Tom Hardy’s alien symbiote lunatic is back for a third and final course.
And that third course now has an official title and an earlier release date, with longtime Venom scribe and first-time director Kelly Marcel’s film now called Venom: The Last Dance, with an October 25 premiere, a two-week move from its original November 8 slot. This move up to October 25 returns the franchise to its sweet spot around Halloween.
The Last Dance finds star Tom Hardy returning for a third waltz around the bloody dance floor as journalist Eddie Brock, who, of course, also plays host to the voracious alien symbiote Venom. Joining Hardy in the new film are newcomers Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Marcel directs from a script she wrote, from a story she and Hardy created.
Hardy’s run as Venom began with director Ruben Fleischer’s 2018 hit Venom, followed by Andy Serkis’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which co-starred Woody Harrelson as the alien symbiote that made Venom look mild-mannered by comparison. Marcel wrote on the previous two films, and now she takes the helm in her directorial debut.
As the title suggests and Hardy’s Instagram post from last November made clear, Venom: The Last Dance will be the final film in the series, one he’s said he has loved making. “It’s been and continues to be a lot of fun this journey — there’s always hard turns to burn when we work, but [it] doesn’t feel as hard when you love what you do and when you know you have great material and the support at all sides, of a great team,” Hardy wrote at the time.
Hardy also made sure to spread the love to Marcel, his longtime collaborator at this point: “I want to mention very briefly how proud of my director, writing partner and dear friend Kelly Marcel I am,” Hardy wrote, “watching you taking the helm on this one fills me with pride, it is an honour. Trust your gut, your instincts are always spot on.”
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“I like the fact that there’s something a little bit strange in what we do,” production designer Jan Houllevigue tells The Credits about his collaboration with director Johan Renck (Chernobyl). The two have known each other for years, working on David Bowie music videos, Chanel No. 5 commercials, and the television mini-series The Last Panthers. Their latest is Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler as cosmonaut Jakub Prochazka on a solitary space mission to the edge of the galaxy.
The story is based on the Jaroslav Kalfar novel “Spaceman of Bohemia” (screenplay by Colby Day) and lets us know that even in outer space, hearts can be broken. Isolated and alone, Jakub is months into his voyage only to regret leaving his wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan). Enter a six-eyed hairy creature named Hanuš (voiced by Paul Dano) as Jakub’s voice of reason to navigate the troubled relationship. The task for Houllevigue was building distinct worlds that immerse viewers in Jakub’s singular environment and the life he left on Earth.
In creating the spacecraft the production designer steered away from the high-tech, digital vibes you’d find in Star Warsor Star Trek and leaned into an analog approach. “We wanted to make something that had more of a brutalist feeling to it,” he notes. The entire aircraft was designed from scratch. Its shape, architecture, and details are laid out through concept drawings and 3D renderings. Each section was then built into modules so that “every piece was moveable” for filming. “We made a 360-degree set and tried to make it as small as possible because it had to feel claustrophobic,” says Houllevigue.
Its tactile design blends an eye-quenching color palette that creates a comforting connection as if the spacecraft is an extension of a home rather than a piece of technology in space. The immersive details inside the ship were a collaboration with set decoration. All the touchable dials and buttons were made to blend seamlessly into the surrounding environment. Artificial light sources were chosen to illuminate the ship’s interior rather than shaping sunlight through windows, further separating Jakub’s life on Earth.
For anti-gravity scenes, ship modules were arranged to coincide with each framed shot. Various rigs were attached to Sandler or the set to simulate the character floating in space. “It’s difficult to shoot in a tight environment and even more difficult to shoot in zero gravity, but every piece of the ship was moveable. It was a big puzzle,” says Houllevigue. Most of the photography was produced in-camera but visual effects stepped in to replace sections of the ship that were removed for filming. A digital 3D scan of the aircraft allowed visual effects supervisor Matt Sloan and the VFX team to reconstruct the interiors in post-production.
The bigger hurdle for visual effects was Hanuš. On set, a plush toy spider with a 3D printed face to provide an eye line for Sandler was positioned in frame before being fully replaced with a digital version. Space exteriors were also created with visual effects, including the mysterious purple Chopra cloud. To replicate small particles of the cloud falling, the camera department made LED lights that were later finessed by visual effects in a “very natural way.”
Juxtaposing Jakub’s space environment is his life with Lenka. Houllevigue designed locations, like their home, with unique aesthetics that were personal to the characters. “There has to be something grounded and very soft to Lenka’s world,” he says. “The story is not only about Jakub but her as well, so it was a matter of trying to make it work for both.” Location scouts helped inspire the production design story on Earth, which was a mix of set builds and practical locations. “I have an idea going into a location, but I like to be opportunistic when it comes to scouts because if there’s something I like at the location I bring it into the production design,” explains Houllevigue.
Color palette subliminally adds to the story’s depth, which shifts from creams, yellows, oranges, purples, and blues in outer space to more earthy tones of greens, browns, and whites on Earth. “Production design is not always about building huge sets. It’s about finding what’s right for the story,” notes Houllevigue. “We tried to make the emotion work with Lenka and Jakub’s world feel isolated. I hope we succeeded.”
In Part One of our conversation with veteran costume designer Jacqueline West, we talked about the monumental effort that went into weaving the sartorial visuals of the Fremen’s Sietch Tabr community and the southern Reverend Mothers on the desert planet Arrakis. Today, we conclude with the wardrobe fashioned for some of the most intense action sequences in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi opus.
Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Paul Atreides goes from a young man who had never seen battle to losing his father after surviving the Harkonnens’ attack in Dune: Part One, fleeing deep into the Arrakis desert with the Fremens, and finally becoming their messiah, the ‘Lisan al Ghaib.’ How do his costumes reflect this expansive arc?
He wears a stillsuit the whole time. The only things I changed were his wrappings and his hoods. When he takes on the role as their leader, he becomes the T.E. Lawrence of the Fremens, leading them in revolt against their usurpers. I gave him hoods that were almost medieval. But Timothée grew as a man and an actor in those three years between the films, and it shows his maturity. I’d love to say I did that with his wardrobe, that it was costume magic, but I think on this one, I have to hand the praise to Timothée—it was all his acting. He takes on that cloak of power in how he acts and manages his relationship with the Fremens and with Chani.
Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Now, we have to talk about that first impressive wormriding sequence!
I gave Timothée new armor for the wormriding sequences. That’s not CGI. We shot a lot of close-ups in Budapest on an enormous animatronic life-size worm on a gimbal with the most enormous wind machines blasting sand at them. So, the armor had to be able to travel through the desert. That was Gerge’s brilliant work. [head propmaker Gergely Dömölki]
What was the process to make these wormriding suits?
It’s about an inch-and-a-half thick to protect them from the blast of the sand. Since it goes over the stillsuits, we had to design and construct it on a mannequin over a stillsuit. After Denis approved the 3D concept art, I went out to the island and worked with Daniel [Cruden, assistant costume designer] and Gerge to construct them. It’s pretty much from the waist because they’re crouched down on the worm with the worm hooks. It all moves like medieval armor but much thicker. It had to move with the actors’ movements on the worm. It was really like a roller coaster ride. We did several tests with Timothée to see his mobility and make sure it was nimble but protective.
Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and ZENDAYA as Chani in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
One of the new characters is the cruel and blood-thirsty Fyed-Rautha (Austin Butler), heir apparent to House Harkonnen. What went into his collection?
I wanted to keep him as a rock star, but dark and Gothic, mostly dressed in black leather of different textures—black Leather, black vinyl, and heavy, thick black wools—and I pieced them all together in a Goth patchwork. I wanted to keep him dark, sinister, and kind of creepy, but they had to be flexible because of all the battle scenes. I had a wonderful cutter/fitter from England who concentrated just on his costumes.
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Fyed-Rautha’s gladiator battle scene was especially interesting because it was in black and white—since it took place outside, under the black sun on Giedi Prime. Did this impact your process?
I had a rather interesting incident because that scene was all shot in infrared. I didn’t realize some fabrics, when shot in infrared, would turn white. And his outfit had so many different fabrics and leathers. When we camera-tested, some of his pieces came out white, so I had to start over. That’s a heads-up for other designers: when you’re shooting in infrared, test everything. [Cinematographer] Greig Fraser set up a camera outside our atelier where we constructed everything and let me test every piece of fabric for anyone on Giedi Prime.
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Chains, metals, and leather make up a lot of the Hakkonnens’ outfits.
It’s the Goth look. They’re like vampires sucking the blood from the Fremens. I used a lot of stretch leathers, stretch vinyls, and chains. The servants are dressed in these constrictive leather-coated bones that work as corsets, where we took small animal bones and coated them in vinyl, and then laced them all together. Feyd Rautha’s entourage of female slaves are young, ghoulish vampire-esque women in black stretch leather to keep them sinister. Their jewelry was made in our shop, using bones and leather.
L-r: Austin Butler, director Denis Villeneuve, and Dave Bautista in “Dune: Part Two.” Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) is not only the Emperor’s daughter but also a Bene Gesserit. How does her style exemplify her crucial role in the prophecy?
She’s the voice of reason in the Emperor’s world. But she’s also a Bene Gesserit and sees the workings of the plans within plans. Not only is she the intellectual voice, but she’s also a moral barometer and a warrior princess. So, I had to combine all those elements into her designs. When we first see her, she’s in white beaded headpiece, it’s very medieval but also harkens back to Reverend Mother Mohiam, with the beaded veil she wore when she first interrogated Paul [in the first film]. I kept Princess Irulan rather Bene Gesserit-like, but I didn’t want to burden her with many veils. Instead, I made these beaded headdresses for her.
Caption: FLORENCE PUGH as Princess Irulan in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
What about Princess Irulan’s chainmail dress in the ending scene?
I went to Catholic school as a child and always remember the nuns’ faces being pinched in their habit, which looked very constricted. With the very tight beaded headdresses, I wanted to show the Bene Gesserit’s control over her. So, I kept that when I got to her armor outfit when she agrees to marry Paul and rule over the empire with him. It came from medieval chainmail and shows her power to take on all of that.
Caption: FLORENCE PUGH as Princess Irulan in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Dune, Part Two is in theaters now.
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Featured image: Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Netflix took on producing the live-action remake of the long-running, beloved Nickelodeon animation Avatar: The Last Airbender, about four elemental kingdoms (fire, air, water, and earth) who live in harmony until the Fire Nation starts a war to take over the world. The series, which premiered late last month, is true to the original story. Twelve-year-old Aang (Gordon Cormier) is the sole remaining airbender after a Fire Nation attack, and he survives after being frozen in an iceberg for a century before waking up in an icy part of the world of the Southern Water Tribe.
The world around Aang has completely changed, and at the same time that he learns he’s the new avatar, a reincarnated master of all four bending disciplines, he also learns he’s the sole entity who can save this unfamiliar world. But he has help — Katara (Kiawentiio), the Southern Water Tribe’s last waterbender, and Sokka (Ian Ousley), her older brother. Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu), banished from the Fire Nation in favor of his sister until he can locate the avatar, quickly finds them, and the war, which has been raging for the past century, lands at Aang’s feet.
Aang’s exploits bring him to Earth Kingdom locations like Kyoshi Island and Omashu, a lush city carved into a mountain, Agna Qel’a, the icy jewel of the Water Tribe, and Roku’s Temple, a shrine atop a volcanic island. For cinematographer Michael Balfry, who shot the first half of the first episode as well as episodes three, four, seven, and eight, about 98% of his work was in the studio. He used lighting to give each of the four elemental worlds its own atmosphere, shot what he could practically in order to offer a fresh, live-action version of an animated story with an enduring fan base, and spoke with us about those aspects of the set as well as the inspiration he drew from the original cartoon.
How did you use the cinematography to visually differentiate the different elemental worlds?
