Naked Gun is ready for a reboot at Paramount, and a venerable action star known for playing ruthlessly efficient types is ready to become a bumbling detective prone to hilarious catastrophes.
The studio confirmed that the goofball police comedy that starred Leslie Nielsen as the absurdly incompetent detective Frank Drebin is getting rebooted, with none other than Liam Neeson set to play Frank Drebin Jr., is headed to theaters in 2025. The film comes from director Akiva Schaffer, a longtime Saturday Night Live writer and director of the Andy Samberg-led Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping. Seth McFarlane is on board as a producer. Putting Neeson through his absurdist paces as Drebin Jr. alone will be worth the price of admission.
The new Naked Gun joins a slew of upcoming titles Paramount announced. A new film action film from directors Robert Olsen and Dan Berk called Novocaine, starring Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder, is coming to theaters on March 14, 2025. The film is centered on Quaid’s bank executive, who has the unusual ability to feel no pain, a bug that becomes a feature when his bank is robbed. Then there’s Vicious, set for an August 8, 2025 release, directed by Bryan Bertino and starring Dakota Fanning as a woman who fights for her life over the course of a single night after receiving a strange gift. The musical Better Man, starring British singer Robbie Williams as himself and directed by Michael Gracey, has a limited release set for Christmas Day this year and then goes wide on January 17, 2025. Then there’s a new PAW Patrol heading to theaters on July 31, 2026, followed by director Jeff Rowe’s sequel, TMNT2, which is slated for an October 9, 2026 release
For more films and series from Paramount and Paramount+, check out these stories:
Featured image: 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)
All five of the Oscar-nominated songs will be performed live at this year’s Academy Awards.
The Dolby Stage will not only be home to the 96th Oscars ceremony but will also serve as a major concert venue this Sunday, with Jon Batiste, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, Becky G, Scott George and the Osage Singers, and Ryan Gosling and Mark Ronson will all perform their Oscar-nominated numbers.
This news follows an update on who some of the presenters at this year’s Oscars will be, which include Zendaya, Nicolas Cage, Al Pacino, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
As for the original songs you’ll be hearing during the show, here are the song nominees and the performers: “It Never Went Away” from “American Symphony” (performed by Jon Batiste, music and lyric by Jon Batiste and Dan Wilson), “I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie” (performed by Ryan Gosling and Mark Ronson, music and lyric by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt), “The Fire Inside” from “Flamin’ Hot” (performed by Becky G, music and lyric by Diane Warren),“Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)” from “Killers of the Flower Moon” (performed by Scott George and the Osage Singers, music and lyric by Scott George) and “What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie” (performed by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, music and lyric by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell).
Caption: RYAN GOSLING on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer leads all films this year with a whopping 13 nominations, followed closely Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things with 11 and Martin Scorseose’s Killers of the Flower Moon notching 10. Your other Best Picture nominees are Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.
Check out the video here for a refresher on what made “I’m Just Ken” such a phenomenon.
Featured image: L-r: KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR and RYAN GOSLING on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
The first trailer for Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow reveals the Sundance hit that defied easy categorization and yet mesmerized critics.
Schoenbrunn’s film follows two teenagers caught in that nightmarish unreality known colloquially as the suburbs. It’s the 1990s, and Owen (Justice Smith) is the type of kid who feels world-weary already, alienated by his shyness and sense that he’s not entirely himself.
Yet Owen’s life changes when he meets a cool older girl named Maddy (Bridgett Lundy-Paine), who introduces him to the TV show The Pink Opaque, a sci-fi show that airs late on Saturday nights and is centered on two teen girls with a cosmic connection and a duty to fight against evils. Although these two girls live on the other side of the country, they’re able to sense each other through the glowing pink tattoos on the backs of their necks. There’s confident Tara (Lindsay Jordan) and shy Isabel (Helena Howard), and together, their power is formidable. Owen’s hooked.
Owen and Maddy’s friendship mirrors that of Tara and Isabel, with Maddy trying to get Owen to come out of his shell and embrace his true self. Through The Pink Opaque and Maddy’s friendship, Owen has found at least a small foothold on happiness, but trouble is brewing. Soon enough, the reality of Owen’s suburban life and the drama of The Pink Opaque begin to bleed together. What becomes apparent is that who Owen really wants to be is Isabel, the girl from the TV show he loves.
“I Saw the TV Glow is the rare (and precious) sophomore feature that resoundingly expands on debut promise, that confirms its filmmaker as a mighty talent whose creative engine is churning into motion,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson after its Sundance screening.“A layered and authentic portrait of identity and dysphoria, wrapped in ’90s nostalgia and surreal imagery that embeds itself deep into your psyche,” wrote Bloody Disgusting’s Meagan Navarro.
Check out the trailer below. I Saw the TV Glow hits theaters on May 3.
For more stories on upcoming films and in-depth interviews with filmmakers, check these out:
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is rumbling towards theaters this weekend with the thunderous power of a sandworm. The second part of Villeneuve’s possibly three-part epic (he’s currently working on the script for Part Three, which has yet to be confirmed, and would be based on “Dune Messiah,” Frank Herbert’s sequel to his original book) was delayed from releasing this past fall due to the actor’s strike. This has meant that with this weekend’s release, the film’s stars have been out in full force to promote the film, including Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Florence Pugh, and Austin Butler. Now that Part Two‘s premiere is upon us, ticket sales are flying faster than the Spice off the desert of Arrakis, positioning Villeneuve’s latest as the year’s biggest film thus far. (We do and do not apologize for the Dune puns.)
The projections vary, from a more modest but still healthy $65 million opening weekend to a haul nearing $90 million. Still, the consistent takeaway is that Dune: Part Two is tracking for a very big premiere weekend domestically, boosted by a major splash at the international market, which will add another $80-90 million from around 70 markets.
The excitement surrounding Part Two is extra sweet, considering how Part One debuted. Villeneuve’s first installment was critically acclaimed, a sweeping, magisterial introduction to the world Frank Herbert created in his now iconic 1965 novel, the first proper adaptation of Herbert’s book since David Lynch’s 1984 film. Villeneuve decided to break Herbert’s tome into two parts, a bold choice given he and co-writer Jon Spaihtsleft major characters (like Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, played in Part Two by Austin Butler) and major action set pieces for a second film that hadn’t yet been greenlit. Yet the first film, despite opening simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max during the peak COVID era, was not just a critical hit—it ended up doing well commercially, notching $402 million worldwide. Part Two, on the contrary, is opening wide and benefits from being the sole big release this weekend, giving it a huge number of IMAX and Dolby screens, the premium large format that is the preferred choice for sci-fi fans, Villeneuve fans, and Villeneuve himself (as well as fellow filmmakers like Christopher Nolan).
Part Two picks up where the first Dune left off (here’s a video refresher), with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), now under the protection of the Fremen, the native inhabitants of Arrakis. Their desert planet has been the source of intergalactic power-grabbing for years due to the abundance of Spice, which functions as fuel for intergalactic travel and a whole lot more. Part Two is centered on the end game after the evil Houe Harkonnen’s decapitation of House Atreides in Part One, which included the assassination of Paul’s father, Duke (Oscar Isaac), and Paul’s increasingly fervent belief that he was chosen to lead the remnants of his House and the Fremen in a battle royale against House Harkonnen and the forces that backed them up, including the galaxy’s prime mover, Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken).
Along with the aforementioned cast, Dune Part Two includes returning members Javier Bardem as the Fremen Stilgar, Josh Brolin as Atreides’ ally Gurney Halleck, and Dave Bautista as Beast Rabban. Newcomers joining Butler, Pugh (who plays Princess Irulan) are Léa Seydoux as Lady Margot and Souheila Yacoub as Shishakli.
Dune: Part Two opens on March 1.
For more on Dune: Part Two, check out these stories:
Featured image: Caption: A scene from Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Ethan Coen’s solo directorial debut, Drive-Away Dolls, stars Margaret Qualley as Jamie, an unhindered Texan attached at the hip to her best friend and human hand-brake, Marian, played by Geraldine Viswanathan. The only trait these two twenty-somethings seemingly share is that they are both lesbians, but when an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee turns into a game of cat and mouse involving a couple of hired goons, Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C.J. Wilson), the girls’ bond gets even closer, with the fun bonus of their transformation into skilled accomplices.
(L to R) Margaret Qualley as “Jamie” and Geraldine Viswanathan as “Marian” in director Ethan Coen’s DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, a Focus Features release. Credit: Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features
That Marian and Jamie ended up at all with a suitcase of highly coveted contents is an unfortunate coincidence set in motion by Curlie (Bill Camp), the short-worded proprietor of a rundown Philadelphia drive-away service. Hearing he needs to send a particular car to Tallahassee, he hands the keys to the first Tallahassee-bound clients who walk into the shambles of an office. For Jamie and Marian, now the unwitting conveyors of precious cargo, Curly’s is just the first stop on a road trip’s worth of grungy locations, all evocative of an American time that has passed by.
The film is set in 1999 at the end of the year, but “Ethan didn’t care that much about the time,” said Yong Ok Lee, the film’s production designer. Drive-Away Dolls is set in the Y2K era, but she focused less on period and more on the character of each location. For Curly’s dumpy office, for example, “nobody notices this place even exists,” she said, and “texture was more important than other considerations,” so she layered the room with wood, water stains, and bales of paperwork, the last of which doubled as a comedic prop for one of the film’s most memorable action scenes.
