This summer, Disney will release a sequel to 2003’s Freaky Friday, which starred Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis as a mother and daughter whose bodies get switched as a punishment until they learn to love one another selflessly. Much to the first movie’s Millennial fan base’s approval, Freakier Friday, directed by Nisha Ganatra, recast Lohan, Curtis, as well as the movie’s original heartthrob, Jake, played by Chad Michael Murray.
The sequel looks like it’ll be expanding the concept of the grand switcheroo, with Anna (Lohan), Tess (Curtis), and Anna’s daughter and soon-to-be stepdaughter all waking up in one another’s bodies. This multigenerational swap also appears tailored to Gen Z (the palm reader at fault asks for a tip via QR code), but the overall concept is eternal—a family dynamic in need of repair gets worked out when mother and daughter literally step into each other’s shoes.
Regarding that QR code, the concept might stay the same, but the details have vastly changed since the movie’s concept first came out. After all, the Freaky Friday best known and loved by Millennials is already a remake of a 1977 film of the same name, starring Jodie Foster as teenage Annabel and Barbara Harris as her mother, Ellen. With a screenplay written by Mary Rodgers, who penned the original “Freaky Friday” novel in 1972, the mother-daughter trials and tribulations reflect a very different era. Mother and daughter, arguing on Friday the 13th, suddenly switch corporeal forms after simultaneously wishing they could trade places for a day. After landing in her mother’s body, Annabel is forced to contend with the difficulties of being a housewife, including pulling off a 25-person dinner party for her husband—who does nothing—while Ellen, in Annabel’s body, bumbles her way through school activities like field hockey, marching band, and typing class (where she breaks more than one typewriter). Outside of school and home, Annabel, in her mother’s body, bonds with her crush, Boris (Marc McClure), after asking him for help with her pesky younger brother, Ben (Sparky Marcus), and her father’s work dinner. She also learns that Ben, whom she sees as an irritant at best, copies her to try get closer to her.
The 2003 remake keeps the crush and the irritating little brother. Harry (Ryan Malgarini) instigates against Anna, who always gets blamed, but when she shows up for a parent-teacher conference in her mother’s body, Harry’s teacher hands her a letter he wrote, expressing his admiration for his big sister. Anna begins to soften toward her little brother. At the same time, Tess, trapped as Anna, comes around to her daughter’s crush, Jake, after he helps her fill out a standardized test. She also learns that Anna’s English teacher really is out to get her, as Anna claimed, but she can fix it—she recognizes Mr. Bates (Stephen Tobolowsky) from high school, when she rejected him, and calls him out for taking out a decades-long grudge on her daughter. A day in Anna’s shoes also reveals that superficially perfect Stacey Hinkhouse (Julia Gonzalo) really is the mean girl Anna always says she was, and Tess-as-Anna, after a rejected reconciliation, takes her down, too.
Where 2003’s remake departs from the original film is with Tess, also known as Dr. Coleman, a career-minded therapist juggling multiple cell phones and her own imminent second marriage to Ryan (Mark Harmon), a supportive fiancé and emotionally available future stepfather. While Anna’s resentful teenager echoes Annabel’s—adolescent ire doesn’t really change—her interests are updated for a different era, trading aquacade for a rock band and adding details like a keen affinity for bodily piercings. Ellen and Annabel’s switch is an unexplained Friday the 13th phenomenon; Tess and Anna are deliberately swapped by the mother of a proprietress of a local Chinese restaurant who overhears them fighting. But despite the eras’ differences, in both cases, a few days spent as one another imparts a renewed sense of mutual love and appreciation between mother and daughter.
In the 2003 film, Tess and Anna return to their own bodies during Tess’s rehearsal dinner, after Tess releases Anna to join her band for an important audition, and Anna lovingly accepts her mother’s fiancé and their impending marriage. The upcoming remake appears to further work with the challenges faced by blended families, and the actors look set to do a bang-up job, all inhabiting one another, no mean acting feat. Since Freaky Friday came out, Curtis has won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Deirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once, while Lohan, after rocketing to stardom and enduring the uniquely vicious pressure of early 2000s fame, has had a varied career, opening a nightclub in Athens and beach clubs on Mykonos and Rhodes, meeting with Turkish President Erdogan, and now returning to acting, with Disney as well as several Netflix features.
Lohan followers in particular seem delighted to see the actress back at the helm of a big summer Hollywood movie, which also stars up-and-comers Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons. If the franchise’s fifty-year appeal is any indication, Freakier Friday should be a hit with both the older movie’s fans as well as a new generation. Either way, we’re looking forward to seeing both Lohan and Curtis take on the role of being inhabited by teens.
For Deborah Cahn, the journey from The West Wing to Netflix’s The Diplomat began with a simple encounter that revealed the extraordinary lives hidden within the foreign service. The former West Wing writer spent years cultivating relationships with real diplomats, ambassadors, and State Department officials, learning first-hand how complex the world of international politics was, and how much it demanded of the individuals who dedicated their lives to it. It gave her an idea of crafting a series around characters whose nuances speak to the complex crises they must navigate in their work. Work that, in the world of The Diplomat, can become more like an obsession.
“Those people all have a certain purity of intention,” Cahn says about the foreign service folks she’s met throughout her career. “They believe certain things about this country. They haven’t picked this work because they’re making tons of money—they’re not. They’re all really smart and could have done something more lucrative elsewhere. They’re out there representing America and the idea of America.”
What emerged was a series that refuses to traffic in obvious straw men, easy villains, or simple solutions. Cahn’s world of international diplomacy is populated by brilliant minds working at cross purposes—not out of malice, necessarily, but more out of variations of rough-edged confidence that can, at times, cross over into belligerence. These are brilliant people trying to shepherd the lives of millions while representing competing national interests. At the center stands Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, a woman who embodies both the idealism and pragmatism required to survive in modern diplomacy. Kate is brilliant, a bit rough-around-the-edges when it comes to the practiced finesse her new job as the U.S. Ambassador to England requires, and she is disarmingly honest.
Russell is never anything less than compelling—you couldn’t cast a better gravitational force to build a complex narrative machine around—yet Cahn delights in supplying Kate with a large ensemble of sparring partners—from Rory Kinnear’s surprisingly complex British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge to Rufus Sewell’s charismatic yet problematic husband Hal Wyler—that demonstrate her commitment to creating people who defy easy categorization. Through extensive interviews with foreign service professionals, Cahn has crafted a series that captures not only the geopolitical stakes of diplomacy but also the deeply personal costs of representing one’s country on the world stage.
The series is nominated for 2 Emmys this fall, Best Drama Series and Keri Russell for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. With Netflix renewing The Diplomat for a fourth season before the season three premiere this coming fall, it’s clear that Cahn has struck gold once again. We spoke to Cahn about creating characters as complex as the world they’re operating in.
Walk me through the origins of The Diplomat.
The West Wing was a dream job, and I absolutely loved it. When that show ended, I felt like the new dream would be to talk about foreign policy and international politics the way The West Wing did about domestic politics. For a while, I was messing around with ideas about foreign aid workers or foreign correspondents. I thought about setting something in an embassy and pitched that, but was told there was no way an embassy would work—at that point, American audiences weren’t interested in anything happening in another country. Obviously, very different than today, very different than the international audiences we have now.
What was your way into The Diplomat? Was it the world or a specific person?
Then, 20 years later, Netflix asked me to write something. When I was on Homeland, we would always have experts come in from the CIA, military, political people, and journalists. We had a visit from Beth Jones, a former ambassador and assistant secretary of state, who had spent most of her career in the Middle East. She looked like a librarian, talked really fast, and the amount of high-octane activity that happened in a normal Tuesday in her job working in Islamabad—I was like, “Oh, she’s a series. This woman is a superhero in a pantsuit.” It was immediately clear she was what I was looking for.
You give Kate so many incredible sparring partners, perhaps none better than her husband, Rufus Sewell’s Hal. Can you talk me through that relationship?
When I pitched an idea to Netflix, I proposed it in tandem with the notion that we would write about a marriage where two people do the same thing and fall in love at work. I know a lot of people who did that. Every relationship I had before I met my husband was one of those—we met on the job, and we’re both passionate about what we do. But if you stay in that relationship and build a life together, 10 or 15 years down the road, you’re sleeping with somebody who is possibly a competitor, possibly a boss or employee. There’s no getting away from the work if you’re sleeping with it at home, and no getting away from the marriage when you’re at the office.
And in the world of The Diplomat, that office keeps changing.
It turns out the foreign service has a lot of “tandem couples”—people who need a very specific partner because if you’re spending your life in postings overseas, you need someone who wants to move to a different country every three years. Often, you’re in some far-flung place where the only people you know are from the office. There are a lot of people who fell in love in foreign service school or on the job, and they had an agreement to take turns—you’ll have a great job for three years, then I’ll have a great job for three years. Somehow, it doesn’t quite work the way they thought it would.
Despite the pyrotechnics of the plot, Kate and Hal’s marriage feels completely real. Hal keeps claiming it’s Kate’s time to be in the spotlight, and yet…the man can’t help himself.
Richard Holbrooke was a big model for the series and the Hal character. He was famously passionately loved and passionately hated, often by the same people. It’s not hard to find models for very successful alpha males, charismatic leaders who, no matter how much they want somebody else standing out front, have instincts for big moves. Sometimes big moves succeed, sometimes they fail, but when you’re making them in somebody else’s territory, the repercussions of either success or failure are magnified in ways that are useful for marital conflict.
You do a great job with characters who seem like they’d be pushovers. Rory Kinnear doesn’t have the same gravitas as Rufus Sewell at first, but by season two, you realize he’s got a lot going on. How much fun are you having with these supporting characters?
The beauty of TV is that you get to fall in love with an actor and then write for them more. When you see you’ve got Rory Kinnear in your hands—the character was initially supposed to be a little Trump, a little Boris Johnson. You give that to Rory and he’ll play the chaotic, slightly off-his-rocker, reckless character, but infuse it with enough depth that you can’t hate Trowbridge. We actually tried to make Trowbridge more hateable, but in Rory’s hands, you can’t do it. As soon as we recognized that, it became clear he’s a much more interesting, complex character than we initially conceived.
You don’t have many straw men—it’s less interesting when the supposed antagonist is just venal and terrible. Is that the design—when you have someone like Keri Russell, you want to put her against people who are at least her equal in ability?
We try really hard with every character—nobody’s got a bad argument. I didn’t want easily shot-down villains or anyone who was simply venal, corrupt, selfish, or dumb, because it feels too easy. When you’re dealing with two countries, five countries all trying to shepherd the lives of hundreds of millions of people, it would be great if the answer was “they’re stupid and evil,” but it’s not. We never want any argument or character to be reducible in that way. We want to give Kate insurmountable problems, yet she still throws herself bodily at solving these things because that’s what people do in this field. They’re looking at war, at intractable historical conflicts, and they still go back to the table. Keri has the kind of energy that reveals she understands the complexity and magnitude of what she’s up against, yet she still comes back with an indefatigable spirit, refusing to quit.
Given the rapid-fire dialogue, are the shooting scripts longer? How do you practically film an episode when so much plot is advanced through casual conversations at warp speed?
During the first season, we’d go to the stage with these scripts and the script supervisor would time them out and say, “This episode’s gonna be really long.” Both Alex Graves and I would look at each other and say, “No, it’s gonna be short. It’s gonna be really fast.” That’s a sound I fell in love with when Aaron [Sorkin] was writing it—it’s the house where I learned to write and a style I like a lot. I’m always begging the actors to slow down. A lot of times, you go in the editing room trying to tighten things up; we go in trying to put in pauses to make sure we’re following the argument.
That feels like a good problem to have.
It’s a kind of heightened realism, not complete naturalism, but it’s representative of the complexity these people deal with constantly. There are enormous problems dealt with on a prosaic level—are we gonna call it a meeting or an encounter? Every problem is beyond the bounds of the intellect I bring to it, so it feels accurate that we’re looking at people whose heads spin really fast and process information really fast.
How do you juggle working on a series dealing with foreign affairs and staying grounded when the real world seems to be in perpetual berserker mode?
You’re at the heart of what we spend hours trying to figure out, and we get it wrong a bunch of times. For example, in the first season, we interviewed Heather Conley, a brilliant Russia specialist, who talked about this bizarre dynamic when dealing with Russia—for about 20 years, Russia’s foreign policy was largely executed through covert operations. They’d do things, then say, “We didn’t do that, we weren’t there.” So it was this passive-aggressive conflict with a superpower. We had written five scripts based on that premise, then Putin invaded Ukraine. A journalist friend called and said, “Bad news for your storyline and hundreds of millions of innocent people—Putin just invaded Ukraine.” So we rewrote all those stories around the principle that they’re no longer in their passive-aggressive period, they’re in their aggressive-aggressive period.
How often are you rewriting episodes or season arcs because of real current events?
The key is never to try to predict what’s happening right now. I’d love to do a story about Gaza, but who knows what’s gonna be happening there? We’re writing 18 months ahead, two years ahead. There’s no way to predict what the world will be thinking about in two years, especially given the differences between the American government’s current state and its state a week ago. You can’t outdo what’s happening in the news nowadays—there’s nothing we could credibly write without being told we were turning world affairs into a cartoon.
What kind of stories are you looking for, then, that feel both relevant and realistic but also fit your dramatic needs?
I never really wanted Kate to suddenly become Secretary of State and decide whether we’re gonna put troops in Taiwan. For me, it’s powerful looking at people a little down the food chain so we can see their influence. There are hundreds of thousands of people who work for this country whose names we don’t know, and what they do is often unknown to us. However, major disasters are averted because of the work they do every day. We’re never gonna hear about it unless 20 years from now, documents are declassified. Those are the stories we’re looking for.
The nominations for 77th Primetime Emmy Awards have arrived. The nominations were presented by “What We Do in the Shadows” actor Harvey Guillén and “Running Point” star Brenda Song on Tuesday morning.
The Pitt, Severance, and Andor were just a few nominated for Best Drama Series while Abbott Elementary, Hacks, and newcomer The Studio will vie for comedy’s top prize.
The 77th Emmy Awards will be live on Sunday, Sept. 14, on the CBS Network and available to stream live and on demand on Paramount+. It will be hosted by comedian Nate Bargatze.
Check out the list of nominees for TV’s biggest night below as well as stories from The Credits that highlight the best television of the last year:
Outstanding Talk Series
The Daily Show
Jimmy Kimmel Live
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert
Reality Competition Program
The Amazing Race
RuPaul’s Drag Race
Survivor
Top Chef
The Traitors
Best Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie
HBO’s The Pitt emerged as one of television’s most gripping medical dramas in years by doing something deceptively simple yet extraordinarily difficult: following a single, brutal 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room in real time. What made the series so compelling wasn’t just its relentless intensity or unflinching medical realism (the “floating face” fracture in episode 2 will haunt my dreams), but how writers like Valerie Chu and Cynthia Adarkwa managed to weave deeply human character arcs through the chaos of trauma bays and life-or-death decisions.
Under showrunner Scott Gemmill’s guidance, the writing team created something rare in medical television—a show that honored both the technical expertise of healthcare professionals and the emotional complexity of the people wearing the scrubs. The attention to detail was aided by medical consultant Dr. Joe Sachs, who provided authentic clinical details, and Chu and Adarkwa were part of a diverse writers’ room bringing varied perspectives to each storyline. The Pitt achieved that elusive balance of unflinching verisimilitude and narrative momentum, resonating not just with general audiences but with the medical professionals whose daily reality it sought to portray.
We spoke to Chu and Adarkwa about weaving technically precise medical jargon through emotionally resonant character development to create the best medical drama on TV.
When you’re breaking stories in the writers’ room, how do you know you’re creating something special?
Valerie: I think every writer’s room is passionate about the stories they’re telling, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to take off in the world. I’ve had people ask me, “Did you know it was going to be a hit?” And honestly, I didn’t.
