The beloved British bear is back on another adventure in Paddington in Peru.
The marmalade-devoted bear is finally back on the scene after a 7-year hiatus since Paddington 2, the third film in the critically acclaimed series. In the new film, directed by Dougal Wilson, Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) heads back to Peru to visit Aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton), who is now living at the Home for Retired Bears. Paddington’s trip to visit Aunt Lucy turns into a proper adventure when he and the Brown Family end up on a thrilling journey into the Amazon rainforest.
The third film has new faces (and voices), including Olivia Colman’s The Reverand Mother, a nun who can shred on the guitar, and Antonio Banderas’ boat captain Hunter Cabot. Hugh Bonneville returns as Mr. Brown, with Emily Mortimer stepping in to voice Mrs. Brown.
Director Dougal Wilson spoke at the trailer launch and said that the third film will explore Paddington’s origins and how he came to be rescued and live in London. “There’s a lot of missing information about what happens before that, and we thought for the third film it would be very appropriate for him to return to Peru, but this time taking his London friends and community with him and have an adventure there and, in doing so, fill in some of the missing pieces.”
Check out the trailer below. Paddington in Peru hits theaters on January 17, 2025.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Paddington in Peru brings Paddington’s story to Peru as he returns to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown Family in tow, a thrilling adventure ensues when a mystery plunges them into an unexpected journey through the Amazon rainforest and up to the mountain peaks of Peru.
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Composer Tom Howe constructed the score for Paramount+’s superpowered new series Knuckles, putting the warrior Knuckles the Echidna from the Sonic the Hedgehog universe at the center of the action.
“He’s like Sonic, but more fun, more attitude, and probably more fun to have a beer with or go out for dinner with,” Howe says of the titular character. Howe also benefited from an added element that made the sound of Knuckles so appealing—the voice of Knuckles himself, played by Idris Elba. “Idris Elba’s voice is fantastic, with a sort of gravitas. It helps the character a lot. Knuckles is so committed to being a warrior. He has that superhero quality. The fact that he’s so into it gives it believability, but it also play as a comedy or be straight as well. I think he’s a great character.”
In an interview with The Credits, Howe talks about mixing genres and tones in the series, recording in the legendary Abbey Road studio, the inherent music of Idris Elba’s voice, and making friends with the cast of Ted Lasso.
Where did you grow up, and what was the first instrument that you played?
I grew up in England, and the first instrument I played was the piano. My dad played the piano, organ, guitar, and drums, and my parents sang in a choir, so I was exposed to church music early on. Piano was the first thing I learned, and then I took up guitar at about eight or nine, and clarinet, and I did a lot of singing choirs and things.
How did you start piecing together the score for Knuckles?
Well, it’s challenging. I started by coming up with thematic ideas for the different characters. I spent a lot of time thinking about the Knuckles character, obviously the star of the show. What I ended up with is actually a very simple tune, but it took me a long, long time to get there. The score can be very heroic, but at the same time, you can hear a couple of notes of it with a comedy cue. There’s a lot to contend with in this show. Even the episodes jump around. You go from the end of episode one, when they’re in a bowling alley, to having a full-on fight, which looks very much like a video game. They’re jumping around, there are lasers. And in episode three, you’re at a family dinner. In episode four, you’re in a musical.
That’s a tremendous amount of variety for a single series.
In episode one, Knuckles initially runs up the hill, and you see this huge landscape shot of green hills before he runs down and takes out the workmen. Obviously, a big landscape shot like that can have a big, wide-scale sound. But when you’re in a family dinner with just three people and Knuckles, it won’t take the same kind of palette. So, you’ve got to feel your way around thatand work out what the picture can take and what’s suitable for the characters in the story. So that made it very fun. But as a composer, there are a lot of different things to deal with, and you don’t want to over-egg a pudding.
L-R: Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba) and Hudson as Ozzy in Knuckles, episode 1, season 1, streaming on Paramount+, 2024. Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures/Sega/Paramount+.
Knuckles is voiced by Idris Elba, who has that fabulous voice that’s its own kind of music. How does that help you with what you’re creating?
It really helps. His voice reminds me of David Attenborough. There is a lot of talking, the voice is very low, and a lot of the music is sitting above that. There’s very little going in the bottom end of that except for the action cues within that episode.
There are a lot of special effects in this show. When do you enter the process? Do you get the script or storyboards, or are you actually looking at the final visuals?
I get a complete picture, but it’s forever changing in length, and this scene’s now over here, or that bit that was there is now gone completely. It’s an ever-moving thing until they lock it down. If you work on a drama, they may change the edit, but fundamentally, the shots are the shots. But when you’ve got an animated character like Knuckles, in any of the scenes he’s in, when the special effects shots come in, it will all be a littlebit longer or a little bit shorter. It may only a frame here and there, but when you start doing that over a number of sequences, all the music timings will have to move around.
I get an early picture to look at, and that’s when I’ll have a conversation with the filmmakers. We’ll talk about what a particular scene needs, whether it needs music, and if it does, what the music is doing, what the mood behind it is, or what the intention behind it is. I then start trying to kind of put things down, but at that point, it is an ever-moving thing. Every time you move forward, you have to go backward and fix something. I remember in episode six when Knuckles was in the last battle there, and Wade gave a fantastic speech. What I actually see is Wade standing in front of a blue screen. Giving a great performance is challenging enough, but to do it when you’re on your own is really difficult, I’m sure.
There’s a very varied selection of surprising needle drops on the soundtrack. In the first episode alone, you have Edith Piaf and A Tribe Called Quest.
Matt Biffa selected those in collaboration with the filmmakers. Toby Ascher, one of the producers, was also very involved.
What’s the most fun about writing for Knuckles?
The breadth of the palette that you get to play with. If you have a dark drama project, all of the music is going to be in that world. There are not many projects where you can jump around like that and still keep a throughline in terms of melody and instrumentation choice. Episode four has a lot of electric guitars in it, but the others don’t. Episode three has a lot of solo violin and mandolin, but not a lot of the others do. It is a lot of fun to put on these different hats while trying to thread a needle and make it sound like one thing.
Are there individual musicians playing all these parts, or are you creating it on a synthesizer?
I do a demo here in my studio; any pianos, guitars, if there are drums, I will play those here. I have a setup that allows that. But for Knuckles, a lot of it was orchestral, particularly in the big action moments. So, I went to Abbey Road for four episodes and AIR Studios in London for two episodes with an orchestra. And it’s all played and recorded for real, which obviously gives it a quality that can’t be obtained by samples as well as when you get all the musicians together.
What’s your next project?
I’m finishing a David Attenborough series for the BBC and then starting Shrinking season 2 for Apple.
You worked with the Shrinking people on Ted Lasso, too, right?
Yes, of all the things I’ve ever worked on, Ted Lasso was unusual because it went on a long time and because I was involved on some of the things on set as well. I became very friendly with all the actors and filmmakers, and that carries on to this day. I actually had dinner with Nick Muhammad two nights ago, just the two of us in the pub. He’s a fantastic violin player, and I’m also friends with Phil Dunster and Hannah Waddingham. I see Jason Sudeikis when he is in town. So that’s been a lovely thing to be a part of.
Knuckles is streaming on Paramount+
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Featured image: Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba) in Knuckles, episode 6, season 1, streaming on Paramount+, 2024. Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures/Sega/Paramount+.
Back in early May, we got our first look at David Corenswet as Superman, and now it appears that Superman writer/director James Gunn has revealed an image of the Kent Family farm, where the young Kryptonian is raised.
Gunn is one of the most active and open filmmakers when it comes to sharing images and updates from his films. He’s been keeping up that level of engagement ever since he took over DC Studios with co-chief Peter Safran and began working in earnest on Superman. Gunn shared the image of what appears to be the Kent Family farm on his Threads account, and he hasn’t refuted the comments to the post that suggests as much.
You can decide for yourself what iconic Superman location this is, but to us, it screams a farm outside of Smallville, Kansas. (Even if it was shot in, say, Ohio.)
Courtesy James Gunn.
The Superman cast has been growing by leaps and bounds lately. Mikaela Hoover and Christopher MacDonald have just signed up as Cat Grant and Ron Troupe, two members of the Daily Planet staff. They join recent addition Beck Bennett, who’s also playing a member of the Planet team. These three follow the recently added Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince, playing Martha and Jonathan Kent, respectively. Corenswet leads, of course, as Clark Kent/Superman, and he’s joined by Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. The ensemble also includes Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Wendell Pierce as Perry White, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer, and Gunn’s longtime collaborator Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner.
Superman is set to fly into theaters on July 11, 2025
As promised back in mid-May, the first look at The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrimwas unveiled at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on Tuesday by none other than Andy Serkis. Serkis, of course, was one of the stars of Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy, and his time playing Gollum has not come to an end (more on that later). For the War of the Rohirrim unveiling, Serkis moderated a panel about New Line Cinema and Warner Bros.’ upcoming anime epic, which treated festivalgoers to 20 minutes of the film.