I tried to keep it fairly simple because that’s always the hardest thing to do. Fire was a lot of darkness, the evil world. A lot of the lighting is motivated by flames, fire, moonlight, and by hard sunlight. When you get into Omashu, the earth world, we had fairly strong light but softer, directional. I tried to keep the palette in the earth tones. That made it feel warm but not hot, like the Fire Nation. And then, obviously, when we go up north, that’s the coolness of the world. Having shot in all those locations in real life in the past, I was able to bring that experience to The Last Airbender when we had to go into the studio and recreate it. When we’re up north it’s the coldness, the ice, there’s always a breeze up there, and sometimes a really hard light. But you don’t want a hard light that makes your actors squint as if they’re in pain. We tried to keep it directional and soft. Those were the broad strokes of how we approached it.
Have you watched the animated version? Was there anything you tried to carry over?
I did watch the animated show. Wonderful storytelling. It just moved me. I’m getting goosebumps right now just thinking about it. Moving forward to the live-action, we used the animation as inspiration. The animation had a lot of classic filmmaking in it, from what I remember — it’s been a few years since I’ve seen it. But you know, the bad guys are a lot lower, closer, and wider, the lens is not as flattering, more intimidating. I tried to keep Aang, Katara, and Sokka in three shots and then isolated them into brother and sister teams to try to create that connectivity of the characters. That was important. Michael Wylie, our production designer, is an extremely talented man, and he brought sets and assets that really helped me sell the story. If the set looks great, it makes your job so much easier. And Albert Kim, the showrunner, let the creatives be creative, but gave us a roadmap. A very large roadmap because there’s just so much in that animation.
That sense of scale made it into the live-action, too.
When we were color-grading it, I said, I’ve just been around the world, and I haven’t left the stage. What a treat to be part of that.
In a visual effects-heavy series like this, how is your process affected?
It does affect it, but we go in knowing what needs to be done. We fix things in prep and try not to fix things in post. For several episodes, I worked with Jabbar Raisani, the director. He’s extremely knowledgeable on special effects. He worked on Stranger Things, post-side, and he came in knowing what could and couldn’t work. I’d bring my two cents in, and together, we’d forge a path. We had a strong visual effects team there, and it was very collaborative.
Do you have any examples?
We did a scene toward the end of the show where the world turns red and then goes to black and white or monochrome. The red part, I did that practically on set, and it worked out very well. We were talking with visual effects, and they said you can do it practically and leave it as is or use effects down the road. And I said I’d like to do it practically when the moon turns red. My thinking was that we had lanterns there, and I wanted to keep the color of the lanterns true. So the whole lighting changes, except the lanterns remain a constant, and that psychologically helps me sell the idea that it’s a blood moon. And for the black and white, I kept it fairly straightforward. In post-production, we just sat there and tweaked it to make it work for what the story was trying to tell at that point in time. It was a team sport.
Was there any elemental kingdom that was harder to get right?
The stunt department helped a lot with the moves and creating the hand-bending. That was a learning process. We’d sit there and look at dailies to see what did and didn’t work. They’d rehearse behind the scenes with the actors, trying to nail the fluidity of the water, the abruptness of the fire, the strength of the land, and how they’d move their hands. That was a bit of a process, which, by the second week of shooting, was pretty dialed in.
This a series appealing to a built-in fan group. How has the response been?
It’s a massive story. I think the whole team is enjoying the fact that the fan base, the majority is really enjoying the show. We’re all hoping we can continue telling the story of their journey. It was a fantastic shoot to be on because we were recreating and retelling at the same time. We were trying to improve on what had been done in the past. It is a darker story than what the animation was, but the audience who enjoyed the animation many years ago has now grown up, and I hope they’re enjoying this new approach.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is streaming on Netflix.
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One of the great villains of 21st-century cinema was also in a movie with one of its greatest heroes—Mad Max: Fury Road revealed the colossal fascist warlord Immortan Joe (the late, great Hugh Keays-Byrne), a carapace-wearing, skeleton-masked despot who ruled over a parched wasteland where he kept its inhabitants on the brink of starvation, dying of thirst, and much worse for the young women he took as wives. Yet he had in his midst a figure stronger than he was, quietly plotting to rip out his heart in any way she could. This, of course, was Furiosa (a phenomenal Charlize Theron), the one-armed, buzz-cut badass who stole away with Immortan Joe’s wives in a mad dash for her former home. This escape and the chase that followed made up the entirety of George Miller’s flawless Fury Road, but now Miller’s back with a story about how Furiosa came to be (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy), and a younger Immortan Joe, played by Australian actor Lachy Hulme, will play a big part in the film.
Empire Magazine has an image of Hulme as Immortan Joe in his now iconic skeleton mask. Have a look:
EXCLUSIVE 🔥#Furiosa‘s Immortan Joe will be played by Australian actor Lachy Hulme, Empire can confirm.
Hulme describes the film as “David Lean, but with motorbikes instead of camels”.
Hulme is stepping into the massive boots left behind by the late Hugh Keays-Byrne, who was picture-perfect as the sociopathic leader of the V8 Triumvirate. Furiosa arrives nine years after Miller’s nearly flawless Fury Road, which starred Tom Hardy as the titular Max and Theron as Furiosa, the ferocious, fearless heroine who was easily the heart and soul of the movie. Furiosa will take us back and follow her in her younger years when she was snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and ended up in the snares of Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), the leader of the great Biker Horde, and thus began her years-long struggle against the lunatics roaming the vast wasteland and vying for supremacy of a broken world.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is set 45 years after the collapse of society and is centered on Furiosa’s violent odyssey as she desperately tries to get back home. In order to do so, she’ll be required to master all things mechanical and survive a war between Warlord Dementus and Immortan Joe. The trailer gave us glimpses of the ingenious practical effects and unparalleled stunts that made Fury Road a phenomenon and multiple Oscar winner.
Miller directs from a script he wrote alongside his Fury Road co-writer Nick Lathouris, and he’s built the world of Furiosa with plenty more Fury Road alums, including production designer Colin Gibson, costume designer Jenny Beavan, and makeup designer Lesley Vanderwalt, each of whom won an Oscar for their work on Fury Road.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga revs into theaters on May 24, 2024.
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Featured image: Caption: Chris Hemsworth in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Village Roadshow Pictures’ action adventure “FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jasin Boland
After just nine days in release, Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated sequel to his first Dune film has already scored $367 million in worldwide box office. The massive response to Dune: Part Two is due in no small part to costume designer Jacqueline West’s intricate designs that went beyond adding depth to the characters—they are integral in building a complex, harsh world thousands of years into the future.
After designing 2,000-plus costumes—including the bespoke stillsuits—for the first film, the five-time Oscar nominee (who was most recently nominated for Killers of the Flower Moon) is back to bring Frank Herbert’s futuristic Known Universe to life. Whereas part of the first film took place on the lush ocean planet of Caladan— the ancestral home of House Atreides—the sequel is largely set on the desert planet Arrakis, with more focus on the Harkonnens’ mostly barren planet, blackly lit planet Giedi Prime.
When the first installment ended, House Atreides was almost wiped out by the Harkonnens in a sneak attack on Arrakis, leaving Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) on the run. The sequel picks up once they have found refuge at Sietch Tabr, a major Fremen community hiding from the harsh sun Canopus in cavernous caves and tunnels within mountains or rock outcrops.
In Dune: Part One, you had costume designer Bob Morgan co-running the workshops in Budapest, London, etc. How did production evolve in Part Two?
Though it was sad not having Bob, all of my crew from Dune One came back. I just love the show of loyalty—both to the project and to me—and the continuity. I had a new assistant costume designer, the brilliant Daniel Cruden, and still had [costume cutter] Helen Beasley, Rachel Freire cutting for me, and the brilliant [supervising textile artist] Matt Reitsma from London, who printed all those incredible Fremen fabrics. He came up with designs based on the Fremen alphabet for everybody in the Sietch. I had incredible manufacturing capability in this movie, which was much more expansive.
Caption: (L-r) Director/Writer/Producer DENIS VILLENEUVE and TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
In the first film, about 2,000 costumes were made. How many were made for Part Two?
About 4,000 pieces. Gerge [head propmaker Gergely Dömölki] still made all the wormriding armor and a lot of the Harkonnen armor in his armory in Budapest, on an island on the Danube. We had to set up a workshop to replace all the stillsuits that got trashed in the battle scenes in Dune: Part One. It was a huge manufacturing endeavor. I was so happy with my workroom and the level of artistry and commitment. We had a whole soundstage set up for our manufacturing.
Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. PicturesL-r: Austin Butler, director Denis Villeneuve, and Dave Bautista in “Dune: Part Two.” Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
We get much more time with the Fremens living in the Sietch. What do their costumes tell us about this tribe?
They wear practical desert garb that nomadic peoples have worn from the beginning of their history. In Dune: Part Two, various nomadic cultures have merged into one desert culture for survival 11,000 years into the future. They’ve brought the best aspects of every desert culture, the Tuareg, the Bedouins, into this beautiful conglomeration that’s beautiful and romantic, a la Lawrence of Arabia.
Lady Jessica goes through a lot in this film after arriving in Arrakis and fleeing to the Sietch. How do her costumes chart her transformation from where we left off in Part One?
When we left her in Dune: Part One, she was still in her stillsuit and dessert wrap. When she gets to the Sietch, she starts dressing like the Fremens—in a more humble style with the rougher linen, almost djellaba-esque long gowns, and wrapped veils, all printed by Matt.
Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Chiabella JamesCaption: (L-r) ZENDAYA as Chani and REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Once Lady Jessica becomes the Southern Reverend Mother, her face is tattooed over with the prophecy, and her outfits are elaborate but in earthy tones. What went into this collection?
Working with sketch artist Keith Christiansen, we started looking at the Egyptian sarcophagi since the Bene Gesserits are ancient nuns or heads of their particular sect. The sarcophagi are so elaborate, and their shapes are quite beautiful and age-old, with magnificent carving in the details. We used many layers of different fabrics—hand-painted velvets, hand-painted silks, and tapestry fabrics. We purchased all the fabrics, mainly from Italy and some from Thailand and Eastern Europe, and pieced them together into these incredible, ornate patchworks. We painted, dyed, and printed them all in-house.
Caption: REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
What about the elaborate headdresses on Lady Jessica and the other southern Reverend Mothers?
The jewelry came from all over the Middle East and North Africa. I had shoppers in bazaars in Istanbul, Morocco, and Egypt. Then, we disassembled them, and my jewelry maker put everything back in a new way to make it look futuristic. We pieced together different necklaces for each of the Reverend Mothers. We took all of that detail from the sarcophagi and made them come alive.
Caption: REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Lady Jessica and the southern Reverend Mothers dress differently from the ones we saw in Part One, i.e., Reverend Mother Mohiam’s entourage of Bene Gesserit sisters, who were all in black.
Mohiam comes from the Emperor’s world. You don’t wear black in the desert, or you’re going to bake. These women have navigated for many, many years through the different desert cultures within the Fremen world. I imagined Fremen sects in the south were different from those in Northern Arrakis. Even though they’re all Reverend Mothers, they are on a different planet. So, I wanted to distinguish them with color, but their shapes are very similar.
Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and CHARLOTTE RAMPLING as Reverend Mother Mohiam in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary release. Photo Credit: Chiabella James
Yes, their silhouettes and head coverings have a similar look.
They’re all based on Medieval nuns and the women of the tarot cards, particularly with the Queen of Swords.
Caption: REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
The Emperor (played by Christopher Walken) is dressed relatively simply as the Ruler of the Known Universe. What is the reasoning behind that?
