“The Naked Gun”: A Refresher Course in the History of Frank Drebin’s Charmed Stupidity

Posted on by babrams

On August 1st, Lt. Frank Drebin’s uniquely oblivious approach to detective work returns, with The Naked Gun reboot starring Liam Neeson as Drebin’s son, Frank Jr., and Pamela Anderson as Beth, his client and love interest. Following in the goofy footsteps of his father, played in the first three films by Leslie Nielsen, it looks like the biggest difference between the Drebin generations will be Neeson’s husky voice. But the mix-ups, belief-beggaring disguises, and general ineptitude are otherwise fully reloaded for the next generation. The early reactions have all more or less been raves—director Akiva Schaffer has remembered the most important detail from the original films; tread fearlessly in the direction of funny, no matter how insanely stupid. In fact, the dumber the better.

 

Or, based on the new movie’s Boomer and Gen X stars, maybe for the same generation. The first Naked Gun, released in 1988, turned out to be one of the decade’s most enduring screwball comedies. A sequel, Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, came out in 1991 to mixed reviews, but a third installment, Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, in which Frank foils a terrorist plan to attack the Oscars, was better received. The cast of the trio of movies was also studded by actors who went on to immense cultural notoriety, referenced subtly and not in the new film. The trailer reveals Drebin Jr. paying homage beneath his father’s portrait at Police Squad quarters, alongside all his fellow officers, with the exception of Nordberg Jr. (Moses Jones)—his father, Detective Nordberg, was played by O.J. Simpson. More subtly, Anderson’s role seems like an attempt to echo 33 1/3’s casting of the late Anna Nicole Smith.

 

The first three movies were heavy on foiled terrorism plots, though many of Drebin’s worst foes are now also bygones of another time. On vacation in Beirut when the first film opens, Drebin Sr. takes down a conference of Idi Amin, Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. In 2 1/2, the detective helps President George H.W. Bush save an environmentally-friendly energy policy (out of all the franchise’s silliest plot points, this may be the most outrageous) from the malevolent machinations of the heads of the coal, oil, and nuclear power industries. In the upcoming reboot, Drebin Jr.’s foes, if they’re grounded in reality at all, will probably look different.

Even fictionalized, Drebin’s earnestly terrible police work was rooted in the zeitgeist. In the first Naked Gun, at the height of the US war on drugs, Drebin takes down a heroin smuggling operation headed by Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban), in what was surely metaphorically wishful thinking vis a vis the effectiveness of the actual war on drugs—after Drebin shoots him with a dart, Ludwig falls off the back of the stands at Anaheim Stadium, and is then hit by a bus, steamrolled by an actual steamroller, and trampled by a marching band. Further utilizing the noted police tool that are tranquilizer darts, in an attempt to foil a plot against the visiting Queen Elizabeth II (Jeannette Charles), Drebin inadvertently hits a stadium spectator, who falls on and crushes Reggie Jackson, the Queen’s unwitting assassin. Drebin, having been fired from Police Squad for bungling security at a welcome reception for the Queen, gets his job back and his girlfriend, Jane (Priscilla Presley), who accepts his marriage proposal. It’s good work if you can get it. 

A job so well done could only be followed by further success. In 2 1/2, Frank, having lost his fiancée, regains her with yet another winning marriage proposal after disarming a nuclear bomb (he trips on and unplugs the power cord) set by Quentin Habsburg (Robert Goulet), Jane’s boyfriend, oil executive, and mastermind behind the plot to take down renewable energy advocate Dr. Meinheimer (Richard Griffiths). Marital strife enters the picture in 33 1/3, pushing a retired Drebin to get out of the house and help Ed Hocken and Nordberg by going undercover to befriend bomber Rocco Dillon (Fred Ward). Escaping to a safe house with Rocco and his mother, Muriel (Kathleen Freeman), Drebin learns the pair plan to bomb the Oscars via a bomb concealed in the Best Picture envelope. One dropped sign, bomb launch, and near-helicopter explosion later, Rocco and Muriel are successfully taken down, thus also repairing the marital issues between Frank and Jane, who redeclare their love for one another on stage. They also have a baby, thus paving the way for 2025’s franchise reboot featuring Frank Drebin, Jr.

The apple rarely falls far from the tree, and thus the surprising effectiveness of bumbling ineptitude applied to important police business looks like it’ll be consistent with the franchise’s legacy. The 2025 reboot is, again, directed by Akiva Schaffer, who has a lengthy background writing and directing for Saturday Night Live and Lonely Island, as well as a couple of episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the Millennial answer to goofy detectives fumbling their way to success. The only question that remains is whether Neeson can match Nielsen’s special brand of deliberately clueless, straight-faced slapstick. Yet if the trailer’s most sublimely idiotic reveal is any hint (Neeson disguises himself as a little girl armed with a lollipop, somehow shrinking down to her size), and if the initial reactions are to believed, it looks like an actor better known for saving little girls than masquerading as one is a surprisingly good fit for a revamping of the 1980’s best screwball crime thriller.

The Naked Gun stumbles into theaters on August 1.

For more on The Naked Gun, check out these stories:

“The Naked Gun” Trailer: Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson Team-Up to Reboot a Comedy Classic

Pamela Anderson Set to Star in “Naked Gun” Remake Opposite Liam Neeson

“I Have a Very Particular Set of Jokes”: Liam Neeson Set to Star in New “Naked Gun” for Paramount

Featured image: Liam Neeson plays Frank in The Naked Gun from Paramount Pictures.

 

“Paradise” Lost: Directors Glenn Ficarra & John Requa on Crafting the Series’ Most Devastating Episode

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In the first part of our conversation with Paradise directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, we talked about how California’s tax incentive program made it easier for series creator Dan Fogelman to shoot both seasons in Los Angeles. Now, let’s get to the most revealing episode, where Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) finally confronts President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) about the day his life—and the entire world—fell apart.

 

What was it about the cinematography that helped sustain the suspense, grief, and paranoia throughout the series?

Ficarra: Yasu [Tanida] is a great DP—he shot almost every episode of This Is Us. He put a lot of thought into how we could present this world underground. How is the sun different? Because it was an odd color temperature. We came up with the conceit that it’s warmer and more romanticized underground, and the real world was cooler and harder, which was a great way to separate those two environments. We shot on the Alexa 35 camera, which gives you a lot of latitude. We had the same crew from This Is Us and incredible camera operators who really made Episode 7 sing. That episode was all handheld—those guys just had cameras on their shoulders the entire two weeks when we were shooting that.

PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney)
STERLING K. BROWN

In Episode 7, we finally see what happened the day the world collapsed. After the chaos of evacuating Cal from the White House, Xavier is on Air Force One, headed to the Colorado bunker with the kids.

Requa: We built a big White House set that took over an entire soundstage. It was all interconnected like the real executive offices. We moved around with the camera and did long shots so we could get the feel of what it’s like to be in the White House.

PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
JAMES MARSDEN
PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney) DARIN TOONDER, JAMES MARSDEN, TYLER JACOB MOORE

Unfortunately, Xavier’s wife Teri (Enuka Okuma) is still stuck in Atlanta. He literally sees a nuclear bomb heading for Atlanta on the real-time display on the plane while he is on the phone with her. It is just gut-wrenching.

Ficarra: You get a powerhouse actor like Sterling, and the writing is really good, so all we had to do was point a camera at him. The beauty of the show is there’s a lot less plot and a lot more human moments, so we let our amazing cast do the heavy lifting. That was an exciting opportunity to show the end of the world from a very isolated point of view. We’re not bopping all over the world to see the destruction and reactions like other disaster movies. We never leave our characters, so it heightens the tension and makes it feel more personal. We wanted to make you feel the horror of that day without breaking the bank. It was a lot of fun to figure out how we could maintain the tension without cutting to the threats and the villain. Everything was filtered through the eyes of our characters. The TV [news reports] is probably the most outside view you get and we never leave the White House until the very end.

PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney/Brian Roedel). STERLING K. BROWN

In one of many crushing moments, Xavier confronts Cal after realizing that the President knew all along that Teri was never going to make it if she was still in Atlanta. However, he kept up the charade so that Xavier could keep doing his job.

Requa: Cinematographers don’t like to cross shoot in general, which means shooting both actors at the same time, because it’s hard to light, and even harder when you have visual effects. Cal and Xavier are in this really heated, emotional scene where he lets him have it, blaming Cal for his wife dying. It’s nice when you can say to the actors, you don’t have to worry about your dialogue overlapping, just scream at each other like you would in real life. And they just went at each other. They were really great, so we only did three or four takes.

PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
JAMES MARSDEN, STERLING K. BROWN

What makes this post-apocalyptic story different from the others?

Requa: It’s a human drama about people trying to survive the end of the world. In other disaster movies, everybody’s incredibly brave and gets over things quickly so the story can progress. Not in this show, people actually act like real human beings—they deal with the trauma of the world coming to an end.

That’s right. Xavier is very nuanced; he’s not an action hero with endless bravado. His courage and bravery come through in his actions, but he’s also a grieving husband and a worried father, which makes it feel real.

Requa: You see how it haunts them and influences every decision they make in their relationships. It’s Dan’s strong suit, I think it’s awesome that he decided to focus his gifts on an apocalyptic story.

Ficarra: When we first find Xavier, he’s lost, angry, and alone, but he has to protect a man he is very angry with. But he’s an honorable guy who always does the right thing. In Episode 3, we see that’s exactly why he’s there, they count on him to do the right thing.

PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
JAMES MARSDEN, STERLING K. BROWN, KRYS MARSHALL

Two of the other agents, Billy (Jon Beavers) and the psychopathic Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), are terrific quirky additions to the ensemble. Later in the season, we learn that not only are they lovers, they occasionally shirk their duties to play Cal’s Nintendo Wii (at one point, her only condition before committing a heinous act is to have endless Wii privileges). What is behind their obsession with that game?

Ficarra: I think it’s nostalgia, because Wii is so outdated. There’s a lot of nostalgia in the show, like with Cal’s obsession with ’90s music. It’s kind of novel in that bunker and it’s showing their more innocent side.

PARADISE – “Wildcat Is Down” – It’s just another day in Paradise until Agent Xavier Collins discovers one of the world’s most powerful individuals has been viciously murdered. Xavier analyzes the crime scene while recalling his complex relationship with the victim. (Disney/Ser Baffo). NICOLE BRYDON BLOOM

Although Cal appears to live a very privileged life, he is also a broken man in many ways.

Requa: We spend a lot of the season portraying Cal as a shallow, heavy-drinking, superficial ’90s rock-loving disappointment to his wife, his son, and his father (played by the great Gerald McRaney!). Then, in Episode 7, he turns into the guy who saved the world when he chose to shut down the world instead of destroying it. He’s actually the biggest hero in the history of the world, but we spend the entire season painting him as the most inconsequential loser of a man. I think it’s a great character arc. James Marsden is so good, he relished playing both sides of it so much. He loved the drunken bathrobe-wearing loser and the hero who makes the hardest decision in the world, but it was the right decision.

PARADISE – “Wildcat Is Down” – It’s just another day in Paradise until Agent Xavier Collins discovers one of the world’s most powerful individuals has been viciously murdered. Xavier analyzes the crime scene while recalling his complex relationship with the victim. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
JAMES MARSDEN, STERLING K. BROWN

 

Paradise is streaming on Hulu.

Featured image: PARADISE – “The Day” – Sinatra and Xavier confront the past, returning to the harrowing day that brought them to Paradise. (Disney/Brian Roedel) JAMES MARSDEN, STERLING K. BROWN

 

Netflix Reveals Full Cast & First Image From “Pride and Prejudice” Limited Series

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Earlier today, we took a look at new photos from Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Netflix epic Frankenstein, with fresh images of Jacob Elordi as the iconic monster. Del Toro has been dreaming about tackling Mary Shelley’s deathless novel for years, and at long last, he’s done it (Frankenstein is headed to the Venice Film Festival, after which it’ll have its global premiere in November). Yet Netflix isn’t done with its big reveals, however, as we bring you fresh news about another major adaptation of a beloved work of literature, Dolly Alderton’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in a new 6-part limited series, directed by Heartstopper helmer Euros Lyn.

The cast for the upcoming series is appropriately starry, with the previously announced Emma Corrin (Nosferatu, Deadpool & Wolverine) as Elizabeth Bennet, Jack Lowden (Slow Horses) as Mr. Darcy, and Olivia Colman as Mrs. Bennet.

New cast members revealed include Rufus Sewell (The Diplomat) as Mr. Bennet, Freya Mavor (Industry) as Jane Bennet, Jamie Demetriou (Stath Lets Flats) as Mr. Collins, Daryl McCormack (Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery) as Mr. Bingley, Louis Patridge (House of Guinness) as Mr. Wickham, Rhea Norwood (Heartstopper) as Lydia Bennet, Siena Kelly (Black Mirror) as Caroline Bingley, and Fiona Shaw (Andor, Killing Eve) as Lady Catherine de Bourg. Hopey Parish and Hollie Avery make their debuts as Mary Bennet and Kitty Bennet, respectively.

“Once in a generation, a group of people get to retell this wonderful story, and I feel very lucky that I get to be a part of it,” Dolly Alderton said in a statement. “Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is the blueprint for romantic comedy – it has been a joy to delve back into its pages to find both familiar and fresh ways of bringing this beloved book to life.”