The War of the Rohirrim is based on a brief portion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and is centered on Hèra (voiced by Gaia Wise), the daughter of the legendary Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox), a mighty king of Rohan, tracks the Hammerhand family’s attempts to protect their lands from the Dunlendings. Serkis promised that fans were “gonna go nuts for this,” as he himself is a fan of the film—he didn’t work on it, but his Lord of the Rings future is mighty busy. Serkis channeled his iconic character to priase the upcoming anime film—”There is only one word to describe a movie with Lord of the Rings and anime at the same time, and that is precious.”
The panel included the film’s director, Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series), producers Philippa Boyens and Joseph Chou, and Warners executive Jason DeMarco. DeMarco reflected on the challenge of combining The Lord of the Rings world with anime.
“We did not want to make an animated version of a Peter Jackson film,” he said. “We wanted to make a Kenji Kamiyama anime feature film that lives within that world. And that’s a difficult, difficult task that requires a lot of delicate balancing between two types of filmmaking that haven’t really collided like this before.”
Image by Winson Seto. Courtesy Warner Bros.Image by Winson Seto. Courtesy Warner Bros.
The War of the Rohirrim is set roughly two centuries before the events in “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” and will include the creation of Helm’s Deep, the fortified gorge in the White Mountains that was a major setting in Tolkien’s work and the middle film in Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy The Two Towers. The script comes from Phoebe Gittins and her writing partner, Arty Papageorgiou, and is based on a draft from Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews.
“I’m in awe of the creative talent who have come together to bring this epic, heart-pounding story to life, from the mastery of Kenji Kamiyama to a truly stellar cast,” Boyens told Variety back in 2022.
The connection between the new anime film and Jackson’s creative team includes Oscar-winning makeup and visual effects artist Richard Taylor and Oscar-winning art director Alan Lee. Tolkien illustrator John Howe is also involved. The film is slated for a December 13, 2024 release.
Serkis also teased his upcoming live-action feature Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which he will star in and direct, with Peter Jackson executive producing.
Featured image: Helm Hammerhand. Image by Winson Seto. Courtesy Warner Bros.
Director and executive producer Matthew Hamachek calls TheDynasty, the 10-part docu-series now streaming on Apple TV+, “Shakespeare but with football.”
He’s not overstating it. As Dynasty charts the rise and fall of the six-time Super Bowl champion New England Patriots over the course of 20 years, dazzling on-field highlights are deftly layered with the documentary’s themes of male ego, betrayal, the price of success, and the corporatization of sports at the expense of players. The result is textured, riveting drama designed to appeal even to viewers with little interest in football.
Bill Belichick and Tom Brady in “The Dynasty: New England Patriots,” now streaming on Apple TV+. Courtesy of the New England Patriots.
“If you are making something for fans, then you’re probably not getting to the core of what story is because that’s just hagiography,” says Hamachek, who co-directed and produced the Emmy-winning, two-part HBO documentary Tiger, which delivered a similar revealing look at the rise, fall, and epic comeback of golf legend Tiger Woods. A veteran editor, his credits include the acclaimed documentaries If a Tree Falls, Gideon’s Army, and the Oscar-nominated Cartel Land.
The Dynasty offered a unique creative opportunity, he says. “I felt it was important that this would be an unvarnished telling of the New England Patriots story and that it would not come from any one person. It wasn’t going to be [head coach] Bill Belichick’s story or [quarterback] Tom Brady’s or [team owner] Robert Kraft’s story. I wanted to let the 70-plus people we interviewed tell it from their perspective. And we had to get into all of it: Spy Gate, Deflategate, Aaron Hernandez …. At its core, this is a human story; to tell a human story, we have to get into all of it, including the fact that it fell apart at the end.”
Bill Belichick in “The Dynasty: New England Patriots,” now streaming on Apple TV+. Courtesy of the New England Patriots.
Hamachek and his team over two-plus years examined more than 30,000 hours of video footage and audio files from the Patriots organization’s archive. Although much of the material was covered in series writer Jeff Benedict’s bestselling book of the same title, the documentary, which is nominated for a Critics Choice Real TV Award in the Best Sports Show category, goes deeper. Besides never-before-seen footage, Hamachek and his crew conducted 70 new interviews with former players, coaches, sportswriters, family members, and NFL officials for a more detailed story.
Drew Bledsoe in “The Dynasty: New England Patriots,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
From the opening episode, “Backup Plan,” the series traces how the New England Patriots evolved from a struggling team to a powerhouse franchise. The episode’s climax is the devastating knee injury that sidelined star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, one of the series’ candid on-camera interviews, and the ascension of backup quarterback Tom Brady. As coach Belichick takes the risk of sticking with the untested, sixth-round draft pick Brady, the episode builds suspense leading to the famous “Snow Bowl” win against the Oakland Raiders in episode 2.
By the time a dynasty is established, the Patriots have become the New York Yankees of the NFL: no longer a scrappy underdog but a soulless machine with a struggle for control between Brady and Belichick. The Dynasty doesn’t shy from covering controversies; besides accusations of cheating in Spy Gate and Deflategate, episode 6, “At All Costs,” details the miscalculation of signing the troubled Aaron Hernandez. The theme of fathers and sons echoes throughout the series, nowhere more tragically than Kraft’s unwavering belief in Hernandez until the player was charged with murder.
In conducting the face-to-face interviews, it probably helped that Hamachek, who grew up in Washington, DC, wasn’t a Patriots fan. “I wasn’t sitting on the couch with my dad when I was 12 years old remembering this team,” he says. “It was more like, ‘You tell me what was important.’”
Covering two decades of on and off-field drama was a tall order, and Hamachek credits the Dynasty team of editors led by Dan Koehler for the layers of storytelling. Information from the interviews often changed the direction of the narrative, and sometimes an entire episode had to be recut, he says. “It was a great group. They fell in love with the process and wanted to get it right even when [the story] was constantly shifting and moving around. Everybody bought into the idea to make it as perfect as we could. There were a lot of 3 and 4 a.m. nights.”
Rob Gronkowsi in “The Dynasty: New England Patriots,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Some of the most entertaining and insightful commentary comes courtesy of former players, including Bledsoe, Adam Vinatieri, Tedy Bruschi, Rob Gronkowski, Ty Law, Danny Amendola, Julian Edelman, Randy Moss, and Malcolm Butler, who offers candid thoughts on the controversial penultimate episode “Breaking Point” in which Belichick inexplicably failed to play Butler in a big game.
Sports journalists Howard Bryant and Michael Holley, who wrote his own book on the Patriots, are particularly insightful. Sportswriter Nora Princiotti offers a unique perspective on the tenure of quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, who replaced a suspended Brady following Deflategate, musing that their ensuing rivalry was possibly as much about good looks and charisma as it was about talent.
The on-camera interviews are particularly revealing, especially Hamachek’s questioning of tight-lipped Belichick, who emerges as the drama’s villain, communicating volumes with his body language, facial expressions, and silence.
Bill Belichick in “The Dynasty: New England Patriots,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
“It was important, especially in Belichick’s case, that if he didn’t want to answer, that the editors leave it in to show that he did have the chance to comment and that there wasn’t something else he said we weren’t showing. It was important to give him the opportunity to comment on the record,” Hamachek says.
He credits the Dynasty crew for its preparation and research prior to the interviews. “We had 50-plus people working on the archives, so when [subjects] sat down in the chair, we could say things like, ‘Do you remember this particular moment in the locker room?’ It showed them that we had done our homework, which is one of the comments Bill Belichick made after his interview. He came up to me and said, ‘It’s very clear how well-researched you are,’” Hamachek says. “Coming from Bill Belichick, that’s as good a compliment as you could possibly get.”
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Featured image: Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and Robert Kraft in “The Dynasty: New England Patriots,” now streaming on Apple TV+. Courtesy of the New England Patriots.
DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures unveiled the first footage of writer/director Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot on Tuesday at the Annecy Animation Festival, drawing laughter and tears from the festivalgoers.
The upcoming animated film stars Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, and Kit Connor and was adapted by the three-time Oscar nominee Sanders from Peter Brown’s novel. Sanders and his Wild Robot team are still working on the film, which is set to hit theaters on September 20. The Wild Robot is centered on ROZZUM unit 7134, better known as Roz (voiced by Nyong’o), the titular robot who ends up marooned on a wild island filled with animals but no one and nothing like Roz. Roz must learn how to form a connection with the islands’ animal inhabitants and eventually try to support a little orphaned gosling who will need to fly off for the fall migration.
Sanders revealed The Wild Robot‘s opening section for the Annecy crowd, which drew lots of emotion from the audience as Roz explored the wild island. The next portion revealed Roz and the goose Brightbill (Connor) as the gosling grows up, which drew both tears and a standing ovation.
Sanders told the crowd that what he and his team were going for with the look of The Wild Robot was the “analog warmth and soul” of hand-drawn animation. “We start by doing these inspirational paintings,” Sanders explained, aiming for a final film that looks indistinguishable from this initial artwork. As for Peter Brown and his novel, Sanders said, “His guiding principle was that kindness can be a survival strategy.”
