ranking as the 12th highest-grossing movie of all time, with a domestic haul of over $636M.

It has been a hectic year for Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning sound designer Craig Henighan, who not only worked on 2024’s second biggest film but also delivered Apple TV+’s two-hander dark comedy, Wolfs and Cate Blanchett’s limited series, Disclaimer. A frequent collaborator of Levy’s, he previously worked on The Adam Project, Stranger Things, and Free Guy. “I have a long history with Shawn, so I know what he likes and his approach to the action. I understand what he needs from sound at certain points but also know when to leave him alone to find a cut,” Henighan shares.

“I don’t think we could have done it so quickly without that shorthand. Knowing what they want ahead of time really helps,” concurs co-supervising sound editor Ryan Cole, who also worked with Levy and Henighan on The Adam Project and Stranger Things, winning multiple Emmys for the latter along with Henighan. Focusing on dialogue and ADR, Cole had a great time overseeing the loop groups, particularly on the “Deadpool Corps” sequence in the third act.

Henighan and Cole recently spoke with The Credits about what went into the complicated sonic landscape for one of Marvel’s most successful films.

 

How do you design the soundscape for such a stunt-centric film steeped in comedy?

Craig Henighan: This was a great opportunity to merge comedy and action. We needed high action and high-energy sounds, so the cutting had to be tight and precise, but we also had to get out of the way for the jokes. With all the sound elements that go into the stunts, it still needs to be funny, especially with Deadpool’s dialogue. Kudos to our [picture] editors, Dean Zimmerman and Shane Reid, who worked so hard with Ryan [Reynolds] and Shawn in post to make sure everything worked rhythmically and musically. Temp sound usually provides a good roadmap, so we knew where the beats will be. Then, Ryan [Cole] and I flesh out those sounds to make them rock a little more. Almost every action scene has a music cue that the audience needs to hear, so sound has to be there without dominating every moment.

The opening sequence is one of the most deliriously entertaining and absorbing that I can remember—Deadpool finds and fights with Wolverine’s bones against a platoon of masked Time Variance Authority assassins, all set to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye.”

Craig Henighan: With NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” as the driving force, you want to feel the sounds but not necessarily hear them all the time. Sometimes the music would lead for a bit, and then the sound would take over, then music would come back.

Ryan Cole: It plays more like a music video. Especially with the stunts being so visceral and R-rated, you don’t want to hear each guy screaming when he gets stabbed, but you want to hear a couple of them because they’re jokey ones. Shane and Dean were great at creating those spaces for us to throw something in. In the Void fight, Deadpool delivers quips in the middle of all the swords, guns, and claws while people are being thrown around, but you still want to hear the “Eew!” grunts from Deadpool.

 

Speaking of R-rated, congratulations on the movie surpassing Joker to become the #1 R-rated movie worldwide!

Craig Henighan: We all knew it was a really good film when we were working on it, and we laughed all the time with our great crew. But to get to the top spot in less than a month after release, it’s insane. Shawn, Ryan, and Marvel worked tirelessly, and everybody put their heart and soul into this. So, for the world to react in such a positive way has been unbelievable. It’s such an enjoyable, fun movie to experience in the theater; we want everyone to laugh and enjoy something together.

Ryan Cole: It’s also a positive film about two guys becoming friends, with Deadpool finding his family by the end. Being R-rated loses a huge demographic, but people obviously went back to see it over and over again. They connected to it on so many levels.

(L-R): Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, and Director Shawn Levy on the set of Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

Back to the opening sequence, was “Bye Bye Bye” always meant to be the song?

Craig Henighan: We had a lot of time to live with these sequences and understand the dynamics and rhythm of the title sequence. We’d work on something else and come back to it to make sure it still felt right. The initial version didn’t have Deadpool dancing. But once they locked in to “Bye Bye Bye,” someone came up with the idea of inserting cutaways of Deadpool doing the dance moves from NSYNC’s music video.  

Ryan Cole: When you leave and come back to something, it’ll often inform you of what changes are needed that you hadn’t thought of on the first pass.

Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson in Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

How did you mix the music with the sounds of guys getting mauled by Wolverine’s adamantium bones?

Craig Henighan: Our job was to stay out of the way but support the narrative of that song and how fun it is. That opening was the first chance—and maybe only chance—to get the audience along for the ride. So, it had to be fun because the audience needed to know they were going to enjoy this movie. Sonically, we had hits, stabs, gore, and blood, but every stab also had a musical boom to it. If you really get forensic about the hits, some are a little out of sync with the picture but match the song’s beats instead. It was more important to lock sound in with what the music was doing. From an editorial standpoint, it’s a little counterintuitive. Normally, you’re focused on synching perfectly to picture, but this was more about the feel of the music. Some of it was to make sure people hear the TVA soldiers getting killed because 20 minutes later, we call back to that fight.

Ryan Cole: You don’t want to hear everything, but you want to hear the adamantium bones going into body parts in that comedic way or the primal screams as if someone was getting killed that way. [Dialogue and re-recording mixer] Lora Hirschberg set a great stage with the music and set where we needed to go in and out of.

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

How did you make the adamantium hits sound different from the swords and blades?

Craig Henighan: The adamantium hits sounded cool but didn’t have an edge to it. We were looking for a different ring and tonality since you’re looking at adamantium claws versus an adamantium katana sword. With sound designers Eric Norris and Addison Teague, we recorded different types of metal hitting metal, anything from steel rebar hitting other things around the Foley studio that would ring a certain way to get a set of distorted rings and metallic hits. The tremolo technique gave it a flutter effect to some of the ringing. That’s one of the tricks to give a static sound a sense of movement.

 

What other fun, unusual techniques were used to create these sound effects?

Craig Henighan: For the stabs, we used the standard stuff like watermelons, fruit, raw meat. One of my tricks for stabs is to mix a pile of dirt, flour, and mud to make it feel and sound thicker than stuffing your hand into a watermelon would. Squeezing that mixture between your fingertips can add another layer and make it sound like blood is oozing out. When Deadpool twists his baby knife into Wolverine’s thigh, we could use the normal bone-breaking stuff with celery. Or, freeze some wet tea towels overnight, and when you twist them while frozen, that gives you the impression of bones breaking, too, which is a fun layer to add. For instance, I’ve turned a squeaky old hinge on a rolling door into bat squeaks. Us “soundies” always have our ears open and hopefully a microphone/recorder close by. Sometimes, the best way is to use your own voice. If you’re working on a monster sequence, you can map it out with your voice to get the rhythm of the scene and then replace your vocalizations with that of animals or inanimate objects. That’s the fun with sound design.

Check out part two, which puts you inside the hilarious and intense Honda Odyssey brawl and the wild cameos in the third act.

Featured image: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2024 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2024 MARVEL.

“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” Trailer Finds Tom Cruise on Last Epic Mission

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Now we know the title of the 8th Mission: Impossible movie, which carries the weight of the franchise’s history and the possible final mission for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning’s first trailer is an action epic through and through. The film’s logline reads, “Every choice has led to this.”

The trailer has many hallmarks of a classic Mission: Impossible movie: Cruise’s Hunt sprinting on foot always toward danger or the hope of saving somebody (or everybody). Hunt hanging precariously off the side of a plane. Hunt tangling with bad guys who seem to know precisely what makes him tick, yet they can never totally get the upper hand. WIth The Final Reckoning picking up after the events in Dead Reckoning, we’ve got Hunt on a dangerous dive mission in scuba gear, presumably going after the artificial intelligence called The Entity that could give unlimited power to the wrong person. And the trailer has got Hunt’s closest allies—Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell. From Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, we have the newest member of the team, Hayley Atwell’s Grace.

In Dead Reckoning, Hunt and his team faced the Entity, which seemed capable of predicting his every move. The film ended with Hunt tracking the Entity on board a Russian submarine, followed by an enemy from Hunt’s long history in the agency, Garbiel (Esai Morales).

The Final Reckoning also includes Vanessa Kirby as the White Widow, Holt McCallany as Secretary of Defence Berstein, Pom Klementieff as Paris, Angela Bassett as CIA Director Erika Sloane, and Shea Whigham’s Jasper Briggs. Newcomers also include Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, and Tramell Tillman.