With this vast ensemble cast and intersecting storylines, what’s the room process like?
Cynthia: We start with broad ideas. Noah’s [Wyle] in the room with us, so he’s got real insight into Robbie’s character, so we defer to him quite often. Season one, we were working from a pilot, so we had that basis, then we zoomed out to figure out what these fifteen episodes are going to look. We start with, “Oh, what would we like to see?” and jot things down across these huge whiteboards for the shape of the overall season, then go episode by episode. That’s where we get into expert talks. Dr. Joe [Sachs] Zooms with current medical professionals, gaining insight into specific topics—autism, pediatric care, as many areas as you can imagine. We’re talking to experts daily. Then we take what they explain and fuse it into each episode.
Valerie: I don’t have experience writing medical shows, so what I found interesting is that this is a show that cares about character. We look at overarching character arcs for this season—which is funny because it’s only a single day, so you can only evolve the character so much—but Dr. Joe’s expertise, which he had on ER starting as a consultant then becoming a writer, allows us to say, “We want this character to experience this during this episode, so could you find a case where if we want it to be a failure, and this character is going through overcoming that, we want to portray them as a competent doctor, but this is a very valid slip-up that a medical student or teaching resident could have in this teaching hospital setting.” What’s cool about the show is we’re able to work together so the character isn’t lost, and we can adapt those medical cases to serve the character.
How do you write characters with extremely detailed medical knowledge that sounds realistic yet flows within the story without drowning viewers in jargon?
Cynthia: I didn’t go to medical school [laughs], so a lot of the medical jargon goes over my head, too. That specificity comes from our doctor/writer and other consultants who compile medical notes for every episode. As a writer, I write my beat-sheet outline, Dr. Joe and his colleagues take it, and say, “Here’s a trauma scene, here’s exactly what these characters would say.” Then I take that, I don’t touch the medical stuff, and add conversational tidbits between characters. In my episode [episode 6, “12:00 P.M.”], what comes to mind is a trauma scene where our surgeon fellow Garcia [Alexandra Martz] was chatting with Santos [Isa Briones], one of our interns, and she quips, “What’s your sign?” That’s something I get to add to the medical stuff.
Valerie: I want to shout out our writer’s assistant [Kirsten Pierre-Geyfman] and script coordinator [Danny Hogan], because they track patients throughout the season, and it’s really difficult because you’re moving patients in and out of rooms, and everything on this show means something. A patient who comes in during episode 1 ends up being taken back to the ER in episode 7—they’re tracking all of this. Even the writers sometimes ask to be reminded where these patients are. It’s an integral part of the show.
Cynthia: It’s especially important because of the hour-by-hour nature. We have to know where everyone is. It’s almost like we’re writing a play. Because we’re on this one set, we have to know all the moving parts, and if we didn’t, it would be chaos.
How did the incredible reception from viewers feel, especially from medical professionals?
Cynthia: It’s very cool that people connect to the show. I think it hit at a specific time where we feel let down by our government, by the medical system, so that’s another reason people are connecting with it. It’s admirable to see people do hard work. These characters are based on people who have expertise, who have been doing this for years, who have passion, and who are not necessarily making tons of money, but they love what they do. When we meet with residents, that’s when it really speaks to me. We’re representing the real side of what these people are going through. It’s not the glossy soap side—no shame to those shows, I love them too! But we see these residents having a hard time, fighting school debt, fighting burnout, so why not represent them in their totality?
Any favorite storylines or character arcs from season one?
Cynthia: One of my favorite storylines was Dr. Collins’ [Tracy Ifeachor] miscarriage story. Black maternal health is important, and there are misconceptions about fertility when it comes to Black women, and I felt like that story was important to tell. I hope women across the board felt seen in that storyline, but also Black women specifically. We deal with fertility issues at a higher rate than white women; it’s just not spoken about as much.
Team cuts open Hank and removes the nail. (Warrick Page/MAX)
Valerie: The story with Terrance [Coby Bird], our autistic patient who comes in, and Mel [Taylor Dearden] does a great job with him. I’m so proud that we in the room are constantly trying to subvert tropes. There are years of mishandling of disabled representation that have perpetuated negative stereotypes, and as a room, we’re passionate about righting those wrongs. It’s really important for us to tell stories where we’re not leaning into stereotypes, but also, it’s not that they’re coming in with anything related to autism—they’re just coming in because they sprained their ankle. I’m proud that our writing staff figures out how we, as problem solvers, find the more interesting way into this.
As Mel meditates, Alex is dumped with a gunshot wound. (Warrick Page/MAX)
What’s it like inside the writers’ room?
Cynthia: I feel so spoiled saying this, but it’s the dream job. We go to work to be creative, and part of that involves being in conversation with one another. Whether we’re talking about daily news stories or what happened locally in LA or what we had for dinner last night, you have those little conversations so you’re really getting to know each other, and that bleeds into these bigger conversations of what kind of stories we want to tell, what perspectives we want to show.
Valerie: I always describe a writer’s room as part debate club and part therapy—it can get very heated, but it can also be very therapeutic. We very much share our stories in this room. We’ve talked about family deaths, we’ve talked about relatives who have mental health issues, and it creates a safe space. I have to credit our showrunner, Scott [Gemmill], for allowing that, because there are showrunners who might say we shouldn’t go down these personal paths. We are very much allowed to be ourselves, bare our souls, and sometimes that comes out in the writing or the storylines. It’s a very diverse room in terms of life experiences, and credit to Scott for staffing a room like that—he wanted people who had different opinions.
The show builds to an incredibly intense shooting at the Pitt Fest. Was that always part of the plan?
Valerie: That was there from day one. I believe it was part of Scott’s initial pitch to Max, because a normal shift is 12 hours. They were like, “How are we gonna get to the 15 hours? What’s the reason for keeping our doctors in this hospital?” And also let’s speak to this national crisis of gun violence. We knew we were building to that. The interesting thing about the show is that it does feel very realistic, but it is not necessarily your typical day in an ER. Because it is for entertainment, we do add these big moments. And the shooting was our big moment for season one.
Okay, last question—you’ve broken your ankle skateboarding—which two doctors from this show do you want treating you?
Valerie: Robbie for sure. I fractured my tibial plateau right before the room for season two started in February, so six weeks on crutches. Noah Wyle was kindly pushing me in a wheelchair during that time when I had to be off my legs. So Noah and Robbie in real life—just an incredible human being. And I feel like Samira would be a kind, patient doctor.
Cynthia: I definitely echo Val with Robbie. He would just be a comfort. And then my second choice comes out of left field. I’m gonna go with Santos, because I really enjoy banter when I’m in a medical setting. Distract me from what’s happening. I feel like Santos and I would have good banter, and I know she’d be able to take care of me as well.
Featured image:Robby and team work to pinpoint Nick’s condition. (Warrick Page/MAX)
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the 1997 original movie
Before the reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer slashes its way onto screens on July 18th, let’s rewind to the mid-1990s — a time of landlines, low-rise jeans, and uninspired, formulaic follow-ups featuring familiar horror faces. Upon its release in October 1997, I Know What You Did Last Summer wasn’t just a hit; it was a pop-culture explosion that launched the careers of a new generation of Teen Dreams and raised the bar for horror for decades to come. Looking back on its success and influence, it’s easy to see why the original still haunts us nearly thirty years later.
If you were a moviegoer searching for a scare before the release of Scream in December 1996, you’d likely have been out of luck. With few exceptions, like Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Interview with the Vampire (1994), the first half of the decade offered little that could truly terrify audiences. Then came Scream, and everything changed. Kevin Williamson’s razor-sharp screenplay breathed new life into the genre, striking a perfect balance between satire and suspense. Suddenly, audiences were turning their attention back to horror. Williamson’s refreshing writing style, paired with the direction of horror master Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street), took the culture by storm and reminded viewers that the genre could be smart, stylish, and genuinely scary.
Following the box office success of Scream, Williamson was approached to pen a new screenplay based on Lois Duncan’s 1973 novel, I Know What You Did Last Summer. The story follows four teens who, after a night of drunken celebration, accidentally run over a man and dump his body in an attempt to hide their crime. One year later, the friends become victims of a serial stalker with deadly designs and a fisherman’s aesthetic, a look that, it turns out, lends itself exceedingly well to the horror genre. Williamson’s approach to the screenplay for I Know What You Did Last Summer (IKWYDLS) was a contrast from the sharp-tongued, self-referential script of Scream, and he focused more on reworking the novel’s central plot to resemble an 1980s era slasher à laProm Night and The House on Sorority Row. The result was a dark, ominously-toned film that was imbued with suspense and, not only played on audiences pre-existing fears of urban legends with its truly terrifying premise, but subverted expectations of the “final girl” trope (who can forget Sarah Michelle Gellar’s iconic, prolonged chase scene in which we’re convinced she’ll escape the hook-handed maniac, only to be struck down unceremoniously behind a stack of spare tires mere feet away from salvation?)
Thanks to Williamson’s fresh approach to the novel’s screenplay and the film’s charismatic young cast, IKWYDLS was a commercial success, holding the number one spot at the box office for three consecutive weeks. Hollywood noticed. Alongside the groundbreaking success of Scream, IKWYDLS helped usher in a new era of teen slashers: smart, stylish, and self-aware. Studios rushed to capture the same magic, releasing a wave of horror films aimed squarely at a young, pop culture-savvy audience. By the end of 1997, Scream 2 hit theaters, followed by The Faculty, Urban Legend, Disturbing Behavior, and the anxiously anticipated sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, in 1998. Additionally, the success of Duncan’s novel adaptation prompted a mainstream Hollywood trend of turning classic written works into teen movies, giving us hits like She’s All That (Pygmalion), 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew), and Cruel Intentions (Dangerous Liaisons), most of which featured the stars of I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Teen horror was back in style and bankable. The stars of IKWYDLS,once destined for notoriety only within a niche market, became mainstream icons. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Ryan Phillippe graced the covers of Teen People, Seventeen, and J-14, hosted TRL, sported milk mustaches for the legendary 90’s “Got Milk?” ad campaign, and quickly booked roles in romantic comedies, dramas, and TV shows beyond the horror genre. This wasn’t just a genre revival; it was a cultural reset. The blend of horror and teen celebrity created a lasting blueprint for films like Final Destination, Mean Girls, and even TV series such as Pretty Little Liars, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Riverdale, all of which owe a stylistic debt to the glossy, angst-filled world these late-’90s slashers carved out. The ripple effect of this moment is still visible today in the resurgence of nostalgic horror and the continued appeal of teen-centric thrillers that blend scares with star power.
And just as eager as audiences were to consume the new crop of mainstream teen horror were the audiences looking to revel in poking fun at the genre’s clichés. The appetite for satire was sated in July 2000, when moviegoers were treated to the first installment of the Scary Movie franchise, a bold, irreverent comedy largely focused on parodying Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Audiences flocked to theaters for the film’s over-the-top humor and shamelessly exaggerated takes on familiar horror tropes. Scary Movie was a box-office sensation. With a modest budget of just $19 million, Scary Movie raked in nearly $300 million worldwide, proving that parody could be just as commercially viable as the genres it spoofed. And its success didn’t stop at the box office – it rippled through Hollywood, launching a franchise that would go on to include five sequels and cementing the film’s status as a cultural touchstone. More broadly, it revitalized and expanded the parody sub-genre, inspiring a slew of similar teen-oriented comedies that blended slapstick, satire, and pop culture references. In doing so, Scary Movie not only lampooned teen horror, it became an iconic part of its legacy.
Where would we be today without I Know What You Did Last Summer? Would we have experienced the glorious revival of smart, teen-centric media that shaped a generation, from film to television? Could we truly imagine our screens, and our lives, without shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Xena: Warrior Princess, and iconic cult classics like Can’t Hardly Wait, Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and countless others? I’d argue that we’d have been robbed of a cultural era that continues to echo through the minds of millennials everywhere. I cannot count how many times I’ve internally screamed, “What are you waiting for, huh? What are you waiting for?!” every time someone in my life takes a beat too long to decide what to order at dinner with friends.
So let’s take a moment to honor the debt we owe to Kevin Williamson and I Know What You Did Last Summer — a cornerstone of ‘90s teen horror that helped shape pop culture as we know it. And as the countdown begins for its much-anticipated reboot, hitting theaters on July 18th, let’s brace ourselves for a new generation to be hooked, providing thrills, chills, and quotable moments to haunt us all over again.
Featured image: Jennifer Love Hewitt in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
The White Lotus costume designerAlex Bovaird, along with creator Mike White, wanted to make season three of the HBO show bigger and bolder than ever. Although it’s a longer season with more characters and more narrative complexity, for Bovaird, it still always comes down to researching reality and bending it from there.
Every season of The White Lotus has seen characters attempt to escape their own reality by descending upon another culture and failing to let go, adapt, or change in a variety of ways, sometimes with fatal consequences. Season three involved possibly the most disaffected and disregulated tourists yet—almost all of these monied outsiders are struggling with their lives, either unfulfilling or scarily nebulous, a kind of fear and loathing in Thailand, just in snazzier attire and with less hard drugs (although there are some hard drugs). There’s the Ratliff family, a five-top of confused beliefs, pill addictions, daddy issues (mainly via Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon), and one very bad legal problem back home. You’ve got the sweet-and-sour couple, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins), she’s the soulful searcher, he’s the wounded, irritable older man harboring explosive secrets that will build to one of the season’s biggest twists. And, rounding out the guest rotation this season was “the blonde blob”—Laurie (Carrie Coon), Kate (Leslie Bibb), and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), longtime friends reuniting for an expensive, louche trip down memory lane that threatens to become a dead end for their relationships. Finally, there’s longtime White Lotus employee Belinda Brown (Natasha Rothwell) on a business trip of sorts; she’s down in Thailand for a crash course in Thai spa mentality, some luxury time with her son, and, it turns out, a run-in with her former would-be benefactor’s likely killer, Greg (Jon Gries).
Bovaird, whose work includes American Honey, Nope, and True Detective: Night Country, spoke with The Creditsabout her Emmy-contending work dressing these ne’er-do-wells, searchers, and schemers.
Let’s start with Rick (Walton Goggins). How did you decide to give Rick — maybe the most lost man on the show — the most comfortable wardrobe?
Rick has been living as an expat in Asia for some years. His wardrobe is typical of someone living abroad from America. We saw many guys like Rick in Thailand. His clothes should be comfortable, since he knows how to dress for the climate. There’s no fighting that heat — he’s sticky and sweaty, just like real life there. When we meet him, he definitely stands out and raises questions. Rick is running from something, and Chelsea is running towards something, and they’re just star-crossed lovers. They’ve been rocking around these Southeast Asian islands. Their costumes are old, dusty, and grungy. Most of their clothes are vintage, so they look different because they’ve been washed hundreds of times.
Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
The Ratliff family (headed by Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey) is dressed spot-on when it comes to how high society dresses in that part of the country. How did you work to make them individuals, but still clearly part of the same family?
The Ratliffs think they are better than everyone else. I dressed the boys like typical rich kids from North Carolina. They love a brand called Southern Tide. It’s practical and not too flashy. The young men down there wear golf shirts; they aren’t too into fashion. Piper is more earthy, and she’s reaching for ground beyond her sheltered upbringing, so she wears a lot of modest cotton dresses. Tim [Isaacs] had a uniform of linen shorts and shirts, and Victoria isn’t interested in the ocean or the beach or getting out of her comfort zone—she’s strictly lounging in vintage kaftans and heirloom jewelry. They all make an effort.
Patrick Schwarzenegger. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBOJason Isaacs and Parker Posey in “The White Lotus.” Courtesy HBO.Sam Nivola, Sarah Catherine Hook. Photo courtesy of HBO.
How much do you want the costumes to contrast with who these people really are?
There are quite a lot of people on The White Lotus who are posing — that’s part of the conceit of the character and the storytelling. There may be some armor going on with the bag-toting or hiding behind sunglasses or a big floppy hat, clutching a purse out of insecurity. What that purse may be, or how dramatic the sunglasses are, definitely helps to play into the idea of a mask — and masking who we are, using flamboyant costumes as armor.