The cast includes Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry, and Ving Rhames.
Check out the trailer below. The Wild Robot premieres on September 20.
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To be accurate, the third installment in Rian Johnson’s whodunit franchise is actually called Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, and Johnson took to X to share the first image from the set—Daniel Craig’s delightfully dandified sleuth Benoit Blanc is now sporting some long locks. Craig’s Blanc is, as always, dressed to the nines, wearing a three-piece suit and holding a hat. He looks ready to take on the next case, which Johnson promised is Blanc’s most dangerous yet.
Aaaaand we’re off! Today is day 1 of shooting on the next Benoit Blanc mystery “Wake Up Dead Man” – see you on the other side. pic.twitter.com/Napfvq1zXT
The third Knives Out film will once again boast an incredible ensemble. This time around, Craig is joined by Josh O’Connor (recently seen steaming up the screen alongside Zendaya in Challengers), Andrew Scott, Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Josh Brolin, Daryl McCormack, and more.
Johnson is, of course, keeping mum about the plot to Wake Up Dead Man, but we did get a teaser of the title two weeks ago:
Johnson is clearly having the time of his life with this franchise, getting to play in the whodunit sandbox which he has pointed out is vast and offers plenty of room for invention.
I love everything about whodunnits, but one of the things I love most is how malleable the genre is. There’s a whole tonal spectrum from Carr to Christie, and getting to explore that range is one of the most exciting things about making Benoit Blanc movies.
As summer shimmers just ahead and another school year wraps up, we take time now to reflect on the fire looks our teachers were serving. The educators at Abbott Elementary gave it their all through two semesters of change. As they navigated celebrations and setbacks, this season was filled with transformations guided by Hair Department Head Moira Frazier and Makeup Department Head Constance Foe.
Janine Teagues’ (Quinta Brunson) relentless optimism and dedication to her students saw a major payoff when her big ideas caught the attention of the school district. She was recruited for a fellowship, stepping into a more visible professional role. In light of a recent breakup and job offer, Frazier and Foe elevated Janine’s look to take her into the community leadership position.
QUINTA BRUNSON. (Disney/Gilles Mingasson)
“Me and (series creator) Quinta [Brunson] were like, we envision Janine going on YouTube trying to figure out how to style curly hair. What do I need to do? What products do I need to use? That’s why this year, you see her hair a little bit more manageable. It looks a lot more defined in her curl pattern,” Frazier noted. “That middle part just brings more dominance and confidence to her, which is why we ended up doing it that way. It sets a high standard and makes a statement for her.”
The sparkly new glint in Janine’s eye doesn’t just come from her excitement over new school initiatives. She also started playing with bolder makeup products. According to Foe, mixing in metallics was the biggest change in Janine’s routine.
TYLER JAMES WILLIAMS, QUINTA BRUNSON. (Disney/Gilles Mingasson)
“We started doing little jewel tone eyeliners, and when I tell you it was so dark to the naked eye, it was black,” Foe explained. “But when you start to see it in the light, it was like an emerald or an amethyst, and it would match what she would have on, and she was more cognizant of what she was doing this time instead of just, ‘Ok, I’m going to school,’ and she just put on lip-gloss and her regular black or brown eyeliner. She actually spent time in the mirror and said, ‘Ok, I’m ready for the day.”
Abbott’s flamboyant principal, Ava Coleman (Janelle James), also leveled up her look. Although she typically favors style over substance, a summer endeavor steered her in a new direction. After a trip to the halls of Harvard and completing an unrelated professional course, she adopted a more academic style.
“For Ava’s character, we wanted to touch on a little bit of texture and more quality this season,” Frazier said of Ava’s wigs. “This season, when she steps into her role as principal, it’s being taken a little more seriously because of this whole, ‘I went to Harvard’ thing. Even though it was online, she wanted to be taken more seriously. So that’s why we’re seeing a bit of toned-down Ava but with a bit more of a statement. Because there’s no more of a statement than to have a middle part, straight down, all the way, exaggerated, 30 inches. It’s still Ava, but it reads that ‘I’m being taken seriously.’”
JANELLE JAMES (9:00-9:32 p.m. EST), on ABC. (Disney/Gilles Mingasson)
Frazier is a one-stop shop, producing every wig used on the show, including guest actors. She makes a full lace wig in five to seven days with only the highest quality lace and 100% human hair. With cameras reaching 8K resolution, she has to be careful that the lace is not visible to the human eye, or it will be picked up on screen.
“Literally, if there’s any repairs that need to be done, I’m getting it done in a day,” Frazier revealed. “Every guest cast got my high-quality ventilation because I can ventilate a hairline in a day. So, when we had Tatyana Ali, who came in to play ‘Ava 2.0’, I sat there and did her hairline the day before she played on the episode, and I had to do it that day. When she came in the following day, she had a brand-new wig that matched her exact hairline.”
In the emotional and revealing episode “Mother’s Day,” Frazier leaped into a new level of wigs for the show. Several of the Abbott colleagues agree to spend the holiday at a drag brunch where hairstyles are famously maximized and competitively flawless.
“I really, really loved how the queens came through with the hair, the makeup, the wardrobe,” Frazier beamed. “Everything just felt so right. It looked absolutely amazing and read beautifully onscreen, even in the 8K cameras. I’m very, very proud of that work. I’m proud of the structural design that I did on that. It was a beautiful enhancement to see it all play out between myself, my team, Dustin Osborne and Christina Joseph, and our guest hair stylist who came on to help put the wigs on because we can’t do everybody.”
SHEA COULEÉ, CHRIS PERFETTI.(Disney/Gilles Mingasson)SYMONE, CHRIS PERFETTI, DONZELL LEWIS. (Disney/Gilles Mingasson)
Glamorous entertainment icon Sheryl Lee Ralph shines as Barbara Howard, the principled and orderly matron of the school. The Emmy winner has alluded to the transformative nature of her wig as she embodies her character.
“Based on the interviews Sheryl has been doing, the wig is a character in itself,” Frazier explained. “Barbara doesn’t show up until we put the wig on. Once the wig was on Sheryl Lee Ralph, she became Barbara Howard. We made that wig like that because so many people you know have that exact hairstyle. They have that exact personality, and that exudes that type of character. Everyone has a Barbara in their life, whether they’re an aunt, a cousin, a friend of a friend, even a grandmother.”
SHERYL LEE RALPH. (Disney/Gilles Mingasson)
Barbara’s makeup look is timeless and impeccable. Even through the trials of corralling a room full of messy kids all day, she never has a smudge or smear. Foe said that Ralph brings her own vision of the character to the table.
“Miss Sheryl and I collaborated on her look, and we came up with her classic look of grace,” Foe said. “She always has that cut crease, but it’s like the pretty Black girl cut crease. Then she has a mauve lip, or her bold browns and reds go with her cardigans. She really does have a hand in it.”
In the mid-season episode “Panel,” Foe’s greatest challenge was concealing rather than highlighting. Teacher Gregory Edie’s arms are famously admired among his coworkers, but when he bears it all, makeup must cover actor Tyler James Williams’ many tattoos. In a heated basketball match with the students, Foe’s team had to make sure that his real-life ink didn’t show through.
TYLER JAMES WILLIAMS, LISA ANN WALTER, JANELLE JAMES, CHRIS PERFETTI, SHERYL LEE RALPH. (Disney/Gilles Mingasson)
“[Tyler] has tats from his fingers all the way, everywhere,” Foe revealed. “All on the insides of his arms, all on his forearms, on his chest, on his neck. I came up with the perfect formula of color to match his arms. I was talking with lighting to ensure that lighting in our trailer matched the set so that once he left our trailer, he looked exactly the same on set and was natural. It literally took me about an hour to cover both arms and his chest area when he played basketball. I had to shellac him, for lack of better terms, with tattoo cover because he was going to be sweating. I had to make sure it didn’t run off.”
TYLER JAMES WILLIAMS, ZACK FOX. (Disney/Gilles Mingasson)
Of course, the heart of Abbott Elementary is the students, but that makes for a lot of young actors for Frazier and Foe to prep each day. Both department heads are hands-on and involved in making sure that everyone looks ready to learn.
“We go through each and every kid, make sure there is no Cheeto dust on their fingers or their faces,” Foe teased. “Making sure they have lotion, making sure there’s no ice cream or anything. We have said they can’t have donuts anymore because we have little icings everywhere.”
Both teams are dedicated to ensuring that each child is camera-ready and looks appropriate for the scenes.
“I wanted to make it feel very authentic,” Frazier noted. “If you ever really pay attention to the background, you’ll see a lot more braids, twists, and child hairstyles because these kids are not the kids you see on Instagram. These kids are kids, and that’s what we’re trying to bring back that playful era so that they can remain children.”
That includes being cognizant of the script, including location.
“You’ve gotta remember, this is in Philly. This is not in California. Children are not going to come out with a wash-and-go set when it’s 20 degrees outside. I’m from Ohio, so I would like to know. My mom is not sending me out with a freshly washed head so I can catch a cold, as she would say. Don’t nobody got time to take off work because you got sick,” Frazier laughed.
