We have some good news for all the folks who couldn’t snag a ticket to Taylor Swift’s rapturous, record-shattering stadium tour through the U.S.—a filmed version of Swift’s tour, Taylor Swift / The Eras Tour, is coming to theaters across the United States this fall, on Friday, October 13th, no less.
Given the mega-popularity of Swift, AMC Theaters has promised that the concert film will play at every single one of its U.S. locations at least four times a day, from Thursday through Sunday, for its initial run. You can also catch Swift the way so many of her fans see and hear her—as the biggest superstar on the planet—by seeing Taylor Swift / The Eras Tour on premium screens via AMC’s IMAX screens and Dolby Cinema locations.
Cinemark and Regal screens will also be showing the concert film. Cinemark will be showing the movie at all their U.S. theaters beginning on October 13 and running each subsequent weekend through November 5. Regal Cinemas will show the film in its theaters in the U.S., while Cineplex will screen it in around 150 theaters around the country. More theaters and theater chains will likely be added.
Here’s how Swift broke the news to her legion of fans:
The Eras Tour has been the most meaningful, electric experience of my life so far and I’m overjoyed to tell you that it’ll be coming to the big screen soon 😆 Starting Oct 13th you’ll be able to experience the concert film in theaters in North America! Tickets are on sale now at… pic.twitter.com/eKRqS8C7d1
AMC also issued a statement that seems entirely reasonable given the alacrity that Swifties possess when it comes to jumping on tickets to see her perform:
“AMC is also aware that no ticketing system in history seems to have been able to accommodate the soaring demand from Taylor Swift fans when tickets are first placed on sale. Guests wanting to be the first to buy their tickets online may experience delays, longer-than-usual ticket-purchase waiting-room times, and possible outages. AMC is committed to ensuring any delays or outages are addressed as quickly as possible,” the company said in a statement.
Check out the trailer here:
Featured image: GLENDALE, ARIZONA – MARCH 17: (Editorial use only and no commercial use at any time. No use on publication covers is permitted after August 9, 2023.) Taylor Swift performs onstage for the opening night of “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” at State Farm Stadium on March 17, 2023 in Swift City, ERAzona (Glendale, Arizona). The city of Glendale, Arizona was ceremonially renamed to Swift City for March 17-18 in honor of The Eras Tour. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
When he returned to feature filmmaking, writer/director Clement Virgo followed his instincts. Since his last feature, Poor Boy’s Game (2007), Virgo has been directing TV, working more or less nonstop. He’s directed episodes of Empire, Netflix’s Dahmer- Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, and OWN’s megachurch drama Greenleaf. He was thinking about getting back into features when a friend handed him a copy of David Chariandy’s novel “Brother,” about two Trinidadian immigrants in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough during a smotheringly hot summer in 1991.
“I just knew I had to make it,” Virgo says. “I knew the feelings in the novel, and I knew a way into it.”
Virgo’s adaptation is a gorgeously wrought, quietly powerful return to filmmaking. He marshalls all of his gifts and his years of experience to tell the story of two brothers, Francis (Aaron Pierre) and Michael (Lamar Johnson), deftly teasing out their story along three separate timelines, covering some twenty years of their life in Scarborough to a staggering climax, complete with a gorgeous coda. Brother stays with you—the performances, the recurring motifs, the soundscape (both composer Todor Kobakov’s score and the hip hop that’s such a huge part of Francis’s life), the specificity. In Virgo’s hands, the whole thing appears effortless, the mark of an artist who focuses his efforts on the right things.
Clement screened the film at a Motion Picture Association event this past May in Washington, D.C., co-hosted by the Canadian Embassy, in recognition of the MPA’s partnership with the Black Screen Office. We spoke to Virgo about returning to filmmaking with such an assured, devastating new movie, why specificity creates intimacy between a viewer and a film’s subjects and more.
L-r: John Gibson (Vice President, External and Multicultural Affairs, MPA), Damon D’Oliviera (Partner/Producer, Conquering Lion Pictures), Joan Jenkinson (Executive Director, Black Screen Office), Charles Rivkin (Chairman and CEO, MPA), Wendy Noss (President, MPA-Canada), Clement Virgo (Director), Aeschylus Poulos (President/Producer, Hawkeye Pictures)
It was one of those novels that just spoke to me. Like a lot of artists, you don’t know why you’re drawn to something, but this spoke to me in a visceral way and caught me at a time when I wanted to go back to being a filmmaker. I knew the feelings in the novel, and I knew a way into it.
You thread three storylines in such a subtle way, and I’m curious how difficult that was at the scripting stage.
I was very conscious of trying to do something structurally new for me. The great thing about attempting that is that I’m not the first person to try it. I went back and looked at certain films that I thought were very successful at it. I looked at The Godfather Part II, which had that parallel storyline between the father and son. I looked at Manchester by the Sea, which I thought was a beautifully structured film. I find screenplays are really about structure, and once I found the architecture for the story and how each moment and each timeline influences the next and informs what we just saw, I had it. Filmmakers have been playing with structure and time since Orson Welles and D.W. Griffith.
The performances you get from Aaron Pierre and Lamar Johnson are so powerful. As someone who has worked with actors for decades now, I’d love to hear how you managed your relationship with them.
In terms of process, I think every actor has a different methodology for how they work. One of the great things about working in television is that sometimes you haven’t had a chance to meet the actor, and the first time you do is on set. If it’s an ongoing series, you even haven’t cast them, so you don’t have a rapport. So you have to figure out very quickly what they need and what motivates them, and how to be a great audience for them. The great actors are very creative, and if you stay open to that, you get great ideas from them. They make the character so much richer than what you’ve written on the page. And Aaron Pierre and Lamar Johnson brought great ideas to Francis and Michael.
And how were you a good audience for them?
It was to try to help guide them in a subtle way. It’s a cliche, but it’s really a collaboration; it’s trying to be thoughtful and emotionally intelligent about how to inspire, when to push, when to leave them alone, when to encourage, and when to shut up. It’s all the things that you do in any relationship, you’re trying to figure out how to be a good partner and collaborator.
L-r: Aaron Pierre and Clement Virgo on the set of “Brother.”
Your film manages to show, often through the unspoken physicality of how Francis and Michael go through the world, the impact of all the forces arrayed against them—the police, their relationship with their hardworking but often absent mother (a wonderful Marsha Stephanie Blake), their being Jamaican immigrants in a Toronto suburb. I’m wondering how much of that direction and how much is pure performance?
I think it’s really a bunch of different things. It’s cinema in terms of what is the image saying? What are you communicating with that image? What’s the body language, what’s the behavior telling you or not telling you? And how do I, as an audience member, interpret that image? The films that I love communicate through pure cinema. I think that’s the difference between television and film. I just read something that Christopher Nolan said about cinema that’s really interesting. He said that a lot of people think cinema is about plot, but it’s really an audiovisual experience. I thought about that for hours after because it’s true. As a filmmaker, what you’re trying to do is communicate a feeling, a tone. You’re trying to immerse the audience in an experience. Everything is story.
L-r: Lamar Johnson, Aaron Pierre, and Clement Virgo on the set of “Brother.”
Every constituent part within a film is telling one story?
The costumes are story. The set design is story. The lighting is story. You’re trying to communicate non-verbally and have the audience feel something and take something away from the film. How Aaron Pierre walks into a room, what he’s wearing, is the camera with him and subjective, or is it watching him and slowly moving in? It’s all the language and tricks of cinema. Sometimes that stuff is intuitive. You don’t know why you do it. I think most writers and filmmakers, most artists, actually, are trying to create meaning out of their own lives. It’s kind of impossible to hide who you are in your work.
L-r: Lamar Johnson and Aaron Pierre in “Brother.” Credit: Guy Godfree
You made one crucial change in your adaptation, switching the brothers from Trinidadian to Jamaican immigrants. Can you talk about that a bit?
I didn’t want to have to think about it. I didn’t want to intellectualize it, I just wanted to make choices in the moment that felt intuitive. I think that’s the hardest thing, as an artist and a writer, is to get to a place where it’s just pure impulse and instinct. With my background, being born and growing up in Jamaica, I didn’t have to think about the details, I just had to recall and try to communicate and be as specific as I could. I’ve never been a schoolboy in Paris in 1963, but when you see The 400 Blows, it’s so specific to that experience you recognize your own humanity in that story. I’m trying to communicate a collective humanity, and the more specific I am to my own experience, the more it will hopefully translate, and you’ll see your own humanity in my story.
Let’s end with the recurring motif in Brothers, which is Francis and Michael climbing the electrical tower. Can you tell me about filming that?
We filmed it here in Toronto, there’s a decommissioned hydro tower weigh station where there’s no electricity. We got permission from the provincial government to go in and be able to shoot there. We couldn’t climb the tower for real, so it’s a combination of the real space and what we built on our own and with CGI to create that sense of height and jeopardy. But that image is how DavidChariandy starts his novel, and I thought it was a beautiful metaphor for the brothers to use that as a visual motif. I’m assuming the audience is going to think something dreadful is going to happen when they’re climbing that tower, but of course, you try to twist that expectation. They get to the top, and it’s like looking out into the future. It’s a MacGuffin, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane or the Lost Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark; when an object or piece of architecture has meaning in a film, I always find that quite powerful. Like in Mad Max: Fury Road, the image of Charlize Theron falling to her knees in the middle of the desert after that long journey, with the wind blowing sand around her. When I make a film, I think in images.
Lamar Johnson and Aaron Pierre in “Brother.” Credit: Guy Godfree.
Featured image: L-r: Lamar Johnson and Aaron Pierre in “Brother.” Credit: Guy Godfree
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
There isn’t an Oscars category for casting directors (yet), but the Emmys have recognized the foundational importance of the people who find actors with the talent and the chemistry to create magic on screen. Without casting directors, a lot of your favorite moments onscreen would likely never have happened.
In an interview with The Credits, two-time Emmy winner and current nominee Theo Park, nominated for her stellar work on Ted Lasso, talked about how she became a casting director, her favorite scene from the hit Apple series (which garnered 21 Emmy nominations in total), which Ted Lasso actor made an immediate impression, which one had to be persuaded to take the job, and which one never had to audition at all, despite having no background in comedy.
I don’t think children grow up and say, “Someday, I want to be a casting director.” So, how did you find yourself in that job?
I think a lot of us casting directors are failed actors, some ex-actors, or at least people who have aspired to be an actor. And that’s what I did. I wanted very much when I was a child to be an actor. And then, when I got into my teens, I realized that it’s really hard to be an actor, but I still had a passion for performance.
So you kept performing?
I did film at university. And became an agent after working in television for a bit. But realized when I was an agent that it wasn’t quite creative enough. We were looking after fabulous actors but not really being involved in the creative process. So, I flipped it. Instead of selling actors, I decided to buy them. And I was really lucky. I just landed a really fabulous job helping out a casting director in London called Nina Gold. I was her assistant for a few years, and she taught me wonderfully. And I’ve been on my own for about eight years now.
Theo Park
What is the most important quality that a casting director has to have?
Probably an understanding of actors and their work and their craft and what they go through to create a performance. I think having had that background; it has definitely put me in good stead.
So, does it begin with you sitting down with the showrunner and talking about the characters and what they’re looking for?