Featured image: (L-R) Emma Corrin, Freya Mavor, Oliva Colman, Hopey Parish, Hollie Avery

Guillermo del Toro’s Dream Project Comes to Life: New “Frankenstein” Images Showcase Jacob Elordi’s Monster

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Frankenstein is ready for his close-up.

Netflix has released nearly a dozen new images from Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Frankenstein, which is slated to have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, followed by a global release on Netflix in November.

The new images include a look, at long last, at Jacob Elordi as the iconic monster, along with Oscar Isaac’s mad scientist, Viktor Frankenstein, and Mia Goth as his love interest, Elizabeth Lavenza.

We also get looks at Christoph Waltz as Harlander (a new character created for the film), Charles Dance as Leopold Frankenstein, Christian Convery as a young Viktor Frankenstein, and some stunning images of the incredible sets, courtesy of Del Toro’s longtime collaborator, production designer Tamara Deverell, and an image of Del Toro on set that’s looks a bit like a scene from his masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth. All in all, these images make it crystal clear why so many people are excited about seeing Del Toro’s version of this deathless tale.

We got our first glimpse of the visionary director’s remake of the iconic monster movie this past June, when the teaser bowed. Del Toro is perhaps more perfectly suited to enliven a fresh adaptation of Shelley’s deathless novel than any other living director—it’s an adaptation the writer/director has been thinking and dreaming about tackling for decades, and adapting Shelley’s work has long been one of his dream projects, along with adapting H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, but when it came to Frankenstein, Del Toro could never seem to pull the lever on his own electric creativity. Until now. Speaking with Den of Geek in 2016, Del Toro explained that even though Shelley’s masterpiece has been adapted many times, no filmmaker has captured the crucial North Pole sequence, for example, and that, to him, was where he wanted to come in:

“To this day, nobody has made the book, but the book became my bible, because what Mary Shelley wrote was the quintessential sense of isolation you have as a kid,” he told Den of Geek. “So, Frankenstein to me is the pinnacle of everything, and part of me wants to do a version of it, part of me has for more than 25 years chickened out of making it. I dream I can make the greatest Frankenstein ever, but then if you make it, you’ve made it. Whether it’s great or not, it’s done. You cannot dream about it anymore. That’s the tragedy of a filmmaker. You can dream of something, but once you’ve made it, you’ve made it.”

Del Toro has also re-teamed with his longtime cinematographer Dan Laustsen and composer Alexandre Desplat.

Check out the new images from the film del Toro’s been dreaming of for years, a dream that’s come to an end for him, but not for us.

Frankenstein. Mia Goth as Elizabeth in Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
Frankenstein. Mia Goth as Clarie Frankenstein and Christian Convery as Young Victor in Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
Frankenstein. (L to R) Charles Dance as Leopold Frankenstein and Christian Convery as Young Victor in Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
Frankenstein. Oscar Issac as Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein . Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
Frankenstein. Christophe Waltz as Harlander in Frankenstein . Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
Frankenstein. (L to R) Sofia Galasso as little girl and David Bradley as the Blind Man in Frankenstein . Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
Frankenstein. Jacob Elordi as The Creature in Frankenstein . Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
Frankenstein. (L to R) Felix Kammerer as William Frankenstein and Mia Goth as Elizabeth in Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
FRANKENSTEIN. – BTS – (L to R) Director Guillermo del Toro and Oscar Issac as Victor Frankenstein on the set of Frankenstein. Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.
Frankenstein. Jacob Elordi as The Creature in Frankenstein . Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025.

Featured image: Frankenstein. Jacob Elordi as The Creature in Frankenstein . Cr. Ken Woroner/Netflix © 2025.

“Paradise” Directors Glenn Ficarra & John Requa on Crafting the California-Made Emmy-Nominated Thriller

Posted on by babrams

One of only seven TV projects approved for California’s Film and Television Tax Credit Program during the 2022-2023 cycle, Dan Fogelman’s latest offering is an intense amalgamation of a murder mystery, political thriller, and post-apocalyptic survival drama all in one. True to his signature style a la This Is Us, a jaw-dropping twist at the end of the pilot uncovers a multitude of tragic truths and secrets alike. A stoic father in a seemingly picture-perfect town called Paradise, Xavier Collins (the Emmy-nominated Sterling K. Brown, who pulls double duty as Executive Producer) is also a Secret Service agent in charge of President Cal Bradford’s (James Marsden, also an Emmy-nominee) security detail. Zigzagging between two main timelines, the events that led to how they all ended up here slowly unravel. When Bradford is found brutally murdered in his residence, Xavier becomes the initial suspect.

Thanks in part to the $12.2 million in tax incentives (against $59.3 million of in-state qualified expenditures), Paradise was shot entirely in California over 84 filming days, mostly on the Warner Bros Studio backlot. This Is Us alums and directing duo who helmed half of the episodes, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity to work right in their hometown alongside 200 cast and 250 local crew members. “We were incredibly lucky to be shooting here, and that was at Dan and Sterling’s insistence. We love it because we get the best crew and infrastructure around here. And you get to see your family during the week, which is even better,” remarks Ficarra. “These artisans and their families, like grips and gaffers, have done it for multiple generations. This is the best place in the world to make movies, and it’s dying,” says Requa. With renewed urgency to revive Southern California’s hallmark industry after local production reached a new low, Fogelman’s team fought to keep the show local. “Dan was determined not to let it happen. He wants to do whatever he can to get productions to stay in L.A.,” Requa adds.

Speaking to The Credits on their third day of shooting Season Two—which garnered another $12 million in tax incentives—Ficarra and Requa­ take us through the closely guarded secrets of Paradise.

 

Does this feel like a This Is Us reunion of sorts?

Glenn Ficarra: Yeah, there are a lot of the same people from This Is Us, both on the studio side and the crew.

This series has not a single wasted moment. The opening frame teases the mystery right away—the clock is ticking, Xavier hasn’t slept a wink, and we see his bullet scar from the first assassination attempt on President Bradford. How did you decide to begin the story with that scene?

John Requa: This is fundamentally a mystery. We’re trying to plant those seeds. What happened to his wife? Why does he have a devastating wound in his shoulder? The pilot uses every trick in the book—visual language, writing, and performance—to let the audience know that it may look like paradise, but underneath the surface, something’s not right.

Ficarra: You have to really lean in, listen, and try to figure it out.

PARADISE – “Agent Billy Pace” – The citizens of Paradise celebrate at the annual carnival. Xavier and Billy delve deeper into their investigation. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
PERCY DAGGS IV, STERLING K. BROWN, ALIYAH MASTIN

[Spoiler!] At the end of the pilot, someone walks by a billboard that reads “Dawn will be delayed by two hours.” What a fantastic cliffhanger!

Requa: We shot about 20 things like that; Dan needed a bunch of things to foreshadow this big surprise. So, we shot that sign, the mechanical ducks, and a bunch of others that didn’t make the cut. We wanted the pilot to be this growing sense of foreboding and mystery—everything looks perfect, but something’s not right. We didn’t know until the editing room whether we got it.

PARADISE – “Agent Billy Pace” – The citizens of Paradise celebrate at the annual carnival. Xavier and Billy delve deeper into their investigation. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
JON BEAVERS, ALIYAH MASTIN, STERLING K. BROWN

In terms of themes, what do you want audiences to get out of this story?

Requa: The inspiration for the story came from Dan—he had a meeting with a very powerful person and wondered what it’s like to have infinite amounts of power. The show examines the inequities in our world.

Tech billionaire and grieving mother Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) has total control over Paradise and everyone in it, having personally constructed the underground bunker. Why does she think the only way to survive is to be Machiavellian and cold-blooded?

Requa: Paradise is sort of the manifestation of her damage, and she’s a control freak who lost her son to a tragic disease. She wasn’t able to control that, so she decided to build this world to have something she could completely control and also to protect her daughter. It’s her idealized world, and we imply a sort of world that she feels her son would have loved. So, the town is a manifestation of her unprocessed damage.

PARADISE – The Man Who Kept the Secrets – Xavier and Robinson race to find President Bradford’s murderer before it’s too late. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
SARAH SHAHI, JULIANNE NICHOLSON

What does it mean to be one of the rare series that films in and around Los Angeles?

Requa: You’re preserving a century-old tradition of artists and artisans coming to Hollywood to make movies. My house was built in 1922 by a production designer, and it has been occupied by a succession of people who work in the industry; however, that tradition is now at risk. We don’t want to see this tradition die.

Can you discuss some of the locations used for the town, which turns out to be miles underground in a Colorado bunker? Where was Cal’s residence?

Ficarra: That was the Azria Estate in Holmby Hills. We had to cobble together a lot for the underground city. The hangar and the entrance to the underground city were filmed in the Tustin Blimp Hangar #2, one of the largest wooden structures in the world. There’s an incredible housing development in Santa Clarita called Bridgeport, which was where Xavier and the agents live, where you see him jogging in the pilot. This small community is picture-perfect with idyllic homes. That’s also where we filmed the lake with the mechanical ducks. It was just a perfect location for the art direction of the show.

PARADISE – “Agent Billy Pace” – The citizens of Paradise celebrate at the annual carnival. Xavier and Billy delve deeper into their investigation. (Disney/Brian Roedel)
ALIYAH MASTIN, STERLING K. BROWN, PERCY DAGGS IV

The town of Paradise resembles a throwback to the 1980s or early 1990s, especially with everyone being so excited about the annual carnival. What ambiance or aesthetic were you going for and why?  

Ficarra: It had to be believable as a town where a U.S. President would retire to, but also an idealized version of a Midwestern town with an all-American feel. It feels very familiar and cozy—we shot that in the Warner backlot. That’s another reason why shooting in L.A. was really great. 

Check back tomorrow for part two of our conversation, when the directors unpack the most emotionally lacerating episode and what makes Paradise different from other post-apocalyptic stories.

 

Paradise is streaming on Hulu.

Featured image: PARADISE – “Wildcat Is Down” – It’s just another day in Paradise until Agent Xavier Collins discovers one of the world’s most powerful individuals has been viciously murdered. Xavier analyzes the crime scene while recalling his complex relationship with the victim. (Disney/Brian Roedel) JAMES MARSDEN, STERLING K. BROWN

“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” Director Matt Shakman on Re-Building Marvel’s First Family

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While there have been numerous cinematic adaptations of the superheroes known as The First Family of Marvel, The Fantastic Four: First Steps has been lauded by audiences and critics alike as having the team most true to its Marvel origins. The new film takes place in a retrofuturistic version of New York, set in a 1960s-inspired era influenced by the creative genius of the smartest man in the universe. That would be Mister Fantastic, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), who has spearheaded inventions like teleportation devices, flying cars, monorails, and gadgets that have just generally made life easier. Equally essential to the team are The Invisible Woman, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), The Thing, Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and The Human Torch, Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), who support the family and protect the world with their own superpowers and everyday personas.  

Starting four years after the four astronauts were irradiated and given their superpowers on a trip to outer space, the story balances the very real-world concerns of preparing for the arrival of Sue and Reed’s new baby with the global threat of potential planetary destruction by evil extraterrestrial forces, heralded by the Shalla-Bal/Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) and to be carried out by world-eater Galactus (Ralph Ineson). Juxtaposing the relatable experience of bringing a new life into the world against the threat of annihilation not only works, but it also makes every frame of the film rich with tension.  

Director Matt Shakman on the set of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL.

This is due in no small part to director and Marvel super-fan Matt Shakman’s lifelong love of the characters, who read comic books featuring Reed Richards and his crew voraciously throughout his childhood. His passion shows through an incredible attention to detail, both in characterization and visual storytelling. The Easter eggs alone offer potential for new discoveries with each successive viewing of the movie. It’s clear that Shakman, the visionary behind WandaVision, was precisely the right director to bring Marvel’s First Family back to the big screen.

In his chat with The Credits, Shakman revealed some of what fans can look forward to, discussed what inspired the look and feel of the film, and shared why he believes Fantastic Four: First Steps is a great introduction to the next phase in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  

You have a theater degree from Yale, and founded the Black Dahlia Theater in LA. How is your experience in theater reflected in The Fantastic Four: First Steps? 

I love approaching film like theater, and to that end, I like rehearsal, so we spent three weeks rehearsing for this movie. All the actors I worked with are theater rats like me, so they love a good rehearsal room. We enjoyed getting together and talking about these characters, going deep into their history, and building on it so they could feel lived in, very much like table work that you do in theater. We also worked on the script and found little tweaks that could make it better, and did improv that I think made the family feel more like a real family, and the film, I think, feels a bit more alive and spontaneous because of that. 

 

There’s a beautiful sort of 60s Space Race optimism at the heart of this film. 

The Space Race is a huge part of the DNA of these characters, especially since they were created in the 60s, which is why we put it back in that era. We wanted to get in touch with that sense of JFK optimism. It’s the excitement of conquering the unknown, and that with the right mind, the right heart, and the right technology, you can conquer anything. We watched this wonderful Apollo 11 documentary together. We talked to a real astronaut advisor, who advised us on the script, but also made himself available to the actors. We went deep into watching movies and looking at photographs of the World’s Fair and New York in the 1960s, Jackie Kennedy’s tour of the White House, the short ” The Home of Tomorrow, ” and Syd Mead’s art. All of that was inspiration. 

(L-R) Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman and Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/Human Torch in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo by Jay Maidment. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL.

What are some aspects of those inspirations that we can see onscreen? 

