After a glorious second season and a coronation at the most recent Emmys, FX’s spicy series The Bear has been renewed for a fourth season, and what flavors the broth considerably is that seasons three and four will be shot back to back.
It was only this past November when The Bear‘s third season was announced, ahead of its sizzling performance at the Emmys, where it won Best Comedy Series and its three stars, Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, all took home awards in their categories. Season three is set to return in 2024, while season five will most likely land in 2025.
The Bear‘s massive success has meant its featured players have all seen their careers pop off, including creator Christopher Storer, who has several projects lined up in both film and TV. White, Edebiri, and Moss-Bachrach’s film roles have increased in number and size, with Moss-Bachrach recently landing the role of Ben Grimm/The Thing in Marvel’s reboot of The Fantastic Four.
The Bear‘s renewal was initially reported by Reel Chicago.
For more stories on what’s cooking on TV, check these out:
Featured image: The Bear — Season 2 — Season two of FX’s “The Bear,” the critically acclaimed original series, follows Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and Richard “Richie” Jerimovich (Ebon Moss- Bachrach) as they work to transform their grimy sandwich joint into a next-level spot. As they strip the restaurant down to its bones, the crew undertakes transformational journeys of their own, each forced to confront the past and reckon with who they want to be in the future. Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), shown. (Photo: Courtesy of FX)
Not only is Black Mirror returning to Netflix for season 7, but one of the sci-fi anthology’s most beloved storylines is returning, too. A new teaser released by Netflix reveals this juicy detail about the upcoming season.
It looks like the crew—well, the surviving crew—from the season four premiere episode USS Callisterare reporting for duty. Among the six new episodes that will arrive on Netflix in 2025 are a follow-up to the Star Trek parody that enraptured fans. The USS Callister crew won’t be returning full force, however. “Robert Daly is dead, but for the crew of the USS Callister, their problems are just beginning,” the new teaser reveals. Jesse Plemons played Robert Daly in the original episode, a dastardly figure who used the DNA of his colleagues to create the hugely popular multiplayer online game set on the titular spaceship. Things go badly for Captain Daly, however, when a new hire named Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti) stages a revolt against their corrupt captain.
USS Callister was written by Black Mirror co-creator Charlie Brooker and William Bridges and directed by Toby Haynes. While it hasn’t been revealed who from the USS Callister cast is returning, the choices are bountiful. There’s Milioti’s rebellious Nanette Cole, of course, and she was joined in the episode by Jimmi Simpson, Michaela Coel, Billy Magnussen, Milanka Brooks, Osy Ikhile, and Paul G. Raymond. Aaron Paul had a voice cameo in the episode (he later appeared in his own Black Mirror installment in season six, “Beyond the Sea”) and even Kirsten Dunst is an option—she was in a background shot of the crew’s office.
Black Mirror has been one of the most consistently engaging sci-fi series of all time and has been almost freakishly ahead of the curve in looking at our near future with a gimlet eye. It’s won six Emmys in six seasons and has featured a bevy of incredible performers across, some already stars, like season 6’s Salma Hayek, some on their way to becoming them.
Check out the teaser below. Black Mirror season 7 returns to Netflix in 2025:
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
Featured image: Black Mirror, USS Callister. From L-r: Paul G. Raymond, Michaela Cole, Milanka Brooks, Jesse Plemons,Jimmi Simpson, Cristin Milloti and Osy Ikhile. Photo: Jonathan Prime / Netflix
Lionsgate has released the official trailer for Rupert Sanders’ reboot, starring Bill Skarsgård as the musician-turned-avenging angel Eric Draven. Skarsgård steps into a role originally made iconic by Brandon Lee in the 1994 live-action original, a film forever linked to Lee’s tragic death on set. There have been many feints at rebooting The Crow, with everyone from Jason Momoa to Mark Wahlberg to Bill’s older brother AlexanderSkarsgård rumored to be interested in the role. But now, with the first trailer finally here, the role belongs firmly to the younger Skarsgård.
James O’Barr originally conceived The Crow as a comic, and here, Rupert Sanders is taking his shot at creating something as moody as both the source material and the 1994 film but simultaneously creating something vividly singular. Skarsgård resurrects Eric Draven, the doomed musician who is killed, alongside his fiance’ Shelly Webster (FKA twigs), in a brutal double homicide. Yet, Draven’s death is just the beginning, as he finds a new life in the pursuit of vengeance when he’s given a chance to save Shelly by sacrificing himself, and thus, The Crow tracks Draven’s vengeance in this life and the next.
Skarsgård is joined by Danny Huston, Laura Birn, Jordan Bolger, and Isabella Wei.
“The original film left an indelible mark on our culture that lives on,” said producers Victor Hadida, Molly Hassell, and John Jencks in a joint statement when the reboot was announced. The late Samuel Hadida and the late Edward R. Pressman also produced. “We are thrilled to bring a new adaptation for today’s audiences that respects this legacy. Rupert has masterfully brought new dimensions to create a contemporary universe for this timeless saga of undying love, and we can’t wait to share this vision with film audiences.”
“We appreciate what The Crow character and original movie mean to legions of fans and believe this new film will offer audiences an authentic and visceral reinterpretation of its emotional power and mythology,” said Charlotte Koh, Lionsgate executive VP of acquisitions and co-productions, when the reboot was announced. Now, The Crow is flying towards its June 7 release date.
Check out the trailer here:
Featured image: Bill Skarsgård in THE CROW. Photo Credit: Larry Horricks for Lionsgate
Oscar-winning Bong Joon Ho’s first movie since his masterful Parasite will be coming to his home country a few days early.
Warner Bros will be releasing Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattinson, in South Korea on January 28, 2025, timed to the Lunar New Year Holiday. This is three days earlier than its global release on January 31. It’s a fitting choice for its world premiere location, considering Bong is one of South Korea’s most beloved filmmakers.
“Director Bong’s creativity, vision, and imagination always exceed expectations. Mickey 17 will surprise audiences with its original story and characters, unpredictable plot development and humor, as well as great production qualities,” Warners president of international distribution Andrew Cripps said in a statement.
Delayed due to the dual strikes, we’ve already gotten a brief, tantalizing sneak peek—way back in December of 2022. Mickey 17 returns Bong to the sci-fi genre in which he’s made some of his most ambitious films, from 2006’s The Host to 2013’s Snowpiercer and his 2017 Netflix film Okja.
The film is based on the novel “Mickey7” by writer Edward Ashton, published in February of 2022, about the titular protagonist who works as a “disposable employee” on a dangerous mission. In Ashton’s novel, Mickey7 works on a human expedition setting out to colonize the frozen planet of Niflheim, and his role is to step in on any mission deemed too dangerous or borderline suicidal for a human being and sacrifice his body for the cause. The genius of the “disposable employee” design is that while they can regenerate an entirely new body, most of their memories will remain intact. That is, until after six deaths when a replacement clone takes over. The key inflection point in Ashton’s book is when Mickey7 refuses to let Mickey8 take over his job.
Pattison is joined by Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. How closely Bong has stuck to the details of Ashton’s novel is unclear (he changed Mickey’s number, for starters), but there is no question the immensely talented director has created something unique. It’s easily one of the most eagerly-anticipated films of 2025.
Check out the teaser below.
For more on Warner Bros., Max, and more, check out these stories:
Masters of the Air, Apple TV+’s new World War II epic showcasing the heroics and travails of a fleet of young U.S. pilots in Europe, has been lauded for its classical filmmaking and realistic approach to mid-century flight. Focusing on sober, earnest Buck (Austin Butler) and Bucky (Callum Turner), a battle-ready scamp, the show toggles between dogfights in the air and quiet moments on the ground, on airfields in the English countryside and in medical wards where some of the crew suffer from as-yet undiagnosed PTSD.
To recreate the airmen’s world, the sound team was tasked with being “authentic and heroic,” said Michael Minkler, one of the re-recording mixers. “So every original authentic recording, of which there were tens of thousands that we made over weeks and weeks with a recording team, they’re all enhanced in some way to give them more life, more personality, more passion.” Minkler, along with fellow re-recording mixer Duncan McRae and supervising sound editor Jack Whittaker, went up in a B-17 airplane to experience what it was like being on board. “We had to bring that lived experience to the screen. The plane was unimaginably loud, really hot, and very cramped. But to think about how those guys had to serve and do their jobs in that environment is very intense. I think we all took that on board,” Whittaker said.
To get their sounds, the team worked with a plane museum in Arizona to record some of the last 45 or so working B-17s still left. “We microphoned all those positions — the engines, inside the wings, inside the cockpit, at the tail, where the rear wheel comes up. We just tried to capture as much of the experience as we could of being on this plane, inside and out,” Whittaker said. Having microphoned about 60 different positions, they also ran the plane on the ground at the RPM it would have hit in flight to get the frequency and pitch of the engines right.
Thousands of loop-lines then made it possible for the sound team to convey the drama of the dialogue over the noise of the engines. Rerecording dialogue turned into a world-building exercise, spread across nine or ten language and 300 speaking parts, but particularly for the scenes up in the air, it was a necessary exercise. “The actors had so many other things to think about on the set that they wanted to the opportunity to redo lines, and put that fear in the voices of these characters,” Minkler said. “We wanted to be inside with them and all the terror that goes on. We said it was hot for us. For them, they were flying at 25,000 feet, where it could be 50 below zero.”