Bill Camp stars as “Curlie” in director Ethan Coen’s DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, a Focus Features release. Credit: Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features
Staying one step ahead of Arliss and Flint, Marian and Jamie stay at cheap motels and amuse themselves at a series of dive bars. Shooting locations frequently doubled for more than one set, so Lee focused on what the viewer would see inside and out to create the illusion of distinct venues.
“My main focus was how I could achieve making Pittsburgh everywhere, from Philadelphia to Florida,” she said. “The signage was really important for this movie,” and Lee and her team worked with Advision Signs, a local Pittsburgh sign-maker, to create signs for every dive and roadside motel the girls enter. Building a juke joint to which the hired goons are misdirected by a women’s college soccer team with whom Marian and Jamie quickly bond, “we unexpectedly used a lot of recycled material,” primarily from Construction Junction, Lee said, in order to build the juke joint as it would have been in reality, a DIY project using cinder blocks and reused metal and plastic.
Production Designer Yong Ok Lee on the set of director Ethan Coen’s DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, a Focus Features release. Credit: Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features(L to R) Geraldine Viswanathan as “Marian”, Margaret Qualley as “Jamie” and Beanie Feldstein as “Sukie” in director Ethan Coen’s DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, a Focus Features release. Credit: Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features
Home environments, like Marian’s apartment and that of Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), Jamie’s blood-curdling cop ex-girlfriend, were simpler to create, highlighting just what the viewer needs. “I wanted these to be a little loose, design-wise. It’s about character, not about their places. We even let [Sukie’s] place be a little empty so that we could focus on the dildo decoration,” Lee said, of an odd bit of wall decor foreshadowing what’s to come.
Most aesthetically significant are the bars where the film begins and ends, similar long, narrow spaces with high-backed booths reminiscent of classic dives easily found all over the country. In one [spoiler alert], the Collector (Pedro Pascal) loses the story’s precious cargo, as well as his head. In another, Marian and Jamie triumph. Lee built the interior of each bar to mirror the other, using the same layout so that the spaces functioned like “a head and a tail” to this bawdy romp down the Eastern Seaboard.
Pedro Pascal stars as “The Collector” in director Ethan Coen’s DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, a Focus Features release. Credit: Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features(L to R) Actor Geraldine Viswanathan, actor Margaret Qualley and director/writer/producer Ethan Coen on the set of DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, a Focus Features release. Credit: Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features
Drive Away Dolls is in theaters now.
For more on Universal Pictures, Peacock, and Focus Features projects, check out these stories:
Featured image: (L to R) Margaret Qualley as “Jamie” and Geraldine Viswanathan as “Marian” in director Ethan Coen’s DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, a Focus Features release. Credit: Courtesy of Working Title / Focus Features
Throughout her career, Emmy-winning documentarian Alex Stapleton has spotlighted such colorful characters as baseball legend Reggie Jackson and movie maverick Roger Corman. She’s examined the role athletes play in the cultural and political conversation in Shut up and Dribble and investigated the struggle for LGBTQ rights in Pride. But the HBO series God Save Texas presented Stapleton an opportunity to document a subject unlike any she had captured before — herself.
Inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright’s 2019 book of the same name, God Save Texas explores three timely subjects through the eyes of Texas-based filmmakers. Richard Linklater kicks it off with Hometown Prison, an insightful look at the prison industry in Huntsville. In La Frontera, Iliana Sosa offers an emotional exploration of the country’s border policies framed around the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso.
Stapleton’s segment, The Price of Oil,sees her returning to her hometown of Houston to explore how its dominant industry has impacted the Black community. Through interviews with aunts, uncles, and cousins, she details how not only have they failed to reap any economic benefits from oil but also that they are suffering from the environmental impact of unregulated refinery expansion that has put both their health and Pleasantville, their Houston community, at risk.
In a candid conversation, the producer/director discusses taking on big oil, delving into family history, and defining her role as a Black female documentarian.
How did you get involved with God Save Texas?
Larry Wright and (filmmaker) Alex Gibney had partnered on many iconic docs, so they got together with Texas filmmakers to bring the book to life. HBO came in, and the search began. Richard Linklater is an old friend of Larry’s, so it made sense to call him first. Icame on second, and Iliana Sosa became the third director.
What led to your theme of choosing the oil industry in Houston?
There wasn’t a premeditated plan. They wanted these stories to feel authentic and personal. It so happened that I was from Houston, and Larry wanted an oil story. What’s interesting is how my family was left out of the wealth created. So we went with that and started filming.
Houston, Texas. “God Save Texas.” Courtesy HBO.
What surprised you as the story came together?
I’ve been making docs for twenty years. Most of the time, you never know where you’re going to end up because you’re following real life. I had an idea, but thiswas unchartered territory for me.
In what way?
I have never turned the camera on myself and my family. Larry calls mea Texan in exile for over 20 years. I was coming home and learning about my own history. My mother had told me our family had been in Texas for a really long time. But then you see, “Oh my God, seven generations!” My enslaved ancestors, my family’s contributions to the state — I hadn’t put the pieces together.
Director Alex Stapleton’s cousin Dennis Chachere (center) in “God Save Texas.” Courtesy HBO.
What was the filmmaking process like?
We shot during COVID. I had to figure out how to tell a story as the world was shutting down. Texas is a state that’s in denial about a lot of things. The rodeo was starting, and the city shut it down. It’s a big deal when Houston shuts down the rodeo.
How did you adjust?
I was in lockdown with my mom for about six weeks and just kept prepping. I was able to go through the material because we had a lot of time to kill. In a weird way, it became a deeper story because of the pandemic.
Did that impact filming?
There were things I wanted to shoot that I couldn’t. The biggest thing was going back to the plantations. People tour these places and think they’re these great landmarks. How can you show this history and totally ignore what my family was doing there? I wanted to show the flip side but couldn’t during COVID. It made the filmmaker in me sad.
How did your family react when they learned you wanted to film them?
For the first time, they understand what I do. When I came home, I had to get their permission. They said yes and thought I was going to show up with my cell phone and ask questions. Then I got there with my wonderful DP, Arlene Nelson, and my producer, Meghan O’Hara. We weren’t a giant crew, but my family thought our equipment was really cool. They were like, ‘Oh, wow! This is how docs are made!” I think they were proud of me. It was a special moment. I’ve never mixed the two worlds before. I could show them it’s because of my family that I’ve been allowed to have this career.
L-r: Marcus Washington and director Alex Stapleton. Courtesy HBO.
A particularly emotional moment was watching your great aunt’s house torn down because of the damage from Hurricane Harvey.
When I started, I had no idea that was going to happen. I knew my aunt and her daughters were working to get the funds to make fixes. But I didn’t know that tearing it down and building a new one was an option. None of us thought that would happen because this home is like a monument to us. My family called me and I ran there and shot it on my cell phone. I get emotional thinking about it. She passed away not too long after and didn’t see the new house. I lost two family members to COVID. That was the biggest impact the pandemic had on me.
Director Alex Stapleton’s great aunt Lela Johnson in “God Save Texas.” Courtesy HBO
What else does this project mean to you?
I feel lucky to be able to tell a story that’s been overlooked for so long. I love Texas for that village that raised me and the people I know. But I do see the problems. I don’t agree with our politicians’ mission to ban books, erase whole groups of people, and reimagine history. I’m so grateful to Larry for writing this book and Alex Gibney and HBO for bringing me on board. No matter what, this film exists. The history of enslaved people in Texas was not taught in school. I hope that Texans watch this series and understand that it’s up to us to preserve our stories and fight to get them out there.
God Save Texas premiering during Black History Month is especially poignant.
I feel so immensely proud to be from a lineage that endured and survived. I’m part of a rich and vibrant culture. My grandfather was a real cowboy! We grew up celebrating Juneteenth. It’s always been a big holiday in Texas. So it was cool when it went national. I can’t believe that John Thomas, enslaved by Michel Menard, founder of Galveston, is mygreat-great-uncle and part of turning Juneteenth into a holiday.
Why did you choose to make documentaries?
I kind of fell into it. I knew I wanted to work in film and went to New York right out of high school. I wanted to direct scripted projects. I didn’t go to film school. I worked my way up from the bottom, from intern to assistant. It washard to be a woman, especially a Black woman, and say, “I want to be a director” — and have people take you seriously. The doc community was different.I produced my first documentary when I was 24. It premiered at the first Tribeca Film Festival. I enjoyed the fact that I could produce something, take the reins, and be a part of crafting the story. I guess I got bit by the bug on that film. Then, I directed my first film a few years later, and it never left.
God Saves Texas airs on February 27 & 28 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
Featured image: Houston, Texas. “God Save Texas.” Courtesy HBO.
The Creator‘s Oscar-nominated supervising sound editors, Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, had a dream experience creating the soundscape for director Gareth Edwards‘ vision of a nightmarish future. The timing of the film couldn’t have been better—The Creator is set at a point in human history where there’s an outright war between humanity and artificial intelligence, a classic sci-fi set-up that felt alarmingly less fictive given the rapid expansion of AI in our real world. Yet The Creator puts a human face on the algorithms of doom, namely that of a young girl named Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who is believed to be an artificial agent of doom by the militant humans in command. John David Washington’s Joshua, an ex-special forces agent grieving his wife’s disappearance (Gemma Chan), is recruited to take Alphie out, but complications arise when he’s confronted with the increasingly obvious reality that it’s human beings, not machines, that are rushing the world towards oblivion.