Christopher McQuarrie returns as co-writer and director, having helmed Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning. McQuarrie co-wrote the script for The Final Reckoning with Erik Jendresen and Bruce Geller.

Check out the trailer below. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning hits theaters on May 23, 2025.

For more on the Mission: Impossible franchise, check out these stories:

Defying Death With “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” Second Unit Director & Stunt Coordinator Wade Eastwood

“Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part Two” Gets New Title, Release Date, And Longer IMAX Run

How “Mission:  Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” DP Fraser Taggart Pulled Off That Insane Train Sequence

Featured image: Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

A New Hope for a Fresh “Star Wars” Saga: New Trilogy to be Written & Produced by “X-Men” Alum Simon Kinberg

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From the sprawling, brawling world of mutants on X-Men to the intergalactic intrigue in a galaxy far, far away—this is the path for former X-Men writer, director, and producer Simon Kinberg. Although it’s a path that Kinberg knows well.

News broke that Kinberg is working with Lucasfilm on a brand-new Star Wars trilogy alongside Lucasfilm studio chief Kathleen Kennedy, which will kickstart a whole new set of characters separate from the previous trilogy, which ended in 2019 with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and starred Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac. Kinberg initially helped launch the new Star Wars trilogy,  2015’s The Force Awakens, acting as a consultant to the J.J. Abrams-directed film. Deadline initially reported that Kinberg’s trilogy would bring us back to George Lucas’s mega-story, which he started (and helped usher in a new era of cinema, too) with his 1977 game-changer Star Wars: A New Hope. That film introduced us to Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, characters that would appear in the last trilogy, beginning with Ford in The Force Awakens and Hamill and Fisher in The Last Jedi. Hamill would then reappear in Force Ghost form in The Rise of Skywalker.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi..L to R: Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill)..Photo: Jonathan Olley..©2017 Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

So Kinberg is no stranger to spaceships and alien battles—he also co-created the animated series Star Wars: Rebels with Dave Filoni and Carrie Beck, which ran for four seasons from 2014 to 2018. He’s also part of that other iconic franchise that deals in hyperspace, Star Trek, as he’s attached to produce Paramount’s upcoming Star Trek film directed by Toby Haynes and written by Seth Grahame-Smith. Kinberg will be one of the rare folks to brandish a lightsaber and phaser creatively and possibly the first to do so simultaneously.

Details about Kinberg’s Star Wars project are frozen in carbonite for the time being, but Lucasfilm has said it’s decidedly not a continuation of the 9-film arc of the Skywalker saga, which included Lucas’s original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, and the most recent trilogy. New characters and a new adventure will give Star Wars a chance to expand on the big screen in a way it hasn’t before—and how it is on the small screen in the live-action Disney+ series.

Kinberg was a major part of Fox’s run of X-Men movies, including producing James Mangold’s beloved Logan and the first two Deadpool films. His next film is Edgar Wright’s reboot of Stephen King’s The Running Man, which previously was given a big screen adaptation in a 1987 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The next Star Wars saga will be on the small screen in the Jude Law-led Skeleton Crew, which arrives on Disney+ on December 3.

For more on all things Star Wars, check out these stories:

The First Trailer for “Skeleton Crew” Unveils the Jude Law-led Disney+ “Star Wars” Series

“The Acolyte” Composer Michael Abels on Scoring a “Star Wars” Story Unlike Any Before It

Get Mauled by The Trailer for the Remastered “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”

Featured image: The Millenium Falcon in SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY.

“Forrest Gump” DP Don Burgess Re-Teams with Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and Director Bob Zemeckis on “Here”

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Cinematographer Don Burgess earned an Oscar nomination and helped make an American classic when she shot Forrest Gump in 1994. He’s since re-teamed with star Tom Hanks and director Bob Zemeckis on The Polar Express, Cast Away, and Disney’s live-action remake of Pinocchio. Now, he’s the man behind the camera in Here (in theaters) which pairs Hanks and his Gump co-star Robin Wright in a story that mainly unfolds across ten decades within one New Jersey living room.

True to its single-location theme, Here was filmed entirely at Pinewood Studios near London, where the cast, including Paul Bettany (WandaVision), Kelly Reilly (Yellowstone) and Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) gathered under Zemeckis’ watchful eye. Making a Zemeckis movie is “not easy,” Burgess laughs. “Our running gag is Bob saying, ‘Anybody could do it that way, but how about we try something else?'” Here also offered Burgess the perk of getting to hang out with Hanks. Burgess says. “Tom’s a lovely man to be around and very dedicated to the craft of making movies.”

Speaking from Los Angeles, Burgess talks about his unmovable camera and how the Here team deployed AI technologies as a de-aging fountain of digital youth.

 

Here represents another adventure in experimental cinema from Bob Zemeckis. When you guys first talked about the project, what was your creative brief?

The goal was to do as much in-camera as we could by combining all the different technologies to record the image in-camera so that what we see in the final movie is captured in that first recording.

The picture window in the living room conveys what’s going on outdoors from 1907, when the house was built, to the present day in 2022. How did you prep the lighting for that scenery?

We used LED Wall technology as the backing for our window. The script supervisor and I came up with the exact day and time for every scene in the movie, so I had the room lighting pre-programmed in the computer 24/7, 365 days a year. We might say “It’s summer, we’re in New Jersey at 8:30 at night so it’s still light out.” We had our go-to settings for overcast, rain, snow, and wind, as well as the seasons, but the lighting was never done until we were ready to shoot, in case Bob wanted to call an audible and change something. Then we’d dial it in, block the scene and shoot.

Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright on the set of HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures

That sounds like a lot of pre-planning.

The issue is that you have to build the entire asset before you start shooting, and then you need to be in command of the entire image from minimum focus to infinity on any given shot. Rather than pushing those decisions off into post-production, it all has to be front-loaded before you start shooting.

Once you did start shooting, how did you approach camera placement?

For Bob, it was important that the camera be invisible. He didn’t want the audience to notice camera movement, and he didn’t want you to pull focus. What he was really talking about was depth of field. We didn’t want the camera to exaggerate anything. You keep coming back to the same location, but it’s a completely different scene, from dinosaurs to indigenous people to the building of the house. Everything keeps evolving at exactly the same spot on the planet.

 

How did you arrive at your ideal depth of field?

Once I grasped what Bob was trying to get at, I figured out how to limit my exposure to a certain ASA [light-sensitive film speed] with a certain f-stop on the lens to create the right depth of field. And then there’s the LED wall to consider: What does that need to be exposed at? To come up with the best-looking image, I tested different lenses different cameras, and put all that stuff in a bowl, and stirred it around to come up with hopefully the best package to shoot the film.

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.

Which was…?

We ended up using a Panavision P70 35-millimeter lens set to a 5.6 f-stop. That became our sweet spot.

And camera?

The RED Raptor, with a digital 8 K resolution chip. In combination with the P70, which is a large format lens, we pushed the ASA to [the maximum] 1600, and that allowed me to expose the LED wall.

It’s interesting that your camera remains stationary throughout the film. Did you just put it on a tripod and leave it there?

Bob didn’t want anything underneath the camera or on either side of it. He didn’t want a dolly, a tripod, or the camera to move at all, so we bolted it to the floor with some box steel bracing and hung it from above. Mounting the rig and building the set around it became quite a challenge, making sure we could get the camera back to that exact same spot every single day.

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.

You have now shot five Zemeckis movies starring starring Tom Hanks. What’s it like to observe one of America’s finest actors at close hand?

It’s a pleasure sitting in the front row and watching what Tom does because he really brings it for every take. He’s not fooling around out there. He’s done his homework, he knows what his character’s about, but he is also willing [to take direction]. Many times, I’ve seen the director say, for example, “Tom, I need you to go to the window” because the audience has got to see out this window, and Tom will say, “Watch this.” He’ll take it as a challenge! And he’s smart about it. He’ll convince us that he needs to go to that window.

And, of course, Hanks shares a special rapport with Zemeckis.

They’re both so good at what they do. Tom and Bob make it look easy. It’s not easy.

 

Bob Zemeckis is known for pioneering new filmmaking tools. In The Polar Express, he became one of the first directors to use motion capture technology. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has played an increasingly important role in the culture. How did AI impact your work on Here?