Abbott Elementary is available to stream on Hulu.
Featured image: TYLER JAMES WILLIAMS, QUINTA BRUNSON. (Disney/Gilles Mingasson)
In the fourth time around for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s wise-cracking Miami detectives, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, now in theaters, earns its summer popcorn movie bonafides with loads of goofy banter and antic action sequences. Helmed by Belgian-Moroccan directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. Ride or Die follows Mike Lowery [Smith] and Marcus Lawrence [Lawrence] as they do battle with a sadistic criminal mastermind named McGrath (Eric Dane) and corrupt cops.
As always, cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert helps Arbi and Fallah bring the story to life. He’s shot every one of their movies since the trio first met as teenagers at a film school in Brussels. “We know each other very well,” says Heyvaert. “I can tell in three seconds, just from a look or a hand motion, what they want. Then it’s up to me to explain that to the rest of the gang, which potentially might be 50 crew members.”
Speaking from the London area, where he’s prepping a new movie, the Brussels-based cinematographer discusses using nonstop camera movement to capture Ride or Die in all its eye-popping, trash-talking glory.
Building on the hyper-kinetic style originated by Michael Bay back in 1995, the camera never stops moving in Ride or Die. Literally, cameras move from side to side every moment of screen time, circling around the actors, going in close, or pulling back. How did you arrive at this dynamic approach to camera movement?
The original tagline during pre-production, I think, was “Bad Boys: On the Run.” The idea embedded in the story is that Will and Martin are always on the move, so the camera should always be on the move as well, without it feeling weird or wrong. In most cases, the camera movement goes hand in hand with the blocking, characters going from A to B to C to D, wherever. On top of that, we have a lot of push-ins or pull-outs to emphasize the drama or the spectacle. And more than the previous one, Bad Boys for Life, there’s way more handheld here, for dialogue and even action [scenes]. We thought it would be fun for a blockbuster of this size to go down and dirty, take the camera in hand, move it around, and get close to people’s faces.
The bright color palette contributes to Ride or Die‘s high-energy feel in the spirit of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice. What colors did you want to accentuate for Ride or Die?
Looking at contemporary Miami, the colors that most attracted us were the bright pinks and blues. In the night shots, we really pushed the envelope on the pink. In fact, I think pink might be my favorite color now. On shooting days, it’s the low golden sun that you see almost every day in Miami, especially during the golden hour.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
What were some of your references cinematically?
For this movie, where we push everything slightly further than reality, we were inspired by classic eighties and nineties cinema, like Tony Scott movies [Top Gun and True Romance], which always have this golden sun with strong backlight and high contrast usually combined with long focal [lenses]. We really embraced that golden feel. In short, I would say our credo was neon-soaked nights and golden sun days.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
What kind of gear did you use to capture all that color and movement?
The main cameras were Alexa 35 and Sony Venice. We combined those modern digital cameras with Panavision G series cameras. They’re lightweight and perfect for handheld action scenes but also give you that classic anamorphic feel with the wide-angle perspective.
What about lenses?
Working with Panavision, we adjusted the lenses and all the other optics so that when you get a streak of light that would normally be a horizontal blue line, in Bad Boys every streak line is pink. Panavision did a great job tweaking the coating on the lens glass so we could really embrace the pink.
Martin Lawrence stars in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
You also used something called the SnorriCam, which was invented by a couple of guys from Iceland who call themselves the Snorri Brothers. How does it work?
You have the actor wear a harness with a camera attached. The first time I heard about SnorriCam was in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. In Ride or Die, we pushed it a step further and adjusted the rig in such a way that we could go from a frontal shot of an actor and then the camera swings around so you’re really [seeing things] in their point of view, almost like video game. It took some physical strength because the rig is quite heavy, about thirty pounds, Will and Martin pulled it off.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
When do your SnorriCam shots show up in the movie?
In the final piece, when Will and Martin’s characters enter Gator Land, we start with a long shot frontal on Will. Then the camera whips around, and you look over his gun. He tosses it to Martin’s character, who catches the gun, and the camera [POV] attaches to his body. It’s not a very long sequence, but I hope it’s iconic.
You enjoy an unusually tight relationship with Live or Die directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah.How do you deal with having two directors that you need to answer to? Is there a division of labor?
It’s a good question, but I don’t really know the answer. They cross over all the time within days or scenes. One day, I’ll be talking mainly to Bilall because he knows the angles, and halfway through the scene, Adil will step in and say, “Let’s do it this way.”
Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah on the set of Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
Martin Lawrence and Will Smith look like they’re having fun. What’s it like filming these guys?
It’s amazing watching them do their thing, especially with the comedy when they’re free-styling. Obviously, there is a script, but for every single take, they’ll come up with new lines or better lines or add a joke. We always have many cameras rolling simultaneously because once Will and Martin start free-styling, it might only happen once, so you’d better get it. That’s always a little stressful for me to make sure three, four, five, and six cameras are in the right position because you have to be ready and on edge when that spark of genius comedy comes to life.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
On the action front, what was your favorite Ride or Die scene to film?
The sequence I had the most fun shooting was the crashing helicopter. It’s a very contained set, almost like we were filming a mini-submarine movie. Making a big action piece in a tiny environment is really challenging, and you also have to keep that camera moving. We used a rig with a speed rail built into the ceiling that could transport the camera back and forth, allowing us to move the camera really fast from the back of the chopper to the front and vice versa.
People are flying all over the place!
We needed to capture the moment where the characters fall from back to front at twenty miles an hour and then the moment when the guy’s parachute is being sucked out of the chopper. Choreographing all that action in sync with special effects took a lot of storyboarding, meetings, and prep to tell the story beats in a clear way.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
You also have to deal with that giant cage imprisoning Mike’s murderous son Armando (Jacob Scipio).
That cage weighs about half a ton, but we still needed to keep things energetic and keep the camera shaking like it would in a real crashing helicopter—or so I assume. I’ve never been in a crashing helicopter.
Helicopter crashes, shootouts, movie stars, Miami—for a kid from Belgium, does it sometimes feel a little surreal when you find yourself making a big Hollywood movie?
Any kid on the planet would think it’s surreal. Belgium is a small country that does not have a big film industry, so growing up there and now getting the chance to collaborate with the cream of the crop of the American film industry feels like a blessing.
Featured image: Will Smith and Martin Lawrence star in Columbia Pictures BAD BOYS: RIDE OR DIE. Photo by: Frank Masi
In Richard Linklater‘s latest film, an irresistibly sexy romantic comedy that’s also a bit of a noir, a giddy satire on the hitman genre, and a screwball quasi-whodunit, the one constant is a vibe that is decidedly and effusively all Linklater. Glen Powell, a rising star who has been Linklater’s longtime collaborator through a string of roles dating back to 2006’s Fast Food Nation, plays Gary Johnson, a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of New Orleans who is as passionate about Nietzsche as he is dispassionate about the affairs of his own life. Based on a true story written by Skips Hollandsworth for Texas Monthly and adapted (with generous tweaks) by Linklater and Powell, Gary’s pleasantly low-wattage life—tidy apartment, a Honda Civic, a pair of cats named Ego and Id—gets put under the hot lights when his tech consultancy work for the New Orleans Police Department turns into a last-minute job going undercover to pose as a contract killer.
This brings Gary into the orbit of some delightfully sketchy characters—few directors alive give their actors, even ones in single scenes with a few lines—quite as much loving attention as Linklater. The oddballs and misfits Gary comes into contact with as he continuously tweaks and tailors his hitman personae to match the clientele are both a running gag and a solid case for why Linklater is one of the best directors of actors working today.
But then Gary comes into the orbit of Madison (Adria Arjona), a beautiful, emotionally battered young woman who wants to off her abusive husband. Up until now, Gary (via a knockout performance from Powell) has been having the time of his life duping would-be killers into the clutches of the NOPD, but with Madison, it’s different. There’s chemistry: abundant, immediate, intellectual, and physical. There’s a snap to their every interaction, a syncopation of rhythms. Gary is willing to bend the rules to keep Madison out of harm’s way and, inevitably, into his arms. The question becomes how far Gary will go to protect her and how far Madison is willing to go to protect them both.
In Linklater’s able hands, working with some of his most trusted allies like cinematographer Shane Kelly and editor Sandra Adair, Hit Man sizzles from start to finish and proves Gary’s beloved Nietzsche may have been right when he wrote, “There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness.”
Linklater explains the methods to his madness below.
I’d love to start with your casting process. Glenn and Adria have abundant onscreen chemistry, but the entire cast, down to people with single scenes, really pops. Can you describe the process of working with casting director Vicki Boone?
Yeah, well, casting is the crucial moment, isn’t it? You’re dead in the water if you get the wrong person in there, so that’s always been such an intuitive, important process, and you just kind of know them when you see them, and I’ve loved partnering with Vicki because she loves actors. She just has a feel for them, and we explore this together. She’s just an enthusiast. You gotta love actors and see the possibilities in people.