Yes, absolutely. You’re normally sent a script. And in the case of Ted Lasso, I was sent the pilot script, so that gave me a good idea of the world. And then you talk to the creatives. In this instance, it was Jason Sudeikis, and he talked me through all of the characters, who was going to be a regular, and who were the important characters that we needed to focus on. And then we’d talk about their arcs because I’d only read one script and a lot of it hadn’t been written yet. And then I’d go away and come up with some ideas, and then we’d talk again.
Brendan Hunt, Jason Sudeikis and Nick Mohammed in “Ted Lasso” season two, now streaming on Apple TV+.
What about when you’re actually taping a performer?
When it’s a taping situation, as in the creatives are either out of the country or already shooting, and they can’t meet a whole load of actors in the flesh, we will get people to just audition with us. And then I might be a bit more selective and only send Jason half a dozen of the best people. And he and the creatives get to choose the pick of the bunch.
NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 10: (L-R) Phil Dunster, Stephen Manas, James Lance, Hannah Waddingham, Charlie Hiscock, Juno Temple, David Elsendoorn, Cristo Fernández, Kola Bokinni, Annette Badland, Jeremy Swift, Yvette Nicole Brown, Moe Jeudy-Lamour, Billy Harris, and Theo Park attend Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso” Season Three FYC at Saban Media Center on June 10, 2023 in North Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
If you’ve read just the script for the first episode, do you have some idea about the arcs that some of these characters are going to have? Because even through the first season, I don’t think we would have guessed where the characters played by Toheeb Jimoh or Nick Mohammed were going.
No, we didn’t. For Toheeb’s character, Sam Obisanya, I didn’t know anything about what was going to happen; apart from that he needed to have this lovely warm glow, a lovely positive energy to him. And that matched Ted in a way. And Toheeb came in, and you look at him, and he’s just so beautiful. And the warmth just exudes from him, doesn’t it? So, he was easy. Everyone just said, “Well, he’s it.”
Jeremy Swift, Toheeb Jimoh and Hannah Waddingham in “Ted Lasso,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
But for Nick Mohammed and Nate, yes, Jason did talk me through the arc of his character, certainly for Season One. Because we actually had to persuade Nick Mohammed to come in for it. He didn’t want to come in for it originally because he felt it was too similar to a slightly downtrodden character that he’d played in his own show, Intelligence, a wonderful comedy show that he did with David Schwimmer. And so, we were able to tell Nick, “This is different; there is this character arc.” And he gave it a go and totally nailed the audition.
Nick Mohammed and Jason Sudeikis in “Ted Lasso,” coming soon to Apple TV+.
I have read that Juno Temple, who plays Keely, had not done comedy before. What brought her to the role?
I’m a massive fan of hers. I’ve seen all of her work. I think she’s exceptional. She was actually Jason’s idea. And we all thought behind the scenes, “Oh, gosh, would she ever do this? Would she ever sign up for further seasons on a TV show when she’s such an indie film darling?” But he persuaded her. She didn’t have to audition. He knew she had it in her. He’s very, very good at casting, I have to say, Jason is. He always makes the right choices.
Just as in real-life football, the team in the Ted Lasso cast had tremendous diversity.
Yes, this is set in the world of Premier League football. There are people from all over the world playing in Premier League football clubs. So, that was really important from the start. Is it a challenge? No. It’s just exciting. It’s exciting to be able to cast different people everywhere within the show.
Cristo Fernandez in “Ted Lasso,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
I’m fascinated by accents. Was everyone using pretty close to their own accents, or was there a lot of accent work?
What is quite funny is that one of the things that Jason said to me is, “I want people to be playing themselves. I don’t want any accents. I want to really believe these people. We should just be casting close to type.” But ultimately, nobody’s really using their own accent. Nick Mohammed is using an accent. Juno Temple is using an accent. Toheeb is using an accent. Billy Harris [Colin] is using an accent. Billy Harris is not from Wales. He is from Essex.
Did Jason realize this?
I wonder if a lot of it slipped under the radar slightly, and Jason didn’t really know that everyone was working so hard on their accents. Because it’s quite subtle, especially in the UK. A lot of the accents are very subtly different to maybe an American audience.
What about Hannah Waddingham as Rebecca?
Hannah Waddingham’s accent, what she’s doing for Rebecca, is very close to her. But she’s able to do anything. She’s a real chameleon. She can do any accent under the sun.
Tell me a movie that you think is especially well cast.
I absolutely love Bridesmaids. It’s my favorite movie. Well, after When Harry Met Sally. Both are cast exceptionally. But Bridesmaids, Oh, my gosh. Every single performer in that film is incredible and hysterical. It’s perfection. It really is.
What makes you laugh?
There’s a scene in Ted Lasso I rewatch quite a lot, Season Two, Episode Three when he turns into Led Tasso. The sequence is the funniest sequence in the whole of the three seasons, and I rewind it and watch it again and again. Just comedy genius. I loved him doing that because it was just a throwback to the absolute pure comedy bones that that man has. I just loved it.
For more stories on Apple TV series and films, check these out:
Legendary director Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral, The Insider) has been thinking about making Ferrari for decades, and now, at long last, Mann’s meticulously crafted epic about Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is here. Ferrari, which is set to have its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival this week, has dropped its first trailer.
In this nearly wordless 90-second glimpse, it’s 1957, and we’re behind the wheel of one of Enzo Ferrari’s namesake racecars as it barrels along one of the most dangerous races in the world, the brutal 1,000-mile sprint across Italy called the Mille Miglia. Ferrari is in crisis—his son, Dino, has died a year earlier; his marriage to Laura (Penelope Cruz), the woman who helped him build the Ferrari factory, is strained from the loss and from his relationship with his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley). With the Mille Miglia coming up, Ferrari’s team needs to win big, but the cost of their obsession could be life and death, as the notoriously deadly race has already taken lives before.
Ferrari will cover one of the most infamous catastrophes in racing history, when one of Ferrari’s racecars blew a tire during the Mille Miglia, and the driver, plus nine spectators, died in the ensuing crash. The disaster turned into a legal battle as Ferrari and the tire manufacturer were charged with manslaughter. Ferrari was filmed primarily in Brescia, Italy, where the Mille Miglia race took place.
Ferrari also stars Patrick Dempsey as racecar driver Piero Taruffi, Jack O’Connell as driver Peter Collins, Sarah Gadon as Linda Christian, and Gabriel Leone as driver Alfonso de Portago.
Mann adapted the script alongside the late Troy Kennedy-Martin from Brock Yate’s 1991 biography “Enzo Ferrari – The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine.”
Check out the trailer below. Ferrari hits theaters on Christmas Day.
Here’s the official synopsis:
It is the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura built from nothing ten years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino a year earlier. Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son Piero with Lina Lardi. Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.
Featured image: Adam Driver is Enzo Ferrari in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari.” Courtesy NEON.
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, easily one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the year, has decided against a limited release in early October in favor of a simultaneous global release later that month.
Apple Studios announced that Scorsese’s historical crime drama, based on investigative journalist David Grann’s masterful 2017 book, will premiere worldwide on October 20, with a streaming release on Apple TV+ at some point after that. Scorsese’s film stars his longtime collaborators, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, along with Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemmons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, and more.
Apple Studios didn’t specify exactly why they’ve made the decision to eschew the limited release and opt for a global release, but the obvious culprit is the SAG-AFRTA strike that has affected actors’ ability to promote their films. Without stars like DiCaprio, De Niro, and rising star Gladstone able to promote Scorsese’s latest, a single wide release should make for a bigger splash and give the Oscar-hopeful plenty of buzz rather than an initial limited release.
Killers of the Flower Moon is centered on a series of murders by white settlers of members of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma, whose land lies on massive oil fields and who have become, practically overnight, some of the wealthiest people in the country. Scorsese’s sweeping crime saga was met with a nine-minute standing ovation when it had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where Gladstone came in for special attention for her stunning portrayal of Mollie Burkhart, an Osage Nation member who marries Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio), one of the white settlers at the center of the murder mystery.
Killers of the Flower Moon is already considered to be a major player come awards season, and its global release, now in the middle of a fall movie season in major flux, will be one of the most keenly watched releases of the year.
For more on Killers of the Flower Moon, check out these stories:
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
An elite force of female soldiers, the Agojie, is all that stands between the African Kingdom of Dahomey and the combined forces of the Oyo Empire and Mahi people. The Oyo and Mahi plan to raid Dahomey villages and sell their captives to European slavers. We open on a Mahi village where raiders heat their machetes over a fire at night. Their leader hears something in the tall grass surrounding them and quiets his men, standing to get a better look. A flock of birds burst from the grass. The men laugh. Their leader is paranoid. All is well, and their raid will go off as planned.
A moment later, the leader of the Agojie, Nanisca (Viola Davis), rises from the grass, followed by her fellow female soldiers. It’s an ambush. And despite it taking place at night before we’ve met Nanisca and her elite force, the action is framed by someone who knows exactly where she wants her camera to be, exactly whose story she’s telling, and exactly what the purpose for every beat is.
We’re 90 seconds into the beginning of director Gina Prince-Bythewood‘s The Woman King — her second brilliantly conceived and executed action epic in a row, following her 2020 movie The Old Guard, an adaptation of a graphic novel that tracked a team of immortal mercenaries led by Charlize Theron’s Andy and joined by KiKi Layne’s Nile. With The Woman King, Prince-Bythewood once again centered the action on women, only the degree of difficulty was significantly higher for reasons technical (larger cast, larger crew, more complicated set pieces), global (Covid-19), and professional (the film had been delayed for years over concerns that its predominantly Black female cast would not attract audiences). Yet Prince-Bythewood once again deployed her immense gifts for crafting visually coherent, emotionally resonant action sequences, an ability shaped by the fact she’s a former top-tier athlete herself. Few directors better understand that action has to be legible to be enjoyable, but to make great action, each moment, each beat, each punch, and each kick have to be supercharged by the personalities, histories, and heartbreaks of the combatants involved.
For this reason and many more besides, Gina Prince-Bythewood is the Motion Picture Association’s 2023 Creator Award recipient, having created a thrilling body of work that has consistently reframed whose stories get told and who gets to tell them. From her breakout hit Love & Basketball in 2000, through The Secret Life of Bees (2008) and Beyond the Lights (2014), Prince-Bythewood has gravitated toward intimate stories that, occasionally, as of late, happen to take place on an epic scale. You can’t separate her vision when shaping an action sequence from her years as an athlete, nor can you separate her action movies from her early, intimate, personal films.
L-r: Sanaa Lathan and Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of “Love & Basketball” in 2000. Courtesy New Line Cinema.
Prince-Bythewood has approached every film with a mantra. “I see a connection between [all my movies] in terms of the stories I want to tell, which I call intimately epic,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what size canvas I’m working with; you have to care about the character’s story first.”
One of the reasons Prince-Bythewood is one of the best action directors working is she understands on a visceral level what it takes to compete, what it feels like to believe you can and will defeat your opponent, and what it requires to achieve that. She can make a large-scale scene of hand-to-hand combat flow as beautifully and cogently as she made an offense flow on the basketball court when she was running point.
“All the lessons you learn from sports, especially as a girl, are things that are normally not encouraged or thought of as assets for girls,” Prince-Bythewood says. “To learn that aggression is good, to learn that ambition is good, to learn how to outwork everybody, to learn to have stamina, to learn to leave it all out on the floor, I’ve been able to take that to sets when I’m a director to pull the team together, to inspire and lead, and hopefully encourage them with my vision. These are all things I learned on the court and on the track.”