Actually, we created a film similar to the famous Westinghouse short from the 1960s that didn’t make it into the finished film. At one point, H.E.R.B.I.E. even makes a martini for the guest host. It’s meant to evoke that Jackie Kennedy White House tour. There are a lot of touches in the production design informed by those films. If you look at the Baxter Building, the kitchen features a sort of half-sphere, half-dome oven and cabinets that drop out of the counters, evoking the “House of Tomorrow.” 

(L-R) Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing and H.E.R.B.I.E in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL.

And yet, you strike a very fine balance between the 60s mid-century modern style and the technology, creating a lived-in, homey feel. 

We needed it to be a believable domestic space, but at the same time, evoke this retrofuturism. It needed both grandness and intimacy. The production design team did a brilliant job. We centered it around the sunken living room, which is very of the period, and it brings the family together. It’s circular, and everything in our film is based on circles and arcs. The space is about hearth and home, and has a TV and a fireplace that can rotate, depending on what the family wants to be doing. It was a challenge because one of my biggest concerns was that this penthouse apartment needs to feel lived in, especially after the baby comes. These people are too busy to do the dishes. Even H.E.R.B.I.E is too busy. One of my favorite things that came up early in shooting was this idea of baby proofing the Baxter Building, which meant bringing in all these gates and breaking up all these perfect lines. 

(L-R) Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman and Ada Scott as Franklin Richards in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL

You mentioned you had an astronaut advisor, who was Rick Mastracchio. How did he contribute to the design details of the Fantastic Four’s spaceship, the Excelsior? 

Marval had spacecraft that were whimsical and fun, like those in Guardians of the Galaxy, but I wanted to go more realistic and bring back the danger of space, the idea of floating in a tin can, as with the Apollo missions, which were incredibly risky. The last time these four went up, they were transformed, so for them personally, they are aware of the dangers from their own trauma. For us, having zero-g was hugely important. We leaned on Rick for all that. As it happens, Rick is also married to a delivery room nurse, so when we talked about how someone would have a baby in zero gravity, they were the perfect couple to consult with. Of course, Sue has to be strapped down when giving birth. She needs gravity. 

(L-R) Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/Human Torch and Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantasticin 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL.

Also, we wanted to be consistent with our retrofuturism, so we had to balance what people of the 50s imagined space travel would be when they imagined it with the minimalism you think of when you think of Apollo. Many of the monitors are high up and can only be accessed at zero gravity. There are handrails everywhere. This world, though, has had the benefit of Reed Richards and his innovations for 20 or 30 years, so the spaceship has booster rockets like Apollo, but they’re like SpaceX rockets in that they reignite to land safely. 

 

Your version of Times Square is spectacular, with huge billboards and ads. It feels like Times Square of the ’60s, but with 100% more rockets. 

I have these books by Taschan that do advertisements by decade, and the 60s are all about the Space Race. There were Marlboro ads with people in space helmets smoking cigarettes. We created billboards, and one of them was Johnny in a Coppertone ad, which was something I wanted to do early on. We built on all that old advertising. We intermixed real commercials playing on these huge retrofuture televisions that we licensed, like old Little Caesar ads, with commercials we made ourselves for Reed Tech, H.E.R.B.I.E robots, and Velo Jet Motors, which is the name of the bubble cars we made. It was incredibly fun to build that world, and there was no detail that was too small. 

What are you hoping audiences will take away from the film? 

Definitely that sense of optimism. The fact that it’s a family is also really important. There’s so much we see in the Fantastic Four because they’re a family that you don’t see in other superhero movies. There’s a relatability in that they have big public personalities, but they go home, and they’re domestic and messy just like the rest of us, and they have the same fights, and love each other. It’s what has made them popular decade after decade, and trying to capture that on film has been my goal. 

(L-R): Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic and Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/Human Torch in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL.

 

Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters nationwide. 

 

 

 

The Willem Dafoe of Dinosaurs: How “Jurassic World: Rebirth” VFX Supervisor Charmaine Chan Created the Distortus Rex

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Charmaine Chan began working at Industrial Light & Magic 18 years ago—it was her first gig out of college, starting off as an assistant technical director and contributing to Michael Bay’s Transformers. Chan stayed on at ILM and continued to work on some of the biggest franchises there are, becoming a digital compositor on Star Wars, Mission: Impossible, and films within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As her talent sustained her and her capacities grew, she was more than ready to take on a dino-sized challenge.

Chan served as ILM’s visual effects supervisor on Jurassic World: Rebirth, reteaming with filmmaker Gareth Edwards, taking on her first VFX supervisor role on Edwards’ elegant sci-fi actioner The Creator. Once again, Chan helped Edwards build out an entire, fantastical world that felt lived-in and real. Since Rebirth is set on an unexplored island — Ile Saint-Hubert, “Site B” — where scientists have been foolishly tampering with dino-DNA once again, Chan and her team introduced new, hybrid dinosaurs, some fantastic, others grotesque, but nearly all of them capable of terrorizing any human being foolish enough to set foot on IleSaint-Hubert.

Rebirth follows mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and her team, who are tasked with a secret mission to the island to collect dinosaur DNA for a pharmaceutical company. Whether Zora is marveling at or battling dinosaurs — including those monstrous hybrids — there’s always considerable weight and texture to the effects, the calling card of the franchise since Steven Spielberg and his team first wowed us in 1993 with Jurassic Park. Thanks to a consistent mix of practical effects and CG, Chan and the team at ILM helped bring the franchise back to its awe-inspiring, action-adventure roots. We spoke with Chan about how she breathed life into these prehistoric show-stoppers.

 

What are the first steps that you and your fellow visual effects artists at ILM take in creating the dinosaurs?

We were working on dinosaur asset development and building, likely around the spring of 2024. It’s just reading the script, asking the questions we need to ask, and breaking it down to: “Alright, these are our dinosaurs.” We needed Gareth to lock down his designs quickly, which is always hard to get a director to do. We really wanted to do 3D prints of all our dinosaur heads so we’d have lighting references and maquettes — and also so the actors knew what they were interacting with. 

Spinosaurus in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

For your work on the Star Wars franchise, you referenced the franchise’s extensive canon and years of cinematic history. For Jurassic World: Rebirth, do you reference [make-up effects artist] Stan Winston’s work on the original film? Do the original animatronics ever influence CG?

We did a huge deep dive into both the original Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III. Gareth actually loves Jurassic Park III. He was especially drawn to the raptors — the way they were animatronic, the leather texture of the skin, that sheen. We even considered putting that same specular response into our T. Rex. Since he’s walking through the river, of course, he’s going to get wet, so we wanted to get that same wet, tactile look. Even before Stan Winston, we went back to the early 1900s, looking at Charles Knight’s original T. rex paintings. The style is chunkier, the stance is shorter, and Gareth was drawn to that more than the T. Rex from the last Jurassic World films.

L to R: Luna Blaise and the T-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards

A few people have commented that the D-Rex, the Distortus Rex, bears a resemblance to H. R. Giger’s Xenomorph design from Alien. What inspired the D-Rex’s creation?

We definitely explored a whole circle of different reference imagery. The modeler who designed it — he’s an amazing artist — really helped Distortus become what it is. You can still sense the T. rex in there. The main thing was giving it character. Gareth described it as making him the Willem Dafoe of dinosaurs. We wanted something unique and asymmetrical. We went through several rounds of design, but it was actually one of the first that got approved, because Gareth knew that was the one. Distortus is a sad fellow. He’s been trapped on this island, and I think you feel it. It was fun trying to use a T. rex as the base and imagine what would happen if experiments went wrong.

D-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Were there any qualities you and the animators wanted to elicit some sympathy for Distortus?

He’s super sensitive to light, which is why he was going towards the flare when Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) lights it. It’s curiosity as well as fear — frightened, unsure of what’s going on. Our animators looked at some references of gorillas when it comes to its general movements. With Gareth, it’s always about asymmetry, so one arm might be a little less strong than the other arm. It’s just a creature that’s trying to find its way around.

D-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Where you and Gareth create a very tangible sense of scale is with the Mosasaurus. The frame can barely hold up to or keep pace with the animal. How’d the sea creature’s scale evolve throughout animation?

The Mosasaurus went through the most scale changes of any creature. We created the Mosa based on something very similar to the Mosa before, and then we’d start to put them in the shot, and Gareth would go, “Not big enough.” And you’re like, “This is already two times the size of a whale — that’s ginormous.” He’s like, “No, it needs to be cut off from the frame. It needs to feel absolutely massive.” There were a couple of shots where we scaled up to 400% larger than the original size and ratio. It was almost a shot-by-shot basis. We basically went through each shot and went, “Okay, that one’s 100%. That one’s 250%. Alright, that one’s more like 100% again.” 

Mosasaurus in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

How does alternating the scale of a Mosasaurus affect the other visual effects, like the massive body of water?

It affects our water simulations as well. Luckily, the way things were composed and the way we mixed both effects, water and practical plate photography, all worked. You weren’t too worried about the scale feeling unrealistic. There were many discussions [about shooting the sequence]: Is it going to be shot on the ocean? In a tank? Or will it have no water at all and be on a blue screen stage? What combination would provide safety for the actors while also maintaining flexibility for CG to still feel realistic? It was a combination. Some footage was shot in the open ocean with stunt doubles. For close-ups with the actors, that was done in a tank, on a rig, with more safety precautions.

Mosasaurus in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Even though you have the titanic task of bringing dinosaurs back to life on-screen, in 2025, is digital water still one of the industry’s massive challenges for VFX artists?

We knew water would be the most challenging thing. Before finalizing any dinosaurs, we started testing the water sims. We had different sea creatures we’d animate—whale, dolphin, and more—to simulate what the water would do. We had amazing FX artists, led by our CG supervisor Miguel [Perez Senent]. They looked into water dripping off the creatures to secondary splashes caused by the primary splash. Every little detail they could think of, they created. When we’re in the open ocean, and the boat’s driving through real water, we’re trying to replicate those splashes. We drew on real-life photography references, but our goal was to push the boundaries of how realistic CG water can look. We had an amazing team determined to finally “unlock” that button — where the audience can’t tell it’s CG water.

When you create these massive worlds in The Creator and Jurassic World Rebirth, what qualities in VFX do you and Gaerth Edwards chase? What makes CG in a fantastical world believable? 

It’s about not trying to perfect the visual effects, if that makes sense. One of the great things about Gareth is that he shoots so much beautiful plate photography. We use that as our base. You want something tangible and grounded in reality. Even if it’s sci-fi or set on a fictional dinosaur island, it still needs to feel like it could exist. Gareth never treats VFX as a full replacement — it’s always an augmentation, adding things into what’s already there. Gareth would rather roto people and add things into a real-world plate than rely on blue screens. When you add something into an environment that already exists, it just sits better.

Featured image: D-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

“The Naked Gun” Legacy: How a Canceled TV Show Spawned Cinematic Comedic Gold

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As we eagerly await the theatrical release of the next installment in The Naked Gun franchise on August 1st, this time with Liam Neeson stepping into the role of Frank Drebin Jr., it’s the perfect moment to reflect on the legacy of the original film. An iconic example of slapstick comedy, The Naked Gun not only sparked a successful trilogy but also redefined the parody genre, impacting multiple generations of viewers and leaving an indelible mark on comedy for decades following its release.

The idea for The Naked Gun began in March of 1982, when ABC approached David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the creative team behind Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and Airplane! (1980) for a mid-season replacement series. The group, collectively known as ZAZ, came up with a little show called Police Squad!, lampooning dramatic detective shows of the late 1960s like M Squad and Felony Squad. The series starred Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin, a hapless detective who’s colossally oblivious to his surroundings, but who also, seemingly by accident, always gets his man. The network decided not to pick up the series, and it was canceled after only 4 of its 6 episodes had been aired. However, critics and fans took notice of the show’s clever wordplay, hilarious sight gags, and Leslie Nielsen’s perfectly deadpan delivery of some of the most absurd lines ever written, and the series gained a powerful cult following. Repeated broadcasts on other networks solidified the popularity of the short-lived series, and soon the idea for a feature-length version was born, resulting in the release of 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

 

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! held its own at the box office in a year packed with iconic releases, ultimately landing at No. 21 among film legends of the 1980s such as Die Hard, Big, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Coming to America, and Beetlejuice. Despite stiff competition, the film was a commercial success, which was owed to the combination of its absurd, fast-paced, slapstick comedy, chock-full of visual puns and gags, and Leslie Nielsen’s delivery of Frank Drebin’s wittingly preposterous wordplay, with simple, one-line jokes that hit the funny bone squarely and with force. 

Leslie Nielsen is seduced by Anna Nicole Smith in a scene from the film ‘Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult’, 1994. (Photo by Paramount/Getty Images)

Nielsen had previously gained notoriety as an actor in dramatic roles, such as Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), as well as his dramatic portrayals of stern authority figures, including doctors, generals, and detectives, in television dramas. When casting their 1980 disaster spoof, Airplane!, the ZAZ team deliberately sought to cast dramatic actors like Robert Stack, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, and Nielsen to star. According to David Zucker, “We thought they were much funnier than the comedians of that time were.” As it turns out, Zucker’s instinct was correct, and Airplane! would go on to become a critical and commercial success, grossing $171 million on a $3.5 million budget and earning a widely regarded reputation as one of the greatest comedy movies of all time. This success solidified Nielsen as a bona fide comedy actor. With his straight-man delivery, Nielsen could transform even the most preposterous one-liner into an unforgettable quote, making him the natural choice for the role of Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun. Roger Ebert perfectly summed up the film’s comedic style and effect on audiences in his 1988 review, saying, “You laugh, and then you laugh at yourself for laughing.”