The big AI challenge for this movie was de-aging the actors so they could play their characters at the age they needed to be. AI technology enabled us to take the [actor’s] live image and basically show us, a little glitchy, what they looked like when they were young. We had two monitors right next to each other so you could see what Tom and Robin really look like today and what they’re going to look like when the movie’s done.

Wow. Instead of applying makeup or prosthetics, you’re essentially placing an AI-sourced young face on the actor.

Yeah, and it’s kind of mind-blowing when you first see this happen on the spot. I think it stimulated the actors to see themselves at that age, and for some of us who knew Tom and Robin when they were [30 years] younger, it was, “Oh my God!”

 

For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:

“Venom: The Last Dance” Stunt Coordinator James Churchman on Tom Hardy, Wild Horses and Flying Kids

“Here” Production Designer Ashley Lamont on Building an Entire Life in a Single Room for Tom Hanks & Robin Wright

Ralph Fiennes Says That Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later” Was Shot Partly On an iPhone

Featured image: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.

 

“Stranger Things 5” Reveals Season 5 Episode Titles & 2025 Release

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Netflix has revealed a new Stranger Things teaser that reveals the titles for the fifth and final season’s episodes and that the gang will have one last adventure in 2025. November 6 is a special day in the Stranger Things verse; it was November 6, 1983, when Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) was abducted and taken to the Upside Down. Now, we know the titles for the series’ final eight episodes thanks to Netflix’s little taster, and they also revealed that the final season takes place in the fall of 1987, four years after Will Byers was first abducted. The Stranger Things crew has had one heckuva ride.

The episode titles are “The Crawl,” “The Vanishing of…,” “The Turnbow Trap,” “Sorcerer,” “Shock Jock,” “Escape From Camazotz,” “The Bridge,” and “The Rightside Up.” Many of these titles speak to earlier titles and details from the series.

The first episode of the entire series was “The Vanishing of Will Byers,” and now that we’re somewhat revisiting that title with “The Vanishing of…”, the fan speculation engine has ramped up regarding who the new missing person will be. The scuttlebutt is that the missing person will be Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) younger sister, Holly Wheeler, recently recast with Evil Dead Rise actor Nell Fisher. Naturally, Netflix hasn’t revealed a thing. Then there’s the reveal of the season finale’s title, “The Rightside Up,” which echoes the season 1 finale “The Upside Down.”

Stranger Things fans will also probably recall a business in Hawkins called Turnbow Land Development & Realty, which would lend credence to the belief that “The Turnbow Trap” will involve the business. Fans of Madeline L’Engle’s iconic sci-fi novel “A Wrinkle in Time” will notice the name of a planet from that book, Camaztoz, which is controlled by the evil Black Thing and IT, in the title “Escape From Camaztoz.”

Check out the teaser below. Stranger Things 5 premieres on Netflix in 2025.

For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out

Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman Face Off in First “Carry-On” Teaser

Birmingham Goes Big Time: “Peaky Blinders” Movie Adds Stephen Graham to the Starry Cast

Will Smith And Michael Bay to Re-team for Netflix Action Film “Fast and Loose”

Featured image: STRANGER THINGS. (L to R) Noah Schnapp, Millie Bobby Brown, David Harbour, Winona Ryder, Cara Buono, Joe Keery, Amybeth McNulty, Charlie Heaton, Brett Gelman, Maya Hawke, Natalia Dyer, Jamie Campbell Bower, Priah Ferguson, Linda Hamilton, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Ross Duffer, Matt Duffer, Finn Wolfhard, and Sadie Sink of STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix © 2024

How The “Blitz” Sound Team Shook Steve McQueen’s Harrowing World War II Film

Posted on by babrams

While researching Small Axe, a riveting series about the political awakening of London’s West Indian community, director Steven McQueen found a photograph of a young Black boy standing on a train platform holding a large suitcase. The stark image had the director questioning who the child was and what his story was during the London Blitz, a period in World War II when the city was bombed by Germany over eight long months. The image inspired McQueen’s latest film, Blitz, starring Saoirse Ronan as Rita, a widowed mother terrified of what might happen to her only son George (Elliott Heffernan).

Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

The poetically kinetic narrative unfolds as a mother and son trying to reunite after she sends him away from the danger. Visually, we are transported to the harrowing period events through production design, cinematography, and costumes, but elevating the intensity of the film is a dynamic soundscape that immerses viewers in the emotions of the characters.

The sonic journey started with production sound mixer John Casali filming across practical locations and stages in London before the post team guided by supervising sound editors and rerecording mixers James Harrison and Paul Cotterell. The trio discusses how they approached and developed the aural landscape of the moving story and how they hope audiences respond to the film.

 

McQueen tells a layered story, but at times, it’s told through the eyes of George. How did you want to treat that perspective sonically?

Sound editor/rerecording mixer James Harrison: We spoke very early on about just that play on perspectives. You know, a lot of the film is seen from a nine-year-old’s point of view. And Steve was quite interested in just playing, not going over the top, but just playing with that and portraying the sort of normal sounds of London as being slightly heightened and slightly over the top, as seen through George’s eyes. I think somewhere like the train station is quite a good example of that. When you get in, you get the real hustle and bustle; it’s really quite chaotic. And then the huge slamming doors and the furnace and things like that, just things like that, where a nine-year-old’s just slightly overwhelmed by all of those noises that’s going on around him. So it’s definitely something that we were really playing with.

Sound editor/rerecording mixer Paul Cotterell:  Steve was very clear on what he wanted and knew exactly what kind of film he was making. And in that sense, he could be really prescriptive at times, but he’s also completely open to things that he may not have considered. He’s a Londoner, and he tells us stories or memories. For example, he talked about his mum taking him to the markets as a little kid. So he would describe what he’d seen and heard as a little kid around those markets. Those kinds of memories and things gave us an interesting way into scenes.

 

What was your approach in recording the production sound?

Production and sound mixer John Casali: In the ideal world, you want to boom everything, but the way we shot, there were a lot of radio mics used on most scenes. Steve wants us to approach what we do quietly and not disrupt the actors, especially when we have children involved. And with Steve he demands a quiet set which is fantastic for me and everyone stays focused.

What went into micing Elliott Heffernan, who plays George, with a wireless transmitter?

John Casali: We had some sound shorts to put the transmitter discretely close to his body without him feeling it or the microphone. Fortunately we didn’t have to do much messing around with it. You want to do as little as possible to not distract or take them out of scenes.

Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

Adding to the looming danger are the air-raid sirens. How did the team create them for Blitz?

James Harrison: We went through sound libraries and previous effects we had but realized we needed to get decent recordings of an actual hand crank siren. So we got some manual sirens to record on stage, which I thoroughly regretted after spending two hours turning this thing around in my arm. Oh, I thought I was fit. Then we layered it with electronically controlled sirens so you have many sirens going off at these different points. So we created this 3D layer of things going on in the background with the sirens, the planes, and the panic of the crowds. It’s amazing to hear, especially in Dolby Atmos.

There’s a resonating scene where Rita and Jack sing in a bomb shelter. How did you want to drive the emotion of that sequence aurally?

Paul Cotterell: It’s pretty much all production sound, certainly for the principles. Then we picked up a few lines of ADR of individuals as the camera moved past their faces to emphasize their lips so you felt a bit of contact with them. It took some balancing because it’s a subdued rendition of the song and we wanted the feeling that his room is almost moving.

Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

One of the more heroic scenes takes place in a subway station where water rapidly fills the tunnel, sweeping people away. It’s up to George to get help. How did you approach the production and sound of the scene in post?

John Casali: We were fortunate that Hayley Williams, our special effects supervisor, put all the pumps for the flooding off the stage. So when the water came through, we got a lot of good sound effects of the water coming in so it didn’t feel like we were on the stage. The set was amazing, and it felt like you were in the tube because it was built lower down. So you went downstairs to get to the set, and it felt like we were able to achieve something acoustically that was true to life at that time. The team was in wetsuits for three days, but it felt like we’d really achieved something.

Elliott Heffernan and Steve McQueen on the set of “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

James Harrison: For us, it was a lot of trial and error. Water is very difficult to work with because it’s just sheer white noise.  And when you’re trying to get all the different things through the screams and those frequencies and the music playing, the footsteps, it can be hard. The difficulty was trying to shape things while keeping the energy up, keeping it chaotic, and keeping the narrative going. It took a lot of work to carve out those little bits we wanted to poke through. Then, when the music takes over, there’s a lot of ebb and flow, especially with the extras. It was definitely one of the trickier sequences to track and mix.