L-r: Queen Latifah, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Jennifer Hudson on the set of “The Secret Life of Bees” in 2008. Courtesy Searchlight Pictures.
Crucially, for The Woman King, Prince-Bythewood also excelled in the ring as a kickboxer after college.
“To be able to know what a good punch looks like, what a good kick looks like, the intensity of when you’re in a ring and what it means when you’re facing an opponent, the intention behind your swings and kicks — those were all things I was able to talk to the actors about,” she says.
As incredible as the women in Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King cast were — Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, and more — she knew she was going to ask them to do things they’d never done before. She and her team — fight and stunt coordinator Danny Hernandez, fight choreographer Jénel Stevens, and lead cast trainer and nutritionist Gabby Mclain — built them into a cohesive fighting unit, one brutal day of training at a time.
Jenel Stevens on set of “The Woman King.” Courtesy Sony Pictures
“I knew I didn’t just want my actors to learn the moves; I needed them to really do it because I think that’s the best way to film action,” Prince-Bythewood says. “The question was, how can I build athletes? So I talked to my team, Danny Hernandez, my incredible fight and stunt coordinator who’s also a martial artist, and Gabby Mclain, who was in charge of building up their bodies so that they could withstand [the training], and we built athletes to see what they could do.”
Gabriela Mclain and Viola Davis training during “The Woman King.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
They could do a lot, it turns out. The cast went through a grueling training regimen that began months before Prince-Bythewood shot a single frame, and they continued training once they were on location in South Africa. At one point Prince-Bythewood had them training six days a week, including morning sprints for an hour and a half, martial arts training with Hernandez, and two hours of strength training with weights.
“It was a really beautiful thing to see women who hadn’t been in touch with that part of themselves overcome so much of the negative self-talk that had been built up over time to realize the way you do one thing is the way you do all things,” Prince-Bythewood says. “That’s something you learn from sports as well. For them to see their bodies get stronger, to see their swagger increase, to see the way that they walked into a room, the confidence, all of that was built in the gym. Because I’d been through it myself, I knew that’s what it would do.”
But what about the practicalities of her profession, the technical aspects of turning a melee into a meaningful moment of violent catharsis? How does she find the poetry within all those bodies slashing and slamming into each other? How does she avoid the trap that so many directors seem to fall into, where the camera seems to move as hyper-kinetically as the action, and the viewer is left dazed and a little defeated by the scene?
“Building and shooting the action sequences in The Woman King, I could be right there with Danny [Hernandez] saying, ‘I didn’t believe that; she really needs to have intent.’ Talking to the actors, I could say, ‘You’re not just swinging a machete, you’re swinging it through flesh and bone, you have to have an intent, so what is your intent?’” she says. “And that changes the way that people swing.”
Camera placement is key. Prince-Bythewood has honed her skill as a visual storyteller by remaining committed to the emotional beats that make a physical showdown meaningful.
“First and foremost, it starts with the fact that as a director, I’m the first audience, so I need to understand the scene, I need to be able to follow the story, and then it’s my job to tell that story,” Prince-Bythewood says. “I put the camera where I feel like I can watch the action, follow the action, and care about the action. We always start with, ‘What is the character doing? What is this revealing about the character? What is the story of this moment? Honestly, I equate it to a love scene. I love doing love scenes, and it’s the same concept. It has to have a story, it has to be character-based.”
L-r: Lashana Lynch, Thuso Mbedu and director, Gina Prince-Bythewood.
Caring about the emotional state of a character is as crucial for a director to succeed as it is for a viewer to lose themselves in a story. It’s why you watch The Old Guard and feel so caught up in the initial terror and fury of KiKi Layne’s Nile as she fights Charlize Theron’s Andy on a cargo plane (an all-time great action sequence). Or why, in The Woman King, you find yourself drawn to each of the main characters within a given action set piece and know not only who they are by how they fight, but why they fight that way.
Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of “The Old Guard.” Courtesy Netflix.
“If you take Lashana Lynch’s character Izogie, the very first time you meet her says so much about her as a character,” Prince-Bythewood says. “The fact that she uses her nails as a weapon, the intensity in her face. We talked about a feral abandon with the way she fights where she’s trying to humiliate her opponent to get back at all the trauma she’s experienced. This is opposed to Viola’s character Nanisca, who’s a general and has this brutal efficiency and shows no emotion. That tells you a lot about her. That’s the fun part, building these scenes and knowing you want them to look cool and have cool moves, but you have to have an intent, a story, and a character behind those moves for an audience to care.”
Lashana Lynch stars in THE WOMAN KING. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Prince-Bythewood has followed her own instincts and interests, from athletics to film, from smaller intimate films to action epics, yet there’s been a remarkable consistency in all her work, no matter the scale, a genuine interest in the interiority of the characters she depicts.
“I truly believe that the first thing you come out with should tell the world who you are as an artist and tell Hollywood who you are as an artist,” she says about that crucial first movie. “I also believe everyone has a story only they can tell, and that’s what’s going to separate you. It’s something I had to learn — I really thought the way to break in was to mimic the things that were successful. People want fresh stories. Fresh perspectives. It took me a second to get there, but also, it takes courage to say, ‘My story is meaningful enough that millions of people will want to see it.’ [Laughs] Whether that’s courage or swagger, it goes back to that athlete mentality. When I walk on the court, I am the best person on it.”
It’s hard enough to write a personal story, harder still to share it, and perhaps hardest of all to hear no. Prince-Bythewood knows from this experience.
“You have to have that to be able to sit down and write a personal story and believe that others will care. That’s a hard thing to do, and there will be times where you’ll lose confidence and certainly, for me, I kept thinking [about Love & Basketball], ‘Who’s going to care about a story about a Black girl who wants to be the first woman in the NBA?’ But I believed in it so much that it kept getting me back into the chair, even after every single studio and production company turned down that film. It was soul-crushing to put something on the page that you believed in so much, that was a personal story, and to be told essentially, your voice doesn’t matter, your story doesn’t matter. But that never made me question the story, it was just a hard thing to push through. But overcoming no is something you have to learn in this industry because you just need that one yes. I was so, so fortunate to get that yes from Sundance, which changed the trajectory of my career.”
L-r: L-r: Sanaa Lathan, Omar Epps, and Gina Prince-Bythewood on the set of “Love & Basketball” in 2000. Courtesy New Line Cinema.
Prince-Bythewood credits having a great support group of filmmakers and friends. Her biggest rock, however, is her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood, who she’s collaborating with on Genius: MLK/X, which is focused on the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She and her husband will serve as Executive Producers under their production company Undisputed Cinema.
“My husband is my biggest champion and my biggest support and my favorite writer,” she says. “So on those days where you’re on the floor, there’s somebody saying, ‘Get up, keep fighting.’ That’s supremely important.”
As for the MPA Creator Award, she says it speaks to something she’s believed since she was working on Love & Basketball.
“The thing I’m excited about with the MPA Creator Award is what I’m being honored — that those who make film and television can change the world. That’s how I approach the work even 23 years later; I’ve never let go of the knowledge of the power of film and how it literally can change lives and change perception and shift culture. So, to be honored for that, to know that people are seeing that in my work, that it’s not just about entertaining but I am actually trying to say something to the world — it’s incredibly meaningful.”
For more on Gina Prince-Bythewood, check out these stories:
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
Beef creator Lee Sung Jin (Dave, Undone), who goes by Sonny Lee, reached out to production designer Grace Yun (Past Lives, Ramy, Hereditary) to share his vision of the series that pins Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), a failing contractor, and Amy Lau (Ali Wong), a self-made entrepreneur, against one other following a heated parking lot altercation. “I was impressed from the start, and our exchange felt really fun and effortless,” Yun shares with The Credits.
The dark comedy unravels through ten episodes and asks the question: How far are you willing to go to ruin the life of a complete stranger? For Danny and Amy, there are no limits. In conjuring the visual style of the Netflix show, Yun was inspired by the duality of characters, drawing from their inner struggles and public personalities, a motifcostume designer Helen Huang pulled from as well.
Below, Yun shares how each of their character attributes played into designing the homes of Danny and Amy.
The material of Beef is deliciously chaotic yet also beautiful in its own way. Was there anything you and Sonny referenced in terms of creating the overall visual style?
Sonny sent me his “holy grail” formula: Thirty-five percent Sopranos/Paul Thomas Anderson flawed character comedy, plus thirty-five percent Netflix binge-ability/White Lotus water cooler moments, plus thirty percent Ingmar Bergman/Hirokazu Koreeda warm melancholic pathos.
Fantastic.
I thought it was highly ambitious but wanted to help go for it! Visually, we wanted to ground the story in a world that felt real and believable but with moments that veered surreal as the narrative progressed. It was also important for the world to feel like Los Angeles. We shot the majority of the show in LA locations, but Danny’s apartment and Amy’s house were stage builds. Cinematographer Larkin Seiple and I worked together to create a parched, sunbaked color palette to reference the unrelenting Los Angeles sun.
Was there anything else you and Larkin Seiple discussed to guide the visual style?
Beyond our sun-baked look, we talked pretty much every day about upcoming scenes, especially if we were planning to do something extra for a tonal shift. Episode ten was a fun experience, it was the last week of shooting almost all exteriors in a park, and the challenge was to hide all the walking paths and signage with overgrown greens at a moment’s notice. We had to work closely together to create those compositions that hopefully don’t read like a public park.
Amy’s home has a Le Corbusier vibe to it. Modern, bespoke with a monochrome palette. Was there a driving force behind its look that connected it to her character?
Sonny described Amy as someone who works incredibly hard for her ambitions but at the cost of being honestly herself. So we wanted her home to represent the great effort she puts into her presentational side, yet still have the darker mood of her inner self. Her curated aesthetic needed to touch almost every element in her home and Koyohaus [her business]. We talked about her house being a cage of her own making, so we leaned into that motif with the floor plan, wood slats, and concrete-colored walls. Another important feature was restricting views of the sky.
On the flip side, Amy’s workplace has its unique feel. How did you want to separate her business from her home life through design?
Koyohaus is all about Amy being successful in business, so we wanted it to feel brighter and more vibrant than her home space. The light wood motif is there but in a grid wall pattern with pink desert images on a white wall backdrop. The design approached Koyohaus as Amy’s version of a gallery space for plants. She’s drawing from the trend of taking care of plants as if they are beloved pets. The setup she has is trying to sell a millennial minimalist bespoke lifestyle; each plant is like a unique sculpture in a wabi-sabi pot of the client’s choosing (within 4 colors and 4 shapes). Accessories like hand-woven brooms and blown glass bottles with plant nutrient elixirs add to the aesthetic lifestyle branding.
Danny’s apartment he shares with his brother Paul (Young Mazino) has such a stripped-down, lived-in vibe. Did Sonny have any specific thoughts about the appearance?
Sonny reminisced that Danny’s apartment felt like his first apartment in Los Angeles, and that became the early inspiration. From here, there were many layers we wanted to convey in terms of mood and lifestyle. We wanted the apartment to look like Danny’s DIY attempt to convert the space into a two-bedroom but with an unfinished look to represent his lack of motivation to complete his goals. Other layers hope to show his resourceful mentality of saving construction supplies, sentimentality like the Korean folding table and older mismatched furniture that give it a collected, frugal feel. It’s been a while since he had enough to spend on new furnishings.
When establishing the look of a television series versus a film, are there different things you have to consider from the start?