It looks like the camera really loves each and every one of these goofballs. Is that something you talked about before with your cinematographer, Shane Kelly? Or is it at this point, because you guys have worked together for so long, that it’s kind of a shorthand?
It’s a shorthand. I just think it’s an attitude that pervades the movie. The tone is set by the director, of course. We respect these people, even though they’re desperate sad sacks making huge mistakes in their lives. We have respect for the actors, too. We rehearse a lot, and we try to think through our parts and really bring our best to them so that the actor finds that character in them.
One moment that stood out was when Gary was undercover as a German hitman with red hair and freckles, and the guy he was talking to has a really deep Cajun twang. Was that exchange as fun to film as it was to watch?
Absolutely. The actor Glenn is working with is Richard Robichaux, who I have worked with a lot. He’s actually from Louisiana. He kind of tweaked up the Cajun accent a bit, but it was like these two guys are from other planets. Gary even asks him, “Where are you from?”And Richard’s character is looking at him thinking, “You’re from Mars, maybe? Some other planet,” you know? That character Gary is playing then, we called him Dean, the orange-haired, strange-accented, freckled guy. Every department, from hair, makeup, and costumes, everybody just pushed it to the max here. It was still grounded, but way, way out there. We had fun.
The spark between Glenn and Adria is potent. I haven’t seen a movie like this in a while that focuses on two people with tremendous chemistry who take so much pleasure in it. What was it like capturing that on camera?
Yeah, I always refer to this as kind of like my 80s throwback movie where people really had sex and they were driven by passion and it got them in trouble. And, you know, one of these kinds of movies they don’t supposedly make much anymore. You get the right people in there like Glen and Adria; they’re such charismatic, vivacious people, and they’re both smart and funny. It was just fun to work with them. But you can’t create chemistry. They either have that or they don’t. But you can kind of nurture it. You can give it room to articulate itself and find a new level. But you can’t – you can’t fundamentally create it. It’s like it’s hard to create funny people—people are funny or they are not. It was easy with Adria and Glenn. They’re there already, you know.
Hit Man. (L to R) Adria Arjona as Madison Masters and Glen Powell as Gary Johnson. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix
There was a snap to their banter. Hit Man just seemed like a movie that would be fun to make.
Oh yeah. And that fun started in the workshop rehearsals that I do, and the way we process the script, touch it up constantly, keep pushing ourselves and each other, and make each other laugh. So yeah, it’s a process, but it was really fun. Every bit of it was joyful.
You’re a veteran screenwriter as well as director, but I’m curious how difficult adapting this story from Skip Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly piece was, considering you have several surprising twists you and Glen, your co-writer, created, which I imagine is not an easy thing to nail.
It was fun to be able to do that. Most of my stuff is character-based, which doesn’t really rely on that. I often make fun of it, it’s like, “Well, plot twist, that hat’s artificial.” Your life doesn’t give you that many plot twists. So it was fun to actually go into that world and create plot twists. I wanted to do it well. I wanted to really go with it and make it work. I don’t want a lot of holes in the story. I don’t want people asking questions. I want it to be tight, tight, tight, and I want to get it perfect and keep going. It was great to have those classic twists. Cinema, it’s got good roller coaster potential.
Hit Man. (L to R) Co-Writer Glen Powell as Gary Johnson with Adria Arjona as Madison on the set of Hit Man. Cr. Brian Roedel / courtesy Netflix
I want to ask about the pacing. You’ve worked with your editor, Sandra Adair, for a long time, and Hit Man moves at such a fun, screwball pace, yet it doesn’t draw attention to itself. Again, is this just shorthand between you and Sandra at this point, or were you talking about this before you started filming?
We share the same postproduction brain, that’s for sure. She can just look at my footage and go, “I know what you’re thinking.” In general, this one we actually did move things around in post, it took a little more finagling than usual. Usually, my films have this A-Z quality, and they don’t deviate that much. In this one, we kind of moved some things around and paced things out a little differently. It was more tweaking; I didn’t do reshoots or anything, but it was a little more time-consuming than usual. But I’m not surprised, given the tone and the genre we were working in, because, especially with the performances, I’m always going for this kind of effortless vibe.
That effortless vibe is another hallmark of your career and your way with performers specifically.
Sometimes, that works to the detriment of the actors, like people think they’re just improving or it’s not really acting because they just seem real. We all know what gets rewarded is when you just see the effort and the big stuff. But I’m typically not that interested in that. There is some big stuff here, but it’s the story we’re telling. It’s pretty crazy.
Another thing that stood out was that here was a New Orleans-set movie without a single shot of Bourbon Street…
Yeah. Thank you. I made a film in Paris and you never see the Eiffel Tower. Someone can eat a normal meal in Louisiana and not have it be some exotic Cajun dish, and people don’t all have these Cajun accents. There’s not voodoo and alligators everywhere. They’re just great people. New Orleans is full of big characters. But yeah, every shot doesn’t have to take place in the French Quarter. You know, we never stepped foot in the French Quarter.
There are some great diner scenes in this movie.
The real Gary Johnson loved Denny’s. New Orleans happened to not have many Denny’s. I don’t know if we could have gotten them on a corporate level anyway; I’m not sure they’d want to be associated with murder deals. But yeah, he liked meeting in little diner-type places that felt real, you know?
Hit Man is playing in select theaters and now streaming on Netflix.
Featured image: Hit Man, (L to R) Adria Arjona as Madison, director & co-writer Richard Linkletter, co-writer Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, and director of photography Shane F. Kelly. Cr. Brian Rondel / Courtesy of Netflix
I Am Legend 2, the sequel to Will Smith’s 2007 hit, is very much in the works, but don’t just take our word for it.
Michael B. Jordan recently told Peoplethat Akiva Goldsman, who wrote the original film, and Mark Protosevich are writing the script for the sequel. Jordan will join Smith in the follow-up.
“We’re still working on the script and getting that up to par,” Jordan told People. “It doesn’t have a release date or anything like that. I’m not sure exactly where we’re going to be filming that one, but I’m really excited to get in front of the camera with him. Being somebody that I’ve looked up to for a really long time, to be able to work with Will is something I’m really looking forward to. I’m really excited.”
I Am Legend was directed by Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games franchise) and featured Smith as virologist Robert Neville, the last man standing in a New York City that’s been devastated by a man-made plague that turned humans into ravenous, murderous mutants. Smith’s Neville wasn’t merely trying eke out an existence and stay out of sight, he was a man on a mission, working on a cure while trying to reconnect with any other survivors. While he might have been the loneliest man in New York, he at least had one trusted compatriot, his dog, Samantha, a German Shepherd that was his sole companion and protector—that is, if you don’t count the mannequins that Neville talked to (it’s hard to stay completely sane in that situation).
Last month, Smith told Entertainment Tonight that the sequel is was looking good. “[We have some] really solid ideas… I think [Michael and I are] going to make it on screen together. That dude is the truth, so I would love to do that,” he said.
Smith gave another update at the Red Sea International Film Festival earlier in the year, revealing that the sequel would work off the alternate ending to the 2007 film in which Robert Neville survives. In the original film released into theaters, that wasn’t the case.
“I have a call with Michael B. Jordan tomorrow. We’re really close, script just came in,” Smith said at the festival of the sequel. “You have to be a real I Am Legend buff to know this, but in the first theatrical version, my character dies, but on the DVD, there was an alternate version of the ending where my character lived. We are going with the mythology of the DVD version. I can’t tell you anything more, but Michael B. Jordan is in.”
On tap next for Jordan is the film he’s working on with his longtime collaborator Ryan Cooger. Although not much is known about the project, what we do know is very exciting—an original story, one that could kick off a franchise, and that was the subject of an intense bidding war. We’re in.
For more big stories about upcoming films and series, check out these stories:
Featured image: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 06:Michael B. Jordan attends the LA Community Screening Of Warner Bros Pictures’ “Just Mercy” at Cinemark Baldwin Hills on January 06, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Longtime Saturday Night Live star Beck Bennett has joined the cast of James Gunn’s Superman, which is currently filming in Atlanta.
Bennett is the latest cast member to join Gunn’s reboot of DC’s most iconic character (Batman fans will disagree), following the recently added Neva Howell and Pruitt Taylor Vince, playing Martha and Jonathan Kent, respectively. The film stars David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. It features a huge ensemble that includes Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Wendell Pierce as Perry White, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer, and Gunn’s longtime collaborator Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner.
The Hollywood Reporterhears that Bennett will be a part of the reporting team at the Daily Planet, run by Wendell Pierce’s Perry White, which also includes Clark Kent and Lois Lane on staff. Bennet was a fixture on SNL for eight seasons, from 2013 to 2021, and recently appeared in Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix comedy Unfrosted.
Gunn’s Superman will be released next summer on screens worldwide, including on IMAX, an appropriate venue considering Gunn is filming Superman entirely in IMAX. Superman will be the biggest film to come out of DC Studios in years and the first marquee feature from Gunn and Peter Safran’s new version of DC, which will unify all titles across film and TV under a new vision for the studio. Superman is the first film out of the gate for Gunn and Safran’s opening slate, titled “Chapter 1: Gods & Monsters.”