There were two main references. One was a bronze statue of Kublai Khan—I was obsessed by the power and the simplicity of his wardrobe. And there was a Japanese Emperor from the movie Rikyu, I remember the simplicity of his dress and the power it gave him. Since we were shooting that portion in Italy with very simple architecture at the cemetery [on the grounds of the Brion tomb in San Vito d’Altivole, Italy], he’s not surrounded by anything ornate. It’s all elegant and almost ritualistic in style, so I thought his wardrobe had to be consistent with his surroundings.
Check back tomorrow for the conclusion of our conversation, where West discusses Paul Atreides’ worm-riding armor, how Catholic nuns inspired Princess Irulan’s headdresses, and why it is crucial to camera test every fabric when shooting in infrared.
Check out part two of interview with Jacqueline West here.
Dune: Part Two is in theaters now.
For more on Dune: Part Two, check out these interviews:
Featured image: Caption: REBECCA FERGUSON as Lady Jessica in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
Disney+ just released an exciting new 6-part animated series called Iwájú, representing the first collaboration with an outside studio in its partnership with Pan-African storytelling company Kugali Media. Kugali’s co-founders created a uniquely African story, which takes place in a futuristic Lagos, Nigeria. In fact, every single character that appears in Iwájú is Nigerian.
The series is a coming-of-age tale centered on an idealistic 10-year-old girl named Tola. She lives in the rarified and protected environment her tech mogul father Tunde has created on the island, the wealthiest part of Lagos. Her best friend, streetwise, self-taught tech expert Kole, lives with his mom on the overpopulated mainland in a makeshift dwelling. For her 10th birthday, Tunde gives Tola his best new tech, a defensive robot disguised as a simple lizard named Otin. When crime kingpin Bode and his henchmen, who have been terrorizing the people of mainland Lagos, set Tola as their target, it’s up to Tola, Kole, and Otin to save the day.
Marlon West, who was the visual effects supervisor for the project, described what the folks at Kugali were trying to say with the project. “It was actually a warts-and-all love letter to Legos, the hometown of two of the three Kugali founders, one of which still lives there.” All three founders took on leadership roles in the project, with Nigerians Olufikayo “Ziki” Adeola as director and Tolu Olowofoyeku as cultural consultant, and Ugandan Hamid Ibrahim as production designer. Their love of Lagos is expressed in Iwájú through everything from the production design to the characters and the way they speak to the joy characters in Iwájú seek in their everyday experiences. The Credits spoke to West about his part in the Disney/Kugali collaboration, as well as its Africanfuturism, examination of class inequality, and celebration of Black excellence.
After a decades-long career at Disney as head of effects animation, Iwájú is your first time in the role of visual effects supervisor. How is that different from what you’ve done before?
Most of my career was spent doing only special effects as a head of effects on several of our Disney films, like Encanto, Frozen, and Moana. The visual effects supervisor sounds like the same job, but it’s different in the sense that I’m in charge of everything visual to get our world from visual development drawings and paintings and storyboards to the final images you see onscreen. It’s going through the whole process. My job wasn’t just the visual effects, like the lightning and water and rain that I typically do, but everything that is part of the visual storytelling and the technical creation of the entire project of Iwájú.
This was a first for Disney in terms of collaboration, but they know animation, and Kugali knows Nigeria.
Kugali is a media company that primarily did comics prior to this project. They were first-time filmmakers, and it was their first time working in animation. They have wonderful artwork in their comics. We had Cinesite in Montreal as a partner studio that did the lion’s share of the production work, from assets to lighting. It was key that Disney leadership, myself included, made sure both Cinesite and Kugali were up to the game we usually play, and everyone was really excited to rise to that occasion.
In this story, technology plays a different part in the lives of each character.
We worked with production designer Hamid Ibrahim to make the technology specific to who is using it or what the source might be. Tunde’s tech is more legit because he created it himself. It has a purple hue, including what’s in his house and his car. With Bode, our fantasy backstory is that his glasses and cloaking devices and all the tech he uses is more hacked military tech as if it’s bootlegged. It’s blue and scratchy, and the avatar he uses is not at all off-the-shelf. It’s as crooked as he is, as far as where it comes from.
Otin has her own set of rules in terms of tech. She’s both a lizard and robot.
She’s an Agama lizard. I’ve never been to Lagos, but they’re ubiquitous there like squirrels are here in the states, so we tried to suggest that there are Agama lizards around their compound. Otin had to be believable to the rest of the world as just a lizard, but why would this little girl be making a pet of a lizard that is otherwise just everywhere? She has lots of tells that she is a robot. If you look really closely at her eyes, they are lenses. Her markings have lights that let you know if her batteries are low. She also doesn’t speak. Even when there’s audio coming out of her, she’s got a microphone. She doesn’t lip sync. That was a decision we made to make her feel more like a robot, and less like a character or a talking lizard. When she does speak, she’s just blank faced, and audio is coming from a speaker way in the back of her mouth.
There are a number of ways that Iwájú differentiates between those in power and wealth and those in poverty, right down to the colors used.
That was baked into how our people dressed, in our production design, and how they were able to experience life, like the difference between how Tola lives, versus how Kole lives. Kole’s dwelling doesn’t even have a front door. Here in the US a lot of cities use the expression “other side of the tracks” for the line between good and bad neighborhoods and in terms of living conditions. We’ve driven freeways through neighborhoods in America, and in Lagos, they have a physical island that’s a real geographical difference, where in the 50s they started filling in a lot of marshland and building really nice houses on that island. In the real Lagos there’s less of a clear divide between wealthy, middle and lower middle class people and where they live, but we leaned heavily into the physical divide. The haves are on the island, and the have-nots are on the mainland. We tried to use different colors, with earthy tones on the mainland, and pastels on the island, and clearly show different architecture in the two.
There are African patterns and symbols in a lot of the spaces, designs, and architecture in the show.
We really wanted to have these African patterns play a part in world-building, not only in people’s clothing but also in architecture. There are drum-shaped buildings. There are a lot of poor people on the mainland who live in stacked storage containers, and those have circles or squares, and when they’re stacked on top of each other, they make a pattern, especially at night. There’s overt design in the world by the architects and world builders of our futuristic Lagos, but there are also the implied African patterns, like in our scenes where two characters come head to head with each other. There are these patterns that come in. We wanted the tech to have an African feel, too, and not look at all like it’s coming from America but rather from Tunde’s company or one of his company’s rivals. It’s an African story and, even more specifically, a Nigerian story, and that is very much expressed visually.
What do you think is the best thing people will get out of seeing Iwájú?
I’ve seen a lot of people respond to the trailer like that reminded them of a famous Marvel property, and I think that is not a function of how much this looks like something else and more about how little we get so see science fiction with Black people. I really hope this expands that thinking because no one looks at Star Wars and says it’s just like Star Trek, but people look at this and say it looks like Wakanda. That’s because it’s so rare to see; it’s their only point of reference. When people see Tola, this rich African girl, for the first time, see her wake up on her 10th birthday, hop on her hoverboard, and play with her robot, they’re going to realize how much they need to see that. “I didn’t realize how starved I was to see the daughter of an African tycoon flying around in her futuristic pad. I hadn’t seen that ever before, and now I’m glad I have.” That’s in the first five minutes. There’s plenty more where that came from.
Iwájú is streaming now on Disney+.
For more stories on 20th Century Studios, Searchlight Pictures, Marvel Studios and what’s streaming or coming to Disney+, check these out:
Featured image: “IWÁJÚ” is all-new original long-form series created in collaboration with Pan-African comic book entertainment company Kugali. Kugali filmmakers Olufikayo Ziki Adeola, Hamid Ibrahim and Tolu Olowofoyeku call the series a love letter to Lagos, Nigeria. Their futuristic depiction is bursting with color, unique visual elements and technological advancements is inspired by the spirit of Lagos, which is physically divided into an island and a mainland separated by both water and socio-economic status. The coming-of-age story introduces Tola, a young heiress from the wealthy island, her best friend Kole, a self-taught tech expert and loving son from the mainland, and Tola’s calculating robotic pet lizard, Otin. “Iwájú” streams on Disney+ in 2024.
Christopher Nolan and his riveting, historic biopic Oppenheimer had a huge night at the 96th Academy Awards. Nolan notched his first-ever Oscar win after seven previous nominations, winning Best Director. “Movies are just a little bit over 100 years old,” Nolan said during his acceptance speech. “I would imagine being 100 years into painting or theater. We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here, but to know that you think that I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me.”
Oppenheimer had a huge night, notching seven wins in total, including Best Picture. Nolan’s riveting look at the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his efforts to give the United States an atomic weapon before the Nazis achieved the same turned out to be a career-capping story for many of the principal players, including Cillian Murphy, who won his first Oscar for Best Actor in the titular role, and Robert Downey Jr., who took. home his first Oscar—three decades after his first nomination for 1992’s Chaplin—for his stunning performance as Oppenheimer’s one-time advocate-turned-nemesis Lewis Strauss. “Here’s my little secret: I needed this job more than it needed me,” Downey said upon accepting his award, having traded in Tony Stark’s Iron Man armor for a mid-century bureaucrat’s suit, which, it turned out, had a splash of gold.
Joining Nolan, Murphy, and Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer glory were fellow Oscar winners cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, editor Jennifer Lame, composer Ludwig Göransson, and Nolan’s partner in life and filmmaking, his wife and producer Emma Thomas, who earned her first Oscar when Oppenheimer won Best Picture, accepting the award with Nolan and producer Charles Roven, flanked by much of the cast and crew members like Hoytema and Göransson.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 10: (L-R) Robert Downey Jr., winner of the Best Supporting Actor award for “Oppenheimer, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, winner of the Best Supporting Actress award for “The Holdovers”, Emma Stone, winner of the Best Actress in a Leading Role award for “Poor Things”, and Cillian Murphy, winner of the Best Actor in a Leading Role award for “Oppenheimer” pose in the press room during the 96th Annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood on March 10, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)
One of the night’s surprises belonged to Emma Stone, who edged out Killers of the Flower Moon breakout star Lily Gladstone for Best Actress for her performance in Poor Things. Stone played the newborn adult Bella Baxter undergoing an odyssey of self-discovery in the trippy Victorian fever dream from Yorgos Lanthimos. “The best part about making movies is all of us together, and I am so deeply honored to share this with every cast member, with every crew member, with every single person who poured their love and their care and their brilliance into the making of this film,” Stone said. She nabbed one of Poor Things‘ 4 Oscars, joining costume designer Holly Waddington, makeup and hairstylists Nadia Stacey, Mark Coulier, and Josh Weston, and production designers Shona Heath and James Price.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph kicked off the telecast by winning her first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her richly layered, moving turn as Mary Lamb, a grieving cook at a boarding school in The Holdovers. “For so long, I’ve always wanted to be different, and now, I realize I just need to be myself,” Randolph said.
Jonathan Glazer’s unflinching The Zone of Interest won Best International Feature, while Zone’s sound designer Johnnie Burn and sound mixer Tarn Willers won for Best Sound. Staying international, co-writer/director Justine Triet and screenwriter Arthur Harari won an Oscar for Original Screenplay for their stunning thriller Anatomy of a Fall, Hayao Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki’s The Boy and the Heron won for Best Animated Feature, edging out Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and the intensely harrowing 20 Days in Mariupol, which tracked the horrors committed by Russia during their brutal siege of that Ukrainian city, won for Best Documentary. Director Mstyslav Chernov delivered a powerful speech when he accepted the award, saying, “Russians are killing tens of thousands of my fellow Ukrainians. I wish I had never made this film. I wish to be able to exchange this to Russia [for] never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities.”
Best Adapted Screenplay went to writer/director Cord Jefferson for American Fiction, which he adapted from Percival Everertt’s novel “Erasure.” Jefferson used some of his acceptance speech time to make a passionate case for the more modestly budgeted films and the filmmakers out there waiting to make them, saying the next Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, and Christopher Nolan were out there; they just needed a shot.