Mostly it’s in how we prep. TV is usually a much shorter prep time, juggling many episode timelines in one shooting block, and often we don’t have all the scripts written. So you have to stay adaptable and ready to pivot at any moment. Creatively, I find having strong themes and concepts that carry through the entire season is helpful to keep the look in bounds.
For more on big titles on Netflix, check these out:
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
When Chris Nolan wrapped Tenet in 2919, actor Robert Pattinson gave him a book of J. Robert Oppenheimer speeches as a parting gift. That tome led Nolan to Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” For the next three years, Nolan used the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography as the foundation for what critics are hailing as his most mature, emotional work.
Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) as the brilliant physicist who was tapped to run the Manhattan Project, the United States ultimately successful effort to build the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer and his team developed the weapons of mass destruction that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Nolan told The Credits that he thinks, despite never publicly apologizing or expressing any guilt over the horror his weapons caused, “all of his actions from 1945 onwards are the actions of somebody truly suffering under an immense weight of shame and guilt.”
Several months before he started filming, Nolan called Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson. “Chris never talks about what he’s working on,” says Göransson, who previously scored Tenet. “The phone call is out of the blue. ‘Hey, I’ve got a script—do you want to read it tomorrow?’ I had no idea what to expect. I go over and read the script. It was a jaw-dropping moment like you’re watching the world through Oppenheimer’s eyes, living the world through his mind. And I realized that’s what the music needs to do. It needs to channel the whole spectrum of his emotions. That was a big challenge: How do you put all these different types of emotions into the music?”
The answers can be heard in Göransson’s intense orchestrations for Oppenheimer, co-starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh, among others. Göransson, who spoke to The Credits about his Black Panther: Wakanda Forever music, talked about how he collaborated with his violinist wife, skipped traditional percussion, and faced one of the biggest challenges of his career by setting imagery of atomic particles to music.
With Black Panther, you cited the singer Baaba Maal as a key inspiration. In creating the music of Oppenheimer, did you also have someone like that who helped focus your efforts?
Yeah, it was actually my wife Serena Göransson.
How so?
She’s a very accomplished violin player, and one of Chris’s first ideas for the music was that he wanted solo violin to portray the character of Robert Oppenheimer. Especially since it’s a fretless instrument, the violin can go from the most melodic, romantic tone to a neurotic horrific manic vibrato within a split second, so I worked a lot with Serena on this. Experimenting with Serena and doing this music together was a great opportunity.
The string section produces this signature motif that sounds like something the layman might call a “smear.” What do you call that effect?
I would call it string glissandos. It’s these micro-tonal glissandos where one violin goes down, and maybe two go up to create a kind of cluster. You hear violins in horror movies played in this way, but I talked to Chris about this: what if you take that idea and play [the glissando] with the most romantic, beautiful tone? You can tell the audience that something horrific is about to happen and kind of dive down [imitating the ominous “smear” glissando], but then you land on a beautiful note, a haunting note. That is what we wanted to embellish about Oppenheimer’s personality. His confidence is pretty high, but he also has some inner demons.
Having worked on Tenet and now Oppenheimer, what’s it like collaborating with Chris Nolan?
Chris has a crystal-clear image of what he wants to achieve and how he wants to get there. That being said, he’s incredibly open to my input, so there’s this exchange of ideas that allows us to push the boundaries of what we can do. And one thing that makes the work so successful is that he invites me into the project early on.
L-r: Ludwig Göransson and Christopher Nolan. Courtesy Universal Pictures.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.
How early?
For about three months before he started production, I’d meet with Chris once a week and show him about ten minutes of [new] music. By the time he went off to shoot the film, Chris already has three hours of my music.
The music at this point would be in demo form, right?
Yes. Maybe the first months, it was just violin experiments, going into the studio with Serena and recording this microtonal “smear.” In the second month, I started writing themes on piano, violin, strings, and harp. I’d record these melodies and textures as demos.
During pre-production, did you get to see any concept art or visual information?
A couple of weeks after I read the script, Chris invited me to a screening at an IMAX theater to watch visual effects he’d made with Andrew Jackson, experiments with atoms swirling around, and that kind of stuff. I go into this darkened theater and get hit in the face with fluorescent lights and things I’d never seen before. It had a big impact on me: “I want the music to sound like that.”
Once Nolan started principal photography, did you get dailies or any footage of what he’d been capturing?
No. Sometimes I’d get a phone call, “Hey, this one piece we worked on, can you change the ending to an up note, or can you add a minute to this or put more tempo on it?” After three months of shooting, Chris gets back and goes into the editing booth with Jennifer Lame, and they start cutting the movie. They used all the existing music I had written.
Wow! All those music cues you created during pre-production wound up in the rough cut?
Yeah. When I see the rough cut, all my music was already in there, which is great because most filmmakers put together a first cut using a temp score that takes music from already existing movies. I think that creates difficulties down the line because you’re taking [musical] DNA from a world that already exists. It seems to me not a very creative way to work.
Where did you record the final score?
We took two hours and fortysomething minutes of music to the scoring stage at Warner Brothers and recorded it in five days with the Hollywood Studio Orchestra, which has some of the best musicians in the world. At its peak, we were 40 string players, eight horns, three trombones, one tuba, three trumpets, and a harp.
All those instruments but no percussion?
No drums. One of the first things Chris and I talked about is that we didn’t want to have any sense of military nuance to Oppenheimer’s character because that’s not where he’s coming from. We didn’t want that [drum sound] to drive his character at all.
L to R: Matt Damon is Leslie Groves and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Did you use other methods to get that driving feel typically provided by percussion?
We had footsteps, we had the stomping, we had the bomb going off — so much more of a visceral experience. It was cool to see how the music and the sound design went hand in hand with each other. Also, we had the cellists use a technique called collegno, where they [rotate] their bows and use them like sticks, which creates a percussive sound during the nuclear reactor sequence. And then there’s this metallic ticking, which sounds like someone’s tapping a pencil on the bomb — that’s one of our musicians hitting a little metallic thing, almost like a cup.
What was the most challenging piece of music to record?
The piece of music with the atoms swirling. I never thought we’d be able to record that in one continuous take because there are 21 tempo changes. But my wife has been sitting in on these recording sessions for twenty years, and she knows the musicians. She said, “I think you can do it; We just have to give them a different type of click in their headphones so when they record, they get the new tempo before it happens.” On the third day, we gave the musicians a different click in their headphones, and they did the whole piece of music in one take with all those tempo changes.
It must be exciting to hear this huge orchestra of world-class players performing your music live.
One of my favorite parts of the process is seeing how it all comes alive. When you have forty or fifty people in a room together, creating this ambiance in the air — it’s something that’ll never be replaced by computers. The music changed when we started recording with live musicians. They made everything so much more dynamic.
Featured image: L to R: Matt Damon is Leslie Groves and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Blue Beetle is the groundbreaking first Mexican-American addition to DC Studio’s roster. Helmed by Angel Manuel Soto (Charm City Kings), written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (Miss Bala), and propelled by a winning cast that will win your heart, Blue Beetle propels us into an action-packed origin story that unabashedly champions the family ties that characterize Latino communities.
Meet Jaime Reyes (pronounced Hi-meh Ray-yes), portrayed by Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai). Fresh out of college, he comes back to the fictional Palmera City to find the challenges of gentrification tugging at his family’s core. While pursuing a job at Kord Industries, he stumbles upon a coveted scarab named Kahdi-Ja (voiced by Becky G) — an otherworldly relic that thrusts him into extraordinary powers.
Pre-Blue Beetle, embracing Hollywood’s superhero tales was, to me, a stretch. Flying aliens with laser-shooting eyes? Sure, no problem. But secretive young (even teen!) heroes smoothly juggling a secret life, constantly absent from home, all while hiding an arsenal and flashy outfits from their families? That was way too fantastical. At least, to me, a Mexican. The truth is that very little remains under wraps in a traditional Mexican household.
In fact, Angel Manuel Soto, of Puerto Rican descent, emphasized that this was a cornerstone of the film’s creation. “Good luck trying to keep a secret from your Latino family,” he said in an appearance on CBS Mornings.
My excitement for Blue Beetle soared ever since I first saw it. Of course, everyone in the family would be involved in Jaime’s adventure! Of course! ¡Así somos! This emphasis on family ties is just one of the aspects of Latinidad that Soto masterfully conveys throughout Blue Beetle.
The Reyes family is led by father Alberto, played by one of Mexico’s most prominent actors, Damián Alcázar (Narcos). Elpidia Carrillo (Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities), the first Mexican actress of indigenous descent to have achieved a prolific career in Hollywood, is Rocio, the mother.
Rising star Belissa Escobedo (Hocus Pocus 2) is Jaime´s sister, Milagro. Two luminaries, George Lopez (George Lopez) andAdriana Barraza (Babel), complete the Reyes household. They respectively bring to life rowdy Uncle Rudy and not-quite-what-you-imagine grandma Nana. Topping the band of good guys, we have Jenny Kord, played by Brazilian star Bruna Marquezine.
On the opposing side, we see Susan Sarandon as Jenny’s aunt, Victoria Kord—a villain with appalling manners towards Latinos. Alongside her henchman, Conrad Carapax, played by Raoul Trujillo from Sicario, she’s determined to go to any lengths to realize her sinister plans involving the Scarab.
When it comes to infusing the film with authenticity, Soto has shared with numerous sources that “both the creators and the actors wanted to have the freedom to be freely Latino, of not having to explain our Latinness.” They succeeded.
The film is thoroughly seasoned with allusions to Latin American pop culture and family habits. There’s a pitch-perfect depiction of a Latino household where mothers would try to use Vick’s VapoRub to treat any and all ailments; the walls grace tons of family portraits, all under the steady gaze of “La Virgen De Guadalupe.” Pay special attention to the multiple references to the other Mexican bug superhero El Chapulín Colorado, also known as The Red Grasshopper.
As the Reyes family proudly embraces their Mexican heritage, the echoes of Mexican culture extend far beyond borders, resonating powerfully within the broader Latinx community. Soto adeptly captured this sentiment, confirming that shared experiences bring together diverse Latino communities. As Soto expressed to Cinemex, “A lot of the Mexican references are also very Puerto Rican and are also veryLatin.” A universal essence emerges —one that welcomes newcomers and old-timers alike into the embrace of the Reyes family.
The soundtrack is another standout in Blue Beetle. It’s so well curated it’s practically educational. It features the likes of Selena Quintanilla, Thalía, Ivy Queen, Calle 13, Soda Estéreo, Vicente Fernández, and Los Saicos. To get a taste of an inclusive, delicious Latino musical experience, go listen to it.
Blue Beetle shines as a vibrant testament to representation and inclusivity. From its electrifying action to its heartfelt family connections, this film takes us on an exhilarating ride where Latinx culture and superhero universes collide.
For more on Warner Bros., HBO, and Max, check out these stories:
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
Visually, the sequel continues to marry artistic styles to make it feel as if a comic book has come to life, but this time around, there is more of it. A lot more. The story is bigger, more villainous, and a heck of a lot more Spider-y. Thankfully, the emotional arc doesn’t get lost in the multiverse – it’s only Miles who physically gets trapped and tries to sling and swing his way out. The new story brought in a fresh trio of directors (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson) and behind-the-scenes creatives to reinvigorate the success of the original.