Corenswet becomes only the fourth person to play Superman on screen, joining Christopher Reeve, who played him from 1978 to 1987, beginning with Richard Donner’s iconic Superman—which Gunn is clearly inspired by, considering he lopped Legacy off his own title—Brandon Routh in a 2006 reboot, and most recently, Henry Cavill for Zack Snyder’s film, beginning with Man of Steel in 2013 and through Batman v. Superman and Justice League.
Superman hits theaters on July 11, 2025.
David Corenswet is Clark Kent/Superman in “Superman.” Courtesy James Gunn/Warner Bros.
Featured image: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 10: Beck Bennet attends the LA premiere of ‘The Unicorn’ at ArcLight Hollywood on January 10, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
Fans of Star Wars have been eagerly anticipating their newest live-action series, The Acolyte, which features all-new characters in a tense and action-filled story that explores the light and dark sides of the force, as well as many grey areas in between. Set in the High Republic era that leads into Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, The Acolyte is the creation of Russian Doll writer/producer/director and lifelong Star Wars fan Leslye Headland. A mystery thriller at its core, the plot centers on a former Padawan (Amandla Stenberg) and her Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae) reuniting to investigate a series of crimes that put them both at risk as forces become ever more dangerous and sinister.
This new story in the Star Wars universe offered an exciting opportunity for Pulitzer Prize-winning 21st-century composer and Emmy and Grammy-nominated recording artist Michael Abels. Abels wanted to balance the lush orchestral quality of more traditional Star Wars music with the edgy, sound design inspired style fans of his work on Jordan Peele’s films Get Out, Us, and Nope will recognize.
Speaking with The Credits, Abels talks about crafting percussive heavy fight sequences, how to score a coven of alien witches, and the notes you can expect to hear when the lightsabers are unleashed.
What were some of your early discussions with Leslye Headland about creating this score?
This is a new Star Wars story. It’s all new characters and takes place centuries before any of the other stories we’re familiar with, so it was important to both tell these characters’ stories and introduce them to people, but also to let people know that this is the Star Wars we all know and love. So Leslye and I talked a lot about the balance between the expected and the unexpected and how to extend the tradition and enhance it in the ways Leslye had in mind. We decided pretty quickly we wanted to have a very lush orchestral score that had big music because that’s really what the Star Wars world is known for, but then also make sure that we are telling the story of these characters and take the music where it needs to go as they have their own journey.
In terms of sticking to Star Wars tradition or going further afield, what might audiences hear? The fight scenes, for example, are much more percussive.
Right. There are a lot of fight sequences that are very martial arts inspired, and if you look at some of the Jedi philosophy, there’s a certain Eastern aesthetic in some of the philosophy of the Jedi. That was something that Leslye really leaned into in the characters, so the music we use for those scenes is not particularly harmony-forward but rather percussion-based. We wanted those sections to feel very different sonically than the rest of the Star Wars world. When starting the score, one of my jumping-in points was in the very percussive battle sequences and figuring out what worked for the characters that were going to fight in that specific way. There are also some terror elements that are meant to be pretty edgy, so even though the context can be very orchestral, at the same time, it’s very dissonant.
The themes created for this particular Star Wars series are presented a bit differently.
Some of them you can identify with characters, but that isn’t how I created them in this case. I identify them with the emotion in the plot that the character is experiencing. For example, there’s an aspiring Jedi, and when you feel her sense of wanting something greater and morally fulfilling, you hear this theme. On the one hand, it feels like her theme, but it sometimes occurs when her mentor, Sol, is also onscreen. It’s more a theme based on noble aspiration. Then, another theme is more meant to represent evil as it rears up from the depths or of the growth or expansion of evil. It’s not attached to a particular scene or character but is part of how the story unfolds. So, the cues are more based on the emotion happening onscreen instead of when we might be seeing a certain character’s face.
That’s a definite departure from what we might be used to, instead of something like “Darth’s Theme.”
Right. Leslye wanted it to be a melodic score with identifiable themes because that’s something we love about Star Wars, but there’s a literary theme at work in The Acolyte, a storytelling theme of moral ambiguity. That’s a fresh take that Leslye really wanted to explore in depth in an episodic way. It’s possible in this series that one’s alliances will shift. The story is deliberately told from different characters’ perspectives, and you see that good versus evil is a little more complicated than how it might present itself. So, not every theme is used for every character, but the idea is that it might have been a possibility in the right situation. The approach I took was that a noble theme could be used for a character that we haven’t thought of as very noble because that’s a major feature of how we hope audiences watch this series.
Witches are a fairly recent addition to the Star Wars canon. How did you approach scoring the coven introduced in The Acolyte?
Even before the percussion, that was actually where I started because these witches are a very important element to the story, but also, there’s a logistical reason I started there, which is that they perform the music on camera. That means it has to exist before they shoot it instead of being created in post-production. The music is mostly women’s voices because the coven is all women, so that seemed natural, and even though they represent an alien culture, it is very multicultural because it’s meant to feel like a culture of spirit that’s not of this world. So we deliberately made sure we had a range of vocals from throughout the world, and that each singer had an ability so they could sing riffs that were distinct to their cultural backgrounds, then I wrote music that allowed all those styles to coexist. The words are right from the script: “The power of one, the power of two, the power of many.” Then, once it had been shot, I added some percussive elements because the scene is a ritual, and it had to feel supernatural, but it also had to feel ceremonial in a way that felt tribal.
What can fans look forward to as they watch the whole season?
For one thing, there’s solo violin, and as it turns out, Amandla is a talented violinist, so it felt predestined. I wish I’d known that about her so she could have played those solos, but it felt like a clear psychic connection through the score. There are also some battle scenes coming up with lightsabers, and I looked at the fight scenes as two types, the ones with lightsabers and those without them. The lightsaber fights have a giant brass sound that Star Wars is known for in its more heroic moments.
As not only a composer but also a Star Wars fan, what was the best moment for you while creating The Acolyte?
When we were making the music for the coven, I felt it was really important to be on set because they might need me as a consultant—at least, that was my pitch. Fortunately, they bought that line, and I got to come on set. That was super fun, even though it was on a freezing night shoot in London in January. It was fantastic. I was never so happy to be so uncomfortable.
New episodes of The Acolyte premiere every Tuesday in the US and every Wednesday in the UK on Disney+.
With Deadpool & Wolverineslashing its way toward its July 26 premiere, its director, Shawn Levy, remains a very busy man. He’s got the final season of Stranger Things on his dance card—he’s directing two episodes and executive producing, which will carry him into 2025. This was the initial reason why Levy, when offered the opportunity to possibly direct the next Avengers movie, had to turn it down. Now, things have changed a bit.
Sources have told The Hollywood Reporter that with the shifts in development for the upcoming Avengers film, which has been changed dramatically as it will no longer focus on Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror, now makes it possible for Levy to direct. He’s not the only director in contention for the job, but Levy’s a hot commodity, and Marvel is clearly pleased with his work on their one and only 2024, the big ticket team-up of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine.
The timetable for the fifth Avengers film shifted by several months as the script was being re-written, and with that shift, Marvel reengaged with Levy about the project. Loki creator Michael Waldron has written the recent drafts, while the previous director, Destin Daniel Cretton, departed this past November.
Levy has previously directed Night at the Museum, Real Steel, Free Guy, and The Adam Project (the latter two starring Reynolds). He’s also been a major force on Netflix’s Stranger Things. Now that he’s in the Marvel Studios family with Deadpool & Wolverine, it would make plenty of sense for the studio to want to keep him around for what will be one of the most crucial films in their Phase Six.
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You know the old adage, made famous by Ridley Scott’s original Alien, that in space, no one can you hear scream? You can be sure there will be screams aplenty in director Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, an interquel that bridges the gap between Scott’s 1979 game changer and James Cameron’s fantastic 1986 sequel Aliens.
Alvarez’s film has the distinction of having been approved by both Scott and Cameron. Romulus is centered on a crew of young space colonists who come into contact with a fearsome Xenomorph, the acid-spewing, multiple-mouthed creature that literally burst onto the scene in Scott’s original. In Alien, we got an incredible performance from Sigourney Weaver as the indomitable Ellen Ripley, who battled and eventually vanquished a Xenomorph after a grueling duel aboard the USCSS Nostromo. Cameron picked up the story seven years later and followed a battle-hardened Ripley, now a part of a military mission to a space colony to investigate a fresh xenomorph attack. Romulus is set between these two films and boasts an ensemble of young performers led by Cailee Spaeny, Isabela Merced, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu.
The trailer reveals Spaeny’s Rain Carradine making a fateful decision; she wants out of her boring life and into something a little more eventful. So, she jumps aboard a ship that will end up being a house of horrors, including a chest-busting alien that brings us all the way back to the original Alien.
Check out the trailer below. Alien: Romulus hits theaters on August 16.