Paul Cotterell: Steve was really keen on tracking George all the way through the water scene. So we just got layers and layers and layers of breathing and breaths from him. We did that by getting his father to stand before him, and he was kind of wrestling his dad to get all these grunts and noises out. And then, we gave him a lightweight dumbbell and recorded him running with it. It was all really good fun, and he’s a brilliant kid.

 

In another scene, we’re inside a jazz club with a lively crowd listening to and dancing to a band on stage. How did you approach the production sound?

John Casali: That scene was done with playback because it had to be loud. We wanted everyone to dance and to be consumed by the party feel. And then we had Pro Tools playback of the sirens so everyone could react. It worked well because it really focused everybody.

How did you find moments to Hans Zimmer’s emotional telling score?

Paul Cotterell: We used temp music throughout the process, and Steve would listen to everything, so it was a very full, very dense track, especially during the bigger sequences. Hans had a sound effects track to work against for his score, and for us, it became a question of choice. But I think the sound design and the music from Hans slotted together like a dream really.

James Harrison: I remember getting some of his temp music for the jewelry store scene with George, and I’d done quite a lot of sound design to create this otherworldly effect to make it spooky, and Han’s music fit in like a glove. It was like, oh great, we don’t have anything to worry about; we’re all on the same wavelength.

 

There’s a touching moment where Rita and George lay in bed, and she asks him to make a wish. In light of that, what’s one wish you’d like the audience to take away from this movie?

James Harrison: Wow, interesting question. For me, one of the things that this film is filled with is little snippets of history, historical elements, and stories like the Café de Paris, that’s based on a club in SoHo. Little details like that can get lost in time if it wasn’t for films, documentaries, and things like that bringing them to the fore again. Hopefully, a few audience members do some research on a character or a place. For us, and probably for Steve, it’s this idea to keep these memories alive a little bit longer. It’s important that we don’t forget.

Paul Cotterell: When we were setting up for a screening in the West End in London on an enormous screen, it was stunning to see its scale and detail, and we hope the sound lives nicely alongside that. So our hope is that audiences can watch this film in a big place.

 

Blitz is in theaters now. 

For more on Blitz, check out this story below:

“Blitz” Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran Threads Through a Traumatic History in Steve McQueen’s WWII Epic

Featured image: Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22. Courtesy Apple TV+

“Venom: The Last Dance” Stunt Coordinator James Churchman on Tom Hardy, Wild Horses and Flying Kids

Posted on by babrams

When he was nine years old, James M. Churchman bought his first motorcycle and started riding the backroads of his native Florida. A few years later, he became a professional stuntman, and by the late nineties, he’d invented a computerized flying system that is still in use today. In the 2000s, Churchman emerged as a go-to stunt coordinator for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, winning the 2014 Taurus World Stunt Award for staging Iron Man 3‘s 14-man free-fall spectacle. He’s also supervised stunt sequences for X-Men, Spider-Man, Ant-Man, and Doctor Strange movies. Most recently, he served as stunt coordinator for Venom: The Last Dance (now in theaters) starring Tom Hardy.

Written and directed by Kelly Marcel, this third installment of the Venom trilogy, co-starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, and Rhys Ifans, follows everyman Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his guttural-voiced parasite Venom as they road-trip through America with alien “symbiotes” in hot pursuit.

Speaking from the Sony Pictures backlot, where he’s working on an undisclosed new project, Churchman describes Tom Hardy as a quick study, deconstructs Venom‘s insane horse stunt, and shares the origins story of his Flying Hero Club.

Tom Hardy is widely viewed as one of the best actors of his generation. What does he bring to the table as the anchor of this Venom franchise?

For me, Tom brings heart. He’s been through his trials, and I was going through mine. We’ve had a lot of in-depth conversations about life, not just acting and whatnot. The way he connects to the real world and emotes—I think that’s what he brought to Venom. Tom’s a movie star, 100 percent, but he’s also this grounded dude.

What kind of learning curve did you expect from Tom when it came to prepping him for action sequences?

The second Venom movie [Carnage] was my first time working with Tom. He was coming off two knee surgeries, so we had to limit what we did, but even in Carnage, he did a lot of the wire work himself. The great thing about coming back for The Last Dance is that we had this foundation of trust so we could push further. He’s also in better physical condition, so we were flying him all over the place — he’s leaping 30 feet in the air, hitting the ground, sliding on his feet. And talk about a learning curve! There’s some motorcycle work in the third act where Tom has to drive a motorcycle, slide it sideways, come to a stop, deliver dialogue, and take off. To get prepared, Tom’s double Jake and I took him out to a dirt field. The first day, Tom’s like, “I don’t like the height of the bike” — dirt bikes tend to be taller – “I don’t like the gravel, I don’t like these tires.” I get it, so I say, “Let’s just spend some time getting used to it.” The next day, Tom comes back and nails it perfectly. I’ve never seen a learning curve like that.

 

SPOILER ALERT

The Last Dance builds toward this wild sequence where a horse suddenly grows Venom-like teeth and flies through the air with “Nick” barely staying on his back. How did you design that stunt?

Basically, the horse is real, up to the point where Venom takes it over. And Tom is real for the majority of that sequence because we did all his elements on wires. When the horse jumps off a cliff and Tom’s hanging on for dear life, we did that on stage using a plate we shot of a real mountain [as background]. Then [VFX coordinator] John Moffat put in the horse.

Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock/Venom in Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANCE.

The hand-off between physical stunts and digital effects has come a long way since you started doing stunts professionally in 1993. How have you seen stunt technology evolve over the course of your own career?

I don’t want to talk about myself too much, but I want to talk a little bit about history – my father and grandfather built drive-in movie theaters. When I decided to become a stuntman, it was in Kentucky; I was 12 or 13 when they had a private showing of a Lee Majors movie called Steel. End of the movie, they had a dedication to a guy named A.J. Bakunas. He did a world record high fall, hit the airbag; the stitching blew open on the airbag, he went through it, hit the ground, and died. It just dawned on me, “Oh, that’s a job. That’s what I’m going to do.” My dad wasn’t too stoked about it.

The stuntman died —you get that part, right?

[Laughing]. That’s the irony. I know.

Early on, you didn’t just perform stunts. You also built your own gear.

Yeah. Because I was raised in a machine shop doing all kinds of fabrication, I saw the equipment involved in the stunt world. It was pretty rudimentary, and I thought I could have made it better. So, I started making air ramps. In 1998, I started building what I think was the first set of computerized flying winches in the industry. My buddies and I designed this system, which is completely programmed, repeatable, and controllable. Once you rehearse it a few times, it’s the same flight path doing exactly the same thing. That allows actors like Tom Hardy to concentrate on their performance along with the physical action.

Director Kelly Marcel and Tom Hardy on the set of Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANXE. photo by: Laura Radford

Sounds like a big step forward.

The first movie I got it up and running on was Underworld 2 with Kate Beckinsale. It changed how far we could go because, to me, the best shots are when we push the physical stunts in the real world as far as we can before the visual effects take over to complete the action with something we couldn’t do safely [with practical stunts]. Together, we can create just about anything.

Venom in Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANCE. Photo Courtesy: Sony Pictures

I imagine you worked closely with VFX on Eddie/Venom’s big third-act river sequence. How did you guys put that together?

We’d been shooting just outside of London at the Leavesden studio where the special effects team built this huge pool, 150 feet long, 25 feet wide, eight feet deep with controllable rapids and rubber rocks — it was great. When I watched the movie, I thought, “If you don’t know it’s not a river, you believe you’re in a river.” So we were going to do the real part of that sequence in the northern UK, but the union went on strike for four months, and that pushed us into winter. We had to find a better climate, so we found a river, a whitewater-rafting mecca, in northern Spain. Combined, I think we were two weeks in the pool and then shot for a week in the [Spanish] location, where we pre-rigged for a week and a half to set it up.

Venom in Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANCE. Photo Courtesy: Sony Pictures

When you’re not supervising stunts on movies you run the Flying Hero Club for kids. How does that work?