It was a smooth show, with an earlier-than-usual start time and some stellar musical performances studded throughout, including two songs from Barbie, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For” and Ryan Gosling and Mark Ronson’s emo-ballad “I’m Just Ken.,” with surprise guest, guitarist Slash.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 10: (L-R) Ryan Gosling and Slash perform ‘I’m Just Ken’ from “Barbie” onstage during the 96th Annual Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre on March 10, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Host Jimmy Kimmel kept things brisk, stopping for less than a minute toward the telecast’s end to respond to a former President’s live tweeting of his hosting ability. “Isn’t it past your jail time,” Kimmel quipped.
Featured image: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 10: In this handout photo provided by A.M.P.A.S., Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan are seen backstage during the 96th Annual Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre on March 10, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Richard Harbaugh/A.M.P.A.S. via Getty Images)
*Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, we’re re-posting our interview with Barbie production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer, both of whom are nominated for Oscars. Barbie has eight nominations, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Achievement in Costume Design, Best Performance by an Actress and Actor in a Supporting Role, America Ferrera and Ryan Gosling, respectively.
“It was trying to find a solution to what makes a toy,” says production designer Sarah Greenwood about creating the charmed sets of Barbie alongside set decorator Katie Spencer. The two have been near inseparable, having worked on over thirty projects together. Darkest Hour, Beauty and the Beast, and Anna Karenina are among their six Academy Award nominations. “It became this huge journey of discovery, and it started with us buying a Barbie Dreamhouse and playing with it.”
Like Margot Robbie, who stars in the title role (and also serves as co-producer), Greenwood and Spencer didn’t own the iconic doll growing up. The first thing they noticed was the irregular proportions between Barbie and her accessories. “If you put the doll in the Dreamhouse and she puts her hands in the air, she can touch the ceiling. She is strikingly out of scale,” says Greenwood. “It’s the same with the car. Barbie never quite fits because her legs don’t bend. We worked it out to be 23% smaller than human size for the sets. What this did is when you built it for real, you made the actors seem bigger in the house. That gives it a toy quality or what we found out Mattel calls “toyetic.” Finding what it is that makes it a toy.”
Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING and MARGOT ROBBIE on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap BuitendijkCaption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING as Ken and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Co-written and directed by Greta Gerwig (Noah Baumbach is the other co-writer), Barbie’s carefree, perfect life is turned upside down when she starts having dark thoughts about death, and more distressing, her perfectly arched feet fall flat. To find out what’s happening to her, she travels outside Barbie Land and into the real world for answers. With Ken (Ryan Gosling) in tow, she begins to discover more about herself than she could ever imagine.
Caption: (L-r) MARGOT ROBBIE and RYAN GOSLING on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Atsushi Nishijiima
Barbie Land is a potpourri of pink, posh, and chic. The plastic town was constructed at Warner Bros Studios in Hertfordshire, England. The Dreamhouse, a focal point for Greenwood and Spencer, insisted on creating “their own version” of Barbie’s home. The work was done with minimal CGI, which meant building everything with detail from scratch. Inspiration was taken from the midcentury modernism of Palm Springs, including Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann house, famously photographed by Slim Aarons.
Caption: MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
The Dreamhouse and her neighbors’ homes like Midge, the discontinued “Pregnant Barbie” (Emerald Fennell), “President Barbie” (Issa Rae), and the played with too much “Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon) were fabricated from metal and finished with an open front in typical Barbie house fashion. The color palette of Barbie Land was stripped of black, white, and chrome. And playing with the toy box idea, atmosphere, fire, water, electricity, and physics were removed. If Barbie needed to get to her car, she could simply “jump” down from her second story without consequence – which she absolutely does in the movie.
Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING, KATE MCKINNON and Director/Writer GRETA GERWIG on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
Another point of intention was the blend of 3D and 2D elements. “We didn’t want you to look at the Dreamhouse and be disappointed, so it was important everything was made tangible and tactile,” says Spencer. “What’s not there speaks volumes to what is there.” Many of the objects in and around Barbie’s home were flat hand-painted decals or images like the lettering on the milk carton or the teardrop-shaped pool that’s connected to Barbie’s twirling slide. The pool was painted and then covered with multiple coats of a clear resin. “People still wouldn’t walk on it besides Margot,” Spencer points out. Bookending the Barbie Land fantasy is 250 foot long bubblegum blue skyline of the San Jacinto Mountains. The painted backdrop perfectly adds to the wonderlicous world.
Caption: MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
When Barbie enters the real world, the Mattel corporation becomes an unexpected stop. It’s here Barbie meets a cheery Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell) and other executives in a boardroom. To bring it to life, the design is “one stop in Barbie Land and one stop in the real world.” Greenwood says, “We created a massive heart-shaped table and heart-shaped light above. And we wanted everything about Mattel until you walked into that room to be monochromatic. Everything is black and white leading up to that point.” The boardroom had its own scenic painted backdrop. “It’s everything you love about Los Angeles. The Hollywood sign, the mountains, we put the Warner Bros Tower center frame and included downtown Los Angeles, but it’s painted like the Emerald City in TheWizard of Oz. You’re creating this other-worldly idea about it,” adds Greenwood.
Another Wizard ofOz reference was placed on the road in and out of Barbie Land. “The little bricks are in the same style as the movie, and so is the rainbow,” says Spencer. “No one stopped us. It was so much fun.” Greenwood adds, “This was an absolute dream. Greta is a poet in the way she approaches and describes things.”
Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING as Ken and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Barbie is in theaters now.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
Featured image: Caption: MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Director J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow, which recounts the experience of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972, is Spain’s Oscar entry for best international feature. But the film, which depicts the crash and subsequent survival of 16 out of 45 passengers in exquisitely painful detail, is also nominated in another category. The passengers break bones. They sustain face injuries. They starve. For their incredible work creating the visual reality of this suffering, the film’s hair and makeup team, including makeup designer Ana López-Puigcerver, hair designer Belén López-Puigcerver, and special makeup effects artists David Martí and Montse Ribé (who won an Oscar for their work on Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth) are nominated for an Oscar in best makeup and hairstyling.
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571’s survivors were rescued after 72 days in the mountains. The MUAH team designed eight or nine phases for each character. “It must be emphasized that there are practically no ellipses in the film, so it was extremely important that the change be very gradual,” said makeup designer López-Puigcerver. “Since the environment was always absolutely the same, the viewer has to feel that slow passage of time,” which she depicted through skin texture, reddened hands, reddened and sunken eyes, and flaking spots. After the survivors’ first month outdoors, as the Andes got colder and snowier, López-Puigcerver made the actors look frostbitten through bruised lips and ears, red noses, and red or pink eyes, and different types of hydrated polymer to simulate the frost and ice, whether they were outdoors or sheltering in the broken plane, that clung to their faces and hair.
Injuries that healed or worsened were attended to by the prosthetics team. For a character like Nando (Agustín Pardella), who hit his head as the plane went down, at first, “half his face is fake,” explained Martí. He and Ribé used a prosthetic over Pardella’s forehead, added eyebrows, and gave him contact lenses to give the impression of bloodied eyes, then slowly removed the prosthetic and other effects until Nando’s face looked almost healed. “The design was fundamental, knowing what was happening to them at each moment and how this affected them each in a different way,” said López-Puigcerver. “The sick, for example, had a different deterioration than those who were healthier and left the fuselage.”
Numa (Enzo Vogrincic) in “Society of the Snow.” Courtesy Netflix.
In addition to painstaking transformations, Society of the Snow is filled with makeup and prosthetic effects invisible to the viewer. “Some of the special makeup effects we did don’t appear in the movie because J.A., at the end, thought it was too much,” said Martí. For example, he and Ribé created an ankle wound for Coche (Simon Hempé), drained for him by a fellow player, Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt). “J.A. was like okay, second take, refill, and we injected more pus in the wound,” said Martí. “That was disgusting and disturbing,” and ultimately, the audience never sees it. The makeup effects artists also created corpses of those who died, and we aren’t shown these, either.
Coche (Simon Hempe) with an injured leg. Courtesy Netflix.
The set itself was also physically challenging. Along with two other members of the MUAH team, López-Puigcerver traveled to the Andes to work and cited the difficulty of working at a 3,000-meter elevation and getting to set using crampons and a helmet. Working inside the tight quarters of the plane itself was complicated and made retouches difficult. Martí recalled sending signals to the actor Tomas Wolf, who played Gustavo and wore prosthetic ears for the entire shoot to mimic those of the real Gustavo, to press his ears so they wouldn’t fall off. Despite being unable to access the actors, their makeup had to be perfect. “They used this camera inside the plane that goes in and out, and it’s like a magnifying glass. Anything that was wrong, you’ll see it,” Martí said.
(Tomás Wolf). Courtesy Netflix.The team working on Coche’s legs. Courtesy Netflix.Society of the Snow – Production Still Image. Courtesy Netflix.
Society of the Snow depicts not just the plane crash’s survivors but those who died, most of them tragically young. It was important for the crew to take this into consideration. “An aspect that I found, not disturbing but of maximum respect, was to reproduce with makeup the moment when the characters who did not return died,” said López-Puigcerver. She recalled that it was impossible not to cry while watching those moments on the monitor. Martí recalled that their team and the actors worked together like a big family, which, given the gravity of the film’s material, seemed like a necessity to make such a challenging shoot succeed so well.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
*Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, we’re re-posting our interview with Christopher Nolan. He’s nominated for three Oscars—Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) stares wide-eyed into the pond spread out in front of him; his last conversation with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) on the potential catalytic effects of the atomic bomb has rendered him speechless. The music swells as the screen fades to black — this is the final scene of Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-laden Oppenheimer, 13 nominations in total.
L to R: Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
A “singularly dramatic moment in history” — That’s how Nolan describes the motivation behind his desire to tell the story of Robert Oppenheimer.
“This moment in which Oppenheimer [and] the key scientists in the Manhattan Project realized they could not completely eliminate the possibility of the chain reaction from the first atomic detonation, that first test that would destroy the world,” Nolan says.
It was that specific moment in history, Oppenheimer’s reckoning with the possible world-ending consequences of his actions, that guided Nolan’s storytelling.
OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan
“His story is one of the most dramatic ever encountered, full of all kinds of twists, and suspense, things that you couldn’t possibly deal with in any kind of fictional context,” he explains. “So I really got hooked on the idea of trying to bring the audience into his experience…what he went through, make his decisions with him…try and arrive at a telling of his story that would invite understanding rather than judgment.”
Moral ambiguity is a theme Nolan frequently explores in his films, and Oppenheimer follows that theme into one towering genius’s soul and into the unseen world of theoretical physics he was obsessed with. But Nolan says he’s not here to tell us whether or not Robert Oppenheimer was a good person; rather, he wants to walk the audience through his decision-making.
L to R: Robert Downey Jr is Lewis Strauss and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
“Humans, individual flaws, and the tension between his aspirations and his brilliant intellect telling him what he should be doing, and his inability to live up to those things, or his blindness to where some of these things might take him,” Nolan explains of his creative process. “That’s what creates interesting tension in the story.”
When stripped raw, Oppenheimer, at its core, is a story with an age-old message: If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned. And it tells us as much in the opening shot: billowing flames, hundreds of feet high, encompass the entirety of the screen, the words of the great story of Prometheus overlaying the fire.
“We haven’t made a documentary; we’ve made a dramatic interpretation of his life,” Nolan says. “You’re looking at a character who was very careful. But everything he said about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—was very precise. He never apologized. He never acknowledged any guilt as relating to his part and what had happened. And yet, all of his actions from 1945 onwards are the actions of somebody truly suffering under an immense weight of shame and guilt.”