Sam Rockwell, Walton Goggins. Courtesy of HBO.
When you first read Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie on the page, where did your instincts go?
Jaclyn reminded me of actresses I’ve worked with and the group dynamic I’ve seen when ladies get competitive around the edges. I knew they’d be dressing for each other and upping the ante. As they settle in, we see who’s got the power and who is more fragile, and their outfits take cues from that.
Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan. Photograph by Courtesy of HBO
How did you want them to up the ante on one another?
It was almost designing one character with three heads, because they were slightly interchangeable. They were dressing for each other, all showing off a bit. They would wear colorful and fancy attire to the beach, especially when they arrived. They’re like, “Oh, look at my fabulous thing that I bought,” which can be very true to female behavior. We are in the business of generalizing sometimes when we want to make a point, but they had more bits and bobs than anybody else. They always had to have a good shoe, a different bag, and good earrings, because that was who they were. They were proving to each other that life was pretty good, even though some of them were crumbling.
Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
How did you approach their looks for the final dinner, when Laurie has that great monologue? How’d her truthfulness influence you?
Laurie is softer. She feels more comfortable. She is beautiful in that scene, wearing a silvery kaftan and expensive earrings. She’s throwing down the gauntlet and letting them know how she really feels. They’re all gorgeous in that shot. There’s a lot more to it that was cut. You see them back at the villa, too. There’s more catharsis with them bonding than just that little snippet. But they do their little camp routine that they’ve been talking about, that they used to do. They act it out, where one of them puts their hands through the other’s dress, and they do this little show. Some of the components of the costume were thought through [for that scene], so that would look good as well. The costumes were shiny and gorgeous, but we didn’t see as much of them [in the final cut].
On the page, does Mike White write many ideas about how the characters dress?
He told me that the Ratliffs look like they stepped out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue. He wanted them to look uniform and gorgeous. He also wanted the ladies to look like “a blonde blob.” I think the short swapping of Saxon and Lochlan was on the page. I love working with Mike, and we definitely have a shorthand now.
He shoots your costumes very lovingly, especially in wide shots. What do you appreciate when you watch your work through his eyes?
I get a kick out of seeing the entire costume, because it’s more gratifying than when you’re like, “Ah, all that work, and you can’t even see it.”
Aime Lou Wood, Walton Goggins. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
Many costume designers say, “Why is it all medium shots and close-ups?”
In season two, they used a lot of tracking shots, where you’re constantly following people in and out. Personally — not because you see more of the costume — I like to stay with the character, to be in the mind of somebody by following them. I found that sometimes in season three, we were static in the restaurants. I think that was a lot of logistics because the places we were shooting were up in almost, like, a treehouse. It was probably difficult to lay the track down sometimes, because of the windy paths. I’m contradicting you slightly, because you’re saying he shoots in a way that you see the costume so well. Ben [Kutchins], the same cinematographer from season two, lights beautifully, particularly for the colors, the costumes, and the background. I think everything looks more beautiful than it is, so I’m grateful for that.
Any members from the costume department you’d like to single out, sing their praises?
Oh my God, they were all good. I wouldn’t have survived without Julia, my assistant, because she was with me every step of the way. The Thai crew were amazing, and the set crew were the real heroes. They were watching the actors from dusk to dawn, keeping them comfortable, cool, and ensuring their costumes looked good. They have such dedication to preserving the costumes. My job is to create the outfits; it’s their job to maintain them on set. If you watch The White Lotus, in Thailand, people’s colors are pristine, their linen is pressed when we want it to be, and they did a tremendous service to my costume design by making sure the costumes look as good as they play.
Feature image: Walton Goggins. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
“There’s a lot of sh*t that can get ruined on the internet in this movie, so I really do encourage people to see it as soon as possible,” director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson tells The Credits of her film I Know What You Did Last Summer, which carves its way into theaters July 18.
Robinson, 37, a Miami native now living in Los Angeles, has plenty to share, but for this writer, the real question is where she stands on the deli sandwiches from Florida’s Publix supermarket. Thankfully, we see bread to bread. “Publix subs are the best subs in the world, and nothing compares to them. My brother is in Florida right now, and he sent me a picture from Publix maybe three hours ago. We ride hard for Publix in my family.”
Important Sandwich takes aside, the former actor turned writer/director snatched Hollywood’s attention creating Sweet Vicious, a 2016 MTV series about two college girls who take revenge on campus sexual predators – a familiar refrain found in movies like Promising Young Women, Ms. 45, and M.F.A., the latter of which stars Leah McKendrick, who coincidentally has a story by credit on IKnow What you Did Last Summer. “Leah came in with a really great pitch and she wrote an initial draft that then Sam [Lansky] and I ran with,” says Robinson. Lansky, the ghostwriter behind Brittney Spears’ memoir, co-wrote the screenplay with the director. “Sam and I had a lot of conversations about beautiful people behaving badly. And really, what is on screen is us taking her story and really crafting what ended up being the final version of the film…a story that would be scary, fun, and satisfying.”
The film serves as the fourth installment in the franchise, and Robinson confirmed it’s not a reboot but a sequel to the 1997 original film. The director stated thatISKWYDLS is canon. Jennifer Love Hewitt, 46, and Freddy Prinze Jr., 49, both return as Julie James and Ray Bronson in the slasher follow-up that sees five friends – Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Sarah Pidgeon, Jonah Hauer-King, and Tyriq Withers – try to conceal a deadly car accident, as in the original, their dark secret refuses to stay buried.
Missing from the cast (and rightfully so) is beauty queen Helen Shivers, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, who has been married to Prinze Jr. since 2002 and also starred in Robinson’s film Do Revenge (2022), a sharp, dark comedy tackling themes of female empowerment, rage, and agency. Gellar and Robinson have become friends since, and the director hopelessly tried to bring Shivers’ very dead body back to life, telling Entertainment Weekly, she “pitched some crazy sh*t” to convince Gellar to return. What we wanted to know is if Robinson had gotten that chance, would she have killed Shivers again? “Oh my god, I don’t think I would,” she retorts, “Everybody hates it when Helen Shivers dies. I’m not going to kill her a second time. Maybe a sequel idea, but no, you can’t.”
Another change, at least from a production standpoint, is its shooting location, moving from North Carolina to Australia, with some scenes being filmed in Los Angeles. “The most candid thing I can say about it is because of the budget,” admits Robinson. “Studios make those decisions, and you just roll with it to get your movie made. But, I think Australia ended up being a really awesome backdrop because a lot of the movie is about the way that Southport has been kind of overhauled and gentrified and had this glow up. So I think that Australia provided this really cool texture that I don’t necessarily know would have existed in North Carolina, as I think North Carolina looks much like it did in the ‘90s. So a lot of how everything appears, at least the fictional Southport of this franchise, is different now.”
“I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
To shape the visual language, Robinson tapped production designers Courtney and Hillary Andujar, who are twin sisters, and cinematographer Elisha Christian. Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws became one of their inspirations. “We talked about the color palette, how rich Jaws is, and how beautiful it is,” notes the director. “We shot the movie on an Alexa 35, which, while it is a digital camera, has a very film-like quality to it. There’s kind of natural grain that happens just in the way that this particular camera shoots, which I really, really love the end result of and I’m very, very excited about.” In defining the aesthetic, the director says she wanted the movie to have a “fresh and nostalgic quality to it.” Adding, “It should feel like a movie coming out in 2025. We didn’t want it to feel like we were trying to make something look like it was from another time. But I also really wanted it to feel like it has that same texture and quality of those slasher movies from the ‘90s that this is really nodding towards.”
Iconic to the franchise is the killer’s raincoat and the chilling hook that so often turns every scream into silence. Robinson sought to recapture the look but with a fresh twist. “We did make our own hook, but we had the OG hook and OG slicker flown into Australia so that we could all look at them. So, both with Courtney and Hillary, the three of us redesigned the hook together. And then with Mari-An Ceo, our costume designer, we redesigned the slicker together,” says Robinson. It was always my intention from the beginning of this process to make sure that this installment had its own identity in both hook and slicker. So, from day one, I knew that I was going to redesign these things because it is a different story, a different world, and a different version of I Know You Did Last Summer. So I felt that it was time for an update.”
“I Know What You Did Last Summer” poster. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
The mayhem also got an update, the director drawing inspiration not just from the hook but from different fishing-inspired weaponry – harpoons, butcher’s knife, flare guns, and a lobster trap – into the attacks. “We went into this definitely wanting to ratchet up the violence, the gore, which I do think we’ve done. But also wanting to make sure that all of these kill sequences, action sequences, scare sequences feel like they were rooted in character, rooted in story, and weren’t just meant to scare you, but are always pushing the story forward,” she says. “So for me I think part of the spectacle, and part of the fun of designing them was also figuring out how each of them could be big and splashy, but also kind of nod towards character and story throughout the whole film.”
Adding to the scare factor was an in-camera approach. “I wanted everything to feel real. We do have a Kill Bill-esque moment, but the violence, the tone of the movie is very fun. In the harpoon sequence, which is in a lot of the trailers, Josh Cobrin is doing every single thing. We did not have a stunt person,” she says. “We cast someone who could do the entire sequence front to back. I wanted actors who could do things so we weren’t switching back and forth, and we were truly getting as much in-camera as we possibly could.”
“I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
The idea extended into the set designs with production rebuilding the original twisting road, Reaper’s Curve, to stage the initial car accident the group tries to cover up. The scene was shot in a former mining site in nearby Sydney and required four hydraulic rigs to pull off the intense action, with visual effects stepping in to paint the North Carolina backdrop. In another scene, Robinson took a page from a favorite auteur, David Lynch. “There’s a sequence with Madelyn Cline and Tyriq Withers in a cemetery. That cemetery is from Twin Peaks,” she says. When asked if she would consider a remake of that iconic series, she says, “No, no, I wouldn’t touch that. It’s so good. No one should touch that.”
I Know What You Did Last Summer slashes into theaters July 18.
Featured image: “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Courtesy Sony Pictures
Almost a decade in the making, Epic Universe at Universal Orlando Resort in Florida is a groundbreaking theme park that highlights the shared DNA between filmmaking, attractions, and immersive real-world experiences, taking audiences and guests on a cinematic journey.
Three of the five worlds that make up Epic Universe are born out of IPs that have graced both the big and small screens, namely The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic,Dark Universe, which is the home of the iconic Universal Monsters, and How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk. The Harry Potter and How to Train Your Dragon franchises alone have grossed over $11.2 billion combined, but they continue to create jobs in the industry both domestically and internationally. According to an economic study, the investment in Epic Universe, which reportedly cost around $7 billion to build, has resulted in $11 billion of economic impact nationwide. In its first year of operation, the park is anticipated to generate $2 billion for the state of Florida alone.
Inside Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry in The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter – Ministry Of Magic (Courtesy of Universal Destinations & Experiences)
According to figures from Universal Destinations and Experiences, in 2023, Universal Orlando generated 94,000 jobs across the US, from highly skilled engineers to construction crew and software specialists to artists, architects, and more, and Epic Universe is projected to create more than 17,500 new jobs across the country in its first year of operation.
With the increasing overlap between Hollywood and theme park experiences, should the state and federal tax breaks available to TV and film be extended to the theme park industry where cinematic IPs are involved? It’s worth noting that Florida does not currently have a statewide film tax credit program for film and TV. Right now, only six of its 67 counties do.
“Just from a selfish point of view, I think it would be amazing,” explains Dean DeBlois, writer-director of all three animated How to Train Your Dragon films, as well as the live-action adaptation. “There was great expense in investing in the construction of Epic Universe, so it’s no small feat to commit and engage on a theme.”
The filmmaker believes the emotional impact of the elevated experience builds an even stronger bond with the IP. He continues, “People walking in there who were familiar with How to Train Your Dragon were so immersed that they were being affected emotionally and visibly, and I was one of them. It blew me away, so I would love to see more of it. “
As with the other two Universal theme parks in Orlando and the company’s properties in Hollywood, Beijing, Japan, Singapore, and soon the UK, the connection to cinema is deep in their DNA. Steven Spielberg himself serves as the Creative Consultant for Universal Destinations and Experiences and is very hands-on.
“One of my greatest joys was being able to take Steven Spielberg on a tour through Dark Universe,” recalls Chris Frisella, Assistant Director and Executive Producer at Universal Creative. “We were still walking on sand at that point, but facades were going up, and he was asking questions.”
Frisella agrees that audiences are hungry to extend their journey with the IPs they love and take them to the next level, bringing the screen and parks closer together than ever before.
“Just like film and television, we are visual storytellers,’ he explains. “We don’t have a fourth wall, and we live 360 degrees, so we have to be thinking about what’s around the guests at all times. It’s about all the visuals, the music, everything tactile, so it’s about giving our guests a chance to step into those worlds they’ve been looking at flat for so many years and come in and live in them. We want to make sure that we tell the story, but not the entire story, because there needs to be room for you to see yourself in it.”
Epic Universe’s How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk is a great example of the interconnection between the creatives working on the films and the ones manifesting the immersive IP in the theme park.
“When we were first doing blue-sky and going into concept, DreamWorks was making the third film, so we had a lot of access to the team,” explains Katy Pacitti, Senior Director and Executive Producer at Universal Creative. “It was beneficial to be able to ask questions like whether the mountain has a name, because I was getting that question. In terms of getting hold of all of their assets, we got the Isle of Berk [from How to Train Your Dragon] as a Maya file, and we had to break it apart so we could look at all the buildings and see which ones we wanted to build.”
“We also got great notes back from one of their art directors. My favorite was that there’s no pink in Berk. Also, when they saw what we were doing for Mead Hall with the tapestries, which they had in the first film but were a bit serious, they created something for us and made them funny.”
How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk – Hiccup’s Wing Gliders (Courtesy of Universal Destinations & Experiences)
Universal Creative is based in Orlando, Florida, where the core of the work takes place. However, creatives in states across the US, many of which currently take advantage of tax breaks and incentives for TV and film, play vital roles in bringing attractions such as those at Epic Universe to life.
“There’s talent everywhere, so it depends on the type of experience we’re developing and delivering, and where the best people are to execute that type of vision,” muses Scott Verble, Assistant Director and Executive Producer at Universal Creative. “The experience that we’re trying to develop is really what drives where the people come from.”
During the 1990s, there was a push to bring more TV and film production to Orlando from Los Angeles. Many of the people who made the move still live in or around Orlando.
“That helps especially with some of the more traditional physical trades, like prop making and model making,” Verble continues. “All those things are essential to the design process, so we have that homegrown talent here, but also with the international reach of these theme parks. The Universal Destinations and Experiences brand is recognized globally, significantly expanding our talent pool to include not only local talent in Florida but also a diverse international pool. People who were inspired by what we’ve delivered so far want to help make the next park.”
Understandably, one of the states with which the Florida team frequently collaborates is California, which offers various film tax incentives to encourage film and television production but is under pressure to do more. Currently, if a scene is filmed inside a theme park attraction, the costs of using that attraction could be eligible for a tax credit. However, the production of a theme park attraction or experience based on a TV or film IP is currently not covered by the California Film Commission’s program – tax credits only apply to “scripted content.”
Guests witness the amphibious Gill-man emerging from the inky depths of the Black Lagoon, ready to terrorize guests alongside his fellow monsters inside the Dark Universe world of the new theme park, Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment. (Courtesy of Universal Destinations & Experiences)
“For Dark Universe, we worked with a lot of monster creators who are all based on the West Coast,” Frisella confirms. “For example, we worked with Eryn Krueger Mekash, who is an Emmy-winning producer on things like American Horror Story. She’s also a creator, so she designed a character for us, and then we had that built and installed here in the land.”