“They wanted something entirely fresh,” says character designer Kris Anka about the approach to the visual language. “The whole thinking was just because the animation of the first film was good doesn’t mean it can’t be better.” Anka was one of several character designers on Across the Spider-Verse and oversaw the creation of Miguel (voiced by Oscar Isaac), a Spider-Man-like superhero responsible for producing the multiverse travel technology that has Miles and Gwen (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), along with new characters, Spider-Punk Hobie (voiced by Daniel Kaluuya) and Jessica Drew (voiced by Issa Rae) fighting a portal-jumping “villain of the week” named Spot (voiced by Jason Schwartzman).
Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac) and Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation’s SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Anka spent around 15 months in creating Miguel, adding new layers to the suit design and silhouette of the character. “Depending on how close you are to him, you see different layers of detail. At the macro level, it’s this simple red, black, and blue design, but as you get closer, there’s patterning on everything,” says Anka. The designer added layers of cultural specificity to Miguel’s suit. “I went on a deep dive into Mesoamerican patterns and tried to find ways to add culture to the suit.” In using textiles and familiar patterns, the design language was grounded in something tangible instead of arbitrarily conceived.
Jessica Drew (Issa Rae) and Miguel O’ Hara (Oscar Isaac) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
“Another aspect the directors had coming into the film was that Miguel was intentionally giving himself his powers. It wasn’t a bite or an accident, but he was actively doing this,” notes Anka. “Miguel’s entire persona is that he’s willfully doing all this, and he takes things seriously. He puts in the work compared to someone like Peter Parker [voiced by Jack Quaid], who has a naturalistic body and attitude. Miguel had to be the opposite, where everything is designed, and everything Miguel is doing is with intent. It was about trying to find a balance and a look that suggests Miguel takes this way too seriously.”
Miguel O’ Hara (Oscar Isaac) clashes with Vulture (Jorma Taccone) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
In creating how Miguel moved on screen, head of character animation Alan Hawkins took inspiration from the character Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) from the hit television series The Wire. “He [Stringer] has this really interesting posture,” notes Hawks. “He looks like a tough guy, but there’s a slouch to him. It feels like he’s burdened by the weight of responsibility, but still seems like he’s aggressive. That nature inspired Miguel’s posture for most of the film.”
For Hobie, a very English (and cool) punk version of Spider-Man, Hawkins and the team used mixed frame rates in his design to make him feel chaotic and inconsistent. “The jacket he wears is on 4s, but his body is sometimes on 3s, and his guitar is even lower,” says Hawkins. The 4s and 3s Hawkins is referring to are the number of individual drawings for each second of animation based on a 24 frames per second timeline. Animating on 1’s means there are 24 individual drawings for each second of animation – the action is fast and fluid. Animating on 2’s has 12 drawings, 3’s there’s 8, and 4’s has 6 drawings. The lower the number (3, 4…), the slower the animation can look. Having Hobie’s body and jacket on different animations delivered a juxtaposed style that matched his rocker personality.
Hobie Brown/Spider-Punk, voiced by Daniel Kaluuya. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
Miles, now slightly older, saw a refresh to his look (based on models by Omar Smith) that combined new fabrics and reflective patterns to a black suit that has a red stripe down the side and different-sized Spider-Man logos on the front and back to differentiate him while in motion. “We wanted that immediate read for the audience,” notes Anka. In animating Miles, the team referenced the first film to pose his eye and get the angle of his cheeks right. Gwen saw subtle changes in her costume, adding different hints of pink to her suit.
However, the biggest hurdle was creating a near-infinite number of Spider-Man found in the so-called Spider Society – the central “lounge” (created by Miguel) for all the Spider-Man traveling through the multiverse. For the climatic sequence that has Miles being chased by every single society member, the animation team aimed to make it as interesting as possible, creating different looks to avoid repetition. The edge-of-your-seat scene is packed with action and well-placed humor that even sees a T-Rex version of Spider-Man chomp on screen.
Though Across the Spider-Verse immerses you with a visual style where any frame could be used as a promotional poster, the guiding light for the creative team was the emotional beats of the story. “Animation is hard, and making a strong acting choice is different from a strong animation choice. Something the movie has always strived for was good acting and not good animation,” says Hawkins. “We ignored animation. It was the tool we were using, but we thought about how a real person acts who is feeling these complex layers of emotions. We wanted to inject that into each one of our characters.”
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is in theaters now.
For more on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, check out these stories:
Featured image: A visual development image featuring Pavitr Prabhakar, aka Spider-Man India, Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales fighting The Spot in the city of Mumbattan on Earth-50101 – a kaleidoscopic hybrid of Mumbai and Manhattanfor Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
Oppenheimer is a colossal achievement. Christopher Nolan’s film is an exquisitely calibrated epic, brimming with ambition and ingenuity, appropriate for its titular protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the brilliant physicist who led America’s Manhattan Project during World War II. Nolan and his crew, including production designer Ruth De Jong (Nope), reached for the stars and succeeded in their quest for a pure, tangible vision in presenting one of the most important and dangerous minds of the 20th century – the father of the atomic bomb.
In the brisk and often unnerving three-hour epic, J. Robert Oppenheimer is in a race against the Nazis. The American government enlists him to help them build a weapon of mass destruction, despite his affiliations with communism, which will plague him years after the war. Oppenheimer, both careful and careless in his quest to prove his theory correct, becomes a celebrity when his team succeeds—at a remarkably swift pace— and their achievements a vision of unprecedented horror when America dropped two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. As Oppenheimer famously quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita after the successful testing of the bomb, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
In a narrative that spans decades, Nolan brings Oppenheimer’s inner life to the screen, revealing his thoughts, dreams, and nightmares. The critical and commercial success of Oppenheimer, now extending its run in IMAX theaters due to popular demand, is a credit not only to Nolan but to the incredible crew he assembled to achieve his masterpiece, including Ruth De Jong and her masterful design work.
For a movie that’s about obsession, it didn’t call for it in the process of making it. During a recent interview with The Credits, De Jong reveals the modern touches in the unconventional, idiosyncratic summer blockbuster and why working on Oppenheimer was likely not at all what you might have imagined it to be.
In the case of Oppenheimer, you have to capture both the period and the protagonist’s point of view in these environments. How’d you balance that?
I think there was freedom. I mean, Chris and I wanted to be correct to the periods and bring people right there to that time, to that place. There was no obsession with that from Chris’ standpoint; he was always interested in pushing modernity in the sense that if it was the 1920s, but we were shooting a car that was built in 1931, he’d like the way the 1931 car looked. I’m paraphrasing, but he was like, “I almost find it too distracting because it’s almost like we’re in 1925, and here’s this very boxy, early Americana vehicle when I don’t want to be distracted by that. I wanna make this film timeless with the overarching period correctness, but not to the degree that it’s distracting the film.” I felt very much the same way.
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.
So you were encouraged to depart from the period?
I think a lot of period films can be so full of period objects screaming what moment in time it is. We tried to do the opposite and make it as timeless as possible and peel back and simplify—less is more. There was some specificity where we honed in on it was the creation of the atomic bomb that you see throughout the entire story. Recreating that to its exact specs, the Trinity Tower, everything else, of course, all the houses were in the ilk of the period, but there wasn’t an obsession. I mean, we got to shoot in Oppenheimer’s house, his actual house, but all of that, you take a little bit of creative freedom because you’re never gonna find the absolute exact chair Oppenheimer was sitting in.
L to R: Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer and David Krumholtz is Isidor Rabi in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
There’s not a single CGI shot in the film. How’d that impact your work? Was it kind of comforting knowing your work wouldn’t be altered in post-production?
It was great because I’m not a fan, either. It’s usually like, “Oh, all you need to do is build this, and don’t worry, we’ll extend this and do this and that.” How it affected our work was we had to be smart with the budget. We had to build enough, but not too much, but enough to make it feel like the town was growing and evolving. I just was smart about building every single building that we did 360 degrees, so you could shoot behind it, in front of it, on the side of it. Chris and [cinematographer] Hoyte [van Hoytema] took full advantage of that. I think it was liberating knowing there was no CGI because you had to do everything on camera, and it created an entirely immersive experience for the cast.
L to R: Benny Safdie is Edward Teller and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
As you said, the job didn’t require obsessiveness, but were there any details you did obsess over?
Early on, I got too engrossed or ingrained in the actual research. We had an incredible researcher, Lauren Sandoval, who did a magnificent job and had so many inroads to the Library of Congress, and the US government, getting all declassified documents as well as all these archives across the country and the world. She was speaking to libraries in England and France and all over the place. We had just incredible photography that a lot of us had never seen before, Chris included. You’re going, “Well, look at the chalkboard behind Oppenheimer and look at this thing.” I remember at one point, Chris was just like, “Ruth, let it go. I’m selling popcorn; I’m not making a documentary.” [Laughs]
L to R: Cillian Murphy (as J. Robert Oppenheimer) and writer, director, and producer Christopher Nolan on the set of OPPENHEIMER.
[Laughs] That’s a great way of putting it.So, you could be more interpretive of the time, if that makes sense?
It is almost a dream back to the past. There were certain things, like telephones and water fountains, that looked like they were from the 1800s. I would say, “It’s from 1935.” Chris would be like, “Get it out of here,” because it became too kitsch. We wanted almost to be utilitarian. There was a 1970s water fountain, and he was like, “No one will notice. No one.” The minute you start to draw attention and start to dress every corner, it becomes too obnoxious.
OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
How’d you approach the bomb and its surroundings? Who were your closest collaborators for that section of the film?
We were all under such a crunch to do this epic movie for very little, you know, and everyone’s like, “Oh, you’re on a Nolan movie?” And I’m like, “No, I might as well be on an indie movie. This is not comfortable. We don’t have cash flowing to pay for things, and we have to be smart about our decisions.” And you know, Chris is like, I only really need to see a couple of bits. Like, when Ciillian’s up in the shed and looking at the atomic bomb, there were just some moments that were very important to Chris, but when I got together with Scott Fisher from special effects, and Guillaume [DeLouche], our prop master, it was like, we have to build this entire bomb.
Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
So, again, he could shoot it 360?
It doesn’t make any sense just to build a piece of it to save some money. This is the main character of the entire film. Chris told us no, but we did it anyway. I think he is forever grateful because then it changed; he ended up following the evolution of this thing getting created, and it became more integral. It was areas like that where we tried to be smart about what we wanted to feature and why, and that just felt so important. Chris didn’t say no because he didn’t want us to build it. He was just trying to help us with our budget. He’s like, “Look, I can be smart on my end and figure out ways to shoot around it.” But we knew at the core; we’re not gonna limit him in that way. That’s not fair.
Oppenheimer is in theaters now.
For more on Universal Pictures, Peacock, and Focus Features projects, check out these stories:
A ruined world, decimated by a fungi-borne plague and teeming with zombified hordes and hardened survivors who can be just as dangerous. A biopic about one of the all-time greatest musical tricksters who created an astonishingly successful career parodying hit songs. A reality show where contestants move into a palatial castle and need to cohere as a team to complete a series of increasingly difficult missions to earn big money, with some in the group committed to thwarting their ambitions from within. A zany children’s show based on the most iconic puppets of all time. A live-action epic centered on one of the most legendary characters in the history of cinema. These are descriptions of the shows four talented Emmy nominees worked on—The Last of Us production designer John Paino; Weird: The Al Yankovic Story composer Leo Birenberg; The Traitors casting director Jazzy Collins; and Muppets Mayhem main title creator and Obi-Wan Kenobi consulting producer Hannah Friedman.