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
After Hiroshima and the death of Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), there’s a scene in the film where Oppenheimer is slumped against the trunk of a tree, spiraling into an all-consuming panic. Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) shakes her husband and says, “You don’t get to sin and then play the victim.”
L to R: Florence Pugh is Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan
Nolan doesn’t confirm his personal feelings on Oppenheimer’s morality, and when asked if this scene is meant as an interpretation of Kitty’s feelings in that part of her life or an interpretation of the audience’s feelings toward the character, he says it’s all of the above.
“There are times when the writing wants to synchronize with or guide the audience’s particular expectations or interpretations,” he explains. “But I think what’s most successful is when it synchronizes sort of seamlessly with the feelings and emotions of the character in the moment.”
L to R: Emily Blunt (as Kitty Oppenheimer) with writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) on the set of OPPENHEIMER.
Oppenheimer is immensely detailed — an attribute characteristic of Nolan’s filmmaking style, along with his intricately woven storylines. No apple goes unnoticed, no close-up without intent. In Oppenheimer, it’s the hanging of bed sheets on the clothesline to dry that becomes one of the most profound metaphors in the film and serves as an almost unspoken language between Robert and Kitty.
L to R: Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
“I came across this fact in the book, this notion that because [Robert] couldn’t talk directly to anybody about the success or failure of the test, they came up with this code relating to change in his life,” Nolan explains. [Oppenheimer was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.] “The sheets make up a bit. And I wanted to bring it together in a visual sense. For me, Kitty Oppenheimer is one of the most interesting characters in the film—one of the most interesting characters of Oppenheimer’s real-life story—their relationship was complex. So I love the idea of a coded message between them that only they can understand.”
Kitty Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist in her own right, and Nolan says that during her time at Los Alamos (the creation town of the atomic bomb), she was “given very little to do,” so the sheets also symbolize her domestic experience.
“It was very frustrating [for her] and caused a lot of problems,” he says. “So, for me, it was the coming together of all of those different things.”
L to R: Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
During his 32-year marriage to Kitty, Robert Oppenheimer had a long history of affairs, a fact not left out of Nolan’s retelling. One of Oppenheimer’s most famous lines in history is when he quoted part of the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” after witnessing the first detonation of the atomic bomb. In Nolan’s version, that line comes during a sex scene with Jean Tatlock.
“I wanted to destabilize the context in which that quote normally appears,” he says. “Oppenheimer was very controlling of his image in his public statements. He was extremely self-conscious, and very, very aware of the theatricality of his persona. He used that to further a lot of causes he espoused, the things he was worried about. And I wanted to present this in a new way that would cut through that.”
Like many of Nolan’s films, Oppenheimer shuffles between past and present — between the creation of the atomic bomb and the two security hearings beginning in 1954 about Oppenheimer’s affiliation with the Communist party. Beyond the use of black-and-white scenes to depict the timeline of the hearing, Nolan says the color shifts serve another purpose.
“You’re looking for a subtle way, a clearer way of shifting between the intensely subjective storytelling in the cover sequences,” Nolan explains. “And then the more objective view very often provided by Robert Downey Jr., as his character, Lewis Strauss.”
Nolan succeeded, possibly more so than even he could have imagined. Oppenheimer is primed to win a slew of Oscars this weekend, and Nolan just might very well win his first, second, even third.
For more interviews with Oscar nominees, check these out:
The final trailer for easily one of the biggest upcoming series of the year has arrived. Netflix’s 3 Body Problem makes first contact in a mere three weeks, the first new series from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss since their HBO juggernaut ended in 2019. Benioff, Weiss, and True Blood writer/producer Alexander Woo have adapted their hugely ambitious series from author Liu Cixin’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy centered on how humanity preps for a coming alien invasion.
“What we are hoping to do is to convey the experience — if not necessarily the exact details — of the novel onto the screen,” Woo said at CES in Las Vegas this past January. “What stayed, we hope, is the sense of wonderment and the sense of scope, of scale, where the problems are no longer just the problems of an individual or even a nation, but of an entire species.”
3 Body Problem is centered on the momentous decision made by a young woman in 1960s China that echoes across time. In the present day, a group of scientists and a detective with unusual methods will band together to try to unpuzzle what is happening when the laws of physics crumble and humanity is facing a potential extinction-level event.
This sweeping sci-fi adventure offers Benioff and Weiss another immense world conceived with brilliant detail, trading in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy realm for Cixin’s expansive sci-fi world.
And once again, Benioff and Weiss have another stellar ensemble cast to work with, including former Game of Thrones alums Liam Cunningham, Jonathan Pryce, and John Bradley, along with Jovan Adepo, Rosalind Chao, Eiza González, Jess Hong, Marlo Kelly, Alex Sharp, Sea Shimooka, Zine Tseng, Saamer Usmani, and Benedict Wong.
Check out the final trailer below. 3 Body Problem arrives on Netflix on March 21.
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After sweeping this awards season with trophies at the BAFTAs, France’s César Awards, Critics Choice, and the recent Spirit Awards, writer-director Justine Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari’s cerebral courtroom drama is headed for the home stretch, with five Academy Award nominations on the line. Anatomy of a Fall is a masterclass of filmmaking across the board, and that surely includes the surgical work done by editor Laurent Sénéchal (C’est ça l’amour, Sybil), who not only notched his first César Award but his first Oscar nomination, too.
The slow-burn thriller centers around successful novelist Sandra (played by Sandra Hüller, also nominated for an Oscar), who is accused of murdering her husband and struggling writer, Samuel (Samuel Theis) after he falls from the attic of their three-story chalet in the French Alps. As the trial drags on, the fissures in their marriage are painstakingly unraveled in the courtroom, culminating with an intense, long quarrel that happened to be recorded on his phone. All this while, the only person who could exonerate—or condemn—Sandra is the couple’s visually impaired 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner).
Speaking to The Credits from France on the eve of this weekend’s 96th Oscars, Sénéchal explains the film’s unique sonic palette—without the use of a music score—and how language plays a crucial and intricate role in the dramatic stakes.
Were you editing on set during most of the shoot? How long did it take?
It took 38 weeks. No, I wasn’t on set, but I watched the dailies and had calls with Justine maybe once a week. We decided to start editing only once filming was done. It’s faster that way because she has to be there when choices are done. The starting point is important because acting is the main thing for her, to find where the performances are vivid. She doesn’t focus on the meaning at the beginning—she needs to see what’s good. What is she feeling? Is there truth in the performance? Is it deep? Justine is really into acting. It’s like her door into directing.
ANATOMY OF A FALL_LaurentAndJustinePicPhoto CreditCynthiaArra copy
Justine asked for your advice on the script before filming. What were some of your suggestions?
I asked her to pay more attention to transitions. For the fight, in the script, it was like a cut, which is realistic, but it was tricky for me because it’s nobody’s point of view. If she needed a flashback there, I asked her to shoot long shots of Sandra and the audience in the courtroom. She also had some close-ups on the TVs [in the courtroom], where the dialogue was translated for the jury. It was a way for me to enter and leave the flashback. After reading the script, I suggested being clearer about the couple’s money problems. This is a story about two writers with upper-class problems, and I wanted them to have problems that many people can relate to so the viewers can project themselves onto these characters.
This story is unique in that it makes language itself one of the points of contention between the couple. Did the bilingual nature of the story affect how you had to edit?
Not at all. It’s one more layer to manage. It was great because it was in the heart of their fight. They’re arguing over using English instead of French with their son; she says that’s their meeting point. This was an issue even in the courtroom. When it gets too hard for Sandra to be precise [in French], and when she has an emotional moment, she switches to English. In the script, it was hard to imagine that it was going to work, but in editing, it became another leverage we could use to shape this character.
The movie starts when a student interviews Sandra on the chalet’s first floor while Samuel keeps increasing the volume of a cover version of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. upstairs. What does this scene tell us about their marriage?
This scene launches everything. Samuel uses that music to show his anger, to not allow this flirtation downstairs and this lightness [between Sandra and the student]. He can’t hear what they’re talking about but could hear her laughter. As soon as he hears that, he increases the volume of the music. It was our way to create tension at the beginning of this thriller. Sandra is trying to be light, but she’s not; you can feel that. Then we hear Sandra asking the student, “What do you want to know? What is fiction versus reality?” These are themes [explored] in the trial as well. It’s called Anatomy of a Fall, but it could be called Anatomy of the Opening Scene.
The opening credits come after Samuel fell to his death, showing us snippets of their lives before everything falls apart. Talk about weaving those photographs to paint a vague picture of this family.
Using the photographs came really late in the editing process. At first, it was supposed to be a very long shot following the lawyer’s car driving to the chalet. It worked, but was a bit academic. Then Justine told me, maybe we can hear the piano here as the start of Daniel’s piano journey. I thought it was great, like twisting the shot on the car, because we were already in that intimate climate with the agitating piano music.
And it gives us a chance to have another look at Samuel.
But it was really important to see Samuel come to life at that point because we’re not going to see him again until the argument. So, the photos were a great way to show who these characters are. Most of them were done with VFX. We put the boy in some of the two actors’ pictures with VFX. In some pictures, it’s the face of Samuel but Arthur Harari’s body. The little boy playing the piano at the end of the credit was actually a girl; it was Justine’s daughter. The script was really great, and with editing, we tried to make it even better so that we could invite the audience with us and guide them through the story.
It was a deliberate choice to do without any musical score, and there isn’t much ambient sound in the film, except for when Daniel plays the piano. What was the reasoning behind this?
The challenge was to start like a thriller movie, but not like a normal thriller. It was a way to increase the tension and intensify the diegetic music in the movie, such as Daniel’s piano and P.I.M.P., the music the father plays at the beginning. It was even more realistic. With no score, you’re really listening to every sound. The movie is really about sound, and it starts when we hear Sandra asking, “What do you want to know?” It’s like she’s talking to the audience. “What do you want to know about me?” And this question is going to resonate for two and a half hours. In the first scene, the music is really loud; it’s like we’re avoiding the voices and paying attention to every sound. That’s what we wanted. If we had some score music, I think it would have been less original.
Sandra Hüller is Sandra in “Anatomy Of A Fall.” Courtesy Neon.
For the big fight between Sandra and Samuel—we hear the audio for a few beats first before going into the visual. Why was that?
I had the idea to stay long enough with audio for the viewer—once the audience starts to get complacent, it was possible to go into images and surprise the audience. Otherwise, I was pretty sure it would be hard for the audience if we cut right into the fight.
How much of that fight was originally scripted vs improvisation between Hüller and Theis?
Most of it was scripted; there was no improv. The way they played it was really rich, so I had great options. For Samuel, it was better to have him a bit weak, but with some shots where we can feel that he is surprised by the violence of Sandra’s words. We had to balance it because Sandra was really powerful, and we wanted him to not to be destroyed too early in the scene. It’s like a boxing scene.
How did you sustain the suspense during that fight without revealing whether Sandra played any part in Samuel’s death?
At first, we thought we would need intense and calm moments, but it didn’t work out like that. It was quite linear. We had two or three moments of calm when they were drinking around the kitchen table, and she said, “I love you.” With Sandra being that harsh and violent with him with words, we imagined it was going to be a slight move in this balance. He was vulnerable here; he could have committed suicide, maybe. But she’s so hard with him that, maybe not directly, but she’s guilty in some way. In the editing process, we were looking for a more balanced ending for that scene. We could not have a weak scene here—it was better to have a vulnerable Samuel than to have a weak scene here because the whole movie would fall [apart].
What were some of your favorite scenes to work on?