On the ground, the team leaned into the storytelling afforded by quieter moments. “That was really useful, at times, to show positive life and the camaraderie on base,” McRae said. “A lot of the cast went through boot camp to build that connection we see on screen.” In scenes that touch on the pilots’ experience of PTSD before that diagnosis existed, the sound team stripped away noise to almost nothing, adding back in subliminal sounds to convey emotion while remaining authentic. “We were not leaning into very subjective spaces of sound design,” Whittaker pointed out. As Bucky struggles to talk about a failure of a day while drinking on an airfield, a bird tweets in the distance, realistic but somehow adding to Bucky’s emotional storm. “We went through a dozen different things to see what was a sad bird—but hopeful,” said Whittaker.
The goal was always to support the writers’ intent, to showcase the intertwined fear and heroism of a crew of boys who know their next twelve hours up in the air may be their last. “We never went completely silent because that’s kind of a gimmick,” Minkler said. “But you can see it in their eyes, that they’re momentarily stunned, and we tried to give them those little moments without being obvious.”
The finale of season one of Masters of the Air arrives on Apple+ TV on March 15.
For more stories on Apple TV+ series and films, check these out:
You’ll have to wait a little bit longer for the full trailer for The Crow, but for those of you eager to get a quick peek at Bill Skarsgård in the title role in the eagerly-anticipated reboot, this new teaser will whet your appetite.
Skarsgård takes on a role made iconic and ultimately tragic by Brandon Lee in the 1994 original film, which was rocked during production when a prop gun fatally wounded Lee. Although he had filmed most of his scenes, the movie still required some rewrites, effects, and a stunt double to complete. Now, 30 years later, Skarsgård steps into the role ofEric Draven, a musician resurrected from the dead, to seek vengeance against the gang that murdered his finacée. Draven and Shelly Webster (FKA twigs) were both brutally murdered when her past finally caught up to her, but in death, Draven finds a new life in the pursuit of vengeance. He’s given a chance to save Shelly by sacrificing himself, and thus, The Crow tracks his efforts to find and punish their killers.
The film comes from director Rupert Sanders, and the cast includes Danny Huston, Laura Birn, Jordan Bolger, and Isabella Wei.
“The original film left an indelible mark on our culture that lives on,” said producers Victor Hadida, Molly Hassell, and John Jencks in a joint statement when the reboot was announced. The late Samuel Hadida and the late Edward R. Pressman also produced. “We are thrilled to bring a new adaptation for today’s audiences that respects this legacy. Rupert has masterfully brought new dimensions to create a contemporary universe for this timeless saga of undying love, and we can’t wait to share this vision with film audiences.”
“We appreciate what The Crow character and original movie mean to legions of fans and believe this new film will offer audiences an authentic and visceral reinterpretation of its emotional power and mythology,” said Charlotte Koh, Lionsgate executive VP of acquisitions and co-productions, when the reboot was announced. Now, The Crow is flying towards its June 7 release date.
Check out the trailer here:
For more stories and interviews you don’t want to miss, check these out:
Jennifer Lopez lost in space. That’s a conceit that sells itself, but there’s a whole lot more to Lopez’s upcoming film Atlas, director Brad Peyton’s starry sci-fi thriller for Netflix. Lopez is no stranger to Netflix, with her action hit The Mother knocking out Netflix viewer records last year.
The first teaser for Atlas has landed, revealing Lopez’s Atlas Shepherd, a brilliant data analyst with a misanthropic side who is forced to do what to her is utterly unthinkable—ally herself with artificial intelligence in order to course-correct during a space voyage in which she was tracking down a renegade robot.
Things go pear-shaped for Atlas, with her vessel crash-landing on a frozen planet and in desperate need to contact her comrades for help. Yet Atlas is forced to rely on an AI in order to save humanity from AI, a tricky Catch-22 even for the best quant. How she’ll escape the alien tundra she finds herself on and what the ultimate fate of humanity will be in this battle with an artificial intelligence that has decided the key to ending war is ending humanity will be puzzled out in the course of the film. For now, we have this action-packed glimpse of Lopez’s latest Netflix film.
Lopez is joined by Simu Liu, recent Oscar-nominee Sterling K. Brown, Gregor James Cohan, Abraham Popoola, Lana Parrilla, and Mark Strong.
Check out the trailer below. Atlas lands on Netflix on May 24:
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
The panelists on stage at the law firm Greenberg Traurig for a discussion held in conjunction with the Motion Picture Association during the 74th Berlin International Film Festival represented a notable list of luminaries from across the film and television industry. Mediated by Greenberg Traurig Partner Laura Zentner, they were largely in agreement regarding the panel’s topic, German film funding in 2025 and beyond. The panel members emphasized that filming in Germany, from infrastructure to local talent, is excellent, but navigating the associated bureaucracy — which will get worse if the new proposal comes to pass — is not.
As panelist Stan McCoy, the President and Managing Director of the MPA EMEA, joked, the MPA’s member studios “don’t make film and television as a regulatory compliance exercise.” However, the federal bill currently under consideration, and which, if passed, would come into effect in 2025, includes a tax incentive model and an investment obligation, the latter of which would require both German and foreign studios to invest 20% of their sales generated in Germany back into European productions. Thanks to “a maze of sub-quotas,” which include a limit on IP to five years, as well as a requirement that 70% of the work created in German under the 20% investment rule be in German, the bill risks making it significantly more complicated to let creatives focus on making content audiences will want to watch.
There was also a concern on stage that the mandate for German language content was redundant. “Weirdly, the regulation would be forcing international streamers into competition with German domestic broadcasters,” McCoy pointed out, “making the kind of content that German domestic broadcasters are already very good at making.” Wolf Osthaus, the Senior Director of Public Policy at Netflix for the DACH, Benelux, and Nordics, agreed. He noted that the proposed regulation would risk depriving companies like Netflix of flexibility (and that Netflix has already spent over 500 million euros in recent years on German-language content, “and we have no intention to do less.”) Furthermore, the potential funding law won’t necessarily strengthen Germany as a filmmaking hub, despite this being one of the key aims of the proposed regulation. “If we were obliged to do more in the German language, we could still do it wherever we want in the European Union,” Osthaus said.
But the panelists also agreed that Germany is an attractive production location where studios and international streamers would like to do more, not less. What Ashley Rice, the President and Co-Managing Partner of Cinespace Studios, who also spoke on behalf of Studio Babelsberg, argued is that Germany already has what the studios need, from great infrastructure to a talented workforce — but production in the country is limited enough that crew wind up leaving. “I’ve worked with many Germans overseas who I’m sure would love to come home,” Rice said. Studio Babelsberg and Cinespace Studios recently announced their partnership. “The expertise is here. So we just need to create an environment that really puts it on a map, competitively.” Veronica Sullivan, the Senior Vice President, Head of Global Production External Affairs and State and Local Government at NBCUniversal, cited the recent production of Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin, which hired over 700 local workers, an indication of the level of talent in the country. “All the elements that go into making a production destination work were all here, and it was wonderful. Getting here, on the other hand, was a little challenging,” she said, primarily due to the difficulty of planning around the peculiarities of Germany’s current funding structure for in-country productions.
What, then, will make the country more attractive to studios and international streamers? When Conrad Clemens, Saxony’s State Secretary who gave the panel’s State of Play speech, declared that “we want to win productions to come to Germany,” the entire room broke into applause. The desire is there, and the solution, among the panelists, is clear: a competitive tax incentive on par with neighboring countries. In his opening remarks, the chairman and CEO of the MPA, Charles Rivkin, mentioned that “just next door in Poland, investment in original European content by both streamers and broadcasters in 2022 hit $679 million,” thanks to a combination of a 30% tax incentive and a relatively small investment requirement on streamers, amounting to a 1.5% film fund levy. The panelists were also enthusiastic about Spain, currently one of the most popular places to film in the EU, which has a manageable 5% investment obligation. The speakers also mentioned Austria, which just introduced a new tax incentive and put the discussion of investment requirements on hold. “There is wide agreement that we need the tax incentive,” in Germany, Osthaus said, “and we need it quickly.” Panelist Thomas Hacker, a member of the German Parliament and the Media Policy Spokesperson for the FDP Bundestag group, also pointed out that there’s flexibility regarding a tax incentive. “If it will not do as we all expect, then we can discuss in five years or later on,” he said. He also made clear that his party opposes an investment obligation.
The panelists were also clear that a tax incentive decoupled from an investment obligation (or coupled with a lower, less complex version of what’s currently on the table) would be an economic benefit to the country. Over the course of filming Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin, Sullivan said, the production worked with 650 small businesses across all the country’s Länder (the sixteen federal German states). And production creates entirely new jobs, as Leon Forde, the Managing Director of Olsberg-SPI, pointed out. “A great case study of that is the UK, which has seen incredible growth in different regions, like Northern Ireland with Game of Thrones.” Sullivan also mentioned a recent meeting with representatives from the German states, who voiced concerns that increased production would primarily be focused in Berlin. “I just think it’s really important for people to look at other jurisdictions around the world and see how they’ve spread,” she said. Rice concurred. “There are states next to New York with a very competitive incentive. Who would have ever thought we’d be shooting in New Jersey? Well, it does spread out.”