I got the idea when I was doing an X-Men movie in Montreal and became friendly with the restaurant owner out in the woods called the Au Pied du Cochon. He has two kids, a boy and a girl who was five then, so I invited them to come by [the set] after hours and take a ride on the rig. They started flying together, and they were laughing. I looked over at their mom, and her face was full of tears. She says, “Our daughter is a two-time cancer survivor. I haven’t heard her laugh in a year because it’s been nothing but doctors and treatments, so for me to hear Sacha laugh right now is just the biggest gift.” I’m tearing up now just thinking about it. But at that moment, I listened to the universe and realized I could use my profession to help kids who are facing challenges in life so they can forget about all that for a day and just have fun. That’s when I started the Flying Hero Club. 

What happens at a Flying Hero Club event?

We give the kids tee-shirts, masks, and capes, and a guitarist sings their names while they’re flying on billboards so when they get their video, it has their name in it. To date, we’ve had eleven events and flown over 700 kids. Tom Hardy helped me put one on in London when we did Venom 2, and the stunt community always shows up as if you wouldn’t believe it. And now we’re going to make a docu-series. Hopefully, it will effect a positive change for families struggling with the financial cost of medical care.

Repurposing your movie-making skills to give sick children a stunt-flying experience must be gratifying.

Those are my favorite days on the planet.

For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:

“Here” Production Designer Ashley Lamont on Building an Entire Life in a Single Room for Tom Hanks & Robin Wright

Ralph Fiennes Says That Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later” Was Shot Partly On an iPhone

Swing Time: Tom Holland Says “Spider-Man 4” to Start Filming Next Summer

Featured image: Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock/Venom in Columbia Pictures VENOM: THE LAST DANCE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.

“Here” Production Designer Ashley Lamont on Building an Entire Life in a Single Room for Tom Hanks & Robin Wright

Posted on by babrams

Robert Zemeckis’ new film Here is based on an unusual concept: the entire movie takes place in one location, and the camera never moves. The living room at the center of the film is set in an early 20th-century house in New England, although as the story revisits different eras, the set also transforms into a forest and a colonial-era drive, both of which represent the same site before the house’s construction in 1907.

But for the most part, we’re in a living room that touches almost every decade from the early 20th century to the present as different families move in and out, raise their children, and encounter joy and tragedy. The story focuses on one family in particular: the Youngs, starting with Rose (Kelly Reilly) and Al (Paul Bettany), who buy the house at the end of World War II and wind up sharing the home with their oldest son, Richard (Tom Hanks) and his girlfriend, Margaret (Robin Wright) when the couple become teen parents. Much to Margaret’s chagrin, she and Richard and their daughter put down roots in Richard’s parents’ home, establishing a multigenerational setup conveyed as much by Margaret’s slow takeover of the space as by the decades that appear on the actors’ faces.

In addition to the Youngs, there are the house’s buttoned-up first occupants, Pauline (Michelle Dockery) and John (Gwilym Lee), followed by the happy-go-lucky Lee (David Fynn) and Stella (Ophelia Lovibond), who move into the charged space in 1925 and stay on until 1944, when Lee, the inventor of the Laz-E-Boy chair, makes it big. And in the present day, Helen (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Devon (Nicholas Pinnock) grapple with the Covid pandemic and raising their son, Justin (Cache Vanderpuye), to stay safe in the face of police violence.

For production designer Ashley Lamont, who previously worked with Zemeckis on Pinocchio, getting a single room right through the ages took meticulous planning and precise detail work across doubled sets. We spoke with Lamont about the unusual process, from centuries of timeline maps to recreating identical sets: 

Did you start with a particular time period and work your way out from there?

It’s very important to lock down what Bob and I call the constants of our show and the relationship between them — them being the colonial house in the background, the position of the window, how that colonial house interacts with it, and our camera. Once we locked them in, we could only move on to any specifics. Then we could jump into the key elements we come across, the whole exterior outside of our window and room, and what that looks like before the street and house arrive. Then we started moving into the overall design of the room, which, being 100 years old, gave us what era we should be building it in. Once we had that laid in, we moved on to the general looks of each family, their colorways, and the positions of their furniture within the same space. Obviously, we knew most things couldn’t move — the fireplace, the window, the door. So, we tried to come up with unique ways to address each era, which would complement said era and allow fluidity throughout the scene and space.

Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright on the set of HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures

How did you plan one look as it related to another?

We started with the Youngs, Tom and Robin’s family. We spend the majority of our time with them. That brought about a family timeline that evolved into a whole timeline for the entire film. We had a huge timeline, which would literally go all the way around my office, mapping out all these periods. So you could look at a block or an era with that family or spanning between them and assign a different look or colorway. Once we’d landed on some key elements, we broke down what should be specific to that era, which immediately gives you the sense that you’re in the Sixties or the Eighties. It was quite fun trying to come up with clear, decisive, definitive looks for each family and era, getting them all on the wall, and mapping your way through the entire show.

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.

How did you manage to coordinate all the different objects for each era?

Our timeline for the entire show grew into timelines for just about every single item that would come and go in the room. Obviously, sofas come and go, and fashion and shape change and you have to keep up with that. So we ended up having timelines for everything: a timeline for a couch, timelines for armchairs, televisions, and magazine racks, knowing you need to understand the complexities between all of those items.

What’s the set like for a project like this?

We actually had two rooms built on two different sound stages, both absolutely identical. The reason we had two is so we could we could turn around one to a different era while shooting simultaneously on the other stage. That allowed us to get through our shooting day. On paper, if someone said to you, oh, we need two of the sets, absolutely identical, [you’d think] absolutely, no problem, and start building it. And to your eye, it looks absolutely identical, but once you get the camera on, and you start fading one in and one out to start to try and see where those imperfections are, you very quickly realize that a millimeter out here or there, you can really see. We were quite particular about making sure everything lined up all the way down to the smallest details like an architrave turning around the door properly. It was quite something. 

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.

Did you keep the eras separate by assigning each family a colorway?

I suppose in my head I did. In the early years, everything would tend to be quite dark. So we have this dark wood wainscot moving around the bottom of the room and a dark red wallpaper, quite reminiscent of the time and fashion. For whatever reason, I always associate the Youngs’ colorway as being pink. Although they have many different looks throughout their lifespan there, the room that I could relate to the most was the pink room with the brown sofa. We might have even had both of our sets dressed in the same way for a short time, sharing a few items of dressing here and there.

 

How did you source items from different eras?

The film is set on the East Coast. And that clearly means that everything has to be American, quintessential Americana. We wanted to make sure we had the biggest scope of choice we could possibly get, so we ended up sourcing a lot of stuff in LA and shipping it over here. Our set decorator, Anna Lynch-Robinson, and her team put together a wonderful lot of stuff that was brought over that really meant you could be immersed in this sort of Americana-wonder.

How much was already on the page as you started working?

I always felt like Bob knew exactly what he wanted. So, it was very clear both what was on the page and from meeting with Bob that specific things had to be there, be it a model of car in our exterior driving past the window, or the TV, or some small item of dressing. And so, actually, being able to take what you got in the script became very easy to source. It was quite remarkable how much Bob could draw from his memories and life experiences through the years and eras. His vast experience working in the movies meant his knowledge was just impeccable.

Here is playing in theaters now.

For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:

Ralph Fiennes Says That Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later” Was Shot Partly On an iPhone

Swing Time: Tom Holland Says “Spider-Man 4” to Start Filming Next Summer

Lights, Camera, Recreation: “Saturday Night” Production Designer Jess Gonchor on Bringing “SNL”‘s Studio to Life

Featured image: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in HERE. Courtesy Sony Pictures.

“The Wild Robot” Composer Kris Bowers on Accessing a Robot’s Humanity Through Music

Posted on by babrams

Emmy and Oscar-winning composer Kris Bowers has become one of the go-to composers in Hollywood. Known for his work on films and TV shows like King Richard, The Color Purple, The Last Repair Shop, and Bridgerton, he has created well-known scores for a wide diversity of genres. For writer/director Chris Sanders‘ The Wild Robot, Bowers has added feature animation to his list of credits. The music for the film has placed him as a leading contender for an Oscar nomination. 