Following the critical and commercial success of The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, the ZAZ team set out to develop a sequel. By the time The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear was released in 1991, the franchise had already carved a niche in the cultural zeitgeist for its absurd, rapid-fire visual comedy and wordplay. What distinguished this sequel from the original was its confident escalation of comedic set pieces, proving that the formula wasn’t just a fluke but a blueprint. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear would be the biggest commercial success of the first three films, ousting Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves from the No. 1 box office spot in its first week, and ultimately grossing $192 million against a $23 million budget, making it the 10th highest grossing film of 1991 among iconic films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Home Alone, Silence of the Lambs, Dances with Wolves, and The Addams Family.

 

The franchise’s third installment, The Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult, was released in 1994, cementing the series as one of comedy’s most beloved parody trilogies. While the previous two films were directed by David Zucker, the third installment handed the reins to Peter Segal in his directorial debut. Segal would go on to direct comedy favorites including Tommy Boy (1995), Anger Management (2003), and 50 First Dates (2004). While the first Naked Gun film focused on a general spoofing of police procedurals and the second leaned into political satire, 33 1/3 heavily incorporated broader visual parodies, allowing audiences to immediately recognize send-ups of famous films, including The Untouchables, The Great Escape, and Thelma & Louise. This shift in comedic style preserved the absurdity for which the franchise had become known while doubling down on visual humor that audiences could instantly identify.

 

Having established itself as part of a landmark trilogy in modern cinema, 33 ⅓  also treats audiences to cameos by notable names of the 1990’s such as Olympia Dukakis, Shannen Doherty, Vanna White, and Weird Al Yankovic (who makes cameo appearances in all three films). Look closely at the audience in the final scene and you’ll spot a young Paul Feig, who created the short-lived but brilliant comedy series Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000) before becoming a big-time movie director himself.

Although the first three Naked Gun films inspired a boom in the parody genre following their respective releases, the category has been relatively quiet in the past decade. However, audiences’ appetite for parody is set to be reawakened by director Akiva Schaffer’s take on the upcoming installment. Schaffer, a Saturday Night Live alum, has serious comedy chops (he also directed the hysterical Andy Samberg-led Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and is, along with Samberg and Jorma Taccone, part of the comedy music group The Lonely Island), and counts as one of his producers Seth MacFarlane, a lover of parodies. Known for his work on Family Guy, American Dad!, and The Orville, MacFarlane has consistently demonstrated a deep understanding of both classic and contemporary pop culture, as well as a fearless approach to irreverent, joke-a-second humor. What sets him apart is his ability to blend smart satire with outlandish slapstick, a tone that aligns perfectly with the DNA of The Naked Gun franchise. His comedic sensibilities are rooted in homage. He doesn’t just mock pop culture, he clearly loves it, dissecting tropes with affection as much as sarcasm. Schaffer and MacFarlane’s comedic sensibilities, combined with the audience’s existing fondness for the The Naked Gun series, seem like a recipe for the perfect comedic cocktail that will keep audiences rolling in their seats through the summer. Look for The Naked Gun in theaters on August 1st.

 

Featured image: SANTA MONICA, CA – 1988: Actor Leslie Nielsen sits in an electric bumper car during the 1988 Santa Monica, California, filming of the comedy movie “The Naked Gun.” (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)

Designer Easter Eggs: “Jurassic World: Rebirth” Costume Designer Sammy Sheldon Differ Reveals the Wardrobe’s Hidden Details

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Jurassic World: Rebirth isn’t costume designer Sammy Sheldon Differ‘s first time at the dino rodeo. Having previously worked on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the British artisan relished the opportunity to return to one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.

Set five years after Jurassic World: Dominion, Rebirth sees Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett lead an expedition into a no-go zone to extract DNA from three prehistoric creatures in the hopes of manifesting a groundbreaking medical breakthrough. Rebirth also stars Oscar winner Mahershala, Wicked‘s Jonathan Bailey, and Rupert Friend. It’s directed by Gareth Edwards, best known for Monsters, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and The Creator.

Here, Differ reveals where she found inspiration in classic Steven Spielberg films (including, of course, the original Jurassic Park), how shooting on film informed the color palette, and some of the Easter Eggs hidden in the costuming.

Is there a franchise Bible that you use as a guide?

Not really, but there’s a theme, and there is definitely a look. You don’t want it to have fashion in it. It’s not generic, but it’s about trying not to place it in a specific period in time. For this film, we looked back a lot in order to make it feel nostalgic.

Scarlett Johansson is skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Where did you start?

Reading the script is always my first stop. Scarlett Johansson’s character, Zora, is the linchpin and driving force in the story, so we had to ensure she isn’t represented in a comic book way. There is a reality to her, but in that reality, there is also a practicality. There’s nothing frivolous. We started with Scarlett because we met her first. We didn’t want Zora to feel too special ops or ‘girl in the field,’ but her costume had to have functionality. Zora is a very motivated and strong person, so we had to accommodate her and ensure everything else fit around her.

Scarlett Johansson is skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Is there a Jurassic palette you needed to bear in mind?

We were shooting on film, which was amazing because you knew the colors and textures would appear slightly different from those of digital cameras. Gareth wanted to make it almost feel like a film that was shot in the 1980s and rediscovered. We looked at several Spielberg movies and noted the colors used, particularly where red, yellow, and blue stood out. We also looked at what colors weren’t there as a period thing. There are different shades of green, purple, and yellow today than there were then. The color theory across the film was very strong, particularly in terms of what we decided to place in each scene. A lot of it involved balancing the green of the trees and the textures of the dinosaurs.

Bechir Sylvain as LeClerc and the Quetzalcoatlus in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

How much of the costuming was off-the-peg and adapted, and how much did you create from scratch?

When you watch the film, you think, ‘They’re in the same thing throughout,’ but we had to do somewhere between 20 and 35 duplications of each character’s costumes. That included trousers, tops, kit, boots, and so on, because they traversed various terrains, ranging from wet to dry, muddy, and more. We had a very short time to prep. We met Scarlet about seven weeks before we started filming, but we met everybody else two weeks before production started. We knew the looks we wanted, but the fittings had to be quick. As a result, a significant portion of it was purchased and adapted, while some items were disassembled and completely remade. There was a lot of breakdown, dyeing to change the color of things, taking pockets off and putting pockets on, and having a kit made that you can’t buy. We put it together like a big jigsaw. Gareth also wanted prints on t-shirts, and that is always tricky because if it’s something that already exists, you have to get it cleared. Teresa has a David Bowie t-shirt that we managed to get them to let us use. It’s an old one from the Glass Spider era. We wanted it to make you wonder whose t-shirt it was or if it was something she likes. Isabella’s t-shirt features a print that we created from various references to past Jurassic movies.

L to R: Isabella Delgado (Audrina Miranda), Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), Teresa Delgado (Luna Blaise) and Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono) in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.
L to R: Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid and Audrina Miranda as Isabella Delgado in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Tell me more.

Gareth wanted a logo that resembles a t-shirt you might have purchased from a place like Gap, but upon closer inspection, you notice specific details. We asked ourselves what the famous quotes and imagery of the early films were, and there also had to be a creature. We were trying to riff on the fact that Isabella doesn’t like dinosaurs, so it had to be an animal related to a dinosaur, but still fun. We came up with the pelican because, at the end of Jurassic Park, there are pelicans flying, and they serve as a crossover to the pterodactyl. So, we created an image of a pelican wearing a cap because caps are featured in many ’80s movies, and there’s also a tiny little helicopter in there, too. Additionally, since the family has a Hispanic background, we decided to reflect that in the writing behind the image, so it reads ‘life finds a way’ in Spanish.

Did you find yourself leaning more into the original trilogy for inspiration?

Very much so. There are loads of little things we looked at, including specific shades of red and yellow. There’s also the yellow raincoat that the little girl wears, which is a direct link to the first film. We dressed Ed Skrein to give him a Bob Peck feel when he was on the boat. He also has a badge that you don’t see in the movie. We wanted to find an animal that his character related to, and we came up with a mongoose. Around his badge, we had written, ‘We need a bigger boat,’ which is a reference to Jaws. We also looked at E.T. and The Goonies for the kids.

Mosasaurus in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Since you had such a small window for costuming, did you need to start filming without everything finished?

We were prepping and buying items in advance because we knew who the cast members were, but we didn’t always get to fit them. As soon as we liked something, such as a top, we would have to see if we could get 30 or 40 of them. There were a couple of characters for whom we only had a limited number of pairs of trousers, and we had to hope they would last until the end of filming. We had most of the items on time, but because we were filming in Thailand, shipping them over created an additional complication. We would have some items shipped from the UK before they were fitted, and then we would do the fittings when we arrived. We also had buyers in England sending stuff out.

How much work was done in Thailand rather than the UK?

Quite a bit. We had a lovely team in Thailand. Mai, our supervisor, was amazing, and she had a great team. All the alterations were done there. I brought a couple of people from the UK, but it wasn’t just a British crew, by any means. In Malta, we had the same thing. We had a local team there, although that was more about maintenance. I remember we had to do a rush ride over 24 hours to Phuket for a character that came very last minute and had to work on the first day. I took the local crew with me to navigate everything. We had great support in all the countries we went to.

L to R: Bechir Sylvain as Leclerc, Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Henry Loomis and Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Were there any instances where you had to rethink a costume design to work with the vision of the set designers or something specific that Gareth needed to shoot?

For the opening scene in the lab, we had to design a hazmat suit that worked for both the action and the setting. Hazmat suits are clumpy and serve their purpose, but they’re not aesthetically pleasing. Our biggest challenge was that the scene was set slightly in the past, and we’re 17 years in the future, but it needs to look futuristic for that time. Gareth has a very strong aesthetic when it comes to tech. He likes everything to have slightly round corners with layers, and it needs to be believable. What we built was a fully working hazmat suit with an opening visor, allowing Gareth to get a shot of the guy eating. You would never do that in a real hazmat suit! We created a mechanical device that had the shield rise and fall over his face. It also had lights and a breathing apparatus inside because it kept fogging up. We also installed fans to prevent it from fogging. Funnily enough, they ended up putting fog back in afterwards.

D-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is in theaters now.

Featured image: L to R: Scarlett Johansson as skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett and Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Death Metal Vocals & Brutalized Cabbages: How Sound Designer Johnnie Burn Crafted “28 Years Later” Sonic Terror

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Sound designer Johnnie Burn had just won the Academy Award for his dread-inducing contributions to The Zone of Interest when he got a late-night phone call from 28 Years Later director Danny Boyle. “I was drunk at the Vanity Fair party after the Oscar win when someone called from my office in London and handed the phone to Danny Boyle, who was standing in the reception,” Burn recalls. “Danny said, ‘I know you’re not here in London because I just saw you on the telly, but will you do the sound on my next film? And I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ The tendrils of zombie sounds in 28 Days Later extend into so much of horror culture over the last three decades, and I was also in awe of how he put together the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. So this became my first go with Danny.”

Now that he’s infused the post-apocalyptic zombie drama 28 Years Later with its own feral identity, Burn can add Boyle to his list of auteur collaborators. In addition to Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer, Burn has become the go-to designer for Jordan Peele (Nope, Get Out) and Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Poor Things), as well as Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland—Burn worked on her upcoming film, Hamnet).

Speaking from his home in Brighton, England, Burn explains the science of jump scares, describes Great Britain’s quietest stretch of wilderness, and salutes the death metal vocalist who screamed his guts out to voice 28 Years Later‘s alpha zombie.

Johnnie, you once said, “We process image but we react to sound.” Can you elaborate on that idea and how you implemented it in 28 Years Later?

There’s an actual statistic that says you react to an image in about 100 milliseconds, whereas sound takes only 15 milliseconds because it goes to a different part of the brain, through the limbic system, rather than the cerebral cortex. When you lull people into a sense of security, then throw something incredibly loud and fast at them, it’s very visceral. Imagine somebody breathed in your ear, versus showing someone an image of a nostril. In this film, there are at least five times when we tried to get people with the jump scares before they realized what was happening. “Oh-my-god-oh-s***” You can shut your eyes, but you can’t shut your ears.

How did your approach fit into Danny Boyle’s creative brief?

Danny basically said he wanted it to be exciting and relatable and surprising and loud, and he kept saying the loud bit, and I never realized quite how loud he wanted it! My ears were ringing at the end of the movie.

 

To capture the ambient sound of the virus-wracked United Kingdom, you and your team traveled to northern England and the island of Lindisfarne where 28 Years Later was mainly shot?

Yes. There’s probably only one sound I’d happily take out of a stock sound library, and that would be the Wilhelm Scream, so we visited the locations the filmmakers had been to in the previous few weeks and recorded footsteps and the wildlife comprehensively across the whole film for every scene. But, unfortunately, when we went to Lindisfarne and Yorkshire, we found there wasn’t the lack of traffic noise that we’d expected.

Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) in Columbia Pictures’ 28 YEARS LATER.

So where did you find your car-free wilderness?

We had to go 100 miles west deep into the Welsh hills, where the valleys are so steep and thick with woods that the [traffic] sound doesn’t travel. We spent a few days there, wandering around, capturing birds, babbling streams and brooks, and crunching twigs, trying to gather enough layers of sound to create the density this film needed to suggest that nature had been allowed to run rampant.

You literally could not find a stretch of rural landscape in northern England free of car noise?