The Creator benefits immensely from the fact it was shot on location across multiple countries, including Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, grounding the high-concept technology in lush, lived-in reality, achieving a retro-futurism that stands apart from most sci-fi films you’ve seen. “Sound is so powerful in terms of evoking sort of these subliminal emotions,” Aadahl says. “It was either Walter Murch or Randy Thom who said that while images come in through the front door, sound comes in through the back door.”
The Creator‘s sound achieves this level of subconscious potency. We spoke to the Oscar nominees about their process, what makes Gareth Edwards a sound designer’s dream, and what it takes to design a new kind of sci-fi sound.
Let’s first dig into the naturalism of The Creator. You can really feel that it was filmed in real environments—how are you blending in those natural sounds with the advanced technology depicted?
Ethan: Gareth’s whole idea of the movie was as if James Cameron and Terrence Malick had a baby. Creating the physical reality and believability is so crucial in a film like this, which has this high-concept future technology. In order to make it all believable, we have to make the audience believe in this whole world, which starts with the natural world. We recorded real sounds in real places with real people and then brought these sounds back into the studio. And in reality, this is what we’re always doing with our work. But this film just created this incredible opportunity because we’re not used to seeing these big movies that are shot in real places with real people. We felt an extra responsibility to really make it sing with the sound design.
On location for “The Creator.” Courtesy 20th Century Studios
The Creator deals with fundamental sci-fi concepts and themes, yet there’s something really different about the way these robots and artificially intelligent androids sound. What was the approach to differentiating how The Creator’s non-human world sounded from other sci-fi films?
Erik: Gareth’s vision of the future is that not everything is the most high-tech thing you can imagine. Just look at now—we have the iPhone, but we also have normal telephones, we have advanced computers, but then we’ve got gas-powered cars. We have a whole mix of technologies, and why would the future be any different? So, not every robot is going to be like the most advanced new iPhone; there’s going to be what Gareth called the Sony Walkman version of robots. So yes, we have super high-concept sci-fi, but we also have something we called retro-futurism, and this was something Gareth really loved playing with. The police robots, for example, or the bomb robots. These were the Sony Walkman versions of technology. This is such a high-tech movie, but it feels like it could have been made in the 70s, and that’s really unique.
Ethan: I’ll add that in regards to referencing other sci-fi films, there were a couple of clear references, including THX-1138 [George Lucas’s first sci-fi film], and then there were references like Apocalypse Now, which influenced the jet helicopters, and we definitely wanted that sort of retro vibe fused with a technology vibe. But then the other side of it was there was the direction to come up with sounds that haven’t been heard before in any other movies. We need to come up with something completely fresh. That kind of direction we love, but it also creates a massive challenge.
Did Gareth ever give you specific notes on how he wanted a particular robot or ship to sound?
Erik: The way that Gareth directs with sound is by not saying, ‘Make it sound like this movie,’ but rather it’s more of a feeling. For example, there’s the Nomad, the orbital space station that goes across the globe and emits these blue beams that are used to track and target AI bases and locations and then bomb them. When Gareth was describing what he wanted to evoke with those blue beams, he didn’t reference a particular sound, instead he said that it should sound like it would give you cancer if you put your hand in the beam for too long. To me that’s the best kind of direction you can get. What he means is it’s volatile, it’s dangerous, it’s radioactive, and then we reverse engineer those feelings sonically.
Ethan: What makes Gareth such an amazing director for sound designers is that one of his credos is that in every moment, we have a series of choices we can make, and I want us as a team to make the unexpected choice, the more dangerous choice. That’s unbelievable to get that kind of direction. Intead of recreating what’s already been done, we’re creating something brand new.
What’s so interesting is that sci-fi, probably more so than any other genre, has iconic sounds that are a part of our collective consciousness, whether it’s the whoosh of a lightsaber or the scream of a TIE Fighter or even HAL 9000’s eerily calm voice in 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, how do you approach trying to create something totally new?
Erik: The very first sequence that Gareth sent us was the floating village tank battle. We got it in, and it was a 15-minute sequence with no temp music and no visual effects. There was gorgeous, David Lean-style photography, though. And the battle starts, and there was just this font that came across the screen that read tank. Working without image is challenging, but it’s also very freeing because you can start to experiment and dance around with ideas and free associate. We wanted a sound that you could close your eyes, and it had a tank-like quality. We played with all sorts of different synthetic sounds. One of my favorite things about sound design is that moments of serendipity happen. We had a weekend off, and I went skiing, and I was driving back down on Sunday evening. My car veered a little bit into the road meridian where there’s the serrated edge that wakes up a driver, and the whole car resonated with this crazy, powerful sound. So I pulled over, pulled out my recording rig, and went to town recording every variation and speed of that sound. We brought that back into the studio, and that became the sound of those tanks.
Ethan: Another example is the helicopter, where we’re fusing the familiar sound of a helicopter’s thwop-thwop with future jet technology. Fusing those two together creates something new. We’re filming in the Himalayas with Tibetan monks, but the monks are robots. That’s fusing two different ideas together, so sound-wise, when we apply that, we’re almost guaranteed to come up with new sounds. That’s the brilliance of the movie, combining all these disparate ideas, visuals, and sounds and putting them together in new ways.
Erik: When we first started seeing this imagery, like robot Tibetan monks, made us start asking ourselves questions like, ‘Can AI be spiritual? What does that mean?’ Alphie is such an interesting character because she has these incredible powers, but she’s also learning in a new way and becoming more human than many of the humans in the film. For example, that moment when meets the bomb robot that’s sent out to destroy her, and it kneels before her. I remember when we first saw that, we were like, this is powerful, so what do we do sound-wise? During our first passes, we took out all the sounds of the battle and decided to go internal, and we got the chills. So then, as she starts using her power on this bomb robot, we made a conscious decision that we didn’t want her power based on something synthetic, a computer-created sound, so we wound up using the sound of an Aboriginal didgeridoo, which has a spiritual quality to it. I can’t think of many other films where we can take such disparate ideas and combine them.
In Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, the music is flipped. Tracking the arc of Leonard Bernstein’s career in tandem with his loving but complicated marriage to Chilean actress Felicia Monteleagre (Carey Mulligan), the film’s music is Bernstein’s music, playing as it did over the course of the composer’s life, whether that’s performed on stage or worked out in the studio at the family’s Fairfield country house. When we revisit emotionally charged, private moments from Bernstein’s life, at a frightfully strained family Thanksgiving, or when he finally lies to his oldest daughter about his affairs, there is no underscore conveying to the audience what to feel. Instead, the dialogue’s weight is underpinned by a seemingly simple but deliberate atmosphere.
Re-recording mixers Tom Ozanich and Dean Zupancic worked to create subliminal rhythms in scenes like these so that even something as ordinary as the wind or a bird coming or going supports where Bernstein is emotionally, whether that’s falling in love with Felicia or concealing huge parts of his life from his children. Their work has led to Oscar nominations, alongside their sound colleagues Steven A. Morrow [sound mixer], Richard King [supervising sound editor], and Jason Ruder [supervising music producer].
We had the chance to speak with Zupancic and Ozanich about the sound department’s supercharged focus on rhythm throughout the Maestro edit, how they balanced key musical moments with an unusual approach to dialogue, and took on the film’s period elements to make them feel true but never gimmicky.
Some of Maestro’s most emotionally charged moments take place at parties, particularly at Lenny and Felicia’s home in the Dakota. How did you manage the unusual approach to sound during those scenes?
Tom Ozanich: That was recorded not only by miking up the principal actors, but a bunch of extras, other actors in the scene, and plant mikes. Bradley wanted to have it feel real. For the actors, it did add this real feeling that they had to speak up over a crowd. From a technical standpoint, the tricky part is that all those people are actually talking. The big challenge is maintaining control over what the main actors are talking about at any moment. Because of the proximity to microphones, you sometimes get problems when people standing near Bradley pick him up on their microphone, making their microphone somewhat unusable. It has to be downplayed, or it’s going to cause a bad-sounding version of his. We want him to sound rich and full and close. It’s a constant evaluation of what to use.
Dean Zupancic: And a bit of a dialogue editor nightmare.
Ozanich: Tony Martinez was our dialogue supervisor, and he did a great job of trying to give me all the parts that were actually usable.
What did your work entail during big performance scenes, like at Carnegie Hall, where the music is as important as the dialogue?
Ozanich: When we first meet Lenny, and he wakes up and runs into Carnegie Hall, it’s a great example of how we were trying to really make the whole movie musical, even the stuff that’s not necessarily music. In that case, the music is a very featured forefront part of the soundtrack, and then the conversation comes in, and you can follow it, but the music is not trying to back away and give us space for that. We really wanted the music to be this critical center of the film. It doesn’t play like it normally would. There’s a radio broadcast at the end, and you miss a bit of it, and that’s intentional. You hear the key parts.
Zupancic: And when he walks onto the stage, and no one in the audience makes a sound, all you can hear are his footsteps. There are so many subliminal rhythms. In mixing, the mantra of this movie was that it had to be rhythmic to highlight Bernstein’s music. The effects of the crowd mimic the movement of the camera. As the camera turns, the crowds sweep around and by us. There are a lot of little incidentals to make it all feel real.
What’s another example of subliminal rhythm that we hear but a layperson might not notice?