“We also used Norman Cabrera, who is known as the king of werewolves, to create a lot of the werewolves here in the land,” Frisella says. “We also worked with Steve Wang, a monster creator, who created the two hero vampires featured in Das Stakehaus. We wanted to make sure that we were tapping into the legitimacy of the true horror and monster fans to give us some street cred with that crowd.”
Among the monsters unleashed within Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment is the fearsome Wolf Man. As guests try to escape the catacombs of Frankenstein Manor, they come within inches of his razor-sharp teeth and jagged claws. (Courtesy of Universal Destinations & Experiences)
Who makes up the team of creatives at Universal Orlando Resort that tells the stories also matters, and the diversity of the worlds they create is drawn from the diversity of the world they live in and work in. Almost every keynote speech at Epic Universe’s opening event highlighted the work of the women and men who achieved a common goal under the leadership of Karen Irwin, President and COO of Universal Orlando Resort.
“I’m older, so I’ve been around for a while, and there for many years, I was the only woman at the table,” Pacitti concludes. “Universal has done an excellent job. Our engineering teams are probably 50/50. We’ve got a strong group of women engineers. As we age up to those upper levels, it tends to be mostly men, but they’ve earned their stripes, and that’s only because 20 years ago, it was mostly men. Now, women are advancing to higher levels. For example, we have Molly Murphy, our President at Universal Creative, and Karen, who has now stepped into the leadership role overseeing all the parks here. She has made an incredible difference in the attitude and the level of engagement with the team members.”
Featured image: Dark Universe at Night (Courtesy of Universal Destinations & Experiences)
After 15 years of chasing what television networks wanted—workplace comedies, procedurals, whatever was trending—actress and writer Erin Foster had almost given up on her writing career.
“I had a lot of setbacks as a writer,” Foster says. “Some of those were like, ‘You’re not a good joke writer’ and ‘You write things that feel sort of like a play—it’s just people talking and there’s not enough plot.’ So there were a lot of times that I really second-guessed what path I was going to go down.”
With rejections piling up, Foster began questioning whether she was cut out to be a television writer at all.
Then something unexpected happened: she fell in love, converted to Judaism, and found herself living the kind of quietly content life that seemed antithetical to good television. It was her producing partner who finally saw what Foster couldn’t—that her most personal story was also her most universal one. The result was Nobody Wants This, Netflix’s breakout romantic comedy, which proved that audiences were hungry for authentic, warm storytelling that happened to be drawn directly from Foster’s real life.
Foster’s journey from trying to write what she was being told would sell to writing about something deeply personal that ultimately became a hit illustrates a fundamental truth about creative work: sometimes the story you’re afraid to tell is exactly the one the world needs to hear. In our conversation, she opens up about the long road to finding her voice, the courage it took to mine her most personal experiences, and how writing authentically finally unlocked the success that had eluded her for over a decade.
We have to start with how your own life informed your show…
I’ve been a writer for 15 years, and I’ve tried many times to write shows about topics that networks want me to write about—workplace comedies, female cop comedies, whatever the thing is. And it just didn’t really hit for me. So, I went through a long journey of what my career path was meant to be. Am I a writer? Am I a good writer? Can I only write about things that I’ve been through? When I met my husband and we got into our relationship, I didn’t realize it was good for TV at all. In a lot of ways, I was very uninspired by it because I was really happy and I was really content, and it was very normal and lovely. And I didn’t really know what about that would be funny. I was really used to writing about my pitfalls.
What finally got you to try to turn your fundamentally positive experience into a show?
It wasn’t until my producing partner and manager said to me, while I was converting to Judaism, “This is a show. This is very interesting.” And so then that got the wheels turning, but it took a long time for me to realize if this was a good idea or not.
How did the casting come together? Were Kristen Bell and Adam Brody attached from the beginning?
Nobody was attached. When I sold the show to Netflix, I had already written the pilot, and, technically, I was attached to be the star of the show. But by the time we sold it to Netflix, I was really trying to get pregnant and had been going through years of fertility issues. That’s just where my head was at. So, when they made it really clear that they had no interest in me being the star of the show, I was like, “Great. I would love to be a mom anyway.” They knew very quickly that Kristen was who they wanted in that role. They had worked with her before; they knew how well she did on their platform. She was attached pretty quickly, really immediately, when we got to Netflix.
And then from there, we auditioned basically every single hot Jewish man in America who can act. And I have to give Kristen credit that in the very beginning, she said, “This is Adam Brody.” She’s like, “You can audition as many people as you want, but I promise you it’s Adam Brody.” We auditioned so many guys. There was not one single audition from really talented people where I felt like “this is him.” It just never happened. And Adam and Kristen—these people don’t audition. They’re too big for that. So, my wanting to audition people wasn’t a matter of not believing in Adam. It was just like, I want an opportunity to see what chemistry we can come up with, or maybe there’s some outside-the-box unexpected person that you wouldn’t think of in this role. But in the end, we got really lucky with Adam and Kristen. It’s just perfect.
It was refreshing to see Adam Brody play a Jewish character who wasn’t neurotic. Was that intentional?
It was very important to me that he not be neurotic. I did not want to create this nebbish neurotic stereotype of a Jewish man. That’s why it annoys me when I get shit for stereotypes in the show. Like, tell me what stereotype Adam Brody falls into for a Jewish rabbi. You’re not going to find it.
The show captures a really cozy side of LA. How did you choose the locations?
We got really lucky that we could shoot in LA at all. That’s very rare and very expensive, and it reflected in our budget. It was hard to shoot. But I got lucky because Kristen and Adam both live in LA with their kids, and neither of them is going to move to Vancouver for three months. When we were going to shoot in LA, it was really important to me that we shot on locations and not on stages. Personally, I can feel the difference. I know that you can still shoot outside sometimes, but I just can feel a stage. I can feel fake light coming through a window, and you know it’s not a real house. I just can’t stand the way that feels. So I begged and pushed for locations.
How did you decide which neighborhoods the characters would live in?
I think, similar to New York, when you talk about a neighborhood, you know what kind of person lives in that neighborhood, if you’re generalizing. So I tried to nail down what parts of town these people grew up in. I landed on Noah probably growing up in Sherman Oaks. His parents are immigrants from Russia, immigrant Jews. And I think that they probably live in a big, nice house in the Valley. And I think they live in Los Feliz because Silver Lake is too hipster for them. West Hollywood’s too basic. Santa Monica’s too young families, and Venice is too earthy and beachy. So, Los Feliz felt like a good middle ground to take place.
Did making the show change your relationship with LA?
I grew up in LA, and I hated it. I never thought I liked the city, and I always wanted to live somewhere else. I never thought I would create a show highlighting the great aspects of LA. And the truth is I kind of realized how much culture LA actually has by making this show—highlighting it and finding things to highlight. Because LA gets a bad rap for not really having any culture. So getting to highlight some of it was kind of cool.
How do you absorb the unexpected success of the show?
I don’t know. I mean, the show’s level of success blows my mind. It really is crazy, especially because I’ve had a lot of failures in my writing career. So I was very ready for that and prepared for it. So it means a lot to me. I’m really, really appreciative and grateful. And I feel really lucky that the things that make sense in my head also translated to the screen because everybody thinks that what they’re writing is meaningful, and they hope that people are going to connect to it. I also gave birth two weeks after we wrapped last year. So I was pregnant during the process. And then my water broke while I was on a music spotting session and editing. And so when the show came out, I had a two-month-old baby, and I was deep in the newness of motherhood, and it really helped offset the chaos that was happening.
What’s your approach to season two after this unexpected success?
So, I really try to focus on what’s important, which is my family and the opportunities I have. Getting anybody to care about something I write is the coolest thing ever for me. So I feel like I’ve already won. I feel really lucky. I just hope that people are happy with season two because the success of season one happened completely accidentally, and I don’t know what I did. So I tried to do it intentionally in season two, and I hope it worked.
Few people in Hollywood have had as rich and varied a career as Adam Arkin. With decades of experience both in front of and behind the camera—from his breakthrough role in Northern Exposure to acclaimed directing work on series like The Americans, Justified, Sons of Anarchy, Fargo, Succession, and The Night Agent—Arkin brings decades of experience both in front and behind the camera to every project he tackles.
His latest endeavor finds him serving as producer and director on Rian Johnson’s Poker Face, the Peacock mystery series that has lovingly and hilariously updated the whodunit format for modern audiences. Starring Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a human bullsh*t detector who solves a crime per episode, the show follows her cross-country journey in a Plymouth Barracuda as she encounters murder and mayhem across small-town America, lending her gimlet eye and gift/curse to cases along the way. While Lyonne is one of the most delightful and singular performers on TV today, what rounds out Poker Face‘s flush hand is its incredible rotating ensemble cast—featuring everyone from Steve Buscemi and Benjamin Bratt to Rhea Perlman, Adrien Brody, Ron Perlman, Ellen Barkin, Tim Blake Nelson, and Chloë Sevigny—each bringing their talents to Johnson’s clever “howcatchem” format. For season two, Cynthia Erivo plays sextuplets.
For Arkin, who directed episodes 206 (“Sloppy Joseph”) and 207 (“One Last Job”) in the show’s second season, Poker Face presented unique challenges that stretched his considerable skills as both producer and director. In our conversation, he opened up about working with legendary guest stars, the logistical complexities of the show’s anthology-style format, and what draws him to quality projects after decades in the business.
I imagine Poker Face is a particularly fun show to work on, but not that easy to produce or direct, given the number of moving parts?
The approach to directing a mystery wasn’t that foreign to me. The dramatic elements of making sure you’re honoring those story points and creating clarity for the audience as to what’s going on, what the stakes are, are not difficult in and of themselves. What was one of the more challenging aspects of this show is that unlike almost any other series, every episode is so much of a standalone that it’s almost akin to having to do a pilot every time, because you’re working with new sets, new locations, and new cast members who are getting up to speed and checking both with themselves and with the producers that they’re in the zone—especially because of the echelon of guest stars that we had. You’re not working with people generally who’ve auditioned for things; a lot of it was done on an offer basis.
You do have an embarrassment of riches, I suppose.
I know from having been in the position of having things just offered, it’s simultaneously a great honor, but it’s also intimidating because you’re preparing and showing up on set your first day, and there’s a little thought in the back of my mind going, “What if when I start doing this and it’s not what anybody wanted or pictured?” At least with auditions, you know that you’ve done your interpretation of the role, and that’s what people have signed on for. There is also the aspect of the show having to reinvent itself every episode, as each episode was a standalone new event. I think that was probably the most challenging thing, not just for me, but for the entire company, because it’s just that much more work and creative commitment.
POKER FACE — Sloppy Joseph” Episode 206 — Pictured: (l-r) Eva Jade Halford and Adam Arkin — (Photo by: Sarah Shatz/PEACOCK)– (Photo by: Sarah Shatz/PEACOCK)
So, how do you get people to feel like, “Hey, look, you’re here for a reason. This is all going to work out”?
You just summed up what I feel like my approach is. To the extent that I was dealing with cast members coming in, in episodes that I was not directing, as a producerial presence, I just made it clear that the company was thrilled that they were there, that they were the number one choice for what everyone envisioned, and that we were there to be as supportive and welcoming to them in that effort as we could be. I know from my acting experience that being reminded that people want you there goes a long way towards allowing you to relax enough to do your best work. So I felt that was sort of the mandate with people coming in.
Let me ask you about filming location. Season two was shot in Brooklyn?
Yes. The sound stages were up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and a lot of the locations that they used were in concentric circles radiating out from that area.
What is that like from a producer and director standpoint, where you don’t have the luxury of just being in the same location episode after episode?
You don’t even have any standing sets to return to. Even on shows that have a great deal of variety in terms of locations, you have the comfort zone of knowing that after they go and solve this crime, they’re going to be coming back to headquarters or their apartment. You had none of that on Poker Face—Charlie’s on the road. She changes locations and states, moving from urban to rural environments. So every episode required a level of commitment to location scouting and the time that goes into that, because especially on a show where our sound stages were in Brooklyn and yet we had locations that had to feel very rural—in one case, like the swamps of Florida—you’re not going to find that without getting in a van and logging in the miles to find the right location. There was just a lot of extra time and work that had to go into being on the road and finding places 95% of the time that were close enough to New York that we did not have to be housing people out of town, and yet still were convincing enough to be viable as our shooting locations.
POKER FACE — “Sloppy Joseph” Episode 206 — Pictured: Adam Arkin — (Photo by: Sarah Shatz/PEACOCK)
When you were not on your sound stages, were you predominantly working in the five boroughs?
We worked a lot in the five boroughs. We shot in Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. We shot a little bit in New Jersey, and then we shot in the upper Hudson Valley as well, on both sides of the river.
Can you walk me through your episodes? Episodes 206 and 207—”Sloppy Joseph” and “One Last Job”—especially working with Margo Martindale?
It was great. I really had a great time on both episodes. Both are very different, but equally satisfying. “Sloppy Joseph” was the first one I did—in spite of it being episode six, we shot it as the third episode of the season. I advocated for Margo and brought her up pretty early on. She was already on their radar as someone who would be a great Dr. Ham in that episode, and I was thrilled to get to work with her again. Poker Face was either the fifth or sixth show that I’ve worked with Margo on, going back to The Riches, Justified, The Americans, Sneaky Pete, now Poker Face. She goes back even further with my family because she worked with my father on the Sidney Lumet series 100 Centre Street back in the day. So it’s just an ongoing love affair with her. I think she’s also just screen gold. You put a camera on her, and you’re going to have something memorable happen.
POKER FACE — “TBD” Episode 206 — Pictured: (l-r) — (Photo by: Sarah Shatz/PEACOCK)
How’d you approach “Sloppy Joseph”?
The script had a baked-in stylistic requirement of delineating between the children’s world and the adult world, which lent itself to some really fun visual approaches. I had the opportunity to work with a great DP who came on board only for that episode—this brilliant DP, Tari Segal—and we developed an approach to create the different worlds of adult and child. Then I was lucky enough to work with two extraordinarily talented kids—Eva Halford and Callum Vincent—who possess a level of professionalism and a clear understanding of why they want to be doing this that extends far beyond their chronological age. They both had very specific ideas. They were capable of taking sometimes complex notes and also doing technically demanding things.
POKER FACE — “Sloppy Joseph” Episode 206 — Pictured: (l-r) Adam Arkin and Eva Jade Halford — (Photo by: Sarah Shatz/PEACOCK)
There was one sequence with Eva where she had to ride a playground merry-go-round. Those kinds of sequences can be really challenging and time-consuming if people are not adept at remembering the continuity of what they’re doing. And she just had an uncanny knack of knowing how to match her actions and make sure she was saying her lines at the same point of the rotation of that toy, which seems like a small thing, but it made all the difference between us being able to get that sequence and not.
You also worked with David Krumholtz, who is one of those performers who sneakily steals scenes in every show or movie he’s in.
David is a wonderful actor and a lovely guy. The advantage of having him, in addition to all of that, was that he had a history with Natasha of having worked with her back on Slums of Beverly Hills, which, ironically, my father was also in. There was a kind of family reunion vibe to much of the episode, particularly between Margo and David, as well as Natasha’s history with David.
You’ve shot so many awesome series—The Night Agent, Succession, Fargo, and The Americans. What is your approach to selecting projects?
That’s a good question. I wish I could say it was always the quality of the writing or the relevance of the subject matter. When everything is going well, those are the most prominent criteria for making choices. But to be totally honest, sometimes it’s just a question of what’s going on and how long it’s been since I’ve worked, and is it time to get busy again? I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on some excellent projects. And in some cases, having those be return engagements where there’s been an ongoing, multi-year, multi-season relationship—Justified, Sons of Anarchy, now The Night Agent being among those.
I guess you can’t really know, unless you’re coming into a series that’s already a hit, whether what you’re working on will resonate.