Even at three in the morning, there’s always some road a few miles away emanating white noise-y hiss that interrupts the owl you’re trying to capture. So we asked the Foley team to take an iPad with them into the forest in Wales, watch the film, hold the mic, and do the actual stuff for real. The more credible the sound, the deeper the emotion.

 

A terrifying moment of horror occurs when the “evolved” zombie Samson unleashes his primal roar in the direction of young Spike and his father. Where did that scream come from?

For a good couple of months, that was me, making this loud guttural roar. Then my friends and people at my company all had a go at it, doing various roars.

Various roars.

Various roars. [laughing]. But then, when we did the final sound mix for the film in London at this [post-production] place called Halo, there was this guy who helped set up the engineering technicalities. Danny said, “It’d be nice if we could get that main zombie voice just a little bit richer and a little bit longer.” That’s when the tech guy let slip that he was the vocalist in a death metal band!

No kidding.

So we got a microphone, and that’s the scream you hear in the film now. It’s brilliant.

An infected on the set of Columbia Pictures’ 28 YEARS LATER.

Unlike Samson, most people infected with the Rage Virus have no cognitive powers, right?

That’s right. The alpha zombie was about intoning a certain amount of cerebral awareness, but for our less intellectual zombies, it was important that they be absolutely animalistic and show no sense of knowing or understanding.

How did you achieve that?

We had a line of 30 loop group actors walking up to a microphone and doing their own versions of a zombie scream. It’s very amusing to see them all getting into zombie mode, limping, [acting like they have] missing limbs, and then growling “arggh.” Turns out that it’s actually quite difficult to do zombie-infected screams. It’s easy to do ones that sound like a hammy actor or a pirate, but to vocalize a guttural sound that makes an immediate connection, you actually have to put your heart and soul into it and work up a bit of a sweat.

In 28 Years Later, it’s all about analog weaponry and their sickening sounds of impact.

For the hits, that was a large assortment of cabbages being brutalized by various implements to find the right sound for bodily impact [laughing].

Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) in Columbia Pictures’ 28 YEARS LATER.

Your sound design here blends really well with the score by UK rap duo The Young Fathers. What were they like to work with?

They were fantastic. A few times, we looked at scenes together where I might say, “At this point, if you’re going low, I’ll make sure the birds go up high.” I’m always trying to make the music feel like it’s coming out of a piece of wind or birdsong, to make the soundscape [and music] feel like it’s part of the same thing.

 

You’ve become a favorite of auteurs like Jordan Peele, Yorgos Lanthimos, Jonathan Glazer, and now Danny Boyle. What, if anything, do all these filmmakers have in common?

They’re all driven to create something groundbreaking, fresh, and innovative within the storytelling paradigm of cinema. And all these directors are humming at their best when they work with the same crew more than once, because your crew can then help them understand the tools they have. “I know Johnnie can do that. So and so can do this.”

If we can circle back to something you mentioned earlier: What is the Wilhelm Scream?

The Wilhelm Scream is a recording made by the actor Sheb Wooley, hired to do ADR voice screams [of a man eaten by an alligator in the 1951 film Distant Drums]. Everyone in the sound industry knows it because this scream has made its way into Return of the Jedi, when the three stormtroopers go down; it’s also featured in Jaws and Nope. Once you’re aware of the Wilhelm Scream, you hear it everywhere!

Several movies you’ve worked on are steeped in dread, but 28 Years Later is your first zombie picture. What’s your takeaway after being immersed for a few months in Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic horror world?

It was good fun because of the film’s potential for sound to scare the hell out of people and paint a picture of England gone feral. For me, that was very enjoyable.

 

 

 

Featured image: An infected in Columbia Pictures’ 28 YEARS LATER.

Decoding Deceptive Design With “Presumed Innocent” Production Designer John Paino & Set Decorator Amy Wells

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In part one of our conversation about David E. Kelley’s rigorously intense and captivating courtroom drama, Presumed Innocent, production designer John Paino and set decorator Amy Wells talked about the elaborate courtroom set and what it was like to shoot the Chicago-set series entirely in Southern California.

Thanks to Jake Gyllenhaal’s nuanced, Emmy-nominated performance, Rusty’s culpability on the grisly murder of his fellow prosecutor and lover, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve), remains inscrutable until the very end. The series masterfully navigates his moral ambiguity as he oscillates between genuine penitence and heartbreak one moment and shamelessness and arrogance the next. Now, we delve into how Paino and Wells crafted the canvas for some of the most emotionally charged moments. 

This show has an anachronistic vibe—the visual palette has a retro feel even though the story takes place in contemporary Chicago. The cinematographers drew inspiration from 1970s thrillers in creating a naturalistic, moody feel. How did that influence your designs and set dressing?

Paino: One of the things I referenced with director Anne Sewitsky and David [Kelley] on the color palette was the movie Klute, which has a saturated palette. Anne really liked that. Since we’re doing Chicago in Los Angeles, I made sure there was a certain urban feel and tried to steer clear of many things that are inherently L.A.

Wells: The Sabich family aren’t hipsters. They live in a traditional home and have good taste, but since they don’t have an interior designer, we wanted the design to be naturalistic. That was really important to Anne; she wanted layers upon layers on every set. She didn’t want things to look neat, but have a very naturalistic feel.

 

What elements about Rusty or the family did you want the décor to reflect?

Wells: I wanted to show his wife Barbara’s [Ruth Negga, also nominated for an Emmy] artistic eye, but also have it feel real and comfortable. That’s always my biggest hurdle, getting the place to feel real. You don’t want things to stand out and distract from the story—you want it to be part of the story.

Paino: It was a little hard because you could see so much of each room. How do you make every room look different and yet not drastically different? With all the archways between the rooms, you could see almost the whole house.

Wells: Anne wanted to go through the house with the camera, so that was important to her.

Kingston Rumi Southwick, Chase Infiniti and Ruth Negga in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Many emotional scenes take place at their house, such as when Barbara puts Rusty on the spot and makes him tell the kids about his affair and that he is now a suspect in Carolyn’s murder. Was that interior on the soundstage? 

Paino: We based it on a location, so you try to keep the windows the same for the establishing shots. The interior was an open, traditional home. Amy went out of her way to get some cool African-American art. Since Barbara is a gallerist, she knows artists, so she might have promoted some of the pieces when she ran the gallery. I showed Amy one or two pieces from my artist friends in New York City. They often trade art with other artists. When I was an artist, I would trade a drawing for someone’s painting that I liked. So that was some of the dressing.  

Wells: My friend Angie’s art was there too—it was so good.

Paino: We picked out the colors and paintings, and Amy handled the fabrics. I was always interested in what she was getting and worked it into the overall schema.  

Barbara is understandably distraught and furious since this is the second time that Rusty has cheated on her with Carolyn. At one point, she almost has an affair with bartender and artist, Clifton (Sarunas J. Jackson), when they go to his studio. What stood out in that space?

Paino: He was a light projection artist, so we had 3D projections on the walls in his loft that were moving and undulating. We found a white space studio and turned it into his loft/art studio. Amy found all this equipment for it, and we hired this company to put in their special projectors.

That gruesome crime scene looks like a complex set. Where was Carolyn’s house, where her body was found hogtied in her own living room?

Paino: We based that on a brick house in Koreatown and built a replica of it on stage. The house had a real bohemian flair to it. It felt appropriately modest like an artist’s place; I think that added a lot to her character.

 

Did your team dress that crime scene or was it more props?

Paino: Many departments were involved. I did some drawings of the trussing up. We looked at crime scene photos and talked to former police detectives who told us how a crime scene should look, such as using different colored police tapes for different parts of it. They weren’t on set, but they were extremely helpful. We had a general idea and a drawing of what the body would look like. Then, we worked with makeup. I assumed we would make a prosthetic body—I’ve never had a set where the murder victim was tied up and used an actual person. But the actress [Reinsve] was incredible; she actually did it, even though it would be very uncomfortable for anybody. She was a trooper.

What about the prosecutor’s office in the city, where several verbal altercations occurred between Rusty, Tommy (Peter Sarsgaard, another Emmy nominee), and the newly elected prosecutor, Nico (O-T Fagbenle)?

Paino: The office evolved. We were going to do it at a fabulous old bank, but at the last minute, it didn’t work out. So, we had to build and design it very quickly. I looked at many Chicago federal buildings and their offices. Chicago still feels like New York in the ’70s and ’80s— there’s not a lot of money to put into courtrooms or government offices. So, it feels beat up, and a lot of paper is still being used. So that informed the overall look. We kept to earth tones to give it a grounded feel.

Wells: It’s always hard to distinguish a character in an office. You try to give them some backstory with photographs of their family, their school, and how they relate to the city they live in.

Paino: There are so many procedurals done, and you want to find a way to make an interesting, realistic office that isn’t just all glass partitions.

O-T Fagbenle and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

The series does a fantastic job of maintaining Rusty’s innocence versus culpability all the way to the final moments!

Wells: Were you surprised by the ending? We shot more than one.

[SPOILERS!] So, there is a world where Rusty did it?

Wells: No, I think there’s one where Barbara did it.

 

Presumed Innocent is streaming now on Apple TV+.

Featured image: Ruth Negga and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

 

From Chaos to Culture: How “The Bear” Effect is Having a Real Impact on Chicago’s Restaurant Scene

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FX’s The Bear has only grown hotter each season, and not just in the kitchen. Since its debut in 2022, the series has captivated audiences with its emotionally raw portrayal of life inside a restaurant. 

In season one, we followed Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a young fine-dining chef who returns to Chicago to run his late brother’s struggling sandwich shop. With clashing personalities and mounting debt, the audience is thrown into the kitchen and witnesses how Carmy transforms both the restaurant and himself. 

THE BEAR — “Omelette” — Season 2, Episode 9 (Airs Thursday, June 22nd) Pictured: (l-r) Lionel Boyce as Marcus, Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto. CR: Chuck Hodes/FX.

By season four, Carmy continues to spiral under the weight of his own stainless-steel stubbornness, poising Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) to take center stage. Sydney steps forward, allowing her culinary ambition rooted in discipline and emotional intelligence to become the backbone of the restaurant. After three seasons of playing sous-chef in Carmy’s chaos, season four gives Sydney something rare in modern television: space. We see her navigating her Black identity, attending investor meetings, refining the menu, and walking through the same Chicago streets that once overwhelmed her now with quiet authority.

 

What began as a story about grief evolved into one of the most culturally resonant shows of the streaming era. The sandwich shop has cemented its place not just as a story of survival but of evolution. A global craze that is leaving a mark on both television and Chicago’s food industry. At the heart of The Bear is its reverence for realism. It’s portrayal of Chicago as a lived-in, beloved city, warts and all, that helps ground the narrative in authenticity. 

However, it’s the series’ depiction of the restaurant industry, particularly the chaos of a high-pressure kitchen, that has resonated deeply, especially in a world where restaurants are still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Many chefs and restaurateurs have praised The Bear for capturing what it truly feels like to run a service: the stress, the camaraderie, the sacrifices, and the artistry. Each new season has brought a new wave of attention to Chicago’s food scene, now being dubbed “The Bear Effect.” 

 

Since the show’s debut, restaurants featured on the show have seen spikes in foot traffic, online engagement, and national media attention. Kasama, the Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant visited by Carmy and Sydney in the season two episode “Sundae,” saw a major surge in demand following its feature. Mr.Beef on Orleans, the inspiration for The Original Beef in the show, has become a pilgrimage site for fans, with crowds regularly queuing down the block. It’s a rare moment when art imitates life and then life, in return, is elevated by the art itself. 

 

Only one week after the release of The Bear’s latest season, FX confirmed its renewal for a fifth season, a move that thrilled fans of the show. Season four ended on an enthralling cliffhanger that left the fate of the restaurant, and its tightly wound team, hanging in the balance. 

The show’s renewal was a move that surprised no one but confirmed: The Bear isn’t just a show about food anymore. It’s about the people who dare to imagine new ways to survive, and when we decide to build something better, even in the heat.

THE BEAR — “Groundhogs”— Season 4 Episode 1 (Streams Thursday, June 26th) — Pictured: (l-r) Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu, Liza Colón-Zayas as Tina. CR: FX

Production has remained in Chicago, filming in River North, Ukrainian Village, and Wicker Park, spotlighting just a few of the neighborhoods that are integral to the city. The continued use of these real locations only further solidifies the show’s bond with Chicago. With multiple Emmys and a Golden Globe under its belt, The Bear is no stranger to critical acclaim and shows no signs of stopping. The series recently scored another 13 Emmy nominations, bringing the total to 49 nominations after just three seasons. Of those, The Bear has taken home 21, becoming one of the most decorated shows. 

Among the Emmys this year, Ayo Edebiri made history by receiving her third consecutive nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series as well as earning her first nomination for directing. She is the first woman ever to be recognized in both categories in the same year for a comedy series. 

THE BEAR — “Groundhogs”— Season 4 Episode 1 (Streams Thursday, June 26th) Pictured: Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu. CR: FX.

All four seasons of FX’s The Bear are now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

Featured image: THE BEAR — “Soubise” — Season 4 Episode 2 (Streams Thursday, June 26th) Pictured: (l-r) Jeremy Allen White as Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, Ayo Edebiri as Sydney Adamu. CR: FX.