Zupancic: All the scenes have some kind of rhythm. There’s a rhythm to how the winds come in and go away. There’s a rhythm to how the birds are tweeting, whether it’s a dove or a crow. It’s nothing that the audience probably picks up on, but it’s a feeling you get. It’s sprinkled throughout the entire film. It was always the thought to be rhythmic, and that was the first thing we discussed when planning with Richard King to build the effects. And in a lot of transitions, the A-side is going across the cut while the B-side is coming in, so there’s always a fluid rhythm to the cut. There aren’t a lot of hard cuts in the movie.
Ozanich: Which really emphasizes the couple cuts that are deliberately extreme. At the end of Carnegie, there’s this huge applause, and it hard cuts to the dressing room. The same thing happens at the end of the Ely scene. There’s this giant applause, and boom; it hard cuts into the tragedy that then unfolds. One of our main driving motives was to always serve that emotional storyline, so everything is designed to support that.
And when we’re out in the country with the Bernstein family, there’s a sense of timelessness, and it’s often very quiet. How did you maintain the emotion in those scenes?
Zupancic: Especially in what we call the big lie, when Lenny’s on the porch talking to Jamie, there are quite a few dramatic dialogue scenes that were not scored, so it was up to the backgrounds to deliver the emotion. Those scenes are tough to mix because you have to sound real, obviously, but we still have to support the emotion of what’s going on. I thought playing a lot of those scenes without music was a brilliant decision by Bradley and Jason Ruder, our supervising music editor, because then, when the music does come in, it’s so much more impactful.
Ozanich: I think one of the great, powerful things about sound is that people don’t think as overtly about what they’re hearing as they do about what they’re seeing, yet all of that is having an effect on your experience and what you’re feeling. Normally, you’d use music to be this underscore, to tell you what to feel, and a lot of the more intimate scenes don’t have it. It’s totally leaning on the actual performances as well as some of the sound.
Zupancic: The other great scene I love, too, is when Lenny’s having the interview outside the pool. The winds are blowing, you feel it, the birds are in the background, but it’s all weaving through what the story is telling us.
Ozanich: That scene has a lot of heaviness to it, in the backgrounds where you feel this weight and a darkness. In that whole scene, Lenny is struggling with what he’s being confronted with in that interview. You contrast that to some of the scenes early on with Felicia, when they’re sitting back to back, and it’s beautiful, it’s light, there are beautiful birds, and you feel like you’re falling in love like them.
Going into the edit, were there any rules or guidelines to deal with the fact that this is a period piece?
Ozanich: Yes and no. We talked about attempting to do some more dramatic, period-based transitions. Ultimately, we decided not to put the limitations of those time periods there because it felt like that was going to break how real it feels and how tangible they are, sitting there in front of us. What we did decide to do was use today’s technology but make it have a feeling and a flavor of those time periods. So, for some of the older stuff, you wouldn’t have as dense of a track; maybe there’s less background without every detail playing.
Zupancic: We didn’t want to rely on technical gimmicks, i.e., making it sound like a 1940s film, but rather, again, the movie is rhythm and feeling, so make it feel like a 1940s movie, then as you get into color, the feeling of the 1970s, which is a time when more sounds were being played, more detail.
Ozanich: It’s amazing to me because I feel like we didn’t overly focus on that. We did have some intentionality to it, but I just felt like what we’re doing is so subtle, no one is even going to notice it, and yet we’ve had so many people asking, how did we make it sound like that time period?
Kevin Costner’s Horizon isn’t just an old-school Western epic—it’s a four-part film saga he co-wrote, directed, produced, and stars in.
Costner has revealed the first trailer for Horizon: An American Saga, his hugely ambitious post-Civil War epic that pulled him away from another Western you may have heard of, a little show called Yellowstone. The trailer finds Costner marshaling an old-school, sweeping movie that promises all the hallmarks of the genre, including gunfights, wide-open spaces, and plenty of conflict, both at high noon and romantically.
Costner co-wrote the series with Jon Baird, with Chapter One arriving this summer (June 28) and Chapter Two following hot on its heels (August 16), a bold release strategy for a film that Costner has been working towards for three decades.
How personal is Horizon to Costner? He reportedly took a loan out on his home to help finance the series, which was shot on location in Utah.
“When no one wanted to make the first one, I got the bright idea to make four,” Costner said during a chat about the Horizon trailer. “So I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I wanted it to step away from what we usually see in Westerns where there’s a town that’s already there. No one knows how [the town] came to be. There’s a guy who comes in off the horizon, if you will. We don’t know much about him, except that he has some skills he’d like to put behind him and this town ends up needing those stills desperately…too often, it’s just a convenience for the hero guy to knock down a dumb guy.”
Costner has long been connected to the genre—he directed the Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves way back in 1990—to say nothing of his star turn in the phenomenon Yellowstone. Yet perhaps no film, or, that is, films, are as personal to him as Horizon.
“These are real lives,” Costner said about Horizon. “People just making their way, women just trying to keep their families clean and fed … I’m drawn to that. I’m always gonna get to my gunfight, but I’m drawn to the little things that people had to endure. So, to me, Horizon was worth holding on to because I just felt like I wanted to tell it. It grew and it grew and it grew until suddenly I realized that I just had to make it, and I had to look to myself financially to do it — which is not the smartest thing. But I count on the movie speaking louder than anything I can say.”
Check out the trailer below. The first installment of Horizion hits theaters on June 28:
For more on Warner Bros., Max, and more, check out these stories:
One of the year’s Oscar Cinderella stories is the best documentary nomination for director Nisha Pahuja’s To Kill a Tiger. It took Pahuja and her small crew eight years to complete their independent film about a father’s fight for justice after three men abducted his 13-year-old daughter and sexually assaulted her in a poor rural village in India.
“It has not quite hit me yet,” says Pahuja of what will be her first-ever trip to the Oscar ceremony on March 10. “An awards campaign never figured into what I was trying to achieve or what I was aiming for. This is a small, independently funded production without a major studio or streamer behind it.”
But critical acclaim and a host of festival awards gave To Kill a Tiger momentum even though the Indian-born Canadian filmmaker says her goal was always “about impact. How do we use this film to make change? How do we use this film to advocate for survivors of sexual violence? And how do we use it to encourage men to stand with women and girls? That was always the intention,” Pahuja says.
Nisha Pahuja. Credit: Mrinal Desia.
To Kill a Tiger follows Kiran (her pseudonym in the film) and her parents as they seek justice for the assault with the assistance of activists from the Srijan Foundation, an advocacy organization. The focus becomes Kiran’s father, Ranjit, who, out of love for his daughter, goes against the tribalist, deeply patriarchal culture that blames the victim, with one villager even suggesting that Kiran marry one of her assailants in order to keep the peace.
A scene from “To Kill a Tiger.” Courtesy National Film Board of Canada.
The film began, says Pahuja, as a look at toxic masculinity (that footage will be used for another upcoming film). But gradually, Ranjit’s determined quest for justice and Kieran’s courage in standing up to entrenched misogamy emerged as a specific narrative with universal themes.
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s not a woman or girl on the planet who hasn’t been afraid that this could happen to her. That fear is there for all of us, so I knew that aspect. But, for me, what was so interesting and universal was the hero’s journey. It’s a real David and Goliath story that made it universal, as well as the extraordinary love [Ranjit] has for his child, what he would do for his daughter, battling obstacles outside himself, but also internally: his own fears and insecurities. Those elements made it feel almost narrative, like fiction,” she says.
Over time, Pahuja and her small crew, which included her DP and husband, Mrinal Desai, and their regular sound recordist in India, Anita Kushwaha, achieved trust and intimacy with the family. But the film also gives the antagonistic villagers their say and never demonizes them despite their troubling views minimizing sexual assault. “Because I’ve spent so much time in India and I come from that culture, I am familiar with those attitudes. It’s not a surprise to me; they don’t anger me anymore. I’ve heard them so many times,” says Pahuja. “It is a problem, but what is the solution? How do we change this mindset, this culture? So I focus on that. I saw it from their perspective. I was this outsider, this foreigner coming in and disrupting the peace, order, and how things function there. I can completely understand their anger and frustration because from their perspective, just as Ranjit and his wife loved their daughter and were fighting for justice, those families loved their sons and were fighting to protect them and to keep the peace.”
In one jarring scene, some village leaders invade Ranjit’s home, threaten the filmmakers, and try to intimidate them into leaving. The moment underscores the high stakes for both the family and their allies.
“I was scared, but more than fear, it was the sense of guilt and shame and remorse I felt at creating a situation like this,” Pahuja says. “I could have removed those scenes from the film; it would not have affected the story. But the idea of us as a crew and the effect we were having and the impact on the story — that we had become part of the story — was so critical to the film. It makes the film more interesting and forces all of us, as creators of documentaries and as consumers of documentaries, to ask certain questions about [our roles]. I don’t believe we should not do the things we do as filmmakers because so many of us are motivated by change and justice in improving human rights. But, over the course of making this film, I was really forced to confront my privilege and my responsibility.”
Ranjit in a scene from “To Kill a Tiger.” Courtesy National Film Board of Canada.
It is gratifying to Pahuja that Ranjit and his family have embraced the film. But more surprising is that some villagers who initially opposed them have also responded positively.
“The family came to the UK for screenings in London and Birmingham. That was just incredible for everyone: the audience, me, and them. I will never forget that night,” she says. “Then I showed it to others [from the village] because we are doing a big impact campaign with the film, and we want to start it in the community itself. As much as we can, we want to ensure the rift has healed. It’s been six years now. The ward member who is supposed to testify [against the family] loved the film. He said afterward he felt ashamed of himself because he didn’t stand up for the family. He explained he was under pressure and was trying to keep the community together.”