I’m really proud of the opening scene. It was a hard sequence to shape, so I’m happy to have done that. The moment that was really moving for me is when Daniel plays the piano before he testifies a second time. We can see that he’s made up his mind. He’s playing the Chopin on the piano with one hand, it’s the same piece that he was playing with Sandra previously. When he starts playing with both hands, we see him upstairs, where his father was before he fell. That scene was simple and quiet. Without words, you’re really captivated by him, and he brings us into his mind. You don’t know exactly what he’s going to do [at tomorrow’s testimony], so there’s suspense. It’s very emotional because he’s making up his mind and determined. You’re physically and emotionally with him. It’s great when you can feel that as an audience. At the end, when Sandra returns to him at the chalet for the first time after the trial, they don’t talk very much, but you understand how complex and really emotional it is.
Milo Machado-Graner is Daniel in “Anatomy of a Fall.” Courtesy Neon.
How challenging was it to cut the long courtroom sequences?
The very long scene after we see Sandra and Samuel’s fight, where the prosecutor and the lawyers go back and forth for about 20 minutes. At one point, they discuss literature, and the prosecutor reads excerpts from one of Sandra’s novels. That’s a great moment because it goes further than the affair. It’s talking about an issue of our time, how what you may have written years ago can be used against you. It’s very interesting. It’s artistic, playing with reality, and really clever. So, in this way, I think the movie is bigger than itself.
Anatomy of a Fall is nominated for five Academy Awards at this Sunday’s 96th Oscars.
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Nicholas Hoult has revealed a bit about what it was like to audition for James Gunn’s upcoming Superman, the first movie to be released by Gunn and Peter Safran’s new DC Studios.
Hoult initially auditioned for the role of Superman himself, becoming one of the last three actors on Gunn’s list, alongside Tom Brittney and David Corenswet. The role ultimately went to Corenswet, who will star alongside Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane. Hoult eventually nabbed the role of iconic Superman nemesis Lex Luthor, which might actually be more fun to play (aren’t the villains always more fun to play?) While Gunn has been keeping us posted about Superman with steady updates (including the fact that, on day one of filming, he revealed he’d changed the film’s title to Superman from Superman: Legacy), the performers haven’t revealed all that much about the audition process—untill now.
Hoult went on the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast to discuss his career and revealed some good tidbits about auditioning for Superman. One of the first things Hoult mentioned was that it was actually Rosenbaum, not Gene Hackman, who he first saw playing Luthor. Rosenbaum played the legendary villain in WB’s Smallville for a whopping 154 episodes; that was the Luthor that Hoult grew up with.
“The first ever Lex I saw was you. Yeah, I grew up, Smallville was on,” Hoult said. “That was the show I would watch and see my first iterations of Superman and Lex and all those stories. I’ve since seen Richard Donner’s movies and all the other ones and kind of seen some of the other performances but you’re like the one…it’s the best.”
The Richard Donner movies, beginning with 1978’s game-changing Superman, cemented Christopher Reeve, who played Clark Kent/Superman, as a star. It also burnished Gene Hackman’s already robust legend thanks to his stellar performance as the shameless, ruthless Luthor.
When Hoult auditioned for Gunn, he said the writer/director created a lively space.
“[He has the] ability to keep things fun and alive and try things in the moment and be like, just shouting out from the monitors, ‘Say this line. Do this! Do that!’ And that’s something that I really enjoy,” Hoult said. “That’s the whole process of prep for me is like, be prepared as possible so when you get there you can throw it all away and do whatever you want in the moment.”
And while it’s Superman who’s the Man of Steel, Hoult said his Lex Luthor will be no slouch in the strength department.
“There’s that bit in “All-Star Superman” [a comic book series] where he talks about his muscles being real and hard work and all that,” Hoult said. “I kind of took that as a little bit of fuel for the fire.”
We won’t see what kind of fire Hoult’s Luthor brings to Superman for a bit—the film is slated for theaters on July 11, 2025.
Featured image: LONDON, ENGLAND – NOVEMBER 09: Nicholas Hoult attends “The Menu” UK Premiere at BFI Southbank on November 09, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)
Richard King, one of Hollywood’s most successful sound designers, is known for creating increasingly complex aural environments that help achieve a director’s vision, giving the movie its own rhythm and texture. Over the past two decades, he’s won four Academy Awards. And at this year’s Oscars, he’s nominated for two more for his contributions to Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro and Christopher Nolan’sOppenheimer, an R-rated historical drama about the first atomic bomb, which means King will be competing against himself for another Best Sound Oscar. Let’s call this one the great “Bernsteinheimer” matchup.
King has collaborated with A-list directors on huge tentpoles, including Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) and Peter Weir’s high-seas adventure Master and Commander (2003), which earned King his first Oscar. With Maestro, which Cooper directed and starred in, King wanted the sound to function like a symphony orchestra, a combination of peacefulness and intensity. Maestro is a look at Bernstein at his peak, as both a composer and conductor (On the Town, Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony No. 2), as well as a study of his fatalistic romance with actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). The sound is always with the characters; there is no score, and sometimes, all you hear is a tiny rustle in the trees as they lie in the grass at Tanglewood. There’s no music at all over the scenes where the couple is separated.
Oppenheimer bears a heavier weight, and its sound design can be more visceral and terrifying. The title character is the genius nuclear physicist (Cillian Murphy) overseeing the Manhattan Project. Because writer/director Christopher Nolan wanted to filter the story through the perception of Oppenheimer – a bafflingly complex man who sports a big-brimmed porkpie hat – much of its emotional intensity is expressed through the use of sound. There are aspects of Abstract Expressionism, like when we see Oppenheimer’s vision of a subatomic universe, which King punches up with edgy, staticky noise impressions of dark matter. Then there’s the eerie rhythmic thumping Oppenheimer hears growing louder and more oppressive throughout the film. You could practically feel the floorboards shake.
“The stamping feet is a motif Chris wanted to use several times before the dropping of the bomb,” said King, who works out of Warner Bros. Studios. “It’s a device to convey Oppenheimer’s growing panic about what the creation of this weapon meant to the world.” He and Nolan have done eight movies together, including The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), and Dunkirk (2017), all of which won best sound Oscars.
Even when he’s not sitting at a mixing board, he remains a vigilant listener. “My work has programmed me to keep my ears open,” said King, who studied painting in college and then began his career in New York in low-budget genre films. An early adopter of digital sound technology, he described his work as painting with sound and said he is heavily influenced by Vermeer and Ingres for their heightened reality and the works of de Kooning, Pollack, and Picasso. “The way sound was used in old movies was almost like a stage cue in a play,” said King, whose most recent credit is the critical and commercial smash Dune: Part Two. “It wasn’t possible to get elaborate with the existing technology. But it’s evolved to the point you’re only limited by your imagination.”
The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
Now that you have eight Academy Award nominations, we wonder, when you go to the annual Oscars luncheon, does somebody ask if you want your regular table?
[Laughs] There are people there who have had many more nominations. In fact, my co-nominee, Kevin O’Connell, has 22. He’s the sound mixer on Oppenheimer. But the lunch is fun. It’s the most relaxed of all these events and, for that reason, the most enjoyable.
Okay, seriously, film sound is somewhat of a mystery for people. When members of the sound branch vote, what is it they listen for in movies?
Several things: the shape of the mix from beginning to end, the ebb and flow, the dynamics of the mix, which is invisible to the audience, but you feel it when it’s off-kilter somehow. I think film sound is a mystery because it’s not meant to be noticed by the audience, as much as it is a conduit, a way to draw audiences into the film.
This is a labor-intensive process. How does it work?
The sound recorded on set is maybe 3% of what’s in the film. It’s an important 3% because it contains the dialogue and a lot of sync movement that grounds the picture. But we create the world around that dialogue, all the background sounds and effects, explosions, machinery, and footsteps. They are recorded or created, placed in sync with the picture and layered with other sounds during post-production to create the sonic world the characters inhabit. That’s sound design. All of this takes months of diligent, creative work by the sound team.
What were you trying to accomplish with Maestro?
We attempted to be musical in the presentation of sound. We used rhythm and texture to underscore the characters’ emotions and smooth the transitions. Quite often in films, there’s a distinct sound contrast when you cut from one location or scene to another. You immediately tell the audience, I’m in a different place. With Maestro, all those transitions are seamless. The movie just flows from scene to scene, unrolling like a piece of music.
What did you think the first time you read the script for Oppenheimer, the bulk of which was written in the first person, and what did you circle on the page?
It’s an amazing script, and I loved the way Chris created a kaleidoscopic overview of Oppenheimer’s predicament, the enormous events shaping the world at the time, and his emotional journey through them. After reading it, we had a general conversation before he went off to shoot the film. He wanted me to think about the quantum particle scenes. We were going for unique sounds that convey the power of the objects and events Oppenheimer saw in his imagination. The other thing was how to treat Oppenheimer’s more subjective moments. He was such an enigma. There are moments, though, where you are in his head. You sense his [moral dilemma] about working on the Manhattan Project.
When did you begin coming up with the sounds for Oppenheimer?
Chris invited me to the last day of dailies. They had shot part of the security clearance hearing. It was Oppenheimer in the Gray Commission room when the background behind him starts to vibrate as the lawyer’s yelling in his face, saying he wanted to do this experiment, and yet he regrets having done it. That’s the gist of his dilemma, and Chris wanted to sense him feeling somehow unmoored from the experience, trying to reconcile it. When I saw those images, I started getting ideas about how to deal with his [complicated feelings sonically]. It’s hard for me to respond to words on the page. I need images; that’s just the way my brain works.
L to R: Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Large sections of the movie are split between the Los Alamos desert and a shabby conference room, where the Atomic Energy Commission interrogates Oppenheimer. How did you convey the sense of isolation the team of scientists felt working in secret on the bomb and the claustrophobia of that government hearing?
We gave each location a unique character. The wide-open spaces of New Mexico allowed us to use wind, rain, thunder, and wildlife sounds to accentuate the distances. For instance, placing a bird call or coyote howl far away and adding a lot of reverb. The Gray Commission room is oppressive, without much sense of what’s going on outside. We added a low, airy rumble to add to the oppressiveness.
Take us inside Fuller Lodge, where an excitable crowd has packed into the bleachers to hear Oppenheimer speak about the bomb being dropped in Japan, and we hear the sound of dozens of feet stamping rhythmically.
It’s another scene where his surroundings begin to glitch, a brilliantly executed practical effect that was done in-camera. The shots, to me, convey Oppenheimer’s emotional distress. He doesn’t quite know how to feel about the audience, half of whom are cheering and high-fiving and drinking. It’s a celebration. The other half are weeping and puking. The scene reflects the nightmarish feelings he must have experienced.
Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
You studied painting in school. How did you end up working in sound?
As a kid, I wanted to be in movies. My friends and I would make Super 8 movies with ridiculous plots, sometimes using stop motion. But growing up in Florida, I had zero connection to the film business. It wasn’t until my mid-20s when I moved to New York, and said I’m going to get into this business. One of the doors I knocked on was basically a one-man shop. He made industrial films – the latest sheep dip or cattle worming medicine – documentaries, commercials. He’d let me edit some sequences and give me feedback. He was more interested in shooting than editing. He had pretty much zero interest in the sound. So he gave me a primer on cutting sound effects and music to picture, then said, here’s this film. Why don’t you put sound in it? I worked on a documentary about the building of the dam in South America, so there were lots of explosions and big, Earth-moving equipment, cool 8-year-old boy stuff I could sink my teeth into. I wrote a list of sounds and went to a sound effects house, which meant I sat in a room full of quarter-inch tapes and previewed sounds. Then I made an order list, had them transfer the sounds to 16mm film, picked out music that would be appropriate, brought it all back, and cut it myself. And it was great. A new world opened up to me.
You went on to work for Cannon Films, which became a hot little studio at one point whose specialty was American-style action movies for overseas markets, like Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold.