Germany has a great history of filmmaking, and different legislation than what’s currently on the table would be a way to double down on that legacy. And just as significant, the panelists seemed to agree the economic benefits of increased production would justify a more competitive tax incentive. As Forde pointed out, “pretty much every government is looking to the creative sector for the future of its economy.”
Featured image: Motion Pictures Association Chairman and CEO Charlie Rivkin.
Costume designer Alex Bovaird creates a tactile, frozen world in True Detective: Night Country. In the fourth season of the HBO series, filmmaker Issa Lopez takes Bovaird and audiences to the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska. As the True Detective formula goes, two badge-wearers, Chief Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), try to crack a mystery. A past case once brought the two together, and a new case – eight men gone missing and found frozen to death in ice – reunites them.
Making the mystery more challenging, not to mention more atmospheric and cinematic, is the harsh climate. “Issa wanted to create a real world,” Bovaid told The Credits. “A world that we don’t often see.”
Bovaird, the critically acclaimed costume designer behind American Honey, Nope, and The White Lotus, recently spoke to The Credits about her journey towards a chilly authenticity with True Detective: Night Country.
What did crunch time look like on True Detective: Night Country?
Well, when you do these shoots abroad, they have all these logistical problems that are really boring to talk about, but it’s funny because people texting me are like, “Was it easy? A breath of fresh air to do a uniform show?” Everyone thinks the uniforms are easy. We shot it in Iceland, and you can’t walk down the street and pick up an Alaska State trooper uniform. You just couldn’t get products that you needed, and then you had to replicate the Alaska State Troopers very authentically, but you couldn’t get it from the Alaska State Troopers.
Kali Reis, Jodie Foster. Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO
What about the Ennis police uniform Chief Danvers wears? Same deal?
There’s only so much you can do with a police uniform. It’s either blue or gray or navy or brown. We wanted to make it distinct from other shows, but also, there are only so many things you can do. So we chose the colors, and we got custom things made for Jodie because of her size. The police uniforms are never that flattering, but we made things custom for her body. We got a guy in New York to make a special shirt with the right size pockets so it looked like it fit her well. There were just lots of logistical problems. At crunch time, where are we going to get the right color fabric to make the rest of our uniform? It was all very down to the wire, but we got the real person who makes the Alaska State Troopers vests in Colorado to make some.
Jodie Foster. Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBOJodie Foster. Photograph by Michele K. Short / HBO
Did you go to Alaska and do research there?
My team and I did almost a month of shopping and researching. We met some troopers. I met someone at a fabric shop, actually, whose husband was a trooper, and so she was a wealth of information. I kept texting her to look inside various garments that he had and tell me the fabric content. We watched a lot of Alaska State Troopers as well, which is a show like Cops. Pretty amazing show. With the snow, cops have to stay nimble, but they also have to stay warm. So, a lot of them go out on snowmobiles, and they’re in ski pants and parkas, and they’ve got icicles hanging out of their noses. It’s actually more extreme than it looks in our show.
Jodie Foster, Kali Reis Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO
How’d you want to help define Jodie Foster’s character when she’s out of uniform?
Jodie had met a bunch of cops, and she felt the women often wanted to play up their femininity a bit more when they were off-duty, which is maybe contrary to what people think. Maybe the women are more tomboys or maybe they’re sporty, but she definitely wanted to have some items in her civilian looks that were soft, red, pink, and a bit more girly. She has what you call long johns, with little flowers on them. So, she has some pretty and dainty things to contrast with her tough police uniform.
Issa Lopez and Jodie Foster. Photograph by Michele K. Short.
What about Kaylee? What character traits did you both want the costumes to emphasize for Evangeline Navarro?
With Kaylee, we wanted to weave in her story that she used to be in the military and she works out and she’s tough, so she definitely has more sporty costumes. She wears an Army green sweater a lot of the time, and she wears a Carhartt. Once you go to Alaska, you see everybody wearing Carhartt. Everybody wears the same kind of rubber boots, too.
Aka Niviâna, Kali Reis. Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBOKali Reis. Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO
How’d the weather challenge you?
The cold was truly awful at times and really challenging, and so was the darkness. I thought the writing was so good in Issa’s scripts, but I did hesitate when every other scene was exterior. I worked with my husband, but he’s a little bit more out in the world gathering things, and he was like, “We got to do the show.” And I was like, “Yeah, but you are not the one standing outside at night.” The first couple of nights we did, it was like minus 20 Celsius. I hadn’t gotten the right boots yet, and my toes were attacking me.
With the cold and the dark, what kind of costume tests did you, Issa, and the cinematographer, Florian [Hoffmeister], do?
I tried to figure out with Florian what shooting in darkness and at night meant. We did lots of tests with different costumes and fabrics with this blueish filter. In the last three episodes, Jodie wears a white parka. It was a controversial choice because white in film, you don’t see it a lot. A lot of DPs don’t like it, but I just thought it would be iconic to have something that totally stands out in the darkness. Florian was really up for it. I think he was really happy with it in the end because you can pick her out.
Kali Reis. Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBOJodie Foster. Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO
A lot of these characters dress to survive. During your time in Alaska, however, did you find any exceptionally stylish dressers?
Not the non-native Alaskans, but the indigenous community is pretty lively and colorful and keeps hold of their traditions. Lots of fur, bone earrings, and walrus tusk necklaces, and that stuff was pretty cool. We went to some wild places that sold all the different animal pelts. Learned a lot about things like wolverines. It’s the animal that has the best fur for not creating a frost, and so it’s better for visibility. And then there’s the muskox. It looks like a buffalo. It also has the warmest yarn known to man or something, and they make muskox scarves. That’s the warmest thing you can have on your neck.
How else did you want your choices to respect the indigenous culture in Alaska?
They’re very proud. A lot of the reason that they choose to exist out in these communities and stay together is that they’re holding onto their heritage. There’s a lot of pride in that. They gather salmon berries every season, every spring, so a lot of their clothes have salmon berries on them. Their use of animals to keep warm is important to them, and I think it’s important to the indigenous community that we made their clothes in the right way. Alaskan producers advised us to use the correct materials, so we got them from Alaska.
True Detective: Night Country is streaming on HBO Max.
Featured image: Kali Reis and Jodie Foster. Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO
Tom Hardy’s alien symbiote lunatic is back for a third and final course.
And that third course now has an official title and an earlier release date, with longtime Venom scribe and first-time director Kelly Marcel’s film now called Venom: The Last Dance, with an October 25 premiere, a two-week move from its original November 8 slot. This move up to October 25 returns the franchise to its sweet spot around Halloween.
The Last Dance finds star Tom Hardy returning for a third waltz around the bloody dance floor as journalist Eddie Brock, who, of course, also plays host to the voracious alien symbiote Venom. Joining Hardy in the new film are newcomers Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Marcel directs from a script she wrote, from a story she and Hardy created.
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. Marcel wrote on the previous two films, and now she takes the helm in her directorial debut.
As the title suggests and Hardy’s Instagram post from last November made clear, Venom: The Last Dance will be the final film in the series, one he’s said he has loved making. “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,” Hardy wrote at the time.
Hardy also made sure to spread the love to Marcel, his longtime collaborator at this point: “I want to mention very briefly how proud of my director, writing partner and dear friend Kelly Marcel I am,” Hardy wrote, “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.”
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
“I like the fact that there’s something a little bit strange in what we do,” production designer Jan Houllevigue tells The Credits about his collaboration with director Johan Renck (Chernobyl). The two have known each other for years, working on David Bowie music videos, Chanel No. 5 commercials, and the television mini-series The Last Panthers. Their latest is Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler as cosmonaut Jakub Prochazka on a solitary space mission to the edge of the galaxy.
The story is based on the Jaroslav Kalfar novel “Spaceman of Bohemia” (screenplay by Colby Day) and lets us know that even in outer space, hearts can be broken. Isolated and alone, Jakub is months into his voyage only to regret leaving his wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan). Enter a six-eyed hairy creature named Hanuš (voiced by Paul Dano) as Jakub’s voice of reason to navigate the troubled relationship. The task for Houllevigue was building distinct worlds that immerse viewers in Jakub’s singular environment and the life he left on Earth.
In creating the spacecraft the production designer steered away from the high-tech, digital vibes you’d find in Star Warsor Star Trek and leaned into an analog approach. “We wanted to make something that had more of a brutalist feeling to it,” he notes. The entire aircraft was designed from scratch. Its shape, architecture, and details are laid out through concept drawings and 3D renderings. Each section was then built into modules so that “every piece was moveable” for filming. “We made a 360-degree set and tried to make it as small as possible because it had to feel claustrophobic,” says Houllevigue.
Its tactile design blends an eye-quenching color palette that creates a comforting connection as if the spacecraft is an extension of a home rather than a piece of technology in space. The immersive details inside the ship were a collaboration with set decoration. All the touchable dials and buttons were made to blend seamlessly into the surrounding environment. Artificial light sources were chosen to illuminate the ship’s interior rather than shaping sunlight through windows, further separating Jakub’s life on Earth.
For anti-gravity scenes, ship modules were arranged to coincide with each framed shot. Various rigs were attached to Sandler or the set to simulate the character floating in space. “It’s difficult to shoot in a tight environment and even more difficult to shoot in zero gravity, but every piece of the ship was moveable. It was a big puzzle,” says Houllevigue. Most of the photography was produced in-camera but visual effects stepped in to replace sections of the ship that were removed for filming. A digital 3D scan of the aircraft allowed visual effects supervisor Matt Sloan and the VFX team to reconstruct the interiors in post-production.