It will also be especially rewarding for Pahuja if Ranjit is able to attend the Oscar ceremony with her. “He will come if we’re able to get his visa on time. I feel, in a way, he and the family are why we are there,” she says. “If it weren’t for their bravery and their courage, we would not have this story in the world.”
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check out these stories:
Imagine for a moment if a music icon like Beyoncé or Dolly Parton ran for United States President. Cool, right? But imagine, during their campaign, they were arrested, brutally beaten, and thrown in jail by the incumbent government while their supporters were detained, shot at, and killed. As Americans, would we simply look the other way? In Uganda, similar events actually took place leading up to the 2021 presidential election as Bobi Wine, a superstar musician, activist, and former member of parliament, ran for office against President Yoweri Museveni, who had been in power since 1986.
Directors Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo first set out to document Bobi’s cultural influence through his music, but the story took a turn as Bobi stepped further into the political sphere, gaining popularity among Ugandans who sought change. What followed was a five-year journey of Bobi’s heroic path leading up to the 2021 election, one riddled with horrific violence and life-threatening uncertainty.
Close to 4,000 hours of footage was turned into a two-hour documentary called Bobi Wine: The People’s President. Now nominated for an Oscar, the film authentically represents “not just the dramatic events unfolding in Uganda, but also the raw and genuine spirit of an inspiring group of people.”
Below, co-directorMoses Bwayo shares his experience working on the film, how the government actively suppressed media coverage that supported Bobi Wine, and how he survived the violent acts that threatened his own life.
How did you come to meet co-director Christopher Sharp?
I met Christopher through a mutual friend; we were introduced in mid-2017. Christopher had traveled to Uganda to assemble a team to start the film’s principal photography. We met at a little downtown hotel, and he shared the idea of the film. I felt compelled, and I quickly said yes. Bobi is an inspiration to the youth in Uganda, and his message at the time profoundly spoke to my heart.
Moses Bwayo, Co-director. Photo courtesy of Southern Films.
Can you talk about how you and Christopher wanted to tell Bobi’s story?
As documentary filmmakers, Christopher and I wanted to tell the most honest story about the Ugandan struggle for democracy, peace, and freedom. We quickly realized that this story would be best told as an observational documentary through Bobi Wine and those close to him. His wife was a central character in the story. In the five years following Bobi and his wife, we filmed multiple other characters who were essential to the story, but we knew if we stuck closely to Bobi and Barbie, the story would be strong, and through them, we would see the struggles of the Ugandan people. We leaned towards cinema verité to best portray this poignant story. We also wanted to tell an inspirational story, to give hope to our audience and get them to want to act after they saw the film.
Bobi Wine on top of his vehicle with his wife Barbara ltungo Kyagulanyi as they campaigned in Kasanda district, Central Uganda on November 27, 2020.(photo credit: Lookman Kampala)
The documentary uses crowd-sourced footage to help tell the story. How was the team able to collect and manage it all?
Yes, we had a lot of footage from citizen journalists. One of the film’s producers, John Battsek, helped us assemble a great post-production team that received, managed, and sourced a lot of footage; our co-producer and archive researcher, Megan Horlinghurst, went through tons of footage archives from online sources and media organizations to find what was suitable for the edit. We also collected a lot of footage from the Ugandan public.
Bobi Wine on a motorbike escaping from police in Uganda Kampala. (Mandatory photo credit: Katumba Badru)
Did the government try to restrict Bobi Wine’s media coverage?
In late 2018, the Ugandan government clamped down on media houses and journalists covering Wine’s political events. This has led to self-censorship by media houses and journalists in the country, and it isn’t easy to find honest reporting there. There has been a rise in citizen journalism around the country. Most of them use their mobile phones to broadcast to social media channels. In the five years of following Bobi Wine, I got deeply embedded in the political movement; I knew lots of bloggers and thought leaders who shared a lot of their content online, and we collected a lot of this footage like the November 18th and 19th murders committed by the military, police, and army; the public filmed and posted videos online, these clips became an asset to tell the story of the November 2020 murders.
Bobi Wine lashes at the Ugandan security personnel who stopped him from getting to the location of his campaign event in Mbale District, Eastern Uganda, November 15, 2020. (photo credit: Lookman Kampala)
What shocked you the most about how far incumbent president Yoweri Museveni would go to retain his power?
There were multiple shocking moments. However, the most profound moment was the violence that the state apparatus was willing to cause upon the population. The violence was meted upon politicians and their supporters; however, as we got closer to the general election, it was directed towards journalists covering political events. Some media houses had their licenses withdrawn for covering Bobi Wine’s political events. Wine was the primary challenger to the establishment, a now 38-year-long dictatorship bent on consolidating power. This was shocking because journalists are mandated to cover news and report on the situation in the country; it was appalling to witness the situation deteriorate to this level.
Ugandan President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni during one of his televised addresses to the country on January 16, 2022. He has been in power for at least the last 37 years. He seized power in 1986 after staging guerilla warfare in 1980 that killed at least 500,000 Ugandans. (photo credit: Lookman Kampala)
Speaking of violence, you were arrested, imprisoned, and shot at while filming. Do you think if you were documenting and supporting Museveni your treatment would have been different?
Covering Bobi Wine was dangerous for journalists; we were brutalized multiple times. I can’t remember any moment when we interacted with the police or military and weren’t brutalized. As you have clearly stated, I was arrested on multiple occasions and locked up in jail, and as the election drew closer, I was shot in the face at close range. The stakes were high while making this film. I have friends who, until today, we don’t know where they are; others have had life-altering injuries. The police and army protected the Museveni campaigns; on the other hand, his supporters were at no point arrested or had their rights violated in any way. Journalists on his team would get special treatment from the state establishment.
Bobi Wine assists his music producer Dan Magic into a hospital in Kayunga, Uganda, after he was injured by police teargas canisters and rubber bullets used to disperse crowds on December 1, 2020.(photo credit: Lookman Kampala)
Following the election, Uganda’s internet went offline, and we see Bobi and his wife, Barbie, essentially imprisoned in their home waiting for the results. What were those moments like for the crew?
I spent about 14 days under house arrest with Bobi and Barbie; we were surrounded by the military, police, army, and plain-clothed gunmen; there was a heavy deployment around the house. We were worried that at any moment, the police and military would break into the house; that was our greatest fear. It felt so foreign; we were in the house without access to the outside, and we started running out of food as no one was allowed in or out of the compound. When the police and military later withdrew from the compound, I did not leave immediately. I knew the house was still under heavy surveillance. I knew I might be followed and have the footage confiscated. I waited until Bobi participated in a press conference with many journalists in attendance. I left mixed up in the group of those journalists. I sent the footage ahead of me with a “boda boda,” a motorcycle taxi, so the footage would still be safe if I had been followed.
Barbie puts her head on the table. Photo credit: Southern Films.
The film shows Yoweri Museveni supporters and how they organized similarly to Bobi Wine supporters but were never reprimanded for their actions, unlike Wine supporters. Having witnessed the election, do you feel Museveni had enough votes to win?
Museveni would have lost that election if it had been in a free and fair contest. Yes, we did show some rallies by Museveni. However, we didn’t tell the audience that most of those supported were either paid to attend those rallies or were ferried to those regions from Museveni’s home districts where he enjoys support because of tribalism, which he has encouraged through nepotism. Museveni has lost support amongst the population, and his political party, the NRM, is exceptionally corrupt; they have made politics expensive in general because of the corruption and voter bribery they oversee.
What do you think is the future of Uganda after Museveni is out of office?
The people of Uganda have endured 38 years of strongman military rule. Museveni has held a firm grip on power by rigging elections and changing the constitution twice to allow him to run. He continues to oppress his opponents with the state apparatus. Uganda has never had a peaceful transition of power; Museveni came through a long, brutal guerilla war promising a fundamental change and a return to democracy; that war was waged in a densely populated region of the country in central Uganda, the war left over half a million Ugandans dead. The Ugandan people hoped this democrat would provide the much-needed solutions to the country’s problems. However, his regime has been a shadow of his once glorious past.
Do Ugandans remain hopeful?
Ugandans are hopeful regardless of the continued repression. Uganda is the second youngest nation in the world, with over 75% of the population under 35. The young people of Uganda are ready for change and demanding it. The future of a free Uganda free from political violence and a Uganda that accommodates us all is possible. It is achievable through free and fair elections, and as Bobi Wine says, “Violence begets violence.”
You can watch Bobi Wine: The People’s President on National Geographic and other streaming platforms.
Featured image: Bobi Wine on top of his vehicle during the 2021 presidential campaigns as he solicited for support in Nakaseke, Central Uganda on November 18, 2020. (photo credit: Lookman Kampala)
How do you make fire feel endearing rather than scary? And how do you turn water into a gusher of emotions? Those were key questions faced by director Peter Sohn when he set forth to make Elemental. The Bronx-born animator previously helped anthropomorphize rats, robots, dolphins, and dinosaurs in Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, WALL•E, and The Little Dinosaur. But never before had he tried to put a human face on earth, air, fire, and water. In directing his Oscar-nominated animated feature Elemental (now streaming on Disney +), Sohn created a fully enflamed hero fueled by the virtues and complexities expected from any big-screen protagonist.