John Paino schools us on what it took to build a believably destroyed world. Leo Birenberg describes some of the surprising choices he and his co-composer, Zach Robinson, made when crafting the score for a movie about a musical legend. Jazzy Collins breaks down the hundreds (even thousands) of auditions required to populate The Traitors with a perfectly balanced cast. Hannah Friedman describes what it’s like to set off for a galaxy far, far away and help shape a new story about an old favorite, Obi-Wan Kenobi. And that’s just a portion of what’s on hand.
In collaboration with Impact24, The Credits was delighted to moderate “Beyond the Craft,” in which these talented individuals, recognized for their stellar work, talk about the above and a whole lot more.
Check out our “Beyond the Craft” panel below:
For more interviews with TV creators, check out these stories:
An editor’s role requires taking a mountain of footage and carving out a story. Sometimes, that story is inspiring, like the work that Emmy-nominated editors Charlies Little II, ACE, and Michael Brown did in the docu-series Welcome to Wrexham, which followed the story of Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying Wrexham AFC, one of the oldest professional football clubs in the world, and the transformation of the team, and the town, in the process. Sometimes, an editor works with comedic geniuses in order to turn some very funny footage into the tightest, most hilarious version the material has to offer, which was the case for Malinda Zehner Guerra and Stephanie Filo and their Emmy-nominated efforts on A Black Lady Sketch Show. Filo, meanwhile, is also nominated for shaping the globe-trotting comedy History of the World Part II and shaping a chilling, illuminating look at one of the most gruesome serial killers of all time in Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Then there’s Russell Griffin, ACE, who has two nominations for his work on the comedies How I Met Your Father and The Upshaws, which are very different shows that still deliver very steady laughs.
In collaboration with Impact24, The Credits moderated a panel with these talented individuals to talk about their craft, their journeys to becoming Emmy-nominated editors, the demands of storytelling, the joy of sitting with your father when you find out you’ve been nominated thrice (we now call this The Stephanie Filo Experience) and more.
Check out our “Beyond the Cut” panel here:
For more interviews with editors, check out these stories:
Greta Gerwig’s gangbusters blockbuster is poised to become the highest-grossing film in Warner Bros. history as it’s slated to pass Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 on Monday to claim the title. Gerwig, her star and producer Margot Robbie, and the rest of the Barbie cast and crew will now claim the number one spot in Warner Bros.’s storied 100-year history after scooping up another $18.2 million this past weekend in 75 international territories, pushing its global gross to an astonishing $1.34 billion. Barbie‘s next order of business after that will likely to be take the top spot for 2023’s global box office from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, too.
Meanwhile, the other half of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, is hurtling towards a stupendous $800 million at the global box office. It’s an incredible feat for a three-hour biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the father of the atomic bomb. The two films, which opened simultaneously on July 21 and have been twinned ever since have been the stories of the summer and, quite possibly, will be the stories of the year for 2023’s biggest, most satisfying blockbusters.
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie and RYAN GOSLING as Ken and in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. (PRESS KIT). Photo Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
Spoilers below; approach with extreme caution if you haven’t seen the film yet.
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 — the final scene of Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated Oppenheimer.
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 in telling 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 encounters, 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 tackles that tenfold. But Nolan says he’s not here to tell us whether or not Robert Oppenheimer was a good person but rather 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—it was very precise, 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.”
L to R: Florence Pugh is Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in OPPENHEIMER, written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.
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.”
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 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 become 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 (Florence Pugh).
“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, very, very aware of the theatricality of his persona, and 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.”
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.
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
Since its release last month, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has been hailed as a marvel of a balancing act between sincerity and hilarity. On top of the nuanced script, Barbieland is populated by a Barbie and Ken of every stripe, for every type, despite dozens of characters who share a mere two first names (plus the singular Allan). Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) and her dependent Ken (Ryan Gosling) were early commitments to the Warner Bros. project, but for co-casting directors Allison Jones (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lady Bird) and Lucy Bevan (The Batman, Belfast), casting the wild melange of supporting doll roles meant combing through audition tapes of a who’s-who roster of actors thrilled at the chance to be immortalized as two of pop culture’s most iconic plastic figures.
aption: (L-r) MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie, ALEXANDRA SHIPP as Barbie, MICHAEL CERA as Allan, ARIANA GREENBLATT as Sasha and AMERICA FERRERA as Gloria in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
The actors needed to be funny, of course. But what set apart the audition tapes (more on that anachronism in a moment) was a pure and well-rounded earnestness. “The thing that Greta did always stress was that none of these people were sarcastic or winking at the camera. They were really Kens and Barbies,” Jones explained. In addition to being able to land a comedy beat, the actors needed to be sincere, truthful, and guileless. “There were certain scenes we used to audition, and the fine line between the comedy and sincerity of those characters is a difficult balance,” Bevan said.
Because casting took place during Covid, Jones and Bevan reverted back to the use of taped auditions. “Huge actors went on tape with only seeing a few pages of dialogue,” Jones said, and since “everybody was Barbie in the script,” the pair wound up working in reverse, sending the tapes they liked on to Gerwig, who then identified particular talent for different Barbies and Kens. “She really made the characters for who she liked best in different auditions,” Jones said, designating Issa Rae as President Barbie, for example, and looking for Ken’s arch-rival Ken by seeking out the actor who would be best to “beach off” with Gosling’s character.
Caption: (L-r) EMMA MACKEY as Barbie, NCUTI GATWA as Ken, SIMU LIU as Ken, MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie, RYAN GOSLING as Ken and KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR as Ken in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. PicturesCaption: ISSA RAE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Before it became a go-to quote in the Barbie fandom lexicon, rival Ken’s challenge — “I’ll beach you off any day, Ken” — was one of the film’s audition lines. “Those scenes were fun to audition,” said Bevan. “Some of the Kens would take off their t-shirts, and we were like, no, no, you don’t need to take off your t-shirt. But Simu [Liu] just nailed that [line] in the film.” Allan required some demystifying. Jones used pictures of different Allan dolls owned by a Barbie collector friend, sending them out to agents to shed light on this previously unknown resident of Barbieland, now immortalized by Michael Cera. “I’m so happy that in perpetuity now he’s like an icon for being Allan,” Jones joked.
Caption: (L-r) ISSA RAE as Barbie, SCOTT EVANS as Ken, SIMU LIU as Ken, EMMA MACKEY as Barbie and NCUTI GATWA as Ken in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Since the film’s release, the internet has teemed with anecdotes of beloved comedic actors who wanted to be in Barbie butaren’t. It’s not because they aren’t funny enough. “It’s rather a boring reason, actually,” Bevan said. “On a movie like this, it was a hugely ambitious shoot and a complicated schedule, and you can have brilliant ideas, and people’s availability either does or doesn’t work.” Thanks to strict Covid rules in the UK, where most of the film was shot, and the scale of the project, even smaller roles required a three-month commitment. So, no gossip there.
Caption: (L-r) RYAN GOSLING, MARGOT ROBBIE and Director/Writer GRETA GERWIG on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Jaap Buitendijk
Even auditioning was a commitment, given Barbie‘s closely-guarded script. Bevan and Jones got to read it in its entirety, of course, but were limited to sending the actors’ sides (short script excerpts). “And now you have to send things through websites where you have to go through layers of passwords to get to the sides,” said Jones, of the effort actors went through to tape themselves. “So it was very secretive. I don’t think anybody knew quite how good it was,” she added. But just as Gerwig has become a name who can draw in movie-goers no matter the project, so too is the director for the actors themselves.“We weren’t allowed to send the script to anybody. So people did a lot of it on faith,” Jones said. “Everybody wanted to work with Greta, for good reason.”
Featured image: Caption: (L-r) ANA CRUZ KAYNE as Barbie, SHARON ROONEY as Barbie, ALEXANDRA SHIPP as Barbie, MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie, HARI NEF as Barbie and EMMA MACKEY as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
Not bad for a sequel. Following on its 2018 Oscar-winning predecessor, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ranks as the best-reviewed wide-release movie of the year, boasting a 96 percent approved rating on Rotten Tomatoes while grossing $390 million worldwide since its release earlier this month (at the time of publication). Critics have hailed the film’s ability to stitch together a dizzying array of looks informed by comic books, action painting, Brutalist architecture, and more.
Master-minded by writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Across the Spider-Verse required three directors and more than three years to make. Some 1,000 animation artists (including a 14-year whiz kid) contributed to the story of Brooklyn’s one and only Spider-Man, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), and Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) as they journey through alternate universes populated with previously unknown Spider-People. One of those people is actually a T-Rex.
Look of Picture Supervisor Bret St. Clair helped fine-tune the movie’s array of painterly styles. Raised in Tennessee and schooled in animation at Dallas Institute of Art, St. Clair, a self-described “jack of all trades,” initially worked in video games before taking on Hollywood blockbusters like Matrix Reloaded to Haunted Transylvania. At the start of the Pandemic, St. Clair began work on Across the Spider-Verse, rarely leaving his home office in South Pasadena. Speaking from a parked car outside his house, St. Clair talks about digitized paint brushes, Indian comic books, and Blade Runner production designer Syd Mead as inspirations for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
You’re not the production designer, you’re not the VFX supervisor, you’re the “Look of Picture Supervisor.” What exactly does that mean?
My job is to develop the tools and techniques to match all the various styles in the rendering and compositing stages. The title is unique to these films, and it’s actually listed as “Spider-Verse Look Supervisor” in the credits.
Can you give an example of what that entails?
A lot of it has to do with creating techniques for brush strokes or various kinds of line work.
Miles Morales as Spider-Man (Shameik Moore) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation’s SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
How many of these techniques did you repurpose from the first Spider-Verse movie, or did start from scratch?
For Miles’ world, we maybe added a couple of new tools for brushing on his face. For every other world, we had to go back to the well and figure out new ways to do things.
Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) and Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Can you deconstruct each of these new worlds starting with the movie’s opening set piece that takes place on “Earth 65,” home to Gwen Stacy?
Gwen’s world was based on comic book art by Jason Latour. Jason’s art is beautiful, but it’s also loose and subjective, so sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s represented by a particular brush stroke. There were all these visual things we had to dissect and interpret. Earth-65 was the most intensive of any of the worlds we worked on. It was really about writing tools to create brushes that exist in 3-D space while also moving in ways that look good.
Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation’s SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
JasonLatour applies ink on paper with a brush. You created that same kind of texture with digital tools. How did you do that?
I bought a scanner and bought a lot of paint and during the first month of the film, I spent my weekends painting and scanning and building up a library of things so we could test out different ideas. And a lot of those ended up being used in the film. We studied the way paint diffuses, how paint rubs, the way a brush picks up different colors and smears them together.
After spending time in Miles Morales’ “Earth 1610” world, the story moves on to a futuristic Mumbai AKA Mumbattan, Earth-50101, home to Pavitr Prabhakar/Spider-Man India.
The Mumbattan style was based on Indrajal Comics from the seventies. It’s a very simplified style in India created by artists who didn’t have a lot of time working for a publisher who didn’t have much budget. The artists worked under incredible constraints. In art school, you learn that it’s through limitations that great artists innovate and create unique things, so it was really fun that the directors want to pay homage to that look. For example, a background in Mumbattan would dissolve into a very simple representation with a heavy reliance on outlines because [in the Indrajal era] the artist wouldn’t have had time to hand paint the building.
Spider-Man India (Karan Soni) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Then we’ve got Miguel O’Hara’s “Nueva York,” Earth-928, populated with hundreds of Spider-people.