The shows that you’re listing are the ones that stayed in our consciousness, because they were good. I’ve done plenty of work that has come and gone and isn’t necessarily among the things people are referencing. I’ve done enough of this now to know that I’ve been involved with several situations where all of my standards, best instincts, research, and the questions I’ve asked ahead of time have been applied, and it’s looked like a can’t-lose situation. And then the process of doing it reveals impediments or dysfunction, or it just doesn’t turn out the way all that due diligence seemed to indicate. And I’ve had just the opposite experience where I thought I was doing something because it was time to do a money job and it’s not going to be great art, but hopefully I’ll have some fun—and had that turn out to be sometimes the end result being stuff that I’m incredibly proud of.
Featured image: POKER FACE — “TBD” Episode 206 — Pictured: (l-r) — (Photo by: Sarah Shatz/PEACOCK)
“Eyes up here!” says Superman (David Corenswet) in one of the trailers for James Gunn’s Superman, pointing up to his face (perhaps getting an onlooker to stop staring at his red underpants), a moment before he bursts into flight at around zero to a hundred miles per hour. And now, Gunn’s feature is about to soar into theaters, and all that waiting will be over. Yet the opening act to the DC Universe is shaping up to be more than a simple superhero reboot—Gunn’s fresh, heartfelt reimaging of the character has Superman stepping out of the gritty antihero shadow he dabbled in during Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and The Justice League, and into the light of truth, justice, and hope. What makes this even more fun is that this more earnest, heartfelt take is coming from a man who became a household name putting misfits, oddballs, and anti-heroes through their paces in The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and The Suicide Squad.
Yes, Superman will boast those big, cinematic moments that’ll live up to any in Gunn’s superhero oeuvre, but he’s gunning (pun, regretfully, intended) for real emotional depth. All the teasers, trailers, and reveals from Gunn and the cast speak to a story about identity, legacy, and what it means to be a symbol for good in a fractured world. David Corenswet’s portrayal brings a sense of charisma, humility, and strength to the character – it’s not just about flying faster than a speeding bullet, it’s about the heart behind the cape.
Gunn’s latest love letter to longtime fans is brought together by a supportive creative team that balances nostalgia and bold storytelling. Superman is back in a way that feels like exactly what we need in the world right now: a hero. Here’s a quick look primer to help get you up to speed before you take in James Gunn’s vision for Superman on July 11.
A Brief Primer About the New-Look DC Studios
Superman marks DC Studios’ first feature film under the new leadership of Peter Safran and James Gunn, who are focused on a much more unified approach to storytelling, creating a proper DC Universe. Their ambitions aren’t merely to wrangle the existing DC superheroes and villains moviegoers have come to expect cycling through the cineplex into a more cohesive mega-narrative (save for those titles that fall under the DC Elseworlds banner, like Matt Reeves upcoming The Batman Part II), but expanding to introduce characters who have never appeared on the big (or small) screen before, like Clayface, or have been missing in action for generations, like Swamp Thing. They’re even rolling out their titles in chapters (yes, like Marvel’s vaunted Phases), with the first chapter called “Gods and Monsters.” While Gunn’s credits are well-known, Safran earned his chops developing The Conjuring franchise and films like Aquaman, The Suicide Squad, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Consider them two sides of the same coin: Safran handles the business side, and Gunn handles the creative side. Both are producers on Superman, with Gunn directing his own screenplay. Warner Bros. Pictures is distributing the film, both are under the Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) umbrella, which will be split into two separate media companies in the near future.
Characters & Cameos
Superman is packed with characters. David Corenswet will be playing the title role, known as Kal-El on Krypton and Clark Kent on Earth, yet he’s hardly the only super-powered being in Gunn’s world. The first sneak peek also introduced us to Krypto the Superdog, Superman’s adorable four-legged friend, a beloved character from the comics. Krypto first appeared in Adventure Comics #210 in March 1955 and has made on-screen cameos in Smallville, HBO Max’s Titans, and the animated film DC League of Super-Pets, voiced by Dwayne Johnson.
Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Second billing goes to Rachel Brosnahan, playing Louis Lane. Brosnahan rose to stardom in TheMarvelous Mrs Maisel, and she’s perfectly suited to play the smart, tough journalist who Clark/Superman falls head-over-cap with.
Caption: (L to r) RACHEL BROSNAHAN as Lois Lane and DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio
Nicholas Hoult plays Lex Luthor, the brilliant, brutal CEO of LexCorp, which would be a choice piece of casting even if Hoult hadn’t first auditioned for the role of Superman.
Caption: NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio
How about the Justice Gang? Yeah, they’re not quite a Justice League (yet?), but Superman’s fellow DC heroes will be present—Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion) will all have big moments. The trio has a backer in Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn), a tech billionaire who has made previous appearances in Supergirl andWonder Woman 1984, and will also appear in Season 2 of Peacemaker, set to premiere this August. Gunn has stated that the business tycoon is not shaped by references from any “live performances of the character,” but rather “from written materials,” so fans should expect a new portrayal.
Caption: (From L-R) NATHAN FILLION as Guy Gardner, ISABELA MERCED as Hawkgirl and EDI GATHEGI as Mr. Terrific in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Other confirmed characters include the shapeshifting Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), Angela Spica aka The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), who is another antagonist in the storyline, as well as Lex Luthor’s henchman Ultra Man. Gunn told Entertainment Weekly, “Ultra Man is sort of Lex’s thug, and is pretty powerful.” And we cannot forget Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, played by Milly Alcock from House of the Dragon. Alcock has already wrapped filming the standalone feature, Supergirl, which is scheduled for a 2026 release. What part will she have in Superman? She has been absent from all promotional materials, so this is going to be a fun surprise and a big hint at how Alcock will portray Superman’s cousin.
Caption: (L to r) MARÍA GABRIELA DE FARÍA as The Engineer, SARA SAMPAIO as Eve and NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
There are plenty of other characters making appearances like Clark’s adoptive parents, Pa and Martha, and Rick Flag Sr (Frank Grillo), of the Creature Commandos. But what about really big, unexpected cameos? Even with a film packed with characters, it’s safe to say there should be a shocking cameo or two. While nothing is confirmed, Superman’s Kryptonian father is rumored to be portrayed by…well, we won’t spoil that one (look it up at your own peril if you like your surprises.)
The Plot
When Gunn and Safran announced the first 10 projects emerging from DC Studios, also known as “Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters,” the original title was Superman: Legacy. Later, Gunn told Rolling Stone, he was “sick of the superhero title, colon, other-name thing” and simplified it, saying the original title, “seemed to be looking back when we’re looking forward, even though it does have to do with legacy in the movie itself.” However, “legacy” offers a glimpse into potential themes such as hope, compassion, the goodness of humanity, and family.
As for the plot, details have slowly been taking shape. Safran told Variety that the story “focuses on Superman balancing his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing,” with Gunn confirming it would not be an origin story. The film jumps into the Superman world with Clark Kent already dating Lois Lane and Lex Luthor’s hatred of the Man of Steel established. Gunn has said the movie begins with an action sequence, a growing trend in modern movies. There have also been numerous rumors about what may transpire, including a theory about a Superman clone. One thing we do know is that Gunn drew inspiration from a number of comics: All-Star Superman, Superman for All Seasons, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and Kingdom Come (available in a box set).
Tonally, Gunn said, “It’s humorous, but it certainly is not as comic or as much of a comedy as either Suicide Squad or Guardians. There’s plenty of humor in it…but it’s trying to create something that is grounded, but also it’s an incredibly fanciful world, it’s fantasy, it’s taking from other things like Game of Thrones, where it’s this universe where superheroes actually exist.”
What about a post-credit scene? Gunn has confirmed that, too. While it will most likely tie into the DCU or play into Supergirl, we’re hoping it might also include the only other DC superhero who could credibly claim to at least be in a tie for the top spot on fan favorites—Batman.
Behind the Scenes
It’s safe to assume James Gunn’s Superman will not carry a darker tone similar to Zack Snyder’s portrayals. In the behind-the-scenes feature above, Gunn said, “This character is noble, and he’s beautiful,” and recalled how much he “loved the purity of Superman” as a child. So expect the Kid from Krypton to be a savior with a heart. The footage also shares some insight into how they approached the production.
Production Design & Cinematography
Filming began in February of 2024 with stage work taking place at Trilith Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. Practical work included spots in the Georgia area, Ohio, and Svalbard, Norway, to shoot scenes for the Fortress of Solitude.
Cleveland locations included downtown, the Cleveland Greyhound Station, Public Square, and Progressive Field for a clash between Superman and Ultraman. The exterior of the Leader Building served as a stand-in for the Daily Planet, where Lois and Clark work, utilizing the exteriors of the Huntington Bank Building and Key Tower. Production also visited Cincinnati to take over the Union Terminal, Lytle Tunnel, and Cincinnati Museum Center. Blending the stage work with the practical was production designer Beth Mickle, who work includes Drive, The Suicide Squad, and Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3.
Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Cinematographer Henry Braham (Guardians Vol. 2, Vol. 3) re-teamed with Gunn to shoot the entire film in IMAX using RED V-Raptor digital cameras. Braham deployed a number of lenses, the most interesting choice being the Leica Tri-Elmar. Typically used for photography, the Tri-Elmar is a wide-angle lens that can be switched between 16mm, 18mm, and 21mm focal lengths without changing out the lens. The wider view reveals more of the world while still creating an intimate portrait of the characters. For action sequences, they took inspiration from Top Gun: Maverick by using drones to capture Superman’s flight scenes. Gunn said, “We shoot a lot of our action with actual drones flying in and around Superman and the people that he’s flying with, Engineer, whoever else, that he’s fighting up in the air. We got these really small, crazy drones now. We’ve got some of the best flyers in the world here who are working with it.”
Score & Sound
John Murphy (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Suicide Squad) and David Flemming (The Last of Us) composed the film’s score. When you listen to the released theme above, you can hear elements of John Williams’ iconic Superman theme through a fresh musical taste that honors the character’s legacy. Mixing the sound on the dub stage is supervising sound editors David Acord (Andor) and Katy Wood (The Marvels), along with rerecording mixers Christopher Boyes (Avatar: Way of Water) and Tim LeBlanc (Aquaman). Matching the visual awe of IMAX cameras, audiences will be able to experience the sound through Dolby Atmos.
Picture Editing & Visual Effects
Cutting the movie are editors Craig Alpert (Deadpool 2) and William Hoy (The Batman), two exceptional storytellers who complement each other well in terms of action and humor. Visual effects can be a turning point with today’s moviegoers, and it looks like Superman hasn’t fallen into the “too much CG” trap. Yes, there’s going to be plenty of it, but overseeing it all is production visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti, who worked on some of the biggest blockbusters in the biz, including Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Endgame. VFX houses on the project include Framestore, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Wētā FX, and Rodeo FX.
Feeling primed? Feeling ready? Great. Superman flies into theaters July 11.
Featured image: Caption: Director JAMES GUNN and DAVID CORENSWET on the set of DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Photo by Greg Williams
Growing up in New Jersey with immigrant parents who ran a Chinese restaurant, Murderbot production designer Sue Chan didn’t even know the job existed when she first laid eyes on the futuristic movie that would inspire her journey into show business. “I basically decided to be an architect after going to see Blade Runner,” she recalls. “When I walked out of that movie theater with my family, I was like, ‘I want to do that. I want to be an architect.”
After studying design at Harvard, Chan worked at a San Francisco architectural firm before finding her way to Los Angeles. “What solidified in my brain is that I like to tell stories with environments,” says Chan. “I interned as a P.A. and then got to work with some great mentors. I just ate it up.”
Before designing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten RingsandWhere the Crawdads Sing, Chen art-directed three films for Murderbot co-creator Paul Weitz. He and brother Chris Weitzasked Chan in late 2023 to design Murderbot (streaming weekly on Apple TV + through July 11). In the future, robotic “Security Units” protect the human “PreservationAux” survey team dispatched by Corporate Rim bosses to scout a distant planet for natural resources. All hell breaks loose when one SecUnit, naming itself “Murderbot” (Alexander Skarsgård), secretly achieves free will and muddles through the complications of being nearly human.
Speaking from her home studio in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood, Chan talks geodesic domes, homicidal “Burrower” freaks, and eco-friendly technologies undergirding Murderbot in outer space.
Can you discuss the key challenges involved in designing the environment for Murderbot?
Murderbot is actually my first top-to-bottom world-building, capital-S sci-fi project. The challenges were also the virtues because here we are, imagining the diaspora of the human race hundreds of generations into the future.
What fueled your imagination?
Paul and Chris and [novelist] Martha Wells had it all on the page. The Corporation Rim, in all of its economic hegemony, was one anchor for me, contrasted with the PresAux team, which is…you know, the word “woke” is thrown around a lot, but I like to think of them as a polyamorous people who really care about culture. I looked at all the continents of our world – Etruscans, proto-Europeans, proto-Asians, Africa – and made a Bible. We asked ourselves, “If you meld all that together into motifs, textiles, pottery, flags, colors, symbolism, how would these elements come together for our PresAux team?”
Akshay Khanna, Sabrina Wu, David Dastmalchian, Noma Dumezweni and Tattiawna Jones in “Murderbot,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
This “Bible” was analog, or was it digital?
It was digital, but then I had my team print out our favorite references. We covered the entire wall in the art department with images, so if the showrunner or the guest director or the producers or people from the studio came in, I could say to them, “Hey, over here, this is what we want to key off of for set design.”
The “Habitat” headquarters for the survey team looks kind of space-age, funky, filled with curves. What’s that about?
There are very few right angles in this show. Why go square if you don’t have to? We were influenced by the idea that a geodesic structure is very efficient.
Concept art of the “Habitat.” Courtesy Sue Chan/Apple TV+.“Murderbot,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Besides the geodesic architecture, how did the Habitat reflect the mindset of the crew members living there?
The PresAux people are responsible stewards and wouldn’t want to plunder the planet to power their stations, so we wanted their Habitat to be passively powered. The skin of the Habitat is actually based on current solar technology using TPU [thermoplastic polyurethane]pillows that trap heat during the day and release it at night. We hired a company to build those pillows for us and inflated them inside this metal structure. We also had a company make amazing solar collectors that look like windmills, and we put a couple of those on set, along with water capture basins.
In the Murderbot future, nearly everything is 3-D printed, including the Habitat. Did you use 3-D printing in your own pre-production process?
We did print a few miniatures, and also, some components on the set were 3-D printed. We also modeled a lot of sets in [virtual] 3-D. We were able to put on goggles and see things in 3-D, and do walk-throughs in [computer graphics tool] Unreal Engine.
People get around on this planet on a hovercraft called “The Hopper.” What kind of tech powers this vehicle?
The Hopper is based on technology used in Dyson fans [invented by British designer James Dyson], which blow a lot of air through them. There are hover-cycles right now where one person can fly using that same kind of cylindrical air technology. We basically nuclearized Dyson fan technology for this aircraft, which is almost like a tour bus taking you from continent to continent without leaving the planet. It’s not a spacecraft. And like Murderbot itself, the Hopper is pretty beat up, so it’s been refurbished. That’s why you see panels that don’t match.
Concept art of the Hopper. ourtesy Sue Chan/Apple TV+.“Murderbot,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
Murderbot takes place mainly on a desolate planet. Did you build the landscape practically, or is it primarily visual effects?
My team did all of the concept work and built as much practically as we could, like those little lollipop-shaped things. That’s slime mold, which thrives in a semi-volcanic environment. We designed each biome to have different flora and fauna, then sent all of that reference on to Sean Faden and his visual effects team. They finished the story.
Concept art from “Murderbot.” Courtesy Sue Chan/Apple TV+.
Did your team have a hand in designing the creepy “Burrower” creature?
Even before the show was greenlit, I had a stable of wonderful artists, including Guy Davis, who did the very first version of the Burrower. We talked about it being beige and insect-like with enormous teeth. Our prosthetics team built a set of jaws to augment the VFX, and we built the slimy interior, but the Burrower was almost 100 percent VFX.
Concept art from of Murderbot and the Burrower. Courtesy Sue Chan/Apple TV+.