The Wild Robot tells the story of service robot Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), who must adapt to her new surroundings after being shipwrecked on an island inhabited only by its native animals. That includes orphaned gosling Brightbill (voiced by Kit Conor), who she builds a parental bond with as she works to prepare the undersized goose for winter migration. 

The Credits spoke to Bowers about his foray into composing for animation, including his experience watching cartoons and how parenthood helped shape his emotional and spirited score for the film. 

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 25: Kris Bowers attends “The Wild Robot” Los Angeles screening and tastemaker event presented by DreamWorks Animation at Ross House on September 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images for DreamWorks Animation)

Early in the production, the first 20 minutes of The Wild Robot had almost no dialogue – and even the finished film has large swaths in which little is said.  How did that impact the structure of your composition?  

One of the things I looked forward to on The Wild Robot was knowing how much music can do in film and TV from watching cartoons when I was a kid. I remember sitting and watching Tom and Jerry, Silly Symphonies, and Looney Tunes, and seeing how much the music dictates the shape of how you feel. When Chris told me there would be these sequences that wouldn’t have much dialogue, it was just exciting for me to create something that was going to be very active while being supportive of the story and interesting compositionally enough that it doesn’t feel boring to listen to, while there’s nothing else going on, at least in terms of dialogue.

DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders.

You have a theme for Roz that mirrors the fact she is technology in an organic environment. How did you approach the way she starts to merge with her environment and become more organic over the course of the story? 

With Roz’s theme, I was actually thinking a lot about these products that we interact with. When Lupita talks about her voice work, which is so incredible and very subtle, she says she began trying to emulate what she calls this programmed optimism that you hear in Siri and Alexa. They always sound very bright, bubbly, and happy. She starts in that place and then continues to add her own warmth and humanity to the sound. With that in mind, for Roz’s theme, we started with a piece that could function as her commercial music, which she plays off of her speaker at the very beginning of the film. We wanted to have a little chime like your LG washing machine, so there’s a little thing that plays that is her “task acquired” chime, and then there’s a B side to her theme that, for me, represents the moments where she’s going beyond her programming. You hear that in the rescue mission and in the more heroic aspects of the winter storm. The main theme started as advertising music, and then I tried to see if that same melody would function as Roz became more.  

 

Sandbox Percussion uses percussive elements based on more “found sounds,” like playing on tree branches and scrap metal. These are all live musical elements. In what practical ways did you collaborate with them?

When Chris and I discussed what the sound of the score would be, we talked about wanting to have this balance of the organic and the synthetic and something that represented the wild of the island. My first instinct, which was stereotypical, was to have ethnic flutes, but I immediately started questioning, “Where are we?” and “What culture is this?” Are we saying we’re in that place? So I wanted to find something with that kind of tactile quality but felt like you couldn’t place it in terms of geography. A friend of mine, classical composer Thomas Kotcheff, told me about Sandbox Percussion, a primarily classical percussion ensemble, but they play in this unorthodox way. It’s four guys, and they set up these crazy workstations that are tuned metal pipes, wood planks, an oxygen tank, and a tea kettle and tea cups and bottles. It’s more like foley and sound design, but then they play those as instruments. 

 

How did you incorporate their instrumentation with your own choices?

First I wrote a demo cue to experiment with their sound, then I also wrote music to the raccoon sequence early in the film, where the raccoons are stealing part of Roz’s body, and I thought those would be two great moments to have this tactile sound. I took those recordings and made my own library, essentially, to use with their sound throughout the rest of the film. Then we went back and recorded with them. For example, there was this sound I had been calling “the rusty bucket.” We were trying to figure out what that would be, and they’d say, “That sounds like a tam-tam played with a metal stick, but then we can also play a cymbal covered with a towel, and then we’ll do that together, and that’ll be the sound for the rusty bucket.”

 

It also feels like where they land in the mix is very intentional.  

Exactly. There was a lot of collaboration to figure out how to reproduce some of these unorthodox percussion sounds creatively, but I recorded them separately, so they were functioning almost like ASMR on top of the orchestra. They were always mixed differently than all the other percussion, the orchestra, and everything else so that they had their own place to live in the soundscape.

How did the main theme used in the migration sequence develop or change over time? Was there trial and error?

I started working on the migration theme very early on because I wanted to make sure the main theme worked in the rest of the film. For the sequence where Roz is saying goodbye to Brightbill, I thought of what that experience would be like as a parent. My daughter was six months old, and I imagined dropping her off at college. I wrote this piece and shared it with Chris, and he said, “Yeah, that really isn’t right. You should try to imagine dropping your daughter off at college”, which, of course, was what I’d done. I realized that the video that played in my mind was really cute, with us waving at each other, and she’d look back, so I wrote this very sweet and nostalgic, jaunty piece. But Chris and I talked about what was happening at that moment in the film. They’re not saying goodbye or that they love each other, even though they may not see each other again. Going home, I imagined a different scenario and thought of all the inevitable complexities of what our relationship might be. No matter how hard I try, I’m going to fail her. There will be things she’ll have to forgive me for or that she has to accept about me. There are worst-case scenarios, but that’s also just part of parenting. With my own relationships with my parents, there are things I’m still trying to accept and deal with, and all those complexities brought completely different emotions. I tried again, and Chris said, “You’re really onto something here.” 

 

The next step, then? 

He told me to write away from the film, not to watch the sequence, but write, and he’d animate to that. That was really freeing and exciting to just work on building the music. So he then went to the editor, Mary Blee, and the animators and shaped it based on the music.

These days, that’s a rare gift.

Well, Chris comes from the days of 2D animation, having worked on movies like Beauty and the Beast, which speaks to his history. I found out recently that at Disney back in the day the director’s room was called “the music room,” because they were working with existing pieces of music, which is true too with Looney Tunes and music by folks like Carl Stalling. That explains his comfort with music coming first. He comes from a generation of animators who really believe music is essential to great animation. It’s just a pleasure to work with someone with that perspective. 

The Wild Robot is in theaters nationwide and is now widely available on demand. 

 

 

 

Featured image: (from left) Roz (Lupita N’yongo), and Brightbill (Kit Connor) in DreamWorks Animation’s Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders.

Warner Bros. Developing a “Game of Thrones” Film

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Warner Bros. has been quietly developing a movie based on George R.R. Martin’s juggernaut fantasy series that set HBO on fire for eight seasons and has been parlayed into a successful spinoff series, House of the Dragon. The news broke late last week and marked the first time the series had been launched on the big screen. There’s already one successful spinoff series unfolding on HBO—House of the Dragon—centered on the internal strife within the powerful Hosue Targaryen and set around 172 years before the events depicted in Game of Thrones. Another series, based on Martin’s “Dunk & Egg” novella, is set to become A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, centered on the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk) and young Aegon V Targaryen (Egg), which is set 90 years before the events in Martin’s most iconic work, “A Song of Fire and Ice,” which is the series that spawned GoT. But this would be the first feature film the studio has made from Martin’s deliciously rich fantasy world, and there’s word that it might also be the first to be set after the events in the flagship series.

Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO
Season 8, episode 2 (debut 4/21/19): Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington. Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

The Hollywood Reporter scooped that the film project is in the very early stages of development, without a director, cast, or writer yet attached. Yet the studio is serious about bringing Martin’s brawling, sprawling, bloodthirsty Westerosi denizens onto the silver screen. This wouldn’t be far afield for Warner Bros. when you consider that Martin and the co-creators of Game of Thrones, Dan Weiss and David Benioff, were all interested in exploring Game of Thrones as a feature film. Weiss and Benioff’s idea was to conclude their series with a film trilogy rather than the 8th season that aired in 2019. At the time, HBO wanted to keep Game of Thrones firmly saddled on the small screen.

Season 8, episode 6/series finale (debut 5/19/19): Emilia Clarke. photo: Courtesy of HBO
Season 8, episode 6/series finale (debut 5/19/19): Emilia Clarke. photo: Courtesy of HBO

The landscape has changed since Game of Thrones concluded on May 19, 2019, with new folks at the top of the TV and film division (Casey Bloys heads HBO, while the film studio is led by Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca), with films now begetting series, like Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Warner Bros’s own The Batman spinning off into HBO’s beloved The Penguin. Warner Bros. also has another spinoff just about to premiere; Dune: Prophecy is about to arrive on November 17, derived from Denis Villeneuve’s critically acclaimed Dune and Dune: Part II but set thousands of years before the rise of House Atreides. 