That style was based on Syd Mead, the designer famous for Blade Runner. It was exciting to look at his art and dissect it. The unique thing is that Earth-928 was less about paint strokes and more about markers.
Miguel O’ Hara (Oscar Isaac) clashes with Vulture (Jorma Taccone) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Markers, as in felt-tipped “Magic Markers?”
Yeah. Markers are transparent, so they have to be layered in a very certain way. If you put one marker stroke on a piece of white paper and then put a second marker stroke on top of that, [the image] becomes darker where the two things overlap. Because our rendered markers are transparent, we can’t add too many layers before we hit a dark value, so it becomes really important to control the placement of the marker stroke so it won’t become too dark and opaque.
Along the way we meet Spider-Punk with his cool Mohawk haircut. He embodies the DIY punk rock aesthetic famous for its cheap Xeroxed graphics. How did you approach Spider-Punk?
Early on, I worked with the artists who developed Spider-Punk, and we did a lot of exploration, playing with things like the question of should the layers of collage cast shadows? Should we be using little pieces of tape that would be included in the Xerox or staples? A lot of it had to do with taking traditional renders and then coming up with treatments aimed at emulating different styles of printing or copying that reflect posters from that era.
Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
Animated features often have two directors, but Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, like its predecessor Into the Spider-Verse, has three. How did you deal with three different people steering the ship along with writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller?
On the previous film, you might get comments from all the directors at once, and sometimes they didn’t agree. This was much more streamlined. Justin Thompson had been the production designer on Into the Spider-Verse, and here, he was promoted to director, so Justin was the one we interacted with. Obviously, Chris and Phil also had very specific artistic ideas. Occasionally we’d get comments from Phil to change something.
The visuals for Across the Spider-Verse are so dense and rich, it must have been a very labor-intensive project. When did you start work on the show, and when did you finish?
I came on in early 2020 when we went home for the lockdown — maybe a week after that — and I’ve been working on Across the Spider-Verse until a few weeks ago. I went into the office twice and did pretty much everything from home. We wrote the tools, and then we rewrote the tools to make them faster, and then we rewrote the tools again to make them even faster. Knowing we had to deliver so many shots was stressful. The way to deal with that stress was to make sure our tools were as fast as they could possibly be so that we could hit our target.
A visual development image featuring Pavitr Prabhakar, aka Spider-Man India, Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales fighting The Spot in the city of Mumbattan on Earth-50101 – a kaleidoscopic hybrid of Mumbai and Manhattanfor Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations’ SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE.
You spent many months watching Across the Spider-Verse scenes in bits and pieces on your computer monitor. Last month, you finally got to see the whole thing on a big screen at the world premiere in Westwood. What was that experience like?
It’s hard to be objective about the visuals, but having spent years looking at this stuff from my tiny little room in my house, to see everything together on a giant screen, with the music and the sound effects? That was pretty impressive. But the biggest part for me was hearing the audience’s response. When you’re trapped in your room working, you don’t really know what people will think. You worry, “Are people going to get it? Are they going to understand this little corner frame that we put so much effort into?” But people have responded so well to the artistry, it makes me proud. This is the kind of movie you want to make every chance you get. It’s the reason I got into the industry.
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House of the Dragon cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt stepped back into Westerosi history in the Game of Thrones prequel and into Emmys history when she was nominated for an Emmy for her work in the 8th episode of season one, “The Lord of the Tides.” In that episode, Goldschmidt was tasked with subtly taking viewers six years into the future as two bloody succession battles are taking place. The immediate quarrel is over who will succeed Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) on the Driftwood Throne, with a fight brewing over the chosen heir, Corlys’ grandson Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) and his brother, Ser Vaemond Velaryon (Wil Johnson). Meanwhile, an ailing King Viserys (Paddy Considine), wants to bring his entire family together one last time and make clear his own chosen successor, his daughter Princess Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), will rule. Yet her former best friend (and father’s current wife), Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), has other ideas, and the two are moving closer to open war with one another.
“The Lord of the Tides” was one of the most thrilling episodes of the season, a family saga for the ages, a cauldron of resentment and familial rage finally boiling over. Goldschmidt brought it off beautifully and, in the process, is now the only woman nominated in the Outstanding Cinematography For A Series (One Hour) category this year and only the fourth woman ever nominated in the 67 years this award has been given. If she wins, she’ll be the first woman ever to do so.
We spoke to Goldschmidt about the differences between the shooting styles of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, capturing a family at war with itself, and the subtle changes to iconic locations that turned this prequel series into a historical epic.
Catherine Goldschmidt. Courtesy HBO/Max.
Can you describe how you modified your approach to shooting this series compared to how Game of Thrones was filmed?
Although House of the Dragon is a prequel to Game of Thrones, it is a brand-new show with a brand-new look. We shot on Alexa 65 and Alexa LF cameras with Arri DNA lensing, which was a completely different choice from the original show. The color palette of GoT was constantly shifting to define the different worlds, but House of the Dragon Season One is about one family in one place, so the palette could be more connected to character and story than to location. I think the biggest way we were consistent with GoT was in how we moved the camera – classic dolly and crane moves and very little handheld. We did use Steadicam more than the original series, however.
How did you capture the world of Westeros in episode 8, “The Lord of the Tides”? There are so many beautiful little details that let a viewer fall into this fantasy realm while keeping the characters and their motivations front and central?
It’s definitely a team effort as far as the overall tone goes, and also the attention to detail in terms of the world-building. I’ll give you a specific example from “The Lord of the Tides” that will give you a taste of how the collaboration works. Towards the beginning of the episode, we have a small, dialogue-free scene in which we see Daemon collecting some dragon eggs. So, we all know what dragon eggs look like from Game of Thrones, but as far as where he would find them, how he would find them, what tools he would use to find them…this was all new, and we had to work together with the props team, with production design, with VFX and SFX, under the direction of our showrunners Ryan [Condal] and Miguel [Sapochnik], as well as my director Geeta Patel, to figure out exactly what this scene would look like, and what it would entail.
What were you hoping to get across in this scene?
We wanted to create a sense of mystery with the sequence, and for me, that meant using shadow and silhouette as well as camera movement to reveal Daemon in this strange environment eventually. The scene takes place down a crevice of Dragonmount, and we discussed everything from how deep this crevice is to how Daemon gets down it to how the dragons get down it…everything had to make logical sense, even though we’re dealing with fantasy creatures. And that kind of reality-based logic also informed my lighting choices- where would the light come from if you’re down such a crevice? I had the art department make cracks in the rock ceiling of the set so that daylight could stream down in certain key places.
How would you describe the main emotional beats of “The Lord of the Tides” that you wanted to capture?
There’s a lot going on in this episode. All the characters are coming back together one last time before they break apart for the rest of the season. They all want something, and they’re all having a hard time getting it. Viserys wants to see his family reunited before he goes, and he wants to have everyone recognize Rhaenyra as his true heir. Rhaenyra wants to be the heir, and her succession is being challenged. Alicent is one of the key people challenging Rhaenyra’s succession because she wants her son Aegon [Tom Glynn-Carney] to rule instead. Alicent and Rhaenyra, once the closest of friends, are now enemies, and Viserys wants them to reconcile. The emotional spectrum of the episode ranges from love on the one hand to betrayal on the other.
Olivia Cooke and Emma D’Arcy. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
What was your collaboration like with director Geeta Patel and the great ensemble cast?
Collaborating with Geeta was and is (we’re doing Season Two together as we speak!) one of the greatest creative collaborations of my career so far. Geeta is incredibly generous as far as always wanting to hear my thoughts, always considering my perspective, and always being open to new ideas. She is like this with everyone on the crew and in the cast. She knows exactly what she wants and has a strong vision for the show, but at the same time, she really absorbs and synthesizes what everyone is bringing to the table. I love working with Geeta, and so does the entire cast and crew. My collaboration with the cast is definitely via Geeta. Geeta and I will discuss how we think a scene should be blocked, but then in rehearsal- she’ll always pose this as a suggestion rather than a mandate to the cast. They’re happy to oblige, but sometimes they’ll have new thoughts and ideas, which we always accommodate.
Matt Smith, Harry Collett, Emma D’Arcy, Phoebe Campbell. Photograph by Liam Daniel/ HBO
Can you describe the conversations you had with showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik before you filmed a single frame on what the most important aspects of The House of the Dragon were to reveal to audiences?
We discussed the overall tone and that House of the Dragon is more of a historical epic than a fantasy show. We also discussed in great detail how “The Lord of the Tides” happens six years after the previous episode, and now that Alicent is in charge of the Red Keep, it is a colder, more austere place than it was under Viserys. We spoke a lot about Viserys’ look and how his illness would present in its most advanced state in our episode. Defining how this would work practically across all departments, including VFX, SFX, prosthetics, hair and makeup, costume, and cinematography, was very important to Ryan, Miguel, and Geeta.
Paddy Considine in “House of the Dragon.” Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
What was the approach to the scenes between Emma D’Arcy’s Princess Rhaenyra and Eve Best’s Princess Rhaenys, considering the latter believed the former murdered her son?
We have a key scene between Rhaenyra and Rhaenys in the Godswood where Rhaenyra essentially begs Rhaenys to take her side and back her succession claim. This is complicated for Rhaenys not only because of her son but also because, as a woman, she herself was passed over for succession, and the kingdom voted for a man to lead instead. The dynamics are fascinatingly complex between these two women, and Geeta and I both drew lots of parallels to our own experiences of being women in leadership roles traditionally held by men. Because of where the scene falls in the episode – in the very next scene, Rhaenyra comes to her father’s bedside at night to beg for his help also – we saw it tonally as “ a storm is coming.” Although we shot on a very sunny day, we wanted the scene to feel like the end of the day and with a storm coming also, so we added lots of wind from SFX, and I blocked out the sun as much as humanly possible.
Bethany Antonia, Eve Best. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
Do any particular moments or sequences from this episode stand out to you as singularly special for you?
I love the moment when Viserys enters the throne room. It’s such a major event in our big Throne room scene and in the episode in general, and we spent a lot of time planning all the angles we wanted to shoot it from. Chiefly, we wanted to be in Viserys’ POV- leading him, following him, and showing what he sees. It’s an incredibly emotional moment for him as well as everyone else in that room, and Paddy performed the walk so well. The moment when Viserys’ crown falls off wasn’t scripted, but as soon as it happened once, everyone felt that it was exactly right for the scene, and we kept shooting it this way – pure kismet!
King Visery’s view: Matt Smith, Emma D’Arcy, Phoebe Campbell, Elliot Grihault, Eve Best. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
The Red Keep looks a bit different, a bit more forbidding, in House of the Dragon. Can you describe how you capture the Gothic appeal of it?
Ryan and Miguel both impressed upon Geeta and me how different the Red Keep should feel to Rhaenyra, who is coming back for the first time in six years to find she doesn’t recognize it. We worked with Production Designer Jim Clay and Set Decorator Claire Richards to strip the Red Keep back in terms of furniture, decoration, and lighting. I went for colder, harsher, more wintery light with more contrast. Jim designed this very imposing Star of the Seven for the Great Hall, and we shot Rhaenyra dwarfed below it to show Alicent’s power over her at the start of the episode.
Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy. Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO.
Can you tell me about the “Hero Triangle” and how that idea was conceived and executed?