Sohn says, “I was interested in portraying what an urban first-gen character looks like. With Ember, it was more about finding a type rather than [modeling her on] a specific person.” In the film, feisty Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) has been living contently with her immigrant parents in their district of the segregated Elemental City. Then she meets go-with-the-flow slacker Wade (voiced by Mamoudou Athie) from the water side of town, and everything changes.
Speaking from Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, California, Sohn describes how the Elemental team made fire and H20 look adorable. He also digs into the ways his experiences as a second-generation Korean-American inspired his most personal film to date.
You took a big swing by animating fire and water in the form of soulful, wise-cracking, human-like characters. Where did you get the idea?
It started in school growing up in New York when saw the chart of all the elements. They looked like apartment complexes to me and each little box was a different family. I’d make up little jokes about it, like carbon lives next door to mercury, but be careful about the helium; it’s a little gassy.
Decades later, other ideas started to shake hands with that world of the elements. One was that I fell in love with someone who was not Korean — my grandmother’s dying words were “marry Korean!”
Instead, your wife is Italian-American, right?
Half Italian, yeah. She’s very fiery, and I’m just a sap.
A sap?
I get very emotional about things. So that sparked the opposites attract idea. And then this idea of fire and water got me to the classical concept of elements, which led me to build the giant Elemental City made of different communities, which connected to my childhood in New York growing up with all these different cultures sort of stacked on top of each other.
And at the center of it all is Ember. What’s her origin story?
It was a sketch that I did. I like to do free drawing, where I just let the ink line lead me. I drew a little flame and put that flame in a boat over water, and that drawing triggered it all for me. From there, water came very quickly.
Pixar develops movies by subjecting stories to a rigorous peer review process that incorporates specific guidelines. How did that process impact Elemental?
Usually, at Pixar, you go down a path where you build three ideas. Three separate concepts, three worlds, and three storylines of characters. Elemental was not done that way.
How so?
When I got back from doing press for my second movie, The Good Dinosaur, I was invited by the mayor of the Bronx, where I grew up, to give a speech at an event. I got up on stage and just seeing my parents out there in the audience, I lost it because I was so grateful for the sacrifices they made for my brother and me. When I came back from that trip, my boss said, “That’s your movie.” So Elemental started out from that seed.
Then what happened?
The unusual part is that my parents passed away during development. The film had started with this warm heart, but I sort of shifted it into a dark place after my father passed away. The personal loss affected me in a way I hadn’t felt any time before while working on a movie. I was lost in grief, and that spun me for a loop.
How the Pixar structure come into play at this point?
That rigor usually gives you this structural support group, but here, it became almost an emotional support group because my co-workers knew what I was going through. They’d remind me of why I started this project in the first place and helped me find my way back in. But it was a roller coaster as I got deeper into the story.
Elemental has a lot to say about first-generation immigrants and their children when Ember decides not to take over the family business and instead leaves home. Did you base some of that inter-generational conflict on your own experience?
I wanted to get into the arts, and that caused a rift with my parents, especially my mother. She grew up at the tail end of the Korean War, so her family had no money. Any time I would draw anything, she’d tear up my papers. My father took my mother’s side until high school when he bumped into an animator working on a TV show in New Rochelle. My father said, “Oh, you’re an animator; how much money do you make?”
Getting straight to the point.
Straight to the point. Once my father understood you could make a living [as an animator], he immediately flipped sides
Creating characters made of fire must have been challenging if only because flame in its natural state flickers constantly, as opposed to the relatively static surface of a regular face. How did you make fire so relatable?
We had to make the audience’s eyes connect to the landscape of a face amid all that busy movement. When you turn on the [visual] effects and put eyes in there, fire just looks like a demonic creature, so we had to travel down many different paths and collect clues so that we could strike a balance where you feel the kinetic energy, but the fire is caricatured so the facial features can sit there in a way that allows us to empathize with Ember. It took a long time to get there.
Ultimately, you arrived at Ember’s “campfire”-inspired face and the big, tapering hair?
That was really trying to find the Ying Yang in her relationship with Wade. Ember’s face settles to the bottom, and her energies go up, whereas Wade is shaped like a waterdrop where his face stays up to the top, and his energies go down. When Wade became emotional, he was like a Bellagio water fountain [of tears], so that shaped what he needed to become.
Wade has a great head of water hair. What inspired that look?
There’s that famous [Utagawa ] Hiroshige woodblock [print] of a wave, and we tried to find other iconic looks for the water. That wave on the top gives Wade this uplifting feel, even though he’d be crying a lot. To be honest, Wade was the nightmare. If the ripples and bubbles went too slow, he’d become jelly-like. If the [reflective qualities of the] caustics became too thick, he’d turn into a ghost.
To shift focus for a moment, Elemental required a huge team to put all the pieces together. What kind of impact does your filmmaking have on Emeryville in terms of the local economy?
The studio brings in artists from outside the area and from local colleges like the Academy of Art. They also have [job] fairs within the atrium with business owners who come in to share their wares. The studio has been a huge partner to Emeryville and the whole Bay area.
Elemental sounds like an unusually personal project for you. What do you want audiences to take away from this film?
In a world that has so many sequels, Elemental is an original story. It’s about a young woman falling in love, not just with this water person but with her own family and her father. I want the film to inspire empathy and open up all these different paths with the people in your life.
James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy is flying into production. This has been evident in recent posts and updates, but none more so than the first cast photo that Gunn has shared. It was also made crystal clear during an earning’s call with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who revealed that Superman: Legacy begins filming next week.
Gunn revealed this shot of his full cast on Instagram on Thursday, revealing his Legacy team gathered around for a table read. Also in the pic are Gunn himself and his DC Studios co-chief Peter Safran, both probably feeling a sense of genuine joy and excitement over this gathering of performers for the first big film that will fall under their new-look DC.
The photo includes David Corenswet, Gunn’s new Clark Kent/Superman, Rachel Brosnahan, on board as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult, shorn of head as the new Lex Luthor, Sara Sampaio, who plays Eve Teschmacher, Terence Rosemore, playing Otis, Edi Gathegi, playing Mr. Terrific, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, María Gabriela de Faría as the The Engineer, and Gunn’s longtime collaborator Nathan Fillion, front and center, playing Guy Gardner.
There’s one notable face not in this photo—newly minted Supergirl, Milly Alcock—who will be leading the upcoming Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. We’ll likely see Alcock in a DC Studios project before her big film, but it’s unclear if that will be Gunn’s Superman: Legacy or another title.
Superman: Legacy is the big kickoff film for Gunn and Safran’s first phase of their new DC Studios, titled Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters. This chapter includes a film series set on Wonder Woman’s home island of Themyscira called Paradise Lost, the introduction of a new Batman in The Brave and the Bold, the aforementioned Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and Swamp Thing, which will return the infamous monster to the big screen. Also in the mix is Matt Reeves’ The Batman Part II, which will find Robert Pattinson returning to his version of Batman in a film that will exist outside the Gods and Monsters timeline.
For more on Superman: Legacy, check out these stories:
Featured image: L-r: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 16: David Corenswet attends the Los Angeles Premiere of Netflix’s “Look Both Ways” at TUDUM Theater on August 16, 2022 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)NEW YORK; NEW YORK – APRIL 11: Rachel Brosnahan attends Prime Video’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” Season 5 Premiere at The Standard Highline on April 11, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images)
Kevin Tent, nominated for this year’s best editing Oscar for The Holdovers, considers himself “the luckiest editor ever” thanks to his 28-year collaboration with director Alexander Payne. Tent has edited all nine of Payne’s films dating back to his feature directing debut Citizen Ruth (1996). It’s an impressive list that includes Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), Paris, Je T’aime (2006), The Descendants (2011), which earned Tent his first Oscar nomination, Nebraska (2013), Downsizing (2017) and now The Holdovers.
After all these years, Tent says, he and Payne’s creative partnership has a shorthand that often begins before there’s a finished script.
“Even if he’s just circling a project, he’ll send it to me to see what I think,” says Tent, a Buffalo, NY native who moved to California after dropping out of college because “they make movies there.”
“He sent me about 45 pages [of ‘The Holdovers’] up to when the boys leave. Mostly, I was excited about it because he was excited about it so I knew it would be something good. He’s grown as a director, but he’s still basically the same guy I met 28 years ago. He’s just gotten better and more generous and more collaborative. He counts on you, and everyone works hard for him because we are all on the same team. He creates passion for doing a great job which is truly a gift.”
Payne worked closely with screenwriter David Hemingson to develop the script. The Holdovers, nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, is set in the early 1970s at a fictional New England prep school. Best Actor nominee Paul Giamatti plays a veteran teacher forced to stay on campus during Christmas break to look after several students with nowhere to go. When he and a difficult student (played by newcomer Dominic Sessa) decide to accompany the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, also nominated) on a trip into Boston, the three loners gradually form a family bond.
Some critics have compared The Holdovers with Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973), a three-character comedy-drama starring Jack Nicholson about two Navy lifers forced to escort a naive young seaman on a trip to the brig.
Tent says The Last Detail is a movie he and Payne “both love. They do long dissolves, and we’ve always done that,” he says. “AP screened it for the crew. It’s a phenomenal movie. I worked with Ted Demme years ago, and that was one of his favorite movies, too. I still have the VHS tape he gave me to watch.”
The 1970s aesthetic for The Holdovers was intentional from the start.