While there are more Game of Thrones spinoffs in the works for the small screen, they’ve all been set before the original series, and there’s a chance the film project could be set after the traumatic conclusion to the action, which saw Kit Harrington’s Jon Snow turning on Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen to save the Seven Kingdoms. What do the Seven Kingdoms look like in the aftermath of the epic battle with the Night King and Dany’s fall from power? Not even George R. R. Martin has told us that.

The Night King. Courtesy HBO.

Featured image: Season 8, episode 1 (debut 4/14/19): Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke.
photo: HBO

“Blitz” Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran Threads Through a Traumatic History in Steve McQueen’s WWII Epic

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Costume designer Jacqueline Durran first dressed Saoirse Ronan in director Joe Wright’s sweeping English drama Atonement in 2007. She did so again for Wright’s action thriller Hanna and Greta Gerwig’s heartwarming period adaptation of Little Women, winning an Oscar for Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Aclott’s beloved book. Durran collabs with the dazzling Irish performer for a fourth time in Steve McQueen’s wartime epic Blitz which follows Ronan as a widowed mother (Rita) trying to protect her only son George (magnificently played by eleven-year-old Elliott Heffernan) from the looming atrocities by sending him on a train far away. But George is determined to find his way back home. What transpires is a journey through the eyes of a child and a distraught mother trying to reunite during the perils of war.

“It’s unbelievable how quick it goes,” the costume designer says when reminded that it’s been 18 years since Atonement. Durran’s focus for Blitz was researching World War II London during a time when Nazi Germany systematically bombed the city over eight months between September 1940 and May 1941. Period photos grounded Durran’s decision-making where she stitched a realistic tapestry of silhouettes and colors of those fighting for their lives in a crumbling city. “London was this kind of metropolis full of people having a life-changing experience, but it was so important to capture them as characters,” she tells The Credits. “We wanted to create the idea of individuality with the costumes.” What it meant was developing looks that reflected the time period but also the personality of the characters.

Below, Durran discusses her second collaboration with McQueen following the series Small Axe, how character influenced costume design in this intimate portrait of survivors of the Nazi assault on London.

Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

You mentioned you wanted to avoid the clichés of the time period. How did that affect the costume design and how you approached it?

What I tried to do was to go back to the original photographic sources. And one of the things we got our hands on was the pictures from the Imperial War Museum that had been censored. We took all the pictures that had people in, and we put them on our walls, and then we bored down into them to really see what people were wearing and the differences between the people and the characters in people. I wanted to ground it as much as I could in the references from the period instead of just doing a kind of 1940s sweep, which you can do pretty easily. I wanted to actually try and get character into it.

Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

You can see the individuality come through the costume design. It’s almost as if each person in this film is telling their own story.  

One of the key things about the movie is that it’s about London, and it’s about hundreds of thousands of people. And you really wanted to feel that it was hundreds of thousands of different people who all had their own story. And at any given time, you could have gone down and examined their story instead of Rita’s story. And it would have been a different story but equally valid.

McQueen has said the inspiration for Blitz stems from an image he saw of a small black boy standing on a rail platform with a suitcase. Did he show you the photograph?

Yeah, he did. We had that picture on our wall.

Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

Did the image become an inspiration for George’s look?

In a way, it did. With that picture and with all of the children in the film, we could look at the pictures closely and take the details from what they were wearing, which wasn’t a massive range of clothing in England at that time. The children in those photos would be in shorts of different lengths and different degrees of raggedness that would either be too big or too small. It’s all about just being really observant about the details.

How did you approach grounding George’s grandfather Gerald’s (Paul Weller) costumes?

Gerald’s back story was that he had been an educated working-class man in the docks. He’d worked in physical labor, but there was a big tradition of working-class education in the UK during that period. He was part of that, so they were kind of the educated working class. That fed into what he was wearing, but now that he’s retired, he keeps things clean.

Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan and Paul Weller in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

Did that working-class vibe fall into Rita’s look?

There are all these things that you can deduce about a character from a starting point that you can thread through. The thing about Rita was that there was a lot of reference for women that were putting their kind of best face forward. They felt it was part of the war effort to keep their appearance together.  And I think that was part of Rita’s character, and Rita’s friends were all part of that, really.

You can see that during the factory scene when Rita speaks to a crowd of women.

Yes. When we get to the factory and you see all of the women, they’re in their context, they’re there, but there’s another 200 of them that are the same. Everybody’s got their story, everybody’s got their character and their individuality. That was what we were aiming for, and I thought it really ended up looking like the reference pictures; it was just great.

Saoirse Ronan and Steve McQueen on the set of “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

The color red is part of Rita’s character, especially her jackets. How did that play into your thought process?

I felt like it was part of the story of the smartness that people were aiming for during the war. And when we looked at original jackets, and we pulled a whole load of things to try for the first fitting, it was remarkable how stylish and well-cut these jackets were and the quality of them. I mean, there are so many that still exist. It’s amazing, however, that many years later, they’re still there. You can still try them on. They’re really well made. They’re beautiful pieces of clothing, and they were made during the war or immediately before. I wanted to capture the fact that a good jacket was widely available. Red is a color that repeats through the 1940s, and it just felt like the kind of color that was going to work for her character and also for her in the story.

 

One of my favorite shots is Rita sitting on the bus, which is red with her red jacket looking out. I think it’s such a beautiful shot, and it’s such a beautiful London scene that I just loved it. So I think it was more of a feeling of an atmosphere and a period and of London and other things for me.

Saoirse Ronan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

George meets a soldier named Ife (Benjamin Clémentine) who tries to help him return home. How did you want to approach his uniform in terms of period accuracy?

All the uniforms are pretty accurate. The color of them was going to be that navy blue. For Ife, we made some samples in different weights of cotton because it’s all about what you would have under and how it will hang. So we did that to get a great shape in the uniform. Putting the piece of knitwear under it was always about finding a way of making that uniform human. It’s someone’s choice. It’s what someone’s wearing. So we knitted the sweater for him that went underneath. It’s gray and not showy in any way, but it’s about being warm and being utility and being your work clothes.

Blitz is in theaters now and streams on Apple TV+ on November 22.

 

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Featured image: Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan in “Blitz,” now in theaters and premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22. Courtesy Apple TV+

The First Trailer for “Skeleton Crew” Unveils the Jude Law-led Disney+ “Star Wars” Series

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The first trailer for Skeleton Crew has officially landed—or, perhaps, it’s more accurate to say it’s officially lost in space.

The latest Star Wars series on Disney+ has decidedly different vibes from previous live-action series set in a galaxy far, far away—think Goonies in space, and you’re halfway there. And that’s no slight—Goonies was one of the great kid’s adventure movies of the 1980s (or ever, frankly)—only this saga is set as far from Earth as you can get. Led by Jude Law, Skeleton Crew is centered on the epic adventure of four kids whose discovery of a ship on their otherwise non-mysterious home planet launches them on a journey into a much more dangerous galaxy.

While careening through space, they come across Jod Na Nawood (Law), a stranger with the skills they’ll need to make it back home. Madcap adventures with some sinister characters await, with droids and creatures aplenty.

(L-R) KB (Kyrianna Kratter), Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) in Lucasfilm’s STAR WARS: SKELETON CREW, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

Law is joined by Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, Tunde Adebimpe, Kerry Condon, and Nick Frost. The series boasts a stellar list of directors, too, including Spider-Man trilogy helmer Jon Watts, The Green Knight director David Lowery, Everything Everywhere All At Once directors the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), and actor and The Mandalorian director Bryce Dallas Howard.

Check out the trailer below. Skeleton Crew arrives on Disney+ on December 3.

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Featured image: Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) is closely examined by security droid eyestalks while his young partners stand back in Lucasfilm’s STAR WARS: SKELETON CREW, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

New “Squid Game” Season 2 Trailer Unleashes the Giant Robot Younghee in a Sinister Second Look

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A second Squid Game trailer has emerged, and it seems even more nervy and sinister than the last. Nobody thought that the second season for the contestants of the deadliest game on the planet would be any safer, but the demand to “smile” as the games begin feels extra cruel.