The bigger hurdle for visual effects was Hanuš. On set, a plush toy spider with a 3D printed face to provide an eye line for Sandler was positioned in frame before being fully replaced with a digital version. Space exteriors were also created with visual effects, including the mysterious purple Chopra cloud. To replicate small particles of the cloud falling, the camera department made LED lights that were later finessed by visual effects in a “very natural way.”
Juxtaposing Jakub’s space environment is his life with Lenka. Houllevigue designed locations, like their home, with unique aesthetics that were personal to the characters. “There has to be something grounded and very soft to Lenka’s world,” he says. “The story is not only about Jakub but her as well, so it was a matter of trying to make it work for both.” Location scouts helped inspire the production design story on Earth, which was a mix of set builds and practical locations. “I have an idea going into a location, but I like to be opportunistic when it comes to scouts because if there’s something I like at the location I bring it into the production design,” explains Houllevigue.
Color palette subliminally adds to the story’s depth, which shifts from creams, yellows, oranges, purples, and blues in outer space to more earthy tones of greens, browns, and whites on Earth. “Production design is not always about building huge sets. It’s about finding what’s right for the story,” notes Houllevigue. “We tried to make the emotion work with Lenka and Jakub’s world feel isolated. I hope we succeeded.”
In Part One of our conversation with veteran costume designer Jacqueline West, we talked about the monumental effort that went into weaving the sartorial visuals of the Fremen’s Sietch Tabr community and the southern Reverend Mothers on the desert planet Arrakis. Today, we conclude with the wardrobe fashioned for some of the most intense action sequences in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi opus.
Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Paul Atreides goes from a young man who had never seen battle to losing his father after surviving the Harkonnens’ attack in Dune: Part One, fleeing deep into the Arrakis desert with the Fremens, and finally becoming their messiah, the ‘Lisan al Ghaib.’ How do his costumes reflect this expansive arc?
He wears a stillsuit the whole time. The only things I changed were his wrappings and his hoods. When he takes on the role as their leader, he becomes the T.E. Lawrence of the Fremens, leading them in revolt against their usurpers. I gave him hoods that were almost medieval. But Timothée grew as a man and an actor in those three years between the films, and it shows his maturity. I’d love to say I did that with his wardrobe, that it was costume magic, but I think on this one, I have to hand the praise to Timothée—it was all his acting. He takes on that cloak of power in how he acts and manages his relationship with the Fremens and with Chani.
Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Now, we have to talk about that first impressive wormriding sequence!
I gave Timothée new armor for the wormriding sequences. That’s not CGI. We shot a lot of close-ups in Budapest on an enormous animatronic life-size worm on a gimbal with the most enormous wind machines blasting sand at them. So, the armor had to be able to travel through the desert. That was Gerge’s brilliant work. [head propmaker Gergely Dömölki]
What was the process to make these wormriding suits?
It’s about an inch-and-a-half thick to protect them from the blast of the sand. Since it goes over the stillsuits, we had to design and construct it on a mannequin over a stillsuit. After Denis approved the 3D concept art, I went out to the island and worked with Daniel [Cruden, assistant costume designer] and Gerge to construct them. It’s pretty much from the waist because they’re crouched down on the worm with the worm hooks. It all moves like medieval armor but much thicker. It had to move with the actors’ movements on the worm. It was really like a roller coaster ride. We did several tests with Timothée to see his mobility and make sure it was nimble but protective.
Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and ZENDAYA as Chani in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
One of the new characters is the cruel and blood-thirsty Fyed-Rautha (Austin Butler), heir apparent to House Harkonnen. What went into his collection?
I wanted to keep him as a rock star, but dark and Gothic, mostly dressed in black leather of different textures—black Leather, black vinyl, and heavy, thick black wools—and I pieced them all together in a Goth patchwork. I wanted to keep him dark, sinister, and kind of creepy, but they had to be flexible because of all the battle scenes. I had a wonderful cutter/fitter from England who concentrated just on his costumes.
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Fyed-Rautha’s gladiator battle scene was especially interesting because it was in black and white—since it took place outside, under the black sun on Giedi Prime. Did this impact your process?
I had a rather interesting incident because that scene was all shot in infrared. I didn’t realize some fabrics, when shot in infrared, would turn white. And his outfit had so many different fabrics and leathers. When we camera-tested, some of his pieces came out white, so I had to start over. That’s a heads-up for other designers: when you’re shooting in infrared, test everything. [Cinematographer] Greig Fraser set up a camera outside our atelier where we constructed everything and let me test every piece of fabric for anyone on Giedi Prime.
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Chains, metals, and leather make up a lot of the Hakkonnens’ outfits.
It’s the Goth look. They’re like vampires sucking the blood from the Fremens. I used a lot of stretch leathers, stretch vinyls, and chains. The servants are dressed in these constrictive leather-coated bones that work as corsets, where we took small animal bones and coated them in vinyl, and then laced them all together. Feyd Rautha’s entourage of female slaves are young, ghoulish vampire-esque women in black stretch leather to keep them sinister. Their jewelry was made in our shop, using bones and leather.
L-r: Austin Butler, director Denis Villeneuve, and Dave Bautista in “Dune: Part Two.” Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) is not only the Emperor’s daughter but also a Bene Gesserit. How does her style exemplify her crucial role in the prophecy?
She’s the voice of reason in the Emperor’s world. But she’s also a Bene Gesserit and sees the workings of the plans within plans. Not only is she the intellectual voice, but she’s also a moral barometer and a warrior princess. So, I had to combine all those elements into her designs. When we first see her, she’s in white beaded headpiece, it’s very medieval but also harkens back to Reverend Mother Mohiam, with the beaded veil she wore when she first interrogated Paul [in the first film]. I kept Princess Irulan rather Bene Gesserit-like, but I didn’t want to burden her with many veils. Instead, I made these beaded headdresses for her.
Caption: FLORENCE PUGH as Princess Irulan in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
What about Princess Irulan’s chainmail dress in the ending scene?
I went to Catholic school as a child and always remember the nuns’ faces being pinched in their habit, which looked very constricted. With the very tight beaded headdresses, I wanted to show the Bene Gesserit’s control over her. So, I kept that when I got to her armor outfit when she agrees to marry Paul and rule over the empire with him. It came from medieval chainmail and shows her power to take on all of that.
Caption: FLORENCE PUGH as Princess Irulan in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Dune, Part Two is in theaters now.
For more on Dune: Part Two, check out these interviews:
Featured image: Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Netflix took on producing the live-action remake of the long-running, beloved Nickelodeon animation Avatar: The Last Airbender, about four elemental kingdoms (fire, air, water, and earth) who live in harmony until the Fire Nation starts a war to take over the world. The series, which premiered late last month, is true to the original story. Twelve-year-old Aang (Gordon Cormier) is the sole remaining airbender after a Fire Nation attack, and he survives after being frozen in an iceberg for a century before waking up in an icy part of the world of the Southern Water Tribe.
The world around Aang has completely changed, and at the same time that he learns he’s the new avatar, a reincarnated master of all four bending disciplines, he also learns he’s the sole entity who can save this unfamiliar world. But he has help — Katara (Kiawentiio), the Southern Water Tribe’s last waterbender, and Sokka (Ian Ousley), her older brother. Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu), banished from the Fire Nation in favor of his sister until he can locate the avatar, quickly finds them, and the war, which has been raging for the past century, lands at Aang’s feet.
Aang’s exploits bring him to Earth Kingdom locations like Kyoshi Island and Omashu, a lush city carved into a mountain, Agna Qel’a, the icy jewel of the Water Tribe, and Roku’s Temple, a shrine atop a volcanic island. For cinematographer Michael Balfry, who shot the first half of the first episode as well as episodes three, four, seven, and eight, about 98% of his work was in the studio. He used lighting to give each of the four elemental worlds its own atmosphere, shot what he could practically in order to offer a fresh, live-action version of an animated story with an enduring fan base, and spoke with us about those aspects of the set as well as the inspiration he drew from the original cartoon.
How did you use the cinematography to visually differentiate the different elemental worlds?
I tried to keep it fairly simple because that’s always the hardest thing to do. Fire was a lot of darkness, the evil world. A lot of the lighting is motivated by flames, fire, moonlight, and by hard sunlight. When you get into Omashu, the earth world, we had fairly strong light but softer, directional. I tried to keep the palette in the earth tones. That made it feel warm but not hot, like the Fire Nation. And then, obviously, when we go up north, that’s the coolness of the world. Having shot in all those locations in real life in the past, I was able to bring that experience to The Last Airbender when we had to go into the studio and recreate it. When we’re up north it’s the coldness, the ice, there’s always a breeze up there, and sometimes a really hard light. But you don’t want a hard light that makes your actors squint as if they’re in pain. We tried to keep it directional and soft. Those were the broad strokes of how we approached it.
Have you watched the animated version? Was there anything you tried to carry over?