Payne, Tent says, “wanted it to look like a movie that had been in a vault and hadn’t been seen for a while. He wanted it to look and feel like it came from the ‘70s. That was something he did in production. In post, we did a few things to make it feel grainier in places and added some bits of negative dirt to make it look like it was from the film lab. Eighty percent of the choices we made were related to performance. We didn’t approach it any differently than any of Alex’s other films. As Alex said, ‘Maybe we’ve always been making movies that look like the 1970s.’”
The challenge of editing a dialogue-driven character film like The Holdovers is to keep the pace brisk.
“I’m always the one in the cutting room worried about people leaving or starting to think about where they parked the car,” says Tent, who serves as president of the board of the American Cinema Editors (ACE). “But I think the screenplay is so good because you are learning things all along about the characters. That’s part of the job in the cutting room — to make sure you are engaged with the characters. The way it’s written, you keep getting more information about them the deeper you get into the movie. You find out Paul’s mother died and that he was then railroaded out of Harvard, but you find out so late in the movie. Traditionally, they want to jam all that in the beginning, and there’s nothing left to discover.”
The Holdovers role was written specifically for Giamatti, who’d previously earned acclaim for Sideways.
“Paul is so good. I knew he would be; when I read the [script], I could see him perfectly in the role,” Tent says. “It was exciting when I was cutting to work with his footage again. There are some tongue twisters in there that David wrote and he just nailed them. I asked AP on the first day how exciting it was to work again with Paul, and he said, ‘We’re both giddy.’”
While editing the film, Tent attended an ACE luncheon, he says, and swapped stories with his colleagues about their projects. “One of them had worked with Paul on Billions, and someone else worked with him on another movie, and I was telling them how amazing he is in this film. They laughed and said, ‘Yeah, just cut to Paul.’”
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Robb Armstrong’s JumpStart is the most widely syndicated daily comic strip by an African American in the world. He was inspired to his career as a cartoonist, in part, by reading the Peanuts comics by Charles Schulz and started drawing images from the famed strip as a child. Of course, one major influence was Franklin, the first Black character in Peanuts, who was introduced in 1968. Early in his career, he was able to meet Schulz, and they became friends. In the mid-nineties, a new special necessitated Schulz, or Sparky, as he was known to his friends and family, giving Franklin a last name. Schulz went to Armstrong, his then-longtime friend, and asked if he could name him Franklin Armstrong.
Now Robb Armstrong has collaborated with the Peanuts production team, which includes Charles Schulz’s son Craig and grandson Bryan Schulz, to write the 51st Peanuts special, Snoopy Presents:Welcome Home, Franklin. It is Franklin’s first starring role as part of Peanuts animation and explores the character more in-depth. In the special, Franklin is learning how to make new friends based on a notebook from his grandfather. When, after having trouble fitting in, he winds up one of two kids without a partner for the neighborhood Soap Box Derby race, he and Charlie Brown team up, learning how to be better friends in the process.
The Credits discussed Franklin’s first featured special with Robb Armstrong, including the ways he and Franklin are similar. He also shared how he and his co-writers approached that now infamous table scene from the 1973 Thanksgiving special, in which Franklin sits alone across from the Peanuts gang, reframing the storytelling to be positive and joyful, as they believe Schulz and the 1973 filmmakers originally intended.
Welcome Home, Franklin is the 51st Peanuts special. How did you come to be part of it with Craig and Bryan Schulz and the other members of the team?
What tends to happen in life sometimes that there are many ideas floating around in the zeitgeist simultaneously, because Charles Schultz as a creator had been under fire for few years because of how Franklin was portrayed, specifically in the Thanksgiving special eating on one side of the table, and it’s an unfavorable moment. The reaction to it was over-the-top harsh, accusatory, and inaccurate.
Fans of Schulz, and you in particular, know he was the least racist person in the world.
Exactly. He was the least racist guy in the world. I was just furious about it. Friends of mine suggested I approach the Schulz family on the subject of doing something about it. I had no way of knowing at the time that Sparky’s son Craig and his grandson Brian felt the same way. We’re grown, college-educated men. It’s one scene. Can’t we figure out how to address this? I approached Sparky’s wife, Jeannie, and she said, “Oh my goodness, Craig is also talking about this and looking to do something.” So it was kismet. By the time I got a call from the team, I was strangely expecting it.
What happened from there?
It all fell together very quickly from there. Craig and Bryan have a history of writing really good specials for Peanuts together. They did The Peanuts Movie, so I was coming into an existing world. I felt exactly like Franklin, coming from the outside into their world and thinking, “I hope I’m a winner.” So that helped, writing for Franklin, because I felt like him. Franklin’s not like a character in JumpStart. I’m very different from those characters. Even after doing it for 34 years, no one has turned to me or expressed my opinion about things. But Franklin, in some ways, is exactly like me.
Charlie Brown and Franklin Armstrong in “Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin,” premiering February 16, 2024 on Apple TV+.
What are some examples of how you are the same?
There’s a scene where he’s talking about his uncle being a Negro League baseball player. That’s true. My real-life uncle Eugene Benson played in the Negro Leagues, and it was a thrill to have a scene giving a spotlight to this man who never got any fame or recognition when he played baseball. He mentored Jackie Robinson, the guy deserves a spotlight, and he never really got it. Getting it into the screenplay meant describing this moment to this team, and I’m talking about my real life uncle, and everyone is confused. At one point, Craig said, “Robb, who are we talking about right now, Franklin or you?”
Franklin Armstrong and Charlie Brown in “Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin,” premiering February 16, 2024 on Apple TV+.
What other elements are from your own life?
Well, Franklin’s plight is from my own life. He’s going through something that I went through when I was 12 years old. I went from an all-Black public school to a private school. It was 98% white and a private school, originally an all-girls school. They boarded and lived there. I really struggled to connect with those kids, but I did. Strangely, my biggest problem was that I had to go home after school. All the boys were day students, so I had to go back home to my neighborhood, which was all Black. It was going back that was the problem. It was being ostracized by the kids I had grown up with. There’s no nice way to put it. They accused me of betrayal. That was really, really difficult. Franklin isn’t going through that same thing, but he feels like a permanent outlier. Wherever he goes is just temporary. His family travels, and he’s never made a real friend. I was able to tap into lots of feelings of marginalization.
Franklin Armstrong and Linus in “Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin,” premiering February 16, 2024 on Apple TV+.
In his way, he’s like Charlie Brown.
Yes. It was interesting working with a team that’s been expressing Charlie Brown’s feelings for so long, someone who is also an outlier. He’s from that neighborhood but still feels like an outsider. So they’re both isolated but get thrown together because neither of them gets picked, so they end up together.
The music in this special is so wonderful. It includes John Coltrane, which is such a nod to Vince Guaraldi.
I thought it would be great to have a Black version of Guaraldi. Guaraldi’s contributions to animation are unique. He stands alone. If you hear his music for Peanuts specials in the mall or the barbershop or walking down the street, it’s like a pneumonic device. You think Charlie Brown. So I thought Coltrane has the same really cool, meaningful, smoky jazz club vibe. I wanted a Black Vince Guaraldi-type song that you’d hear every time you’d see Franklin.
And there are other great Black musicians represented.
I made a list with Stevie Wonder, Billy Preston, and James Brown, thinking about representing an era. The list was massive, and what we ended up with was a really beautiful representation of a kind of feeling that is accurate to the Peanuts universe for Franklin.
The Stevie Wonder song “Happier Than the Morning Sun” was perfect at capturing Franklin’s optimism. How did you choose that out of all his great songs?
Other Stevie Wonder songs are too popular. Peanuts is not supposed to have something where you turn on the radio, and it already has its own space and separate legacy. You want something that’s familiar but not part of your life already. Peanuts taps into originality and uniqueness. There’s something unique and special to all the specials, and we wanted Welcome Home, Franklin, to have that, too.
What is one thing about Franklin that everyone should know after seeing this special?
Franklin is a very, very good kid, but like a lot of kids, he’s misguided sometimes. He’s not perfect, but he sincerely values friendship. Anyone who sincerely values friendship, and I think that’s all of us, we all want a good friend. We all want to have the benefits that come from having a good friend, but we often don’t know, and sometimes I don’t know; it’s more important to be that friend. Just be that sacrificing person. Be that person who thinks about someone else first, and then the friendship you’re looking for will come your way. The first move is up to us. That’s what Franklin represents.
Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin is now streaminig on Apple TV+
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James Gunn gave two of his Peacemaker stars, Freddie Stroma and Jennifer Holland, a little tour of the lots where he’s set to start shooting a small indie film he’s working on that you might have heard about—Superman: Legacy.
Okay, while not technically an indie (not even remotely close), Legacy is the first big feature film slated to kickstart the new-look DC Studios, being led by Gunn and his co-chief, Peter Safran. The casting process has been long, with lots of incredibly talented performers vying for roles that they are well aware could change their lives. Now that Gunn’s got his Superman (David Corenswet), his Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), his Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), his Supergirl (Milly Alcock), his Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), his Guy Gardener (Nathan Fillion), his Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), his Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), and his Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), cameras are getting ready to roll. (There are more—his brother Sean Gunn will play Maxwell Lord, María Gabriela de Faria will play the Engineer, and Sara Sampaio will play Eve Teschmacher.)
Production on Legacy is slated to start on Warner Bros and DC Studios’ lots in Atlanta, where Gunn took Stroma and Holland for their set tour. While the image is really just the three of them standing in front of some sound stages, it further cements just how close Gunn is to principal photography on the film, especially considering reports that there have been recent table reads.