The new season of Squid Game brings back a familiar face—Seong Gi-hun, number 456 (Lee Jung-jae)—only his friends and foes from the first time around are, of course, no longer around. There are new contestants Seong has to manage or, to put it more bluntly, outlast, outwit, and outlive.

The new trailer reintroduces us to one of the most astonishingly brutal moments of TV in the past four years, the first time we saw Squid Games’ version of Red Light, Green Light, a classic kid’s game turned into a nightmare by the makes of the games. In this version, the contestants must make it to the other side of a field without being mowed down by a giant robot doll, Younghee, who shoots anything that moves. It’s hard to watch, and in season 2, it doesn’t look a smidge easier to bear.

Yet, in the opening seconds of the new trailer, a devilish proposition is proposed to the contestants. If they want, they can forgo the games and split the prize money, saving themselves a lot of pain and death by being just a bit less greedy.

Seong Gi-hun tries to keep the contestants alive, but why would they listen to him? So he reveals to the contestants that he’s been in the game before, a surprising fact given the circumstances. “Why the hell would you come crawling back?” one asks. Good question.

The second season of Netflix’s biggest series ever returns on December 26, usually a very active time for streaming. When the first season premiered in 2021, it brought in an astonishing 265.2 million views and a total watch-time of 2.2 billion hours—in its first 13 weeks of release.  

“Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), who vowed revenge at the end of season one, returns and joins the game again,” Squid Game executive producer, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote in a press release detailing the series’ upcoming conclusion. “Will he succeed in getting his revenge? Front Man doesn’t seem to be an easy opponent this time, either. The fierce clash between their two worlds will continue into the series finale in season three, which will be brought to you next year.”

Lee Jung-Jae’s career has taken off stateside since Squid Game first bowed, starring in Disney+’s recent Star Wars series, The Acolyte, playing Master Jedi Sol. He’ll be joined in season two by returning cast members Lee Byung-hun, Wi Ha-jun, and Gong Yoo. Newcomers include Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Park Gyu-young, Lee Jin-uk, Park Sung-hoon, Yang Dong-geun, Kang Ae-sim, Lee David, Choi Seung-hyun, Roh Jae-won, Jo Yu-ri and Won Ji-an.

Check out the trailer below.

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Featured image: Lee Jung-jae in Squid Game. Photo by Juhan Noh. Courtesy Netflix.

“Smile 2” Horror Auteur Parker Finn on Crafting a Sequel About a Haunted Pop Star in New York

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Writer/director Parker Finn has been enjoying a whirlwind victory lap in the days since his Smile 2 opened number one at the box office to become the year’s top-grossing horror film. “It’s been very surreal and exciting,” Finn told The Credits, speaking from his Los Angeles home. In fact, the past four years have unspooled for Finn with the kind of momentum young filmmakers dream about, thanks to his mastery of nightmarish scenarios.

Finn became obsessed with horror films growing up in Ohio, where he absorbed the art and craft of the well-timed jump scare. He applied those lessons in his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept, which won a SXSW Special Jury prize after playing to festival crowds in 2020. He then signed with Paramount Pictures to make the feature-length Smile. That 2021 effort, centered on a virus-like curse that announces its presence with a terrifyingly insincere grin, earned $217 million on a $17 million budget.

For the follow-up, Finn shrewdly cast against type by picking British singer-actress Naomi Scott, who literally played a Disney princess in Aladdin, to portray haunted pop star Skye Riley. Inspired by singers like FKA Twigs, Sia, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Olivia Rodrigo, Skye is bedeviled by toxic fans and the ever-lurking “smile” demon.

On a recent afternoon, Finn, who’s a producer on the film, explained how he cracked the code for creating a fresh-feeling sequel and about how his movie helped spur local economies in New York, where Smile 2 was filmed.

Director Parker Finn on the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”

Sequels can be very tough to get right. You figured out how to successfully extend the original Smile premise into fresh territory in ways that have excited horror fans of all stripes. How did you come up with pop star-meets-horror concept for Smile 2 ?

Early on, all of the ideas that initially came to me when I first thought about a sequel —I threw them all away because they felt too obvious, too expected. I really wanted to push myself to do something that nobody would see coming, and I landed on this mega-pop star character of Skye Riley. What I loved about it was that the world of this pop star felt so far from the first one. Where everything was supposed to be shiny and fun and exciting. I was curious if I could make it feel cold, frightening, and almost alien.

Naomi Scott, left, and Director Parker Finn on the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”

When you say you “landed on” the idea for this character, was there a specific lightbulb moment, maybe while watching a music video, when you realized, “This is my hook?“

I don’t know if I could trace it to an exact moment. I think that right now we’re at this peak para-social relationship with fame and celebrity and fandom and stuff like that. I love pop music. I’m fascinated by how we, as humans, worship celebrities, and I guess there was just something in the air that felt interesting to me. Once I got struck by the lightning bolt, I got obsessed with it.

Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”

You build your story around Skye Riley, portrayed brilliantly by Naomi Scott, who always tries to put on a happy face.

You know, once I started thinking about this incredibly famous, public-facing figure who’s expected to be “on” all the time, who’s performing and playing this persona that everybody thinks she is, I then wanted to go behind the scenes, behind that velvet rope, and explore the real human who’s trapped by her own fame and everything that she’s dealing with inside of her own head.

Naomi Scott stars in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”

You shot Smile 2 in New York, not, for example, in Romania or some other country where mid-budget films often get made. In addition to writing and directing, you’re also a producer on Smile 2.

Yeah.

Rosemarie DeWitt, left, and Naomi Scott star in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”

So, from a producer’s standpoint, were you mindful of the impact movie productions have on local economies?

Absolutely. Even with a modestly medium-budgeted film like Smile, you’re talking about thousands of people’s jobs who are affected by this movie from the moment it’s greenlit to when it’s delivered in post. Of course, first and foremost, you have to service the film and story. What does it demand? So I needed to look at that. And I think when you are trying to work inside your box, your budget box and schedule and everything, you’ve got to see what you can make work. But I was setting this film in New York City, and we’d shot Smile One in New Jersey, so I was familiar with the crew. We’re very lucky that New York has some of the best crews in the world, in my opinion, so we brought much of the first Smile crew back for Smile 2. But we also shot much of the film upstate in the Hudson Valley, so we were thinking about how to utilize local locations and work with local small businesses and things like that.

On the set of Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”

You filmed in small towns in upstate New York, such as Newburgh, Wappinger Falls, and Poughkeepsie. When Smile 2 came to town, would the production generate business for support services like catering, car rentals, and location fees?

Definitely. You’ve got to feed a crew of 100 people every day, and sometimes not just one meal. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into that. Or if we’re in one of these towns during the week and far enough from home base, we’re putting people up in hotels. There are so many ways where [film production] has a major ripple effect.

Smile 2‘s costume designer, Alexis Forge, for example, would need to hire a team to help her execute her vision for the characters’ clothes.

Every department is obviously going to figure out how to utilize their particular budget. Our costume designer has people she loves to work with, and some are from the city. Some are from upstate, but there are even things like laundering services for costumes and stuff like that.

Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) signs a fans shirt in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”

I remember when Chris Nolan shot a night scene for Oppenheimer down the street from where I live. The sequence only lasted a few seconds on screen, but for three days, vintage car wranglers, lighting technicians, set dressers, and security guards were on hand to make sure everything went smoothly. It takes a lot of man and womanpower to create the stories audiences enjoy in a movie theater!

There are a million different ways where it all intersects. In an increasingly globalized world, it feels good sometimes to have an impact locally. That’s a special part of making a film, especially an original film — I know this is a sequel, but it’s a sequel to an original film that was homegrown. You’re getting to help create jobs or sustain jobs. That’s really important because I think what we’re facing right now is a crazy time trying to make movies. I hope we keep finding ways to push and make the industry healthy, so everybody wins.

 

For more on Smile 2, check out these stories:

“Smile 2” Prosthetic Makeup Designer Jeremy Selenfriend on the Sequel’s Gruesome, Grinning Details

“Smile 2” DP Charlie Sarroff on Lighting a Curse-Afflicted Pop Star in the Big City

Featured image: Dylan Gelula, left, and Naomi Scott star in Paramount Pictures Presents A Temple Hill Production A Parker Finn FIlm “SMILE 2”