The color palette for the Habitat interior leans towards dusty orange, buttery yellow, and soft green, with limited use of vibrant primary colors. Why is that?
We wanted warm colors and a certain softness for the PresAux gang because those characters are the heroes, and also, who doesn’t love orange? We contrast that with their foes by using more metallic or desaturated colors for the Corporation Rim station, the DeltFall habitat, and the GreyCris group.
Alexander Skarsgård and David Dastmalchian in “Murderbot,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
You first started working on Murderbot in late 2023. Given all the time you’ve invested in this world, what sticks with you the most?
I love that Paul and Chris achieved what they set out to do, which is to tell this very human story about the messiness and comedy of being a non-human character interacting with a bunch of humans. That’s not easy to do in science fiction, which tends to be overweighted with dystopia or high concept. For me,it was just nice to contribute to all these textures that help tell that story.
Featured image: Alexander Skarsgård in “Murderbot,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
James Gunn’s Superman is the first feature film in the recently reinvigorated, rejiggered, and newly unified DC Universe under Gunn and Peter Safran’s vision, and from what we’ve seen so far, it’s about to make a huge mark in the legacy of one of the most iconic superheroes in history. Hitting theaters July 11, David Corenswet suits up as the Man of Steel with Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. You can expect plenty of other characters to make an appearance, including Supergirl (Milly Alcock), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), the Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Ed Gathegi), Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), and, of course, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) among them.
From early glimpses, the visual style echoes classic Americana with a slightly retro-futuristic feel. The costume design stays true to Superman’s traditional look while updating it with modern textures and details. The iconic “S” emblem directly references the Kingdom Come comic book. Production design reflects Smallville’s heartland charm and Metropolis’ urban vibe, creating a contrast that mirrors Clark Kent’s dual identity. The visual effects team has grounded the spectacle rather than overwhelming us with CGI. And for the score, it evokes the warmth and influence of John Williams’ iconic theme but with a fresh, emotional voice. But what sets this Superman apart from previous interactions is a story that is not only epic but is filled with heart.
Below, we highlight from the film’s production notes how production design, costume design, visual effects, and score created key moments in Gunn’s Superman.
Production Designer Beth Mickle
What went into designing the Fortress of Solitude?
The Fortress of Solitude is Superman’s man cave…it’s to be a place of inspiration and a place where he works, where he’s intellectually curious, where he has his laboratories, where, in the comic books, he has a zoo with aliens that he’s gathered from around the galaxies. We wanted it to show that this is his base of operations. James at first had said it could be the Richard Donner version, he felt like that’s what audiences knew, and felt like that was familiar, but I really felt like we had the opportunity to do something different, something exciting, something we hadn’t seen before, but still honor and pay homage to the original.
So we looked at the way crystals grew and kind of exploded from stone formations, which is often how they grow in laboratories or in nature. And then I started looking at the way water hits rocks and hits rock faces, it has this big projectile feel to it that was similar to the way crystal growth exploded outward from its base. I thought there was something really dynamic there, something kind of reaching toward the sky with this sense of acceleration….then I literally took this gorgeous photo from the 1950s or 60s of a big wave hitting a rock, and it soars up 50 feet in the air over the top of this little gentleman. He’s like a little ant in the photo. And I cut it out and I pasted it onto this flat, snowy landscape. And I thought there was something beautiful, sharp, and striking about that. We did 40 or 50 other versions of how crystals could come together to make a Fortress, but that idea was the first one that I led with when I showed James ideas, and immediately he said, “That’s our Fortress.”
Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Costume Designer Judianna Makovsky
How did you approach creating Superman’s suits?
Well, the one thing we didn’t want was a sculpted fake body. Right off the bat, he didn’t want to see the fake muscles coming through. He said he wanted clothing that is a uniform, as opposed to some magical, made-of-weird-fabric suit. So I think that was where we started. He kept saying it’s more of a uniform, and he puts it on like anyone gets dressed to go to work. And I think that was where we started on our illustrations. James was very clear from the beginning which S-Shield he wanted to use, and it actually came from DC, from Kingdom Come. It’s tweaked a little, but it is that S. I like it because it’s very clean and very elegant and not fussy.
David Corenswet is Clark Kent/Superman in “Superman.” Courtesy James Gunn/Warner Bros.
Visual Effects Supervisor Stephane Ceretti
What went into the making of the adorable Kyrpto the dog?
Krypto is heavily inspired by James’ dog, Ozu… It’s a very funny dog because it’s got this ear that pops up all the time, and he cannot really have his ear down. He’s a very, very cute dog, a little crazy. James kept calling him a bad dog, and I think that inspired James to put Krypto into the movie. The character of Krypto is Ozus’s shape, and the way he behaves is very much inspired by Ozu…
James was very keen on us understanding his dog more, so he filmed a ton of footage with Ozu at home and everywhere he was taking him, and scanned Ozu, and we shared it all with the animators at Framestore, who created the model based on him. Krypto is a slightly bigger dog, so we had to change the proportions, and then change the color of his fur and everything. But apart from that, the face, the eyes, the ears, all of that is really inspired by Ozu’s anatomy… and James was very precise in terms of what we were connecting with from the real-life Ozu to the movie Krypto.
It’s actually really complicated to try and get the right look, because when you build a CG character, you have to first build the surface and everything, then the fur, you have to groom the fur, and then the eyes had to be very precisely like Ozu’s eyes, so that we could get that kind of deadpan expression that he has…we didn’t want it to be a cartoonish character because he’s meant to be a dog. He doesn’t speak like we’ve done with previous characters that are animal-based. It required a lot of subtlety from all the animators at Framestore, and obviously, we shared that asset and some of the scenes with ILM and Weta, who all had to do the animation for Ozu, which makes it even more complicated because they needed to match the look of the fur, the body, the facial expressions and the animation styles. When you have to do it at three places because the dog is in a lot of scenes throughout the movie, then it’s even more complicated.
Composers John Murphy, David Fleming
How did the film history and comic book legacy influence the score of Gunn’s Superman?
John Murphy: That was the thing that was always at the front of my mind, because we knew quite early on that it was an amazing opportunity to start a whole new story and a whole new world, especially knowing that it was going to be borrowing more from the actual comic books rather than previous movies. That’s what the beautiful thing was, that I knew James was going back to the well. And we both had this love of John’s original score…
We wanted to show our love for it. It’s an amazing, iconic score, and we both were on board from the get-go. But, the challenge then, obviously, is when you have something that precious, let’s not overuse this. Let’s find the perfect moments, let’s be respectful. That was the difficult thing, because the amount of times I thought, are we overdoing this now? Or should I be really playing that on electric guitar? Am I going to composer hell for this? [LAUGHS] There was a lot of second-guessing and wondering if we were being respectful enough.
David Fleming: This Superman is very much a James Gunn film, it is singular in that way. But I think there is something about the spirit of that original movie that obviously touched James and that he has embraced, which includes the DNA of John Williams’s incredible theme. There’s something that Williams really captured about Superman’s inherent goodness and optimism that is inextricable from the character, so I knew figuring out how to use that iconic theme in a way that fits our film was key to helping James harness the spirit he was after.
I remember one particular meeting with James where I started playing around on the piano, exploring the back half of the Williams theme, which up to that point we hadn’t really utilized. As I was playing different variations, it felt like we were discovering something classic and new at the same time. I could tell it affected James, and it quickly became the musical key to Clark’s throughline in this film as he confronts his own purpose on Earth. What I love about this movie is the same thing I love about the original theme: how it taps into the heart and humanity of the character, not just as Superman, but as Clark Kent.
From the moment the first episode streamed on Netflix in March, The Residence has garnered millions of fans and great ratings. There’s also been a growing fan base for its lead character, Cordelia Cupp, known as the world’s greatest detective by those surrounding her in this unique mystery dramedy. The whodunit comes from longtime Shondaland collaborator Paul William Davies (Scandal, For the People), and is inspired by Kate Anderson Brewer’s nonfiction book on the history of The White House and its staff. Cordelia Cupp, played by a perfectly cast Uzo Aduba, is brought in after the White House chief usher is found dead during a state dinner. Cordelia, along with every member of the staff, the party guests, and other officials, including the president, spend a sleepless night in The People’s House as she tries to solve what others declare a suicide, but she knows is a murder.
Cordelia Cupp, like all great fictional detectives, comes complete with a bevy of quirky traits and singular skills. Beyond being a genius, she is an avid birder who is comfortable in her own skin and thinks faster than anyone else in the room. To head the star-filled cast as Cordelia, Davies tapped Aduba, who is known for her work on Orange is the New Black and the miniseries Mrs. America, both of which led to Emmy awards. The Credits spoke to Aduba about her headlining role in creating this great new addition to the world of detective fiction.
A lot of the character existed before you signed on, but Paul William Davies says you were his co-creator in realizing Cordelia Cupp. What did you see as the essential parts of her as a character?
We talked a lot about who she is and how she moves through the world. She takes up space, and that, for me, was a very worthy attribute. Paul wrote her as a very intelligent woman, but what struck me was that she didn’t seem to be apologetic for being great at her job. She doesn’t walk around saying she’s the world’s greatest detective, people say that about her, so something we really talked about was, how does she take up space? This is The People’s House, and it became clear that she doesn’t ever feel intimidated by whatever space she’s in. You’ll never see Cordelia do that thing where she enters a room and takes a pause to compose herself. She’s had to share spaces in which people see themselves as ranked or stacked above her, but she never approaches a space thinking that. She’s someone who is quite self-possessed, maybe knows she’s stood out her entire life, and she’s always been ok with that. Whatever room she’s in, whoever she’s interrogating, you’ll never see a difference in response from her, whether it’s an engineer or the president’s chief advisor.
She doesn’t get mentioned as a woman or as Black, but rather as the world’s greatest detective. What were some ways you used to embody that?
Paul had on the page that she finds a lot of information from a very small piece of evidence every time she speaks. I thought that was reflective of her intelligence, that she could extract so much from something as small as a pine needle. There’s a great example of how he sets the stage for her from the beginning. It’s how she first deals with the scene of the crime, the game room. Within seconds, she knows there’s no knife. They’ve been there for minutes, maybe even up to an hour, and they’ve ruled it a suicide with no weapon. She also has all these wonderful phrases, and so something from the physical that was really important for me was that she has no filter between her mind and her process. It just comes out. For that, there were two exercises. One was speaking as fast as her mind works, and the other was the exercise of stillness. Those were two things that were really important in terms of what makes her the world’s greatest detective.
She’s way ahead of everyone else.
Her mind works faster than everyone else in the room. In this room specifically, we hear and watch how fast that mind moves from the initial exam of the victim, A.B. Winter, that there’s poison, there’s a contusion on the back of his head, his wrists are slit the wrong way, and his shoes look slightly off, so he’s been dragged into the room. All those points she’s been able to notice in a minute, two minutes tops. I wanted to get the physical process of her mind. I talk a lot, but don’t talk that fast. I had to bring her voice down, if you can believe that, because I already have a pretty deep voice. For me, to be able to physicalize talking that fast, I had to put her pitch about a half step lower than mine, so that I could talk or prattle that fast, and also enunciate well enough to be understood by the viewer. I also had to refrain from moving my mouth as much to get the words out effectively, which then inspired the idea of stillness. I thought that was a worthy exercise in her interrogation process as well. She gives nothing away. No one outranks her in the room, and in her mind, at the end of the day, they’re all being kept there for the same reason. They never imagined a murder in the White House, but there they all are. Anyone could have done it, and no one is above the law, the system, or her investigation. She’s in a house where everyone is excellent at holding cards close to their vest, so it’s her responsibility to hold her cards just as close. These are people who broker deals globally and constantly juggle geopolitics, conducting press and interviews without showing a bead of sweat. She needed to employ those same skills.
Right. I talk with my hands, and I give a lot away, but she’s not giving anything away. She’s really there to listen and make sure whoever she’s interrogating is giving her information that’s consistent with what she already knows to be true. All those elements are key pieces for me to build her out as a character. Her memory, her stillness, and her observational skills are what make her the greatest detective.
Her stillness is definitely one of her superpowers.
I think that’s part of the birder in her. She’s learned to wait for the thing she’s looking for, the “blink,” to come to her. She knows any quick movements or a sudden question might lead someone away from the thing she’d actually be looking to confirm.
Cordelia is such a powerful woman. You have a new daughter. What of Cordelia’s attributes would you like her grow up to have?
I’d love her to be long in the spine and confident about those things that she does well. Being confident about who you are and what you do is not the same as being arrogant. It’s ok to be proud of doing a great job, and it’s ok to be smart. Often it seems that’s not ok, especially as a female, and I want her to know it’s ok to be smart. I want her to confidently lean into her intelligence the way Cordelia always does. I really love how unapologetic she is about taking up space and owning her intelligence. I have to give credit to Paul in that regard, because he wrote her that way. He wrote a show that is smart. He trusted the viewer to keep up with the story and the characters and how fast they moved. I loved that, and had been longing to see it as an audience member; so, to be a part of creating it was just wonderful.
All episodes of The Residence are streaming now on Netflix.
In a profile of David Corneswet for Time, Superman writer/director James Gunn said he’d offered him the title role under the condition that he “treated everyone with kindness and respect.” Gunn was referring to past set experiences he had with Chris Pratt and John Cena, and he wanted Cornenswet to do the same. The Philadelphia native might raise a few eyebrows as the new Man of Steel, given his lack of major blockbuster experience – Affairs of State, Lady in the Lake, Twisters, and the self-produced web comedy series Moe & Jerryweather are all must-watch material – but this type of casting is very James Gunn. Before Guardians, Chris Pratt was a goofy, lovable slacker on Parks and Recreation. In 2006, Gunn tapped Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place regular Nathan Fillion for his zombie flick Slither and then again for the mini-series PG Porn and the action-hero film Super. The two collaborate once more on Superman with Fillion portraying Guy Gardner, aka The Green Lantern.
Caption: (From L-R) NATHAN FILLION as Guy Gardner, ISABELA MERCED as Hawkgirl and EDI GATHEGI as Mr. Terrific in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Gunn has an eye for overlooked talent. It also does not hurt that Cornenswet appears as if he was carved straight from the Superman comics, even further transforming his body for the Man of Steel role – and we’re all for someone not needing a ton of experience in similar roles to be given an opportunity. Better yet, Cornenswet is crushing it as Superman in promotional material, making good on Gunn’s ask. So, as we draw closer to the July 11 theatrical release, let’s take look at what inspired Cornenswet to take on the role, what it was like working with Gunn, and what’s Superman’s relationship status with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) by highlighting insight from an interview shared by Warner Bros. in the film’s production notes.
Prior to Gunn’s film, who was Superman to you?
This may sound strange, but the main thing the character was to me was the thing that made me the happiest: when strangers or friends would call me it. I didn’t grow up watching the Donner movies, the Christopher Reeve movies. I knew who Christopher Reeve was, and I knew that he played Superman, but we didn’t grow up watching the films. I didn’t grow up reading the comic books. I knew who Superman was as a character, but I was never particularly connected to him. So, I think my first connection to the character was when somebody would say I was like him.
What was it like to work with James Gunn?
I was astonished at how much fun James has doing all of the different things he has to do. Seeing Guardians of the Galaxy especially, you get the sense that this director loves not so much action scenes, but the scenes where there’s a lot happening, and loves an explosion even if it’s just to get some more colors on screen, and loves putting his characters in kind of crazy, wacky situations that they have to get out of. And I didn’t realize until the first time I met him in person at the screen test that he loves a dialogue scene. I came from the theater so I love talking about text and what each word means and what each punctuation mark means, and I can piss people off doing that…
Caption: (L to r) NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor, DAVID CORENSWET as Superman and Director JAMES GUNN in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio
I really worried that James was going to be like, “I don’t care about that punctuation,” or “I don’t care,” you know? But he’ll have any conversation with you until the bitter end. To have a director who is so known for spectacle and for heart as well, to realize that he also is interested in incredibly complex dialogue in esoteric arguments about what it means to have power in a situation where you’re talking to the person you love? There was nothing that was off the table. There was nothing that was not of interest to him.