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A pioneer of animation in Thailand, producer Auchara Kijkanjanas is no stranger to copyright infringement. The founder and head of Big Brain Studio produced the nation’s first big animation hit, which was pirated shortly after it was released. Hence, Kijkanjanas takes both personal and professional satisfaction from witnessing the changes in attitude and behavior toward intellectual property that have occurred in subsequent years. She also holds out hope that something like Thailand’s generous and successful production incentives for live-action projects from overseas might one day be introduced for the animation sector.
The absence of a domestic animation industry meant that Kijkanjanas took a roundabout route to the sector she was instrumental in creating. After studying architecture and developing an interest in art, she opted for a degree in industrial design, which she felt contained elements of both.
Realizing she would have to go abroad to achieve what she was really aiming for, Kijkanjanas headed for Houston, Texas, to study English. That was followed by a master’s degree in computer graphics design at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State, where she encountered real animated graphics for the first time.
After additional animation training in New York, Kijkanjanas returned to Thailand in 1990 and secured a role that allowed her to learn how to operate 3-D graphic specialist machines. After honing her craft on commercials and VFX for films, she began working as an artist and producer in the nascent domestic animation field.
“Advances in animation ran in parallel with the progress of the computer hardware and software,” she noted.
At Kantana Animation Studios, a division of Kantana, Thailand’s biggest film and television production company, Kijkanjanas began producing her first long-form, 24-part animation series, Zon 100%, in 2001. Series director Kompin Kemgumnird had also studied and worked in the US, including as an animator on Atlantis:The Lost Empire, Tarzan, and Ice Age.
Kijkanjanas and Kemgumnird teamed up again on Blue Elephant (Khan Kluay), which became Thailand’s first computer-animated feature in 2006. Based on a historical tale of war elephants during the 16th-century Burmese-Siamese War, the film took the domestic box office crown that year, landed awards at international film festivals, and put Thai animation on the map. It still holds the record for the highest-grossing Thai animated feature and spawned a 2009 sequel.
“Being the first feature of its kind, theaters didn’t give Blue Elephant many screens when it was first released,” said Kijkanjanas. “But a lot of people wanted to see it.”
This combination of high demand and a lack of awareness at the time around protecting IP set the stage for a major setback.
“I was in the office early when I got a call from a young guy who asked if I was the producer of the film. He told me he felt bad for me, and when I asked why, he said there were guys selling pirated DVDs in the market. I almost fainted.”
Kijkanjanas says revenue took a hit because of the pirated copies, though the film went on to show on more screens and had a long theatrical run. As that run was nearing its end, she received another unexpected call.
“A lady called to complain that there were no subtitles on her DVD. I had to tell her the film was still showing in cinemas and that the master was in my hand, as I was about to send it to the home theater company that had bought the license. She had no idea her copy was pirated, of course.”
According to Kijkanjanas, people in Thailand didn’t really understand the concept of IP or piracy at the time. Education campaigns on the subject have been a game changer, she said. “Now it is not seen as cool to buy fake things.”
In 2012, she collaborated with Kemgumnird again on Southeast Asia’s first 3D stereoscopic animated feature, Adventure Planet (Echo Planet), whose English-language release featured the voices of Jane Lynch, Brooke Shields, and J.K. Simmons.
The following year, Kijkanjanas founded Big Brain Studio to give herself more freedom to create content. In addition to their own productions, the studio has partnered with India’s Toonz Media Group on a project and does commissions for corporate and academic entities in Thailand. Last year, animation fan Conan O’Brien visited the studio while filming the Thailand episode for the recently premiered Conan O’Brien Must Go travel show on HBO Max.
Though Blue Elephant did receive some government subsidies, Kijkanjanas says that the animation sector doesn’t see the kind of incentives that have brought several high-profile international TV and movie shoots to Thailand. “We are jealous of the Malaysian animation industry as it gets a lot of support from the government there.”
Kijkanjanas believes this is partly due to the long timeframes involved in animation productions, meaning it can be years before the results are seen. “But I hope someday they [the Thai government] will realize the value of animation; I’m still waiting for that.”
Looking ahead, Kijkanjanas eagerly anticipates her daughter’s return home after nine years of working in Japanese anime. She hopes she will leverage her knowledge for the domestic industry. As for Big Brain, her mission is to keep “making animation for our kids to watch that has both Thai and international flavors to it.”
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George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Story has given us the best action sequence of the year, a relentless, 15-minute literal thrill ride that pits a young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), her War Rig mentor Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), and some assorted War Boys against the onslaught of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and his Biker Horde. This includes the Mortiflyers, a team of motorcyclists who get airborne using a number of inventive techniques, including huge fans and paragliders.
Following the relentless action and success of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller’s Furiosa doesn’t skimp on the action while also covering a whole lot more ground and time (years, in fact) than its tightly wound successor, which introduced the world to Charlize Theron’s indomitable Furiosa. Miller reassembled a ton of his Fury Road creatives, and that includes Dutch composer Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL), who provides Furiosa with a sound suitable to the Wastelands and the murderous men—and resilient women—who live and die there.
In an interview with The Credits, Holkenborg discusses deploying the duduk and didgeridoo, buying additional “instruments” at a hardware store, utilizing silence as a part of music, and which family member can be heard on the soundtrack.
How did you get started in music?
I just grew up in a family where everybody played instruments like it was the most normal thing to do. Since I started banging on the piano with my fists, my mom thought it was a good idea to give me a drum kit when I was seven. And so drums were my first instrument. Then, later, bass and guitar. I had violin lessons. I was playing the recorder. But by the time I was 14, I started working in a music store. I have to say, though, I’m not a master at any of them. I’m just a jack of all trades. I know a little bit about all these different instruments, and that’s what I love.
What do you compose on when you’re scoring a film?
It depends on the movie. For instance, when I was doing Fury Road, the first image that I saw was that guitar player [the Doof Warrior]. So, it makes sense to start with the guitar riff. And since the drummers were on the back of the truck, the drums came after that. But if you score a movie like Black Mass, which I did in 2015, that was like a cello, predominantly cello scores. So. you write it for a cello first. It totally depends on what the movie is and what is required for it.
I call myself a full-contact composer because I don’t want to be stuck behind two computer screens and an electronic keyboard to figure out what I’ll be writing. I have all this equipment in the studio here, I just like to turn knobs, move faders. up and down, play guitars, play bass—it’s right behind me, right there. I just love being physical with my instruments.
What was it like to come back to the Mad Max environment?
Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s like it never left me. Fury Road was a career-defining moment for me. It’s an action movie with rock and roll drums and rock and roll guitars and bass guitars, and the orchestra is like on speed, and everything sounds over the top and mangled with whatever tools. It took a while, but after about a year, I heard from people that the score was a fresh breeze of air in how you approach action. And so, it’s been a very special movie for me, and that’s why it was so special to return to that world.
Furiosa is just as action-packed as Fury Road, but the new film covers a lot more ground.
The first one was also pretty much shot in real time, except for a few breaks, all happening in 48 hours. This movie takes place over a period of 20 years. The first one used a third-person perspective approach. Furiosa is a first-person perspective score, so everything needs to be approached through her eyes. It’s quite different, but it’s the same world.
How does having everything seen through Furiosa’s eyes affect the way that you approach the score?
There’s a great music editor, Bob Battersby, that I’ve worked with on many, many movies before he retired. And he said to me, “Tom, never put more instruments in your arrangements that can fit in the room where the actors are.” So, if you have a discussion between two people in a kitchen, you wouldn’t use a 150-piece choir and orchestra. It made so much sense. So, if you score a movie with a very young girl, and when something really horrific is happening in front of her eyes, she’s not imagining a really emotional string piece. She doesn’t even know what strings are. But what she does feel is her heart pumping out of her chest and feeling sheer panic in her head, which has an impact on how you approach the score of things. It is apulse, which is more of a heartbeat approach. And since I was also one of the re-recording engineers on this movie, I was able to give it the sounds that George and I were looking for.
Secondly, the duduk and the didgeridoo keep reminding her of the Green Place, until she loses her arm. This time around, we needed way more of that duduk and didgeridoo because the Green Place actually still exists. Until Furiosa loses her arm with the astral body navigation on it, which means, okay, from that point forward, there is no Green Place for her. The reason I picked up the duduk and the didgeridoo is because they are both instruments that feel like Earth to me.
Third, it’s the incredibly aggressive sounds that we called The Darkest of Gods, From the Deepest of Hell, a characterization of which she’s witnessing the Dementors being that person until she becomes it herself at the end of the movie.
The fourth element is the typical repurposed instruments we used for Fury Road: the percussion, the mangled strings, and the metal sounds. So, it was quite a different approach on this one, and it took way longer in the movie itself to get to the point where that sound is warranted.
What kind of conversations did you have about the score with George Miller?