[Laughs] My first film as a sound supervisor. I’d been a sound editor on one movie, then asked to supervise sound on a movie, and they gave me Allan Quartermain, a massive movie. Richard Chamberlain was in it. It was one of Sharon Stone’s first films. It was an Indiana Jones rip-off. But it was shot in Africa and had these crazy Raiders of the Lost-type predicaments, big set pieces, and action scenes. It was a gold mine of sound opportunities, and at the time, I didn’t have a sound library, so we recorded everything. At that point, I was completely fixed on that route to creating sound for film. The movies I worked on were low-budget, so even getting the story to make sense felt like a magician’s trick. When I edited picture, I found the quality of the footage limited me, but when it came to sound, there were no limitations. I had a blank canvas, so sound has become my paint.
HBO’s going to send you back to Westeros this summer.
House of the Dragon season 2 will be premiering this June, a dragon egg-sized nugget revealed by Warner Bros. Discovery streaming and gaming chief J.B. Perrette during an interview on Monday.
The first season of House of the Dragon, the first Game of Thrones spinoff to make it to air, managed the tricky feat of giving GoT fans a heaping helping of the palace intrigue, dragon fire, and power-obsessed family squabbles that made the original show such a hit, yet was decidedly its own thing. With a bit of a tighter focus than its sprawling predecessor, Dragon focused on House Targaryen, a family with more than enough drama to fuel an entire series. Set 200 years before the events in GoT, Dragon dropped us into a united Seven Kingdoms, thanks to the dragon-lord Targyens, but peace is hardly the default setting in Westeros.
When we spoke to showrunner Ryan Condal, he teased how much more dragon-centric season 2 would be.
“We’ll definitely introduce more of them as we go along. I think that’s part of the fun of doing the show. They are characters, and in season two, they’re needed for their most famous purpose, which is to decimate and cause death and destruction.”
Condal also discussed how they worked on differentiating the dragons in House of the Dragon from the beasts fans got to know and love in Game of Thrones.
“In season one, the dragons were designed over the course of a year, where we did a lot of early concepting on basic things like how our dragons are different from what you saw in the original series and honoring what they did with Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion,” Condall said. “Then it was figuring out, during a time when there were many more dragons, was there just one breed? We came up with these three different genotypes of them, where they’re all the same species but have different breeds with different shapes, colors, and sizes.”
The returning cast for season 2 includes Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy, Eve Best, Steve Toussaint, Fabien Frankel, Ewan Mitchell, Tom Glynn-Carney, Sonoya Mizuno, Rhys Ifans, Harry Collett, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell, Phia Saban, Jefferson Hall and Matthew Needham. Dragon newcomers are Abubakar Salim as Alyn of Hull, Gayle Rankin as Alys Rivers, Freddie Fox as Ser Gwayne Hightower, and Simon Russell Beale as Ser Simon Strong.
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When she was five years old, Kasia Walicka Maimone started making her own clothes. “Growing up in Poland, a lot of people had that skill,” she says. “My grandmother made clothes. My mother, a doctor, made clothes. And I did clothes for my musician friends without giving it a thought. I was like, ‘What’s the big deal?'”
As it turned out, Maimone’s talent for costuming became quite a big deal. After studying English in Warsaw, moving to New York City, and enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Maimone designed outfits for dance, theater, and indie films before teaming up in 2012 with Wes Anderson on his acclaimed Moonrise Kingdom. She went on to costume-design Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and Ready Player One before crafting the spectacular turn-of-the-century fashions recently showcased in The Gilded Age series. Last year, Maimone returned to the Wes Anderson fold and designed the outfits for his Oscar-nominated short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
Shot on 16-millimeter film on a London soundstage, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, based on British writer Roald Dahl’s 1973 story, casts Ralph Fiennes as the author, with Benedict Cumberbatch portraying the upper-class title character who trains himself to see through blackjack cards by studying the memoir of an Indian mystic showman, played by Ben Kingsley.
Speaking from New York City, Maimone likens her collaborative back and forth with Wes Anderson to ping pong and explains how she uses “real clothes” as the foundation for the writer-director’s theatrically elevated narratives.
You first immersed yourself in the Wes Anderson Method when you worked on Moonrise Kingdom. He’s famously meticulous so I imagine that must have been an intense experience.
That’s an interesting way to refer to define it, the Wes Anderson “method.” I call it the Wes Anderson world. His vision is so precise that whatever the influences are, they get transformed. On Moonrise Kingdom, I learned his [filmmaking] language very quickly. You do a lot of research and then get immediate responses from him to your ideas. It’s like playing ping pong on an Olympic level because he shoots his ideas very fast, and you cannot fall off.
What was it like to reunite with Wes Anderson on Henry Sugar. ?
It was a blast and a fun challenge for me because I had been doing TheGilded Age, which is a completely different kind of grand scale. With Wes, it’s like you have to re-train your eye for this element of extraordinary precision. [Laughing]. I also blame the miniatures [in the stop-motion animated movie Fantastic Mr. Fox], where he developed a whole other level of precision. Once he experienced that miniature scale, Wes came back on a grand scale, but he’d sharpened all his skills.
Before you generated ideas for Henry Sugar, what was Wes Anderson’s creative brief to you?
It’s funny because Wes and I don’t actually talk that much. We just send each other visuals. There were a lot of specific descriptions in the Henry Sugar script, so I prepared a presentation of characters. From there, I did rough sketches, he’d send back images, and we kept communicating like that until, after a few weeks, the vision for each character became sharper and sharper. Wes also made a short film that portrays the story in sketches.
Ralph Fiennes introduces the story as author Roald Dahl, and he looks relaxed and elegant, just as you might imagine a successful English writer from that period would look.
Much of that outfit was inspired by the real Roald Dahl, except we manipulated the color for the purpose of Wes’ movie. Ralph wears a terry cloth polo shirt like the real author wore, vintage polyester pants, and a camel-color sweater made of wool mixed with cashmere.
Yeah, the colors are so warm — you use one shade of red for the shirt and a slightly different shade for the pants.
We like to use unexpected combinations of colors to create this world of strategized randomness.
Strategized randomness?
It’s a very controlled, heightened world, and sometimes, there are no words to describe how we do it. It’s about the dynamics of color and how they play with each other. With Ralph, I’d gather a bunch of pieces, sketch, do the first fitting, see what works, build on top of that for the second fitting, third fitting, and we’re done.
Benedict Cumberbatch goes through a lot of costume changes as Henry Sugar, starting with his origins as an entitled English gentleman.
Henry’s look was very much driven by the culture of bespoke Saville Road tailoring and the quiet elegance of the British aristocracy. We had a tailor from Saville Road who understood that language.
Later on, there’s a fun montage where Henry tries on a bunch of different disguises in rapid succession.
Those fittings were fun because we got to watch this spectacle of Benedict morphing from one person to another. It’s not just about him wearing the clothes; it’s him embodying the character on the page. When Benedict is dressed as a tourist, it’s a completely different body language from when he emanates being a priest. The clothes I provided were just a level of skin that Benedict transforms into, using his craft, skill, talent, and inner chameleon.
Ben Kingsley’s character from India introduces a meditative vibe to the story. How did you conceptualize his clothing?
We got all of Ben’s pieces from India. They had to be real so we worked with a bunch of people there. We also had an extraordinary German tailor with us in London. I always try to go to the real place for the source. British textiles for the British gentlemen; for Ben, we go to India; and for Roald Dahl, it’s just what he would be really wearing [from our research]. There’s always a mix of construction and real garments because Wes’ movies are deep with cultural references. When the pieces come from the real world, even if they get transformed, they resonate, and audiences respond to the colors and the textures. It’s coded in a way like a cultural response machine.
Your color choices coordinate so well with the production design palette devised by Adam Stockhausen. You two must collaborate well together?
We’ve done a bunch of movies together—Moonrise, Bridge of Spies, Ready Player One,and now Henry Sugar—and we don’t really have to think about it. Adam and I share information constantly, so I know exactly what he’s doing, he knows what I’m doing, and we bounce off each other. Of course, Wes knows exactly what he’s looking for, so it’s like we’re continuously putting this puzzle together.
Color in Wes Anderson’s films often operates on a whole other level in the ways these unusual hues clash or harmonize to evoke different moods.
That’s one thousand percent deliberate. The color creates the rhythm, driven by the characters and the mood. It’s like asking a musician how she plays music: We play color in exactly the same way as if we’re playing an orchestral piece that is kind of wild but that also breaks apart. Wes’ work is very theatrical and highly controlled. I come from theater, so I think that training comes through.
What was your gut reaction the first time you saw The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar in a movie theater?
It was magical. There’s so much suffering in the world now, and I feel proud to be an entertainer and to be part of a business that brings people joy. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, like The Gilde Age—these pieces bring joy.
Henry Sugardefinitely has an uplifting message that you don’t always find in arthouse films.
There are tons of dark ones, which I’m also very proud of, but this is not that. Particularly this year, we need uplift as a society. I also love Henry Sugar because it’s about the discipline of the mind. I think we all need to exercise that, like, big time.
There’s a scene in Dune: Part Two where Chani (Zendaya) tells Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), “You’ll never lose me as long as you stay who you are.” Editor Joe Walker, who won an Academy Award for his work on Dune: Part One, allowed the foretelling moment to breathe. “There’s quite a pause after that line,” he shares with The Credits about the tragedy to come. The chemistry between Paul and Chani was just one of several storylines in the second installment of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune saga Walker navigated with ambition and care.
“It’s a lot more challenging to have a large cast and doubly so with a book that’s rich,” Walker says of the film, which had its initial November 2023 release moved to March 2024 due to industry labor strikes. The extra time allowed the editor to “chisel away” at the project, perfecting storylines and steering new characters and plot points. “What I think we did well in part one was disguise how much setting up there was for this second film. It meant many of the characters had limited screen time in the first film, but with Part Two, they are given a little bit more space for the drama to unfold.”
Three of the narratives consuming Part Two are Paul’s romance with Chani, a psychotic killer named Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), and Paul becoming the leader of the Fremen. Below, Walker shares how he threaded those story puzzle pieces together for thecritically acclaimed sequel.
The Love
Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and ZENDAYA as Chani in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
The first film ends with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) meeting Chani (Zendaya), who, along with fellow Fremen, take Paul and his Bene Gesserit mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), into hiding. In Part Two, the relationship between Paul and Chani blossoms. Walker intertwined their arc with tender playfulness, blending intimacy with the practicality of Paul learning his new desert way of life.
Joe Walker: “Their relationship was the most important thing to get right in the film. We are leaning into action adventure and dazzling sequences, but if the heart isn’t in the right place, then it’s not going to work. We spent a lot of time taking care of that relationship. It’s almost like an Alexander Calder sculpture. They’re delicate, and if you lean too heavily into one piece, then the whole thing collapses.”
Caption: ZENDAYA as Chani in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
“Denis didn’t want Paul to automatically gain Chani’s hand. She doesn’t pay him serious attention until he’s proven himself. And boy, does he ever prove himself to be a fearless and brave man who reassures her that he’s going to be an equal in some way.”
Caption: (L-r) ZENDAYA as Chani and TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides. in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
“It was also allowing it to be romantic. The scene on the dune where Paul talks about where he comes from – the world of castles and water – and how it’s not like that for her, that entire scene was charged. It was so clear from the dailies that it was going to be one of those rare, beautiful moments. Putting that scene together happened so quickly. It was one where we said let’s get the best out of Hans [Zimmer]. Later, Chani says in the film, “The world has made choices for us.” And that’s really how it plays out in this drama, making it all the more tragic.
The Villain
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Portrayed by Austin Butler, Feyd-Rautha is the ruthless nephew of Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), a character director Denis Villeneuve says “is motivated by power and ambition” and has “no moral boundaries.” His pale white skin, hairless body, and chiseled physique are a temple of Harkonnen blood. His deadening stare pierces the soul. Traits the Bene Gesserit strategically groomed to be the next potential Emperor. We first witness Feyd’s merciless strength in fighting against three captured Atreides soldiers, including Lieutenant Lanville (Roger Yuan), inside a massive coliseum of cheering Harkonnen. The bloodthirsty bout is a gift from Baron Harkonnen on Feyd’s birthday.