I did watch the animated show. Wonderful storytelling. It just moved me. I’m getting goosebumps right now just thinking about it. Moving forward to the live-action, we used the animation as inspiration. The animation had a lot of classic filmmaking in it, from what I remember — it’s been a few years since I’ve seen it. But you know, the bad guys are a lot lower, closer, and wider, the lens is not as flattering, more intimidating. I tried to keep Aang, Katara, and Sokka in three shots and then isolated them into brother and sister teams to try to create that connectivity of the characters. That was important. Michael Wylie, our production designer, is an extremely talented man, and he brought sets and assets that really helped me sell the story. If the set looks great, it makes your job so much easier. And Albert Kim, the showrunner, let the creatives be creative, but gave us a roadmap. A very large roadmap because there’s just so much in that animation.
That sense of scale made it into the live-action, too.
When we were color-grading it, I said, I’ve just been around the world, and I haven’t left the stage. What a treat to be part of that.
In a visual effects-heavy series like this, how is your process affected?
It does affect it, but we go in knowing what needs to be done. We fix things in prep and try not to fix things in post. For several episodes, I worked with Jabbar Raisani, the director. He’s extremely knowledgeable on special effects. He worked on Stranger Things, post-side, and he came in knowing what could and couldn’t work. I’d bring my two cents in, and together, we’d forge a path. We had a strong visual effects team there, and it was very collaborative.
Do you have any examples?
We did a scene toward the end of the show where the world turns red and then goes to black and white or monochrome. The red part, I did that practically on set, and it worked out very well. We were talking with visual effects, and they said you can do it practically and leave it as is or use effects down the road. And I said I’d like to do it practically when the moon turns red. My thinking was that we had lanterns there, and I wanted to keep the color of the lanterns true. So the whole lighting changes, except the lanterns remain a constant, and that psychologically helps me sell the idea that it’s a blood moon. And for the black and white, I kept it fairly straightforward. In post-production, we just sat there and tweaked it to make it work for what the story was trying to tell at that point in time. It was a team sport.
Was there any elemental kingdom that was harder to get right?
The stunt department helped a lot with the moves and creating the hand-bending. That was a learning process. We’d sit there and look at dailies to see what did and didn’t work. They’d rehearse behind the scenes with the actors, trying to nail the fluidity of the water, the abruptness of the fire, the strength of the land, and how they’d move their hands. That was a bit of a process, which, by the second week of shooting, was pretty dialed in.
This a series appealing to a built-in fan group. How has the response been?
It’s a massive story. I think the whole team is enjoying the fact that the fan base, the majority is really enjoying the show. We’re all hoping we can continue telling the story of their journey. It was a fantastic shoot to be on because we were recreating and retelling at the same time. We were trying to improve on what had been done in the past. It is a darker story than what the animation was, but the audience who enjoyed the animation many years ago has now grown up, and I hope they’re enjoying this new approach.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is streaming on Netflix.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
One of the great villains of 21st-century cinema was also in a movie with one of its greatest heroes—Mad Max: Fury Road revealed the colossal fascist warlord Immortan Joe (the late, great Hugh Keays-Byrne), a carapace-wearing, skeleton-masked despot who ruled over a parched wasteland where he kept its inhabitants on the brink of starvation, dying of thirst, and much worse for the young women he took as wives. Yet he had in his midst a figure stronger than he was, quietly plotting to rip out his heart in any way she could. This, of course, was Furiosa (a phenomenal Charlize Theron), the one-armed, buzz-cut badass who stole away with Immortan Joe’s wives in a mad dash for her former home. This escape and the chase that followed made up the entirety of George Miller’s flawless Fury Road, but now Miller’s back with a story about how Furiosa came to be (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy), and a younger Immortan Joe, played by Australian actor Lachy Hulme, will play a big part in the film.
Empire Magazine has an image of Hulme as Immortan Joe in his now iconic skeleton mask. Have a look:
EXCLUSIVE 🔥#Furiosa‘s Immortan Joe will be played by Australian actor Lachy Hulme, Empire can confirm.
Hulme describes the film as “David Lean, but with motorbikes instead of camels”.
Hulme is stepping into the massive boots left behind by the late Hugh Keays-Byrne, who was picture-perfect as the sociopathic leader of the V8 Triumvirate. Furiosa arrives nine years after Miller’s nearly flawless Fury Road, which starred Tom Hardy as the titular Max and Theron as Furiosa, the ferocious, fearless heroine who was easily the heart and soul of the movie. Furiosa will take us back and follow her in her younger years when she was snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and ended up in the snares of Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the leader of the great Biker Horde, and thus began her years-long struggle against the lunatics roaming the vast wasteland and vying for supremacy of a broken world.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is set 45 years after the collapse of society and is centered on Furiosa’s violent odyssey as she desperately tries to get back home. In order to do so, she’ll be required to master all things mechanical and survive a war between Warlord Dementus and Immortan Joe. The trailer gave us glimpses of the ingenious practical effects and unparalleled stunts that made Fury Road a phenomenon and multiple Oscar winner.
Miller directs from a script he wrote alongside his Fury Road co-writer Nick Lathouris, and he’s built the world of Furiosa with plenty more Fury Road alums, including production designer Colin Gibson, costume designer Jenny Beavan, and makeup designer Lesley Vanderwalt, each of whom won an Oscar for their work on Fury Road.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga revs into theaters on May 24, 2024.
For more on Warner Bros., Max, and more, check out these stories:
Featured image: Caption: Chris Hemsworth in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
After just nine days in release, Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated sequel to his first Dune film has already scored $367 million in worldwide box office. The massive response to Dune: Part Two is due in no small part to costume designer Jacqueline West’s intricate designs that went beyond adding depth to the characters—they are integral in building a complex, harsh world thousands of years into the future.
After designing 2,000-plus costumes—including the bespoke stillsuits—for the first film, the five-time Oscar nominee (who was most recently nominated for Killers of the Flower Moon) is back to bring Frank Herbert’s futuristic Known Universe to life. Whereas part of the first film took place on the lush ocean planet of Caladan— the ancestral home of House Atreides—the sequel is largely set on the desert planet Arrakis, with more focus on the Harkonnens’ mostly barren planet, blackly lit planet Giedi Prime.
When the first installment ended, House Atreides was almost wiped out by the Harkonnens in a sneak attack on Arrakis, leaving Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) on the run. The sequel picks up once they have found refuge at Sietch Tabr, a major Fremen community hiding from the harsh sun Canopus in cavernous caves and tunnels within mountains or rock outcrops.
In Dune: Part One, you had costume designer Bob Morgan co-running the workshops in Budapest, London, etc. How did production evolve in Part Two?
Though it was sad not having Bob, all of my crew from Dune One came back. I just love the show of loyalty—both to the project and to me—and the continuity. I had a new assistant costume designer, the brilliant Daniel Cruden, and still had [costume cutter] Helen Beasley, Rachel Freire cutting for me, and the brilliant [supervising textile artist] Matt Reitsma from London, who printed all those incredible Fremen fabrics. He came up with designs based on the Fremen alphabet for everybody in the Sietch. I had incredible manufacturing capability in this movie, which was much more expansive.
Caption: (L-r) Director/Writer/Producer DENIS VILLENEUVE and TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
In the first film, about 2,000 costumes were made. How many were made for Part Two?
About 4,000 pieces. Gerge [head propmaker Gergely Dömölki] still made all the wormriding armor and a lot of the Harkonnen armor in his armory in Budapest, on an island on the Danube. We had to set up a workshop to replace all the stillsuits that got trashed in the battle scenes in Dune: Part One. It was a huge manufacturing endeavor. I was so happy with my workroom and the level of artistry and commitment. We had a whole soundstage set up for our manufacturing.
Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. PicturesL-r: Austin Butler, director Denis Villeneuve, and Dave Bautista in “Dune: Part Two.” Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
We get much more time with the Fremens living in the Sietch. What do their costumes tell us about this tribe?
They wear practical desert garb that nomadic peoples have worn from the beginning of their history. In Dune: Part Two, various nomadic cultures have merged into one desert culture for survival 11,000 years into the future. They’ve brought the best aspects of every desert culture, the Tuareg, the Bedouins, into this beautiful conglomeration that’s beautiful and romantic, a la Lawrence of Arabia.
Lady Jessica goes through a lot in this film after arriving in Arrakis and fleeing to the Sietch. How do her costumes chart her transformation from where we left off in Part One?
When we left her in Dune: Part One, she was still in her stillsuit and dessert wrap. When she gets to the Sietch, she starts dressing like the Fremens—in a more humble style with the rougher linen, almost djellaba-esque long gowns, and wrapped veils, all printed by Matt.
Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Chiabella JamesCaption: (L-r) ZENDAYA as Chani and REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Once Lady Jessica becomes the Southern Reverend Mother, her face is tattooed over with the prophecy, and her outfits are elaborate but in earthy tones. What went into this collection?
Working with sketch artist Keith Christiansen, we started looking at the Egyptian sarcophagi since the Bene Gesserits are ancient nuns or heads of their particular sect. The sarcophagi are so elaborate, and their shapes are quite beautiful and age-old, with magnificent carving in the details. We used many layers of different fabrics—hand-painted velvets, hand-painted silks, and tapestry fabrics. We purchased all the fabrics, mainly from Italy and some from Thailand and Eastern Europe, and pieced them together into these incredible, ornate patchworks. We painted, dyed, and printed them all in-house.
Caption: REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
What about the elaborate headdresses on Lady Jessica and the other southern Reverend Mothers?