“Jurassic World: Rebirth” Production Designer James Clyne on Creating Killer Labs and Animalistic Architecture

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Production designer James Clyne recreates and modernizes the dinosaur playground gone wrong that first blew our minds in Steven Spielberg‘s 1993 classic Jurassic Park. Back then, that playground—or theme park, to be more accurate—was the brainchild of John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), and like all children, it had a mind and personality of its own, determined to become something other than its parents’ fervent wish. In Jurassic World: Rebirth, Clyne introduces audiences to hidden labs on Isla Saint-Hubert, known as “Site B,” more of a theoretical theme park for scientists experimenting with creating dino hybrids. Clyne develops familiar sights and settings, drawing inspiration from production designer Rick Carter (Jurassic Park), with whom he collaborated on Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Lincoln.

For director Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World: Rebirth, the production designer was tasked with filling spaces with danger around every monolith, in every cave, and behind every tree. A mercenary of sorts, Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), is hired to infiltrate the abandoned hybrid-dino island. Along with Dr. Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), Zora and her hired guns have the nice and easy job of retrieving DNA from man-eating dinosaurs that could cure hearts and save lives. Piece of cake, save for all the things on the island that can kill you, and intend to do just that.

Clyne initially envisioned a career designing cars, but after over two decades in the film industry, he’s now creating vehicles — as well as science labs and temples — for the big screen. We chat with him about recreating the prehistoric past and imagining the scientific future.

 

You studied automotive design back in school; that was the career path you were on. You’ve got to design a truck that’s pivotal in Jurassic World: Rebirth. How’d your automotive skills help you there?

The truck that you see in Rebirth was one of the first things that Gareth had us design. Initially, I thought, ‘We have such little time on this film; maybe I’ll get some Land Rovers and do a cool paint job.’ I remember Gareth saying, “Well, we’re in Jurassic Park. If we have a vehicle, why don’t we design one from the ground up?” It’s like, okay, alright.  And so, those skills of being an automotive designer certainly helped – not only with vehicles, but worlds themselves and industrial design. In a way, I get to have my cake and eat it, too. I don’t have to spend 10 years developing a vehicle for Mercedes or Toyota. I get to create an entire vehicle within five weeks. 

L to R: Rupert Friend as Martin Krebs and Scarlett Johansson is skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

How does the aesthetic of Spielberg’s original film and the work of the production designer Rick Carter guide you? 

With Rebirth, it was a challenge because we didn’t want to compromise the inherent look of Jurassic Park. There were touchstones that we constantly wanted to keep throughout. For the truck itself, that red color on the truck is an exact color match of the original security Jeep from Jurassic Park. We found one of the Jeeps at Universal Studios in L.A. and took a sample from it to match exactly. You’ll notice the red throughout the film. Another example of using the classic Jurassic Park aesthetic is at the end. They go to these kinds of thermal structures on the island when the two groups meet up at the end. In the first movie, they featured these angled, almost concrete-like pieces of architecture. We took that design, updated it, and created our world out of it. 

L to R: Rupert Friend is Martin Krebs, Mahershala Ali is Duncan Kincaid, Scarlett Johansson is skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett and Jonathan Bailey is paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

The opening of the film is a laboratory, where, in Jurassic Park fashion, things go terribly wrong. How’d you want to update the franchise’s past labs? 

The lab was the most expensive set that we did for the entire movie. It was my opportunity to create a high-tech, clean-room aesthetic. In my mind, this island was more like an advanced program. Think of it like Skunk Works, a Lockheed Martin kind of advanced program, where they were given all the money and technology to build whatever. I wanted the lab to reflect that ability to throw money at something and create something incredible.

D-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Was everything in that environment practical? For example, the big glass door where we see the employee get eaten? 

Gareth wanted that door to be massive. It’s all in-camera. Not only was the glass probably 18 feet tall, allowing him to really get the camera in there to see the creature come in, but there was also a huge circular door that we built on set. I just tried to build the largest door I could possibly fit into the stage at Elstree [Studios]. Some of the set is inspired by brutalist architecture – the big concrete beams that you see holding up the structure. And for that white, we used automotive-grade paints to achieve the perfect finish. So, that probably goes back to what you were questioning in the beginning, of that automotive tie.

For the lab, how do you and the prop team create not only a cinematic but convincing set? 

On some level, for a movie, you just want things to look interesting. We examined a number of labs, but they’re so clean that there’s almost nothing visible. We wanted to have the tools seen and laid out. We even built instruction manuals, and if you open one, you’ll find a bunch of literature on dissection and dinosaur DNA. All those levels we knew the camera might not pick up on, but we had to be ready for it, because if Gareth put his camera right on something, we needed to have that level of fidelity and detail. 

Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

You and Gareth create a lot of scope even in restricted sets. When Zora (Scarlett Johansson) and Dr. Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) retrieve DNA from the Quetzalcoatlus’ nest – the temple – it’s claustrophobic, but at the same time, a major set piece. How do you create such scale in a tight set?

There is a lot of back and forth, as we try to understand where Gareth wants to place the action. Also, how large that dinosaur is dictates the size of the space. That’s when we got our heads wrapped around that. We start to build little models. We do concept art. We show them to Gareth. He reacts. I had this idea that there’s a mouth at the end of the temple that relates, obviously, to the large mouths of dinosaurs. That wasn’t in the script. It was just something to play with, this feeling you’re almost in the throat of a dinosaur, but you’re in this temple.

L to R: Scarlett Johansson as skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett and Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

Were there other sets you wanted, like the Temple, to feature animalistic qualities? 

Everything we did, I wanted it to feel a little like an animal. Even the ship had this weird graphic texture or pattern on it. The pattern is almost a graphical representation of a dinosaur. You can see the stripes on the Titanosaurus — there’s red on it. There are patterns and colors that we pushed in the dinosaurs themselves. I wanted the world to reflect that, too. Even the truck, I wanted it to feel animalistic, like a creature. I tried to push that as much as I could. 

Spinosaurus in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

As someone who’s worked on several Steven Spielberg productions, like Minority Report and Lincoln, how’d those experiences shape you as the production designer you are today?

I learned something from him in that he could be very graphic with his imagery. He can focus and use the set to his advantage. I think things become very complicated in the design world and the film industry these days, with all the technology we have. I’m constantly trying to tell myself: make it simpler, more graphic. Simpler and more graphic is more cinematic. Maybe that’s what I’ve learned from him above all.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is in theaters now.

Featured image: D-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.

“Minted” Director Nicholas Bruckman on Spending Two Years Following Digital Artists Through NFT Heaven & Hell

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Nicholas Bruckman has built a distinctive career that bridges documentary filmmaking with commercial storytelling, following his instincts and his passions on projects big and small. The New York-based director has participated in prestigious labs, including the Rotterdam Producers Lab and the IFP Cannes Producers Fellowship, and the Sloan Foundation, Cinereach, and other notable organizations support his work. Through his company People’s Television, he regularly produces branded films for major clients including Airbnb, Greenpeace, Meta, and Dropbox, having shot in over 25 countries worldwide.

Bruckman’s feature documentaries tackle complex social and cultural movements with nuance and empathy. His previous film, Not Going Quietly, followed activist Adi Barkan’s fight for healthcare reform in 2018 during his battle with ALS. Now, with Minted, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens, and is now streaming on Netflix, Bruckman turns his lens to the NFT phenomenon, exploring how digital artists navigated the crypto art boom and bust, and what the NFT market, and the artists, buyers and sellers who created it, are signaling about the broader art world.

Bruckman reveals how he tracked the rise, fall, and potential lasting legacy of NFTs through interviews with the artists themselves, with an eye toward how the “weird” world of Non-Fungible Tokens has lessons for the skeptics and naysayers.

Considering you balance both passion projects and client-based work, how do you decide what you’re going to focus on when you tackle a new doc?

All my films—feature documentaries, narratives, and short-form brand work—have always been shaped by responses to things facing us as a society. It’s tempting to follow the news cycle. “Everyone’s talking about the environment today,” or “Everyone’s talking about Ukraine, so we should double down on that story.” But by the time you finish your film, maybe that’s not the topic of the day anymore. I learned this with Not Going Quietly. We wanted to release it by the 2020 election, as it centers on the 2018 midterms, when Adi Barkan helped flip control to the Democrats. We said, “We have to get this out before the election.”

 

But that didn’t happen.

We almost did—the film got into Tribeca 2020, but then everything was canceled due to COVID. Luckily, we kept working and realized events from that year were more important and universal to the story. It became more personal and ultimately more timely because the film is about healthcare, which became crucial during the pandemic. Barbara Koppel, who made the Oscar-winning Harlan County USA, told me: “I thought I needed to get my film out before the next miners’ strike. I was rushing, rushing, rushing. Then it took me years, and thank God it did because people are still talking about that movie today.” Great films last forever.

How do you balance what you’re passionate about with client demands?

I came to filmmaking from an activist background. I grew up in New York and was filming on 9/11 as a teenage filmmaker. I became involved in anti-Iraq war protests and felt disheartened when Bush was reelected in 2004 despite the war’s atrocities. I realized filmmaking was a medium for advocacy and social change. Roger Ebert said film is an empathy machine—you can walk in somebody else’s shoes. That’s needed more than ever. The more divided our world becomes, the more we need this format to bridge gaps in ways social media clips can’t.

How does that viewpoint shape your process? 

I’m interested in telling the stories of people who are less likely to be seen on screen—whether they’re doing extraordinary things or facing extraordinary challenges, like Adi Barkan. But not every film is about progressive activists. Minuted is about NFTs, which surprised people because the crypto world is so different from my issue-driven films. But I thought it had similar inspirational characters, like Beeple, the artist who sold his $69 million NFT. He’s an iconoclast like Adi—someone whose shoes you’d want to walk in. The idea of bringing people together and forming deep connections between people who might never meet transcends partisanship. We need that now more than ever.

Beeple looking at artwork – NFT Film LLC/Minted.

Even though you wisely don’t try to time your work to the newscycle, were you ever concerned that NFTs would be less relevant by the time Minted premiered?

We had the same question: “Who cares about NFTs? We have to get this out while NFTs are hot.” But, the NFT market crashed, and that became key to the story. After incredible highs when NFTs were worth millions, the crash became important, with parallels to other market crashes, from tulip mania to stock market crashes. Now, with recent political changes, the crypto market is booming again. These things come in unpredictable waves. Telling the best story is most important.

Walk me through the production process on the film.

We began shooting in 2021 during the huge crypto boom when everyone was at home trading GameStop and NFTs and Bored Ape pictures worth millions. What wasn’t being reported was that artists doing interesting work—Beeple and others we profile worldwide, such as Justin Aversano, Latasha, Karina, and Kina Matahari in Cuba—were using crypto art and tokenizing their artwork onto the blockchain for extraordinary purposes. First, to create financial stability for the first time. In Karina’s case, to escape censorship in Cuba. In Justin’s case, to collect royalties on artwork, addressing this fundamental flaw where artists never collect secondary royalties.

Karina is a Cuban gallerist and political artist operating out of the art community in Havana. An artist combating censorship by the strict laws of the Cuban government, she was drawn to the decentralized nature of NFTs as a form of expression.

Which was definitely not the overarching way NFTs were or still are being discussed.

There was this counter-narrative to the speculative mania that was really changing lives. We had no idea where the story was going—we were just watching their lives change overnight. We shot until 2023. The film follows the seasons of this market. Because it has many characters and threads, we use a two-year chronology, beginning with Beeple selling his $69 million piece and ending with the last scene, two years later, when he hosts a huge party celebrating both the rise and fall of this movement. Even though the NFT market declined, the NFT journey created mainstream digital art. Beeple is having digital art parties at MoMA, and Justin’s artworks are collected for millions, alongside history’s highest-selling photographers. It was a movement that changed the perception of digital art, even if most awareness centers on controversial aspects, such as generative Bored Ape pictures.

Bored Ape animation. Courtesy Minted.

Your approach was straightforward, too—you’re not proselytizing for NFTs, but you’re certainly not poo pooing them, either.

The film doesn’t take a value position on whether NFTs are good or bad, but shows that artists lead the way with new technologies to find stability. They create paths for other creators, innovators, scientists, and educators.

I’m curious about your thoughts on AI and what it means for creators.

It’s as transformative as people anticipate. It’s essential for artists to be involved—not just using it, but also helping to frame the conversation and regulation surrounding it. Like NFTs, there are amazing pros: it’ll democratize and create accessibility for VFX shots that would have cost ten times more, bringing incredible visions to life for people with great stories. It’ll also lead to rapid transformation, job loss, and maybe devaluation of certain crafts. But, I don’t think it’ll fundamentally replace storytellers and great stories, though it will greatly augment them.

Courtesy Minted.

What would your advice to filmmakers be?

My advice to filmmakers: start using it and don’t be afraid or hostile. That said, regulation is likely needed to protect artists, although I am uncertain about what the future holds. It’s understandable for people to be scared. Minted shows it’s up to artists to shape how technology is used for good or bad. Artists must lead and show positive use cases that make the world better. I hope that happens with AI.

Minted is available on Netflix and, via Grasshopper Film, on digital VOD platforms like Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

Featured image: Featured image: Brooklyn native and current resident of Los Angeles Latashá Alcindor is a hip-hop artist who has ventured into the NFT world by offering her music and music videos for sale on the blockchain, selling for thousands of dollars. Inspired by classic MTV, Latashá strives to redefine the music video as a distinct art form.