The “hero triangle” is how we referred to the relationship dynamics between Viserys at the apex, Rhaenyra on one side, and Alicent on the other. This triangle informed all of our blocking, lighting, and lensing decisions. For example, in the dinner scene, we placed Viserys right in the middle of the table, putting Alicent and her family on one side of him and Rhaenyra and her family on the other. In this way, we visualized the drama: even though Viserys is desperately trying to bring both sides together, he is also the reason why they are apart.
Ewan Mitchell, Rhys, Ifans, Olivia Cooke, Paddy Consdine, Emma D’Arcy. Photograph by Ollie Upton / HBO
Congratulations, by the way, on your nomination. It’s a historic one — you’re the only the fourth woman nominated in the Outstanding Cinematography for a Series in the one-hour category in the show’s 67 years — how does that feel?
Thank you! I’m very honored to be nominated alongside so many great cinematographers who have all done incredible work. It’s true I am the only woman to be nominated this year; however, I do want to acknowledge the women who have been nominated in this category before me: Autumn Durald, Zoe White, and Anette Haellmigk, who was nominated twice for her fantastic work on Game of Thrones! It’s sadly true that no woman has ever won the Emmy award in this category, but who knows- maybe this is the year!
For more on House of the Dragon, check out these stories:
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA Creator Award Recipient and filmmaker extraordinaire Gina Prince-Bythewood and more.
Editors’ Note: This story contains mild spoilers.
The action in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One rolls out like a conveyor belt ofdelicious candy, leaving you wanting more. And director Christopher McQuarrie delivers those highs again and again. The global affair treks from Abu Dhabi for a swirling desert shootout and on to Rome for a goosebumps-inducing car chase, in, of course, an adorable yellow FIAT. It then lands in Norway for that epic, very realmotorcycle stunt that everyone, including your mother, is talking about. Tom Cruise repeated the death-defying stunt that has him jumping off a 4,000-foot cliff into a ravine before opening a parachute to land atop a moving train seven times. Yes, seven. If the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is still wondering why it should award an Oscar for stunts, these are seven reasons to make this a reality.
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning – Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
The story that ignites this edge-of-your-seat thrill ride is a tale of high-stakes espionage reminiscent of the very first Mission Impossible (1996). McQuarrie even puts in his own version of the infamous bridge scene from the original film that sees Jim Phelps (Jon Voigt) fake his own death—this time with different results. The twisty plot has Ethan Hunt (Cruise) in search of a key that unlocks the power of an artificial intelligence that’s gone rogue. Seemingly everyone Hunt crosses paths with also wants it, including Grace (Hayley Atwell), a master thief, former MI6 intelligence officer Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) from Rogue Nation, a new deadly adversary in Gabriel (Esai Morales), The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), and Kittridge (Henry Czerny), who is now acting CIA director.
Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning – Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
Lensing Dead Reckoning Part One was cinematographer Fraser Taggart, who shot Rogue Nation and Fallout as the 2nd unit cinematographer. (Part Two is in production with Taggart on board.) “When I was growing up, which is a long time ago now, movies gave you escapism. They took me to different places in the world, and I adored that as a kid,” says Taggart. “We very much wanted to make this movie feel the same way. To give the audience that escapism to other countries.”
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
Taggart furnished each location with a distinct look. In Abu Dhabi, he referenced Lawrence of Arabia. Rome brought a rich color palette and higher contrast. In Norway, a slightly cooler aesthetic. It’s here where a climactic action-packed train sequence unfolds. This is a sequence that manages to contain the very soul of the franchise—Ethan Hunt pushed to his absolute limits, which, it turns out, are incredibly flexible. Whatever it takes, Hunt will adapt and stretch himself to the challenge.
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
In preparation for actual shooting days, the team found a location in England to practice. Taggart researched and tested all the camera angles and shots that would be used to record the action, whether it was a drone, helicopter, or mounted camera. In capturing a fight sequence between Ethan and Gabriel atop the speeding train, handheld cameras were used to give it “energy and life” but in a controlled way.
The biggest “oh my” moment is when the train runs out of track and is about to fall hundreds of feet below into a quarry. Ethan and Grace (Hayley Atwell) are in the train car that’s about to go over and have to climb up to save themselves. Practical train cars were built and placed on huge hydraulic rigs constructed by the special effects department. These rigs could lift the carriage around 80 feet into the air and tilt it 30 degrees. “The scene has the train moving like a caterpillar whereas the weight goes over into the falling edge, it lifts the carriage behind and slams it down in a sort of zero-g moment,” explains Taggart. “All the physical effects were quite incredible.”
Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
Stunt doubles rehearsed the sequence first to choreograph the precise action before Cruise and Atwell stepped in. “Hayley amazed me the first time she did the run with Tom,” says Taggart. “We’re on safety wires, but we are 80 feet in the air with them. She and Tom have to trust everyone around them. She went for it on the first take, and it was brilliant.”
When the train finally does fall over, production physically crashed a train on location in England. “We dropped a real carriage, so that’s all used in the movie,” says Taggart. “For me, you want to feel like you’re on the train with them. You want to feel like another character in the movie stuck on the train. It’s a very important part of these movies. It’s a challenge, but it works very well.”
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in theaters now.
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Calgary-based hairstylist Chris Harrison-Glimsdale happily pursued the apocalypse and lived to tell the tale. In fact, she’s got an Emmy nomination for her efforts, alongside her colleagues Penny Thompson and Courtney Ullrich, for shaping the locks of the survivors and their undead pursuers who populated HBO’s critically acclaimed series The Last Of Us.
Co-created by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (creator of the critical and commercial smash hit video game that the series is based on), The Last Of Us is focused on two survivors of a fungi-based plague, Joel (Pedro Pascal) and his charge, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who venture across a devastated American landscape that’s been turned into the world’s worst salad—the plague is the result of the Cordyceps genus (it includes some 600 species) run amok, which has turned a huge percentage of the global population into a garden variety of zombies nearly as variable as the fungus kingdom itself (there are an estimated 2.2 to 3.8 million species, but nobody knows for sure—only 148,000 have been identified).
Hair department head Harrison-Glimsdale and her team—which at certain points included 35 additional stylists to help handle the hordes of infected—were key to helping Mazin and Druckmann build their beautifully grotesque hellscape. We spoke to the Emmy nominee about creating a world in which a shower is mostly a thing of the past, a zombie might retain a remnant of their old hairstyle, and mushrooms reign supreme.
Tell me a bit about your team and how you tackled the huge number of actors that needed to be styled.
We were four people full-time. It was me, Penny Thompson, Judy Durbacz, and Eva Baulackey. We also had Pedro [Pascal]’s stylist, Courtney Ullrich, who came in after the first episode. They were everything to me. They kept me in line and in order and were there to help me process the main cast, as well as help me work on the infected with the Gowers [Barrie and Sarah Gower, the prosthetics designers]. We’d create the look for the character after consulting with Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, achieving the right level of grittiness dimension, and depth for where each character went. I also had a team of thirty-five hairstylists that came and did a boot camp where I taught everyone how to lay hair because it’s not something we do all the time.
Chris Harrison-Glimsdale (left) on set. Courtesy HBO/Max.
What is laying hair?
Laying hair is adding the lace pieces into the prosthetics. So we’d go in and lay single strands of hair into the cordyceps in collaboration with the effects team. We’d teach them how to lay the hair, so it looked like the hair was coming out of the cordyceps instead of laying flat. It had to look like the mushrooms were growing through the hair. That was a really important thing to explain. And then we had to teach them how it should look as the infected were moving and getting into fight sequences.
How long did it take to turn someone into one of the infected?
To apply the cordyceps and the hair was a five to six-hour process for each actor or stunt person. It was a pretty in-depth procedure, and so much fun to get in there and work with them. So when it was just the main cast, we had the four of us, but when we had the really big days with the infected, we had thirty-five people working with me and my team. We had a very organized with the Gowers; it was a very smooth machine. Also with wardrobe, because their clothes had cordyceps on them, too, everyone was so great at collaborating.
One of the infected in “The Last of Us.” Courtesy Max.
And because the infected are in various stages of infection, that must have added a degree of difficulty to your work.
Every single infected was different. We had to recreate hairlines of the different levels of the infected, that was the best part. We got to go from lots of hair to no hair, going in and adding full or partial wigs—it was just so creative on our end of it.
Did the Clickers have hair?
They did have hair. Very sparse, usually long and jagged. So when we did the Clickers, I’d apply the lace piece between the cordyceps and then cut it to where we needed each character. Each Clicker had to look different; they each had their own characteristics and their own story. Whether it was shorter hair or longer hair, it was always very thin and processed because it had fallen out as the cordyceps grew.
Samuel Hoeksema in “The Last Of Us.” Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
One thing that stuck with me from a previous The Last of Us interview was the idea that the infected were people, and there was a real commitment to bring that across in the series. Yes, they’re terrifying, but there was a person there beneath the cordyceps.
We thought about that. We had to create their backstory to understand how to create their hair. Finding out what they’re wearing helped us figure out the mold of their hair and the style. If they’re in a nurse’s uniform, did they have their hair tied back? Those questions came into play. They weren’t just wild creatures. It was haunting to look into the infected’s eyes and see the real person there. Even when the Clickers were attacking Ellie and Joel in the museum, it was real; those actors were those Clickers, and you actually got chills because you could feel that they were human.
One of the most haunting scenes is in the first episode, when Joel’s daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) is in the foreground, and the old woman, their neighbor, is becoming infected behind her.
We had a big part in that. We created that woman’s look with the Gowers. Her sparse hair was a wig we’d created with Nair. We took it apart and gave her the hollowness and bedhead. She had the look of someone who had been taken care of as a granny at home where someone had brushed her hair, but she still had the bedhead. She was still coherent but not really there. Everything worked well together between the wardrobe and the Gowers going through and modeling her face with [makeup department head] Connie Parker and [key makeup artist] Joanna Mireau. Then, adding the wig and the nightdress gave you that realism of someone switching over. The faintness of her twitches—that all came together, and you could really feel it.
Nico Parker in “The Last of Us.” Courtesy Max.
We’re obviously dealing with an apocalyptic landscape, so bathing isn’t the most important thing for the survivors. How did you make people look credibly unshowered?
We really did our research, going through photos of people in the backcountry, tribes, and people when there were not a lot of resources for washing. The texture and dimension of their hair and how it looked. Also, not making them look crazy. Even when you don’t have those things, you still pat down your hair and style it.We tried to use a lot of natural oils and conditioners and then used real dirt so that we could mix it in with the product. We also got things in at the very root instead of piling it on top. Get in there and make it real. We did a lot of rubbing every day, so you’d go, you look perfect. Even when a performer didn’t wash their hair, we’d say,great! Let’s manipulate that a little bit. And using natural fibers to tie their hair because they didn’t always have elastics or anything like that. So, we’d cover strips of fabric in dirt and break it down a bit. But still, a woman wouldn’t always want hair in their face, so they’d tie it back.
Bella Ramsey. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
And for the main characters?
For Ellie, we kept it very simple and plain. We used a fabric tie to tie her ponytail back. We also gave her all that breakage around her face, which was us going in and cutting it up to keep it like that. Also, she has a natural curl, so with the sweat in it, it would kind of move really naturally. We thought of it like this: imagine you were working outside all day. If you had long hair, you’d tie it back and have all that fuzziness and broken-down bits. I had my team looking at construction workers, farmers, wranglers, and even crew members. People who are doing physical things all day. So, for the background actors, that’s how I wanted them to look: not contrived, not perfect, just natural.
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
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