George told me, “You have to be very, very sparse with what we would call traditional music or traditional emotional music because she’s not there at any point anywhere in the movie yet.” With Fury Road, it was like 50-50. In this movie, it was more like 10 percent, 90 percent. So, 10 percent of the orchestral players were playing the proper notes I had notated. And 90 percent of them were just experimental sessions with each other in a room and very experimental notation. None of these performances would ever be the same because you’re leaving a lot of interpretation up to the players. It was really fun to do that. And when we were done with the recordings, we would take these mixes. Sometimes, I would use them in their natural sounds and sprinkle them throughout the movie. I would then take these recordings and, through this incredible Buchla synthesizer system developed in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, create even weirder sounds out of it and again. There’s this everlasting rise. You don’t feel it stop, and it feels like it’s rising over and over and over again. That’s used in all the tense moments. I would also like to say, one powerful tool a composer has is not when to write music, but when not to write music. That was also a big part of the concept in this movie.
Much like Fury Road, it felt like the music was being played on the machinery I saw in the movie.
Repurposed instruments were obviously a massive quest for Fury Road, and so I did so much recording on my own. We rented a massive truck from U-Haul and went to Home Depot, where we bought absolutely everything that looked like metal: sledgehammers, pipes, the kitchen sink, metal toilets, you name it. All these recordings describe the world; they don’t describe one character.They just describe the world and the wasteland that we’re in. So, obviously, this is taking place in that same wasteland. Just a different story, but it’s still the same wasteland. It made sense to use all those recordings again but pick the things we hadn’t used so much on Fury Road.
Can you give me an example?
When Furiosa is sitting in the cave with Praetorian Jack, and he fixes her shoulder, it’s that first moment of warmth. And you can see clearly in the movie that she’s very, very hesitant to even open up the tiniest bit to him. Therefore, the music had to be very restrained in its emotional quality because it’s not like a love affair, and you start with all your violins. They don’t even know what violins are.
Your dog was on the soundtrack of Fury Road. Any other members of the household we can hear in Furiosa?
You can hear a recording of my oldest son’s heartbeat from before he was born.
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Featured image: Caption: War Boys in Warner Bros. Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
Elle Fanning is ready to take on the universe’s most lethal hunter.
The star of Hulu’s series The Great is trading in her royal robes in 18th-century Russia for Dan Trachtenberg’s upcoming Predator film Badlands, the sequel to his 2022 hit Prey, which starred Amber Midthunder as Naru, a young Comanche woman in 1719 fighting back against one of the first Predators to reach earth. Prey was a huge hit for Hulu, breaking viewing records for the streamer at the time of release.
“Prey.” Courtesy 20th Century Studios/Hulu
For Badlands, Trachtenberg has reunited with his Prey screenwriter Patrick Aison to craft a story that is reportedly not set in the past like Prey and instead will be set sometime in the future. The Predator franchise began with director John McTiernan’s 1987 original, based on a script by Jim and John Thomas and starring an ascendant Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dutch, a member of a commando team on a doomed mission in a Central American jungle who has to tangle with a relentless enemy unlike any they’ve ever seen. The film spawned multiple sequels—the Danny Glover-led Predator 2 in 1990, the 2010 film Predators (starring Walton Goggins, Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, and Alice Braga), and 2010 and Shane Black’s 2018 film The Predator. There were also crossover movers pitting the two meanest aliens against each other, the Predator against the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise.
There are no concrete plot details yet for Badlands. The film is being produced by 20th Century Studios. Whether it gets a theatrical run or goes straight to Hulu is also still an open question. We’ll let you know more when we do.
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The official trailer for first-time director Kelly Marcel’s Venom: The Last Dance is here, and as the title suggests, this will be the last time we see Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, the journalist turned host of an alien symbiote with an insatiable appetite who has, over the years, learned to channel his aggression (sort of) for the right causes.
Hardy collaborated on the story with writer/director Marcel, a longtime Venom scribe, to help bring home the third and final installment in the franchise. Joining Hardy in the new film are newcomers Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Hardy’s run as Venom began with director Ruben Fleischer’s 2018 hit Venom, followed by Andy Serkis’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which co-starred Woody Harrelson as the alien symbiote that made Venom look mild-mannered by comparison.
Hardy wrote in an Instagram post last November that he loved making the final film with Marcel. “It’s been and continues to be a lot of fun this journey — there’s always hard turns to burn when we work, but [it] doesn’t feel as hard when you love what you do and when you know you have great material and the support at all sides, of a great team. I want to mention very briefly how proud of my director, writing partner and dear friend Kelly Marcel I am. Watching you taking the helm on this one fills me with pride, it is an honour. Trust your gut, your instincts are always spot on.”
Check out the trailer below. Venom: The Last Dance arrives in theaters on October 25.
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Ron Howard’s documentary Jim Henson: Idea Man, out May 31st on Disney+, is not only a tribute to the beloved, brilliant creator of the Muppets but feels like an artistic reflection of the creator’s own work. Cutting between Henson’s best-known creations, Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, along with his early short films, commercials, abstract videos, and Henson family footage, the documentary also uses visual effects, stop-motion animation, and regular animation alongside contemporary interviews to show Henson’s non-stop drive to create. And just as Sesame Street toggles between Oscar the Grouch’s garbage can and, say, a claymation short about the number seven, Idea Man toggles between these these different elements in a way that seems perfectly logical.
Jim Henson in Kermit the Frog. Courtesy Disney+.
The process started with finding representative gems in thousands of hours of Henson’s work. The volume of “what we had to work with was insane,” said Paul Crowder, who co-edited the documentary with Sierra Neal (previous projects together include McCartney 3,2,1, Pavarotti, and The Yin and Yang of Gerry Lopez). Crowder and Neal went through the output of Henson’s 36-year-long career, coming out the other side with a fresh understanding of the creator’s “affectionate anarchy,” as one documentary subject described the early days of Sesame Street. In addition to combing through endless episodes of Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and Fraggle Rock, at the Henson family’s behest, the editors visited the Jim Henson Company’s offices to screen footage of the creator’s earlier work, independent films and shorts made from the 1950s onward. This viewing was crucial to the final edit. “We tried to use Jim’s work to tell the story at different places in the film,” Neal said, using, for example, clips from the 1965 short experimental film, Time Piece, to help shape scenes from throughout Henson’s life.
Given the volume of behind-the-scenes footage (Henson’s camera team filmed extensively in places like the creature shop, where the Muppets are made), the editors had a huge amount of material to mine to portray Henson’s career. “It’s a blessing to be able to make an archive film where you haven’t got to cheat anything,” Crowder said. What was more challenging was getting across a private sense of who Jim Henson was. He gave infrequent interviews about himself and comes across as shy, humble, and private in the rare footage where he’s asked questions about his family or how much money he’s making. More typically, “an interviewer would ask him some easy questions and then ask for Kermit to appear, and Kermit would do the rest of the interview,” Neal said.
Jim Henson in his office. Couratesy Disney+
But conveying what made Henson tick and, thus, what drove him to such dedicated creative lengths is what makes Idea Man gel. “It wasn’t until we really started to get in a little bit deeper to Jim’s life, and his relationship with his wife, his work, his staff, that Ron really pushed us,” Neal said, “and that’s when it started to really come together, and feel like we had a message to put forward.” Interviews with Henson’s adult children (who have their own distinguished careers in art and filmmaking) and co-creators like Frank Oz in a so-called cube, a boundary-less device that allowed for images and animation to be layered with the interview footage was one way into Henson’s personal life. The other was to work as much as possible with past interviews from Jane Henson, Jim’s wife from 1959 to 1986 (Jane passed away in 2013).
Jim and Hane Henson. Courtesy Disney+
Jane and Jim Henson met in a college puppeteering class and had five children together. Despite never becoming its face, Jane was a part of the Jim Henson Company at its founding. A puppeteer herself, she quit working full-time in the 1960s to raise the children, coming back to Muppets projects in the 1980s and 90s. For Crowder and Neal, recordings of Jane’s past interviews, given for print, were among the most helpful finds in terms of detailing the inside story of Henson’s family life, and the production went to great lengths to clean up room sounds from the audio to make them usable.
An image from “Jim Henson: Idea Man.” Courtesy Disney+
The editors also used a creative avenue to represent Henson by editing the documentary as he might have done it himself. “The entire team, including Ron especially, was passionate about Jim’s work but was also on board with this idea of making it very Jim,” Neal said. “That meant it was going to be abstract at times. It was going to be a little kooky, and we were going to try to play an oddball joke sometimes.” After screening his lesser-known work, the editors sat down with Henson’s family to ask how he would have approached the project, from editing to additional animation. “We really just leaned into Jim-if this as much as we could,” Crowder said. We learn about this icon who revolutionized television, a shy artist who seemed to forever view himself as a tall skinny kid with difficult skin, not just from behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with his family and closest collaborators, but from a lively, effective edit of this footage creatively unified with choice gems from 36 years of his body of work.
An image from “Jim Henson: Idea Man.” Courtesy Disney+An image from “Jim Henson: Idea Man.” Courtesy Disney+
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Featured image: “Jim Henson Idea Man” takes us into the mind of this singular creative visionary, from his early years puppeteering on local television to the worldwide success of Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and beyond. Courtesy Disney+.