How “Presumed Innocent” Production Designer John Paino & Set Decorator Amy Wells Brought Chicago to Los Angeles

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Shot mostly in Pasadena and around Los Angeles, Presumed Innocent, showrunner David E. Kelley’s twisty and riveting courtroom psychological thriller, was able to do so largely thanks to the $12 million in California tax incentives allocated to the prestige drama from Apple TV+. “The crew we have here is the best I’ve worked with all over the world. They’re an incredible bunch of people; you’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with,” production designer John Paino says, referring to the 29 cast and 176 crew members who got to work in their own backyard during the 92-day shoot. Set decorator Amy Wells concurs, adding that everyone in her 30-plus team of decorators and set dressers was based in California.

Filmed at the Warner Bros studio lot, the well-crafted character study stars Jake Gyllenhaal—recently nominated for an Emmy for his work—as Rusty Sabich, a savvy Chicago prosecutor accused of savagely murdering his colleague and lover, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World). As a steady stream of frenzied flashbacks unravels true motivations, secrets, and half-truths, almost everyone’s story begins to waver while the homicide trial proceeds. In an instant, his idyllic life with his wife, Barbara (Ruth Negga, also nominated), and their two teenage children is shattered. Not only that, the new prosecutor taking over the case is scheming rival Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard, nominated as well), who will stop at nothing to pin the murder on him.

In their sixth collaboration, following projects like Big Little Lies and the upcoming series Lanterns, Paino and Wells have developed a shorthand that makes the process much more efficient. “I never have to worry about details with Amy—she’s very detail-oriented and has a great crew. Everything is in place like magic. That’s the shorthand,” Paino shares.  

What was it like to work on your fifth collaboration with Presumed Innocent?

Amy Wells: We know each other very well. So, when I bring him something, I usually know what he’ll like and what he won’t. You’re trying to make choices for the show that fit the characters and our aesthetic. We might like something, but it may not be what the Sabich family would have in their house. We want to make them feel as real as possible.

John Paino: Often, the scripts aren’t very descriptive [about décor], so we fill in the blanks with the director and showrunner. Since we’ve worked together so much, we can reach that point more quickly.

This series was shot entirely around Los Angeles, especially in Pasadena. Was it difficult to double for Chicago?

Paino: It was hard to find locations that felt like suburban Chicago. We used suburbs like Winnetka, which are very leafy and have larger yards. We built interiors for the homes, not only for camera positions, but some of the homes here are so well-renovated that they’re not suitable for filming. The Sabich family is upper-middle-class but not nouveau riche.

Wells: We were the last show to shoot on the old Warner Bros backlot and soundstages, which have since been torn down. They’re putting up new stages and office buildings. But we loved it; it was like our own private back lot.

 

What were some of the Los Angeles neighborhoods where you filmed?

Wells: We shot a lot in Pasadena and Hancock Park. Rusty’s house was on Arroyo [in Pasadena].

Paino: For Carolyn’s house, it was really hard to find a brick house. In Chicago, the architecture features a lot of red brick, which is relatively rare in Los Angeles.

Were most of your crew and vendors local, and how big was your team?

Wells: My crew was all local. The base crew was 10 people, including a woman, who has been my lead person for nine years, the assistant decorator has worked with me for 17 years, six permanent crew, a coordinator, and a PA, plus two on-set dressers. Depending on the day, I could have another 10-20 set dressers working on different sets around town.

Paino: My team of art directors included the incredible supervising art director, Sarah Pott, who had one or two art directors and two assistant art directors. It fluctuates depending on how much we’re doing. We also had a graphic designer.

Wells: Props works closely with us, too. If there are key props that need to be designed, the prop master goes through John and then coordinates with me.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga in “Presumed Innocent,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Much of the story unfolds in the courtroom. What were some of the tricks to liven up the courtroom in an otherwise drab environment during very dialogue-intensive sequences?

Paino: I’m really proud of the courtroom set, I think it’s one of the most realistic sets that Amy and I have done. We spent a lot of time aging things so it looked like it was rebuilt in the ’60s or ’70s— it has a lived-in, beaten-up feel to it. We based it on an amalgamation of big federal courtrooms in Chicago, and then we added a few things. Amy found these gold metallic Venetian blinds that looked fabulous.

Wells: It was an evolving set; it would change from scene to scene as far as the detritus, the mess, and the piles of papers everywhere. It needed to be tended to constantly. It was a good courtroom. I’m sorry to see it go.

Paino: You would think with all the courtroom procedural shows, there’d be a courtroom that we can shoot in. However, there aren’t any because every show builds a courtroom and then disposes of it. This one was such a nice set, I expected them to hold onto it, especially since it was expensive. That courtroom really was a character in the show.

 

To reflect different times of day and give the courtroom sequences various looks, the cinematographers mentioned a rig that you built into the ceiling, allowing them to adjust the lighting as needed. How did that work?

Paino: We made sure the lights were built into the ceiling, and they were big enough so you could see a change in the lighting. There were big, soft diffusers above our set, and with the way the ceiling was built, they could control the light. We had some big windows too. If we only had a few small lights, you wouldn’t be able to get the effect.

Check out part two of our conversation, where Paino and Wells discuss how they dressed Rusty’s house and the gruesome crime scene and what inspired the retro vibe of the show.

 

Presumed Innocent is streaming now on Apple TV+.

Featured image: Episode 2. Jake Gyllenhaal and Bill Camp in “Presumed Innocent,” premiering June 12, 2024 on Apple TV+.

Remembering Malcolm-Jamal Warner: Questlove, Magic Johnson, Tracee Ellis Ross & More Share Their Heartbreak

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The news that Malcolm-Jamal Warner passed away on Sunday sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry and the world at large, as millions of people who watched—and adored—Warner through eight seasons of The Cosby Show and followed his career after were deeply affected. Warner died in an accidental drowning in Costa Rica, the Costa Rican National Police told media outlets. He was 54.

The reaction from those who knew him and those who grew up watching him was swift. Questlove wrote a detailed, lovely tribute to Warner on his Instagram account. A portion of his remembrance reads: “Seeing myself in every episode through his shoes: like being bad at football, wanting clothes outside of my budget, hiding things from your parents (ear piercings or weed), living in a “respectable politics” house of jazz vs “teen music” —-pssssh Theo being instrumental to a lion’s share of gen x teens to see how a sampler worked!!! Or even singalongs at a family gathering—-him dealing with dyslexia ——he even had me think I too can get by in life surviving on “bologna & cereal” and for the first time thinking about “what does it mean to be an adult without depending on your parents?”

Later, Questlove adds: “Mal Jam was the earliest co-signer of the Roots. He attended many a show way before the world got to know us. All that time talking about music extensively and we never got our chance to collaborate as we said we would.”

Here’s the full post:

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A post shared by Questlove (@questlove)

Magic Johnson shared his thoughts on X. Johnson appeared in an AIDS awareness video directed by Warner.

“Cookie and I are sad to hear about the passing of our dear friend Malcolm-Jamal Warner. We were both super fans of the hit Cosby Show and continued to follow his career on shows like Malcolm and Eddie and The Resident. Every time I ran into Malcolm, we would have deep and fun conversations about basketball, life, and business. He will truly be missed. Cookie and I are praying his family and close friends during this difficult time.”

Niecy Nash-Betts also shared her thoughts about Warner on Instagram. “You were giving me my flowers for my work in @grotesqueriefx, and we talked about how happy we both were in our marriages. Damn friend,” she said. “You were the cornerstone of The Cosby Show. We all loved Theo! Never to be forgotten. You will be missed. Rest Easy”

Eddie Griffin, who co-starred with Warner on UPN’s Malcolm & Eddie from 1996-2000, wrote on Instagram, “My Heart is heavy today… For what the world lost was a Father a Son a Poet a Musician a Actor a Teacher a Writer a Director a Friend a Warrior that I had the pleasure of going to war with against the Hollywood machine and sometimes with each other because that’s what Brothers do but the Love was and is always there. You’ve taught me so much and I thank you. Rest Well My Big little Brother.”

Tracee Ellis Ross, who starred alongside Warner in Reed Between the Lines on BET, shared photos of herself and Warner on Instagram.

“I love you, Malcolm. First I met you as Theo with the rest of the world then you were my first TV husband,” she wrote. “My heart is so so sad. What an actor and friend you were: warm, gentle, present, kind, thoughtful, deep, funny, elegant. You made the world a brighter place. Sending so much love to your family. I’m so sorry for this unimaginable loss.”

onstage at the BET Awards ’11 held at The Shrine Auditorium on June 26, 2011 in Los Angeles, California.

These were just a few of the many people who have responded to the gutting news. Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah, Tyrese Gibson, Larenz Tate, Jamie Foxx, Taraji P. Henson, Senator Raphael Warnock, and more have taken to social media to praise and mourn Warner, a talented actor who had the rare gift of being as beloved off-screen as he was on. He will be missed.

NEW YORK CITY – SEPTEMBER 26: Actress Phylicia Rashad and Malcolm Jamal Warner attending “Franciscan Games” on September 26, 1987 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

Featured image: Malcolm-Jamal Warner at AOL Studios In New York on February 12, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Desiree Navarro/WireImage)

“Eddington” Writer/Director Ari Aster on Bringing His Pandemic-Era Neo-Western Thriller Home to New Mexico

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Writer/director Ari Aster broke new ground with Eddington in that it’s the first of his films to be shot where it was intended to be set. Both happen to be in his native state of New Mexico, where production created over 300 jobs.

Set in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the neo-Western satirical black comedy reunites him with his Beau Is Afraid lead, Joaquin Phoenix. The Oscar-winning Joker actor plays a small-town sheriff and mayor locked in a feud with the town’s mayor, played by Pedro Pascal. Eddington‘s ensemble cast also includes Deirdre O’Connell, Emma Stone, Michael Ward, and Luke Grimes.

Here, Aster, who also produced the film and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, discusses what he and Phoenix did to present an authentic New Mexico, screening the movie where it was shot, and how 1980s action flicks influenced the explosive finale.

 

Both you and Joaquin went to New Mexico ahead of filming to scout and for him to get a feel of the community. How did that help?

Before we went out there together, I went out and drove all across the state, went to different counties and talked to different sheriffs, went to small towns, spoke to police chiefs, mayors, public officials, went to Pueblos and talked to people. There were several people that I found very interesting, and served as models for me when I was rewriting the script. I wanted to go out there with Joaquin because there were a few people I had already met that I wanted him to talk to, one of whom I had a strong feeling he would gravitate towards. I tried to leave that to him and not oversell these people, but there was one guy I knew Joaquin was going to like. That turned out to be what happened. We ended up doing a ride-along with him for a day, and we went to his house. I had already spent a considerable amount of time with him, learning about his history, and he had a somewhat contentious relationship with the mayor of the largest town in his county. He and Joaquin got along, and everything from the way Joaquin holds himself, how he walks, and his wardrobe in Eddington was inspired by this guy. He ended up consulting and showing up on set a couple of times. It turned out to be an essential part of the process.

Joaquin Phoenix on duty in ‘Eddington’ (Courtesy of Richard Foreman/A24)

Did that buy the production a lot of good grace, as well as helping with the authenticity?

It was hugely helpful. I’m also from New Mexico. I grew up there, so that helped, too. The film is set in 2020 and depicts the fraught political atmosphere in New Mexico. Eddington works as a microcosm for the country, but it also works as a microcosm for New Mexico itself. It’s a very specific state and I’ve always wanted to make a film set there, because I’ve always felt how fraught the climate has always been. In 2020, that reached a boiling point, and I was very interested in what their experience was during that time. They had stories to tell.

Filming in New Mexico created hundreds of jobs. The production employed over 300 local actors, including crew, principal actors, and background talent—how did that impact the film?

We had an excellent local crew. I prefer to be on location because of budgetary demands, but we don’t always shoot where the film is set. For instance, we didn’t shoot Midsommar in Sweden; we shot that in Hungary. Beau Is Afraid was shot in Montreal, which turned out to be a great place to make a film, but that’s not where the world of Beau Is Afraid exists. It was the same with Hereditary, which wasn’t written to be set in Utah. Eddington was the first time I thought, ‘The film is set in New Mexico and we should be shooting it there.’ It’s also the first time that I’ve worked only on location. The sheriff’s office and Garcia’s bar were abandoned buildings that we had to refortify, or, more accurately, rebuild the interiors from scratch. Otherwise, we were beholden to actual locations. I’m used to building sets for at least some of the locations, and that was a great and challenging experience.

A campaign billboard for Joaquin Phoenix’s ‘Eddington’ character erected in Truth or Consequences, NM (Courtesy of Wes Ellis/A24)

Was a lot of the talent pool you needed to do that available locally?

You bring in the people you need to be the best of the best, so we brought in our production designer, Elliot Hostetter, and Adam Willis, who was the set decorator. A lot of our camera crew came from outside of New Mexico, but most of the other crew was local. That’s also because it’s very expensive to fly people in. You have to put them up the whole way through, so you want to be decisive about who you’re doing that for, especially when you know your budget isn’t huge.

You took the finished film back to one of the towns where you had filmed.

It was important to me to take the film back and screen it for the locals. A part of that was because we shot a lot of the movie in Truth or Consequences. It was a ten-week shoot; we spent four weeks there and loved being there. It’s a really interesting town, and the residents were incredibly generous. We got to do a lot there that we wouldn’t have been able to do in another town, including firing machine guns all night. It felt poetic to revisit the movie and screen it at the local theater.

Writer-director Ari Aster outside one of the El Cortez in Truth or Consequences, NM (Courtesy of Wes Ellis/A24)

You mention the shoot-out finale. That feels very inspired by the action movies of the 80s, a genre and period of filmmaking that many of today’s filmmakers grew up with. Were there any particular films that inspired you?