Caption: AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Joe Walker: “Some of the very first material I received was from the gladiatorial arena. Feyd is a terrifying character, and I couldn’t have dreamt of him looking the way he did. Denis and Austin found something tremendous together for his character, and when we first meet Feyd, he is kind of a rock star living a life of massive corruption and self-serving violence surrounded by his ladies.”
Caption: (L-r) AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen and LÉA SEYDOUX as Lady Margot Fenring in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
“What was fun cutting that sequence was creating a world not just visually, but in sound terms, something that doesn’t sound like a 21st Century sports event but has its own unique flavor. We spent a long time developing layers upon layers of different Harkonnen sounds. It was also uncompromising filmmaking in many ways, as it was shot in high infrared. Denis had this concept that the sun on Giedi Prime would suck the color out of the world. It’s this stark black and white but peculiar in the way that makes you very aware of the vein structure of peoples’ eyes and the thinness of their skin. That look was all baked into the image, and it was a bold touch from the production team.”
Caption: (L-r) AUSTIN BUTLER, Director/Writer/Producer DENIS VILLENEUVE and DAVE BAUTISTA on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
“We also wanted to show the fight was a breeze for Feyd and there was nothing challenging about it. But right at the end of the fight, there’s a nice implication of masochism—that Feyd has been in control and has been the more powerful person all the way long. He’s just entertaining life at the edge of a blade. Lady Margot Fenring [Léa Seydoux] says at one point, “He loves pain.”
The One
Caption: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
As Part Two unfolds, Paul becomes part of the Fremen culture. We see him train in the desert, ransack spice harvesters, and ride sandworms. His rise among the Fremen people is fueled by the whispers of Lady Jessica, who has become their Reverend Mother. A fiery speech held in southern Arrakis transforms Paul from a fatherless boy into a worshiped messiah – The One.
Joe Walker: “I felt like it would shortchange the story completely if we didn’t lean into the Fremen culture. I feel it would be sidelining something very important not only in the film but in the book. Paul is passionate about the Fremen culture, and I always feel that’s something Timothée carries off well. You have this sense that if it weren’t for blood, he would be content to be a Fremen for the rest of his days.”
Caption: (L-r) Director/Writer/Producer DENIS VILLENEUVE and TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
“It’s interesting to see how Paul must transform from a young adult who, when we first meet him, is a guy dreaming about a girl who doesn’t want to practice with his mother at the breakfast table. But through the course of it, it becomes, first of all, a man, and then this superpower in a way.”
Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
“With Feyd-Rautha, there’s a lot of complicated stuff going on and how much of a flipside to Paul he is. It’s an important piece of architecture you establish that Feyd is a profoundly dangerous opponent, so he becomes this politically, emotionally, and physically way to match Paul.”
The Experience
Caption: A scene from Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Dune: Part Two is a treasure trove of visceral imagery and immersive sound that should be experienced in theaters. Walker agrees.
Joe Walker: “I think it’s essential. It’s been completely designed for large-screen entertainment. Not just to see it but to hear it. Denis and I share a great love of sound together, and we invest so much time on a dense, layered soundtrack working with geniuses like Richard King, Doug Hemphill, Ron Bartlett, and Hans Zimmer, of course. It’s kind of the pinnacle of people being engaged in making something that’s spectacular to sit in front of. And you’re in the world, completely scooped up by the experience because it’s been designed as a very compelling cinematic experience.
Dune: Part Two is in theaters now.
For more on Dune: Part Two, check out these stories:
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET as Paul Atreides and AUSTIN BUTLER as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “DUNE: PART TWO,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise
The vast expanse and harsh conditions of space can impose solitude or offer a fresh perspective. As astronaut Jakub Prochazka (Adam Sandler) is nearing the climax of a six-month interplanetary investigation, he sails farther from the problems he left behind on Earth in director Johan Renck’sSpaceman. With four young children, Renck understands the forces that pull at a working parent – especially a career that requires long stretches of separation.
“Our vocation, our job, whatever we do is important for several reasons, of course, but life is what happens when you’re busy doing other things,” Renck reflected. “It becomes evident. You grow up, wise up, and understand that you must make some choices.”
As Jakub investigates a Milky Way mystery, his wife (Carey Mulligan) reckons with his absence and the aftershocks of their personal turmoil. Just when their connection fails, an unexpected visitor boards Jakub’s craft. The creature has fearsome features that resemble Earth spiders and octopi, but they have a soulful connection.
“It’s kind of beautiful to take the naïve and slightly pure ideal of the human meeting this sage-like creature who has this full-on understanding about boiling down the universe as it should be,” Renck said. “A lot of the things we as humans tend to worry about or get upset about that kind of goes down to one thing – it is what it is, and it is what it should be in any given situation.”
Jakub comes to address the ancient alien as Hanus (Paul Dano). Through their discussions, Jakub’s noble aspirations begin to tarnish in the light of wisdom. His selfless contributions to mankind seemingly derive from more personal motives.
“This very ethereal creature from the earliest universe encounters a human and becomes deprived of a lot of the tools that he has at his disposal because he’s dealing with an imbecile basically, which is us, humans,” Renck explained. “In terms of how we treat the planet, and we look upon ourselves and the priorities we make and our narcissism and egoism and all those sorts of primitive animalistic things that we are.”
But is the encounter even real? The Earth-based crew never receives transmissions with proof of Hanus, and they begin questioning Jakub’s erratic behavior. Does the lonely astronaut’s guilty conscience produce hallucinatory visions of intelligent extraterrestrials? Renck answers a resounding no and points to the sneeze that proves it.
“I wanted a proper nonnegotiable moment with Hanus that solidifies [his existence],” Renck declared. “There’s no other way that he could get mucous on the visor of the helmet. There’s not some malfunctioning device in the spaceship that’s going to spray him. The residue of that moment is in the whole film on that space helmet. It’s very important that Hanus is 100% real for sure.”
The script was adapted by Colby Day from the novel “Spaceman of Bohemia” by Czech author Jaroslav Kalfař. Although produced for an English-speaking audience, Renck resisted changing the characters’ nationality.
“For me, part of the specificity of this book and how we developed it into a script is there is an Eastern European trajectory,” Renck explained. “It’s subtly noted in the film how Jakub’s father was an informant for the party, and Jakub had a bit of inherited guilt there. I felt that the specificity of keeping it Czech is going to be way better than trying to translate it into some American or English landscape. There’s such specificity to the plight and trials and tribulations. The thing with being an informant in the Soviet Union was it’s either that or a bullet to your head. There’s no in-between.”
Don’t expect Sandler and Mulligan to flex their Czech accents, though. Renck is fiercely opposed to the practice.
“I hate accents in film. It’s the dumbest thing on the planet,” he humorously objected. “All we need to do is believe in how people talk to each other to some extent. For me, if we would have a film of all these people speaking with a Czech accent, number one, what does that even mean? If you’re Czech, you don’t have an accent if you’re speaking Czech.”
Renck’s work is consistently rooted in the human condition, yet technology has been central to his career in both subject matter and the tools he uses to tell stories. He took home the Emmy for directing Chernobylabout the 1986 nuclear disaster and has been driving trends in music videos for decades. Renck even served as executive producer of the buzzy virtual ABBA concert, ABBA Voyage. For Spaceman, he blended style and science to create an emotional space fantasy.
“It’s kind of retro-futuristic kind of thing,” Renck explained. “On one end, it’s very analog, but at the same time, we’ve invented this kind of technology for them to communicate. Because otherwise, if you’re speaking from Jupiter to Earth, it’s gonna take like several hours for that signal to reach Earth and several hours for the answer to come back, so we just devised this Czech Connect quantum technology because it’s theoretically possible to communicate at the near speed of light.”
On the practical side, Jakub spends the majority of the film floating in the spacecraft, and the visuals for Hanus were only realized in post-production. Sandler had to act the scenes alone under challenging conditions to appear as if he was floating and sharing the cabin with the alien.
“I would say that Adam’s performance, given the fact that he was hanging in painful wires, subjected to the weight of your own body cutting in everywhere, acting a whole movie to a tennis ball because we didn’t have Hanus there, of course, I would say that his performance is pretty incredible based on that,” Renck praised. “But zero gravity is really tricky. You have to use everything. There are wires, there are various rigs, and there’s even CGI involved in terms of making that as believable as you can. It’s really tricky.”
Shooting the scenes on board the ship were so slow and painstaking that Renck felt Carey Mulligan’s Earth scenes were “too easy” at times. As for the challenge of zero gravity, Renck says he had enough.
“I’m never doing that again,” he laughed. “It’s terrible for everybody involved.”
Renck surprisingly proclaimed that he is “useless with computers” and praised the smart crews he has surrounded himself with. He remembers sleeping at the postproduction houses early in his career to learn about the software.
“I’m tremendously interested in [tech] because, for me, various aspects of this is something that is used for my benefit in the job that I have,” he said. “I am really intrigued by anything that scares me. My favorite place to be is where I have no idea what I’m doing. I like to put myself in a situation where I’m working with stuff that’s daunting or overwhelming. That’s when I function at its best.”
Ultimately, all of the cutting-edge technology works to serve the story. Spaceman is an emotional reflection on our brief existence, albeit one in a stunning interplanetary setting.
“I just want people to plunge into the world and be embraced by it. Allow it to take you wherever it takes you without having to abide by some very pragmatic, boring rules. It’s a fantasy. That’s what it is. That’s the fun of making movies, isn’t it?”
Spaceman is now showing in select theaters and streaming on Netflix.
The beloved Wendell Pierce—the kind of actor who elevates every scene he’s in—will now be making a trip to Metropolis in James Gunn’s Superman, The Hollywood Reporter scoops. Pierce will be playing Perry White, the Editor-in-chief of “The Daily Planet,” the paper where Clark Kent (David Corenswet) and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) work.
Clark and Lois’s new boss will have all the gravitas necessary in Pierce, best known for his stellar performance as Detective William “Bunk” Moreland on HBO’s sensational The Wire. Pierce will deploy his skills to keep young reporter Clark Kent and his more seasoned and fearless colleague Lois Lane in line. Just how this version of Perry White will handle his cub reporters is an open question.
Perry White first came on the scene not in the comics but in a Superman radio serial in 1940. White’s approach to leading “The Daily Planet” and dealing with Clark Kent and Lois Lane has differed over the years, from rough and tumble to being more of a mentor. He’s been portrayed on the big screen by Jackie Cooper in Richard Donner’s seminal 1978 film Superman and the rest of the Christopher Reeve-led films, Frank Langella in 2006’s Superman Returns, and Laurence Fishburne in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and his Synderverse films in the 2010s.
There’s been a lot happening with Gunn’s upcoming film, the first feature set to roll out of his new-look DC Studios, which he’s running alongside Peter Safran. Superman—recently titled Superman: Legacy until Gunn decided to tighten it up—will kick off the new DC Studios’ first phase of films and series and is titled Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters. This first phase includes a TV series set on Wonder Woman’s home island of Themyscira called Paradise Lost, the introduction of a new Batman in The Brave and the Bold, the film Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow starring Milly Alcock, and Swamp Thing, in development with director James Mangold, which will return the infamous monster to the big screen.
Rounding out the Superman cast are Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, María Gabriela de Faría as The Engineer, and Gunn’s longtime collaborator Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner.
For more on Superman—previously titled Superman: Legacy—check out these stories:
Featured image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JANUARY 11: Wendell Pierce attends the National Board Of Review 2024 Awards Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street on January 11, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for National Board of Review)