The jewelry came from all over the Middle East and North Africa. I had shoppers in bazaars in Istanbul, Morocco, and Egypt. Then, we disassembled them, and my jewelry maker put everything back in a new way to make it look futuristic. We pieced together different necklaces for each of the Reverend Mothers. We took all of that detail from the sarcophagi and made them come alive.
Caption: REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Lady Jessica and the southern Reverend Mothers dress differently from the ones we saw in Part One, i.e., Reverend Mother Mohiam’s entourage of Bene Gesserit sisters, who were all in black.
Mohiam comes from the Emperor’s world. You don’t wear black in the desert, or you’re going to bake. These women have navigated for many, many years through the different desert cultures within the Fremen world. I imagined Fremen sects in the south were different from those in Northern Arrakis. Even though they’re all Reverend Mothers, they are on a different planet. So, I wanted to distinguish them with color, but their shapes are very similar.
Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and CHARLOTTE RAMPLING as Reverend Mother Mohiam in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Chiabella James
Yes, their silhouettes and head coverings have a similar look.
They’re all based on Medieval nuns and the women of the tarot cards, particularly with the Queen of Swords.
Caption: REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
The Emperor (played by Christopher Walken) is dressed relatively simply as the Ruler of the Known Universe. What is the reasoning behind that?
There were two main references. One was a bronze statue of Kublai Khan—I was obsessed by the power and the simplicity of his wardrobe. And there was a Japanese Emperor from the movie Rikyu, I remember the simplicity of his dress and the power it gave him. Since we were shooting that portion in Italy with very simple architecture at the cemetery [on the grounds of the Brion tomb in San Vito d’Altivole, Italy], he’s not surrounded by anything ornate. It’s all elegant and almost ritualistic in style, so I thought his wardrobe had to be consistent with his surroundings.
Check back tomorrow for the conclusion of our conversation, where West discusses Paul Atreides’ worm-riding armor, how Catholic nuns inspired Princess Irulan’s headdresses, and why it is crucial to camera test every fabric when shooting in infrared.
Check out part two of interview with Jacqueline West here.
Dune: Part Two is in theaters now.
For more on Dune: Part Two, check out these interviews:
Featured image: Caption: REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
Disney+ just released an exciting new 6-part animated series called Iwájú, representing the first collaboration with an outside studio in its partnership with Pan-African storytelling company Kugali Media. Kugali’s co-founders created a uniquely African story, which takes place in a futuristic Lagos, Nigeria. In fact, every single character that appears in Iwájú is Nigerian.
The series is a coming-of-age tale centered on an idealistic 10-year-old girl named Tola. She lives in the rarified and protected environment her tech mogul father Tunde has created on the island, the wealthiest part of Lagos. Her best friend, streetwise, self-taught tech expert Kole, lives with his mom on the overpopulated mainland in a makeshift dwelling. For her 10th birthday, Tunde gives Tola his best new tech, a defensive robot disguised as a simple lizard named Otin. When crime kingpin Bode and his henchmen, who have been terrorizing the people of mainland Lagos, set Tola as their target, it’s up to Tola, Kole, and Otin to save the day.
Marlon West, who was the visual effects supervisor for the project, described what the folks at Kugali were trying to say with the project. “It was actually a warts-and-all love letter to Legos, the hometown of two of the three Kugali founders, one of which still lives there.” All three founders took on leadership roles in the project, with Nigerians Olufikayo “Ziki” Adeola as director and Tolu Olowofoyeku as cultural consultant, and Ugandan Hamid Ibrahim as production designer. Their love of Lagos is expressed in Iwájú through everything from the production design to the characters and the way they speak to the joy characters in Iwájú seek in their everyday experiences. The Credits spoke to West about his part in the Disney/Kugali collaboration, as well as its Africanfuturism, examination of class inequality, and celebration of Black excellence.
After a decades-long career at Disney as head of effects animation, Iwájú is your first time in the role of visual effects supervisor. How is that different from what you’ve done before?
Most of my career was spent doing only special effects as a head of effects on several of our Disney films, like Encanto, Frozen, and Moana. The visual effects supervisor sounds like the same job, but it’s different in the sense that I’m in charge of everything visual to get our world from visual development drawings and paintings and storyboards to the final images you see onscreen. It’s going through the whole process. My job wasn’t just the visual effects, like the lightning and water and rain that I typically do, but everything that is part of the visual storytelling and the technical creation of the entire project of Iwájú.
This was a first for Disney in terms of collaboration, but they know animation, and Kugali knows Nigeria.
Kugali is a media company that primarily did comics prior to this project. They were first-time filmmakers, and it was their first time working in animation. They have wonderful artwork in their comics. We had Cinesite in Montreal as a partner studio that did the lion’s share of the production work, from assets to lighting. It was key that Disney leadership, myself included, made sure both Cinesite and Kugali were up to the game we usually play, and everyone was really excited to rise to that occasion.
In this story, technology plays a different part in the lives of each character.
We worked with production designer Hamid Ibrahim to make the technology specific to who is using it or what the source might be. Tunde’s tech is more legit because he created it himself. It has a purple hue, including what’s in his house and his car. With Bode, our fantasy backstory is that his glasses and cloaking devices and all the tech he uses is more hacked military tech as if it’s bootlegged. It’s blue and scratchy, and the avatar he uses is not at all off-the-shelf. It’s as crooked as he is, as far as where it comes from.
Otin has her own set of rules in terms of tech. She’s both a lizard and robot.
She’s an Agama lizard. I’ve never been to Lagos, but they’re ubiquitous there like squirrels are here in the states, so we tried to suggest that there are Agama lizards around their compound. Otin had to be believable to the rest of the world as just a lizard, but why would this little girl be making a pet of a lizard that is otherwise just everywhere? She has lots of tells that she is a robot. If you look really closely at her eyes, they are lenses. Her markings have lights that let you know if her batteries are low. She also doesn’t speak. Even when there’s audio coming out of her, she’s got a microphone. She doesn’t lip sync. That was a decision we made to make her feel more like a robot, and less like a character or a talking lizard. When she does speak, she’s just blank faced, and audio is coming from a speaker way in the back of her mouth.
There are a number of ways that Iwájú differentiates between those in power and wealth and those in poverty, right down to the colors used.
That was baked into how our people dressed, in our production design, and how they were able to experience life, like the difference between how Tola lives, versus how Kole lives. Kole’s dwelling doesn’t even have a front door. Here in the US a lot of cities use the expression “other side of the tracks” for the line between good and bad neighborhoods and in terms of living conditions. We’ve driven freeways through neighborhoods in America, and in Lagos, they have a physical island that’s a real geographical difference, where in the 50s they started filling in a lot of marshland and building really nice houses on that island. In the real Lagos there’s less of a clear divide between wealthy, middle and lower middle class people and where they live, but we leaned heavily into the physical divide. The haves are on the island, and the have-nots are on the mainland. We tried to use different colors, with earthy tones on the mainland, and pastels on the island, and clearly show different architecture in the two.
There are African patterns and symbols in a lot of the spaces, designs, and architecture in the show.
We really wanted to have these African patterns play a part in world-building, not only in people’s clothing but also in architecture. There are drum-shaped buildings. There are a lot of poor people on the mainland who live in stacked storage containers, and those have circles or squares, and when they’re stacked on top of each other, they make a pattern, especially at night. There’s overt design in the world by the architects and world builders of our futuristic Lagos, but there are also the implied African patterns, like in our scenes where two characters come head to head with each other. There are these patterns that come in. We wanted the tech to have an African feel, too, and not look at all like it’s coming from America but rather from Tunde’s company or one of his company’s rivals. It’s an African story and, even more specifically, a Nigerian story, and that is very much expressed visually.
What do you think is the best thing people will get out of seeing Iwájú?
I’ve seen a lot of people respond to the trailer like that reminded them of a famous Marvel property, and I think that is not a function of how much this looks like something else and more about how little we get so see science fiction with Black people. I really hope this expands that thinking because no one looks at Star Wars and says it’s just like Star Trek, but people look at this and say it looks like Wakanda. That’s because it’s so rare to see; it’s their only point of reference. When people see Tola, this rich African girl, for the first time, see her wake up on her 10th birthday, hop on her hoverboard, and play with her robot, they’re going to realize how much they need to see that. “I didn’t realize how starved I was to see the daughter of an African tycoon flying around in her futuristic pad. I hadn’t seen that ever before, and now I’m glad I have.” That’s in the first five minutes. There’s plenty more where that came from.
Iwájú is streaming now on Disney+.
For more stories on 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to Disney+, check these out:
Featured image: “IWÁJÚ” is all-new original long-form series created in collaboration with Pan-African comic book entertainment company Kugali. Kugali filmmakers Olufikayo Ziki Adeola, Hamid Ibrahim and Tolu Olowofoyeku call the series a love letter to Lagos, Nigeria. Their futuristic depiction is bursting with color, unique visual elements and technological advancements is inspired by the spirit of Lagos, which is physically divided into an island and a mainland separated by both water and socio-economic status. The coming-of-age story introduces Tola, a young heiress from the wealthy island, her best friend Kole, a self-taught tech expert and loving son from the mainland, and Tola’s calculating robotic pet lizard, Otin. “Iwájú” streams on Disney+ in 2024.