It was more about the spirit of those films, but it’s true. Joe Cross, the Joaquin Phoenix character, is 50 years old, and those action movies of the 80s and the 90s would have been very important to him. So, at the end of the film, he gets to live through one. He’s shooting at phantoms, but that was in the language of the film, since this is a movie infused with modern realism. All of these characters are living on the internet, and they would have seen all of these movies, including the more sentimental and romantic Westerns that inform Joaquin’s character’s worldview and his image of himself. You also have younger people for whom video games are more important than movies, and language finds its way into the film as well. It almost becomes like Call of Duty.

Pedro Pascal and writer-director Ari Aster discuss a scene on the set of ’Eddington’ (Courtesy of Richard Foreman/A24)

It’s increasingly essential for audiences to support indie films in theaters rather than waiting for streaming. What do you have to say to audiences on that?

It’s hugely important to me. First of all, the movies are finished for the theatrical experience. I spend months in a theater, mixing the sound and utilizing all the speakers to provide you with the most immersive experience possible. That’s just the sound, right? You put so much work into making the film as beautiful as possible, and you want it to be on a big screen. There’s also the communal aspect of the film, and especially a period piece like this, which looks back at a time that we all experienced. If there’s anything hopeful in the movie, it’s that Eddington is about a situation that we’re all still in. Still, hopefully, there can be some solidarity, some strange sauce, in looking back and seeing how we were. Perhaps that’ll allow us to see more clearly where we are, the path we’re on, and whether we’re interested in staying on that path. The film explores the atomization and fracturing of society, where people live in isolated bubbles. I would hate for this to be a film that people only watch in those bubbles, away from each other.

Eddington is in theaters now.

Featured image: L-r: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in “Eddington.” Courtesy A24

Marvel Boss Kevin Feige Talks “Fantastic Four,” Recasting a New Tony Stark, Rebooting the X-Men, & More

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Marvel super producer Kevin Feige invited select journalists to a conference room at Marvel Studios and revealed more in a single sitting than you often get from someone with the keys to a kingdom as vast as Marvel over the course of a full year.

Sitting in the same room where so many big-time introductions and pitch meetings have occurred, Feige regaled his company with his thoughts on the state of the superhero movie industry, his plans for Marvel’s immediate and long-term future, and more. This freewheeling session came just a week ahead of the July 25 release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, one of the MCU’s most marquee movies in years, ushering in the long-awaited reboot of Marvel’s First Family, now led by Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards and Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, while Marvel’s main competitor, DC Studios, enjoys the glow from their own recent and equally massive reboot, James Gunn’s Superman, which soared once again this past weekend.

“I love how you just jump right into it,” Fiege said about Gunn’s film. “You don’t know who Mr. Terrific is? Tough. You’ll figure it out. You don’t know what this is? Just go, go. This is a fully fleshed-out world.” Gunn, of course, was a former Marvel director, having helmed the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy for Feige. The director took his sensibility and his love for the comic source material to DC Studios (which he now leads, alongside Peter Safran.)

Feige intimated that the feeling of arriving in a fully-formed world is one of the things he’s excited about in director Matt Shakman’s Fantastic Four, which is set in a retro-futuristic 1960s New York that is not the same New York that has been destroyed (again and again) in various Marvel films to date.

“We didn’t want to have the Eternals issue of ‘Where were they, where have they been, how come they didn’t help with Thanos?’” Feige told the journalists. “We wanted them to be apart from our reality so that we didn’t have to say, ‘Oh look, they were hiding over here.’” As for the retro-futuristic aesthetic, Feige said that there’s a lot more behind the beautifully designed sets than the pure aesthetic pleasure of it. “It was a unique aesthetic that felt like it could absolutely be its own world, its own reality. And when we show it to audiences in the screening process that we do leading up to it, people just accept it right off the bat and feel liberated that they can just enjoy what’s ahead of them…it is no-homework-required.”

(L-R) Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing and H.E.R.B.I.E in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL.

Beyond The Fantastic Four, Marvel has the massive Avengers: Doomsday on the horizon, which sees the return of directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who last helmed Marvel’s most successful film, Avengers: Endgame. They bring with them Robert Downey Jr., now in the role of Dr. Doom, the iconic villain from the comics, who will be facing off against a massive list of superheroes and mutants. Doomsday will boast X-Men stars from the 2000s and 2010s, reprising their roles for the film—Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, James Marsden as Cyclops, and Kelsey Grammer as Beast.

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 27: Robert Downey Jr. speaks onstage during the Marvel Studios Panel in Hall H at SDCC in San Diego, California on July 27, 2024. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)

Feige said that the old X-Men cast will eventually give way to new actors in the roles, with these new X-Men making their MCU debut in their own film. Marvel can do this, of course, thanks to the MCU existing in a narrative multiverse, itself born from the comics. The “Secret Wars” storyline from 2015 serves as a key touchstone for the world-building Marvel is currently undertaking, with multiple timelines intersecting and characters being dispersed across them.

Feige also hinted that it won’t just be the X-Men who are getting recast, but some of the MCU mainstays, too, including Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. Feige pointed out that recasting iconic roles is a long-standing tradition in Hollywood.

“Amy Pascal and David Heyman are now searching for a new James Bond,” Feige said, regarding the producers of Amazon MGM’s upcoming Bond mission, with Dune visionary Denis Villeneuve in the director’s chair.  “David [Corenswet], the new Superman — he was awesome. That will always be the case.”

Not that it’s easy to do. Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are massive international stars for a reason; they were perfect as Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. Yet Feige said the same was true of Sean Connery as James Bond, and yet when the role was recast, the franchise continued to flourish.

Then there are mainstays who are staying, like Tom Holland as Peter Parker, who returns for his fourth turn as Spider-Man in the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day,

Feige hinted that the bittersweet ending of No Way Home has opened up storytelling opportunities for Holland to become the Spider-Man that was beloved in the comics, a proper defender of New York City.

“I think there’s a promise at the end of No Way Home, that for as sad as it is that Peter is forgotten by everyone in his life, we are seeing for the first time in the Tom Holland Spider-Man stories him being a proper Spider-Man. Him being by himself, dedicated to saving the city, and dealing with — for lack of better terms — street-level crime, as opposed to world-ending events.”

When you talk about street-level crime in New York City, one name that comes to mind for Marvel fans is the Punisher. Feige discussed how Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher will be a perfect addition to this new commitment that Spider-Man is making.

“So when you do that, you say, okay, who are the other street-level characters that we’ve never seen him interact with? And of course, I love that The Punisher started in a Spider-Man comic. That great cover… I don’t want to say too much, but Destin [Daniel Cretton, the director] — I will say too much — Destin is doing an amazing job right now on that movie, which starts shooting very soon. And he’s got eight or nine comic covers up on his wall in his art department that he is bringing to life in this movie, which is super cool.”

Featured image: Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL

“Smurfs”: Rihanna & Henry Jackman Join Forces for a Score That’s Weird, Wonderful, and a Total Bop 

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When news first broke that Rihanna would not only voice Smurfette but also produce the upcoming Smurfs movie and contribute original music, fans were immediately intrigued. The announcement practically created a new kind of internet hype: “Rihanna is Smurfette” became its own meme moment, and rightfully so. But as the film’s July 18, 2025 release approaches, it’s becoming clear that Rihanna’s involvement goes far beyond novelty — and when paired with composer Henry Jackman, the Smurfs musical direction is shaping up to be just as bold, playful, and surprising as the movie itself.  

Rihanna’s Return to Music, via the Mushroom Village 

Rihanna’s new single “Friend of Mine” is her first in three years, and while it’s technically written for a movie about blue animated creatures, the track is no joke. As Matt Patches put it in Polygon, “Friend of Mine” is, unquestionably, a bop. He goes on to say, “With all due respect to Maroon 5 and Pharrell and all the other acts who have sailed through the Despicable-Me-to-#1-pop-hit pipeline, this is how it’s done.” 

Described as a tropical, dance-inspired anthem, Friend of Mine features “very limited lyrics and more of vocal refrains,” according to Shaurya Thapa of Time Out, but it doesn’t need much to shine. The song’s breezy rhythm and vocal flourishes showcase Rihanna’s signature style of relaxation, melodic, and memorable. 

Rihanna in “Smurfs.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Director Chris Miller confirmed in an interview with Collider that Friend of Mine is just one of two songs Rihanna created for the film: “It is multiple. It’s two songs — one that really, really lives in the body of the movie and one towards the end of the film.” Miller added that Rihanna and Roc Nation were key collaborators in defining the film’s musical identity: “Her ability to produce, her team, the Roc Nation team, really took the reins of creating the music and zeroing in on the musical style for the film when it came to the songs.” 

 

As a producer on the film, Rihanna was hands-on in shaping both sound and style. She was even involved in tweaking the look of Smurfette: “It was about a year where we went around and we tried everything that we could,” Miller said, describing the process of working with her to refine Smurfette’s design. “It was funny… we ended up both, at the same time, pretty much landing back at exactly our starting point.” 

Enter: Henry Jackman’s Epic Score 

While Rihanna delivers the pop heat, composer Henry Jackman handles the orchestral heartbeat of the film. Best known for his work on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Wreck-It Ralph, and Puss in Boots, Jackman reunites with director Chris Miller to score Smurfs. His cinematic instincts are expected to guide the film’s emotional and adventurous turns — from warm moments in Smurf Village to high-stakes missions across dimensions. 

Miller had nothing but praise for Jackman’s work: “Henry crushed the score.” He hinted that the music had to evolve as the film went from quirky village life to “a rescue mission to get Papa Smurf back,” involving magic, family secrets, and even “a whole dimensional thing” in the third act. 

A Soundtrack That Smurfs the Line Between Fun and Global 

The full Smurfs soundtrack blends Jackman’s traditional film scoring with pop from around the globe. According to NME, the album includes 14 tracks, and features contributions from Tyla, Cardi B, James Corden, and Indian-American artists like Natania and Subhi, with some songs even including Hindi lyrics. It’s a globally minded collection that reflects the diversity of the cast and the expansive world the film builds. 

As Thapa notes, the Smurfs franchise has a history of feel-good singles (like Britney Spears’ “Ooh La La” and Meghan Trainor’s “I’m A Lady”), but this reboot takes it a step further: “The film’s soundtrack promises to be a step above its precursors.”  

 What Makes This Musical Collaboration Work? 

At first glance, pairing a Grammy-winning pop icon with a film score veteran for a kid’s movie might sound like a marketing stunt. But Smurfs (2025) seems to be crafting a musical experience that’s both thoughtful and fresh. Rihanna’s return to music isn’t just a one-off — it’s embedded in the narrative. And Jackman’s score promises to elevate the visuals and emotions without overpowering them. 

Miller summed it up best when speaking about Rihanna’s dual role: “She took her time with it and found it… this is not going to be a cookie-cutter, standardized version of a ballad, for instance, that you see in an animated movie.” 

Final Thoughts 

With Rihanna bringing the pop, Jackman anchoring the emotion, and a soundtrack that blends cultures and genres, Smurfs isn’t just a reboot — it’s a musical reawakening. Whether you’re here for the nostalgia, the visuals, or the soundtrack, this could be the rare animated film where the score truly hits as hard as the story. 

Smurfs arrives in theaters on July 18, 2025. And yes — “Rihanna is Smurfette” really did deliver. 

Featured image: Rihanna in “Smurfs.” Courtesy Paramount Pictures.

 

 

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” Breaks New Ground: 70MM IMAX Tickets Available Now for 2026 Release

Posted on by babrams

In an unprecedented move, tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey are already on sale—a year ahead of the movie’s release date.

Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Homer’s epic isn’t due in theaters until July 17, 2026. Advanced tickets are already on sale for IMAX theaters capable of screening the film in Nolan’s preferred 70mm. This appears to be the first time in movie history that tickets for a film have been made available a year before its release. The only rub is that there aren’t that many theaters in the U.S. with 70mm capability—just a few dozen.

Yet Universal is, wisely, all-in on Nolan’s latest. “We know this film will be a once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece that Homer himself would be very proud of,” Jim Orr, Universal Pictures’ president of domestic theatrical distribution, said from the stage of the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on Wednesday at this year’s CinemaCon.

Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic is the writer/director’s star-studded follow-up to his Oscar-winning biopic Oppenheimer, which turned the life of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, into a riveting, three-hour storytelling masterclass. Nolan certainly seems ideally suited to take on Homer’s epic, which stars Matt Damon as the waylaid hero Odysseus, prohibited from coming home after the Trojan War by vengeful gods, goddesses, and more. Nolan’s incredible cast, which includes Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Mia Goth, Tom Holland, Benny Safdies, and others, will portray the tale’s motley crew of gods, goddesses, kings, peasants, debaucherous suitors, all spread out over far-flung locations and who come into contact, for good or ill, with Odysseus. Nolan embarked on his adaptation with longtime collaborators like DP Hoyte Van Hoytema, editor Jennifer Lame, and composer Ludwig Göransson, all well suited to his meticulous, singular approach.

Orr described Nolan’s film as a “mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology.” Nolan, Hoytema, and his team were able to deploy brand-new IMAX cameras after Nolan asked the company if they could resolve some of the camera’s problems, which IMAX then delivered. Hoytema and his team were able to use new, lighter-weight cameras this time around. 

It makes sense that Nolan and Universal are so invested in getting people into IMAX theaters—Oppenheimer earned more than $190 million of the film’s total gross on the large format screens.

Featured image: Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Courtesy Universal Pictures.