How did you prepare for the role?
All I could do initially was go to the gym because the actors had gone on strike, and so there were no conversations to be had with James or Peter [Safran] or the costume department or anybody. And we actually hadn’t even had a discussion about what James wanted me to look like physically. I knew that eventually I would do some stunt training and fight training and whatnot, but the only thing that James said was when he called me to tell me I had gotten the role, he said, “You’re in good shape, David, but I want to get you a trainer. I want you to work on your shoulders and your vulnerability,” which I thought was a good line. Most of the training was to put on weight; you eat a lot, and you lift heavy weights as intensely as you can, basically. So, most of what I did was think about what to eat, eat it, digest it, go to the gym, lift for two and a half hours a day, go home, sleep, and then repeat that cycle. It was definitely at a level of intensity that I’d never pushed myself to before.
David Corenswet is Clark Kent/Superman in “Superman.” Courtesy James Gunn/Warner Bros.
Tell us what’s happening in Superman’s life right now? Is he dating Lois Lane?
Superman is already an established superhero at this point. I think he’s sort of just gone international. He was keeping it local for a while, but he’s just recently intervened in a potential conflict overseas, and he got a lot of flak for that in the news. Of course, the Daily Planet wrote a glowing piece courtesy of Clark Kent. But Lois Lane—they are dating, it’s sort of new—is a little more critical of his actions and a little more skeptical of his motivations. So, he’s kind of established as Superman, and he’s expanding his territory and hoping to do more good around the world. And at the same time, he’s being met on the home front by Lois, who’s calling him on his bullshit a little bit and making him think twice about some things. And on the global front, Lex Luthor doesn’t like the idea of Superman being in charge of world affairs.
Caption: NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio
What was your reaction to putting on the Superman suit for the first time?
You want to hear the disappointing answer? It was underwhelming. You know why? Because the first time you put on one of these suits, it’s in two pieces, and the S isn’t sewn in right, and the cape isn’t really the cape, and they haven’t figured it all out. These suits take so much designing and building and rebuilding and fitting, and then they have to be refit and redesigned when you start realizing what kind of movements you need to be able to do in them and how the fabric stretches over time and all this. I don’t pretend to understand it, although I tried to pay attention in my costume fittings, but the costume department did an incredible job designing this suit from scratch. Then every time one of my castmates saw me for the first time in the suit, that was pretty cool because for them it’s just the suit for the first time, or the first time I saw a glimpse in the monitor after we had shot something and I saw a little bit of playback of me in the suit, on camera, I thought, “That looks pretty freaking cool.”
What most excites you for audiences to experience when they see Superman in theaters?
The film is aspirational, and I think what James has created is not so much a movie adaptation of a comic book character as it is the feeling of a great comic book playing out on a huge screen with real actors and great effects, and you just get to see it instead of on a little page in front of you, on the biggest screens there are. That’s what I think is going to excite fans the most. And that’s going to be hopefully for a new generation of kids who maybe aren’t going to the comic shops and reading comics. Hopefully, this will be the thing that then sends them to the comic shop to read the print versions of these stories, like James did as a kid.
Superman is released into theaters July 11, 2025.
Featured image: Caption: DAVID CORENSWET as Superman in DC Studios’ and Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio.
James Gunn’s Superman soars into theaters July 11. The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy writer/director, along with Peter Safran, are the two new heads of the newly unified and invigorated DC Studios, and they’ve made their ambitions clear. They announced a number of projects in the first chapter of the DC Universe (DCU) dubbed “Gods and Monsters,” in which Superman is the inaugural feature film. Other titles include Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Clayface, and Swamp Thing, as well as television series focusing on Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern Corps, and Booster Gold.
Gunn has teased plenty about the Man of Steel story, for instance, that it won’t be about his origins and that the film opens with an action sequence that parleys intoKrypto the dog rescuing Kal-El. However, for the most part, the plot has been under a tight seal, with plenty of fan theories circulating. However, what isn’t a rumor are the influences Gunn referenced to bring this new Superman saga to light.
“All previous DC media influenced me,”Gunn told The Wrap. “I think that obviously the original Donner movie influenced me, but there are also a lot of things that this isn’t, like I’m not just making a Donner-type movie. It’s very different from that.”
Gunn pointed to All-Star Superman as a major influence and noted three other comic books as references: Superman for All Seasons, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and Kingdom Come. All four had a role in shaping the character, themes, and story of Gunn’s Superman. So if you want to sink into the ethos behind the creativity, these are must-reads. Let’s look at how each might have influenced Gunn’s Kid from Krypton.
All-Star Superman
“All Star Superman.” Courtesy DC Comics
Introduced in November 2005, the 12-issue series was written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Frank Quitely, and digitally inked by Jamie Grant. It was later adapted into an animated film, released by Warner Bros. Animation in 2011, which is also worth watching. The story revolves around Superman doing heroic deeds, all the while, overexposure to the Earth’s sun is killing him. Thematically, it’s all about Superman doing the right thing to help humanity, leading up to his eventual death. But before he dies, he reveals his secret identity to Louis Lane, which echoes what’s already been revealed in the director’sSuperman trailer. Now, it wouldn’t seem like Gunn would go so far as actually to kill Superman in this film, but we wouldn’t take it off the table down the line. So expect a similar ethos for this film: Superman fighting for the success of the human race above anything else. But should we expect anything less from a hero?
Superman for All Seasons
“Superman For All Seasons.” Courtesy DC Comics.
Written by Jeph Loeb with art by Tim Sale, the four-part series was released in 1998 following the success of Batman: The Long Halloween. As the title suggests, the story unfolds through each passing season, starting in spring. It’s also not a Superman origin story, but one that centers on how the character came to be, which could hint at what we might expect from Gunn’s Superman: a story about who he is now and his arduous acceptance of his place in the world. This might be a stretch, but we could also see all four seasons in the film. We’ve seen the snowy Fortress of Solitude scenes in the trailers, and warmer temperatures on Earth. Gunn could use the season changing as a passage of time, but from what we’ve seen in the trailer, it appears that an extended period of time is a key plot point.
Also unique to the comic book is that each season is narrated by a different character: Pa Kent, Louis, Lex Luthor, and Lana Lang, a love interest of Clark Kent. Now we wouldn’t expect to see the drama of a love-triangle at the Daily Planet, but we wouldn’t put it past Gunn. Who remembers Star-Lord flirting with Nebula in Guardians Vol. 3? Sorry Gamora.
Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
“Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” Courtesy DC Comics.
The comic book is the oldest in the quarter, written by legendary Watchmen creator Alan Moore. It was released as a two-part story in 1986 and tells the final chapter of the Silver Age Superman, something Gunn said interested him in reading All-Star Superman. The first part is told by Lois Lane, who recounts the attacks against Superman, those close to him who have died, and the public’s discovery of his secret identity, Clark Kent – all plot points closely related to Gunn’s Superman. The second part sees Superman face the Legion of Super-Villains, a futuristic team of supervillains led by Lex Luthor. While the exact villains in this film are not the same, we wouldn’t be surprised by Lex having a bunch of goons under his thumb to annihilate Superman, whom he despises for, among other things, getting more attention than he does. Supergirl and Krypto the dog also make an appearance in the comic, with the four-legged superhero killing the villain Kryptonite Man during an ambush. So, could we see Krypto save Superman more than once?
Kingdom Come
“Kingdom Come.” Courtesy DC Comics.
Created by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, Kingdom Come was released in 1996, with a sequel called The Kingdom hitting shelves in 1999, sans Ross. The former sees Superman leave Earth for the Fortress of Solitude after Lois’s death. Then, a decade later, he’s convinced to return to action by Wonder Woman and reforms the Justice League. Interesting tidbit: Kingdom Come is where Wonder Woman gets her golden winged armor seen in Wonder Woman 1984, and by its end, the two superheroes are expecting a child. While Gunn’s Superman doesn’t quite showcase a Justice League, more of a Justice Gang, what he did take inspiration from is the costume. The two share similar, if not the exact same, “S” emblem on their chest, but with a different color palette. Now that’s a legacy.
James Gunn’s Superman releases into theaters on July 11.
Featured image: Caption: (L to r) NICHOLAS HOULT as Lex Luthor, DAVID CORENSWET as Superman and Director JAMES GUNN in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SUPERMAN,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jessica Miglio
In creating one of the year’s most talked about movie sequences, Sinners filmmaker Ryan Coogler assembled his de facto repertory company including Michael B. Jordan, production designer Hannah Beachler, costume designer Ruth Carter, DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw, composer Ludwig Göransson, and a lesser known member of his team: concept artist Nikkolas Smith. Smith previously worked on Black Panther and Wakanda Forever. For Sinners, Smith contributed painterly pieces devoted to the vampire Remmick and the ecstatic juke scene, celebrating centuries of Black music as Preacher Boy Sammy tears up the joint.
Before joining forces with Coogler, Smith, a Houston native, studied architecture at Hampton University, and then taught himself to paint digitally on a Wacom tablet via YouTube tutorials in his spare time while employed by Disney as a theme park designer. Smith befriended Coogler at red-carpet events, where he’d share images from his phone. Coogler eventually asked Smith to create concept art for Space Jam 2, which he produced. Smith says, “Sometimes you need your art to get people to say ‘I know what this film is going to look like when it’s done because I can feel it, I can hear it, I can almost smell it.’ You want your concept art to do all of that.”
A self-described “artivist,” Smith has also produced numerous picture books informed by Black culture, including the recent release “The History of We.” Speaking from his home studio in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood, Smith drills into the themes that inspired his vivid interpretations of the Ryan Coogler Cinematic Universe.
Caption: (L-r) JAYME LAWSON as Pearline, WUNMI MOSAKU as Annie, MICHAEL B. JORDAN as Smoke, MILES CATON as Sammie Moore, and LI JUN LI as Grace Chow, in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “SINNERS,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
For Sinners, your concept art conveys the essence of a scene in such a vivid way. How did you approach the now-famous juke sequence?
For years, I’ve been inspired by oil painters, including Ernie Barnes. I actually alluded to [Barnes’ 1976 painting] “The Sugar Shack” when I did art for the Barack and Michelle Obama project, Southside With You.
Courtesy Nikkolas Smith.
So when I read the juke scene in Ryan’s script, my mind went straight to “Sugar Shack.” I wanted to have all those elongated limbs so you can almost feel the people dancing, right? And Preacher Boy Sammy has this soulful voice, so that aura had to be the focal point warming the entire piece.
The red, orange, and yellow tones in your palette have a warming effect. How did you picture the characters at this Juke party?
And there are all different types of people fading into the darkness or seen as silhouettes. I even threw in a little bit of an Easter egg where you can see Barack and Michelle Obama in the background, at the table. I also added these sparks that rise into the air, hinting at the way the music has this almost magical power to connect past, present, and future. I wanted it to feel like a snapshot of that moment in time where everything is chill and everyone’s having a great time.
Courtesy Nikkolas Smith.
You also pay homage to Sinners‘ charming Irish vampire Remmick. What was your creative brief from Ryan Coogler?
The beautiful thing about Ryan is that he puts so much trust in us, as artists. After I read the script, I expected to be asked specific points, but he asked me, “What parts give you the horror vibe that really stand out?” And I’m like, “You’re asking me? This is your film!” But I told him it’s definitely when we first see Remmick. The script talks about that grin on his face. I wanted to capture that moment in this dark cabin, with a little moonlight coming through the window, where you see Remmick’s bloody smile with a little glint in his eye as he’s coming out of the shadows.
Courtesy Nikkolas Smith.
And then there’s Remmick’s mad dancing.
Remmick has a majestic but creepy vibe, so I put him in this almost royal pose, where he’s literally mind-controlling all the people around him. And there are so many layers with Remmick – Irish history, his connection to religion, the connection to music, appropriation, and how he wanted Sammy’s gift. There’s that kind of river dance that Remmick does, so I wanted his feet to have this sense of motion.
Courtesy Nikkolas Smith.
Remmick connected with audiences. How have your fans reacted to this piece?
The cool thing is that when I posted this online, I included Ludwig’s amazing music, and it’s now my most viral TikTok post I’ve ever had.
Courtesy Nikkolas Smith.
Michael B. Jordan’s twins, Smoke and Stack, anchorSinners with a stylish force that you manage to capture in your poster and concept art. What inspired these images?
Shoutout to costume designer Ruth Carter, because she had laid out that they’d have this Chicago gangster look, that Smoke was going to be in blue, Stack in red. Ryan broke down the aspect ratio dimensions, explaining that this would be a super-wide shot, so I wanted to capture the flat Mississippi Delta vibe with a golden hour sunset. Ryan also gave me information about the model of the car, so I just put all that together as a big establishing shot where you get the sense that these are two different characters. I gave Stack that sly fox look and had him rolling a cigarette for his brother, just as he does in the film. For Smoke, I gave him this serious, stoic look. Even though it’s two brothers standing by a car, I wanted to give everything this painterly sense of motion.
You first worked with Ryan Coogler when he asked you to create concept art for Space Jam 2, which he produced. Then you got involved in Black Panther. How did you prepare?
I got invited by Ryan and [producer] Nate Moore to visit the Black Panther set in Atlanta, where I met Chadwick Boseman. That was life changing. He treated us like royalty. And it was great to see up close what they were creating. Toward the end of the filmmaking, Ryan and Nate had me create this cast and crew gift poster.
The poster conveys a great deal of information in a very dramatic fashion. What were your references?
I wanted it to feel like a classic Drew Struzan or Richard Amsel poster from the eighties with a Mad Max retro vibe, where you have Wakanda, the golden city, in the background, with Nakia next to T’Challa, and then the Dora Milaje, and then the Jabari tribe down below.
Next came Wakanda Forever.
Production designer, Hannah Beachler, shared all this information from her Wakanda bible about the River Tribe and the battles, which we used to flesh things out as concept art. Wakanda is such an emotional film. We were trying to pay homage to Chadwick by showing the Sacred Grove in a way that felt like a very solemn funeral procession and a celebration at the same time.
Courtesy Nikkolas Smith.
Featured image: Smoke and Stack from Ryan Cooglers’ Sinners. Courtesy Nikkolas Smith.
Continuing in the tradition of his last blockbuster,Top Gun: Maverick, director Joseph Kosinski returns this summer with Apple’s most successful theatrical outing to date, with the sleek and thrilling racing drama F1, grossing north of $144 million on opening weekend. In a world where every fraction of a second could cost you a trophy—or worse, your life— Brad Pitt’s veteran driver, Sonny Hayes, wants to build “a car for combat” in order to salvage his old buddy Ruben’s (Javier Bardem) APXGP team. A Formula 1 legend who missed his shot at greatness after a near-fatal crash, the charismatic and confident Sonny is pit against cocky young hotshot and teammate, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), as they try to wrest their collective fate from the jaws of defeat.
To thrill audiences with the most cortisol-triggering cinematic experience, Kosinski’s team puts us squarely in the F1 racecar cockpit, not only with the custom “Carmen” camera system developed with Sony, but also with a crack aerial photography team with aerial cinematographer, Phil Arntz (Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, No Time to Die), and his camera pilot, Will Banks. Together, they make up the UK-based The Aerial Film Company.
Arntz recently talked to The Credits about the rigorous process of shooting at two Grand Prix races – at Silverstone in the United Kingdom and the climactic race in Abu Dhabi.
How did your love of extreme sports lead you to aerial photography?
I’ve always had a passion for movies and wanted to do that as a career. I also love extreme sports—skydiving, wingsuiting, and motocross—and that’s how I drifted into aerial filming, because that’s the main way to capture these sports. I love all things that are quick and fast, loud engines, and all that. So, this suits me perfectly – it’s 95% of what I do now.
Before that, was there another area of filmmaking that you wanted to get into?