Christopher Nolan and his riveting, historic biopic Oppenheimer had a huge night at the 96th Academy Awards. Nolan notched his first-ever Oscar win after seven previous nominations, winning Best Director. “Movies are just a little bit over 100 years old,” Nolan said during his acceptance speech. “I would imagine being 100 years into painting or theater. We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here, but to know that you think that I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me.”
Oppenheimer had a huge night, notching seven wins in total, including Best Picture. Nolan’s riveting look at the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his efforts to give the United States an atomic weapon before the Nazis achieved the same turned out to be a career-capping story for many of the principal players, including Cillian Murphy, who won his first Oscar for Best Actor in the titular role, and Robert Downey Jr., who took. home his first Oscar—three decades after his first nomination for 1992’s Chaplin—for his stunning performance as Oppenheimer’s one-time advocate-turned-nemesis Lewis Strauss. “Here’s my little secret: I needed this job more than it needed me,” Downey said upon accepting his award, having traded in Tony Stark’s Iron Man armor for a mid-century bureaucrat’s suit, which, it turned out, had a splash of gold.
Joining Nolan, Murphy, and Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer glory were fellow Oscar winners cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, editor Jennifer Lame, composer Ludwig Göransson, and Nolan’s partner in life and filmmaking, his wife and producer Emma Thomas, who earned her first Oscar when Oppenheimer won Best Picture, accepting the award with Nolan and producer Charles Roven, flanked by much of the cast and crew members like Hoytema and Göransson.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 10: (L-R) Robert Downey Jr., winner of the Best Supporting Actor award for “Oppenheimer, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, winner of the Best Supporting Actress award for “The Holdovers”, Emma Stone, winner of the Best Actress in a Leading Role award for “Poor Things”, and Cillian Murphy, winner of the Best Actor in a Leading Role award for “Oppenheimer” pose in the press room during the 96th Annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood on March 10, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)
One of the night’s surprises belonged to Emma Stone, who edged out Killers of the Flower Moon breakout star Lily Gladstone for Best Actress for her performance in Poor Things. Stone played the newborn adult Bella Baxter undergoing an odyssey of self-discovery in the trippy Victorian fever dream from Yorgos Lanthimos. “The best part about making movies is all of us together, and I am so deeply honored to share this with every cast member, with every crew member, with every single person who poured their love and their care and their brilliance into the making of this film,” Stone said. She nabbed one of Poor Things‘ 4 Oscars, joining costume designer Holly Waddington, makeup and hairstylists Nadia Stacey, Mark Coulier, and Josh Weston, and production designers Shona Heath and James Price.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph kicked off the telecast by winning her first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her richly layered, moving turn as Mary Lamb, a grieving cook at a boarding school in The Holdovers. “For so long, I’ve always wanted to be different, and now, I realize I just need to be myself,” Randolph said.
Jonathan Glazer’s unflinching The Zone of Interest won Best International Feature, while Zone’s sound designer Johnnie Burn and sound mixer Tarn Willers won for Best Sound. Staying international, co-writer/director Justine Triet and screenwriter Arthur Harari won an Oscar for Original Screenplay for their stunning thriller Anatomy of a Fall, Hayao Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki’s The Boy and the Heron won for Best Animated Feature, edging out Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and the intensely harrowing 20 Days in Mariupol, which tracked the horrors committed by Russia during their brutal siege of that Ukrainian city, won for Best Documentary. Director Mstyslav Chernov delivered a powerful speech when he accepted the award, saying, “Russians are killing tens of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians. I wish I had never made this film. I wish to be able to exchange this to Russia [for] never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities.”
Best Adapted Screenplay went to writer/director Cord Jefferson for American Fiction, which he adapted from Percival Everertt’s novel “Erasure.” Jefferson used some of his acceptance speech time to make a passionate case for the more modestly budgeted films and the filmmakers out there waiting to make them, saying the next Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, and Christopher Nolan were out there; they just needed a shot.
It was a smooth show, with an earlier-than-usual start time and some stellar musical performances studded throughout, including two songs from Barbie, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For” and Ryan Gosling and Mark Ronson’s emo-ballad “I’m Just Ken.,” with surprise guest, guitarist Slash.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 10: (L-R) Ryan Gosling and Slash perform ‘I’m Just Ken’ from “Barbie” onstage during the 96th Annual Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre on March 10, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Host Jimmy Kimmel kept things brisk, stopping for less than a minute toward the telecast’s end to respond to a former President’s live tweeting of his hosting ability. “Isn’t it past your jail time,” Kimmel quipped.
Featured image: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 10: In this handout photo provided by A.M.P.A.S., Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan are seen backstage during the 96th Annual Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre on March 10, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Richard Harbaugh/A.M.P.A.S. via Getty Images)
*Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, we’re re-posting our interview with Barbie production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer, both of whom are nominated for Oscars. Barbie has eight nominations, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Achievement in Costume Design, Best Performance by an Actress and Actor in a Supporting Role, America Ferrera and Ryan Gosling, respectively.
“It was trying to find a solution to what makes a toy,” says production designer Sarah Greenwood about creating the charmed sets of Barbie alongside set decorator Katie Spencer. The two have been near inseparable, having worked on over thirty projects together. Darkest Hour, Beauty and the Beast, and Anna Karenina are among their six Academy Award nominations. “It became this huge journey of discovery, and it started with us buying a Barbie Dreamhouse and playing with it.”
Like Margot Robbie, who stars in the title role (and also serves as co-producer), Greenwood and Spencer didn’t own the iconic doll growing up. The first thing they noticed was the irregular proportions between Barbie and her accessories. “If you put the doll in the Dreamhouse and she puts her hands in the air, she can touch the ceiling. She is strikingly out of scale,” says Greenwood. “It’s the same with the car. Barbie never quite fits because her legs don’t bend. We worked it out to be 23% smaller than human size for the sets. What this did is when you built it for real, you made the actors seem bigger in the house. That gives it a toy quality or what we found out Mattel calls “toyetic.” Finding what it is that makes it a toy.”
Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING and MARGOT ROBBIE on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap BuitendijkCaption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING as Ken and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Co-written and directed by Greta Gerwig (Noah Baumbach is the other co-writer), Barbie’s carefree, perfect life is turned upside down when she starts having dark thoughts about death, and more distressing, her perfectly arched feet fall flat. To find out what’s happening to her, she travels outside Barbie Land and into the real world for answers. With Ken (Ryan Gosling) in tow, she begins to discover more about herself than she could ever imagine.
Caption: (L-r) MARGOT ROBBIE and RYAN GOSLING on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Atsushi Nishijiima
Barbie Land is a potpourri of pink, posh, and chic. The plastic town was constructed at Warner Bros Studios in Hertfordshire, England. The Dreamhouse, a focal point for Greenwood and Spencer, insisted on creating “their own version” of Barbie’s home. The work was done with minimal CGI, which meant building everything with detail from scratch. Inspiration was taken from the midcentury modernism of Palm Springs, including Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann house, famously photographed by Slim Aarons.
Caption: MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
The Dreamhouse and her neighbors’ homes like Midge, the discontinued “Pregnant Barbie” (Emerald Fennell), “President Barbie” (Issa Rae), and the played with too much “Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon) were fabricated from metal and finished with an open front in typical Barbie house fashion. The color palette of Barbie Land was stripped of black, white, and chrome. And playing with the toy box idea, atmosphere, fire, water, electricity, and physics were removed. If Barbie needed to get to her car, she could simply “jump” down from her second story without consequence – which she absolutely does in the movie.
Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING, KATE MCKINNON and Director/Writer GRETA GERWIG on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
Another point of intention was the blend of 3D and 2D elements. “We didn’t want you to look at the Dreamhouse and be disappointed, so it was important everything was made tangible and tactile,” says Spencer. “What’s not there speaks volumes to what is there.” Many of the objects in and around Barbie’s home were flat hand-painted decals or images like the lettering on the milk carton or the teardrop-shaped pool that’s connected to Barbie’s twirling slide. The pool was painted and then covered with multiple coats of a clear resin. “People still wouldn’t walk on it besides Margot,” Spencer points out. Bookending the Barbie Land fantasy is 250 foot long bubblegum blue skyline of the San Jacinto Mountains. The painted backdrop perfectly adds to the wonderlicous world.
Caption: MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
When Barbie enters the real world, the Mattel corporation becomes an unexpected stop. It’s here Barbie meets a cheery Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell) and other executives in a boardroom. To bring it to life, the design is “one stop in Barbie Land and one stop in the real world.” Greenwood says, “We created a massive heart-shaped table and heart-shaped light above. And we wanted everything about Mattel until you walked into that room to be monochromatic. Everything is black and white leading up to that point.” The boardroom had its own scenic painted backdrop. “It’s everything you love about Los Angeles. The Hollywood sign, the mountains, we put the Warner Bros Tower center frame and included downtown Los Angeles, but it’s painted like the Emerald City in TheWizard of Oz. You’re creating this other-worldly idea about it,” adds Greenwood.
Another Wizard ofOz reference was placed on the road in and out of Barbie Land. “The little bricks are in the same style as the movie, and so is the rainbow,” says Spencer. “No one stopped us. It was so much fun.” Greenwood adds, “This was an absolute dream. Greta is a poet in the way she approaches and describes things.”
Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING as Ken and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Barbie is in theaters now.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
Featured image: Caption: MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Director J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow, which recounts the experience of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972, is Spain’s Oscar entry for best international feature. But the film, which depicts the crash and subsequent survival of 16 out of 45 passengers in exquisitely painful detail, is also nominated in another category. The passengers break bones. They sustain face injuries. They starve. For their incredible work creating the visual reality of this suffering, the film’s hair and makeup team, including makeup designer Ana López-Puigcerver, hair designer Belén López-Puigcerver, and special makeup effects artists David Martí and Montse Ribé (who won an Oscar for their work on Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth) are nominated for an Oscar in best makeup and hairstyling.
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571’s survivors were rescued after 72 days in the mountains. The MUAH team designed eight or nine phases for each character. “It must be emphasized that there are practically no ellipses in the film, so it was extremely important that the change be very gradual,” said makeup designer López-Puigcerver. “Since the environment was always absolutely the same, the viewer has to feel that slow passage of time,” which she depicted through skin texture, reddened hands, reddened and sunken eyes, and flaking spots. After the survivors’ first month outdoors, as the Andes got colder and snowier, López-Puigcerver made the actors look frostbitten through bruised lips and ears, red noses, and red or pink eyes, and different types of hydrated polymer to simulate the frost and ice, whether they were outdoors or sheltering in the broken plane, that clung to their faces and hair.
Injuries that healed or worsened were attended to by the prosthetics team. For a character like Nando (Agustín Pardella), who hit his head as the plane went down, at first, “half his face is fake,” explained Martí. He and Ribé used a prosthetic over Pardella’s forehead, added eyebrows, and gave him contact lenses to give the impression of bloodied eyes, then slowly removed the prosthetic and other effects until Nando’s face looked almost healed. “The design was fundamental, knowing what was happening to them at each moment and how this affected them each in a different way,” said López-Puigcerver. “The sick, for example, had a different deterioration than those who were healthier and left the fuselage.”
Numa (Enzo Vogrincic) in “Society of the Snow.” Courtesy Netflix.
In addition to painstaking transformations, Society of the Snow is filled with makeup and prosthetic effects invisible to the viewer. “Some of the special makeup effects we did don’t appear in the movie because J.A., at the end, thought it was too much,” said Martí. For example, he and Ribé created an ankle wound for Coche (Simon Hempé), drained for him by a fellow player, Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt). “J.A. was like okay, second take, refill, and we injected more pus in the wound,” said Martí. “That was disgusting and disturbing,” and ultimately, the audience never sees it. The makeup effects artists also created corpses of those who died, and we aren’t shown these, either.
Coche (Simon Hempe) with an injured leg. Courtesy Netflix.
The set itself was also physically challenging. Along with two other members of the MUAH team, López-Puigcerver traveled to the Andes to work and cited the difficulty of working at a 3,000-meter elevation and getting to set using crampons and a helmet. Working inside the tight quarters of the plane itself was complicated and made retouches difficult. Martí recalled sending signals to the actor Tomas Wolf, who played Gustavo and wore prosthetic ears for the entire shoot to mimic those of the real Gustavo, to press his ears so they wouldn’t fall off. Despite being unable to access the actors, their makeup had to be perfect. “They used this camera inside the plane that goes in and out, and it’s like a magnifying glass. Anything that was wrong, you’ll see it,” Martí said.
(Tomás Wolf). Courtesy Netflix.The team working on Coche’s legs. Courtesy Netflix.Society of the Snow – Production Still Image. Courtesy Netflix.
Society of the Snow depicts not just the plane crash’s survivors but those who died, most of them tragically young. It was important for the crew to take this into consideration. “An aspect that I found, not disturbing but of maximum respect, was to reproduce with makeup the moment when the characters who did not return died,” said López-Puigcerver. She recalled that it was impossible not to cry while watching those moments on the monitor. Martí recalled that their team and the actors worked together like a big family, which, given the gravity of the film’s material, seemed like a necessity to make such a challenging shoot succeed so well.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
*Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, we’re re-posting our interview with Christopher Nolan. He’s nominated for three Oscars—Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) stares wide-eyed into the pond spread out in front of him; his last conversation with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) on the potential catalytic effects of the atomic bomb has rendered him speechless. The music swells as the screen fades to black — this is the final scene of Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-laden Oppenheimer, 13 nominations in total.
L to R: Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
A “singularly dramatic moment in history” — That’s how Nolan describes the motivation behind his desire to tell the story of Robert Oppenheimer.
“This moment in which Oppenheimer [and] the key scientists in the Manhattan Project realized they could not completely eliminate the possibility of the chain reaction from the first atomic detonation, that first test that would destroy the world,” Nolan says.
It was that specific moment in history, Oppenheimer’s reckoning with the possible world-ending consequences of his actions, that guided Nolan’s storytelling.
OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan
“His story is one of the most dramatic ever encountered, full of all kinds of twists, and suspense, things that you couldn’t possibly deal with in any kind of fictional context,” he explains. “So I really got hooked on the idea of trying to bring the audience into his experience…what he went through, make his decisions with him…try and arrive at a telling of his story that would invite understanding rather than judgment.”
Moral ambiguity is a theme Nolan frequently explores in his films, and Oppenheimer follows that theme into one towering genius’s soul and into the unseen world of theoretical physics he was obsessed with. But Nolan says he’s not here to tell us whether or not Robert Oppenheimer was a good person; rather, he wants to walk the audience through his decision-making.
L to R: Robert Downey Jr is Lewis Strauss and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
“Humans, individual flaws, and the tension between his aspirations and his brilliant intellect telling him what he should be doing, and his inability to live up to those things, or his blindness to where some of these things might take him,” Nolan explains of his creative process. “That’s what creates interesting tension in the story.”
When stripped raw, Oppenheimer, at its core, is a story with an age-old message: If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned. And it tells us as much in the opening shot: billowing flames, hundreds of feet high, encompass the entirety of the screen, the words of the great story of Prometheus overlaying the fire.
“We haven’t made a documentary; we’ve made a dramatic interpretation of his life,” Nolan says. “You’re looking at a character who was very careful. But everything he said about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—was very precise. He never apologized. He never acknowledged any guilt as relating to his part and what had happened. And yet, all of his actions from 1945 onwards are the actions of somebody truly suffering under an immense weight of shame and guilt.”
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
After Hiroshima and the death of Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), there’s a scene in the film where Oppenheimer is slumped against the trunk of a tree, spiraling into an all-consuming panic. Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) shakes her husband and says, “You don’t get to sin and then play the victim.”
L to R: Florence Pugh is Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Nolan doesn’t confirm his personal feelings on Oppenheimer’s morality, and when asked if this scene is meant as an interpretation of Kitty’s feelings in that part of her life or an interpretation of the audience’s feelings toward the character, he says it’s all of the above.
“There are times when the writing wants to synchronize with or guide the audience’s particular expectations or interpretations,” he explains. “But I think what’s most successful is when it synchronizes sort of seamlessly with the feelings and emotions of the character in the moment.”
L to R: Emily Blunt (as Kitty Oppenheimer) with writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) on the set of OPPENHEIMER.
Oppenheimer is immensely detailed — an attribute characteristic of Nolan’s filmmaking style, along with his intricately woven storylines. No apple goes unnoticed, no close-up without intent. In Oppenheimer, it’s the hanging of bed sheets on the clothesline to dry that becomes one of the most profound metaphors in the film and serves as an almost unspoken language between Robert and Kitty.
L to R: Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
“I came across this fact in the book, this notion that because [Robert] couldn’t talk directly to anybody about the success or failure of the test, they came up with this code relating to change in his life,” Nolan explains. [Oppenheimer was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.] “The sheets make up a bit. And I wanted to bring it together in a visual sense. For me, Kitty Oppenheimer is one of the most interesting characters in the film—one of the most interesting characters of Oppenheimer’s real-life story—their relationship was complex. So I love the idea of a coded message between them that only they can understand.”
Kitty Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist in her own right, and Nolan says that during her time at Los Alamos (the creation town of the atomic bomb), she was “given very little to do,” so the sheets also symbolize her domestic experience.
“It was very frustrating [for her] and caused a lot of problems,” he says. “So, for me, it was the coming together of all of those different things.”
L to R: Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
During his 32-year marriage to Kitty, Robert Oppenheimer had a long history of affairs, a fact not left out of Nolan’s retelling. One of Oppenheimer’s most famous lines in history is when he quoted part of the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” after witnessing the first detonation of the atomic bomb. In Nolan’s version, that line comes during a sex scene with Jean Tatlock.
“I wanted to destabilize the context in which that quote normally appears,” he says. “Oppenheimer was very controlling of his image in his public statements. He was extremely self-conscious, and very, very aware of the theatricality of his persona. He used that to further a lot of causes he espoused, the things he was worried about. And I wanted to present this in a new way that would cut through that.”
Like many of Nolan’s films, Oppenheimer shuffles between past and present — between the creation of the atomic bomb and the two security hearings beginning in 1954 about Oppenheimer’s affiliation with the Communist party. Beyond the use of black-and-white scenes to depict the timeline of the hearing, Nolan says the color shifts serve another purpose.
“You’re looking for a subtle way, a clearer way of shifting between the intensely subjective storytelling in the cover sequences,” Nolan explains. “And then the more objective view very often provided by Robert Downey Jr., as his character, Lewis Strauss.”
Nolan succeeded, possibly more so than even he could have imagined. Oppenheimer is primed to win a slew of Oscars this weekend, and Nolan just might very well win his first, second, even third.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