While Holland and Stroma’s work in Peacemaker and on other DC Extended Universe projects was under the previous leadership at DC Studios, Peacemaker will continue into the new era. Although Gunn promises us in the caption to his Instagram photo that the pair are not in Superman: Legacy, who knows where they might find themselves on future DC projects.
Check out Gunn’s Instagram post below. Superman: Legacy is set to hit theaters on July 11, 2025.
Featured image: SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – APRIL 18: Director James Gunn attends the press conference for “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol.3” at the Conrad Hotel on April 18, 2023 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
The review embargo for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Twohas been lifted as if by a fleet of ornithopters (the jet-powered, flapping-winged aircraft introduced in the originalfilm), and the overwhelming critical response can be summed up by a single word: wow. The continuation of Villeneuve’s epic (“continuation” is his preferred description rather than calling it a sequel) possesses all the things you want in a sci-fi epic—astonishing visuals, visceral action set pieces, stellar performances—while also managing the even trickier feat of charging full-force into the complexity at the heart of Frank Herbert’s original source material.
“Villeneuve has made a serious, stately opus, and while he doesn’t have a pop bone in his body, he knows how to put on a show as he fans a timely argument about who gets to play the hero now,” writes the New York Times Manhola Dargis. “This is a real epic, and it is exhilarating to find a filmmaker thinking as big as this,” says the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Dune: Part Two is a robust piece of filmmaking, a reminder that this kind of broad-scale blockbuster can be done with artistry and flair,” adds RogerEbert.com‘s Brian Tallerico.
Picking up where the first Dune left off (here’s a video refresher, too), Part Two finds Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), now under the protection of the native inhabitants of Arrakis, the Fremen, whose desert planet has been the source of intergalactic power-grabbing for years. This continuation includes all the action and a slew of major characters that Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts wisely left out of the original film so that they could focus Part One on the tragedy of the Atreides family without overstuffing it with Herbert’s hugely populated, vast world. The Atreides’ tragic flaws, arguably hubris and honor in a dishonorable galaxy, led to patriarch Duke Atreides’ (Oscar Isaac) assassination by House Harkonnen after Duke and the entire Atreides clan, including their advisors, soldiers, and various apparatchiks had moved to Arrakis to oversee the manufacture and production of Spice, the abundant natural resource on the planet that galactic forces have been exploiting for generations. This left Paul and Lady Jessica in the wind—or, more accurately, in the dunes.
Part Two is centered on the end game after the Harkonnen’s decapitation of House Atreides and Paul’s increasingly fervent belief that he was chosen to lead the remnants of his House and the Fremen in a battle royale against House Harkonnen and the forces that backed them up, including the galaxy’s prime mover, Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken). Key players include Chani (Zendaya), a Fremen whom Paul first met in his dreams and who has a much larger role in the sequel, as well as newcomers like Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler), Paul’s rival and combatant in one of the original book’s most memorable set pieces.
The cast also includes returning cast members Javier Bardem as the Fremen Stilgar, Josh Brolin as Atreides’ ally Gurney Halleck, and Dave Bautista as Beast Rabban. Newcomers joining Walken and Butler are Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, Léa Seydoux as Lady Margot, and Souheila Yacoub as Shishakli.
Let’s have a quick tour of what the critics are saying. Dune: Part Two opens on March 1.
I write a lot of reviews but every once in a while, you work extra, extra hard on one because the film deserves it. #DunePartTwo is one of those movies and this is one of those reviews.
Review: ‘Dune: Part Two’ is an engaging film, a robust space opera of revolution and religious fervor built off of the first film’s collection of storyboard images.
Even better than the first film, the stakes are exponentially higher, the power struggles even more mythic, the on-screen world-building richer and more exotically filigreed, and the visuals even more dazzling—something I didn’t think was possible. https://t.co/NgRVOYW73h
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
Paul, John, George, and Ringo are each getting their own biopic in director Sam Mendes’ hugely ambitious project. Considering it the Beatles-verse, a chance to get inside arguably the most iconic band of all time and view it from the perspective of each of its members.
Mendes seems like a great fit to tackle a one-of-a-kind approach to giving each member of the Beatles their cinematic due. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s taken on British royalty, so to speak—Mendes directed the James Bond films Skyfall and Spectre—and he’s got a long track record of great films besides those.
“I’m honored to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” Mendes said in a statement.
The four films will be under the Sony Pictures banner, and all four are slated for a 2027 release. It’s an intriguing strategy, one that’s never been before, nor has a filmmaker ever created a film for each member of a band. The Beatles’ popularity seems to never wane, and given the success of recent musician biopics and music films, from Baz Luhrmann’s Elvisto Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tourto Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s Bob Marley: One Love, the genre is thriving.
Mendes’ upcoming quartet of films will be joining yet more major features pegged to musical legends set for release. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Blackis coming to theaters this May 10, while director Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael is slated for an April 18, 2025 release.
Mendes also has something else major going for him—the support of the Beatles—marking the first time they’ve backed a scripted film based on their lives. Recently, Peter Jackson’s epic The Beatles: Get Back detailed the lead-up to their iconic live performance atop their Seville Row studio.
“We intend this to be a uniquely thrilling, and epic cinematic experience: four films, told from four different perspectives which tell a single story about the most celebrated band of all time,” said one of the film’s producers, Pippa Harris, in a statement. “To have The Beatles’ and Apple Corps’ blessing to do this is an immense privilege.”
Featured image: LONDON – 1964: Rock and roll band ‘The Beatles’ perform onstage in a still from their movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ which was released in 1964. (L-R) Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
For a moment there, it looked as if the next installment of Jurassic World was going to be directed by David Leitch. However, now Gareth Edwards, helmer of the critically acclaimed Star Wars spinoff Rogue One and the recent sci-fi epic The Creator is taking his blockbuster chops to the land of dinosaurs.
The upcoming film is going to be set apart from the recent Jurassic World trilogy, meaning that Chris Pratt’s Owen Brady, Bryce Dallas Award’s Claire Dearborn, and the original Jurassic Park trio of Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum are not in the new film. However, this next trip into the jaws of a T-Rex was written by screenwriter David Koepp, the man who penned Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original Jurassic Park and the follow-up, Jurassic Park: New World.
The upcoming Universal Pictures film is set for a July 2, 2025 release, and with that fast timeline in mind and with Leitch and Universal parting ways, Universal and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment needed someone with blockbuster experience and who could be ready to roll quickly, as production is slated to begin this June. Edwards rose to the top of their lists.
Edwards knows a thing or two about colossal lizards—he also directed 2014’s Godzilla, which launched Lengedary’s Monsterverse and re-introduced the King of the Monsters as a misunderstood, if no less destructive, force of nature. He’s proven again and again, with Rogue One and The Creator, that he can create fully realized worlds that pop with memorable characters and lived-in environments, both crucial elements to the Jurassic World franchise.
The new film is being executive produced by Spielberg through Amblin, alongside longtime Jurassic producers Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley.
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Featured image: (from left) A Pyroraptor, Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise) and Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) in Jurassic World Dominion, co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow.
Warner Bros. has released a new video that will help those of you with a few burning questions ahead of the Dune: Part Two premiere to go into the film feeling properly educated. It might also even entice those Dune holdouts into seeing the first film so they can enjoy director Denis Villeneuve’s critically acclaimed two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic 1965 novel.
If there were one major Cliff’s Notes version of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, it would be that, at its core, it’s a story about warring families. On one side, you’ve got House Atreides, which were led by Duke (Oscar Isaac) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) in the first film, with their promising son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) showing skills derived from both his parents. Yet when House Atreides was asked by Emperor Shaddam IV (played in Part Two by Christopher Walken, unseen in the first film) to go to the desert planet of Arrakis to help take over the massive manufacturing hub of the planet’s natural resource, Spice, trouble was in the air. Enter the bad family, House Harkonnen, led by Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), who attacked the Atreides in the first film, killing Duke and sending Paul and Lady Jessica on the run in the desert.
The desert of Arrakis is home to a powerful band of people known as the Fremen, led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and including Chani (Zendaya), the young woman Paul kept seeing in his dreams. In Part Two, Paul and Lady Jessica will be deeply embedded within Fremen society as Paul plots his revenge against the Harkonnen, his rage and his growing belief that he’s the chosen one sure to have galactic implications. Chani will have a much larger role to play as Paul’s determination to defeat his enemies and lead the Fremen to control their planet will become dangerous itself. Part Two will introduce a slew of characters who were all crucial in Herbert’s original book, including Walken as the aforementioned Emperor Shaddam IV, Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, Paul’s direct challenger, Florence Pugh as Princess Irrulan Corrino, and Léa Seydoux as Lady Margot.
The fight between Paul Atreides and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is one of the most thrilling moments in Frank Herbert’s original book, a ferocious clash with galactic implications. When we spoke to Dune: Part One and Two co-writer Jon Spaihts about the first film, he explained that he and Villeneuve had left much of the most thrilling action from Herbert’s 1965 novel for the second installment, choosing to focus Part One on the treachery and galactic scheming that led the galaxy to the brink of all-out war. Part Two, however, will feature many of the major set pieces from Herbert’s book and the war that’s been brewing.
For a proper catch-up via video, check out the below. Dune: Part Two opens in theaters on March 1:
For more on Dune: Part Two, check out these stories:
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and JOSH BROLIN as Gurney Halleck in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