I’ve always wanted to work in the camera department. It’s amazing to create these things with cameras that completely suspend disbelief for two or three hours, allowing the audience to forget everything else and just be totally immersed in the story.
How was aerial filming on F1 different from other projects?
On other projects, we usually have a lot of freedom to figure things out in the air and find the right angles. On F1, before we even started, Joe [Kosinski] and Claudio [Miranda, cinematographer] had all the shots mapped out, especially for the Silverstone sequence in the UK. The big opening shot starts looking at all of Silverstone before coming into a close-up of the driver. They had a very specific vision of what they wanted. Joe and Claudio watched the Previs footage side-by-side next to a live image from our helicopter, and we had to match the Previs shots. It was a really cool experience to stick so close to what was planned. By the time we started filming, there had been weeks of legwork and one of the most detailed risk assessments we’d ever done. That’s how we could get so close to the cars on the track.
What was Previs like for something with so many moving parts? You were shooting before and after Grand Prix races.
The Silverstone sequence was very specific; these are the story beats. We enjoyed the challenge of replicating the shots for real. The Previs was created before we knew whether a helicopter could even fly that particular path. It was interesting to see how we could transition from 1,500 feet down to track level, side by side with a car, and end up in a close-up of the driver. On rehearsal day, it was amazing to see that we could actually thread the needle through the grandstands and get to track level.
Caption: A scene from Apple Original Films’ “F1® The Movie,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films
Can you talk about the process with the Civil Aviation Authority [the British equivalent of the FAA]?
I think the permitting process was about three or four weeks. Since it was such a high-profile permit for a high-profile location, one of the senior inspectors was there to make sure that it was done exactly to the specifications on the permit. The inspector said that in the 25 years he’d been doing this, he’d never seen anyone stick so rigorously to the permit and operate in such a safe manner.
What type of helicopter, camera, and lenses were used for the aerial shots?
We had our Twin Squirrel, a twin-engine Airbus helicopter, the AS355, which doesn’t have as much performance as a single-engine, but the Civil Aviation Authority wanted it for safety reasons. We used our Shotover F1 gyrostabilizer with a Sony Venice 2 camera with Fujinon Premista 28-100mm lenses.
Did you have multiple cameras mounted?
The Shotover F1 is mounted on a single pole on one side of the aircraft. We had two single poles, so we could change the side of the camera system if needed. Since we were flying at such high speeds, you couldn’t really turn the helicopter towards the cars. So, it was always a single camera. We’d start on the wide end and creep in on the Zoom for a closer shot to take the audience into the race and the story.
Could you discuss the rehearsal process?
The day before, we did a rig for the helicopter, flew to Silverstone, and had about two hours of rehearsals before shooting the next morning. Once the car gets going, it does high-speed laps around the track nonstop. During the rehearsals, we sat half a mile away, where you could just about spot a car in the distance, and used certain corners of the track to decide when to go. For Silverstone, we’re starting so high, so it’s a good 15 seconds before you know whether you’ve nailed the timing. You keep trying with the car at different points of the track to see when you finally get to that low level where you’re riding alongside it. The car keeps doing its lap, and we shoot up in the air, turn around, and run straight into the next take.
Caption: A scene from Apple Original Films’ “F1® The Movie,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films
How many takes does something like that require?
We shot that one setup in rehearsals for about two hours, and on the day of shooting, I think we did three takes.
Were you shooting during the live races?
No, they’ve got a helicopter that does the broadcast. So, my team filmed at two races—Silverstone and Abu Dhabi, plus a fair bit of work that wasn’t racetrack-related. From my understanding, production had some of the broadcast material for the film and augmented that with what we shot. I think that’s why the film is so fantastic, it blends that line so well. Hopefully, for diehard Formula 1 fans, it’s like watching a Formula 1 film. But then all of a sudden, you’ve got a helicopter on track level, it starts high and comes in low, and you’re fully immersed in it. We tried to shoot just before or after the race so you’d still have all the preparations and some of the signage on the grandstands.
Were there significant differences when you filmed at the other races?
When we went to Abu Dhabi, there was a bit more freedom, partly due to how the film permits for aviation were written. It gave us a bit more flexibility to explore, fly the track, and find great shots. That race is at night, so there was an added difficulty for Will flying at night with loads of big lighting rigs all around. A lot of it was about creating a sense of speed from a moving camera at a low angle. We had to find the angles that you can’t normally get in a live broadcast because the helicopter covers it in a Top Shot. Whereas we were flying really low, countering the cars, flying low over them, chasing them from behind. Those cars are so bloody quick, even if you’re going full chat on a helicopter, keeping up with them isn’t possible.
F1 is playing in theaters nationwide.
Featured image: Caption: A scene from Apple Original Films’ “F1® The Movie,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Photo by Scott Garfield Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films
The moment writer-director-producer J.J. Abrams saw actor Josh Holloway pull up to a pay phone in a vintage mini-muscle car, he knew what his next show would be. Duster, co-created with LaToya Morgan and streaming on HBO through July 3, casts Holloway, revered for his role in Abrams’ ABC hit Lost, as fast-driving rogue Jim Ellis, whose entanglement with drug dealers in 1972 Phoenix warrants the attention of Rachel Bilson’s Phoenix FBI Agent Dana Hayes.
To ground Jim’s misadventures in vintage seventies backdrops, production designer Jonah Markowitz teamed with set decorator James Kent and location manager Shani Orona’s 38-person team. Together, they tweaked the environment to transport viewers half a century into the past.
Markowitz is something of an expert on the seventies period, having also designed the country music biopic George & Tammy, Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Mapplethorpe. He says, “We didn’t want to reference all the other ’70s films. With Duster, we wanted to strike out and make our own fun version of this period.”
Speaking from Toronto, where he’s working on a Little House on the Prairie reboot, Markowitz sings the praises of primary colors, deconstructs the Elvis Presley bowling alley, and explains why, except for the car itself, Duster‘s version of the seventies is really more about the sixties.
Let’s start with the mini-muscle car that basically co-stars with Holloway in many scenes. How did you find this cool-looking Duster?
I wish I could take credit for the car, but the Duster was already cast when I came on the show by our genius picture car coordinator, Ted Moser. And it wasn’t just one, because we carried five of those cars for all the different kinds of shots, exteriors, and interiors. And we actually painted our cars to match the exact shade of red for Dusters at that time.
Josh Holloway in “Duster.” Photograph by Ursula Coyote/Max
So, period correct red?
It is. And I will say that that primary red color really informed the palette I ended up going with.
People often associate the seventies with earth tones, so it’s interesting to see red front and center.
When you think of 1972, the culture is really coming from the sixties. On George & Tammy, the oranges and browns and avocadoes were certainly around, but it’s been redone so many times that people tend to think that’s all the seventies were about. For my pitch to J.J., I showed all these images I’d pulled from Roadside Americana, where the road signs, diners, and gas stations were primary colors almost across the board. I found a picture of a blue car on the road, the backlight was red, the line on the road was yellow, and that was it.
Rachel Hilson, Sydney Elisabeth. Photograph by Ursula Coyote/Max
You pitched a bold concept: “Let’s not do the seventies the way everybody else does them.”
Because I knew I was going to be up against a lot of other good designers, so I had to come in with a strong idea. When I told J.J. and La Toya I wanted to design this show in three primary colors, he said he hadn’t seen anything like this, let’s go for it.
It sounds like you pictured American life in 1972 through the influence of the sixties.
In our art department, one of the walls had photos of nothing but color, palette, and pattern. At the top, it said, “This is a sixties show.” Except for the cars.
Sydney Elisabeth, Josh HollowayPhotograph by Ursula Coyote/Max
Duster is set primarily in Phoenix, but you actually shot the series in New Mexico. Did you have to alter the landscape?
There was one thing we really had to change, which was the cactus. New Mexico has big Loony-Tune cactus, and I just hated them. They were basically tall cylinders — we called them the three pickles — and I asked the visual effects supervisor, Pauline Duvall, “If we put these in front of a house, can you put arms on them?” We were able to create all those cacti that look like real Arizona, thanks to a collaboration between the art department and visual effects.
What about dressing contemporary structures so they look vintage?
Luckily, Albuquerque is full of mid-century architecture. Unfortunately, most of those homes were removed in the nineties. If you look at an old photograph of Central Boulevard, all the signs are from the fifties and sixties for blocks and blocks, and now they’re all gone.
Josh Holloway, Donal Logue. Photograph by Ursula Coyote/Max
How did you deal with that?
We had to find diamonds in the rough. We’d find a gas station from that period that still exists, but nothing else around it works. It’s almost like archeology, sifting through the dirt to find architecture you can use. You’ve got the bones, but now you still have to figure out camera angles and coverage. By the end, we become really well-versed in how to hide things that are modern and fill in the details that add character.
The Elvis Presley-themed bowling alley must have required quite the makeover.
We looked at every single bowling alley in Albuquerque, but they all have [widescreen] television screens and automatic ball return. We finally chose a bowling alley with an office up above the lanes so you could see people bowling in the background when Dana’s talking to Jim. We loved the layout, but had to build covers for all the TV screens and make the ball returns a different shape because there’s a scene where the pin re-setter comes out. We did four lanes [practically] that were perfect for the seventies, and then Pauline replicated that [for the rest of the bowling alley] with visual effects.
Patrick Warburton, Josh Holloway. Photograph by Ursula Coyote/Max
In contrast to these colorful locations, you and your team built Nina’s vast, mostly beige FBI headquarters on an Albuquerque soundstage. How did you come up with that environment?
Nina is the first black FBI agent, with all eyes on her, people scrutinizing her. What if I put her in a fishbowl where everyone can see her? So, I designed the conference room to be in the middle of this enormous rectangular set, with no closed hallways. That pushed all the windows — 225 running feet — to the outside of the set.
Asivak Koostachin, Rachel Hilson. Photograph by Ursula Coyote/Max
And outside those windows, it has to look like 1970s Phoenix. How did you pull that off?
We sent six photographers to Phoenix, where they positioned themselves on 19 different parking garages to shoot my favorite building there from every direction. They brought those photographs in and had graphic designers re-illustrate those buildings for the period. Then we added a 1970s-style haze to it. That translight backing took six weeks to print. When this 225-foot-wide backing finally got hung on the set, there was a big sigh of relief because, after spending almost four months making that translight, we loved it.
Josh Holloway in “Duster.” Photograph by Ursula Coyote/Max
Filming in New Mexico, how do you see a project like Duster impacting the local community?
New Mexico has a very robust filmmaking community due to its tax credit, which generates a significant number of jobs, and all local businesses are positively impacted. What we don’t talk about as much is what filmmaking contributes to a community by attracting so many artisans and by training people locally who can now pursue visual craft as a livelihood. That changes the vibe of a city.
Factoring in delays from COVID and the actors’ strike, you spent about 18 months working on this show. What did you learn along the way?
I learned that the most successful way to find great locations is not to look for what you’re looking for.
Can you explain?
It sounds crazy, but sometimes the best place to find a great restaurant is to look at a country club. You come back to the showrunners and say, “I found this social club, the oldest building in New Mexico, it overlooks the city and has an incredible balcony. I think we could bring in the restaurant elements and make the shot work.” Or maybe you pass an abandoned drive-in theater and realize it would make a great location for a shoot-out, even if it wasn’t scripted. You’ve got to keep your eyes open.
J.J. Abrams’ formidable track record includes everything from Felicity to Mission: Impossible and Star Trek movies. What’s he like to work with?
J.J.’s like this creative laser beam of inspiration, but he’s also incredible at directing people ever so slightly to help them realize their ideas. And once he sees that you understand his vision, J.J. trusts you to bring some of your own creativity to what he’s doing.
Duster is streaming on HBO Max.
Featured image: Josh Holloway in “Duster.” Photograph by Ursula Coyote/Max
The dinosaurs are back — and this time, they brought heart. Jurassic World: Rebirth (in theaters now), the seventh entry in the iconic dino-saga, lands with a thunderous roar and a surprisingly soulful step. This film may be the shot of prehistoric adrenaline this 30+ year-old franchise needed. Directed by Rogue One and Godzilla helmer Gareth Edwards, and written by Jurassic Park OG David Koepp, the seventh installment has critics praising its balance of T-Rex-sized spectacle, emotional resonance, and a cast that delivers everything we needed.
Stephanie Zacharek of TIME celebrates the fact that the film “finally makes dinosaurs the stars of the show” again. She praises Edwards and Koepp for understanding the ideal “ratio of human business to dinosaur antics,” leaning into the awe these creatures should command. From soaring Quetzalcoatlus to a hulking mutant D. Rex with a head like Barney on a bad day, the film’s creature design has brought back both the terror and tenderness missing from recent entries.
D-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.
Maureen Lee Lenker of Entertainment Weeklyechoes the sentiment, noting that Rebirth eschews complicated lore and conspiracy in favor of old-school adventure and wonder. She applauds Scarlett Johansson’s long-awaited entry into the Jurassic universe and hails Jonathan Bailey’s performance as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis as “pure, moving, and magnetic.” She also nods to Mahershala Ali’s grounded presence as Duncan and praises the chemistry among the trio.
L to R: Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis and Scarlett Johansson as skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.
Bailey earns praise across the board. His portrayal of the bespectacled, dino-loving Henry Loomis is drawing comparisons to franchise legends. TIME calls him “adorable,” The Hollywood Reporter notes the “bantering flirtation” between him and Johansson, and EW refers to him as “tailor-made” for the role — channeling a blend of Alan Grant’s scientific reverence and Ian Malcolm’s charm.
His tearful encounter with a grazing brontosaurus is quickly becoming one of the standout scenes in the series’ history, giving the franchise one of its most emotional beats since the original.
L to R: Scarlett Johansson as skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett and Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.
“Bailey has the purest, most moving moment in the film,” writes Lenker. “His electric joy and overwhelming awe at getting to actually touch a dinosaur…have the power to make the entire audience feel like a child again.” The Bridgerton breakout brings both brains and biceps to the role, blending nerdy charm with a sincere reverence for prehistoric life.
David Rooney at The Hollywood Reporter credits Rebirth with “propulsive narrative drive, big scares, and appealing new characters,” while highlighting Edwards’ choice to shoot on 35mm Panavision as a nod to Spielberg’s original. There’s also no shortage of spectacle: chase sequences on land, sea, and air deliver high-octane thrills, with nods to Jaws and the original Jurassic Park. Rooney celebrates the film’s ability to “deliver adrenalized action.”
Mosasaurus in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.
Even Vanity Fair acknowledges the film has “flair and wit,” engaging performances, and moments of spectacle that are hard to deny. Richard Lawson points out that the film seems to “be aware of its redundancy,” but that self-awareness doesn’t stop it from delivering on “likable performances” and “lush, primordial” visuals. He notes the structure’s simplicity — a clear three-part mission across land, sea, and air — helps keep the film grounded, even as new hybrid dinos and nostalgic musical cues swirl around.
D-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.
Alexandre Desplat’s sweeping score earns consistent acclaim — especially for his integration of John Williams’ iconic theme — and Edwards’ gift for visual composition gives Rebirth some of the most cinematic moments in recent franchise memory. The glowing orange T. rex raft chase, the velvety jungle vistas, and the climactic tunnel escape all prove that this world still has teeth.
While some critics remain skeptical of its long-term impact, many agree that Jurassic World: Rebirth does exactly what its title promises. It breathes new life into a franchise many thought extinct — not by reinventing the wheel, but by remembering what made it turn in the first place: dinosaurs, spectacle, and a sense of awe.
With Rebirth roaring into theaters just ahead of the July 4th weekend, one thing is clear: there’s still plenty of bite left in the franchise. Zacharek perhaps says it best: Rebirth offers “the fantasy of prehistoric creatures big and small, carnivore and veg, deadly and friendly, resurrected from the sleep of extinction.”
Verdict: It roars again.
Featured image: L to R: Luna Blaise and the T-Rex in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards
